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An Alternative Sexual Morality for Classical Athenians

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

J. Roy
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Extract

It is generally accepted that in classical Athens a widely proclaimed sexual morality expected citizen women not only to be chaste, confining sexual activity to marriage, but also to avoid any suspicion of improper contact with men. While some recent works still suggest that Athenian citizen women did conform to their society's expectations, and even that women lived in seclusion to promote chastity, others have long recognized that Athenian women showed a wider range of behaviour and, sometimes at least, had sexual liaisons with men other than their husbands. It is unfortunate that the most vigorous statement of the view that significant numbers of Athenian women did not in practice accept their society's constraints, an article by Richter in 1971, while containing much of value, weakens its own case by overstatement: few can accept, for instance, that in classical Athens ‘the young wives were as undisciplined a bevy of nymphs as Hellas ever reared’. Nonetheless it seems clear that Athenian women (and of course Athenian men) breached the sexual code commonly proclaimed in their society. It is the purpose of this paper to consider how widespread such breaches were, and in what spirit they were undertaken, whether purely as guilty acts or as behaviour that was at least condoned by an alternative morality.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 44 , Issue 1 , April 1997 , pp. 11 - 22
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1997

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References

Notes

1. I am grateful to Professor A. H. Sommerstein for suggested improvements to this paper, while stressing that he is not responsible for any of its defects. The present discussion is primarily concerned with citizen women. Information about metic women is poor. Some, belonging to households more or less assimilated into Athenian society, no doubt sought to live by Athenian norms, but the category of metic women extended to groups, such as prostitutes, living by other standards. Slave women were commonly compelled to submit to the sexual desires of others. The present discussion is also concerned exclusively with women's heterosexual behaviour because it is virtually impossible to discuss female homoeroticism in classical Athens. Dover, K. J., Greek Homosexuality (London, 1978), 172Google Scholar notes that classical Athenian literature refers only once to female homosexuality (in Plato, , Symposium 191e)Google Scholar. It goes without saving that Athenian men could find sexual partners other than Athenian citizen women.

2. E.g., Garland, R., The Greek Way of Life (London, 1990)Google Scholar.

3. See, for example, the observations of Ehrenberg, V., The People of Aristophanes (3rd edition, New York, 1962), 195Google Scholar, recognizing that adultery occurred but supposing that it was relatively rare. Blundell, S., Women in Ancient Greece (London, 1995), 126Google Scholar argues that ‘it is impossible to know how often women were involved in illicit love affairs’, but suggests that such affairs were not common. Gardner, J. F., G&R 36 (1989), 51 ffGoogle Scholar. explores Athenian men's fears about their wives, including the fear that wives would commit adultery, while Konstan, D. in Boegehold, A. L. and Scafuro, A. C. (edd.), Athenian Identity and Civic Ideology (Baltimore, 1994), p217ffGoogle Scholar. examines anxieties of Athenian men about Athenian women who had premarital sexual experience (including victims of rape). The discussion of Athenian attitudes to rape and seduction (Harris, E. M., CQ 40 [1990], 370ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. and Brown, P. G. M., CQ 41 [1991], 533 fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.) clearly supposes that both occurred. Dover, , Arethusa 6 (1973), 69Google Scholar suggested that, at least lower down the social scale, Athenian girls might have love-affairs.

4. Richter, D. C., Classical Journal 67 (1971), 1ffGoogle Scholar.

5. A breach of conventional sexual morality was also an undermining of the authority of the woman's guardian, and hence of the collective male authority which characterized the Athenian community (Foxhal, L.l in Gagarin, M. [ed.], Symposion 1990: Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte (Pacific Grove, California, 24.–26. September 1990), Akten der Gesellschaft für Griechische und Hellenistische Rechtsgeschichte No. 8 [Cologne, Weimar, Vienna, 1991], 297ffGoogle Scholar.: this accounts for the readiness with which Athenians condemned improper sexual relations with Athenian citizen women. Conversely the opportunity to undermine another man's authority and standing may have been for some Athenians a motive for seducing Athenian women (Cohen, D., Law, Sexuality, and Society: the Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens [Cambridge, 1991], 163fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.). C. B. Patterson in Boegehold and Scafuro (see n. 3), 199ff. explores the importance for the civic ideology of democratic Athens of legitimate marriage and the civic legitimacy which marriage created: improper sexual behaviour would be a threat to such legitimacy.

6. Cohen, , Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Romanistische Abteilung 102 (1985), 385ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Cohen, in Cartledge, P., Millett, P., and Todd, S. (edd.), Nomos: Essays in Athenian Law, Politics, and Society (Cambridge, 1990), 147 ffGoogle Scholar. Cohen, , Law, Sexuality, and Society: the Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens (Cambridge, 1991CrossRefGoogle Scholar) developed the ideas which he had published in 1989 (previous note) and in 1990.

