Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It

An excerpt from Dr. Emily Hauser and Penguin Books UK

PAC would like to express their deepest thanks to Dr. Emily Hauser and Penguin Books UK for this exclusive excerpt from Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It.

Muse: A New Invocation

August 2017, and it’s a hot summer’s day in Boston, Massachusetts, but the stacks of Harvard’s Widener Library are as cold as catacombs. I’m sitting in the Smyth Classics Library up in the gods of Widener, thumbing through a Greek text of Homer’s Odyssey. Walnut desks and mismatched chairs are overseen by white plaster busts of bearded ancient poets. There’s the overwhelming, musty scent of old books, the air thick with the hush of minds at work, broken only by the tapping of laptop keys and the wind through the yellowwood trees out in the Yard. I’m searching for a particular passage in the Odyssey s first book – following the invocation where the poet calls on the Muse to strike up and tell the story of ‘a man’– where, I hope, I can find evidence that women in Homer’s world might have been more important than we’ve been led to believe. Greek letters crowd the page, black ink pressing on the paper margins, and I feel myself thrill with excitement to be deciphering this ancient language - the same excitement I felt when I first started learning Greek and got gripped by the sensation of being able to unravel these Morse-code messages from the past.

As we dive into Homer’s story, we’re dropped into a world from over three thousand years back, an ancient land burnished to a sheen by legend and filled with a character cast of capricious gods, power- hungry kings and swaggering heroes. Greek citadels perch like crowns on rocky outcrops, each ruled by an overweening lord who spends his time doling out favours in his throne room or sallying abroad to loot gold and capture women, while wives and daughters crowd faceless in the palace shadows. What Homer is describing seems to look back (at least in part) to a real civilization of historical ancient Greeks who lived in the Late Bronze Age, called the Mycenaeans – named (by the archaeologists who discovered them) after the kingdom of Mycenae, one of the most over weening and gold-filled of them all. The ancient Greeks believed that Troy, the Trojan War, as well as the swarming Greek forces who invaded from Mycenae, Pylos and Sparta, were all certifiably, tangibly real: one ancient chronicler even gave the sack of Troy a specific date – 1184 bce. This is (or at least, so the ancients imagined) the stamping ground of Odysseus, king of Ithaca, sacker of cities, master of disguise. And it’s also the world of Penelope.

Odysseus, so the tale goes, has been gone from Ithaca for nearly twenty years, swashbuckling away in the Trojan War of legend. He’d sworn to Menelaus – king of Sparta, according to Homer, and brother of Agamemnon, king of Mycenae – to protect Helen, Menelaus’ wife, the most beautiful woman in the world and so (naturally, to the loot-minded men) a prize ripe for the taking. When Helen had run off with Paris, prince of Troy, Odysseus and the other Greek kings duly banded together to get her back. The legend tells us it took ten years and a siege against Troy, a protracted war of sufficient horror and greatness for one epic poem, centuries later, to be born: Homer’s Iliad. And then there were the exploits of the heroes’ years- long voyage back to Greece – enough to fill another epic, the Odyssey, charting Odysseus’ stunts and scrapes on his way home.

In all this, Odysseus’ wife Penelope lingers in the background, waiting (so the Homeric epics tell us) on rocky Ithaca and fending off her many suitors while Odysseus has all the adventures. At the very beginning of the Odyssey, we meet her coming downstairs from her bedroom to find a bard singing in the palace’s hall about the trials and tribulations of the Greeks on their return from Troy. Not surprisingly, Penelope, who has been spending ten years trying to forget the setbacks Odysseus must be facing, finds this a rather tactless choice of subject. In front of the suitors thronging the palace, all waiting until she finally gives up on Odysseus, she interrupts the bard, who has already struck up his tune, and tells him to sing something else. But it’s not going to be that easy. Penelope’s teenage son, Telemachus, who feels like flexing his authority in front of the other males, stands up and puts his mother in her place: ‘Go in and do your work. Stick to the loom and distaff. Tell your slaves to do their chores as well. It is for men to talk, especially me. I am the master.’1 And off Penelope goes.

