Download DO NOT WRITE ON ME! CLASS SET! I HAVE A FAMILY

DO NOT WRITE ON ME!
CLASS SET!
I HAVE A FAMILY DEPENDING ON ME!
Women in Athenian Society
What Athenian Men Said About Women
Since few women in the Ancient World knew how to read or write, most of our information about
their life comes to us filtered through the eyes of men. This is particularly problematic in the case of
Greece for Athenian men claimed to have a fairly low opinion of women. Here are some examples of
what they said:
1) Aristotle said that man is by nature superior to the female and so the man should rule and
the woman should be ruled.
2) Demosthenes wrote “We keep hetaerae for the sake of pleasure, females slaves for our
daily care and wives to give us legitimate children and to be the guardians of our
households.”
3) “A man who teaches a woman to write should know that he is providing poison to an
asp.”
4)
Euripides has women characters make disparaging remarks about their sex:
a)
I am only a woman, a thing which the world hates.
b) No cure has been found for a woman’s venom, worse than that of reptiles. We are
a curse to man.
c) Men of sense should never let gossiping women visit their wives, for they work
mischief.
5)
“There are two days on which a woman is most pleasing---when someone marries her
and when he carries out her dead body.”
6)
“A woman who travels outside her house should be old enough that people ask whose
mother she is, not whose wife she is.”
7)
“A woman’s reputation is highest when men say little about her, whether it be good or
evil.”
The Hippocratic writers believed that men and women were different in that the latter had flesh
that is more porous and softer and that it drew moisture faster and in greater quantities from the belly
than did men. Menstruation was nature’s way of getting rid of this excess. Only Aristotle saw that they
were essentially the same animal: the woman, he said, was simply an inferior sort of man.
It seems clear, then, that Athenians saw women as beguiling creatures capable of causing
considerable harm to themselves and others, and weaker in mind and body than men. Many believed
that young girls were somewhat wild and difficult to control and that virgins were subject to
DO NOT WRITE ON ME!
CLASS SET!
I HAVE A FAMILY DEPENDING ON ME!
hallucinations that could encourage them to be self-destructive. The solution was an early marriage, for
only after a woman had delivered her first baby could she be a fully-operational female.
HOW SECLUDED WERE ATHENIAN WOMEN?
With so much known about Athenian thought and philosophy one would think it would be
easy to talk about the life of women. Unfortunately this is not the case, for Athenian men might have
written a great deal about almost every other topic, but they said very little about women and life inside
the home. The traditional view in the modern world has been that Athenian men took wives because
women were needed to bear and raise the children necessary to permit the continuation of society, but
that otherwise wives were ignored and confined to the back of the house, with only slave-girls, harlots,
concubines, and the very poor free to wander about. Women were kept in what was called “Oriental
Seclusion,” a rather strange expression implying that women were confined to specific rooms in their
home and allowed no contact with anyone, particularly male, who was not part of the immediate family.
The phrase was probably first used to show a sharp distinction between the treatment of women in
Athens and the other elements of Athenian culture that form part of the foundation of Western
Civilization. In any event, the term has endured but there is a growing feeling that what once seemed so
obvious may not have been true at all.
What evidence exists for this picture of Oriental Seclusion? The economic restrictions on Athenian
women certainly left them dependent on men for their entire lives, and what Athenian men said about
women was hardly complementary, but this does not really tell us anything at all about their day-to-day
life. The fact that domestic life is rarely a topic in literature might mean that whatever happened at
home was unimportant, but it could also be that it was too important to be reduced to paper.
Tombstones often contain epitaphs expressing considerable affection. The charge to the jury in a court
case against Neaera for falsely passing herself off as a citizen of Athens included the question, “If you
acquit this woman what will you say to your wives and daughters?” That query would make no sense if
current affairs were not a standard topic in the home. The picture is hazy and a few continue to argue
that women were kept in “oriental seclusion” while others now see women as free to live life as they
saw fit, but perhaps a consensus will emerge in the middle. It was certainly considered a gross violation
of privacy for any man to enter the inner portion of a house, unless he resided there and was part of the
nuclear family, but then neither would a casual guest today consider it appropriate to wander uninvited
through the back rooms of a host’s residence.
