The Forbidden Woman: How Menander Reconciles Non-Athenian Female Characters with the Greek Assumption of Citizens’ Superiority

Hellenistic New Comedy, in which the work of Menander has a significant role, is deeply rooted in ideology. The content of the plays is largely apolitical, which suggests that it served more as a distraction from the political turmoil in Athens at the time. However, although the work does not explicitly acknowledge political shifts and we can hardly assume that the Athenian belief system is perfectly reflected in the plays, the ideology behind the patterns in the body of work lies in the structure underlying the text. As with any literary genre, “this structure organizes values and motives,” David Konstan wrote, and in a society which associated certain values with specific social groups, New Comedy also organized people associated with those values and motives into groups within a structure. Because morals and values are relatively nonnegotiable in any literary genre, this structure became the “condition for conformity with or violation of the social protocols,” and the social structure continues to be replicated throughout the genre.[1] This paper will attempt to answer two questions. First, is Menander a good source of information on women and the social dynamics in Hellenistic Athens? This refers to the “conscious” impact Menander had on his work, and the intentionality behind how it interacted with its audience and social context. Second, what can we learn about the Athenian status quo in the late 4th century and early 3rd century BC from the themes of his work? Motifs and norms  in the comedy can provide us with clues about norms in the Greek world. This is the unconscious impact Menander has upon his work.

To answer our first question, we must ask a few others:

Is Menander faithful to real-world Hellenistic Athens?

“The rules and values of ancient city-state society constitute a cultural system.”[2] The cultural system of Athens is reflected in the plays— in particular, Athenian marriage law features prominently in New Comedy. In 451 B.C., legislation was passed stating that “only the offspring of two parents of citizen status were entitled to full civil and political rights.”[3] Only citizens who married other citizens could produce heirs who inherited citizen status, creating a “citizen community,” and a “closed conjugal group.”[4]

Despite the “citizen community” created by Athenian law, Hellenistic Athens was comprised of many different classes of women, and non-citizen women frequently worked as prostitutes. Prostitutes and “working women” were a important feature of Middle Comedy and these women played a significant role in Hellenistic Greece. Menander’s women, very frequently non-citizens and/or prostitutes, are faithful to the roles they would have played in the real-world of Hellenistic Athens. 

The political climate in which New Comedy was created was fraught. Athens experienced a series of wars and conflict over control of the polis after the death of Alexander. Within the city, friction between the rich and poor, while it had existed for centuries, was “contained by communal traditions, which bound the citizens together as a status group over and against foreigners, slaves, resident aliens,” and other “others.”[5] The longstanding tension between classes surfaced Hellenistic because the “communal traditions” were weakening along with Athens itself under the control of Macedonia.[6] The plays, which appear to be purely apolitical, rarely mention this, but the political themes in Hellenistic Athens can nonetheless be seen under the surface of the text. Questions regarding identity and citizenship in the plays mirrors this shift in Athens.

Menander faithfully recreated this picture of Hellenistic Athens, at least in terms of verifiable legal and social convention, in his work. The female social structure underlying the texts seems to mirror traditional Greek distinctions between different “types” of women: citizen,  non-citizen, or enslaved; married or unmarried; Greek women were also defined based upon their profession.[7] Because New Comedy seems to recreate the reality of Hellenistic Greece, the world within the comedies is easily taken for reality and, Agatha Heap suggested in her book Behind the Mask, used as evidence for the status of Athenian women.[8] This cannot be done, not least because women primarily serve as a plot device: the object of a young man’s fixation and usually the cause of the obstacles the young man faces because of her unattainability. These are women written by men to serve the plot lines of men, not free-thinking women whose behavior and motives are meant to be analyzed beyond what is immediately obvious. However, this provides insight into the perception of women in Hellenistic Athens and, by analyzing the patterns in women’s usage as a plot device, we can distance ourselves from the flawed human characters and examine what these motifs can tell us. Misconstrued identity, a common motif, mirrors political themes in Hellenistic politics. Whether Menander, writing in an apolitical discipline, intended this leads us to our next question.  

