Attitudes to Women in the Greek/Roman World
Attitudes to Women
in the Greek/Roman World
The Greek and Roman world was the
environment in which Christianity spread. It contained a background of thought
and practice in which the message of Christ brought freedom and salvation, but
it also imposed constraints on what could be done. As the church strayed
further from New Testament teaching, pagan attitudes, including pagan attitudes
towards women, influenced Christianity. Some analysis of attitudes to women
amongst the Greeks and Romans is therefore relevant.
It is difficult to give an adequate analysis of societies which
lasted for centuries and covered the area from Syria to Britain. Different
customs existed, according to place and date. Attitudes to women in Athens, for
example, were different from those in warlike Sparta, at least in the
well-known historical period of the 400s BC. It would be true, however, to say
that women in general were controlled by male owners (fathers, husbands or
masters), the prediction to Eve that “he will rule over you” (Genesis 3:16) was
almost universally demonstrated, and the attitude displayed by men towards
women was frequently neither kind nor considerate.
According to Hesiod (c. 800 BC) Zeus, chief of the gods in Greek
mythology, created a woman, Pandora, “an evil thing”,“a plague to men” an
“inescapable snare”. She was given “lies and crafty words and a deceitful
nature.” Out of curiosity she opened a jar which contained hard toil and
diseases, and these spread to men:
... the
tribes of men had previously lived on the earth free and apart from evils, free
from burdensome labour and from painful diseases....
But then
woman, raising the jar’s lid in her hands and scattering its contents, devised
anguishing miseries for men.
(Hesiod,
Works and Days, 53-105)
All the ills of this world are therefore attributable to a woman,
and by extension to all women. This was done by the will of Zeus who sent woman
as a punishment to men for their arrogance.
Semonides (c. 7th century BC, or later) considered women to be
lazy, greedy, slovenly, gossipy and adulterous: “... women are the biggest
single bad thing Zeus has made for us”.
A woman was certainly not usually treated as a “suitable helper”,
“bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh” (Genesis 2:20-23). The fall from God’s
original intention is well illustrated by men’s contemptuous attitude towards
women.
Positive Attitudes, but Restrictive Roles
Some very positive descriptions of marriage have been handed down
from antiquity, and these usefully provide a counter to the negative comments.
There are few more attractive pictures of happily married life than that
painted in the fictional account in the Odyssey,
composed about 800 BC. Odysseus speaking to Nausicaa says:
“... may
the gods grant your heart’s desire; may they give you a husband and a home, and
the harmony that is so much to be desired, since there is nothing nobler or
more admirable than when two people who see eye to eye keep house as man and
wife....”
(Homer,
Odyssey VI, 180-185)
Seneca, Stoic philosopher, tutor of Nero and brother of Gallio
(Acts 18:12), advocated chastity in marriage for both husband and wife:
You know
that a man does wrong in requiring chastity of his wife, while he himself is
intriguing with the wives of other men; you know that, as your wife should have
no dealings with a lover, neither should you yourself with a mistress. (Seneca, Epistle
94:26)
Pliny wrote in the 1st century AD to his wife Calpurnia, while
they were apart:
I, too, am
always reading your letters, and returning to them again and again as if they
were new to me — but this only fans the fire of my longing for you. If your
letters are dear to me, you can imagine how I delight in your company; do write
as often as you can, although you give me pleasure mingled with pain.” (Pliny, Letters, VI, 7)
In the societies depicted here, amongst the “top” people in
ancient times, women’s roles were considerably restricted. Men had a greater
range of outside activities than their wives. In the same book of the Odyssey,
the queen was “sitting at the hearth with her maid, spinning yarn stained with
sea-purple”, while the king “was going out to join his princely colleagues at a
conference to which he was called by the ... nobles” (Odyssey VI, 51-55). The Odyssey is, of course, a work of fiction,
but nevertheless is evidence of ancient attitudes.
Pliny was a prominent Roman lawyer, landowner and government
official. He wrote of his wife, Calpurnia,
She is
highly intelligent and a careful housewife, and her devotion to me is a sure
indication of her virtue. In addition, this love has given her an interest in
literature .... If I am giving a reading [of my poetry] she sits behind a
curtain nearby and greedily drinks in every word of appreciation. (Pliny,
Letters, IV, 19)
The reading of his poetry was to his circle of male friends.
Presumably it would be thought too much “in public” for his wife to be present,
so she sat hidden behind a curtain. The date of this letter is about 100 AD.
We have already quoted Philo, writing in Alexandria a few decades
earlier:
Market
places and council halls, law courts and gatherings, and meetings where a large
number of people are gathered, in short all public life with its discussions
and deeds, in times of peace and of war, are proper for men. It is suitable for
women to stay indoors and to live in retirement, limited by the middle door (to
the men’s apartments) for young girls, and the outer door for married women.
