 Introduction of Feminism in Greek Literature This is a LibriVox recording. All LibriVox recordings are in the public domain. For more information or to volunteer, please visit LibriVox.org Recording by Beth Thomas Feminism in Greek Literature by Frederick Adam Wright Introduction There is a question sometimes put to scholars, a doubt often latent in scholars' minds. How was it that Greek civilisation with all its high ideals and achievements fell so easily before what seems at first sight an altogether inferior culture? The difficulty is not solved by reference to military resources or administrative skill, for moral strength is the only thing that matters in history, and a nation has never yet succeeded merely by pure intellect or by brute force. The fact is, and it is as well to state it plainly, that the Greek world perished from one main cause, a low ideal of womanhood, and a degradation of women, which found expression both in literature and in social life. The position of women and the position of slaves for the two classes went together, were the canker spots which, left unhealed, brought about the decay first of Athens and then of Greece. For many centuries in Ionia and Athens there was an almost open state of sex war. At Miletus a woman never sat at table with her husband, for he was the enemy with whom bread must not be broken. At Athens, while all the men went free, women were kept as slaves, and a stranger in the harem might be killed at sight. The sexes were sharply separated, men and women had but few opportunities for mutual esteem and affection, and domestic life, the life of the home, the wife and the children, was poisoned at its source. The causes and results of this war, far worse than any faction or civil strife, are lamentable enough. Its manifestations in ancient literature are perhaps even more important, for it is hard to say how far current opinions of feminine disabilities are not unconsciously due to the long line of writers, Greek and Latin, from Simonides of Amorgos in the seventh century before Christ to juvenile in the second century of our era, who used all their powers of rhetoric and literary skill to encourage and depreciate womankind. In the whole deplorable business men were in the wrong, and they therefore took the aggressive. They applied to women the comforting doctrine of Aristotle, that some people were slaves because they were made by nature to be slaves. Women were men's moral inferiors, and therefore it was men's duty to keep them down. At Sparta certainly, and perhaps in North Greece, women occupied a very different place. Sparta and women were regarded as free human beings, and the relations between the sexes were inestimably better than at Athens. But Sparta, Thessaly, Macedonia have no direct representation in Greek literature. We get their point of view only in the writings of some Athenians, such as Plato and Xenophon, who rebelled against the current institutions of their state, and in the Alexandrian poets Apollonius and Theocritas, who even in the midst of the luxurious city kept some of the freshness of their native hills. Most of the great writers came from Ionia or from Athens. The Ionians are nearly all misogynists and have succeeded in colouring many parts of the Homeric poems with their perverse immorality. The typical Athenian, and those foreigners who found their ideal in Athens, Herodotus, Sophocles, Thucydides, and the Orators, usually treat women as a negligible quantity. Escalus was an original thinker, and in this, as in many ways, took a different view from most of his countrymen. But it is not until we come to Euripides that we get the woman's side of the case definitely stated. Euripides ventured to doubt man's infallibility. He put the doctrine of the nobility of man as he put the other doctrines of the nobility of race and the nobility of war to the touchstone of a really critical intelligence. And he came to a conclusion very different from that which is expressed by the great majority of his predecessors. Upon his own generation, Euripides had a profound effect. Socrates, Aristophanes, Plato, and Xenophon are all feminists in varying degrees, and a fairly full statement of feminist doctrine may be found in their works. But the idealists did not win the day. It is true that women were never so degraded, in European civilisation at least, after Euripides' time as they had been before, but his teaching did not bear its full fruit. Aristotle, the supreme type of the practical mind, threw all the weight of his unexampled influence into the other scale, and the Aristotelian view of the natural inferiority of women prevailed. So that the poets of Ionia, Libertines, and Prophlegates as most of them were find their work completed by the philosopher of Staguerus. Greek is the source from which most Roman writers drew their inspiration, and although the position of the Roman matron honoured as the mother of the household was infinitely higher than that of the too often childless Athenian wife, there is still an undercurrent of misogyny which permeates Latin literature and finds its fullest expression in juvenile. All the venom of earlier writers is collected by the satirist who adds the bitterness of his own bile seasoned with the highly coloured rhetoric which the Romans loved, and finally, with infinite zest, disgorges the mixture in the six hundred lines of the sixth satire. But even as Aristotle sums up the final tendencies of Greek literature, so juvenile represents almost the last effort of the anti-feminist school at Rome. The Christianity of the East and the Romance of the North were already beginning to modify the gross surrealism of the Mediterranean world, and towards the end of the second century the reaction came when the Greek genius gave to the world the last, and perhaps the most fruitful, of all its gifts in literature, the romantic novel. Longus, in the Daphnis and Chloe, strikes a new note, and his hero is perhaps the first gentleman in matters of the affections that we find in ancient literature. The barbarian invasions soon came to devastate the land, but Longus had sown the seed, and he is the true father of all the love romances of medieval chivalry. As Norsica is the first, so Chloe is almost the last of ancient heroines, and Greek literature, by a curious turn of fate, ironical enough considering its general tendency, ends as it begins with the praise of the perfect maiden. End of introduction. The Early Epic Any discussion of Greek literature must begin with Homer, although as regards women and the social position, the epic in its first form, stands somewhat aloof from the general current of ancient thought. The Homeric poems are in a very real sense the Greek Bible, for they represent a standard of morality, which in many respects is far higher than that which prevailed at Athens in the great era of Greek history, and they picture a state of society from the complex civilisation of the city-state. It must be remembered that the Homeric poems were not written to suit the taste of the old Mediterranean people, who, if we may trust the evidence of archaeology and certain signs in their language, had but a low code of sexual morality, and were inclined to regard women as mere instruments of pleasure. The epic in its original shape was composed for Achaean chiefs who came down into Greece from central Europe, and in sexual matters were rather of the Scandinavian type. But the Achaeans were only a small ruling class, and were soon assimilated by the conquered peoples, whose language they adopted. A second tide of invasion by the northern tribes called Dorian led to somewhat more permanent results, but the original Mediterranean race was always far superior in numbers, and unless intermarriage was prohibited by law, it was only a matter of time for the primary racial type to reappear. Hence the interest of Greek history, which is one long process of interblending and change, the renaissance of the conquered and the gradual disappearance of the conquerors. Hence also the difference of view in all feminist matters between Homer and much of the later Greek literature. The Odyssey especially, which, though perhaps later in composition than the original Iliad, has been less worked over and received fewer editions, is based on an entirely different idea of women's position from that which was held after the 7th century BC. Samuel Butler's theory that the Odyssey was composed by a woman, perhaps Norsikeia herself, is hardly capable of exact proof. But at any rate, women in the Odyssey are never degraded as they are in many of the later passages of the Iliad, and the one lewd passage, the first lay of Domoticus in Bouquet, the loves of Ares and Aphrodite, is a plain interpolation and a clumsy one at that. Women indeed pull the strings in the Odyssey. The goddess Athena, the nymphs Calypso and Cersei, and the mortals Penelope and Norsikeia are the principal actors in the drama. With both these latter there are traces of the old German custom of Muterecht. The kingship of the tribe seems to go on the woman's side. The claimants to Odysseus' chieftainship seek it through his wife. Norsikeia is the only daughter and her marriage is of importance to all the tribe. So Calypso and Cersei are represented as island queens, living in independent sovereignty and normally unconcerned with male companionship. Odysseus is to both very much in the position of a prince consort, and, being an active man, suffers severely from lack of occupation and lack of power. Athena is the guiding spirit of the whole action and takes a motherly interest in the hero, but otherwise she is pure intelligence, superior to man, and quite free from any desire for man's society. The women of the Odyssey follow her lead and have little trace of that over-sexuality which is ascribed by later writers to all women as a natural trait. It cannot be said that the wise Penelope shows any womanish weakness in her constant love. She bears her husband's absence with resignation and maintains his authority intact during a period of twenty years. On his return she is by no means over-anxious to recognize him. When the nurse tells her of the slaughter of the suitors by Odysseus she calls her a fool and threatens her with punishment for disturbing a busy woman with idle tales. Telemachus chides her for a wilful stubbornness. Odysseus dresses himself in royal raiment but fails to make any impression. And finally, in disgust, calls to the nurse to make him up a bed so that he may go off and sleep by himself for, says he, this woman has a heart of iron in her breast. When at last she is convinced she explains that her hesitation has been due to a well-founded distrust of men and their