An Interview with Emily Hauser

Hello Emily, thank you for joining me today to talk about your recent book, Mythica (also known as Penelope’s Bones in the US). I’m particularly thrilled to be chatting to you because Homer’s epics have a special place in my heart—my Greek Cypriot dad told me and my sister these epics as our bedtime stories growing up. Could you start by giving us a sense of what this book is?

The first layer, the one you’ll interact most with in the book, is recovering the real women behind Homer’s myths. When we’re talking about Homer, we mean the epics of The Iliad—which tells a section of the saga of the Trojan War—and The Odyssey—which focuses on one of the war hero’s voyages home. Both of these epics are very male-centered, so the question of the book was: how can we bring the women of these stories into the foreground? Women like Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, or Helen of Troy, whose seizure from Sparta by Paris initiates the entire Trojan War. These are important women, women who are complex and can be fleshed out in interesting ways, but they are often marginalized and silenced. So the book is basically saying, instead of starting with the women in the myths—which are from a resolutely male tradition, handed down by male bards, and constructed for male audiences about male themes—what if we started with the women through history? What if we looked at real historical women from the period that fed into Homer’s vision of this long-lost age, looked at their experiences and what we are uncovering from their bones, from their DNA, from the artifacts they were engaging with? How might this then make us read Homer differently?

For me, that was kind of a revolution. I think critics or historians often start from the wrong end, with the accounts written by men within the system used to shore up messages about what it was to be a man. So instead, I put that to one side and started with the archaeology and therefore with the reality—as far as we can uncover it—of these women’s experiences. Then we can loop back around and ask, how does that change how we read the myths?

Secondly, in foregrounding the discoveries that are helping us to uncover these women, it was particularly important to recognize the women who have had a hand in this work. We’ve been talking about the silencing and the marginalization of these women of legend, but there are a lot of women scholars, excavators, archaeologists, and translators who have also been pushed to the sidelines. So, this is both a story about the past and the present.

So what was the spark that began your journey to write this book?

I have an interdisciplinary background in that I published three novels, Greek myth retellings, and I was writing those at the same time as I was doing a PhD in Classics in the US. So the spark with this book was thinking, I know I want to write something about women in Homer but instead of saying, this is an academic book or this is a public book, I could say, actually I’m bringing together critical analysis, historical understanding, archaeological reports, but also narrative storytelling. So really it was a culmination of all the different ways of thinking I’d been doing over the years.

The breadth of the book is remarkable—there’s archaeology, anthropology, DNA analysis, literature, mythology. You move through nine women from The Iliad, seven from The Odyssey. What was the research process like? And how did it go from being all these disparate pieces into something coherent?

For me, it was not about including these women in my book because they’re in Homer, but instead because they each have something to tell us about the experience of being a woman.

I really wanted the historical experiences of women to be my starting point. So my first port of call was to comb through all the archaeological reports I could find across the Late Bronze Age—the period that I decided to focus on, roughly 13^th to 12^th century BCE. I wanted to delve into different experiences from different kinds of women—so we’re not looking entirely at elite women, but we’re also looking at non-elites—and I was also really interested in showcasing a variety of technologies, approaches, and disciplines.

Then I looked at my list of Homer’s women. How can I start to weave these together? I felt almost like the Muses were watching over me, because there were all these correspondences that I could never have planned. The one that really stuck out was the Uluburun Shipwreck. I’d known for ages that I wanted to write about it not only because it’s an amazing underwater excavation but also because it foregrounds the techniques that incredible marine archaeologists use. As a Late Bronze Age shipwreck, I knew it would enable me to speak to issues of trade, and that then made me think about xenia—”guest friendship”—in The Odyssey. This brought Arete to mind, queen of the mythical Phaenicians and a key demonstrator of xenia. Then I was looking through what was discovered on the ship, and I couldn’t believe it: one of the most valuable objects was a single gold chalice, precisely the object that is given to Odysseus by Arete’s husband, the king. I just could not have planned that, the confluences were extraordinary.

How did you come up with the order? Did you grapple with it at all?

The idea was that the ordering of the women would create another subliminal layer. Though I start each chapter with the archaeology and historical context, I then move to the Homeric narrative and give a summary of where we’re at in the epic so as a reader you are essentially getting a summary of The Iliad and The Odyssey narrated through the women. So though people might not notice, the women are now our introduction to the epics.

