“Young girls leaped in unison,
toes tapping, shouting happy songs,
and in their homes, bright lights
of torches gave their darkened gleam
to the hours of sleep.
I was one of those girls: in the palace,
I sang and danced with all the rest
for the mountain goddess,
the virgin child of Zeus.”
– Euripides, The Trojan Women (Trans. Emily Wilson in Lefkowitz and Romm, lines 537–545)
The gods had taken her sister and her brothers and her father. Now they wanted her toys. That at least is what Clymene’s mother told her. In the weeks since the plague had dwindled, she and her mother had moved into her uncle’s house, buried their dead, and wept together. And in the rare moments when they were not weeping, Clymene’s mother had introduced her to a new word: epikleros.
An epikleros was the daughter of a man who had died with no male children to inherit his estate. Clymene was now an epikleros, and it was her duty to marry to ensure that her father’s business and lands stayed in control of the family.
To be more precise, it was Clymene’s duty to marry her uncle. He was forty-five, tall and strong, but growing paunchy about the middle, and he had dark, coarse hair covering his forearms and hands – even his knuckles. He seemed always to be scowling, and when he spoke, it was only for two reasons: to complain about how his family treated him, or to abuse his slaves and servants.
Clymene was a month shy of fifteen, and – thanks to the years of wartime rationing that had marked her childhood – small for her age. Before the plague, she had been fond of dancing, embroidery, and playing with her pet ferrets and her baby sister. She had never enjoyed her uncle’s visits, shuddering inside every time she was told to present her cheek for a kiss. Now she would have to live with him forever and let him kiss her whenever he wanted to.
Since her mother had broken the news to her, Clymene’s crying was almost as much about the wedding as it was for her lost loved ones. Mother did not seem happy about the situation. She kept repeating that Clymene should be glad she was marrying her uncle and not some stranger, but the way she said it suggested to Clymene that Mother was trying to convince them both that it would be all right.
Mother also talked about the importance of the marriage festival: three days that would see Clymene move from the guest-quarters in her uncle’s house to his bedroom; three days that would see her become a wife of the city of Athens instead of a virgin.
It was a virgin goddess who wanted Clymene’s toys: Artemis, the brave huntress who ruled over the lives of young girls. Clymene was to offer up her dolls and clay dishes on the first day of the wedding, though she couldn’t understand what Apollo’s sister would do with such things in the forests where she roamed with her bow and arrow. But perhaps, if Clymene prayed devoutly enough, the goddess would pity her – the fatherless girl who must now marry her old uncle – and take her into the wild woods instead.
I’m Rose Judson. Welcome to Books of All Time.
Introduction: Women in Classical Athens – A Gap in History
Books of All Time is a podcast that’s tackling classic literature in chronological order. This is episode 36: Euripides, The Trojan Women, Part 2 – I Was One of Those Girls. As always, if you want to read the transcript of this episode or see the references I used to write it, you can visit our website, www.booksofalltime.co.uk. There’s a link in the show notes if you need it. Let’s begin.
This week, we’re using the play The Trojan Women as a jumping-off point for learning about the lives of real women during the peak period of Classical Athens – that is, during the 5th century BCE, when Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides were alive and writing plays. And about Eurpides – I know I mentioned this in passing during the last episode, but I just want to lay it out more clearly this time – he seems to have been very interested in women as subjects. We only have 19 of the 90-plus plays that he wrote. 13 of those have women characters in leading roles, and 14 of them have choruses representing women.
It’s possible that we just happen to have wound up with a woman-heavy sample of his oeuvre. But the lists we have of lost plays by him seem to include even more stories about women: Cretan Women, Andromeda, Wise Melanippe, Captive Melanippe, Hypsipyle, Antiope, Antigone – it looks like roughly 40 – 50% of the titles indicate a woman character at the centre of the action. Sophocles and Aeschylus have nothing like that level of representation.
We can’t ever know what Euripides was thinking, not having any evidence of his opinions beyond the plays that remain to us, but it seems clear he enjoyed working with the dramatic potential of women’s stories more than any of his contemporaries.
We also can’t ever know what actual women of Euripides’s time thought. That became immediately clear to me as soon as I started reading for this episode: in the golden age of Athens, when art and drama and philosophy were flourishing; when democracy was emerging and orators spoke beautifully about the rights and privileges of citizenship, women were not allowed to speak for themselves. At all.
