“So she spoke, and his longing for mourning swelled within him—
He wept holding the wife fit to his heart, a woman who knew careful thoughts.
As when the land appears welcome to men as the swim
Whose well-made ship Poseidon has dashed apart on the sea,
As it is driven by the wind and a striking wave.
Then few men flee from the grey sea to the shore
As they swim and the bodies are covered with brine on their skin,
They happily climb on the shore, escaping evil.
So welcome a sight was her husband to her as she looked upon him
And she would not pull her white arms away from his neck.”
This simile is exceptional because it starts out making us think that it is about Odysseus but then shifts during its telling to be about Penelope’s reaction.
St Omer Psalter, England (Norfolk), c. 1330-c. 1440, Yates Thompson MS 14, f. 70v
Bill Beck has a good article on Eidolonabout the way ancient (and eventually Modern) etymology and “word science” manipulates the concept of the original meaning of words in order to reinforce various types of dominant cultural discourse.
Here is another example, the history of the word clitoris. I have arranged the examples in roughly chronological order.
Hesychius
“Kleitoris: the over-covering skin [lit. of hypodoris?] of a woman’s genitals. From where we get the word kleitoriazein, which means to rub or touch [as in to masturbate].”
Murton: “myrtle berry” The form of the female genitalia in the middle of which is the clitoris. From this we get the word kleitorizesthai which means to touch oneself licentiously. The lip is the hupodoris and the sides the myrtle-lips
5 “Others tell the story that in the land of the Lapiths the king Elatos had a daughter whose name was Kainis. After Poseidon had sex with her he promised to make her into whatever she wanted. She said she wanted to be changed into a man who was invulnerable. When Poseidon did this—as was right—he changed her name to Kaineus.”
This story is older than Ovid and Phlegon. It is detailed in the fragments of Akousilaus, perhaps alluded to in Homer, definitely indicated by Apollonius Rhodes, and present even in Plato. While the sex-change narrative remains an important element, the main feature of Kaineus’ tale is his hubris–because of his invulnerability he asks to be made into a god.
“Poseidon has sex with Kainê of Elatos. Then—for it was not right for him [sic] to have children with him nor anyone else—Poseidon turned him into an invulnerable man, who had the greatest strength of the men at that time. Whenever anyone tried to strike him with iron or bronze, [the attacker] was completely defeated.
Then [Kaineus] became king of the Lapiths and was warring with the Centaurs. After he set up his javelin in the agora he was asking to be included in the number of the gods. This was not pleasing to the gods. And when Zeus saw him doing this, he threatened him and raised the Centaurs against him. They struck him straight down into the earth and placed a stone above as assign. Then he died.”
In this account, Poseidon seems to be changing Kaineus because of his inability to have children. This makes it rather clear what women are good for from this cultural perspective. In addition, it is interesting that Kaineus as an intersex figure is involved in the war between the Lapiths and Centaurs, a conflict which has its origins in a rapes at a wedding and is often seen as a reflection of the civilized Lapiths struggling against the primitive and violent urges of the Centaurs.
But, as can be seen from the relief below which dates to the early Archaic period, the punishment of Kaineus is a primary motif of the story tradition. In a way, if the sex-change and rape were equally ancient, this is a tale about a women who is raped ultimately being punished for surviving and thriving and exacting retribution for her suffering.
D Scholia ad Il. 264
“Kaineus was a son of Elatos and king of the Lapiths. He was a very beautiful virgin girl before. But after Poseidon had sex with her, she asked to be changed from a young woman into a man. And he became invulnerable, and the most excellent of those alive at the time. And after he stuck his javelin into the middle of the agora, he demanded to be entered into the number of the gods for this reason.
Zeus was annoyed by this request and he arranged the following type of payback from him for impiety. For, even though he was invincible, he made him less while he was fighting the Centaurs. For they were hurling and striking him with pines and oak trees and they drove him into the ground. Apollonius recalls this in the Argonautica saying this, “For the singers used to report the fame that Kaineus was killed by Centaurs, when he alone from the rest of the best drove them, they surged back. They were not strong enough to repel him nor to kill him, but he went under the earth, unbroken, unbent, pummeled by the striking force of powerful pines.”
This story is held up as a wistful impossibility by Plato in the laws. This passage is, well, upsetting.
