ed io che sono?

Francesco Petrarca annotating "my most pleasant transalpine solitude" (Transalpina solitudo mea iocundissima) on the margins of a passage from the Naturalis Historia where Plinius mentions the river Sorgue, around Valcluse, where Petrarca had lived for many years.

Giovanni Boccaccio, 20 pages later, annotating "there weren't the ones from Certaldo yet" (Nondum certaldenses erant) under a passage where Plinius discusses the best kinds of onions, referencing his hometown of Certaldo, renowned for its onions.

Francesco Petrarca annotating "my most pleasant transalpine solitude" (Transalpina solitudo mea iocundissima) on the margins of a passage from the Naturalis Historia where Plinius mentions the river Sorgue, around Valcluse, where Petrarca had lived for many years.

Giovanni Boccaccio, 20 pages later, annotating "there weren't the ones from Certaldo yet" (Nondum certaldenses erant) under a passage where Plinius discusses the best kinds of onions, referencing his hometown of Certaldo, renowned for its onions.

That's the problem with the modern "commercialization" and "politicization" of feminism. it stopped being feminist at its core and it's now a battle of wits of "who do we consider to be sexist so we can cancel them" and "I say I'm a feminist therefore I'm a good person".

I'm not cancelling feminism in its entirety; for one thing, women sacrificed themselves so that we have the right to vote, the right to inheritance and education, even the right to wear trousers and bikinis. As Helen Mirren said, if you take a woman from today and bring her to a world 40 years back, she won't want to stay in that world.

But let's call a spade a spade.

Of course Homer isn't the feminist icon; nor do we demand or expect him to be. However, claiming that he gave women "too little screen time" (???) is ridiculous. Consider this - we don't know half the names of Odysseus' men or the "brave Archean soldiers", but we do know and encounter women like Helen, Andromache, Kassandra, Penelope, Calypso, Circe, Hecuba, even the 'insignificant' ones like Chrysseis and Brysseis. Each of these women has her own personality, backstory (i.e. Cassandra, Helen, Penelope), and we don't differentiate between likeable or non-likeable. Even Andromache, who's on the enemies' side, is a sympathetic figure. She's a young mother and a devoted wife, she dreads to see the Troy she so loves be wasted to war and all these brave soldiers gone, and when she mourns for Hector you can feel her breaking inside (then we also see her son being killed and her being taken as a slave). We see Helen's PTSD, Circe's anger, Cassandra's anguish over what's to come and not being heard, Penelope's certainty that her husband will come back and her efforts to protect and defend her and her family's honour.

Andromache, Helen, Penelope and Hecuba represent four different negative sides to war. Families being killed, women suffering, women waiting (and raising children alone), and Hecuba symbolizes the fallen grandeur of Troy itself.

And this is why feminist retellings fail; they take this rainbow of women and turn the whole thing into a boring black vs white, in which the "patriarchy" is to be blamed for everything. In the end, what you end up with is female characters that differ to one another in name only.

Thing is, you can be a feminist and not cancel Homer for being 'sexist'. You just need to not apply the modern ideas of "feminism" unto Homer.