{"id":19167,"date":"2023-11-14T10:21:14","date_gmt":"2023-11-14T09:21:14","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19167"},"modified":"2025-10-19T16:35:14","modified_gmt":"2025-10-19T15:35:14","slug":"elizabeth-vandiver-monstrous-females-and-female-monsters","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19167","title":{"rendered":"Elizabeth Vandiver &#8211; Monstrous Females and Female Monsters"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>21 &#8211; <strong>Monstrous Females and Female Monsters &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 22) by Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Run time: 31:41 \/ 2011-01-04<\/p>\n<div style=\"width: 640px;\" class=\"wp-video\"><video class=\"wp-video-shortcode\" id=\"video-19167-1\" width=\"640\" height=\"360\" preload=\"metadata\" controls=\"controls\"><source type=\"video\/mp4\" src=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume22\/21.MonstrousFemalesAndFemaleMonsters_512kb.mp4?_=1\" \/><a href=\"https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume22\/21.MonstrousFemalesAndFemaleMonsters_512kb.mp4\">https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume22\/21.MonstrousFemalesAndFemaleMonsters_512kb.mp4<\/a><\/video><\/div>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<p><strong>Elizabeth Vandiver<\/strong> &#8211; Hello and welcome to lecture 21. In the previous lecture on Oedipus and Sophocles&#8217; treatment of the Oedipus myth, among other things, I pointed out some of the traditional folk tale elements that exist in the narrative of Oedipus&#8217; birth and childhood, and his ascension to the throne of Thebes. In this lecture, we&#8217;re going to look at one particular narrative element that is common to many hero stories, the idea that heroes encounter anomalous and dangerous female creatures as part of their heroic tasks. We&#8217;re going to look specifically at the Amazons, Medea, and at some of the many dangerous female monsters who appear throughout Greek myth.<br \/>\nNow, the greatest Greek heroes all have an encounter with the Amazons at some point in their careers. Heracles, Achilles, and Theseus all meet with and defeat an Amazon queen in one way or another.<\/p>\n<p>So who are these Amazons and why was encountering them, in some sense, a test of hero status? The Amazons, as I&#8217;ve mentioned before, were a race of warrior women. They supposedly lived somewhere near the remote edges of the world. Most accounts of the Amazons put their homeland somewhere near the Black Sea, sometimes in ancient Scythia, although some traditions placed them in Ethiopia instead.<\/p>\n<p>Now that seems like a remarkable divergence, either near the Black Sea or in Ethiopia. What those two ideas have in common is that wherever the Amazons live, they live near the edge of the known world. Greek myth reflected a very strong sense that the further you got away from the center of the world, and the center of the world was of course Greece, the further you got away from the center of the world, the stranger cultures, customs, and creatures all became. So that by locating the Amazon&#8217;s society at the very edge of the known world, whether to the north or to the south, the myth stresses the idea that the Amazons are extremely peculiar creatures.<\/p>\n<p>And indeed they are. There may be some historical basis to the myth of the Amazon, surprisingly enough. Now, it&#8217;s very unlikely that there was ever actually a female society that lived entirely self-sufficiently with no men at all. But many versions of the Amazon story, as I already said, place their homeland in Scythia, an area near the Black Sea. And ancient Scythian women<br \/>\nwere part of a nomadic society in which the women as well as the men rode horses, rode astride on horses, lived a nomadic existence, and the two sexes in Scythian society dressed very, very similarly. Women in Scythian society were given a degree of autonomy and power, so far as we can tell, that was much greater than what they were given in Greek society. <\/p>\n<p>And so it is at least possible that the Amazon story reflects or incorporates travelers tales, tales told by Greek traders who had gone to the Black Sea to buy and sell goods about the Scythians and their extremely man-like, according to the Greek view of things, women. But for our purposes, the most important thing to observe about the mythical Amazons, whether their myth reflects some memory of Scythian women or not, is that they invert or reverse or turn upside down just about every standard assumption that Greek society makes about proper roles for women. First of all, the Amazons are warriors. That&#8217;s the main defining characteristic of the Amazons. They&#8217;re warriors who meet men on the battlefield on equal terms, and they are very good warriors.