Women and Power

Traditionally in the ancient Greek world men attained power through physical force and public political activity. Women had

fewer avenues to power: generally smaller and physically weaker than men, they were excluded from military power and also from public political life. In the Hellenistic world, however, men were losing their sense of public power due to the ascendancy of autocratic hegemonies and mercenary soldiery, and women were becoming more visible in the public arena, as shown by, e.g., terracotta representations of girls wearing cloaks and carrying tablets, presumably on their way to school.^[69] The public presence of Hellenistic queens offered women a new model of feminine power and Greek males a gendered reminder of their relative powerlessness in the state. Greek men and women in Egypt especially, with its long tradition of relative equality for women, were witnessing different modes of gender behavior. The changing social conditions, both on the public and the private level, were destabilizing traditional Greek assumptions about relations of power between men and women.

Theocritus's three urban mimes, Idylls 2, 14, and 15, all feature self-assertive women retaliating against traditional male acts that threaten their sense of self: in Idyll 2, when Delphis cavalierly deserts her, Simaetha takes active retaliatory steps through magic; in Idyll 14, when Aeschinas beats her, Cynisca protests by leaving his symposium (and his life); in Idyll 15, when a male bystander tries to shame Praxinoa into silence, Praxinoa vigorously asserts her right to public speech. The previous section focused on representations of direct male-female interactions in Theocritus's urban mimes. This section examines other ways in which the topic of women's power emerges in Theocritus's poems as a central thematic concern, with attention to the themes of magic, motherhood, and the relations of powerful females and subordinate males. Select works of other Hellenistic poets are also included for comparative purposes.

The resources available to a woman mistreated by a man in ancient Greek society varied depending on class, status, and ethnicity. If a Greek woman had a kurios (male guardian) available, she could rely on him to take appropriate measures on her behalf. But a mobile world intensified problems of female protection and retribution. The rise of marriage contracts in the Hellenistic age addressed some of these problems by specifically spelling out the obligations of both partners and by allowing the woman, in the case of a dispute, to appeal directly to outside parties approved by both husband and wife.^[70] But contracts were not available to cover other tricky situations, such as the plight of a woman who, abandoned by a male lover, finds herself without kin to defend her publicly (e.g., Theocritus's Simaetha).

Witchcraft offered one countercultural, private source of psychological power to women who were seemingly without recourse. The story of Medea, one of the three great witches in Greek literature and myth (the other two being Hecate and Circe), shows the kind of isolation that could provoke the use of magic. In Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica , Medea's appeal to Jason to take her with him to the Greek world underscores the vulnerable position of a woman immigrant separated from her family:

        (Argon . 4.90-91 O.C.T .)

Do not expose me to insult and disgrace when I have left
my country far away and have no kinsmen to protect me.
        (trans. Rieu,  Apollonius , 149)

Euripides' Medea illustrates what can happen when a man disregards such an injunction and deserts an inconvenient woman in order to marry into power.^[71] Isolated in Corinth, an alien woman without official support, Medea turns to Hecate, the sinister goddess of witchcraft, to help her avenge her injuries:

        (395-98  O.C.T .)

It shall not be—I swear it by her, my mistress,
Whom most I honor and have chosen as partner,
Hecate, who dwells in the recesses of my hearth—
That any man shall be glad to have injured me.
        (trans. Warner,  Medea,  72)

By having Medea locate Hecate, goddess of public crossroads, at the heart of her household,^[72] Euripides suggests Medea has mined the house against its former master, Jason, and remade it into a nucleus of power from which she moves against Corinth's hegemony.

Theocritus's Idyll 2 provides an elaborated and sustained representation of a woman empowering herself against an aristocratic Greek male's assumption of sexual privilege and social domination. Hecate, Circe, and Medea (Circe's niece) dominate the Greek literary and mythic tradition of witchcraft. In Idyll 2, by invoking her powerful predecessors in

moving against Delphis, Simaetha shows that she understands herself to be participating in a strong female tradition of witchcraft:

        (14-16)

Hail, dread Hecate, and attend me to the end,
making my drugs as strong as Circe's
or Medea's or blond Perimede's.

Delphis is at the center of a male-dominated elitist Greek world, defined by gymnasia and symposia. To counter his position of power, Simaetha is relocating herself into an alternative world of magic that privileges women rather than men.

A consideration of how Theocritus shapes Simaetha's magic is central to a discussion of the theme of women and power in Theocritus's poetry, for Simaetha's magic aims at subverting Delphis's public self and male autonomy.^[73] Repetitions of vocabulary and themes in Simaetha's magic rites and self-narration show Simaetha acting out the reversal of normative relations of dominance and subordination she wishes to effect between herself and Delphis.

First, Simaetha is seeking through magic to dominate Delphis by evoking in him the love symptoms he induced in her. Thus she evokes the symptoms of burning (, "may Delphis's flesh be destroyed in the flame," 26; , "I am all on fire for him," 40); consumption ( , "may he waste with love for me," 29; , "my beauty wasted for him," 83); and madness ( , "like a man driven mad / may he come to this house," 50-51; , "when I saw him I was driven mad," 82).

