Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae, a comedy produced in 411 BCE, is about a man infiltrating a forbidden, all-female space. Since he doesn’t want to be discovered, Euripides’ kinsman (often called Mnesilochus) puts a great deal of effort into hiding his gender by putting on a dress, over-accessorizing, removing his body hair, and speaking in falsetto. But when he arrives at the festival, he finds that the exclusively female venue of the Thesmophoria has been appropriated for an unexpected purpose: the women are holding a formal assembly (ecclesia). They’re using their temporary freedom from male eyes to act like men.

Is there a better metaphor for the work of the female scholar of Greek drama? Whenever I study these texts, I feel acutely aware that I’m not the intended audience. Greek tragedies and comedies were written by men, for men. But once I, like Mnesilochus, have managed to invade the exclusively male sphere of the theater, I see men pretending to be women.

A quick study of the archives of the Bryn Mawr Classical Review from the past few years shows that male scholars still command the study of comedy, but men and women have been publishing books about tragedy in relatively equal numbers. Women may even have a slight edge. I want to believe that the large number of female scholars of Greek tragedy is a victory for feminism, that we’ve somehow managed to overturn the patriarchal construct in which the genre was created. But sometimes I worry that the opposite is true. Is there a way to focus on such a male-dominated genre without confirming the patriarchal bias of classical literature? Don’t we listen to dead white male voices enough?

Fifth-century Attic drama was exclusively the province of men. Lyric poetry can claim a female voice in Sappho, and other male-authored poems (such as Alcman 1) were intended for performance by women. In contrast, tragedy and comedy were written by male poets and performed by male actors and choruses (often costumed as women) for male judges and an audience that was either exclusively male or nearly so. Most scholars believe that there were probably some women in the Theater of Dionysus, but either way, the notional audience for Greek tragedy and comedy was Athenian citizen males. Even if we choose to believe the story from the Life of Aeschylus that a pregnant woman watching the Eumenides was so terrified by the sight of the Erinyes that she had a miscarriage, her presence in the audience doesn’t change the fact that the Oresteia was written for men.

This all-male context provides a safe space for many Greek tragedies (and even a few comedies) to focus on female characters and female concerns. Female choruses outnumber male choruses in extant tragedy in a ratio of 2 to 1. Only one extant tragedy, Sophocles’ Philoctetes, has no female characters at all. In fact, although Sophocles gave us the immortal feminist icon Antigone and an Electra who has dominated all other depictions of the character, he seems to have used fewer female protagonists and choruses than Aeschylus. Euripides’ evident interest in women and female psychology forms a crucial part of the premise of the Thesmophoriazusae: the reason for Mnesilochus’ sneaking into the Thesmophoria is to argue on Euripides’ behalf when the women debate whether or not to execute him. Euripides’ alleged crime is that by writing about so many immoral female characters — Melanippe, Phaedra, and Stheneboea are among those singled out by name — he has convinced the men of Athens that they can’t trust their wives.

Unfortunately, the women in the Thesmophoriazusae aren’t very good interpreters of Euripides’ plays. They cherry-pick evidence to fit an eventually untenable thesis — Euripides wrote about exceptionally virtuous women like Alcestis as often as he wrote about sexually licentious ones. By the performance of the Thesmophoriazusae in 411, he had already written second, less problematic versions of Phaedra and Melanippe. The Euripidean plays parodied at length in Aristophanes’ play, the Helen and the Andromeda, both contain unobjectionable heroines.

It might be true that Euripides’ female characters often behave badly, if you define ‘badly’ as ‘outside the very strict set of guidelines for female behavior in fifth-century Athens’. One could argue that simply by leaving the skene to participate in the action of the drama onstage, female characters are acting in a transgressive way. The exception, perhaps, is the sacrificial virgin, an Iphigenia or Polyxena who never surrenders her virtue when she gives up her life to benefit a group of men.

Female behavior in Greek tragedy has been studied extensively by many scholars: Helene Foley, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz, Laura McClure, Kirk Ormand, Daniel Mendelsohn, Nicole Loraux, and Victoria Wohl, to mention only a fraction of those who have written excellent book-length studies on the topic. And I haven’t even begun on the shorter pieces of scholarship, the most influential of which is probably Froma Zeitlin’s seminal article “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama”. Zeitlin argues that even prominent and memorable female characters primarily facilitate action involving male characters. Phaedra may dominate her own play, but eventually her function is to cause the downfall of Hippolytus.