To all intents and purposes, then, one of the most famous Greek legends of all time begins with something of a mission statement: that women aren’t meant to talk. Nor are they allowed to tell their own stories, their own myths, in their own words. The Greek term Telemachus uses for ‘talking’ is mythos – ‘word’ (it’s where the English ‘myth’ comes from). He essentially says not just ‘words are for men’, but ‘myths are for men’. Both the myths that get told, and the words employed to tell them, are – in this manifesto – a men’s-only zone.

It’s a statement that has, until recently, always been taken at face value – and it’s easy to see why. You can’t read many of the ancient Greek myths, let alone epics like Homer’s, without being told in one way or another that women are meant to be silent – seen and not heard (even better if they’re not seen). In Homer’s war epic, the Iliad, one particularly important woman – a trafficked and raped sex slave called Briseis, who is the reason the whole story exists – speaks only once, and gets to say about as much as Achilles’ magical (male) talking horse. When women do try to have their say, then men will quickly close them down: Telemachus’ refusal to hear Penelope out, and to get the poet to tell the story that she’s asked for, is what Mary Beard calls ‘the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to “shut up” ’ in Western literature.2 And it’s not just the mortals, either. In the first book of the Iliad, Hera – queen of the gods – gets slapped back (almost literally) by Zeus: when she tries to challenge him, he snaps at her to ‘sit down, be quiet, and do as I say’ (along with the threat of a beating if she doesn’t obey him).3 If the role of women is to shut up, it’s made abundantly clear, meanwhile, that great stories are only meant to be told about the adventures of men like Odysseus. The Odyssey ’s opening line makes the instruction to the female Muse (goddess of song and poetry) quite clear: she’s only meant to inspire stories about men. ‘Muse: tell me about a man’, the story begins – where ‘man’ (andra) is the epic’s first word in Greek.4 In these legends of the Greek past, women are put firmly, and ever-so-silently, in the background, and the mythical world is made resolutely male.

But as I sit in my twenty- first- century library with the text of the Odyssey resting against the blinking screen of my open laptop, I wonder if there aren’t different questions to be asked. Is it possible that we might be able to read past Penelope’s shutting up? Can we, as modern historians, instead make space for her to speak for herself? Can we dig deeper into the past to begin to invoke the voices of Homer’s women – beyond, or behind, the tale that we’ve always been told?

Only a few months earlier, I’d completed my PhD dissertation at Yale, based on a hunch that there was more to be discovered about the silenced women of Homer’s world. The year before, in 2016, I’d published my debut novel, For the Most Beautiful, a rewriting of the Iliad that tells the untold story of Briseis and Chryseis, two Trojan women enslaved by Achilles and Agamemnon in the Greek camp. These women, like Penelope, like Helen of Troy, Cassandra, Circe and Calypso, have had to stand at the sidelines for thousands of years – both in the stories that handed them down to us, and in the scholarship that curated and interpreted them – as mere accessories to the greater theatre of epics that are, supposedly, all about men. But then, at the same time, there was the central paradox to Homer’s epics that no one, to my mind, had yet satisfactorily addressed: the fundamental incompatibility between the claim the epics make that women don’t matter, and the fact that in every case they are essential to the story and the myth. There wouldn’t be an epic without a Muse. There wouldn’t be a Trojan War without a Helen. The Iliad wouldn’t begin without a Briseis. The Odyssey wouldn’t end without a Penelope. I knew, deep down, that there had to be more to Homer’s women than the traditional viewpoint suggested.

Extracted from Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It by Emily Hauser (Doubleday, £25) is available from all good book retailers now.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/457730/mythica-by-hauser-emily/9781529932485

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Dr Emily Hauser is an award-winning classicist and historian. She read Classics at Cambridge with Mary Beard, where she received a double first with distinction and won the prestigious Chancellor's Medal for Classical Proficiency. She has a PhD in Classics from Yale University, and was a Junior Fellow at the Society of Fellows at Harvard University. She is now Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and teaches and researches on women's writing, ancient and modern.