The poets of New Comedy leaned heavily upon the “long arm of coincidence.” The young women who are the recipients of the gilded youths’ favors are frequently found in the outcome to be free-born, the children of respectable parents, and acceptable wives. In several instances the victim of violence at some nocturnal festival has unwittingly become the spouse of her ravisher. The situation is aggravated by the unity of time. Men who have been absent from their homes for months or years must some day return to their households, pregnant women must at last be delivered of their offspring, long-standing debts must finally fall due, and the escapades of spoiled sons must at some time be brought to light and receive the attention of “hard-hearted” parents. Coming singly, such occurrences occasion no surprise. But when several of that sort are crowded into a period of twenty-four hours or less in play after play, to our minds the coincidence becomes well-nigh intolerable. It seems likely, however, that the ancients regarded such concatenations of events with more kindly eyes, for the reason that Chance or Fortune (Τύχη) was commonly accepted as exercising supreme authority over the lives and fortunes of men. This conception also helps to explain the curious immunity from punishment which was usually enjoyed by the scheming slaves in comedy. Of course to a race whose national characteristics were embodied in the wily Odysseus, cleverness, however unscrupulous, always seemed to elevate its practitioners above the rules of ordinary morality. But more. Just as “in the days of the Odyssey a man merely required to be skilful at deceiving his fellows to become a favorite of Athena’s, so in the days of New Comedy this quality gave him a claim to the favor of the queen of the world—omnipotent Tyche.”[350]
It is not always realized how almost oriental was the seclusion in which respectable women were kept at Athens during the period of its greatness in drama. Respectable women of good family were not permitted to leave their homes except for special reasons, nor to converse with men other than near relatives or slaves. When it is remembered that the physical arrangements of the Greek theaters did not readily admit of interior scenes (see [pp. 237 ff.], above) it will be understood how difficult it was for an ancient playwright to bring women of the better class upon his stage. This applies particularly to comedy as being a more accurate mirror of contemporaneous manners; in tragedy, as will presently appear, it was counteracted by another factor. At weddings, funerals, and religious festivals women, especially married women, were allowed greater liberty than at other times. Thus, in Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria the coming of the festa affords them an opportunity of carrying on the business of the play. In the same writer’s Women in Council they act in secret and disguised as men until their coup d’état has succeeded and the government has been voted into their hands. The situation in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata is quite as abnormal, being nothing more or less than a “sex strike!” In more conventional plays the speaking characters, apart from divinities, are practically restricted to women of the demimonde, foreign residents (metics), female slaves, those other virtuous but vulgar creatures whom poverty has compelled to seek a livelihood in various business pursuits of the humbler sort, and finally women advanced in years, shrewish in disposition, and unattractive in person. The first and last types are especially common in New Comedy, while Plautus’ Persian is said to be unique in its presentation of a chaste and free-born maiden in an active rôle.[351] Even the girl who has excited the young man’s affections and whose counterpart in modern drama would be a conspicuous figure is seldom seen and is not always heard. The most that she seems normally capable of doing is to ejaculate a cry of agony from behind the scenes at the moment of childbirth. This is the more surprising since the fact of her Attic citizenship is rarely established and sometimes is not even suspected until the very close of the play. The poet’s consciousness of what he intends to make of her—a free-born citizen and a legal wife—apparently constrains him to protect her from an unconventionality of conduct which, though suitable to her present condition, would afterward be looked back upon with regret by herself, her husband and newly recovered relatives, and even by the spectators themselves. Truth to tell the girls from whom an Athenian was required to take his bride were scarcely fitted to be his intellectual companions or to grace a dialogue in drama, while the best of the courtesans could qualify in either capacity. According to American notions the marriage of convenience arranged by the parents is hardly warranted to produce domestic felicity. But the hero of Greek comedy often selected a mistress for graces of mind and person and afterward, when her legitimate birth was discovered, gladly made her his wife. At least such matches ought to have resulted happily. Yet surprisingly little is ever said of married bliss and affection arising from any sort of union. While this social situation prevented the ancient dramatist from introducing certain scenes which are the stock in trade of the modern playwright, in one respect it was of service to him. Since practically no attention was paid to the girl’s wishes in such matters and almost none to the youth’s, the speed with which engagements could be made and unmade or consummated in wedlock aided materially in observing the unity of time. The plots and concentrated action of many plays in the New Comedy (cf. for example Terence’s Andrian Girl) would be quite impossible if women in such a case were not passive and helpless instruments in the hands of others. Professor Lounsbury (op. cit., pp. 120 ff.) has convincingly shown what a stumbling-block the unity of time proved to the classical dramatists of Western Europe who tried to conform to the unities but lived in a society to which such rapidity in courtship was repugnant.
In Greek tragedy the representation of women is strikingly different from that in comedy. Whereas in this respect the latter reacted to the usage of contemporaneous society, tragedy reverted to the practice of Homer. In the Iliad women like Helen and Andromache, suitably attended, not only traverse the Trojan streets but appear on the walls and among the men without losing caste or being regarded as immodest; and though Helen’s elopement with his brother was the source of all Troy’s present woes, Hector addresses her with far more consideration than he shows the wayward Paris. In the fourth book of the Odyssey she assists Menelaus at their Spartan home in entertaining the strangers from Ithaca and Pylus, and freely participates in the conversation without embarrassment and as an equal. How faithful a picture these poems present of the social situation in Homer’s own day is largely beside the question, since it is evident that they portray the events of a bygone age, viz., the close of that “Aegean” or “Minoan” civilization which has been unearthed by Schliemann on the Greek mainland and more recently by Evans and others in Crete.
It is certain that women must have lived on a footing of greater equality with the men than in any other ancient civilization, and we see in the frescoes of Knossos conclusive indications of an open and easy association of men and women, corresponding to our idea of “Society,” at the Minoan Court unparalleled till our own day.[352]
The extant remains clearly demonstrate that Homer’s delineation was at the least derived from a genuine tradition. In view of the fact that with three or four exceptions (see [pp. 123 f.], above) the themes of tragedy were always selected from Homeric or other mythological sources, it was natural that the Greek tragedians should take over from him a social system which so conveniently liberated them from the restrictions of contemporaneous customs. It is unnecessary to cite passages to prove that they actually did this; the women of almost every tragedy move about with a freedom and conduct themselves with an independence such as no respectable woman among the playwright’s contemporaries could have asserted.
Nor is it peculiar that so artificial a pose is not consistently maintained. Occasionally, an unconscious sense of outraged propriety causes the dramatist to put words into a woman’s mouth which stand in glaring contrast with the rest of the scene. In Euripides’ Andromache, Hermione’s confidential slave brings their dialogue to a close by saying to her mistress:
Nay, pass within; make not thyself a show
Before this house, lest thou shouldst get thee shame,
Before this palace seen of men, my child.
[Vss. 877 ff.; Way’s translation]