Odysseus strings his great bow and turns his furious vengeance on the suitors. Antinous takes the first arrow through the throat as he lifts his cup. Over the course of one of the text’s 24 books, Homer describes how more than 100 suitors are mown down among the wreckage of tables. The housemaids who have shared the suitors’ beds are hanged in a line, their pale legs twitching in their death throes. The goat-herd Melanthius, who aided the enemy, is mutilated at the storeroom door. Homer tells the tale without apology, indeed with a sense of relish.
But when Lupita Nyong’o, promoting the latest Hollywood version of The Odyssey, declared that “when you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, very little time is spent in the perspective of the women. It’s told from a very masculine side of things”, she set off a fresh argument about the epic’s true nature. Nyong’o, who holds a bachelor’s degree in film and theatre studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts, spoke as a “very 2020s figure”, roaming around in search of something to say until she found a class of people to present in the light of Victimhood.
“Lupita Nyong’o says Odyssey lacks female perspective; Samuel Butler argued it was written by a woman.”
The Victorian writer Samuel Butler would have disagreed. So struck was Butler by the “highly feminine character of the Odyssey” that he wrote an entire book on the subject, The Authoress of the Odyssey, published in 1896. Butler argued that if a man called Homer wrote the Iliad, it was quite a different writer from the one who set down the Odyssey. This author, he claimed, was familiar with the Iliad, but the approach, the psychological framework, the patches of intense knowledge and total ignorance led to one conclusion: the Odyssey was strongly suggestive of being written by a woman. Butler, a wonderfully intelligent and puckish mind, indifferent to generally accepted conclusions, argued that whoever wrote the Odyssey had very little idea about the construction of boats, putting rudders at both ends, about how sheep feed their young, about the sound of wind at sea, about hawks tearing prey apart, and evidently believed that “dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree”.
While the modern reader may find the extent of Odysseus’s revenge excessive, the poem’s own world betrays no such unease. Retaliation, retributive justice and punishment are juridical and criminological concepts. Revenge is not — a notion that many in liberal modern societies may consider distasteful. Centuries after Homer sang, Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy Oresteia hammered home the harsh truth that vendetta is exhausting and endless. But while society has turned vengeful retribution into condign punishment, the impulse for vengeance has not disappeared. Instead, we tell those who feel wronged that anger poisons only the one who holds it, that forgiveness is maturity, that revenge will not bring the dead back or buy closure.
The debate over gender and violence in Homer’s epic is unlikely to be resolved by Hollywood actresses or Victorian contrarians. But as a new film brings the story to a modern audience, the tension remains: can readers stomach the bloodshed, and was the woman’s voice always there, hidden in plain sight?
