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CHAPTER THREE

Female Feck

Unlike the boundaries of continents and landscapes, the borders of sex and species may seem much more solid, at least in ancient Greek thought. Greek writers, including Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, employ a consistent vocabulary to differentiate “women” (gunaikes) from “men” (andres) and “humans” (anthrōpoi) from other animals (ktēnea, thēria). But Greek concepts of sex, gender, and species are surprisingly complex.¹ As demonstrated in this chapter, Herodotus and Diodorus are more invested in the boundaries between types of bodies than they are in the distinction between geographical boundaries. But where these bodily boundaries come into question—at the edges of the Greek world—new relationships between men and women and between humans and other animals become possible.

It is no coincidence that foreign women are the catalyst for questioning the distinctions between these potent categories. Intersectional analyses, which consider how the many aspects of one’s identity and culture affect experience, including the experience of oppression, have also shed light on how people with multiply marginal identities (women of color, for example) uniquely prompt and effect social change, including environmental change.² From their experience at the nexus of social and natural categories, foreign women in Greek ethnography develop new knowledge that can overturn seemingly natural categories.

The foreign women who rewrite categories in the Histories and Library allow us to see how sex and gender equality is connected to environmental justice, since the logic that subordinates women to men also underwrites the idea of humans as superior to other animals. For example, the philosopher Thales is supposed to have given thanks every day that he had been born human, male, and Greek, rather than a beast, female, or a “barbarian.”³ More casually, Greek writers also refer to women in animal terms, including Homer’s bitchy Helen (Il. 6.344); Hesiod’s Pandora with her doggish mind (WD 67); and Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, standing over her victims like a crow (Ag. 1473). These characterizations imply that women are less human than men and that humanity is a higher order than other animals, naturalizing the exploitation of women and nonhuman animals simultaneously.

This chapter has three movements. In the first, I explore sex/gender and species variance in Herodotus and Diodorus Siculus, positioning them against the background just described. As discussed in chapter 2, the boundary between normative and transgressive is enacted rather than essential; it is historians whose investigation of female characters materializes sex/gender and species categories. In the second movement, I argue that Herodotus’s and Diodorus’s female characters, like the rulers and rivers of chapter 2, are historical agents, altering families, bloodlines, and even the boundaries of empire. Women also remake their worlds by acting as a natural resource passed among men in societies that practice “sex in common” (mixis epikoinos). Finally, the chapter ends with Semiramis, the Babylonian queen encountered briefly in chapter 2. Contrary to Herodotus, who represents sex/gender variance as a sign of divine displeasure, Diodorus celebrates Semiramis for rewriting gender norms and producing giant elephant devices that couple human, animal, and plant materials. Semiramis is able to remake her world by virtue of the knowledge she possesses as an outsider to elite male society.

SEX/GENDER VARIANCE

As Lesley Dean-Jones, Brooke Holmes, and Helen King have shown, Greek writers documented sudden changes to the sexed body that could in turn shift a person’s gender role.⁴ The story of Phaethousa and Nanno, whose bodies “masculinized and became hairy all over” (Hippocrates Ep. 6.8.32: sōma ētndrōthē kai edasunthē panta), is illustrative. From the Hippocratic perspective, Phaethousa and Nanno did not become men but lost their grip on the female sex.⁵ In Greek models of sex/gender, women are sometimes described as a separate species (genos, in Hesiod); sometimes as underdeveloped men (Aristotle); and sometimes, as in the Hippocratic corpus, as part of a spectrum of sex/gender differences.⁶ Greek writers agree on the superiority of male bodies and manly practices while debating what material-discursive forces produce differently sexed and gendered beings.

