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The immortals will furnish a pleasing song
For humans in honour of constant Penelope.
What a contrast with the daughter of Tyndareus, who devised
Evil and killed her wedded husband! A hateful song
Will there be among men for her. She provides a harsh sentence
On the whole race of women, even one who works nobly. |
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Penelope, who has helped preserve her husband's status by her constancy and proper attitudes ( 194), is praised, and promised a glorifying immortality of song. Clytemnestra, who has destroyed her husband, the speaker of these lines, will have an equally immortal song of hate addressed to her. A polarity is drawn up which rehearses both a standard aesthetic discourse (the opposition of praise/blame, celebration/hate) and a standard moral discourse (the good woman preserves her home/husband/attitudes, a bad woman corrupts and destroys her home/husband/attitudes). Yet if Penelope is exemplary, it is Clytemnestra who provides the model for women in general ( ); indeed, even a woman who is  , good and noble at the work by which a woman's place is defined, still is (to be) stained by the  the words, report, sentence, judgement, reputation that has been established by Clytemnestra. This rhetoric of misogyny has been read by critics as an 'understandable',32 'natural'33 move for the shamefully betrayed husband, 'generalizing from his personal experience',34 and as the beginnings of a Greek tradition of misogynistic writing: 'Agamemnon here looks ahead to the formation of a tradition of misogyny that, as he acknowledges it, is based on paying attention to some examples and not to others'.35 Exemplary Penelope is viewed thus as 'a counter-example at the center of the story'36 of man's necessary distrust of women. |
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Indeed, the effects of this spread of the phêmis of Clytemnestra can be seen in the preceding speech of Amphimedon, one of the slaughtered suitors, which prompts Agamemnon's exclamation of praise and blame. For Amphimedon highlights the deceptiveness of Penelope the quality which has distinguished the dangerous Clytemnestra even wrongly attributing to her a role in the bow competition at which the suitors died.37 The deceptive woman at the centre of the house is a threat differently instantiated in Penelope and Clytemnestra but both instantiations contribute to a discourse of gender evaluation. So, indeed, in the first Nekuia, Agamemnon frames his praise of Penelope with a repeated |
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32 Wender (1978) 38. |
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33 Eisenberger (1973) 1812. |
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34 Stanford (1978) ad 11.4412. |
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35 Murnaghan (1987) 125. |
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36 Murnaghan (1987) 124. |
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37 For discussion and bibliography on Amphimedon's speech see Goldhill (1988). |
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