Laughing with MEDUSA : Classical Myth and Feminist Thought

286 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

and post-human world implies the domination of technology over
nature, machine over animal, ‘hard’ science over ‘soft’ humanity.
Yet Haraway claims that a world of cyborgs need not necessarily
entail the strengthening of dichotomies between human and animal,
man and machine, man and woman. Rather,

a cyborg world might be about lived social and bodily realities in which
people are not afraid of their joint kinship with animals and machines, not
afraid of permanently partial identities and contradictory standpoints. The
political struggle is to see from both perspectives at once because each
reveals both dominations and possibilities unimaginable from the other
vantage point. Single vision produces worse illusions than double vision
or many-headed monsters. Cyborg unities are monstrous and illegitimate;
in our present political circumstances, we could hardly hope for more
potent myths for resistance and recoupling.29

In declarations such as these, metaphor is translated into myth.
Haraway’s cyborg metaphor is reconfigured as cyber myth. But
how potent is this new myth for feminist resistance? And what are
the ideological implications of Haraway’s insistence on our kinship
with the illegitimate and monstrous character of the cyborg? Does
her cyborg manifesto seek to construct a classical genealogy for her
myth—or for her feminism?

Central to Haraway’s thesis is her belief that science is one of the
principal and most influential ‘representing machines’ of our time.30
Pushing the boundaries of the view that contemporary science-
fiction narratives provide a new mythology for a new technological
age, Haraway maintains that science and technoscientific discourses
provide the images, figures, landscapes, and languages in and with
which twentieth-century myths are formulated.31 She insists, more-
over, that the anti-science position adopted by many feminists de-
nies women a historic opportunity to influence and inscribe the

29 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 154.
30 D. J. Haraway, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with Thyrza Nichols
Goodeve (London, 2000), 26. See S. Kember, Cyberfeminism and Artificial
Life (London and New York, 2003), 178.
31 From this perspective, Darwin’s theory of evolution, Dawkins’s selfish
genes, and Lovelock’s Gaia are no less myths or science fictions than
Gibson’s Neuromancer, Ridley Scott’s Bladerunner, or the Judaeo-Christian
story of Creation.

science fictions and cyber myths 287

‘codes’ that will program their place in a post-modern, post-human,
world. Stressing the political potential and potency of feminist
engagement in technoscientific practice and technoscience studies,
she claims that, ‘There is a myth system waiting to become a
political language to ground one way of looking at science and
technology and challenging the informatics of domination.’32

Indeed, presenting her cyborg myth as a demonstration of one
such way in which this technoscientific ‘myth system’ might be
appropriated for feminist political purposes, Haraway suggests
that the discourses of science and technology, ‘including crucially
the systems of myth and meanings structuring our imagination’,33
can offer a way to rethink and reconstruct contemporary feminist
politics. At a time in which ‘feminism’ is increasingly contested as a
term and as a point of political affiliation, when post-modern dis-
courses argue for the socially and historically contingent configur-
ation of class, race, sex, and gender, the possibility of a unified
affinity between ‘feminist’ identities and feminist politics is chal-
lenged. Contemporary feminism(s) and post-feminism(s) offer con-
tradictory, competing, and incomplete perspectives that destabilize
and deny the grounding of a feminist identity according to any
essentialist or ‘natural’ definition. Haraway, however, suggests
that the hybrid figure of the cyborg promises a new way to approach
and reconfigure these fragments of feminism. She claims:

The permanent partiality of feminist points of view has consequences for
our expectations of forms of political organization and participation. We do
not need a totality in order to work well. . . . Perhaps, ironically, we can
learn from our fusions with animals and machines how not to be Man, the
embodiment of Western logos.34

Her ‘cyborg feminism’ thus represents an attempt to renegotiate a way
around the political, ideological, and epistemological gridlock that
threatens to disable the feminist movement in the twenty-first century.
Her cyborg myth imagines a world of lived social, political, and bodily
realities in which feminists ‘are not afraid of their joint kinship’ with
others—with men, with cyborgs, and crucially with women of other

32 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 181. 33 Ibid. 163.
34 Ibid. 173.

288 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

classes, races, or political, sexual, and ideological persuasions—and in
which they are ‘not afraid of permanently partial identities and con-
tradictory standpoints’ but rather struggle to see from different per-
spectives at once, ‘because each reveals both dominations and
possibilities unimaginable from the other vantage point[s]’.35

Haraway’s model of cyborg feminism has its own feminist critics,
however. Teresa Ebert in her Marxist critique of Haraway’s mani-
festo fundamentally disagrees with Haraway’s claim that the late
twentieth century is a new age requiring new myths and new femin-
isms. She draws our attention to the point that cyborgs are the
products and tools of an advanced capitalist and patriarchal econ-
omy, and questions the idea that such tools might be useful to
Marxists or to feminists seeking to dismantle the social, political,
and ideological structures of that economy. While Haraway ac-
knowledges that her cyborgs may be viewed as the ‘offspring of
militarism and patriarchal capitalism’,36 she also invokes Luce
Irigaray’s Speculum as an illustration of the way in which the cyborg
could be employed as a ‘tool’ for re-imaging and reclaiming the
female body and the body politic in the late twentieth century. ‘The
speculum served as an icon of women’s claiming their bodies in the
1970’s,’ she observes, but that old-fashioned hand tool is inadequate
as instrument, icon, and metaphor for twenty-first century negoti-
ations of body politics—particularly of cyber body politics.37

In a chapter she subtitles ‘The virtual speculum in the new world
order’ in Modest_Witness, Haraway asks, ‘What is the right specu-
lum for the job of opening up observation into the orifices of the
technoscientific body politic?’38 A new imaginative tool, a new
technological icon for a new technological age, is needed, she sug-
gests—the cyborg. Aligning the speculum and the cyborg in this
way, Haraway succinctly demonstrates that feminists can success-
fully repossess and employ ‘the master’s tools’ to open up the
gendered body and the body politic to new scrutiny. The foundation
of the gynaecological speculum as symbolic and material tool, she
reminds us, lies originally with ‘the displacement of the female
midwife by the specialist male physician and gynaecologist’, and

35 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 154. 36 Ibid. 151.

37 Ibid. 169. 38 Modest_Witness, 193.

science fictions and cyber myths 289

the mirror as ‘the symbol forced on women as a signifier of our own
bodies as spectacle-for-another in the guise of our own supposed
narcissism’.39 By implication, then, criticisms that the foundation of
the cyborg as symbolic and material tool lies originally with mili-
tarism and patriarchal capitalism need not necessarily prevent its
re-appropriation as a feminist tool.

Genealogies and foundation stories play an important role in
Haraway’s cyborg myth, tracing where the cyborg has come from
so as to understand better where it may be going to, or at least so as
to project better an imaginative telos for its mythic narrative. Indeed,
throughout her work, she seems anxious both to resist and to con-
struct a genealogy for her cyborgs, a foundation story for her myth.
Thus she appears to offer competing and not obviously reconcilable
accounts of the origins of the cyborg. Sometimes she maintains that,
‘the cyborg has no origin story in the Western sense—a ‘‘final’’ irony
since the cyborg is also the awful apocalyptic telos of the ‘‘West’s’’
escalating dominations of abstract individuation.’40 The lack of an
origin story in this sense means that no myth of original creation by
some paternal figure, no myth of separation from original unity with
a maternal figure, no Oedipal narrative, no Adam or Eve story
encodes or explains the family drama of the cyborg. Thus:

Unlike the hopes of Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborg does not expect its
father to save it through a restoration of the garden; that is, through the
fabrication of a heterosexual mate . . . The cyborg does not dream of com-
munity on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal
project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made
of mud and cannot dream of returning to dust.41

Yet, at other points in her narrative,42 Haraway concedes that
cyborgs ‘are the illegitimate offspring’ of Western militarism,
capitalism, socialism, and patriarchy—describing precisely the
dysfunctional parentage that concerns those wary of the techno-
progeny of Haraway’s cyber feminism. Her defence, that ‘illegitim-
ate offspring are often exceedingly unfaithful to their origins’ on the
grounds that ‘their fathers, after all, are inessential’, is not entirely
reassuring either.43 Nor does she expand upon the presumably

39 Ibid. 40 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 150–1.

41 Ibid. 151. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid.

290 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

‘essential’ role of the mother in this hetero-normative, biologically
coded model of cyborg reproduction—the very model that the
cyborg is supposed to subvert. Perhaps the ‘illegitimate’ cyborg
does not escape the Freudian family drama as completely as Har-
away would like us to believe.

In Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleManß_Meets_
OncomouseTM, Haraway introduces us to some of our cyborg
‘kin’, among them the trademarked and patented OncomouseTM, a
‘primal cyborg figure for the dramas of technoscience’, genetically
engineered to carry an oncogene—a gene that produces breast-can-
cer tumours in humans—and to take part in a heroic quest in the
search for a cure for cancer. According to Haraway, OncomouseTM
is one of us:

OncomouseTM is my sibling, and more properly, male or female, s/he is my
sister. . . S/he is our scapegoat; s/he bears our suffering; s/he signifies and
enacts our mortality in a powerful, historically specific way that promises a
culturally privileged kind of salvation—a ‘cure for cancer’ . . . If not in my
own body, then surely in those of my friends, I will some day owe to
OncomouseTM or her subsequently designed rodent kin a large debt.44

Alongside this representation of the ‘technobastard’ Oncomouse, in
which the cyborg is made mythical scapegoat, Haraway emphasizes
kinship. She returns repeatedly to the question: ‘Who are my kin in
this odd world of promising monsters?’—a question that also
shapes the discourse of her cyborg manifesto as she seeks to map a
genealogy both for her cyborg myth and for her cyborg feminism.45

Although Haraway criticizes the tendency ‘among contemporary
feminists from different ‘‘moments’’ or ‘‘conversations’’ in feminist
practice to taxonomize the women’s movement to make one’s own
political tendencies appear to be the telos of the whole’,46 the
discourse of her own cyborg feminism engages in apparently similar
tactics of validation and teleology, both affirming and denying her
kinship with other feminists, resisting and recognizing the relation

44 Haraway, Modest_Witness, 79.
45 Haraway (ibid. 52) argues that: ‘cyborg anthropology attempts to
refigure provocatively the border relations among specific humans, other
organisms, and machines.’
46 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 156.

science fictions and cyber myths 291

of her cyborg myth to other myths of late twentieth-century femi-
nism. Thus her appropriation of Irigaray’s ‘speculum’ as a symbolic
prototype for her cyborg simultaneously acknowledges her ideo-
logical kinship with the French feminist movement while positing
herself and her cyborg as part of the ‘next generation’ of feminists.

In a related and appropriate hybridizing cyborg strategy, Har-
away explicitly defines her own feminist myth in opposition to the
narratives and myths offered by second-wave pagan and ecofemi-
nists like Mary Daly, Susan Griffin, Audre Lorde, and Adrienne
Rich at the same time as incorporating them into the teleology
and genealogy of her own project; ecofeminists are represented as
the (poor) relations of cyborg feminists, cyborgs as the telos of post-
modern feminism. ‘They insist on the organic, opposing it to the
technological,’ she observes of Daly et al., ‘[b]ut their symbolic
systems and the related positions of ecofeminism and feminist
paganism, replete with organicisms, can only be understood . . . as
oppositional ideologies fitting the late twentieth century.’47 The
preoccupations of these ‘eco-mythographers’, she suggests, are
rooted, not in the past or in nature, but in the high-tech world of
the late twentieth century—a world that is already the world of the
cyborg, a creature of nature and science, of the past and the present.

