ABSTRACT
Revealing remarks from antiquity about the activities and circumstances of Athenian women are more numerous than might be supposed. The modern analysis of this evidence is still at an early stage of development: the scope for students to offer improvements to existing theory is unusually obvious.1 As with other areas of Greek social history, the source material for a study of Athenian women is scattered through a very large number of ancient texts. The labour involved in assembling and evaluating this material partly explains why social history has been much less studied than political, for which a large proportion of the evidence is conveniently contained in the works of two writers, Herodotos and Thucydides. Yet the frequent adjustment needed when reconstructing ancient social history, to allow for the varied characteristics of numerous sources, closely resembles the process by which we adjust to innumerable sources in evaluating everyday information of our own time. In the assessment of ancient (and modern) statements, judgement must often be suspended where little is known about context and the author’s purpose. For the study of Athenian women a special caution is made necessary by the fact that almost all relevant statements from antiquity originated with, or have at least been mediated by, men. One consequence of this fact is that our information, and the reconstruction we base upon it, tend to concern the relations between women and men. And yet, in a society largely segregated by gender, as was Athens, relations within the female group must have been, for many women and in many ways, far more important. There are many surviving statements of ideal relating to Greek women. These are often of great interest, but their value as evidence needs cautious assessment. A statement of ideal may, depending on the circumstances in which it was uttered, reflect the wishes only of its author. In other respects its value as evidence may be the exact reverse of what first appears. A female, non-Athenian, writer stated
that women should not wear gold, emeralds or make-up.2 Whether the writer’s views were widely shared in her community, and so formed an important influence on women’s behaviour, we cannot tell. It is, however, almost certain that some women had worn, and were thought likely to go on wearing, gold and the rest: people do not normally trouble to forbid or advise against behaviour of a kind which they have neither experienced nor heard of. Much social history can be reconstructed on the principle that stated ideals tend to be a negation of what is, at least to some extent, actually happening.3 A better-known profession of an ideal concerning women is that ascribed by Thucydides to Perikles, as part of a speech of 431/0. Perikles is reported as attributing great glory to those widows who were least spoken of among men, whether for praise or blame.4 Perikles here speaks as the representative of the Athenian community on a solemn occasion, the funeral of warriors killed fighting for Athens in the first year of the Peloponnesian War. The nature of the occasion indicates that the ideals expressed were likely to be shared, or at least not opposed, by Perikles’ fellow citizens, his audience.5 We should notice, in addition, that the ideal of female segregation was judged to be in need of reinforcement by Perikles’ statement. Women in some numbers were, it seems, being spoken of among men. A similar argument applies to the idea, commonly expressed at Athens,6 that citizen women should stay at home, going no further than the outer door of their home. The frequency with which we meet this idea reflects a body of opinion probably sufficient to constrain female behaviour to some extent. But that same frequency should suggest that the ideal asserted was continuing to be breached. The behaviour of women was commonly appraised with words from the root kosm-, which often implied the orderly separation of things.7 As we shall see, not only activity in public but also the living quarters of some private houses were segregated on sexual lines. Statements of ideal also occur in the form of complaints and jokes, to the effect that women went to excess in eating,8 drinking,9 talking10 and sexual activity (or the desire for it).11 Great caution is needed if we seek to use such references as evidence for women’s behaviour, since they typically involve no precise indication of what was the desirable or acceptable standard which women allegedly exceeded. Among the most valuable general remarks, for our purposes, are those made by Aristotle, particularly in his Politics. Two sections of Aristotle’s work are relevant immediately. He writes that having a gynaikonomos, an official to control the movements of women,12 would not be compatible with dēmokratia, “For,” he asks rhetorically,
