In the Homeric world, the very roots of stories were gendered. The Muses, who inspired humans to create stories and songs, were women, daughters of Memory. Stories therefore have gender identities from the moment they are created, and in the Odyssey the men and women who tell them adhere to the strict gender roles assigned by ancient Greek culture. Female stories and songs are generally used to seduce and take control of men by luring or deceiving them. Men tell stories to tell facts and reinforce codes of behavior; frequently, male narratives take place within the framework of appropriate etiquette or ritual. Since the Odyssey itself belongs to the second type, each of the instances of narration is instructive. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay Sirens sing to seduce; their song is the entirety of their existence. They are, like the rest of the Greek pantheon, humans on a larger scale. In particular, the mermaids are larger-than-life women, and they amplify the misogyny of The Odyssey to its clearest incarnation. Their song is a symbol of the power of desire; it strips men of their defenses and self-control, distracting them from their daily lives and concerns. They sing of a unique knowledge that they possess, dating back to antiquity and contemporary times, more so that women have secret information that men must constantly try to guess from them. Is there pleasure in acquiring this knowledge? “You can have joy in hearing the song of the sirens,” Circe said to Odysseus? but he must restrain himself physically against the irrationality that lust will produce in him (XI.52). Typically, storytelling connects pleasure and pain, and in this case, the ultimate pleasure of the siren song brings the ultimate pain. Not only is the seduction itself more powerful, but its consequences are deadly. Circe paints an ugly picture of this for Odysseus, saying that the mermaids "sit in their meadow, but the beach before them is filled with heaps of men's bones now rotten, and the skins shrivel on them" (xi. 45-46). Mermaids, who embody female desirability, are untouchable. Perfection and its achievement are inversely related; Homer seems to be saying that the greater the desire and lust, the smaller the possibility of achieving them. If the Odyssey is a moral tale attributing self-control and moderation to the perfect man, then the mermaids, by hyperbole, represent the dangers presented by seductresses. Mermaids are not the only female characters whose song represents their power of seduction. When Hermes comes to announce to Kalypso the will of Zeus, who ordered him to free Odysseus, he stands up and admires the scene unfolding before him. The garden is charming; the interior of the cave is hot and fragrant; in short, everything is idealized, including Kalypso's activity. “She sang in a sweet voice as she moved up and down the loom with a golden shuttle” (V.61-62). Because this passage is part of others describing a kind of domestic paradise, Kalypso is presented as the domestic icon par excellence, in the same way that the Sirens are the seductresses par excellence. His power in this area is so absolute, in fact, that Odysseus cannot escape this divine oikos until Zeus himself demands his release. There is also a slight extension of the sirens' power of seduction in Calypso's "sweet voice." Kalypso's song, as well as her weaving, seem to symbolize her femininity; in the houseidealized, these are the activities of the female head of the family. Circe, too, was “singing in a sweet voice as she raised and lowered a large design on a loom” when Odysseus' men met her (X .221-222). It is this song that attracts them since, as Polites says, “the whole place murmurs to its echo” (X.227-228). Outside Circe's house are lions and wolves, which she has tamed by drugging them, making them forget their ferocious nature. As soon as she has attracted the heroes to her with songs, Circe serves them a potion that makes them forget their home. For animals the medicine was enough, but for humans it had to work in conjunction with the song. Songs are therefore perhaps drugs that act on the intangible essence of humanity, on certain elements of consciousness, rather than on the physical body and the fundamental needs that humans have in common with animals. Helen, too, drugs her listeners. His potion is “a heartache, without gall, to make you forget all sorrows” (IV.221). The narration, which at its best transports its listeners to an alternative world, making them forget their own, simultaneously encourages the memory of things past. The Muses are, after all, the daughters of Memory, so it is perhaps appropriate that, in the ritual of her story, Helen makes her audience forget some things and remember others. Its type of story is almost masculine, intended, like the stories of Nestor and Menelaus, to teach Telemachus more about his father. However, she tells it because she experienced it firsthand and was the only person to see through Odysseus' disguise. When Helen is finished, Menelaus performs the story in an all-male format for Telemachus's instructions. Penelope, too, tells a story. It is initially told before the action of the Odyssey begins and is only present in the text through stories. The story of Penelope conceived by necessity; she tells it to delay the choice between the suitors, in order to give Odysseus more time to return home. Like Kalypso, Penelope tells her story as she weaves. Homer thus establishes a parallel between the two women which illuminates their disparity: one divine and one mortal, one holding Odysseus captive and the other awaiting his return. The action of weaving takes on another symbolic dimension when we consider the expression “to weave a tale”. They say Penelope is good at weaving? “expert in fine work”? and, considering this to represent a skill in storytelling, it makes sense that she was able to deceive the suitors for three years (II.17). The story of Penelope is also a lie, which is another type of male-dominated story. But she tells it precisely because there is no man to say it for her; it is because Ulysses has left that she is being courted. While women tell stories to gain power over men, men tell stories to achieve a concrete goal or as part of a formalized cultural practice. Demodokos is the most accomplished storyteller in Phaiacia, a place renowned for its tales. He represents the ideal storyteller from a formal point of view. When he sings, Odysseus says it is as if “you had been there yourself or heard it from someone who was there” (VIII.491-492). Indeed, Odysseus tells him that he appreciates him “more than all other mortals,” elevating him to an almost divine level (VIII.487). Storytelling was one of the most valued skills in ancient Greece, and its formal practice was generally reserved for men. Demodokos also sings exclusively of gods and heroes, excluding mortal women. His tales reify heroic ethics and.