September 13, 2026 • 61 mins
In this episode of Greek Mythology Retold, I sit down with classicist and author Dr. Eirene Allen to discuss her book The Epic Women of Homer. We explore the women at the heart of the Iliad and Odyssey, including Penelope, Helen, Andromache, and Briseis and the different forms of power Homer gives them.
Are these women truly secondary to the heroes, or have modern readers simply overlooked the ways women wield power in Homer’s world? Join me for a fascinating conversation about women, war, survival, memory, and the enduring power of Homer’s epic women.
The Epic Women of Homer
Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
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Are these women truly secondary to the heroes, or have modern readers simply overlooked the ways women wield power in Homer’s world? Join me for a fascinating conversation about women, war, survival, memory, and the enduring power of Homer’s epic women.
The Epic Women of Homer
Explore more Greek myth and epic retellings:
The Homeric Chronicles, an adult fantasy series inspired by Greek mythology and the Trojan War.
Homeric Chronicles Series
WikiHow Expert Contributor
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:17):
Welcome back to Greek Mythology Retold, and I am your host,
Janelle Rhiannon. Today, I am delighted to be joined by Dr.
Irene Allen, classicist and educator and director of the Institute
for Classics Education. And she is visiting us today to
talk about her book, The Epic Women of Homer. And
(00:38):
I am currently reading it, and I love it. And
in this book, she is inviting us to consider the
women that Homer wrote, And look at them in a
more in-depth and maybe a well-rounded way and how Homer
intended to show us how women and men were joined
(01:02):
in the ancient world and how... They each contributed to
their cultures and society.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Dr.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Allen, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure
to talk about Homer.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah. So one of the ideas that really struck me
in your book was that Homer doesn't diminish the women
just because they aren't on the battlefield. And instead, he
does give them a different kind of power. And you
talk about through their weaving, through lament and memory. the
counsel that they give, the way that they preserve their households.
(01:37):
And what do you think that modern readers sometimes mistake?
Do you think that they mistake these forms of power
for lesser forms of power?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, I think one of the problems is that the
kind of labor that women are associated with in the
ancient world isn't, we don't really do it anymore. We
don't weave. We don't make our families clothes. Maybe we cook.
Some of us, I don't. Sorry to say, but the
kinds of labor that women do in the ancient world
(02:11):
and that they do in Homer isn't just, isn't just,
that's the number one thing I would do. It can't
be done by anybody. It's not easy. It's not low skill.
It's actually high skill. And I think the most important
thing is that it's also sacred labor. So all the
(02:32):
things that we see women doing in the Iliad and Odyssey, weaving, washing,
in the case of Nausicaa, these are things that women
would do to serve the goddesses and heroines that they
worshipped as well. And I think when we start to
think about the weaving of the peplos for Athena in
(02:52):
the Panathenaia, for example, women, I think, also wove a
garment for Apollo in Sparta. And there are other instances
where garments are being offered to gods. And at least
in Athens, we know they were woven by women. So
this kind of labor of clothing the goddess is already
(03:16):
giving us a very different feeling about this skill of weaving.
And also they're telling stories on the cloth. So on
the peplos for Athena, for example, who would tell the
story of the Gigantomachy. So the story of Athena's great
victory for order, establishing order in the cosmos, is a
(03:40):
story that women tell on the cloth. So that's one thing.
And the washing is also really interesting because a lot
of times we think, oh, it's just the little girls
doing the least important labor. But actually, there was a
festival in Athens, the Plinteria, that involved processing the cult
(04:00):
statue of Athena down to the water to bathe her.
And then she would be dressed and re-adorned, redressed. And
this is, again, something that was done by women. So
washing is not, it's just, it's very important. It's crucial, really.
(04:22):
And it's sacred and it's serving the goddess. So that's
something I think we're just so far removed from. And
if we don't have the context for what women were
doing in the ancient world, not just like what they
were doing in their houses, but how that labor in
their household was also reverberating out into their service for
(04:45):
the community. It's hard to see that. And I think
one of the crucial things is that Homer is showing,
he's kind of scripting that for us because we see
the women in book six of the Iliad offering a
garment to Athena. We also see Nausicaa leading young girls
down to the river to wash clothes. Of course, we
(05:08):
see Andromache, Helen, and Penelope weaving. And in the case
of Helen, we see that she's weaving a story onto
the cloth. She's weaving the story of the Trojan War.
So we're seeing weaving as an analog to storytelling, to
bardic work. Gregory Nash has a wonderful discussion of the
(05:32):
word hymnos, saying that basically hymnos and hufainen share a root.
And so the craft of poetry and the craft of
weaving have intersecting, they're seen as kind of intersecting technologies.
So I think these are things that are hard for
us to relate to.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Right. I grew up, I told you that I had
a Nona and she was always crocheting and knitting and
she always had a basket of yarn. And I still
have the last thing that she crocheted, which was, I
have two things that she crocheted. One is this gorgeous,
(06:14):
I can't even put it out, but it's like, it's
the point set up pattern. And it's just this white
crew pattern. It's like this giant heavy doily, but it's
for a bedspread. And then the last thing that she
actually made that I have is all of her extra
yarn that she had. And she wove that. So it's
(06:35):
this afghan that's all of the remnants of all of her,
all the yarns that she had of everything that she
had made. So I have that piece. But that was
very much always known as crocheting. Sometimes knitting, but always crocheting.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
And that's very metaphoric, I think, the idea that she's
taking all the scraps and weaving them into a whole.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And I feel privileged to have that. And I'm afraid,
you know, there's like a little needs to, a couple
of places needs to be mended because it's very old now.
But I keep it in the cupboard because I'm afraid
somebody will mess it up.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
I don't want anybody. Can't let that happen. No, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
But women, like women don't sew as much anymore because
it's easy for us to go to the store and
just buy something, you know. But there was a time
when that was not the way it was. Like you
had to make your clothes. My Nona was always sewing
and making clothes for like my dad and his sisters,
(07:41):
you know.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
They lived on a farm and so on. See, that's,
and I do think that there's a real interest these days.
I see a lot of women, especially picking up things
like sewing and knitting and crocheting and other kinds of handiwork.
And there's a certain satisfaction in making something and completing
(08:04):
it and seeing that you have produced something. And even
so though, we won't have that same feeling of necessity.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
In the ancient world, if you didn't weave it, It
didn't happen. Like you didn't have the blanket. You didn't
have the garments to cover your body. You didn't have
your tunic. You didn't have your chitin. You didn't have
any of that. Somebody had to make that. And I
think that was something that I read about how, is
(08:35):
it Nausicaa or Nausicaa? I heard somebody say Nausicaa.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
We can say Nausicaa.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
The clothing that she made, she would recognize her own stitch.
She would recognize something had been given him. So as
an introduction, without even saying anything.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Exactly. And that's something she does say to him. The
first thing she says is, I thought you said you
came here from far away, but where'd you get that garment?
So that's a way to test him really, to see
how is he going to explain the fact that he's
wearing a garment that she can identify as. And that's
(09:42):
the other thing too, because Penelope also, when she tests,
one of her tests of Odysseus is what, when he says, oh,
I met Odysseus. And she said, well, what was he wearing?
And he was able to describe the garment as well
as other things. But you weaving is in a sense
your signature it's a kind of signature that you can
(10:05):
identify somebody and where they belong by what they're wearing
and this is has a long life at least in
the Greek world and I'm sure elsewhere as well that
traditional dress for particular regions is It's a way of
identifying yourself. So it has a deep meaning.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What you had said earlier made me also think about
how when Hector came off the battlefield, he went to
his mother and he said, take your best garment and
take it, you and all the gray hairs, all the
older women, take it to Athena and offer prayer to
her and offer the garment so that we can win
(10:47):
on the battlefield. Like he wouldn't have asked that if
there was not some sort of power or sacredness related
to the task. He wasn't just giving her something to do.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
To get her out of the way, you know. And so,
go ahead.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Well, I was going to say that's another really interesting
facet because in book six of where that episode happens,
There's a symmetry between men on the battlefield and women
in the sanctuary where both are forming or performing protective functions,
(11:30):
the men by fighting and the women by praying to
the goddess. And there's one wonderful precedent for that described
by a later historian, Pellaeonus, saying that in one battle
between the Spartans and Athenians in, I think it was
the 360s, the festival, Scyra, the Scyra festival was taking
(11:54):
place on the same day of battle. And so the
general garlanded the ships when they went out. And according
to Pelionis, they fought really confidently because they felt they
had the goddess's protection because they knew their wives were
praying at the altars on that day. Now, is this
(12:15):
historically accurate? Whereas in a legend, isn't really the point.
The point is that we're seeing how that symmetry is
understood in the mind of the historian who's telling it, right?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah. And you mentioned that in your book where Helen
is weaving the story where she's the center of the tapestry,
the story she's telling in her weaving. And Andromaca... was
weaving and it was more of a sacred prayer, like
intoning as she's weaving, doesn't realize that Hector's even dead.
(12:49):
I don't want to say spell casting, but a sacred, magical,
it's kind of like what we say. It's what we
say today, like be positive. And why do we pray now?
Because we're hoping for some power beyond our being to
(13:10):
protect or guide or something. And so that makes me
think of that. I'm so sad for Andromaca in that scene.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I know. I know. It's very sad.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
I know. I know. I love... Yeah. I did, in
my series, I had... You know how Penelope is weaving
on the big loom where... All the suitors can see
her weaving. But she has a smaller loom set up
and an antechamber in her room. And she's weaving the
(13:43):
events that are happening for the past 20 years. And
so she reads her cloth back to Odysseus. And he
realizes that the symbols and colors she chose, it wasn't
just decoration. And he has this epiphany that, oh, my.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
God, she.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Is the storyteller. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Of Ithaca.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
And that's when he realizes she is Ithaca. She's more
Ithaca than he is. Cause she, she has, she holds
the knowledge that he, you know, he's a stranger.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
I mean, she does hold the knowledge and she engineers events.
I think much more than we think because we're used
to a storytelling of explicitness perhaps. Yeah. at least in contemporary,
in a lot of contemporary literature. And actually, what's happening
(14:40):
is very much under the surface. And there's a question of,
are you able to read the signs? Do you see
what she's doing and how she's operating and how she
and Telemachus are, in a sense, performing one conversation on
the surface and another conversation underneath? She's being concealed from us.
