In ancient Greece, women were child-bearers confined to their homes with few rights, but Greek mythology features powerful and frightening female characters. Think of the Amazons, the women warriors; the snake-haired Medusa, who turns men to stone; and Medea, who murders her children. In myth, it seems, Greek women took their bloody revenge.

This is why the Greeks needed myth: for that boundary, to know where they stood amidst the infinite. No one can simply coexist with the ocean, storms, the cypress trees. They had to codify the elements with language and greater meaning, and create gods out of them—gods who looked suspiciously like themselves—so that even if they were powerless over