In _Mythica_ Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world's greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer's epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women - queens, mothers, warriors, slaves - were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not - until now) remembered them.
A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer's epics charted entirely by women - from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope - _Mythica_ is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece's greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.
DR EMILY HAUSER is an award-winning classicist and historian and the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels retelling the stories of women of Greek myth, _For the Most Beautiful_, _For the Winner_ and _For the Immortal_. She read Classics at Cambridge, where she received a double first with distinction and won the Chancellor's Medal for Classical Proficiency. She has a PhD in Classics from Yale, and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard Society of Fellows. She is now a Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and teaches and researches on women's writing, ancient and modern. Her recent publications include _How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature_ and a book for younger readers - _Ancient Love Stories,_ illustrated by Sander Berg.
Emily Hauser lives in Exeter.