Punishment and the Damned
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document in English
humanities/philosophy
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published 19/10/2007
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Summary
It can be questioned whether the Greek and Roman people ever believed in their own gods. However, even such questioning cannot undermine the didactic value of their religion. Greek and Roman mythology thrived on storytelling; bards assumed the role of primitive priests, teaching moral reasoning to those who listened. The poets, the playwrights, and the satirists provided the ruling class with a never-ending flow of excuses for the decisions of their courts and forums. Greek and Roman leaders fought hard to sustain a patriarchal system, and it is no accident that women in these myths were either completely docile or utterly brash. They were examples from the government to the Greek and Roman women of proper behavior, of legal behavior, and of the consequences of defiance. Women listened, for these examples, shrouded in religious connotations, transformed disobedience into sin.
Table of Contents
- Greece and Rome clearly divided the world into gendered spheres
- . From the Greek plays of Aeschylus to the Roman epics of Virgil and Ovid, readers are enthralled by the lives of these motherly slaughterers, these warrior women, these autonomous queens
- Ovid takes the idea of the warrior woman to a new level in his Metamorphoses with the introduction of Caenis.
- Perhaps even more tragic than the hopeless stories of the warrior women is the story of a woman who thought it her right, not to fight a pathetic war, but to lead a city.
- These women escaping sexual dominance and these women escaping sexual submission, these women seeking a new kind of power on the battlefields and the thrones, are all overshadowed by the most infamous woman in all of Greek and Roman mythology
- The happiest women in Greek and Roman mythology are the woman the modern world disdains
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