What is Menander’s intended effect upon his audience?

Answers to this question presented in existing scholarship depend heavily on the way in which the works are read. Although political speeches and Athenian propaganda from the 320s emphasized patriotism and focused on forming a united front against the threat presented by Macedonia, Athenians were being divided.[9] Changes were made to Athenian citizenship laws under Macedonian control in the 320s, disenfranchising lower-class, non-property holding men.[10] Menander’s plays must be read with this historical context in mind.

Whether Menander’s plays are a commentary on the political climate in newly-Macedonian Athens is hotly debated. Wilfred Major, in his own reading of the plays, noted that “[the fact] that neither these upheavals nor the machinations of empire-building garner more than rare incidental mention in Menander's plays has accordingly incited reaction and attempts at explanation from numerous commentators.”[11] Major, who argued that despite his seeming silence on politics, Menander betrays himself as a Macedonian sympathizer, wrote that “Menander's plays operate in a world encased in a sphere of Macedonian control over Athens, indeed the entire Mediterranean area.”[12] Whether his plays contain any explicit or intended political message, the climate in which the plays were written undoubtedly had an affect, even if only unconsciously.

Do his plays reinforce or upset the status quo?

New Comedy employs a nearly constant cast of characters, including a young man and the object of his desires. New Comedic plots almost always follow the same pattern, as illustrated by C.R. Post, who noted that “the comic poets, then, evidently set very slight value on originality.”[13] This continual repetition of the same motifs is important, though. In almost all of Menander’s plays, a young man “falls in love” with a woman who he cannot have. There occurs a misidentification of a woman, usually a misidentification of status, which creates the obstacle between the man and the woman, and then a conflict between her believed status and her character. The consistency of this conflict speaks to the Greek tendency to conflate low social status with low character. In most cases, the woman displays the characteristics of a high-class Athenian woman despite her poor or foreign or otherwise lesser status. The plot is resolved by returning the woman to her rightful status as a marriageable Athenian woman and there is invariably a “happy ending,” ie, a marriage, between the two lovers.

The consistency of this conservative ending throughout New Comedy and particularly throughout Menander’s work suggests that he was writing to his audience, mostly middle and upper class Athenian men.[14] Menander’s plots also retain existing laws and Athenian customs, which suggests, more than it does that he was making a statement on the correctness of any laws, that Menander was making sure not to offend Athenian sensibilities, and is even “subtly flattering [the] audience.”[15] Perpetuating succession within the closed society was of utmost importance to citizens and, due to Athenian citizenship law, fully dictated who young Athenian men could marry.[16] She had to be Athenian so that their sons could inherit their citizenship and because Athenian blood was so heavily emphasized, a wife’s fidelity was tantamount to ensuring that her children were truly citizens and protecting her husband's inheritance for her own children. Should she participate in infidelity, “the act…cast suspicion on all her children, past and future,” jeopardizing the closely held family inheritance and potentially introducing non-citizen blood into the Athenian closed community.[17] Citizen women in Menander’s plays are held to these standards, and when violated by a man, must always end up married to him in order to uphold the status distinction, as is demanded by the structuralist approach to society.

While Menander’s plays not only acknowledge Greek status divisions but also seem to reinforce them through his consistent compliance with them, the ambiguity in status of many of his female characters challenges the idea that all Greeks fit into clearly cut groups.[18] This almost suggests that Menander is seeking to upset the firmly held Athenian conviction in the divisions in their society. The young men of Menander’s plays are threatening Athenian society by seeking to marry non-citizens, which would “dissolve the boundary that separated citizens from strangers.”[19] The plays serve as a projection of male desires: they give male characters freedom to chose their sexual partner, breaking free from Athenian marriage customs. Menander panders to his audience but does not revolutionize their customs. The world of New Comedy is not far removed from the real world. The plays indulge the young man’s illicit romance but end with marriage; “their problem,” Elaine Fantham wrote, “is to reconcile romance with morality.”[20]

What do the assumptions about status of women that lie below the surface of the text reveal about the social dynamics?

