“The Greeks” by H.D.F Kitto
In his widely read Penguin paperback The Greeks, the Englishman H.D.F. Kitto combined the suggestion that slavery was a necessary price for the glory that was Greece with the allegation that, comparatively speaking, it was not on the whole such a disagreeable thing to be a slave at Athens. Athenian slaves, he assured his many readers, were not only happier than black slaves in the antebellum South but also possessed far more legal protection than the enfranchised American blacks of his own day. Kitto—who was also one of the best-known twentieth-century apologists for the status of women at Athens—compared the misery of slaves in the Athenian silver mines with the deaths of randomly selected Britons in auto accidents, arguing that just as Athenians exploited slave labor, so the English “kill 4,000 citizens annually on the roads because their present way of life could not otherwise continue.” (Kitto, 1950) Kitto concludes that to “understand is not necessarily to pardon, but there is no harm in trying to understand,” but he certainly seems to me to be pardoning, and rather graciously, too. (Kitto, 1950)
In the same successful paperback in which he had spoken so cheerfully of Athenian slavery, Kitto cited Gomme’s essay with approval and carried his line of argument still farther. Kitto drew on the mores of his own era in suggesting that the division of women at Athens into wives and courtesans was characteristic of Western civilization and (therefore) fundamentally harmless. Even in his own society, he writes, “it is not unknown that a girl who lives alone in a small flat and takes her meals out may have a more active social life than the married woman. These hetaerae were adventuresses who had said No to the serious business of life. Of course they amused men—’But, my dear fellow, one doesn’t marry a woman like that.’” (Kitto, 1950) For Kitto, it was sufficient to cite parallels from modern society in order to demonstrate that there was nothing fundamentally rotten in the Athenian system. This was a comfortable posture for them since they were not alienated from their own heritage.
For others less approving of the status quo, the situation of women in classical Athens was tied up with the deeply problematic legacy of the Western tradition itself. Some thinkers in all eras, moreover, have been able to distance themselves from questions of right and wrong, healthy and unhealthy, and, as in the case of slavery, to ask simply how a phenomenon fits into a larger system. Kitto had introduced his discussion of the status of women at Athens by an analogy with a detective. In mystery stories, he wrote, there often comes a point at which the detective, being in possession of all the facts, sees unmistakably that they all lead to one conclusion; but since ten chapters of the book remain, the detective is troubled by a vague unease.
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