"Even in antiquity, there's a sense that the material representations of gender performance are somehow hardwired."
A conversation with Jackie Murray about how our exes both proposed with the same Odyssey quotation
Two days after I turned 21, I walked into my apartment to discover that my boyfriend at the time — now my ex-wife — had prepared a candlelit dinner for me. Over stuffed portobello mushrooms, she launched into a prepared speech in which she quoted a passage from book 6 of the Odyssey about an ideal marriage. Here’s Emily Wilson’s translation of the passage:
So may the gods grant you all your heart’s desires,
a home and a husband, somebody like-minded (homophrosyne).
For nothing could be better than when two
live in one house, their minds in harmony (homophroneonte noemasin),
husband and wife. Their enemies are jealous,
their friends are delighted, and they have great honor.
She then got down on one knee and asked me to marry her. We were such cute nerdy kids! Of course, if you know anything about what marriage looks like in the Odyssey, or about the wisdom of a 21-year-old thinking that she has any clue what marriage means, you might see a few red flags here.
Many years later, I was telling this story to Jackie Murray, a colleague and friend who also used to be married to a fellow classicist who transitioned during their marriage. And she told me that her ex proposed to her using the exact same passage. What are the odds?
When I launched this newsletter, I approached Jackie asking if she’d be willing to help me construct a just-for-kicks trans reading of this passage. We had a great time, and I hope you’ll enjoy reading our conversation below.
Jackie Murray is an Associate Professor of Classics at the State University at Buffalo. She grew up in Toronto. Her research areas and publications are in Hellenistic and Latin Poetry, Race and Ethnicity in Antiquity, and Black Classicisms, especially the reception of Classics in African American and Afro-Caribbean literature. Her monograph, Neikos: Apollonius’ Argonautica and the Poetics of Controversy is under contract with Harvard University Press.
The conversation has been condensed and lightly edited for clarity.
So, you and I have this very surprising and unique similarity. Just to go back a little, I was of course familiar with your work on Greek literature before we met, and then we met through David Kaufman, who was in my cohort at Princeton.
My former next-door neighbor and co-author.
And you guys invited me down to Lexington, Kentucky to talk about my book Not All Dead White Men a few years back, and that was really lovely. I think while I was there, you and I connected over this similarity, where we were both married to other classicists who are trans women. And your ex taught my ex Greek, and she’s part of the reason why, when my ex is quoting things in Greek, she does so with a strong Dutch accent. And later when I was first telling you about my memoir project and how Classics is sort of braided through, I mentioned that she proposed to me using this quotation from Odyssey 6 and you said, oh, my ex did the same thing.
Exactly. Mine went even further, because it’s in her co-translation of Lucian’s True Histories, so there’s kind of an irony there.1
So wild. Okay, why don't you tell the story of how you got proposed to.
Well, my ex gave me a copy of her and her co-translator’s translation of Lucian's True Histories into Dutch. And I was like, oh, isn't this cool? Okay, it’s in Dutch. I can’t read it, but isn’t it very cool? So I showed it to my professor of Greek, Dr. Matthews, peace be on his soul. And he said, “Oh, you need to read the inscription. Because I don’t think you did!”
That’s incredible. So she proposed to you with an inscription in a book and then…
I didn’t read the inscription, I’m just so happy with the book.
How long passed between when you were given this gift and when you realized?
Oh, probably a couple of days. Maybe I got it on the weekend, and on Monday I showed it to my professor.
Okay, so that’s not that long, but still. When my ex proposed to me, if she had had to wait a couple of days for a response, she would have been very nervous.
Well, mine came by mail.
Yeah, you guys were doing the long-distance thing. So what did the inscription say?
I can’t even remember exactly, but it was a quotation from the Odyssey. And we used it in the wedding.
Oh, that’s beautiful. So for anybody reading this, we’re talking about this passage in Odyssey book 6. The context is that Odysseus has finally been allowed to leave Calypso’s island and head back home to Penelope, but Poseidon has one last trick for him, and he ends up shipwrecked and naked on the beaches of Scheria, where he runs into Nausicaa, this virgin princess. Fortunately, Athena prepped the virginal princess for this encounter. The night before she gave her a very preparatory dream where a friend of hers came to her and said, “You’ve got to do your laundry. You’re of a marriageable age now. That means laundry time.” So she’s down at the beach washing her clothes, because she’s at a marriageable age, and Odysseus comes out of the bushes naked. And he needs clothes so that he can go to the king for help and hopefully get a boat to go back to Ithaca. And in his extremely over-the-top request for clothing, he starts with this long praise of her and how beautiful she is, which he does in a way that isn’t creepy. Which is impressive because, you know, he’s just a random naked shipwrecked dude.