Second, in her magic rites Simaetha appropriates symbols of Delphis's patriarchal world and uses them against him. In preparation for a binding-spell against Delphis, Simaetha orders her slave to wreathe a bowl with crimson wool (2), and she calls the bowl a , a term applied to vessels used at symposia.^[74] Delphis described himself to Simaetha as a would-be sympotic komastes (reveller), wearing a wreath en-twined with crimson bands (121), and Simaetha learned of his defection when a woman reported that he left a symposium to wreathe a house with garlands (153). The komastes typically performs ritual acts of seduc-

tion (a komos ) at the beloved's house door: Simaetha's slave Thestylis is to perform ritual acts on Delphis's doorstep (60-62). Further, by casting a spell to make Delphis turn at her door like the bronze rhomb she whirls (30-31),^[75] Simaetha would trap Delphis in a dizzying command performance of a komos ritual.

Third, in reversing their gendered roles of power, Simaetha uses Delphis's most characteristic trait, his fickleness, against him:

        (44-46)

Whether a woman is lying by him or a man,
may he be as forgetful of them as Theseus, they say,
once forgot fair-haired Ariadne on Dia.

In using an analogy suited to herself (an Ariadne forgotten by a Theseus), Simaetha seeks to rewrite the mythic story. In her revisionist version, Ariadne will triumph over Theseus: Delphis will forget his current lover and return to her.

Delphis, a star member of the gymnastic and sympotic set, repeatedly left his oil flask with Simaetha: she interprets this act as a sign of her power over his world (155-58). Now that Delphis has abandoned her, Simaetha seeks, through magic, to separate Delphis from the sporting life:

        (50-51)

And like a man driven mad
may he come to this house from the shiny palaestra.

The repetition in the poem of the verb (to be driven mad) in association with sites of athletic activity (50-51, 80, 82) underscores the theme of power reversal. Simaetha was driven mad by the sight of Delphis, glistening, fresh from the gymnasium (79-80, 82). Now she wants him driven mad and forced outside the shiny palaestra, back into her domestic world.^[76] By showing how Simaetha's ritual overturns conventions of Delphis's world, the poet evokes male fears that women might use magic to control and redefine them, that through witchcraft women might redefine terms of sexual discourse.

Relations of the word in Idyll 2 show how language can reinforce positions of Power and also mirror the shifting of power rela-

tions. Delphis had plunged Simaetha into a crisis of self-identity: ("He has made me, instead of a wife, a bad woman, and a maid no more"; 41). But Simaetha moves away from a patriarchal word that ranks her as (bad) by her sexual relations with men into an alternative realm in which (bad things) can work in her favor. Empowered by Hecate in a world of witchcraft, Simaetha is bringing against Delphis: ("I'll mash a lizard and bring Delphis a bad drink tomorrow," 58).^[77] Delphis, now making love toasts with unmixed wine (151-52), will drink a instead and learn what it means to be a victim rather than an agent of . Although Simaetha begins her self-narration by seeing herself as victim of whose causation she is struggling to understand (; "Who brought this badness upon me?" 65), by the poem's end Simaetha has established herself in the position of controlling subject rather than victim:

        (159-61)

Now with spells I will bind him; and if he hurts me still,
by the Fates, he shall knock on Hades' gate,
such bad drags, I swear, I keep for him in my box.

Simaetha's redescription of Delphis's and her relationship ends by affirming the power reversal between Delphis and herself: when Delphis had been her suitor, he regularly knocked at her "door" (6); now, if he continues to play komastes elsewhere, she will use bad drugs (from her "box") against him. She will reverse the terms of eroticism and send him to play komastes at Hades' door.

Through the emotional experience of magic rites, by acting out matching retributions for her maltreatment, Simaetha releases herself from her dependency on Delphis and from society's hierarchical constraints: the poem starts with her resolve to go to Delphis's wrestling school tomorrow and reproach him (8-9), but it ends with her vow to kill him if necessary (159-62). The crisis of identity and emotional turmoil caused by Delphis separates Simaetha from her environment:

        (38-39)

The sea is still, and the breezes are still;
yet the anguish in my breast will not be still.

In the course of the poem, through sympathetic magic and reciprocal self-narration, Simaetha changes the terms of sexual discourse and moves toward creating a more satisfactory world and self-identity for herself.

Allegory further enhances Idyll 2's presentation of Simaetha's process of reclaiming herself. Midway to Lycon's place (place of the wolf, a wild predator), Simaetha saw Delphis, and the sight distracted her from Artemis's festival: ("No longer did I take notice of / that procession," 83-84). She turned away from her path toward Artemis, mistress of fierce beasts (67-68), chaste goddess of the wild, to pursue Delphis (an Apollo figure, Artemis's seductive twin).^[78] At the poem's end, Simaetha is finding a way to return to her former path, to regain a sense of power over herself and her world. Her willingness to kill her violator Delphis (159-60), her desire to rid herself of his intrusion into her life, also suggests a turning back toward Artemis, goddess of independence from men, the goddess who destroyed Actaeon for seeing her naked.^[79]

At the poems end, Simaetha transfers the quality of shining from Delphis and his friend ( ; "[whose] breasts were far more shining than you, Selene [the Moon]"; 79)^[80] to Selene, invoked as ("of the shining throne," 165). Griffiths suggests that this reversal signifies Simaetha's move away from her own world: "Though Simaetha is venturing again into somewhat heightened poetic usages, she is no longer applying them to her own experiences. She is, rather, finding momentary release by projecting her sensuality into a removed aesthetic realm."^[81] Yet by having Simaetha strip Delphis of his adjective and give it to the Moon, her ally in magic, Theocritus also shows Simaetha deconstructing her image of Delphis and returning from her obsession with his world to reclaim her own life.^[82] Thus Simaetha's farewell to the moon and the night ( , "tranquil night," 166) suggests movement away from the turmoil caused by Delphis:

        (165-66)

Farewell, Selene of the shining throne, and farewell you other
stars that attend upon the chariot of tranquil Night.

