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off to Troy by Paris, thus causing the Trojan War. Helen the beautiful, Helen the frivolous, “the face that launch’d a thousand ships” in the stirring words of Christopher Marlowe, was the most famous femme fatale of antiquity, one of those dangerous women men fear for their voluptuous beauty. In the Greco-Roman world, Helen and Penelope represented the bad and the good wife, an opposition that Christians would later attribute to Eve and the Virgin Mary.
    Yet it is hardly for their stereotypical qualities that Penelope and
    Odysseus have enchanted readers for generations. Even if she repre- sents the home-bound wife and he the wandering hero in accordance with the sex roles meted out to the two genders, what rings especially true for modern readers is their playful gamesmanship and deep inti- macy, their sense of a shared history unattenuated by their long separa- tion, their reunion in bed with the pleasures of lovemaking and “the fresh delights of talk.” This pillow talk (did the Greeks have pillows?) is the special province of spouses in all ages. “He heard his noble wife tell of all she had put up with in his home.... And in his turn, royal Odys- seus told her of all the discomfiture he had inflicted on his foes.” Which couple has not delighted in this kind of verbal interchange before or after lovemaking? Such a scene of harmonious domestic intimacy is indeed rare in the pages of antique literature. It provides literary evi- dence for the belief, current among many classicists, that marriage at the time of Homer was more egalitarian than it would become three centuries later in Athens, and that Homeric women enjoyed a respect and freedom unknown to Greek women of the classical period. 14
    When we turn from the Homeric period to the classical age in fifth- century Athens, the source of information about wives is considerably larger, if still confined to male-authored documents. The great tragedi- ans of this later period—Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides— confront us with terrible domestic violence inflicted by willful husbands and wives. Oedipus and Jocasta, Agamemnon and Clytemnestra, Jason and Medea are destined to destroy one another. Clytemnestra kills her husband Agamemnon on his return from the Trojan War (with the help of her lover) on the grounds that Agamemnon had sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia when he set out for Troy. Medea kills the two chil- dren she had with Jason as revenge upon him for renouncing her in favor of a new wife. And what of Oedipus, who unwittingly killed his father, Laius, and married his mother, Jocasta, only to discover the truth years later—a discovery that caused Oedipus to blind himself and Jocasta to commit suicide. These stories reveal a deep-seated fear of vengeful wives, such as Clytemnestra and Medea, and the pollution that could issue, however unwittingly, from an incestuous widow like Jocasta. A good Greek widow would not have remarried in the first place. The dark truths embodied in these dramas suggest the smolder- ing tensions that existed, and continue to exist, between many spouses. Wives do indeed nurture murderous thoughts towards the husbands
    who replace them with other women or harm their children, though they rarely act out their revenge in such spectacular fashion.
    Greek comedy, on the other hand, probably came closer to the daily reality of conjugal life, even when grossly exaggerated. In Lysistrata, first presented in 411 B . C . E ., Aristophanes seized upon the timeless idea of a wife refusing her husband sex and expanded it into an outlandish political comedy. When Lysistrata and her sister conspirators decide to oppose the warlike ways of men by simply denying them sexual satis- faction, Greek society comes to a standstill. At least in this instance, the power of the bed proved stronger than the power of the sword. With its ribald props and comments, the play seems as fresh today as the sixties slogan “Make Love, Not War.”

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