Greek Literary Sources

Texts dating from the Homeric age through to the Roman imperial period will be considered here, and I offer short commentaries on some key issues arising within the sources.

Homer, Iliad 1.560-89

And Zeus who marshals the thunderheads returned, ‘Maddening one...

Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2002); Vivien F. Go, ‘Crossing the Threshold: Engendered Definitions of Socially Acceptable Domestic Violence in Chennai, India', Culture, Health and Sexuality 5.5 (2003), 393-408; Pamal J. Chana, Domestic Violence: the Impact of Culture on Experiences of Asian (Indian Subcontinent) Women (Norwich: University of East Anglia Press, 2005); S. Hossain and L. Welchman (eds.), Honour Crimes, Paradigms and Violence against Women (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005); Sharada Srinivasan and Arjun Bedi, ‘Domestic Violence and Dowry: Evidence from a South Indian Village', World Development 35.5 (2007), 857-80; Amir H. Jafri, Honour Killing: Dilemma, Ritual, Understanding (Oxford and Lahore: Oxford University Press, 2008). yourself from me a little more - and all the worse for you... Now go sit down. Be quiet now. Obey my orders, for fear the gods, however many Olympus holds, are powerless to protect you when I come to throttle you with my irresistible hands.' He subsided but Hera the Queen, her eyes wider, was terrified. She sat in silence. She matched her will to his. And throughout all the halls of Zeus the gods of heaven quaked with fear. Hephaestus... rose up... trying now to bring his loving mother a little comfort: ‘... It will be unbearable if the two of you come to blows this way... I urge you, mother,... work your way back into his good graces... '

(trans. Janko) According to Homer, even goddesses can suffer maltreatment at the hands of their husbands, as his description of Zeus' threat of ‘unpreven­table physical violence' towards his wife Hera makes clear.^[777] Willcock interprets this scene as one of several incidents early on in the Iliad that are needed to stress the supremacy of Zeus as the kyrios (lord) of the heavenly oikos; on these occasions he becomes a bully and threatens the other gods with violence, and always comes out on top.^[778] However, his bona fide anger is reserved for his wife - his antagonism towards Hera has a special, marital, quality, and their matrimony increases the sig­nificance of the violence.

Nonetheless, here Hera is terrified. The goddess understands too well the danger that faces her, which no doubt serves to remind her of the violence she has suffered in the past, and immediately acquiesces in Zeus' command for silence. Hephaestus then quietly beseeches his mother to mollify Zeus with soft words and to play, in effect, the role (at the very least) of the submissive and complacent housewife.

Homer, Iliad 15.12-23

At the sight of Hector the father of men and gods, filled with pity now and shooting a terrible dark glance down at Hera, burst out at her, ‘What a disaster you create! Uncontrollable Hera... I'll whip you stroke on stroke. Don't you recall the time I strung you mid-air and slung those two massive anvils down from your feet and lashed both hands with a golden chain you could not break? There, in the clouds... you dangled. And the mighty gods on steep Olympus raged away, impotent - what could they do to set you free? Standing there, helpless.'

(trans. Janko)

The dialogue of book 15 is the climax of a series of references to violence against Hera, and this section is commonly referred to as the ‘Punishment of Hera' (kolasis tes Heras). Janko certainly reads the passage as humour: ‘Homer's audience will have been most amused by this tale's domestic appeals'.^[780] Whitman too suggests that ‘probably Homer thought this episode slightly comic... [it was] simply the kolasis Heras - a piece of rather grim domestic discipline, but well deserved'.^[781] We could, however, read the scene on another level altogether; as an ugly reminder that Zeus' loss of face and sense of self-worth has aroused his anger and that Hera is in danger of severe punishment, on a par with the chastisement she received in the past when she was suspended from the sky in chains and weights.

Semonides fr. 7 (On Women), 12-20

Another [the god] made from a bitch... She peers everywhere and strays everywhere, always yapping, even if she sees no human being. A man cannot stop her with threatening, nor by losing his temper and knocking her teeth out with a stone... but ceaselessly she keeps up a barking (leleken)...

(trans. Lloyd-Jones)

Semonides' On Women is the longest surviving piece of non-hexameter verse from before the Classical period, as well as being the first text in Western literature to have women as its sole subject, and therefore it is tempting to interpret it as literal historical data about Greek attitudes towards women who are shown to be inferior beings, without mind and lacking in self­control. According to Semonides, the ‘bitch-woman' drives men to physical anger (cf. Od. 18.25-9).

