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Living it up in Ancient Greece (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 month ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

I’m interested in learning the context here.

Because modernity also hates women and I guess I’m ignorant but.. weren’t there options for women then..? Like midwife/doula-type things, herbalist/witch, spinster/seamstress-clothier?

Potentially more than they could have in modern history?

[–] [email protected] 38 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (1 children)

Modern media heavily whitewashes ancient Greece. Women were property, they held virtually no political rights of any kind.

Roman women were marginally better off, but by modern standards they were still in the dumpster.

Ancient Greece was also heavily into boy rape. It was really, really bad.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 1 month ago* (last edited 1 month ago) (2 children)

Remember that "ancient Greece" is our term for an area, rather than a singular nation / empire like Rome.

The area of Greece mainly had Athens and Sparta, and Athens is probably who you're referring to.

But Spartan women weren't that bad off, compared to other places in antiquity.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_ancient_Sparta

Spartan women were famous in ancient Greece for seemingly having more freedom than women elsewhere in the Greek world. To contemporaries outside of Sparta, Spartan women had a reputation for promiscuity and controlling their husbands. Spartan women could legally own and inherit property, and they were usually better educated than their Athenian counterparts.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 month ago (1 children)

But Spartan women weren't that bad off, compared to other places in antiquity

We also white wash Spartan history pretty dramatically. Yes, Spartan women who were citizens were better off than their Athenian counterparts. However, that's not saying much when you consider spartan citizens were a fraction of the population of Sparta.

The vast majority of women in Sparta were helots, and were subject to chattel slavery. I don't think you can claim that Spartans cared about gender equality when they had an entire social class made up of the bastards produced by raping their slaves.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago (1 children)

Oh yeah, they weren't like democratic utopias, lol.

The point being that Sparta was as shit as anything in history, but they were a bit less discriminatory towards women. Probably because they weren't really as posessive of them as many other cultures. For... some reason.

On the night of the wedding, the bride would have her hair cut short and be dressed in a man's cloak and sandals. The bride appeared dressed like a man or a young boy to be perceived as less threatening to her husband.

In Sparta [...] the cropping of the bride’s hair and transvestism likely aimed to transform her temporarily into an adolescent Spartan boy – a less threatening figure to the groom, who probably had made his own transition to adulthood via a close emotional and sexual relationship with an older male and was now in the position to sexually initiate other boys into Spartan society

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 month ago

In ancient Greece the women were for babies and the boys were for fun, so the saying goes.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 1 month ago

Ya you're right, there is nuance to the subject.