Deprived of Culture?
By Madalina Dana
The stereotypical image of Greek women propagated by classical authors is that of the good housewife, whose job is to oversee the household beginning at a very early age: by the age of 14, a girl could draw up a list of domestic objects (Xenophon, Economics IX, 10). Accordingly, Theophrastus advised teaching women to read so that they could better perform their domestic responsibilities. Menander, on the other hand, claimed that educating a woman was akin to “giving a serpent more venom” (F 702, Kock).
Various accounts show that sometimes the city-state itself was responsible for educating its future citizens, boys and girls alike (up to a certain point). Thus, in the 5th century B.C., Herodotus, in his Histories (VI, 27), recounts the distress of the inhabitants of Chios when the roof of the school collapsed on the 120 children learning their letters within. We must note that Herodotus does not specify that these students were boys, which leads us to believe that the school was co-educational. An inscription from three centuries later in Teos, in Asia Minor, mentions the foundation established by a rich citizen named Polythrous to finance the education of young people, both boys and girls (Syll.3, 578). Paintings on vases represent schoolgirls learning to read and write, with tablets, styli, and scrolls of papyrus (1). Ultimately, the education of girls, like that of boys, depended on the social status of their families. On the island of Lesbos, Sappho (6th century B.C.), daughter of a rich family and, together with the poet Alcaeus, a pre-eminent representative of the tradition of lyric poetry (2), was the very picture of a cultivated woman (today we would call her an intellectual) (3).
Women of the Scroll
Learned women were often called “friends of the Muses”—the Muses were patronesses of all literary, artistic, and scientific activities—and each of the most famous poetesses was referred to as “the tenth Muse.” In art, the Muses are represented holding a scroll or tablet, symbols of intellectual activity. On funeral steles from the Hellenistic period, the equivalent to a reference to the Muses in the text of an epigram was the image of a scroll of papyrus in the hand of the deceased. Women almost always appear associated with their husbands when they are depicted reading in banquet scenes: the man, reclining on a bed (klinê) holds a half-unrolled papyrus scroll in one hand; the woman, seated at the end of the klinê or on a chair, holds her veil with one hand in a posture of reserve, while the other hand holds a scroll or tablet. However, a stele from Byzantium (1st century A.D.) bears an unprecedented scene: it is not the husband, nor the two spouses, but rather the woman alone who is represented holding a scroll. Even more notable, only the woman’s name is written: Lysandra, daughter of Dôlês, a patronym of Thracian origin (I. Byzantion, 368). Seated on an imposing armchair that resembles a seat of honor in a theatre, the deceased woman holds in her left hand a large volumen partially unfurled on her knees. We may wonder what is revealed in this representation of wives in Byzantium, who are shown to be as learned as their husbands—as well what kind of increased status this would result in for their families.
A Public Space for Learned Women
In order to understand representations of women holding scrolls on steles, these monuments must be put in context—that is, they must be situated within a particular space and time. Recent studies point to the “intellectualization” of portraits of citizens in images from the late Hellenistic period. In the 2nd century B.C., the motif of a young woman reading was added to the canonical representation of reading, which consisted in an image of a young man reading. In the Hellenistic era, the scroll symbolized culture (to which people of modest means could henceforth aspire)—but it also represented a revolution in gender, as culture took on a greater role in the repertory of images used to honor deceased women.