(15:02):
Just like she's being, shall we say, she's concealing herself
from the suitors. She's not letting them see exactly what, right,
this is what Antinous tells us. He says, oh, she
says one thing and does another thing. We don't really
know what she's thinking. And that's what the bard is
doing with her as well, I think. He's making us guess. Wait,
(15:24):
what does she know? When is she, at what point
is she pulling the strings? She's always pulling the strings,
I think, is the answer, you know.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I think people underestimate Penelope because she's usually seen juxtaposed
to Clytemnestra. And so we see the action. We see
what Clytemnestra does when Agamemnon returns home. We see the
violence of that. And it's so shocking. And so it's
(15:53):
easier to think of Clytemnestra as being empowered in some way.
But Penelope is doing exactly what Clytemnestra is doing. She's
holding an entire kingdom together for even longer. And she
does it in a way that in the end, she
preserves her son's life. Her husband does return home. And,
(16:17):
you know, she's just as powerful. But I think people
don't see that. They don't see it in the same
way that she's just weaving and weeping. somehow for 20
years that's all she does is i'm just gonna weave
and weep that's.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
It well the the interesting thing about penelope is that
she specifically talks about her own her kleos her fame
her epic fame and it's referenced in book two that
her this ruse that she did to hold off the
suitors this the shroud for laertes is what she has
(16:53):
achieved fame for kleos for But what she says later is,
my fame will be even greater if my husband returns.
And a lot of times we think that that's, oh,
that's Penelope like ceding power to Odysseus. But actually, one
(17:14):
of them is not more important than the other. They
really are the yin and the yang. You can't have
one without the other. You can't understand the power of
one without the power of the other. And in book five,
when Odysseus is preparing to leave Calypso, and the deal
(17:37):
is Calypso has to let Odysseus go if he wants
to go. If he chooses to stay, that's different. And
so she says, don't you want to stay? I can
give you immortality. If you leave, you're going to suffer.
And he says... So be it. Like you are great.
(17:59):
You're really great. You're the best, but I want to
go home. And it's that, that's the fame of Penelope
is that her husband will give up ease. Even a
goddess can't keep him away from Penelope. And that's Penelope's
strength as much as it's Odysseus's. So I think that,
(18:21):
that absolute perfect interconnection is really, hard for us to
even really recognize, I guess, because we're not, we're thinking
somebody's got to be the top, but actually they're both
the top, you know, there's the heroine's fame and the
hero's fame and they're perfectly symmetrical.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
You said, you have a section in your introduction where
you kind of break down some words and I was
particularly blown away because again you get you fall into
the language and this goes to this speaks to like
translations and why like for me I'll read a lot
of translations and I know right now there's a lot
of commentary about translations in the Greek myth space.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
But you you broke down the word that's why yeah
all right you broke down the word is.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It histos is that Histos. And so could you walk
us through what that means, why it was difficult to translate,
and then how Homer would have looked at it and
how that root word then connects Odysseus and Penelope, as
you're saying, on an equal level, not one's better than
(19:40):
the other, but gave us that balance through the language.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Yeah. So a lot of times, I just want to
say a lot of times people say to me, so
couldn't we say Penelope? is even more powerful? They're equally powerful.
We really have like a hard time with the equality.
They are equally powerful and they're powerful in different ways.
So the histos is the wonderful example of that. And
(20:05):
it's a wonderful example of why we cannot in English translation,
do what Homer's doing because our language doesn't work the
same way. So histos literally means standing beam. And it
shares a root with the verb histemi, to make something
stand or to stand. Also histion, for sale. Hopefully I'm
(20:30):
not forgetting that.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
I notated that. Yes.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
But the histemi and the histion is really important because,
or sorry, the histos is really important because this word
standing being is used for a loom because they used
standing looms and also for mast. And with the yin
and the yang, it's infinite dynamism and infinite stillness. And
(21:01):
I think the histos, which is referring to the loom,
is how Penelope stops time. So it feels very much
like the infinite stillness. She's going to make it impossible
for events to move forward. So basically, she's controlling time
in Ithaca to give Odysseus that space to return. And
(21:27):
he is crafting his own histos, his own mast, which
he does in this grove that Calypso leads him into
so that he can build his ship, his raft, to
escape Adygea. And he's going to use his histos to
re-enter the flow of time. Because as far as, as
(21:49):
long as he's with Calypso, he's sort of concealed. He's
neither really alive or dead. He's sort of in this
intermediate space. But he's going to use his mast, infinite dynamism,
you know, to get back into, to get back to time,
to And so those two kinds of authorities, the ship,
you know, the histos, the mast, and the histos, the loom,
(22:14):
they're separated by this vast space. But those are going
to be the mediums that bring them back together. They're
using their mutual authorities, like mutually important mediums. but also
completely different. So it's the same, but it's different, you know,
because it's a histos. It's a very different kind of
(22:36):
histos for Odysseus than it is for Penelope. And yet
they cannot achieve their reunion without both of them exercising
their authority with the tools available to them. And I
think that's just one of the things that makes Homer
so special is he really doesn't. One isn't more important
(22:58):
than the other. They're perfectly interconnected.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
It's showing us true partnership.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I mean, I just want to say I really love
all of them. I love all the heroes. I love
all the heroines. There's nobody that I don't feel empathy for,
and I think that's a testament to Homer. Even Agamemnon,
he makes us feel bad for Agamemnon. He shows us
Agamemnon's failures, but And he shows us where heroes fail,
(23:30):
but we are the heroes. So, and the heroes are us.
So if we don't have empathy for the heroes, that's really, um,
that's a failing on our, on our part. And I
think that's the genius of Homer is if we walk
away from it and we don't feel empathy for every,
(23:51):
every hero struggle, every heroine struggle, um, we're really kind
of missing the, I think we're missing the meaning.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
That's when we talk, when we talk about Homer, the
Iliad or the Odyssey speaking to us about what it
means to be a human. We don't mean that in.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
A trite way.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
That's, it's very real because who hasn't ever had to
make a decision that didn't feel like it was going
to be bad this way and kind of bad this way.
And then have to choose between two things that, just,
you didn't really want to, that just didn't, somebody was
going to get hurt either way or something. We've all
(24:31):
faced those kinds of decisions and then made it and
then had to live with the consequence of that and go, ugh.
But then you don't really know what you would do differently.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
I say a lot of times that the tragic in
the Greek sense isn't just what happens to you from
outside of you, but what you do to yourself. And
that that's where the deep empathy comes. Because if we
only feel bad for people because something is done to
(25:05):
them and we don't have empathy for them when they
do something to themselves, then how do we even overcome
our own mistakes? Because that's always going to be something
that we experience ourselves, right? Oh, that was such a
huge mistake. Why did I do that? Well, you've got to,
(25:25):
you know, how do you get past that if you
don't have empathy for people's, you know, if you look
at the heroes and say, oh, they're terrible, they make
mistakes all the time, they do such stupid things. Yeah, exactly.
That's when we have empathy for them.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, don't we all?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
So I'm sure you saw the Nolan's Odyssey, I'm assuming.
You didn't see it?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Well, not to be a spoiler or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
No, it's okay.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I'm not going to. There was much ado about the
role of Helen. And I felt like in the presentation
of Helen in Nolan's Odyssey, I don't think we really
got a good look at Helen. You know what I mean?
(26:15):
Like what she meant in the story and and her
interaction with Telemachus. And could you tell us a little
bit about Homer's Helen?
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, I haven't seen the film, so you don't have
to worry about spoilers. I'm also not going to see it.
I don't need to. I mean, for me, I'd rather
spend the two hours, or three hours, I don't know
how long the film is, rereading something in Homer. Yeah. No, no,
no judgment on anyone else who is interested in the film.
(26:52):
But as far as Homer's, I mean, that's it, right?
I can't, I'm not going to find a better version
of Helen than Homer's Helen. I'm confident about that. I
could be wrong, but I'm confident. And so Homer's Helen
is uncanny. She's maybe a goddess, maybe a heroine. We're
(27:13):
not quite sure. He never spells it out for us. Historically,
Helen was worshipped as both a goddess and a heroine.
So maybe Homer is alluding to that liminality in her character,
in her figure, as a cult figure. When we see
(27:36):
her in the Iliad, we see that she is absolutely
being guided by Aphrodite. She is walking in Aphrodite's footsteps, literally,
and under compulsion. She doesn't want to. And again, I'm
just going to say most people could probably be like,
(28:01):
have an experience like that where they were like, why
did I do that? Right? Like on a very basic
human level, I just had a big dessert with my coffee.
And then at the end, I had a stomach ache
and I'm, why did I do that? You know, I'm
just a really dumb example, but like, that's the point,
you know, this is not a dumb example. Helen's is
(28:23):
very serious, but this, this feeling of necessity driving you
on and not really not wanting to do it, but
not being able to stop yourself. Am I being compelled
from the outside or am I compelling myself? And something
I always say is that in ancient Greek, we have
the active voice and we have the passive voice, just
(28:46):
like we have in English. But we also have the
middle voice, which is that voice where we're doing something
to ourselves. And in certain tenses, you can't differentiate. The
passive and the middle are formed in the same way.
And a really, an example that I'll never forget because
(29:07):
it was the first time that I realized, oh my gosh,
the grammar itself makes it impossible to differentiate is in
the play Ajax by Sophocles when there's a point where
Ajax says, by coming to Troy, I was destroyed, but
it could also be translated, I destroyed myself. And you can't,
(29:27):
the grammar doesn't let you decide which one it is
because the middle and the passive or the voices are
formed the same way. So, you know, it's this moment
where you're like, wait, which, is it? And immediately we
all said, oh, he destroyed himself. And then, and then
it was, wait, wait, it's passive also. So it could be,
(29:49):
he was destroyed by the gods. Right. And this is Helen, right?
Did she go with Paris or was she made to
go with Paris? And that's just a debate across the
whole tradition, different poets giving different views of that. So
(30:12):
that's one thing that Homer's Helen is tapped into is
this paradigmatic figure that we can see the struggle to
try to define whether we're doing things on our own
or whether we're being led, we're being kind of pushed
into it without really understanding why we're doing things. But
(30:33):
then in the Odyssey, well, I should say also in
the Iliad, she is a bardic figure in the sense
that she reads the story of the war. So she's
the cause, which is not the same as to blame,
because the cause is simply the thing that initiates. Blame
(30:53):
is a moral category. So the Trojan elders say she's
not the cause of all these problems in book three
when they're on the walls of Troy. She's not the cause.
