Women of Golden Age Greece

Even so, there ar compelling reasons for questioning whether the characterization of women as isolated and disdain is appropriate. Scholarly investigation and analysis of texts dealing with ancient Greek social customs and practices wee-wee all overtaken such comments as those by Loomis, written in 1942, on the Symposium. One bibliographic endeavor covering such scholarship notes in particular the "anachronous" nature of the idea that Greek women were confined to "oriental seclusion," and cites the egress of monographs and essay collections on the subject of women's partnership in litigation and public life (Katz 540).

Women's social identities were anchored by their relationship to fathers, husbands, uncles, who functioned as their guardians, or kyrios, and had a good deal of control over them. The fact that, in Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis Agamemnon is able to summon his wife Clytemnestra and their female child Iphigenia to him as he prepares to leave for war--only to sacrifice Iphigenia so that the gods will give the Achaean ships the wind they need to sail off to Troy--is instructive in that regard. However, readers of Aeschylus' Orestia trilogy know that Agamemnon's butchery of his daughter cost him plenty when he returned home from the war.

In the normal world of ancient Greece, male kyrios may

Women also fulfilled roles at public functions. A choral ode in Lysistrata catalogues of ritual duties that women have performed for the glory of the state--duties that justify their boldness of state authority:

Antigone describes her defiance of her uncle Creon in burying Polyneics as her duty (Ant. 43-46). It is also treason, and whatever the tragic mise-en-scFne her death creates for Creon and Haemon, it git also be interpreted as an indictment of semi policy-making tyranny.

I, who to her thoughtful tender care

Loomis, Louise Ropes. Introduction, Symposium. Plato. Roslyn, New York: Walter J. Black, 1942. 157-158.

Aristophanes. Lysistrata. Trans. Benjamin Bickley Rogers. cinque Comedies of Aristophanes. New York: Doubleday/Anchor, 1955. 283-336.

Along the same lines, Burton asserts that women were socially engaged, being more than involved in "wining and dining," in the sense associated with making political and social alliances, than texts such as the Symposium would suggest. Burton cites evidence of social accomplishments of a variety of high-born women portrayed in Greek drama, including Iphigenia and the daughters of Oedipus, as salubrious as such historical figures as Aspasia, who was Pericles' longtime companion, and the participation in women's cult worship. By the Hellenistic period, two queens, Berenice and Arsinoe, "were displaying authority and power in the public sphere by such acts as sponsoring temples and festivals" (148). Gradually, it appears, real-world women were achieving the status of women portrayed in epic rime and tragedy.

The general dynamic of women's experience in ancient Greece seems to have been that their visibility in the culture was increasing, the more widespread gentility and knowledge were disseminated. Figures such as Berenice, for example, can be con rampred politically transitional for Greece. Unfortunately, the momentum of history seems to have been on the side of reassertion of patriarchal privilege--for example by Rome afte
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