Judith Starkston - Achilles Wife

In this episode of "In Conversation," host Terry Shepherd sits down with historical fantasy author Judith Starkston to explore the captivating intersection of history, archaeology, and myth. Judith discusses her latest novel, Achilles' s Wife, and her passion for placing women at the center of ancient Bronze Age narratives. They also dive into a thoughtful review of Christopher Nolan's contemporary film adaptation of The Odyssey, unpacking its modern themes, character portrayals, and departures from Homer's original epic.

Key Highlights

• Reimagining Achilles: Judith explains how Achilles' sWife explores a hidden chapter of the hero's life on the island of Scyros, giving voice to the often-overlooked princess Deidameia.
• Nolan's The Odyssey: A lively critique of Christopher Nolan's action-packed thriller adaptation, including thoughts on Anne Hathaway's performance, the removal of the original myth's sexual elements (like the Calypso storyline), and the film's focus on modern themes such as migration and the ancient concept of xenia (guest-host relationship).
• Women in Antiquity: A discussion on how ancient women often held more rights and ruling power than typically assumed, and how legendary writers like Homer subtly highlighted their intelligence despite the patriarchal norm.
• Translating Homer: Judith shares her favorite translations of The Iliad and The Odyssey, specifically praising the oral quality of Lombardo's work and the less repressive, more accurate language of Emily Wilson's modern translation.
• What's Next: A sneak peek into Judith's current work-in-progress—a humorous, contemporary novel following a modern classicist who experiences mythological visions featuring the goddess Athena.

About the Guest

Judith Starkston is a classicist and author who writes historical fantasy and mythic retellings set in the worlds of the Greeks and Hittites. Her storytelling is grounded in serious scholarship, holding classics degrees from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Cornell. Prior to writing full-time, she taught high school students and shared her deep love for ancient history and mythology. Her published works include Hand of Fire, the four-book Tesha series, and her latest release, Achilles' Wife.

Links & Resources

• Visit Judith's Website: judithstarkston.com
• Books Mentioned: Achilles' s Wife and Hand of Fire (available wherever cool books are sold)

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:35

In conversation with Terry Shepard, award-winning broadcaster, narrator, and author. A deep dive into the writer's craft with the artists and support systems who create the stories we love.

SPEAKER_02 0:48

Today's guest has spent her career exploring the place where history, archaeology, and myth come together. Judith Starkston writes historical fantasy and mythic retellings set in the Bronze Age worlds of the Greeks and Hittites, with a particular gift for bringing women out of the shadows of ancient history and placing them at the center of the story. Her novels include Achilles' Wife and Hand of Fire in the Trojan Thread series, along with the four-book Tesha series, inspired by the remarkable Hittite queen Pottahippa. Her short fiction includes Season of Death in the So West Desert Justice anthology. Along the way, Hand of Fire was a semifinalist for the M.M. Bennett Award for Historical Fiction, while Priestess of Ashana received the San Diego State University Conference Choice Award. Judith's fascination with the ancient world is grounded in serious scholarship. She holds degrees in classics from the University of California, Santa Cruz, and Cornell, and regularly writes about archaeology, history, mythology, and the discoveries that continue to reshape our understanding of the Braun Age. Judith Starkson, it's great to have you back.

SPEAKER_01 2:08

It's good to be here. Thank you for inviting me.

SPEAKER_02 2:11

I have to ask the question: Have you seen The Odyssey? And what did you think of the movie? I did see the Odyssey.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

I went very promptly when it came out. And uh I loved it. I it is an interpretation. It's not there are a lot of people saying he shouldn't have called it the Odyssey because it's not the Odyssey, but I'm sorry, that's the name we all recognize. And I'm good with taking ancient myths and taking ancient stories and reinterpreting them. His is very much an Odysseus for today. The concerns of the film are very contemporary concerns, but I'm good with that. And it's a great action pack. If in the action movie thriller, you were glued to your seat. Yes, it was a little long, but it was fun. So there's that too.

SPEAKER_02 3:06

Barely mentioned Achilles in that movie. I kind of felt bad for you there.

SPEAKER_01 3:10

Achilles is not, he's not a character in Odysseus's story, although my novel Achilles' wife has Odysseus because Odysseus, in the very early part of Achilles' childlike teenage years, has a key role. Odysseus pops into everybody's myths here and there, but no, he's Achilles is not part of that later stage. He's dead and gone by then.

SPEAKER_02 3:35

Give us the 411 on Achilles' wife.

