Mary Beard
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90:14
I want to start very near the beginning of the tradition of Western literature, and its first recorded example of a man telling a woman to ‘shut up’; telling her that her voice was not to be heard in public. I’m thinking of a moment immortalised at the start of the Odyssey. We tend now to think of the Odyssey as the story of Odysseus and the adventures and scrapes he had returning home after the Trojan War – while for decades Penelope loyally waited for him, fending off the suitors who were pressing for her hand.1 But the Odyssey is just as much the story of Telemachus, the son of Odysseus and Penelope; the story of his growing up; how over the course of the poem he matures from boy to man. The process starts in the first book with Penelope coming down from her private quarters into the great hall, to find a bard performing to throngs of her suitors; he’s singing about the difficulties the Greek heroes are having in reaching home. She isn’t amused, and in front of everyone she asks him to choose another, happier number. At which point young Telemachus intervenes: ‘Mother,’ he says, ‘go back up into your quarters, and take up your own work, the loom and the distaff … speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all; for mine is the power in this household.’ And off she goes, back upstairs.2
There is something faintly ridiculous about this wet-behind-the-ears
lad shutting up the savvy, middle-aged Penelope. But it’s a nice
demonstration that right where written evidence for Western culture
starts, women’s voices are not being heard in the public sphere; more
than that, as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is
learning to take control of public utterance and to silence the female
of the species. The actual words Telemachus uses are significant too.
When he says ‘speech’ is ‘men’s business’, the word is muthos –
not in the sense that it has come down to us of ‘myth’. In Homeric
Greek it signals authoritative public speech (not the kind of chatting,
prattling or gossip that anyone – women included, or especially women –
could do).
