What can history tell us about the lives of women at the time of the Trojan War? Emily Hauser’s new book examines how recent advances in archaeology and science reveal a surprising amount about the real women who made the Greek myths.
‘Myth’. The very word in English appears to mean something that’s not true – something that feels the very opposite of history.
Myths – like that most famous myth cycle from ancient Greece, the Trojan War – are very good at sweeping generalizations, at big-picture landscapes, at rises and falls, at once-upon-a-times (Helen went to Troy) and not-so-happily-ever-afters (oh dear, Agamemnon). What myth won’t do – what it can’t do – is provide infallible, accurate records of historical events and characters.
Myth doesn’t keep receipts; it doesn’t remember which bits in the chain of stories, passed from mouth to mouth, got changed or amplified or magicked just a bit with the wand of imagination.
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For centuries, (mostly male) archaeologists have got this wrong, searching for the “reality” behind legendary sites like Troy and – as in the case of Heinrich Schliemann, who dug at Troy in the 1870s – getting so desperate to prove the myth right that they ended up blasting through most of the ancient ruins, and so (with aching irony) destroying the actual evidence in the process.
Yet there is a lot at stake in myth, too – particularly when it comes to women. It’s no coincidence that the horrifying monsters that populate these ancient legends are almost always women (the serpent-haired Medusa whose gaze turns men to stone; the riddling Sphinx; the multi-headed, invincible Lernean Hydra); while heroes are near-exclusively men (Perseus, Oedipus, Heracles).
Trickling down into enormously influential ancient texts, like Homer’s grand war-epic, the Iliad, and the hero’s voyage home told in the Odyssey, such myths became concretized in a tradition of male poets, sung for (and read by) male audiences, and taught to male schoolboys across the centuries. It’s out of myth that stereotypes about what women and men should and shouldn’t do, and be, took root.
So, when I set out to write my new book, Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out Of It, I didn’t just want to shake things up: I wanted to show that, by either ignoring myth or letting it dictate where we start, we’ve been beholden to a narrative that’s just repeating and shoring up the gatekeeping of history.
I decided to do something radical: to start with the women of history, diving into the evidence that the latest advances in DNA analysis and newest archaeological discoveries are throwing up, and see if changing the direction – starting from the evidence for the experiences and lives of real women in the age that Homer’s epics, and the legends of ancient Greece, were looking back to – changes the way we read the myths.
And, by Hera, does it change them.
To give just one example: one of the biggest surprises I uncovered was when I came to look at Calypso – the goddess nymph who, we’re told in the Odyssey, held Odysseus captive having sex with her for seven years during his return. I had always thought that the Odyssey’s narrative of his imprisonment by Calypso didn’t hold water, blaming her for keeping him hostage, turning her into yet another obstacle on the hero’s return.
When I turned the narrative on its head – looking at the history behind the myth, what real women can tell us about Homer (instead of, as has always been done, what Homer or, indeed, Odysseus can tell us about women) – I had the sudden realization that Calypso sends Odysseus off from her island with, not just a ship, but a sail.
Who made that sail? It must have been Calypso – women are always weavers in the ancient Greek world, and we even see Calypso weaving in the epic’s opening books: “Inside, she was singing / and weaving with a shuttle made of gold” (in Emily Wilson’s translation).
And when I looked into exactly how long it would have taken a woman, weaving alone, to make a sail, the answer – coming out of cutting-edge research done by modern experimental archaeologists, using replicas of ancient tools that would have been used by women in the Late Bronze Age – was a staggering four years.
It’s this kind of example that completely changes how we see this supposedly stereotyped woman of Greek myth, the final obstacle in Odysseus’ path home who keeps him trapped upon her island year upon year. In this version, informed by real historical knowledge of the immensity and labour of women’s work, she becomes a woman who is working hard to do the labour needed to support a man. She isn’t the gaoler any more.
With a resounding and brilliant surge in women’s reworkings of the women of Greek myth in recent years, Mythica sets the women of the legends of Homer’s epics in the context of history – showing that, while novels from Madeline Miller’s Circe to Pat Barker’s The Silence of the Girls are a vital and revitalizing part of literature now, there is a long, long history both to the women of Greek myth (in the history that stands behind them: the real, empowered queens and warriors and mothers and wives of the Late Bronze Age), and to the women writers and scholars and archaeologists who have worked for hundreds of years to recover their stories.
This is a story that is both incredibly new and timely, and also, very old.
Women have always been there. They are much, much more than a myth. And it’s our job, as historians, as writers, to piece together the bits of the jigsaw puzzle, and to write them back into the story: as legends in their own right, and as a vital part of history.
Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, through the Women Written Out Of It by Emily Hauser is published on 17 April, 2025.
Emily Hauser is an award-winning classicist. She is the author of three novels retelling the stories of the women of Greek myth: For the Most Beautiful, For the Winner and For the Immortal.
She has written for Historia about the Women of the Trojan War and reviewed the British Museum’s Troy: Myth and Reality exhibition in Troy: an ancient story for a modern age. You can also read her features on Amazon Warrior Women: The Truth Behind the Myth and Jason, the Argonauts – and a Woman?
Other related features include:
The Trojan Wars: men or myths? and
The triumph of Greek myths and the destruction of a civilisation by Hilary Green
Motives of a Bronze Age murderess and
Shame and the Ancient Greek hero by Susan C Wilson
And, for fun: Beware of Greeks: when Homer meets Holmes by Peter Tonkin
Images:
- Menelaus intends to strike Helen; struck by her beauty, he drops his swords, red-figure crater, c450–440BC: Louvre Museum via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Sophia Schliemann wearing gold jewellery her husband excavated at Hissarlik (site of Troy), c1876: Wikimedia (public domain)
- Circe and Odysseus, skyphos, Boeotian ware, 450–420BC: © The Trustees of the British Museum (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0)
- Odysseus resisting the Sirens, third century BC: Bardo National Museum, Tunis, via Wikimedia (public domain)
- Women making woollen cloth: weaving (centre) and spinning, terracotta lekythos, c550–530 BC: Metropolitan Museum (public domain)
