Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Private Life 157
hold, generally from their mothers. Girls may even have been
actively discouraged from becoming literate in order to keep them
“unspoiled.” A fragment from a lost play by Menander states
axiomatically, “He who teaches his wife how to read and write
does no good. He’s giving additional poison to a horrible snake.”
Although some women were able to play a musical instrument, as
we see from depictions in Greek art, few are likely to have been
sufficiently well informed to express an opinion about the political
issues of the day. Xenophon’s fictional Ischomachos, therefore,
probably speaks for a number of middle-class Athenians when he
declares,
When I married my wife, she was not yet fifteen and had been so carefully
supervised that she had no experience of life whatsoever, seeing, hearing,
and saying very little. A man should be content, don’t you think, if his
wife comes to him knowing only how to take wool and make clothes and
supervise the distribution of spinning among slaves. (Household Management
7.5–6)
Even so, we should not discount the possibility that Ischomachos
is being portrayed as somewhat out of touch with reality. Athenian
girls may not have been quite so submissive as is sometimes
assumed.
Elsewhere in the Greek world girls received little education,
though there may have been a few exceptions. The poetess Sappho,
for instance, is thought to have been associated with a school for
young women that flourished on the island of Lesbos in the second
half of the seventh century b.c.e. The one society where girls
received some education at state expense was Sparta (see p. 122) .
Higher Education
What we might describe as higher or tertiary education began
for Athenian youths around the age of 16. The principal subjects
taught were rhetoric and philosophy. The ability to speak in public
was not only the hallmark of a well-educated gentleman but also
a vital attribute for anyone who wished to make a mark for himself
in a democratic society, whether in the political assembly or
in the law courts or in more informal contexts such as the symposium.
Rhetoric was first taught by the Sophists around the middle
of the fifth century b.c.e. , although its importance is already evident
in Homer, where the ability to be persuasive in public is a