Natasha Bershadsky
Note: I would like to express my gratitude to the participants of the conference ‘Mythical History and Historical Myth’, where it was my great pleasure to deliver this paper. My warmest thanks are for the wonderful organizers of the conference for the intellectual thrill and the cordiality of those beautiful days.
Abstract
This chapter discusses the tale of heroic defense of Argos by the Argive women, led by the poet Telesilla after the battle of Sepeia. It argues that this tale was employed by the Argive democratic regime in the 460s BCE as an aetiological myth portraying a transition of Argos from oligarchy to democracy. The key image is that of the Argive women driving out the army of Demaratus from an entity called Pamphyliacum: it evokes major tribal reforms, which took place in Argos sometime before the middle of the fifth century BCE. The tale of the Argive women married to the perioikoi of Argos after the battle of Sepeia and obliged to wear beards while sleeping with their husbands is a related contemporary article of democratic Argive mythmaking. It represents a subjugation of communities of the Argive plain by Argos in the first half of the fifth century as a domestic cohabitation between the perioikoi and the Argive women and provides an aition for the crossdressing festival of Hybristica. Herodotus, who does not mention the story of the defense of Argos by women, probably visited Argos after 450 BCE, in the period of the oligarchic reconstruction, by which point that democratic myth might have been suppressed. A variant of an oracle to the Argives that Herodotus presents preserves an image of an uncoiled snake, which can be connected to the bawdy celebration of Hybristica.
Introduction
The subject of this chapter is history and myths of the city of Argos related to the battle of Sepeia. More precisely, I analyze an account of Plutarch that reports several traditions, associated with the battle. I will argue that certain elements that have not been considered mythological should be identified as myths and I will also attempt to trace the history of those myths.1
City of Women
According to Herodotus, the Battle of Sepeia was won by deception. The Spartans, led by Cleomenes, made a treacherous attack on the Argives. After the assault, Cleomenes proceeded to kill sacrilegiously the Argives who took refuge in a sacred precinct, the grove of Argos; then he burned the grove. After whipping a priest in the temple of Hera he returned to Sparta, where he faced a prosecution for failing to capture Argos (Herodotus 6.77–82).
Two other main accounts of the Sepeia campaign, by Plutarch (Moralia 245c-e), in his De Mulierum Virtutibus and by Pausanias (2.20.8–10), introduce a narrative element that is absent in Herodotus. These authors report that after the battle of Sepeia Cleomenes brought his army to attack Argos, which was completely stripped of males of military age. At that point an Argive poetess, Telesilla, led the resistance. Pausanias recounts that Telesilla positioned very young and old men, as well as slaves, on the walls of Argos. Pausanias and Plutarch both tell that the women then valiantly fought the Spartans, who eventually turned back, unable to capture the city.
Plutarch’s version contains some especially remarkable details. On the authority of the Argive historian Socrates, Plutarch reports that the women not only repulsed Cleomenes’ army, but also drove out the army of the second Spartan king, Demaratus, that somehow managed to enter Argos. Plutarch describes the Argive commemoration of the women’s valor and adds that on the anniversary of the battle, the Argives to his day celebrated a festival called Hybristica, characterized by cross-dressing (Moralia 245e-f).
The versions of Plutarch and Pausanias have found little favor with modern scholars of Greek history. Many details seem untrustworthy. The report that Cleomenes’ army attacked Argos contradicts Herodotus’ version of the events, which seems by far the more reliable.2 The materialization of Demaratus’ army in Argos looks even less credible.
However, these stories have historical value of their own as reflections of Greek perceptions of the past. This value can be particularly great if we succeed in establishing when and why these stories were created. One way to approach this task is to study the ideologies of these narratives, investigating the particular versions of the past that they promote.
I will start from pointing out the details of Plutarch’s account that are most redolent of myth. There is “the energy and divine daring” (ὁρμὴ καὶ τόλμα δαιμόνιος, Moralia 245d) of the Argive women; there is a striking image of the women who “enwreathed the walls in a circle” (κύκλῳ … περιέστεψαν, Moralia 245e). It has been argued that the women’s resistance is described in terms reminiscent of a choral performance.3 There is also a fascinating reference to the Pamphyliacum (Moralia 245e), to which I will return.
