Women in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook

245 Pages·2012·0.98 MB·English

by  Bonnie MacLachlan

Women in Ancient Greece

Women in Ancient Greece
A Sourcebook
Bonnie MacLachlan
Continuum International Publishing Group
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www.continuumbooks.com
© Bonnie MacLachlan, 2012
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying,
recording or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission
from the publishers.
Bonnie MacLachlan has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work.
First published 2012
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
ISBN: 978-1-4411-0475-5
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
Typeset by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NN
Contents
Introduction vi
Abbreviations for works cited xi
Part 1 The Archaic period 1
1 Where it all began: women in Hesiod 3
2 Aphrodite and Demeter: goddesses in the Homeric Hymns 7
3 Women divine and mortal in the Homeric epics 12
4 Women and gender in the melic and lyric poets 32
Part 2 The Classical period 51
5 The lived experiences of girls and women 53
6 Women and property 86
7 Foreign women 94
8 Prostitutes 98
9 Religious life of girls and women 115
10 Gender performed on the Athenian stage 131
11 Dorian girls and women 151
12 Women and the state: Plato and Aristotle 165
13 Warrior women 180
14 The female body 187
Part 3 The post-Classical period 203
15 Women in the Hellenistic era 205
General bibliography 223
Index of ancient authors and texts 225
General index 229
Introduction
In the study of the ancient world, we have all benefited in recent years from
the focus on women and gender interaction in the Mediterranean. This shift
in attention was launched by the publication of Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses,
Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity in 1975. Suddenly we
were invited to interrogate the texts, inscriptions and material culture surviving
from the Classical world in new ways. And asking fresh questions invigorated
our readings of the evidence. It breathed on the embers of a fire that had been
preserved for millennia but was losing vigour under the weight of traditional
assumptions about the lives of the people behind the words and artifacts.
Greece and Rome were, to a large degree, patriarchal cultures, and our inves-
tigation into the lives of their women has not been without its challenges as we
seek to listen for the female voice, to get access to what mattered to girls and
women. Those responsible for most of those texts and artifacts were men, and
the attitudes toward women that they convey, whether idealizing or dismissive,
originate with individuals who for the most part controlled the narrative.
This has not been a deterrent to fruitful searches, however, inquiries
motivated by a determination to find the authentic voice of women in those
male-authored (and in the few remaining female-authored) texts, and in those
inscriptions, sculptures and vase paintings that have survived from the Classical
world. Many of the important publications that resulted from these investiga-
tions into the lives of Greek women can be found in the sources listed in this
text.
This book is intended to supply a survey of ancient textual sources (which
I have translated into English) – literary, historical, philosophical and inscrip-
tional – to be used in the study of women in ancient Greece. It is by no means
a complete compilation, but offers several lenses through which to look at the
lived experiences of our female forebears in Greece. The earliest surviving texts
that can help in the quest date from the Archaic period (c. 800–480 bce), and
material relating to this era is contained in the first four chapters. After 480 bce
and the ending of the Persian Wars, political changes that included the rise of
the Athenian city-state introduced a new era, the Classical period. Considerable
textual documentation survives from this chapter of Greek history – literary,
historical and philosophical, together with forensic speeches and inscriptions
INTRoDuCTIoN vii
that support the inquiry into the lives of women. A selection from this consid-
erable body of material is found in Chapters 5 to 14. With the defeat of Athens
by Sparta at the end of the 5th century bce another political transition occurred
that altered the social configuration of Greek life. The post-Classical era, the
Hellenistic period, is conventionally dated from the death of Alexander the
Great in 323 bce until c. 100 bce. The political and social shift that occurred
around the Mediterranean world with the empire established by Alexander had
major consequences for the lives of women, and the last chapter contains a wide
variety of sources that document a “modernization” of their lived realities.
Throughout the book, I have selected texts that apply to life not only on the
Greek mainland but to the Greek diaspora, the communities along the eastern
shores of the Mediterranean, in Egypt and in the Greek west (southern Italy
and Sicily). I have also looked for material that documents the lives of non-elite
women – such as the foreigners in Athens, lower class and slave women,
prostitutes.
Much of this evidence is not documentary. There were no comprehensive
archives in ancient Greece, no formal registries of births, marriages or divorces,
for example. There were no census data to provide evidence for the lifespan or
occupation (where this was the case) of women. Literary evidence, whether
drawn from poetry or drama, is, of course, largely fictional – then as now. But
those fictions were the product of a conceptual framework that we can test for
inter-textual consistency, with the aim of getting a glimpse of what mattered
most to the ancient Greeks, what stories and images reflected and informed the
priorities in their lives. For this reason, I have included a considerable number
of excerpts from literary works, from the Homeric epics to Hellenistic epigrams.
My hope is that readers who have not yet been drawn to read the whole of the
longer works will be tempted to do so.
Some of the important literary texts drew on the rich array of mythical
material accessible to the Greeks. These were tales, as I tell my students, that
are self-evidently not true, but while untrue in an empirical sense they were
carriers of the deepest truths about the complex value systems that governed
Greek life, and merit sensitive attention on our part. We assume that the
courtroom speeches quoted in this book are closer to documentary evidence