But these studies of women in Greek drama, brilliant though they are, are only partially relevant to my own question of what it means to be a woman studying Greek drama. The demographics of the list of scholars named in the paragraph above are arguably more important for my inquiry than the contents of their books and articles. Although I’m probably guilty of selection bias, it isn’t an accident that the scholars I’ve mentioned are almost exclusively female: while female scholars have only a narrow majority in the study of Greek tragedy in general, they certainly dominate the study of women in Greek tragedy. On the one hand, that predominance seems logical: wouldn’t we expect women to be drawn more strongly toward the study of women? But Euripides’ works are themselves proof that it isn’t self-evidently true that women care more about the depiction of women than men do.

Foley comes close to addressing this issue in the introduction of Female Acts in Greek Tragedy:

“[N]othing requires the modern feminist to identify with tragedy’s sometimes rebellious but finally subordinated women, as long as she remains fully conscious of the dynamics that put these characters in their place. Both the male protagonists in Greek tragedy and the male citizens of Athens faced in different ways negotiating conflicts between public and private worlds and identities… All these problems are now faced by twentieth-century women as well as men, and both women and men can now find themselves in the position of creating and enforcing social and political ideology.” (Foley 2001, p. 13)

I’m intrigued that Foley chose to use the singular “the modern feminist” followed by the pronoun “she” when she could have easily written “modern feminists” and then used the gender-neutral plural ‘they’. But while Foley deserves credit for considering the relationship between her study and contemporary feminism — even though immediately follows this paragraph with “I myself remain more interested in the concerns of Aristophanes, Plutarch, and Origen” (Foley 2001, p. 13) — her concern is still with the relationship between feminism and identification with female characters in tragedy. She doesn’t ask what it means for “the modern feminist” to be looking at Greek tragedy in the first place.

Mnesilochus infiltrates the Thesmophoria in female dress in order to manipulate the women (who are, of course, actually men dressed as women) toward a course of action more favorable to Euripides. What’s at stake for female scholars who infiltrate the male world of Greek drama?

Just as Euripides needs to abandon tragic plots in favor of comic tropes to rescue Mnesilochus in the Thesmophoriazusae, I needed to look outside the field of Classics to find scholars who have considered my question. Unfortunately, what I found wasn’t exactly optimistic about the possibilities for feminist scholarship of Greek drama.

In 1985, feminist theater scholar Sue-Ellen Case wrote an article called “Classic Drag: The Greek Creation of Female Parts”. Case argues that a female character represented on the Greek stage is not a woman but “Woman”, a construct invented entirely by men. Drama tells us nothing about female experience in fifth-century Athens. After a discussion of female marginalization in Aeschylus’ Oresteia and Aristotle’s Poetics, she writes:

“The feminist reader, identifying with the class called ‘women’ finds herself reading against this text. In fact, she discovers that she is not even intended to be a reader of this text. Whatever anger she might feel in reading Aristotle’s insults or whatever pity she might feel in identifying with the excluded women in this classical era seems inappropriate within the exclusivity of this textual world. At this point, the feminist finds herself to be defined as one without the necessary criteria for the study or the practice of the drama. The prominence of The Poetics within the history of the drama and within the study of the history of the drama, makes the exclusion of the feminist reader even more comprehensive.” (Case 1985, p. 327)

Case, like Foley, equates feminist with female. But while Foley’s choice is merely one of pronoun usage, Case blurs the two in a problematic way. At least the first usage of the word “feminist” in the quoted paragraph should almost certainly read “female” — I can easily imagine a male feminist scholar who does not identify with the class called ‘women’.

Nevertheless, Case articulates well my feeling that I’m interacting with and commenting on texts that weren’t meant for me. She also addresses head-on a question that female scholars of Greek tragedy skirt around: when studying a text with problematic gender politics, applying feminist theory doesn’t necessarily make for a feminist reading. The two categories aren’t identical, although they’re not mutually exclusive either — except for Case, they are. She concludes:

“The feminist theatre practitioner may come to a new understanding of how to reproduce the classic Greek plays. For example, rather than considering a text such as Lysistrata as a good play for women, she might view it as a male drag show, with burlesque jokes about breasts and phalluses playing well within the drag tradition. The feminist director may cast a man in the role of Medea, underscoring the patriarchal prejudices of ownership/jealousy and children as male-identified concerns. The feminist actor may no longer regard these roles as desirable for her career. Overall, the feminist practitioners and scholars may decide that such plays do not belong in the canon — that they are not central to the study and practice of theatre.” (Case 1985, p. 327)

Although I’d certainly go and see a modern version of Euripides’ Medea where Medea is played by a man, Case elides here the very substantial difference between cross-dressing on the ancient stage and modern drag shows. Her work precedes the most influential studies of gender roles in the ancient world, like J. J. Winkler’s The Constraints of Desire, and Case’s study is cited only very infrequently by recent feminist scholars of Greek tragedy. But my problem with this paragraph is more rhetorical than methodological. I’ve argued in the past in favor of a first-person authorial voice in scholarship, rather than the pseudo-omniscient detached stance that many scholars affect. But even that false objectivity seems preferable to Case’s use of the word ‘may’, which feels passive-aggressive — as though what she’s really saying is, “a good feminist will make these choices, and if you don’t, you aren’t really a feminist.”

