Broken leg
It is dangerous to generalize and claim that classical Greeks divided women into two big groups: mothers and prostitutes, although this idea can be derived from certain testimony. " We have Heteras for pleasure, spouses for everyday personal service and wives for making own children and for having a reliable servant at home." This passage from Pseudoddemostren /Agaisnt Nearii, 122/ should be ranked into the period of deep spiritual crises, which means beginnings of great decadence in 4th century BC.
In classical Greece as well as in the antique world, the role of woman was to conceive and give birth to children to retain family line of a man and town and in the old age they would support their parents. In any case, Greek did not express as cruelly as Romans, who sometimes called a his wife venter - stomach. A Woman was a form for making children. If they had enough resource, the citizen could have except for his wife also a legitimate concubine- pallaké, a second wife, who were illegitimate if that is why they did not inherit. The existence of a wife and concubine did not exclude occasional relationships with other mistresses or boys. A man was sexually free.
It was not the same for a woman. Certain Greek from classical period wrote the basic expression very willingly. We can find it in Spanish language in the following form: "Married woman, broken leg." We have already mentioned that a wife of a poor man, had to look for an everyday bread, she enjoyed freedom, but a wife of a wealthy man lived almost always closed at home. She managed to get out only under pretences of worshipping the cult, or religious service or sanctum. We do not need to say that, women from higher classes were or pretended to be religious.
Paradoxically, in developed Ahtens a wealthy woman did not have other duty only to be a good mother to children and run the household. The girls learned only what she needed: spinning, cook and make home chores. Intellectual life, shops, communal politics, it all belonged to men. And though in other towns in Sparta and Milan, women enjoyed bigger freedom.
In the house of a rich burgher , were two clearly limited zones. One designated to women, gynaikonitis-women's chamber, without the view into outside world, so that potential intruders could not disturb the intimacy of women at her home and so on. In some extremely strict cases, the chamber could be closed and was guarded by a sheepdog. It was a similar situation as in moslim harems and in some chambers of African communities.
A married woman, belonging to higher social class, lived a life devoted to housework. It could seem that these Queens of fireplace were bored to death, but house gave them enough work to escape the boredom: give orders and assign the work to servants, look after the work with a spinning wheel, by pots and in chamber. This and the education of boys until their age o 7-8 years /age, when they were brought up by fathers or tutor/ and daughters, until they got married, they offered them enough space for fulfilling their time. If some man came to visit , a wise woman and her daughters hid in chamber of women. It was considered to be inappropriate to interfere in the conversation of men. We have already mentioned that the first virtue of a woman was Soprhosyne, moderation. A polite woman did not come out of her privacy of home voluntarily, until she reached the age, when " her husband who met her in the street did not ask her whose wife she is but whose mother she is/Slobaios: Hypereides LXXIV, page76/. A good wife should not know anything secular or she was supposed to pretend that she is like this. She looked more attractive this way. Hippolytos, a character in Euripius's play says it very clearly: I hate her, if she is clever and wise."