Both male and female historians have tended to suppress the historical record of matriarchy.  Matriarchy is a social system in which men, born and nurtured by women, are then subordinate to their mothers or female lovers.  Matriarchy has dominated human history to the present.  The figure of a woman riding a man as if riding a beast has been popular in cultures from India to France for at least the past two millennia.  That figure indicates the historical importance of matriarchy.

The Panchatantra, a collection of tales arising in India about 2000 years ago, provides an early example of the matriarchy figure.  The frame story of the Panchatantra, Book IV, tells of a crocodile who sought to kill his good friend.  The crocodile sought to kill his friend because the crocodile’s wife wanted to eat his friend’s heart.  The wife said that she would starve herself to death unless the crocodile killed his friend for her.  The crocodile, ruled by his wife, sought to kill his friend.

While the frame story of Panchatantra, Book IV, is an exposition of matriarchy, the enduring figure of matriarchy occurs as a tale within that frame.  The friend, who is a monkey, learned of the crocodile’s plot to kill him.  After having escaped, the monkey told the crocodile a story about a king.  A long time ago, a king ruled the whole world.  The king’s wife got angry with him.  The king responded to his wife:

“Beloved, I cannot live a moment without you.  I will fall at your feet and beg your pardon.”  She said: “If you hold a bit in your mouth and let me climb on your back and drive you, and if, when driven, you neigh like a horse, then I will relent.” [1]

The king obeyed his wife.  He accepted a bridle in his mouth and neighed like a horse while carrying his wife around on his back.  That’s the power of matriarchy.

The matriarchy figure spread across Mesopotamia.  The figure occurs in an early Arabic book doubtfully attributed to al-Jahiz, a leading ninth-century Baghdad intellectual.[2]  A Turkish manuscript in the library of the King of France in 1770 included the matriarchy figure as the centerpiece of a story of a young sultan and his old vizir.[3]  The old vizir chastised the young sultan for spending so much time enjoying the pleasures of the slave women of his seraglio.  After the sultan greatly reduced his time in pleasure with the women, the women protested.  One of the sultan’s slave girls asked to be given to the vizir.  She wanted to demonstrate that he could not resist her power.  The sultan agreed to the transfer.  The vizir soon became enamored of his new slave girl.  Despite the vizir falling to his knees and imploring her, the slave girl treated him severely and refused to have sex with him.  But she offered him a bargain: if he would obey her completely for one day, then she would yield to his passionate desire.  The vizir acquiesced:

“I can refuse you nothing,” replied the old vizir {to the slave girl}; “you shall for ever experience from me an equal complaisance.”

The slave girl used her power over the vizir to create the figure of matriarchy:

 “This,” said she to the vizir, “is the criterion of your love; let me see how far your boasted complaisance will go.  You must submit to bear this saddle and bridle, and suffer me to mount upon your back.”

The poor vizir, with half reluctance, half pleasantry, put himself into the posture of a horse, and submitted to the girt and bridle [4]

Not merely a wife, but even a slave girl, can rule a male ruler.

In western Europe, the earliest surviving instance of this matriarchy figure is from an early thirteenth-century fable.  The characters in the fable are Alexander the Great, Aristotle his tutor, and Alexander’s Indian mistress, who is repeatedly described as having blond hair.  Aristotle admonished Alexander to give up his mistress.  Alexander did so for many days, but then surrendered to his desire and returned to his mistress.  The mistress promised Alexander that she would avenge herself on his “pale old tutor”:

His logic and his grammar will do him no good against me.  He will be a skillful fencer indeed if, now that I have made up my mind, Mother Nature does not subdue him through me. [5]

The mistress arose early in the morning and went out into the garden:

dressed in nothing but her shift … in all her figure there was nothing that did not rightly belong there.  And do not think that she had a wimple or band about her head; her beautiful tresses, long and blond, set off her loveliness.  … Barefoot, bareheaded, ungirdled, she went her way, raising the skirts of her tunic and singing

The scholar Aristotle’s thoughts became his desire for the mistress’s body.  The mistress declared to Aristotle:

“Ah, tutor,” she said, “before I yield to your folly, you must, if you are so stricken with love, consent to do a strange thing for me.  For I have been seized with a great desire to ride astride you over the grass in this garden.  And I want you to wear a saddle, for so I shall ride more respectably.”