(Philo,
De Spec. Leg. III, 169)
The idea that women should keep a
low profile was expressed in Athens by Pericles (the political leader behind
the building of the Parthenon) about 440 BC. After a lengthy speech praising
the Athenian men who had died in a recent war with Sparta, he addressed a few,
succinct remarks to the widows on their duties as women:
Your great
glory is not to be inferior to what God has made you, and the greatest glory of
a woman is to be least talked about by men, whether they are praising you or
criticizing you.
(Thucydides,
Peloponnesian War, II, 45)
Similarly, in Plato’s dialogue between Socrates and Meno, c.384
BC, Meno expresses the standard view of his time:
If you
want to describe excellence in a man, it is easy. It is this: to be good at
involvement in public affairs, ensuring that his friends do well and his
enemies do badly,
while taking good care that he doesn’t suffer any such harm. If you want to
describe excellence in a woman, it is not difficult: she ought to look after
her house well, ensuring the safety of everything inside and being obedient to
her husband. (Plato, Meno, III, 71E)
Public praise and activity was considered the role of men,
activity in the home that of women, who were expected to be out of sight and
out of mind. This would apply, primarily, to the upper classes; the lower
classes could not remain at home: both men and women had to struggle to keep
themselves fed and clothed, while slaves, male and female, had to do as their
master or mistresses bade. In that respect, the Christian churches did offer
some opportunity for slaves. When Pliny reported to the Emperor Trajan, c. 112
AD, about the activities of the Christians in the province of Bithynia, of
which he was governor, he said he had decided it was necessary “to extract the
truth by torture from two slave women, whom they call deaconesses” (Letters, X, 96). It is interesting that
these unfortunate women evidently held a position within the church, though as
with Phoebe (Romans 16:1), it is difficult to define what is meant by the word
(ministrae) translated “deaconesses”.
Wives held strong influence within the home, but were subjected to
double standards:
Mistresses
are for pleasure, concubines for daily service to our bodies, but wives for the
procreation of legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of the
household. (Demosthenes 59)
Husbands felt entitled to have sex in these three areas:
mistresses, concubines and wives.
If you
were to take your wife in the act of adultery, you could freely kill her
without a trial; whereas if you were to commit adultery ... she would not dare
to lift a finger against you, nor would it be right. (Gellius 10.23)
Cicero, top Roman politician and lawyer in the century before
Christ, said in 56 BC:
Anyone who
thought young men ought to be forbidden to visit prostitutes would certainly be
the virtuous of the virtuous, that I cannot deny. But he would be out of step
not only with this easy-going age but also our ancestors, who customarily made
youth that concession. Was there ever a time when this was not habitual
practice, when it was censured and not permitted, in short when what is
allowable was not allowed? (Cicero,
Pro Caelio, 20)
Power and control were with the men, the very opposite to the
sharing, caring, mutual relationship enjoined by the apostle Paul or envisaged
by God “from the beginning”:
The
husband should give to his wife her conjugal rights, and likewise the wife to
her husband. For the wife does not rule over her own body, but the husband
does; likewise the husband does not rule over his own body, but the wife does.
Do not refuse one another except perhaps by agreement for a season ... (1
Corinthians 7:3-5)
Passages like this which show mutuality and equality were
overlooked when the church moved away from New Testament teaching, becoming
influenced by Greek philosophers such as Aristotle. Aristotle (384-322 BC)
considered it part of the natural order that masters should rule over slaves,
husbands over wives, fathers over children; and his reasoning has been followed
for much of the last 2,000 years:
... the
male is better fitted to command than the female ...
... there
are by nature various classes of rulers and ruled. For the free rules the slave,
the male the female, and the man the child in a different way. And all possess
the various parts of the soul, but possess them in different ways; for the
slave has not got the deliberative part at all, the female has it, but it is
ineffective, and the child has it but in an undeveloped form. (Aristotle, Politics, 1259b-1260a)
In
other words, slaves cannot think rationally at all, women just a little, and
children in an undeveloped form. Only Aristotle’s assessment about children
could be considered valid today, but this type of reasoning about women has
held sway until recent times because of male prejudice, mistaken assumptions
about biology, and the refusal to allow women to be adequately educated until
the end of the 19th century.
Mistaken Medical Understanding
Attempts to understand medical
matters were influenced by social understandings and vice-versa. Women were
considered inferior to men in social terms. This was illustrated by medical
explanations, which in turn were subsequently taken to prove that women were
inferior socially.
Men’s bodies were believed to be “hot” and therefore produced
white hot semen which could carry the soul of a new human being; women’s bodies
were thought to be cold, and therefore could produce only blood, which did not
have this ability to any appreciable extent.
Just as it
sometimes happens that deformed offspring are produced by deformed parents, and
sometimes not, so the offspring produced by a female are sometimes female,
sometimes not, but male. The reason is that the female is as it were a deformed
male.
(Aristotle, Generation of Animals, 737a25-28)
A woman is a “deformed male” in that she can contribute so little
a part to reproduction, and therefore (according to Aristotle) she is weaker! The coldness in a woman’s
body also means that she is intellectually inferior to man. And this was
thought to have its parallel in character weakness.
