Women in Athenian Law and Life

Roger Just

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• eBook ISBN: 9781134931668
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

This book provides a comprehensive account of the Athenians' conception of women during the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Though nothing remains that represents the authentic voice of the women themselves, there is a wealth of evidence showing how men sought to define women. By working through a range of material, from the provisions of Athenian law through to the representations of tragedy and comedy, the author builds up, in the manner of an anthropological ethnography, a coherent and integrated picture of the Athenians' notion of `woman'.

1
INTRODUCTION: THE ‘PROBLEM’ OF WOMEN

I

The study of women in classical Athens presents us with a dilemma. As A.W.Gomme remarked many years ago, There is, in fact, no literature, no art of any country, in which women are more prominent, more carefully studied and with more interest, than in the tragedy, sculpture, and painting of fifth-century Athens’ (1925:4). Moreover, there exists a considerable body of evidence, mainly in the form of law-court speeches, which allows us to reconstruct (though not without the inevitable gaps and uncertainties) the position of women within the political, legal, social and economic structures of the Athenian polis. It would seem, then, that social historians had a wealth of material at their disposal. Yet the fact remains that for all practical purposes there is nothing which represents the authentic voice of women themselves. Euripides’ Medea may speak passionately for women, but it is still Euripides who does the talking. Contrary to the recorded comments of Athenian men, the women of Athens have kept a prudent silence. Further, compared with our knowledge of public institutions and political and military history, the private and day-to-day lives of the Athenians remain relatively opaque, and it is in this context that we might have hoped best to register the role of women, for they make scant appearance in the chronicles of Athens’ greatness. Either, then, we know what men said about women and how they represented them, or we know very little about them at all; and when we look to determine the position of women in Athens we can claim to be determining only what Athenian men thought about women, and how rules and regulations constructed by men sought to define and locate women within a male conception of society (Gould 1980:38–9). This is a distressing situation, particularly at a time when a general attempt is being made to reassess the contribution of women to society and history; yet it is a situation whose several consequences must be accepted.

II

Problems of evidence (and of its omissions) are the special concern of historians, and nowhere are historians more exercised by them than in the study of ancient history. But given the particular difficulties attendant on studying women, it is worth noting certain developments within the anthropology of contemporary societies; for despite radically different conditions of investigation, there too strangely similar problems obtain.

It has been suggested with some justification that the minor role attributed to women in most ethnographies can be seen as the result of certain prejudices, or at least presuppositions, on the part of the ethnographer about the essentially masculine nature of society (and this whether the ethnographer happened to be male or female). However, in an important article originally published in 1972 (and from which I borrow the title for this chapter) Edwin Ardener argued that this minor role had little or nothing to do with the actual amount of information recorded about women, or even with the amount of interest shown in the position and activities of women. Rather, it had to do with the perspective within which that information was cast; for any prejudices or presuppositions the ethnographer might have had about the essentially masculine nature of society, and consequently about the peripheral role of women, were likely to be shared and reinforced by the very observations of the society under study. It seems that within society it is a male view which predominates, and that it is thus a male view of society which is most readily forthcoming. The ethnographer in the field, with all his or her ‘information’ in full view, still tends to see the society through male eyes because it is the men of the society who are the most willing and capable of providing an articulate account of their lives; an account in which women have, precisely, ‘a place’. Indeed, as Ardener says, when attention turns to women, both ethnographer and ‘his people’ are likely to be engaged in a similar process of ‘bird-watching’ whereby women become passive characters in a masculine social drama rather than being seen as at the centre of their own interpreted world (Ardener 1975:1–4). ¹

Nevertheless, what anthropologists now accuse themselves of is not so much a failure to have recorded the social truth about women, as a failure to have seen beyond one social truth about women located in a reality constructed by men. What current criticisms of the traditional anthropological treatment of women have highlighted is not so much the mistakenness of presenting a male view of women, as the mistakenness of not recognizing its relativity as a male view. And it follows that the rectification of this situation does not lie in discarding the male view of society in favour of a search for some elusive objectivity, but in supplementing that view with the female alternative. The male view of society still retains its significance, for social reality is a social construct and what people think themselves and others to be remains a primary object of social enquiry.

