SOURCE: Wiles, David. “Gender.” In Greek Theatre Performance: An Introduction, pp. 66-88. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

[In the following essay, Wiles examines the position of women in Greek democracy, in ritual, and as characters in plays, and summarizes assorted feminist critiques of Greek tragedy.]

WOMEN, POLITICS AND MYTH

THE PROBLEM

Amongst our qualities,
god's gift of singing to the lyre
was not granted us by Apollo, commander of music.
Otherwise I'd have sung out my reply
to the race of men.
The past has as much to tell of woman's lot
as it does of males.

(chorus: Medea, 424-30)

The theatre of Athens was created by and for men, yet it is generally thought to contain some of the best female roles in the repertory. The contrast with Shakespearean theatre is a striking one. Why? The question has caused much concern in the late twentieth century.

The first surviving words of dramatic dialogue from the Greek world are actually written by a woman:

Virginity, virginity, you have left me: where have you gone?
I shall never return to you, never return.(1)

The singer of the first line represents a bride, and the reply is by an individual or more probably a chorus playing the bride's lost virginity. Sappho wrote this text for a wedding on the island of Lesbos, more than a century before Greek theatre as we know it came into being, and there is no reason to doubt that the performers were women. Another text by Sappho laments the annual death of the young god Adonis, and a singer representing the goddess Aphrodite (probably Sappho herself) is in dialogue with a chorus of girls:

Aphrodite! the delicate Adonis is dying: what should we do?
Strike yourselves, maidens, tear your tunics.(2)

In the classical period, the emergence of democracy meant that female voices like Sappho's were removed from the public domain. When the Athenian historian Thucydides places a democratic manifesto in the mouth of Pericles on the occasion of a state funeral, the only mention of women is a brief afterthought addressed to widows of the dead: ‘Great is your glory if you prove not inferior to that nature that you have, and enjoy no kind of reputation among males either for good or for bad.’³ In the pre-democratic age these silent widows without ‘reputation’ would have been the focus of attention, keening loudly and beating their bodies to purge their grief, to signal respect for their dead husbands, and if necessary to whip up the spirit of revenge; but in democratic Athens a sober speech by a male politician has supplanted those female voices and actions. Funerals in the old style identified the dead first and foremost as members of a family, but the new democratic funeral rendered the family invisible, and located the dead men as children of their city. The sons of these fallen warriors would now be reared by the state and not by their mothers. The logic that silenced these mourning widows of Athens also silenced women like Sappho, whose role included the creation of public performances at weddings. Like funerals, traditional weddings glorified the family and not the state. The enactment of female behaviour by men in Athenian drama has to be seen in its complex relationship to this great act of suppression by the male democratic state. Tears and lamentations that were no longer tolerated in real funerals seem to have been relocated in the theatre. Men who restrained themselves over the real bodies of their fallen comrades were content to weep in the theatre as they watched men dressed as women wailing and lamenting over simulated corpses.

There is no dispute that the roles in Athenian theatre were all taken by men. The audience has proved a more contentious issue, and jokes in Aristophanes have been dissected time and again in vain efforts to determine whether they seem funnier if there is indeed a female presence in the auditorium.⁴ Certainly men did not go to the theatre escorting their wives as they did in ancient Rome, or in the modern bourgeois theatre. Athenian theatre was sponsored by the state, and thus men attended as members of the male community that embodied the state. If women were present, then it is generally assumed that those who came sat at the back, or maybe the sides, and the female presence was marginal. The plays were directed at male spectators.

The best evidence for a female spectator is a seat which can be inspected today in the theatre in Athens: a throne in the front row for a priestess of Athene. There is no reason why this surviving monument should not reflect time-honoured tradition. Male priests represented the other goddesses, and this solitary woman seems to be the exception who proves the rule—representing the goddess who has no mother and no sexual relationships, and fights like a man. We may consider her rather like the token white (a dummy if necessary) whom Genet required to be present in the front row if ever his play The Blacks was performed to a black audience.⁵ Without the symbolic presence of the other in the audience, the play's debate about otherness would not have the same force. This token female seems to lie behind the figure of Lysistrata, who in Aristophanes' comedy inspired the women of Athens to declare a sex strike and barricade themselves in the Acropolis in a bid to end the war. ‘Lysistrata’ means ‘dissolver of armies’ and the real priestess who viewed the performance was called Lysimache, ‘dissolver of war’.⁶

WOMEN IN ATHENIAN DEMOCRACY

Penelope, the wife of Homer's Odysseus, spends her life weaving, like most Athenian women, but the palace where she lives is a place where important people assemble, and the price she pays is sexual harassment when her husband is away at sea. In the democratic era, men removed themselves from the household to a new set of public spaces where the important business of life was now conducted. Women at the same time were removed from the public domain in which citizen males paraded their equality. Solon, in the early days of the city-state, imposed a series of controls upon Athenian women which included: regulation of women's festivals; restraints upon extravagant dress; a curfew for women after dark; smaller trousseaux to prevent bridegrooms from appearing to sell their bodies for money; no displays at funerals with hired mourners and self-flagellation. The funeral procession was to take place before daybreak, with women walking at the back, and traditional female mourning was dismissed as ‘barbaric’.⁷ Behind Solon's measures lay a democratic logic. In the new era of the city-state, rich men were not to flaunt their wealth by showing how women of their family could dress. The elite should not be tempted to use marriage to pool their wealth. The chastity of citizen women should be protected, so there could be no ambiguity about who was or was not a son of Athens.