Case’s interpretation ends up looking strikingly similar to that of the women in the Thesmophoriazusae: seeing tragedies with (some kinds of) female characters is damaging to women, so it has to be stopped. Euripides has to be silenced. But the comedy ends with the women and Euripides coming to a compromise. I have to believe, pace Case, that some compromise is possible for female and feminist scholars, too.

Aristophanes obviously enjoyed the concept of the female ecclesia, because he revisited it approximately 20 years later in the Ecclesiazusae. But having women ape male civic institutions isn’t necessarily an act of empowerment. Aristophanes’ female assemblies share less in common with A League of Their Own, a movie with the tagline “A woman’s place is on home, first, second, and third”, than they do with John Oliver’s Supreme Court Dogs segment, where we laugh because it’s funny to watch dogs act like people.

But the reception of Greek tragedy and comedy may offer one possible solution to the problem of how to read these texts as a feminist. That the original performance context denies the possibility of accessing or valorizing the female experience in any meaningful way hasn’t prevented later women from using them for more empowering purposes.

The nineteenth century saw Elizabeth Barrett Browning dedicate a great amount of energy to learning Greek so she could translate Greek tragedy, especially Aeschylus. In a diary entry from June 1831 she complains about a hard day spent trying to learn μι-verbs, an exasperation shared with every beginning Greek student. In 1885, the suffragette Janet Case acted in the Cambridge Greek tragedy (although she played Athena in the Eumenides, who says that she is “entirely on the side of the male” (τὸ δ᾽ ἄρσεν αἰνῶ πάντα, Eumenides 737), and is one of the handful of female characters in Greek tragedy who might still make more sense when played by a man). Case is better known as the Greek teacher of Virginia Woolf, who wrote Case’s obituary in the London Times and praised her for her skill in teaching talented students and less academically inclined alike, for both making the texts “so sane and yet so stimulating… if inaccessible still supremely desirable.” All three of these women too could be seen as reinscribing the male dominance of the genre rather than subverting it, I suppose. But I don’t think many would characterize the author of A Room of One’s Own and Orlando as a slave to the patriarchy.

Is it enough for feminist scholars of Greek tragedy to point to earlier feminists who studied Greek tragedy as proof that it’s not a problematic enterprise? Does Antigone’s Claim absolve feminists of the guilt of continuing to study dead white men? This is, in effect, the argument that Steve Wilmer makes in his 2007 rebuttal of Sue-Ellen Case: the strong female characters of Greek tragedy may be the creations and reflections of men, but contemporary women find them compelling and meaningful and sympathetic.

Perhaps that’s enough. Or maybe it’s enough when combined with an appropriate level of discomfort over how much power men had in the ancient world over the literary representations of women. Unfortunately, that hasn’t changed as much as we’d like in the intervening two and a half millennia: ideal femininity is still often expressed in terms that are prescribed by men. It may be true that the female characters of Greek drama can tell us more about how 5th-century men thought about femininity (and masculinity) than they actually tell us about 5th-century femininity. But the tension between the two hasn’t disappeared.

Several of the scholars who study female characters in Greek tragedy focus on women as objects of exchange between men. Mnesilochus in the Thesmophoriazusae also ends up becoming an object of exchange when Euripides secures his freedom by promising not to portray women badly in his tragedies anymore. Many of the tragic women are less willing to accept that role than Mnesilochus is: they fight to escape from the system of exchange that constrains them, usually with disastrous results. If we look at these female characters with an eye toward their reception throughout history, it can even seem as though the strongest of these characters are trying to break free from the patriarchal system of male playwrights and actors that created them. As Edith Hall has pointed out, tragedy sometimes seems to think in a way that’s more sophisticated than the society that produced it.

So perhaps being a female scholar of Greek tragedy is one way to break the system down: the female characters are finally being exchanged between women instead of men. Zeitlin argues that the male audience looked through female characters to construct the male self; maybe female scholars can look through the male world that created tragedy to construct (a version of) the female self. I hope that’s true, because I have no intention of doing as Case suggests and not studying these plays. At the very least, I can aspire to be a better reader of Euripides than the women in the Thesmophoriazusae are.

Donna Zuckerberg received her PhD in Classics from Princeton in 2014. She is the founding editor of Eidolon and teaches Greek drama at Stanford Continuing Studies and online for the Paideia Institute. Read more of her work here.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not reflect the views of the Paideia Institute.