It may well have been, then, that beyond the dominant ideology of the male, which purports to account for society in its totality, there existed in Athens another social reality constructed by women in which not only their own role and nature, but also those of men, might have been construed in a significantly different fashion. Ideally, this would constitute a large part of the subject-matter in any investigation of Athenian women; but the evidence for it is not recoverable, and though I would certainly not wish to argue that classicists and historians are any the less prone to making sexist assumptions than the anthropologists of contemporary societies, it is scarcely their fault that the evidence from antiquity tends in certain areas to neglect women (in itself a salient fact) and in other areas to represent them in a manner which no doubt gives them very much less than was their due. On the other hand, what historians continually do confront, and what they can respect as a quite legitimate object of study, is precisely the prejudices, or should one say cultural assumptions, of the male society which has chosen to record its views for posterity in the enduring authority of written texts. Although all of what is known about women comes from the representations and ordinances of men, and although this evidence will not allow the discovery of the whole truth about women—about how they felt, about how they saw Athenian society and their place within it, or even very much about what they did within the confines of their private and domestic lives—it will nevertheless allow the discovery of something of the way in which Athenian men thought of women, of the place allocated to them in the male construction of society, and of the attributes and characteristics with which they were thereby credited. In discovering this, like most ethnographers (though with very much less choice), the historian can still claim to be recording an important, but ‘partial’ in every sense of the word, truth about women: not what they were, but what men saw them to be. This is to limit the study of Athenian women and to reorient its findings; but it is by no means to invalidate that study.

III

The particular nature of the evidence, its status as a register of male ideas and values rather than as a direct and intimate record of the female condition, has more effect, however, than merely to impose certain limits on the study of Athenian women. The difference between a naive view of society as a set of objective phenomena to be determined, examined, interpreted, and judged, and society as a construct already replete with judgements and meanings given it by those who live out its reality, lies at the heart of any attempt to discuss Athenian women, and explains the confusions created by many early attempts.

When Gomme published his famous essay in 1925 it was to counteract a nineteenthcentury orthodoxy that in classical Athens women lived lives of cloistered confinement verging on ‘oriental seclusion’, that they were legally, politically, economically, and socially subjugated and suppressed, and that they were treated with an indifference approaching contempt. ² Gomme’s challenge to this view has been upheld by a number of later scholars, notably Kitto (1951), Seltman (1956), and later Richter (1971). As a corrective to so bleak a view of women’s position it had great value; but to argue whether Athenian women were held in contempt or were honoured and cherished members of the community was to set most subsequent discussion of the position of women in Athens within the terms of a debate that could not advance. ³ To put it bluntly, the question which most classicists asked themselves, even if their answer remained cautiously inconclusive, was, ‘Did the Athenians treat their women well or not?’ or ‘Was woman’s position in Athens a happy one or not?’ Admittedly this is an obvious and even import-ant question to ask; but it is not a question it is possible to answer (Gould 1980:39).

As Sarah Pomeroy pointed out in her bibliography on women in antiquity (1973:141–3) ⁴ and again in her book Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (1975:58–60), divergence of opinion on this question related not only to a subjective interpretation of the available evidence, but also to a subjective selection of the genres of evidence taken into account. The ‘pessimists’ view was based largely on a reading of the Athenian orators, on philosophers’ and moralists’ writings, and on what little can be pieced together from various prose sources and from comedy about Athenian daily life. The ‘optimists’ view sprang from a consideration of Athenian art and drama and from a recognition of the prominent place of women within them. Adherence to one or other of the opposed views then necessitated the mutual charge that the evidence on which the opposition’s claims were based was either unrepresentative or unimportant. Thus while Gomme and his followers would argue that the legally defined position of women in Attic law had little or nothing to do with the respect and honour granted them, W.K.Lacey, for example, writes in his book on the family in classical Greece: ‘Amongst the intentional omissions of this book are large-scale references to Greek Tragedy…. What the characters say [in tragedy] …has no independent value for telling us about society, though very often it will support what we know from other sources to be true’ (1968:10). But although the selection of evidence was an important factor in the controversy and raises certain very real questions to which I shall return, it is not the decisive factor. The dispute over the status of women resulted from a more fundamental error.

