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Please reference as: Tamboukou, Maria. 2025. 'Kassia', https://sites.google.com/site/mariatamboukoupersonalblog/home/research-projects/soundscapes-and-echoes/kassia/on-men-and-women
Kassia’s secular gnomic verses on “Men” and “Women” appear at first glance as brief moral sketches—didactic maxims listing virtues and vices. Yet, when read closely, their tone of irony and ambivalence reveals a sophisticated commentary on gendered behaviour and moral discourse. These verses offer a compact but penetrating insight into how gender was thought, performed, and critiqued in the moral vocabulary of the medieval Byzantine world. [1]
Men and the Performativity of Virtue
Kassia’s portrait of the male subject begins with grotesque irony:
A man bald, dumb, and with only one hand,
short, swarthy, and with a speech impediment,
bowed legged and with crossed eyes … said:
“I am not the cause of my misfortunes;
for in no way did I want to be like this.”
The humor here is caustic. Physical deformity becomes the figure of moral failure. The man’s defense—that he is “not the cause” of his condition—is punctured by Kassia’s counter-claim: “but you are in part the cause of your faults.” Her gnomic voice is not compassionate but diagnostic; it refuses the alibi of fate.
From there, Kassia constructs a taxonomy of male conduct: the honest man who avoids oaths, the prudent man who governs passions, the miser who hides from his friends. Virtue is equated with kratein, mastery—of self, speech, and emotion. This alignment of manliness with self-command is familiar in Byzantine ethics, echoing Stoic and monastic ideals. Yet Kassia’s catalogue also exposes the theatrical nature of such ideals.
Through the lens of Judith Butler’s (1990) notion of gender performativity masculinity is configured as an ongoing performance of control that conceals fragility. The opening caricature of the disfigured man reads as an early satire of masculine victimhood—an insistence on innocence that masks complicity. Kassia’s aphorisms thus illustrate what Butler (1997) describes as the reiterative structure of subjection: the male subject’s moral identity depends on repeating the gestures of authority and self-control that continually risk failure.
Her gnomic form mirrors that instability. Each aphorism asserts a moral truth only to unsettle it with the next. The rhythm of declaration and contradiction becomes a literary enactment of what Butler describes as the precariousness of gendered identity itself.
Women and the Paradox of Beauty
If Kassia’s men perform virtue, her women are caught in the performance of visibility. The Women verses begin with a moral binary:
A woman industrious and prudent, although in hard times,
definitely overcomes her misfortunes;
but a woman lazy, idle, and mean
actually causes misfortune.
Virtue here is pragmatic—labor and prudence are means of survival, not ornamentation. Yet the subsequent verses turn abruptly toward the problem of beauty:
It is not good for a woman to be beautiful; for beauty is distracting;
but if she is ugly and ill-mannered, without distraction it is twice as bad.
Kassia exposes the logical absurdity of the patriarchal double bind: women are condemned both for possessing and for lacking beauty. The irony of “beauty has its consolation” registers a moral critique—the impossibility of female virtue within a value system that judges by appearance. This paradox resonates with Simone de Beauvoir’s (1949) influential insight that woman is defined and differentiated with reference to man and not he with reference to her. Kassia’s woman, whether beautiful or plain, remains entrapped in a system of relational judgment. Yet Kassia’s invocation of the Book of Esdras reverses the terms:
Esdras is witness that women, together with truth, prevail over all.
In the scriptural episode (1 Esdras 4:13–32), truth ultimately surpasses women in strength. Kassia’s adaptation subtly shifts this hierarchy: “women together with truth” are the prevailing force. The pairing of women and truth becomes her understated theological feminism—a claim that moral insight, not physical form, constitutes true strength.Kassia’s ethical irony operates through what Luce Irigaray (1985, 76) terms mimicry: the strategic repetition of patriarchal discourse to expose its contradictions By imitating the aphoristic voice of masculine wisdom, she reveals its fault lines. The extreme symmetry of her formulations—where both excess and lack are condemned—parodies the logic of moral binaries themselves.
