Quiz Notes

Quiz #1

1. According to Pomeroy, Athena, the Greek goddess of war and wisdom, is “the most complex of the goddesses” because:

a. She has a complicated love life

b. She works all day and parties all night

c. She possesses both masculine and feminine qualities(true)

d. She has seven uturuses

The text draws attention how she’s presented as a “masculine woman”: female in appearance and in some aspects (olive fertility, handicrafts), but associated with traditionally “male” elements (warrior goddess, protector of the citadel, depicted with armor and weapons, patroness of particular warriors; goddess of industry and manufacture (but also spinning and weaving); also wisdom, later appropriated by Greek men as a male attribute). Disguising herself as a man is also unusual. She’s a virgin, born of man, not woman, and identifies the father as the true parent.

Adding to her complexity is the fact that more stories and plays have survived depicting her, placing her in many diverse contexts.

2. A double standard seen in stories about the gods’ and goddesses’ relationships is:

a. Goddesses are expected to sleep only with other gods, but gods can sleep with whoever(true)

b. Goddesses can sleep with women but gods can never sleep with men

c. Gods can give fruit baskets and other gifts to their lovers, but goddesses can’t

d. Cursing your lover can only be done on Sundays

Pomeroy notes a double standard wherein goddesses are expected to have sex with individuals close to them in rank—male gods or demigods/heroes—but gods fornicate with all sorts. Gods’ relations with mortals (mostly Zeus and Apollo) tend to result in suffering, revealing the vulnerability of the women and the male gods’ tendency to exploitation.

3. The “virginal” Olympian goddesses (that is, those who are unmarried and nonmonogamous) include all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Athena

b. Artemis

c. Hestia

d. Hera(not true)

Athena, Artemis, and Hestia were all seen as “virginal”—i.e., they were not married or in a monogamous relationship. Hera, the goddess of marriage, had a husband, Zeus.

4. Mother goddesses in various cultures make a connection between female fertility and

a. architecture

b. agriculture(true)

c. archeology

d. astrophysics

Mother goddesses like Gaia or Ge represented a connection between the earth, fertility, and agriculture—that food is born of the fertile mother earth.

5. The pre-Olympian god Cronus is known for all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Castrating his father with a sickle

b. Swallowing his own children

c. Being defeated by Zeus with the help of his wife Rhea

d. Bathing weekly in goats' milk(not true)

The Titan Cronus was indeed known for castrating his father with a sickle, swallowing his own children to defy a prophecy his son would surpass him, and being defeated by Zeus with the help of his wife Rhea.

Quiz #2

1. In heroic Greek society, marriage patterns between powerful families included

a. matrilocal marriage (a roving warrior marries a princess and settles in her kingdom)

b. patrilocal marriage (a suitor brings a bride back to his lands and family)

c. all mature women being expected to marry in order to ensure the city’s future defense

d. all of the above (true)

In the patrilocal pattern, a suitor brings back a bride to his own house, and this bridges the families of the husband and the bride’s father. Variant: Marriage by capture (e.g., Briseis). In the matrilocal pattern, a roving warrior marries a princess and settles down in her kingdom. Variant: Marriage by contest, in which the kingdom is a prize for the right suitor. Either way, marriage was expected of both genders in this warrior society, in order to produce future warriors.

2. The queen who, enraged by her husband sacrificing their daughter, cast him aside and married his cousin instead was

a. Iphigenia

b. Helen

c. Clytaemnestra(true)

d. Mary Tudor

When Agamemnon sacrificed their daughter Iphigenia to the gods, Clytaemnestra was incensed. After Agamemnon left for the Trojan War, leaving a herald to watch over his wife, Clytaemnestra repudiated her marriage to Agamemnon and married his cousin, Aegisthus.

3. In Greek art, the exclusively female Amazons were often depicted as

a. fighting against centaurs, who were originally thought of as exclusively male(true)

b. ugly, representing their unfeminine nature

c. having a secret king

d. makers and sellers of books

There are a number of depictions of Amazons fighting centaurs, contrasting the centaurs’ masculine qualities (violent and lusty) with those of the Amazon women (strong but chaste).