Some scholars in the past have argued that Athenian houses were physically divided into two
separate areas, one for the men and one for the women. Two often quoted texts support this view.
The Greek words andron and gunaikon are conventionally translated as “men’s apartment” and
“women’s apartment,” but there is no English equivalent and in truth we do not really know what the
Greeks meant by those two words.
Women did visit one another, perhaps to gossip and on occasion to borrow a spice for the evening
meal and when it came time to deliver a baby, midwives and friends arrived to offer assistance; such
women would have had to walk the streets to get there. Women did walk from one place to another for
DO NOT WRITE ON ME!
CLASS SET!
I HAVE A FAMILY DEPENDING ON ME!
social reasons and religious activities would have required them to spend time outdoors. Staying indoors
may well have been a safety issue for the elite or for those aspiring to be considered part of the elite,
but it was certainly impractical for anyone who could not afford a slave. The poor had to leave the house
for the jobs that allowed them to eat and Athenian citizen women are attested doing agriculture, woolworking, midwifery, selling their own goods or working at the market, and some gained employment as
wet nurses. Perhaps the concern was not so much about women being seen outdoors but about their
being seen conversing with men, for that was taken as a sure sign of a prostitute or hetaera.
Marriage in Ancient Athens
It was the father’s obligation to arrange an appropriate marriage for each daughter. This involved
the provision of a dowry and the selection of a suitable groom. A loving father would, of course, want a
man who would make a good husband, but we must remember that the father was not only picking his
daughter’s husband but his own son-in-law, and in theory, at least, marriages in Ancient Athens were
arranged at a meeting between the fathers of the young couple based on the needs and best interests
of the senior men, with little concern for the thoughts of the groom and absolutely none for the wishes
of the girl. Hopefully the one he picked would do a good job in both roles, but many fathers were more
interested in expanding a business or forging an alliance between families than finding a kind and loving
mate for their daughters. We have no real way of knowing how often a girl’s first look at her future
husband occurred on the wedding day or shortly before, but certainly among the better classes it was
possible that the bride and groom had never met let alone had a chance to fall in love and even the
potential for compatibility seems to have played little or no role in the matchmaking. Picking a cousin,
even a distant one, or a close friend, might make a father less unhappy about the loss of that part of his
estate going to the dowry, and under these circumstances a girl might have seen him at a family party or
at least have heard mention of his name.
Men were in their late twenties or early thirties when they married for the first time, while girls
were only fourteen or fifteen. Various reasons have been suggested for the late marrying age for men: a
desire to finish military obligations before starting a family, a desire to prolong the joys of the single life
for as long as possible, and a shortage of women due to the unwillingness of fathers to raise girls who
had to be supplied with dowries. It was one thing for a man to bequeath his property at death when he
no longer has need of it, but quite another to give away large sums of money to daughters while he is
still living and in need of it to support himself. The discrepancy in ages more or less ensured that the
more experienced man was going to be in charge and that there would be a large number of young
widows seeking second and third husbands.
The dowry was an integral part of any marriage in Ancient Athens. While one might hazard a guess
there is no means by which we can know what Athenians were thinking when they first conceived the
idea of a dowry; we can say, however, what they saw as the advantages and results of a dowered
marriage. Setting up and maintaining a home was as expensive an operation then as it is now, and the
dowry was the woman’s contribution to those costs. Though an individual daughter’s dowry was worth
considerably less than what her brother could expect some day to inherit, the dowry had to be paid in
advance and it had to be paid out of the savings that might otherwise be used to support a father in his
DO NOT WRITE ON ME!
CLASS SET!
