Types of Women

Types of Women, sometimes translated simply as Women or rendered as Semonides 7, is an Archaic Greek satirical poem written by Semonides of Amorgos in the sixth or seventh century BCE. The poem is based on the idea that Zeus created men and women differently, and that he specifically created ten types of women based on different models from the natural world. The poem survives due to its inclusion in the anthology of Joannes Stobaeus.

The poem is 118 lines long, and written in iambic trimeter. The first 94 lines describe ten women, or types of women: seven are animals, two are elements, and the final woman is a bee. The second part of the poem consists of a complaint about the evils of women in general. The poem ends with a mythical example illustrating this point, after which the poem breaks off. It is not certain whether the poem originally ended here: Hugh Lloyd-Jones thinks that the ending as it stands is too abrupt, and suggests that there may have been a number of other mythical examples following the one which is preserved; Leslie Schear disagrees, arguing that it is difficult to think of a mythical example from Greek mythology of a wife's treachery which can top that of Helen of Troy.

Of the ten types of women in the poem, nine are delineated as destructive: the dirty woman comes from a pig; the cunning woman originates from a fox, the incessantly curious and high-maintenance woman comes from a dog, the lazy or apathetic woman comes from earth or soil, the capricious woman of mood swings comes from seawater, the stubborn woman comes from an ass, the untrustworthy and uncontrollable woman comes from a weasel or skunk (depending on the translation), the overly proud woman comes from a mare, and the worst and ugliest type of woman comes from an ape or monkey. Only the "Bee Woman" (who is dismissed as an impossible ideal) is regarded as virtuous. The bee reference is considered homage to the earlier poem of Hesiod entitled Theogony, which uses the metaphor of women and men as bees in one part.

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