As Odysseus strings his great bow and turns on the suitors feasting in his palace, the first arrow takes Antinous through the throat as he lifts his cup. Over the course of one book of Homer’s Odyssey, more than 100 suitors are mown down among the wreckage of tables. The housemaids who have shared their 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, with a sense of relish. But while the modern reader may find Odysseus’s vengeance excessive, the poem’s own world betrays no unease.
Centuries after Homer sang, Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy Oresteia hammered home the harsh truth that vendetta is exhausting and endless. Yet 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 state, not the individual, is now the arbiter of legitimate force.
“Homer's graphic violence in the Odyssey clashes with theories it was written by a woman.”
Actor Lupita Nyong’o, who holds a bachelor’s degree in film and theatre studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts, recently promoted the latest film adaptation of the Odyssey by saying: “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.”
But the Victorian writer Samuel Butler thought differently. In 1896, he published The Authoress of the Odyssey, which argued that the poem was strongly suggestive of being written by a woman. Butler, a homosexual sceptical of conventional proprieties, had earlier warned of artificial intelligence in an 1863 essay, “Darwin Among The Machines”. His mounting of evidence included the observation that the Odyssey’s author 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 apparently believed that dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree.
The debate over the Odyssey’s authorship reflects broader tensions between ancient and modern sensibilities: can a tale soaked in bloodshed also be the work of a woman?
