Home before lunch: The emancipated woman in Theocritus

The Women of Ptolemaic Alexandria enjoyed an advance in their condition sufficient to inspire modern talk of emancipation and a new spiritual freedom. After the low point reached in the age of Pericles, the flowering of vast new metropolises a century later diminished the male monopoly on the marketplace, the law court, the palaestra, the stoa, and the throneroom, as papyrus fragments (deeds, marriage contracts, even some letters) reveal in unprecedented detail. ¹ We remain curiously uninformed, however, about the feelings, aspirations, and values of the “New Woman” ² because usable literary evidence now becomes scarce. As respectable women ventured into the streets, poets were disappearing into libraries to cultivate a style that says everything about art and remarkably little about character. The intellectual toys of a learned age — geographical arcana, quaint outcroppings of saga, recherché vocabulary, literary criticism — all find their way into refined and allusive verse. Only a small handful of poems give voice to the women of the age in any direct and extensive fashion.