“Hey Boss, really enjoying the series on the Odyssey. So you think Odysseus did not love Penelope? Do you think the heroes of the epics experienced Romantic love in the way that we understand it?”

-Sean, December 2025, by text

Love was regarded as a curse that could even sway God’s will, something that men must be wary of and women depended upon for dedicated protection by a man capable of providing it. In this light, few working class women would practice love, as their men, being slaves, subjects at best, could not provide it. They would rather love the king whose feet they might kiss in passing. A hero though, could command a woman’s love, which is ALWAYS OWAYS ATLLTIMES, conditional! Woman cannot experience unconditional love. Men can, and need be wary of that weakness. This need on the part of the woman would then be partially or totally transferred to the children he sired on her, with that, their joint legacy in the field of Time, in temporary mortal life, now their joint cause, their fruits.

These fruits, of either what love the woman managed to cast upon the man with her sorcery, or his lust imposed upon her physically, or in the case of Odysseus and Penelope or Phillip and Olympias, of their political/domestic union, imposed upon them in a societal way, would now be the glue, or the wedge, in their union. No doubt, some men and women fell naturally in love, even in arranged marriages. Others grew naturally in love. Women, as indicated by the moon being regarded as the divine mirror of love, are and were more prone to insanity, to include LOVE. There is also no accident that the Fates, Furies, Norns of various faiths are all depicted as feminine.

Odysseus alone among Homeric heroes, seems to have been immune to Love and able even to seduce a Goddess and a nymph, who loved him! The counterpart of Odysseus, the hero who is never at a loss, is, in Homer, Athena, the storm-cloud bearer, a wolfish Valkyrie who alone KNOWS the mind of God, a harshly practical angel who projects a feminine care only for just and pious heroes who are unjustly afflicted AND their loyal wives and good-hearted sons. Athena, Thought-lady, alone among the angels, is stronger than War, the dark, vengeful one. As such, there is demonstrated room for love in the eyes of Thought if it serves the High Truth and does not corrupt. Hence, such later romantic myths as The Death of Arthur proposed by Mallory, those of Shakespeare and the western tradition that followed, sympathize with corruption by love, an ancient sin yet a modern honor. Such are this writer’s musings on love among heroes.

What is best, is to select Arуan examples of romantic relations between heroes and women, down through Time, from the oldest I can recall…

Gilgamesh is immune to romantic love and possess only love for his war companion Enkidu, who is entrapped by the holy whore Shamahat and seduced into civilized life where he is stricken by the gods with disease as punishment for helping Gilgamesh defeat the forest demon. Enkidu loves her still as he dies, wishing her well.

The closest thing to romantic love I recall from the Bible, involves Samson, of the Arуan Danes, of Dan, whose heroic tribe converted into the anti-heroic Chosen Way. Samson Agonistes by Milton gives a good dissertation on an early modern Christian view of how a man’s love for a woman, entwined with lusty allure as it is, remains a spell of entrapment. Odysseus is not prone to this. He coldly interviews Penelope, to determine if she is loyal. He does not trust her! She does not recognize him, and is willing, if she discovers Odysseus is dead, to love this man of the world he is pretending to be who might save her and her son.

The women of Achilles and Patroclus, slave women, taken from slain husbands, brothers and fathers, yet LOVE their conquerors! They yearn for their return, and when their bodies only return, they mourn for them. The two heroes, doomed to soon die, treasure their prize women as possessions won by deed and held by right, but make no pretense at love. Such deep affection is only held for battle companions and seemingly divorced from sexual conduct, with the passion satisfied by stabbing and smashing the foe! Sex with the prize women might be seen as an extension of this, with Patroculus and Achilles having exclusive slave girls in the same tent. This is the crisis of the Achaean army when the Iliad begins, a feud over prize women with Agamemnon. The cause of the war, Helen, is again prized by her captor, Paris, and by her jilted husband Menaleus, but not “loved.”

Only in the Odyssey, in the Telemachia prequel composed probably by a woman of the 200s B.C., in the decadent Hellenistic Age, does love seem to exist between Menaleus and Helen reunited. At this time, in the post-heroic period of Hellenic decline, “love” seems to occur. Interestingly, this addendum as prequel was written in a period of population decline. As fecund Rome rose in the west, criminal psychopaths breeding armies of disposable sons for the war road, Greek civilization was in such steep cultural decline that entire cities were empty. Great families no longer had children, but willed their estates to slaves. [1] In such times, when children no longer occupy the dedication of a mother’s heart and the ambitions of a father’s mind, married couples of middle years are likely to either drift apart into love affairs with others, or fall more closely in love with each other. We live in such a time. Look to the people you know who have one child or less and are still married. They are either getting closer together or falling further apart and looking to other human contact to sooth their specific mortal decline.

Herakles demonstrates lust for a bride who he wins in battle, though he is driven mad by its poison. He will eventually be driven crazy and slay his won wife and children and fell a forest on a mountain side to burn himself on a pyre. I regard this as a mythic tale reflecting an assimilated barbarian warrior culture falling prey to the sorcery of all-corrupting civilization.

Aeneas and Dido fall in love, which gets her killed.

I do not recall if Dionysus had a love interest.

Beowulf and his queen, the King of Heroat and his queen, are dutifully loyal to one another, and demonstrate nothing we would equate with personal love. The strongest love shown is by the monster’s monstrous mother for her son, and by the women of Beowulf’s kingdom for their dragon-slain king, who wail that they and their people will now be slaves.

No personal love across sexual lines exists in the Song of Roland. Warriors love Jesus, their King, the peers who die by their side, their horse, and their sword. The person who loves is the princess, the daughter of Marsile the Muslim, who loves any man her protector, whatever faith, and eagerly becomes Christian under Charles The Great’s protection.

I am hazy on love in The Death of Arthur, though Euther was clearly practicing lust when he sired the storied king while in disguise. As with the Poetic Edas, it seems that love is the province of women past child bearing years and their warrior consorts engaged on the sly.

In heroic terms, love is a problem. So, in cultural terms, a society built on pillars that include love, will tend towards safety orientation and secrecy, with a concurrent degradation, or reduction in status of the hero, and the erosion of positive, risk-taking morality, or heroism.

Notes

-1. See The Life of Greece, Will Durant