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. Mythica was an instant Times bestseller.
Mary Beard. Natalie Haynes. Madeline Miller. A prolific public academic, a broadcaster and writer, and a novelist. What do they all have in common? They have all built their careers on engaging with the ancient world – the civilisations of ancient Greece and Rome that have come to be called “the Classics”. They are all hugely popular. And they’re all women.
In celebration of this International Women’s Day 2026, I thought it was time for a low-down on how women are leading the charge in Classics, how women are at the forefront right now producing some of the most exciting and boundary-defying work there is in making us see the ancient world anew – and how that should never be taken for granted.
What is history (or herstory)?
History is always about taking the long view: about using context to understand better what we’re seeing now. It’s like taking a two-dimensional shape – say, a book – and turning it sideways, to look at it in depth. Seeing the broader picture, with all its bumps and ridges, its highlights and its shadows, helps you to see things you might not have appreciated on first glance. A short view – one that might take a glance at the shelves of bookshops across the world filled with bestselling Greek myth reworkings by women – might suggest it’s not all that surprising that women are leading our ideas about the ancient world. Look at the immense popularity of novels like Madeline Miller’s The Song of Achilles on TikTok, you might say! Look at one of the most recent smash hit novels to top the bestseller charts, Ayana Gray’s I, Medusa! Look at Mary Beard’s global status, on screen and on the page, as the face of Classics!
But I’m here to take the long view and tell you: this was not inevitable. This was not easy. It has been fought for and worked for. And there is much, much more to come.
So before I talk about everything that women are doing for Classics now, I want to talk about our origin story.
An origin story
The Greek myths that have fuelled so many modern reworkings come from a culture, and a literature, that was highly and markedly androcentric. This is the civilisation of the ancient Greeks: one that takes many twists and turns in its long history (spanning hundreds if not thousands of years), but which is remarkably thorough in its patriarchy, its androcentrism, and its elitism. Athenian democracy, so often touted as an origin point for Western political systems, was a democracy only for free (not enslaved) Athenian (not foreign) men (not women). Almost all literature was written by, for and about men (some depressing statistics: we know the names of over 3200 male writers of Greek, and just over fifty women). Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – the earliest written literature in the West, dating to around the 8th–7th centuries BCE – generated the script for androcentric values which were followed in society (what men did) and literature (what men wrote) for centuries, long after the ancient Greeks had gone. One fact you may not know: the first word of the Odyssey is actually “man” – andra, in the Greek. The word we get “androcentric” from.
If we might imagine the Greeks passing down a generalised sense of androcentric values, those values came to be enshrined, above all, in the texts that outlived them. These texts – not only Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, but Plato’s dialogues, Sophocles’ tragedies, Thucydides’ histories – came, in Europe, to form the core of Western elite, male, education. The ability to read ancient Greek, indeed to have a working knowledge of any of these texts, was one which was the province of educated and elite white men above all. In 1923 – just over a hundred years ago – the great writer Virginia Woolf expressed her sense of deep exclusion from the arcane world of Classics, in an essay titled On Not Knowing Greek: “it is vain and foolish to talk of knowing Greek, since in our ignorance we should be at the bottom of any class of schoolboys”. Meanwhile, Western male writers from Virgil to Dante to Shakespeare to Byron had been drawing on their entry to the Greek club as a fuel for their imagination and their writing for many hundreds of years.
It’s about time women had a turn to lead the charge.
Revisioning the past
What’s extraordinary, I think, about this very potted version of the long view, is that it makes us see how much energy and urgency there is in what women are doing now. There are two main counts to what is happening when women lead the conversation: one is in rebutting the narrative that the ancient world had to be all about men; and the other is a refutation that antiquity is only to be responded to and reworked – inherited, if you like – by men.
The first count – let’s call it the revisionist view – says that we can work harder to find other experiences in ancient history, myth, literature and so on. I often like to say that, in the past, the fact that ancient Greek and Roman history elides the experiences of women, enslaved people and all kinds of others who didn’t fit the “typical” narrative was often taken by more modern historians as an excuse. The inevitable shoulder shrug: we don’t know where the enslaved people slept, so let’s end the conversation there. We can’t see the women in the archaeological record because they spent most of their time weaving, so let’s focus on the men’s armour instead.
But it’s not an excuse. For revisionists – and I’d put Mary Beard in there, as well as novelists like Miller and Haynes and Jennifer Saint, and myself too in my recent book Mythica – that’s an invitation to go deeper. How might we use other clues to discover what’s not been looked at in the past? How might we become more inventive, more creative, more analytical? How might we use new tools – the tools of modern science, or even of creative retelling – to step into another’s shoes, to unearth experiences that go beyond old ways of looking? Because this is the clincher: history is what you look for. It doesn’t “exist” out there, until you begin to piece the jigsaw puzzle together. It’s in who uncovers it. It’s in the story you look for, and the story you tell.
It’s one of the key reasons, I think, why Greek myth retellings like those of Miller, Haynes and Saint have proved so important, and so popular. They’re offering a call to see the ancient world through new eyes. To understand, and to remember, that fifty per cent of the population was always there, and that there is a dynamism and a power to uncovering their voices and their lives.
Revamping the future
The second count is wrapped up in the first, but it’s different in an important way: if the first is about saying women were there in the ancient world, the second is about saying that women are here now – and that we have something to say in the conversation about the past, and about our own experiences, our narratives, our histories. Novels like Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls, which came out in 2018, led the conversation in identifying the trafficked women of the Iliad’s war camp – but it also spoke to the experiences and voices of thousands of women around the world, who at that very moment were working to reclaim their own voices and community in the face of sexual violence through the #MeToo movement.
So you might have thought that the past is always in the past.
I’m here to say: the past is dictated by what we want to look for in our present.
Here’s to a new era for the ancient world. And all the many ways we can look back to look forward.
Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It by Emily Hauser (Penguin, £10.99) is now available in paperback.
