Ancient Greek Misogyny

The ancient Greeks have a reputation for being great thinkers and innovators. I have written about Greek achievements many times before and I even discuss them at length in this article from March 2019. Unfortunately, ancient Greek society was also, in many ways, deeply flawed. Notably, misogynistic attitudes towards women were extremely common, especially among elite educated men.

Lengthy tirades about the supposed “evils” of women that even the most avowed sexist today would fear to say outright in public absolutely inundate ancient Greek literature. These tirades are practically ubiquitous; they even occur in some of the oldest and most revered works of classical Greek literature. In this article, I will quote some of these passages—not because I think the opinions in them are in any way correct or justified, but rather to illustrate one hateful aspect of ancient Greek civilization.

Telemachos’s rebuke to Penelope in the Odyssey

Blatant misogyny appears in some of the earliest extant works of ancient Greek literature. In Book One of the Odyssey, Odysseus’s wife Penelope comes downstairs to the hall where her suitors are and where her and Odysseus’s son Telemachos is. There, in the hall, the bard Phemios sings a song about the Achaians’ return home from Troy.

Penelope is understandably pained by this and asks Phemios to please sing a different song that does not remind her of her missing husband. Telemachos immediately scolds her for having come downstairs and for being so “rude” to the poor bard. He tells her that talking is men’s business and orders her to go back upstairs and to return to her loom. He tells her, as translated by the classicist Robert Garland:

“Go inside the house, and attend to your work, the loom and the distaff, and bid your handmaidens attend to their work also. Talking is men’s business, all men’s business, but my business most of all.” (lines 356-359)

Penelope obeys her son’s command and goes upstairs to work at her loom. In this story, Penelope represents an idealized, submissive woman who is totally obedient to the commands of her male relatives—in this case, her own son. Ancient Greek male authors believed that this was how all women were supposed to act.

ABOVE: Penelope and the Suitors, painted in 1912 by the English Pre-Raphaelite painter John William Waterhouse, showing Odysseus’s wife Penelope working at her loom

Hesiodos of Askre’s misogynistic tirades

In his long narrative poem Theogonia, the Boiotian poet Hesiodos of Askre, who lived in around the late eighth or early seventh century BC, gives a partial retelling of the story of Pandora, the first woman, followed by a rant in which he describes all women as a horrible evil and a burden to men, a loathsome curse sent by Zeus:

“For from her [i.e. Pandora] is the descent of female women
[for the race and tribes of women are destructive,]
a great pain for mortals, living with men,
companions not of destructive Poverty but of Plenty.
As when, in hives overhung from above, bees feed
drones, conspirators in evil deeds,
all day until the setting sun,
they busy themselves and pack white honeycombs,
while the drones, staying within the sheltered nest,
scrape into their stomachs the fruits of another’s weariness,
thus women, conspirators of grievous deeds,
Zeus high thunderer ordained to be an evil for mortal men.
He gave another evil in return for something noble.
Whoever, fleeing marriage and women’s mischievous deeds,
chooses not to marry comes to destructive old age
without someone to tend to his old age. He lives in want
of nothing, but when he dies, distant relatives divide up
his property. For that man whose lot it is to marry
and have a trusty wife, one suited to his ways,
evil unceasingly rivals good from his prime (?).
Whoever gets a baneful type lives with an unremitting sorrow
on his spirit and heart, and it is an evil incurable.
Thus, there is no deceiving Zeus’s mind nor getting by it.”

In his other poem Works and Days, Hesiodos gives a fuller account of the story of Pandora, the first woman, explaining how she was created by Zeus as “a plague to men who eat bread” and how she—and consequently the race of women descended from her—is directly responsible for all the evils that have ever befallen humanity because she opened a pithos or storage jar containing all the evils and suffering in the universe, unleashing them all upon the world.

So, basically according to Hesiodos, women are not only the worst evil in all the world, but also the cause of all other evils. Alongside the Homeric Epics, these poems of Hesiodos, Theogonia and Works and Days, were considered foundational works of all literature in ancient Greece. They were models to be admired and imitated for all classical writers afterwards.