SPEAKER_01 3:39

So Achilles' wife is focuses on this early episode in Achilles' life, which is does not have any main big myths told about it. Not because they weren't there in the ancient world, but because none of them survived. So, for example, we know there was a whole Euripidan play called the Skyrians. That's the island that my novel takes place, Skyros. And so there must have been a big version of it. But it doesn't zip, we got none of that. So the only version we have is this really silly poem, Latin, late Latin poem, that it's laughably bad. So what the source material for this myth is kind of dreary, but it's this great myth. So what happens? So Achilles' mother, who's a goddess, and she knows that if her son goes to this war that's not yet started, but she knows it's gonna, he's gonna die. So what does she want to do? Keep him out of the war. So what does she choose? She tries various strategies that don't work, and finally she hides him on this obscure little island called Skyros in the women's quarters, dressed up like a girl, and expects nothing bad to happen. Put a teenage boy in the middle of the women's quarters. So the expected thing that any normal human being who's not a goddess clueless about human nature would the princess, of course, gets pregnant and has his son eventually. That's the myth. And she, that princess, just as pretty girl, gets pregnant offstage, he abandons her, goes off to the war, and later that son comes back into the myth, goes, gets dragged off to Troy, much to his delight, and he slaughters Priam on the altars as God. He's like one of the great jerks of Greek mythology because he's really violent and nasty. And I, Mama, writer, etc., I'm thinking, what the heck happened to poor Daedomia left behind with this really monstrously impossible child to raise, et cetera, et cetera. And how did she have a relationship with Achilles of value and interest to the reading public? Because my Achilles, in my first book, and always, I've always liked Achilles. He's not the empty, selfish jerk that everyone wants to think he is. He's the one at one point in the Iliad, he compares himself to a mother bird trying to take care of her chicks, and the chicks he's referring to, they're all the warriors that, you know, his fellow warriors in the Greek on the Greek side. This is a guy with multiple sides and dimensions. So I make one significant change in the way the myth happens. When a when Thetis, Achilles' mother, brings him to the island, instead of tr putting him into dressing up a warrior in a little tunic or a little peplos gown and expecting that no one will see this giant warrior underneath a little skimpy dress, I have her change him into the body of a woman. So what do we know about such things? Bad situation for Achilles. He will fall apart psychologically. So who's gonna step up and be his supporter and try and understand this, even though there's all kinds of secrets being kept from her? Daidomia. So now we have a real relationship and off she goes.

SPEAKER_02 7:18

In Homer's time, women were considered property, and yet the subtext is always how smart they are and the ideas they come up with that actually change the story in a very fundamental way. Why do you think that was?

SPEAKER_01 7:33

They're maybe a little less considered property than, like, for example, Homeric, ancient women had more rights than, say, Victorian women in England. So history's not as as progressive, straight line, it's more cyclical. So there's that. There are women who rule in the ancient world, lots of them. It's not the norm, it's not the go-to thing. Patriarchy is the norm, but it nonetheless, it's it's there. So there's that. But also, I think, of course, a sensitive writer realizes that women are have to be part of the picture. I just I think that's sort of obvious. Shakespeare, Homer. Look at great writers across all the centuries. They always come down on the side of yes, women are intelligent halves of the universe.

SPEAKER_02 8:24

There have been a number of translations of Homer over the centuries. Do you have some favorites?

SPEAKER_01 8:30

I for years taught. There's a translator, Lombardo, and his the Iliad. He did it originally as a radio play, like for radio. So it's very oral, which I taught it to my high school students, and that one really I like his voice and the modernness of it. Emily Wilson has very recently translated, of course, to great controversy, the Odyssey and the Iliad. And she, her Odyssey is famously less oinky. Women are given more freedom in their activities and their and the language is less repressive about them. That I think is true to the Homeric language. The translations that people say, oh, but it was this way, but they're reading those 19th century, those early 20th century translations, and they're reading the translations through these male minds that assumed that the women needed to be quiet and shut up and go away. And that's not the Homeric vision. So I think Wilson gave room. There, I wouldn't defend every word of her translation. I wouldn't defend anybody's translation, is this highly interpretive process, and you've got to make the choices. And I like hers. I like the there's nothing highfalutin. People like, oh, her language is so informal. It's like, yeah. Go take ancient Greek, then once you know it, read Homer and tell me it's highfalutin' something. It's not. It's Shakespeare. Again, I'm using that parallel, but the Globe Theater was an oral product. You went to the plays and the completely illiterate masses happily were entertained. Homer was oral entertainment. It might have been the nobility that hired him, but I think all the servants and everybody else are listening spellbound when he's reciting. So I think all of these are universal. You don't have to be some fancy schmancy scholar to enjoy them. They're just plain fun, and that's their intent.

