You have probably noticed that most of the translated passages in Sheltons As the Romans Did refer to men and to male activities. This is no accident, of course. It is clear that ancient Greek and Roman society did not commemorate in art or literature the exploits of women anywhere near as much as it commemorated the exploits of men. We tend to forget that… Greece and Rome were warrior societies. What really mattered, even to the Athenians, the most intellectual of all, was winning wars and maintaining an empire, along with the training that was an essential prerequisite for these goals. Except in their role as bearers of future soldiers, most women were peripheral to these concerns. However, the exact status of women in Greek and Roman antiquity relative to the status of women at other times and other places has been a matter of some debate among the learnd for generations. Many scholars have asserted that women [in Athens] were held in a durance not unlike that of the Oriental harem, that their life was a species of vassalage, and that they were treated with contempt by the other sex; while the few have contended that there existed a degree of emancipation differing but slightly from that of the female sex in modern times. As is usually the case, the truth lies in the golden mean between these two extremes… How do you interpret the evidence? In terms of prominence, status, roles, autonomy and the like, how do the women of the ancient Greco-Roman world stack up against the women of other ancient cultures? How would they do when compared to the women of Greece and Italy today? How were the lives of ordinary women in pagan times different from the lives of women in early Christian times?