My main source for this episode is the 1994 edition of a seminal work of history, “Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity,” by Sarah Pomeroy. First published in 1975, it is widely considered one of the founding texts of women’s studies – one of the first to look at, as Pomeroy puts it, “what women were doing while men were active in all the areas traditionally emphasized by classical scholars.” (Pomeroy ix) Of classical Athens, she says:
“Rarely has there been a wider discrepancy between the cultural rewards a society had to offer and women’s participation in that culture. Did his wife Xanthippe ever hear Socrates’s dialogues on beauty and truth? How many women actually read the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides? What did women do instead? When pagan goddesses were, in their way, as powerful as gods, why was the status of human females so low?” (Pomeroy ix)
50 years after the initial publication of Pomeroy’s book, these are questions we still haven’t answered. That’s because, again, there is almost no evidence about the lives of women during this period. There’s some archaeological evidence. There’s some documentary evidence, such as contracts and court testimonies, but those usually involve men talking about women, as do works of philosophy or the orations of politicians. As Pomeroy puts it, many of these ancient writers “influenced by their ideal of womanhood, were led to bitter disapproval of the actual women who were being described.” (ix)
Until the early 20th century, historians also relied heavily on poetry and tragic plays as sources for information about women (when they bothered to think about them at all). Again, you can see the problem here: those sources also involved men talking about women, usually in emotionally or dramatically heightened contexts. We just do not have anything written by Athenian women in this period that tells us about their lives. (Yes, Sappho was out there writing poetry somewhere. But Sappho didn’t live in Athens.)
This silence is especially profound when looking into women who didn’t belong to the ruling classes. We are left poring over paintings on vases, minutely examining looms and other objects used by women, and even trying to read between the lines of inscriptions on grave monuments, or graffiti on ancient buildings, just to get a glimpse of a woman who wasn’t a man wearing a mask on one level or another.
There are some very, very basic questions we can’t answer about the women who would have inhabited Athens alongside Euripides, Sophocles, and Aeschylus. For example: were women considered citizens of Athens, too? Obviously they couldn’t vote, but did they or did they not have some kind of legal status?
The answer is: we’re not sure, and even if we were, it would depend on circumstances. Over the course of the 5th century BCE the meaning of citizenship in Athens fluctuated. Sometimes it was about your military rank. Other times it was about belonging to a specific occupation, or where you lived. Usually, according to “The Position of Attic Women in Democratic Athens”, a 2014 article by David Pritchard, it was about social class and income. (Pritchard 175). If you belonged to the 5 per cent or so of Athenian men who were rich enough not to need to work for a living, you always counted as a citizen.
Pritchard explains that the definition of who counted as an Athenian citizen wasn’t just about class, though: there was also a mythological explanation for it. (176) According to this myth, every man in Athens was a direct descendent of a legendary early ruler of the city called Erichthonius. He was the product of an unsuccessful rape: Hephaestus, god of the forge, tried to rape Athena, goddess of wisdom, but was unable to consummate the deed. His, uh, manly fluids fell onto the earth and magically became the infant Erichthonius, who was secretly fostered by Athena until he came of age to seize the throne of Athens.
The female residents of Athens, however – well, they were believed to be direct descendants of Pandora, as described by our old friend Hesiod the woman-hater: an evil to mortal men.
“A woman was almost never called a polites or citizen,” explains David Pritchard. “Instead, she was called an astē (‘a woman belonging to the city’) or an Attikē gunē (‘an Attic woman or wife’).” (Prithcard 177) Another piece of evidence in favour of women’s inferior status is that records were kept of the citizens living in every district of Athens. The names in these registers of citizens were all men’s names. (177) Whenever Athenian citizens arranged a marriage or did anything else that involved proving their citizenship, their mother being born within the city was not enough – they had to prove that her father was a citizen, too.
It seems pretty clear that women’s legal status in Athens depended entirely on their fathers and husbands – a fairly normal state of affairs throughout the entire world until the last hundred years or so before our time. Based on this, can we prove that women of Athens were not citizens? No. Does it seem likely that they were? Also no.
Another basic question about the women of Athens that we’ve not resolved – one a bit more pertinent to our project here at Books of All Time – is whether or not they would have been allowed to watch the plays we’ve been discussing for these last few months. This is surprisingly contentious: I read articles by Jeffrey Henderson (“Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals”, 1991) and Marilyn Katz (“Did the Women of Ancient Athens Attend the Theater?”, 1998) and both of them, in reviewing the arguments of previous years, describe what’s basically a centuries-long scholarly ping-pong match about the topic.