SPEAKER_02 10:42

Talking with Judith Starkston, her latest book is Achilles' Wife, part of the Trojan Thread series, which also includes Hands of Fire. And we've been discussing Odyssey, Homeric translate translations, the power of women throughout history. How old were you, Judith, when you first realized you were in love with mythology?

SPEAKER_01 11:05

I read mythology when I was a little kid, although I was more enamored of pioneer women and families than I was myth. But when I went to college, I had no idea that I was going to become a classicist until during freshman orientation, two days on campus. And one of the English professors that I was listening to said his only regret was he didn't take ancient Greek. And I thought, okay, I'll up him the goofiness of the pre-teen, pre-twenties person. And I took Greek and it was I was done for right from that on out. It was the that was the thing. And I'd always been a storyteller. And I remember telling, I can't remember it, must have been my one of my children was in the backseat, and my mother was in the seat beside me, which was she didn't live near us, so she must have been visiting. And I remember I was telling some story from myth to keep my kid happy in the backseat. And my mom turned to me and said, Boy, you're really good at that. That was like years ago, long before I was publishing novels. So I was like, I and I guess I stored that away in some corner of my imagination. That, like, okay, that's something you could do someday. What made you decide to become a writer? I stopped teaching for a number of reasons and retired from that. And I had always wondered there's this the character in the Iliad, the young woman Briseus, who gets argued over by Achilles and Agamemnon, and she triggers their split. She's the driver of the plot, but she has almost no words, and the words she says are about someone else. We just don't hear about her. But there's this one little phrase as she's being dragged away to go to Agamemnon's camp instead of Achilles, that she goes all unwillingly. She liked being with Achilles. That was my seed towards thinking about telling women's stories. And I already, having taught at that point the Iliad for many years, I already knew I liked Achilles. So I wasn't surprised that she liked Achilles, but I wanted to know who she could be and what her story was. So that got me. I had first it took me a decade to actually get so I was writing stories well. You're a writer. It doesn't, it's a skill you develop. You have to have some inner drive that makes you want to tell stories and you can't put them down, but you also have to just refine it. And so it took me a while, but that's where it came from.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

How did you create her story when there's no history behind the reality of Homer's?

SPEAKER_01 13:56

Because we don't know much. We know a little bit about her, where she comes from. She knew her hometown, and so I started her there. I went, that's where I started getting interested in Hittites because when I was in grad school, no one talked about this giant empire that to the east, it's northeast of Ankara today, this capital of this giant empire. But Troy was just a satellite empire or small kingdom. The big guys were the Hittites. That was not something we were talking about. They were excavated and explored, and the translations and all that knowledge has come out since I'm old, but not that old. So it's all pretty darn recent information. I started delving into that because there it's a written culture. They have we have these huge libraries of cuneiform tablets, and said, who could Briseus, as a princess of a town, in that, you know, satellite kingdom be? And I found a kind of priestess and a kind of healer and a person she could be that would be highly literate, very interested in the same things that the tradition about Achilles, he was trained by Chiron, the centaur, to be a healer. He's a musician, he's a poet. I just created commonalities that even when she hates him and he's destroyed her life and he's killed her family, and she's not going to have anything to do with him, eventually they connect. Making that connection was really hard. I had to, there were a lot of ways and means, and I was trying to work all within the tradition of the Iliad. Achilles' wife, the fun there was I have grown up into a big and put my big exploratory pants on, and I don't need to be so close to the actual tradition. And so I was okay working with a myth where we don't have a lot of it. And what we have is, as I say, it's these this late version. So there I could play around much more. So they're very they're different in terms of where I came, how I approached them, although they have similar feels, I think.

SPEAKER_02 16:15

Judith Starkston is our special guest. Her website is Judith Starkston.com. Very easy to remember. Odysseus Penelope Telemachus. How did the actors who portrayed them in the film do in your mind?

