Continuity and Change in Athenian Social and Intellectual History
A complex interweaving of contintuity and change characterized the social and
intellectual history of Athens in the Golden Age. The lives of Athenian women during most
of the fifth century largely continued the patterns established in Athenian society in
earlier times. The loss of many husbands, fathers, and brothers in the prolonged struggle
of the
Peloponnesian War1 between Athens and Sparta (431-404 B.C.), however, forced many citizen women to
look for work outside the home for the first time. The traditional character of education
for wealthy young men also experienced a major change when professional teachers called
sophists2 began to offer new views on subjects as
diverse as oratory and physics in the second half of the century. The friendships that
developed between prominent, controversial sophists and political leaders such as
Pericles3 only heightened the concern that many people felt about the possibly deleterious
effects on society of these new intellectual trends.
Property, Social Freedom, and Athenian Women
Athenian
women4 exercised power and earned status both in private life and public, through
their roles in the family and religion respectively. Their absence from politics,
however, meant that their contributions to the city-state might well be overlooked by
men. One heroine in a fragmentary tragedy by Euripides,
Melanippe,
vigorously expresses this judgment in a famous speech denouncing men who denigrate
women: “Empty is the slanderous blame men place on women; it is no more than
the twanging of a bowstring without an arrow; women are better than men, and I will
prove it: women make agreements without having to have witnesses to guarantee their
honesty ... Women manage the household and preserve its valuable property. Without a
wife, no household is clean or happily prosperous. And in matters pertaining to the
gods—this is our most important contribution—we have the greatest
share. In the oracle at
Delphi5 we propound the will of Apollo, and at the
oracle of Zeus
at Dodona6 we reveal the will of Zeus to
any Greek who wishes to know it.” Euripides portrays his heroine
Medea7 as insisting that women who bear children are due respect at least commensurate
with that granted men who fight as hoplites: “People say that we women lead a
safe life at home, while men have to go to war. What fools they are! I would much rather
fight in the phalanx three times than give birth to a child only once.”
Women's Responsibilities and Property Rights
Athenian
women8 contributed to the public life of the polis by acting as priestesses and participating as
priestesses9 and participating as
worshippers in religious rites and festivals10. Their private responsibilities included, above all, bearing and raising
legitimate children, the future citizens of the city-state, and serving as managers of
the family's property in the home, including
household slaves11, and its supplies. These aspects of their private lives
obviously had bearing on the public life of the community as well, for it could not
continue without a constant supply of new citizens and management of the goods and
labor that helped sustain them. Women's property rights in classical Athens reflected
both the importance of the control of property by women as well as the predisposition
of Athenian society to promote the formation and preservation of households headed by
property-owning men. Under Athenian democracy, women could control property, even
land—the most valued possession in their society—through
inheritance and
dowry12,
although more legal restrictions were imposed on their ability to dispose of property
freely than on that of men.
Inheritance and Dowry
Athenian men and women were supposed to preserve their property as best they could
so that it could be handed down to their children. Parents who spent all of their
cash and disposed of their other property for their own personal pleasure without
due regard for the ultimate consequences for their offspring incurred social
disgrace. Daughters did not inherit a portion of their father's property if there
were any living sons, but demographic patterns meant that perhaps one household in
five had only daughters, to whom the father's property then fell. Women could also
inherit from other male relatives who had no male offspring. A woman's regular share
in her father's estate came to her in her dowry at marriage. A son whose father was
still alive at the time of the son's marriage similarly often received a share of
his inheritance at that time to allow him to set up a household. A bride's husband
had legal control over the property in his wife's
dowry13, and their respective holdings freqently
became commingled. In this sense husband and wife were co-owners of the household's
common property, which only
had to be alloted between its separate owners if
the marriage was dissolved14. The husband was legally
responsible for preserving the dowry and using it for the support and comfort of his
wife and her children. A man often had to put up valuable land of his own as
collateral to guarantee the safety of his wife's dowry. Upon her death, the dowry
became the inheritance of her children. The expectation that a woman would have a
dowry tended to encourage marriage within groups of similar wealth and status. As
with the rules governing women's rights to inheritances, customary dowry
arrangements supported the society's goal of enabling males to establish and
maintain households because daughters' dowries were usually smaller in value than
their brothers' inheritances and therefore kept the bulk of a father's property
attached to his sons.
