"By giving its support to these series, the Onassis Foundation wished to explore the links existing between the culture of ancient Greece and the world today." "It was never in it intention to associate itself to any opinion concerning the history and the political life of modern Greece." "The Onassis Foundation insists in clarfying that the choice of the themes as well as the selection of the interviewed persons are the sole responsibility of the director." "THE OWL'S LEGACY" "11 MISOGYNY or the Snares of Desire" "Lets remember now those Germans who sort of invented Greece, and most famous of them all, Winkelman." "Sexuality, for the Greeks, isn't sinful or wicked in itself." "One can say that in the literature of the Church Fathers the ban, the stigma is directed towards pleasure as such." "The pursuit of earthly pleasure, indulging in pleasures of the body, that's what was seen as wicked." "'You must not take pleasure' say the Church Fathers." "Or at least, not with your body." "You must find joy in the contemplation and in God." "The Greeks had a different view 'Beware of desire'." "Why?" "Because desire is infinite." "Desire is a decoy." "It perpetually engenders itself." "There is a sort of judgement, a very intellectual judgement, on the vanity of desire." "It is a moral judgement because the person is assumed to be responsible for his life and for his choices." "With the Church Fathers, their very fury against desire, it's something of an overrating because it implies that desire lurks everywhere and that to guard against it you must seal your whole body, each orifice is a gateway to desire" "so the body must be like a ship, perfectly water-tight." "Whereas for the Greeks desire is seen as something which disillusions you." "It is something you can control and must have a dialogue with." "I think that Eros is the wind, it's everywhere." "It's the atmosphere, where we are." "Because the wind does everything." "It's the change of temperature, the currents of the air." "It warms up, it goes down, it carries everything everywhere." "It circulates." "In Aristophanes there is a link between Eros and the wind." "He flaps his wings." "The actions of young Eros imply a division of the sexes." "Aristophanes says that Eros exists because in the beginning primordial man had eight limbs." "They had four arms, four legs, double bodies and both sex organs." "Therefore the being was completed." "It was a self-sufficient sphere." "Then they were divided in two, the division of the sexes." "And over since then, one half has been seeking the other." "Therefore, the homosexual man seeks the masculine half of his former whole and the homosexual woman seeks the female half of her whole while heterosexuals are two parts of the former whole of an androgynous body, a hermaphrodite." "So one way of explaining desire is in terms of nostalgia accepting its power and imminence as well as its arbitrary nature." "It's true that homosexuality." "the relationship between men, is a good model of a relationship that used to initiate a young man into philosophy." "Homosexuality, not heterosexuality." "You must go through the body before you relinquish it." "Plato's discourses clearly show a fascination with male beatuy, the beauty of young adolescents must have had a strong effect on the mature men who taught them, dealt with them and initiated them." "Plato describes this fascination with great tenderness even with great sensuality." "But the discourse always ends up with a remainder that the body, that one must experience the body, one must acknowledge its beauty but then go beyond it." "It is the beauty of the soul which must be the object of desire." "Philosophy is love of knowledge and this love has its seed in physical desire and in love." "Women, by definition, must have a desire for children." "Plato describes this desire as madness of the womb which, in the absence of children, can run wild in the body." "Hippocrates' theory of hysteria stems for this." "And therefore a childless woman will see the body as" "invaded from all sides by this internal organ which is seen as a sort of animal moving around in the body and settling in varous places thus producing various diseases." "The Greeks had no anatomical notion of virginity." "But the meaning of 'parthenos' isn't just an unmarried young girl." "It's a body which is distinguished by a closure and this closure is seen as a statement of integrity, a sexual organ which is closed but not sealed." "So the Greeks utterly disregarded the high value of the rip, of the blood, of the stain, the concept of loos of maidenhood, of losing the 'parthenia', seen as an irreparable rupture, a fracture of something solid." "The Athenian society which had institutions like the Ephebia for boys, a sort of military drill, a very far-fetched similitude." "It was more of an apprenticeship in savagery and marginality which preceded social integration." "Nothing similar existed for girls." "There was simply a destination, they were trained for marriage." "What would it be then the proper female conduct?" "Silence, to start with." "A woman should not speak." "This can be seen in connection with the value given to restraint, which was both sexual restraint, the closed sexual organ image, and the restraint of speech." "And since chastity is imposed on these two areas, the sexual organ and the mouth, so the rule is silence." "They can only talk to the husband or through him, as Plutarch says." "And of course honesty, sexual chastity, sophrosyne." "Everyone knows only too well those texts which claim that it's quite normal for a man to have 3-4 lawful wives but nowhere does it say that women have the same rights." "What we see, in fact, is that the woman's position is essentially quite different." "She must have one husband only." "Whatever she does on the side has to be clandestine." "Hence, female nautre is deceitful." "Women didn't take part in politics." "This is important in a democracy where the participation in meetings defines your citizenship." "Women weren't practising citizens." "This corresponds to a legal point, women never reached majority." "Women remained minors." "So that in court, for example, women always had to be represented by a guardian responsible for them as if they were children." "The same rule applied to children except that a boy of 18 would attain an adult status hence entitled to his full rights and being his own master." "Whereas women never did." "I'm not sure what was going on but judging from what we know," "whether you're a feminist or if you're just.." "Whatever the conditions were it couldn't have been a big deal." "It was quite macho, quite hard." "I suffered from it in modern Greece." "Maybe that's one of the reasons why I don't want to live there." "I may be too hard on the Greeks but quoting Elytis' line 'They give themselves tyrants'." "When you create tyrants too often maybe it's because we all have a little dormant tyrant within us." "Xenophon gives this impression in his handbook of Etiquette for the Athenian woman what she should or shouldn't do." "A respectable woman must stay home, carry out only indoor tasks." "Yet the illustrations show them playing music, writing and reading and also doing gymnastics." "This was the case in Sparta." "Our only evidence for Athens are vases showing women by a pool washing themselves after exercising." "So there must have been days when the Palaestra was 'women only' but this contradicts the texts." "There are no women in The Banquet." "Maybe flautists, or hetairiai..." "Mind you, there is a difference between prostitutes and hetairai." "Hetairai resemble Japanese geishas who are fairly cultivated women, someone one can converse with and not just a prostitute." "And I think that among the hetairai there were some who left their mark as inscriptions or as personalities." "They had an important social role in the Athens of 5th century BC." "It's not very well known." "The problem with illustrations is if they're not in gynaeceum women are assumed to be hetairai." "It's difficult to prove otherwise but it's hard to prove it's true." "That, to my mind, makes one hetaira too many." "One stele portrays a woman doctor which wasn't that usual then." "Not just a midwife, but a doctor." "Whether she studied medicine as men did, it's hard to say." "Anyway, she practiced medicine." "Certain women had huge fortunes in their own name, even in Athens." "So it's difficult to imagine all the society of women being reduced to nothing." "It seems that the Athenian woman within her own home was all powerful." "A little bit like the Arab women." "They may not be allowed to go out but at home, they rule supreme, over their husbands as well." "It may have been a matriarchy under-cover, within the home," "but that was a high price to pay." "I've never found the idea exciting." "At home, you're the queen but then outside..." "Kinky people, these Greeks." "Democrats and phallocrats." "Petty dictators over women and yet helplees and disarmed when women go on a love strike with Lysistrata." "Desire to save souls as long the bodies they inhabit are desirable and yet their sculptors left us breathtaking imprints of womanhood while their dramatists left us the strongest characters ever conceived." "Enough." "To avoid being unfair towards the ambiguous relation between" "Greek man and woman, it's time to raise a curtain on world in which that relation is lifted to the hights it deserves." "The world of tragedy."