Yeah, given the context of raiders showing up on beaches and abducting girls. So it seems he really does maybe need to go over the top there.
And it really is set up where she’s playing with her girlfriends there. They’re throwing a ball and it’s very much exactly the kind of scene where Hades is going to pop up out of the ground and snatch Persephone off to the underworld.
Right.
At the end of his plea for clothes, he does this over-the-top wish for her to have all the good things that she can wish for, and especially the very best thing that you can have, which is a husband and home, and homophrosyne, this quality of “having two minds that think as one.” Because there’s nothing better than when a man and a woman who have this quality have a home together, and it makes their friends happy and their enemies upset. So that’s the quote with which my ex proposed to me.
You can imagine a lot of people’s exes or spouses proposed with this text.
Probably. I bet there are a lot more classicists who have been proposed to with this quote. But the deeper you dig into the nuance, the more problematic it is as a proposal quote. Because he’s sort of hinting at her, and there’s a bit of a courtship element, but really he is not interested in her and he’s talking about his bond with his wife. So it’s a little bit manipulative, and then there’s the question of, how good a husband has he been to Penelope? But probably any quote, if you look at the context, you could be like, “Welllllll…”
It’s not just the words. You’ve got to think about the larger context.
DO you, though? I mean, I feel like the more you think about the larger context, the less happy you’re going to be.
That’s what I’m saying. It’s interesting how people get attached to the phrasing of things because they’re beautiful just by themselves on their own, but when you put them in their context… And when you’re taking it into the present and using it for your romantic situation, you can’t read it the same way you would read it if it was Virgil quoting Homer, say, and then how the context of that allusion affects Virgil. You just see it as, “We’re just borrowing this really lovely phrase.” It’s the same with that quotation from Virgil that they put on the 9/11 monument.
Yes, that’s a great example.
It’s a perfect problematic example where on its own it works very nicely, but then when you put it in context, you wonder if they chose it ironically or something.2
I think this is why classicists are just unhappy people. Because even if you take a nice quote, then the classicists are all like, “well, but the context actually…”
Context. Exactly.
And I feel like your proposal is especially interesting because it has this pairing with Lucian.
Right. So then there’s a lot of subliminal messaging going on. There’s a whole case of me just not being good at interpreting. And I’m not paying attention.
See, this is what I want to get into. Obviously I don’t think that there’s anything actually trans or trans-signifying about using this passage as a proposal.
Oh no, no, no.
But I thought it would be funny, and I asked my ex and she agreed, that it was just an amusing intellectual exercise to say, well, if we wanted to construct a theory that there’s something egg-like about proposing with this passage, what would it be? When I told my ex about this, she was very amused, but she was like, “Do you really think you’re going to be able to make an argument for that?” And I was like, “Oh yes, absolutely I’m going to be able to make an argument for this.” But what stands out to you?
Well I think the idea of homophrosyne, that a man and a woman can have a single mind or the same mind that communicates… I think that would be the word you would latch onto in that passage. Because that brings together the two genders. And the sympathy in the two different genders. They’re creating a home, but they are so alike that they have the same mind.
Because there’s nothing about homophrosyne that itself suggests that it has to be between a man and a woman. And in fact, you might say that it’s somewhat unnatural and difficult under conditions of patriarchy for a man and a woman to be able to have the same agenda.
He also says, once upon a time I saw a tree on Delos. And it looks like you to a certain extent.
A flourishing young palm tree.
So to me that also has this idea that seems to be related to the idea of homophrosyne. What it does for me is it triggers, and maybe for me just because I have a late Greek, Hellenistic poetry, and Latin poetry focus, it just immediately always reminds me of Ovid’s story in the Metamorphoses of the old couple that welcome the gods, and then they become this intertwined tree.
