BACHBAROVA 2013 Io and The Gorgon

Io and the Gorgon: Ancient Greek Medical and Mythical Constructions
of the Interaction Between Women’s Experiences of Sex and Birth
Mary R. Bachvarova
Arethusa, Volume 46, Number 3, Fall 2013, pp. 415-446 (Article)
Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: 10.1353/are.2013.0022
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IO AND THE GORGON: ANCIENT GREEK
MEDICAL AND MYTHICAL CONSTRUCTIONS
OF THE INTERACTION BETWEEN WOMEN’S
EXPERIENCES OF SEX AND BIRTH
MARY R. BACHVAROVA
I explore here ancient Greek representations of the interaction between

women’s experiences of sex and their experience of childbirth, focusing
in particular on how experiences of nonconsensual sex or anxiety about
sexual activities affected women’s experiences of and thoughts about sex
and birth—or, at least, how the interaction between women’s experiences
of sex and birth was framed by ancient Greek men as shown by two dispa-
rate sets of texts. Gynecological treatises tell us about male constructions
of physical and psychiatric sufferings centered around the reproductive
functions of women—sufferings we could interpret as brought on by sex-
ual anxiety and shame. Also important are certain tragedies: Aeschylus’s
Suppliants and Euripides’ Ion and Electra, I argue, allude to commonly
held notions about the roots of specific gynecological disorders in women’s
attitudes to sexual experiences.
In this exploration, I am guided by the insight of the medical
anthropologist and psychiatrist Arthur Kleinman (1988.26): “Local cultural
systems provide both the theoretical framework of myth and the established
script for ritual behavior that transform an individual’s affliction into a sanc-
tioned symbolic form for the group.”1 In other words, not only did myth
follow culturally sanctioned storylines for psychiatric illnesses, but so did
1 I use the following editions unless otherwise noted: for Aeschylus, West 1990; for Eurip-
ides Ion and Electra, Diggle 1981; for Hippocrates, Littré 1839–61; for Soranus, Burguière,
Gourevitch, and Malinas 1988–2000. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
415
Arethusa 46 (2013) 415–446 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

416 Mary R. Bachvarova
medical theory, and we can use the two together to better understand how
the fears of ancient Greek women concerning sexual experiences and the
physiological effects of those fears were understood by their male contem-
poraries. My focus here is an area of women’s experiences for which trag-
edy can be fruitfully used to supplement the medical writings: the effect of
sexual guilt and negative sexual experiences on conception and childbirth,
and the intertwining of fear and anticipation when facing birth and marriage.
I do not intend to argue that the medical texts we have were known
to or used by contemporary women, although the male lens through which
we can gain a glimpse of women’s ailments would also have shaped women’s
own view of their suffering. However, they do refract for modern scholars
the anxieties of female patients by showing us culturally recognized ways
of expressing them. Moreover, I do not argue that tragedy directly influ-
enced, promoted, or shaped the fears of a putative female audience. Rather,
it presents to us motifs and themes that its audience—male or female—
would have recognized as alluding to the process of birth and its attendant
anxieties. Thus we can access, although not directly, some elements of the
sexual experiences of ancient Greek women through their representations
on stage and in medical texts.
I first show that marriage, death, and childbirth shared a series of
physically and socially determined attributes. I then elucidate how negative
experiences or fear of sex were then, and are still now, thought to inter-
act with the experience of childbirth, bringing in modern medical discus-
sions and cross-cultural examples from African theories about the causes
of gynecological illnesses to Jamaican techniques for easing childbirth. I
go on to examine the use of the story of Io by the Danaids in Aeschylus’s
Suppliants who suffer from an intense fear of marriage that Aeschylus
connects to fear of childbirth by layering birth imagery onto the theme
of forced marriage. I then explore the symbolism of Perseus slaying the
Gorgon, arguing that she can be seen as a woman who was the target of a
god’s sexual interest (like Io) and then died in childbirth. Finally, I apply my
conclusions to analyses of both the plot of Euripides’ Ion, in which Creusa’s
traumatic rape has rendered her infertile and murderous, and the murder
by her own children of the adulterous Clytemnestra in Euripides’ Electra.
The connection between marriage and death in Greek tragedy
and in modern Balkan countries has been much studied,2 and scholars
2 Alexiou 2002.120–22 was one of the first to discuss the connection between marriage
and death in modern Greece by examining wedding laments. Seaford 1987 discussed
the connection in tragedy in detail (see 110–19 on Suppliants) and was followed by the
Ancient Greek Medical and Mythical Constructions 417
interested in the life of women in the ancient world have dwelt on the dan-
gers of childbirth. As Euripides had Medea say: “I’d rather take up a posi-
tion beside my shield three times than give birth once” (Medea 250–51).3
But it has gone unnoticed that many of the parallels observed between
marriage and death in tragedy4 apply to birth as well. In fact, fear and
anticipation of childbirth, the purpose of marriage, must have affected a
Greek woman’s feelings about marriage (Bachvarova 2001.66–67). The
parallels between birth, death, and marriage in ancient Greece were both
physically and culturally conditioned. The similarities between birth and
death rituals centered particularly on the notion of blood pollution, each
rite of passage involving anointing, washing, undressing, dressing, and a
period and place of pollution. Like the parturient mother and the corpse,
the bride underwent a ritual washing and anointing, depicted on many
wedding vases. She was dressed in elaborate clothing, including a spe-
cial girdle she would wear until the birth of her first child. She began to
undress when she first unveiled herself to the groom. After continuing to
disrobe by undoing her girdle, she underwent a painful defloration (an act
which required ritual purification), often at the hands of a total stranger,
in a bedroom guarded on the outside by the groom’s friends.5
even more in-depth discussion of Rehm 1994. Other important discussions of parallels
between marriage and death in ancient Greece include Blundell 1995.123 and Redfield
1982.188–91. More recent work on the Balkan custom of equating marriage with death
includes Danforth 1982, especially 74–90, on Greece, and Kligman 1988 on Romania. On
the trauma of marriage for the ancient Greek bride and her family, see Demand 1994.14–15
and Stewart 1995.83–84.
3 See Blundell 1995.110, 1998.49; Demand 1994.71–86, 121; and Loraux 1981.44.
4 On which see, especially, Seaford 1987.106–07.
5 Pollution: see Stears 1998.117–20, Cole 1992.107–11, and Parker 1983.32–73, 336, 352–55.
The cathartic laws of Cyrene prescribe purification for the bride (SEG 9.72.75–76). Bathing:
Porph. Antr. 12, E. Ph. 347 with scholion, Thuc. 2.15.5, Call. frag. 65 Pfeiffer. See Larson
2001.100, 108–12, 115; Reeder 1995b.161–63, 174; Garland 1990.220; and Lloyd-Jones
1957.567. The name of the lost Aeschylean tragedy Semele or Hydrophoroi possibly comes
from the ceremonious washing the baby receives (Robertson 1983.154, note 24), but it
also might have evoked the bride’s bath. Bathing and anointing in labor: Soranus Gyn. 4.7.
Guarded by friends: Poll. 3.42 defines thurōros as “a friend of the groom who, standing
at the door, blocks the women from helping when the bride cries out,” and see Garland
1990.222. On the violence to the bride, see Calame 1999.121. Blundell 1995.120 points
out that the husband often came from the bride’s extended family, so she probably would
have had some acquaintance with him. Yet later on she does acknowledge: “It would not
be surprising if the experience were a traumatic one, especially since it preceded the loss
of her virginity to an older man who may have been almost a complete stranger to her”
(Blundell 1995.124, also see Golden 1990.75–76). That the loss of virginity was considered
a kind of death is brought out in the myth told by Servius (in Aen. 1.651) concerning the
youthful Hymenaios who was crushed beneath a falling wall on his wedding day, never
The experience of the parturient mother in ancient Greece repeated