Plutarch portrays the community on the brink of disappearance, with the men already dead and the women about to succumb to the unified assault of both Spartan kings. Then comes the salvation by the women. Importantly, the women’s defense constitutes not just a rescue, but also a victory over the Spartans, since Cleomenes retreats with heavy losses. The female triumph that saves the city of Argos at the same time marks the end of the old community: Argos, whose males are extinct and whose females act like males,4 is a new city.5
Liberating the Pamphyliacum
Plutarch concludes his account of the defense of Argos by the women by the description of the festival of Hybristica. Then he adds a peculiar story about a marriage of the Argive women to the perioikoi of Argos (Moralia 245f). I would like to establish what period of Argive history the detail about the enfranchisement of the perioikoi fits best. The enfranchisement constitutes a synoecism, in the most literal of the senses: the best of the perioikoi are made to cohabit (συνῴκισαν) with the Argive women. While our knowledge of Argive history is imperfect, the period of 460–450 BCE appears to provide a remarkably suitable setting for the tale featuring the reference to the synoecism and perioikoi. By that time, as has been convincingly demonstrated by Jonathan Hall, Argos finally acquired control over the previously independent neighboring communities of the Argive Plain.6 The inscriptional evidence reflects a major restructuring of the Argive citizen body sometime before the middle of the fifth century; it has been suggested that this restructuring indicates a democratic reform, connected with Argive acquisition of the new territories and a subsequent integration of new citizens from the dependent communities.7 Thus, I conjecture that Plutarch’s account of the enfranchisement of the perioikoi, as well as the story of the women’s defense of Argos, stems from the historical milieu of 460–450 BC. These tales express the ideology of democratic Argos, retrojecting the establishment of democracy all the way back to the times of Sepeia.
In Plutarch’s version, the liberation of the Pamphyliacum by the women is presented as a climactic moment of the salvation of Argos. The mention of the liberation is followed by the statement: “in this way the city survived” (οὕτω δὲ τῆς πόλεως περιγενομένης, Moralia 245e). I propose that the importance of the Pamphyliacum derives from the visualization, inherent in that designation, of the totality of the citizen body as composed of different phylai.
We have strong reason to think that the concept of phylai had a particular significance in Argos in the middle of the fifth century. The restructuring of the citizen body that I have just mentioned apparently involved a (re)division of each tribe into twelve phratries.8 It is also likely that there was some redistribution of people across the tribes. At some point before the mid-fifth century the fourth Argive tribe, the Hyrnathioi, was added. We do not know exactly when this tribe was added to the three traditional Dorian phylai, but our best guess is that the addition of this tribe is also connected to the Argive territorial conquests and the resulting enfranchisement of new citizens.9 Thus, if we accept the mid-fifth-century dating of the story of the women’s defense, the detail about the liberation of the Pamphyliacum, previously overlooked, can be seen as meaningful, thematically connected to the subjects of enfranchisement and synoecism.
The appellation Pamphyliacum also can denote, of course, an entity belonging to the tribe of the Pamphyloi. It has been regularly assumed that the word refers to a quarter, or perhaps a sanctuary, of the Pamphyloi.10 This interpretation does not exclude my previous point about the word’s reference to all phylai, since the name of the tribe functions as a pars pro toto, metonymically denoting the whole community.11
Importantly, it has been argued that the Pamphyloi occupied the lowest rank in a traditional hierarchy of the Doric tribes.12 Even more interestingly, it has been even suggested on the basis of the inscriptional evidence that the Argive Pamphyloi were at some point promoted in the tribal hierarchy. Their place vis-à-vis two other Doric tribes remained the same, but they began to outrank the tribe of the Hyrnathioi that had been preceding the Pamphyloi in the earlier inscriptions. It was tentatively suggested that the context for this promotion was the democratic reforms of the 460–450 BCE,13 which fits very well with my interpretation of the reference to the liberation of the Pamphyliacum. In my reading, the story of the women’s defense of Argos singles out the tribe of the Pamphyloi – the notional ‘common people’ of Argos – as the chief beneficiaries of the female victory.
