Quiz Notes

Quiz #1

1. According to Pomeroy, Athena, the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, is “the most complex of the goddesses” because:

a. She has a complicated love life

b. She works all day and parties all night

c. She possesses both masculine and feminine qualities(true)

d. She has seven uturuses

The text draws attention how she’s presented as a “masculine woman”: female in appearance and in some aspects (olive fertility, handicrafts), but associated with traditionally “male” elements (warrior goddess, protector of the citadel, depicted with armor and weapons, patroness of particular warriors; goddess of industry and manufacture (but also spinning and weaving); also wisdom, later appropriated by Greek men as a male attribute). Disguising herself as a man is also unusual. She’s a virgin, born of man, not woman, and identifies the father as the true parent.

Adding to her complexity is the fact that more stories and plays have survived depicting her, placing her in many diverse contexts.

2. A double standard seen in stories about the gods’ and goddesses’ relationships is:

a. Goddesses are expected to sleep only with other gods, but gods can sleep with whoever(true)

b. Goddesses can sleep with women but gods can never sleep with men

c. Gods can give fruit baskets and other gifts to their lovers, but goddesses can’t

d. Cursing your lover can only be done on Sundays

Pomeroy notes a double standard wherein goddesses are expected to have sex with individuals close to them in rank—male gods or demigods/heroes—but gods fornicate with all sorts. Gods’ relations with mortals (mostly Zeus and Apollo) tend to result in suffering, revealing the vulnerability of the women and the male gods’ tendency to exploitation.

3. The “virginal” Olympian goddesses (that is, those who are unmarried and nonmonogamous) include all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Athena

b. Artemis

c. Hestia

d. Hera(not true)

Athena, Artemis, and Hestia were all seen as “virginal”—i.e., they were not married or in a monogamous relationship. Hera, the goddess of marriage, had a husband, Zeus.

4. Mother goddesses in various cultures make a connection between female fertility and

a. architecture

b. agriculture(true)

c. archeology

d. astrophysics

Mother goddesses like Gaia or Ge represented a connection between the earth, fertility, and agriculture—that food is born of the fertile mother earth.

5. The pre-Olympian god Cronus is known for all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Castrating his father with a sickle

b. Swallowing his own children

c. Being defeated by Zeus with the help of his wife Rhea

d. Bathing weekly in goats' milk(not true)

The Titan Cronus was indeed known for castrating his father with a sickle, swallowing his own children to defy a prophecy his son would surpass him, and being defeated by Zeus with the help of his wife Rhea.

Quiz #2

1. In heroic Greek society, marriage patterns between powerful families included

a. matrilocal marriage (a roving warrior marries a princess and settles in her kingdom)

b. patrilocal marriage (a suitor brings a bride back to his lands and family)

c. all mature women being expected to marry in order to ensure the city’s future defense

d. all of the above (true)

In the patrilocal pattern, a suitor brings back a bride to his own house, and this bridges the families of the husband and the bride’s father. Variant: Marriage by capture (e.g., Briseis). In the matrilocal pattern, a roving warrior marries a princess and settles down in her kingdom. Variant: Marriage by contest, in which the kingdom is a prize for the right suitor. Either way, marriage was expected of both genders in this warrior society, in order to produce future warriors.

2. The queen who, enraged by her husband sacrificing their daughter, cast him aside and married his cousin instead was

a. Iphigenia

b. Helen

c. Clytaemnestra(true)

d. Mary Tudor

When Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods, Clytaemnestra was incensed. After Agamemnon left for the Trojan War, leaving a herald to watch over his wife, Clytaemnestra repudiated her marriage to Agamemnon and married his cousin, Aegisthus.

3. In Greek art, the exclusively female Amazons were often depicted as

a. fighting against centaurs, who were originally thought of as exclusively male(true)

b. ugly, representing their unfeminine nature

c. having a secret king

d. makers and sellers of books

There are a number of depictions of Amazons fighting centaurs, contrasting the centaurs’ masculine qualities (violent and lusty) with those of the Amazon women (strong but chaste).

4. Women were a larger proportion of which group in heroic Greek society?

a. Landholders

b. Slaves(true)

c. Actors

d. Stonemasons

Ready access to slave women resulted in part from the practice, when taking a city, of ransoming or killing the landholding men but enslaving the women of that class.

5. When Nausicaa meets Odysseus, she does all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Accompanies him boldly into town and into her father’s presence(not true)

b. Admires his beauty once he’s had a bath

c. Chastises her handmaidens for running away from him

d. Tells him he should ignore her father and try to win over her mother instead

Nausicaa cannot accompany Odysseus into the city, as she knows that doing so will affect her reputation as a maiden and future wife among the men and women of the town.

