Were Women Really Victims of Their Times? Homer, Patriarchy, and the Historical Myth

Blind Homer and His Blindness to Women. The place of women through the centuries under the pretext of “their times.”

Had the myth of the Amazons been an established historical fact, today there would be no need either to debate it or to burden it with historical proof. Such a reality alone—the replacement of patriarchy by matriarchy—would overturn, from the ground up, every historical, social, political, and cultural assumption we have inherited.

Even more importantly, it would invalidate one of the oldest maxims of traditional historiography: that one must “see yesterday through yesterday’s eyes”—that we should transport our critical judgment into the age itself in order to explain its actions and conduct, even when these involve crimes or acts of barbarity.

The myth of the Amazons remains just that: a myth. Just as mythical, in many respects, is the tale of the “Greeks'” expedition against wealthy Troy.

It was all for the sake of beautiful Helen, we are told by the blind poet—whether her beauty was fair or dark matters little. The purpose, supposedly, was to avenge the dishonor inflicted when Priam’s son, a guest under Menelaus’ roof, carried off his gracious wife—whether by force or by her own consent—and took her to his distant homeland.

Yet no true poet—otherwise he would not deserve the name—would have filled his verses with the historical truth: that the Greeks sailed so far primarily to plunder the riches of prosperous Troy and to satisfy their insatiable sexual appetite with fresh young flesh.

Indeed, it was not Homer’s task to preserve that historical truth.

Our own task, however, is to dismantle another myth: the belief that women throughout history were merely victims of “their times,” of prevailing customs, moral codes, and social conditions. That there can be no other explanation for the enduring crime that scarred human civilization across the centuries: the stripping of women of their very human identity, with all that such dispossession implies—the denial of the most basic, inalienable, and inviolable rights that belong to every human being, regardless of sex.

We have examined this issue extensively elsewhere. We return to it briefly because we were genuinely delighted by Lupita Nyong’o’s imagined question to Homer mentioned above.

The historical truth is this: it was the interests of political power, priesthoods, and the ruling elites of every age that condemned women to the degraded position they endured—not the customs of the times, not civilization, not culture, nor any supposed physical or intellectual inferiority of women.

History offers countless examples. We shall mention only the most striking.

1. The Minoan Civilization

In Minoan Crete, the status of women and their participation in every sphere of political and social life—even in athletic competitions traditionally associated with men—is beyond dispute as a historical fact.

At precisely the same time, only a short distance away, Moses and the prophets of Israel were condemning women to perpetual humiliation, branding them impure simply because they menstruated.

2. Ionia and Classical Athens

In ancient Ionia and in Athens—the celebrated cradle of philosophy, reflection, and poetry—women of learning and intellect distinguished themselves in public life and enjoyed freedoms unimaginable to the overwhelming majority of women, who remained confined to the women’s quarters, occupied solely with household duties and childbearing.

3. Ancient Corinth

In ancient Corinth, girls as young as twelve freely offered sexual services in the famous Temple of Aphrodite in order to earn their dowries.

Elsewhere in the Greek world, prostitution was regarded as shameful and degrading—particularly for men who prostituted themselves.

In Corinth, however, not only did the authorities and parents approve of the practice, they also benefited from its proceeds, as did the city itself, whose prosperity rested largely upon sex tourism and the commercial traffic passing through the famous Diolkos.

Even Saul—later Paul—the zealous apostle of the new Nazarene faith, condemned the Corinthians’ permissive sexual customs with visible disgust in his two Epistles to them. He even coined the verb to Corinthianize (korinthiazō) as a byword for sexual licentiousness, warning the members of his churches not to imitate the city’s liberated way of life.

4. Nabis of Sparta

Finally, let us consider the revolutionary king of ancient Sparta, Nabis.

Probably a former helot himself, this remarkable reformer introduced innovations so radical that they astonished even the conquering Romans.

He not only liberated the helots but elevated Spartan women to the same civic and social standing as men.

He went even further: he appointed a woman—his companion Apega—as commander of the Spartan army.

It should also be remembered that Sparta had long displayed unusual attitudes toward women. A Spartan wife, for example, could lawfully enter into a sexual relationship even with a helot, provided he was strong and intelligent enough to produce offspring capable of feeding Sparta’s insatiable military machine.

The conclusion is unavoidable.

It is a myth that societies were somehow incapable—because of their culture or morality—of recognizing women as fully human long before modern times.

Patriarchy simply had no interest in doing so.

Above all, political power did not. It required expendable human material for war and backbreaking labor, rewarding the “soldier” and the “beast of burden” with the possession of fresh female bodies reduced to servitude.

Yet wherever economic interest demanded it—or wherever enlightened minds succeeded in transforming society—that entire myth of “the spirit of the age” and its supposedly immutable civilization collapsed as if by magic, disintegrating into the very elements from which it had been constructed.