While Haraway argues that one of the benefits of her cyborg myth
for contemporary feminism would be the political and ideological
model of effective affinity and unity through difference—the poten-
tial for kinship through hybridization—that it offers, her manifesto
makes clear the sharp division in identity between those feminists
who privilege the ‘natural’ in their discourses of gender and
feminism, and those who privilege the ‘scientific’. Throughout
Haraway’s cyborg writing criticism of the ‘goddess’ myth of
second-wave feminist thinking, as particularly identified with the
writings of Mary Daly, is implicit. Daly’s theory that ancient
cultures worshipped a ‘Goddess’ before her myths and traditions
were assimilated by the patriarchal order of Christianity is dis-
missed. A return to the conditions of this mythical, primal past,
Haraway argues, is neither desirable nor possible. Any utopian
gyn-ecological myths of a lost matriarchal golden age lack both

47 Ibid. 174.

292 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

potency and relevance in an advanced technological era—in ‘our
mythic time’. ‘We cannot go back ideologically or materially,’ Har-
away claims, ‘It’s not just that ‘‘god’’ is dead; so is the ‘‘goddess’’.’48

Given this resistance to the myths of late twentieth-century femi-
nism and her criticism of appeals in some second-wave feminist
thinking to a mythical, primal past, it seems inconsistent—and
illegitimate—of Haraway to appeal to classical myth in the config-
uration of a genealogy for her cyborg. In particular, she draws an
explicit relationship between the monstrous cyborg and two ‘mon-
strous’ figures from classical Greek myth—the Centaur and the
Amazon. The cyborg monsters of Haraway’s myth, like the
Centaurs and Amazons, articulate questions of boundaries and
definitions, testing and redefining the limits of kinship, community,
and identity. Akin to the Amazons and Centaurs, the cyborgs are
imagined to destabilize traditional dichotomies and force us to
rethink the possible conditions for unified subjectivity. Cyborgs it
seems, like the monsters of ancient Greek myth, embody otherness
and pollute boundaries yet also evoke affinity and reinscribe mar-
gins. Positing a relationship between the cyborg, the monsters of
ancient Greek myth, and the monkeys of Darwinian stories of
evolution—and collapsing temporal distinctions as she does so—
Haraway writes that:

Monsters have always defined the limits of community in Western imagin-
ations. The Centaurs and Amazons of ancient Greece established the limits
of the centred polis of the Greek male human by their disruption of
marriage and boundary pollutions of the warrior with animality and
woman . . . The evolutionary and behavioural sciences of monkeys and
apes have marked the multiple boundaries of late twentieth-century indus-
trial identities. Cyborg monsters in feminist science fiction define quite
different political possibilities and limits from those proposed by the mun-
dane fiction of Man and Woman.49

The role of Haraway’s monsters, related to that of the Centaurs and
Amazons of ancient Greek myth, is to articulate new questions
about boundaries and definitions, testing and redefining new limits
of kinship, community, and identity in Western imaginations. Like
the Amazons and Centaurs, and even more like Hephaestus’s Talos

48 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 162. 49 Ibid. 180.

science fictions and cyber myths 293

or Frankenstein’s monster, the cyborgs of our ‘mythic time’ are seen
to destabilize traditional and ‘troubling’ dichotomies and dualisms
between self/other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civil-
ized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/resource,
maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/par-
tial, God/man. Yet, although Haraway may be seen to appeal to
the classical tradition of mythology in order to establish the legit-
imacy of her modern myth through its association with two potent
and enduring mythological icons, her emphasis upon the kinship of
the cyborg to its ancient Greek cousins also highlights the illegitim-
acy of the cyborg as a ‘technobastard’ who is not a direct heir to the
classical tradition. The cyborg’s ancestry and history may lie in the
dust of ancient Greece, but in the post-modern world of ‘promising
monsters’, the cyborg has more obvious kin.

As monstrous others in Western imaginations, Amazons and Cen-
taurs have been seen to define limits, to reinforce dichotomies, and to
establish boundaries even as they have appeared to transgress and
pollute them. The cyborg, however, is not the monstrous other that
destabilizes and defines the limits of community and identity in our
mythic time but the monstrous kin that denies us and our post-
human selves the conditions of a unified subjectivity, the monstrous
self that defies organic definitions of gender and the hierarchical
dualisms that dominate Western imaginations—and persist in con-
temporary feminist thinking. The Centaur and Amazon of classical
myth have served as imaginative resources to describe and reinscribe
social, political, geographical, and anatomical boundaries, as fic-
tions to map the conditions and the identity of the ancient Greek
male—and, by default, female. The cyborg serves a related imagina-
tive function in the interrogation and inscription of twenty-first
century borders and identities. Yet the symbolic and imaginative
force of the cyborg is very different from these mythical, monstrous
‘others’. Cyborg imagery and cyborg mythologies remind us that,

The machine is not an it . . . The machine is us, our processes, an aspect of
our embodiment. We can be responsible for machines; they do not domin-
ate or threaten us. We are responsible for boundaries; we are they.50

50 Ibid.

294 g e n e v i e ve l i v e l e y

The cyborg thus represents a new mythic figure, performing a new
symbolic function not simply for the subjects of a new technological
age but with us. Haraway’s cyborg myth allows for our ‘pleasure in
the confusion of boundaries’ but also demands our ‘responsibility in
their construction’.51 Amazons, Centaurs, bronze giants, and other
monsters may have performed an important symbolic function—
and in the terms of a familiar trope, have been ‘good to think
with’—in the past. But the new material and imaginary conditions
of our post-modern, post-human lives renders cyborgs not just
‘good to think with’ as critical instruments of inquiry and imagina-
tive investigation—but alongside, together with. For we are all
cyborgs now.

51 Haraway, ‘Cyborg Manifesto’, 150; emphases in original.

part v

Myth and Poetry

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12

Putting the Women Back into the
Hesiodic Catalogue of Women

Lillian Doherty

Before there was feminist thought, there were women’s traditions
and women’s genres, forms of expression practised by specific
groups of women within larger cultural formations. These oral
traditions have been largely effaced, or at least muted, in the canons
of literate cultures and in the intellectual movements or disciplines
they have identified as central, including history and literary criti-
cism. Even in anthropology and folklore studies, women’s genres
have only recently been seriously studied as distinctive elements
within more generalized bodies of folk tradition.1 My essay seeks

For generous suggestions and responses to questions related to this paper
I would like to thank Wendy Doniger, Lori Garner, Ann Gold, Lindsey
Harlan, Joseph C. Miller, Laurie L. Patton, Gloria Raheja, and Richard
Saran. I am also grateful to the audiences at the University of Bristol,
University College Dublin, the University of Colorado at Boulder, and the
conference on Feminism and Classics IV in Tucson (May 2004), whose
responses to oral versions of this paper helped me to improve it in various
ways. Finally, I thank the editors and anonymous referees of the present
volume for their very helpful suggestions.

1 In the ethnography of South-East Asia, which I have sampled most
widely in the research for this paper, work focusing on women’s traditions,

298 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

to recover possible traces of women’s traditions in a fragmentary
Greek work of the archaic age—the Catalogue of Women attributed
to Hesiod—and to consider how and why these traces have been
effaced, both in the composition of the Catalogue itself and in the
practice of classical scholarship.

Since the 1970s there have been a variety of explicitly feminist
voices within both classical studies and anthropology. They have
been in the minority, however, and despite widespread acceptance
of the importance of gender as an analytic category, scholars who
identify their work as feminist or who see it as contributing to
feminist activism are few. It may be that the field of classics, with
its overwhelmingly masculine canon, tends not to attract many
students committed to a feminist agenda.2 But even within anthro-
pology, which studies living human groups in which women are as
numerous as men, feminists seem a somewhat embattled minority.
The 1995 volume Women Writing Culture, for example, was gen-
erated as an explicitly feminist response to an earlier ‘authoritative’
collection, Writing Culture, from which the work of women an-
thropologists had been entirely omitted.3 Although feminism is not
to be equated with the study of women, the absence of the former
can often be correlated with inattention to the latter, especially in

carried out beginning in the 1980s, began to be published in the 1990s; see
in particular Arjun Appadurai, Frank Korom, and Margaret Mills, Gender,
Genre, and Power in South Asian Expressive Traditions (Philadelphia,
1991); Gloria Goodwin Raheja and Ann Grodzins Gold, Listen to the
Heron’s Words: Reimagining Gender and Kinship in North India (Berkeley,
1994); and Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Gender and Genre in the Folklore
of Middle India (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1996); Kirin Narayan, in collab-
oration with Urmila Devi Sood, Mondays on the Dark Night of the Moon:
Himalayan Foothill Folktales (New York, 1997). For a survey of the situ-
ation in a different sub-field (that of African oral traditions), see Thomas A.
Hale, Griots and Griottes: Masters of Words and Music (Bloomington,
Ind., 1998), ch. 7.

2 I could not help noticing the modest numbers of scholars attending the
two explicitly feminist conferences at which I read versions of this paper;
moreover, the great majority of those attending were women.

3 See Ruth Behar and Deborah Gordon (eds.), Women Writing Culture
(Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1995), esp. 3–5; James Clifford and George
Marcus (eds.), Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography
(Berkeley, 1986).

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 299

overviews of a discipline. Thus while an appreciable number of
recent ethnographic monographs focus on women, collections of
papers surveying the field as a whole or specific sub-fields tend to
include at most one or two studies of women’s activities.4

An important lesson of feminist anthropology, and of women’s
studies since the 1980s, is that women do not comprise a uniform
class or group, even within a single society, so that studies of them
must take account of racial and class divisions as well as of individ-
uals who resist prevailing norms. Given the differences among
women in living groups, it may seem overly simplistic to hope to
recover traces of ‘women’s traditions’ in the scanty material surviv-
ing from archaic Greece. But as a feminist classicist I see the effort as
a necessary corrective to the tacit assumption in much classical
scholarship that the cultural products of the ancient world were
shaped in a purely masculine milieu and that the masculine genres
that survive had no feminine counterparts. I grant in advance that
whatever traditions I uncover are likely to be aristocratic, since
what survives of archaic Greek poetry tends to focus on the activ-
ities of ‘heroic’ males and their families. It follows that whatever
women’s perspectives may be uncovered will tend to be shaped by
the privileges of membership in an upper class. It cannot be
assumed, moreover, that women’s perspectives will necessarily
differ from men’s, even on the question of women’s relative import-
ance. But the documented existence of distinctive women’s genres in
the traditional villages of modern India encourages me to ask
whether the Hesiodic Catalogue, with its striking emphasis on
female ancestors, might not have incorporated elements of a
women’s tradition. The value of the exercise, like that of Ellen
O’Gorman’s essay in this volume,5 lies in the recovery and recogni-
tion of women’s agency in areas from which it has been elided.

Myth is important to feminism because it is one element of
literate culture that has the potential to incorporate women’s tradi-
tions and perspectives. By this I do not mean simply that at some

4 e.g. the Annual Review of Anthropology, a journal of review essays
meant to give an overview of the most important developments and debates
in the field, has included only an occasional essay on feminist research over
the past ten years.

5 Ch. 7, looking at the woman’s role in warfare.

300 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

time in the distant past men’s poetry incorporated a women’s trad-
ition once and for all—for example, by reflecting vestiges of ‘matri-
archal’ social or political organization.6 Rather, because myths are
stories that combine an imaginative fluidity with an authoritative
force, and because they are told in a variety of contexts even when
they are also written down, they provide a point of entry for
women’s perspectives and concerns in the discourse shared by
women and men. Women’s versions may be derided as ‘old wives
tales’ and marginalized, but they have had a surprising longevity in
cultures with active oral traditions: witness the women’s tales and
songs collected by nineteenth- and twentieth-century anthropolo-
gists (especially women anthropologists) in a variety of rural set-
tings worldwide, not excluding Greece and Italy.7 Although in
retrospect we see the introduction of writing as exercising a chilling
effect on such oral diversity, this may be because the loss of oral
variants is only definitive for periods in the distant past. A more
serious challenge to the survival of women’s traditions in the present
seems to be posed by the centralization and globalization of the
mass media, which suppress local variants by removing the occa-
sions and incentives for their performance.8

The distinctiveness of women’s traditions seems to be tied to a
degree of gender segregation, in performance contexts and/or in
daily life. When daily tasks are segregated, work songs tend to be
gender-specific. In some cultures, women perform only, or primar-
ily, with and for other women because it is considered shameful for
them to perform for men. Women anthropologists working in such
cultures, who initially are often treated as ‘honorary men’, have

6 It has been plausibly argued that some Greek myths, whose origins are
traceable to the Bronze Age, may reflect a greater prominence or influence
of women in that age; but it has also been shown that some of the female
figures in these myths are given enhanced roles in the later genre of tragedy.
See Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in
Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975), 94.

7 A Greek example is John Petropoulos, Heat and Lust: Hesiod’s Mid-
summer Festival Scene Revisited (Lanham, Md., 1994). An exemplary
study of European fairy tales is Marina Warner, From the Beast to the
Blonde: On Fairy Tales and their Tellers (New York, 1995).