Optional Extra Credit

EC. According to Pomeroy, why might the matrilocal pattern of marriage be better for the bride?

Though the bride seldom had the choice of husbands in either pattern, the matrilocal scenario allowed the bride to remain within her support system of friends and family members.

Quiz #3

1. Spartan women

a. went to war alongside the men

b. exercised and ate well(true)

c. never married

d. were nude at all times

Because the biological role of the mother was important to producing strong warrior children, Spartan girls were trained to be as physically fit and as well nourished as the boys. Housework and clothes-making were performed by lower classes, freeing Spartan women to train the gymnasium, manage the household, play music, and rear children. Women could bear children of men other than their husbands, though if they were helots’ children they could not be citizens, and adultery was not as strictly proscribed as elsewhere. Pomeroy believes they also engaged in homosexual liaisons in order to prevent unwanted children from heterosexual fornication for pleasure.

Women controlled their dowries and inheritances, so that by the fourth century two-fifths of Spartan land and property was controlled by women, many living luxurious lives. Increasingly later Spartan women displayed their wealth with clothing, purchases like racehorces, and jewelry and cosmetics; Agis’s attempts to restore Lycurgan discipline failed through women’s resistance to archaic austerity.

2. All of the following are true of archaic Athenian Greek burials EXCEPT:

a. Washing and dressing the dead was always done by male relatives of the dead(not true)

b. Male graves significantly outnumber female graves

c. Male graves contain spears and shields; female graves contain cooking pots, spindle whorls, and jewelry

d. Depictions of funerals show women beating their heads and tearing their hair, while men are rigid and restrained

Grave goods of Athenian women included spindle whorls, cooking pots, and other items indicating they still performed household chores that Spartan women had offloaded to lower classes. Depictions of funerals show kinswomen tending to the dead (washing, anointing, and dressing the corpse) and as chief mourners, engaging in public lamentation as an important part of the death rituals.

Burial grounds from early periods show many more male graves than female; this is partly due to men being more likely to be honored with a public burial, but Pomeroy suggests female infanticide is also to blame (again, unlike Sparta, where we are told all the girl babies were kept and only boy infants were exposed if defective).

3. The archaic statues of maidens (korai) and youths (kouroi) were

a. clothed if male, naked if female

b. naked if male, clothed if female(true)

c. always naked

d. always clothed

Both fame and female grave-marker figures (kouroi, korai) are extant from archaic Athens, both derived from Egyptian forms and exhibiting the bland physical ideal of each gender. Male figures were naked and emphasized strength and aesthetic proportions. Female figures were clothed and emphasized strength and restraint; physically the buttocks were a focus of beauty.

4. According to Pomeroy, all of the following are true of Sappho EXCEPT:

a. She belonged to a community, Lesbos, where women were valued and educated

b. Her work is an example of individualism in Greek poetry during this period

c. She was the only female Greek lyric poet(not true)

d. Some of her poetry suggests she may have been married and had a child

There were a number of other female lyric poets; some of their writing survives in fragments, as quoted by other authors.

5. Advice given by Hesiod in Works and Days includes:

a. “Do not let a flaunting woman coax and cozen and deceive you: she is after your barn.”

b. “First of all, get a house, and a woman, and an ox for the plough—a slave woman and not a wife, to follow the oxen.”

c. “A man should not clean his body with water in which a woman has washed, for there is bitter mischief in that.”

d. All of the above(true)

All three of the quotes are indeed from Hesiod’s Works and Days, which displays a strong mistrust and fear of women rooted in the vulnerability of men.

Optional Extra Credit

EC. Pomeroy called Spartan marriage customs “unusual among the Greeks.” How so?

Spartan warriors were held to be equal; consequently, marriage among the landholding elite was not about family status as in Athens and elsewhere. Instead, marriage focused on compatibility and the ability to produce children; as the weddings were often secret, unproductive marriages might be quietly annulled and both parties could seek new mates. In some cases, young men and women were shut up in a dark room to see who went home with whom. Other customs sometimes practiced included the groom carrying the bride away in secret. The wedding involved the bride with male clothing and hair cut short, possibly reflecting a transition from the groom’s previous homosexual relations in the barracks.