The old man replied joyfully that he would do that willingly and as one who belonged to her entirely.  The God of Love must really have overwhelmed him to make him carry a palfrey’s saddle on his shoulder into the garden.  You can imagine how mad he looked carrying it.  And she busied herself to put it on his back.  Love can indeed work miracles with an old codger, since Nature so commands, if he can cause the greatest scholar in the world to be saddled like an old nag and crawl on all fours over the grass … He let the girl get up on his back and so he carried her. [6]

The matriarchy figure of a woman riding a man as if he were a beast subsequently became widespread in European literature and art.

The matriarchy figure almost surely was transmitted to Europe from an ancient Indian source such as the Panchatantra.  The geographic and historical range of the matriarchy figure testifies to the importance of matriarchy across a wide range of times and societies.[7]  In common sense, sex is natural and powerful.  Yet discussion of matriarchy is difficult and often suppressed.  The matriarchy figure is a rare means for expressing the actual, underlying natural distribution of power by sex in human societies.

Many scholars have confused matriarchy and patriarchy.  The root(ster) of that confusion is male fear of inadequacy in penetration.  Every male ruler has a mother, and most, at least one female lover.  The implication of binary difference is a relation of domination and subordination, like that of hydrogen and oxygen.  Foucault.  Butler.  Increased scholarly appreciation for the social construction of the social construction of gender has engendered  a more fecund gender field of scholarly literature.  An important result has been the development of demasculinized discourse and the installation of new leading metaphor: matriarchy encompasses patriarchy.

If Chaucer has any authority over the scandal of gender difference that this tale exposes, it is of an implicated sort that can only laugh at the absurdity of a system that often works despite its flimsy claims to authority. … each of these performances, because they are revealed to be absurd, demonstrates the ways that men and women collaborate to make fictions of gender convincing. [8]

The rest is silence.

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Read more:

• men’s inferiority in guile makes women’s rule of paternity
• slave girls rule mighty caliphs
• men’s sexual vulnerability undermines gender equality

Notes:

[1] Panchatantra, Book IV (“Loss of Gains”), story of “King Joy {Nanda} and Secretary Splendor {Vararuci},” trans. from Sanskrit, Ryder (1925) pp. 408-9.  The actors in the tales of the Panchatantra are predominately animals, but unlike the animals in Aesop’s fables, the animals in the Panchatantra are sex-typed and act like humans.  A surviving eighth-century Arabic translation of the Panchatrantra, known as Kalila Wa-Dimna, includes the frame story (“The Story of the Tortoise and the Ape”), but not the embedded tale with the matriarchy figure of the woman riding on the back of her lover.  See Keith-Falconer (1885) pp. 158-168.  Kalila Wa-Dimna in translation was widely known in medieval western Europe as the Fables of Bidpai.

[2] Sarton (1930), p. 9, states that it occurs in al-Jahiz’s Kitab al-mahasin wa al-addad (The Treatise on Good Qualities and Their Antonyms).  Montgomery (2005) p. 232 lists al-Jahiz’s authorship of that work as doubtful.

[3] Cardonne (1771), vol. 1, pp. 14-18.  The story uses the terms sultan, seraglio, and odalisque.  These are Turkish terms.  In addition, a note on id. p. 15 states:

when the Grand Seignior dies, the slaves, who have had no children by that prince, are married to the grandees of the Porte.

“Porte” most plausibly refers to the Ottoman capital of Constantinople, rather than the major inland cities of Mesopotamia.  Thus I assume that the story is from a Turkish manuscript.

[4] Id. p. 17 (including previous quote).