Plato’s Laws 944d-c
“What then would be the right punishment for someone who has thrown away this kind of a power of a defensive weapon for the opposite? For it is not possible for a person to do the opposite of what they say the god did when he changed the Thessalian Kaineus from a women into a man. For one who throws away his shield, the opposite of this transformation, changing from a man into a women, in some way would be the best of all punishments for this.”
The Scene: In Euripides’ Helen, Proteus’ son wants to marry her and Menelaos has been shipwrecked outside of Egypt. He arrived with a fake-Helen but has now found the real one and they are trying to persuade the seer Theonoe not to tell her brother that Menelaos is there. Just in case the plan fails, Menelaos has a contingency plan:
832-854
Menelaos: Come on, what if she doesn’t accept our arguments?
Helen: The you die. And wretched me, well I will be married by force
M: You would be a traitor. You use ‘force’ as an excuse.
H:No—I swear a sacred oath on your head…
M: What are you saying, you will die? You will never leave our bed?
H: By the same sword. I will lie near you.
M: Take my right hand to swear these things.
H:I take it: I will leave the life when you die.
M: And I, deprived of you, will end my life.
H: How will we die in a way that gains us fame?
M: After killing you over the back of this grave I will kill myself.
But first we will fight a great fight over your bed.
Let any man who wants to come near.
I will not bring shame to my Trojan fame,
Nor will I have left Greece to get great blame,
I, the man who deprived Thetis of Achilles,
Who saw Telamonian Ajax slaughter himself
And saw Neleus’ son made childless! Should I not
Think it right that I should die for my own wife?
Oh, it really is. For if the gods are wise,
They will make a light burden of the earth’s tomb
For the brave man struck down by his enemies,
While they expel cowards from onto lonely stone.”
I have been weighing the sense and import of the pages below for a few weeks now. Typically, I don’t teach too much about sexuality and I research it even less as a Homerist. I suspect that this is partly disciplinary (Homer is happy to indicate the power and fact of sexual acts with little specification; this is largely a generic characteristic) but part is nurture: my parents were both Lutherans of mid-Western Scandinavian persuasion: sex is fine, as long as no one talks about it.
But I do mention misogyny quite a bit in classes and on the blog and I have long been worried about the ways in which an uncritical presentation of the material in Homer and myth merely recapitulates and strengthens structural biases about gender and power. When it comes to human sexuality, I get a little squeamish with posts on this site: I like to post material that surprises people with the dirtiness of the Ancient world (you know, farting, shitting, middle fingers) and which disabuses people of the notion that what we have from the Ancient Greek and Romans is largely philosophy and Galen. But in a time when people misuse the ancient world for many things–most execrably to support racists and white supremacist views erroneously--I do fear that some postings might appear exploitative or be misused in some way.
This is one reason, for example although I put up a post about masturbation in ancient Greek, I did not follow it up, as requested with one about female masturbation. For one, there is only a small amount of evidence (and the evidence is extremely problematic because it comes from men and is mostly negative). For another, I don’t think there is any way for a male author to post information about female masturbation online without seeming in some way salacious, creepy, or just, well, gross.
(Again, this is where both my nature and my nurture may be causing me problems. Oh, and this: not talking about female masturbation reinforces taboos about female sexuality and agency.)
Another area in which we have posted very little is on topics that pertain to homosexuality, same-sex acts, or non-heteronormative (in a modern sense) eroticism. People respond all too well to lists of words for feces, but descriptions of sexuality that fall under the earlier categories get some strange responses. This is not enough to stop us alone. My worry is akin to my concern in the last paragraph, but more. I fear that some readers will use such material negatively (doing harm to ancient and modern communities); I also feel we run the risk of getting cheap entertainment through the exploitative expropriation of someone else’s sexuality.
But I have been struggling with the line of thought in the passage I am about to cite. The work of the book The Maculate Muse is really groundbreaking (and it is a work to which I have referred for many years), but the comments on comparing modern and ancient ‘homosexuality’ seem skewed in a damaging way. I am posting them not with the intention of shaming the scholar, but instead with the hope that someone will tell me I have read this all wrong.
J. Henderson. The Maculate Muse, 1991 (2nd edition; first 1975): 207
The Maculate Muse, 1991: 208
I am troubled by a few things here. The bit about “perversion” and “not without reason” seems particularly problematic, especially since it is unexplained. The additional language of compulsion is also borderline for me. Although the second edition is now nearly 30 years old (and the original is closer to 50!), I would have thought that it would be more sensitive in its treatment of sexual categories and notions of sexual activity, sexual identity, gender and sex.
