Wives

War and adventure repeatedly call epic warriors from home, thus leaving the survival of a man’s household in the hands of the aged, the young, or the hero’s wife. As Hektor makes clear to his beloved wife Andromache, the Homeric warrior’s chaste wife is to stay at home weaving, caring for the goods of the household, and producing and nurturing children. His reminder comes at the moment when Andromache has taken the liberty of giving advice on masculine matters; she wants Hektor to take a defensive role in the war in order to insure the survival of himself and Troy (Il. 6.431-8). Hektor’s adviser Polydamas later gives him similar advice (18.273-9), and the hero dies because he has foolishly taken an overly aggressive stance in battle. But Hektor’s role as masculine warrior prevents him from taking his wife’s suggestion seriously and silences Andromache’s resisting female voice except in her later role as mourner.

The Odyssey’s women, and above all the extraordinary faithful wife Penelope, are given a chance to play their traditional spousal roles more actively. Here the ideal wife has the same mind and capacity for virtue as her husband, even if she cannot exercise her talents as fully (H. Foley 1995:95). Penelope wins kleos or fame, the goal of every Homeric warrior, for devising her trick of constantly unweaving her web to delay her suitors and for remembering Odysseus and everything he stood for (Od. 2.125, 24.196-7). We see her struggle to make the virtuous choice about her marriage, despite pressures from her suitors, her son’s endangered situation, and her own uncertainty about Odysseus’ survival. Her like-minded intelligence emerges in her final test of Odysseus concerning the secret of their immovable bed and in her exclusive sharing of stories with her husband after their reunion in Book 23. Like the Phaeacian queen Arete, whose husband trusts her to enact a public role in adjudicating quarrels among men (7.73-4), we expect Penelope to take on a public role in the court of her returned husband; after all, even Helen, whose questionable past is still a bone of contention with her husband Menelaos, actively does so. As wife, Penelope has an assertive role and voice in the Odyssey that the poem celebrates, however cautiously, given the behavior of the adulterous wives Clytemnestra and Helen.

Such paradigms of wifely virtue play a smaller role in later Greek or Latin epic, however. Exogamous liaisons and marriages create partnerships between strangers and so may endanger masculine goals. In order to achieve his mission, Apollonius’ Jason must abandon his liaison with the Lemnian queen Hypsipyle to continue on his journey to win the golden fleece; to protect the ‘‘Argo’’ and its men he later threatens to abandon his promises to marry and defend a Medea who has sacrificed everything for him. Without the intervention of the Phaeacian wife Arete with her husband Alkinouos in Book 4, Medea would have been given up to her pursuing countrymen for punishment. In the Aeneid, Aeneas loses his loyal wife Creusa in Troy and goes on, after her ghost restores his courage and the urge for survival in Book 2, to desert Dido in Carthage (Book 4) and nearly all of the Trojan women who voyaged with him in Sicily (Book 5). He is destined instead to make a dynastic marriage in Italy with the virginal Lavinia, who may or may not be in love with her former suitor Turnus (Lyne 1983). Indeed, whereas the Odyssey makes home and Penelope a goal for which the hero gives up immortality with the nymph Calypso, the Aeneid entails a process of abandoning beloved wives or women for the masculine goal of empire and heroic self-control.

In Bellum civile Lucan depicts Pompey’s wife Cornelia as a passionately devoted spouse, who suffers visibly over every separation from and failure of her husband and blames herself (or is blamed by others) for his misfortunes (2.348-9, 3.21-2, 8.88-105, and 639-50). Cato’s wife Marcia promises to devote herself to her husband’s cause in the civil wars (2.347-9), but their remarriage immediately after the death of her second husband (to whom she had been married at the stoic Cato’s behest) is represented as an abnormal ritual that will establish a union in name only. The angry dead Julia, once a mediating link between Caesar and Pompey who helped defer conflict (1.111-20), harasses her husband in his dreams as a ghost (3.10-34). In Silius Italicus’ Punica, Hannibal’s devoted wife Imilce expresses both fear for her spouse and an equal willingness to follow her husband into battle; she stays to care for their son, who is soon under threat of being sacrificed by Hannibal’s rival Hanno (3.97-157 and 4.770-807); their situation echoes the pathos of the Iliads Hektor and Andromache. Only Argia in Statius’ Thebaid 12 rivals Penelope’s wifely devotion in that she travels from Argos to Thebes in order to bury Polynices’ body, where she is later joined by other mourning wives and mothers. The Odyssey’s climactic celebration of family and private life often gives way in later epic to an Iliadic concern with more public goals, to which wives are less relevant and more dangerous, even when they attempt to serve their husbands' interests, because of their pointedly less rational and weaker natures or their divided allegiances.