For the most part, questions about the position of women in Athens were posed from the outset in moral or evaluative terms. Were women despised and held in contempt, or were they honoured and cherished? But it is not possible to read through the corpus of Athenian writings and substantiate in any empirical fashion from direct statements about the matter whether Athenian men as a whole liked or disliked women, whether they went around honouring or despising them. Nor is this surprising. There is a body of explicitly misogynic Greek (though not necessarily Athenian or classical) literature. Hesiod and Semonides of Amorgos come immediately to mind. So does Hippolytos’ lengthy monologue in Euripides’ tragedy. But Hippolytos’ speech must be understood within its dramatic context and, as Gomme correctly pointed out (1925:8–9), for every explicitly misogynic statement extracted from literature one can find another to the effect that there is no greater blessing for a man than a good woman—a sentiment to which even Hesiod subscribed. This being the case, the recourse was naturally to evidence other than direct and unambiguous expressions of affection or hostility. From such indirect evidence classicists then set themselves the task of deducing whether the Athenians honoured or despised their women. But these deductions perforce entailed a series of a priori, personal, and culturally relative judgements about what sort of behaviour towards women, what sort of conditions for women, and, indeed, what sort of characterizations of women would be indicative of an attitude of admiration or disparagement. The trading of opinion was considerable. The same applies even to the question of ‘oppression’. From the available evidence it can certainly be said that in Athens a woman’s life was in most areas a much more restricted one than a man’s; that she was not allowed to do, or simply did not do, many of the things that a man did. And, by the way, I am by no means arguing that this could not have constituted oppression. Certainly by our standards it would. But before one could confidently talk of oppression, or of treatment constitutive of contempt, it would be necessary to know whether the restrictions imposed upon women contravened or frustrated their own desires; whether women resented their situation and felt themselves underrated or even despised. It would be necessary to know something of their own assessment of their situation—and this is not known. What took its place were classicists’ opinions about how one ought to treat women—and they, of course, were various. ⁵

Being treated badly or well, being honoured or despised, must depend on the culturally and historically specific estimations of those who are or were themselves the inhabitants of the society or period under consideration. ⁶ Such estimations cannot be supplied by proxy, for they do not concern matters which permit of objective determination on universal grounds. It seems clear that Athenian men, about whose opinions we know something, did not think themselves contemptuous of women. This being so, the acceptability or otherwise of their treatment of women would become an interesting and possible debate only if something were known of what Athenian women themselves thought of their situation. But given the state of the evidence the most that can be done is occasionally to remind ourselves that not everything to which women might now, and with great justification, object was necessarily resented by the women of Athens, and conversely to appreciate that historical changes have altered, and will continue to alter, people’s consciousness of themselves, of others, and of gender roles within society. But perhaps the most unfortunate effect of the long and essentially futile debate over women’s ‘despised’ or ‘honoured’ state in Athens was that it served to obscure what was a worthwhile and possible field of investigation: namely, the very nature of those ‘prejudices’ or cultural assumptions which lie embedded in a variety of contexts from law through to literature and which together reveal what the meaning of ‘woman’ or femininity was for the Athenians.

IV

In a somewhat rhetorical passage Seltman wrote at the outset of his book Women in Antiquity: ‘one must be precise about terms of reference. “Woman.“ There is no need to attempt a definition. We are always with them, and they with us. Fortunately’ (1956:15). Yet is the definition self-evident? Can we presume to know in any universal sense what is meant by ‘woman’ (or for that matter what is meant by ‘man’)? True, both the Greek term ‘gyne’ and the English term ‘woman’ refer to a human being of female gender. But the connotations of both terms are far more extensive, and there is no certainty that what was brought to mind by the word ‘gyne’ in fifth- and fourth-century BC Athens was the same as what is brought to mind by the word ‘woman’ in contemporary western society—not, that is, unless the meaning of the words is restricted to nothing other than a human being who is biologically female. Rather than taking the definition of woman as universally given, and then proceeding to see whether she was ‘rightly’ or ‘wrongly’ characterized and treated within an alien culture, it is, I believe, more profitable to reverse the process and to attempt to see how the characterizations and treatment of women in an alien culture went towards defining what a woman actually was. In short, what must be investigated is the semantic field of ‘woman’ within the confines of a particular society and culture. That, increasingly, has been the general direction of the more recent studies of women in ancient society—a direction which runs parallel to much contemporary anthropological writing, now that women’s studies have lost their initial stridency and begun to investigate the rich complexity of gender differentiation throughout history and society. ⁷ It is also the direction of this book.

