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. A woman under pressure, then.
That is the situation when the Odyssey begins, and in the first book, while the suitors are munching their way through Odysseus’s livestock over dinner, Penelope descends from her bedroom and orders Telemachus to stop the bard Phemius from singing what is to her a painful song about the Trojan war. Rejecting her request, he orders her back to her bedroom. She is ‘surprised’, ‘takes his words to heart’ and retires. Dame Mary concludes that here, from the very beginnings of western literature, we have a precise example of the thesis she is proposing.
But is it? This is Penelope’s home, not ‘the public sphere’; she wishes to change her son’s choice of music and is refused; and though surprised (the first time this has happened?) she takes his words seriously.
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