Heiresses
Like the rules concerning inheritance and dowry,
Athenian law concerning
heiresses15 also supported the goal of providing resources to enable as many male
citizens as possible to form households. Under Athenian law, if a father died
leaving only a daughter to survive him, his property devolved upon her as his
heiress, but she did not own it in the modern sense of being able to dispose of it
as she pleased. Instead, the law (in the simplest case) required her father's
closest male relative —her official guardian after her father's
death—to marry her himself, with the aim of producing a son. The inherited
property then belonged to that son when he reached adulthood. This rule
theoretically applied regardless of whether the heiress was already married (without
any sons) or whether the male relative already had a wife. The heiress and the male
relative were both supposed to divorce their present spouses and marry each other,
although in practice the rule could be circumvented by legal subterfuge. This rule
about heiresses preserved the father's line and kept the property in his family,
prevented rich men from getting richer by engineering deals with wealthy heiresses'
guardians to marry them and therefore merge their estates, and, above all, prevented
property from piling up in the hands of unmarried women. At Sparta,
Aristotle
reported16, precisely this kind of agglomeration of wealth took place as women
inherited land or received it in their dowries without—to Aristotle's way
of thinking—adequate regulations promoting remarriage. He claimed that
women in this way had come to own forty percent of Spartan territory. The law at
Athens was more successful at regulating women's control over property in the
interests of forming households headed by property-owning men.
Women's Lives at Home and at Work
The character Medea's comment in Euripides' play17 named after her that
women18 were said to lead a safe life at
home reflected the expectation in Athenian society that women from the propertied
class would avoid frequent or close contact with men who were not members of their own
family or its circle of friends. Women of this socio-economic level were therefore
supposed to spend much of their time in their own home or the
home of women
friends19. There, women dressed and slept in
rooms set aside for them20, but these rooms usually opened onto a walled courtyard where the women could
walk in the open air, talk, supervise the
domestic chores of the family's
slaves21, and
interact with other
members of the household22 male and female. Here, in their territory as it were,
women would spin
wool23 for clothing while chatting with women friends who had come to visit,
play with their children24, and give their opinions on various matters to the men of the house as they
came and went. Poor women had little time for such activities because they, like their
husbands, sons, and brothers, had to leave their homes, often only a crowded rental
apartment, to find work. They often set up
small stalls25 to sell bread, vegetables, simple clothing, or trinkets.
Their husbands and sons sought jobs
as laborers in workshops or foundries or on
construction projects.26.
Restrictions on the Lives of Upper-Class Women
Upper-class women were supposed to observe
standards of decorum27 that restricted her freedom of movement in public life and her contact with
men outside her family. A woman rich enough to have servants in her home who answered
the door herself would be reproached as careless of her reputation. So, too, a proper
woman would go out of her home only for an appropriate reason. Fortunately, there were
many such occasions:
religious festivals28,
funerals29, childbirths
at the houses of relatives and friends30, and trips to workshops to buy shoes or other articles. Sometimes her husband
would escort her, but more often she was accompanied only by a servant, which left
more opportunity for independent action. Social protocol also dictated the way in
which men dealt with women. For example, custom demanded that men not speak the names
of women in public conversations and speeches in court unless practical necessity
demanded it or the women were not socially respectable, as in the case of prostitutes.
Presumably, many upper-class women valued their limited contact with men outside the
household as a badge of their superior social status. In a gender-segregated society
such as that of the wealthy at Athens, the primary opportunities for personal
relationships in a wealthy woman's life probably came in her contact with her children
and the other women with whom she spent most of her time.
