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Starke Frauen in der Antike
Έκθεση αφιερωμένη στις δυναμικές γυναίκες της ελληνικής αρχαιότητας - τις μυθικές Αμαζόνες, τις ηρωίδες της λογοτεχνίας, όπως η Ιφιγένεια και η Πηνελόπη, την καθημερινή ζωή των γυναικών της Αθήνας – μέσα από αναπαραστάσεις σε αγγεία, νομίσματα, γλυπτά.
4 Ιουνίου 2008–1 Αυγούστου 2010
Staatliche Antikensammlung
Μόναχο, Γερμανία
Strong Women
The mythology and history of the ancient world tell of many female persons who exhibit great strength. In this context it is the goddesses who should be mentioned first. They are not however a subject of this exhibition, as the ancient goddesses are by nature superhumanly strong: they are for ever young and immortal.
Also of only marginal interest for us are the numerous women of ancient history who can be regarded as ‘strong’ in the present day meaning of the word: queens who carry out great deeds, priests, poets, influential married women or courtesans. Their lives have been only fragmentarily handed down to us and cannot be credibly reconstructed.
Our ‘strong women’ derive from mythology and not from historical reality. They are sometimes distinguished by special, sometimes less than positive, characteristics or by an unusual life for a woman. Mythology often takes the ‘strength’ of these women to the extreme and elevates their fate beyond that of the individual to the realm of the exemplary and eternally valid. This is why the women of mythology were not only continually redefined and enriched in the ancient world, but over the centuries inspired western poets, artists and composers to new creations andinterpretations. The endurance of these myths is illustrated by selected masterpieces of western art in the companion book to this exhibition.
It is not easy to explain why the myths of ‘strong women’ were so widespread in the ancient world. An important reason may well be that the society of the time was patriarchal. This applies for the whole of the ancient world, even when we can identify many changes and in part quite considerable differences between the individual epochs, regions and even cities: thus in the democratic Athens of the 5th century BC women had considerably fewer rights than in the oligarchic conservative Sparta. The daily life of an Athenian woman was centred above all in the domestic area which she dominated. She was not as enclosed as in oriental societies, but she could not exercise any public function, apart from that of a priestess. Pious, virtuous and proficient in the house – that was the ideal woman. And thus the first section of this exhibition gives an insight into the life of Greek women. It is pointless to consider whether the well-to-do woman in democratic Athens felt repressed, as nobody would in those times have raised this question. What would be regarded today as a weak social position of women was then regarded as entirely normal. Just for this reason and also because it was known or at least suspected that women could by nature be very strong, poets and pictorial artists always recreated anew the myths of ‘strong women’. This is however a modern designation and we know of no comparable concept in the ancient world. Putting it simply, it can be said: the ‘strong women’ of ancient myth are characterised by their breaking with the stereotyped role of actual women in ancient society in that they behave like men or live out their womanly qualities or virtues to the extreme.
Amazons
The Amazons are still today the epitome of the ‘strong women’ in the ancient world. Homer characterises them with the designation “peers of men”. Amazons after all enjoyed fighting, which otherwise only men did. And they lived without men. The latter were used only for
procreation. The Amazons were thus for the Greeks dangerous barbarian strangers. Their home could only lie outside the known civilised world. Ancient writers name very different regions, such as the northern Asia Minor and areas around the Black Sea, as well as Libya and Ethiopia, as the home of the Amazons. On one point all the sources agree: where Amazons rule, men have
nothing to laugh about. All the reports of ancient writers are tales from oral traditions or are pure fantasy. Here belongs the story that the Amazons pressed away the right breast or that it was burnt away in childhood so that it would not hinder them in fighting when throwing a javelin or shooting arrows. Ancient pictorial art did not follow this literary tradition: the Amazons were never depicted as “breastless”. “Breastless is in Greek “a-mazos”. Consequently at a later period it was probably sought in this way to explain the foreign word “Amazons” and so these breast legends were born. The Greeks did not distinguish so strictly between legends, tales and history. There are countless depictions of the fights of the Greeks against the Amazons. They alone fillthelargest room in the exhibition.[…] (από τον κατάλογο της έκθεσης)
Starke Frauen in der Antike
Έκθεση αφιερωμένη στις δυναμικές γυναίκες της ελληνικής αρχαιότητας - τις μυθικές Αμαζόνες, τις ηρωίδες της λογοτεχνίας, όπως η Ιφιγένεια και η Πηνελόπη, την καθημερινή ζωή των γυναικών της Αθήνας – μέσα από αναπαραστάσεις σε αγγεία, νομίσματα, γλυπτά.
