IN 18 B.C. according to the historian Cassius Dio there were more upper-class men than women.1 Such is my perception of the ratio of males to females, not only in the Roman upper class in the days of Augustus, but, with few exceptions, in all social strata throughout classical antiquity.
A selection from the crude and haphazard data of various periods and places in antiquity shows that males outnumbered females by at least two to one. These are the sex ratios to be deduced from the funerary artifacts of the Dark Age and Archaic period, the prosopographical studies of propertied families in Classical Athens, sepulchral inscriptions of slaves and freedmen in the early Empire, and the list of children receiving the alimentary fund at Veleia.
Were there actually fewer females than males in antiquity, or is the apparent disproportion between the sexes illusory? Demographers point out that when a census is taken in an underdeveloped country, women are not adequately counted. Certainly statistics cannot be based on the sort of evidence cited here. Demography, in any case, is a dangerous field, and it would be incautious to argue that the disproportion between men and women was as vast as our evidence indicates. Either women were underenumerated when living and undercommemorated after death to an extent that can only be described as startling, or there actually were fewer women than men, or both of these factors operated simultaneously.
If, following years of civil war and proscriptions—when far more men than women were killed and, in the aftermath of war, huge contingents of veterans were exported as colonists—as Cassius Dio records, there were still more men than women at Rome, then it is likely that in periods of peace the disproportion between the sexes was even greater.
There can be little doubt that female infanticide was practiced, apparently more in Hellenistic than in Classical Greece; the parents’ financial situation and the general political climate probably were the major determinants in deciding whether infant girls would be raised. Moreover, poor health resulting from a diet inferior to that accorded boys—as indicated by the writings of Xenophon, the Persepolis inscriptions, and the discriminatory alimentary allotments at Rome—followed by childbearing at an immature age, resulted in women’s life expectancy being shorter than men’s by five to ten years. If fewer female infants were raised, and if women’s lives were shorter, the result would inevitably manifest itself in a disproportionate sex ratio.
Certainly the attitude of ancient society toward the relative importance of the activities of men and women was such that most women were less likely to be described by ancient historians or to be commemorated by enduring sepulchral monuments. The glaring exception to undercommemoration is noted by Keith Hopkins, who points out that, among women whose ages are recorded on their tombstones, wives who died in their childbearing years and predeceased their husbands are more likely than other women to be commemorated. We tend to forget that—despite a dazzling veneer of literary and artistic achievements—Greece and Rome were warrior societies. What really mattered, even to the Athenians, the most intellectual of all, was winning wars and maintaining an empire, along with the training that was an essential prerequisite for these goals. Except in their role as bearers of future soldiers, most women were peripheral to these concerns.
The women who are known to us are those who influenced matters of interest to men. Most is known—on the lowest level of society—about prostitutes, and—on the highest level—about women who played a role in politics: Hellenistic queens and those Roman women who asserted themselves in traditionally masculine spheres of activity. The names of a few poetesses have been immortalized but, for the majority of them, little remains beyond their names and the comments of later critics. It is no surprise that the only woman in antiquity who could be the subject of a full-length biography is Cleopatra. Yet, unlike Alexander, whom she rivals as the theme of romance and legend, Cleopatra is known to us through overwhelmingly hostile sources. The reward of the “good” woman in Rome was likely to be praise in stereotyped phrases; in Athens she won oblivion.
In contrast to the scarcity of reliable historical information about women are the abundant portrayals of women in art and literature, from the Neolithic figurines and nameless mourners and flute girls depicted on pottery to the well-known heroines of tragedy and the fictionalized mistresses of elegiac poets. It would appear that in Classical Athens, where respectable women were ideally in little evidence, artists were most prolific and inventive in creating them. Banished from participation in men’s lives, women returned to haunt men’s imaginations, dreams, and nightmares. Poets, Athenian and otherwise, were not uniformly misogynistic, and the literary portraits of women, even when monstrous, show self-assertion, self-esteem, dignity, and rage at injustice—and not all of them were monstrous. I can think of no other literature in which women are such compelling figures, beginning with Andromache and Penelope. These Galateas are so seductive that scholars have chosen to pursue them with greater zeal than they display in their attempts to study flesh-and-blood women: no one yet has adequately explained the relationship between, for example, the heroines of epic or Athenian drama and the women who were living contemporaries of the poets. It may be that the gulf between fact and fiction was so broad and the relationship so obscure that it is not to be perceived from this vantage point.
In this account I have attempted to find out about the realities of women’s existence in the ancient world rather than concentrate on the images that men had of women. Yet to compose a polemic against the men of Greece and Rome and to write a brief in defense of their women are not the proper objectives of a historian. Nor would it be defensible to pronounce a verdict based on modern preferences, noting that although the basic patriarchal power structure was similar in Greece and Rome, Roman women appear to have led more satisfying lives as a result of the deepening of the marriage relationship and the transference of the possibilities of the finer kind of love from homosexual to heterosexual relationships. I hope I may be forgiven for suggesting that the modern woman would have felt more at home among the Romans, since despite the perspective of some 2,000 years the women of classical antiquity evoke an emotional response. For the ancient views of women, as well as what can be determined about their actual lives, remain valid paradigms for the modern world.
To redress the balance, something can be said in favor of the men of classical antiquity. The Greeks were the first we know of to consider and question women’s role. This did not happen in other societies at the time or indeed much later. Whether they took actual notice of the women around them as they formulated their theories is debatable. The product is a variegated fabric so finely woven that we cannot tell how much to attribute to the living women of the period and how much is due to men’s imagination.
A chasm gapes between the beastlike women in the verses of Semonides and the female watchdogs of Plato’s Republic; yet, upon closer analysis, the attitudes of one of the most celebrated misogynists and one of the greatest philogynists of antiquity show more similarities than differences. Even Plato—of ancient authors one of the most sympathetic to women—found that the one sex was in general inferior to the other, although he allowed for exceptions. Plato had strayed far from the mainstream of Greek thought. The views of Aristotle were more representative: he elucidated in detail the range of woman’s inferiority, from her passive role in procreativity to her limited capacity for mental activity. Serious intellectual thought about women continued: Stoicism, the most popular of the Hellenistic and Roman philosophies, directed women’s energies to marriage and motherhood. The argumentation is brilliant and difficult to refute. And this rationalized confinement of women to the domestic sphere, as well as the systematization of anti-female thought by poets and philosophers, are two of the most devastating creations in the classical legacy.