8. In interpreting Lysias 3.6 it is however important to note (as did Richter, , op. cit., 6fGoogle Scholar.) the context for the girls' modesty: the speaker is describing how at night a drunken stranger burst into the women's quarters.

9. On the Haloa and similar cults see the recent reconsideration by Winkler, J. J., The Constraints of Desire (New York and London, 1990), 193—203Google Scholar. Winkler quotes a translation of the scholion on Lucian about the Haloa. On women's festivals see Foxhall, in Cornwall, A. and Lindisfarne, N. (edd.), Dislocating Masculinity: Comparative Ethnographies (London, 1994), 137fGoogle Scholar. and on female sexuality in Athens ibid. 141–5.

10. Concern about illegitimate children could be taken as an indication of improper sexual relations: see generally Ogden, D., Greek Bastardy in the Classical and the Hellenistic Periods (Oxford, 1996), 32–212Google Scholar on such concerns at Athens (though he argues [149–50] that the Athenian state was anxious to protect the legitimacy of the citizenship). The issue is complicated by disagreement about the meaning of the term nothoi used by the ancients: Ogden, whose book is centrally concerned with the concept of notheia (5–6), argues (15–18) that the term nothoi covered all extramarital children, against the view of Patterson, , Classical Antiquity 9 (1990), 40ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. that nothos, though often taken by modern scholars to mean ‘bastard’, in fact refers to a recognized child of inferior status. Ogden (107–10) considers the evidence (mainly from drama) that an illegitimate child might be exposed, or passed off as the offspring of another woman, and he also notes (6—8) both that no figures exist for the number of bastards in classical Athenian society, and that ‘adulterine bastardy has of course historically been virtually undetectable, and most children conceived in this way will have been passed off by the wife as her husband's’.

11. See Scafuro in Boegehold and Scafuro (see n. 3), 8 n. 36, maintaining the existence of this form of legal action.

12. See Halperin, D. M., One Hundred Years of Homosexuality (New York and London, 1990), 92fGoogle Scholar. on the laws against illicit sex with citizen women, and the danger of such behaviour (and the easy access for Athenian men to prostitutes): Ogden, , op. cit., 136–dash;42Google Scholar also reviews the laws. See Foxhall, , op. cit., 141 fGoogle Scholar. on moral judgements of illicit sex.

13. Harrison, A. R. W., The Law of Athens, Vol. 1 The Family and Property (Oxford, 1968), 32–6Google Scholar. See also Cole, S. G., CP 79 (1984), 97 ffGoogle Scholar. Controversy over the meaning of moicheia, stemming from arguments developed by Cohen, is reviewed, with references, by Cohn-Haft, L., JHS (1995), 3 n. 11Google Scholar: the main issue is whether the word refers exclusively to illicit sex with a wife, or whether its meaning extends to illicit sex with any woman under the protection of a kyrios. For the present argument the precise meaning of moicheia is not critical, since illicit sex with any citizen woman, whether or not technically described as moicheia, was certainly a breach of conventional morality.

14. Harrison, , op. cit., 73Google Scholar: the law is cited by Plutarch, , Solon 23Google Scholar.

15. Cohen in Cartledge, Millett, and Todd (see n. 7), 147ff.

16. Fantham, E., Foley, H. P., Kampen, N. B., Pomeroy, S. B., and Shapiro, H. A. (edd.), Women in the Classical World: Image and Text (Oxford, 1994), 114Google Scholar.

17. What ‘catching’ an adulterer might mean is not entirely clear: see E. Cantarella in Gagarin (see n. 5), 289ff. There were nonetheless occasions on which the belief that an individual had been found to be engaged in an adulterous relationship was strong enough to justify the countermeasures allowed by the law.

18. Cohn-Haft, , op. cit., 3Google Scholar. While it is agreed that humiliating physical punishments were also sometimes inflicted on male adulterers, there has been debate about whether the versions of them mentioned in comedy and in other, later, literary passages are mere jokes (Cohen, , Zeitschrift der Savigny-Stiftung für Rechtsgeschichte, Romanistische Abteilung 102 [1985], 385–7CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Roy, J., Liverpool Classical Monthly 16.5 [05 1991], 73ffGoogle Scholar.) or are the punishments actually inflicted (Carey, C., Liverpool Classical Monthly 18.4 [04 1993], 53 ff)Google Scholar.

19. See Foxhall in Cornwall and Lindisfarne (see n. 9), 133 ff. on the problems facing a cuckolded husband who had to decide whether to reassert his authority.