<\/p>\n<p>It would not be any test of heroic prowess to overcome an Amazon if the assumption were not that most times when Amazons meet men in battle, the Amazons are triumphant. They were very, very good warriors indeed.<\/p>\n<p>Secondly, they are women who are sexually active outside the bounds of marriage. In fact, they&#8217;re women who reject the idea of marriage entirely. The Amazons were a self-sufficient female society in Greek myth. The one thing they could not do, being human and not goddesses, was to produce children parthenogenically. So, supposedly, once a year or so, the Amazons would go around to neighboring tribes, would kidnap a certain number of men, force the men to have sex with them, and once they had become pregnant, they would either kill the men, enslave them, or perhaps just let them go again. <\/p>\n<p>So, the Amazons used men for sexual purposes, but their sexuality was outside the bounds of marriage, and marriage was not part of their culture at all.<br \/>\nAnother way in which they invert the standard assumptions of Greek society is in their preference of female children to male children. Although I haven&#8217;t specifically talked about this before, you know enough now about Greek society as reflected in myth that it should not come as a surprise that male children were much more highly valued than female children. But in the Amazon society, that picture is precisely reversed.<\/p>\n<p>The Amazons would, of course, sometimes bear male children, but supposedly when they did, they either killed the babies, the baby boys, castrated them and or sold them into slavery. So again, male children are undervalued, female children are valued in Amazon society. This is a point by point reversal of all the most important Greek assumptions about women and women&#8217;s roles.<br \/>\nNow, Greek culture very frequently makes a symbolic equivalency between sexual defloration for a girl and a boy&#8217;s first wounding in battle as a moment of maturity for either gender. So a girl becomes mature sexually and in other ways when she is married and when she has her first intercourse with her husband. <\/p>\n<p>A boy becomes mature, at least in one way of looking at it, when he is first wounded in battle. And if you want to press the point, the idea seems to be that bodily penetration sexually for a girl and by a weapon for a male is necessary for full maturity. The Amazons pretty clearly combine elements of maturity of both sexes. Or another way of putting it is that this symbolic equivalence that Greek culture sees between marriage and resulting sex for girls and battle for boys helps to explain why the Amazons, women who reject marriage, are conceived of as warriors, if they reject the proper maturation required for women they&#8217;ve got to have some sort of maturation so they go through the maturation required for men instead they reject marriage, therefore they must take part in battle and yet they are also sexually active, though outside of marriage, and they remain sexually attractive to Greek males, including Greek heroes. Thus, they&#8217;re a kind of hybrid. <\/p>\n<p>They partake of characteristics of both genders, of adult females and adult males, and this hybrid nature, the fact that they act like men but remain very sexually attractive as women, makes them extremely disturbing in Greek myth. It&#8217;s hard to know how to deal with them. It&#8217;s hard to know how to categorize them. The interactions of Greek heroes with Amazons can, among other things, be seen as reasserting the proper, quote unquote, order of things in the Greek mind. On the simplest level, when a Greek hero confronts an Amazon, the hero defeats the Amazon. This happens with Achilles, this happens with Theseus, this happens any time a major Greek hero encounters the Amazon, the Amazon is defeated.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>On the simplest level, this means that the Greek is defeating the barbarian foreigner. Barbarian in Greek was just a term for foreigner, by the way, originally, before it had any pejorative connotations. Supposedly, the word comes from the fact that foreigners, people who can&#8217;t speak good, clear Greek, make sounds that sound like bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, bar, so they&#8217;re called barbaroi or barbarians. That supposedly is the etymology of the word.