The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [139]
Little surprise, perhaps, that some Athenian men should seem a bit nervous of their womenfolk.
So think back. The sound of young women’s voices, praising in the temples and sanctuaries, carried on the air, their figures stone-silhouetted against the sky, their names carved on stelai and statue plinths and grave monuments across the city – these were clearly a force to be reckoned with. In the British Museum there is a 3-foot-high gold sceptre, and a golden necklace heavy with flowers, with fruits waiting to burst, nestling next to the heads of horned women. The provenance is shrouded in the treasure-seeking, tomb-raiding ambiguity of the 1870s, when the artefacts were acquired – but one sensible reading is that these belonged to the priestesses of a cult of the goddess Hera.10 Some of the religiously significant women in Athens wore necklaces of dried figs, a sign of their fertility, while others were chosen for their ‘god-given’ beauty. We know this from their names: Kallisto, Most Beautiful; Megiste, Most Great; Chrysis, Golden; Theodote, God-Given;11 Aristonoe, Best.12
At night women’s ritual activity increased exponentially. It was thought appropriate that women should operate most vigorously not in the brightness of day, but in the gloom. In the all-female Haloa, a festival associated with wine, fertility and libido, it seems that women ‘tended’ fake phalli (not surprising to learn perhaps that the festival was particularly popular with prostitutes). Young girls sang from door to door in honour of the ‘great Mother’ (the oldest fertility goddess), accompanied by the dark and, so they thought, the priapic god Pan.13 Young and old processed at night to praise another newcomer to the city, the god Sabazios, a ‘dodgy’ easterner from Phrygia.14 Young devotees of Aphrodite carried ‘unspeakable offerings in baskets’ through the Acropolis at night. Dread forces, the ‘nameless goddesses’ – awful creatures like the Eumenides, the ‘Kindly Ones,’ more honestly known as the Erinyes, the ‘Furies’ – were escorted back into the earth at night by women thankful, one imagines, for the comfort of the flaming torches they carried. In women-only rites, young dogs were sacrificed after sunset and flung into flame-lit crevasses to appease the goddess of the Underworld, Hekate. The Adonia, where females mourned with Aphrodite the loss of the beautiful boy Adonis, involved a night-time ritual, a mock-funeral procession, much wailing and no little drinking. Deeper into the war, the grief of these Adonis-worshippers was thought to be a terrible omen for Athens.15
Although our literary sources tell us that respectable women in classical Athens should stay indoors, women who walked hand-in-hand with the gods in fact glinted and scintillated as, carrying the golden sceptres and staffs of their priesthood, they officiated at civic rituals, filling the air with unearthly ululating sounds. They spoke out, and their hands flashed as they killed and carved the sacrificial meat.
As soon as I turned seven I was a child hand-maiden, up on the Acropolis,
then, I ground sacred grain; when I was ten I shed
my saffron robe for the Foundress, being a bear at the Brauronia;
And once, when I was a beautiful maiden, I carried sacred baskets,
wearing a necklace of dried figs.16
This list appears in a cool, serious passage in the middle of Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata. It is presented as an explanation as to why women’s voices, in Athens, needed to be heard. In the Socratic Dialogues of Plato we have the only other extant example of Athenian women, through conversations with the philosopher, being given a high-level platform. Socrates is rare in the philosophical canon. This unusual, thoughtful man, and his disciple