8 See e.g. Narayan, Mondays, 16.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 301

found that they had to live among the women and observe their
strictures for gendered behaviour (including, e.g., veiling and seg-
regation) before they could be accepted as women; only at this point
were they invited to participate in women’s rituals or trusted as
confidantes.9 Class or caste is also an important determinant of who
performs for whom, or who may be present at a given performance.

Often, to be sure, the content of women’s traditions is altogether
distinct from men’s, and may even be kept secret: hence our uncer-
tainty about what went on at the Thesmophoria, a Greek women’s
religious festival from which men were banned (and at which stories
must have been told).10 But there are often significant areas of
overlap, where both genders use a common store of material and
shape it in distinctive ways. Epic, with rare exceptions,11 is not a
women’s genre; yet the myths that are central to the classical Indian
epics, the Ramayana and Mahabharata, are also found in women’s
songs.

Women’s versions of mythic material, where they can be com-
pared to men’s, tend to differ in a variety of ways. Prominent among
these is genre: whereas men’s performances are often public and of
some length, women’s are often private and shorter, made to fit
specific ritual occasions or rare intervals of leisure. A related differ-
ence involves plot: the plots of the shorter genres may be considered

9 See esp. the account of Gloria Raheja in the preface to Raheja and
Gold, Listen to the Heron’s Words, pp. xvii–xxvi.

10 Although a number of scholars have seen the Homeric Hymn to
Demeter as somehow related to the Thesmophoria, there is no agreement
on the specifics of this relationship. For an intriguing ‘excavation’ of the
Hymn highlighting its treatment of relationships between women, see Ann
Suter, The Narcissus and the Pomegranate: An Archaeology of the Homeric
Hymn to Demeter (Ann Arbor, 2002). Narayan, Mondays, 18, cites a case
in which male priests who volunteered versions of women’s ritual tales ‘got
the plots and characters hopelessly garbled, to the stifled amusement of
women listening in’.

11 A few of the professional bards who performed oral epic in the South
Slavic tradition were women. See Celia Hawkesworth, Voices in the
Shadows: Women and Verbal Art in Serbia and Bosnia (New York,
2000), 51–62. Hale, Griots and Griottes, 226–33, describes African per-
formances of epic stories in which male and female griots take complemen-
tary parts.

302 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

mere episodes or digressions in the context of longer ones such as
epic.12 Significantly, in women’s versions female characters often
play more central roles and provide a greater share of the focaliza-
tion. Thus Rama’s foster-sister Santa, a minor character in literary
versions of the Ramayana, plays a central role in many women’s tales
about Rama and Sita, in which as an elder sister she has the authority
to ‘command, criticize, and admonish her younger brother’.13 Still
more striking is the fact that in women’s versions, crucial decisions
that advance the plot may be attributed to female characters instead
of to the males who make them in men’s versions.14

But women’s and men’s traditions, while distinct, do not exist in
isolation from one another. Even in the most segregated of cultures,
women’s songs may be overheard by men or reported to them by
female relatives.15 One sensitive article on women’s songs about
Sita and Rama was inspired by the scholar’s memories of hearing
them in his home as a boy, when he was still young enough to be
included in the audience for women’s performances.16 In the dia-
logues of Plato likewise, the male characters are aware of the
content of stories and songs they claim children hear from ‘old
women’.17 A fortiori, men’s songs are likely to be overheard by

12 For a discussion of systematic differences between domestic and pub-
lic performances of the ‘same’ tales in one region of India, see A. K.
Ramanujan, ‘Two Realms of Kannada Folklore’, in Stuart H. Blackburn
and A. K. Ramanujan (eds.,) Another Harmony: New Essays on the Folk-
lore of India (Berkeley, 1986), 42–51.

13 Velcheru Narayana Rao, ‘A Ramayana of their Own: Women’s Oral
Tradition in Telugu’, in Paula Richman (ed.), Many Ramayanas: The Diver-
sity of a Narrative Tradition in South Asia (Berkeley, 1991, 114–36), 121.

14 Ibid. 122.
15 Cf. e.g. the comment of Raheja and Gold, Listen to the Heron’s
Words, 38: ‘Women may not sing with men, but they often sing at them
and very often in close proximity to them.’ Lila Abu-Lughod describes the
use of poetry as a more private form of communication between men and
women in Veiled Sentiments: Honor & Poetry in a Bedouin Society, 2nd
edn. (Berkeley, 1999), while Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger, Gender and
Genre, ch. 3, documents the appropriation and transformation of women’s
ritual songs by men in the Chhatisgarh region of Madhya Pradesh, India.
16 Narayana Rao, ‘Ramayana of their Own’, 114 and 117.
17 Plato, Lysis 205c–e, Hippias Major 286a; Republic 2. 377c speaks of
‘nurses and mothers’.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 303

women because there are fewer strictures on men’s performing in
public. It follows that there is give and take between the parallel
traditions, with each expressing distinctive viewpoints but taking
account of, sometimes even answering, the other. These findings
would indicate that in a living oral tradition, it is the norm rather
than the exception for a multiplicity of ‘women’s genres’ to exist
side by side with the ‘men’s genres’. In the study of classical litera-
ture, the notion of a women’s tradition has been applied thus far
only to the study of Sappho and the other women poets whose
works survive in fragmentary form.18 Are there other surviving
works that might reflect the existence, and possibly the influence,
of lost ‘women’s genres’?

The Odyssey may provide a clue that the Hesiodic Catalogue of
Women was related to, or descended from, one or more such
genres.19 With the cleverness for which he is celebrated, Odysseus
is portrayed as interrupting the tale of his adventures to his hosts the
Phaeacians in Book 11 of the Odyssey just after a long description
of the famous women he saw in the Underworld. The first member
of his audience to speak up is the queen, Arete, who recommends
increasing the guest-gifts her people are bestowing on the hero. Is it
accidental that the section of his tale for which the queen rewards
Odysseus bears a striking resemblance to the Catalogue of
Women?20 Or would an early audience have recognized that the
account of famous women had a special appeal to the queen because

18 See esp. Marilyn B. Skinner, ‘Woman and Language in Archaic
Greece, or, Why is Sappho a Woman?’, in Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and
Amy Richlin (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (New York and
London, 1993), 125–44. A recent exception to this exclusive focus on
surviving fragments of women’s poetry is Laurie O’Higgins’ study of
women’s cultic expressions of mockery and obscenity and their relationship
to the Greek comic tradition: Women and Humor in Classical Greece
(Cambridge, 2003).

19 For a fuller version of this argument, see Lillian E. Doherty, Siren
Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey (Ann Arbor,
1995), 65–9.

20 Scholars have long noticed the similarity between this passage and
the Hesiodic Catalogue; it includes some of the same ‘heroines’ and uses the
same dual emphasis on the women’s courtship and the children who were
born to them.

304 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

it belonged to a genre that incorporated women’s traditions? In the
Odyssey passage, the catalogue excerpt is simply addressed to a
woman; but in its focus on female characters who are the daughters
and wives of mythic heroes, it resembles the Indian women’s tales.
There are even some traces of female focalization in the descriptions
of Tyro and Epicaste (Od. 11. 235–40 and 271–80).

The Hesiodic Catalogue is a highly problematic work. Although
I intend ultimately to approach the problems as opportunities, it is
important to identify them at the outset. In the first place, its
authorship, date, and place of composition are uncertain. In
antiquity it was attributed to Hesiod and it clearly belongs to the
formal oral tradition from which his poems descend, but differences
in the use of formulaic epithets and the inclusion of ‘late’ mythic
details such as the divinity of Heracles have led scholars to doubt
that the Catalogue was composed by the author of the Theogony
and Works and Days. M. L. West has postulated that it received its
final form in Attica in the sixth century bce.21

A more serious difficulty is the highly fragmentary state of the
work. Until the discovery of the Oxyrhynchus papyri beginning in
the late nineteenth century, the only surviving fragments were those
preserved in other authors, who cited it under the titles of Gunaiko¯ n
Katalogos (that is, Catalogue of Women), Ehoiai, or simply ‘Hes-
iod’. Although the papyri have given us much more of the text,
many of the recovered fragments are inscrutable: they preserve parts
of lines, parts of names, parts of stories. For a scholar whose
primary interest is in literary texts, this is intensely frustrating.
It is true that the formulaic nature of the language often makes

21 Martin L. West, The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (Oxford, 1985),
168–71, seconded by Robert L. Fowler, ‘Genealogical Thinking, Hesiod’s
Catalogue, and the Creation of the Hellenes’, Proceedings of the Cambridge
Philological Society, 44 (1998), 1–19. Richard Janko, by contrast, dates it
to the early seventh century in Homer, Hesiod, and the Hymns: Diachronic
Development in Epic Diction (Cambridge, 1982), 85–6, 200, 221–5. For a
fuller discussion of the issue of dating, see Ian Rutherford, ‘Formulas,
Voice, and Death in Ehoie-Poetry, the Hesiodic Gunaikon Katalogos, and
the Odysseian Nekuia’, in Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink (eds.), Matrices
of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society (Cambridge, Mass., 2000), 82–3
and nn.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 305

it possible to restore part of a line with reasonable assurance; but
this assurance can become inflated, leading the highly competent
editor to recompose whole blocks of lines. The omnipresent brack-
ets in the published Greek text (there is no published translation) are
used to flag reconstructed parts of lines and must serve to remind us
that much of this text, however plausible, is the work of its modern
editors, M. L. West and R. Merkelbach.22 The same caveat extends
to the arrangement of fragments in a narrative sequence. West
outlines the organizing principles and much of the specific argu-
mentation for this arrangement in his book The Hesiodic Catalogue
of Women.23

A final difficulty is the uncertainty surrounding the genre of the
work and its antecedents. This is compounded by the fact that other
works thought to belong to the same genre have been almost com-
pletely lost.24 Recent discussion has focused on the possibility that
the genre was a hybrid, combining ‘true catalogue poetry’—that is,
lists of famous women—with genealogies.25 The alternative title
Ehoiai is the plural of the formula used to introduce and connect

22 Reinhold Merkelbach and Martin L. West, Fragmenta Hesiodea (Ox-
ford, 1967). The revised edition, published as ‘Fragmenta Selecta’ within
the Oxford Classical Text’s volume of Hesiod edited by Friedrich Solmsen,
Hesiodi Theogonia, Opera et Dies, Scutum, 3rd edn. (Oxford, 1990),
includes fragments recovered after 1967 and is thus an indispensable sup-
plement to the first edition, but the apparatus is considerably abbreviated
and the testimonia are omitted. I will cite the first edition as ‘Merkelbach
and West 1967’ and the revised edition as ‘Merkelbach and West 1990’;
where fragments are identical in both versions, the date is not given.

23 See n. 21.
24 A few tiny fragments exist of the Megalai Ehoiai, which from its title is
assumed to have been a longer work of the same genre as the Catalogue.
The Naupaktia Epe¯, of which equally little remains, was described by
Pausanias (10, 38, 11) as being ‘about women’ (epesin pepoie¯menois es
gunaikas), but most of what we know of it comes from the scholia to
Apollonius, Argonautica, since it included a narrative of the voyage of the
Argo. Its version of this narrative, in so far as we can reconstruct it, includes
Medea but does not seem to emphasize women’s roles. See George
L. Huxley, Greek Epic Poetry from Eumelos to Panyassis (Cambridge,
Mass., 1969), 68–73.
25 This idea of M. L. West’s (Hesiodic Catalogue, 35, 167) has been
developed most fully by Rutherford, ‘Formulas’ (above, n. 21).

306 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

many sections of the work: e¯ hoie¯, ‘or such as’ (‘such as’ being in the
feminine). An individual section dealing with a single female figure
may be referred to in ancient authors as ‘the e¯hoie¯ of so-and-so’; as
an example, the ‘Alkme¯ne¯-e¯hoie¯’, describing how Alcmena came to
sleep with both Zeus and Amphitryon on the same night, can be
found in lines 1–56 of the Aspis, the Shield of Heracles (another
‘pseudo-Hesiodic’ work). The original intent of the phrase e¯ hoie¯,
with its emphasis on a quality or qualities of the woman, must have
been to identify exemplary women and either explicitly or implicitly
to compare them with one another. In its surviving form, however,
the Catalogue has come to incorporate genealogies of such length
that this original use of the formula is lost or at least attenuated. In
the view of M. L. West, the formula has assumed a new function,
that of introducing or returning to a collateral branch of a family. In
addition to the genealogies, the Catalogue incorporates narrative
digressions about specific mythic ancestors, many in the form of
brief asides, and a few detailed narratives, such as Atalanta’s race
and the wooing of Helen.