<\/p>\n<p>So when a Greek defeats an Amazon, on the simplest level, the Greek is defeating the barbarian, the male is defeating the female. In both cases, the proper order of things is reasserted. And here we can remember that when Theseus kidnaps the queen of the Amazons, the Amazons come and besiege Athens to get her back. Theseus and the Athenians defeat the Amazons, that is pretty clearly seen in Athenian myth as a paradigmatic defining moment in the Athenian construction of their self-image. When they turn the Amazons back, they are both asserting the hegemony of Greek culture over foreign cultures and they&#8217;re asserting or validating the role of males in their society as superior to females.<\/p>\n<p>But the encounter between a Greek hero and an Amazon works on more than just the surface level of male defeating female. It also always entails a re-feminizing or re-sexualizing in an overt way of the Amazon. Most obviously Theseus marries Hippolyta. He kidnaps her, takes her back to Athens and marries her. Heracles, you&#8217;ll remember, steals Hippolyta&#8217;s girdle or belt. Now, you may wonder where is the re-feminizing, where is the sexualizing of Hippolyta in that? Well, the answer is that to loosen a woman&#8217;s girdle was a standard metaphor in classical Greek for having sex with the woman. Just as we will use the metaphor he slept with her to mean that he had sex with her. <\/p>\n<p>Greek would use the metaphor he loosened her girdle or he took off her girdle to mean he had sex with her. He took off her belt. The belt or girdle held the woman&#8217;s robe closed. If you untied the belt the robe fell open. The assumption is there would only be one reason why a man would open a woman&#8217;s robe and there you have the underlying reason for the metaphor.<\/p>\n<p>So, although the myth does not say that Heracles actually did have sex with Hippolyta, just by saying Heracles took the girdle off Hippolyta, you have the implication that Heracles sexually dominated Hippolyta. Perhaps most interestingly, is that when Achilles has his encounter with an Amazon named Penthesilea, this happens supposedly right after the action of the Iliad, Achilles falls in love with Penthesilea as she is dying from the wound that he has inflicted on her. This shows up in various examples of ancient Greek art.<br \/>\nAchilles stabs Penthesilea with a spear or a sword. She lies dying at his feet. Their eyes meet and he is smitten by sexual passion for her. There you see pretty clearly the idea that wounding in battle in some way is the symbolic equivalent of sexual intercourse.<\/p>\n<p>Achilles wounds Penthesilea and falls in love with her at the same moment. So in each of these examples, Theseus, Heracles and Achilles, we have the encounter with the male hero re-feminizing the Amazon and re-asserting what the Greeks would see as her proper sexual role to be sexually dominated by the Greek male. The story of Hippolytus, who you&#8217;ll remember is the son of Theseus and the Amazon Queen Hippolyta, reflects many of these same ideas in a very interesting and unusual way since Hippolytus is himself male. Hippolytus is the son of an Athenian father and an Amazon mother.<\/p>\n<p>And as I mentioned briefly when we were talking about Theseus, Hippolytus shuns sexuality. That&#8217;s why Aphrodite is angry at him. And in his story, as the playwright Euripides tells it, it is the anger of Aphrodite at Hippolytus, her anger because Hippolytus does not honor her appropriately, that leads to the whole story of Hippolytus&#8217; stepmother Phaedra falling in love with him and the resultant deaths of both Phaedra and Hippolytus. In the account that the playwright Euripides gives us, all of this is Aphrodite&#8217;s revenge against Hippolytus because he does not honor her appropriately. Why doesn&#8217;t he honor her appropriately? Because he shuns sexuality. He refuses to take part in any sexual activity whatsoever. Instead, Hippolytus devotes himself to the goddess Artemis.<\/p>\n<p>To understand what&#8217;s going on in the story of Hippolytus, we have to set aside any assumptions that we may have about chastity or the eschewing of sexuality as being somehow purifying or ennobling or good for the soul.