ABOVE: Imaginative Roman marble bust of Hesiod, based on a second-century BC Greek original, showing how the artist imagined him

Semonides of Amorgos

If you think Hesiodos is the worst misogyny can get, though, you have not seen anything yet; there are other Greek writers who make Hesiodos’s hatred for women look tame. A seventh-century BC lyric poet named Semonides of Amorgos wrote a poem called “Types of Women,” which is too long to quote here, but which categorizes women into different “types,” all of which are awful in different ways, except the last. The poem concludes (in M. L. West’s translation):

“Yes, the worst pestilence Zeus ever made
is women. Even if they look to be a
helpmeet, yet the master suffers most:
the man who keeps a woman in his house
never gets through a whole day in good cheer,
nor will he soon drive Hunger from his door,
that hostile lodger, hateful deity.
When with his household he seems most content,
whether by God’s grace or on man’s account,
she finds some fault, and girds herself for war.
Where there’s a woman, they may not be keen
even to welcome in a visitor.
I’ll tell you, she that looks the best-behaved
in fact is the most rotten of them all,
for while her man gawps fondly at her, oh,
the neighbours’ merriment: another dupe!
Yes, when the talk’s of wives, each man will praise
his own and criticize the other bloke’s,
but we don’t realize it’s equal shares.
For Zeus made wives as his worst pestilence
and fettered us in bonds unbreakable.”

So, basically, according to Semonides, women are the absolute worst thing ever to happen to men. According to him, all women are an unbearable burden, all they will ever do is absolutely ruin your whole life, and, if you think you have found a woman who is not completely horrible, then she is secretly even worse than all the rest and you just aren’t paying close enough attention to notice.

This is ancient Greek misogyny at its most paranoid and fanatical.

Misogynistic epigrams and sayings

The lyric poet Hipponax of Ephesos, who lived in around the middle of the sixth century BC, writes in fragment sixty-eight (again, in M. L. West’s translation):

“Two days of a woman’s life give greatest pleasure:
those of her wedding and her funeral.”

There are a whole bunch of sayings similar to this one attributed (probably apocryphally) to the comic playwright Menandros (lived c. 342/41 – c. 290 BC) about the supposed evils of women. These sayings attributed to Menandros include real nuggets of patriarchal wisdom such as:

• “Never trust your life to a woman.”
• “A woman knows nothing except what she wants to know.”
• “It’s better to bury a woman than to marry her.”
• “Don’t trust a woman even if she’s dead.”
• “When there’s no women around, nothing bad happens to a man.”
• “A woman is silver-coated dirt.”
• “A woman is the wildest of all wild animals.”
• “Sea, fire, and women as the third evil.”
• “A woman knows nothing except what she wants to know.”

The list goes on and on, but I think you all get the impression. Basically, the sayings are all about how all women are (supposedly) dangerous, malevolent, sub-human animals who can never be trusted and who do nothing but ruin honest, hardworking men’s lives. There is, however, at least one saying that is somewhat positive:

“Even women can behave reasonably [sometimes].”

Of course it is a back-handed insult. What else would you expect from an ancient Greek when it comes to saying something positive about women?

ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a Greek fourth-century BC original portrait bust of Menandros, a comic playwright to whom a large number of (probably apocryphal) sayings about the evils of women are attributed.

Misogynistic medical “knowledge”

In ancient Greece, it was widely believed, even by the best of medical professionals, that women were not even fully human, but rather lesser, imperfect, inferior creatures.

In the tragedy The Eumenides, written by the Athenian tragic playwright Aischylos (lived c. 525 – c. 456 BC) and first performed at the City Dionysia in 458 BC, the god Apollon defends the hero Orestes, who has murdered by his own mother Klytaimnestra in revenge for her having murdered his father Agamemnon. In the course of this defense, Apollon argues that Orestes has not really murdered a blood relative because the mother of a child is not really a parent of that child at all.

Apollon declares that a woman is nothing more than a mere vessel for a man’s seed and that everything the child is comes exclusively from the father, not the mother, and that the mother contributes nothing. According to Apollon, the only purpose a woman serves in bearing a child is keeping the man’s seed safe and warm so it can develop. Here is Apollon’s actual argument, as translated by George Thomson:

“The mother is not the parent, on the nurse
of the seed which the true parent, the father,
commits to her as a stranger to
keep it with God’s help safe from harm. And I
have proof of this. There can be a father
without a mother. We have a witness here,
this daughter of Olympian Zeus [i.e. the goddess Athena], who sprang
armed from her father’s head, a goddess whom
no goddess could have brought to birth.”

From our perspective, this argument that the mother is not a true parent and that she contributes nothing whatsoever to the child she bears is clearly completely ridiculous. Today, in the twenty-first century, we know as a scientific fact that a child inherits exactly half of its nuclear DNA from the mother and exactly half from the father.

