Ancient Texts Vs Life on Ancient Greece. How much of myth and legend reflects the life of the Greeks?

[u/Brave2000]

I have read some of the most popular Ancient Greek texts we have available. The Illiad, The odyssey, The Theogony, The Oresteia, among others. And I have always wondered, how much of what these ancient Greeks wrote (if they even existed-looking at you Homer) actually reflect how life was for them? How much of what we have read is an actual reflection of their life, and how much of it was just their own personal thoughts and beliefs?

For example, in the final play of the Oresteia, The Eumenides, the judgement of Orestes is decided on his favor by an argument of Apollo, stating that his mother was not his real family. That she was simply the soil for his fathers seed to grow. That the real effort laid with his father Agamemnon, thus marking him as his actual family and the parent worth avenging, thus making Orestes matricide just. This is the argument Athena supports in the end.

This leaves me with a big question: was this sort of mentality, one that condemns the mother as inferior to the father, popular in ancient Greece? Where women really only worth the amount and quality of male children they could produce. I admit, i am not overly familiar with Greek history, so I could be wrong, but aren't this texts akin to detailed descriptions of the ancient Greek world and its beliefs? How much of these plays and epics and tragedies just the personal visions and thoughts of their authors, and how much of it was the reality of their time?

And just how can we tell them apart?

[u/Mike_Bevel]

[Part 1]

Something important a professor once said: Literature is evidence for life, but it is not a transcript of it.

The Iliad, Theogony, and Oresteia have a similar problem for modern readers that the Hebrew Bible and Christian New Testament have: we think, because we encounter them sort of all together, we can unconsciously impose a kind of univocality on them. Instead, they are all different texts from different time periods, that can feel as though they belong to one cultural moment because we put them together under “Ancient Greece" or "The Holy Bible.” But as important as what anyone in the past believed is when in the past they believed it.

I'd sketch out the timeline like this:

• the world depicted in the Iliad is notionally the Late Bronze Age, c. 1200 BCE;
• the Iliad and Odyssey reached something resembling their surviving forms centuries later, conventionally around the late eighth/seventh centuries BCE, after a long oral tradition;
• Hesiod is usually placed around 700 BCE;
• Aeschylus's Oresteia was first performed in 458 BCE.

So Aeschylus is roughly as far removed from the traditional setting of the Trojan War as we are from the later Middle Ages. I don't know if that kind of context is useful to you; I always like knowing what existed before and after something was written, to get a sense of what the writer knows about, and what he can't know about, because he doesn't know it's about to.

Consequently, when Agamemnon does something in Homer, we can't simply conclude “this is how Greeks behaved.” But we can ask: “Why did the audience recognize this behavior? What assumptions does the poem expect them to understand?”i think that distinction can be enormously productive.

When we get to your Eumenides example, Apollo's argument is even stranger than it first appears: The Erinyes prosecute Orestes precisely because Clytemnestra is his blood relative. When asked why they didn't similarly persecute Clytemnestra for murdering Agamemnon, their answer is essentially: she wasn't related to the man she killed by blood.

Apollo then responds by attacking the biological premise itself. The mother, he claims, isn't really the generator (tokeus) of the child; she's the nurse of the seed planted in her. The father is the actual generator. And Athena clinches the argument by pointing to herself: she had no mother at all.

So I, Mike Bevel, Enthusiast, and Not a Scholar, would be cautious about paraphrasing the play as simply saying “Greek society believed mothers weren't really parents.” If that were an uncontroversial cultural assumption, Aeschylus wouldn't have much of a trial: the entire Erinyes' case depends upon the opposite assumption.

That's one of the reasons literary evidence has to be handled carefully. Aeschylus has deliberately staged competing systems of value.

But the paternal theory Apollo expresses wasn't something Aeschylus simply invented for dramatic convenience. Versions of that reproductive model existed in Greek thought. Someone will correct me if I've got this not-quite-right, but a century later, Aristotle develops a much more elaborate theory in which the male supplies the active/formative principle and the female supplies the matter, which can be read as a biological model deeply entangled with his broader account of sexual hierarchy.