The Importance of Being Bearded
A prevalent current assumption is that Plutarch’s story about the Argives establishing a law according to which a married woman should sleep with her husband while wearing a beard is a result of Plutarch’s erroneous connection between the story of Sepeia and a traditional Argive marriage rite, involving the transvestism of the bride.14 This assertion rests on a broader claim that female transvestism was a widespread custom in Greece. It is this assumption that I would like to examine now.
The remarkable fact is that despite the claims that female transvestism during marriage rites was a common phenomenon, the only two cases that are cited in the literature are Plutarch’s description of a marriage ceremony of Spartan women, during which the bride’s hair was cut and she was dressed in a male cloak,15 and our Argive story.16 We should observe that the Argive story does not explicitly talk about transvestism during the marriage ceremony: rather, Plutarch reports a law prescribing a certain behavior of the married women. Two cases, out of which one is not explicitly characterized as a marriage custom, cannot support an assertion that female transvestism was a regular feature of marriage ceremonies.
Male transvestism during marriage rites, on the other hand, is much more robustly attested. So, what we seem to face is an instance of an asymmetry in marriage rites between the genders. Such asymmetry, of course, is not very surprising if we think of the drastic gender inequality in the Greek society. The meaning of marriage was different for men and for women; thus, male and female transvestism potentially could have operated in very different frames of reference. David Leitao, an expert in matters related to the phenomenon of transvestism in ancient Greece, observes this divergence in the functions of male and female marriage transvestism: “When the bridegroom donned the clothing of the opposite sex, it was to dramatize before the community his final transition from the world of women to the world of men. Brides, however, did not undergo a comparable transformation of gender at puberty, and therefore a different interpretation must be sought.”17 As a solution, Leitao has proposed that female transvestism had a very different function, a psychological one, aiming “to ease the anxiety of the individual bridegroom,” unaccustomed to heterosexual relationships.18 However, the effectiveness of the bride’s false beard in alleviating the anxieties of the individual Argive bridegrooms remains uncertain.
Gloria Ferrari emphasizes, concerning the social status of a woman, that “the formalities of female rites of passage and the conception of marriage insistently suggest that an adult is what she must never become.”19 In this context, how can we make sense of a married woman in Plutarch flaunting a full beard, indicating, in the case of a male, an adult status?
Given the stress on the sub-adult status of women in the framework of marriage, a bride’s wearing of a beard, that is, her temporary assumption of the identity of an adult male, would have constituted a striking conceptual oddity in a routine marriage ritual.20 Therefore, I suggest that we should abandon the conjecture that Plutarch mistakenly linked a traditional marriage ritual to the story of the battle of Sepeia. Instead, let us consider Plutarch’s text as it stands.
As soon as we come back to Plutarch’s original presentation, the idiosyncratic detail about the married women wearing beards finds a correspondingly exceptional context: the extraordinary moment in the past when the Argive females had a higher status than the perioecic males. The transmission of citizenship by uterine descent, formalized by the marriage of the citizen women to the perioikoi, is an anomaly; the beards worn by the married woman give this anomaly a dramatic expression.
The logic of the Argive law, as reported by Plutarch, both articulates the superiority of the women over their perioecic husbands by means of giving them beards, and at the same time presents this superiority as something temporary, unnatural, un-female. The explicit aim of the law is to cut the women down to size, so that they would not disrespect their husbands, and the false beards do it through presenting the female supremacy as grotesque. A woman with a beard is laughable, as the following dialogue from Aristophanes’ Assemblywomen shows. After the Athenian women have tied on their false beards, in order to disguise themselves as men, one woman complains to Praxagora (Ecclesiazusae 124–128):
(Γυνὴ)
δεῦρ᾽ ὦ γλυκυτάτη Πραξαγόρα, σκέψαι τάλαν
ὡς καὶ καταγέλαστον τὸ πρᾶγμα φαίνεται. 125
(Πραξαγόρα)
πῶς καταγέλαστον;
(Γυνὴ)
ὥσπερ εἴ τις σηπίαις
πώγωνα περιδήσειεν ἐσταθευμέναις.
