How did the Greeks stereotype women and how were they justified in doing so?
            
             From the beginnings of establishing male physical superiority over women, men in antiquity went on to assume women were morally and intellectually inferior to men. Women, in their eyes, were different and should be treated as such.
             It would be quite wrong to say that female stereotypes of ancient Greece emerged from the divine; nor can we extrapolate any common stereotypes from their actions. The goddesses cannot strictly be thought of as female as they are divine entities merely taking the shape of a human – Athene is only called such through convention and for ease of recognition. Also, by definition, the goddesses were not normal people; this is where the first problem arises in assessing the stereotypes of women in Greece – normal people, especially women, were not written about much only the extraordinary were studied; this makes the assessment of the norm even more difficult.
             Semonides is one writer who concentrated on the character of women at his time; his work sums up the typecast role of a woman. He begins his poem with the line:
             'In the beginning Zeus made the female mind separately'
             here he is immediately isolating women - women were made differently and should be treated differently – this was the male justification. He carries on to describe the ten different characters of the female species, these are: the pig (a slob), the fox, earth (glutton), the bitch ( 'always yapping'), the sea woman (moody), donkey (promiscuous), ferret ( 'she makes any man she has with her sick'), the horse (lazy), the monkey ( 'the biggest plague of all that Zeus has given to man') and the bee lady (a respectable housewife). These characters all lay the basis for the ancient Greek stereotype of women, as is evident, the majority of these stereotypes are negative.
             By first stating women have identifiabl...