New Directions in The Study of Women in The Greco-Roman World (Ronnie Ancona Georgia Tsouvala

i
New Directions in the Study

of Women in the Greco-Roman World
ii
iii
New Directions
in the Study of
Women in the
Greco-Roman
World
z
Edited by
RONNIE ANCONA AND

GEORGIA TSOUVALA
1
iv
1
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Ancona, Ronnie, 1951– editor. | Tsouvala, Georgia, editor.
Title: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World /
edited by Ronnie Ancona and Georgia Tsouvala.
Description: New York : Oxford University Press, 2021. |
Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020038365 (print) | LCCN 2020038366 (ebook) |
ISBN 9780190937638 (hardback) | ISBN 9780190937652 (epub)
Subjects: LCSH: Women—History—To 500. | Greece—Social conditions |
Rome—Social conditions. | Women—Greece—Social conditions. | Women—
Rome—Social conditions. | Rome—Intellectual life. | Greece—Intellectual life.
Classification: LCC HQ1134.N49 2021 (print) | LCC HQ1134 (ebook) |
DDC 305.409/01—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038365
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038366
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.001.0001
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Integrated Books International, United States of America
v
Contents
List of Figures  vii

Acknowledgments  ix
List of Contributors  xi
Editions and Abbreviations  xv
Introduction 1
Ronnie Ancona
1. Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave: Euripides’ Hippolytus and

Epistemic Injustice toward Women  11
Edith Hall
2. Periphrôn Pênelopeia: The Reception of Penelope in

Fifth-Century Athens  29
H. A. Shapiro
3. The First basilissa: Phila, Daughter of Antipater and Wife of

Demetrius Poliorcetes  45
Elizabeth D. Carney
4. Power and Patronage: Rethinking the Legacy of Artemisia II 59

Walter D. Penrose Jr.
5. The Murder of Apronia 79

Barbara Levick
6. A Century of Women’s History from the Papyri  95

Roger S. Bagnall
vi
vi Contents
7. Cosmetics in Daily Life of the Ancient Mediterranean  123

Ann Ellis Hanson
8. Female Athletes in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Greek World  139
Georgia Tsouvala
9. Normalizing Illegality? The Roman Jurists and Underage Marriage  173

Bruce W. Frier
10. Augustus and the Economics of Adultery  187

Marilyn B. Skinner
11. Social Laws and Social Facts  205

Kristina Milnor
12. The Woman in the Street: Becoming Visible in

Mid-Republican Rome  213
Amy Richlin
Bibliography  231
Index  265
vi
Figures
2.1 Penelope and Telemachos 31

2.2 The foot-washing of Odysseus 31
2.3 Odysseus and Penelope 34
2.4 Slaughter of the suitors 37
2.5 “Mourning Athena” 38
2.6 Nausikaa and Odysseus 43
8.1 Female athlete with diazoma/perizoma 150
8.2 Brauron, view of the stoa 151
8.3 Stadium at Olympia 154
8.4 Female charioteer 165
8.5 Girls going to school 171
Plate I Embassy to Achilles 00

Plate II Penelope 00
Plate III Foot-washing of Odysseus
Plate IV Female athlete with diazoma/perizoma and shoes00P00
Plate V Female athlete holding a strigil
Plate VI Athletes conversing 00
Plate VII Stamnos (jar) with female athletes bathing 00
Plate VIII Female athlete
vi
ix
Acknowledgments
We would like to acknowledge the help and support we have had for
this project from many sources. First, we owe the greatest debt to Sarah
B. Pomeroy, to whom we dedicate this book, for without her neither one of
us would have had the involvement in the field of women in classical antiquity
that we do. As Georgia Tsouvala’s teacher and as Ronnie Ancona’s colleague,
she has been an inspiration. We both feel privileged to have continuing pro-
fessional relationships with her now and to count her as a dear friend. Her
work in women’s history for the past fifty years has fundamentally changed
Greco-Roman studies for the better. She has been in our thoughts at each
step of this book.
We are very grateful to our editor at Oxford University Press (OUP),
Stefan Vranka, for his support of this project from the outset and for his guid-
ance throughout. Editorial assistants at OUP, John Veranes, Emily Zogbi,
Zara Cannon-Mohammed, and Isabelle Prince, have provided help as well.
The anonymous peer reviewers chosen by OUP for our proposal and for
the final manuscript offered valuable feedback at both stages of the writing
and editing process that clearly made this a better book. We thank indexer,
John Grennan, copyeditor, Judith Hoover, production manager, Aishwarya
Krishnamoorthy, production editor, Leslie Johnson for their careful work.
We thank our contributors for their scholarship, their patience, and their in-
terest in this project.
Ronnie Ancona is grateful to The Pleskow Classics Fund of the Department
of Classical and Oriental Studies, Hunter College, for help in funding the in-
clusion of color images for the book, and to her PSC-CUNY Award # 62030-
00 50 (2019–2020) of the PSC-CUNY Research Award Program for funding
to hire an indexer. Georgia Tsouvala is grateful to Illinois State University for
additional help with the funding for images.
x
x Acknowledgments
Finally, we both feel fortunate to have had a chance to collaborate as

coeditors for this project. We learned much from each other, both substantial
things and technical things. It was particularly useful in editing an interdisci-
plinary volume to have been able to discuss the project with each other from
our differing research backgrounds and perspectives.
xi
Contributors
Ronnie Ancona is Professor of Classics at Hunter College and The Graduate

Center (CUNY). She is the author of Time and the Erotic in Horace’s Odes
(1994), Horace: Selected Odes and Satire 1.9 (2nd edition, 2014), Writing Passion
Plus: A Catullus Reader (2013), and Writing Passion: A Catullus Reader (2nd
edition, 2013). She is coeditor of Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry
(2005) and editor of A Concise Guide to Teaching Latin Literature (2007). She
served as series editor for the nineteen-volume BC Latin Readers series from
Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers, coedits with Sarah Pomeroy the “Women in
Antiquity” series from Oxford University Press, and is editor of The Classical
Outlook. Her current research project focuses on Martha Graham’s Greek
myth-based dances and her collaboration with Isamu Noguchi.
Roger S. Bagnall is Leon Levy Director and Professor of Ancient History

Emeritus at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, New York
University, and Jay Professor of Greek and Latin and Professor of History
emeritus at Columbia University. His work focuses on the economic and social
history of the Hellenistic to Late Antique eastern Mediterranean, particularly
Egypt, and on ancient documents. Among his best known publications are
Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History
(1995, second ed. 2019), Early Christian Books in Egypt (2009), and Everyday
Writing in the Graeco-Roman East (2010). He is coauthor of The Demography
of Roman Egypt (1994) and cofounder of a multi-university consortium
creating the Advanced Papyrological Information System. His latest book, An
Oasis City, presents the results of the Amheida excavations in the Dakhla
Oasis in Egypt, which he directs.
Elizabeth D. Carney is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar

in the Humanities Emerita at Clemson University. She has written dozens
xi
xii List of Contributors
of essays on gender, naming practices, Ptolemaic Egypt, and women and

military leadership. She has written on monarchy and the role of royal
women in monarchy, including Women and Monarchy in Ancient Macedonia
(2000), Olympias: Mother of Alexander the Great (2006), Arsinoë of Egypt
and Macedon: A Royal Life (2013), and Eurydice and the Birth of Macedonian
Power (2019).
Bruce W. Frier is the John and Teresa D’Arms Distinguished University

Professor of Classics and Roman Law at the University of Michigan. He is the
author of numerous books and articles about economic and social history. His
publications include Landlords and Tenants in Imperial Rome (1980), The Rise
of the Roman Jurists: Studies in Cicero’s Pro Caecina (1985), and A Casebook on
the Roman Law of Delict (1989). He is coauthor of The Modern Law of Contracts
(2019) and A Casebook on Roman Family Law (2003) and general editor
of a three-volume annotated translation of the Codex of Justinian (2016).
Currently, he is finishing several books, including Casebook on the Roman Law
of Contracts, Four Treatises on Roman Law: The Fragmentum Dositheanum, The
Tituli Ulpiani and the Epitomes of Gaius, The Gaian Tradition: Late Roman
Elementary Treatises, and Sources for Roman Law: The Tituli Ulpiani and the
Sententiae Pauli, all forthcoming by Oxford University Press.
Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King’s College London, cofounder and

consultant director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman
Drama at Oxford University, and chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust. She
has published more than twenty-five books on ancient Greek and Roman
culture and their continuing presences in modernity. Her most recent book is
Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life (2018).
Ann Ellis Hanson is a papyrologist and Senior Research Scholar and Lecturer
at Yale University Emerita, and she was named a MacArthur Fellow in 1992;
she has held visiting professorships at the Universities of Texas–Austin,
California–Berkeley, and Michigan–Ann Arbor. She has published over
100 papyri, most of which are from the Roman period, in various periodicals
and monographs, and served as editor of the monograph series of American
Studies in Papyrology. She has also authored numerous articles on women’s
bodies and ancient health.
Barbara Levick, fellow and tutor in Literae Humaniores at St. Hilda’s

College, Oxford (1959–1998), is currently Emerita Fellow (1998–present).
xi
List of Contributors xiii
She has written numerous books in Roman Imperial history, the social life of
Asia Minor, and women’s history. Her publications include Roman Colonies
in Southern Asia Minor (1967), Tiberius the Politician (1976), The Government
of the Roman Empire (1985), Claudius (1990), Julia Domna: Syrian Empress
(2007), Imperial Women of the Golden Age: Faustina I and II (2014), and
Catiline (2015). She is also the coauthor of Monuments from Aezanitis and
the Tembris Valley (MAMA 9 and 10, 1988 and 1993) and coeditor of Women
in Antiquity: New Perspectives (1994) and The Customs Law of Asia (2008).
Kristina Milnor is Professor of Classics at Barnard College. She is the author

of Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus (2005) and Graffiti and the
Literary Landscape in Roman Pompeii (2014). Her research interests lie in
Roman literature and history, feminist theory, and the intersection of textual
and material culture. She is currently at work on a book about women and
money in Roman society.
Walter D. Penrose Jr. is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State

University. He is the author of Postcolonial Amazons: Female Masculinity
and Courage in Ancient Greek and Sanskrit Literature (2016). He has also
published essays on Hellenistic queens, the Tomb of the Diver Paintings,
pedagogy in the Classics classroom, conceptions of disability in ancient
Greece, and the reception of Sappho from antiquity to the early Renaissance.
Amy Richlin is Distinguished Professor of Classics at UCLA. She got

her start in the study of ancient women at the 1983 NEH Institute run by
Helene Foley, Natalie Kampen, and Sarah Pomeroy. She has published widely
on the history of sexuality, including The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and
Aggression in Roman Humor (1983), Rome and the Mysterious Orient (2005),
Marcus Aurelius in Love (2006), and Slave Theater in the Roman Republic
(2017). She is the editor of Pornography and Representation in Greece and
Rome (1992) and coeditor of Feminist Theory and the Classics (1993). Her
2014 book, Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women,
collects essays written between 1981 and 2001. Most recently she has been
working on Roman comedy.
H. A. Shapiro is W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology Emeritus

and Academy Professor at Johns Hopkins University. He has written
numerous studies of Greek vase iconography, including Personifications in
Greek Art (1993), Myth into Art: Poet and Painter in Classical Greece (1994),
xvi
xiv List of Contributors
and Art and Cult under the Tyrants in Athens (1989; Supplement, 1995). He
is also coeditor of Greek Vases in the San Antonio Museum of Art (1995) and
editor of the Cambridge Companion to Archaic Greece (2007) and Worshipping
Women: Ritual and Reality in Classica Athens (2008). His current project is
on a study of Theseus in fifth-century Athens.
Marilyn B. Skinner is Professor of Classics Emerita at the University of

Arizona in Tucson. Her main research specialization is ancient gender
and sexuality, including Catullus’ “Passer”: The Arrangement of the Book of
Polymetric Poems (1981), Catullus in Verona: A Reading of the Elegiac Libellus,
Poems 65–116 (2003), and Clodia Metelli: The Tribune’s Sister (2011). She
coedited the essay collection Roman Sexualities (1997), which pioneered work
on Roman sexual protocols, and published the first comprehensive textbook
on ancient sexuality, Sexuality in Greek and Roman Culture (2005, 2013). She
is presently working on Horace’s poetry from the Triumviral period.
Georgia Tsouvala is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State

University and associate editor of the Brill “Research Perspectives in Ancient
History” series. She is coauthor of Ancient Greece: A Political, Social, and
Cultural History (2018) and A Brief History of Ancient Greece (2020) and
coeditor of The Discourse of Marriage in the Graeco-Roman World (2020).
Her publications include articles on epigraphy and on the history of Roman
Greece, Greco-Roman women, Plutarch, and love and marriage in Greek and
Roman literature.
xv
Editions and Abbreviations
Greek and Latin texts reproduced or translated in this volume come

from the standard editions published in Oxford Classical Texts, the Teubner
series, or the Loeb Classical Library, unless otherwise noted. All translations
are by the contributors unless otherwise noted. Abbreviations of ancient
authors and works follow the Oxford Classical Dictionary (4th edition), the
Greek-English Lexicon edited by Liddell, Scott, and Jones (9th edition), or the
Oxford Latin Dictionary (2nd edition). Abbreviations of periodicals follow
L’Année philologique and the American Journal of Archaeology.
xvi
1
Introduction
Ronnie Ancona
Part One
It seems appropriate that there be a volume dedicated to new directions in the
history of women in Ancient Greece and Rome following the fortieth anni-
versary of the publication of the groundbreaking study by Sarah B. Pomeroy,
Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves ([1975] 1995).1 Pomeroy’s book, the first
full-scale scholarly treatment of women throughout Greco-Roman antiquity
published in English, introduced a generation of students and scholars to a
new field of study in classics and ancient history. This volume, inspired in part
by the extremely well-received panel in Pomeroy’s honor at the 2015 annual
meeting of the Society for Classical Studies (SCS), which was sponsored by
the SCS Committee on the Status of Women and of Minority Groups and
organized by Georgia Tsouvala and Celia Schultz, showcases through a set of
original essays the current stage of and new directions in the now well-estab-
lished field of women’s history in classical antiquity.
1. I would like to thank the following people who were of great assistance to me in the research
for this introduction: Sarah Pomeroy; Claibourne (Clay) Williams, interim chief librarian
and associate professor, Hunter College Library; Rebecca Altermatt, archivist, Archives and
Special Collections, Hunter College Library; and Lilia Melani, professor emerita, English
Department, Brooklyn College, CUNY (personal communication via email, January 3, 2019).
I conducted a three-hour oral interview with Sarah Pomeroy on January 23, 2016, at her home
in New York City so that she could expand upon some written answers to a set of questions
about her career she had supplied me with via email. I value her openness during the interview
as well as her interest in preserving the historical record. I am fortunate to have had her as a
colleague at Hunter College and the CUNY Graduate Center and as a friend. Finally, I thank
my coeditor, Georgia Tsouvala, for her welcome insights into our contributors’ chapters and,
more generally, about the themes of our book, which she has so generously shared with me.
Ronnie Ancona, Introduction In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
Edited by: Ronnie Ancona and Georgia Tsouvala, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0001
2
2 Ron n ie Ancona
While there have been edited volumes on various aspects of women in

antiquity over the years, introductory scholarly handbooks on this topic
and books on specific female figures from antiquity (for example, Foley
[(1981) 2004]; Pomeroy [1991]; Hawley and Levick [1995]; James and Dillon
[2012]; and Ancona and Pomeroy, eds., “Women in Antiquity” series from
Oxford University Press, and earlier, “Women of the Ancient World” se-
ries from Routledge), surprisingly, there has not been a single recent edited
volume of essays showing the diversity of new work in this field covering dif-
ferent time periods and utilizing varied approaches. While handbooks, like
the excellent Blackwell Companion to Women in the Ancient World ( James
and Dillon 2012), serve an important purpose in terms of broad coverage of
the field, they are less geared toward new directions and methodologies and
more geared toward summarizing historiographical work that has already
been done on specific topics. The recent volume from Routledge, Women in
Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World, edited by Budin and Turfa
(2016), while useful, will be used solely as a reference work due to size and cost.
The other, older volumes mentioned, while still important, do not reflect the
most up-to-date work in this field. The current volume, therefore, seeks to fill
that gap. It does not represent one particular approach to the study of women
in antiquity, nor does it favor the study of women in any one time period. In
fact, it is its eclectic and inclusive quality that will be particularly valuable, for
while each chapter provides a significant individual scholarly contribution,
the book as a whole will enable readers to gain a picture of where the field is
headed more broadly.
The “new directions” for the study of women in antiquity featured in
this edited volume involve new methodological questions to be asked, new
time periods to be explored, new objects of study, as well as new informa-
tion to be uncovered. To address these new directions, the volume contains
work by a distinguished and varied group of contributors. They are historians,
philologists, literary critics, archaeologists, art historians, and specialists in
subfields like ancient medicine, ancient law, papyrology, and epigraphy. The
breadth of their training and interests will provide the reader with a real sense
of the diversity of approaches in this multidisciplinary field.
The contributors to and editors of this volume have all been influenced by
Sarah Pomeroy (1938–) and her work. Therefore, I begin with a look back and
then forward, as our volume title invites. I will start with some remarks on the
scholarship and career of Pomeroy, who is largely responsible for the study
of women in antiquity becoming a recognized field of inquiry in classics and
ancient history. Those remarks will take us back to the 1970s. I will then move
3
Introduction 3
forward to the present, giving an overview of the chapters in this collection,

situating them in the context of newer directions in the study of women in
antiquity.
I have always found fascinating the following sentence, which begins the
introduction to Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: “This
book was conceived when I asked myself what women were doing while men
were active in all the areas traditionally emphasized by classical scholars.”2
Although Pomeroy has no recollection of why she might have chosen to use
the word “conceived,”3 both the mental and physical senses of the word are
more appropriate and central to the trajectory of Pomeroy’s scholarship and
career than most might realize.
Readers of Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, I suspect, have no know-
ledge of the conditions under which it was written. That it was a product of
the mid-1970s, the decade that produced Ms. Magazine and the Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court decision, is probably not a surprise. But after oral and written
interviews with Sarah Pomeroy and my study of the Sarah B. Pomeroy Papers
in the Archives and Special Collections of the Hunter College Libraries, it is
impossible to avoid seeing the stark intersection between a groundbreaking
book on women’s lives and the impediments to one woman’s career based on
discrimination against women.4 I would suggest that the word “conception,”
in its dual senses, permeated the thinking behind writing this book as well as
professional consequences in the life of its author, while also pointing to is-
sues that mattered for women in antiquity.
Pomeroy was a brilliant scholar from very early on, earning her BA from
Barnard in 1957 and her PhD from Columbia in 1961 at the almost unheard-
of age of twenty-one.5 She was the youngest person at the time to have re-
ceived a doctorate from the Graduate Faculties of Philosophy of Columbia
University. Two papers she wrote as a graduate student were published virtu-
ally unchanged as her first two publications.6
2. Pomeroy (1975) ix (p. xiv in 1995 edition).

3. Personal communication with author, 2016.
4. For further information, see Claire Catenaccio’s 2019 interview with Pomeroy.
5. Sarah B. Pomeroy Papers, “History of Ongoing Discrimination at Hunter College CUNY,”
1, box 2, folder 8, Archives and Special Collections, Hunter College Libraries, Hunter College
of the City University of New York.
6. These appeared in AJP in 1960 (Day and Porges [Pomeroy]) and in 1961 in TAPA
(Porges 1961).
4
4 Ron n ie Ancona
Pomeroy came to Hunter College in 1964, yet she did not have tenure until
September 1, 1980, several years after the publication of Goddesses. Her first
appointment, in spring 1964, was as a part-time lecturer; in fall of 1964 she
was appointed a full-time lecturer. The delay in her achieving tenure was due
to a combination of sexist attitudes and practices and a CUNY-wide practice
common at the time, typically referred to as “forced maternity leave.”7 The
New York City Board of Higher Education Bylaws, Section 13.4, stipulated
that a faculty member who became pregnant must announce her pregnancy
and must take leave.8 The Classics Department chair, Clairève Grandjouan,
stated in a meeting with Pomeroy and administrators that she did not think a
mother should work before her children were seventeen years old.9
Forced maternity leave was not leave a woman chose to take but one she
was required to take. While this practice was later outlawed, it severely im-
pacted Pomeroy’s career by forcing her, twice, to take a leave when she became
pregnant with her second and third children. (Her first was born before she
came to Hunter.)10 Pomeroy did file a Step 1 grievance seeking that “[she]
be reappointed for a full-time position, that her past service be counted full-
time toward tenure and that she be granted back pay,” but it failed (1972).11
Pomeroy pursued things further. A settlement was finally reached in 1974 that
appointed her a full-time assistant professor. It did not award anything else.12
Pomeroy was only one of many women discriminated against at CUNY
and was one of the named plaintiffs in the class action suit Lilia Melani, et al.,
7. See Larson (1975) for a discussion of legal issues surrounding forced maternity leave. See
Pedriana (2009) on the Pregnancy Discrimination Act of 1978: “This Article traces the his-
torical, legal, and cultural forces that converged to place the rights of pregnant women at the
forefront of employment discrimination policy in the early-to mid-1970s” (2).
8. See “Chancellor’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women at CUNY” (1972), espe-
cially 40–48, for discussions of parenthood and pregnancy and CUNY women faculty.
9. Sarah B. Pomeroy Papers, “History of Ongoing Discrimination at Hunter College CUNY,” 3.
10. Larson (1975) 831ff.
11. Sarah B. Pomeroy Papers, “Grievance of Sarah Pomeroy,” 1, box 2, folder 8, Archives and
Special Collections, Hunter College Libraries, Hunter College of the City University of
New York. One of several bases for the opinion in the decision is worth quoting: “Maternity
leave was not in such a category, it was not morally reprehensible; it did not treat one group
of people, blacks or women, as being second class, and no violation occurred. If our views are
different now on this, it does not mean that maternity leave existed for reprehensible reasons,
rather our judgment is better now. The concept of continuing wrong does not apply here” (5).
12. Sarah B. Pomeroy Papers, “Settlement Agreement,” January 1974, letter from David Newton
to Arnold Cantor, box 2, folder 8, Archives and Special Collections, Hunter College Libraries,
Hunter College of the City University of New York.
5
Introduction 5
Plaintiffs, v. Board of Higher Education of the City of New York, known as the
Melani case, which was filed in 1973. The women against CUNY eventually
won the case in 1983 in a ruling by a federal judge, based on salary discrimi-
nation. The case was a major victory for CUNY women. The compensation
received provided only a tiny amount financially to redress the losses of the
past for individual women.13 When Pomeroy became a CUNY distinguished
professor, a position that includes both honor and extra salary, her salary
increased, but those early financial losses could never be recovered.
Pomeroy claims that her experience at Hunter radicalized her. It is hard to
imagine today what a long path it was for her to attain the professional status
she deserved. Through her involvement in her own grievance case, the Melani
case, the Women’s Classical Caucus, of which she was an original founder, and
the Women’s Studies Program at Hunter College, many of us have benefited
from that radicalization. It is easy to forget that prominent women classicists
often did not arrive at their positions of prominence with ease. Hunter
College is fortunate that it is the institution that Pomeroy chose to house her
papers, which are a very valuable source on the career of one pioneer in the
field of women in antiquity and the historical context of that career.
When asked what she thought her greatest contribution was to the field
of women in classical antiquity, Pomeroy answered, “Interdisciplinarity.”
Always interested in what could be learned of the reality of women’s life in
antiquity, she utilized such fields as papyrology, epigraphy, archaeology, and
art history to get at that reality. As a classicist, ancient historian, and scholar
of women’s studies, Pomeroy sought multiple sources and methodologies for
approaching her research.
Pomeroy’s work has clearly been foundational for the field of women in
classical antiquity. In the time since she published Goddesses, Whores, Wives,
and Slaves, the study of women in antiquity has become a recognized spe-
cialty within classics and ancient history.
How does this brief history of Pomeroy’s early career connect with the
topic of this volume? It certainly should make us reconsider that perhaps un-
intentional but significant use of the word “conceived.” Just as matters of con-
ception and their consequences affected women in Greco-Roman antiquity,
so, too, did they affect this scholar’s career in ways that most in the profession
have been unaware of. Hopefully this backstory makes Pomeroy’s beginning
13. See McFadden (1983) for coverage of the decision in the New York Times. For the text of the
decision, see “Melani vs. Board of Higher Education of City University of New York” (1983).
6
6 Ron n ie Ancona
to her introduction resonate more fully in the dual contexts of classical schol-
arship and the challenges to women classicists’ careers.
Part Two
The following twelve chapters employ a variety of methodologies to ex-
plore the topic of women in antiquity. They incorporate interdisciplinarity,
reception, and the tools of historians as well as those of literary critics and
philologists to attempt to recover the actual lived lives of women as well as
how perceptions of women have been formed and have become influential.
The volume highlights the ways in which the study of women in antiquity
has evolved to a point where antiquity speaks to the present and the present
to antiquity and where strict boundaries and limits of Greek and Roman are
no longer useful. Even strict chronology is avoided, as the historical time in
which researchers lived and the time period of the focus of their research
topics become intertwined or, to put it another way, as research and recep-
tion bring past and present together.
The volume begins with a chapter that brings together a figure from fifth-
century bce Greek drama with current discussions in society today about false
accusations of rape. In “Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave: Euripides’
Hippolytus and Epistemic Injustice toward Women,” Edith Hall argues that
Phaedra’s false accusation of rape against her stepson Hippolytus in Euripides’
tragedy Hippolytus has been instrumental in developing the common belief
that women often make such false charges and thus are not trustworthy. The
Phaedra story has become a classic and has been imitated by later authors, in-
cluding Seneca and Racine. Hall uses arguments from the field of philosophy
and from discussions about sexual harassment in the workplace to challenge
this particular stereotype about women. Her chapter is especially timely amid
current discussions of how the field of classics intersects with current social
and political issues, such as the MeToo movement.
H. A. Shapiro contributes the second chapter, “Periphrôn Pênelopeia: The
Reception of Penelope in Fifth-Century Athens.” Like Hall, he is inspired
by a work from fifth-century Athens depicting a female figure. Specifically,
Shapiro addresses the figure of Penelope and discusses why a statue of her that
was found in the ruins of the palace at Persepolis, and now located in Teheran,
might have been sent in 449 bce to the Great King of the Persians as part
of negotiations for a peace treaty. He uses both literary and iconographical
material to combine the history of art with diplomatic history between the
Greeks and the Persians. While Hall moves from the fifth century forward
7
Introduction 7
in time to today, Shapiro moves geographically outward from Athens and

highlights the role the Athenian reception of a female figure so well-known
to us from the Odyssey might have played in the intercultural context of Persia
and Greece in the fifth century.
The third chapter, “The First basilissa: Phila, Daughter of Antipater and
Wife of Demetrius Poliorcetes” by Elizabeth Carney, moves our attention
away from Athens and fictional figures, like Phaedra and Penelope, toward
a historical figure from the fourth century and her ramifications. Carney
explores the life and career of Phila (c. 350–294 bce), the first woman to
whom the title basilissa was applied. In her analysis, Carney identifies sev-
eral factors that led to Phila becoming the prototype for Hellenistic queens
and inevitably addresses issues of Hellenistic kingship as well. Her discussion
contributes to our knowledge about terminology used to refer to a specific
group of women in antiquity, namely royal women, and the circumstances
that led to its use. She extends our knowledge of powerful historical women
from antiquity and the role they can have in influencing those who come
after them.
The fourth chapter, “Power and Patronage: Rethinking the Legacy of
Artemisia II,” by Walter Penrose, continues Carney’s focus on royal women
of the fourth century bce and focuses on another royal woman, Artemisia
II of Caria, in Anatolia. Penrose uses the extant ancient sources to chal-
lenge recent scholars who have questioned Artemisia’s role in planning
the building of the Mausoleum, the tomb of her husband and brother,
Mausolus, which is considered one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient
World. Like Carney, Penrose contributes to work on non-Athenocentric
topics for the study of women in antiquity, and, like Levick, he highlights
the biases of modern historiography as well as some of the problems with
which modern historians are faced when researching and writing about the
lives of women in antiquity.
Barbara Levick’s chapter, “The Murder of Apronia,” the fifth in the col-
lection, moves us to the Roman world of the first century ce, focusing on
the power of an elite woman with close connections to the imperial Roman
household. It discusses the motivation for the murder of Apronia by her hus-
band, M. Plautius Silvanus, in the early first century ce in Rome, recounted
by Tacitus. The role of Urgulania, a close associate of Livia and grandmother
of Apronia’s husband, is examined to call into question what is usually
considered a crime of passion. Unlike the chapters by Carney and Penrose,
Levick’s does not have a royal woman as its focus but, rather, explores an
elite woman and her ability to act in relation to the imperial figure of Livia.
8
8 Ron n ie Ancona
Levick’s chapter, like Richlin’s, expands our notion of the contributions of

women of different social groups to political culture in Rome.
The sixth chapter is entitled “A Century of Women’s History from the
Papyri.” Building upon the work of Mondini (1917), Pomeroy (1981, 1984),
and others, Roger Bagnall provides a retrospective of previous work that
has been done to discover the lives of women through ancient papyri. He
explores recent developments, like the contextualization of the papyrolog-
ical finds in their archaeological sites and material artifactual remains, as
well as the issue of how much what has been learned about women in the
context of Hellenistic Egypt can be generalized beyond that society. His
chapter is both retrospective and prospective, outlining what work still
needs to be done.
The seventh chapter, “Cosmetics in Daily Life of the Ancient
Mediterranean” by Ann Ellis Hanson, examines papyri and other rele-
vant sources for evidence about the cosmetics used by women (and men)
of the Roman province of Egypt in order to keep their faces and bodies at-
tractive. Hanson provides a diachronic treatment of cosmetics and female
embellishments in literature and medicine. This wide-ranging piece includes
discussion of the famous passage about the young wife’s use of cosmetics in
Xenophon’s Oeconomicus as well as the medical writing of Galen. Like Hall’s
chapter, this one addresses an issue, in this case cosmetics, that has been
closely connected with perceptions of women in antiquity, as it still is in
today’s world.
Georgia Tsouvala, coeditor of this volume, contributes the eighth
chapter, “Female Athletes in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Greek World.”
Tsouvala’s contribution examines the literary and epigraphic evidence for
women’s participation in athletic events and venues in the late Hellenistic and
early Imperial period in Greece. Her chapter fills a gap in historiography on
women’s athletics within the larger, and quite popular, field of sports in antiq-
uity and within the growing field of Roman Greece more generally.
In the ninth chapter, “Normalizing Illegality? The Roman Jurists and
Underage Marriage,” Bruce Frier explores how jurists in the late Roman
Republic and early Empire handled marriages in which the bride was below
the Roman legal age for marriage and how this impacted property and in-
heritance laws, as well as laws concerning adultery. Frier’s chapter advances
work on legal matters concerning Roman women, specifically in the area of
underage marriage. He helps to show how complicated the issue of marriage
could be in antiquity and how looking at the legal issues involved expands our
view of what women in antiquity would have experienced in their lives.
9
Introduction 9
The tenth chapter, “Augustus and the Economics of Adultery” by Marilyn

Skinner, looks at the intertwining of financial, legal, and moral issues in the
late first century bce. Skinner examines the financial penalties for adultery
in Augustan legislation with an eye to how they might relate to the increased
wealth in women’s hands by this period in Roman history. Like Frier, Skinner
is interested in legislation concerned with marriage and how it impacted
women’s lives. While Frier looks at the underage bride, Skinner examines
wives with increasing autonomy. Both chapters shed light on the elaborate
web of issues involved with discussions of the institution of marriage.
Kristina Milnor is the author of the penultimate chapter, “Social Laws
and Social Facts.” Like the chapter by Hall, Milnor’s is concerned with episte-
mological issues and with issues of truth in the study of women in antiquity.
Milnor’s focus, like that of Frier and Skinner, is an aspect of Augustan legis-
lation. Milnor’s starting points are a statement by Cassius Dio on the rela-
tive presence of elite women and men at Rome in the late first century bce
and Pomeroy’s discussion of that statement in Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and
Slaves as both a historical fact and a representational matter. Her discussion
suggests additional questions that should be asked today about research on
women in antiquity, expanding the inquiry to address wider matters related
to the creation of or the absence of knowledge.
The twelfth, and final, chapter, “The Woman in the Street: Becoming
Visible in Mid-Republican Rome,” is by Amy Richlin, who examines the
Roman political culture of “the woman in the street” as well as of poor
people and slaves in mid-Republican Rome and, like Hall, intertwines it with
modern events and societal issues, making connections with the Mothers of
the Plaza de Mayo and actions by women in Vietnam and Northern Ireland.
Drawing upon literary sources, including the plays of Plautus and the his-
torical writings of Livy, she uncovers a wide range of public political activity
that has not been considered adequately in previous discussions of Roman
political culture. Richlin’s analysis not only expands our knowledge of women
in antiquity; it places our view of those women in a larger temporal and geo-
graphical context.
The field of the history of women in antiquity in Greece and Rome and
beyond has made progress in the more than forty years since the publica-
tion of Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves. The understand-
able initial opposition of this history to that of men (see Pomeroy quoted
earlier: “what women were doing while men were active in all the areas tradi-
tionally emphasized by classical scholars”) has flourished into a field that is no
longer just a reaction to the history of great men or to the interpretation of
10
10 Ron n ie Ancona
men’s views of women. Indeed the “Women in Antiquity” series from Oxford
University Press (formerly “Women of the Ancient World” from Routledge),
coedited by Ancona and Pomeroy, makes women’s lives in antiquity its cen-
tral focus. The use of old tools (such as literary and documentary texts) for
new purposes as well as the introduction of new interpretive and conceptual
frameworks (emerging from epistemology or modern contexts, as examples)
has reshaped the field. Its interdisciplinarity, which Pomeroy sees as her
greatest contribution to the field, has happily become axiomatic. Art history,
archaeology, literary criticism, papyrology, epigraphy, economics, and law are
all embedded in the chapters gathered for this collection.
The intent of this volume was to complicate the study of women in an-
tiquity by making clear that time and place and culture and genre and more
all contribute to specific information about and depictions of women. That
said, we hope to have developed some common threads within that diversity
as well. This volume, whether read selectively or as a whole, is meant to look
to the future with respect and appreciation for the research that preceded
it, especially that of Sarah Pomeroy, whose literal (physical) and figurative
(mental) “conceptions” are a part of the story of the writing of Goddesses,
Whores, Wives, and Slaves.
1
Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave

Euripides’ Hippolytus and Epistemic
Injustice toward Women
Edith Hall
But when Hippolutos exclaimed with rage

Against the miserable Queen, she judged
Intolerable life, and, pricked at heart
An Amazonian stranger’s race had right
To scorn her, perished by the murderous cord:
Yet, ere she perished, blasted in a scroll
The fame of him her swerving made not swerve.
—R obert Browning, “Artemis Prologizes,” 1842
Here is some advice which appeared in a standard textbook on the law

of evidence published repeatedly between 1899 and 1961 and used in the
training of many thousands of lawyers and judges in English-speaking coun-
tries throughout those decades:
Modern psychiatrists have studied the behaviour of errant young girls

and the women coming before the courts in all sorts of cases. Their
psychic complexes are multifarious and distorted. . . . One form taken
by these complexes is that of contriving false charges of sexual offences
by men.1
The author was an American jurist named John Henry Wigmore, the dean
of the Law School at Northwestern University. He concluded here that all
1. Wigmore (1940) section 924a.
Edith Hall, Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0002
12
12 Edit h H all
female evidence in cases of sexual assault must be vetted by psychiatrists to see

if it is reliable enough to go to court.
Things may have improved for women witnesses somewhat since 1961,
which is coincidentally the year when Sarah Pomeroy was awarded her PhD
from Columbia University. It is in profound admiration and gratitude for
her incomparable contribution to the investigation and teaching of ancient
women that this chapter has been written.2 But much more recent events
in the cinema and other industries have cast an unprecedented spotlight on
the issue of the reliability of women’s accounts where they say that they have
been sexually harassed, intimidated, assaulted, or raped by men. Women’s tes-
timony in all such cases, not only historically but also in our own time, has
often been doubted or subjected to a greater degree of aggressive examination
than other kinds of testimony, for a complex variety of reasons.3 These include
the difficulty of proving or disproving acts to which there were no witnesses
other than the accuser and the accused, and the indisputable fact that some
women in history have laid false allegations of sexual violence against some
men. A recent article in the Journal of Forensic Psychology studied police
records of allegations made between 2006 and 2012 in the USA and de-
termined that a very small proportion of rape allegations—approximately
5 percent—had been deemed either false or baseless.4 Yet, even taking into ac-
count the problem that the original investigators may have come to the incor-
rect conclusion in deeming a case false or baseless, and that the scholars (all
male) who published the article were not focused on discovering how those
judgments had been arrived at, this is a remarkably small proportion of the
total allegations laid. It is, moreover, a far smaller proportion of rapes that actu-
ally take place, since this crime is notoriously and shockingly underreported,5
partly because women are afraid that they will not be believed.
By far the most important reason that women’s word is routinely doubted
has been ideological: it is the ubiquity of the belief that women are at a
2. It is appropriate that the venue in which I delivered this paper, as Bluhm Visiting Lecturer
at Hunter College, CUNY, New York City, in April 2015, was the institution with which
Professor Pomeroy was affiliated for much of her career. One of my editors, Professor Ronnie
Ancona, is on the faculty at Hunter, and the other, Georgia Tsouvala, studied there. I am
deeply grateful to comments made on the occasion that I delivered the lecture by Lawrence
M. Kowerski, Helene Foley, and Judy Hallett.
3. Mack (1993).
4. De Zutter, Horselenberg, and van Koppen (2017).
5. See, e.g., for England and Wales, OFS (2018).
13
Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 13
fundamental level epistemologically more unreliable than men. This unfor-

tunate perception transcends both times and cultures. The particular motif of
the sexually spurned woman, who frames for sexual assault the man who has
spurned her, is attested in mythologies worldwide, including the biblical story
of Potiphar’s wife and Joseph in Genesis 39.6 Patriarchy needs to bolster the
perceived real-world pervasiveness of the motif. In this chapter, I argue that
it has been reinforced for twenty-five centuries by the powerful influence on
our shared cultural imagination of the Greek mythical figure of Phaedra. The
“classic” status of Euripides’ Hippolytus, in which, as Browning said, she mur-
derously “blasted” her stepson in her suicidal “scroll,”7 and Euripides’ equally
influential epigones, Seneca’s Phaedra, and Jean Racine’s Phèdre,8 have helped
to “naturalize” in our culture a very specific figure: the woman who takes re-
venge on a man she desires, if he rebuffs her, by falsely accusing him of sexual
assault. The naturalization of the woman-who-cries-rape is made even easier
because the erroneous idea that women are somehow more prone to vengeful
behavior than men, an idea physically embodied in the emphatic if deviant
femininity of the Erinyes, also ran very deep in ancient Greek culture and
society.9 This does not mean that we should exclude these aesthetically su-
perb dramas from the curriculum or the repertoire, but it does mean that we
should be careful when teaching or staging them to draw attention to the ide-
ological work that the figure of Phaedra is doing and has always done.
I first published this argument in a short blog posted on May 24, 2015.10
I wrote it in response to an apology issued by the Hampshire Police for
mistreating a rape victim from Winchester in southern England. She had re-
ported the crime at the age of seventeen in 2012. The police threatened her
with prosecution for lying about the attack. A male classics colleague had said
to me at that time that she was one of the large number of women (he alleged)
who, “like Phaedra,” frame innocent men for sex crimes because they have been
rejected or out of vindictive spite. But when the police finally conducted fo-
rensic tests on the T-shirt the Winchester woman had provided, they realized
her evidence was entirely credible. The rapist was charged and convicted. The
case clarified my intuitive dislike of Euripides’ tragedy Hippolytus, a play of
6. Yohannan (1968); Goldman (1995).

7. Browning (1991) 109.
8. See Amodeo (1930); Heldmann (1968); Tschiedel (1969).
9. See Hall (2018).
10. Hall (2015).
14
14 Edit h H all
exquisite poetic beauty but toxic ideology,11 the text of which I had come to
know intimately when I played the role of Phaedra in a production by Oxford
University Classical Drama Society in the gardens of St. John’s College in the
summer of 1980.
Between the Greek original, the Neronian Phaedra attributed to Seneca,
and Racine’s Phèdre (1677), let alone descendants such as Eugene O’Neill’s
Desire under the Elms (1924), Mike Nichols’ movie The Graduate (1967),12
and Sarah Kane’s iconoclastic Phaedra’s Love (2005), this plot line has been
mightily applauded on page, stage, and screen over the centuries. Eighteenth-
century conservative aristocrats recommended that their sons study the myth
of Phaedra and Hippolytus intensively.13 Countless actors, such as Madame
Rachel, Sarah Bernhardt, Glenda Jackson, Diana Rigg, Isabelle Huppert,
and Helen Mirren, have been keen to play the mendacious rape-accuser of
Racine’s famous tragedy Phèdre, in which the plot, which adopts elements
from both Euripides and Seneca,14 is further complicated by Hippolyte’s het-
erosexuality and love affair with Aricie. All these women stars have received
rapturous acclaim for the supposed sublimity of the psychological portraits
they have drawn.15
Spectators at one of Bernhardt’s performances in England said that they
could not bring themselves to applaud, since “the tragedy appeared too awful
a reality.”16 Bernhardt herself used the language both of the method actor’s
“reality” and the metaphysical epiphany of the divinely inspired performer in
remembering her experience of the role alongside the star Jean Mounet-Sully:
11. At the time, Zuckerberg (2015) criticized my blog, claiming that it implied “an imaginary
state of nature surrounding rape allegations: as though once upon a time, when people claimed
they’d been raped, they were implicitly believed, until one day, somebody decided to lie (prob-
ably for revenge), and ever since then we’ve been deeply suspicious of sexual assault victims. If
we could just stop telling stories about false allegations, goes the undertone, we’d forget that
they’d ever happened and revert back to believing victims.” I see no need to refute Zuckerberg
here, since my own blogpost had maintained nothing of the kind, either explicitly or in any
“undertone.”
12. For the relationship between this movie and Euripides’ Hippolytus, see Looney (2014).
13. See, for example, what the Right Honorable Philip Dormer Stanhope, Earl of Chesterfield,
writes to his son, Philip Stanhope, Esq., in Stanhope (1774) vol. 1, 114.
14. See Wygant (1999). Much of the evidence for the Euripidean influence comes from Racine’s
markings on his Euripidean texts: see Phillippo (2003) 111–121.
15. For such lavish praise of Rachel as Racine’s Phèdre, see Anon. (1846); for Bernhardt, see
Richardson (1977) 57; in general, see Booth, Stokes, and Bassnett (1996).
16. Cited in Richardson (1977) 79.
15
I suffered, I wept, I implored, I cried: all of it was real; my suffering

was horrible, the tears that flowed were burning and bitter. I implored
Hippolyte for the love that was killing me, and the arms that I stretched
out to Mounet-Sully were the arms of Phèdre, tense with the cruel
longing to embrace. The god had come.17
Mirren’s Phaedra was “a real woman poleaxed by passion.”18 Every perfor-

mance, especially if it is sensed as a psychological reality and enhanced by
the emotional conviction of a famous actor, constitutes another authorita-
tive “proof ” of the mass delusion that information imparted by women is
unreliable—the delusion that, as we shall see, philosopher Miranda Fricker
calls “epistemic injustice” against them.
Although there have been a few attempts by classical scholars to interpret
Euripides’ Hippolytus in a way that recovers Phaedra for modern feminism,19
this has not been much reflected in the performance arts. Unlike the many revi-
sionist authors and directors of plays about Clytemnestra, Medea, Jocasta, and
Aeschylus’ Danaids, or the heroine of Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew for that
matter,20 the writers and directors of few productions or adaptations of which
I am aware have decided to alter the ancient playscript altogether by, for example,
removing the false accusation,21 or by reversing the gender roles to portray the
obsession and lies of a young husband of a middle-aged woman when he falls in
love with her daughter. Julia Ward Howe, for whom women’s rights were a cause
along with abolition and world peace, did nothing to ameliorate the impact of
Phaedra’s lethal lie in her otherwise radical rewriting of Hippolytus performed in
Boston in 1911.22 Neelam Mansingh Chowdhry emphasized the damage done
to the Indian psyche by British imperialism in her Punjabi verse adaptation of
Racine’s Phèdre, Fida (1990). She wanted to use the parallel Punjabi legend of
17. Cited in Mckee (2017) 168.

18. Billington (2009).
19. For feminist interpretations of the play, emphasizing Phaedra’s attempts at self–control,
moral agency, and the cruel limitations of life for women in the world of Athenian tragedy, see
Rabinowitz (1986, 1993); Goff (1990), especially the first two chapters.
20. See the discussions in Hall, Macintosh, and Wrigley (2004); Macintosh et al. (2006); Hall,
Macintosh, and Taplin (2000); and Rackin (2001). For feminist adaptations of Antigone and
Iphigenia in Tauris, see Mee and Foley (2011) and Hall (2013) 256–273.
21. For the few exceptions, which often play down Theseus’ role entirely and consummate the
relationship between Phaedra and Hippolytus, see Lauriola (2015).
22. On which see Foley (2015).
16
16 Edit h H all
Loona, the vindictive queen who persecutes her chaste stepson, Puran Bhagat,
when he will not sleep with her, even though this story is equally as damaging
to women’s claim to veracity as Phaedra’s. But beyond making Rani Fida much
more emotionally confused than in the previous plays, there is no difference in
Chowdhry’s play in her culpability for the false charge.23
It is perplexing that so few adaptors have shunned the motif of the false
rape accusation. Rewriting the plot altogether was already recommended
by Stevie Smith, in her poem “Phèdre,” composed in the early 1960s after
watching a production of Racine’s tragedy starring Marie Bell:24
Now if I
Had been writing this story
I should have arranged for Theseus
To die,
(Well, he was old)
And then I should have let
Phèdre and Hippolytus
Find Aricie out
In some small meanness,
Say
Eating up somebody else’s chocolates,
Half a pound of them, soft centred. Secretly in bed at night, alone,
One after another,
Positively wolfing them down.
This would have put Hip. off,
And Phaedra would be there too
And he would turn and see
That she was pretty disgusted, too,
So then they would have got married
And everything would have been respectable,
And the wretched Venus could have lumped it,
Lumped, I mean, Phèdre
Being the only respectable member
Of her awful family,
And being happy.
23. Fida is included in Mukherjee (2005).

24. Reproduced from Smith (1975).
17
Smith concludes that classical stories could be rewritten: “If I were writing the
story /I should have made it a go.”
There have, in fact, been a tiny number of versions where the false accu-
sation has become entirely the work of one of Phaedra’s servants and never
corroborated by her, which exculpates her from the perjury charge—if
not the prejudice—against libidinous women: Rameau’s opera Hippolyte
et Aricie (1733), with a libretto by Abbé Simon-Joseph Pellegrin, draws on
both Euripides and Seneca, and above all on Racine’s Phèdre. But in Act III
only Thésée and the nurse Oenone are on stage when Oenone invents the
charge against Hippolyte. She does so to explain why he had been struggling
over a sword with Phèdre when Thésée unexpectedly returned from the
Underworld. Hippolyte is thought (mistakenly) to have died before Phèdre’s
integrity can ever be tested by asking whether she refutes or corroborates
Oenone’s testimony.25 In the event, Phèdre kills herself before she is thus
tested, and Hippolyte’s life is saved by Diana for the happy ending obligatory
in French operatic entertainments of the 1730s. A false rape charge is here
laid by a woman, but the woman is for once not Phaedra. In the most famous
English-language neoclassical version of the story, Edmund Smith’s Phaedra
and Hippolitus (1707), the lie is invented not by a female nurse but by the
male Lycon, a courtier who is in love with Phaedra.26 Smith, however, leaves
Phaedra’s complicity in the falsehood ambiguous as she does nothing to re-
fute Lycon’s accusation.
I suspect that the Euripidean Phaedra’s function as archetypal maker of a
false rape allegation has drawn less attention from explicitly feminist scholars
than it might have done because it has partly been obscured by her status
as stepmother. Cultural histories of her influence often emphasize her close
relationship by marriage with Hippolytus and the quasi-incestuous nature
of her desire for him as, legally speaking if not by consanguinity, a surrogate
mother figure—one of the legion of persecutory stepmothers not only in
Greek myth and literature but in the Roman imagination and the folk tales
of the world.27 Psychoanalytical discussions have also emphasized the vicar-
iously parental nature of Phaedra’s relationship with Hippolytus: this is the
“Phaedra Complex” as identified in 1969 by the influential psychiatrist Alfred
25. See the discussion of McKee (2017) 84–85, although she does not notice the unusualness
and significance of the exculpation of Phèdre.
26. See further Hall and Macintosh (2005) 71–74.
27. Watson (1995); Yohannan (1968).
18
18 Edit h H all
A. Messer, then a professor at Emory State University and chief of Family

Research and Treatment at the Georgia Mental Health Institute. He defined
it as any eroticized feelings of a stepparent toward a stepchild.28 That is, the
reception of the Phaedra myth has failed to take the ethical issue of her deci-
sion to make a false allegation seriously enough in comparison with her erotic
impulse.
First, let us remind ourselves exactly how this persuasive case of a
“false rape allegation” unfolds in Euripides’ canonical tragedy, which was
awarded first prize at the Athenian City Dionysia in 428 bce. Phaedra is
actually a victim of collateral damage, since Aphrodite tells us in her pro-
logue that she has made her conceive a passion for Hippolytus in order
to use the queen as an instrument in destroying her stepson in punish-
ment for neglecting to worship Aphrodite (24–50); Artemis’ appearance
at the end of the tragedy implies that the entire episode has been just one
part of a much longer term game played between gods and goddesses over
the lives and deaths of their favorite and least favorite humans. But since
Phaedra’s scenes are played out entirely without further divine interven-
tion, we watch her take decisions and act on them as if she is an entirely
autonomous moral agent. The implication is that Aphrodite can use her as
her instrument in a false rape allegation only because, as a Cretan woman,
the daughter of Pasiphae and sister to Ariadne, she is genetically vulner-
able to sexual aberration (337–339). She has tried to control her desire but
has failed and resolved on suicide in order to protect her young sons’ good
names (391–402). She reveals weakness of character in letting her nurse
extract information from her and an apparent agreement to consider phar-
maceutical help, even though she explicitly says she fears that the nurse will
inform Hippolytus about the situation (486–520). When she overhears
the opening of their dialogue, she leaves the stage (596–601).
On her return, she secures an oath from the chorus that they will divulge
nothing of what has happened (711–714) and tells them that she will kill her-
self in order to preserve her own and her sons’ good names (723). In addition,
however, she will become a menace to Hippolytus (728–731) in order “to pre-
vent him from being self-righteous about my plight” (μὴ ’πὶ τοῖς ἐμοῖς κακοῖς/
ὑψηλὸς εἶναι). “By taking his share in this malady of mine, he will learn to be
temperate” (τῆς νόσου δὲ τῆσδέ μοι/κοινῇ μετασχὼν σωφρονεῖν μαθήσεται). In
one of the first, and certainly one of the most dramatic false rape allegations
28. Messer (1969); see also Gérard (1993).

19
in world literature, she frames Hippolytus by hanging a sealed tablet from her
gown before hanging herself. Theseus either reads out her writing or infers
from it that Hippolytus “presumed forcibly to assault my marriage bed”
(Ἱππόλυτος εὐνῆς τῆς ἐμῆς ἔτλη θιγεῖν /βίᾳ; 855–856). Because Theseus is in-
candescent with rage, believes the message, and makes no attempt to check
whether anyone has any evidence to adduce or can corroborate her allegation,
Hippolytus is doomed.
Phaedra’s behavior in accusing Hippolytus of rape is immoral: “Thou
shalt not bear false witness.” So is the behavior of anyone who makes false
allegations against anyone else, even if the motive has an altruistic element,
such as Phaedra’s hope to protect her own children’s names. In Euripides’
own earlier version of the myth, Hippolytus Veiled, about which we know
very little for certain, she seems to have behaved even worse, although
scholars disagree about the reason. It seems to be Phaedra who even admits
in one fragment (fr. 430) that she has “a teacher of daring and audacity
[τόλμης καὶ θράσους] who is most inventive amid difficulties—Eros, the
hardest god of all to fight.”29 It is difficult to imagine a self-characterization
more different from that of Euripides’ other Phaedra, who is preoccupied
with maintaining a reputation for modesty and honor.30 Hippolytus Veiled
may have involved Phaedra plotting to persuade Hippolytus to kill Theseus
and seize the throne, or approaching him directly or through a letter sent
by her nurse, or by staying alive to accuse Hippolytus directly.31 The hy-
pothesis prefixed to the extant Hippolytus by Aristophanes of Byzantium
(T i) says that it was written later than Hippolytus Veiled, “for what was
unseemly and reprehensible [τὸ γὰρ ἀπρεπὲς καὶ κατηγορίας ἄξιον] has been
put right in this play.” Aristophanes clearly did not see Phaedra’s false ac-
cusation as notably “unseemly” or “reprehensible”: like most ancient and
many modern men, he probably just thought it was a typical example, and
further proof, of women’s congenital unreliability as moral agents and
custodians of truth.
Sadly, we know next to nothing about the contents of Sophocles’
Phaedra.32 The woman’s perjury is much more detailed in the more
29. All references to the fragments of and testimonia to Euripides’ lost plays are cited from
Collard and Cropp (2008).
30. See the classic article by Dodds (1925) and the response of Craik (1993).
31. See Roisman (1999); Hutchinson (2004).
32. See Kiso (1973).
20
20 Edit h H all
substantial remains of Euripides’ Stheneboea. This dramatized the story

of Stheneboea’s sexual passion for Bellerophon, the Corinthian guest-
friend who had committed a murder and fled to the palace of her husband,
Proetus, King of Tiryns. The surviving hypothesis contains this information
(Test. iia.7–15):
Βελλεροφόντην δὲ φεύ-
γοντα ἐκ Κορίνθου διὰ φόνον αὐτὸς
μὲν ἥγνισε τοῦ μύσους, ἡ γυνὴ δὲ αὐ-
τοῦ τὸν ξένον ἠγάπησε. τυχεῖν δὲ οὐ
δυναμένη τῶν ἐπιθυμημάτων δι-
έβαλεν ὡς ἐπιθέμενον ἑαυτῇ τὸν
Κορίνθιον [ξένο]ν. πιστεύσας δὲ
ὁ Προῖτος αὐτὸν εἰς Καρίαν ἐξ-
έπεμψεν, ἵνα ἀπόληται.
When Bellerophon fled Corinth because of a killing, Proetus purified

him of the pollution, but his wife fell in love with their guest. When
she was unable to achieve her desires, she traduced the Corinthian
[guest] as having assaulted her. Trusting [her], Proetus sent him to
Caria to be killed.33
In the prologue, Bellerophon said that he resolved to leave Tiryns because

Proetus had a “foolish wife” who had “shamed” her husband (γυνὴ κατῄσχυν᾿
ἐν δόμοισι νηπία; fr. 661.5) by her constant sexual propositions to Bellerophon,
relayed by her nurse (fr. 661.8–14):
λόγοισι πείθει καὶ δόλῳ θηρεύεται

κρυφαῖον εὐνῆς εἰς ὁμιλίαν πεσεῖν.
ἀεὶ γὰρ ἥπερ τῷδ᾿ ἐφέστηκεν λόγῳ
τροφὸς γεραιὰ καὶ ξυνίστησιν λέχος,
ὑμνεῖ τὸν αὐτὸν μῦθον· “ὦ κακῶς φρονῶν,
πιθοῦ· τί μαίνῃ; τλῆθι δεσποίνης ἐμῆς
[one or more lines missing]
κτήσῃ δ᾿ ἄνακτος δώμαθ᾿ ἓν πεισθεὶς βραχύ.”
33. Translated by Collard and Cropp (2008).

21
She tried words to persuade me and guile to snare me into slipping

covertly into the intimacy of her bed: for her old nurse, who is in
charge of this talk and tries to bring us together, always sings the same
tune: “Your thinking is bad! Be persuaded! Why this madness? Have
the courage . . . of my mistress, and you will gain the king’s palace, once
you are persuaded in this one small thing.”
Bellerophon concludes that he must leave, since he has no wish (30–31) to

denounce Stheneboea and thus stain her reputation in a way that would tear
apart Proetus’ household (οὐδ᾿ αὖ κατειπεῖν καὶ γυναικὶ προσβαλεῖν/κηλῖδα
Προίτου καὶ διασπάσαι δόμον). This, of course, is the sort of selfless, manly
moral scruple that neither Phaedra nor Stheneboea possesses.
The play covered an unusually extended period of time, for by its end
Bellerophon had returned from Lycia, having survived his ordeals there, and
dispatched Stheneboea by dropping her from Pegasus’ back into the sea near
Melos. Her body was taken back to Tiryns, and Bellerophon returned there
once more, to tell Proetus that by her death, and Proetus’ bereavement, he
had punished both of them for plotting against him. The last fragment sums
up the moral of the play (fr. 671); someone, presumably Proetus, asks that she
(probably her corpse) be taken inside, since “no sensible person ought to trust
a woman” (πιστεύειν δὲ χρὴ/γ υναικὶ μηδὲν ὅστις εὖ φρονεῖ βροτῶν).
The point of exploring Euripides’ Stheneboea in detail is to show how,
in his surviving Hippolytus, the spotlight was cast much more intensely on
Phaedra’s false accusation. In Stheneboea, the antiheroine’s plans included
deposing her husband, presumably by killing him, as well as adulterous sex.
She only compounded these nefarious designs by laying the false charge
against her beloved. In Hippolytus, on the other hand, Hippolytus may be ar-
rogant and Theseus may take precipitate decisions, the nurse is meddlesome
and disobedient, and Phaedra sexually frustrated. But the sole seriously im-
moral act—the leaving of the mendacious suicide note—is committed by a
woman. This makes the play’s message—that even otherwise virtuous women
with previously unblemished records do not make credible witnesses—even
more ideologically potent.
In the Renaissance and Early Modern periods, the Senecan Phaedra
exerted a much greater cultural influence than Euripides’ play, which was not
published in Greek until 1495, nor translated into English until 1781.34 The
34. Lascaris (1495); Potter (1781).

2
22 Edit h H all
Senecan play was performed in Latin at the Palais de Cardinal Saint Georges
in France as early as 1474 and was imitated closely by Robert Garnier in
his humanist tragedy Hippolyte in 1573. Its influence can be seen at work in
Shakespearean drama and in the work of many other authors.35 In this influen-
tial Senecan version, it is the nurse, not Phaedra, who invents the false charge
against Hippolytus (719–735). But Phaedra does elaborate the details of the
fabricated rape directly to her husband, Theseus (888–902). She redeems her-
self to a certain extent by confessing that she had lied before she commits sui-
cide, but Hippolytus is dead. The moral effect is just as sexist as the version in
Euripides—indeed, the play implies that even when two women lay the iden-
tical charge against a single man, their word should routinely be doubted. But
in sharing the falsehood between the nurse and Phaedra and in writing a con-
fession for Phaedra, the Senecan play slightly dilutes Phaedra’s revenge mo-
tive. Her nurse is primarily concerned to save Phaedra’s life (she is convinced
that if the truth is revealed, Phaedra will kill herself immediately; see 854–
857), and Phaedra does eventually make an effort to clear Hippolytus’ name.
One line of argument often used by social conservatives to defend artworks
in any media that appeal to obsolete ideological beliefs, whether about race,
class, sexual orientation, or gender, is that they are designed for entertainment
and have negligible social impact. The ancient Greeks themselves were rather
more honest about the enormous potential of stories to shape individual
character and collective history. In Aristophanes’ Frogs, there is a curiously
modern-sounding interchange between Aeschylus and Euripides on the re-
lationship of tragedy to its spectators. Aeschylus claims that his plays about
heroic warriors helped keep the citizens of Athens ready for warfare. He did
not put “whores” like Phaedra and Stheneboea on stage, and nobody knows
of any “erotic woman” about whom he has ever written a role (1043–1044):
ἀλλ᾽ οὐ μὰ Δί᾽ οὐ Φαίδρας ἐποίουν πόρνας οὐδὲ Σθενεβοίας,

οὐδ᾽ οἶδ᾽ οὐδεὶς ἥντιν᾽ ἐρῶσαν πώποτ᾽ ἐποίησα γυναῖκα.
But by Zeus I created neither whorish Phaedras nor Stheneboeas, And

nobody knows of any lustful woman I have created.
An interchange follows alleging that Euripides’ own wife had behaved
similarly to these whores (pornai), leading into this discussion of the relation-
ship between fiction, truth, and the poet’s role as civics teacher (1049–1056):
35. Arkins (1995); Jacquot (1964); Lefèvre (1978).

23
Εὐριπίδης καὶ τί βλάπτουσ᾽ ὦ σχέτλι᾽ ἀνδρῶν τὴν πόλιν ἁμαὶ Σθενέβοιαι;

Αἰσχύλοςὅτι γενναίας καὶ γενναίων ἀνδρῶν ἀλόχους ἀνέπεισας
κώνεια πιεῖν αἰσχυνθείσας διὰ τοὺς σοὺς Βελλεροφόντας.
Εὐριπίδης πότερον δ᾽ οὐκ ὄντα λόγον τοῦτον περὶ τῆς Φαίδρας ξυνέθηκα;
Αἰσχύλος μὰ Δί᾽ ἀλλ᾽ ὄντ᾽: ἀλλ᾽ ἀποκρύπτειν χρὴ τὸ πονηρὸν
τόν γε ποιητήν,
καὶ μὴ παράγειν μηδὲ διδάσκειν. τοῖς μὲν γὰρ παιδαρίοισιν
ἔστι διδάσκαλος ὅστις φράζει, τοῖσιν δ᾽ ἡβῶσι ποιηταί.
πάνυ δὴ δεῖ χρηστὰ λέγειν ἡμᾶς.
Euripides And what harm do my Stheneboeas do to the state, you wretch?
Aeschylus You incited noble wives of noble men to drink hemlock out
of shame on account of your Bellerophons.
Euripides So was the story I composed about Phaedra imaginary?
Aeschylus No, it is real. But the poet should cover up wickedness, not
represent it and teach it. For little boys are taught by teachers,
and adults by poets. We are under obligation to speak about
honourable matters.
In this breathtaking sequence, no fewer than four different ways of thinking

about the relationship of “whores” in Euripidean tragedy to social reality
are considered: (1) that these stage characters can make virtuous women
feel so ashamed that they are suicidal; (2) that they are somehow inspired
by Euripides’ own experience of his own real-life wife; (3) that the story of
Phaedra is “real,” whether in the sense that the events depicted in Euripides’
tragedy were historical or that the story about Phaedra was so well known
that she had acquired an indisputable ontological status; and (4) that poets
need to avoid staging or to hide “real” wickedness in order to improve the
morals of their audience.
Plato’s Socrates is almost certainly thinking of the same Euripidean
females when he argues in the Republic that citizens should not be involved in
the theatrical mimesis of inappropriate character types, including the “erotic
woman” (ἐρῶσαν), because people internalize habits even if they are just
assumed during the “make-believe” process of theater (3.395d–e).36 Just be-
cause ancient men seemed more concerned about the sex drive of Phaedra and
Stheneboea than about their duplicity, whereas in the twenty-first century
we are much more likely to find the latter completely unacceptable, does not
36. On which see further Hall (2017) 35–41.

24
24 Edit h H all
detract from the theoretical sophistication of the discussions in Aristophanes

and Plato regarding the relationship of art to life. We may not take hemlock
out of revulsion at characters in the fictions we consume, nor embark on blind
imitation of their misconduct. But our sensibilities and attitudes to others are
certainly shaped by these fictions’ contents.
And in academia, if not in the popular press, few would now deny that
myths were a crucial part of the ideological training of individuals in classical
antiquity. The conduct of heroes and heroines offered role models, positive
and negative paradigms of behavior, reinforcement of fundamental taboos
and imperatives, and the establishment of boundaries between human and
god, human and animal, Greek and non-Greek, man and woman, adult and
child, civilized and uncivilized, honorable and dishonorable. Young men were
trained for the horrors of the battlefield with stories of the heroic exploits of
Achilles and Diomedes; they were shown ideal models of male friendship by
Heracles and Theseus or Orestes and Pylades. The Odyssey offered a variety
of episodes of xenia exemplifying the right and wrong way of treating guests
and hosts and even poor beggars who entered your portals. And a Greek au-
thor writing under the Roman Empire in the second century ce suggests that
women did relate closely to the experiences of the female characters whom
they saw on stage in drama. The author is Artemidorus, who recorded in his
Interpretation of Dreams two dreams women had really experienced in which
tragic myth is involved. The deterioration in a relationship between a woman
and her slave girl, for example, was presaged by her dream about the con-
flict between Hermione and her slave Andromache in Euripides’ Andromache
(4.59). Another woman dreamed that she danced in a chorus for Dionysus, a
dream that correctly predicted that she would kill her own son, as Agave kills
her son Pentheus in Euripides’ Bacchae (4.39).
An important work of classical scholarship asking seriously and in a
sustained manner how myth shaped female psyches is Helene Foley’s path-
breaking commentary on the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, published in 1994.
Foley emphasized the relationship between the psychological development
of girls, especially their preparation for marriage and motherhood, and the
myth of mother-daughter separation, loss, and then partial reunion after the
daughter had been incorporated into her new, patrilocal, marital household.
But the landmark text in terms of the ideological work done by stories in
the limiting of the potential of female experience is Carolyn Heilbrun’s essay
“What Was Penelope Unweaving?” She first delivered it to a conference in
1985, lamenting the lack of female quest heroes in our cultural heritage and
claiming that women had at that time few stories other than marriage and
25
motherhood by which to shape their lives. The problem for Penelope was
that hers was an unwritten story: “how a woman may manage her own des-
tiny when she has no plot, no narrative, no tale to guide her.”37 It could be
argued that women have had no positive paradigms for how to behave prop-
erly when erotically smitten with an inappropriate person. It could equally
well be argued that men watching Hippolytus come away with the conviction
that any accusation of rape made by a woman is likely to be untruthful, and
that an accused man may be innocent even if he does not use all the legal
defenses at his disposal because he may well be an honorable man and have
sworn someone an oath of silence.
Doubting women’s evidence is an international menace. At its most ex-
treme, under sharia law, women’s evidence is officially worth half or a quarter
of a man’s, if admissible at all. At the other end of the spectrum, it has merely
impeded women’s progress in professions where custody of the truth is cen-
tral: the church, the law, and academia. Within classics, the vocabulary
used historically in reviews of works published by female scholars has often
undermined their claim to reliability or veracity by the use of skeptical or
dismissive vocabulary.38 The brilliant work of philosopher Miranda Fricker
in her Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (2009) has done
much to advance our understanding of the ways implicit bias works against
groups, including women, who have been historically regarded as unsafe
custodians of the truth.
Fricker identifies two types of dysfunction in our epistemic practices.
Much of our knowledge is acquired from the testimony of others, whether
from family members, colleagues, or newspapers. But some speakers are
granted a reduced degree of credibility by a listener on account of some preju-
dice the listener holds. This is not just an epistemological question. A testifier
whose credibility is reduced on account of a prejudice is wronged by having
her or his “capacity as a knower” belittled. An example would be when a jury
does not believe something said to them by a witness because the person is
female or speaks with a foreign accent. “Testimonial injustice” is partly a re-
sult of Fricker’s second dysfunction, which she calls “hermeneutical injustice.”
This is a more general phenomenon,
37. Heilbrun ([1985] 1990) 126.

38. See Hall and Wyles (2016) 20–21.
26
26 Edit h H all
when someone is trying to make sense of a social experience but is hand-

icapped in this by a certain sort of gap in collective understanding—a
hermeneutical lacuna whose existence is owing to the relative power-
lessness of a social group to which the subject belongs. Such a lacuna
renders the collective interpretive resources structurally prejudiced.39
Both forms of injustice were experienced by women individually and as a

group in classical Athens, where women were not even allowed to represent
themselves in court and where tragedy repeatedly reaffirmed the inferiority
of female deliberative powers and the chaos that unsupervised womenfolk
could inflict on households in the absence of legitimate husbands.40 Both
forms of injustice still blight our attitudes to allegations of sexual assault,
and both rest on prejudices that are constantly reaffirmed in certain kinds
of fiction which we consume as part of our canonical curriculum as well as
recreationally.
Euripides’ Hippolytus is correctly included in the article entitled “False
Rape Accusation” on the popular-culture wiki TVTropes,41 founded in
2004 and now also covering film, theater, and fiction as well as television.
The length of the list of false rape accusations made by women against men
in both canonical and contemporary popular culture is depressing. Several
acclaimed high-brow novels feature the trope, from the trials of Dr. Aziz,
wrongly accused of raping Adela in E. M. Forster’s A Passage to India (1924),
and Tom Robinson, the victim of Mayella Ewell’s lies in Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird (1960), to Briony Tallis’ vicious lies in Ian McEwan’s Atonement
(2001). These novels have all been made into famous movies. Other successful
“false rape accusation” films abound: ones in which the females are motivated
by revenge include in Alan Shapiro’s The Crush (1993), where the accuser is
only 14; John McNaughton’s Wild Things (1998), and The Life of David Gale
(2003), directed by Alan Parker and starring, ironically, Kevin Spacey as the
victim of the false charge. Accusations of sexual misconduct are just some
of the lies told by the pernicious Amy Elliott Dunne in the hugely popular
thriller Gone Girl (2014). False rape accusations are also a staple of plot lines
in major television series that have included M*A*S*H, Baywatch, CSI NY,
39. Fricker (2008) 69.

