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Women In Ancient Greece

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The Greek polis, or city-state, arose in the Archaic Period spanning from 800 to 500 B.C. This period followed three hundred years of a Dark Age in which the people of Greece lived in nomadic groups following the fall of Mycenaean civilization in 1100 B.C. Though life was arduous for Greeks in the Dark Ages and no written records exist from the time, this period allowed for the dissolving of Mycenaean structures and the rise of Archaic Greece. City-states of the Archaic era were unified, urban centers that spread throughout the Mediterranean basin due to vigorous colonization. With this shift back to state-level society came the organization of polis populations into a hierarchy of citizens, foreign residents, and slaves. Advancements of …show more content…

Only male citizens of Athens could vote on issues concerning the city and serve on juries. Female citizens, children, metics (foreigners presiding in Athens), and slaves were prohibited from participating in governing procedures. The purpose of this paper is to investigate current scholarly understanding of women in Classical Athens, the positions they held, and the way they were perceived in society at the time. My forthcoming analysis will also attempt to expand knowledge about Athenian women into a broader, more comprehensive picture using archaeological evidence related to funerary commemorations and …show more content…

In the ancient Greek context, archaeological evidence is especially valuable in that it fills the holes left by literary sources and “represent[s] the residues of actual patterns of activity, unfiltered by the kinds of choices operating to produce the written evidence” (Nevett 365). Before drawing upon archaeological findings to challenge and expand commonly-held views of Classical Athenian women, I will first present the common views, the vast majority of which stem from writings from the

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