In the “against” column, we have lots of evidence from plays and orations that respectable women were not allowed out in public at all; instead, they were subject to a “convention of silence.” Henderson explains that Classical Athens was “the preserve of citizen males only, and the group ideal for women was to be seen in public spaces as infrequently as practicable.” (Henderson 136)
Marilyn Katz cites evidence that women did not attend men’s dining halls if outsiders were present, nor did they enter the men’s quarters of their own households if there was a chance visitors might see them. (109) But a lot of this evidence, when looked at closely, seems to be conclusions drawn by 18th and 19th century scholars – conclusions heavily coloured by their own ideas of what makes women respectable.
In the “for” column, we have the fact that women in Athens – at least, those related to citizens – were known to appear in public and participate in public festivals connected to religious occasions. The Great Dionysia was one such event. Plato, in the dialogues of Socrates, also makes a few references to women (and young boys) being in the audience for tragedies – which he believed had an educational effect upon them. (Henderson 138)
There were also near-contemporary accounts of the effect the masks of the Furies in Aeschylus’s Eumenides had on the audience – some women in attendance were said to be so frightened that they miscarried. Finally, it’s known that various priestesses played important roles in the religious rituals associated with the Great Dionysia – the rituals that happened outside of the theatre, anyway. It’s hard to imagine that they wouldn’t have been allowed to watch what happened inside of it.
That’s a lot of throat-clearing just to say: we’re not really sure what the lives of women in Ancient Greece were really like, which is rather surprising given the central place it has in our cultural imagination. That said, let’s do our best to see if we can go from cradle to grave with an Athenian woman of Euripides’s day.
Infancy and Childhood for Girls in Classical Athens
A girl’s birth was a bit of a downer for the family. Girls were the inheritor of last resort, and they were likely to cost their parents a good packet of cash at some point in the future. This was because the parents of girls were required to give a dowry – a bride-payment – to the family of her prospective husband upon betrothal. This attitude is evident in the different ways a household would decorate their front door after a birth: an olive wreath for a boy, who might grow up to be a great hero or at least a respectable citizen; a knot of woollen thread for a girl, who needed to earn her keep as a wife by doing crafts such as weaving. (Bardis 167)
A newborn girl was also fighting some pretty stiff odds as to whether or not she’d survive long enough to learn to walk. At the beginning of the 5th century BCE, a baby had roughly a one in three chance of getting out of childhood alive, thanks to childhood illnesses. (Pomeroy 66) Plus, babies in Ancient Athens were sometimes deliberately done away with, although Pomeroy notes that the high rate of natural childhood mortality means that this practice was probably not as prevalent as it seems to be in Greek drama. (Pomeroy 67) However, what records we do have from this period indicate that boys outnumbered girls to an unnatural degree – so, either girls were more likely to be rejected just after birth, or boys were more likely to be considered important enough to add to formal records. It’s not clear.
What we do know is that it was up to the father to decide whether or not to accept a baby into the household. If he did not want the baby, he did not expose it on a hillside, as in Oedipus Rex. Instead, a 5th-century Athenian man would take his tiny newborn to a temple and place it in the care of whatever officials were there.
A child that was deemed worthy to stay in the family would be swaddled in wool. If she survived 10 days after birth, her father would then give her official recognition in a naming ceremony known as the dekate. The daughter of a wealthy household would be handed off to a wet-nurse – a nanny with breastfeeding duties – to be cared for. Daughters from lower-class households would stay with their mothers.
Boys and girls were not separated during early childhood. They would sleep, play, and eat together in the women’s quarters of their household – again, depending on the social class of the family, this could be either a separate wing of a large house, or a room or two in a more modest house. They played with the kinds of toys human children have always played with: rattles, models, dolls, hoops, balls on strings, and the like.
A 1964 article by Panos D. Bardis notes that children also liked pets: ducks, turtles, dogs and ferrets were particularly cherished (remember from our episodes on Aesop that Ancient Greeks hadn’t yet caught on to the delight of having cats). Children also enjoyed playing with scarab beetles: they would catch them and tie strings to them, then watch them fly in agitated spirals, or run and tug them along to make them fly. Psychotic fun! (Bardis 167-68)
After the age of seven, the paths of boys and girls diverged sharply. Boys would be whisked off into formal education – apprenticeships for lower-class boys; schooling for wealthier ones – while girls would begin to learn the decorative and domestic arts. Girls were taught to sing, to dance, to recite poetry, and sometimes to play musical instruments. It’s possible some girls would also be taught to read, but this would have been highly unusual.
