THE HELLENISTIC world was dramatically different from that of the preceding period. Loss of political autonomy on the part of the city-states wrought a change in men’s political relationships to their societies and to each other. These changes, in turn, affected women’s position in the family and in society. The effect on any individual woman depended largely on her social class and the area of the world in which she lived.
The amount of information available on Hellenistic women is surprisingly large, especially in comparison with the dearth of material on Greek women in earlier periods.1 The abundance of information about the royal women of Greek descent during the Hellenistic era can be attributed both to the impact these memorable women had on ancient authors and to the fact that they involved themselves in the political activities of men—which are, after all, the concern of most historians. The experience of women of lesser status can also be found in public records, as some freeborn women gained more influence in political and economic affairs, besides expanding their options with regard to marriage, public roles, education, and the conduct of their private lives. Finally, the experience of women—from slaves and courtesans to queens—has been preserved in the cultural artifacts of the period. Close scrutiny of the representation of women in sculpture, vase painting, New Comedy, and other art forms yields much insight into their sexual experiences as well as into the nature of their everyday lives. The commentary of philosophers—for the most part urging the retention of traditional female roles—reveals that women’s position altered as society changed during this period.
Macedonia, located in the wilds of northern Greece, was ruled by kings. The conquest of the rest of Greece by Philip II, who acceded to the throne of Macedon in 359 B.C., brought an end to the independence of the city-states. The further imposition of Macedonian power on the East by Philip’s son, Alexander, ultimately resulted—after fifty years of war among his successors—in the establishment of dynasties of Macedonians: the Antigonids in Greece, the Ptolemies in Egypt, and the Seleucids in Asia Minor. The competition for power among these rulers concerns us here only insofar as the women of their courts were affected. Scholars usually define the Hellenistic period as the three centuries between the death of Alexander in 323 B.C. and the Roman settlement of Egypt in 30 B.C., but our time span will be more flexible.
Among Macedonian ruling families, the relationship between mother and son could be much stronger and more significant than that between husband and wife. Many Macedonian kings indulged in both formal and informal polygamy, and because they often chose not to confer most-favored status on one of their wives—thereby making clear as well which of their sons was the designated successor to the throne—they fostered a climate of intrigue and struggle for power within their courts which could end in their own death at the hands of a power-hungry mother plotting on behalf of her son. The stories that have come down to us portray the Macedonian queens as ambitious, shrewd, and, in many instances, ruthless. The common elements of the tales relate the elimination—often by poison—of political antagonists and rival queens and their progeny, the murder of the husband, and the queen’s expectation that she will enjoy more power in the reign of her son than she did when her husband was on the throne. Clearly, these are women competing in a traditionally male arena, and using decidedly male tactics and weapons, in addition to poison, said to be a “woman’s weapon.”
Aside from Cleopatra VII, who will be discussed again later, the most powerful and illustrious of the Macedonian princesses were Olympias and Arsinoë II. Olympias is famous as the mother of Alexander the Great. At the court of her husband, Philip II, Olympias struggled against rival wives, mistresses, and their children to assure Alexander’s succession to the throne of Macedonia. Though she ultimately suffered defeat and exile, she was clearly a woman of genius and determination. Plutarch has given us even more enticing evidence of her unique qualities:
Once a serpent was seen stretched out next to the body of Olympias as she slept, and this, more than anything else, they say, abated the ardor of Philip’s passion for her. Accordingly, he no longer came often to sleep next to her, either because he feared some spells and charms might be put on him by her or thought she had intercourse with some superior being. But there is another story about these matters: All the women of this region were addicted to Orphic rites and the orgies of Dionysus from extreme antiquity.… Olympias, who affected these divine inspirations more enthusiastically than other women, and performed them in more barbaric fashion, would provide the revelers with large tame snakes which often would crawl out from the ivy and the mystic winnowing baskets and wind themselves around the wands and garlands of the women, thus terrifying the men.2
The psychological impact that such a mother must have had on Alexander has long been a subject of historical speculation.
Alexander was proclaimed king after the murder of Philip in 336 B.C. The murder was blamed on Olympias, probably unjustly (she was in exile at the time), although she had much to gain when her twenty-year-old son succeeded his father. Two years later, Alexander set out on his conquest of the Persian Empire. While Alexander was absent on campaign, Olympias presided over the court of Macedonia. She competed for power with Antipater, whom Alexander had left at home as viceroy. Politically, Alexander supported Antipater, but he never ceased to be personally devoted to his mother.
Although the pattern of alliances of strong mothers and sons was repeated time and again (it was echoed in the behavior of the Roman empresses, though, unlike the Romans, the Macedonian princesses were not commonly accused of aimless sexual licentiousness but of using sex to further their political ambitions), women were also used in passive roles by Hellenistic kings in ways that paralleled those employed by the Greek tyrants of the Archaic Age. The marriages of Macedonian princesses, for example, were often arranged by their male guardians to cement alliances between men: the guardian and the husband. These dynastic marriages were dissolved when new alliances appeared politically more attractive. However, the unilateral rejection of a queen by the husband in favor of another could result in violence, and once the disfavored bride’s father or guardian became involved, marriage alliances often produced international entanglements. One of the many unfortunate marriages was that of Berenice and Antiochus.
In 253 B.C. Ptolemy II of Egypt arranged a diplomatic marriage between his daughter Berenice and the Seleucid Antiochus II. Imitating the ostentatious tyrants of the Archaic Age, Ptolemy gave his daughter so lavish a dowry that she was nicknamed “Phernophoros” (dowry-bringer). Antiochus repudiated his former wife and half-sister Laodice, but later, apparently through personal preference, he returned to live with Laodice without formally divorcing Berenice. Ptolemy II had given his daughter in marriage with the expectation that the bridegroom would repudiate earlier wives and their children in favor of the new wife, and, most important of all, he expected that the offspring of his daughter would inherit the throne. The bridegrooms, as was mentioned earlier, in order to avoid offending the families of earlier wives and for personal reasons as well, did not always make decisive pronouncements of who was the most important wife and whose child would inherit the throne.3
Laodice, like Olympias before her, was driven to desperate measures on behalf of her sons. She took the opportunity to poison Antiochus, and had Berenice and her baby murdered in order to assure the succession of Seleucus, the elder of her two sons by Antiochus. Berenice’s brother, Ptolemy III, then king of Egypt, arrived with troops too late to save his sister, but avenged her and exploited the situation by precipitating the Third Syrian War (246–241 B.C.).4
The Ptolemies, as the sad story of Berenice demonstrates, readily arranged dynastic marriages for their women. But four of the first eight Ptolemies married their sisters.5 The marriage of full sister and brother had never been encouraged among Greeks or Macedonians, who regarded it as incestuous, but it had been a local Egyptian custom of the royal family, to whom the Ptolemies wished to appear as successors.6 Moreover, brother-sister marriage eliminated foreign influences from the court. The first marriage of full brother and sister among the Ptolemies was that of Ptolemy II and Arsinoë II, who were both officially worshiped as divine during their lifetimes, reviving another traditional Egyptian custom which was also followed by their successors.7
Arsinoë ruled with her brother for approximately five years, until her death in 270 B.C. AS was customary in Macedonian courts, she inaugurated her reign by accusing all her rivals of treason and having them eliminated. She was the first Egyptian queen whose portrait was shown with her husband’s on coins, and Theocritus and Callimachus celebrated her in poetry. The period when Arsinoë joined her brother in the government was characterized by a dramatic improvement in the military and political affairs of Egypt; Arsinoë herself was responsible for the expansion of Egyptian sea power.8 Though some historians condemn her for unbridled ambition, most agree that she surpassed her brother in talent for governing Egypt.
