Paleothea: the Ancient Goddess

I honestly thought that the next entry I posted was going to say, “Sorry, I’m done with this blog. See you in a few years!” But then someone sent me an email asking me to fix my entry on Medusa to reflect that Medusa was raped by Poseidon and thus the punishment was deeply unjust.

I thought about it. The emailer was correct that the word Ovid uses to describe their sexual intercourse does not emphasize consent. But, in the end I decided not to for two reasons: 1) I’m pretty sure Ovid considered Medusa responsible for the sex, and that is not a description of rape I am comfortable with, and 2) having re-read Ovid’s version, I now think that Medusa is an awesome resister of the patriarchy!

There is a third possible reason as well, namely that earlier versions of the myth describe “laying together in a soft meadow among spring flowers” and even Ovid later describes this event as a “mingling of soft embraces.” This could easily outweigh the one word “vitiasse” (which I have arbitrarily decided to translated as “spoiled”). But the reality is, I don’t think we SHOULD write off “vitiasse.” In fact, quite the opposite! I think that Ovid is making the point that Poseidon “spoiled” Medusa for marriage. I mean, Ovid’s whole introduction to this is about what a hot potential wife Medusa was! This would have been considered illegal for both parties in ancient Rome, which helps explain why Ovid continues that Athena’s mutation of Medusa was a punishment of her “filthy crime.”

So, if you believe as Ovid appeared to that Medusa was complicit and responsible for this whole sexy-sex with Poseidon (which, for those who don’t remember the details of the story, took place in the temple of Athena), then Medusa is not the pathetic victim that a current reading of the word “rape” might suggest. Instead, she becomes this totally awesome radical damn-the-man feminist! She says, “F* you, suitors, maybe I just want to have sex with a cute guy instead of sitting inside your women’s quarters for the rest of my life!” She says, “F* you, you daddy-loving, girl-power-hating Goddess! Maybe I don’t think you or any other representation of the system should get to decide where or with whom I get it on!” And, yeah, she totally suffers the consequence of breaking the rules, and, yeah, she is totally turned into this awful threat to women of “this is what happens to women who sleep with sexy men when they should be the property of their fathers,” but DAMN if she doesn’t go down fighting. Looking at it with a BIT of a revisionist eye, she lives out the rest of her life fighting against those “heroes” of patriarchal Greece. Even sitting on Athena’s shield should remind you of the dangerous power of a woman who decides to stop accepting the sexist rules and strikes out to do what she will!

Go Medusa!

Hey guys, have you heard? There’s been a shift in Amazon Rank and stories like the ones you come to Women in Greek Myths to enjoy are in danger. That’s right, in the name of protecting kids from “adult” material, anything containing sexual, erotic, romantic, gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgendered or queer content is getting censored from the sales Amazon Rank. Although I doubt they will actually start cutting D’Aulaires, books like Lovers’ Legends Unbound might be in real trouble (you can see my review of it here). Although I’m not pleased about the censorship generally, it is the unequal application (that LGBT - queer - books get slapped with the “adult” label when they’ve got nothing erotic about ‘em, but plenty of erotic hetero books continue on their merry, Amazon Ranked, way.

As some of you may remember from my post on Age-Appropriate Definitions in Greek Myths, I am hardly a radical on the question of how to talk about sexuality with kids, but (if people stopped forgetting that greek myths are full of this sort of thing) the book I dream of one day writing (discussed here) would probably be screwed, too.

ETA: Yeah, Lovers’ Legends Unbound got stripped of its Amazon Rank. Jerks.

As it turns out, I DID get a copy of Kirk Ormand’s Controlling Desires not for Thesmophoria but just in time for Christmas. That worked out well, because I got to read it all during our Winter Break. Except that I was so totally burnt out from last semester, that I actually mostly just hid in bed and read fantasy. Now that the semester has begun again, I’m slowly being forced out of my shell again, and Controlling Desires is a new and exciting part of my life (that, of course, I no longer actually have time to read - but procrastination from real reading is a powerful thing, so I expect it will go fast now).

Ormand leads with background on gender and sexuality and how we think about such things. Although he totally ties it to specifically Classical things, in retrospect I realize that it is lessons like this that led me to go for my PhD in anthropology. But enough about me, here’s the gist of that point:

We think about sex(uality) in fundamentally different ways than the ancient Greek and Romans did.

In another post - which WILL happen eventually, fear not - I will talk more about it.

In my imagination, I will also be posting about 1) Monsters! Yay! and 2) Hera and Medea! Oooooh!

I’ve mentioned Byblis before, I think. The poor girl fell in love with her brother which eventually led to being turned into a spring. But how she got from point A to point B is the awesomeness of the myth. And, because he is possibly the coolest guy on the planet, J. Harker over at Tales of a Wayward Classicist did a fantastic translation/adaptation of her myth from the Metamorphoses.

Here’s a selection:

It steadily got worse. She’d dream about him.
Really dream about him, you know?
The kind of dreams she’d ache to go back to sleep for.
She hated when he called her sister.
Something wasn’t right. She knew it, but couldn’t say it. Wouldn’t.

…

We have to tell him. Can you? Can you talk to him?
I’m afraid. I don’t know what’ll happen if I open my mouth.
We’ll write him a letter.

Oh the awesomeness … Go read the whole thing.

I grew up reading D’Aulaire’s Greek Myths, like lots of kids, and credit it with my early inspiration to create my website, Women in Greek Myths. But, I should add, it was a negative inspiration. I had decided that they didn’t have all the facts (a horrible crime to a know-it-all 13 year old) and worse, they didn’t tell all the stories (I shudder now to imagine a book that WOULD), and so I set out to correct it. I imagined the website as a place where I could store my notes, notes that would eventually become a fantastic book that would replace the insufficient D’Aulaires.

Now, as an adult, and having a lot more of the “real” stories under my belt, and in the original Greek, no less [Ailia pats herself on back], I have changed my tune. I am hugely impressed by D’Aulaires giving it 5/5 stars over at Goodreads, and I realize that what they did by connecting all of the different, winding tales together was genius. Sure, it makes you think that it’s how Greek myths really are - like some Biblical narrative where everything is essentially working together and rarely out and out contradictory - but the alternative, especially for kids, seems virtually impossible. And, even though I don’t think that the illustrations are up there with, say, with The Forbidden Door, almost no one’s are, and it DOES have some of the absolute best scene depictions of Greek myths I have ever seen (for example, the one with Syrinx and Daphne being chased at once).

But, in its attempt to be univerally acceptable, it has not only toned down the violence against women (which I don’t think is so bad anymore),  it also pretty much erased any mention of myths that would now be considered queer. (And I use that word as a blanket term that includes lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex, etc.) So, you don’t see any of the stories from my post on Transgender Myths To Know. And you don’t see any of the stories that turn up in Lovers’ Legends Unbound. And Hylas and Ganymede are turned from the beloveds of heroes (Heracles) and gods (Zeus), to mere victims of nymphs and cupbearers.

Some day, I have just decided, I’m going to write a book.* It will not be an attempt to replace D’Aulaires, but it will reject their silencing of those stories. The Greeks didn’t view Zeus or Heracles as “gay” or Caenis as “trans” but our current definitions made them invisible (at least partly). If I write a children’s book, something like The Other Greek Myths, I will attempt to do much of what the D’Aulaires did so successfully. I have no goal to shock, and my intent is not to preserve an ancient Greek way of life, but to use the myths as we have always done, to highlight stories we find relevant. There is, for the first time in a long time, room for such a book (thanks to books like And Tango Makes Three), and, with the help of an artist (maybe I could convince someone like Erika Meriaux to jump on board?) I think it could be something really special.

*The 13-year-old in my head makes me add that I’ll include a note for grown ups at the end contextualizing the thing.

I’m doing a bunch of projects on sexuality and adolescence in school and I happened to come across this gem: a girl insisting that if you “jump up and down a lot, the stuff will fall out of you and you won’t get pregnant.” Now, it so happens that I have heard plenty of similar things during my few years as a sex educator, so it doesn’t surprise me, but it is SO close to Galen’s idea that I mentioned in my post on ancient Greek sexual health that I couldn’t help but be a little excited.

And, just in case you, too, are tempted by this logic, allow me to correct you. Jumping does not prevent pregnancy, douching does not prevent pregnancy (and may actually increase your risks), having sex during your period does not prevent pregnancy, and withdrawal does not prevent pregnancy (although that last one does at least decrease your chances some).

You must know how I love putting pictures with my posts, but I have no image of a teen jumping around trying to eject semen and I would probably risk prosecution if I did. Oh well.

So as must be obvious to many of you, I love Goodreads.com. Whenever I talk about any good book, I provide a link there. I might be able to pick up a little pocket change by referring you to Amazon.com instead, or make you more likely to support the world by sending you to Better World Books, but I keep linking to Goodreads because it’s an opportunity for community interaction. It’s a great opportunity to share and talk and all such good things.

Although my recent reading has been dominated by more professional interests like anthropology, immigration, and adolescent sexuality, I recently heard from my awesome professor Kirk Ormand is coming out with a new book as soon as December 30, 2008! You better believe I’ll be reviewing it here when it does, but until then, go check out Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome.

And if you want to be my Goodreads buddy and share opinions on books, then drop me a comment and I’ll send you an invite.  Fair warning: joining Goodreads may suck up all of your free time, but it is an awesome way to waste it.

Watch out, Paleothea is about to get partisan. What little readership I have does not come here for this, but this is how I see the world, and yes, I think it relates to ancient Greece.

Women’s health, it is helpfully explained to us, is not like men’s health. For one thing, simply being a virgin past the “appropriate age” (14-17?) makes a girl susceptible to hysteria and suicidal insanity. Hippocrates’ solution to this: “My prescription is that when virgins experience this trouble, they should cohabit with a man as quickly as possible. If they become pregnant, they will be cured.” There are plenty of variations on this them, but it all reinforces the idea of women as, essentially, mothers.

That said, even Hippocrates recognized that pregnancy held many dangers for women. If abortion was anathema (and it wasn’t for everyone, Galen gives a useful prescription of jumping up and down to expel a fetus which he says actually worked in his office when his kinswomen brought in a slave-girl she was prostituting - it wasn’t an act of kindness, the kinswoman just didn’t want to lose her money-maker), it was at least partly because abortifacients were generally so dangerous, including severe bloodletting and “sharp-edged” things that wounded adjacent parts.

Remember, these are people who thought that the womb moved around the body like a furry animal and could be moved back into place (if it had traveled too low) by giving her sweet-scented wine to drink  (the carrot) and burning “foul-scented vapours below her womb” (the stick).  But damn, at least these people were trying …

All the ancient Greek medicine is from Women’s Life in Greece and Rome by Mary Lefkowitz and Maureen Fant.

This is a series on Penelope, who rocks and everyone should know more about. The breakdown is based on my reading (in ancient Greek, thank you very much) of the Odyssey and with some help from Jenny Strauss Clay, Nancy Felson-Rubin, and Sheila Murnaghan. Read Goddess-Like Penelope, Hera-Like Penelope, and Artemis-Like Penelope below.

–

Aphrodite, on the other hand, offers Penelope New Life. The myths of the Goddess of Love are in many ways the most applicable to Penelope’s situation. Think, for example, of the fling she had with Ares, the God of War while she was still Hephaestus’ wife, or the fact that it was her intervention that caused Helen to leave Menelaus and elope with Paris, thus beginning the Trojan War. These are examples of Dalliance as described by Nancy Felson-Rubin.

Nevertheless, Aphrodite does not merely advocate free love in this scenario but new marriage. This is particularly noticeable in the quotation below where it is she, and not the Protectress of Marriage (Hera), who petitions Zeus for the marriage of the daughters of Pandareos. When Penelope washes her face in the ambrosia of Aphrodite (18.185), the hardship, the old weighing life she had, falls away and she is born anew, just as the Goddess of Beauty ritually renews herself in the sea.

So if Aphrodite is running the show, Penelope would do well to go ahead and choose one of the Suitors for her husband and start a new life with him. Likewise, if Artemis is running the show, the only option that will bring her relief is a chaste death. Hera, as we saw in a previous post, is not well-equipped to help women in Penelope’s position and indeed, barely manages when her own husband isn’t in eye-sight.

It’s also worth noting that Aphrodite is a powerful goddess, and more of a personality in the Odyssey than Artemis - who, as you may recall from the last post, represents the chaste-death option for Penelope. Helen, who comes down the stairs looking like Artemis, of all people, is the one who makes that power most obvious. Helen takes no responsibility for her behavior; she was forced, she says, by Aphrodite. Poor Penelope. She knows the story of Helen, and that of Klytaimnestra, and so she knows the influences that Aphrodite can have on women’s lives when she chooses to interfere. But she does not know which goddess is running the show in her own life, and is caught in between trying to decide on the correct direction.

Felson-Rubin, Nancy. “Penelope’s Perspective: Character from Plot.” Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretive Essays. Seth L. Schein, ed. Princeton, N.J. : Princeton University Press, 1996

—

Next week: Which goddess is Penelope really like?

You may have heard by now about Nailin’ Paylin. It’s being made by Larry Flint and that’s really all you need to know.

Although I understand people’s anger, I think that’s exactly what Flint is challenging. I see it as a critique of Palin’s and the West’s (especially the U.S.’s) hypocrisy about sex and sexiness.

What is it that makes her sexual portrayal of herself in beauty contests more acceptable than her portrayal in porn except for societal values about the lines of acceptable sexuality? (Well, that and consent - but that’s why it’s a critique.) As a beauty queen she is like Artemis, irresistible but untouchable (think of Actaeon, people). But make her Aphrodite’s devotee, as porn star/sex worker in this scenario, but it could as easily have been as sex education advocate (remember Jocelyn Elders‘ ideas about masturbation?), and she would be perceived as vulgar. As she is now, beautiful and inaccessible but also the “ideal” mother,  Palin is a walking reinforcement of patriarchal standards of acceptable womanhood; she’s a friggin’ Hestia for goodness sake.

As for the inclusion of Condi and Hillary, these two women have generally been cast in our culture as Athena and Hera, respectively. Condi as the asexual woman who is the Man’s scion (Bush as Zeus here) extending His power; Hillary as the long-suffering wife who cannot be sexy except in the context of her stereotypically sexist relationship (Bill Clinton as Zeus here) and longs for ultimate power in her own right. And yet, sadly, they are both the symbols of success for woman in this culture. This video turns that on its head, challenging public conceptions, expectations, and values that are sadly consistent with some from ancient Greece.

By thrusting them without consent into Aphrodite’s realm, Larry Flint reminds us of the violence inherent in our current portrayals of acceptable gender and sexuality. If we could embrace Aphrodite - the erotic - in our public and private lives, it would take us far closer to the equality we long for.*

I figure most of my readers are going to disagree with me, and that’s fine. One of the best things about a video like this, no matter where you fall on the issue, is the discussion that it motivates. Passionate discussion. Because sex matters and gender matters and they matter even more in politics, the public forum for our national identities.

*And there, too Aphrodite is should be our teacher as longing, himeros, is  under her jurisdiction.

Go online, and it is easy to find scores of sites dedicated to Athena as the patron Goddess of good feminist neo-pagans. In my opinion, however, Athena was more of a product and purveyor of “the patriarchy” than any other Goddess in the Olympic pantheon. There was no other goddess with such power in the (Athenian) populace, and this came from the very fact that her power was not that of a feminist revolutionary, but rather the embodiment of the patriarchy as the parthenogenic daughter of The Father (Zeus). The oppression of women had been Athena’s realm since she founded Athens (and decreed that women shouldn’t vote or be citizens). Sex was an important tool for that oppression (keeping in mind the fact that gender identity and erotic desire can and should be distinguished) as illustrated in the myths surrounding the House of Athens. Read the rest of this entry »

It was defining “virgin” and “rape” that got me thinking about this. If I recall, and I can’t check because I’m still in the boonies of Latin America, even D’Aulaire’s couldn’t avoid using that language, because there’s no pussyfooting around the fact that sex - mostly varying degrees of non-consensual sex - is at the root of a LOT of those stories. No Classical education is complete without the story of Persephone, for example, and there’s a ton more.

When I - briefly - taught comparative (strong on the Greek angle) mythology to middle schoolers, I wasn’t allowed to bring in paintings by Peter Paul Rubens to show my class, but I didn’t even think about bringing up the subject of rape and virginity, of castration or infidelity. These things ARE Greek myths. And I assumed - though perhaps I shouldn’t have - that all of my students had a basic working understanding of these concepts.

My 9-year-old niece got D’Aulaire’s for Christmas last year, and so it surprised me that when I started retelling her some of the stories here she had to stop me to ask me “what’s a virgin?” and then later, “what’s rape?” I’m so friggin’ sex-ed-positive that it didn’t occur to me that the underlying question - “what’s sex?” - had not been answered yet.

I am secretly horrified that her introduction to these concepts came through such violent and patriarchal storytelling and I am (again) struck by the ever-presence of sex and violence in the world kids live in. It seems like an incredibly persuasive reason to start educating your kids about sex - and whatever positive values you can offer - from an early age. But given that I think Greek myths should ALSO be introduced at an early age, how can I address the sexual values contained therein? With my own children, I imagine that conversations about cultural conceptions of sex will be taking place as soon as they can understand them (I got that from my own feminist mother in an “age-appropriate” way from an early age, and that’s a good part of the reason that I started Women in Greek Myths), but what the heck do I do with kids that aren’t mine?

Any thoughts are very welcome.

You may be thinking as you browse the various titles here, why so much sex? The seductive moonings of innocent young landowners ¹, man-on-man lovin’², slave-girl sex (consensual and not)³, cheating wives who murder their husbands and are subsequently killed by their sons (I guess that might be hot to somebody)⁴, ancient lingerie (eww)⁵, sex with castration and trans-sex⁶, man, I even talk about Earth sex⁷! Am I a sex-crazed maniac?

Um, not so much.

Actually, the whole field of gender and sexuality in ancient Greece and Rome is so valid that I actually took a class with that very title as an undergrad. And, though many of our founding mothers and fathers weren’t so keen on discussing it (they much preferred to read Thucydides apparently), sex happens a lot. And, with varying degrees of licentiousness, the Greeks tended to include that important facet of their lives in their stories.

Sure, sure, you might protest, but why do you have to spend so much time talking about it? Well, for one thing, because it’s so often misrepresented everywhere. I mean, people love the idea of coming a finding an Archetypal Goddess (don’t let me stop you, more power to you!), but rarely do they bother to look into why Athena, Artemis, and Hestia stay virgins (although the goddesses’ chastity is often cited by such people as proof of their righteous independence). And let’s not leave the blame with just the well-intentioned new-fans, think of movies like the movie 300 with it’s “Athenians? Boy lovers!” comment and, like, every other contemporary homophobic and/or misogynist reframing of the heroic masculine Classical myths.

The truth is, I am personally interested in gender and sexuality outside of the Classical context (in part because people remain as shockingly badly informed about these things in our own times and places just as much as about a culture we are still trying to piece together), so that is definitely part of why I keep bringing it up, too. And, because, hey! Prude or promiscuous, learning about other people’s sex lives is titillating! And finally, perhaps most importantly, there’s so much sex in ancient Greek myths that no collection, no matter how “kid-friendly”, can avoid the subject matter completely. What’s the best way to deal with this? Enjoy it!

It shouldn’t surprise you that vanity appears to have been around as we’ve had records. But what might surprise you is that, just as butts are part of the hotness requirements for women today, butts were also totally “big” back in the day! Breasts were a good thing, too (Phryne’s got her out of a charge of impiety, for example), but today I’m interested in the butt and nothing but. It was all inspired by this picture of Aphrodite on the right.

Have you taken the Quiz to find out which goddess you’re most like? I tend to score as Aphrodite unless I’m feeling really anti-social.

So anyway, that Aphrodite is called Kallipygos - literally, Beautifulbutt. And, although no wise mortal should doubt the attractiveness of the Goddess of Beauty’s derrière, this story comes from a less divine source. Two sisters were arguing in the random way that all sisters do, regardless of what millennium they inhabit, about who had the cuter bottom. To resolve the issue, they stopped their young and rich neighbor - the son of a wealthy landowner - and asked him to decide. Well, he chose for the eldest, but one look was not enough and he decided to go back and marry the girl. He brought his younger brother along to meet her sister and, sure enough, those two fell in love, too!

Well, the two girls (totally country, imagine Elly May from the Beverly Hillbillies) were so tickled that their fannies had brought them such good fortune, that they built a temple to Aphrodite Kallipygos in gratitude.

And, since we’re already on the subject, I adore the part in the Lysistrata when the women start making butt jokes - the implication is that the Spartan men are so into other dudes, that their favorite part about a woman is when she’s facing away from them and they can look at her gorgeous assets and imagine they belong to another gender. Awesome.

The author kindly shared a copy of this book (with accompanying CD performing a retelling of the myths included) with me for my review. It has taken a long time for me to find the appropriate space to do so.

In short, it is a book that retells the Greek myths that involve love between males - god and young man, etc. It does it quite well. It is an attractive book, though not full of pictures or anything like that. The performance on the CD is a great way to listen to myths, since so many of them would have been oral. The myths are totally accessible for beginning myth-heads.

In fact, I think a person not deeply versed in Greek myth already would be the ideal person to buy this since most academically inclined people will prefer the original versions. I imagine that the majority of people buying this book also happen to be gay men. However, I will say that I think people who are expanding their knowledge of myths by reading compilations and such should DEFINITELY get this, as it will emphasize an important aspect of Greek myth that is to easily “forgotten” in other compilations of Greek myths. If you’re open-minded, get it for your kids, too! I mean, it’s no more graphic and certainly no less “authentic” or important a story than any other! And getting an audio version is a wonderful way to learn the myths.

Of course, I feel it is necessary to add that this shouldn’t be the ONLY myth book on your shelf. Beginning or not, invest in The Complete Idiot’s Guide to Classical Mythology. And although I haven’t come across a beginner’s compilation of women in Greek myths that I love yet, I definitely think Sue Blundell’s Women in Greek Myths and/or Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves should be read by anyone wanting a sense of what that world might have looked like for women. I know people will tell you to read Robert Graves (including me in a couple places on the main site), but now I say skip him and Hamilton and go straight to the far hipper and better cited Complete Idiot’s Guide.

So in the U.S. (and lots of other places), we really dig the low-born (and occasionally low-brow) hero. Titanic and Shrek are good examples. But the ancient Greeks had a very different class structure than we do, and you’re really not going to find any good heroes (outside of comedy) that weren’t born seriously aristocratic. The same thing tends to go for women. So when, rarely, we actually see a female slave in Greek myth, she tends to be secretly noble. Like Leucippe and Andromache. Even Briseis - the Achilles’ slave girl in the Iliad - was the daughter of the king of the Leleges at Pedasus.

We rarely see the world from a woman’s perspective, but a lower class woman’s perspective or that of a slave-woman (born a slave) virtually never. Slave-girls were considered to be available for sex pretty much whenever by pretty much whoever (with some exceptions). Whether they were kept concubines, flute-girls (mostly a euphemism), or just unlucky house slaves, sex was wholly outside of their control. Not only were they available to their masters, they were not permitted to form their own sexual relationships without their master’s consent. (27 Pomeroy)

Maybe I shouldn’t even be talking about them, since they are so absent from myth. But they must have grown up with many of the same stories. I wonder, which gods and goddesses they saw as sympathetic. Surely not the aristocratic Athena, but I’d be willing to bet that at least some became supplicants of Aphrodite.

A lot of the important points about motherhood in ancient Greek myth are already made in the posts On Being a Virgin and Ge, Gaia, Gaie: Earth, but to summarize all that quickly, I will quote from Sue Blundell’s Women in Ancient Greece:

There is a marked tendency in Greek mythological representations to divide powerful women up into the sexually active but hostile, and the virginal but helpful. … A child-bearing woman was supposed to come under male domination, and any female who tried to evade this social truth, and to take control of events, was clearly up to no good.

Greek mythology is full of fascinating mothers, but I’m gonna mix things up and talk about a mortal mother for this post. Let’s begin with Clytemnestra. Although she is generally perceived as “bad,” Clytemnestra is a woman - a mother - who is not difficult to understand. How many women would not want to kill the man who murdered their child? And, in fact, Aeschylus (the guy who wrote the plays that tell her story in detail) shows her judgment is not an easy decision.

Clytemnestra says, “To give birth is a dreadful thing; despite suffering badly one cannot bring oneself to hate those she has born.”¹ And then her children, Electra and Orestes plot and kill her to avenge Clytemnestra’s murder of their father, who in turn had sacrificed their daughter, Iphigenia, in order to get a better sailing wind for heading off to war. The betrayals and deaths ripped the family apart, of course, and Clytemnestra received the lion’s share of the blame for that disruption. But the question of primacy of motherhood vs. fatherhood was painfully drawn out in Aeschylus’ retelling of the story. In the end, the virgin Athena affirms that Clytemnestra’s son (Orestes) was correct in killing his mother to avenge his father, not because of any sort of proper justice, but because Athena has no mother and therefore is on the father’s side.² In other words, it isn’t that women, or mothers, deserve less but that it just works out best for “everyone” if they are not treated equally.

The problem with sexually active women, and therefore with mothers, is that they have all of these emotions. And it makes them dangerous, as I noted initially, to the men who are supposed to keep them in check. It also makes them human.

A good wife, I think we can fairly imagine, would be distraught over the loss of her daughter but ultimately would bow to her husband’s decision. A good woman stays in the background, like Andromache.³ Passive like Alcestis, who agrees to die in her husband’s place, leaving her children with him despite his obvious inadequacies. A bad woman, a bad mother, a bad wife, overwhelmed with emotions, takes action. Medea said, “People say that we women lead a life of without danger inside our homes, while men fight in war; but they are wrong. I would rather serve three times in battle than give birth once.”⁴ And when confronted with her husband’s betrayal, she took her revenge on their most precious treasures: she murdered the children she had risked so much to bear.

Although Clytemnestra is more defensible, it is ultimately not her right to do anything. Clytemnestra acts as a hunter, trapping her husband and murdering him in retribution for killing her daughter (and cheating on her). She acts, in short, like I imagine Artemis might, except that there’s a reason that Artemis is a virgin goddess. Can we anticipate what might have happened if Clytemnestra did not try to take the death-bringer role of Artemis, but instead tried on that of the mourning Demeter? Would people have paid attention or would she have gotten shafted like the Trojan women or the Theban women, who mostly just suffered when men ignored the wisdom of their warnings?

What I think is really fascinating is that as frustrating as the sexism is, it isn’t blind. Alcestis’ decision really sucks for lots of people, even though she’s lauded for making it. Andromache’s ideal behavior looks like it’ll win her a life of slavery. And monstrous though Medea’s infanticide is, you cannot help but empathize with the total helplessness and injustice of her situation. No ancient Greek could have failed to understand, if not wholly agree with, Clytemnestra’s actions. It’s as if the ancient Greeks are admitting that the fate of women is pretty unjust, even though it seems like the best thing to do, all things considered. It keeps civilization moving. It means that vengeance is not unending. But that doesn’t mean it’s fair.

Motherhood was a dangerous proposition for mortals, perhaps a 10-20% incidence of death in childbirth,⁵ and yet, it was generally considered a woman’s most important function. She took great risks to bring children into the world, but she was no walking womb. The myths of mortal mothers remind us not to reduce mothers to frighteningly unpredictable protectors nor long-suffering martyrs. Motherhood was divine, chthonic, incomprehensible, and only a part of what made up a woman.

<sub>Notes:
1. Line 770 of Sophocles’ Elektra, my translation but click on the link to see Sir Richard Jebb’s on Perseus Project.
2.Moreover, Clytemnestra’s actions are associated with a more primal scary chthonic time and defended by the Furies, while Orestes is defended by the total Greek male Apollo. Whether her violence was justified becomes irrelevant, now it seems to be said that in order to maintain Order and Civilization, someone’s gotta get the fuzzy end of the lollipop and doesn’t it make sense that it would be a woman rather than a man?
3. In Euripides’ Trojan Women, Andromache describes her ideal behavior, including “I offered my husband a silent tongue and a calm appearance.” (line 655 or so) That’s the translation on page 11 of Maureen Fant and Mary Lefkowitz’s Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation.
4. Line 246 of Euripides’ Medea as translated in Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation by Maureen Fant and Mary Lefkowitz, page 10
5.Garland’s the Greek Way of Life cited on page 110 of Women in Ancient Greece</sub>

---

This is part of a synchroblog on Motherhood. Check out the other posts (* by the ones who have already posted):
The Aquila ka Hecate *
Symbolic Meanings *
Between Old and New Moons*
Jewish Myth, Magic, and Mysticism*
Goddess in a Teapot
Full Circle* Earthwise News and Notes
Religion Think - On the Goddess of Canaan*And even though it couldn’t have been intentionally part of this sychroblog, there’s a great post on Mother and Daughter, Demeter and Persephone over at Mythphile.

We are talking about Athena, Artemis, and Hestia here, folks: the Three Virgin Goddesses. At the risk of presenting a depressingly simplistic argument, I’m gonna do my best to give you a starting point for thinking about these things. Remember, now, that ancient Greece was a pretty patriarchal collection of cultures.

So the thing these ladies had in common was that they weren’t interested in having sex with men - but beyond that they were quite different. Athena was kinda butchy with her interest in war and adventure. The perfect daughter (at least for a patriarch) she owed all of her allegiance to Daddy and that would never change because no husband - or even a mama, in her case - would compete for her attention. As a virgin, she represented an ideal of daughter-hood.

Artemis, on the other hand, was super hot. Tomboy? Sure, but in a sexy sort of way. She ran around in her short little skirt hunting deer, she bathed naked in woodland streams and ponds, she was the sort of untouchable beauty you might “flay the flayed dog” to late at night. But just as virginal daughters were supposed to be attractive but off limits until the deal was sealed with a wedding, so too was Artemis off limits. This stage - tight-bodied virginal beauty - is perfectly represented by the goddess.

And finally, Hestia. Dear Hestia. She was a virgin, but only because the alternative seemed so darn complicated. She represents the perfect homemaker. The problem with women is that once they’re sexually active, you can’t tell WHO they’ve slept with. Also, who knows whether a mother’s allegiance will be to her children or her husband (dangerous for a patriarch - see Rhea). And what about her familial obligations to her father? Hestia circumvents all of these issues. She is literally the hearth, the center of the home, and her virginity is an example of the problematic role that women played in such a patriarchal culture.