Poseidon, Hera, Athena, Aphrodite, Zeus; these are all gods and goddesses from Hellenic (Ancient Greek) mythology who have been worshipped and prayed to by the people of Hellas for millennia, although not today, but the gods used to be the centre of life in Hellas. The Hellenes would pray to, worship, sacrifice animals to, give up wine and food to and revere the gods due to their power and authority over them. Hoplite: Torch of Prometheus, by Michael Pritsos, takes place in the eighteenth year of the Peloponnesian War (413 BC) in Hellas. The main character, Maxites, is the adopted son of king Diocrates of a fictional polis named Devanum. Through hardships, near death experiences, nightmares and visions, conversations with the gods and the loss of nearly everyone he loves, Maxites learns to lead, follow orders, suffer losses and survive in the harshest conditions. The dominant Hellenistic culture as depicted in this novel negatively impacted and influenced those living in Hellas at that time. This Ancient culture has oppressed the Hellenes specifically through gender roles, family and the community. By oppressing these people, the Hellenistic culture did not give these people the Human Rights that they deserved.
To begin, the first way Hellenes were negatively influenced by their culture was through gender roles, these gender roles also took away from the rights of the Hellenes. When Maxites leaves Devanum to meet his soon-to-be wife, he enters her polis named Sunium and helps his own men from Devanum build a wall of protection around Sunium to keep those in Sunium safe from the wrath of the barbaric Spartans. While he and his men worked, Adara (his future wife) and some other women from Sunium fed them and gave them water. In a ...
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The studied passage indicates a clear division of classes: the free men, those excluded from political rights, the serfs and the slaves. The question of ‘serfdom’ in ancient Greece remains a disputable concept among scholars, and there is no wide consensus that serfs and slaves were clear-cut categories in Gortyn – but it quite probable that the terms were used to distinguish the ‘home-grown’ servile population from the foreign chattel-slaves. Not surprisingly, the text confirms that slaves had fewer rights than free men, but also indicates that lower-status people were granted protection under the law against the most severe abuses – in sharp contrast with slavery practices in Athens for instance. These legal provisions might be explained by the fact that the servile population was rather ‘home-grown’ than from foreign origin – and it can be argued that the development of chattel-slavery involved a progressive diminution of the rights of those who became slaves. In any case, this is a strong indication that slavery practices differ from one city-state to another, meaning that conclusions derived from the Gortyn code should not be too quickly
Recently in my class, we have been discussing different civilizations and how women were treated during that time. While reading the books, I was able to read things and relate them to notes that I had recently taken. Something in particular that I found that correlated was in chapter four of the book. This chapter talked about women’s role in Athens, which was motherhood. We had just talked about this in class, and how men were able to divorce women with no public humiliation, if the wife was not able to conceive a
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She places in people the desire to have sexual relations and causes fear in men of the power of seduction by women. Her marriage to her husband was ignored as she had affairs with immortal and mortal men. Her infidelity in her marriage places her on the side with Greek men, rather than Greek women because only Greek men were able to cheat on their wives; not the other way around. In conclusion, the three important rules discussed in this paper that Greek women were required to obey, can be seen in the myths of the goddesses Hera, Athena, and Aphrodite. Whether or not the Greek goddesses obeyed or did not obey these rules, their importance to the Greek culture is ever strong.
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The account of Roman women is a fascinating facet of the greater saga of the Roman Empire itself. During the Roman Empire, the economy, politics and civilization as a whole, was dominated almost entirely by men. As a result, a number of expectations were placed on women, detailing how they should look, behave and with whom they should associate. These expectations were reinforced and affected by both the social and political fixtures of the Roman Empire. Although women made a number of important social and legal advances in Ancient Rome, the development of the Empire proved to be detrimental to the emancipation of women as the pre-existing social expectations were altered in order to impose a more conservative moral order. These antecedent expectations were crafted from a number of ideals concerning female intellect, sexuality and influence, that existed in society prior to the development of the Roman Empire.
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One of the best summarizes of Greeks’ gods attitude toward human is the claim of Aphrodite in Euripides’ Hippolytus that she will treat well the people who revere her power, but will “trip up” those who are proud towards her, and this pri...