So even though he’s describing it as a flourishing tree, I kind of imagined it to be this intertwining tree. I just somehow always think about the tree as two different trees together. I think that’s how he's thinking about the relationship. Because later on you have the tree in the palace in Ithaca that his bed is carved into, right? That is the symbol of his relationship with Penelope. So I would never argue that as an actual, literary analysis, but as a sort of stream-of-consciousness analysis.
Oh, that’s really lovely. I like how it flows through time, that interpretation, and through different literary allusions. And the Odyssey text does not describe at all what about this tree is so remarkable. It’s just a palm tree on Delos, and palm trees on Delos have this sort of special resonance because Leto was gripping a palm tree when she gave birth to Apollo and Artemis. And Odysseus also compares Nausicaa to Artemis, which is interesting.
He actually addresses her as Artemis, right? And she’s like, I’m not Artemis!
Yeah, well. You’ve got to be careful, because if she is Artemis, then you’re in trouble. So start with the worst case scenario. Fail-safe.
Exactly. And then move on. But also, even the Artemis reference, to get back to the sort of danger of that meeting and the threat he poses to her, his addressing her as Artemis is sort of like him saying, hey, if you’re Artemis…
Please don’t hurt me.
Although, with Artemis, of course she is not welcoming of hetero male attention. Notoriously so. And so he calls her that as opposed to, say, Aphrodite.
It’s interesting how he sort of has his cake and eats it too in that.
As he always does.
Indeed. He starts from this whole stance of, I’m going to assume that you’re Artemis and you’re not interested in heterosexual men and I’m going to approach you from that angle, but then he finishes off the speech with, but if you are interested, if you’re down, may you have a husband.
He does have this two-pronged approach that keeps him safe no matter what.
It’s a real rhetorical masterpiece, this request for something to cover his junk.
That’s a great way to put it.
Which, for me, as I was looking for trans signifiers in the scene, one of the things that really stuck out to me is how at pains he is to cover up his junk. So when he comes out of the bushes, right as he’s about to emerge, he grabs a little branch and he’s like, oh, better cover up. And then the whole multi-pronged request is literally just, “Hey, I see you’ve got clothes right there. Would it be cool if I took some?”
Yeah, to what extent does the tree analogy sort of draw attention to the bush that he’s using? You look like a lovely tree. Maybe you could cover me up like a lovely tree.
Nice. And I see that the Zoom transcript, which is not very good, wrote, “would it be cool if I tucked up” instead of “would it be cool if I took some” [of the clothes], which is funny because when I was talking to my ex about some of these examples, and how the central problem of the book is sort of “what do we do about Odysseus’ penis,” her response was something like, “Did he not know how to tuck?”
That’s hilarious. Especially for a Greek man. He should know what he’s doing.
Yeah, he should definitely know what he’s doing. What about in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae? There's a whole scene that’s entirely about tucking!
Exactly.
The other thing that struck me was where Nausicaa is in her development. She’s at this very interesting place where, it seems like she’s maybe a little on the young side to be getting married. She’s just entering the cusp of marriageability. And when she goes to her father to say, “Would it be okay if I took the carriage out so that I can do the laundry?”, she’s ashamed to tell him that she wants to do the laundry because she’s about to get hitched. So her excuse is, “I’ve got all these brothers and they need clean clothes.”
Which is great because it just so happens that he does need masculine clothes. Otherwise she could be bringing girls’ clothes.
I mean, he’d make do. It’s still a step up from a bush, probably.
Now that would be a great adaptation where she’s, “Well, all we have are these gowns. You could try one?”
There aren’t really any Odysseus cross-dressing scenes, are there?
Achilles gets that, but not him.
But Odysseus is the one who sees through Achilles’ cross-dressing ruse, right? He’s the one who knows that Achilles is dressed as a girl, but he’ll go for the weapon. Anyway, the point I wanted to make about this with the bigger argument is, I think that you might say Nausicaa is at this very transitional moment of, as Britney Spears might say, not a girl, not yet a woman.
So she was still sort of in the herd of Artemis then. But she’s at the moment to come out.
Exactly. And my sense is that this moment where she’s on the cusp of womanhood but not quite there is also a moment that might have resonance for trans women, especially in early transition.