The strength of the city-state was a matter of life and death. If the men of the city fought side by side as equals with complete commitment to the collective good, then the city became rich. If it was torn apart by in-fighting between rich and poor, the city could be annihilated. The suppression of women was therefore a means to an end. The place of Athenian women became the home—and even within the home they were excluded from rooms where men entertained male guests. The place of males became the market, the assembly, the law court, the gymnasium where they conversed and trained for war, and the theatre where they questioned in the most fundamental ways who they were and how they should live. The suppression of women is perhaps most obvious in the rules of the law court. Though citizen women could engage in the religious practice of swearing an oath, they could not otherwise speak, and had to be represented by the male relative who was their legal master. Their identities were effaced to the point that not even their names could be mentioned in public. We cannot tell how far women resented a political system which reduced them to non-persons, because their voices are lost.

Pericles' injunction that Athenian women should live in accordance with ‘that nature that you have’ begged a few questions. It would take a generation or two longer before democratic ideology (by which term I refer to the work of philosophers, biologists and theatre-makers, amongst others) would bring the new socially constructed role of women into alignment with public perceptions of the natural and god-given. In the classical period there seemed nothing natural about the way Athenian women were required to behave, for too many alternative models were available. Myths of great antiquity showed goddesses resisting their husbands and driving chariots into battle. A woman like Aspasia, the mistress and intellectual companion of Pericles, was free to mingle with men because she was not Athenian but an Ionian Greek from Asia Minor. Customs were seen to be different in non-democratic societies. In Sparta, for example, women were educated, they could own property, they could dance in public and criticize the dancing displays of men.⁸ Most famously, Spartan girls could run naked like men in athletic contests. A subject population took responsibility for most of the weaving, and the Spartan priority was that women should be physically fit to breed fit sons. In Athens, the debate about an ideal society could at no point sidestep the issue of woman's role and nature.

There was thus a conspicuous gap in classical Athens between sex and gender. Dramatists could construct new myths in order to efface this gap, or they could play upon the gap in order to explore deep tensions and contradictions within the democratic system. Aeschylus is often associated with the first strategy, Euripides and Aristophanes with the second.

WOMEN IN AESCHYLUS

Aeschylus' Oresteia portrayed a process of political change, starting in a Homeric, monarchical Argos, and finishing in a law court of democratic Athens …. In Argos a woman, Clytaemnestra, rules for ten years while her husband Agamemnon is away at war, and she kills him when he returns, for reasons that seem to touch her as a woman: he made a human sacrifice of their daughter; he brings a concubine into her home; and he abandoned her without a male protector, so she has taken a man to replace her husband. In the second play of the trilogy their son Orestes returns and avenges his father by killing his mother. In baring her breast, Clytaemnestra emphasizes the biological bond of mother and child. In Eumenides, the third play, the affair is brought to trial before the sexually ambivalent figure of Athene. The issue is thus, whose crime was the greater? That of the woman who broke the social bond by killing her husband, or that of the man who broke the biological bond by killing his mother? Athene determines, through her casting vote, that the social bond is more important. The overt moral is clear: in Greek democratic society, ties of family have to be subordinated to those socially constructed ties which constitute the political system.

In the trial scene, Orestes has as his advocate the male god Apollo, who commanded him to kill. Clytaemnestra's case is represented by twelve demonic Furies, who are associated with the earth and represent the forces of nature and reproduction. The core of Apollo's case is the argument that the womb is merely a container for the male seed: ‘The so-called mother is not the parent of her child, but nurse to a freshly seeded foetus. The parent is he who mounts. The woman is a stranger who preserves the shoots of a stranger, if a god helps him.’⁹

Apollo's patriarchal biology drew upon new fashions of thought that were later consolidated by Aristotle, but flew in the face of normal thinking at the time, thinking embedded in medicine and in law. Seven years later, Pericles implemented a new marriage code which required that citizenship be restricted to those born of citizen mothers as well as citizen fathers, and such laws assumed that the mother had a significant role in the reproductive process. The harshness of Apollo's phrasing has led many interpreters to conclude that Aeschylus intended to generate a critical response and not simple assent.

In the final scene, Athene makes her peace with the Furies, and gives them a home in a cave beneath the Areopagus, the crag on which the court sat. The Furies become ‘eumenides’, ‘well-disposed’. The metaphor of the cave can be read in several ways. (1) Women are below and men above. (2) Women are now sequestered in the privacy of the home. (3) Women according to the formula used in the wedding ceremony are given to be ploughed for the propagation of legitimate children: the female Furies are thus associated with the fertility of the earth. (4) Women are equated with forces of political instability: if the lower orders of society are not accommodated, the power structure will collapse. Aeschylus' trilogy can be read as patriarchal propaganda, but it can also be read as an ironic and symbolic representation of sociopolitical changes currently taking place. Peter Stein was at pains to capture the complexity of the final image in his staging of the final scene. His Furies were bound up in tight cloths to suggest both patriarchal rearing practices (foot-binding, swaddling clothes) and the form of a chrysalis that would one day hatch. His use of a Russian cast emphasized the vulnerability of the new Athenian order.¹⁰ Silviu Purcarete with a Romanian cast had pregnant and faceless Furies lying on the ground to emphasize their link with the earth. The ironic contrast between their lyrical blessing song and their loss of freedom again tied post-communist politics to the question of gender.¹¹