<\/p>\n<p>In classical Greek culture, a young man who eschewed sexuality would not be seen as pure or noble, he would be seen as weird. Furthermore, he would be seen as selfish, because by eschewing sexuality, by refusing to be sexually mature, Hippolytus is refusing the duties of an adult male citizen. In a society with high infant mortality and many enemies, it was the absolute, unambiguous, unarguable duty of every male citizen to marry and beget children, whether he wanted to or not. That was his duty as an Athenian citizen, as a Greek citizen. <\/p>\n<p>And so when Hippolytus refuses to take part in the area supervised by Aphrodite, he&#8217;s not just failing to show respect to an important goddess, he&#8217;s also refusing to be an adult male, his devotion to Artemis means that he is in effect acting like a young girl because as you&#8217;ll remember Artemis is the patron goddess of young unmarried girls. So Hippolytus too, like the Amazons themselves, is a kind of bizarre hybrid. He is male, but he devotes himself to a goddess who is appropriate for a young unmarried girl, and he refuses to become an adult male. He refuses to take his part in society by marrying and begetting children. In his case, however, his hybrid nature seems to involve refusing to become an adult of either gender. <\/p>\n<p>The Amazons, I said, are hybrids who share traits of adults of both genders. Hippolytus is frozen in a kind of pre-adolescence let alone pre-adulthood, in which he will not or cannot become an adult of either gender. He&#8217;s devoted to Artemis, the goddess to whom young girls are devoted up to the time of their marriage, but he can&#8217;t marry as a female. That&#8217;s simply not open to him, so he can&#8217;t move beyond devotion to Artemis, and he refuses to be an adult male.<br \/>\nApparently, he, the offspring of an Athenian father and an Amazon mother, is a hybrid who simply cannot exist in Athenian society. There&#8217;s no place for Hippolytus. He&#8217;s a hybrid that just simply doesn&#8217;t work.<\/p>\n<p>Now, the Amazons are not the only interesting females in Greek myth who in many ways invert or at least call into question the assumptions that Greek myth makes about the proper roles of women. One of the most obvious such females in Greek myth is Medea, who is herself the subject of a play by her name, written by the same playwright, Euripides, who wrote Hippolytus. Medea, in many ways, parallels the Amazons. Her story highlights many of the same points we see in the story of the Amazons. In fact, she almost is a pseudo-Amazon herself in various different ways. First of all, she comes from the same neighborhood as the Amazons. Medea comes from a town called Colchis near the Black Sea, and this is where Jason sailed on the Argo to get the Golden Fleece.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>And, of course, he got the golden fleece with Medea&#8217;s help, as is so common in myth. She helped him on the understanding that he would marry her and take her with him when he left Colchus&#8217; golden fleece in hand. And so he did. Like the Amazons, Medea is an extremely powerful woman who does not hesitate to use violence against males when she needs to, she&#8217;s not a warrior like the amazons there&#8217;s no indication that medea ever enters into battle directly rather she uses magic and sorcery to assert her power. <\/p>\n<p>But like the amazons when she has to when need arises she is quite capable of direct overt physical violence against males the most obvious and horrifying example is that when she and jason are fleeing colchus when they&#8217;re on the argo sailing away from colchus and Medea&#8217;s father, the rightful owner of the Golden Fleece, is giving chase to them in his own ship. Medea delays her father by killing her little brother Absyrtus, cutting his body into small pieces, and throwing the pieces overboard one by one so that her father has to slow down and gather up the pieces of his son so that he can give the boy a proper funeral. Medea knows that this will slow her father&#8217;s progress down enough that she and Jason can get away.<\/p>\n<p>So she is perfectly capable of using horrible physical violence against males, even males of her own family, when it suits her purposes. And like the Amazons, Medea is no less desirable, no less sexually desirable, for the fact of being frighteningly powerful and willing to use violence. Jason marries her, and begets at least two children with her. After her marriage with Jason falls apart, for reasons I&#8217;ll get back to in just a second, she becomes the wife of Aegis, as we&#8217;ve already discussed. You&#8217;ll remember that she tries to kill Theseus when Theseus first presents himself to his father Aegis in Athens.