(British: Mythica: a new history of Homer’s world through the women written out of it. London: Doubleday, 2025. Pp. 469. ISBN 9781529932485)
This book weaves together four strands: Homeric women, knowledge or reasonable speculation about Bronze Age women (especially based on recent archaeological methods such as DNA analysis), fictional reimaginings of (mostly) Homeric characters, and the history of archaeology and scholarship on the late Bronze Age, with an emphasis on the contributions of women. Each chapter is named for a female character from the epics or their periphery (Cassandra is not a prophet in Homer and Penthesilea does not appear), with goddesses, as well as mortal women, each labelled with a single defining social identity: Queen, Wife, Slave, Prophet. Each chapter then begins, after an illustration, with a close third-person rendering of the possible thoughts of the character or someone in a similar situation, in italics. These are very skilled at evoking a possible person—Emily Hauser is a novelist—although they do not, in my view, offer plausible versions of what the character presented in the epics would think or feel; the book is about types more than the individual characters presented in the narratives themselves. Then, attention turns to an account of how we have acquired information about the past: Alice Kober’s work on Linear B (she deserves credit along with Michael Ventris), the Uluburun shipwreck (a 14th-century BCE wreck loaded with copper, tin, and an astonishing variety of luxury goods), Kim Shelton and the analysis of pig remains, which indicate that at Mycenae, pigs for the palace were fattened on high-quality fodder, while pigs in the town ate rubbish (and were eaten young). These stories are wonderfully vivid and engaging. Many sections begin with the writer’s experience when she visited a site or spoke to an investigator. Then the main body of the chapter goes from some aspect of the character named, most often the status named in the chapter title, how the evidence provided by the modern discoveries provides a background in the real world for that aspect of the character and the character’s situation. So, Hecuba’s conduct of a ritual in Iliad 6 is discussed as a reflection of a powerful Hittite Queen like Puduhepa, Penthesilea prompts a discussion of ancient warrior women, Briseis an examination of enslaved Chian women on the Pylos tablets who do decorative work on textile borders. Circe evokes herbalists, while Nausicaa is put in a context of the marriage laws of Hammurabi. Then, where there are relevant modern revisionist fictions, these receive a quick survey, though they are not treated in any detail.
Footnoting (endnotes) is light, and includes the citations of the epics, which could have been provided parenthetically. The notes often convey the impression that the author frequently has relied heavily on a few sources—unsurprisingly, when a particular site or excavation is discussed. There is a list of characters/glossary, a bibliography, and an index. There are maps, and a section of excellent illustrations, essential for a work that depends so much on material evidence. Now and then there are comparisons to the present: drought contributed to weakening the great empire of the Late Bronze Age; moderns tend to ignore both the labor that went into making ancient textiles and the conditions of those who make the clothes that we wear.
The book has been reviewed enthusiastically, including in the TLS.[1] It is easy to see why. It provides a very wide range of material, and the intended reader can learn a great deal in a remarkably enjoyable way. The ideal reader is perhaps a reader of the recent novels, including Hauser’s own, that offer woman-centered versions of the epics and who has become interested in their backgrounds, or a student who has read the poems and been intrigued. Students, for example, might be inspired when they read Hauser’s account of going to the British Library to look at the Townleianus, with its famous scholium that tells us that the Aethiopis could be linked to the Iliad through the substitution ἦλθε δ’ Ἀμάζων in the last two metra. Even those who are, like me, familiar with the T scholia, will probably be informed and engaged by some of the recent archaeological work, or puzzled by matters they have not previously considered (were the monthly rations of wheat and figs for the textile workers at Pylos really their complete diet?)
I do not share the author’s basic assumptions about Homeric epic. While I take a very different view of the origins of the Homeric text (I think that an early written text is more likely than gradual fixation over time), it is more important that I do not think that the epics reflect Minoan and Mycenean societies, or the neighboring cultures of the eastern Mediterranean with which they were in close contact, quite as much as the author does. Hauser generally emphasizes passages where even elite women are treated as commodities (married to whoever provides the most gifts. I see the situation as more complicated: gifts matter, but so do a suitor’s reputation and qualities (cf. Od. 20.335). A marriage is not a one-off transaction, but maintains or establishes an ongoing relationship, and I would guess that the gifts are in part a way of measuring not just the suitor’s wealth, but his readiness to invest in that relationship. This does not matter as much as one might expect, however, because the book does not try to draw close connections between the individual characters who inspire each chapter (but are not typically treated in much detail) and the Bronze Age background. The final chapter is the extreme case, since its title returns to Penelope but it is mostly about Bittlestone’s argument that the Homeric Ithaca is actually the Paliki peninsula on Cephalonia.[2] I am unconvinced (as are many others), but the debate is not important for Penelope, and the account of the geological work is very interesting in itself. My concerns are mostly for students who are not likely to consider, for example, that Odysseus does not have clerks who record all the livestock consumed by the suitors, or that the dead in the Iliad are cremated (in contrast to Bronze Age inhumation).
