Show notes
We sat down recently with Associate Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy to talk all about Ancient Greek women, specifically in relation to Athens. Futo Kennedy teaches in Classical Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies at Denison University. Kennedy holds a BA in Classical Studies, an MA in Greek and Latin, and completed her PhD on the representation of Athena in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles at Ohio State University. Kennedy’s most recent monograph is entitled Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City. Special Episode – Ancient Greek Women with Rebecca Futo Kennedy In this conversation we explore the terminology and semantic fields of meaning connected with women in Ancient Greece including some of the persistent misconceptions and assumptions that come along with language. For example, the word hetaira is quite well-known, but what did the ancient Greeks really mean when they used the term? How did women fit into the social structures and hierarchies of the ancient Greek city of Athens? What were women’s lives like and what does the remaining evidence suggest about how they lived and the meaning they saw in their own experiences? We also delve into the complexities attendant upon understanding metics – foreigners in Athens and what this category meant when you were also a woman. And the conversation rounds out with a consideration of poverty in ancient Athens and the challenges in studying this subject. Some Sources A number of sources and scholars are mentioned in this episode. Here’s a few that come up: Jean-Leon Gerome Greek Interior 1848 Brown, Peter 1989. The World of Late Antiquity: AD 150-750 Cecchet, Lucia 2015. Poverty in Athenian Public Discourse: From the Eve of the Peloponnesian War to the Rise of Macedonia Meyer, Elizabeth A. 2010. Metics and the Athenian Phialai-inscriptions: A Study in Athenian Epigraphy and Law Osborne, Robin 1997. ‘Law, the Democratic Citizen and the Representation of Women in Classical Athens’ Past and Present 155, pp 3-33 Pomeroy, Sarah B. 1995. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity – pretty readable, we recommend it if you’re looking for a way to dip further into this subject. Taylor, Claire 2017. Poverty, Wealth, and Well-Being: Experiencing Penia in Democratic Athens Woman playing kottabos. Painting attributed to the Bryn Mawr Painter, c. 480 BCE Sound Credits Thanks to the thrilling Bettina Joy de Guzman for our theme music. Transcript We’re playing around with auto-generated transcripts. This one was generated by Otter AI. Dr Rad 0:16Welcome to the Partial Historians, Dr G 0:20we explore all the details of ancient Rome. Dr Rad 0:23Everything from the political scandals, the love of ours, that battles waged, and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr. Rad. Dr G 0:34And I’m Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Roman Sword by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories. Dr Rad 0:43Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city. Dr G 0:57Thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Rad and I are super thrilled to welcome Associate Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy to the show. Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy teaches in Classical Studies, women and gender studies and environmental studies at Denison University. Kennedy holds a BA in Classical Studies, and MA in Greek and Latin and completed her PhD on the representation of Athena in the trailer tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles at Ohio State University. Kennedy’s most recent monograph is entitled immigrant women in Athens, gender, ethnicity, and citizenship in the classical city. And it’s the subject of Athenian women and non Athenian women, that will be the subject of the conversation that we have today. So thank you so much for joining us, Rebecca. Professor Futo Kennedy 1:52Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate the the logistics of scheduling with such vast timezone differences. Yeah, I was looking at it today, it’s like a 14 hour time difference. So it’s somewhat of a miracle that we mathematically were able to work it out at all, to be honest. I know, I know, when we should have scheduled – when I was in Greece. Dr G 2:18To get started on this subject of Athenian women, and also non Athenian women, I want to talk to you about language as a first step, because it’s a really important window on to how we understand society. And this is true as much today as it was in ancient Greece, words carry certain connotations, and they start to reveal certain values to us and sense of community start to emerge from that usage as well. So as a first step, I wanted to ask you about what are some of the terms that are used for women in ancient Greece? How are women socially coded? Professor Futo Kennedy 2:56Yeah, it’s actually a really interesting thing. One of the things I discovered back when I was a graduate student, many, many years ago, is that there is no word for woman default, you have the word octopus, which is the word for either man or human. And you can throw a feminine article in front of it, but it’s actually very rarely done. We see it in medical texts, when you’re really just talking about a body, right? Or the female. Like there’s