many of the details of her wedding night. She probably gave birth in the
women’s area, in an inner chamber out of sight of strangers and bad influ-
ences.6 She removed her girdle and loosened her hair, stripping off at
least some of her clothes.7 The physical trauma of losing her virginity was
repeated in a far more intense form by the physical trauma of birth. This
painful and uncertain process resulted—if she were lucky—in a permanent
change of status (from numphē to gunē8) that could win her much praise
(if the child was a boy). If she were unlucky, then either the baby or she
herself could die (Demand 1994.21–22, Blundell 1998.35).
The Roman gynecologist Soranus (second century C.E.) acknowl-
edged in his Gynecology (our only good source on ancient obstetrics) that
the mother’s psychological state was a key factor in the success or failure
of the labor (just as it was in conception), for among the factors inhibiting
birth, besides physical narrowness, are “sorrow or fear” (Gyn. 4.4–6). In
his most detailed discussion, he notes (Gyn. 4.2.59–69):
And in fact difficult labor occurs because of the one in

labor whenever the cause is in the psychic function or in
the vital one, or rather in the body; and it is <in> the vital
function whenever there is sorrow, joy, fear, cowardice,
feebleness, anger <or> excessive softness (for some are
to be seen again (pace Sissa 1990a.106–08). He was lamented on the wedding day, just
as laments were sung for the bride herself by her family and friends.
6 See Garland 1990.61. Cross-cultural examples of shutting a laboring woman in a room to
protect her from evil influences: pre-modern France (Gélis 1991.97) and Malaysia (Lader-
man 1982.87).
7 Loosening girdle in birth: Pi. Ol. 6.39, Call. Del. 209, 222. The girdle-loosening imagery
in both marriage and birth is noted by King 1983.121 and Loraux 1981.45. I have sug-
gested that the scene in the Suppliants in which the Danaids strip off their veils (112–33)
conflates the removal of both the bride’s veil and the headdress of the laboring woman
(Bachvarova 2001.78–79). The term optēria referred to gifts given to commemorate either
the first glimpse of the bride by the groom or the first sight of the baby: Eur. Ion 1127,
Call. Dian. 74, Nonn. D. 5.139, Hsch. s.v. optēria, and Poll. 2.59, 3.36. See LSJ ad loc.,
Redfield 1982.193–94, Golden 1990.23, and Garland 1990.94. Another parallel between
birth, death, and marriage was the ritual cry that marked the occasion. As Reeder 1995b.195
points out: “It was women who ushered the deceased out of the world through a funerary
ritual marked by anguished cries analogous to those that accompanied childbirth.” For
the ololygē at a birth, see hAp 119. McLure 1999.54 provides a detailed discussion with
references to classical authors. Sappho 44.31 mentions the ritual cry eleleu performed by
married women during the wedding procession.
8 The meaning of these terms has been much discussed. See, for example, King 1983.11–13.
self-indulgent and don’t exert effort); and it occurs because

of inexperience <so as not> to work with the birth-pain;
and it occurs through suspension of reasoning, for the pain
becomes enfeebling—but thus someone would say about
apoplectic and lethargic women; difficult labor also occurs
through the notion of not having conceived.
The final comment made by Soranus is particularly revealing:

when might a woman imagine that she was not pregnant? Although there
are modern cases of women in long-term relationships who did not realize
they were pregnant until they went into labor, this situation would arise
most commonly, due to ignorance or denial, with unmarried girls who had
been raped or seduced.
Fear of giving birth may have colored a Greek woman’s attitude
towards sex. Certainly Aristotle (GA 774a 5–6) commented that over-sexed
women were cured after they had given birth several times. While he says
this is because they have got rid through childbearing of an excess of the
menstrual fluid that he sees as analogous to a man’s seminal fluid, we might
consider this phenomenon, if real, to be evidence that fear of the process
of birth, once personally experienced, could deter women from getting
pregnant, as Lesley Ann Dean-Jones (1994.134–35, with note 79) suggests.
In turn, when sex was painful and anxiety-producing, anxiety about
surviving a painful, physically traumatic labor and producing a healthy
son may have been added to the negative feelings about the sexual act that
began the pregnancy. According to studies of modern women, women who
do not enjoy intercourse or feel uncomfortable about their sexuality are
likely to have more difficulties in labor because of the similarities between
intercourse and birth in the involuntary responses to sexual excitement and
the throes of labor (Newton 1955, Kitzinger 1985.78, 209–18).
In addition, anxiety and guilt about an illicit sexual experience
that resulted in pregnancy could also cause a difficult birth. If she had
engaged in illicit sex, whether willing or unwilling, either way she was
ruined, as the normal term for the act, phtheirein, “ruin,” makes clear.9
Indeed, according to the Hippocratic theory that the woman provided seed
like the man, some process analogous to orgasm caused the seed’s emis-
sion (Hp. Genit. 4.7.474–76, ed. Lonie 319–20). For those ancient Greeks
9 See Scafuro 1990 and Rosivach 1998.13–15.

who believed that a woman needed to achieve orgasm in order to become

pregnant, pregnancy was evidence that a woman had enjoyed the act that
led to conception (Dean-Jones 1992.82–83),10 and she would not be believed
if she claimed that she had not been willing. This was stated by Soranus
(Gyn. 1.37–38) with reference to rape, although he distinguishes between
an instinctive desire for procreation and an intellectual disgust at the act.
Under these conditions, a girl would be likely to go to great lengths to
conceal the fact she was not a virgin, together with the results of such
contact. In fact, by late antiquity at least, there was actually some debate
among doctors over whether the hymen really existed (Sissa 1990a.110–17,
1990b.349–52).11 Thus the loss of a woman’s virginity only “happened” if
someone else found out or it was detected by indirect evidence, includ-
ing the woman becoming pregnant. The anxiety of the laboring woman
described by Soranus would have been exacerbated in ancient Greece by
the custom of exposing unwanted children, although it is unclear how com-
mon exposure of infants was in the ancient world.12
Cross-cultural evidence supports the suggestion that, in this situa-
tion, a woman could be expected to experience difficulties in labor. Sheila
Kitzinger (1978.89), a renowned expert on modern childbirth, suggests
that shame and guilt over past sexual sins or anger between husband and
wife can impede labor:
In many non-Western societies the psychological ele-

ment in some childbirth difficulties is understood and
techniques exist for encouraging better psychosomatic
coordination. In some African societies a woman having
a difficult labour is urged to confess her sins so that the
birth may proceed. The psychological impact of getting
rid of guilt may allow her to get on with her labour. These
techniques are based not only on ideas about the body,
10 [Aristotle] HA 10 636b states that the emission from both partners must be simultaneous.
Also see Rousselle 1993.27–30 and Dean-Jones 1994.153–60.
11 Hanson 1990.324–30 refutes some of the specifics of Sissa’s argument.
12 On exposure, see Garland 1990.86–93, with earlier references, who emphasizes that we
have no firm evidence of actual practice. The ceremony for acknowledging a child was the
amphidromia (Garland 1990.93–94, citing Hsch. and Suda, etc.). This custom theoretically
gave fathers and husbands the same level of control over the life and death of the child
as the mother. See Sourvinou-Inwood 1995.113, with earlier references, and Kitzinger
1978.98–99, 101 for modern parallels.
about health and sickness and dirt and cleanliness, but

also on concepts of good and evil. If the most disgusting
thing that a woman can do is break an incest taboo or
commit adultery, such acts committed during pregnancy
may endanger the life of the coming child, and so have
to be confessed and expiated. Among the Manus of New
Guinea, the husband and wife are exhorted to confess any
hidden anger they may feel against each other so that the
labour can proceed normally.
She further clarifies how a man’s support for his partner and
acknowledgment of his partner’s child can have a crucial effect on the
woman’s labor (Kitzinger 1978.89–90):
We have seen that it is generally accepted that every child

