Making Women´s History Visible in Europe
A European Learning Partnership (Grundtvig 2)
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Annette: A Stele
I flew to Athens with great expectations. But I was also a bit uneasy. Before leaving I had done some reading about the matriarchal roots of the Greek classical period. But I have been brought up on the stories about the great Greek philosophers – Socrates, Plato, Aristotele - , and about Athens as the cradle of our democracy. What would I find in the museums of Athens? How would I react?
From the very first moment Athens intrigued me. It surpassed all my wildest expectations. Together with Barbara I visited many museums and in each museum I learned more about the way the Greek talk about their own past. In their museums they start with stories about their early matriarchal history, showing the culture developed and represented by women. I found one of my favourite women figurines: the women from Selko (4800-4500 BC), sitting on a chair or a thrown, dressed in her striped skin of a serpent and holding a baby in her arms, conveying to us the same message as later the statues of Isis or the Christian Virgin Mary do. I was impressed by the awareness of the continuity of matriarchal traditions, which these museums of Athens reflected. And also by the pride they showed in presenting the sources of the matriarchal Greek past. These testimonies of matriarchal patterns in our history were the stories I am most interested it. Do these stories reach an end sometime, somewhere in history? Does at any time within Greek history a different pattern of story telling – a patriarchal pattern – overrule this way of viewing our past?
This is my leading question.
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Therefore I have chosen this picture, showing a stele of the fourth century BC, now standing in the Museum of Ancient Agora of Athens. It is called the stele of democracy. The lower half documents the first law against tyranny in history. On the upper half a relief is to be seen, showing a female figure crowning a male, sitting on a thrown. The female figure represents the assembly or the ecclesia and thereby the idea of democracy , whereas the male figure is representative of the people, the demos of Athens. The guidebook puts it this way: the relief depicts “Democracy crowning Demos (the Athenian people) enthroned”. Barbara and I spent a long time discussing this oldest document of democracy with history, both of us realising that it is remarkable to find a woman symbolizing the democratic idea of government and the will of the people and installing democratic power to a man as representative of the will of the people. We tried to get further information but this was very difficult. Only the very latest guide, edited in 2004 and developed by the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, quoted the law against tyranny at (nearly) full length. Here we also found the mention of a goddess, who should receive one tenth of the confiscated good of the person who attempted to overthrow democracy. This seems to me to be quite incredible. All my earlier feminist readings came back into my mind. I realized that they are right. We certainly were encountered with a valuable source, telling us a great deal we could get straight before about the matriarchal roots of Greek democracy.
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Back home I have once again started to search for the hidden stories behind this stele. There are many more to be found. At this moment the most important message for me is the story about matriarchal power, which generates democratic terms of trade in a democratic society. Women represent this power and hand it over to men, trusting their sense of responsibility. This is an understanding of democracy I wish to explore more seriously. I am sure there still is much more to be discovered.
Annette K. May 2005