Women in ancient Greece

In classical Athens, the centre of a woman’s life was the οἶκος: the house, the family and everything they owned. Girls usually did not go to school like boys. They learned at home from their mothers how to spin wool, weave cloth on the loom, the ἱστός, cook and look after the stores of food.

Girls married young, often to a much older man chosen by their father. In Xenophon’s Oeconomicus (7.5), a rich Athenian says that his wife was “not yet fifteen” when she came to his house. The same book (7.30) says that it is more honourable for a woman to stay indoors and for a man to work outside.

Houses had rooms for the women, the γυναικωνῖτις. In a speech by Lysias (1.9), a husband says that the women’s rooms were upstairs and the men’s rooms downstairs; in Xenophon (9.5) they are behind a bolted door. Archaeologists who study excavated houses are more careful: the rooms of real houses were often used for many things, so the strict picture in these texts may describe an ideal more than daily life.

In law, an Athenian woman always had a guardian, her κύριος: first her father, then her husband, or a brother or another male relative. She could not take a case to court herself. An Athenian law quoted in a speech of Demosthenes (46.18) says that a woman’s marriage was arranged by her father, her brother or her grandfather, and that if she was an epikleros, a daughter with no brothers, her guardian had to marry her so that the family property stayed in the family.

A bride brought a dowry, the προίξ, usually money or goods from her father. It helped to support the new household and was meant to protect her: if her husband sent her away, the law said that he had to pay the dowry back (Demosthenes 59.52).

Women could not vote, but they mattered for citizenship. After a law proposed by Pericles in 451/0 BC, a man was a citizen only if both his father and his mother were from Athenian citizen families (Aristotle, Constitution of the Athenians 26.4).

Not every woman stayed indoors. In another speech of Demosthenes (57.31–45), a man admits that his citizen mother sold ribbons in the market and worked as a nurse, and says that many poor Athenian women worked at the loom or in the vineyards.

Religion was the one public area where women had real honour. Some of the most important offices in Athens were held by a ἱέρεια, a priestess. The priestess of Athena Polias, the goddess of the city on the Acropolis, came from one old family, the Eteoboutadai.

One of these priestesses, Lysimache, served Athena for sixty-four years. Her statue base, found on the Acropolis and dated around 360 BC, still records this, and the Roman writer Pliny mentions her portrait by the sculptor Demetrios. Some scholars think that Aristophanes was thinking of her when he named the heroine of his comedy Lysistrata (411 BC), but others are not convinced.

Women also had festivals that men could not join. The best known is the Thesmophoria, in honour of Demeter. In Aristophanes’ comedy Women at the Thesmophoria, a character notes that the courts and the council are not sitting, because it is the third day of the festival, and the women are meeting in the temple of Demeter.

Life was not the same in every city. In Sparta, according to Plutarch (Lycurgus 14), girls trained their bodies in running, wrestling, the discus and the javelin. Aristotle complained (Politics 2, 1270a) that nearly two-fifths of the Spartan land belonged to women, because of inheritances and large dowries. A Spartan princess, Kyniska, bred horses and, Pausanias says (3.8.1), was the first woman to win an Olympic victory, as the owner of the horses.

On the island of Lesbos, around 600 BC, lived Sappho, born in Eresos around 630 BC. She wrote love poems and wedding songs in the Aeolic dialect, and later scholars in Alexandria arranged her poems in nine books. An ancient epigram calls her “the tenth Muse”. Only parts of her work survive.

In Athens itself, the best-known woman of Pericles’ time was Aspasia, from Miletus, who lived with Pericles. Plato and Plutarch describe her as clever and well spoken, while comic poets mocked her.

Remember one thing about all this evidence: almost all of it was written by men, and mostly about rich families. We rarely hear women speak for themselves.