Quiz #4

1. In The Bacchae, Pentheus is attacked and torn to pieces by

a. the goddess Athena

b. the women of Thebes(true)

c. wild animals

d. the vengeful Furies

The Maenads—women of Thebes induced into a frenzy by the liberating rites of Dionysus, and led by Pentheus’s mother, Agave—attack Pentheus while he is spying on their rampage. In their dream state they believe he is a lion. Pentheus himself is feeling the effects of the god’s power and seeing things as well. The Maenads rend him to pieces, and Agave brings the head of the “lion” home as a trophy of the power that the women have together.

All of this is the result of Thebes not accepting Dionysus and ignoring his rites, which Pentheus has outlawed. Dionysus exerts his power as punishment for the city and its rulers, to teach them the wrath of the gods and the possibilities of inhuman understanding released through the frenzy.

2. All of the following were true of the hetairai EXCEPT:

a. They were elite courtesans, registered and taxed like all prostitutes in Athens

b. Many possessed not only physical beauty but intellectual training and artistic talents

c. They were required to be above average in height and let their hair grow to their knees(not true)

d. The most famous woman in fifth-century Athens was a hetaira

“In classical Athens, prostitutes had to be registered and were subject to a special tax. Those at the top of this social scale were called hetairai, or ‘companions to men.’ Many of these, in addition to physical beauty, had had intellectual training and possessed artistic talents, attributes that made them more entertaining companions to Athenian men at parties than their legitimate wives. It is no accident that the most famous woman in fifth-century Athens was the foreign-born Aspasia, who started as a hetaira and ended as a madam, and in the course of her life lived with Pericles, the political leader of Athens.”

3. Seclusion of women in Athens involved

a. No access was permitted to any space outside the home to any woman of any class

b. Sexy clothing for women as a kind of compensation for their inaccessibility

c. Any man seeing a naked woman having to undergo a cleansing ritual in front of his kinsmen

d. Separate quarters for men and women in wealthy homes, if possible(true)

Seclusion of women was designed to minimize the ability of male visitors to come in contact with the women of the household. It involved a separation of spaces within private homes (when there was enough space for this to be possible). Though wealthy women with female slaves tended to remain in the home, sending their slaves out to market and to collect water, less wealthy matrons had only themselves to send, making the markets and wells social places for women of lower rank. Women of all classes also were involved in public festivals and could participate in funerals and other rituals, though the latter was more limited in classical times than previously.

4. In Classical Athens, all of the following were true about seduction EXCEPT:

a. Seduction was considered a more serious crime than rape, because it implied longer contact

b. Adultery via seduction was allowed on one day a year, on the Festival of Eros(not true)

c. The aggrieved husband had the right, but not the obligation to kill the seducer

d. As with rape, the male was presumed to be the guilty party, not the female

Since it was assumed men were vulnerable to their urges in relation to women, seduction, adultery, and rape were all assumed to be the fault of the man. Seduction was especially reviled because it required more time to create an emotional connection. Ancient traditions allowed the cuckolded husband the right to seek vengeance on the male adulterer.

5. Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle all believed Spartan customs regarding women were more wholesome than those of Athens because:

a. Athenian women married young, making childbirth more dangerous at an early age

b. Spartan women were kept as well fed as the men; this was less consistently true for Athenian women

c. Physical exercise for women was common in Sparta; not so in Athens

d. All of the above(true)

“Motherhood at an early age, combined with a life spent indoors, was disadvantageous to the health of the Athenian woman. More children were born in the first half of the twenty-year reproductive period than in the second half, making the period from approximately sixteen to twenty-six years old the most hazardous. It is interesting to recall here Plutarch’s approbation of the Spartan custom of having girls marry at eighteen, since they are then in a better physical condition to bear children, although he preferred earlier marriages for other reasons.

“Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle all believed that Spartan customs concerning women were more wholesome. Xenophon praised the Spartans for nourishing their girls as well as their boys, for it was unusual among the Greeks to do so. This differentiation in nourishment could exist even for suckling newborns. … Xenophon also approved of the Spartan custom of encouraging women to exercise so that they could maintain a good physical condition for motherhood. The well-developed physiques of Spartan women caused comment among the Athenian housewives in the comedy Lysistrata, although it may be suggested that performing household chores, especially moving back and forth before the loom, offered an Athenian woman ample opportunity for strenuous exercise. In the Republic, Plato prescribed physical exercise for women and stated that females should become parents for the first time at twenty and males at thirty. Later, in the Laws, he reduced the age minimum for females to any time between sixteen and twenty. Aristotle suggested that pregnant women be forced to exercise by passing a law that they must take a daily walk to worship the divinities presiding over childbirth. He also noted that it was undesirable for the very young to produce offspring, since more of the babies were likely to be female, and the mothers endured a more difficult labor and were more likely to die in childbirth. He suggested that the optimum age for marriage was eighteen for women, thirty-seven for men.”

