Summary Of Walcot's Greek Attitudes Towards Women

There are many ways mythology can be interpreted beyond the simple storytelling it represents. It is a culture’s way of explaining the world, yes, but it can also be used to gain a deeper understanding of said culture. Myths reflect attitudes, fears, beliefs and can lead to a fuller knowledge of the people who nurtured and created them. At least that’s what P. Walcot argues in his article Greek Attitudes towards Women: The Mythological Evidence. By using mythological characters and stories as proof, Walcot claims that there is a relationship between female sexuality, female empowerment and the ancient Greeks’ intense mistrust of the female gender. Using various stories and characters to prove his thesis, Walcot offers an overall well rounded

Truth be told, Walcot’s examples aren’t numerous enough to fully prove his thesis. While he does a good job to generally describe the stories of various humans and deities, it seems that there are quite a few big omissions that could have supported the idea even more than it already did. Briefs mentions of characters like Helen and Clytemnestra are good but the author could have gone a lot deeper with those examples since they are both mythological women who, not unlike all the others he’s explained in details, brought chaos and destruction to the men in their lives. If there were ever two mythological characters that prove that men despised and mistrusted women for their sexuality, a wife accidentally engineering a war by leaving her husband and another planning and executing the murder of hers with her lover, are two seemingly obvious choices on which he could have, and should have, elaborated. As mentioned above, Walcot justifies his choice of only using mythological evidence to support his thesis very well. His reasons are excellent but a stronger article still would have added historical proofs and examples to help strengthen the point. A great way of doing this would have been to add a few non-mythological proofs, if said non-mythological proofs exist, such as laws or pieces of pottery depicting the everyday greek women to fortify the thesis. These examples of real women and real women’s lives would have helped contextualised the rest of the article and would have offered a broader, fuller, analysis of the Greeks’ attitudes towards women. The text does mention the poet Semonides and his famous, potentially satirical, poem describing the various types of women that exist in the world. This is a strong addition that shows the real life association between female sexuality and mistrust since all