{"id":460,"date":"2026-07-08T05:10:35","date_gmt":"2026-07-08T05:10:35","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=460"},"modified":"2026-07-08T05:10:35","modified_gmt":"2026-07-08T05:10:35","slug":"did-homer-have-a-woman-problem","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=460","title":{"rendered":"Did Homer have a woman problem?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

When an enormous Hollywood blockbuster is extruded, the actors cast in it are employed to put on a sage voice and discuss its importance. Lupita Nyong\u2019o took up the challenge to promote the latest version of\u00a0The Odyssey<\/i>, declaiming to an appropriately awed interviewer: \u201cWhen you read the Iliad<\/em> and the Odyssey<\/em>, very little time is spent in the perspective of the women. It\u2019s told from a very masculine side of things.\u201d<\/p>\n

Read more Farage\u2019s Clacton reckoning<\/a><\/p>\n

Nyong\u2019o is an educated woman, who holds a bachelor\u2019s degree in film and theater studies from Hampshire College, Massachusetts. She is a very 2020s figure, and naturally, roaming around in search of something to say, wasn\u2019t satisfied until she found a class of people who she might be able to present in the light of Victimhood. As for the lack of \u201cthe female perspective\u201d, she might have forgotten for the moment that the Victorian writer Samuel Butler was so struck by the highly feminine character of the\u00a0Odyssey<\/i>\u00a0that he wrote an entire book on the subject. It was dedicated to the proposition that if a man called Homer wrote the\u00a0Iliad<\/i>,\u00a0it was quite a different writer from the one who set down the\u00a0Odyssey<\/i>.\u00a0This author was familiar with the\u00a0Iliad<\/i>,\u00a0but the approach, the psychological framework, the patches of intense knowledge and total ignorance led the very learned Butler to one conclusion.\u00a0The Odyssey<\/i>, far from being \u201ctold from a very masculine side of things\u201d, was strongly suggestive of being written by a woman. Butler\u2019s book was called\u00a0The Authoress of the Odyssey<\/i>\u00a0and was published in 1896.<\/p>\n

Butler was a wonderfully intelligent and puckish mind, quite indifferent to generally accepted conclusions \u2014 he was homosexual, and skeptical of conventional proprieties. In 1863, he published an essay entitled \u201cDarwin Among The Machines\u201d, wondering what would happen to the human race if machines acquired the ability to build themselves, and acquire the processes of intelligent self-improvement \u2014 a remarkable warning about AI from 160 years ago. His excellent short novel\u00a0The Fair Haven<\/i>\u00a0is a grossly sarcastic religious treatise that first fooled everyone who read it, and then utterly enraged them. He withheld his outrageous novel\u00a0The Way of All Flesh<\/i>\u00a0to be published after his death in 1902, one of the funniest eviscerations of religious hypocrisy ever written.<\/p>\n

Unlike a Hollywood actress putting on the voice of a great thinker at work, he didn\u2019t care what people thought.\u00a0The Authoress of the Odyssey<\/i>\u00a0is a brilliant mounting up of evidence, and a compelling and complex set of ideas about what animates male and female writers. Whoever wrote the\u00a0Odyssey,<\/i> it argues,\u00a0had very little idea about the construction of boats, putting rudders at both ends, about how sheep feed their young, about the sound of wind at sea, about hawks tearing prey apart, and evidently believed that \u201cdry and well-seasoned timber can be cut from a growing tree\u201d. On the other hand, though evidently barred from practical matters that men would have no difficulty with, the author realizes immediately what it would mean to kill a large number of suitors in a banqueting hall, and that the first thing that \u201cHomer\u201d thinks of after the bloodspilling is \u201cthe dining room carpet\u201d.<\/p>\n

Read more A cancellation novel\u2019s lunar sequel<\/a><\/p>\n

Butler notices, too, that it is exclusively the men who are mocked in the poem. Excuses are constantly found in a sympathetic way for the women, and laughter never falls upon them. In other Greek tellings of the story, Odysseus\u2019s wife, Penelope, has her scandalous behavior condemned. Butler notes how \u201cHomer\u201d \u201cwhitewashes\u201d Penelope, and puts it down to sex-based fellow feeling. It is an ingenious and very learned book, which rests on the knowledge that, in fact, there were plenty much-admired women poets in the pre-Athenian age of Greek poets \u2014 not just Sappho, but Damophila, the Paphylian and Erinna of Telos among many others. Butler\u2019s marshalling of evidence suggests that, even if his premise isn\u2019t true, there is, at the very least, a \u201cperspective of women\u201d in the\u00a0Odyssey<\/em>.\u00a0So why say something so evidently absurd as \u201cit\u2019s told from a very masculine side of things\u201d?<\/p>\n

In Kingsley Amis\u2019s 1978 academic comedy Jake\u2019s Thing<\/i>, an angry English don reports an encounter with an undergraduate essay on Shakespeare. \u201cHer case was roughly that since Hamlet is far too nice and intelligent to be a man, he must be a woman because there\u2019s nothing else to be.\u201d Things have moved on: that undergraduate would these days be hauled over the coals for ignorance of non-binariness and accused of transphobia. But the underlying sense that the attitudes of the past, and the quality of their writing too, were appallingly limited until some present-day enlightened figure came along to put things right has only sharpened in the last half century of increasing orthodoxy. Of course, we can improve on Homer, and Shakespeare too!<\/p>\n

The duty of improvement is so imperative, moreover, that we no longer need to read the great epics we\u2019re improving on, let alone books of commentary by someone as intelligent and well-informed as Samuel Butler. Butler foresaw ChatGPT in 1863. He had no difficulty whatsoever in telling us about the limits of people many decades in the future, talking confidently about one of the great classics of literature. \u201cEvery scholar has read a Book of two of the Odyssey<\/i> here and there; some have read the whole; a few have read it through more than once; but no one that I have asked have so much as been able to tell me whether Ulysses had a sister or no \u2014 much less what her name was.\u201d So, Lupita, did he have a sister? I mean, before you start ticking off one of the greatest poets in world literature about his interest in women, presumably you took so important a question into account?<\/p>\n

Read more Meta glasses are for perverts<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

When an enormous Hollywood blockbuster is extruded, the actors cast in it are employed to put on a sage voice and discuss its importance. Lupita Nyong\u2019o took up the challenge to promote the latest version of\u00a0The Odyssey, declaiming to an appropriately awed interviewer: \u201cWhen you read the Iliad and the Odyssey, very little time is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":459,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[74],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-460","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-film"],"yoast_head":"\nDid Homer have a woman problem? - \u0421ity Flow Journal<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/cityflowjournal.com\/?p=460\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"Did Homer have a woman problem? - \u0421ity Flow Journal\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"When an enormous Hollywood blockbuster is extruded, the actors cast in it are employed to put on a sage voice and discuss its importance. 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