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Journal of Interdisciplinary History 30.4 (2000) 648-649



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Book Review

The Family in Greek History


The Family in Greek History. By Cynthia B. Patterson (Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press, 1998) 286 pp. $35.00.

Patterson investigates the ancient Greek family as an integral part of political life rather than as a discreet subject of the private realm. An expert on Greek law and an acute reader of texts, Patterson presents a fine interweaving of household and polis from the periods of Homer, Hesiod, and the law codes of Gortyn in Crete to democratic and Hellenistic Athens. By emphasizing patterns of kinship, inheritance, and marriage laws, Patterson sees women in Greek history "not solely as objects of male gaze but as participants in social institutions (228)." For other Athenians in addition to Plato, it seems, the polis was the highest form of family.

In an especially rich chapter, "Adultery Onstage and in Court," Patterson ascertains the political function of marriage and adultery laws from Athenian public theater and courts of law, the two institutions that most commonly brought the population together for reflection on questions and cases of interest to the community as a whole. "The close [End Page 648] connection," says Patterson, "between the two institutions is apparent in the interconnections of their genre: Athenian drama is notable for the rhetorical character of its dialogue, and Athenian oratory for its sense of high drama (138)."

Patterson's approach sets her significantly apart from the nineteenth-century armchair scholars of the ancient family, especially Bachofen, Fustel de Coulanges, Maine, Morgan, and Engels, to whose mistaken views she devotes her entire first chapter. 1 She argues persuasively against their confidence in evolutionary progress toward an ideal family, as the "primitive" gives way to more enlightened attitudes, especially toward women. "Gone (or going) also," Patterson claims, "is the more recent twentieth-century enthusiasm for reified separate spheres as an interpretive tool for understanding the subordination of women in a patriarchal society (228)."

Patterson persistently belittles with quotation marks her predecessors' work in the field of, as she puts it, "women's studies." She refers to studies of "seclusion" of the "women's quarters" (2), emphasis on patriarchal "male-dominated institutions" (8), "the recent boom in 'women in antiquity'" (32), "the ideological basis of the topic 'women in antiquity'" (42), "recent work in 'women's studies'" (35), and "the field of 'women in ancient Greece'" (40). Of Pomeroy she concludes, "Pomeroy is one of the founders of the late twentieth-century discussion of 'women in antiquity'; the historical premise of her discussion, however, is rooted in the nineteenth century (40)."

Such slights are the one unattractive feature of Patterson's book. Meyer Reinhold taught the first women in antiquity course in any American university in 1970. Pomeroy's groundbreaking Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, 1975) appeared five years later. Until as recently as ten years ago, research on ancient women and the family was still scant. The work of the pioneers during these past few decades, as McGinn recently observed, "transformed practically the whole field of ancient social history." 2 Patterson is able to contribute significantly to the now well-established field of Greek social and family history because her recent predecessors took the risk of creating it.

Susan Ford Wiltshire
Vanderbilt University

Notes

1. See, for example, Johan. Jakob Bachofen (trans. Ralph Mannheim), Myth, Religion, and Mother Right (Princeton, 1967); Numa Denis Fustel de Coulanges (trans. W. Small), The Ancient City: A Study on the Religion, Laws and Institutions of Greece and Rome (New York, 1929; orig. pub. 1873); Henry Maine, Ancient Law (New York, 1965); Lewis Henry Morgan (ed. Leslie A. White), Ancient Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1964); Friedrich Engels (trans. West Barrett), The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (London, 1986).

2. Thomas A. J. McGinn, Book Review, History, XXVI (1998), 91.

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