Art & Culture
‘A woman should cast off her shame together with her clothes’: What women in ancient times really thought about Relationships
A new book tells the history of the ancient world through women. Here author Daisy Dunn explores what they had to say about their own sexuality – flying in the face of misogynist male stereotypes.
According to Semonides of Amorgos, a male poet working in Greece in the 7th Century BC, there are 10 main kinds of women. There are women who are like pigs, because they prefer eating to cleaning; women who resemble foxes, as they are peculiarly observant; donkey-women, who are sexually promiscuous; dog-women, marked for their disobedience. There are stormy sea-women, greedy Earth-women, thieving weasel-women, lazy horse-women, unattractive ape-women, and – the one good kind – hard-working bee-women.
Of all the women described in this list, which pulsates with the misogyny of the time, those so-called sexually promiscuous “donkey-women” are perhaps the most mysterious.
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Historical accounts from the ancient world tend to reveal the cloistered nature of women’s lives. In Greece, women were usually veiled in public, and in Rome, they had “guardians” (ordinarily their father or husband) to supervise their movements and handling of property. Was the concept of the lusty woman pure male fantasy? Or were women of the ancient world more interested in sex than is generally believed?
As I learned while researching my new book The Missing Thread, the first history of the ancient world to be written through women, we have to look hard if we want to uncover what women really thought about sex.
So far were ancient women from flinching at the sight of erotica that some were even buried with it
The vast majority of the surviving sources were written by men who were prone to exaggerate women’s sexual habits in one direction or the other. Some went to such lengths to emphasise a woman’s virtue that they made her seem almost saintly and inhuman. Others purposely presented women as sexually voracious as a means of blackening their characters. If we took these descriptions at face value, we would come to the conclusion that women in the ancient world were either all chaste, or sex-mad. Fortunately, it is possible to peer into the hearts of some classical women, who provide a far deeper view of female sexuality.
Confessions of infatuation
Looking to the same period as the poet quoted above, we encounter Sappho, who composed lyric poetry on the Greek island of Lesbos in the 7th Century BC. Gazing at a woman sitting talking to a man, Sappho documented the intense physical sensations she experienced – fluttering heart, faltering speech, fire through the veins, temporary blindness, ringing ears, cold sweat, trembling, pallor – all of which are familiar to anyone who’s ever fallen in lust. In another poem, Sappho described garlanding a woman with flowers and reminisced wistfully about how, on a soft bed, she would “quench [her] desire”. These are the confessions of a woman who understands the irrepressibility of infatuation.
Sappho’s poems are so fragmentary today that it can be difficult to read them accurately, but scholars have detected in one of the papyri a reference to “dildos”, known in Greek as olisboi. These were employed in fertility rituals in Greece, as well as for pleasure, and feature as such on a number of vase paintings. Later in Rome, too, phallic objects had a talisman-like quality. It would not have made sense for women to shy away from symbols that were believed to bring good luck.
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So far were ancient women from flinching at the sight of erotica that some were even buried with it. In the period before Rome came to prominence, the highly skilled Etruscans dominated the Italian mainland and filled it with scenes of a romantic nature. Numerous works of art and pieces of tomb statuary depict men and women reclining together. An incense burner featuring men and women touching each other’s genitals was interred with an Etruscan woman in the 8th Century BC.
How prostitution was perceived
You only have to visit an ancient brothel, such as those of Pompeii, to see that sex was frequently on show. The walls of the dismal, cell-like rooms in which sex workers plied their trade are covered in graffiti, much of it written by male clients, who liked to comment on the performances of named women.
Historical accounts and speeches abound with descriptions of the hardships endured by such workers. Against Neaera, a prosecution speech delivered by Athenian politician Apollodorus in the 4th Century BC, provides particularly startling insight into the precariousness of these women’s lives. Just occasionally, however, we hear from a woman in touch with this world – and her words surprise.
In the 3rd Century BC, a female poet named Nossis living in the toe of Italy wrote in praise of an artwork and the fact that it was funded by a sex worker. A glorious statue of Aphrodite, goddess of sex and love, sung Nossis, had been erected in a temple using money raised by Polyarchis.
