Response to Nathan’s Paper

Nathan excellently used the works of Aristophanes and Xenophon to explain the ideals of Greek wives. The Xenophon clearly describes the most ideal wife who is kept chaste and ignorant by her father. She is then molded and taught by her husband to keep a household in working order. Any mistakes she makes are the fault of her father or husband’s improper instruction. Aristophanes’s caricatures of ‘bad’ wives portray women as incredibly sexually promiscuous from an early age and as deceitful beings. The paper was very good, with the argument excellently supported. I have not read the Lysistrita, but I believe that it was quoted effectively.

It is not very easy to compare the standards of wives in ancient Athens to those in ancient Rome, because we have not specifically read something on the subject of the ideal Roman wife. Chloe is a girl, not yet a wife, and Cleopatra and Dido were foreign, powerful women and were not proper Roman wives. Women in Rome married earlier, earliest around twelve, than Greek women who married around fifteen. Yet, women in ancient Rome were not as secluded in the household as Greek women were. From what I have read, it seems to me that the Romans were not as absorbed by the ideal of a wife’s perfection as the Greeks were.

Dido and Cleopatra are both powerful women who ensnare great Roman men. Neither of these women stay in the household, are secluded from men, or lead naïve lives. These women are not ideals of what a perfect Roman wife should be, they are not even Roman, but they are not caricatures of the most obscene wife possible. The Xenophon and the works of Aristophanes only describe the most perfect and the most horrible wives. The real woman described in the Greek legal texts, whose husband has killed her lover, is described as neither completely horrible nor completely perfect. But she is a real woman, not a character in literature.

The play "The Mother In Law" by Terence is written by a Roman but set in Athens. The young wife in this play is the epitome of Athenian wifely virtue except for her unfortunate rape. Virtue is expected by the young woman, but circumstances beyond her control, such as her rape, make her intended virtue worthless. It does not appear to me that virtue in a young wife is so highly praised in this play. Virtue looses its importance, on the part of the woman, if it can so easily be taken away and given right back.

I was also startled by the difference in Roman and Greek society shown in Daphnis and Chloe. Daphnis is only two years older than Chloe, not the fifteen years in traditional Athenian relationships. Both Daphnis and Chloe are young and ignorant. In one book Daphnis rescues Chloe, and in another book Chloe rescues Daphnis. The man does not have to dominate and teach the woman. I cannot image this story being written in ancient Greece, it would be completely contradictory to their wifely ideals. The Romans do not seem to be so interested in writing stories of the perfect Roman wife or the worst Roman wife. Their female characters are somewhere in between.

I thought Nathan’s paper was very good and adequately explored the ideals of an ancient Athenian wife.