wiles and she is content to let her husband go off the very next morning to visit the old laertes. Again, Norsicaea has no traces of the timid shyness which is counted a virtue among harem women. She faces the half-naked Odysseus boldly as he comes from the bush where he has been hiding like a lion of the hills rained upon and buffeted by the wind and his eyes are ablaze and in all her dealings with him she is a charming mixture of generosity and caution. Moreover, the morality of the Odysseus in all sexual matters is very high and if it is not offensive to say so it is women's morality. There is very little appeal to the sensual man and although Calypso and Cersei were by later writers taken as types of the voluptuous female their fascination in the Odyssey is left entirely to the imagination and they are pictured as industrious housewives. The description is the same for both singing in a sweet voice within doors as she walked to and fro before the loom. Little or nothing is said of any physical attraction they may have possessed. So with the punishment meted out the story to the maid servants who had accepted the embraces of the suitors. First they carry out the corpses of their dead lovers then they wash and cleanse the bloody floor and finally they are hanged, twelve of them together like thrushes or doves caught in a snare and they struggled with their feet for a little while but not for long. It is one of the few ruthless passages in the poem. There is no tendency here to err on the side of indulgence to the sins of the flesh and for such sins harsher measure is dealt out to the woman than to the man. But as significant as anything of the gulf between the Odyssey and later Greek literature is the treatment of the two famous sisters Helen and Clytemnestra. Helen to the later Greeks the type of the wanton appears in the Odyssey as the faithful wife respected and self-respecting of King Menelaus. She lives in his palace busy with domestic duties and when she thinks of the past it is to rejoice over her return home and escape from Troy where she says I used to mourn over the cruel fate which Aphrodite sent upon me when she'd led me from my beloved country leaving behind me my daughter my home and my husband dear who lacked nothing of perfection in mind or in body. It is a very different picture from that of Paris's mistress as we have her in later stories flying with a foreign youth from her lawful lord and betraying her to fond master. So Clytemnestra after the lyric poets of the 7th and 6th centuries had worked up her story is that most dreadful figure to King Man the Regicide the woman who dares by craft and guile to kill the man set over her as ruler. In all the later stories it is Clytemnestra who arranges the details of Agamemnon's death the bath, the enveloping robe and the axe it is she who deals the fatal blow while her lover, Aegisthus is a cowardly non-entity entirely under the dominion of the woman. But in the Odyssey the story is very different it is told twice by Agamemnon to Odysseus in Hades and by Nestor to Telemachus at Pylos and this last version is significant enough to be given word for word We Greeks, says Nestor were lingering over there at Troy and many a task did we fulfill. But he, Aegisthus at his ease in the quiet valleys of Argos where the horses feed tried to beguile the wife of Agamemnon with soft words At first of course fair Clytemnestra refused to do the shameful thing for she was a woman of honest heart. Moreover there was with her a minstrel whom Agamemnon, when he went to Troy had bidden to protect his wife but soon the fate of heaven encompassed the minstrel and brought him to his death for Aegisthus took him to a desert island and left him there a pray for the birds to tear us under As for the queen he willing and she willing he led her to his house and many a sacrifice did he offer to the gods when he had done that great deed which never in his heart had he expected to accomplish such as the passage and the last two sentences are a literal translation of the lines which appear thus in Pope's version then Virtue was no more her guard away she fell to lust a voluntary prey even to the temple stalk to the adulterous spows with impious thanks and mockery of vows for these are the dangers of poetical translation but more important than any single character or episode is the general impression given by the whole poem and it may fairly be said that the entire framework of the odyssey presupposes a condition of society in which women are regarded as not in the least quare women inferior to men in the Iliad things are different and the poem as we have it now gives us three distinct pictures of women's position in life the original epic The Wrath of Achilles has hardly any place for women at all that Achilles' anger has for its cause the woman Bryceus but Achilles is angry not at the loss of a woman whom he loves but at the loss of a piece of property which he knows by experience to be of considerable value and service Bryceus is a slave a thing, not a person in the whole Iliad she has only mentioned ten times and nine times out of those ten she has merely cataloged as an article of value with the slave dealer's epithet fair cheeked attached but this is hardly surprising all the earlier portions of the Iliad are primarily lays of battle they are antisocial and woman has no part or lot in them the Iliad however is built up of many different strata and one stratum by no means the least important was contributed by a poet who understood and sympathised with women in thought and language the author of the Odyssey and he is probably responsible for the one passage in the poem where Bryceus appears as a human being and makes lament over the dead body of Patroclus a speech which served of it as the groundwork where from, with many embellishments he expands the letter in the heroines from the same hand as Bryceus' speech comes the supreme scene of the parting between Hector and Andromache and passages of the Iliad the ransoming of Hector and the lamentation of the women his wife, his mother and Helen over the corpse no one can read the Iliad without feeling that the moral spirit of all these passages is of a very different and of a very much higher quality than the brutality of the earliest lays and the loose cynicism of the last editions to the poem which we shall have next to consider end of section 1 in Greek literature there is a gap of centuries and when the curtain goes up again on Greek history at the end of the 8th century the centre of civilisation is in Asia Minor the coast towns and their adjacent islands the period of fighting invasions and tribal migrations is over there has been a revival of the old Minoan culture the Greeks have become a nation of traders living in luxurious cities such as Miletus and Mitilini politically they are dependent on the great eastern land empires and from the east they have taken ideas which vitally affect the position of women the first of these may be stated thus a woman, even a free born woman is the property of the man who is her husband the second which follows from this is that love between man and his property being absurd romantic affection is only conceivable between men between man and woman it is impossible to ideas the first which involve the seclusion of women and the harem system was only partially applied in ancient Greece it flourished in Ionia and at Athens during the great period of her history but it never took root in Sparta or in the chief cities of Hellenistic civilisation its corollary however spread fatally from Asia to Greece and from Greece to Italy it lasted for many centuries and tended to destroy all romantic love between the two sexes and very often all the ordinary comfortable affection which may exist without romance between husband and wife the sexes drew apart the man immersed in war and politics and absent from his home most of his life had little experience of woman as a thinking animal and unfamiliarity, bred contempt as happened again later in the world's history under the very different conditions of monastic life the natural social intercourse between men and women was artificially hampered and the inevitable crop of errors and perversions followed but the monks in their dislike of women were at least ostensibly inspired by a strict code of sexual morality a good deal of Ionian literature as for one of its objects a desire to defend the perverted sexual instinct which was the curse of ancient life of this sort are the stories of Ganymede, the young Asiatic taken up to heaven by the ruler of the sky and displacing the maiden Hebe and of Hylas the minion of Heracles whose beauty brought him to his death Narcissus and Hyacinthus are persons of the same type while the heroes of this kind of literature Jason, Heracles and Theseus reserve all their fine and chivalrous feelings for men and regard women as a kind of booty to be won if possible by fraud if fraud is ineffective by the judicious use of force Jason deserts Medea in favor of a younger and richer woman Heracles leaves his wife to Rome abroad capturing by force any woman that pleases him Theseus spends his life in betraying women and in his old age marries Faida, the young sister of Ariadne but their exploits do not at all detract from the heroic character of the three worthy's for it is now recognized that women are vile creatures who deserve vile treatment and so we have a second class of tale invented to illustrate the innate viciousness of the female sex there is the story of pacify and the minotaur Mira and Adonis Lida and the swan Europa and the bull and so on and so on the same frame of mind that invented these tales ascribed to Sappho all kinds of unnatural vice degraded Helen into a wanton and Penelope into a shrew and made it seem only logical that women, being the creatures they were should be kept prisoners in Aharim and confined to child bearing that indispensable function being indeed the main reason for their being allowed to exist at all the tales of pacify, Lida and Europa however though useful enough in their way are a little crude and we have a more artistic method employed in the passages which about this time were incorporated into the Iliad by Ionian poets with the idea of degrading the whole conception of the two divinities who represent womanly love Hera and Aphrodite Hera, the goddess of married life the wife in her divine aspect is represented by these decadence as an interfering termigant spying upon her husband and seeking always to thwart him in the enjoyment of his legitimate lusts and caprices Aphrodite, the goddess of unrestrained physical passion becomes a calculating courtesan the method pursued is that same kind