Olympias and Arsinoë are only two in a long line of queens of Greek extraction leading up to the famous Cleopatra. In 51 B.C., at the age of seventeen, Cleopatra VII and her brother Ptolemy XIII, then ten years old, inherited the throne of Egypt. A feud between the two heirs was settled with the assistance of Julius Caesar, who left Cleopatra on the throne with her younger brother Ptolemy XIV. In 47 B.C., Cleopatra bore a son whom she named Caesarion, since she claimed Caesar as the father. Caesar invited her to Rome, where she lived as his mistress for the two years until his assassination. After returning to Egypt, she eliminated all potential rivals to the throne, in the fashion of Hellenistic monarchs, by arranging for the deaths of her brother-consort and her sister Arsinoë. Cleopatra’s relationship with Marc Antony compels us to consider her more fully in the next chapter. Nevertheless, the phenomenon of Cleopatra must be set firmly in the context of Ptolemaic queens, shrewd, able, and ambitious. She was not a courtesan, an exotic plaything for Roman generals. Rather, Cleopatra’s liaisons with the Romans must be considered to have been, from her viewpoint, legitimate dynastic alliances with promises of the greatest possible success and profit to the queen and to Egypt.
No Hellenistic queen had political power solely by virtue of birth, except when she was destined to marry her brother. Only in Egypt, during the decline of the Ptolemies, did a daughter (Berenice III), or a sister (Cleopatra VII) with her brother (Ptolemy XIII), succeed to the throne. But many women wielded power as wives or mothers, especially of weak kings, and as regents for young sons or absent husbands, or through the dynamism of personal ambition. The competent women visible in Hellenistic courts were one of the positive influences of this period toward increasing the prestige of nonroyal but upper-class women.
The status of the Hellenistic queen becomes intelligible against the background of the status of other women in Greek cities and interacts with it. The less-restricted movement of queens in spheres of activity formerly reserved for men set a style that was emulated by some wealthy and aristocratic women. The legal and economic responsibilities of women increased, but political gains were more illusory. The apparent formal expansion of women’s competence may be attributable to the fact that for the Hellenistic period there exist data from many different areas inhabited by Greeks, while our view of women’s position in Classical Greece is monopolized by the situation at Athens and the implication that, on the whole, Sparta was exceptional because of a unique social system. In other words, we may hypothesize that non-Athenian women even outside Sparta may have been less restricted before the Hellenistic period, but this cannot be documented.
As living queens were being celebrated by poets and receiving numerous public honors, so public decrees honoring women were published in the Greek world in the Hellenistic period, and increased in frequency under Roman rule.9 Priestesses and women performing religious services received the most numerous honors, as they had even in Classical Athens. In the second century B.C. lengthy decrees were passed for Archippe by the assembly of Cyme in Asia Minor, detailing her generosity, including the amount she had spent on wining and dining the entire population.10 Even in Athens, Pericles’ idea that women should not be spoken of, either for praise or blame, no longer prevailed. With aristocratic ostentation, fathers of girls who spun wool and embroidered the peplos of Athena had decrees passed honoring their daughters’ service.11 The names of many girls of noble families are listed.
Women were also the beneficiaries of the more generous granting (for diplomatic, economic, and cultural reasons) of citizenship and political rights by Greek cities that was a characteristic phenomenon in this cosmopolitan period. A few women obtained awards of political rights or held public office. Some were awarded honorary citizenship and the rights of proxeny (privileges granted to foreigners) by foreign cities in gratitude for services performed.12 In 218 B.C. Aristodama, a poetess of Smyrna, was granted honorary citizenship by the Aetolians of Lamia in Thessaly because her poetry had praised the Aetolian people and their ancestors.13 An inscription records the existence of a female archon (magistrate) in Histria in the second century B.C.14 In the first century B.C. another female magistrate, Phile of Priene, became the first woman to construct a reservoir and aqueduct.15 It is very likely that she was made a magistrate because she promised to contribute to the public works out of her private funds. Here we have one of the main reasons for the increased importance of women: the acquisition and use of economic power.
These women were exceptional, and most others continued to be excluded from participation in government. But since, at least from our viewpoint, under the domination of Hellenistic monarchs the implications of citizenship and its privileges were less far-reaching for men than they had been in the independent city-states of the Classical world, on the one hand the gap in privileges between men and women was much narrowed, and on the other, the men—rather than attempting to hoard them—became more ready to share with women the less-valued privileges they had.
Although the increase in the political involvement of nonroyal Greek women was slight, a slow evolution in legal status, particularly in private law, can be traced. This change can be seen more in the areas newly Hellenized through Macedonian conquest than in the old cities of the Greek mainland. In this milieu of the deracinated Greek, lacking the traditional safeguards of the polis, a Greek woman might not have easy recourse to the protection of her male guardians, and hence she required both an ability to safeguard herself and an increased legal capacity to act on her own behalf.
