replace the broken ones on Marie’s necklace. I folded a square of scrap paper into a makeshift envelope and slipped them inside.
My phone dinged. An email notification hung at the top of the screen with Dr. Kent’s name in the subject line. I stuck the envelope with Marie’s gift in my pocket and opened the email.
Hello Briseis,
Angie told me you are thinking of majoring in botany when you get to college, but if you change your mind and want to venture into classical studies, please let me know. You seem to have a passion for it. As for your questions, I’ll try to address them in order.
1)Yes, I charge a consulting fee, but not for this conversation. I cannot express how touched I was that you understand the value of picking another person’s brain. You are a gem. Truly.
2)Oftentimes, the stories we think of as purely legend are based, at least in part, on real-world events. There are stories, for example, of the Priestesses of Apollo and the Oracle at Delphi. Many believed these were tall tales, but we’ve found the actual temple where the Pythia sat to give her predictions. We’ve uncovered the palace at Knossos where King Minos ruled. His wife, Pasiphae, was the mother of the Minotaur in Greek mythology. We now know the location of Troy, where the Trojans sent their famed horse full of invaders. Alexander the Great made a pilgrimage to the tomb of Achilles so that he could pay his respects. This is a fact. These people, these stories, are grounded in truths that have been exaggerated and distorted over time.
3)As for Medea specifically, there is less known about her beyond what the classic stories tell, but in my own research I have found evidence that she was a real person and that her origin story may have predated the Greek mythology by hundreds of years. She was indeed described as a witch or sorceress, but not like the witches we think of today. Think of her more as a priestess, someone initiated into the mysteries of a certain set of beliefs. Most priestesses were thought to be chosen by the gods or goddesses they served. In Medea’s case, she was a devotee of the goddess Hecate, but Hecate only arrives in Greek mythology in the fifth century BCE, which means that, like so many other Greek myths, she originated somewhere else much, much earlier. Long before the Olympians i.e., Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades come on to the scene. Hecate was shoehorned into Greek storytelling when people became aware of her later on, but one of her earliest mentions is alongside Medea. They are always linked, implying some deeper connection that has yet to be discovered.
Medea is said to have killed her own brother in an attempt to avoid being married off by her tyrannical father, who happened to be the son of the god Helios. She was said to have been cursed in some way because of this. What I know for certain is that her legend has been twisted, retold, and reimagined so many times that original elements have been obscured. I don’t believe she killed her own children, as only in Euripides’s play does she do this. There is some evidence to support my theory.
There is a folio in the Vatican Archives that a colleague of mine had access to about twenty years ago. It’s an assortment of documents that he believed were saved from the Library of Alexandria. These ancient, priceless relics were in pretty rough shape. One of them was the Medea story, and that version predated the stories we know now by centuries. There was even some talk about it being composed by someone who knew her. My colleague had planned to decipher the ancient Greek and try to mend the document, but his access to the archives was unexpectedly and without explanation revoked. There were rumors that the document had been “misplaced,” which is doublespeak for stolen or destroyed. I lean toward destroyed, because it is nearly impossible to remove anything from the Vatican Archives without being caught.
I’m attaching the only known image of the document. I have had it analyzed, but to no avail. It’s a poor-quality photograph and impossible to see clearly enough to decipher. But the photo is proof this narrative existed, and that is a tantalizing fact in and of itself.
I hope this helps to answer some of your questions. Mythology is a murky world. It’s much like unraveling a centuries-long game