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Eros and the Woman

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  04 July 2014

Page duBois
Page duBois*
Affiliation:
University of California, San Diego
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Extract

Well then, gentlemen, the earthly Aphrodite's Love is a very earthly Love indeed, and does his work entirely at random. It is he that governs the passions of the vulgar. For, first, they are as much attracted by women as by boys; next, whoever they may love, their desires are of the body rather than of the soul; and, finally, they make a point of courting the shallowest people they can find, looking forward to the mere act of fruition and careless whether it be a worthy or unworthy consummation. And hence they take their pleasures where they find them, good and bad alike. For this is the Love of the younger Aphrodite, whose nature partakes of both male and female.

Pausanias, in Plato's Symposium (181b)

Type
Research Article
Information
Ramus , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , 1992 , pp. 97 - 116
Copyright
Copyright © Aureal Publications 1992

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References

1. Halperin, David M., Winkler, John J. and Zeitlin, Froma I. (eds.), Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton 1990), 135–69Google Scholar.

2. Of course there are many voices in the Platonic dialogues, and we cannot attribute to Plato the views expressed by Pausanias. However, it has seemed to me that a current of misogyny runs through Plato’s works, and that even such moments as the discourse of Diotima in the Symposium reveal Plato’s desire to appropriate women’s powers, rather than to honour them. See duBois, P., Sowing the Body: Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women (Chicago 1988), 181–83CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For another point of view, see Halperin, David, One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (New York and London 1990), 113–51Google Scholar.

3. Foucault, Michel, The Use of Pleasure (The History of Sexuality Vol. 2), tr. Hurley, Robert (New York 1985)Google Scholar.

4. Ibid. 21.

5. The translation is that of Willis Barnstone (Sappho and the Greek Lyric Poets [New York 1988], 50).

6. For further evidence concerning the erotic life of the Greeks, of the sort that Foucault ignores, see Aristophanes’ positive representations of heterosexuality. Although I find these often to be misogynist, they are not anti-erotic in the sense that Hesiod’s and Plato’s formulations often are.

7. Anne Carson, ‘Putting Her in Her Place: Woman, Dirt, and Desire’, in Halperin et al. (n.1 above), 135–69. For many details concerning women’s bodies in medical discourse, see also Anne Ellis Hanson, ‘The Medical Writers’ Woman’, ibid. 309–38.

8. The translation is that of Athanassakis, Apostolos N. (Hesiod: Theogony, Works and Days, Shield [Baltimore and London 1983], 86Google Scholar). All citations from the text of Hesiod in English are taken from this translation.

9. Jean-Pierre Vernant, ‘One … Two … Three … Eros’, tr. Deborah Lyons, in Halperin et al. (n.1 above), 465–77. This essay appeared as ‘Un, deux, trois: Eros’, in Vernant, Jean-Pierre, L’individu, la more, l’amour. Soi-même et I’autre en Grèce ancienne (Paris 1989), 153–71Google Scholar.

10. Vernant relies for the description of the two Erotes on the work of Rudhardt, Jean, Le Rôle d’Eros et d’Aphrodite dans les cosmologies grecques (Paris 1986)Google Scholar. See also Bonnafé, Annie, Eros et Eris. Manages divins et my the de succession chez Hésiode (Lyon 1985)Google Scholar. Bonnafé argues that the Theogony is finally almost a hymn in praise of Zeus, rather than a cyclical account of divine succession (120). Cf. 114: ‘Entre Ouranos ou Cronos—qui font mauvais usage de Verōs et ce faisant instaurent l’un l’echthra, l’autre l’eris—et Zeus, qui les neutralise l’une et l’autre en instaurant la philotēs—par tous les moyens, mais essentiellement par l’union amoureuse—, 1’opposition est totale.’

11. See also Mondi, Robert, ‘XAOΣ and the Hesiodic Cosmogony’, HSCP 92 (1989), 1–41Google Scholar. He argues that khaos is ‘the state or condition of undifferentiated formlessness regarded as an entity in itself’ (25). He translates the beginning of the Hesiodic cosmogony, Theogony 116f: ‘At first all was formless; then the earth came into existence.’ See also Sussman, Linda S., ‘The Birth of the Gods: Sexuality, Conflict and Cosmic Structure in Hesiod’s Theogony’, Ramus 7(1978),61–77CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

12. Vernant (n.9 above), 466.

13. Ibid. 467.

14. See P. duBois (n.2 above), 10–17.

15. Arthur, Marilyn, ‘Cultural Strategies in Hesiod’s Theogony: Law, Family, Society’, Arethusa 15 (1982), 63–82Google Scholar, and ‘The Dream of a World without Women: Poetics and the Circles of Order in the Theogony Prooemium’, Arethusa 16 (1983), 97–116Google Scholar.

