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Greek Attitudes Towards Women: The Mythological Evidence1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

P. Walcot
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Extract

Students today demand that what they are taught or what they discuss is ‘socially relevant’. A topic appears to exhibit social relevance when it is related to some issue currently reckoned important and the subject of controversy. No topic at present is thought more socially relevant than the role of women in society. Extra-mural students can vote with their feet as undergraduates cannot, and it is significant how regularly the brochures of university extra-mural departments in Britain have come to feature courses with titles such as ‘Women's Studies’, ‘New Horizons for Women’, ‘Images of Women’, and ‘Women Speak’. Teachers of Classics have not been reluctant to devise their own courses on women in antiquity, and it is my impression that no university in North America is without a course of this type, while postgraduate seminars covering the same field of interest seem to have become firmly established throughout Western Europe. Books, articles, and notes on women and ancient society abound, and the resultant bibliography grows more and more daunting each year.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 31 , Issue 1 , April 1984 , pp. 37 - 47
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1984

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References

Notes

2. An updated version of the bibliography published in Arethusa 6 (1973)Google Scholar is to appear early in 1984 in Women in the Ancient World: the Arethusa Papers (S.U.N.Y. Press Classical Series). The two studies since 1973 which students are likely to find most helpful are Just, Roger, ‘Conceptions of Women in Classical Athens’, Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford 6 (1975), 153–70Google Scholar and Gould, John, ‘Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens’, JHS 100 (1980), 38–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Femme et Mythe (Paris, 1982)Google Scholar by Georges Devereux consists of a number of papers written from very much the point of view of a Freudian (see G & R 31 (1984), 103–4)Google Scholar.

3. The evidence is conveniently collected by M. L. West in his note on verse 698 of his edition, Hesiod, Works and Days (Oxford, 1978)Google Scholar.

4. An example of the wealthy flouting convention is provided by the Athenian Callias who, according to Herodotus (6.122), allowed his daughters to choose their own husbands. As for the poor, note Aristotle's question, ‘Who could prevent the wives of the poor from going out when they want to?’ (Politics, 1300a).

5. Il. 14. 159ff. and Od. 8.339–42.

6. See Eur, . Medea, 244–7Google Scholar and Electro, 1036–40.

7. See Il. 14.294–6, lines which emphasize the desirability of marrying a daughter off as soon as possible.

8. See Feldman, Thalia, Arion, Autumn 1965, 493–4 n. 10Google Scholar. Cf. also Glenn, Justin, G &R 25 (1978), 141–55Google Scholar. On women in Greek myth and psychoanalysis, see Farber, Ada, Psychoanalytic Review 62 (1975), 29–47Google Scholar.

9. Frag. 275 (Merkelbach-West). This myth is discussed in detail by Brisson, Luc, Le Mythe de Tiresias (Leiden, 1976)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see also Gual, Carlos Garcia, Emerita 43 (1975), 107–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

10. See Tourraix, A., Dialogues d'Histoire Ancienne 2 (1976), 369ff.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

11. Thus Bisset, K. A., G&R 18 (1971), 150Google Scholar. The latest consideration of the Amazons by a feminist writer is duBois, Page, Centaurs and Amazons (Ann Arbor, 1982)Google Scholar.

12. For the female breast as an erotic object, see Gerber, Douglas E., Arethusa 11 (1978), 203–12Google Scholar.

13. Myth and Thought among the Greeks (London, Boston, Melbourne, and Henley, 1983), pp. 127ff.Google Scholar My quotation is taken from pp. 133–4.

14. Cf. Bodkin, Maud, Archetypal Patterns in Poetry (Oxford, paperback edition 1963), pp. 153ff.Google Scholar

15. See Gow's, A. S. F. note on verse 106f. in his edition, Theocritus (Cambridge, 1950)Google Scholar.

16. See Lloyd-Jones, Hugh, Femalesofthe Species, Semonides on Women (London, 1975) online 53 (pp. 77–8)Google Scholar.

17. Cf. North, Helen F., Illinois Classical Studies 2 (1977), 36–7Google Scholar.

18. Still of interest as a survey of ‘ancient apicultural lore’ is Whitfield, B. G., G&R 3 (1956), 99–117Google Scholar; rather more exciting is Detienne, Marcel in Myth, Religion and Society (Cambridge and Paris, 1981), pp. 95–109Google Scholar, who remarks that ‘the Greek conception of the bee (melissa) was based on a model which, in essential features, remained unchanged for over fifteen centuries. The melissa was distinguished by a way of life which was pure and chaste and also by a strictly vegetarian diet (compare the Amazons?) … the bee showed a most scrupulous purity; not only did it avoid rotting substances and keep well away from impure things, but it also had the reputation of extreme abstinence in sexual matters’ (p. 98).