Something that really struck me reading The Odyssey this time is the description of the young Phaeacians dancing (book VII). I remember going to Greek restaurants as a young woman (in Berlin) and being delighted by the dancing that sometime took place late at night: men in groups, their arms on each others' shoulders, dancing in a circle, starting our slow and becoming faster and faster. Women would participate, too, but even then I understood that in traditional Greek society, certain dances were danced by men alone.
In The Odyssey, dancing is part of the athletic games the Phaeacians put on to entertain their guest.
I am also interested in the many times that Odysseus and Telemachus are shown to weep; and while they conceal their weeping, nobody seems to think such weeping is "unmanly." There is indeed one time when Odysseus is, in his weeping, compared to a woman, a woman who weeps over her fallen husband and who is captured by the enemy (book VIII, p. 90). In other words, a woman who suffers precisely the fate that the Achaians brought on Troy, when they killed the Trojan men, destroyed the city, and took the women as slaves. This is curious to me, since you would expect that in as patriarchal a world as that of Homer's Odyssey, any comparison to women's behavior would be viewed as emasculating, or at least feminizing. But in this instance--and in others I have sinced encountered--the same is true. Perhaps there's a difference between being directly compared to a woman and simile in which a man's feelings are likened to those of a woman.
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