“how is it possible to prevent the wives of the poor from going out?” Aristotle spent much of his life, in the mid-fourth century, at Athens under the dēmokratia: if the wives of the Athenian poor had been prevented from going out at that period, he would hardly write as he does. The inference made above, that numerous women did not stay at home, seems to be confirmed.13 Also, Aristotle illustrates the need for caution in interpreting ancient claims that women transgressed certain ideals. Greek remarks about talkative or complaining women may suggest the modern stereotype of women as gossips. Aristotle, however, notes that “a woman would seem to be a chatterbox if she were as restrained (kosmia) as a good man”.14 When it came to conversation, that is, what was thought proper for a man was judged excessive in a woman. We shall see evidence of a similar disparity of standards as regards eating and sexual activity. Athenian law-court speeches, with their frequent references to women, date mainly from the fourth century. The clients who commissioned them, and delivered the versions heard in court,15 would in most cases be known to be prosperous.16 The speeches survive because they were esteemed in antiquity for their elegant Greek. Their authors, who tended to be famous in their own time, were no doubt expensive to hire. The speeches frequently contain lies, or at least statements made in careless disregard of the truth. Paradoxically, this may even enhance the value for us of their statements on domestic life. If these works had been written with a thorough and energetic love of truth, what they told us of this or that person’s marital history might reflect no more than the peculiarities of a family. However, since the orators were concerned to be plausible rather than accurate, their statements reflect the jurors’ ideas of what might generally be expected in the behaviour of prosperous Athenians. It is obviously valuable to identify such expectations, although we should be aware that Athenian men would not be perfectly informed about the cloistered world in which many women lived, a world carefully constructed so as to be inaccessible to men outside the immediate family.17 We hear of men boasting to each other about their wives,18 which suggests not only that they presented a biased set of information but also that the wives in question could not be talked to or seen; for then boasting might have been unnecessary or impossible. The idea enunciated by Perikles is also of importance here, that women gained great glory by being very rarely spoken of among men. This notion is not self-contradictory;19 the word for “men” reported by Thucydides means “males”, not “people”. The passage seems to mean that a woman might have a great reputation among women while, for closely related reasons,
being seldom referred to by men; if so, that would imply an impressive degree of insulation between the worlds of women and men. To judge by the volume of published material, Greek women have been studied far more intensively in the years since 1970 than at earlier periods; the revival of feminism has prompted much sympathetic, and perhaps some unsympathetic, interest.20 When we deal with a subject with lively implications for modern politics, there is an obvious danger that we may – depending on our temperament – either exaggerate or play down certain features, to yield a convenient picture of thorough infamy, or of general decency. In the present case, features likely to be distorted include the limitations on movement, conversation and sexual contact which applied to many women and girls, at least in the prosperous sections of Athenian society. To modern tastes, there may seem to have been more satisfaction in the lives of hetairai, courtesans often attached to particular men and employed for their sexual and conversational abilities, especially at drinking parties, from which citizen wives were excluded.21 However, as S. B. Pomeroy makes clear, it would be seriously wrong to assume that Athenian citizen women generally envied the hetairai and their way of life.22 The latter were normally slaves, or citizen women whose poverty left them few choices. Plato, who was most unusual in advocating a common way of life for women and men,23 conceded that women would passionately and powerfully resist his scheme for them to attend communal meals because they were used, as he put it, to a life in the shadows.24 To mix with men would be degrading. (Classical Greek used an analogy between women and female horses. Mares fell into two groups: those kept in the stable, trophiai, and those let out to pasture, phorbades. The latter term came to be applied to women who were not kept at home, and it meant prostitutes.) The point is echoed in an undervalued and psychologically sensitive collection of historical sketches, the Dialogues of the hetairai, by the post-classical Greek writer Lucian. An impoverished Athenian widow plans to make her naive young daughter into a hetaira, and tempts her with the prospect of riches, “from being with very young men, drinking with them and sleeping with them in exchange for money”. “Just like Lyra, Daphnis’ daughter?” asks the girl. “Yes.” “But she’s a hetaira.”25 By force of poverty, the wives of some citizens worked outdoors, particularly in retail trades:26 they again may seem to us to have lived more rewarding, because more colourful and varied, lives than their wealthier counterparts. But this activity, too, was commonly looked down on as fit only for slaves. In contrast, the cloistered existence was a badge of high status, and was almost certainly valued as such by many women.
