Emily Hauser is a British classicist, ancient historian, and author whose latest book is titled Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It.
Drawing upon research from archaeology, linguistics, ancient DNA discoveries, and literary analysis, Hauser seeks to recreate the lives of women in Bronze Age Greece and to restore their voices, which were routinely silenced in ancient classic literature.
Hauser is part of a wave of scholars and authors working to reclaim and reinterpret the stories of women that were marginalized and ignored in the writings of Ancient Greece.
These stories, roughly contemporaneous with the timeframe of the Old Testament, provide a dark contrast to how God values his image bearers, both female and male. The modern reappraisals of these writings challenge us to take a critical look at how women have been misrepresented in literature and the arts since the time of Homer until the present.
Voiceless women in ancient literature
Homer’s two epic poems, the Iliad and the Odyssey, were written sometime around 700 BC and form the beginning of the Western literary canon. These massive works derived from an oral tradition that looked back five centuries earlier, to the Late Bronze Age circa 1200 BC. They sought to preserve dimly remembered mythical stories of a heroic past centred on the Trojan War. The Iliad takes place during the final year of the 10-year conflict, while the Odyssey spans an additional 10 years, chronicling Odysseus’ tortuous journey home to his wife, Penelope, and his island kingdom of Ithaca.
These stories were written and sung by men, for men, about men seeking glory through warfare, plunder, and acquired status among their peers. The women in the stories were incidental. Powerful goddesses, influential queens, deceptive witches, and female monsters underscored an aversion to female authority. Regular women were considered property to be captured and enslaved as spoils of war. Their traumatic experiences and points of view were downplayed or not even considered.
The Odyssey opens with Penelope, the wife of Odysseus, who has been waiting 20 years for the return of her husband. A gang of suitors has invaded her home, eating and drinking and pressuring her to marry one of them. A bard shows up, singing about the misfortunes of the returning heroes, prompting Penelope to come downstairs and ask him to sing something else. Her adolescent son, Telemachus, cuts her off and tells her to go back upstairs to her weaving work. “Words are for men,” he rudely says to his mother.
Hauser explains the lasting impact of this episode: “To all intents and purposes, then, one of the most famous of all the ancient texts, telling one of the most famous ancient legends, begins with something of a mission statement: that women aren’t meant to talk. Nor are they allowed to tell their own stories, their own myths, in their own words. . . . Both the myths that get told, and the words employed to tell them, are – in this manifesto – a men’s-only zone.”
Another classics scholar, Mary Beard, calls this “the first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’” in Western literature. This is keenly ironic, considering that the poem begins with Homer invoking the Muse to use him as her instrument to tell this story.
Truth be told, Homer is far more ambivalent about his subject matter than subsequent sources admit. On the one hand, he leans into the toxic bravado and casual misogyny of his ancient heroes. On the other, he acknowledges its consequences and the plight of its victims. On close reading, these epics don’t so much glorify war but rather observe its devastation and futility as an avenue to glory.
Archaeology, DNA, and literary analysis
Until the mid-20th century, the Mycenaean civilization of Bronze Age Greece, so named after its principal city, Mycenae, remained something of a closed book. Its ruins had been unearthed and volumes of clay tablets discovered, containing syllabic writing known as Linear B, some of these tablets dating as early as 1450 BC.
The problem was that Linear B couldn’t be deciphered, until a self-taught linguist named Michael Ventris accomplished the feat in 1952. His breakthrough was made possible by the earlier work of classicist Alice Kober, who discovered that Linear B, like later Greek, was an inflected language with grammatical gender. Ventris, however, failed to acknowledge Kober’s contributions. Today, he is credited with unlocking the earliest known form of the Greek language, while her name is all but forgotten.
For the most part, the Mycenaean Greek tablets contain inventories of property owned by prominent men, including gold, weapons, foodstuffs, and women captured in war and imported as slaves. These records corroborate the details in Homer and illustrate what life was like for many women during the Bronze Age.
