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Naples and Athens, Fifth century BC and beyond
Look at what people usually do – all women in particular, they dedicate the first thing that comes to hand, they swear to offer sacrifice, and promise to found shrines for gods and spirits and children of god.
Plato, Laws, 909e–9101
This counterfeit coin, woman, to curse the human race.
Euripides, Hippolytus, 616–172
ONE OF THE FEW REMAINING IMAGES of Socrates and Diotima is lost in the vast Naples Archaeological Museum: literally. I turned up there one blisteringly wet October afternoon to examine the little bronze plaque (originally used to decorate furniture in some well-to-do household). It was not on show, so a curator took me backstage, to the fabulously functional, creaking, gargantuan storerooms where much of the finest art from an entire antiquity is kept under lock and key.
Past racks of frescoes from Pompeii, dulled with dust, past one-armed goddesses, downwards in stainless-steel lifts with mobster-manqué security guards and over to a padlocked metal locker. We peered into an old plastic crate, the bottom of which was scattered with metal objects, many wrapped in brown paper and string and simply labelled. But Diotima wasn’t there. Loaned to an exhibition, she was playing hide-and-seek somewhere with her philosopher-companion.
A stern bust of Socrates was on show in the public galleries, as was a finely tessellated mosaic – the pieces so numerous that no one has yet counted them. But the intricacy of the philosopher’s relationships, particularly with the women around him, was not obvious. Nor was this furniture-decoration, priestess-loving Socrates, a Socrates the public wanted to see. But in fact the character of Diotima is a close ally when it comes to trying to understand both what Socrates thought and who he was.
Diotima was a priestess. A priestess from Mantinea.3 It is difficult to tell how accurately she is represented in Plato. It could quite possibly be that she is fictional. But then again, no one in Plato’s Dialogues is entirely made up, apart from the mysterious ‘Eleaic Stranger’, so it would be slightly odd for Plato to fabricate her entirely. And then, too, there is the fact that Diotima’s demeanour, her life skills, are very believable. She talks in public – as priestesses were allowed to;4 she represents herself as a kind of messenger (priestesses from the Oracle at Delphi and those in charge of the sacred mysteries at Eleusis were also the message-carriers of the gods). And (in some aspects) Diotima is believable as a woman. When ruminating on love, she looks for a productive middle way – she thinks that it is love that inspires humankind; desire forces us to want to be better: better philosophers, better lovers, better humans.
This, when once beheld, will outshine your gold and your clothing, your beautiful boys and young men, whose aspect now so astounds you and makes you and many another, at the sight and constant society of your darlings, ready to do without either food or drink if that were in any way possible, and only gaze upon them and have their company. But tell me, what would happen if one of you had the fortune to look upon essential beauty entire, pure and unalloyed; not infected with the flesh and colour of humanity, and ever so much more of mortal trash? What if he could behold the divine beauty itself in its unique form?5
Sometimes described as an anomaly, in fact Diotima reminds us that priestesses were a highly visible part of the Athens where Socrates lived, worked and loved.6 These women were not just arranging antiquity’s equivalent of flowers on the altar – they were responsible for the smooth running of ritual and religion, and therefore of life itself. The Athenians thought their good fortune came only from their good relationship with assorted spirits and Olympian deities and it was all down to the women of the city to keep this relationship sweet. One fragment from a lost play by Euripides – performed, in Athens, during the Peloponnesian War – makes that poetically clear:
And in divine affairs – I think this of the first importance –
we have the greatest part. For at the oracles of Phoibos
women expound Apollo’s will. At the holy seat of Dodona
by the sacred oak the female race conveys
the thoughts of Zeus to all Greeks who desire it.
As for the holy rituals performed for the Fates
and the nameless goddesses, these are not holy
in men’s hands; but among women they flourish,
every one of them. Thus in holy service woman
plays the righteous role.7
So the women in Socrates’ day didn’t just drift around at home: many of the best-born were busy priestesses. Virgin, wife, old maid alike – these women had practical duties. If they were well heeled, they would be expected to fund the building of cisterns, porticos, temples. They supplied oil for gyms and animals for sacrifice.8 Priestesses could be temple key-holders – a big job given that these sanctuaries doubled up as banks, a safe depository for the community’s wealth.9 The temple keys themselves were enormous things, more like the starter-handles of early-twentieth-century cars, and on a number of carved stelai we see women confidently wielding them.
