Women in Ancient Greece: A Source-book by Bonnie MacLachlan (review)

MacLachlan provides a new addition to the growing range of sourcebooks catering to undergraduate courses on women’s lives in the ancient Mediterranean.¹ Most of this volume is dedicated to ten chapters setting out the evidence for the lives of Greek women in the Classical period (Part 2). These chapters are flanked by four chapters on women in the Archaic period (Part 1), and one on Hellenistic women (Part 3). Following each chapter is a list of suggestions for further reading.

In Chapters 1–4 we are introduced first to a brief selection of sources from Hesiod, then to passages from the Homeric hymns to Aphrodite and Demeter. Chapters 3 and 4, “Women Divine and Mortal in the Homeric Epics” and “Women and Gender in the Melic and Lyric Poets,” are each much longer than the preceding ones, and the space given over to the selections from Alcman, Sappho, Alcaeus, Ibycus, Anacreon, Archilochus, Hipponax, and Semonides in Chapter 4 is well used.

Next MacLachlan turns to the Classical period, introducing the reader to this by way of a long chapter (5), “The Lived Experiences of Girls and Women.” MacLachlan opens by acknowledging the difficulties that scholars encounter in locating contemporary evidence, and few readers will be altogether satisfied by the assurance that later sources are useful because “patterns of social behaviour are slow to change, particularly when reinforced by ritual.” Thus, a great deal of the epigraphic material that is presented in Part 2 is Hellenistic, and likewise many of the literary sources are either Hellenistic or Roman. The material is arranged thematically, detailing the experiences of childbirth, nubile women, married life, wool-working, pregnancy, concubines, wife abuse, adultery, lower-class women, slave women, older women, and women’s roles in death and funerals. Chapter 6, “Women and Property,” records the management of women’s dowries and women’s performance of financial transactions. MacLachlan contrasts a passage of Isaeus, noting the legal prohibition against women performing transactions involving sums greater than a medimnus, with passages from Lysias and Demosthenes describing women doing exactly that. This arrangement nicely illustrates some of the problems associated with taking statements in ancient sources about what women were or were not allowed to do under the law as reflecting the reality of lived experience. Chapter 7 deals with foreign women, with much of it given over to texts relating to Aspasia of Miletus. Chapter 8 collects sources on prostitutes and deals with a number of women in some detail, notably Rhodopis/Doricha (in Herodotus and Sappho)² and Neaera (Apollodorus). Chapter 9 addresses the religious life of women at various stages in the female life cycle: rituals for young girls, for nymphae, marriage rituals, and rituals for women. Chapter 10 looks at women in the tragic and comic poets and is followed by a chapter called “Dorian Women,” the heading under which the women of Sparta and Gortyn in Crete are discussed. The extracts from the Gortyn law code are chosen to illustrate the liberal treatment of the women of this city in contrast to those of Athens. Here cross-references to the comparative Athenian material would have proved very valuable. The final three chapters of Section 2 are devoted to Platonic and Aristotelian discussions of women’s roles in the ideal state, warrior women (the Amazons, Telesilla, and Artemisia), and finally the female body in the writers of the Hippocratic corpus, Aeschylus, Plato, and Aristotle.

The final chapter of the book, “Women in the Hellenistic Era” (Part 3), contains a wide variety of interesting sources. Amongst these are marriage contracts from Ptolemaic Egypt, curse tablets, a wide selection of fragmentary female poets (Nossis, Anyte, Moero, and Erinna), and an epistolary record of women’s discussions of philosophy and its application to the problems of their own lives. As it stands, Part 3 is only slightly longer than the chapter on Homeric women in Part 1 and could...