The Games Gods Play

In The Games Gods Play, Abigail Owen repurposes classical depictions of the Greek pantheon of gods and goddesses and adapts them to a modern setting. The core premises of the classical myths remains the same: Zeus, god of the skies and lightning, is brother to Poseidon, god of the seas, and Hades, god of death and king of the Underworld. Perpetually at odds with one another, their family often devolves into dangerous conflicts led by their volatile temperaments. The other members of the pantheon largely retain their classical identities: Apollo and Artemis are twin siblings; Aphrodite is the goddess of love; Ares is the god of war; Athena is the goddess of wisdom and war; and Hermes is the god of thieves. However, the inter-deity dynamics are not clearly defined or inspired by the classic tales, which saw, for instance, Aphrodite emerge from the sea, become Ares’s lover, and marry Hephaestus. The Titans—a cornerstone of the origin of the Greek deities in classical myths—also remain mysterious: Though Hades notably makes a throwaway comment in Owen’s narrative about his father (“Could be worse. […] You could have been swallowed alive as a baby by your Titan father” [300]), Owen’s narrative doesn’t clearly use Cronos’s myth, which sees infant Zeus hidden away until returning to defeat Cronos and save his siblings, whom Cronos had consumed.

Owen uses ambiguity, however, to fold in allusions to disputed myths, different pantheons, and subtle synecdoches. Specifically, she references the Roman pantheon of deities in direct equation to the Greek gods to extend her worldbuilding and account for all different iterations of the classical gods: Though the Greek gods have taken their influence and worship outside of Greece—as evidenced by Zeus being the patron god of San Francisco—so, too, do their Roman appellations survive and thrive, as evidenced by Athena’s Labor in a new Roman colosseum, where all the gods still bear their Roman names, and in Olympus itself, where Dionysus’s bar is named Bacchus’ Place, after his Roman name. Owen doesn’t preclude the existence of pantheons unrelated to the Greek or Roman ones, since she includes Norse gods—Odin, specifically—and Celtic gods, and in the case of the former, notes their participation in the battle against the Titans. Owen follows the classical myths in the plurality of accounts of the same tale. She alludes that multiplicity also exists in her narrative world, specifically in the case of Hephaestus’s origin story, where even Lyra knows of multiple accounts pertaining to how Hephaestus’s feet were turned backwards, including him falling from Mount Olympus for defending his mother from Zeus’s advances. Overall, Owen pays homage to and repurposes the classical myths both as the bedrock and spirit of her narrative world.