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Part III of the linked blog demolishes that pretty effectively: https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-iii-spartan-women/ https://acou
by Clewza313 6y ago
Part III of the linked blog demolishes that pretty effectively:
https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-part-iii-spartan-women/ https://acoup.blog/2019/08/29/collections-this-isnt-sparta-p...
TL;DR: Spartan elite women were slightly freer than Athenian women, mostly because all their housework was outsourced to an army of slaves. But they were not citizens, could not choose who to marry, and were by and large treated as property, up to and including lending to other men.
The 95+% of Spartan women who were not in the elite, on the other hand, led lives that were miserable even by the low standards of antiquity, including random rape and murder during the yearly crypteia purges.
- railton 6y agoHe also points out in this post that rape was so common there's an entire, identifiable social class of Spartan bastards (_nothoi_ / _mothakes_). > But we don’t need to guess or rely on comparative evidence, because this rape was happening frequently enough that it produced an identifiable social class. The one secure passage we have to this effect is from Xenophon, who notes that the Spartan army marching to war included a group he calls the nothoi – the bastards (Xen. Hell. 5.3.9). The phrase typically means – and here clearly means – boys born to slave mothers.