5. 800-400 BCE Founding Myths and Women’s Place 

Ancient Rome and Greece established gender norms that would last millennia in the western world. These norms diminished women's rights and subjugated them to the domestic sphere. And yet, there was nuance and differences across the early western world. Forewarning, this section may be triggering for some related to discussion of sexual assault and rape.

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​The ancient world saw the rise of professional historians and thus more is known about the lives, stories, and experiences of people who lived then even women. However, almost everything we know about them was recorded by men. While these ancient city states and budding empires are known for pretty amazing things like democracy, enduring philosophies, and uniting massive empires, very little of this “progress” was designed by or for women and often these ideologies laid the groundwork for millennia of oppression for women every settled place in the world.

Warning, not all women’s experience in the ancient past were great, so this may be triggering for some related to discussion of sexual assault and rape.

Ancient Greece: 
Ancient Greece is one of the few places in them ancient world where we are able to learn about the experiences of women, from women writers themselves. Much of what women wrote about was love in the form of poetry, and they were pretty good at it. In the 5th century BCE, Korinna of Boeotia beat Theban poet Pindar in a competition five times.

For the Greeks, love did not always exist in marriage. Sappho of the Greek island Lesbos, is perhaps the most famous poet of ancient Greece. Only one of her poems survives in complete form, while quotes and other fragmants from her are referenced in other surviving literature. Sappho is known for her passionate poetry about her romantic love for another woman. She writes: “I would remind you… of all the loveliness that we have shared together… you wove around yourself by my side.”

But sex was another matter. Attitudes on sexual relations varied according to class and gender. Women’s role was to produce legitimate children, so therefore extramarital relations with other men were suspect. Men however could have concubines, hire prostitutes, or even well- educated women, called hetaira, not just for sex, but their skills in dance, music, and conversation. Biology required that they give birth, an act that took the lives of countless women. To be married in most of world history was to triple your chances of premature death. The perpetual double standards of male and female sexuality cost countless women their lives. Women found to be unchaste were murdered by their own families in every region of the world.  These so-called “honor killings,” which should really be called “misogyny killings,” remained legal by law in present memory and are still law in some parts of the world. A prehistoric grave in Britain found the bodies of two women and older women who have been buried naked and alive, and a younger woman who had been brutally raped, her assailant using a spear through the knee to pin her down, was later killed by her own family for her loss of virginity to a rapist. 

Because so much of a woman’s life revolved around her uterus, it’s no wonder medical writing of this time focused a lot on that. Hippocrates is known today for the Hippocratic oath that doctors take to do no harm. He was an ancient Greek physician whose ideas were written down by other male physicians years later. The compilation of medical works attributed to Hippocrates, known as The Hippocratic Corpus included treatises like Diseases of Women, Nature of Women, and Diseases of Young Girls looked for natural causes rather than godly retribution for disease and is the work from which almost all western medical thinking is derived even today. Keep in mind this was written before autopsies were done so they knew very little about internal organs. 

Hippocrates believed women's bodies were different and therefore their illnesses needed to be dealt with differently logically. He remarked that a lot of women died because physicians treated them like men. But before you think he's championing women's rights, he definitely was not. Pretty much every illness that afflicted women somehow came back to a woman's uterus. Hippocratic physicians wrote extensively about female puberty, menstruation, conception, pregnancy, and menopause. And pretty regularly, the cure it was for them to have more sex with men. They wrote, "I assert that a woman who has not borne children becomes ill from her menses more seriously and sooner than one who has borne children." He dangerously believed that epileptic fits, visions, loss of breath, pain, and paralysis we're all symptoms of the womb not getting enough sex.  How did the womb impact so many different body parts? They hypothesized that it wandered around a woman's body bumping into different organs as it went. Herbal remedies were used to send the uterus back to its rightful place. One position went so far as to describe the wandering womb as "An animal within an animal."

With such hostile views of the female body, it's no wonder that women physicians and midwives took things into their own hands. Agnodice, for example, disguised herself as a man to study medicine and became a skilled gynecologist. Rival doctors hoped to supersede her by claiming she was seducing her patients, forcing her to reveal her sex to save her life. She was charged with practicing medicine as a female. The practice of cross-dressing for personal or professional pursuits continued until women were allowed to pursue nontraditional occupations. 