The night is over, and the moon has played her role as confidant in Simaetha's ritual therapy.

Idyll 2 reflects male concerns about the increased visibility of women in the Hellenistic world by suggesting the possibility of fearful female vengeance in the everyday world. Egypt's long tradition of rituals of enchantment, now more visible to Greeks due to Egypt's prominence in the Hellenistic Greek world,^[83] may have strengthened Greek male anxieties about aliens and others (e.g., females) using magic to limit Greek male autonomy.

Ritual activities that particularly encouraged the acting out of oppositional Positions toward gender roles and institutions of Power among the Greeks include Dionysiac rites, witchcraft, and the worship of foreign gods. Theocritus's poems featuring women's religious activities highlight their countercultural aspects. In Idyll 26, bacchantes perform mystic rituals and then ecstatically dismember Pentheus, Thebe's king (and Agave's son). In Idyll 2, Simaetha first saw Delphis, whom she unconventionally pursued, at a festival of Artemis, goddess of the hunt (68), female initiations, and the wild. Simaetha's ritual magic also involves invoking Hecate, goddess of witchcraft, and Selene, the Moon goddess, both outside the Olympian establishment. Idyll 15 represents an Adonia, which celebrates Aphrodite's extramarital reunion with Adonis, a subordinated young male related to the Babylonian Tammuz, among others.^[84] The Adonia was traditionally a countercultural festival celebrated privately by women; in Idyll 15, Theocritus explores the social dynamics involved when this formerly subversive festival is sponsored by Queen Arsinoe and celebrated in the center of the Ptolemaic state.

The subject of the capacity of women's communities and religious rituals to subvert traditional male Power was popular among other Hellenistic Greek poets as well. Apollonius Rhodius's Argonautica features several oppositional or intrusive female communities: Medea and her sister Chalciope plot against their father, Colchis's ruler; the Lemnian women threaten to abort Jason's heroic quest; Aphrodite, Hera, and Athena plot to manipulate Jason and Medea. Callimachus's Hymn 6 in-dudes the story of how Demeter punished a man for violating her grove by having him consume his family's estate; Callimachus's Hymn 5, how Athena punished a boy with blindness for gazing on her naked. Several of Herodas's mimes starring women also focus on ways female activities and friendships can overturn male assumptions of dominance and power (Mimes 3 and 6 are discussed later in this chapter).

Throughout Greek history, religious ceremonies, including funerals,

provided standard occasions for women to enter the public domain, where they might encounter men,^[85] and Hellenistic poets follow an established poetic tradition in using religious rituals to facilitate fictive encounters between men and women (e.g., Men. Citharista 93-97, Sam . 38-49 O.C.T .). As mentioned above, in Theocritus's Idyll 2, Simaetha was accompanying a friend to a festival of Artemis when she saw Delphis and fell in love. So too in Idyll 15, Praxinoa and Gorgo, on their way to the festival of Adonis, encounter several men (and an old woman).^[86] Also, in Herodas's Mime 1, Metriche's athletic suitor first saw her at a festival of the goddess Mise (56),^[87] and in Callimachus's Aetia 3, frs. 67-75, Acontius fell in love with Cydippe at a Delian festival of Apollo (frs. 67.5-6, 70).

Other Hellenistic poems featuring more benign women's religious activities include Herodas's Mime 4, which represents women visiting a shrine of Asclepius (see chapter 3 for discussion). Further, Theocritus's Idyll 24, an epic narrative, highlights a mother's religious role: Teiresias directs Alcmene to bum at midnight the snakes that attacked her sons, to have them cast from the community at dawn, to fumigate the house, and then to sacrifice a boar.^[88] Callimachus's poetry also features women's religious communities, e.g., Hymn 5's female celebrants of Athena, as well as Athena and her company of maidens, and Hymn 6's female celebrants of Demeter.^[89]

The motif of hostilities between male intruders and female celebrants is traditional in literary representations of women's ceremonies: in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae , Euripides' relation Mnesilochus dresses in drag to infiltrate the Thesmophoria; in Euripides' Bacchae , Pentheus dresses in drag to spy on bacchantes. In Theocritus's Idyll 26, also featuring bacchantes, the poet heightens the sense of male violation of female space by having Pentheus spy on women engaged in the most secret ritual activities: removing holy things from a mystic chest and laying them on altars (7- 8).^[90] But by focusing on human agency in the destruction of Pentheus, not divine agency, the poet can underscore the fearsome power of women to destroy men.^[91] Callimachus's Hymns 5 and 6 also underscore the exclusion of males from female religious celebrations through cautionary stories that reinforce the principle of female inviolability.^[92] But in both these poems, unlike Theocritus's Idyll 26, the agent of the male's destruction is a goddess, not a mortal female: in Hymn 5, Teiresias sees Athena naked and she blinds him; in Hymn 6, Erysichthon violates Demeter's sacred grove to cut trees for a dining hall and she curses him with insatiable hunger.^[93]

