Centaurs and Amazons: Women and the Pre-History of the Great Chain of Being

V. Men and Women

V Men and Women The metope is a graphic representation of the agon, the confrontation between two kinds of beings seen by the Greeks as utterly different, polar opposites. War, po/emos, is the proper relation between such creatures; it clarifies their difference and asserts the selfhood of the maker of the work of art, the citizen architect, not-barbarian, not-animal, not-female. The representations of the Greek male warrior, in combat with Centaur and Amazon, celebrate the subject of history, the victor of the Persian Wars, as does Aeschylus' tragedy the Persae. When the attention of the polis moves away from the polar opposite, the barbarian enemy, to the closed circle of the city, the agora in which citizens must live together, must exchange women in order to preserve the shape of the city, its artistic and literary production changes. In the Trachiniae the matter of difference is posed in terms of exclusion, and the problematic is not only the delimitation of boundaries for the city, but also the nature of relations between equals within.l The model of differentiation is no longer a series of polarities, but a circle, homogeneous in ritual and exchange, which keeps difference outside and marks its boundaries with creatures from myth like the Centaur and the Amazon. However, in the work of Euripides, even though the younger playwright's work is contemporary with that of Sophocles, there is a final crisis in speculation about difference. In the Medea, the focus of this chapter on male/female difference, Euripides tests the limits of the analogical mode of discourse concerning sexual, species, and racial difference.2 Euripides presented in a clearly articulated fashion the difficulties of maintaining traditional categories of definition in the period of the Peloponnesian War. In the Medea, produced in 431, he centered on the male/female difference, a seemingly clearly, 110 Men and Women 111 physically perceptible difference which was an unquestioned element of the intellectual vocabulary of the period.3 Myths and works of art delineated clearly the malelfemale polarity as one strongly marked in the culture of the Greeks.4 Even as such mythical creatures as the Amazons seemed to question the boundaries between male and female, the myth as a whole ended by denying the viability of single-sex female culture, and by affirming the traditional pattern of exchange of women by citizen men. The color coding of sexual difference was expressed in poetic diction as well as in painting, as Eleanor Irwin shows in Colour Terms in Greek Poetry.5 Men were described in poetry as melas, dark, while women were leukos, white; "the differentiation between the sexes was very clearly marked ...,,6 Irwin assumes the contrast "reflects a contrast between men and women with regard to their social status and functions. Men worked outdoors, women in the house; men were tough and hardy, women soft and vulnerable."7 In Egyptian painting, in Mycenaean wall-paintings, and on archaic vases, women's flesh was shown as light, while men's was reddish-brown or black. Irwin concludes: The Greeks thought that a dark complexion signified manliness , including virility and such manly virtues as courage and the ability to fight well. A fair complexion, on the other hand, signified effeminacy in men.8 Although the convenient contrast between kinds of flesh was no longer so readily available in red-figure vase painting, and the painters abandoned the practice of differentiating between male and female eye, the male round, the latter elongated,9 a distinction between male and female bodies continued to be made, a differentiation that went beyond the mere outline of the body. Bernard Ashmole attributes the persistent artistic motifs like the Amazonomachy to their potential for expressing sexual difference, and remarks on the contrast "between the sinewy male torsos and limbs, and the softer more rounded forms of the Amazons, who still retain their femininity in spite of the life they lead."10 Although these differences were strongly marked, the Greek male youth was sometimes represented with more feminine 112 CENTAURS AND AMAZONS characteristics. In Greek Homosexuality, K.J. Dover describes a shift of tastes from the overtly masculine representation of young men, to a more effeminate ideal expressed in poetry and in painting . Fair skin, for example, apparently became a desired attribute in objects of homosexual eros. 11 The effect of such a work as the Bassae frieze, containing an Amazonomachy as...