In an essay on the act of interpretation, Hans-Jost Frey notes that
‘the fragment, which does not fulfill the presupposition of whole-
ness, is not a popular object for literary scholarship and perhaps not
even a possible one.’26 He goes on to explain that this is because of
the role that the desire for control of meaning has played in trad-
itional literary studies. Starting with the premise that the work is a
finished whole, we seek to describe the conceptual order that its
wholeness evokes for us. There is a related tendency to attribute this
finished whole to a single author and to see its coherence as a
projection of the coherent personality that produced it. Thus
West, while analysing the strands of tradition that went into the
Catalogue, concludes that in its final form it was the work of a single
Attic poet of the sixth century, whose detailed knowledge of local
Attic legends and use of Attic dialectal forms reveal his origins.27 In
recent years this model of interpretation has been called into ques-
tion even in classics, first with the work of Parry and Lord on the

26 Hans-Jost Frey, Interruptions, trans. Georgia Albert (Albany, NY,
1996), 32. Orig. pub. as Unterbrechungen (Zurich, 1989).

27 West, Hesiodic Catalogue, 168–71.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 307

oral traditions behind ‘Homer’ and later with the insights of literary
theory concerning the role of the reader in interpretation and the
related phenomenon of intertextuality, in which a text’s meaning
can be altered by the mere existence of other texts. Yet in classics the
older model is still strong, and even those of us who seek to use the
new approaches feel obliged to demonstrate that what we find is
really ‘there in the text’. This may help to explain why so few
classicists have ventured to write about the Catalogue of Women.

But when I began to read systematically what has been written
about it, I quickly encountered a further difficulty. Strange as it may
seem, almost none of these scholars even acknowledges that the
Catalogue is about women.28 This is especially striking in the work
of West, for whom the Catalogue has two components: a compre-
hensive set of heroic genealogies and enough interpolated mythic
material to build them up into ‘a compendious account of the whole
story of the nation’.29 He acknowledges that the proem, ‘which
survives in fragmentary form (F 1)’, ‘calls upon the Muses to
sing . . . of ‘‘the women . . . who were the finest in those times . . . and
unfastened their waistbands . . . in union with gods’’ ’. ‘But’, West
adds, ‘these legendary unions between gods and mortal women
were only a starting-point for extensive heroic genealogies. The
poem could be considered as being about those celebrated women,
or more broadly as being about the genealogy of heroes.’30 Once he
has identified the work as essentially a genealogy, he never returns
to the possibility that it is ‘about’ the women it singles out, and none
of the parallel genealogical works he cites from other oral traditions
has anything to do with women—at least to judge by West’s account
of them.31 Late in the book, he raises the possibility that the

28 A forthcoming collection on the Catalogue, which I have not been
able to consult, may correct this imbalance: Richard Hunter (ed.), The
Hesiodic Catalogue of Women: Constructions and Reconstructions (Cam-
bridge, forthcoming).

29 West, Hesiodic Catalogue, 3.
30 Ibid. 2
31 Ibid. 11–30. By contrast, in The Bedtrick (Chicago, 2000), 263–4,
Wendy Doniger studies the ‘patriline’ of ancestors of Jesus as given in
Matthew’s gospel and shows that at three crucial junctures it is the initiative
of a woman of doubtful virtue that ensures the continuation of the line.

308 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

‘Ehoie-form’ of the genealogies, introducing each branch with a
female ancestor, may have originated in Locris, where according
to a fragment of Aristotle the form of inheritance was matrilinear.32
But for West this is just a minor point about the possible geograph-
ical origins of the Catalogue or of the genre to which it belongs. As
he and Merkelbach have reconstructed it (and there is no serious
challenge to their reconstruction), it is a text composed by men for
men. The bulk of West’s own study is devoted to piecing together
the details of the genealogies, which luckily correspond in many
instances to those given in the Library of Apollodorus (another
‘pseudonymous’ work of much later date that survives more or
less intact). But these genealogies are considered only as expressions
of men’s relationships with one another, including the ethnic and
even political relationships among the cities and regions of Greece.

At the risk of emphasizing null results, let me describe a few more
of the frustrations I encountered in reading the secondary literature
on this poem. Obviously in classical studies our evidence is such that
masculine perspectives predominate; yet I think we need to keep
reminding ourselves that this androcentric perspective is a skewed
one, not a picture of a totality. Recent work by Robert Fowler and
Jonathan Hall,33 informed by a sophisticated and fully contempor-
ary understanding of ancient texts as discourse, nevertheless seems
to take for granted that the discourse was shared by men only. There
may be multiple voices within the tradition, reflecting the perspec-
tives of different social classes or ethnic groups; it may even be
possible to reconstruct the emergence and evolution of ethnic con-
sciousness in groups such as the Argives or the Ionians, but not,
apparently, to consider the possibility that women within these
groups had any role in shaping that consciousness or the practices
that dovetailed with it. Hall points out that repeatedly in the
Catalogue a normative patrilineal scheme is disrupted by cases of

West makes no attempt to distinguish between bilateral genealogies like
those in the Catalogue, which include both male and female ancestors, and
purely patrilineal ones; both types exist, e.g., in India (Richard Saran,
University of Michigan, personal communication).

32 West, Hesiodic Catalogue, 168; Aristotle fr. 547.
33 Fowler, ‘Genealogical Thinking’ (see n. 21); Jonathan M. Hall, Ethnic
Identity in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge, 1997), 40–51.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 309

matrilineal inheritance (mother to son) or uxorilocal residence
(a husband settling with his wife’s people, for example, Menelaus
with Helen in Sparta). Hall even identifies these anomalies as
‘fracture points’ in the genealogies, ‘nodes which contradict or
challenge [their] internal logic’. But he never goes on to ask whether
women—as opposed to the men who ‘exchanged’ them—might
have had a stake in the way such contradictions were either empha-
sized or suppressed.

Deborah Lyons, who discusses the Catalogue in her book about
Greek heroines, Gender and Immortality,34 obviously acknow-
ledges and even focuses on the presence of women in the geneal-
ogies, and she makes the important point that many of these figures
received cult and were thus perceived as belonging to a different
category of being, somewhere in between mortal and divine. But
Lyons too assumes that the tradition is devoid of women’s perspec-
tives. In her view most of the women ancestors in the Catalogue are
mere ciphers or ‘place-holders’; even their names are not ‘distinct-
ive’ or individualized, and unless they suffer in dramatic ways, ‘they
essentially have no story’.35

Admittedly, many of the narrative excurses in the Catalogue are
about the feats of male heroes: for example, the Boreads’ pursuit of
the Harpies, the shape-shifting of Periclymenus and his defeat at the
hands of Heracles. And it is true that many of the women are simply
named in passing and have no stories of their own. But quite a few,
including those least known to later accounts of mythology, have
very interesting ones, and many of these are told at least in out-
line.36 What is more, several authors who summarized the content
of the Catalogue in antiquity used language suggesting that the
women were then seen as more central to the work. Lucian refers
to its subject as gunaiko¯ n aretas, ‘the excellences of women’; Ser-
vius’ commentary on Virgil describes Hesiod’s heroines as actively
‘desiring marriage with strong men’; and Dio Chrysostom goes so
far as to suggest that Hesiod ‘praised the women, leaving it to

34 Deborah Lyons, Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek
Myth and Cult (Princeton, 1997).

35 Ibid. 54–5.
36 See e.g. that of Mestra, discussed below.

310 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

Homer to praise the men’.37 Could the Catalogue of Women really
be about women after all?38

As for the genealogical content, surely it is worth considering why
this systematic genealogy of a patriarchal culture accords such
prominence to women throughout. Although the opening lines
emphasize the women who slept with gods, they are not the only
ones singled out for attention. The account of each family line
begins with a woman—sometimes with one who merely married
into it. Usually the daughters of a couple are listed before the sons;
sometimes the daughters’ children are also listed before the sons’.
Robert Fowler has argued that each major lineage outlined in the
poem can be traced back to a male founder (Aeolus, Perseus, Hera-
cles), and that women are used as links between lineage segments to
provide mythic precedent for social or political affinities between
historic groups.39 This may well reflect the thinking of the men who
gave the Catalogue its extant form; but it assumes that the geneal-
ogies, like the attendant narratives, are only or primarily of interest
to men, for whom their ‘point’ is establishing a precedent in the past
for relationships to other men in the present.

I would argue, by contrast, that both the genealogical and the
narrative components of the Catalogue may have been at home in a
women’s tradition which may have differed from, while overlapping
with, the ‘public’ androcentric tradition. Even in a patrilineal sys-
tem, women can be as interested in genealogy as men—sometimes
more interested. This is true of relationships through males as well
as through females, but women may be more likely to preserve
knowledge of relationships through females that tend to become
obscured in public contexts by patrilineal systems of naming and

37 Lucian, Diss. c. Hesiodo 1; Servius on Aeneid 7. 268; Dio Chrysostom
[¼ Dio Prus.] 2. 13. Cf. also the comment of Maximus of Tyre that Hesiod
wrote about ‘the loves of women’, gunaiko¯ n ero¯ tas. These references are
collected, but not translated, in the opening section of Merkelbach & West
1967 (above, n. 22), 1–3.

38 Exceptions to the trend I have noted in modern scholarship are Mary
R. Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth (London, 1986), 34–7, who notes
that ‘Hesiod’s catalogue attributes to women a significant role in this formal
history’, and Rutherford, ‘Formulas’, 89, who acknowledges ‘the primary
position given to female characters’.

39 Fowler, ‘Genealogical Thinking’, 5–6.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 311

inheritance. Since I began researching my own father’s family, about
which he himself knew very little, the major breakthroughs have
come through contacts with ‘lost’ female relatives, some of whom
had been compiling information for years.40 Even those who were
not interested in genealogy per se recalled oral traditions—often
transmitted from mother to daughter—that gave substance to (and
sometimes qualified) the bare facts of public record, which focused
on the males of the family. Granted that ours is a radically different
society from that of archaic Greece, there are enough continuities in
women’s domestic roles to make the comparison plausible. As
primary caregivers for children and elders, women perforce observe
the relationships that are at the core of family life; they may be the
repositories of family secrets. Greek New Comedy and its Roman
adaptations insist on women’s superior knowledge of intimate mat-
ters, including most notoriously the paternity of children.41
Although women in patriarchal cultures tend to adopt prevailing
attitudes about the superior importance of men, they may also
‘think back through their mothers’.42 There is thus nothing implaus-
ible in postulating a women’s genealogical tradition in which female
ancestors were at least as important as the males.

Of course, knowledge does not necessarily issue in poetry:
women may have known these things without transposing them
into verse. Yet our lack of evidence for such poetry does not prove
that it never existed. A tantalizing phrase in Plato’s Lysis refers to
‘the sorts of things old women sing’ in describing a musty family
tradition about the descent of an ancestor from Zeus and the
daughter of the deme’s founder.43 Even if transmitted informally,

40 Some of these contacts were originally lost because my father’s mother
and grandmother died young; he was raised by his father and paternal
grandfather.

41 The relevance of New Comedy to my argument was suggested by
Ariana Traill (personal communication). Some examples include the par-
entage of the babies in Menander’s Samia and Terence’s Hecyra, and that of
the twins Glykera and Moschion in Menander’s Perikeiromene¯.

42 Virginia Woolf’s phrase in A Room of One’s Own.
43 haper hai graiai aidousi, Lysis 205d, cited as evidence of women’s role
in the transmission of oral traditions by Rosalind Thomas, Oral Tradition
and Written Record in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1989), 109.

312 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

by word of mouth, women’s genealogical traditions may have found
their way into men’s genealogies or influenced the forms they took.

Likewise, just as women in our society are the primary authors
and readers of novels with female protagonists (including, e.g.,
romance novels), women in traditional societies have tended to
tell each other folk and fairy tales in which the protagonists are
women. It thus makes sense to assume that there were women’s
versions of the stories we find in the Catalogue, and that their
existence was known to the men who compiled the work in the
version we have. The dismissive tone of Plato’s speakers when
mentioning ‘old wives’ tales’ helps to account for the loss of such
materials from the written record, as well as for modern scholars’
lack of interest in recovering their traces. Women as well as men
who have been trained in a masculinist, text-based tradition may be
oblivious of the very possibility that such traditions existed.