Polyarchis was not an anomaly. An earlier hetaera (courtesan or high-status sex worker) called Doricha used the money she had acquired similarly to purchase something for public view, in her case impressive spits for cooking oxen to be displayed at Delphi.
It was not sex these women embraced but rather the rare chance it afforded them to be remembered after they died. The vast majority of the women they knew were destined for anonymity.
Male writers’ insights
Male writers, for all their prejudices, can provide some of the most interesting insights into women and sex. In 411 BC, the comedian Aristophanes put on a play called Lysistrata, in which the women of Athens organise a sex strike in a bid to persuade their husbands to agree peace terms during the Peloponnesian War. This was a real conflict, waged between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies across three decades.
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Many of the women in the play are less than pleased at having to give up their pleasure. They are made to conform to the donkey-woman stereotype for comic effect. There is a moment, however, at which the play turns in a serious direction and Aristophanes offers a more convincing female viewpoint.
The title character Lysistrata, who organises the strike, describes what it is really like for women in wartime. Not only are they banned from the Assembly, in which the war is discussed, but they are repeatedly bereaved. And while such a protracted conflict is hell for married women, it is still worse for unmarried women, who are deprived of the chance to marry altogether.
It was quite usual among the upper classes for marriages to be arranged – and a woman’s first experience of sex could be disorientating
While the men, Lysistrata points out, may return home from war grey-haired and still marry, the same does not hold true for virgins, many of whom will be deemed too old to wed and procreate. These lines convey the difference between the male and the female experience of war so accurately that it is tempting to believe that they reflect what women of the day were really saying.
We may find real women’s fears surrounding sex expressed in Greek tragedy too. Sophocles, the playwright most famous for Oedipus Rex, had a female character in his lost play Tereus describe what it is like to go from being a virgin to a wife. “And this, as soon as one night has yoked us,” utters Procne, a mythical queen, “we must commend and deem to be quite lovely”.
It was quite usual among the upper classes for marriages to be arranged. A woman’s first experience of sex could be as disorientating as Procne described.
Ancient sex tips
Women sometimes committed such thoughts to papyrus. In a letter attributed to her, Theano, a Greek female philosopher in the circle of Pythagoras (some say she was his wife), offers her friend Eurydice some timeless advice. A woman, she writes, should cast off her shame together with her clothes when she enters her husband’s bed. She can put both back on together as soon as she has stood up again.
Theano’s letter has come under scrutiny and may not be authentic. Nevertheless, it closely echoes what many women have said to each other in more modern times, and its advice seems to have been followed by women in the ancient world as well.
British Museum
A certain Greek poet, Elephantis, was allegedly so keen to give women sex tips that she wrote her own short books on the topic. There is sadly no sign of her work today, but it is mentioned by both the Roman poet Martial and the Roman biographer and archivist Suetonius, who claimed that Emperor Tiberius (notorious for his sexual appetites) owned copies.
Where other women are quoted in other men’s writings, they tend to express themselves in terms of love as opposed to sex explicitly, which marks them out from some of their male contemporaries, including Martial and Catullus.
Lesbia, the pseudonymous lover of Catullus, tells him that “What a lady says to her lover in the moment / Ought to be written on the wind and running water”. The phrase “pillow talk” comes to mind.
Sulpicia, one of the few Roman poetesses whose verses survive, describes her misery at being in the countryside away from her lover Cerinthus on her birthday – and then her relief that she can be in Rome after all.
These women did not need to describe sex with their beloved in crude detail to reveal what they really thought of it. Men may dominate the sources but women, as Aphrodite well knew, could be every bit as passionate when the curtains were closed.
The Missing Thread: A New History of the Ancient World Through the Women Who Shaped It by Daisy Dunn has just been published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in the UK and will be published by Viking in the US on 30 July.
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Tam O’Shanter is a rip-roaring tale of witches and alcohol, but it has hidden depths. On Burns Night this Sunday – and 235 years after the poem was published in 1791 – Scots everywhere may well be treated to a masterwork with a unique, universal appeal.
