Ancient Greece in the Archaic Age of Ancient Greece
After the Dark Ages, Greece experienced the Archaic Age, which featured such writers as Homer and Sappho.
Delphi is best known as the home of the Delphic Oracle or the Pythia, a priestess of Apollo. The traditional picture is of the Pythia, in an altered state, muttering words inspired by the god, which male priests transcribed. The Pythia sat on a great bronze tripod in a spot above a crevice in rocks from which vapors rose. Before sitting, she burned laurel leaves and barley meal on the altar.
In Ancient Greece, technological advances and the havoc they wrought on the archaic age farming and land-owning system, including land shortages.
We can only generalize from limited available material about the place of women in Archaic Greece. Most evidence is literary, coming from men who naturally didn't know what it was like to live as a woman. Some of the poets, notably Hesiod and Semonides, appear to be misogynist, seeing the role of woman in the world as little more than a curse man would be well off without.
Homer and Hesiod are the first names in Greek literature. It was they who gave the Greeks their gods, according to the historian Herodotus
Sappho and Alcaeus (flourished in the 42 Olympiad (612-609 B.C.) were both contemporaries, natives of Mytilene on Lesbos, and aristocrats affected by local power struggles.
An introduction to the period in Greek history known as the Archaic Greece.
An e-text of William Smith's "A Smaller History of Greece."