Standards of Beauty
Since they stayed inside or in the shade so much31, women rich enough not to have to work maintained very pale
complexions. This pallor was much admired as a sign of a enviable life of leisure
and wealth, much as an even, all-over tan is valued today for the same reason. Women
regularly used powdered white lead as make-up to give themselves a suitably
pale look32. As
depictions of women on vase paintings33, richly decorated and colorful
clothing34,
headbands, coiffures, and jewelry35 constituted important aspects of a woman's beauty as well.
Paternity and Women's Social Standing
The social restrictions on women's freedom of movement served men's goal of avoiding
uncertainty about the
paternity of children36 by limiting oppportunities for adultery among wives and protecting the
virginity of daughters. Given the importance attached to citizenship as the defining
political structure of the city-state and of a man's personal freedom, it was
crucially important to be certain a boy truly was his father's son and not the
offspring of some other man, who could conceivably even be a foreigner or a slave.
Furthermore, the preference for keeping property in the father's line could be
maintained only if the boys who inherited a father's property were his legitimate
sons. In this patriarchal system, the value attached to citizenship for men and its
accompanying rights to property therefore led to restrictions on women's freedom of
movement in society. Women who did bear legitimate children, however, immediately
earned a higher social standing and greater freedom in the family, as explained, for
example, by an Athenian man in
this excerpt from his remarks before a
court37 in a case in which he had killed an adulterer whom he had caught with his
wife: “After my marriage, I initially refrained from bothering my wife very
much, but neither did I allow her too much independence. I kept an eye on her.... But
after she had a baby, I started to trust her more and put her in charge of all my
things, believing we now had the closest of relationships.”
The Value of Sons
Bearing male children brought special honor to a woman because sons meant security
for parents. They could appear in court in support of their parents in lawsuits and
protect them in the streets of the city, which had no regular police patrols. By
law,
sons were required to support their parents38 in their old age, a
necessity in a society with no state-sponsored system for the support of the elderly
like Social Security in the United States. So intense was the pressure to produce
sons that stories were common of barren women who smuggled in a baby born to a slave
in order to pass it off as their own. Such tales, whose truth is hard to gauge, were
only credible because husbands customarily were not present at childbirth.
Prostitutes and “Companions”
Athenian men, unlike women, had opportunities for heterosexual sex outside marriage
that carried no penalties. “Certainly you don't think men beget children out
of sexual desire?”,
wrote an Athenian man39. “The streets and the brothels are swarming with ways to take care
of that.” Besides sex with female slaves, who could not refuse their
masters, men could choose among various classes of
prostitutes40, depending on how much money they had to spend. A man could not
keep a prostitute in the same house as his wife without causing trouble, but otherwise
he incurred no disgrace by paying for sex with a woman.
The most expensive
female prostitutes the Greeks called
“companions”.41 Usually from another city-state than the one in which they
worked, “companions” supplemented their physical attractiveness
with the ability to sing and play musical instruments at mens' dinner parties (which
wives never attended). Many “companions” lived precarious lives
subject to exploitation or even violence at the hands of their male customers. The
most accomplished “companions,” however, could attract lovers from
the highest levels of society and become sufficiently rich to live in luxury on their
own. This independent existence strongly distinguished them from citizen women, as did
the freedom to control their own sexuality.
“Companions” and Freedom of Speech with Men
The cultivated ability of “companions” to converse with men in
public was as distinctive as their erotic skills. Like the geisha of Japan,
“companions” entertained men especially with their witty,
bantering conversation. Indeed, “companions,” with their
characteristic skill at clever taunts and verbal snubs, enjoyed a freedom of speech
in conversing with men that was denied proper women. Only very rich citizen women of
advanced years, such as
Elpinike the sister of Cimon,42 could
occasionally enjoy a similar freedom of expression.
She, for example, once
publicly rebuked Pericles for having boasted about the Athenian conquest of Samos
after its rebellion.43 When other Athenian women were praising Pericles for his success, Elpinike
sarcastically remarked, “This really is wonderful, Pericles, ... that you
have caused the loss of many good citizens, not in battle against Phoenicians or
Persians, like my brother Cimon, but in suppressing an allied city of fellow
Greeks.”