Just as the plays complied with the laws and social demands of real-world Athens, Menander also conformed to accepted Greek sensibilities, such as the belief that status reflected moral character.[21] The conflation of moral and political identity is one of the most consistent themes throughout Menander’s work. “Goodness” in women is reserved for Athenian citizens. Because of their citizenship, these are married or marriageable women, and therefore virgins. By contrast, hetairai, “companions,” a euphemism for prostitute and a more dignified word for “whore,” are usually non-citizens. Indeed, non-citizen women are broadly defined, based upon an assumption that they work as hetairai, as “bad,” “audacious,” and are said to “plot for gain."[22] They are almost always not virginal, but it is multitudes less important that hetairai preserve their virginities than it is that citizen women do so. Menander’s women always seem to fall on one side of this binary. However, the young men of Menander’s plays very frequently “fall in love” with a “forbidden woman." This is a plot device heavily used throughout the plays; as Sarah Pomeroy wrote, “in the romantic atmosphere of New Comedy one plot is repeated ad nauseam: a free young man is smitten with passion for a young slave woman.” This woman, whether enslaved, captive, or free, is a hetaira or is thought to be due to a mischaracterization, which presents a contradiction to the “good” and “bad,” citizen vs non-citizen binary that upsets the status quo. Though the women often turn out to be “lost daughters,” of citizens, the fact that most of Menander’s female characters with speaking roles are foreigners, freedwomen, and slaves, all identities which were associated with sex work and prostitution, or are citizen women who have been mistaken to be a hetaira poses multiple questions:[23]

Why are poor women, non-Athenian women, or women thought to be non-Athenian the object of affection in so many of Menander’s plays, when his plays uphold the assumption that morality and goodness is restricted to upper class women?

French Hellenist Phillipe Legrand presented an answer to this question which is highlighted in Vincent Rosivach’s book on the rape motif in New Comedy. Legrand argued that the women of Menander’s works, of a low social class or having already been declassed by circumstance, are realistically freer to express emotions like love than upper class women.[24] This argument is partially discredited by the fact that the women almost never express any love or desire comparable to that of the male character, although in Hellenistic Athens, upper class citizen women, especially unmarried women with carefully protected virginities, were closely guarded, and lower class women were realistically “more accessible” to men.[25] Throughout the plays, an unmarried Athenian women is always contacted through her kyrios, usually her father, and after the citizenship of “lost daughters,” (note the terminology, which is standard throughout the body of work) has been discovered, marriage negotiations, now a legal possibility and a plot necessity, occur between the male lead and the female lead’s father. Therefore, the only romantic arrangement that can ever arise between the two Athenian youths is marriage, and Rosivach argued that New Comedic plots require forbidden sexual affairs and presents the examples “anonymous rapes, affairs with prostitutes, liaisons with non-citizens— anything but legitimate marriage.”[26] Unprotected women are necessary for the “forbidden woman” motif to work.

Rosivach noted that, whether due to citizenship or gender, “there is always status imbalance…which works to the the young man’s advantage.[27] The status imbalance, Rosivach continued, is “a point well worth keeping in mind when we see these young men lamenting about their powerlessness to resist some woman’s charms.”[28] Classicist Helene Foley directly connected this status difference between a “lost daughter” and an Athenian man to the youths’ apparent inability to resist the women: “the young men…are madly in love with them (perhaps because of the earlier painful loss of resources and identity as well as the absence of a male guardian).”[29] The consensus between these three classicists seems to be that the appeal of the women lies in their vulnerability, or at least that ease of access is enough reason for the men to be madly in love with them and for Menander to almost exclusively feature lower class women.