Differences in the ways Theocritus and Callimachus handle the topic of childbirth exemplify differences in their approaches to the issue of women and power. Theocritus's Idyll 17, Ptolemy's encomium, features the theme of Ptolemy II's birth from Berenice. Childbirth is a conventional hymnic topic (e.g., Hymn. Hom. Ap. ; Callim. Hymn 1, to Zeus, and Hymn 4, to Delos), and Idyll 17's poet-narrator conventionally enhances the theme of Ptolemy's birth by associating it with legendary warrior births: the Argive woman's bearing Diomedes to Tydeus and Thetis's bearing Achilles to Peleus (53-56). But in commemorating the marriage union of Ptolemy's parents, the poet also emphasizes sources of male matrimonial anxiety:

        (43-44).

But if a woman know not conjugal love, her mind is ever set on others;
easily she gives birth, but the children resemble not their sire.
        (trans. Gow,  Theocritus  1:133)

Further, assurances of legitimacy precede the narrative of Ptolemy's birth too: ("And in his father's likeness / was he born, a child beloved"; trans. Gow, Theocritus 1: 135; 63-64). The focus here is the woman's power over her husband in determining the legitimacy of offspring and the danger a wife's infidelity would create in a household (and in the Ptolemies' case, the state). Thus Ptolemy's encomium, Idyll 17, includes the theme of a woman's power to determine the legitimacy and claim of a child to patrimony and also raises the issue of a woman's role in a patriarchal system. Matrilineal identifications emphasize the themes of motherhood and female transmission of power in Idyll 17: Berenice, Ptolemy's mother, is identified as Antigone's daughter (61); Aphrodite, as Dione's daughter (36).^[94] Further, Idyll 18's wedding song exalts Helen's importance (and undermines Menelaus's) by wishing they might have a child resembling its mother, not its father (21).^[95]

Lysias's Euphiletus, in defending his killing of his wife's seducer Eratosthenes, shows the depth of male, patriarchal anxiety about the possibility of a woman having an extramarital affair:

. (Lys 1.33 O.C.T. )

Those who have got their way by persuasion corrupt women's minds, in
such a way as to make other men's wives more attached to themselves than
to their husbands, so that the whole house is in their power, and it is uncer-
tain who is the children's father, the husband or the lover.
        (trans. Freeman, "Killing of Eratosthenes," 49)

Herodas too pays special attention to the issue of female sexual fidelity in a mobile world. In Mime 1, an old bawd urges a young married woman to have an extramarital affair while her husband is away in Egypt. Mime 6 evokes male anxieties about sexual roles and the problem of infidelity: two women discuss dildoes, which Koritto claims, if well made, can be more than adequate substitutes for men (69-71). The importance of wifely loyalty for legitimate offspring is an ongoing motif in marriage songs (e.g., Cat. 61.217-26) and also in descriptions of ideal or alternative worlds (e.g., Hes. Op . 235; Hor. Od . 4.5.23; Mart. 6.27.3-4).

When Callimachus's poetry features the theme of childbirth, the focus is on the birthing process itself, with emphasis on female vulnerability and suffering. The emphasis on suffering in childbirth is not new with Callimachus, of course: the high risks of childbirth in the ancient world were notable.^[96] But the point here is that suffering in childbirth is the focus of Callimachus's representations of childbirth and that this focus contrasts dramatically with Theocritus's focus on women's power in relation to children's legitimacy. Callimachus's Hymn 1 includes the story of how Rhea gave birth to Zeus and searched in distress for water afterwards (10-41). Hymn 3 identifies the unjust city as a place where women suffer and die in childbirth and bear lame children (126-28). Hymn 4 features the story of the unhappy wanderings of pregnant Leto (55-263), persecuted by Hera and dominated by her unborn son, who issues orders from the womb (162-95; cf. 86-99). Also in Hymn 4, Hera curses Zeus's mistresses with unhappy, difficult childbirth:

        (241-43)

And [may you] bring forth in darkness, not even where the poor
mill-women bring forth in difficult labour, but where the seals
of the sea bring forth, amid the desolate rocks.
        (trans. Mair, "Callimachus," 105)

Further, Epigram 53, in giving thanks to Eileithuia for the easy birth of a daughter and praying for the easy birth of a son, reflects the theme of

difficult childbirth and the long tradition of Greek women's prayers and offerings to Eileithuia and other birth goddesses.^[97]

Writing in a Hellenistic world defined by autocratic hegemonies, which denied Greek men political self-determination and placed them in positions of dependency instead, Theocritus repeatedly introduces into his poems the motif of strong mothers and dependent sons. Idyll 11 exemplifies the Theocritean theme of the complicated interdependency between mothers and sons. An adolescent cyclops blames his mother for not assisting him in his courtship of Galatea, but he also expresses confidence that she will empathize with his suffering if he tells her of it:

        (67-71)

My mother alone it is who wrongs me, and her I blame;
for never once has she spoken a kindly word for me to thee,
though she sees me growing thinner day by day.
I will tell her my head throbs, and both my feet,
that she may suffer since I too suffer.
        (trans. Gow,  Theocritus  1:91)

