women in ancient Greece Archives - Tales of Times Forgotten

Why Prehistoric Matriarchy Wasn’t a Thing (A Brief Explanation)

If you are interested in religion and gender in the ancient world like I am, there is a fairly strong likelihood that, at some point, you’ve encountered some version of the claim that, at one point in human prehistory (variously conceived as sometime in the Upper Paleolithic, Neolithic, Bronze Age, or all three), either all human societies worldwide or at least the majority of human societies in Europe belonged to a matriarchal social order, in which women were supreme over men, and that this system preceded the imposition of the current patriarchal order.

The kinds of arguments and evidence that various proponents of the hypothesis of “prehistoric matriarchy” have tried to invoke over the years are so wildly disparate that it is impossible to address all the supposed evidence comprehensively in a single post. At the end of the day, the common denominator of all the arguments is that all the “evidence” they try to cite is weak, irrelevant, and/or open to many other interpretations. In this post, I will very briefly address the arguments that the man who originally formulated the hypothesis used and explain why those arguments do not hold up to scrutiny.

Have Scholars Really Only Just Now Figured Out That Sappho’s Supposed Husband’s Name Is Dirty Joke?

As many readers are already aware, I am a queer woman who is currently a graduate student in Ancient Greek and Roman Studies. For a couple of years now, I have been following the subreddit r/SapphoAndHerFriend, which is named after the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho, who is known for her homoerotic work, and is dedicated to showcasing humorous or mildly infuriating examples of queer erasure. It’s an amusing space. Unfortunately, people are constantly making posts in the subreddit about Sappho that are, shall we say, factually dubious. For instance, users frequently make posts in which they make fun of “historians” for having supposedly believed for ages in total earnestness that Sappho had a husband named “Kerkylas of Andros,” which they say translates as “Dick Allcock from the Isle of Man.”

Posts of this kind are a frequent occurrence, but this one happens to be the most recent. These posts regularly ignore the fact that the claim they mock “historians” for having supposedly believed only occurs in one extremely late, notoriously uncritical premodern source and modern scholars have generally recognized it as an obscene joke for nearly 170 years. Additionally, I think that people should be aware of some rather discomforting information about the man whose translation of the name they keep sharing.

How Did Ancient Greek Women Make Themselves Look Seductive?

Imagine that you’re a woman in ancient Greece and, for some reason, you find yourself in a situation where you need (or want) to seduce someone. How would you go about doing it? What kind of clothes or cosmetics would you wear to do it? Some readers may be surprised to learn that there are actually a significant number of surviving texts from ancient Greece that describe in considerable detail how goddesses and mortal women made themselves look sexy in order to seduce people and, in this post, I will put my years of classics education to excellent use by introducing all my wonderful readers to them.

In general, these texts indicate that, if a woman wanted to look sexually attractive in order to seduce someone, she might engage in preparations such as bathing herself, anointing her skin with oil, putting on perfume, dressing herself in beautiful, expensive, and sometimes diaphanous clothing, putting on ornate and expensive jewelry, powdering her face with white lead to make herself look paler, painting alkanet dye rouge on her cheeks to make them look rosier, and removing her body hair.

The Lost Ancient Greek Novel with a Lesbian Love Plot in It

As I wrote about previously in this post from January 2020, the literary form of the novel (by which I mean a long work of narrative prose fiction) is vastly older than a lot of people believe. In fact, a significant number of novels written in the Ancient Greek and Latin languages by various authors from the first century BCE onward have survived to the present day. In fact, as of the time I am writing this, I have just completed a graduate-level course on the ancient Greek novel.

The central theme of many of the ancient Greek-language novels that have survived is ἔρως (érōs), which refers to sexual and romantic desire. (The ancient Greeks did not distinguish between the two.) The novels in which ἔρως is a central theme center around a pair of protagonists—invariably a young man and a young woman—who deeply and passionately erotically desire each other.

