Traces of Power: Recent Books on Women in Antiquity

These four ambitious books provide welcome new perspectives on the lives of ancient women, the spaces they inhabited, and the ways in which they influenced their societies. Although long a commonplace of classical scholarship that religion provided the primary access to power for ancient women, scant attention has been paid to the subject. All of these books address some aspect of gender and religion, from the ritual activities of women in ancient Greece, to the evolution of a maternal divinity in pagan religions and her translation to Christianity, and to the profound impact of a deified Egyptian queen on Roman culture.

In Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space, Susan Guettel Cole explores the intersection of gender and ritual practice in ancient Greece, with close attention to the epigraphical evidence. Meticulously researched, the book weaves together a broad range of evidence, from inscriptions, literary and medical texts, to archaeological remains. What emerges is a complex picture of the organization of ritual space in ancient Greece and the ways it structured political communities.

Cole begins by exploring three related and coextensive landscapes: the natural, the human, and the imagined. In Greece, the division of space always had political implications, and stories about the organization of space and the natural landscape were often "infused with gender." Early Greek epics, such as Hesiod's Theogony and the Catalogue of Women, contain numerous geographical narratives that "locate the individual community in its landscape and connect it to mythic representations of the larger universe" (21). Such narratives also reflected human categories and social hierarchies: for instance, fixed locations, like the hearth, were associated in the Greek imagination with the female.

Chapter 2 examines the ways in which the ancient Greeks delimited the human from the divine. Injunctions against washing in a woman's bathwater, setting a boy on a grave, or eating from an unconsecrated pot, illustrate the profound need to separate human physical processes from the divine. Directed to an exclusively male audience, they also show the importance of delineating male from female. The inability to maintain these boundaries could infect the entire political community with pollution, thus requiring constant maintenance through the symbolic marking of perimeters and the repetition of ritual.

In chapter 3, Cole considers the form and function of regional sanctuaries. These helped to merge autonomous cities—separated by geography and fiercely independent political structures—into a unified culture of shared traditions. The gods worshipped at these sites—Zeus at Olympia and Apollo at Delphi—promoted the universal recognition of divine laws. Apollo in particular was invested with a judicial authority that transcended political and territorial boundaries, supporting the "process by which cities made decisions and protected citizens from capricious leaders" (73). The fact that his sanctuary at Delphi marked the imaginary center of the world attests to the god's universality. Just as Delphi provided a sacred center that unified separate city-states into a culture of shared traditions and common laws, so, too, each city-state itself was organized around the prytaneion, "a space . . . both sacred and political" (80) that enclosed its common hearth and sacred fire and forged male solidarity and community.

Chapter 4 elucidates the gender asymmetries entailed in ritual practice. Because the ancient Greeks worshipped in groups, gender often came into play in ritual contexts. Although it was less common for men and women to participate in shared rituals, there was no single formula for determining ritual constituency. Rituals connected with the body, especially...