From the way Aischylos presents the argument, however, it is clearly meant to be believable. In fact, in the play, this argument convinces none other than the goddess Athena herself to cast the deciding vote to acquit Orestes. This same idea also appears in the medical writings of the Hippokratic Corpus, indicating that this was an idea that was believed by the foremost medical experts of the era.

ABOVE: Image from a Paestan red-figure bell-krater dating to c. 330 BC depicting the hero Orestes at Delphoi, flanked by the goddess Athena on his right and the god Apollon on his left.

Many of the most renowned ancient Greek medical experts believed that a woman’s womb was a creature with a mind of its own and that it could wander around all over the place inside the woman’s body, interfering in normal physiological processes and causing her to act crazy. The ancient Greek word for “womb” was ὑστέρα. This is the origin of our modern English word hysteria, meaning “madness.”

There was a widespread belief among many ancient Greek medical professionals that a woman’s womb needed to be regularly “watered” by a man with seed and, if a woman went too long without having sex with a man, her womb would dry out and she would suffer horrible symptoms, including possibly even hysteria and insanity.

Abolishing women…

In the tragedy Medeia, written by the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides (lived c. 480 – c. 406 BC) and originally performed in Athens in 431 BC at the City Dionysia, Medeia’s husband Iason justifies his decision to marry another woman by telling Medeia that she does not need any sons because she is just a woman and a woman has no use for offspring; whereas a man needs sons in order for them to carry on his legacy.

Iason concludes with a statement of vexation over the fact that women are necessary in order to produce sons, saying that it would be better if there were no women at all and men could make sons in some other way. Here is a full passage, as translated by Peter D. Arnott:

“You need no sons,
but it profits me to add to those I have. Is this
so reprehensible? It’s only jealousy
that makes you think so. But things have come to such a pass
that women think marriage is the only thing that matters.
When once your sole possession is endangered,
Whatever’s good and right for you to do
you fight it. There ought to be some other way
for men to get their sons, there ought to be
no women; then a man could live his life in peace.”

Judging from how the play ends, it seems unlikely that Iason is speaking an opinion here that Euripides himself would agree with, but it is certainly an attitude that would have been commonplace among elite Athenian males of the fifth century BC.

ABOVE: Scene from a Campanian red-figure neck-amphora by the Ixion Painter dating to c. 330 BC, depicting Medeia murdering one of her own sons in an act of vengeance against Iason

“A woman’s glory” according to the ancient Athenians

It was certainly a firmly entrenched belief at least in ancient Athens, but probably in many other Greek city-states as well, that a woman should neither be seen nor heard. For a man in ancient Greece, it was considered glorious for him to have others talk about his words and deeds, especially his deeds on the battlefield.

Women, however, were held to the exact opposite standard; women were expected to keep their very existence as secret as possible. It was considered shameful for a woman to be talked about by anyone, even if the person was saying good things about her, because it was thought that a woman’s place was to be live and die in total obscurity.

In the version of the “Funerary Oration of Perikles” recorded in Thoukydides’s Histories of the Peloponnesian War, the following words concerning what is shameful and what is glorious for women are attributed to the Athenian statesman Perikles, as translated by J. M. Dent:

“On the other hand 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.”

It is likely that, in practice, very few women actually lived up to this ideal of living in total obscurity. Indeed, it is likely that even the most respectable of Athenian women were occasionally seen in public. Nonetheless, it is apparent that total obscurity was indeed considered the ideal for women, at least in ancient Athens and probably in most other Greek city-states as well.

In ancient Athenian court speeches, when a woman plays a prominent role in the case, she is usually mentioned only by her position within the home and her name is not given because even having someone speak a woman’s name in public was considered shameful for her. When a woman is mentioned by name in an ancient Athenian court speech, it is usually because she is a prostitute or a woman of similarly ill reputation.

ABOVE: The Funeral Oration of Perikles, painted in 1877 by the German history painter Philipp Foltz

Do any Greek male writers have anything good to say about women?

We do find a number of Greek male authors who praise certain, specific women. Indeed, certain women such as the poet Sappho of Lesbos (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BC) were widely praised. On the other hand, though, Greek writers rarely ever attempt to defend women as a whole. One notable exception to this might be this passage from Xenophon’s Symposium (translated here by J. C. McKeown), in which the following remarks concerning a dancing girl are attributed to Socrates:

“The girl’s performance is just one of many proofs that women are not naturally inferior to men; they lack only sense and strength.”