Certainly, girls learned various textile arts, chiefly weaving and embroidery. Girls from poorer families would also learn to cook – an art that, in wealthier families, was left to the servants and slaves. (Bardis 169) Boys, meanwhile, would be learning rhetoric, undergoing intense physical education, and studying classic literature as preparation for their future roles in the government of the city, whether as public servants, jurors, or warriors. They underwent various milestones en route to their coming of age around 15 years old – an event that often involved a lot of wine.
Girls, on the other hand? Well, as Sarah Pomeroy says: “The qualities admired in girls were the opposite from those desired in boys: silence, submissiveness, and abstinence from men’s pleasures.” (Pomeroy 72) Girls remained with their mothers until not long after menarche – the onset of menstruation – which, from the evidence available to us, usually happened around the age of 14.
Nutrition seems to play a role in triggering menarche, which is possibly why today’s girls start that process younger – they are better-fed than even the wealthy girls of ancient Athens, who would have been allotted less food than their brothers, particularly in wartime.
A young pubescent virgin was considered dangerous to public order because she was supposedly wild with lust. Pubescent girls were often compared to wild horses (Pritchard 179-180), and the only way to deal with a wild horse is to get a man to tame it – in this case, through an early marriage.
Betrothal, Dowries, and Teenage Brides: Ancient Greek Marriage Rites
Marriages in Classical Athens were arranged by the father or guardian of a teenage girl and another man – usually the groom himself, who tended to be close to 30 years old. The formal betrothal ceremony, described by both Sarah Pomeroy and David Pritchard, sounds like it was an all-guys affair, with the bride-to-be not even in attendance. The climax of the ceremony was a declaration by the father of the bride in front of witnesses, stating that he pledges to give the girl in question to the groom, and, most importantly, that he pledges to settle a dowry on her.
Dowries were expensive. Pritchard states that the usual amount of a dowry was between 10 and 20 per cent of the father’s estate. (Pritchard 180) Men for whom this was an unbearably high expense could lean on wealthier relatives or pass the hat, as it were, around their extended family to make up the amount. In extreme circumstances, dowries could be obtained via other means. Pomeroy notes that from the middle of the fifth century onwards, there existed a kind of state-backed social safety net for brides: “the law required that dowries be provided for poor girls of even passably attractive appearance,” she says, “and a few times, Athens provided dowries for daughters of men who had served the state.” (Pomeroy 61)
With very few exceptions, a marriage that didn’t involve a dowry payment was considered illegitimate: a woman who married a man without bringing a dowry along was seen as a concubine rather than a wife. The dowry money would be used to maintain the wife within her husband’s house and also to support her in the case of divorce or of his death – not unlikely, given the fact that there was generally a 15-year age gap between the couple. She didn’t live a free and easy life as a divorcee or a widow, however – she would immediately come under the supervision of some other man in her circle, whether it was her father, a brother-in-law, or an adult son – and they would control and disburse her dowry funds for her.
The actual wedding itself, as mentioned in our little vignette at the top of the show, was a three-day affair. The first day was the proaulia. This was largelya preparatory day for the bride. She would go with her family to make offerings at a temple. This included giving the goddess Artemis her toys, her girdle, and other girlish things: Artemis was believed to watch over young virgins, and the bride’s offerings were an expression of her thanks for the goddess’s protection. The bride would also make offerings to Hera, wife of Zeus, and Aphrodite, goddess of love and sex, with the hopes that they would make her marriage a prosperous and fruitful one.
Day two was the actual wedding, the gamos, which began with a ritual bath for the bride, who would then dress (or be dressed, if the family had slaves or servants) in her wedding clothes. Bridal clothes were colorful. They included a crown and a veil to cover the bride’s face. There would be a sacrifice by the bride’s father in her family home, and then feasts would be held – feasts at which men and women would eat separately – even the bridal couple. After dark there was a noisy, festive procession to escort the couple from the bride’s family home to the husband’s home, with the bride’s mother carrying a lantern or lit torch to lead the way.
