Women and culture in Herodotus' Histories

HERODOTUS' PURPOSE, as his proem describes it, is to narrate and explain the great war between the Persians and the Greeks. In the process he displays a rich panorama of sixthand fifth-century society, both Greek and barbarian, in which women play a prominent role. Many are members of the great families, Greek and barbarian, that form the backbone of the narrative, but a variety of others appears as well -concubines, nurses, bakers, priestesses, and even an occasional oddity like the Egyptian lady sodomist in 2.46. This essay investigates Herodotus' portrait of women, in the belief that he is an important and generally neglected witness to fifth-century assumptions and attitudes about women in society. In the first place, Herodotus himself was born in Asia Minor and lived at some point in his life both in Athens and in western Greece; many of his sources were oral, and they seem to have been drawn from the whole of the Greek-speaking Mediterranean world. Thus his portrait of women reflects not the narrow anxieties or controversies of a particular state at a given moment, but a composite oral tradition with some claim to representing underlying and broadly Greek beliefs. Furthermore, as the first historian, Herodotus is the first extant Greek author whose stated purpose is to record ta genomena, that is, facts and events. As much as he can, he presents his narration stripped of the elements of myth and special pleading. The women who appear in his account are not depicted according to the prior conventions of a genre as, for