I remember there was an anthropological video that I saw when I was in high school about this tribe where they actually had coming of age ceremonies that involved allowing the child that’s becoming an adult to choose their gender. I just remember that sticking in my head, like, oh wow, that’s interesting. They would choose whether they wanted to be a boy or a girl and then they would just continue on according to the choice that they made.
You know, my partner and his ex, they have a 5-year-old and they decided that they were going to raise their child without an assigned gender. Which was especially tricky for them because they were living in Germany. And the pronoun situation was pretty dire.
Right, the pronouns themselves. Oh yeah, there’s a lot of complaints. Like, people complain about pronouns here, but there even the most apparently liberal-looking person, they think it’s a nuisance.
Yeah, and I remember she was going to start at German preschool, and they were still using they/them pronouns. And they had to have this whole conversation with her teachers about what pronouns to use. At the time, actually, a majority of our children were using they/them pronouns because my oldest was also identifying as non-binary. And then my oldest came out to us as a trans girl and said her pronouns were she/her. So we explained to our then 3-year-old children that she was a girl, and that we were going to use she/her to refer to her, and then, my partner’s kid said, “I’m a girl too. I want to use she/her too.” And then also, not literally the next day, but almost literally the next day, she was like, “My favorite color is pink and I’m a princess and I like unicorns and rainbows.” And these two parents who’ve been not assigning her gender were like, what the hell?!
She’s been waiting. She just came out to them and now she’s ready to come out as a girl as stereotyped by the society we live in.
It’s a harsh reminder that you don't have to be the kind of parent who sees a penis on the ultrasound and immediately stamps a truck on everything. Like, I will only accept onesies that are blue and have trucks on them at my baby shower. You don’t have to be at that level of gendering your children for them to decide that that’s what they want.
And, to keep it in the classical realm, think about how that plays out with Achilles on Skyros, right? Basically he’s been living as a girl for most of his post-puberty life. And then these guys show up and then they give all this stuff that’s, you know, the unicorns and the ribbons and the frilly dresses, and then there’s all these trucks and weapons and whatever. And he just beelines the trucks and the weapons. So even in antiquity, there’s a sense that the material representations of gender performance are somehow hardwired. And so there’s an assumption that yes, if he’s really male, he’ll go right after this stuff, which is interesting. Because it’s all cultural, right? All these things that he would be attracted to are actually cultural. So he’s ultimately making a cultural choice and not necessarily one connected to biology at all.
Well, I will say that we have a robust collection of foam swords in my house, and all of the children love the foam swords regardless of gender. They would all reach for a foam sword in a heartbeat.
Of course. That’s pretty funny.
I do think it's funny that both of our exes chose this passage that is like, “when a man and a woman are married.”
Well, I think in my ex’s case, it's a matter of at that point in time trying to assert over her real identity, to assert the conventional identity that goes with her physical representation. Overcompensation, perhaps, of like, “I’m really a guy!” when in fact I’m really a woman.
And that’s a difference in our experience. There are a lot of different kinds of trans experience and some trans people know from a really young age and if they’re afraid they might live in the closet for a long time. But my ex hatched pretty late. She was 35 or something. So, when she proposed to me 15 years ago, she was thinking of herself as a man, more or less. But later when she told me that she was a woman and we were trying to figure out what that meant for our marriage, there was a hope that we would maybe be able to achieve a greater degree of homophrosyne. Putting the “homo” in homophrosyne, as it were. And there are ways in which I think it’s true. We don’t have a house together anymore. But we do have parts of each other’s lived experience that are accessible to us now as women that we didn’t share when she was living as a man.
So what else is there in this passage?
Well, all the Artemis comparisons.
Yeah, because she is sort of like Athena. You know, gender-ambiguous in this way, like she’s up there hunting. Which is not really a girls’ thing to do in Greece, really.
And even separately from the original Homeric context, or the later classical or Hellenistic context, I think that if you’re looking from the present day, people definitely see Artemis and all of her gals, you know, “those gals sure are pals!”, right? Definitely now people see that as queer representation. So when you’re attracted to a girl on the fringes of Artemis’s gang, there’s a question of, do you want to marry her, or do you want to be a girl with her?
Right. But then, this makes me think about the role of Athena in this whole operation, because no one would assume that Athena is the goddess who’s going to initiate anybody getting married, right? That's Aphrodite’s job or Hera’s job. So that’s another sort of interesting thing we could explore as related to Athena, who is definitely a non-binary figure and is received as such in antiquity. So when she’s telling Nausicaa, okay, you’ve got to go down to the beach and get married. Get some clothes ready. Do some laundry there.
