Women's History and Ancient History. - book reviews

Journal of Social History, Spring, 1993 by Jane F. Gardner

Women's History and Ancient History. Edited by Sarah B. Pomeroy (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. xvi plus 317 pp. $39.95/cloth $13.95/paper).

Of the twelve papers collected in this volume, seven were originally delivered in 1987 at conferences at Wellesley College and the Graduate School of the City University of New York. Among the others, two (Snyder, Corbier (1)) are based on previously published work, and one was originally presented as a paper in 1985 (Carney). The usual preponderance of Greek studies over Roman, recently remarked upon by the editors of the special issues on Roman women of Helios 16 (1989), is less marked here; four papers are on Roman subjects, one Judaeo-Christian. Eight are presented as four complementary pairs, on Greek women poets (Sappho and Nossis), the Hippocratic corpus, Athenians and Spartans, and women in Roman art and public euergetism (Plancia Magna). The rest are heterogeneous: Macedonian royalty, Roman aristocracy, Fulvia (wife of Mark Antony) and menstrual taboos in Judaism.

The predominant theme is the relationship between public and private in women's lives. Jane McIntosh Snyder's account of the major fragments of Sappho's poetry highlights both the private slant given traditional public modes, and the intense sensuality of her private verse. Snyder's analysis, however, is less profound than that of Marilyn Skinner, who in a brilliant essay, engaging word-to-word with the Greek texts, shows how Nossis, a poetess of Hellenistic Magna Graecia, converted and subverted standard poetic tropes. This, as she points out, has important implications for the level of literary education and sophistication among Nossis's female contemporaries.

Natalie Boymel Kampen's paper is also to be welcomed as an expansion of the (so far) scanty body of work on representations of women in Roman art, a field in which she herself is a notable pioneer. She documents how women's images, rare in the public context of the historical relief, there follow established gender symbolism to promote the values of the family and legitimate reproduction. Mary Taliaferro Boatwright's study of the benefactions by Plancia Magna is a valuable case study to bulk out the hitherto rather thin dossier on Roman female benefactors in the Greek East.

Elizabeth Carney shows how recently after the adoption of the royal title by Macedonian kings it began to be applied also to their wives. Shaye J. D. Cohen's "Menstruants and the Sacred in Judaism and Christianity" is the first historical survey in English on this subject.

Most of the remaining papers do not, at first sight, give the appearance of breaking new ground, but this is in part a reflection of the high level of activity in recent years. Much good work is going on simultaneously, and similar ideas or approaches are likely to emerge. Also, it would be fair to say that in general recent approaches have here been applied to fresh material, or recently-propounded theories challenged.

Thus, Claude Mosse's remarks, in 'Women in the Spartan revolutions of the third century B. C.', on the political effects of female economic power in the period are a useful pendant to Stephen Hodkinson's paper (2) (not available to Mosse at the time of writing) on its demographic effects in the fifth and fourth centuries B.C. Diana Delia's exposure of the distortions in the traditional depiction of Fulvia is an excellent case-study to read in conjunction with Tom Hillard's paper in Helios 16.2 on the manipulative political use of such images by male writers.

The two papers on the Hippocratic corpus examine well-known and often studied texts. Ann Ellis Hanson shows, through selected examples, how the Hippocratics helped the development of gynecology as a separate medical genre, although her presentation confusingly combines this theme with the relationship of medical practice to contemporary folk-treatment. Lesley Dean-Jones' comparison of the accounts of sexual differentia in the Hippocratics and in Aristotle, showing how in each case these are referred to a supposed single central physiological difference between the sexes, is the most coherent and convincing to date.

Cynthia Patterson's "Marriage and the Married Woman in Athenian Law" discusses "the ways in which 'living together' of a man and woman was recognised and validated by Classical Athenian law and custom, establishing what we can indeed call a marriage or marital relationship." This way of defining the nature of the investigation--in terms both of "validating" a relationship and of "establishing" a marriage--confuses the issue somewhat, since it raises separate questions. While she rightly rejects the search for a single constitutive event, her own formulation leads her to the conclusion "we ought to see Athenian marriage as a multifaceted process." Her view is that "validation and recognition of the marriage itself was left to social and religious customs and rituals." She compares one or two lawcourt speeches, appealing to the observed behaviour and presumed intent of the couple themselves, with Roman juristic definitions. It should be noted, however, that the context of the Roman examples is usually the ending of a marriage by one or other of the partners. The Athenian speeches, having to do with inheritance or citizenship claims, are mostly concerned to argue that an actual marriage has existed, and the evidence commonly adduced is not the woman's behavior or intent, but the initial actions of her male relatives in setting up the cohabitation.