Semonides' main purpose was to entertain - and if this fragmentary poem is indeed a comedy, a social satire or a series of jokes on the theme that women are a curse to men, then we laugh through the common cultural idioms, in this particular case, the image of the over-talkative and, thus, deservedly beaten wife. That Semonides' poem is entertaining does not negate its value for serious reflection on women's role in society. The word leleken, for instance, is invariably translated in this passage as the bark or yelp of a dog, and while verbs of sustained sound do have their canine connotations, it is interesting to note that when used in respect to men, leleken can simply mean ‘speaking loudly' or ‘speaking too loudly'; the dual application should not be missed in the context of Semonides' poem. The bitch-woman, with her constant gos­siping, speaks too much and too loudly.

Euripides fr. 497 (Melanippe Wise/Melanippe Captive)

Punish her (teisasthe tende)!... Some men do not get rid of a woman when they find she is bad... then her wrongdoing overflows to many others and progresses, so their virtue completely vanishes.

A series of Euripidean fragments from his two lost plays on the Melanippe myth, which evidently centred on the theme of adultery and retribution, provide some insights, perhaps, into commonly held views.^[782] Thus, on the general nature of women an unknown (male?) character states: ‘The hatred women incur is very hurtful.

Aristophanes, Lysistrata 160-6

Calonice: And what if they drag us into the bedroom by force (bia)?

Lysistrata: Hold onto the door.

Calonice: And what if they beat us? (ean de tuptosin;)

Lysistrata: Then submit, but disagreeably: men get no pleasure in sex when they have to force you (bian). Don't worry, they'll soon give in. No husband can have a happy life if his wife doesn't want him to.

(trans. Henderson)

In this passage the husband’s authority over his wife is stressed through an escalation of violence. At line 160, bia denotes the general force by which husbands take their wives into the bedroom, but just two lines later the violence becomes more specific (tuptosin, ‘strike’, ‘blow’), the intensity of the action demonstrated in the etymology of tupos, meaning ‘mark of a blow’ or ‘impression’.

Aristophanes, Lysistrata 507-20

Lysistrata: Before now, and for quite some time, we maintained our decorum and suffered [in silence] whatever you men did, because you wouldn’t let us make a sound. But you weren’t exactly all we could ask for. No, we knew only too well what you were up to, and many a time we’d hear in our homes about a bad decision you’d made on some great issue of state. Then, masking the pain in our hearts, we’d put on a smile and ask you, ‘How did the Assembly go today...?’ And my husband would say, ‘What’s that to you? Shut up!’ And I’d shut up.

Old Woman: I wouldn’t have shut up!

Magistrate: If you hadn’t have shut up you’d have got a beating.

Lysistrata: Well, that’s why I did shut up - then. But later on we began to hear about even worse decisions you’d made, and then we would ask, ‘Husband, how come you’re handling this so stupidly?’ And right away he’d glare at me and tell me to get back to my sewing if I didn’t want major damage to my head.

(trans. Henderson)

According to Lysistrata, an over-talkative wife might be threatened with brutality by her husband following a bad day at the Assembly and so, to avoid a beating, she should be wise and keep quiet. Aristophanes stresses that the violence comes only after a wife presses her husband on the matter of the Assembly business for a second time (while criticising him to boot). She has not learned her place and does not know when to offer her husband ‘a silent tongue and a calm appearance’.^[784]

Aristophanes, Clouds 1443-6

Pheidippides: I'll beat mother, as I beat you.

Strepsiades: What's that? What did you say? That's different, afargreater crime!

Pheidippides: And what if I use the Worse Argument to defeat you on the resolution, it's right to beat one's mother?

(trans. Henderson)

While wife abuse is passed over with, it seems, little or no comment, the beating of parents is never condoned; mother-beating is particularly odious.

