The wisdom of Semonides fr. 7

Abstract

Semonides fr. 7, for a long time one of the poor relations of archaic literature, has recently been basking in the attentions of both literary critics and historians. A comic catalogue of the types of women created by Zeus, each of them derived from an animal, insect or inanimate material and nearly all of them vicious, it has been connected with Hesiod's myth of Pandora and other stories in which women are seen as dangerously and subversively different from men. Along with other invective iambic poetry, it has been sited in the symposium, where scholars have suggested that the exclusion and degradation of women helped to create and reinforce male solidarity. Since as individuals men often like women, and need wives, and their sympotic invective therefore cannot be taken too seriously, readers have highlighted the poem's use of irony and paradox.In what follows I hope to add something to our reading of both the poem and its context. I shall try to show that Semonides' picture of women and male–female relations is more complex than has been assumed, and that we can place it in a tradition of moralizing literature which is concerned not just to pillory aspects of its world, but to explore its problems and stimulate people to think about them.