I HAVE A FAMILY DEPENDING ON ME!
retirement. It was one thing to give away your wealth to sons after your death, but quite another to
have to give it away to a daughter before you were finished using it. Providing a generous dowry was a
source of prestige in the community and a useful ploy in arranging a marriage that was as much if not
more about forging an alliance between families and picking a good son-in-law than it was about finding
a suitable husband, but it still left a hole in the family’s finances. It is no wonder that men were reluctant
to have daughters and willing to abandon or expose the ones they considered superfluous. As the
generations moved along, daughters received considerably less of their family’s wealth than sons did
and therefore had less to contribute to setting up a home in each new generation. Occasionally a wife’s
dowry represented as much as 20 percent or more of her new husband’s wealth, but it was usually
much less, often under 10 percent, and would not even have produced sufficient income to cover the
cost of having a wife in the home.
The dowry did provide a woman with a bit of security if her husband died or divorced her and
offered her a chance at remarriage if she were young enough, and failing that gave a bit of incentive to
whichever kinsman was prepared to take her in. Not least, the dowry seems to have given the wife a
little more power in the relationship than she might otherwise have had in such a male dominated
society, for at one point Plato suggested the abolition of the dowry on the grounds that it would make
women less arrogant and men less servile. If her life got too bad she could leave, forcing him to sell off
enough assets to raise the cash necessary to return the dowry. Finally, the dowry provided an incentive
for the wife’s birth family to retain an interest in the marriage and in her well-being. The modern world
is often critical of dowered matrimony for standing in the way of true love. We must remember,
however, that even if there were no such thing as the need for a dowry, the woman with nothing to
offer but her poverty was never going to get a rich man for a husband and a look through the results of
having a dowry, as the Athenians viewed them, leaves little doubt that the wife gained a great deal
more from the system than the husband.
Women, Money and Law in Ancient Athens
Athenian law required and assumed a woman to be under the control and protection of a kyrios or
guardian who was responsible for her safety and well being, and acted on her behalf anytime she
needed legal contact with the outside or public world. His duties, of course, included effective control of
any money or property that she might possess. As a child, she would normally have been under the
guardianship of her father and when she married she would leave her family, move to her husband’s
home and pass into his control and guardianship. Athenian guardianship, at least as far as money and
marriage was concerned, was real and never became the legal fiction that it did in the Roman Empire
when unmarried women were able to work around their guardians’ wishes, and sometimes even
dispense with them entirely. Anything the Athenian woman possessed belonged to her guardian and he
was free to dispose of it as he wished. At the same time, he was responsible for making sure she had
food, clothing and shelter, and if appropriate he was supposed to provide her with a dowry if she was of
a marriageable age. If he failed to live up to his obligation the archon would enforce it.
On her own a woman could not make a contract or enter a financial transaction worth more than a
medimnos of barley, a quantity sufficient, perhaps, to feed a family for four or five days. She could sell
DO NOT WRITE ON ME!
CLASS SET!
I HAVE A FAMILY DEPENDING ON ME!
vegetables and handicrafts, and she could purchase household supplies on a day to day basis, but
anything bigger than that required, at least in theory, the permission of her kyrios. How strictly enforced
this regulation was in real life is unknown . Young women about to be married regularly gave their toys
and other childhood property to the temple, and several wealthy women are known to have donated
considerable sums in their own names to a god or goddess. A number of hetaera, both freed and citizenborn, must have had considerable wealth, yet the record makes no mention of their having a kyrios or
anyone else to participate in the conduct of their financial lives. It seems likely, then, that many women
did conduct affairs on their own that were over the limit, but anyone making an agreement with a
woman that exceeded this amount would know that it could not be enforced in a court of law.
While she was not allowed to buy or sell, she could certainly possess, use and enjoy property of any
sort with no upper limit on its value. She might have her own personal slave, jewelry or some of the
furniture in the house. We tend to think that the owner of an object should be free to do with it as he
wishes, but even today that is not always true. Zoning regulations might prevent you using your home as
a store, and the gas company may have the right to run a pipe across your lot even though you are not
one of their customers and do not have any gas appliances in your house. In the ancient world there
were even more forms of ownership and the person who had the right to use property may not have
been the person who had the right to sell it or bequeath it. Thus a woman might own the use of a
personal slave, but not the slave herself. A woman might own the use of a piece of jewelry, but not the
jewelry itself.
