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  • Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece
  • Susan Stephens (bio)
Joan Breton Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007), 415 pp.

Books on ancient Greek women usually begin from the premise that they were marginal for most of what counted in Greek society, where they led lives of quiet desperation or exercised power by manipulation and subterfuge (the power of [End Page 518] the oppressed). Connelly’s book is a refreshing change. She has synthesized a considerable number of disparate sources—archaeological remains, inscriptions, visual representations of religious behavior, and texts—in what she calls a “multi-methodological approach” derived from recent feminist theory and social archaeology (she is a field archaeologist). The result is a fascinating and readable picture of women in ancient Greek cults. Some of her conclusions run counter to received wisdom. For one, we should not infer from Athens being a “democratic” state that religion and politics were separable in the life of the Greek cities. The two were continuously intertwined; therefore, the sheer number and social distinction of women who served as priestesses for prominent cults undercut the standard view that women were not important social actors. Connelly ends her study with a fascinating claim that the centrality of women in Greek cult contributed a model of action for early Christian women, who often lived in households in which pagan and Christian family members coexisted. It is well documented that, over time, an increasingly centralized male Christian authority suppressed these roles for women; Connelly gives us a historical trajectory for understanding the process.

Susan Stephens

Susan Stephens, professor of classics at Stanford University, is the author of Seeing Double: Intercultural Poetics in Ptolemaic Alexandria. As a papyrologist, she has published literary and documentary texts belonging to the Oxyrhynchus and Yale collections, and is coeditor of Ancient Greek Novels: The Fragments.

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