If you’re Scottish, or if you wish you were, then this Sunday is a red-letter day. Scotland’s greatest poet, Robert Burns, was born on 25 January 1759, and Burns Suppers are now held every year, all over the world, to mark his birthday. The guests drink whisky (not “whiskey”, please – that’s the Irish and US spelling), they eat haggis, tatties and neeps (don’t ask), and they hear some of the bard’s many ballads and poems. Ae Fond Kiss, To A Mouse and Auld Lang Syne are usually on the bill. And somebody may well recite Tam O’Shanter, a rip-roaring yarn about witchcraft and heavy drinking that was first published 235 years ago in 1791. It’s a poem that has even more to it than most Burns Supper regulars might realise.
“Tam O’Shanter is Burns’s masterpiece, it really is,” says Pauline Mackay, professor of Robert Burns studies and cultural heritage at the University of Glasgow. “It’s one of his most popular works, so when you say it’s your favourite Burns poem, people say, ‘Urgh, that’s so obvious’. But actually, I’ve been studying it for many, many years, and it’s so multifaceted. Burns brought all of his considerable talents to bear on capturing what inspires him, what motivates him, and his own perception of humanity and human nature.”
And that’s not all. Robert Irvine, the editor of Burns: Selected Poems and Songs, notes that there is a darkness to the poem that goes beyond its spine-tingling descriptions of the devil and his minions. “There’s some weird stuff going on there,” he says.
Most of the revellers are ‘rigwoodie hags’, but one witch, Nannie, is young, attractive and scantily clad
The poem tells the mock-heroic tale of Tam O’Shanter, a farmer who spends as much time drinking as he does working. At the end of one market day in Ayr, he retires to the pub with his “ancient, trusty, drouthy crony” Souter Johnnie (ie, Johnnie the shoemaker), never mind that his wife Kate is waiting at home. It’s only after hours of boozing and flirting with the landlady that Tam finally sets off on his horse, Maggie. But it’s a dark and stormy night, so he has to hold on to his hat, and sing songs to keep up his spirits. “Whiles holding fast his gude blue bonnet; / Whiles crooning o’er some auld Scots sonnet.” This reference to a “blue bonnet”, incidentally, is why beret-like flat hats with pom-poms are called Tam O’Shanters.
When he approaches Alloway’s Auld Kirk, Tam notices that a diabolical party is underway inside: witches and warlocks are dancing, and the devil himself, Auld Nick, is playing the bagpipes. Most of the revellers are “rigwoodie hags”, but one witch, Nannie, is so young, attractive and scantily clad that Tam yells out the only words he speaks in the poem: “Weel done, Cutty-sark!” This cat call would later lend its name to the Cutty Sark, a 19th-Century clipper ship that can be visited in Greenwich, London. Roughly translated, it means: “Well done, Short Dress!”
Nannie and her cohorts aren’t pleased to hear it: Tam has to flee on horseback with a crowd of screeching witches in hot pursuit, “Wi’ mony an eldritch skriech and hollo”. Luckily for him, witches can’t cross running water, and the River Doon is nearby. Tam manages to race over the bridge to safety, but Maggie the horse isn’t quite so fortunate. Nannie grabs hold of her tail just as she steps on to the Brig O’ Doon, and – spoiler alert – she is left with “scarce a stump”.
Rude jokes and chilling imagery
Carruthers calls it a “fairly hackneyed ghost story plot”, but the way Burns tells his story means that “there’s no other poem like it in Scottish literature”. Tam O’Shanter is “incredibly rich, so visual, so carefully crafted and so well-paced”, Mackay tells the BBC. “There’s just so much in there: everything from the way Burns has absorbed and assimilated the landscape and folklore of Ayrshire where he was born, and Dumfriesshire where he was writing the poem, to his keen interest in the supernatural, to the various comments that he makes on the complexities of human relationships and gender. All of this is so fascinating.”
There are lines in Scots, and others in English. There are rude jokes, and there is chillingly macabre imagery. There are tributes to the joys of getting drunk with friends in a cosy pub: “Kings may be blest, but Tam was glorious. / O’er a’ the ills o’ life victorious!” And there are rueful philosophical musings on how transient those joys are: “But pleasures are like poppies spread, / You seize the flower, its bloom is shed.” Sometimes the narrator will address Tam himself: “O Tam, hadst thou but been sae wise, / As ta’en thou ain wife Kate’s advice!” At other times, he will address another character or the reader / listener – one reason, says Irvine, why the poem “lends itself to performance”, and has become a Burns Supper staple.
