Only when the Odyssey turns Iliadic, as Odysseus and his son and two loyal servants face the suitors in the hall, are women offstage, and even there Athena is at hand, sustaining the morale of the hero and his party, diverting the suitors' spears from the target. Elsewhere in the poem women's voices are heard at frequent intervals and sometimes at length. Hostile critics might well be tempted to cite the defense of his tragedies Aristophanes put in the mouth of "Euripides" in the Frogs: "They all stepped up to speak their piece, the mistress spoke, the slave spoke too, / the master spoke, the daughter spoke, and grandma spoke." In the Iliad, scenes that present men in contact with women, though memorable, are rare —Helen and Paris, Hector and Andromache, Hecuba and Priam —but in the Odyssey, the rare exception is the scene from which women are excluded —the battle in the hall, the Cyclops in the cave.

Unknown, Homer, Robert Fagles_ Knox,…, loc. 225