GUEST POST: THE WOMEN WHO MADE HOMER

A treat - and details of a new book signing

On Monday March 16th I’ll be in conversation with the award-winning classicist Dr Emily Hauser, author of Mythica, which was one of my favourite books of last year.

You can book tickets to see us, and get books signed, here.

Ahead of that, I’m handing over the reins of today’s Substack to Emily, to give you a flavour of what her work is all about.

Come join us in March if you can. Now, over to Emily…

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In 1897, the novelist and critic Samuel Butler published a book titled The Authoress of the Odyssey. Its thesis: that Homer’s Odyssey – which is getting the Christopher Nolan treatment this July – was actually written by a woman.

Before you start thinking this sounds very progressive for the 1890s, it’s worth checking how Butler came to this conclusion. He claimed that the Odyssey must have been composed by a young girl, because no man would be naïve enough to believe Odysseus would actually want to go back to his middle-aged wife, Penelope.

Not so progressive after all, then.

But we don’t need to go as wide of the mark as Butler to find women in the pages of Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey – the two epic poems telling the tales of two Trojan War heroes, Achilles and Odysseus, which became era-defining in the ancient Greek period and beyond.

In my book, Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through The Women Written Out of It, I uncover the women of Homer’s epics – Helen of Troy, Penelope, Calypso, Circe, Briseis and many more, and delve into the real history behind the myths.

So here, let me introduce you to my three favourite women behind Homer – the myths, the legends, and the real women you never knew about. Sing to me, Muse…

CIRCE

Circe has risen to fame recently thanks to Madeline Miller’s 2018 novel of the same name. She’s often portrayed as a witch. Yet despite being the woman often said to lie at the start of the Western witch-tradition, Circe is never actually called a witch in Homer. In ancient Greek she is called polypharmakos – a compound word that literally means “many-drug” and suggests someone who has a deep and intricate knowledge of drugs (pharmaka, in Greek – whence English “pharmacy”).

Drugs, in ancient Greek as in English, can be good or bad – which means that Circe is less a witch in the medieval cat-owning-effigy-poking mode, and more a herbalist, who has an expert knowledge of plants that can be used to help or to hinder, as she wishes.

In Homer’s Odyssey, Odysseus’ crew famously get on the wrong end of Circe’s herbal magic when she turns them into pigs. Odysseus has his own helpful herb in his back pocket (courtesy of the god Hermes), so he escapes the pigsty; and Circe transforms his crew back into humans with a little rub of ointment. Not available at your local pharmacy.

CALYPSO

Another goddess encountered by Odysseus on his legendary travels home, Calypso might not have magic herbs, but she’s got a trick or two up her sleeve. Her name comes from the Greek word for “hiding, concealing” (kalyptein), and she’s the one who opens the Odyssey posing the quintessential problem for the hero. We’re told multiple times that she’s keeping him from getting home to Ithaca, and has been for seven years, having sex with him despite his ambivalence (“not wanting her / though she still wanted him”, in Emily Wilson’s translation).

But then again, this is what the Odyssey, and Odysseus, needs the audience to believe. I’ve always felt that the traditional narrative that the Odyssey pushes – that Calypso just gets in Odysseus’ way – doesn’t do enough to acknowledge that Odysseus has to spin the story that way: he needs to make it look like he was always on his way back to Ithaca, that he always wanted to be reunited with Penelope.

But what if we read between the lines of what the poem and its hero need us to believe, and imagine that Calypso wasn’t keeping Odysseus captive, then? What was she doing that needed him to stay for seven years? It’s a fascinating detective story which I unravel in Mythica, starting with the erasure of women’s weaving – women’s invisible work throughout history – and ending with the latest calculations for how long it would have taken to spin and weave a sail in ancient Greece: four years.

When Odysseus leaves Calypso, she gives him a sail. So what if Calypso wasn’t hiding Odysseus, but was hidden instead behind her invisible work? What if, all that time, she was spinning and weaving a sail: doing her darnedest to get him off her island?

PUDUHEPA

This is a queen whose name I hope you will remember, because she is very important and truly under-rated. In the Trojan War story – a bit of which is related in Homer’s Iliad – we’re told about a queen of Troy, Hecuba, who comes from a kingdom in inland Anatolia (modern-day Turkey) to marry the king of Troy, Priam.

Looking for a ‘real’ historical Hecuba in exactly the way that Homer describes her is probably futile. But what we can do is search for real-life Anatolian queens, whose histories would have been told around the Late Bronze Age (that’s late second millennium BCE) Aegean world; whom bards, the forebears of poets like “Homer”, would have heard about, and incorporated into their tales of Troy.

One is Puduhepa, a thirteenth-century BCE queen of the empire of the Hittites: the rulers of a vast central Anatolian empire which bordered the historical city of Troy (now in modern-day north-west Turkey), and left extensive archival records as well as a stunning hilltop palace and city at their capital.

Like Homer’s Hecuba, the historical queen Puduhepa came from a different part of Anatolia to the Trojans. Like Hecuba (who prays to the goddess Athena to ward off an eager Greek fighter, Diomedes), Puduhepa authored a prayer, which still survives: asking a goddess to ward off a renegade who had thrown his luck in with people we think were the Greeks. These people are called, in the Hittite archives, the “Ahhiyawans” – which may be an analogue for Homer’s term for the Greeks: Achaeans.

So when we’re reading Homer’s Iliad, and find in it a tale of a Trojan queen praying to a goddess to save them from the Greeks – might we be seeing the memory of a real and powerful ancient queen, from a long-forgotten empire? I certainly like to think so.

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Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out of It is out in paperback now. You can find it on Waterstones here, Amazon here, or support independent bookshops here.

Emily and I will be in conversation at Staines Library, hosted by Waterstones Staines, on Monday 16^th March at 6:30pm – get your tickets here.