Zeus is the cause. But really, she's too powerful and
we should get her out of here, you know, get
(31:14):
her out of here because she's dangerous. Divine power is dangerous.
Of course, she doesn't go. But then she comes to
the walls and she gives a mini catalog of the
Achaean leaders. And people say, well, why is she telling
Priam who the leaders are 10 years in or nine
years into the war. Well, the whole point is it's,
she's performing a catalog. So it's showing us her power
(31:39):
to tell this, to shape the story. And what is
the bard? Well, the bard is the instrument of the muses.
So the bard is both the actor and the instrument,
the agent of the instrument, if you want. And the,
We are always talking about control and power. I think
the ancient Greeks were talking about agency. So slightly different, right?
(32:06):
Then we go to find Helen in the Odyssey and
now she's still the one in control. She's telling a
story that frames herself in a certain way as having
helped Odysseus. So she's still a storyteller. She's still shaping
how people perceive things. Menelaus tells a story that doesn't
(32:28):
sit so easily with hers, you know? Maybe it does,
maybe it doesn't. Again, Homer's saying, here you go. Now
make sense of it. Come together and talk about it.
But she's clearly more on the ball than he is.
I think she's the social superior in their relationship. Homer
(32:50):
makes that pretty clear. There's that one moment where an
omen appears and someone in Menelaus is like, hmm, what
is that? And Helen says, I'll tell you what it means.
So we know that she's, but actually one of my
favorite moments is when she first comes in to the
hall where Menelaus is meeting and they put a footstool
(33:14):
under her foot, under her feet, the ladies who are
with her. And then a couple of lines later, the
word for spouse is used to refer to Menelaus as
And it's formed very similarly to how stool, footstool is formed.
So I feel like Homer's making it very clear. Menelaus
is the inferior socially because she's the daughter of Zeus.
(33:38):
This epithet is only used in Homer for goddesses. So
that's our little hint that maybe she's a goddess, but
it's unclear. And then of course, at the very end,
he gives Telemachus a garment for his future bride. Well, okay,
(34:00):
if we saw her weaving the story of the Trojan
War on a garment, and now she's giving a garment
to be handed forward, we, I think, can be allowed
to consider the possibility that it's a story cloth and
that it is basically the story of the war that
(34:20):
the story of the heroic age, maybe that she is
now entrusting to Telemachus to the future generations. She is
also put in that role in the Iliad when she
delivers the final lament for Hector. So she's the last voice,
the last woman who speaks in the Iliad. So she's
(34:43):
being presented, I think, as a, the parallel to the bard,
the feminine counterpart to the male bard. So he sings
the song like the Rhapsodes stitch the Homeric epics at
the Patathenaia. And she's doing the same work, but on cloth.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
That's interesting because it made me think about when the
bard was singing in Odysseus Hall and when Telemachus tells
his mother that go back to your work. And I
want you to speak to that because I don't, I
don't think you, you made, you made a very good
case about why it's not a simple scolding, but he's
(35:27):
saying though that there's, uh, other people have lost fathers
and brothers to the war. We want to hear the song.
So go back to your, go back to your weaving.
And then Helen says, gives him a cloth that may
be a part of storytelling. So Telemachus is on the
(35:47):
receiving end of all of these stories about the Trojan War.
And that's really, that's all he knows his father through,
is through what other people tell him. Like Odysseus is
a stranger, literally. Athena didn't even have to put a
disguise on Odysseus because Telemachus wouldn't have recognized him anyway.
(36:08):
How would he know what he looks like? Did you
want to speak to that about was Telemachus scolding his
mother or not? Because that was a very good argument,
discussion that you had in your book.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
I mean, I just think it's boring to think of
it that way. And I think we're just getting caught
up in our own concerns. And we're not thinking about
what is the Greek language doing. So first we have
the histos. Yeah, there's that. But there's also, for me,
(36:44):
the fact that the loom and the distaff are associated
with goddesses of civilization and order. And really, life itself,
because the fates are spinners. Aphrodite is sometimes, I think,
depicted spinning. She's also, in the religious sense, believed to
(37:08):
be present at every birth. Because she's, of course... sort
of reproductive associated with all that realm. And Athena is
the goddess of basically of civilization and she's a weaver.
(37:28):
So women are depicted, goddesses at least, and heroines are
depicted shaping the world, like shaping the cosmic fabric. So
for me, it just feels very flat to be like, oh,
he's scolding his mother. When he says, go to your
loom and distaff, like, I just think it's deeper. It's
(37:54):
got to be deeper, especially because that formula appears three
times in Homer. We hear it. We hear Hector say
it to Andromache. We hear Telemachus. Hector says it to Andromache, obviously,
in Iliad 6. And then Telemachus says it to Penelope
in book one and book 21. And each time, there's
(38:16):
a slight variable. Hector says, war is the work of men.
Telemachus says, public speaking is the work of men in
book one. And then in book 21, he says, might
is the work of men. You go to your Lumen Distaff.
So he's, if we look across the three, might, Masculine
(38:38):
heroism is war, public speaking, and might, physical strength. Or
you could say, yeah, because I said physical strength is
how I would put it. So feminine authority is weaving, spinning.
(39:01):
But what does that mean, again, in the context of Homer? Strategy?
It means.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Care.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
It means civilization, order. So I think it's what are
heroes and heroines associated with. And in the cult sense,
the extremity is death for both the hero and the heroine.
I mean, the mortal part has to die for the
(39:31):
immortalization to happen. And with the masculine heroes, they're dying
in war, of course. But they might also, I'm trying
to think, maybe what is Heracles gets taken out by
the the robe right that didn't day in era at
least in one version but what um what did that
(39:54):
what to heroines what occult heroines we don't see any
of them die no heroines die in homer but what
occult heroines die of well they're hounded by goddesses certainly
i know some melee agave it's it always has to
do in some way with nurture and care taken to
(40:16):
an extreme or turned against itself. I think Aino jumps
off the cliff with one of her children, trying to
escape Hera. So yeah, I mean, the idea of nurture
and care are not, I mean, how do you survive
(40:37):
without them, you know? So no, I don't think it's,
I think to say he's, it's just, he's scolding his
mother just feels really, like I said, it just feels
kind of flat. And it takes me out of the
story completely because there's so much about weaving for memory
and storytelling and order and creation that to just say
(41:01):
he's scolding him is sort of to override the whole
logic of Homer, really, for me.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I think I understood it is that public speaking was
for men. We're listening to the bard. We're here. And
it's like, we're doing our storytelling and listening and you
go do your storytelling over there. I hear a young
man and, you know, I told you I have grandsons,
but I could hear my, I could hear my eldest
(41:31):
specifically going, no, no, you just, you go over there
and do your thing. And I'm going to go over
here and I'm going to do my thing. And it's
my choice to go.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
Okay. Yeah. All right.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
I see you.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
I got you. And the thing is, I mean, if
we look historically, I mean, I'm not talking about the
Bronze Age because that's the unrecoverable, not unrecoverable historically, but
like specifically, what is Homer? For me, what I see
in Homer, the texts of Homer, because what we've inherited
(42:04):
are texts. Do they have origins? Obviously, there's a story
being handed forward and we can There's wonderful historians who
can talk about that. What I'm fascinated by is the
intersections and the resonances with what we see in Athens,
simply because the epic to me feels like it's enshrining
(42:30):
the systems of its own performance in this festival age.
I mean, this is all theoretical, right? But I do
find it really interesting when I think about something like
the Thesmophoria or even the Adonia in Athens. The Thesmophoria
was a state-funded festival that was women only. So we
(42:50):
also have to consider that when Telemachus is saying, go
talk to your ladies and do your thing. that that
actually has value in their world because it did in Athens,
at least, right? And the Thesmophoria was celebrated across the
Greek world in this period. So this is a woman-only
(43:11):
festival where it is of crucial importance and it is legally,
men are not allowed, there's inscriptions saying this must be done,
it must be coordinated, the priestess has to do such
and such, and it must be done for all time
and nobody is to interfere. So this is a woman-only
(43:31):
occasion that is on the calendar and it's super important. Similarly,
the Adonia, well, similarly, it is women doing it and
it's not actually a funded festival. But as much as
we see people, like we see men in writing complaining
(43:51):
about the women screaming at the Adonia, nobody's ever stopping
the Adonia from taking place. And actually, there's some fascinating interpretations.
L'Orealan writes, Samer has a fascinating book of the Athenian
Adonia in context that completely changes how I think people
(44:15):
can read something like Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Yeah, so when
we're saying women are doing things oh, just go do
what the women do. That doesn't necessarily mean what we
think it does and what it would mean if somebody
said it now. Because there are important women-only occasions that
(44:38):
are respected and funded or at least even part of
the calendar and nobody's interfering with them.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
One of my favorite figures in the Iliad is Thetis.
And I love Thetis and I love her relationship with Achilles.
And I always cringe a little bit when I see
a post or a comment that Achilles was just a crybaby.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Ugh, killing me.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
You're killing me. Because he wasn't spoiled. He wasn't a crybaby.
I mean, this is the ancient world. And I think
of ancient texts and stories of people in their grief
pulling their hair out, rending their clothes, pouring ash on
their head. These are things that we also see reflected.
(45:27):
in Achilles' behavior and his grief and his frustration. I
feel like that relationship gets misunderstood, that I think it's
a close bond. And he knows that when he is
in despair, where does he goes to the beach? He
knows exactly what he's doing, right? He knows his mother's
(45:48):
going to come. Like what better relationship is that? And
then she tries to fix things for him. She tries
to make things right because she knows he's got a
short life. And as a mother, I think, what wouldn't
I do for my child?
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Do you have anything? Can you add? Can you have
any insights on Thetis?
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Yeah, I'm going to say like as the mother of
a son, right? Don't mess with the relationship between Thaddeus
and Achilles, you know? But on a more serious note,
there's also Thetis and Achilles in the tradition. And in
(46:35):
the tradition, if we look at the wider epic tradition,
Thetis is pursued by Poseidon and Zeus. They're both interested
in marrying her. But they're warned by Themis, the goddess
of good order. not to marry her because the prophecy
(46:56):
that her son will be more powerful than his father.
And so they're warned, you cannot marry her because if
she has a son, he would be able to unseat Zeus.