My suspicions about this passage and its implicit definitions of sexuality (and identities) have led me to read a lot of what Henderson says about “pathics”, effeminacy, and the insults which may or may not pertain to these categories with much greater caution.
Update: an important note of context. The comments cited above were not updated from the 1975 edition of the book. The following note precedes the discussion.
A scholar familiar with the development of this book from dissertation to publication and revision was kind enough to share some context. It was dangerous for a career to write this book in the 1970s. Classics has not always been in the social and cultural vanguard.
So, this passage can serve particularly well as a lesson for how our scholarship is shaped by cultural constrainta both in its articulation and ita reception over time.
“The Sirens were some Greek women with beautiful voices in ancient Greek myth who sat on some island and so delighted passers-by with their euphony that they stayed there until death. From the chest up they had the shape of sparrows but their lower halves were woman.
The mythographers claim that they were small birds with female faces who deceived passers-by, beguiling the ears of those who heard them with pornographic songs. And the song of pleasure has no end that is good, only death.
But the true story is this: there are certain places in the sea, narrowed between hills, which release a high song when the water is compressed into them. When people who sail by hear them they entrust their souls to the water’s swell and they die along with their ships.
The creatures who are called Sirens and Donkey-centaurs in Isaiah are some kind of demons who are foretold for abandoned cities which fall under divine wrath. The Syrians say they are swans. For after swans bathe, they fly from the water and sing a sweet melody in the air. This is why Job says, “I have become the Sirens’ brother, the companion of ostriches. This means that I sing my sufferings just like the ostriches.”
He calls the Sirens strouthoi, but he means what we call ostriches [strouthokamêmlos: “sparrow-camel”]. This is a bird which has the feet and neck of a donkey. There is a saying in the Epirgams “that chatter is sweeter than the Sirens’”. The Sirens were named Thelksiepeia, Peisinoê, and Ligeia. The Island they inhabited was called Anthemousa.”
“Klea, I do not have the same opinion as Thucydides concerning the virtue of women. For he claims that the best woman is the one who has the slimmest reputation among those outside her home, critical or positive—since he believes that the name of a good woman ought to be locked up and kept indoors just like her body. Gorgias, in fact, is more appealing to me, since he insists that the fame rather than the form of a woman should be known to many. Indeed, the Roman practice seems best: granting praise to women in public after their death just as for men.
So, when Leontis, one of the best women died, you and I had a rather long conversation which did not lack philosophical solace; and now, just as you have asked, I have written down for you the rest of the things one can say supporting the assertion that the virtue of a man and woman are the same thing. This [composition] is historical and is not arranged for pleasurable hearing. But if some pleasure is possible in a persuasive piece thanks to the nature of its example, then the argument itself does not avoid some charm—that aid to explanation—nor is it reluctant to “mix the Graces in with the Muses, a most noble pairing”, in the words of Euripides, basing its credibility on the love of beauty which is a special province of the soul.”
At the beginning of the Odyssey, Phemios appears singing tales of the terrible homecomings of the Achaeans
Od. 1.325-327
“The very famous singer sang among them and they
Sat listening in silence as he sang the murderous homecoming of the Achaeans
Which Pallas Athena had set for them from Troy.”
But when the time comes for the example the suitor mentions, Kasandra is left out of the picture
Od. 4.499-511
“Ajax perished with his ash-oared ships.
First Poseidon drove him against the great Guraean
Cliffs and then he saved him from the sea.
He would have avoided death then even though he was hated by Athena,
If he hadn’t shot out an arrogant word as he was greatly blinded.
He said that he would escape the great swell of the sea despite divine will.
And when Poseidon heard him boasting so greatly
He immediately grabbed his trident with his strong hands
And struck the Guraen cliff, splitting it in half.
One part remained where it was, the other fell to the sea,
First where the great-blinded fool Ajax was then waiting.
It carried him down into the endless whirling sea.
And he died there, after drinking the salt water.”
The primary argument seems to have something to do with generalizing the wickedness of Ajax to all of the Achaeans
Od. 3.132-136
“And then Zeus was really devising a murderous homecoming in his thoughts
For the Argives, since they were not all just or prudent a bit.
This is why many of them suffering a terrible fate
From the ruinous rage of the grey-eyed-daughter of a strong-father
Who sent strife between Atreides’ two sons.
At least, that’s how another scholiast interprets the absence of a reference to Kassandra in this passage
Schol ad Od. 3.135 HEVQ
“The ruinous rage: “Since they did not stop Lokrian Ajax from raping Kasandra in her tample. Now the rage is [directed at everyone in common, but it is clear that the responsibility for the anger lies with Ajax.”
