Plutarch and the Naming of Greek Women

Abstract

Recently David Schaps' has devoted an interesting discussion to the fact that the Greek orators studiously avoided mentioning the names of women. The only exception they made was for of shady reputation, women connected with the speaker's opponent and dead women.2 The avoidance was part of the general muting of women in Athenian society, as John Gould3 has now demonstrated in a seminal article on the position of Athenian women, and this reluctance to mention the name of any living respectable woman continued to exist at least until 260 B.C., as can be shown from Xenophon, Plato and comedy.4 Even though, then, it was permitted to mention the names of dead women, we may well wonder whether this in practice would have happened very often. If women's names were not mentioned when they were alive-who would remember them when they were dead? The avoidance of the names must have often amounted to a damnatio memoriae, as can be well illustrated by some passages in Plutarch's Lives. Concerning Solon's mother Plutarch5 knows only that according to Heraclides Ponticus (F 147 Wehrli2) she was a cousin of the mother of Pisistratus. In the case of Demosthenes, Plutarch (Dem. 4.2) wonders whether his maternal grandmother was a barbarian, as Aeschines (3.171) asserted, but he is unable to adduce any evidence to solve the problem, even though she may well have been Athenian.6 In fact, in his biography of Alcibiades (Alc. 1.2) he notes with apparent exasperation that whereas even the name of Alcibiades' nurse is