We'll be back to where we were in the battle
days when the gods were all fighting and we were
constantly having these succession wars. So you have to make
sure she marries a mortal. So Thetis is forced to
(47:18):
marry a mortal, which is... He narrates very poignantly in
book 18 of the Iliad. And what does this mean, though?
This means that her son inherits the mortality of his father.
So because Thetis' son is a threat, she's forced to
(47:40):
marry a mortal and she's forced to grieve her son eternally. So,
you know, people say Achilles is such a brat and
he's so entitled, but he has to die. Because the
gods would not allow, could not allow instability to become
a threat. And a lot of times people think, oh,
(48:00):
this is Zeus trying to hold. It's the goddess of
good order who says, if you want to maintain peace,
you cannot allow this. And so stability of the Olympian
reign is bought at the price of Achilles mortality. That's
pretty serious. So when Thetis goes to Zeus and says,
(48:23):
remember that time I helped you, there's a version inside
the epic that allows it to be logical and coherent
as a whole. But when you know the larger tradition,
remember that time I helped you, it hits a little
harder because you think about, well, Achilles could have been
(48:45):
at the very top. And instead, he's got to die.
So that's kind of, I mean, I hope that we
would have some understanding that that's a serious and very
tragic outcome for Achilles. He's the victim, right? He's the
(49:06):
recipient of things. He's paying the price for other things
that have nothing to do with him or anything he's done.
And so, of course, he's preoccupied with his rights as
a son of a goddess, and the honor that maybe
the honor that's due to him given what he's had
to give up in order to maintain peace.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
And Thetis has to, you know, from a mother's, seen
it through a mother's eyes, as soon as he's born,
you know, she wants to make him immortal, right? you know?
And so we have the story. There's one story where
she tries to burn it out of him. Then there's
another story about the river Styx. Everybody kind of seems
to know that one, you know, the image of the dunk,
(49:50):
the baby in the water, except for the heel. But
that's something that a mother does who is already anticipating
this tremendous grief that she's going to have and also
wanting to do whatever she could to save her child.
And as a mother, who wouldn't have that same motivation?
Speaker 2 (50:15):
Exactly. Yeah. And it's so sad in book 18 when
she's talking to Hephaestus and she's saying, he's like, gosh,
I wish I could do something for you, but I can't,
you know, nobody can save Achilles from this fate. So
it's very sad. And the heel, I don't know, I
don't think we have any early examples of the heel.
That might be a later thing. Absolutely. In Homer, we
(50:39):
don't have a sense of him being invulnerable. There's no
mention of any invulnerability in the Iliad. But we know,
I think the burning story is told in Argonautica. Is
that right? I think, I feel like, which is also later,
of course. But yeah, I think it's very poignant. And
(51:00):
I feel very, I think it's very sad. Achilles having
to come to terms with his mortality is very sad.
What could have been? It could have been. I could
have been.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Could you imagine if Zeus would have said, okay, just
one time, Thetis, she got pregnant. Oh, yeah. And then
Achilles would have, can you imagine Achilles as a god
fighting Zeus and Poseidon? That's a great story.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
That's a good what if.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
You can write the alternate history.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
Alternate universe. The other person that always intrigues me relating
to Achilles and really Patroclus, because there's sort of three
of them in the story, is Briseis. And we don't
really have a lot about Briseis. She just kind of
(51:55):
drops off. In my series, I give her a whole
other story because it's a big blank canvas as far
as I'm concerned as a writer. What is your take
or your understanding of the relationship between Briseis and Achilles?
Because for me, I see Agamemnon taking Briseis like that's
the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak,
(52:17):
because he's mad. The withdrawal isn't necessarily only because of Briseis.
when you look at all the things that he says
to Agamemnon up until Agamemnon takes it, he's already mad. Like,
you take everything. Like, I'm out here fighting. It's been
almost 10 years of fighting, right? 23 cities he's conquered.
(52:39):
And he's like, all this stuff, and look at all
the lion's share. Look at all the stuff you have.
And I don't have that much stuff, you know. But
I'm out there fighting more than you are. And so
then when Achilles tells him, Well, hey, you can get
more stuff. You have to give Chryseis back. You can
(52:59):
get more stuff after we conquer Troy. I'll make sure
that you'll get everything. But Agamemnon won't take it. He's like, nope,
that's not good enough. I'm going to take your prize.
Because Achilles was like, there's nothing left to give you, dude.
We have to fight some more.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Let us sack the city.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
And then look at all the stuff you can have
after that. But he does say, he says a couple
of things. Are the brothers Atreus, are you guys the
only ones that love your wives? Like you? Like, I
love Briseis too. And he says something, I don't know
if I'm getting this wrong, but like the wife of
my heart or something to that effect. So it just
(53:40):
sort of calls into question, what is the relationship? What
is Achilles drawing attention to for Agamemnon to make his argument?
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Achilles drawing attention to to make his argument? One thing
I will say, there is, I think Douay has a
book about, right, Briseis, that there's a whole tradition around her.
Maybe Briseis is daughter of Briseis, right? So her own
name is Hippodamia. So there's a whole heroine story behind her.
(54:13):
And as far as the argument inside the Iliad, I
was just talking about this last week and now I can't,
I can't recall it because I have so many things
stuck in my head. But I will say that I
do think that Briseis represents his honor because honor isn't
(54:36):
an abstraction. It's manifested in the things that are given
to you by your peers. And this isn't about actually
what Achilles claims as his honor. It's what has been
given to him as his honor. Part of what's difficult.
And when we think about, again, this gets us really
(54:59):
far from things that we can relate to in the
modern world. And it's just the way, you know, that's
just the reality. But when we think about Helen, Helen
was the prize that was given to Paris, right? So
isn't Perseus the prize that was given to to Achilles.
So what do we mean by prize? Well, it's an
(55:24):
honor to have this, you know, to be given this woman.
It's very painful to think about, right? Again, in modern terms,
this is really unthinkable, but, or should be, right? We
want it to be unthinkable. But all I would say
is that he's basically making an argument, like, if you
(55:45):
are going to fight a whole war, over this woman,
why wouldn't I fight a whole war over this woman?
And I don't know what it means. You know, it's
hard to in any way try to understand what's going
on in the minds of people and how are they
seeing these things. I think it's interesting to talk about
(56:07):
a little bit about Sappho here in her Fragment 16
where she has Helen be almost really choose to go
and have the agency of going. And that is hard
for moderns as well, because a lot of times people say,
(56:27):
Helen was forced, you know, she was good. She wasn't
a bad person. Well, nobody said she was a bad person.
What Sappho says is the thing you desire is the
most beautiful thing. And Helen went to, Paris because that
was the thing she desired. Now, desire is also a god,
(56:48):
so we haven't eliminated the possibility that there is divine,
a divine hand. But it is interesting that Sappho gives
the agency to Helen. Now, we don't really have an
exact parallel to that other than when Briseis is taken
from Achilles, she goes unwillingly. Right. I guess that's the
(57:10):
seed that part that's similar it's just that for us
I don't think we can really get past.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Relate to that at least Achilles was familiar to her
and to be taken from him would have placed her
in another unfamiliar surrounding you know sometimes sometimes where you're
at is just maybe feel safer than another new place
(57:39):
especially in a camp I.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
Don't know I mean, you know, Pat Parker has that book,
Silence of the Girls. I think she tells the story
right from Briseis' point of view. It's just so difficult.
You know, the issue, the stuff with Briseis is just
very hard because how can we reconcile? And Homer doesn't
(58:04):
make it, you know, I wouldn't say that Homer... is
kind of saying, oh, this is great. It's a great
thing that's done. I think Homer's a documentarian more than anything.
I don't think Homer is really a moralist as much
as he is documenting this world and that this is
the reality that happens in war. But I do think
(58:25):
that Briseis is the manifestation of Achilles' honor in the
way that Helen is an honor for Menelaus. We're told
that Menelaus will go to the Isle of the Blessed
because he's Zeus' son-in-law, not on his own merit, but
because he's the husband of Helen. I don't really know
(58:46):
what to do with Perseus. I think that's a really
hard one. Other than to say, it's interesting to look
into the tradition and see what happens to Hippodamia. And
this is, you know, I think this is a reality
of what happened to women that we should, look at
(59:08):
and not sanitize it and not also not necessarily look
at it as we do in our own time because
I'm sure reflecting things about history the story is also
(59:31):
clearly meant to tell us something about the relationship between
gods and mortals and heroes, that whole dynamic. And so
we can't just look at it as a piece of history,
as if the things happening in there are history, even
though there's people who will talk about the Hittite records and,
(59:52):
you know, there's a lot of history in them. And
then somebody like me, I'll come in and talk about
the history resonances with Athenian festivals and yeah, that's a
tough one. Perseus is a hard one. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Well, we are just about at the top of our
hour and I have enjoyed our conversation so much and
I feel like I have, I have a whole, I
have a whole bunch more questions, but I am so
happy to have chatted with you today and I can
hardly wait to share what we have talked about with
my audience because I think they're going to love it.
(01:00:29):
And again, for those of us that are, those of
you that see on the video, this book, The Epic
Women of Homer, I think is worth your time. I
would get this. And it is probably my favorite nonfiction
read of 2026.
Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
I mean, if you could see, let me just, so
everybody knows that, like, can you guys see all my annotations? Dude,
I am like 100%.
Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
I'm into this. I'm so honored. Thank you so much.
It's really been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
I enjoy this. I hope I can have you on
again some other time.
Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
It'd be my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
All right. I'm going to go ahead and sign out.
Welcome back to Greek Mythology Retold, and I am your host,
Janelle Rhiannon. Today, I am delighted to be joined by Dr.
Irene Allen, classicist and educator and director of the Institute
for Classics Education. And she is visiting us today to
talk about her book, The Epic Women of Homer. And
(00:38):
I am currently reading it, and I love it. And
in this book, she is inviting us to consider the
women that Homer wrote, And look at them in a
more in-depth and maybe a well-rounded way and how Homer
intended to show us how women and men were joined
(01:02):
in the ancient world and how... They each contributed to
their cultures and society.
Speaker 2 (01:07):
Dr.
Speaker 1 (01:08):
Allen, thank you for joining us today.
Speaker 2 (01:11):
Thank you so much for having me. Always a pleasure
to talk about Homer.
Speaker 1 (01:15):
Yeah. So one of the ideas that really struck me
in your book was that Homer doesn't diminish the women
just because they aren't on the battlefield. And instead, he
does give them a different kind of power. And you
talk about through their weaving, through lament and memory. the
counsel that they give, the way that they preserve their households.
