A still from the opening scene of Godard's Le Mépris, a contemplation on the mistrust at the centre of Homer's Odyssey. Photograph: Kobal
It was with a queasy sensation that I recently reread the final pages of Homer's Odyssey. I'm not talking about the massacre of the suitors, those hundred or so upper class louts who, while Odysseus seeks a passage back to Ithaca, have been eating him out of house and home while pressuring his wife Penelope to remarry. No, the outrageous part for me is the execution of the maids. As always with Homeric death scenes, the details are clinical, unbelievably cruel, weirdly tender. They are hanged - "most piteously. / Their feet danced for a little, but not for long".
Their crime is to have slept with the enemy - the suitors (such barbarous exactions, one realizes, didn't go out with the Bronze Age). Down in Hades, Achilles meets the dead suitors and, of Penelope, exults "a valliant wife! / True to her husband's honour". So Odysseus has put his house in order, which is the same as saying he has put his women in order. But this doesn't feel like the Odyssey I've been reading, nor is this the Penelope I think I know. Nor, for that matter, the other women who people this poem.
If the Iliad is a book about arms and men, particularly the killing machine that is Achilles, the Odyssey, to my mind, is very much about women. More particularly, it is about the sexuality of women. One thinks of the goddess Calypso, with whom the "captive" Odysseus has been compelled to "revel and lay" for nigh-on seven years. Previous to this, he has been wined, dined and loved twelve months by the witch Circe, who turns his dim ship mates "into swine", beating them with a long stick, rather like a latter day dominatrix.
But a wind of liberation blows amongst mortal women too. In a banquet scene in Book 4, Helen airily repents the "mad day Aphrodite drew me away from my fatherland". Given that it took her all of ten years to tire of her lover Paris, the Trojan war raging about her all the while, one imagines the muffled coughs and shifting in seats of the assembled guests. "An excellent tale, my dear," breaks in her husband, "flame-haired" Menelaus, as well he might.
The sexual awakening of the teenage Nausicaa provides another key moment. Having offered clothes to the naked Odysseus, washed up yet again on another foreign shore, she exclaims, "I wish my husband could be as fine as he!" And this without forgetting Penelope, the prematurely widowed queen, taunting the suitors with her beauty - "instant weakness took these men / in the knee joints".
These are vivid portraits of women living by their wits with passion and guile. So vivid, in fact, that the Odyssey is pervaded with anxiety of an eternal male kind. Adolescent Telemachus glumly establishes the tone - "My mother says I am his (Odysseus') son; I know not/surely. Who has known his own engendering?"
Which may suggest why The Odyssey has offered authors such rich pickings in our own times of increased sexual freedom. Joyce, notoriously jealous of his wife Nora, builds his Ulysses on Homer's rock, investing his hero Bloom with all the anguish of a man who does not know what his wife is about. Alberto Moravia's Contempt (which inspired the Jean Luc Godard film), pervaded by the stomach churning unease of Molteni, "a man who loves his wife, but whose wife doesn't love him" has a screenplay about Homer's epic at its centre.
Which leads me to throw out the following. We can't allow Achilles his blustering signing off about the virtue of women to provide the Odyssey with its moral. This is a dead man talking, after all. If there's any moral to the Odyssey, it might well be about men, how they seek to control women, and how women continue to elide such control. Because life itself elides control. Which is why (somewhat contentiously, I own) I often suspect that the execution of the maids was probably as shocking to audiences then as it is now. The maids might be dead, but isn't Homer asking a subtle question - Will Odysseus ever know womankind, or even his wife for that matter?
