with Anactoria Clarke
Today’s guest, Dr. Anactoria Clarke, is on the Regional Academic Staff of The Open University, UK, where she is a Staff Tutor in English Literature. Dr. Clarke has not one but two PhDs, the first in English Literature and the second in Classics!
At left: Cheiron the centaur, Attic black-figure dinos (mixing bowl), ca. 580–570 BCE. At right: publicity poster for—you guessed it!—6-Headed Shark Attack (2018, dir. Mark Atkins)
You’ve got an upcoming course on ancient monsters—can you tell us more about that?
I have! I’m running an 8-week course on ‘Monsters in Greek Mythology’ through H.M. Classics Academy, so it’s online via Zoom, starting on 3 October 2024. I’m going to be introducing students to monster theory in the first week, and then we’re going to be examining a wide variety of ancient monsters in the following weeks, looking at attributes that they share and the ancient texts which describe them, with the final week focusing on modern receptions of these monsters—Medusa being a popular and fascinating case study. We’ll be applying our theory to the monsters in our discussions, and I’ll be introducing students to sources from key scholars in the field. I’m looking forward to hearing what the students think of the monsters!
How did you first get interested in studying ancient monsters?
I studied English Literature first before coming to Classics, and gained my PhD with a thesis on ‘male doubling’ in late nineteenth-century gothic fiction. ‘Male doubling’ is the phenomenon where there are either two male characters who share similarities and/or differences, or a character who has two sides to them. A useful example is Jekyll and Hyde. I’ve always loved gothic fiction, and have a particular soft spot for vampires. What I have always loved about those gothic monsters is how they are commenting on contemporary cultural concerns, and that they offer a different side to ourselves, that we paradoxically both want to keep close but also want safely kept away. What I really enjoyed discovering when I turned my attention to classics and ancient texts is the variety of monsters, and the sheer number of hybrid creatures that permeate the myths.
Do you have a favorite ancient monster, and if so, how did it become your favorite?
My favourite ancient monster, Cheiron the centaur, is a bit of a strange one as he’s benign and helps out all of the young heroes that are sent to him (including Jason, Herakles, and Achilles). He’s revered for the way he helps to raise them to be heroes. I became interested in him when I started my Classics PhD, initially looking at male prophets. I was desperate to get a prophetic centaur into the mix but after digging around, I realized that there was so much more to him than that (although it is a fascinating aspect of his ancient representation that frequently does not make it into reception texts). What I particularly enjoy about Cheiron is that he fulfils various criteria attributed to monsters and yet he is not feared. Cheiron fits monster criteria in several ways, if we follow Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s famous ‘monster theses’: in Cheiron’s case, physical hybridity and liminal living space are the primary indicators of monstrosity. However, he’s also culturally specific, and in some ways tells us what it is to be human. The heroes he trains are sent to him because they cannot learn what they need to know from another human; they need his range of skills to fulfil their duties. And with Cheiron, even after he is accidentally wounded by a poison-tipped arrow and is in excruciating pain (but cannot die, because of his divine lineage), he continues helping humans. But the rest of the centaurs (who have different lineage) fit Cohen’s monstrous aspects really well: in addition to being physical hybrids who live on the margins of the civilized world, their savage behavior also helps qualify them as monsters.
I should also confess that I have a huge soft spot for Cerberus too, though. The episode where Herakles enters the Underworld to borrow him for one of his Labours must be the first incidence of ‘Borrow My Doggy’ (a UK website which aims to link dog owners with interested people who do not have full-time ownership of dogs but who would like to help out with dog sitting and walks)!
Given that you find centaurs especially interesting, can you speculate as to what cultural context might have given rise to such creatures—for example, what fears or anxieties might the centaur be expressing, or what in the natural world might they be explaining?
Centaurs are really interesting in the event they are primarily known for: the Centauromachy, in which they battle a group of humans in Thessaly known as the Lapiths. The centaurs had been invited to a Lapith wedding but after getting extremely drunk they tried to abduct and assault the bride and the other women there. They represent the lack of guest friendship, of civilized behaviour, and they live on mountains because they need to be away from society, as they don’t behave in a way that fits in. Whilst Cheiron also lives on a nearby mountain, Mount Pelion, his reason for being situated in such a location is different: because he raises neophyte heroes, they need to be sent to a liminal space to be educated and trained. They are then reintegrated into society once they can fulfil that purpose. So Cheiron’s liminality has a positive purpose, compared to the negative liminality of the other centaurs. He also helps to protect Peleus (Achilles’ father) from centaurs in the mythological record, too.
Are there any modern adaptations of Cheiron that you find particularly interesting and useful, or especially inaccurate and misleading?
I found the way in which both Elizabeth Cook in Achilles and Madeline Miller in The Song of Achilles wrote about Cheiron to be fascinating. These two authors focus on how Cheiron’s body feels—both to himself, through his wound (in Cook’s text), and to Patroclus (Achilles’ close friend), as a hybrid being (in Miller’s). There is very little extant ancient literature on Cheiron’s hybrid body, and virtually none coming from the perspective of the centaur himself, so we don’t really get a sense of how that body would feel or move; we just get ancient authors sometimes arguing for the impossibility of it! So the fact that female authors are using the centaur in ways that explore bodily difference is of real interest to me.
What do you think accounts for the ongoing appeal of ancient monsters in the modern world?
That’s a really good question! After all, we have monsters from different historical and geographical periods, so many that we can use and engage with. But I think ancient monsters offer the most variety, and the greatest complexity in how they can be read. We only need to think about Medusa, and how she has been rehabilitated in recent academic and reception texts—people have looked back at the ancient sources, considered how she became monstrous, and questioned whether that reading of her and her actions is fair.
However, I also think that ancient monsters offer a lot of power. They fundamentally underpin the cultures in which they arose, and offer modern audiences a lineage for what they find monstrous. I think that modern audiences are more aware of the ubiquity of monstrosity, in our culture, our surroundings, and even in ourselves. And ancient monsters help a modern audience to realise that monstrosity is not always the fault of the monstrous, and that it’s not always a bad thing. Over time, we’ve learned that we can laugh at the monster from a safe distance—the sheer number of terrible monster movies with very improbable monsters (six-headed sharks that can hobble across land, for example) attests to this.
Dr. Anactoria Clarke has always loved reading and literature, and has also always been curious about different things, so classics fulfils that interdisciplinary need. In terms of upcoming projects, Dr. Clarke is finalizing a book proposal based on her Classics PhD topic, and is writing a chapter on Ursula Le Guin’s Lavinia for a forthcoming edited collection, The Afterlives of the Aeneid’s Women.