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Plays and Politics: Women in Ancient Greece
From: Cambridge University Press
| By:
David Wiles |
EDITOR'S INTRODUCTION |
Theatre attendance in Ancient Greece was reserved almost exclusively for men. This was a reflection of the democratic values of a state where women were removed from the public domain: in fact, Solon, leader of ancient Athens, revoked a woman's right to public life in order to foster democracy in the young city-state. The parallels between theatre and politics are intricate and interesting. Taking examples from Homer's Odyssey and Aeschylus' plays, David Wiles here examines the role of women in literature and life in the world of the Ancient Greeks. |
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| Silhouettes of the Furies on the roof of the house at the start of the Agamemnon; from The Oresteia, directed by Silviu Purcarete. Limoges, 1996. | |
 enelope, the wife of Homer's Odysseus, spends her life weaving, like most Athenian women, but the palace where she lives is a place where important people assemble, and the price she pays is sexual harassment when her husband is away at sea. In the democratic era, men removed themselves from the household to a new set of public spaces where the important business of life was now conducted. Women at the same time were removed from the public domain in which citizen males paraded their equality. Solon, in the early days of the city-state, imposed a series of controls upon Athenian women which included: regulation of women's festivals; restraints upon extravagant dress; a curfew for women after dark; smaller trousseaux to prevent bridegrooms from appearing to sell their bodies for money; no displays at funerals with hired mourners and self-flagellation. The funeral procession was to take place before daybreak, with women walking at the back, and traditional female mourning was dismissed as 'barbaric' (Plutarch, Life of Solon). Behind Solon's measures lay a democratic logic. In the new era of the city-state, rich men were not to flaunt their wealth by showing how women of their family could dress. The elite should not be tempted to use marriage to pool their wealth. The chastity of citizen women should be protected, so there could be no ambiguity about who was or was not a son of Athens. |
Women in the Athenian democracy
The strength of the city-state was a matter of life and death. If the men of the city fought side by side as equals with complete commitment to the collective good, then the city became rich. If it was torn apart by in-fighting between rich and poor, the city could be annihilated. The suppression of women was therefore a means to an end. The place of Athenian women became the home--and even within the home they were excluded from rooms where men entertained male guests. The place of males became the market, the assembly, the law court, the gymnasium where they conversed and trained for war, and the theatre where they questioned in the most fundamental ways who they were and how they should live. The suppression of women is perhaps most obvious in the rules of the law court. Though citizen women could engage in the religious practice of swearing an oath, they could not otherwise speak, and had to be represented by the male relative who was their legal master. Their identities were effaced to the point that not even their names could be mentioned in public. We cannot tell how far women resented a political system which reduced them to non-persons, because their voices are lost. |
Pericles' injunction that Athenian women should live in accordance with 'that nature that you have' begged a few questions. It would take a generation or two longer before democratic ideology (by which term I refer to the work of philosophers, biologists and theatre-makers, amongst others) would bring the new socially constructed role of women into alignment with public perceptions of the natural and god-given. In the classical period there seemed nothing natural about the way Athenian women were required to behave, for too many alternative models were available. Myths of great antiquity showed goddesses resisting their husbands and driving chariots into battle. A woman like Aspasia, the mistress and intellectual companion of Pericles, was free to mingle with men because she was not Athenian but an Ionian Greek from Asia Minor. Customs were seen to be different in non-democratic societies. In Sparta, for example, women were educated, they could own property, they could dance in public and criticize the dancing displays of men (Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus). Most famously, Spartan girls could run naked like men in athletic contests. A subject population took responsibility for most of the weaving, and the Spartan priority was that women should be physically fit to breed fit sons. In Athens, the debate about an ideal society could at no point sidestep the issue of woman's role and nature. |
There was thus a conspicuous gap in classical Athens between sex and gender. Dramatists could construct new myths in order to efface this gap, or they could play upon the gap in order to explore deep tensions and contradictions within the democratic system. Aeschylus is often associated with the first strategy, Euripides and Aristophanes with the second. |
Women in Aeschylus
Aeschylus' Oresteia portrayed a process of political change, starting in a Homeric, monarchical Argos, and finishing in a law court of democratic Athens. In Argos a woman, Clytaemnestra, rules for ten years while her husband Agamemnon is away at war, and she kills him when he returns, for reasons that seem to touch her as a woman: he made a human sacrifice of their daughter; he brings a concubine into her home; and he abandoned her without a male protector, so she has taken a man to replace her husband. In the second play of the trilogy their son Orestes returns and avenges his father by killing his mother. In baring her breast, Clytaemnestra emphasizes the biological bond of mother and child. In Eumenides, the third play, the affair is brought to trial before the sexually ambivalent figure of Athene. The issue is thus, whose crime was the greater? That of the woman who broke the social bond by tiling her husband, or that of the man who broke the biological bond by killing his mother? Athene determines, through her casting vote, that the social bond is more important. The overt moral is clear: in Greek democratic society, ties of family have to be subordinated to those socially constructed ties which constitute the political system. |