Papyrus documents from Egypt provide abundant evidence in the field of private law, but the assumption must not be made that Hellenistic law was uniform, nor that Egyptian practices apply to other areas.16 It is necessary to distinguish between laws governing Greek women living in Egypt and laws for native Egyptians, which, although not sufficiently studied, appear less stringent. Greek women, when they acted within the traditional conventions of Greek law, continued to need a guardian; Egyptian women did not. A guardian was required when a Greek woman made a public declaration or incurred a contractual obligation concerning persons or property. Examples of these contracts are countless. Documents show women as purchasers, sellers, lessors, lessees, borrowers, lenders; women were as liable as men for the various taxes that attached to these commercial activities. Women also had the right to receive and make legacies, acting with their guardians, and they usually named their husbands and children as heirs.17
Greek women in Egypt were nevertheless permitted to act without a guardian in some situations. A woman was permitted to write a petition to the government or police on her own behalf, since this involved neither contractual obligation nor undue publicity. In these petitions, some women exploit the notion that they are members of the weaker sex, without male defenders: one asks for special consideration as “a needy defenseless woman”; another says she is obviously deserving of pity because she is a “working woman”; a third asks to be relieved of the obligation to cultivate state land, citing earlier decisions where women were granted exemptions solely on the basis of their sex, and adds that she is “childless and incapable of providing even for myself.”18. Widows or mothers of illegitimate children could give their daughters in marriage and apprentice their sons. In at least one case we know of, a widow had the right to expose a posthumous infant after obtaining the permission of her former mother-in-law.19
The expansion of married women’s rights can be seen in a marriage contract of 311 B.C. between a Greek man and woman living in Egypt:
In the 7th year of the reign of Alexander, son of Alexander, the 14th year of Ptolemy’s administration as satrap, in the month Dius.
Contract of marriage of Heraclides and Demetria.
Heraclides takes as his lawful wife Demetria of Cos from her father Leptines of Cos and her mother Philotis. He is free; she is free. She brings with her to the marriage clothing and ornaments valued at 1000 drachmas. Heraclides shall supply to Demetria all that is suitable for a freeborn wife. We shall live together in whatever place seems best to Leptines and Heraclides, deciding together.
If Demetria is caught in fraudulent machinations to the disgrace of her husband Heraclides, she shall forfeit all that she has brought with her. But Heraclides shall prove whatever he charges against Demetria before three men whom they both approve. It shall not be lawful for Heraclides to bring home another woman for himself in such a way as to inflict contumely on Demetria, nor to have children by another woman, nor to indulge in fraudulent machinations against Demetria on any pretext. If Heraclides is caught doing any of these things, and Demetria proves it before three men whom they both approve. Heraclides shall return to Demetria the dowry of 1000 drachmas which she brought, and also forfeit 1000 drachmas of the silver coinage of [Ptolemy bearing a portrait head of] Alexander. Demetria and those helping Demetria shall have the right to exact payment from Heraclides and from his property on both land and sea, as if by a legal judgment.
This contract shall be valid in every respect, wherever Heraclides may produce it against Demetria, or Demetria and those helping Demetria to exact payment may produce it against Heraclides, as though the agreement had been made in that place.
Heraclides and Demetria shall each have the right to keep a copy of the contract in their own custody, and to produce it against one another. Witnesses.20
The most striking features of this agreement are the recognition of two codes of marital behavior—one for the husband, another for the wife—and the stipulation that both codes are subject to interpretation by the couple’s social peers. The moral element explicit in the phrases “disgrace of her husband” and “contumely on Demetria” should be noted: social and moral rights and obligations are recognized in both partners. The husband’s potential indiscretions are elaborated, while the wife’s are modestly veiled. In the Hellenistic context, the contractual obligations may be interpreted as: no extramarital sex at all for the wife; casual adultery, especially with slave girls or prostitutes, permitted to the husband; no second quasi-legitimate domestic establishment by the husband with another woman whose presence would be odious to Demetria and whose children could have claims on his estate.
The definition of the marital offense by the judgment of the couple’s circle and the use of property to exact stipulated damages as punishment are both quite commendable legal ideas. A notional fund is established, consisting of the value of the wife’s dowry and an equivalent sum contributed by the husband. The contract provides that if transgression of the moral code is proved to the satisfaction of the three arbitrators, the fund is to become the property of the wronged party by way of damages to that party and punishment for the transgressor.
The document makes no provision for inheritance or for the division of communal property in case of divorce. No doubt explicit stipulations were not needed because a pattern pertaining to such topics was already established in the Greek colony at Elephantine.
The mother’s participation in the giving of her daughter in marriage is unusual. The bride does not sever ties with her family, for there is the possibility of continuing interference by the bride’s father in determining where the couple will live, and the references to “those helping Demetria” probably envision the aid of her father and other relatives in extracting justice from her husband. Justice consists in obtaining the notional fund, for one purpose of marriage contracts is the protection of property.
As the Hellenistic era progressed, the role of the bride’s father diminished. It was common for a father to give a daughter in marriage in his role of formal guardian, but some contracts were made simply between a woman and man agreeing to share a common life.21 The right of the married daughter to self-determination against paternal authority began to be asserted. According to Athenian, Roman, and Egyptian law, a father was permitted to dissolve his daughter’s marriage against her will. However, later, in Roman Egypt, under Egyptian law, the authority of the father over a married daughter was curtailed by judicial rulings stating that the wishes of the woman were the determining factor. If she wished to remain married, she could do so.22
Divorce is foreseen in numerous marriage contracts, allowing husband and wife equal opportunity to repudiate each other. Deeds of divorce are also found. The most important provision is for the return of the dowry. Children were to be maintained by the father, although they did not necessarily reside with him. Maintenance by the father was fair, since communal property usually remained with him. A marriage contract of 92 B.C. that discusses the protection of communal property during the duration of the marriage makes it clear that a wife usually suffers financially upon the dissolution of a marriage, for she receives no portion of the shared property but simply the return of her dowry.23 This document also defines the sexual behavior required of the husband rather specifically, so as to include not bringing in a second wife, not keeping a concubine or a boy lover, and not having children by another woman nor living in another house apart from the wife.
Gains in economic responsibility outstripped women’s legal competence during this period. Not only in Egypt but in other areas of the Greek world respectable women were participating more actively in economic affairs. Greek women exercised control over slaves, for they are common among the manumittors named in inscriptions. There are 123 women among the 491 manumittors listed at Delphi before 150 B.C. The records of land sales from Ceos and Tenos also list many women. There is good evidence for economic activity of women at Delos: married women, assisted by their guardians, borrowed money—suggesting that they rather than their husbands were responsible for their own debts—and wives of borrowers are recorded as “agreeing to” loans made by their husbands. At Amorgos, likewise, inscriptions show husbands making contracts concerning property with the explicit agreement of their wives.24 Moreover, as we have observed above, a few women won public acclaim for generous contributions from their personal funds. Yet it must be acknowledged that even where male guardians are not specifically mentioned as participants in women’s financial transactions, they are operating, at the very least, as some sort of legal fiction. Sparta was an exception, for there women employed their money as they wished, in spite of the occasional disapproval of male relatives.
