Prof. Pura Nieto (Brown University): Homer: The Intimacy of battle and a lion’s heart

As Emily Vermeule, Jean-Pierre Vernant and other scholars have demonstrated, in Greek, and more precisely in Homeric poetry, encounters of warriors on the battlefield and meetings of lovers in amorous contexts are described with the same language and images. An unarmed, defeated warrior may, for example, be compared to a woman. But there are many other situations where we can see in Homer a destabilization of the boundaries between the genders: male and female thus appear as less rigid categories than previously thought. The main heroes of both poems, Achilles and Odysseus, both present what are traditionally perceived as feminine characteristics, and strong female characters such as Andromache and Penelope exhibit in turn masculine traits and behaviors. My paper will exhibit and analyze such inversions with regard to the protagonists of both epics.