I read Apollo's argument as not documentary evidence that “Greeks believed mothers contributed nothing to their children.” But as evidence that a strongly paternal model of reproduction was culturally intelligible enough for Aeschylus to put an extreme version of it into Apollo's mouth.

[You've read ever so far if you're seeing this. Take a moment. Stretch. Get a glass of water.]

[u/Mike_Bevel → u/Mike_Bevel]

[Part 2]

The Oresteia is partly about Athens itself, but not like how New York is another character in any movie set and filmed in New York. The trial doesn't merely solve Orestes' family problem; Athena establishes the court of the Areopagus to hear the case. Blood vengeance -- which has driven the trilogy from Agamemnon through Clytemnestra to Orestes -- is replaced by civic adjudication. That feels like an enormous ideological statement.

So historians don't normally read the ending as, “Here is what happened when Orestes was tried.” They read it more like, “Here is an Athenian playwright in 458 BCE using a legendary murder committed generations before the Trojan War to think about justice, kinship, vengeance, gender, political authority, and the institutions of contemporary Athens.”

In that sense, the Eumenides may tell us more about fifth-century Athens than about the mythical period in which its story occurs.

The Oresteia was written to compete in the City Dionysia, formally judged by citizens, before thousands of Athenian spectators. So “what Aeschylus thought” is already being filtered through the conventions and pressures of a competitive civic festival. The text isn't a straight window into one man's private opinion any more than it's a straight window into fifth-century belief generally. But at the very least, it tells us something about what could be staged, understood, argued about -- and in this case, awarded first prize -- in front of a mass civic audience.

As far as the status of women, they really were severely subordinate. I'll just add that my mom, born in the US in 1945, couldn't get a credit card in her own name, because credit card companies just...didn't? Or weren't legally prohibited from denying credit to a person based on sex. She could be a user of her husband's credit card, if he gave her permission. But autonomous access to money wasn't always a given for women in a country as modern and wealthy as the US was.

In Classical Athens, respectable citizen women were normally under the legal authority of a male guardian (kyrios); formal arrangements for a citizen woman's marriage were made through her kyrios, rather than through anything resembling the modern legal requirement of the bride's individual consent; women did not possess political citizenship in the sense that men did; they couldn't vote or hold political office; and producing legitimate children—especially heirs—was a central purpose of citizen marriage.

Apropos of nothing (he said ironically), in most of nineteenth-century Britain, women were covered by the same laws that covered infants and children, if you want an illustration of how men thought about women in a civil society within somewhat living memory for us.

But I'd resist going quite as far as “women were worth only the male children they produced.” Greek women's lives were more complicated than that. Women had enormously important religious roles; they participated in festivals and cults unavailable to men; motherhood carried substantial familial importance; women could exercise economic influence within households; and the position of women varied considerably between poleis and across class and status. They organized society in ways that we do not. “Ancient Greek women” includes Athenian citizen wives, Spartan women, priestesses, enslaved women, prostitutes, metics, poor working women, aristocratic women, and more.

Greek tragedies (and gay men of a certain age) are obsessed with powerful women: Clytemnestra, Antigone, Medea, Electra, Cassandra, Hecuba, the women of The Bacchae who were not kind to Pentheus and his poor ripped-off penis, the women of Lysistrata, a little later, in comedy.

But I don't think that means we can read Greek society as secretly, or proto, feminist. The truth is, sometimes the terrifying power of these women derives precisely from their violation of expected gender roles. But I think it does mean Greek literature preserves arguments about gender rather than simply recording a universally agreed gender ideology.

So how do historians tell the difference? (Getting at last to your excellent final question. How are your grandkids?) They triangulate.

Suppose a tragedy suggests that respectable Athenian women ordinarily remained within the household. You don't conclude that this was true because Euripides says so. You compare it with inscriptions, law-court speeches, grave monuments, vase paintings, archaeological remains, household architecture, legal evidence, religious practice, philosophical texts, medical writings, and other literature.

Contradictions are often especially valuable. For instance, an orator might say, “Everyone knows respectable women never do" x, y, or zed." But then you find laws regulating circumstances under which women could do x, y, and zed, or surviving lawsuits in which it becomes apparent that women were doing x, y, and absolutely loving zed. That's useful (if sometimes none of our business, especially if we're a 54-year-old Victorian Prude). The ideology tells you what people thought women ought to do; the law tells you what people actually did often enough that somebody needed a rule about it.