(Woman)
Look, my dear, and see
how really ludicrous the thing looks. 125
(Praxagora)
In what way ludicrous?
(Woman)
It’s as if someone tied a beard
on to lightly browned cuttlefishes!21
The story about the law obliging women to wear beards features the same motif of the Argive women behaving in a manly manner as does the story of the female defense of Argos; however, the two narratives present opposite, tragic and comic, viewpoints on such a behavior. The story of the female defense of Argos portrays the manly conduct of the women positively, as a heroic feat in an extreme situation. The law concerning the women’s beards portrays the female manliness as hybristic, and aims to defuse it, bringing it under control through ridicule.
What can we say about the nature of the law regarding the women’s beards, reported by Plutarch? I consider the information that Plutarch transmits to be based on a genuine Argive tradition; however, was it a real law that was endorsed once upon a time? Since, as I have argued in the previous section, the tradition about the enfranchisement of the perioikoi after the battle of Sepeia is likely to have been coined around the time of the floruit of the Argive democracy in the 460s, the story about the contemptuous Argive women and the law ordering them to wear beards in all probability should belong to the same historical period. Thus, the law is a mythical invention. I submit that, along with the story of the female defense of Argos, the story about the wives of perioikoi sporting beards served as an aition for the cross-dressing festival of Hybristica.22 As I have noted, the two tales are complementary, expressing opposite attitudes toward the motif of the female manliness. Taken together, these two myths motivate both the celebration of the topsy-turvy situation of gender reversal and the transition back to normalcy.
Coiled or Uncoiled? Herodotus and the Hybristica
I have not yet discussed an element that is widely considered to exert a crucial influence on the emergence of the myth of Telesilla and the Argive women, that is, an oracle about the victory of the female over the male, quoted by Herodotus in his description of the Battle of Sepeia. What place does the oracle have in my reconstruction of the events?
Herodotus reports that the oracle was a joint prediction, given in Delphi to the Milesians and the Argives (although he never cites together the parts concerning Miletus and Argos). Here is the Argive part of the pronouncement (Hdt. 6.77.2):
ἀλλ᾽ ὅταν ἡ θήλεια τὸν ἄρσενα νικήσασα
ἐξελάσῃ καὶ κῦδος ἐν Ἀργείοισιν ἄρηται,
πολλὰς Ἀργείων ἀμφιδρυφέας τότε θήσει.
ὧς ποτέ τις ἐρέει καὶ ἐπεσσομένων ἀνθρώπων
δεινὸς ὄφις τριέλικτος23 ἀπώλετο δουρὶ δαμασθείς.
When the female defeats the male
and drives him away, winning glory in Argos,
she will make many Argive women tear their cheeks.
