Sex, Status, and Survival in Hellenistic Athens: A Study of Women in New Comedy

Abstract

GOMME'S ESSAY on the position of women in Athens, ' written in 1925, has remained a classic source for students of this topic, and its humanity and breadth of scope still has much to teach us after fifty years. Yet by the very fact of quoting the greatest thinkers, by his use of the royal women of Greek tragedy, and by his interest in the no less aristocratic values of a Pericles, he provides a picture unrepresentative of the great bulk of bourgeois Athenians (gentlemen and would-be gentlemen), whose less enlightened standards affected a far greater number of women. My purpose in writing this essay is more limited, but perhaps more attainable; to test and use the evidence of Menandrian2 comedy in order to present an account of the social roles available to different categories of women in the everyday world of around 300 B.C.: this will require a brief introduction, distinguishing the legal and economic factors which affected their choice of life, considering their social mobility and the degree to which they were protected or exposed by the laws and conventions of their world.