(Ancient Greek and Roman) girls just wanna have fun
by Vicki León
photo courtesy of Vicki Leon, copyright 2009
Looking at women’s lives 2000 years ago, it’s easy to dwell on the dire side: pregnancies, plague, piracy—to say nothing of the rest of the alphabet.
Visual portrayals of the period seem to confirm that grim reality. All those marble sculptures of wellborn Roman matrons with ghastly hairdos and “mine doesn’t stink” expressions.
All those Greek vase paintings where mopey wives and daughters, their necks bent at chiropractically crazy angles, weave or wave adios to the family warrior.
I’m here to tell you that most Greek and Roman gals of long ago weren’t like that. How do I know this? For starters, 95 percent of those portraits were –surprise! made by men who liked the “me Tarzan” status quo. Secondly, I’ve had the luck to live and work for years among the Greek and other Mediterranean descendants of these women. Talk about saucy, no-holds-barred female personalities; they’re alive and well from Athens to Sicily.
I’ve had the further good fortune of doing deep research on over a thousand livewires from ancient times. For every homebound matron there was an uppity counterpart: rascally female fishmongers; gore-minded female gladiators; wild-eyed alchemists; and other free spirits.
Brainy ladies held their own, too. In my recent book on science and superstition, I profiled philosophers from Plato’s mom Perictione to a firecracker named Hipparchia. After falling for a social activist named Crates, Hipparchia became a Cynic street philosopher herself, a multitasking mom of two–and in spare moments, writing outrageous diatribes, the op-ed pieces of her day.
Women back then were already into networking. Leontium, for instance, a philosophical follower of Epicurus, managed to keep their study circle from starving during a siege of Athens by tapping into her friendship with the gal pal of one of the besiegers.
At the other end of the philosophical spectrum I discovered the bewitching tale of Menippus, a twenty-something philosophy intern. He was hit on by a gorgeous gal in Corinth who invited him home; as the affair caught fire, he and Empusa made wedding plans. Unbeknown to the lovesick intern, she was a licensed vampire and had gastronomic rather than erotic designs on his
bod. His professor, more savvy about the Empusa lifestyle, did a vampire intervention at the wedding banquet, causing the cast and crew to blast off like bats in a bad horror film.
From the supernatural to the pragmatic: women of childbearing years also practiced (and shared) multiple strategies for avoiding and/or spacing out pregnancies. Males of those times had firmly-held beliefs in their own raging-bull potency. Someone (eg wives) pushed the notion of anti-Viagra, a reverse aphrodisiac to rein in those great big libidos. One recipe: apply the left side of a hippo’s forehead to a woman’s groin. You’ve got to admit—that would quell almost anyone’s urges!
Girls and women of all ages did face serious challenges, ranging from toxic cosmetics to an appalling dearth of chocolate. Nevertheless, long-ago gals wanted their share of fun–and grabbed it when they could, with a hearty “Carpe diem! Seize the day!”
Vicki Leon is the author of the fascinating read, HOW TO MELLIFY A CORPSE. If you love the gruesome fun and zany historical superstitions, this is the read for you. – Malena Lott