Like writers in other genres, Herodotus investigates women’s bodies to understand and reaffirm the distinction between men and women. Although famous for his prominent female characters, many of whom possess typically masculine attributes and roles, his text is also invested in a sex/gender binary (male vs. female) endorsed by the gods.⁷ For example, Aphrodite afflicts Scythian men and their descendants with the “female disease” (1.105.4: thēlean nouson), which they pass on to their descendants.⁸ Although Herodotus does not explain what this disease entails, its very name pathologizes sex/gender instability.⁹ Athena too communicates with humans by altering how their bodies can be classified. “Whenever something terrible (anapitēdeion) was about to happen to them or their neighbors the priestess of Athena grew a big beard” (1.175).¹⁰ This bearded woman is a disaster analogous to the disaster she announces. Although human behaviors in the Histories travel along a continuum of masculinity and femininity, bodies are clearly sexed and gendered, and the gods express their displeasure or signify impending doom by speaking to human beings in the language of a bodily male-female binary.

Like the gods, Herodotus’s men are invested in proper sex/gender performance, especially their wives’ fidelity. Men guarantee this fidelity by looking for signs of sexual impurity or disloyalty in the world around them. The virgins (parthenoi) of the Auseans, for example, fight one another every year in honor of Athena. Only the pseudo-virgins (pseudoparthenoi) die (4.180). Among the Auseans, sexual purity is manifested in the body’s martial strength.

A similar story locates a woman’s sexual fidelity in the interaction between her body and her husband’s. To regain his sight after insulting a river, the Egyptian king Sesostris is told that he must wash his eyes with the urine of a woman “who has had sex only with her own husband, not knowing (apeiros) any other man.”¹¹ Finding his own wife wanting, Sesostris burns her alive along with others who fail his test (peirasthai), until he finally finds and marries a woman whose urine proves effective (2.111.4). Although Herodotus does not comment on Sesostris’s action, the fact that women’s power resides in their sexual purity seems to endorse it. Women are not allowed to “test out” (apeiros) other men, even though Sesostris is rewarded for “testing” (peirasthai) them. The future wife left standing is defined by her pure body and its effect on her husband.

Like Sesostris, Amasis, another Egyptian king, thinks he knows his wife’s allegiance by his own body’s response. Whenever Amasis lay down with Ladice, his new wife from Cyrene, “he was unable to have sex, although he could with every other one of his wives.”¹² Amasis accuses Ladice of sorcery (epharmaxas) and threatens her with death, but she is saved by a quick prayer to Aphrodite and promises to make a future dedication. Amasis, like Sesostris, blames his wife for his ailment.

As Greek readers would expect, obedience is key to how Sesostris and Amasis define their wives. More interestingly, it is the husbands’ bodies that seem to men to manifest their wives’ allegiance (or lack thereof). Sesostris’s and Amasis’s actions argue that a man knows a wife best not by observing her actions, which can be hidden, or even by observing her body, as the Auseans observe their fighting parthenoi, but by waiting for her to affect his own body. In other words, wifehood—to which womanhood is often reduced—comes into being at the juncture of a woman’s actions and her husband’s body. Sesostris and Amasis interact with their wives’ hidden actions (and in Sesostris’s case, his wife’s urine as well) to measure their wives’ obedience to them.¹³

Though the Histories divide humans and other animals into males and females, these marvelous stories of sexual transgression reveal the inner workings of the divide and probe its borders. In Diodorus’s Library, manliness is used in a similar way to test out the borders of maleness and femaleness.¹⁴ Diodorus celebrates masculine women but denigrates feminine men, allowing them much less scope for gender performance.¹⁵ Unlike Herodotus, Diodorus reports cases of intersexed people, those with a “mixed” nature, although he is not sure he believes them (4.6.5; cf. 3.28.1). Yet Diodorus saves his greatest admiration in the first part of the Library for a woman, Semiramis, who troubles the sex/gender binary as well as distinctions between species.¹⁶

