But we were still called up occasionally by magicians and conjurors—men who’d made pacts with the infernal powers—and then by smaller fry, the table tilters, the mediums, the channellers, people of that ilk. It was demeaning, all of it—to have to materialise in a chalk circle or a velvet-upholstered parlour just because someone wanted to gape at you—but it did allow us to keep up with what was going on among the still-alive. I was very interested in the invention of the light bulb, for instance, and in the matter-into-energy theories of the twentieth century. More recently, some of us have been able to infiltrate the new ethereal-wave system that now encircles the globe, and to travel around that way, looking out at the world through the flat, illuminated surfaces that serve as domestic shrines. Perhaps that’s how the gods were able to come and go as quickly as they did back then—they must have had something like that at their disposal.

I never got summoned much by the magicians. I was famous, yes—ask anyone—but for some reason they didn’t want to see me, whereas my cousin Helen was much in demand. It didn’t seem fair—I wasn’t known for doing anything notorious, especially of a sexual nature, and she was nothing if not infamous. Of course she was very beautiful. It was claimed she’d come out of an egg, being the daughter of Zeus who’d raped her mother in the form of a swan. She was quite stuck-up about it, was Helen.

I wonder how many of us really believed that swan rape concoction? There were a lot of stories of that kind going around then—the gods couldn’t seem to keep their hands or paws or beaks off mortal women, they were always raping someone or other.