of false realism which has supplied our comic stage with the well-worn themes of the old maid and the mother-in-law and it need hardly be said that it harmonizes very badly with the romantic splendor of the epic lays the heroic examiter gives for our ears an air of nobility even to this stuff but in its essence it is colloquial style of a rather tawdry sort and one or two passages will illustrate its character the last hundred lines of book one of the Iliad an episode altogether out of harmony with the rest of the book Thetis has come to us Zeus to avenge her son Hera knows of her visit and this is the language she uses to her husband you crafty one you know it's true who of the gods pray has been plotting with you again you know that it is what you like to get away from me and to make up your mind without me keeping your plans secret you have the decency to tell me outright what you mean to do her husband, being a male is far more reasonable in his tone you must not expect to know all my business, my dear it would be too hard for you, you know though you are my wife and so on gently putting her in her inferior place but Hera refuses to listen to reason what do you mean by that, she cries I have been only too ready in the past not to ask questions I have left you at your ease you have done what you liked and she proceeds to disclose her well-founded suspicions until Zeus, giving up any further appeals to her better feelings, tells her bluntly to sit still and do what she has told if not all the gods in heaven you know won't be of any use to you when I come close and lay my irresistible hands upon you a further edifying touch is given by the well-meant intervention of Hera's lame son, Hephaestus and the scene closes with the unquenchable laughter of the blessed gods another similar episode is the passage in Book 14 known as the beguiling of Zeus or as we might say the tricked husband Hera, it begins, saw her husband sitting on Mount Ida and appalled the sight of him the story can be condensed by omitting all the ornamental epithets in terms of phrase which are used to give a very un-epic passage and epic colouring and it runs somewhat like this though she detests her lord she still has to consider how to get the better of him and she decides to dress herself in her finest she goes accordingly to her bower with its close shut doors and its secret key fastens the bolt and begins an elaborate toilet it is a sure sign of the odour list that perfumes, jewellery adornment of every kind are lavished upon her by the very men who really regard her as a chattel the description that follows reads like a passage in the Arabian Nights themselves probably a product of the same kind of Greek genius as compose these portions of the Iliad every detail is lovingly dwelt upon first with Ambrosia the author hardly troubles himself about what Ambrosia really is and uses it as a sort of trade word she washes her lovely skin and then she anoints herself with oil an extra-Ambrosial sort and then she perfumes for her then she combs her hair and twists it into bright, beautiful Ambrosial curls next comes the Ambrosial robe with dainty patterns upon it pinned across the chest by golden brooches and the corset belt with its hundred tassels and finally the earrings shining brightly with their three pendants the goddess is now ready except for the last two articles of a Greek ladies toilet the yashmack veil and the sandals being abroad she puts them on and calls upon Aphrodite being a woman she begins with a circumlocution dear child she says I wonder whether you will say yes or no to what I have to ask Aphrodite invites her to be a little more plain and the crafty hero then enters into an elaborate and entirely false explanation she wants to borrow the magic cestus of Aphrodite in order to reconcile Oceanus matrimonial affairs have been going so badly that they are now occupying separate rooms if I could only get them together she says they would ever afterwards call me their friend whether Aphrodite believes the story or not is best left unsaid but she at once consents it is not possible or proper to refuse you for you sleep in the arms of the mighty Zeus and she hands her the cestus with all its magic powers in it are love and desire and sweet dalliance and alluring words which rob even the wise of their wits then with mutual smiles they separate all through the passage it will be noticed there is a good deal of talk about magic the same sort of magic as we get in the Arabian knights but the effect of the cestus is really quite independent of any supernatural aid it was an article such as may be seen today advertised in a fashion paper a sutien groj and it produced that development of the female bust and general appearance of embon poin which has always seemed to eastern nations the ideal of feminine beauty binding the cestus then under her breast here it goes off to pay her next visit to the god sleep whom she begs to send Zeus into a deep slumber for this service she promises the god a beautiful golden chair something quite unbreakable with a footstool attached but sleep raises difficulties he has tried a similar trick on Zeus before at the lady's request and when the god awoke he was very violent and sleep would have been thrown out of heaven into the sea had not mother night interfered to save him infine a chair even a golden chair is not a sufficient reward for such a dangerous task here it accordingly raises her offer from a chair to a woman and promises him one of the younger graces as his bedfellow Zeus agrees to help the pair go to Mount Ida sleep changes himself into a bird to watch the scene of beguiling and Hera reveals herself to Zeus as soon as the god sees her he asks where she is going and she repeats again the story of Oceanus and Tethys' misadventures and her projected intervention but the god tells her brusquely like a real master of the harem that he needs her presence and that she can go there another day with a maximax of good taste he recites the long list of his mistresses beginning with Ixion's wife and ending with Leto to this impassioned love-making worthy of Don Juan himself Hera, the crafty replies at first with an affectation of modesty but the scene ends with the god in her arms her purpose is accomplished and man once again is beguiled Dr. Leif finds the passage full of healthy sensuousness but to other readers it will seem thoroughly unpleasant both in its sentiment and in its language for example the horrible reiteration of Tui Montserie at the end of Hera's speech of invitation still it is a valuable document the brutal god and the crafty goddess are plainly the poet's ideals of man and woman his ideals are very low these two passages from the Iliad may serve as specimens of the second method of attack a sarcastic depreciation under the guise of realism of which we have some further examples in Hesiod the strange medley that now bears his name is in the same position as the Iliad there is much ancient wisdom in which woman has little part get first a house and then a woman and then a plowing ox and there are also many passages plainly inspired by the new Ionian spirit the few facts that we know of Hesiod's life is that he was an Ionian poet who migrated to Biosia and incorporated into his verse the ancient law of the country much of it as old as anything we have in Greek literature Hesiod's father was a merchant who lived at Chimi on the coast of Asia Minor the son passed most of his life at Ascra but of his life we know little of his death a good deal he had a friend, a citizen of Miletus who came to stay with him in Greece the two Ionians travelling together were entertained by one Fegius a citizen of Lochris they repaid his hospitality by seducing his daughter the girl committed suicide and her brothers taking the law into their own hands avenged her ruin by killing both Hesiod and his friend who indeed was said to have been the chief culprit this tale which is by far the best authenticated fact in Hesiod's life does not give us a very pleasant impression as to the poet's capacity for passing judgement on women and probably the details of the Pandora myth are his own invention the story itself is very old but as told by Hesiod it has all the sham epic machinery while it is linked on to the ancient fable of Prometheus to revenge the gift of fire to men Zeus resolves to make a woman I will give them an evil thing he says every man in his heart will rejoice therein and hug his own misfortune accordingly Hephaestus mixes the pace and fashions the doll Athena gives her skill in weaving Aphrodite sheds charm about her head and baleful desire and passion that eats away the strength of men finally Hermes gives her a dog's shameless mind and thieving ways then the doll is dressed with kirtle and girdle chains of gold are hung about her body spring flowers put upon her head and she is sent down to earth a sheer and hopeless delusion to be the bane of men who work for their bread Epimetheus takes her to wife and when he had got her then and only then did he know the evil thing he possessed so the tale of Pandora ends and the story of the jar although it comes next in the works and days is not certainly connected with her history it is a woman but not necessarily Pandora who takes the lid from the jar of evil things and lets them fly free over the world so that only one curse now remains constant that curse it will be remembered is Elpis not so much hope as the gambler's belief in luck it is the idea that things must change for the better if you will only risk all your fortune that the laws of the universe will be providentially altered for your benefit the belief in fact that so often makes the elderly misogynist take a young wife such is Hesiod's attitude towards women and with Hesiod the first stage of Greek literature comes to an end end of section 2 of the literature of the 7th and 6th centuries before Christ the lyric, iambic and elegiac poetry we have only inconsiderable fragments there are two reasons for the disappearance in the case of the greatest names Alcheas and Sappho the Romans preferred the adaptations of Horus to the originals with most of the other poets and poets the Romans preferred the adaptations of Horus to the originals with most of the other poets the general standard of morality in their verse is so low that they fell under the ban of the early church and as we know unreasonably enough in her case Sappho was included with them and her poems publicly burnt but in the fragments that we do possess there appears unmistakably the same mixture of sensual desire and cynical distaste for women which disfigures the late epic until in this period it ends in sheer misogyny in nothing is Aristotle's