Idyll 11 emphasizes a mother's striking independence from family concerns: she consorts with a female friend (Galatea) and ignores her son's needs and demands. Further, the role that Polyphemus assigns his mother of arranging courtship/marriage was traditionally assigned to the father in the Greek world.^[98] But in Theocritus's Idyll 11, no mention of a father interferes with the strained relations between Polyphemus and his mother.^[99]

Idyll 24, on Heracles' infancy and early childhood, also focuses on a mother's relations with her sons. Although the poem includes a father, his less-than-attentive presence contrasts with Alcmene's dominating role in her sons' upbringing: she roused her husband, still sleeping, when baby Iphicles cried in fright; she summoned Teiresias to learn the meaning of the snake incident after her husband had gone back to bed; she directed Heracles' education, even choosing his tutors. More incidental mentions of dose relationships between mothers and sons appear in Idylls 10 and 12: Idyll 10's Milon mockingly urges the lovelorn Bucaeus to complain to his mother when she rises in the morning (57-58);

Idyll 12's poet-narrator notes that the winner of a boys' kissing contest returns, laden with garlands, to his mother (32-33). Idyll 26 represents the most dysfunctional of Theocritus's mother-son relationships: the sparagmos (dismemberment) of Pentheus at the hands of his mother and aunts.^[100] Further, Idyll 26's narrator's suggestion that a similar fate might yet befall some nine- or ten-year-old male child (28-29) brings the threat of the terrible, destroying mother figure into the contemporary world.^[101]

In Idyll 15, Theocritus offers a paradigm of the process of power reversal between mothers and sons, as sons grow up. Within the context of the household, women can exercise power over males: Praxinoa and Gorgo complain about their husbands and Praxinoa invokes the female bogey Mormo, a surrogate dread mother, to scare her male child. Praxinoa's repetition of the verb (to lock up), used first when she leaves the home (43) and again when she and her companions enter the palace grounds (77), signifies how relations change, however, between mothers and male children. While a son is still young, a mother can lock him at home, invoke the biting horse and bogeywoman, protect him from the outside world:

        (40-43)

I will not take you, child. Mormo, the hone bites.
Cry however much you like, but I won't have you maimed.
Let's go. Phrygia, take the little one and play with him.
Call the female dog inside; lock up the front door.

But when a child becomes a man, the power shifts and he now does the locking up: ("'All women inside,' said the man, locking the door on the bride"; 77). Through Praxinoa's me of this proverb as the women reach the festival grounds of the Adonia, a celebration of the extramarital union of a goddess and her young consort, the poet underscores how the Adonia subverts normative, gendered relations: a bridegroom may dominate a bride, but not when the principals are Adonis and Aphrodite. Further, the Adonia offers women respite from their husbands' lock.^[102] Also, by having Praxinoa me this phrase as she herself appropriates the bridegroom's power in inhering her companions inside the palace grounds,^[103] Theocritus wryly highlights the distance between normative, traditional expecta-

tions about gender relations (and women's submissive behavior) and Alexandria's changing social world (as represented in the poem by, e.g., Praxinoa's assertion of liberty on public streets).

Matrilineal identifications underscore the thematic importance of women in Idyll 15: the hymnist is identified as the Argive woman's daughter (97), .Arsinoe as Berenice's daughter (110), and Aphrodite as Dione's daughter (106). A further matrilineal description occurs in the catalogue of heroes, for the hymnist identifies Hector as Hecuba's eldest son (139).^[104] Further, no identifications by father are made for women throughout the poem. By focusing on matrilineal identifications in the context of representing a festival sponsored by Queen Arsinoe and honoring her mother, Theocritus also emphasizes the transmission of power and identity from mother to daughter.

Herodas's poetry too includes the theme of the terrible, domineering mother. In Mime 3, Metrotime (honored mother) urges her sons schoolteacher Lampriskos^[105] to beat her son:

        (1-4)

As you wish for any pleasure from the dear Muses,
Lampriskos, and to enjoy your life,
so do you beat this fellow a-shoulder, till his life—
curse it—remain hanging on his lips.
        (trans. Knox, in Headlam and Knox,  Herodas , 111)

Like Theocritus's Idyll 24, Mime 3 puts emphasis on the mother's role in her sons education:

        (26-29)

[I called]
myself a fool for not teaching him
to feed asses, rather than to learn letters
in the hope that I might have a support in my old age.
        (trans. Knox, in Headlam and Knox,  Herodas , 111-13)

The parents share in the son's training: the son was expected to recite tragic speeches to either Metrotime or his father by command (30-31).^[106] Through Metrotime's description of her husband as elderly and hard of hearing and sight (32), the poet emphasizes how the natural age discrepancy between men and women in a Greek household might result in an inversion of gender authority in the household over time: the mother would be better able to hear the sons recitations. The mother here takes charge of disciplining the son, even to the point of going to his school and giving orders to his teacher.

