Restoring Power to the Women of Ancient Myth

The first time I read the Circe episode in the Odyssey, I hated it.

I was 13, sitting cross-legged on my bed. The book in my hands, Fitzgerald’s translation of the Odyssey, was only a month old, but it was already foxed from being handled so often. Greek mythology had long been an obsession of mine, and now that I had my own copy of the almost 3,000-year-old poem, I could scarcely stand to set it down. So it meant something for me to hurl the book across the room.

The hero of the story, Odysseus, was desperately trying to get back home to his wife and son in Ithaca, after ten years fighting at Troy. This had proved challenging, thanks to a series of monsters and misfires. Now, grieving and in despair, he had washed up on an island called Aiaia, where a witch named Circe lived.

It was all good stuff, and I had been steaming along. I loved the wolves and lions who draped themselves over Circe’s threshold. I loved Odysseus’s buffoonish men being transformed to pigs by Circe’s drugged wine and magic. I loved sneaky Hermes coming to tell Odysseus that if he used a special herb, her sorcery would have no power over him. Then Circe served him the drugged wine, and lifted her wand.

This was going to be fun, I thought. There would be a real duel, a battle of wits between two clever, headstrong people.

Instead, Odysseus drew his sword and the powerful sorceress dropped to her knees. She wailed, begging for mercy, and offered to take him to her bed. Reading that, I felt a shocked and roiling disappointment, as if I had been betrayed by a friend.

I retrieved the book to see if the section had improved during its time on the floor. But it was all still there, the sexual slavishness, Circe’s demeaning loss of power. I stared at the pages in fury. It didn’t even make sense to me. Circe was a goddess, why was she afraid of a sword? And the phallic symbol was so grossly obvious, even my 13-year-old eyes could see it. Odysseus shows a blade, and suddenly she has to kneel and offer herself to him?

It was not the first time I’d been frustrated by a woman’s portrayal in Greek mythology. I’d long been familiar with two major types: the tragic victims (Eurydice, Iphigenia, Cassandra), and the bloody villains (Medea, Clytemnestra). There was also a third type, which encompassed nearly all the other female characters I encountered: those who barely registered. They were there only as plot points: to be kidnapped, chased, married, or raped, to inspire the hero or to conveniently help him, or, most often, to give birth to him. Then they would vanish from the story.

So I had been pleased to see a character like Circe, so vivid and unusual and powerful. But of course that power was the problem. A woman who could control men was unacceptable. She must be corrected by the hero, set back in her place. Instead of Odysseus being transformed by her spell, she is the one changed: from potent, independent goddess to bedmate, helpmeet, patient nurse of men’s pain.

At 13, I couldn’t articulate all this, I just knew that something about the scene made my skin crawl. I quickly read onward, glad when Odysseus sailed off to face more monsters.

As I continued to study Classics I grew adept at such compartmentalization. I learned to read past the rapes and routine violence directed at women, the casual equation of a woman’s value with her virginity. When the poet Ovid wrote of Daphne fleeing from the god Apollo, and how her flushed panic enflamed his desire all the more, I distantly noted the idea’s grotesqueness before moving on to the matter of Ovid’s poetic devices and word play. Sexism in the ancient world was so ubiquitous that if I got angry about it every time I saw it, I would be in a state of perpetual rage.

Still, that old feeling would break through from time to time, prickling across my skin. When I read about yet another rape; when another powerful female figure had to be killed, constrained or safely married off. In those moments I was acutely aware of my own female body. Ovid compares the fleeing Daphne to a hare, and Apollo to a hound on her heels. She is prey, something to be consumed before moving onto the next meal.

I looked around the classroom, which was all, or nearly all, men. I examined their faces, wondering what they made of Ovid’s lightly comedic approach to sexual assault. Did they even notice these moments, disguised as they were in Ovid’s charming, soufflé style? And if they noticed, had these sentiments been so validated by the weight of centuries, by all the scholars who had read these lines and written in their honor, that they gave it a pass?

I don’t know. None of them said anything, and I didn’t say anything either. The conversation was about metrical effects, and I would have had to wrench the subject away. I was young then, and shy in the best of circumstances. Though I proudly called myself a feminist, I didn’t want to be, you know, difficult. I remember feeling glad that the next section we would read was about Daedalus and his son Icarus. Perverse as it sounds, it was easier when there were no women to deal with at all; when, so I told myself, I could be a scholar purely, without having to constantly negotiate my own place in the room.

It was the old dilemma of a disenfranchised group. Be silent, and feel complicit in letting the injustice stand; speak up and become the standard-bearer of resistance. I didn’t want to be silent, but the truth was, I didn’t want to be the standard-bearer either. I didn’t want to have to become a specialist in women in Classical literature just because I myself was a woman. And even if I became the world’s foremost scholar on ancient sexism, I would never be given the respect of a scholar who studied something more time-honored and traditional. I would always be suspect: as a woman studying women, I would be seen to have an “agenda.”

I also knew that there was a history in Classical scholarship of women scholars being steered towards “softer” aspects of Classics. Female students had often been encouraged towards things like love poetry and art history, which were seen as more domestic, more naturally a female realm. The great epics, the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid, were about so-called important things: heroes and war, power politics and destiny. They were reserved for the most serious scholars, ie, men. (I think it is no coincidence that it was only very recently that the first English translations of Homer by women were published.)

In the end, I decided that the most feminist thing to do would be to pursue the ideas I was most passionately invested in as a scholar. Some of these included issues of gender in ancient literature, but many of them did not.

My experience as a female Classicist was a fortunate one. I can count on one hand the number of open acts of sexism I have experienced in my career. Yes, there was the one older professor who started the semester warning us not to ask questions about “slaves and women” because “this is a course about history.” There was the one professor who always sat uncomfortably close, and invited me to be his “companion” on trips (I declined). But they were outliers. My universities were progressive, and my departments more so. My professors were collegial and warm, rigorous scholars who were incredibly supportive of my work. They went out of their way to encourage my interests, including in those grand epic texts. I ended up specializing in Homer and Virgil, whose works are great passions of my life.

The irony, of course, is that all these issues of sexism that I struggled with in ancient literature are still very much with us. As recent news has made abundantly clear, treating women as prey or unimportant plot points in a male narrative has proven to be timeless. We still distrust powerful women, and are encouraged to revel when they fall. We still struggle to allow women to stand at the center of their own story. Too often, they are still asked to kneel at the feet of men, serving as faceless support.

I never forgot my reaction to Circe and Odysseus’s meeting. I never stopped wanting to respond to it. It took me 25 years from that first frustration to work out a reply, which turned into my second novel, Circe. In it, I got to write my own version of that scene, from Circe’s perspective. She still yields to Odysseus’s trick, that is a piece of the plot. But she does not kneel.