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Through men’s writing, we gain most insights on Greek views of women. Ancient male authors demonstrated their fears about and desires for women into fantastic and mythical tales about monstrous females. One of the most famous pieces of Greek Literature, Homer’s The Odyssey is full of these women. At one point, Odysseus must choose between fighting a six-headed, twelve-legged beast-woman or a female sea monster. One historian said, female monsters represent “the bedtime stories patriarchy tells itself,” which was going strong in Ancient Greece. In almost all these tales, the woman had somehow rejected her proper state of nurturing caregiver and met her end at the hands of a heroic male. The Odyssey states women’s role clearly, “Go inside the house, and attend to your work, the loom and distaff, and bid your handmaidens attend to their work also. Talking is men’s business.” But the city states of Greece were different from one another, and literature does not always reflect the realities of life in the past. It can be hard to view Odysseus as a hero when he ordered women to be mutilated and hanged.

Greek mythology, however, did not shy away from the image of a strong, warrior woman. In fact, many of their histories, epics, and folklore describe an entire race of warrior women known as the Amazons, who were supposed to be the daughters of the god of war, Ares, and also denied their role as nurturing mothers. Their origins were unknown, described as existing at the far-reaches of known society (best described as being near the Black Sea), in a community of only women. Men were allowed into their society only for breeding purposes, though some myths claim Ares was the father of them all. They are described as wearing hoplite armor, using a bow or spear, often on horseback, and being tall and muscular.

These warrior women are also said to have stood toe-to-toe with the greatest of Greek warriors according to the mythology of the time. Hercules was challenged to the impossible task of stealing Queen Hippolyte’s girdle. He would ultimately be successful, but according to some legends, it required a full army to overtake the Amazons. Hercules is also depicted on pottery fighting the Amazon Andromeda. Future ruler of Athens, Theseus, fell in love with Amazon Antiope and abducted her, only to lose her in the ensuing battle as the Amazons fought to bring her home. Even the ultimate Greek warrior, Achilles, took on the Amazons. Toward the end of the Trojan War, the Trojans were calling in every favor they had in hopes of holding off the Greek alliance. The Amazons arrived from those far reaches of society and their best warrior, Penthesilea was sent to duel with Achilles, who had already killed countless Trojan warriors and heroes. There are contradicting versions of the story from there. In one version, Achilles slays her as he did the best men Troy had to offer. In another, he slays her, but falls in love with her as his one true equal just before she dies. In yet another, she kills him, only for the gods to resurrect him and have him defeat her.

Herodotus claims that the Amazons eventually combined with another traditional warrior people, the Scythians, and settled in southern Russia, becoming the Sarmaitans. This warrior culture was known for their ferocity, and was also speculated to use women as warriors. 

However, proof that the Amazons ever existed is speculative at best. Yet, that doesn’t really diminish what they can tell us about Greek society’s view of women. Amazons were used by the great to symbolize the horrors of what happens when women abandon their traditional mothering roles. If these women are entirely fictional, they were still purposefully created by the Greeks. The Greeks, who were enamored with perfection in every way, possibly created this society of powerful, self-sufficient women who could tussle with the strongest men Greece had to offer. The woman who could challenge Hercules. The woman who could best Achilles. 

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Classicist historian Mary Beard explained that in the ancient tradition, female subordination was an important part of being a man and was deeply ingrained in the culture in accounts of the time both in the east and west. She did a gendered analysis of Homer’s The Odyssey using Penelope as an example. In the story, she said, “as Homer has it, an integral part of growing up, as a man, is learning to control the public utterance and to silence the female of the species.” Beard went on to explain that entire works were dedicated to the absurdity and inferiority of female power. Examining the stories about the mythical Amazon women, Beard concluded that, “The underlying point was that it was the duty of man to save civilisation from the rule of women.”  She elegantly showed that oratory and power in the west have always seemed to be a male sphere of influence. 

In the real world however, women’s lives were far more restricted. Athens, for example, is viewed as a pillar of democracy and freedom, but Athenian women were basically slaves to the men around them and had no voice in business or politics so democracy for free men. Upper class women were pushed into the domestic sphere, not allowed to speak or even be seen in public, lived inside of their homes preparing meals and tending to the house unless supervised by a man. Education was rare and only available to wealthy women. They didn’t have property rights or rights as widows. The only events that women were allowed to attend were ones of religious nature. Women were punished severely for adultery and did not have any sexual freedom outside of marriage. Even without any freedoms, they were allowed to be citizens of Athens but what is citizenship without freedom?

