Women of Legend
Women of Legend: Ideal and Dangerous
The myths of ancient Greece and Rome are full of extraordinary women — figures whose stories were told and retold because they embodied ideas their cultures found compelling, troubling or both. These legendary women were rarely straightforward. Some represented the ideal: the faithful wife, the devoted mother. Others embodied danger: the sorceress, the adulteress, the woman who stepped beyond her proper boundary. Together they reveal a great deal about what Greek and Roman men feared, admired and expected from women.
Pandora: The First Woman
The Greek poet Hesiod tells the story of Pandora in his poem Works and Days. According to Hesiod, the gods created Pandora as a gift — but a treacherous one. Zeus was angry that Prometheus had stolen fire to give to humanity, so he sent Pandora as punishment. The gods each gave her a quality: beauty, charm, cunning, deceit. She was sent to live with men, carrying a large storage jar (in Greek, a pithos). When she opened it, all the evils, sicknesses and hardships that now afflict humankind poured out into the world. Only Hope remained trapped inside.
Hesiod describes Pandora in deeply ambivalent terms. She is “beautiful evil,” a figure whose loveliness conceals destruction. His account reflects a widespread ancient Greek tendency to blame women for human suffering. For the exam, it is important to move beyond the narrative and ask: what does this myth tell us about how men viewed women? Pandora is passive, curious and dangerous — a combination that justified the supervision and seclusion of real women in Athens.
Hesiod’s Works and Days, lines 53–105, is the prescribed literary source for Pandora. The jar (pithos) she opens releases evils into the world; only Hope remains inside. Pandora embodies the Greek view that women are “beautiful evil” — attractive but destructive.
Helen of Troy
Helen was said to be the most beautiful woman in the world, the daughter of Zeus and Leda. Her abduction — or elopement — with the Trojan prince Paris caused the Trojan War, which resulted in the deaths of thousands and the destruction of a great city. The prescribed literary source for Helen is Euripides’ play Helen, lines 1–67, in which Helen herself speaks. In Homer’s Iliad, Book 3 (lines 121–180), she appears in a scene known as the “viewing from the walls” (the teichoscopia). Lines 121–180 show the goddess Iris visiting Helen in her chamber and leading her to the Scaean Gate; from line 181 onwards, Helen identifies the Greek leaders — Agamemnon, Odysseus, Ajax and Idomeneus — to the Trojan king Priam as they watch from the walls.
Helen is a complex figure. In the Iliad, Homer shows her as deeply conflicted: she condemns herself and longs to return home. In Euripides’ Helen, the playwright invents a radical version of the story in which Helen never went to Troy at all — only her phantom did — and she spent the whole war faithfully waiting in Egypt. This version completely reverses her reputation. The contrast between the two literary treatments is important: it shows how ancient authors could use myth to explore different ideas about female virtue, guilt and agency.
Ancient sources disagree sharply. In Homer’s Iliad, Helen acts with some autonomy but also expresses remorse — she calls herself a “dog” and wishes she had died. In Euripides’ Helen, she is entirely innocent: it is a phantom, not the real Helen, who went to Troy. This version was unusual in antiquity and would have surprised an ancient audience expecting the familiar version. The key point for analysis is that male authors controlled Helen’s story: even her innocence was invented by a man. The Hegeso Stele, a grave relief in Athens dating to around 400 BC, shows a very different kind of woman — the quiet, domestic ideal. The contrast with Helen is striking.
Medea: The Dangerous Foreign Woman
Medea is one of the most terrifying women in Greek myth. The prescribed literary source is Euripides’ play Medea, lines 1–38 and 1293–1389. Medea is a foreigner — a princess from Colchis on the Black Sea — and a powerful sorceress. She used her magic to help Jason win the Golden Fleece and sailed back to Greece with him, killing her own brother to prevent pursuit. When Jason abandons her to marry a Greek princess, Medea’s revenge is catastrophic: she kills their children to punish him most deeply.
The opening of the play (lines 1–38) is narrated by the Nurse, who sets out Medea’s misery and her dangerous, passionate nature. The ending (lines 1293–1389) shows Medea escaping in a chariot drawn by dragons, unpunished. For an Athenian audience, Medea concentrated every fear about foreign women: she was not bound by the social rules that kept Athenian women in their place. She acted independently, used magic and destroyed her own family. The Flight of Medea Krater in the Cleveland Museum of Art, a red-figure vessel dating to around 400 BC, depicts Medea in her dragon chariot, the dead children visible below — confirming that this was a well-known and disturbing image.
Roman authors inherited Greek myths but shaped them to reflect Roman values. The emphasis in Roman storytelling tends to fall more heavily on virtue (virtus), duty (pietas) and service to the state. A dangerous Greek figure like Medea (a foreigner who kills her children) maps onto Roman anxiety about powerful foreign women, a theme that would resurface in the Roman portrayal of Cleopatra. By contrast, Roman legend produced the story of the Sabine Women — a very different treatment of women caught in conflict between loyalties.
The Sabine Women and Tarpeia
The Sabine Women feature in Livy’s History of Rome, 1.9–10 and 1.12–13, one of the prescribed literary sources. The early Romans, all men, lacked wives. Romulus invited the neighbouring Sabines to a festival and seized their women. The Sabine men went to war to reclaim them — but by then the women had settled, married and had children. In Livy’s account, the Sabine women themselves rush between the two armies and plead for peace, declaring that they would rather die than see their fathers and husbands kill each other. Their intervention ends the war.
This myth celebrates a Roman female ideal: self-sacrifice, loyalty to family and the ability to maintain harmony. These women are powerful, but their power is exercised in the service of the community rather than for personal gain. Contrast this with Tarpeia, whose betrayal of Rome for personal reward made her a figure of shame — her name lives on in the Tarpeian Rock, the cliff from which condemned traitors were thrown.
The Sabine Women (Livy 1.9–10, 1.12–13) and Tarpeia represent contrasting Roman attitudes: the Sabine Women’s self-sacrificing intervention models ideal womanhood, while Tarpeia’s treachery for personal gain models the dangerous, selfish woman to be condemned.
Lucretia: The Roman Ideal
The story of Lucretia appears in Livy, 1.57–59. She was renowned for her virtue: while the Roman princes were carousing during the siege of Ardea, Lucretia alone was found at home, weaving with her slave women. This visual image — the weaving wife at home — is the Roman ideal of female virtue made flesh. When Sextus Tarquinius raped her, Lucretia told her father and husband, then killed herself, saying no unchaste woman should ever use her as a precedent. Her death triggered the expulsion of the kings and the founding of the Roman Republic. Lucretia’s story is therefore political as well as moral: her body becomes the site on which Roman political identity is built. The prescribed visual source Pudicitia (Pudicizia) in the Vatican Museum shows a draped female figure whose posture — head slightly bowed, cloak drawn across the body — conveys modesty and self-concealment, the physical embodiment of the virtue Lucretia exemplified.