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Women in Greece From: J.A.C.T. (Joint Association of Classical Teachers). The World of Athens: An Introduction to Classical Athenian Culture. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1996, pp. 147-9 (Sections 3.18-20) and 161-72 (Sections 4.2139). [Cross-references have been eliminated.]

Women and slaves In a standard work on Athenian law, the index has one entry under 'Women' it is 'disabilities.' The important point is that women and slaves were not independent: they had to rely on someone else for their existence and status. They were, in other words, incapable of competing. So too with the poor. A Greek defined 'wealth' as the condition in which he could live without working, 'poverty' as the condition in which he could only live by working. The latter condition removed his independence of action, especially if he was forced into the lowest category of work working for someone else. We can easily understand how dependent slaves were. As for free women, it is important to remember that they had little role outside the home (festivals in honour of the gods were an important exception), so had little or no opportunity to make identifiable friends and foes, and consequently were unable to reciprocate in a way that was obligatory for men. A woman's role lay, by definition, amongst her philoi in her own home. In general women were seen by the men who wrote about them not only as physically but also as morally, socially and intellectually weaker. But there is an ambivalence about them. On the one hand, they were seen as the all-embracing archetypal source and providers of life, on the other as she-monsters of outrageous and devilish cunning (cf. the myth of Pandora). When Klutaimstra faced her son, the returning Orestes, knowing full well that he planned to kill her, her first reaction was to call for an axe with which to slaughter him, but a few seconds later she was appealing to him as his mother: Klutaimstra: What is the matter? What's this shouting in the palace? Servant: I tell you the dead [i.e. Agamemnon's spirit] are slaughtering the living. K: Alas. You speak in riddles but I understand. We killed him [i.e. Agamemnon] treacherously and by treachery shall we die. Quickly, give me a battleaxe. It is the crisis now; will it be death or victory? (Enter Orestes) Orestes: It is for you I am looking. I have dealt with him. K: Alas. My dearest strong Aigisthos [the lover she took during her husband's absence], dead. O: You love your man? You shall lie in the same tomb; no chance for you to desert the dead. K: Hold your hand, son; see this breast, child, at which you slept and drew the milk that made you grow. (Aeschylus, Libation Bearers 885ff.) It is difficult to say exactly why women should have been seen as such a potential danger. Perhaps one of the reasons may be that a woman had to cross lines of kinship in order to fulfil herself in marriage: she left one family, and was absorbed into another. Such outsiders could be seen as a dangerous threat to institutions as tightly knit as family, where the roles were made by men, and the descent of property was through the male line. Again, women were widely regarded as enjoying the sexual act more than men. Teiresias, the mythical prophet who had enjoyed the dubious pleasure of being both man and woman, was once asked who found more pleasure in making love, and replied that of the ten units of pleasure involved, the man got one and the woman nine. He was blinded for his pains by the goddess Hera, on the grounds that he had given away woman's great secret. Consequently, the Athenian male tended to feel threatened by any male outsiders in his home and would be commended for keeping a close watch on his wife. As Xenophon remarked, if one detected a fault in a herd of cattle, one would probably blame the herdsman, but if one detected a fault in a woman, there could be no possible doubt that the husband was to blame. [] Property A daughter could not technically be an heiress in the full sense, because women could not own and control property in their own right under Athenian law. A daughter who had no surviving brothers of the same father inherited only as an epiklros, so called because she went with klros or estate. That is, she acted as a passive instrument in the transfer of the estate to the nearest legitimate heir in the male line. The 'eponymous' arkhn saw to it that she was properly married to her nearest relative (preferably related by birth rather than marriage)

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and that the property was duly passed on. If already married, the epiklros might even be obliged to divorce her husband in order to marry the appropriate relative, although it was open to her father to adopt her son or some other male relative. This may seem extraordinary to our way of thinking, but it is simply the most striking illustration of the Athenians' fixed determination to keep property within the family and so preserve the number of functioning oikoi [households]. In this way concentrations of property might be avoided and the social basis of the democracy maintained. The chief acknowledged purpose of Athenian marriage was, as we shall see, the procreation of legitimate children. Yet contradictory pressures operated on parents in a society without scientific birth control and where the death of children by disease or violence was far more likely than in our own. On the one hand, there was the risk of producing too many children, so that the property would be fragmented among the male heirs or depleted by dowries. On the other hand, if an Athenian father followed the advice of Hesiod to have only one son, that son might die prematurely and