Education, the Sophists, and New Intellectual Developments
The norms of respectable behavior in ancient Athens for both women and men were
primarily taught not in school, but
by the family44 and in the
countless episodes of everyday life. Formal education in the modern sense indeed hardly
existed because schools subsidized by the state did not exist. Privately-paid
instructors45 or educated
educated family slaves46 taught children the rudiments of learning, if their parents could afford the
expense. Around the middle of the fifth century, however, a new kind of professional
teachers emerged. The
sophists47, as they are called, taught
controversial theories on many subjects ranging from public speaking to ethics to
cosmology. They
charged high fees48, enjoyed great celebrity, and
upset people who worried about the effects on society of the sophists' views.
Schools and Teachers
Classical Athens had no public schools or
teachers49
paid by the state. Only well-to-do families could afford to pay the fees charged by
private teachers, to whom they sent their sons to learn to read, to write, perhaps to
learn to sing or play a musical instrument, and to train for athletics and military
service. Physical fitness was considered so important for men, however, who could be
called on for military service from the age of eighteen until sixty, that the
city-state did provid open-air exercise facilities for daily workouts. These gymnasia
were also favorite places for political conversations and the exchange of news. Tutors
would be hired to teach basic skills to girls of well-to-do families because a woman
with the ability to read, write, and do simple arithmetic would be better prepared to
manage the household finances and supplies for the husband of property
she was
expected to marry and aid with daily estate management50.
Literacy and the Poor
Poorer girls and boys learned a trade and perhaps some rudiments of
literacy51 by helping their parents in their daily work, or, if they were fortunate, by
being apprenticed to skilled crafts producers. The level of literacy in Athenian
society outside the ranks of the prosperous was quite low by modern standards, with
only a small minority of the poor able to do much more than perhaps sign their names.
The inability to read presented few insurmountable difficulties for most people, who
could find someone to read aloud to them any written texts they needed to understand.
The predominance of oral rather than written communication meant that people were
accustomed to
absorbing information by ear52 (those who could read usually read out loud) and very fond of songs, speeches,
narrated stories, and lively conversation.
Mentorship in the Education of Males
Young men from prosperous families traditionally acquired the advanced skills
required for successful participation in the public life of Athenian democracy by
observing their fathers, uncles, and other older men as they participated in the
assembly, served as councilors or magistrates, and made speeches in court cases. The
most important skill to acquire was an effective style in public speaking and
persuasive argument.
In many cases, an older man would choose an adolescent boy
as his special favorite to educate.53 The boy would learn about public life by
spending
his time in the company of the older man and his adult friends54. During the day,
the boy would observe his mentor talking politics in
the agora,55, help him perform his duties in public office, and work out with him in a
gymnasium56. Their
evenings would be spent at a
symposium57, a drinking party for
men and “
companions58,” which could encompass a range of behavior from serious political
and philosophical discussion to riotous partying.
Homosexuality and Mentorship
The
mentor-protégé relationship59
relationship between an older and a younger man could include homosexual love as an
expression of the bond between the boy and the man, who would normally also be
married. Although homosexuality between women, as between men outside a
mentor-protégé relationship, was not socially acceptable, the
homosexuality between older mentors and younger protégés was
generally accepted as appropriate behavior so long as the older man did not exploit
his younger companion physically while neglecting his education in public affairs.
Athenian society therefore encompassed a wide range of bonds among men, ranging from
political and military activity, to training of mind and body, to sexual
practices.
