y and awareness, we are thrust out and battered away, far from the gods of our forefathers and parents, some to good homes and some to abusive ones. And after one single joyful night live, we are compelled to praise this arrangement and consider ourselves lucky. Sophocles, Fragment 583 from terus. A scorned wife spoke this in one of Sophocles lost plays. Sophocles has seized the essence of what it means to be a woman in Athens at this time. The marriage of an Athenian woman and man is hard to define exactly because there has not been an exact word translated that is equivalent to the word, marriage. The Athenians have words that translate as physical acts for a marriage for the sake of having a child, they also have words that translate as cohabit or live together. This leads to the conclusion that our traditional connotation of marriage as a bond is not the way it was in Athens. The reasons for a man and a woman to be joined in marriage were nor for love, as we would expect, it would be for profitable and more pragmatic reasons. Usually most beneficial to the males in the brides life. Since the women were not supposed to be unattended they are assumed to have accepted what was decided for them in terms of a husband. A husband normally addresses his wife as woman. The Greek word for woman, is Gyne, literally means childbearer. Wives are not allowed to leave the house and any work will be done within the house along with the slaves. The man was, free to engage in politics, and intellectual and military training, athletics. Women were not free to do any of the things that man would. Although they may not have even known what they were missing, nor perhaps were they even interested in it, but the choice was not theirs to make. Men utilized the domestic skills of women but still thought of them as inferior. Womens work was productive, but because it was the same as slaves work, it was not highly valued. Wives were no...
