Semonides of Amorgos, a seventh-century BCE iambic poet, wrote the catalogue usually called fragment 7, or “Types of Women.” It survives because the late anthologist Stobaeus quoted it. It is 118 lines of iambic trimeter, the meter of insult and comedy, and it reads like symposium talk: husbands sorting wives by the stuff Zeus supposedly used to make their minds.

The frame is that the gods made women different from men, and made most of them from animals or elements. Nine types are disasters. One is good. Then the poem drops the catalogue and says women as a class are the worst thing Zeus inflicted on men, with Helen as the mythic example.

The ten types, in order:

Sow. Dirty, unwashed, in filthy clothes. The house becomes a dung-heap. She grows fat sitting in the mess and will not clean.

Vixen. Knows everything, good and bad, and twists it. Mood flips without warning. Charming one hour, impossible the next. The cunning wife.

Bitch. Wants to hear, see, and meddle in everything. Barks whether anyone is there or not. Threats and knocking out her teeth do not stop her. Neighbors hate the noise.

Earth. Stupid, inert, no sense of good or bad, no skill except eating. In winter she only drags her stool nearer the fire. A clod, not a helper.

Sea. Two faces, like weather. One day she smiles and the house is calm. The next she is unapproachable, raging like a storm at sea. You cannot predict which woman you married.

Donkey (ass). Endures blows and forced labor, works all day, but also eats in the back room all night and all day, and will take any man who comes. Labor plus gluttony and indiscriminate sex.

Weasel (or ferret; the Greek is the house-weasel). Wretched and sex-obsessed. Steals from neighbors and from sacrifices. Nauseating to the man who has her. Some translators say ferret; the animal is the small predatory household weasel, not a modern ferret.

Mare. The luxury type. Long mane, refuses slaves’ work and grinding grain, bathes two or three times a day, wears scent and flowers. Beautiful, and a beautiful expense. She is a showpiece for someone else to keep, not a working wife.

Monkey. Ugliest. Short neck, hardly any hips, moves with difficulty. Pitied rather than desired, and full of tricks. Spends the day plotting harm and does not care if people laugh.

Bee. The only one excused. The household thrives under her. She loves her husband and grows old with him, having borne handsome, reputable children. She shines among women and is wrapped in divine grace. She does not like sitting with other women talking about sex. Finding her is luck.

The praise is still instrumental. The good wife works, keeps the house prosperous, bears legitimate children, stays loyal, and does not gossip about sex with other women. She is not praised for intellect, independence, or a life outside the household. Hesiod had used the bee or drone image the other way: women as drones who eat what men produce. Semonides flips only this one type into the industrious bee.

After the bee, the poem undercuts even that exception. Whoever lives with a woman will not keep hunger out of the house. A man who seems to have the good wife still ends up with a daily evil. Zeus made women as the greatest curse, and men are chained to them anyway. The bee is the best of a bad creation, not a refutation of the misogyny.

It is satire and blame poetry, not biology or political theory. It belongs with Hesiod on Pandora and with later Greek jokes about wives, not with Aristotle’s arguments about nature and rule. The animal scheme is the point: women’s characters are borrowed from beasts, and the only acceptable woman is the one who labors and reproduces without causing talk.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5908748&forum_id=2#50166066)

Great find Tom

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5908748&forum_id=2#50166119)