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"Indulge a woman never, and never tell her all you know" (XI:343), Agamemnon tells Odysseus in The Odyssey, as he recognizes that women are more complex than he once thought. Though Agamemnon has a good reason for his statement, him being betrayed and killed by his own wife, he still only illustrates one of the many kinds of women Homer describes in his two great epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey. Among the many different types of women presented in The Odyssey, the reader finds strong, devoted wives, sexually intimidating fantasies, dangerous witches and monsters, innocent virgins, sex slaves and possessions. While The Iliad portrays two basic views of women, The Odyssey’s portrait of women includes a number of different kinds of women, making the roles and characters of women more complex and enjoyable.
In both The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer presents women as possessions, which men win through their exploits in war. The Iliad even begins with a dispute between Achilles and Agamemnon over a woman, Chryseis, who Agamemnon had stolen to make his mistress. Achilles tells Agamemnon to return the girl to her father to end a curse on the Greeks, yet Agamemnon replies that he "won’t give up the girl," and she will "slave back and forth at the loom, forced to share [his] bed" (I:33-36). To Agamemnon, Chryseis is just a prize he won, another one of his possessions that he can do anything with. She is not even a person, just a concubine and a slave. To get back at Achilles, Agamemnon says he will "take Briseis in all her beauty, [Achilles’s] own prize -- so [Achilles] can learn just how much greater [Agamemnon is]" (I:218-19). These two men see the women as symbols of wealth and power. All that matters to each man is that he is more powerful than the other. Though they may say they love the women, they actually only love the status the women give them. They do not treat the women as real human beings, just as objects.
The suitors and the Ithacan townspeople in The Odyssey also view women as possessions. Although Odysseus has been gone for twenty years, his wife Penelope refuses to remarry, despite the many suitors who constantly harass her. At the assembly Telemakhos calls, the suitor Antinoos tells Telemakhos to "dismiss [his] mother from the house, or make her marry the man her father names" (II:119-20). In the suitors’ eyes, Penelope does not even have the freedom to make the choice of whom she will marry. These men see her only as a possession, who at the moment has no master, so they persist in harassing her that one of them may finally own her. Like Achilles and Agamemnon, these men see her as a prize they can win.
In contrast, the two epics also show a more favorable view of women, as revered and noble wives who remain faithful to their husbands and support their husbands unconditionally. As opposed to the Greeks in The Iliad and the suitors in The Odyssey, the Trojan hero, Hector, treats his wife, Andromache, and the other Trojan women quite respectfully. When he returns home from fighting, although he knows the other warriors need him, he "must go home to…visit [his] own dear wife and baby son" (VI:301-2). Unlike the Greeks who do not seem to care about the women’s feelings, he recognizes that his wife is a person with feelings, so he goes to see how she is before returning to battle.
Also upon returning home, he asks the "noble women" (VI:186) to make sacrifices at Athena’s shrine. To Hector, these women are not objects, but people who should be respected, who are worthy enough to make sacrifices in the place of men. Achilles and Agamemnon probably would not have let their concubines perform such an important rite. The Trojan women are also revered enough to lead the mourning when Hector dies. Andromache is the first as she "leads their songs of sorrow" (XXIV:850). Hector’s mother and Helen also lead chants of mourning. Because the Trojans do not see the women as possessions, but as actual people, the women are allowed to lead such important rites and are revered for it.
Women are revered in The Odyssey as well, as seen by the way people treat Penelope and the Phaiakian queen Arete. While the women in The Iliad are revered for their passions and the mere fact that they are women, these women from The Odyssey are revered for specific traits -- Penelope for her craftiness and faith, and Arete for her nobility and wisdom.
Though the suitors treat Penelope like a possession, the other people around her revere her because of her strength at holding off the suitors and her faithfulness to Odysseus. Several times, the narrator refers to her as "Penelope the wise" (V:861), because of her craftiness and her skepticism about Odysseus’s return. Although she misses him terribly, whenever she is faced with information about a possible return, she reviews it objectively, never letting herself become too emotionally attached because that could just lead to more heartbreak. Even when her honored nurse tells her Odysseus has returned, she tells the nurse that "the gods have touched [her]" (XXIII:11) because she would rather believe that her nurse is crazy than get her hopes up that Odysseus has returned, which illustrates her rationality and strength.
