Odysseus has been gone for eighteen years. Ten years at Troy and eight years wandering at the whim of Poseidon now wasting time – five of them at this point - with that nymph Calypso on her island of Ogygia. And they said he was the most cunning of the Greeks.
Look where his smarts landed him. To begin with there was that scheme about who Helen was to marry. There was Helen, beautiful daughter of Leda, fathered by Zeus but foster-fathered by Tyndareus of Sparta. All the princes of Greece came with rich gifts as her suitors. Odysseus came too, empty-handed. He had not the least chance of success but he knew that she would be won and wooed by Menelaus, brother of Agamemnon who, incidentally, had married Helen’s sister Clytemnestra after murdering her first husband.
Tyndareus did not want to be seen to be favouring one suitor – a theme repeated in Ithaca but in a different context - over the other for fear of a quarrel that could consume Greece in conflict.
Odysseus proposed a solution. Tyndareus was to insist that all Helen’s suitors (himself included) would swear to defend her chosen husband against whoever resents his good fortune. But Odysseus had a price – he was not a something for nothing schemer. His price was to marry Penelope, the daughter of Icaurius and cousin of Helen and Clytemnestra. And so it was. And as we all know Trojan Paris, backed by Aphrodite, won Helen away after her marriage, thus requiring the Greek princes, led by Agamemnon, to fulfil their oath.
And so it was that Agamemnon came calling to Ithaca – calling upon Odysseus to fulfil his oath. Such is the law of unintended consequences. Odysseus had been warned by an oracle that if he left to go to Troy he would not return for twenty years and so he feigned madness.
Agamemnon, Menelaus and Palamedes found him wearing a peasant’s felt cap, ploughing with an ass and ox yoked together feigning madness, flinging salt over his shoulder. Odysseus pretended not to recognize his distinguished guests until Palamedes snatched his baby son Telemachus from Penelope’s arms and set him in the ground before the advancing team. Odysseus reined them in to avoid killing his only son. His ploy was revealed, his “madness” cured, his smarts defeated and he was obliged to join the expedition.
Odysseus had a part to play in the Trojan War and was responsible for the stratagem of the Wooden Horse deception by which the Greeks breach the walls of Troy after a ten year siege but he is out of the picture and the action on Ithaca.
Look where his smarts landed his kingdom, what is left of his people, his son Telemachus and his wife Penelope. A generation of men have been shipped of to Troy to fight in the war, leaving old men and women behind to look after the kingdom. The warriors have returned in dribs and drabs but there is a generation lost.
Ithaca – positioned strategically at the mouth of the Gulf of Corinth, controls trade up the Ionian Sea and there are rumours that the wealth of Odysseus is there for the taking. An attractive Queen, a wealthy and influential island kingdom that is kingless because after the ten years of war, veterans have returned but not Odysseus. Who could resist such a prize.
And so after eighteen years of absence suitors for the hand of Penelope and the rule of the kingdom gather. Penelope, like her uncle Tyndareus, is careful not to play favourites. If she does two things will happen. There will be bloodshed, but even more significantly she will have breached the iron-hard laws of hospitality that require her to feed and provide for her guests and do nothing that might harm them.
But Ithaca is under threat and as the book opens raiders, from Illyria it seems but not all is as it seems, are making a nuisance of themselves on Ithaca’s northern coast.
The book covers the space of a few months as Penelope struggles with threats from raiders, the impatience of the suitors, her son Telemachus who wants to do more, the larger threat that may come from a Greek princeling anxious to absorb Ithaca and the constant concern as to whether Odysseus will return or not.
There is a suggestion that the raids may have been organized by one of the suitors either as part of a protection racket or in an effort to bring some finality to the question of Penelope’s remarriage and the future of Ithaca. A thread of the story deals with the way in which this is suggestion is investigated but in such a way as to conceal the inquiry and also to maintain the rigorous hospitality customs.
And into the mix, as if things were complicated enough, comes Clytemnestra, fleeing Mycenae after her murder of her husband Agamemnon. Penelope is aware of her presence and she must remain hidden. Why? Because hot on her heels are her children Orestes and Elektra and so the story of Ithaca becomes interwoven with the Orestia and the curse of the House of Atreus.
Orestes must avenge the murder of his father by killing Clytemnestra. The problem is that this vengeance involves the horrible crime of matricide and as the doom of Clytemnestra approaches, the Furies, vengeful spirits, are lurking below, waiting to bedevil Orestes.
The book ends with a resolution of the problem of the raids and with the death of Clytemnestra at the hand of Orestes although the effort seems to be a half-hearted one and involves the assistance of Elektra. And the ultimate return of Odysseus – we all know that this is going to happen but not in this story – is heralded.
This is a woman’s story dealing not with the actions of the heroes – all men – with which readers of Greek myth are familiar – but with the actions, thoughts, fears, joys and threats to the women around them. The book is written by a woman – of which more shortly – and the story-teller is a woman although it takes a little while to work out that in fact the narrator is the goddess Hera who is working quietly, not directly interfering with the events on the island and avoiding attracting the attention of Zeus. The Gods have made their decrees at least about the fate of Odysseus and it would be unwise to interfere. But there are others who are prepared to be a little more active – Athena for example who is the protector of Odysseus. And towards the end of the story the wild forest denizen huntress Artemis makes an appearance.
