Victor Davis Hanson: ‘The Odyssey’ and the Woke Feminists Trying to Rewrite Homer’s Play

**SPEAKER_1** (0:00)
Welcome to The Daily Signal podcast, where we provide intelligence for the intelligent. Now, without further ado, here's today's take.

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:08)
Christopher Nolan, the renowned British director, has a new film coming out. Everybody's been talking about it. One of the stars, Lupita Nyong'o, what she said was there was not a sufficient portrayal of women or they were not powerful enough.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:21)
So Homer, how do you feel about this screen time given to these women?

**Victor Davis Hanson** (0:26)
She admitted she'd never read The Odyssey. How can you go in the United States to a premier college and then get a master's from Yale and not have ever read The Odyssey? There's no literature anywhere in the world at that time that has been more deferential to or more interested in women.
Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. Christopher Nolan, the renowned British director, has a new film coming out, another remake of The Odyssey by Homer. It's supposed to come out July 17th. Everybody's been talking about it, not because they know what's in it, or they're trying to guess how he treats this age-old epic, but because one of the stars, Lupita Nyong'o, and forgive me if I mispronounced her name, has been very vocal that as she views the script and Homer's work himself, there's a matter of feminism that Homer did not highlight women sufficiently. Homer wrote The Odyssey, remember, at around 700 to 650 BC at the dawn of the Greek city-state. It's the second of his two epics, The Iliad and The Odyssey, and it's a much different epic than The Iliad, which takes place in about 11 weeks on the plain of Troy. This is a panoramic view of the Mediterranean and traces the 20-year Odyssey of the hero Odysseus to get back from Troy to the northeastern island off the coast of Greece, Ithaca.
What she said was that there was not a sufficient portrayal of women or they were not powerful enough. I couldn't understand. I taught the Odyssey for 20 years in English at the California State University system to a variety of students, probably 2,000 students in humanities courses, as well as much smaller number in Greek. One thing one comes away with that there's no literature anywhere in the world at that time that has been more deferential to or more interested in women. Remember that Odysseus is trying to get home to his palace as King of Ithaca and his wife Penelope is there for 20 years, and soon the suitors, and these are people who want to marry her for the purposes of expropriating the kingdom. She's got to deal with them. She has no enforcer. The men of Ithaca have all gone with Odysseus to Troy, and they've all been lost, and their families are angry. Everybody's mad at Odysseus. He's not there. The suitors then represent this anger, and they want to take over one of them, at least does the palace. But she brilliantly puts them off in hopes that someday he'll come back. She weaves every evening and says that when she's done with her shawl, blanket, tapestry, then she'll marry one. Then she onweaves it during the night, and they don't catch on for a long, long time. She organizes the resistance, or she has loyal servants and people on Ithaca that are all waiting for Odysseus to come. So when he comes, the suitors are in his house, but they haven't taken over it, thanks to Penelope. He also is waylaid by two supernatural immortals. One is Circe the Witch. I guess you call her a witch. She's a sorceress and she meets Odysseus and his crew on her own private island. They're very rambunctious. Her crew is, they're kind of coarse and crew. They drank and she turns them into swine, pigs. Kind of a commentary on what women think of rowdy men that are empowered like Circe. And then she makes up with Odysseus and tries to help him. She becomes his lover. But the point is that she's, she's not a typical Greek woman of 650 BC. She's very powerful. He meets another woman, Calypso. He's there on her island for seven years. And she's a divine figure as well. And she makes love with him. She attends to his needs. She's very unhappy when the goddess, God Hermes tells her that he must leave is now the will of Zeus to go back. But she's also a powerful character. As is the goddess, Athena, who is the patron saint of Odysseus. And she makes numerous appearances in the book. And what you get from her is even though she's not quite Zeus by her wisdom, courage and influence, she's really one of the two or three most powerful of the gods on Olympus. And she alone makes it possible for Odysseus to get home. If you look at Helen, Helen is the one that caused supposedly the Trojan War because she ran off from her husband Menelaus with the kind of player, Paris. And she's known as the most beautiful woman in the world, the most powerful woman because of her beauty. And she's disrupted the entire course of what would then be mythical history. In actuality, it may be a reminiscent of a Mycenaean campaign over to the coast of Asia Minor.