Women in Ancient Greece

Christopher Nolan's block-buster Odyssey film has sparked much discussion about the role of women in ancient Greece, and whether Nolan's portrayal was accurate.  This is a topic I delved into in How Jesus has Liberated Women Part I: Before Christ.  Here is the first two thirds or so of Chapter 7, named after the Queen of Ithaca, to which Odysseus strives to return in the book and movie named after him. 

DM

Chapter Seven:  Penelope’s Long Wait: Greece and Rome

 

More than in Sumer or Egypt, diversity was the hallmark of Greek civilization.  With many islands and ports surrounded by mountains, Greece consisted of numerous isolated laboratories in which society tested how to organize itself.  Some of the boldest experiments were carried out in Sparta, which lent women a certain independence, even panache.[1]  In general, though, the Greco-Roman world, its “cultural capital” of Athens in particular, devalued women.  Elizabeth Barber puts it more strongly: “Women were virtually house prisoners” in Athenian society from shortly before Homer on.[2]  David Hamilton paints an almost unrelentingly negative picture of how Greek men treated women.[3]  However, he overlooks the sympathy many find in the playwright Euripides, and egalitarian (if sometimes batty) theories proffered by philosophers like Plato and Musonius Rufus.

Did Greek men like women?  Odd that the question has been asked, about a civilization that churned out generations of kids, and offered so many striking female portraits: Helen of Troy, Olympias, Penelope, Circe, Athena, Aphrodite, Antigone, Electra, the Furies, the Fates.  For a balanced view of where women stood in the Mediterranean world before Christ, let us follow the flow of Greco-Roman culture from myths, epic, and drama to philosophy, history, and law, then plunge into the nitty-gritty of the Roman Empire.  

Women in Greek Myth

The first woman in Greek mythology, Pandora (“all gifts”), has often been compared to Eve.  Entrusted with a jar containing the world’s plagues, she opened it, and loosed all troubles on humanity.  The poet Hesiod’s story differs from Genesis in that in it, the woman sins alone.  Also, men enjoyed a “Golden Age” before Zeus created woman (with help from other gods).  He made woman not to render man less lonely, but to punish him.  Indeed, in a biologically-challenged metaphor, Hesiod compared women to lazy drones that enjoy the labor of worker bees:

"In thatched hives bees feed the drones whose nature is to do mischief.  By day and throughout the day until the sun goes down the bees are busy and lay the white combs, while the drones stay at home . . . and reap the toil of others into their own bellies.  Even so Zeus who thunders on high made women to be an evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil.”[4]

A poet from Greek’s Bronze Age pointed to a girl named Helen and said, “See!”  (Though that poet himself could not see, or read if he could see, his age having lost the art of letters.) 

Homer’s episodic account of the Trojan War proved a cultural watershed, like Moses’ tale of slavery in Egypt.  Scenes from the Trojan War and its aftermath were enacted before thousands in plays for the City Dionysus Festival in Athens.  Helen, the beautiful wife of Spartan King Menelaus, was seduced off to Troy.  A thousand ships followed, and battle raged for nine years.  Then the victors faced the wrath of the gods while sailing home, or relaxing in the tub once they arrived.  That wrath was, again, often communicated through females: witches, sirens, wives with new lovers and sharp knives.  (Though cyclops and coup-happy lovers were also implicated.)     

Hesiod says all this ruckus started with Eris, Goddess of Discord.  Snubbed at a heavenly wedding feast, she came anyway, tossing a golden apple to the ground on which (in later versions) was written, “to the most beautiful.”  Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena all made a grab for the fruit.  Zeus prudently declined to judge a beauty contest between his wife and two daughters, so Paris Prince of Troy was deputized.  Aphrodite promised him the most beautiful woman in the world if he picked her.  So female vanity, and mutual lust (the playwrights say Helen went gladly), got those thousand ships launched.

Later spin doctors, beginning with Herodotus, claimed Helen of Troy was a body double, the original having been spirited off to Egypt. [5]  No doubt also to save heroes the shame of suffering as cuckolds, Greek novels employed equally unlikely plot twists to save the heroine’s virginity when she was (as often) kidnapped by nominally rapacious pirates.[6]    

“Hellenism,” the civilization that grew from those city states after that epic battle, eventually colonized Egypt, where in the ruins of the famous lighthouse outside Alexandria, Euclid invented geometry, and Eratosthenes calculated the circumference of the Earth. 

