Published in 2025
16 hours and 22 minutes
Emily Hauser is an award-winning ancient historian and author, and a world-leading voice in rediscovering the women of the ancient world. She studied Classics at Cambridge with Mary Beard, where she took a double first with distinction and won the prestigious Chancellor’s Medal for Classical Proficiency. She has a PhD in Classics from Yale and was a Junior Fellow at the Harvard University Society of Fellows. The author of acclaimed novels rewriting Greek myth, including For the Most Beautiful, as well as a number of academic works, her books have been published and translated across the world, listed among the “28 Best Books for Summer” in The Telegraph and shortlisted for the Seminary Co-Op’s Best Books of 2023. She has appeared on several BBC Radio shows including Radio 4 Woman’s Hour, and has been featured in The Guardian alongside Colm Tóibín and Natalie Haynes.
What is this book about?
Award-winning classicist and historian Emily Hauser takes listenerson an epic journey to uncover the astonishing true story of the real women behind ancient Greece’s greatest legends, and the real heroes of those ancient epics, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey . . .
Contrary to perceptions built up over three millennia, ancient history is not all about men – and it’s not only men’s stories that deserve to be told.
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.