40. Hall (1997, 2009).
41. See “False Rape Accusation,” TVTropes, accessed August 18, 2020, http://tvtropes.org/
pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FalserapeAccusation.
27
Dexter, and Hetty Wainthropp Investigates. I am not suggesting that such plot
lines be banned, of course, although I am personally surprised that women
seem to queue up to act in them. I am simply suggesting that, as in the case of
Euripides’ Hippolytus and its derivatives, we take considerable pains to keep
our own minds and those of our students focused on the indisputable truth
that the stories they tell of mendacious females framing men for rape are, in
actual fact, fiction.
28
29
Periphrôn Pênelopeia
The Reception of Penelope in
Fifth-C entury Athens
H. A. Shapiro
Penelope has rightly been called “the most enigmatic character in

the Odyssey.”1 Writing in 1975, Sarah B. Pomeroy commented that Homer’s
Penelope is admired above all for her chastity.2 While this is still as true
as when she wrote it, a whole generation of feminist classicists inspired by
Pomeroy’s pathbreaking work has, in the past thirty years, explored the many
ways in which Penelope’s other qualities—her shrewdness and wiliness, her
moral authority, her cautiousness, her circumspect (periphron: the epithet
most often used of her in the Odyssey) nature—make her not just enigmatic
but triumphant in bringing about the best possible outcome, a joyful reunion
with her long-lost husband.3 Her chastity is not merely admirable but is one
of her main weapons in overcoming considerable obstacles to reach that
happy end.
In trying to assess the reception of Penelope in the Classical period, we
are faced with one major obstacle. Like all the familiar figures of the Epic
Cycle, she must have been featured on the tragic stage in fifth-century Athens,
but not one of those plays survives as more than a title or a few exiguous
1. Felson-Rubin (1994) x.
2. Pomeroy ([1975] 1995) 21.
3. I have in mind, among others, the books of Murnaghan (1987), Katz (1991), Felson-Rubin
(1994), and Foley (2003).
H. A. Shapiro, Periphrôn Pênelopeia In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0003
30
30 H. A . Sh apiro
fragments.4 How different from both Helen and Klytemnestra, two heroines
with whom Penelope is pointedly compared throughout the Odyssey, whose
vivid portrayals by the tragedians demonstrate the eagerness of Athenian
audiences to rethink, revisit, and reimagine the familiar heroines and to see
them as “flesh and blood” people upon the stage. Penelope’s absence from
the surviving corpus may have helped perpetuate the one-dimensional and
oversimplified image of her as a paragon of virtue.5
In the visual arts of the fifth century, Penelope is somewhat better
attested than in drama, but still quite underrepresented in comparison
with the more colorful Klytemnestra and Helen, not to mention her own
husband, Odysseus.6 It is particularly striking that in the whole corpus
of extant Attic black-and red-figure vases, Penelope is pictured with cer-
tainty only a single time. This vase, a red-figure skyphos found in the area
of Chiusi, which gives his nickname to the Penelope Painter and was
made about 440–430 bce,7 would be exceptional even in a larger corpus
of images (Figures 2.1 and 2.2). To begin with, it pairs two distinctive
Odyssean motifs on either side of the vase, a not unknown practice that
is nevertheless quite rare.8 One side shows Penelope at her loom, attended
by her son Telemachos (Figure 2.1), while the other features the washing
of Odysseus’ feet by his old nurse, Eurykleia, in the presence of the rustic
swineherd Eumaios (Figure 2.2).
Both scenes, it has been alleged, have such evident divergences from our
Odyssey that they might derive from sources outside the epic, such as one
or more of the lost plays.9 Thus, instead of Eurykleia, the painter labels her
4. See Mactoux (1975) 49–53 for the fullest summary of the evidence for Penelope in tragedy.
The Penelope of Aischylos, of which one fragment survives, apparently included the recogni-
tion of Odysseus and Penelope and the slaughter of the suitors.
5. In Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazousai (546–548), a female character accuses Euripides of
dramatizing only wicked women like Melanippe and Phaidra, but never the virtuous Penelope.
6. For overviews of Penelope in Classical art, see Touchefeu-Meynier (1968); LIMC VII 291–
295, s.v. Penelope [C. Hausmann].
7. Chiusi 62 705; ARV2 1300, 2; BAPD no. 216789; Iozzo (2012) 72–74, figs. 10–11.
8. The earliest and best-known parallel for such a combination is the black-figure cup, more
than a century earlier than our skyphos, with, on one side, Odysseus and his men getting the
Cyclops drunk and, on the other, Circe transforming the companions of Odysseus into ani-
mals: Boston 99.518; ABV 198; BAPD no. 302569. Among many discussions see the ingenious
interpretation of Wannagat (1999).
9. See Iozzo (2012) 73, with references to earlier discussions.
31
Figure 2.1 Penelope and Telemachos. Attic red- figure skyphos, Chiusi, Museo
Archeologico 62 705, c. 440–430 bce. After Furtwängler and Reichhold (1904) pl. 142.
Figure 2.2 The foot-washing of Odysseus. Reverse of the skyphos in Figure 2.1. After
Furtwängler and Reichhold (1904) pl. 142.
32
32 H. A . Sh apiro
Antiphata, an otherwise unknown variant, while in Homer’s poem Eumaios

was not present in the foot-washing scene (Od. 19.363–509). Similarly, if
the scene on the obverse is understood as related to Telemachos’ departure
from Ithaka in search of news of his father, as is sometimes assumed, this di-
rectly contradicts the epic, in which Telemachos sneaks off the island without
telling his mother, instructing Eurykleia not to breathe a word to Penelope
until he has been gone for eleven or twelve days, or such time as she notices
that he is gone (Od. 2.371–376). Furthermore, Telemachos’ appearance in his
mother’s private quarters, where she keeps her loom, carrying a pair of spears
looks singularly inappropriate.
In a recent discussion of this vase, Mario Iozzo has rightly reminded us
not to overlook the “creative freedom” of the painter.10 Keeping this in mind,
I believe we can read both scenes as being true to the spirit, if not to the letter,
of Homer’s Odyssey, while giving us some insight into fifth-century responses
to the figure of Penelope.
On the obverse (Figure 2.1), Penelope sits on a four-legged stool, or
diphros, her head inclined to the side and her chin resting lightly on the fin-
gers of her right hand. She wears a finely pleated chiton and, over it, a heavy
himation pulled up over the back of her head like a veil. Her left leg is crossed
over the right, with the left foot dangling just in front of Telemachos’ spears.
Her left hand rests on the diphros, as if to steady herself. Behind her is a very
large standing loom that has been much studied for its elaborate construc-
tion and the textile—presumably the shroud for Laertes—on which she
has been working, with its embroidered winged creatures and decorative
motifs.11 Telemachos, a tall ephebe wearing a himation that leaves much of
his chest exposed, looks down toward his mother, but she is completely lost
in thought and seemingly unaware of his presence. The pair of spears forms a
perfect vertical axis through the middle of the scene and seems symbolically
to suggest that the two characters inhabit separate spaces and utterly fail to
communicate.
This is a pretty fair representation of the relationship of Penelope and
Telemachos, which devolves into one of almost no communication in the early
books of the poem. As Nancy Felson-Rubin observes, Penelope becomes “a near
stranger” for Telemachos, “a potential betrayer, held in suspicion, and kept in the
10. Iozzo (2012) 73.

11. On the loom and the weaving, see Iozzo (2012) 73, with further references to specialized
discussions.
3
Periphrôn Pênelopeia 33
dark.”12 Once Athena has come to Telemachos in the guise of Mentes and
commanded him to undertake his journey (Od. 1.279–305), he “disengages
himself from his mother.”13 Their one direct encounter is very telling. Attracted
by the sounds of the bard Phemios entertaining the suitors, Penelope descends
from her chamber, accompanied by a pair of handmaidens (Od. 1.350–359).
But when she asks the singer to perform something less painful to her than
the disastrous homecoming of the Greeks from Troy, Telemachos chastises
her, ordering her to go back to her room and her loom. Astonished by this
rebuke, she silently withdraws.
To the fifth-century viewer, no object was as closely associated with
Penelope as her loom, thanks to the famous ruse of undoing her weaving every
night in order to stall the suitors.14 Here the enormous loom is the elephant
in the room, so to speak, as it alludes both to that ruse and to the claim of her
rebellious adolescent that this is about all she is good for. He, on the other
hand, looks like a young orator and a man of action, as he leans on his spears
with one hand, rests the other on his hip in a casually authoritative pose, and
wears the mantle over his left arm just so. We are reminded that he will ad-
dress the people of Ithaka the next day after his encounter with his mother,
with a brilliantly rhetorical speech—his public debut (Od. 2.42–78). Indeed,
in dismissing her, he had said to his mother that public speaking (muthos) is
for men, weaving for women (Od. 1.359). On our vase, the vertical spears di-
vide the scene into the public space of men and the private space of women, a
notion that was especially prevalent in the world of Periklean Athens.
The distinctive pose of Penelope here has been much discussed, since it
seems to echo quite closely one that had been widely used for Penelope in
both large-scale marble sculpture and small-scale terracotta reliefs, gems, and
finger rings in the several decades before the Penelope Painter’s skyphos.15 This
is typically referred to as the “mourning Penelope” type, though the contexts
in which it is used suggest that mourning is not its only or even necessarily its
primary connotation.16 The veil, for example, can be worn by mourners at the
12. Felson-Rubin (1994) 67, drawing on anthropological fieldwork on the maturation of ado-
lescent boys and their relationship to the mother.
13. Felson-Rubin (1994) 77.
14. Appropriately enough, two clay loom weights excavated in a late fifth-century house in the
Kerameikos have images of Penelope: LIMC VII 292, s.v. Penelope, no. 4.
15. The material is most conveniently collected in LIMC VII 291–293, s.v. Penelope.
16. For the history of interpretation of the pose as one of mourning (“die Stellung einer
sitzenden Trauernden”), see Huber (2001) 123.
34
34 H. A . Sh apiro
Figure 2.3 Odysseus and Penelope. Terracotta relief, c. 470–

460 bce. Berlin,
Antikensammlung TC 8757. After Stilp (2006) pl. 31.
tomb17 but also by modest women in a variety of situations. So, for example,
Homer says that when Penelope descended from her room, she held a veil be-
fore her cheeks, presumably as a gesture of modesty (aidos) in a room full of
rowdy young men (Od. 1.334).18
The earliest examples of the so-called mourning Penelope are on small
rectangular terracotta panels conventionally referred to in the scholar-
ship as Melian Reliefs, now renamed Jacobsthal Reliefs in honor of an early
scholar who first collected and studied them, and dated to the second quarter
of the fifth century.19 A recent, full-scale study of the material has shown
17. A good example that is pertinent here is the figure of Elektra mourning at the tomb of her
father, Agamemnon, on Jacobsthal Reliefs contemporary with those of Penelope and Odysseus
(see n. 21 and figure 2.3). Though the two women are in similar poses, they are not the same, for
Elektra does not cross her legs. See Stilp (2006) pl. 34, cat. 78; pl. 35, cat. 80.
18. For the iconography of veiled women, see Llewellyn Jones (2003).
19. Jacobsthal (1931).
35
conclusively that there is no connection to the island of Melos, but rather

most are of Attic manufacture.20 The “mourning Penelope” is found in a group
of reliefs depicting Odysseus, disguised as an old beggar standing before the
seated Penelope and gently touching her wrist (Figure 2.3).21 A kalathos, or
wool basket, symbol of her wifely devotion to weaving, sits under her chair.
Mourning does not seem the right description of what is happening on this
relief. In the encounter that comes closest to what we see here in the Odyssey,
a skeptical Penelope interviews the disguised Odysseus, seeming not to rec-
ognize her husband, though some commentators have argued that she does
in fact but plays along for her own reasons (Od. 23.88–208).22 The conversa-
tion is in any event a lively one, whereas on the reliefs there appears to be no
communication at all. She is unresponsive to both his words and his nuptial
gesture.23
The disparity between the fully engaged Penelope of the epic and the si-
lent, oblivious Penelope of the reliefs is reminiscent of the iconography of
the “Embassy to Achilles” on red-figure vases of roughly the same period, the
first half of the fifth century.24 While the Achilles of Iliad Book 9 greets his
three colleagues with warm hospitality and voluble conversation (even if ul-
timately refusing their entreaties), on the vases Achilles sits bent over on a
stool, wrapped in a voluminous garment pulled up over his head, and refuses
even to make eye contact with his guests (Plate I).25 The usual explanation
is that the painters are following a now-lost Aischylean tragedy, Myrmidons,
in which, we are told by an ancient source, Achilles never uttered a word,
20. Stilp (2006) 61–62.

21. Once Berlin, Antikensammlung TC 8757; Stilp (2006) pl. 31. For the group, see Touchefeu-
Meynier (1968) 233–235, cat. nos. 424–429; Stilp (2006) 100–101, cat. 65–72, pl. 29–31.
Perhaps the best-known example of this type is one in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
30.11.19; LIMC VII 293, s.v. Penelope, no. 33b. It appears to be a prime example of the practice
of adding extra figures who do not “belong” for dramatic effect—here, Laertes, Telemachos,
and Eumaios—but Stilp (2006) 244–245, cat. 161, has shown conclusively that the relief is a
forgery made some time before 1904.
22. See Felson-Rubin (1994) 4, with earlier references, for the arguments about when Penelope
first recognizes Odysseus. Cf. Murnaghan (1987) 131–138.
23. Stilp (2006) 101 likens the gesture to the familiar cheir’ epi karpo of wedding scenes and
argues that this is a key feature ensuring their identity as a married couple, namely, Odysseus
and Penelope.
24. LIMC I 108–110, s.v. Achilleus [A. Kossatz-Deißmann].
25. Red-figure hydria, Basel, Antikenmuseum + Sammlung Ludwig BS 477; ARV2 361, 7;
BAPD no. 203796; LIMC I 110, s.v. Achilleus, no. 453.
36
36 H. A . Sh apiro
a coup-de-théâtre that astonished the audience.26 Though his pose has also
been described as one of mourning, this does not capture its essence. For
what, or whom, would Achilles be mourning? Later on he will mourn ex-
travagantly for the dead Patroklos, but for now Patroklos is alive and well and
sharing his tent. In the case of both Achilles and Penelope, I think the pose
and gestures lend a kind of “abstracted” quality, an isolation from the world
around them brought on by pain and sorrow, an inability to communicate. In
Attic funerary monuments, the deceased is often depicted with this kind of
faraway, abstracted quality, as if already removed from the world of the living,
a condition evocatively described in German scholarship as Entrücktheit (lit-
erally, “having been snatched away”).27 The deceased do not mourn since they
are already dead, but neither can they communicate with the living.
If this is correct, then there is no need to posit a literary source for the
scene on the Penelope Painter’s skyphos. It represents a thoughtful painter’s
reimagining of a key relationship in the Odyssey. The same can be said of the
scene on the reverse (Figure 2.2), where the addition of Eumaios to the scene
of the foot-washing, where he does not “belong,” has its own logic in the
world of the poem. Eumaios and Eurykleia are the two figures of low social
status who have remained loyal to their master in all the years of his absence
as they have grown old, and they will both play key roles in the success of his
final triumph, the slaughter of the suitors.28
That the Penelope Painter was a careful student of the Odyssey is often
supposed on the basis of a second skyphos from his hand, usually considered
a kind of pendant to the first, which gives us a rare example of that very epi-
sode, the slaughter of the suitors (Figure 2.4).29 While the Chiusi skyphos has
two discrete scenes that are linked by a common thread—everyone belongs
either to Odysseus’ immediate family or his faithful servants—the skyphos
in Berlin spreads the single scene over both sides of the vase. This ingenious
arrangement has the effect that the arrows fired by Odysseus and Telemachos
26. See Döhle (1967). The report is in Aristophanes, Frogs 911–913.

27. Himmelmann-Wildschütz (1956) 15. In the same context, Himmelmann also speaks of a
spiritual “Für-sich-sein” to describe the isolation of the deceased.
28. On the two coordinated scenes on the skyphos, see also the comments of Buitron-Oliver
and Cohen (1995) 44–45.
29. Berlin F 2588; ARV2 1301, 1; BAPD no. 216788; Iozzo (2012) 74, fig. 12 and p. 74 for the
notion of a pendant. He suggests that the two vases could have traveled to Etruria together and
then been sold in different markets, one to Chiusi and the other to Tarquinia, where the Berlin
skyphos was found.
37
Figure 2.4 Slaughter of the suitors. Attic red-figure skyphos, c. 440–430 bce. Berlin,
Antikenmuseum. After Furtwängler and Reichhold (1904) pl. 138, 2.
from one side of the vase seem to travel some distance to hit their targets,
three suitors who try in vain to hide behind pieces of furniture. The addition
of two nervous maids, perhaps anticipating a grisly fate (strung up from the
rafters: Od. 22.469–473), completes the assortment of “villains,” just as the
Chiusi skyphos presents the full range of the “good guys.”
To return to Penelope: There is often a fine line between gestures, poses,
and expressions that convey mourning and those that express a troubled,
alienated, or merely pensive state of mind.30 A prime example of this dilemma
can be seen on a well-known marble relief of the Early Classical period found
on the Akropolis (Figure 2.5).31 Athena, armed with helmet and spear, stands
quietly with her head inclined as she looks down at a rectangular stele. In
English-language scholarship, she is conventionally called the Mourning
Athena, in part thanks to an old suggestion that the stele could contain one
of the so-called casualty lists, inscribed names of the war dead of the pre-
vious year, organized by phyle (tribe).32 But German scholarship calls her “die
sinnende [contemplative] Athena,” a far more noncommittal designation.33
In Penelope’s case, contemplation turns to abstraction or alienation when she
is in the presence of other people. When she is alone, however, as in several
30. See Settis (1975).

31. Akropolis Museum 695; Brouskari (1974) 123–124, pl. 237.
32. See Ridgway (1970) 48, who believes that the casualty list hypothesis is “now superseded”
and that the nickname Mourning Athena is “of course valid only for mnemonic purposes.” She
prefers the suggestion that the stele is either the boundary stone of a sanctuary or a pillar in the
palaestra, a reference to the Panathenaic Games.
33. For example, Meyer (1989).
38
38 H. A . Sh apiro
Figure 2.5 “Mourning Athena.” Athenian marble votive relief, c. 460 bce. Athens,
Akropolis Museum 695. Photograph Creative Commons, 2006, https://upload.
wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/14/Acropole_Musée_Athéna_pensante.JPG.
life-size marble sculptures,34 I do not think we can infer a state of mourning.

In fact, in several small-scale versions of the type, as on a gold ring, the traits
that have been thought to express mourning—head in hand and veil—have
been omitted or mitigated. A bow has been added in the field, a reference to
34. The most complete Roman copy of the so-called Mourning Penelope type is a statue in the
Vatican, inv. 754; LIMC VII 291, s.v. Penelope, no. 2, a-1.
39
Penelope’s brilliant stratagem.35 Again, Penelope does not mourn, because no

one has died, and to mourn for Odysseus as if he were dead when his fate is
still unknown would surely be premature and ill omened.36
The discovery in 1945 of a marble statue of the seated Penelope, apparently
a Greek original of the mid-fifth century, in the ruins of the palace at Persepolis
electrified the archaeological world and has never ceased to fascinate and con-
found scholars (Plate II).37 In the most recent, detailed study, Tonio Hölscher
weaves a brilliant and compelling, if highly speculative scenario, in which there
were two versions of the statue made in the years around 450, one sent to the
Persian king as a diplomatic gift at the time of the Peace of Kallias and the other
set up on the Athenian Akropolis.38 It is not my intention to review all the ar-
chaeological and historical arguments so well laid out by Hölscher, but only to
raise again the question of what a statue of Penelope alone (evidently not part of a
group) could have meant to the ancient viewer, whether in Athens or Persepolis.
Taking up and developing a suggestion of Werner Gauer, Hölscher argues
that Penelope symbolizes women’s impatience and longing for a war to end
that has dragged on for twenty years (for Gauer, the length of Odysseus’ ab-
sence from Ithaka) or even forty years (for Hölscher, from Marathon to 450/
449, the Peace of Kallias).39 For this idea to work, Hölscher must posit a uni-
versal emotion on the part of women, whether Persian or Greek, the anx-
iety and fears for the lives of their husbands away on military campaigns. In
the case of Persian women, he relies on the portrayal of Atossa, the Queen
Mother, in Aischylos’ Persians of 472, and the lamentations of the chorus of
Persian elders.40 This seems to me problematic, since the world that Aischylos
creates in the play is an imaginary Persia, even if drawing on a wide range
35. Oxford, Ashmolean Museum (said to be from Sparta). Her name is inscribed in Doric,
Panelopa: LIMC VII 292, s.v. Penelope, no. 5.
36. Cf. Buitron-Oliver and Cohen (1995) 47, who conclude that the pose and gesture of the
seated Penelope “may denote neither simply mourning nor faithfulness, but anguished thought
and, more specifically, sexual decision making.” In other words, the chastity highlighted by
Sarah Pomeroy ([1975] 1995) is far more complex than a facile “no means no.”
37. Teheran Archaeological Museum 1538; LIMC VII 292, s.v. Penelope, no. 2b. Illustrated here
is a plaster cast of the statue as it has recently been reconstructed in the museum of plaster
casts of Classical sculpture in Munich. For a recent study of the Persepolis statue and other
versions of the type, see Hölscher (2015), a very condensed version of the author’s lengthy
study, Hölscher (2011), with additional observations. See also Razmjou (2105) for the discovery
and original placement of the statue and details of the surviving torso.
38. Hölscher (2011).
39. Gauer (1990) 52–53; Hölscher (2011) 34–35.
40. Hölscher (2011) 70–71.
40
40 H. A . Sh apiro
of contemporary sources and eyewitness accounts. The play is the earliest

instance in the Western tradition of what Edward Said famously termed
Orientalism,41 and, as Edith Hall has shown, the unrestrained lamentation
(of both women and men) is but one element in the playwright’s depiction
of Persian habrosunê (softness, delicacy, lack of restraint).42 If the Penelope
statue indeed arrived at the court along with Kallias, would he have explained
who she was, as Hölscher supposes, and would this have resonated with the
locals?43 We have no way of knowing.
On the Greek side, Hölscher relies primarily on another play of Aischylos,
the Agamemnon (458), and especially the figure of Klytemnestra as represen-
tative of Greek women when she speaks of her longing for her absent hus-
band and fears for his safety.44 This seems to me even more problematic, since
every word from Klytemnestra’s mouth is a calculated lie that she will glee-
fully unsay after the murder of her husband (1372–1373). When she claims,
for example, that if all the rumors of Agamemnon’s fatal blows were true, he
would have arrived home like a net full of holes (856–868), this is no more
than an ironic foreshadowing of his ultimate state when she gets through with
him. Her real fear was not that he would die at Troy but that he would come
home safe and sound to discover her adultery. Even if one wanted to argue
that Klytemnestra means to feign the anxieties of a typical Greek wife, her
colorful hyperbole and shameless self-dramatizing would seem to undercut
that idea. Suggesting that Klytemnestra is a reliable guide to a wife’s feelings is
like asking Medea for advice on wedding presents.
Even if we accept that women often fear for the safety of their husbands
away at war, Penelope would not seem to be an obvious choice to represent
such women. Her image in the fifth century, as we have seen, embodies such
intensely private and personal virtues that it is hard to imagine a statue of her
created as a “political monument,” as Hölscher would have it.45 By the time
the Odyssey opens, it is widely known that Odysseus has survived the war at
Troy. Penelope is not longing for the war to be over, since it already is. In
contrasting Penelope and Klytemnestra throughout the poem, the Odyssey
41. Said (1979) 56, citing a lamentation of the chorus (Persians 548–557) as a foundational text
for the idea that “Asia speaks through and by virtue of the European imagination.”
42. Hall (1989) 83–84.
43. Hölscher (2011) 71.
44. Hölscher (2011) 62.
45. Hölscher (2011) 63.
41
thematizes not the wife’s fears for her husband but rather what happens when
he gets home. The epic has nothing to say about Greek war widows, since
all the married heroes (Menelaos, Agamemnon, Odysseus) make it home
safely. The best example of a true war widow is Andromache, with all that
entails: being sold into slavery in a foreign land, seeing her only child brutally
put to death. Furthermore, Athenian soldiers and sailors in the fifth century
were not away from home for twenty years but rather came home at the end
of each battle or campaign season. The agonizing choice of whether to re-
marry or remain faithful to a husband who may never come home is not one
that the typical Athenian (or Persian) wife had to face.
Whether the statue from Persepolis (of which large parts are missing) in-
deed depicts Penelope at all is far from certain. Over the years, many other
identities have been proposed, including Aphrodite, the nymph Larisa, and
the personifications Hellas, Aidos, and Eleutheria.46 Leaving Persia aside,
in order to understand what associations Penelope carried for fifth-century
Athenians, we would do best to look at the minor arts: terracotta reliefs, gems
and jewelry, and vase-painting. Naturally, she represents the virtuous woman
and faithful wife. But beyond that, I would suggest that virtually every image
conveys some variation on the quality of wise, careful circumspection that is
expressed in her Homeric epithet, periphrôn.47
In no instance is she involved in conversation or any kind of interaction
or communication with another figure in the skyphos scene. When she and
her son, Telemachos, appear together, there is a wide gulf between them
(Figure 2.1). To those around her, she can seem frustratingly indecisive, as
when Telemachos says she can neither accept nor refuse marriage to a suitor
(Od. 16.121–128). Similarly, she declines to engage with her disguised hus-
band on the series of Jacobsthal Reliefs (Figure 2.3). Another of these reliefs
has a unique scene of the foot-washing of Odysseus with both Telemachos
and Penelope present (Plate III).48 As in the Penelope Painter’s scene with
Eumaios, who does not “belong” at the foot-washing (Figure 2.2), so too
Telemachos was not present on that occasion, yet the artist considered it
appropriate to include him. Perhaps this was meant to lend additional sus-
pense to the scene, since by now Telemachos knows the beggar’s true identity
46. See Ridgway (1970) 102; Hölscher (2011) 46, 65.

47. Cf. Felson-Rubin (1994) 41 on the epithet.
48. New York, MMA 25.78.26; Stilp (2006) 100, cat. 64; Touchefeu-Meynier (1968) 249–250,
cat. 457.
42
42 H. A . Sh apiro
but Penelope does not.49 This is the only Penelope in Greek art who is not
shown seated. Rather, she stands toward the right edge of the scene in a dis-
tinctive pose: her right hand raised to her chin, while her left arm rests hor-
izontally across her waist. Günther Neumann has characterized the pose as
besorgtes Nachdenken, or “worried contemplation.” Whether worried or not,
she does not appear engaged in the action, with a faraway expression, rather
than looking down at Eurykleia and Odysseus, as perhaps does her son, whose
head is slightly inclined.50 Staying within the world of the Odyssey, a close
parallel for Penelope’s pose is offered by the figure of Nausikaa on a red-figure
vase of the later fifth century (Figure 2.6).51 While her companions flee in
distress at the sight of the naked stranger who has washed up on their shore,
only Nausikaa stands her ground. She appears more relaxed than besorgt as
she carefully appraises the astonishing apparition before her. The image of
Penelope in this very pose evidently made an impression, since this is just how
she appears half a millennium later in Pompeiian painting.52
I suggest that this is a big part of what makes Penelope the most enig-
matic character in the Odyssey: we almost never know what is going through
her “circumspect” mind. She keeps her counsel, as the saying goes. A second
epithet that Homer uses of her is echephrôn (sensible, prudent), literally
“heart-restraining.”53 She deliberately refuses to betray what is in her heart,
even when this causes frustration and anxiety to her nearest and dearest. Yet
she is as often able to control the action by what she does not say as by what
she does.
A key part of being periphrôn is knowing and understanding oneself. Not
surprisingly, then, perhaps the best account of Penelope’s feelings, her frame
of mind, and her behavior is given by Penelope herself:
49. Hausmann (1960) 55.

50. Stilp (2006) 100 and others associate Penelope’s abstracted look with Homer’s comment
that Athena distracted Penelope at the moment Eurykleia was about to expose Odysseus’ iden-
tity (Od. 19.474–479). Perhaps the same idea is behind an extraordinary marble relief from
Thessaly of the later fourth century. The scene is the foot-washing, but in the background
Penelope stands at her loom, oblivious to what is happening “behind her back:” Athens, NM
1914; Havelock (1995) 188–189, pl. 57. Cf. Hausmann (1960) 54, who believes that Penelope
has briefly turned to look, attracted by Eurykleia’s stifled cry, but Penelope’s head has entirely
broken off, making it impossible to be sure.
51. Boston, Museum of Fine Arts 04.18; ARV2 1177, 48; BAPD no. 215604. See Shapiro (1995)
158–159, with further references.
52. LIMC VII s.v. Penelope, no. 36
53. For example, Od. 4.111; Felson-Rubin (1994) 41.
43
Figure 2.6 Nausikaa and Odysseus. Attic red-figure pyxis lid, c. 440 bce. Boston,
Museum of Fine Arts 04.18. Henry Lillie Pierce Fund. Photograph © 2020 Museum of
Fine Arts, Boston.
Therefore, I pay no attention to strangers, nor to suppliants

Nor yet to heralds, who are in the public service, but always
I waste away at the inward heart, longing for Odysseus.54
54. Od. 19.134–136, trans. Richmond Lattimore.

4
45
The First basilissa

Phila, Daughter of Antipater and Wife of
Demetrius Poliorcetes
Elizabeth D. Carney
The chapter on “queens” in Sarah Pomeroy’s Women in Hellenistic

Egypt in 1984 was the first general discussion of the role of royal women in
the Hellenistic world since Grace Harriet Macurdy’s Hellenistic Queens in
1932 and Pomeroy’s 1991 edited volume, Women’s History and Ancient History,
contained an article of mine on the development in the Hellenistic period
of basilissa as a title for royal women.1 In this chapter I return to the topic of
basilissa, this time focusing on the life and career of the first woman to whom
the title was applied, Phila, daughter of Antipater and first of the many wives
of Demetrius Poliorcetes. I want to consider why she served as the prototype
for the basilissai to follow and for so many other aspects of the role of royal
women in Hellenistic monarchy. I argue that the critical role her husband and
father-in-law Antigonus played in the formation of Hellenistic kingship, the
ways in which Phila’s actions and titles mirrored theirs, as well as Phila’s func-
tion as a legitimator of her husband’s rule of Macedonia (because she was the
daughter of Antipater) are the primary reasons she became an exemplar of the
role of women in Hellenistic monarchy.
Traditionally, neither male nor female titles played a part in Argead
(the dynasty that ruled Macedonia from at least the sixth century bce until
c. 308) Macedonian monarchy. Only in the reign of Alexander III did Argead
1. Pomeroy (1984 [1990]); Macurdy (1932); Carney (1991).
Elizabeth D. Carney, The First basilissa In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0004
46
46 Eli z abet h D. Carn ey
kings begin to employ a title, and Argead women appear without titles in all
extant inscriptions, including a dedication made by Alexander’s wife Roxane.2
None of the Successors took a royal title until about four years after the death
of Alexander IV, when in 306 Antigonus and his son Demetrius began to use
the title basileus: after a great victory, their philoi (friends) acclaimed each as
basileus, and soon the other Successors followed suit (Plut. Demetr. 17.2–18.4;
Diod. 20.53.1–4; App. Syr. 54).3 No similar literary evidence survives about the
date, circumstances, or possible ceremony relating to the initiation of the fe-
male title.4 The earliest extant evidence for the use of a female royal title in the
Hellenic world is an inscription (SIG 333.6–7) honoring a certain Demarchus,
who is referred to as a guard in basilissa Phila’s entourage.5 This Samian decree
is usually dated to the period of Demetrius’ siege of Rhodes, thus to about
305.6 Whatever the exact date of this particular decree, it is highly unlikely
that the practice of referring to Phila as basilissa began after the Antigonid
defeat at Ipsus in 301 and very likely that it happened within about a year of
the initiation of the male title by Phila’s father-in-law and husband.7 The use
2. See later discussion for a possible female exception. On IG II2 1492A, Alexander is basileus
(king), but she is simply his gune (woman or wife). The exact date of Roxane’s dedication
is disputed since it is part of an inventory from 305/304 and the inscription is damaged.
Themelis (2003) 165; Mirón Pérez (2011) 45; and Müller (2012) 300 favor a date after the death
of Alexander, contra Harders (2014) 373–374. Kosmetatou (2004) 75 cannot choose. The
arguments for a post-Alexander date are more convincing.
3. See Paschidis (2013) 129–132 for a recent discussion of the assumption of a royal title and for
references. See also Billows (1990) 155–160.
4. It was sometimes the subject of public proclamation; see Savalli-Lestrade (2015) 8; as with
the assumption of a title, proclamation of a basilissa may have varied by dynasty and period.
5. Harders (2013) 47 argues that Demarchus’ importance at Antigonus’ court confirms Phila’s,
as does (see later discussion) Adeimantus’ role in her cult.
6. Robert (1946) 17, n. 1. An Ephesian decree (Ephesus II, 3) which honors a Melesippus, said to
be part of what appears to be basilissa Phila’s court or entourage, was originally dated to c. 300/
299, but Robert (1946) 17, nn. 1–2, argued for a date close to his for the Samian decree; Wehrli
(1964) 142 accepted this view. Paschidis (2008) 387–389 dates the Samian decree to c. 299,
arguing that it is part of an Antigonid attempt to regain ground lost after Ipsus, though he also
seems to agree that the Samian decree is the earliest evidence for the female title. His dating is
not convincing. Moreover, if these two decrees date to the turn of the century or slightly later,
then they would not necessarily be the earliest.
7. On the basis of extant inscriptions, Phila appears to be the only one of Demetrius’ wives to
whom the title was applied. Harders (2016) 30 assumes that Stratonice, wife of Antigonus, was
not referred to as basilissa, whereas Paschidis (2008) 368, n. 1 assumes the reverse and suggests
that a Delian cult statue to basilissa Stratonice IG XI 4.51 belonged to Antigonus’ wife, not to
his granddaughter of the same name. See further discussion below.
47
The First basilissa 47
of a female royal title spread rapidly to the other Hellenistic dynasties and was
common by about 300.8
Calling Phila basilissa could have been a practice that originated with the
Antigonid philoi (who may have been the ones to implement it, as they had
done with the male title and with the creation of a female cult) and/or con-
ceivably with Phila herself.9 Alternatively and more likely, Antigonus and
Demetrius could have ordered it, in association with their own acquisition of
royal titles. If, as is possible but entirely unproven, the Argead Adea Eurydice10
employed basilissa as a title for her own ends, at some point between 323 and
317, then the application of the title basilissa to Phila could have been another
instance of adoption and adaptation of Argead practices by the Successors.
Despite the apparent parallelism of the initiation of titles for males and
females in the Antigonid dynasty and, subsequently, in the other ruling
families, in practice the terms basileus and basilissa functioned quite differ-
ently. Basileus applied to male rulers (and sometimes to male co-rulers); ef-
fectively the title had a job description, whereas the title basilissa did not.
The word basilissa had been formed by adding a feminine suffix to the root
of basileus and first appeared in Xenophon.11 The title basilissa was given to
some (but not all) royal wives, daughters, and female co-rulers and, possibly,
royal widows;12 its usage may have varied by dynasty, by period, and perhaps
even by ruler.13 Basilissa is, therefore, best translated as “royal woman,” not
8. See Carney (1991); Carney (2000a) 225–228; Carney (2011) 202–204.

9. Harders (2016) 30 wonders if her court initiated the practice and Demetrius simply accepted
it. I consider this an unlikely possibility.
10. See Carney (2000a) 132–137 for her career. Though no inscriptional evidence exists to prove
or disprove it, Adea Eurydice could possibly have been the first to employ it, sometime after
her marriage to Philip Arrhidaeus. Adea Eurydice was an Argead herself (doubly so), married
to another Argead who had a royal title, but one who was somehow not mentally competent to
function independently. She tried to take a leadership role, often acting for her husband or in
his name. It is possible that she turned basilissa into a title because of her highly unusual situa-
tion and that the Antigonids then adopted her usage, just as they did that of the Argead male
title. Until an inscription appears showing Adea Eurydice with or without the title, however,
this is mere speculation and we should assume that Phila was the first to whom the title was
applied.
11. See Carney (1991) 150, nn. 11–14; Carney (2000a) 227.
12. See Bielman-Sánchez (2002); Savalli-Lestrade (2003); Carney (2011) for discussions of the
role of royal women in Hellenistic courts.
13. Harders (2013) 47; Coşkun and McAuley (2016) 19 point out that not all kings’ wives bore
the title.
48
“queen.14 The timing of the appearance of basilissa as a title connects its im-
plementation to the early development of Hellenistic monarchy, particularly
as initiated by the Antigonids.
In order to reflect on why Phila was given a title, we must first review
the ancient source tradition about her.15 Phila was the eldest daughter of
Antipater,16 one of Philip II’s favorite generals and diplomats, the man who
managed Macedonian affairs in Greece throughout Alexander’s campaign
and who, after Alexander’s death until his own in 319, held the dominant
place among the former generals of Alexander. During the period when
members of the Argead dynasty were being killed off but none of the generals
had yet dared to claim royal authority themselves, Antipater functioned as a
transitional figure from the Argead past into the Hellenistic future. He had
a number of sons and daughters whom he employed in a series of marriage
alliances, particularly in the years just before the departure of the army for
Asia in 334 and again in the unsettled period after Alexander’s death.
Born about the middle of the fourth century,17 Phila married three times,
each marriage arranged by her father.18 Her first husband, whom she must
have married before the departure of Alexander for Asia, was Balacrus, a royal
bodyguard under Alexander and satrap in Cilicia until he was killed in 324.19
They probably had a son together.20 She next married Craterus, the most mil-
itarily distinguished of Alexander’s officers.21 Alexander ordered Craterus to
14. Carney (1991) 156, 161; Carney (2000a) 226–227; Savalli-Lestrade (2015) 189, especially nn.
7 and 8.
15. For overviews, see Wehrli (1964); Carney (2000a) 165–169; Heckel (2006) 207–208.
16. See discussion and references in Heckel (2006) 35–38 and Heckel (2016) 33–43.
17. See further references in Carney (2000a) 303, n. 44. Plutarch (Demetr. 27.4, Comp. Demetr.
Ant.1.5) says that she was considerably older than Demetrius when she married him. Bosworth
(1994) 61 implausibly argues that she was ten years older, born in 360. Among other things,
the fact that she apparently produced two more children soon after her marriage to Demetrius
suggests that she was still quite fertile at the time of her marriage and thus unlikely to have been
a bride of forty.
18. See Macurdy (1932) 58–69; Wehrli (1964); Carney (2000a) 165–169; Heckel (2006)
207–208.
19. Bosworth (1994); Heckel (2006) 68–69 argue that this marriage took place and that
Antipater, son of Balacrus, was their son, but Macurdy (1932) 60 rejects the idea of this
marriage.
20. Heckel (2006) 207 surmises, on the basis of Phot. Bib. l 111a–b, that she stayed with her
father in Macedonia until 331 or 330.
21. See discussion and references in Heckel (2006) 95–99; Anson (2012); Ashton (2015); and
Heckel (2016) 122–152.
49
replace Antipater in Macedonia and Greece (Arr. 7.12.4), but Craterus had
not yet returned to Macedonia when Alexander died; he remained in Asia
until he responded to Antipater’s call for reinforcements in the Lamian War.
Craterus may have escorted Phila back from Asia and married her soon after
they reached Macedonia, c. 322/321 bce (Diod. 18.18.7; Memnon FGrH
434 F 1 4.4; Plut. Demetr. 14.2). Arrian compares Antipater very unfavor-
ably to Craterus, suggesting that theirs was a competitive relationship (Suda
K. 2335 = Arr. Succ. Frag. 19).22 Phila cannot have had an easy time serving as
the human link between these two men. She had a son by Craterus, also called
Craterus. The senior Craterus, having returned to Asia, was killed in battle
against Eumenes. Years later, Phila received Craterus’ ashes (Diod. 19.9.3;
Nep. Eum. 4.4).
After the meeting of Antipater and many of the other Successors at
Triparadeisus about 320, a resettlement of Macedonian affairs, Phila was mar-
ried for a final time, to Demetrius, son of Antigonus.23 After the death of
Alexander, Antigonus had retained the satrapy of Phrygia and used it to build
an Asian empire. Phila’s first two husbands must have been much older than
she, but Demetrius was considerably younger than Phila. He ungraciously
objected to her age, agreeing to the marriage only to please his father (Plut.
Demetr. 14.2–4, 27.8). This marriage happened shortly before her father’s
death in 319. Soon after her third marriage, Phila had first a son, the future
king of Macedonia, Antigonus Gonatas, and a daughter, Stratonice, wife first
of Seleucus and later of Antiochus I (Plut. Demetr. 31.5, 37.4, 53.8).
Though it is likely Phila remained in Asia subsequent to her third marriage,
nothing further—apart from the births of her two children by Demetrius—is
known of her for more than ten years. As we have seen, she had her own body-
guard by the time of the siege of Rhodes and probably her own court (Ephesus
II, 3). Phila prepared and dispatched to Demetrius letters, royal garments
(purple, fitting for a king), and other household goods suitable for a royal
household (Diod. 20.93.4; Plut. Demetr. 22.1).
The first evidence for a cult dedicated to a royal woman involves Phila
and dates to roughly the same time period as the siege of Rhodes, c. 305, or a
22. The passage, whatever its absolute truth, seems to confirm the view that Craterus had royal
ambitions. See Ashton (2015) 113–116; Heckel (2016) 148–149.
23. On Antigonus, see Anson (1988) 471–477; Billows (1990); Heckel (2006) 32–34. Billows
(1990) 368 bases the date of the marriage on a calculation from the age of her son by Demetrius,
Antigonus Gonatas.
50
year or two earlier.24 Adeimantus of Lampsacus, an important philos of Phila’s

husband Demetrius, with his associates, dedicated a sanctuary (and statues)
to Phila Aphrodite at Thria, an Attic deme (Ath. 255c).25 An Athenian play by
Alexis has a character drink a toast with a libation to the theoi soteres (savior
gods), Antigonus and Demetrius, and to Phila Aphrodite (Ath. 254a). The
toast could refer to Adeimantus’ private cult, but quite possibly it relates to a
separate civic cult to Phila.26 Certainly the Athenians and Thebans initiated
what were clearly civic cults to some of Demetrius’ hetairai (“courtesans”; Ath.
253a–253b), and the other cult referred to in the toast was civic. Phila may also
have had a civic cult at Samos.27 Thus Phila’s cults, as with her title, seem to
parallel cult practices related to her husband and father-in-law.28 Important
philoi like Adeimantus played a vital role connecting the kings and dynasties
24. Carney (2000a) 218, n. 78 suggests a date between 307 and 305 bce; see also Carney
(2000b) 31–32, nn. 53 and 54. Wallace (2013) 144–146 dates the cult to 306/305–305/304,
because he connects it to Adeimantus’ years as strategos (general or military governor), though
he grants that the cult could date as early as 307. Martin (1996) 182 says it was later than 307
bce, whereas Arnott (1996) 309–311, 326–328, dates the reference to Alexis’ play to 305. But
Arnott’s entire discussion founders on the assumption that Demetrius was not polygamous
and that Phila was divorced.
25. On royal philoi generally, see Herman (1980–1981); Savalli-Lestrade (1998); Paschidis
(2008); and on the Antigonid philoi, see O’Neil (2003). On Adeimantus, see discussion and
references in Billows (1990) 362–364; Landucci Gattinoni (2000), who sees him as one of
Demetrius’ most important philoi; and Wallace (2013), who focuses on Adeimantus’ role
dealing with the Greek cities, particularly Athens, for Demetrius.
26. See Carney (2000b) 32. Billows (1990) 363 assumes that the cult of Phila founded by
Adeimantus is identical to the one in the toast and, thus, that the toast confirms the existence
of Adeimantus’ foundation. Paschidis (2008) 366, n. 6 discounts the reference in Athenaeus to
Dionysius (i.e., Adeimantus’ cult) but accepts the Alexis reference (which includes the toast),
though he believes it to have been a cult initiated by philoi and approved by the Athenians;
he denies the existence of an Athenian civic cult, but as Wallace (2013) 143–144 notes, such
cults were common. Ogden (2011) 231 ascribes this cult not to the daughter of Antipater, but
Demetrius’ daughter of the same name by the hetaera Lamia (see later discussion). This seems
quite unlikely, granted the probable age of such a daughter.
27. IG XIII, 6, 150 LL. 23–24 refers to a temenos (sanctuary) of Phila; it was first assumed to
refer to the wife of Demetrius Poliorcetes, later to the younger Phila, the daughter of Seleucus
and thus the granddaughter of Phila, daughter of Antipater (see Wehrli [1964] 140, n. 5; Le
Bohec [1993] 237, n. 64; Carney [2000a] 309, n. 17), but more recently Crowther (1999) 255–
257 and Paschidis (2008) 388, n. 4 have returned to the view that the temenos was that of Phila,
daughter of Antipater.
28. For some recent discussions of the dynamic and intent of Demetrius’ involvement in
Athenian cult, see Green (2003); Müller (2010); Chaniotis (2011). Chaniotis (2011) 173–175
stresses the importance of accessibility, of the physical presence of the divinity. As we shall see,
Phila, like royal women after her, served as an intercessor; conceiving of her and other women
connected to Demetrius as Aphrodite may have related to this need.
51
to Greek cities, often acting as civic benefactors; the relationship between

philoi and cults of royal women and royal women also served to entrench
and legitimize kings and dynasties.29 As with the use of a female title, by the
turn of the third century such cults, typically connecting the royal woman to
Aphrodite, had become common for royal women in several dynasties.30
Whereas Phila could have only one husband at a time, Demetrius imitated
the Argead kings by marrying many wives (three more while his wife Phila
was alive) and very publicly keeping many mistresses.31 Indeed, Demetrius,
even among the other kings, was famed for his willingness to take new wives
(Plut. Pyrrh. 10.5, Demetr. 14.2–3, Comp. Demetr. Ant. 4.1). Plutarch (Demetr.
14.2) asserts that Phila had the greatest public reputation (axioma) and honor
(timē) of all Demetrius’ wives because of her father and because of her pre-
vious marriage to Craterus. Phila may have seemed the most prestigious wife
to Plutarch, but Demetrius’ marriage to Deidameia, the sister of Pyrrhus
and a member of the long-ruling Epirote royal house, could have eclipsed
Phila’s own.32 Deidameia, however, died soon after her marriage. Moreover,
of Demetrius’ wives, only Phila is attested as a basilissa33 and received a cult.
Phila was the mother, after all, of Demetrius’ apparent heir. In any event,
Plutarch, in the passage cited, seems to be discussing general views of Phila’s
status, not Demetrius’ view of her.
Until 301, the combined successes of Antigonus and Demetrius had made
them and their court the center of attention. In 301, at Ipsus, facing the armies
of virtually all the other Successors, Antigonus fell on the battlefield and
Demetrius escaped with only a few thousand troops, the Antigonid Asian
possessions largely lost. After Ipsus, Phila may have remained in Asia, though
Demetrius, his mother Stratonice, and some of Demetrius’ children were ap-
parently in Cyprus (Diod. 21.1.4). Amazingly, the remarkably resilient (and
lucky) Demetrius quickly recovered from this military disaster. Demetrius
recommenced naval activities, soon made peace with Seleucus, and the mar-
riage of Stratonice, the daughter of Demetrius and Phila, to Seleucus was
29. See Carney (2013) 166, n. 137 and Wallace (2013) 145 on parallels between the relationship
between Adeimantus and Phila’s cult to that between Callicrates and Arsinoë II’s cult; and see
Le Bohec (1993) 237, n. 64 and Savalli-Lestrade (1994) 431 on royal women and philoi generally.
30. See Carney (2000a, 2000b) for the evolution of cults for royal women and Phila’s role.
31. Ogden (1999) 176–177.
32. Macurdy (1932) 63 is right about this.
33. Wheatley (2003) 33, n. 22 points out that despite Harpalus’ apparent use of basilissa in terms
of two of his hetairai (Ath. 13.586, 595–596a), no source gives Lamia the title.
52
arranged. Both Demetrius and Phila attended the wedding in Syria (Plut.
Demetr. 31.3–32.4) and apparently took part in the related elaborate royal cer-
emonies. Leaving Demetrius behind (he was once more in charge of Cilicia,
displacing Phila’s brother Pleistarchus), Phila went off to negotiate with
her brother Cassander, the ruler of Macedonia. Demetrius’ actions against
Pleistarchus had apparently angered Cassander.
Demetrius subsequently returned to Greece and took Athens by siege.
Thanks to the implosion of Cassander’s dynasty (after Cassander’s death
in 297, his eldest son soon died; his next eldest murdered his own mother,
Thessalonice; and his youngest sought help from Demetrius, only to be
murdered by Demetrius), in 294 Demetrius took the throne of Macedonia
(Plut. Demetr. 36–38). Plutarch tells us that he was chosen king of Macedonia
primarily because his wife was the daughter of Antipater and that Demetrius
had a grown son by her (Demetr. 37.3). With Demetrius, neither good nor bad
fortune endured: while he spent his time on adventures in southern Greece,
the power of Pyrrhus in Macedonia grew, and finally Demetrius’ soldiers went
over to Pyrrhus. In 288, Demetrius departed Macedonia for exile, but Phila
took poison and died (Plut. Demetr. 35.1).34 Demetrius managed one more
period of independence and adventurism before, after several years under
Seleucus’ house arrest, he died in 283.
In addition to this collection of material from an assortment of sources
that provides a rough chronology of Phila’s life, Diodorus preserves an enco-
mium of Phila (19.59.3–6), universally believed to derive from Hieronymus
of Cardia’s history of the Successors. Though originally taken as a prisoner
by Antigonus, Hieronymus passed into the patronage of the Antigonids
and ended his days at the court of Phila’s son Antigonus Gonatas. The enco-
mium lacks any clear chronological or geographic context, though it prob-
ably refers to the period of Phila’s marriage to Demetrius and to her activities
related to Demetrius’ forces. The passage praises Phila for her intelligence
and makes several specific assertions about her actions and responsibilities.
Diodorus says that she dealt with troublemakers in camp by catering to each
individual’s needs. He describes this action on her part as administering or
governing (19.59.4). Phila also paid for the marriages of the sisters and daugh-
ters of the needy (possibly needy soldiers) at her own expense and freed from
danger those who had been falsely charged. Diodorus concludes by observing
that Phila’s father, Antipater, considered the wisest ruler of his generation,
34. Some scholars believe that the fresco of the Villa de Boscoreale shows Antigonus Gonatas
and his mother, Phila. See Ogden (1999) 174, n. 20.
53
consulted her in important matters when she was still a girl. Diodorus noted
that he would say more about her character later in his narrative, but unfortu-
nately that portion of his narrative is lost.
Modern interpretation has oversimplified this overwhelmingly positive
and admiring ancient source tradition about Phila and created a saccharine
Phila who doted upon her husband Demetrius.35 As Plutarch notes twice
(Demetr. 14.2, 3), Demetrius paid little attention or honor to any of his wives,
including Phila. Perhaps Demetrius had some affection for the famous hetaira
Lamia,36 but nothing suggests any for Phila. Demetrius, after all, publicly
criticized her for being too old, he allowed Lamia to name her daughter after
Phila (Ath. 13.577c),37 and Phila was repeatedly compelled to flee because
of the latest change in Demetrius’ fortunes. According to the sentimental
view, affection motivated Phila’s dispatch of royal garments,38 but Diodorus
(20.93.4) says she did so out of ambition or a desire for display. She apparently
participated in Antigonid royal stagecraft (see later discussion).
Her suicide should be reconsidered without reference to sentimentality
and in a Macedonian context.39 According to Plutarch (Demetr. 45.1), Phila,
overwhelmed with emotion, unable to see her husband, the most long-
suffering of kings, again a private person and an exile, she gave up hope and,
hating his luck, killed herself. Plutarch, after all, knew nothing about her mo-
tivation other than what he deduced or what he found useful to ascribe to her
as part of his portrait of Demetrius.40 Moreover, he was wrong to imply that,
35. Macurdy (1932) 59–69 is particularly sentimental, contrasting Phila to other “bad” royal
women like Olympias and also to Phila’s brother Cassander. Thus she asserts, “There can be no
doubt Phila loved him” (Macurdy [1932] 61).
36. Wheatley (2003) 30 terms her “the most important intimate companion” of Demetrius in
the period.
37. Ogden (1999) 177 simply says that the name choice “suggests her high status.” Heckel (2006)
208 characterizes the fact that Lamia named her daughter by Demetrius Phila a “kind of abuse,”
whereas Wheatley (2003) 34 suggests that the name was chosen because Phila brought her
up, Lamia having, he surmises, died in childbirth. It is possible that she did bring up Lamia’s
Phila, but granted the status of Lamia, I see no reason to think basilissa Phila would have
been flattered. Moreover, Plutarch (Demetr. 35.3, 38.1) tells us only that Demetrius’ mother
Stratonice was with Demetrius’ children at the time of the siege of Cyprian Salamis, not that
Phila had their care. The source tradition makes Phila a “good” woman, as it does Octavia
the elder, and it is Plutarch (Ant. 54.2) again who tells us that Octavia brought up Antony’s
surviving children, but the situation with Phila and Lamia was not parallel.
38. So Heckel (2006) 208.
39. See discussions of her death in Carney (2000a) 169; Savalli-Lestrade (2015) 190.
40. See Mossman (2015) 157.
54
simply because Demetrius had lost control of Macedonia, either he or Phila

had lost their royal titles.41 It seems far more likely that Phila, then at least in
her sixties, had had enough. Demetrius’ loss of Macedonia, more than some
of his overtly military defeats, may have seemed to her avoidable. He had been
recognized as king in good part because of her, so she might easily have felt
the loss of the rule of Macedonia compromised her reputation in some way.
Perhaps she did not want to leave Macedonia again and killed herself because
she, at least, thought this was the honorable choice. Reflection about suicides
of other women of distinguished family suggests that honor was a motivator.
Such deaths in royal men were sometimes read as heroic, and Phila’s should
be as well.42
Phila’s activities show that she frequently lived and acted apart from her
husband, had an entourage or court of her own (though one that overlapped
with that of her husband), and seemed to carry out administrative duties
and, of course, ambassadorial ones as well, with efficiency. Suggestions that
Demetrius consciously kept his assorted wives and mistresses apart seem du-
bious, founded on scholars’ discomfort with the realities of polygamy.43 The
practicalities of Demetrius’ career as roving general, sea lord,44 and king,
combined with Phila’s apparent duties, are more likely explanations for their
frequent lack of “face time.” This was not an intimate relationship but quite
literally an alliance in which Phila fulfilled her developing duties with con-
siderable competence and yet, as she had with her two previous husbands,
managed to produce a male heir.
41. As Billows (1990) 160 points out, the male title was not necessarily tied to a particular
kingdom in this period but was rather personal: Demetrius and Antigonus Gonatas exemplify
this situation. Applying basilissa to Phila apparently happened because of or in the context of
her husband’s acquisition of the male title; I see no reason to assume that she lost her title if
he did not.
42. See Carney (1993) 52–54, especially n. 64. There I expressed some doubts about the reality
of Phila’s suicide, doubts I no longer entertain. Savalli-Lestrade (2015) 215 observes that suicides
were generally very rare among royal women. In addition to Phila, there is only Cleopatra VII,
who also seems to have poisoned herself for reasons of honor. Savalli-Lestrade (2015) 215, n. 193
thinks that similar male deaths fit “norms héroïques” (heroic norms), and these female suicides
fit as well.
43. Wehrli (1964) 141–142 suggested that Demetrius and Phila virtually never lived together.
See discussion in Ogden (1999) 273–274, who doubts that suggestion and considers the as-
sorted, and sometimes similar, locations of Demetrius’ wives.
44. Walbank (1982) 215 discusses the importance for Antigonus and Demetrius of dominating
the eastern Mediterranean, something Demetrius continued to do after the death of his father
and the loss of most of his Asian empire.
5
In the light of Phila’s career, what can we conclude about why the title
basilissa began to be employed? After the death of Alexander, the Successors
fairly quickly turned to king-like acts (long before they took royal titles). They
also began to expand the public role of royal women, as evidenced, for in-
stance, by the naming of cities after female members of their families. This
expansion was part of the rapid and experimental evolution of Hellenistic
monarchy. Granted that Antigonus and his son Demetrius were the first of
the Successors to receive a civic cult and the first to use a royal title, it seems
evident that Phila’s role paralleled their own, that the development of a more
institutionalized role for royal women paralleled the rise and articulation of
Hellenistic kingship, and particularly that of Demetrius and his father.
Despite their many failures, Antigonus and particularly Demetrius became
models for the development of Hellenistic monarchy. There are a number of
reasons that is so: Antigonus and his son amassed (if only to lose) a large por-
tion of Alexander’s empire and presented an early example of father-son co-
kingship. (Antigonus was simply older than most of the other Successors and
so too his son in comparison to theirs.) And Demetrius and the Antigonid
court demonstrated great showmanship in both military matters and royal
display—a theatricality Plutarch clearly loathes (Plut. Demetr. 44.6, 53.1–3).45
The set piece, for instance, created at their courts for the taking of the royal
title by son and father was a demonstration of not only Antigonus’ power but
Demetrius’ sharing in it.46
Macedonian elite culture, particularly monarchy, at least from the days of
Philip II on, involved more than a bit of the theatrical; monarchy was effec-
tively staged. The theatrical element grew increasingly important in Hellenistic
culture generally and particularly in Hellenistic monarchy, but Demetrius
Poliorcetes epitomized this phenomenon, most famously in terms of his fab-
ulous garments.47 Hellenistic statesmen and rulers, particularly Demetrius,
were often compared to actors: Plutarch claims that Demetrius, having taken
off his royal robes and put on those of an ordinary man, left Macedonia in
45. Müller (2010) argues that the understanding of Demetrius’ presentation of himself as king
was not only affected by propaganda by the winning side but was a consequence of the fact
that he was a second-generation king and much influenced by Alexander’s adoption of aspects
of Persian kingship.
46. Billows (1990) 38.
47. Plut. Demetr. 41.7–8, 51.4; Ath. 535f–536a; Dio Cass. 63.6.7; Duris FGrH 76 F14. Mossman
(2015) discusses the ways Demetrius used his garments to articulate his public presentation,
particularly his political imagery, as well as the ways in which Plutarch used description of these
garments, not always realistically, to develop his characterization of Demetrius.
56
288 like an actor leaving a set (Demetr. 44.6).48 His son Antigonus Gonatas
staged his funeral in a manner Plutarch found theatrical, though the details
provided in Plutarch (Demetr. 53.1–3) do accord well with what we know of
Macedonian elite/royal funerary customs.49 Apart from participating in her
daughter’s wedding and quite possibly in some public ceremony associated
with her new title, Phila was apparently the stage manager for some of that
display, something we know (see earlier discussion) simply because a por-
tion of the “stage set” was hijacked. One wonders, granted the association
of women and fabric and weaving, whether she herself had something to do
with the creation of her husband’s fabulous garments, including his solar or
celestial cloak.50
Doubtless the prominent role of Argead women in the last years of that
dynasty contributed to the tendency to institutionalize some aspects of a role
for royal women and may have served as a partial model for Phila. The last
Argead women had served as real or potential legitimators of male power,
but had also acted on their own. Phila’s role resembles theirs in some respects,
particularly the careers of Olympias and her daughter Cleopatra during the
reign of Alexander.51 The Diodoran encomium, though the specifics of time
and place for her exemplary actions are not clear, makes Phila a kind of mini-
king (or king substitute): she makes her own decisions, has her own funds,
and has some sort of authority over the troops and sailors and their families.
Like Olympias and Cleopatra, she was more accessible than the king himself.
Though the previous role of Argead royal women was important, Phila
(not Olympias and certainly not Roxane) served as the primary model for
Hellenistic royal women. Royal philoi, quite possibly the philoi of both Phila
and Demetrius, played a critical role in her career and would for subsequent
royal women. Phila’s equation to Aphrodite in cult was a prototype for many
subsequent royal women; Aphrodite embodied female power, but of a con-
ventional sort. The most important aspect of the role of the woman in a royal
couple was not so much to define the ruling husband’s masculinity52 but more
48. Chaniotis (1997) is vital to this discussion, particularly 244–245, a section called “The
Hellenistic Ruler as an Actor: The Case of Demetrios Poliorketes.”
49. See Alonso Troncoso (2009), especially 296–298, on the legitimizing aspect for the
successor.
50. O’Sullivan (2008) 78–89 discusses Demetrius’ cloak in terms of his association with solar
imagery; see also Chaniotis (2011) 165–166.
51. See Carney (2000a) 85–93.
52. Contra Roy (1998).
57
often to legitimize or validate a husband’s rule (this despite the fact that Phila
would not likely have received either cult or title had she not been married to
Demetrius). The lineage of royal women, as Phila’s life demonstrates, was vital
for the legitimization of Hellenistic kings, particularly in the early period,
when they could not plausibly claim descent as the grounds for rule.
Throughout her life, the most important thing about Phila, in a per-
sonal and genealogical sense, was that she was her father’s daughter. By 323,
the Macedonians were far more familiar with the rule of Antipater than
with that of Alexander; it is no accident that Antipater’s descendants ruled
Macedonia most of the time until the Roman conquest—Antipater’s son-in-
law Demetrius being one of the few (and only partial) exceptions. This truth
would be more obvious if we scholars, like the Greeks and Macedonians, were
not so used to tracing descent through the male line. Though Antipater’s
other daughters made prestigious marriages as well, Phila retained a long-
term prominence and independence that they did not. She stayed closer to
her birth family than did they and, despite her long absence, closer to their
Macedonian roots. She, more than her husband, was the reason he acquired
control of Macedonia. While Antigonid propaganda probably demonized
Cassander and his sons and disassociated them from Antipater,53 it was
only through Antipater’s daughter that Demetrius could claim any sort of
legitimacy to rule Macedonia. This was a kind of precedent that will be re-
peated: Ptolemaic royal women, particularly, seemed to legitimate Ptolemaic
rulers and, increasingly, the Seleucid rulers as well.
Encomiastic though the Diodorus passage is, the picture of Phila as
having a kind of thoughtful and reflective intelligence, an ability to grasp af-
fairs, qualities similar to those of her father, seems plausible based on what
we know. While nothing suggests that she and Demetrius got on personally,
everything confirms that she could be trusted to do her duty. Antigonus and
especially his flamboyant and glamorous son grabbed the attention of their
rivals by their ability to invent more ways to demonstrate and make accessible
their power and, if temporarily, to take control of vast territories. Phila, in
a limited way, perpetuated the authority and persona of her father, but also
theirs.
53. Landucci Gattinoni (2009) 269.

58
59
Power and Patronage

Rethinking the Legacy of Artemisia II
Walter D. Penrose Jr.
The Mausoleum, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world, tow-
ered above the city of Halicarnassus, creating a lasting memory of not only
Mausolus, in whose honor the tomb was built, but also of his wife, Artemisia
II. According to all ancient accounts, Artemisia commissioned the tomb in
Mausolus’ honor and, furthermore, initiated an agōn or contest among the
leading orators and tragedians of her day to laud Mausolus after his death
(Plin. HN 36.4.30; Pompon. Mela De Situ Orbis 1.85; Strabo 14.2.16–17; Cic.
Tusc. Disp. 3.31.75; Aul. Gell. NA 10.18.4–6; Val. Max. 4.6.ext 1; Theopomp.
FGrHist 115 F 345; Plut. Mor. 838b; Suda s.v. Theodektes, Isocrates).1
Artemisia had co-ruled beside her husband from c. 377/376 to 353/352 bce
and, after his death ruled alone from 353/352 to 351/350 (Diod. Sic. 16.36.2).2
Generally speaking, Artemisia has been overshadowed in recent scholarship
by her husband and brother, Mausolus, to whom much credit is given not
1. I thank Sarah B. Pomeroy for providing me with the feminist training and inspiration that
lies behind this essay when I was a graduate student under her mentorship; Ronnie Ancona and
Georgia Tsouvala for their encouragement and careful editing of this volume; Sarah Pomeroy
and Ronnie Ancona for suggesting that I write on the biographical tradition of Artemisia
in the first place; and Elizabeth Carney for a number of stimulating conversations that have
enriched my thoughts on monarchy and the place of women in it. All errors or inaccuracies
in this essay are mine. All translations are mine. Some modern scholars believe that Artemisia
possibly instituted a heröon, or hero cult, in honor of her deceased husband. See the “Artemisia
as a Patron” section of this chapter.
2. Hornblower (1982) 38, 38 n. 15.
Walter D. Penrose Jr, Power and Patronage In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0005
60
60 walt er d. pen rose
just for his own achievements but for those of Artemisia as well.3 In ignoring
Artemisia’s role in the shaping of the Hecatomnid dynasty, scholars risk not
seeing the complexities of the makeup of the dynasty. By focusing upon
Artemisia’s motives in her patronage of the arts, I will outline a new reading
that demonstrates her agency in the creation of the Mausoleum and the dy-
nastic facelift that it provided for the Hecatomnids. While Artemisia’s power
was obtained through dynasteia, I will demonstrate that she herself bolstered
and retained her position as sole ruler through patronage, the use of propa-
ganda, and military savvy and, furthermore, that she possibly did so because
Mausolus’ harsh rule had left her in a precarious position following his death.
In this examination of Artemisia II’s legacy, we need to underscore some
of the challenges that arise in writing the biography of a royal woman. First
of all, there has been a historiographical bias against women, especially a
denial of women’s agency in politics and the public sphere. In the case of
the Hecatomnids, Artemisia was written out of the historical record in the
Byzantine period. This erasure, which was surely linked to misogyny, has been
replicated to some degree by numerous modern historians. Mausolus has been
heralded as a masterful ruler, while Artemisia has, for the most part, been
occluded by his shadow. Second, most of the source material on Artemisia
derives from the Roman era. Was it based upon primary sources, and, even
if so, should we thus trust them? A number of primary sources were written
during the time of Artemisia, and thus the kernel of her biographical tradition
may be true. By the same token, she was lauded by the Romans as the quin-
tessential univira woman, and, correspondingly, her actions were attributed
to private motives (i.e., grief ), as opposed to public ones. Thus, some of what
we may be seeing in Roman sources is already reception, making teasing fact
from fiction difficult. Third, because many historians have a tendency to dis-
count accounts of the political and military actions of women rulers, they fail
to analyze the circumstances in which such actions were taken and hence the
motives of the women. Epigraphic and other source material that provides a
historical background within which to understand Artemisia’s motives has
often been briefly noted but otherwise overlooked. By investigating such
3. For example, Hornblower (1982) 129, 238; Ruzicka (1992) 51; Romer (1998) 58; Henry (2009)
142; Aubriet (2013) 192. There are several exceptions to this trend: Bockisch (1970) 145; Carney
(2005) esp. 78; Roller (2018) 14. Nourse (2002) 98 notes that “Of all this, Mausolos may have
been the primary author, laying the foundation for the dynastic construct with the planning of
his own monument. But it remains that the building and the funerary agon, which took place
when the Mausoleum was consecrated, were attributed to Artemisia alone, Mausolos’ widow
and successor.”
61
Power and Patronage 61
contextual evidence, I will argue that Artemisia built the Mausoleum as part
of a larger program to rehabilitate the reputation of Mausolus, who, by all ex-
tant accounts, seems to have been a rather unpopular ruler (and, by extension,
to increase her own popularity). Because modern historians have largely cast
Mausolus in a heroic role, they have downplayed sources that portray him as
an overtaxing, autocratic, and corrupt satrap.4
Artemisia and Mausolus

Artemisia’s building program and propaganda campaign to laud Mausolus
may well have been part of a much-needed dynastic facelift; in her propa-
ganda campaign, she must have sought to solidify her own position on the
throne, in addition to continuing the success of the Hecatomnids after her
death.5 Artemisia served as a cultural leader, as much as or perhaps even more
so than Mausolus. Extant sources indicate that it was she who brought the
best sculptors, artists, historians, and poets to the court at Halicarnassus,
instigating artistic and literary competitions (Theopomp. FGrHist 115 F 345;
Plut. Mor. 838b; Aul. Gell. NA 10.18.6; Suda s.v. Theodektes). It can no longer
be doubted that Artemisia was an influential ruler as well as a true force be-
hind the Hecatomnid cultural legacy of the Mausoleum. She governed Caria,
a land where women could usurp more power than elsewhere in the Greek
oikoumenē (area of inhabitation).6
As Sarah Pomeroy has argued in Spartan Women, gender is a marker of
ethnicity, and thus I would argue that gender was constructed differently at
Halicarnassus than at Athens.7 While our evidence for fourth-century Carian
women is largely limited to the ruling class (save for a few women mentioned
briefly in inscriptions), for men to show allegiance to a woman ruler suggests
4. Hornblower (1982) 70 briefly mentions the unrest, noting that Mausolus “was unpop-
ular among some of his countrymen.” Ruzicka (1992) 40–41 calls Mausolus an “ever vigilant
figure alert to every potential source of money or goods” and notes his “exploitative economic
practices.” Neither Ruzicka nor Hornblower factor Mausolus’ unpopularity into their anal-
ysis of Artemisia’s propaganda campaign. On the epigraphic and literary sources pointing to
Mausolus’ unpopularity as a ruler, see later discussion.
5. See further Nourse (2002) 98–99; Carstens (2002) 43.
6. See further Sebillotte Cuchet (2012) esp. 429; Penrose (2016) esp. 18–20, 152–174, 181–183.
7. Pomeroy (2002) 131–135. On the difference between the “gender regimes” of Athens and
other Greek cities such as Halicarnassus, see Sebillotte-Cuchet (2012) esp. 429; Penrose (2016)
esp. 18–20, 152–174, 181–183.
62
difference in male gender roles as well.8 In ancient sources, Artemisia is

credited with defeating the Rhodians after her husband’s death (Vitr. 2.8.14–
15). Ancient Caria was a place where men were willing to follow a woman
leader in battle, as comparison of the generalship of Artemisia II to her name-
sake Artemisia I and her sister Ada I reveals.9 Women could attain a modicum
of power in Halicarnassus that was not available to them in mainland Greece.
This, in part, was seemingly due to the prominence that women could attain
in the local dynasties of Asia Minor.10
Artemisia II was both the sister and the wife of Mausolus. Both were
children of Hecatomnus, who became the satrap of Caria in c. 392/391.11
Mausolus “inherited” the office of satrap from his father, but he seems to
have also styled himself a king. He was the basileus of Zeus Laubrandeus,
and his holding of the title basileus may have had a religious more than
a political significance.12 Whatever the case may have been—and our
records are murky—the Hecatomnids were local Carian dynasts from
Mylasa who, during both the satrapies of Hecatomnus and Mausolus, had
increased their purview, first, over all of Caria, then over Lycia and nearby
islands in the Aegean Sea.13 When Mausolus died, Artemisia became the
sole ruler (Diod. Sic. 16.36.2). Although literary sources do not mention
Artemisia’s role in Mausolus’ government, inscriptional evidence, inter-
estingly, suggests that Artemisia was co-ruler with Mausolus before he
died.14 Epigraphy further suggests that Artemisia’s sister, Ada I, later co-
ruled with her husband-brother, Idreius, just as Artemisia co-ruled with
Mausolus. Carney writes, “What is distinctive about Artemisia and her
sister Ada is that several documents demonstrate that their power was not
simply private—exercised behind the scenes as was the case with so many
8. Penrose (2016) 153. Some nonroyal women who are named after Hecatomnid royal women
are mentioned in inscriptions from Mylasa. See further Aubriet (2013).
9. Penrose (2006) 104; Penrose (2016) 19, 152–174, 181, 269, 271; Sebillotte Cuchet (2008)
2, 6, 13.
10. Nourse (2002) 73–74, 78–79; Carney (2005) esp. 74–75.
11. See further Hornblower (1982) 34–36; Jeppesen (2002b) 173; Ruzicka (1992) 17; Roller
(2018) 14.
12. Hornblower (1982) 55–62.
13. Hornblower (1982) esp. 34–137 passim; Ruzicka (1992) 15–99 passim.
14. Crampa (1955) 3.2, no. 40; Syll3 168 = Tod (1948) no. 155 = Engelmann and Merkelbach
(1972) no. 8. See further Hornblower (1982) 75, 75 n. 152; Ruzicka (1992) 42; Carney (2005) 66.
63
royal women in other cultures and periods—but publicly acknowledged in

official documents.”15
The amount of power that Artemisia exerted while co- ruling with
Mausolus, however, is difficult to measure. It was not until the discovery of
16
epigraphic evidence at the inland Carian site of Labraunda that Artemisia’s

role in the satrapy of Mausolus became evident; Diodorus (16.36.2) states
only that Artemisia took power upon Mausolus’ death. While Mausolus
and Artemisia are both named in the inscription from Labraunda as the
benefactors who extend privileges to the Cnossians, as well as the guarantors
of those privileges, the said privileges are extended to them in “all the land
that Mausolus rules.”17 The inscription does not say “in all the land which
Mausolus and Artemisia rule,” and Carney thus argues that, while Artemisia
shared in Mausolus’ rule, her share of power was “hardly equal” to that of
her husband.18 Artemisia’s name may also be invoked in a second, fragmen-
tary Hecatomnid inscription, in which Mausolus swears an oath to uphold
an agreement with the city of Phaselis on the coast of Lycia.19 Her name has
been supplied in a lacuna. If the insertion is correct, then she accompanies
Mausolus in swearing the oath, but we cannot be certain.20 Artemisia’s name
is missing from other known inscriptions generated by her husband’s rule,
where only Mausolus is invoked. Yet she is mentioned in a non-Hecatomnid
inscription. An undated inscription from Erythrai, one of the member-cities
of the Ionian league, honors Mausolus as a “benefactor of the city, a guest-
friend, and a citizen” with a “bronze statue in the agora,” and similarly honors
Artemisia with “a marble statue in the temple of Athena.”21 Carney suggests
that the role taken on by Hecatomnid royal women may have been different
15. Carney (2005) 71.