The Sophists
In the second half of the fifth century B.C., a new kind of teacher became available
to young men who sought to polish their skills for politics. They were called
sophists60 (“wise men”),
a label that acquired a pejorative sense preserved in the English word
“sophistry,” because they were so clever at public speaking and
philosophic debates and were feared by traditionally-minded men whose political
opinions they threatened. The earliest sophists arose in parts of the Greek world
other than Athens, but from about 450 B.C. on they began to travel to Athens, which
was then at the height of its material prosperity, in search of pupils who could pay
the hefty
prices the sophists charged61 for their instruction. Wealthy
young men flocked to the dazzling demonstrations of these
itinerant
teachers62' ability to speak persuasively, an
ability that they claimed to be able to impart to students. The sophists were offering
just what every ambitious young man wanted to learn because the greatest single skill
that a man in democratic Athens could possess was to be able to persuade his fellow
male citizens in the debates of the assembly and the council or in lawsuits before
large juries. For those unwilling or unable to master the new rhetorical skills of
sophistry, the sophists for hefty fees would compose speeches to be delivered by the
purchaser as his own composition. The overwhelming importance of persuasive speech in
an oral culture like that of ancient Greece made the sophists frightening figures to
many, for the new teachers offered an escalation of the power of speech that seemed
potentially destabilizing to political and social traditions.
Protagoras
The most famous sophist was
Protagoras63, a
contemporary of
Pericles64 from
Abdera in northern Greece.65 Protagoras emigrated to Athens about 450 B.C. when he was about forty and
spent most of his career there. His oratorical ability and his upright character so
impressed the men of Athens that they soon chose him to devise a code of laws for a
new colony to be founded in Thurii in southern Italy in 444 B.C. Some of Protagoras'
ideas eventually aroused considerable controversy, such as his agnostic position
concerning the gods: “Whether the gods exist I cannot discover, nor what
their form is like, for there are many impediments to knowledge, [such as] the
obscurity of the subject and the brevity of human life.”
The Subjectivism of Protagoras
Equally controversial was Protagoras' view that there was no absolute standard of
truth, that there were two sides to every question. For example, if one person
feeling a breeze thinks it warm, while a different person judges the same wind to be
cool, there is no decision to be made concerning which judgment is correct; the wind
simply is warm to one and cool to the other. Protagoras summed up his subjectivism
(the belief that there is no absolute reality behind and independent of appearances)
in the
much-quoted opening of his work66 entitled
Truth
67 (most of which is now lost): “Man is the measure of all things, of
the things that are that they are, and of the things that are not that they are
not.” “Man” in this passage (anthropos in Greek, hence our word anthropology) seems to refer to the
individual human being (whether male or female), whom Protagoras makes the
sole judge of his or her own impressions.68
The Perceived Dangers of Relativism
Two related views taught by sophists aroused special controversy: the idea that
human institutions and values were only matters of convention, custom, or law
(nomos) and not products of nature (physis), and the idea that, since truth was relative,
speakers should be able to argue either side of a question with equal
persuasiveness69. Since the first idea implied that traditional human institutions were
arbitrary rather than grounded in immutable nature and the second made rhetoric into
an amoral skill, the combination of the two seemed very dangerous to a society so
devoted to the spoken word because it threatened the shared public values of the
polis with unpredictable changes. Protagoras
himself insisted that his doctrines were not hostile to democracy, especially
because he argued that every person had an innate capability for
“excellence” and that human survival depended on the rule of law
based on a sense of justice. Members of the community, he argued, should be
persuaded to obey the laws not because they were based on absolute truth, which did
not exist, but because it was expedient for people to live by them. A thief who
claimed, for instance, that in his opinion a law against stealing was not
appropriate, would have to be persuaded that the law forbidding theft was to his
advantage, both to protect his own property and to allow the community to function
in which he, like all human beings, had to live in order to survive.
Unsettling Cosmologies
Protagoras' relativistic approach to such fundamental issues as the moral basis of
the rule of law in society was not the only source of disquietude for many Athenian
men concerning the new intellectual developments. Philosophers such as
Anaxagoras of Clazomenae70 in
Ionia and
Leucippus71 of
Miletus72 propounded unsettling new theories about the nature of the cosmos in
response to the provocative physics of the Ionian thinkers of the sixth century B.C.
