I wanted to know more about women's role at the time of the Trojan war. A great site (see below) by Christopher Witcomb, Professor of Art History at Sweet Briar College helped answer my questions and more. (BTW, that's a painting by Leonardo da Vinci of Helen of Troy's mother and father, Leda and the Swan. More on that later.)According to Professor Witcomb:
One of the main determinants of whether a society is patriarchial or matriarchial are inheritance laws. At the time of The Iliad, the women of the Aegean passed property down to daughters. It was only after the Indo-European invaders came and imposed their social structure that women went from being owners to owned. More societal threads overlaid on the original tapestry!By the time the Bronze Age myths and legends began to be written down, starting in the 8th century BCE with Homer, the patriarchal Greek culture which had by then established itself on the mainland wished to see reflected in them its own social value system.
Yet, despite the patriarchal adjustments made to the stories, retained within them, like the pre-Greek identity hidden beneath the later "Greek" names [e.g., Odysseus, Achilles, Aphrodite are not actually Greek names], are clues which indicate that the original cultural context within which these stories were composed was a matrilineal one.
One other note of interest,Professor Witcomb explains that a husband-less pregnant woman was an "affront to patriarchal sensibilities [which was therefore] softened with the explanation that each child was in fact fathered by a god"; therefore, Helen's father became Zeus (in the form of a swan) and her mother was no
longer wanton.
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/snakegoddess/aegeanmatriliny.html
Jessica, great post! We'll discuss this in more detail in the first session this evening, but a word or two here won't hurt either. With women's history, particularly for the ancient world and the Aegean Bronze Age in particular, we have a real problem with sources. There are very few, most have "issues" of one kind or another (e.g. the relationship between myth and history), and we're almost entirely reliant upon what _men_ had to say about women, and as you have seen from "The Iliad" alone, not the rosiest picture of women, certainly not one in keeping with prevailing views in the 21st century western world. Our own view of things tends to color our reading of the past as well.
ReplyDeleteWitcomb provides some wonderful information, but like many in my field, I am more cautious and less sure. While Mycenaean peoples certainly appear to have been patriarchal, it is unclear as yet just what connection there was between pre-Mycenaean, Mycenaean and the myths of Homer's time—much of what we read has parallels elsewhere in Indo-Euro. cultures; lacking pre-Bronze Age versions, we can only guess and I am not happy even to do that normally.
Were they matrilineal or not? We don't know. Mythology is rather tantalizing (pardon the pun) as a historical source, but it is not history, so determining to what degree these people(s) were matrilineal or patrilineal from myth is, again, tough if not impossible--moreover, one cannot label Indo-Europeans as patriarchal _in toto_. There were matrilineal societies that spoke IE languages, one example from my own field are the Picts of Scotland. Language, ethnicity, etc. cannot be equated easily and no one group was as monolithic as we make them out to be (this we do for reasons of pedagogy only).
It does seem quite possible, however, from the myths, that both patrilocal and matrilocal marriage may have existed in the Bronze Age simultaneously. One of the key problems for this issue and for women's history in general is we simply lack enough information. In my view, I think we should keep open minds, be mindful that the male perspective of women probably does not represent either how things "really worked" or how women felt about their lot. For all their denigration of women, so much of which "protesteth too much," I find it hard to believe that societies can thrive where there is not some harmony, some dialogue between men and women.
That said, I would not want to be anyone on the losing side of a battle--any man not killed on the battlefield would be killed when the the town was sacked, women would be mistreated, and all the women and children sold into slavery or kept as slaves by the victors. This is one reason Andromache's pleas to Hector are so powerful--she knows exactly what will happen if the city falls. Outside of war, however, there is evidence, even from the Mycenaeans, that not all was as wretched for women as we often think. Remind me to show you all some slides this evening about this--it's pretty cool.
Of note, and something Witcomb mentions as well, is the mystery of Minoan culture—women clearly emerge from our meager evidence differently than do those for Bronze Age Greece; art history is particularly rich here, but, the absence of fortifications and scant evidence and artifacts of military nature are significant.