In The Trojan Women, we see Cassandra making a mockery of this tradition when she carries a torch after hearing that she’s to be given to Agamemnon as a concubine – she tries to cajole her mother into carrying it for her, and to bully the chorus into singing and dancing behind her as she goes down to the ship.
Once home, the husband would remove his wife’s veil, and the couple would be sent to bed to consummate the marriage.
Day three, the epaulia, involved visits from the bride’s family, who would bring gifts such as household items to the new couple. One last banquet, involving only the men of her husband’s family, served to introduce the wife to her new home.
A new wife would have to learn how to manage her husband’s household: managing the budget, putting any servants to work, overseeing the acquisition and preparation of food, making clothes and other textiles for the family. Someone – either the man or his mother – would step in to teach her how to do that. This phase of her education, dictated by a mother-in-law she didn’t know and a husband twice her age, couldn’t have been very pleasant. And it probably didn’t give men a very good impression of feminine capabilities, either: It’s not hard to conclude all women are perpetual children when your own wife is an illiterate teenager whose pelvis hasn’t finished growing yet.
Speaking of pelvises, let’s move on to childbirth. Pregnancy and birth in ancient times were processes fraught with danger. Mothers frequently did not survive childbed, either because of injuries or complications during the event or infections that set in afterwards. Sarah Pomeroy cites archaeological evidence which concludes adult women in Classical Greece only lived to about 36 years of age, with about 10 – 20 per cent of women dying in childbirth – a process the average woman would go through five times. (Pomeroy 67)
Women in labour were almost always attended by other women, though male doctors might be called in for emergencies. Women who survived the ordeal would make offerings to Eileithyia, the goddess of childbirth. They would undergo a convalescence period, with women who’d given birth to sons being given more food and consideration than those who’d given birth to daughters. Women who didn’t had their robes dedicated to Artemis.
Athenian women seem to have been less hardy than their counterparts elsewhere in Greece, particularly Spartan women. Spartan ladies tended to marry at eighteen, when their bodies were fully prepared for bearing children. They also were in good physical condition – they weren’t subject to the same dietary restrictions as women in Athens, and they were required to get lots of exercise. (Pomeroy 79-80)
Athenian women, on the other hand, were kept largely indoors. I’ve already described the separation of the household by gender. This seclusion extended into public life, too. On the rare occasions that women left the house – to help a relative with a birth, say, or to go and borrow some oil from a neighbour – they wore veils over their heads and faces, much like some Islamic women do today. This held true even if they were lower-class women who had to get their own water or food, or even work outside the home.
When in public, women did not speak to, make eye contact with, or interact in any way with strange men if at all possible, and the vast majority of men were socialized into returning the favour. It was considered dishonourable to speak to a woman you didn’t know, especially a married one.
Doing so risked not just the woman’s reputation but the reputation of her husband – a flirtatious woman could be an unfaithful one, and an unfaithful woman could give birth to another man’s child. In a society where your rights as a citizen depended on your being born legitimately, this was a risk nobody wanted to take. According to Sarah Pomeroy:
“In a city where only men and male children belonged to families in any permanent sense, but where women were easily transferred from their fathers’ families to those of successive husbands, men were readily suspicious of the loyalty of women to the families in which they found themselves.” (Pomeroy 86)
Given how uptight Athenians were about women being seen in public, you can understand why there’s been so much debate about whether or not they could go to plays. There were two events at which women were allowed to appear in public, however: religious festivals and funerals.
Funerals and Festivals in Ancient Greece: A Rare Women’s Day Out
Let’s start with funerals. If you think back to Aeschylus’s The Libation Bearers, the first half of the play takes place around a grave monument, where Electra, daughter of Agamemnon, is performing prayers and offerings to her murdered father’s ghost. The chorus that attends her is made up of women, who are fulfilling a traditional role as professional mourners: wailing and tearing their cheeks with their fingernails to express their dismay at the loss of the deceased. This is not all dramatic license: women did indeed play important roles in funeral rites and in commemorating the dead long after the funeral.
I read a 2008 paper by Kerri J. Hame, “Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy,” which points out that in the past, historians have over-interpreted scenes from Greek tragedy to conclude that women had complete control over funeral rites. Archaeological evidence doesn’t bear this out. We can’t assume that what we read in Aeschylus or Euripides is an accurate reflection of real-life practices any more than we can assume that, say, an episode of Grey’s Anatomy accurately reflects real working conditions in hospitals.