Are we then reduced to speculation in our search for women’s
genres outside the lyric tradition? Or is there some textual evi-
dence—the kind that classicists have been taught to seek—to sup-
port their existence? I believe there is, in the form of the Odyssey
passage I have already mentioned, in which Odysseus addresses an
account of famous women to an audience that includes the Phae-
acian queen Arete. In fact, the Odyssey passage in its narrative
context can provide evidence both of women’s genealogical know-
ledge and of their interest in stories that highlight female characters.
In a valuable attempt to trace the history of the Catalogue’s genre,
Ian Rutherford has pointed out that the ‘catalogue of heroines’
in Odyssey 11, which on the surface is a list of unrelated
women—those whom Odysseus happened to see in the Under-
world—includes ‘some hidden genealogical connections’ (among
the women, and between them and other characters in the Odys-
sey): ‘Tyro was mother of Neleus, and Chloris married Neleus and
gave birth to Pero, who was wooed by Melampus; Tyro was also
grandmother of Melampus, [and] although that relationship is not
mentioned, it seems to provide a background to the story of Theo-
clymenus later in the Odyssey.’44 Tyro is described in the Odyssey

44 Rutherford, ‘Formulas’, 94. Tyro, Chloris, and Pero are female fig-
ures; Neleus and Theoclymenus are male.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 313

passage (11. 235–53) as actively seeking the love of the river
Enipeus; the divine lover who comes to her is not Enipeus but the
greater god Poseidon, who disguises himself as Enipeus, presumably
to gratify the woman’s desire as well as his own. Several complete
lines and parts of lines, admittedly formulaic, appeared in both the
Odyssey passage and the Catalogue, which also described the en-
counter between Tyro and Poseidon.45 The Catalogue’s version of
the story adds the interesting information that Tyro tried to dissuade
her father, the impious Salmoneus, from creating artificial thunder
and lightning in emulation of Zeus; presumably this is meant to
explain why she was saved when Zeus struck Salmoneus with the
real thing. Reared in the house of Cretheus, who was to become her
human husband, she attracted the attention of Poseidon.

The Odyssey thus alludes to the tradition represented by the
Catalogue, and does so in a way that emphasizes both the female
characters’ roles in the stories and the interest of female characters
in hearing them told. Moreover, if we consider that Odysseus’
account of the ‘famous heroines’ in the Underworld is framed by
the epic narrator’s account of the Phaeacians in Books 6 to 13, there
is further evidence of a women’s perspective combining genealogical
knowledge with praise of women. For the genealogy of Arete and
her husband Alcinous, who is also her uncle, is given in full by
Athena when she appears to Odysseus as a little girl to guide him
to the palace (7. 54–68). If this genealogy is compared to the
Underworld account, there is a striking parallel between the stories
of Tyro—the most fully represented of the ‘heroines’—and of
Periboea, who was the grandmother of Arete, the queen to whom
Odysseus is addressing his tale. Like Tyro’s father Salmoneus,
Eurymedon, the great-grandfather of Arete and Alcinous, perished
for ‘reckless’ behaviour while ruling the Giants, but his daughter
Periboea, like Tyro, attracted the attention of Poseidon and bore
Nausithous, who continued the line. When one of Nausithous’s sons
died prematurely, leaving a single daughter—Arete—the other son,
Alcinous, married her. Athena adds:

ŒÆß ìØí ŠôØóš ‰ò ïh ôØò Kðd ÷Łïíd ôßåôÆØ ¼ººç,
‹óóÆØ í~ıí ªå ªıíÆ~ØŒåò •ð š IíäæÜóØí ï~NŒïí Š÷ïıóØí:

45 Frs. 30–2, Merkelbach and West.

314 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

Sò Œåßíç ðåæd Œç~æØ ôåôßìçôÆß ôå ŒÆd ŠóôØí
ŠŒ ôå öߺøí ðÆßäøí ŠŒ ôš ÆPôï~ı š `ºŒØíüïØï
ŒÆd ºÆø~í, ï¥ ìßí ÞÆ Łåeí Sò åNóïæüøíôåò
äåØäÝ÷ÆôÆØ ìýŁïØóØí, ‹ôå óôåß÷fi çóš Iía ¼óôı:
ïP ìbí ªÜæ ôØ íüïı ªå ŒÆd ÆPôc äåýåôÆØ KóŁºï~ıÁ
ï~ƒóßí ôš å~P öæïíÝfi çóØ ŒÆd IíäæÜóØ íåߌåÆ ºýåØ:
åY ŒÝí ôïØ Œåßíç ªå ö᧒ öæïíÝfi çóš Kíd Łıìfiø~,
KºðøæÞ ôïØ ŠðåØôÆ öߺïıò NäÝåØí ŒÆd ƒŒÝóŁÆØ
ï~NŒïí Kò •łüæïöïí ŒÆd ócí Kò ðÆôæßäÆ ªÆ~ØÆí:

He [Alcinous] honours her [Arete] as no other woman on earth is honoured
Of all those who now keep house for their husbands.
Thus has she been honoured at heart and is so still
By her own children and by Alcinous himself
And by the people, who look upon her as a god
And greet her with words when she walks through the town.
For she has no lack of good sense
And for those of whom she thinks well she settles disputes, even for men.
If she should think well of you in her heart
There is hope that you will see your friends and arrive
At your high-roofed home and your fatherland. (7. 67–77)46

It seems significant to me that this statement is presented as the
peroration to a woman’s genealogy and is put into the mouth not
only of a female god, but of one who has disguised herself as a
human girl. Moreover, in this guise Athena confirms the advice of
Nausicaa that Odysseus approach the queen rather than the king;
there is agreement among the female characters that Arete is the
‘power behind the throne’. Although Alcinous does in fact approve
Arete’s proposal to increase Odysseus’ guest-gifts, an old courtier is
portrayed as calling upon Alcinous to ratify it ‘in word and deed’
(11. 344–6). There is thus apparently a difference of opinion
between women and men about whose decision counts, but the
Odyssey foregrounds the opinion of the women.

These parallels and dovetailings between the Odyssey passage
and the Catalogue suggest to me that the traditional materials of
which the Catalogue is composed—both the stories of famous
women and the genealogies highlighting their role in the continu-
ation of heroic lines—might be at home in a women’s tradition. The
consensus among the Phaeacian women that Arete has power ‘even

46 Translations are my own unless otherwise indicated.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 315

among men’, combined with the recital of her genealogy and the
implication that she is pleased by an account of famous heroines
linked by ties of blood, one of whose stories echoes that of her own
grandmother: all of this conjures up a context in which the materials
of the Catalogue are known to and valued by aristocratic women.

Although this evidence from the Odyssey is indirect, it is ‘textual’
enough to satisfy my expectations as a well-trained classicist. At the
same time, I cannot overlook the equally textual—albeit fragmen-
tary—evidence of masculine focalization in the Catalogue. Even if
we acknowledge that the poem is about ‘the excellences of women’,
female voices are largely absent from its narratives. Ian Rutherford
has found that in the surviving fragments no human female is given
direct speech (Athena may be the speaker of one passage, fr. 43a,
41–3.)47 This fact alone is not conclusive, since direct speech by
characters is rare in the work; the Catalogue was cited by one
ancient grammarian (who would have had access to the entire
text) as an example of a narrative told entirely in the third person.48
Third-person narrative need not be neutral: it may include ‘embed-
ded’ focalization by characters. Yet while some of the characters
represented in this way in the Catalogue are female, more are male.
In the story of Atalanta’s race, for example, which contains two of
the five direct speeches identified by Rutherford (an announcement
by Atalanta’s father Schoineus of the terms of the marriage contest
and an appeal by the winner Hippomenes to Atalanta during the
race49), there are several indications of embedded focalization by
males. In the lines leading up to the race, ‘amazement seized all
those looking’ (75, 8); some if not all of ‘those looking’ are male,
since the participle is masculine, and the implied object of their gaze
is Atalanta. If West’s hypothetical reconstruction of lines 7–10 is
basically correct, they are gazing at the tunic covering her breasts as

47 ‘Of all the characters that speak, none is a woman,’ Rutherford,
‘Formulas’, 88.

48 Diomedes (4th or 5th c. ce), in Keil (ed.), Grammatici Latini, i. 482,
included in the Testimonia to Merkelbach and West 1967 and cited by
Rutherford, ‘Formulas’, 87.

49 Schoineus speaks in fr. 75, 13–25 (the length of the speech is unclear,
since both its beginning and its end are lost) and Hippomenes in fr. 76, 9–10
(the speech may have continued beyond this point).

316 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

the wind stirs it. The fragments of the race include one allusion to
Atalanta’s motives: ‘She for her part was running in rejection of the
gifts of [golden Aphrodite]’ (76, 5–6); yet this is immediately bal-
anced and capped by an evocation of Hippomenes’ desperate situ-
ation: ‘but his race was for his life’ (76, 7). The end of the race, as far
as we have it, is described from Hippomenes’ point of view: ‘He
threw the third [apple] to the ground, j And with it he escaped death
and [black] fate; j he stood catching his breath and . . . ’ (n äb
ôe ôæßôïí wŒå ÷½AìÆ~æåÁ j ófí ôHØ äš KîÝöıªåí ŁÜíÆôïí ŒÆd
Œ\½æÆ ìݺÆØíÆí, j Š_óôç äš Iìðíåßøí ŒÆd [ . . . , 76, 21–3). Here the frag-
m_ent breaks off, so we do not know whether Atalanta’s reaction to
the outcome was explored.

A more frustrating silence in what remains of the work concerns
the reaction of Helen to her father’s choice of Menelaus as her
husband. This silence is especially egregious because the courtship
of Helen, drawn out at great length, immediately preceded the
conclusion of the Catalogue and was evidently the culminating
instance of courtship in the work. What is more, the failure of
Helen’s marriage precipitated the Trojan War, which seems to
have been portrayed in this conclusion as the catastrophe that
brought about the end of the age of heroes. Here masculine focal-
ization in the courtship narrative seems to dovetail with the frame of
the work as a whole. The dominant perspective in what remains of
the closing lines is that of Zeus, and his plan to decimate the human
race is described in lines that evoke the opening of the Iliad: ‘the
bronze was to hurl to Hades many heads/ of heroes who were to fall
in the struggle’ (. . . ðŠïººaò ڎäçØ Œåöƺaò Iðe ÷ƺŒeí NÜł[åØ]í j
Ií]äÐ æø~í ™æþøí Kí äçœïôBôØ ð_ åóüíôøí, Cat. 204, 118–19); co_mpare
the__wrat_h_ of Achilles, which ‘hurled to Hades many strong souls j
of heroes’, Iliad 1. 3–4. Perhaps it is not merely the hazards of time
but the text itself that has elided Helen’s perspective, since the
focalization in the substantial surviving fragments of her courtship
narrative is altogether masculine. Suitor after suitor is described as
‘wanting greatly to be the husband of Argive Helen’,50 and calcu-

50 One of two equivalent formulas with this meaning, ìܺÆ
äš XŁåºå j š `æªåßçò š ¯ºÝíçò ðüóØò ŠììåíÆØ or ƒìåßæøí œ ¯ºÝíçò ðüóØò ŠììåíÆØ
MıŒüìïØï, appears in frs. 199, 200, and 204 (twice in the latter: lines 42–3,
54–5).

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 317

lating his chances of winning her based on his wealth (since Tyndar-
eus, Helen’s foster father,51 gives her to the man who offers the most
gifts, pleista poro¯ n, fr. 204, 87). The clever Odysseus is described as
making a token bid but sending no gifts, since he foresees that no
one will match Menelaus in wealth (fr. 198). Tyndareus demands an
oath of the suitors, to the effect that all of them together will punish
the man who dares take Helen by force (bie¯, fr. 204, 82). As for
Helen herself, her beauty, like that of Atalanta, is emphasized at the
beginning of the passage (fr. 196, 5–6), and at the end it is noted that
she bore a daughter, Hermione, ‘unlooked for’ (or ‘unhoped for’,
fr. 204, 94–5)—perhaps because a male heir was expected? But
nothing is said of Helen’s attitude toward the marriage.52 The
narrative then shifts suddenly to the divine plane, where Zeus is
creating dissension among the gods by proposing to decimate the
human race. The final fragmentary lines of the poem as we have it
seem to describe a catastrophic change in the human condition,
accompanied by changes in the weather and the mysterious appear-
ance of a ‘dread serpent’ (deinos ophis, 204, 136). The point seems
to be that the end of an era has come, precipitated by the Trojan
War. That Helen was blamed to some extent for leaving Menelaus
can be seen from fragment 176, 7, which Merkelbach and West
place earlier in the Catalogue: ‘thus Helen disgraced the bed of fair-
haired Menelaus’. But no surviving passage gives an account of her
feelings for either of her two husbands.