a word for female, but that works for humans and Non Humans, like. So the fact that you don’t really have a general word, to just say woman is, is, of course, a quite interesting thing. So what you actually have are a series of words that basically code them by marital status or relationship to children. So the word parthenos, for example, which we often translate as virgin actually doesn’t mean virgin. It’s an unmarried girl who hasn’t had a child yet. But you can’t actually the problem is you have to think about what the word means versus how you translate it. And there’s always a gap between there because for translations, we always look for it. They all sort of pity, like one word or a short phrase. And this inevitably warps what the word actually means in context, right? So parthenos is for your sort of younger set. These are the girls who would wear their hair down and wear sleeveless tunics, and often short tuna, but it’s really for unmarried girls. And one of the things that, that some scholars have talked about is that you don’t switch over to being a gyne, which is the word that we is they often translated as woman, but it really means life is it’s childbirth, that actually does the transition, not marriage versus not married. Once you once you have a child, that’s your sort of coming of age, and that usually would have occurred in Athens, which is different from other cities sometime around 14 or 15 or 16. That’s sort of the zone for marriage for girls. We would come So there’s that child marriage now. But this is just, it’s just this it was basically, okay, they have had puberty and now it’s like a little bit out. So you’re a parthenos, you know, 13 to 14 year old. And then by the time she sort of gets married and has her first child, then she would switch to being gyne. And then you have widows, which is pretty easy to you have a word for old women, which isn’t necessarily have any, that’s one of the ones that’s really good to grouse. It doesn’t actually have much to do with marriage status or not marriage status, it’s just old. Right, just old people. When you see it in context, it’s often used of formerly enslaved women. So you’ll see it in like the Odyssey of the old nurse of Odysseus, or in tragedy of these older former nannies for more wet nurses, characters, and then you have a series of words that are for people who are outside of the marriage track. And those can be super confusing. So one of them is the word Paula kiss or Paula Kay. There’s actually two spelling of the word. And that word is often translated as concubine. And the reason why it is translated that way is because our dictionaries are made with 19th century. Right? Dr Rad 6:23Right, yeah. And there’s Victorians. Yeah, so Professor Futo Kennedy 6:26they refer to them, because it appears in Herodotus in the context of in one particular context of the Persian harem. And so it gets coded as concubine. But then you see it in lots of different Greek contexts and Roman Greek contexts. So we have some Roman era inscriptions, in which the word appears, that are actually probably temple attendance. Because it’s a it’s a generational inscription at a temple, saying, you know, thanking the Goddess. And definitely Boudin has argued, based on the context for this, that these can’t have been generations of concubines, in the same family or us, sometimes scholars will just say, oh, it just means prostitute. Like everything is code for prostitute if it’s not wife. And so and so, it seems to actually be an attendant or a companion to the Goddess, right, as you will. And then you see it in Athenian context, where you’ll see it in tragedy to refer to and drama key. And so this idea that she’s the concubine of Achilles, son, me autonomous in the play. But and then you see is founded on a tombstone, which is super rare. And I think what it has to be that because there’s only a couple of words that go, if you’re missing letters, we’re missing some major. So apparently, when a tomb was first study, published in the 1920s, there were more letters there. But it’s in the Piraeus museum. And who knows, you know, during World War Two, they hid all the objects and tried to like hide all the different strap all the objects down when the Nazis were marching. And so I’m sure damage occurred to some of the objects but there’s a big hole where there used to be a letter. So I’m pretty sure it says politicus, because the only other option is really pull Lacus, which just means often and you wouldn’t put that on your tombstone, to list your status in relationship to a man I am often have a man talking to work. So translation pavlakis, here and also into other contexts in a CDN. Court speeches, suggests that the term also means a contracted relationship. So a not a marriage, like relationships for people who can’t actually contract a marriage. Some scholars have argued that it’s a powerless relationship. But most of the ones that I found are of non citizen women in a relationship, but there was a law in Athens. That goes back apparently to Solon, where this particular type of woman, it was a legally binding contract, and children were considered legitimate. Even if they weren’t citizens, they were still legitimate children. So arguments have been made that these were enslaved women, typically, but they wouldn’t have been able to have legitimate children, with a with their owner with their own flavour, if it was such. So I think there’s that word has like three different meanings. But everybody conflates it to concubine, thanks to our dictionaries. And then of course, probably the most well known and most contentious one is hiera, which everybody translates as core design, which is not necessarily, again, 19th century dictionary. You know, often I asked my students like, Do you know what a concubine is? Do you know two quarters of this? And they’re like, no idea. Dr G 9:45Yeah, like, what’s the fine grain of nuance there for the 19th century that were missing? Professor Futo Kennedy 9:49Yeah, right. And in the shade, it seems to be between those two words in the 19th century is one is a Turkish woman in the Ottoman Empire as foreign and one Is your your sort of grind horizontally your demi-monde girlfriend or something? But that’s the 19th century? Not, you know? Dr G 10:11Yeah. How do we get that into ancient Athens? Really? Dr Rad 10:15Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about how the definition of hetaira has changed over time. Professor Futo Kennedy 10:23Yeah, it’s a funny one too, because the got coded in the 19th century by our lexicon writers, you know, Liddell and Scott and Jones as courtesans. But in like 1929, Gong wrote an article that was like, there was no like, trained finishing school for like, fine courtesans, ends and assets, like no such thing like, you know, so even in the 1920s, people were like, this is ridiculous. But it got really picked up in the 1980s by feminist scholars in the field, as part of a movement to sort of bring for scholarship of non elite women. And so this whole industry basically developed around studying prostitution in the ancient world. Part of this is part of the modern movement to de stigmatise sex work. But what they ended up doing was taking all these women who are called hetaira, in any context, even being called this thing by people who are attacking them in court, right, and treating it as a status category. First off, and then treating a cortisone as an independent, educated woman, as if they were sort of looking for, you know, someone like these 19th century women, who often were able to live outside of marriages and, and held salons and things you know, in Paris, and in London, I often think of a good example is Elizabeth Armitage, who ended up marrying a former prime minister and we had so many legacies left to her by her former partners that she was able to buy her own house in the countryside and sort of lived out her life, happily married to the man of her dreams, to an aristocrat, you know, etc. So they sort of imagined this grand courtesan, educated, liberated, and they use a spacia as the sort of model for this. Basically, misunderstanding, Athenian law. And the leading Plutarch, who 700 years after she had lived, basically said that she held a she random harem in Paris Leazes house after telling us the territories was so worried about public opinion that he wouldn’t even go to party and drink. Dr G 12:32So if it’s over here, this is fine. Professor Futo Kennedy 12:34Yeah. The harem like, she’s, she’s running, she’s running a brothel out of his living room. Dr Rad 12:40But you don’t have one of these, you gotta get Professor Futo Kennedy 12:42A girl’s gotta get educated. Right, so everybody became a hetaira. And then of course, we had this famous article in the 90s from Leslie Kirk, which is like inventing the hetaira, where she like makes this grand distinction between the courtesan and the hetaira. Oh, porne is another word for women, which she classified as the sort of streetwalker, sort of the really poor, lower class, sex worker versus the hetaira who was the high class. But, you know, you’ve looked at these dictionaries, and these words have like one word listed. The new Cambridge lexicon, actually has a really nice full definition of attire that takes into consideration the last like three decades of four decades of scholarship. So that’s one nice thing that they’ve done in that. But you see that like, The Word Appears in Sappho. And it refers to Artemis and Hera is like, hetairae. So clearly, they’re not courtesans. So it has to mean something else. So what are the things that you see that in earlier texts, a lot of contexts, it probably just means girlfriend, as in your friends who are girls on the equivalent of the word hetairos, which is your buddies that you hang out, listen to requests at parties, and we actually have this whole class of women in the sort of early fifth century, late sixth century and Athens who were like the wives and sisters and daughters of the wealthiest of the wealthy. People like Pisistratus’ daughter Coesyra, people like Elpinice, who was Miltiades, the general’s daughter and the sister of Kimon and she was married to the wealthiest man in Athens. They are not courtesans but they’re we you know, they’re clearly public figures. And we have inscriptions referring to them ostracism inscriptions, like they want their husbands or their brothers or their sons to be kicked out of the city. They’re like, take your mother with you. Take your sister with you. And so there’s all these rumours they have bad reputations like, openly gay supposed…
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