The poets peopled their world with goddesses and nymphs as well as gods and satyrs.  Goddesses could fight, seduce heroes heading home from war, or turn their crews into swine.  But as Euripides shows in Women of Troy (written as a prophecy of Athens’ own demise) and historians like Thucydides and Polybius describe, women often served as mere spoils of war.  They might lob missiles from upper rooms at invaders.  More often, they are said to have been sold into slavery with their children after conquest, after husbands and lovers were killed.  Even as lovers, women often played second fiddle to boys.     

In History of Ideas on Women: A Sourcebook, Rosemary Agonito cites a passage in Homer’s Odyssey in which Telemachus asks his mother Penelope to go inside and leave public matters to him as the newly-minted man in the family.  Samuel Butler translated that passage:

“Go, then, within the house and busy yourself with your daily duties, your loom, your distaff, and the ordering of your servants.  This bow is a man's matter, and mine above all others, for it is I who am master here.’”

To which Penelope meekly:

“Went wondering back into the house, and laid her son's saying in her heart.  Then going upstairs with her handmaids into her room, she mourned her dear husband till Minerva sent sweet sleep over her eyelids.”[7]

In 1975 the classicist Sarah Pomeroy wrote Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves which, despite its flamboyant title, was a generally judicious early work in Women’s Studies.  She pointed out that while Penelope and other women in Homer were constrained within female roles, there is no trace of misogyny in his epics, nor (as Helen shows) were women confined geographically.  She agreed with the consensus that in the transition to classical times, women grew more confined and despised in some male circles, especially in Athens and related cultures.  Almost three decades later she wrote Spartan Women, focusing on what even the ancients agreed to be the chief exception to Greek misogyny.   

Drama

Hesiod and Homer provided fodder for one of Greece’s most popular institutions: public dramas, sponsored by Athena and Dionysus, written by brilliant playwrights, watched by throngs.  Relations between the sexes were one of the hottest topics on stage.    

In Lysistrata, comedian Aristophanes tells how the women of Athens and other Greek states conspire to end war with Sparta by staging a sex strike.  They do so grudgingly.  (“We must do without sex altogether.”  “I won’t do it!  Let the war go on!”)  But despite defections, they seize the Acropolis.  The lead male sings the immortal line, “We can’t live with women, but we cannot live without them.”[8])  In the end, the women have their way, and peace between states (if not within households) dawns. 

“Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow you die.”  Greek production reversed the order and proportion of this pastiche of biblical lines.  Three tragedies were shown (“die, die, die!”), followed by a satyr play (“be merry!”).  The only surviving example of the latter is a spoof on the story of Odysseus and the Cyclops by Euripides, in which a wine-slurping Silenus and his horny sons furtively support the clever mariner as he plots to blind the ogre who keeps them all captive – so they can enjoy sex again.    

But most extant plays are tragedies, written by Euripides and two other geniuses: Aeschylus and Sophocles.  

Sophocles tells the tragic tale of King Oedipus (fated to unknowingly kill his father and marry his mother) and his doomed children.  The most heroic figure in this trilogy is Antigone, the king’s daughter.  In Oedipus at Colonus, at great risk to herself, she leads her blind, exiled, and disgraced father from town to town, his only comfort and guide.  Harvard Hellenist Bernard Knox calls this “The one shaft of light in the dark universe of Sophoclean tragedy.”[9]  In Antigone, she alone sticks up for her brother, whom Oedipus cursed and King Creon’s troops killed.  Not that her goodness earns any mercy from the gods: shut up in a cave by her uncle, she commits suicide (which Pomeroy points out was seen as a rather cowardly, therefore womanly, way out.[10])

Meanwhile, the upstart Creon takes pot-shots at women: “Let them know that they are women, not free to roam abroad.”[11]  “We must not let a woman defy us.”  “This is depravity, putting a woman foremost!”  By contrast, Oedipus curses his sons and blesses his daughters: “They’re men, not women, when it comes to shouldering my burdens.”[12]

Aeschylus related the fate of the equally doomed family of King Agamemnon, before and after the Trojan War.  This family split when the goddess Artimis demanded that the oldest daughter, Iphigenia, be sacrificed to allow the Greek navy sail to Troy. 

