The Worlds of Penelope: Women in the Mycenaean and Homeric Economies

δμῳαὶ Ὀδυσση̑ος, δὴν οἰχομένοιο ἄνακτος, / ἔρχεσθε πρὸς δώμαθ᾽, ἵν᾽ αἰδοίη βασίλεια: / τῃ̑ δὲ παρ᾽ ἠλάκατα στροφαλίζετε, τέρπετε δ᾽ αὐτὴν / ἥμεναι ἐν μεγάρῳ, ἢ εἴρια πείκετε χερσίν: / αὐτὰρ ἐγὼ τούτοισι φάος πάντεσσι παρέξω.

Maid servants of Odysseus, of your long-gone lord, go to the chambers there where the revered queen is; there twist the wool on the distaff, be glad sitting in the hall, or card the wool with your hands.

(Od. 18.313–17)²

Pylos Linear B tablet PY Ab 578:

a GRA 2 T 4 TA

b pu-ro pe-ki-ti-ra2 MUL 7 ko-wa 4 ko-wo 4 NI 2 T 4

At Pylos, 7 women wool-carders, 4 girls, 4 boys: wheat 230.4 liters, figs 230.4 liters, 1 TA

INTRODUCTION

The Homeric epics and the Mycenaean Linear B tablets each depict Greek women playing pivotal roles in early Greek palatial society. Conflicts over women such as Helen, Penelope, and Briseis drive many of the plotlines of the epics, and the female cast is large and varied, encompassing aristocrats, royals, palace dependents, and captive women. Likewise, the Linear B tablets record a world where women contribute in multiple ways to the economic, civic, and religious institutions of their states, and a few women also seem to emerge as actors in their own right—in particular, the key-bearer Karpathia and priestess Eritha, engaged in the oldest known legal dispute from Europe. But how closely do these two sources align in their depiction of women in palace society? Do Helen and Penelope inhabit the same world as Karpathia and Eritha?

From the first excavations of Heinrich Schliemann at Troy, scholarly investigations into the relationship of the historical Bronze Age and the mythological world of the epics have been a source of lively controversy (Wiener 2006). This is unsurprising; the epics largely depict an imaginary Early Iron Age society that purports to be a representation of the fourteenth- and thirteenth-century palace-states of Mycenaean Greece. Current scholarship on both archaeological and literary grounds roundly rejects the notion of the Homeric epics as an accurate reflection of the earlier palace-states,³ but not much attention has been given to the rationale behind the specific choices made in the epics’ re-imagining of the Bronze Age.

W. G. Thalmann observes (1998.5–13) that epic creates an idealized version of the heroic past, but that this idealized representation often distorts the realities of some characters. While he speaks primarily of distorted representations of minor characters and members of the underclass, the same holds quite true for epic’s female cast. But what might such a distortion signify, particularly considering epic’s role as a means to re-imagine and transmit key information about the events, individuals, and social values of early Greece and the Bronze Age palace society it would represent—a society separated from Homer by several hundred years and a catastrophic rupture in culture and continuity?⁴ Here I analyze the ways in which the Homeric epics represent and transmit the roles of women in palace society—particularly their involvement in economic affairs—and the ramifications of these choices in shaping women’s representations in Greek historical memory. The key difference in the representation of women in the two sources lies in their relationship to the domestic world: while in the Homeric epics, women are most visible through their relationship to the oikos, in the Linear B tablets, textual visibility is clearest for the women farthest from it.

WOMEN IN MYCENAEAN GREECE: PYLOS

The Linear B tablets provide a crucial point of entry into the lives and activities of real, once-living people in the palace-centered societies of Mycenaean Greece.⁵ Across the different archives, more than 7,000 people are recorded, including some 2,000 women (Olsen 2014). Of the places preserving Linear B tablets, the southwestern Peloponnesian site of Pylos provides the most useful archive, with its 1,100 well-preserved tablets dating to the end of the LH IIIB period (c. 1200 b.c.e.).⁶ Attentive scribes composed, sorted, and stored these tablets in a two-room complex at the Palace at Ano Englianos, more commonly known as the Palace of Nestor, which helped to render these the...