Sources

• Xenophon’s Estate Manager: details a idealised wife’s domestic duties, conversation between Ischomachus and Socrates
• Sophocles, Tereus Fragment 583


  women seen as nothing, were happy/protected as child but puberty/understanding sells them to strangers(husbands) and joyless/unfriendly homes
• Description of Greece, 1.27.3


  story of virgins (carriers) working for Athena(’s priestess)
• Plutarch


  married at 14/15 to Ischomachus (28) double her age - ‘she was not yet 15 when she came to me’
• Mythical - Medea (Euripides)

  'marriage is lottery! and divorce is dishonourable for women’

  'I would rather stand in battle with a shield three times than give birth once'
• Aspasia - mistress of Pericles 


  Arrived in Athens c. 450 as a metic (non-citizen worker) from Miletus and became Pericles's mistress by mid 440s

  Attacked by comic poets as a 'dog-eyed concubine’ and ‘whore’

  Socrates: jokes that she wrote a funeral speech and taught Pericles how to be a good speaker - she was intelligent