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Sparta was a world apart. Spartan women participated freely in almost every aspect of their city-state’s social life. Women were trained as athletes because Spartans believed women needed to be physically healthy to survive birth. They were seen outside the home, educated within the home the same as boys, although the boys would go on to private school. Through liaisons with men other than their husbands, Spartan women could also acquire control of more than one home and surrounding lands, and many became wealthy landowners. The purpose of sex within marriage was to create strong, healthy children, but women were allowed to take male lovers to accomplish this same end. Same-sex relationships among men and women were for pleasure and personal fulfilment. These relationships were regarded as natural as long as both parties were of a certain age and had consented. There were a significant number of widows in Sparta who had lost husbands and sons in the wars but never had to worry about survival because they owned the land and knew how to make it profitable.  However, we must not forget that Spartan society could only exist because they practiced slavery and were exceedingly brutal in order to maintain order.

Although some Athenian women are mentioned as merchants, potters, or pursuing other careers, they were routinely secluded from men (possibly even in the home) and had no legal recourse in the courts, limited economic power, and no political voice. 

For the Greeks, women’s lesser position and thus their lack of support for women’s education, was justified by the gods.  Hesiod, a Greek thinker, wrote, “Zeus, who thunders on high, made women to be an evil to mortal men, with the nature to do evil.”  Another male thinker, Semonides, wrote, “the worst plague Zeus ever made— women.”  Famous mathematician Pythagoras wrote, “there’s a good principle in which created order, light, and man, and an evil principle which created chaos, darkness, and woman.“  Pythagoras of course was educated by Artistoclea, a female scholar, and possibly married to Theano, another female scholar and mathematician, who ran his school after he died. Although we know she wrote on mathematics and philosophy, two anecdotes about her survive. First, someone once commented that she had a beautiful elbow– random. She responded, “Yes, but not a public one!” Oh, those all-too scandalously enticing public elbows! Someone else apparently asked her when a woman’s purity returned after sex and she supposedly answered, “With your husband, instantly, with somebody else, never.” Pythagoras’ daughter Dano would champion women’s education.  

Socrates, who was educated by Diotma, another female scholar, is quoted as saying, “all the pursuits of men are the pursuits of women also, but in all of them a woman is inferior to a man.” Thanks Socrates! Plato’s teacher was Aspasia, another female scholar, but yet he placed women between man and beast.  Aristotle wrote that women were, “mutilated males.”  Menander stated, “he who teaches a woman letters feeds more poison to the frightful asp.”  Perhaps  his disdain for women was grounded in fear of their power.

These beliefs were essentially universal among Greek men and society. Women were regarded as inherently vicious, irrational, and untrustworthy, investment in their education was useless, counterproductive, and potentially dangerous. The flagrant disrespect and blindness to the hypocrisy that one could be educated by a woman and doubt her intellect is unbelievable and shows how pervasive misogyny was in Greek society. Women in this climate faced reprehensible misogyny, yet some persisted in their efforts to be educated and find fulfillment beyond the domestic sphere. 

But one has to imagine that the lives of Greek women were a bit better than in other places. Women’s subjugation was so terrible that in many places they dominated the ranks of the enslaved. A horrified Greek historian wrote on his travels to Egypt, “they were continually without being allowed any rest by night or day. They have not a rag to cover their nakedness, and neither their weakness of age nor women’s infirmities or any plea to excuse them, but they are driven by blows until they drop dead.”

Romulus and Remus: Around the same time, Rome was growing. There are several stories of Rome’s founding, but perhaps the most popular is the story of Romulus and Remus. This is perhaps one of the most bizarre historical legends of any city's founding. Firstly, the city has two male founders, brothers. Secondly, the brothers were born to a virgin priestess by the name of Rhea Silvia. But Sylvia becomes pregnant. According to the Roman writer Livy, she was raped by the god Mars when his disembodied phallus came out of the fire she was tending. Ouch!  She gave birth to twin brothers who were thrown into the nearby river to drown, but they survived and were nursed back to health by a conveniently lactating shewolf. Interestingly, the Roman word for wolf was also a colloquial term for prostitute, and so it’s entirely possible that despite what the myth says the boys were nursed to health by a very real lower class woman. A shepherd finds the boys and it is entirely possible that his wife was the supposed prostitute. The boys are competitive and when they grow up, they fight over what parts of the hills that surround Rome belong to them. The details here are fuzzy, but what everybody agrees upon is that Romulus killed his brother and became the sole ruler of Romulus… I mean Rome. 

Many single men flocked to this new founded city: runaway slaves, convicted criminals, exiles, and refugees - mostly men. In order for civilizations to survive they need women, so Romulus resorted to abduction and rape (interestingly both have the same meaning in Latin). He invited the neighboring villages to have a festival and in the middle of it the men of Rome abducted the young women from the visiting families and carried them off as wives. Where did the dividing line fall between abduction and rape? Livy defends the behavior of the early male Romans as the origin of marriage not adultery, and that this was necessary for the future of the realm. While others used this story to demonstrate the belligerence of Rome. Romulus’s father was of course Mars, the god of war.
The parents of these young women did not find their abduction and rape innocent or flirtatious. Hostilities between the men were halted because women begged the men in their life to stop fighting. Even in such dire circumstances, the women chose the path of peace, though painful.