The male Olympians are not present. They are in the background and play no active part in the proceedings. In some respects there are echoes of Robert Graves theories about the White Goddess. He suggested that the prototypical religion involved Goddess worship, with many ceremonies honouring the Moon Goddess. Other female deities – The Great Mother and Isis of the Egyptians for example – suggest the dominance of female deities who were later replaced by a male dominated pantheon and the development of the male dominated society that is echoed in the stories of myth.
But the Goddess remains and mythologies – and those of the Greeks are no exception – are populated with strong women. And a number of these strong women of Greek myth have been the subject of retellings of some of the stories.
Whereas the accepted accounts of the heroes in the past have come from male writers, the retellings provide a different perspective. Elements of the stories that may not have been present in the male telling are brought forward, sometimes highlighted, or placed into sharper focus by a female writer.
Claire North’s telling of the story is in the form of a slow burn. We can sense the frustration felt by the narrator Hera at her inability to dramatically affect events and there seems to be a sense of inevitability of tragedy. But the tragedy is not that of Penelope who was, at sixteen, married to Odysseus and who grows and matures, clever and cunning in her own way, revealed more by action – or possibly inaction – that any clear insight into her motivations although slowly and gradually they become clear.
There is no romantic ideal of life on Ithaca. This is not a Greece of marble and beauty but a rough farming community on a rough and rocky island that is well situated on the trade routes. Although she is Queen, Penelope has to at times get down and dirty along with everyone else. Instead of magnificent temples and monuments there are sheep folds and pig pens. Instead of the smell of sacrifice there is the odour of offal and dung. Most of the buildings are anything but permanent and burn easily after the application of a raider’s torch.
But it is within this setting that the power play takes place and the intermingled tragedies play out. Telemachus struggles with his own views of ancestral expectations. Orestes knows what he has to do but in a sense would rather avoid doing it. It is the women – the strong women – backed by female Goddesses – who must bring the necessary steel to the spine. And of course, this is not what we hear from Homer or Hesiod although Euripedes The Trojan Women is a tale of feminine strength in extreme adversity. Hecuba in particular lets it be known that Troy had been her home for her entire life, only to see herself as an old grandmother watching the burning of Troy, the death of her husband, her children, and her grandchildren before she will be taken as a slave to Odysseus. Katharine Hepburn’s portrayal in the 1971 film is a triumph.
There are a number of modern recastings of the tales of Greek myth from a woman’s perspective. Jennifer Saint has retold the stories of Elektra, Ariadne and Atalanta. Laura Shepperson’s debut novel tells the tale of Phaedra and her allegation of rape and the fight against the patriarchy. I recently saw a book in Unity by Luna Macnamara entitled Eros and Psyche, described as a riotous adventure populated by a cast of vivid glittering characters, as all these stories are. Natalia Haynes tells the tale of Medusa in Stone Blind who is also the subject of Hannah Lynn’s Athena’s Child. Lynn has also written of the Amazons in Queens of Themiscyra and of Clytemnestra in A Spartan’s Sorrow.
Clytemnestra provides a good ground for rewriting. The dramatic story of the Queen betrayed so often by her powerful husband, the image of the vengeful Queen, long-handled axe in hand standing before her dead husband in a bath as portrayed by John Collier is just too good to go past. And the awful tale of her daughter Iphigenia and her other children, Orestes and Elektra have long provided writers and dramatists with an opportunity for retelling.
Costanza Casati has written of the vengeance and infamy of the Queen in Clytemnestra. The tales that hover on the fringes of the voyages of Odysseus are the subject of re-imaginings as well. An example can be found in Madelaine Miller’s Circe who has also retold the story of Achilles through the eyes of Briseis in The Song of Achilles and the Trojan War from an all-female perspective in A Thousand Ships.
Some may question why we need these retellings. The uncharitable might say that Greek myth provides a fertile ground because there is no copyright in the stories. That, of course, is rubbish. Of course there should be retellings. The tales of myth are all retellings. Overlays of well-known stories come from many sources. The poet we call Homer is not the only source for the Trojan War or the wanderings of Odysseus. That becomes clear if a reader checks the sources of the stories in Robert Graves The Greek Myths. Retellings are part of the literary tradition of myth.
That business with the promise of the Greek princes at the wedding of Helen isn’t in the Iliad, nor that tale of the madness of Odysseus when required to fulfil his oath. Aeschylus and Euripedes both wrote of the events and people of the Trojan Wars and the Orestia was reimagined and updated in Eugene O’Neill in Mourning Becomes Electra.
So rejoice in the retellings. I understand that Ithaca is the first book in a series known as The Songs of Penelope and the second book The House of Odysseus is to be published in August 2023. It seems that the threats present in Ithaca become even more complex with the continued presence of Orestes and Elektra and Aphrodite, who was not present in the narrative of Ithaca becomes involved. I look forward to its release.
But as I read all these books I get a sense that not only are there echoes of Graves’ White Goddess in the story line itself but that the Goddess as Muse perhaps inspires the authors of these various very readable and thought-provoking retellings.
And should you think that in this day and age there is no place for deities, and especially Olympian deities, reflect upon the Greek name of Greece’s best known city Ἀθῆναι Athenai – the ancient name of the Goddess.