ought to have father, although the man who is a baby’s
social father may be quite different from the biological
father. In some societies, notably those disorganized by
slavery, men who are willing to accept the social respon-
sibilities of fatherhood are hard to come by.
In Jamaica delivery can be speeded by getting
the mother to sniff the sweaty shirt of the father of the
child. The point about this is that a large proportion of
babies in Jamaica are born to women who are not in a
stable union, and the most usual time for a man to decide
he has had enough and leave is just before or just after
the birth of the baby. Having his sweaty shirt around is
a fairly good sign that he is available to “response for”
the baby. Reminding the woman of her good fortune at a
critical point in the labour probably has a valuable psy-
chological effect and gives her fresh strength.
Similar concerns and cures can be found in both Greco-Roman

medical practice and myth, suggesting that our male authors are refract-
ing for us a real sense of anxiety about birth on the part of women that
was closely tied to anxiety about how the women got pregnant in the first
place. Thus Pliny (Nat. 28.9.42) advises: “The male from whom some
woman has conceived hastens parturition, if he should bind his belt on
her, having unbound it from himself, then untie it, with the incantation
added, that he has tied and he will untie, and then he goes away.”13 On the
mythical plane, Ovid’s Heroides 11, probably based on Euripides’ Aeolus,14
tells of the incestuous love between Canace and Macareus that results in a
pregnancy; while in labor, Canace is unable to bring forth the baby until
Macareus promises to marry her, even though he is her brother.
Undesired outcomes, on the other hand, were represented by
myths that illustrated the dangers of inappropriate behavior or explained
the motivations of supernatural beings who wished to injure the bride or
parturient mother. Such beings, symbolizing conflicts concerning sexuality
and the pressures of conflicting demands put on women, must be propiti-
ated in fertility rituals. I again present first a cross-cultural example: the
response of Ndembu women to the particular set of pressures that come
from their own marriage and childrearing practices, as described by Vic-
tor Turner (1995.12–13):
The Ndembu, who practice matrilineal descent combined

with virilocal marriage, live in small, mobile villages . . .
Since women return to their matrikin on divorce—and a
fortiori to their children resident among those kin—in
a very real sense, village continuity, through women,
depends upon marital discontinuity. But, while a woman
is residing with her husband with her young children, and
thus fulfilling the valid norm that a woman should please
him, she is not fulfilling an equally valid norm that she
should contribute children to the contemporaneous mem-
bership of her matrilineal village . . . Interestingly, it is
the shades of direct matrilineal kinswomen—own mothers
or own mothers’ mothers—that are held to afflict women
with reproductive disorders, resulting in temporary bar-
renness. Most of these victims are residing with their
husbands when divination decrees that they have been
caught with infertility by their matrilineal shades. They
13 Cross-cultural examples of the symbolic evoking of the father to aid a difficult labor by
applying the father’s clothes: MacDermott 1998.79, Gélis 1991.145, Jordan 1993.34; further
examples of sexual guilt causing problems in labor are found in Lefèber and Voorhoeve
1998.33.
14 This story is also mentioned by Plato (Lg. 838b) as an example of a heinous crime in the
eyes of the gods. See the discussion of Ovid’s sources in Reeson 2001.211–12.
have been caught, so Ndembu regularly say, because they

have “forgotten” those shades who are not only their direct
ascendants but also the immediate progenetrices of their
matrikin—who form the core membership of villages dif-
ferent from those of their husbands . . . The condition of
barrenness these shades bring about is considered to be
a temporary one, to be removed by performance of the
appropriate rites.
While Ndembu women feel themselves to be persecuted by the

ghosts of the women to whom they owe the greatest obligation to produce
children, in Greece, the ghosts of women who were unable to achieve the
telos of marriage, to produce a child, were held to afflict women with ste-
rility and haunt them (Johnston 1999.161–99). These terrifying Greek daim-
ones were unsatisfied spirits of women who died childless or in childbirth;
Gello, Lamia, and Mormo were, like the Gorgons, related to Near Eastern
divinities such as the child-killing demon Lamashtu.15
In addition, such spirits afflicted the virgins described in the Hip-
pocratic On Diseases of Virgins (8.466–70, trans. Demand 1994.96–97):
First about the so-called sacred disease, and about those

who are stricken, and about terrors, all that men fear
exceedingly so as to be out of their minds and to seem to
have seen certain daimons hostile to them . . . For from
such a vision many already are strangled, more women
than men; for the female nature is more fainthearted and
lesser. But parthenoi, for whom it is the time of marriage,
remaining unmarried, suffer this more at the time of the
going down of the menses. Earlier they do not suffer these
distresses, for it is later that the blood is collected in the
womb so as to flow away. Whenever then the mouth of the
15 Cf. Zenobius Prov. 3.3, explaining the mention of Gello in Sappho frag. 178; for Lamia,
see Duris FGrH 76 F 17 and D. S. 20.41; on Mormo, see Schol. Aristid. p. 41 Dindorf.
On Lamia and other such spirits, see Johnston 1999.161–99. On such beings in Mesopo-
tamia, see Scurlock 1991.153–59 and Wiggerman in Stol 2000.217ff. As in Greece, Meso-
potamian women who died before completing the telos of motherhood or marriage came
back as malevolent demons. Also see Gufler 2002, Burkert 1987.25–34, Goldman 1961,
and Hopkins 1961 on the evolution from Huwawa or Lamashtu to Medusa in pictorial
representations.
exit is not opened for it, and more blood flows in because
of nourishment and the growth of the body, at this time
the blood, not having an outlet, bursts forth by reason of
its magnitude into the kardia and diaphragm. Whenever
these are filled, the kardia becomes sluggish; then from
sluggishness comes torpor; then from torpor, madness . . .
From the kardia and the phrenes it runs back slowly, for
the veins are at an angle, and the part is critical and dis-
posed for derangement and mania. And whenever these
parts are filled, shivering with fever starts up quickly;
they call these fevers wandering. But when these things
are thus, she is driven mad by the violent inflammation,
and she is made murderous by the putrefaction, and she
is fearful and anxious by reason of the gloom, and stran-
gulations result from the pressure around the kardia,
and the spirit, distraught and anguished by reason of the
badness of the blood, is drawn toward evil. And another
thing, she addresses by name fearful things, and they
order her to jump about and to fall down into wells and
to be strangled, as if it were better and had every sort of
advantage. And whenever they are without visions, there
is a kind of pleasure that makes her desire death as if it
were some sort of good. But when the woman returns
to reason, women dedicate both many other things and
the most expensive feminine clothing to Artemis, being
utterly deceived, the soothsayers ordering it. Her deliver-
ance [is] whenever nothing hinders the outflow of blood.
But I myself bid parthenoi, whenever they suffer such
things, to cohabit with men as quickly as possible, for if
they conceive they become healthy.
As with the Ndembu women, the problem is resolved by mak-

ing propitiatory sacrifices to the appropriate spirits (a practice derided
by Hippocrates). As we will see, the symptoms described in the medical
treatise apply both to the cow-maiden Io and to her descendants the Dan-
aids. According to On Diseases of Women, a displaced uterus occurred
particularly with women who had not had children, did not experience their
menstrual period, and/or did not have sexual intercourse with a man, such
as virgins and young widows, because the uterus was empty, light, and dry
from the lack of intercourse.16 We can see here a conflation of the desire
for intercourse and the desire for children that is exploited by Plato in his
Symposium. In addition, we gain a glimpse into the way in which the suf-
fering of women was turned into a medically recognized syndrome paral-
leling a common mythical motif, for as M. R. Lefkowitz notes (1981.16):
“The womb in its wandering behaves like insane women in myth.”
As Dean-Jones argues (1994.108): “Since the reproductive years
were culturally defined as more problematic for women than the years before
and after, women were expected to (and perhaps did) experience biological
disorders during the transition into these years rather than the transition
out.” While Hippocrates saw immediate marriage, intercourse, and preg-
nancy as cures for diseases caused by the womb,17 a diagnosis once followed
without criticism by modern scholars, feminist scholars have questioned
the remedy.18 Lefkowitz asserts (1981.19–20): “According to what women
themselves say, it is not sexual desire, but ignorance, fear, and resentment
of their prescribed role in life that makes them ‘mad.’”19 It is true that it is
mythical women whom she goes on to cite, such as Medea, quoted earlier,
and Sophocles’ Procne, the abused wife of Tereus, who uttered a program-
matic statement of the married woman’s lot (frag. 583 Radt):
16 See, for example, Hp. Mul. 1.2, 2.127.