As discussed in chapter 2, boundaries and borders between continents were not taken as natural but marked by their benefits or disadvantages to human beings, and Diodorus similarly evaluates sex/gender variance by its effects on the larger community. The most famous feminine man Diodorus describes is the Assyrian king Sardanapallus, despised by an onlooker for his “luxury and longing for womanly pursuits,” which include wearing women’s clothes and makeup and employing a womanly voice (phōnēn gynaikōdē), as well as spinning wool and spending time with women (2.23.1).¹⁷ Sardanapallus not only weaves as a Greek woman would be expected to but chooses to work the most feminine cloth possible, dyed with expensive purple and made of the “softest” (malakōtata) wool (2.23.1). Diodorus comments that Sardanapallus is so devoted to cosmetics that he tricks out his face “more delicately than any luxurious woman” (2.23.1: hapalōteron pasēs gynaikos trupheras). Diodorus is especially offended by Sardanapallus’s sexual appetite, which he indulges with both men and women “without restraint” (2.23.2: anedēn). His way of life is notable for its “luxury and idleness” (2.23.1: tryphē kai rathumia), which Diodorus associates with inaccessibility; he says that the king was never “seen by anyone outside” the palace (2.23.1: tou mēd’ hyph’ henos tōn exōthen horasthai).

On the surface, Sardanapallus looks like a stereotypically “effeminate” Eastern ruler, although feminine luxury, as Robert Gorman and Vanessa Gorman have noted, is not the direct cause of his downfall. Medes and Persians who witness his behavior are encouraged to pursue their conspiracy against him, but their motivations and ultimate success are unrelated to Sardanapallus’s private pursuits.¹⁸ Nevertheless, Diodorus links two other qualities to his ultimate defeat—idleness and inaccessibility—and in the context of Sardanapallus’s broader story we should understand these as feminine failings. Since elite Greek women were usually confined to the home and prohibited from performing most kinds of work, idleness and seclusion, like luxury, were qualities often associated with women. Sardanapallus, who is marked so strongly as feminine, performs luxury, idleness, and inaccessibility in a feminine way.¹⁹

Sardanapallus’s war with the rebels is long and complicated, but an important turning point occurs when he decides to retreat to the palace and “remain hopeful, thinking he would endure the siege and await the troops sent by his subjects.”²⁰ We are not told whether these troops materialize, but Sardanapallus seems foolish to expect that they will, given how he has cut himself off from his people. The rebels, on the other hand, are able to challenge and ultimately defeat the great Assyrian empire by forging alliances. Arbaces and Belesys, the ringleaders, “united with the leaders of the other nations and zealously invited them all to banquets and common gatherings, building friendship with each of them.”²¹ Sardanapallus, whether devoted to his desires or holed up against a siege waiting for help from subordinates, is the polar opposite of Arbaces and Belesys, who rely on face-to-face contact between equals to form personal relationships. In Diodorus’s account of Sardanapallus, femininity is linked to defeat, but not through luxury. Rather, Diodorus demonstrates that feminine pursuits are disastrous for rulers because they generate or reinforce the desire for idleness and seclusion, both of which are inimical to strong relationships with potential allies and one’s people.

Diodorus devotes another section of book 2 to masculine women, Amazons, Scythians, and human Gorgons.²² Through these communities of women, Diodorus explores the limits of sex/gender variance, admiring masculine women as long as they do not feminize men. Before Diodorus, Herodotus had presented communities of warrior women in neutral terms. His story of the Amazons, who ultimately incorporate Scythian men into their community, inverts some typical features of Greek sex/gender norms (4.114; cf. 2.35), but Herodotus does not express admiration (as Diodorus does) for their strength or way of life.²³

The first warrior women Diodorus describes are the Scythians, whose rulers are “notable for their might” (alkēn diapherousai). This quality is not inborn, Diodorus notes, but cultivated through egalitarian training in war, as a result of which they “do not at all fall short of the men in their acts of courage” (tais andreiais ouden leipontai tōn andrōn) and are themselves doers of “great deeds” (2.44.1: megalai praxeis).²⁴ While Walter Penrose has convincingly argued that andreia, “courage,” is attributed to both men and women in the Hellenistic period, Diodorus retains this word’s masculine overtones by pairing it with a cognate in the phrase tōn andrōn.²⁵