6.3 The Means of Accomplishing part 3

The preamble says the purpose of the U.S. Constitution (social contract) is to preserve its members “general welfare”. Accomplishing that requires an agreement to provide the necessary services and protections. These include assuring individual autonomy; preserving history; providing education, history, health care, infrastructure; and establishing a system of government.

Establishing individual autonomy requires limiting the self-interest of those wielding the power of government. Powerful leaders justified disenfranchising whole classes of people through appeals to The Great Chain of Being, claims of cultural or racial superiority, and their raw power to strip “inferiors” of their autonomy. Differences in race, nationality, religion, and class complicate understanding. The attack on individual autonomy is easiest to see in the disregard for women’s rights, but if the public accepts using power to dehumanize women, it legitimates using that power to dehumanize every less powerful person or group. Unless the social contract defends everyone, society devolves to Hobbes’ war of all against all.

Renaissance scholars found clashing systems of privileges and abuse in ancient Greece. They adopted the rules and ideas that most devalued the women. Slave figures were smaller, often nude, in Athenian statues and art. Citizens’ wives were shown clothed. Goddess statues were clothed until Phyrne posed nude for the statue of Aphrodites of Knidos.¹ Rather than prudery, clothing Citizens’ wives was the same form of erasure as the Muslim chador, establishing male ownership of women’s visibility. The Spartan had not shared that public erasure of women. By contrast, nude male statues reflected male self ownership with an artistic feature displaying male Athenian citizens’ superiority. Greeks considered strong emotional and sexual desires evidence of barbarity. The small genitals decorating male statues showed freedom from desire.

The Other Women in Greek Society

The revived Greek history focused on citizen’s lives. Medics’ (free non-citizen) and slaves’ lives were footnotes. Greek daily life was lived in the space between the male citizens and everyone else. The agora, the public space for politics, sports, commerce, and religious celebrations was surrounded by dicteria, (brothels) designed to serve clients of every wealth and class. The clients visiting them could abuse the dicteriades² (the slaves staffing them), in whatever manner clients desired, subject to extra charges for damaging their owner’s property. Everyone with money could use them, but wealth bought additional opportunities. While wives never attended banquets, paintings and stories show that women were regular participants at even the highest citizens’ banquets. Men wanted the company of beautiful, intelligent women who would entertain, talk, even debate them on philosophy and politics. Flute-players (auletrides), a social class higher than dicteriades, provided entertainment. Although some were metics, but most were slaves trained by their owners and valued for their beauty and entertainment skills. Depending on the agreement between their owners and the hosts, flute-girls might join the guests on their couches. The entertainment they offered might, but did not automatically, include sexual activity. Citizens and metics having sex with any available person was not the issue behind statues’ small genitals. The feared barbarity was being controlled by a too strong desire for passion.

The highest status women joining the banquets were the hetairae, comparable to noble’s courtesans and aristocrats’ mistresses.Initially some came from citizens’ houses. Over time these independent women were mainly free foreigners and metics. Hetairae were highly educated, beautiful, and sexually exciting. That reflects a disconnect between the philosophy of controlled emotions and life as lived. Some hetairae became extremely wealthy. Some married political leaders. They argued politics and philosophy³ with important men. Aspasia of Miletus, for example, taught Socrates rhetorics and dialectics. Diotima of Mantinea⁴ structured his philosophy of love.

How did Greek philosophers view women? With more nuance than reached the middle ages and Renaissance. Thucydides rejected Aristotle’s Realism argument that governments should act in their own self-interest even if that meant acting unjustly. He cautioned that those who do not respect morality and restrain their actions risk falling into ruin: power did not justify domination. Socrates favored including women in public politics. Aristotle pressed harder, using both “aner (male) and gender inclusive “anthropus” (human) in discussing politics. He believed women had a heightened capacity for learning, memory, strategic thinking, and prudence. Those are skills he thought critical for political leadership. Both recognized women as citizens without qualification.

The presence of flute-players, and hetairae are evidence of what women in Athens were capable of being, both at home and in public. Powerful men enjoyed women in public, just not for them to include wives. The difference between public women, citizens’ wives, and Spartan women shows what Athenians knowingly prevented their wives from becoming. The Renaissance scholars searching the past for justification skipped Socrates and Aristotle to dredge up the harshest rules restricting women’s autonomy. The men setting the laws we’ve adopted from the middle ages and Counter Enlightenment themselves adopted the rules that protected Greek citizens, that is protected men’s power.

Those privileged scholars dredged up the most repressive beliefs the new generation of elite citizens could use to reject others’ individual autonomy. The rest of people could not survive following those rules. That would be comparable to imposing the rules governing Gilded Age aristocrat’s wives on 1890s Kansas farm families. Only the wealthy can afford such abusive.

Ancient Rome’s male chauvinism matched Athen’s, sharing the same broad classes: citizens, non-citizens, and slaves. Only male Roman citizens had political voice (yes some wives had significant influence). The law for citizens, lus Civile, provided citizens extra protections. The laws for everyone else, lus Gentium, preserved territorial peace as the empire expanded. Roman rules governing women and marriage began with a debasement of women similar to Athens. That system, pater familias, collapsed of its own weight as the Roman Republic gave way to Imperial Rome, only to be revived with the rise of the Holy Roman Empire. As Greek theologians formalized Christian doctrine they filtered ancient Jewish and first century Christian beliefs through an Athenian lens.

Next: Rome and individual autonomy through the treatment of women.

1 Sculpted by Praxiteles, Phryne , a hetaira, was tried for impiety, a serious change. Hypereides defended her by baring her breasts and claiming such beauty could not offend the goddess. She was acquitted and goddess statues changed.

 2 Also called pornae included young men and women.

3 Philosophy included science as the method of knowing.

 4 Diotima of Mantinea may have been false name to protect Aspasia’s identity.