Husbands and Wives in Homer

How do I know that there were dead white males who loved and respected their wives? Because the twin literary fountainheads of Western literature each highlights a mature and faithful couple who share mutual affection and regard for one another: Hector and Andromache in the “Iliad”; Odysseus and Penelope in the “Odyssey.”

As a Texan who spent the first half of his life in New Jersey, New York, and Michigan, I can attest that the prejudice of north against south is in many ways stronger and more deeply ingrained than that of south against north. There are many who live below the Mason-Dixon line who don’t like Yankees and who make their feelings known, but the distaste for and dismissal of the South is at once more subtle and more pervasive in the East Coast and Midwest.

Northern schoolkids have instilled in them a mostly sub-rational suspicion that folks from the south are backward and bigoted, intolerant and ill-educated, only partly civilized rednecks who are “not like us.” It is not that different from the way all Americans continue to have instilled in them a bias against the Middle Ages: that dark period marked by the Spanish Inquisition, witch trials, and the divine right of kings, when people thought the earth was flat and technology and education were primitive. Even when people learn the truth—that the first three took place during the Renaissance, that every educated Medieval from Augustine to Aquinas, Boethius to Dante knew the earth was round, and that those same Medievals built the great cathedrals and universities—they are likely to persist in believing the self-aggrandizing bias they were taught.

I call the bias against the Middle Ages (and the South) self-aggrandizing because the act of labelling other periods (or groups) as ignorant, superstitious, and unenlightened allows us to feel intellectually and morally superior to them. This supercilious conceit, this self-satisfied back-patting, which continues to be directed at the Middle Ages and the South, is directed with even greater haughtiness and condescension at the husbands and fathers of the past. Before the modern period, we are taught, men looked upon their wives as chattel, as nothing more than their goods and property.

Now, it is true that the women of the past did not have the right to vote; it is also true that they mostly lacked property, educational, and financial rights. Though they nevertheless exerted a strong influence on their families and cultures, and though most men lacked the same rights, it is true that women had considerable limits placed upon them. It is not true, however, that all husbands therefore scorned and mistreated their wives. There were good and bad husbands (and fathers) in the past as there are today: some who loved, respected, and sacrificed for their wives and some who abused, dishonored, and neglected them.

How do I know that there were dead white males who loved and respected their wives? Because the twin literary fountainheads of Western literature each highlights a mature and faithful couple who share mutual affection and regard for one another: Hector and Andromache in the Iliad; Odysseus and Penelope in the Odyssey. Though it might be argued that Homer’s epics are mere flukes of history, the fact that they were read and reread by hundreds of generations of readers, all of whom were able to recognize and find themselves in those two couples, validates the essential and perennial authenticity of their intimate marital partnership.

Husband and Wife Separated

The meeting of Hector and Andromache in Book 6 of the Iliad is one of the most poignant and human episodes in all of literature, ancient as well as modern. Hector, crown prince of Troy, is a warrior committed fully to his men and his city, but he takes the time to meet with and console his wife before returning to the war that he fears will take his life. He does not do this to virtue signal or to prove how sensitive and caring he is. He does it because he loves his wife (and son) and because he is as committed to her as he is to the battlefield where men win glory.

To set up the final dialogue between husband and wife, Homer has Hector seek out Andromache in the private, domestic, feminine sphere of home, family, and temple. But she is in neither of these places; instead, she has run to the public, political, masculine sphere of the watchtower, for she has heard that the tide of war has turned toward the Greeks and fears her husband is in danger. In the end, the lovers reunite in a liminal space by the city gates, where they can meet on neutral ground and say their farewells (lines 369-395; Richmond Lattimore translation).

Andromache begs Hector to remain inside the walls where he will be safe, but her appeal is not only emotional. She is a fine match for Troy’s greatest general, and Homer has her appeal to her husband with some excellent strategic advice: “draw your people up by the fig tree, there where the city / is openest to attack, and where the wall may be mounted. / Three times their bravest came that way, and fought there to storm it” (433-435).