Many of the surviving novels, however, feature side characters who also have experiences with ἔρως, including some who either currently have or have previously had a partner of the same gender as themself. For instance, in the novel Leukippe and Kleitophon, written by Achilleus Tatios, a Greek-language writer from Alexandria in around the late second century CE, the male protagonist Kleitophon initially learns about ἔρως from his older male cousin Kleinias, who has a boyfriend. Fascinatingly, one ancient novel that has not survived—the Babyloniaka or Babylonian Tale, which a Syrian writer named Iamblichos wrote in the Greek language sometime between c. 165 and c. 180 CE—is known to have included a subplot involving two women characters who erotically desire one another and possibly end up marrying each other.

At What Age Did Ancient Greek Women Typically Marry?

It is well and widely known that ancient Greek parents typically compelled their daughters to marry at a shockingly young age, one at which they would legally be considered minors in most countries in the twenty-first century. Greek men, by contrast, typically married much older, usually when they were in their late twenties or thirties. As a result, the groom at an ancient Greek wedding was usually at least a decade older than the bride he was marrying—and in many cases much older than that.

Unmarried girls were effectively considered their father’s property. Marriages were usually arranged primarily between a girl’s father and her male suitor. The extent to which a father allowed his daughter to decide which man she would marry probably varied significantly depending on factors such as time period, region, and the specific father in question’s personality and attitudes; in some cases, girls probably had significant say over which man they married, but it is likely that, in other cases, they had little or no say.

Exactly how young did ancient Greek women really marry, though? Popular histories and even many academics routinely assert as fact that Greek parents typically forced their daughters to marry as soon as they began puberty, before they even turned fifteen. In this post, however, I will argue that this is based mainly on one literary passage describing a bride who was probably unusually young and was not typical for most city-states. Instead, a more comprehensive view of the evidence suggests that Greek girls actually most commonly married when they were a bit older, broadly between the ages of fourteen and nineteen. The ages at which girls married also varied significantly across regions; ancient authors record that, in certain parts of the Greek world, girls typically married significantly younger or older than they did in other parts.

How Likely Is It That Scholars Will Find More of Sappho’s Lost Poems?

Sappho (lived c. 630 – c. 570 BCE) was a female early Greek lyric poet who flourished on the island of Lesbos, located just off the west coast of Asia Minor, and composed many poems in the Aeolic dialect of the Greek language. Her output was so prolific that the standard edition of her work in antiquity, which literary scholars working at the Library of Alexandria in Egypt produced in around the third century BCE, is thought to have spanned nine “books” or rolls of papyrus. Ancient audiences esteemed her as one of the greatest of all lyric poets, if not the greatest. She was known as the “Tenth Muse” and some even regarded her work as on par with that of Homer (the putative author of the Iliad and the Odyssey and most revered of all ancient Greek poets).

Sadly, nearly all of her poems have been lost. Only one poem, Fragment 1 (the “Ode to Aphrodite”) has survived to the present day totally complete. Only a handful of others—including Fragment 16 (the “Anaktoria Poem”), Fragment 31 (“Phainetai Moi”), Fragment 58 (the “Tithonos Poem”), and the “Brothers Poem”—are nearly complete. Most of what survives are tiny fragments of only a few lines or less. Nonetheless, today, many scholars of ancient literature regard Sappho’s more complete poems as among the greatest that have survived from antiquity. The fact that she is one of the very few female ancient Greek or Roman authors who have any works that have survived to the present day and the fact that she composed poems in which her female speaker openly discusses her erotic desire for other women have both further magnified contemporary interest in her work.

As a result of this, many people have wondered: How likely is it that more of Sappho’s poems will be recovered? To answer this question, in this post, I will discuss the history of how her work was transmitted in antiquity, how most of it became lost, how the parts that have survived have managed to survive, and, finally, how likely it is that someone will discover and publish any substantial material by her that is not currently known anytime in the next half century.

The Ancient Greek Woman Who Dressed as a Man to Seduce Men

Earlier this week, I came across an absolutely fascinating epigram in the Greek Anthology by Asklepiades of Samos (lived c. 320 – after c. 263 BCE), an early Hellenistic Greek poet, whose epigrams are among the oldest that are included in the anthology. In the poem, he describes a beautiful young person named Dorkion (which is the diminutive form of the name Dorkas, which means “gazelle”) who was apparently assigned female at birth, whom he describes using feminine grammatical forms, and whom modern scholars have universally interpreted as woman, who dresses and behaves like a young man while trying to seduce young men.

