Essay On Women In Classical Greece

Women in Classical Greece were very greatly oppressed. However, some of the oppression changed after the Peloponnesian War and further shifted after the Macedonian conquer of Greece and the beginning of the Hellenistic Period. Women were frequently allowed more freedoms in different areas of the new creation, although some states still heavily controlled women, even going so far as dealing heavier autocracy over them than what was found during the Classical age. With the shift of control over women, women’s societal, political, and economical roles changed, for better or worse.
During the Classical period in Greece, women were under heavy-handed control—especially in Athens—which had initially been begun with Solon’s creation of an Athenian Democracy. Solon’s point in controlling these women was both to protect them from men, in order to keep their purity intact, and to help end the strife of men between

Governments in the former great city-states were turned into smaller pieces of what they once had been and therefore they had much bigger problems than to worry about women. There was a great lack of men left over to fight for these city-states, as well as a lack of men to reproduce. The smaller governments fought each other for more land and power, further destroying the little population of men that they had. In this power vacuum, Macedonian, which had long been seen as little threat, gained power and eventually conquered all of Greece, the Mediterranean, and much of the modern-day Middle East through its rulers Phillip II and Alexander the Great. The arrival of Macedonian conquerors brought with it customs that had not been common within Greece and its counterparts. Included in this was increased freedoms for women in society, politics, and even economics. Furthermore, women were increasingly included in writings from the time period, giving classicists more evidence of what roles women had in the new