16. See further Carney (2005) 66, 71–74.
17. Hoposēs Maussollos archei. Crampa (1955), part 2, no. 40 = Hornblower (1982) 366, no. M7.
18. Carney (2005) 71. See also Nourse (2002) 126, who argues, “Where the woman’s husband
still lived, he was clearly considered the head of the dynasty with supreme authority over the
dynasteia. The role played by wives nevertheless remained politically important, and has the
appearance of a partnership, in which the women possessed the authority to pursue dynastic
policies in conjunction with their husbands.”
19. Bengston (1975) 260.
20. See further Hornblower (1982) 367, no. M10; Ruzicka (1992) 42; Carney (2005) 71.
21. Tod (1948) no. 155 = Syll3 no. 168 = Engelmann and Merkelbach (1972) no. 8. Hornblower
(1982) 107, 107 n. 4 makes a convincing case that the Hecatomnids controlled Erythrai at this
time; whereas Robert (1945) 101 does not see this as the situation.
64
from that espoused by the male members of the dynasty, though she notes
that “the prejudice toward women who played a public role found in some
strands of the Greek literary tradition” may exaggerate that distinction.22
That the Erythraians did not give citizenship to Artemisia, a woman, is per-
haps not surprising, but the fact that they set up a statue of a woman is unu-
sual, at least in a Greek context.23 The inscriptional evidence therefore speaks
to the importance of Artemisia in a way that the literary tradition does not.
After Mausolus’ death, there is not a clear record of Artemisia being of-
ficially named satrap by the Persians,24 although when Strabo (14.2.17)
mentions her archē he may suggest that she was the satrap after Mausolus’
death. Xenophon (An. 1.1.8) discusses the potential of Cyrus the Younger to
rule (archein) as satrap over Lydia, and, as mentioned earlier, a Mylasan inscrip-
tion describes Mausolus’ satrapy as “the land that Mausolus rules [archei].”25
Even if Artemisia had not been officially named satrap by the Persians after
Mausolus’ death, she was nevertheless the de facto satrap.26 The Persians may
not have cared as long as tribute was received; one suspects, nevertheless, that
given the time period of her rule, some acknowledgment may have been made
by the Persians that is no longer part of the extant record.27 In any event, that
Artemisia assumed sole rule of Caria after Mausolus’ death is not in doubt.
Artemisia and the Mausoleum

From 353/352 to 351/350, Artemisia ruled alone (Diod. Sic. 16.36.2), despite
the fact that she had grown male brothers who could have become ruler.28
While a number of modern scholars have given the credit for designing the
Mausoleum to her husband-brother, there is no ancient evidence to support
22. Carney (2005) 73; Bockisch (1970) 126, 174 suggests that Carian royal women had equal
rights with their husband-brothers, an assertion that Carney (2005) 75 n. 73 calls “dubious.”
23. Carney (2005) 72 notes that the erection of a statue for a woman was relatively rare.
24. Ruzicka (1992) 100.
25. Hornblower (1982) 75, 75 n. 156, 154, 366 no. M7 = Crampa (1955) 40, line 7.
26. Carney (2005) 75–76. See also Nourse (2002) 108–109.
27. Cf. Ruzicka (1992) 100–102.
28. Nourse (2002) 108, 118; Penrose (2016) 164. Carney (2005) 75 further notes, “There may
have been some tradition in Caria of shared rule by married pairs and a sense that a widow
was a more direct heir to a deceased husband than either a son or brother.” On the dates of
Artemisia II’s rule, see Hornblower (1982) esp. 40–41; Ruzicka (1992) 100–104; Carney
(2005) 66, 71, 75.
65
this. To the contrary, six ancient sources of which I am aware report that
Artemisia built the Mausoleum (Plin. HN 36.4.30; Pompon. Mela 1.85;
Strabo 14.2.16; Cic. Tusc. 3.31.75; Aul. Gell. NA 10.18.4–5; Val. Max. 4.6.ext 1).
Furthermore, Vitruvius (2.8.13) credits Mausolus with building the palace of
the Hecatomnids but never asserts that Mausolus either commissioned or
built the Mausoleum.
Yet, despite the ancient literary evidence, scholars have been reluctant to
give Artemisia credit for her achievements, especially for having commissioned
the building of the Mausoleum. This failure to give credit where credit is due
can be traced back to the Byzantine period, a most misogynistic era. In his
description of the Seven Wonders of the World, the Byzantine Nicetas of
Heracleia asserts that Mausolus built the Mausoleum but does not mention
Artemisia.29 The same is true for the entry on Mausolus in the encyclopedic
Iōnia attributed to the Byzantine Empress Eudokia Makrembolitissa.30 While
neither of these sources corresponds to the ancient testimony, C. T. Newton,
writing in the 1860s, gave the (very late) Byzantine sources precedence over
ancient ones. Newton argues, “It seems probable, as is stated by two late
Byzantine authors, that Mausolus himself commenced this tomb, in accord-
ance with a practice which has prevailed till a very recent period among some
of the native dynasties of India.”31 If Newton’s use of late Byzantine sources
over ancient ones is not enough to give the historian pause, his use of the
tomb-building practices of nineteenth-century India with which to under-
stand Hecatomnid construction of the Mausoleum surely should be.
Although Hornblower acknowledges, “The ancient authorities say that
Artemisia built it,” he also casts doubt on her role in the project, in part due to
the shortness of her reign and, in equal measure, due to the fact that Mausolus,
according to Callisthenes (FGrHist 124 F 25 = Strabo 13.1.59), enacted the
synoikismos or political reorganization of the cities of the Carian coast into
the polis of Halicarnassus.32 Hornblower suggests that the replanning of the
city of Halicarnassus was thus “likely to be the work of Mausolus” and that
Mausolus had “deliberately left a place for the Mausoleum (including its
29. Nicetas of Heracleia = Nichita din Heracleea (1977) 188 no. 67.
30. Makrembolitissa (1781) I:286. The Iōnia is now thought to be a forgery written by
Constantine Paleocappa. See Dorandi (2009) 185–194.
31. Newton (1863) 55.
32. Hornblower (1982) 238. On archaeological evidence and the synoikismos, see Carstens
(2002) 406–407.
6
large temenos) in the plan.”33 Hence Hornblower argues that “the concept
of the Mausoleum, with its vast acreage, would go back to Mausolus.”34 As
for Artemisia, Hornblower asserts that “if she had anything to do with it—
and her grief for Mausolus is well attested; the story that she died of sorrow
for her brother and husband goes back to Theopompos—she either started,
continued, or completed it,” but he goes on to say, “That she started it is un-
likely, because the tomb fits admirably into the city plan.”35 Pliny nevertheless
notes not only that the tomb was built by Artemisia (sepulchrum hoc est ab
uxore Artemisia factum Mausolo; 36.4.30, ed. André), but that it remained un-
finished upon Artemisia’s untimely death and that the sculptors continued
their work after she died. Pliny’s testimony is clear: the tomb was begun by
Artemisia and finished after her death. Hornblower’s analysis of the lifespans
of each of the artists known to have worked on the sculptural ornamenta-
tion of the Mausoleum supports, rather than detracts, from Pliny’s assertion.36
Each of the artists, when one analyzes all of the available data, lived well be-
yond the death of Artemisia in 351/350 bce, and therefore Pliny’s testimony
is compatible with what can be reconstructed of the biographies of these
sculptors.
Nevertheless, Ruzicka follows Hornblower in not giving Artemisia credit
for having commissioned the Mausoleum. Although Ruzicka notes that “an-
cient writers who knew of work on it by Greek sculptors under Maussollus’
widow, Artemisia, made her responsible for the work as a whole,” he argues,
“However, the central and commanding location of the monument in the
refounded city suggest that Maussollus conceived the idea of such a mon-
ument and perhaps also its general design when planning the city.”37 In the
next sentence, Ruzicka moves from interpolation to supposition, asserting,
“Construction certainly began during his lifetime, and continued well after his
death.”38 He further asserts that, with regard to the funerary agōn, Mausolus,
“a master of self-advertisement who was well-attuned to contemporary
33. Hornblower (1982) 238.

34. Hornblower (1982) 238.
35. Hornblower (1982) 238. In the passage cited as evidence by Hornblower, Theopompus
(FGrHist 115 F 297) does not mention the tomb, only Artemisia’s grief.
36. On the chronology of the lives of the artists, see Hornblower (1982) 240–244, 267.
37. Ruzicka (1992) 51.
38. Ruzicka (1992) 51.
67
dynastic practices in the eastern Mediterranean world, may have made plans
himself for such an event.”39
In contrast, Carney has pointed out the “crucial role” played by women
“in the public presentation of the Hecatomnid dynasty, particularly in the
formation of a dynastic identity.”40 In this vein, she argues that the “only ob-
jective evidence” for asserting that Mausolus planned his own tomb “is that
the space left for the monument in the revised city plan did take shape during
Mausolus’ rule, but this need only signify that Mausolus intended to have
a grand tomb monument, not that he had specific plans for it.”41 Even this
conclusion, states Carney, is “based upon the presumption that Artemisia
had no role in decisions until her brother was dead.” The ancient sources, to
the contrary, credit Artemisia alone not only with the erection of the tomb
but also with the planning of Mausolus’ funerary celebration. The evidence
of Pliny has already been discussed. In tandem, Strabo (14.2.17, ed. Radt)
asserts that “Mausolus ruled, and then, dying childless, left the sovereignty
[archē] to his wife, by whom . . . the tomb was constructed [kateskeuasthē].”
The verb kataskeuazō means “to build or construct” but can also mean “to
establish.”42 Pomponius Mela (De Situ Orbis 1.85, ed. Ranstrand), writing in
c. 43–44 ce, asserts that the tomb was “the work of Artemisia” (Artemisiae
opus), not Mausolus, but provides no source. Other extant Latin sources use
the verb facere to describe Artemisia’s construction of the tomb, as in Cicero
(Tusc. 3.31.75, ed. Fohlen): “Consider how Artemisia, wife of Mausolus the
king of Caria, who built [fecit] that renowned sepulcher at Halicarnassus, as
long as she lived, lived in mourning, and likewise wasted away on account of
that same affliction.”43 Aulus Gellius (NA 10.18.5, ed. Hosius) goes further,
saying, “Artemisia dedicated [dicaret] this monument to the deified shades
of Mausolus.” Gellius does cite Cicero as a source, however, so his testimony
may simply be a retelling of Cicero. While Cicero may be the earliest ex-
tant source on the construction of the Mausoleum, he was not the earliest
source on Artemisia in antiquity nor, one suspects, on the commissioning of
39. Ruzicka (1992) 103.

40. Carney (2005) 65.
41. Carney (2005) 78.
42. LSJ s.v. kataskeuazō.
43. Ut Artemisia illa, Mausoli, Cariae regis, uxor, quae nobile illud Halicarnassi fecit sepulcrum,
quam diu vixit, vixit in luctu, eodemque etiam confecta contabuit.
68
the Mausoleum itself. There were, in all likelihood, a number of eyewitness

sources in the days of Cicero and his later contemporaries.
Artemisia the Patron

After Mausolus’ death, Artemisia hired not only artists and architects but also
tragedians, orators, historians, and possibly others (e.g., poets) to commem-
orate Mausolus’ death. According to Aulus Gellius (NA 10.18.5–6), when she
dedicated the Mausoleum to her husband, she also held an agōn, or contest of
the best tragedians and orators of the Greek world to write encomia praising
Mausolus. Theopompus, Theodectes, Naucrates, and possibly Isocrates him-
self, Gellius tells us, competed for the prize, but Theopompus, who was him-
self a student of Isocrates, won.44 Suidas (s.v. Theodectes), on the other hand,
relates that Theodectes was the champion, but he also notes that “others say
that Theopompus took first prize.” Suidas further relates that Theodectes won
for his tragedy, which we know from Aulus Gellius (NA 10.18.7) was called
the Mausolus. It was perhaps performed in the new Hecatomnid theater
overlooking the site of the Mausoleum, yet another public benefit provided
to the citizens of Caria, and the script was still apparently extant in the time of
Gellius. In any event, even if they are no longer available, the mention of these
works strongly suggests that those who credited Artemisia with building the
Mausoleum had primary, eyewitness sources at their disposal, even though
we modern historians do not. As the agōn was called for by Artemisia after
Mausolus’ death, and the primary sources created at that time certainly would
have flattered Mausolus, they would have also esteemed Artemisia, who was
the patron.
Additionally, Artemisia spared no expense to create a tomb better than
any others yet known in Greece or Anatolia; she hired the best artists of
her day to create the visual counterpart to the rhetorical and dramatic
tribute she commissioned for Mausolus. Pliny (HN 36.4.30) tells us that she
commissioned Scopas, Bryaxis, Timotheus, and Leochares each to carve the
reliefs and statuary on the east, north, south, and west faces of the monument,
44. Gellius notes that some authors say that “even Isocrates himself ” participated in the agōn
but does not seem assured that this is fact. Plutarch (Mor. 838B), on the other hand, does as-
sert without hesitation that Isocrates “competed in the contest held by Artemisia in Mausolus’
honor” but notes that, even in his day, Isocrates’ eulogy was no longer extant. According to the
Suda (s.v. Isocrates, Theodectes = FGrHist 115 T 6a), the Isocrates in question was Isocrates of
Apollonia. Suidas lists Isokratēs ho rētōr ho Apollōniatēs as one of the contestants, not the more
famous Isocrates of Athens. See further Blass (1892) 2:449; Hornblower (1982) 334 n. 7.
69
respectively. The crowning glory of the monument, which was later counted
among the seven wonders of the ancient world due to its stunning artwork,
was a four-horse chariot of marble sculpted by none other than the famed
Pythis (Plin. HN 36.4.31). Archaeologists have recovered some, though by no
means all, of this work.45 Sculptures of not only Mausolus and Artemisia but
other Hecatomnids, past and contemporary, and perhaps even the Lygdamids
(the predecessors and possible ancestors of the Hecatomnids) were appar-
ently commissioned as part of the Mausoleum project.46 Statues of women
were prominent among these representations and speak to the importance of
women in the dynasty.47
By commissioning the Mausoleum and hiring the finest orators and
poets of the day to laud Mausolus and perhaps other Hecatomnids as well,
Artemisia sought to secure loyalty to herself in addition to giving Mausolus a
sendoff to the afterlife.48 It is not known whether the events held at Mausolus’
funeral celebration served as steps in developing a Greek-style hero cult for
him.49 On the one hand, Mausolus had already been associated with Heracles,
and the poetic and oratorical celebrations held in his honor by Artemisia
mirror those held to heroize other dynasts, in particular Evagoras of Cyprus.50
Furthermore, oikistai (founders of the city) were buried in the center of a
Greek colony, and Mausolus, due to the synoikismos that he carried out, may
45. See further Newton (1863) esp. 99–156 passim; Jeppesen (1958) 15–58 passim; Jeppesen
(2002b) esp. 9–23, 60–262 passim; Waywell (1978) passim; Hornblower (1982) esp. 234–237;
Cook (2005).
46. See further Waywell (1978) 40–43; Jeppesen (1998); Jeppesen (2002a); Jeppesen (2002b)
170–182; Hornblower (1982) 271; Nourse (2002) 99.
47. Waywell (1978) 43 asserts that half of the statues were of women and reflect the co-rule of
women as well as brother-sister marriage. See also Nourse (2002) 99–100.
48. Nourse (2002) 98–99.
49. The theory that Mausolus was worshipped as part of a heröon has been advanced by
Newton (1863) 139; Hornblower (1982) 252–261; and Ruzicka (1992) 53–54. Hornblower calls
the theory “speculative,” however, and notes that the story of Artemisia drinking Mausolus’
ashes (which I discuss later) detracts from the hypothesis. Højlund (1981) 83–87 suggests that
the sacrifices performed at the Mausoleum may not have been the type of chthonic sacrifices
performed in Greek hero cults but does note the possible consistency of the practices with
what little we do know of Carian cults to the dead. Højlund defers definitive judgment to
“future investigations” that compare the archaeological remains with “literary, epigraphical,
and pictorial sources.” See also Jeppesen (1994); Carstens (2002), who discusses Carian tomb
cult; and Dusinberre (2013) 222–244, who discusses Hecatomnid imitation of Persian cultic
practice.
50. Ruzicka (1992) 102–104.
70
have been considered an oikistēs, or city founder.51 Artemisia’s program may

have thus served to heroize him as the man who refounded Halicarnassus just
as Theseus was the hero who carried out the synoecism at Athens. On the
other hand, food offerings have been discovered at the site of the Mausoleum,
and the animals were butchered in a manner that has been described by
Højlund as possibly incompatible with heroization.52
If Mausolus was indeed heroized, then what we may be seeing here is syn-
cretism of Greek, local Carian, and Persian cultic practices.53 With regard to
the cult of Zeus Labraunda, which was heavily sponsored by the Hecatomnids,
Dusinberre asserts that it did not demonstrate assimilation of other deities’
worship but rather demonstrated association “between worshipping the
god and paying homage to the king, a blend of actions and iconography
that brings the Hecatomnid dynasts of Caria into the notion of ‘ascension’
at Persepolis.”54 Furthermore, “we see here . . . association between practices
connected with paying homage to the king of gods, the king of kings, and the
king of local lands.”55 Carstens argues that “the practice of hero or ancestor
cult” is “difficult to separate from tomb cult other than as something more
monumentalizing,” and further states, “It is doubtful whether the tomb [of
Mausolus] was also regarded as a sacred monument.”56
Whether or not Mausolus was heroized remains to be determined, but
we can be assured that Artemisia had agency in lauding him. Nevertheless, as
Carney has suggested, there has been a tendency to assume “a construction of
gender and allotment of sexual roles in Caria based on the situation in other,
better-known ancient cultures.”57 Literary sources, in particular, present a
rather Athenocentric and, particularly, Romanocentric view of Artemisia as a
grieving widow consumed with private rather than public concerns. In typical
fashion, male Greek and Roman authors saw Artemisia’s actions as part and
51. Hornblower (1982) 255, 258, 260.

52. Højlund (1981) 83–87; Hornblower (1982) 252.
53. On heroiziation and the “accretion of cults” in Achaemenid Anatolia, see Dusinberre (2013)
222–244. On indigenous Carian cult practices, see Laumonier (1958); Carstens (2002).
54. Dusinberre (2013) 230. Dusinberre (2013) 225 similarly argues, “Deities were seldom
syncretized, that is, multiple deities were rarely combined into one, but aspects of their cults
were much more fluid and show significant accretion of ritual.”
55. Dusinberre (2013) 234.
56. Carstens (2002) 403.
57. Carney (2005) 78.
71
parcel of her private grief. Whereas the actions of kings or other male royals
are usually attributed to political and hence public causes, the actions of royal
women are generally attributed to private motives.58
Artemisia’s Grief: A Roman Construction

of Widowhood?
Despite having built one of the wonders of the ancient world, Artemisia was
seemingly most celebrated for her grief and chastity. She never remarried after
Mausolus’ death, and she died childless. Her contemporary Theopompus of
Chios (FGrHist 115 F 297) tells us that Artemisia pined away from grief for
Mausolus and died shortly thereafter. According to Roman authors, she so
loved her husband that she not only built a tomb that towered to the sky for
him, but she mixed his ashes up with some liquid and drank them. In telling
Roman fashion, Valerius Maximus (4.6.ext 1, ed. Briscoe) sees this action, not
the Mausoleum, as her greatest achievement:
It would be trivial to argue how much Artemisia, queen of the Carian

people, missed her dead husband Mausolus after the magnificence of
the many kinds of honors she devised for him and the monument that
arose to become one of the Seven Wonders. Why indeed collect the
former or speak of that renowned tomb when she herself desired to
become a living and breathing sepulcher of Mausolus according to the
testimony of those who recount that she drank a potion sprinkled with
the deceased’s bones?
For Valerius, Artemisia was the quintessential univira woman, and her
drinking of this “love potion” outdid all of her other deeds. With this par-
ticularly Roman assessment, one begins to wonder if we are already looking
at a history of reception rather than a history itself.59 Did Artemisia indeed
drink Mausolus’ ashes? The story may originate in a primary source, such as
Theopompus of Chios, and could possibly be true. That said, Valerius Maximus
may interpret the purpose of her actions differently than an ancient Carian, or
58. Carney (2000a) 12.

59. Carney (2005) 66 notes that Carians were known for their professional singing of funerary
dirges in other parts of the Greek-speaking world, and Artemisia’s excessive mourning in the
literary sources may be the result of conflation with an artistic “regional and dynastic type” of
the mourning woman. Cf. Theopompus FGrHist 115 F 297.
72
maybe even Theopompus, would have. I suspect that if Artemisia did indeed
drink the ashes, she may have done so as part of an ancestor or tomb cult.
Mausolus was not only her husband but also her brother. Ancestor cults, and
cults to the dead more generally, were prominent in the Halicarnassian penin-
sula, as well as on the nearby islands of the south and southeastern Aegean.60
But for Roman authors, the act of drinking Mausolus’ ashes put Artemisia on
par, or perhaps beyond, even Cornelia.
Avoiding and Repressing Rebellions

Although Artemisia may well have experienced extreme grief on a personal
(i.e., private) level, she also had need to assert her control over Hecatomnid
territories after Mausolus’ death, and we must understand that she was prob-
ably motivated by public, political, as well as personal concerns. Indeed, in her
role as sovereign dynast, the personal and political were entangled. Artemisia
may have inherited the throne at a precarious point in time, and her prop-
aganda can be understood as reflective of that situation. In essence, what
Artemisia seems to have done was to create her own equivalent of bread and
circuses to create loyalty among her subjects. Her actions in commemorating
Mausolus served to secure her own position as his sister, widow, and heir, as
well as to promote the Hecatomnid dynasty as a whole.61
That Mausolus had done damage to the reputation and political clout
of the dynasty is suggested by a number of sources. He was remembered for
heavy taxation and apparently was not well liked in Caria or abroad, but he
held onto power through martial rule.62 Theopompus (FGrHist 115 F 299),
a contemporary of Mausolus, stated that he would do anything for money.
Pseudo-Aristotle (Oec. 1348a) and Polyaenus (7.23.1) both relate that Mausolus
used his position to extort money from his subjects.63 Pseudo-Aristotle (Oec.
60. Kamps (1937) 145–179; Hornblower (1982) 260; Sherwin-White (1977); Sherwin-White
(1978) 363–367; Carstens (2002) 391–409.
61. Laumonier (1958) 638 asserts that the Mausoleum was intended less as a personal mon-
ument to Mausolus and Artemisia than as a familial heröon like that of the Philippeion
at Olympia. The statues of numerous others, most likely Hecatomnids and possibly even
Lygdamid predecessors (ancestors?) of the Hecatomnids, present on the monument do sup-
port such a reading; the fact that the building was ultimately named the Mausoleum, however,
does give Mausolus some primacy among that group. See also Carney (2005) 65, 83–85.
62. See further Hornblower (1982) 75–76. Ruzicka (1992) 72 discusses Mausolus’ subjugation
of Ionia.
63. Hornblower (1982) 75.
73
1348a) relates that Mausolus first taxed his subjects because he was short of
money and needed to pay tribute to the king of Persia, but he later preyed
upon the people of Mylasa by telling them that he expected the Persian to
attack and that he needed to raise money to fortify the city. Fearing for their
lives and property, the citizens of Mylasa anted up. Mausolus never did build
the walls around Mylasa, however, but kept the money. Aristotle was a con-
temporary of Mausolus (though perhaps not an eyewitness), and, even if the
Oeconomica was written by one of Aristotle’s students, the actions it reports
explain why there were multiple uprisings and even an assassination attempt
against Mausolus, as I discuss later.64 Though he wrote much later, Polyaenus
(7.23.1, ed. Krentz and Wheeler) confirms the general sense that one gets from
Pseudo-Aristotle: “Mausolus, king of Caria desired to take money from his
friends and, hesitating to ask openly, he feigned that ‘The King is stripping me
of my power.’ ” He then proceeded to show these friends the treasure that he
had compiled, asserting that he needed to send it and more to the king in order
to resecure his ancestral domain. He thus fooled his friends into sending him
vast sums of money, which, Polyaenus implies, he did not send to the king.
Mausolus apparently did owe large amounts of tribute to the Persian king of
kings after he participated in an uprising of satraps that began in c. 364/363
and seems to have ended by 361/360 bce.65 The possibility that his actions
and wars may have led to increased taxes, even if he did pay them to the king
when push came to shove, potentially would still have made him unpopular.
Inscriptional evidence leaves no doubt that there had been several uprisings
in Caria during Mausolus’ lifetime, and an assassination attempt had occurred
only several years prior to his death. One inscription records an uprising at
Iasos on the Carian coast which was suppressed by Mausolus.66 The names
64. Aubriet (2013) 195–196, asserts that further inscriptional evidence demonstrates the un-
popularity of Mausolus. In inscriptions from Mylasa, onomastic patterns reveal that, though
Carians named their children after the Hecatomnids (including Artemisia), the name
Mausolus shows up far less than that of his father, Hecatomnus. Aubriet (2013) 195–196 writes,
“Let us note that the memory of Hecatomnus stands out clearly from the others and that the
feeble presence of the name Mausolus can be explained by the memory of his legendary fiscal
severity.” The editors in SEG 63.837, however, criticize Aubriet, pointing to several inscriptions
he possibly missed and calling his survey “superficial” and further noting that epigraphic data
“must be treated with caution.” They go on to state, “The apparent absence of echoes of the
satrap Mausolus’ name at Mylasa and elsewhere in Caria warrants further investigation. The
name is more prevalent in later periods in Lycia (see notably our lemma no. 1336 for numerous
new instances at Patara).”
65. Ruzicka (1992) 78–82.
66. Syll3 no. 169. See further Hornblower (1982) 112–113; Ruzicka (1992) 41.
74
of the conspirators are listed; although most are Greek names, some are
Carian. Another inscription from Mylasa records that in 355/354, Mausolus
was attacked at the Festival of Zeus Labraundeus in Mylasa by Manitas, son
of Pactyes.67 Mausolus was saved by divine interference, or so we are told in
the inscription. Manitas, the attacker, was killed. Yet another inscription tells
us that other insurgents were punished for conspiring against Mausolus and
defacing a statue of Hecatomnus.68
We are told by Vitruvius that the Rhodians later revolted against
Artemisia, but her Carian and Carian Greek subjects remained loyal to her,
and she prevailed over the Rhodians. Vitruvius (2.8.14–15) writes:
Thus, after the death of Mausolus, when his wife Artemisia inherited
the throne, the Rhodians were indignant that a woman was ruling
over all of the cities of Caria. Therefore, they set forth with an armed
fleet to invade the realm. When this was reported to Artemisia, she
concealed her fleet in the secret harbor, having paired the rowers
and the marines, and she commanded the rest of the citizens to
protect the walls. When the Rhodians landed with their armada in
the larger harbor, Artemisia commanded the citizens to greet the
Rhodians from the walls and promise to surrender the city. When
the Rhodians left their ships unguarded and advanced to inside the
city wall, Artemisia, sneaking through a canal dug out to the sea,
suddenly let her fleet out from the lesser harbor and thus sailed into
the greater. Having landed her soldiers, she abducted the empty
Rhodian fleet and towed it out to sea. Thus the Rhodians, having no
way to recover their ships, were surrounded in the middle of the city
and cut to pieces in the forum. In the meantime, Artemisia placed
her own troops and rowers in the ships of the Rhodians and made
headway towards Rhodes. Now when the Rhodians saw their own
ships in the distance coming back decked with laurel, thinking that
their fellow-citizens were returning after a victory, they admitted
the enemy to the harbor. Then Artemisia, having taken Rhodes,
killed the foremost citizens, and erected a trophy of her victory in
the city of Rhodes.
67. Blümel (1987) 5–6 no. 3.

68. Syll3 no. 167. See further Hornblower (1982) 68–69, 70 n. 127.
75
While Vitruvius is a late source, and thus his testimony has been discounted
by several scholars, the inscriptional evidence I mentioned underscores that
uprisings against Hecatomnid rule did occur, and both contemporary and
later literary evidence suggests why: Mausolus was corrupt. Hence Artemisia’s
benefactions and patronage of the arts, coupled with the pro-Hecatomnid
propaganda she spread as part of Mausolus’ funerary celebrations, may well
have sought to ensure the loyalty of Carians in case another assassination plot
or uprising were to occur. Indeed, Vitruvius tells us that just such a rebellion
was initiated by the Rhodians, who were still ostensibly ruled by Artemisia
after Mausolus’ death.69 Although some modern scholars, in particular
Berthold, Hornblower, Jeppesen, and Sebillotte Cuchet, have doubted the
veracity of this uprising, the story remains plausible.70 As I have discussed
this matter elsewhere in detail, I will simply summarize my findings here.71
While Vitruvius is a late source, Demosthenes (15.11), a contemporary, asserts
that the Rhodians were contemplating rebellion. Berthold has argued that
the story of Vitruvius is not plausible due to the geography of Halicarnassus,
but archaeological examination of the site, coupled with ancient references,
proves the opposite. First of all, the archaeological investigations of Kristian
Jeppesen and Poul Pedersen confirm that the story of Vitruvius is compatible
with the topography of Halicarnassus.72 Vitruvius mentions a “secret harbor,”
which was probably placed between the island where the castle of St. Peter
stands today and the mainland, as well as a canal (fossa) that connected the
secret harbor to the outer harbor. At present, there is an isthmus of low-lying
ground connecting the mainland to the rocky island, but we know from an-
cient references that the island was not always connected to the mainland
69. Ruzicka (1992) 106–111 suggests that the motives for the Rhodian uprising were largely
commercial; the downfall of the Hecatomnids would have brought more wealth into Rhodes.
This is not at all incompatible with my thesis that Mausolus’ oppressive rule, especially his
heavy taxation, had been resented.
70. Berthold (1978); Hornblower (1982) 129, 268; Sebillotte Cuchet (2015) 233–235. A number
of other recent scholars, in contrast, argue that the account may be truthful or at least based
on some kernel of the truth; see Ruzicka (1992) 107–111; Gros (1999) 141–144; Carney (2005)
67–68; Penrose (2016) 165–171. Although Jeppesen’s (2002b) 173 archaeological analysis of
Halicarnassus suggests that the account is plausible, he nevertheless asserts that a tour guide
may have made up the story. Nourse (2002) 111 n. 144 asserts that “Artemisia’s use of trickery
in the story is reminiscent of the ruse of Artemisia in Polyain. 8.53.4, so the details should be
considered suspect even if the story has some basis in fact.”
71. Penrose (2016) 165–171.
72. Jeppesen (1986) 85–96; Pedersen (2010) esp. 305–306; See also Gros (1999) 141–144;
Penrose (2016) 165–171.
76
(Plin. HN 2.91; Diod. Sic. 17.27.6; see also Pseudo-Scylax Periplus 99.1).73
Furthermore, a submerged mole in the present-day harbor of Bodrum, which
is still visible, may well have “carried a fortification wall” that was part of the
“secret harbor” mentioned by Vitruvius.74
Conclusion
Artemisia had good reason to be concerned about uprisings, and her actions
after her husband-brother’s death must be understood against this back-
ground; her husband had been a powerful but also unpopular ruler who was
remembered by several ancient authors for extorting every last drachma from
his subjects. It makes sense that Artemisia was not just grieving and spending
lavishly to console herself; she was engaging in a propaganda campaign to
shore up her own power. The ancient sources assert that she, not Mausolus,
commissioned the Mausoleum, and we have every reason to believe that these
ancient authors, in turn, had primary sources at their disposal since Artemisia
commissioned the writing of many texts as part of the agōn held in Mausolus’
honor. She has been ignored or misunderstood by scholars from the Byzantine
period to the modern era due to misogyny. We can analyze neither Artemisia
nor her Carian context using an Athenocentric or a Romanocentric perspec-
tive that aligns men with the public sphere and women with the private.75
Halicarnassus was a location where Greeks and Carians mingled, and, while
Artemisia imported Greek culture through her patronage of the arts, she
must be understood as a native Carian woman living in a region that had be-
come somewhat Hellenized but was not entirely Greek. Greek culture may
have conquered Caria, so to speak, but native Carians (the Hecatomnids) had
usurped the Greek colonies along the Carian coast, even if they ruled them
ostensibly in the name of Persia.76
This analysis of Artemisia’s reign suggests that she deserves her place in
the historiographical record of the Hecatomnids. Like her husband, at whose
side she stood as a co-ruler, she was a capable politician and leader. The intense
73. See further Newton (1863) 38, 275; Jeppesen (1986) 85–91; Penrose (2016) 168–170.
74. A photograph of this mole has been published by Pedersen (2010) 305 fig. 43.
75. See further Penrose (2016) 18–19, 22, 154, 164, 181–183, 269, 271.
76. On the blending of Greek, Persian, Egyptian, and local Carian/Asia Minor–inspired
elements in the Mausoleum, see Hornblower (1982) 245–251. Cf. Carstens (2002). On the
imitation of Persian royal worship in Hecatomnid practice, see Dusinberre (2013) 222–244
passim.
7
emphasis modern scholars place on Mausolus’ planning of his own funeral

and tomb is of keen interest to this inquiry, as the ancient sources attribute
these actions to Artemisia alone. Yet the Byzantines wrote Artemisia out of
the historical record, and the choice of C. T. Newton in the 1860s to prefer
Byzantine to earlier Roman sources has haunting echoes in much modern his-
toriography. Some fifty years into the current gender revolution, it is high
time that we give credit where credit is due. Artemisia showed much agency
in shaping the cultural and political landscape of her sole reign and may have
done so as well while co-ruling with Mausolus.
78
79
The Murder of Apronia

Barbara Levick
Introduction: the Succession to Augustus

The somber topic of this paper may seem inappropriate as an offering to the
scholar whom we delight to honor and who has thrown such brilliant light
onto the entire field of women’s studies, yet it lies at the center of relations
between men and women at Rome and may suggest reconsidering what some
women, not imperial, might achieve.1
After his defeat of Antony and Cleopatra in 30 bce Augustus had estab-
lished a new form of Roman government, the principate, in which one man
ruled, but all the old forms of government survived, in however weakened
form. It is important to recognize both that the new form of government—
one-man rule—was in complete conflict with the constitution of the Republic,
with its collegialities and limited terms of office, and that struggles for the suc-
cession, and how to prevent any such thing, began early in his reign, leading
to the conspiracy of Caepio and Murena of 23 or 22 bce. Augustus shifted his
position and found new ways of bringing on potential heirs and successors
(Marcus Agrippa and his own grandsons Gaius and Lucius Caesars, as well as
his stepsons Tiberius and Drusus after the death of Agrippa in 12 bce), what-
ever the resentment it caused in Republican circles.
It was a consequence of this dynastic element in Augustus’ schemes that
the political role of women should be enhanced, especially that of his wife
and daughter, Livia and the elder Julia. That was noticed, on the whole
1. I am greatly indebted to Dr. Geraldine Herbert-Brown for her careful and critical reading of
an earlier draft of this paper.
Barbara Levick, The Murder of Apronia In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0006
80
80 Barbar a Levick
unfavorably, but women in their circle of friends were also able to access
sources of power (potentia) that lay outside official spheres, through the use of
personality, money, and patronage.
Augustus had established himself beyond any idea of failure and in 2
bce, the very year in which his daughter was disgraced in a sexual scandal
that had political overtones, was formally styled Father of His Country
(Pater Patriae). The last ten years of Augustus’ principate (4–14 ce)
were dark. Not only did the Roman army suffer striking reverses, most
notoriously the loss of three legions in the Teutoburgerwald in 9 ce, but
there was widespread unrest in the provinces connected with stringent
tax demands, shortage of grain at Rome, and an acute struggle for the
succession within the imperial family. That had its clearest roots in the
death of Augustus’ stepson Drusus in 9 bce, which led to the promo-
tion of his brother Tiberius. (This was the year in which Livy chose to
end his History of Rome.) Another pair of claimants, Augustus’ grandsons
through his daughter Julia, whom Tiberius had had to marry, sprang for-
ward, and Tiberius withdrew into virtual exile on Rhodes. But Gaius and
Lucius Caesars also died, in 2 bce and 4 ce, and Julia fell into her dis-
grace. The rehabilitated Tiberius became Augustus’ undoubted heir in 4
ce, with Agrippa Postumus, youngest brother of the deceased princes, a
partner short-lived for his blatant discontent with the inequity of his po-
sition, and paying for it within a few years by relegation at Sorrento and
ultimately exile on Planasia. His sister the younger Julia was also exiled
in 8 ce.
Whatever the struggles for supremacy, Augustus in 14 ce left his fifty-
six-year-old step-and adopted son Tiberius firmly in control and in posses-
sion of all the powers that the Princeps needed. His position was eagerly
ratified by magistrates, Senate, and people. Even so, the son that Augustus
had disinherited and removed from the Julian family, Agrippa Postumus,
was immediately executed, and the new emperor had to face unrest in the
armies of Germany and in the Balkans. Tiberius had two sons and heirs to
back him up: Germanicus and Drusus Caesars, the first the adopted son
of his beloved brother, the second his own child. They got on well, but
neither survived long: Germanicus took up a command in the East and
died there in 19, and Drusus passed away at Rome in 23. That left the suc-
cession open once again to a struggle in the next generation between the
sons of Germanicus, Nero and Drusus Caesars, Drusus’ boy Gemellus, and
Tiberius’ increasingly powerful minster L. Aelius Sejanus, his prefect of the
Praetorian Guard.
81
The Murder of Apronia 81
The Death of Apronia

For the following year, 24, Tacitus provides disturbing events. First comes
the premature offer to the gods of vows for the safety of the young princes
Nero and Drusus Caesars, the sons of Germanicus; for this the pontiffs were
rebuked by the emperor. Then came the downfall and suicide of C. Silius,
consul in 13 ce, who as commander of the upper Rhine army and legate of
Germanicus, had put down a revolt in Gaul; his wife Sosia Galla, a friend of
Germanicus’ widow Agrippina, was exiled. The hand of Tiberius’ minister
Sejanus was behind this mischief. Two other attacks followed, involving sen-
atorial pronouncements, to be dealt with later.2
At the end of his account of these domestic events of 24 ce Tacitus offers
a bizarre episode. It is the murder of Apronia (A 975; R-C 86) by her husband
the urban praetor M. Plautius Silvanus (P 479), who threw her from a height
for reasons which were unclear.3 Dragged before Caesar by his father-in-law,
he replied in a disturbed state of mind to the effect that he had been heavily
asleep and therefore unconscious and that his wife had chosen to die of her
own accord. Without hesitation Tiberius proceeded to the house, visited the
bedroom, where traces of her struggle and forcible ejection were to be seen,
and referred the matter to the Senate. A jury was appointed (showing prima
facie presumption of guilt on the part of the Senate—whether the case was
remitted to a regular jury court or, more probably, given the status of the ac-
cused, assigned to a smaller body of senators) and Urgulania, Silvanus’ grand-
mother,4 sent her grandson a dagger, an action that was believed to have been
taken virtually on the emperor’s advice, owing to Augusta’s (that is, before her
elevation on the death of Augustus, Livia’s) friendship with Urgulania. Having
tried the weapon to no purpose, the accused offered his veins to be cut—
evidently by a slave, perhaps a professional doctor. Subsequently Silvanus’
former wife Fabia Numantina,5 charged with having induced insanity in the
husband by spells and poisons, was judged innocent. How far this charge was
taken we are not told. The language (innocens iudicatur) suggests that the case
was taken to a formal court, presumably again before a jury of senators, if the
Senate itself did not dismiss the case in a preliminary hearing. Tacitus then
2. Tac. Ann. 4.17–21. For Silius, see PIR S 718; for Sosia, PIR S 781 and Raepsaet-Charlier
(1987) 574 no. 720.
3. Tac. Ann. 24. Apronia: PIR A 975; Raepsaet-Charlier (1987) no. 86. Silvanus: PIR P 479.
4. Urgulania: PIR ed., 1, V 684.
5. Fabia Numantina: PIR ed. 2, F 78; Raepsaet-Charlier (1987) no. 353.
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82 Barbar a Levick
turns to external matters: the end of the war against the rebel Tacfarinas in
North Africa.
This is a succinct account, in part certainly drawn, like much of Book
Four, directly or indirectly from the minutes of the Senate, acta senatus. It
was an open-and-shut case, in the sense that judge and jury—the Princeps
and presumably the Senate who decided on the appointment of a jury—were
satisfied with the outcome. The evidence of the murderer’s guilt is plain, and
this is a locked-room mystery, or at least a locked-mansion mystery, since the
crime took place at night and the doors of the mansion would have been se-
curely barred against intruders, with a lodge keeper at the main entrance.
Only the inmates of the house—the family and its slaves, who may have num-
bered hundreds, but in the mass can have had no plausible motive pinned on
them—come under suspicion. No doubt was expressed except by the accused
husband with his exculpatory story, and no scope remained for an inquiry
along the lines of an Agatha Christie murder mystery, nor much temptation
to look for a deeper solution. There was evidently general satisfaction at the
outcome. Even the hypercritical Tacitus’ suspicions extend only as far as the
possible role of the empress in securing the death of Silvanus.
Unexplained Circumstances
All the same, some things remain unclear. The context and outcome were as
much political as judicial, and it is this political context that I should like to
consider. First of all, the physical circumstances are unclear. Whether Apronia
fell like Amy Robsart, wife of Robert Dudley, at Cumnor Place in Berkshire in
1560 down a possibly quite shallow inner flight of stairs or through an exterior
window (the contrast with the pitching of his discarded fiancée Lisa Harnum
by Simon Guttany from the fifteenth floor of a Sydney building in 2011, with
another claim of suicide, is striking),6 is not stated. Again, the timing of
events is only relatively clear. The alarm may have been raised by slaves, since
Plautius claimed to have been fast asleep when his wife died. They will have
roused their master, and the next person seen in action is the dead woman’s
father, L. Apronius.7 The married couple might be expected to be living in
the husband’s house. In any case Apronius would have had to be informed
6. Robsart: see, e.g., Black (1959) 49–51; I owe the information about Harnum to Dr. Geraldine
Herbert-Brown.
7. Apronius: PIR ed. 2, A 971.
83
immediately: under the principate a Roman woman normally did not pass
into the manus of her husband but remained in the power of her father even
after marriage. And a father’s feelings will have taken him to the scene at once.
The two residences will have been in exclusive areas of the city and perhaps
not far apart.8 Apronius’ next move was to approach Tiberius, “dragging” his
son-in-law the praetor with him. (The verb is trahere.) The looming authority
of the emperor overrode any imperium of the praetor; he could not defy even
the private individual Apronius.
The emperor might still have been at his morning levée, the salutatio that
was expected of senators as a token of respect toward the emperor, and the
seniority of the men involved as well as the news they carried would have
given the case for their admission priority.9 Tiberius acknowledged it: he lost
no time in going in person to the scene, where the traces of the disturbance
were still visible—or had been reassembled.
Plautius’ claim that Apronia killed herself was never plausible, though a
parallel case is recorded in the principate. Quintilian tells us that he had been
involved in a trial that hung on an issue exactly parallel to that of Plautius:10
Naevius, a man from Arpinum, was accused of murdering his wife by throwing
her from a height; he too pleaded that she jumped. That of course was all he
could say. But hanging, after the manner of Amata in the Aeneid, or suffoca-
tion, alleged for Brutus’ wife Porcia, or any of the other numerous methods
listed by scholars,11 not jumping out of windows, was a preferred method for
unforced Roman female suicides. Only in a blind passion would a woman take
her own life in the way her husband wished on Apronia. What form Naevius’
height took is unspecified. Not that husbands murdering wives were com-
monly found in Roman culture; as S. Treggiari observes, divorce was too easy
for that. Plautius could readily have been free of his wife, unless he was still
under the control (potestas) of a father who wanted the marriage continued,
and it is generally agreed that the elder Silvanus was already dead by four-
teen. Only catching his wife in flagrante (no evidence for that) or the sudden
revelation of a bastard child passed off as his own might have provoked the
husband to such a fit of rage.
8. For Roman “privacy,” see Anguissola (2012). For the salutatio, see Talbert (1984) 68–70 and
Michel (2015) 31–56.
9. For Tiberius’ residence on the Palatine, see Wiseman (2013) 259; Michel (2015) 31–56.
10. Quint. Inst. Orat. 7.24.2.
11. For example, Grisé (1982); Treggiari ([1991] 1993) 484–488.
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84 Barbar a Levick
The Family of the Victim

Apronia belonged to a family that rose to distinction only in the Augustan age.
No Apronii figure in F. Münzer’s treatment of noble and aristocratic families
of the Republic, while T. R. S. Broughton shows only a fifth-century tribune
and a third-century aedile.12 Apronia’s father, L. Apronius, surfaces late in
Augustus’ principate. He opened his career by holding one of the posts in the
board of twenty (the vigintivirate) expected of young would-be senators. But
curiously enough, he held one of the four most distinguished positions in it,
often reserved for young men of the highest rank: that of the quattuoruir (but
in Apronius’ year entitling themselves IIIVIR) monetalis, master of the mint.
He would have been about seventeen or eighteen at that point, which C. H.
V. Sutherland dates to c. 5 bce.13 Apronius’ colleagues in issuing quadrantes
were a Galus, a Sisenna, and a Messalla. Of these, the cognomen Messalla is
resplendent in the Augustan age: it belongs to consuls of 31, 29, 12, and 3 bce
and most relevantly to Apronius’ contemporary L. Valerius Messalla Volesus,
the consul of 5 ce, a villainous provincial governor, it turned out, but an aris-
tocratic colleague for Apronius.14 The Apronii were clearly “new men,” in the
technical sense, never having reached the consulship before, or indeed any
curule office. As we shall see, L. Apronius himself under Augustus may have
held a priesthood often awarded to new men, that of a fetialis. Military merit,
as Velleius Paterculus’ account of the Balkan war suggests,15 may have laid the
foundations of Apronius’ career, as well as patronage from a superior officer,
perhaps a Vibius. His son L. Apronius Caesianus, eponymous consul in 39,
would be connected through his mother with the Caesii, but they too were
newcomers under Augustus.
Apronius served with distinction in Dalmatia. Velleius’ chapter, preceding
his account of the Varian disaster of 9 ce, is devoted to praise of worthy
officers, and it is carefully graded to take in men who succeeded in winning
the highest honors and those who (for one reason or another, not necessarily
through any fault of their own) missed the ornamenta triumphalia. Apronius’
success was cloudless, but he was too junior as yet (it seems) for the ornamenta
that his commander C. Vibius Postumus (suffect consul in 5 ce) achieved.
12. Münzer (1999); Broughton (1951–1986).

13. Sutherland (1984) 139, n. 161.
14. Volesus: PIR V 96.
15. Vell. Pat 2.116. C. Vibius Postumus at section 3.
85
He passed to his own consulship in 8 ce. Not surprisingly for a man of his
social standing, it was held in the second half of the year. Not only military
merit was relevant. The political turmoil of the years 4 to 8 needs to be taken
into account, indeed of the decade since Tiberius had gone into voluntary
exile in Rhodes (6 bce), leaving Gaius and Lucius Caesars and their mother,
the elder Julia, in possession of the field at Rome. That supremacy had ended
in the deaths of the brothers on service abroad and the exile of their mother
in 2 bce and of their surviving siblings, Agrippa Postumus and the younger
Julia, after Tiberius’ return to power in 4 ce. A whole new band of polit-
ical arrivistes was swarming up the ladder as loyal supporters of the aged
Augustus’ regime and of his final heir, Tiberius, entrenched since 4. They rose
to prominence with Tiberius in the aftermath of his adoption.16 Other prom-
inent members were the Vibii, the general C. Vibius Postumus, consul 5 ce
and successful in Dalmatia, and A. Vibius Habitus, suffect consul 8 ce and so
Apronius’ colleague. Indeed, the wife of Apronia’s brother-in-law P. Plautius
Pulcher was a Vibia, daughter of C. Vibius Marsus the suffect consul of 17.17
Naturally there were opponents, some covert, others vociferous, most prob-
ably the orator Cassius Severus, who was exiled at the end of Augustus’ reign
for vilifying members of the aristocracy. Severus’ penalty was aggravated by
the Senate precisely in the year of Apronia’s murder because the slanderer was
persisting in his vilifications in that year. We have no details.18
A second and minor factor to take into account in considering the
promotions of these years is Augustus’ need to make a new institution, the
suffect consulship, acceptable to rising politicians from the aristocracy and
so to find places for more men of ambition—but of lower birth. Once taken
by high-ranking aristocrats, it would become a perfectly routine honor. So
it had been when honorific replacements for the triumph, the triumphalia
ornamenta, were introduced; significantly Tiberius himself and L. Calpurnius
Piso (consul 13 bce) had been the first to accept them, setting a fine example.
As a military man Apronius certainly qualified for Syme’s description of
him as a favorite of Tiberius. He served not only in Dalmatia but after his
consulship both in Germany and in Africa. In 15 he was a consular legate to
Germanicus and was awarded the triumphal ornaments. It may not have been
16. The new aristocracy: Syme (1986) 100–101. Vibius Habitus: Syme (1984) 1427. P. Plautius
Pulcher: PIR P 472, cf. ILS 964.
17. Habitus as Apronius’ colleague: Syme (1984) 1427; Vibia: ILS 964.
18. Cassius Severus: Tac. Ann. 1.72.3, 4.21.3.
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86 Barbar a Levick
unwelcome to Tiberius to have a steady loyalist in the field with a dashing ge-
neral whom he could not or would not quite trust, whether as a soldier or as
a political adviser. But it was not Germanicus and his coterie but the families
who were arraigned against the entire dynasty of Tiberius and his sons, natural
and adoptive, against whom new men such as L. Apronius formed a bulwark.
At any rate, what looks like a whole series of quite intimate if sometimes tart
exchanges may be traced between Apronius and Tiberius in the following years,
though they have not attracted as much attention as they might.
Back in Rome after his time in Germany, Apronius spoke among the
consulars in the Senate. He was ready with a sycophantic proposal, recorded in
Tacitus, to commemorate as a festal day the suicide on September 13, 16, of the
alleged conspirator M. Libo Drusus, whose criminal plan, documented in the
Fasti of Amiternum, was to annihilate the house of the Caesars and take power
on his own account. Apronius’ fellow proposers were the Samnite M. Papius
Mutilus, suffect consul 9 ce, and C. Asinius Gallus, consul in 8 bce, who had
married Tiberius’ former wife Vipsania and delighted in appearing to enhance
the powers of the Princeps—for the benefit of his own family; the infamous
third was most likely the “chronic traitor” L. Plancus.19 Their self-interested
motives were transparent; certainly Apronius in particular had his future com-
mand abroad in mind.
It was time in 18, after the required interval had elapsed, for Apronius to
draw lots for his consular province, and he obtained Africa, not the peaceful
Asia. There too he distinguished himself and was further rewarded by holding
it not for the normal one year but for three (18–21, evidently at the behest of
the emperor, who knew that the difficulty of the terrain and the cunning and
experience of Rome’s opponent meant that more than one campaign would
be necessary), though he did not bring the war against the rebel Tacfarinas
to an end. He was awarded the ornamenta triumphalia.20 When he took over
the command a candid exchange of views took place between Apronius and
Tiberius. Apronius boldly applied the ancient punishment of decimation—
the execution by flogging of every tenth man—to one of his legionary cohorts
that had failed in battle. In response Tiberius, with equal antiquarian correct-
ness, perhaps playfully reproved him for not conferring the full traditional
19. Apronius’ proposal: Tac. Ann. 2.32.2. The plot: Ehrenberg and Jones (1976) 52. Papius
Mutilius and Asinius Gallus: PIR ed. 2, P 123 and A 1229; Plancus: M 729 and Syme (1986) 343.
20. Ornamenta: Tac. Ann. 4.23.1.
87
honor of the corona civica, awarded for saving the life of a fellow citizen,21
which was another prerogative of the governor, on Helvius Rufus, a soldier
who had been cited as having earned it. This was a curious and no doubt tartly
enjoyable exchange of civilities on the theme of a governor’s rights and duties.
Again, while in Africa Apronius made a dedication to the emperor at
the temple of Venus on Mount Eryx in Sicily—an act of notable homage.22
Apronius sent his son Caesianus, already a member if the prestigious priest-
hood of the seven-man board in charge of Feasts (Septemuiri Epulonum), to
set up the twenty-four-line verse joint dedication to the emperor, along with
weaponry from a victorious encounter with the enemy and an image of the
emperor.
That did not help him when in 22, back in the Senate, Apronius proposed
that fetiales, as well as priests of boards more senior to them, should preside
over the games that were established to celebrate the recovery of Julia Augusta
from her severe illness in that year.23 Tiberius firmly put him down with elab-
orate argumentation to the effect that the ancient college of the fetiales had
never enjoyed such prestige. The proposal makes one suspect that Apronius
himself was a member of the order and hoped to take part in the ceremonies.
The Marriages of Apronius’ Daughters

The direct cultivation of Tiberius and service as a first-rate governor was
not all that carried on Apronius’ career. He made upwardly mobile marriage
alliances. He gave his daughter Apronia Caesiana24 in a very distinguished
marriage, finding her a niche within one of the most stable and secure
dynasties of the late republican era—and one that survived well into the prin-
cipate. The Cornelii Lentuli were patrician, and so one of Apronius’ daugh-
ters was married to a son of Cossus Cornelius Lentulus; he was a Gaetulicus,
consul in 26 ce. The family guaranteed a high position no matter who else
was on the rise.
The marital career of Apronius’ other daughter was less unclouded right
from the start. In 7 ce, M. Plautius Silvanus, consul 2 bce,25 brought legionary
21. Military awards: Tac. Ann. 3.21.

22. Dedication: ILS 939.
23. Proposal on fetiales: Tac. Ann. 3.64.4.
24. Caesiana: PIR A 976, based on Tac. Ann. 6.30; cf. Vell. Pat. 2.116.2; PIR C 1380.
25. Silvanus the elder: PIR P ed. 2, 478.
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88 Barbar a Levick
reinforcements from Galatia to Tiberius’ forces in the Balkans—which the

supreme commander promptly returned to Asia Minor. Worse, Silvanus and
his colleague, according to Velleius, were close to meeting a severe defeat en
route. It is not surprising that he does not feature in the “chapter of tributes”
that Velleius uses to separate the Dalmatian victory from the Varian disaster,
but Cassius Dio records signal successes of his against the Breuci and the
Dalmati in 8 and 9.26 It was to this man’s son that Apronius gave his other
daughter. An earlier marriage of Silvanus to Fabia Numantina (whom he had
received as a widowed heiress from Sex. Appuleius, the consul of 14 ce, Syme
conjectured) had been dissolved, we do not know why. Either side might have
been trying to better itself. Paullus Fabius Maximus, consul 11 bce,27 who was
probably her father, member of an ancient and distinguished family, had been
involved in gossip from the end of Augustus’ life. The story was of a trip to
Planasia made by the emperor in the company of Fabius and a plan to reha-
bilitate the disgraced Agrippa Postumus, in exile there. True or not—and few
believed or believe it—what matters is that the story went round. Maximus
was dead by the end of the same year. Not only his widow Marcia allegedly
blamed herself for his death (she had been too talkative) but so did Ovid,
exiled when the younger Julia fell, who claimed that Fabius had been going to
intercede with the emperor on his behalf. This may have been when Silvanus
moved on, taking the daughter of a safe adherent of the new regime. In other
words, the alliance with L. Apronius and his daughter strengthened the po-
sition of young Plautius Silvanus in the late Augustan political constellation.
Silvanus was not the only member of his family to make an advantageous
marriage during this period. The later emperor Claudius’ first wife was a
Plautia Urgulanilla, that is, the sister of the praetor of 24 ce.28 She was not
the first choice made for Claudius, but was a replacement for the daughter of
the younger Julia, who had fallen into disgrace in 8 ce, and for Furia Camilla,
who died on her wedding day; presumably Claudius and Urgulanilla were
married in about 9 or 10. This marriage ended in divorce, at a time unspeci-
fied. Claudius’ grounds were adultery and more unusually “some suspicion of
murder” (homicidium). The victim is not named. He or she might have been a
slave or some other individual considered of no account, struck in anger, but
26. Silvanus’ successes of 8 and 9: Cassius Dio 55.34.6, 56.12.2.

27. Fabius Maximus and his fate PIR F ed. 2, 47; Ovid, Ex Ponto 4.6.9–13; Tac. Ann. 1.5; Syme
(1986) 414–418.
28. Urgulanilla: Raepsaet-Charlier, Prosopographie no. 619; homicidium: Suet. Claud. 26.2.
89
the question arises whether Urgulanilla was suspected of complicity in a more

significant murder, that of her sister-in-law. Claudius went on to make an-
other marriage, to Aelia Paetina, a woman distantly related to Tiberius’ min-
ister Aelius Sejanus; it took place before 28, for the child it produced, Claudia
Antonia, was married by 41.
The Collapse of an Alliance

Within the group of Tiberius’ and Germanicus’ adherents perfect concord
did not reign for long. They had prevailed over the children of the elder Julia,
her daughter and son Agrippa Postumus and purported ally Libo Drusus, but
that merely left gaps open for new rivalries to develop. Alliances were stabilized
by marriage but could be loosened over time, especially when pressure from
external hostility weakened. There was good reason for discord among the
adherents of Germanicus. His death in 19, followed three years later by that
of Drusus Caesar and a half-hearted attempt to bring forward Claudius, dis-
turbed the politics of the court and caused rifts to open up within the leading
families. One prime example came even before Drusus died. He had been ill
in 21, and a poet boasted of the reward he would have for his verses on the
prince’s death—recited at the house of P. Petronius (suffect consul 19 ce),
an adherent of Germanicus. Only Petronius’ mother-in-law Vitellia denied
hearing the poem; its author was executed by decree of the Senate.29 Tiberius’
reaction was to order that no executions should take place until the sentences
had been recorded for ten days within the state treasury, giving time for due
leniency to be exercised.
L. Apronius cultivated personal relations with the emperor. They were
both military men and shared a taste for law. That was felicitous. Apronius
was linked with the very center of power as well as with lesser gentes such as
the Vibii and now through his daughters the patrician Cornelii Lentuli and
the newer plebeian nobiles the Plautii. What Apronia felt about the alliance is
to be conjectured, but the network of political connections in which she was
involved invites inquirers to ask whether her murder was not necessarily an
inexplicable crime passionel but was, or became, part of a crisis in the relations
between segments of court factions; she died in a political quarrel.
The wife of Cossus did better socially, but Silvanus’ grandmother Urgulania
was intimate with the new emperor’s mother, Julia Augusta. Urgulania may
29. Fate of Clutorius Priscus the poet: Tac. Ann. 3, 49–51.

90
90 Barbar a Levick
have been instrumental in engineering the marriage alliance in the first place.
L. Apronius, then, was a man whose military gifts attracted the attention of
the imperial family in Augustus’ Balkan and German campaigns. He took
advantage of the openings created by them for new men and allied himself
with others who were taking the same path, first as a subordinate of C. Vibius
Postumus (consul 5 ce) in the Balkans, where the elder M. Plautius Silvanus
had operated, and then in independent commands under the direct control
of Tiberius.
Besides making advantageous connections with prominent dynasties of the
day, Apronius pursued a political path that he mapped entirely for himself—
and in doing so he was acting like any other opportunist Roman politician.
His attentions to Tiberius were particularly marked, and it is a wonder that he
was not singled out by Tacitus, like C. Haterius, Domitius Afer, and others,
for opprobrium. The answer lies in the low-level, unaggressive nature of his
activities (with the exception of his attack on the memory of Libo Drusus,
who was, after all, already dead and manifestly guilty) and the caution of his
ambition. Apronius was no delator. No living person of high significance is
known to have suffered as a result of his ambitions. He advanced his daugh-
ters as pawns on the political board, and only Apronia and her husband paid
the price.
Conclusion: Women in the Political Background

Disappointing as it may be not to be able to do a Murder of Roger Ackroyd
in the style of Agatha Christie on the murder of Apronia, we must accept
the unanimous verdict of her father, of Tiberius, Urgulania, the Senate, even
of her husband, and of the chorus of modern scholars. But the singular act,
of real madness or a reaction to infidelity, should be considered not in isola-
tion but in its political context. It was part of a tense few years in which the
worst problem of the early principate, that of the succession, had seemed to be
solved but had been shown not to be. The year before Apronia’s death, Drusus
Caesar, the last of Tiberius’ two viable adult heirs, died, leaving Germanicus’
sons and his own infants as potential rivals for supremacy, backed by their
families. The dynasty, after so many efforts to achieve a settlement, had once
again been cheated.
We have already noticed the context in which Tacitus sets the murder: fac-
tional trials within the Senate, including an attack on none other than L. Piso,
Urgulania’s creditor, by Q. Veranius, another of Germanicus’ adherents. Men
were fighting for position. (Nothing came of this prosecution, because Piso
91
died.) We have also seen fresh senatorial measures taken against the publicist
Cassius Severus; he had continued to issue calumnies against leading members
of society (evidently the men and women who were now in high favor and
power at Tiberius’ court) and was removed from Crete to the small and more
remote island of Seriphos in the Cyclades and condemned to loss of access to
fire and water. That is evidence for discontent and rancor, without regard for
the discredit to Roman arms of failure in Africa to bring Tacfarinas’ rebellion
to a decisive end. That had already proved to the advantage of Tiberius’ lieu-
tenant Sejanus and his followers: in 21 Sejanus’ uncle Junius Blaesus had been
advanced to command of the campaign.30
Hence the speed of Tiberius’ reaction, and perhaps more significantly the se-
verity of Urgulania’s. Her grandson had shattered the family construction that
she had helped to build up over the previous two decades, linking her own family
of the Plautii with that of the Caesars. Not only Plautius Silvanus had to pay the
price for the murder, but his sister Urgulanilla was removed from her position as
Claudius’ wife, under suspicion of being an accessory. Now Sejanus was drawn
closer to the group through Claudius’ engagement to his kinswoman. A new
constellation was forming: the ever-loyal Apronius was confirmed; he returned
to Germany as legate of the Lower Rhine army and despite a reverse against
the Frisians in 28 was not recalled.31 His son was consul ordinarius under Gaius
Caligula in 39 and may have risen to the patriciate thanks to Claudius.
And what of the women? First, Apronia. She was not a cipher simply
eliminated from her family as she fell, as Hindu, Sikh, and Muslim women
were eliminated during the violence of Partition of India in 1947, while the
British left, whether they were slaughtered by rampaging hordes, were killed by
their own coreligionists, fathers and husbands, to save them from the enemy,
or even threw themselves down wells to save their “honor.” “Eliminated” is
the appropriate word for these women because of the way the memory of
some of them was erased from the minds of their kin. These horrors, repeated
elsewhere more recently, have been vividly presented in a television program
by a kinswoman, Anita Rani, as well as being attested on film and in sober
histories of the time.32 All these women were the victims of male violence,
alien, or patriarchal.
30. Appointment of Junius Blaesus: Tac. Ann. 3.35.

