Greek Virginity (review)

In this intriguing study of the connection between virginity and inspiration, illustrated by the figure of the Pythia, the prophetess of Apollo at Delphi, Giulia Sissa takes on not merely one but several formidable tasks. In order to understand how the virginal body of the priestess, filled with the spirit of the deity, becomes the deity's "voice," and how that "breath" of the deity is received, Sissa cautions that one must understand the entire "structure of enthusiasm" in the antique world, and proceeds to delineate that structure. Interpreting metaphors, symbols, and "signs" of the virgin body throughout the text, Sissa claims that "Sexuality is . . . implicit in divinatory speech" (4).

Sissa shows how the body, and especially the female body, in classical Greece was used as a metaphor for inspiration, alternating "closed" or "open" representations: either as a vessel (container) or as a "perforated jar or leaking sieve" (5). These alternations between closure and penetrability, openness and vulnerability, find their mythic and cultic expressions in the role of the Pythia, in the language of the mysteries of Eleusis, and in the myth of the Danaides. The image of the female body in ancient Greece as an empty vessel that can be "filled" through conception, through its analogue, inspiration—in sum, as a "vehicle" for the conveyance of spiritual or physical "insemination"—is not unique to Sissa (cf. Page du Bois, Sowing the Body [Chicago, 1988]). Nor is Sissa's carefully-drawn relationship between religious and philosophical views of the inspired female and the presentation of the female body in ancient medical literature unique (cf. Aline Rousselle, Porneia [Basil Blackwell, 1988]).

Nevertheless, Sissa does make a unique contribution, through her analysis of the concept of virginity in classical Greece, to the study of perceptions of the female body in its "closed" or "open" state. She continues this analysis by pointing out significant contradictions between the Greek view and that of the early Christians, who nevertheless partially shared it, and were certainly influenced by it. For example, Christians like Origen and Chrysostom praised virginity as understood in the specifically Christian ascetic sense, while casting aspersions on the source of the "inspiration" of the virgin Pythia. In explaining the anomaly of the Christian "virginal conception," she shows how a woman might be regarded as a "virgin" in the ancient pagan Greek world, even though penetrated by a male, if the "evidence" in the form of an out-of-wedlock child (i.e., Danae and Perseus) was not a factor.

But the most important contribution Sissa makes to the study of the meaning of virginity in ancient Greece as well in that of early Christianity, a chronologically but not conceptually distinct era, is her close reading and interpretation of the contemporary medical literature, particularly with reference to its opinion on the hymen as "closed" or "open." By means of this analysis, she demonstrates that the "virgin birth" is a metaphor possible in ancient Greece as well as in early Christianity because of their common visualization of the female body as a "leaking sieve." In connection with this argument, she claims that ". . . the Greek idea of partheneia did not require the presence of a seal over the genitals" (170). This "seal" or the "hymen," as Sissa contends, was always envisioned, like many other "guards" over the vulnerable body of the woman in classical Greece, as many times more significant in literature and society than it actually was in the medical literature itself. One of the chief ways in which she disagrees with writers like Rousselle is in her analysis of the writers of the Hippocratic collection, Galen, and Soranus, which shows that neither Greek nor Roman writers believed in the existence of a virginal, penetrable and breakable hymen. This hypothetical organ is, in her words, "a crude and contestable sign" (172).

The use of the term, "sign," brings us to the major flaw in Sissa's argument. When she portrays virginity as a metaphorical state in literature or religious language, she is on firmer ground...