Optional Extra Credit

EC. If you were a woman in Athens, would you rather be a hetaira or a married woman in a noble family? Why?

“The hetaira had access to the intellectual life of Athens, which we nowadays treasure, and a popular courtesan who was not a slave had the freedom to be with whoever pleased her. Admittedly our sources are biased, but the fact that we know of some courtesans who attempted to live as respectable wives, while we know of no citizen wives who wished to be courtesans, should make us reconsider the question of which was the preferable role in Classical Athens—companion or wife.”

Quiz #5

1. According to Pomeroy, Athenian tragedies often showed women as forceful and rebellious because the plays’ female protagonists

a. represented the needs of private life and family against the power of the state(true)

b. were there to be destroyed and put in their place at the end of the play

c. accurately reflected Athenian women’s agency and active public participation in real life

d. were actually gods dressed as women

Athenian drama often shows women acting in rebellion against the established norms of society. This was because women’s interests and responsibilities were private and family-oriented, putting them in conflict with the patriarchal state and reflecting concerns more primitive than the later Olympian support for the state.

In drama, this means heroines who act in a “masculine” way—not submissive or modest. This gives us insights into the conflicts within Athenian society, but also means that women in Greek drama are not to be taken at face value as representative of normal behavior or expectations. A good example is Antigone, in which the title heroine stands against the state in defense of older values related to family and private religious duties. Antigone herself is a heroine and so dies not act like a normal woman, which she actually laments at the end of the play. Instead, she stands for the collective concern of women in Athenian society.

2. In the play Antigone, Antigone’s sister Ismene insists that Antigone must not

a. delay in burying their brother

b. disobey Creon’s ban on burying their brother(true)

c. offer to fight Creon in single combat

d. visit Egypt during the tourist season

Both sisters represent a woman’s duty to her family. Ismene believes in what Antigone wants but fears to challenge Creon and the laws. Ismene’s actions cast Antigone as the heroine, a larger-than-life character in an exaggerated pursuit of the ideal. Even though she survives in the end, her survival seems not to matter, so in a way both sisters are lost.

One way of seeing Ismene is that she is holding herself to how she thinks a woman is supposed to be seen, rather than acting on the burden or female moral responsibility that Antigone accepts.

3. In the play Medea, the legendary hero Jason

a. kills his own sons to spite Medea

b. has sailed away and is not present in the play

c. sets aside his foreign wife, Medea, and marries a princess to get ahead(true)

d. dies at the end

Jason wants a more socially impressive wife, and so sets aside Medea, whom he met and married on his travels.

4. According to Pomeroy, all of the following are true about Plato’s utopian exercise, Republic, EXCEPT:

a. No private property meant there was no need for monogamous marriage

b. Plato thought men and women were similar in nature apart from their roles in begetting children

c. Prostitution was common, accounting for one-sixth of the female population(not true)

d. Women were included in the ruling elite class, the guardians

Treatment of women in Plato’s Republic is more egalitarian in some ways (though this is partly because male citizens don’t have much public agency under the rule of the guardians and the philosopher-kings). Prostitution is not any more common in this utopia than in real life.

5. The comedy Lysistrata, by Aristophanes, is about women ending a 20-year war by

a. denying sex to the men until they declare peace(true)

b. taking over the fighting of the war and winning

c. bribing the men to make peace by giving them fine new clothes and horses

d. appealing to the gods to intervene and make the men more rational and less aggressive

Lysistrata is a comic account of a woman’s extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War between Greek city-states by denying all the men of the land any sex, which was the only thing they truly and deeply desired. Lysistrata persuades the women of the warring cities to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace—a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes.

Optional Extra Credit

EC. The play Medea ends with Medea escaping in a flying chariot. In terms of the play’s message, what do you think this might mean?

The end of the play means that Medea escapes, rising up out of the scene in a manner normally associated with the gods. This suggests that a divine or mystical justice has been visited on Jason, and reinforces Medea’s association with mystical power as a non-Greek woman (the exotic Other unbound by Greek rules, combined with the nature-driven life-creating power of the woman). This implicitly makes her a witch and suggestive of Hekate. That Medea escapes in the end casts Jason’s actions as the evil, and her actions as a sacrifice to ensure justice and suffering on him and those around him, as noted above.