Only the first play survives of Aeschylus' Danaid trilogy, but there too Aeschylus uses a broad historical sweep to represent the changing status of Greek women. In Suppliants, the surviving first play of the trilogy, fifty wild but genetically Greek women (represented by twelve actors) arrive from North Africa as refugees from an arranged marriage which they oppose. They dress with oriental extravagance and engage in ritual displays of grief that include tearing their veils, beating their breasts and lacerating their faces. They engage, therefore, in practices which Athens and other Greek states tried to curb. The king of Argos decides to protect them, after minimal democratic consultations. In the lost second play, when Argos has been defeated in battle, the women murder their Egyptian husbands on their wedding night. One woman opts out of the conspiracy, perhaps because her husband declines to engage in marital rape. It appears that a new sexual regime is now implemented in Argos: whilst males give up Egyptian-style rapacity, women give up their autonomy. Suppliants dramatizes female qualities which alarmed Athenian males: the power to seduce and deceive, the power of emotion expressed through the body, the power and exclusiveness of women in a collective group.

Gender in Suppliants is bound up with ethnicity. It emerges as a Greek principle that the woman submits to her husband, and the husband controls his rapacious instincts. The barbaric east is associated time and again in Greek thinking with femininity and lack of self-control; oriental men were said to fawn before monarchs, dress luxuriously and indulge in emotional displays. The sexual regime of classical Athens relates not only to democracy but also to the ideology of race. The classical historian Herodotus sketched an Egypt where gender roles are reversed. Women urinate standing up, and sell goods in the market, leaving men at home to do the weaving. Most interestingly, Herodotus describes a dramatic festival dedicated to a god he recognized as Dionysos. Women, he says, processed from village to village operating marionettes equipped with a giant mobile phallus. The remarkable thing was not the obscenity, but the fact that women performed these obscenities before men.¹² Similar role inversion is a feature of Aeschylus' Persians, where the widowed queen performs her ritual functions with dignity and authority, but Xerxes her son, defeated by the Greeks in battle, leads the male chorus in a frenzied display of feminine emotion. The Persian males ululate, beat their breasts, tear at their hair, rip their clothing and weep in a manner antithetical to Greek notions of masculinity.

WOMEN ON THE PARTHENON

On the temple of Athene the ‘Maiden’ (Parthenos), sculptors fixed forever in stone myths about the foundation of civilization in general and Athens in particular, myths which represent the viewpoint of those who controlled Athens in around 440 bc. On the four sides of the temple above the outside columns appear four archetypal conflicts: the Greeks sack Troy and retrieve Helen; men fight off centaurs trying to rape their women; Athenian men fight Amazons, with the fight evenly balanced; and the gods beat off primeval giants, with goddesses fighting alongside gods. The Parthenon thus declared women to be equals in the world of the gods, but not in the world of humans, where they may be a cause of trouble like Helen, or vulnerable beings who need protection from the animal lusts of centaurs. Yet women also have the potential to be Amazons strong as men, and there is nothing butch or overtly unfeminine about the way these Amazons are represented. Athene in The Oresteia reminds the audience that she establishes male rule on the very hill where the Amazons once camped when laying siege to the Acropolis.¹³ These Amazons were an important folk memory, and the Amazon myth makes it clear that male dominance never existed in nature, but was at some point imposed. Phaedra, the heroine of Euripides' Hippolytus, is the daughter of an Amazon, and longs to ride a chariot and hunt in the mountains like a man. There is no sense in the play that these longings are unnatural.

The Parthenon is concerned with gender because it was a temple to Athene the Maiden, the female patron of a society ruled by men, and its sculptures explore the ambivalence of a goddess who transcends sexuality. The frieze above the main door depicted the most prestigious ceremony in which Athenian women participated, bringing newly woven robes every four years to dress the goddess's wooden statue. Yet Athene was not only the goddess of weaving but also a warrior. The east pediment depicted the birth of Athene from her single, male parent, and the west her fight with Poseidon. Inside the building, a magnificent statue of Athene the warrior stood on a base depicting Pandora, the first wife and a creature of foolish curiosity, consigned to low status. On Athene's shield, ringed by battling Amazons, was the face of the Gorgon, which turned all men to stone. The power and danger of women was a recurrent theme, and the figure of Athene is a reminder of how complex the male-female relationship actually was. Like the cult of Elizabeth in Shakespeare's England, the cult of Athene was a constant stimulus to the exploration of gender.

