Gender Roles in Seven Against Thebes

The gender roles play an important part in Seven Against Thebes and the differences in our cultures from Greek culture. The gender roles differ greatly from today’s standards. To better understand Aeschylus’ play, differences in ways of thinking must be taken into account.

The chorus starts out lamenting, near hysterical, and disordered. After Eteokles accused them of hindering, more than helping their cause. Eteokles tells the chorus of women to not lament on the tragedy they might suffer, to ignore the fact that the city could be sacked could lose, and to ignore the fact that they have very little effect on the eventual outcome of the fight.

Eteokles wants them to take male characteristics, to cheer the troops on, like modern-day cheerleaders. He claims they are doing more damage than good by whining to the gods about how horrible their lives would be if Thebes were taken and how grateful they would be if it were not. This is insensitive of Eteokles he does not consider the women’s viewpoint and the effects on them if the city was ransacked.

Also, how could praying to the powerful gods be harmful? Eteokles believes that although the gods have the supreme power, the men actually fight the battles so the women should be cheering them on, not appealing to the gods. Eteokles is wrong in his assumption. The gods hold the supreme power not the people. Like in chess, it is not the pawns, knights, or even kings that win or lose a game but the brain behind the strategy.

The gods are the brains behind the madness. The gods decide the fate of humans.

The chorus starts acting female by lamenting their fate at the hands of the enemy as if the city had already had been lost. Today’s females however, would be just as capable as the men fighting the battles and be right there beside them. They point out that females have the worst lot if the city is ransacked and that if would be better to die in the field with glory that be subject to rape and the desecration of their homes they had worked hard on to keep up. A housewife derives her identity from how well she keeps her house, which would be destroyed if the city were ransacked.

Females in Western society can get their identity from their ability to keep a house but there are many more places such as a career to give her identity. The men are wounded and die, whereas the females are wounded repeatedly by rape and batterment. They are conscious during the brutal pillage, unless they are lucky enough to die. In our society, gender roles do not make females so dependent upon a protector for their safety. By being more independent, they have control over their future. Plus, females do not have to worry about the city being ransacked, but rather walking down dark alleys at night.

The Thebian women living suffer a mental and emotional scaring that the dead men don’t. In addition, the men know their death will be noble while the females can only look forward to a quick death and unconsciousness. Being a virgin determines the unmarried females worth. An “unfamilied girl became the whore and trophy of her captor forded to spread for the sweating soldier, triumphant, hate-inflamed”. Where she hopes for a “dark deliverance…a species of relief, an end of tidal groaning weeping and grief”(36), death. Today virginity is, in general, not such a measure of a female’s worth as a person.

The Greeks had a very sexist society in terms of today’s standards. Eteokles goes as far as asking Zeus “what a race of women you gave us”(32). Koryphaios, however, complies with Eteokles’ wishes, yet she seems to not be convinced, just subjugated and promises to “endure with the others what is to come”(32). It seems that she does what is expected, and bows to the intelligence and authority of Eteokles. Antigone is the only one who actually rebels against the authority and she pays for it with her life in Antigone. The chorus agrees “to shape their prayers as these formulas require”(33) yet they will still be afraid and nothing Eteokles says will really change that. Eteokles can not possibly understand their fear because he faces death on the battlefield with glory, not repeated physical, mental, and emotional abuse.

Without an understanding of the gender roles in Seven Against Thebes and the differences in the roles from modern Western culture, Aeschylus’ meaning of the play is distorted. Constance Baker Motley the first black woman in the US to become a federal judge states “Something which we think is impossible now is not impossible in another decade.” The change over time from the Greeks is a very pronounced difference, what will it be 100 years from now?