Voices from the Underworld: The Female Body Discussed in Two Dialogues

The following pair of dialogues was composed with the aim of presenting Graeco-Roman views about the female body to a class of students engaged in the study of women in classical antiquity. This semi-dramatic structure, in which several interlocutors take distinct positions on a selected topic, has the advantage of eliciting a high degree of involvement by the students and consequent engagement in the subject matter. The dialogues do not follow the Platonic model that employs the Socratic method of elenchus, inasmuch as there is no single speaker asking questions, then challenging the responses from the others in such a way as to draw ultimately a preferred answer. Rather, the dialogues imitate a symposium gathering in which diverse voices are heard, in the first instance (Dialogue 1) among male medical writers and philosophers, and the second (Dialogue 2) in which different women describe their in-body experiences. The contrast between the two dialogues, each with a variety of perspectives and consisting of voices from a variety of contexts ranging over seven hundred years, uncovers roughly consistent gendered perspectives and a type of discourse familiar to all of us working with Graeco-Roman texts.

The dialogues are set in the Underworld, so as to include participants from various time periods, ranging from 600 B.C.E. to the second century C.E.¹

Dialogue 1

Setting: A meadow, where some idle souls (Greeks and Romans), who had formerly inhabited the bodies of philosophers and physicians, discuss the nature of the female body. The former Plato is the host.

Plato: Let us while away the time today by reflecting on the nature of women. All of us had experience of women, but how well did we know what they were really like?

My own view is that while women may have the intellectual gifts to enable them to take on the role of men in the state, still their bodies are not strong,² and certainly not controllable. They are always affected by their wombs, in one way or another. These wombs are like hungry animals with a will of their own, moving around inside women, never satisfied.³

Hippocrates I: Yes, you're absolutely right, Plato. Those darn wombs are always after it—after the wet, I mean. Women, poor creatures, need to stay wet; that spongy flesh of theirs just soaks it up.⁴ Not at all like us men, with our taut, muscular bodies, so fit for exercise, beautiful to see in the gymnasium. No, women are mushy and need to stay mushy. If that womb of theirs doesn't get its moisture, off it goes, smacking up against the liver and hitting at the diaphragm; then it sails on to occupy the breathing spaces at the center of her body. The first thing you know the poor woman is suffocating:she loses her voice, her teeth chatter, her eyes roll, and sometimes foam spills out of her mouth. The best thing I've found for this condition is to wipe the woman's nostrils with seal oil or ground-up deer horn.⁵

Hippocrates II: Fumigating the uterus when it is out of place is also very helpful—all you need are herbs or dung heated in a pot underneath her and a reed to direct the fumes into her womb. One must be careful not to fumigate on a windy day, however, lest she be chilled or perhaps burn herself. You can always try inserting a pessary made of cantharid beetles. If she gets her period, make sure she sleeps with her husband, for what she needs for a total cure for this restless womb is to give birth.⁶

Hippocrates III: Now menstruation is another big problem for women. Let menstrual blood get backed up and not flow out, and your woman is in real trouble: she really needs that monthly cleansing. We...