Thanks a lot, Xenophon. You just called women stupid and weak, but, yet, somehow that may be one of the nicest things a classical Greek prose writer ever said about women in general.

Actually, Aristotle also has a few kind things to say about women in his History of Animals 608b, albeit in the midst of a lengthy diatribe about women’s supposed weaknesses. He writes, as translated by J. C. McKeown:

“Women are more compassionate than men, more easily moved to tears. But they are also more prone to envy, grumbling, criticizing, aggression, depression, pessimism, deceit, trickery, resentment. They are more wakeful than men, more hesitant, harder to rouse to action, and they need less food. Men are braver than women, and more ready to help others. Mollusks demonstrate this difference: when a female cuttlefish is struck by a trident, the male helps her, but if a male is struck, the female flees.”

So, there you have it; at least Xenophon and Aristotle had a few nice things to say about women, even though they had a lot more negative things to say about them.

ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a bust of the Greek philosopher Aristotle by the sculptor Lysippos, dating to around 330 BC. Aristotle had a few nice things to say about women, but a lot of criticisms.

We do find a few characters in some of the tragedies of Euripides who appear to defend women. In particular, several speeches from Euripides’s now-lost tragedy Melanippe Captive have been preserved that appear—at least superficially—to condemn misogyny and defend women.

Fragment 493 is a portion of a speech from Melanippe Captive that has been preserved through quotation by the fifth-century AD Greek writer Ioannes Stobaios. This speech would have been spoken by one of the characters in the play (most likely Melanippe). Here is the translation of the fragment by Christopher Collard and Martin Cropp from the Loeb Classical Library:

“Hatred of womankind is a most grievous thing. Those who have fallen bring disgrace on those who have not, and the bad ones share their censure with the good; and where marriage is concerned men think they have no integrity at all.”

Fragment 494 is another, longer fragment from this same play has been preserved in Papyrus Berlin 9772. Like Fragment 493, this passage would have been spoken by one of the characters in the play (again, most likely Melanippe). Here is the translation of Fragment 494 by Collard and Cropp:

“Vainly does censure from men twang an idle bowshot at women and denounce them. In fact they are better than men, as I shall demonstrate . . . contracts without witnesses . . . and not reneging . . . (they do not bring?) hardships (upon?) one another . . . brings disgrace . . . a woman will expel(?) . . . They manage households, and save what is brought by sea within the home, and no house deprived of a woman can be tidy and prosperous.”

“Now as for dealings with the gods, which I consider of prime importance, we have a very great role in them. Women proclaim Loxias’ mind in Phoebus’ halls, and by Dodona’s holy foundations, beside the sacred oak, womankind conveys the thoughts of Zeus to those Greeks who want to know it. Those rituals, too, which are performed for the Fates and the Nameless Goddesses are not open to men, but are promoted by women entirely. That is how the rights of women stand in dealings with the gods.”

“Why then should womankind be denigrated? Will the vain censures of men not cease and those excessively thinking if just one is found to be bad, to condemn all women alike? For my part I will make a distinction: on the one hand nothing is worse than a bad woman, but on the other nothing excels a good one in goodness. The natures of each are different.”

These passages seem to reflect exactly the sentiment that we as modern readers long for so desperately. Unfortunately, it is important to remember that these are lines that were meant to have been spoken by a character in a tragedy. We have no way of knowing to what extent these lines may reflect what Euripides himself actually thought.

ABOVE: Roman marble copy of a fourth-century BC Greek bust of the Athenian tragic playwright Euripides, whose plays contain some passages spoken by characters that seem to condemn misogyny. We have no way of knowing to what extent these passages reflect Euripides’s own views, though.

What did ancient Greek women have to say about all this?

Unfortunately, there is very little surviving information about what ancient Greek women thought about the rampant misogyny within their culture. Although there is no question that at least some ancient Greek women did indeed know how to read and write, literacy seems to have been much less common among Greek women than among Greek men. Consequently, it was very unusual (although certainly not unheard of!) for women to write literature.

Another problem is that educated Greek-speaking elites tended not to be very interested in reading works written by female authors. Consequently, nearly all the ancient Greek sources that are known to have existed and that are known to have been written by women have been lost, because they were not popular and they were not copied. As a result of this, there are very few surviving ancient Greek sources written by women and nearly all the sources that have survived were written by men.

The most famous of all ancient Greek female writers is undoubtedly the lyric poet Sappho of Lesbos. In antiquity, she was widely regarded as one of the greatest poets of all time. She was known as simply “The Poetess” in the same way that Homer was known as “The Poet.” An epigram attributed (probably spuriously) to Plato calls her “the Tenth Muse.”