Spartan women were a conspicuous group of wealthy females. The richest people in Hellenistic Sparta were the mother and grandmother of King Agis. Women owned two-fifths of the land, and they opposed economic reforms which would have redistributed the wealth of Sparta. Like wealthy men, they sometimes chose to exhibit race horses at the Olympic games in order to draw attention to themselves and their prosperity. Their names are recorded on inscriptions which they erected and on victor lists. Two Spartans (Cynisca and Euryleonis) and a courtesan (Bilistiche of Argos, who was the concubine of Ptolemy II) were the first women whose horses won at Olympia.25
In Athens, in contrast to some other parts of the Greek world,there was little, if any, economic or legal emancipation of citizen women. In fact, from 317 to 307 B.C., during the government of Demetrius of Phalerum, there was less freedom than in the Classical period. The legislation of Demetrius reflected the ethical ideas of Aristotle, who, as we have seen, believed that the deliberative part of woman’s soul was impotent and needed supervision.26 Demetrius established a board of “regulators of women” (gynaikonomoi), who censored women’s conduct and also controlled the lavishness of dinner parties.27 Aristotle observed that the supervision of women was suitable for states that have leisure and property, and was primarily directed at the regulation of upper-class extravagance, for the poor lacked slaves and were obliged to send their wives out on the errands of servants.28 Wealthy and independent women, such as Spartans and prostitutes, might show off fortunes which were truly in their own hands, but the wife of a wealthy man, as I have suggested in my comments on Solon’s sumptuary legislation, could be used as an emblem of her husband’s prosperity. Hence the regulation of women in Athens, especially in association with restrictions on dinner parties, was actually a limitation of the extravagance of men.
Athens remained the center for philosophy—as it had been in the Classical period—and citizen women in Athens still were by and large exposed to nothing more intellectual than practical training in domestic matters.29 At the opening of the Hellenistic Age, men continued to be attracted to the Peripatetic followers of Aristotle, who explained man’s public role by analogy to his place in the individual family—a microcosm of the patriarchal city-state. Theophrastus, another disciple of Aristotle, theorized that more education would turn women into rather lazy, talkative busybodies.30 Even the upper class, to which one would naturally look for an endorsement of schooling for women, did not educate its daughters.
Meanwhile, there flourished new philosophies offering guides to the individual in a world far larger than a city-state. Nevertheless, despite the changing world, Stoicism, by far the most popular of the Hellenistic philosophies, reinforced traditional roles for women. This position may have been partially a response to the realization that a few respectable women—but a highly conspicuous few—were trespassing on male territory. The Neopythagoreans, a small sect obviously distressed by the economic, political, and social vicissitudes of the time, took comfort in formulating intricate and highly restrictive codes of conduct for women, thus to ensure for themselves some measure of harmony in a world that otherwise resisted their theorems. The only two schools of thought that theoretically advocated the emancipation of women—the nonconformist Epicureanism and Cynicism—gained few prominent adherents and had little impact on official attitudes toward women.
Zeno (335–263 B.C.), the founder of the Stoic school of philosophy, had envisioned a community of wives—similar to the sharing of women described in Plato’s Republic (see this page)—but his followers abandoned utopian schemes and urged monogamous marriage on their adherents.31 The Stoic doctrine of equality and brotherhood of man, while contributing to the breakdown of class distinctions, did not posit equality between the sexes. The Stoics joined the Peripatetics in recommending the familiar roles of wife and mother for women. Stoicism was adapted by the Romans, and, to a large extent, it was owing to Roman influence that marriage and the rearing of children were elevated to the level of moral, religious, and patriotic duty.
The practical direction of Stoicism was a response to a social need. Owing to men’s reluctance to marry and the practice of exposing unwanted children. Greek cities were becoming underpopulated. Polybius, a historian of the second century B.C., attributed the tendency to celibacy and the reluctance to raise children to men’s pretentiousness, greed, and laziness.32 However, for some, the old incentives for marriage—which were essentially religious, economic, and political—had vanished. Men had once married out of religious duty to their ancestors, with the primary objectives of perpetuating family lines and maintaining family cults and tombs. But in the Hellenistic period, the values of the Classical period were losing their potency. Communal ideals were replaced by the goal of individual self-satisfaction. People drifted away from their lands. Some moved from their ancestral plots to the cities because of fear of attacks coming from constantly warring Hellenistic monarchs and later from the Romans. Some joined overseas colonies, effectively abandoning their family tombs. As was the case in the earlier period of colonization, the Dark Age, a wife and family were an encumbrance for a colonist, although some took them along.
The Hellenistic period was also marked by an increasing gap between the wealthy and the poor; many people lost their lands through poverty. The economic considerations determining marriage among the poor are elusive; the degree of poverty is the determining factor. On the one hand, it can be argued that a wife and children are a resource of free labor for a poor man; on the other, that there is an economic level below which a man may not hope to support a wife and family.
For men of all social classes—including the late fifth-century nobles Conon and Xenophon—there were new and more exciting careers. For the mercenary soldiers and adventurers who drifted about calling no city their own, sexual satisfaction was easy to find, and a concubine was less burdensome than a wife. The raising of children was a commitment with little appeal for a wanderer. His children would not be likely to be granted citizenship in a city that was not his father’s native land. In this context, another traditional impetus to marriage among the upper class—political alliance—retained its validity only among the very few who ruled and contracted dynastic marriages. For the subjected multitudes, which now included the upper classes, political power could no longer be an incentive to marriage.
