The women in the Odyssey are compelling characters, and the goddess Athena and demigoddesses Circe and Calypso are genuinely powerful; like the sirens, the latter two are also portrayed as dangerous. But the human women are rendered powerless by their society. Penelope is unable to just govern Ithaca herself and is besieged by the suitors and patronized by her son; Helen is kidnapped by Paris (or is given to him as a prize by Aphrodite or elopes with him), setting off the Trojan War. In the prequel Iliad Trojan women become sex slaves to the Greeks camped outside Troy, and the Trojan priestess Cassandra (blessed with the gift of prophesy, cursed with never being believed because she refused to have sex with the god Apollo) is raped by Ajax the lesser after the fall of Troy and then murdered when Agamemnon brings her back to his kingdom as a sex slave (the euphemism ‘concubine’ is often used for these captive women).

Sex slaves are not a thing of the past….[A]fter the Tates built an online sex show business in which dozens of women were essentially held captive, the brothers turned to teaching other men and boys both how to do this and how to despise and dehumanize women… Tate presided over an online network called the War Room… Members learned how to recruit women into ‘sexual slavery’ in a series of tutorials that Tate called his Ph.D., or ‘Pimping Hoes Degree.

Only as an adult did I notice how normalized rape and sexual coercion were in ancient Greek literature…

— “Listening to Cassandra: Misogyny, Classical and Modern,” Rebecca Solnit