great doctrine of the golden mean more valuable than in matters of sex the sexual appetite is as natural as the appetites of eating and drinking and is necessary for that which is nature's sole concern the preservation of the species if the sexual appetite is wholly starved the result is disastrous to the race as the total deprivation of food and drink would be to the individual if it is unduly fostered nature revenges herself in the same way as she does upon those who exceed in the matter of food or drink and abnormal perversities of every kind begin in sex matters the normal man and woman alone should be considered the father and the mother of a family and their opinion alone is of any real value unfortunately in literature and especially in this Ionian literature the normal person is the exception and most of the writers we now have to consider seem to have been unmarried and childless the paucity of material probably no great loss either in an artistic or a moral sense has obscured the facts but there seems little doubt that in this period literature was definitely used for the first time in the book the Iambic meter was invented for the express purpose of satirical Columny and the three chief Iambic poets of the Alexandrian canon Archilochus, Simonides and Hipponax in their scanty fragments all agree on one point the chief object of their lampoon is woman at the beginning of this period the two sexes are fairly equal in their opportunities the female is plainly the inferior Sappho and Arana mark the turning point in literature living at a time when it had not been made impossible for women to write they showed that a woman could equal or surpass the male poets of her day the few fragments of Arana's verse that we possess e.g. the epigram on the portrait of Agatharchus and the pathetic elegy on the dead Bausus reveal a talent at least as fine and as strong as that of Alcheas while of all the Greek lyricists Sappho, both in reputation and as far as we can judge in actual achievement holds by far the highest place later ages indeed found it difficult to believe that Sappho was a woman at all the scandal of male gossip was inspired by a genuine and pathetic belief that such a genius as hers must at least have been touched with masculine vices and Sappho's writings, which are our only real evidence there is nothing distinctively mannish she is neither gross nor tedious in the technique of her art metrical skill the music of verse she is at least the equal of any poet who has lived since her day in thought and diction she is far superior to all of her contemporaries in dealing with the Ionian poetry exact dates are impossible but the lyric age extends roughly from the middle of the 7th to the middle of the 6th century the earliest writer in order of time and in some ways the most important is Archelochus the burns or villain of Greece Outlaw, soldier of fortune poet the first man to introduce his own personal feelings into literature Archelochus had his own special reasons for hating women Archelochum proprio and as he says he had learned the great lesson if anyone hurts you hurt her in return betrothed to Cleabule the daughter of a wealthy citizen of Paros he found his marriage forbidden by the lady's father like Cambys the father's reasons may be guessed even from the few fragments of Archelochus that still remain but the poet turned abruptly from amorist to misogynist he spent the rest of his life in railing against his lost mistress and womankind in general both in love and war he is uncompromisingly frank he tells us how he threw away his shield beside the bush in battle but doos take the shields I will get another just as good and at any rate I have escaped from death his love poems are equally free-spoken it is the actual image of his mistress that torments him when he cries with myrtle boughs and roses fair she used to delight herself and again all her back and shoulders were covered by the shadow of her hair but to his fierce spirit such love brings little comfort wretch that I am like a dead man I lie captive to desire pierced with cruel anguish through all my bones and the longing that takes the strength from a man's limbs I have lost her beauty no longer does your soft flesh bloom fair even as dry leaves it begins to wither like all women she is false and full of guile in one hand she carries waltz I have lost her beauty I have lost her beauty I have lost her beauty I have lost her beauty in one hand she carries water in the other the fire of craft to marry a woman now is to take to one's house manifest ruin the folly of men and the falsity of women seem to have been the themes of the animal stories which archelocus like asop composed woman is the fox man is now the eagle now the ape but the fragments are too short for a certain judgment what remains indeed of archelocus is always tantalizing in its incompleteness of his epigrams for example only three are left here's a free translation of one of them miss high and mighty as soon as she became a wedded wife kicked her bonnet over the moon fortunately however we have preserved for us in herodotus a much longer specimen of archelocus's manner a real malesian tale the story of juggies and kendallies the tale is handed down to us in herodotus's prose and it is impossible to disentangle the shares contributed by the Ionian poet and the Ionian historian nor is it necessary the story is typical of both kendallies makes the initial mistake of being enamored of his own wife and the second mistake of not believing juggies when he is enlightened on the subject of female modesty his folly naturally brings him to a bad end the story is interesting but it is especially significant when we compare it with the tale of the same juggies as told by Plato there the sensual elements disappear the interest centers on the magic ring and the seduction of the queen and murder of the king for merely the hasty conclusion of the narrative the difference between the two stories is the measure of the difference between the feminist philosopher and the libertine turned woman hater but Archilochus at least has once loved a woman our next poet Simonides of Amorgos seems to have been a misogynist from birth his work now only exists in fragments but it is so significant of a frame of mind that the two longest passages that survive deserve a verbatim translation the first runs thus women they are the greatest evil that God ever created even if they do appear to be useful at times they usually turn out a curse to their owners a man who lives with a wife never gets through a whole day without trouble and it is no easy matter for him to drive away from his house that fiend abhorred the foul fiend hunger moreover just when a man is thinking to be married at home by God's grace or man's service the woman always finds some ground of faults and puts on her armor for battle where there is a wife you can never entertain a guest without fear of trouble again the woman who seems to be most virtuous mind you may well be the most mischievous of all her husband gapes at her in admiration but his neighbors laugh to see him and the mistake he is making everyone will praise his own wife men are shrewed enough for that and then we'll talk scandal about his neighbors and all the time we do not realize that we are all in the same plight for as we said before this is the greatest evil that God ever created the other fragment the catalog of women is longer and better known it begins from the first God made women's characters different into one kind of woman he put the mind of a pig lank and bristly and in her house everything lies about in disorder bedraggled with mud and rolling on the floor while she herself unwashed in dirty clothes sits in the mire and waxes fat the second woman God made out of a mischievous fox she is cunning in all things alike she knows everything all that is bad and all that is good often her speech is fair but often it is evil and her mood changes every day the third sort of woman is a dog and she is the true child of her mother ever restless she wants to hear and know about everything she is always peering about and roaming around growling even though there is no one in sight a man cannot stop her with threats no not even if in sudden anger he break her teeth with a stone soft talk is useless too it is all the same even if she happened to be sitting among strangers a man finds her a continual and hopeless nuisance the fourth woman the gods in heaven made out of mud or rather they half made her and then gave her to man such a one knows nothing good or bad the only business she has sense enough for is eating even if god sends a bitter winter's day and she be shivering she never will draw her chair closer to the fire the fifth woman was made out of the sea and she has two minds within her one day she is all smiles and gladness a stranger seeing her in the house will praise her in all the world says he there is not a better or a fair lady but another day she is insupportable to look at or to approach she is filled with fury like a bitch guarding her cubs savage to all alike friends and foes detestable even so the sea often stands quiet and harmless a joy to sailors in the summer and often again is driven to madness by the thunderous waves it is to the sea that such a woman is most like the sixth woman was made from an ass gray of hide and stubborn against blows though you use reproaches and force it is with difficulty you get her to give way to you and do her work satisfactorily she is always eating day and night she eats in her bedroom she eats by the fireside approaches to make love to her she comes forward quickly enough to welcome him the seventh was made out of a pole cat a plaguey and grievous kind there is nothing fair or lovable in her nothing pleasant, nothing charming and any man who comes near she fills with nausea she is a thief and annoys her neighbors and often she gobbles up the sacrifice herself without offering any to the gods the eighth woman daughter of a mare stepping daintily with flowing mane she shutters at the thought of any servant's work or labor she will never lay her hand to the millstone nor lift up the sieve nor throw the dung out of doors she won't even sit near the kitchen stove because she is afraid of the soot and she makes her husband well acquainted with adversity every day, two or three times she washes every speck of dirt off her and annoys herself with ungence her hair is always luxuriant and well combed with garlands of flowers upon it of course such a woman is a fine sight for the men to see but she is a curse to her owner unless indeed he be a tyrant or a sceptred king who has a fancy to pride himself on such delights the ninth woman