31. Apronius on the Rhine: Tac. Ann. 4.73, 6.30, 11.19; CIL 13.7088. Caesianus: PIR A 972.
32. See Rani (2015); Chamberlain (1974) 226; Singh (1987) 249. A recent exposé: Dalrymple
(2015).
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92 Barbar a Levick
No woman plays an active role in those stories. That is far from the case
with the story that Tacitus recounts, and here there is a difference between
Indian and Roman society. For we need to consider first what passed in the
bedroom before Apronia was thrown from the window: there were signs of
violence. She was putting up a forceful resistance to her husband. What the
issue was we do not know; it could have been political as much as domestic,
or both. Very clear is the role that Silvanus’ grandmother Urgulania had
played in the past decade. It was she who brought about her grandson’s death
by sending him a dagger. People took it to come from Tiberius because of
Urgulania’s friendship with Julia Augusta; that is, the power lay in men’s minds
with the empress. This relationship and Tiberius’ deference to it had been
strikingly illustrated eight years previously, in 16, when Urgulania had been
summoned to the praetor’s court by the bold and outspoken L. Calpurnius
Piso (consul 1 bce) over a debt, and had refused to respond. On one dramatic
day Julia Augusta had been brought to pay the debt, and Tiberius himself had
proceeded to court to support the empress’s friend.33 Gender, then, was not
decisive, nor official authority, but age and personality, and perhaps money,
for refusal to pay a debt is not necessarily a sign of impoverishment, rather of
obduracy, or possibly of grand designs supported by grand loans. The Roman
public did not know who decided that Plautius should receive the dagger, and
speculated accordingly. But it was no more than speculation that the order
came from further than Plautius’ formidable grandmother herself.
This woman, then, had already succeeded in maneuvering Tiberius into
following her in support to the praetorian court in 16 and (this may be the
more significant fact) in getting Julia Augusta to pay the debt. Tacitus, and no
doubt public opinion, portrayed the empress as the mistress of the situation,
but it was Urgulania who won the day in 16. A woman of age and standing
could manipulate her family and in this case seems to have done so. The
Plautian-Apronian-Claudian alliance was a creation to the advantage of her
family, and those who endangered it must be removed from it. Lesser pieces,
such as Claudius and Sejanus, could be disposed of elsewhere and linked to
each other—they were not significant enough to be dangerous to Urgulania’s
new disposition.
The factional intrigue emerges in the aftermath of Silvanus’ death. He had
sympathizers: those who tried to divert blame from him on to his former wife,
who had allegedly used the woman’s notorious weapons of noxious drugs.
33. Tac. Ann. 2.34, with PIR C ed. 2, 290. The possibility of grand loans was suggested to me in
conversation by Kathryn Welch.
93
Fabia Numantina and her late father were already associated with the faction
that had supported Agrippa Postumus and his sister the younger Julia. Now
came an attempt to blacken them further, but it did not succeed.
No more is heard of Urgulania. She may have been a coeval of her friend
Julia Augusta, having a son consul in 2 bce, and may have died soon after the
events of 24. But she was a dominant figure in the political life of the first
decade of Tiberius’ principate.
What can have been her aim? Not imperium whether in the civil state or
the military, but the informal authority (potentia, politely dubbed auctoritas)
that family, wealth, age, and personality bring, what accrued indeed to
respected statesmen and which Julia Augusta herself is succinctly and system-
atically described as aiming at by the historian Cassius Dio at the beginning of
Tiberius’ principate.34 Urgulania gained it most directly through her relations
with Tiberius and Julia Augusta, then through their dependents: Apronius,
the Vibii. But it came to her through age, money, and above all personality.
On her death it all faded, and men’s ambitions centered on the children of
Germanicus, ultimately on Gaius Caligula (so Apronius Caesianus) or, until
31, Drusus Caesar’s son Gemellus, championed by Sejanus. In Urgulania we
are dealing with a politician who played her family’s cards boldly and effec-
tively over two decades of early imperial history.
34. Cassius Dio 57.12.

94
95
A Century of Women’s History

from the Papyri
Roger S. Bagnall
If the circles of those who study women and gender in the ancient
world and those who work with papyri overlap today to a significant extent,
that is in part a reflection of the impetus given to the use of the papyri to study
ancient women given by Sarah Pomeroy in the 1970s and 1980s.1 Perhaps only
a few of those in either group know that her career as a publishing scholar
began with the publication of papyri from the Columbia University collec-
tion, one of which had been the subject of her doctoral dissertation.2 These
papyri showed women as economic actors—borrowers, lenders, and property
owners—and are thus a foretaste of future directions in her work, although
women’s economic role in fact played little part in the commentaries to the
papyri. This early work did, however, give her the expertise that allowed her
to write with authority on Egypt in the Roman period in her article of 1981
as well as already in the chapter on Egypt in Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and
1. The bibliography to this article does not claim to be a comprehensive bibliography of the
subject, which would take up enormously more space, even apart from the difficulty of de-
ciding what its boundaries would be. Rather, it aims to illustrate the lines of development that
I have tried to describe. Despite the absence of any category of women or women’s history in
the Bibliographie Papyrologique (http://www.aere-egke.be/BP/), I am profoundly indebted to
the intelligent indexing of subjects over the decades by its successive editors, and I remember
with gratitude the life’s work on the bibliography of my friends Marcel Hombert and Georges
Nachtergael as well as the current team. I thank Sabine Huebner, the late Jane Rowlandson,
and Terry Wilfong for helpful comments on a draft of this chapter. A shorter version was
delivered as the Earle Lecture at Hunter College on May 4, 2018.
2. Day and Porges (1960); Porges (1961).
Roger S. Bagnall, A Century of Women’s History from the Papyri In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the
Greco-Roman World. Edited by: Ronnie Ancona and Georgia Tsouvala, Oxford University Press (2021).
© Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0007
96
96 Ro ger S. Bagnall
Slaves and in the book on Women in Hellenistic Egypt in 1984.3 These works
are often cited by papyrologists and historians for their vital role in stimu-
lating subsequent work on women in the papyri, which has been roughly
doubling in volume each decade since the 1980s.
That post-Pomeroy history is of some considerable interest, and I shall de-
vote most of this chapter to sketching the directions in which recent schol-
arship has gone in using the papyri to try to understand women’s lives in
antiquity. But I shall begin by looking back at the decades pre-Pomeroy, from
which it becomes clear that the subject is now a century old. Its prehistory has
occasionally been given brief reference in modern accounts, but all of these
have in my view suffered from a reductionist description that misses much
of the very real interest of this early work for not merely the study of women
but the broader social analysis of the ancient world, not to speak of the intel-
lectual history of papyrology itself; the role of contingency in the directions
scholarship has taken is all too visible.4
Women’s History from the Papyri before

the Second World War
The path begins with an article by Wilhelm Schubart, published in 1915–1916
in a journal not widely available today and, although sometimes cited in later
work, probably not often actually read.5 “Die Frau im griechisch-römischen
Ägypten” was written for a general audience and lacks footnotes; documen-
tation would have taken up too much room, Schubart says. It sounds themes
often found in later work: the unmediated character of the papyri and ac-
cess to ordinary people and everyday life. He gives in eighteen pages a rapid
sketch of a remarkably wide variety of subjects, lauds the Hellenistic period as
a “Zeitalter der Frau,” and collapses a millennium into a single plane, saying
that it is too soon to try to write a true history of how the position of women
changed, given that this is the first attempt at even a brief treatment. A reader
3. Pomeroy ([1975] 1995, 1981, 1994).

4. I am not going to discuss recent scholarship on the Ptolemaic queens, a topic to which
Pomeroy ([1984] 1990) devoted a chapter in Women in Hellenistic Egypt. Other historians have
differed considerably in the extent to which they think the roles played by the queens affected
the lives of “ordinary” women, something for which Pomeroy argued for a significant impact.
See Schuller (1985) for a thoughtful discussion of the question.
5. Schubart (1915–1916). The Internationale Monatsschrift für Wissenschaft und Technik is held
in the US only by the University of Tulsa, according to WorldCat.
97
A Century of Women’s History from the Papyri 97
today will be struck by not only how much what he says is echoed (even if un-
consciously) in later writing on the subject, but by Schubart’s optimism about
the enterprise of using the papyri to recover information about women’s lives.
That optimism was shared by Maria Mondini (1894–1977), author of the
first really scholarly article in this domain, her study of women’s letters on
papyrus, published a year later.6 She stresses the importance of domestic and
family life as subjects of inquiry, and the unique role of the letters written by
women for understanding these aspects of antiquity. She also saw the papyri
as showing women in a much better light than the often misogynistic lit-
erary sources. Although methodologically sophisticated enough to see the
far greater potential of archives than of individual texts, she did not ques-
tion whether women actually wrote the letters that bear their names, or how
far the interposition of secretaries might modify her ideal of the women as
“directly represented” in the letters. Nor was she analytic about structural is-
sues in society, particularly matters of class, where her simplistic division of
society into elite and ordinary is hardly satisfying. Still, Mondini was a real
pioneer in her study of the letters, particularly of the archive of the family of
the strategos Apollonios (to which Schubart had also given some attention).
Her work was not accidental or isolated. Mondini was a student of Aristide
Calderini, the founder of the Milanese school of papyrology.7 She published
eight articles between 1915 and 1920, receiving her doctorate in 1917 from the
Royal Scientific-Literary Academy of Milan. (The Catholic University was
founded only in 1921.) Soon after, she married Calderini, who was a widower.
Three daughters born to the marriage became professors. Calderini Mondini,
as she was known after marriage, remained active in scholarship to the last,
but she published almost nothing under her own name—by her wish, ac-
cording to Orsolina Montevecchi.
If to a contemporary taste this tale of the academic woman effacing herself
for the sake of her husband seems a bit depressing, we should look at the larger
context, which suggests a larger impact on the school over which Calderini
presided for another half-century. The lines of influence in this partnership
are impossible to tease apart today, but Calderini was the central figure of the
next two decades in laying the foundations for taking the study of women
6. Mondini (1917). See Bagnall and Cribiore (2006) 5–6 for reflections on Mondini’s work.
7. Montevecchi (1977) gives a brief but compelling necrology, based on long personal acquaint-
ance. Zabalegui (2011) discusses Mondini’s contributions in detail, with much information
about her life. She emphasizes the pioneering character of Mondini’s article on the theoretical
and methodological side and her identification of women’s history as a distinct subject.
98
seriously. In the early 1920s he began the first systematic study of the census
declarations of the Roman period, which have from then on been one of the
main foundations of all study of the family in antiquity. The publication in
1926 of Rostovtzeff ’s Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire made
papyrologists more aware of the potential of their documents, and by the
early 1930s social history was on the agenda. The organizing committee for
the congress of papyrology in Munich in 1933 asked Calderini to speak on the
subject, and his paper not only makes the case for social history and sociology
(a distinction to which we shall return) but traces the history of earlier work,
going back as far as Giacomo Lumbroso, who wrote about the condition of
women.8 Among other subjects, Calderini talks about ethnicity, demography,
the exposure of infants, slavery, the family, women, professional associations,
social psychology (on which he cited his wife’s article on the letters), and the
possibility of statistical treatment of information about personal appearance
in the papyri.9 And, strikingly, Calderini speaks of “un largo studio anzitutto
sulla donna nell’ età tolemaica, che la signora Calderini ha compiuto da
qualche anno, ma che per ora altre cure le impediscono di pubblicare e di
continuare per l’Egitto romano” (a broad study firstly on women in the
Ptolemaic period, which Mrs. Calderini has produced some years ago, but of
which for the moment other concerns are in the way of publishing and con-
tinuing for Roman Egypt). Evidently the reluctance of Mondini Calderini to
publish under her own name, to which Montevecchi refers, was not some-
thing taken for granted at this point. The history of the subject might have
been much different if she had published that book.
The year after the Munich proceedings appeared, Calderini’s stu-
dent Orsolina Montevecchi launched a series of “researches of sociology
in the documents of Greco-Roman Egypt,” explicitly aimed at laying the
foundations for a large work on the social history of Greco-Roman Egypt.10
She invoked Calderini’s paper at Munich and his work of the preceding
decade on the census declarations. The article, dealing with wills, was to be
the first of several treating different document types in great analytic detail,
seeking to tease out all of their elements relevant to the study of the family.
8. Calderini (1934). Calderini had edited the Festschrift for Lumbroso in 1925.
9. He refers to a book on La pigmentazione degli abitanti dell’Egitto nell’età greco-romana
published by Corrado Gini (the creator of the Gini index) in Rome in 1932; no copies in North
American libraries are registered in WorldCat, but a version can be found in Gini (1933). On
Gini and fascism, see Cassata (2006).
10. Montevecchi (1935).
9
Although Montevecchi speaks of sociology rather than social history, she is

attentive to matters of time and place in her analysis. Characteristically, she
is very reticent about offering broad conclusions, reserving them for a time
when the raw materials of social history would all have been subjected to sim-
ilar treatment.11
The very year that Montevecchi’s article appeared, the next congress was
held in Florence, and H. I. Bell delivered a talk on “proposals for a social his-
tory of Graeco-Roman Egypt.” He remarked, “It seems then a little strange
that the scheme for a social history of Graeco-Roman Egypt, suggested some
time since by Rostovtzeff and supported at the Munich Congress by Calderini,
has never been undertaken.”12 It might seem even stranger to a reader that he
would use such a phrase about a project first discussed just two years earlier
and not likely to be accomplished in such a short time.13 But he goes on to
assert the possibility of such a project, and its desirability, urging that it be
carried out by a single writer using materials assembled by a large team.
At the next congress (Oxford, 1937), Montevecchi responded, in effect,
“I’m doing it.”14 She talked, in somewhat broader terms, about the results that
were emerging from her document studies, covering spousal relations, sibling
marriage, women’s economic activity, the numerical preponderance of female
slaves, and a number of other issues. The war years were undoubtedly difficult,
but soon after the war she published a methodological paper on the need to
look at each document type carefully and pass through “piccole conclusioni
parziali” (small partial conclusions) that take account of local variation.15 Her
series of such studies continued in these years with additional genres, such as
birth declarations.16 But somehow the project stalled. After a short book on
work contracts published in 1950, her interests turned elsewhere: in part to
editing papyri in the collections of Milan and Bologna, in part to Christianity
11. Montevecchi also mentions, as Calderini does in his Munich paper, her contemporary
Sandra Avogadro, who published several articles in 1932–1934, including a major discussion
of declarations of property, party of the same project as Montevecchi’s articles. But Avogadro’s
publishing career ended at this point.
12. Bell (1936) 39.
13. To be fair, Bell had himself been attentive to family history and social history more broadly
in the bibliographies of Greco-Roman Egypt that he published in the Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology from 1914 to 1933, as Terry Wilfong points out.
14. Montevecchi ([1937] 1938).
15. Montevecchi (1943–1949).
16. Montevecchi (1947).
10
in Egypt.17 Given her methodological approach, she may have found the chal-
lenge of turning from the details to the grand synthesis too daunting, but that
is only a speculation.
But in the years before World War II, it was not only in Milan that women’s
history was of interest (and as has often been noted), 1939 brought two
syntheses focused on women’s legal situation in the Hellenistic period, the
doctoral dissertation of Lea Bringmann (under the supervision of Friedrich
Oertel) and the master’s thesis of Iza Bieżuńska.18 Bringmann’s dissertation
was produced, she tells us, under difficult circumstances which precluded sys-
tematic revision or the completion of a planned fourth chapter on women
in the family. Half of the book was devoted to women’s legal position, and
shorter chapters to public life and economic activity. She suggests that the
differences in the patterns visible in Ptolemaic Egypt compared to those of
classical Athens may owe something to the legal traditions of other parts of
Greece, and she proposes as well to see Babylonian influence in the improve-
ment of the position of Egyptian women in the law from the Persian period
on. Phrases like “in rassischer und kultureller Abgeschlossenheit” (in racial
and cultural separation) to describe the relationship of Greeks and Egyptians
are not likely to recommend themselves to readers today, but the substantive
view they represent had a long posterity. At all events, the coming of the war
meant that the book had limited circulation outside Germany and relatively
little impact on later scholarship.19
Bieżuńska’s thesis fared far worse: the building in Lvov holding the en-
tire stock of the small book was bombed by German forces soon after pub-
lication, and few copies survive; there is not even a record in WorldCat.20
She herself published a brief but rich retrospect on it toward the end of her
life.21 From that perspective, she observed that it was too Athenocentric;
the growth in legal studies of the rest of the Greek world in the intervening
17. See Montevecchi (1950) for the work contracts. A search of the Bibliographie Papyrologique
(www.aere-egke.be/bp) provides an instructive view of the shift in Montevecchi’s interests.
18. Bringmann (1939); Bieżuńska (1939).
19. As Fikhman (2001) points out, it received only one book review. Fikhman (a review of
Rowlandson [1998]) is, incidentally, rich in bibliography about women in the papyri.
20. Fikhman (2001) recounts his search for a copy and his learning from the author about
the destruction of the copies. Tomasz Derda has confirmed this account. Wolfgang Schuller
(1985) 125 n. 18 announced plans for a German translation of the book. The translation has just
appeared as this volume was about to go to press: Bieżuńska (2019).
21. Bieżuńska-Małowist (1993).
10
decades (thanks largely to Hans- Julius Wolff and Joseph Mélèze

Modrzejewski) has made it clear that we need to be more alert not only
to the upper-class bias of the Athenian sources but also to the diversity of
the Greek tradition. Women were more independent in other cities than in
Athens. She also acknowledged (and praised) the contribution of American
feminism to drawing attention to women’s history, but she resisted seeing
this as an autonomous subject or women as a separate class. Her view of
women as having a substantial degree of influence and independence in
family life had been vindicated, she thought. She did not think that queens
were an important factor in the lives of women in general. Her overall con-
clusion was that existing studies (in which she included both Préaux [1959]
and Pomeroy [1984]) were far too selective in their treatment of subjects
and sources, and she announced plans, never to be fulfilled, to write the
book she wanted to read.22
Starting Over after 1945

Where the prospects for the history of women in Greco-Roman Egypt
looked bright in 1939, the promise thus faded for various reasons, and the
postwar years were bleak. It is not until 1959 that a significant specifically
targeted contribution can be found, Claire Préaux’s much-cited article.23 It
is far too rich to summarize adequately, but it reflects two critical views: that
there is no meaningful divide between Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt; and
that the phenomena we see in the Greek documents from Egypt reflect in-
ternal developments in Greek law, with little or no influence from Egyptian
legal traditions and practices. Despite her emphasis on the conservatism of
Greek traditions, however, she supported the positive view of Hellenistic
developments already voiced by Schubart and, a quarter-century later, to
find strong advocacy in Pomeroy’s book. She saw a significant reduction in
paternal authority in favor of spousal autonomy, a greater equation of the
moral duties of husband and wife, a more liberal view of divorce, more ready
access to the courts, and the ability to make wills (except at Alexandria). The
article is strongly focused on law, with only four rather perfunctory pages
22. But she did publish a book in Polish, Kobiety antyku (Warsaw 1993), mentioned by Adam
Lukaszewicz in his obituary (JJP 25 [1995] 9). I have not seen this, but given the fact that it
appeared the same year as the article, it cannot be the intended scholarly treatment.
23. Préaux (1959). She does note the publication a few years earlier of an early article by
Modrzejewski (1955–1956) on the family in private letters.
102
at the end dealing with social issues. She ends with the point that substan-
tial progress in the private sphere was decoupled from any such progress in
public life.
The immediate postwar years did see one other important foundation
stone for later study, although it had little immediate impact: the book on the
census in Roman Egypt by Marcel Hombert and Claire Préaux.24 This was
published in 1952 but completed four years earlier, and along with publication
of a roll of declarations and a detailed study of the formalities of the census
process it includes a section on the “données des déclarations de recensement
touchant l’histoire de la société” (data from the census declarations con-
cerning social history), a brief but insightful review of many questions about
the family.
Legal History as a Major Driver

The following decade, marked in the US by the rebirth of feminism,25 was
not much brighter in the domain of scholarship on women in the papyri.26
But one of the major lines of work that ultimately contributed to the re-
covery of the subject did emerge, namely the study of Egyptian marriage
law and legal instruments, with the books (both dissertations originally)
of Erich Lüddeckens and P. W. Pestman, published in 1960 and 1961, re-
spectively. These studies, by two of the great demoticists of the century,
provided a much firmer basis for papyrologists working on Greek mate-
rial27 to use the Egyptian documents with confidence in trying to under-
stand how far the Greek and Egyptian traditions interacted, a question
that, as we have seen, was of importance to the pioneers in the field.28
24. Hombert and Préaux (1952).

25. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, an inescapable milestone, was published in 1963.
I should probably declare my own experience of those decades: having a working mother (with
strong support from my father in an egalitarian marriage) and my own marriage to a charter
subscriber to Ms. magazine.
26. Only for amusement do I mention Jack Lindsay’s (1963) popular book on daily life, rich in
inaccuracy.
27. No comparably comprehensive work on the Greek marriage contracts appeared until
Yiftach-Firanko (2003), although there is a long history of juristic studies on which he was able
to build, for which his rich bibliography may be consulted.
28. These works also, as Terry Wilfong has pointed out to me, represent the beginning of the
serious use of documentary material for the study of women in Egyptology, moving away from
the “great queens” approach.
103
Pestman’s influence, particularly through his students in Leiden, where he

delivered his inaugural lecture as professor of the history of law of ancient
Egypt and Greece and of juristic papyrology in 1969,29 was to be momen-
tous. As his career developed, he came to represent a style of studies of
papyrus archives,30 especially bilingual ones, that allowed microhistorical
investigations to add texture and humanity to the generalizations all too
prevalent in the literature.31
Two years earlier another teaching career in ancient law began in Paris,
equally momentous for the study of women in the ancient world, when
Joseph Modrzejewski was appointed to teach the history of ancient law at
the University of Paris. When upheavals in the French university system led
to the cancelation of his position five years later, he was able to move to the
École Pratique des Hautes Études, where he taught for a third of a century,
forming many of the most active scholars in the field.32 Already in 1971 he
was focused on the status of women, for example in a paper on the tutorship
of women in Roman Egypt, in which he reflects on the interaction of what
he describes as imperial policy favorable to women’s liberty with more con-
servative provincial practices rooted in the Greek kyrieia.33 Although he had
completed his studies in Paris, Modrzejewski had been formed in Warsaw by
Rafael Taubenschlag. He himself was never an editor of papyri, but he read
them with intense attention and insight, and the closeness to the documents
that he brought to his work is visible in the writings of his students as well.
And, although Bieżuńska-Małowist devoted her attention in the postwar
years much more to slavery than to women, it should be noted that Warsaw
remained an active center of social history during the period when it was part
of the Soviet bloc.
29. Pestman (1969).

30. His focus on archives ultimately lies behind the database of archives at Trismegistos.org.
31. It was not only because of his book that he came to be regarded as an authority on Egyptian
women, although he was amused by being characterized as a feminist: see van Minnen (1998)
for an evocation of the microhistorical work on archives, looking to get behind appearances
to lived reality.
32. See his foreword to Vélissaropoulos-Karakostas (2011). The annual reports of his teaching
at the EPHE are of tremendous interest; for our subject, above all the report on 1977–1978
(Modrzejewski [1982]), listing Sophie Adam, Barbara Anagnostou, Joëlle Beaucamp, and Julie
Vélissaropoulos, among others. After c. 1988, Modrzejewski signs himself Mélèze Modrzejewski
in publications.
33. Modrzejewski ([1971] 1990). Other relevant works can be found in the bibliography to
Yiftach-Firanko (2003).
104
The Development of Late Antiquity

Alongside this comparative wealth of scholarship on the juristic side and the
beginnings of the study of archives, a third important strand can be traced to
the late 1960s and early 1970s: the development of Late Antiquity as a field.
The impact of this wave of interest was not felt quickly in the study of women
in the papyri, and to try to trace it more generally would be a distraction here.
But it was to bear fruit later, and it is important to stress that it is not only
the Late Antiquity movement that developed on the classical side (Peter
Brown, Alan Cameron, Averil Cameron, and others) that was important, but
the beginnings of interest on the side of Byzantine studies. It is to Hélène
Ahrweiler that Joëlle Beaucamp traces the beginnings of the work that was to
take form in her epochal book on the status of women “at Byzantium,” but in
fact in the later Roman Empire (fourth to seventh centuries).34
The Impact of Feminist Scholarship

And, of course, there was the fourth great motor: feminist scholarship. Its
impact on the study of the papyri was perhaps somewhat slower than that of
the other impulses I have described. Even Pomeroy’s Goddesses, which was to
have an exceptionally broad impact, was not mostly about Egypt, of course;
it grew out of an undergraduate survey course, and only one chapter deals
to any large degree with Egypt.35 The first article about Roman Egypt that
I know of to respond directly to the book (and to Pomeroy’s bibliography on
women in antiquity)36 was in fact based on reading the astrological work of
Claudius Ptolemy.37 Otherwise, it seems to me fair to see the impact of femi-
nist approaches in Keith Bradley’s article on sexual regulations in wet-nursing
contracts and in Emiel Eyben’s long article on family planning, although that
practically ignores the papyrological evidence.38
34. Beaucamp (1992), to which we shall return. For the genesis of her scholarly work, see the
introduction to Beaucamp (2010).
35. Pomeroy ([1975] 1995) chapter 7, 120–148 covers Hellenistic women and is partly drawn
from the papyri. But chapter 9, “Women of the Roman Lower Classes,” is (in retrospect) sur-
prisingly lacking in papyrological evidence.
36. Pomeroy (1973).
37. Liviabella Furiani (1979). The article is a bit too ready to read the Tetrabiblos at face value,
but its observations on what seems to be assumed in Ptolemy about sex, marriage, family, and
household management are nonetheless of great interest.
38. Bradley (1980); Eyben (1980–1981).
105
The 1980s were the period of Pomeroy’s two more specifically papyrolog-
ical contributions, the article of 1981 on Roman Egypt and the book of 1984
on the Hellenistic period. Certainly these had an impact on papyrologists for
whom women’s history was not necessarily a primary interest. For example,
a series of short pieces by Piet Sijpesteijn and Peter van Minnen pointed up
a number of documents in which women discharge public functions, all in
virtue of their property holdings and with no clear indication of whether
they merely bore the financial responsibility of the office or had any per-
sonal involvement.39 More substantive and influential were two articles of
Deborah Hobson on women’s economic roles, working in one case with the
papyri from Soknopaiou Nesos, in the other with the grapheion registers
from Tebtynis.40 Despite the differences between these two Fayyum villages,
Hobson saw common patterns, including the centrality of the ownership of
property (houses at Soknopaiou Nesos, more land at Tebtynis) and a certain
amount of activity involving the use of cash coming from the dowry. But at
this point women do not appear as lenders or lessors, nor do they engage in
transactions about animals. The Tebtynis registers come from a period of ec-
onomic stress, and Hobson interpreted them as reflecting this, with women’s
patrimonies serving as a kind of reserve for households under pressure.41 One
other significant contribution from the women’s studies side in this period
was Ross Kraemer’s first exploration of the epigraphical and papyrological ev-
idence for Jewish women in Egypt, which found little to distinguish them
from other women of Roman Egypt.42
Outside this first wave of ripples from Pomeroy’s impetus, the decade also
produced work on the legal side by Modrzejewski’s pupils, including Barbara
Anagnostou-Cañas’ fine article on women’s use of the courts in Roman Egypt
and Sophia Adam’s discussion of the legal treatment of pregnant women.43
The 1980s also yielded several of the articles growing out of the thesis that
39. Sijpesteijn (1985, 1986, 1987; this last less persuasive to me than the others); van Minnen
(1986), with a female naukleros who is perhaps the same as the tax collector in Sijpesteijn (1985).
40. Hobson (1983, 1984).
41. Tebtynis dowries already came in for an interesting analysis in Keith Hopkins’ (1980) article
on brother-sister marriage.
42. Kraemer (1987).
43. Anagnostou-Cañas (1984); Adam ([1983] 1989). Anagnostou-Cañas wrestles with, among
other things, the odd statement in P. Mich. 8.507 that “a woman is not allowed to litigate
without an ekdikos,” which is not true in Roman law and may be a misunderstanding of older
Greek practice.
106
would eventually result in Beaucamp’s book in 1992.44 These deal with

nursing, widowhood, and dowry, joining earlier articles from 1976 and 1977
on the vocabulary of feminine weakness and the legal situation of women in
Byzantium. And, outside the Parisian circle, Edgar Kutzner’s dissertation on
women at Oxyrhynchos in 1989 was the first such study devoted to a partic-
ular site.45
Women in the Papyri Become a

Mainstream Subject
With the 1990s, this modest flow of publications on women in the papyri
becomes both broader and deeper, and it seems fair to say that the study of
women in Greco-Roman Egypt has been a mainstream subject in the past
quarter-century. The four tributaries to this stream that I cited earlier have
continued to flow, but now they are joined by others. A chronological ap-
proach no longer seems useful, and I shall turn instead to a selective outline
of the main areas in which work has been done and to offer my assessment
of their contributions. By the end of the decade of the 1990s, there had been
a major conference (Leuven and Brussels 1997) and the first sourcebook de-
voted to the Egyptian evidence for women in society, and one could begin to
think of the field as having achieved a kind of maturity.46
Legal History
We may appropriately begin with legal history, which has remained a fruitful
area even in an era of anxiety about the future of juristic papyrology, and with
the pupils of Modrzejewski. Apart from work already mentioned, the impor-
tant synthesis of Greek law in the Hellenistic period by Julie Vélissaropoulos-
Karakostas places the Egyptian developments in a wide geographical context,
bringing together a large number of epigraphical texts as well as the papyri.47
Another significant body of work is that of Bernard Legras, whose book on
44. These are gathered in Beaucamp (2010).

45. Kutzner (1989). For criticisms, see Bagnall (2007).
46. The conference proceedings appeared as Melaerts and Mooren (2002); articles in it will be
discussed individually. The sourcebook is Rowlandson (1998).
47. Vélissaropoulos-Karakostas (2011), over a thousand pages in two volumes, a true life’s work,
organized along the lines of Gaius’s Institutes.
107
men and women of Egypt is organized around the life cycle but largely legal
in contents.48 Two articles from the work leading up to that book are also
interesting, one on marriage documents and the other on wills.49 The latter
shows that men in Ptolemaic Egypt had much freedom of testation in leaving
estates partly or wholly to women, usually their wives, but that women’s own
freedom to leave property on their own to whomever they wished cannot
be demonstrated. The article on marriage documents begins with a (rather
limited) history of women’s history from the papyri, beginning only in 1939.
Legras’ interest here is in the degree to which the field has begun to move into
gender studies, of which he sees some beginnings in the sourcebook edited by
Jane Rowlandson.50 His conception of gender studies, however, seems rather
limited: “l’étude des rapports entre les hommes et les femmes, autrement dit,
pour une étude de genre” (the study of relations between men and women, in
other words, for a study of gender).
The appearance of Beaucamp’s magnum opus in 1992 was a major event.
As I have summarized and discussed it in a long review,51 I need not describe
its contents here in any detail. My concerns centered largely around what
I saw as an insufficient attention to the variability within major categories of
analysis, for example that women need to be differentiated by economic and
social status, not treated as a whole, and a sense that the Ptolemaic and earlier
Roman background had not been adequately worked into the argument. But
despite limitations, this is one of the most important contributions of the past
quarter-century and has been very influential in part because of the great care
and skill with which all of the evidence is analyzed.
But not all legal history is Parisian, and the three examples that I shall
cite next are also interesting because all involve experienced editors of papyri.
It is striking that Modrzejewski did not edit papyri, nor did his teacher
Taubenschlag, nor have those students of his whom I have mentioned, nor yet
Beaucamp. That is not a criticism; they bring different formations to the use
of the papyri, which has been essential to approaching the kinds of questions
they ask. But it is also good to have the experience of wrestling with actual
48. Legras (2010), with a fine evocation of Modrzejewski’s teaching. Despite its title, an-
thropology plays little part in the book, and indeed there is not much about everyday lived
relationships.
49. Legras (2007a and 2007b, respectively).
50. Rowlandson (1998).
51. Bagnall (1995).
108
editing when one must confront interpretive problems. Two articles dealing
with women’s legal capacity are interesting in this regard. One is by Maren
Schentuleit, and it focuses on the question of whether Egyptian women
(which means in this context women engaging in Egyptian-language legal
acts) could act without a kyrios in the Roman period.52 She uses the Demotic
documents from Soknopaiou Nesos as her basis. Where transactions fall
within the area of transmission of property inside the family, no male gen-
erally accompanies the woman in the contract, but outside that zone a male
representative is normally involved. Even where they are present, the men are
omitted from the Greek subscriptions to documents. Katelijn Vandorpe and
Sofie Waebens look at both Greek documents, where the kyrios was usual,
and Demotic, where it was not.53 They note the continued appearance of the
kyrios after the Antonine Constitution and the common presence of a male
even with women who claim the ius trium liberorum as Roman citizens with
the requisite three children. Greek practice prevailed in substance, they argue.
They go on to discuss social mobility, where they think women did not fare
well under Roman rule.
A complement to Beaucamp’s work from a very different background
is found in the third example, Antti Arjava’s work Women and Law in
Late Antiquity.54 He presents it as a product in part of the Late Antiquity
movement, in part of the Anglo-American interest in family history (as the
acknowledgments in his preface show), and in part of more personal interests
from outside the ancient world. The work is not mainly about Egypt or the
papyri, but the papyri are integrated into the discussion. The kind of separa-
tion implied by the two-part organization of Beaucamp’s work is thus avoided.
Her broad conclusions are also missing; Arjava thinks there was no broad and
readily described trend in the evolution of female roles in Late Antiquity.
The Family as Lived Experience

Much of the legal history dealing with women is about the family in one way
or another, both because the structures of ancient society made the family the
main focus of most women’s lives and because that is, therefore, what jurists
52. Schentuleit (2009).

53. Vandorpe and Waebens (2010).
54. Arjava (1996). In the years around the publication of the book, he published a number of
articles on related subjects, specifically concerning Egypt and the papyri.
109
tended to write about and people produce contracts about. But the family
is not only about law and normative statements; it is also about lived expe-
rience. That is more difficult to get at than the rules are, but it has been a
major focus of many scholars of the ancient world in recent decades.55 The
most essential source for the demographic realities, since Calderini and then
Hombert and Préaux, has been the census declarations. These were again col-
lected and analyzed by Bruce Frier and me in 1994, with, for the first time,
the use of modern demographic modeling to try to get a better sense of the
main life functions.56 This has led to a flourishing industry using both the raw
data and the analysis for a variety of subjects.57 The publication in 2006 of the
Ptolemaic equivalent, Counting the People, by Willy Clarysse and Dorothy
Thompson, enriched this discussion still more, even though the Ptolemaic
documents are far less revealing than the Roman for most demographic
purposes and do not allow calculation of mortality tables.58
Even before publication, however, the Ptolemaic data led Thompson to
give a useful synthesis, which pointed out that Greek families tended to be
larger than Egyptian, and really large households (with slaves) tended to be
Greeks.59 The Greeks also show a much higher sex ratio, with fewer women
in most families. Thompson argued (against Pomeroy) that infant exposure
was important already in the Ptolemaic period.60 She estimates that about
9 percent of the married Greeks had wives with Egyptian names, helping
to put some specificity on a phenomenon often discussed but usually left
quantitatively vague.
But just as the available data are richer for the Roman period, so most of
the literature has concentrated there. Sabine Huebner has used the census in-
formation and much else in her comprehensive book The Family in Roman
55. Pomeroy (1996, 1997; the latter incorporating a version of the former) are two obvious
contributions of substance. I cannot give here a bibliography of the wider field of ancient
family history, but most of that literature is cited in the works that I do mention.
56. Bagnall and Frier ([1994] 2006).
57. I omit references to the more purely demographic debates that have followed, which have
their own abundant bibliography.
58. Clarysse and Thompson (2006).
59. Thompson (2002).
60. On the Roman period, see Bagnall (1997) for the argument that there is a relationship
between patterns in the urban, Greek exposure of infants, and the disproportionate share of
slaves who are female. Evans Grubbs (2013) surveys the subject across antiquity, using the pa-
pyrological evidence without quite integrating it into the larger picture or making any original
contribution concerning it.
10
Egypt, with a particular interest in relations between generations.61 She is

acutely sensitive to what isn’t recorded in the declarations as well as what is;
detecting remarriage, for example, is far from easy. And she has made a per-
suasive case that the papyri do not generally distinguish between natural and
adoptive children, making it hard to discern the latter in the documents.62
The problem of adoption also lay behind her argument that brother-sister
marriage, that perennial bone of contention in scholarship, was at least in
part, and in her view largely or wholly, a matter of adoptive rather than nat-
ural siblings.63 Not surprisingly, this thesis was heavily contested, and there
is now a considerable consensus that adoption can at best explain only part
of the cases, with others clearly not resulting from adoption.64 Christel Freu
has recently discussed the issue of endogamy in a broader context, looking at
close-kin (but not always brother-sister) marriages not as universal practices
but as highly variable strategies, particularly useful where family situations
leave orphans or other children needing protection; they appear prominently
in some family archives but not others.65
The consequences of early mortality for husbands and fathers have
attracted attention from a number of other scholars, too. Some of these
have dealt with the situation of widows, often vulnerable to intrafamilial
difficulties as well as economic deprivation.66 On the other hand, women of
propertied families played a significant role in managing the estates of their
minor children.67 Fatherless children have received attention in a series of
studies by Myrto Malouta. One of these looks at the apatores (fatherless) not
in legal or diplomatic terms but for their actual activities, which on the whole
are unexceptional and suggest the normality and integration of this group.68
In an article on the broader phenomenon of illegitimacy, I have argued that
61. Huebner (2013a); see also her earlier article Huebner (2009a).
62. Huebner (2013b).
63. Huebner (2007).
64. Remijsen and Clarysse (2008) and Rowlandson and Takahashi (2009) are two important
contributions to the debate. On the Ptolemaic side, Ager (2005) is interesting for its attempt
to link royal sibling marriages to an ideological program emphasizing power, luxury, and lack
of restraint.
65. Freu (2012).
66. See Hanson (2000, 2005; the latter on the Judaean documents); Pudsey (2012).
67. Vuolonto (2002); Gagliardi (2012).
68. Malouta (2009).
1
it reflects in large part not so much formal restrictions on marriage as women

in a sufficiently disadvantageous situation that they had to accept such long-
term unmarried relationships.69 Finally, I may mention a few more synthetic
articles on families by Malouta, Richard Alston, and myself, generally based
on a wider body of evidence and less on the specific information from the
census.70
Women in the Economy

Inevitably, scholarship follows the evidence. Legal acts and the recording
of vital personal information are two of the areas in which women are best
documented,71 and it is hardly surprising that law and family have been
such central preoccupations of historical study. The same is true of the third
large area to have seen important developments in the past twenty-five
years: women in the economy. The pioneering works of Hobson mentioned
earlier have been followed up with studies of women as property owners,
women as businesspeople, and women at work. We shall take these in order.
The origins of women’s landholdings and other involvement in property
are traced in an important article by Jane Rowlandson, in which she sees tes-
tamentary practice, monetization, and greater ability to enter into contracts
and to litigate as critical in opening up cracks in the male-oriented struc-
ture of property under the Ptolemaic state.72 She also sees some convergence
in the Greek sphere with historic Egyptian practices; the gradual widening
of private control of land in the later Ptolemaic period also contributed to
what? Alexandra O’Brien’s study of the Demotic evidence for women in
the economy of Thebes reinforces some of Rowlandson’s points; she notes
69. Bagnall (2016). On the question of the supposed ending of the prohibition on marriage by
military personnel, see most recently Speidel (2013), who questions the supposed removal of
restrictions under Septimius Severus.
70. Malouta (2012); (Alston) 2005; Bagnall (2007). Alston starts with brother-sister mar-
riage but moves on to look more broadly at endogamy and family strategies. Like most such
approaches, his tends to give little scope for female agency, which is certain to have been impor-
tant in marriages after the first. My article, written for the Oxyrhynchos centenary, deals with
this issue, among other things; I also emphasize that weakness and vulnerability on women’s
part tend to appear more in dealing with struggles within the family rather than with outside
threats.
71. Women are better documented in the Roman period than earlier thanks in part to changes
in practices in the way people are identified: see Broux-Depauw (2015) and Depauw (2010).
72. Rowlandson (1995).
12
extensive female property ownership and the fact that documents do not
always reflect the practices associated with the language in which they are
written; culture and language do not map to one another as neatly as one
might expect.73
For the Roman period, on which Hobson concentrated, there has been
somewhat less that is new, but a detailed article of Henri Melaerts looked
again at Tebtynis, examining other documents to see how far they followed
the patterns that Hobson discerned in the grapheion registers.74 He notes
women’s high percentage of presence in documents involving sales and
cessions of real property. Not surprisingly, women are more often lenders than
borrowers and lessors than lessees, as they seek in effect passive means of ex-
ploitation of their patrimony rather than personal engagement in economic
activity.75 A broader perspective on women’s operations in credit markets was
provided by an important article of François Lerouxel, followed now by his
major book on credit markets.76
The extensive discussion of the prominence of large aristocratic estates in
Late Antiquity has not failed to pick up on the role played in these by women
landowners. Klaas Worp’s publication of the archive of Aurelia Charite in
1980 (P.Charite) was an important opening into this subject, and articles
by Hermann Harrauer and (in more depth) Roberta Mazza have explored
it.77 Although Mazza’s focus is on the Apions, at the pinnacle of society, she
emphasizes that it is possible to tease out ways in which women could create
roles for themselves even at considerably less exalted levels.
Several scholars have in fact explored more active roles played by women
in what we would today call business, often (but not always) lending
money or commodities. Katelijn Vandorpe has rehabilitated Apollonia
alias Senmonthis, the wife of the Ptolemaic officer Dryton, showing that
73. O’Brien (2002), based on her unpublished 1999 Chicago dissertation. She cites Pomeroy’s
([1984] 1990) vii call for more work on the Demotic evidence for women as a spur to her
project.
74. Melaerts (2002).
75. Saavedra (2002), in the same volume, seeks to compare Roman Egypt and Roman Spain in
the area of women’s property holdings, but the argument is rather an apple and oranges affair,
and vitiated by her confusion over the effect of the kyrieia; see Balconi ([2001] 2004).
76. Lerouxel (2006, 2016).
77. Harrauer (1994); Mazza (2002). Harrauer rather downplays such large landownership
before the fourth century, but this perhaps reflects his focus in the article on archives in the
Vienna collection.
13
her lending activities were neither contrary to her husband’s interests and
wishes (indeed, he kept her accounts) nor conducted at abnormal in-
terest rates.78 She used Egyptian contracts in many cases, in part because
her town, Pathyris, lacked a Greek notary at the time her earlier loans were
contracted. At the other end of antiquity, Terry Wilfong’s book Women of
Jeme, which is to a large degree a series of microhistorical studies, focuses
in one chapter on the now famous case of the pawnbroker Koloje, who in
fact represents simply one generation in a family business exercised over a
considerable period.79
An even more active form of business activity by a woman is brought to
light by Peter van Minnen from the little dossier of Berenike of Oxyrhynchos,
whose husband was a wine producer and merchant.80 They had made a joint
will, a unique document allowing the survivor to retain the entire estate and
divide it later among the sons. After his death she took over the business. The
husband’s former business partner sued her; the draft of his petition shows
that he assumed Berenike’s incapacity and the dominant role of the sons in
the business. But, as van Minnen shows, he was wrong about that. Berenike
was a capable and independent economic actor, able to keep her own ac-
counts.81 The level of society to which she belonged may be suggested by
the fact that the back of her accounts was later used to copy the Hypsipyle of
Euripides, although the gap in time is too great to allow any close connection
to be established.
Not all working women were of the wealthier classes, of course. These are
much less well documented, and recovering something of the reality of their
lives is a much tougher challenge. Much of the work in this area has been es-
sentially one of compiling lists of occupational titles, although this has many
limits and pitfalls. Hans-Joachim Drexhage specifies three areas in which
significant female participation is visible: food preparation and processing,
textiles, and local or regional retail trade.82 A recent study by Sophie Gällnö,
part of a larger project aimed at identifying the biases that cause female work
78. Vandorpe (2002). Her reedition of the archive appeared in the same year, with the proposed
abbreviation P.Dryton; the volume title is more telling: The Bilingual Family Archive of Dryton,
His Wife Apollonia and Their Daughter Senmouthis.
79. Wilfong (2003).
80. van Minnen (1998).
81. SB XX 14409.
82. Drexhage (1992). Worp (2011) makes only marginal additional contributions to the picture.
14
to be less visible in the documents than male work, focuses on weavers.83 She
finds that the relative rarity of terms for female weavers reflects the fact that
they occur only in connection with actual work, rather than as, with men, a
means of identification in other contexts, which of course enlarges the docu-
mentation for men.
Two final aspects of the subject have received important attention,
illuminating opposite ends of the spectrum. One is Egyptian priesthoods.
Women held priestly titles, but it has generally been thought that Herodotus
basically got it right in claiming that women did not exercise priesthoods
in Egypt. Frédéric Colin has shown decisively that this is not true: women
could and did exercise priestly functions, performing services and even taking
charge of the building of sacred buildings.84 But it is true that their num-
bers were small in comparison to those of men, and Colin connects that fact
to the overall role of women in the village economy, citing Hobson’s work
on the Tebtynis grapheion registers and Janet Johnson’s important article
exploring the complexities of the Egyptian evidence for women’s work and
wealth in the Ptolemaic period.85 Although Johnson disagrees with some of
Pestman’s arguments minimizing women’s activity, she concludes that “al-
though a woman had the legal right to handle her own property, she might
frequently prefer (for personal reasons, lack of experience, or simply because
‘it was proper’) to let her husband take care of things.” Colin and Johnson
both stress the urgency of using both Greek and Egyptian evidence in matters
of this sort.
And then, at the other end of the social spectrum, there is “the oldest pro-
fession.” The bibliography on ancient prostitution in recent years has been
enormous, but two specifically papyrological contributions deserve mention
here. One is by Kai Ruffing, who focuses on the Coptos Tariff and its high
tariff for prostitutes in the Eastern Desert during the Roman period.86 In the
process, he reviews much of the rest of the evidence for the way in which the
state profited from prostitution, seeing the tax on prostitution as much less
important than brothels in public facilities and the supply of women to the
83. Gällnö (2012).

84. Colin (2002).
85. Johnson (1998). The following quote is from p. 1416.
86. Ruffing (2013). He gives a very extensive bibliography of recent work on Roman prosti-
tution, both more general and Egypt-specific, which I have not reproduced here. For termi-
nology of late antique prostitution, see Diethart and Kislinger (1991).
15
desert forts and ports. On that subject, the work of Hélène Cuvigny has grad-
ually over the past fifteen years brought to light the general system and the
detailed mechanics of prostitution in the desert.87
Women outside Egypt

For all of the new evidence and new insights that these studies in legal,
family, and economic spheres have brought, and they are numerous and
important, one might be forgiven for feeling that these axes of investiga-
tion were all largely visible a century ago in Schubart’s article. But there
are also dimensions of the subject that he could not have foreseen. One
important one is the discovery of more papyri outside Egypt, which give
us new ways of approaching the perennial conundrum of the interaction of
metropolitan and indigenous practices that we see in the Egyptian papyri.
By far the most important of these finds for the study of ancient women
is the discovery of the archives of Babatha and Salome Komaise in the
Judaean desert, but reflecting Jewish life in what became the Roman prov-
ince of Arabia in 106 ce. Hannah Cotton has used these archives to sketch
a picture with many local particularities but also some familiar dynamics.88
These Jewish women were active in buying, selling, and giving property,
as well as in moneylending, and they crossed provincial boundaries freely.
They used multiple languages to satisfy their legal needs, reflecting the
changing availability of courts and procedures more than any cultural af-
finity; for example, the Aramaic texts date before the Roman annexation
of the Nabataean kingdom. In documents drawn up to be used in a Roman
system, the rules of Roman law are followed, with tutors present but not
making the decisions. By contrast, in the documents in Semitic languages,
there is no such male involvement. The Aramaic marriage contracts con-
form to rabbinic formulas and concepts, by and large, while the Greek
contracts resemble those from Egypt. As in Egypt, we see women using the
legal systems embedded in different languages to achieve their purposes in
a variety of ways, but the legal traditions underlying the actions of Jewish
women are not those of Egypt, so we see Jewish local customs carried on
as far as possible.
87. Most recently Cuvigny (2010), with references to earlier bibliography.

88. Cotton (2002).
16
Late Antiquity
The rise of Late Antique studies has led, not surprisingly, to much interest
in women as well. In the case of Egypt, attention has been drawn mainly to
literary sources for ascetics and holy women, but Heike Behlmer has pointed
out how few such figures there are compared to men: fewer than fifteen as-
cetic women of whom lives are known, compared to about 130 men; the
Synaxary (liturgical calendar) has higher numbers but a similar ratio.89 Even
for ordinary Christian women, including ascetics, the amount of evidence
is disappointing. María Jesús Albarrán Martínez has devoted a monograph,
a prosopography, and articles to female asceticism, based on the papyri and
ostraka.90 Her work has been praised by Ewa Wipszycka for its careful collec-
tion and analysis of the sources, but Wipszycka argues convincingly that the
dragnet has swept up many women who were not in fact ascetics, distorting
and inflating the body of evidence.91 Many of the women in question were
simply people who had family members in monasteries and corresponded
with them. Still, Wipszycka concludes that the book persuades her that the
subject of female ascetics is not quite as hopeless as she argued in an earlier
article.92 In that paper, she focused mainly on monastic organization, drawing
largely on the literary tradition, including the apophthegmata and similar
works (although she refuses to credit the information about wandering nuns,
against Susanna Elm and Benedicta Ward); she expressed disappointment
about the documentary material for the subject.
The substantial monograph of Erica Mathieson on Christian women in
the third and fourth centuries, not focused on ascetics but firmly based on
the papyri, does not face such selection problems, but much of its space is
devoted to subjects not particular to women and with respect to which they
have nothing very unusual to offer, like biblical imagery and themes, theolog-
ical questions, and the practice of prayer.93 The lack of a distinctive focus on
women is indeed the major criticism of the review by Gregory Paulson.94 To
89. Behlmer (2015).

90. Albarrán Martínez (2009, 2010, 2011, 2013).
91. Wipszycka (2012), reviewing Albarrán Martínez (2011). She notes the failure of the book to
use some of the literature on women’s monasticism cited in the bibliography, notably works of
Rebecca Krawiec and Caroline Schroeder.
92. Wipszycka (2002).
93. Mathieson (2014).
94. In BMCR 2016.12.28.
17
round out what may be described as a somewhat disappointing area, the ar-
ticle on Christian women in the early Arab period by Gesa Schenke describes
clearly the shortage of information about women, leading her to conclude
that women were largely “lost in marriage” and preoccupied with family
matters.95 She does not think that Muslim rule had any particularly direct
impact on women, who, instead, simply shared in the circumstances faced by
their families.
The Gendering of Life Experiences

The final section of this paper is devoted to what might unkindly be described
as a miscellany but which I think represents an as yet inchoate but fascinating
turn toward the study of the gendering of experience. Part of this has to do
with less formal and more qualitative aspects of life experiences, as they are
perceived and expressed in petitions and private letters; part of it has to do
with the attempt to get at the nature of personal relationships and at women’s
experience of violence; and part has to do with the vexed question of the link
between gender and perceived ethnicity.
It is striking how little explicit engagement, beyond lip service, with
gender studies there has been in papyrology. The most valuable treatment is
Terry Wilfong’s paper for the Dumbarton Oaks Symposium on Byzantine
Egypt.96 He gives a good survey of work on women in Egypt based on the
papyri and recognizes that the subject has become a mainstream interest. But,
he points out, gender studies involves much more than women’s history; it
requires attention to men and masculinity, too. This is so far hardly to be
seen, except to some degree in the book, written for a popular audience, of
Dominic Montserrat.97 There we find a direct engagement with the question
of homosexuality in Egyptian society along with the more usual topics con-
cerning women’s lives. Montserrat’s keen attention to the realities of daily life
led him to consider the physical circumstances in which people had sex and
how that affected them—subjects on which we have little direct information,
95. Schenke (2015).

96. Wilfong (2007); cf. also the preface to Wilfong (2003).
97. Montserrat (1996). His premature death was a tremendous loss to the study of gender in
Greco-Roman Egypt; an idea of what he had to contribute to the field can be had also from his
article on the male body (Montserrat [1998]).
18
any more than we really do about premarital sex.98 But issues of gender, elusive
as they are, remain important and understudied. In what follows, I describe a
few ways in which gender differences in daily life have been approached. It is
also fair to say that there are signs that attention to the body, another area in
which Montserrat was a pioneer in papyrology, is increasing. Two important
examples are Sabine Huebner’s article on female circumcision and Véronique
Dasen’s extensive publications on giving birth, multiple births, breastfeeding,
and related subjects, in which the papyrological evidence is part of a larger
picture.99 Much more may be expected in the near future from a number of
scholars.
The value of women’s letters for subjective aspects of life—not just the ac-
tivities mentioned in them but how they are presented and treated—has been
evident since Mondini’s article, and even Schubart devoted some space to the
question. As Raffaella Cribiore and I were working on our collection of these
letters, we both felt the attraction of the letters and experienced unease with the
usual assumption that they represent unmediated testimony.100 We concluded
that it was only occasionally possible to be sure who actually wrote down the
letter on papyrus, but that the oral style of the letters made it likely that women’s
dictation was for the most part taken down verbatim or nearly so. One imag-
ines that, in general, the secretaries were male; thus women’s correspondence is
largely filtered through male ears, brains, and hands. This is why language seems
such a critical area in reading the letters.
The degree to which women went about in public or were largely confined
to the home is a perennial staple of the study of ancient gender differentiation.
There has been no systematic treatment of this question for Greco-Roman
Egypt, but our sense from the letters certainly favored substantial freedom of
movement (even if often accompanied) for women at least of the wealthier
classes—and perhaps of necessity for the poor. Women did use public baths,
as Béatrice Meyer has shown; not everyone approved, and the church fathers
98. Still worth reading is also the article by Whitehorne (1979), who sees Greco-Roman Egypt
as a highly sexualized society, and yet one whose written record mostly gives us very little
sense of this. He stresses the need to combine different types of evidence to reach worthwhile
conclusions.
99. Huebner (2009b); Dasen (2005; on twins). Most of Dasen’s extensive work is not specifi-
cally papyrological, but it deals with both Egypt and the Greco-Roman world.
100. Bagnall and Cribiore (2006, [2006] 2008). See also Cribiore (2001, 2002; both on the
archive of the strategos Apollonios), written during that project, and Ruffing (2006) on the
Apollonios and Paniskos archives.
19
were particularly hostile to the practice.101 But they did. We know almost
nothing about whether they used separate facilities from men (which seems
likely) or at times the same facility but at different hours (a well-known prac-
tice in other periods and places). They were at times served by male attendants,
which may seem surprising, but these were either slaves or young boys, or per-
haps both; in any case, they were not persons whose presence would infringe
on ancient concepts of modesty.102
Women’s encounters with violence have attracted a significant amount
of recent study. Bernard Legras discusses several incidents recorded in
papyri from the Ptolemaic period, concluding that none of them involved
violence directed at women because they were women; they are no dif-
ferent, in his view, from such incidents involving men that are recorded in
other texts, usually complaints.103 He asks how to explain the absence in the
record of mention of specifically sexual crimes, which are equally missing in
the Roman papyri and barely more noticeable in those from Late Antiquity.
He proposes that such things were simply not reported to the authorities.
That seems sure to be right in cases of domestic violence, but it is hard, in
the absence of evidence, to know if it is correct in other instances. Maryline
Parca is also very reserved about any gender element in violent attacks by
and against women; she prefers to see ethnic tensions in the Ptolemaic
instances.104
There has been increasing interest in trying to uncover emotions and the
tone of personal interactions in the papyri: not an easy endeavor, or it would
have been done long ago. Reinhold Scholl, as an expert in Ptolemaic slavery,
asked what we can discern about the relationship between female owners
and their slaves, where there were grounds for worry both about violence and
about the potential for a sexual relationship.105 Surprised that no one had
looked into this before, he enumerated the known cases, concluding that we
can see little if any difference between men’s ownership and women’s: acqui-
sition was largely by the same means; women owned both male and female
101. Meyer (1992).

102. Legras (1999) thinks the boy was prepubescent.
103. Legras (1999).
104. Parca (2002). This is a paper delivered in 1997, and she apparently did not know Legras
(1999) in time to include it in her discussion. Schubert (2014) is a recent publication of a com-
plaint by a woman, with a good discussion of parallels.
105. Scholl (2002).
120
slaves, and slaves of both Greek and Egyptian origin. None of this is very sur-
prising, and the evidence is virtually all devoid of emotional tonality.
In a volume that came out of a research project on the emotions directed
by Angelos Chaniotis, Chrysi Kotsifou contributed both a general survey of
papyrus documents and the types of emotional information they can yield,
including the relationship of emotion and gender, and a targeted look at one
family in the Sakaon archive.106 In general, women’s use of petitions, which
are full of emotional language, in Late Antiquity seems more limited than in
earlier periods.107
Two other forays into microhistory give hints of the kind of thing that is
possible. A brief article by Arthur Verhoogt looks at the marriage strategies
implicit in the linkage of two families in Tebtynis: one wealthy in land but
in financial difficulties, of Greco-Egyptian background; the other of the
Greek settler class, prone to naming their girls after queens.108 One family
was wealthier, the other better connected in village politics. The use of girls
as a form of currency is in no way unique to Roman Tebtynis, but we know
enough of the families to be able to get some sense of the context in which
such decisions would have been made. The other case is in all respects the
opposite: we know nothing at all of the context, but the direct contents are
intensely personal. An ostrakon from Elephantine edited by Nikos Litinas
describes the activities of “your woman,” neither the writer nor the recip-
ient being known to us.109 She was drinking, the note says, with two other
people, at least one of whom was male, and a mention is made of the removal
of some of the property of the addressee. Was the woman the recipient’s wife,
or “woman” in a less legal sense? We do not know; I would read it as “wife.”
A nosy neighbor? A spy placed by the husband? Litinas valiantly canvasses
the possibilities but prudently abstains from deciding. What comes across un-
mistakably is the fact that someone would write such things down and use
them in some way.
106. The survey; Kotsifou (2012a); on Aurelia Artemis and her children: Kotsifou (2012b). The
survey starts with the archive of Paniskos and Ploutogeneia (but does not know the discussion
in Ruffing [2006]); emotion and gender are treated on 72–75. The article on Artemis considers
the way petitions seek to elicit empathy and the role that gender and status play in this effort.
On this archive, see also Bérenger-Badel (2005), mainly from the governor’s point of view.
107. Bagnall (2004).
108. Verhoogt (2004).
109. Litinas (2014).
12
There has been a fair amount of debate about the degree to which ethnicity
in Greco-Roman Egypt was gendered. Because more of the early Greek settlers
were male than female, it is a certainty that some proportion of those settlers
who married took Egyptian wives. As we have seen, the Fayyum census records
suggest that about a tenth of married settlers had Egyptian wives, like Dryton
in his second marriage. Throughout the period, and even more in the Roman
period than earlier, we find that women of the propertied classes are more likely
than the men of the same families to have Egyptian names. Jane Rowlandson has
argued that this is not sufficient evidence to support a sweeping dichotomy be-
tween male/Greek/public and female/Egyptian/private.110 Moreover, although
women were far less likely to be able to read and write Greek than men were, she
does not think their relatively greater illiteracy gives us any information on rela-
tive ability to speak the language. In my view, this is an overreaction to what was
admittedly a too easy schematization. There is, in fact, not only the onomastic
evidence but the fact that in Late Antiquity women turn to Coptic instead of
Greek as an epistolary language, far more than is the case for men.111
The last third of the century surveyed here has obviously been a time of
great excitement for anyone interested in the social history of the ancient
world, and especially of the Egypt of the papyri—meaning the Demotic,
Coptic, and Arabic papyri as well as those in Greek. All of us owe a tremen-
dous debt to those who led the way in raising the issues that today are part of
the remit of every social historian. Some of the questions debated across the
decades remain alive today, particularly the tension between sociology and so-
cial history. Our evidence will always be uneven and act as an impediment to
a full-scale description of historical change. By contrast, the supposed struggle
between women’s history as an autonomous subject and as a part of a larger
whole seems to me largely a straw woman. Urging serious attention to women’s
lives in antiquity has never really implied detaching them from those of men.
It is not my purpose here to try to guess what lies ahead. But I close with the sug-
gestion that the next decades will be more productively spent looking to elicit the
varieties of experience that individuals had as a result of gender, class, age, ethnicity,
literacy,112 and other parts of their identity than in arguing for sweeping
110. Rowlandson (2004), citing earlier work by Jean Bingen, Orsolina Montevecchi, and me,
as well as van Minnen (2002).
111. Bagnall ([2001] 2006).
112. Sheridan (1998) discusses the significance of literacy in shaping women’s economic lives.
Sabine Huebner has a forthcoming article on women’s literacy.
12
generalizations. Without significant new evidence, particularly quanti-

fiable evidence, the latter are likely to be hard to come by. Total history of
anything is hard to write from the papyri, and all the various projects for all-
encompassing synthesis that we have seen have foundered. But the various
types of microhistory that I have described in recent work seem to me capable
of shedding light far beyond the cases that give rise to them, and there is much
yet to do.
123
Cosmetics in Daily Life of the

Ancient Mediterranean
Ann Ellis Hanson
In the latter portion of the Oeconomicus, Xenophon’s Socrates claims

to have heard that the young Athenian Ischomachus was considered a fine
gentleman (kalos te k’agathos) by men, women, citizens, and foreigners alike,
and so he determined to make Ischomachus’ acquaintance (6.17). Once con-
versation began between the two men, it turns out that Socrates wants to
know about Ischomachus’ wife and whether or not she came to him from her
parents already knowing her household duties. Socrates’ question prompts
a laugh from Ischomachus: “How could she, for she was not yet fifteen! She
had, he went on, excellent training in controlling her appetite, as had I from
my father, and as soon as she became accustomed to family conversations
with me, I began to describe her duties to her.”1 Ischomachus’ first lesson is
about marriage itself, in which he lectures at her more than he converses with
her; after this, his mode of teaching moves in the direction of the Socratic
question-and-answer style—a dialogue, if you will, in which the young wife
learns by thinking out answers to her husband’s prompts about many aspects
of household management she needs to master. Analogies help, such as the
role of the queen bee who stays within the hive, assigning tasks to other bees
and overseeing their work, or the Phoenician merchant ship, where there was
a place for everything and each piece of ship’s tackle properly stored in its
own place. Ischomachus acknowledges that she is being assigned tasks harder
1. My paraphrase of Xenophon is based on the elegant edition and translation of the text by
Pomeroy (1994).
Ann Ellis Hanson, Cosmetics in Daily Life of the Ancient Mediterranean In: New Directions in the Study of Women in
the Greco-Roman World. Edited by: Ronnie Ancona and Georgia Tsouvala, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford
University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0008
124
124 An n Ellis H anson
than what is assigned to their slaves, but he explains that this is because she
is the one who gains most by preservation of the household’s property and
loses most by its destruction. She is, then, the one who will take best care of
the household’s assets. She disagrees with him on one point, telling him he
is wrong to think her tasks the more laborious ones, for it would, in fact, be
far harder for her to neglect their possessions than for her to care for them
diligently—an answer that brings her praise from Socrates when Ischomachus
relays how she contradicted him.
One day perhaps early in their married life, the wife presented herself
to Ischomachus with white lead (psimythion) on her face to make it paler,
root of the plant alkanet (enchousa) on her cheeks to make them redder,
platform sandals to make her taller. Ischomachus’ reaction to her deliber-
ately altered appearance is by no means positive, but rather than scolding or
threatening the girl, he talks about makeup in terms of the deception and du-
plicity it represents, its fakery and counterfeiting. He asks her to contemplate
embracing him when he has lathered pigments over his own body and face
(miltos and andreikelos, red and flesh-colored). He tells her “these tricks might
perhaps succeed in deceiving strangers without ever being detected, but those
who spend their entire lives together are bound to be found out if they try to
deceive one another” (10.2–13). When she asks Ischomachus for advice as to
how she might look truly beautiful, he reprises his comparison with the queen
bee2 who constantly works in behalf of her hive, suggesting exercises to her
such as kneading bread, moving back and forth before her loom as she weaves,
shaking out their clothes. Ischomachus reported to Socrates that in future his
wife never again resorted to artificial embellishments of her person but con-
stantly busied herself with chores that not only benefited her household but
exercised her body. His wife was not a deceiver who sits around as slaves do,
but household activities enhanced her complexion and body without need
for artificial adornment: her undoctored face and graceful body alone were
more than sufficient stimulants to arouse a husband’s desire.
Ischomachus did not bother to ask his young wife what inspired her to
test makeup as a way to increase his attentions to her. The obvious wealth of
Ischomachus’ family and probably also of his wife’s family no doubt sheltered
this Athenian parthenos from the world outside her home until she moved to
the household of her husband. She may have achieved a basic literacy at home,
so as to be able to write and read household inventories or brief notes prior
2. Pomeroy (1984).
125
Cosmetics in Daily Life 125
to her marriage, or she may have acquired the skill only later, as his wife—or
perhaps not at all, remaining unable to write or read throughout her life.
The topic of literacy never comes up in the couple’s conversations as
Xenophon reconstructed them, although Ischomachus himself was likely
to have achieved at least minimal literacy, for being able to read offers
protections for a family’s property and possessions. His young wife no doubt
heard about cosmetic enhancement of her appearance from female relatives
or other women in her home, and she may even have learned about makeup
and other embellishments for face and body from Homer’s tale of Hera
beautifying herself in the Iliad (14.164–221). The goddess intends to seduce
her husband and turn his attentions away from the battlefield at Troy, fur-
nishing her an opportunity to help out the wearied Achaean forces she favors.
Deception, then, lies at the heart of Hera’s story, as she attempts to turn her
husband away from watching war games to making love. The epic poet plays
the scene in comic mode, since Hera’s tale not only instructs men in his au-
dience about the deceitful ways of women and wives but adds the irony that,
in this case, the goddess’s target is her unfaithful husband. Hera locks her-
self in her chamber, bathes and anoints her body with ambrosial sweet oil
whose scent penetrates heaven and earth, and then dresses her hair with addi-
tional oils. Next, she dons a veil, diaphanous clothing, and last of all sandals
to mimic a warrior’s taking up his weaponry for battle in a similar head-to-toe
ordering. Not satisfied, Hera decides to borrow “loveliness and desirability,
the graces with which the goddess Aphrodite overwhelms mortal men and all
the immortals.” Hera even dissembles her motivation for needing borrowed
equipment.
In Plautus’ Mostellaria, it is not so much that the young meretrix
Philematium intends to deceive her lover Philolaches now that he has al-
ready purchased her freedom for her, but simply that she desires to please
him through cosmetic enhancements. The girl’s worldly wise servant Scapha
assures Philematium that old women are the ones who must resort to white
lead on the face and pinkish-purple clay on the cheeks to hide their advanced
age and inherent ugliness. The beautiful young woman, however, is lovelier
when naked and lacking embellishment. She smells best when she doesn’t
smell at all (257–274).
My purpose in this chapter is to chart evidence for normative attention to
one’s appearance and to suggest the kinds of cosmetic preparations that might
have been habitually in use on one’s face or body in Roman Egypt, where plen-
tiful evidence from papyri suggests that neither the behavior of Ischomachus’
young wife nor that of Homer’s goddess Hera inform us as to how perfumed
126
oils and unguents are used within the home. By the first century ce, more than
four hundred years after Ischomachus and his wife were resident in Athens,
rolls of papyrus with recipes were in circulation; some were more medical
in content, while others contained recipes intended only to enhance a user’s
appearance, and collections of recipes labeled Kosmetikon or Kosmetika were
likely to contain both types. One early Kosmetikon is attributed to Queen
Cleopatra VII—unlikely, we think these days, to be from the hand of the
queen herself, although perhaps from the milieu of her court, famous for its
cultivation and elegance. Galen does seem to credit Queen Cleopatra her-
self with being the author when he quotes recipes from the Kosmetikon he
is excerpting for inclusion in his own drug book, especially recipes that deal
with mange and loss of hair (De Comp. Med. sec. loc.1.2, 12.403–404 Kühn).
No Hellenistic collection of cosmetic recipes seems to have survived in toto
to modern times, but snippets are known through quotations in later writers,
including Galen. The name for “title tag,” the label affixed to a closed roll of
papyrus that reveals the roll’s contents, is probably either sittyba (Shackleton
Bailey) or syllybus, (OLD), for the form of the Greek word Cicero uses in let-
ters to Atticus has been mangled by Latin scribes unfamiliar with the term.
A recently published title tag from the Beinecke Library at Yale University
seems to register a work entitled “Daily Routines” (Kathemerina), authored
by someone named Olympios, who might be Cleopatra’s personal physician,
called (mistakenly, it would seem) by Plutarch or his tradition Olympos/
Olympus (Plut. Vit. Ant. 82.4).3
Mummy portraits have been found in cemeteries of the Roman period
over much of the former province, although the first to attract collectors and
scholars were unearthed at the end of the nineteenth century in cemeteries of
the Fayum, at er-Rubayat servicing areas around the village of Philadelpheia,
and at the large cemetery near the village of Hawara, entrance to the Fayum
and site of a pyramid and mortuary temple belonging to a Middle Kingdom
pharaoh.4 These affective portraits of individuals were painted on wooden
boards in encaustic technique, less frequently in tempera, and inserted
into the mummy wrappings over the face of the deceased. Men wear white
garments, women clothing of many hues, both often decorated with gold leaf
to enhance jewelry and other finery. Their skin tones reiterate the varied her-
itage of this mixed Greek and Egyptian population, in which the men were
3. Hanson (2004); Plut. Vit. Ant., 28, 32, 293–294, ed. Pelling.
4. Roberts (2008).
127
often deeply tanned and swarthy, the women with paler skin tones, some-
times sallow. The lips and cheeks of the women are painted pink, and images
of the men on occasion betray traces of rouge as well. The eyes of both men
and women were outlined in black with kohl that also darkens eyelids and
serves as mascara for eyelashes. Hairstyles for women reflect those worn by
women of the imperial household and change over the three hundred or so
years when mummy portraits were in vogue; men’s facial hair also followed
current trends.
Several matters with regard to Ischomachus and his young wife are like-
wise touched upon in letters of a family archive from Roman Egypt consisting
of some 230 papyri written in Greek between the years 113 and 120 ce; the
archive is named for the father of the family, the strategus Apollonius, whose
business papers form the bulk of the collection.5 Twenty-five letters are from
women of the family, especially Apollonius’ mother, Eudaimonis, and his wife
Aline, and these letters provide additional perspectives on women’s literacy,
as well as their serious concern for the attractiveness of the clothing they
produce back in Hermopolis for Apollonius to wear when on official busi-
ness.6 The women write to Apollonius asking which fabric he prefers (linen
or wool), the colors and styles in which they are to fashion the garments to be
sent to him (A7.16, letter 46). In one letter, Aline asks him to send her a small
sample of the color he wants for the woolen garment she is currently working
on; she cautions him that if he wants his light, white cloak to drape prop-
erly over his shoulder, he needs to think about (what happened with his?)
purple one.7 The family is wealthy, and, as strategus, Apollonius serves in the
highest office available to Greco-Egyptian provincials in the second century
ce. Eudaimonis and Aline are fully literate in Greek, and Aline’s handwriting
is small, regular, and much more competent than that of her mother-in-
law; further, the vocabulary Aline manipulates is complex and underscores
the fine education she received. In common with Eudaimonis, she some-
times makes use of a scribe to whom she dictates her letter, adding farewell
greetings in her own hand. The women also superintend teams of slave girls
weaving for the commercial market (A7.11, letter 41). Aline sometimes goes
5. The clandestine diggers who discovered Apollonius’ archive sold the papyri to antiquities
dealers purchasing for several European institutions, unaware the papers derived from one and
the same archive.
6. Bagnall and Cribiore ([2006] 2008) A7.1–25, letters 31–55.
7. Accent as πορφυρᾶς, the adjective (πορφυροῦς, -ᾶ, -οῦν) in P.Giss. 20.18 + BL 11.84 = P.Giss.
Apoll. 11.18+BL 12.78 = Bagnall and Cribiore ([2006] 2008) A7.25, letter 55.
128
to the far south of the province to be with her husband during his time as
strategus of the Apollonopolis-Heptakomia district in Upper Egypt, bringing
the younger children with her; otherwise, she resides in Hermopolis. Most of
the correspondence among the three adults occurs when they are not living
there together, as might be expected. The women’s ability to write and read
makes a significant difference in the amount of support and encouragement
they give to Heraidous, eldest daughter of Apollonius, in her studies with a
teacher—by contrast, Ischomachus’ young wife was trained at home to prac-
tice self-control prior to her marriage, according to Xenophon’s Ischomachus.
Heraidous, too, is either a late preteen or already a teenager, and although she
is close in age to the young wife of Ischomachus, no one in her family mentions
marriage, which, although likely for her, will occur some eight to ten years
hence, when she reaches her late teens or early twenties. Heraidous lives with
her paternal grandmother, Eudaimonis, in Hermopolis, district capital of the
Hermopolite nome in Middle Egypt. The letters from her grandmother to
her parents, Eudaimonis’ son and daughter-in-law, invariably mention with
pleasure Heraidous’ steady progress with writing and reading; close to the end
of the archive, Aline reports to Apollonius that there are now younger chil-
dren of the couple, working at their studies in Hermopolis (A7.24, letter 54).
In one letter Eudaimonis tells Aline, who is pregnant, that she hopes this baby
is a boy (A7.11, letter 41). Further correspondence between the two women,
however, never mentions perfumes, unguents, or makeup, and, in fact, cos-
metic enhancements are mentioned only once in the entire Bagnall-Cribiore
collection of 314 letters from the women of Greek and Roman Egypt, and
this letter is part of a shopping list Tetos sends to her father, asking him to
purchase for her myrrh, nard oil, myrrh oil, cloths, containers for pomades
(A2.2, letter 8). Corrections to the papyrus P.Bingen 79.1–4 reveal it also to be
a woman’s shopping list that includes the luxury perfume Foliatum.8
The lack of specific references suggests to me that cosmetic preparations
are readily available for most inhabitants of the province whenever they
want them, and that they are compounded of simple ingredients, easy to
acquire, and often prepared in the home, especially diluting a concentrate
or adding liquid to dried forms. The exception to the assumption of omni-
presence is itself telling: a certain Menelaus located at the quarries of Mons
Claudianus in Egypt’s eastern desert—the probable source of the eight gray
granite columns on the porch of the Pantheon at Rome—writes to his friend,
8. Bagnall and Cribiore ([2006] 2008) A2.2 third/second bce; Andorlini (2016).
129
another Menelaus, “Please, I beg you, do me the favor of buying me a small

flask [lekythion] of rose oil [rhodinon], and send it to me, because mine was
stolen! I find no place here to purchase any” (O.Claud. 1.171.3–7). As the short
note makes clear, no rose oil at all can be bought at an outpost in the desert;
the man who covets rose oil has no choice but to steal some when he finds
it, while the original owner wants a replacement so badly that he writes to a
friend to purchase more for him. He may well be exposed to the desert sun
and his skin require the welcome hydration rose oil affords. This short mes-
sage of appeal is written on a pot sherd because papyrus is also difficult to
acquire in the desert, while broken pieces of pottery are plentiful.
Both Eudaimonis and Aline worry when Apollonius is ill and all in the
house rejoice when his health improves (A7.17, letter 47). Eudaimonis claims
she continues to refrain from bathing or worshipping the gods until she hears
he is safe and sound once again (A7.13, letter 43). While the office of strategus
in Roman Egypt no longer entails military obligations, the women’s fears for
him nonetheless underscore the notion that Apollonius may be called upon to
fight when the uprising of the Jewish diaspora spreads from Cyrene to Egypt
late in the reign of Trajan and remains problematic into Hadrian’s reign.
Eudaimonis writes to her son, “Given the disturbances in our area, I cannot
endure, since day and night I am praying to all the gods and goddesses that
they keep you safe” (A7.3, letter 33). Aline’s anguish is even more palpable
when she writes to Apollonius, echoing at the end of her letter the kind of
strategic advice Homer’s Andromache once gave to Hector (Il. 6.431–434):
I am so worried about you, because of the rumors being spread here

at the moment and the fact that you left me so suddenly. I take no
pleasure in food or drink, being awake day and night, thinking only
of your safety. . . . I beg you, look out for your own safety and do not
approach danger alone without your troop of guards, but you should
do as the strategus here does and put the burden on officials. (A7.15,
letter 45)
Of all the women whose letters are gathered in the Bagnall-Cribiore collec-
tion, Aline seems to me the most likely not only to be sufficiently well edu-
cated so as to be able to channel a bit of Homer, but also sensitive enough to
omit Iliadic lines in which Andromache openly foreshadows the disasters to
come: “Your own great strength will destroy you” (6.407).
When Apollonius’ term as strategus ends, he returns home to resume his
life as a gentleman farmer and he carries with him the letters sent to him while
130
away and most of his business papers, all of which were found together in
Hermopolis. One of the first papyri from his archive to be published appears
to be a memento from an impressive event that took place at the very end
of the Egyptian year, while he was still strategus: the announcement of the
deification of Emperor Trajan9 and the accession of Hadrian, staged as a dia-
logue between Phoebus Apollo and the citizenry of the Apollonopolite dis-
trict (P.Giss. 3).10 The people call for celebrations and laughter, drinking of
wine from fountains and anointing one’s body with unguents from the var-
ious gymnasia (6–14). Rubbing oneself with perfumed oils prior to exercising
in a palaestra of the gymnasium with a strigil for scraping off oils and sweat
thereafter was a favored pastime for Greek males, and Ptolemaic monarchs
fostered gymnasium habits among Greek elites now living in the district cap-
itals or metropoleis of Egypt. Gymnasia continued to flourish in the Roman
period, although country villages that earlier may have enjoyed the pleasures
of a gymnasium under the Ptolemies, such as Philadelpheia in the Fayum,
lost these early in the Roman period. With the creation of councils (boulai)
in the metropoleis after 200 ce, the town councilors assumed responsibilities
for their local community’s food supply, its bathing establishments, and
gymnasia, including the educational programs, themselves paying for building
repairs and enhancements for these institutions. In the mid-third century ce,
councilors at Oxyrhynchus hired a public grammaticus to teach in the gym-
nasium. Lollianus, however, subsequently complained in a petition-dossier he
sent to the emperors that his salary was seldom paid on time and the rations
he received were but sour wine and worm-eaten grain. He begs to be given
a walled-off orchard instead, as a way to guarantee him constant income for
himself and his family (P.Oxy. 47.3366). Papyrus archives shed further light
on the councils in the capitals of the Arsinoite district, the Oxyrhynchite, and
the Hermopolite; those councilors who could afford to spend lavishly on the
public buildings did so, as well as on stipends for victorious athletes in retire-
ment and on free meals for them in the prytanium. Lollianus at Oxyrhynchus
was perhaps unlucky to encounter drachma-pinching councilors, although,
as time went on, more and more councilors claimed they were themselves
impoverished due to their public service. Wrestlers and pancratiasts, the most
vigorous and most admired of athletes, may well have brought their own
9. Emperor Trajan died on either 8 or 9 August 117 ce in Selinus, Cilicia.

