When, at the beginning of The Iliad - and Western literature — King Agamemnon steals Achilles' slave-girl, Briseis, the king tells the world's greatest warrior that he is doing so "to let you know that I am more powerful than you, and to teach others not to bandy words with me and openly defy their king". But literary scholar Jonathan Gottschall believes that the true focus of Homer's epic is not royal authority, but royal genes. Gottschall is one of a group of researchers, calling themselves literary darwinists, devoted to studying literature using the concepts of evolutionary biology and the empirical, quantitative methods of the sciences. "Women in Homer are not a proxy for status and honour," says Gottschall. "At bottom, the men in the stories are motivated by reproductive concerns. Every homeric raid involves killing the men and abducting the women." The violent world of the epics, he says, reflects a society where men fought for scarce mates and chieftains had access to as many women as slaves and concubines. And he thinks that everything written since Homer is open to similar analysis.
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