WOMEN AND RITUAL

THE WORSHIP OF GODDESSES

Under democracy women became legal and political non-entities. A woman in Euripides makes a case for equality on the grounds of her role in the religious life of the city:

Women are superior to men. I shall prove it … In the matter of religion—the crux in my view—the major role is ours. In Apollo's oracles, women are prophetesses who speak the mind of the god. At the holy seat of Dodona, by the sacred oak-tree, womankind transmits the will of Zeus to all Greeks who want to attend. Rites dedicated to the Fates, or the Nameless Goddesses, would be impure if males took part, but invariably thrive when the participants are women. In religion the female receives her due. So why slander the race of women?¹⁴

As so often in tragedy, the speaker uses bad arguments to support a good case. It is a woman's psychic powers that allow her to act as mouthpiece for male gods, not her reason; and the Fates and Furies (the so-called ‘nameless goddesses’) are marginal figures, worshipped by women because of their association with death. Yet women did indeed play a major part in Athenian religion. The religious life of the democratic state was not centred on oracles in remote places or on primeval Fates and Furies, but on the worship of Olympian deities, particularly the canonical twelve. The twelve traditionally numbered six males and six females, reflecting an ancient quest for equilibrium, but in the democratic era, the sixth female, Hestia goddess of the domestic hearth, yielded up her place to Dionysos. So, for example, it was Dionysos who occupied the twelfth position above the entrance to the Parthenon. Male deities now outnumber females, so the symmetry of the sexes is broken. The goddess of the home is effaced, like her human counterparts, in favour of a god whose worship falls to the community as a whole.

Despite men's monopoly of the political sphere in the democratic period, numerous cults allowed women the chance to emerge from the home and engage in collective activities, often of a para-theatrical nature. Selected Athenian girls went to the outlying shrine of Brauron and donned bear masks in the worship of Artemis, a goddess associated with hunting in the wilderness. In the classical period, however, we cease to hear of Athenian girls at festivals of Artemis giving public displays of dancing, for this type of performance, common in earlier times and in communities like Sparta, was found incompatible with the democratic way of life.

All married Athenian women celebrated a festival of Demeter and Persephone called the Thesmophoria, which linked the sowing of seed in the autumn to female fertility. For three days the women of Athens took over the Pnyx, the male assembly-place, and reverted to a pre-civilized way of living, with no houses or fire for cooking. Males were excluded. The events again symbolically recreated the disappearance of Persephone and her reappearance after the winter. Much obscenity was involved in order to draw a smile from the goddess, who wept for her lost daughter: in the rites of Demeter, excessive feminine modesty was recognized as a bar to human fertility. We can see the Thesmophoria either as a liberating event for women or as a symbolic statement that woman equates with barbarism. Aristophanes made this double-edged festival the setting for a comedy in which Euripides is put on trial for insulting womankind.¹⁵ Yet another festival of Demeter provides the occasion in Aristophanes' Assembly Women when women conspire to take over the city and share the available men on an egalitarian basis. Aristophanes' visions of sexual inversion are inspired by ritual practice.

Both men and women could be initiated into the ‘Mysteries’ at Eleusis, where they received some kind of vision related to reproduction and the after-life. Aristophanes portrays separate male and female processions singing and dancing in the procession.¹⁶ At Eleusis, two priestesses performed a kind of sacred drama: Demeter's daughter Persephone disappeared into a cavern, supposedly abducted by the god of the underworld, and returned to her grieving mother after the symbolic elapse of winter.¹⁷ Women were not prevented entirely from being performers in classical Athens.

WOMEN AND RITUAL IN TRAGEDY

There is a recurrent tension in Greek tragedy between women's claim upon the ritual sphere and men's claim upon the political sphere. A common focus is the role of women as public mourners. A familiar example is Antigone, where Antigone insists upon the right to bury her brother despite Creon's calculated decision to leave the body unburied as an example to others. The moral of the play is clearly that the Creons of this world need to take more account of the female-ritual dimension. Since theatre was both an act of worship of a god and a kind of surrogate political assembly, it was in its nature to explore this middle ground between politics and ritual.

The woman's role as mourner, which the democratic city kept trying to check, was not simply a passive function. The chorus of Euripides' Suppliants, for example, are highly proactive. Argive women appear at the shrine of Demeter in Eleusis, demanding that Athens help them reclaim their dead from the siege of Thebes, so that burial may take place. The king of Athens succumbs to collective female pressure and rescues the corpses, but does nothing to stop the cycle of violence repeating in the next generation. In The Libation Bearers, the chorus of Trojan slave-women prove equally efficacious when they dance their lament around the tomb of Agamemnon, whipping up Orestes to a point of frenzy that allows him to kill. The democratic city suppressed ritual mourning not only because it lent status to aristocratic families, but also because the practice caused actions to be taken on the basis of emotion and codes of honour rather than calculation of the collective interest.

In Aeschylus' Seven Against Thebes the male warrior and politician Eteocles protests at a different kind of ritual. The women of the besieged city insist upon dressing the statues of the Theban gods in robes and garlands, in a rite that recalls for example the dressing of Athene at the Panathenaia. Eteocles condemns the women's howling as bad for morale, and declares that he will never share a house with anyone of the ‘female race’; the woman's place is indoors, he insists, and she should express no opinions about the outdoor world of men. He proceeds to give the women a lecture on ritual practice: they should ululate in an upbeat manner to demoralize the enemy, and then make a cool-headed bargain with the gods, promising a fixed number of sacrifices in return for divine aid. The irony of course is that the women prove right. Eteocles' fate has been determined by the gods because his forebears have transgressed the sexual code. No voice of male authority is left at the end of the play to check the female lament over Eteocles' corpse. As always in Greek tragedy, the rational, male world view proves itself insufficient.

