Social Convention, Conformity and Violence

The violent realities of Greek life are supported by scholarship on the honour-shame nexus in Hellenic society, particularly as it relates to female members of the oikos.1^[766] Attitudes towards female honour and shame, reflected in, for instance, strict and codified veiling practices, are therefore an integral part of the ancient Greek social order.

Ancient Greek judge-made laws were very important and custom may have played only a minor role as a legitimate source of law, but this does not rule out the possibility that social convention and even ‘family law', or what we can term ‘oikos traditions,' occasionally bypassed the formal city laws in what has been termed by David Cohen ‘extra-legal forms of sanctions and controls'.^[767] It is known, for example, that in Athens adulterous women were severely dealt with by the law: an adulteress was to be divorced from her husband and ostracised from public life (that is to say, she was deprived of her religious duties because of her self-imposed pollution), and could be beaten by anyone (any man, probably) who took it upon himself to perform the deed.^[768] The severity of the punishment was intended to instil a sense of fear within women and encourage them to be chaste,^[769] although it is interesting to note that some men preferred not to make public the sexual scandal of their private lives, perhaps, it has been suggested, out of a desire for financial gain, or love for their wives, or to preserve their and their family's honour.1^[770] Nonetheless, as Cohen notes, ‘in any society with arranged marriages, restricted courtship, and a double standard, adultery is a likely outlet for the emotional and social frustrations which such arrangements often produce'.^[771] Therefore, as has been recognised, both an informal method of social control and a particular kind of legislation were required to keep the threat of adultery in check.

The Greek fixation with careful guardianship of the chastity of wives and daughters has been well explored, but did the ideology of women as the inferior, volatile sex invoke male violence to keep them under guard and under control? A recent Jordanian newspaper column (male-authored, of course) has propounded the familiar Arab (but not Koranic) nomos that ‘It is permissible to beat a woman if she disobeys her husband's instructions. Beating does not hurt a woman's dignity. That is impossible, because woman is born without dignity.'^[774] Do we find the endorsement of a similar code of violence towards women expounded in the Greek sources? In today's West there is broad social disapproval of both wife beating and wife battering (although alarming figures highlight its routineness). In some non-Western, or in what are often termed ‘traditional', societies, however, the picture can be different. Violence against women is not always condemned by society and can, in fact, be championed as an expression of ‘patriarchal values'. In some ‘traditional' societies, community values positively sanction the use of violence in the domestic setting, and aggressive behaviour and violence are actually used as a ‘problem-solving' technique within families.

A series of penetrating studies of ‘traditional' patriarchal communities in rural Iran, Bangladesh and northern India have revealed those societies to be highly violent cultures (which can be modelled, in fact, along the lines of Gilmore's Andalusian or Fisher's Athenian communities).^[776] In these communities there are high levels of wife beating and battery which accompany an extreme general use of violence and warfare within the paralleled masculine zone of society. There is no community inter­vention in violence against wives, and definitions of masculinity posi­tively promote aggressive behaviour and dominance over women. Moreover, a number of socio-cultural factors make a wife subservient to her husband. Young women are carefully guarded and can be segre­gated or secluded from the rest of society depending on the cultural norms of the group (often they are compelled to stay at home as much as possible under the close watch of female guardians). They tend to be married off at a very young age and then subdued as new wives. Women are economically and socially dependent on their fathers, brothers or husbands, and the failure to control a wife is tantamount to a loss of face for the husband and is seen as shameful for the whole family.

Many, if not all, of the issues identified by contemporary social anthro­pologists for classifying the subservient role of women within traditional masculine violent cultures can be, and have been, readily identified in the low social status of women in the ancient Greek world too. There are very few overt allusions to violence against women in the ancient Greek corpus, but those few that do exist need to be unpacked carefully for the information they contain.