I’d be absolutely fascinated to see if someone who, never having read Homer, read your book first and then went to Homer, and how that might change the entire framing. Is there a particular woman who was your favorite to write?

Well, it is difficult to pick, but I think the one that stood out for me the most was Thetis, the mother. I had recently become a mother myself, and so I was re-reading The Iliad with a completely different eye than before. In her chapter, I write about the part in The Iliad where Thetis talks about her motherhood, where she comes up with this word which we call, in Classics, a hapax legomenon, which means a “once said.” She makes up this word, and no one ever uses it again in any text, so it’s her word. The word is dusaristotokeia, which means “the worst-best-female-birther.” To unpack that, it conveys how it feels as a woman to go through an experience that can sometimes, for some women, be the worst of their life. In Thetis’s case, it’s certainly the worst of her life because as an immortal mother giving birth to a mortal child, Achilles, she knows she’s going to lose her child, which is the worst thing a mother can experience. But the birth is simultaneously the best thing, because it has brought into the world the thing that is the most precious to her.

So, this led me to think, how can we re-evaluate ancient burials and attitudes to infant deaths? In the past, male-authored, archaeological scholarship took an impassive approach to it: there were so many infant burials that the assumption is people were just used to it. But when instead you read with an attitude of empathy, you wonder, can we read this differently? We notice that, for instance, some of the infants are buried under the floor of a house, or they’re buried with specifically made objects, like a sippy cup that a family of potters made in Late Bronze Age Mycenae. So if we read with that empathy, I think it makes us see the care with which these lost children were being treated. Weaving that together was a pretty cathartic experience for me.

This leads me to wonder if there was any one woman who you found particularly surprising or unexpected?

The surprising one would have to be Calypso. I knew that Calypso had always posed a problem for me. The way she is talked about in The Odyssey and in criticism is always as a blocker of Odysseus. That had always really bugged me. But I couldn’t think of a response, because the narrative is that she gets in the way of Odysseus getting home as he’s kept captive on her island for seven years. There’s a really interesting moment where the poet of The Odyssey and Odysseus himself echo each other by using the same vocabulary, with the poet saying “Odysseus had been kept captive by Calypso,” and then later Odysseus says, “Calypso kept me captive,” using the same words. So, there’s a sort of double blaming of Calypso. It’s something that scholars tend to repeat and I couldn’t put my finger on how I could create a rebuttal.

The answer came, again, by starting with the history. As I was doing research into ancient weaving, I realized that one of the most exciting things being done now is experimental archaeology: where scholars basically recreate the tools that were used by ancient women weavers and then do the weaving itself. And what that does for us is gives us a sense of time. The technology of weaving has always been emphasized, but time wasn’t really something that was talked about. But the average estimate, based on the latest findings, is that women spent about ten hours a day spinning and weaving. And then I came across a statistic that it would have taken one woman roughly four years to make just one sail. Suddenly I realized, this is the rebuttal: considering Calypso through the work she was doing. She’s not just a temptress luring Odysseus with sex. That’s what the poem is telling us, that’s what the man is telling us, but it’s not what she’s doing. What she’s doing for most of the day every day is spinning and weaving a sail.

I love that. In that same chapter, you draw the concept together with our consumption of fast fashion nowadays, and how one in six people alive are involved in that industry in some form and most of them are women.

Exactly. Eighty per cent of the global textile labor is female. I really wanted to get across that this isn’t just an ancient story. You see patterns repeating. This means that we can argue that this is not just a poem about the past, we can also refract it into modern concerns.

I was really struck by the breadth of locations too. Your book is a wondrous tangle of different cultures. I wondered if your perceptions of place might have changed by looking through the lens of the women?

