Women on classical Greek vases

Magazine Antiques, Dec, 1995 by Carol Benson

For more than fifty years the study of classical Greek vase painting has focused on stylistic details that identify individual artists and schools of painters. The brilliant work of Sir John D. Beazley in particular established the characteristics of several hundred Athenian vase painters of the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.(1)

His achievements inspired many to follow his example in the careful examination of details, which has given prominence to a stylistic analysis of vase painting that far outweighs the significance of the vases in their own day. These were, after all, utilitarian clay vessels made for entertaining, as gifts, and as prizes, although most were undoubtedly household treasures, handed down over the generations, or buried in the tombs of their owners. However, as Michael Vickers and others have argued in the past decade, vessels made of precious metals and delicate paintings on wooden wall panels, which have not survived, were no doubt much more valued in antiquity than painted vases.(2)

Traditionally, interpretations of the images on classical vases have been purposely vague, with most being called generic scenes unless identified by an inscription. However, recently a new interest has developed in how the imagery on classical Greek vases was viewed by the clientele for which it was produced.(3) A vast vocabulary of poses, gestures, and symbolic details is now considered to be the visual equivalent of labels, and the meanings of the scenes are made more emphatic by the use of compositional devices adapted from earlier prototypes and individualized by the painter.

An exhibition currently at the Walters Art Gallery in Baltimore focuses on the woman, her nature, and her place in classical Greek society as depicted in vase paintings. At the time, a female's identity was always defined in relation to a male's. As a girl she lived in the custody of her father or a male relative - her kyrios (guardian). When she was married she was given over to the custodianship of her husband, along with a dowry with which to maintain her. The maiden ready for marriage was called a parthenos, and in the classical Greek view she was at the peak of her physical strength, sexuality, and fertility. Along with these positive associations was the possibility that the parthenos would escape the control of her father and society and become violent or even go mad. Thus the powerful heroines of myth, such as Atalanta and Iphigenia, are parthenoi, as are the Amazons, the terrible Gorgon Medusa, and the daughters of King Proitos, who go mad and wander the countryside lowing like cows. The Greeks believed that the solution to such a precarious state was marriage or, as in the case of Iphigenia, sacrifice, which was likened to a marriage to Hades. Preparation for marriage was a process aimed at taming the wild potency of the female without causing her to lose her reproductive powers.

As a girl grew she passed through a variety of rituals that prepared her for her adult role. A number of these rituals are encapsulated in this passage from Lysistrata by Aristophanes (c. 450-c. 388 B.C.):

Once I was seven, I became an arrephoros [dew carrier]. Then at ten I became an aletris [grain grinder] for the goddess. After that, wearing[?] a saffron robe, I was an arktos [bear] at Brauron. And as a lovely young girl, I once served as a kanephoros [basket bearer], wearing a string of figs.(4)

Only four girls between the ages of seven and eleven, all from noble families, were selected each year to be the arrephoroi. They took part in a nocturnal fertility rite known as the Arrephoria in which, carrying baskets on their heads, they walked down an underground passage to a sanctuary of Aphrodite under the Acropolis in Athens. There they traded the secret contents of their baskets for other contents, which they brought back to the surface, completing a cyclical event. The aletrides were also selected from the families of the nobility and participated in grinding the groin for sacred ritual cakes.

Many girls served as arktoi (little bears) in the cult of Artemis at Brauron near Athens. They wore saffron-colored robes, dyed with the herb that the ancient Greeks associated with women and menstrual ailments. Artemis was the goddess of the hunt and of the moon. She enforced boundaries and oversaw transitions (see Pl. VI), and was therefore thought to play a major role in young girls' lives. Although what the arktoi actually did is not known, the culminating ritual is thought to have been a race, when the girls were chased by a "bear." At the conclusion, their wild natures tamed, they emerged ready for the domestication of married life.

The crowning honor for an Athenian parthenos of noble birth was to be the kanephoros in the Great Panathenaic processsion, which took place once every four years. This maiden carried on her head the kanoun, a sacred basket that contained the barley and the knife used for animal sacrifices on the altar of Athena. As the kanephoroi for this and other Athenian festivals were chosen for their purity, it was considered a mark of tremendous virtue to be selected.