I’ve been listening to the Odyssey and the Iliad, as translated by Emily Wilson and read respectively by Claire Danes and Audra McDonald – they were written to be performed out loud, after all. Wilson has done a great job of stripping away all the pompousness and phoney archaism which (for me at least) is associated with the classics. As she points out in her introduction, it’s nonsense to think that archaic English from two centuries ago is somehow a more authentic representation of Homeric Greek than modern English is: these poems are getting on for three thousand years old!
Having them read by two American women works well for the same reason. When not portentously declaimed by middle-aged men with public school accents (i.e. people who sound a bit like me), these ancient texts no longer smell mustily of Oxbridge lecture theatres, and I felt like I could catch a glimpse, though very dimly and filtered in all kinds of ways, of living human beings going about their lives, all the way back in the Bronze Age. Danes’ youthful, slightly husky, passionate voice worked particularly well, making the rough but vivid storytelling feel alive.
These are evocations of a very strange world. I loved one moment in the Odyssey where a princess sets off to do her washing in a nearby river. The dirty clothes are loaded into a cart on which the princess herself rides while a dozen of her slave girls walk beside her. While the clothes are drying, the princess and her slaves play games together on the bank. How alien this all is to us! She’s a wealthy princess, she owns many slaves, but she still washes her clothes in a river, still goes along herself to do it, and her slave girls are – sort of – also her playmates!
There seems to be a widespread assumption around at the moment that the arts are there to subvert and challenge the established order, but actually, as I’ve observed before, they most often serve the opposite purpose, of bolstering and legitimising privilege. And while these days they often do the latter while pretending to do the former, until recently they made no bones about it. In Celtic Britain, a prince would employ praise poets whose job was to celebrate his achievements. Go back another millenium and Homer is raising to mythical status a class of warlords, who own slaves, go on raiding parties, hobnob with gods, and themselves employ poets to entertain them at their sumptuous dinner parties. We are constantly being told about their wealth and their many beautiful possessions. A sewing basket made of silver stuck in my mind, because the poet made a point of mentioning that it even had wheels.
But what was particularly striking for me is that these poems were written not only for the ruling class, but for the ruling gender. There are many women characters, some of them powerful (notably the goddess Athena), but this is a world in which you raid a city, kill the men and carry off the women as part of the loot – and that apparently is fine. The Iliad famously begins with a quarrel between two men, Achilles and Agamemnon, over a beautiful princess, Briseis, who Achilles has captured and made his sex slave, but who Agamemnon demands for himself, having had to give up his own sex slave for diplomatic reasons. When he loses Briseis, Achilles sulks like a spoiled child and has to be comforted by his goddess mother – but no one considers what Briseis thinks.
The Trojan war itself is fought over another woman, Helen, who a Trojan prince, Paris, has kidnapped from her Greek husband, Menelaus, taking her away also from her daughter and friends. There is an attempt -it doesn’t work out- to avert war by having a duel between these two men, with the agreement that whoever kills the other gets Helen as his wife, plus all the dead man’s wealth, and then the two sides will make peace. Weirdly, Helen is presented in the text as an intelligent human being with feelings of her own, and yet her own preferences regarding these two men are apparently still as irrelevant as the preferences of a herd of does watching two stags fighting for control of them.
Women belong to the men who capture them. Men do as they please, but the slave women in Odysseus’ household who had sex with the suitors who pestered his wife Penelope in his absence, are hanged by our hero on his return. (Neither Odysseus’s son nor Penelope were strong enough to stop these men coming round and eating their food, but apparently their slave women should have stood up to them.)
By the way, I’ve looked into this recently and the idea that it’s okay to have sex with women you capture in a war – which to say, rape them, as we’d understand it now – is permitted both in the Koran and the Bible. Here’s the Koran telling Mohammed it’s okay to have sex with woman prisoners:
Oh prophet! We have made lawful to thee thy wives to whom thou hast paid their dowers, and those whom thy right hand possesses out of the prisoners of war whom Allah has assigned to thee… (Surah 33: 50)*
The Bible, meanwhile, is all heart and allows a captive woman a month to grieve her families before her new owner is permitted to ‘go in unto her’. It even – awww, God, you’re so nice! – forbids him from selling her for money if he decides he doesn’t like her:
10. When thou goest forth to war against thine enemies, and the Lord thy God hath delivered them into thine hands , and thou has taken them captive, 11. And seest among the captives a beautiful woman, and hast a desire unto her, that thou wouldest have her to be thy wife; 12. Then thou shalt bring her home to thine house; and she shall shave her head, and pare her nails; 13. And she shall put the raiment of her captivity from off her, and shall remain in thine house, and bewail her father and mother a full month: and after that thou shalt go in unto her, and be her husband, and she shall be thy wife. 14. And it shall be, if thou hast no delight in her, then thou shalt let her go whither she will; but thou shalt not sell her at all for money, thou shalt not make merchandise of her, because thou has humbled her. (KJV: Deuteronomy, 21: 10-14)
Jeez! What a legacy women are up against!
*My copy of the Koran is published by Amana publications with a commentary by Abdullah Yusuf Ali, and was given to me free at a street stall by the Albirr Foundation UK.
