The Amazon and the Wise Woman, or ‘God Knows What She Thought’

Abstract

The Iliad ends with the line, ‘Such were the funeral rites of Hector tamer of horses’.1 In antiquity some continuations of the epic went on to describe the arrival of Queen Penthesilea and adapted the line to ‘Such were the funeral rites of Hector. And now there came an Amazon’.2 In view of the later development of the epic tradition it is a suggestive mutation. In the stark world of the Iliad, our earliest work of European literature, women are primarily slaves, chattels, spoils of war. The poem opens with the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles over a female captive. This is the background to even the most tender of personal relationships. Hector foretells that after his death Andromache will be sold into slavery to sleep with her master and work for his wife. At the funeral of Patroclus the voices of his comrades are joined by a chorus of women slaves who lament for the dead warrior but are really grieving for themselves.3 But the female characters of the Odyssey are not pathetic. Odysseus is supported by the powerful goddess Athene, seduced by the enchanting Circe and Calypso, impressed by the courageous young princess Nausicaa and inspired throughout his journeyings by the thought of his loyal wife Penelope waiting for him in Ithaca. Domestic happiness replaces military glory as the mainspring of the hero’s actions.