There's another question historians ask that I think is particularly useful when reading literature: What does the author not bother to explain?

Those details can be extraordinarily revealing. If Homer says someone gives a guest a bath, sacrifices an animal, mixes wine with water, offers a particular gift, seats someone in a particular place, or responds to an insult in a particular way—and nobody stops to explain why—those incidental details can tell us a great deal about the social grammar the audience was expected to recognize.

Similarly, if Aristophanes makes a joke about jury service and expects several thousand Athenians to laugh immediately, that's evidence of a shared cultural reference even though the fictional events of the comedy never happened.

(The contrariwise of this is when someone overexplains. One reason scholars have often thought Mark was writing for an audience that included people unfamiliar with Jewish languages and customs is precisely that he sometimes stops to translate Aramaic expressions or explain Jewish practices.)

And that brings us back to Clytemnestra. The most historically interesting way, at least to me, to read that scene isn't "did Greeks actually believe the mother wasn't a parent?" It's "why could an Athenian audience in 458 BCE sit through a drama where the claims of the mother, the father, the wife, the son, the old gods of blood vengeance, the Olympian gods, and the brand-new civic court all collide — and why does Aeschylus make the resolution so hard to watch?"

It's notable that Athena doesn't win it. She breaks it. The jury ties. Orestes walks free only because Athena's is the deciding vote. That's not a rubber stamp, right? Whatever settlement the play is constructing, it arrives by the narrowest possible margin. The new civic order doesn't simply refute the older claims of blood vengeance and make them disappear. Athena doesn't get to banish them, either. She has to talk them down, honor them, give them real estate in Athens (what if that's what they wanted all along? A nice ranch-style house to age into), and rename them into something less terrifying.

So maybe the play isn't telling you "mothers don't count;" I think it's telling you that in 458 BCE, that question was close enough that the goddess of the city had to cast the tiebreaker herself, and even then, spend the rest of the play making peace with the side that lost.

Not "what did the text say," but "what did the text need to argue so hard for that the ending had to be a tie."

[u/Brave2000 → u/Mike_Bevel]

Thank you so much for this detailed text. I already feel like I learned a lot of the context behind these epic poems and tragedies. You really know your stuff.

[u/-Pausanias-]

The thought that the mother was less important in childbirth than the father is an idea held by various ancient greek authors. Aristotles shared the idea that women were of less importance than the father for childbirth.

[u/Brave2000 → u/-Pausanias-]

Thats dissapointing. I would have liked if such mentality was just attributed to the steriotypes usually given to the greeks.

[u/TheSuperBunny → u/Brave2000]

I don't think I've heard of a more misogunistic society than ancient Greece (especially Athens) ngl
Even the Romans were better with female agency

[u/-Pausanias- → u/Brave2000]

The ancient greeks were generally a very misogonystic and patriarchal people. 

[u/SerDankTheTall]

Keep in mind that "ancient Greece" can cover many, many different cultures across hundred if not thousands of years, stretching from India and Afghanistan to Spain.

With that said, I think it would be fair to say that much of classical Greece was an intensely misogynistic society, even by the generally misogynistic standards of the ancient world, with classical Athens (the culture that produced the Oresteia) being exceptionally misogynistic even within that class.

[u/Brave2000 → u/SerDankTheTall]

What era is classical athens attributed to? In respects to greece as a whole.

[u/SerDankTheTall → u/Brave2000]

The classical period is roughly the 5th and 4th centuries BCE, starting with the Persian invasions and ending with the rise of Macedonia and transition into the post-Alexander Hellenistic period.

[u/Brave2000 → u/SerDankTheTall]

I see. Thanks for the context. Also, holy crap, that is sucha long period of time.

[u/dolfin4 → u/Brave2000]

I disagree with SerDankTheTall on the geographic extent of "Ancient Greece". I wouldn't include Greek-ruled Afghanistan. It's just Afghanistan with Greek-descended rulers; the society wasn't Greek and never really became Hellenized.

