The following is an investigation of the nature of women in the Homeric poems. It is generally accepted that epic figures are typical rather than individual, idiosyncratic personalities. So it is reasonable to assume that the women of the two poems represent the general conception of female behaviour held by Homer's audience. Even if the poems represent a tradition which was a long time in the making, it remains true that what appears within the poems must have made sense somehow to Homer's contemporary audience. And that is the sense we must seek.

There has been very little said about the role of women in the Homeric epics. Discussion is bound to be uneven; women are glimpsed infrequently in the Iliad, whereas they are everywhere in the Odyssey. But this in itself perhaps offers insights into the nature of the difference between the two poems. In addition an analysis of the part women play in these poems helps to explain the continual appeal of the Iliad and the Odyssey. For the poems, like all truly great pieces of literature, say things that we humans need and want to hear. As is true of other facets of the poems the female characters are extraordinarily authentic. They manifest moods and psychological states which are true to women, at least in the Western world. Moreover the poems, especially the Odyssey, show with great profundity some important truths of male-female relationships. Whether these are inherent and never-changing or it is because women's situation has not much changed through the millenia is hard to say.

The Women of Trachis — or more properly, the Girls of Trachis — looks backward to a work of Aeschylus, and forward to one of Euripides. All three, the Oresteia, the Trachiniae, the Medea, are tragedies about the sexes.

The Trachiniae reminds us of the Oresteia in the following points: Heracles, like Agamemnon, has been away for a long time, on ‘men's business’. He brings home a concubine, Iole, as Agamemnon brings Cassandra. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, comments on the silence of the captive girl. Deianeira, like Clytemnestra, causes the death of her husband. Deianeira has a son Hyllus who, like Orestes, is loyal to his father and outraged by his father's murder. There the similarity ends. Although Heracles is not totally unlike Agamemnon, Deianeira could hardly be more different from Clytemnestra: she is feminine and passive, gentle with Iole, whose silence she understands, and she kills her husband accidentally, from love, not hatred. Hyllus, too, is different from Orestes: even when he thinks Deianeira has wilfully murdered his father, the worst treatment he can conceive for her is banishment with his curse. In the Oresteia, gods are ever-present, and appear in person on the stage to effect the happy conclusion of the trilogy.

In his review of the first edition of Brooks Otis's Ovid as an Epic Poet, William Anderson challenges the notion that structural symmetry is the principle that governs Ovid's narrative design. To propose an alternative view of Ovidian aesthetics, he takes for his example the weaving contest of Arachne and Minerva in Book 6. Minerva's tapestry which depicts her own victory in the contest for the naming of Athens is arranged in a completely symmetrical design. The judging gods stand six on either side of Jupiter; the disputants likewise stand on opposite sides. Each corner of the tapestry contains a panel showing the punishment of mortals who in one way or another have challenged the gods, and the whole is framed with an ornamental border of olive leaves. “The goddess,” as Anderson says, “produced a perfect piece of Classicistic art, structurally balanced and thematically grandiose, in support of the established order.” With this monumental and authoritarian piece of work, the tapestry of Minerva's rival Arachne contrasts in every way. It is flagrantly asymmetrical and lifelike:

Ovid tells us everything in the first poem. Love poetry requires a lover. Experience and involvement are essential ingredients of this poetry. The subjective nature of elegy is critical.

Cupid poises his bow: the picture is breath-catchingly drawn. After the crisp unfolding of the earlier part of the poem, these lines hang in suspense. We feel the suspended moments as the bow bends and the string tightens, as the arm steadies, takes aim and lets fly:

questus eram, pharetra cum protinus ille soluta
legit in exitium spicula facta meum
lunavitque genu sinuosum fortiter arcum
‘quodque canas, vates, accipe’ dixit ‘opus.’

There is also the careful selection of the correct arrow and Cupid's statement, its effortful staccato imitating his physical tensing and swift release.

Like the previous speakers of Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes describes Eros in terms of his own profession, even endowing it with his personal image. His hiccups are programmatic, creating laughter; they are strategic too, enabling him to speak after Doctor Eryximachus, whose pretensions to scientific mastery of the various ‘erotic sciences’ he is bound to undercut. Indeed, just before he speaks, he states his purpose. It is to ‘make laughter’. He is not afraid of saying something comical, ‘for that would be clear gain, the native business of our Muse’, but of saying something ridiculous, of being laughed at, not with. The preliminary skirmish, so like a comic proagon, shows confidence and skill; a major competitor, and a dangerous one, has entered on the scene.