came from a monkey this sword is indeed preeminently the very greatest curse that god ever sent to men her features are shamefully ugly such a woman as she walks through a town is a mockery to all men she has a short neck and moves with difficulty she has no buttocks her legs are all bone alas for the poor wretch who holds such an evil thing in his arms but as for guile and tricks she knows them all and like a monkey she does not mind being laughed at she never renders anyone a service but all day long this is what she is seeking for how to do someone as much harm as she can the tenth woman was made out of a bee happy the man who gets her on her alone no breath of scandal lights but she brings a life of happiness and prosperity husband and wife grow old together in love and fair and glorious are her children famous among all woman is she and a grace divine encompasses her about she takes no delight in sitting with other women when they are telling body tales such woman is she are the best and wisest given by God to men all the other kinds are a bane to men and by God's decree a bane they will always be and so the fragment ends all this is pure misogyny but it is interesting to notice the special faults which our poet imputes to woman kind they are chiefly the two vices which a surly master will always find in his servants gluttony and idleness they work too little and eat too much we are far removed in this world from our feed the brute and it must be remembered that in a greek household the work was hard monotonous and continual there were no labor saving appliances for the hard work was chiefly done by women every mouth full of bread or porridge eaten in a greek home had come into the house as a sack the grain first it was winnowed and cleaned by hand then the grain was put into a small hand mill and by a laborious process of pestle and mortar it was ground into flour the flour was then made into dough kneaded and baked every process being attended with the maximum of manual labor and general inconvenience born by the woman of the house while the master strolled about the city so also with the clothes and fabrics every operation in their manufacture was done at home by the woman the master contented himself with buying the sheep skins and as theocritis lets us see often did that very badly which he then handed to his wife first the skins had to be washed and dried then the wool was cut off and carted then by a laborious process of spinning the wool was turned into yarn and finally on a hand loom into claw the same piece of stuff so excellent was the workmanship often serving for coat blanket and shroud it is obvious then that an idle wife if such a thing existed or a wife who ate more than her share of the laboriously prepared bread would be a great grief to her lord and master who was himself too busy with the higher work of politics to attend to such things and that the machinery of the household was very much out of gear it may well be that Simon Edes was unfortunate in his choice of a helpmate for as Hipponax the third of this company mournfully complains it is hard to get a wife who will both bring you a good dowry and then do all the work Hipponax if we may judge him by some 40 short fragments was a thoroughly disagreeable person he is always asking and being refused he varies complaints with abuse and right threats hold my coat he cries and I will knock out his eye I've got two right hands and I never miss when I throw on the subject of women he does not say so much as the other two for the range of his thought is almost confined to carnal delights a fair sample of his style is this fragment there are only two days in your life that your wife gives you pleasure the day you marry her the first instance on the physical side of love runs through all the elegiac and lyric poetry of the age love to Mim Nirmis is a thing of secret kisses of chambering and wantonness and it depends alone on physical attractions a young man is happy for he is handsome and desirable an old man is wretched to women an object of scorn the satiety that comes from excess of sensual pleasure is the main cause of melancholy pessimism that broods over much of Ionian literature a valcheus in his likeis an acreon in his bathilus theognes and searness it is unnecessary now to speak but it is difficult to believe such amiable apologists as Mr. Baneck when they tried to show that a fine idealism was the inspiration of these relationships neither the character of the men's writings nor that of their time and country are much ground for such confidence and if we seek the purity of love's passion we must turn to Saffo among all the foulness of her time Saffo shines out like a star no loss in literature is so lamentable as the loss of the nine books of her poems that the alexandrian library possessed no treasure in literature is quite so precious as the fragments that various chances have preserved for us and luckily the number of those fragments is still increasing as will be seen by comparison of the two best studies of Saffo in recent years the exquisite collection of translations issued by Mr. Wharton in 1886 and the brilliant monograph on the new fragments by Mr. J. M. Edmonds in 1912 even since that date fresh poems have come to light and we do not know what Egypt may have yet in store in all fragments, new or old there is an indefinable quality of personal feeling Saffo, it has been said has left us only a fragment of her work but it is a fragment of her soul her friend and rival Alcheas is a great poet but he lacks the fiery intensity of her inspiration which gives life even to the briefest phrase that some grammarian has quoted for a rare word take the lines that Rosetti adapted take the sweet apple a which reddens upon topmost bow a top on the topmost twig which the pluckers forget somehow forget it not nay but got it not for none could get it till now like the wild hyacinth flower which on the hills is found which the passing feet of the shepherds forever tear and wound until the purple blossom is trodden into the ground or again this other ground bereft of breath silent alone the closed shut tomb in full lethy to my songs thou wouldst not harken and songless shalt thou be thou wouldst not love me here on earth in death thou shalt loveless be Mr. Edmunds in his translations has kept much of the simple charm of the greek I have a little daughter rare that like the golden flowers fair my cleus wide no nor lovely grease beside for cleus and this a portion of a new fragment an often as her way she wanders an on gentle attis ponders with sad longing love oppressed her heart devours her tender breast till she cries in pain oh come to me for you and I know the burden of her cry since night which hath the myriad ears sense her word of what she hears across the severing main this tender simplicity is the soul of Sappho and in her verse even a few words will suggest a picture come to me oh love oh love the inheritor enter in everywhere is swept and garnished everything is prepared the fire of my heart burns brightly all my body is food for thee and on my bosom thou shalt sleep the long night through surely no one safe Sappho has touched so closely the heart love and poetry End of Chapter 3 Section 4 of Feminism in Greek Literature this is a LibriVox recording or LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for further information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org Feminism in Greek Literature by Frederick Adam Wright Chapter 4 The Mylesian Tales the chief characteristic of Ionian literature is a certain softness a kind of laxity of morals corresponding to a looseness of political organization the Ionian man was a convinced believer in freedom for himself but he was by no means a believer in the discipline which alone makes freedom possible both in sexual matters and in politics his desire for freedom and his desire for pleasure were constantly at cross purposes he wished to be independent of women but he was not meant by nature to be a monk and he purchased his apparent freedom by yielding to a sensuality far more degrading than that of women's love he wished to be independent of Persia but he was not a born soldier and he finally bought a pretense of autonomy by the payment of tribute to a persian sap trap forfeiting his manhood for the sake of peace the Ionians were indeed a strange medley of qualities and with them intellectual activity stood in sharp contrast with moral and physical sloth they were essentially a race of city dwellers for them the charm of the country and of nature had little attraction and their civilization found its most perfect expression during the 7th and 6th centuries in the splendid luxury of such towns as the Ionian Miletus in Asia Minor and the Achaean Sibiris in South Italy the two cities were closely connected by ties of trade and social intercourse in both places material prosperity led quickly to moral corruption and voluptuousness became the rule of life like Buenos Aires today Miletus and Sibiris were trading ports founded in a new country and the rapid growth of riches discouraged the manlier virtues the mixture of races was a danger the climate favoured voluptuous pleasures and the bracing stimulus of war was, until too late, absent the moral and sexual degradation that resulted from this unbridled pursuit of pleasure found its expression, as we have seen in literature the tale of Ganymede the episode of the tricked husband in the Iliad and the catalogue of women in Simonides and of fair examples of Ionian thought no one of the three has any moral value indeed a strict Puritan would probably refuse to let them soil his lips but they are at least decent enough to be written down in a literary form and to pass muster if they are not too closely examined there was, however, another and even less creditable class of story of which literary historians tell us little but which probably was first invented in such towns as Miletus and Sibiris in the 7th and 6th centuries during the time of their greatest prosperity the so-called Milesian tales usually circulating by word of mouth they endured for centuries and occasionally may have furtive appearance in history but their significance in sexual morality has not always been appreciated in dealing with them as literature we are confronted with a threefold difficulty firstly many of the typical specimens of this style were never written down at all secondly most of the stories that found a footing in literature were blotted out by the righteous indignation of Christian moralists thirdly in the case of the few that do survive it is neither possible nor desirable to introduce them to a modern audience but though they are the least