Politeness, gender and the social balance of the Homeric household

Abstract This paper focusses on the role of women within the Homeric household (οἶκος, “oikos”) as related to politeness. The social balance of the household has its fulcrum in the relation between the householder and his wife, and the latter has a crucial role in preserving the face of her husband and hence his authority in the oikos. In practice, to preserve his public image within the oikos, householders delegate a core part of their authority to their wives, and in exchange of this wife-characters such as Penelope or the goddess Hera are keen always to stage the subaltern role, which women have in the Homeric society. The paper compares specific examples of similar politeness strategies to the behaviour of Helen in Book 6 of the Iliad (321–356). Helen enacts a reverse politeness strategy aiming to make her husband Paris’s face collapse in front of Hector. By combining Erving Goffman’s concepts of “face” and “social situation” and the Homeric values of τιμή (“timē”) and αἰδώς (“aidōs”) into a framework for studying politeness in the epics, it becomes possible to shed light on the real power balance that – underneath the veil of politeness – characterises the relationship between the householder and his wife in the Homeric oikos.