About the lecture

In this module, we think about why women matter in the Homeric poems, thinking in particular about: (i) the scene in Book 6 of the Iliad where Hector outlines (what he sees as) the appropriate behaviour for men (war) and for women (weaving); (ii) the reasons why women do in fact matter in Homer (e.g. driving the plot, providing a different (better?) experience of the world of men, direct interaction with men etc.); and (iii) the difficulty of recovering the experience of women from the archaeological and literary record.

About the lecturer

Dr Emily Hauser is Senior Lecturer in Classics and Ancient History at the University of Exeter, and the author of an acclaimed trilogy of novels reworking the women of Greek myth, including For the Most Beautiful (2016, Penguin Random House). She has written articles on gender in Homer, women poets in antiquity and their reception in contemporary women’s writing; she also co-edited Reading Poetry, Writing Genre: English Poetry and Literary Criticism in Dialogue with Classical Scholarship (2018, Bloomsbury). Her latest books are Ancient Love Stories (2023, Bonnier) and How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature (2023, Princeton).