Hector knows that Andromache is desperate to have him stay, and there is a part of him that wants to do so. But he is a man of duty and honor, and he knows that he must return to his men. He could simply shrug off Andromache’s feminine tears and leave, but he does not. Rather, he takes the time and the effort to explain to her why he must return:

“All these
things are in my mind also, lady; yet I would feel deep shame
before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments,
if like a coward I were to shrink aside from the fighting;
and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant
and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans,
winning for my own self great glory, and for my father.” (440-446)

Note how patient and tender Hector is with his wife. He neither dismisses nor belittles her concerns. He hears her and even agrees with her, but his valiant and noble spirit will not allow him to shirk his duties. He could not bear the shame that would fall upon him if he forsook his masculine role of guardian and protector. The code by which he lives has been instilled deeply in him, but not in the way that anti-southern or anti-medieval or anti-dead white male bias has been instilled in the last several generations of Americans. Our modernist catechisms have taught us to feel smug and superior; Hector’s has taught him to be humble and responsible.

Having tried his best to console his wife and to explain to her, rational adult to rational adult, why he must do what he must do, Hector could have quickly taken his leave. Instead, he reaches out to take their child in his arms. His intentions are tender and loving, but when the baby sees his father’s dreadful helmet with its nodding crest of horsehair, he cries out in terror (469). In response, the loving father takes off his helmet, laughs out loud, tosses his boy in his hands, kisses him, and speaks a blessing over his head. It is a rare and humanizing moment in an epic dedicated to warfare, and it speaks powerfully to the intimate bond that exists between husband and wife, father and son.

But he is still not done. As he places their baby back in his mother’s arms, he sees that, despite her smile, her tears are still flowing. “And her husband saw,” writes Homer, “and took pity upon her, / and stroked her with his hand, and called her by name and spoke to her” (484-485). He sees her, not as an impersonal possession or an inanimate object, but as a woman whom he loves dearly and who desperately needs consolation. And so, once again, with patience and gentleness, he tries to explain why he must leave, Whatever path he chooses, he assures her, he cannot escape his death day. It is best, then, that he choose the path of courage and duty.

As for Andromache, Hector offers her advice on how she may deal physically and emotionally with the madness around them:

“Go therefore back to our house, and take up your own work,
the loom and the distaff, and see to it that your handmaidens
ply their work also; but the men must see to the fighting,
all men who are the people of Ilion, but I beyond others.” (490-493)

What Hector offers Andromache is a traditional understanding of the two spheres, with the wife taking charge of the domestic sphere and the husband taking charge of the military-civic sphere. He does so, not to crush her or control her or objectify her or infantilize her, but to provide her with a strategy for imposing order, balance, and harmony on a world that often lacks all three. As he explains it, both of their spheres are equally essential and equally meaningful. In both, they not only labor themselves, but guide others in their labor. As long as they remain faithful to that labor, all will be well.

When, in Book 22, Hector meets his death day, Andromache is neither on the watchtower nor by the city gates. She is working busily at the loom, where her husband asked her to be, where she is fulfilling a role that is both essential and meaningful to herself, her family, and her community.

Husband and Wife Reunited

Although Achilles, not Hector, is the central character of the Iliad, he is only nineteen years old at the time of the epic, the same age Telemachus, son of Odysseus, is in the Odyssey. Neither has a wife nor understands what it means to be a husband. That is why readers in search of a Homeric model for domestic partnership must look to Hector in the Iliad and Odysseus in the Odyssey.

Whereas Hector is a relatively young husband and father, Odysseus and Penelope have been married for over two decades. Sadly, they spend nearly all those years separated by the Trojan War and by Odysseus’s lengthy return journey. Too often, modern readers of the Odyssey come away from the epic with a vision of Odysseus as a lusty sailor with a girl in every port. That vision is supported by the fact that most moderns read the Odyssey through the lens of Dante’s Inferno 26 and Tennyson’s “Ulysses,” poems that present Odysseus as a Greek Sinbad the Sailor, a restless adventurer with a wanderlust whose greatest desire is to sail perpetually across the seven seas.

In fact, Odysseus, whose sole desire is to return home to Ithaca, only sleeps with two women during his decade-long travels, both of whom are goddesses, and both of whom he must sleep with to survive. I don’t say this to justify adultery but to point out that what is remarkable about Odysseus is not that he sleeps with the eternally young and beautiful Circe and Calypso but that he willingly leaves them to return to Penelope.