It is true that vulnerable women are usually necessary for New Comedic motifs, but this introduces the tension between citizenship versus non-citizenship. Almost all of Menander’s female characters embody the “forbidden woman,” who is usually a hetaira or a lower class woman presumed to be one, and therefore considered amoral, but almost never a citizen. Conversely, the conservative convention of New Comedy requires the happy ending of a legal marriage between two Athenians and this dilemma presents the audience with an uncomfortable compromise that must be made upon their conventional perception of what makes a woman “bad” or “good,” because the young man must now end up with the “forbidden woman.” Although conclusions presented by cited scholarship are plausible, there is no concrete answer to the question of why poor and non-Athenian women are the object of affection of most of Menander’s young men, because the answer that they are needed to fulfill the requirements of New Comedic plots feels insufficient. Asking the next logical question may provide us with more clarity. The standard plots create tension that could have been omitted from the plays, but what can its presence tell us?

Menander is concerned with “the reconciliation of romance with morality,” but most of his women are “forbidden:” Does he reconcile this and what does this tension created by the “forbidden woman” motif tell us?

Menander reconciles the two by always revealing the woman’s citizenship at the right moment, reassuming the comfortable good-bad binary. However, in the fourth century, there was an existing debate over this black and white belief system. Middle Comic poets, including Antiphanes, spoke of specific hetairai, if not the entire class, in more a humanizing, positive manner. This quotation[30] is significant because not only does it deny that any negative connotation is inherently associated with the term hetaira, and is instead warranted by the character of the women themselves, it sets one woman, a citizen, above the rest. This suggests that citizenship, not profession or virginity, ultimately defined whether a woman was “good” or “bad.” In the face of Macedonian aggression, F. H. Sandbach wrote, Athenians were divided between those who wanted to accept Macedonian control in the name of security, and those who demanded that Athens continue fighting for independence.[31] Regardless, Macedonia’s growing power posed a foreign threat to the Greeks, already accustomed to defining people by their citizenship.[32] Perhaps because of this, Antiphanes doesn’t define women based upon their profession, although hetairai were associated with a lack of citizenship to the extent that foreign women were sometimes assumed to be hetairai, or based on their “virtue,” which is less of a determinant of whether a woman was good or bad. Women who are already presumed to be good were citizen women, and therefore were married or marriageable. If unmarried, they were socially mandated to be remain “virtuous,” but their virginity does not seem to be the ultimate determinant of what made a woman good or bad, but instead is mandated of citizen women for the purpose of ensuring the legitimacy of heirs, and therefore is of little matter to non-citizen women.[33] Instead, as Antiphanes’ quotation seems to state, the divide in Athenian society lies between those who hold Athenian citizenship and those who do not.

However, as citizenship laws changed under the Macedonians in the 320s and lower-class, non-landowning men were excluded from citizenship, the lines began to blur. The Macedonian government in Athens intensified the conflict between upper and lower classes by giving the wealthy power and disenfranchising the poor. J.E. Atkinson, in a paper on Macedonian-Athenian political relations in the Hellenistic, noted that “wealth consumption and conspicuous accumulation” were objects of attack in political rhetoric in Athens during this period.[34] The divide between rich and poor increased and poorer Athenians were excluded from citizenship, and this shift betrayed the imperfections in the cut and dry definition of Athenians as “good” and foreigners as “bad.” How could these once-Athenian’s character change based on their citizenship status?

Contrary to the expected pattern, women who are misidentified as hetairai are portrayed as “ethically distinct and admirable female character[s],” most frequently of all of Menander’s women, which is unsettling to an audience used to the prescriptive and derogatory definition of non-citizen women as “bad.”[35] Even when the woman is truly a citizen, this representation of working women as “admirable female character[s]” contrasts sharply with the accepted definition.[36] Helene Foley, in an essay on the performance of gender in New Comedy, highlights the character of Glycera, the heroine of Menander’s Perikeiromenê, (“The Girl whose Hair was Cut Short,”) who is an Athenian citizen, but was exposed at birth and then saved by a non-citizen woman, and therefore is unaware of her citizenship. In this quotation[37] from the play, her ability to articulately defend herself and her actions, which were misconstrued as infidelity to her partner, is striking. Though we know that she is truly a citizen, citizen women are by no means treated more like free-thinking individuals by Menander than non-citizens, and the fact that almost all of the women in Menander who defend themselves in such a way are represented, however incorrectly, as hetairai, is especially notable and potentially upsetting to the long-held belief in the disparity between integrity of character and low social status.