SPEAKER_01 16:30

They were all fine. I think that Anne Hathaway, I guess she has her detractors. I liked her when she takes Telemachus and rips him up one for, hey, I've been on this throne for 20 years while your dear dad is traipsing about God knows where. And I've done a good I've done the best that I'm allowed to do within the strictures. That theme, I have to say, the strictures on women as rulers is definitely part of Achilles' wife because De Demia, she's she and her father are the throne there. And so that I thought Ann Hathaway, I was all for her read and the limitations that she's shoving against. And I would have liked more of her world and her. I don't think Nolan paid much attention at all to women. He's very different than me and his focus. I thought it's similarly when he's trying to get you to sympathize with the Trojans, they're faceless, they're not. We see their city being burnt up, we see the decapitation of the statue over and over again. I skip the repetitions and just get some truly human details about Trojans that so we care about them. And I think we could have seen Penelope's world in more intimate detail. I think Telemachus, we got his struggle. We his is a little more transparent. No, Dad, these guys want to kill me, but I want to show them. It's a simpler narrative to get. I don't think teenagers are quite as deep as 20 years of trying to hold a country together while everything's going to pot around you. That's a more complicated narrative. So I would have given Penelope more, but I thought Telemachus was good. And I liked Odysseus for a modern version. He's not the Nolan took all the sex out of it. I'm sorry, Calypso. It's a giant sex vest in the Odyssey. That's part of why my ninth graders had so much fun with that book. It was, it's not graphic, it's not, you can safely put it in any teenager's hands, but let's face it, why did he have so much trouble leaving her? It wasn't PTSD. But I PTSD is such a critical thing for us to be thinking about. I am totally good with Nolan rewriting the hero Odysseus to focus us on issues that are so much here and now. The whole issue of migrations of people and the way we treat each other when we go to a foreign place. I have to say, the in the film, the Zeus's Law, which is definitely a thing in the ancient world, there's Xenia, and the rule is enforced by Zeus, if you, a guest, come to some foreign place, you enter their home, they have to feed you and take care of you and not harm you. And once they've done that, they cannot ever harm you because you have this bond of Xenia of guest host relationship. And then if you reveal, then they can ask you who you are and why you're there. And if you say, I'm your father's worst enemy, but now I'm here to make peace, you can't kill them because Zeus will get you. So it's this very that's something we should be thinking about in the modern world. Now, Nolan washes it down to the golden rule or something, which I like the golden rule, but this is actually if he'd listened to the scholarship, it's even better for his point, I think, than washing it out to be nice to everybody. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 20:22

Is that a key message that you wish everybody would take away from their viewing of the Odyssey?

SPEAKER_01 20:27

Yeah, no, I think that's that is, I think that's what he was trying to say. Is if you don't want to be psychological psychologically trashed, and if we don't want our culture to just go shunk and collapse completely, then we need to start considering our actions more carefully and being kinder. And that's the sort of quick version. What is next for Judith Starkston?

SPEAKER_02 20:53

What are you working on?

SPEAKER_01 20:55

I am working on something a little different than I've ever done before because it its primary main character is set in the modern world. So it's got a very contemporary narrative voice. Sophia is very living today, but she is a classicist. She works with mythology, and to her extreme distress at first, mythological visions or something, she's not sure at first, come in. And those Athena is the sort of central character in those mythic cycles. That is set in the ancient world. So I get to use all my I love to write ancient world stuff, but it's all through this very contemporary voice. So it's has a very different feel, lots of fun. Athena, which brings up a few issues of concern these days, free speech, treating each other kindly. That is definitely there. The role of women and being respected and not dismissed offhand by our culture and our politics. So that's what that book is doing. And it's very funny. I've never written a novel that's consistently there's incidental humor in my novels, but this one there's just way more humor, which is great fun to write. Was it hard to make the switch?

SPEAKER_02 22:16

And how do you write effective humor?

SPEAKER_01 22:20

Yeah, yes, it was hard to write. It took me a long time to be sure that, and then I had to go back to the first part and completely rework the voice because I hadn't quite got it yet. So I'm not all that far in this manuscript, but yeah, humor I think comes by observing. First of all, absurd people are funny. So absurd, I get to have villains in this who are really like Zeus. He's just a jerk. He's not nuanced. That's often funny. Usually there are definitely some nuanced villains in it, but they're also the ones who are we like to laugh at them. And they echo things that are bug bugging us in our world. And that's a kind of dark humor, but don't we all love to laugh at our troubles today? And this kind of gives people a way of saying, yeah, but look, she's also this writer's also making me think about it. I'm laughing, but I'm also seeing a way, maybe out of it. So that's what I'm trying to do, not in a preachy way at all.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

If you enjoyed Odyssey, but don't want to undertake a reading of Emily's epic translation of Homer's poem, a great place to start is anything written by our special guest, Judith Starkston. Her most recent Achilles' wife is available wherever cool books are sold, as is Hands of Fire. And most of the other books that she's written are in circulation someplace, and you can learn all about it on her website at Judith Starkston.com. Judith, thank you so much for doing this. It's been great.

SPEAKER_01 24:05

Thank you, Terry. It's always fun to talk to you.

SPEAKER_00 24:08

In Conversation with Terry Shepard is a copyrighted presentation. All rights reserved. I'm Lisa Davis. Join Terry Shepherd next time in conversation.