Maternity and Mortality in Homeric Poetry

THE MYTHOLOGICAL TRADITION expressed in early Greek hexameter poetry offers an ancient and influential witness to one of the most pervasive assump tions shaping Western cultural constructions of gender, the assumption that there is a link between two inescapable aspects of the human condition: the fact of being born from a woman and the fact of having to die. That body of poetry, which includes not only the Homeric epics, the Iliad and the Odyssey, but also a number of roughly contemporary texts, such as Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days and the narratives concerning the Olympian gods that form the Ho meric Hymns, is preoccupied with defining human life by exploring the line that separates men and gods. As they carry out this project, these poems follow a widespread tendency to identify mortality, the necessity of dying, with women. Those who bring people into the world by giving them birth are especially linked to their passing out of it as well, an association often expressed in the special place of women in funerary ritual and lamentation. This paper has benefited from the questions and responses of those present on the three occasions on which it was delivered in earlier versions: at the NYU conference on "Greek and Greek American Women in Voice and Text," sponsored by the Alexander S. Onassis Center for Hellenic Studies, on April 15, 1989; at Rutgers University on October 4, 1989; and at Bryn Mawr College on November 22, 1991. For specific suggestions, I owe particular thanks to Margaret Bruzelius, Thomas Figueira, and Sarah Winter.