Unfortunately, even though there were at least eight books worth of poems attributed to Sappho in circulation in antiquity, her poetry fell out of popularity in late antiquity because it was all written in the Aeolic dialect of Ancient Greek, which many readers regarded as virtually incomprehensible because it was so different from the Attic dialect that they were accustomed to reading.

Only one of Sappho’s poems, the “Ode to Aphrodite,” has survived to the present day complete. There are only ten more of her poems from which half or more of the original poem has survived. In none of her extant poems does Sappho ever explicitly address the rampant misogyny of her own culture.

ABOVE: Marble head identified as “probably” a copy of a fourth-century BC imaginative portrait of Sappho by the Athenian sculptor Silanion, currently held in the Glyptothek Museum in Munich, Germany

There were, of course, other ancient Greek female writers other than Sappho, but very little has survived from the works of these writers either. The vast majority of ancient Greek women writers are known in name only from references to their works in works written by men.

For instance, Pamphile of Epidauros was an extraordinarily prolific female Greek historian who lived in the first century AD, but no works have survived that can be definitively attributed to her and she is mostly only known to us because her Historical Commentaries, a thirty-three-volume collection of miscellaneous stories and anecdotes, is frequently cited by the (male) Roman writer Aulus Gellius (c. 125 – after 180 AD) in his book Attic Nights and by the (male) third-century AD Greek biographer Diogenes Laërtios in his book The Lives and Opinions of Eminent Philosophers.

Then there is the other problem that it is widely thought that many of these supposed women writers were actually men posing as women. For instance, Philainis of Samos, the supposed author of a famous sex manual, was probably actually a fictional character, possibly invented by the (male) Athenian Sophist Polykrates. Pamphile of Epidauros’s works were attributed by the Souda, the tenth-century Byzantine encyclopedia that is one of our major sources on her life, to her husband.

Quite simply, the women of ancient Greece have almost no voice in our surviving writings. They do have some voice, but that voice is so small and so overwhelmed by the cacophonous chorus of the male misogynists that we can barely tell what it is saying.

A disclaimer

I know that, after reading all these horrible quotes about what the ancient Greeks thought about women, my readers are probably all thinking, “Wow! The ancient Greeks were absolutely horrible! Why do we even honor these people?” I must therefore clarify that, while I think very few people today would deny that the prevailing views among ancient Greek men concerning women are absolutely reprehensible, there is far more to the ancient Greeks than just misogyny. The ancient Greeks really did do many important and commendable things. I have written about some of those things in some of my other articles.

In other words, this is a disclaimer to remind everyone that the ancient Greeks were not all bad; they were simply flawed human beings just like everyone today and one of the many flaws in their society just happens to have been the overwhelming prevalence of misogyny. Being a progressive does not mean deploring everything associated with the past; we can study the past and see what there is in the past that was good, while also acknowledging that there were other things in the past that were bad. Ancient Greek misogyny is just one of those bad things.

It is also worth pointing out how impressive it really is that, despite the harsh and oppressive society in which they lived, some ancient Greek women were still able to accomplish things.

Conclusion

At first glance, the misogynistic world of the ancient Greeks seems totally alien and removed from our own twenty-first-century world. Today, women are not only permitted to leave their homes without being shamed, but they are even allowed to pursue careers other than prostitution! Even more astonishing to an ancient Greek would be the fact that, today, women are allowed to vote and run for political office!

The very notion of a woman being actively involved in politics would have been seen by the ancient Greeks as utterly, thoroughly ridiculous—something so laughably inconceivable that no one could seriously entertain it. Even though it is 2019 and the United States has still never had a female president, the very fact that we no longer see the prospect of a female president as totally ridiculous is a testament to the astounding success of modern feminism.

We have indeed come a very long way from Telemachos’s rebuke to Penelope in Book I of the Odyssey. Though the way has not by any means been straightforward, when we look back, we can see that we have indeed come very far.

At the same time, however, there are still eerie echoes of ancient misogyny alive and well in our own world. These ancient patriarchal ideas are imbued in the very foundation of our entire civilization. They have suffered a long, slow death and, even now, they still linger on in our society. Though misogyny is far less common and far less blatant today than it was in ancient Greece, it is still present.

Even though we have already come a long way, we still have a long way left to go. It is possible that misogyny may never be totally eradicated, but we must still work to reduce it wherever possible and build a better society.