Figure 3 Artemis and Swan. White ground lekythos, attributed to the Pan painter, c.490 BCE. State Hermitage Museum, St. Petersburg, inv. no. B 670. Wearing a deerskin and carrying a quiver, Artemis propitiates a wild swan, the animal form adopted by Zeus when he appeared to her mother. 3 BOUND TO BLEED: ARTEMIS AND GREEK WOMEN H. King In Edwin Ardener's influential paper `Belief and the problem of women' (1975), the `problem', that of finding out how women see the world of which they are a part when our only informants are men, is shown to be twofold. There is a `technical' problem: women are less likely to `speak', to act as our sources. There is also an `analytical', or conceptual, dimen- sion for, even when our informants are women, the model of the world and of their place in it which they give may be less acceptable to the observer than the neat, bounded categories given by the male informant (1975, pp. 1±3). A particular form of technical/conceptual division can be applied to ancient Greek source material. The problem of Greek women is usually presented as a technical problem; that is, as something originating in the sources. In the words of Vatin: `It is in the deeds, the words and the laws of men that we must look for the traces [of Greek women]' (1970, pp. 2±3: my translation). The evidence available to us was mostly written by Greek men; although this statement itself tells us something about Greek women it also acts as a screen to distance us from them. In addition, the sources are preselected so that, where comparative material raises interest- ing questions, the type of evidence required to answer them may simply be unavailable. The often conflicting images of women which emerge from the evidence similarly tend to be seen in terms of the technical problems of the sources. Shaw's article on women in fifth-century Athenian drama (1975) criticises 78 H. KING a very simple example of this approach, the division of the evidence into two main classes; firstly legal and historical material, in which women are `defined as near slaves, or as perpetual minors' (p. 255), and secondly literature and the visual arts, in which women seem to have a prominent role. Either category of evidence can be discarded by those working on the period; law as only theory, drama as mere fantasy. A more sophisticated and inclusive division of the source material, as concerned with `social organisation', `popular morality' or `myth', appears in Just's article (1975). The `problem' of Greek women, then, is firstly that we have no direct means of access to them; we only have sources written by men. Secondly, however, even these sources give us the contrast between the strong, dominant women of tragedy and the almost invisible women of the Funeral Speech of Thucydides, in which Pericles says that `the greatest glory of a woman is to be least talked about by men' (2.46). Both Shaw and Just claim that there is a coherent model of Greek women beneath these different images given in the evidence, but I would suggest that they are mistaken in giving so much weight to the problems of the sources. The discovery that different types of evidence give different, even contradict- ory, presentations of women is not a problem, but a solution, and it should be acknowledged rather than being concealed by the division of that evidence into categories such as `law', `custom' and `myth' (as in Gould, 1980) based on our own society's criteria of rationality. It is important to realise here that, even outside the Greek context, the concept of `woman' has inherent potential for ambiguity. `Woman' can be opposed to `man', as female to male, or subsumed under the category `man' so that humanity is set up against `gods' or `beasts' (cf. Hastrup, 1978, p. 54): `woman' is thus both excluded and included, alien and familiar. For the Greeks woman is a necessary evil, a kalon kakon (Hesiod, Theogony 585); an evil because she is undisciplined and licentious, lacking the self-control of which men are capable, yet necessary to society as constructed by men, in order to reproduce it.1 In social terms, women can be put under the control of men, being assigned a specific space within male culture and society where they can give birth, weave and cook, while being excluded from economic and political spheres. The Greek word for woman, gyneÅ, is also the word for `wife', and it was as a wife and mother that woman was most fully brought into male culture. Her domestication could be so complete that she would express and enforce the male model of society, including the reasons for her own entry into it (Redfield, 1977, p. 149); yet even here the risk that she would run wild remained. BOUND TO BLEED: ARTEMIS AND GREEK WOMEN 79 In the words of Sarah B. Pomeroy's title, women were `Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves' (1975): in conceptual terms these four iden- tities are all strands which can be taken out of the basic, ambiguous term `woman', but such a separation can never be complete because the sub-categories have a tendency to drift back towards their original unity.2 The goddesses of the Greek pantheon include Hera the wife, Demeter the mother, and Artemis as the woman who rejects both marriage and motherhood; all women are potential whores, if they are allowed to surrender to their uncontrolled desires; all women are slaves to their emotions, of which only man can be a master. In this paper I intend to look at another way in which the range of meanings of `woman' was separated out in Greek thought. As the positive values of `woman' tended to be centred on the concept of the reproducer, the gyneÅ, so the negative values shifted to the unmarried girl. The focus of this paper is therefore not on the technical problems of the sources, but on the conceptual framework within which they were produced, the ideas about `woman' which governed the perception of the female life-cycle; in particular, on the entry into what was culturally established as the category of the mature woman, the gyneÅ. From Parthenos to GyneÅ All women start their lives conceptually `outside' male society, but most are taken `inside' through the process of maturation. Children, for the Greeks, are by nature wild (Plato, Timaeus, 44a±b; Laws II, 653d±e, 666a±e); in particular, the parthenos, `childless, unmarried, yet of the age for marriage',3 is untamed (admeÅs) and must be domesticated before it is even possible for a man to carry on a conversation with her (Xeno- phon, Oeconomicus, 7. 10: use of tithaseuein). A girl's upbringing is represented as the `taming' or `breaking in' of a filly, and marriage is the end of this process: marriage also opens the process of submission to the yoke of Aphrodite.4 There are a number of biologically and socially defined points at which the transition from parthenos to gyneÅ can be situated, the most obvious being menarche, defloration, marriage and the first parturition. In con- nection with the choice5 of one or more of these as involving a significant change of status the factor of control is particularly relevant. Menarche is a transition which neither men nor women can control (although Sor- anus, Gynaecology 1. 25, gives exercises to encourage it). Marriage, in Greek society, is under male control, being arranged between oikos heads. 80 H. KING Defloration is more ambiguous, covering a spectrum ranging from male control (rape) to female control (seduction). The first parturition may appear as an entirely female event, but there is scope for male control;6 men are necessary not only for conception (although see Detienne, 1976) but also to bring on labour by having intercourse with their wives (Aristotle, Historia Animalium, 584a 30±1) and as doctors to speed up labour with appropriate drugs (e.g. PG, 1. 34).7 There is in addition the possibility that a registration or initiation procedure linked to age may be used, although this does not seem to have been the case with Greek women.8 In a society in which women are valued above all for their reproductive capacities, it is to be expected that a biological event or series of events will be used to form the entry to the category `mature woman': in a society in which woman can also be seen as the `Other' (Arthur, 1976, p. 390; Padel, [1983]) to be brought under male control, it is to be expected that the cultural ideal will be one of a close connection between the male-controlled social event, marriage, and the less controllable physical changes in a woman's life. Ideally, therefore, menarche con- firmed that a girl was `ripe' for marriage (on ripeness see for example Pausanias 2. 33. 2 and Greek Anthology (hereafter Anth. Pal.), VII.600) and defloration (Soranus, Gyn, I.33.4, 33.6): she would be deflowered by her husband on her wedding night (the `first yoke of Aphrodite' in Anth. Pal., IX.245): she would begin bearing children as soon as possible. The temporal gap between parthenos and gyneÅ would be short; the Greek process of becoming married, extending from betrothal to the birth of the first child, would cover it (Vernant, 1974) and the term nympheÅ would be applied to those in the `latent period' stretching from marriage- able to married (Schmitt, 1977, p. 1068; see also Chantraine, 1946±7, pp.