[5] Henri d’Andeli, “The Lay of Aristotle,” trans. from Old French, Hellman & O’Gorman (1965) p. 172.  Johann Herolt (d. 1468), also called Discipulus, included a version as an exemplum in Latin in his Promptuarium Exemplorum and attributed it to Jacques de Vitry (d. 1240).  The story isn’t included in The exempla or illustrative stories from the Sermones Vulgares of Jacques de Vitry.  Here is Herolt’s Latin text and an English translation (with added fairy-tale opening and closing).  A thirteenth-century German version names Alexander’s mistress as “Fillus” (Phyllis).  Sarton (1930) p. 10.  The tale and matriarchy figure became widely known in medieval Europe as “Alexander and Phyllis.” Recent scholarly advances have tended to transform the name to “Phyllis and Alexander.” Matheolus, who was a keen student of the leading medieval writer Marie de France, referred to the story in his Latin Lamentations, Bk. I, ll. 463-503.  Van Hamel (1892) pp. 33-36.  Matheolus includes details, including that of Aristotle with a bridle under his beard, not included in d’Andeli’s tale.  Moreover,  d’Andeli seems to be creating his story in the context of an existing similar story.  He begins by emphasizing that his story is “without scandal or baseness.”  Trans. Hellman & O’Gorman (1965) p. 168. D’Andeli’s repeatedly refers to Alexander’s Indian mistress as having blond hair.  That seems like a pointed contrast.  Moreover, d’Andeli has Alexander declare:

For a man can love only one woman, and truly he cannot please more than one.

Id. p. 170.  That’s a pointed contrast with the western stereotype of eastern men.  Eastern tales seem to have been part of the common culture of learned persons in thirteenth-century France.

[6] Id. pp. 172-3, 175-6 (inc. previous quote).

[8] Writing from a position of academic prominence about the time of the Great Stock Market Crash of 1929, George Sarton concluded his study of the matriarchy figure:

The candid and ingenious clerk who had the idea seven hundred years ago of bringing an old story up-to-date and giving new zest to it by changing a Muslim vizir into a Greek philosopher, did not do so without a good purpose. He wanted to put his brethren on guard against their greatest peril. This warning is just as timely to-day as it ever was. If the infallible Master failed as ignominiously, any excess of confidence in ourselves is mere foolishness. We must not feel too secure in our virtue, nor ever take our salvation for granted, for we are all the time surrounded by dangerous creatures.

Sarton (1930) pp. 18-9.  By dangerous creatures Sarton poetically refers to men’s natural selves.

[8] Crocker (2003) p. 195.  In Chaucer’s The Merchant’s Tale, a wife climbs on her husband’s back to move up into a tree, where she has sex with her lover.  The wife then convinces the husband that his sight of that act was false.  Men’s inferiority in guile was well-recognized in medieval literature.

[image] Woodcut of Lucas van Leyden (1494-1533). Size 41 x 29 cm.  Published in Sarton (1930) and a German journal in 1897.  This woodcut was not originally labeled “Aristotle and Phyllis.”  Id. provides a review of the iconography and five images.

References:

Cardonne, Denis Dominique. 1771. A miscellany of eastern learning: translated from Turkish, Arabian, and Persian manuscripts, in the library of the King of France. London: Printed for J. Wilkie … and B. Law (originally published in French in 1770).

Crocker, Holly A. (Holly Adryan). 2003. “Performative Passivity and Fantasies of Masculinity in the Merchant’s Tale.” The Chaucer Review. 38 (2): 178-198.

Hellman, Robert, and Richard O’Gorman. 1965. Fabliaux; ribald tales from the old French. New York: Crowell.

Keith-Falconer, I. G. N., ed. and trans. 1885. Kalilah and Dimnah: or, The Fables of Bidpai: being an account of their literary history. Cambridge: University Press.

Montgomery, James E. 2005. “Al-Jahiz.”  Pp. 231-242 in Cooperson, Michael, and Shawkat M. Toorawa. 2005. Arabic literary culture, 500-925.  Dictionary of Literary Biography, v. 311. Detroit: Thomson Gale.

