That Hera is white-armed is, of course, part of the formulaic tradition. It does not belong exclusively to Hera; it is used of Helen at 3.121 and of Andromache at 24.723. When Athene transforms Odysseus back to his usual form, the poet says that his skin took on its usual dark colour (μελαγχροιής, Od. 16.175). This distinction between pale women and dark men was an aesthetic one in Homer; Greek vase-painting of the eighth and seventh centuries shows women’s skin as white and that of men as reddish-brown. [Later sources say that having white skin was unusual and the result either of the use of cosmetics (Xen. Oec. 10 .2) or of deliberately staying indoors (Eur. Bacch. 457).] No doubt upper-class men valued paleness in their women since it showed they did not have to engage in outdoor manual work.Chapter 29 of Robin Lane Fox, Homer and His Iliad (New York: Basic Books, 2023), has the title "White-Armed Women".
Thanks to Eric Thomson for drawing my attention to Joseph Russo's commentary on Homer, Odyssey 18.196:
[W]hiteness is the conventional attribute of women’s skin, both in the Homeric world and later in the archaic and classical periods. Homer repeatedly uses the epithet λευκώλενος of Hera, Andromache, Helen, Arete, Nausicaa, and various female attendants; and the arms of Aphrodite and of Penelope are white in the conventional formula πήχεε λευκώ (Il. v 314, Od. xxiii 240). Greek vase painting of the eighth and seventh centuries represents women’s skin as white and men’s as reddish-brown: see J.D. Beazley and B. Ashmole, Greek Sculpture and Painting to the End of the Hellenistic Period (Cambridge, 1932), 6-7, 23; J.D. Beazley, The Development of Attic Black Figure (Berkeley, 1951), 1; E. Buschor, Griechischen Vasen (Munich, 1940), 67; E. Irwin, Colour Terms in Greek Poetry (Toronto, 1974), 112-14. It should be noted that this stereotyping begins as early as Minoan palace painting. M. Treu, op. cit. 52, 75-6, stresses that white skin for women and dark skin for men (cf. Od. xvi 175) are aesthetic ideals in Homeric epic; but he notes that white skin is often attributed to heroes also, citing Jax, op. cit. 31-2, n. 131, who suggests, no doubt rightly, that in such cases the poet is emphasizing the vulnerability of the hero’s skin.Related posts: