The Subjugation of Women in Greek Culture and Literature

The Ancient Greece, most prominently represented by Athens of circa 5th Century BCE, was an outright male-dominated society, often so to an obnoxious degree. The way the women were systematically suppressed in that society, disregarded, and denied seemingly almost all human dignity appears surreal to modern sensibilities. If the ubiquitous Greek homosexuality seems scandalous to us, the role of women in Greek society is one of the most appalling testaments conceivable to the moral depravity that mankind can sink into.

When it comes to Greek drama and literature, which is a most important source of knowledge about women in Ancient Greece, the fairer sex paradoxically assumes a rather prominent, even glorified, position — but such an impression can be deceptive.

The images of women that are revealed in Greek drama are of highly artificial and stereotypical nature, purely created by men and played for a male chauvinist audience.

Moreover the female roles in a drama are actually played by men themselves on the stage.

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The feminist term “male chauvinist pig” has assumed a rather mild and even a facetious connotation these days; but it can be a very apt and meaningful term to describe the particular category of human species that preponderated in a number of cultures throughout the human history. And the men of ancient Greece stand second to none in this respect.

However, the phenomenon of suppression of women in Ancient Greece is almost a bizarre case of human oppression of fellow humans, in that the Greeks were highly given to worship female deities, had women playing prominent roles in their mythology and drama, even if deviously and subtly manipulated ones — and yet women in real life were relegated to subhuman status.

The classical Greeks were able writers, poets, artists, and even historians.

The written lore of ancient Greece, from philosophy to drama to statements by eminent personalities, embodies male cultural assumptions about women, the ways in which men viewed women as subservient to them, and the characteristics which they attributed to them. Women are described and defined by means of virtues, values and psychological traits contrasting with those of men. The crux of such differentiation, which is mostly baseless and ridiculous, seems to be that men are superior in every way and women are just inferior creatures lacking everything that men have or should ideally have.

The denunciation of women was carried out to ludicrous proportions. For instance, men in ancient Greece freely and constantly indulged in their uninhibited bisexual impulses, with prostitution being a state-sponsored enterprise and the sex industry running rampant — and yet most ironically, women most of the time secluded in their households were berated because of their childish lack of self-control which was supposed to render them slaves to their sexual desires.

As such, women were deemed in need of constant rational male supervision. Women were considered as economically unproductive and wasteful of their husbands' resources, when the truth is that all natural expression of women was deliberately and ruthlessly quelled by paranoid deluded men who could have hardly had any notion of the enormity of atrocities they were perpetrating.

In the end, the supreme irony of it all is that these same men of the fifth-century Athens have been considered down the ages and well into the modern times as personification of the very best ideals in the ancient society, as creators of democracy and fathers of philosophy. It is true that the Ancient Greece has contributed immensely to the advent of modern Western society and is rightly considered a progenitor of enlightened thinking that emerged in Europe during the Renaissance, however the people of the ancient Greece had a few major abysmally murky facets.