In every bookshop today, from Blackwell’s to Waterstones, an unmistakable pattern emerges: Greek myth is everywhere. Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles, Natalie Haynes’ A Thousand Ships and Stone Blind, Jennifer Saint’s Ariadne and Elektra – the shelves are lined with new voices reanimating old gods. TikTok’s #BookTok feeds are filled with passages from the Iliad rephrased as feminist manifestos. At first glance, it might seem like another publishing trend, a convenient recycling of familiar stories. Yet, the deeper one looks, the more this modern fascination resembles something much older: the Renaissance revival of classical antiquity.
In the fifteenth century, figures such as Erasmus and Petrarch championed what became known as imitatio – the creative imitation of classical forms not to replicate them, but to revive moral and intellectual life through them. Humanist education taught that returning to Homer, Virgil, and Ovid was not an act of nostalgia, but of renewal. The ancients were the mirror in which one might learn how to be human. The irony is that, half a millennium later, our own culture appears to be doing the same thing – but with an entirely different goal. Our retellings are not about perfecting eloquence or virtue. They are about recovering lost voices, rewriting the silenced, and reinterpreting old myths for a fractured modern world.
The principle of imitatio still stands, but it has mutated. In Miller’s Circe, the once-marginal witch of The Odyssey becomes a self-determining woman, a figure of autonomy rather than enchantment. Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls retells the Iliad through the enslaved women of the Trojan War, transforming an epic of heroes into a testimony of trauma. In both cases, imitation becomes dialogue: the ancient story is kept intact, but its meaning is reconfigured. The authors imitate less the style of the ancients than the act of reinterpretation itself. They do to myth what the Renaissance did to antiquity, just with a different set of moral priorities.
The Renaissance humanists sought harmony; we seek empathy. Where Erasmus believed that reading the ancients refined the intellect, we turn to them to process identity, loss, and power. That shift reflects our time and zeitgeist. We live in an age of endless digital noise, political fatigue, and moral uncertainty. Myths offer structure in the chaos – not moral clarity, but continuity. Their archetypes persist precisely because they are so elastic: gods and mortals, fate and free will, hubris and punishment. These are the recurring cycles through which human experience can still be traced.
And yet, it would be unfair to dismiss the revival as purely aesthetic or therapeutic. Greek mythology is uniquely built for reinvention. Its stories are broad enough to absorb every cultural anxiety. Today, feminist writers use it to reassert female subjectivity; queer authors find in it the fluidity of identity and desire. The Song of Achilles’ tender portrayal of love between Achilles and Patroclus has resonated profoundly with a generation newly attuned to queerness and emotional vulnerability. The myths’ capacity to change shape without losing their essence is what allows them to thrive now just as they did two thousand years ago, and again in the Renaissance.
It is not insignificant that these retellings are also aesthetically seductive objects. The modern publishing market has been quick to capitalise on the trend, packaging ancient tragedy in pastel covers and gold-leaf lettering. Myth has become a commodity of beauty, marketed as both literary and accessible. Yet, the commodification doesn’t necessarily diminish its value. After all, ancient myths were also commercial in their own way: performed, copied, and reinterpreted for different audiences and city-states. The endless retelling of these stories is what has kept them alive. Still, there is an undeniable tension between revival and marketing, between rediscovering meaning and reproducing it for aesthetic consumption.
Perhaps the question, then, is not whether our fascination with Greek myth is genuine, but what kind of meaning we expect it to provide. The Renaissance returned to the ancients to find order; we return to it to find ourselves. We reimagine Medusa not as a monster but as a woman punished for her violation, a mirror of modern rage. We turn to Icarus not as a warning against ambition, but as an emblem of yearning for transcendence. The myths change shape, but the human need behind them does not. We use myth to articulate what cannot otherwise be said – the unspeakable, the repetitive, the archetypal.
Our retellings are, at heart, exercises in humanist thinking. Erasmus might not recognise his doctrine of imitatio in #BookTok, but he would recognise the impulse. To rewrite an ancient story is to participate in the same ongoing project of self-definition that the humanists began: using the past to refine, and in some sense define, the present. Our current mythic revival is therefore not an escape from modernity but a confrontation with it. Through the ancients, we rediscover our capacity for meaning, even when meaning feels endangered in the times we live in.