In the Catalogue fragments themselves, then, we seem faced with
the same elision of women’s perspectives that characterized the
scholarship on the poem. Does this negate my identification of
elements in the poem that would also be at home in a women’s
tradition? I think not. I began by describing a situation that can be
seen as normative for living oral traditions, in which an array of
men’s and women’s genres present the same mythic material in
diverse ways. If we postulate such a situation for archaic Greece,
we can identify the Catalogue as representing the ‘men’s tradition’

51 Zeus is her actual father.
52 Another courtship sequence in the Catalogue in which the focalization
is strikingly masculine is that of Alcmena, fr. 195; in this case the passage is
preserved in its entirety.

318 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

without denying that a parallel ‘women’s tradition’ existed. What
I am arguing is that even as we acknowledge its masculine framing
and focalization, we keep sight of the alternative: a set of versions in
different generic forms, including informal word-of-mouth trans-
mission, that would have given greater space to female focalization
and the experiences of women.

There is a further reason, intrinsic to the subject of the Catalogue,
for insisting that women’s versions of this material once existed. For
a genealogy, however it may elide the female perspective, is a record
of sexual unions between females and males. Gender segregation
may be the cultural norm, but if the culture is to reproduce itself
men and women must be brought together. Thus the Catalogue
features stories of courtship: narratives that rehearse the obstacles
to union and the ways in which they may be overcome. As I have
shown, the poem as we have it presents at least some of these stories
from the male perspective; but there are traces of female focaliza-
tion in the Atalanta story and in some others.53 In what remains of
this essay I will focus on such traces, which acknowledge the exist-
ence of women’s desires and refusals, as a possible reflection of
women’s versions.

The period of courtship and marriage is the stage in a woman’s
life at which she is asked most pointedly to assent to the patriarchal
order. If her marriage is arranged, she must accept her father’s
authority to arrange it; at the same time, in most gender systems,
she must accept her husband’s authority over her for the rest of her
life. This helps to account for the centrality of courtship in many
women’s genres, including European fairy tales and the Telugu
women’s songs about Sita and Rama (several of which focus on
Sita’s wedding and that of her sister-in-law Santa). The overt scen-
ario is that the father, solicited by prospective grooms, chooses a
husband for his daughter, while the daughter has nothing to do but

53 I do not mean to suggest that all focalization is either masculine or
feminine or that gendered focalization necessarily reflects the sex of the
author. Clearly, male poets are capable of using female characters as foca-
lizers. But the choice of focalizers is often an indication of the intended
audience of a work; and in the parallel examples I have cited from living
oral traditions, female focalization is often correlated with female compos-
ition and performance.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 319

acquiesce. Machinery is set in motion—the father and the prospect-
ive husband, or his father, reach a contractual agreement; gifts and
promises are publicly given. Yet if the bride is essentially unwilling,
her unhappiness can undermine the success of the marriage—or
even, in unusual cases, derail it altogether.54 In such a system,
acknowledgment of the woman’s desires may be more at home in
a women’s tradition; but a realistic male perspective must also
include the possibility of female resistance. Thus it makes sense
for a men’s tradition to include narratives like that of Atalanta in
which the woman’s initial reluctance is overcome.

It is true that in many of the courtship accounts in the Catalogue
no attention is paid to the woman’s desires: she is given in marriage
by her father or chosen by a god who desires her beauty. Yet some
other accounts clearly include either a statement about the woman’s
attitude toward the match or actions of the woman that imply a
distinct attitude. In fact, the opening lines of the poem, which ask
the Muses to sing of ‘the tribe of women’, make the women subjects
of active verbs: they ‘loosened their belts . . . mixing in love with
gods’ (ìßôæÆò ôš IººýóÆíôï ½. . . j ìØóªüìåíÆØ Łåï}ó[Øí, fr. 1, 4–5).55
This complements Servius’ description o_ f the p_ _oem as portraying
women ‘desiring marriage with strong men’ and the comment of
Maximus of Tyre that Hesiod described ‘the loves of women’
(gunaiko¯ n ero¯ tas).56 The focus then seems to shift to the male
gods who sought union with these women, who are enumerated in
the fragmentary lines that follow. It certainly seems paradoxical
that accounts of women’s unions with gods, in which the women
ought to have the least power of resistance, should include the

54 A fascinating modern example is given in Lila Abu-Lughod’s study of
gender relations and poetry among the Bedouin, Veiled Sentiments (above,
n. 15), 101–2. A young Bedouin woman made her unhappiness at her first
marriage so evident—first by screaming, then by hiding from the groom and
running away—that it was decided she was ‘possessed’ and could be
granted a divorce.

55 For the active translation of allusanto here, see the Supplement to LSJ,
s.v. analuo¯ .

56 See above, n. 37. That the genitive in Maximus is subjective rather
than objective, i.e., that it is the women who feel the desire, is clear from the
context.

320 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

clearest acknowledgments of their desires. To the men who incorp-
orated these stories into heroic genealogies, the point was evidently
to claim divine origin for their ancestors; yet from a woman’s
perspective, such a union might be a wish-fulfilment fantasy, in
which a highly attractive and powerful suitor is overcome with
passion for a woman of inferior status but of undeniable beauty
and ‘excellence’.

There is more evidence of such a perspective in fragment 31, as
reconstructed with the help of Odyssey 11, whose words it partly
matches. This fragment describes how Tyro was seduced by Posei-
don in the shape of the river Enipeus, with whom she was in love.
The much fuller Odyssey version of the episode is striking for its
portrayal of female desire: there is no question that Tyro feels eros
for the river (potamou e¯rassat’, 11. 238), whose company she seeks
(po¯ lesketo, 240). The fact that Poseidon tricks her, and in fact puts
her to sleep during the sexual act, is problematic, and I do not mean
to suggest that such a fantasy would be an empowering one for a
woman to entertain; but it is not necessarily just a male fantasy. The
god who comes to Tyro is more powerful than the one she desired;
he takes the trouble to assume a shape that is pleasing to her, and the
detail of putting her to sleep at least means that she suffers no pain;
perhaps it even implies that the encounter is like a pleasant dream.57
Another of the ‘heroines’ seen by Odysseus in the Underworld,
Iphimedia, was also loved by Poseidon; although no description of
their encounter survives in the Odyssey or the Catalogue fragments,
the Library of Apollodorus (which used the Catalogue as a source)
describes her as acting on her desires still more overtly than Tyro
did: ‘going continually to the sea’s edge she scooped water into her
genitals with her hands.’58 In this version, a god apparently does

57 For a fuller analysis of this scene, see Lillian E. Doherty, ‘Tyro in
Odyssey 11: Closed and Open Readings’, Helios, 20 (1993), 3–15. The
account of Alcmena’s sexual encounter with Zeus (fr. 195), which resulted
in the birth of Herakles, describes a divine lover taking the place of a mortal
husband; once again the god is disguised, this time as the husband (the
Catalogue does not say so directly, but assumes audience knowledge of
the story).

58 Apollodorus 1. 7. 4, trans. Michael Simpson, in Gods and Heroes of
the Greeks: The Library of Apollodorus (Amherst, Mass., 1976), 33.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 321

come in answer to a woman’s prayers. Both the Odyssey and the
Library describe her as the wife of Aloeus (a mortal) before describ-
ing the tryst with Poseidon, and her sons are known as the Aloea-
dae. So in this instance the fantasy may be about extramarital rather
than premarital sex.

A more subtle variation on the theme of the woman and the
divine lover may be found in the story of Demodice, daughter of
Agenor. In fragment 22, Demodice refuses all of her many suitors
despite their offers of splendid gifts. But in the Library Demodice is
described as the mother of four sons by the god Ares, and one of
these, Thestius, is the father of Leda, who is named with her
children and grandchildren in fragment 23 of the Catalogue.59
What is the missing link between these two fragments, assuming
they originally appeared in this order? Evidently Demodice, who
refused all her human suitors, attracted a divine suitor. Given the
admiration expressed in the poem’s opening lines for ‘the
women . . . who were the finest in those times . . . and unfastened
their waistbands . . . in union with gods,’60 it is unlikely that Demo-
dice’s union with Poseidon was seen as in any sense a punishment
for her refusal to marry; it might even have been seen as a reward.61

To be sure, the gods do not marry mortals, so their unions with
such women in myth tend to be brief. In some versions these unions
have tragic consequences for the women: a case in point is that of
Creusa as described in the Ion of Euripides (NB a tragic drama from
a much later era). The Catalogue does not seem to have avoided
tragic stories altogether, since it included, for example, Apollo’s
discovery of the infidelity of his lover Coronis,62 and a brief mention
of the murder of Clytemnestra by her son Orestes.63 But rarely in

59 Leda’s name appears in full (23a, 5 and 8); so do those of her grandchil-
dren Electra, Iphimede, and Timandra (lines 16–17, 31). Clytemnestra and
Orestes are clearly referred to, although their names are truncated (27–30).

60 The translation is that of M. L. West in Hesiodic Catalogue (above,
n. 21), 2.

61 Cf. Lefkowitz, Women in Greek Myth (above, n. 38), 34: ‘[Demodice]
held out, apparently, for a god instead [of a human suitor]’.

62 Fr. 60, from the scholia to Pindar’s third Pythian ode.
63 Fr. 23a, 30. Deianira is also described as ‘doing a fearful deed’ in
sending the poisoned shirt to Herakles, fr. 25, 20–4, but, as in later versions,
there is no suggestion that her intent was to kill him.

322 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

the extant fragments do we find overt expressions of blame for a
woman’s sexual behaviour, or accounts of a woman’s punishment
for such behaviour.64 (One woman whose father intended that she
be punished for a premarital seduction or rape—the language is
ambiguous—actually became the wife of the man designated to kill
her.65) This absence of blame and punishment may have been char-
acteristic of the genre: in the context of a genealogy, sexual unions
cannot be primarily tragic because they are seen in retrospect as
essential to the family’s continuation. And since the heroines com-
memorated in the Catalogue are foremothers of men as well as of
women, the work’s positive ‘spin’ need not be attributed to women.
Yet in a culture that included a misogynistic strand from very early
on,66 such absence of blame is remarkable.

A tantalizing but highly fragmentary example of a courtship
story in the Catalogue that seems to make room for a woman’s
initiative is that of Mestra,67 daughter of Aethon (also known as
Erysichthon), in fragment 43a. It is possible to reconstruct the story
only in part, with the help of other extant versions which may have
differed from it in crucial details.68 A Hellenistic paraphrase of the
myth says that Mestra was a pharmakis, a sorceress, capable of

64 The most notable exception to this is the statement that all three
daughters of Tyndareus abandoned their husbands (fr. 176); but the quota-
tion is introduced in its source, a scholion to Euripides’ Orestes, by the
claim that this behaviour was imposed by Aphrodite as punishment for the
impiety of Tyndareus. Alcyone is punished, equally with her husband Ceyx,
for impiety; infatuated, they address one another as ‘Zeus’ and ‘Hera’ and
are transformed into birds (fr. 10d, Merkelbach and West 1990, an an-
onymous summary from a papyrus). Although they are described as ‘enam-
oured of one another’ (al]le¯lo¯ n erasthentes), this is not explicitly
represented as the cause of their impiety.