17 I mostly avoid the term “hysteria” in this article, which King 1998.205–46 shows was not
used in Greek medicine. In addition, Demand 1994.97–98, 103–07 argues that the disease
as described in On Diseases of Virgins is not the “wandering womb,” noting that this ill-
ness can strike men too (1994.98–99), as does Lefkowitz 1981.12, note 3. Also see King
1983.113–23. On diseases and mental illnesses caused by the womb, see also Blundell
1995.100–01, 1998.24–25, 46, Demand 1994.11, Sissa 1990a.44–45, and Lefkowitz
1981.12–25. I have already discussed the similarities between the Danaids’ symptoms and
diseases caused by the womb in Bachvarova 2001.67–68.
18 Ancient Greek women were the subject of medical theories that attributed all medical
problems to a gynecological source, but, on the other hand, aimed to enhance their repro-
ductive abilities. These are two of the reasons for the oft-repeated cure that a woman
should engage in frequent intercourse with her husband (Dean-Jones 1994.108). The con-
nection between intercourse and over-all health for females is also discussed by Garland
1990.17, citing Hp. Genit. 4, and Hanson 1990.316–20. Hanson 1992.57 points out that
the connection is no longer valid for Soranus, who advocates virginity and abstaining
from intercourse.
19 She is disputing Simon’s (1978.238–70) Freudian analysis of the causes of “hysteria.”
Demand 1994.103–07 also argues against the “male perspective” put forth by Simon that
“what the girl really wanted was attention, respite from work, a quick marriage, and sex.
He overlooks the possibility that the illness resulted from fear of the approaching changes
rather than desire for them” (106). See further King 1998.220–21 on the flaws in Simon’s
reasoning.
But now I am nothing, separated (from my natal fam-

ily); but often I looked upon woman’s nature (phūsis) in
this way, that we are nothing. As girls we live, I think,
the sweetest life of humans in our father’s house; for
ignorance always raises children happily. But, when our
sense develops and we have fully reached maturity, we
are shoved out and sold away from our paternal gods and
the ones who raised us, some to strangers (xenous), others
to barbarians, some to homes without happiness, others
to abusive ones. And, these things, after a single night
yokes us, it is necessary to praise and deem to be good.
But extreme as the case of Procne was: married to a barbaric Thra-

cian who had sexual intercourse with her sister and then cut out her tongue,
the fact that such words were put into the mouths of tragic heroines shows
that some segment of the male population of ancient Greece recognized
how difficult married life could be for their womenfolk.
In addition, the psychosomatic illness described by Hippocrates
can be connected to conflicting requirements to be pure and virginal
yet fertile and therefore polluting. The need on the part of the bride to
be both chaste and seductive (but only to her husband) exacerbated her
difficulties, as has been argued by Robert Garland (1990.56) and James
Redfield (1982). Ideally, it was the husband’s powers of persuasion that
enabled a woman’s difficult transition from sexually inactive to sexually
active. Thus Peithō, Persuasion, was one of the deities of marriage (Bux-
ton 1982.35–36, 76–78, 87),20 but there was slippage between persuasion
and force, just as there was slippage between marriage and rape or abduc-
tion. Other attempts to mediate the transition for women relied on a more
nakedly coercive approach through myth and ritual, portraying the virtue
of the mythic heroine not as decisive action but rather as endurance and
self-sacrifice (Lefkowitz 1981.1–10, 1995),21 a message pointedly ignored
by the Danaids in Aeschylus’s Suppliants.
We turn now to the first of our case studies of tragedies that refract
the connection between attitudes towards sex and attitudes towards birth:
20 Calame 1999.116–21 discusses the role of erotic desire in marriage for women.
21 As Robson 1997.77–78 comments, the “bestial rape” so frequent in Greek myth repre-
sents “the fears of girls on the verge of marriage,” and the myth’s happy ending serves a
“didactic” purpose, teaching girls to accept their role in Greek society.
the Suppliants, the only extant play of its tetralogy. It opens with the fifty
Danaids proclaiming they have fled to Argos under the guidance of their
father Danaus to escape marriage to their cousins, the Aegyptids. Throw-
ing themselves on the mercy of King Pelasgus, they persuade him that they
do have a right to claim Argive protection through their ancestor, the cow-
maiden Io, an Argive princess who had fled to Egypt pursued by Hera’s
gadfly where she gave birth to a son of Zeus by the god’s healing touch and
breath. They are thus returning to their ancestral homeland. Pelasgus gives
way before the girls’ threats to pollute Argos by hanging themselves from
the statues of the gods with their girdles and persuades his people to give
them asylum. Then the cousins’ representative, an aggressive and hybristic
herald, appears and attempts to drag the girls off, but he is stopped just
in time by the return of Pelasgus and a troop of guards, and the play ends
with the girls having been given the status of metics and the land prepar-
ing for war against the Aegyptids.22
The Danaids’ agitation reaches its height after the news arrives
that the Aegyptids have been sighted. As the herald of the Aegyptids and
his men approach, the maidens sing a stasimon that grows ever more fran-
tic (Supp. 784–99):
The evil no longer may be shunned. My dear heart shivers,

black-complexioned. The sightings of my father seized me;
I am going out of my mind with fear (oikhomai phobōi).
I would rather meet my fate in a knotted halter before
an abominable man touches this skin. Before that, may
Hades rule me, dead.
Whence might there be an airy throne for me on
which snow becomes wet clouds, or a slippery, unnoticed,
lonely-minded, beetling rock for vultures, avoided even
by goats, witnessing my deep dive, before I encounter a
murdering marriage, doing violence to my heart?
The Danaids threaten to kill themselves in the two ways expected of