As the concubine of a soldier named Polemon, Glykera does not hold the status of a wife, but also is not equated with the call girl variety of hetaira. As Demosthenes wrote of Athenian women, “we have pallakai for the sake of daily care of the body.”[38] He is referring to concubines, who held a role more like that of the wife than a hired hetaira.[39] Glycera is a concubine, and, because she is believed to be a non-citizen, she legally cannot assume the position of Polemon’s wife. Her position is therefore much more vulnerable than that of a wife, who is less easily discarded when, for example, a misunderstanding regarding her fidelity to her master/partner, a popular plot device, arises.[40]

Chrysis in Menander’s Samia is a foreigner who worked as a courtesan until entering a relationship with widowed Demeas, a wealthy Athenian man.[41] As Demosthenes wrote of Athenian women, “we have pallakai for the sake of daily care of the body.”[42] He is referring to concubines, who held a role more like that of the wife than a hired hetaira. However, Demeas “is readier…to throw Chyrsis out because she is only his [concubine], not his citizen wife, and because of her past.”[43] Chrysis retains the “characteristics of her profession,” as live-in courtesans are not generally treated by New Comedic playwrights the way that wives are, instead portrayed as kakon…oikoi mega, (“a great evil to his [her master’s’] home.”)[44] As Demeas cruelly reminds Chrysis in Samia as he casts her out of his home based on his belief in her infidelity, she isn’t so different from the class of hetairai which she came from initially.[45] Demeas no longer speaks of her as a “hetaira,” but instead drops the euphemism and simply refers to her as a “whore.” (show quotations; Samia 390-8) Note how the translations differ in the way they define Chrysis. Jeppesen's translation emphasizes Demeas’ act of sending Chrysis back to her own kind, reminding her that she is “not what you’ve imagined yourself to be, Chrysis,” that is, his wife.[46] Conversely, R.L. emphasizes the differences between her and the class of hetairai she came from initially. By setting apart their class of hetairai, the quotation actually associates courtesans with citizen women. Since marriageable women are strictly Athenian citizens, as enforced by the “closed conjugal society,” representing non-citizen women, particularly Chrysis in Samia in a manner similar to wives is a striking divergence from the norm.        

Similiarly, in Perikeiomenê, because Glycera’s citizenship means she will end up married to her master, “her behavior must not be incompatible with the station of a legitimately married woman.”[47] In this case, because the audience knows that she is truly a citizen, the contrast between concubine and the “common whore,” (because we all know that’s what this implies,) variety of hetaira is sharply defined and easily justified. However, the phenomenon, particularly in Samia, is a notable exception to the rule that only citizen women can be considered good and therefore “wife material.” Since marriageable women are strictly Athenian citizens, as enforced by the “closed conjugal society,” representing non-citizen women in a manner similar to wives is a striking divergence from the norm.

In this quotation from Plutarch praising Menander on his conformity to social respectability, he refers to the young man as “chastened” for his ill-advised love, or permitted “as a humane indulgence of the young man’s sense of shame.”[48] Eros, “the impulse to aspire to the forbidden” is a threat to Athenian convention, and Menander’s men know that they must feel shame for “conflicting claims of private passion and social responsibility.” Demeas feels shame for his relationship with Chrysis,[49] and this device allows Menander to have it both ways: “[b]eing ashamed enables Demeas…to violate normative sociosexual practices while simultaneously reinforcing the very value system their passions have breached.”[50] The obstacle in many of Menander’s plays is this impropriety, presented by the main character himself. However, their shame makes the inconsistencies between ideology and practice acceptable.

