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 Delphi ⁵ we propound the will of Apollo, and at the oracle of Zeus at Dodona ⁶ 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 Truth⁶⁷ (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 Clazomenae ⁷⁰ in Ionia and Leucippus⁷¹ of Miletus ⁷² 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 Miletus ⁷⁶, 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 Histories⁷⁸ 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 Cos ⁸⁰, 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.

Thomas R. Martin An Overview of Classical Greek History from Mycenae to Alexander 11

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