‘If you speak at the right length, winding together the strands of many themes into one, the reproach of men will be less' (ll. 81-82). And in truth Pindar's First Pythian is filled with complex and conflicting elements twisted into a tightly knit pattern of myth, metaphor, advice, and historical allusion. The listener moves from celestial harmony to the volcano of Aitna, from the sack of Troy to the founding of a new city. He witnesses the battle of Cumae and the strivings of a tyrant for immortal fame. He is lulled to sleep by the lyre, startled awake by grim Typhon and the barbarians of Carthage, made to feel compassion for the sick Philoktetes, and confronted with the incarnate evil of a man who burned his enemies to death in a bronze bull. Yet at the same time, in counterpoint to this rapid succession of images, Pindar polarizes basic themes — music and discord, peace and pain, chaos and foundation — over the widest range his poetry will allow.

Furi et Aureli, comites Catulli,
sive in extremos penetrabit Indos,
litus ut longe resonante Eoa tunditur unda,

sive in Hyrcanos Arabasve molles,
seu Sagas sagittiferosve Parthos,
sive quae septemgeminus colorat aequora Nilus,

sive trans altas gradietur Alpes,
Caesaris visens monimenta magni,
Gallicum Rhenum horribile aequor ultimosque Britannos,

omnia haec, quaecumque feret voluntas
caelitum, temptare simul parati,
pauca nuntiate meae puellae non bona dicta.

cum suis vivat valeatque moechis,
quos simul complexa tenet trecentos,
nullum amans vere, sed identidem omnium ilia rumpens;

nee meum respectet, ut ante, amorem,
qui illius culpa cecidit velut prati
ultimi flos, praetereunte postquam tactus aratro est.

(Furius and Aurelius, companions of Catullus, whether he will make his way into the farthest Indi, where the shore is beaten by the far-resounding eastern wave, or into the Hyrcani or the soft Arabians, whether to the Sagae or arrow-bearing Parthians, whether into the waters which sevenfold Nile dyes, whether he will cross over the lofty Alps, viewing the memorials of mighty Caesar, the Gallic Rhine, bristling water and remotest Britons — all these things, prepared to test together whatever the will of the gods shall bring: announce a few words to my girl, words not pleasant. Let her live and flourish with her adulterers, whom three hundred at once she holds in her embrace, loving no one of them truly, but again and again breaking the strength of all. And let her not look for my love, as before, which by her fault has fallen like a flower of the remotest meadow after it has been touched by a passing plough.)

Il y a plus affairs à interpréter les interprétations qu'à interpréter les choses.

Montaigne

The ninety-three line galliambic narrative of the story of Attis and his encounter with Cybele occupies an important position in the oeuvre of Catullus, yet it has received relatively little attention from Catullan scholars and critics. One reason for this inattention may be traced to the fact that Poem 63, one of the carmina maiora, seems to contain little or no biographical information; thus it has been passed over by critics and scholars of the biographical persuasion and by those who tend in that direction, in favor of the shorter poems which are more closely connected to Catullus' personal life and experience. The old but tenacious belief in the ‘spontaneous Catullus’ has also served to divert attention from the carmina maiora as a group, since these poems are such obvious products of a doctus poeta writing in the neoteric and Alexandrian fashion. Critics like Elder and Quinn have done well to demonstrate that the so-called ‘spontaneous’ poems are often full of the same carefully calculated artistic effects and subtle doctrina which characterize the long poems, and such efforts have led to renewed consideration of the carmina maiora, especially of Poem 64. Moreover, the demonstration of stylistic connections between the long poems and the rest of the Catullan oeuvre has provided the impetus for Ross's recent study, which argues that there are closer links between the carmina maiora and the polymetrics than between the polymetrics and the epigrams which make up the last part of the liber Catulli. Despite all this, however, I would maintain that serious critical discussion of Poem 63 still lags behind some of the work being done on other poems of Catullus, that consideration of the Attis is still hampered by its distance from the poet's ‘experience’ or by misguided and forced attempts to make it somehow connect with that experience.