This double voice—both inside and outside patriarchal language—marks Kassia’s verse as a site of early gendered consciousness. She does not reject the moral frame but performs its contradictions. Her satire depends on the reader’s recognition of irony; it presupposes a knowing audience capable of hearing the dissonance between moral instruction and lived absurdity.
Beyond the Binary: A Byzantine Critique of Performativity
Both “On Men” and “On Women” hinge on performance. The man’s ethical status depends on his ability to control speech and passion; the woman’s worth depends on her relation to appearance and labor. In each case, identity is externalized, measured by conformity to a visible code. Seen through Butler’s Undoing Gender (2004), Kassia’s moral types exemplify the social norms that constitute the intelligibility of gendered life. The prudent man and the industrious woman are intelligible figures precisely because they reproduce expected behaviours; the grotesque man and the “ugly, ill-mannered” woman fall outside the frame of legibility. Kassia’s irony exposes that boundary: virtue and vice are not intrinsic states but social recognitions, contingent on visibility and speech. Her gnomic form—assertion followed by reversal—enacts what we might call a Byzantine poetics of performativity. Each maxim performs its own undoing, revealing the instability of the categories it names. The ethical and the aesthetic, the male and the female, virtue and vice—all depend on repetition, on citation, and thus on potential failure.
Toward a Feminist Hermeneutics of Byzantine Irony
Kassia’s secular verses invite a reading akin to what Elisabeth Schüssler Fiorenza has called a hermeneutics of suspicion (1983, 56): a strategy that uncovers patriarchal logic within sacred and moral discourse while reclaiming its suppressed possibilities. Her Men and Women gnomai are not moral treatises but acts of interpretation—miniature theological fictions about human weakness and the structures that sustain it.
To reread Kassia’s secular verses through the conceptual vocabularies of gender theories is to illuminate how her irony and moral inversion resonate with later critiques of gendered performance. Yet this resonance must not be mistaken for continuity or ancestry. To position Kassia as a “protofeminist” would impose a retrospective teleology—a search for origins that obscures the historical textures of Byzantine moral thought.
Rather than establishing a lineage, such readings can help trace entanglements: ways in which different epochs think through embodiment, speech, and virtue under conditions of constraint. Kassia’s verses do not anticipate feminist theory; they articulate, within their own theological and linguistic world, the fractures of moral discourse that later theories would name differently.
Reading Kassia’s gnomai on men and women through de Beauvoir, Butler, or Irigaray—merely instances drawn from a broader spectrum of feminist interpretations—does not aim to recover a feminist precursor, but rather to open a dialogic field between past and present forms of critique. In this sense, the value of a gender-theoretical reading lies not in locating an origin, but in revealing how irony, repetition, and moral reflection continue to shape the grammar through which gendered subjectivities are both imagined and undone.
Notes
[1] For excellent studies of gender relations in Byzantium, see Garland and Bronwen 2013, Neville 2019 and Meyer and Messis 2024.
References
Butler, Judith. (1990) Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. New York: Routledge.
Butler, Judith. (1997) The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Butler, Judith. (2004) Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge.
Beauvoir, Simone de. (1949) Le deuxième sexe. Paris: Gallimard.
Garland, Lynda, and Bronwen Neil. 2013. Questions of Gender in Byzantine Society. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
Irigaray, Luce. (1985) This Sex Which Is Not One. Trans. Catherine Porter and Carolyn Burke. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Meyer, Mati, and Charis Messis, eds. (2024) The Routledge Handbook of Gender and Sexuality in Byzantium. London: Routledge.
Neville, Leonora (2019). Byzantine Gender. York: Arc Humanities Press. https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctvmd8403
Schüssler Fiorenza, Elisabeth. (1983) In Memory of Her: A Feminist Theological Reconstruction of Christian Origins. New York: Crossroad.
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