WOMEN AND DIONYSOS

The devotions of Athenian women were, broadly speaking, focussed upon goddesses. Dionysos as twelfth Olympian is something of an anomaly, and according to tradition was worshipped by women who wandered the mountains in a state approaching trance. Athenian vases depict such ‘maenads’ encircling the robe and mask of Dionysos set on top of a pole. Whether these maenads are figures from myth or figures from some contemporary ritual remains unclear. … It is not clear how far classical Athens tolerated a real as opposed to symbolic enactment of … ecstatic practices. The City Dionysia did not exist as a festival until shortly before the emergence of democracy, and here flesh and blood women are conspicuous by their absence. We hear only of a single aristocratic maiden who carried a basket with the first fruits of the spring. Five hundred boys and five hundred men danced in the dithyramb, but no place was found for women.

Dionysos … [when] represented in his traditional guise, [is] mature and bearded. However, when Dionysos is depicted in connexion with theatre, as for example in the famous Pronomos vase …, he is normally presented as a beautiful youth. In The Bacchae, Euripides fixed for ever the new androgynous image. In that play Dionysos breaks down the masculinity of Pentheus, the young fascistic king of Thebes, and persuades him in a famous scene of seduction to dress as a woman in order to spy on his mother and her fellow maenads. Aristophanes parodies this image of Dionysos in The Frogs, specifying a woman's saffron dress as the god's costume. … The idea of androgyny was reinforced in all theatre performances by the appearance of the piper, who wore a long feminine robe. One reason for building a second temple in the theatre complex soon after the classical period must have been to house a statue that represented this new conception of the god.

Dionysos, god of theatre, is a god who dissolves identity in general, and gender in particular. Euripides makes it clear that Pentheus, in trying to suppress maenadism, also suppresses the feminine aspects of himself. When the male in Greek plays seeks absolute dominance, and absolute suppression of the female, then he ends by destroying himself. Perhaps the exclusion of women from the Dionysia created conditions in which men could uncover, within themselves, their own female dimension. One can explain the sexual ambivalence of Dionysos in psychoanalytic terms. Carl Jung argued that everyone has a male animus and a female anima, and countered Freudian patriarchy by arguing that every female has an Electra complex just as every male has an Oedipus complex.¹⁸ It may be more helpful to compare Greek thinking to Chinese ideas about the need to balance the opposed principles of yin and yang.

Whether we take a positive view of Athenian theatre, considering it a public recognition of patriarchy's deficiencies, or a negative view, considering it as an appropriation by men of women's very identity, is a matter of our politics. At all events, male cross-dressing is bound up at a fundamental level with the Greek conception of theatre. The legal political system denied women a place in the new democratic order, and the religio-political institution of theatre addressed the resulting imbalance. The exclusion of women from public performance is in a sense the source of Greek drama's preoccupation with gender.

Despite (or because of) the androgynous conception of Dionysos, the major emblem of the Dionysia was the phallus. Colonies sent golden images of the erect male member to Athens to be paraded through the streets. The chorus of satyrs wore erect life-size phalluses, probably in memory of the festival's foundation myth …. The costume of comedy gave males a long, hanging phallus. Whilst the golden phallus represents the power and fertility of Athens, the erect phallus of the satyr play and the grotesque phallus of comedy represent negatives: the male Athenian who has lost his self-control, or his well-proportioned beauty. Biological drives are at the forefront of the satyric and comic view of life; tragedy, on the other hand, effaced the human body beneath long robes, and made little verbal reference to bodily functions. Where comedy and the satyr play identify human beings in relation to their biological sex, tragedy is concerned with how human beings perform their gender. In tragedy men are shown surrendering, for better or worse, to female emotion and female behaviour.

SEXUALITY

The bodies and minds of women were generally associated with the physical qualities of cold and wet, whilst men were associated with the hot and the dry. These qualities accorded with the contrasting life-styles of women who worked indoors and men who sailed, ploughed, fought and conducted politics in the open sunshine. Women's bodies were conceived as dark, porous containers, with their genitalia indoors, so to speak. These anatomical conceptions correlate with codes of dress. Respectable women covered their heads in public, and their cloaks concealed their bodies, while Athenian men exposed their genitalia in the gymnasium and in athletic contests. Although the female body was conceived as a container, it was a moist container, and the normal classical assumption—despite the views of Aeschylus' Apollo, and later Aristotle—was that women concocted sperm just like men and that female orgasm was needed for reproduction; though of course, it was weaker sperm that engendered females.

Differences between male and female were not seen as absolute but as differences of balance or degree, and Greek males were bisexual in their tastes. Mature Athenian men, married or unmarried, liked to establish sexual relationships with adolescent boys between the age of puberty and the growth of the beard. Sexual intercourse was approved provided the couple faced each other, and the older man took the role of active partner whilst the younger avoided giving signs of sexual pleasure. Plato idealizes young male beauty, and praises pederastic love as the highest form of love. Though his claim that the truly wise man avoids physical consummation may not have accorded with common practice, he provides valuable evidence of cultural anxieties about self-control. Athens was not a society of carefree sexual abandon. The idealization of pederastic love may have been less prominent amongst the poorer classes, who have not left their writings to posterity. It required leisure to cultivate the body beautiful in the gymnasium, and the poor probably felt that elaborate rituals of courtship had an aristocratic flavour. This is one explanation for the striking absence of homosexual love in tragedy. In a lost play by Aeschylus, Achilles recalled embracing his dead boy-friend Patroclus, but elsewhere desire is heterosexual.¹⁹ In Aristophanic comedy homosexual love never has positive associations, but of course it was in the nature of comedy to present the body as ugly. The comic body, with its huge phallus, bulging buttocks and sagging stomach was the antithesis of the body beautiful which many Greeks spent many hours acquiring.

