When I was a boy, I was obsessed by the Greek gods and heroes. I read everything I could about them. I would draw pictures of them for hours and hours. I had one big regret, however: that the age of heroes had come to an end. Once the Trojan War had been fought, once the great city of Troy had been burned to the ground, once the Greeks had all returned home, the gods vanished. They stopped appearing to mortals. The Greeks no longer lived in a world of myth filled with nymphs and sea monsters. All that wonder disappeared.
But this did not mean that the Greeks stopped having adventures. Many years after the sack of Troy, they had to fight another war. A huge army, led by the most powerful man on earth, invaded Greece. The king of Persia had millions at his command. His forces made the ground shake. They drank rivers dry. Lots of Greek cities, knowing they were massively and terrifyingly outnumbered, surrendered. But some refused to give up. Among these brave cities were the two most famous in Greece: Sparta and Athens. Together they stood resolute. Even after a Spartan king was killed, even after Athens was burned, they refused to give up. Against all the odds they defeated the invader. The Persians were turned back. Greece was free.
When I first read this story, it seemed to me as thrilling as anything from the age of heroes. In some ways, in fact, it seemed even more thrilling. It was an adventure, after all, that had actually happened. At a narrow pass called Thermopylae, three hundred Spartans had stood against an entire army – but this wasn’t a myth, it was history. Leonidas, their brave king, seemed to me just as much a hero as anyone who had died at Troy – but he wasn’t made up; he had really existed. And so I became obsessed by the story. I am still obsessed by it today.
Even so, I have never forgotten that sense of longing I felt as a boy: for the gods not to have vanished from the face of Greece. When my daughters were young, we went to live near Athens for six months; and while we were there I would tell them how the Persians had invaded Greece. My version of the story, however, was one in which the gods as well as mortals had taken part. The central figure in this story was Gorgo, a Spartan princess. Like Leonidas, whom she married, she had really existed. Even as a girl, she had been famous for her cleverness and her courage. She was also descended from Heracles, the greatest of all the ancient heroes. This made her, I thought, the perfect heroine for the version of the story I wanted to tell my daughters. But I needed a hero as well as a heroine: and so I chose Themistocles, the Athenian who took the lead in persuading his city not to surrender to the king of Persia. Like Odysseus, the hero who spent ten years getting back home from Troy, he was crafty, brave and brilliant. I made him the favourite of Athena, the goddess who had been devoted to Odysseus. She, I knew, would have adored Themistocles.
This is the story I have retold in Wolf-Girl: a story full of wonder and adventure, but which is based on true events. Greek warriors and Persian kings, Spartans and Athenians, oracles and battleships: all are here. But so too are nymphs and giant snakes, woods alive with magic and the halls of the gods, magical transformations and prophecies that come true. It is the story of the most thrilling episode in the whole of history – but told as it has never been told before.
Tom Holland 2023