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ἐλάχɩστον … ἐν τοῖς ἄρσεσι κλέος: Thucydides, Women, and the Limits of Rational Analysis

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Thomas E. J. Wiedemann
Thomas E. J. Wiedemann
Affiliation:
I am particularly greatful to Prof. H. Strasburger and Jürgen Malitz for their advice and criticism.
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Extract

The comparative infrequency of references to women in Thucydides' history has often been remarked upon, and explained as due in part to the choice of warfare as his theme, and in part to the success of the Greek republics in excluding women from the political arena. As Pericles says in his funeral speech, women ought to give their menfolk the least possible cause to have to take note of them (2.45.2). But the exclusion of women from the subject-matter of historical discourse is peculiarly Thucydidean. Powell's Lexicon tells us that Thucydides' contemporary Herodotus uses γ⋯νηs 373 times, while the number of references to women/wives, mothers, priestesses etc. in Thucydides is less than fifty. This does not mean of course that Thucydides has no interest in, or sympathy for, women: frequently he mentions them as the passive objects of military circumstances precisely in order to underline the tragic effects of warfare. But some of the references to women are decidedly curious. There is a clear example in the account of the unsuccessful Theban attack on Plataea in 431 B.C., with which active hostilities began. Thucydides tells us that some of the Thebans who were locked into the town escaped by breaking open a deserted gate without being noticed (2.4.4). Why does he gratuitously mention that it was a women – presumably a Plataean – who gave her enemies an axe: γυναικ⋯ς δο⋯σης π⋯λɛκυν Clearly, it is an overimplification to say that Thucydides ignores women.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 30 , Issue 2 , October 1983 , pp. 163 - 170
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1983

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References

Notes

1. E.g. Strasburger, H., ‘Der Geschichtsbegriff des Thukydides’, Studien zur Alten Geschichte 2 (Hildesheim, 1982), 787fGoogle Scholar. On the position of women generally, Fisher, N. R. E., Social Values in Classical Athens (London, 1976), pp. 7ffGoogle Scholar.; Pomeroy, S. B., Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York, 1975), chs. 4–6Google Scholar; Gould, J., ‘Women in Classical Athens’, JHS 100 (1980), 38–59CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Schapps, D., ‘The Women of Greece in Wartime’, CPh 77 (1982), 193–213Google Scholar, is a useful list of historical writers' representations of the roles typically ascribed to women – though his proposition that ‘The women with whom we are dealing are real ones, not literary characters invented by men’ (212) is highly questionable. Walcot, P., ‘The funeral Speech. A Study of Values’, G&R 20 (1973), 111–21Google Scholar, is a reminder that a Greek peasant's ideal of democracy was not that of a western liberal.

2. Cf. Powell, J. E., Lexicon to Herodotus (Cambridge, 1938)Google Scholar; Betant, E. A., Lexicon Thucydideum (Geneva, 1843Google Scholar; repr. Hildesheim, 1961). I have omitted a consideration of the intervention of goddesses (e.g. 4.116.2), since they involve different problems. It is ironic in view of Thucydides' attitude to Persians, females, and the divine, that his text should end with a Persian sacrificing to a female deity.

3. Cf. Malitz, J., ‘Thucydides' Weg zur Geschichtsschreibung’, Historia 31 (1982), 267–89, esp. 284Google Scholar.

4. Typically, Demosthenes, , Against Neaira: 59, 122Google Scholar.

5. This point is noted by Kassel, R., Quomodo quibus locis apud veteres scriptores Graecos infantes atque parvuli pueri inducantur describantur commemorentur (Wiirzburg, 1954), 76 n. 267Google Scholar.

6. I would prefer to take ⋯ρχαιολɛγɛῑν to mean ‘speaking in an old-fashioned way’ (with Gomme, p. 446), rather than as ‘talking about (great victories of) the past’ (with LSJ). The context would surely allow either interpretation.

7. See the introduction to the Bristol Classical Press reprint of Marchant, E. C., Thucydides: Book I (Bristol, 1983)Google Scholar.

8. For example, at Pylos: Stahl, H.-P., Thukydides, (Munich, 1966), pp. 130ff.Google Scholar

9. Cf. Gomme, , Commentary II, p. 90 n. 1Google Scholar; Westlake, H. D., ‘Irrelevant Notes in Thucydides’, Essays on the Greek Historians and Greek History (Manchester, 1969), p. 12Google Scholar.

10. If we accept the traditional view of the role of the Prophetes in interpreting the Pythia's utterances: cf. Parke, H. W., Greek Oracles (London, 1967), pp. 83f.Google ScholarContra: Fontenrose, J., The Delphic Oracle (Univ. California Press, 1978), pp. 196ff.Google Scholar (who does not discuss this passage).

11. Stahl, H.-P., Thukydides, ch. 4, pp. 65ff.Google Scholar