The Greeks were deeply ambivalent about women. They recognized that as the ones who bore children and tended the hearth, they were at the centre of settled living.
An Athenian woman who was a citizen herself and married to one was allowed to pass on the privileged status to her children and so held a crucial place in society. Yet women were also seen as ‘other, passionate and emotional, violent and untrustworthy in their sexual instincts. Convention, and, it would be argued by the fifth-century Athenian male, prudence required that the wife be segregated in the home. (See, as introductions, Susan Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece, Cambridge, Mass., and London, 1995 and Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, New York, 1995.)
The male Greek’s fantasies and fears of women were well represented in drama. Here is further evidence that the Greeks saw women as capable of intense emotion, emotions which could be manipulated by the playwright to explore the furthest boundaries of human behaviour. Greek tragedy is full of strong women, Medea, Phaedra, Antigone, Electra, who exhibit the full range of lust, defiance, and revenge that, for cultural reasons, it may have been difficult to attribute to male characters. However, the playwrights were also able to show some empathy for the condition of women, as in the famous speech given by Euripides to Medea:
Of all things that are living and can form a judgement we women are the most unfortunate creatures. Firstly, with an excess of wealth it is required for us to buy a husband and take for our bodies a master; for not to take one is even worse. And now the question is serious whether we take a good or bad one; for there is no easy escape for a woman, nor can she say no to her marriage. She arrives among new modes of behaviour and manners, and needs prophetic power, unless she has learned at home, how best to manage him who shares the bed with her. And if we work this out well and carefully, and the husband lives with us and lightly bears his yoke, then life is enviable. If not, I’d rather die. A man, when he’s tired of the company in his home, goes out of the house and puts an end to his boredom and turns to a friend or companion of his own age. But we are forced to keep our eyes on one alone. What they say of us is that we have a peaceful time living at home, while they do the fighting in war. How wrong they are. I would very much rather stand three times in the front of battle than bear one child. (Translation: Simon Goldhill)
(There may be much truth in the final two lines. One calculation from the evidence of Greek skeletons suggests that the average lifespan of adult women was thirty-six years, compared to the forty-five of men (although more sophisticated analysis may raise these figures). Early death from childbearing seems the most likely explanation. There is also evidence that girl babies were more likely to be exposed to die than boys.)
Whatever the reality of women’s lives in Greece, they themselves have left little record of it. When they speak, above all in tragic drama, they do so through men’s voices. In short it is hard to know what Athenian wives really felt as they sat together in the women’s quarters of the cramped and probably smelly houses that were typical of urban Athens. They may have taken some satisfaction in their status as citizens and mothers of citizens-to-be. On the other hand, they may have yearned to enjoy the freedom of the hetairai, the courtesans who attended the symposia and who sometimes established stable relationships with young aristocrats. However successful in the short term, however, the hetaira’s life depended on her looks and
Charm. She was vulnerable to pregnancy (and the child could never be recognized as a citizen, although the Athenian Pericles did manage to achieve citizenship for his son by his mistress, Aspasia, by special decree) and disease, and when her lover married she would be discarded. The best-documented case in Athens is one Neaera. Neaera had been born a slave girl but had worked her way up so successfully that one of her lovers, an up-and-coming politician, Stephanos, tried to pass her off as his legitimate wife and her daughters by previous relationships as Athenian citizens. In the ensuing court case (brought by a rival of Stephanos, wishing to discredit him with the truth about his wife) Neaera’s previous life was revealed in sordid detail and was clearly one in which she had suffered sexual abuse. One previous lover had even had sex with her openly at a symposium, ‘making his privilege a display to the onlookers’.
As this case suggests, sex was freely available for men in Athens. Xenarchus, a fourth-century dramatist, describes the city prostitutes ‘basking in the sun, their breasts uncovered, stripped for action. As in many such societies (Victorian England comes to mind) the purity of the wife is maintained alongside a flurry of sexual activity in the back streets. In Athens the ‘pure’ citizen wife, whose life is described below, contrasts with those who have to use their bodies to survive. ‘Mistresses we have for pleasure, concubines for daily service to our body, but wives for the procreation of legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of the household,’ as one Athenian put it.
Every Athenian woman had her protector, the kyrios, either a male relative before she was married or her husband. ‘Her’ property, outside her immediate possessions of clothes and jewellery, was in his care and she could undertake only the most modest of transactions on her own behalf. For a conventional Athenian woman the most important moment of transition was marriage. The experience consisted of being taken at a young age, just after puberty, into a relationship with an older man, in a strange home. A fragment from one of Sophocles’ plays records the experience:
Unmarried girls, in my own opinion, have the sweetest existence known to mortals in their fathers’ homes, for their innocence always keeps such children safe and happy. But when we reach puberty and can understand we are thrust out and sold away from our ancestral gods and from our parents. Some go to strange men’s homes, others to foreigners, some to joyless houses, some to hostile. And all this once the first night has yoked us to our husband we are forced to praise and say all is well. (Translation: Oswyn Murray)
The fragment is written, like almost all comments on women, by a man, but it makes the point that women, unlike men, entered a form of exile when they married. Solon had recommended that men marry between the ages of 28 and 35, when they were past the peak of their strength and should rightly consider the future of their family. Girls might be ten to fifteen years younger. This discrepancy may have been deliberate, to ensure the dominance of males who were, at their age of marriage, sophisticated and well used to public life, over women who, in the words of one source, ‘had been closely supervised in order that they would see as little as
Possible, hear as little as possible and learn as little as possible. There were also medical theories that childbearing was safest for a younger mother (while, in contrast, male sperm became more potent with age) and that sexual intercourse was the best answer to the emotional upheavals of female adolescence.
