Always a Mother: Antikleia and her Son

The main point of this paper is that in the Homeric world a mother looks at her motherhood not as a dual relationship between herself and her child but as a wider relationship in which the whole community (the family, the house, the city) is involved. In the view of a Homeric mother her child is not someone that she alone has the right to love, but someone that she must share (so to say) with many other people. To reach this conclusion the paper analyses the behaviour of the great mothers of the Homeric poems, Penelope, Hecuba and Anticleia: Penelope and Hecuba in the Upper World, Anticleia in the Under World.