Herodotus and Egyptian women: the construction of female behaviors in the second logos of Histories

Abstract

 Aiming at the presentation of new possibilities in studying the women in the Classical Antiquity involving the discussions of the Cultural History, gender studies, identity and subjectivity of the historical subjects, we have chosen as a source of such article the work of Herodotus from Halicarnassus, the Greek historian, who wrote Histories in the fifth century B.C. Our intention is to analyze the selected passages in Book II in which the Egyptian women are presented in several situations, searching for evidences that this historian would support an ideal of a woman which could be part of the imaginary of a great deal of the Greek male population. Thus, we intend to demonstrate the way female behavior is represented in our source and how varied feminist social practices could be present in the same imagined would for women in ancient world.