Author Peter Taylor – Gooby
Athens of the fifth century BCE was a city of contradictions. It was the foremost city of the Eastern Mediterranean, the cradle of democracy where some of the first scholarly history and philosophy was written, home to dramatists such as Sophocles and Euripides whose work is still performed, where the Parthenon and the Areopagus still attract millions of visitors annually.
Yet the wealth of the city was based on forced contributions from subject states and the work of slaves chained underground in the silver mines for all their short lives. The rights to vote and hold public office were confined to male citizens, a small minority, perhaps a fifth of the population, who met in the Assembly, the key decision-making body. Immigrants were heavily taxed and treated with contempt.
Aspasia in Debate Extract II image Wikipedia
Athens was a divided society. Demosthenes, the eminent lawyer and politician, summed up (men’s) attitudes to women in a much-quoted speech:
“We keep sex-workers for the sake of pleasure, females slaves for our daily care and wives to give us legitimate children and to be the guardians of our household.”
Women had virtually no rights and, in families that could afford it, were hidden away in the home. If they went out they would wear head scarves and veils. And run their errands to the temple or the market as unobtrusively as possible.
Pericles the leading politician of the golden age, and Aspasia’s lover, remarked in his most famous speech, the Funeral Oration of 429 BCE:
“It is the greatest glory for a woman never to be talked about for good or for evil among men.”
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