16. Pucci, Pietro, Hesiod and the Language of Poetry (Baltimore 1977), 95Google Scholar. See also Vernant, Jean-Pierre, ‘Le mythe prométhéen chez Hesiode: Théogonie 535–616; Travaux 42–105’, in Il mito greco (Rome 1977), 91–106Google Scholar; Mason, Peter, ‘Third Person/Second Sex: Patterns of Sexual Asymmetry in the Theogony of Hesiodos’, in Blok, Josine and Mason, Peter (eds.), Sexual Asymmetry: Studies in Ancient Society (Amsterdam 1987), 147–68Google Scholar; and Leveque, Pierre, ‘Pandora ou la terrifiante feminité’, Kernos 1 (1988), 49–62Google Scholar.

17. Pucci (n.l6 above), 86. See also Marquardt, P.A., ‘Hesiod’s Ambiguous View of Women’, CP77 (1982), 283–91Google Scholar.

18. See McLaughlin, J.D., ‘Who Was Hesiod’s Pandora?’, Maia 33 (1981), 17fGoogle Scholar.

19. Pucci (n.16 above), 93.

20. On this passage (especially 598f.) see Sussman, Linda S., ‘Workers and Drones: Labor, Idleness and Gender Definition in Hesiod’s Beehive’, Arethusa 11 (1978—a special issue on Women in the Ancient World), 27–41Google Scholar, and Nicole Loraux, ‘Sur la race des femmes et quelquesunes de ses tribus’, ibid. 46f. See also Roscalla, Fabio, ‘La descrizione del se e dell’altro: api ed alveare da Esiodo e Semonide’, QUCC 58 (1988), 23–47Google Scholar at 47: ‘L’alveare in sintesi ha proprio rappresentato questo per i maschi greci: il desiderio di una vita che possa escludere l’altra, la donna; il desiderio di riconoscersi in un genos chiuso e nello stesso tempo attivo, capace di svolgere tutte le funzioni essenziali, e così, negando la sessualità, neutralizzare il potere delle gunaikes, per permetter agli andres, finalmente di nuovo anthrōpoi, di vivere e riprodursi per sempre senza conflitti come api felici.’

21. On personification, see Northrup, M.D., The Use of Personification in Hesiod and the Presocratics (Diss. Brown University, Providence 1976)Google Scholar.

22. Bonnafé (n.10 above, 122) points out that Philotes, sister of Eris, plays the role of a middle term between Eros and Eris.

23. See Olstein, K., ‘Pandora and Dike in Hesiod’s Works and Days’, Emerita 48 (1980), 295–312CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

24. See Hoffmann, C., ‘Pandora, la jarre et l’espoir’, Études rurales 97–98 (1985), 119–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and ‘Pandora, Hésiode et les femmes’, MH 43 (1986), 231–46Google Scholar. Elpis, ‘hope’ or ‘expectation’, remains in the jar, but this is in spite of Pandora’s intent or accident. Jean-Pierre Vernant argues that in this text elpis is expectation of both good and bad: see Detienne, Marcel, Vernant, Jean-Pierre, et al., La cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (Paris 1979)Google Scholar.

25. As Apostolos Athanassakis points out (personal communication), a woman one married might have been more independent than a purchased one. Such a woman might be more difficult to manage and less likely to increase one’s capital.

26. See P. duBois (n.2 above), 110–29, on the metaphor associating women’s bodies with ovens. Aristophanes finds this analogy highly amusing.

27. Marcel Detienne, The Gardens of Adonis: Spices in Greek Mythobgy, tr. Janet Lloyd (Atlantic Highlands NJ 1977), 121; cf. ibid. 125: ‘Sexual activity, even at the appropriate time and within the bounds of married life, was considered by the Pythagoreans to be a source of debilitation, the degree of which varied according to season … In the summer … it became so extreme that the Pythagoreans had no hesitation, on this score alone, in forbidding all sexual activity during the hot season.’

28. Arrighetti, G., in ‘II misoginismo di Esiodo’, Misoginia e maschitismo in Grecia e in Roma (Genova 1981), 27–48Google Scholar, denies that Hesiod is misogynist.

29. On this passage in general, see Ramnoux, Clemence, ‘Les femmes de Zeus; Hésiode, Théogonie, vers 885–955’, in Poikilia: Études offertes à Jean-Pierre Vernant (Paris 1987), 155–64Google Scholar.

30. The Amazons, violent women, similarly strike on the field of battle. See duBois, P., Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Prehistory of the Great Chain of Being (Ann Arbor 1982)Google Scholar.

31. Loraux, Nicole, ‘Therefore Socrates is Immortal’, tr. Lloyd, Janet, in Zone 4 (1989)Google Scholar, ‘Fragments for a History of the Human Body, Part Two’ (published in French as ‘Done Socrate est immortel’, Les expériences de Tirésias. Le féminin et l’homme grec [Paris 1989]), 182Google Scholar.

32. See West, M.L., The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women. Its Nature, Structure, and Origins (Oxford 1985)Google Scholar.