As someday one of men to come will say:
the dread thrice-coiled serpent died tamed by the spear.24
A widespread current view takes this oracle to be the source from which the myth of the heroic female defense of Argos was derived.25 The development of this myth is typically considered to postdate Herodotus, since Herodotus does not mention it in his presentation of the events.26
I will try now to show that there is a more dialogical connection between the oracle, on the one hand, and the Hybristica and its myths, on the other, than has been acknowledged so far. I accept the possibility that the oracle may have influenced the formation of the myth about the female defense of Argos. However, I believe that the connection goes both ways and that we can discern traces of the Hybristica and its myths in the oracle.27
A recent analysis of the Sepeia oracle by Marcel Piérart argues that the oracle, which is linked by Herodotus and the Greek Anthology to a prophesy of the fall of Miletus, stems from the setting of the Ionian revolt (the oracle’s reference to the Argives, Piérart maintains, was initially construed as denoting the Greeks in general).28 Piérart suggests that the oracle was later embraced by the Argives as alluding to the events of the battle of Sepeia. For Piérart, the terminus ante quem for such an adoption is c. 450 BCE, the date which he ascribes to Herodotus’ visit to Argos in search of the information about the Spartan-Argive relationship.29 A treatment of the subject by Pierre Sauzeau discusses at length various Argive ‘readings’ of the oracle, resulting in the ‘rewriting’ of Argive history and a creation of the myth of the victorious Argive women.30 Yet, despite Piérart’s and Sauzeau’s acute appreciation of the importance of the Argive phase of the oracle, they treat the text of the oracle as a constant, which could be only reinterpreted, not changed, throughout its history. I would like to revise this perception of the oracle as a fixed entity, by taking into account Lisa Maurizio’s important work on the oral character of the Delphic oracles.31
Maurizio makes a case that “the primary means of transmission of Delphic oracles was word of mouth, and that the Delphic tradition was an oral one.”32 Thus, the oracles were not only repeatedly reperformed and reinterpreted, but also recomposed in the process of the reperformance. Given the prominent Argive phase in the transmission of the Sepeia oracle, we can expect to see in it traces of the Argive recomposition. Moreover, since, as Piérart argues, Herodotus collected the oracle in Argos,33 the Argive context should be particularly significant. That is to say, the oracle as a whole should be understandable from the Argive perspective, since the oral tradition typically maintains the details that are meaningful for the current audience.34
The part of the oracle about the victory of the female over the male, of course, does not present any problem in this respect: the myth of Telesilla and the Argive women provides the Argive referent. The crucial element to be explained is the snake, subdued by the spear. This part of the oracle, which Piérart calls “one of the most obscure passages in oracular literature”35 currently lacks a convincing interpretation. Earlier attempts to construe the image of the snake as the city of Argos are difficult to substantiate and none of the explanations achieves an organic connection between the triumphant female and the defeated snake.
Let us consider the wording of the oracle. After the passage about the victory of the female and the grief of the Argive women, the image of the snake is introduced by the following line (Hdt. 6.77):
ὧς ποτέ τις ἐρέει καὶ ἐπεσσομένων ἀνθρώπων
as someday one of men to come will say …
This verse features a remarkable change in the temporal point of view: while the previous segment of the poem speaks about the future disaster as foreseen from the present time, the image of the snake is introduced as a past from the standpoint of the future generations. From the perspective of future people, the battle of Sepeia has happened already and is now contemplated as a past event. In other poetic texts, the future middle forms of the verb ἔπειμι are repeatedly associated with commemoration. In Theocritus’ Idyll 12, the future people (ἐπεσσομένοις, 12.11) become the audience of a song into which two lovers are transformed. In a poem inscribed on a stone herm, quoted by Aeschines, the future Athenians (ἐπεσσομένων, Aesch. 3.184) are imagined as the audience, reading the inscription. Most interestingly, the Homeric Hymn to Demeter promises that an unfading honor will always attach to the baby Demophon (τιμὴ δ’ ἄφθιτος αἰὲν ἐπέσσεται, Hymn. Hom. Cer. 264), since a goddess was his nurse. What follows is a description of ritual battles that the Eleusinians shall recurrently celebrate in Demophon’s honor (Hymn. Hom. Cer. 266–268). Thus, ἐπέσσεται introduces the future of hero-cult honors.36 So, the future middle forms of ἔπειμι signal the transition to a commemorative mode, through monuments, song, or cult. Importantly, what is represented as a future from the poems’ interior point of view, is in fact the present for the poems’ audience. On this reasoning, the oracle’s line (ὧς ποτέ τις ἐρέει καὶ ἐπεσσομένων ἀνθρώπων) should refer to the commemoration of the Battle of Sepeia. Given the Argive setting of the poem’s performance, we can expect this commemoration to be specifically Argive.
At this point it is relevant to consider an alternate reading of the oracle: the Greek Anthology 14.90 and some Herodotean manuscripts attest ὄφις ἀέλικτος (‘uncoiled snake’) instead of ὄφις τριέλικτος (‘thrice-coiled snake’). The word ἀέλικτος is a hapax and a lectio difficilior and therefore should command our attention. What does an uncoiled snake remind us of?
