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But as significant as anything of the gulf between the Odyssey and later Greek literature is the treatment of the two famous sisters, Helen and Clytemnestra.
Helen, to the later Greeks the type of the wanton, appears in the Odyssey as the faithful wife, respected and self-respecting, of King Menelaus. She lives in his palace, busy with domestic duties, and when she thinks of the past it is to rejoice over her return home and escape from Troy, 'where,' she says, 'I used to mourn over the cruel fate which Aphrodite[12] sent upon me, when she led me from my beloved country, leaving behind me my daughter, my home, and my husband dear, who lacked nothing of perfection in mind or in body.' It is a very different picture from that of Paris' mistress, as we have her in later stories, flying with a foreign youth from her lawful lord, and betraying her too fond master.
So Clytemnestra---after the lyric poets of the seventh and sixth centuries had worked up her story---is that most dreadful figure to King Man, the regicide, the woman who dares, by craft and guile, to kill the man set over her as ruler. In all the later stories it is Clytemnestra who arranges the details of Agamemnon's death---the bath, the enveloping robe, and the axe; it is she who deals the fatal blow, while her lover, gisthus, is a cowardly nonentity, entirely under the dominion of the woman.
But in the Odyssey the story is very different. It is told twice---by Agamemnon to Odysseus in Hades, and by Nestor to Telemachus at Pylos, and this last version is significant enough to be given word for word:
We Greeks (says Nestor) were lingering over there at Troy, and many a task did we fulfil. But he---gisthus---at his ease in the quiet valleys of Argos, where the horses feed, tried to beguile the wife of Agamemnon with soft words. At first, of course, fair Clytemnestra refused to do the shameful thing, for she was a woman[13] of honest heart. Moreover, there was with her a minstrel, whom Agamemnon, when he went to Troy, had bidden to protect his wife. But soon the fate of heaven encompassed the minstrel, and brought him to his death, for gisthus took him to a desert island and left him there, a prey for the birds to tear asunder. As for the queen---he willing and she willing---he led her to his house. And many a sacrifice did he offer to the gods when he had done that great deed, which never in his heart had he expected to accomplish.
Such is the passage, and the last two sentences are a literal translation of the lines which appear thus in Pope's version:
For these are the dangers of poetical translation.
But more important than any single character or episode is the general impression given by the whole poem, and it may fairly be said that the entire framework of the Odyssey presupposes a condition of society in which women are regarded as not in the least, qu women, inferior to men.
In the Iliad things are different, and the poem, as we have it now, gives us three distinct pictures of women's position in life. The original epic, the 'Wrath of Achilles' has hardly any place for women at all. It is true that Achilles' anger has for its[14] cause the woman Briseis; but Achilles is angry, not at the loss of a woman whom he loves, but at the loss of a piece of property which he knows by experience to be of considerable value and service. Briseis is a slave---a thing, not a person. In the whole Iliad she is only mentioned ten times, and nine times out of those ten she is merely catalogued as an article of value, with the slave-dealer's epithet, 'fair-cheeked,' attached.
But this is hardly surprising. All the earlier portions of the Iliad are primarily lays of battle. They are anti-social, and woman has no part or lot in them.
The Iliad however, is built up of many different strata, and one stratum---by no means the least important---was contributed by a poet who understood and sympathised with women. In thought and language he has many affinities with the author of the Odyssey, and he is probably responsible for the one passage in the poem where Briseis appears as a human being, and makes lament over the dead body of Patroclus: a speech which served Ovid as the groundwork wherefrom---with many embellishments---he expands the letter in 'the Heroines.' From the same hand as Briseis' speech comes the supreme scene of the parting between Hector and Andromache, and all the closing passages of the Iliad: the ransoming of Hector, and the lamentation[15] of the women---his wife, his mother, and Helen---over the corpse.
No one can read the Iliad without feeling that the moral spirit of all these passages is of a very different and of a very much higher quality than the brutality of the earliest lays, and the loose cynicism of the last additions to the poem, which we shall have next to consider.
Between the Homeric poems in their first shape and the next stage of Greek literature there is a gap of centuries, and when the curtain goes up again on Greek history at the end of the eighth century, the centre of civilisation is in Asia Minor, the coast towns and their adjacent islands.
The period of fighting, invasions, and tribal migrations is over: there has been a revival of the old Minoan culture, the Greeks have become a nation of traders living in luxurious cities, such as Miletus and Mytilene. Politically they are dependent on the great Eastern land empires, and from the East they have taken ideas which vitally affect the position of women.
The first of these may be stated thus: a woman, even a free-born woman, is the property of the man who is her husband. The second, which follows from this, is that, love between man and his property being absurd, romantic affection is only conceivable between men; between man and woman it is impossible. Of these two ideas, the first, which involved the seclusion of women and the harem system,[17] was only partially applied in ancient Greece. It flourished in Ionia and at Athens during the great period of her history, but it never took root in Sparta, or in the chief cities of Hellenistic civilisation. Its corollary, however, spread fatally from Asia to Greece, and from Greece to Italy. It lasted for many centuries, and tended to destroy all romantic love between the two sexes, and very often all the ordinary comfortable affection which may exist without romance between husband and wife. The sexes drew apart: the man, immersed in war and politics and absent from his home most of his life, had little experience of woman as a thinking animal, and unfamiliarity bred contempt. As happened again later in the world's history under the very different conditions of monastic life, the natural social intercourse between men and women was artificially hampered, and the inevitable crop of errors and perversions followed. But the monks, in their dislike of women, were at least ostensibly inspired by a strict code of sexual morality: a good deal of Ionian literature has for one of its objects a desire to defend the perverted sexual instinct which was the curse of ancient life. Of this sort are the stories of Ganymede, the young Asiatic, taken up to heaven by the ruler of the sky and displacing the maiden Hebe, and of Hylas, the minion of Heracles, whose beauty brought him to his death.
