Sexual life in ancient Greece : with thirty-two full-page plates

MARRIAGE AND THE LIFE OF WOMEN

its wings in the season of tiring summer, then kids are fattest and wine is most mellow, and women are most lustful, but men are feeblest, for the skin is dry through the heat’’—but, he continues, a good meal and good wine soon restore their vigour.

As time went on, Hellenic culture became more and more occupied with the male sex, as is shown by the fact that an actual education is only spoken of in the case of boys. ‘The most necessary elementary knowledge in reading and writing, and likewise skill in female handiwork, the most important of which were spinning and weaving, was taught girls by their mothers.

If a little instruction in music is included female education is substantially exhausted; we hear nothing of scientific culture, indeed, we hear often enough that the married woman ought not to be cleverer than befits a woman, as, for instance, Hippolytus in Euripides (Hzppolytus, 635) expressly says. The Greek was penetrated with the conviction that the proper place for girls and women was the women’s quarters, where they had no need of book learning. At that time social intercourse with women was unknown, but it is false to assert that this was the result of the retired life led by them. Rather it was the knowledge that conversation with men, such as highly cultivated Athenians demanded as their daily bread, was impossible for women, considering their entirely different psychological conditions and their completely different interests—it was this that banished the woman to the seclusion of the woman’s chamber. That “ young girls’, especially up to the time they were married, led a very retired and according to our ideas a joyless existence, might generally have been the rule, perhaps with the exception of those of Sparta. Only on special occasions, perhaps the spectacle of a festal procession or taking part in such or at funerals, girls were to be seen in larger numbers in the streets and then certainly some kind of communication between

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