Around the exterior of the Parthenon, begun on the initiative of Pericles in the 440s, runs a frieze of metopes or panels depicting mythical battles between Gods and Giants, Greeks and Trojans, Athenians and Amazons, and Lapiths (a legendary population of Thessaly) and Centaurs. A common interpretation of these scenes is that they articulate the sort of binary oppositions that characterize Greek thought and express a citizen ideal through explicit contrast with antitypical figures such as savage beasts (Giants; Centaurs), slavish foreigners (Trojans), and warlike women (Amazons). Influenced ultimately by French structuralist thought of the 1950s and 1960s, it is precisely this type of interpretation that underpins arguments for the construction, in the course of the eighth century, of a “middling ideology” that symbolically constructed a community of equal male citizens through the systematic exclusion of women, slaves, and outsiders (see above). Yet, as satisfying as the identification of neat symmetrical patterns in Greek thought undoubtedly is, structuralism is profoundly ahistorical, concentrating usually on explaining how things are rather than how they came to be. The discussion in this chapter, for example, must necessarily cast doubt on the notion that it was the exclusion of slaves that helped construct a self-conscious political community for the simple reason that there was a wide spectrum of dependent and unfree statuses that would inevitably have blurred any clear distinction between slave and free in the earlier
Archaic period. Indeed, far from being a prerequisite for the creation of a citizen ideal, the institution of chattel slavery on any significant scale - at least in Attica
- seems rather to have been an economic response to a political redefinition of the political community. But what about women?
There is little doubt that, to modern sensibilities, the tone of much Archaic literature is decidedly and unattractively misogynistic. Hesiod describes Pandora, the first and prototypical woman, as possessing the beauty and charm of a goddess but the manners and morals of a bitch (WD 59-68). Elsewhere he cautions Perses not to be taken in by a woman, “flaunting her arse, prattling and flattering you, with an eye on your barn” (373-4) and counsels him to choose a wife carefully, “for there is no greater prize that a man can carry off than a good wife, but neither is there anything that will make him shiver more than a bad and parasitic wife who, without a fire-brand, singes her husband even if he is strong and brings him to raw old age” (702-5). Semonides of Amorgos, conventionally dated to the last quarter of the seventh century, is credited with a poem (fr. 7) classifying women according to various natural categories such as sows, vixens, bitches, the earth, the sea, asses, weasels, mares, monkeys, and bees
- the last, blameless and faithful, being the only woman worth having as a wife. Phocylides (fr. 2) presents similar sentiments. Iambic poets such as Archilochus (e. g. frs. 42-3, 46, 54, 67, 82, 119, 152, 196a, 206, and 328) and Hipponax (frs. 12, 68, 70, 84, 92, and 104) betray a more loutish side to the symposium in their boasts of successful conquests, outbursts of abusive vitriol, and references to sexual violence.
In terms of explanatory power, however, the charge of misogyny is not terribly meaningful. The task of the historian is not to condone the motivations behind such negative views but to seek to understand some of them. Two of the specific complaints that Hesiod - and, to a lesser extent, Semonides - levels against women are that they are parasitic upon their husbands and that they are fundamentally untrustworthy. It has been plausibly suggested that both attitudes derive from the increasingly important role that the oikos or household played from the seventh century onwards. In the Dark Age, a failing farmer could probably hope for some support from the local basileus but the new aristocracies of Greece felt no such obligation to their social inferiors. It was left to individual oikoi to meet their subsistence needs and, in such a climate of imminent risk, it was essential that production match - or preferably exceed - consumption. Women were, of course, essential to the reproduction and continuation of the oikos, but high mortality rates meant that, on average, a woman would need to experience between four and five pregnancies to ensure the survival to adulthood of at least two children and, in agricultural regimes at any rate, the productivity of women in advanced stages of pregnancy or the early stages of nurture tends to be limited even though they and their children need to be fed. Furthermore, in the world described by Hesiod, individual households are not supported by large kin networks. When Hesiod tells Perses that the best sort of wife is one who lives nearby (WD 700), the implication seems to be that it was not uncommon for brides to travel some distance from the household of their father to that of their husband and it may be that this transference of women from household to household led to suspicions about their allegiance to their husband’s household - eventually spawning anxiety about infidelity and the production of illegitimate heirs. Certainly, one of the fundamental themes that is treated incessantly in Attic tragedy of the fifth century concerns the ruin visited upon households when female characters in particular either value affiliation to affines (relations through marriage) over allegiance to cognates (blood relations), as is the case with Ariadne or Medea, or else rank loyalty to cognates above that to affines, as with Clytemnestra or Antigone.