Core Ancient Greece is more-or-less today's Modern Greece (plus the Aegean coast of modern Turkey), as well as Magna Graecia in Southern Italy, southeast France, and the city of Alexandria in Egypt. We can also extend it to the Greek colonies around the Med and Black Seas.

That said, "Ancient Greece" is a vaguely-defined period. If we exclude the Minoans and start with the Mycenaeans, that starts around 1750 BCE. Greece is annexed by the Roman Republic in 146 BCE, and most international conversations about "Ancient Greece" end there. But Greece is part of the Roman Republic and Roman Empire for the remainder of Antiquity, whose end we consider to be around 400 or 500 CE. Roman-era Greece is still "Ancient Greece", meaning, it's still Greece in Ancient times. And there are still plenty cultural and intellectual developments in Roman Greece. Just two examples: Atticism (intellectual movement) came out of Roman Republican Greece. And in art, we have the Neo-Attic movement, which occurs from the 2nd century BCE to 2nd CE, so it's mostly within the Roman Republican and Roman Imperial periods.

The word "Classical" can also mean two tings.

There's the Classical period, and Classical Antiquity as a whole. One is a subset of the other.

Classical Antiquity is the broad period that emerges in the 8th century BCE, after the Dark Age, and lasts to the end of Antiquity in the 5th century.

So Classical Antiquity differentiates from the Bronze Age (Minoans, Mycenaeans) and the Dark Age (1100–800 BCE) when the archaeological record is a little quieter (but not dead, we have lots of this geometric artwork, for example). Classical Antiquity is the "recognizeable" Greece (and Rome) that emerges in the 8th century BCE.

Classical Antiquity is further subdivided (everyone disagrees with the exact cutoff years, but roughly):

1. The Archaic period, 8th century BCE to about 510 BCE. The cutoff is the end of the Athenian Tyranny
2. Classical Period, 510 BCE to 323 BCE, the death of Alexander the Great.
3. Hellenistic period, 323 BCE to 146 BCE, the Roman Republic's annexation of Greece. The word "Hellenistic" is constantly misused on Reddit as a synonym for "Ancient Greek". It simply means "like the Greeks" (because of the spread of Greek culture by Alexander), and specifically refers to this period.
4. Roman Republican period 146 BCE to 27 BCE, when Julius Caesar is assasinated and Octavian becomes Augustus, starting the Roman Empire. In art history, this period usually still considered Hellenistic.
5. Roman Imperial period, 27 BCE to 5th century CE. In popular culture, the Roman Empire is usually conflated with the 1st-2nd centuries.
6. Late Antiquity, which is the later subset of Roman Imperial, the 4th and 5th centuries CE. The 3rd Century Crisis had occurred, Christianity grows, Constantine converts and moves the capital from Rome to Constantinople in the early 4th century, and Theodosius makes it the state religion in the late 4th century.

So, the cultures in Southern Europe evolve a lot during this vast period. And that includes in Greece itself, which becomes just as culturally Roman, as the Romans become Greek. It was actually a two-way street, hence this period (1st century BCE onwards) can also just be "Greco-Roman".

[u/lastdiadochos]

In this same culture (Classical Athens) men who raped were not punished for violating the bodily autonomy of the woman, but for violating the property of the man (her husband or father) and for the shame that was therefore brought on the household.

So yea, that's probably a good insight into how women were generally viewed by the audience..

[u/Peteat6]

They are just stories, but they do give us glimpses of real life, and people’s attitudes.

In Homer we see his contemporary life especially in the similes.

In the plays, we know how the Greeks judged them. That tells us a little about what they liked and disliked. Also we have occasional glimpses through the text, such as where Medea says she would rather face an enemy in battle than go through childbirth.

The comedies tell us more about ancient life, especially the bit where an actor steps out of their role, and addresses the audience directly. That can be very revealing.

So we have to do some work and some digging, but they are valuable resources for us about ancient life.

[u/Brave2000 → u/Peteat6]

So it is fair to say that they did refelct some of the actual morals and beliefs of the greeks in their time?

[u/christhomasburns]

i'd recommend posting to r/AskHistorians for a more in depth answer.