virgins in need of immediate marriage according to On Diseases of Virgins:
hanging and jumping into water (King 1998.75–98). While in On Diseases
22 For recent analyses of the play with full bibliography, see Bachvarova 2009 and (with dif-
fering conclusions on key points not relevant to this article), Bednarowski 2010, 2011.
of Virgins, the virgins throw themselves into wells, the Danaids, as they
watch the approach of their cousins from the sea, fantasize jumping into
the ocean from a cliff. Their threat to use their girdles to hang themselves
(154–60, 457–65) also alludes to the wedding night and to childbirth, two
occasions when the girdle was loosed. In fact, as Helen King (1998.28–29,
83–84) discusses, hanging inverts bloody rape, since the vagina and throat
were considered connected as if by a tube.23 The strangling also mimics
one of the symptoms of a displaced uterus.24 Like the patients described by
the Hippocratic On Diseases of Virgins, the Danaids are shivering, wan-
dering, murderous, and suffer from hallucinations, imagining the Egyptian
herald who comes to fetch them to be a spider, a snake, and a nightmare
(887–88, 895). The description of their hearts as “black-complexioned”
(kelainokhrōn) draws on medical terminology (Dumortier 1935.5), and, in
fact, their dark skin (119 = 130, 154–55) and barbaric, inarticulate speech
(119 = 130, 877ff.) mimic other symptoms of a uterus in need of impreg-
nation as described elsewhere in the Hippocratic corpus (Mul. 1.2, 2.127),
for there it is stated that as the uterus moves towards the liver, the patient
shivers and wanders, her skin darkens (hē khroiē pelidnē ginetai), and she
chokes and becomes inarticulate.
How widespread was the knowledge of the medical theories pre-
served for us in the Hippocratic corpus is difficult to say, but it certainly
seems likely that the behavior of the Danaids was meant to remind the
audience of the culturally defined disease characteristic of girls on the
verge of marriage as described in On Diseases of Virgins and Diseases of
Women—a disease related to pressure to marry, whether we see marriage
as a cure (as the ancients evidently did) or a cause. Indeed, Aeschylus’s
Suppliants as a whole has been interpreted as an extended exploration
of the theme of marriage in the light of the heightened social pressures
on Athenian women to perform as childbearers, which must have only
increased the complexity of their mixed fear and anticipation as they
looked forward to marriage. Many scholars have pointed out that the rise
of democracy in Athens meant a decrease in the power of women as the
old genos-based system, in which women were able to wield power in the
23 Thus the uterus could be lured upwards or driven downwards by substances placed in
the mouth or in front of the nose (for example, Hp. Mul. 2.146, 3.214, 219, 230), and if
menses were blocked, a woman might bleed from the nose (Arist. GA 727a). See King
1998.28, with earlier references.
24 See King 1998.225–26 on pnix.
outside world through their authority within the family, was replaced by
a polis system in which the state assumed ever greater control over the
issues of legitimacy and inheritance. Furthermore, because the purpose of
marriage in general was reproduction, wedlock impinged on the concerns
of the Athenian state insofar as it was in the interests of the democracy
to optimize the number of healthy oikoi and well-off citizens who could
contribute to its prosperity as a whole. Thus the inheritance law of Solon
required an epiklēros (“heiress” or orphan girl without brothers or sons)
to marry a relative in order to keep the property in the family (Plu. Sol.
20.2–3), and the Athenian state felt compelled to interfere in private fam-
ily life to the extent that the man who married an epiklēros was required
by law to engage in intercourse with her once a month (Plu. Sol. 20.4). In
these arrangements, there seems to be little thought for the feelings of the
women involved. As Roger Just puts it (1989.99): “Women played a role
integral to the economic transference and kinship solidarity of the polis;
but their role was nevertheless entirely passive and always subordinate to
the interests of men.”25
The Danaids were potential epiklēroi who should have married
their cousins according to Athenian law yet have fled from their bridegrooms
to Argos demanding protection as suppliants (Thomson 1971, 1972.289).
Ironically, Danaus seems to be playing on their fears and encouraging them
rather than allaying them and persuading the girls to accept their marriage
as a good Greek father should have (Sommerstein 1996.146).26 It has been
argued back and forth whether the Danaids refuse marriage in general,
are against endogamous marriage, or are against marrying their cousins
25 More on this revolution and its effects on women in Vernant 1990.55–77, Just 1989.95–104,
with earlier references, and Stewart 1995.85–86. Just 1989.40–66 discusses the legisla-
tion concerning epiklēroi and legitimate citizens in Athens. He compares the situation in
which Medea finds herself to that of the wife of Euboulides in D. 57.41, divorced in order
that her husband might marry an epiklēros. Medea, because she is a foreigner, could not,
according to Athenian law, produce legitimate heirs for Jason, and he therefore would be
justified in divorcing her in order to marry the daughter of Creon (Just 1989.103). Also
see Seaford 1990 in a discussion of the connection between the stories of Euripidean
tragedy and the Athenian legal code (155–71). More details on marriage, inheritance, and
the legal treatment of Athenian women are found in Sealey 1990.12–49. See also Cantar-
ella 1987.47–48, with earlier references, and Blundell 1995.116–19. When in 451 B.C.E.,
Athens required that all citizens be born from legitimate marriages of legitimate offspring
of citizens (Ath. Pol. 26.4), all Athenian marriages became in effect endogamous, and an
individual’s desires were further subordinated to those of the state (Seaford 1994.214–16).
26 See Seaford 1987.119, who shows that the Danaids’ situation was one that spoke to the
fears of the ancient Greek woman.
because they dislike them. The ambiguity is to some degree a deliberate