Normally young men are portrayed naked and respectable women clothed on classical vases. If we look at vases where prostitutes are naked, it is frequently hard to tell whether we are looking at a male or female body. The breasts are small, the hips no larger than a man's, the limbs no more or less slender. A single set of aesthetic criteria determined the qualities that made the young human body beautiful. When Aristotle described the biological difference between male and female, and decided to deny women their equal status in reproduction as producers of sperm, he rationalized the difference by describing women as sterile or castrated men. Their menstrual blood was sperm that had not been properly cooked by male heat.²⁰ Aristotle does not speak for the classical age, but his theories accord with an old understanding that male and female differ in degree rather than essence.

It can plausibly be argued that the young chorus-men who impersonated old men or women in the theatre were engaged in a rite of passage, acquiring virility through impersonating those who lacked virility. When playing a woman, a young man encountered not an opposite but an aspect of himself that had to be transcended. After all, he knew what it was to be loved by a man. Transvestism was shameful in daily life, as Pentheus is acutely aware, but was perfectly admissible in a ritual context. In an Athenian festival called the ‘vine-bearing’, for example, two beautiful young men processed out of one of Dionysos' temples dressed as women. The rite celebrated a ruse played by Theseus when he dressed two men as girls destined for the minotaur. Judith Butler writes that ‘The performance of drag plays upon the distinction between the anatomy of the performer and the gender that is being performed.’²¹ Young men playing women in a tragedy or in the vine-bearing were not engaged in anything like modern drag because the anatomical distinction was not conceived in such clear-cut terms as it is today.

The most elaborate exercise in cross-dressing in Greek drama is found in Aristophanes' Assembly Women. Here a group of women (played by male actors, of course) steal their husbands' cloaks, sticks and shoes, and with the further aid of false beards successfully hijack the assembly. They expose how far masculinity is a construct by tanning their skin in the sun, avoiding perfume, and declining to shave their body hair. The mannerisms of men are easily acquired, and the main giveaway is their habit of invoking the goddesses whose cults have been the focus of all social activity.

FEMINIST APPROACHES

AMERICAN FEMINISM

In a sense the feminist critique of Greek tragedy begins with Aristophanes. In Women at the Thesmophoria, the premise of the plot is that women gathered for their festival are determined to indict Euripides for slander. The focus of their attack is the characterization of Phaedra in Euripides' play Hippolytus. Phaedra is a married woman who tries to seduce her stepson, and the women allege that all husbands in Athens now suspect their wives of adultery. The debate about Euripides' misogyny has rumbled on ever since.

Sarah Pomeroy in a pioneering feminist study of 1975 spoke up for Euripides:

My subjective estimate of Euripides is favorable. I do not think it misogynistic to present women as strong, assertive, successful, and sexually demanding even if they are also selfish or villainous. Other feminists share my opinion, and British suffragists used to recite speeches from Euripides at their meetings.²²

Pomeroy values Euripides, in comparison with Sophocles and Aeschylus, because his women are ‘scaled down closer to life’.²³ The proposition that Euripides reflects Athenian social conditions is certainly one that can be defended. Consider, for example, the case of Medea, a highly educated princess from a city on the Black Sea who has migrated to Corinth. Her husband suddenly decides to divorce her because he wants to marry a Corinthian. Twenty years before Euripides' play, a change in Athenian law meant that the children of non-Athenian brides would be considered illegitimate. At the time when Euripides wrote, the first children of these unions would recently have been refused citizenship.²⁴ Many real-life women must have found themselves in Medea's predicament. Pomeroy admires Euripides as a realist playwright, and her views echo those of early suffragettes. Following a celebrated production by Granville Barker in 1907, members of the Actresses' Franchise League incorporated extracts into their repertoire.²⁵

By 1985 the climate had changed. Sue-Ellen Case published a manifesto in which she declared that it was ‘no longer possible to believe that the portrayal of women in classical plays by men relates to actual women’.²⁶ The key text now became the Oresteia, with its ‘public rationalization of misogyny’ effected through the judgement of Athene. Case argued that the feminist reader should avoid reading in sympathy with figures like Medea, but read against the text, and she implied that feminist actresses and directors should leave Greek tragedy to men. Her thinking was in line with that of Tony Harrison, who decided that the Oresteia should be ‘vacuum-sealed in maleness because the play seemed to have been written to overthrow … dynamic female images … and to present some kind of male image liberated from this defeat of the female principle’.²⁷ Peter Hall adopted an all-male cast when he produced Harrison's translation in London in 1981.