Confronted by the fluctuating mores of the Hellenistic period, the Neopythagoreans were concerned about the proper behavior of women and wrote several texts on the subject. Whether the authors of these writings lived at Rome, Alexandria, or elsewhere, and whether they wrote as early as the fourth century or as late as the first century B.C., are subjects of scholarly controversy. Pythagoras, the founder of a religious order at Croton in the late sixth century B.C., had had many women followers who were admitted on equal terms with men. Adherence to his doctrines required a rigorous discipline. The regulations specifically enjoined upon women are not extant, but they are likely to have included measures concerning abstinence or moderation, possibly in the realms of financial expenditures and sexual activity, if it is true that many husbands actually sent their wives to study with Pythagoras. Some Neopythagorean texts that do discuss the correct behavior of women are extant, and certain of these are attributed to female writers. The authors are at least as likely to have actually been male, but this cannot be conclusively proven. To “Theano” (the name of the wife or daughter of Pythagoras) were attributed Hellenistic texts giving rules for the proper behavior of women whose husbands were adulterous. “Melissa” wrote on the obligations of women, especially that of abstaining from luxury. “Perictione” was the name of Plato’s mother, and it was claimed that she had been a disciple of Pythagoras. In the Hellenistic period several treatises were written purporting to be by Plato’s mother; but the ascription was deliberately fraudulent; they were probably written by some later Perictione or by a Neopythagorean disciple who then attributed his or her work to some “Perictione.” One such little-known treatise gives us a spectacularly early example of “advice to young ladies”:
We must deem the harmonious woman to be one who is well endowed with wisdom and self-restraint. For her soul must be very wise indeed when it comes to virtue so that she will be just and courageous [lit. manly], while being sensible and beautified with self-sufficiency, despising empty opinion. For from these qualities fair deeds accrue to a woman for herself as well as for her husband, children, and home; and perchance even to a city, if in fact such a woman were to govern cities or peoples, as we see in the case of a legitimate monarchy. Surely, by controlling her desire and passion, a woman becomes devout and harmonious, resulting in her not becoming a prey to impious love affairs. Rather, she will be full of love for her husband and children and her entire household. For all those women who have a desire for extramarital relations [lit. alien beds] themselves become enemies of all the freedmen and domestics in the house. Such a woman contrives both falsehood and deceits for her husband and tells lies against everyone to him as well, so that she alone seems to excel in good will and in mastery over the household, though she revels in idleness. For from all these activities comes the ruination that jointly afflicts the woman as well as her husband. And so let these precepts be pronounced before the women of today. With regard to the sustenance and natural requirements of the body, it must be provided with a proper measure of clothing, bathing, anointing, hair-setting, and all those items of gold and precious stones that are used for adornment. For women who eat and drink all sorts of extravagant dishes and dress themselves sumptuously, wearing things that women are given to wearing, are decked out for seduction into all manner of vice, not only the bed but also the commission of other wrongful deeds. And so, a woman must merely satisfy her hunger and thirst, and if she is of the poorer class, her chill, if she has a cloak made of goatskin. To be consumers of goods from far-off lands or of items that cost a great amount of money or are highly esteemed is manifestly no small vice. And to wear dresses that are excessively styled and elaborately dyed with purple or some other color is a foolish indulgence in extravagance. For the body desires merely not to be cold or, for the sake of appearances, naked; but it needs nothing else. Men’s opinion runs ignorantly after inanities and oddities. So that a woman will neither cover herself with gold or the stone of India or of any other place, nor will she braid her hair with artful device; nor will she anoint herself with Arabian perfume; nor will she put white makeup on her face or rouge her cheeks or darken her brows and lashes or artfully dye her graying hair; nor will she bathe a lot. For by pursuing these things a woman seeks to make a spectacle of female incontinence. The beauty that comes from wisdom and not from these things brings pleasure to women who are well born. Let a woman not think that noble birth and wealth and coming from a great city and having the esteem and love of illustrious and royal men are necessities. For if a woman is well off, she has nothing to complain about; if not, it doesn’t do to yearn. A clever woman is not prevented from living without these benefits. Even if allotments be great and marvelous, let not the soul strive for them, but let it walk far away from them. For they do more harm than good when someone drags a woman into trouble. Treachery, malice, and spite are associated with them, so that a woman so endowed could never be serene. A woman must reverence the gods if she hopes for happiness, obeying the ancestral laws and institutions. And I name after these [the gods], her parents, whom she must honor and reverence. For parents are in all respects equivalent to gods and they act in the interest of their grandchildren. A woman must live for her husband according to law and in actuality, thinking no private thoughts of her own, but taking care of her marriage and guarding it. For everything depends on this. A woman must bear all that her husband bears, whether he be unlucky or sin out of ignorance, whether he be sick or drunk or sleep with other women. For this latter sin is peculiar to men, but never to women. Rather it brings vengeance upon her. Therefore, a woman must preserve the law and not emulate men. And she must endure her husband’s temper, stinginess, complaining, jealousy, abuse, and anything else peculiar to his nature. And she will deal with all of his characteristics in such a way as is congenial to him by being discreet. For a woman who is affectionate to her husband and treats him in an agreeable way is a harmonious woman and one who loves her whole household and makes everyone in it well disposed. But when a woman has no love in her, she has no desire to look upon her home or children or slaves or their security whatsoever, but yearns for them to go to perdition just as an enemy would; and she prays for her husband to die as she would a foe, hating everybody who pleases him. just so she can sleep with other men. Thus, I think a woman is harmonious if she is full of sagacity and temperance. For she will not only help her husband but also her children, relatives, slaves, and her whole household, in which reside all her possessions and her dear kin and friends. She will conduct their home with simplicity, speaking and hearing fair words and holding views on their common mode of living that are compatible, while acting in concert with those relatives and friends whom her husband extols. And if her husband thinks something is sweet, she will think so too; or if he thinks something bitter, she will agree with him. Otherwise she will be out of tune with her whole universe.33
In contrast to Neopythagoreanism and Stoicism—especially as exploited by the Romans—Epicureanism and Cynicism were oriented toward the happiness of the individual rather than the well-being of the family and the state. Neither Epicurus nor Diogenes, one of the earliest Cynics, favored conventional marriage, although Epicurus admitted that marriage could occur in special circumstances.34 Diogenes advocated a community of wives, but unlike earlier utopian theorists he also considered the will of the woman essential, “recognizing no other marriage than that of the man who persuades with the woman who is persuaded.” 35
Epicurus admitted women to the school in his garden on the same terms as men. The Cynics were never organized in a conventional school, but we know of one female philosopher who lived according to Cynic principles. She was Hipparchia, wife of Crates, who went about with her husband, appeared with him in public, went to dinner parties, and was proud to have spent her time in education rather than in working at the loom.36
Hipparchia, the philosopher, was an aristocrat from Maroneia in northeastern Greece, and there is evidence that in other parts of the Greek world some women were given at least a rudimentary education in athletics, music, and reading, in imitation of the time-honored curriculum for boys.
Physical education was now available to women. Athletics were an essential part of the male curriculum that was opened to women in the Hellenistic period precisely because the Classical ideal no longer prevailed. Classical athletics had provided an opportunity for the assertion of individual prowess by amateurs, while the Hellenistic and Roman periods saw professionals supplant amateurs and athletics become a spectator sport. [Plate 13]
Apart from some races at Olympia segregated from the men’s events, and footraces in honor of Hera at Elis for maidens classified by age, women in Greece did not personally participate in athletic competitions until the first century A.D., when their names begin to appear in inscriptions. An inscription erected at Delphi honoring three female athletes from Tralles proclaims that one of them, Hedea, won prizes for singing and accompanying herself on the cithara at Athens, for footracing at Nemea, and for driving a war chariot at Isthmia.37
More important than the possibility of participating in professional athletics was the acquisition of the ability to read and write. During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, we find from Egyptian papyri that some women are able to sign their names to contracts, although the number of illiterate women who have to resort to another person to sign on their behalf is proportionately higher than for men.38
Not surprising against the background of increased literacy and education for women is the reemergence of poetesses. One poetess of the period won high praise. Erinna, of the Dorian island of Telos, can be compared to Sappho.39 Both speak of private worlds, and both are masterful artists. Erinna showed her originality in using the dactylic hexameter for a poem of lamentation, when tradition dictated the elegiac couplet or a choral meter. By the age of nineteen, Erinna had written her famous pom “The Distaff”:
You leaped from the white horses
And raced madly into the deep wave—
But “I’ve got you, dear!” I shouted loudly,
And when you were the Tortoise
You ran skipping through the yard of the great court.