choice on the part of Aeschylus, and it may be that Danaus himself was
attempting to prevent his daughters from marrying anyone at all, if he had
learned in the previous play of an oracle that predicted that he would be
killed if his daughters married, as some scholars now argue.27 In any case,
the important point here is that the maidens themselves repeatedly accuse
their cousins of hybris (Supp. 81, 104, 426, 487, 528, 817, 880–81), and the
Aegyptids are portrayed as excessively aggressive, making no attempt to
gently persuade the girls. Rather, they rely on the use of force (873–910),
which the audience would have perceived as less than ideal, at the least.
Thus it is tempting to surmise that hysteria was a disease that had
achieved a certain salience in the Athenian community at this time and
that Aeschylus was taking part in a conversation about Athenian women,
their role, and how they could best be persuaded to conform to it. Cer-
tainly, Aeschylus was indulging his well-known interest in medical theory
(Dumortier 1935) in order to enhance a set of parallels and oppositions
between male-female relations and relations in the public world of poli-
tics that centered on the contrast between the use of gentle persuasion and
aggressive and autocratic force. For Aeschylus, the marital relation was a
homology for the relation between leader and polis (Zeitlin 1996.123–71),
and thus he allows us another glimpse of an apparently common construc-
tion of women’s attitudes towards marriage, a construction in which their
fear could drive them to madness and in which they needed the interven-
tion of a caring and gentle man to help them complete the transition.
While Io could be diagnosed as suffering from the same medical
syndrome as that afflicting the Danaids (Lefkowitz 1981.12–34), there is
much more to Io’s story because it links fear of sexual contact with fear of
childbirth. I have previously argued that the story of Io as told in Aeschy-
lus’s Suppliants refracts a birth incantation known to his audience, basing
my conclusion on its similarities with the story of the pregnant cow-maiden
Geme-Sin that served as a birth incantation throughout the Near East and
on the presence of other birth incantation themes throughout the Suppliants.
27 Lévy 1985 discusses the inconsistent motivations of the Danaids: at some points they shy
away from marriage to their cousins as incestuous and, at others, exclaim they will not be
subordinate to any man. The oracle was first discussed by Sicherl 1986. The reorganization
of the trilogy, placing Suppliants second, is due to Rösler 1993. Also see the corroborat-
ing arguments of Sommerstein 1995. Counter-arguments are presented by Hose 2006 and
Garvie 2006.xvii–xix.
(We do know that both Greeks and Romans used birth incantations since
Plato Tht. 149c9–d2 and Ovid Met. 9.301, 10.511 tell us so, although no
birth incantations have been recorded as such.28) Io’s tale is a variant of a
commonly told story of a cow-maiden who has sexual intercourse with a
god in the form of a bull and undergoes a difficult labor only brought to a
successful conclusion by the intervention of the same god who impregnated
her. This story was extremely widespread in the Near East in the second
millennium B.C.E., and versions appeared in Sumerian, Akkadian, Ugaritic,
Hittite, Luwian, and Hurrian.29 The well-preserved Neo-Assyrian version
(1100–700 B.C.E.) and the second version of Io’s story, told in Suppliants
531–94 in a prayer to Zeus, show remarkable parallels, down to the con-
cealed sexual act, the uncontrollable movement of the cow, the horror of
the onlookers, the healing touch of the god that produces a healthy son, the
acknowledgment of the child, and the request, “as it happened before, so
may it happen again.” Io’s prolonged frantic journey before she gives birth,
rather than the banishment or other trials after the child is born that are
typical of other Greek myths involving pregnant parthenoi, is a reflection
of the myth’s origin in a birth incantation that served to guide the thoughts
of the birthing mother towards the desired result. 30
The major difference between the stories of Io and Geme-Sin,
possibly stemming from a major difference in women’s attitudes towards
the sexual act, is the way the conception and labor are described. In the
ode that tells Io’s story (524–99), conception and birth are simultane-
ous, both caused by the healing touch of Zeus—an improbable sequence
of events also followed in modern editions of Aeschylus’s Prometheus
Bound.31 However, the Danaids have already told the story once before in
the Suppliants in order to show King Pelasgus that they have an ancestral
connection to Argos; in this earlier version (295–307), the sexual act is,
in fact, mentioned, and the source of Hera’s anger is clearly caused by the
28 See Bachvarova 2001.50. See Morb. Sacr. 1 and Virg. for the negative opinions of Hip-
pocratic doctors about the use of incantations.
29 In fact, it was one of the most widespread stories in the ancient Near East, on par with
The Epic of Gilgamesh.
30 Von Weiher 1983.8 suggests that the Akkadian cow-maiden story was a story of an ille-
gitimate birth and that the birth was made difficult because of the woman’s sin, in which
case, this version of the cow-maiden story could also reflect a psychological reality or fear
of Mesopotamian women.
31 Editors have changed the text of PV 849 to create the same sequence; see Bachvarova
2001.58, note 14. The version in B. 19 follows the sequence of the Near Eastern incantations.
sexual liaison between Zeus and Io. Although the liaison was concealed
at first, Hera did find out and unsuccessfully attempted to prevent it by
turning Io into a cow, then posting a guard. The gadfly appears after Io
is already pregnant by the previous sexual contact and carries a threefold
symbolic load: Hera’s anger, the sexual penetration by Zeus, and the ines-
capable suffering of labor, which is only relieved by Zeus’s healing hand
acknowledging his fatherhood (313). The audience, having already heard
this version, must have been quite aware of the sanitizing change in the
second version when the Danaids call on Zeus, whom we might consider
Io’s rapist, to protect them from marriage to their Egyptian cousins whose
“inescapable sting” (110) they are fleeing.
Moreover, Io’s long flight pursued by the gadfly seems to allude
not only to the suffering of labor, but also to the propulsive power of lust,
affecting both the lover and the beloved, that was perceived by the Greeks
not as a source of pleasure but as a form of illness.32 It can be activated
without a person’s consent by, for example, an agōgē, a magic spell meant
to force the victim to flee willy-nilly from her father’s house into the arms
of the enchanter. Certainly the emphasis in an agōgē is not on the pleasure
felt by the girl but on the punishment and pain inflicted upon her by the
person in love with her (Winkler 1990.70–91, Faraone 1999.78–94). Not
only is Io suffering from the illness of erotic passion and thus forced to
flee from her home, but so are the Aegyptids, the suitors pursuing the Dan-
aids. Contrasted with this illness is that of the Danaids, who suffer from
an intense fear of marriage that causes them to threaten suicide.
In the Suppliants, the imagery associated with these illnesses is
conflated with the violent imagery associated with birth, the pain of which
was attributed by Greek doctors to the struggles of the baby to break free
(Demand 1994.19, Bachvarova 2001.73). Aeschylus’s purpose in introduc-
ing birth imagery, I argue, is to suggest that the Danaids’ fear of sex was
connected to a fear of childbirth. By so doing, he enhances the irony of
the behavior of the Danaids, for outside of the tragedy, the Danaids were
linked with the Inachid nymphs who oversaw marriage and birth, a paradox
32 See Faraone 1999.43–55, with earlier references, on love as an illness. Lefkowitz 1993.28
argues that the sexual act undergone by mythic heroines such as Io is not rape but seduc-
tion—the suffering comes afterwards in the period before she is acknowledged by the god,
and the transition, not the sexual act, is what disturbs the woman. However, her interpre-
tation does not work for Creusa’s story, in which the act itself is frightening and painful,
and this is what must be resolved after a period of suffering.
that I have suggested elsewhere was a major theme exploited in the tetral-
ogy as a whole.33
Finally, when Io’s descendants tell her story, they intend to per-
suade Zeus, her rapist and healer, to protect them from the advances of their
cousins, marriage to whom they consider worse than death. As Io’s story
ended in happy motherhood, the gambit must have seemed utterly unrea-
sonable and inappropriate to the original audience of the play, especially
as they knew the traditional outcome of the Danaids’ story: although forty-
nine of the maidens killed their bridegrooms on their wedding night, one,
Hypermnestra, refused to do so, and she and Lynceus went on to found a
new Argive dynasty. Thus just as Io’s suffering was resolved through the
birth of a son, so will Hypermnestra’s.
We turn now to how the story of the Gorgon was manipulated
in Euripides’ Ion to express the suffering of the sexually violated Creusa
and her resulting infertility. First of all, the story of Perseus and the Gor-
gon. Among its myriad thematized conflicts and fears were the concerns
of unwed mothers—but from a very different angle than that taken by
the Io myth. Medusa was related iconographically not only to the Meso-
potamian Lamashtu but also to the monster vanquished by Gilgamesh,
Huwawa, whose death was often portrayed in the visual arts and provided
the prototype for the scenes of Perseus killing Medusa. The grinning face
of Huwawa, the guardian of the Cedar Forest whose death was recounted
in The Epic of Gilgamesh, was radically reworked for the Greek audience,
for whom it represented not supernatural dangers lurking on the edge of
civilization overcome by men working together, but the fears inspired by
jealous women unable to attain motherhood who blighted other women’s
fertility (see the references in note 15 above).
The death of Medusa was merged into a standard Greek myth
about a girl who has illicit sex and bears a child. In such myths, the girl
exposes or attempts to conceal the child, then is found out by her father
with deadly consequences. Alternatively, she ends up vindicated by the
great deeds of the grown-up child that prove his divine parentage. The
girl’s parents’ characteristic refusal to believe that she was really raped
by a god lends insight into the pitiful attempts by Greek girls to cover up
33 On nymphs and their relationship to marriage and birth, see Larson 2001.3–60, 100–20.
On the Inachid nymphs, see Larson 2001.52–53. See Bachvarova 2009 for a full discus-
sion of ironic references to nymph cult in the Suppliants and in the tetralogy as a whole.
such acts (Seaford 1990.161), and the final vindication by the word of the
god represents their wish fulfillment.34
The story of Perseus and Medusa according to Pherecydes (FGrH
3 F11, 12) is focused on illicit impregnation and difficult gestation: Perseus’s
mother Danae (a descendant of Io) was imprisoned by her father Acrisius,
who had received an oracle that her son would kill him. Zeus, however,
managed to enter her chamber as a shower of golden rain and impregnate
her. Some time after Perseus was born, Danae and her son were found
out. Although she claimed Zeus was the father, Acrisius refused to believe
her and cast both into the sea inside a chest, an act filled with childbirth
imagery, for the pains of labor are often compared to the sea, and mother
and fetus are a boat weathering a storm, while the womb is a container
meant to open and close at fixed times to allow the conception, gestation,
and successful birth of a child.35 Perseus reached manhood on Seripus, but
the king Polydectes fell in love with Perseus’s mother and, in order to get
rid of the youth, arranged a potluck feast at which Perseus made the rash
promise to bring back the head of a Gorgon. Athena and Hermes aided the
hero, advising him to slay Medusa, the only mortal among the three Gor-
gon maidens, and to avoid looking at her paralyzingly ugly face by using
the reflection in his shield.
When Medusa was beheaded, says Apollodorus, agreeing with
Hesiod (Th. 278–81), Pegasus and Chrysaor, who were fathered by Posei-
don, leapt from her throat, the orifice serving as the egress for the off-
spring because, as noted earlier, a woman was imagined as having a tube
running from her vagina to her throat. Ovid (Met. 4.794–803) adds the
pitiful detail that she, once a beautiful girl with many suitors, was turned
into a monster by Minerva because the chaste goddess was offended that
Neptune violated (vitiasse) Medusa in her temple. Thus Medusa was, in
fact, a mother who died in labor, and the manner of her death refracted
fears felt by women pregnant from an illicit relationship, whether forced
or voluntary, although here it is her death that allows for the birth of her
children rather than being caused by it.
34 Seaford’s discussion of such story lines in Euripides (1990.159–60) looks at them from a
different angle from that presented here. He contrasts Homer’s versions, in which the god
as father solves the problem of finding a mate for a lone daughter while allowing her off-
spring to remain in her father’s house—a solution that no longer worked in Athens after
legitimacy required citizenship of both parents and legal marriage.
35 See Bachvarova 2001.73–76, 79–81 for a cross-cultural discussion. This motif is found in
the story of Auge as well (Str. 13.1.69).
Perseus’s offer to bring Medusa’s head to Polydectes represents a