Though it was probably a social rather than a legal requirement, a dowry was an integral part of
almost every marriage in Classical Athens and a rich man was unlikely to marry a girl without one no
matter how desirable she was in every other way. The dowry, representing a daughter’s share of her
father’s estate, usually consisted of a sum of cash, though some from poorer families were made up of
household goods and in every case a note was made before witnesses of the cash value before it was
handed over to the groom, for that had to be returned to the bride after a divorce or death. If the
marriage produced a son, a widower could keep his dead wife’s dowry until her son was old enough to
inherit it and if it was the husband who died the widow could return to her family with her dowry, or she
and her dowry could remain with her husband’s family. If the husband or his heirs could not or did not
repay the dowry after a divorce, however it was caused, interest had to be paid at the rate of 18 per
cent per annum.
A second way women could acquire property was through inheritance. Daughters usually got their
share of the paternal estate in advance in the form of a dowry, leaving the balance to be divided among
the sons. Once a man realized he was never going to have a son, he usually adopted the man he was
planning to pick as his daughter’s husband, allowing his estate to go to them in the normal manner. A
problem arose when a man died with a daughter but no son and no adopted son. The daughter was the
logical heir, but this created a serious problem, for it meant the end of the father’s line and the passing
of his property into another family.
The Greek word we usually translate as family was oikos, but the word meant a great deal more
than mom, dad and the kids. Of course, you say, we have to add assorted servants, aunts, cousins and
DO NOT WRITE ON ME!
CLASS SET!
I HAVE A FAMILY DEPENDING ON ME!
perhaps a widowed mother, but the Athenian would also add the family home and farm. Since this is
such a totally foreign concept to us, there is no word in the English language that encompasses all that
Athenians meant when they talked about the oikos.
Athens was a state comprised of families and the family included land, the home, and all of the
people in the home. The death of the head of the oikos might be a shock, but there was every reason
why the remainder of the oikos, which was so much more than one man, should continue on. A single
son would take over immediately and at least on the surface everything would carry on much as it had
before. Two or more sons would require dividing up the oikos and all of its contents, human and
otherwise, with nothing and no one left out, but if there is no son the oikos would come to an end, and
the mere thought of such a catastrophe was enough to inspire endless nightmares in Ancient Athens.
When an oikos ceased to exist, all of its members lost their place in society.
Making it illegal for a woman to inherit anything more than her dowry would prevent an oikos
passing into a different family, but it would not prevent the death of the oikos itself. If the deceased’s
nearest male relative married the daughter, she could produce the grandson who would ultimately not
only inherit but continue his grandfather’s oikos. Thus arose the Athenian concept of the epikleros, or
heiress.
Out of convenience we usually translate epikleros as heiress, but the literal meaning of the Greek
word is “with the property”. If an Athenian died without a son or an adopted son, his daughter became
an epikleros, which is to say she became the person who carried the property. She did not inherit it, but
rather became the means by which the property would be transferred to someone appropriate, and as a
result was obligated to marry her father’s closest male heir. In the meantime, she held the property in
trust until such time as the son such a marriage hopefully produced came of age and her father’s oikos
could be revived in the hands of a grandson. Since all daughters took it for granted they had little or no
say in the choice of husbands, the epikleros was really no worse off than any other young Athenian
woman, unless she already had a husband, in which case she could be required to divorce him. [3] The
kinsman who married the epikleros got to manage and live off the estate but only until such time as the
resulting son reached maturity. The son would then take over the property in his own name allowing his
grandfather’s oikos to continue just as if nothing untoward had ever happened.
Some kinsmen thought the deal was too good to pass up, while others rejected its temporary
nature, particularly if they had to divorce an existing wife in order to marry the epikleros. If there were
no kinsmen, or none willing to marry her, the epikleros was free to take her father’s estate and marry a
man of her own choosing. Some people today have seen the laws on the epikleros as misogynous, but
the Athenians would probably have denied the charge, arguing that the survival of the oikos was vital
and that every citizen, whether man or woman, was expected to make sacrifices for the good of the
community. Further, they would say that every marriage was arranged and in that sense the epikleros
was no different from any other woman.