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“She went to the temple and offered a sacrifice to, well...somebody. Athena, most likely. And while she was there, Poseidon appeared, all wet and naked and in the mood. They shagged in the temple. Or he raped her. Several versions of the myth say it was rape, but in those same versions, she’s the one who’s telling everyone that her son was fathered by Poseidon. I don’t know how to reconcile a woman bragging about her son being the child of her rapist.”
“Do you think it was rape?”
“Possible,” Lia said. “On one hand, he was a god and she was mortal. That’s a big power imbalance. Hard to imagine she could properly consent to an immortal. On the other hand...if you had the chance to shag a god, wouldn’t you take it? Don’t answer that, Mum. Rhetorical question.”
“Oh, I definitely would,” her mother said. “I’d start with Thor.”
The good countess clearly needed a refresher course on rhetoric.
“Look at that. Could you resist that?” her mother asked. She’d turned to a page in the book, a full-color photograph of Bernini’s most famous sculpture,The Rape of Proserpina. Bernini had lavished all his talent and attention onto the body of Pluto—Hades to the Greeks. He was massive, naked and impossibly strong. Proserpina—Persephone to the Greeks—squirmed in his grasp but in vain. No woman—goddess or mortal—could escape such a being. Utterly male but more than male. Human but more than human. Merciless in his beauty. Savage in his lusts.
“No.” Lia stared at the god and the poor girl helpless in his grasp. “I wouldn’t even try.”
“Poseidon and Hades were brothers,” her mother said. “If Poseidon looked anything like that, Aethra probably volunteered for the job of having his child.”
“You know the maddest thing?” Lia asked. “There’s no artwork depicting the encounter—Aethra and Poseidon in the temple. Theseus is one of the most famous Greek mythological heroes and, according to his mother, he had two fathers—one a king and one a god. But no artwork at all? Not a single famous painting or kylix or amphora or anything that depicts Aethra and Poseidon in the temple? So strange.”
She tossed the book and it landed neatly on the love seat.
Mum smiled and sat down next to the book.
“Suppression,” her mother said as she drew her legs under her into a position that could have been called almost-yoga. “It’s the most dangerous form of flattery. When a story like that gets ignored by male artists, that always means they’re afraid of it for one reason or another.”
Lia turned on her stool and gave her mother her full attention.
“What do you mean?” she asked.
“Ever heard of a book calledMathildaby Mary Shelley?”
“No,” Lia said. “I only know ofFrankenstein.”
“The reason you’ve never heard of it is because it’s the story of a teenage girl whose life is destroyed when her father falls in love with her. Mary Shelley’s father was a book publisher. He read her new manuscript, was horrified by the implications of it—guilty conscience, probably—and confiscated it. He wouldn’t allow it to be published, and it wasn’t—for over a hundred years. If a story is suppressed or obscured, it’s because somewhere along the way it scared the shit out of a man. And that story of Aethra sounds like a prime candidate for suppression by men. On one hand,” her mother said, holding up her right hand, “you have a woman who’s trying to tell anyone who would listen that the father of her son was the god Poseidon. On the other hand, you have a mortal man humiliated that his young bride left their marriage bed on their wedding night to have sex with someone else. Who benefits by calling it rape?”
“The husband,” Lia said. “If she had sex with Poseidon willingly, then he’s a cuckold. If she was raped, well...you can’t sue a god for adultery.”
“More important,” her mother said, folding her hands into her lap, “King Aegeus would have been humiliated to have his wife telling the world she’d left him sleeping in bed to go have sex with someone else. If he called it rape, he saved face. And the best evidence that nobody buys the rape story is the lack of artwork about it. The old masters loved painting rapes. Walk through any art gallery of Renaissance paintings and it’s a history of rape on the walls. They adored subjects where women were being hunted, chased, kidnapped, raped. The artists wanted to enshrine male power over women. They chose what myths they thought were worthy—the rape of the Sabine women, Apollo and Daphne, Medusa—”
“Hades and Persephone,” Lia said. “Leda being raped by Zeus in the form of a swan. Europa. Helen of Troy.” Lia had seen dozens of paintings of those subjects.
“The old male masters would never choose to preserve the story of a wife who got to have more fun than her husband. Not only that, she isn’t punished for it. She’s not turned into a tree or some reeds or a cow. In fact, she’s rewarded for her adultery by giving birth to the most famous hero in Greek mythology.”
“I hadn’t thought of it like that,” Lia said. “You’re probably right.”
“You should weave it,” her mother said. “As talented as you are, you don’t need an original source to work from. You can do it all by yourself. And Aethra and all the badly behaved wives in history will thank you.”
Lia felt a surge of love for her mother. Sometimes she forgot how nice it was to talk to her about art, life, love, nonsense. She had a much different perspective than her father, who cared more about the value of an artwork than the substance of it.
“I’m going to tell Daddy you said all that.”
“Do it,” Mum said, laughing. “He loves me because I’m so badly behaved, not in spite of it. As a good husband should. Or a wicked whore of a husband like mine.”
“Mother.”
“Sorry.”
“You are not.”
“Not really. Your father might be a handsome whore but he’s also the love of my life, the father of my children, my best friend and, well, all the clichés. But I can pretend he’s a normal saintly husband for your sake if you like.”
