Rob Schaap wrote:
>
> and Pericles's
> patronising ravings (funny, that; his wife was a formidable and
> intellectual presence by all accounts),
No -- his "mistress" was. We know nothing of his wife (or at least I don't -- I've read quite a bit of ancient history and never recall any reference to her).
and women not being entitled to
> property. But their pantheon is interesting, no? Lots of powerful
> intelligent and dignified deities of distinctly female form up there!
The _most_ interesting feature of the female part of the pantheon is Athena's role in the _Oresteia_. Even before the case goes to the "jury" (of Athenian citizens) Athena announces that in case of a tie she will vote for Orestes -- NOT because his case is just but because she has only a father, not a mother, and therefore takes the male side. In other words, Aeschylus believed that _the_ foundation of Athenian democracy was the subordination of women. And of course she takes the Achaian (i.e., male) side in Homer.
I think that for the most part the Engels-Thompson account of archaic Greek history has been undermined -- there was no Minoan "matriarchy," etc. and I have not read any recent scholarship re the question of "matrilinearity" in the ancient Aegean. But it sure is easy to read the _Odyssey_ as revolving around a world-historicl betrayal of the female sex by Penelope.
Just
> makes me wonder whether 'well born' women mightn't have had significant
> social power and status once (eg before 6th century BC), and then had it
> taken away from them later on - things can change a lot in a century or so.
Look -- probably some scholar _knows_ an answer to this question, so speculation by amateurs needs to be kept a little more humble. I'm not a classicist -- though from teaching an undergraduate course in ancient literature for nearly 35 years I probably know a bit more about ancient Greece than most non-classicists. And I don't know anywheres near enough to carry my speculation too far.
There is altogether too much tendency among leftists (marxist and non-marxist) to think that their "anti-establishment" stance gives them the capacity to take a little fragment of knowledge from some specialized field and run with it. This is especially glaring in reference to the physical and biological sciences, linguistics, and pre-industrial history. For example, only someone who knows Russian, Polish, German, Church Latin, Old French, Old English, Middle English, French, and perhaps a couple more languages has any right to an independent opinion re the economy of medieval europe. And yet I know leftists (marxist and non-marxist) who will read a handful of tertiary or quaternary sources, form a hard and fast "leftist" position grounded only in those sources (which have to be more or less random picks since they are so plentiful), and set themselves up as independent authorities on the "left" or "anti-establishment" position on the life of pre-industrial peoples.
The knowledge of specialists is not all that easily available to non-specialists, and even understanding some material from (for example) genetics does _not_ qualify the non-geneticist to propound greatly on the the social role of genetics. There are all too many traps involved. For example, all that I know or think I know about the _Odyssey_ could easily be undercut by a single article in some obscure specialist journal, which could change the context for understanding of every feature of the poem.
Carrol