- Tell me, oh, muse of that high Hellenistic canon whose fates and foibles have inspired everything from high literature I skimmed in college to the 58 YA novels I have on my bookshelf but have not read, and probably never will.

Retellings of all sorts are having a moment, but today we're going to focus on that darling of eighth-grade English, it's Greek mythology.

Whether you've picked up a Percy Jackson novel, read all the way through James Joyce's "Ulysses," or were just one of those really pedantic, nerdy sixth graders who had thoughts on the historical accuracy of Disney's "Hercules", the ancient Greek canon has worked its way into modern pop culture so deeply that it would be a Sisyphean task to compile every way it's manifested, so we're not going to do that.

But we are going to look at some times that Greek mythology has inspired our favorite books, some more obvious, some less so.

(upbeat music) So let's start with the backbone of the whole mythology thing, those wacky, jealous, tempestuous, incestuous, Greek pantheon of deities.

In the Greek pantheon, you've got your major gods like Zeus, Poseidon and Athena, and other more minor figures like Eros, Hecate, and the Muses, most of whom are the patron god of something, some natural element or craft or concept, kind of like a proto BuzzFeed quiz.

Oh, my god I got Artemis!

No, I am obviously an Athena, honey.

Then there are your heroes with a capital H. Some are purely mortal, some are descended from the gods, and they're basically your superhero archetypes.

Your Heracles, Odysseus, Jasons, traveling distances far, slaying beasts most foul, and having weaknesses most oddly specific.

Hm, and if you're a woman in ancient Greece, good luck not getting kidnapped.

Many of these characters are household names today but it was a long road getting them from ancient Greece to Disney.

Greek mythology was co-opted by the Romans who used that pantheon because, as Disney will tell you, you can never own too many popular characters.

And then came the Christians during the twilight of the Roman Empire.

The Christian influence changed a lot of how some aspects of Greek mythology became contextualized.

Take for instance the god Hades and the place Hades, both in their own contexts scary, but, you know, neutral not evil.

However, owing basically to a 2,000-year-old translation error, the word Hades has in some contexts become synonymous with the Christian concept of Hell and Hades himself with the Christian Satan, and that just ain't right.

That's doing Hades dirty.

But that is an example of the filter Greek mythology has gone through in, oh, these 2,000 years or so.

Then came the Medieval period when Europe went all-in on Christianity and it was kind of frowned upon to even study ancient Pagan religions.

So nobody cared that much about the Greek deities for 1000 years or so.

But then the Renaissance saw a renewed interest in the ancient philosophies, sciences, and arts and much of our current perspective on Greek mythology can be traced to the Renaissance.

We saw another period of renewed interest in late 18th century Germany, when academics began looking at classical mythology not as lowly and Paganistic but as a field of study in and of itself.

We kind of take for granted that, of course, European academia would revere the Ancients when in reality we could have very easily forgotten mythology.

Again, it's been a few thousand years.

We don't exactly invoke the Babylonian pantheon in quite the same way we do the Greeks.

The period of renewed interest in the 18th century led to a rise of new translations and lo, that brings us to that eighth-grade English class and all of those Greek myth YA retelling novels that you get free copies of at BookCon, but have not read.

There is the wildly popular "Percy Jackson and the Olympians" series by Rick Riordan which concerns itself with the titular Percy and his adventures with the members of the Pantheon in a modern day setting.

It's basically "Harry Potter".

It is, I'm sorry.

There's a Hermione and everything.

Then there's Marie Phillips 2007 novel "Gods Behaving Badly", which reimagines all of the Olympians living with each other in a ramshackle London apartment and of course there are also your more high-minded literary works inspired by the Classics.

In James Joyce's stream-of-consciousness "Ulysses", its hero Leopold Bloom spends a day wandering about turn-of-the-century Dublin that eerily mirrors the trials of Odysseus.

No one has ever finished reading this novel and they are lying to you if they say that they have.

Margaret Atwood's "The Penelopiad" is a retelling of the Odyssey from the point of view of Odysseus's long-suffering wife Penelope and her maids, who are unfairly hanged in the original story.

Atwood used this point of view to discuss the sexist double standards both of ancient Greek society and of today, along with how our understanding of justice has, for better or worse, changed a little.

But there's more to the influence of mythology than direct reiterations.

I can only read so many YA retellings of Greek myths, fam.

Modern literature has taken much broader inspirations and less obvious examples as well.

Prometheus the Titan who steals fire from the Olympians to gift it to the mortals and is horrificly punished by being chained to a rock for all eternity while a bird pecks out his liver has become a popular symbol for those who suffer to obtain forbidden knowledge and/or tamper in the gods' domain.

