Can Odysseus even HAVE an Odyssey without female characters to help him, terrorize him, and sometimes both? Join Sonja and Vanessa as their guest, classics scholar Amy Meyers, dishes on Scylla, the Sirens, and the intimidating goddess, Athena. Like an arrow through a dozen axe holes lined up, Homer’s male hero shoots through the decidedly feminine architecture of his labyrinthian odyssey.

Sources mentioned:

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Emily Wilson

The Odyssey by Homer, translated by Robert Fagles

The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer's Odyssey by Beth Cohen

Sonja takes Vanessa down a rabbit hole to the 12th century for a scandalous romance, starring a very learned woman named Heloise. If you’re tired of the passion ending at the altar, this episode’s for you: spicy letters, secluded country estates, lots of reading, divine and carnal love, and keeping passion lit–even in the face of late-in-life eunuchism. IWAW celebrates that love can be messy!

Letters of Abelard and Heloise by Pierre Bayle

Sonja and Vanessa visit Circe’s Island, both in the Odyssey and in Madeline Miller’s brilliant novel. For those keeping score: time with Calypso + Circe = 80% of Odysseus’s 10-year trip home is on Love Islands with gorgeous, immortal women. Vanessa quizzes Sonja on ancient Greek witchcraft and why women keep giving grown men baths, and Sonja, as always, knows a thing or two. Spoiler Alerts for Madeline Miller’s Circe!

Works referenced:
Circe by Madeline Miller

“Bias, She Wrote: The Gender Bias of the New York Times Bestseller List,” by Rosie Cima

“Patterns of Persecutions: ‘Witchcraft’ Trials in Ancient Athens,” by Esther Eidinow

Theogony by Hesiod

“Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” by Joan Scott
“Circe’s Etruscan Pharmaka: Reconsidering a Fragment of Aeschylean Elegy,” by Jessica Lightfoot

The Hero with a Thousand Faces by Joseph Campbell