leave the estate without an heir. Various responses to these pressures were open. Newborn infants might be exposed to die, a fate to which girls seem to have been more vulnerable than boys; or a son and heir might be adopted. In any event, the primary objective of reproduction was to secure the continuity of the oikos with all its social, religious, political and military implications. Women and marriage Betrothal and marriage continued the concern of the state and individual kurioi with property and legitimacy. The very word for betrothal, eggu, also means 'pledge' or 'security' and so emphasises the vital element of property in the transaction. The bride's kurios [the male master of the household] betrothed the girl to her prospective husband with the following formula: 'I give you this woman for the ploughing of legitimate children.' This ceremony took place in the presence of as many witnesses as possible to attest the girl's virginity and the size of her dowry. The girl, who might be betrothed at the age of five, had no say in the matter of her marriage, which was essentially a contract between the kurioi of two oikoi. Marriage at Athens did not go together with romantic love. Another difference from modern Western marriage is that Athenian marriage was a private contract and not registered with the state authorities; legal marriage was not constituted by a wedding ceremony and signing of the register. Instead it was a simple 'living together' (sunoikein), embarked upon as a private enterprise and considered valid from the moment the bride entered the house of her lord and master. This step was regularly taken when the girl was only about fourteen. The new wife brought with her a dowry, usually a sum of money. This was considered so important that a father might mortgage land to provide a dowry of suitable size. But the wife did not technically own her dowry. It remained the property of her father or guardian, and the control of how it was spent was in the hands of her husband. None the less, the provisions for the return of the dowry, for example on divorce, could afford some protection for the wife, or at least for her family whose property it really was. Divorce proceedings could be initiated by either party, but as usual in this male-dominated society it was easier for the husband to obtain a divorce. Not surprisingly, too, the 'double standard' that still exists in many countries today was in full force in Athens. While husbands were permitted to take concubines and mistresses and consort with prostitutes, sexual relations between a wife and a man to whom she was not married automatically counted as adultery; and a wife convicted of adultery was liable to cruel public humiliation. The practical reason for this was that the paternity of a child might be challenged by an enemy, but Athenian views on adultery also reflect the chauvinism of Athenian males. They considered the seduction of a woman a more heinous crime than rape, since seduction implied that the wife's affections had been turned away from her husband. One of the most vivid illustrations of the extremes to which an Athenian husband could go to preserve the legitimacy of his oikos is contained in a lawcourt speech delivered early in the fourth century. The speaker had been accused of murdering a man. His defence is that the homicide was justified because he had caught the man in flagrante delicto committing adultery with his wife in his own house: When I decided to marry, Athenians, and brought a wife into my house, I was for some time disposed not to harass her but not to leave her too free to do just as she pleased. So I watched her as far as I could and paid attention to her as far as was reasonable. But when my child was born, thinking this the truest expression of the close tie between us, I began to trust her and I put all my resources at her disposal. At first, gentlemen, she was the best of wives a clever housekeeper, thrifty and exact in her stewardship. It was my mother's death that was the origin of all my troubles. When she was carried out to burial, my wife went with the cortege, was seen by that man and eventually seduced. He used to wait for the slave-girl

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who went to market and, making propositions through her, brought about my wife's downfall. (Lysias (Against Eratosthenes)1.6ff.) This passage has another point of interest. It was when she was attending her mother-in-law's funeral, outside the marital home, that the speaker's wife was seen by the alleged adulterer. Thereafter relations between the guilty pair had at first been carried on through an intermediary, the wife's servant-girl. Respectable wives, in other words, or at least the wives of wealthier men, should not, according to the Athenian social code, be as a rule seen in public. Their place was in the home, where we shall meet them again shortly. Only for funerals and festivals might they legitimately and without shame leave the house and play a social role in public. The speaker in the disputed citizenship case discussed earlier was considerably embarrassed at having to admit in court that his family was so poor his mother had to go to the market to sell ribbons: 'We do not live', he confesses, 'in the way we would like.' Passages like these have featured centrally in a long-running debate over what is too often called 'the position of women' in Athens. To pose the issue in these terms, however, involves dangerous ambiguities. For much depends on precisely which women we are talking about: daughters, sisters, or wives; wives as mothers or marriage partners; rich or poor, free or unfree women. Besides, this thorny question raises fundamental problems of method. The evidence