The Hemlock Cup - Bettany Hughes [140]
37
LITTLE BEARS
Brauron, north of Athens
Women so beautiful it hurt your eyes to see them.
Herodotus, The Histories [adapted], 5.18
AND WHAT OF THE OTHER FEMALE citizens: the girls, the maidens, the widows of Athens?
Every four years, Socrates would have seen, walking through the Agora and along the Sacred Way, diminutive lines of temporary exiles. Their destination was Brauron, a two-day hike east of Athens; for many this must have seemed a long road, because the majority of these pilgrims were young children. Eight-, nine-, ten-year-old girls from good families were regularly sent out to this religious sanctuary from Athena’s city, to live for three, four, five years, as ‘wild animals’.
Little Bears, arktoi, they were called. Dedicated to the virgin huntress goddess Artemis, they wore animal skins and headdresses, and on occasion saffron-yellow dresses. Vase fragments from the site show naked maidens running away from pursuing bears – a rite the girls themselves possibly endured with real wild beasts. Sometimes the girls raced in short chitons, sometimes naked. Plato approved: in his ideal city-state, as in Sparta, young women were encouraged to compete nude in foot-racing and athletics.1 The purpose of the exercise at Brauron was to run the animal out of the child. Their time in this religious boarding school appeased the coiled, virgin goddess Artemis – the chaste huntress whose arrows could strike women down in childbirth. The Little Bears’ days were filled with dances. They learned the jobs a good Athenian wife would be expected to accomplish – in their sanctuary-home you can still see the dormitories where (one imagines, worn out) they slept.
What remains of the temple complex is peaceful now. Today the only sound of water is the leak of pipes, and the ghost of a stream, irrigating nearby fields. In its heyday, in the mid–fifth century BC, as recent excavations have shown, a monumental fountain, 60 feet long, was installed here to channel the sacred water. Lichen-covered rocks are a protection and a backdrop, a reminder of the primeval wash of this sanctuary’s devotion. But we should also remember that in some ways this sacred zone would have resembled an outpost of the rag-trade; when women died in childbirth their clothes were dedicated here; draped, hung and stored around the sanctuary; a limp gift to pitiless Artemis, to whom, probably just a few years from now, the girls would be calling out during the dreadful pangs of labour.2 Votaries still come here to pray for help in childbirth from a distant relative of those goddesses, the Virgin Mary, in the pretty little Byzantine church on the edge of the site.
During the Peloponnesian War Brauron’s satellite sanctuary up on the Acropolis was extended. Athens had a gimlet-eye focused on Brauron in political terms – useful strategic territory, but as the Athenian population was effectively being thinned out by the dragging conflict, it was also essential that the girls – the reproductive future of the community – were kept secure. In Brauron itself, the youngsters, it was hoped, would chasten the beast within them and learn to appreciate the grinding reality of being an Athenian wife. Subdued, de-spirited, around the age of twelve the youngsters would then be dressed in modest clothes and marched back to Athens to find a husband.
Socrates – in a straightforwardly pragmatic way – seemed to think the female of the species could be used in society a little more imaginatively.3
SOCRATES: Is there anyone to whom you commit more affairs of importance than to your wife?
CRITOBULUS: No.
SOCRATES: Is there anyone to whom you talk less?
CRITOBULUS: Few or none, I confess.
SOCRATES: And you married her when she was a mere child and had seen and heard almost nothing?4
During the city’s difficult war-days the philosopher suggested that a group of women, relatives of one of his friends, become gainfully