10. Also published as Pestman (1994) no. 29.2; Heitsch (1961) no. 12; Smallwood (1966) no. 519,
etc. Discussion in den Boer (1975); see also P.Oxy. 55.3781.
13
bottles of perfumed oils with them for anointing their bodies before contests
in the palaestra.
Galen (129–c. 216 ce), the famous physician at Rome, weighs in on the
matter of cosmetic embellishments at the outset of his ten-book Compound
Drugs according to Place (De Comp. Med. sec. loc. 1.2, 12.434.5–435.7 Kühn).
He asks, “In what way does the cosmetic portions of medicine [kosmetika]
differ from the part that only beautifies or embellishes [kommotika]?,” and
then he answers his own question. By doing so, he not only medicalizes the
rewards to individuals that paying attention to their outward appearance and
their body’s presentation to the world at large bring, but eschews the gender
bias inherent in most other ancient and late antique discussions of cosmetic
preparations, for authors tend to assume that women are the ones who paint
their faces white and rouge their cheeks (Ov. Medic. 73). To prove his point
about the deceptive unpleasantness makeup produces in a partner or spouse,
Ischomachus does ask his young wife to contemplate him with face and
body painted with more masculine hues, along with reddened cheeks. She
recoils much as he did when her saw her in full paint. Ovid also suggests that
husbands sometimes deck themselves out much as the womenfolk do (Medic.
25), while papyri show that Hellenophone males in Roman Egypt acquired,
and, in all likelihood, rubbed on their own skin and scalp perfumed unguents
and oils whose aim was to preserve the body in its natural state of attractive-
ness. Galen’s explication of the differences between kosmetika and kommotika
is worth presenting (my translation):
τῷ μὲν κομμωτικῷ σκοπός ἐστι κάλλος ἐπίκτητον ἐργάσασθαι, τῷ δὲ τῆς

ἰατρικῆς μέρει τῷ κοσμητικῷ τὸ κατὰ φύσιν ἅπαν ἐν τῷ σώματι φυλάττειν,
ᾧ καὶ τὸ κατὰ φύσιν ἕπεται κάλλος. ἀπρεπὴς γὰρ ὀφθῆναι κεφαλὴ πάθος
ἀλωπεκίας ἔχουσα, καθάπερ γε κᾂν ἐκ τῶν ὀφθαλμῶν αἱ βλεφαρίδες
ἐκπέσωσι καὶ τῶν ὀφρύων αἱ τρίχες. οὐ μόνον δ’ εἰς κάλλος, ἀλλὰ καὶ πολὺ
πρότερον εἰς αὐτὴν τὴν ὑγείαν τῶν μορίων αἱ τρίχες αὗται συντελοῦσιν, ὡς
ἐν τοῖς περὶ χρείας μορίων ἐδείχθη. τί δεῖ λέγειν περὶ λειχήνων ἢ ψώρας ἢ
λέπρας ὡς παρὰ φύσιν ταῦτα; τὸ μέντοι λευκότερον τὸ χρῶμα τοῦ προσώπου
ποιεῖν ἐκ φαρμάκων ἢ ἐρυθρότερον ἢ τὰς τρίχας τῆς κεφαλῆς οὔλας ἢ πυρρὰς
ἢ μελαίνας ἢ καθάπερ αἱ γυναῖκες ἐπὶ μήκιστον αὐξανομένας, ταῦτα καὶ τὰ
τοιαῦτα τῆς κομμωτικῆς κακίας ἐστὶν, οὐ τῆς ἰατρικῆς τέχνης ἔργα.
The aim of embellishment, kommotika, is to produce “add-on” beauty,

but the aim of the cosmetic aspects of medicine, kosmetika, is to pre-
serve everything that naturally belongs to the body, to which the beauty
132
that occurs naturally follows. Caring for the hair is a part of medicine
because it is in accordance with nature, since the head is ugly to look
at when afflicted by alopecy or mange, equally so when eyelashes fall
out from around the eyes and hairs from the eyebrows. Not only do
these particular hairs pertain to natural attractiveness, but they also
contribute in more primary ways to health itself, as I pointed out in
my treatise Usefulness of the Parts. What is the point of going on to talk
about lichens or psoriasis or pustules—examples of dermatological
maladies that are contrary to nature? The following, however, are part
and parcel of the evilness associated with embellishments: making the
color of one’s face whiter, or rosier from drugs [pharmaka]; or making
the curly locks of one’s head red or black, or frizzed to increase its ex-
tent, as women are wont to do. These latter are not the business of
medicine.
Galen makes a strong case for medicine playing a role in providing counsel
and therapeutic recipes to aid the individual in maintaining the body’s integrity
with its exterior parts maintaining a healthy appearance. Should these suffer
damage, the recipes in his collection offer the means to restore them back into
the integrated whole. Galen knew both worlds of the Roman Empire, for he
was born in Pergamum, on the Mediterranean coast of what is now northern
Turkey, and immigrated to Rome in the 160s, remaining there for most of the
rest of his exceptionally long life, for the Arabic tradition has him living into
his mid-eighties. Not only was Galen a skilled researcher in medicine, asking
many of the right questions, especially in anatomy (even though his physiology
was rejected with increasing frequency from the Enlightenment onward). He
was a much-trusted doctor to friends and acquaintances at all levels of society,
as well as an astute social climber. Once arrived in Rome, Galen speedily be-
came acquainted with the city’s aristocrats and not long afterward was one
of the physicians attendant on Emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180) and his
family. When Galen was an octogenarian, he was still making house calls at
the imperial palace on the Palatine Hill, although the resident family was by
then that of Emperor Septimius Severus (145–211). Galen’s emphasis on the
difference between artificial embellishment of one’s person, on the one hand,
and preservation of the body’s inherent attractiveness, on the other, through
application of dermatological treatments, justifies the production of his own
collection of recipes, drawn in large part from drug books by predecessors
such as Crito, physician at the court of Emperor Trajan, and the Kosmetikon
attributed to Queen Cleopatra that instructs how to sustain a full head of hair
13
in prime condition. While Galen makes brief mention of embellishments to

one’s person that are not the business of medicine, such as painting one’s face
and dyeing one’s hair, he betrays little interest in hectoring women who did.
Ovid tries to warn his Corinna about the damage she was doing to her
hair with potent dyes and hot curling irons. Eventually she had so abused her
delicate locks that few hairs remained, and for a time she was forced to wear
a wig made from the hair of a German slave (Am. 1.14). Galen insists that
attempts to enhance beauty by artificial means have nothing to do with med-
icine or the doctor, and his explication of the differences between kosmetika
and kommotika passes over not only the obvious expense and potential du-
plicity of makeup but also the dangers of overuse associated with artificial
embellishments of self. Galen exhorts the medical man not to succumb to
patients’ demands for unhealthy cosmetics.
The cosmetic prescriptions Ovid includes in his Face Cosmetics are jus-
tifiably praised, for they give the impression of actual recipes known from
over three hundred examples in the papyri and many times more in the drug
books of Galen and later medical writers. Ovid’s first and longest recipe in
Face Cosmetics is compounded from multiple ingredients and is said to make
the face luminous and bright first thing in the morning: barley with chaff
removed, vetch, ten eggs, and ending with gum Arabic and honey for liquid
ingredients (51–68). Another recipe of his named alcyonea (77–78) calls for
a bird’s nest to rid the face of spots. The Elder Pliny knows about a medica-
ment with even greater efficacy called crocodilea that was much in vogue in
the Rome of his day and he describes it at length (Plin. HN 28.108–110): it
was gathered from the intestines of the land crocodile who feeds on sweet-
smelling flowers, thus an herbivore. When extracted from the croc’s intestines
and mixed with cedar oil or water and applied to the face as a mask, it
removes blotches, heals diseases that spread over the face, and clarifies the
skin, removing freckles, pimples, spots, and rendering the complexion ra-
diant. A similar claim for crocodilea is given in the Greek pseudo-Dioscorides
Euporista, or Medicaments Easily Procured (1.104). In this account the sub-
stance is associated with clays from Chios and Selinous, which, when mixed
with crocodilea, pseudo- Dioscorides claims, make the face resplendent.
Horace in his Epode 12 seems to know something about a cosmetic prepa-
ration made from crocodile dung (stercore fucatus crocodili; 11), but either
he or his source has misunderstood and considers this a cosmetic rouge. Or
perhaps Horace has deliberately misunderstood so as to make his portrait of
the fetid old hag forcing him to make love more unpleasant than it already
is, for by using the crocodile preparation to redden her cheeks, her profuse
134
sweating causes the white and red paints to run together. For Pliny, crocodilea
is a clarifying mask, not to be worn in public. The best crocodilea is crumbly in
texture and shiny in appearance when rubbed between the fingers and is pre-
pared for use in a manner similar to that used for white lead (cerussa), a fact
that may heighten the confusion of Horace or his source. Those Romans who
could afford crocodilea were eager to apply it to their faces, for the wondrous
results it yielded, underscoring the fact that Pliny’s audience is more familiar
with crocodilea than was the audience of Horace, perhaps even prior to the
absorption of Egypt and its crocodiles into the Roman Empire.
Perfumed oils and unguents are popular among Mediterranean populations
and are mentioned frequently enough in papyri, especially in accounts and
lists, to make clear that wealthier inhabitants in the Roman province of Egypt
were anointing their faces and bodies with compounds of olive oil (the pre-
ferred oil for cosmetic preparations) mixed with the odor-producing parts of
plants and minerals as a pleasant means to lubricate one’s face and body in the
arid climate of the Mediterranean basin. Women, according to Theophrastus’
Odors, prefer the oils and unguents they use to be powerfully scented and as
long-lasting as possible (42), such as myrrh oil (staktê), oil of sweet marjoram
(amarakinon), and spikenard (nardinon), all three of which perfumed oils
Theophrastus claims are expensive. Even more sought after was the perfumed
oil Theophrastus suggestively names “Magnificence” (Megaleion), because it
was compounded from costly ingredients and took a long time to prepare
(30). By Late Antiquity, however, the adjective megaleios had become an hon-
orific title for a wealthy patron or high official, its use as a name for an expen-
sive perfumed oil apparently forgotten. The first three items mentioned by
Theophrastus in Odors do appear in lists and accounts on papyrus throughout
antiquity—e.g., oil of myrrh (staktê: P.Col. 8.240.13, P.Prag. 1.88.4, Stud.Pal.
20.233.2), sweet marjoram oil (amarakinon: P.Cair.Zen. 4.59536.18), and
spikenard (nardinon: SB 28.17139.13).
Men, on the other hand, according to Theophrastus’ Odors, prefer the
oils and unguents they apply to their skin to be lighter and easily diffused in
the air (42), giving examples such as rose oil (rhodinon), cedar oil (kyprinon
or kypros in Theophrastus and some papyri), and lily oil (krinon). He speaks
so frequently in Odors about the virtues of rose oil, often in the same breath
with cedar oil, that he gives the impression of having used these oils him-
self. Although many of the perfumed oils and unguents are no doubt man-
ufactured in both expensive and cheap varieties, or knock-offs, we know for
certain that the finest rose oil was marketed as “first quality” throughout
Ptolemaic and Roman times, attested early in the third century bce in the
135
archive of Zenon (P.Lond. 7.2141) and in the price edict of Diocletian at the
end of the third century ce.11
Nemesion, tax collector for Julio-Claudian emperors at the Fayum village
of Philadelpheia, is known for his partnership with the Roman centurion on
active duty in Egypt, L. Cattius Catullus (P.Thomas 5).12 For some thirteen
years during the mid-first century ce the two men joined together in agricul-
tural dealings, sharing profits and expenses. The provincial Nemesion is the
owner of record for real estate and grain lands, as well as the herds of sheep
and goats; the Roman Cattius supplies armed soldiers under his command
to enforce cooperation from recalcitrant shepherds in their employ and to
assist Nemesion in the collection of private debts owed to him from loans
to indigent fellow villagers. Nemesion’s wife Thermouthis is literate, an un-
usual accomplishment for a woman from a farming village, and Nemesion
retains the letter she wrote to him in July 59, detailing what is happening at
home while he was away on business, including the arrival of Cattius (whom
she calls Lykos/Lucius), who seizes the shepherds’ belongings.13 Nemesion
apparently encouraged his wife’s fluency in writing Greek, for she replicates
several of his orthographic infelicities, such as writing upsilon in the place of
the diphthong omicron-iota, and confusing long and short vowels. Not unlike
the young wife of Ischomachus, Thermouthis presents herself as guardian of
the household’s property.
P.Graux 2.10 is a letter Servilius wrote to Nemesion, reporting on purchases
he made for Nemesion: five rolls of papyrus, one and a quarter cotyls (about
one-third of a liter) of first-quality Italian rose oil for eight drachmas, an
amount about equal to the wages of a semiskilled worker for seven or eight
days, in addition to other costly items, including cubes of silphium, perhaps
to be made into perfumes or medicaments, and a gold ring, likely presents for
Thermouthis. Servilius’ access to Italian goods that end up on Alexandrian
markets may indicate he was involved in the transshipping of Egyptian wheat
to Puteoli, the important depot in these years at the southern point of the
bay of Naples. Servilius’ willingness to purchase items for Nemesion, who
lives up-country in the Fayum, implies their reciprocal relationship, a token
of which is the wheat Servilius asks Nemesion to sell for him at current price,
11. Lauffer (1971) 36.89.

12. I have spent some years gathering together and preparing for publication the approximately
125 papyri in Nemesion’s archive and am drawing on some of that material here.
13. SB 14.11585 = Bagnall and Cribiore ([2006] 2008) B4.34, letter 233; Hanson (2015) 20–29.
136
unless the sale has already taken place. At the close of his letter, Servilius sends
greetings to Thermouthis and all those in the household, as well as reaffirming
to Nemesion the promise to fill any requests he may have (“If you need some-
thing, just write, and I will do it”; 2.10.13).14
In his Enquiry into Plants Theophrastus notes that the fragrance of the
Egyptian rose, in particular, is not as intense as that produced by other
flowers and that the Egyptian rosebush lives only five years, the potency of its
blossoms diminishing as it ages (6.8.5). There seem to be quite a few references
to rhodinon in papyri, but the word can also refer to the color pink and to
dyes for making clothing or wall paint that hue. The text of an early Ptolemaic
account from mummy cartonnage (P.Petr. 2.34b ii 4–6) reads ῥοδίνου β
κ(ότυλαι) η, probably indicating “2 c[otyls] of rose oil, 8 [drachmas],” rather
than “one cotyl of second quality rose oil, 8 [drachmas].” The rose oil in this list
is paired with two entries for cedar oil, a join already noted by Theophrastus.
Nonetheless, ambiguities involving rhodinon, whether indicating rose oil or
the color pink, can be seen in editions of papyri whose editors vacillate be-
tween the two meanings.
Several grades of rose oil were available for purchase, and buying not only
rose oil of first quality but rose oil imported from Italy marks Nemesion as
a wealthy man, as do his reciprocal business dealings with Servilius and the
other men identified only by Roman family names ( Julius and Antonius).15
His resources are considerable when compared with those of the peasant
farmers of Philadelpheia and other, smaller villages in his Fayum neigh-
borhood from whom he and his collectors gather cash payments for capi-
tation taxes owed to Rome, the most important of which was the poll tax
(laographia). His business papers show that for 51 ce, Claudius’ eleventh
regnal year, he anticipated collecting from 906 and a half male villagers of
Philadelpheia between the ages of fourteen and sixty-one a total of 5 talents,
1,940 drachmas, 4½ obols (P.Sijp. 26.137).16 Nemesion, however, was not a
14. Andorlini (2016), papyrus evidence for trade in luxury goods between Puteoli and
Alexandria.
15. In contrast to the centurion Cattius, Nemesion’s archive never shows Servilius, Julius (said
to be son-in-law of Servilius; P.Graux 2.10.4), or Antonius (said to be “son of Leonides” and
“soldier from a cohort,” στρατιώτης ἐκ σπείρης; P.Graux 2.10.6–7) with the Roman tria nomina.
Hence the trio may have assumed Roman names only in anticipation of the Roman citizenship
they hope to gain at the end of their active military service in an auxiliary cohort or a naval
classis.
16. The “one-half man” appears because taxpayers who die within the first months of the year
are asked to pay less than the full amount and are thus in the tax registers as “a half man.”
137
publicanus, for these had been fading as a group from the Roman scene since
the demise of the Roman Republic,17 and by the middle of the first century
ce those still bidding for contracts to collect Rome’s taxes are to be found in
older provinces, such as Asia. The Gospel writers vilified publicani to whom
they were paying their taxes, and in the King James version they speak repeat-
edly of “publicans and sinners” (telonai kai hamartoloi), for the amounts they
extorted from provincials also included the publican’s own profits, in addi-
tion to taxes for Rome. Nemesion’s situation was different, as was his title,
“collector of money taxes” (praktor argyrikon), for he was operating under the
new system introduced by Octavian/Augustus when he incorporated Egypt
into the Roman provincial system in 30 bce upon the demise of Cleopatra,
last of the Ptolemies. During Augustus’ reign residents of Egypt underwent
provincial censuses and accordingly paid taxes as assessed.
Nemesion apparently serves willingly as praktor for perhaps as many as
fourteen years, well beyond the three-year terms for the compulsory liturgic
assignments for collectors of money taxes familiar a half-century later, during
the reign of Trajan and beyond. Even under the Augustan system not every
taxpayer paid as anticipated, and Nemesion’s archive contains three long lists
of men who owe arrears for previous tax years. About 57 ce Nemesion took
the lead among five other praktores from neighboring villages in writing a
petition to the prefect of Egypt, alerting him to the difficulties all six were
having in making their collections (SB 4.7462), most often due to insufficient
inundations of the Nile in a region normally productive of abundant yields.
Nemesion and his fellow collectors plead with the prefect to rein in his sub-
ordinate at the district level, the strategos of Herakleides division, and prevent
him from harassing them for tax moneys owed until he, the prefect, completes
his yearly circuit in the area where the villages are located. The praktores hint
that they may be forced to abandon their posts and affirm that their hopes lie
with the prefect, chief executive officer for the entire province, “savior of all
and benefactor,” who alone can bring about a harmonious understanding of
the predicament squeezing the six praktores.
Thermouthis and Nemesion produced two sons who survived to at
least fourteen years of age, for they appear in a list of men liable for taxes at
Philadelpheia in 69/70 ce (BGU 7.1614A.7–8). One son is named Ptollis;
his brother’s name has been lost from the record. Their children seem to have
been greeted after Thermouthis in another letter to Nemesion: Diogenes first,
17. Badian (1972) 118.

138
perhaps the name of the son missing from the taxing list, and then two girls,
perhaps daughters, are greeted next, Ammonous and Nemesous, the latter
named after her father (P.Graux 2.11.11–12). Among the purchases Servilius
made in Nemesion’s behalf, the gold ring may have been a gift for Thermouthis
or one of the daughters. The cube of silphium in the same shopping list is
a potential ingredient for a perfumed oil with heavy scent. according to
Theophrastus’ Odors (9.1). If Theophrastus’ claim still holds true, that rose
oil was particularly popular among men, then Nemesion and his sons were
the family members most likely to enjoy using the first-quality Italian rose oil,
and Nemesion himself the one likely to dilute the rose oil concentrate with
additional olive oil, a refresher for body and mind after a busy day in the tax
office he supervised.
The men and women of the ancient Mediterranean who are known to us,
whether their lives are described in high literature or have come down to us
more directly through the papyrus archives in which they play a role, are nei-
ther abjectly poor nor fabulously rich. Rather they are individuals with some
extra money that allows them to live comfortable lives and enjoy luxuries be-
yond the basics for food and housing. One luxury is literacy, for not only
are the men literate, but often women are as well. Both parents are likely to
show concern that their children acquire skills that enhance their own lives.
A mother may teach her children basic skills of writing and reading, or other
work may occupy her time, causing the family to hire a teacher instead. If the
family lives in a metropolis, the children no doubt turn to the gymnasium for
advanced educational opportunities, as well as sport. Bathing establishments
are to be found not only in the cities, but also in prosperous villages, and having
the leisure to enjoy the baths is a minor luxury that often entails indulging in
cosmetic preparations during massage. Both men and women of the ancient
Mediterranean had a taste for the perfumed oils and pomades they employed
to protect their faces and bodies from the drying effects of low humidity and
constant summer sunshine—perhaps even a preference for the healthfully re-
storative varieties of kosmetika of which Galen approved.
139
Female Athletes in the Late Hellenistic

and Roman Greek World
Georgia Tsouvala
Most studies of Greco-Roman women in the Classical world are

based on evidence from the triad of Athens, Sparta, and Rome.1 Athenian
women and their experiences have been considered “the standard” in studying
women’s lives in the Greek world, and Spartan women the aberration. When
art historians, philologists, and historians refer to “Greek” anything, they and
their audiences often assume Athenian traditions. Roman history and women
stand on their own in the historical discourse and separate from the East, even
when the histories of the eastern and western Mediterranean overlap. In Greek
history we talk about the “Hellenistic period,” while in Roman history we dis-
cuss the “Republic.” The traditional chronological and regional ways in which
we have been organizing Greco-Roman history, in general, and women’s his-
tory, in particular, although not monolithic, conceal the interconnectedness
of the two civilizations, especially in the late Hellenistic and early Imperial
periods.2 Furthermore, because of the association of ancient athletics with
1. Earlier versions of this research on female athletics in the Late Hellenistic and Roman
periods were presented at the 2010 annual meeting of the Association of Ancient Historians in
Salt Lake City, Utah (not cited in Kyle [2014] 270–272), and at the 2011 First North American
Congress in Greek and Latin Epigraphy in San Antonio, Texas. See also Tsouvala (2015).
2. The traditional periodization for Greek history (Archaic, Classical, Hellenistic) is based on
political and artistic changes, especially as they relate to Athens and its art. This periodiza-
tion does not reflect, however, the changes that happened across the Greek world during the
Hellenistic period (traditionally defined by the death of Alexander in 323 and the death of the
last Ptolemaic queen of Egypt in 30 bce) and the advent of the Romans in different parts of
that world, after they crossed the Adriatic Sea in a military campaign in 221. Moreover, what art
Georgia Tsouvala, Female Athletes in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Greek World In: New Directions in the Study of
Women in the Greco-Roman World. Edited by: Ronnie Ancona and Georgia Tsouvala, Oxford University Press (2021).
140
140 Georgi a Tsouval a
aristocratic ideals, citizenship, education, pederasty, and military training,3

modern perceptions of ancient physical education are also based on the po-
litical, social, and spatial access ancient cities provided or did not provide to
their citizen women. As a result, ancient athletics has been considered the
exclusive domain of men, while women’s athletics has been marginalized be-
cause of their association with religion and cult.4 It is difficult to separate ath-
letics from religion and its festivals however, whether one discusses male or
female competitions; both men and women athletes participated in religious
festivals, which often included athletic and musical contests that exemplified
Greek paideia (education). Because of our own expectations and traditional
historical training, we do not expect women to be athletes and to participate
regularly in athletic training (except in Sparta, another way this polis is an
aberration in our minds).5 Furthermore, when female athletes do appear in
the scholarship, their athletic contributions and victories in competitions are
qualified as participation in religious festivals (e.g., at the Heraia), initiation
historians and philologists define as Hellenistic art and literature continued into the world of
the Roman Empire. As a result, when I refer to the “Late Hellenistic period,” “Roman Greece,”
or “Imperial Greece,” I am referring to the Greek world after its military contact with and even-
tual political takeover by the Romans. Depending on the region or poleis discussed, the polit-
ical changes occurred at different times (e.g., 146 bce for Corinth, but 30 bce for Alexandria).
Furthermore, I include evidence from the cities of Magna Graecia (South Italy) when they
were Greek colonies and continued to write in Greek. Although the cities of Magna Graecia
and Sicily came under Roman political control in the late second century bce, some continued
to speak and write in Greek, which emphasizes that they held onto their Greek identity well
into the Empire. Nero, for example, chose Naples for his first public artistic appearance because
it was a Greek city (Tac. Ann. 15.33). Newby’s (2005) study of the processes of Romanization
and Hellenization through the adoption of athletics and its imagery (statues, mosaics, and
architecture) is important here; see also Landes, Guiéorguiéva, and Kramérovskis (1994) on
Greek stadia and visual images in Roman regions (Etruria, Pannonia, Rome, North Africa);
Pleket (2010); Weiler (2014) 118–119 for bibliography on Greek sport and the Roman Empire.
3. For a discussion of the scholarship for Greek and Roman sport studies, see Scanlon (2014a)
4–23; Christesen and Kyle (2014a); Weiler (2014).
4. In the large bibliography of sports and spectacles in the Greek and Roman worlds, there are
very few works that deal specifically with women’s athletics. Mantas (1995) discusses mostly
women and athletics in the Hellenistic period. Arrigoni’s (1985) edited volume Le donne in
Grecia devotes a chapter, “Donne e sport nel mondo Greco: Religione e società,” to Greek
women’s sports, and Spartan women prevail. Bernandini (1988) includes an article on the
footrace and the Greek female. On Spartan women, see Pomeroy (2002); Scanlon (1988);
Cartledge (1982). See also Schaus and Wenn (2007) and Mahoney (2001) on women. Miller
(2004) includes ten pages on women’s athletics.
5. Yet even Plato considered women to be natural athletes (Rep. 456A) and allowed nude ex-
ercise for women (457A). In the Laws, he approves of nude racing for girls before they reach
puberty, and clothed racing for young women until their marriage (833C).
14
Female Athletes 141
rites (e.g., at Brauron and Sparta), and euergetism or patronage (esp. in Asia
Minor but also on the Greek mainland).6
This chapter provides a corrective in modern scholarship by discussing
women’s membership in gymnasia (exercise facilities) and palaestrae (wres-
tling grounds), as well as female participation and victories in local, regional,
and transregional competitions in the Greco-Roman world of the Late
Hellenistic and Roman periods. By this time, gymnasia were expanded to in-
clude bathing facilities, libraries, and odeia (lecture halls). Hellenistic rulers
and Roman emperors, such as Augustus, Hadrian, and Antoninus Pius, and
many local benefactors improved the facilities at Olympia, Athens, Isthmia,
Delphi, and elsewhere. Athletic buildings and eventually bath complexes
multiplied in the Greek cities of the East, as they became centers of a more
general training open to a wider number of citizens and foreigners, including
women. Athletic and bathing facilities became centers of not only physical
but also cultural education as well as places to relax, network, and socialize.7
Courses of study (mathemata) and public lectures (acroaseis) were part of this
cultural education.
In the Hellenistic period many sacred crown contests (agones hieroi
kai stephanitai) were founded and widely advertised.8 In the mid-second
century ce, the Greek orator and sophist Aelius Aristides wrote that all
6. Van Bremen (1996), van Nijf (2004) 208 n. 17, and Kyle (2014) 259 have all dismissed
women’s activities associated with gymnasia in the Hellenistic and Roman periods as secondary
(namely, as those of officials and benefactors, wealthy heiresses who took over the family es-
tate and its political and financial burdens, not because of their own wealth and elite posi-
tion in their societies, but because of the lack of male heirs in their families). See, for example,
Kyle (2014) 259 in the recent Blackwell Companion to Sport and Spectacle in Greek and Roman
Antiquity: “Greek female sport never had the societal importance that was accorded to male
sport”; “Female sport typically involved unmarried girls (parthenoi) in rituals of transition or
initiation, which prepared them for marriage”; and “Spartan female physical education and
indirect female equestrian victories at Olympia (females owned horses but did not personally
participate in the races) were anomalous.” Earlier, Scanlon (2002) 121–138 concludes that the
physical education of Spartan women was meant to attract suitors and to better prepare them
to be wives and mothers. (Both Plutarch and Xenophon discuss the goal of Lycurgus to be the
need of the state to create healthy and strong citizens, whether male or female.) Furthermore,
Scanlon sees female physical education as initiatory, prenuptial, eugenic, and erotic, although
the same can be (and has been) said about male physical education, not only in Sparta but all
over the Greek world. See also Kearsely (2005). Rowlandson (1998) 303, 304 n. 5 described
girls’ registrations with the gymnasium officials in third-century ce Egypt “as a way of situating
proper young women in the Hellenized social and intellectual milieu”; see also 304 n. 5: two
registrations of girls are known from Oxyrhynchos, P. Corn. 118 (291 ce) and P. Oxy. 43. 3136
(292 ce).
7. See Kah and Scholz (2004); Scholz and Wiegandt (2015).
8. Robert (1989) 709–717.
142
localities of the Roman Empire were full of gymnasia (Or. 97) and that there
was an infinite number of competitions (agones, Or. 99). Inscriptions and
coins demonstrate the number of contests celebrated in the Greek world
before and during the Roman period.9 We know of at least five hundred
separate contests, both the so-called sacred crown games and the money
(chrematic) games in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire from the
first through the third centuries ce. Thousands of athletes participated in
these, although only a fraction of the names of those who were victorious
survived, while an even smaller number of female names can be attested.
In the first century bce and the first century ce, the circuit (periodos) of
the sacred crown games at Olympia (Olympia), Delphi (Pythia), Isthmia
(Isthmia), and Argos (Nemea)10 was created, and soon it was extended
to include the Capitolia in Rome, the Actia in Nicopolis, and either the
Heraea in Argos or the Sebastea in Naples.11 Games in the provinces were
important for the Roman state in their communications with a large pro-
vincial audience.12 Roman emperors through their benefactions and their
own participation sometimes supported athletic and musical festivals all
over the Greek world, in addition to the Panhellenic games of old (i.e.,
the Olympic, Nemean, Pythian, and Isthmian Games). Over time more
sacred games were founded; some were called “isopythian” (equal to the
Pythian Games at Delphi) or “isolympic” (equal to the Olympic Games at
Olympia), while others used the title “Pythia” to refer to their city’s games
in honor of Apollo. In the Roman period, about twenty “Olympic Games”
were organized and celebrated in the cities of the eastern provinces.13 Those
athletes who participated in transregional games had to be the best and to
have a very good chance at winning so that they could get prizes and other
9. Pleket (2014) 102.

10. The archaeology of the site of Nemea indicates that the area suffered widespread destruc-
tion c. 420 bce, at which time the Nemean Games moved to Argos. Except for a couple of
decades when the Nemean Games were revived by the Macedonians at Nemea, they remained
at Argos from the mid-to late fourth century and into the Roman period, until they ended
under the Christian emperors. See Knapp and Mac Isaac (2005) 15–17.
11. Pleket (2014) 103 with bibliography.
12. For example, the Roman general Sulla and the emperor Nero proclaimed the “freedom of
the Greeks” at the Isthmian Games. Greek-style athletic contests were supported by Roman
statesmen in the Late Republic to celebrate, mainly, their military victories. See Golden (2008)
especially chapter 3, and notes 36–38. See also Leschhorn (1998). In the Hellenistic and Roman
periods even sacred crown games sometimes offer chrematic prizes.
13. See van Nijf (1999); Klose (2004).
143
Female Athletes 143
honors to support themselves (and their families). Travel from one place to
another was expensive; training facilities were needed and private trainers
had to be hired. Athletes still came from the elite echelons of society, al-
though some athletes were from the “middle class.”14
Where do women fit in this cosmopolitan and competitive world? Did
they participate in these contests, and if so, in which ones and where? How
did the professionalization of these games affect them? These are a few of the
questions this chapter addresses. First, I discuss briefly three inscriptions that
have made it possible to reexamine the topic of female athletics in general
and membership in athletic venues in particular. Second, I present epigraphic
and literary evidence that commemorates female athletes who were victorious
in a number of competitions in the Greek world of the Late Hellenistic and
Roman periods and thus would have needed athletic facilities, whether public
or private, in which to train beforehand. Finally, I point to future research on
the subject of female athletics.
The Inscriptions: Membership Lists

IG VI 1777 is an inscription from the Boeotian city of Thespiae in central
Greece dated to the first century ce (probably after 14 ce and closer to the
end of the century).15 The inscription consists of a list of names set up on
a stele of those in the “upper gymnasium” (τοὺς ἐν τῶ ἄνω γυμνάσιω [sic];
L. 4). The first few lines of the inscription that introduce the list of names
(or superscript) read as follows (NB: although what I present here is not
a facsimile of the inscription, the position of the letters is, more or less,
maintained visually):
[Ἄρ]χο̣ντ̣ο̣ς Π̣ο̣πλίου * τοῦ Δέκμου μηνὸς Βουκα-

τίου ν οἱ ἄρχοντες Μ. Ἀντώνιος Πρῖμος κα̣ὶ Μ. Ἀν-
τώνιος Ζώσιμος καὶ Π. Καστρίκ̣ιος Λάκιμος̣
4 ἐστηλογράφησαν τοὺς ἐν τῶ ἄνω γυμνάσιω (sic)
Μ. Ἰσμηνοδώρα ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων·
14. For example, SEG 54.1182 records that a promising athlete needed financial help for
training and staying abroad.
15. Initial findings regarding IG VII 1777 were presented at the American Philological
Association (now, Society for Classical Studies) annual meeting in 2005 in Boston. For a new
edition of the inscription and revised conclusions, see Tsouvala (2008) 115–122. The inscription
was first published by Koumanoudes (1882) and then in IG VII by Lolling.
14
When Poplius, son of Decmus, was archon, during the month of

Boucatius, [space] the archons M. Antonius Primus and
M. Antonius Zosimus and P. Castricius Lacimus
4 set up a stele with the names of those in the upper gymnasium
M. Ismenodora from private [ funds];16
A list of male names, both Greek and Roman, follows, but the first name on
the list and in a distinct position from the others is that of M. Ismenodora.
M. Ismenodora appears on the fifth line of the superscript and is aligned
with the phrase ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων (“from their own funds” or “from her own
funds”; L. 5). I have argued elsewhere that this Ismenodora is related to the
Ismenodora we read about in Plutarch’s Dialogue on Love (a work also known
by its Greek and Roman names, Erotikos and Amatorius, respectively). She
might be the same Ismenodora that appears in that dialogue or one from
that family. There are three columns below the superscript: the first two are
lists of names—Greek and Roman of different socioeconomic levels—while
the third consists of the names of fathers and sons who had provided some-
thing special for the gymnasium (e.g., oil, some kind of filtering or cleaning
of the pyriaterion, a sauna-like bath building located near the palaestra).
Certain rasurae (erasures) and consequent reinscriptions indicate additions
and corrections in a later period (possibly into the late second century, based
on the form of the letters). Membership in this gymnasium was probably
inherited, unless a special invitation was issued, as in the case of Athenaios
Eumaronnos (Col III, L. 33–38).
The next inscription, IG IV 732, is one from Hermione in the Argolid in
the Peloponnese. It consists of a list of names identified elsewhere as a member-
ship list of both women and men associated with gymnasia who participated
in the games of a festival.17 Out of the 134 names or bits of names that ap-
pear on the facsimile of IG IV 732, a quarter are feminine, half are masculine,
and the rest are of uncertain gender. A Roman imperial date, possibly of the
mid-first to the mid-second century ce, is supported by letter forms and ono-
mastic data. We know that in the second century ce, the people of Hermione
organized an annual festival to honor Dionysus Melanoegidos (dressed in
black goatskin) with competitions and prizes in music, swimming, and sailing
16. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted.

17. For a new edition of IG IV 732, see Tsouvala (2015).
145
Female Athletes 145
(Paus. 34.11–35.1). In all likelihood, both male and female members of the
local gymnasia participated in these competitions.18
Finally, Inscr. di Cos ED 228 is another membership list from the island of
Cos in the southeastern Aegean from the late first century ce.19 The super-
script reads as follows:
ἐπὶ μο(νάρχων) Ἑρμία καὶ Διογένους· οἵδε εἰσῆλθον

2 ἐς τὰν πρεσβυτικὰν παλαίστραν, γυμνασιαρχοῦν̣-
3 τος Τιβερίου Κλαυδίου Ἀλκιδάμου υἱοῦ Ἀλκιδά-
4 μου - καὶ ἐπιμελητᾶ Σέξτου Ποπιλλίου Σέξ-
5 του υἱοῦ Λωρείκα φιλοκαισάρων.
When Hermias and Diogenes were monarchs [i.e., magistrates];

these [i.e., names written below] entered the “elders” wrestling
ground, while Tiberius Claudius Alcidamas, son of Alcidamas was
gymnasiarch
–and Sextus Popillius, son of Sextus Loreicas, was epimeletes [i.e.,
supervisor of
5 the gymnasium], philokaisares [i.e., friends of the emperor].
This inscription includes a list of names of inductees (L. 5–35, mostly in the
Roman tria nomina formula, but also in the traditional Greek formula of name
and patronymic), one after the other separated by dots, into the palaestra (wres-
tling ground) of the presbytes or presbyteroi (the “elders”).20 Hetereia Prokilla,
daughter of Gaius, appears as the last name on this list (vacat Ἑτερηία—Γα(ΐου)
θυ(γάτηρ) Πρόκιλλα vacat; L. 36). Since this inscription is clearly a membership
list of the inductees to the presbytike palaestra, we can safely argue that Hetereia
Prokilla is a member of that palaestra and not an official or a patroness.
18. We should also consider whether the other inscriptions associated with IG IV 732 (i.e., 728,
730–735) are lists of women and men members of local gymnasia who participated in or were
victorious in the same festival.
19. See Tsouvala (2015).
20. Inscriptions reveal that each city had various age groups for classifying its youth, including
paides (children; at the Roman Olympic Games younger than eighteen [Paus. 6.2.10–11]),
neaniskoi, epheboi, and/or neoi (young men, eighteen to thirty years old depending on the polis
and period), andres (men; at the Roman Olympic Games eighteen and older [Paus. 6.14.2]),
agenioi (teens without a beard yet), and sometimes presbyteroi (elders). A first-century bce
inscription (SIG3 959) from Chios mentions the following age classes: paides, epheboi neoteroi,
epheboi mesoi, epheboi presbyteroi, and andres. Petermandl (2014) 239–243 maintains that the
age categories apply only to males. See also Kennell (1999, 2006).
146
These three inscriptions provide the basis on which this chapter seeks to
reexamine female athletics in the Late Hellenistic and early Roman periods
in Greece. These inscriptions have provided us with a conundrum: if athletics
was the purview of men, as modern scholarship maintains, then why do the
inscriptions attest to women as members of gymnasia and palaestrae? Has an
Athenocentric focus led us to false conclusions? Has there been change over
time? Although I am not aware of any other membership lists in which fe-
male athletes appear, a number of female victors are commented on in literary
sources and celebrated on inscriptions from all over the Greek world in the
periods under investigation. As might be evident, these victorious athletes
would have to train in facilities (such as gymnasia and palaestrae, whether
privately or publicly owned) to be able to compete and win at local, regional,
and transregional events. These references I have gathered and organized ac-
cording to competition and (where possible) date.
Sparta and the Peloponnese

Certain areas of the Greek world appear to have had an athletic education for
women, and the Peloponnese ranks at the top of these.21 A young Arcadian
woman and the most famous mythological female wrestler, hunter, and
runner, for example, was Atalanta (or Atalante), who fought against Peleus,
the Thessalian king.22 She is depicted on vase paintings from all historical
periods running, wrestling, and hunting, often wearing a short tunic, or briefs
known as the diazoma or perizoma.
Of course, the most legendary female athletes in the historical period were
those of Sparta. Sparta was the only city-state attested to have had a public
system of education (agoge), which included mousike (literacy, dance, poetry,
21. In addition to Hermione (IG IV 732) in the Peloponnese, inscriptions, art, and literary
sources include athletic venues or games where women were allowed to participate in Sparta
(agoge), Arcadia (Atalanta), Elis, Olympia (Olympic Games), Corinth (Isthmia), and Patras.
22. See LIMC s.v. Atalante. The most famous depiction of this wrestling match can be found on a
black-figure Chalcidean hydria (c. 540 bce) now in Munich’s Staatlische Antikensammlungen,
Inv. No. 596. Atalanta might also be the woman who is participating in a competition of
throwing the javelin on a black-figure dinos (580–570 bce) at the National Archaeological
Museum in Athens, Inv. No. 590. If the identification with Atalanta on the dinos is correct, then
this is the only depiction of the heroine participating in a competition of javelin throwing—
rather than wrestling—of which I am aware. The theme of Atalanta participating in the capture
(and demise) of the Calydonian boar by Melanion and other heroes was a favorite in ancient
art. An early example of Atalanta preparing to throw the javelin against the Calydonian boar
is the one on the famous François vase, now in the Archaeological Museum in Florence, Italy,
Inv. No. 4209.
147
Female Athletes 147
music) and physical education for both girls and boys in the Classical period
(Xen. Lac. Pol. 1.4; Pl. Laws 806A, Prot. 342D).23 Xenophon elaborates that
Lycurgus established agones (contests) of running and strength (Xen. Lac.
Pol. 1.4). Euripides alludes to racing and wrestling (Andr. 595–602),24 and
Alcman wrote a work titled Kolymbosai (Female Swimmers).25 The agoge was
abandoned in the Hellenistic period, only to be revived by King Cleomenes
III. When his revolution failed, the agoge continued until it was abolished by
Philopoemen in 188 bce, but it was restored in the Roman period.26
It was this physical education for Spartan women in the Roman period
that the Roman poets Propertius (first century bce), Ovid, and Vergil (end
of first century bce to beginning of first century ce), as well as the Greek
biographer and philosopher Plutarch (end of first century and beginning of
second century ce) are describing. The Roman poet Ovid remarks on Helen’s
nude coed wrestling (Ov. Her. 16. 151–152: dum nuda palaestra ludis et es nudis
femina mixta viris), and Propertius references nude coed wrestling as well as
ball playing, hoop rolling, pancration (wrestling with unprohibited holds
and moves), discus throwing, chariot driving, hunting, and wearing armor
(3.14). Vergil mentions Spartan women hunting a boar and wearing short
dresses and holding bows and arrows (Aen. 1.314–325). Plutarch includes run-
ning, wrestling, and discus and javelin throwing in his discussion of the agoge
(Lyc. 14.2).27 He goes on to write that Lycurgus made girls as accustomed to
parading nude as boys, and to dancing and singing at certain festivals with
men as spectators. There was nothing shameful in the young women’s naked-
ness, never a trace of lewdness, just modesty, Plutarch writes. He also attests to
a gymnasium building with stoas at Sparta, where women could train (Plut.
23. According to Plato, Crete instituted nude athletic training first, and then Sparta (Rep.
452C). Crete is also mentioned by Plato for taking pride in educated men and women, and
he goes on to praise the philosophical skills of women (Prot. 342D). Since Greek education
usually included the education of both the mind and the body, Cretan girls might have also
participated in athletics. Scanlon (2014b) suggests that coed athletics might have originated on
Bronze Age Crete for initiation purposes, and then been transferred to Sparta and elsewhere
on the mainland.
24. “[T]‌hey desert their homes to go out with men, with their thighs bare and robes unbelted,
and they hold races and wrestling contests with them—I would not stand for it!” (Eur. Andr.
595–602). In the sixth century bce, the poet Ibycus referred to Spartan young women as
“thigh-flashers” (fr. 339).
25. PMGFTB 1, fr. 158. See also Shefton (1954) 307, no. 17 for an artistic representation of
Laconian women swimming, as well as Neils (2012) 158.
26. Pomeroy (2002) 4, n. 4, 28–29.
27. Kennell (1995) 98, 147.
148
Cimon 16.5). At the end of the second and the beginning of the third cen-
tury ce, Athenaeus commented on the Spartan custom of “stripping young
girls [parthenoi] before strangers [or guests]” as something praised (ἐπαινοῦν
τες τῶν Σπαρτιατῶν τὸ ἔθος τὸ γυμνοῦν τὰς παρθένους τοῖς ξένοις) and goes on
to say that on the island of Chios young girls wrestled with young men (ἐν
Χίῳ δὲ τῇ νήσῳ καὶ βαδίζειν ἥδιστόν ἐστιν ἐπὶ τὰ γυμνάσια καὶ τοὺς δρόμους καὶ
ὁρᾶν προσπαλαίοντας τοὺς νέους ταῖς κόραις; 13.566e). Not only coed training
but also coed wrestling competitions were available to young women in the
early Empire. The scholiast (fifth century ce) to Juvenal, citing Probus, writes
that “Palfurius Sura, the son of a consul under Nero, competed in wrestling
with a young Spartan woman” (Palfurius Sura—ut inquit Probus—consularis
viri filius sub Nerone luctatus est cum virgine Lacedaemonia in agone).28 Our
modern biases about gender and class might hinder our approval of respect-
able elite women wrestling in the nude. Spartiates, whether men or women,
were the aristocratic members of their society, however, and the literary
sources of the first and second century ce seem to agree on the practice of
coed nude training and competition that would have made a young Spartan
woman (virgine) strong and confident enough to wrestle with a young, aris-
tocratic Roman man.
All of the sports and practices mentioned in these later authors appear
to be part of both the female and male physical curriculum in the Roman
period.29 The fact that they were also part of the military training of Spartan
men does not exclude them from the physical agoge for Spartan women. We
need not reject our sources to make a case for segregated competitions for
young men and women or for a less rigorous training for the girls than for
the boys when we study athletics and education in Roman Sparta.30 War
28. See Cameron (2010) for the date of the scholia. In 60 ce Nero instituted the Neronia,
a certamen (contest after the Greek model and different from the Roman ludi, games, and
munera, gladiatorial contests and hunts in the amphitheater) that included athletic games as
well as chariot racing and music (singing and recitations in prose and verse). They were inspired
by the Augustalia in Naples (Str. 5.246; Stat. Silv. 2.2.6). According to Tacitus, they repeated
in 65, but Suetonius reports 64 ce (Ann. 14.20, 16.4–5; Suet. Nero 12.3). Crowther (2009)
197 dismisses the report by the scholiast to Juvenal: “We can probably discount this isolated
and improbable reference to the Roman aristocracy, which does not necessarily refer to the
Neronia held in Rome in a.d. 60 and 64.”
29. Plutarch in particular is very interested in the political structures of the Empire and in the
role of the citizens (both female and male) in them. He is a writer also for whom education (a
Greek education specifically) is very important for the creation of the ideal statesman (each
of his Lives begins with the education of the political man under discussion). In fact, Plutarch
follows Plato in his expectation of women having an education, which includes athletics.
30. Kyle (2014) 263, citing also Christesen (2012) 153 and Scanlon (2002) 121–138.
149
Female Athletes 149
training during the Pax Romana was no longer fundamentally necessary,

nor would it have required the same discipline, precision, and strength a
hoplite phalanx of the Classical period had. In fact, it is well established
that, by the Roman period, Sparta and its agoge had been turned into tourist
attractions that emphasized the strength and harshness of its physical cur-
riculum.31 Spartans valued and were proud of their women as much as of
their men; they would have had no reason to exclude either sex from par-
ticipation in displays of strength and superiority. In fact, the sensationalism
that others might have experienced (being outsiders themselves) and have
reported in their writings about Sparta after their visits would have made
Sparta, its archaizing institutions, and its women (and men) more attractive
to sightseers.
Clearly, coed nude training and competition caught the attention of an-
cient writers enough for them to comment on them, which has led modern
scholars to consider Spartan women to be unique and anomalous in the
Greek world in respect to their involvement in athletics.32 This is not the case,
however, if we are to take at face value Athenaeus’ comment regarding the
Chian women. Furthermore, a number of bronze mirrors and libation bowls
(paterae) with a sculpted nude or seminude female on their handles, I would
argue, are probably portraying female athletes.33 Most of them are either nude
or topless and wearing briefs (diazoma or perizoma) covering the pelvic area
(Figure 8.1, Plates IV–V ). These handles are found in several places of the
Peloponnese, including Hermione, Nemea, Messene, and Sparta, as well as
in places further away, such as Athens, Acarnania in western Greece, Cyprus,
Odessa on the Black Sea, Tarantum, Sicily, and Etruria in Italy.34 The bodies of
these young women are strong and athletic but not especially well-developed
31. Pomeroy (2002) 14, n. 41; Kennell (1995).

32. See Pomeroy (2002) 12–13; Kyle (2007a); Crowther ([2007] 2010). Neils (2012) 154, in
discussing an Attic red-figure kylix (drinking cup) c. 400 bce near the Jena Painter, writes,
“Because women were not equestrians in Ancient Greece, this Spartan female must have
appeared quite exotic to Athenian viewers . . . ” Kyle (2014) 259: “Greek males usually recorded
female physical activities only if they were seen as odd, improper, or erotic.”
33. The items identified as “libation bowls” need not be used for religious purposes only.
They could easily be used to pour water on oneself while bathing, for example. See Stewart
(1997) 232–234 for the most complete catalogue of these “Laconian” mirrors. Pomeroy (2002)
164–165 argues that these mirrors were manufactured in Sparta and exported, and eventually
imitated by other poleis.
34. Very helpful is Andrew Stewart’s (1997) 221–234 appendix of archaic and early classical
small bronzes of girls “going Dorian” with bibliography.
150
Figure 8.1 Female athlete with diazoma/perizoma. Bronze patera handle (L. 19.3 cm),
last quarter of the sixth century bce. New York, Metropolitan Museum, 41.11.5a. Rogers
Fund, 1941. Photograph © Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain).
or muscular, emphasizing their youth and beauty. Like modern Barbie dolls,
the athletic woman on the handle of the mirror or libation bowl would have
been held up as a role model for girls and young women to imitate.
Female Victors in Footraces

From the Brauronia and Arkteia in Attica to the Heraia at Olympia, footraces
have been associated with religious festivals and initiation rites for girls before
15
Female Athletes 151
Figure 8.2 Brauron, view of the stoa, 2018. Photograph by Lee L. Brice.
marriage.35 There has been much speculation regarding both the Brauronia
and the Arkteia festivals at Brauron in honor of Artemis and Iphigeneia,
but from the few fragments of vases and the material remains of the site, we
can conjecture that there was, at least, a footrace, and different ages of girls
participated in the two festivals. Which events, other than a race, were held
at Brauron we can only speculate about, but a third-century bce inscription
refers to a gymnasion, a palaestra, and hippones (stables) at the site, although
these buildings have not been found or excavated.36 The excavated remains
of the site date to the Classical period (Figure 8.2), but based on Hellenistic
and Roman reliefs and statues displayed at the Brauron museum, we can con-
clude that the festivals and any associated athletic events continued into the
Hellenistic and Roman periods.
In the third century bce, the poet Theocritus imagines Helen as the
Spartan bride of Menelaus, and her childhood friends, as the chorus, rem-
inisce about the activities they shared together. One of those activities was
practicing running, nude and anointed, like men (they say) by the Eurotas
River in Sparta (Id. 18.22–25). Considering that Helen was about to get mar-
ried, these young women were parthenoi (παρθένοι).
35. Calame (1997) 213–214; Scanlon (1984) 85; Serwint (1993).

36. For some bibliography and an edition of the inscription, see Themelis (2002) 112–114.
152
In an inscription from Piazza Nicola Amore in Naples,37 young women

(parthenoi) of different designations participated and won at the stadion (200
meters) and the dolichos (400 meters) races at the Italika Rhomaia Sebasta
Isolympia at Naples in 82 ce.38 The games were established in 2 bce to honor
Augustus (Sebastos, in Greek) and included fifty-seven types of competitions,
of which thirty-two are classified as athletic, six as equestrian, and nineteen as
artistic.39 A number of female victors and their names have thus far been re-
vealed: Iousta of Naples among the βουλ(ευτῶν) θυγατ]έρας (daughters of the
council members) won the stadion. Kasta among the παρθένου]ς συγκλητι[κάς
(senatorial parthenoi?) won a race. An anonymous woman among the
παρθέ]ν(ους) πολ[ειτικάς (citizen parthenoi) won a race. Flavia Thalassia from
Ephesus won the [π]αρθένων stadion. Aemilia Rekteina won the diaulos
παρθένων. The designations of the young women (βουλ(ευτῶν) θυγατ]έρας,
παρθένου]ς συγκλητι[κάς, παρθέ]ν(ους) πολ[ειτικάς, and [π]αρθένων) mark
their families’ political status (council members, senators, citizens). There
seem to be only two age categories in these competitions: those of the
thygateres (daughters) and the parthenoi. In addition to the footraces,
thygateres participated in the equestrian events.40
SEG 14.602 is an honorary inscription from Ischia for Seia Spes (Σεΐα
Σπῆς), daughter of the market official (ἀγορανόμος) Seios Liberales (Σέιος
Λειβεράλης). It records her victory in a footrace among the daughters of the
council members (βουλή) at the Sebasta in Naples c. 154 ce.41 Her husband
was proud enough of her to set up this inscription to record Seia’s athletic vic-
tory in her hometown.42
37. Heartfelt thanks to Joseph Day for bringing my attention to the inscriptions from Naples.
Neapolis (modern Naples) was one of the earliest Greek colonies of Magna Graecia. The
inscriptions from this excavation are catalogues of those who participated at the Italika
Rhomaia Sebasta Isolympia in the years 74, 78, 82, 86, 90, and 94 ce. There were 213 victors
in gymnastic, equestrian, and artistic events, of which 156 are attested on the inscriptions from
Piazza Nicola Amore. See Miranda De Martino (2017a).
38. Miranda De Martino (2017b). Tacitus reports that Naples was like a Greek city in his time
(Ann. 13.32.2, Neapolim quasi Graecam urbem).
39. Miranda De Martino (2016). The games were established to honor Augustus and continued
to be held until the fourth century ce.
40. Miranda De Martino (2014).
41. Miranda De Martino (2017a) 94.
42. Pace Crowther ([2007] 2010) 196, who maintains that Romans viewed these events for
what he believes were Italian (not Greek) women as curiosities and entertainment rather than
real contests.
153
Female Athletes 153
SEG 11.830 (cf. IG V 1. 588) is an undated inscription from a statue base,

which honors a Spartan female athlete. The name is undecipherable, but the
editor suggests Ἰουλία Πανθαλίδα, who won a race.43 If the name stands, we
can assume that her family received citizenship under the Julio-Claudians,
and thus the inscription can be dated to the first century ce.
According to the Roman biographer Suetonius (second half of the first
century ce), the emperor Domitian established athletic, equestrian, and
musical contests (certamen), which included both men and women, around
89 ce. Suetonius attests that there were competitions in both Greek and
Latin prose and poetry, declamations, musical contests of singing and lyre
playing, and in the stadium there was a race “even for young women” (in
stadio vero cursu etiam virgines; Suet. Dom. 4.4). Regarding the same oc-
casion, the epitome of Cassius Dio’s Roman History (late second century
to third century ce), Domitian gave a very costly spectacle in respect to
which we have nothing worthy of the historic record, except that parthenoi
competed in the footrace (Dio 67.8.1). The epitomizer John Xiphilinus, an
eleventh-century Byzantine monk, adds that Domitian would often con-
duct the games at night and sometimes would pit dwarfs and women against
each other (Dio. 67.8.4). One need not believe everything a Byzantine
monk with his own agenda against Roman emperors and pagan women
wrote, but it is worthwhile to point out the single attestation present in
both Suetonius and reportedly Dio (who might have read Suetonius): that
young women (virgines, parthenoi) participated in footraces in honor of
Jupiter Capitolinus.
SEG 11.610 is a fragmentary inscription of the second century ce that
indicates that the biduoi (state overseers) in charge of ephebic competitions
also supervised twelve female followers of Dionysos (Dionysiades).44
These were parthenoi, and eleven of them ran a footrace at the festival of
Dionysos at Sparta; they took the tradition from Delphi, according to
43. See Pomeroy (2002) 29 n. 115.

44. Hesychius, s.v. Dionysiades. See Kennell (1995) 45–46: “Clearly, biduoi administered
contests for girls as well as for youths, indicating that girls were considered to be just as much
members of the agoge as the ephebes. Regrettably, apart from this and what has been called
‘a scatter of evidence’ for the physical training of girls in the Roman period, nothing survives
that might enable us to venture any guesses whatsoever about the organizational framework
of the female version of the agoge. Despite this ignorance, we can assume that Spartan girls
had training that mirrored to some extent that of the ephebes during every phase of the agoge’s
history.”
154
Figure 8.3 Stadium at Olympia, 2013. Photograph: Creative Commons, https://com-

mons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stadium_at_Olympia_2013.JPG.
Pausanias (3.11.2, 3.13.7, 3.16.1).45 The race is said to have been held near the
place where the suitors of the Homeric Penelope had begun their prenup-
tial contest.46
At the Heraia of the second century ce at Olympia, Pausanias reports
that there was a race of parthenoi (5.16.1–5) organized by sixteen women
from Elis every four years, which games were as old as the games for men.47
The runners ran with their hair down and wore the chiton exomis (a short
tunic that reached above the knee, with one sleeve leaving one of the breasts
bare). A number of statuettes from the Peloponnese portray women dressed
45. Pomeroy (2002) 29 suggests that these games were founded under Tiberius or Claudius
but does not elaborate.
46. Pomeroy (2002) 118–119, with bibliography. Scanlon (2002) 104–105, 133–135, 287–290
explains this race as a prenuptial initiatory rite.
47. Scanlon (1984, 2008); Pomeroy (2002) 24–25; Langenfeld (2006); Kyle (2014) 264–266,
with bibliography.
15
Female Athletes 155
in a short chiton.48 What women from other places might have worn at
footraces is hard to say, but we can speculate that the garment would have
to allow for the athlete’s free movement. The women ran at the stadium at
Olympia, but the course was shortened by a sixth of the stadium, or about
160 meters (Figure 8.3).49 Pausanias goes on to write, “[T]‌he competition is a
footrace among parthenoi; not all of them are from the same age, but first are
the neotatai [youngest]; after those, the deuterai [second in age]; and they
view last all those who are the presbytatai [oldest] of the parthenoi” (5.16.2).
It is significant to note that the category parthenoi consists of different age
groups in the second century ce.50 The winners of these races received olive
crowns and a share of the cow sacrificed to Hera, as well as the honor to
dedicate statues or painted images (εἰκόνες) of themselves with their names
engraved on them, like their male counterparts at the Olympic Games. If the
Heraia, which like the Olympic Games were held every four years, occurred
close in time or at the same time as the Olympic Games, then Pausanias
might be referring to the parthenoi from these footraces, who were allowed
to view the men’s games along with the priestess of Demeter Chamyne at the
Olympic Games (6.20.8–9). Pausanias is categorical that the parthenoi were
not forbidden to watch the Olympic Games of his time.
On an inscription from Patras (Rizakis, Achaïe II 267, second to fourth
century ce), Nicophilos, brother of Nicegora, commemorates his sister, who
won in running (possibly in παρθένων δρόμον), by setting up this stone made
of bright white Parian marble.
Νικηγόραν Νικόφιλος
νικήσασαν δρόμῳ,
τῇδ’ ἀνέθηκα λίθου Παρίου,
τὴν γλυκυτάτην ἀδελφήν.
I, Nicophilos,
set up this stone of Parian [marble]
for Nicegora, who won in the dromos [ footrace],
his sweetest sister.
48. For how Athenians might have reacted to female nudity or the wearing of the short chiton,
see Stewart (1997) 108–130; Neils (2012).
49. Romano (1983) 14.
50. Cf. Chios 57, where the ephebes (young men) are also broken into three age groups: neoi
(young), mesoi (middle), and presbyteroi (older).
156
Female Victors in Other Types of Competition

IG XII 9.1190, a fragmentary inscription of unknown date from Histiaea in
northwestern Euboea, attests to a parthenos agrotera (a huntress51 or a rural
young woman) who won a prize (ἄθλος) in the pyrrhic dance.
[--]αι πυρρίχηι ἂθλω[ι] (or ἂθλω[ν])

[πα]ρθένον ἀ[γρ]οτέρα[ν].
for [name unknown], [who won in] the pyrrhic

contest [or of contests]
a parthenos agrotera.
The pyrriche or pyrrhic dance was an armed dance that was part of the
Panathenaic Games in Athens, since Athena danced it after the defeat of the
Titans (Dion. Hal. Ant. 7.72.7) or at the moment of her birth from the head
of Zeus (Luc. D. Deor. 8). Solo pyrrhic dancing was done naked except for
a helmet, round shield, and spear (the traditional panoply of Athena at the
moment of her birth).52 Most Athenian vase painting representations of the
female pyrrhic dance have a standing or sitting female aulos player, a female
dancer, and a male figure wearing a himation, resting on a stick and watching
the scene.53 The scene is set either indoors or outdoors.54
An undated inscription from Chios attests to another father, Aristodemos
Aristanaktos, who honors [Pha]nion, (wife?) of Onesandros ([Φά]νιον
Ὀνησάνδρου . . . ΕΜ . . . τὴν θυγατέρα) for having won at the games for Leto
51. Agrotera (huntress) is a common epithet of the goddess Artemis.

