#parthenoi

Does the word "virgin" carried the same meaning to the Ancient Greeks as it does today? Were Athena, Artemis, and Hestia universally accepted as the virgin goddesses, and are there any other goddesses that were also referred as such?

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“Before we proceed we need to consider what the social construct ‘virgin’ or parthenos signified to the ancient Greeks. Childhood in general, both for males and females, was considered to be a state of wildness, although we hear much more about the bestial nature of young females. Greek poetry, myth, and ritual treat the parthenos as an untamed and hence unsocialized female. In general an unwed female is adamatos, ‘untamed’; while to marry or even seduce a young girl is to damazein, ‘tame,’ her. The lyric poet Anacreon teases a young woman by likening her to a ‘Thracian filly’ who has not yet tasted the bit (PMG, 335). Myths which feature women transformed into animals, for example Callisto, are usually specific to young women on the threshold of sexual maturity. Girls’ puberty rituals suggest a similar correlation between beast and maiden. In a puberty rite at Brauron selected Athenian girls emulated bears, and in Thessaly girls played the part of deer or fawns.

“Greek virginity by definition excluded sexual submission to a male. The divine virgin remained adamatos, ‘untamed’ or ‘unsubdued’ in the fullest sense of the word. No husband controlled her, nor did she submit to the power of Aphrodite. The Greeks, who equated masculine sexuality with social dominance, also found it difficult to accept the inverse situation in which goddesses were active lovers If a goddess took a mortal lover she distorted the social order, for she would automatically become the dominant partner in the relationship. Virgin goddesses had no interest in exerting their powers in this way. Instead, the Greeks made them interact with mortal men in a kourotrophic capacity: rather than functioning as sexual partners, they became nurturing guardians of young men approaching adulthood or protectors of male heroes.

"One of these departures involves goddesses who remain eternally virgin, who refuse to make the transition from parthenos to gynê, from nubile young woman to the woman with sexual experience. At the outset of the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite 5 (7–33) we learn that three of the Olympian goddesses took no pleasure in the ‘works of Aphrodite’ and requested from Zeus the right to remain virginal: Athena preferred the pleasure to be found in warfare and craft; for Artemis it was the bow and hunting, and the dances and songs of her women followers; Hestia, despite the suits of Poseidon and Apollo, firmly resisted them and swore a great oath before Zeus that she would live forever virgin and become celibate guardian of the hearth fires of home and city. As virgins these immortals enjoyed a unique autonomy granted by their unmarried status, an independence that was denied to Greek women, who were perpetually under the guardianship of their kyrios. The specific strength of these immortal virgins in fact resided in their refusal to relinquish partheneia, the ephemeral state between childhood and motherhood experienced by all young women. This was a time of life that was filled with potency derived from a reservoir of as-yet-unreleased generative energy, a transitional phase in the life pattern of a mortal woman that was a time of crisis, when she exerted an attractive yet threatening wildness. Mortal virgins therefore had to move beyond partheneia to transmute and shape its wild energy into the requirements of wifehood and motherhood. But for goddesses virginity could be permanent or even (in the case of Hera, discussed below) renewable. Translated into a permanent state, partheneia became a source of eternal and unyielding power."

“Virgin Artemis was a powerful kourotrophic divinity. Her fierce attachment to Hippolytus is but one example, although his refusal to renounce virginity served as a reminder that only the immortals could remain celibate with impunity. She was also a kourotrophic figure for Athenian ephebes: adolescent males were inducted into the rights of citizenship by swearing an oath in her sanctuary. She was the protecting deity in rituals involving parthenoi, at Brauron for instance. With parthenoi (historical and mythical) she was rigorous in demanding virginity in her followers. When Callisto became pregnant by Zeus, the goddess’s anger was ferocious Pausanias (7.19.2–5) gives us an account of a priestess of Artemis Triclaria in Achaia named Comaetho, who loved one Melanippus. Unable to obtain permission from their parents to marry, the couple used the sanctuary of Artemis as a bridal chamber. Artemis sent disease and death upon the inhabitants of the region until Apollo commanded that the lovers be sacrificed to Artemis; an Achaean sacrifice was reenacted annually requiring for it the most beautiful young man and woman. In Cyrene, Greek women about to marry were obliged to engage in a prenuptial rite of appeasement to Artemis for the loss of their virginity. The ferocity of Artemis, virgin and patron of virgins, arose from her refusal to submit to the same mature sexual identity required of a human female. Resistance added value to human virgins before they married, however; this was the furthest apple on the highest branch of the apple tree, according to Sappho (105aV), a prize worth defending and fighting for. And patriarchal society would have it so, for girls before their marriage: a sexually reticent girl possessed the feminine virtues of sophrosyne, self-control, so important in a patrilineal inheritance system in which a man needed to know that he was the father of his heirs.”

“Despite their erotic attractiveness to men, divine and mortal parthenoi displayed a kind of dynamic androgyny. A Greek parthenos did not assume her gendered identity until marriage: like the Amazons, she existed outside boundaries confining women and exhibited both male and female features. In the same way, the virgin goddesses – eternal parthenoi – partook of the gendered expectations of both males and females. Artemis Potnia Theron mediated between the masculine pursuit of hunting and the more feminine nurture of wild animals. The number of dedications of clothing at her cult site in Brauron attests to an association between the goddess and weaving, the definitive feminine occupation. The warrior goddess Athena, born from her father’s head in full armour, also presided over weaving, as Athena Ergane. The androgyny of both goddesses was consistent with the idea of the virgin as pre-gendered, a belief not confined to the Greeks and one based upon the notion that the sexual identity of a young, unmarried woman was not yet fixed. Greek and Roman medical writers described the flesh of the unpenetrated female body as dense and hard – that is, more like a man’s – and not yet having the porous consistency of that of a sexually active woman. This physiological theory finds its ritual corollary in the athletic competitions in honour of Hera, the Heraia. Girls participating in the foot races wore a masculine exomis, which has been connected to the ritual transvestism associated with puberty rites. Even more dramatic is evidence found of a cult of Artemis which, according to Hesychius, required girls to don the phallus.24 The juxtaposition of innocent girlhood and such overt symbols of masculinity is not as odd as it first seems: the Greek imagination focused upon the parthenos as an incipient gyne, or woman, by recognizing in her an unformed being whose potential fecundity could take a variety of shapes until it was fixed in its final feminine form.”

“Unlike the modern notion of physical virginity (someone who has never had sex), a parthenos was a girl who had not clearly been shown to have had sex. A new bride might be referred to as a parthenos, as could a woman who had had sex but had hidden the evidence. Kreusa, in Euripides’s Ion, is the mother by Apollo of Ion (whom she exposes as an infant). Although the play’s chorus knows this about Kreusa, they nevertheless call her a parthenos, not because she is physically a virgin, and not even because she is not yet a mother, but because her social standing is that of a woman who is not known to be a mother. Thus, the ancient Greek term parthenos had more to do with how one was perceived by society than with the physical state of one’s body.”