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Miriam B. Peskowitz is Assistant Professor of Religion at the University of Florida and coeditor, with Laura Levitt, of Judaism since Gender (1996).

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Spinning Fantasies

University of California Press

For storytelling is always the art of repeating stories, and this art is lost when the stories are no longer retained. It is lost because there is no more weaving and spinning to go on while they are being listened to. The more self-forgetful the listener is, the more deeply is what he listens to impressed upon his memory. When the rhythm of work has seized him, he listens to the tales in such a way that the gift of retelling them comes to him all by itself. This, then, is the nature of the web in which the gift of storytelling is cradled. 1
Walter Benjamin, "The Storyteller " (1936)

Far from being faraway, ancient times, people, and places are made familiar and close at hand by the telling of stories. But in the process of storytelling, what cultural work is done? In making the past familiar and usable, what complexities are flattened and effaced? Whose past does it become? We create our pasts, in various ways and with various texts and artifacts. Despite the habit of wrapping history in objectivity and stability, our pasts are pliable. So too, did people in Roman times creatively convey figures and events into stories about themselves and their pasts. Those who are ancient to us crafted for themselves stories of their own antiquities.

From whatever standpoint of time they are viewed and read, pasts are always gendered pasts. To go about finding a past that includes Jewish women, and to find a Jewish discourse on women, men, and gender in the period of the Roman Empire, I start with stories about spinners and weavers. These stories were as potent and important in Roman times as they are in our own years. The meanings of these stories are stable, and yet they shift, sometimes quietly, sometimes dramatically.

Think about Penelope. In Homer's Odyssey , Penelope sits daily at her loom and weaves, and returns nocturnally to unweave. Her weaving is an occupation, an identity, a quotidian event, a conventional sign of her femininity, and an act of resistance to others' plans for her remarriage. Homer uses the loom to represent Penelope's domesticity, fidelity, and loyalty to her missing husband, Odysseus. Although believed dead, in fact Odysseus is merely traveling far from home. But until the story unravels and Odysseus returns, Penelope must make plans to remarry. To prevent, or at least to postpone the plans for her remarriage, Penelope makes known that in order to maintain her reputation among local women, she must weave the shroud for her father-in-law, Laertes. She promises that once the shroud is complete, she will remarry. But in the meantime Penelope sets up her loom to weave a cloth of huge dimensions. For three years she weaves each day and by night secretly unravels the web. Then her trick is discovered by a maid, who reveals it to the suitors who have gathered around Penelope to woo her. In Homer's telling, Penelope now has no choice but to finish her weaving and remarry.2

Since her birthing in Homer's Odyssey , the heroine Penelope has had an afterlife as a beloved icon of gender and sexuality. Penelope proliferated in new landscapes, monuments, objects, and written texts. A marble relief from Thessaly, dated to the fifth century B.C.E. , depicts her weaving at her loom while a maid washes the feet of Odysseus, in his guise as a beggar.3 A painted vase produced in Chiusi in the early fifth century also depicts Penelope. Facing forward, she is seated in front of a loom whose web contains a detailed pattern of border motifs and winged animals; her son, Telemachus, stands next to her.4 Homer's literary Penelope became a household image, appearing on bronze mirrors such as those excavated from Hellenistic sites. During the early Roman Empire, artistic images of Penelope coincided with the writings of the elegiac poets, and inside homes, such as those excavated at Pompeii, bas-reliefs and wall frescos depicted events from the story of Penelope's life, to be viewed again and again as ordinary people went about their lives.5

In the Roman-influenced Mediterranean, Penelope was already a five-hundred-year-old character. She became part of the landscape. Pausanias's travelogue of Greece describes streets and other visual reminders of Penelope's life. For instance, the race that Penelope's father, Ikarios, held to determine which of the suitors could marry her is commemorated at several places. "As you leave the marketplace by Leaving Street," Pausanias wrote in the mid-second century, "you come to what

they call the Cattleprice; but I must first deal with the name of the street. They say Ikarios held a race for Penelope's lovers, and obviously Odysseus won, but the others were left behind in Leaving Street" (3.12.1). The beginning of the race was marked by a statue of "the Starting God" (3.12.1). Another monument, the Aidos statue, is placed between the cities Lakonia and Ithaca. Pausanias recounts that "the local people" reported to him that the statue marks the spot where the young Penelope chose to leave Ikarios's house in order to enter the home of her new husband, Odysseus. When Ikarios gave Penelope to Odysseus, he wanted the couple to settle in Lakonia. Odysseus disagreed. Ikarios begged his daughter to stay, and when she set out with Odysseus for Ithaca, he followed her in a chariot. After some time of being trailed by Ikarios, Odysseus declared that Penelope must choose: she must either stay with her father or continue on with Odysseus. In Pausanias's telling, Penelope relinquishes her voice and replies to her father's entreaties by placing her face inside a veil. The statue that Pausanias describes marks the place where Penelope hid her face (3.20.10b 11)

The life and character of Penelope became monuments, to be recognizedb or ignored?b in various ways by those who passed by these places or by those who wrote about them.6 These markings in the landscape contain this paradox: the monuments that depict moments in Penelope's life often refer either to her absence (as in the race for her suitors) or her passivity (as in the meaning of the Aidos statue).7 By making geography tell history, Pausanias guides his readers through the landscape of Mantinea. In Arcadia, off to the side of one of the roads to Orchomenos, is a high mound "which they say" marks the site of Penelope's grave. The following legend, he tells us, is popular among Mantineans: Odysseus sent Penelope away. She moved first to Sparta and then to Mantinea, where she died and was buried.8 Yet Pausanias is provocative in that he recalls multiple local tales about Penelope. After reporting on the burial mound, he tells his readers about an alternate story, in which Penelope bears another child for Odysseus and remains in Troy until her death and burial (8.12.5b 6). Thus, the landscape tells multiple stories about Penelope. The past matters, but it includes the contentiousness of multiple stories and accounts, including Pausanias's own. Furthermore, the textuality of Pausanias's accounts of traveling in Greece matters. His books were meant to preserve the inheritance of the Greek past, to produce and continue a consciousness of Penelope, Homer, and their world into his present and future.9

Penelope multiplies into Penelopes. Looking not for...