<\/p>\n<p>So Medea parallels the Amazons in coming from the area of the Black Sea, in being a very powerful woman who is both capable of and willing to use violence and in being no less sexually desirable to Greek men for the fact of her power and her violence. There&#8217;s one other way in which she parallels the Amazons and that is in the fact that she kills her own sons. Now, her motivation for doing so and the time at which she does so is very different from the Amazons. You&#8217;ll remember that the Amazons kill their baby boys because they want daughters and not sons and they kill the boys or get rid of the boys as infants. Medea, at least as Euripides presents her story, wants her children and even seems to love her children until Jason decides to leave her for another woman.<\/p>\n<p>And it&#8217;s when Jason decides to set her aside and marry a young Greek woman that Medea kills her sons. And she does this within the logic of her own story, specifically to make Jason suffer. She knows that the worst thing she can do to him is deprive him of his sons, kill his children. And so despite the fact that they&#8217;re also her children, the desire to make Jason suffer outweighs in her mind her maternal affection for her sons. So she kills the sons to make Jason suffer.<\/p>\n<p>But this act can also be seen as reasserting Medea&#8217;s Amazon-like status as she leaves her marriage to a Greek hero, an anomalous marriage for a foreign woman and particularly for an Amazonian type woman. As she leaves her marriage to the Greek Jason, Medea reasserts her Amazon-like status by doing what an Amazon mother would have done in the first place, killing her two male children. So there are many ways in which Medea follows the patterns of the Amazons and also reverses completely the pattern of a Greek woman. The most unimaginable thing a Greek woman could do, I think it&#8217;s safe to say, would be to kill her children, particularly her male children. This puts Medea absolutely outside the pale of normal female human behavior in the Greek view of things. Well, we might say in anyone&#8217;s view of things.<\/p>\n<p>Now, there is one more category of mythic females to look at very closely, as well as the Amazons and Medea, and that is the very large number of threatening female monsters who show up in many Greek myths.<br \/>\nI&#8217;m not saying that all monsters are female. There are certainly many male monsters. You might remember triple-bodied Gerion, for instance, whom Heracles had to encounter in his tenth labor. But there are a lot of monsters who are females, and they seem to play some particular or some specific roles associated with their female nature.<\/p>\n<p>There are various different types of these monsters, but the two most important types are female monsters who eat men. Scylla, whom Odysseus encounters during his wanderings, would be an example of this. Scylla is a multi-headed, multi-bodied monster. She has six heads, six upper bodies. She&#8217;s a snake or snakes from the waist down. She lives in a cave halfway up a cliff when ships sail too close to her, she leans out of the cave with all six of her upper bodies, grabs men off the decks of the ship and eats them alive in front of their comrades. So she&#8217;s a particularly threatening, frightening and nasty female monster. The Sphinx is another example of a female monster. <\/p>\n<p>She&#8217;s normally shown as having the body of a lion or of some other beast sometimes and a woman&#8217;s face and upper body, sometimes wings as well. And of course, as we saw in discussing Oedipus, she kills and devours men. There are also monsters who kill men but don&#8217;t eat them, who are not cannibalistic monsters. Medusa, encountered by the hero Perseus, whom unfortunately I haven&#8217;t had time to talk about in this course, is perhaps the most famous example of a monster who kills but does not eat.<\/p>\n<p>Medusa is a Gorgon, that is she&#8217;s one of three mythic female monsters with snakes for hair whose gaze turns men to stone. Just looking at her face literally petrifies anyone, well man or animal, who looks at her. Now one very interesting point about such monsters is that very frequently they became monsters in the first place because of some kind of sexual transgression, on their part or on the part of some male who encountered them. Let&#8217;s take Scylla as an example. <\/p>\n<p>Scylla, according to Ovid, was loved by a sea god named Glaucus. Glaucus was in turn the beloved of the goddess Circe, the same sorceress goddess whom Odysseus encounters in the Odyssey. Because Glaucus loved Scylla, Circe was jealous of Scylla, who started life as an extremely beautiful young woman. And Circe therefore turned Scylla into a monster specifically to punish her for attracting Glaucus. So Scylla&#8217;s monsterhood was a result of the sexual attraction she had exerted as a beautiful young woman on the sea god Glaucus.