A journey into the past:
Image
1: Gate
of the Cariatids, Erecteon, the Acrópolis, Athens
Image
2:
Roman
Pantheon.
Image
3:
Amazon,
Fidias, Capitol Museum, Rome.
Image
4:
Fresco,
Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii.
Image
5:
Interpretation
of a Roman street.
Image
6:
Ionic
order.
Image
7:
Isle
of Rhodes, Greece.
GREECE AND ROME
SECOND-CLASS
CITIZENSHIP: FOREIGNERS,
WOMEN AND SLAVES
In
the Mediterranean region, the birthplace of Western civilisation, the Graeco-Roman
world devised the concept of the city (polis),
not merely as an ordered grouping of people, buildings and spaces, but in the
broader sense of citizens’ participation based on speech, the ultimate
political instrument, assigning specific duties and a specific area of operation
for each individual.
Women
belonged to the private domain (oikonomia)
and were not allowed access to the assembly or to express their views on matters
of public interest,
and those who dared to try were considered as rebels bringing misfortune upon
the community.
“Women
have no souls,” Aristotle said, “and
their best ornament is silence”. Women cannot make their voices heard in
public and they are treated as second-class citizens, together with slaves and
foreigners, deprived of the right to free speech. The only full citizens or
political subjects are men.
The
role of women in the building of the city and society was limited to their
reproductive roles as mothers and carers of the young, the sick and the old,
remaining at the hearth and maintaining traditions.
When
women did leave the home it was to go to the well to fetch water, to the market
to buy the family’s food, to wash clothes or to take part in the few religious
rites that were open to them. They had no access to the gymnasium, forum or
assembly, and the baths for women were far less luxurious than the men’s
equivalents.. Only public women — prostitutes and fallen women — could
access the forbidden places.
The
public space was the essence of the city. As symbols of interrelationships,
participation in a spirit of solidarity and debate among citizens, the Greek agora
or Roman forum were meeting places where the public space that gave birth to
Western society was developed dialectically.
City and society are very similar concepts, based on education, the word and
reasoned argument (logos) where there
was no place for women, women were not worthy of being listened to, and women
were childish, inferior beings on the margin of society as a political entity.
Exceptions
that prove the rule include the famous Roman midwife Hortensia, who, flying in
the face of every rules, burst into the forum to defend peace: “Men of Rome”,
she cried, “why must we pay taxes if we are barred from the offices, honours,
military postings and, in short, in the government for which you fight with such
miserable results?”