Homer's Epic and Love in the Trojan War

Abstract

In his works ‘Iliad’ and ‘Odyssey’, Homer offers insights into his attitudes toward women, reflecting the societal views of the period to which he belonged (8th century BCE). This also extends to the heroic age of great wars and powerful kingdoms, which Homer seeks to reconstruct, and which classical philology designates as the Mycenaean age and the era of the Trojan War (16th-13th centuries BCE).

By setting earlier and later conceptions of women’s status in deliberate contrast, the poet is able to articulate a set of nuanced and broadly resonant reflections on this topic. This study proceeds by examining selected textual details and thematic developments in order to assess how The Iliad and The Odyssey represent attitudes toward women in the context of the Trojan War, as well as how they construct emotional expression and the motif of love.

To clarify this issue, we will examine a series of couples who serve as the basis for understanding the dynamics between men and women during the Trojan War. These couples are: Hector and Andromache, Odysseus and Penelope, Alcinous and Arete, Alexander and Helen, Menelaus and Helen, and Agamemnon and Clytemnestra.

All of these couples are linked through marital bonds. This is hardly surprising, as the fundamental social unit depicted in the epics—both among the Achaeans and the Trojans—is the family, whose principal and fully  recognized members are the husband, the wife, and the children.

Homer presents an idealized vision of marriage. In his epics, women preserve their traditional roles:  they love their husbands, attend to their customary tasks and obligations, and care for their children and spouses. Yet Homer's perspective on women is strikingly innovative, for he elevates the marital bond to a level of romantic attachment that would scarcely be matched in later literature—and was absent in real social practice at least until the Classical period (5th-4th centuries BCE).

Homer is interested not in the isolated figure—whether an outstanding heroe or a woman—but in the relationship between them: an equal partnership in which both share the same pains and anxieties toward their enemies and the same goodwill toward their friends. Homer’s unmistakably positive stance is directed toward a society in which the rights of women and men are balanced, both within the household and in society.

Particular attention should also be given to the affectionate tone with which Priam, the mighty king of Troy, speaks of the Colchian Amazon maidens with whom he won many battles, and whose queens—despite leading distinctly masculine lives—were often objects of romantic admiration.