52. Borthwick (1970) 378–319. For the best description of the dance, see Pl. Laws 7.815: the
dancer either defends or attacks , pretending to be in battle. Plato also emphasizes the signifi-
cance of such a dance in exercising the body.
53. For representations of the pyrrhic dance and female pyrrhic dancers, see also Goulaki-Voutira
(1996). There are usually one or two dancers portrayed on vases, sometimes accompanied by
an aulos player, and at times the motif is supplemented by a stool. The dancer or dancers place
their clothes on the stool, an element we also find in palaestra scenes and which connects the
dance with the area of the gymnasium. Although Goulaki-Voutira would have the female pyr-
rhic dancers that appear on vases be hetaerae (courtesans) preparing for a pantomime in a sym-
posium (based on the assumption that they cannot be athletes), there is no reason to assume
that the male in the himation is a client rather than a trainer (7–8). Many of the female pyrrhic
dancers are either naked (figs. 1–4 in Goulaki-Voutira) or wear a short dress (fig. 7), or wear
the diazoma or perizoma (here, a bikini-like outfit, figs. 9–10) that would further indicate that
these are athletes. See also Poursat (1968) 586–615.
54. See Bron (1996) and the connection of female armed dances (apokinos, pyrrhic, prylis) asso-
ciated with the cult of Artemis in Euboea and Attica.
157
Female Athletes 157
(Chios 136*5). On the island of Delos, Leto was usually celebrated along with
her children, Artemis and Apollo, but we have no information about the
Chian games and the contests that took place in them.
Women Victors at Athletic and Musical

Panhellenic Events
According to an inscription found in Corinth in 1938, the Romans added
contests for παρθένοι (virgines in Latin) at the Isthmian Games in ei-
ther 25 ce or, more likely, in 43 ce.55 Either L. Castricius Regulus or Cn.
Cornelius Pulcher (aedilis prefectus iure dicundo, duovir, quinquennialis
duovir, agonothetes of the Tiberea Caesarea Sebastea and of the Isthmian and
Caesarean Games) introduced poetry contests in honor of the divine Julia
Augusta and a contest (certamen) for young women (virgines). The introduc-
tion of the contest for virgines sent a clear message to the provincials that their
daughters were valuable commodities and citizens.56
In addition, an inscription from Delphi provides us with evidence for paides
and parthenoi in a variety of athletic events (FD III 1:534). This and another
inscription from Delphi that mention the variety of events, competitions, age
groups, and honors a woman could receive for her victories in the first and
second centuries ce in the Greek world are worth citing in full.
FD III 1:534 (Delphi, c. 45 ce):57

1 Ἑρμησιάναξ Διονυσίου Καισαρεὺς Τραλ[λιαν]ὸς ὁ καὶ
Κο[․․․․․․․․] | τὰς ἑαυτοῦ θυγατέρας ἐχούσας καὶ α[ὐτ]ὰς τὰς
αὐτὰς πο[λειτείας]. |
1.3 Τρυφῶσαν νεικήσασαν Πύθια ἐ | πὶ ἀγωνοθετῶν Ἀντιγόνου | καὶ
Κλεομαχίδα· καὶ Ἴσθμια ἐπὶ | ἀγωνοθέτου Ἰουβεντίου Πρό| κλου·
στάδιον κατὰ τὸ ἑξῆς πρώ| τη παρθένων. |
2.3 Ἡδέαν νεικήσασαν Ἴσθμια ἐπὶ ἀγωνο| θέτου Κορνηλίου Πούλχρου
ἐνόπλι | ον ἅρματι· καὶ Νέμεα στάδιον ἐπὶ ἀγω | νοθέτου Ἀντιγόνου· καὶ
55. By then Corinth had been refounded as a Roman colony. For the inscription, see Kent
(1966) no. 153 (= Corinth 8, 3 153), with a revised edition and dating proposed by Kajava (2002)
177. Certamen is the Latin equivalent of agon; Latin virgines stand for Greek parthenoi.
56. Kajava (2002) 176 argues, convincingly I think, that the games were organized by Cn.
Cornelius Pulcher, a prominent Epidaurian, who after he himself had won at the Caesarea in
Epidaurus (c. 32/33 ce), married a Roman Corinthian woman and moved to Corinth, an im-
portant provincial center, with ambitions for high office.
57. Cf. Syll.3 802, SEG 52.526; West (1928).
158
ἐν Σικυῶνι ἐπὶ | ἀγωνοθέτου Μενοίτα· ἐνείκα δὲ καὶ | παῖδας κιθαρωδοὺς

Ἀθήνησι Σεβάστεια | ἐπὶ ἀγωνοθέτου Νουίου τοῦ Φιλεί | νο<υ>· πρώ[τη
ἀπ’ αἰῶ]νος ἐγένετο πολεῖ | [τις ․․․․․․․․ π]ρώ(τη) παρθένος. |
3.3 Διονυσίαν νεικ[ήσασαν ․․․․․․] | ἐπὶ ἀγωνοθέτου Ἀν[τιγ]ό[νου]·
| καὶ Ἀσκλάπεια ἐν Ἐπιδαύρω | τῆ ἱερᾶ ἐπὶ ἀγων[ο]θέτου Νεικο |
τέλου στάδι[ον]. | Ἀπόλλωνι Πυθίω.
1 Hermesianax son of Dionysos, citizen of Tralles in Caesarea, also
known as Ko[-something] [honors] his own daughters who, also,
are citizens of the same places.
1. 3 Tryphosa won at the Pythian games when Antigonos and
Kleomachidas were agonothetai,58 and at the Isthmian when
Iuventius Proclus was agonothetes. She was the first of the
parthenoi to win the footrace back to back.
2.3 Hedea won at the Isthmian games when Cornelius Pulchrus was
agonothetes in the enoplion harmati [war chariot].59 She also won
in the stadion at the Nemea when Antigonos was agonothetes; and
in Sicyon when Menoetas was agonothetes. She also won in Athens
at the Sebasteia in the category of paides playing the kithara when
Novius Phileinos was agonothetes. She was the first ever parthenos
to become citizen [of Athens] . . . the first parthenos.
3.3. Dionysia won at . . . when Antigonos was agonothetes; and in
the stadion for the serpent at the Asclepeia in Epidaurus when
Neikoteles was agonothetes.
To Apollo Pythios.
It is important to notice that for most of the competitions in which Tryphosa,

Hedea, and Dionysia participated, we are not told in what age group they
belonged. The exceptions are Tryphosa as a runner in the category of the
parthenoi and Hedea for playing the kithaira (lyre) in the category of paides.60
58. Agonothetes (s., agonothetai, pl.) were the magistrates in charge of the games. They often pro-
vided the finances for them, but under the emperors the financial responsibility was lightened
or entirely taken away.
59. If Kajava (2002) is correct with the dating, then Hedea won in the war chariot at the
Isthmian Games when the certamen for virgines was introduced, possibly, in 43 ce by Cn.
Cornelius Pulcher. See note 56.
60. Ugolini (2015) 32–33 distinguishes three different age classes for men in the Olympic
Games of the Roman Empire: paides (twelve to fourteen years old), ageneioi, i.e., “without
beard” (fourteen to twenty years old), and andres (twenty and older). See also Frisch (1988).
159
Female Athletes 159
Pais (sing.; paides, pl.) is the Greek word for “child” (of either sex) and “a
slave.” Certainly Hedea was not a slave; she and her sisters were, in fact, cit-
izen women, as their father asserts at the beginning of the inscription (τὰς
ἑαυτοῦ θυγατέρας ἐχούσας καὶ α[ὐτ]ὰς τὰς αὐτὰς πο[λειτείας]). We can con-
clude, therefore, that parthenos and pais are age groups for young women and
girls,61 as ephebe and pais are for young men and boys.62 Hermesianax was a
proud father; his daughters had a rounded education, a Greek paideia, which
included both athletics and intellectual pursuits.63
Among the many prizes these contestants (both female and male) would
have received in addition to wreaths, material goods, and money, there could
be other honors as well. Hedea, for example, received Athenian citizenship
(πρώ[τη ἀπ’ αἰῶ]νος ἐγένετο πολεῖ | [τις). Her participation in the kithara
contest of the paides at the Sebasteia in Athens need not be the reason for
this honor.64 In fact, the inscription asserts that she was the first parthenos
(not pais) ever to receive citizenship from Athens, as her sister Tryphosa was
the first of the parthenoi to win the stadion numerous times and one after
61. Cf. Magnesia 2 (from Magnesia, 197/196 bce); IvP II 463 (from Pergamum, before 37 ce);
Laodicee du Lycos 300.14 Robert (from Claros in Ionia, c. 150 ce).
62. Hatzopoulos (1994) argues that Thessalian and Macedonian dedications show that the par-
ticiple νε(F)εύσα(ν)σα is a dialectical form of νεβεύσα(ν)σα from the verb νέω (cf. νέαι) that
signifies the passage from one age class to another, e.g., from childhood to womanhood. Calame
(1999) 125–129 examines the stages of the passage from parthenos (or kore) to nymphe (bride)
and finally to gyne (woman, wife) through specific literary examples. Parthenos, in particular,
denotes the unmarried state of a young woman, not necessarily her virginity. In Menander’s
Samia, for example, the pregnant but unmarried Plangon is still a parthenos (67). As historians
and epigraphists, we have to pause and consider how often we have assumed a pais to be a male
child rather than a female. Even in the case of Spartan women, when the evidence for Spartan
athletics is the most abundant, some scholars, based on the premise that athletics is the sphere
of men alone (as it was in Classical Athens), interpret the evidence in a way that excludes girls.
See, for example, Pettersson (1992) 120, who interprets the word in an exclusive way and does
not find any evidence for female children participating in the festival, while Pomeroy (2002)
158 interprets the evidence more inclusively and would have nude girls and boys at the festival.
63. Cf. SEG 54.783 (Cos, late third century bce), an honorary epigram for the female poet
(elegiographos) Delphis, who might have been the daughter of the doctor Praxagoras from Cos.
The epigram also touches upon the excellent Coan athletes (athleteras), an uncommon word
that refers to both male and female athletes. Perhaps it refers to female athletes, since Daphnis
is a woman.
64. Cf. SEG 54.787 (Cos, first century ce): the name of the woman on this inscription has not
survived, but the name of her father was Apollonius. She was a citizen of Cos and Alexandria,
a poet of old comedy (ἀρχαίας κωμωδίας), who won at Olympia as well as in other sacred games
in Asia, including those held at Pergamum. It appears that this unknown poet’s family was
from Alexandria and that she was granted citizenship on Cos, probably because of her artistic
excellence.
160
the other (στάδιον κατὰ τὸ ἑξῆς πρώ| τη παρθένων). Hedea must have con-
tinued to compete at contests in Athens into her teen years, when she would
have moved to the category of parthenos, at which point she participated in
some competition in which she was victorious. The competition and her per-
formance in it had to be significant enough for the Athenians to grant her
citizenship.
Hedea was not the only young woman to have received citizenship from
an important city like Athens. A decree from the beginning of the second
century ce commemorates Auphria, who was granted citizenship and
statues—presumably paid for by the city of Delphi—for the high quality of
her education and for the speeches she gave at the sacred Delphic synodos
(meeting) of the Greeks.65
FD III 4:79 (Delphi, mid-second century):

1 [θε]ός. τύχαι ἀγαθᾶ[ι].|[ἔδοξ]εν τῇ πόλει|[τῶν Δε]λφίων
Αὐφρίαν|[․․․․]νὴν Δελφὴν εἶναι,|
5 [ἐπειδ]ή, παραγενομένη|[πρὸς τ]ὸν θεόν πᾶν τὸ|[ἦθος τῆ]ς παιδείας
ἐπε|[δείξατο], λόγους τε πολ|[λοὺς καὶ κ]αλοὺς καὶ ἡδί|
10 [στους ἐν] τῇ π[υ]θικῇ συ|[νόδῳ τῶν] Ἑλ[λήν]ων δ[ιέ]|[θετο, ․․․
․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․]|․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․|
․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․|․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․
․․․․․․․․․|․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․|․․․․․․․․․․
․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․|․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․|․
․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․․|
20 [․․․․․․․․․․․․φ]ανῇ [ἐφ’ ․․․․․]|[․․․․․․․․․․․․․] πεποιη
μέν[․]|[․․․․․․․․․․․․․ τ]ῷ θεῷ ἀγαθ[ὰ π]οι|[․․․․․․․․․․․]
ἐψηφισάμεθα.|[ἐπὶ δὲ Αἰ]λ. Πυθοδώρου ἐψηφισάμεθα|
25 [τὰς τῶν ἀν]δριάντων ἀναστάσεις.
1 God. To Good Fortune. It seemed right to the city of Delphi that
Auphria [ . . . ] be a citizen of Delphi,
5 because, by being present [at the games], she showed the ethos of
her education in every way to the god [Apollo], and recited many
beautiful and sweet speeches
10 in the Pythian meeting of the Greeks . . . (8 lines missing) . . .
65. Cf. Plut. Quaest. Conv. 675 for the changes made to the Pythian and Olympic Games during
his time.
16
Female Athletes 161
20 . . . glorious on . . . to the god good . . .we voted. During [the

magistracy] of Aelius Pythodorus we voted on
25 the erection of statues [for her].
Earlier, in 86 bce, a Theban choropsaltria (a female harpist who

accompanied the chorus) and orator, Polygnota daughter of Socrates, who
had emigrated to Delphi, was granted a number of honors, including a
wreath and 500 drachmas, and dispensations including that of proxenos (a
public guest of the city, an ambassador), proedria (privilege of the front seats)
at the games (agonois), an invitation to a common meal at the prytaneion
(magistrates’ hall), and to be present at and make the sacrifice to Apollo
(FD III 3:249).66 Although the examples of the high honors presented to
women such as Polygnota and Auphria are not for their athletic but for
their intellectual victories, nevertheless one can get a glimpse of the kind of
opportunities young women athletes, like Hedea, could have had because
of these transregional games. Although still living and competing in a man’s
world, they were acknowledged and honored for their achievements by their
families and even by foreign cities.
Female Victors at Equestrian Events

I have left the discussion of horsemanship and chariot races until last because
it can be argued that they are not part of a physical education curriculum
since equestrian events do not require the same kind of physical strength as
other sports.67 Furthermore, chariot racing did not involve directly and nec-
essarily the person who received the crown, but the owner of the horses and
chariots that competed. Both men and women who won at chariot races em-
ployed jockeys to run the race, but the owner of the horse or horses received
the crown. Nevertheless, I include them here because they are discussed in the
66. There are several such decrees from the third and second centuries bce that honor women
and their skills in mousike: e.g., FD III 3:145 (Chaleion, a city in Phocis) and IG IX 2.62 (Lamia,
a city in Thessaly) honor Aristodama, daughter of Amyntas, an epic female poet from Smyrna
in Ionia with the proxenia; IG XII 5.812 (with SEG 30: 1066) from Tenos honors Alcinoe (pos-
sibly a poet) from Thronion in Aetolia with the magistracy of the stephanophoros; Syll.3 689
from Delphi honors an unnamed choropsaltria, daughter of Aristocrates, from Kyme, who suc-
cessfully competed at the Pythian Games for two days after the magistrates there invited her to
do so. They honored her with a bronze eikon, 1,000 drachmas, and a number of other honors,
including the proedria (the privilege of the front seats) at all the contests of the city of Delphi.
67. On horsemanship and Spartan women, see Pomeroy (2002) 24. For a more traditional
point of view, see Kyle (2007b).
162
scholarship on men’s athletics, and they provide further evidence for women’s
participation and victories in regional and transregional games and contests.
The first woman to win at the tethrippon (quadriga, four-horse chariot)
in two successive Olympiads (396 and 392 bce) was the Spartan princess
Cynisca, daughter of Archelaus II and sister of Agis II and Agesilaus, whose
statue base inscription declared, “I am the only woman in all of Greece to
have won this crown.”68 She was allowed the same honor allowed all those
men who won at the Games, namely, to set up her own statues. Her statue at
Olympia was made by Apelleas son of Callicles. She also received a heroon (cult
shrine) near the Platinistas, where athletic competitions for young Spartans
took place. Like other athletes in Greece who were given heroic status by their
cities, Cynisca was heroized to be held up as an ideal for both female and
male Spartan youths. Her example was followed by another Spartan woman,
Euryleonis, who won in the synoris (biga, two-horse chariot) at Olympia in
368, and who also had her own statues erected at Olympia and at Sparta.69
Hellenistic women (e.g., Bilistiche, Berenice I, Berenice II, Arsinoe II, and
possibly Berenice Syra) became famous all over the Greek world by winning
in chariot races.70 Female participation in equestrian events continued into
the Late Hellenistic and Roman periods.
A number of women are attested as victors even at the Panathenaic Games
in Athens in the Hellenistic period. IG II2, 2313 (with Hesperia 1991, 221–223)
cites [Z]‌euxo (L. 9), Eucrateia (L. 13), and [Hermio]ne (L. 15), all daughters of
Polycrates, son of Mnasiadas of Argos (L. 62) and his wife Zeuxo of Cyrene,
daughter of Ariston (L. 60). Zeuxo won in the keleti teleioi, Eucrateia in the
harmati teleioi, and Hermione in an unknown equestrian event. Hermione
was an athlophoros for Berenice Euergetis in Alexandria in 170/169 bce. Their
mother, Zeuxo, also won in harmati teleioi, and their father, Polycrates, who
was in the service of the Ptolemies, won at these Panathenaic Games in an
equestrian event in 194/193 bce.
In 182/181 bce, IG II2 2314 (with Hesperia 1991, 221–223) cites a woman
from Argos, daughter of Mnasiades (Col. I, L. 48), who won in the harmati
polikoi along with another Argean woman (Col. I, L. 50, possibly Zeuxo
daughter of Polycrates), who won in the keleti teleioi, and a third (Col. I,
68. IvO 160. Cynisca also appears on an inscription from Sparta IG V, 1 234. See also the Attic
red-figure kylix (drinking cup) at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts (1900.354) from the same
period, with a woman named Sparte dismounting from a horse as it approaches an altar.
69. See IvO 396, 418; Pomeroy (2002) 23–24.
70. Kainz (2016) draws from Callimachus’ Aitia and Posidippus’ Hippika.
163
Female Athletes 163
L. 54) who won in the harmati teleioi. Furthermore, an Alexandrian woman

won in the synoridi teleiai (Col. I, L. 52). In column II, Hermione (possibly
daughter of Polycrates) shows up twice in L. 92 and 94. She is from Argos and
won the hippos polydromos (long-distance horse race).
Among the fifty-five victors who appear in the three Panathenaic victors’
lists discussed in Hesperia 1991 there are eight women, only four of whom can
be identified prosopographically, including the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra
II.71 In 170/169 bce, Cleainete (Col. I, L. 31), daughter of Caron, a Ligystine,
won in teleiai synoridi. Her name is rare. Archagathe (Col. I, L. 32), daughter
of Polycleitos, from Antioch, at the Pyramos (also known as Magarsos) won
at harmati polikoi (a chariot race for fully grown horses) in 170 bce. Eirene
from Alexandria (Col. I, L. 33), daughter of Ptolemy, who was governor of
Cyprus under Ptolemy V Epiphanes, was crowned for her victory in the
teleioi polikoi (colt chariot race) in 170/169 bce. Her father was originally
from Megalopolis, and her son Andromachos dedicated a statue of her in
the temple of Artemis at Cition, Cyprus. Eirene became the first priestess
of the cult of the queen Arsinoe Philopator in 199–170 bce, and she fig-
ures as a priestess in the Ptolemaic decree on the famous Rosetta Stone.72
A Lacedaimonian woman, Olympio (Col. I, L. 34), daughter of Agetor and
sister to Pedestratos, who not only was a victor in the Panathenaic Games
himself but was also in the service of Ptolemy Philometor, won in the hyppoi
polydromoi in the Panathenaic Games in 170/169 bce.
In the games of 166/165 bce, Eugenia (Col. II, L. 29), daughter of Zenon,
from Antioch at the River Kydnos (also known as Tarsus), is mentioned along
with three men from the same family. She won in the keleti telioi. In 162/161
bce, Menophila (Col. III, L. 12), daughter of Nestor, won in keleti polikoi.
Agathokleia (Col. III, L. 18), daughter of Noumenios, might have been the
daughter of Noumenios Apollodoros, also a victor in an equestrian event at
the Panathenaic Games thirty years earlier or, more likely, the daughter of
Noumenios Herakleodoros from Alexandria, who had served as proxenos,
governor, priest, and ambassador for a number of kings, including Queen
Cleopatra, and sister to Cleainete, priestess of Arsinoe Philopator in 166/165.
71. Tracy and Habicht (1991) 205, 213–214, now supplemented with Tracy (2015), who shows
that Agora I 6701 is part of a series of other known Panathenaic lists from this period.
72. The Rosetta Stone, now in the British Museum, summarizes benefactions conferred by
Ptolemy V Epiphanes (205–180 bce) and was written in the ninth year of his reign in com-
memoration of his accession to the throne. Inscribed in three writing systems, hieroglyphics,
Demotic (a cursive form of Egyptian hieroglyphics), and Greek, it provided a key to the deci-
pherment of Egyptian hieroglyphic writing.
164
Agathoclea served as priestess to Queen Cleopatra in Ptolemais in 165/164

and might have been athlophoros of Berenice Euergetis in Alexandria in 166/
165. She was victorious at the Panathenaic Games in keleti teleioi. The first
time that Queen Cleopatra II (Col. III, L. 22) is attested in a Panathenaic
victory is 162 bce. She is the daughter of Ptolemy V Epiphanes and Cleopatra
I, and sister and wife to Ptolemy VI Philometor. She became co-regent with
her two brothers in 170 bce. According to the inscription, she participated
as a citizen (ek ton politikon) and won in the hyppoi polydromoi (long-distance
horse race).
From the first century bce, SEG 54.560, a fragmentary marble inscription
at the museum in Larisa, Thessaly (No. 117), that dates to 80–70 bce, lists a
number of victors at the Eleutheria (Liberation Games). These games cele-
brated Zeus Eleutherios and the freedom of the Thessalians from Macedonian
control in 196 bce thanks to the help they received from the Romans at
Cynocephalae in 197. The Eleutheria were modeled after the Olympic
Games.73 The inscription cites a female name, Hepione or Epione ([Ηπιό]νη),
daughter of Polyxenos, a Thessalian from Larisa who won in an equestrian
event.74 Also from Larisa, IG IX 526 (L. 18–19) includes Aristocleia, daughter
of Megalocles, who won in the teleiai synoridi (chariot race drawn by two
foals). The Thessalians had a long history of raising the best horses in Greece,
and it is not surprising to find another Thessalian woman, this time from
Krannon, among the inscriptions at the Amphiareion at Oropos in northern
Attica dating to 80–50 bce (Epigr. Tou Oropou 529; cf. SEG 51:585). M]
nasimacha daughter of Phoxinos won in the young-horse-drawn chariot race
at the Amphiaraia and Rhomaia there.
Returning to the Peloponnese and its tradition of female participation
in contests of equestrian events, IvO 233 (with BCH 1990, 746–748) was
found on the north side of the Prytaneion at Olympia. Casia, daughter of
M. Vetlenus (or Vetilenus or Vetulenus) Laetus, won at the Olympia in the
tethrippoi polikoi in 21 ce.75 She is the sister of L. Vetulenus Florus, who had
won at Olympia in the keleti teleioi in 53 ce (IvO 226). Cassia’s nephew (her
brother’s son) is L. Vetulenus Laetus, who is honored by all the athletes at the
Olympia in 85 ce, and by the Olympic council (boule) and the city of Elis
73. Gallis (1988) 218.

74. Adrymi-Sismani, Batziou-Eustathiou, and Vouzaksakis (2004) 122–123, n. 24.
75. This inscription has two fragments that have been reedited by Pariente (1990). For this
inscription and the family that appears in a number of other inscriptions from Olympia, see
Zoumbaki (1993).
165
Female Athletes 165
Figure 8.4 Female charioteer. Attic red-figure kylix, c. 430–420 bce. Attributed to
the Marlay Group at the Getty Villa, 86.AE.297. 8 × 29.5 × 22.9 cm. Photograph The
J. Paul Getty Museum, Villa Collection, Malibu, California (public domain).
around 96–98 ce. The family of the Vettuleni from Elis had a long rela-
tionship with the Olympic Games from the turn of the second century
ce to the mid-third, either by supporting the games or by participating
in them.
Finally, according to Athenaeus (end of the second century to the be-
ginning of the third century ce) citing Didymus, Spartan parthenoi raced
two-horse-yoked chariots (harmata) at the Hyacinthia, a Spartan festival
to honor Apollo (4.139f ). It is unclear whether Athenaeus means that the
women themselves raced the chariots or had drivers do that, as was cus-
tomary. An early Attic red-figure kylix attributed to the Marlay Group (c.
430–420 bce) and now at the Getty Museum shows a female charioteer
racing a three-horse-drawn chariot (Figure 8.4). The scene repeats almost
identically on the other side of the cup. The tondo inside the cup portrays a
youth with longer hair than the charioteer, crowned with a wreath of myrtle
or laurel, and holding the kithara while a flying Nike brings a victory fillet.76
76. Neils (2012) 159–161. Comparing the evidence from Athenaeus about the Hyacinthia with
the particular arrangement of the horses on this cup, Neils attributes the representation of the
three-horse-drawn chariot (triga) to the Athenian painter’s ignorance of the event in Sparta,
since Athenaeus wrote about the two-horse-yoked chariot driven by Spartan women at the
Hyacinthia. I would like to point out, however, that since Athenaeus writes about ἁρμάτων
16
Neils has convincingly discussed the identity of the female charioteers on

this cup as Spartan and the representation of their possible participation in
the Spartan Hyacinthia.77
Later Festivals with Women Participants

The Greek chronicler Malalas from Antioch (sixth century ce) described
the Olympic Games there during the reign of Commodus (161–192 ce).
The games attracted many different contestants, including parthenoi who
were educated in philosophy, were respectable (κατὰ τάγμα σωφροσύνης
ἐρχόμεναι), and who competed in wrestling under the thundering roar of
the crowd, as well as in running, tragedy, and Greek poetry. Both women
and men at the games became crown victors by acclamation, were confirmed
(ἐσφραγίζετο),78 and were established as priests and priestesses for life (Chron.
22.379).
Reportedly, Dio wrote about a gymnastic contest (ἀγὼν γυμνικός) or-
ganized during Septimius Severus’ reign (193–211 ce). The crowd of athletes
was so great that it was a miracle the stadium held them all. Not only men
but women also competed most fiercely in the contests, so that the most dis-
tinguished of them taunted all the other women; on account of this, it was
forbidden to any woman, no matter where she came from, to fight in single
combat any more (Dio 76.16.1: καὶ γυναῖκες δὲ ἐν τῷ ἀγῶνι τούτῳ ἀγριώτατα
ἁμμιλλώμεναι ἐμαχέσαντο, ὥστε καὶ ἐς τὰς ἄλλας πάνυ ἐπιφανεῖς ἀπ᾽αὐτῶν
ἀποσκώπτεσθαι: καὶ διὰ τοῦτ᾽ ἐκωλύθη μηκέτι μηδεμίαν γυναῖκα μηδαμόθεν μον
ομαχεῖν). The word μονομαχεῖν usually refers to gladiators, but the text makes
it clear that these were not gladiatorial games but an agon gymnikos. In all like-
lihood, the epitomizer of Dio is exaggerating about the fierce nature of these
athletes and the end result of the games.
ἐζευγμένων (yoked chariots, or chariots drawn by yoked horses), the phrase does not signify
necessarily the number of horses yoked but rather a chariot that is drawn by yoked horses. In
the case of this cup, the painter shows the chariot drawn by three horses: two are yoked and the
third one, like the dexioseiros, is the outrigger whose position sets the pace. The painter would
have heard about this race at the Hyacinthia and probably knew what he was drawing.
77. Neils (2012). Cf. the Getty kalyx with the red-figure column krater (mixing bowl) attributed
to the Nausicaä painter at the Metropolitan Museum in New York (41.162.69 Rogers Fund
1941), second quarter of the fifth century bce.
78. The Greek word means “to seal” something but also “to authenticate” a document by put-
ting a seal of approval upon it, i.e., to authenticate, confirm, or accredit something or someone.
167
Female Athletes 167
Conclusions
This chapter has explored the presence of women in the contexts of the
gymnasium and the palaestra of the Greek world in the late Hellenistic and
Roman period. The evidence for female athletics continues to be scarce
compared to the material available for male athletics; nevertheless, as we
have seen, literary and epigraphic evidence attests to women’s participa-
tion and victories in local, regional, and transregional (Panhellenic) athletic
and musical games and festivals. Female and male participation in athletic
contests was an old practice and tradition associated with religious and in-
itiatory rites, but women’s presence on lists of those who were members of
the gymnasia and palaestrae of the Greek East seems to be an early imperial
phenomenon. (We should keep in mind, however, that an imperial date may
be partly due to the increase in the number and variety of our sources for the
early Empire.)
Education in the gymnasium was of athletic (which includes military),
intellectual, religious, and political character—as was the character of
festivals and competitions. The curriculum aimed at creating citizens, both
male and female. Young male citizens were expected to become soldiers
and magistrates, although the role of the soldier was diminished under the
Pax Romana. Young female citizens were expected to become wives and
mothers. In the Hellenistic and Roman periods, we also find women holding
important priesthoods and even political magistracies, such as that of the
stephanophoros. Nevertheless, wifehood and motherhood continued to be
the state’s primary goals for women. These women needed to have an ed-
ucation equal to that of their husbands and male counterparts. Paideia (in-
tellectual and physical education) was important for the elites, who hoped
that their sons would become illustrious politicians, and their daughters dis-
tinguished wives and mothers of such men. It is not surprising, therefore, to
find women members of gymnasia, such as M. Ismenodora at Thespiae or
Hetereia Prokilla on Cos.
From the evidence presented in this chapter, we can surmise that certain
regions, such as the Peloponnese and the Aegean islands, predominated in
women’s athletics and victories, but other areas, such as Asia Minor, Magna
Graecia, and Thessaly, also appear to have a tradition in competitive athletics
as part of both female and male education in the Late Hellenistic and Roman
periods. Many of these competitions reveal age groups that include female
children or pubescent girls (paides, thygateres) and young teenage women
168
before marriage (parthenoi), similar to those for pubescent and teenage boys
(paides and ephebes, respectively).
Some of these young women athletes came from families with a tradi-
tion in athletics, and most continued to come from the upper socioeconomic
groups that could support their education and training. Some parents, such
as Hermesianax, were willing to support their daughters in their paideia, in-
cluding in their athletic education. The prizes and honors that Hermesianax’s
daughters, Tryphosa, Hedea, and Dionysia, won could have supplemented
their finances and dowries. Furthermore, they were well-traveled, holisti-
cally educated, famous for their achievements, and, in all likelihood, well-
connected not only in their own city of Tralles in Caesarea but also in the
important provincial centers of Greece, such as Athens, Delphi, and Corinth,
where they had competed. Therefore, they would have made prime brides for
provincial men of the world, well-educated mothers for their children, and
respectable and renowned citizens for their cities.
In certain city-states, such as Thespiae and Cos, women were able to have
membership in the communal gymnasia and palaestrae. Otherwise, and if
their families could afford it, they could exercise in private gymnasia, such
as those that appear on the inscription from Hermione. They could have also
trained at their family’s bath complexes. Elite Hellenistic houses and Roman
villas from all over the eastern Mediterranean often had such bath complexes,
the most famous of which is located in the fourth-century ce villa at Piazza
Armerina in Sicily.79 The villa had exercise and musical rooms, if we are to
judge from its famous athletic mosaic, often referred to as “The Bikini Girls,”
and the mosaics in the adjacent rooms. The young women portrayed on the
particular mosaic are wearing the diazoma or perizoma and deserve to be
identified for what they were: victorious athletes.80
The practice of elite women’s first marriage and subsequent motherhood
at an early age in both the Greek and Roman worlds probably ended many
female athletic careers. Girls marrying late stood a better chance to complete
their paideia.81 Of course, that is not to say that all elite women had access
79. Lee (1984).

80. Four leather lower-half Roman “bikinis” that are thought to have been worn by female
athletes and acrobats were found at a 1958 excavation at Queen Victoria Street in London and
are now at the Museum of London (no. 21233). I would like to thank Dimitris Grigoropoulos
for this reference.
81. For the stages of (intellectual) education for elite Roman girls and women, as well as for
ancient attitudes toward educated women, see Hemelrijk (2004).
169
Female Athletes 169
to an intellectual and physical education before their marriage. Such access

was heavily dependent on their family’s status, finances, tradition, and dispo-
sition toward such an education. Access to teachers and trainers would have
also played a part. Urban families might have had easier access to teachers,
trainers, and public facilities than rural families, who might have required
live-in professionals and private facilities. Traveling to competitions would
have put a heavy financial burden on their families, which they could elevate
if they were victorious.
In the Late Empire, the Panhellenic games of the past did not serve the an-
cient festivals and religion as before. Over time the professionalism of athletes
and the introduction of gladiatorial combats, spectacular executions, and events
with beasts led to the games becoming “spectacles,” venues for entertainment.
At Corinth, Athens, Antioch, and the other poleis of the Roman East, these new
events became part of the games. Athletic guilds, gladiators, and professional
athletes received financial support from the emperor.82 The professionalism of
athletics and its transformation into a spectacle bore no relation to the athlet-
icism of the gymnasium and palaestra at the local and Panhellenic festivals of
old.83 Professionalism preferred the so-called heavy events (wrestling, boxing,
pancration), and athletic unions (synodoi) were created. The professionalization
of sports must have been detrimental to a woman’s involvement in competitions.
Nevertheless, the family’s economic status, as well as wifehood and motherhood,
would remain the top reasons for ending women’s athletic careers.
It is my hope that this chapter will act as a preliminary study for further
research in female athletics and education in the Hellenistic and Roman world
of the East. I have researched inscriptions and literature, but papyri, coins, art,
and archaeology can supplement the literary sources and illuminate the lives
of women, in general, and female athletes, in particular. Art historians, espe-
cially, could be quite productive by reevaluating the evidence for figures such
as Atalanta, Artemis, Nike, Selene, Athena, the nymphs, and the Amazons.
There is a series of vase paintings, for example, such as those attributed to the
Aberdeen Painter (c. 450–430 bce; ARV2 919, nos. 2–5), that show a male
82. Sometimes competitors of athletic and musical games created associations, like modern
unions, to represent themselves and their interests to the directors of the different games and
even to the emperor himself. We know, for example, that Hadrian wrote at least three letters to
such an association in Alexandria Troas in 133/134 ce setting out rules for the administration
of the funds for the festivals, for the protection of the competitors, and for the punishment of
the directors of the games (agonothetai) who did not follow them. See Petzl and Schwertheim
(2006) = ZPE 161: 145–156 (for an English translation) = SEG 56:1359.
83. Kyrkos ([1976] 2003) 280.
170
standing by a female wearing the diazoma or perizoma. Often the female figure
is identified by modern scholars as Atalanta, although there is no inscription
on the painting to indicate that (see, for example, Plate VI).84 Another series
of Attic early fifth-century bce red-figure column craters show nude women
standing by a basin, some located indoors and others outdoors. The women
are using strigils and aryballoi (perfume oil bottles), or sponges are hanging in
the vicinity; these items are traditionally found in the context of male athletes
and the palaestra, and clearly the viewer is to read these scenes as taking place in
similar contexts (Plate VII).85 It would be a challenge to show the craters were
made for local Athenian consumption, and that challenge has led scholars
to identify these figures as Spartan.86 We know little, however, about metic
women in Attica, who might not have been under the same rules of activities
and behavior that had to be followed by Athenian citizen women.87 Could
these females on the column craters be metic women, who were able to have
an education and are portrayed cleaning themselves or preparing for the pa-
laestra and the gymnasium? The same question can be asked of the Attic red-
figure kylix of “the girls going to school” at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
in New York (Figure 8.5). Or, perhaps, we can dare to state that some girls went
to school, even in Athens.
In sculpture, the “Barberini Atalanta” from the Vatican Museum (Museo
Pio-Clementino, inv. 2784),88 the Motya charioteer in Mozia Sicily (Museo
Giuseppe Whitaker, inv. 4310), and the early Hellenistic statue of a female
84. The item description of the kylix from the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (03.820) reads,
“Interior: bathing place; basin (louterion) at left; nude youth with strigils, female gymnast
seated. (Possibly Atlanta and Peleus). Because men and women generally did not exercise
or bathe together in Ancient Greece, this image can be interpreted as a mythological scene,
showing Atlanta, the famous athlete, as she converses and bathes with Peleus, who she has just
defeated in a wrestling match. It may also represent a scene from Spartan life, where young men
and women did exercise together.” In addition, Neils (2012) includes a list of these vases with
bibliography and interprets them as Spartan girls because they are women athletes, cleaning up
after their rigorous exercise. Although we cannot discount the fact that they might represent
Spartan women, we now know that there were other cities that promoted athletics for young
women, including Athens. Perhaps we can ask whether these images were made for export, not
only to Sparta but to other cities in the Peloponnese, or to places that had a tradition of female
athletics, such as Etruria, southern Italy, and Asia Minor.
85. See Plate VII, the stamnos at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (95.21), which also includes
an inscription on side A (Hediste kale, i.e., Hediste is beautiful).
86. See discussion in Neils (2012) 163–165, who thinks that these might be Spartan women.
87. See Futo Kennedy (2014) on metic women.
88. Thanks to Aileen Ajootian for this reference.
17
Female Athletes 171
Figure 8.5 Girls going to school. Attic red-figure terracotta kylix, c. 460–450 bce.
Attributed to the Painter of Bologna 417. 15.2 cm. New York, Metropolitan Museum
1021.67. Rogers Fund 1906. Photograph © Metropolitan Museum of Art (public domain).
runner with both breasts bare at the Louvre (MA 522) are all candidates for
identification as female victors in athletic competitions. Furthermore, the
bronze statuettes of female runners, and the handles of mirrors and paterae
(libation dishes) with nude females or females wearing the diazoma or
perizoma, that have been identified as Spartan or Laconian, could have been
dedications or utility items not only from or for Laconia but also from other
cities, although most seem to have been created in Laconian workshops.89
Similar figurines continued to be created from the Archaic through the
Roman period (see Plates IV, V, and VIII).90 The form of the female athlete as
the handle of a mirror could have served as a role model for young women or
as an honor for the victorious young woman using it.
89. Stewart (1997) 221–234.

90. See a patera with handle in the shape of a female athlete from the third century bce at the
Museum of Fine Arts in Boston (Plate V), for example, or the bronze statuette of the so-called
female gladiator, now in Hamburg (Plate VIII). The latter is clearly a female athlete wearing the
diazoma or perizoma and holding a strigil, not a gladiator.
172
Audiences on four continents have asked me why scholars have not paid
attention to this topic before. I think the answer lies in the fact that female ath-
letics has been undervalued throughout the ages for various reasons. Ancient
elite male authors were not so much interested in the lives of girls and women
as in the education, activities, and political and military careers of famous men
who could become examples for their sons and young men of their cities to
imitate. Even in the United States, arguably one of the richest and technologi-
cally advanced countries of the twenty-first century, and almost fifty years after
Title IX, women’s athletics is still undervalued.91 From tennis players to soccer
players, female athletes continue to be underpaid and unsupported by their
federations.92 For example, in a law suit filed against U.S. Soccer, the all-female
team accused its employer of gender discrimination that affects “not only their
paychecks but also where they play and how often, how they train, the medical
treatment and coaching they receive and even how they travel to matches.”93
The players of the Women’s National Basketball Association are seeking
leaguewide standards on issues like hotels, travel, and trainers, and Canada’s
women’s soccer team is trying to get maternity coverage in its contract.94 It
is not surprising, then, that there are not as many names of and references to
female athletes as there are of male athletes that have survived on the record
from two thousand years ago. If we look for the women, however, we will find
them. If we evaluate our evidence based not on our preconceptions but on
what has survived, we may come to solid and new conclusions.95
91. Title IX is a federal civil rights law in the United States that was passed as part of the
Education Amendments of 1972. This is Public Law No. 92-318, 86 Stat. 235 ( June 23, 1972),
codified at 20 U.S.C. §§ 1681–1688. The original text as it was signed into law by President
Nixon on June 23, 1972, states, “No person in the United States shall, on the basis of sex, be
excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination
under any education program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”
92. The Wimbledon championships, the last of the Grand Slam tournaments, offered equal
prize money to its female players in 2007 for the first time. See BBC (2007).
93. Das (2019).
94. Das (2018).
95. I would like to thank the staff of the ephorates at Nauplio, Thebes, and Rhodes, Alkistis
Papademetriou, Vasilis Aravantinos, Melina Philemonos, and Dimitris Bosnakis; the staff at
the libraries of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens; Ronnie Ancona for her
insightful comments and for her patience; Joseph Day for reading and commenting on an early
version of this discussion; Aileen Ajootian, Lee L. Brice, Nigel Kennell, Sarah B. Pomeroy,
Mary (Molly) Richardson, and Andrew Stewart for lively conversations about art, history,
epigraphy, and women. This work has been supported by the Franklin Grant of the American
Philosophical Society and funding from Illinois State University.
173
Normalizing Illegality?
The Roman Jurists and Underage Marriage
Bruce W. Frier
I have written this chapter in honor of Professor Sarah B. Pomeroy.

From the beginning of her remarkable scholarly career, she has stood for the
insight that the positioning of women in the ancient world must be explored
with canny, unapologetic realism. Often such research turns up unexpected
sources of optimism: the ways, sometimes subtle and sometimes stark, in
which women were able to express their personalities both as individuals and
as women, or to exert their artistry, power, or influence. But there is unques-
tionably a grimmer side as well. This chapter explores one aspect of Roman
social life that is particularly grim: the marriage of underage girls.
Underage marriage is defined as marriage occurring before one or both
parties reach the legally accepted age for marriage, but in practice only the girl
is impacted. (There are no attestations for boys.) Unlike in modern law, the
Romans did not set this minimum age by statute but, in the case of women,
seem to have employed an initially somewhat nebulous concept of sexual de-
velopment that they described with the adjective viripotens: roughly, “capable
of [having sexual intercourse with] a man”; in the Augustan jurist Labeo’s
paraphrase, a woman younger than this is one quae virum pati non potest,
“who is not able to sustain a man.”1 Through a process that cannot be entirely
1. Viripotens: Labeo (3 Post. a Iav. Epit.), D. 36.2.30 (quoted here) and (6 Post. a Lab. Epit.),
D. 24.1.65. Viripotens for marriage also in the Lex Flavia Malicitana Municipalis of 82–84
ce, paragraph 56. Also later jurists: Papinian (8 Resp.), D. 35.1.101 pr.; Ulpian (59 Ad Ed.),
D. 42.4.5.2 (quoting the Praetor’s Edict); Paul (4 ad Sab), D. 32.51. These sources imply that
the link between viripotens and age twelve was never lost. See also Justinian, Inst. 1.10 pr. (of
Bruce W. Frier, Normalizing Illegality? In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0010
174
174 Bruce W. Frier
reconstructed, by at least the mid-second century ce (and probably earlier)

the age for marriage, and perhaps for female majority more generally, had
come to be fixed at twelve.2 It was also possible for girls younger than twelve
to become engaged (sponsa) to a future husband, with marriage expected to
follow after she reached age twelve.3
However, a considerable number of sources, almost all from juristic
writings, indicate that the Romans did know of marriages in which the bride
was below the iusta aetas, “the legal age of marriage.” These sources were
discussed in detail in a 2013 book by the Romanist Isabella Piro, on which
I wrote a lengthy review article trying to reconstruct, more exactly, the nature
of such underage marriages and their social context.4
In this chapter I want to consider more deeply the law that the Roman
jurists constructed around the institution, in an attempt to answer a diffi-
cult question: Did the jurists tacitly recognize such underage marriages as
somehow legitimate, or quasi-legitimate, in the sense that they were not, or
not entirely, nullified?
Briefly, what we know of these underage marriages is approximately
this:5 They appear to have been celebrated according to the normal custom
of Roman weddings, with the father “giving his daughter in marriage” (dare
nuptum) and her being “led into the house” (deducta) of the groom. After the
wedding, she lives in her putative husband’s house (apud illum or in domo
illius) as a wife, and, just as with a legitimate Roman marriage, the parties
regularly establish a dowry (Ulpian calls it a quasi dos) for her support there.
early Roman marriage law: masculi quidem puberes, feminae autem viripotentes, “males who
have reached puberty, females who are capable of sexual relations”). Throughout this chapter,
all translations are my own.
2. The sources are discussed in detail by McGinn (2015), a review of Piro (2013). The earliest
legal sources are Julian in Ulpian, D. 24.1.32.27 and 27.6.11.3–4; Pomponius, D. 23.2.4; but
see already the Augustan antiquarian Verrius Flaccus (probably) in Festus/Paulus, s.v. pubes
(pp. 296–297 L., a difficult text). At the end of the first century ce, Neratius (2 Membr.),
D. 12.4.8 (citing Servius), still has iusta aetas; but McGinn argues plausibly (122–133) that age
twelve had been set by the reign of Augustus or even by the late Republic.
3. Pauli Sent. 2.19.1 (Sponsalia tam inter puberes quam inter impuberes contrahi possunt,
“Engagement can be contracted between those above puberty and those below”); also
Modestinus (4 Diff.), D. 23.1.14. On the status of betrothed persons, see Astolfi (1994).
4. Piro (2013), reviewed by Frier (2015). My earlier paper dealt with the social institution of
underage marriage. The present chapter is meant to complement my review. By and large, in
this chapter I have relied on primary sources, since Piro discusses at length the prior scholarship
on these sources.
5. Frier (2015) 656–658.
175
Normalizing Illegality? 175
If their arrangement is dissolved before the girl reaches age twelve, one source
even speaks of a divorce (divortium).6 In short, virtually all the elements of a
legitimate marriage are apparently present and observed. There is no way to
determine the frequency of underage marriages, but the abundance of juristic
sources, across the entire period of classical Roman law, suggests that they
were at least not uncommon.
It is very difficult to determine what the participants in such an underage
marriage thought they were accomplishing. The Roman jurists, for their part,
are adamant that, at least in the eyes of the law, there can be no underage mar-
riage, with Ulpian, for instance, stating that a girl less than twelve, if “led into
[a man’s] home as though a wife [quasi uxor],” is nonetheless “not yet a wife”
since there is “no marriage because a marriage could not occur.”7 Yet Ulpian
entertains the possibility that a man who marries an underage girl might plau-
sibly “think . . . she is his wife already,” even though she has not yet reached
adulthood—suggesting either ignorance of the law or indifference to it by the
groom.8 By contrast, other sources suggest that the parties usually knew no
valid marriage could result until the girl reached age twelve.9
Although the jurist Julian pointed out that a father might have benev-
olent motives for placing an underage daughter in this sort of marriage,10
the perils for such a child bride are truly frightening. Historically, marriage
brings with it the likelihood of heightened sexual activity, dangerous for a girl
whose body has not yet fully matured; in this respect, as ancient physicians
recognized,11 twelve, the minimum Roman age for female marriage, is already
6. Neratius (2 Membr.), D. 12.4.8: si divortium intercesserit (“if a divorce intervenes”).

7. See, respectively, Ulpian (63 ad Ed.), D. 42.5.17.1 (si minor duodecim annis in domum quasi
uxor deducta sit, licet nondum uxor sit) and (33 ad Sab.), D. 24.1.32.27 (neque nuptias [esse], quod
nuptiae esse non potuerunt).
8. Ulpian (33 ad Sab.), D. 24.1.32.27 (quamvis iam uxorem esse putet qui duxit). Elsewhere
Ulpian suggests possible fraud by the putative husband: (35 ad Ed.), D. 27.6.11.3–4, but the
nature of the fraud is unclear. In Papinian (10 Quaest.), D. 23.3.68, a father misrepresents an
underage girl as of age.
9. Ulpian (15 ad Ed.), D. 5.3.13.1, discussing a man’s property rights to a “quasi-dowry” (quasi
dotem) that he “knowingly” (sciens) received on behalf of an underage girl whom he married;
this knowledge is surely that his putative marriage is invalid. See also Hermogenianus (5 Epit.),
D. 23.3.74.
10. Julian, cited by Ulpian (35 ad Ed.), D. 27.6.11.3: “a desire to see her settled more quickly in
her fiancé’s home” (qui filiam suam maturius in familiam sponsi perducere voluit); but Julian
also recognizes the possibility of more malevolent (dolo malo) motives (see later discussion).
11. Caldwell (2015) 94–100, also summarizing earlier research.
176
176 Bruce W. Frier
too young. (Most Roman women appear to have married in their mid-to late
teens.) But Ulpian, in a text I consider later, describes a girl bride, less than
twelve, who has already had sex with a man not her “husband”; other evidence
suggests that sexual activity, if not necessarily the main objective of underage
marriages, may not have been unusual.12 Still, nothing indicates that underage
marriage, although legally impossible, was ever criminalized;13 to judge from
surviving sources, sexual relations with underage girls, if they occurred with at
least the implied consent of their families, were also not criminal, since “statu-
tory rape” (sex with persons below the age of consent) is unknown.14
These considerations are crucial in considering the situation of the Roman
jurists, who, during the first three centuries of the Empire, had the primary
duty of preserving and developing legal norms between private individuals.
The dilemma they faced was the following: For what were presumably sound
policy reasons related to the well-being of those entering marriage, Roman
law considered void all marriages in which one or both parties were below the
minimum age, but the state did nothing to directly enforce this prohibition.
Marriages were not licensed or registered or even vetted by the state, nor were
those participating in underage marriages prosecuted; criminal law remained
silent. Through their jurisprudence, the Roman jurists had some influence
over the direction that the law took, but little power to set law—much less
the world that law affected—on a dramatically new course. At the same time,
they were faced with the reality that such underage marriages were occurring,
if not frequently, then at least with some regularity. Further, these “unofficial
marriages” (if they can be so described) could raise significant legal questions
arising out of transactions or events incidentally associated with them. By
their responses to these questions, the jurists indirectly revealed something of
how they understood and reacted to the underlying problems.
The questions I will examine are the following: How did the jurists con-
struct the transition from an underage marriage to a legitimate marriage after
the bride turned twelve? How did they treat putative dowries offered for un-
derage brides? How did they handle adultery by an underage girl bride? More
broadly, how did they construe the status of an underage bride so long as she
remained underage?
12. Ulpian (2 de Adult.), D. 48.5.14.8, cf. 4; Frier (2015) 660–661, citing Roman inscriptions
indicating possible high mortality among child brides.
13. McGinn (2015) 151: “no thought of liability for stuprum in the context of such relationships.”
14. However, various indirect protections for minors are known, mainly via family law: Nguyen
(2006).
17
The Transition to Legitimate Marriage

In Roman law, when two adults marry, both parties, as well as their respec-
tive patresfamilias if either or both are in his power, must in principle con-
sent to the marriage; this general principle is attenuated only in rare cases.15
When parties become engaged prior to marriage, their agreement is also
required, but here consent becomes difficult if one or both of the engaged
couple are under the age of majority and hence unable to give legal consent.
In that event, however, Modestinus allows nonetheless for betrothal, pro-
vided that (in the text as preserved) “each party understands what is hap-
pening, that is, if they are not less than seven years old.”16 Understanding of
the situation (intelligentia) stands in for consent (consensus).
One might imagine the jurists considering a similar conceit for underage
marriage. But this was impossible. Engagement (sponsalia) was a legally
recognized (if fairly informal) arrangement, with, as we shall see, some rights
and duties, while underage marriage was not. However, perhaps surprisingly,
the jurists consistently suggest that underage “brides” become legitimately
married immediately on their 12th birthday, without any separate act of con-
sent by the girl; as Pomponius puts it, “A woman less than 12 who is mar-
ried will become a legitimate wife when she reaches age 12 in her husband’s
home.”17
It is not easy to parallel this kind of transition, but Roman rules for entry
into marriage are notoriously relaxed, and marriage can readily be inferred
when two persons cohabit and treat one another as spouses. For instance, in
the early post-Classical period the Emperor Probus validates a marriage when
a long-term cohabiting couple, who have a daughter, are in addition regarded
15. See esp. Tituli Ulp. 5.2, listing three requirements: marital capacity (conubium) between the
parties, their age, and their agreement (consensus) and that of their patresfamilias. Note that the
minimum age requirement is not directly derived from the requirement of agreement (through
a theory of “age of consent”), even though girls become adults at age twelve.
16. Modestinus (4 Diff.), D. 23.1.14: si modo id fieri ab utraque persona intellegatur, id est, si
non sint minores quam septem annis (provided each party understands what is happening, i.e.,
if they are not less than seven years old). This last clause is often thought to be interpolated.
17. Ponponius (3 ad Sab.), D. 23.2.4: Minorem annis duodecim nuptam tunc legitimam uxorem
fore, cum apud virum explesset duodecim annos. So also Labeo (3 Post. a Iav. Epit.), D. 36.2.30;
Neratius (2 Membr.), D. 12.4.8; Ulpian (63 ad Ed.), D. 42.5.17.1, and (2 de Adult.), D. 48.5.14.8.
Scaevola (9 Dig.), D. 24.1.66.1, by contrast, considers a more usual case in which a young
woman, evidently of marriageable age, takes up residence in her husband’s house (with separate
bedrooms) before the set wedding date; she becomes a wife only when the marriage ceremony
takes place.
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178 Bruce W. Frier
as married by their friends and neighbors; that is, they hold themselves out
to the community as married.18 When the underage bride reaches age twelve,
her consent to her marriage may, it seems, therefore simply be inferred from
the fact of her continued residence in her husband’s house. The transition is
seamless.
In the case of underage marriage, the policy interest appears to be to pre-
serve its continuity by allowing it to metamorphose into a legitimate state.
This policy is reflected in a fragment of Neratius, writing c. 100 ce, in which
underage marriage is strongly assimilated to the vocabulary of legitimate mar-
riage; the couple who remain together until the bride reaches age twelve are
said to “remain in the same state of matrimony,” such that “the marital rela-
tionship remains between them” even though “marriage is not yet entered
upon.”19
Dowry for an Underage Marriage

The jurists set down rights for the transfer of property in the context of a
marriage: during engagement, the betrothed couple can give each other gifts,
but gifts between them after the marriage begins are in principle voidable.20
However, before or after the start of marriage the bride’s side can give a dowry
in order to provide for her maintenance during the marriage. These rules
create an anomalous situation when a putative dowry is given on behalf of
an underage bride.21 What is the legal status of the dowry before she reaches
age twelve?
18. Probus, C. 5.4.9 (276–282 ce). Also Gaius (lib. sing. de Form. Hyp.), D. 22.4.4: nuptiae sunt
[validae], licet testatio sine scriptis habita est (marriages are valid even though the evidence is
unwritten).
19. Neratius (2 Membr.), D. 12.4.8: donec autem in eodem habitu matrimonii permanent . . . donec
maneat inter eos adfinitas . . . nondum coito matrimonio (so long as they remain in the same state
of marriage . . . so long as marital relationship remains between them . . . the marriage not yet
having been entered upon).
20. See, for instance, Ulpian/Paul, D. 24.1.1–3 pr. (no gifts after marriage).
21. Ulpian (63 ad Ed.), D. 23.3.3: Dotis appellatio non refertur ad ea matrimonia, quae consistere
non possunt: neque enim dos sine matrimonio esse potest. Ubicumque igitur matrimonii nomen
non est, nec dos est. (The term “dowry” is not used for marriages that cannot arise [because
they are illegal], since there can be no dowry without [legitimate] marriage. So whenever the
word “marriage” is not applicable, neither is “dowry.”) If a dowry is promised but not delivered,
the promise is unenforceable until the underage girl reaches age twelve: Papinian (10 Quaest.),
D. 23.2.68 (at least when the girl’s age is misrepresented).
179
At the end of the first century ce, a fragment of Neratius reports his dis-
agreement with the late Republican jurist Servius, who, apparently enforcing
the rule that dowry cannot subsist unless a valid marriage occurs, had held
that the dowry could be reclaimed in the interim; that is, the putative hus-
band did not have a right to retain it.
Neratius (2 Membr.), D. 12.4.8: Quod Servius in libro de dotibus

scribit, si inter eas personas, quarum altera nondum iustam aetatem
habeat, nuptiae factae sint, quod dotis nomine interim datum sit,
repeti posse, sic intellegendum est, ut, si divortium intercesserit,
priusquam utraque persona iustam aetatem habeat, sit eius pecuniae
repetitio, donec autem in eodem habitu matrimonii permanent, non
magis id repeti possit, quam quod sponsa sponso dotis nomine dederit,
donec maneat inter eos adfinitas: quod enim ex ea causa nondum coito
matrimonio datur, cum sic detur tamquam in dotem perventurum,
quamdiu pervenire potest, repetitio eius non est.
Servius writes, in his book on dowries, that if marriage is contracted
between persons of whom one (the bride) is not yet of legal age, what
is given in the meantime as a dowry can be reclaimed. This must be
interpreted such that, if a divorce intervenes before either person
reaches legal age, the money can be reclaimed;22 but so long as they
remain in the same state of marriage, it can no more be reclaimed than
that which a betrothed woman gives her fiancé as a dowry, so long
as the relationship remains between them. For what is given for this
reason before entry into marriage, when this is given such that it will
become part of the dowry, cannot be reclaimed so long as it remains
possible to do so.23
Neratius overturns Servius’ holding in circumstances where the underage

marriage persists. His reasoning clearly analogizes the underage bride’s legal
condition to that of a fiancée, on whose behalf a dowry can be given that is
22. Compare the early post-Classical jurist Hermogenianus (5 Epit.), D. 23.3.74: Si sponsa dotem
dederit nec nupserit vel minor duodecim annis ut uxor habeatur, exemplo dotis condictioni favoris
ratione privilegium, quod inter personales actiones vertitur, tribui placuit. (If a fiancée gives a
dowry and does not then marry, or a girl less than twelve (does so) in order to be considered a
wife, the prevailing view is that, on the analogy of dowry because of legal favor for the claim for
return (of the dowry), the privilege that arises among personal actions be accorded.)
23. On this fragment, see McGinn (2015) 131–134.
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180 Bruce W. Frier
irrecoverable unless the marriage fails then to occur. In line with this decision,
Ulpian regards the putative husband as receiving the dowry’s possession pro
possessore even if he marries knowing the underage marriage to be invalid.24
In another fragment, Ulpian treats the underage bride, if she gives a dowry
to her “husband,” as a preferred creditor against his estate, for recovering the
dowry, if he should die before she reaches age twelve (thereby dissolving their
relationship); in this respect, although she is not yet a wife, she is likewise
in the same legal position as a fiancée who has conveyed a dowry to her be-
trothed.25 To this fragment the Digest compilers have attached a policy argu-
ment from Ulpian’s contemporary, Paul: “For it is in the public interest that
she also sue for the entire [dowry], so that she can marry when age permits.”26
Complicating this situation somewhat is Ulpian’s citation of Julian, who
is discussing an action given against a falsus tutor, someone who improperly
authorizes a transaction by a minor.27 In this passage the action is extended to
a father whose consent is required for marriage:
Ulpian (35 ad Ed.), D. 27.6.11.3–4: 3. Iulianus libro vicesimo primo

digestorum tractat, in patrem debeat dari haec actio, qui filiam minorem
duodecim annis nuptum dedit. et magis probat patri ignoscendum esse,
qui filiam suam maturius in familiam sponsi perducere voluit: affectu
enim propensiore magis quam dolo malo id videri fecisse. 4. Quod
si intra duodecim annos haec decesserit, cum haberet dotem, putat
Iulianus, si dolo malo conversatus sit is ad quem dos pertinet, posse
maritum doli mali exceptione condicentem summovere in casibus, in
quibus dotem vel in totum vel in partem, si constabat matrimonium,
fuerat lucraturus.
24. Ulpian (15 ad Ed.), D. 5.3.13.1: “Likewise, title ‘as dowry’ gives possession ‘as a possessor,’
if, for instance, from a girl less than 12 years old whom I married I knowingly received (pro-
perty) as if a dowry.” (Item pro dote titulus recipit pro possessore possessionem, ut puta si a minore
duodecim annis nupta mihi quasi dotem sciens accepi.)
25. Ulpian (63 ad Ed.), D. 42.5.17.1: [I]‌dem puto dicendum etiam, si minor duodecim annis in
domum quasi uxor deducta sit, licet nondum uxor sit. ([After discussing the privileged status
of a fiancée against the estate of her dead betrothed:] I think the same should be held also if
a woman less than twelve has been led into [a man’s] house as a wife, although she is not yet
a wife.)
26. Paul (60 ad Ed.), 42.5.18: interest enim rei publicae et hanc solidum consequi, ut aetate
permittente nubere possit.
27. Ulpian (35 ad Ed.), D. 27.6.1 pr.-3; Paul (10 Resp.), D. 50.16.221 (falsum tutorem eum vere dici,
qui tutor non est, “he is correctly called a false tutor who is not a tutor”); Lenel (1927) 317. The
actio protutelae is for damages caused by the false guardian.
18
3. Julian, in book 21 of his Digests, discusses whether this action should

be given against a father who gives in marriage a daughter less than
twelve years old. And he recommends, rather, that a father be forgiven
who wishes his daughter introduced more quickly into her fiancé’s
household, since he is held to have done this out of more eager feeling
than with wrongful intent [dolo malo]. 4. And if she has a dowry and
dies before becoming twelve, Julian thinks that if the person to whom
the dowry appertains acted with wrongful intent [dolo malo], the hus-
band, through the defense of deceit [exceptio doli mali], can block him
bringing suit for it [the dowry] in cases where he [the husband] would
have acquired the dowry, either in totality or in part, if the marriage
endured.
The fact situation in section 3 is not crystal clear,28 but the father,
in arranging the marriage for a daughter less than twelve, apparently
misrepresented her as being of marriageable age. Julian’s view, it seems, is that
the father would be liable if he acted fraudulently (dolo malo), but not if he
acted out of an affectionate desire to see his daughter more quickly placed. If
this reconstruction is correct, the fraud consisted of luring the prospective
groom into what the latter had expected would be a legitimate marriage—
a fraud doubtless with some attendant financial implications. The fragment
thus may give a rare and fascinating insight into the complex interfamilial
politics preceding a marriage.
In section 4, Julian moves on to consider the situation when a donor
(probably her father again) has conferred a dowry on the daughter; she then
dies before reaching age twelve. In a legitimate marriage, when a wife dies, the
dowry would normally be kept by the husband,29 but in this instance their
marriage was not legitimate, and so the donor, despite having acted fraudu-
lently (dolo malo) in bringing about the marriage, sues for the dowry’s return,
evidently arguing, under the rule discussed by Neratius in the earlier passage,
that the union has ended and the “quasi-dowry” can therefore be reclaimed.
28. As Tafaro (1988) 166, argues, magis fairly clearly indicates that the original text reported an-
other view, most likely that the father be invariably liable (a holding preferable to the one that
Julian adopts, as benevolent motives do not justify fraud, cf. Papinian (10 Quaest.), D. 23.3.68);
the process of abbreviation may have led to omission of some clarifying detail. McGinn (2015)
146–147 notes it is unclear whether an engagement preceded the underage marriage (cf.
sponsi), but it hardly matters for this purpose.
29. Tituli Ulp. 6.4–5, a summary of the rules.
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182 Bruce W. Frier
But Julian allows the “husband” to invoke the donor’s prior deceit and thereby
rebuff his lawsuit.
Conversely, where the father’s intent was not wrongful, it appears that
Julian would require the husband to surrender the dowry back to the giver.
This same outcome would have obtained if a dowry had been paid to a fiancé
and the bride had then died prior to the wedding.30 The legal assimilation of
the two situations thus probably continues in this passage.
The Adultery Laws

Under the Lex Julia de Adulteriis of Augustus (18/17 bce), a husband who
learned that his wife had committed adultery could prosecute her; the em-
peror Septimius Severus later extended this power to a man whose betrothed
fiancée had sexual relations with a third party. Ulpian discusses a situation
in which an underage “bride” commits adultery after being led into her
“husband’s” home and concludes that the “husband” may not prosecute her as
a husband (iure viri) even after she has reached age twelve, but may prosecute
her “as if she is a fiancée” (quasi sponsa).31
In this fragment, at least for purposes of the adultery law, the status of the
underage “bride” is fully assimilated to that of a fiancée. Ulpian’s reasoning
for this extension is unclear, but he may have believed that, since the emperor
had extended the adultery law to fiancées (including those under age twelve),
it was inconsistent not to use the same rule for underage “brides”; the exten-
sion would thus uphold the high value that Romans placed on premarital
chastity.32
30. See, e.g., Ulpian (3 Disp.), D. 12.4.6: a standard illustration of condictio causa data causa
non secuta.
31. Ulpian (2 de Adult.), D. 48.5.14.8: Si minor duodecim annis in domum deducta adulterium
commiserit, mox apud eum aetatem excesserit coeperitque esse uxor, non poterit iure viri accusari
ex eo adulterio, quod ante aetatem nupta commisit, sed vel quasi sponsa poterit accusari ex rescripto
divi Severi, quod supra relatum est. (A girl less than twelve years old was led into the home [of
her prospective husband] and [then] committed adultery; soon thereafter she passed the age
[of marriage] in his house and began to be his wife. He cannot use a husband’s right to accuse
her of an adultery which she committed when married before the [legal] age; but she can be
accused as a betrothed woman, in accord with the rescript of the deified Emperor Severus that
was set out above.) Cf. also Ulpian (2 de Adult.), D. 48.5.14.4, of a woman “who, although
held with the intent to marry, nonetheless cannot be a wife” (ea, quae, quamvis uxoris animo
haberetur, uxor tamen esse non potest): the “husband” must prosecute not by right of an actual
husband (ius viri) but by a third-party right (ius extranei).
32. See, for instance, Treggiari ([1991] 1993) 232–237; Langlands (2009) 37–38, on puditicia.
But Tom McGinn, who kindly read this paper, has a much darker interpretation of Ulpian’s
183
Gifts, Legacies, and Constructive Betrothal

To a considerable extent, therefore, the jurists might appear to have normalized
the status of the underage bride by according to her rights (with respect to the
dowry) and duties (with respect to adultery) resembling those of a fiancée.
In both cases, of course, strong familial and public interests were involved, at
least as the Romans see the matter.
The final step in developing this analogy could have been to drop the
analogy altogether and simply deem her a sponsa by operation of law, what
we might call a “constructive fiancée,” who is identical to a real one for all
legal purposes. Julian, c. 130 ce, may well have been willing to take this fur-
ther step, but he encountered resistance among later jurists. The specific legal
issue concerned the validity of gifts exchanged between a husband and his
underage bride.
Ulpian (33 ad Sab.), D. 24.1.32.27: Si quis sponsam habuerit, deinde

eandem uxorem duxerit cum non liceret, an donationes quasi
in sponsalibus factae valeant, videamus. Et Iulianus tractat hanc
quaestionem in minore duodecim annis, si in domum quasi mariti
immatura sit deducta: ait enim hanc sponsam esse, etsi uxor non
sit. Sed est verius, quod Labeoni videtur et a nobis et a Papiniano
libro decimo quaestionum probatum est, ut, si quidem praecesserint
sponsalia, durent, quamvis iam uxorem esse putet qui duxit, si vero
non praecesserint, neque sponsalia esse, quoniam non fuerunt, neque
nuptias, quod nuptiae esse non potuerunt. Ideoque si sponsalia
antecesserint, valet donatio: si minus, nulla est, quia non quasi ad
extraneam, sed quasi ad uxorem fecit et ideo nec oratio locum habebit.
If someone has a fiancée and he then takes the same woman as a wife even
though this is not permitted, let us examine the validity of gifts made as
if during a betrothal. And Julian discusses this problem in the case of a
girl less than twelve, if she, while a juvenile, has been led into the home
of her quasi-husband; for he says that she is a fiancée [sponsa] although
not a wife. But the more correct view is the one that Labeo deemed right
motives: “This seems to me to be a particularly cruel piece of misogyny, even by Roman

standards. The girl is too young to give (legal) consent to marry but is deemed capable of the
criminal intent necessary to commit stuprum. If the jurists really wanted to protect her and
others like her, I think they might have construed sex with such girls as criminal fornication,
even or especially for their so-called husbands. They were perfectly capable of granting unilat-
eral liability in cases of rape or deception, so why not here?” (from an email). He may be right.
184
184 Bruce W. Frier
and was approved by me and by Papinian in Book 10 of his Quaestiones,

namely that if an engagement [sponsalia] actually precedes, it continues
even if the man who led her thinks she is already his wife; but if one did
not precede, then there is no engagement since one did not occur, nor
a marriage because no marriage could arise. And so if an engagement
precedes, the gift is valid; if not, it is void since he made it not as if to a
third party, but as if to a wife, and so the oratio will not be relevant.33
Labeo fairly clearly took the view that Ulpian ascribes to him. In a frag-
ment Labeo holds that if a young girl receives a legacy due “when she marries”
(quandoque nupserit), and then marries while not yet of marriageable age, the
legacy is not owed until she comes of age.34 Ulpian gives no clear reason for
rejecting Julian’s contrary ruling. Nor does he indicate why he could not hold,
instead, that the underage bride should, in this situation at least, be once again
analogized to a fiancée (a strategy he had accepted in other contexts, as we have
seen). But perhaps adventitious benefits such as gifts and legacies simply could
not command the public policy protections that are accorded to dowries. In
any case, for Ulpian Julian’s solution was plainly a bridge too far. As he remarks
in a parallel passage, “The mere fact that she was led into [her husband’s] home
does not mean an engagement has transpired” (D. 23.1.9: hoc ipso quod in
domum deducta est non videri sponsalia facta). In other words, in the absence of
a formal engagement, the underage bride must remain a “wife apparent” until
she reaches her twelfth birthday and becomes a legitimate wife.
The juristic sources resemble, at first glance, a checkerboard of indecision,
with no clear construction of the legal position of an underage bride. But
33. The oratio that Ulpian refers to is a legislative proposal (but effectively a statute) of Septimius
Severus and Caracalla, 206 ce, partially validating gifts between husband and wife: Ulpian,
D. 24.1.32 pr.-1. The text discussed earlier is also preserved in shorter form, but with the same
citations, by Ulpian (35 ad Ed.), D. 23.1.9, where the jurist focuses more specifically on Julian’s
“constructive engagement” and states emphatically that he has “always approved Labeo’s view”
(semper Labeonis sententiam probavi). On D. 24.1.32.27, see Piro (2013) 144–145 and McGinn
(2015) 143–146, who both emphasize (wrongly, in my opinion) the role of the parties’ intent.
34. Labeo (3 Post. a Iav. Epit.), D. 36.2.30: Quod pupillae legatum est “quandoque nupserit,” si
ea minor quam viripotens nupserit, non ante ei legatum debebitur, quam viripotens esse coeperit,
quia non potest videri nupta, quae virum pati non potest. (Anything bequeathed to a female
ward “when she marries,” if she marries when less than capable of marriage, will not be owed as
a legacy to her before she becomes capable, since she cannot be deemed married when unable
to bear a man [sexually].) Labeo probably took the same position in another incompletely
preserved fragment (6 a Iav. Epit., D. 24.1.65) with respect to a gift from a putative husband to
his underage bride; it “will become ratified” (ratum futurum), most likely when the marriage
becomes legitimate.
185
upon deeper review one can perhaps detect a steady movement over time,
not to accept, much less to tacitly legitimize underage marriage, but rather
to ameliorate its consequences for the endangered “wives.” Admittedly, this
effort is hampered by its confinement within the imperfect and tangential
mechanisms of Roman private law. But once the jurists had abandoned their
earlier position treating an illegal marriage purely and simply as a nonexistent
relationship (Servius and Labeo), they reached out to protect those concerns
of an underage bride that could be deemed truly essential: her interest in a
future legitimate marriage when she comes of age, and her parallel interest
in her dowry as a provision for her maintenance in that or other marriages.
Even the extension to her, by analogy, of the adultery law may perhaps be
interpreted less as a censorious penalty on her conduct than as an indirect
means of discouraging premature sexual activity.
All of this remains, of course, somewhat in the realm of conjecture. The
jurists never wear their policy hearts on their sleeves, and so we are left to spec-
ulate on their motives and methods; they proceed subtly, often with a measure
of intentional misdirection. Nonetheless, as the late Max Kaser demonstrated
at length, the jurists are eminently pragmatic in their handling of legal nul-
lity or voidness when transactions are treated as if they did not exist or had
never happened. Despite such nullity, the jurists not infrequently build in
protections for adversely affected parties—especially innocent parties—that
can almost make it seem like a void transaction is actually operative.35 Thus it
appears to have been with underage marriage as well.
But there lurks herein a larger point as well. All developed legal systems—
and Roman law hardly the least of them—are highly symbolic cultural
expressions that encode an enormous quantity of unfamiliar and valuable
perceptions and insights about contemporary social values and transactions.
Even for experts, these insights are intricately embedded in the rules and rea-
soning and progress of the law; hence, it is no easy task to decode the law
and recover them. Decoding means subjecting our sources to analysis not
only on doctrinal grounds but also through intimate attention to the pur-
posive aspects of all advanced legal systems. This method is scarcely fool-
proof, but the reward for such an exercise is considerable: new personalities
are introduced onto the stage of history, new ways of thinking come to the
light, and our historical knowledge correspondingly deepens.
35. Kaser (1977).

