For an archaeologist, Black - and Red-Figure fine tableware is less interesting for its disputed status as evidence for master craftsmen, than for the insights it offers into how Greek society worked, or was supposed to work, as represented on such vases. Figure 12.4 offers an excellent introduction to the study of Classical gender relations (Beard 1991).
This image, used repeatedly, follows clear conventions, allowing us to recognize a house interior, with the wife intently spinning on a chair, whilst her husband watches carefully. He stands over her, close enough to be almost threatening, but his walking-stick informs us he is either on his way out of the home or just arrived back, and that he is a man-about-town of sufficient income not to need to use his hands
Figure 12.4 Red-Figure Attic vase showing a household scene.
© Trustees of the British Museum.
For manual work. A female servant appears from behind the housewife with a box, perhaps the wife’s jewelry. The latter activity is generally shown separately, where the wife examines her adornments alone with her servant. In Greek art it was permissible to show sequent activities on the same panel (“synoptic” scenes). Very similar scenes appear on the gravestones of women (Stears 1995, Leader 1997).
The relative body positions of the man and woman indicate the dominance of the husband, and the importance he attaches to her wifely duties. Another common task portrayed is the wife looking after the children (usually male). If the woman’s place is in the home, the man appears to be “not at home” but calling in, between his activities in the outside world of the city. Some representations however show an old man, seated, but with a walking-stick. This seems to illustrate the fate of this male age-group, unable to spend the day out in the town due to age and infirmity, but perhaps wishing to be there. The opposition between oikos (the home) and polis (the public side of city life), is a central theme ofsuch scenes, symbolizing gender roles. As we shall see later, recent research identifies the entire house (the formal dining-room excepted) as the women’s area. Appropriately, male grave reliefs show a different role “persona” (Leader 1997): hoplite, athlete, or man-about-town.
However, purely chauvinistic readings of such scenes require some “deconstruction.” The presentation of the wife’s jewelry casket is a good place to start, especially if we link this with women depicted on vases and gravestones looking into mirrors. A modern reading might identify a male stereotype of women as obsessed with outward appearances, but there are strong reasons to reject this. The wife’s dowry was fundamental to most marriages, whilst she was also responsible for the household economy; if divorce occurred, her own family was entitled to reclaim her bride-wealth. Thus the jewelry box symbolizes her contribution to the couple’s assets (money, land, stock, textiles). The mirror scenes contain another message. On one tombstone with such a portrayal, a text informs the passer-by of the inner beauty of the deceased. The deceased woman looking at herself in the mirror symbolizes her relatives looking admirably into her remembered character.
Other vase images show a very different world, orgiastic parties in the andron or formal dining-room of the house. Textual sources indicate that the participants are the male household-head and his male relatives and acquaintances, the only females being party entertainers or prostitutes. Appropriately the scene is found on drinking-cups (kylix or skyphos) used on such occasions. Also of note, females paid to entertain men are allowed to drink reclining like men, whereas wives and daughters in domestic scenes are seated in upright chairs. Wild symposia of this kind were probably restricted to the wealthy sector of the polis, whilst more typical gatherings were perhaps better seen as the ancient equivalent of the Early Modern Greek male-only coffee-house (kapheneion) where men bonded and arranged marriages, land-deals and exchanged reflections on the contemporary world (Jameson 1990b). Returning to the issue of gender portrayals, it is striking that female nudity in Classical Greek art is extremely rare outside such “lowlife” contexts. Introducing the female nude into public art, including religious art, even of the love-goddess Aphrodite, was highly unusual. When the late Classical sculptor Praxiteles carved a titillating nude Aphrodite (Figure 12.5), the citizens of Cnidus set it into a
Figure 12.5 The Cnidos Aphrodite. Marble. Roman, ca. 180 AD. Slightly altered copy of the Aphrodite of Cnidos by Praxiteles, ca. 350 BC.
Vatican Museums, Rome, inv. no. 474. akg-images/ Nimatallah.
Portico peep-show; it became a focus of sensational pilgrimage (Spivey 1997b).
In contrast to “respectable women,” male nudity was ubiquitous and appears gratuitous and celebratory, in vase-painting, freestanding sculpture, and friezes. A well-known tombstone of two youths has one entirely nude; they are seemingly citizens of Athens who perished in battle, from the hoplite equipment they bear. But this cannot be so, since Athens had a special funeral place for its heroic war dead, and this monument is part of the general cemetery memorials. Rather the deceased appear with appropriate symbolism for their stage in life. A young free male at 18 became a citizen, and in the following years he accrued rights and duties: firstly to fight for his city, training initially in border-patrols. Ideally he would exercise frequently in the gymnasium in preparation for war. Only later was he allowed to vote in the assembly and the lawcourts. The men are shown in youthful prime, physically ideal. The nakedness of the front figure is clearly designed to display his beautiful physique to the admiring onlooker. In the same way aristocratic members of the Parthenon procession frieze include naked riders.
