Machismo and Violence: Athens and beyond
In a 1998 article Nick Fisher explored the nature of overt masculine aggression in Athenian society; he showed ancient Athens to have been a violent city, suffering from the strains of a machismo ideology.[758] In fact, to get this reading Fisher utilised David Gilmore's anthropological model of violence, which focused on Andalusian society and adjacent Mediterranean communities, for defining what constitutes a masculine culture.[759] It was noted by Gilmore that for the creation of a machismo culture, certain elements are fundamentally necessary: there must be, for instance, a clear view of the differences between male and female natures and abilities.
Men in ‘machismo societies' are under constant pressure to perform adequately, and therefore publicly, as fathers (especially of worthy sons) and as husbands who provide for their wives and guard them vigilantly. To do this, they need to ‘play' the ‘role' of the macho male. Especially important in this regard is their ability to play sexually dominant roles within society and to rigorously avoid any slur of effeminacy. This role-playing scenario is further endorsed by the need for men to engage in competitions of masculinity as well as elaborate rites of passage.Furthermore, macho men are obliged both to maintain an independence of occupation and to sustain the position of the close family group. They must display continual pride in honour and, most importantly, respond adequately to insults directed against their masculine image, against their family and, especially, against the reputations of their female relatives. By extension, this vigilance over personal and familial honour requires the display of masculine virility in public acts, including bawling and fighting and, sometimes, killing.
Fisher explored each of the categories that Gilmore highlighted and carefully utilised them to show how Athenian males responded to the same social pressures and requirements.
Athens, he stated, was a ‘seriously violent society... [D]espite the persistence of a strong ideological commitment that citizens should prove their manhood, maintain their honour and avoid shame... much low-level fighting occurred'.[760] Fisher ascertained that ‘it should be emphasised that casual violence against dependents and slaves, and the beating of children, were all likely to have been common'. While this in itself is uncontroversial,[761] Fisher went further: ‘Rather less is heard explicitly of wife beating as a regular practice but it seems unlikely that it did not occur pretty routinely.'[762] This is a bold statement, and Fisher follows it up with yet another: ‘There seems less evidence, not surprisingly, for sexual abuse within the family, in contrast to the sexual abuse of young slaves; in part the ready availability of such sex-objects may have diminished the levels of abuse of free children, but this is surely unlikely to have made, for example, father-daughter abuse a fairly infrequent problem.'[763] [764] These ideas are thought-provoking and, although it was beyond his remit to locate the evidence, Fisher nevertheless compels us to acknowledge that some of the most repellent aspects of human nature were daily realities in the lives of the Greeks, spilling out onto the streets or permeating the rooms of the oikos.However, in a stimulating article of 2003, Danielle Allen has argued that violence within Athens arose from the concept of anger as a necessity: law court oratory prized anger as an admirable state of mind since ‘hot-blooded anger' contributed to justice and good politics.11 Of course, a political order which requires and relies on anger and, by extension, violence, runs many risks, and therefore the scope of anger, Allen argues, was limited and regulated. Anger was not for the home, nor was it an emotion appropriate to women.
Does this mean that the violence identified by Fisher as a central facet of Athenian society was not extended into the family unit or did not affect women? I will argue in this chapter, given the evidence contained in the sources, that it is difficult to accept Allen's supposition that anger and violence were ideally restricted to a public arena.[765] Male violence operating around the adjuncts of honour and shame clearly entered into domestic life, as I will demonstrate.