The Authoress of the Odyssey / Where and when she wrote, who she was, the use she made of the Iliad, and how the poem grew under her hands

by Samuel Butler

"Telemachus, I fear you are no longer so discreet and well conducted as you used to be. When you were younger you had a greater sense of propriety; now, however, that you are grown up, though a stranger to look at you would take you for the son of a well-to-do father as far as size and good looks go, your conduct is by no means what it should have been. What is all this disturbance that has been going on, and how came you to allow a stranger to be so disgracefully ill-treated? What would have happened if he had suffered serious injury while a suppliant in our house? Surely this would have been very discreditable to you."

I do not believe any man could make a mother rebuke her son so femininely.

Again, the fidelity with which people go on crying incessantly for a son who has been lost to them for twenty years, though they have still three sons left,[6] or for a brother whom they have never even seen,[7] is part and parcel of that jealousy for the sanctity of domestic life, in respect of which women are apt to be more exacting than men.

And yet in spite of all this the writer makes Telemachus take no pains to hide the fact that his grievance is not so much the alleged ill-treatment of his mother, nor yet the death of his father, as the hole which the extravagance of the suitors is making in his own pocket. When demanding assistance from his fellow countrymen, he says, of the two great evils that have fallen upon his house:—

"The first of these is the loss of my excellent father, who was chief among all you here present and was like a father to every one of you. The second is much more serious, and ere long will be the utter ruin of my estate. The sons of all the chief men among you are pestering my mother to marry them against her will. They are afraid to go to her father Icarius, asking him to choose the one he likes best, and to provide marriage gifts for his daughter, but day after day they keep hanging about my father's house, sacrificing our oxen, sheep, and fat goats for their banquets, and never giving so much as a thought to the quantity of wine they drink. No estate can stand such recklessness (ii. 46-48)."

Moreover it is clear throughout Books iii. and iv., in which Telemachus is trying to get news of his father, that what he really wants is evidence of his death, not of his being alive, though this may only be because he despairs of the second alternative. The indignation of Telemachus on the score of the extravagance of the suitors is noticeably shared by the writer all through the poem; she is furious about it; perhaps by reason of the waste she saw going on in her father's house. Under all she says on this head we seem to feel the rankling of a private grievance, and it often crosses my mind that in the suitors she also saw the neighbours who night after night came sponging on the reckless good nature of Alcinous, to the probable eventual ruin of his house.

Woman, religion, and money are the three dominant ideas in the mind of the writer of the Odyssey. In the Iliad the belli causa is a woman, money is a detail, and man is most in evidence. In the Odyssey the belli causa is mainly money, and woman is most in evidence—often when she does not appear to be so—just as in the books of the Iliad in which the Trojans are supposed to be most triumphant over the Achæans, it is the Trojans all the time whose slaughter is most dwelt upon.

It is strange that the Odyssey, in which money is so constantly present to the mind of the writer, should show not even the faintest signs of having been written from a business point of view, whereas the Iliad, in which money appears but little, abounds with evidence of its having been written to take with a certain audience whom the writer both disliked and despised—and hence of having been written with an eye to money.

I will now proceed to the question whether Penelope is being, if I may say so, whitewashed. Is the version of her conduct that is given us in the Odyssey the then current one, or is the writer manipulating a very different story, and putting another face on it—as all poets are apt to do with any story that they are re-telling? Tennyson, not to mention many earlier writers, has done this with the Arthurian Legends, the original form of which takes us into a moral atmosphere as different as can well be conceived from the one we meet with in the Idylls of the King.