The contrasted representation of female and male bodies in Classical Greek art proves extremely enlightening for our understanding of the social reproduction of polis society (Stewart 1997, Spivey 1997). Although the home in art and texts formed the domain of women, whilst male citizens were expected to be outside, busy with the wider life of the city, this has to be significantly nuanced. Firstly, as in Western society until recently, this gender division was desired by the middle and upper classes, based on achieved income by the husband, or inherited wealth from both partners. But perhaps one half of the free population belonged to the poorer citizenry, where family labor sustained the household. Most Greeks were full-or part-time farmers, and although only the poorest citizens were without slaves (Jameson 1977—1978), the assistance of wife and children in farming or artisanal work would probably have been normal for the lower and lower-middle income groups. This would have meant daytime absence from the house, and communal work, for women and daughters, something rarely visible in Classical art, where the lifestyle of the upper half of society dominates. Nonetheless, modesty remained important to a patriarchal society, and arranging female work in public within a wider circle of relatives and friends would have been the first protection of female virtue, followed by modesty in clothing. But for the upper-middle and upper-class families, the desirability of female seclusion in the enclosed house is suggested by ancient sources and house designs. As for permitted travel into public areas by such women, accompanied by suitable male escorts, there is considerable evidence for their use of veiling in the presence of strangers (Llewellyn-Jones 2004).
Women were a guarded resource. Firstly because they brought wealth to the household, but secondly because the polis monitored the parenthood of offspring to ensure their legal and political rights. Moreover, in a severely chauvinistic society, the respect of male citizens was at risk from the sexual attentions of other men toward their womenfolk. The naked female body was usually displayed in art, as in public, to represent non-respectable females, their immodesty marking their role in society as marginalized taboo-breakers exciting the lust of men.
But why the constant exposure of the male body? The traditional answer connects ideal forms of human to the ideal gender: male. Contemporary texts classify women as weaker physically and intellectually than men, their role being to support the male citizen through a well-run home and by producing male children. The higher aim of the human species was (male) participation in the introverted society of the polis, through its communal political and legal institutions, and equally important, being able to defend the polis against its enemies (often close neighbors).
The Olympian gods were, with few exceptions given perfect human bodies with supernatural powers, and chief among them were the males. Legendary heroes possessed similar attributes. The ideal form for a citizen was therefore a well-proportioned, athletic male, and we can see this aspect in sculpture and gravestones, or figured vase scenes, where the male is often gratuitously naked. Experts such as Richter (1971) focus therefore on the anatomical exactness of the male body-beautiful (Figure 12.6) as the explanatory key to repetitive male nudes in Classical art. Furthermore ancient writers report that leading sculptors (such as here Polycleitos) consciously designed figures with mathematically balanced proportions (Spivey 1997a).
And yet, there is much more being expressed here. Stewart (1997) and Beaumont (1994, 1998) emphasize the divergent trajectories of male and female citizens at puberty. In Athens, where our sources are richest, girls were married as young as possible, often from age 13, passing fTom their mothers’ tutelage to the control of a husband, who was typically twice their age. They moved from learning to practicing wifely skills. Teenage boys were expected to mix with male relatives, male peers, and also older unrelated males. Sports and military training provided indoctrination into the outdoor world of masculine citizens, whilst here and through the participation of youths at the symposium, came intimate relations with older men. If men generally married in their late 20s, then male sexual desires from puberty might be directed to prostitutes, but especially through homosexuality. Indeed the partnership of young males and older men was considered a respectable
Figure 12.6 The Garlanded Youth (Diadumenos) by Polycleitos. Marble, h. 186 cm. Fifth century BC. Ancient copy from Delos.
Akg-images/De Agostini Picture Library.
And desirable form of male citizen bonding, achieving a broader intimacy and education into the society of male citizens than relatives might provide. Revisiting the public statues to Harmodius and Aristogeiton, which opened this chapter, the bearded and beardless pair shows the age difference between two male lovers, whose quarrel with the ruling family of tyrants in late sixth-century Athens was as much about sexual rivalry as violent politics. On Athenian figured vases (Berard 1984), a recurrent theme is the pursuit of youths by older men, portrayed metaphorically through the hunt, a dog chasing a hare, and more direct scenes of gifts of wild game (dead, or playfully alive) to such boys, symbolizing the same romantic metaphor.
For Stewart (1997), the obsession with nude masculinity in Classical Greece reflected a highly successful strategy, where adolescent male sexual desire was diverted from largely unavailable female sexuality in order to strengthen a male-bonded public life.