186
187
10
Augustus and the Economics

of Adultery
Marilyn B. Skinner
For elite Roman families of the late Republic and early Augustan
periods, wealth in female hands posed a complicated social and financial
problem.1 As Sarah B. Pomeroy observed in Goddesses, Whores, Wives and
Slaves, heavy manpower losses during the Second Punic War combined with
laws on intestate inheritance brought large portions of estates under women’s
control.2 Despite official confiscations of jewelry and dowries to fund the
war effort, female enrichment persisted. Struggle over repeal of the lex Oppia
(195 bce) and limits on bequests to women imposed by the lex Voconia (169
bce) indicate that disputes about their access to capital continued in the
post-Hannibalic era.3 During the second century bce, meanwhile, victorious
Roman generals amassed massive amounts of booty, and dowries, used by
noble families as vehicles of conspicuous consumption, swelled enormously
1. This chapter was originally delivered as the sixteenth annual Helen F. North Lecture at
Swarthmore College in March 2016. I would like to express my warmest thanks to the audi-
ence members who offered valuable comments after the presentation, and to Professor Grace
Ledbetter and the faculty and staff of the Classics Department for their exceptional hospitality.
2. Pomeroy ([1975] 1995) 177–178.
3. Passed at the height of the war in 215 bce as an austerity measure, the lex Oppia limited
women’s display of gold and finery and prohibited their use of carriages apart from religious
festivals. Its proposed abolition was furiously opposed by conservatives, led by the consul
M. Porcius Cato; women themselves lobbied magistrates and engaged in an ultimately suc-
cessful mass demonstration for repeal (Livy 34.1–8). The lex Voconia, whose rationale is still
debated, decreed, among other provisions, that a testator registered in the first propertied class
could not name a woman, even a wife or only daughter, as sole heir to an estate.
Marilyn B. Skinner, Augustus and the Economics of Adultery In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the
Greco-Roman World. Edited by: Ronnie Ancona and Georgia Tsouvala, Oxford University Press (2021).
18
188 M arily n B. Sk in n er
within a single generation.4 Resentment of women applying their huge dowries

as leverage against spouses is voiced in oratory, comedy, and satire.5 In the
final years of the Republic prejudice against affluent women had not ebbed.
When defending his young client M. Caelius Rufus on a charge of attempted
murder, Cicero invokes popular condemnation of female excess to defame the
prosecution witness Clodia Metelli.6 Blandly posing, in one flight of fancy,
the hypothetical instance of a dissolute widow (unlike Clodia, of course), the
orator skillfully interweaves autonomy, profligacy, and self-indulgence into a
damning rhetorical question: Si vidua libere, proterva petulanter, dives effuse,
libidinosa meretrico more viveret, adulterum ego putarem, si quis hanc paulo
liberius salutasset? (If, being single, she were to live loosely; if, being impudent,
provocatively; if, being rich, immoderately; if, being lustful, in the manner
of a prostitute, should I regard as an adulterer anyone who had greeted her
somewhat informally?; Cael. 38).
This essay returns to the topic of Roman women’s tenure of property by
examining its possible associations during the Augustan era with cultural
anxieties over their independence, on the one hand, and their putative im-
morality, on the other. Female sexual misconduct in the late Republic has
been exhaustively investigated by experts on Roman political and legal his-
tory and ancient gender relations.7 Perhaps, though, there is room for an-
other examination, one that probes the still not fully explored connection
between fears of adultery on the part of noblewomen and concerns about
their handling of family assets. After considering that as one explanation for
worries over wives’ unchastity in late first-century bce sources, I inspect the
rationale behind Augustus’ criminalization of extramarital sexual activity in
the lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis of 18 bce, concentrating on the penalties,
chiefly financial, imposed after trial upon those convicted in criminal court.
4. On the astronomical growth of dowry in the years after the Second Punic War as a mode of
consumptive expenditure and its socially disruptive consequences, consult Evans (1991) 59–67.
5. In a fragment of a speech supporting the lex Voconia (Malcovati, ORF2 fr. 158, preserved in
Gell. NA 17.6), the elder Cato cites a wife who loans her husband money from a bequest, then
duns him publicly for repayment. As a stock trope, Plautine comedies feature rants denouncing
the arrogance and extravagance of rich wives: see Asin. 85–87; Aul. 167–169, 498–502; Men.
765–767; Mil. 679–681, 685–700. For the satirist Lucilius’ portrayals of women’s lust and rapa-
ciousness, see fr. 639–643 Marx.
6. Skinner (2011) 96–116. See further Strong (2016) 100–105, who explores the literary and so-
cial implications of branding an aristocratic Roman matron a meretrix (whore).
7. See, for example, Treggiari ([1991] 1993) 262–319; Edwards (1993) 34–62; McGinn (1998)
passim; Richlin ([1981] 2014).
189
Augustus and the Economics of Adultery 189
Comparison with goals proposed for its corollary statute, the lex Iulia de
maritandis ordinibus, suggests that punishments ordained were not merely
deterrent; arguably they may also have facilitated transfer of property from
irresponsible hands back into the possession of those more deserving. If so,
preexisting biases would have guaranteed that the irresponsible hands were
largely female and the deserving ones male.
Adultery had a precise meaning in Roman law. It was defined by the status
of the woman and consisted of sexual activity between a married female cit-
izen and a man not her spouse. For a man to have illegitimate sex with an un-
married woman or a citizen boy was a different kind of sexual offense, stuprum
or criminal fornication.8 His own marital status was immaterial; wedded or
not, he could legally have sex with whomever he pleased provided he refrained
from those who were off-limits. Prior to the lex Iulia, the key civic sanction
against men guilty of adultery was imposed by the censors, two magistrates
elected every five years to review the citizen lists; they could mark the names
of presumed wrongdoers with a stigma (nota), which, in the case of the ar-
istocracy, meant expulsion from the Senate.9 Responsibility for overseeing
and, if necessary, punishing a woman’s behavior had rested with her family.
Cases of adultery were deliberated in a family council involving the husband
and the kinfolk of the offending wife and normally settled through divorce.
By taking legal action (actio de moribus), the husband might also be awarded
a share of the dowry as compensation—one-sixth, according to the jurist
Ulpian (Reg. 6.12). Such private dealings probably minimized interfamilial
conflict and scandal. While in all ancient Mediterranean cultures male honor
was compromised by a spouse’s unfaithfulness, at Rome the public disgrace of
the husband was far less pronounced. In removing marital misconduct from
private oversight and making it a state crime, the Julian legislation effected
a major change that rendered all parties highly visible, even before any trial
occurred.
Yet the puzzling fact, as Amy Richlin notes, is that in a society where di-
vorce had long been unexceptional and acceptable for both parties, and men
themselves had other permitted sexual outlets, female infidelity had become,
8. Fantham (1991).
9. Aediles could bring prosecutions against men or women for antisocial behavior, including
sexual transgressions (Treggiari [(1991) 1993] 275–276). In comedy, iamb, and satire (e.g., Hor.
Sat. 1.2.37–46) wronged husbands physically assault their wives’ paramours with impunity. An
anecdotal list of incidents where husbands took the law into their own hands is furnished by
Valerius Maximus 6.1.13, writing during the reign of Tiberius.
190
by the end of the Republic, a cultural obsession.10 The quantity and diver-
sity of sources on the topic, ranging from lyric, elegiac, and epic poetry and
novels to history and biography, rhetorical exempla and school declamations,
satire and invective, comedy and preserved jokes and gossip, together with the
vast number of legal treatises interpreting the lex Iulia, convincingly prove the
widespread existence of upper-class apprehension over wives’ sexual freedom.
This was not because their adultery necessarily constituted an emotional be-
trayal. Although partners were expected to feel respect and affection for each
other, elite marriages were arranged with little consideration for sentiment,
and couples may have been more invested in their children and natal kin than
in their marriages.11 Fear of illegitimate progeny contaminating the blood-
line also seems, surprisingly, a minor concern. In texts of the classical period
allegations of bastardy or accusations of fathering suppositious children are
seldom found.12 Even when rumors of delinquency swirl around a mother,
her offspring’s biological paternity usually goes unquestioned. As the father’s
power of life and death over his descendants (patria potestas) allowed him to
expose an unwanted infant, his choice to accept it as his own must have been
the deciding factor regarding public acquiescence in its legitimacy.13 To un-
derstand what adultery meant to the Romans, then, we cannot consider only
its immediate pragmatic impact upon families; we need to discover what it
represented, what free-floating angst had crystallized around it.
Such disquiet was surfacing well before Augustus’ accession. In 46 bce,
while enumerating measures to restore public order after the disruptions of
civil war, Cicero specifically pressed a victorious Julius Caesar, now dictator,
to enact regulations curbing depravity and increasing birth rates: constituenda
iudicia, revocanda fides, comprimendae libidines, propaganda suboles, omnia,
quae dilapsa iam diffluxerunt, severis legibus vincienda sunt (law courts must
be established, trust summoned back, license checked, offspring produced,
10. Richlin ([1981] 2014) 38.

11. The weakness of the affective bond in elite Roman marriages has been postulated by Veyne
(1978) and by Hallett (1984) 235–243. For contrary opinion, see Treggiari ([1991] 1993) 253–
261 on romantic aspects of married love in literature and Dixon (1992) 83–90 on the frequency
of spousal expressions of endearment.
12. Syme (1960).
13. When the younger Julia, Augustus’ granddaughter, was condemned to exile for adultery in 8
ce, the emperor ordered that the child to which she subsequently gave birth should be exposed
(Suet. Div. Aug. 65.4). Barnes (1981) plausibly suggests that its putative father, Julia’s husband
L. Aemilius Paullus, had been exiled himself two years earlier. The child was thus evidence of
her crime, and Augustus exercised his power as head of household in refusing to recognize it.
19
all things that, broken down, have now ebbed away must be bound back
up by strict laws; Marc. 23). Asking what led Romans to construe adultery
as a practice so symptomatic of cultural ills that it called for state remedies
generates mixed scholarly responses. In one frequently cited account based on
a literal reading of ancient pronouncements, Rome saw herself appointed to
rule other nations as an agent of divine justice; if she no longer possessed the
moral capacity to govern well, her sovereignty was doomed. Elite immorality
provoked divine displeasure, which in turn brought about internal political
instability and military disasters abroad and threatened loss of empire. Legal
repression, thought the only solution, accordingly became a “necessary cor-
ollary of Augustus’ imperialistic ambition.”14 From an opposing perspective,
complaints about female adultery can be interpreted as a mode of symbolic
discourse: perceiving that claims of a wife’s infidelity connote political and
social weakness on the part of her husband, Catharine Edwards posits that
“discussions of adultery were a means of articulating a variety of associated
concerns—with masculinity, power and, on a more general level, patriarchy
itself.”15
Aristocratic Roman males, I would add, confirmed power and prestige
through successful competition for honors and offices, for which increasingly
large fortunes were required. Wealth in the hands of women was not directly
available for that purpose and would remain unusable if transmitted, in turn,
to female beneficiaries.16 By the late Republic, as we will see, changes in the
form of marriage driven by inheritance laws had brought about the doubtless
unintended consequence of increasing a married woman’s autonomy while
removing assurances that dowry and personal holdings would pass to her
sons. Hence it is possible that tirades about sexual license mask deeper worries
over what females might arbitrarily do with goods to which they held title.
Romans had always engaged in a certain amount of doublethink regarding
women’s ability to own and manage property. On the one hand, the Law of
the Twelve Tables, Rome’s oldest legal code, stipulated that in the absence
of a valid will the patrimony would be divided equally among the children
who were its immediate heirs, without distinction of sex. Woman’s capacity
for ownership was therefore recognized in law. On the other hand, women
14. Galinsky (1981) 141.

15. Edwards (1993) 57.
16. Gardner (1986) 175. Accordingly, McClintock (2013) 190, 192 theorizes that the lex Voconia
sought to restrict the concept of “heir” to men by preventing a testator, male or female, from
preferring a daughter to a son.
192
who were independent (sui iuris, released from male control by the death of a
father or husband) were still subject to fiscal oversight by a tutor, usually the
closest male member of their natal family, designated the tutor legitimus. In
the view of the second-century ce jurist Gaius, this institution was ordained
by early authorities because of female “frivolity” (levitas animi; Inst. 1.144–
150). While the actual reason was surely different,17 tutelage did impose
restrictions on women’s financial freedom. Management decisions regarding
real property, such as disposal of land or buildings, were subject to the ap-
proval of a third party charged with ensuring that family assets destined for
blood relatives were not prematurely alienated through sale, gift, or bequest.
Theoretically, then, women could not manumit slaves, contract obligations,
endower daughters, or make valid wills without tutorial permission, a re-
quirement that might restrict their ability even to provide for their own
children. To be sure, ways were found to get around the rules, and Cicero’s
letters show wealthy female contemporaries, including his own wife Terentia,
conducting business independently without expressly seeking a tutor’s per-
mission.18 However, Augustus’ establishment of the ius liberorum, a legal pro-
vision releasing freeborn mothers of three children from tutelage, suggests
it was still considered a burden and its removal viewed as an inducement to
childbearing.19
With the increased economic importance of women’s holdings came a
change in the legal position of the wife within a marriage. Roman family law,
as remarked previously, was grounded upon patria potestas, the life-and-death
authority of the paterfamilias (the oldest member of the paternal line in direct
descent) over all the members of his household, including his children. From
the beginning, however, the law allowed for two kinds of marriage, cum manu
and sine manu. In a cum manu marriage, control over the wife, or manus,
was reassigned from her father to her new husband. Her dowry passed into
17. According to Dixon (1984) 343, legal historians agree that the original intent of tutela
mulierum perpetua was to safeguard the property rights of agnate male kin rather than to
protect women financially. That it arose instead from belief in female incompetence, first
off-handedly suggested by Cicero (Mur. 12.27), gained acceptance in juristic theory and pop-
ular wisdom only after the institution itself had been greatly weakened. For further argument
supporting Dixon’s position, see Gardner (1993) 89–91.
18. Dixon (1984) 347. Later in his Institutes (1.190) Gaius himself observes that there is no valid
reason for women of mature age to be under guardianship, noting that they commonly con-
duct their own affairs with the guardian’s authorization being treated as a matter of form, or
even compelled by law, should a court find the request reasonable.
19. Evans (1991) 14–15; Treggiari ([1991] 1993) 381–382.
193
the bridegroom’s ownership, and he was responsible for paying her personal
expenses out of its proceeds. The bride became a member of her husband’s
family and, for inheritance purposes, was treated the same as one of her own
children: if the husband died without a valid will, she received a share equal
to each of theirs. Upon his death she became legally independent. Though
she was still required to have a tutor, the husband could name a sympathetic
associate in his will or even allow her to choose her own tutor. Less unease
surrounded the woman’s possession and management of property because it
was assumed she would use it for the benefit of her children, who, like her,
belonged to their father’s family and were her natural heirs.
Larger and larger dowries, however, created an issue for the bride’s clan.
Under cum manu marriage, a sizable amount of the patrimony became the
irrevocable property of another household, depriving the bride’s siblings of
their eventual claim upon it. As a result, the second kind of marriage, mar-
riage sine manu, gradually became more popular. Under this arrangement,
the father of the bride retained manus, and she herself remained a member
of her natal family. While the groom held title to the dowry and received its
income, the principal had to be returned to her family if the marriage ended
through death or divorce, although a share could be kept back for the chil-
dren.20 In a patriarchal culture, the subversive legal and social ramifications
of so-called free marriage were considerable. Husbands could not punish
their wives for wrongdoing; the father alone possessed that right. Since the
wife lived with her husband in another house, it was comparatively easy to
escape paternal supervision. When a father died, his power over his daughter
terminated, and she became legally independent with full ownership of her
own properties. Under law, the holdings of wife and husband in a sine manu
situation were separate; he had no say over what she did with her money. To
prevent one party enriching the other at his or her own expense, gifts between
marriage partners were forbidden (Ulp. Dig. 24.1.1). Hence spouses could not
be pressured into contributing their own resources to further a husband’s po-
litical goals. All these circumstances obviously worked to the wife’s personal
advantage.
20. If a divorce was initiated by the wife herself or her paterfamilias, retentio propter liberos
(withholding on behalf of offspring) allowed the husband to take back one-sixth of the dowry
for each child up to a maximum of three children. Children were thus recognized as having
a claim on part of their mother’s capital should she dissociate herself from them (Treggiari
[(1991) 1993] 338–339).
194
On the other hand, a woman’s children were regarded as belonging for custo-
dial purposes solely to their father, who exercised patria potestas over them. A pa-
terfamilias could arrange a marriage or emancipate a child without its mother’s
consent, and if the mother died intestate (possibly because her tutor refused
to approve her will) her estate succeeded to her siblings, not to her husband or
children, who were members of a different family. Sine manu marriage legally
ensured that ancestral land and buildings remained with the clan at the cost of
the marital bond, which was weakened because husband and wife no longer had
joint financial interests. Divorce, easily available to either partner under these
conditions, likewise became more common as marriage alliances created to forge
strategic ties fell victim to shifting political currents. Social expectations that a
woman would use her means to maintain her children if necessary and would
accordingly make a “dutiful will” passing the greater share of her dowry and
goods on to them far exceeded the demands of the legal code,21 but, as we will
see in the case of Cicero’s family, there were no guarantees. Yet, despite its likely
adverse effects on spousal relationships and the increased autonomy it allowed
women, the sine manu union was the standard type of marriage by the end of
the Republic. That concern about the destabilizing impact of such legal and
fiscal changes on individual families took the shape of free-floating anxiety over
women’s adultery is speculative, of course, but the inference is appealing.22 The
less commitment a wife felt to her husband’s household, the more likely she was
to form attachments elsewhere.
Cicero’s domestic problems, reflected in his letters to Atticus, his
confidante and agent, offer insight into the tensions that might arise in
a sine manu partnership where a wife could manage her money without
restrictions. The consul never suspected his wife of infidelity, as far as we
know, but in his later years he does express grave misgivings over her hand-
ling of funds and the provisions she was making for their children. Terentia
was a rich woman who had brought him a dowry of 400,000 sesterces, the
property qualification at the time for entering the Senate and perhaps one
resource he had employed when launching his career (Plut. Cic. 8.2).23 As an
exile in 58 bce, facing confiscation of his own possessions and fearing that
21. Dixon (1986) 102–111.

22. Strong (2016) 23–25 plausibly surmises that the literary archetype of the selfish cour-
tesan, who has no family ties and chooses profit over the greater social good, informs Roman
assumptions that women in charge of inherited wealth will squander it on personal enjoyments.
23. Treggiari (2007) 32.
195
her dowry might be seized as well,24 he could only plead with her not to
spend her wealth on his behalf: after he learns that she is planning to sell a
housing block, he remonstrates: Et si nos premet eadem fortuna, quod puero
misero fiet? . . . Vide ne puerum perditum perdamus (And if the same fortune
befalls us, what will become of the poor boy? . . . Take care that we don’t ruin
our already ruined son!; Fam. 14.1). Eleven years afterward, the combined
stresses of physical separation, continued political turmoil, heavy financial
pressures, and family troubles apparently tore the marriage apart.25 When,
in June 47, Terentia voiced her plans to make a will (probably not for the
first time), Cicero began to wonder what she would settle upon the children.
According to her freedman steward Philotemus, she was “doing some things
maliciously” (eam scelerate quaedam facere) and, though he doubted the truth
of the report (credibile vix est, “it is hardly believable”), Cicero asked Atticus
to intervene (Att. 11.16). Two months after that, another letter to Atticus gives
clear evidence of mistrust: passing over “countless other matters” (mitto cetera
quae sunt innumerabilia), he cites her shortchanging him in a small transac-
tion as a sign of what she might do in a greater one (Att. 11.24). Following
the divorce, there was mutual disagreement over arrangements for new wills,
his and hers, necessitated by the death of their daughter Tullia and the birth
of a short-lived grandson. Terentia grumbled about not being invited to the
signing of his document, while he accused her of avoiding witnesses who
might question the content of hers: each, apparently, thought the other was
making inadequate provisions for the infant (Att. 12.18a). Cicero’s increasing
obstinacy and refusal to deal with what, on the surface, appear relatively
minor complications may point to a long history of submerged resentment.
In a free marriage, the husband’s ambiguous situation, in which the dowry
was his and yet not his and where he had no actual say over his wife’s financial
24. Whether a wife’s dowry might be confiscated as punishment for a husband’s crime was a
tricky point at law. Technically, dotal property passed into the husband’s ownership, but its
status was equivocal (Dig. 23.3.75; Dixon [1986] 95–97). In any case, as Claassen (1996) 212
points out, a decree of exile technically dissolved a marriage, making Cicero liable for returning
it, an impossibility if his own property was forfeit.
25. Having chosen the wrong side in the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, Cicero was
marooned in Brundisium during the winter of 48/47 while Terentia managed his affairs at
Rome. Plutarch (Cic. 41) states that Terentia’s neglect of him during and after the war was
the cause of their subsequent divorce, but recent scholarship tends to exculpate her (Claassen
[1996]; Treggiari [2007] 129–130). Conversely, Dixon (1986) believes Terentia was guilty of
fraudulent dealings that came to light in 47. The predicament of Cicero’s daughter Tullia,
trapped in an unhappy marriage, and his estrangement from his brother and nephew, who had
both gone over to Caesar, created additional frictions that might also have contributed to the
collapse of their union.
196
decisions but still depended on her to help support and endow their offspring,
easily created frustrations that would manifest as suspicions of peculation and
downright betrayal in Cicero’s case26 and, in other marriages, possible qualms
over irregular sexual behavior.
Despite these deterrents, marriage sine manu was, as stated earlier, the
norm when, in the wake of his successful victories over Antony and Cleopatra
and his two administrative settlements of the state in 27 and 24 bce, the prin-
ceps Augustus embarked on a campaign of religious and moral reform. In the
30s, as triumvir, he had already initiated an ambitious program of temple res-
toration, including rebuilding the shrines of Patrician and Plebeian Chastity,
a task delegated to his wife Livia. Having attained sole rule, he continued
reconstructing sanctuaries (RG 20.4) and also built and dedicated other
monumental sacred spaces, such as the Temple of Palatine Apollo. Now, in 18
bce, Augustus confronted head-on the perceived issues of population decline
among upper-class families and a corresponding surge in marital infidelity.
That year, as part of an extensive package of social legislation, he enacted two
famous laws, the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus (later modified by the lex
Papia Poppaea of 9 ce) and its companion piece, the lex Iulia de adulteriis
coercendis. The first strengthened class boundaries by prohibiting marriages be-
tween members of the senatorial class and former slaves and between all free-
born citizens and infames, morally disgraced persons such as pimps, actresses,
and criminals, including those convicted of adultery. It also encouraged pro-
creation by offering rewards to parents of several children, career advantages
for men and freedom from tutelage for women, while penalizing the cel-
ibate and childless though inheritance restrictions. Single persons of child-
producing age were forbidden to accept bequests from any testator other than
relatives within the sixth degree, and married persons without children were
limited to taking half of a bequest from a nonfamily member. Since leaving
legacies to friends in public recognition of the beneficiary’s services was an
established custom in elite circles,27 that sanction was not a trivial one.
26. In a letter to Cn. Plancius, Cicero bemoans the crime (scelus) of those he had benefited,
complains that he saw “nothing within my walls safe for me, nothing free of traps,” and explains
his recent second marriage in this way: novarum me necessitudinum fidelitate contra veterum
perfidiam muniendum putavi (I thought I ought to strengthen myself by the loyalty of new
connections against the treachery of old ones; Fam. 4.14, winter of 46/45).
27. Champlin (1991) 12–13, 142–150. On Augustus’ accompanying ideological promotion of
marriage and procreation to safeguard the state, consult the first chapter of Wheeler-Reed
(2017).
197
Meanwhile, the second law repressed adultery and stuprum by making

them civil offenses to be tried in a standing criminal court.28 Procedures
for prosecution were spelled out in detail. Stipulations allowed a father,
exercising his potestas, to kill both culprits caught in the act in the father’s
or husband’s house. Husbands were not permitted to kill their wives and
could kill the adulterer only if he was of low (slave, freedman) or disgraced
status. Otherwise, a husband who became aware of his wife’s adultery had
to divorce her immediately, since under law a woman still married could not
be accused of a transgression committed during that marriage. Either he or
her father, as paterfamilias, was then obligated to bring a charge against her
within sixty days. If he failed to divorce her, he himself could be prosecuted
for lenocinium, conventionally labeled “pandering” but more accurately de-
fined as being complicit with her crime. Should neither husband nor father
exercise his responsibility to indict her within the allotted time, a third party
might do so in the hope of receiving a portion of the confiscated goods if she
was condemned. Parties were liable to prosecution for up to five years from
the date of the supposed offense; after that no action could be brought. These
points of law were much discussed by ancient jurists who wrote treatises on
them,29 and they still arouse considerable scholarly debate.
The law prescribed that the two parties involved could not be tried si-
multaneously (Cod. Iust. 9.9.8). Gardner reckons that the woman, if single,
was usually prosecuted first, but if she was married a prosecutor could bring
charges against her suspected partner.30 If he was acquitted, she could not be
charged; if found guilty, she could then be indicted even though married,
but might be pronounced innocent despite the earlier verdict.31 I will not go
into the parts of the statute that dealt with persons apprehended in adultery
or accused in court, as my focus is on the criminal penalties, chiefly financial,
imposed after trial upon those convicted. The differential treatment meted
out to male and female offenders indicates that the latter may have been the
primary intended targets.
28. For an overview of debates surrounding the statute, see Raditsa (1980) 310–319; on its var-
ious provisions, the discussion of McGinn (1998) 140–215 is authoritative.
29. See the opinions assembled in Dig. 48.5.1–45.
30. Gardner (1986) 128.
31. Treggiari ([1991] 1993) 286.
198
Our information about fiscal penalties comes from a late but presumably
reliable source, the postclassical Opinions (Sententiae) falsely ascribed to a fa-
mous Severan-period lawyer, Julius Paulus:
Adulterii convictas mulieres dimidia parte dotis et tertia parte

bonorum ac relegatione in insulam placuit coerceri: adulteris vero
viris pari in insulam relegatione dimidiam bonorum partem auferri,
dummodo in diversas insulas relegentur. (Paulus, Sent. 2.26.14)
It has been held that women convicted of adultery shall be punished
with the loss of half of their dowry and a third of their estates, and by
relegation to an island. Adulterous males, however, shall be deprived
of half their property, and shall also be punished by relegation to an
island, provided the parties are exiled to different islands.
We do not know whether deportation to an island was permanent or tem-

porary, though prohibition of remarriage and the loss of capacity to testify
in court may imply that an eventual return to society was envisioned.32 In
any case, although both partners in crime are punished, the financial damage
visited upon the adulteress was considerably greater. The amount of dowry
confiscated went far beyond the one-sixth granted to the injured husband be-
fore the law was put in place; in addition, she lost a sizable portion of her pri-
vate property. From other sources, we learn that she was forbidden to remarry
a freeborn Roman citizen (Ulp. Dig. 48.5.30.1). If she did, her new husband
was liable to a charge of lenocinium, and if convicted adulterous lovers mar-
ried, the union was null and void (Pap. Dig. 34.9.13). She was consequently
subject to the restrictions on inheritance visited upon single persons.
There were attendant nonmonetary punishments. As convicted criminals,
both wrongdoers were branded with infamia, which carried with it legal
disabilities such as incapacity to testify in court.33 One further indignity was
gender-specific: stripped of the symbolic dress of a matron, the woman was
obliged to wear the toga, the professional garb of a prostitute. The social ef-
fect of this last regulation was to draw a strictly defined line between two
classes of women, the respectable materfamilias and the nonrespectable sex
32. Sehling (1883) 162.

33. On the convicted adulteress’s inability to testify, see Ulp. Dig. 28.1.20.6. Whether infamia
removed the capacity to make a will was debated; although this was legal doctrine by Justinian’s
time (Inst. 2.10.6), Gardner (1993) 118–23 considers it a post-Augustan development.
19
worker (who, as a female with no virtue to lose, was exempt from the adul-
tery law), and permanently to isolate the adulteress by conflating her with the
latter group.34 Public shaming reinforced the class degradation imposed by
depriving her of property.
What happened to her confiscated wealth? In the late Republic, the as-
sets of persons found guilty of crimes against the state were appropriated and
sold at auction.35 From a passage in Suetonius’ biography (Div. Aug. 41.1),
we learn that in the Principate profits “from the goods of those condemned”
(ex damnatorum bonis) passed into Augustus’ hands and became part of
the fiscus, his private account. In like manner, the belongings of those who
died intestate without kin or whose heirs and legatees were ineligible to re-
ceive bequests under the lex Iulia et Papia (the combined specifications of
the inheritance legislation of 18 bce and 9 ce) were treated as bona caduca
(escheatable goods) and claimed for the fiscus (Ulp. Tit. 28.7).36
Tacitus famously casts the latter regulation in the worst possible light. His
excursus on the growth of the complex Roman legal system culminates in a
sinister picture of an oppressive government policing the private lives of cit-
izens, forcing compliance with its objectives by a system of informants and
enriching itself through repossession:
sexto demum consulatu Caesar Augustus, potentiae securus, quae

triumviratu iusserat abolevit deditque iura quis pace et principe
uteremur. acriora ex eo vincla, inditi custodes et lege Papia Poppaea
praemiis inducti ut, si a privilegiis parentum cessaretur, velut parens
omnium populus vacantia teneret. sed altius penetrabant urbemque
et Italiam et quod usquam civium corripuerant, multorumque excisi
status. et terror omnibus intentabatur. (Ann. 3.28)
Finally, in his sixth consulate, Caesar Augustus, secure in his power,
abolished what he had ordered during his triumvirate and laid down
laws by which we might avail ourselves of peace and a princeps. From
that time on our bonds were tighter; spies were introduced and in-
duced by rewards under the lex Papia Poppaea, so that if men balked at
assuming the privileges of parents, the state, as parent of all, might lay
34. McGinn (1998) 156–171.

35. Millar (1977) 163–165.
36. On the historical precedent for Augustus’ exercise of a claim to ownerless or invalidly
bequeathed properties, see Millar (1977) 158–163.
20
claim to their vacant estates. But the informants were spreading deeper
into Rome and Italy and because they had preyed upon citizens every-
where the status of many was ruined. Fear threatened all.
On the strength of this testimony, some might suppose that, in addition to the
laudable aims of promoting family life and increasing manpower, Augustus’
motives for introducing legislation included the less laudable object of lining
his own pockets. We must remember, though, that Tacitus, writing under
a later dynasty, had little incentive to commend the founder of the Julio-
Claudian regime.
Furthermore, largesse was expected of a great man. Suetonius testifies to
Augustus’ redistribution of confiscated property to members of the upper classes.
Some surplus revenues aided those whose estates, though large, were not readily
converted into cash if needed: limited-term interest-free loans were offered to
borrowers able to pledge twice the amount in collateral (usum eius gratuitum iis,
qui cavere in duplum possent, ad certum tempus indulsit; Div. Aug. 41.1). Other
monies went to help disadvantaged nobility; when the property qualification for
the Senate was raised to one million sesterces, those in that body whose holdings
fell short were granted funds to make up the deficit. Incentives to continue an
illustrious line were also offered. To the impoverished grandson of the orator
Hortensius Augustus provided the equivalent of a senatorial fortune so that he
could marry and father children, ne clarissima familia extingueretur (lest a most
distinguished household be obliterated; Tac. Ann. 2.37).
When subsequently requested to subsidize the Hortensii a second time,
Augustus’ successor Tiberius protested that the original grant was intended
as a one-time-only disbursement. Nevertheless, he finally settled limited
amounts on the sons (Ann. 2.38). Later, he reaffirmed Augustus’ intentions
when he passed the vacant estates of two citizens dying without wills or ap-
parent immediate heirs on to remoter kin instead of appropriating them
for the fiscus. Tacitus reports his justification: nobilitatem utriusque pecunia
iuvandam praefatus (the good birth of each man ought to be bolstered by
wealth; Ann. 2.48). It reflects a prevalent conviction that affiliates of leading
houses deserve the income to support an aristocratic lifestyle. Tacitus had la-
beled Augustus’ benevolence to Hortensius “generosity” (liberalitas), a virtue
essential to monarchs,37 and he calls Tiberius’ acts by the same name, since the
emperor had no legal obligation to turn over those windfalls.
37. Millar (1977) 133–134.

201
Andrew Wallace-Hadrill perceives related aims at work in the provisions

of the lex Iulia et Papia imposing inheritance limitations on unmarried and
childless persons. Military recruitment, he argues, was merely an ideolog-
ical justification for the marriage law. Its practical intent was to stabilize the
devolution of patrimonies within elite families from one generation to the
next, ensuring continuity of rank and status. The legislation presupposes in-
tense social pressure to leave legacies to extranei, persons outside the family,
in recognition of benefits conferred through patronage. Under the Roman
patronage system, a childless individual “had the advantage in securing serv-
ices that could lift him to wealth and power; and what Augustus does is to
cut him out of the chain of inheritance, so that he does not also enjoy the
patron’s advantages of bequests.”38 Legacies outside a direct or, failing that, a
lateral line of descent are confined to heirs with dependents, who will eventu-
ally succeed to a parent’s property. Legacy-hunting by the childless was thus
impeded and established families assured of adequate resources. If we assume
that the adultery law had comparable objectives, part of the property taken
from offenders may have been restored to family members, lessening the inad-
vertent harm done to innocent persons.
Some concessions are specifically prescribed in law. Injured husbands
could still claim one-sixth of the dowry for the wrong they had suffered. They
were assured of the right to protect their own interests by bringing a suit
against the fiscus (Pap. Dig. 48.20.4). Jurists also acknowledged that the state
ought to pay back a portion of a condemned parent’s estate to the children
(Paul. Dig. 48.20.7).39 If natural heirs were themselves parents of at least one
child, the argument for reimbursement would be even stronger. While the
jurists do not tell us explicitly that such repayments occurred, it seems likely
from the similar disposition of legacies that selective compensation may have
taken place. Because the choice of recipients was at the discretion of the em-
peror, married men as heads of households would have naturally been the
preferred beneficiaries.
Other legal structures ensured that assets remaining in the hands of the
convicted woman would no longer be misused. If her father was alive, her
property, of course, belonged to him and she would be dependent upon
an allowance (peculium), and, if she was sui iuris, her tutor would exercise
38. Wallace-Hadrill (1981) 68.

39. In the second century ce an imperial rescript limited this concession to those whose entire
parental estates had been confiscated (Call. Dig. 48.20.3).
20
surveillance. While she might not be left entirely destitute, relegation to an

island meant that luxury goods were probably not even available; after her
recall, her disgraced condition discouraged public visibility and consequent
expenditure. Participation in civic religious cult, particularly matronal cult,
was out of the question. Divorced, and unable to remarry a freeborn citizen,
she was left socially invisible, as a woman’s status followed that of her hus-
band.40 What remained of her dowry after penalties were extracted became
hers after her father’s death, but, since she could not remarry, it was useless
for all practical purposes. If she had children, her most pressing obligation
would have been to make a will properly disposing of her belongings. Every
consideration must have encouraged her to live quietly in retirement, calling
no attention to herself. Women surviving under those circumstances were,
even more than most, in the position of mere conduits through whom estates
would pass without profiting their nominal owner.
For well-off matrons of the Augustan age and later, then, inherited riches
may have become something of a mixed blessing and administering them a
balancing act. In the second century bce the Greek historian Polybius could
describe Scipio Africanus’ widow Aemilia parading in a ritual procession
through the streets of Rome with an imposing retinue, the sumptuousness
of her religious paraphernalia a reminder of her husband’s triumph over
Hannibal (Hist. 31.26.3–5). Augustus’ moral legislation arguably encouraged
greater circumspection, because flaunting wealth, in combination with even
the vaguest gossip, might awaken invidia (jealousy) and invite prosecu-
tion.41 Lavish consumption continued to be a vice, if we can believe imperial
moralists, but the venue of display had shifted to the convivium and the male
voluptuary is the chief target of reproach.42
But a cultural link between female affluence and dubious morality
persisted. Reporting the death of the septuagenarian matriarch Ummidia
Quadratilla, Pliny the Younger sniffs that her fondness for her troupe of pan-
tomime actors was ill-advised in a lady of her class: [eos] fovebatque effusius
quam principi feminae convenit (and she used to favor them more unabash-
edly than suits a high-ranking woman; Ep. 7.24.4). The louche connotations
of pantomime—both the risqué nature of the genre and the close associa-
tion in the public mind between actors and prostitution—could blemish a
40. Gardner (1993) 148.

41. Treggiari ([1991] 1993) 297.
42. Edwards (1993) 173–206.
203
widowed matron’s character irrevocably. While he also disparages the public

attention she received at their performances, Pliny neglects to mention
her civic benefactions to her hometown of Casinum, including restoration
of the very theater in which those mimes performed.43 In the end, though,
even Ummidia can be redeemed. She made an exemplary will, Pliny reports,
leaving two-thirds of her estate to her promising adult grandson and the re-
maining third to her granddaughter, with only a small gratuity (corollarium)
bestowed upon her pantomimes. Consequently, he delights in “the pietas of
the dead woman, the honor paid to an excellent young man.” Property, in
short, is back where it belongs, unalienated and unadulterated, ready to ad-
vance another distinguished senatorial career. For that, Pliny, like any other
right-thinking Roman paterfamilias, is relieved and grateful, and, we may
conjecture, if Augustus’ legislation had anything to do with Ummidia’s final
testament, so much the better.
43. On the inscriptional evidence for Ummidia’s donations to Casinum, see Hemelrijk (2015)
109–111. Sick (1999) argues that her investment in slave entertainers might have been a shrewd
financial venture.
204
205
11
Social Laws and Social Facts

Kristina Milnor
Sarah Pomeroy ’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves ends with an

epistemological chapter entitled “The Elusive Women of Classical Antiquity,”1
in which the author addresses our lack of knowledge about ancient women’s
lives, where it comes from, and whether it might be redressed. Pomeroy opens
this exploration by noting Cassius Dio’s assertion that, in Rome in 18 bce,
there were more men among the upper classes than women:
ὁ δ᾽οὖν Αὔγουστος ἄλλα τε ἐνομοθέτησε, καὶ τοὺς δεκάσαντας τινας ἐπὶ

ταῖς ἀρχαῖς ἐς πέντε ἔτη αὐτῶν εἶρξε. τοῖς τε ἀγάμοις καὶ ταῖς ἀνάνδροις
βαρύτερα τὰ ἐπιτίμια ἐπέταξε, καὶ ἔμπαλιν τοῦ τε γάμου καὶ τῆς παιδοποιί
ας ἆθλα ἔθηκεν. ἐπειδή τε πολὺ πλεῖον τὸ ἄρρεν τοῦ θήλεος τοῦ εὐγενοῦς ἦν,
ἐπέτρεψε καὶ ἐξελευθέρας τοῖς ἐθέλουσι, πλὴν τῶν βουλευόντων, ἄγεσθαι,
ἔννομον τὴν τεκνοποιίαν αὐτῶν εἶναι κελεύσας. (Rom. Hist. 54.16.2)
Among the laws that Augustus enacted was one which provided
that those who had bribed anyone in order to gain office should be
debarred from office for five years. He laid heavier assessment upon the
unmarried men and upon the women without husbands, and on the
other hand offered prizes for marriage and the begetting of children.
And since among the nobility there were far more males than females,
he allowed all who wished, except the senators, to marry freedwomen,
and ordered that their offspring should be held legitimate. (E. Cary
trans. [Loeb])
1. Pomeroy ([1975] 1995) 227–230.
Kristina Milnor, Social Laws and Social Facts In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0012
206
206 K rist ina Milnor
Assessing the truth value of this statement, as Pomeroy discusses it with char-
acteristic seriousness and insight, is an issue at once real and representational;
that is, it is necessary to determine the actual historical influences on the sur-
vival of girls and women at all stages of life and to examine the processes by
which women’s very existence is systematically excluded from the historical
record. One question that Pomeroy does not ask, however, is why Dio might
have chosen to impart this piece of information where he does; in other
words, not just why are women absent, but why are they present in the histor-
ical record at specific times and places.
One reason Pomeroy may not have considered this particular question
is that she identifies herself as a social historian and is thus emerging from
a scholarly tradition that sees historical presence as the unmarked category.
That is, historians generally and understandably default to the position that
if something happened, and we are to know it happened, its traces (however
exiguous) must be able to be seen, identified, and studied. On the other hand,
even the most optimistic of feminist historians must admit that women will
never have as much purchase on the ancient record as men do. Thus, once
we have told the stories of female actors, which are there in the ancient evi-
dence but have been suppressed by modern prejudice, we are left with telling
the stories of ancient prejudice, explaining why there are so few stories to be
told. In the same way that the history of homosexuality sometimes regrettably
becomes the history of homophobia, women’s history sometimes devolves
into the history of misogyny. This is a difficult situation and one which in the
years since the publication of Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, has been
tackled in a number of different ways. One is to see the project of women’s
history as challenging not just the content of our ancient histories—both
the ones written then and the ones written now—but their epistemology.
Women’s history forces us to ask not just what we know to have happened
but how we know it, what structures of knowledge allow us to see it and not
to see other things.2
As one example of this approach, we may take the very fact from Dio with
which Pomeroy opens her epistemological exploration. Dio makes his state-
ment about the relative number of males and females in the Roman elite as
part of his description of the Augustan social legislation—those laws that
were passed in 18–17 bce to regulate certain aspects of Roman domestic life.
The lex Iulia de adulteriis formally outlawed adultery for the first time and
2. For two excellent summaries of the influence of feminist approaches on ancient history, see
Dixon (2001) 3–28 and Richlin ([1993] 2014).
207
Social Laws and Social Facts 207
imposed a system of penalties on both those who committed the act and those
who were seen to have colluded in it; the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, so
called, established certain incentives for marriage and child rearing but also re-
stricted intermarriage between senatorial families and other classes of person
(actors, children of actors, those caught in adultery, freedpeople).3 It is this
last part of the legislation to which Dio’s comment refers, putting a positive
spin on the strictures by noting that it was only senatorial families who were
prevented from marrying freedpeople. In fact, the historian remarks, it was
because of the paucity of females among the nobility that the law was passed
to allow men, except those from senatorial families, to marry freedwomen
and produce legitimate children.
Whether Dio’s information about the relative numbers of elite Roman
men and women is actually true is a matter of some debate. Pomeroy is in-
clined to believe him, as are many other historians, in part because of other, al-
beit “crude and haphazard,”4 data which seem to show that men outnumbered
women in antiquity generally. More recently, Thomas McGinn5 has argued in
favor of Dio by systematically dismantling Jens-Uwe Krause’s demographic
arguments6 against a gender imbalance in the Roman Empire—although it
might be noted that the lack of evidence against something does not trans-
late to evidence for it. Other historians, such as Beryl Rawson7 and Susan
Treggiari,8 are more skeptical of Dio. Treggiari notes that if Augustus was
actually concerned with the lack of women among the elite, he would have
attacked what most scholars see as the central cause of the gender imbal-
ance: the abandonment of female babies. McGinn9 retorts that Augustus may
simply have taken a more direct path to his goal by increasing the numbers of
marriageable women immediately rather than waiting for a new generation of
(unabandoned) female babies to grow up.
And so it goes. Pomeroy’s discussion from 1975 still ranks as one of the most
balanced, considered, and compelling in all of this scholarly back-and-forth.
3. For a discussion, see McGinn (2002) esp. 50–57, and Marilyn Skinner in this volume.
4. Pomeroy ([1975] 1995) 227.
5. McGinn (2004).
6. Krause (1994).
7. Rawson (1986), 1–57.
8. Treggiari (1996).
9. McGinn (2004) 202.
208
But one thing on which people on both sides of the issue seem to agree is that,
whatever its truth value, no one can say where Dio—writing two centuries
after the fact—got his information. It certainly doesn’t appear in any of the
other historians who discuss the social legislation or its time period, although,
of course, there are many texts that would have been available to Dio which
are lost to us. On the other hand, Dio’s point is curiously inconsistent, both
with the way that the social legislation is discussed in other ancient historians
and with the actual terms of the laws themselves. That is, historians generally
in antiquity saw the marriage provisions in the social legislation as restrictive
rather than permissive; that is, they were focused, to people’s displeasure, on
preventing certain marriages rather than encouraging others. Suetonius tells
us that Augustus had to revise the lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus in the face
of mass resistance (prae tumultu recusantium) and, even after relaxing some of
its harsher provisions, still had to face down a mob in the theater calling for
the law’s repeal.10 Tacitus describes Augustus’ motivations in passing the laws
as “to bolster the penalties for celibacy and augment his budget” (incitandis
caelibum poenis et augendo aerario) and then later, as “chains” (vincla) that
allow the people to take over the role of parent (Tacitus, Ann. 3.25–28).
Moreover, all of the references to the law in the jurists—which admittedly
reflect not just Augustus’ original but its multiply revised later versions—
refer exclusively to the people who are forbidden from marrying rather than
those who were now permitted to do so. Thus, for example, Paulus (Dig.
23.2.44.pr) writes, “[N]‌o senator, senator’s son, grandson through his son,
or great-grandson through his son and grandson now and in future existing
shall knowingly and with wrongful intention become engaged to or marry a
freedwoman.”11
Dio’s focus, therefore, on the enabling of marriages rather than their pre-
vention is inconsistent with other ancient accounts. In addition, by suggesting
that Augustus was motivated by the paucity of women in the elite classes,
Dio also ignores some important aspects of the laws themselves. First, the law
seems to have lowered the age of first marriage for men but not for women (it
stipulates that men must marry by twenty-five and women by twenty), which
would have exacerbated a gender imbalance rather than mitigated it. Second,
the law did not permit—or restrict, depending on your perspective—marriage
10. Suetonius, Div. Aug. 34.

11. Qui senator est quive filius neposve ex filio proneposve ex <nepote> filio nato cuius eorum est erit,
ne quis eorum sponsam uxoremve sciens dolo malo habeto libertinam aut eam, quae ipsa cuiusve
pater materve artem ludicram facit fecerit; translation and discussion: McGinn (2002) 86.
209
just between men and women, but also between women and men; Paulus tells
us that the restrictions on the marriage of senatorial males also held true for
senatorial females, which presumably means that subsenatorial women could
now marry freedmen as well as the other way around. But Dio refers only to
Augustus’ permitting elite men to marry freedwomen.
Given these inconsistencies with other historical information, as well as
the fact that we can identify no ancient source for Dio’s assertion, the provoc-
ative suggestion has been made (by Beryl Rawson,12 but accepted by others)
that Dio may simply have been extrapolating from the content of the law.
That is, he saw that intermarriage was now permitted between subsenatorial
elites and freedpeople and drew the conclusion that Augustus must have been
attempting to solve the problem of female underpopulation. This does not, of
course, necessarily mean that he was wrong; indeed, as Pomeroy so cogently
argues, there are good reasons to believe that he was right. But what I would
like to suggest here—and I think that this is the direction in which studies of
ancient women have gone in the past forty years, but to my mind could go
further—is that the rightness or wrongness of Dio’s assertion is probably not
the most interesting thing about it. That is, given the fact that its actual truth
value is so debatable, it seems to me that what is illustrated by Dio’s comment
is not so much a fact about the historical context of the social legislation but
rather how the social legislation itself generated historical facts, and particu-
larly historical facts about women. Dio, I would argue, had little information
about women in the Augustan period, and yet there they are, enshrined in the
social legislation’s marriage stipulations for all to see and wonder about! An
ancient historian might well be forgiven for imagining some demographic
data to fill in the background, to explain this peculiar eruption of femininity
and domestic concerns into the sober masculine precincts of the canon of
Roman law.
By way of support for this idea, I should note that we have an example
of the same process occurring in the modern day in regard to a different as-
pect of the social legislation. Up until a few years ago, no one would have
questioned the notion that the lex Iulia de adulteriis—the law that formally
outlawed adultery for the first time—was passed in reaction to the indis-
criminate sexual behavior of elite Roman women under the late Republic.13
“Evidence” of these loose morals was readily found in the poetry of the Latin
12. Rawson (1986) 49 n. 51.

13. Syme (1939) 443–445.
210
elegists, whose work testifies—allegedly—to the existence of a demimonde

wherein married women regularly dallied with poets and then broke their
hearts.14 Nowadays, however, under the influence of feminist and other crit-
ical theories, we read the elegists differently and have also come to a different
understanding of the adultery law.15 Whatever Augustus’ motivation might
have been (demographic, ideological, paternalistic), few people today would
argue that the existence of a law about adultery necessarily testifies to the ex-
istence of a problem with adultery.16 Again, though, as with Dio, we see the
ways in which the social legislation demands that we generate social historical
facts to give real-world context to its peculiarly authoritative yet entirely un-
informative statements about the lives of women.
Of course, in some ways the question of real social historical cause and
effect is no different for the social legislation than for any other law passed
by the Roman Senate. But I would argue that the case of women and the
Augustan social legislation is particularly acute—a particularly fertile site for
the generation and regeneration of historical facts—for two reasons. First,
we have the very real vacuum of historical information in regard to the lives
of ancient women. This was, as I suggested, almost as true in antiquity as it
is today: with a very few exceptions, the ability of ancient men to write the
stories of their foremothers was as compromised by the lack of authoritative
sources as is ours. Thus, they too were forced to read backward through the
legislation and imagine the female lives it governed. Second, though, is the
nature of the Augustan laws themselves. Whatever else one may think of
the social legislation—its motivations, aims, and effects—it appears peculiarly
focused on the roles and behavior of women. Our one textual reference to it
at the time of its passage, by Horace in the Carmen Saeculare, calls it decreta
super iugandis /feminis (the decrees about marrying women; 18–19). In a sim-
ilar vein, Dionysius of Halicarnassus’ description of the social legislation of
Romulus—widely seen as influenced by contemporary Augustan politics17—
explicitly says that laws concerning marriage are necessary “because of
14. For example, Luck (1969) 22–24.

15. Milnor (2005) 150–154.
16. I am reminded of one of my favorite Onion headlines from a few years ago: “New Bill
Would Defend Marriage from Sharks,” September 19, 2006, accessed March 24, 2017, http://
www.theonion.com/article/new-bill-would-defend-marriage-from-sharks-2047.
17. For example, Balsdon (1971).
21
women.”18 Laws generally may gesture toward and attempt to control certain
social identities and relationships, but the Augustan legislation is unusual in
its strong, almost exclusive focus on women.
Moreover, the social legislation does not just represent women as a
group; it also depends on and enforces the existence of certain classes of
women: those worthy of marriage and not, those sexually available and those
off-limits. This is particularly evident in the case of the adultery legislation,
which standardizes categories such as materfamilias and prostitute, a move
that was critical to the law’s functioning, since it was the status of the woman,
rather than the man, which defined a sexual act as adulterous. In addition,
the laws also insisted that these social categories needed to be visible, a goal
it achieved by mandating specific distinctive clothing for respectable women
and prostitutes.19 Thus, the laws not only purport to “know” certain things
about women—which were good ones, which were bad, which were worthy
of marriage, which were not—but they sought to extend that knowledge to
others, creating a language of visible virtue that might be seen and understood
by the population at large. This “publication” of women’s domestic lives was
particularly horrifying to Tacitus, who describes the laws’ effects as a violation
of the integrity of the Roman home: “[E]‌very home was being undermined
by the investigations of informers. Thus, as much as up to that point it had la-
bored under the weight of its sins, now the house was burdened by the laws.”20
The word Tacitus uses here for the activities of the informers,
interpretationes, is untranslatable to sensible English, but the historian’s point
is clear: the informers have been tasked with “reading” Roman homes, with
interpreting what is going on there and translating it for the state. In other
words, Tacitus brilliantly implies, the laws do not just depend on the existence
of certain knowledge about women and their lives; they actually also generate
more knowledge, more meanings, more facts which spread outward from
them like ripples in a pond. In this sense, Dio’s act of interpretatio (if such it
was) is fully in keeping with the behavior the laws sought to encourage: they
want us to wonder, worry even, about the lives of women, to turn our atten-
tion to the female members of Roman society and continue to try to guess
what they were up to. Looking back to Pomeroy, then, I would say that her use
18. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.24.4.

19. McGinn (1998) 144–145.
20. Ceterum multitudo periclitantium gliscebat, cum omnis domus delatorum interpretationibus
subverteretur, utque antehac flagitiis ita tunc legibus laborabatur; Tac. Ann. 3. 25.
21
of Dio’s comment as a springboard for a discussion of epistemological issues

is remarkably apt. In Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves, she was interested
in establishing a framework of facts within which we might understand the
lives of women in classical antiquity—facts that had been obscured, ignored,
and misinterpreted for hundreds, if not thousands of years. She did a great
job, and, as I said, her discussion of the various influences on the “fact” that
Dio adduces about the relative numbers of men and women in the Augustan
age is sensible, balanced, and compelling. Forty-some years on, however,
I think we have come to the point where we can also question the fact of
Dio’s fact—not just its facticity or historical truth value but how it functions
within an epistemological framework that wrote women’s stories then and
is still writing them now. This is not to dismiss the part of women’s history
that seeks to recover lost knowledge about ancient female lives. Rather it is to
suggest that in the forty-plus years since the original publication of Goddesses,
Whores, Wives, and Slaves—and at least in part because of the epistemological
challenges presented by the study of women in antiquity—we have gained a
better understanding of how both knowing and not knowing must be taken
into account when writing the story of classical antiquity.
213
12
The Woman in the Street

Becoming Visible in Mid-R epublican Rome
Amy Richlin
Becoming Visible was a classic in the new feminist history of the 1970s,
but for some historical periods visibility has been slow in coming. Current
treatments of Roman political culture tend to erase not only women but poor
people and slaves.1 We know women were always there and always constituted
half the population, more or less; yet, for long stretches of history, they are in-
visible. This is a wrong that must be righted.
The problem was stated best by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, as her
heroine, Catherine Morland, explains why it is that she does not like to read
history: “I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either
vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in
every page; the men all so good-for-nothing, and hardly any women at all—it
is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a
great deal of it must be invention.”
Just so. It is not just that women are omitted; it is clear that they are de-
liberately omitted, since historians are the ones who choose what they put in.
Even Livy complained about the tendency of historians to fib; as he put it,
1. Many thanks to the editors; to Patricia Johnston and her colleagues at Boston University for
their invitation to present this material at the Boston Area Roman Studies Conference in 2015,
especially to Zsuzsanna Várhelyi, Ann Vasaly, and my co-presenter, Barbara Gold; to my fellow
panelists at Feminism & Classics VII, Dorota Dutsch, Ann Feltovich, Sharon James, and Erin
Moodie; and above all to Sarah Pomeroy, who taught me how to give a talk and from whose
work I have learned so much over the years. Translations throughout are my own; references to
comedy are to the plays of Plautus.
Amy Richlin, The Woman in the Street In: New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World.
DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190937638.003.0013
214
214 A m y Richlin
adeo nullus mentiendi modus est (there is just no limit to their lying; 26.49.3).
He was worried about casualty figures, but the kind of history he and his
sources were writing is in many ways fictional. Even when he puts women in,
we have to ask: Is this for real? This is a problem we will come back to as we
look for the woman in the street: an ordinary woman, going about her busi-
ness, interacting with the street scene.
In recent work on Plautus, I argue that Roman comedy gives a bottom-
up view of its times, and that Roman comedy—the palliata—developed in
Italy from around 270 to 200 bce, on into the 190s–180s. This model pushes
the conventional start date for Latin literature back by several decades, but
even the few fragments of Livius Andronicus’ comedies incorporate comic
formulae. Plautus, then, who was born in the 250s, along with Livius and
Naevius (both dead by 200), was using material that was developed during that
earlier period—a period filled with war. A timeline of the 200s bce through
the reputed date of Plautus’ death (184) shows many city sackings and mass
enslavements contemporary with the development of Roman drama. Rome
had armies in the field almost every year between 343 and 242, as did many
Italian cities, so that any individual’s experience of city sacking would have
been within a few degrees of separation.2 The list of wars in which Rome was
involved featured the Third Samnite War (297–290), the war against Pyrrhus
(280–275), the First Punic War (264–241), and the Second Punic War (220–
202); even in the gaps, there were major military events going on in the Italian
peninsula and abroad: the invasion of Sardinia (235), the First Illyrian War
(229), invasions from the North by Celtic tribes. The First Macedonian War
was undertaken during the Second Punic War (214). The century ended with
the start of the Second Macedonian War. The Second Punic War alone lasted
eighteen years, and, for all but the last year or so, the Italian peninsula was oc-
cupied by Carthaginian armies under Hannibal: three times longer than the
occupation of France in World War II.
If a troupe of actors was walking down a road in Italy at any point in the 200s
bce, they would have met up with groups of refugees whose town had been
sacked or their land appropriated. They might have come from Compulteria,
Trebula, Austicula in 215 (Livy 23.39.6); from Compulteria, Telesia, Compsa,
Fugifulae, Orbitanium, Blanda or Aecae or Acuca in 214 (24.20.4–5, 8).
Near Locri in 215, “every day a greater crowd of them poured out from every
2. For a survey of mass enslavements in this period, see Volkmann (1990), supplemented for
Italy by Harris (1979) 59 n. 4; for the timeline, see Richlin (2017) 481–491. On Rome’s armies
in the field, see Oakley (2005) 20.
215
The Woman in the Street 215
gate . . . a crowd mixed up of every age and class, wandering in the fields,
mostly unarmed” (multitudo, multitudinem; 24.1.3, 4). Hannibal burned
Herdonea to the ground and moved the “crowd” to Thurii and Metapontum
(multitudine; 27.1.14). The people of Nuceria and Acerrae had nowhere to go
after Acerrae was partly burned down and Nuceria destroyed; the Nucerians
were moved to Atella and the Atellans were moved to Calatia (27.3.6–7). The
same conditions applied everywhere; when the Roman army landed in North
Africa in 204, the roads out of the coastal cities were blocked by crowds mixed
with “lines of women and boys” and cattle (29.28.3). In Acarnania in 210, as an
Aetolian invasion loomed, wives and children and men over sixty were sent
across the border into Epirus, while men from fifteen to sixty stayed to fight
(26.25.11). Some refugees were allowed to leave their homes just with what
they could carry, as when Hannibal offered the Saguntines their bodies “unvi-
olated” if they left the town with no more than two sets of clothing apiece, un-
armed (corpora . . . inviolata, si inermes cum binis vestimentis; 21.13.7, cf. 23.15.3
at Nuceria—less generous).3 In all the towns the actors came to there would
have been people in the audience like these, along with the newly enslaved.
Every town would have been full of those violently displaced by the wars and
what went along with war: the enslavement of captives after an army sacks a
town—often only the women and children, who have to watch when the men
are killed; the poverty that can make a family abandon a child, who is then
picked up and enslaved; the kidnapping and human trafficking that thrive
when the world is at war.
Women had particular cause for concern. Kathy Gaca, in a string of searing
articles, has put together notices of the rape of women and girls by soldiers,
from Homer through the Byzantine period, and has juxtaposed them with
atrocities we know took place during wars in our own time.4 Women lost male
kin in the army, to death or enslavement. When a city was taken, the slaves
were usually part of the spoils, so a slave-woman might endure a second de-
racination. It is sometimes argued that wars are good for women in a material
sense, in that wealth might accumulate in their hands, as Aristotle claimed
it did in Sparta (Politics 1270a23–25). It is true that some men profited by
the Second Punic War, particularly those whom Philip Kay calls “Rome’s
3. For a full picture of the devastation caused by the wars of the 200s, see Brunt (1971); Erdkamp
(1998); Toynbee (1965).
4. See Gaca (2010–2011, 2011, 2014, 2015).
216
216 A m y Richlin
aristocratic plutocracy.”5 Some Roman women, as will be seen, had enough

gold that they could contribute to fund drives during this war, enough that
the Oppian Law was passed in 215 to limit women’s displays of wealth; and
women famously lobbied for repeal of the Oppian Law when the war was
over and the city was afloat on the tidal wave of money from the Carthaginian
indemnity (195 bce).6 It is safe to say that war was not good for most women.
These people needed a laugh, and the palliata grew up to meet that need.
Plautine comedy features many female characters—mostly slave-women, a
few freedwomen, some memorable matronae. If we want to think about what
women were doing in the 200s in central Italy, we can look in the palliata
(which I do not take to be actually Greek, or actually set in an earlier time,
or no-time). This matters, because there are few other places to look. All the
surviving histories of the period come from much later. Polybius is the best,
but much of what he wrote is lost, and he was writing in the mid-100s bce;
Livy wrote over a century later. Polybius was exiled to Italy soon after 168 bce,
so he could have known survivors of the Second Punic War, which ended in
202—only a thirty-four-year gap. Still, he was not really contemporary, nor
was he at all concerned to include ordinary women as political agents in his-
tory. Comedy both staged women and played to women, so that we can get a
secondhand idea of what made women laugh in mid-Republican Rome and
how that fits with their political culture.
Astaphium’s Earrings
The plays of Plautus act out women negotiating their culture. In Truculentus,
the slave-woman Astaphium belongs to the prostitute Phronesium; ac-
cordingly, she wears makeup and fancy jewelry, as we know, typically, from
comments written into the dialogue. In one scene, where she flirts with a male
slave, he makes fun of her jewelry and says it is all fake; he challenges her, “Go
on, bet me those Victorias you got ain’t made of wood” (Truc. 275). This mys-
terious line is usually taken to refer to her earrings; certainly it refers to some
ornament she is wearing, possibly a pair of fibulae. As Stefan Weinstock long
ago demonstrated, the cult of Victoria made rapid strides in Italy beginning
with the period after the death of Alexander; shrines and statues appear in
5. Kay (2014) 15–17.

6. On the Oppian Law, see Culham (1982).
217
Rome starting in the early 200s.7 Here we see the goddess in popular culture,
in the form of cheap jewelry worn by a prostitute’s slave-woman. What was
Victoria to her? A great deal; slave-women had good reason to fear the sacking
of their city, as some of them had good reason to remember. Moreover, this
slave-woman was probably played by a male actor, perhaps himself a slave,
and so also with good reason to remember, for male as well as female children
were raped and sold into slavery when cities were sacked, and male as well as
female slaves were used for sex by their owners (a running joke onstage). As in
Nancy Rabinowitz’s formulation, the “narrative audience” sees a slave-woman
dressed up in lucky earrings made to look like those a wealthy woman would
wear (for Victoria meant a great deal to all women); the “authorial audi-
ence” sees the male body inside Astaphium, with his own coat of tarnish, his
own scars.8 Scholars who reconstruct the Roman street sometimes wonder if
women would have been able to display jewelry in public; Astaphium answers
that question.9
Were women present in the audience of the palliata? They are directly
addressed in the prologue to Poenulus (28–29, 32–35):
Wet-nurses should take care of their itty-bitty

baby boys at home, and not bring them to watch.
...
Married ladies should watch in silence, laugh in silence;
they should hold off from tinkling their bell-like voices here;
they should bring their delicious dishy gossip home,
so they’re not a pain to their husbands here like they are at home.
Wet-nurses were either slaves or very low-class; this teasing shout-out not only
puts women in the audience but suggests how the top census classes in cen-
tral Italy might have gained an early appreciation for the palliata: brought to
the show by the nanny. And then the “married ladies,” matronae: how upper-
class were they? Livy occasionally distinguishes them from freedwomen (in
22.1.18, matronae offer money to Juno on the Aventine, libertinae to Feronia);
a freedwoman speaker in Plautus’ Cistellaria complains that the upper-class
7. On Astaphium’s ornaments, see Dutsch (2015); Richlin (2017) 121, 143. On the cult of
Victoria, Weinstock (1957).
8. See Rabinowitz (1998); Richlin (2017) 281–303.
9. See Harlow (2013) 235–236.
218
218 A m y Richlin
matronae look down on her kind (23–27).10 But I think it is possible that mar-
ried freedwomen were matronae; that is, you did not have to be upper class to
be a matrona. And, as Lily Ross Taylor showed, the city of Rome in the 200s
bce was full of freed slaves.11
Named figures from real life—never mind women—are very rare in
Plautus; unlike Old Comedy, Roman comedy does not insult real people by
name, at least in the texts we have. However, names may have been inserted ad
hoc, and one clear extant example belongs to a woman: in the famous tour of
the Forum Romanum in Curculio, the Choragus (stage manager) tells the au-
dience, “You’ll find rich husbands with money problems at Leucadia Oppia’s”
(485). From her name, she is a freed slave; from the context, she runs an ex-
pensive brothel, and the Choragus locates it in plain sight.
Indeed, Curculio and other plays suggest that the temporary wooden stage
of the palliata was sometimes set up in the Forum itself, a perfect position from
which to comment on political culture. Not only did the palliata constitute
popular culture at an official Roman event, the ludi; not only did the palliata
incorporate pop culture references like Astaphium’s earrings; but the palliata
made plenty of political comments. It is clear from the use of the word populus
in the corpus that women were included in civic functions like coming to
the rescue, passing judgment on their neighbors, and throwing things at the
unpopular. To be sure, historical sources, when they do report on women in
the Forum, make it seem as if women were out of place there, never seen. The
palliata, however, suggests that women moved freely around the city: a slave
describes the display of fashions by the crowd of prostitutes greeting the re-
turning troops (Epid. 213–235); two girl musicians are rented from the Forum
(Aul. 281); wives are said to demand a long list of services provided by female
workers, who make house calls (Mil. 691–700); a wife is said to demand “a
cart to carry me” (Aul. 502). The Forum Romanum had shops as much as the
other fora in Rome and elsewhere, and this is richly attested, although not for
another 250 years.12 Women were part of the palliata, both onstage and in the
audience, and the relationship between women and current political issues is
in fact quite visible in the plays. One wife mocks an old man as a “pillar of the
senate” (Cas. 536), another mocks her husband as “ornament of the coffin”
10. See Richlin (2017) 272–275.