In Mime 3, the socioeconomic status of the family is low: they live in joint housing; the son's education and his damage to the tenement's roof tiling take up most of the household budget; the family grandma is illiterate and destitute. Metrotime's use of analogy emphasizes her frustrated ambitions for her son:

        (50-52)

See now in what a state of grime all his back has become,
in his wanderings on the hills, as with some Delian
lobster-catcher wasting his dull life on the sea.
        (trans. Knox, in Headlam end Knox,  Herodas , 113)

Metrotime's bitter severity against her son reflects an understanding that she must rely on him for security in old age (29).^[107] The emphasis in Herodas's Mime 3, as well as Theocritus's Idyll 24, on a mother's concern about her sons education may also reflect the increased urgency in a monde Hellenistic world for women to secure their futures for themselves. So too the rise in educational opportunities for girls during the Hellenistic period would have familiarized more women with teaching techniques: in Herodas's Mime 3, the mother helps her son with his homework and advises the schoolmaster; in Theocritus's Idyll 24, the mother chooses her sons tutors.

Mime 3's Metrotime resents the thanklessness of her sacrifices for her son. Instead of writing on the wax tablets she so carefully prepares, he throws them down or scrapes off their wax (14-18); he knows the way to the gambling den but not to school (8-13); rather than attend class or study, he gambles (5-21), sits on the rooftop (40-41), eats grandma's food (38-39), and roams about (50-52). Metrotime's resolve at the poems dose underscores her controlling, aggressive urges toward her

son (and her dominance over her husband). When the schoolmaster stops flogging her son, despite her insistence that he continue (87-92), Metrotime announces she will fetch footstraps from home so that her son might be publicly lettered for humiliation (94-97). She does not propose to discuss the course of action with her husband, but simply to inform him (94): her disrespect is shown by the term she uses for him, (old man).

The diminishment of the husband's authority in the household is also a theme in Herodas's Mime 5, in which the mistress of the household, Bitinna, has taken a young male slave, Gastron, as sexual consort.^[108] In a world restricting extramarital sex to men,^[109] Bitinna, a married woman, claims extramarital privilege and challenges the tradition that only free males could consider slaves as sexual opportunities.^[110] The poem opens with Bitinna's suspicion that Gastron (Glutton) has become so (overfull) with sexual privilege that he now consorts with another married woman as well (1-3). Gastron's infidelity diminishes Bitinna's self-image and authority in the household: she tries to reassert her position as mistress of the house by having him bound and publicly flogged. Bitinna's oath by a female tyrant (; "no, by the female tyrant"; 77) underscores her assumption of a tyrant's role over Gastron (and the household).^[111] In Herodas's poems, as well as in some of Theocritus's poems featuring women (e.g., Idylls 2 and 15), the notable absence of male kurioi (guardians)—e.g., husbands, fathers, and other male relatives^[112] —which may reflect a growing reality related to mobility,^[113] puts an emphasis on women's attempts to make a way for themselves in the world.

In Callimachus's poetry, unlike Theocritus's and Herodas's, fathers (not mothers) typically take aggressive action in the case of household disruptions. In the Aetia 's story of Acontius and Cydippe, when Cydippe became ill, her father responds by consulting the oracle about her marriage and then questioning her about her condition (Aet . 3, fr. 75.20-39). So too in Hymn 6, when Erysichthon becomes insatiably hungry, his father seeks outside help (96-106), while his mother just turns down embarrassing social invitations (75-86) and weeps (94-95). By contrast, in Theocritus's Idyll 24, as discussed above, the mother Alcmene (not the father) consults a seer about her son's strange powers over snakes. Another of Callimachus's poems that highlights the father's power is Callimachus's Hymn 3, which features Artemis's appeal to her father Zeus for perpetual virginity.

Callimachus's poetry, like Theocritus's, includes representations of re-

lations between mothers and sons. But while Theocritus's fictive mothers take strong, aggressive roles (e.g., Idyll 24's Alcmene), Callimachus's fictive mothers are generally put in weak or subordinated positions. In Callimachus's Hymns 5 and 6, mortal mothers cannot save their sons from the terrible punishments goddesses give them: Chariclo cannot save Teiresias from Athena's blinding him (Hymn 5); Erysichthon's parents cannot save him from Demeter's curse of insatiable hunger (Hymn 6).^[114] Instead of Theocritus's strong and controlling mothers, sorrowing mothers are an important theme in Callimachus's poetry.^[115] In Hymn 5's cautionary tale, Chariclo grieves for her blinded son Teiresias (93-95). In Hymn 6's cautionary tale, Erysichthon's mother (with other women of the household) bemoans her sons insatiable hunger (94-95). Also, the start of Hymn 6 features Demeter's sad search for her daughter Persephone (10-17), Greek mythology's most paradigmatic example of the sorrowing mother theme. In Hymn 2, the hymnist-narrator quiets celebrants by noting that Apollo's paean can silence even the laments of Thetis and Niobe, also mythic paradigms of sorrowing mothers (20-24).

A related theme in Callimachus's poems is nurturant reciprocity between younger males and older, maternal females, mourned after their death.^[116]Epigram 40 commemorates an old priestess who died in the arms of her two sons; Epigram 50, a Phrygian nurse, whom Miccus, a former nurseling, cared for in her old age and honored with a statue after her death. Callimachus's epic poem Hecale , which features an old woman who offers a young hero hospitality on his journey, elaborates the theme of the nurturing older woman, lamented after death by the young male she helped. When Theseus returns from his heroic exploit and seeks Hecale, he discovers she has died, and the poem includes Hecale's posthumous honors (Hecale frs. 79-83, Hollis, pp. 263-69).

