Figure 57 Apulian red-figure bell-krater illustrating a scene from Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae;
height of vase 18.5 cm, 370s BC. Würzburg, Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg.
Source: © Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg, Foto: E. Oehrlein.
Aristophanes thus manages to subject to merciless ridicule not only Euripides but the entire female sex.
We have already seen, in chapters 3 and 4, that poets like Hesiod and Semonides have little to say about
women that is not defamatory. It seems clear that those poets were addressing themselves to a largely, if
not exclusively, male audience. But what about Aristophanes? Was the audience at the festival of the
Dionysia entirely or predominately male? The evidence, unfortunately, does not allow us to answer that
question with any confidence. What is interesting is that, even if women regularly attended the theater, the
exclusively male dramatic poets, addressing their audience through the lips of an exclusively male cast,
seem to assume that the audience as a whole shares their view that women belong to a different category
from themselves. Even so, that does not justify (nor could anything justify) the almost entirely negative
tone that characterizes Aristophanes’, and other Greek poets’, treatment of women. While it is not
possible to understand fully the attitude of ancient Greek men toward women (or of Greek women toward
themselves), we can begin to make some sense of it in terms of a concept that pervades Greek thinking
about status, namely the concept of constraint. So, for example, what distinguishes a free male citizen
from a slave is that, unlike the latter, the former cannot legally be constrained by another person. If an
Athenian citizen falls upon hard times and becomes impoverished, he can be thought of as being
constrained by circumstances, but he cannot, after the reforms of Solon (p. 132), become the slave of