I was reading Aeschylus’ Oresteia for a class on mythology and I came across the part during The Eumenides where Apollo argues that females are merely fields to be plowed while the male seed is responsible for the creation of the baby.
From Robert Fagles’ translation:
The woman you call the mother of the child
is not the parent, just a nurse to the seed,
the new-sown seed that grows and swells inside her.
The man is the source of life - the one who mounts.
…
I give you proof that all I say is true.
The father can father forth without a mother.
Here she stands, our living witness. Look
(Athena comes in who was thought to have sprung from Zeus’ forehead fully grown)
I’ve come across other references to this belief in various other works, but in this one, it was argued that a man shouldn’t be punished for killing his mother because of his logic.
Did the Greeks at this time (525 BCE to 456 BCE) believe this? I find it difficult to accept that they did since most of the other cultures put more emphasis on the role the females played. And, anyone can easily see the female’s side of the family in the faces of their offspring, especially when given a large enough sample size. Not to mention the farmers had to know basic genetics at this point.
Actually, a work of the Hippocratic corpus, The Seed and the Nature of the Child, believed that ‘seed’ was contributed by both the man and the woman at the point of orgasm. Aristotle was the most prominent proponent of the Aeschylean theory, that the woman contributed only the place for the embryo. He, of course, ended up becoming the medical mainstream, but it was only one of several competing theories in the 6th and 5th centuries.
So, for Aristotle, at least, the female produces the raw material which makes up the baby, and the male, the organizing principle which arranges that raw material into the baby.
I remember in a biology class seeing a wood-print from a (probably) 17th century period treatise on human reproduction that had an illustration of the sperm. The head of the sperm contained a complete, minature human form, ready to be deposited and grow in the woman. So the Aristotlean theory continued quite late, it would seem.
That’s the problem with Aristotle’s form of scientific inquiry for you. This model may have some ideological benefits, but any farmer could have told him how important the mother’s stock is to breeding.
Yeah, the Academy got great press due to Alexander being Aristotle’s student, but what a bunch of misogynist twerps they could be.
Really, if not for that particular historical fluke of Helleno-Macedonian ascendancy, I’m not sure we’d have much regard for or knowledge of the Academy, or Athenian literature in general; we probably would, however, have other texts just as good, that in our history just didn’t get the political & academic support over centuries that Plato & Aristotle did.
In that case, we’d be goggling at something else odd in the canon other than the woman-despising vapidity of the buggers of old Athens.
Well, some did, eg. (pseudo)-Hippocrates. Otherwise, I’m not entirely convinced of the importance of observation to Greek minds in face of a nice, solid theory.
I think Aistotle is hightly over-rated and do not understand why he has such a good press. As a mathematiician I am prejudiced, I suppose, but Archimedes and Euclid are fully deserving of their reputations and there are others (Thales comes to mind).
In the Bible and other ancient texts, I’ve often wondered if when they referred to a man’s “seed” just how literal they were being. It seems that they considered sperm to be a seed and wombs to be the ground and thus resemblance to mother’s would come from its time in the ground. (Ancients would at least have known that a fair-skinned mother and dark-skinned father [or vice versa] would most likely produce a child who was somewhere in between, so they had to account for the maternal influence somewhere.)
I read recently in a James Burke book that the homunculus was believed as late as the 20th century by some Islamic tribal cultures even though they had access to modern discoveries. The last Shah of Iran divorced a first wife for not having sons in the 1940s, very probably a holdover of this.
Well, Aristotle was a big improvement over Plato, in that he at least acknowledged that the world actually existed. But he was still rather lacking on the notion that one ought to actually observe it, in addition to just thinking about it a lot, to understand it.
Aristotle noticed that, and he explained it. It’s kind of too long to quote here, but basically, the semen has various “movements”…that’s to say, certain creative characteristics that influence and shape the matter in the womb and makes the parts grow.
But not all the semen has all these movements entirely. If the semen were “perfect”, then the child would resemble to its father. But all semen is defective in one way or another, and if the semen lacks certain movements, then the embryo will take on the forms and traits of the mother. I’m oversimplifying…Aristotle also talks about why some people look like their grandfathers, or grandmothers, or so on.
I don’t know that that’s fair. Aristotle spends a lot of time in his works observing nature. He just draws conclusions from his observations that are often wrong.
Thank you for your answers. I wonder if the popularity of this view could be partly due to it’s probable use in the support of support laws that favored the rights of the fathers over the mothers.
I don’t get this part. If they subscribe to the homunculus belief, wouldn’t that implicate the father in any failure to produce sons? If the women is just a fertile field, why would be her fault if she didn’t produce oranges when the man planted apples?
Are there other similar picture floating around? For some reason, I was picturing the sperm being horizantal and the man inside was more ‘obvious,’ that is, the face wasn’t obscured by the design at the top. In fact, I want to say he had a beard. But I saw this picture along time ago.
Hey, you try searching yahoo images for sperm man inside and see what you come up with (BTW that search is not at all work safe).
I beleive in the Bible the man did ‘plant’ the seed, the woman ‘watered’ the seed - both roles different but equally needed, but God created and maintains the life.