In contrast to the sorrowing, maternal figures who nurture young males in Callimachus's poetry, older women in Theocritus's idylls are typically strong, and their relationships with young males are often non-nurturant,^[117] erotic,^[118] and even magic (old women are valued for their magic charms and powers).^[119] Theocritus's extant poetry does not feature sorrowing mothers, even when such a plot motif might seem natural: thus in Idyll 26, Agave does not lament after dismembering her son.^[120]Idylls 1 and 15 feature the related theme of how a young male's premature death affects females (other than his mother). But here too the theme of lamentation is displaced and diminished. In Idyll 1, Daphnis's story deflects the theme of female lamention for Daphnis to the animal kingdom.

The Muses, nymphs, and Aphrodite do not sorrow for Daphnis (despite the Muses' love and nymphs' fondness for him [141], and Aphrodite's regret when he dies [138-39]). Instead jackals, wolves, a lion, and cattle bewail Daphnis (71-75). Further, Thyrsis begins his song by reproaching the nymphs for their absence while Daphnis suffered (66-69). In Idyll 15, although the hymnist elaborates how women will lament the death of Adonis the next day (132-35), still Aphrodite's personal sorrow or lamentation is not mentioned,^[121] and women celebrants participating in a ritual, communal lament are far from Callimachus's "sorrowing mother" theme. In both Idylls 1 and 15, moreover, the relationships are oriented around eros (and Aphrodite) rather than "motherlove."

The subject of passionate love, the kind of love that disrupts everyday life and overturns normative values, pervades Theocritus's poetry, and Aphrodite, goddess of love, plays a major role, especially in Idylls 1 and 15. In Idyll 1, the subject of Thyrsis's song is Daphnis and his unhappy interactions with Aphrodite. Further, Aphrodite has one of the rare speaking roles for a god in Theocritus's poetry: in Thyrsis's song she admonishes Daphnis and he responds (Id . 1.97-113).^[122]Idyll 15's Adonia celebrates the passionate reunion of Adonis and Aphrodite: the hymnist invokes Aphrodite (100-11), and the tableau's centerpiece is a couch on which Aphrodite and Adonis figures embrace (128, 131). References to Aphrodite are also frequent elsewhere in Theocritus, especially in contexts of passionate, sexual love: heterosexual, extramarital love (Id . 2.130-31, Id . 10.33, Id . 11.16); mutual, married love (Id . 18.51, Id . 17.36); homosexual love (Id . 7.55); either-sexed love (Id . 2.7). Other references to Aphrodite involve a variety of subjects. In Idyll 2, Simaetha links Aphrodite's powers with the rhombus, which she uses in an effort to bewitch Delphis (30). In Idylls 15 and 17, more courtly poems, Aphrodite is credited with immortalizing Alexandria's old Queen Berenice (Id . 15.106-8, Id . 17.45) and also explicitly linked with the current queen, Arsinoe (Id . 15.109-11).^[123]Idyll 28 highlights an Aphrodite-precinct in describing Miletus, home of Nicias and Theugenis (4). Epigram 13 represents an inscription on a statue of Aphrodite Urania in honor of a chaste matron.^[124]

In Theocritus's poetry, Idyll 13's descriptions of the interactions between Hylas, a young boy, and insomniac water nymphs, ("dread goddesses for country folk"; trans. Gow, Theocritus 1:99; 44), perhaps best exemplify the dangerous entanglement of erotic and maternal impulses in the relations of powerful women and youths.^[125] For example:

        (53-54)

There in their laps the Nymphs sought to comfort
the weeping lad with gentle words.
        (trans. Gow,  Theocritus  1: 99)

The most prominent (and domineering) goddess in Theocritus's poetry is Aphrodite, goddess of passionate, womanly love, a threatening figure for young Daphnis in Idyll 1 and a dominating figure for youthful Adonis in Idyll 15.^[126] But this major erotic power in Theocritus's poetry receives mostly incidental mention in Callimachus's poetry, and typically not in the context of passionate, sexual love.^[127] Callimachus's poems do not focus on female erotic subjectivity and do not link mothers with powerful, frustrated erotic impulses that can emerge in ambivalent feelings and hostilities directed toward the male child.^[128] Instead, as shown by Callimachus's hymns, the focus is on chaste and/or matronly goddesses: Artemis (Hymn 3), Athena (Hymn 5), Demeter (Hymn 6), and Hera (whose jealousy in Hymn 4. [to Delos] focuses on her female rivals, not their progeny).

Another central theme in Theocritus's poetry is the destruction of young males' lives through powerful females.^[129] This theme is developed on both mundane and elevated levels, and eros typically plays a role. On the divine and heroic level, Idyll 1's Daphnis commits suicide to escape Aphrodite's threatening, erotic power; Idyll 13's Hylas is pulled into a pool by loving water nymphs who drown him; Idyll 15's Adonis each year passionately reunites with Aphrodite and then dies. More incidental references to the theme of young, doomed consorts of powerful female deities include Endymion, Selene's lover, who sleeps forever (Id . 3.4.9-50), and Iasion, Demeter's lover, killed by a thunderbolt (Id . 3.49-50; see Hom. Od . 5.125-28). Two further poems develop the theme of the threatened youth on a more earthly plane: in Idyll 2, a young urban woman, Simaetha, assaults her youthful, male ex-lover through magic and poisonous drugs; in Idyll 3, a goatherd responds to his female beloved's indifference by threatening suicide.^[130] Eros is not a factor in Idyll 26, in which Pentheus is killed by his mother Agave and her sisters, but the poem provides another example of the underlying theme of youth destroyed by powerful women.

