Talk:Women in classical Athens

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment
This article is or was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Edemick.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 04:56, 18 January 2022 (UTC)

Segregation of women
Just quickly looking over this Wiki entry. It seems, and as the sources show, it stems largely from Pomeroy's articles and works on women in Athens and the antiquated notion that women entirely had no contact with men.

While a lot of evidence does indicate that houses were designed largely with male/female sections, the leap that academics made in declaring that women were bound to their sections of the houses is largely rejected these days.

In On the Murder of Erasto we're told that the defendant's (unnamed) wife leaves the house in the middle of the night and returns at a later time. When questioned by her husband about this she simply states she was fetching a source of light to relight a lamp that went out, and the husband accepts this without question. Given the proposed tone of this entire wiki article this evidence, and various other sources, it would seem that this sort of behaviour would be impossible, but we have ample sources to the contrary.

I'm curious however if this article is worth saving. As the warning indicates it reads largely as an essay piece, and not an actual wiki entry. Can any higher ups determine if this article is worth saving and investing time into, or should it just be partially folded perchance into a larger article (perhaps History of Athens?) or just removed all together. I'm happy to put a bit of time into providing additional sources for some of the existing work, and I can flesh it out a bit more on my own, but I'd like to discuss it a bit first.

Cheers!

101.161.151.211 (talk) 14:45, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

Small note: that's Lysias 1, On the Murder of Eratosthenes — [dave] cardiff &#124; chestnut — 15:55, 9 April 2012 (UTC)

I agree that the article is very old-fashioned (the works cited indicate that); recent research has radically changed the standard views in this area, as books and articles published within the last few years indicate. Perhaps until someone could produce a properly balanced article, this should be cut down significantly, and turned into a stub ready for expansion. --46.208.122.103 (talk) 17:05, 28 November 2014 (UTC)

Prostitution section
I've done quite a lot of work with this article over the past month, and I think it's much better than it was. I haven't yet done much on the prostitution section, though, and I think that still needs a bit of work, so I'm going to put some of the problems I see with it up here in case anyone wants to a) defend it, or b) fix some of them.


 * It would be nice if we could have a source for some statistics on proportions of slave/metic/Athenian prostitutes. Currently the first paragraph simply states that 'most' were slaves or metics, which doesn't tell us very much.


 * Likewise, a source about prostitution and symposiums would be quite nice.


 * Aspasia is described as the 'most famous' hetaira. How is this quantified? Is this someone's opinion, and if so whose?  If it is the opinion of a specific scholar, we should source that; otherwise we should get rid of it as editorialising


 * Likewise, the other statements about Aspasia are united


 * I'm not even convinced that any of the stuff about Aspasia as it currently is tells us anything about the life of women in Classical Athens. We have a (very good!) article on Aspasia for stuff about her; this article should be for things about women in Classical Athens.


 * Lots of the stuff about the lives of hetairae looks unsourced. More sources are always nice.


 * Citing classical oratory as a source on what Athenian laws were is... problematic, to say the least. We should definitely try to find a modern, not ancient, source for the claim about citizenship of the children of hetairas


 * Especially problematic: 'their most unattractive feature': what do we mean by 'unattractive' here? Unattractive in what way?

Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 13:43, 2 November 2015 (UTC)


 * I got round to rewriting this section, so the issues here are hopefully no longer a problem... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 15:08, 2 February 2016 (UTC)

Student Editor
I am a student planning to edit this page in the next couple of weeks. I've noticed that there have been a lot of edits recently, so I wanted to make sure that our edits didn't overlap. I plan to edit the introductory paragraph to clarify what the article is about, the Family Life section, and the Economic Activities section. Additionally, I plan to add links to the See Also section and create an External Links section, while just generally cleaning up the article. I will review the edits Caeciliusinhorto already made. Thanks, Edemick (talk) 17:06, 30 November 2015 (UTC)


 * The lead paragraph is in desperate need of attention, so I'd be very happy to see someone improve that. I haven't made many edits to the actual text of the article outside of the women in religion section, so you shouldn't have any trouble on that front.... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 19:50, 30 November 2015 (UTC)

Last picture
We do realize both figures in the last image in the article are male, yes? Johnbod (talk) 19:45, 26 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Well, now that you mention it... *wanders off to smack some sense into himself*... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 10:13, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Though to be fair to past me, I did find it in the commons category "hetairas in ancient Greek pottery"... Caeciliusinhorto (talk) 10:15, 27 April 2016 (UTC)
 * Thanks - nice replacement. Johnbod (talk) 12:29, 27 April 2016 (UTC)

Capitalization in title
Per MOS:CAPS, "classical Athens" is not a proper name ("classical" is an adjective modifying "Athens") so I don't think "classical" should be capitalized. Excessive capitalization interrupts the prose flow. Thoughts?  Mini  apolis  14:02, 22 May 2016 (UTC)
 * No: Classical Greece is a specific period, roughly 510-320 BC, and this and related terms need to be capitalized as proper names, if only to avoid confusion with the much wider period of classical antiquity. Likewise Archaic Greece etc. I don't actually see that MOSCAPS has anything to say on this specifically, or indeed historical periods generally. Johnbod (talk) 14:19, 22 May 2016 (UTC)