Myth as unfinished business

Why a weekly for very old stories

Greek myths were never finished objects. Every poet who told them cut, rearranged and pasted, and audiences expected it. Euripides could send Helen to Egypt while a phantom went to Troy in her place; Ovid could turn a solemn Greek legend into a Roman joke. That habit of remaking is the most modern thing about the myths, and we think it deserves a magazine that treats them as live material rather than as museum labels.

Each essay takes one figure or story and asks a sharp question of it: what do the ancient texts actually say, where do they contradict each other, and why does the story keep coming back – in a novel, a gallery, a phrase we use without thinking?

How we read the sources

We start from the ancient works themselves – Homer and Hesiod, the Homeric Hymns, the tragedians, Ovid, Apuleius, Pausanias – and we try to say which source tells which episode. A story that survives only in a late handbook is labelled as late, not dressed up as archaic.

Where authors disagree, we show the disagreement instead of smoothing it over. Quotations are our own renderings from the Greek and Latin, marked as such, and we give book and line numbers only when we are sure of them. For folk tradition we rely on the folklorists who recorded it, and we say plainly when a custom varied from one place to another.

Collage as a method

Our pages borrow from the cut-and-paste culture section: big numbers, bold headlines, fragments set against one another. That is also how we think. An essay on Dionysus might put a line of Euripides next to a modern novel; one on Pan might travel from a Theocritus poem to a word on a news ticker. Juxtaposition is not decoration. It is how a reader sees that an ancient story is still doing work.

What we will not do is invent. No made-up quotations, no imaginary experts, and no tidy morals that the sources do not support.

About the pictures

Every illustration on Mythwork Weekly is a cut-paper collage made for this site: torn olive, sand, black and cream papers layered into bold, simple shapes. They are interpretations, not reconstructions of ancient art, and they are never photographs of real objects. When an essay discusses a real vase, statue or painting, we name it and say where it is kept.