4. Women were a larger proportion of which group in heroic Greek society?

a. Landholders

b. Slaves(true)

c. Actors

d. Stonemasons

Ready access to slave women resulted in part from the practice, when taking a city, of ransoming or killing the landholding men but enslaving the women of that class.

5. When Nausicaa meets Odysseus, she does all of the following EXCEPT:

a. Accompanies him boldly into town and into her father’s presence(not true)

b. Admires his beauty once he’s had a bath

c. Chastises her handmaidens for running away from him

d. Tells him he should ignore her father and try to win over her mother instead

Nausicaa cannot accompany Odysseus into the city, as she knows that doing so will affect her reputation as a maiden and future wife among the men and women of the town.

Optional Extra Credit

EC. According to Pomeroy, why might the matrilocal pattern of marriage be better for the bride?

Though the bride seldom had the choice of husbands in either pattern, the matrilocal scenario allowed the bride to remain within her support system of friends and family members.

Quiz #3

1. Spartan women

a. went to war alongside the men

b. exercised and ate well(true)

c. never married

d. were nude at all times

Because the biological role of the mother was important to producing strong warrior children, Spartan girls were trained to be as physically fit and as well nourished as the boys. Housework and clothes-making were performed by lower classes, freeing Spartan women to train the gymnasium, manage the household, play music, and rear children. Women could bear children of men other than their husbands, though if they were helots’ children they could not be citizens, and adultery was not as strictly proscribed as elsewhere. Pomeroy believes they also engaged in homosexual liaisons in order to prevent unwanted children from heterosexual fornication for pleasure.

Women controlled their dowries and inheritances, so that by the fourth century two-fifths of Spartan land and property was controlled by women, many living luxurious lives. Increasingly later Spartan women displayed their wealth with clothing, purchases like racehorces, and jewelry and cosmetics; Agis’s attempts to restore Lycurgan discipline failed through women’s resistance to archaic austerity.

2. All of the following are true of archaic Athenian Greek burials EXCEPT:

a. Washing and dressing the dead was always done by male relatives of the dead(not true)

b. Male graves significantly outnumber female graves

c. Male graves contain spears and shields; female graves contain cooking pots, spindle whorls, and jewelry

d. Depictions of funerals show women beating their heads and tearing their hair, while men are rigid and restrained

Grave goods of Athenian women included spindle whorls, cooking pots, and other items indicating they still performed household chores that Spartan women had offloaded to lower classes. Depictions of funerals show kinswomen tending to the dead (washing, anointing, and dressing the corpse) and as chief mourners, engaging in public lamentation as an important part of the death rituals.

Burial grounds from early periods show many more male graves than female; this is partly due to men being more likely to be honored with a public burial, but Pomeroy suggests female infanticide is also to blame (again, unlike Sparta, where we are told all the girl babies were kept and only boy infants were exposed if defective).

3. The archaic statues of maidens (korai) and youths (kouroi) were

a. clothed if male, naked if female

b. naked if male, clothed if female(true)

c. always naked

d. always clothed

Both fame and female grave-marker figures (kouroi, korai) are extant from archaic Athens, both derived from Egyptian forms and exhibiting the bland physical ideal of each gender. Male figures were naked and emphasized strength and aesthetic proportions. Female figures were clothed and emphasized strength and restraint; physically the buttocks were a focus of beauty.

4. According to Pomeroy, all of the following are true of Sappho EXCEPT:

a. She belonged to a community, Lesbos, where women were valued and educated

b. Her work is an example of individualism in Greek poetry during this period

c. She was the only female Greek lyric poet(not true)

d. Some of her poetry suggests she may have been married and had a child

There were a number of other female lyric poets; some of their writing survives in fragments, as quoted by other authors.

5. Advice given by Hesiod in Works and Days includes:

a. “Do not let a flaunting woman coax and cozen and deceive you: she is after your barn.”

b. “First of all, get a house, and a woman, and an ox for the plough—a slave woman and not a wife, to follow the oxen.”

c. “A man should not clean his body with water in which a woman has washed, for there is bitter mischief in that.”

d. All of the above(true)

All three of the quotes are indeed from Hesiod’s Works and Days, which displays a strong mistrust and fear of women rooted in the vulnerability of men.

