I would like to know how ancient Greeks thought women's bodies worked?

Answer 1

Ha. Good question. I'll look this up a bit more and get back to you. I believe Aristotle wrote that women's uteruses floated around inside their bodies, and this had something to do with "hysteria." "Hysteria," according to Dictionary.com, comes from the Greek word _hystéra_, meaning womb or uterus.

The origin of the word "hysteria," which is indeed Greek, is described here:
"Origin: 1650–60; < L hystericus < Gk hysterikós, suffering in the womb, hysterical (reflecting the Greeks' belief that hysteria was peculiar to women and caused by disturbances in the uterus)" (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=hysteric ).

Oh, here's a good book review of _Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female Body in Ancient Greece_ by Helen King: http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/bmcr/2000/2000-07-20.html . Here's another interesting site: http://www.womenintheancientworld.com/health%20in%20greece.htm .
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In _The Creation of Patriarchy_, Gerda Lerner theorizes that patriarchy's rise was due in part to the reappropriation by men of the mysterious female power of creation and childbirth, traditionally represented by the Mother Goddess. Religions attempted to symbolically assign to *men*, such as the monotheistic Jewish and Christian god who "created everything," the power of creation that biologically belongs to women. She writes:

"The doctrine of male procreativity reappears in its most developed form in the work of Aristotle. It is in this form that it had its determining and shaping influence on Western science and philosophy. Aristotle elevated the counterfactual account of the origin of human life from the level of myth to the level of science by grounding it in a broad-ranging philosophical system. His theory of causation posited four factors that make a thing what it is: (1) a material cause; (2) the efficient cause (that which gives it impetus); (3) a formal cause (that which gives it form); and (4) the _telos_, the goal toward which it strives. In line with Greek philosophical thought, Aristotle considers matter of lower importance than spirit. In his explanation of the origin of human life, three of the four causes for being were attributed to the male's contribution to procreation (semen), with only the fourth and lowest, the material, being the woman's contribution. Aristotle even strongly denied that the semen contributed any material component to the embryo; he saw its contribution as spiritual, hence "more divine." "For the first principle of the movement, or efficient cause, whereby that which comes into being is male, is better and more divine than the material whereby it is female." Aristotle explained that life was created by the meeting of sperm and what he called catamenia, the female discharge. However, he defined both sperm and catamenia as "semen" or "seed," with the difference that "catamenia are semen not in a pure state but in need of working up." Aristotle believed that the female's colder blood prevented her blood from completing the necessary transformation into semen. It is worth noting how at every point in his explanatory system it so happens that the female's endowment or contribution is inferior to that of the male. He further postulates that the male is active and the female is passive:

(quote) If, then, the male stands for the effective and active, and the female, considered as female, for the passive, it follows that what the female would contribute to the semen of the male would not be semen but material for the semen to work upon. This is just what we find to be the case, for the catamenia have in their nature an affinity to the primitive matter. (end quote)

Aristotle elaborated on the essential and important difference between the active male and the passive female sex. Without offering much evidence for his assertion, he explained that "if ... it is the male that has the power of making the sensitive soul, it is impossible for the female to generate an animal from itself alone." In a later analogy he described the process as that of a craftsman making a bed from wood or a ball from wax, the craftsman presumably being the male, the material substance being the female contribution. The historian Maryanne Cline Horowitz, who has written an insightful feminist critique of Aristotle's work, comments that in Aristotle's view:

(quote) the female passively takes on her task, laboring with her body to fulfill another's design and plan. The product of her labor is not hers. The man, on the other hand, does not labor but works ... Aristotle implied that the male is _homo faber_, the maker, who works upon inert matter according to a design, bringing forth a lasting work of art. His soul contributes the form and model of creation. (end quote)

Having a priori and without further explanation assumed the inferiority of the female's biological equipment, Aristotle explains that a predominance of the female principle is responsible for the birth of monstrosities. Among these he lists children who do not resemble their parents and women, using this language: "The fist departure [from type] is indeed that the offspring should become female instead of male; this, however, is a natural necessity." Aristotle is even more explicit elsewhere:

(quote) ... for just as the young of mutilated parents are sometimes born mutilated and sometimes not, so also the young born of a female are sometimes female and sometimes male instead. For the female is, as it were, a mutilated male, and the catamenia are semen, only not pure; for there is only one thing they have not in them, the principle of soul. (end quote)

These definitions of women as mutilated males, devoid of the principle of soul, are not isolated but rather permeate Aristotle's biological and philosophical work. He is quite consistent in reasoning that the biological inferiority of woman must make her inferior also in her capacities, her ability to reason and therefore her ability to make decisions. From this follows Aristotle's definition of gender and its integration into his political thought."

Answer 2

I will give You a list of names and that way You can truly research the subject, as oposed to getting only some insights from other contributors.

Aristotle
Asclepius
Erasistratus of Ceos
Eratosthenes
Galen
Herodotus
Herophilos of Chalcdron
Hippocrates
You might like to look up a copy of "Hippocrates' Woman: Reading the Female body in Ancient Greece" by Helen King.
That should give You plenty to keep You occupied over the next few weeks.
Cheers.

Answer 3

i might suspect that they have got been very like the main events we girls folk have right this moment:You ask for tomb inscriptions and that i for sure think of of Pompey. there have been numerous photographs of user-friendly conventional events.Engagement, weddings, childbirth. as far as roles, their grow to be a surprisingly lots defined caste equipment. So women folk interior the grander residences have been responsibly for entertainment and maintenance of the kinfolk worship. Moth

Answer 4

who really knows what they thought. i think they were confused about alot of things.