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Pheidias made the Eleans' Aphrodite.1 He depicted her stepping on a tortoise as a symbol of the need for women to stay indoors and keep silent. For a woman should only speak to her husband or through her husband. She should accept the fact that, like a flautist, she says something more worthy of respect through a voice that is not lier own.
(Plutarch Moralin 14 2d)
Plutarch expresses a sentiment common in Græco-Roman literature, that women should keep their voices private. A virtuous woman should not expose herself to men outside her close family. Plutarch explains that a woman should not say anything in public as this would reveal her feelings, character and temperament to the world; it would be as if she had shipped off her clothes and shown herself to the world naked.' Yet despite such prejudice, and the perception it produces that all Greek and Roman literature had to be written by men, we find that from the seventh century BC through to the sixth century AD women did compose works on a wide variety of topics, including travel, philosophy, musical theory, grammar, literary criticism, astronomy, medicine, mathematics, and alchemy. Women were perceived to be holders of mysterious knowledge: experts in magic, medicine, alchemy and sex/' The highest praise was awarded to women poets such as Sappho, Anyte, Moero, Nossis and Erinna.4 However, women in the ancient world have not been recognised as historians,5 making the first widely acknowledged woman historian the Byzantine Anna Comnena, who completed th eA/exiad m 1148.
In the ancient world, the subject matter of historical works was almost exclusively about the activities of men. History was defined as early as Thucydides as being, essentially, about war and the politics of states. Such politics excluded a role for women.6 Lucian, in lus lecture How to Write History quoted Heraclitus' famous pronouncement, "War is the father of all things", to conclude that war is the father of all historians. He argues that a historian must understand war personally and to do so must have spent time m a military camp and have some knowledge of military drills, weapons and strategies.' Such autopsy, or at least personal acquaintance with eyewitnesses was regarded as crucial for the historian. For...