<\/p>\n<p>Perhaps even more horrifyingly, Medusa, again according to Ovid, becomes a monster because Poseidon raped Medusa in Athena&#8217;s temple. And Athena therefore punished Medusa, the victim of the crime, by making her a monster with snakes for hair. Now, in both of those stories, well, very clearly, we see again the idea that intentions, or in this case even actions, are irrelevant. It&#8217;s the result that seems to count. Scylla did not actually do anything. She simply attracted Glaucus.<\/p>\n<p>Medusa certainly did not do anything. She was Poseidon&#8217;s victim. And yet both of those young women are punished by goddesses for the very fact of their sexual attractiveness. They&#8217;re punished by the goddesses by being turned into monsters who kill men. I don&#8217;t think we have to delve too deep into psychological theory to see a connection there between sexual attractiveness and danger, between the woman who is sexually attractive and the woman who devours. All of that kind of psychological anxiety seems very clearly to be here in this story in which innocent young women whose only crime is being beautiful become devouring monsters who literally destroy men.<\/p>\n<p>Now, there&#8217;s one fascinating example of a female monster in Greek myth who is not particularly threatening, despite being associated with snakes and despite being encountered by a hero. This is the Scythian echidna, a word that&#8217;s often translated viper woman or snake woman, as described by the Greek historian Herodotus. This is an unusual story in many ways, not least that it shows up in the first work of Greek history, rather than in a work having overtly to do with myth.<\/p>\n<p>Heracles encounters this snake woman as he is driving Gerion&#8217;s cattle home from the far west. He encounters her in Scythia, and that&#8217;s bizarre to begin with. If Gerion is in the far west and Heracles is driving the cattle home from the west to Greece, I have never been able to determine what on earth he&#8217;s doing in Scythia. But there he is, up by the Black Sea.<br \/>\nHe wakes up one morning, Heracles wakes up and discovers that his mares are missing, the mares who have been driving his chariot. He goes looking for them and finds living in a cave a snake woman whom Herodotus says is a woman from the waist up and a snake or snakes from the waist down. This snake woman tells Heracles that she has his mares and she will give them back to him if he&#8217;ll have sex with her.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<!--nextpage--><\/p>\n<p>So the viper woman, the snake woman, the echidna, is basically benevolent or at least not malevolent. She doesn&#8217;t want to harm Heracles. She doesn&#8217;t want to devour him. She wants children from him. And so Heracles sleeps with her, Herodotus says on that understanding, begets three sons with her. Herodotus doesn&#8217;t say if they&#8217;re triplets or if Heracles stays for a while. And after their three sons are born, the snake woman agrees to let Heracles go.<br \/>\nNow, this monster parallels the dangerous females in several ways. Like Medea and the Amazon, she lives near the Black Sea in Scythia. Like Scylla and Medusa, she&#8217;s partly snake. As I said, she&#8217;s a woman from the waist up and a snake from the waist down. Her youngest son is Scythes.<\/p>\n<p>Scythes becomes the ancestor of the Scythians and a fascinating little connection with the Amazons. According to Herodotus, the Scythians later mate with the Amazons, with a few Amazons who decide they want to settle down and be normal human beings. They mate with the Scythians and produce a tribe called the Saramatai. So there&#8217;s a connection between the descendant of this snake woman and the Amazons, the snake woman is not a malevolent monster and to be honest I don&#8217;t quite know why this should be so I&#8217;m still thinking about the myth of the snake woman but it occurs to me at least that among other things that may be going on here is again the idea of reversal just as women don&#8217;t act like women at the edges of the world perhaps female monsters don&#8217;t act like female monsters at the edges of the world perhaps at the very far edges of the world you get monsters who are friendly rather than monsters who are dangerous<\/p>\n<p>In any case, these various females, the Amazons, Medea, the monsters all seem pretty clearly to represent the Greek male&#8217;s anxiety about women&#8217;s power and particularly about women&#8217;s sexual power. This theme is most clearly encapsulated in Medea, whose name, believe it or not, means both genitals and clever plans. The idea that sexuality equals deceit, that sexual power involves deceit is encapsulated in Medea&#8217;s very name.