Sometimes this culminated in an extreme public self-sacrifice, when an elite core of the polis army comprised pairs of male lovers, who would perish rather than flee even in defeat, to avoid shame in their partner’s eyes.
Nonetheless, we cannot underestimate the significant, if secondary, place assigned to women citizens in the Classical polis. In fifth-century Athenian cemeteries there are as many female as male figured gravestones, and as many as both combined where males and females are portrayed together (Stears 1995). In contrast to the Archaic period, where rich males dominate figured-stelae graves or graves with sculptures above, the Classical repertoire represents a broadening to middle-class use and a new balance in the genders, whilst the scenes highlight how men and women equally maintain society. In democratic states anti-elite legislation led to the decline of the more prestigious grave sculptures, but in those that remain from Athens the equal emphasis on men and women served the state’s purposes by advertising the legitimacy of offspring as born of two citizen parents. On a more positive note, much of the art expresses a broader set of approved norms for women as household manager, dowry-bringer, manufacturer of home textiles, and carrier of admired virtue, rather than merely as childrearer.
The complexity of funerary art symbolism reminds us that communal cemeteries were visual highpoints in the cityscape. Graves were not just in use at the time of bereavement, but witnessed regular ceremonies of memorial by relatives. Urban necropoleis were often located by roadsides leading out of the town so that passers-by were drawn to “view” them; they were thus theaters of representation of desired social relations, at least for the middle to upper classes who could afford such monuments and aspire to the lifestyle portrayed.
In contrast, at least in Boeotia, where surface survey has located numerous dispersed rural cemeteries marking the estates of Classical farmers, computer-aided spatial analysis indicates that most family grave groups were rarely visible from roads or other farms, and were largely placed for the benefit of the landowning families themselves as they worked their farms, and their guests, and to remind others who strayed onto an estate whose land it was (Bintliff et al. 2004—2005, 2007).
Women on figured pots and grave sculptures are rarely shown in professions. Apart from entertainers, servants assist their housewife-mistresses, their lower status emphasized through lighter, more revealing clothing, shorter hair, and often in reduced scale. This underlines these scenes’ class bias, working-class farmers’ wives and street vendors also being unsuitable models for representation. A potter’s workshop shown on a figured-vase, where one painter is clearly female is a rare glimpse of underrepresented realities.
Closer analysis of women on figured vases (Berard 1984) encourages the view that although middle - and upper-class wives were constrained by male-focused conventions, they could create a parallel world in which perhaps men were intruders. Women reading to each other, performing music or dancing, were private, small-scale forms oT’resistance” to their exclusion from public artistic expression, yet some would link such rarely-portrayed scenes to a broader world of female companionship, in which women are shown swimming in the countryside, and even using the gymnasium (speculatively on special women’s days?). Additionally women were the central figures in rites concerned with death and commemoration of family dead. Finally, women had public and private cults of their own in which they could find organizational and spiritual fulfillment and a shared female perspective. One was a house-cult of Adonis, when women decorated the roofs.
Beaumont (1998) points out that in Greek Classical art, female goddesses are adult and powerful, and should not be shown as children. Aphrodite and Athena were indeed born as adults. A childlike weakness, assumed by Greek culture to be typical of mortal women throughout their lives, cannot be permitted with the gods. The need to draw the line between allowing immortal women to hold sway over a man’s world, and the tight subordination of mortal women, is clearly expressed in iconography and myth.
In late Classical times, the power of most poleis declined, and specialists have seen a corresponding rise in a more sympathetic portrayal of women, children, and the family in art, as society turned more inwards to the individual and private life (Leader 1997, Beaumont 1994, 1998). Sojc (2005) has sensitively charted this trend toward a broader and subtler humanity in grave reliefs. At the same time, as family begins to take precedence over community, art and house design show more obvious class distinctions. Yet even in Athens during the highpoint of its democracy, there was always scope for elite families to emphasize their distinctiveness, whether in deploying advantages in education and leisure to lead the city in political or military matters, or being allowed to continue taking traditionally privileged roles in religious cults, or being blatantly milked by the city through compulsory contributions to the construction of warships and the sponsoring of dramatic choruses (leitourgia).
Slaves were depicted in smaller scale than citizens, like children, and indeed the same word paidia was used for both. Conditions varied from family to family as to how household slaves were treated, although in formal respects they were treated as family members and were often honored thus in death. Yet literature and iconography includes examples suggesting that abuse of slaves, including physical and sexual maltreatment, need not arouse communal disapproval. Nonetheless inscriptions show that building projects, craft workshops, and farming were widely carried out by mixed teams of citizens, free aliens (metics), and slaves. Only in projects such as the Athenian silver-mines at Lavrion were many thousands of slaves employed in generally brutal conditions, but even here it is argued that skilled technicians amongst them lived like prosperous citizens (Lohmann 2005).
World History
