When I was 8 or 9 years old, my uncle and aunt gave me a copy of D’Aulaires’ Book of Greek Myths, a standard-bearer for children’s folklore that was originally published in 1962. I was immediately dazzled by the book: D’Aulaires’ was my first exposure to Greek mythology, and I marveled at its vibrant cosmology, its richly illustrated tales of deities whose omnipotence was matched only by their strikingly human, self-indulgent caprice.
Over the years, I committed to memory the elaborate organizing logic of Greek antiquity. The immortal residents of Mount Olympus—philandering Zeus and his cascading (sometimes circular) family tree—governed every aspect of human existence. I was daunted by such a deterministic universe, in which the free will of mortals counted for so little. Yet I was compelled, even comforted, by the coherence of this worldview, in which one’s life was entirely foretold.
The Greek writer Kay Cicellis, who died in 2001, might have shuddered at such a sunny view of fate. One year before Ingri and Edgar Parin D’Aulaire published their compendium of Greek myths, Cicellis released her second work of fiction, The Way to Colonos, which ruthlessly dramatizes the limits of individual freedom and the agony of facing one’s powerlessness. The book has recently been reissued at what feels like a propitious moment, when modern treatments of Greek myth proliferate, many of them adapting stories about destiny and order for a chaotic and individualistic time.
Cicellis’s book consists of three stories that parallel Sophoclean tragedies—“The Way to Colonos” (Oedipus at Colonos), “The Return” (Electra), and “The Exile” (Philoctetes). In an author’s note, Cicellis calls any connection to the Greek playwright’s work a “coincidence”: She was inspired by the original myths, rather than the plays based on them. Each of Cicellis’s retellings transforms its myth into a short story set in mid-20th-century Greece, juxtaposing an ancient sense of fate against the messy uncertainty of modernity. In The Way to Colonos, the horror that emerges is more suppressed and internal than in the ancient texts. The violence is psychological and rarely fatal, in marked contrast to that in Sophocles’s work (in other words, nobody gouges out their eyes after having mistakenly slept with their own mother). And unlike Sophocles’s plays, in which the deities are persistently invoked, Cicellis’s universe is spiritually arid. Her discontented characters seem to wander beneath an empty firmament.
But make no mistake: This is not a world of freedom and abandon. Each of Cicellis’s young protagonists arrives at the grim realization that their life is circumscribed not by a god but by the pull of obligation to an undeserving parent or mentor. In these stories, Cicellis presents fate as the imposition of familial or vocational inheritance, rather than the decree of a higher power. It is something silently assumed, perhaps even chosen—if only because no other choice seems possible.
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In the first story, “The Way to Colonos,” Antigone and her infirm, recently widowed father sail to the titular island, an isolated and inhospitable place, to make a new home. Antigone views their relocation as a dual exile: Both of them have committed “evil” acts, “indigestible as stone.” Antigone had an affair with a married man. Her father, after quarreling with Antigone’s mother, locked her out of their house overnight, which led to a terrible accident. Antigone hopes that on the island, her father will join her in “complete despair,” a mental state characterized less by remorse than by self-abasing catatonia. For Antigone is a merciless judge; she regards both her father and herself as unworthy of rehabilitation, or even the oblivion of death.
“The Return” foregrounds another relationship between parent and daughter, though this one is much more tempestuous. Eugenia (a version of Electra) lives in a filthy house with her lazy, corrupt mother, Madame Nini, and Madame Nini’s lover. The home is always swarming with visitors, many of them young women. Eugenia wonders bitterly if Madame Nini and her lover are running a brothel, or perhaps an underground abortion network.
As disgusted as she is by her mother, Eugenia is equally obsessed with her. She skulks around the house, scheming for opportunities to pick a fight. She writes constantly to her younger brother, Orestes, begging him to return from school and reestablish domestic order. When he does come home, he is repulsed by the squalor of his mother’s house and by the violent antagonism between Madame Nini and Eugenia. He presses Eugenia to leave with him.
Eugenia has other ideas. “Orestes! Kill her!” she demands, in response to his proposal. But unlike his Sophoclean namesake, Orestes is bewildered by this escalation and refuses. Ultimately, Eugenia binds herself to Madame Nini, “like a seaman on deck who has cut off the moorings of his ship and abandoned himself to his element.” In Sophocles’s play, the final acts of violence provide a kind of catharsis. By contrast, Eugenia condemns herself to a future of festering tension and fury.
Cicellis’s third revised myth, “The Exile,” foregrounds a nonfamilial intergenerational bond. Stamos, 19, is a version of Neoptolemus, son of the warrior Achilles. He serves as a squire of sorts to Greek guerrilla soldiers who, after the Second World War, operated as Communist resistance forces in the mountains. At the start of the story, he has traveled to an obscure island in order to convince Rigas, an exiled former commander, to return to the ranks. Stamos quickly romanticizes the soldier’s isolation—his freedom from social expectations—and begins to dream of defecting. Rigas actually detests his remote existence, but he adopts the persona of a rugged maestro who lives off the land. Eventually, he is forced to drop the charade. “You offered me a role. I took it,” Rigas explains to Stamos. “You gave me something to be. What did you expect?”
Unlike with Antigone and Eugenia, whose perceptions of their respective parents curdled long ago, the reader watches Stamos experience disillusionment. Reverence for one’s elders, Cicellis implies, is a dangerous kind of fan fiction. Nonetheless, Stamos’s disappointment does not prompt him to sever ties with the guerrillas, and he follows them back to the harbor, just as both Antigone and Eugenia adhere to their wretched parents.
Rachel Cusk, who wrote the foreword to the new edition of Cicellis’s trilogy, argues that the author’s “young protagonists claim as a freedom the right to hate or disapprove of the adults who hold so-called authority over them, when the forces of tragedy and fate have decreed that no such freedom exists.” In my view, this reading gives the characters more agency than they seem to think they have. Cicellis’s young characters may despise the elders in their orbits, because even a universe governed by fate does not dictate human emotion. But that is not freedom: They are otherwise impotent, incapable of emancipating themselves from the adults who have harmed or disappointed them.
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There is something dreadful in the resignation depicted at each story’s denouement—in the cool viciousness of Antigone’s sense of justice, and in Eugenia’s realization that while her mother lives, she must be at her side. The brutality of “The Exile” manifests in its portrayal of enlightenment rendered powerless: Stamos learns that Rigas isn’t who he thought he was, and yet he does not reject him. If these adaptations retain the solemnity of a Greek myth, it is less because of their source material than because their young characters come to understand their lives as roles they are bound to enact. Tragedy, in The Way to Colonos, emerges from its protagonists’ obliterating desire to follow the story that is most legible to them, in which they are most legible to themselves.
Cicellis understands what I was too young to realize in my earliest encounters with Greek mythology: that our fascination with these stories is fundamentally existential. What, in one’s life, is inevitable? What traits, decisions, or misfortunes exceed a person’s jurisdiction? These are enduring human quandaries.
The abundance of contemporary retellings and revisions, from Kay Cicellis’s trilogy to Emily Wilson’s 2017 retranslation of The Odyssey to Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel, Circe, expose an ongoing fascination with the tension between fate and control. In a modern world where free will is taken as a given, fate might be best understood as the tangle of powers that facilitate or obstruct individual wills. Perhaps it is our intuitive recognition of this dynamic—one not between gods and mortals, but between the free and the vulnerable—that brings us back to this ancient folklore, century after century.