And then, often at night, the female religious leaders were joined by their devoted followers: mature women or girls bearing the finest of baskets – willow-woven, bronze, gilded, silver – which contained the most precious, the most mysterious of things. Banish the image of women just balancing water on their heads after another back-breaking trip to the well; these creatures had the honour of bearing the holiest of liquids.
This is not to deny that some of the all-female activities ring a little discordantly in twenty-first-century ears: the Thesmophoria, for example. This festival’s origins stretch back to the Stone Age. Married women (no men were allowed) congregated to indulge in rites that were largely obscene and extreme. The worshippers would insult one another and expose themselves, they would carry phallic objects. Slaughtering a large number of piglets or puppies, they threw the corpses into a chasm, and then days later dug up the gamey, half-decayed remains as an offering for the goddess Demeter.
Little surprise, perhaps, that some Athenian men should seem a bit nervous of their womenfolk.
So think back. The sound of young women’s voices, praising in the temples and sanctuaries, carried on the air, their figures stone-silhouetted against the sky, their names carved on stelai and statue plinths and grave monuments across the city – these were clearly a force to be reckoned with. In the British Museum there is a 3-foot-high gold sceptre, and a golden necklace heavy with flowers, with fruits waiting to burst, nestling next to the heads of horned women. The provenance is shrouded in the treasure-seeking, tomb-raiding ambiguity of the 1870s, when the artefacts were acquired – but one sensible reading is that these belonged to the priestesses of a cult of the goddess Hera.10 Some of the religiously significant women in Athens wore necklaces of dried figs, a sign of their fertility, while others were chosen for their ‘god-given’ beauty. We know this from their names: Kallisto, Most Beautiful; Megiste, Most Great; Chrysis, Golden; Theodote, God-Given;11 Aristonoe, Best.12
At night women’s ritual activity increased exponentially. It was thought appropriate that women should operate most vigorously not in the brightness of day, but in the gloom. In the all-female Haloa, a festival associated with wine, fertility and libido, it seems that women ‘tended’ fake phalli (not surprising to learn perhaps that the festival was particularly popular with prostitutes). Young girls sang from door to door in honour of the ‘great Mother’ (the oldest fertility goddess), accompanied by the dark and, so they thought, the priapic god Pan.13 Young and old processed at night to praise another newcomer to the city, the god Sabazios, a ‘dodgy’ easterner from Phrygia.14 Young devotees of Aphrodite carried ‘unspeakable offerings in baskets’ through the Acropolis at night. Dread forces, the ‘nameless goddesses’ – awful creatures like the Eumenides, the ‘Kindly Ones,’ more honestly known as the Erinyes, the ‘Furies’ – were escorted back into the earth at night by women thankful, one imagines, for the comfort of the flaming torches they carried. In women-only rites, young dogs were sacrificed after sunset and flung into flame-lit crevasses to appease the goddess of the Underworld, Hekate. The Adonia, where females mourned with Aphrodite the loss of the beautiful boy Adonis, involved a night-time ritual, a mock-funeral procession, much wailing and no little drinking. Deeper into the war, the grief of these Adonis-worshippers was thought to be a terrible omen for Athens.15
Although our literary sources tell us that respectable women in classical Athens should stay indoors, women who walked hand-in-hand with the gods in fact glinted and scintillated as, carrying the golden sceptres and staffs of their priesthood, they officiated at civic rituals, filling the air with unearthly ululating sounds. They spoke out, and their hands flashed as they killed and carved the sacrificial meat.
As soon as I turned seven I was a child hand-maiden, up on the Acropolis,
then, I ground sacred grain; when I was ten I shed
my saffron robe for the Foundress, being a bear at the Brauronia;
And once, when I was a beautiful maiden, I carried sacred baskets,
wearing a necklace of dried figs.16
This list appears in a cool, serious passage in the middle of Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata. It is presented as an explanation as to why women’s voices, in Athens, needed to be heard. In the Socratic Dialogues of Plato we have the only other extant example of Athenian women, through conversations with the philosopher, being given a high-level platform. Socrates is rare in the philosophical canon. This unusual, thoughtful man, and his disciple Plato, who were in reality surrounded by women active in the maintenance of Golden Age, democratic Athens, however briefly, give women a voice.