One of the most interesting things for me was to think about women’s experiences beyond Greece. This wasn’t something that I had any expertise in before. I knew about as much as we can know about Mycenaean women, but to start discovering women from, for example, the Hittite Empire in Anatolia and what they were doing, to start reading their texts, that was not only really exciting but also it challenged me to consider the boundaries that we put on history. There’s a quote from Raymond Westbrook—he says something akin to “the ancient legal tradition of Mesopotamia did not stop dead at the shores of the Aegean.” It’s such a testament to the way that later thinkers and historians have put time periods and cultures and civilizations into very neat countries and conglomerations. If you think about Greece in this period, they’re not even calling themselves Greece. There is probably, potentially, a sense of a united identity—though even that’s contested—but what we’re seeing, particularly in the archaeology, is individuated city states that have trade connections with other cultures. So when we are talking about women, we are not talking about isolated Greek women, we’re talking about a map of women across different cultures, many of which treated women in different ways. There were some cultures in which women could become incredibly important, like the Hittite Empire, where their names were handed down to posterity in ways that we tend not to see in the Mycenaean Greek tradition. So that was a massive eye-opener.

And then secondly, Homer has often been venerated as a Greek-centered text. It is, of course, written in Greek. And there are a lot of scholars who would argue that there is a drive within it towards Hellenic identity. But at the same time, it’s not inconceivable that the bards who were sharing these stories before the epics were written down were circulating within a very fluid and much more global cosmopolitan tradition. And therefore, there could be threads of all kinds of different cultures, all kinds of different women’s stories woven into the epics. So we’re shaking up this idea that we are looking at a canonical male text, because now we’re looking at something that could be fluid and oral, that could have space for women from different cultures, that doesn’t just have to be Hellenocentric but can be looking across the ancient Mediterranean world writ large. For me, as a historian, that gave me so much space to play in.

If you take that concept of shaking up what it meant to be Greek, does the same process allow for a shaking up of what it meant to be a woman?

That is something I really wanted to address in the book. One of the key characterizations of woman’s place in society—to be sidelined and silenced and marginalized—is not, in fact, necessarily from Homer. I think Homer is a contributing factor, but perhaps weighing more heavily is the importance of Athens in the 5th century BCE, the so-called classical period in which it’s very likely that the Homeric poems became concretized and standardized. That same period is when women had the least amount of autonomy, where the ideal was that women weren’t meant to be seen, they were kept within the household, they should be silent, and that was the only way that they can gain any kind of approbation. I think that because of the importance of classical Greece this became such an important model, so much so that other variant models of what it might be to be a woman from other cultures across the Mediterranean—and even from within Homer where you do get a complexity of womanhood—became forgotten.

There are a couple of chapters that really stood out on that front, one exploring Athena and her gender fluidity, and then Penthesilea, who is the Amazon, the female warrior. This brings me on to a very tangly subject: how did you grapple with the fluidity of legend versus all this scientific research when creating what you call your own “counter-history”?

Legend is such a difficult one. I spend a lot of time defining it in the book, because what’s really interesting about legend is that it doesn’t exist outside of text. We only have fixed end-product versions that gesture back to earlier legends. Legend and myth, by definition, are fluid, oral, moving, unfixed, something that can be changed. That is why myth is such a powerful force, precisely because it can be changed. And that’s what’s so interesting about epic—they begin as earlier oral instantiations handed down by bards with that fluidity of legend behind them, but they have now been fixed and rooted. Because I am a scholar of archaic literature—and that’s what you’re looking at in the archaic period, this transition from oral, burgeoning myth into textual versions—you get quite used to oscillating between the two. It’s telling you something about what the text is trying to do—on the one hand, it’s gesturing towards wider meanings while on the other hand, it’s also closing them down and saying, this is my version.

Absolutely, and that gives you much more gray space in which to play. So what do you see as your role within that?

My role is to open people up to an understanding of how these ideas came about while at the same time, harnessing the flexibility of myth to show that these ideas can always be changed. So we’re explaining why the canon has the force that it has, but we’re also saying myths can always be rewritten and changed, and therefore, this is where we can come in and see things from a new angle.

Digging into that a little bit more, especially as International Women’s Day is coming up, how does this distant history draw into our current times?

As we’ve mentioned, in each of the chapters I link how these experiences do speak to modern themes. I think the overarching sense of the book was that women have always been there in history. That is the bottom line. Fifty per cent of the population was living their life throughout history, and it is our job now to start to tell these stories about them. In the past, the silence of women in the record used to be taken as an excuse not to look further. What this book taught me was to see this instead as an invitation to be more inventive and more exciting methodologically, to dig deeper, to ask different questions, so that by the end you actually come out with something that, to me, is even richer and more exciting. Silence is not the stopping point, it’s the start.