available to us is almost entirely produced by and for men living in a male-dominated world and is expressed in the dominant language of men. Above all, perhaps, study of the 'woman question' in ancient Athens cannot help being affected by the impassioned debates over the status of women current in our own, also male-dominated, society. Caution therefore is the order of the day. Anyone who looks at all deeply into the social roles played by women in Athenian society (for the moment these remarks are confined to women of citizen status) is soon struck by an apparent paradox. In the private, enclosed and often secret world of the Athenian home, relations between men and women who are kindred can be warm, intimate and familiar. It is true that men and women occupy different physical spaces within the home and that the women are relegated to the back or upstairs parts, but in itself this is a sign not so much of contempt by the men as of their desire to protect the women from unwelcome contact with unrelated males; separateness did not necessarily imply inequality. But in the public world outside the home, by contrast, men alone have the opportunity to shine (except in one important area to be noted shortly). The exception referred to has already been noted in a different context. It is the extraordinarily prominent role allotted to women in ritual. Athenian women acted as priestesses in more than forty major public cults, including that of the patron deity of the city, Athn Polias, and they played leading roles in the great religious processions. Listen to the female chorus in a play of Aristophanes: When I was seven, I carried the sacred symbols; then at ten I was grinder of Athn's barley; then at the Brauronian festival of Artemis I was the Bear-girl in the saffron robe; and when I was grown up handsome, I carried the sacred basket, wearing a necklace of dried figs . . . (Aristophanes, Lysistrata 641ff.) There were, moreover, festivals exclusively for women, most notably the cult of Dmtr at the Thesmophoria. Finally, in rites of passage birth, initiation, marriage and death women were indispensable, providing the element of continuity fundamental to the perpetuation of the polis and the maintenance of right relations between men and the gods. One more factor has to be taken into account: the role of women in myth. Here again, as with their role in ritual, what is striking is the women's prominence. But whereas in ritual the valuation of women is largely positive, in myth their functions and roles as seen by men are shot through with ambiguities and tensions. That is to say, male attitudes to Athenian women as revealed in the imaginative projections of myth show a deep sense of unease. They oscillate between the poles of fear, even revulsion, and of total dependence towards women. Here perhaps lies the clue to explaining, so far as our limited and one-sided sources permit, the 'position' in society of Athenian citizen women. They are essential to the functioning and continuity of society and yet by their (alleged) potentially rampant sexuality and crossing of kinship lines they constantly threaten its male-dominated orderliness. In public that is, in the strictly political arenas of the democracy women are allotted no role whatsoever. They have no political rights and have to be represented at law by their male guardians. Where the public and private spheres overlap, in rituals performed outside the home, women are allowed a role, often indeed an important one. But the true sphere of Athenian citizen women, the sphere where their dependence on men was both most tangible and yet could be most attenuated, was the home.

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Home life Women of all classes were expected to live very different lives from their husbands. While the men met together in ekklsia [town assembly], lawcourts or agora [market place] to conduct the business of state, and spent much of their leisure with male friends or lovers in the wrestling-grounds, stoas [colonnaded public buildings] or cool groves of the Academy or the Lykeion, their wives were supposed to spend nearly all of their lives inside their homes. Even in the evening when men brought friends home to dine, wives and daughters were not expected to join them. For a woman to dine with an unrelated man could be used in court as evidence that she was not a legitimate Athenian wife. The men's dining-room (andrn) was a world apart from the women's quarters (gunaikeion, gunaiknitis), and it was non-Athenian women or slaves brought in specially from outside the household who graced the ritualised male drinking-parties (sumposia) held in this room. Of course this account is a generalisation and draws the contrast too sharply. Above all, it does not adequately describe the lives of poor women, the wives and daughters of poor Athenians; and in Athenian terms the majority of Athenian citizens were more or less poor. Thus in both town and country wives must have worked alongside their husbands if they could not afford slaves. So, too, poor citizen women went shopping and fetched water from the public fountains tasks otherwise performed by slaves. Poverty drove some women to act as wet-nurses, midwives or petty market traders. There is some reason for thinking that the women of rich men were more rigidly secluded than their poor sisters, partly for snobbish reasons; but even they will have been able to establish gossip relationships with neighbours and rub shoulders with other women at the public festivals. For all this, though, it remains true that the Athenian woman's place was in the home. From her earliest years she had been brought up to perform or supervise exclusively domestic tasks; this was woman's work. This