Here, Aristophanes is certainly creating a fantastical situation by demon­strating the topsy-turvy nature of his imagined Athens (his is a city where children beat parents, whereas in reality parents punish children), never­theless to claim, as Barry Strauss has done, that parent abuse is only comic fantasy is naive.^[785] References to father-beating and mother-beating are not unknown in the Greek sources, although usually the metraloias and the patraloias are spoken of together, and nowhere in law or rhetoric is it stated that violence against a mother is any more heinous than that against a father.^[786] In Clouds, however, Pheidippides is completely mistaken in believing that his father would be glad to know that he was proposing to beat his mother - not that Pheidippides seems to bear a grudge against her; he plans to hit his mother only to gratify the hen-pecked Strepsiades. The outrage felt by Strepsiades at his son's suggestion might be explained by the Athenian nomos that the bond between mother and son was closer than that shared by son and father.

Plutarch, Life of Alcibiades 8.4

Alcibiades came up and seized [Hipparete] and dragged her off home with him through the market place, no man daring to oppose him or take her from him.

(trans. Perrin with amendments) According to Plutarch, Alcibiades was a bully. Nevertheless, his rough public treatment of his wife, Hipparete, who was trying to reach the Archon to petition for divorce, passed without public comment: ‘such violence (bia)', states Plutarch, ‘was not thought lawless or cruel at all. Indeed, the law prescribes that the wife who would separate from her husband shall go to court in person, to the end, it would seem, that the husband may meet her on the way and thus regain possession of her.'^[787]

The Hipparete incident recounted in the Life of Alcibiades might be explained by Plutarch's desire to spin around the figure of Alcibiades stories of moral worthlessness and excess;^[788] it is no coincidence that the Hipparete story is followed immediately by Plutarch's account of Alcibiades' dog:

Possessing a dog of wonderful size and beauty, which had cost him seventy minas, he had its tail cut off, and a beautiful tail it was, too. His friends criticised him for this, and declared that everybody was furious about the dog and abusive of its owner. But Alcibiades burst out laughing and said: ‘That's just what I want; I want Athens to talk about this, so that it may say nothing worse about me.'^[789]

The anecdote about Alcibiades' maltreatment of the dog is on a par with the rough treatment of his wife, but while the punishment of Hipparete goes without public comment, the clipping of the dog's tail (albeit done for aesthetic concerns) engenders public consternation. Pseudo-Andokides seems to have regarded Alcibiades' treatment of Hipparete as egregious hubris, but he stands alone in this regard.^[790] This compels us to wonder if violence against a woman could ever be hubristic. Women are certainly regarded as catalysts of male hubris, but following Fisher's suggestion that hubris gives the assailant a sense of superiority while simultaneously break­ing the laws of state or challenging the norms of the community, it could be proposed that a woman's refusal to acknowledge her inferiority or sub­ordination to the wishes of a man are acts of hubris in themselves.^[791] A fragment of Plato Comicus suggests just this: ‘If you are always punishing your wife, she's the best of all possessions; if you relax too much, she's a hybristic thing and uncontrolled.'^[792] Hipparete was of an aristocratic family; the ideology of violence over women therefore applied to the aristoi too. We should not assume that violence towards wives was the preserve of the lower social orders; in fact, we might argue that as the honour-shame ideologies of the upper classes permeated the lower classes, so did their methods of control.^[793]

Chariton, Callirhoe 1.4.12-1.5.1

[Chaereas] could find no voice with which to reproach [Callirhoe]; but overcome by anger, he kicked at her as she ran forward. His foot struck the girl squarely in the diaphragm and stopped her breath. She collapsed, and her maidservants, picking her up, laid her on the bed. Thus Callirhoe lay without speech or breath, presenting to all an appearance of death.

(trans. Reardon)

The most blatant portrayal of domestic violence occurs in the first extant Greek novel, Callirhoe, dated to the late Hellenistic or early imperial Roman period. The novel's hero, Chaereas, beats his young wife with such jealous ferocity that he thinks he has killed her; she is battered into a coma but miraculously escapes with her life.^[794] The attack is instigated by a rumour about Callirhoe's fidelity; there is no gradual escalation of violence here and the beating is not prefixed by any threat or warning. Chaereas simply lashes out in blind anger in a frenzy of jealousy, humiliation and hurt. Callirhoe is left for dead, while Chaereas next takes out his rage on the maids: ‘it was while they were undergoing fire and torture that he learned the truth' (1.5.2).