Thank you. This is just what I was looking for--I wanted to separate the wheat from the chaff. What did you make of his assertation that unmarried women frequently had gods father their children?
ReplyDeleteThis too is conjecture. Gods as fathers of semi-mortal children abound in myth, but it is all together another thing to say that unmarried women attributed their offspring to gods; I'd like to see his *proof* for this. What is particularly troubling about some of the modern sources Witcomb uses is that they project contemporary understanding of sexual and gender relations into the past: we honestly do not know how Mycenaean men and women viewed one another, and, the evidence from myth must be used with caution. To name one example, there are frescos with women depicted in situations like religious rites from Mycenaean as well as Minoan sites--were all Bronze Age men as horrid as some scholars suggest I have a hard time believing we'd find evidence like that.
ReplyDeleteBack to unwed mothers, if anything, some evidence, albeit much of it more recent, suggests that some societies found ways to deal with unplanned/unwed pregnancy without recourse to divine intervention. The whole issue was perhaps more of a potential crisis in aristocratic circles, where land, inheritance, etc. were at stake, and thus political stability, but to name one example from a more general population (this from early modern Scotland), there were varying levels of marriage and thus status of children. In one such arrangement, a couple could be together for a year and a day, and if they called it quits, fine. Were children born in that time, the community took care of them, no real stigma attached. This is a very late example, but it goes to show that people are people--they will fool around, they will have kids, and life goes on. We cannot say what they did in the Bronze Age, though we can guess (and not all answers are pretty...I'm thinking of exposure here), so again I tend to keep an open mind and figure people are people and they deal. I know that is a somewhat informal answer, but it feels safer than saying "Ancient people believed X" when our evidence is so scant and problematic. Incidentally, but on a slightly unrelated note, there have been notions put forth that some myths of foundlings make a lot of sense in a world where one could and probably did run into exposed infants. One could, theoretically, assume divine parentage, but I would hazard a guess that most people pre-birth-control did not automatically leap to that conclusion...
Conjecture. hmmm. Too bad...
ReplyDeleteHowever, your points are well taken. Evaluating history is about source evidence, not about revising what IS there to suit our own prejudices or wishes. And be careful not to believe all you read. Glad to have you as a resource...
BTW, I'm not angry with history. It is what it was and knowing about may prevent us from repeating it. ;D
This was fascinating! Thank you for posting some more information about the role of women at this period in history. I especially found the point about 'husband-less pregnant women' intriguing, since it adds another layer to the backstory of Helen of Troy as well.
ReplyDeleteI wanted to post again after reading all of the comments (I wanted to react first to what you had written without other influences). Since some of the sources upon which Prof. Witcomb based his arguments/assertions may be less reliable than others, I would be interested in knowing in both of your opinions on what sources might be considered more reliable in terms of learning more on this topic? Also, while I would never take a work of mythology (or any other tale for that matter, whether historically based or no) as the whole truth, one has to imagine that a great deal of it is describing either real events or real beliefs of individuals during those events. I guess what I would like to get at is the assertion that "Mythology is rather tantalizing (pardon the pun) as a historical source, but it is not history..." which assumes a stance that historical texts would have more truth to them than stories from a period or culture. Since histories are still subject to the biases of their writers, shouldn't we also approach even historical texts with the proverbial grain of salt?
ReplyDeleteKristina, weren't you an English major? English is wonderful because it's ALL "truth" in one way or another! Historians, as I understand it (Jim fortunately will correct me) find their truths in source documents (which means being able to analyze all sorts of different languages in the original language) and if they are good, avoid conjecture. I like having Jim as a source because he's already done all the work and he's done it with a historian's eye. (Like you, I found the god-pregnancies pretty fascinating. How nice for a single mom to have a demigod for a child and how great for the child to be a demigod!) Besides history, I love how myth ties in with philosophy (and all of humanity since there is so many commonality between cultures!)
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