estimable part of our inheritance from ancient literature their influence on ancient morals was very great and their tendency was so definitely to ruin any reasonable conception of sex relationships that they forced themselves into notice though sometimes written in prose their natural medium was the iambic measure invented by Archilicus and they were meant both for a male and female audience iambus the jester Pierrot and his female counterpart in iambi Pierrette who appears in the Homeric hymn to Demeter and by her capers forces the sad goddess to smile once more this is perhaps the one justification of the tales in their more innocent form they were intended to purge away that feeling of melancholy of which as the precursor of madness the Greeks were so much afraid by exciting the emotion of laughter just as tragedy affects the same purpose by exciting the emotions of pity and fear but this sort of humour in Athens and Ionia soon degenerated into coarseness and iambi her name now changed to baubo as we see her in the ritual statuette a woman sitting on a pig played a prominent and shameful part in the Ellucian mysteries of Demeter the worship of the soaring mother Meta Dolorosa was made the cloak for nameless obscenities the importance of religion was added to that of literature to degrade men's conception of women these are the sort of verses and images to which Aristotle eludes in the seventh book of the politics and this is one of the reasons for Plato's objection to poetry better no literature at all he thinks the literature degraded to these ends the worst type of mylesian or cybaritic tale was definitely meant to stimulate the animal passions and owed little to any qualities of humour or imagination the sense of artistic fitness which the Athenians always possessed kept this kind of stories out of written literature during the great period and confined them to the gossip of the perfumers and barbers shops but as soon as the decadence began these Ionian poems as Atheneus calls them became a recognised branch of letters and we hear of their chief practitioners writers of the facetii the hillarodii the simodi and the lyciodii among the more notorious authors were Simus the Magnesian Alexander the Aetolian Pyres the Mylesian and Sotides of Maronia who gives his name to that whole class of licentious writings which is represented in modern times by the sotadic satire of Nicolás Choré Sotides however did not confine himself to the comparatively safe pastime of libling women he ventured to rewrite lampoons upon Ptolemy Philadelphus and his sister Arsinoe was caught on the island where he had taken refuge put into a jar with the leaden top and drowned but the most famous or infamous of all the classes Aristides usually called but on very little evidence of Miletus who lived perhaps in the second century before Christ of the man in his book we have little direct knowledge but he was translated into Latin by Cicena the companion of Sulla in his voluptuous debauchery and copies of this version were found by the Parthians in the tents of the Roman officers after the Battle of Cahay even the Parthians as Plutarch tells us were disgusted by Aristides and Ovid tries to use him as a shelter for himself against the charge of immoral writing the Roman poet who, though a Libertine was at least free from some of the devices of his age, complains bitterly in his exile of the difference in treatment meted out to Aristides and himself Aristides was not banished he cries and yet he fathered all the scandalous stories of Miletus the authors amongst us who now put together Ciberitic stories go unpunished Ciberitic and Miletian were the descriptive adjectives used even in Ovid's time for this kind of writing and we can trace its popularity in Rome quotations are obviously impossible and indeed the genre does not depend on literary grace one author alone, Patronius, possesses sufficient skill to make it tolerable and the vile apportions of the satiricon are the most real examples of the literature that was inspired by Miletus and by Miletian ideas of womankind the natural coarseness of the Roman mind gave this sort of story a greater prominence than the Greeks ever allowed it will probably be correct to trace its first origin to the coast of Ionia in the seventh century and especially to the metropolis of the Ionian states from the beginning at Miletus the relations between men and women were notoriously bad and as Herodotus tells us they had some historical justification the first settlers at Miletus he says having no wives of their own killed the men and seized the women of the country on account of this massacre men established the law and imposed upon themselves an oath which they handed down to their daughters to this effect they should never eat at the same table with their husbands nor should any woman ever call her husband by his name for they had killed their fathers their husbands and their sons and after doing so had forced them to become their wives this is the first incident in the history of Miletus an episode not unlike the story of the Lemnian women in the chief city of Ionia enmity not love was the law between husband and wife domestic life was poisoned and literature caught the infection by action and reaction the mischief spread and it is impossible for us now fully to estimate its extent but we cannot doubt the effect that Ionian literature had in lowering men's estimate of women and thereby degrading all their ideals of social life the three great curses of Greek civilization sexual perversion infanticide and the harem system all come into prominence during the 6th century and there is good reason to believe that it was just at this time that the natural increase of population was checked and the slow process of race suicide begun if Ionia was the cradle of Greek culture as we know it from Ionia also came the germs of that moral disease which made a fatal counter-poise in the fantasy of Greece in the worst type of mylesian tale immorality takes its most revolting form but there was another and more pleasing form of story also invented in Ionia about this time which occasionally is called by the same title and is best known to us in the collection of Aesop's fables Aesop himself the lame slave who was made by tradition the fellow servant of the fair courtesan Rhodopis and so a contemporary of Sappho was more a real person than Homer and his name was used as a convenient shelter for two slightly different kinds of humorous story there were the well-known animal fables which are common to the whole Mediterranean and Asiatic world and in Aesop find a Greek dress and beside them a sort of humorous anecdote sometimes trivial, sometimes coarse but always strongly realistic they were especially popular at Athens tell them a funny tale of Aesop or of Sibiris a very old gentleman in Aristophanes' wasps something you heard at the club and later on in the play when Bedeliklion is intoxicated we get two specimens of the style like our limericks they are in verse with a cat refrained a woman at Sibiris once and Aesop one day and although they are not particularly humorous it must be remembered that they are the witticisms of a drunken man the first runs thus Aesop one night was going back from dinner when a bitch began to bark at him a bold drunken creature thereupon said he dear dear my good bitch if you were to sell that foul tongue of yours and buy some flour you would be more sensible the other is this a woman of Sibiris once broke a jug the jug got a friend to act as witness and laid a claim for damages thereupon the lady said by the virgin if you would let the lawyers alone buy some sticking plaster you would show more wisdom the fables of Aesop are now a nursery classic for like the Arabian knights and gullivers travels they have been turned by the kindly irony of time to a use which their authors hardly contemplated but in their mylesian shape there was always an underlying vein of satire even in the animal stories the male animals the eagle and the lion are brave and generous the females the fox and the weasel are cunning and treacherous moreover as we see in the Greek version of Babrius and the Latin of Faedrus separated though they'd be from the original by a gap of centuries there was a great deal of matter in the Aesopian stories which was plainly misogynistic as examples we may take from Babrius Fable 10 a man fell in love with an ugly dirty slave girl his own property and readily gave her all she asked she had her fill of gold fine purple robes trailing at her ankle and soon she began to rival the mistress of the house the goddess of love thought she is the cause of all this and she honoured her with votive tapers going every day to sacrifice and prayer with supplications and requests but at last the goddess came in a dream while they were asleep and appearing to the slave girl she said do not thank me or suppose that I have made you beautiful I am angry with that fellow there and so he thinks you fair belief in women's beauty we see is mere infatuation and so is belief in their truth as number 16 shows a country nurse once threatened a whining child stop or I will throw you to the wolf the wolf heard the words and supposing that the old dame was speaking the truth waited patiently for the meal which he thought would soon be ready it was not till evening that the child fell asleep and the wolf who had been waiting on slow hope went off home very hungry his mouth really agape how is it you have come home empty handed said his wife who had been keeping house it is very unusual but the wolf replied what would you have I have trusted a woman number 32 is a curious reminiscence of Simonides once upon a time a cat fell in love with a comely man and glorious Cyprus the mother of desire allowed her to change her shape and take a woman's body once so fair that all men desired her the young man saw her fell captive in his turn and arranged a wed the marriage feast was just prepared when a mouse ran by and the bride jumping down from the high couch rushed after it so the banquet came to an end and love who had had a merry jest departed too for even he could not fight against nature once upon a time a middle aged man not young but not yet old his hair a mixture of black and white feeling that he still had leisure for love and merriment took two mistresses one young one old now the young woman wanted to see in her lover a young man the old dame desired someone as old as herself so every time the girl plucked out any hairs that she could find turning white while the old lady did the same to the black hairs until young and old together at last pulled out all the hair he had and left him bald moral? pitiful is the man who