Keeping it real
The series did include lots of elements from ‘real’ Greek mythology. Numerous Greek gods and goddesses turned up over the course of the show, from famous Olympians like Ares, Zeus, and Aphrodite, to less well known deities like Nemesis (goddess of justice), Morpheus (god of dreams), and Discord (in Greek Eris, the goddess of discord). Some early episodes were inspired by stories from Greek myth, like Hercules freeing the Titan Prometheus from being chained up and having his magically regenerating liver eaten by a giant eagle every day (Season 1’s ‘Prometheus’); the story of Odysseus, known by his Latin name Ulysses in the show, and his long journey home to his wife Penelope (Season 2’s ‘Ulysses’), and Season 1’s brief glimpse of the Trojan War in ‘Beware Greeks Bearing Gifts’. Ancient Greek playwrights would mess around with the stories people thought they knew to surprise their audience and keep their attention. The famous story of the witch Medea murdering her own children, for example, was an innovation of the playwright Euripides, adapting earlier stories where they were killed by accident or killed by other characters. So what Xena (and parent show Hercules: The Legendary Journeys) was doing was exactly what ancient Greek dramatists did, taking ideas and characters people know and playing around with them to create something new.
Remixing the myths
One of the interesting things about Xena: Warrior Princess was the way the show took place in a vaguely described mythical time which seemed to cover millennia of not just Greek mythology and legend, but even well-known, real and dateable Roman history. For the ancient Greeks and Romans, there was a sense that the distant past was a time of myths, and that gods and heroes and monsters walked the earth long before their own time. However, they also had a fairly strong sense of there being a rough chronology to these stories. Certain myths happened in a certain order, and there was a clear progression of ‘Ages’ with different events belonging to different periods. The Titan Kronos was in charge first, then he was usurped by his son Zeus. Mankind was created by the Titan Prometheus, and Woman inflicted on them as a punishment to Prometheus by Zeus (ancient Greek myth was not as feminist as the show it inspired, as you can tell!). The Greek poet Hesiod outlined five Ages of Man. The Golden Age was the reign of Kronos, when men lived like gods. When Zeus took over, the Silver Age began, and men were now inferior beings who had to work for a living. The Bronze Age was an age of strong, warlike men who were destroyed by Deucalion’s flood (the Greek equivalent of the story of Noah’s Ark). Next was the Age of Heroes, and this is where myth starts to meet legend and pre-history. This is the period when the Trojan War supposedly took place – the war is fictional, but the city of Troy is real (it’s at a site called Hissarlik in modern Turkey) and so were the Greek city states described in the stories, so this war can be placed in a real timeline of human history, at around 1200 BCE, even if the war as described in the stories never really happened. The final age was the Age of Iron, Hesiod’s present day of around 700 BCE, an era of misery and toil (Hesiod was not much of an optimist). Xena throws all of this chronology out of the window and blends everything together into a glorious mish-mash of myth, legend, and history. The 10-year Trojan War is covered in a single episode set at the end of the siege. Heroes from different stories appear in no particular order. King David of Israel turns up – he lived around 1010-970 BCE, which would be a couple of centuries after the Trojan War. Most bizarrely for a show supposedly about Greek mythology, substantial chunks of Roman history are thrown into the mix as well, forming major story arcs across the years, especially in the fourth season. Producer Rob Tapert is obviously keen on this period because he later produced the STARZ Spartacus series – starring his wife, Lucy Lawless, a.k.a Xena – which features several of the same characters including Julius Caesar, Crassus and (briefly) Pompey. There’s something kind of wonderful about this ‘throw everything at the wall and see what sticks’ approach to chronology. There are lots of fun depictions of Julius Caesar in pop culture (from the dude with the surfer hairdo in Tapert’s Spartacus: War of the Damned to Kenneth Williams camping it up in Carry on Cleo) but none are quite as off-beat as Karl Urban repeatedly trying to kill Xena and even escaping the underworld after death to create a new reality where she never met Gabrielle, in an attempt to save himself. And the idea that the first Empress and possible serial killer (depending which ancient Roman rumours you believe) Livia was really Xena’s daughter – and a formidable warrior – is rather fun too.
Playing in other cultures’ sandpits
It wasn’t just time that Xena jumbled up whenever the writers felt like it – the series also included plenty of gods, myths and heroes from other places that had nothing to do with Greece or Rome. From Norse gods (including Loki and Odin) to Hindu gods, to Tau Chinese characters, to the early medieval British hero Beowulf, Xena’s “time of ancient gods, warlords, and kings” and “land in turmoil” could be anywhere, anywhen. This gave the writers great freedom in choosing the stories they wanted to tell and playing with them in new and creative ways, as well as allowing them to cast a diverse group of actors to play them. Casting black actresses Galyn Gorg and Gina Torres as Helen of Troy and Cleopatra respectively was reflective of academic movements throughout the late 1980s and 1990s to recognise the importance of black Africans to Mediterranean culture, and it has been argued that the real Cleopatra was black, as while her ethnicity was primarily Greek (her Greek ancestors conquered Egypt), her grandmother was a concubine of unknown origin. But the wide range of sources of inspiration Xena drew on meant that they could largely cast actors suited to their roles, regardless of skin colour. Although the goddess of Love, Aphrodite, was somehow still portrayed as a slim, ditzy blonde in pink, which is not a representation the ancient Greeks would have recognised – their statues of Aphrodite are a lot more rounded in body shape and wear even less clothing! Xena: Warrior Princess, like a lot of great shows from the 1990s, was a series full of good humour and creativity that didn’t take itself too seriously most of the time, but was still able to land a dramatic punch when it turned its mind to it. It’s a method of making television that, when done well, can give audiences the best of all worlds, and perhaps one that might see a bit of a comeback if audiences start to tire of heavily serialised, grimdark TV. The series’ approach to Greek mythology was like its approach to story-telling in general – use the things that you think will work, don’t be afraid to change things, to mix it up, to mess things around, and tell whatever story you want to tell using whatever tools are available to you to tell it. The ancient Greek playwrights would have been proud.