Ryder, Arthur W., trans. 1925. The Panchatantra. Chicago, Ill: University of Chicago Press.

Sarton, George. 1930. “Aristotle and Phyllis.” Isis. 14 (1).

Van Hamel, Anton Gerard, ed. and trans. 1892. Mathéolus, Jean Le Fèvre. Les lamentations de Mathéolus et le livre de leesce de Jehan Le Fèvre, de Ressons: poèmes français du XIVe siècle. Paris: Bouillon.

Like rogues, thugs, and bad boys today, Roman gladiators were highly attractive to women.  Within the old gladiatorial barracks in Pompeii have survived graffiti indicating gladiators’ sexual allure.  Among the graffiti are these:

• Celadus, heartthrob of the girls
• Celadus, the girls’ idol
• Cresces, the net-man, puts right the night-time girls, the morning girls and all the others [1]

According to a leading scholar of ordinary life in ancient Rome, these graffiti are:

simultaneously bloke-ish boasting and the poignant fantasies of a couple of young fighters, who faced a short life and may never have got their girl, or at least not for long. [2]

Only an academic with no memory of masculine men could interpret as “bloke-ish boasting … poignant fantasies” a gladiator writing “Celadus, heartthrob of the girls” or “Celadus, the girls’ idol.”[3]  Men typically don’t boast or fantasize about being the center of attention.  Men’s interests are usually more act-oriented.  Moreover, much closely observed and carefully analyzed experience indicates that men who act like they are not desperate for sex or for women’s attention are more successful in getting just that.  Scholars of the new applied game theory call this “aloof asshole game.”

Rather than representing Celadus’s boasting or fantasies, the Celadus heartthrob/idol graffiti more probably represent another gladiator taunting Celadus.  Men’s sexual allure to women depends strongly on their status among men.  Describing Celadus as the hearthrob/idol of the girls implicitly questions his status among men.  One aspect of that status challenge might be homosexual, but it’s not necessarily so.  Describing Celadus as the hearthrob/idol of the girls also puts pressure on Celadus’s ability to run aloof asshole game.  Pretending that you aren’t eager to have sex with girls requires more guile when your brothers-in-arms are taunting you about how much girls adore you.

The richly jeweled woman found within the volcanic ash that smothered the Pompeii gladiator barracks most probably is further evidence of gladiators’ sexual allure.  No one plausibly believes that the rich woman was in the gladiator barracks having sex with a gladiator during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.  Seventeen other persons and a couple of dogs were also in the small room during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.  Knowing that isn’t necessary to surmise that the rich woman and a gladiator weren’t having sex during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius.  Nonetheless, a Cambridge don who has a prominent newspaper column (a symbolic superpower!) authoritatively declared:

the myth of the upmarket Pompeian lady being caught red-handed in the gladiatorial barracks, with her gladiator lover, is just that: a myth [4]

That’s a thought-suffocating myth of a myth.  Do you believe that during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius a richly jeweled woman took shelter in a gladiator barrack with strong, dangerous men that she did not know?  That’s possible.  But reason, feeling, and experience tend to suggest otherwise.  During the terror that Mt. Vesuvius rained down on Pompeii, the rich woman probably sought out the strong arms of her gladiator-lover.

Subvert the power of myth-makers with real understanding and your own creative thinking.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• marginal men’s graffiti in the Roman Empire
• Henry Mayhew laments women’s choices of lovers
• appreciating ancient Roman pantomime

Notes:

[1] Reported in the above English translation in Beard (2008) p. 275.

[2] Id.  If a male scholar put forward such an obtuse, tendentious, and belittling interpretation of a woman’s writing, he would be condemned as a misogynist and sternly instructed that only women can justly celebrate women’s voices.

[3] The third graffito probably isn’t a fantasy.  It seems to reflect a man’s sense of instrumental achievement.  That mode of personal valuation contributes to men’s relative disposability.  Other Roman graffiti also display that sense of men’s sexual achievement, with one rare note of protest.

