Greek Women

by Mitchell Carroll

XI

THE WOMAN QUESTION IN ANCIENT ATHENS

Anyone who makes a careful perusal of the philosophical literature of Athens in the fourth century before our era will be struck with the amount of attention that has been paid to the question of the social and domestic position of woman. If he trace the subject back, he will observe that in the dramatic literature of the latter part of the previous century the same problems received the consideration of Euripides and Aristophanes. And the conviction will be forced upon him that this agitation was rooted in a sociological movement of great import, and that the dramatic and philosophical writers merely gave a literary form to the debates which profoundly stirred Athenian society in the fifth century.

This discussion of woman's rights is a subject of perennial interest, and the underlying currents in such movements are usually the same in every age. They take their rise, too, not in the efforts of philanthropic men who recognize that the status of woman is not what it should be, but in the efforts of the members of the sex themselves, who are sufficiently intelligent to see that they, while having an abundant share of the burdens, have not a fair share of the emoluments of life, and consequently endeavor to better the conditions which environ themselves and their sisters.

In this chapter we shall make a study of the dramatists and philosophers of Athens, in so far as they give insight into the social life of the city in its most important epoch, and outline what they contribute to our knowledge of Greek woman and the ever-present Woman Question.

For the early part of this brilliant period we must rely on the ideal pictures of tragedy for the higher side, and the ribald travesties of comedy for the lower side of feminine life, Æschylus flourished just before and during the glorious period following the Persian War,--the good days before the influx of foreigners and the new education corrupted the life and undermined the faith of the citizens. In his seven extant plays he has presented to us only three feminine characters of any importance,--Clytemnestra, Electra, and Cassandra,--all belonging to the cycle of tragedies treating of the fate of King Agamemnon and his royal house at Mycenæ. The dramatist's pictures of home life show his high conception of the ability and the importance of women and of the large part they play in human history. His Clytemnestra is a ruling queen exercising all the functions of royalty, but her powerful nature has been debased by grief and sin. She identifies herself with the "ancient bitter Alastor," who visits on Agamemnon the curse of his house. She is self-sufficingness, adamantine purpose, studied craft, and cold disdain incarnate. With fulsome speech and consummate flattery she welcomes her husband home; and when the deed is done and he lies dead by her hand, in exultant tones she rejoices in the blood upon her robe as "a cornfield in the dews of spring." Truly she is the most powerful portrait of feminine guilt that dramatic literature affords us. Æschylus drew his scenery and his characters largely from the conditions of the Heroic Age as pictured by Homer, and was little affected by the current of everyday life about him.

As Æschylus has given us Clytemnestra for an ideal type of feminine power and wickedness, so Sophocles has presented two immortal heroines, Antigone and Electra, who are statuesque in the beauty and grandeur of their characters. In Antigone we observe two fundamental qualities,--enthusiasm in the performance of duty, and intensity of domestic affection, as seen in her efforts to reconcile her brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, her desire to shield her sister Ismene, her self-sacrifice for the sake of her brother Polynices, and her filial devotion to her aged father. Electra also is an ideal type of sisterly love. Ill-treated by her unnatural mother, abused by the cowardly and brutal tyrant who had usurped her father's place, only one ray of hope was left her, that her brother Orestes would return to avenge their wrongs upon the guilty pair. When the deed is done, and Orestes is pursued by the Furies, she proves herself a devoted and unselfish sister. In these two characters we have sublime conceptions of heroic devotion to duty, but the more human womanly traits have been lost in the poet's delineation of them as the embodiment of lofty ideals.

Mahaffy finds in these two heroines something hard and masculine, traits which would not stir the sympathies of the reader or hearer and lead to emulation. He prefers Sophocles's Deianira and Tecmessa as being "truly 'female women,' as Homer would say, gentle and loving, not above jealousy, and for that reason a finer and clearer contrast to the heroes than are the coarser and more dominant heroines." ... "If these criticisms be just," he adds, "they will show that, in the most perfect and exclusive Athenian society--that is to say, among Thucydides's and Sophocles's set, the ideal of female character had degenerated; that to these men, whose affections were centred on very different objects, the notion of a true heroine was no longer natural, but was supplanted by a hard and masculine type. The old free, noble woman, whom Æschylus had, in early days, still known, was banished from their city life to make way for the domestic slave of the Attic household, called 'mistress,' but as such contrasted with the 'companions,' who gradually supplanted her in Athenian society."

The types of womanhood presented by Æschylus and Sophocles belonged to a state of society which had passed away, and were too remote from the life of their own day to be ideals for the daughters of Athens. These dramatists did not touch upon the problems which were then engaging the thoughts of enlightened men and women. There is nothing in Æschylus, absorbed as he was in the problems of destiny, to show that he felt the many weighty problems that confronted the social life of his time; and the serene Sophocles gives no hint that the world about him was not the best of all possible worlds. But how was it with the sombre and melancholy Euripides? What insight does he give us into the social life of the times?

There was a famous saying of Sophocles that "he himself represented men as they ought to be--Euripides, men as they are." This means that Euripides, while making the old legends the foundation of his tragedies, attributed to his heroes and heroines the faults and passions of ordinary men and women and utilized his plots to present the problems which confronted society as he knew it. As a follower of Anaxagoras and a member of the party of philosophers, he was dissatisfied with the conditions of life about him, and endeavored, through his dramas, to assist the movements for reform. He was, in many respects, a daring innovator, and this explains the bitter hostility which Aristophanes, the ultra-conservative, exhibited toward him. The glaring fault in Athenian social life was the status of woman, and to the solution of this problem Euripides bent all his energies. He used woman and the moral conflicts originating through the relations of the sexes as a motif for his poetry, and the whole body of his plays is a commentary on the Woman Question. He found in the portrayal of woman a new field for his genius, as well as a new means of advocating an unpopular but righteous cause.