When a person died in Classical Athens, it kicked off a process that, like marriage, had three parts. First, there was the prothesis, the preparatory phase. First, a near relative had to claim the body of the dead person. This almost always meant a male relative. If the only available relative of the deceased was a woman, she would have to get a man from somewhere to conduct these rites on her behalf. Several scenes from tragedy show women disobeying this chain of authority and initiating funeral rites on their own, or against the wishes of a male leader.
We didn’t read Sophocles’ play Antigone for this show, but the main conflict of that story is that Antigone, one of the daughters of Oedipus, wants permission to bury her brother, who has died while rebelling against their uncle Cleon, king of Thebes. When Cleon doesn’t give Antigone that permission, she defies him, visiting the body on the battlefield and sprinkling earth over it while reciting prayers. While this is presented as having a certain nobility to it – Antigone is trying to do her duty by her family and the gods – it was also, for the time, deeply defiant and anti-social behaviour. Antigone is buried alive at the end of the play. (Hame 11)
Again, I remind you of the Oresteia: at the end of Agamemnon, Clytemnestra takes the responsibility of conducting Agamemnon’s funeral rites on herself – this would have been doubly shocking to the audience of the day, both because she was burying the man she had brazenly murdered, and because she was usurping a man’s traditional place as the leader of funeral rites. (Hame 5)
At any rate. Once the body was claimed by a male relative, he would close the eyes of the dead and then call in women to begin preparing the body for burial. These women would wash the body all over, lay it down on a movable bed with its feet pointing toward the exit of the house, dress it, and anoint it with oil or perfume. They might add a wreath or a place a coin over the mouth as payment for Charon, ferryman of the dead. Finally, the body would be covered the body with a shroud. We see Hecuba performing these actions for her poor grandson Astyanax in The Trojan Women, using her son Hector’s shield as the baby’s funeral bed.
On the second day after death, people would visit the home to view the body. Women of the household would stand around the body giving demonstrations of dramatic grief: ripping their hair or their clothes, striking their breasts, wailing or chanting dirges. On the third day, the second phase began: the ekphora. Before dawn, the mourners would process to the burial site, where a stele – a commemorative marker – was set up. Once the remains were committed to the earth, the lead mourner – again, usually a male relative – would pour a liquid offering (usually a mixture of wine, oils, and honey) at the base of the stele.
After that was the final stage, the perideipnon. This involved a funeral feast to thank the mourners for seeing that the dead was properly buried. Then, the women of the house were tasked with ritually cleaning the house, all the belongings of the dead person, and their own bodies, because people who had been in contact with the dead were considered unclean for up to a year. During that year, women were responsible for carrying out the physical and spiritual maintenance of the grave site, visiting it regularly to keep it clean, chant prayers, and pour out further offerings to keep the dead person’s spirit safely in the underworld.
Funerals seem to have been one of the few public occasions where men and women mixed more or less openly. Sarah Pomeroy includes some testimony from a murder trial in her book which supports this. A husband is being tried for murdering his wife’s lover, and he testifies that the man fell in love with his wife after seeing her at a family funeral. (Pomeroy 80)
However, there were also some other opportunities. A culture with a lot of gods is going to have a lot of cults and a lot of religious festivals. Some of these cults and festivals allowed women a leading role in activities. We’ve talked about the priestesses of Apollo – the Pythia and her attendants – in past episodes. However, most priestesses in the 5th century BCE didn’t live cloistered religious lives. Instead, they performed their duties at specific times of year while maintaining an otherwise normal domestic life. (McClure 2018)
There were many, many religious festivals and rituals in which women could participate in classical Athens. David Pritchard says that “religion was the one area in which Attic women had prominence and independence. Indeed, for rich women festivals and funerals were among the few activities for which their husbands or fathers would allow them to leave the [home].” (Prichard 189)
Two of the major Athenian religious cults in which women played leading roles were the cult of the goddess Athena – not surprising, given she was the goddess for whom the city was named – and the cult of Demeter – also not surprising, given that she was the goddess of fertility.
The office of high priestess of Athena was hereditary. An older woman from a specific family would be nominated to serve in the office. It was her duty to oversee the functioning of Athena’s temple in the city and to help direct the annual celebration of Athena’s birthday. This festival was called the Panathenea, and it took place in the summer.
