Adultery
The next two categories of activities
about which Athenian males harbored suspicions, adultery and
exchanging/importing babies, fall under the larger heading of
activities which compromise the claims to citizenship of children
in the household. Legitimacy was an ultra-sensitive issue at
the time of Aristophanes because, as Daniel Ogden describes,
during that period Athens had "a bastardy regime in which
the widest number of classes of children were bastardized . .
. The state was also the harshest in the debarring of its defined
bastards from the privileges of the legitimate, and the most
rigorous in policing the distinction between bastard and legitimate."6
Therefore, any activity that might cast doubt on the parentage
of a child was one that must be diligently guarded against. This
legal situation, compounded by the distrust of men from other
oikoi and the belief, as we will see below, that women are naturally
inclined to promiscuity, made the fear of adultery a pressing
concern.
The first reference to adultery
in the Lysistrata comes up in the passage in which Lysistrata
proposes her sex strike. This proposal is made within a context
of women's general lustfulness, with her complaining that the
war has deprived women of all possible sexual partners. After
lamenting that their husbands are never home anymore, she continues,
saying "There isn't anyone even to have an affair with -
not a sausage! Talking of which, now the Milesians have rebelled,
we can't even get our six-inch Ladies' Comforters which we used
to keep as leather rations for when all else failed."7
Her co-conspirators agree heartily that this situation is intolerable,
but then pale at her proposed solution, prompting her rebuke
"The tragic poets are right about us after all: all we're
interested in is having our fun and then getting rid of the baby."8
This passage is rich in the
insights it provides about the male paranoia about female sexuality:
women are obsessed with sex, they are indiscriminate in their
choice of partners - if their husbands are unavailable, they
quickly turn to adultery - and they practice masturbation as
a last resort. About the last item I would again refer you to
Eva Keuls and her excellent discussion of female masturbation
as a male fantasy (p. 82 ff.) and I will confine my own remarks
to the first two. That women are constantly interested in sex,
judging from this play and others, seems to be an article of
faith among Aristophanic men. The Lysistrata begins with
sexual innuendoes9
and keeps up a fairly steady stream throughout; thoughts of sex
are never far from the characters' minds.
The notion that women will have
sex with anyone is also clearly evident from Lysistrata's lines
mentioned above and later from the speech of the magistrate10
in which he suggests two scenarios for extra-marital affairs
that are actually facilitated by the husband. The magistrate
describes two situations in which a man might ask a craftsman
to go to his house to fix something for his wife. The language
of these descriptions, with their multiple double entendres,
makes it clear that these are seen as prime opportunities for
sexual liaison, with the willingness of both the wife and the
craftsman being assumed. To us, the idea that any man coming
into another man's home is automatically a potential adulterer
seems, on the surface, absurd, but in the movie Afterglow you
can see how a modern example of how this plays out. In the film,
a young married woman hires a contractor to do some work for
her, including fixing a lock (I won't even go into the erotic
associations there) and a tumultuous affair results. Apparently,
letting a craftsman into your home is still a sexually threatening
concern, especially if the craftsman is Nick Nolte.
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