Alison Keith (editor) - Maternal conceptions in classical literature and philosophy

alison keith, mairad mcauley, and alison sharrock

The study of motherhood in classical antiquity is of relatively recent date, as classical scholars inspired by second-wave feminism turned their attention away from the traditional disciplinary focus on fathers and sons

Literary and philosophical scholars of classical antiquity have been slower to examine the role of maternity and motherhood in ancient literature, despite the fact that the inaugural feminist study of contemporary motherhood was written by the poet Adrienne Rich, whose important work Of Woman Born we discuss below. Yet the earliest literature of ancient Greece might be said to focus, obsessively, on the role of the mother in the life of the hero. Indeed, while the action of Homers Iliad finds its point of departure

The poet of the Odyssey presents motherhood as intuitively comprehensible by contrast with paternity. Thus, Telemachus explains to his fathers guest-friend Mentes (the disguised Athena) that My mother says indeed I am his [sc. Odysseuss son]. I for my part / do not know. Nobody really knows his own father (Od. 1.21516). Telemachus interrogation of his paternity and paternal inheritance, which constitutes the focus of the narrative of the Telemachy, apparently leaves no room for the problematic of maternity. Indeed, in contrast to the Iliad, the Odyssey seems positively to vaunt the absence of its heros mother from the plot when she appears in the underworld (Od. 11.847): Next there came to me the soul of my dead mother, / Antikleia, daughter of great-hearted Autolykos, / whom I had left alive when I went to sacred Ilion. / I broke into tears at the sight of her and my heart pitied her. Although surprised and devastated to encounter his mothers shade amongst the dead in the underworld, Odysseus postpones his interview with her to follow that with Tiresias, whom Circe has told him to consult about his journey home to Ithaca. Nonetheless, she is his first thought after his colloquy with Tiresias (Od. 11.13944):

All this, Teiresias, surely must be as the gods spun it.

But come now, tell me this and give me an accurate answer. 140

I see before me now the soul of my perished mother,

but she sits beside the blood in silence, and has not yet deigned

to look directly at her own son and speak a word to me.

Tell me, lord, what will make her know me, and know my presence?

Anticleia, thus introduced as Odysseus second interlocutor in the Nekuia, stands at the head of his meetings with the women of classical myth, in the Homeric adaptation of the Hesiodic form of a catalogue of women (Od. 11.225332).

Odysseus questions his mother closely about his father and son, his wife and kingdom (Od. 11.1749), but his first question (Od. 11.1703) and her final answer focus on what brought her to the underworld (Od. 11.197203):

And so it was with me also and that was the reason I perished,

nor in my palace did the lady of arrows, well-aiming,

come upon me with her painless shafts, and destroy me

nor was I visited by sickness, which beyond other 200

things takes the life out of the body with hateful weakness,

but, shining Odysseus, it was my longing for you, your cleverness

and your gentle ways, that took the sweet spirit of life from me.

Anticleia thus presents the maternal bond as the central relationship of her life, on which she quite literally depends for her existence. In turn, Odysseus desire to speak with Anticleia recalls Achilles repeated recursion to his mother in the elaboration of the plot of the Iliad. But Anticleias explanation of her own death accentuates the stark contrast between the mothers of the two Homeric heroes. The goddess Thetis, capable of securing divine assistance for Achilles, outdoes in every respect the merely mortal Anticleia, who has wasted away to death grieving for her missing son (Od. 11.20422). Moreover, Odysseus response to his mothers unhappy tale effects another pointed comparison between the two Homeric heroes (Od. 11.2037):

So she spoke, but I, pondering it in my heart, yet wished

to take the soul of my dead mother in my arms. Three times

I started toward her, and my heart was urgent to hold her, 205

and three times she fluttered out of my hands like a shadow

or a dream, and the sorrow sharpened at the heart within me

Odysseus vain attempt to embrace his mothers shade underlines her importance to the heros psychic life, as it associates her emphatically with Patroclus, whose ghost Achilles vainly endeavours to clasp in Iliad 23 (97101). While the loss of Anticleia to the