Case assimilates Greek performance to drag, and argues that female roles are male stereotypes:

Though all the characters were formalised and masked, even with cross-gender casting for female characters these were distinguished in kind from the male characters. A subtextual message was delivered about the nature of the female gender, its behaviour, appearance and formal distance from representation of the male.²⁸

It is hard to find evidence to support her proposition. The male actor of forty-something who played a female character was not doing anything that differed in kind from the activity of representing a male youth or a slave or an old man. All were types. The long robes and full head mask prevented the audience from seeing the actor's anatomy in counterpoint to the role. Case's distinction between ‘real women’ and ‘masks of patriarchal production’ does not relate to the real masks that were a defining feature of Greek performance.²⁹

A further weakness in Case's argument is her readiness to read Greek tragedy through the mediation of Aristotle's Poetics. … She lays much stress on Aristotle's statement that female characters should not exhibit the courage or intellect of men,³⁰ without recognizing that the Macedonian philosopher was engaged in sanitizing Athenian tragedy. Whatever the views of Aristotle, Medea does not, on the face of it, lack either courage or intellect. I find it more helpful to start from the premise that Greek tragedy explored competing and contested values, rather than the premise that it delivered a static ideology—which is not to deny that men alone set the agenda and debated the issues.

In the same year that Case published her essay, Froma Zeitlin offered classicists a new direction, tying literary criticism to anthropology. She considers tragedy to be ‘a kind of recurrent masculine initiation, for adults as well as for the young’, and more broadly a mode of education for the citizen. Consequently ‘the self that is really at stake is to be identified with the male, while the woman is assigned the role of the radical other’.³¹ The feminization of the god Dionysos and the exclusion of women from the festival are thus highly significant. It was in the nature of the theatrical medium, Zeitlin argues, to centre on women, for theatre is the medium of the body, and women were particularly associated with the body through their role in reproduction and in burial rites. As ‘the radical other’ the woman served to define the true male, just as the Persian served to define the true Greek. Whilst Case reads plays as representations of Greek society skewed and falsified by the male gaze, Zeitlin sees them as authentic records of a male ritual conducted in response to flesh and blood women. Case dismisses female roles as stereotypical masks, but Zeitlin provides a more dynamic view of those roles, opening the way for female practitioners to recolonize the ‘radical other’. A recent study of Aristophanes by Lauren Taafe, owing much to Zeitlin, ends with specific proposals as to how a feminist theatre company might proceed.³²

FRENCH FEMINISM

French feminists have often found Greek drama relevant to their concerns. As a psychoanalyst, Luce Irigaray shares Freud's perception that Greek myths relate to fundamental psychic processes: ‘Give or take a few additions and retractions, our imaginary still functions in accordance with the schema established through Greek mythologies and tragedies.’ Irigaray condemns Freud for putting all his emphasis on the primal murder of the father-figure, Laius, and argues that Freud ‘forgets a more archaic murder, that of the mother, necessitated by the establishment of a certain order in the polis’. The murder of Clytaemnestra seems to her particularly important because it symbolizes the suppression of the mother, a key feature of western civilization. Athene, bonded only to her father, embodies an ideal of femininity which Irigaray deplores. ‘The mythology underlying patriarchy has not changed. What the Oresteia describes for us still takes place.’³³

A feature of patriarchy for Irigaray is the imposition of the ‘rule of language’ in place of the world of the flesh which unites the mother to the child in her womb. The same distinction between language and the body has preoccupied Hélène Cixous, who develops a notion of ‘feminine writing’ effected through the body. ‘Why so few texts?’ she asks, and answers: ‘Because so few women have as yet won back their body. Women must write through their bodies’.³⁴ The logic of this position drew her to theatre, though a theatre in which women would not like Electra and Antigone be offered as the eternal sacrificial object. ‘It is high time’, she wrote in 1977, ‘that women gave back to the theatre its fortunate position, its raison d'être and what makes it different—the fact that there it is possible to get across the living, breathing, speaking body’.³⁵ And so began a long collaboration with the (female) French director, Ariane Mnouchkine. Cixous translated the final play of Les Atrides, Mnouchkine's version of the Oresteia presented in 1991/2. Mnouchkine's assumptions about gender are in line with those of Cixous and Irigaray, and inform her production at every point.

As an introduction to the three plays of Aeschylus, Mnouchkine presented Euripides' Iphigenia at Aulis, which tells how Agamemnon sacrificed his and Clytaemnestra's daughter in order to secure a fair wind to sail to Troy. This extension of the narrative established Clytaemnestra as the injured party, and Les Atrides became her story, the story of the murder of the primal mother. The production used make-up masks, formal costumes and movement reminiscent of kathakali, the classical dance-drama of India. This orientalized style turned the characters into mythic prototypes rather than members of a specific society. It placed Aeschylean theatre not as the great ancestor of ‘our’ western theatre but as something strange and hard to account for. It related the marginalization of women to the marginalization of the east by a male-dominated western tradition. But most important of all, it created the conditions for a kind of écriture corporelle, a ‘writing with the body’. As Cixous writes: ‘Where does the tragedy first of all take place? In the body, in the stomach, in the legs, as we know since the Greek tragedies. Aeschylus' characters tell, first and foremost, a body state.’³⁶ While most male directors like Hall and Stein give first emphasis to the text, Mnouchkine adopts the priorities of eastern theatre and thinks first of the actor's body. The masks, extraordinary costumes and ever-present percussionist fostered an acting style in which the body became more eloquent than words. The element of dance, eliminated in most contemporary performances of Greek tragedy, was allowed the dominance that it had in Athens. Another important device was the doubling of actors, where Mnouchkine reverted to and perhaps rediscovered the power of an Aeschylean practice. … The player of Agamemnon became Agamemnon's son Orestes; Clytaemnestra became Athene who forgives Clytaemnestra's murderer; and Iphigenia the victim became first her vengeful sister Electra and then leader of the Furies. The doubling disorientates the spectator, and suggests that the past is contained in the present, that individuality and uniqueness are a ‘phallocentric’ obsession. As Cixous puts it, ‘Pure I, identified to I-self, does not exist.’³⁷