Further archaeological discoveries have unearthed several burial sites that shed light on the lives of Bronze Age women at the top end of the social spectrum. These Mycenaean graves, beehive-shaped structures cut into hillsides and known as tholos tombs, were reserved for burying the royal dead. Ancient DNA recovered from the teeth of one of the bodies confirmed that she was female, native to mainland Greece, likely had brown hair and eyes, and had lived around 1400 BC, about two centuries before the setting of the Homeric myths. She had been buried with the panoply and wealth befitting a queen.
Similar discoveries around the Black Sea have yielded even more startling evidence about the diverse lives of women in the ancient world. Over the years, numerous tombs have been excavated in this region, containing the bodies of warriors buried with their horses and their weapons. Until recently, it was assumed these warriors were men, but ancient DNA and closer skeletal analysis revealed that many of them were women who had died fighting in battle. Homer and other Greek writers told stories about mythical warrior women, the Amazons, who were thought to live near the Black Sea, and these findings offer a historical basis for those legends.
Translations and modern retellings
The Homeric epics look back on an earlier, dimly remembered heroic age, combining myth with kernels of history. They were originally sung by professional bards at banquets for the entertainment of mostly male audiences. While reflecting the patriarchal attitudes of their era, these poems also display a fair degree of ambiguity toward those attitudes.
Several centuries after Homer, the Athenians elevated these epics to the status of near-sacred writ. While Athens is credited with inventing democracy, it was also one of the most restrictive societies for women in Ancient Greece. For the Athenians, Homer became a blueprint for society, a guide for how men and women ought to behave. Women were to stay home and be quiet, while men were free to do as they pleased.
In the words of Thucydides, an Athenian historian and military leader, “a woman will have the greatest glory if she’s least talked about among the men – whether for good or bad.” The Athenian poets weighed in as well. A character in a play by Euripides proclaims, “for a woman, being silent and modest is best, and staying quietly inside the house,” and according to Sophocles, “silence is a woman’s best ornament.”
As Hauser summarizes, “Any woman who wanted to tell her own tale, who wanted to write her own story, simply didn’t get listened to, and women’s songs, women’s myths, were lost. (The numbers give the best idea of the stark reality: we know the names of at least 3,200 male authors writing in Greek – and those of fewer than a hundred women.)”
These attitudes persisted beyond classical Athens into the modern Western world, and are reflected in many translations of Homer, the vast majority done by men. These translations tend to downplay the cruelty and misogyny of the male characters in favour of their heroic actions. The female characters are likewise made to appear weaker and more passive, at times described with crude adjectives absent from the original Greek.
In 2017 Emily Wilson, a British American translator and classics scholar, produced the first English translation of the Odyssey by a woman. She followed that up in 2023 with her translation of the Iliad. Wilson’s Homer is poetic, powerful, and fast-moving, stripping away the archaizing language of earlier translations. She also strips away many of the linguistic accretions that have strayed from Homer’s Greek over the centuries. In an article for The New Yorker, Wilson gives an example of a major distortion she has sought to address in her Odyssey translation:
“After Odysseus slaughters [Penelope’s] suitors, he tells Telemachus to kill the female slaves who have slept with them. Contemporary translators and commentators often present the massacre of these women as if it were quite ordinary, and entirely justified. The murdered slaves are routinely described in contemporary American English translations as ‘disobedient maids,’ and are labelled as ‘sluts’ or ‘whores’ – a level of verbal abuse that finds absolutely no analogue in the Greek. The killing of these abused slaves (who are usually referred to, euphemistically, as ‘servants’ or ‘maids’) is often described as if it were unquestionably ethical.”
Hauser and Wilson are not alone in their work to highlight the experiences of the women in these ancient writings, and to tell their stories from their own point of view. A genre of mythological retellings has sprung up in recent years, reimagining these classic stories through the eyes and voices of the female characters. Margaret Atwood, Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, Costanza Casati, Pat Barker, Jennifer Saint, and Claire North, along with Hauser herself, are some of the leading authors working in this genre, allowing these sidelined and silenced women of myth to tell their own stories in their own voices.
Voices of women in the Scriptures
The Scriptures teach that the Fall of humanity has led to a broken world filled with cruelty and injustice. One of the most ubiquitous earmarks of this brokenness, evident in most cultures throughout history, is the systemic misogyny and abuse directed at women. This is evident not only in the Homeric epics – but also in the Scriptures.
