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An introduction to... Women in Greek Theatre

University of Oxford, 2025

Greek drama: a male art form?

Greek drama was written by, performed by, and performed to, men. Yet, it was fascinated by women. Classical drama presents a problem for its deeply patriarchal society: it shows women doing everything that they were not meant to do in the real world.

A picture of the ‘ideal’ Greek woman emerges from a famous speech delivered by the Athenian general Pericles in 431 BCE: ‘To a woman, to show no more weakness than is natural to her gender, and to not be talked about for good or evil among men, is a great glory’ (Thucydides 2.45.2). In other words: be neither seen nor heard. That same year, a tragedy about a woman who does the very opposite was staged at Athens’ largest dramatic festival, the Great Dionysia: Euripides’ Medea.

Women in Greek tragedy

No genre of Greek literature puts women so centre-stage as tragedy. Of the 32 surviving tragedies, female choruses are twice as common as male choruses, and only one tragedy, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, has no female characters. Despite this, debate has raged for centuries over whether the tragic playwrights, especially Euripides, portrayed women in a proto-feminist or misogynistic light. At the heart of this debate lies Medea, a revenge tragedy about a woman who murders her children and her husband’s new bride to punish his betrayal of their marriage oaths.

With her first appearance on stage, Medea delivers a powerful monologue that strikes at the heart of gendered inequalities:

Of all the creatures that breathe and possess thought,
We women are the most wretched.
First we must, at great expense,
Purchase a husband and a master of our bodies;
And the greatest struggle is this, whether we get a bad one
Or a good one. For divorce is not respectful for
Women, and refusing him is not possible. […]
They say that we live a life free from danger
At home, while they are fighting with the spear;
But how wrong they are: I would rather stand in
Battle with a shield three times than give birth once. 

(Euripides, Medea 230-251; author's own translation)

Image:
Black and white photograph of woman dressed in robes, with one arm raised and her mouth open as if shouting, standing in front of large wooden doors.
Sybil Thorndike as Medea
Performing at Christ Church College, Oxford, 5 June 1925. Photograph, APGRD collections.

At the turn of the 20th century, this speech was chanted at suffragette meetings, seen as encapsulating the prejudices women continued to face in patriarchal British society. It was catapulted to prominence by a new translation by Gilbert Murray, who considered Euripides to be a champion of women, and even remarked that Medea ‘might have been written’ for the women’s movement (Thomson and Toynbee 1936, Essays in Honour of Gilbert Murray: 74). It was, importantly, the first translation to include Medea’s proto-feminist speech in full. The lead actress, Sybil Thorndike, considered Medea to be a thoroughly feminist play, remarking, ‘As I studied the part I thought a lot about the position of women in the world, the position of the underdog — their endless struggle for freedom and fulfilment — and I came to see very clearly how oppression breeds hatred’ (Croall 2008, Sybil Thorndike: a star of life: 133).

Women in Greek comedy

Given this endorsement of Medea by feminist protestors, why is it that Euripides simultaneously came to be viewed as an arch-misogynist? This reputation has its origins in the comedies of Aristophanes. In his Women at the Thesmophoria (411 BCE), a character named Mika complains that in Euripides’ plays, women are ‘trampled in the mud’ (Thesmo. 385), subject to indignities and cast in a bad light, for which reason, the women of Athens want to put Euripides to death.

Image:
Hand-drawn illustration in a cartoon style of many women in a state of undress
Programme notes for Thesmophoriazousai
Θεσμοφοριάζουσαι by THOC (Θεατρικός Οργανισμός Κύπρου), performed at the 1996 Epidaurus Festival; programme notes, APGRD Collections © THOC

On the surface, Aristophanes’ comedies appear to present a radically proto-feminist alternative to reality, where women plot to take down the tragedian who misrepresents them. In another play of the same year, Lysistrata, the women of Athens and Sparta band together to stage a coup d’état, accompanied by a sex strike, in a (successful!) bid to end the Peloponnesian War. Explaining how women will bring order back to the city, the protagonist Lysistrata compares the management of the polis to women’s process for creating a woollen fleece: they will purge the city of pests just as they pluck thorns and clumps of mud from wool and create a united society by weaving all the strands together — citizens and foreigners alike (Lysistrata 574–586). Aristophanes seems to be offering a utopian vision of a matriarchal society. The question is: should we take him seriously?

Image:
Punk-style collage of ancient Greek or Roman statue of female body, with added pink wig, lipstick, and nail varnish, she balances a globe with a peace-sign overlaid on it on her finger
New Prometheus Touring Theatre co. presents LYSSISTRATA, 1985
The flyer combines a 1970's punk aesthetic with ancient sculpture; flyer, APGRD Collections.

Women at the dramatic festivals?

Although drama produced powerful roles for female characters, they were all performed by male actors. Does this undermine the empowering speeches playwrights crafted for their women protagonists? Moreover, were these speeches ever delivered in the presence of women? This is a crucial question and there is, sadly, little evidence to provide a definitive answer.

Anecdotes from post-classical antiquity offer reports of women in the audience suffering miscarriages at the first sight of the Furies – terrifying spirits – in Aeschylus’ Oresteia, but such anecdotes have generally been disregarded as spurious by modern scholars. The plays themselves offer only hints.

One comic fragment invites speculation. In the Gunaikokratia (‘Rule of Women’) by Alexis, a 4th-century BCE playwright, a character complains, ‘Here we women have to sit in the very last wedge of seats to spectate, just like a foreign woman’. ‘Wedges’ (kerkides) refer to the division of seats in the Greek theatre. Is this evidence that women did indeed partake in the audience? If so, how does this affect our interpretation of tragedy and comedy’s portrayal of women? There is no doubt that if Medea’s famous monologue or Lysistrata’s woollen fleece analogy had been performed before a female audience, it would have resonated profoundly with its spectators. But the question remains: was that the case?

Want to read more?

  • Henderson, Jeffrey. 1991. ‘Women and the Athenian Dramatic Festivals.’ Transactions of the American Philological Association 121: 133–147.
  • Gilhuly, Kate. 2008. ‘Sex and sacrifice in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens. Cambridge University Press: 140–179.
  • Macintosh, Fiona; Kenward, Claire and Wrobel, Tom. 2016. Medea: A Performance History. APGRD.
  • March, Jennifer. 1990. ‘Euripides the misogynist?’ In Powell, Anton. Euripides, Women, and Sexuality. Routledge: 32–75.

Banner image: Detail from greyscale version of oil painting by Frederic Leighton, Helen on the Walls of Troy, 1865.