Using evidence from the Athenian Agora, the authors show how objects discovered during excavations provide a vivid picture of women's lives. The book is structured according to the social roles women played: as owners of property, companions (in and outside of marriage), participants in ritual, craftspeople, producers, and consumers. A final section moves from the ancient world to the modern, discussing the role of women as archaeologists in the early years of the Agora excavations.
Here Sian Lewis considers the full range of female existence in classical Greece - childhood and old age, unfree and foreign status, and the ageless woman characteristic of Athenian red-figure painting. Ceramics are an unparalleled resource for women's lives in ancient Greece, since they show a huge number of female types and activities. Yet it can be difficult to interpret the meanings of these images, especially when they seem to conflict with literary sources. This much-needed study shows that it is vital to see the vases as archaeology as well as art, since context is the key to understanding which images can stand as evidence for the real lives of women, and which should be reassessed.
Largely excluded from any public role, the women of ancient Greece nonetheless appear in various guises in the art and writing of the period, and in legal documents. These representations, in Sue Blundell's analysis, reveal a great deal about women's day-to-day experience as well as their legal and economic position - and how they were regarded by men.
About the Image on the Front Cover: This image is one the most endearing of all the sculptures made during the Classical Period of Athens. It shows a husband and wife whose names, inscribed above their heads, are Philoxenos, dressed in the uniform of a hoplite, one of many foot soldiers fighting in phalanx formation, wearing a metal helmet, breastplate, short tunic called exomis and sandals, and holding a shield on his left arm, and Philoumene, his wife, wearing a long robe, called peplos, flowing down yet attached at the waist, with her hair in a snood and elevated shoes. The pose is classic, standing straight in serene elegance, one knee bent as if they were ready to walk away from each other. They gaze at each other for a tender and sad farewell and shake hands to express their mutual love and loyalty. This scene is carved in relief on a grave stele made of marble, white with a hue of grey, from a quarry on the south side of Mount Pentelikon, about ten miles northeast of Athens. It may have been painted originally, but the paint has disappeared. The dimensions are 102.2 cm (40 in.) in height, 44.5 cm (17 in.) in width and 16.5 cm (6 in.) in depth. It is dated of about 400 BCE, during the return to normal life in Athens after the end of the Peloponnesian War in 404 BCE. The timing may indicate that the tribute was from the wife to her husband killed in action and, for this reason, that the gravestone was paid for by her wealthy family. This image is reproduced here from the J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California, 83.AA.378. See the Museums Handbook of the Antiquities Collection, p. 22. http://www.greekancienthistory.com/
This book provides a comprehensive account of the Athenians' conception of women during the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Though nothing remains that represents the authentic voice of the women themselves, there is a wealth of evidence showing how men sought to define women. By working through a range of material, from the provisions of Athenian law through to the representations of tragedy and comedy, the author builds up, in the manner of an anthropological ethnography, a coherent and integrated picture of the Athenians' notion of `woman'.
Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being ‘sexually exploitable.’ Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the ‘citizen wife’ and the ‘common prostitute,’ the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in Classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market. This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study if women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic women, because they could not legally be wives, as some variety of whores. Author Rebecca Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the Classical period. She then constructs new approaches to the study of metic women in Classical Athens that fit the evidence and open up further paths for exploration. This leading-edge volume advances the study of women beyond their sexual status and breaks down the ideological constraints that both Victorians and feminist scholars reacting to them have historically relied upon throughout the study of women in antiquity.
This book takes as its starting-point the images of women in the Parthenon sculptures, in order to investigate two levels of feminine experience in Classical Athens, the human and the divine. The inter-play between women's religious prominence and their domestic obscurity is examined in relation to the young citizen women who lead the procession; while the great goddesses represented in the frieze are studies in terms of their relationships with their human worshippers and, on a symbolic level, with the mythological females, such as the Amazons, who appear in the metopes. Finally, the book turns to a third aspect of th e feminine experience, and looks at the women who do not appear in the Parthenon sculptures - the prostitutes, slaves and alien women who made a vital economic and ideological contribution to the Athenian achievement.
Examining tragedies and comedies by a variety of authors, she illustrates how the dramatic poets exploited speech conventions among both women and men to construct characters and to convey urgent social and political issues."--BOOK JACKET.
Information about women is scattered throughout the fragmented mosaic of ancient history: the vivid poetry of Sappho survived antiquity on remnants of damaged papyrus; the inscription on a beautiful fourth century B.C.E. grave praises the virtues of Mnesarete, an Athenian woman who died young; a great number of Roman wives were found guilty of poisoning their husbands, but was it accidental food poisoning, or disease, or something more sinister. Apart from the legends of Cleopatra, Dido and Lucretia, and images of graceful maidens dancing on urns, the evidence about the lives of women of the classical world--visual, archaeological, and written--has remained uncollected and uninterpreted. Now, the lavishly illustrated and meticulously researched Women in the Classical World lifts the curtain on the women of ancient Greece and Rome, exploring the lives of slaves and prostitutes, Athenian housewives, and Rome's imperial family. The first book on classical women to give equal weight to written texts and artistic representations, it brings together a great wealth of materials--poetry, vase painting, legislation, medical treatises, architecture, religious and funerary art, women's ornaments, historical epics, political speeches, even ancient coins--to present women in the historical and cultural context of their time. Written by leading experts in the fields of ancient history and art history, women's studies, and Greek and Roman literature, the book's chronological arrangement allows the changing roles of women to unfold over a thousand-year period, beginning in the eighth century B.C.E. Both the art and the literature highlight women's creativity, sexuality and coming of age, marriage and childrearing, religious and public roles, and other themes. Fascinating chapters report on the wild behavior of Spartan and Etruscan women and the mythical Amazons; the changing views of the female body presented in male-authored gynecological treatises; the "new woman" represented by the love poetry of the late Republic and Augustan Age; and the traces of upper- and lower-class life in Pompeii, miraculously preserved by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 C.E. Provocative and surprising, Women in the Classical World is a masterly foray into the past, and a definitive statement on the lives of women in ancient Greece and Rome.
Greek women routinely wore the veil. That is the unexpected finding of this meticulous study, one with interesting implications for the origins of Western civilisation. The Greeks, popularly (and rightly) credited with the invention of civic openness, are revealed as also part of a more Eastern tradition of seclusion. Llewellyn-Jones' work proceeds from literary and, notably, from iconographic evidence. In sculpture and vase painting it demonstrates the presence of the veil, often covering the head, but also more unobtrusively folded back onto the shoulders. This discreet fashion not only gave a priviledged view of the face to the ancient art consumer, but also, incidentally, allowed the veil to escape the notice of traditional modern scholarship. From Greek literary sources, the author shows that full veiling of the head and face was commonplace. He analyses the elaborate Greek vocabulary for veiling and explores what the veil meant to achieve. He shows that the veil was a conscious extension of the house and was often referred to as `tegidion', literally `a little roof'. Veiling was thus an ingeneous compromise; it allowed women to circulate in public while mainting the ideal of a house-bound existence. Alert to the different types of veil used, the author uses Greek and more modern evidence (mostly from the Arab world) to show how women could exploit and subvert the veil as a means of eloquent, sometimes emotional, communication. First published in 2003 and reissued as a paperback in 2010, Llewellyn-Jones' book has established itself as a central - and inspiring - text for the study of ancient women.