Instead of Theocritus's young men intimidated and destroyed by powerful, erotic females (e.g., Daphnis, Hylas, Adonis), Callimachus's

poetry includes vignettes of chaste girls who flee powerful, erotic males. Hymn 3's Britomartis leaped from a cliff into the sea to escape Minos (190-97); Hymn 4's Asteria leaped from heaven into an abyss to flee Zero (36-38).^[131]Hymn 3's attention to young Artemis's request for perpetual virginity underscores the theme of female flight from men and marriage.^[132] The sexes of Callimachus's and Theocritus's bogey-monsters exemplify the reversals in Callimachus's and Theocritus's approaches to male-female power relations. Theocritus has a mother invoke a female bogey (Mormo) to frighten a male child (Theoc. Id . 15.40). Callimachus describes how mothers invoke male bogeys (cyclopes and Hermes) to frighten female children (Hymn 3.66-71; , "[Hermes] plays the bogey to the girl," 70).^[133] Further, in Callimachus's Hymn 4, the marriage hymn itself frightens maidens in a bogeylike manner (, 296-97). In Theocritus's wedding song, on the other hand, a maidens' chorus mock the bridegroom's sexual inadequacies and extol the bride's accomplishments (Id . 18.54-55).

The topic of motherhood and sons also emerges elsewhere in Theocritus's poetry, most naturally in Idyll 18, Helen's wedding song.^[134] Even in Idyll 22, Theocritus's most martial epic narrative, the poet-narrator introduces Castor and Polydeuces as the sons of Leda and Zero (1) and again as the sons of Thestius's daughter (Leda, 5), and later highlights their adversary Idas's death through the poignant detail that his mother Laocoosa would not see him married (205-6). Also, Idyll 26, a narrative hymnic poem on Pentheus's death, underscores the importance of Dionysus's mother, Semele: the poem begins by describing how the bacchantes set up three altars for Semele and nine for Dionysus (6), and the poem ends by saluting Dionysus, then Semele and her sisters (33-37). Further, the poem's final greeting to Dionysus recalls, in a relative clause, his babyhood and birth from Zeus's thigh (33-34), which leads back to Semele, his mother (35).^[135] The relative importance of the theme of motherhood in Theocritus's poetry, in contrast with fatherhood, is reflected in the prevalence of imagery featuring relations between mothers and children and the rarity of imagery of fathers and their young.^[136]

The recurring theme in Theocritus's poetry of men (and women) seeking help from old crones and sorceresses also draws attention to the issue of gender and power.^[137] In Idyll 2, Simaetha goes to the houses of old women to seek charms to cure her of love (90-91). In Idyll 3, the goatherd reports that Agroeo, a sieve diviner, told him his love was not

reciprocated (31-33). In Idyll 6, Damoetas ends his song by reporting that he spit into his bosom to avert the evil eye, as the old woman Cotyttaris showed him. In Idyll 7, Simichidas ends his song with the wish for a crone ("to spit on us and keep unlovely things away"; trans. Gow, Theocritus 1: 65; 126-27). In Idyll 15, a mysterious old woman appears and gives directions to the palace grounds (6o-64).^[138]

In summary, much of Theocritus's poetry features strong women—e.g., mothers who dominate and even destroy their sons; young women who threaten their lovers; Aphrodite, a powerful goddess, who subordinates young mortal males. Theocritus's urban mimes pay special attention to the issue of women's roles and access to power in a mobile world: particularly Idylls 2 and 15, which star women characters, but also Idyll 14, which includes a self-willed woman who disrupts a male-defined symposium. Several of Theocritus's poems also show how women isolated from their families or typically disregarded in patriarchal societies (such as old women) can find power in alternative realms of magic and cult; for example, Idyll 2's Simaetha attacks Delphis through witchcraft, and several poems feature old women giving advice to the superstitious.

These themes are not unique to Theocritus among Hellenistic poets. Herodas's poetry too includes the themes of the powerful, domineering mother and of self-willed females out in the world. Callimachus's poetry seems to approach women differently, however. When his poems feature mortal women, the focus is generally on women's vulnerability and suffering: sorrowing, nurturing mothers (and mother figures) and vulnerable, chaste maidens (mostly victimized by Zeus). The topic of female erotic subjectivity—prominent in Theocritus's Idyll 2 and also featured in such poems as Idylls 14 and 15, central to several of Herodas's mimes and Apollonius Rhodius's epic—is largely absent from Callimachus's poetry. Aphrodite, a central and dangerous erotic deity in Theocritus's poetry, invoked repeatedly in contexts of passionate love, seems sanitized in Callimachus's poetry, which mentions her only incidentally. Instead, Callimachus's hymns feature chaste Olympian goddesses such as Artemis, Demeter, and Athena. While in Theocritus's poetry, young males suffer intimidation and death at the hands of powerful erotic female deities (e.g., Idyll 1's Aphrodite and Idyll 13's water nymphs), in Callimachus's poetry, young mortals threatened by powerful, erotic immortals are typically chaste young females fleeing adulterous Zeus (a tricky theme in a state run by Ptolemy, notorious for his amorous adventures and likened by Callimachus himself to Zeus).^[139]