Crafty
by Joy Connolly
The Odyssean lineage of metis in Hesiod’s Theogony
In the run-up to the release of Christopher Nolan's movie version of The Odyssey, and anticipating that it might, just might, influence how many classicists think about the ancient, I asked three recent IMR contributors to think about other works of art, ancient or modern, that had significantly changed, perhaps even shaped, their view of The Odyssey. We begin first by publishing the thoughts of Joy Connolly and Paul Cartledge, and Kirk Ormand and I will soon follow. New versions, translations, and adaptations don't just offer something new, but can help us reimagine the original text in radically different ways, to get to grips with it properly, to see it anew. Later, we will compare these reflections on the immediate effect of Nolan's film itself.
Mark Buchan, In Medias Res Editor
For me it’s always been the Iliad, not the Odyssey. To me as a child, reading Classic Illustrated comics and then prose abridgements, the Odyssey was a collection of tales of witches and monsters and a happy ending about a royal house reunited. The Iliad invited me into an adult world of war, loss, and heart-breaking choices. Patroclus donning Achilles’ armor and facing death in the front lines, and Achilles choosing glory over a long life – these were my heroes, not Odysseus sneaking out of Polyphemus’ cave clinging to the belly of a sheep.
When I read Richmond Lattimore’s translation of the poem in high school, my childhood judgment seemed confirmed. Odysseus’ revenge on the suitors and the maidservants in Book 22 struck me as excessive and vicious – the deed not of a hero, but of a man incapable of tolerating disloyalty, perhaps driven mad by years of war and wandering.
Only when I encountered Hesiod’s Theogony while also reading feminist interpretations of Greek literature for the first time, in college, did I begin to see the Odyssey as something more than an elaborate fairytale. A little over one thousand lines long, composed in the eighth or seventh centuries BCE, the Theogony recounts the family trees (accompanied by many family feuds) of the gods and their descendants. It starts with Chaos and ends with – drum roll! – Odysseus.
Hesiod starts by invoking the Muses, whom he met dancing “dainty-footed” near a spring on Mount Helicon where he was grazing his sheep. They tell him, famously: “We know how to say many false things that look like actual things; we also know, whenever we wish it, how to sing true things.” As Ann Bergren noted in her 1983 article “Language and the female in early Greek thought,” the phrase about false things that resemble true ones appears only one other time in extant Greek literature, in the Odyssey, when Odysseus tells false stories about himself (19.203).
Whether we are supposed to see the Theogony (which the Muses inspire Hesiod to sing) as an example of truth or lies, its story presents the choice to speak truthfully or falsely as a tactical decision for gods and mortals alike. Rather than issuing moral judgment or rule of the “Thou shalt not bear false witness” type, the Theogony treats deceit and other forms of trickery and craftiness as tools, comparable to physical strength.
In the beginning, Hesiod says, were Chaos, Earth, Tartaros, and Love. Earth (Gaia), having created Sky (Ouranos), produced with him a host of offspring, starting with the one-eyed Cyclopes, who possess both strength and skill with machines (quite a lofty genealogy for the dim-witted monster I remembered from Classics Illustrated). Craft is the defining mark of mother Earth, who connives with her son Kronos when she has had enough of Sky controlling her reproductive choices by keeping their children wedged inside her. Kronos slices off his father’s genitals with the sickle Earth has given him. But when he repeats the paternal pattern, devouring his own offspring as soon as they are born, his wife Rhea asks her parents-in-law Earth and Sky for a trick (metis) to prevent further infant-feasts, and she gives him a stone wrapped in swaddling clothes to gulp down in place of their son Zeus.
Zeus marries the goddess of wily wisdom herself, Metis. When it’s their turn to produce progeny, he uses false speech to make her eponymous capacity literally part of his body. “By deceit, beguiling her mind with flattery”, he swallows the pregnant Metis, and their child Athena (who will become Odysseus’ patron goddess) springs from his own head. Zeus’ grandparents Earth and Sky have warned him that Metis’ child will be unusually powerful, and this trickery appears to make her more his own property, in every sense of that word. Now it’s time to remember that one of Odysseus’ epithets is polumetis, “very clever” “wily,” or “tricksy.” Though the word Metis (“cunning intelligence” or “trick”) is the name of a goddess, male gods and human men in Greek myth repeatedly employ it for their own benefit and to limit or destroy female agency.
At the end of the poem, Hesiod tells us that Circe, the daughter of Ocean and the Sun, and Calypso, the daughter of Ocean and a sea goddess, Tethys, each have two children by Odysseus, thanks to his trysts with them on his way back to Ithaka. They cap the work: they are the last figures Hesiod mentions before he closes with two lines about the Muses.
By placing Odysseus in the company of gods at the origin point of the cosmos, the Theogony (enriched by the writings of Ann Bergren, Marilyn Arthur, and Froma Zeitlin) opened my late adolescent eyes to feminist literary analysis as it was taking inspiring flight in the 1980s. As I grasped how the gendering of behaviors grew from sociopolitical hierarchies, I began thinking harder about Odysseus’ story-telling skills, which led me to reflect on gender in ancient rhetorical discourse, which was the topic of my dissertation. And it helped me see that my early fascination with the Iliad’s battlefields was a way of indulging childhood fantasies of yes-no choices between life or death, courage or greed, friend or foe, “you’re with us or against us.” I’m not saying the Iliad is simple, of course, just that my first affection for it was bound up in seeing its characters’ decisions as weightier than the gray areas that the Odyssey explores, and that fill much of our own lives. (I have other reasons to love the Iliad today.)
Also: studying gender in ancient Greek literature in the late 1980s and early 1990s felt like a revolutionary act. Recent politically incentivized backlash against feminism is making it feel revolutionary once more. Back then, I viewed the work of understanding how the patriarchy reproduced itself by crushing or stealing female agency as a liberatory step toward draining the categories of male, masculine, female, and feminine of power, making them irrelevant. These days I understand these categories in a more nuanced, situational way — as identities that function in different ways for different people, empowering some, constraining others. Odysseus’ own journeys across gender and class lines bring him suffering as well as triumph, and what impact they have on audiences today must be the topic of another essay. Perhaps Christopher Nolan’s film will point the way.
Joy Connolly is the President of the American Council of Learned Societies.