Perform your gender, you might say.
And the whole point of that is of course so that she can provide the appropriate clothing for Odysseus to have. I think that the role of Athena in that whole episode is provocative, right? Because it's not her job as a goddess, that’s not her province. And Apollonius’ Argonautica makes that very clear, when she leaves for the conversation about making Medea fall in love with Jason, because that’s not her business. And Medea is deliberately compared to Nausicaa there. So it’s disturbing in an interesting way that it’s Athena.
I wonder if there’s this element here, and this is always the place that I go to when I’m talking about heterosexual marriage, where the issue is that the female labor will always end up being occluded. Because Nausicaa does give Odysseus these clothes. And then he goes in and then she says, okay, I can’t go in with you, because people will talk if I, an unmarried maiden, enter with a strange man. So he goes in and of course everybody immediately sees that he’s wearing her clothes. It’s noticed that she has helped him. But it is sort of not remarked on, right? The ways in which she has smoothed the way for him, snowplowed for him, are brushed aside in favor of all the ways in which he and his hosts are performing the guest-host relationship.
There is that it’s Arete [Nausicaa’s mother] who is the one that notices.
They’ve been doing the whole, “We’re going to be your hosts…”
Right, and we’re not going to ask for ID or anything like that, but Arete is the one that finally says, “Okay, look, this is not okay.”
“I see that you are wearing my daughter’s clothing. Not my daughter’s clothing, but the clothing that my daughter was washing for her brothers.” Although now I’m picturing that he’s been there in this little girl dress the whole time and nobody’s been commenting on it.
I can just imagine a whole travesty version of this, where it is her clothes and he has to come in in a dress. And he has no credibility now whatsoever, because he’s dressed as a woman.
Whatever tweens wear now. Minidresses and sneakers. But I think that Athena’s labor is also so significant to his return home.
And in the Odyssey, Athena is constantly presenting herself as male.
All of her appearances in people’s dreams. But she’s a girl in this one. When she talks to Nausicaa, she’s Nausicaa’s slightly older friend.
But also when he’s walking to the town, and he’s wearing the outfit, then she comes to him again. And she gives him a little bit of a story. Then she’s a girl as well.
And she puts a little glow-up sparkle on him.
Because when she meets him on Ithaca she’s a boy, or a young man. So in both cases I think she shows up as not a full-grown woman. If we're gonna have a trans reading, we have to talk about her role in initiating this meeting and her gender ambiguity. You see in the other episodes, she’s either Mentor or she’s the shepherd boy.
And in Aeschylus’s Eumenides, she says, “I am wholly aligned with the male gender.”
“I don’t even have a mother. That’s why I’m voting this way. I can’t even imagine the perspective of a woman, so I am going to vote with Orestes here.”
I do think… so, in Callimachus’ Hymn to Athena, there’s this Actaeon moment where Tiresias sees her bathing, and she says, “Okay, well, now I’ve got to take your eyes out, sorry. I don’t make the rules. I just make the rules.”
Yeah, well, that hymn is all over the place as far as trans narratives. Because the other myth of Tiresias is, how does he get blind? He gets blind because he comes up with the wrong answer for Zeus and Hera. He’s first a woman and then a man, and then because he’s had both experiences, they see him as the source of information [on which gender enjoys sex more]. And he gives the wrong answer. One of them blinds him. And that’s the normal myth, and Callimachus comes up with this other version where he adapts the Actaeon story. Tiresias sees Athena naked and she gouges his eyes out. But then at the same time, there’s all this language about her relationship with Chariclo, his mother, and it’s all very homoerotic. How she loved her more than all of the others and she was her favorite and so much about her being in love with his mom. And then the whole idea that she doesn’t like all the stuff that Aphrodite likes. She doesn’t have the mirror and the hair, she only likes olive oil and athletic stuff, the stuff that Hercules and the Dioscuri used to smarten themselves up. That’s what she’s into. Not the face creams and lipstick and tiaras.