“It is right that they should passionately cry for the winds to be lulled by the blood of a girl.”[13]

After Troy lost the fight King Priam’s daughter Cassandra, now unwilling concubine to Agamemnon, also spoke of the “death of a woman slave, an easy victim.”[14]  But the fullest surviving account of this family drama would be told by Athen’s third great tragedian. 

Euripides had a gift for setting plausible arguments in the mouths even of unsympathetic characters.  His plays were works of fiery street art not cool philosophy, and he took unusual interest in those on the margins.  Euripides has, thus, been accused both of feeling for women too much, and of heartless misogyny.

One translator of his plays concludes, “He was appalled by the low status of women even in hypercivilized Athens.”[15]  Misogyny is indeed often noted: “As a woman, I was the ready butt for hate by all.” (Hippolytus[16])  “How hard it is for women to deal with men!  They lump the good and bad together and find us all a pest.” (Ion[17])  “What man will it be who clenches his fist on my golden hair, and plucks me like a weeping flower out of my perishing country?” (Iphigenia at Aulis[18])

Almost half of Euripides’ extant plays feature female leads.  Whether depicting the plight of Helen of Troy, Trojan captives, royal concubines, female suppliants who lost loved ones in battle, or even the witch-queen Medea, who killed her own children to avenge her man’s new love, Euripides’ women argue their cases with force and passion, and often sound reason.  “Of all things that have life and sense we women are the most hapless creatures,” Medea complains.  One buys a husband and “tyrant over ourselves.”  Then one has to adjust to the husband’s home culture (Medea was born a princess in Central Asia, before being swept off her feet by Jason seeking the Golden Fleece).  If she fails at that, “It were best to die.”  Euripides sent Athenian males home from plays with cries like the following ringing in their ears:  

“I would rather stand in battle armor three times, than once give birth.”[19]

Two of his plays (Andromache and Medea) focus on the evil of polygamy:

“Never shall I praise the double marriage of mortals, nor children born of different mothers:  makers of quarrels at home and hateful sorrow.  Let husbands be contented with one marriage couch, unshared.”[20]

However, classicist Sarah Ruden warns:

“I have read of considerate men staying faithful to their wives within the walls of home, keeping their hands off the slaves (male and female) and not bringing women (or little boys) home . . . But I have never seen any hint that a wife was entitled to challenge what her husband did outside: any speculating or accusing was nagging.”[21]

Pomeroy finds Euripides, while no propagandist for any cause, unique among the playwrights in insight and sympathy: in his work, “the horrors of patriarchy compose a background of unremitting female misery.”[22]  But Aristophanes knew more of his plays than we do.  His comedy Thesmophoriazusae recounts a plot by the women of Athens to assassinate Euripides for disclosing their wiles on stage: “calling us intriguers, strumpets, tipplers, deceivers, rotten to the core and a curse to mankind.[23]”  (An echo of Hesiod’s views!)  In that play, Euripides talks a homely male relative into cross-dressing to infiltrate a female-only festival and trying to win the women over.  The playwright then follows in various ridiculous disguises to rescue his flailing ambassador.  And in Aristophanes’ war-of-the-sexes comedy Lysistrata, a male leader describes women as “Euripides and God-detested.”[24] 

In Euripides’ own extant plays, women themselves often disrespect females.  Menelaus’ daughter Hermione accuses Andromache, formerly a Trojan princess but now slave and concubine, of poisoning her to keep her infertile.  Hermione’s female friends talk her into trying to murder Andromache and her little boy.  Andromache laments:

“It’s strange one of the gods above has given mortals medicine for serpent bites, but never found a cure for savage women who are worse than any snakes, are worse than fire itself.  So great an evil are we women to mankind.”[25] 

Hermione later blames her attempted hit on “evil women” who came calling and asked: “Will you endure to have that rotten slave girl here to share your husband’s bed, with you right in the house?”[26]  So she advises married men not to let their wives’ friends visit often: “they only teach (your wife) wickedness.”  In Electra, Agamemnon’s equally murderous wife Clytemnestra speaks of “that harlot Helen” and “that crazy Cassandra,” admitting that “women are silly creatures,” then blaming her husband for committing adultery first.[27]  Her daughter replies by saying a “sensible woman” should “yield to her husband in everything.”

