Samuel Butler

“ The other chief characteristics of the "Odyssey" which incline me to ascribe it to a woman are a kind of art for arts sake love of a small lie, and a determination to have things both ways whenever it suits her purpose. ”

“ If they do not, I will give up my case, but if they do, I shall hold it highly improbable that a man in the Homeric age would undertake the impossible task of making Penelope at the same time plausible and virtuous. ”

“ Fierce as the writer is against the suitors, she is far more so against the women. When the suitors are all killed, Euryclea begins to raise a cry of triumph over them, but Ulysses checks her. "Hold your tongue, woman," he says, "it is ill bragging over the bodies of dead men" (xxii. 411) . So also it is ill getting the most hideous service out of women up to the very moment when they are to be executed; but the writer seems to have no sense of this; where female honour has been violated by those of woman's own sex, no punishment is too bad for them. ”

“ Telemachus, if you are made of the same stuff as your father you will be neither fool or coward henceforward, for Ulysses never broke his word nor left his work half done. If, then, you take after him your voyage will not be fruitless, but unless you have the blood of Ulysses and Penelope in your veins I see no likelihood of your succeeding. Sons are seldom as good men as their fathers; they are generally worse not better ”

“ The sons of all the chief men among you are pestering my mother to marry them against her will. They are afraid to go to her father Icarius, asking him to choose the one he likes best, and to provide marriage gifts for his daughter, but day after day they keep hanging about my father's house, sacrificing our oxen, sheep, and fat goats for their banquets, and never giving so much as a thought to the quantity of wine they drink. ”

“ Men may be laughed at, indeed Alcinous is hardly mentioned at all except to be made more or less ridiculous. One cannot say that Menelaus in Books iv. and xv. is being deliberately made ridiculous, but made ridiculous he certainly is, and he is treated as a person of far less interest and importance than his wife is. Indeed Ulysses, Alcinous, Menelaus, and Nestor are all so like one another that I do not doubt they were drawn from the same person, just as Ithaca and Scheria are from the same place. ”

“ Under all she says on this head we seem to feel the rankling of a private grievance, and it often crosses my mind that in the suitors she also saw the neighbours who night after night came sponging on the reckless good nature of Alcinous, to the probable eventual ruin of his house.
Women, religion, and money are the three dominant ideas in the mind of the writer of the "Odyssey." In the "Iliad" the belli causa is a woman, money is a detail, and man is most in evidence. ”

“ If, however, a woman has misconducted herself she is to be shewn no mercy. There are only three cases in point, and one of these hardly counts inasmuch as the punishment of the guilty woman, Clytemnestra, was not meted out to her by the authoress herself. ”

“ Who that person was we shall never know; nevertheless I would point out that unless a girl adores her father he is generally, to her, a mysterious powerful being whose ways are not as her ways. He is feared as a dark room is feared by children ”

“ Again, the fidelity with which people go on crying incessantly for a son who has been lost to them for twenty years, though they have still three sons left, * or for a brother whom they have never even seen, † is part and parcel of that jealousy for the sanctity of domestic life, in respect of which women are apt to be more exacting than men. ”

“ But, as I have said, though men may be laughed at, the women are never taken other than quite seriously. Venus is, indeed, made a little ridiculous in one passage, but she was a goddess, so it does not matter ”