The two negative attitudes towards women that Hesiod displays are fairly typical of peasant societies generally. They are sometimes contrasted with the views that are presented in the Homeric epics and lyric poetry. Homer’s portrayal of the relationship between Hector and Andromache has been interpreted as validating the concept of the nuclear family over households based around more extended families, and Homeric women generally are portrayed in a positive light as paragons not only of beauty but also of domestic virtue (e. g. Arete or Penelope). It is, perhaps, not terribly surprising that the poetess Sappho should display a more tender and positive attitude towards her fellow women but the Spartan poet Alcman also reveals a sensitivity towards female camaraderie in the choral lyrics that he wrote for choirs of girls. In the opinion of some, the difference is to be explained by the fact that these authors subscribed to an “elitist ideology,” that elided distinctions between - among other categories - men and women to reinforce a basic distinction between elites and commoners. There are, however, two problems with this view.
Firstly, if Homeric and lyric poetry, which was undoubtedly aimed at an aristocratic audience, testifies to an attitude of respect and affection for women, that does not mean that gender distinctions were blurred. In fact, elite women were objectified as commodities that, through marriage, served to cement alliances between powerful families. One of the most visible expressions of this attitude can be found in the production of korai (singular: kore), the statues of standing female figures that first begin to appear towards the end of the seventh century. Like their male counterpart, the kouros (Figure 7.3; pp. 179-80), korai could serve either as dedications in sanctuaries or as grave markers, but unlike the naked kouroi whose massive dimensions they also never attained, they were invariably clothed with elaborate drapery that became ever more luxuriant and sumptuous as East Greek fashions spread westwards. The korai, dedicated on the Athenian acropolis in the last third of the sixth century for example, wear variations of the “Ionic” khiton - a linen garment, normally with sleeves - and the himation or mantle, both detailed with complex patterns of folds and pleats and decorated with brightly-colored geometric motifs. They are also bedecked with expensive jewelry and elaborate coiffures and head dresses that serve to emphasize their function as a medium of exchange - indeed some of the acropolis korai were actually dedicated by men (Figure 8.1). Some are accompanied by inscriptions which draw attention to the role women played in forging relations between families. So, for example, a kore from the sanctuary of Artemis
Figure 8.1 Kore from the Athenian acropolis, signed by Antenor and dedicated by the potter Nearkhos. Source: American School of Classical Studies at Athens, Archives in the Blegen Library, Alison Frantz Photographic Collection
On Delos, dated to 640-630, is inscribed “Nikandre, the excellent daughter of Deinodikes of Naxos, sister of Deinomenes and now wife of Phraxos, dedicated me to the far-shooting goddess who rejoices in the arrow” (ID 2). By contrast, an inscribed base of a funerary kore by the Parian sculptor Aristion (Figure 8.2), found at Merenda (ancient Myrrhinous) to the southeast of Athens and dated approximately a century later, commemorates a girl named Phrasikleia and bewails the fact that she died unmarried: “she will always be called ‘maiden’ (kore), having been allotted this name by the gods instead of marriage” (IG I3 1261).
Secondly, as we saw earlier in this chapter, the distinction between “elitist” and “middling” or “bourgeois” poets is probably exaggerated, given that the latter’s verses were undoubtedly composed for performance at the aristocratic symposium. The often offensive tone of Iambic poetry should probably be seen as reflective not of a socioeconomic class but of a masculinist environment in which expressions of bravado and machismo served as rituals of male bonding. As such, they also need to be read against homoerotic symposiastic poetry such
Figure 8.2 Phrasikleia kore. Source: National Archaeological Museum, Athens, © 2013 Marie Mauzy / SCALA, Florence
As Solon’s reference (fr. 25) to loving a boy “in the lovely flower of youth, with desiring thighs and a sweet mouth” or Theognis’ admission (1341-50) that he is “in love with a soft-skinned youth who displays me to all his friends even though I am unwilling.”
There may be a few hints that the exclusion of women from political life was the source of some anxiety for Greek males. According to this view, Hesiod’s account in the Theogony of the eventual supremacy of the patriarchal Olympian gods over previous generations in which female deities were more powerful or Apollo’s victory over the female dragon who guarded the site of Delphi, as told in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo, could conceivably offer some justification for the way things were in the Archaic Greek world, seeking to cast cultural contingency in terms of natural determinism. A similar explanation has often been adduced for female religious rituals. Although there is no doubt that rituals in honor of divinities such as Artemis, Demeter and Kore, and Dionysus offered women a certain empowerment, those rituals were regulated by a society for which religious decisions were ultimately political decisions and hence in the hands of males. In the case of the Thesmophoria festival in honor of Demeter, for example, the rituals that are attested for the Classical period - including the removal of women from their homes to a sanctuary outside the civic center and the mandate that they abstain from sexual intercourse for the period of the festival - seem to reinforce, through the strategy of inversion, societal norms which expected women to attend to the household and to give birth to legitimate children. But to assume that the exclusion of women from political decision-making constituted a foundational function in imagining the political community would be to assume that their inclusion was ever entertained historically as a feasible option and for this there is no convincing evidence. Why this should have been the case is certainly an interesting question but it is not one that is unique to the Greek world.
World History