4 Ιουνίου 2008–1 Αυγούστου 2010
Staatliche Antikensammlung
Μόναχο, Γερμανία
Strong Women
The mythology and history of the ancient world tell of many female persons who exhibit great strength. In this context it is the goddesses who should be mentioned first. They are not however a subject of this exhibition, as the ancient goddesses are by nature superhumanly strong: they are for ever young and immortal.
Also of only marginal interest for us are the numerous women of ancient history who can be regarded as ‘strong’ in the present day meaning of the word: queens who carry out great deeds, priests, poets, influential married women or courtesans. Their lives have been only fragmentarily handed down to us and cannot be credibly reconstructed.
Our ‘strong women’ derive from mythology and not from historical reality. They are sometimes distinguished by special, sometimes less than positive, characteristics or by an unusual life for a woman. Mythology often takes the ‘strength’ of these women to the extreme and elevates their fate beyond that of the individual to the realm of the exemplary and eternally valid. This is why the women of mythology were not only continually redefined and enriched in the ancient world, but over the centuries inspired western poets, artists and composers to new creations andinterpretations. The endurance of these myths is illustrated by selected masterpieces of western art in the companion book to this exhibition.
It is not easy to explain why the myths of ‘strong women’ were so widespread in the ancient world. An important reason may well be that the society of the time was patriarchal. This applies for the whole of the ancient world, even when we can identify many changes and in part quite considerable differences between the individual epochs, regions and even cities: thus in the democratic Athens of the 5th century BC women had considerably fewer rights than in the oligarchic conservative Sparta. The daily life of an Athenian woman was centred above all in the domestic area which she dominated. She was not as enclosed as in oriental societies, but she could not exercise any public function, apart from that of a priestess. Pious, virtuous and proficient in the house – that was the ideal woman. And thus the first section of this exhibition gives an insight into the life of Greek women. It is pointless to consider whether the well-to-do woman in democratic Athens felt repressed, as nobody would in those times have raised this question. What would be regarded today as a weak social position of women was then regarded as entirely normal. Just for this reason and also because it was known or at least suspected that women could by nature be very strong, poets and pictorial artists always recreated anew the myths of ‘strong women’. This is however a modern designation and we know of no comparable concept in the ancient world. Putting it simply, it can be said: the ‘strong women’ of ancient myth are characterised by their breaking with the stereotyped role of actual women in ancient society in that they behave like men or live out their womanly qualities or virtues to the extreme.
Amazons
The Amazons are still today the epitome of the ‘strong women’ in the ancient world. Homer characterises them with the designation “peers of men”. Amazons after all enjoyed fighting, which otherwise only men did. And they lived without men. The latter were used only for
procreation. The Amazons were thus for the Greeks dangerous barbarian strangers. Their home could only lie outside the known civilised world. Ancient writers name very different regions, such as the northern Asia Minor and areas around the Black Sea, as well as Libya and Ethiopia, as the home of the Amazons. On one point all the sources agree: where Amazons rule, men have
nothing to laugh about. All the reports of ancient writers are tales from oral traditions or are pure fantasy. Here belongs the story that the Amazons pressed away the right breast or that it was burnt away in childhood so that it would not hinder them in fighting when throwing a javelin or shooting arrows. Ancient pictorial art did not follow this literary tradition: the Amazons were never depicted as “breastless”. “Breastless is in Greek “a-mazos”. Consequently at a later period it was probably sought in this way to explain the foreign word “Amazons” and so these breast legends were born. The Greeks did not distinguish so strictly between legends, tales and history. There are countless depictions of the fights of the Greeks against the Amazons. They alone fillthelargest room in the exhibition.[…] (από τον κατάλογο της έκθεσης)
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