Like Aristotle, Roman physicians believed that women, all of them, patricians, plebeians, or slaves, had fewer teeth and smaller brains than men, and that on the days they menstruated, their mirrors darkened with a reddish tinge.
Pliny the Elder, the empire’s greatest scientific authority, demonstrated that a menstruating woman soured new wine, sterilized crops, caused seeds and fruits to wither, killed grafted plants and swarms of bees, tarnished bronze, and made dogs go crazy.
GREEKS
A headache may give birth to a goddess. Athena sprouted from the throbbing head of her father, Zeus, whose temples split open to deliver her. She was born without a mother.
Some time later she cast the deciding vote when a tribunal of the gods on Olympus had to judge a difficult case: to avenge their father, Electra and her brother Orestes had chopped off their mother’s head with an ax.
The Furies prosecuted. They demanded the murderers be stoned to death because the life of a queen is sacred, and killing one’s mother cannot be forgiven.
Apollo took up the defense. He maintained that the accused were children of an unworthy mother and that maternity did not matter in the least. A mother, argued Apollo, is nothing more than an inert furrow where the man throws his seed.
Of the thirteen gods of the jury, six voted to condemn and six to absolve.
Athena would break the tie. She voted against the mother she never had and gave eternal life to the power of men in Athens.
AMAZONS
The Amazons, fearsome women, fought against Hercules when he was Heracles, and against Achilles in the Trojan War. They hated men and cut off their right breasts so their arrows would fly true.
The great river that cuts across the body of America from one side to the other is called Amazon, thanks to Spanish conquistador Francisco de Orellana.
He was the first European to navigate its length, from the inner depths of the land to the outer reaches of the sea. He returned to Spain minus an eye and said women warriors, who fought in the nude and roared like wild beasts, had riddled his brigantines with arrows. When they hungered for love, they kidnapped men, kissed them all night long, and strangled them at dawn.
And to burnish his story with the luster of the Greeks, Orellana said they were the very Amazons who worshipped the goddess Diana, and with their name he baptized the river where they reigned.
Centuries have passed. The Amazons were never heard from again. But the river still bears their name, and though poisoned daily by pesticides, chemical fertilizers, mercury from mines, and oil from ships, its waters are still the richest in the world in fish, birds, and stories.
WHEN THE LIVER WAS THE HOME OF THE SOUL
In earlier times, long before cardiologists and balladeers, matters of the heart could well have been called matters of the liver.
The liver lay at the heart of everything.
The Chinese believed the liver was where the soul slept and dreamt.
In Egypt, its custody was in the hands of Amset, son of the god Horus, and in Rome none less than Jupiter, father of the gods, cared for it.
The Etruscans read the future in the livers of the animals they sacrificed.
In Greek tradition, Prometheus stole fire from the gods for us mortals. Then Zeus, top dog on Mount Olympus, punished him by chaining him to a rock where every day a vulture devoured his liver. Not his heart, his liver. Every day Prometheus’s liver grew back and that was proof of his immortality.
ORIGIN OF MISOGYNY
As if such torment were not enough, Zeus also punished Prometheus’s betrayal by creating the first woman. And he sent us the present.
According to the poets of Olympus, her name was Pandora. She was lovely and curious and rather harebrained.
Pandora arrived on earth holding in her arms a large box. Inside the box, captive, were the sorrows. Zeus forbade her to open it, but barely had she arrived among us than she succumbed to temptation and took off the lid.
Out flew the woes and stung us. Thus came death to the world, as did old age, illness, war, work. .
According to the priests of the Bible, a woman named Eve, created by another god on another cloud, also brought us nothing but calamities.
HERACLES
Zeus was quite the punisher. For behaving badly, he sold his son Heracles into slavery.
Heracles, who in Rome would be called Hercules, was bought by Omphale, queen of Lydia, and in her service he destroyed a giant serpent, not a tall order for one who had been chopping up snakes since he was a baby. And he captured the twins who turned into flies at night and robbed people of their sleep.
Queen Omphale was unimpressed by such feats. She wanted a lover, not a bodyguard.
They almost always stayed indoors. The few times they emerged, he wore a pearl necklace, gold bracelets, and brightly colored underwear that did not last because his muscles burst the seams. And she wore the skin of the lion he had strangled with his bare hands in Nemea.
Word went around the kingdom that when he misbehaved she slapped him on the ass with her sandal. And that in his free time Heracles lay at his owner’s feet and busied himself sewing and weaving, while the women of the court fanned him, groomed him, perfumed him, spoon-fed him, and served him wine by the sip.
The vacation lasted three years, until Zeus the father ordered Heracles back to work to finish the twelve labors of the strongest man in the world.
ORIGIN OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION
They needed a god of trade. From his throne on Olympus, Zeus surveyed his family. He did not have to ponder long. Hermes was the god for the job.
Zeus gave him sandals with little gold wings and put him in charge of promoting the exchange of goods, the signing of treaties, and the safeguarding of free trade.
Hermes, who would become Mercury in Rome, was chosen because he was the best liar.
ORIGIN OF THE POSTAL SERVICE
Two thousand five hundred years ago, horses and cries carried messages to far-off lands.
Cyrus the Great, son of the house of Achaemenes, prince of Anzan, king of Persia, organized a postal system in which the Persian cavalry’s best horsemen rode relay night and day.
The express service, the most expensive, worked by shouts. From voice to voice, words crossed the mountains.
ECHO
In earlier times, the nymph Echo knew how to speak. And she spoke with such grace that her words seemed always new, never before spoken by any mouth.
But the goddess Hera, Zeus’s legal spouse, cursed her during one of her frequent fits of jealousy. And Echo suffered the worst of all punishments: she was deprived of her own voice.