Needless to say I shall not be attempting to find or to formulate any neat definition of the Athenian idea of woman. Rather, the task will be to trace through the evidence of those various systems of thought and behaviour, those institutions and representations within which women were granted a place to see how and whether they might allow the gradual construction of some coherent picture of what the Athenians thought woman to be. This cannot be done quickly. First, I intend to examine woman’s incorporation (or lack of incorporation) into the Athenian polis, and her role within kinship organization and family structure. Here I shall be concerned not only with the legal rules which defined her capabilities and incapabilities, but also with her economic status and the degree of her participation in the less formally defined areas of social life. Second, I wish to consider the comments made in fifth- and fourth-century writings about the ‘nature’ or ‘character’ of women. Here I will also be concerned with those characteristics, both behavioural and ‘psychological’, which were thought ideally to be the prerogative of men—for it will be necessary to see in what way women were thought to be different from men in order to appreciate the meaning of those characteristics which men attributed to women. Finally, I shall review some of the symbolic associations and connections into which women entered in the rituals of the Athenian state and also in the stories, the myths, of Greece on whose traditions the Athenian playwrights drew. It is from such a range of sources and different contexts that I hope a coherent picture of the Athenians’ conception of women may emerge.

I shall not, however, be attempting to evaluate the justice of this conception, its ‘correctness’ with respect to our own moral persuasions. On the other hand, what I shall continually be dealing with are moral evaluations and notions of morality, both explicit and implicit—those of a past and alien society. According to Thoukydides’ account, Perikles’ funeral oration, delivered at the end of the first year of the Peloponnesian War, contained the following words:

If I am also to speak about feminine virtue, referring to those of you who will from now on be widows, I can say all I have to say in one short word of advice. Your great glory is not to be inferior to the way nature made you; and the greatest glory is hers who is least talked about by men, whether in praise or in blame.

(Thoukydides: 2.45)

Richter (1971) has argued that the sentiments of the speech should be attributed to Thoukydides the historian rather than to Perikles the statesman since Thoukydides is ‘prejudiced’ against women and regularly ignores them in his history; that the sentiments could scarcely carry a genuinely misogynic connotation if they were Periklean, since clearly Perikles was no woman-hater (Richter reminds us of Perikles’ notorious relationship with the courtesan Aspasia, and of the anecdote that on his death-bed Perikles sheepishly admitted having kept through the years an amulet some woman had given him); and that the advice to women given in this passage is but another expression of that characteristic Hellenic ideal of sophrosyne (‘discretion’, ‘prudence’) since in an oration of this sort any reminder that public familiarity with a respectable woman’s private life might compromise her would be apt. I am not sure why a ‘prejudice’ on Perikles’ part would be sociologically important, but can be dismissed if expressed by Thoukydides. (Indeed, that Thoukydides hardly mentions women in his history seems quite in accord with their general exclusion from the public domain.)⁸ But, whatever the case, the substance of Richter’s comments functions only within the framework of an illusory argument—an argument that assumes that if Perikles said what he said and meant what he said then he is open to the charge of despising women. That Perikles was no woman-hater is clear; but whether Perikles loved or hated women is not, except for his biographer, an important question. The real question must be what, for the Athenian male, were these women whom Perikles, or Thoukydides, or any number of other Athenian men were at liberty either to cherish or to despise according to their individual persuasions; what, for Perikles, Thoukydides and all the rest, constituted a ‘good woman’ whom ideally they ought to honour and respect, or a ‘bad woman’ whom they ought to deride. The answer given here is clear, though incomplete, and must be respected: ‘The greatest glory is hers who is least talked about by men, whether in praise or in blame.’

V

In trying to reconstitute the Athenian notion of women from a range of evidence I shall, however, be forced to deal with one particular problem raised by the established debate over women’s status—a problem to which Pomeroy has drawn attention: the apparent discrepancy between woman’s role in day-to-day life and her role in art and tragedy. As Gould (1980:40) has argued, it can be shown that contrary to the assertions of Gomme and his followers the social conventions which the heroines of tragedy obey (or are criticized for disobeying) do not differ radically from those to which the women of fifth and fourth-century Athens appear to have been subject. Nevertheless, those who have adduced the evidence of tragedy and art have still raised a substantial problem: how is one to reconcile the very forcefulness of those awesome women who appear in tragedy, and the magnitude of their actions continually celebrated in drama, with the values of a society which otherwise would appear to hav...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• WOMEN IN ATHENIAN LAW AND LIFE
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
• 1: INTRODUCTION: THE 'PROBLEM' OF WOMEN
• 2: POLITICS
• 3: LEGAL CAPABILITIES
• 4: MARRIAGE AND THE STATE
• 5: FAMILY AND PROPERTY
• 6: FREEDOM AND SECLUSION
• 7: PERSONAL RELATIONSHIPS
• 8: THE ATTRIBUTES OF GENDER
• 9: THE ENEMY WITHIN
• 10: THE SAVAGE WITHOUT
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY