When Odysseus finally returns to Ithaca, he strings his great bow and turns his furious vengeance 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, Homer describes how more than 100 suitors are mown down among the wreckage of tables. The housemaids who bedded the suitors are hanged in a line, their pale legs twitching in death. The goat-herd Melanthius is mutilated at the storeroom door. Homer tells the tale without apology, indeed with a sense of relish. While the modern reader is likely to find the extent of Odysseus’s revenge excessive, the poem’s own world betrays no such unease.
That unease has now been voiced by Lupita Nyong’o, who stars in the latest Hollywood blockbuster adaptation of *The Odyssey*. Promoting the film, she told an interviewer: “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.” Nyong’o, an educated woman with a bachelor’s degree in film and theatre studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts, is a very 2020s figure — roaming for a class of people she might present in the light of victimhood.
“Homer's bloody revenge in the Odyssey clashes with modern sensibilities as Lupita Nyong'o questions its male perspective.”
But her claim has been challenged by a long-forgotten Victorian theory. The writer Samuel Butler was so struck by the feminine character of the *Odyssey* that he wrote an entire book, *The Authoress of the Odyssey* (1896), dedicated to the proposition that a different writer — possibly a woman — composed the poem. Butler, a wonderfully intelligent and puckish mind who was homosexual and sceptical of conventional proprieties, argued that the *Odyssey* showed patches of intense knowledge and total ignorance: very little idea about boat construction (putting rudders at both ends), about how sheep feed their young, about the sound of wind at sea, or about hawks tearing prey apart. He even claimed the author believed that “dry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree”.
Butler’s work on the *Odyssey* is a brilliant mounting up of evidence and a compelling set of ideas about what animates male and female writers. He was the same man who, in 1863, published an essay titled “Darwin Among The Machines”, warning of AI self-improvement 160 years ago. His outrageous novel *The Way of All Flesh*, published after his death in 1902, is one of the funniest eviscerations of religious hypocrisy ever written. Unlike a Hollywood actress putting on the voice of a great thinker, Butler didn’t care what people thought.
The debate over the *Odyssey*’s perspective — masculine or feminine — points to a deeper question. The poem’s original audience delighted in violence and bloodshed. Can modern readers, who are told that anger poisons only the holder, that forgiveness is maturity, that revenge will not bring the dead back, stomach Homer’s story without unease?