About Female voices in ancient Greek texts, New book release and interview with author Eirene Allen

Human beings constantly seek to understand themselves through the past, through the experiences and ideas of others who have suffered, lived and loved just like us.

The past shapes us, connects us all, allows us to feel.

JohnWilliamWaterhouse-Penelope and the Suitors, detail.

We constantly search in the voices of the past, in their echoes, to hear what moves us today, to find ourselves in those heroes of ancient times, in the golden age.

For me all these answers are in ancient Greece, in its epic poems, in Homer, Euripides, in Medea and the Olympian gods, in the power and the sacred that unites all this.

I believe in the divine power of antiquity, and I believe that sometimes life connects us with people who are part of our past. That was what happened to me with my great friend Dr. Eirene Allen, I like to think that we are two ancient souls who met again.

Eirene loves and feels deeply all the heritage, the power and the sacredness of ancient Greece. A great and brilliant academic, she not only has an absolutely respectful and profound view of Greek literature, oral tradition and epic poetry, but being Greek herself, she is intimately connected to these stories and this past that is still alive today.

She is a great thinker, writer and human, and soon we will have the pleasure of reading her new book entitled: The Epic Women of Homer: Exploring Women's Roles in the Iliad and Odyssey.

You can pre-order her amazing new book here

This book and Eirene's ideas and dialogue in this regard are the motivation for this interview and post.

Circe Offering the Cup to Ulysses by John William Waterhouse, detail.

Especially in recent years there has been a boom in contemporary literature that claims to do something that I personally find troubled and is "giving voice to the women of ancient Greece." Did these women really have no voice? This question, so difficult and enormous, can be considered one of the the central axis of the following interview and something that has been the subject of hours and hours of conversation, critical thinking and coffees:

When you think about the power of the word in the Greek oral tradition, what do you think off?

Eirene: This question reminded me of something one of my wonderful Greek teachers told me: she loves ancient Greek because she feels it is a language with a soul. I agree. Greek feels like a living being. It is a language designed to be vocalized and heard. Though it consistently resists structure, it has a sense of harmony and logic that transcends mere rules.

I see this especially in the way word roots function, creating a web of associative meanings across the language. These associative webs render the language as adaptable and resilient as nature itself, ever growing. They also enable a single word to hold a world inside of it. A word can tell the whole story of a god/goddess or hero/heroine where we might need three or five (or many more) English words to tell the same story.

A beautiful example of this is the epithet of Penelope, periphron, literally thinking/understanding all around. Through this word, we can access the whole story of Penelope. She is a heroine who is always aware, always processing and calculating, and this, above all, enables her to achieve her ends.

There is a lot of talk about "giving voice to women", what is your opinion on this?

E: For centuries, women in Homer, and Greek myths more broadly, both goddesses and heroines, received little attention, as if they were accessories that could be removed or replaced with no lasting impact on either the narratives or their meaning. You and I know this is not the case. Rather, in the ancient mind, men and women are two halves of a whole. Whether their relationships are antagonistic or complementary, both are essential. In the Iliad, for example, Hera prompts Achilles to confront Agamemnon, and Thetis amplifies the conflict between them by supplicating Zeus to honor her son. In the Odyssey, Penelope is the home Odysseus strives to recover. Without her, there is no reason for the hero to battle for his return. In no case can you remove the women and have the same story and meaning.

In the last few years, we have seen many novels that strive to correct misperceptions of the past about women in Greek myths, marketed with this goal of, as you say, “giving voice to women.” As a response to fiction and scholarship of the modern period, this is appropriate, because the voices of women in the myths have not been acknowledged. My concern is that this has led to the assumption that they have no voice in the ancient myths either, but this is not so. Homer weaves their voices across both epics. The question that intrigued and engaged me was, what do they say for and about themselves in the epics?

Homer's epic and women, a topic that has been much misunderstood. Can we expect illuminating insights on this in your new book?