In the trial scene, Orestes has as his advocate the male god Apollo, who commanded him to kill. Clytaemnestra's case is represented by twelve demonic Furies, who are associated with the earth and represent the forces of nature and reproduction. The core of Apollo's case is the argument that the womb is merely a container for the male seed: 'The so-called mother is not the parent of her child, but nurse to a freshly seeded foetus. The parent is he who mounts. The woman is a stranger who preserves the shoots of a stranger, if a god helps him' (Eumenides). |
Apollo's patriarchal biology drew upon new fashions of thought that were later consolidated by Aristotle, but flew in the face of normal thinking at the time, thinking embedded in medicine and in law. Seven years later, Pericles implemented a new marriage code which required that citizenship be restricted to those born of citizen mothers as well as citizen fathers, and such laws assumed that the mother had a significant role in the reproductive process. The harshness of Apollo's phrasing has led many interpreters to conclude that Aeschylus intended to generate a critical response and not simple assent. |
In the final scene, Athene makes her peace with the Furies, and gives them a home in a cave beneath the Areopagus, the crag on which the court sat. The Furies become 'eumenides', 'well-disposed'. The metaphor of the cave can be read in several ways. (1) Women are below and men above. (2) Women are now sequestered in the privacy of the home. (3) Women according to the formula used in the wedding ceremony are given to be ploughed for the propagation of legitimate children: the female Furies are thus associated with the fertility of the earth. (4) Women are equated with forces of political instability: if the lower orders of society are not accommodated, the power structure will collapse. Aeschylus' trilogy can be read as patriarchal propaganda, but it can also be read as an ironic and symbolic representation of sociopolitical changes currently taking place. Peter Stein was at pains to capture the complexity of the final image in his staging of the final scene. His Furies were bound up in tight cloths to suggest both patriarchal rearing practices (foot-binding, swaddling clothes) and the form of a chrysalis that would one day hatch. His use of a Russian cast emphasized the vulnerability of the new Athenian order. Silviu Purcarete with a Romanian cast had pregnant and faceless Furies lying on the ground to emphasize their link with the earth. The ironic contrast between their lyrical blessing song and their loss of freedom again tied postcommunist politics to the question of gender. |
Only the first play survives of Aeschylus' Danaid trilogy, but there too Aeschylus uses a broad historical sweep to represent the changing status of Greek women. In Suppliants, the surviving first play of the trilogy, fifty wild but genetically Greek women (represented by twelve actors) arrive from North Africa as refugees from an arranged marriage which they oppose. They dress with oriental extravagance and engage in ritual displays of grief that include tearing their veils, beating their breasts and lacerating their faces. |
They engage, therefore, in practices which Athens and other Greek states tried to curb. The king of Argos decides to protect them, after minimal democratic consultations. In the lost second play, when Argos has been defeated in battle, the women murder their Egyptian husbands on their wedding night. One woman opts out of the conspiracy, perhaps because her husband declines to engage in marital rape. It appears that a new sexual regime is now implemented in Argos: whilst males give up Egyptian-style rapacity, women give up their autonomy. Suppliants dramatizes female qualities which alarmed Athenian males: the power to seduce and deceive, the power of emotion expressed through the body, the power and exclusiveness of women in a collective group. |
Gender in Suppliants is bound up with ethnicity. It emerges as a Greek principle that the woman submits to her husband, and the husband controls his rapacious instincts. The barbaric east is associated time and again in Greek thinking with femininity and lack of self-control; oriental men were said to fawn before monarchs, dress luxuriously and indulge in emotional displays. The sexual regime of classical Athens relates not only to democracy but also to the ideology of race. The classical historian Herodotus sketched an Egypt where gender roles are reversed. Women urinate standing up, and sell goods in the market, leaving men at home to do the weaving. Most interestingly, Herodotus describes a dramatic festival dedicated to a god he recognized as Dionysos. Women, he says, processed from village to village operating marionettes equipped with a giant mobile phallus. The remarkable thing was not the obscenity, but the fact that women performed these obscenities before men (Histories). Similar role inversion is a feature of Aeschylus' Persians, where the widowed queen performs her ritual functions with dignity and authority, but Xerxes her son, defeated by the Greeks in battle, leads the male chorus in a frenzied display of feminine emotion. The Persian males ululate, beat their breasts, tear at their hair, rip their clothing and weep in a manner antithetical to Greek notions of masculinity. |
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