Although it takes quite a bit of coaxing from his men to get Odysseus to leave Circe (Book 10), he chooses on his own to leave Calypso. Despite the fact that Calypso promises to make him immortal—and we must not forget that before he mees Calypso, he visits the underworld and sees how miserable it is—Odysseus chooses a mortal life with Penelope over an immortal one with Calypso. The passage in which he articulates the reason for his choice offers powerful proof that not all men of the past looked upon their wives as mere servants or possessions.

Here is how Odysseus responds to the despondent Calypso when she insists that his Penelope cannot be more beautiful than she:

“My lady goddess, do not be angry at what I am about to say. I too know well enough that my wise Penelope’s looks and stature are insignificant compared with yours. For she is mortal, while you have immortality and unfading youth. Nevertheless I long to reach my home and see the day of my return. It is my never failing wish. And what if one of the gods does wreck me out on the wine-dark sea? I have a heart that is inured to suffering and I shall steel it to endure that too. For in my day I have had many bitter and painful experiences in war and on the stormy seas. So let this new disaster come. It only makes one more.” (Book 5, lines 215-24; E. V. Rieu prose translation)

Odysseus here does not denigrate his wife’s beauty. He merely states an incontrovertible fact: no mortal woman, however lovely, can match the beauty of the divine and immortal Calypso. Odysseus is no shallow male concerned only with looks and sex appeal; he is also not interested in having a trophy wife. He returns to Penelope, not because of her external beauty, but because he is not himself when he is not with her.

All is summed up in that single, pivotal conjunction: “nevertheless.” Everything Calypso says is true; Odysseus must be mad to leave her and return to Penelope. Nevertheless, he chooses to leave her, for he cannot do anything else. Ithaca is his home, but that home has no meaning if he is not also reunited with Penelope. That is who Odysseus is. It is true that he possesses Penelope, but then Penelope possesses him as well.

Just as Andromache’s strategic mind complements Hector’s, so Penelope complements Odysseus in her cunning and ability to survive whatever fortune throws at her. Odysseus knows that, and he loves and respects her for it. They are a perfect team, with a practical cleverness combined with a deep sense of loyalty and perseverance. It is Penelope who sets in motion the happy ending by proving her loyalty in a rather unique way.

Though she despises the suitors and has no desire to marry any of them, she announces to them—in the presence of Odysseus, who is disguised as an old beggar—that before her husband left for Troy, he had made her promise that if Telemachus came of age before his return, she would take another husband. She then scolds them for their boorish behavior and instructs them to bring their own food and to give her gifts befitting suitors.

“The noble, patient Odysseus,” writes Homer, “was delighted at her words, because she was extorting gifts from her suitors and bewitching them by her persuasive words, while all the time her heart was set on something quite different” (Book 18, lines 281-283). Here is a man who trusts his wife, who respects and takes pleasure in her quick wit and shrewd intellect. Circe and Calypso may have immortal beauty, but Penelope is his soulmate, his partner in crime, his girl Friday.

Penelope declares that she will marry the suitor who can bend Odysseus’s bow and shoot an arrow through a row of axe heads—a contest that provides the means for Odysseus, with Telemachus’ help, to kill the suitors who have been desecrating his home. Although Penelope initially oversees the contest, when the moment comes near for the disguised Odysseus to make his move, Telemachus takes the bow from his mother and says,

Go therefore back into the house, and take up your own work,
the loom and the distaff, and see to it that your handmaidens
ply their work also. The men shall have the bow in their keeping,
all men, but I most of all. For mine is the power in this household.”
(Book 21, lines 350-353; Lattimore translation)

The attentive reader will note that these four verses—an earlier version of which Telemachus speaks in Book 1, lines 356-359—are nearly identical to those that Hector speaks to Andromache. Here, too, in the world of the Odyssey, there are masculine and feminine spheres that provide order, balance, and meaning to a tenuous world. That Telemachus speaks them shows that he is ready to take up the mantle of his father and to someday take a wife of his own whom he will guard, respect, and love.

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The featured image is “Parting of Hector and Andromache” by John Smibert (1688-1751), and is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.