Term 1: Outline

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Term 1 Outline

• 1 Who Were the Women of Ancient Greece? 2 Myth
  Religion Athena, maenads3 Sex Goddesses
  Aphrodite, Eos (Dawn) Lady Monsters4 Seminar
  The Hymn of Aphrodite5 Images of Greek Women6
  Reading Week7 Women in Greece A Survey8
  Seminar Cities of Women Aristophanes
  Ecclesiazusae (Lysistrata), Plato Republic V9
  Marriage and Adultery Lysias 1, On the Murder of
  Eratosthenes10 Courtesans and Hetairai Neaera,
  Theodote

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Sex Gender in Ancient Greece

• Who Were the Women of Ancient Greece?

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The Beginnings of Scholarship
Pomeroy, 1975 introduced new era of study
Women in Antiquity
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Evidence The Challenges

• Textual and material culture
• Bias in sources in traditional scholarship
• Sources cannot be taken at face value

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Literary Testimony

• Grave problems with biased sources
• Majority of literature produced by men
• Range of literature histories, speeches, legal
  documents, tragedy, and comedy

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Men Praising Women

• It was not clothes, it was not gold that this
  woman admired during her lifetime it was her
  husband and the good sense that she showed in her
  behaviour. But in return for the youth you shared
  with him, Dionysia, your tomb is adorned by your
  husband Antiphilus
• Dionysias, Athens 4th Century BC

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Men Hating Women

• Talking of Pandora From her is descended a
  great pain to mortal men, the race of female
  women, who live with men, and who cannot put up
  with harsh poverty, but only with plenty the man
  who gets a wife of the wicked sort, lives with
  undying pain in his heart and his evil is without
  cure
• Hesiod, Theogony, 590-612

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Men Hating Women

• The two best days in a womans life are when
  someone marries her and when he carries her dead
  body to the grave
• Hipponax, 6th century fragment

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Sappho
When I look at you, fr. 31.G The man seems to
me strong as a god, the man who sits across from
you and listens to your sweet talk nearby And
your lovely laughter which, when I hear it,
strikes fear in the heart in my breast. For
whenever I glance at you, it seems that I can say
nothing at all But my tongue is broken in
silence, and that instant a light fire rushes
beneath my skin, I can no longer see anything in
my eyes and my ears are thundering, And cold
sweat pours down me, and shuddering grasps me all
over, and I am greener than grass, and I seem to
myself to be little short of death But all is
endurable, since even a poor man
Attic red-figure vase, 470 BC
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Female Poets

• Insights into womens lives importance of other
  women, festivals, household games
• Poems written to goddesses
• Sappho most famous female poet

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Comedy
Aristophanes
Are the women in Aristophanes plays more
realistic depictions of women?
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Law Courts
Against Neaera, Mid-fourth century Apollodorus Th
e Murder of Eratosthenes, Fourth-century Lysias
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Who were the women of Ancient Greece?

• You are making a presentation on this topic to
  the Coventry History Society what are the three
  most important things they MUST know about?
• You have 5 mins to prepare!

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Material Culture

• Images of women limited in elite arts
  sculpture, stela, coins and gems
• More variety in affordable art vase painting,
  small-scale terracotta figurines
• The Greeks didnt have art for arts sake
  everything had to have a function

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Women in Sculpture
The Lady of Auxerre, mid-7th century
Copy of the Aphrodite of Knidos, original 350-340
BC
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Women on Pots
Attic red-figure skyphos
Attic red-figure cup
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Households
Loom weight
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Women in Religion
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Source Questions

• How does the purpose of this text/sculpture
  effect its representation of reality?
• What are the potential issues with this source?
• What insights into the world of ancient Greek
  woman does this source provide?

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Herodotus

• In their manner and customs the Egyptians seem
  to have reversed the ordinary practices of
  mankind. For instance, women go to the market and
  engage in trade, while men stay home and do the
  weaving. The Histories, 2.35

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