More troubling than insults or even this “shut up and take it” philosophy is Euripides’ suggestion that virtuous women should die with their husbands, offered by Menelaus in Andromache.  After Evadne regains her husband’s remains in The Suppliants, she climbs a rock and announces:

“For the sake of honor, I’ll rush off this rock and leap into the fire, mingling my body in bright flame with my darling, my dear, joining my flesh to his flesh.”[28]

Which she does, claiming by suicide to “conquer all women whom the sun looks upon.”  (Though the husband she dies for is in fact a useless slob.)  Agamemnon’s daughter Iphigenia likewise rationalizes her death by saying better she die than Generalissimo Dad: “A single man is worthier to look upon the light than ten thousand women.  If Artemis is determined to have my carcass, shall I a mortal female cheat the goddess?” (Iphigenia at Aulis[29])  Even after Artemis rescues her, she repeats this sentiment to her brother:

“A man’s death is a family’s loss, a woman’s is no matter.” (Iphigenia Among the Taurians[30])

Hecuba, widow of Priam, King of Troy, expresses the same sentiment while giving Helen a tongue-lashing (as she receives even more often than Paris in these plays):

“Did anyone ever find you putting a noose around your neck or sharpening a dagger, as any decent woman would have done, pining for her husband?” (The Trojan Women[31])

Such lines make good drama, and need not negate the sympathy Euripides often expressed.  Plutarch says Alexander brought Euripides and the other two great dramatists along on his conquests,[32] and that the king quoted Medea and Andromache,[33] while Arrian has him quoting a lost work by Euripides.[34] Did Alexander introduce this idea of a good woman dying with her husband to India?  Probably not.  As noted, a universal phenomenon does not require a local explanation.  Such passages in Greek and Indian literature look like survivals into “civilized times” of the common feeling that servants should die in sympathy with, and go on serving, masters.  Pomeroy argues, though, that classical Greek authors set strong, opinionated, high-born women in public, though they were often confined in fact, because Bronze Age sources like Homer reflected an earlier, militaristic and cruel, but freer society.   (And also these authors would have been raised by women.[35])   

Greek Sages

Attitudes expressed in Greek philosophy can often be found in poets and dramatists who preceded them.  If Homer and classical plays were the Old Testament of Greek culture, Socrates, Plato, the Stoic and Cynic schools might collectively serve as its New Testament. 

In Plato’s Republic, Socrates notes that “the gifts of nature are alike diffused” to both sexes.  Ladies may serve as musicians, gymnasts, or philosophers, may be listless or full of spirit, or even “have a turn” for military exercises.[36]

Plato’s sagely mouthpiece conceded that men were superior in most activities, aside from weaving, “watching pancakes,” and (no doubt) producing babies.  (And in his Symposium, a girl flutist was hired to entertain the men, then sent to the women’s quarters or to play alone when the men decide to talk about love – mostly between rich Epstein type men and needy teenage boys.)[37]  Yet women fit to act as consorts of ruling men and as mothers must also strip to fight in the games to prepare their bodies for battle.  (However men may laugh – he does not say ogle.)  Women should be given lighter tasks, but must help defend the nation, including as guardians of the state.   

Such was “the first wave” of Plato’s planned sexual revolution.  The second would wash higher:

“The wives of our guardians are to be common, and their children are to be common, and no parent is to know his own child, nor any child his parent.”

In Plato’s utopia, when a child was born, he would be left with nurses, and mothers would give milk to any children of that generation.  Men would act as fathers to all children of a certain age.  Since property and children would be held in common, rulers need not squabble over such traditional bones of contention, and harmony would reign. 

No doubt this is one scheme that led G. K. Chesterton to call Plato the “father of faddists.”  

Agonito thinks Plato represented progress, and Pomeroy seems more dispassionately to agree.  But in his commune, people would be bred for the public interest not the benefit of families, which would be abolished.[38]  Like the revenge Medea sought, the equality Plato offered was rather inhuman: the former inhumanly fiery, the latter inhumanly cold.  Both led to the same result: mothers without children.   

Aristotle responded by echoing the chauvinism of the poets and dramatists:  "The male is by nature fitter for command than females."[39]  In a scientific work, he described women as "mutilated males.”[40]  Aristotle did admit that a man’s lordship over his woman was less absolute than that over his slave. 

Would most women prefer to live in Plato's commune, or the more sexist but family-friendly societies Aristotle seemed to prefer, in which they could hold their own children, rather than giving suck to any kid that comes along?  As we will see, later “progressive” thinkers followed Plato in seeking to unload the fruits of "free love" on the State or other third parties.  Other modern philosophers to take an even dimmer view of women than Aristotle, including one revered founder of modern feminism.   

Perhaps Aristotle got his idea that females are defective males from his teacher.  In Timaeus, after a long explanation of the creation of the first man, with much pseudo-scientific talk of elements and proportions, Plato’s speaker mentions the origin of women in terms even less flattering than those his student would later employ:

“Thus we have finished the discussion of the universe, which, according to our original intention, has now been brought down to the creation of man.  Completeness seems to require that something should be briefly said about other animals: first of women, who are probably degenerate and cowardly men.” [41]

A more credibly sympathetic male, the Stoic Musonius Rufus, wrote in the First Century AD.  He did not, like Plato, think women should wrestle naked in the ring.  But he agreed that women shared the gift of reason.  Musonius cited Amazons as proof that women could fight: what they lacked was not courage, but practice.  Virtues like chastity, bravery, and self-control were necessary for both sexes, so both would benefit from Stoic philosophy.  If animals were trained irrespective of sex, why shouldn’t women study, too?  

“It is necessary for women to be able to repel attack, unless indeed they are willing to appear more cowardly than hens and other female birds which fight with creatures much larger than themselves to defend their young.”[42]

In short, Musonius was as enlightened as the timber wolf who watches pups while his mate hits the trail.  Both recognized gender roles, but allowed some fluidity.  Unlike Plato, he recognized that a hen does not indifferently watch all the chicks in its barnyard. 

Women in Classical History, Law, and Anthropology

Herodotus’ sweeping account of war with Persia described gender relations not only between remote tribes, but also among advanced nations that Greeks faced in battle.  Cambyses II of Persia (reigned 529-522 BC) fell in love with his sister and determined to marry her (3.31), a custom Herodotus said was new among Persians (if not Egyptians; and the Ptolemies would copy this custom to rule Egypt).  Counselors adept at kissing up said that they found no law allowing the measure, but found another "which said that he who was king of Persia could do anything he wanted."  

The Babylonians revolted from Persia, sending mothers away.  Each chose one woman from his household to cook meals, then, facing a siege, "the others were strangled that they might not use up the supply of bread" (3.150).

“Cherchez la femme!”  Like Hesiod’s Trojan War, Herodotus traced troubles between Persians and Greeks to sexual conflict.  Darius of Persia sent ambassadors to Macedonia, who entertained them "lavishly."  The Persians then demanded, "When we put on a great feast like this one, we bring in our wives and our mistresses to sit with us . . .  Now comply with this custom" (5.18).  Amyntas the king replied, "With us the men and women are separated.  But since you are our masters and request this of us, this privilege too shall be yours."  

Durant claims that “legal wives” in Persia were in fact kept under wraps, a custom he thought was passed on to Islam, while concubines were free to move around and banquet with men.  He suggested this was because Persian women were so comely that “men had to be guarded from them.”[43]  But according to Herodotus, the envoys found Macedonian women attractive enough, and began making moves.  Alexander, the king's son, smiled and asked his father to knock off for the day while "I remain here and give the guests everything they have coming.”  As the enjoys awaited consorts in their rooms, dagger-wielding assassins entered in female garb and planted the kiss of death on each cheek.  Thus, the Persian invasion. 

In Carthage, a rich, populous Phoenician metropolis on the north coast of Africa, Durant says women led “for the most part a veiled and secluded life.”  Phoenicians were famed among Jews, Greeks and Romans for child sacrifice, often to the god Baal-Haman, identified by Latins with Kronos or Saturn.  Durant claims that in times of crisis, up to three hundred were placed in the arms of the god and burnt in one day: 

“Their cries were drowned in the noise of trumpets and cymbals; their mothers were required to look upon the scene without moan or tear, lest they be accused of impiety and lose the credit due to them from the god.”[44]

One of Durant’s sources, Diodorus Siculus, like Herodotus enjoyed wild stories, and some have disputed such accounts as Roman war propaganda.  But archeologists have found suspicious cremated remains.[45]  Diodorus says the rich bought poor children for this purpose, or substituted an animal, until an invasion forced rulers to get serious with the gods by throwing aristocratic children into “a gaping pit filled with fire.”[46] 

Perhaps the scale has been exaggerated.  Almost all Carthaginian writings have been lost.  But at least we can say, liberation for women was unlikely to come from Persia or Phoenicia. 

The Greek statesman Callias, from a wealthy family known to supply slaves for the state silver mine, committed an eccentric and generous act: he allowed his three daughters to marry any man they liked (6.122).

One of Xerxes' minor allies was a Greek woman named Artemisia, who brought a ship to war on the Athenians.  When the Battle of Salamis turned against the Persian navy, she rammed a member of her own coalition to escape Athenian pursuit, causing the king to wince: "My men have become women, and my women men" (8.88).  The Athenians set a prize for capturing her, "for they regarded it as a scandal that a woman should make war upon Athens" (8.93). 

Not all Greek historians shared an interest in such drama.  Narrating the subsequent war between Athenian and Spartan federations, Thucydides simply noted several times that Athens, or less often Sparta, conquered a city, killed its fighting-age men, and enslaved women and children.  In revolutionary Corcyra, the exception that proved the rule, women “joined in the fighting with great daring, hurling down tiles from the rooftops and standing up to the din of battle with a courage beyond their sex.”[47]  Polybius was even muter on females in his account of how Rome subjugated Greece.   

Like Herodotus, serial biographer Plutarch found it hard to pass up a sexy story.  “I hope the reader will bear with digressions of this kind (in this case, on the ‘fiery’ soil of Persia, introduced by a tale about the witch-queen Medea) so long as they are kept within reasonable limits.”[48] 

Wicked women who make history feature prominently in Plutarch’s account of Alexander the Great’s life.  Olympias was married to Philip of Macedonia, but reportedly conceived when her womb was struck by a thunderbolt.  Philip also heard that a snake had been seen lying beside his bride, which “weakened Philip’s passion and cooled his affection” for her.  Reportedly she was a follower of Dionysius and dallied with a god.  As a fan of Euripides, Alexander would have read his prize-winning play Bacchantes, which describes what happens when even a king pries too much into divinely-sponsored female orgies.  Ruden noted that the “folk wisdom that helped shape all those sociopathic female characters in literature” was that women were “wild, lustful, and depraved” by nature.[49] 

Plutarch claims that Olympias’ depraved character poisoned the Macedonian state.  Philip’s many affairs created “quarrels” in the women’s quarters (endemic, Pomeroy claims, among elite Macedonian women, who liked to massacre rivals for their lord’s affections after ascension[50]).  This led to “bitter clashes” with his son, egged on by the jealous and “vindictive” Olympias.  Once, Philip married a young woman named Cleopatra, and her uncle insulted the queen by drunkenly but pointedly toasting the prospect of, finally, a legitimate heir.  Alexander threw a cup at the man.  His father came at his son armed and drunk, but fell down.  The son taunted:

“Here is the man who was making ready to cross from Europe to Asia, and who cannot even cross from one table to another without losing his balance.”[51]

Alexander was careful, Plutarch insisted, to leave the beautiful wife and daughters of the Persian king unmolested, supported the death penalty for Macedonians who seduced the wives of Greek mercenaries, and chastised a naval commander who offered him handsome boy slaves.  The party girl Thais suggested burning down Xerxes’ palace: Alexander thought better, and had the flames quelled.   

Plutarch ended his account as he began it, by describing the cruelty of Olympias, who suspected that her son had been poisoned (emphasizing however that rumors of Aristotle’s involvement were false):

“Olympias put many men to death and had the ashes of Iolas, Antipater’s son, scattered to the winds on the supposition that he had administered the poison.”[52]

What to expect while you’re expecting?  The final paragraph of Plutarch’s account tells how Alexander’s beloved Roxane forged a letter when she was pregnant to get hubby’s second wife, Stateira, into her hands.  She had the woman and her sister murdered and their bodies thrown into a well.  The story also involves the ever-jealous Olympias addling the brain of a man named Perdiccas with drugs, with Roxane then seizing power in his name.

Not all women in Plutarch are so nasty.  But Greek historians do give the impression that confining upper-class women barely kept them out of trouble, and that sexual jealousies kept society at a constant low broil, until it bubbled over and scalded everyone within range. 

Gender in Law

Many ancient writers remarked with surprise on the status of women in Sparta.  Peleus, who saves Andromache and her son in Euripides’ play, sees Helen as typical among senseless Spartan women, who go naked of thigh and loose of dress, to race, wrestle and flirt with men.[53]  Xenophon noted that “throughout the rest of the world” well-brought up girls were given “the plainest food attainable” with little meat, few condiments, and only watered-down wine.  The “rest of the Hellenes” asked girls to “sit quietly and work wools.”  Xenophon ascribed greater foresight to Lycurgus, the perhaps legendary law-maker of Sparta, who anticipated some of Plato’s ideas:

 

“Lycurgus . . . insisted on the training of the body as incumbent no less on the female than the male; and in pursuit of the same idea instituted rival contests in running and feats of strength for women as for men.  His belief was that where both parents were strong their progeny would be found to be more vigorous.”[54]

Spartan women owned some 40% of the land.  Xenophon insisted that Sparta was a stark exception among the Greeks in this and other ways.[55]  Pomeroy points out that Spartan women married at 18 or later, ate better than other Greek females, enjoyed more economic freedom, shared patriotic pride with husbands, and long enjoyed the benefits their martial society secured.[56]

Spartans worried when King Anaxandrides failed to produce an heir, says Herodotus, and ephors (religious elders) asked him to divorce his wife and marry another.  He refused, but finally took a second wife.  Both women conceived, one of the sons of the original being none other than Leonidas,[57] the warrior who would buy Greece time by fighting off a vast Persian Army at Thermopylae, memorably played by Jerard Butler in the movie 300.

Exercise of body and mind lent Spartan women swagger.  When someone told Leonidas’s wife that only Spartan women control their men, she famously sniffed:

 

“That’s because we’re the only ones who give birth to men.”[58] 

This was doubtless a swipe at Greek states where women were kept weak.  Aristotle thought rich women caused the ruin of Sparta.[59]  Steven Hodkinson argues that class, not sex, led to the nation’s fall: the rich of both sexes came to dominate, to the fury of the poor.[60] 

Pomeroy emphasized the complexity of female roles in ancient Greece: the status of women varied by era, subculture and state, class and role, as well as individual attitude and fate.  But she cited one set of data (defending it in a footnote) that causes one to shudder: “J. Lawrence Angel’s studies of skeletal remains indicates that the average adult longevity in Classical Greece was 45 years for males and 36.2 for females.”[61]  And that doesn’t include selective infanticide, which Pomeroy agrees was habitual.  (True, some young males may have died young in battle and not been counted.)  Later, she ascribes this disparity largely to subpar rations for females and to death in childhood.[62]

---

[1] For an overview, see Sarah Pomeroy, Spartan Women (Oxford University Press, 2002).

[2] Barber, 180

[3] Loren Cunningham and David Hamilton, Why Not Women?  A Fresh Look at Scripture on Women in Missions, Ministry, and Leadership (YWAM Publishing, 2000).  Hamilton’s first two chapters, 5 and 6, offer a picture of the status of women in Greece that may be too unremittingly dark. 

[4] Hesiod, Theogomy, 590, from Hesiod, The Homeric Hymns and Homerica with an English Translation by Hugh G. Evelyn-White. Theogony. (Harvard University Press; William Heinemann Ltd. 1914)

[5] One of C. S. Lewis’ more obscure short stories, After Ten Years, imagines the meeting between a now middle-aged Helen and her husband Menelaus in Egypt.  

[6] In Xenophon’s An Ephesian Tale, for instance, the golden-haired beauty Anthia is kidnapped by pirates, one of whom falls in love with her.  She is poisoned, lives with a goatherd, sent to be sacrificed, and appointed for sale to a brothel – yet somehow maintains chaste fidelity to her lover throughout. 

[7] Homer, Odysseus, translated by Samuel Butler (1900), Book 11, Page 7 The Odyssey, by Homer, Butler Tr.; Book XXI Page 7 (pagebypagebooks.com)

[8] L. R. Lind, 398

[9] Sophocles: The Three Theban Plays (Penguin Classics, 1982), 277

[10] Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (Schoken Books, 1975), 101

[11] L. R. Lind, 94

[12] Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus, in The Three Theban Plays, 364

[13] Aeschylus, Agamemnon, in Lind, 42

[14] Ibid, 68

[15] Ibid, Introduction

[16] Ibid, 62

[17] Ibid, 118

[18] Ibid, 245

[19] Euripides, Medea, 251

[20] Euripides, Andromache, in Lind, 304

[21] Sarah Ruden, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Image Books, 2010), 105

[22] Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, 101

[23] Aristophanes,  (Penguin Classics), 434

[24] Aristophanes, Lysistrata, translated by Charles Murphy, in L. R. Lind, Ten Greek Plays in Contemporary Translations (Houghton Mifflin Co, 1957), 378

[25] Euripides, Andromache, translated by L. R. Lind, Ten Greek Plays in Contemporary Translations, 299-300

[26] Ibid, 315

[27] Euripides: Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche (Signet Classics, 1998), 202

[28] Euripides, The Suppliants, translated by L. R. Lind, in Lind, 282

[29] Euripides, Ten Plays, translated by Paul Roche, 267

[30] Ibid, 315

[31] Ibid, 488-9

[32] Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 8, in Age of Alexander (Penguin Classics), 260

[33] Ibid, 265, 309, see also 293

[34] Arrian, The Campaigns of Alexander (Penguin Classics), 376

[35] Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, 94-97

[36] Plato, The Republic, V.

[37] Plato, The Symposium, especially the speech of Pausanias, but seemingly assumed by other speakers as well.  Being men of class, the accepted view is that homosexual love affairs should be intellectual, not just physical. 

[38] Ibid.  

[39] Aristotle, in Agonito, 52

[40] Aristotle, On the Generation of Animals, II.3 ESP Digital Books: On the Generation of Animals

[41] Plato, Timeus, translated by Benjamin Jowett (The Project Gutenberg eBook of Timaeus, by Plato), Section 1

[42] Musonius Rufus, Fragments, Discourse Four, A Stoic Breviary: Classical Wisdom in Daily Practice: TEXT: Musonius Rufus, Lectures and Fragments (tr Cora E. Lutz)

[43] Will Durant, The Age of Faith, 137

[44] Ibid, 41-42

[45] Ancient Carthaginians really did sacrifice their children | University of Oxford

[46] Diodorus Siculus, Library of History XX. 14 (LacusCurtius • Diodorus Siculus — Book XX Chapters 1‑18 (uchicago.edu))

[47] Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, translated by Rex Warner (Penguin Classics, 1954), III, 74

[48] Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 35, in The Age of Alexander, translated by Ian Scott-Kilvert (Penguin Classics, 1973), 292

[49] Sarah Ruden, Paul Among the People: The Apostle Reinterpreted and Reimagined in His Own Time (Image Books, 2010), 98

[50] Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, 121

[51] Plutarch, Life of Alexander, 9 (261)

[52] Ibid, 77 (333)

[53] Andromache, in Lind, 307

[54] Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaemonians, 1.4

[55] Xenophon, Constitution of the Lacedaimonians

[56] Sarah Pomeroy, Spartan Women (Oxford University Press, 2002)

[57] Herodotus, Histories, 5,39

[58] Ibid,                                       

[59] Aristotle, Politics, 2.9

[60] Steven Hodkinson, “Female Property Ownership and Status in Classical and Hellenistic Sparta,” Center for Hellenic Studies, 2020, conference on Women and Property, organized and edited by Deborah Lyons and Raymond Westbrook

[61] Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, 68. 

[62] Ibid, 228