11. See Taylor ([1960] 2013).
12. For women not in the Forum Romanum, see Boatwright (2011); for women shopping and
working in shops, see Groen-Vallinga (2013); Holleran (2013); Kampen (1982).
219
(capuli decus; As. 892), a probable pun on “ornament of the populus”; political
slogans are available to nonvoters in a particularly cynical way. Politics and
war affected everyone.
The Woman in the Street

The current model of Roman political culture is all-male, and here I will
single out the work of Karl-Joachim Hölkeskamp, the leading spokesman
for this approach.13 Hölkeskamp likes to talk about the meaning of Roman
public space as a place where communal memory is produced. As Ann Vasaly
showed, however, the Roman Forum was imbued with multiple meanings for
the people who walked through it.14 Hölkeskamp’s vision is instead mono-
lithic, populated by a figure he refers to as “the man in the Roman street.”
In this model, political memory is organized from the top down:
[Cicero] draws an implicit but telling comparison by theatrically

pointing to the equestrian statue of Q. Marcius Tremulus in foro ante
templum Castoris, “who had vanquished the Hernici,” thus evoking
certain elements of the implicit master narrative of the early stages of
Rome’s rise to power, inscribed in the collective (or rather cultural)
memory of the Roman people, which was fed, nurtured, administered,
and controlled by an educated sociopolitical elite, but obviously shared
to a large extent by the elusive “man in the Roman street.”15
As I have argued elsewhere, victory monuments also commemorate loss; the

ruling class might appeal to meanings that suited them, but they could never
control the perceptions of those in the street.16
Hölkeskamp’s city is male all the way through: “all senators . . . were always
superior to all the other social strata of the populus Romanus collectively, as well
as to the man in the Roman street individually—as ordinary citizen and as rank-
and-file in the legions.”17 Not even all men were in the legions—members of the
13. Only Hölkeskamp (2006, 2010, 2014) are discussed here, but this is just a sample.
14. See Hölkeskamp (2006, 2014); Vasaly (1993).
15. Hölkeskamp (2014) 67, emphasis added, here and in the excerpts from Hölkeskamp that
follow.
16. See Richlin (2018).
17. Hölkeskamp (2010) 32.
20
220 A m y Richlin
lowest census class served as oarsmen in the navy or were noncombatants—

and in the palliata officers and their slaves are ridiculed by prostitutes, slaves,
and poor men (Amphitruo, Curculio, Miles Gloriosus, Poenulus, Pseudolus,
Truculentus), while the Senate is ridiculed by everyone.
For Hölkeskamp, “nomological knowledge” (the cultural norms taught by
Roman legends and customs)
applies to the complex “dramaturgy” of political action and public ap-

pearance in general. It thus affects all media, forms, and levels of so-
cial interaction and communication, once again individually as well
as collectively, inside the political class itself: between nobiles, “ordi-
nary” senators, patrons, as well as between this class and the “man in
the Roman street,” the populus Romanus or the plebs at large.18
Certainly some members of the populus Romanus felt a sense of alienation

from the class of patrons; distrust of the summi viri is all over the palliata,
and the slave Stasimus in Trinummus critiques the mos maiorum and its hyp-
ocritical invocation by the ruling class.19 At the same time, the literal drama-
turgy of the palliata incorporates a nomological knowledge quite outside the
legends of Rome, as old women tell young women how the world works, and
female characters speak truth to power. Gesine Manuwald has shown how im-
portant was the exemplarity of female characters in Roman tragedy.20
Hölkeskamp’s view of political culture also extends to money, “the down-
to-earth medium that the man in the street had in everyday use—namely,
the coinage of the Republic and its telling imagery.”21 Onstage, lenae and
prostitutes handle money all the time; the lena in Asinaria lectures the young
man on where groceries come from (198–201)—no credit, cash only, just as
with prostitutes; an old slave-woman jokes that a young prostitute’s hand
should not smell like silver (Mos. 268–269).22 Even the pages of Livy indi-
cate that the woman in the street had an acquaintance with coinage: Busa at
18. Hölkeskamp (2010) 55.

19. See Blösel (2000) 27–37; Richlin (in progress).
20. See Manuwald (2015), also covering the importance of female characters in the Republican
fabula praetexta; compare remarks by Langlands (2018) on the ability of audiences to repurpose
exemplary stories. On female characters speaking out, see Richlin (2017) 256–281.
21. Hölkeskamp (2010) 62–63.
22. For such lines in relationship to the development of Roman coinage in the 200s, see Burnett
(2012); Kay (2014) 23–24, 44; Richlin (2017) 435–441.
21
Canusium gave food, clothing, and road money (viaticum) to soldiers who
had fled there after Cannae, and she went on to support fugitives in their
thousands (22.52.7, 22.54.4); Pacula Cluvia at Capua, a former prostitute,
supplied Roman prisoners with food (26.33.8). In the later Republic, women,
as well as men, appeared as exemplary images on coins.23
Law, too, is stripped of the women it protects, as Hölkeskamp speaks of
“the fundamental legislation de provocatione, guaranteeing and protecting the
libertas of the man in the Roman street.”24 But one of the more memorable
legends associated with this right is the story of Verginia, a young lower-
class girl who is falsely claimed as a slave as she walks to school in the Forum
(Livy 3.44–48); her nanny raises the traditional appeal for help to fellow city
dwellers, and nearby women join in. In Plautus’ Rudens, the slave Trachalio
performs a similar formal appeal on behalf of two slave prostitutes (615–626);
unlike Verginia, they survive, and both gain their libertas. Hölkeskamp goes
so far as to claim that “in Rome, there was absolutely no one—no popularis
tribune and no self-professed champion of the plebs, no political philoso-
pher, and certainly not the notoriously elusive ‘man in the Roman street’—who
would even have dreamt that ‘equality’ between all and for all could ever be
a desirable value sui generis.”25 Evidently the woman in the Roman street is
even more elusive, yet almost every play of Plautus is set in the street, where
matronae, prostitutes, slave-women, and one outspoken Virgo (in Persa)
have plenty to say. And in fact a wish for what is aequum is very commonly
expressed in the palliata, and not just for men, as the slave-woman Syra makes
a cogent argument for equal rights for married women (Mer. 817–829).
Turning to history, there are two major episode-types in Livy’s books
about the Second Punic War in which women are actually in the street: stories
about religion and stories about war loss and fighting. In Livy’s gender poli-
tics, the two merge, but neither type appears to be entirely fictitious.
Most commonly, Livy associates women in public with religious functions.
This is the one way in which women are conventionally visible to him. Not
that women always get it right; so in 212 bce, as part of a rise in “supersti-
tion” (religio) due to the tensions of war, as people crowded into the city “out
of destitution and fear”: “Nor were the Roman rites done away with now in
secret and behind closed doors, but even in public and in the Forum and on
23. See DiLuzio (2016) 169–171, with illustrations.

24. Hölkeskamp (2010) 117.
25. Hölkeskamp (2010) 134.
2
222 A m y Richlin
the Capitolium there was a crowd of women who were neither sacrificing nor
praying to the gods according to our ancestral custom” (25.1.7). The Senate
and the urban praetor crack down. This event long predates the famous case
of the Bacanalia in Italy (186); these women break the rules at Rome’s center.
This passing episode should remind us that the Forum belonged to the Vestals
as well as to the pontiffs, that its law courts and entertainments were open to
all, and that, on the Capitolium, Juno and Minerva were worshiped alongside
Jupiter.
More often in Livy, women do follow ancestral custom or act in accord-
ance with priestly instructions. Still, they take action, and in public. Women
are wrongly erased from some current overviews of Roman religion; an event
Livy places in 207 bce undermines any idea that women took a back seat in
public worship.26 Livy here includes circumstantial details of women’s ritual
as the wartime city responds to a bad omen, the birth of an intersex child in
Frusino. The child is drowned, and the gods propitiated (27.37.7–15):
Likewise the pontifices decreed that thrice nine virgins should go

through the city singing a hymn. While they were in the temple of
Jupiter Stator learning this hymn (which had been written by the
poet Livius Andronicus) the temple of Juno Regina on the Aventine
was struck by lightning. When the haruspices had responded that this
pertained to the married women [matronae], and that the goddess
had to be placated with a gift, by an edict of the curule aediles all the
matronae were gathered together on the Capitolium who were living
in the city or within the tenth milestone, and they delegated from
among themselves twenty-five women to whom they would all give a
donation from their dowries; from this gift a golden platter was made
and brought to the Aventine, and a pure and chaste offering was made
by the matronae. [Then the priests decide that yet another sacrifice
is required.] . . . From the temple of Apollo, two white heifers were
led from the Porta Carmentalis into the city; after them, two cypress-
wood statues of Juno Regina were carried; then came the twenty-seven
virgins, clad in long dresses, singing their hymn to Juno Regina—a
26. On the state of the question on women in/and Roman religion, see Richlin (2014) 28–
32, 199–200; note especially Fanny Dolansky’s (2011a, 2011b, 2011c) strong arguments for the
treatment of Roman religion as gender-integrated. See now Meghan DiLuzio’s (2016) account
of women as agents in Republican ritual, esp. 5–6 for a cogent rebuttal of John Scheid. On the
worship of Juno Regina in this period, see Schultz (2006) 33–38.
23
hymn perhaps praiseworthy for the crude talents of that time, but now
off-putting and awkward if I were to record it. The decemvirs followed
the line of virgins, wearing laurel wreaths and purple-bordered togas.
They came from the gate via the Vicus Jugarius to the Forum; in the
Forum the parade stopped, and then the virgins, taking up a rope in
their hands, walked on, timing the sound of their voice to the beat of
their feet. From there they went via the Vicus Tuscus and the Velabrum
through the Forum Boarium to the Clivus Publicius, and so to the
temple of Juno Regina.
This is a walk of over 1.5 kilometers, routed through the Forum Romanum
and ending on the Aventine Hill. Note how the women delegate, give, com-
mission, act, and how the chorus of virgins, singing their special hymn, walk
all around the city, the center of attraction, preceding the priests. Most fa-
mously, of course, women welcomed the Magna Mater when she arrived from
Pergamum in 204 bce, spawning a legend that Cicero used as a stick with
which to beat Clodia in the Pro Caelio (34). Yet the heroine of this tale is
Claudia Quinta, cui dubia, ut traditur, antea fama clariorem ad posteros tam
religioso ministerio pudicitiam fecit (whose previous doubtful reputation,
as they say, made her chastity the more famous among posterity because
of such a pious act of service; Liv. 29.14.12).27 Claudia herself miraculously
towed in the ship that had run aground in the Tiber, but she was only one of
the matronae primores who formed a human chain and passed the goddess
from hand to hand from the Tiber to the temple of Victoria on the Palatine
(29.14.13–14): victoria, again, being the point.
Naturally, then, Livy also places women in the streets to react to news of
the war. In the countryside, when the consul Nero makes a lightning strike
north in 207 toward his coming victory at the Metaurus, “men and women”
come pouring across the fields to cheer his army on the march (27.45.7). In
Rome, as people await word of the outcome of the battle, women wander
from temple to temple, beseeching the gods (27.50.5); when word comes of
victory, the whole city pours into the streets, although some women stay
home with the children and wait for their husbands to fill them in (27.51.7);
a holiday is declared, and for three days matronae with their children give
thanks in the temples (27.51.9). Defeat likewise brings women out en masse.
After the Romans’ disastrous defeat at Lake Trasimene in 217 bce, women
27. On this story, see Langlands (2009) 65–69.

24
224 A m y Richlin
roamed the streets seeking information (22.7.7) as their particular concern

(22.7.11–12):
[A]‌crowd made up more of women than men was standing at the

gates, waiting either for someone of theirs or for word of them; they
mobbed everyone who came through, asking and asking, nor could
they be pulled off. . . . Both the good news and the grief belonged es-
pecially to women.
After Cannae in 216, when there was no information, the wailing was
such that women were ordered to stay home (22.55.3, 6–7). When the Senate
refused to ransom the Cannae POWs, women came down to the Comitium
with their male kin to plead for mercy (22.60.1). In 211, when Hannibal
marched on Rome, there was general panic, and Livy builds up to a set piece
with women not only wailing at home but running out into public with their
hair hanging down, running to all the temples and sweeping the altars with
their hair, raising their arms to heaven and praying to the gods to save the
city from enemy hands and to “preserve the Roman mothers and little chil-
dren unviolated” (inviolatos; 26.9.6–8). This account reaches a peak of hyper-
bole when Vibius Virrus, speaking at Capua, expostulates that the merciless
Roman army continued to besiege Capua even though “the cries of their
wives and children could almost be heard from here” (26.13.13).
For it was a convention that the fall of a city is marked by the wailing
of women. Yet it really was women’s job to mourn for the dead; during the
200s bce, they had plenty to cry about.28 The wars listed earlier suggest how
often they might have lost kin to battle or enslavement; ten thousand men
were taken captive after Cannae (Polyb. 3.117.3), and the Senate’s refusal to
ransom them sent them off into slavery. Nathan Rosenstein estimates a cas-
ualty rate for the Roman army of between 34 and 40 percent, and the rate
must have been higher for men of the lowest census group, who had to row
in the navy, belowdecks, and for slaves in the army, who usually carried no
weapons.29 Slaves had no legal wives or mothers, but this does not mean they
28. See Richlin ([2001] 2014) on professional mourners; Jeppesen (2016) on the lament
tradition.
29. For mortality figures, see Rosenstein (2012) 363; this is in the generally victorious period
from 200 to 168. See Leigh (2004) 66–72 on the Senate’s decision; Richlin (2018) on the im-
pact of class and civil status on casualties; and Welwei (1988) 5–18, 28–42, 56–80 on slaves in
the army and navy.
25
had no female kin. Livy records that, in the levy of 216 bce, after Cannae,
boys under fifteen were conscripted into the army (quosdam praetextatos;
22.57.9)—as were eight thousand slaves, due to the lack of free men (22.57.11).
Families who had lost kin to captivity had little hope of finding them again.
A Saguntine embassy thanked the Senate for the investigators sent out by the
two elder Scipios to locate and bring back the ones who had been enslaved at
Saguntum (28.39.5).
The state of mind of women whose children had been lost might have
been like what we read about the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo in Buenos
Aires, whose children were “disappeared” in the 1970s, for example, Marta
Vazquez, mother of Maria Marta Vazquez de Lugones, twenty-three years old,
abducted with her husband, Cesar Amadeo Lugones, twenty-six years old, on
May 14, 1976. She tells what it felt like to go to the Plaza:
And for us going to the Plaza every Thursday became a need. It didn’t
matter how we were feeling because I will tell you, every Thursday, be-
fore going to the Plaza, when I woke up and remembered what day
it was, my stomach started to ache. . . . But it was simply a matter of
getting onto the Plaza, and that seemed to calm me down, to fill me
with an unknown strength.30
It took daring to go to the Plaza, as it must have done for women in Italy
to go to the local forum in the 200s bce, if they went alone. Naevius has
a character in his tragedy Danae say, “They start rumors at once if they see
a woman alone in the street” (8 TrRF = Trag. 7 R.2–3); Manuwald includes
this among elements in Roman tragedy that interact with Roman values,
themselves serving a policing function.31 Nor were the streets risky only for
upper-class women; as the prostitute Gymnasium in Plautus’ Cistellaria says,
“For a meretrix to stand alone in the street is the sure sign of a prostibulum”
(331)—not just a prostitute, but a cheap prostitute. An old man in Mercator
describes the reaction on the street when a too-pretty slave-woman walks by,
accompanying a matrona: “they’d all stare, they’d look at her, they’d nod, they’d
wink, they’d whistle, /they’d pinch her, call her, they’d annoy her; they’d set
up a chant outside the door” (407–408). Slave-women had no honor to lose,
except in their own eyes. In wartime, one fear outweighed the other.
30. Mellibovsky (1997) 99.

31. Manuwald (2015) 174.
26
226 A m y Richlin
The disappeared in Argentina included young children as well:
General Camps’s plan of finding “new parents” for the children meant,
in practice, that many of them were given—like pieces of property or
war booty—to highly placed government officials, to members of the
military, or to police officers. Others were abandoned in the street or
left at orphanages with no information about their origins. . . . The
Grandmothers have coined the term desaparecidos con vida (the living
disappeared) to describe the condition of these children.32
Children like this—exposed, or kidnapped and sold into prostitution or to

some rich old man or to some nice family who needs a maid or a houseboy—
provide the plots of eight of Plautus’ twenty extant plays. The Virgo in
Plautus’ Persa is sold as part of the spoils from an imaginary war in Arabia. It
was a topic of current interest.
In Plautus’ Epidicus, Philippa comes to Athens from Thebes, looking
for her daughter. Philippa herself was raped in Epidaurus as a poor young
girl; she moved with her baby to Thebes, where this daughter, now a
young woman, has been taken in the praeda and sold to a young soldier
who wants her for a sex slave. He is not the only buyer, for, as we hear in a
description of the returning army early in the play, the soldiers each have
two or three captives with them, boys and girls (pueros, virgines; 210–212).
The Greek setting flickers when the army is referred to as the legio (46,
58, 91); Thebes was actually sacked by Alexander in 335, and its women
raped, but legio evokes more recent activity.33 Philippa sings when she
enters (526–532):
If a person has miseries that are pitiable, she feels miserable in her soul.
This I know from experience, since many things run together that beat
at my heart
at once: multiple trouble has me worked up.
Poverty and fear keep my soul’s mind terrified,
and I don’t have anywhere to put my hopes in, anywhere, no
well-g uarded place.
32. Arditti (1999) 51.

33. On the sack of Thebes, see Gaca (2010–2011) 105–106.
27
So—my daughter’s in the power of the enemy and I don’t know where
she may be now.
Just like the Madres de la Plaza de Mayo, kin onstage seek lost children: fa-
thers in Captivi and Poenulus, mothers in Cistellaria and Epidicus, a brother
in Menaechmi. The fantasy of family reunion haunts the plays.
Livy occasionally records the details of a disappearance, as in an epi-
sode demonstrating the tyrannical behavior of King Philip V in 208 bce
(27.31.8): “Even from one of the leading citizens of the Achaeans, Aratus,
his wife Polycratia was taken, and carried away to Macedonia in expectation
of a royal wedding night.” Is this a real record of a desaparecida? Or just a
rhetorical invention? This is where reading Livy starts to seem like reading
through a brick wall; as he half-confesses of his own praxis while describing
the sack of a small trading post called Victumulae by Hannibal’s forces in 217
bce, historians had a pattern-book: neque ulla, quae in tali re memorabilis
scribentibus videri solet, praetermissa clades est (nor was any atrocity
omitted that those who write history usually find worth recording in such
circumstances; Liv. 21.57.14). Instructions on how to describe the sacking of a
city were part of every orator’s training, as seen in the Rhetorica ad Herennium
in a vivid illustration of the figure of vivid description (descriptio; 4.51):
For it is unknown to none of you, fellow citizens, what miseries al-

ways follow when a city is taken: those who have borne arms are at
once most cruelly butchered; of the rest, those young enough and
strong enough to do hard labor are carried off into slavery, while those
who are not are killed; finally, at one and the same time each home
is set ablaze by enemy arson, and those joined by family relationship
or kindly choice are torn apart; of the children, some are ripped from
their parents’ arms, some are slaughtered at the breast, others are raped
at their parent’s feet [partim ante pedes constuprantur]. There is no one,
judges, who could pursue this subject sufficiently in words nor express
in speech the magnitude of the catastrophe.
Advice like this threatens to undermine Kathy Gaca’s entire project, since
this late-Republican handbook has companions stretching throughout the
history of rhetorical training, and indeed accounts of city sackings tend to
share all these elements, going back to Homer and beyond.34 As Nathan Kish
34. On the lament tradition, see Bachvarova, Dutsch, and Suter (2016).
28
228 A m y Richlin
rightly observes, however, the final sentence is not at all a disclaimer of au-
thority but “asks the audience to use their imaginations to enhance and am-
plify further the auctor’s already sensational description,” counting on their
already existing fears.35 When the auctor was writing, probably in the first
half of the first century bce, these were not the empty fears of a rural citi-
zenry imagining a jihadi invasion but the fears of a city populace who had
lived through the terrors of the wars between Marius and Sulla, when the
First Proscriptions, as Lucan imagined, turned the Tiber red with blood.
Similar ready-made patches adorn the speeches within Livy’s narrative,
like the one invented for Vibius Virrus: nec rapi ad stuprum matres Campanas
virginesque et ingenuos pueros (nor [will I see] my fatherland ripped apart
and put to the torch, nor Campanian mothers and pubescent girls and free-
born children carried off to be raped; 26.13.15).36 Ready-made—but Capua’s
citizens were enslaved nonetheless (multitudo; 26.16.6, 26.34). A speech by
Fabius Maximus threatens the Carthaginians with the same nightmare
(28.42.11): Homeric. It came true. The story of the noble Scipio and the
Spanish hostages is copied right out of the Alexander legends (26.49–50),
and the common transfer of stories from one event to another is another brick
in the wall; yet, as Rebecca Langlands argues, stories like these are “portable,”
“floating,” and serve the needs of current audiences.37 Even the account of the
atrocities committed by the legate Q. Pleminius in Locri (29.17–18) is packed
with loci communes, as the Locrians complain to the Senate (29.17.15–17, 20):
All [his soldiers] carry us off, despoil us, flog us, wound us, kill us;
they rape married women, young girls, freeborn children snatched
from their parents’ embrace [constuprant matronas, virgines, ingenuos
raptos ex complexu parentium]. Every day our city is taken, every day it
is torn apart; all night and all day, every place resounds with the cries
of women and children who are snatched and carried off. . . . We have
suffered everything that captured cities suffer, and we go on suffering
the utmost, senators.
35. Kish (2018) 51.

36. See Gaca (2010–2011, 2015) on similar lists in Greek—women, maidens, and paides—
arguing strongly that paides in this context are normally prepubescent girls. Pueros, however,
certainly includes boys; cf. Richlin (2015) 355. For rape by Hannibal’s troops in 209 (Polyb.
10.38.1–2), see Gaca (2010–2011) 94.
37. Langlands (2018).
29
Pleminius, at least, wound up in prison after an official inquiry. Again, just

because it is expressed in boilerplate does not mean it did not happen; the in-
adequacy of language in the face of atrocity has often been deplored. It is not
an urban legend that soldiers rape the women in towns they sack.
Women also fought back. We rarely hear about this in antiquity, perhaps
because when a writer learned how to describe a battle, even a city sacking,
women were there to be victims and not to be fighters. Still, the Romans had
Cloelia, and Vergil made up Camilla, so there should be some stories about
real women resisting. They had lives to protect, as we know from experience.
Seymour Hersh went back to Vietnam in 2015, almost fifty years after he
broke the story of the My Lai massacre. There he found out more about what
happened on March 16, 1968. My Lai was not the only place hit that day:
One morning in Danang . . . I had coffee with Vo Cao Loi, one of the
few survivors of Bravo Company’s attack on My Khe 4. He was fifteen
at the time, Loi said. . . . His mother had what she called “a bad feeling”
when she heard helicopters approaching the village. . . . Loi was shooed
out of the village by his mother moments before the attack. . . . “I think
she was afraid because I was almost a grown boy, and, if I stayed, I could
be beaten up or forced to join the South Vietnamese Army. I went to
the river, about fifty metres away. Close, close enough: I heard the fire
and the screaming.” Loi stayed hidden until evening, when he returned
home to bury his mother and other relatives.38
We do not have anything like this eyewitness account in the 200s bce.
There are a few traces. At starving Capua, under siege in 211, the imbellis
multitudo (noncombatants) stood on the walls and banged on pots and pans
(“as if in a lunar eclipse”) in order to distract the armies (Liv. 26.5.9); you can
see women doing the same thing with bin lids in the streets of Belfast in 1981
on the night Bobby Sands died, alongside teenage boys.39 So in Rome, at the
height of the panic over Hannibal’s approach (26.10.7): “Then they fled back
into their homes and under shelter, and they attacked [the cavalrymen riding
through the streets] by throwing stones and missiles.” This was a mixed crowd
(pavida multitudo) targeting allied cavalry by mistake—maybe not just an
38. Hersh (2015) 57–58.

39. See, for example, Wolfeman1798, “Reaction to the Death of Bobby Sands MP,” YouTube,
accessed September 10, 2018, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m77oAHG9beM.
230
230 A m y Richlin
ornamental detail. A slightly more conventional account from the Spanish

town of Iliturgi in 206 bce (28.19.13): “Not only men of military age fought,
but women and children, beyond the strength of their spirit or bodies, were
handing weapons to the fighters, and carrying stones for those who were
fortifying the walls.”
What is mostly left out of the extant historical record of the mid-Republic
is suggested by extant sources from the late Republic, particularly in the letters
of Cicero. He writes to his wife Terentia and their daughter Tullia about what
to do as Caesar marches on Rome (Fam. 14.18.2, January 22, 49 bce): “You’ll
see what other women are doing where you are. . . . You’ll tell Philotimus [the
house manager, a freed slave] that the house should have fortifications and
a guard posted.” This is certainly a response to a letter Terentia has written
outlining just these plans; she did not want to give up her house.40 Cicero
writes again the next day (Fam. 14.14.1, January 23):
It’s your decision now, not just mine, what you should do. . . . Also,
what you yourselves will be the best judges of, whether women like
you are still in Rome or not; and if they’re not, it has to be considered
whether it’s respectable for you to be there. . . . About these things
I wish you’d take counsel with Atticus, with Camillus, with whoever
seems good to you; in short, you should be of good courage.
And Terentia always was.

So this is dedicated to all the women of good courage: the women who
take to the streets, the women who take back the night, the women who sol-
dier on. I am proud to be in that number, and I know who made it possible.
This is for you.
40. Richlin (2013) 102–103.

231
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265
Index
For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–53) may, on
occasion, appear on only one of those pages.
Figures are indicated by f following the page number.
Aberdeen Painter vase paintings, 169–70 women’s family financial assets and,
Achilles, 24, 35–36 188–89, 191, 194–96
Ada I, 61–63 Aelia Paetina, 88–89
Adam, Sophia, 105–6 Aelius Aristides, 141–43
Adea Eurydice, 47 Aemilia (widow of Scipio Africanus), 202
Adeimantus of Lampsacus, 49–51 Aemilia Rekteina, 152
adultery Aeschylus, 15–16, 22, See also Aischylos
bastardy and, 189–90 Agamemnon (Aischylos), 40–41
divorce and, 189, 197, 201–2 Agathokleia, 163–64
dowry funds as compensation for, 189, Agrippa Postumus, 80, 85, 87–89, 92–93
198–99, 201–2 Ahrweiler, Hélène, 104
infamia and, 198–99 Aischylos, 35–36, 39–41
Klytemnestra and, 40 Alexander III (Alexander the
lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis and, Great), 45–47, 48–49, 55, 57
182, 188–90, 196–97, 206–7, 209–10 Alexander IV, 45–47
lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus and, Aline, 127–29
188–89, 196, 206–9 Alston, Richard, 110–11
men’s exemptions under Roman law Amphiareion inscriptions (Oropos), 164
from criminal charges of, 189 Anagnostou-Cañas, Barbara, 105–6
penalties for, 9, 189, 197–99, 201–2 Andromache (Euripides), 24
Roman law and, 189 Andromachos, 163
sine manu marriages and, 194 Antigonus, 45–47, 49, 51–52, 55
slaves and, 197 Antigonus Gonatas, 49, 52–53, 55–56
underage marriage and, 182, 184–85 Antiochus I, 49
26
266 Index
Antipater, 45, 48–49, 57 Byzantine authors’ neglect of,

Antony, Mark, 79, 196 65, 76–77
Aphrodite, 18, 41, 49–51, 56–57, 125 Caria and, 61–62, 64, 74–76
Apollonius, 127–31 chastity of, 71
Apronia Cnossus and, 63–64
marriage to Silvanus of, 87–88 death of, 65–66
murder by Silvanus of, 7–8, 81–83, Hecatomnid dynasty and, 59–60, 61
90, 91–93 Labraunda inscriptions
Senate of Rome’s trial for the murder regarding, 63–64
of, 81–82, 90 The Masoleum and, 7, 59–61,
Silvanus’ claim of a suicidal jump from 64–70, 71, 76
window by, 83 Mausolus and, 7, 59–64, 68–69,
Tacitus’ account of, 7–8, 81–82, 70–71, 76–77
90–91, 92 patronage of the arts by, 59–61,
Tiberius’ role in the murder case of, 68–71, 75–76
81–83, 90–91 Persian Empire and, 64
Apronius political power of, 62–65, 72,
Africa as consular province of, 86–87 74–77
Apronia’s murder and, 82–83 Rhodes and, 61–62, 74–76
as consul, 85, 86–87, 91 Roman Era sources on, 60–61
games to celebrate Julia Augusta’s as univira woman, 60–61, 71–72
recovery from illness and, 87 widowhood and grief of, 60–61,
as Lower Rhine army legate, 91 65–66, 71–72
marriages of the daughters of, “Artemis Prologizes” (Browning), 11
87–88, 89–90 Asinaria (Plautus), 218, 220–21
military service by, 84–85 Atalanta, 146, 169–70
ornamenta triumphalia conferred Athena, 32–33, 37–39, 38f, 156
to, 86–87 Athenaeus, 147–50, 165–66
as quattuoruir (master of the mint), 84 Athens, 52, 61–62, 69–70
Tacfarinas rebellion and, 86–87 athletics
Tiberius and, 82–83, 86–87, 89–90 chariot events and, 161–62, 163,
Apronius Caesianus, 84, 87, 93 165f, 165–66
Archagathe, 163 citizenship as a prize in competitions
Argead dynasty, 45–48, 51, 56 for, 160–61
Aristocleia, 164 contemporary women’s professional
Aristophanes, 19, 22–24 leagues and, 172
Aristotle, 72–73, 215–16 Cos inscriptions regarding, 145,
Arjava, Antti, 108 167, 168
Arrian, 48–49 cosmetics and, 129–31
Artemidorus, 24 Delphi inscriptions regarding, 157–61
Artemisia I, 61–62 diazoma (tunic) as uniform for, 146,
Artemisia II 149–50, 150f, 168, 169–71
267
Index 267
Eleutheria (Liberation Games) imperial succession questions and,

and, 164 79–80, 85
equestrian competitions and, 152, ius liberorum and, 191–92
153, 161–66 lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis and,
footraces and, 150–55 182, 188–89, 196–97, 206–7, 209–10
gymnasia (exercise facilities) and, 129– lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus and,
31, 141–43, 144–45, 146, 167, 168 188–89, 196, 206–9
Heraia festivities and, 139–41, lex Iulia et Papia and, 199, 201
150–51, 154–55 Livia Drusilla and, 79–80
Hermione inscriptions regarding, one-man rule established by, 79
144–45, 168 as Pater Patriae (Father of the
Isthmian Games and, 141–43, 157, 158 Country), 80
Italika Rhomaia Sebasta Isolympia redistribution of confiscated income
and, 152 by, 200
Naples inscriptions and, 152–53 temple restoration program and, 196
Olympic Games and, 141–43, Teutoburgerwald, battle (9 CE)
154–55, 164–66 and, 80
palaestrae (wrestling grounds) Tiberius and, 79, 80
and, 141, 145–46, 150–51, 167, Aulus Gellius, 67–68
168, 169–70 Auphria, 160–61
Panathenaic Games and, 156, 162–64 Austen, Jane, 213
Panhellenic games and, 141–43, 167, 169
pyrrhic dance and, 156 Bacchae (Euripides), 24
Roman Empire competitions and, Bagnall, Roger, 8, 127–28, 129–31
141–43, 169 Balacrus, 48–49
sacred crown contests (agones hieroi “Barberini Atalanta” (sculpture), 170–71
kai stephanitai) and, 141–43 basilissa title (“royal woman”), 7,
in Sparta, 139–41, 146–50, 151 45–48, 51, 55
Thespiae inscriptions Beaucamp, Joëlle, 104, 105–8
regarding, 143–44 Behlmer, Heike, 116
Title IX (of US Civil Rights Act Bell, H. I., 99
Education Amendments 1972) Berenice Euergetis, 162, 163–64
and, 172 Berenike of Oxyrhynchos, 113
Atonement (McEwan), 26–27 Bernhardt, Sarah, 14–15
Augusta. See Livia Drusilla ( Julia Berthold, R.M., 75–76
Augusta) Bieżuńska, Iza, 100–1, 103
Augustus Bradley, Keith, 104
censuses and, 136–37 Brauron, 139–41, 150–51, 151f
conspiracy of Caepio and Murena Bringmann, Lea, 100
and, 79 Broughton, T. R. S., 84
fiscus (private account) of, 199–200 Brown, Peter, 104
Hortensii and, 200 Browning, Robert, 11
268
268 Index
Caelius Rufus, Marcus, 187–88 on women in war, 230

Caepio, 79 Cistellaria (Plautus), 217–18, 225, 227
Calderini, Aristide, 97–99, 108–9 City University of New York (CUNY),
Cameron, Alan, 104 4–5. See also Hunter College
Cameron, Averil, 104 Clarysse, Willy, 108–9
Cannae, battle (216 BCE) of, Claudia Antonia, 88–89
220–21, 224–25 Claudia Quinta, 223
The Capitolium (Rome), 221–23 Claudius, 88–89, 91, 92
Captivi (Plautus), 227 Claudius Ptolemy, 104
Capua, siege (211 BCE) of, 220–21, 224, Cleainete, 163
228, 229–30 Cleomenes III, 146–47
Caria Cleopatra (daughter of Olympias), 56
Artemisia II and, 61–62, 64, 74–76 Cleopatra I, 163–64
gender conventions in, 61–62, 70–71 Cleopatra II, 163–64
Halicarnassus and, 65–66 Cleopatra VII (wife of Mark Antony),
Hecatomnus and, 62–63 54n42, 79, 125–26, 132–33,
Mausolus and, 65–66, 72–74 136–37, 196
Persian Empire and, 64 Clodia Metelli, 187–88, 223
Carmen Saeculare (Horace), 210–11 Cnossus, 63–64
Carney, Elizabeth, 62–64, 67–68, 70–71 Colin, Frédéric, 114
Carstens, M., 70 comedy
Casia, 164–65 Forum Romanum and, 218–19
Cassander, 51–52, 57 naming of characters in, 218–19
Cassius Dio, 9, 87–88, 93, 153, 166, nomological knowledge and, 220
205–9, 211–12 palliata (Roman comedy) and, 214,
Cassius Severus, 85, 90–91 216–18, 221
Catullus, Lucius Cattius, 135 women audience members
Chaniotis, Angelos, 120 and, 217–19
chariot racing, 161–62, 163, 165f, 165–66 Compound Drugs according to Place
Chios inscriptions, 133–34, 156–57 (Galen), 131
Chowdhry, Neelam Mansingh, 15–16 Cornelia, 71–72
Cicero, M. Tullius Cornelius Lentulus, Cossus, 87, 89
children of, 194–96 Cornelius Pulchrus, 157, 158
Clodia Metelli and, 187–88, 223 Cos inscriptions, 145, 167, 168
concern about increasing birth rates cosmetics
expressed by, 190–91 athletics and, 129–31
dowry received by, 194–96 cosmetic recipes (Kosmetika) and,
exile of, 194–96 125–26, 131–33, 138
on the Mausoleum, 67–68 crocodilea and, 133–34
sine manu marriage of, 194–96 deception and, 124–25, 131
Terentia and, 191–92, 194–96, 230 Galen and, 125–26, 131–34, 138
on victory monuments in Rome, 219 hair dye and, 132–33
269
Index 269
The Iliad and, 125 Desire under the Elms (O’Neill), 14

Mostellaria and, 125 Dialogue on Love (Plutarch), 144
mummy portraits and, 126–27 Diocletian, 134–35
Oeconomicus on, 7–8, 124–25, 131 Diodorus, 52–53, 57, 63–64
Ovid on, 131, 133–34 Dionysia, 158–59, 168
papyri’s discussion of, 8, 125–28, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, 210–11
134, 136 divorce
perfumed oils and, 125–26, 129–31, adultery and, 189, 197, 201–2
134–35, 137–38 dowry and, 193
rose oil (rhodinon) and, Roman law’s permissive attitude
128–29, 134–38 toward, 83, 189–90
Theophrastus on, 134–35, 136, 137–38 sine manu marriages and, 194
Thermouthis and, 135–36, 137–38 underage marriage and, 174–75
Cotton, Hannah, 115 Domitian, 153
Craterus, 48–49, 51 Domitius Afer, 90
Cribiore, Raffaela, 118, 127–28, 129 dowry
Crito, 132–33 adultery penalties drawn from, 189,
The Crush (Shapiro), 26–27 198–99, 201–2
Curculio (Plautus), 218–20 Cicero’s receipt of, 194–96
Cuvigny, Hélène, 114–15 cum manu marriage versus sine manu
Cynisca, 162 marriage and, 192–93
Cyrus the Younger, 64 divorce and, 193
papyri records and, 105–6
Danae (Naevius), 225 Second Punic War finances and the
Dasen, Véronique, 117–18 confiscations of, 187–88
Deidameia, 51 underage marriage and, 174–75,
Demarchus, 45–47 178–82, 184–85
Demetrius Poliorcetes Drexhage, Hans-Joachim, 113–14
Athens siege and, 52 Drusus Caesar, 79–81, 89, 90
basileus as title for, 45–47 Dudley, Robert, 82–83
civic cult of, 55 Dusinberre, E., 70
death and funeral of, 52, 55–56
garments of, 55–56 Edwards, Catharine, 190–91
Ipsus, battle of, 51–52 Egypt
Macedonia and, 45, 52, 53–54, 57 censuses and taxes in, 136–37
Phila and, 45, 47, 49, 52–54, 55–57 cosmetics in, 125–26, 131, 133–34, 136
Plutarch on, 52–54, 55–56 feminist scholarship and, 104–6
polygamous marriages and mistresses gendered aspects of ethnicity in, 121
of, 51, 54 gymnasium habits among Greek elites
Rhodes siege (305 BCE) and, 45–47 in, 129–31
Seleucus’ peace with, 51–52 homosexuality in, 117–18
Demosthenes, 75–76 Jewish women in, 105
270
270 Index
Egypt (cont.) Flavia Thalassia, 152

legal history and, 100, 101–3, 106–8 Foley, Helene, 24–25
women aescetics in, 116 footraces, 150–55
women priests in, 114 Forster, E. M., 26–27
women’s landholding in, 111–12, 114 The Forum (Rome), 218–19, 221–23
women’s presence in public life freedwomen, 205, 206–7, 208–9,
in, 118–19 216, 217–18
Eirene from Alexandria, 163 Freu, Christel, 109–10
Eleutheria (Liberation Games), 164 Fricker, Miranda, 15, 25–26
Elm, Susanna, 116 Frier, Bruce, 108–9
Enquiry into Plants (Theophrastus), 136 Frogs (Aristophanes), 22–23
Epidicus (Plautus), 226–27 Furia Camilla, 88–89
Epistemic Injustice (Fricker), 25–26
equestrian competitions, 152, 153, 161–66 Gaca, Kathy, 215–16, 227–28
Erinyes, 12–13 Gaius (second-century CE jurist), 191–92
Eucrateia, 162 Gaius Caesar, 79–80, 85
Eudaimonis, 127–29 Gaius Caligula, 91, 93
Eudokias, 65 Gaius Silius, 81
Eugenia, 163–64 Galen, 8, 125–26, 131–34, 138
Euporista, or Medicaments Gällnö, Sophie, 113–14
Easily Procured Gallus, Gaius Asinius, 86
(pseudo-Dioscorides), 133–34 Garnier, Robert, 21–22
Euripides Gauer, Werner, 39–40
Andromache and, 24 Gemellus, 80, 93
Aristophanes’ depiction of, 22–23 Genesis, Book of, 12–13
on athletic contests, 146–47 Germanicus, 80–81, 85–86, 89, 90–91, 93
Bacchae and, 24 Gone Girl (film), 26–27
Hippolytus and, 12–16, 17–19, 21–22, The Graduate (film), 14
23–25, 26–27 Grandjouan, Clairève, 4
Stheneboea and, 19–21, 23–24 Guttany, Simon, 82–83
Evagoras of Cyprus, 69–70 gymnasia (exercise facilities), 129–31,
Eyben, Emiel, 104 141–43, 144–45, 146, 167, 168
Fabia Numantina, 81–82, 87–88, 92–93 Hadrian, 129–31, 169n82

Fabius Maximus, Paullus, 87–88, 228 Halicarnassus
Face Cosmetics (Ovid), 133–34 ancestor cults in, 71–72
Fayyum, 105, 121 Caria and, 65–66
Felson, Nancy, 32–33 court at, 61
Fida (Chowdhry), 15–16 gender conventions in, 61–62
First Illyrian War, 214 geography of, 75–76
First Macedonian War, 214 The Mausoleum and, 59–60, 67–68
First Punic War, 214 Mausolus and, 69–70
271
Index 271
Hall, Edith, 39–40 stepmother-son relationship in, 17–18

Hannibal, 202, 214–15, 224, 227, 229–30 Hobson, Deborah, 105, 111–12, 114
Harnum, Lisa, 82–83 Hölkeskamp, Karl-Joachim, 219–21
Harrauer, Hermann, 112 Hölscher, Tonio, 39–41
Hecatomnid dynasty Hombert, Marcel, 102, 108–9
Artemisia II’s role in, 59–60, 61 Homer. See The Iliad (Homer); The
Caria and, 62–63 Odyssey (Homer)
The Mausoleum and, 59–60, 61, homosexuality, 117–18, 206
65, 68–69 Horace, 133–34, 210–11
palace of, 64–65 Hornblower, Simon, 65–67, 75–76
royal women’s power in, 63–64, 67–68 Hortensii, 200
uprisings against, 75–76 Howe, Julia Ward, 15–16
Zeus Labraunda and, 70 Huebner, Sabine, 109–10, 117–18
Hecatomnus, 62–63, 73n64, 73–74 human trafficking, 214–15
Hedea, 158–60, 161, 168 Hunter College, 4–5. See also City
Heilbrun, Carolyn, 24–25 University of New York (CUNY)
Helen, 29–30, 147–48, 151 Huppert, Isabelle, 14
Hellenistic Queens (Macurdy), 45 Hyacinthia festival, 165–66
Helvius Rufus, 86–87
Hera, 125, 154–55 Iasos uprising, 73–74
Heracles, 24, 69–70 Idreius, 62–63
Heraia festivities, 139–41, 150–51, 154–55 The Iliad (Homer), 35–36, 40–41, 125, 129
Heraidous, 127–28 Iliturgi, siege (206 BCE), 229–30
Hermesianax, 158, 168 inheritance, 191–94, 199, 201
Hermione inscriptions, 24, 144–45, 168 Interpretation of Dreams
Herodotus, 114 (Artemidorus), 24
Hersh, Seymour, 229 Iousta of Naples, 152
Hetereia Prokilla, 145, 167 Iozzo, Mario, 32
Hieronymus of Cardia, 52–53 Ismenodora, 144, 167–68
Hippolyte (Garnier), 21–22 Isthmian Games, 141–43, 157, 158
Hippolyte et Aricie (Rameau), 17 Italika Rhomaia Sebasta Isolympia, 152
Hippolytus (Euripides) ius liberorum, 191–92
actresses in lead role of, 13–15
Aristophanes on, 23 Jackson, Glenda, 14
City Dionysia prize (428 BCE) Jacobsthal Reliefs (Melian Reliefs), 34f,
awarded to, 18 34–36, 41–42
false rape accusation by Phaedra in, Jeppesen, Kristian, 75–76
12–16, 17–19, 21–22, 23–25, 26–27 Johnson, Janet, 114
feminist interpretations of, Julia Augusta. See Livia Drusilla ( Julia
15–16, 17–18 Augusta)
gods in, 18 Julian (jurist), 175–76, 180–82, 183–84
Phaedra’s suicide in, 18–19, 21 Julia the Elder, 79–80, 85, 89
27
272 Index
Julia The Younger, 80, 85, 87–88, 92–93 political influence of, 79–80, 92, 93
Julius Caesar, 190–91 temple restoration program and, 196
Juno Regina Temple (Rome), Tiberius and, 92
217–18, 221–23 Urgulania and, 7–8, 81–82,
Juvenal, 147–48 89–90, 92, 93
Livius Andronicus, 214, 222–23
Kane, Sarah, 14 Livy
Kaser, Max, 185 on destruction of cities, 227–30
Kasta, 152 on historians’ deceptions, 213–14
Kay, Philip, 215–16 on matronae, 217–18
Kish, Nathan, 227–28 on military conscription of
Klytemnestra, 29–30, 40 boys, 224–25
Kotsifou, Chrysi, 120 on prostitutes, 220–21
Kraemer, Ross, 105 on Verginia, 221
Krause, Jens-Uwe, 207 on women and war, 214–15, 223–24
Kutzner, Edgar, 105–6 on women in public religious
functions, 221–23
Labeo, 173–74, 183–85 Lollianus, 129–31
Labraunda inscriptions, 63–64 Lucan, 227–28
Lamia, 53n37, 53 Lucius Caesar, 79–80, 85
Langlands, Rebecca, 228 Lucius Valerius Messalla Volesus, 84
Law of the Twelve Tables, 191–92 Lüddeckens, Erich, 102–3
Lee, Harper, 26–27 Lumbroso, Giacomo, 97–98
Legras, Bernard, 106–7, 119 Lycurgus, 146–48
Lerouxel, François, 112 Lygdamid dynasty, 68–69
lex Iulia de adulteriis coercendis, 182, 189–
91, 196–97, 206–7, 209–10 Macurdy, Grace Harriet, 45
lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus, 188–89, Malalas from Antioch, 166
196, 206–9 Malouta, Myrto, 110–11
lex Iulia et Papia, 199, 201 Manitas, 73–74
lex Oppia, 187–88 Manuwald, Gesine, 220, 225
lex Papia Poppaea, 196, 199–200 Marcia (widow of Maximus), 87–88
lex Voconia, 187–88 Marcus Agrippa, 79
Libo Drusus, Marcus Scribonius, Marcus Aurelius, 132–33
86, 89, 90 marriage. See also underage marriage
The Life of David Gale (film), 26–27 cum manu marriage versus sine manu
Lilia Melani, et al., Plaintiffs, v. Board of marriage and, 192–96
Higher Education of the City of New gifts and, 193
York (Melani case), 4–5 intermarriage between senatorial
Litinas, Nikos, 120 families and, 206–7, 209
Livia Drusilla ( Julia Augusta) lex Iulia de maritandis ordinibus and,
games held in honor of, 87, 157 188–89, 196, 206–9
273
Index 273
psychological development of girls Melaerts, Henri, 112

and, 24–25 Melani case, 4–5
Roman brides’ median age for, 175–76 Melian Reliefs ( Jacobsthal Reliefs), 34f,
Xenophon on, 123–24 34–36, 41–42
Martínez, María Jesús Albarrán, 116 Menaechmi (Plautus), 227
Mathieson, Erica, 116–17 Menophila, 163–64
matronae (married women), 216, 217–18, Messer, Alfred A., 17–18
221, 222–24 MeToo movement, 6
The Mausoleum Meyer, Béatrice, 118–19
Artemisia II and, 7, 59–61, 64–70, 71, 76 Mirren, Helen, 14, 15
Halicarnassus as home of, Modestinus, 177
59–60, 67–68 Modrzejewski, Joseph Mélèze, 100–1,
Hecatomnid dynasty and, 59–60, 61, 103, 107–8
65, 68–69 Mondini, Maria, 8, 97–98, 118
Lygamid dynasty and, 68–69 Montevecchi, Orsolina, 97–100
Seven Wonders of the World and, 7, Montserrat, Dominic, 117–18
59–60, 65, 68–69, 71 Mostellaria (Plautus), 125
as tomb for Mausolus, 7, 59–60, 65, Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo
66–68, 76–77 (Argentina), 9, 225–26
Mausolus Mounet-Sully, Jean, 14–15
agōn (contest for encomia) honoring, mummy portraits, 126–27
59–60, 68–70, 76 Münzer, F., 84
Artemisia II and, 7, 59–64, 68–69, Murena, 79
70–71, 76–77 Mutilus, M. Papius, 86
assassination attempts against, 72–74 My Lai massacre (Vietnam, 1968), 229
Caria and, 65–66, 72–74 Mylasa, 72–74
Eudokias on, 65 Myrmidons (Aischylos), 35–36
Halicarnassus and, 69–70
Hecatomnid palace and, 64–65 Naevius, 83, 214, 225
Herakles and, 69–70 Nemesion, 135–38
Iasos uprising and, 73–74 Neratius, 178–80, 181–82
Labraunda inscriptions and, 63–64 Nero, 80–81
The Mausoleum and, 7, 59–60, 65, Neumann, Günther, 41–42
66–68, 76–77 Newton, C. T., 65, 76–77
Persian Empire and, 72–73 Nicetas of Heracleia, 65
taxation of subjects by, 72–73, 76 Nichols, Mike, 14
unpopularity as a ruler of, 60–61, nomological knowledge, 220
61n4, 72–74, 75–76 Northanger Abbey (Austen), 213
Mazza, Roberta, 112 Nuceria, 214–15
McEwan, Ian, 26–27
McGinn, Thomas, 207 O’Brien, Alexandra, 111–12
McNaughton, John, 26–27 Odors (Theophrastus), 134, 137–38
274
274 Index
The Odyssey (Homer). See also Penelope gender studies and, 106–7, 117–22
Athena and, 32–33 on homosexuality, 117–18
Eumaios and, 30–32, 36, 41–42 on Jewish women, 105, 115
Eurykleia and, 30–32, 36, 41–42 Late Antiquity studies and, 104, 116–17
foot-washing scene in, 30–32, legal history and, 100–1, 102–3, 105–8
36, 41–42 marriage and, 106–7, 115, 120
Nausikaa and, 41–42, 43f moneylending data and, 112–13, 115
Penelope’s interaction with disguised preisthoods and, 114
Odysseus in, 34–35, 41–42 property transfers and, 107–8, 114
suitors of Penelope in, 36–37, 41–42 prostitution and, 114–15
Telemachos and, 30–33, 31f, slavery and, 119–20
36–37, 41–42 social history and, 97–100, 103, 121
Oeconomicus (Xenophon), 8, 123–28, 131 violence against women and, 119
Oertel, Friedrich, 100 wills and, 106–7
Olympias, 56–57 women ascetics and, 116
Olympic Games, 141–43, 154–55, 164–66 Parca, Maryline, 119
Olympio, 163 Parker, Alan, 26–27
Olympios, 125–26 A Passage to India (Forster), 26–27
O’Neill, Eugene, 14 paterfamilias (oldest member of paternal
Oppian Law, 215–16 line), 192–94, 197, 202–3
Orientalism, 39–40 Patras, 155
Ovid, 87–88, 131, 133–34, 147–48 patria potestas (authority over
descendants), 189–90, 192–94
palaestrae (wrestling grounds), 141, 145– Paulson, Gregory, 116–17
46, 150–51, 167, 168, 169–70 Paulus, Julius, 198, 208–9
Palfurius Sura, 147–48 Pausanias, 153–55
palliata (Roman comedy), 214, Pedersen, Poul, 75–76
216–18, 221 Pellegrin, Simon-Joseph, 17
Panathenaic Games, 156, 162–64 Penelope
Panhellenic games, 141–43, 167, 169 chastity of, 29
Papinian, 183–84 Helen compared to, 29–30
papyri Jacobsthal Reliefs and, 34f, 34–36
census declarations and, 108–9 Klytemnestra compared to, 29–30, 40–41
on childbirth and childrearing, 117–18 lack of female quest heroes and, 24–25
cosmetics discussed in, 8, 125–28, loom of, 33
134, 136 Penelope Painter vase (440-430 BCE)
dowry and, 105–6 and, 30–34, 31f, 36–37, 37f, 41–42
economic history and, 95–96, periphrôn and, 41, 42
99–100, 111–15 Persepolis marble statue of, 6–7,
family experiences and, 108–11 39–40, 41
feminist scholarship and, Persa (Plautus), 221, 226
100–1, 104–6 Persepolis, 6–7, 39, 41, 70
275
Index 275
Persians (Aischylos), 39–40 Plato, 23–24, 140n5, 147n23

Pestman, Pieter W., 102–3, 114 Plautia Urgulanilla, 88–89
Petronius, 89 Plautus
Phaedra Asinaria and, 218, 220–21
Euripides’ depiction of, 12–16, 17–19, biographical background of, 214
21–22, 23–25 Captivi and, 227
false rape accusation against Cistellaria and, 217–18, 225, 227
Hippolytus by, 6, 12–16, 17–19, 21– Curculio and, 218–20
22, 23–25, 26–27 Epidicus and, 226–27
Hippolytus as stepson of, 17–18 Menaechmi and, 227
Racine’s depiction of, 12–14, 17 Mostellaria and, 125
Seneca’s depiction of, 12–14, 21–22 Persa and, 221, 226
Sophocles’ depiction of, 19–20 Poenulus and, 217–18, 219–20, 227
suicide of, 18–19, 21–22 Rudens and, 221
Phaedra and Hippolitus (Smith), 17 Trinummus and, 220
Phaedra’s Love (Kane), 14 Truculentus and, 216–17
Phaselis, 64 women characters in the comedies
Phèdre (Racine), See Phaedra, Racine’s of, 216
depiction of Pleistarchus, 51–52
“Phèdre” (Smith), 16–17 Pleminius, 228–29
Phila Pliny, 65–69, 133–34
Antigonus and, 45, 49 Pliny the Younger, 202–3
Antipater and, 45, 47, 48, 52–53, 57 Plutarch, 51–54, 55–56, 147–48
Balacrus and, 48–49 Poenulus (Plautus), 217–18, 219–20, 227
basilissa title applied to, 7, 45–48, 51, 55 Polyaenus, 72–73
Cassander and, 51–52 Polybius, 202, 216
civic cults to, 49–51, 56–57 Polycrates, 162–63
Craterus and, 48–49, 51 Polycratia, 227
Demetrius Poliorcetes and, 45, 47, 49, Polygnota, 161
52–54, 55–57 Pomeroy, Sarah B.
Hieronymus of Cardia’s encomium education of, 3
to, 52–53 family of, 4
Macedonia and, 45, 51–52, 53–54, 57 Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves
Plutarch on, 51, 53–54 and, 1, 3, 9–10, 95–96, 104, 187–88,
royal responsibilities of, 56, 57 205–6, 211–12
suicide of, 52, 53–54 Hunter College and, 4–5
Phila (daughter of Lamia), 53n37, 53 interdisciplinarity and, 5, 9–10
Philip V, 227 on Penelope, 29
Piazza Armerina (Sicily), 168 on queens in Hellenistic Egypt, 45
Piro, Isabella, 174 Spartan Women and, 61–62
Piso, Luicus Calpurnius, 86, 90–91, 92 Women in Hellenistic Egypt and,
Plancus, Lucius, 86 45, 95–96
276
276 Index
Pomponius Mela, 67–68, 177 Richlin, Amy, 189–90

Porcia, 83 Rigg, Diana, 14
Postumus, Gaius Vibius, 84–85, 89–90 Robsart, Amy, 82–83
Préaux, Claire, 100–2, 108–9 Romulus, 210–11
Probus, 147–48, 177–78 Rosenstein, Nathan, 224–25
Pro Caelio (Cicero), 223 rose oil (rhodinon), 128–29, 134–38
Propertius, 147–48 Rostovtzeff, Michael, 97–99
prostitution, 114–15, 198–99, 202–3, 211, Rowlandson, Jane, 106–7, 111–12, 121
216–17, 220–21, 225 Roxane (wife of Alexander III),
Pseudo-Aristotle, 72–73 45–47, 56–57
pseudo-Dioscorides, 133–34 Rudens (Plautus), 221
Ptolemy VI Philometor, 163–64 Ruffing, Kai, 114–15
pyrrhic dance, 156 Ruzicka, Stephen, 66–67, 75n69
Pyrrhus, 52, 214
Pythis, 68–69 Said, Edward, 39–40
Schenke, Gesa, 116–17
Quintilian, 83 Schentuleit, Maren, 107–8
Quintus Haterius, 90 Scholl, Reinhold, 119–20
Quintus Veranius, 90–91 Schubart, Wilhelm, 96–97, 101–2,
115, 118
Rabinowitz, Nancy, 216–17 Second Macedonian War, 214
Racine, Jean, 6, 12–14, 15–16, 17 Second Punic War, 187–88, 214–16, 221
Rameau, Jean-Philippe, 17 Seia Spes, 152
rape. See also sexual assault Sejanus, Lucius Aelius, 80–81, 88–89,
assumptions regarding reliability of 90–91, 92, 93
women’s accounts of, 12–14, 14n11, Seleucus, 49, 51–52
15, 19, 24–25, 26 Senate of Rome, 81–82, 90–91, 200
contemporary popular culture’s Seneca, 6, 12–14, 17, 21–22
depictions of false accusations Septimius Severus, 132–33, 166, 182
of, 26–27 Servius, 179–80, 184–85
Phaedra’s false accusation of, 6, 12–16, Seven Wonders of the World, 7, 59–60,
17–19, 21–22, 23–25, 26–27 65, 68–69, 71
Roman law and, 175–76 Sextus Appuleius, 87–88
Stheneboea’s false accusation of, sexual assault, 11–13, 26. See also rape
19–21, 23–24 Shakespeare, William, 15–16, 21–22
underreporting of, 12 Shapiro, Alan, 26–27
wartime and civilian victims of, 215–16 Sijpesteijn, Piet, 105
Rawson, Beryl, 207, 209 Silvanus, M. Plautius
The Republic (Plato), 23–24 Apronia murdered by, 7–8,
Rhetorica ad Herennium, 227 81–82, 90–93
Rhodes, 61–62, 74–76 claim of Apronia’s suicide by, 83
27
Index 277
death of, 82 Terentia, 191–92, 194–96, 230

Fabia Numantina and, 82, Teutoburgerwald, battle (9 CE)
87–88, 92–93 of, 80
marriage of Apronia to, 87–88 Theocritus, 151
military career of, 87–88 Theophrastus, 134–35, 136, 137–38
trial at Roman Senate of, 82 Theopompus, 65–66, 68, 71–72
slavery, 24, 119–20, 216–18 Thermouthis, 135–36, 137–38
Smith, Edmund, 17 Theseus, 69–70
Smith, Stevie, 16–17 Thespiae inscriptions, 143–44, 167, 168
Sophocles, 19–20 Thessalonice, 52
Sosia Galla, 81 Third Samnite War, 214
Spacey, Kevin, 26–27 Thompson, Dorothy, 108–9
Sparta, 139–41, 146–50, 214 Tiberius
Stheneboea (Euripides), 19–21, 23–24 Apronia murder case and,
Strabo, 64, 67–68 81–83, 90–91
Stratonice (daughter of Demetrius), Augustus and, 79, 80
49, 51–52 as consul, 86
Stratonice (mother of Demetrius), 51–52 Drusus Caesar and, 80
stuprum (criminal fornication), 189, exile of, 80, 85
197, 228 games to celebrate Julia Augusta’s
Successors (Argead dynasty of recovery from illness and, 87
Macedonia), 45–47, 49, 51–53, 55 Germanicus and, 80
Suetonius, 153, 199, 200, 207–8 Hortensii and, 200
Suidas, 68 imperial succession questions
Sutherland, C. H. V., 84 and, 80, 85
Julia the Elder and, 80, 85
Tacfarinas rebellion (Africa), 81–82, Sejanus and, 80
86–87, 90–91 unrest in Germany and Balkans
Tacitus under, 80
on Apronia’s murder, 7–8, 81–82, Urgulania and, 92, 93
90–91, 92 Title IX (of US Civil Rights Act
on Augustus’ fiscus, 199–200 Education Amendments
on Augustus’ social legislation, 207–8 1972), 172
on redistribution of confiscated To Kill a Mockingbird (Lee), 26–27
income, 200 town councils (boulai), 129–31
on social legislation and Trajan, 129–31
informants, 211–12 Treggiari, Susan, 83, 207
on Tiberius’ alliances, 90 Trinummus (Plautus), 220
Taming of the Shrew (Shakespeare), 15–16 Truculentus (Plautus), 216–17
Taubenschlag, Rafael, 103, 107–8 Tryphosa, 158–60, 168
Taylor, Lily Ross, 217–18 Tullia, 194–96, 230
278
278 Index
Ulpian Verginia, 221

on adultery law’s applicability to Verhoogt, Arthur, 120
fiancées, 182 Vibius Habitus, Aulus, 85
on age threshold for marriage, 175–76 Vibius Virrus, 224, 228
on dowries in underage marriages, Victoria (goddess), 216–17, 223
174–75, 179–81 Vietnam War, 229
on gifts and underage marriage, 183–84 Vipsania, 86
Ummidia Quadratilla, 202–3 Vitellia, 89
underage marriage Vitruvius, 64–65, 74–76
adultery and, 182, 184–85
age threshold for, 173–74, 175–76 Waebens, Sofie, 107–8
cohabitation prior to, 177–78 Wallace-Hadrill, Andrew, 201
divorce and, 174–75 Ward, Benedicta, 116
dowries and, 174–75, 178–82, 184–85 Weinstock, Stefan, 216–17
engagement (sponsalia) and, 173–74, wet-nurses, 217–18
177, 178, 183–84 Wigmore, John Henry, 11–12
fathers of brides and, 174–76, Wild Things (McNaughton), 26–27
177, 180–81 Wilfong, Terry, 112–13, 117–18
gifts and, 178, 183–84 Wipszycka, Ewa, 116
Roman law and, 173–74, 176, 184–85 Wolff, Hans-Julius, 100–1
sex and, 175–76 women’s literacy, 124–25, 127–28,
Urgulania, 7–8, 81–82, 89–93 135, 138
Worp, Klaas, 112
Valerius Maximus, 71–72
Vandorpe, Katelijn, 107–8, 112–13 Xenophon, 8, 47–48, 64, 123–24, 125,
van Minnen, Peter, 105, 113 127–28, 146–47
Vasaly, Ann, 219 Xiphilinus, John, 153
Vazquez, Marta, 225
Vélissaropoulos-Karakostas, Julie, 106–7 Zeus Labraunda, 70
Velleius Paterculus, 83–84 Zeus Labraundeus, 62–63
Vergil, 147–48, 229 Zeuxo of Cyrene, 162–63
279
280
281
28
283
284

New Directions in The Study of Women in The Greco-Roman World (Ronnie Ancona Georgia Tsouvala

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New Directions in The Study of Women in The Greco-Roman World (Ronnie Ancona Georgia Tsouvala

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i

New Directions in the Study

RONNIE ANCONA AND

Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press

© Oxford University Press 2021

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in

You must not circulate this work in any other form

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

List of Figures  vii

1. Goddesses, a Whore-​Wife, and a Slave: Euripides’ Hippolytus and

2. Periphrôn Pênelopeia: The Reception of Penelope in

3. The First basilissa: Phila, Daughter of Antipater and Wife of

4. Power and Patronage: Rethinking the Legacy of Artemisia II 59

5. The Murder of Apronia 79

6. A Century of Women’s History from the Papyri  95

7. Cosmetics in Daily Life of the Ancient Mediterranean  123

9. Normalizing Illegality? The Roman Jurists and Underage Marriage  173

10. Augustus and the Economics of Adultery  187

11. Social Laws and Social Facts  205

12. The Woman in the Street: Becoming Visible in

2.1 Penelope and Telemachos 31

Plate I Embassy to Achilles 00

Finally, we both feel fortunate to have had a chance to collaborate as

Ronnie Ancona is Professor of Classics at Hunter College and The Graduate

Roger S. Bagnall is Leon Levy Director and Professor of Ancient History

Elizabeth D. Carney is Professor of History and Carol K. Brown Scholar

xii List of Contributors

of essays on gender, naming practices, Ptolemaic Egypt, and women and

Bruce W. Frier is the John and Teresa D’Arms Distinguished University

Edith Hall is Professor of Classics at King’s College London, cofounder and

Barbara Levick, fellow and tutor in Literae Humaniores at St. Hilda’s

List of Contributors xiii

Kristina Milnor is Professor of Classics at Barnard College. She is the author

Walter D. Penrose Jr. is Associate Professor of History at San Diego State

Amy Richlin is Distinguished Professor of Classics at UCLA. She got

H. A. Shapiro is W. H. Collins Vickers Professor of Archaeology Emeritus

xiv List of Contributors

Marilyn B. Skinner is Professor of Classics Emerita at the University of

Georgia Tsouvala is Associate Professor of History at Illinois State

Editions and Abbreviations

Greek and Latin texts reproduced or translated in this volume come

While there have been edited volumes on various aspects of women in

forward to the present, giving an overview of the chapters in this collection,

2. Pomeroy (1975) ix (p. xiv in 1995 edition).

in time to today, Shapiro moves geographically outward from Athens and

Levick’s chapter, like Richlin’s, expands our notion of the contributions of

The tenth chapter, “Augustus and the Economics of Adultery” by Marilyn

Goddesses, a Whore-​Wife, and a Slave

But when Hippolutos exclaimed with rage

Here is some advice which appeared in a standard textbook on the law

Modern psychiatrists have studied the behaviour of errant young girls

1. Wigmore (1940) section 924a.

female evidence in cases of sexual assault must be vetted by psychiatrists to see

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 13

fundamental level epistemologically more unreliable than men. This unfor-

6. Yohannan (1968); Goldman (1995).

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 15

I suffered, I wept, I implored, I cried: all of it was real; my suffering

Mirren’s Phaedra was “a real woman poleaxed by passion.”18 Every perfor-

17. Cited in Mckee (2017) 168.

23. Fida is included in Mukherjee (2005).

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 17

A. Messer, then a professor at Emory State University and chief of Family

List of Figures  vii

1. Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave: Euripides’ Hippolytus and

4. Power and Patronage: Rethinking the Legacy of Artemisia II 59

5. The Murder of Apronia 79

6. A Century of Women’s History from the Papyri  95

7. Cosmetics in Daily Life of the Ancient Mediterranean  123

9. Normalizing Illegality? The Roman Jurists and Underage Marriage  173

10. Augustus and the Economics of Adultery  187

11. Social Laws and Social Facts  205

List of Contributors xiii

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 13

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 15

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 17

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 19

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 21

Bellerophon concludes that he must leave, since he has no wish (30–31) to

ἀλλ᾽ οὐ μὰ Δί᾽ οὐ Φαίδρας ἐποίουν πόρνας οὐδὲ Σθενεβοίας,

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 23

Εὐριπίδης καὶ τί βλάπτουσ᾽ ὦ σχέτλι᾽ ἀνδρῶν τὴν πόλιν ἁμαὶ Σθενέβοιαι;

36. On which see further Hall (2017) 35–41.

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 25

Goddesses, a Whore-Wife, and a Slave 27

Figure 2.3 Odysseus and Penelope. Terracotta relief, c. 470–

20. Stilp (2006) 61–62.

26. See Döhle (1967). The report is in Aristophanes, Frogs 911–913.

life-size marble sculptures,34 I do not think we can infer a state of mourning.

54. Od. 19.134–136, trans. Richmond Lattimore.

The First basilissa 47

8. See Carney (1991); Carney (2000a) 225–228; Carney (2011) 202–204.

The First basilissa 49

The First basilissa 51

The First basilissa 53

The First basilissa 55

The First basilissa 57

Power and Patronage 61

Power and Patronage 63

royal women in other cultures and periods—but publicly acknowledged in