These are the things that I lament and Sorrow over, my sad Baucis—these are
Little trails through my heart that are
Still warm—my remembrances of you.
For our former delights are ashes now.
When we were young girls we sat in our rooms
Without a care, holding our dolls and pretending
We were young brides. Remember—at dawn
The “mother,” who distributed the wool
To the attendant servants, came and called
You to help with the salting of the meat.
And how afraid we were, when we were small,
Of Mormo—she had huge ears on her head,
Walked about on four feet,
And was always changing faces.
But when you mounted your husband’s bed
You forgot all about those things,
All you heard from your mother
When you were still a little child.
Dear Baucis, Aphrodite set forgetfulness
In your heart.
And so I lament you and neglect my duties.
For I am not so irreverent as to set foot out-of-doors
Or to look upon a corpse with my eyes
Or let my hair loose in lamentation—
But a blush of grief tears my [cheeks].40
This fragment of a longer poem is sufficient to show why Erinna was acclaimed in antiquity. The poem is a lament for her lifelong friend Baucis. The title “Distaff” refers to the theme of wool-working, which is mentioned only once in the extant fragment but probably occurred more frequently in the full poem. Recurring expressions of grief punctuate the reminiscences about the childhood they enjoyed together: the game of Tortoise, playing with dolls, and being frightened by the bogey Mormo. (In the fantasies of Greek children bogies were mature females, who, having lost their own children, desired to devour others. They were sexually insatiable as well.41 Thus, the mention of Mormo provides a transition from girlhood to married life.) Erinna could not pay a last visit to her friend’s corpse either because of some religious taboo or, more likely, because it was not seemly for a young unmarried woman to enter the house of Baucis’ husband, who was not her relative.
Baucis died shortly after marriage. Erinna elaborates on the traditional theme of the bride of Hades, god of death, in an inscription she wrote for Baucis’ tomb:
I am the tomb of Baucis, the bride. When you pass by the tombstone which causes much lament, say this to Hades in the underworld: “Hades, you are jealous.” And you see the fine inscription announcing the savage fate of Baucis, how her bridegroom’s father lighted her pyre with the same torches that had burned while the bridal hymn was sung. And you. Hymenaeus, changed the harmonious wedding song to the gloomy sounds of lamentation.42
Erinna, like her friend Baucis, died young, shortly after writing the few poems that give evidence of her talent. She died unwed, for a later poet described her as “the maiden bride of Hades.” 43
Who was Erinna? Was she an ordinary woman endowed with the gift of the Muse? Was she an eccentric aristocrat like Hipparchia who chose to live as she pleased, not to marry but to write poetry? Was Erinna, like Sappho, the outstanding member of a group of cultivated women?
The special status accorded upper-class women continued with little relation to the attitudes toward women in less respectable areas of Hellenistic society. These women were the courtesans, who, with the exception of the royal and aristocratic women, were the most sophisticated females of their time—and the most notorious. To a large degree, however, the picture we have of the lives of prostitutes in the Hellenistic Age has been unduly embellished and enhanced by their presentation as characters in New Comedy.
New Comedy, which succeeded tragedy and Old Comedy as the national drama of Athens, and purported to hold up a mirror to life, is peopled with prostitutes. Since the scenes, by convention, are set out-of-doors, and respectable city women, especially unmarried girls, were required to stay inside, courtesans and slaves were the only females available to participate in the intrigue of this drama. In the romantic atmosphere of New Comedy one plot is repeated ad nauseam: a free young man is smitten with passion for a young slave woman. He intrigues to buy or steal her from the pimp who owns her and keep her as a concubine. Her father appears and identifies her as his long-lost daughter by means of trinkets she was wearing when found in infancy. When her parentage is known, she is thereby rendered freeborn, with no taint attaching from her former employment. The father explains the hardships that forced him to expose his daughter in infancy, and furnishes a dowry so that the couple can marry.
Thus the comedy has a happy ending, and the bride, now a “good” woman, can no longer figure in the adventures typical of this sort of drama. If she were a mythical heroine of tragedy, doubtless her marriage would have been of interest. But ordinary respectable women were not intended for representation; stage settings therefore were not designed for interior scenes, and the New Comedy—in true Cinderella fashion—usually closes with marriage.
Needless to say, in reality the careers of few prostitutes ended in such bliss, and the question of their parentage was, for most prostitutes, a sore point indeed. The prostitute’s choice of career was often not her own: exposure of unwanted infants was widely practiced, probably more so than in the Classical period. J. Lawrence Angel has estimated the number of births per female in the Hellenistic period as 3.6, with 1.6 survivors (as compared with 4.6 and 3.0 for the Classical period).44 According to Tarn, inscriptional evidence from the third and second centuries B.C. also shows that the one-child family was commonest, that sons were preferred, and that seldom more than one daughter was reared.45 No doubt the necessity for providing a dowry for the daughter when she was of age contributed to a family’s decision to expose a daughter. Some of the exposed infants were collected by others, and given to a wetnurse to tend. An abandoned infant automatically had slave status, unless proven freeborn. Despite the arguments of modern scholars that rearing an infant was more expensive than buying a full-grown slave, the evidence shows that some slave dealers made this investment.46 The fate of many of these infants, if they were female, was to work as prostitutes, thus alleviating the disparity in numbers between free males and females which exposure of females had created. These women could not, however, become legitimate wives, and many freeborn men were doomed to a life of celibacy, owing to the lack of marriageable women.
The happiest ending a slave prostitute could hope for was manumission, but even so, like any freedwoman, she would continue to owe service to her former mistress or master.47 Her children could be claimed as her master’s property, perhaps to be sold to a brothel. Neaira. however, who had been a notorious courtesan in Corinth, got to keep her children and owed only one obligation to the ex-lovers who contributed money to her freedom: to stay out of Corinth.48 Whether a prostitute was a slave or freedwoman, clients were more likely to be slaves, freedmen, or obscure freeborn men than wealthy, dashing young swains.
Prostitution was potentially lucrative for the prostitute herself, or for her owner if she was a slave. The tariff inscription of A.D. 90 from Coptos in Roman Egypt states that the passport fee for prostitutes was 108 drachmas, while for other women it was only 20 drachmas.49 This differential is not likely to be indicative of social policy or a fine for immorality; rather, it should be attributed to the prostitute’s ability to pay.
