1 - Introduction: gender and genre

Summary

From Homer to Claudian, classical Greek and Latin epic poetry was composed by men, consumed largely by men, and centrally concerned with men. The ancients knew of no female epic poets. The Greek ‘singer of tales’ was a man, whether a fictional character in the Homeric poems themselves (such as Phemius or Demodocus), an exponent of Homeric poetry (such as one of the Homeridae, a Chian guild of bards who recited Homeric poetry in the classical period, or the fictional Ion of the eponymous Platonic dialogue), or one of the mythological or historical singers of non-Homeric epic (such as Orpheus, Hesiod, Panyassis, and Apollonius Rhodius). Ancient and modern critics alike have therefore assumed that behind the name of Homer there lies either a single master poet or a succession of male singers.

A signal exception to this consensus is Samuel Butler, who argued in The Authoress of the Odyssey (1922) that the poem must have been written by a woman, so numerous, so sensitive, and so varied are the depictions of female characters in the Odyssey. Lillian Doherty has shown that ‘what he mistook for evidence of female authorship is actually evidence for the inclusion of females in the implied audience of the poem’, but his work gave renewed attention to the integral importance of female characters in the world of Homeric epic, a subject which has been the focus in recent decades of much provocative scholarship. Homer's ancient commentators long ago saw in the web Helen weaves in the third book of the Iliad, depicting the Trojan war as a struggle undertaken for her sake, ‘a worthy model of his own poem’.