Beyond my basic disagreements, however, I was annoyed while reading that the book is often slightly careless, especially about the Homeric texts, in a way that reviewers have not noted. Simplification is inevitable when we address non-specialists, but inaccuracy is not. The rest of this review will be grumpy, because I care a great deal about what the Homeric poems actually say, and even about other facts—for example, that Brooklyn is not a suburb of New York (p. 55) but has been a borough since 1898. A selection from my list: Homer was not said to have stolen “his poetry” from the Pythia Daphne (p. 132), but to have stolen lines with which he adorned his own composition (Diod. Sic. 4.66). While in epic it appears that power in Sparta is indeed matrilineal (85), this is not the case among the Phaeacians (p. 289), where there is a patrilineal line and the great-grandmother is named because the line begins with her sons by Poseidon (Od. 7.56). In the glossary, “a prize of honor won in battle” is not a satisfactory definition of geras; “a sum of money (or goods)” as a definition of edna gives the false impression that the epics mention money. On p. 138, the author states “Homer describes the corpses heaped in stinking piles, picked over by dogs and carrion birds, their flesh pockmarked with the rings of Apollo’s arrow-strikes.” The Iliad offers nothing of the kind, but instead mentions constant and close-packed funeral pyres (Il. 1.52). As evidence for the husband’s control of a wife’s dowry Hauser says, “we see Priam, king of Troy, drawing on the dowry of his first wife (Hecuba’s predecessor) to pay for his sons’ ransom” (p. 268). The text (Il. 22.49–51) does not specify whom Priam married first; Priam does not in fact use the dowry to ransom Lycaon and Polydorus, who are already dead; since the dowry is their mother’s, this use of it hardly seems arbitrary, especially since the verb is plural, and probably indicates that Laothoe would participate in the ransom.
Sometimes the book states as fact matters that are uncertain: “(Ilios…a word that, in Homeric Greek, would actually have been pronounced Wilios (the ‘w’ was later dropped)” (p.102). It would not be difficult to explain digamma without making any disputable assertions. Page 166 refers to “exposure on a mountainside (a cruel but common fate for unwanted children in the ancient world).” The frequency of exposure is debated, but certainly mountainsides rather than manure piles were not common outside folklore and literature.
Sometimes the book is not wrong, but remote from what the texts actually say. On p. 291, Iphitus is described as “a distinguished ally” of Odysseus and an Argonaut. He is indeed an Argonaut in Apollonius, but what the Odyssey actually says is that he was murdered by Heracles not long after he met the very young Odysseus in Lacedaemon. The bow is indeed a marker of Odysseus’ place in a social network, (p. 291) but its most salient feature is that it belonged to Eurotus, an archer greater than Odysseus himself but one who challenged Apollo (Od. 8.223–8). The chapter on Calypso suggests that perhaps Calypso only kept Odysseus so long because making a sail by herself would take seven years, while her attendants serve food and therefore are not textile workers, though Calypso herself serves at Od. 5.92–3, 196–7.[3] Similarly, the book comments that pig husbandry might be a practical choice for the isolated Circe. Maybe these remarks are jokes, but they are not signaled as such. If we try to imagine these remote goddesses as if they were real, the problems are limitless (does Calypso cultivate flax or keep sheep? Where does her ambrosia come from? What about the mortal food she provides to Odysseus? How does Circe provide feasts for Odysseus and his companions for a year?). More important, the narrator tells us at Od. 1.14–15 that she keeps him on her island intentionally because she wants him as a sexual partner, and everything she says confirms that. The work required for a ship’s sail is worth learning about, but scholars who believe that the Homeric narrator is unreliable need to argue that.
This is all marginal to the book’s real core. Would I recommend it? Yes, but with caution.
Notes
[1] Emma Greensmith. “Magical mutability: A poet for yesterday and today,” TLS. Times Literary Supplement, no. 6381, 18 July 2025, p. 19.
[2] R. Bittlestone, 2005. Odysseus Unbound. The Search for Homer’s Ithaca. Cambridge.
[3] “One of many delightful insights,” A. E. Stallings, Wall Street Journal (Online) Dow Jones & Company Inc. Jun 13, 2025.