I was intrigued by this poem, in part because of what it may reveal about ancient Greek attitudes toward gender, sex, and gender-nonconforming behavior. I thought that my readers might find it interesting as well, so I’ve decided to share it here, along with some information about its background and scholarly interpretations of it.

No, Athena Didn’t Turn Medusa into a Monster to Protect Her

One of the most famous stories in all of ancient Greek and Roman mythology and literature is the tale of the origin of the Gorgon Medusa that the Roman poet Publius Ovidius Naso (lived 43 BCE – c. 17 CE), who is better known in English simply as “Ovid,” tells in his long narrative poem Metamorphoses, which he composed in the Latin language in dactylic hexameter verse in around the year 8 CE or thereabouts.

According to Ovid, Medusa was originally an extraordinarily beautiful mortal woman who was known for her gorgeous hair. Then, however, the god Neptunus (whom the Romans equated with the Greek god Poseidon) raped her in the temple of the goddess Minerva (whom the Romans equated with the Greek goddess Athena) and Minerva punished her by turning her into a hideous monster with snakes entwined in her hair and making it so that any mortal who saw her would instantly turn to stone.

A claim has circulated online for years now claiming that modern people have misunderstood this myth and that, actually, Minerva turned Medusa into a monster and made it so that anyone who saw her would instantly turn to stone in order to protect her so that men would never prey on her again. This claim, however, is not supported by any evidence in any ancient source and, in fact, Ovid’s account expressly says that Minerva cursed Medusa in order to punish her for her involvement in desecrating her temple, even though her involvement was totally nonconsensual. Furthermore, the context in which Ovid tells the story strongly suggests that he intended his readers to sympathize with Medusa and question the justice of Minerva’s punishment.

Was Corinth Really an Ancient City of Vice?

The claim that the ancient Greek city of Corinth was known in antiquity as a place of unparalleled depravity, vice, and licentiousness has regularly occurred in English-language Bible dictionaries, commentaries, and sermons for a century and a half at least. New works have repeated the claim again and again. Recently, it has even begun to make inroads into popular secular media through, for instance, the new Netflix series The Sandman.

Now, I love a good story about an ancient city of vice and perversion as much as the next person, but, unfortunately, there are at least three major problems with this narrative. The first problem is that Corinth didn’t have a reputation for “sin” or “vice” in general, but rather a very specific reputation for its female hired companions who primarily served an upper-class male clientele.

The second problem is that, while Corinth seems to have had this reputation before the Romans destroyed it in 146 BCE, the evidence for it having had this reputation after the Romans refounded the city in 44 BCE as a colonia under their rule is limited at best. The third and final problem is that Corinth was not unique at all in having a stereotypical association with a certain kind of low or disreputable activity; on the contrary, nearly every city in the ancient Greek world had some kind of disreputable stereotype attached to it.

Men Have Been Finding Weird and Unsettling Ways to Describe Women’s Breasts Since Ancient Times

It is common knowledge that cisgender straight and bisexual men frequently possess an overriding fascination with women’s breasts—to such an extent that they often devote more attention to a woman’s breasts than to any other aspect of her person. As a result of this fixation, some male writers have a habit of throwing in references to or descriptions of breasts in places where they are contextually inappropriate. Sometimes they also describe breasts using goofy or perplexing figurative language.

These sorts of references and descriptions have become a subject of widespread memes and satire. There is even an entire subreddit called r/menwritingwomen, which is dedicated to examples of male authors writing about women in incompetent (and often comical) ways. A significant proportion of the examples discussed in the subreddit are breast references and its satirical headline reads: “She breasted boobily down the stairs…..”

One thing some people may not realize is that gynophilic men have been doing this exact same thing for literally thousands of years. In this post, I will discuss three different examples of goofy, weird, unsettling, or just downright creepy descriptions of women’s breasts in texts from the ancient Mediterranean world in three different languages: Biblical Hebrew, Ancient Greek, and Latin.