ABSTRACT
Homer's Odyssey stands at the start of the Western literary tradition. Its action takes place at the end of the Trojan War and at the end of the homeward journey of the Nostoi, the Greek heroes who had fought at Troy. The crucial role of women in the Odyssey has been noted in the past and it is curious that contemporary feminists have not made anything of it. The eighteenth-century scholar Richard Bentley remarked that the Iliad was written for men and the Odyssey for women, and in the late nineteenth century, the novelist Samuel Butler followed ancient sources in attributing the Odyssey to a courtly woman from Sicily. The author of the Odyssey has an awareness and appreciation of women such as the author of the Iliad displays for men. The Odyssey is an epic about endings; the Aeneid is an epic about beginnings.