Prometheus is a direct inspiration for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to the point where the book's subtitle is "The Modern Prometheus".

Victor Frankenstein's hubris and ambition drive him to play God in his bid for immortality and it ultimately destroys him.

And we can't have a conversation about mortal hubris without talking about Icarus, the ill-fated son of master craftsman Daedalus when both father and son are imprisoned on Minos for dad essentially being too clever for his own good, Daedalus gives his son wax wings as a means to escape the island, along with the advice to not fly too close to the Sun because wax melts.

Icarus thinks he has a handle on it and flies too close to the Sun, as you do.

Both Walter Tevis' original novel and the 1976 film adaptation of The Man Who Fell to Earth, a story about an alien who comes to our planet in hopes of saving his dying race but gradually succumbs to Earth's vices, references the Icarus myth.

The opening section of the novel itself is called "Icarus Descending".

And then of course there was Narcissus the hottie with a body who could not, ee, look away from his own reflection.

Narcissus, after coming across his mirror image in a pool of water falls so deeply in love with his own hotness that his vanity consumes him until he melts away and all that's left is a flower.

A nymph named Echo, cursed to only be able to speak by repeating other people, falls in love with him but ends up also wasting away because he's just too into himself.

Compare this to Oscar Wilde's "The Picture of Dorian Gray" in which the titular character's own beauty and need to preserve it drive him to a destructive and violent end.

He even has an Echo analog in the actress character Sibyl Vane.

The ancient Greek canon still influences a lot of our romantic stories.

Pyramus and Thisbe were just two crazy Babylonian kids just trying to defy their families ancient rivalry and make their shadowy, star-crossed love work only for it to end in their tragic deaths and, hey, wow, it's literally the plot of Shakespeare's "Romeo and Juliet".

Beautiful Psyche marrying the unknown and potentially monstrous Eros in exchange for being pardoned some slight to the gods, (being too hot) has been retold time and time again in the "Beauty and the Beast" fairy tale and its countless knockoffs.

Complete with the fact that Eros is also loaded and, lo and behold, Psyche eventually comes to love him for who he is and not his appearance.

And then of course there is Hades, Lord of the Dead and his bride Persephone.

According to some later Roman versions of the myth, Hades gets shot in the heart by Eros, God of Love, and he just can't help but kidnap Demeter's daughter Persephone and take her in to the underworld to be his forever bride.

Demeter, who happens to be Goddess of the Harvest takes issue with this and kills all of the crops until Zeus tells Hades to please do him a solid and undo this kidnapping.

But before Persephone can leave, Hades feeds her some pomegranate seeds, binding her to the underworld, and this means she has to return for a portion of the year, every year, which Demeter does not like and that's why we have seasons.

There are a lot of books that take some inspiration here but I'm going to focus on Gaston Leroux's "The Phantom of the Opera".

Like Hades, The Phantom Erik is directly connoted with death, repeatedly, and even lives in an underworld of sorts, deep beneath the Paris Opera House.

But unlike Hades, Erik does eventually let his Persephone, Christine, go after threatening to blow up the Opera House and killing everyone inside it.

But for all of its pulpy pulpiness and melodramatic trappings, it is a thoughtful examination of the confused, messed-up relationship between a kidnapper and his kidnappee.

Aw, and speaking of yikes, there is of course also Pygmalion and Galatea the guy who couldn't get a girlfriend so he made one out of stone a statue of a woman so perfect that he successfully pleads to Aphrodite to have her turned into an actual human.

Again, there is a lot of yikes to unpack here but most modern reinterpretations of this myth are hip to the weird power discrepancy between Pygmalion and Galatea, the most famous of which is George Bernard Shaw's play "The Pygmalion", which was later adapted into the mega-musical "My Fair Lady."

In this case, a smarmy phonetics professor, Henry Higgins, endeavors to take a lowly flower seller, Eliza, and turns her into a proper society woman falling in love with her along the way.

Where it differs from the original tale is Eliza's eventual realization that she's being used along with her reclamation of self agency when she ditches Higgins to lead her own life, giving the Galatea figure here a say in her fate that she was never granted before.

Galatea's side of things gets even further expanded in Madeline Miller's 2013 novel "Galatea", a retelling of the tale from her point of view.

The reason why we keep coming back to these stories after centuries of societal and technological change maybe boils down to, ironic as it is, that these tales which concern gods ultimately appeal to what feels most human about them.

So I think the thing to take from the persistence of the popularity of Greek mythology is that, like any good story, we see something of ourselves in them.

And hey, maybe one of these days I'll get around to reading one of those YA Hades and Persephone retellings.

Actually, I probably won't but I have read Phantom of the Opera, like, a lot.

Like, a lot.

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