I remember the first time I read that passage, I think a part of what we were talking about was, what is it that Tiresias sees that he’s not allowed to see? And one thing that was brought up was that what he sees is a more feminine body. A body that does not match her gender presentation. When she’s bathing, she’s unexpectedly feminine-looking. And you’re not allowed to see that. It’s rude to ask what Athena’s body looks like under her clothes, just like how you don’t ask trans people, “Have you had surgery?” It’s just rude. So maybe this is our solution for when people ask trans people rudely about what’s going on with their bodies, just be like, well, you’re blind now. I’m sorry, I don’t make the rules. I just make the rules.
That’s literally what she says! “I don't even make the rules here. This is Zeus’s rules, okay? I can’t turn it back.”
My hands are tied.
It’s a different view of seeing Artemis too, right? To get back to the Artemis connection. Because with Artemis, the gaze will be erotic. You’re not supposed to see her – same issue. You’re going to see this goddess who is feminine, and maybe in Artemis’s case it's more that you’re looking at a prepubescent girl who is sexualized. Or not supposed to be sexualized yet. So when you see her naked, the gazer sexualizes her. Because that body looks like a woman’s body. Whereas Athena, I think it’s what you’re talking about, how her gender presentation is more masculine. She identifies as masculine. So when her body is revealed to not match up to that, that’s what you’re seeing, and that’s why you’re being punished. And when you see something the gods don’t want you to see, you get punished. And the violation is coming because of what you do when you see that.
Right. Although you don’t get the sense that Tiresias did anything particularly, it’s just the fact of seeing. And in the medical texts, there’s this way in which I think there’s a strong expectation that gender identity and biology will match. So when there are trans people in the Hippocratic corpus, they tend to sort of spontaneously surgically transition as well. This “woman” is acting like a man suspiciously, and then all of a sudden…
The appropriate parts.
Now he has a penis. So there’s not an ambiguity that needs to be resolved. So maybe the issue here with these gods is that that ambiguity does remain. As it so often does with the divine, right? We’re not going to resolve this ambiguity for you. The numinousness is the point. And any attempt to impose a human gaze or frame on their gender, you know, you’re blind or dead now. That’s just how it goes.
You might also think that it’s always that it’s the male gaze. All the girls with Artemis, they’ve obviously seen her naked. And Chariclo and Athena love to bathe together. That’s what we're told. So it’s okay if it’s a female gaze. But it’s not okay if it’s a male gaze, because the male gaze applies the patriarchal imposition of what the gender norms should be and whether or not you fit into them. The frame that a man will produce is the problem.
Any other classical resonances in your relationship that I should know about? Parallels?
I just remembered one again, of me not being, you know, the best at picking up clues. I was just so bad. So, early on, we were communicating by email, and she would always sign off with some quote or passage. And a lot of them were coming out of Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, especially the third book.
The one that addresses women.
And a lot of the time there were Amazon references. And I started looking at all the signs I just never saw, because I just don’t look. It’s sort of like a dream that you interpret after the fact.
Right, but it’s hard. You're supposed to get the hints, but also you can’t get the hints, right? Like, what is the scenario? You hear the hint and you say, “Oh, I get it. So you’re a woman, right?” But if they’re not ready to come out to you, then they’re not coming out to you.
Right, it’s never gonna happen.
So the hints are sort of in this interesting communication mode, where you are meant to understand and not meant to understand.
It’s sort of like speaking on a subliminal level, one might say.
It’s like a tragic irony where present-day you is the internal audience that doesn’t get it, and then future-you is the audience that does get it.
Precisely that. I like looking back and thinking, oh yeah, there I am, not getting it.
There’s a lot where you could look back and be like, how did we not know? My ex and I do that. We look back and we’re like, wow, it is crazy that we thought we were doing this straight couple thing. We were so bad at it. But we’re happier now. We got the thing that’s even better than when a man and a woman have a house together, right? Getting to live the life you want.
Exactly. As who you are, how you want.
For non-classicists: this is ironic because Lucian’s True Histories contains a passage where he goes down to the underworld and chats up Homer.
TLDR if you can’t read the paywalled NYT article:
“If we take into account its original context, the quotation is more applicable to the aggressors in the 9/11 tragedy than to those honored by the memorial,” said Helen Morales, a classics professor at the University of California at Santa Barbara. “So my first reaction is that the quotation is shockingly inappropriate for the U.S. victims of the 9/11 attack.”