Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome ed. by Lauren Hackworth Petersen, Patricia Salzman-Mitchell (review)

Although most women in the classical world were mothers, surprisingly little has been written about them. The standard works on the topic, Nancy Demand’s Birth, Death, and Motherhood in Classical Greece (1994) and Suzanne Dixon’s The Roman Mother (1988), are by now largely outdated.¹ Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell’s thoughtfully edited and well-illustrated collection of essays provides a welcome expansion of this earlier research as well as points to new avenues of inquiry. The individual chapters deal with ancient conceptions of motherhood across a broad span of time and a diverse spectrum of disciplines, focusing on often neglected aspects of the status, function, and meaning of mothers in the ancient world. Much work remains to be done, as the authors acknowledge, and this volume represents a first step toward opening up the field. Taken as a whole, the book demonstrates the historical and symbolic centrality of mothers despite their virtual exclusion from political life in Greco-Roman antiquity.

The book follows a loose chronological structure, moving from Greek source materials to Roman. A few major themes emerge across the chapters: the disjunction between the lived realities of ancient mothers and their idealized representations in literature and art, often in service of political ideology. Related is the emphasis on the cultural agency and influence exerted by mothers across time periods and social contexts. Lastly, and less successfully in my view, is the attempt to relate ancient ideas about mothers to contemporary debates, such as work–life balance and maternal sexuality. The chapters for the most part are consistent in quality—each contains end-notes and a bibliography—and many include visual materials. Indeed, the abundance and variety of the images from art and architecture, many not well known, is one of the highlights of the volume.

In the first chapter, “Maternity and Miasma: Dress and the Transition from Parthenos to Gunê,” Mireille Lee surveys the visual evidence for maternity garments. Though pregnancy is hard to detect on extant visual sources, Lee demonstrates that the iconography of pregnancy typically involves loosened clothes and hair as well as protective amulets. She then explores the practice of dedicating clothing to Artemis after childbirth, as found on a marble votive relief from Lamia. The next chapter, “Motherhood as Teleia: Rituals of Incorporation at the Kourotrophic Shrine,” by Angela Taraskiewicz, reconstructs the rituals involved in the transition from young married woman to mother. Such a process provoked anxiety in all concerned since a woman could not be wholly incorporated into her husband’s household until she had borne a child. Rituals of fertility and parturition therefore attempted to alleviate fear and to facilitate the process of incorporation. The essay by Yurie Hong, “Collaboration and Conflict: Discourses of Maternity in Hippocratic Gynecology and Embryology,” moves from the external markers of motherhood to the representation of the biological process of pregnancy in the Greek medical corpus. She argues that the Hippocratic texts prefigure or reflect contemporary anxieties about familial relations through their narratives of maternal-fetal complementarity and conflict.

The next two chapters explore the literary representation of mothers. Angelika Tzanetou considers the possibilities of maternal agency in her fine essay, “Citizen-Mothers on the Tragic Stage.” Tragedy, she argues, presents mothers who intervene on behalf of the city, such as Praxithea, Aethra, and Creusa, in a positive light but casts aspersions on those who act contrary to civic ideology. She concludes that women played an important role in the polis not only through their religious agency, but also through their status as mothers, which made them important stakeholders in the larger political community. In “Working Girls: Mother-Daughter Bonds among Ancient Prostitutes,” Anise Strong examines a maternal relationship not usually featured in ancient art and literature. She shows how the relationship of courtesan mothers and their daughters revolves around economic necessity in a variety...