(inheritance law, ancient Greek women didn’t have legal agency, and the artificial inheritance situation engineered for the Odyssey)
Homeric society isn’t a real society with real rules.
Homeric epic depicts a semi- or mostly-fictional society, so questions of legal, political, and social values aren’t exactly questions about a historical reality that can be interrogated and investigated. Having said that, (1) there are elements of internal logic to the society depicted, and (2) while fictionalised, Homeric society is some sense a fictionalised version of a real society.
In the Odyssey, the question of Penelope’s remarrying isn’t about Penelope.
It’s about property, and inheritance law.
In historical ancient Greek societies, marriage was a legal contract between two oikoi (‘households’), not between a man and a woman. The only people with legal agency to arrange a marriage were the kyrioi (‘masters’) of the two oikoi involved.
This is clearest in legal cases and contracts that we see that were edge-cases in legal inheritance. A woman could inherit property, with some caveats: (1) she couldn’t be principal heir in the event that potential male heirs existed (Telemachos’ existence means that Penelope doesn’t own Odysseus’ property in her own name); and (2) any property that she did inherit still wouldn’t exactly be in her own name. The kyrios of an oikos had to be a man. So any property that was inherited by a woman was ultimately passing into an oikos that had a man as its head. There was no such thing as a woman without a kyrios. If the woman had no husband or father, the kyrios would be her next-of-kin. Ideally, any wealth that she inherited would be administered by her kyrios as an inducement for someone from another family to marry her. In the event of a disagreement between a woman and her kyrios, the woman had essentially no say and no legal recourse.
The situation in the Odyssey is an edge-case precisely because it’s unclear who Penelope’s kyrios is.
Odysseus, it seems, is dead, but his status isn’t set in stone.
Telemachos has effectively been a minor up until the start of the Odyssey — too young (nēpios is the word used) to have agency and act as a kyrios in his own right. We’re reminded frequently that there is no other next-of-kin.
The epic makes absolutely sure that Odysseus’ father Laertes is completely cut off from the situation.
Penelope’s former oikos — her father and brothers — are in principle willing to arrange a marriage, as we find out at the start of book 15: we’re told that Penelope’s father and brothers are urging her to marry Eurymachos, one of the suitors. But they can’t actually act as her kyrios: (a) They live elsewhere and so have no legal standing in the polis where Penelope lives. (b) It isn’t Penelope herself that Eurymachos and the other suitors want, it’s Odysseus’ property. And Penelope’s father and brothers absolutely don’t have legal governorship of Odysseus’ property.
It’s this apparent absence of a kyrios that creates the impression that Penelope has agency of her own. To be clear, she definitely doesn’t have legal agency — there’s obviously no legal mechanism for deterring the suitors — but more narrative agency. In ancient Greece a grey area has to be really grey for a woman to have something that even looks like legal agency.
That is to say, the question over Odysseus’ estate comes about because the scenario is an artificial one. The story goes to some trouble to create a scenario where an oikos has no legal kyrios. Penelope has no legal say of her own: it’s the power-vacuum in the oikos that gives her some narrative agency, and creates an impression that she has some say. How exactly a case like this would go down in a classical Athenian court is anyone’s guess. Maybe much like how it plays out in the Odyssey: I mean, if a situation like this did go to court in real life, there’d be no one to represent Odysseus’ oikos. Greek laws over intestate property vary a bit from place to place, but they generally rely on the existence of an extended family to which the property can pass: the Odyssey makes absolutely sure that no extended family exists — book 16 tells us explicitly that it’s been a line of only sons for several generations.
There are many treatments of inheritance law in historical Greek societies as it relates to female heirs. David Schaps’ book Economic rights of women in ancient Greece (Edinburgh, 1979) is still reasonably solid, and has the advantage of being specifically on this topic, even if it is a bit dated and organised as a single discursive treatment, rather than a book where you can refer to a specific passage for a specific topic. For the fact that property law is the underlying problem, there’s a great article by John Halverson, ‘The succession issue in the Odyssey’ (Greece & Rome 1986), which lays out nice and clearly that no one wants to marry Penelope to become king of Ithaca: basileus doesn’t mean ‘king’ in Homer, the position of basileus isn’t strictly hereditary, and the suitors wanting to marry Penelope are doing it in order to stake a claim to Odysseus’ property.
http://www.jstor.org/stable/643251
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