The Panathenaea included feasts, events at the shrine of Athena, and a major animal sacrifice. Women and men mingled during these festivities. The procession that led up to the sacrifice involved a thousand or more people, led by the priestess of Athena. Young girls, usually aged around 11, carried baskets full of grain offerings and sacrificial instruments to the altar site. And young girls and women participated in ritually weaving and dedicating a new dress for the main statue of Athena in the city. (Pomeroy 74-75)
When it came to Demeter’s cult, the main event was a women-only fertility festival called the Thesmophoria. This was celebrated in the autumn, just before farmers would start planting for the following spring, and it was considered by everyone in the city to be a very important festival, essential to ensuring a good harvest and a good crop of healthy children. Laura McClure, writing in the Oxford Reference Encyclopedia of Religion, explains that:
“It was the largest and perhaps oldest Athenian festival celebrated by women. As part of the official state religious calendar, it was a public religious occasion, with a special civic space set aside for it, the shrine of the Thesmophorion, adjacent to the area where the Athenian Assembly met. Citizen men were required by law to pay all expenses for their wives to attend. The main features of the festival were secrecy, pig sacrifice, and rites promoting agricultural fertility.” (McClure 2018)
The women who participated in the Thesmophoria had to be citizens’ wives or daughters and of good reputation. They abstained from sex for three days before the festival and during it. The festival took place over five days. The first two days of the festival took place in the city and were a sort of a prelude to the main event. Part of this prelude involved choosing women to lead the proceedings. Another part was a bawdy, ladies-only celebration at which they told dirty stories and sexual jokes.
On the third day, the women would head up to a place outside the city where there were some sacred caves and set up a campsite. Earlier in the summer, at a different festival, some pigs would have been sacrificed in these caves (pigs were considered sacred to Demeter), and left to lie there along with little phalluses made of clay or dough.
The women of the Thesmophoria would retrieve the remains of these sacred pigs, mix them with seeds, and then spend a day fasting and praying over them before scattering them in the fields on the final day of the festival. The Thesmophoria concluded with a feast that included pomegranates – a fruit that symbolized both fertility and called back to the myth of Demeter and her daughter Persephone, who was imprisoned half the year in the underworld after eating six pomegranate pips.
The ladies of the Thesmophoria also ate cakes in the shape of penises and vulvas at this concluding feast, and honestly, I love that for them: who doesn’t love performing an important civic function while also being able to tell dick jokes?
The citizen women of Athens spent so much of their time inside, voices silent, the narrow boundaries of their lives dictated by men who, at best, considered them to be charming ornaments to their lives. I’m glad that once a year they got to wild out on a girls-only camping trip.
Scratching the Surface
I’ll be honest: this has been a frustrating episode to put together. The evidence we have about women in this place and in this period is so heavily slanted. It’s biased toward a specific social class, and it’s filtered through male perceptions. I feel like I’ve written seven thousand words that barely make a dent in the subject, and that possibly perpetuate the problem of only focusing on higher-status Athenian women.
We could also have talked about foreign-born women who lived in Athens, about female slaves, or about prostitutes – both those who worked in Athens’s state-sanctioned brothels and the higher-status hetairai. These women were cultivated, educated sex workers who served wealthy men. The great Athenian leader Pericles caused scandal by taking as his second wife a hetairai named Aspasia, who was known for being clever and politically savvy. But Aspasia and others like her were outliers, while the lives of slaves are poorly documented.
And the point here was also to think about the women Euripides would have been thinking of when he was writing. Those would most likely have been women from other well-to-do citizen families. Again, Euripides was not a feminist. He was not arguing for a 5th-century version of women’s liberation; you can see this in the way that women in his plays who step out of societal bounds are often made to suffer. However, he had a deep interest in women characters that was remarked upon even in his day – and parodied, too, as we’ll see in next month’s episodes on Aristophanes.
In fact, Euripides was categorized by his contemporaries as a misogynist. He could not possibly respect women, went the thinking of other ancient Greek writers, if he was willing to portray them as angry to the point of murder, as having lustful thoughts, or as being capable of manipulating men to their own ends. From our vantage point, Euripides’s characterizations of women as complex people with a variety of motivations and ambitions actually throws a favourable light over him. As Sarah Pomeroy puts it:
“I do not think it misogynistic to present women as strong, assertive, successful, and sexually demanding even if they are also selfish or villainous. Other feminists share my opinion, and British suffragists used to recite speeches from Euripides at their meetings.” (Pomeroy 107-108)
Pomeroy’s point of view, to which I’m largely sympathetic, is that Euripides didn’t just return again and again to women in his stories because of the dramatic potential, or even to explore their psychology. Instead, he was holding them up as a mirror to the supposedly “civilized” and “democratic” Athens. In The Trojan Women in particular, he seems to be asking: if we treat our daughters and the mothers of our children like this, can we be surprised that violence continues to plague us, or that true justice remains out of reach?
