Mary Beard, the Odyssey and the Reflex

There are many men who want only their version of the Odyssey to exist. This is my third post on this subject because it’s timely and it’s relevant today. At least the newest film version does expand what’s been told before. And I’ve been on a lifelong search of where humanity took women out of the full story. My research has provided lots of powerful women who rose to their glory regardless of what stood in their way.

Here’s what this piece uncovered.

When Mary Beard was 57, she appeared on the BBC and came home to rape threats and death threats. I looked into the why and it doesn’t have relevance on the story, except from where the reflex came from. As a professor of classics at Cambridge, she had spent her career studying ancient Rome. She had no particular reason to become a target. The Reflex is what I was after also.

But she had, and the abuse was severe.

And instead of retreating from public life, she did something that surprised her interviewers and her harassers alike.

She went to her library and asked a question she realized she could actually answer: Where did this reflex come from?

She started with Homer. In the Odyssey, Telemachus tells his mother Penelope to return to her room and leave the talking to men. It is one of the earliest moments in Western literature where a woman is formally told her public voice does not belong to her.

She moved through ancient Rome, where Ovid told of a rapist who cut out his victim’s tongue so she could not name him. Through medieval theology that framed women’s voices as an affront to the divine order. Through Elizabeth I, who felt compelled to tell her court she had the heart and stomach of a king.

The pattern was not accidental, Beard concluded. Silencing women was a structure, not a slip. It had been built into Western civilization’s understanding of public authority for more than three thousand years.

In 2017, she published the result: Women & Power: A Manifesto. Less than 130 pages. It spent months on bestseller lists on both sides of the Atlantic.

Beard did not cast herself as a victim in its pages. She cast the harassment as historical evidence, as data in a pattern so old that most people participating in it did not know they had predecessors in ancient Greece.

The professor who came home to threats.

The classicist who traced those threats back three millennia.

The woman who turned one ugly inbox into a history of civilization.