about everyday life, but these were partisan by nature, and were delivered with
rhetoric that was designed not to tell the whole story. We must be vigilant,
therefore, as we read, and aim to become as informed as possible by having
recourse to the widest possible array of evidence as we assess the texts in front
of us. Even inscriptions tell only part of the story: those on tombs may have
been carved to suit the personal agenda of the survivor; laws written on stone
in public places were prescriptive, not descriptive. How compliant were the
readers? Who had the skills to read them?
viii INTRoDuCTIoN
In our reconstruction of the lives of girls and women in ancient Greece,
we cannot expect to produce a consistent picture. Details will contradict one
another, arising from different time periods or locations, or from authors with
different standpoints. But often the contradictions are fruitful, leading us to ask
further questions that give us a fuller understanding of the situation. our goal
should be to produce a coherent, if not consistent, picture.
For the texts quoted, I have tried to present very brief introductions that set
them in context. Much more investigation will bear fruit, and I have supplied
brief suggestions for further reading at the end of each chapter, which should
both raise and answer some interpretive questions about this material, or
signpost the reader to other sources that may do so. These will be up to date,
of course, only as of the time of submission of this manuscript to the publisher.
The website Diotima (http://www.stoa.org/diotima) is devoted to the study
of women and gender in the ancient world, and is an important electronic
resource that will continue to supply titles of new publications. For journal
articles in classical studies generally the databases found on JSToR and Project
MuSE are extremely helpful. An electronic record, with a brief summary in
French, of books as well as book chapters and articles in classics is available
online through L’Année Philologique.
I have arranged the texts under 15 headings. For the most part, this follows
the chronological order just described, but of necessity some of the material is
synchronic. Mythical material describing the Amazons, for example, includes
narratives that were compiled in the Bronze Age (in the second half of the
third millennium bce) but surface in descriptions of the 5th century bce
historian Herodotus. The authors of some texts claim to have preserved
material from several centuries earlier. Athenaeus, for example, a Greek rheto-
rician and grammarian from the 3rd century ce with a taste for the salacious,
quotes Hermippus, a biographer and near contemporary of Aristotle, who
provided Athenaeus with the information that the great philosopher kept up a
relationship with a courtesan until his death and produced a son with her.
The series of texts that follows begins with the cosmic tales of Hesiod (7th
century bce), which recount the birth of the gods and explain the creation
of the first woman and the female sex. Pandora was as dangerous as she was
beautiful, the product of male anxiety on the part of Zeus, who wanted to
punish a would-be younger successor. Two of the olympian goddesses are the
subject of Chapter 2, which quotes from hymns originating early in the Archaic
period. These hymns provided a narrative of foundational moments in the
divine biographies of Aphrodite and Demeter, goddesses important to women.
Mortal as well as divine women inform much of the action and most of the
emotional energy that drives the dramatic plots of the Homeric epics, and are
the focus of the material quoted in Chapter 3.
INTRoDuCTIoN ix
Excerpts from other poetry of the Archaic period, songs of a more personal
nature than epic, are found in Chapter 4. They range from the homoerotic
lyrics of Sappho to the misogynistic lampoons of Hipponax and Semonides.
In Chapter 5, we turn to the Classical period. This extensive chapter covers
texts that describe events in the female lifecycle, primarily referring to women
in Athens, for which we have the most evidence. This is followed by a
chapter with quotations largely drawn from litigation speeches that provide
information about women and property. How much property could women
own? Did they have the right to dispose of it? With property largely under
the control of men, what kind of pressure was there on a daughter who was
an only child, and stood to inherit her father’s property? Chapters 7 and 8
include quotations from documents describing the lives of foreign women and
prostitutes.
Since religious rituals provided definition and meaning for the principal stages
in a Greek woman’s life, and offered almost the only occasions where women
could perform in public (Chapter 9, on women’s religious life), contains a broad
array of texts and inscriptions. This is followed by a chapter documenting the
variety of ways in which women were depicted on the Athenian dramatic stage,
in both tragedy and comedy. How do we explain viragos like Clytemnestra or
Medea in a culture dominated by men? Was the agency of Lysistrata a male
fantasy or a plausible reality in the Greek male imaginary?
In Chapter 11, the texts address the lives of Dorian women in Sparta or
Crete, who could exercise in the nude with men or inherit property in their
own right, contrasting strongly with the experience of Athenian women. This
is followed in the next chapter by discussions of Plato and Aristotle about the
role of women in the ideal state, and their attitudes about Dorian social arrange-
ments inform their reflections. Warrior women, mythical and real, are the
subject of texts found in Chapter 13.
What about the physical makeup of the female body and how the Greeks
understood it? The records left by Hippocratic medical practitioners, who were
mystified by the reproductive apparatus inside women (because dissection
was not permitted) provide us with a fascinating glimpse at the ways in which
ideology can inform analysis.
The last chapter documents the major transition in the expectations and
experiences of Greek women found in the Hellenistic period. Suddenly, it
appears, women could sign marriage contracts, exert agency in erotic relation-
ships, belong to philosophical movements, compose poetry that was included
with male-authored verses, walk unaccompanied in public. one text (fictional)
describes two women comparing notes on dildoes.
Working with these ancient texts takes us on a fascinating journey, and a
thoughtful interrogation of them obliges us to think about the lived reality of