(01:37):
And what do you think that modern readers sometimes mistake?
Do you think that they mistake these forms of power
for lesser forms of power?
Speaker 2 (01:48):
Yeah, I think one of the problems is that the
kind of labor that women are associated with in the
ancient world isn't, we don't really do it anymore. We
don't weave. We don't make our families clothes. Maybe we cook.
Some of us, I don't. Sorry to say, but the
kinds of labor that women do in the ancient world
(02:11):
and that they do in Homer isn't just, isn't just,
that's the number one thing I would do. It can't
be done by anybody. It's not easy. It's not low skill.
It's actually high skill. And I think the most important
thing is that it's also sacred labor. So all the
(02:32):
things that we see women doing in the Iliad and Odyssey, weaving, washing,
in the case of Nausicaa, these are things that women
would do to serve the goddesses and heroines that they
worshipped as well. And I think when we start to
think about the weaving of the peplos for Athena in
(02:52):
the Panathenaia, for example, women, I think, also wove a
garment for Apollo in Sparta. And there are other instances
where garments are being offered to gods. And at least
in Athens, we know they were woven by women. So
this kind of labor of clothing the goddess is already
(03:16):
giving us a very different feeling about this skill of weaving.
And also they're telling stories on the cloth. So on
the peplos for Athena, for example, who would tell the
story of the Gigantomachy. So the story of Athena's great
victory for order, establishing order in the cosmos, is a
(03:40):
story that women tell on the cloth. So that's one thing.
And the washing is also really interesting because a lot
of times we think, oh, it's just the little girls
doing the least important labor. But actually, there was a
festival in Athens, the Plinteria, that involved processing the cult
(04:00):
statue of Athena down to the water to bathe her.
And then she would be dressed and re-adorned, redressed. And
this is, again, something that was done by women. So
washing is not, it's just, it's very important. It's crucial, really.
(04:22):
And it's sacred and it's serving the goddess. So that's
something I think we're just so far removed from. And
if we don't have the context for what women were
doing in the ancient world, not just like what they
were doing in their houses, but how that labor in
their household was also reverberating out into their service for
(04:45):
the community. It's hard to see that. And I think
one of the crucial things is that Homer is showing,
he's kind of scripting that for us because we see
the women in book six of the Iliad offering a
garment to Athena. We also see Nausicaa leading young girls
down to the river to wash clothes. Of course, we
(05:08):
see Andromache, Helen, and Penelope weaving. And in the case
of Helen, we see that she's weaving a story onto
the cloth. She's weaving the story of the Trojan War.
So we're seeing weaving as an analog to storytelling, to
bardic work. Gregory Nash has a wonderful discussion of the
(05:32):
word hymnos, saying that basically hymnos and hufainen share a root.
And so the craft of poetry and the craft of
weaving have intersecting, they're seen as kind of intersecting technologies.
So I think these are things that are hard for
us to relate to.
Speaker 1 (05:54):
Right. I grew up, I told you that I had
a Nona and she was always crocheting and knitting and
she always had a basket of yarn. And I still
have the last thing that she crocheted, which was, I
have two things that she crocheted. One is this gorgeous,
(06:14):
I can't even put it out, but it's like, it's
the point set up pattern. And it's just this white
crew pattern. It's like this giant heavy doily, but it's
for a bedspread. And then the last thing that she
actually made that I have is all of her extra
yarn that she had. And she wove that. So it's
(06:35):
this afghan that's all of the remnants of all of her,
all the yarns that she had of everything that she
had made. So I have that piece. But that was
very much always known as crocheting. Sometimes knitting, but always crocheting.
Speaker 2 (06:53):
And that's very metaphoric, I think, the idea that she's
taking all the scraps and weaving them into a whole.
Speaker 1 (06:59):
And I feel privileged to have that. And I'm afraid,
you know, there's like a little needs to, a couple
of places needs to be mended because it's very old now.
But I keep it in the cupboard because I'm afraid
somebody will mess it up.
Speaker 2 (07:13):
I don't want anybody. Can't let that happen. No, absolutely not.
Speaker 1 (07:18):
But women, like women don't sew as much anymore because
it's easy for us to go to the store and
just buy something, you know. But there was a time
when that was not the way it was. Like you
had to make your clothes. My Nona was always sewing
and making clothes for like my dad and his sisters,
(07:41):
you know.
Speaker 2 (07:42):
They lived on a farm and so on. See, that's,
and I do think that there's a real interest these days.
I see a lot of women, especially picking up things
like sewing and knitting and crocheting and other kinds of handiwork.
And there's a certain satisfaction in making something and completing
(08:04):
it and seeing that you have produced something. And even
so though, we won't have that same feeling of necessity.
Speaker 1 (08:11):
In the ancient world, if you didn't weave it, It
didn't happen. Like you didn't have the blanket. You didn't
have the garments to cover your body. You didn't have
your tunic. You didn't have your chitin. You didn't have
any of that. Somebody had to make that. And I
think that was something that I read about how, is
(08:35):
it Nausicaa or Nausicaa? I heard somebody say Nausicaa.
Speaker 2 (08:40):
We can say Nausicaa.
Speaker 1 (09:08):
The clothing that she made, she would recognize her own stitch.
She would recognize something had been given him. So as
an introduction, without even saying anything.
Speaker 2 (09:22):
Exactly. And that's something she does say to him. The
first thing she says is, I thought you said you
came here from far away, but where'd you get that garment?
So that's a way to test him really, to see
how is he going to explain the fact that he's
wearing a garment that she can identify as. And that's
(09:42):
the other thing too, because Penelope also, when she tests,
one of her tests of Odysseus is what, when he says, oh,
I met Odysseus. And she said, well, what was he wearing?
And he was able to describe the garment as well
as other things. But you weaving is in a sense
your signature it's a kind of signature that you can
(10:05):
identify somebody and where they belong by what they're wearing
and this is has a long life at least in
the Greek world and I'm sure elsewhere as well that
traditional dress for particular regions is It's a way of
identifying yourself. So it has a deep meaning.
Speaker 1 (10:26):
What you had said earlier made me also think about
how when Hector came off the battlefield, he went to
his mother and he said, take your best garment and
take it, you and all the gray hairs, all the
older women, take it to Athena and offer prayer to
her and offer the garment so that we can win
(10:47):
on the battlefield. Like he wouldn't have asked that if
there was not some sort of power or sacredness related
to the task. He wasn't just giving her something to do.
Speaker 2 (11:00):
Right, exactly.
Speaker 1 (11:01):
To get her out of the way, you know. And so,
go ahead.
Speaker 2 (11:08):
Well, I was going to say that's another really interesting
facet because in book six of where that episode happens,
There's a symmetry between men on the battlefield and women
in the sanctuary where both are forming or performing protective functions,
(11:30):
the men by fighting and the women by praying to
the goddess. And there's one wonderful precedent for that described
by a later historian, Pellaeonus, saying that in one battle
between the Spartans and Athenians in, I think it was
the 360s, the festival, Scyra, the Scyra festival was taking
(11:54):
place on the same day of battle. And so the
general garlanded the ships when they went out. And according
to Pelionis, they fought really confidently because they felt they
had the goddess's protection because they knew their wives were
praying at the altars on that day. Now, is this
(12:15):
historically accurate? Whereas in a legend, isn't really the point.
The point is that we're seeing how that symmetry is
understood in the mind of the historian who's telling it, right?
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Yeah. And you mentioned that in your book where Helen
is weaving the story where she's the center of the tapestry,
the story she's telling in her weaving. And Andromaca... was
weaving and it was more of a sacred prayer, like
intoning as she's weaving, doesn't realize that Hector's even dead.
(12:49):
I don't want to say spell casting, but a sacred, magical,
it's kind of like what we say. It's what we
say today, like be positive. And why do we pray now?
Because we're hoping for some power beyond our being to
(13:10):
protect or guide or something. And so that makes me
think of that. I'm so sad for Andromaca in that scene.
Speaker 2 (13:19):
I know. I know. It's very sad.
Speaker 1 (13:23):
I know. I know. I love... Yeah. I did, in
my series, I had... You know how Penelope is weaving
on the big loom where... All the suitors can see
her weaving. But she has a smaller loom set up
and an antechamber in her room. And she's weaving the
(13:43):
events that are happening for the past 20 years. And
so she reads her cloth back to Odysseus. And he
realizes that the symbols and colors she chose, it wasn't
just decoration. And he has this epiphany that, oh, my.
Speaker 2 (14:00):
God, she.
Speaker 1 (14:02):
Is the storyteller. Mm-hmm.
Speaker 2 (14:04):
Of Ithaca.
Speaker 1 (14:05):
And that's when he realizes she is Ithaca. She's more
Ithaca than he is. Cause she, she has, she holds
the knowledge that he, you know, he's a stranger.
Speaker 2 (14:18):
I mean, she does hold the knowledge and she engineers events.
I think much more than we think because we're used
to a storytelling of explicitness perhaps. Yeah. at least in contemporary,
in a lot of contemporary literature. And actually, what's happening
(14:40):
is very much under the surface. And there's a question of,
are you able to read the signs? Do you see
what she's doing and how she's operating and how she
and Telemachus are, in a sense, performing one conversation on
the surface and another conversation underneath? She's being concealed from us.
(15:02):
Just like she's being, shall we say, she's concealing herself
from the suitors. She's not letting them see exactly what, right,
this is what Antinous tells us. He says, oh, she
says one thing and does another thing. We don't really
know what she's thinking. And that's what the bard is
doing with her as well, I think. He's making us guess. Wait,
(15:24):
what does she know? When is she, at what point
is she pulling the strings? She's always pulling the strings,
I think, is the answer, you know.
Speaker 1 (15:32):
I think people underestimate Penelope because she's usually seen juxtaposed
to Clytemnestra. And so we see the action. We see
what Clytemnestra does when Agamemnon returns home. We see the
violence of that. And it's so shocking. And so it's
(15:53):
easier to think of Clytemnestra as being empowered in some way.
But Penelope is doing exactly what Clytemnestra is doing. She's
holding an entire kingdom together for even longer. And she
does it in a way that in the end, she
preserves her son's life. Her husband does return home. And,
(16:17):
you know, she's just as powerful. But I think people
don't see that. They don't see it in the same
way that she's just weaving and weeping. somehow for 20
years that's all she does is i'm just gonna weave
and weep that's.