Kassandra does appear in the Odyssey, but only in Odysseus’ story of what Agamemnon says about his death.
Od. 11.421-434
“Then I heard the most pitiable voice of Priam’s daughter
Kassandra—crooked-minded Klytemnestra killed her
Over me. Then I fell to the ground with my hands spread wide
Dying on a sword—but the bitch-face turned away from me
And, even as I was on my way to the underworld,
she wouldn’t close my eyes and mouth with her hands.
There is nothing more terrible or cruel than a woman
Who could put such deeds in her thoughts,
The way this woman devised an unseemly act,
When she planned the murder of her wedded husband.
I would have thought that I would come home happy
To my children and the household servants
But she, by conceiving these murderous ideas,
Has poured shame on herself and those to come later,
On the whole female race of women, even for one who does well.”
Book 3 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses offers a delightful tale about Teiresias’ blindness and power of prophecy. The Theban was born as a man but changed into a woman when he saw two snakes copulating in the forest. Years later—after getting married and having at least one child—she happened to be walking in the forest and witnessed the same thing. Wham! Teiresias was a man again.
Sometime after that, Teiresias was summoned to Olympus to adjudicate a marital dispute between Zeus and Hera who had been arguing about whether sex was better for males or females. Teiresias gave an enigmatic answer (1 part enjoyment far a man to 10 for women) and Hera blinded him in rage. Zeus compensated for this by giving him the power of prophecy.
What most people don’t know is that this tale is not at all an Ovidian innovation. A few fragments attributed to Hesiod preserve the answer and Teiresias’ reaction to Zeus’ “gift”.
The first few lines present Hesiod’s answer (Fr. 275):
[Teiresias described how]
“A man delights only in one portion of ten
While a woman delights her thoughts filling out the other ten.”
οἴην μὲν μοῖραν δέκα μοιρέων τέρπεται ἀνήρ,
τὰς δὲ δέκ’ ἐμπίπλησι γυνὴ τέρπουσα νόημα.
Another fragment appears to have Teiresias addressing Zeus (fr. 276):
“Zeus father I wish that you would give me a shorter life
And grant that I might know only the things equal to the thoughts
Of mortal men. Now you have not honored me at all,
You who have made my lifetime so long,
That I will live on through seven generations of mortal men.”
Teiresias is right to lament. As he probably knows from his recent power of prophecy, he will witness Dionysus’ return to Thebes (and subsequent bloodshed); the exposure of Oedipus and his parricidal, incestuous return; the deaths of Oedipus’ sons Eteokles and Polyneices at each other’s hands; and the sack of Thebes in the next generation. And even then his story isn’t over: Odysseus will wake up his tired ghost in the Odyssey for one more prophecy.
As for Teiresias’ answer to Zeus and Hera? When I teach this story I joke that he’s more afraid of Zeus than his wife. But his answer is part of a general Greek misogyny that justifies the cloistering of woman by characterizing them as libidinous by nature. The number 10 seems significant here: there may be an irony in the use of “enjoy”. In the Greek world, babies are born after 10 lunar months. If I had to give an answer to why “10:1” to save my life, that would be all I would have.
Fortunately, no Olympian beings will be seeking my advice…
“I am nothing now, apart. But often
I have examined the nature of women like this,
How we are nothing. As girls we live the sweetest life
of all human beings, I think, in our father’s house.
But ignorance nurses children always with pleasure.
When we come with full wits to adolescence,
We are sent out and made ready for sale,
Away from our paternal gods and our parents,
Some sent to foreign husbands, some sent to barbarians;
Some are sold to unhappy homes, some are wed to horrors.
And then, once a single evening has joined us,
We need to praise it and think that this is living well.”
The story of Prokne, upon which this play of Sophocles is based, is most well-known to us from Ovid. Tereus, a Thracian King, marries the Athenian Prokne and then rapes her sister Philomela when she comes to visit. The sexual assault was not enough–he also cut out her tongue to keep her from telling her sister.
Philomela weaves a picture of what happened to inform Prokne; they kill her son with Tereus (Itys) and feed him to his father. According to Ovid, when Tereus tries to kill them, the gods turn them into birds to help them escape.
It seems that this passage–which shows Sophocles’ ability to empathize with someone else’s perspective–conveys a misery that is prior to the assault.
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