In contrast to Homer, however, the Scriptures are unambiguous in condemning these sins. They insist that women and men alike are created in the very image of God and are thus equal in value and dignity – a concept utterly alien to all other writings of the ancient world. Like Homer, the Scriptures present an unvarnished view of man’s cruelty to man, and to woman. Unlike the Homeric poems, the Old Testament insists on rights and protections for women living in a patriarchal world, even for those taken as plunder under the brutal laws of ancient warfare.
The women in Scripture are not mythical stereotypes, but real individuals gifted by God with personalities and talents that fit them for their calling. They also have voices that are heard and listened to: Ruth in the barley fields of Bethlehem; Esther in the royal courts of the Persian Empire; Deborah’s triumphant war song; Huldah’s prophecy of disaster; Hannah’s prayer for a son; Mary’s Magnificat; and Sheerah of Ephraim, who rebuilt three cities in predynastic Israel, one of which she renamed Uzzen-Sheerah, after herself.
The agency of these women has made some Bible scholars uncomfortable, leading them to argue that these women were exceptional cases, raised up by God only because there were no suitable men at hand. It’s an attitude that has on occasion crept into the field of Bible translation, just as it has with Homer.
Here are two examples, both from the New Testament. First, in his letter to the Romans, Paul mentions a female coworker named Junia, whom he describes as “noteworthy in the eyes of the apostles” or “outstanding among the apostles.” The ambiguous hint that Junia may have been an apostle has led to strident claims that Junia must have been a man named Junias, an option effectively ruled out by the Greek grammar and context.
The second example comes from the book of Acts, where Luke records Priscilla and Aquila taking Apollos aside and correcting his understanding of the Gospel. Sometime in the 3rd or 4th century, a manuscript copyist uncomfortable with the idea that Priscilla may have taken the lead in correcting Apollos, switched the order of names to Aquila and Priscilla. The best and earliest manuscripts, however, preserve the original reading, placing Priscilla first, as she is in all but one mention of the couple in the New Testament.
What are we to make of all this? Should we reject the epics of Homer and other classics of the ancient world? To do so would be a mistake. These works have stood the test of time and rightfully stand at the forefront of the Western literary tradition. They are works of art that have shaped our culture, enriched our understanding of history, and they provide a touchpoint with God’s creation mandate to make beautiful works, especially those that offer an unflinching view of our fallen and broken world.
Nevertheless, it is to the Scriptures that we must turn for the truth about God, about us, and about our world, with all its warts and wounds. More than that, it is God’s Word that assures us of his love, his sovereign kindness, and the infinite value he places on each of us, women and men alike. In his Word, we find the strength to seek justice for victims of abuse and neglect, and to look ahead with hope to the day when God will end all suffering, wipe away every tear, and to paraphrase the consummate classicist J.R.R. Tolkien, make everything sad come untrue.
Sources and further reading
Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad, Vintage Canada, 2006.
Pat Barker, The Silence of the Girls, Penguin UK, 2019.
Costanza Casati, Clytemnestra: A Novel, HarperCollins, 2023.
Emily Hauser, For the Most Beautiful: A Novel of the Women of Troy, Doubleday, 2016.
Emily Hauser, Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer’s World through the Women Written Out of It, University of Chicago Press, 2025.
Emily Hauser and Helen Maimaris, “An interview with Emily Hauser,” F(r)iction, February 24, 2026.
Natalie Haynes, A Thousand Ships, Harper Perennial, 2021.
Homer, The Odyssey, translated by Emily Wilson, WW Norton, 2017.
Homer, The Iliad, translated by Emily Wilson, WW Norton, 2023.
Adrienne Mayor, The Amazons: Lives and Legends of Warrior Women across the Ancient World, Princeton University Press, 2014.
Madeline Miller, Circe, Little, Brown and Company, 2018.
Claire North, Ithaca, Redhook, 2023.
Jennifer Saint, Ariadne, Flatiron Books, 2021.
Emily Wilson, “A translator’s reckoning with the women of the Odyssey,” The New Yorker, December 8, 2017.
Reference to the individuals and organizations quoted does not constitute a blanket endorsement of either the individuals’ external work or their respective organizations.
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