<\/p>\n<p>The theme of women bearing children only to kill them, I think pretty clearly reiterates the regret that we&#8217;ve talked about before, the regret felt by Greek men that women are necessary for the production of offspring. The fact that women bear the children means that in some sense women control men&#8217;s ability to have children, as we&#8217;ve talked about before. Mothers who kill their offspring, mothers who bear sons to their husbands only to kill those sons, are I think simply an exaggerated form of that control. <\/p>\n<p>A woman can deny a man&#8217;s continuity through children either through not bearing the children in the first place or through killing them once she has borne them. The latter is exaggerated and unlikely but it&#8217;s the same general idea and reflects I think the same regret, resentment and anxiety over the fact that men can only produce children through sexual intercourse with women.<br \/>\nAnd it occurs to me that this may even help to explain the very frequent rape motif in Greek myth. Now I&#8217;m not trying to sanitize or reduce the horror of the rape motif. <\/p>\n<p>It comes up very frequently and it is a very disturbing element in Greek myth for modern readers. But I think one way of viewing this might be to say that since such rapes always result in offspring, and they do, a raped girl in Greek myth always gets pregnant, this theme may have less to do with males seeking sexual pleasure than with males seeking control of fertility.<\/p>\n<p>You still have to have access to a woman to beget sons, but in a rape story, the man is forcing reproduction on the woman with the slightest contact with her possible, and this may, I think, reflect the male desire to control reproduction as much as possible, more than it reflects anything about actual Greek sexual mores, per se. Well, that&#8217;s a tentative suggestion that I just wanted to throw out there for what it&#8217;s worth. Women&#8217;s ability to deny men continuity through offspring seems to be enlarged in these myths into a tendency on the part of women to destroy men entirely. And I think that&#8217;s a fairly clear progression. A woman can destroy a man&#8217;s continuity, can destroy his family if she does not bear children. It doesn&#8217;t take much of an imaginative leap to see that as women destroying the man himself entirely or females destroying him entirely.<\/p>\n<p>And finally, the connection that we saw in the House of Atreus myth between illicit sexuality and illicit eating, specifically cannibalism, appears here as well, where many of these female monsters who became monsters because of sexuality now literally devour men. Don&#8217;t just destroy them, but actually eat them.<\/p>\n<p>The hero&#8217;s successful encounters with Amazons and with female monsters, as we&#8217;ve seen in this lecture, seem to represent that whole nexus of male anxieties that we&#8217;ve talked about so much in the course about reproduction, about women, about women&#8217;s potential power in society. And so the whole reiteration of the idea of male dominance and female submission that comes up in these myths can serve as a reminder of the way myth both reflects and constructs the society in which it originates. In the next lecture, we&#8217;ll turn to looking at the other great society of classical myth, the Roman society, and see how they used and changed some of the same myths we&#8217;ve discussed so far.<\/p>\n<p>&nbsp;<br \/>\n<span style=\"color: #999999;\"><em>(Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>21 &#8211; Monstrous Females and Female Monsters &#8211; Classical Mythology (Vol 22) by Elizabeth Vandiver Run time: 31:41 \/ 2011-01-04 https:\/\/archive.org\/download\/ClassicalMythologyvolume22\/21.MonstrousFemalesAndFemaleMonsters_512kb.mp4 &nbsp; (Transcribed with the help of AI &#8211; S. Guraziu, Oct. 2025 &#8211; Video embedded, source IntArchive, Nov. 2023)&hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/?p=19167\" class=\"more-link\">Lexo <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-19167","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-media-extracted"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19167","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=19167"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19167\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=19167"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=19167"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/letrat.eu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=19167"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}