King Agamemnon in the underworld recognizes Penelope’s virtue of faithfulness, as he congratulates the absent Odysseus that "the girl [he] brought home made a valiant wife! True to her husband’s honor and her own…the very gods themselves will sing her story for men on earth -- mistress of her own heart" (XXIV:204-8). It is interesting that Agamemnon, who treated women like possessions in The Iliad now recognizes the honor of Penelope. The woman described here is nothing like the prizes the men won in the war. She thinks for herself, not letting people tell her what to do, because, like Andromache, faithfulness to her husband is important above everything else. Therefore, her fame will continue long after she dies.
The Phaiakian people love Arete, who they call "the great lady" (VII:358). Whenever people see her, "they murmur and gaze, as though she were a goddess. No grace or wisdom fails in her" (VII:76-77). They do not only honor her because of her title, but because she is graceful and wise. She is a benevolent queen who cares for her people, so she has earned the honor they give her, unlike the "noble women" in The Iliad who are only noble because of their gender.
Going beyond these two basic views of women illustrated in Homer’s epics, The Odyssey shows a much more complex portrait of women. Whereas The Iliad’s portrait stops after showing the two contrasting views of women as possessions and women as honored, The Odyssey goes on to show that some women are physically dangerous, while others are innocent and helpful. Even others, while not physically formidable, use their sexuality to weaken men to their will. In The Iliad, women never represented danger to men, and while some of them did support men, they did not physically help the men.
The beautiful goddesses Kalypso and Kirke both use their sexuality to trap Odysseus, therefore prolonging his journey. When Homer first presents the "softly braided nymph" (V:32) Kalypso, he puts her in an innocent, domestic scene. A fire blazes on her "hearthstone" as she sits "before her loom a weaving" (V:64-67). In this situation, she is just like Penelope -- an unthreatening, domestic wife working on her weaving -- yet she also resides in an exotic place, and is extremely beautiful. Kalypso represents a male sexual fantasy, beautiful and living on an exotic, deserted island. Plus, Odysseus "lay[s] with her each night, for she compel[s] him" (V:266). Not only is she beautiful and exotic, but she loves having sex with Odysseus. Her threat to him lies in her entrapment of him, and her unwillingness to let him go home.
Kirke represents the same kind of sexual fantasy and danger as Kalypso. She sings, "while on her loom" (X:235), again in a domestic, but exotic, scene. She is also the "loveliest of goddesses" (X:544), and she compels Odysseus into her "flawless bed of love" (X:379). Most men would love to find a beautiful goddess who cannot keep her hands off them, and Odysseus is no different. But she endangers him by prolonging his journey, presenting a danger that Odysseus is unwilling to avoid.
Odysseus also faces danger in the Sirens, and the female monsters Skylla and Kharybdis, who end up devouring most of his crew. The danger of the Sirens is that they "sing [the] mind away" (XII:47), making men forget their homes and families. The Sirens are powerful women who know what men want to hear, so they lure men to them using that knowledge. Skylla "yaps abominably, a newborn whelp’s cry" (92-93), giving the façade that she is the stereotypical helpless woman, yet through this deception she is able to trap and eat the men. Kharybdis also looks innocent enough, but "when she vomit[s], all the sea [is] like a cauldron" (XII:283-84). She is just as deadly as any other monster, and the men are completely helpless against her.
When Odysseus lands on the island of the Phaiakians, he finds another kind of woman -- the maiden Nausikaa, who assists him because of her innocent curiosity and kindness. Odysseus finds her and her friends doing laundry, as they "run and pass a ball to a rhythmic beat" (VI:108). Homer shows her as a playful child, dancing and having fun while doing a chore. She also has a kind heart in that she insists to her friends, who are frightened by the sight of a man, that they "must take care of him" (VI:219). She is unlike most of the other women in The Odyssey, who present danger and attempt to prolong Odysseus’s journey. Instead, she helps him on his way, eventually enabling him to finally get to Ithaca. Homer also strangely compares her to Kalypso, because Nausikaa also wears "pretty braids" (VI:234). Here the braids are a symbol of her innocence, while with Kalypso, the braids give her the appearance of innocence but actually hide something more sinister.
In The Iliad, Homer presents women as either possessions of men or as honored by men, and their personalities rarely go very far beyond that. They do not interfere in the men’s business, but only offer support in the background. The Odyssey also shows these two basic views of women, although the women revered in The Odyssey are revered for specific traits that are developed in the epic. The Odyssey, however, expands the traditional portrait of women to include more complexity in the women characters. Women are dangerous, by virtue of their sexuality, intelligence, and physical and mental strength, but women are also kind and helpful. They have the power to interfere in men’s lives and affect them for good or bad. While The Iliad seems to try to portray women in a more rigid, black and white mold, The Odyssey recognizes and illustrates that women characters are just as complex as the male characters and cannot be so easily categorized.
