Problems about the misuse of history, especially on subjects such as race and colonialism, have been running for a long time. But when it comes to the ancient world, there are also problems about the misuse of literature.
Dame Mary Beard’s ‘manifesto’ Women and Power (2018) contains an example of the problem. Her thesis is that women’s voices in the public sphere (my emphasis) have been ‘silenced’ by men ever since the West’s first literature (Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) gave us our first access to ‘western’ thoughts, deeds, beliefs, hopes and fears (c. 700 BC).
The problem exists in the first example of her thesis, to which she returns four times — Penelope, the wife of Odysseus. During Odysseus’s 20-year absence at Troy, she had been left to run the home and the estate and raise their son Telemachus (Telemachus was now 20); and for the last four years, she had been besieged by 108 suitors who, reasonably assuming Odysseus was dead, were seeking her hand in marriage.
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