Speaker 2 (16:33):
It well the the interesting thing about penelope is that
she specifically talks about her own her kleos her fame
her epic fame and it's referenced in book two that
her this ruse that she did to hold off the
suitors this the shroud for laertes is what she has
(16:53):
achieved fame for kleos for But what she says later is,
my fame will be even greater if my husband returns.
And a lot of times we think that that's, oh,
that's Penelope like ceding power to Odysseus. But actually, one
(17:14):
of them is not more important than the other. They
really are the yin and the yang. You can't have
one without the other. You can't understand the power of
one without the power of the other. And in book five,
when Odysseus is preparing to leave Calypso, and the deal
(17:37):
is Calypso has to let Odysseus go if he wants
to go. If he chooses to stay, that's different. And
so she says, don't you want to stay? I can
give you immortality. If you leave, you're going to suffer.
And he says... So be it. Like you are great.
(17:59):
You're really great. You're the best, but I want to
go home. And it's that, that's the fame of Penelope
is that her husband will give up ease. Even a
goddess can't keep him away from Penelope. And that's Penelope's
strength as much as it's Odysseus's. So I think that,
(18:21):
that absolute perfect interconnection is really, hard for us to
even really recognize, I guess, because we're not, we're thinking
somebody's got to be the top, but actually they're both
the top, you know, there's the heroine's fame and the
hero's fame and they're perfectly symmetrical.
Speaker 1 (18:45):
You said, you have a section in your introduction where
you kind of break down some words and I was
particularly blown away because again you get you fall into
the language and this goes to this speaks to like
translations and why like for me I'll read a lot
of translations and I know right now there's a lot
of commentary about translations in the Greek myth space.
Speaker 2 (19:10):
But you you broke down the word that's why yeah
all right you broke down the word is.
Speaker 1 (19:17):
It histos is that Histos. And so could you walk
us through what that means, why it was difficult to translate,
and then how Homer would have looked at it and
how that root word then connects Odysseus and Penelope, as
you're saying, on an equal level, not one's better than
(19:40):
the other, but gave us that balance through the language.
Speaker 2 (19:44):
Yeah. So a lot of times, I just want to
say a lot of times people say to me, so
couldn't we say Penelope? is even more powerful? They're equally powerful.
We really have like a hard time with the equality.
They are equally powerful and they're powerful in different ways.
So the histos is the wonderful example of that. And
(20:05):
it's a wonderful example of why we cannot in English translation,
do what Homer's doing because our language doesn't work the
same way. So histos literally means standing beam. And it
shares a root with the verb histemi, to make something
stand or to stand. Also histion, for sale. Hopefully I'm
(20:30):
not forgetting that.
Speaker 1 (20:33):
I notated that. Yes.
Speaker 2 (20:39):
But the histemi and the histion is really important because,
or sorry, the histos is really important because this word
standing being is used for a loom because they used
standing looms and also for mast. And with the yin
and the yang, it's infinite dynamism and infinite stillness. And
(21:01):
I think the histos, which is referring to the loom,
is how Penelope stops time. So it feels very much
like the infinite stillness. She's going to make it impossible
for events to move forward. So basically, she's controlling time
in Ithaca to give Odysseus that space to return. And
(21:27):
he is crafting his own histos, his own mast, which
he does in this grove that Calypso leads him into
so that he can build his ship, his raft, to
escape Adygea. And he's going to use his histos to
re-enter the flow of time. Because as far as, as
(21:49):
long as he's with Calypso, he's sort of concealed. He's
neither really alive or dead. He's sort of in this
intermediate space. But he's going to use his mast, infinite dynamism,
you know, to get back into, to get back to time,
to And so those two kinds of authorities, the ship,
you know, the histos, the mast, and the histos, the loom,
(22:14):
they're separated by this vast space. But those are going
to be the mediums that bring them back together. They're
using their mutual authorities, like mutually important mediums. but also
completely different. So it's the same, but it's different, you know,
because it's a histos. It's a very different kind of
(22:36):
histos for Odysseus than it is for Penelope. And yet
they cannot achieve their reunion without both of them exercising
their authority with the tools available to them. And I
think that's just one of the things that makes Homer
so special is he really doesn't. One isn't more important
(22:58):
than the other. They're perfectly interconnected.
Speaker 1 (23:01):
It's showing us true partnership.
Speaker 2 (23:05):
I mean, I just want to say I really love
all of them. I love all the heroes. I love
all the heroines. There's nobody that I don't feel empathy for,
and I think that's a testament to Homer. Even Agamemnon,
he makes us feel bad for Agamemnon. He shows us
Agamemnon's failures, but And he shows us where heroes fail,
(23:30):
but we are the heroes. So, and the heroes are us.
So if we don't have empathy for the heroes, that's really, um,
that's a failing on our, on our part. And I
think that's the genius of Homer is if we walk
away from it and we don't feel empathy for every,
(23:51):
every hero struggle, every heroine struggle, um, we're really kind
of missing the, I think we're missing the meaning.
Speaker 1 (24:01):
That's when we talk, when we talk about Homer, the
Iliad or the Odyssey speaking to us about what it
means to be a human. We don't mean that in.
Speaker 2 (24:10):
A trite way.
Speaker 1 (24:11):
That's, it's very real because who hasn't ever had to
make a decision that didn't feel like it was going
to be bad this way and kind of bad this way.
And then have to choose between two things that, just,
you didn't really want to, that just didn't, somebody was
going to get hurt either way or something. We've all
(24:31):
faced those kinds of decisions and then made it and
then had to live with the consequence of that and go, ugh.
But then you don't really know what you would do differently.
Speaker 2 (24:42):
I say a lot of times that the tragic in
the Greek sense isn't just what happens to you from
outside of you, but what you do to yourself. And
that that's where the deep empathy comes. Because if we
only feel bad for people because something is done to
(25:05):
them and we don't have empathy for them when they
do something to themselves, then how do we even overcome
our own mistakes? Because that's always going to be something
that we experience ourselves, right? Oh, that was such a
huge mistake. Why did I do that? Well, you've got to,
(25:25):
you know, how do you get past that if you
don't have empathy for people's, you know, if you look
at the heroes and say, oh, they're terrible, they make
mistakes all the time, they do such stupid things. Yeah, exactly.
That's when we have empathy for them.
Speaker 1 (25:40):
Yeah, don't we all?
Speaker 2 (25:42):
Exactly.
Speaker 1 (25:44):
So I'm sure you saw the Nolan's Odyssey, I'm assuming.
You didn't see it?
Speaker 2 (25:49):
Okay. Okay.
Speaker 1 (25:50):
Well, not to be a spoiler or anything like that.
Speaker 2 (25:53):
No, it's okay.
Speaker 1 (25:54):
I'm not going to. There was much ado about the
role of Helen. And I felt like in the presentation
of Helen in Nolan's Odyssey, I don't think we really
got a good look at Helen. You know what I mean?
(26:15):
Like what she meant in the story and and her
interaction with Telemachus. And could you tell us a little
bit about Homer's Helen?
Speaker 2 (26:29):
Yeah, I haven't seen the film, so you don't have
to worry about spoilers. I'm also not going to see it.
I don't need to. I mean, for me, I'd rather
spend the two hours, or three hours, I don't know
how long the film is, rereading something in Homer. Yeah. No, no,
no judgment on anyone else who is interested in the film.
(26:52):
But as far as Homer's, I mean, that's it, right?
I can't, I'm not going to find a better version
of Helen than Homer's Helen. I'm confident about that. I
could be wrong, but I'm confident. And so Homer's Helen
is uncanny. She's maybe a goddess, maybe a heroine. We're
(27:13):
not quite sure. He never spells it out for us. Historically,
Helen was worshipped as both a goddess and a heroine.
So maybe Homer is alluding to that liminality in her character,
in her figure, as a cult figure. When we see
(27:36):
her in the Iliad, we see that she is absolutely
being guided by Aphrodite. She is walking in Aphrodite's footsteps, literally,
and under compulsion. She doesn't want to. And again, I'm
just going to say most people could probably be like,
(28:01):
have an experience like that where they were like, why
did I do that? Right? Like on a very basic
human level, I just had a big dessert with my coffee.
And then at the end, I had a stomach ache
and I'm, why did I do that? You know, I'm
just a really dumb example, but like, that's the point,
you know, this is not a dumb example. Helen's is
(28:23):
very serious, but this, this feeling of necessity driving you
on and not really not wanting to do it, but
not being able to stop yourself. Am I being compelled
from the outside or am I compelling myself? And something
I always say is that in ancient Greek, we have
the active voice and we have the passive voice, just
(28:46):
like we have in English. But we also have the
middle voice, which is that voice where we're doing something
to ourselves. And in certain tenses, you can't differentiate. The
passive and the middle are formed in the same way.
And a really, an example that I'll never forget because
(29:07):
it was the first time that I realized, oh my gosh,
the grammar itself makes it impossible to differentiate is in
the play Ajax by Sophocles when there's a point where
Ajax says, by coming to Troy, I was destroyed, but
it could also be translated, I destroyed myself. And you can't,
(29:27):
the grammar doesn't let you decide which one it is
because the middle and the passive or the voices are
formed the same way. So, you know, it's this moment
where you're like, wait, which, is it? And immediately we
all said, oh, he destroyed himself. And then, and then
it was, wait, wait, it's passive also. So it could be,
(29:49):
he was destroyed by the gods. Right. And this is Helen, right?
Did she go with Paris or was she made to
go with Paris? And that's just a debate across the
whole tradition, different poets giving different views of that. So
(30:12):
that's one thing that Homer's Helen is tapped into is
this paradigmatic figure that we can see the struggle to
try to define whether we're doing things on our own
or whether we're being led, we're being kind of pushed
into it without really understanding why we're doing things. But
(30:33):
then in the Odyssey, well, I should say also in
the Iliad, she is a bardic figure in the sense
that she reads the story of the war. So she's
the cause, which is not the same as to blame,
because the cause is simply the thing that initiates. Blame
(30:53):
is a moral category. So the Trojan elders say she's
not the cause of all these problems in book three
when they're on the walls of Troy. She's not the cause.
Zeus is the cause. But really, she's too powerful and
we should get her out of here, you know, get
(31:14):
her out of here because she's dangerous. Divine power is dangerous.