A few prostitutes, euphemistically referred to as companions (hetairai), led a more glamorous life. The stories told about them are reminiscent of the legends about Aspasia, the courtesan of Pericles, probably due to the unimaginativeness of some of the ancient gossip-mongers.50 Like Aspasia, Hellenistic courtesans mingled with many of the leading men in the state; these were primarily members of the Macedonian courts. The famous courtesan Thai’s was rumored to have captivated Alexander, and then Ptolemy I, to whom she bore three children. Some courtesans were as learned as Aspasia. Leontion, the companion of the philosopher Epicurus, rivaled Theophrastus in writing philosophy.
Naturally, courtesans had to be beautiful. Phryne was the model for Apelles’ painting of Aphrodite rising from the sea and for Praxiteles’ famous nude, the Cnidian Aphrodite. Like Aspasia, Phryne was prosecuted in Athens. She was charged with organizing an immoral club devoted to the worship of the Thracian god Isodaetes and thereby corrupting young women. The orator Hyperides, who happened to be one of her lovers, successfully defended her.
The Ptolemies, at least according to the gossip, were particularly susceptible to the attractions of courtesans, whether or not they had married their own sisters. Resembling the charge that Aspasia caused the Peloponnesian War is the report that Agathoclia not only ruled Egypt through her influence on Ptolemy IV but also was partially responsible for the mob uprising in Alexandria early in the minority of his heir, Ptolemy V.51
The literature and visual art of the Hellenistic period, when compared with either the restrained or lewd depictions of women in the preceding ages, reveal a new interest in the eroticism of women. It is difficult from this vantage point to determine the extent to which these changed sexual mores touched the lives of respectable women, but it may be assumed by analogy with Roman women that, to a degree, some Greek women implemented the advice in the manuals for courtesans—such as Ovid’s Art of Love—for their personal gratification.
The various portrayals of the female figure—draped, naked, or nude—in the visual arts of the Archaic, Classical, and Hellenistic periods are good indicators of changing social attitudes. While art historians have carefully catalogued the stylistic changes (which were not always simultaneous in sculpture and vase painting), only a few have ventured an interpretation of their psychological or social significance.52 For our purposes, the most striking feature of Hellenistic art was the development of the nude female figure in sculpture. To examine this phenomenon it is necessary at this point to review briefly the earlier depictions of women in Archaic and Classical art.
The draped female figure appears in Greek art in both sculpture and vase painting. The unclothed female is found in the vase painting of all periods, but begins to be shown with some frequency in sculpture only in the fourth century B.C. These images will be discussed chronologically according to the date of their Greek originals, although some of the sculptures are known to us only through Roman copies.
As we have seen in the discussion of the kouros and korē (p. 47), in Archaic Greek sculpture the male figure was regularly nude and the female heavily draped. The Athenians gloried in male nudity, for it symbolized a distinction between Greek and barbarian, implying the superiority of the former. In earlier times, Greek and barbarian athletes exercised with loincloths, but the Greeks first stripped for their calisthenics around 720 B.C.53 This “heroic” nudity, as it is commonly labeled, was confined to men at Athens, and is understandable in the context of male homosexuality or bisexuality. Respectable Greek women, except Spartan, did not participate in athletic activities, and there was no occasion for them to strip. One of Plato’s more outlandish proposals was that women exercise in the nude.54 Probably this attitude was of Eastern or Ionian origin. Herodotus, in the first story of his History, tells of the change in regal succession at Sardis because of the wrath of a queen who, with her husband’s connivance, was viewed unclothed.55 Similarly, death was the penalty meted out to Actaion. who happened to see Artemis nude, while Tiresias, according to some authors, was struck blind because he caught sight of Athena bathing. Accordingly, the female figure—both mortal and goddess—in Archaic and Classical Athenian sculpture is draped, with very few exceptions. The best-known totally nude female figures in fifth-century sculpture are the Esquiline Venus and the Flute Player of the Ludovisi Throne. Slightly more numerous are the females depicted in partial nudity to indicate pathos, among them the Barberini Suppliant, the Dying Niobid, and the Lapith women being raped.
However, sculpture is a public art. In the more intimate representations of vase painting, many naked women are represented. These figures occur most frequently on wine cups which began to be produced in the late Archaic period, around 530 B.C. Because wine was the province of Dionysus, scenes depicting the intercourse of Satyrs and Maenads—who formed part of the god’s train—are popular. [Plate 14] There are also many representations of group sex which took place at the symposia. Wine drinking was an activity ideally reserved for men, as the male burials associated with drinking cups and kraters for mixing wine demonstrated (Chapter III above). The cups with erotic painting were designed for the symposia of upper-class men, parties to which respectable women were never invited. A wide variety of men’s sexual activity is recorded on these cups, some homosexual, but more heterosexual.
There can be little doubt that the women depicted in erotic vase paintings were prostitutes. Aside from scenes of conventional intercourse, they are shown more frequently giving pleasure to men than receiving it. Cunnilingus is depicted more rarely than fellatio, and I have yet to see any portrayal of these activities occurring simultaneously. The vase paintings show that the Greeks practiced intercourse in many positions. In literature, especially comedy, the positions are named, many names deriving from traditional wrestling postures; other names are incomprehensible to the modern scholar.56
Noticeable in the portrayal of the female figures on the drinking cups are very prominent buttocks. There are also numerous occurrences of heterosexual anal penetration, probably in some cases a transference from the males’ homosexual activities.
In addition to the pornography of the drinking cups, pictures of women bathing provided an opportunity to show the naked female. These depictions can in no sense be compared to the heroic nudity of the idealized male figure appearing in the sculpture of the same period. The vase paintings do indicate that models were available, if sculptor and patron had wished to portray the nude female in their medium.
T. B. L. Webster has traced a startling increase in the number of depictions of women in the second quarter of the fifth century B.C.57 Before this time, vase paintings of athletes and horsemen were three times as common as portrayals of women and men or of women alone. After the Persian Wars, paintings of women and men or of women alone are at least twice as numerous as those of athletes and horsemen. Many of these vases were intended for use by women, and thus depicted their activities. But since they were manufactured and purchased by men for women, they reveal men’s notions of women’s tastes. Men may also have been increasingly interested in women’s daily private lives. The segregation between the sexes may have fostered a sort of “voyeurism” in men. If Webster is correct, this focus on women appears in vase painting earlier than in the literature of the fifth century B.C.
The hypothesis about the voyeurism of Greek males may be borne out by the emergence, in the second quarter of the fifth century B.C., of large-scale paintings intended for public viewing that depicted women in transparent or wet, clinging drapery.58 The actual paintings have not survived, but some vase paintings—which probably follow the style of the larger works—show women dressed in clothing of gauzelike transparency. Some of the scantily attired women are spinning, weaving, and visiting tombs. It is difficult to decide whether these were portrayals of respectable women or of prostitutes. On their tombstones, citizen wives are shown modestly garbed, but in their homes they often wore light garments.59 On the other hand, prostitutes, especially those living as concubines, had to perform domestic chores such as spinning and weaving.
