But, as I have said, though men may be laughed at, the women are never taken other than quite seriously. Venus is indeed, made a little ridiculous in one passage, but she was a goddess, so it does not matter; besides, the brunt of the ridicule was borne by Mars, and Venus was instantly readorned and comforted by the Graces. I cannot remember a single instance of a woman's being made to do anything which she could not do without loss of dignity—I except, of course, slaves, and am speaking of the higher social classes.
It has often been observed that the Messenger of the Gods in the Iliad is always Iris, while in the Odyssey he is no less invariably Mercury. I incline to attribute this to the author's dislike of the idea that so noble a lady as Iris should be made to fetch and carry for anybody. For it is evident Iris was still generally held to have been the messenger of the gods. This appears from the beginning of Book xviii., where we are told that Irus's real name was Arnæus, but that he was called Irus (which is nothing but Iris with a masculine termination) "because he used to carry messages when any one would send him." Writers do not fly in the face of current versions unless for some special reasons of their own.
If, however, a woman has misconducted herself she is to be shewn no mercy. There are only three cases in point, and one of these hardly counts inasmuch as the punishment of the guilty woman, Clytemnestra, was not meted out to her by the authoress herself. The hold, however, which the story of Clytemnestra's guilt has upon her, the manner in which she repeatedly recurs to it, her horror at it, but at the same time her desire to remove as much of the blame as possible from Clytemnestra's shoulders, convinces me that she acutely feels the disgrace which Clytemnestra's treachery has inflicted upon all women "even on the good ones." Why should she be at such pains to tell us that Clytemnestra was a person of good natural disposition (iii. 266), and was irreproachable until death had removed the bard under whose protection Agamemnon had placed her?[1] When she was left alone—without either husband or guardian, and with an insidious wretch like Ægisthus beguiling her with his incessant flattery, she yielded, and there is no more to be said, except that it was very dreadful and she must be abandoned to her fate. I see Mr. Gladstone has wondered what should have induced Homer (whom he holds to have written the Odyssey as well as the Iliad) to tell us that Clytemnestra was a good woman to start with,[2] but with all my respect for his great services to Homeric literature, I cannot think that he has hit upon the right explanation. It should not be forgotten, moreover, that this extenuation of Clytemnestra's guilt belongs to a part of the Odyssey that was engrafted on to the original design—a part in which, as I shall show later, there was another woman's guilt, which was only not extenuated because it was absolutely denied in the face of overwhelming evidence—I mean Penelope's.
The second case in point is that of the woman who stole Eumæus when he was a child. A few days after she has done this, and has gone on board the ship with the Phœnician traders, she is killed by Diana, and thrown overboard to the seals and fishes (xv. 403-484).
The third case is that of the women of Ulysses' household who had misconducted themselves with the suitors during his absence. We are told that there were fifty women servants in the house, of whom twelve alone were guilty. It is curious that the number of servants should be exactly the same as that of the maidservants in the house of king Alcinous, and it should be also noted that twelve is a very small number for the guilty servants, considering that there were over a hundred suitors, and that the maids seem to have been able to leave the house by night when they chose to do so (xx. 6-8)—true, we are elsewhere told that the women had been violated and only yielded under compulsion, but this makes it more wonderful that they should be so few—and I may add, more terribly severe to hang them. I think the laxity of prehistoric times would have prompted a writer who was not particularly jealous for the honour of woman, to have said that there were thirty-eight, or even more, guilty, and only twelve innocent. We must bear in mind on the other hand that when Euryclea brought out the thirty-eight innocent women to see Ulysses after he had killed the suitors, Ulysses recognised them all (xxii. 501). The youngest of them therefore can hardly have been under forty, and so me no doubt were older—for Ulysses had been gone twenty years.
Now how are the guilty ones treated? A man who was speaking of my theory that the Odyssey was written by a woman as a mere mauvaise plaisanterie, once told me it was absurd, for the first thing a woman would have thought of after the suitors had been killed was the dining room carpet. I said that mutatis mutandis this was the very thing she did think of.
As soon as Ulysses has satisfied himself that not a single suitor is left alive, he tells Euryclea to send him the guilty maidservants, and on their arrival he says to Telemachus, Eumæus and Philœtius (xxii. 437-443):—
"Begin to bear away the corpses, and make the women help you. When you have done this, sponge down the seats and tables, till you have set the whole house in order; then take the maids outside....and thrust them through with your swords."
These orders are faithfully obeyed; the maids help in the work of removing the bodies and they sponge the chairs and tables till they are clean—Ulysses standing over them and seeing that they lose no time. This done, Telemachus (whose mother, we are told (xxii. 426-427) had never yet permitted him to give orders to the female servants) takes them outside and hangs them (xxii. 462), as a more dishonourable death than the one his father had prescribed for them—perhaps also he may have thought he should have less blood to clean up than if he stabbed them—but see note on p. 98. The writer tells us in a line which she borrows in great part from the Iliad,[3] that their feet move convulsively for a short time though not for very long, but her ideas of the way in which Telemachus hanged them are of the vaguest. No commentator has ever yet been able to understand it; the only explanation seems to be that the writer did not understand it herself, and did not care to do so. Let it suffice that the women were obviously hanged.