20. Harrison, , op. cit., 55–6Google Scholar, followed by, e.g., Just, R., Women in Athenian Life and Law (London, 1989), 73Google Scholar and Sealey, R., Women and Law in Classical Greece (Chapel Hill, 1990), 29Google Scholar.

21. Aristophanes, , Lysistrata 270Google Scholar; Eupolis frr. 58, 61, 232, 295 (Kassel-Austin): see Sommerstein, , Quademi di storia 11 (1980), 398–9Google Scholar with n. 38.

22. On Cimon, e.g., Plutarch, , Cimon 4.5–9Google Scholar, 15.3, on Pericles, e.g., Plutarch, , Pericles 13.9–11, 36.3Google Scholar; on Alcibiades, e.g., Antisthenes fr.29a+b, Eupolis fr.171 (Kassel-Austin), Lysias fr.XXX (Budé), Xenophon, , Mem. 1.2.24Google Scholar.

23. The speaker claims (Lysias 1.7–8) that his wife was seen by her future lover when she attended her mother-in-law's funeral. He avoids all suggestion that there was any previous acquaintance. See L. Foxhall in Cornwall and Lindisfarne (see n. 9), 133ff. and 142 on the relationships in this speech.

24. It is of course impossible to know whether events happened as the speaker in the case presents them; but he is clearly both anxious to offer to the jury a plausible scenario, and keen to present himself as somewhat naive, so that the alleged course of events is presumably good evidence of what might happen in Athens.

25. Compare the remarks of Patterson, , TAPA 115 (1985), 103ffGoogle Scholar, especially 122–3, on the comparable problem of assessing the importance of infanticide in classical Greece; and Ogden, , op. cit, 6–7Google Scholar on the lack of statistics for illegitimate children.

26. See Halperin, , op. cit., 107–12Google Scholar on prostitutes. See also Ogden, , op. cit., 157–63Google Scholar on Athenian citizen pallakai (whom he believes to have been very rare) and hetairai.

27. Certain main issues can be identified in Isaeus 3, though the details of the situation discussed in the speech, and their implications, are often far from clear. See Patterson, , Classical Antiquity 9 (1990), 70–3CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

28. Demosthenes 59.67: see Harrison, , op. cit., 37Google Scholar.

29. Aeschines 1.119–24. Though the speaker's immediate concern is with his claim that Timarchus had been a male prostitute, the points which he makes about tax-farmers and prostitutes should apply equally to female prostitutes.

30. The statements of Apollodorus, the speaker in Demosthenes 59, present serious difficulties and may well not be true (see Patterson in Boegehold and Scafuro (see n. 3), 199ff. and esp. 207–9): but the statements suppose that a known hetaira could find a husband.

31. Cohen, , Law, Sexuality, and Society, 127–30Google Scholar notes how a husband might seek to make money from a wife's adultery. In such cases adultery and prostitution would be very close.

32. Women of ambiguous status of course became a stock element of New Comedy: see, e.g., Konstan, , Phoenix 41 (1987), 122 ffCrossRefGoogle Scholar. on Glycera in Menander's Perikeiromene.

33. Just, , op. cit., 50–5Google Scholar.

34. Patterson, , Classical Antiquity 9 (1990), 55–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar and 60 and in Pomeroy, S. B. (ed.), Women's History and Ancient History (Chapel Hill, 1991), 58 n. 61Google Scholar points out the disadvantages to both man and woman, if they were Athenian citizens, of a relationship of man and pallake, while recognizing that such a relationship was not prohibited. See also Halperin, , op. cit., 110–11Google Scholar and Ogden, , op. cit., 158Google Scholar(arguing that citizen pallakai were very rare).

35. Kilmer, M. E, Greek Erotica on Red-figure Vases (London, 1993), 159–67Google Scholar. Osborne, R. in Kampen, N. B. (ed), Sexuality in Ancient Art (Cambridge, 1996), 65 ffGoogle Scholar. considers expressions of desire for women on Athenian vases, interpreting such desire as belonging to a fantasy world and to some extent justifying aggressive male sexuality; but it is possible to suppose, for reasons set out in this paper, that not all Athenian women would be unattainable as objects of desire. See also E Frontisi-Ducroux, 81 ff., also in Kampen.

36. Roy, , Liverpool Classical Monthly 10.9 (11 1985), 132ffGoogle Scholar.

37. See Gardner, , op. cit., 51 ffGoogle Scholar. on men's fears. See also the comments of Foxhall in Cornwall and Lindisfarne (see note 9), 140f. on ‘male fantasies of women conspiring against men’.