Of course, she doesn't go. But then she comes to
the walls and she gives a mini catalog of the
Achaean leaders. And people say, well, why is she telling
Priam who the leaders are 10 years in or nine
years into the war. Well, the whole point is it's,
she's performing a catalog. So it's showing us her power
(31:39):
to tell this, to shape the story. And what is
the bard? Well, the bard is the instrument of the muses.
So the bard is both the actor and the instrument,
the agent of the instrument, if you want. And the,
We are always talking about control and power. I think
the ancient Greeks were talking about agency. So slightly different, right?
(32:06):
Then we go to find Helen in the Odyssey and
now she's still the one in control. She's telling a
story that frames herself in a certain way as having
helped Odysseus. So she's still a storyteller. She's still shaping
how people perceive things. Menelaus tells a story that doesn't
(32:28):
sit so easily with hers, you know? Maybe it does,
maybe it doesn't. Again, Homer's saying, here you go. Now
make sense of it. Come together and talk about it.
But she's clearly more on the ball than he is.
I think she's the social superior in their relationship. Homer
(32:50):
makes that pretty clear. There's that one moment where an
omen appears and someone in Menelaus is like, hmm, what
is that? And Helen says, I'll tell you what it means.
So we know that she's, but actually one of my
favorite moments is when she first comes in to the
hall where Menelaus is meeting and they put a footstool
(33:14):
under her foot, under her feet, the ladies who are
with her. And then a couple of lines later, the
word for spouse is used to refer to Menelaus as
And it's formed very similarly to how stool, footstool is formed.
So I feel like Homer's making it very clear. Menelaus
is the inferior socially because she's the daughter of Zeus.
(33:38):
This epithet is only used in Homer for goddesses. So
that's our little hint that maybe she's a goddess, but
it's unclear. And then of course, at the very end,
he gives Telemachus a garment for his future bride. Well, okay,
(34:00):
if we saw her weaving the story of the Trojan
War on a garment, and now she's giving a garment
to be handed forward, we, I think, can be allowed
to consider the possibility that it's a story cloth and
that it is basically the story of the war that
(34:20):
the story of the heroic age, maybe that she is
now entrusting to Telemachus to the future generations. She is
also put in that role in the Iliad when she
delivers the final lament for Hector. So she's the last voice,
the last woman who speaks in the Iliad. So she's
(34:43):
being presented, I think, as a, the parallel to the bard,
the feminine counterpart to the male bard. So he sings
the song like the Rhapsodes stitch the Homeric epics at
the Patathenaia. And she's doing the same work, but on cloth.
Speaker 1 (35:06):
That's interesting because it made me think about when the
bard was singing in Odysseus Hall and when Telemachus tells
his mother that go back to your work. And I
want you to speak to that because I don't, I
don't think you, you made, you made a very good
case about why it's not a simple scolding, but he's
(35:27):
saying though that there's, uh, other people have lost fathers
and brothers to the war. We want to hear the song.
So go back to your, go back to your weaving.
And then Helen says, gives him a cloth that may
be a part of storytelling. So Telemachus is on the
(35:47):
receiving end of all of these stories about the Trojan War.
And that's really, that's all he knows his father through,
is through what other people tell him. Like Odysseus is
a stranger, literally. Athena didn't even have to put a
disguise on Odysseus because Telemachus wouldn't have recognized him anyway.
(36:08):
How would he know what he looks like? Did you
want to speak to that about was Telemachus scolding his
mother or not? Because that was a very good argument,
discussion that you had in your book.
Speaker 2 (36:23):
I mean, I just think it's boring to think of
it that way. And I think we're just getting caught
up in our own concerns. And we're not thinking about
what is the Greek language doing. So first we have
the histos. Yeah, there's that. But there's also, for me,
(36:44):
the fact that the loom and the distaff are associated
with goddesses of civilization and order. And really, life itself,
because the fates are spinners. Aphrodite is sometimes, I think,
depicted spinning. She's also, in the religious sense, believed to
(37:08):
be present at every birth. Because she's, of course... sort
of reproductive associated with all that realm. And Athena is
the goddess of basically of civilization and she's a weaver.
(37:28):
So women are depicted, goddesses at least, and heroines are
depicted shaping the world, like shaping the cosmic fabric. So
for me, it just feels very flat to be like, oh,
he's scolding his mother. When he says, go to your
loom and distaff, like, I just think it's deeper. It's
(37:54):
got to be deeper, especially because that formula appears three
times in Homer. We hear it. We hear Hector say
it to Andromache. We hear Telemachus. Hector says it to Andromache, obviously,
in Iliad 6. And then Telemachus says it to Penelope
in book one and book 21. And each time, there's
(38:16):
a slight variable. Hector says, war is the work of men.
Telemachus says, public speaking is the work of men in
book one. And then in book 21, he says, might
is the work of men. You go to your Lumen Distaff.
So he's, if we look across the three, might, Masculine
(38:38):
heroism is war, public speaking, and might, physical strength. Or
you could say, yeah, because I said physical strength is
how I would put it. So feminine authority is weaving, spinning.
(39:01):
But what does that mean, again, in the context of Homer? Strategy?
It means.
Speaker 1 (39:09):
Care.
Speaker 2 (39:10):
It means civilization, order. So I think it's what are
heroes and heroines associated with. And in the cult sense,
the extremity is death for both the hero and the heroine.
I mean, the mortal part has to die for the
(39:31):
immortalization to happen. And with the masculine heroes, they're dying
in war, of course. But they might also, I'm trying
to think, maybe what is Heracles gets taken out by
the the robe right that didn't day in era at
least in one version but what um what did that
(39:54):
what to heroines what occult heroines we don't see any
of them die no heroines die in homer but what
occult heroines die of well they're hounded by goddesses certainly
i know some melee agave it's it always has to
do in some way with nurture and care taken to
(40:16):
an extreme or turned against itself. I think Aino jumps
off the cliff with one of her children, trying to
escape Hera. So yeah, I mean, the idea of nurture
and care are not, I mean, how do you survive
(40:37):
without them, you know? So no, I don't think it's,
I think to say he's, it's just, he's scolding his
mother just feels really, like I said, it just feels
kind of flat. And it takes me out of the
story completely because there's so much about weaving for memory
and storytelling and order and creation that to just say
(41:01):
he's scolding him is sort of to override the whole
logic of Homer, really, for me.
Speaker 1 (41:10):
I think I understood it is that public speaking was
for men. We're listening to the bard. We're here. And
it's like, we're doing our storytelling and listening and you
go do your storytelling over there. I hear a young
man and, you know, I told you I have grandsons,
but I could hear my, I could hear my eldest
(41:31):
specifically going, no, no, you just, you go over there
and do your thing. And I'm going to go over
here and I'm going to do my thing. And it's
my choice to go.
Speaker 2 (41:40):
Okay. Yeah. All right.
Speaker 1 (41:41):
I see you.
Speaker 2 (41:42):
I got you. And the thing is, I mean, if
we look historically, I mean, I'm not talking about the
Bronze Age because that's the unrecoverable, not unrecoverable historically, but
like specifically, what is Homer? For me, what I see
in Homer, the texts of Homer, because what we've inherited
(42:04):
are texts. Do they have origins? Obviously, there's a story
being handed forward and we can There's wonderful historians who
can talk about that. What I'm fascinated by is the
intersections and the resonances with what we see in Athens,
simply because the epic to me feels like it's enshrining
(42:30):
the systems of its own performance in this festival age.
I mean, this is all theoretical, right? But I do
find it really interesting when I think about something like
the Thesmophoria or even the Adonia in Athens. The Thesmophoria
was a state-funded festival that was women only. So we
(42:50):
also have to consider that when Telemachus is saying, go
talk to your ladies and do your thing. that that
actually has value in their world because it did in Athens,
at least, right? And the Thesmophoria was celebrated across the
Greek world in this period. So this is a woman-only
(43:11):
festival where it is of crucial importance and it is legally,
men are not allowed, there's inscriptions saying this must be done,
it must be coordinated, the priestess has to do such
and such, and it must be done for all time
and nobody is to interfere. So this is a woman-only
(43:31):
occasion that is on the calendar and it's super important. Similarly,
the Adonia, well, similarly, it is women doing it and
it's not actually a funded festival. But as much as
we see people, like we see men in writing complaining
(43:51):
about the women screaming at the Adonia, nobody's ever stopping
the Adonia from taking place. And actually, there's some fascinating interpretations.
L'Orealan writes, Samer has a fascinating book of the Athenian
Adonia in context that completely changes how I think people
(44:15):
can read something like Lysistrata by Aristophanes. Yeah, so when
we're saying women are doing things oh, just go do
what the women do. That doesn't necessarily mean what we
think it does and what it would mean if somebody
said it now. Because there are important women-only occasions that
(44:38):
are respected and funded or at least even part of
the calendar and nobody's interfering with them.
Speaker 1 (44:44):
One of my favorite figures in the Iliad is Thetis.
And I love Thetis and I love her relationship with Achilles.
And I always cringe a little bit when I see
a post or a comment that Achilles was just a crybaby.
Speaker 2 (45:05):
Ugh, killing me.
Speaker 1 (45:07):
You're killing me. Because he wasn't spoiled. He wasn't a crybaby.
I mean, this is the ancient world. And I think
of ancient texts and stories of people in their grief
pulling their hair out, rending their clothes, pouring ash on
their head. These are things that we also see reflected.
(45:27):
in Achilles' behavior and his grief and his frustration. I
feel like that relationship gets misunderstood, that I think it's
a close bond. And he knows that when he is
in despair, where does he goes to the beach? He
knows exactly what he's doing, right? He knows his mother's
(45:48):
going to come. Like what better relationship is that? And
then she tries to fix things for him. She tries
to make things right because she knows he's got a
short life. And as a mother, I think, what wouldn't
I do for my child?
Speaker 2 (46:06):
Right.
Speaker 1 (46:07):
Do you have anything? Can you add? Can you have
any insights on Thetis?
Speaker 2 (46:14):
Yeah, I'm going to say like as the mother of
a son, right? Don't mess with the relationship between Thaddeus
and Achilles, you know? But on a more serious note,
there's also Thetis and Achilles in the tradition. And in
(46:35):
the tradition, if we look at the wider epic tradition,
Thetis is pursued by Poseidon and Zeus. They're both interested
in marrying her. But they're warned by Themis, the goddess
of good order. not to marry her because the prophecy
(46:56):
that her son will be more powerful than his father.