Another possible interpretation is that the artist was not drawing actual transparent garments, but rather adopted this convention as a means of revealing the shape of the body beneath clothing that was actually opaque. The transparent drapery was also employed in sculpture; the best-known representations of the female figure in wet drapery at this period are the Aphrodite of the Ludovisi Throne [Plate 15], the Nike of Paionius, and the Venus Genetrix.
The female nude appeared in large-scale painting in the early fourth century B.C. When Zeuxis wished to paint a nude Helen, he found five models in the city of Croton and assembled his figure from the best features of each of them.60 Sculpture soon followed suit in the depiction of the totally nude female. In the mid-fourth century Praxiteles sculpted a nude Aphrodite, using his mistress Phryne as the model.61 [Plate 16] The statue was placed in a shrine at Cnidus, where it could be admired from every side. She was totally nude, in preparation for a bath, but held one hand in front of her pelvis as a gesture of modesty (which also drew attention to the concealed area). The canonical proportions for the female nude established by Praxiteles were that the same distance should exist between the breasts, from the lower breast to the navel, and from the navel to the crotch. Pliny relates that one man became so enamored that he embraced the statue during the night and left a stain on it. Yet no one denied that the statue was that of a goddess, deserving of respect.
Other female nudes were sculpted thereafter. Most of these statues are called “Aphrodites,” and portray the goddess partially or totally unclothed in preparation for a bath. [Plate 17] With these statues the female nude finally took its place beside the male nude in Greek sculpture, although the male was more commonly portrayed throughout classical antiquity. These nude images operate on two levels: as the nude male embraced a medley of elements, both homosexual and heroic, so the Aphrodite figure was sexually attractive while she simultaneously embodied religious ideals.
Erotic vase paintings of the Hellenistic Age also proclaim changes in sexual relationships. Earlier vases had depicted group sex scenes in stark physical surroundings. Hellenistic art shows fewer representations of male homosexual activity, and focuses instead on tender heterosexual scenes of couples in bed in a private and comfortably furnished setting. The furnishings are essential prerequisites, for a sophisticated etiquette of romance was developing which was to culminate in handbooks on the art of love.62
Nudity may be interpreted as a more open acknowledgment of women’s erotic impulses and their gratification. The sculptured female nudes are in far more erotic and suggestive poses than males: crouching, stretching—desirable and desiring.
The eternal question of which sex enjoys intercourse more was as much a concern of the Greeks as it is of people today. According to a myth related by Hellenistic and Roman authors, Zeus and Hera asked the prophet Tiresias to settle this dispute: Zeus asserted that the female experiences more delight, Hera insisted that the male does. Tiresias, who was considered an expert since he had experienced part of his life as a male and part as a female, answered: “Women enjoy intercourse nine times more than men.” According to ancient authors, Tiresias had been successively male, then female, then male again, but he combines both sexes simultaneously in T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land,” where he is described as an “old man with wrinkled female breasts.” Eliot’s description suggests another creature of both sexes, the Hermaphrodite, a bisexual deity whose figure appears with relative frequency in the Hellenistic Age and was especially appealing to the literate and wealthy classes. [Plates 18 and 19] The sculpture of the Hermaphrodite evolved from two sources. Either breasts were added to the figure of the ephebe, a youthful male with a feminine body, or male genitals were added to a nude female sculpture of the Aphrodite type. The Hermaphrodite embodied wholeness, transcending the imperfection of belonging to one sex or the other. This marks a new variation in Greek thought: in the Classical period the male was clearly the superior being, and to taint him with the characteristics of “the inferior” would have been a lessening of perfection. The Hermaphrodite’s sensual depictions in sculpture remind us that the Greeks considered the young, both male and female, sexually desirable. Although in the Classical period the emphasis had been on males, Hellenistic art depicts the female as well as an object of sexual desire.
Women’s sexual capacities were obviously noted in the verdict of Tiresias, and there are indications in literature that the satisfaction of women’s desires was also considered in the Hellenistic period. Aristotle had described women’s pleasure in intercourse, distinguishing between the place from which discharges are emitted (presumably the vagina) and the place where pleasure is produced (presumably the clitoris).63 Ovid (43 B.C.-A.D. 17), a Roman influenced by Hellenistic poets, thus instructed lovers:
Believe me, the pleasure of love is not to be rushed, but gradually elicited by well-tempered delay. When you have found the place where a woman loves to be fondled, don’t you be ashamed to touch it any more than she is. You will see her eyes gleaming with a tremulous brightness like the glitter of the sun reflected in clear water. Then she will moan and murmur lovingly, sigh sweetly, and find words that suit her pleasure. But be sure that you don’t sail too fast and leave your mistress behind, nor let her complete her course before you. Race to the goal together. Then pleasure is complete, when man and woman lie vanquished side by side. This tempo you must keep when you dally freely, and fear does not rush a secret affair. When delay is dangerous, then it is useful to speed ahead with full power, spurring your horse as she comes.64
Some literature of the Hellenistic period, notably the mime, depicted women’s sexuality in a manner more vulgar than Aristophanic comedy, but other literature investigated the psychology of passionate women with a sympathy reminiscent of Euripides. The masterpiece in the second category is the Argonautica of Apollonius of Rhodes. The description of Medea’s desire for Jason, which led her to deceive her father and murder her brother, became a model for later authors, including the Roman Virgil, who adapted it for his description of Dido’s ruinous passion for Aeneas.
The turning inward toward a private sexual relationship, which we today take for granted, was of little interest to Greeks of the Classical period, but was fully explored in Hellenistic literature and art. This change in the relationship between the sexes can be attributed, with varying degrees of speculativeness, to a number of factors examined in this chapter: the influence of philosophers, the actions of royal women, and women’s increasing economic power. The polis system of such a city as Athens—requiring a marital arrangement protective of women—had changed, allowing to men a familiarity with respectable women, especially in the areas recently settled by Greeks. At the same time, a new permissiveness was granted to respectable women. In his second Idyll, the poet Theocritus (300–260 B.C.) describes the activities of Simaetha, a virgin, perhaps an orphan, who went to a festival chaperoned by another woman. On the road she caught sight of and fell in love with a young man. He made love to her and later jilted her. In his fifteenth Idyll, Theocritus shows two respectable Greek housewives in Alexandria going to see “The Loves of Venus and Adonis,” where they are jostled and addressed by men in the throng. Here, it is necessary to raise the question whether nudity in the visual arts connoted not only greater freedom for but also less respect toward women.