I heard Aspasia composing a funeral oration about these very dead. For she had
been told , as you were saying, that the Athenians were going to choose a speaker,
and she repeated to me the sort of speech which he should deliver – partly
improvising and partly from previous thought, putting together fragments of the
funeral oration which Pericles spoke, but which, as I believe, she composed.
(Plato, Menexenus, 236b)Whatever we make of the truth of this, it is clear that a hetairacould be rather more
than simply a sexual partner; in fact, she could be a cultivated intellectual companion.
In other cities, women might have greater freedom than they had in Classical
Athens. Evidence from the legal code of the city of Gortyn in Crete revised about 450
makes it clear women here had greater inheritance rights. They could inherit from
both parents and even if they had brothers they were allowed a portion of the estate.
Their dowry was also determined by the value of the estate and not simply the
arbitrary decision of her father. If an heiress had no paternal relations or if they or she
did not wish to marry, she could marry anyone she wished from the tribe. Her fate,
therefore, was not so tied up with the maintenance of the oikosas at Athens.
Arrangements for women at Sparta were also very different. According to the
Lycurgan principle that their role in the community was to provide healthy Spartiate
children, they were brought up to exercise their bodies and not required to marry until
they were physically at their peak. Far from being hidden away in the home, they could
assemble together and exercise naked even in the sight of men, which caused much
scandal in the rest of Greece. As their male children were taken away at the age of seven
to be brought up by the state, their main function as adults was to look after the kleros
allotted to their husbands, while they in turn were fulfilling their role in the sussitia. They
could own and inherit property, to the extent that in the fourth century with the decline
of the Spartiate soldiery it is estimated that women owned two fifths of Spartan land.
But there was one sphere in which women participated in civic life and played
a distinctive part, as clearly enunciated by the female speaker in a fragment of one
of Euripides’ plays.
And what’s more, when it comes to the gods – for I think this is of the first importance- we have the greatest share. For women interpret the mind of Loxias (Apollo) in the
temple of Phoebus. By the holy foundations of Dodona beside the sacred oak the
female race conveys the thoughts of Zeus to all Greeks who wish to know it. As for
the holy rituals performed for the Fates and the Unnamed goddesses, these are not
ordained as holy rituals for men, but among women they thrive, all of them. In affairs
dealing with the gods the appointed right of women stands thus.
(Euripides, Melanippe Captive fr. 494 Tragicorum Graecorum Fragmenta,
edited by R. Kanicht, 2004, translated by Bonnie MacLachlan:
Women in Ancient Greece, Continuum, 2012, p.115)
132 THE GREEKS