The Women of Ancient Greece

The Women of Ancient Greece: Enigma Unbound?

In a popular edition of the selected works of Plato, an introduction to the famous dialogue of love, the Symposium, explains that love "in any noble sense of the word, means to Athenian gentlemen of this period the love of men for other men." It means, the introduction continues,

the protective love of a full-grown man for some gallant and promising youth or the love of two comrades for one another. These were the loves that mattered in a man's life and exalted his character. Women were kept secluded at home and their relationship to men was on a lower plane altogether (Loomis 157-8).

That reference straightforwardly sets limits on the options of the women of Golden Age Greece. It conveys the sense of a culture in which homosexual/homosocial love and behavior appear to have been valorized and heterosexual contact by and large an inconvenience, an embarrassment, an instrumental fact in the socially and personally tiresome but unavoidably necessary project of propagation of the race. What today would be called family values do not appear to have been of great concern to the upper classes of ancient Greece.

Ancient Greek civilization was undoubtedly patriarchal in character, and the evidence of the Platonic dialogues is that homosexual/homosocial behavior appears to have been more or less a routine feature of male elite experience. Further, women were not envisioned as part of the governing class. There is no ancient text attribut

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ic functions. A choral ode in Lysistrata catalogues of ritual duties that women have performed for the glory of the state--duties that justify their assertion of state authority: Right it is that I my slender Tribute to the state should tender, I, who to her thoughtful tender care My happiest memories owe Bore, at seven, the mystic casket . . . Well may such a gracious City all my filial duty claim (Lys. 312). In addition to duties to the state, women seem to have claimed benefits from it. Citing inscriptions that either prohibit or permit women's participation in ritual sacrificial cults, Osborne forcefully argues that women were priestesses in at least some public ritual sacrifices and that when they were specifically excluded from a particular kind of sacrifice, that had more to do with the membership of the cult making the sacrifice than the fact that they were women. Arguing against the conclusions of another scholar, Osborn says that women's exclusion from sacrifice, when it occurred, was not specifically linked to their exclusion from politics or to the fact that they were women. Rather, sacrifice and politics belonged to different spheres as a general rule, intersecting only in particular parts of Greek society: "

Category: History - T