What Ancient Women Wanted in Men Wasn’t What You Think

Picture an ancient man. Quickly. Almost everybody pictures the same thing: big, bearded, holding a weapon.

Now ask whether that is a man women wanted, or a man other men admired. Those are not the same. Most of what we read about ancient men was written by men, for men. A few things survived that were not.

55 love poems from Egypt

They were written down around 1300 BC, on papyrus and on broken pieces of pot. Papyrus was expensive. Broken pot was free. So some of this was written by ordinary people.

About half are in a woman's voice, which is very unusual for the ancient world.

She says her heart is not quiet when she thinks of him. She says she will pretend to be ill so that her mother calls him. That is a plan, not a sigh.

What she never says

She never says he is rich. She never says he owns land. She never mentions his family, and she never calls him brave.

What she does say

She talks about his skin, his arms and the way he moves. One poem says she loves to watch him cross the river. There are crocodiles, and he swims it anyway to get to her.

That praise is not about courage in war. It is about effort, for her. Other poems praise how he smells, his voice and his hands.

A warning: poems are not surveys. They are a fashion as much as a feeling. But a fashion still tells you what was admired.

The walls of Pompeii

A Roman town buried by a volcano kept its walls exactly as they were, covered in thousands of hand-scratched lines. It is the closest thing the ancient world has to a comment section.

One famous line calls a fighter from the arena the one the girls sigh for. People read that and say women wanted fighters.

Careful. Those lines are next to the fighters' own barracks. A fighter writing about how much girls like him is evidence about him, not about girls.

The ordinary lines are more useful. One says a girl called Methe loves Chrestus with her whole heart. One is about being locked out. One says whoever is in love should prosper.

And there are complaints. The wine here is watered down. A rude line about a man's looks. A long line about being ignored. In a warlike empire, the walls are about drink, money, love and being ignored. Almost none of it is about war.

The statues are the official version. The walls are what people were thinking about.

A manual written for women

A Roman poet wrote two books telling men how to find and keep a woman. Then he wrote a third, for women. Nobody writes a book for an audience that is not there, so women were reading in numbers.

His advice is revealing. Do not trust a man who is too well groomed. Be careful of the one with perfect hair, because he has had practice. Laugh at his jokes. Write back, but not too fast.

None of it is about being beautiful. All of it is about behaviour. Some of his advice has aged badly, and he was exiled not long after.

What the three sources share

Different places, different centuries, different languages. None is mainly about wealth, rank or being a warrior. What comes up again and again is simpler:

• attention
• effort
• showing up
• being funny
• smelling good
• hands that work, and a voice she likes

The honest limit

Three sources is three sources. They come from people who could write, or who lived near a wall worth writing on. The poorest people left almost nothing. This is not what everyone thought. It is what the surviving voices say.

But the warrior is missing in all three. If he were the answer, he would be everywhere.

The short answer

The man on the statue was carved by men, for men. The man in the poems is the one who crossed the river.