I suggest that the festival of Hybristica provides a suitable setting for the following answer: the uncoiled snake refers to a phallus and the passage describes, in a riddling manner, the loss of masculinity suffered by the male Argives as a result of the female defense of Argos,37 and seasonally re-experienced by them during the gender reversal of the Hybristica. A snake as a symbolic representation of a penis is widely attested cross-culturally; Greek literature furnishes examples of this symbolism.38 If a snake suggests a penis, the uncoiled snake evokes the same idea much more strongly. The first and second parts of the oracle correspond to the tragic view of the events during the Spartan attack of Argos, articulated by the myth of Telesilla, and the comic view, expressed by the myth of the women wearing beards and the festival of Hybristica.39
The ribald interpretation of the image of the snake that I have offered is supported by the resemblances between the Sepeia oracle and comic oracles, found in Aristophanes. The combination of the solemn Homeric diction with obscenities is part and parcel of Aristophanic oracular jokes. One Aristophanic oracle features a serpent (δράκων, Equites 198) and also includes expressions ἀλλ᾽ ὁπόταν … τότε, ἀπόλλυμι and κῦδος (Equites 197–200); the oracle’s interpretation, given in the play, singles out the serpent’s most phallic quality: ὁ δράκων γάρ ἐστι μακρὸν ὅ τ᾽ ἀλλᾶς αὖ μακρόν (“for the serpent is long, and the sausage is also long,” 207). Another Aristophanic prophesy, bearing a conspicuous similarity to the Sepeia oracle, comes from Lysistrata (770–773):
ἀλλ᾽ ὁπόταν πτήξωσι χελιδόνες εἰς ἕνα χῶρον, 770
τοὺς ἔποπας φεύγουσαι, ἀπόσχωνταί τε φαλήτων,
παῦλα κακῶν ἔσται, τὰ δ᾽ ὑπέρτερα νέρτερα θήσει
Ζεὺς ὑψιβρεμέτης –
Yes, when the swallows hole up in a single home, 770
Fleeing the hoopoes and leaving the phallus alone,
Then are their problems solved, and high-thundering Zeus
Shall reverse what’s up and what’s down –
Sauzeau speaks of “des similitudes troublantes” between this prediction and the Sepeia oracle.40 Indeed, both oracles feature a reversal motif, coupled with the appearance of θήσει in the line-final position. Moreover, my interpretation of the snake as a phallus is paralleled by Aristophanes’ reference to χελιδόνες (‘swallows’), a slang term for female genitals.41
The profusion of oracles in Aristophanes’ plays indicates that there must have been a strongly developed sub-genre of comic oracles. The similarities between the Sepeia oracle and the Aristophanic oracles that I have discussed probably stem from shared genre conventions.42 Perhaps some of the similarities also derive from Aristophanes’ direct familiarity with the Hybristica and the associated myths. A joke from the Ecclesiazusae (127–128), which I have already cited, describes the women disguised with false beards in the following manner:
ὥσπερ εἴ τις σηπίαις
πώγωνα περιδήσειεν ἐσταθευμέναις.