Notes

1. Sappho, fragment 114.

2. Sappho, fragment 140a. The texts are analyzed by Richard Seaford in Reciprocity and Ritual (Oxford University Press, 1994), 278-80; see also Denys Page, Sappho and Alcaeus (Oxford University Press, 1955), 122, 127.

3. Thucydides, History of the Peloponnesian War, ii.45.

4. Simon Goldhill's arguments seem to me compelling in ‘Representing democracy: women at the Great Dionysia’ in Ritual, Finance, Politics, ed. R. Osborne and S. Hornblower (Oxford University Press, 1994), 347-69. For the alternative view, see COAD, 286-7.

5. Jean Genet, The Blacks, tr. B. Frechtman (London: Faber, 1960). I owe this point to an unpublished paper by Nurit Yaari: ‘Women as spectators in classical Athens’.

6. See Nicole Loraux, The Children of Athena, tr. C. Levine (Princeton University Press, 1993), 179-81.

7. Plutarch, Life of Solon, 20-1, 12; Seaford, Reciprocity and Ritual, 78-86.

8. See Plutarch, Life of Lycurgus, 14.

9. Eumenides, 658-61.

10. First performed in the Berlin Schaubühne in 1980 and revived with a Russian cast in 1994.

11. First performed in Limoges in 1996, and revived by the National Theatre of Craiova in 1998.

12. Histories, ii.35, 48.

13. Eumenides, 685-9.

14. Euripides, The Captive Melanippe. The surviving fragments can be read, in a translation by M. J. Cropp, in Euripides, Selected Fragmentary Plays, vol. i, ed. C. Collard et al. (Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1995), 249-65.

15. Aristophanes, Women at the Thesmophoria (translated in the Penguin edition as The Poet and the Women; in the Methuen edition as Festival Time); on the festival, see A. M. Bowie, Aristophanes: myth, ritual, society (Cambridge University Press, 1993), 205-12.

16. The Frogs, 405-16.

17. See Kevin Clinton, Myth and Cult: the iconography of the Eleusinian Mysteries (Stockholm: Svenska Institutet i Athen, 1992), 87-9.

18. C. G. Jung, Freud and Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1961), 152-5.

19. The fragments of Myrmidons can be read in vol. ii of the Loeb edition of Aeschylus, tr. H. W. Smyth (London: Heinemann, 1967), 422-6.

20. On the Generation of Animals, 1.20.

21. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (London: Routledge, 1990), 137.

22. Sarah Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: women in classical antiquity (New York: Schocken, 1975), 107-8.

23. Ibid., 112.

24. See Daniel Ogden, Greek Bastardy in the Classical and Hellenistic Worlds (Oxford University Press, 1996), 63, 194-6.

25. See Edith Hall, ‘Medea and British legislation before the First World War’, Greece and Rome 46 (1999), 42-77; Duncan Wilson, Gilbert Murray OM (Oxford University Press, 1987), 181.

26. Sue-Ellen Case, ‘Classic drag: the Greek creation of female parts’ Theatre Journal 37 (1985), 317-27; reprinted in substance in Feminism and Theatre (London: Macmillan, 1988).

27. Tony Harrison, interview in Marianne McDonald, Ancient Sun, Modern Light: Greek drama on the modern stage (Columbia University Press, 1992), 143.

28. Sue-Ellen Case, in Feminism and Theatre 11.

29. Case, in Feminism and Theatre 7.

30. Case, in Feminism and Theatre 17, citing Poetics, xv.1454a - ALC, 110.

31. Froma Zeitlin, ‘Playing the other: theater, theatricality and the feminine in Greek drama’ in NTDWD, 68; originally published in Representations 11 (1985), 63-94.

32. Lauren K. Taafe, Aristophanes and Women (New York and London: Routledge, 1993), 144-6.

33. Luce Irigaray, ‘The bodily encounter with the mother’ (1981) in The Irigaray Reader, ed. M. Whitford (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 34-46, pp. 36-7.

34. Hélène Cixous, ‘The laugh of the Medusa’ in New French Feminisms, ed. E. Marks and I. de Courtivron (Brighton: Harvester, 1980), 245-64, p. 256.

35. Hélène Cixous, ‘Aller à la mer’ in Modern Drama 27 (1984), 546-8.

36. The Hélène Cixous Reader, ed. S. Sellers (London: Routledge, 1994), ‘Preface’, xix.

37. Ibid., xviii.