Romulus is the beginning of the Regal Period in Roman history. The Time of Kings, before there was a Senate and a republic. Interestingly the end of the Regal Period was also marked by the story of rape. A young group of drunken Romans were trying to find a way of passing the time and began a debate about whose wife was best. To settle the debate, Lucius Tarquinius Collatinus suggested they ride home and see whether they had “good” wives. All the wives were found partying in the absence of their husbands, except for Lucius’ wife Lucretia, who was doing exactly what she “should” have been doing. 

It was her purity, loyalty, and chastity that made her such a good wife– but that’s not the end of the story. After seeing such an amazing woman Sextus Tarquinius became obsessed with Lucretia and came back to her house days later and raped her. She was mortified and after telling her husband what happened, she killed herself– because as the Romans saw it, her chastity was more valuable than her life. 

Male Roman writers would discuss Lucretia for centuries. Some honored her commitment to chastity– the ideal woman. But others wondered was she really innocent? Maybe she asked for it and killed herself because she was guilty. Were the men right? Perhaps a pure wife was not ideal. These are the same things we hear discussed today about rape victims. 

The takeaway? Romans living after the initial period of Kings and during the time of the Republic would use this as evidence the Kings did not serve society, as Rome’s early period started and ended with rape. 

Conclusion: The experience of women in Greece and Rome was not unique. It was replicated around the world– just better documented here. Women, wherever they were, faced all the same challenges men did; war, famine, plague, and drought; but in addition they faced special challenges by being female. 

Learn more about women around the world in our next section 6 800-300 BCE Asian Philosophies and Women’s Place.

By the end of this era, so much remained in question. Why did these norms develop? Why would women submit to these norms? Why were they so universally accepted? Would women be able to circumvent these norms? Would means of women’s education and liberation become available, if not in the modern sense? ​

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Bibliography

Beard, Mary. SPQR : A History of Ancient Rome. Liverlight paperbacked. New York: Liverlight Publishing Corporation, 2016.

Beard, Mary. Women & Power: A Manifesto. Liveright Publishing Corporation: New York, NY, 2017.

Clabaugh, Gary K. “A History of Male Attitudes Toward Educating Women.” Educational Horizons. Vol. 64, No. 3, Spring 2010, 166. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ887227.pdf.

Cleghorn, Elinor. Unwell Women: Misdiagnosis and Myth in a Man-Made World. 2021. Dutton: New York: 2021.

Debakcsy, Dale. “Theano of Croton And The Pythagorean Women Of Ancient Greece.” Women You Should Know About. February 27, 2019. https://womenyoushouldknow.net/theano-of-croton-pythagorean/

​Strayer, R. and Nelson, E., Ways Of The World. 3rd ed. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Wells, Ollie. "Love, Sex, & Marriage in Ancient Greece." World History Encyclopedia. Last modified March 25, 2021. https://www.worldhistory.org/article/1713/love-sex--marriage-in-ancient-greece/.

Primary AUTHOR:

Kelsie Brook Eckert

Primary Reviewer:

Dr. Kristin Heineman

Consulting Team

Editors

Kelsie Brook Eckert, Project Director
Coordinator of Social Studies Education at Plymouth State University

Dr. Nancy Locklin-Sofer, Consultant
Professor of History at Maryville University. 

Chloe Gardner, Consultant
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University

Dr. Whitney Howarth, Consultant
Former Professor of History at Plymouth State University

Jacqui Nelson, Consultant
Teaching Lecturer of Military History at Plymouth State University

​Maria Concepcion Marquez Sandoval
PhD Candidate in History at Arizona University

Amy Flanders
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Ron Kaiser
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy
Chris Canfield
Humanities Teacher, Moultonborough Academy

Reviewers

Ancient:
Dr. Kristin Heineman
Professor of History at Colorado State University
Dr. Bonnie Rock-McCutcheon
Professor of History at Wilson College
Sarah Stone
PhD Candidate in Religious Studies at Edinburgh University
Medieval:
Dr. Katherine Koh
Professor of History at La Sierra University
Dr. Jonathan Couser
Professor of History at Plymouth State University
Dr. Shahla Haeri
Professor of History at Boston University 
Lauren Cole
PhD Candidate in History at Northwestern University
Modern:
Dr. Jack Gronau
Professor of History at Northeastern University