And so they're warned, you cannot marry her because if
she has a son, he would be able to unseat Zeus.
We'll be back to where we were in the battle
days when the gods were all fighting and we were
constantly having these succession wars. So you have to make
sure she marries a mortal. So Thetis is forced to
(47:18):
marry a mortal, which is... He narrates very poignantly in
book 18 of the Iliad. And what does this mean, though?
This means that her son inherits the mortality of his father.
So because Thetis' son is a threat, she's forced to
(47:40):
marry a mortal and she's forced to grieve her son eternally. So,
you know, people say Achilles is such a brat and
he's so entitled, but he has to die. Because the
gods would not allow, could not allow instability to become
a threat. And a lot of times people think, oh,
(48:00):
this is Zeus trying to hold. It's the goddess of
good order who says, if you want to maintain peace,
you cannot allow this. And so stability of the Olympian
reign is bought at the price of Achilles mortality. That's
pretty serious. So when Thetis goes to Zeus and says,
(48:23):
remember that time I helped you, there's a version inside
the epic that allows it to be logical and coherent
as a whole. But when you know the larger tradition,
remember that time I helped you, it hits a little
harder because you think about, well, Achilles could have been
(48:45):
at the very top. And instead, he's got to die.
So that's kind of, I mean, I hope that we
would have some understanding that that's a serious and very
tragic outcome for Achilles. He's the victim, right? He's the
(49:06):
recipient of things. He's paying the price for other things
that have nothing to do with him or anything he's done.
And so, of course, he's preoccupied with his rights as
a son of a goddess, and the honor that maybe
the honor that's due to him given what he's had
to give up in order to maintain peace.
Speaker 1 (49:27):
And Thetis has to, you know, from a mother's, seen
it through a mother's eyes, as soon as he's born,
you know, she wants to make him immortal, right? you know?
And so we have the story. There's one story where
she tries to burn it out of him. Then there's
another story about the river Styx. Everybody kind of seems
to know that one, you know, the image of the dunk,
(49:50):
the baby in the water, except for the heel. But
that's something that a mother does who is already anticipating
this tremendous grief that she's going to have and also
wanting to do whatever she could to save her child.
And as a mother, who wouldn't have that same motivation?
Speaker 2 (50:15):
Exactly. Yeah. And it's so sad in book 18 when
she's talking to Hephaestus and she's saying, he's like, gosh,
I wish I could do something for you, but I can't,
you know, nobody can save Achilles from this fate. So
it's very sad. And the heel, I don't know, I
don't think we have any early examples of the heel.
That might be a later thing. Absolutely. In Homer, we
(50:39):
don't have a sense of him being invulnerable. There's no
mention of any invulnerability in the Iliad. But we know,
I think the burning story is told in Argonautica. Is
that right? I think, I feel like, which is also later,
of course. But yeah, I think it's very poignant. And
(51:00):
I feel very, I think it's very sad. Achilles having
to come to terms with his mortality is very sad.
What could have been? It could have been. I could
have been.
Speaker 1 (51:10):
Could you imagine if Zeus would have said, okay, just
one time, Thetis, she got pregnant. Oh, yeah. And then
Achilles would have, can you imagine Achilles as a god
fighting Zeus and Poseidon? That's a great story.
Speaker 2 (51:29):
That's a good what if.
Speaker 1 (51:30):
There you go.
Speaker 2 (51:32):
You can write the alternate history.
Speaker 1 (51:35):
Alternate universe. The other person that always intrigues me relating
to Achilles and really Patroclus, because there's sort of three
of them in the story, is Briseis. And we don't
really have a lot about Briseis. She just kind of
(51:55):
drops off. In my series, I give her a whole
other story because it's a big blank canvas as far
as I'm concerned as a writer. What is your take
or your understanding of the relationship between Briseis and Achilles?
Because for me, I see Agamemnon taking Briseis like that's
the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak,
(52:17):
because he's mad. The withdrawal isn't necessarily only because of Briseis.
when you look at all the things that he says
to Agamemnon up until Agamemnon takes it, he's already mad. Like,
you take everything. Like, I'm out here fighting. It's been
almost 10 years of fighting, right? 23 cities he's conquered.
(52:39):
And he's like, all this stuff, and look at all
the lion's share. Look at all the stuff you have.
And I don't have that much stuff, you know. But
I'm out there fighting more than you are. And so
then when Achilles tells him, Well, hey, you can get
more stuff. You have to give Chryseis back. You can
(52:59):
get more stuff after we conquer Troy. I'll make sure
that you'll get everything. But Agamemnon won't take it. He's like, nope,
that's not good enough. I'm going to take your prize.
Because Achilles was like, there's nothing left to give you, dude.
We have to fight some more.
Speaker 2 (53:16):
Let us sack the city.
Speaker 1 (53:17):
And then look at all the stuff you can have
after that. But he does say, he says a couple
of things. Are the brothers Atreus, are you guys the
only ones that love your wives? Like you? Like, I
love Briseis too. And he says something, I don't know
if I'm getting this wrong, but like the wife of
my heart or something to that effect. So it just
(53:40):
sort of calls into question, what is the relationship? What
is Achilles drawing attention to for Agamemnon to make his argument?
Speaker 2 (53:49):
Achilles drawing attention to to make his argument? One thing
I will say, there is, I think Douay has a
book about, right, Briseis, that there's a whole tradition around her.
Maybe Briseis is daughter of Briseis, right? So her own
name is Hippodamia. So there's a whole heroine story behind her.
(54:13):
And as far as the argument inside the Iliad, I
was just talking about this last week and now I can't,
I can't recall it because I have so many things
stuck in my head. But I will say that I
do think that Briseis represents his honor because honor isn't
(54:36):
an abstraction. It's manifested in the things that are given
to you by your peers. And this isn't about actually
what Achilles claims as his honor. It's what has been
given to him as his honor. Part of what's difficult.
And when we think about, again, this gets us really
(54:59):
far from things that we can relate to in the
modern world. And it's just the way, you know, that's
just the reality. But when we think about Helen, Helen
was the prize that was given to Paris, right? So
isn't Perseus the prize that was given to to Achilles.
So what do we mean by prize? Well, it's an
(55:24):
honor to have this, you know, to be given this woman.
It's very painful to think about, right? Again, in modern terms,
this is really unthinkable, but, or should be, right? We
want it to be unthinkable. But all I would say
is that he's basically making an argument, like, if you
(55:45):
are going to fight a whole war, over this woman,
why wouldn't I fight a whole war over this woman?
And I don't know what it means. You know, it's
hard to in any way try to understand what's going
on in the minds of people and how are they
seeing these things. I think it's interesting to talk about
(56:07):
a little bit about Sappho here in her Fragment 16
where she has Helen be almost really choose to go
and have the agency of going. And that is hard
for moderns as well, because a lot of times people say,
(56:27):
Helen was forced, you know, she was good. She wasn't
a bad person. Well, nobody said she was a bad person.
What Sappho says is the thing you desire is the
most beautiful thing. And Helen went to, Paris because that
was the thing she desired. Now, desire is also a god,
(56:48):
so we haven't eliminated the possibility that there is divine,
a divine hand. But it is interesting that Sappho gives
the agency to Helen. Now, we don't really have an
exact parallel to that other than when Briseis is taken
from Achilles, she goes unwillingly. Right. I guess that's the
(57:10):
seed that part that's similar it's just that for us
I don't think we can really get past.
Speaker 1 (57:17):
Relate to that at least Achilles was familiar to her
and to be taken from him would have placed her
in another unfamiliar surrounding you know sometimes sometimes where you're
at is just maybe feel safer than another new place
(57:39):
especially in a camp I.
Speaker 2 (57:41):
Don't know I mean, you know, Pat Parker has that book,
Silence of the Girls. I think she tells the story
right from Briseis' point of view. It's just so difficult.
You know, the issue, the stuff with Briseis is just
very hard because how can we reconcile? And Homer doesn't
(58:04):
make it, you know, I wouldn't say that Homer... is
kind of saying, oh, this is great. It's a great
thing that's done. I think Homer's a documentarian more than anything.
I don't think Homer is really a moralist as much
as he is documenting this world and that this is
the reality that happens in war. But I do think
(58:25):
that Briseis is the manifestation of Achilles' honor in the
way that Helen is an honor for Menelaus. We're told
that Menelaus will go to the Isle of the Blessed
because he's Zeus' son-in-law, not on his own merit, but
because he's the husband of Helen. I don't really know
(58:46):
what to do with Perseus. I think that's a really
hard one. Other than to say, it's interesting to look
into the tradition and see what happens to Hippodamia. And
this is, you know, I think this is a reality
of what happened to women that we should, look at
(59:08):
and not sanitize it and not also not necessarily look
at it as we do in our own time because
I'm sure reflecting things about history the story is also
(59:31):
clearly meant to tell us something about the relationship between
gods and mortals and heroes, that whole dynamic. And so
we can't just look at it as a piece of history,
as if the things happening in there are history, even
though there's people who will talk about the Hittite records and,
(59:52):
you know, there's a lot of history in them. And
then somebody like me, I'll come in and talk about
the history resonances with Athenian festivals and yeah, that's a
tough one. Perseus is a hard one. Yeah.
Speaker 1 (01:00:08):
Well, we are just about at the top of our
hour and I have enjoyed our conversation so much and
I feel like I have, I have a whole, I
have a whole bunch more questions, but I am so
happy to have chatted with you today and I can
hardly wait to share what we have talked about with
my audience because I think they're going to love it.
(01:00:29):
And again, for those of us that are, those of
you that see on the video, this book, The Epic
Women of Homer, I think is worth your time. I
would get this. And it is probably my favorite nonfiction
read of 2026.
Speaker 2 (01:00:46):
Oh my goodness.
Speaker 1 (01:00:48):
I mean, if you could see, let me just, so
everybody knows that, like, can you guys see all my annotations? Dude,
I am like 100%.
Speaker 2 (01:00:56):
I'm into this. I'm so honored. Thank you so much.
It's really been a pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:01:03):
I enjoy this. I hope I can have you on
again some other time.
Speaker 2 (01:01:06):
It'd be my pleasure.
Speaker 1 (01:01:07):
Okay.
Speaker 2 (01:01:07):
Thank you.
Speaker 1 (01:01:08):
All right. I'm going to go ahead and sign out.
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