curse on his marriage rather than a gift, and so it proved when he turned
Polydectes to stone with it. Perseus subsequently gave the head to Athena
to wear on her aegis as a symbol of terror, which also alluded to the god-
dess’s own state of perpetual virginity, unacceptable in a normal Greek
female.36 The aegis, in turn, was manipulated in a fertility ritual by the
Athenian priestess of Athena who threatened newly married women with
the head of Medusa, waving it and demanding alms.37
Among the many reasons the Gorgon face was useful to Eurip-
ides in Ion, the most obvious is its connection with Athena as the patron
of Athens, but I suggest that another strand in Euripides’ complex tapestry
of allusions is the devastating suffering of sexually abused women, for he
turned the story of the founder of the Ionic race into a tale of a parentless
boy’s difficult coming of age and a woman’s psychosomatic reaction to a
traumatic sexual experience. Ion, the progeny of Apollo and the Athenian
princess Creusa, was born secretly, exposed, but rescued by Apollo and
taken to his sanctuary at Delphi to grow up as a servant there. Creusa and
Ion finally meet, unaware of each other’s identity, when Creusa comes with
her husband to inquire from the oracle about their childlessness. Creusa’s
inability to talk about and resolve her trauma has prevented her from bear-
ing an heir to Xuthus, a foreigner brought in to marry the only child of the
Athenian king. This, at least, would have been the diagnosis of Soranus,
who lists sadness and fear among the many reasons a woman could be
sterile.38 As Garland (1990.90) puts it: “The case-histories of mothers like
. . . Kreousa as we encounter them in tragedy indicate that the exposing of
a child bequeathed the mother a legacy of bitterness and self-recrimination
which might endure her whole life.”
Creusa, in the extremity of her agony when she finds out that
Xuthus has been declared by the Delphic oracle to have a son (whom he
ironically assumes was the result of a sexual peccadillo in his youth), while
she will be left forever childless, finally reveals what happened to her so
36 On Athena’s aegis and the Gorgoneion, see Halm-Tisserant 1986, Hartswick 1993, and
Marx 1993.
37 See Suda s.v. aigis, ed. Cohn 1961.65 and the discussion in Robertson 1983.157, 162–63.
38 The comment is not preserved in the Greek text of Soranus, from which the section on
barrenness has been omitted (it should be at the end of Book III), but it is found in two
Latin paraphrases of the text, Caelius Amelianus 64 (ed. Drabkin and Drabkin 1951.93)
and the later Muscio 2.16 (51) (sixth cent. C.E.; see Rousselle 1993.40).
many years ago in an aria that vehemently expresses her anger, shame,
and suffering (Ion 860–906):
Oh soul, how can I keep silent? But how can I reveal

the concealed bedding, how can I be so bereft of shame?
For what barrier standing in my way do I
still have? In what contests of virtue am I set? Hasn’t
my husband become my betrayer? I am deprived of
home, deprived of children. My hopes have fled, which
I could not settle well, although I longed to, by keep-
ing silent about my marriage, keeping silent about my
much-mourned birthing. But no! By the many-starred
seat of Zeus, and the goddess on my headlands, and
the revered promontory of the watery Tritonian marsh,
no longer will I conceal the bed; unloading it from my
chest, I will be easier. My eyes drip with tears, and my
soul suffers, having been plotted against evilly by both
men and immortals, whom I will show to be thankless
betrayers of beds.
Oh, you who make sound the voice of the seven-
toned lyre, which makes ring the well-ringing songs of the
muses in soulless rustic horn, against you I will speak out
blame, oh son of Leto, in this daylight. You came to me,
your mane of hair glittering with gold, while I plucked
. . . saffron-colored petals, their gleam as bright as gold,
into the folds of my cloak; fastening on the white wrists
of my hands, you led me into the bed of the cave, as I
voiced the cry, “Oh mother!” a god as bedmate, carrying
out a favor for shameless Kypris. I, wretched one, gave
birth to a son for you, whom I dropped on your bed in
fear of my mother, where you yoked me, miserable in a
miserable bed, the wretched one. Alas, alas, and now he
has perished, seized as a banquet for the birds, my son
and yours! Wretch! Yet you still play on the lyre, sing-
ing paeans.
Imbedded in her heart-rending cry to recognize her suffering, the

erotically tinged images of flower picking and the golden-haired god show
that Creusa is vulnerable to the accusation of crying rape after engaging in
consensual sex, as her own son will later suggest (1524–25)—the cruelest
insult of all.39 Certainly, Creusa herself is well aware that she will be so
accused, after all, she has chosen not to tell for all those years, and it is
only when she reaches the breaking point that she speaks out. Correspond-
ingly, it is only when Creusa and Ion are about to kill one another that
Apollo reveals his shameful secret to both of them and the two recognize
each other through the Gorgon symbol on the swaddling bands woven by
Creusa when she was a girl.
The Gorgon represents the totem of her Erechtheid family and
commemorates Perseus’s victory over Medusa, but the face of the Gorgon, a
woman impregnated by a god and punished by being turned into a hideous
monster, is more than just a symbol of Ion’s heritage, it is also a symbol
of the effects of Creusa’s experience. She has become a murderous fiend
who attempts to kill her own son in her jealous rage at the news that her
husband Xuthus indeed has an heir. Creusa, in fact, tries to poison Ion with
a drop of the Gorgon’s blood (983–1019), explaining that she has inherited
two drops of it: one can “keep off illness and nourish life” (1013), but the
other is deadly poison—an excellent description of the bivalent Gorgon
whose deadly powers could be used apotropaically.40
The resolution of the tragedy draws on stock themes found later
in New Comedy, but here they are not at all funny; here the guilt is put
squarely on the father and the mother’s plight is highlighted. In New Com-
edy, the remedy for illicit sex is marriage, and there is rarely any insight into
the girl’s feelings (Scafuro 1997.238–43, Rosivach 1998.1, 13–50). While
in Io’s story, Zeus is both perpetrator and healer, taking on the role of the
Moon god in the Near Eastern stories as impregnator and divine correlate
of the human doctor or midwife, in Ion, Apollo’s role as healer is a cruel
mockery to Creusa, and the secret sex act is never revealed to her hus-
band: it remains known to only a small circle of people including her son.
Although, in comedy, the benefit of acknowledging the child seems mostly
to accrue to the girl’s family—whose wealth has been diminished by the
damage to its property (Ogden 1997.26)—Apollo’s partial acknowledgment
39 Also see Rabinowitz 1993.197–209, with earlier references, on significant variations in