65 Fr. 12, another paraphrase from the Library.
66 A case in point is the tirade attributed to Agamemnon’s ghost at
Odyssey 11. 427–34, shortly after the catalogue of famous women dis-
cussed above.
67 Appropriately, her name means ‘courted’ (as does the final element in
some other heroines’ names, e.g., Klytaimestra, ‘famously courted’).
68 e.g. Noel Robertson, ‘The Ritual Background of the Erysichthon
Story’, American Journal of Philology, 105 (1984), 369–408, notes that
there is no mention in the Catalogue version of Aithon/Erysichthon’s crime
against Demeter.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 323

transforming herself into a variety of animals; her father Aethon,
afflicted with insatiable hunger for his impiety to Demeter, sold her
repeatedly in animal form to pay for food and she escaped from her
owners to return to her father.69 A later account confirms that
Hesiod in the Ehoiai ‘relates that [Mestra] was sold to feed
Aethon’;70 but the extant fragments suggest that she was ‘sold’
not as an animal but as a bride, for the sake of the gifts—largely
in the form of cattle and goats—that her suitors gave her father
(fr. 43a, 20–4). In lines 31–2, Mestra may be described as using her
shape-shifting ability to escape from her husband and return to her
father’s (and mother’s) house.71 A dispute then arises between
Aethon and Sisyphus, a famously clever figure who has apparently
arranged a marriage between Mestra and his son Glaucus; a female
god (probably Athena, given later references to Athens) is called in
to adjudicate the dispute, since ‘no mortal could judge it’. In the
next fully legible lines, ‘although he [presumably Sisyphus] sur-
passed other men in clever contrivances, j he had no knowledge of
Zeus’ intent, j that the Olympian gods would not give Glaucus
offspring for his sake j from Mestra and seed to leave after [him]
among men’ (I]íäæø~í äb ðæïh÷åóŒå íïÞìÆôÜ ôå ðæÆð[ßäÆò ôå, j I]ººš
ïh ðøò XØäåØ ˘çíeò íüïí; ÆNªØü÷ïØï, j ‰ò ïh ïƒ äï~Øåí ˆºÆýŒøØ ªÝíïò
ˇPæÆíßøíåò j KŒ ÌÞóôæçò ŒÆd óðÝæìÆ ìåôš IíŁæþðïØóØ ºØðÝ ó[ŁÆØ,
fr. 43a, 51–4). Instead, Poseidon abducts Mestra, ‘taking her far
from her father over the wine-dark sea, j . . . although she was
very clever’ (kaiper poluidrin eousan, ibid. 55–7). She bears at least
one son to Poseidon on the island of Cos before returning to her

69 The source is a scholion to the Hellenistic poet Lycophron, cited as
fr. 43b, Merkelbach and West 1967.

70 Philodemus Peri Eusebeias (fr. 43c, Merkelbach and West).
71 The passage is very fragmentary; the words that are clearly legible say,
‘but she, being freed . . . darting away, a/the woman at once . . . j . . . in the
halls; [there] came after [her] . . . ’ (m äb ºıŁ[å}]óÆ . . . j . . . IðƎîÆóÆ, ªıíc
äš ¼Ææ . . . j . . . K]íd ìåªÜæïØóØ_ìåôBºŁ[å . . . , fr. 43a, 31–3); in a plausible emend-
ation proposed by Lobel, she ‘[be_came] a woman [once again] inthe halls [of
her father]’, ªıíc äš ¼Ææ Æ[PôØò Šªåíôï j ðÆôæeò K]íd ìåªÜæïØóØ, 32–3. If it was
Sisyphus or his son who ‘came after’ her, the phrase para me¯tri, ‘beside [her]
mother’, in line 34 may describe where he found her; in any case, it seems to
add the point that at home, she would have spent her time ‘beside her
mother’ in the women’s quarters.

324 l i l l i a n do h e r t y

‘fatherland’;72 further mention is made at this point of her ‘ill-fated
father, whom she cared for’ (ibid. 69).

As in the stories of Atalanta and Demodice, although the Cata-
logue version is focalized by the male characters there are hints of
Mestra’s attitude and implicit praise of her extraordinary abilities.
To be sure, except for the phrase ‘beside her mother’, there is no
mention of her relationships to other women. She uses her skill
entirely in the service of her father; when she escapes, she returns
to his ‘halls’, and even when abducted to a distant island by Posei-
don, she manages to return. Surely this tenacity in a famously clever
woman bespeaks a will to return. The story resembles that of
Demodice in providing a divine ‘suitor’ when the bride has rejected
all mortal ones; but Mestra seems to resist Poseidon as well (he is
said to ‘tame’ her, edamasse, 55), out of loyalty to her father. In
some versions of the myth, her shape-shifting ability was the gift of
Poseidon,73 but the internal chronology of the Catalogue version
does not seem to allow for this.

In the context of a genealogical work that acknowledges the
obstacles to courtship, Mestra’s story, told at length, raises the
possibility that a daughter’s loyalty to her father may prevent her
contracting a successful marriage. By contrast with Tyro and Peri-
boea, who survive the destruction visited on hubristic fathers be-
cause of their own piety, Mestra makes extraordinary efforts to
preserve her father’s life when he is already suffering divine punish-
ment. Only a god can detach her from this purpose, and he is said to
use force, abducting her ‘although she was very clever’. In the logic
of the Catalogue, with its emphasis on the ‘excellences of women’,
the abduction should probably be seen as a compliment to Mestra,

72 It is unclear whether the passage from lines 70 to 82 continues the
story of Mestra or describes a different woman (see apparatus to these lines
in Merkelbach and West 1967). The woman in this passage is also described
as highly intelligent (‘her mind was equal to those of the goddesses’, noeske
gar isa thee¯si, 72); she also sleeps with Poseidon and gives birth to the hero
Bellerophon; in a scholion to the Iliad Mestra is the mother of Bellerophon.
Robertson, ‘Ritual Background’ (above, n. 68), 383 and his n. 31, argues
that the woman described in 70–82 is not Mestra.

73 e.g. Philodemus, Peri Eusebeias, quoted in fr. 43c, Merkelbach and
West 1967.

w o m e n i n t h e h e s i o d i c c a t a l o g u e o f w o m e n 325

the god’s recognition not of mere physical beauty (although that too
is described, 43a, 4 and 19) but of remarkable intelligence and
loyalty. It is easy to see the potential for a women’s version of this
story in which Mestra’s perspective would be given full play, and in
which the pitting of her wits against those of Sisyphus might emerge
as a mainspring of the plot.

Perhaps rather than deplore the fragmentary condition of the
Catalogue, we should be thankful that its incompleteness forces us
to think in terms of potentially divergent traditions and versions.
Rather than impose upon it the ‘presupposition of wholeness’,74
which has informed traditional literary scholarship, we should use
its incompleteness as a reminder that what is missing from the
versions we have may be as significant as what is there. I am not
urging that we simply discard traditional methods of reading; in
adducing textual evidence from the Odyssey for the existence of a
women’s tradition that paralleled the Catalogue, I am myself invok-
ing such methods. In fact, I am asking that the text’s own announce-
ment of its subject matter, and its foregrounding of women
throughout the genealogies, be taken more seriously than hitherto.
But by relying too exclusively on texts, ancient and modern, in
which male focalization predominates, we risk falling into the trap
of assuming that a world could ever exist in which women were
merely the objects of male discourse rather than participants in a
shared discourse. This trap can be avoided by looking outside the
text, to living oral traditions that remind us of the presence of
women’s stories.

74 Frey, Interruptions (above, n. 26), 32.

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13

Reclaiming the Muse

P e nn y Murray

Reading through the newspaper one morning last year my eye was
caught by a rather beautiful photograph of a painting by Burne-
Jones, with the caption, ‘ARTIST’S MUSE: Victorian masterpiece
expected to fetch £800,000’. The painting, being previewed at
Sotheby’s before sale, was described as being ‘inspired by his lover,
Maria Zambaco’, but its title, Cumaean Sibyl, was not mentioned.
What was felt to be important about this ‘masterpiece’ was its
depiction of the artist’s muse, a theme guaranteed to appeal to the
sensibilities of the modern reader. This image of the Muse as loved
object who inspires the male artist, whilst she herself remains silent,
is deeply engrained in contemporary culture, despite the best efforts
of feminist critics to expose the implications of such imagery: man
creates, woman inspires; man is the maker, woman the vehicle of
male fantasy, an object created by the male imagination, incapable
of any kind of agency herself. In short, this image of the Muse denies
woman’s active participation in artistic creation and silences female
creativity.1 The modern paradigm is perhaps most memorably

1 See e.g. S. Gilbert and S. Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic: The
Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (New
Haven 1979); G. Greer, Slip-shod Sibyls: Recognition, Rejection and the
Woman Poet (London, 1995); S. Gubar, ‘The Blank Page and Female

328 p e nn y m u r r ay

expressed in the writings of Robert Graves, who developed an
elaborate mythology surrounding the White Goddess, an idealized,
all-powerful female figure, whom he identified with the Muse, the
quintessential source of poetry. ‘The function of poetry’, he
declared, ‘is religious invocation of the Muse’, which he explained
thus:

The true poet must always be original . . . he must address the Muse and tell
her the truth about himself and her in his own passionate and peculiar
words. The Muse is a deity, but she is also a woman, and if her celebrant
makes love to her with the second-hand phrases and ingenious verbal tricks
that he uses to flatter her son Apollo she rejects him more decisively even
than she rejects the tongue-tied or cowardly bungler. Not that the Muse is
ever completely satisfied. Laura Riding has summed her up in three mem-
orable lines:

Forgive me, giver, if I destroy the gift:
It is so nearly what would please me
I cannot but perfect it.

A poet cannot continue to be a poet if he feels that he has made a permanent
conquest of the Muse, that she is always his for the asking. (The White
Goddess, 442)

The implications of this passage are spelt out more clearly a little
later on:

The reason why so remarkably few young poets continue nowadays to
publish poetry after their twenties is not necessarily. . . the decay of patron-
age and the impossibility of earning a decent living by the profession of
poetry. . . The reason is that something dies in the poet. Perhaps he has
compromised his poetic integrity by valuing some range of experience . . .
above the poetic. But perhaps also he has lost his sense of the White
Goddess: the woman whom he took to be a Muse, or who was a Muse,

Creativity’, in E. Abel (ed.), Writing and Sexual Difference (Brighton,
1982); M. Homans, Women Writers and Poetic Identity: Dorothy Words-
worth, Emily Bronte¨, and Emily Dickinson (Princeton, 1980); R. Parker
and G. Pollock, Old Mistresses: Women, Art and Ideology (London, 1981);
A. Rich, ‘When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision’, in On Lies,
Secrets, and Silence: Selected Prose, 1966–78 (New York, 1979);
M. Warner, Monuments and Maidens: The Allegory of the Female Form
(London, 1985), esp. 199–209, 239, 224 ff.

reclaiming the muse 329

turns into a domestic woman and would have him to turn similarly into a
domesticated man. Loyalty prevents him from parting company with her,
especially if she is the mother of his children and is proud to be reckoned a
good housewife; and as the Muse fades out, so does the poet . . . The White
Goddess is anti-domestic; she is the perpetual ‘other woman’, and her part
is difficult indeed for a woman of sensibility to play for more than a few
years, because the temptation to commit suicide in simple domesticity lurks
in every maenad’s and muse’s heart’ (ibid. 447).2

Graves’s vision of the Muse can be seen as the culmination of a long
tradition of the objectification of the female which stretches back to
classical antiquity. And, not surprisingly, the gendering of creativity
implied by the imagery of artistic inspiration derived from the
Greeks is a subject of lively debate amongst classical scholars.
A recent volume edited by Efie Spentzou and Don Fowler, Cultivat-
ing the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspiration in Classical Lit-
erature (Oxford, 2002) explores this theme at length, and I should
like to quote from Alison Sharrock’s article in that volume, which
succinctly captures some of the themes at the centre of the book.
Talking of Ovid’s invocation of the Muse, she observes amongst
other things that invocation ‘enacts the fetishising and objectifica-
tion of ‘‘poetry’’ as ‘‘woman’’ (goddess and whore) which is sublim-
inal in so much of the discourse of poetics’ (p. 208). Speaking of the
Muse she says:

her relationship with the poet is sometimes overtly, more often covertly, shot
through with erotic undertones. She includes hints of the ‘goddess courting a
mortal man’ . . . and also elements of the passive desired object . . . Even
when not eroticized, the relationship between poet and ‘Muse’ is a gendered
one. Poets are practically all men, and the ‘poet’s voice’ is a male voice:
Muses are all women. In this regard, the ancient and modern practice of
calling Sappho ‘the tenth Muse’ should be deeply troubling . . . because it has
the effect, albeit subliminal, of crossing out or undermining the active
creative function of woman poets. It is only a small step from calling a
woman poet ‘a Muse’ to constructing her as ‘poetry’ rather than ‘poet’, as
the page who ‘is a poem rather than being someone who writes a poem’.