E: That was certainly my intention, and I hope readers will feel they are seeing Homer and women in the epics through a fresh lens. First, and perhaps most essentially, my book approaches the epics as sacred utterances that hold eternal truths. In the archaic and classical periods, they are not yet texts but songs to be shared person to person, and while they are stories, the figures within them are neither fictions nor facts. They are anthropomorphized gods/goddesses and heroes/heroines who are worshiped in historical time. To perceive the importance of women in Homer’s epics, I suggest it is necessary to acknowledge who they were to the earliest hearers of Homer, which is representations of eternal forces that could be invoked in the present moment.

From this starting point, I strive to untangle Homer’s women from how they have been received in the centuries after the classical Greek period. I focus only on who they are within the epics and other Greek verse dated to the archaic period. My translations reproduce repetition as often as possible, and my discussions draw out associative webs to give readers who have not experienced Homer in Greek a window into how the language works.

Tell us a little about how you decided which women and speeches to translate.

E: When I set out to explore this question of what women say for themselves in the epics, I intended to translate every speech by a heroine, captive, or goddess. In the process, I came to appreciate how very often women speak in Homer. When I began working on the book, I recognized that it would not be possible to include every speech, but I wanted every woman who speaks to have her place.

This intention ultimately shaped the organization of the book. I approach them through the central roles they play across the epics, as queens, captives, goddesses, and heroines. Each of these roles is a section in the book, and I discuss each woman alongside my translations of their speeches and scenes. As each human life represents a thread in the cosmic fabric, I treat each woman who speaks in Homer as a thread in the fabric of the epics. In the process, I hope for readers to perceive their nobility and dignity in Homer.

A very fangirl question. How does it feel to be so intimately involved in something as ancient and powerful as Homer's epic and the women in these beautiful stories?

E: Any time I open the Greek text and translate a passage, I am overwhelmed with awe at the depth and power of these words. Reading them in Greek, I can appreciate why ancient people may have believed that the ephemeral and eternal converged when these words were sung or chanted aloud. This is the experience that I strive to honor in my translations.

Maybe there is one heroine with whom you feel a deep connection?

E: Penelope is very special to me because she reminds me of my grandmother, a sea captain’s wife who managed her household and children while my grandfather traveled. I remember her hands always moving, whether it was baking or cooking, sewing or knitting. She was often quiet but always observing, and she carried herself with authority and dignity. She was our pillar, and no one with good understanding underestimated her strength.

Are there any passages that you would love to talk about with Homer?

E: Recently in my Odyssey translation group, we were working on the description of Odysseus building his raft in book five. The Greek was difficult, partly because of unfamiliar vocabulary and partly because of the challenge to understand how the verses fit together. It is terribly easy to get lost in the physicality of the passage, but this physicality seems to me to be a veil that conceals a mystical moment.

Calypso, who has been holding Odysseus in a liminal space, between life and death, will now release him into the flow of time to pursue his return. His antagonist has become his patron. She leads him into a cultivated space, where cults to heroes were established in historical time. There, he cuts down twenty trees for timber to build his raft. Twenty is the number of years he has been away and, in book twenty-three, the number of lines he uses to describe to Penelope how he built their bed and to tell her his story. We remember also the Iliad’s heroes who are compared to trees that are cut down to become timber for ships. In this passage, a recurring simile in the Iliad becomes the reality of Odysseus, the hero who is remembered for surviving the war. I shivered reading this passage. How wonderful it would be to discuss with the bard!

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This is just a small sample of not only Eirene's heart and mind, but also the depth and uniqueness of her book.

Personally, whenever I speak, or write, about these stories, about these gods and texts that are so ancient and loaded with power, I can't help but feel that I am somehow connected to them. Regardless of the way we feel about these stories, the fundamental thing is the respect and maturity with which we approach them.

I am sure that this new book will be enlightening for everyone, in addition to being full of beauty and strength.

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Dr. Eirene Allen PhD is the director of The Institute for Classics Education in U.S. which strives to promote critical thinking skills for the modern world by teaching the classics of ancient Greece.

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