Feminism in Greek Literature from Homer to Aristotle

‘If any one,’ the king says, ‘has spoken ill of women in the past, or is now in the act of speaking or will some day speak, I will cut all his words short—listen—Neither sea nor...

Generally speaking, old men in Euripides are impotent: when they are allowed to act, their energies—Tyndareus for example, and the old servant in the Ion—are mischievous. In one...

You crafty one—you know it’s true; who of the gods, pray, has been plotting with you again? You know that is what you like, to get away from me and to make up your mind without...

All this is pure misogyny; but it is interesting to notice the especial faults which our poet imputes to womankind. They are chiefly the two vices which a surly master will alwa...

It is commonly assumed—and even Verrall tacitly allows this to go unchallenged—that Alcestis ‘is in love with’ Admetus, and Admetus ‘is in love with’ Alcestis. The affection whi...

Thus Socrates draws benefit even from a shrewish wife. His ideas of a happy marriage, and the best means of securing that happiness, are set out for us by Xenophon in the _Œcono...

There is a question sometimes put to scholars, a doubt often latent in scholars’ minds—How was it that Greek civilisation, with all its high ideals and achievements, fell so eas...

The Women in Assembly, _Ecclesiazusæ_, is much less vigorous. Written twenty years later than the _Lysistrata_, it shows plain signs of old age and failing powers. Euripides and...

The characters in the play are nearly all women, the fifty daughters of Danaus, accompanied by their old father, who have fled from Egypt to Greece in order to escape from the v...

This went on for a long time and I never suspected anything. Such an arrant simpleton was I that I thought _my_ wife the most virtuous woman in Athens. Well, gentlemen, time pas...

‘You know,’ so says Eumolpus, ‘the result of a good meal: the soldier was soon as successful in overcoming the matron’s resolute virtue as he had been in overcoming her resolute...

Then comes the proper management of infants, and Plato is very convinced of the importance of constant motion for the young child, who in a Greek household was often closely ban...

Aristotle here seems to be following not any ideal system, but the actual practice of his time, a practice which Euripides (fr. 319) had already condemned. The gap in age betwee...