Optional Extra Credit

EC. Pomeroy called Spartan marriage customs “unusual among the Greeks.” How so?

Spartan warriors were held to be equal; consequently, marriage among the landholding elite was not about family status as in Athens and elsewhere. Instead, marriage focused on compatibility and the ability to produce children; as the weddings were often secret, unproductive marriages might be quietly annulled and both parties could seek new mates. In some cases, young men and women were shut up in a dark room to see who went home with whom. Other customs sometimes practiced included the groom carrying the bride away in secret. The wedding involved the bride with male clothing and hair cut short, possibly reflecting a transition from the groom’s previous homosexual relations in the barracks.

Quiz #4

1. For an Athenian woman from a wealthy family, marriage typically

a. was arranged by her guardian and the groom

b. included a dowry for her support

c. could be easily ended without stigma

d. all of the above(true)

For families with property, marriage was normally arranged between the two families and involved the passing of a dowry commensurate with the bride’s family’s economic status to the groom, to be kept by him intact for her support only, throughout her entire life. Divorce was easily obtained by mutual content or by either party and involved no stigma.

2. Modern historians have disagreed about the status of women in Athens. According to Pomeroy, recent scholarly opinions about Athenian women have included all of the following EXCEPT:

a. They were respected and enjoyed freedom

b. They were despised and kept hidden

c. They were prized and shared between neighbors(not true)

d. They were secluded but revered in the home

Some historians have argued that women in classical Athens were despised and kept in extreme seclusion, like eastern harems (according to Pomeroy, a position severely colored by the historians’ own views of a woman’s proper place). Others have countered that they were respected and enjoyed freedom comparable to women of most other ancient societies (citing fictional heroines like Antigone and Elektra). A third position has argued that they were secluded, but in that seclusion they were both respected and, within the house, dominant (emphasizing that the seclusion was primarily a means of protection something cherished against male strangers).

Pomeroy presents this debate as part of a broader concern regarding the best interpretation of our limited sources for Athenian women, and is flawed in treating Athenian women as if they were all the same. Within the Athenian culture there are major differences across class, region, and period. What’s more important, from her point of view, was that the state considered the duty of citizen women to be the production of legitimate heirs to the oikoi, and thus to the citizenry.

3. In the play Eumenides by Aeschylos, Orestes is tormented by the Furies for killing a parent (his mother, Klytaemnestra). All of the following beings oppose the Furies’ torment EXCEPT:

a. Orestes, because he was ordered to kill her, and because his mother was “twice afflicted with pollution” for killing a husband and father

b. Apollo, because “the mother … is not the parent, but the nurse of the newly-sown embryo”

c. Athena, because she had no mother and “in all things, except for marriage, wholeheartedly I am for the male and entirely on the father’s side”

d. Bacchus, because Orestes was “filled with the sweet wrath of wine” at the time of the murder(not true)

In the play, Orestes, Apollo, and Athena presented the arguments given above in opposition to the Furies, who act as the Chorus. Bacchus is not present in the play.

4. Athenian religious cults in which women played an important role included all of the following EXCEPT:

a. the festival of the Spangeti Teras(not true)

b. the cult of the Olympian goddess Athena

c. the mysteries of Demeter and Korē at Eleusis

d. the exclusively female celebration of the Thesmophoria

Women were involved in a number of religious cults and festivals, providing opportunities for community among women in Athens and other cities. [Spangeti Teras is Greek for Spaghetti Monster.]

5. Education for propertied women in Athens normally consisted of

a. tutoring in art and music by the father’s patron

b. instruction in domestic arts by the mother(true)

c. physical education with the soldiers

d. training in rhetoric by the city archons

Athenian women did not have access to formal education, whereas education was required and expected for men. This education gap contributed to the treatment of women as less than full members of the community.

Optional Extra Credit

EC. Which story from Herodotos in today’s reading did you find most interesting or surprising?

This is subjective and could include any number of key moments, including the nature of the Amazons, Artemesioa, Gorgo, Candaules, or the famous brooches of Athens.