3. The Development of Greek Society and Culture, ca. 3000

Thinking Like a Historian: Gender Roles in Classical Athens

Gender Roles in Classical Athens

Athenian men’s ideas about the proper roles for men and women, conveyed in written and visual form, became a foundation of Western notions of gender. How do the qualities they view as ideal and praiseworthy for men compare with those they view as ideal for women?

1	*Pericles’s funeral oration, from Thucydides’s History of the Peloponnesian War, 430 B.C.E.* In this speech given in honor of those who had died in the war, the Athenian leader Pericles glorifies the achievements of Athenian men and women.

If we look to the laws, they afford equal justice to all in their private differences; if to social standing, advancement in public life falls to reputation for capacity, class considerations not being allowed to interfere with merit; nor again does poverty bar the way, if a man is able to serve the state, he is not hindered by the obscurity of his condition. . . . Further, we provide plenty of means for the mind to refresh itself from business. We celebrate games and sacrifices all the year round, and the elegance of our private establishments forms a daily source of pleasure. . . . [I]n education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. . . . We cultivate refinement without extravagance and knowledge without effeminacy; wealth we employ more for use than for show. . . . Again, in our enterprises we present the singular spectacle of daring and deliberation, each carried to its highest point, and both united in the same persons. . . . In short, I say that as a city we are the school of Hellas; while I doubt if the world can produce a man, who where he has only himself to depend upon, is equal to so many emergencies, and graced by so happy a versatility as the Athenian. . . .

If I must say anything on the subject of female excellence to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation: Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad.

Xenophon, Oeconomicus, ca. 360 B.C.E. In a treatise on household management, the historian, soldier, and philosopher Xenophon creates a character, Isomachus, who provides his much younger wife with advice and informs her about ideal gender roles. “God” in this selection means all of the gods, personified as male; “law” is personified as female (“law gives her consent”).

ISOMACHUS: “God made provision from the first by shaping, as it seems to me, the woman’s nature for indoor and the man’s for outdoor occupations. Man’s body and soul He furnished with a greater capacity for enduring heat and cold, wayfaring and military marches; or, to repeat, He laid upon his shoulders the outdoor works. While in creating the body of woman with less capacity for these things,” I continued, “God would seem to have imposed on her the indoor works; and knowing that He had implanted in the woman and imposed upon her the nurture of new-born babies, He endowed her with a larger share of affection for the new-born child than He bestowed upon man. And since He imposed on woman the guardianship of the things imported from without, God, in His wisdom, perceiving that a fearful spirit was no detriment to guardianship, endowed the woman with a larger measure of timidity than He bestowed on man. Knowing further that he to whom the outdoor works belonged would need to defend them against malign attack, He endowed the man in turn with a larger share of courage. . . . Law, too, gives her consent—law and the usage of mankind, by sanctioning the wedlock of man and wife; and just as God ordained them to be partners in their children, so the law establishes their common ownership of house and estate. Custom, moreover, proclaims as beautiful those excellences of man and woman with which God gifted them at birth. Thus for a woman to bide tranquilly at home rather than roam abroad is no dishonour; but for a man to remain indoors, instead of devoting himself to outdoor pursuits, is a thing discreditable.”

3	Aristotle, The Politics. In The Politics, one of his most important works, Aristotle examines the development of government, which he sees as originating in the power relations in the family and household.

The city belongs among the things that exist by nature, and man is by nature a political animal. . . . The family is the association established by nature for the supply of men’s everyday wants. . . .

It is clear that the rule of the soul over the body, and of the mind and the rational element over the passionate, is natural and expedient; whereas the equality of the two or the rule of the inferior is always hurtful. The same holds good of animals in relation to men; for tame animals have a better nature than wild, and all tame animals are better off when they are ruled by man; for then they are preserved. Again, the male is by nature superior, and the female inferior; and the one rules, and the other is ruled; this principle, of necessity, extends to all mankind. . . .

A similar question may be raised about women and children, whether they too have virtues: ought a woman to be temperate and brave and just, and is a child to be called temperate, and intemperate, or not? . . . Here the very constitution of the soul has shown us the way; in it one part naturally rules, and the other is subject, and the virtue of the ruler we maintain to be different from that of the subject; the one being the virtue of the rational, and the other of the irrational part. Now, it is obvious that the same principle applies generally, and therefore almost all things rule and are ruled according to nature. . . . For the slave has no deliberative faculty at all; the woman has, but it is without authority, and the child has, but it is immature. So it must necessarily be supposed to be with the moral virtues also; all should partake of them, but only in such manner and degree as is required by each for the fulfillment of his duty. . . . Clearly, then, moral virtue belongs to all of them; but the temperance of a man and of a woman, or the courage and justice of a man and of a woman, are not, as Socrates maintained, the same; the courage of a man is shown in commanding, of a woman in obeying. . . . All classes must be deemed to have their special attributes; as the poet says of women, “Silence is a woman’s glory,” but this is not equally the glory of man.

4	Vase painting showing Athenian woman at home, fifth century B.C.E. A well-to-do young woman sits on an elegant chair inside a house, spinning and weaving. The bed piled high with coverlets on the left was a symbol of marriage.

(Musée du Louvre, Paris, France/Erich Lessing/Art Resource, NY)

Lekythos (oil flask), with a wedding scene, attributed to the Amasis Painter, ca. 550 B.C.E. In this early representation of an Attic wedding procession, the bearded groom drives the cart to his home, while the bride (right) pulls her veil forward in a gesture associated with marriage in Greek art.

(Lekythos by Amasis Painter/Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, New York, USA/De Agostini Picture Library/Bridgeman Images)

ANALYZING THE EVIDENCE

In Sources 1–3, what qualities do the authors see as praiseworthy in men? In women?
In Sources 2 and 3, what do Xenophon and Aristotle view as the underlying reasons for gender differences?
The two paintings in Sources 4 and 5 show scenes that were normal parts of real Athenian life, but how do they also convey ideals for men and women? What are these ideals?
Because no writing or art by Athenian women has survived, we have to extrapolate women’s opinions from works by men. What does the body language and expression of the young woman in Source 4 suggest she thought about her situation?

PUTTING IT ALL TOGETHER

Using the sources above, along with what you have learned in class and in Chapter 3, write a short essay that compares ideals for men and women in classical Athens. How did these ideas about gender roles both reflect and shape Athenian society and political life?

Sources: (1) Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War (London: J. M. Dent; New York, E. P. Dutton, 1910), at Perseus Digital Library; (2) Xenophon, The Economist, trans. H. G. Dakyns, at http://www.gutenberg.org/files/1173/1173-h/1173-h.htm; (3) Aristotle, Politics, Book One, translated by Benjamin Jowett, at http://classics.mit.edu/Aristotle/politics.1.one.html.