[4] Id.  The remains of the persons in the gladiators’ barracks were found in the eighteenth century and subsequently lost.  Hence scientific testing on the age and sex of the skeletons cannot now be performed.  The reports indicate that only one richly jeweled woman was found in the room.   Roman literature now moralistically disparaged humorously described gladiators’ sexual allure:

Eppia, the senator’s wife, ran off with a gladiator …  And what were the youthful charms which captivated Eppia? What did she see in him to allow herself to be called “a she-Gladiator”? Her dear Sergius had already begun to shave; a wounded arm gave promise of a discharge, and there were sundry deformities in his face: a scar caused by the helmet, a huge wen upon his nose, a nasty humour always trickling from his eye. But then he was a gladiator! It is this that transforms these fellows into Hyacinths! it was this that she preferred to children and to country, to sister and to husband. What these women love is the sword: had this same Sergius received his discharge, he would have been no better than a Veiento.

Juvenal, Satires 6, ll. 103-113.  Another contemporary writer sarcastically refers to “those most loving gladiators, to whom men prostitute their souls, women too their bodies.” Tertullian, The Shows (De Spectaculis) Ch. 22.

[image] Guardian figure, Japan, Kamakura period (1185–1333), Wood, 226.4 cm. (F1949.20), 233.5 cm. (F1949.21), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.

Reference:

Beard, Mary. 2008. The fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii lost and found. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

In proclaiming the virtues of women in a work written in 393, the learned Christian scholar Jerome set out the example of Bilia and her husband Duilus.  Duilus once criticized Bilia:

After Duilus had grown old and feeble, he was once in the course of a quarrel taunted with having bad breath.  Feeling deeply shamed, he went home and complained to his wife that she had never told him of his bad breath so that he might remedy that fault.  She replied that she would have done so, but she thought that all men had foul breath as he had. [1]

This isn’t an example of misandry.  Jerome’s point is that Bilia was so chaste that she did not know the smell of the breath of any man other than her husband.  Jerome’s story implicitly suggests that other wives had greater knowledge.

Bad breath seems to have become a conventional gag.  In a thirteenth-century European fabliau, a widow who remarried is complaining about her new husband.  She describes her suffering from her new husband and fondly addresses her dead, former husband:

All he {her new husband} wants to do is eat and sleep.  All night long he snores like a pig.  That’s his delight and pastime.  Am I not ill treated then?  When I stretch out next to him all naked and he turns away from me, it almost tears the heart out of me.  My husband, my lord, you never treated me that way.  You called me your sweet beloved, and I called you too, because you turned to me and kissed me sweetly and said to begin with: “My beautiful wife and lady, what a sweet breath you have!”  Husband, those were your very words.  May your soul rest in heaven! [2]

Academics might categorized this passage as an example of misandry, the savaging of the real man set against the socially constructed, unreal ideal Man.  But there’s something funny here.  Maybe the remarried widow actually had bad breath, and the former husband never actually said she had sweet breath!

Bad breath is no joke.  Without bad breath, Alexander the Great’s reshaping of western Eurasia would have started from Persia.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Nahid’s bad breath makes history in the Shahnameh
• ancient bird-shit medicine
• bad breath no problem in ancient love story

Notes:

[1] Jerome, Contra Jovinianum, Bk. I, para. 46, translated from the Latin as Against Jovinianus.  Jerome also quotes Theophrastus, who warned about bad breath and other personal characteristics:

in the case of a wife you cannot pick and choose: you must take her as you find her. If she has a bad temper, or is a fool, if she has a blemish, or is proud, or has bad breath, whatever her fault may be— all this we learn after marriage.

Id. para. 47.   In contrast to Theophrastus’s warning, Jerome seems to have been concerned that women were learning too much about men before marriage.

[2] Gautier le Leu, “La Veuve” (The Widow), trans. Hellman & O’Gorman (1965) p. 153.

Reference:

Hellman, Robert, and Richard O’Gorman. 1965. Fabliaux; ribald tales from the old French. New York: Crowell.