Morning feminists,

I have some classical antiquity related treats for you this morning. I hope you are stoked!

We start with an interview with Emily Wilson, who has translated Homer’s Odyssey – and is the first woman to do so. Lots of interesting thoughts about translation as well as about women in this one, I highly recommend clicking this link and reading in full.

“If you’re going to admit that stories matter,” Wilson told me, “then it matters how we tell them, and that exists on the level of microscopic word choice, as well as on the level of which story are you going to pick to start off with, and then, what exactly is that story? The whole question of ‘What is that story?’ is going to depend on the language, the words that you use.”

https://mobile.nytimes.com/2017/11/02/magazine/the-first-woman-to-translate-the-odyssey-into-english.html

Of course, Homer is traditionally thought of as a man, so let’s now turn our thoughts to Sappho, who was held (according to the below article) in similarly high regard and who invented the gay goth look:

imagine what the name Homer would mean to Western civilization if all we had of the Iliad and the Odyssey was their reputations and, say, ninety lines of each poem. The Greeks, in fact, seem to have thought of Sappho as the female counterpart of Homer: he was known as “the Poet,” and they referred to her as “the Poetess.” Many scholars now see her poetry as an attempt to appropriate and “feminize” the diction and subject matter of heroic epic. (For instance, the appeal to Aphrodite to be her “comrade in arms”—in love.)

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2015/03/16/girl-interrupted

Onto philosophy, I studied several of the works of Plato at college. I did not get on with Plato. I know this is mostly my problem and not Plato’s, so bear that in mind as you read what follows. My main memory is a Socratic dialogue in which Socrates says to some poor sap he’s interrogating about the nature of pleasure, “so I guess your idea of the highest human good is to endlessly cycle through thirst so you can sate your thirst and hunger so you can sate your hunger”* which struck me as so fundamentally terrified of the human form that I think of Socrates as the guy who is nervously trying to avoid shaking hands with his fellow windbags in the Agora, in case he catches Ancient Greek Bird Flu. ANYWAY, have you ever wondered what Plato would have been like if Socrates had been a woman! Apparently you don’t have to:

If you peruse the first volume of M. E. Waith’s series A History of Women Philosophers, you’ll find a wealth of primary texts that represent the ideas of female ancient thinkers, from Pythagoras’ wife Theano, daughter Myia and other Pythagorean women, to Plato’s mother Perictione, as well as the Cyrenaic Arete and the Cynic Hipparchia. If you’re willing to use Plato’s dialogues as records of historical fact (which you shouldn’t be), you could also throw in two prominent women characters from those dialogues, Diotima in the Symposium and Aspasia in the Menexenus.

https://blog.apaonline.org/2016/05/11/the-diotima-problem-women-philosophers-in-classical-antiquity/

Have a lovely Friday!

Alex.

*translation my own