Penelope's Bones

Penelope's Bones: A New History of Homer's World Through the Women Written Out of It- Emily Hauser

University of Chicago Press

Release Date: June 13, 2025

Rating: 📚📚📚

Synopsis: In Mythica Emily Hauser tells, for the first time, the extraordinary stories of the real women behind some of the western world’s greatest legends. Following in their footsteps, digging into the history behind Homer’s epic poems, piecing together evidence from the original texts, recent astonishing archaeological finds and the latest DNA studies, she reveals who these women – queens, mothers, warriors, slaves – were, how they lived, and how history has (or has not – until now) remembered them.

A riveting new history of the Bronze Age Aegean and a journey through Homer’s epics charted entirely by women – from Helen of Troy, Briseis, Cassandra and Aphrodite to Circe, Athena, Hera, Calypso and Penelope – Mythica is a ground-breaking reassessment of the reality behind the often-mythologized women of Greece’s greatest epics, and of the ancient world itself as we learn ever more about it.

___________________________________________________

I had very mixed feelings with this book. On the one hand, there was some very cool information on the latest archaeaolgical research and discoveries. New technology means DNA can tell us about travel in the Late Bronze Age, if families are buried together, or prove that more warrior gravesites are women warriors than were earlier believed. Texts unearthed through the Hittite Empire introduce powerful queens helping to rule the Hittite world next to Troy, and letters and tablets have been unearthed that suggest enough similarities between pieces of Homer's poems and real life to make Hauser's arguments plausible that the epics contain fragments of memories for ways of life that would have probably been old when the Iliad and the Odyssey were written down. I enjoyed most of the archaeological information, because I like reading about that kind of thing. 

Other parts of the book were, to me, more of a stretch. There was a lot of repetition. Hauser clearly didn't trust her audience to remember who any of the characters were, so would remind you every single time- especially the women already less well known like Briseis. Once or twice I can understand, but it was really annoying having her do it all the time. Each chapter would start with a short fictional story, which I know is the current fad, but personally I find throws me out of the nonfiction narrative and I always find off-putting. Some chapters were a stretch in terms of subject matter. In Circe's chapter, for example, I expected to learn about the ancient world's views on magic, or women living alone, or something else that might focus on women. Instead it is mostly about pigs. Yes, Circe and pigs go together and Hauser manages to connect them to religion and briefly to the mystery cults, but I was hoping for more. 

Frequently in the chapters Hauser brings up the modern retellings we see that are so popular today. Madeline Miller, Natalie Haynes, and some of her own books as well. These additions missed the mark for me. The readers of those books may be part of the audience she's trying to reach with this book, but adding the retellings here in the chapters themselves isn't part of the story of Homer's world. It would have worked better in the introduction or conclusion as part of the conversation on why women are now retelling the stories and focusing on reclaiming the lives and voices of the women in Homer's world.

I had high hopes going into Penelope's Bones, and while I would overall recommend reading it, I can't say I was as impressed with the book as I had hoped to be. Maybe I was expecting too much out if it. After all, Trying to uncover what has been pushed to the margins for thousands of years, both by the erosion of time, the men of the time period and by male archeologists until fairly recently, doesn't give you a lot to work with.

I received an ARC of this boon from NetGalley in exchange for an honest review