Back to Honour: Levels of Abuse

It appears from the fleeting glimpses we have into this side of intensely private lives, that women may have taken beatings of various degrees of severity at the hands of their male kin, and that women were punished for offences that compromised male honour or upset the ideology of male domination over female inferiority. Physical chastisement was seen as neces­sary if the wife refused to kowtow or learn her lesson. The Oeconomicus of Xenophon, therefore, contains nothing at all about the chastisement of women since the work's philosopher-author privileges his central character, Ischomachos, with a very young and pliant wife.^[795] It would be interesting to revisit the home of Ischomachos twenty years later.

In many ‘traditional' societies the ideal of masculinity is underpinned by a notion of ‘honour' and is fundamentally connected to policing female beha­viour and sexuality. Honour is generally seen as residing in the bodies of women. Moreover, a woman's honour depends upon the reputation that the community is willing to concede, not upon evidence of facts. While norms and nomoi about women's social comportment vary according to period and place, they are perceived to have a direct effect upon men's honour. Violent acts (including murder) are perpetrated on the slimmest suspicion of shame­ful conduct on the part of the woman. She must foster an intense awareness of her own sense of shame if the men of her family are not to be dishonoured; moreover, if a female violates an honour norm, the whole family experiences the shame. A man must therefore respond appropriately because by not acting in the expected masculine manner he would add to the shame. As Irfan Husain emphasises,

In all relationships the most powerful weapon that men wield over women is the notion of ‘honour'; prior to her marriage a woman, as a daughter, represents the ‘honour' of her father, as sister the ‘honour' of her brother, as the beloved the ‘honour' of her betrothed. After marriage, as a wife, she symbolizes the ‘honour' of her husband, as a daughter-in-law, the ‘honour' of her father-in-law and as a mother she symbolizes the ‘honour' of her sons... Ultimately she comes to signify the ‘honour' of her race, her tribe, the land, the nation. Thus when these male collectives fight against each other, she is the one who must be sacrificed at the altar of male ‘honour'. When it comes to sacrifice, no religion, no sect, no group is different from another. The concept of women as a symbol of ‘honour' makes them into mere signs in which the actual flesh and blood woman disappears.^[796]

Ironically, it is through flesh and blood that male honour is best defended. In northern India a commonly heard maxim is ‘Beat up the shameless hussy', and it is often used as good advice for a husband who is having trouble with a non-conforming wife. Beating of women is very much part of Indian culture and is accepted by women as a matter of course. To understand this ideology, another proverb is useful: ‘A quarrel between a married couple is of no consequence.' Therefore neighbours rarely (if ever) interfere with domestic violence and, in fact, the wife herself resents outside intervention, a situation familiar in the modern West as well.^[797] Abu-Lughod puts an interesting spin on the situation and reveals that among the Awlad Ali, male toughness is admired and to a certain degree, women like the concept of ‘real men' and generally share male idealisation of domestic power (again, this is not necessarily an alien concept in the modern West).^[798]

The ancient Greek evidence suggests that violence or the threat of vio­lence was used if a woman challenged male authority and that physical violence was secondary to threats and verbal abuse. Several key triggers for violence can be identified: wife speaking out of turn (Hera, bitch-woman, Lysistrata); wife's actions contradict the husband's will (Hipparete, bitch­woman, Lysistrata); wife's refusal to have sex (Calonice and Lysistrata); suspicion of a wife's infidelity or her role as the focus of gossip (Callirhoe); and alcohol consumption (the Metropolitan Museum chous). The types of physical violence against women vary widely in our texts, ranging from (presumably) slapping and punching to dragging and carrying, hitting with stones and kicking. The scale of violence can vary from threats of punishment to beatings and battering: wives participating in gossip or backchat (the bitch­woman, Hera and Lysistrata) could be chastised with impunity because of the annoyance it caused to husbands, but wives who were the subject of gossip (like Callirhoe) are open to severe forms of physical punishment since the dishonour caused by the rumour was detrimental to the oikos.

The men in the texts, and those who created them (with the exception perhaps of Plutarch), seem to regard violence as a necessary tool that served to ‘teach' and ultimately discipline their wives. Given that the texts are written by men, it is not surprising that the wives (not even Lysistrata) do not speak out against the punishments or the overarching ideology that perpetuates such abuse; it is possible that women did not think in those terms, but accepted violence unconditionally. As one young wife in an Indian community has put it: ‘Whatever the husband does is okay and is acceptable in the community... And if the wife questions the husband there are going to be lots of problems... This is what the elders during our days have taught us to do and we all feel that we should live up to that.'^[799]