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 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 reassesses 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.
Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out Of It by Emily Hauser is published on 17 April, 2025.
Read Emily’s feature about the real women behind the myth.
There are many more ideas for historical reading in our list of over 160 books published this year.
