Eumenides

[Kyriakos]

Zeus clearly didn't mind; the Erinyes, his hounds, were female.

 

[Gorbles]

Zeus, the fictitious son of Kronos and de facto leader of the Olympian deities of Greek myth?

I mean, maybe? I don't think this is a good thread to discuss how Zeus rated women, in mythological terms.

 

[Kyriakos]

Artemis, another female, was deity of the hunt ^^
There's also that Atalanta affair.
For non-myth, the women in Sparta were politicians and property owners.
Maybe in those hunter-gatherer societies, similar depleted population worries helped propel women to such roles? (and in slightly later ones, including ww2 Britain )

 

[GenMarshall]

Zeus clearly didn't mind; the Erinyes, his hounds, were female.

Knowing the memes surrounding Zeus, I don’t wanna know .

 

[tjs282]

"Hounds" is not literal in this case (AFAIK!).

The more well-known English translation of the Erinyes is the Furies, who were/are usually depicted as women/goddesses, rather than dogs.

 

[Samson]

Maybe in those hunter-gatherer societies, similar depleted population worries helped propel women to such roles? (and in slightly later ones, including ww2 Britain )

The point is that there is no evidence that women were ever not in these roles, so they could not be propelled into them.

I was thinking about this, and I suspect the theory was always bad science, and was just an assumption that followed from the general patriarchal assumptions of female frailty and physical inability. I can off the top of my head think of loads of examples of sexual dimorphism in size in the animal world, in both directions. The ones where the male is larger are to do with sexual selection/inter-male competition (deer and elephant seal spring to mind). The ones that are about food collection result in the female being larger, as she needs more calories to make babies. Bone worms spring to my mind, but spiders and angler fish are probably more famous. I can think of no good reason humans should be an exception.

 

[Chukchi Husky]

"Hounds" is not literal in this case (AFAIK!).

The more well-known English translation of the Erinyes is the Furies, who were/are usually depicted as women/goddesses, rather than dogs.

Add an extra 'r' to 'furies' and they can be both.

 

[Kyriakos]

Add an extra 'r' to 'furies' and they can be both.

Like tjs said, it is a metaphor. Moreover afaik it was already used (well, in greek) in antiquity.

 

[Arakhor]

Also known as the Eumenides ("the kindly/gracious ones"), because using a euphemistic name for something terrible is clearly as old as the hills.

 

[Kyriakos]

It's also the title of the third part of the Oresteia trilogy by Aeschylos (can't bother with the strange english spelling, sorry; imagine how lame Schocrates would look )

 

[Kyriakos]

Shouldn't it be Aiskhylos if you were going to transcribe it directly?

It already looks terrible, but yes. The added letter for the greek chi sucks.

 

[Gori the Grey]

The Furies are humanoid women, but bestial as well. Often they have Gorgon-style snake hair. They're a little like hounds in being able to scent blood. Their role is to avenge blood murder. They predate Zeus, and in fact think of the Olympian gods as upstarts. In the Eumenides, they're hunting down Orestes for having killed his mother. They track him to Athens, where Athena stages a trial of the case (the first ever and foundational jury trial). He's acquitted. The Furies threaten to curse Athens with a blight, so Athena bribes them with becoming Eumenides instead, local goddesses to whom humans will pray for agricultural bounty.