falls into the hands of women they bite and bite until they strip him to the bone so in the fable of the lion who falls in love with the maiden the noble animal strips himself of claws and teeth and everything that makes him formidable to please the girl and for his reward is beaten to death in all these stories there is a note of satirical depreciation but the best example of the cynical humour which inspires the whole class is to be found in the tale of the aphesian widow Fadrus gives us a brief version in Petronius the story is put into the mouth of the satire poet Humulpus and in a condensed form it will perhaps bear quotation there was once a matron of Ephesus so notoriously virtuous that all the women of the neighbouring towns used to come and gaze upon her in a spiritual spectacle so it begins and the first sentence which might come from Voltaire's con deed gives the spirit in which it is written the lady's husband died and not satisfied with the ordinary signs of grief the bereaved wife insisted on following the corpse to the underground chamber where it was laid there the lady with singular and exemplary constancy remained with it for five days deaf to the entreaties of relatives and magistrates refusing all food and attended only by one servant girl whose business it was to share her mistress's grief and renew the taper which alone lit up the subpolcral chamber the whole country was full of the story so the tale runs and men of every class agreed this was a real and brilliant example of virtue and affection in a woman the only one they had ever known in the meantime however some robbers had been crucified near the place and a soldier on guard over the crosses noticed the light of the taper gleaming in the darkness yielding to the weakness of human nature he made his way down to the vault and was surprised to find a pretty woman where he had expected to see a ghost but he soon realized the situation that the lady could not get over the loss of her man and so he brought his traps down to the cellar and began to address some words of comfort to her do not persist in useless grief said he do not rend your breast with unavailing sobs all of us will come to this we all have but one final resting place his attempt at consolation which, though well-meant is certainly somewhat common place only irritated the lady and he turned his attention to the servant for in this sort of stories there is always a soubret and induced her to partake of his rations the girl was then able to persuade a mistress to follow her example and soon all three were eating and drinking together you know so says Eumulpus the result of a good meal the soldier was soon as successful in overcoming the matron's resolute virtue as he had been in overcoming her resolute desire for death the doors of the vault were closed so that it might appear that the good lady had breathed her last over her husband's body the soldier brought down all sorts of commestibles and two or three days and nights were spent in dalliance meanwhile the crucified robbers were quite forgotten and on the third morning the soldier found that one of the crosses was empty for the body had been removed for burial by the relatives in the night he explained his plight to the lady and announced his intention of committing suicide the proper penalty as he said for his neglect of duty but the matron was as compassionate as she was virtuous and, heaven for fend she cried I cannot bear to see two such dear men both depart from life I would rather pay over the dead than lose the living so she told the soldier to take the husband's body out of its receptacle and fix it on the vacant cross the soldier gladly followed the clever ladies ingenious idea and the next day people were wondering how it was that a dead man had found his way to the cross the aphesian widow represents the mylesian tales at their best at their worst they are only to be read by those who can touch pitch and not be defiled in themselves they are beneath contempt but they have a very considerable importance in the history of the world and especially in the history of the relations of the sexes the perverse ideas that underlie them were transplanted from Ionia to Athens and recommended by the literary genius of Athenian writers they have had an influence on later thought which the Ionian pornographers would never have secured of feminism in Greek literature this is a LibriVox recording all LibriVox recordings are in the public domain for more information or to volunteer please visit LibriVox.org recording by April 6090 California, United States of America feminism in Greek literature by Frederick Adam Wright Athens in the 5th century who have traced the main tendencies of Ionian thought and have seen how the degradation of women involved in a corresponding degradation of literature its very offensiveness protects a great deal of Ionian work from notice but it has been necessary to quote some of the less noisiest specimens for it must be remembered that this immorality of literature was both the cause and the result of the low opinion in which women were held the motives which inspired the whole school of writers were utterly contemptible the means they employed were not much better but they were successful in their purpose when Athens took over the leadership of Greece she took over from Ionia the idea of women as inferior creatures and during all the great period of Athenian history women were a subject class it became no longer necessary to slander them they were simply neglected the woman's life at Athens in the 5th century BC was a dreary business she was confined closely to the house a harem prisoner but without any of that luxurious ease which the harem system has sometimes offered as a solace with a loss of freedom an Athenian house was small dark and uncomfortable and a woman's day was occupied with a long round of monotonous work occasionally women were allowed out of prison to walk in some sacred procession as we see the quiet line of girls marshaled on the Parthenian frieze but all the amusements of the town were closed against her from the school and the gymnasium from the Odeon and the academy from public meetings and from private banquets women were jealously debarred it is doubtful whether they were permitted even to enter the theater of Dionyses and their shopping quarter where they bought the rouge and white lead was in the most remote and inaccessible part of the city the whole structure of social life was arranged to suit men and to exclude women it is true that the patron divinity of the state was a woman, Athena but the goddess was divested of feminine attributes she became the ideal Athens a conception as far remote from an anthropomorphic divinity as any race has ever possessed the stages by which women were reduced to this condition of inferiority are in the general obscurity of early Athenian history quite unknown but there can be little doubt that the whole position was due to Ionian influence the legal status of women especially in relation to property seems to have been changed by definite enactment about the end of the 6th century BC and in the suppliant maidens of Aeschyles there are traces of the conflict of principles on which the change was based hence forward in the eyes of the Athenian law a woman was merely in a pinch of any property which she chanced to inherit and her nearest male relative had to take charge of her person a demosa heritus for which the material advantage of her estate served as compensation moreover women in Athens were married far too young for the average age was about 15 and the result of these early marriages was that by the time a woman had arrived at years of discretion and might have been an intellectual companion for her husband her beauty too often was gone and she herself was worn out a premature old woman for girls no education was considered necessary they were kept in constant seclusion they were regarded only as potential bearers of children and the most extreme precautions known to modern eugenics were apparently practiced before marriage but even as mothers they were not very efficient for their physiques suffered from the narrowness of their lives and the wet nurse type was to be found in most families just as the Breton and Norman girls migrate to Paris and the Athenian households that could afford the expense would hire the robust women of Sparta to take the mother's place Alcobiatis for example was suckled by a Lacedemonian nurse and was not altogether an alien when exiled from Athens he took refuge in the Peloponnese it was not in Athens but at Sparta or in the islands where girls wrestled and raced with young men that panace found the model with her flying feet, deep bosom and firm rounded limbs and in Erastophonies when Lysistrata assembles the women of Greece the Athenians can scarcely refrain from half envious adoration of the buxom vigor of the Sparta Lampedo at Athens the restriction of women to one function meant that even that one function was badly performed and all through the great period the Athenian race was slowly declining in numbers in fact alone was there little difference between the sexes at Athens that of dress there was no distinction of sex as there was no distinction of rank in an attic tragedy a chorus of generals, of fishermen and of flower girls would all appear in much the same garb in Asia both sexes wore trousers bags which the Greeks regarded with amused content in Athens neither sex did there are some slight varieties in shape, material and color but speaking generally it is correct to say that an Athenian lady or an Athenian gentleman was dressed informally when she or he had one blanket draped about their person full dress consisted of another blanket over the first and the art of dress consisted in suitable pinning and the proper arrangement of the folds but when a woman left her husband's house and went abroad she had to don the symbol of her slavery the chredimum this article was a kind of yashmak veil drawn across the face to protect a woman from the gaze of strange men not her lawful owners it gave its wear the white cheeks of otolisk and shut her off from the freedom of the outside world it was like our cap and apron the badge of servitude and to escape from it the only way was to become a slave indeed for the slave woman alone could walk abroad with open face this is what Euripides means when he makes the captive Andromache sob and I, even I, was dried from my royal bower down to the sea-beach with nothing about my head save hideous slavery and 109 and Sohecuba, in the Trojan women, a slave barefooted and bareheaded crouches on the ground to escape from the gaze of men and cries guide me to my bed