the story that Creusa tells repeatedly, not always clearly blaming Apollo. See Blundell
1998.50–51 on Creusa and Sissa 1990b.358 on Creusa’s successful concealment of the
sex act and its consequences.
40 The apotropaic side of the Gorgon is discussed by Childs 2003.65, Tsiafakis 2003.85–90,
and Suter forthcoming.
of Ion represents the partial wish fulfillment of both mother and son, nei-
ther of whom were normal members of society without it.
While in Aeschylus’s Suppliants, the terrified maidens refusing to
understand the message of Io’s story likened marriage to death, and in Ion,
Creusa’s unresolved feelings concerning her rape caused her to attempt to
murder her son (replicating her unwilling attempt when she exposed him at
birth), in Euripides’ Electra, the murder of the sexually guilty Clytemnes-
tra at the hands of her children is conflated with their birth, thus speaking
to the worst fears of a mother in labor.
Birth, a leitmotif of Electra as a whole, serves as the excuse to
lure Clytemnestra to Electra’s house so that Orestes and Electra might
take vengeance on her. Electra sends false word to her mother that she has
borne a son, a product of her forced marriage to a humble peasant, and
Clytemnestra pays her a visit to congratulate her. Orestes first kills Cly-
temnestra’s lover Aegisthus as he offers a sacrifice to the nymphs, a cer-
emony typically meant to thank them for the birth of a child or its nurture
(626), then he kills Clytemnestra. In addition, as Froma Zeitlin discusses
(1970.664), the play is set during a festival of Hera, patron of legitimate
wives, as a counterpoint to Electra in her role as an unsatisfied wife and
Clytemnestra as an adulterer: “It is a mother’s death which will be accom-
plished on the putative occasion of a child’s birth, and the executor of the
deed will be her own child.”
The description of Clytemnestra’s murder is filled with birth imag-
ery that, on the one hand, emphasizes what a hideous crime her children
have committed by killing the mother who bore them and, on the other,
compares the murder with the death of a woman in labor. Orestes, emerg-
ing from the house with bloody hands and full of sorrow, first describes
Clytemnestra as “a body which has given birth twice laid on the ground
by a blow from my hand, in payment for my pains” (1179–80).41 Electra
then replies: “It is to be wept over very much, oh fellow-born, and I am
to blame. I, the wretched one, went through fire for that mother who bore
me, a girl” (1182–84). The chorus in turn laments: “Io, for the misfortune,
her misfortune, the mother having given birth to < . . . >, having suffered
miseries unforgettable and beyond measure from her children. But she has
paid justly for the murder of the father” (1185–89).42 Each utterance begins
41 The phrase does not respond with its counterpart in the antistrophe, but is intelligible as
it stands.
42 Again, the strophe does not respond to the antistrophe, but for the most part makes sense
as it stands.
like a lament for a woman who has died in childbirth, then turns into a
justification for her murder by her children as payment for Clytemnes-
tra’s own crime: Orestes singing of the payment for his own pains rather
than the unjust recompense for the mother’s pains, and Electra singing of
the suffering she herself has undergone rather than the suffering of her
mother when giving birth to her daughter. Orestes continues the birthing
imagery with his description of Clytemnestra “resting her birthing limbs
(gonima melea) on the ground” (1208–09); the chorus responds: “You went
through agony (odunē), hearing the grievous cry of the mother who bore
you” (1210–12).43
The pathos in this scene comes from the ultimate violation of
the bond between mother and child and is heightened by the audience’s
knowledge of the extreme dangers of childbirth, the conventional connec-
tion between birth and bloody death, and the notion that labor can go awry
if the mother suffers from guilty feelings because of her relationship with
the father. Here, however, Clytemnestra is punished by her children not for
an adultery that created them but for her unfaithfulness to their father and
for killing her husband. As in Ion, the Gorgon is an important symbol in
the play, appearing first in an ode in which the chorus describes the shield
of Achilles (459–60). M. J. O’Brien shows (1964.16–24) that in the ode,
there is an implicit analogy between Perseus as slayer of the Gorgon and
the recently arrived Orestes, which analogy is made explicit when Orestes
displays the body of Aegisthus, “not the head of the Gorgon” (856–57).44
Orestes (1195–97), in turn, describes himself as too horrifying to be seen
because of his blood guilt, and then describes how he covered his head to
avoid looking at his mother as he killed her (1221–23). Clytemnestra now
takes on the symbolism of the Gorgon, reinforcing the description of her
murder as death in childbirth.
In conclusion, the story of Clytemnestra in Euripides’ Electra
illustrates that birth was considered more dangerous for a woman guilty
of sexual crimes, and Euripides’ Ion demonstrates that sexual trauma was
thought to inhibit not only labor but conception as well. While Io’s story
thematized the psychosomatic illness that was thought to afflict girls on
the verge of marriage and may have been used as an aid to childbirth (as
its correlates were elsewhere in the eastern Mediterranean), Perseus’s story
sent a more complicated message. On the one hand, the illegitimate son
43 The term odunē can apply to a variety of pains, including labor pain (King 1998.118–26,
Loraux 1981.49–50).
44 That it is his body, not his head, is shown by Kovacs 1987.
vindicates his mother through his heroic exploits thus proving his divine
paternity; on the other, Medusa dies while giving birth to Pegasus and
Chrysaor, the products of another liaison with a god. It represents both
wish fulfillment and the mother’s worst fear.
If Io’s story was indeed used as a birth incantation, it would have
allowed the mother to release her shame without confessing and to expe-
rience vicariously the healing acknowledgement of the child by its social
father. In fact, some modern doctors have used the Io story as an effec-
tive tool to guide their patients to recovery from childhood sex abuse,
speculating that such “story lines from myths and fairy tales may have
originated from traumatized individuals in earlier times and can be used
in contemporary therapies to clarify elements of traumatic experience”
(Gardner, Wills, and Goodwin 1995.30). The modern use of Io’s myth to
treat patients parallels the intersection of myth and medicine in ancient
Greece that I have explored at length here, with each used complementa-
rily to define and heal a socially recognized syndrome affecting women.
The socially constructed analogies between birth, death, and
marriage acknowledged and made more salient the physiological paral-
lels between them, which parallels were one of the sources for women’s
fears concerning all three processes. Throughout this article, I have been
careful to focus on the male construction of female experience that shapes
nearly all our primary sources on ancient women (rather than what women
themselves experienced), but the ethnographic examples and perspectives
provided by modern midwives show that similar concerns are found in
“real-life” women who suffer from sexual guilt and trauma and that there
are analogous treatments that focus on relieving their guilt and assuring
them of the father’s support. Thus I suggest that the medical texts and
tragedies examined here do give us a glimpse into the real-life concerns
of Greek women and the real-life cures administered to them. Finally, fear
and shame over the sexual act would not only have afflicted those women
who had participated in illicit behavior, for given the social constraints and
conflicting expectations impressed upon fifth-century Greek women, it is
likely that many women internalized a complex mix of fear, shame, and
anticipation concerning their sexual role in marriage that was then mapped
onto their experience of childbirth. Therefore, it would not be surprising if
the syndrome inhibiting labor explored here was fairly common and well
known to both doctors and tragic audiences.
Willamette University
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Io and the Gorgon: Ancient Greek Medical and Mythical Constructions

of the Interaction Between Women’s Experiences of Sex and Birth

Arethusa, Volume 46, Number 3, Fall 2013, pp. 415-446 (Article)

Published by The Johns Hopkins University Press

For additional information about this article

Access provided by Marshall University (8 Oct 2013 04:57 GMT)

I explore here ancient Greek representations of the interaction between

Arethusa 46 (2013) 415–446 © 2013 by The Johns Hopkins University Press

The experience of the parturient mother in ancient Greece repeated

And in fact difficult labor occurs because of the one in

self-indulgent and don’t exert effort); and it occurs because

The final comment made by Soranus is particularly revealing:

9 See Scafuro 1990 and Rosivach 1998.13–15.

who believed that a woman needed to achieve orgasm in order to become

In many non-Western societies the psychological ele-

about health and sickness and dirt and cleanliness, but

We have seen that it is generally accepted that every child

Similar concerns and cures can be found in both Greco-Roman

The Ndembu, who practice matrilineal descent combined

have been caught, so Ndembu regularly say, because they

While Ndembu women feel themselves to be persecuted by the

First about the so-called sacred disease, and about those

As with the Ndembu women, the problem is resolved by mak-

16 See, for example, Hp. Mul. 1.2, 2.127.

But now I am nothing, separated (from my natal fam-

But extreme as the case of Procne was: married to a barbaric Thra-

The evil no longer may be shunned. My dear heart shivers,

The Danaids threaten to kill themselves in the two ways expected of

because they dislike them. The ambiguity is to some degree a deliberate

Perseus’s offer to bring Medusa’s head to Polydectes represents a

Oh soul, how can I keep silent? But how can I reveal

Imbedded in her heart-rending cry to recognize her suffering, the

39 Also see Rabinowitz 1993.197–209, with earlier references, on significant variations in

Diggle, J. (ed.) 1981. Euripidis Fabulae, vol II. Oxford.

Dionysalexandros: Essays on Aeschylus and his Fellow Tragedians

Lloyd-Jones, H. 1957. “Appendix and Addendum,” in H. W. Smyth, ed.,

Scafuro, A. C. 1990. “Discourses of Sexual Violation in Mythic Accounts and

. 1972. Æschylus and Athens: A Study in the Social Origins of

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