It’s as if someone tied a beard
on to lightly browned cuttlefishes!43
Christoph Auffarth has recently argued that the absurd image of the bearded cuttlefishes (σηπίαις) is in fact a punning reference to the tradition of the Argive women wearing beards after the battle of Sepeia.44 If Auffarth is right, the pun indicates Aristophanes’ acquaintance with the Argive myths celebrated by the Hybristica;45 it also seems to imply that the Athenian audience in the beginning of the fourth century (or at least some part of the audience) was sufficiently familiar with these myths as to catch a fleeting reference.46
The fourth-century Athenians might have been fluent in the Argive comic tradition concerning the aftermath of Sepeia, but what about Herodotus? The ‘hybristic’ interpretation that I have proposed clashes spectacularly with the solemn mood of Herodotus’ account, in which he quotes the Sepeia oracle. How do we explain this striking dissonance? It has been argued that Herodotus’ tale about the rule of the slaves in Argos expresses an aristocratic point of view on the events after the battle of Sepeia.47 Herodotus apparently gathered his information in Argos after 450 BCE, when the aristocratic party was in power,48 and the democratic tale of Telesilla and the heroic Argive women was temporarily ‘out of vogue’. I submit that we can actually see a further step in the recomposition of the oracle in Herodotus’ version. The case in point is the variant τριέλικτος, which is predominant in the Herodotean manuscripts. The image of the three-coiled snake excludes the phallic reading. It seems very appealing to view ὄφις τριέλικτος as a recomposition of the oracle that bleaches out the democratic overtones. I believe that Herodotus received this version of the oracle with an attendant reinterpretation of the rest of the imagery: the victory of the female over the male was construed as an expression of a generally topsy-turvy state of the world, rather than a reference to the specific myth of the female defense of Argos.
The tale of the heroic defense of Argos by women is certainly not historical by itself; it constitutes a mythologization of history; and precisely the appreciation of the mythical quality of this narrative appears also to shed some light on the history of democratic Argos in the fifth century.
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Notes
1
For an overview of myth-history studies, and of their manifold interconnection, see the Preface to the present volume.
2
Hdt. 6.82 specifically reports that Cleomenes was brought to trial in Sparta for not attacking Argos, the information that seems to be based on the Spartan sources.
3
Kowalzig (2004) 50; Goff (2004) 241. On the circularity of the lyric chorus, see Calame (2001) 34–35, esp. 35: “It is appropriate here to recall that Hesychius himself defined the chorus as a circle or a crown” (Hsch. s.v. χορός).
4
The defense of Argos by the women is often described in terms of a reversal of women’s gender role; see Halliday (1909/1910); Graf (1984) 252–253; Loraux (1995) 232–233. Georgoudi (2015) suggests viewing the participation of women in wars in terms of cooperation between women and men, rather than a reversal of gender; however, it appears that particularly in Plutarch’s narrative about the Argive women the situation of gender roles’ reversal is emphasized; see below the discussion of the Hybristica.
5
Cf. McInerney’s (2003, 332) observation about the abundance of ‘ktistic stories’ in Plutarch’s De mulierum virtutibus: “It is as if the crisis of founding a polis authorizes actions which are at odds with normative behavior and permit temporarily a suspension of the usual restrictions on women.”
6
Hall (1995) 592.
7
Hall (1995) 590; Hornblower (2002) 80; Piérart (1997) 332.
8
Kritzas (1992) 236 n. 10.
9
The model that seems reasonable to me is that of a two-stage process, involving first an addition of the Hyrnathioi to the tribal system, followed by the reorganization of the four tribes into the forty-eight phratries sometime in 460–450 BCE.
10
Pamphyliacum as a city quarter: Stadter (1965) 45 n. 46; Jones (1987) 115 n. 20; as a sanctuary: Jones (1987) 115. The Pamphyliacum also could have been a sanctuary of all phylai.
11
Nagy (1990) 281, with a comparison to the identical phenomenon in the case of the Hindu vaiśya.
12
Jones (1980); Nagy (1990) 279–282.
13
Jones (1980) 206; Nagy (1990) 280.
14
Chiaiese (2013) 76–77; Clark (2012) 118; Ament (1993) 18.
15
Plut. Lyc. 15.3. For a discussion of that passage see Lupi (2000) 71–75.
16
For example, La Guardia (2017) 100; Clark (2012) 188; Gagné (2006) 8; Miller (1999) 243 and n. 79; Leitao (1995) 162; Serwint (1993) 421.
17
Leitao (1995) 162–163.
18
Leitao (1995) 163.