As in most traditional societies, love played little part in the choosing of partners. Marriage partners were usually chosen from within a relatively small circle of families known to each other. The bride’s family had to provide a dowry, and it was the passing over of this, into the complete control of the bridegroom, that formalized the agreement. The preservation of property within a family was another important factor. It would normally pass only through the male line, but a woman who had no brothers was assigned a special status, that of epikleros, because she went with the estate (kleros). So that her inheritance would not be lost to the family, she could be married to the nearest of her male relations who would have her. (A paternal uncle would often come forward.) Even if she was already married, a new marriage could be formed to preserve the inheritance, so long as the first marriage was childless.
Inevitably, as with every moment of transition in Greek life, marriage involved rituals. The bride took a purifying bath before being taken in a formal procession with the bridegroom and his best friend in a cart to the bridegroom’s home. The bride would be greeted by the bridegroom’s mother and then go through the formalities of welcome to a new home before the couple retired for the physical consummation of the marriage. The importance of the wife as a bearer of children was underlined by the fact that her status in the new home improved once a son was born. ‘When a child was born, then I began to trust her and I put her in charge of all my things, believing that the closest connections had been formed,’ as one suitor in an Athenian law case put it. A marriage which was childless could be dissolved, and women did possess the right to divorce their husbands if their behaviour was particularly shameless.
The domestic arrangements of Greek families are not well documented. However, at Olynthos in northern Greece, the foundations of houses have been uncovered in a town that was destroyed by Philip of Macedon in 348. Typically, each house was closed off to the outside world, its exterior walls provided with relatively few windows. The men’s room, the andron, was near the main door so that visitors could be entertained without having to intrude on the more secluded quarters of the women. The space of the house was itself sacrosanct—it was always a charged moment when a woman in a tragedy stepped over the threshold and a matter of great offence if an outsider entered a house and came upon its womenfolk unawares. In larger houses there would be a courtyard where the women could sew and weave on warm days, and here there would also be ample space for the storage of the family’s oil, wine, and grain. The reserved space for women did, however, allow the wife to be given a prominent role in everyday management. The charismatic heroine Praxagora, speaking when disguised as a man in Aristophanes’ play Ecclesiazusae, argues ‘that we should hand over the city to the women. After all, we already employ them as managers and stewards of our households.’ ‘Women are better than men’, says another female character in one of Euripides’ plays, ‘they manage the
House and guard within the home goods brought from over the sea. No house is clean and prosperous without a wife. And in dealings with the gods—I judge these of prime importance—we play the greatest part.’ (See further Lisa Nevett, House and Society in the Ancient Greek World, Cambridge and New York, 1999.)
There were occasions, mainly religious festivals, in which women could participate in their own right. The Thesmophoria, the most widespread of the Greek festivals, was celebrated entirely by women. The ritual in Athens lasted for three days, and the women withdrew to a sanctuary out of the sight of men. The sacrifices were of piglets, but there were also rituals in which phalluses were thrown into the earth and the remnants of sacrifices from earlier years brought out from the ground. This suggests elements of a fertility cult, although a period of sexual abstinence was also demanded even before the festival began. In accompanying rituals men were denounced in obscenities and there were legends of men who disturbed the rituals being castrated. ‘At the core of the festival, writes Walter Burkert, in his study Greek Religion (Oxford and New York, 1991), ‘there remains the dissolution of the family, the separation of the sexes, and the constitution of a society of women; once a year at least women demonstrate their independence, their responsibility, and importance for the fertility of the community and the land.’ It could be argued that the Thesmophoria had the social function of legitimizing the oppression of women for the remainder of the year. There were other women’s festivals, the Haloa in January and the Skira in July that were linked to the agricultural year (the Skira with threshing, for instance), that suggested that women were recognized as ensuring the prosperity of the land. The most abandoned was the celebration of Dionysus, described by Euripides in his play The Bacchae, where the women, worked up to a frenzy through dancing, tear to pieces Pentheus, king of Thebes, who has come to spy on them. (See further Sue Blundell and M. Williamson (eds.), The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece, New York and London, 1998.)
The women of Sparta enjoyed (or were seen by outside observers to enjoy) a much freer life than their counterparts in Athens. Their husbands were preoccupied with their military training and often away at war and this may have given women far greater initiative in the management of their daily lives. It is also possible that Spartan women kept their own dowries, which enabled them to own land. (Aristotle claimed that two-fifths of the whole country belonged to women.) However, there is no doubt that the state saw the main role of women as producers of male children. They were expected to undergo physical training to make them stronger for their task. (The fact that they did so naked scandalized other Greeks.) Special privileges were given to those who had three or more sons.
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