2 For discussion and critique of Graves’s views see e.g. L. Feder, Ancient
Myths in Modern Poetry (Princeton, 1971), 358–64.

330 p e nn y m u r r ay

All this is very true of Ovid’s use of the Muse figure and indeed of
many other invocations and evocations of the Muse in classical
authors, especially the Roman poets, discussed by the contributors
to Cultivating the Muse. But there is an alternative story to tell. For
the antique Muse is a far more ambivalent and multi-layered figure
than the ubiquitous modern paradigm of the Muse as mistress
would suggest. What I aim to do in this essay is to explore some
of the more positive implications of the Muses’ gender in the ancient
sources and to highlight some moments in the history of reception
when Muse imagery has been used as a means of empowering
women rather than oppressing them.

Germaine Greer discusses some of these issues in the opening
chapter of her book on women poets, Slip-shod Sibyls, which in-
cludes a critique of the Gravesian interpretation of the function of
the Muses which I have just sketched out. One point which she
emphasizes is the power of the Muses in classical mythology, which
Graves himself documents in his mythical handbook, The Greek
Myths. I quote Greer:

The Muses collected the limbs of dismembered Orpheus and buried them at
the foot of Mount Olympus. The Muses sang more sweetly than the Sirens,
whose wing-feathers were plundered to make them crowns, at the weddings
of Cadmus and Hermione, Peleus and Thetis, and the funeral of Achilles.
The Muses taught Aristaeus the arts of healing and prophecy and the
Sphinx the riddle which Oedipus eventually answered. The Muses stabled
Pegasus, who made the spring of Hippocrene for them by striking the earth
with his hoof. As teachers, performers and critics the Muses were experts.
In them doing and being would appear to be fused; though they may be
descendents of the White Goddess, they traffic, not in ‘dark wisdom’, but in
intelligence and expertise. The classic concept of the muse enables the
female poet; the twentieth century distortion of the classic scheme silences
her. (Slip-shod Sibyls, 4–5; my italics)

Greer rightly argues that one of the nails in the coffin (or, as she puts
it, a significant stage in the ‘castration of the muse’) is the moment
when the grand and distant divinity enthroned on Parnassus dwin-
dled into the poet’s love object—as soon as the Muse is identified
with an embodied woman she loses her power. Greer goes on to
emphasize that ‘poetry is, of course, a matter of intellect; though the
matter may be provided by the unconscious, the form must be

reclaiming the muse 331

forged and apprehended by the conscious. Neither conscious nor
unconscious is actually gendered’, but the image of the Muse per-
sonifies inspiration and the source of creativity as female. Why the
creative function of the human mind should be gendered female is a
question worth thinking about, and it is one to which I shall return.
But for the moment I want to focus on the Muse as an emblem of
female capability.

I shall begin by looking at the society of eighteenth-century
London, when the Muse was a favourite theme in art. This was a
time when women were beginning to participate actively in the
public sphere, and to contribute in significant ways to the trans-
formation of the cultural life of the period, not least through their
role as patrons, producers, and consumers of literature and the fine
arts. The learned ladies of the Bluestocking circle, described by
Hester Thrale as ‘the female Wits—a formidable Body, and called
by those who ridicule them, the Blue Stocking club’, were dedicated
to the participation of women in intellectual life, and played a vital
part in the development of the culture of leisure and the Polite Arts
which were considerd to be the hallmark of civilized society.3
Literary ladies and other eminent women were frequently honoured
with the title of ‘Muse’ or ‘Sappho’, and female celebrities were
depicted in the guise of Muses and other appropriate figures from
classical mythology. Thus Sir Joshua Reynolds’s famous portrait
Mrs. Siddons as Tragic Muse represents the celebrated actress as
the Queen of Tragedy, in the guise of the Tragic Muse, which she
herself had played on stage when she appeared as Melpomene at the
Drury Lane Theatre in 1785. Angelica Kauffmann, well known as a
painter throughout Europe and one of the founding members of the
Royal Academy, seems to have had a particular fondness for Muse
allegories, and even presents herself as her own Muse. Of course,

3 See J. Brewer, The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture
(Harper Collins, 1997), 76–80; R. Porter, Enlightenment: Britain and the
Creation of the Modern World (Harmondsworth, 2000), 320–38; S. H.
Myers, The Bluestocking Circle: Women, Friendship and the Life of the
Mind in Eighteenth-Century England (Oxford, 1990); G. Kelly (ed.), Blue-
stocking Feminism: Writings of the Bluestocking Circle, 6 vols. (London,
1999); G. Kelly, ‘Bluestocking Feminism’, in Eger et al. (eds.), Women,
Writing and the Public Sphere: 1700–1830 (Cambridge, 2001), 163–80.

332 p e nn y m u r r ay

representing a woman as a Muse is not in itself an unequivocal
compliment, and in the hands of a male artist the theme could take
on humorous, not to say risque´, connotations. Reynolds’s portrait
Mr. Garrick, between the two Muses of Tragedy and Comedy
(1762) turns the Muse figure into something of a joke, on a par
with the mock heroic invocation of the Muse in literature, as we see
the renowned tragic actor clearly showing his preference for the
easy-going, coquettish figure of Comedy, and apologetically bidding
goodbye to Tragedy.4 The mythologized renderings of living women
also contrast strongly with the individualized portraits of their male
counterparts, who are customarily depicted with all the regalia of
public office, which serve as a means of indicating their actual status
in society. Nevertheless Muse imagery could still be used in positive
ways to celebrate feminine achievement, particularly when, as in the
case of Mrs Siddons, the subject of the portrait was a practising
artist in her own right.

The art historian Gill Perry has explored the complex ways in
which the conventional system of allegories and symbolic codes
could operate in eighteenth-century female portraiture, and shown
how the Muse could signify active forms of creativity in the sitter, as
well as the traditionally passive role of inspiring the male poet or
artist. For example, Angelica Kauffmann was able to use conven-
tional allegorical figures—Poetry, Music, Painting, and so on—to
dramatize her own ideas about the role of the female artist. One
such painting is The Artist in the Character of Design (1782), in
which she shows herself as the allegorical figure of Design with the
Muse-like figure of Poetry by her side. In keeping with the academic
theory of the time advocated by Sir Joshua Reynolds, she elevates
her own art, design, to the same level as poetry, suggesting that it,
too, is inspired, whilst at the same time conveying the idea that she
is her own source of inspiration.5 Similarly the image of Sappho

4 See e.g. D. Shawe-Taylor, Genial Company: The Theme of Genius in
Eighteenth-Century British Portraiture (Nottingham 1987); C. Grant, ‘The
Choice of Hercules: The Polite Arts and ‘Female Excellence’ in Eighteenth-
Century London’, in Eger et al. (eds.), Women, Writing, 88–9.

5 See G. Perry, ‘The British Sappho’, Oxford Art Journal, 18:1 (1995),
44–57.

reclaiming the muse 333

provided a quasi-mythological role model for contemporary con-
structions of femininity, and could be used as an analogue for the
female creative artist. Kauffmann’s portrait Sappho (1775), which
bears more than a passing resemblance to the artist herself, depicts
the poet inspired by Cupid and actively engaged in the process of
writing: the classical imagery enables Kauffman to say something
about herself whilst also promoting the value of painting as an intel-
lectual activity.The figure of Sappho, like that of the Muses, could be
used in a number of different ways and interpreted on a variety of
levels, but the popularity of these allegorical or mythological portraits
at a time when women were actively involved in forms of creativity
traditionally personified as female can hardly be accidental.

This was the context in which Richard Samuel exhibited his
painting The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain (Fig. 13.1), at
the Royal Academy in 1779, in which the Muses are unquestionably

Fig. 13.1. Richard Samuel,The Nine Living Muses of Great Britain, 1779.
(Courtesy of the National Portrait Gallery, London.)

334 p e nn y m u r r ay

used as icons of feminine capability. The painting is the subject of an
illuminating article by Elizabeth Eger, ‘Representing Culture: the
Nine Living Muses of Great Britain’,6 who interprets it firmly
within its eighteenth-century context. The nine women, draped in
classical garb and depicted as living Muses, formed a veritable
pantheon of modern intellectuals, and were involved in a wide
range of activities. They were: Charlotte Lennox, poet and novelist;
Elizabeth Carter, poet and translator of the Stoic Epictetus; Eliza-
beth Montagu, ‘queen of the Bluestockings’, a wealthy literary
patron, and author of a famous essay, ‘The Genius and Writing of
Shakespeare’; Catherine Macaulay, historian and educationist;
Anna Barbauld, writer and critic; Hannah More, poet and play-
wright, and a close friend of the great tragic actor David Garrick,
who nicknamed her ‘Nine’ because she was for him the embodiment
of all nine Muses;7 Angelica Kauffmann; Elizabeth Griffith, actress,
playwright, and novelist; and Elizabeth Linley, singer, and wife of
the playwright and politician Richard Sheridan.

The novelty of Samuel’s painting is that it depicts living women as
Muses, whilst at the same time evoking the ethereal mythological
figures of earlier famous portrayals of the Muses such as Raphael’s
Parnassus (1511) and Poussin’s Apollo and the Muses on Parnassus
(c.1630–2). But, as Eger points out, the eighteenth century saw the
Muses as emblems of female power rather than as passive enablers
of male artists: ‘as more and more women participated in the
creation and cultivation of polite and professional culture, the
means to represent their achievement and authority tended to be
found in classical myths and histories of civilization’ (Eger, 109).
Thus one Wetenhall Wilkes, in his ‘Essay on the Pleasure and
Advantages of Female Literature’ (London, 1741) asked: ‘If it
were intended by Nature, that Man should Monopolize all Learning
to himself, why were the Muses Female, who . . . were the Mistresses
of all the Sciences, and the Presidents of Music and Poetry?’ Again,
James Barry in his Letter to the Dilittanti Society, first published in
1798, the year after Mary Wollstonecraft’s death says:

6 In Eger et al. (eds.), Women, Writing, 104–32.
7 See A. Stott, Hannah More: The First Victorian (Oxford, 2003), 3, 50–1.

reclaiming the muse 335

If anyone should start a query, why the ancients, who reasoned so deeply,
should, in their personifications of the sovereign wisdom, have chosen
Minerva a female; why the Muses, who preside over the several subordinate
modes of intelligence etc. are all females . . . such queries could have been
well and pertinently answered by the eloquent, generous, amiable sensibil-
ity of the celebrated and long-to-be-lamented Mary Wollstonecraft . . . who
would have found some matter for consolation, in discovering that the
ancient nations of the world entertained a very different opinion of female
capabilities, from those modern Mohometan, tyrannical, and absurd
degrading notions of female nature at which her indignation was so justly
raised.8

The significance of the femininity of the Muses seems to have been a
much discussed topic in the eighteenth century, and Eger convin-
cingly argues that Samuel’s painting ‘can be read as belonging to a
tradition that celebrated the feminine icon of the Muse as a power-
ful example of what women might be and do’ (p. 111). She, like
Greer, points out that ‘images of the muses or muse in the twentieth
century have tended to be of voiceless sources of male creativity
rather than vivid practitioners of the arts’—a view which has ob-
scured some of the more positive portrayals of the Muse in the
classical tradition. What the eighteenth century saw, and what we
seem to have forgotten, is that the Muses were not simply passive
inspirers of poetry or empty allegorical figures, but patronnesses
of intellectual life, presiding over all the arts which constituted
civilized life.9

So—what about this classical potrayal? First of all, we cannot
talk about a universal classical portrayal. There are almost as many
different Muses as there are authors, not to mention the changing
iconography of the Muses and the changing contexts in which they

8 The Works of James Barry, ed. Edward Fryer, 2 vols. (London, 1809),
ii. 594, quoted by L. Eger, ‘Representing Culture’, in Eger et al. (eds.),
Women, Writing, 104.

9 See R. Curtius, European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (Lon-
don, 1953), 228–30; P. Murray, ‘Plato’s Muses’, in E. Spentzou and
D. Fowler (eds.), Cultivating the Muse: Struggles for Power and Inspir-
ation, 29–46, and ‘The Muses and their Arts’, in P. Murray and P. Wilson
(eds.), Music and the Muses: The Culture of Mousike in the Classical
Athenian City (Oxford, 2004), 365–89.