Anaxagoras' general theory postulating an abstract force he called
“
mind73” as the organizing principle of
the universe probably impressed most people as too obscure to worry about, but the
details of his thought seemed to offend those who held the assumptions of
traditional religion. For example, he argued that the sun was in truth nothing more
than a lump of flaming rock, not a divine entity.
Leucippus, whose doctrines
were made famous by his pupil Democritus74 of Abdera, invented an atomic theory of matter to explain
how change was possible and indeed constant. Everything, he argued, consisted of
tiny, invisible particles in eternal motion. Their random collisions caused them to
combine and recombine in an infinite variety of forms. This physical explanation of
the source of change, like Anaxagoras' analysis of the nature of the sun, seemed to
deny the validity of the entire superstructure of traditional religion, which
explained events as the outcome of divine forces.
Herodotus' New Kind of Historical Writing
Sophists were not the only thinkers to emerge with new ideas in the mid-fifth
century. In historical writing, for example,
Hecataeus75 of
Miletus76, born in the later sixth century B.C., had earlier opened the way to a broader
and more critical vision of the past. He wrote both an extensive guide book to
illustrate his map of the world as he knew it and a treatise criticizing mythological
traditions of the past. Most Greek historians who came after him concentrated on the
histories of their local areas and wrote in a spare, chronicle-like style that made
history into little more than a list of events and geographical facts.
Herodotus77 of
Halicarnassus (c. 485-425 B.C.), however, building on the foundations
laid by Hecataeus, made his
Histories
78 a ground-breaking work in its wide geographical scope, its critical approach
to historical evidence, and its lively narrative. To describe and explain the clash
between East and West represented by the wars between Persians and Greeks in the early
fifth century, Herodotus searched for the origins of the conflict both by delving deep
into the past and by examining the cultural traditions of all the peoples involved.
His interest in ethnography recognized the importance and the delight of studying the
cultures of others as a component of historical investigation.
Hippocrates' New Direction in Medicine
The emergence of new ideas in Greek medicine in this period is associated with the
name of
Hippocrates79 of
Cos80, a younger contemporary of Herodotus. Details are sketchy about the life of
this most famous of all Greek doctors, but he certainly made great strides in putting
medical diagnosis and treatment on a scientific basis. Earlier medical practices had
depended on magic and ritual. Hippocrates taught that physicians should base their
knowledge on careful observation of patients and their response to remedies.
Empirically grounded clinical experience, he insisted, was the best guide to
treatments that would not do the sick more harm than good. His contribution to
medicine is remembered today in the oath bearing his name that all doctors swear at
the beginning of their professional careers.
Tension Between Intellectual and Political Forces in the 430s
The teachings of sophists like Protagoras and Anaxagoras made many Athenians nervous,
especially because
leading figures like Pericles flocked to hear
them.81 Many
people feared that the teachings of the sophists in particular and indeed of
intellectuals in general could offend the gods and therefore erode the divine favor
that they believed Athens to enjoy. Just like a murderer, a teacher spouting doctrines
offensive to the gods could bring pollution and therefore divine punishment on the
whole community. So deeply felt was this anxiety that
Pericles' friendship with
Protagoras, Anaxagoras, and other controversial intellectuals gave his rivals a
weapon82 to use against him when
political tensions came to a head in the 430s
B.C. as a result of the threat of war with Sparta.83 Pericles' opponents criticized him as sympathetic to dangerous new ideas as
well as autocratic in his leadership. The impact on ordinary people of the new
developments in history and medicine is hard to assess, but their misgivings about the
new trends in education and philosophy with which Pericles was associated definitely
heightened the political tension in Athens in the 430s B.C. These intellectual
developments had a wide-ranging effect because political, intellectual, and religious
life in ancient Athens was so intricately connected. The same person could feel like
talking about the city-state's foreign and domestic policies on one occasion, about
novel theories of the nature of the universe on another, and on every day about
whether the gods were angry or pleased with the community. By the late 430s B.C., the
Athenians had new reasons to worry about each of these topics.