of straw and to the stones which now will hide my face Trojan women, 508 slavery in ancient times was a hard fate, but for many an Athenian woman it could have had but little terror a wife was already the property of her husband and slaves and women are commonly classed together the Athenian, however, with all his faults was a genuine lover of freedom and did not care for slaves neither his wife nor the flute girls whose charms could be bought by any bitter could really satisfy him strange mixture that he was of sensuality and intellect the only women whose company he desired were those called, half in jest, half in earnest the header I the close companions, the same word being used for those political associations which formed the closest link between man and man the header I were foreign women and stood outside the law they were not Athenian citizens and so had no privileges but, on the other hand, they were not under restraint often highly educated it was their business to take part in all men's interest they were their own mistresses engaged freely in the political life of Athens and in many cases exercised very great influence even in affairs of state to their personal attractions they added social charm long training in the arts of pleasure and the contrast between them and the Athenian wives may be illustrated if we compare the life of an actress of the Comédie Française with that of an inmate of a Turkish heron the French actress and the Japanese geisha are the nearest modern parallels to the Greek header I and all three owe their existence as a class to much the same social conditions a high standard of culture and intelligence a low standard of sexual morality such were the conditions of Athenian life and we shall find them reflected in literature the great lyric poets Simonides, Pindar, Bacalides concerned themselves almost exclusively with men actually is alone in this as in most things the exact antithesis of the typical Athenian regards women as creatures possessed of mind and soul in sharp contrast to the tragedian and a comparison between their views as possible for although the historian is a considerably younger man a good deal of his material goes back to an earlier date and in social matters especially he often represents the ideas of the first years of the fifth century Herodist great traveler and charming personality though he is is still a true Ionian there is frequently a Malaysian about his tales for instance the story of Ramsinides and the robber and it is not unfair to say that in his researches into ancient travel life and folklore he is especially interested in such savage customs as put women in an inferior place the account of the native races of Libya in the last chapters of the fourth book of the history will afford an example but the grandeur of his main theme the struggle between Athens and Persia raised the historian from these doubtful interests and in the last five books of his work there is little depreciation of women as a class it is true that women scarcely come into the narrative and the Aziris remark about Artemisia my men have become women and my women have become men is framed to suit the ideas of an Athenian as it would have suited the Romans who could hardly conceive of a queen it is scarcely as appropriate in the month of a Persian whose own mother, Attasa, was then acting as regent but this is a small point and speaking generally there is little in the last part of the history to offend Herodos is really animated by an ardent patriotism and a genuine love of liberty Iscinomy, he says and many English racegoers will agree with him the very sound of the word is most excellent I must be remembered that his patriotism is for males only and that his equality before the law is an equality from which women were shut out for even Plato makes Iscinomy between men and women the last and almost incredible stage of democratic license so it is in the earlier books alone that the baser manner is evident and one example of it will suffice to give a proof of the difference between the Ionian spirit which brought about the enslavement of women and the spirit of enlightenment which rebelled against the servitude we will take the story of Isle as told by Ischulis and Herodotus for the ancient legends of Greece subjects alike for history and drama have one great advantage their main outlines were impersonal and known to all details treatment and interpretation could be varied to express the artist's personal thought Isle, the daughter of Anakas Argos was beloved by Zeus through the Delcy of Hera she was changed into a cow and after long wanderings regained her mortal shape and found rest in Egypt where she became mother of Euphophas first king of the land such is the legend and this is Herodotus version of it the Persians say that some Phoenicians once brought a cargo of merchandise to Argos the women of town among them Isle and to the sea shore to bargain the Phoenicians seized the women and carried them off to Egypt now to carry off women by violence the Persians think is the act of a wicked man to trouble avenging them is the act of a fool to pay no regard to them when carried off is the part of a wise man or it is clear that and after long wanderings if they had not wished it themselves they would not be ravished such is the Persian account but as regards Isle the Phoenicians do not agree they say that they used no violence in taking her to Egypt but that she had an intrigue with their captain when he was at Argos when she discovered that she was likely to be coming mother she was afraid of her parents and to hide her secret came of her own accord with them to Egypt all the poetry and romance of the story have disappeared realism has triumphed Isle is a woman on the worst interpretation of her conduct she is vain and imprudent she shows herself to strange men and is carried off by them although as the story is at pains though not very logically to add it must have been with her own consent on the worst interpretation she is a mere wanton she allows a sea captain to seduce her and then deserts her home her parents and her native land listen now to Isulis in the beautiful version by Mr. E. R. Bevin the chambers where I housed the virgin hidden strange faces I in the night would visit willing with sooth suggestion oh most huge infortune most happiest of all maidens wherefore maiden oh wherefore so long maiden when there waits thee wedlock the highest he the lord of heaven the desire of thee and with thee would tread the passages of love's delight now therefore foot not from thee oh child the bed of the highest but do this go forth to where the meadow is deep the field of Lerna stations of the household flock home as thy father's herds go even thither that so the eye of Zeus may ease desire with such like dreams the kingly dark for me me miserable till ridden I got me heart to open to my father the visions and the dreams of night and he to play though yeah and even to Dodona sent him bossage on bossage inquiring what thing he had me to do or what would speak to pleasure them that rule us and they came bringing still back Britain's wavering lips sentences blind dark syllabus at last a word cleared visage came to Marcus enjoying plainly saying he should thrust me fourth of the house fourth of the land to wander at large a separate thing even to the last confines of the the story is the same but the treatment is different the two passages illustrate the difference between romantic idealism and realistic depreciation but I am in the Prometheus is only one of the gallery of Celis heroines for in his art women take the foremost place the dramatist is at variance with his age and his fervent patriotism is almost the sole bond of union between him and his fellows the Celis is a mystic who believed in the Delphinic inspiration and took an interest in religious speculation his contemporaries were materialists suspected the politics of Delphi and regarded religion simply as a ceremony a Celis was a conservative in politics though a liberal in thought Athens was already becoming an extreme democracy finally a Celis bases his theater on women and makes them the chief agents of the drama while the ordinary woman of his time was shut out altogether from the active business of life but he is an unconscious feminist and the definite purpose which we find in Euripides is quite absent from his plays it shows however a strange lack of appreciation to reproaching as some critics have done with neglecting the feminine interest of the seven tragedies that the Byzantine tradition has preserved for us four if their subject was handled by a modern dramatist would be called feminist problem plays and in the other three the female characters supply most of the dramatic interest even though the first idea of the plot might seem to put them in the second plan of action of the lost plays many as far as we may judge by their titles and meager fragments have the same characteristic the most famous the Neob had for its central figure the sorrowing mother such another as Euripides Hecuba in the first scene of the Trojan women and represented perhaps in much the same fashion for Achilles like most Athenian women you full well the dramatic value of silence and the pathos of Neobi's situation needs no long speeches so if we possess the Calisto the legend of the mating changed into a bear the Penelope the Iphigenia Ortha or Athea that favored Athenian story of the young girl roaming on the seashore and carried off by the fierce god to his northern fastness we should appreciate even more vividly than we can now the romantic side of the tragedians art it is a significant fact in this connection that of the 60 odd titles of lost plays which have come down to us nearly half our names of women moreover in 17 of these plays the title is taken from the chorus in the Achilles theater the chorus is generally the central figure in the dramatic action such titles as the daughters of the son the nurses of Dionyses and the daughters of Mirius and the Bacchanal women suggest at any rate romantic plays with a strong feminist interest such others as the women of the bed chamber the water carriers and the women of Edna might well be examples of that realistic treatment of women's life of which we have an example in the nurse of the libation bearers arguments drawn merely from the names of lost plays are obviously of little value except insofar as they strengthen the definite evidence which the existing tragedies supply but an examination of the remaining seven plays will show that the first and greatest of Athenian dramatism was deeply impressed with the potentialities for good and evil of the female mind end of chapter number five