Persian Fire

by Tom Holland

“Brought up under the most cramping restrictions, raised from childhood to see and hear as little as possible, and to ask only a minimum of questions,”46 Athenian women lived a life of seclusion without parallel elsewhere in Greece. The peculiar character of the democracy demanded nothing less. The capacity of women to stir up mischief in public life had been a cause of alarm to thoughtful reformers well before the revolution of 507 BC. Concerned to instruct the elite in the virtues of self-restraint, Solon had found any hint of female showiness particularly insufferable, and had made stringent efforts to rein it in. Rather than permit daughters of the aristocracy to flaunt their wealth and taste in public, he had taken the simple, if drastic, step of decreeing that any woman seen “walking the streets, out and about,”47 should be regarded as a prostitute. Athenian husbands—or at least those with sufficient floor space to immure their wives in separate quarters—had seized the opportunities presented by this legislation with relish. Increasingly, over the decades, the law had ensured that only women whom no one ever saw could be regarded as respectable. Simultaneously, of course, it did wonders for the sex trade.