The Patriarchs by Angela Saini;

Author:Angela Saini; [Saini, Angela]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Random House LLC (Publisher Services)
Published: 2023-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

There’s an ancient Greek medical text On Regimen, attributed to the fifth-century BCE physician Hippocrates (the one doctors remember these days when they take their Hippocratic oath), which says that a baby’s character is decided in the womb by a battle between its mother’s seeds and its father’s seeds. Each of these seeds, Walter Penrose explains, can lean toward the feminine or masculine regardless of which parent it comes from, meaning that mothers can make male-leaning seeds and fathers can produce female-leaning ones. So, for instance, a “masculine” female baby could be the result of the father’s female-leaning seed overcoming the mother’s male-leaning seed, but still mingling with it. And there are, of course, other combinations.

If this sounds complicated, it is.

The fact that it is so complicated tells us something. It proves that the ancient Greeks had no choice but to acknowledge that not everyone automatically aligned with society’s gender expectations from birth. The fact of “feminine” men and “masculine” women, people whose qualities didn’t match their stereotypes, had to be explained. This is what On Regimen was attempting to do.

“It took me a while to come to the conclusion that it is a political text. There’s a politics going on there,” Penrose tells me. The author of On Regimen wasn’t just trying to explain reality but was writing for an audience that had to navigate a rigidly gendered society. “The reason he’s spelling all this out is so that the parents can work on their regimen, their diet and their exercise, so that they don’t wind up with a child like this,” one who defies gender expectations. Athenians were known to be viciously intolerant of people who didn’t conform. There are accounts of intersex people in ancient Greece and Rome being killed, sometimes as babies, for fear that they represented cosmic instabilities or signs of bad things to come. This medical text, then, reflected a desire for people to fit into strict gender protocols amid an uneasy recognition that not everyone would.

“It’s the tension between the ideology and the reality,” says Penrose.

This observation sits within a wider body of scholarship that has for decades questioned how we think about women and men in classical antiquity. In their anthology Sex and Difference in Ancient Greece and Rome, the classicists Mark Golden and Peter Toohey describe just how complex this question really is. Inspired by the French philosopher Michel Foucault’s writings on sexuality in the 1970s, some experts have asked if the sexual act of penetration, for example, might be seen as “the main means of defining gender. Men penetrated, women were penetrated. As a result, not all males were men,” Golden and Toohey write. Subordinate males who were penetrated, including slaves and boys, could see a change in their status as men.

“The word ‘women’ is hardly unproblematic either,” writes Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz. As she explains, “Ancient people not only had different words but used the words they did have for female human beings in different ways.” Romans saw women who were more sexually active, rather than passive, as more manly, for example.

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