Sophocles’ subtle use of prayers offered by the characters. Just before Orestes’ servant enters the scene to
report Orestes’ fictitious death, Clytemestra prays to Apollo that her enemies – she means her son Orestes
– may fail in their plots to overthrow her. Her prayers, she thinks, are answered by the servant’s account
of Orestes’ death, but she is mistaken. By contrast, just before Orestes enters the palace to carry out his
vengeance on Clytemestra, Electra prays to Apollo that Orestes’ actions may be successful. Her prayers
are answered and the family of Agamemnon is restored.

Other Persons: Women and Athenian Democracy

In addition to Sophocles’ Electra and Aeschylus’ Clytemestra, fifth-century tragedy is populated with a
number of extraordinary female characters, ranging from the model heroine of Euripides’ Alcestis, who
agrees to die so that her husband may live, to the same dramatist’s Medea, who murders her own children
to avenge herself on the children’s father for abandoning her. This is all the more striking when we
consider that these characters, like all characters in Attic tragedy, were played by male actors, that all the
dramatists whose names are recorded were men, and that it is uncertain whether the audience for dramatic
performances even included women. We may be inclined, then, to dismiss these representations as merely
male fantasies or caricatures, and we may regret the absence of the voice of a “real” woman who can
speak for the female population of ancient Greece. There are, of course, women’s voices that are
available to us, although they are far less numerous than their male counterparts: In addition to the
Archaic poet Sappho, whom we have already considered, we find in later periods other women who
wrote for publication as well as a number of women whose personal letters and other documents have
survived by chance on papyri. It is questionable, however, whether any of these writers can be regarded
as representative of ancient Greek women, just as it is questionable whether Hesiod or Theognis or
Herodotus can be regarded as representative of ancient Greek men. For one thing, these three men come
from different periods and different parts of Greece. For another, they are thoughtful individuals with their
own developed views. The same would naturally be the case with any woman who expressed herself in
writing. Further, as we have seen in the case of Sparta, the way in which women functioned within their
society varied from one polis to another.

Even if we confine ourselves to fifth-century Athens, we find that there can be no such thing as a typical
woman or a representative woman’s voice. For, just as what is expected of a woman differs from polis to
polis, so it differs within a given polis depending on the social and economic milieu and even whether the
setting is rural or urban. The one thing, however, that is expected of all women who belong to citizen
families is that they maintain the family by giving birth, preferably to male offspring. Since the life
expectancy of women was short, owing to the very dangers associated with childbirth, and since infant
mortality rates were high, it was felt necessary for women – or, more accurately, girls – to be married
shortly after menarche, that is, when they were 13 or 14 years of age, so that they could get an early start
on their childbearing responsibilities. Their marriage would be arranged for them by their family, as is
still the case in many parts of the world today, to a husband who was ordinarily around 30 years old, the
age at which citizen men could be expected to participate fully in the political life of the community.
Except during periods of prolonged and intense warfare, life expectancy for men was longer than that for
women, so that this disparity in age had little effect on the couple’s prospects of producing a viable male
heir. The disparity in age, however, did affect the wife’s prospects of developing independently as an
individual. For her marriage consisted of her transfer at a very young age from the household of her adult
father to that of her adult husband. It had been the father’s responsibility to ensure that his daughter not be
sexually active; it was now the husband’s concern to ensure that her sexual activity be restricted to him,
since his aim in procuring a wife was to provide him, not his next-door neighbor, with sons. To the extent