Though Menander almost always returned his female leads to citizenship, affirming the closed conjugal group of the city-state, the consistency of the ambiguous citizenship motif in his work strongly suggests a commentary on, or at least an allusion to, the shifting citizenship rules in Athens at the time. As citizenship was changing and more Athenians were excluded, the easy conflation of character and status became harder to justify. The anxieties surrounding this were not ignored by Menander, but instead taken “as points of departure, resolving them…in happy endings…In an epoch of social stress and change, new comedy represented on the stage a world where tensions evanesce [however unrealistically] through the mechanisms of the plot.”[51] Nevertheless, the subtextual tension, Menander’s unconscious impact on his writing, remains and there is much it can tell us.

Notes

[1] Konstan, Roman Comedy.

[2] Konstan, Roman Comedy, 16.

[3] Konstan, Roman Comedy, 18.

[4] “This perspective informs the structuralist approach to society, according to which social identity is a consequence, not a cause, of difference. The social order is identified by the operation of a rule whose ultimate justification…is the mere capacity to generate a distinction.” (Konstan, Roman Comedy, a la Nick Terranato)

[5] Konstan, Roman Comedy, 21.

[6] Konstan, Roman Comedy, 21.

[7] Traill, 9

[8] Heap, 39.

[9] Atkinson, 42.

[10] Green, 4.

[11] Major, 42

[12] Major, 45

[13] Post, C.R., 115

[14] Traill, 248.

[15] Traill, 249

[16] Fantham, 47.

[17] Fantham, 47.

[18] Traill, 9

[19] Konstan, Roman Comedy, 18.

[20] Fantham, 46.

[21] Traill, 245

[22] Traill, 7; Heap, 40.

[23] Traill, 3

[24] Rosivach, 7

[25] Rosivach, 8

[26] Rosivach, 8

[27] Rosivach, 6

[28] Rosivach, 6

[29] Foley, 272

[30] “The man I’m speaking about saw a certain hetaira living in his neighborhood and fell in love with her— a citizen, but bereft of guardians and relatives, in possession of a character of gold where virtue is concerned, in truth a ‘companion.’ The rest damage the name with their character, although it is in reality a fine one.” [Translation: Ariana Traill, Women and the Comic Plot in Menander]

[31] Sandbach, 68

[32] Atkinson, 42

[33] Traill, 6

[34] Atkinson, 44

[35] Foley, 272

[36] Hunter, 87

[37] Glycera, to her father: “[What] could I [have accomplished], my dear man, by escaping to

[Moschion’s] mother? Consider whether I was trying to make him take me as a wife. Of course, he is by birth my equal? No. Was I trying to have him take me as his mistress? Wouldn’t I have hurried to conceal it from his family then? Would he have chosen to put me up in his father’s house? Would I choose to be a fool, make Myrrhine my enemy, and incur suspicion of misbehaviour that you won’t abandon? Wouldn’t I be ashamed, Pataicus? You came here persuaded of this and assuming that I am that type of person?”

[38] Sealey, 117

[39] Glycera [referring to the actions of Polemon]: It was a wicked act. The sort of thing no honourable man would think of doing, not to a slave girl.

Pataikos: You were no slave girl. You were a wife. In everything but law, you were his wife. 

[Between lines 724-742] [“Translation:” Gilbert Murray] 

The Loeb Classical Library Translation, by comparison, omits this section of the text: “The last fragment of text on this page is too broken to provide continuous sense. In replying to Pataikos’ last remark Glykera uses the word wicked, probably with reference to the outrage, and in the next line she says something about a ’servant girl, poor me.’”

[40] Konstan, Greek Comedy, 122.

[41] Jeppesen, 2

[42] Sealey, 117

[43] Hunter, 88

[44] Heap, 40

[45] Hunter, 88.

[46] Jeppesen, 33.

[47] Konstan, Greek Comedy, 122.

[48] Rosivach, 1

[49] Moschion: “Father fell in love with a certain girl from Samos - a normal thing to do.

He tried to hide it - he was ashamed -“

[Translation: Seth Jeppesen, Menander’s Samia: A New Translation]

[50] Lape, Chapter 5

[51] Konstan, Roman Comedy, 24

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