passage illustrates the range of these supervisory duties in a well-off household; Iskhomakhos is addressing the wife whom he married when she was not yet fifteen: Your business will be to stay indoors and help to despatch the servants who work outside, while supervising those who work indoors. You will receive incoming revenue and allocate it to any necessary expenditure, you will be responsible for any surplus and see that the allocation for the year's expenses is not spent in a month. When wool is delivered to you you will see that garments are made for those that need them, and take care that the dried grain is kept fit for consumption. And there is another of your duties which I'm afraid may seem to you rather thankless you will have to see that any of the servants who is ill gets proper treatment. (Xenophon, Oikonomikos 7.35ff.) A poor wife, of course, would have had to do all the work herself: the bringing up of children, the provision of food, the combing and spinning of wool, the weaving, and so on and so forth. Since all these were timeconsuming, she will have enjoyed little or no leisure, unlike her husband. Indeed, it was of the essence of women's tasks that they be time-consuming, for to a suspicious male eye they could be seen as ways of keeping the women out of mischief. In general, males are presented as being aware of this convention of separation. In [Demosthenes] (Against Euergos) 47.34ff. the speaker, who was a trierarch [wealthy citizen chosen to pay for and captain a trireme, a warship], had not received the ship's gear from his predecessor. He went round to the house of the previous trierarch, Theophemos, to demand the gear or its equivalent value. When refused, the speaker prepared to enter the house by force: but, as he was careful to point out to the courts, 'I had already ascertained that Theophemos was not married.' It was simply not done for a complete stranger to enter a house where a married woman was present. Later on, the speaker forcibly contrasts his behaviour with Theophemos', when Theophemos and his cronies swooped on the speaker's farm, in the presence of his wife and children and servants, and carried off everything he had. The speaker points out that even a neighbour, on seeing the attack, refused to enter the farm because the kurios was not there. This ideal of secluded industriousness is revealed in the design of the Athenian house. There was normally just the one entrance, and this gave on to the men's quarters from which the women were sometimes literally barred. Our evidence suggests that Greek houses, even those of the very rich, were not elaborate. Their few rooms had undecorated walls, there was little in the way of furniture or non-essential ornaments. Exceptions are known from the Attic countryside. But even so most Athenian women lived their lives in cramped, smelly and unhygienic surroundings. Food was also plain; the mainly vegetarian Greek diet seems to have been remarkably spare even by the standards of contemporary rural Greece (meat-eating was confined to sacrifices, see 2.30-3). Clothes, though, which (as today) carried many implications beyond the wealth suggested by the

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material, might be more elaborate. Vase paintings and the plays of Aristophanes attest many variations in pattern, colour and design. Non-citizen women So far only citizen women, especially wives, have been under direct consideration. But, as remarked earlier, Athenian custom tolerated temporary or permanent liaisons with other women. These concubines (pallakai), courtesans (hetairai, literally 'companions') and prostitutes (pornai) would normally not be of Athenian birth. Alkibiades was notorious for not merely having numerous mistresses but also keeping concubines, slave and free, in addition to his aristocratic wife. Pericles, who was for a time Alkibiades' guardian, divorced his wife and formed a lasting union with Aspasia. But since she was a native of Miltos, it was only as a special mark of respect to Pericles that the Athenians granted citizenship to their son. (He was one of the generals executed after Arginoussai.) Concubinage, though, had some legal status. Prostitution too was legalised and freely available a fact which Aristophanes has to suppress in his Lysistrata for the sake of the plot. Prostitutes ranged in class and expensiveness from the brothel-girls of the Peiraieus, through the rather more sophisticated aulos-girls an Athenian might hire to enliven a male drinking-party (sumposion) in the andrn, to the educated courtesans euphemistically known as hetairai. The most amusing story concerning a hetaira in Athens is to be found in Xenophon's fictional Memoirs of Socrates. In an artful display of studied innocence Socrates, noting Theodote's wealth, gradually teases out of her its true source her rich lovers. The passage incidentally lists the chief sources of wealth in Athens, in order of their importance: Socrates asked 'Have you an estate, Theodote?' 'No.' 'Then perhaps you get your income from house-property'. 'No.' 'Well, does it come from some manufacturing business?' 'No.' 'Then what do you live on?' 'I live on the contributions of kind friends.' (Xenophon, Memorabilia 3.11.4) Education Hetairai in Athens might be cultivated women possessing considerable literary or musical skills in addition to their physical charms. Athenian girls, on the other hand, seem typically to have been educated chiefly for purely manual and domestic tasks (though there are vase paintings showing scenes of girls reading and occasional references in the orators to women involved in small-scale financial transactions). So this account of Athenian education applies exclusively to boys and young men.