another citizen. In the eyes of Greek men, women pose the danger of a particularly interesting and
particularly insidious form of constraint.
Everyone is subject to the constraint of sexual desire. For a man to be affected by desire for a woman is,
of course, perfectly natural, but it has the effect – unwelcome to a free Greek male – of allowing another
person a measure of power over him. (The equally natural desire of a woman for a man was not so
problematic, as it did not diminish a woman’s status to be subject to the attractive power of a man.) In
order to assert their control in the face of this troublesome situation, Athenian men, and men in ancient
Greece generally, made sure that women’s opportunities for exercising constraint were limited. This was
particularly the case among the wealthier members of the class of citizens; the poor and the enslaved had
less need to be concerned with preserving their status. As we saw in chapter 8, the tasks expected of a
woman from a family of upper-class citizens kept her indoors much of the time, while her husband’s days
were spent largely outside, supervising agricultural work or participating in public life in the agora or the
assembly. That is not to say that women were strictly secluded, but their opportunities for free movement
outside the house were limited. Weddings and religious festivals, like the one that serves as the setting for
Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, provided occasions for female socialization, as did visits to
relatives, but there was little in a woman’s life to compare with the daily freedom of the adult male
citizen to go where he liked and see whom he wished to see.
“What claim do you have even to count as a man? You allowed yourself to be robbed of your wife
by a man from Phrygia, when you left her at home unattended and not properly secured, as though the
wife you had in your house was chaste, rather than the biggest slut of all. A Spartan girl couldn’t be
chaste even if she wanted to be. They dash out of the house, wearing skimpy dresses and with thighs
bare, to join the boys at the track and – what I find really intolerable – at the gym. Is there any reason
to be surprised, then, that you Spartans can’t train your wives to be chaste?” (Euripides,
Andromache 591–601, Peleus addressing Menelaus)There were, however, exceptions. The majority of the evidence that we have for women’s life, like the
majority of the evidence that we have for everyday life in general, comes from democratic Athens, a polis
that seems to have imposed constraints on its female inhabitants to a greater extent than many other Greek
cities. Spartan women, for example, were more visible than their Athenian counterparts, both in the sense
that they could appear in public more freely and in the sense that they could be seen participating in
athletic activities wearing outfits that exposed even their shoulders and ankles (figure 58), for which they
were occasionally condemned by (male) Athenian writers. Even in Athens not all women adhered, or
could adhere, to the pattern suggested in the previous paragraph, a pattern that reflects the situation of an
idealized, that is to say reasonably wealthy, woman of the citizen class. Many women must have been
forced by their economic condition to earn money themselves. For example, one of the fictional women in
Aristophanes’ comedy says that her husband was killed in the war, leaving her with five children to
support, which she did by selling myrtle wreaths in the market. (These wreaths were worn by participants
in religious rituals, and the woman complains that her business is wilting because Euripides’ tragedies
have had the effect of persuading the Athenians that the gods do not exist.) The only opportunity for a
woman to attain something approaching financial independence in Athens was by means of prostitution, a
profession that was promoted by the Athenian men’s habit of waiting until the age of 30 or so before
marrying. Yet this “independence” too was limited. As is the case today, prostitution was not generally a
profession entered into by choice, but rather because of the constraints of poverty or other unavoidable
circumstances. In any event, most prostitutes were either slaves or aliens, so that their status, even
disregarding their gender, consigned them to a subordinate position in the polis.