The Female Intruder: Women in Fifth-century Drama

IT is exceedingly difficult to assess the position held by women in fifth-century Athens.1 When we examine their position in fourth-century law, we find them defined as near slaves, or as perpetual minors. In fifth-century history, at least as Thucydides saw it, there were no women. Yet women play a prominent part in Athenian literature and visual arts; they are not invisible, not helpless as. children, not creatures of the harem. 2 These two bodies of evidence can be reconciled in several ways. We can conclude that drama reveals how the restrictions on women worked out in practice, that women were not forced to remain inside the role assigned them. This can be supported with what signs there are that women did not stay inside the house, that they did have an interest in politics, and so on. Or we can assume that drama is about the fantasy of Athenians, not about their lives, and that the explanation for the importance of women in drama is to be found more in the fantasies of the nursery than in actual life. A third course is to say that the women of the drama are drawn from epic models, and hence have nothing to do with the contemporary scene.3 Although these conclusions seem to contradict each other, none of them can be rejected out of hand. Literature works on all three levels at once. An explanation of women's role in drama must account for literature's relationship with myth, with the psyche, and with contemporary life. However, before attempting such an explanation, we should observe one salient feature of both strands of evidence: neither literature nor the social documents are about women's place in society. The social documents do not show us actual women; the drama does not show us an actual society. That the drama does not show an actual society may be obvious; that the social documents do not show us actual women may be less so. For instance, let us consider the matter of ownership of property. If ownership means the ability to alienate, as Aristotle said, and if the ability to alienate means the ability to sign the deed, then there seems to be no question of any Athenian woman's owning property.4 However, if we say that ownership resides in the person who decides to alienate, we find that the law tells us nothing about who owns, for example, a wife's dowry property. The law is only interested in who appears to make the transaction. Thus the law defines the ideal roles of men and women, while it is silent concerning their actual