In fact, there isn’t much that Burns doesn’t do in Tam O’Shanter – and he does it all in rhyming iambic tetrameter. “He’s showing off,” says Irvine. “He’s doing one thing, and saying ‘Hey, look, I can do this other thing as well.’ In his first volume of poems, he does that between one poem and the next. He adopts different verse genres, he switches from Scots to English, he borrows from all sorts of different traditions – both what we think of now as the folk tradition, and the literary traditions of England and Scotland. It’s a virtuoso display of all the different things that he can do. And in Tam O’Shanter, he’s doing all that within one poem.”
Appropriately for a Burns Supper centrepiece, Tam O’Shanter is a feast, its most satisfying ingredient being its fond and insightful portrait of a character described as “the universal everyman” by Prof Gerard Carruthers, the editor of The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns. Burns is admired for his egalitarian politics, and even in his rollicking horror comedy, his sympathy for the common man shines through. “Tam O’Shanter is a poem of misdirection,” Carruthers tells the BBC. “Burns is saying: ‘Look at this! Look at the witch! Look at the horse!’ Whereas in fact the real thing that he is talking about is the way in which we’re incorrigible as human beings.” The poem glows with “ridicule and affection at the same time for Tam, and by extension for the human psyche in general”.
It’s a poem about humanity – the pleasures and the appetites, the challenges and the frailties – Gerard Carruthers
Burns – a notorious womaniser – is especially sharp on masculine foibles. “Burns knows the male mind,” says Carruthers. “He knows that men in a lot of ways are stupid wee boys.” On the other hand, says Mackay, women may recognise themselves in Tam O’Shanter, too. “It’s a poem about humanity – the pleasures and the appetites, the challenges and the frailties – and I think that’s one of the reasons why Burns is so universally popular. He talks about what it is to be a human being – and everything that we see in different places throughout his poetic oeuvre is somehow represented in this one poem.”
Still, alongside its compassion, there is devilry of more than one kind in Tam O’Shanter. “The weird and disturbing thing about this poem is that Burns’s father, William Burnes, was a very pious and serious man who despaired of the libertine tendencies of his son,” says Irvine. “He organised repairs to Alloway Kirk when Burns and his brother were boys, and one of the reasons for that is that he wanted to be buried there – and he was. So, in 1784 Burns’s father was buried in Alloway churchyard, which Burns then makes famous as the site of a witches’ orgy. Was he getting revenge on his father for his disapproval of his eldest son?”
As well as everything else Burns is doing in Tam O’Shanter, it could be argued that he is almost literally dancing on his father’s grave. Anyone who hears it at a Burns Supper on Sunday will have plenty to chew on.
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Paris ( Imran Y. CHOUDHRY):- The Embassy of Pakistan organized an event on the archeological studies of the 5000-year-old Indus Valley Civilization with Dr. Aurore Didier, Director of the French Archaeological Mission of the Indus Bassin.
Representatives of the UNESCO World Heritage Center, the Agha Khan Development Network (AKDN), archaeologists, historians and diplomats attended the event, which was organized with the support of the “Cercle des Amis du Pakistan”.
Dr. Didier briefed the audience on the history of the archeological excavations carried out by French archeologists in Pakistan. She gave an update on the latest research resulting from ten years of excavations at Chanhu-daro, one of the emblematic sites of the ancient Indus Valley Civilization. She also addressed how the adaptation of ancient populations to river and environmental fluctuations can be a key to understanding the current crises related to climate change and natural disasters that heavily impact South Asia today.
Addressing the audience, Ambassador Mumtaz Zahra Baloch noted the seventy years of cooperation between Pakistan and France in the domain of archeology. She appreciated the contributions made by the French Archeological Mission in Pakistan in research on the Indus Valley Civilization; and in promoting knowledge and competencies amongst local communities and scholars.
The Ambassador also reiterated her warm support for the “Cercle des Amis du Pakistan” for its initiatives in highlighting the cultural richness and diversity of Pakistan.
Art & Culture
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Isn’t it much better than making a fuss,
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Or you’ll be the laughing stock amidst cries of, “What a dope.”
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