Was Homer a Woman?
Slate reviews a new book by Andrew Dalby that reexamines the origins of the great epics the Iliad and the Odyssey by Homer. The book, entitled “Rediscovering Homer: Inside the Origins of the Epic”, makes the “bold” hypothesis that “Homer” may have been a woman.
“But Dalby deploys a much stronger set of arguments for female authorship, based on comparative anthropological analysis of how women preserve songs, stories, and folk tales. Women are often the ones who retain linguistic and literary traditions for the longest time. Certainly, there is no evidence whatsoever of female epic poets in archaic Greece. When poets are described or alluded to in the Homeric poems themselves, they are always men. This fact alone makes Dalby’s hypothesis implausible. On the other hand, there certainly were female lyric poets—Sappho, for example. We cannot know for sure how distinct the genres of lyric and heroic poetry would have been. Dalby acknowledges that there is no way to prove his hypothesis. It is only a theory, and I don’t really buy it, though I’d like to. But the notion is not necessarily a silly one, if it can act as a reminder of how little we really know about the person or people who made these poems.”
How much would our conceptions of the Iliad and the Odyssey change if we knew for sure that the author was a woman? Would we interpret the text differently? Would we reexamine the place of women in the society that produced these epics? I could certainly see a female epic poet relishing the triumph of Athena over Ares in the Iliad.
“You fool, still so ignorant of how much stronger I can claim to be than you, when you seek to match my power.”
One a related note, while we may never know the gender of “Homer”, there are some women writers doing some wonderful things with the old myths. Specifically, “The Penelopiad: The Myth of Penelope and Odysseus” by Margaret Atwood (now out in paperback) and “Weight: The Myth of Atlas and Heracles” by Jeanette Winterson (also out in paperback) are both amazing reimaginings of the old stories. They could make a good Yule gift for the myth and story lover in your family.
2 responses so far
I think we should not read the text any differently in regards to the author’s gender. There seems to be an assumption that women will somehow “do something” to the text that will be “different” with all the mysterious mumbo-jumbo that goes with such thoughts. Women are just as able to inherit and express the same cultural values as men. However, I don’t believe that Homer was likely a woman.
Robert Graves wrote a novel (I think the title was “Homer’s Daughter”) a very long time ago about Nausicaa, the princess who rescued Odysseus, being the author of The Odyssey. So ‘Homer was a woman’ is not such a new idea as all that.