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Question 3

Bettany, women in Athens are presented as cloistered and veiled. Why then do so many dramas feature – indeed star – powerful women eg Medea, the Women of Troy, and Elektra to name a few?

(From Justine, Edinburgh)

Bettany Hughes: You are right Justine there is a conflict here. It was one of my few regrets with this programme that we did not have more time to analyse in finer detail the role and status of women at this time.

Women were indeed cloistered and (sometimes) veiled, but I think within the academic community we are moving on from a generalised view that they were predominantly penned and silenced at home. If you look on the Telegraph's website there is one excerpt from a couple of our programme sequences which hit the UK cutting room floor in the very final stages of editing. One refers to the strange festival of Thesmophoria, a woman-only affair. These were heady events, where women met together at night to indulge in intense, significant, sensual rituals (worshipping the goddess of crop fertility and livestock, Demeter). The women of Ancient Athens must have had quite some sense of themselves when participating in this kind of activity. There is no question that their role would have been valued in civic terms.

Women were believed to be very close to the spirit world and therefore their intervention in ritual was thought essential. Today we are used to religious ritual being a little marginalised in contemporary society. But in fifth-century Athens religion was all, so you are right, it is dangerous to play down the civic role that women enjoyed. There is a particular vase in the British Museum (from memory it is room 69) where women at a festival for Adonis appear to be enjoying themselves immensely.

What we were trying to approach in the series was a prevailing attitude to/anxiety about women which is clear both from the literature and the archaeology of the time. I am particularly interested in those telling moments where men like Aristophanes and Socrates seem to let down the armour a little, and muse 'well…what if we've got this all wrong…what if women should in fact have a political role too.' The fact that this question hovers on their lips suggests that the ghost of a possibility (where citizen women have similar rights to men) is circulating in Athenian thought.

As you point out, many heroines of Greek drama are extremely powerful…although often petrifying in their strength and capacity for hysteria. Much ink has been spilt on this topic; I think Edith Hall and Helen King are particularly useful. Check out what they have to say (and you could dip into my book, 'Helen of Troy: Goddess, Princess, Whore' to see what trouble the anti-heroine Helen gives the Greeks).

Earlier in the summer I took part in the XIII International Meeting at Delphi (this year dealing with women in Greek Drama). The papers will all be published in early 2008, you might be interested in the results. I'll be exploring all these themes ( ref. women and their role in the early democracy and fifth-century society, the veiling of women, the perceptions of women, women on stage, their day to day lives) in some detail in my forthcoming book on Socrates and Aspasia…I'll let you know when it is about to be unleashed! Thanks for your question.

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