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Women in ancient civilization
Social expectations of women ancient greek
Greek women roles
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Besides the physical differences, men and women have always been viewed differently according to society. In both the early preconceptions of women in early Greek myth, in particular, Pandora’s Box; and in the idea that women are not only demons, but more often the victims; reveals how women are perceived negatively as evil and dimwitted in both situations. Women are usually seen as wicked. From the beginning, it was sought that women were created as the evil to man. Hesoid, the Greek poet, details how Zeus created Pandora, the first women, with a shameless, deceitful mind and irresistible beauty out of spite against Prometheus. Therefore, women were distinguished as being liars and tricksters that cause harm to men. Additionally, “whoever
Conspicuously, Aristotle persists as not the only man that assesses females with such negativity, for various writers, and philosophers, such as Homer, Socrates, Plato, along with numerous other ancient writers, believed that women were the weaker, inferior sex, and essentially lacking. Concurrently, Socrates contends that being born a woman transpires as a divine punishment, since a woman exists as halfway between “a man and an animal.” Simonides, a writer, portrays women with features as different types of animals that symbolize the forces of chaos. This pompous view of women as only sex objects and baby-makers
The creation of woman in Greek myth was initially caused by Prometheus’ attempt to outwit Zeus, first by tricking the gods into choosing the less...
Yet, despite the fact that no two women in this epic are alike, each—through her vices or virtues—helps to delineate the role of the ideal woman. Below, we will show the importance of Circe, Calypso, Nausicaa, Clytaemestra, and Penelope in terms of the movement of the narrative and in defining social roles for the Ancient Greeks. Before we delve into the traits of individual characters, it is important to understand certain assumptions about women that prevailed in the Homeric Age. By modern standards, the Ancient Greeks would be considered a rabidly misogynistic culture. Indeed, the notoriously sour Boetian playwright Hesiod-- who wrote about fifty years before Homer-- proclaimed "Zeus who thunders on high made women to be evil to mortal men, with a nature to do evil (Theogony 600).
women were evil, existed because they were seen as a potential threat to the order of the
Homer's great epic, "The Odyssey" was written several thousands of years ago, a time in human history when men played the dominant role in society. The entire structure of civilization was organized and controlled by men; It was an accepted fact that women held an inferior position in society. Society was constructed as if women were around only to serve the men. The involvement of women in any circumstance was almost completely dominated by what the men allowed. The women were valued in society, only they were not given important roles or any decision making power. It is as if they held no power in the ancient Greek society. This is why Homer's Odyssey is very unique, Homer put women into roles that were previously unheard of for women to possess. Unlike in The Iliad, where women served merely as an object to men; female characters of Odyssey are distinctive because they possess personality, and have intricate relationships with the male characters of the Odyssey. By characterizing the women in "The Odyssey", a reader may come to some conclusions about the role of women in this epic. Along with the belief that women played a secondary role to men in society, the female characters displayed certain traits that could not be exhibited by the men. Athena demonstrated the most intelligence and valor out of all the characters in "The Odyssey." The male characters play the most significant roles in this epic, but without the support of the females in "The Odyssey", Odysseus would not have made it through his journey.
Since the beginning of time, women didn’t have as much power as a men. A great example of this is how women are portrayed in Greek and Irish mythology. Looking at the history of Greek mythology, what roles women play, and the differences between Greek and Irish mythology, it is easy to see the difference in how women are treated compared to men.
The title of this paper takes as its cue Blondell et al's Women on the Edge: Four Plays by Euripides, [1] which argues in its introduction that "[w]omen in tragedy often disrupt 'normal' life by their words and actions: they speak out boldly, tell lies, cause public unrest, violate custom, defy orders, even kill." (Blondell, Gamel, Rabinowitz, Sorkin and Zweig. 1999, x) The four plays selected by the editors - Alcestis, Medea, Helen and Iphigenia at Aulis offer "examples of women who support the status quo and women who oppose and disrupt it." (Blondell, Gamel, Rabinowitz, Sorkin and Zweig. 1999, x) Sometimes, however, it is enough that a woman merely be present for 'normal life' to be not only 'disrupted', but irrevocably altered. Further, a woman's transposition from one sphere to another, and her corresponding transition from one state to the next, may change the very nature of the cosmos itself. This article will discuss several shared characteristics in the myths of Pandora, Persephone and Helen as presented in some of our earliest ancient Greek literary sources. Specifically, I shall look at those dating from the 8th to 6th centuries BCE: Homer's Iliad and Odyssey; Hesiod's Theogony and Works and Days; the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite; and finally, the Greek epic fragments.
In the Greek society women were treated very differently than they are today. Women in ancient Greece were not allowed to own property, participate in politics, and they were under control of the man in their lives. The goddess Aphrodite did not adhere to these social norms and thus the reason the earthly women must comply with the societal structure that was set before them. Aphrodite did not have a father figure according to Hesiod, and therefore did not have a man in her life to tell her what to do. She was a serial adulteress and has many children with many men other than her husband. She was not the only goddess from the ancient Greek myths to cause doubt in the minds of men. Gaia and the Titan Rhea rise up against their husbands in order to protect their children. Pandora, another woman in the Greek myths, shows that all evil comes from woman. Aphrodite, Gaia, Rhea, and Pandora cause the ancient Greek men to be suspicious of women because of her mischievous and wild behavior.
“A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with a judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view” (Ibsen). This saying also applied to the times of the Odyssey, an epic constructed by the blind, eight century B.C.E. poet, Homer. As one of the few representatives of ancient Greek social order, the blind, Homer witnessed women as substandard to men, regardless of their actions; many of them existed as seductresses, prostitutes, or slaves. He engraved into his poem women’s roles; the roles of women, as mothers, wives, seductresses, and goddesses are exemplified in this epic, when shown in comparison to the men of that era.
The society in which classical myths took place, the Greco-Roman society was a very patriarchal one. By taking a careful gander at female characters in Greco-Roman mythology one can see that the roles women played differ greatly from the roles they play today. The light that is cast upon females in classical myths shows us the views that society had about women at the time. In classical mythology women almost always play a certain type of character, that is to say the usual type of role that was always traditionally played by women in the past, the role of the domestic housewife who is in need of a man’s protection, women in myth also tended to have some unpleasant character traits such as vanity, a tendency to be deceitful, and a volatile personality. If one compares the type of roles that ladies played in the myths with the ones they play in today’s society the differences become glaringly obvious whilst the similarities seem to dwindle down. Clearly, and certainly fortunately, society’s views on women today have greatly changed.
Walcot, P. "Greek Attitudes towards Women: The Mythological Evidence." Greece and Rome XXXI.1 (1984). JSTOR. Web.
Mortal females cause struggles among men and are portrayed as wicked in Greek Mythology. In the story of How the World and Mankind Were Created, the Father of Men and of the Gods, Zeus, swears to get revenge upon mankind because of the poor sacrifices made to the altars. Therefore, he “[makes] a great evil for men, a sweet and lovely thing to look upon… they [call] her Pandora… the first woman… who are an evil to men, with a nature to do evil… is the source of all misfortu...
According to Aristotle a woman in the ancient Greek world should give “no heed to public affairs”. Her sole purpose was to attend to affairs in the home. Conversely, the male role was to participate in civic affairs, since only men were considered to be citizens (O’Pry, 3). As a consequence it was men who played significant roles in the development of Greek society, with women only functioning in the private realm. All major political, civil, philosophical, judicial, military, economic, medical, educational and artistic roles were carried out by men (Middleton).
Women play an influential role in The Odyssey. Women appear throughout the story, as goddesses, wives, princesses, or servants. The nymph Calypso enslaves Odysseus for many years. Odysseus desires to reach home and his wife Penelope. It is the goddess Athena who sets the action of The Odyssey rolling; she also guides and orchestrates everything to Odysseus’ good. Women in The Odyssey are divided into two classes: seductresses and helpmeets. By doing so, Homer demonstrates that women have the power to either hinder of help men. Only one woman is able to successfully combine elements of both classes: Penelope. She serves as a role model of virtue and craftiness. All the other women are compared to and contrasted with Penelope.
Women were often subjects of intense focus in ancient literary works. In Sarah Pomeroy’s introduction of her text Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, she writes, “Women pervade nearly every genre of classical literature, yet often the bias of the author distorts the information” (x). It is evident in literature that the social roles of women were more restricted than the roles of men. And since the majority of early literature was written by men, misogyny tends to taint much of it. The female characters are usually given negative traits of deception, temptation, selfishness, and seduction. Women were controlled, contained, and exploited. In early literature, women are seen as objects of possession, forces deadly to men, cunning, passive, shameful, and often less honorable than men. Literature reflects the societal beliefs and attitudes of an era and the consistency of these beliefs and attitudes toward women and the roles women play has endured through the centuries in literature. Women begin at a disadvantage according to these societal definitions. In a world run by competing men, women were viewed as property—prizes of contests, booty of battle and the more power men had over these possessions the more prestigious the man. When reading ancient literature one finds that women are often not only prizes, but they were responsible for luring or seducing men into damnation by using their feminine traits.