19
Ferrari (2002) 8. Ferrari observes an underdeveloped character of female rituals of coming of age, in comparison to male ones, and emphasizes their ‘poverty’ and ‘incoherence’ (p. 176). The existing female rites of passage typically appear as paler reflections of the corresponding male rites, featuring important asymmetries (a phenomenon attested in age-class societies, Ferrari [2002] 176–177 and 299 n. 77, with a reference to Chapter 11 of Bernardi [1985]). For example, Ferrari points out concerning the Spartan wedding transvestism of a bride, seemingly analogous to the male attainment of the adult status through a pederastic relationship, that the bride’s transition from parthenos to gunê is brought about by a man, not a woman (p. 165); further, she observes, like Leitao, that female transvestism does not change the gender of the bride (p. 176). According to Ferrari (p. 177), this imperfect patterning of the female rites on the male ones expresses the “notion that scholars express with the oxymoron ‘women of citizen status’,” namely, the dependence of women on men for having a share in the polis, which the women can achieve only ‘as daughters, wives and mothers of citizens’.
20
“[I]nversion does not make sense in rituals involving persons whose identities are changing: to represent a ritual actor who is in the process of becoming ‘X’ as ‘anti-X’ is to obscure the very process of change which such transformative rituals aim to bring abou,” Leitao (1999) 256.
21
Transl. by Sommerstein (modified). I am grateful to George Harrison for pointing out that the beards may allude to pubic hair, a reading that emphasizes ribald overtones of the Hybristica (see below). See also Ferrari (2002) 169 on the inherently laughable nature of the female public nudity (Pl. Resp. 5.451e6–452b5).
22
Similarly, McInerney (2003) 336–337.
23
The variant ἀέλικτος, attested in Greek Anthology 14.90, will be discussed below.
24
Transl. by Godley (1920).
25
Piérart (2003) 281; Jacoby (1955) 46, Stadter (1965) 48; Bury (1902) 20 and n. 4 for the earlier literature.
26
Among others, Facella (2017) 109; Suárez de la Torre (2004) 253–255.
27
The influence of Telesilla’s story on the oracle has been suggested already by Macan (1895) 336.
28
Piérart (2003) 290–296.
29
Piérart (2003) 284.
30
Sauzeau (1999).
31
Maurizio (1997).
32
Maurizio (1997) 313.
33
Piérart (2003) 284.
34
Forsdyke (1999) 362; Vansina (1985) 100–114.
35
Piérart (2003) 292; similarly, Sauzeau (1999) 134.
36
On timê as the ‘honor of cult’, see Nagy (1990) 132 n. 51. On ritual fights as Demophon’s cult honors, see Pache (2004) 75–78.
37
In Barbara Goff’s formulation: “if women start to behave like men, men will become women.” Goff (2007) 56. Similarly, Gherchanoc (2003) 781–782; Carlà-Uhink (2017) 9.
38
See McMahon (1998) 139–141; Henderson (1991) 127. In Greek Anthology 11.22, ὄφις refers to a penis; double entendres are suspected in Eccl. 906–910 and Lys. 758–759.
39
The risqué quality of the second part of the Sepeia oracle perhaps has something to do with female aischrologia. On women’s use of the obscene speech as an extreme form of gender inversion, see Versnel (1993) 244; McClure (1999) 51.
40
Sauzeau (1999) 146.
41
Henderson (1987) 168 with further references; Sommerstein (1990) 197.
42
Sauzeau (1999) 146.
43
Transl. by Sommerstein (1998) slightly modified.
44
Auffarth (2004) 48. The Aristophanic scholiast thought the comparison to be ‘not to the point’ (ἀπρόσλογος, scholia for Eccl. 126); Ussher (1973) 93. If a pun is involved, the comparison acquires a point. The word order, in which the word σηπίαις comes close to the beginning of the sentence and is immediately followed by πώγωνα, seems to foreground the punning part.
45
Aristophanes’ pun constitutes the earliest attestation of the myth of the female defense of Argos.
46
Auffarth (2004) argues for a pervasive presence of the Hybristica and the associated Argive tales in the Assemblywomen as a meaningful background for the play’s action.
47
Bershadsky (2013) 316–322.
48
Piérart (2003) 284; Vannicelli (2004) 293.