These critiques would have seemed especially pointed in the context of the Peloponnesian War, which was about to end disastrously for Athens just a year after Euripides’s death. He seems to have been thinking about the missteps his society had taken that had led it to the brink of destruction, and using, at least in part, his society’s treatment of women as one framework for that thinking. “His plays are most disturbing,” wrote the scholar Sheila Murnaghan in 1993, “not for the misogyny they may or may not express, but for their claim that human impulses to violence transcend all categories and elude all efforts to contain them.” (Murnaghan 1993)
What my reading of Euripides has shown me is a deeply curious and empathetic artist at work. A striving toward some kind of greater understanding of people beyond us is a fundamental responsibility of being an adult in the world. Any art that explores this can be said to be good art, and an artist who can take you along on that journey toward understanding is a great one. In giving a voice to women – even highly dramatized characterizations of mythological women – at a time when they were expected to remain silent and submissive, Euripides became one of the greatest.
That’s it for this episode. But that’s not it for Euripides – we’re going to see him and Aeschylus as characters in our next work: a comedy about a poetry contest in the afterlife. Join me on Sunday, July 29th for Episode 37: Aristophanes, Frogs, Part 1: Dead Poets Rivalry.
Books of All Time is written and produced by me, Rose Judson. The Disclaimer Voice of Doom is Ed Brown. Lluvia Arras designed our cover art and logo. Special thanks to Yelena Shapiro, Cathy Merli, Matt Brough, John Cole and the Books of All Time Advisory Council: Ed Brown, Beck Collins, Neil Dowling, Caitlin McMullin, Hugh Parker, and Jonathan Skipp. You can support the show by subscribing and leaving a rating or review at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also follow us on social media: we’re on Bluesky, Instagram and Facebook. Thanks for listening! I’ll be back in two weeks.
References and Works Cited:
Bardis, Panos D. “The Ancient Greek Family.” Social Science, vol. 39, no. 3, 1964, pp. 156–175, http://www.jstor.org/stable/23907609.
“Death in Classical Athens.” Death in the Ancient World, 27 May 2018, www.deathintheancientworld.wordpress.com/2018/05/15/death-in-classical-athens/.
Hame, Kerri J. “Female Control of Funeral Rites in Greek Tragedy: Klytaimestra, Medea, and Antigone.” Classical Philology, vol. 103, no. 1, 2008, pp. 1–15, https://doi.org/10.1086/590091.
Henderson, Jeffrey. “Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974-), vol. 121, 1991, pp. 133–147, https://doi.org/10.2307/284448.
Johnstone, Steven. “Women, Property, and Surveillance in Classical Athens.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 22, no. 2, 2003, pp. 247–274, https://doi.org/10.1525/ca.2003.22.2.247.
Katz, Marilyn A. “Did the Women of Ancient Athens Attend the Theater in the Eighteenth Century?” Classical Philology, vol. 93, no. 2, 1998, pp. 105–124, http://www.jstor.org/stable/270354.
McClure, Laura. “Women in Classical Greek Religion.” Oxford Research Encyclopaedia of Religion, Oxford University Press, 30 July 2018, www.oxfordre.com/religion/display/10.1093/acrefore/9780199340378.001.0001/acrefore-9780199340378-e-256.
Osborne, Robin. “Law, the Democratic Citizen and the Representation of Women in Classical Athens.” Past & Present, no. 155, 1997, pp. 3–33, http://www.jstor.org/stable/651125.
Pomeroy, Sarah B. Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. The Bodley Head Ltd, 2015.
Pritchard, David M. “The Position of Attic Women in Democratic Athens.” Greece & Rome, vol. 61, no. 2, 2014, pp. 174–193, http://www.jstor.org/stable/43297497.
Toth, Mike. “8 Key Facts on Ancient Greek Marriages & Wedding Ceremonies.” The Collector, 23 June 2023, www.thecollector.com/ancient-greek-weddings-facts/.
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