Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

72 Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks
Telemachos’s claim about the dominant role of men in Homeric
society, his father Odysseus constantly finds himself in a position
of weakness and dependency vis-à-vis women. As in the real
world, so in the world of The Odyssey, female power takes many
guises: beauty, intelligence, cunning, resourcefulness, wisdom, and
charm. The women whom Odysseus encounters—Kalypso, Kirke,
Nausikaä, Arete, and his wife Penelope—exercise power in ways
that are always indirect, sometimes magical, and often dangerous.
They possess access to privileged information. They control hidden
forces that assist or impede him on his way. They counterfeit and
deceive. And they kill. The source of all the mischief is Helen, the
cause of the Trojan War, still exercising an iron grip over her cuckolded
husband Menelaos in The Odyssey Book 4.
The power that wives wield is aptly symbolized by the different
fates of Odysseus and his commander in chief. Whereas Odysseus
was blessed in the possession of Penelope, who remained faithful
to him for 20 years and had the skill to ward off no fewer than
108 suitors, Agamemnon was immediately murdered on his return
from the Trojan War by his wife Klytaimnestra and her lover Aigisthos.
The question, however, remains: To what extent does this picture
of women’s power in early Greece mirror reality, and to what
extent does it constitute a fantasy on the part of the poet? There is
no means of knowing. Furthermore, there is hardly a single Greek
woman from any period of antiquity whose life is more than a hazy
blur to us.
The Bride
Although we do not have any documentary evidence regarding
age at marriage, literary sources suggest that girls in their early to
mid-teens typically married men who were old enough to be their
fathers. Hesiod, in Works and Days, recommended that a man should
be “not much less than in his thirtieth year” and a girl “in her fifth
year past puberty” (lines 695–99). Hesiod’s view, though that of a
peasant farmer, is by no means unique. Solon was of the opinion
that the right time for a man to marry was between the ages of
27 and 34. Similarly, Plato claimed that a man was at his peak for
marriage in his thirtieth year. Some brides would have been even
younger than the age recommended by Hesiod, particularly those
who came from wealthy families, as we know from a fifth-century
b.c.e. law code from Gortyn on Crete, which decreed that heiresses
should be married “in their twelfth year or older.”