Talking first of animals, and then of men and women, Aristotle
says:
In all
cases, excepting those of the bear and the leopard, the female is less spirited
than the male .... ... the female is softer in disposition, is more
mischievous, less simple, more impulsive, and more attentive to the nurture of
the young; the male, on the other hand, is more spirited, more savage, more
simple and less cunning. The traces of these characters are more or less
visible everywhere, but they are especially visible where character is
more developed, and most of all in man. The fact is, the nature of man is the
most rounded off and complete and consequently in man the qualities above
referred to are found most clearly. Hence woman is more compassionate than man,
more easily moved to tears, at the same time is more jealous, more querulous,
more apt to scold and to strike. She is furthermore more prone to despondency,
and less hopeful than the man, more void of shame, more false of speech, more
deceptive, and of more retentive memory. She is also more wakeful, more
shrinking, more difficult to rouse to action and requires a smaller quantity of
nutriment.
(Aristotle, History of Animals
608a32-b19)
Quite a muddle, but demonstrating why (from his understanding)
women are and should be subordinate to men.
Galen (second century AD) was the most authoritative medical
writer in antiquity, and his influence continued through the middle ages. He
had a better understanding of biology than Aristotle, but still adhered to the
hot and cold theory:
The female
is less perfect than the male for one, principal reason: because she is colder.
For if among animals the warm one is the more active, a colder animal would be
less perfect than a warmer. (Galen, On
the Usefulness of the Parts of the Body, XIV, 6)
Menstruation was not properly
understood until 1908. Until then it was thought that blood was leaking from a
weak womb, and other superstitious views were entertained. Pliny the Elder, who
perished in the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, wrote:
Contact
with the monthly flux of women turns new wine sour, makes crops wither, kills
grafts, dries seeds in gardens, causes the fruit of trees to fall off, dims the
bright surface of mirrors, dulls the edge of steel and the gleam of ivory,
kills bees, rusts iron and bronze, and causes a horrible smell to fill the air.
Dogs who taste the blood become mad, and their bite becomes poisonous as in
rabies. The Dead Sea, thick with salt, cannot be drawn asunder except by a
thread soaked in the poisonous fluid of the menstruous blood. A thread from an
infected dress is sufficient. Linen, touched by the woman while boiling and
washing it in water, turns black. So magical is the power of women during their
monthly periods that they say that hailstorms and whirlwinds are driven away if
menstrual fluid is exposed to the flashes of lightning.
(Pliny, Natural History, book 28,
ch. 23, 78-80; book 7, ch. 65)
This attitude came into medieval church teaching, with the same
superstitious ‘reasons’ repeated, and women were forbidden to enter a church
building during menstruation or after childbirth. The following dates from the
12th century:
For only a
woman is an animal that menstruates. Through touching her blood fruits will
fail to get ripe. Mustard degenerates, grass dries up and trees lose their
fruit before time. Iron gets rusted and the air becomes dark. When dogs eat it,
they acquire rabies.”
(Paucapalea,
‘Summa’ on Church law, Distinctio 5, princ.§ 2. v.)
Such supposedly “scientific” arguments were influential in
confirming that women were inferior to men. In reality they are a reflection of
social attitudes and are devoid of any scientific or biological validity.
Modern Understanding
Modern biology observes the differences and similarities between
male and female without making value judgments for or against either sex.
All
embryos will develop into girl babies unless the male hormone testosterone is
present – hence boys have nipples, although they do not need them. .... Male
brains are physically distinct from female brains in several ways. The most
obvious difference occurs where the two halves of the brain – the left and
right hemispheres – communicate with each other through a large bundle of
nerves that is known as the corpus callosum.
In boys, fewer cross-connections develop between the two
hemispheres, so the communicating corpus callosum is significantly smaller than
those of girls. At the same time, in male brains, the right hemisphere forms
more internal connections and so works more independently than in female
brains.
As a result, boys seem to tackle some types of problem using only
one side of their brain, while girls use both. This may explain why boys tend
to be more interested and proficient in right-sided brain activities, such as
mathematics and spatial tasks .... Testosterone also produces more aggressive
or assertive behaviour in boys, even as infants.
(Sarah
Brewer, “It’s a girl – but she knows that already” Daily Telegraph, Friday
24th August 2001, page 24)
These changes in the brain may explain play preferences as
expressed earlier in the same article:
If a group
of one-year-old infants is dressed identically, their sex is often revealed
purely by the items they choose to play with: girls spend more time playing
with dolls and cuddly animals, while boys show a preference for plastic tools,
lorries, cars and tractors. (Ibid)
In a society such as has existed throughout most of world history
these differences suggest that men are better at heavier, physically tougher
jobs like building, hunting for food or fighting, and women are better at
rearing children. There is no reason to suggest, however, that either sex is
inferior to the other: characteristics of both overlap, and the strengths of
both are needed to support the weakness of the other. As far as service to
Christ is concerned, both sexes are exhorted to serve God fully, with
compassion and kindness, feelings sometime biologically associated more with
one sex than the other. Nature is transcended in service to God in Jesus, but
both male and female are needed in society and in the ecclesia.
