Daily Life of the Ancient Greeks

Pleasure and Leisure 301
Phaidra, who charges her stepson Hippolytos of raping her after
he has scornfully rebuffed her sexual overtures. Only a handful of
women are worthy of admiration, notably Penelope, who remains
faithful to her absent husband Odysseus for 20 years, and Alkestis,
who is so devoted to her husband Admetos that she volunteered to
die in his place.
Simply enumerating myths about violent women merely reveals
that the Greeks understood that women are capable of extreme
violence. What is much more significant is that almost all these
female acts of violence are perpetrated in response to extreme provocation
on the part of husbands and lovers. Medea, for instance,
who is one of the darkest figures in Greek mythology, betrayed
everything that was dear to her—family, homeland, culture—to follow
Jason back to Greece, only to be betrayed by him in turn when
he found a more suitable wife to take her place. She is a woman
who has lost all her identity. Even so, we can hardly ignore the
fact that women in myth are anything but the shy, retiring, stay-athomes
that Thukydides spoke of (see p. 78), and there is something
to be said for the view that they represent male paranoia about the
hidden power of women—power, that is, that lies invested in the
privacy of the home rather than in a public arena.
In addition to women whose acts of violence provide an outlet
for their frustrations and disappointments, there is also a group
of witchlike creatures who direct their destructiveness to all and
sundry. These include the Gorgon Medusa, whose terrifying gaze
turned men to stone; the half woman, half dog monster Skylla, who
seized sailors and devoured them alive; a reptilian monster called
Lamia, who stole children from their parents; the Graiai, or Grey
Ones, women born old, who shared a single eye and a single tooth;
the monstrous bird-women called the Harpies who kidnapped
humans; and, finally, the Furies, who punished the guilty for crimes
committed within the family.
Plato’s Use of Myth
It is often stated that mythology lost its preeminence when Greek
tragedy went into terminal decline at the end of the fifth century
b.c.e. , because, from this time onward, other ways of understanding
human behavior came to the fore. In fact, however, myth continued
to provide a vital means of interpreting the world even after
the death of tragedy, not least in the philosophical works of Plato.
In his Symposium, for instance, the comic poet Aristophanes claims