Another sourcebook on ancient women is welcome and MacL.'s engaging translations nicely complement the two extensive sourcebooks by M. Lefkowitz and M. Fant (Women's Life in Greece and Rome [1982/1992]) and J. Rowlandson (Women & Society in Greek & Roman Egypt [1998]), and I.M. Plant's literary anthology (Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome [2004]). While understandably including some overlaps, MacL.'s book has many sources not found in these others. MacL. acknowledges her work's connection to Lefkowitz and Fant and cites Rowlandson but not Plant, which I could not find in the bibliographies.
MacL. especially distinguishes herself from these works by providing greater narratives of cultural context and, at times, analysis of the sources she presents. Her book thus stands in between works that are primarily sourcebooks and those that describe and discuss ancient women's roles, such as S. Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (1975). MacL.'s book is more general in scope and possibly in its intended audience than J. Snyder's The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome (1989), which combines sources with extended analysis.
While another sourcebook is welcome, numerous aspects of this book could be improved. First, the sources and MacL.'s comments are printed in a very similar typeface making it hard to distinguish the two. The book's organisation and mode of presenting the source material are confusing. It would help the page layout and the organisation if sub-headings were used consistently in all chapters to identify distinct topics within them; instead the narrative often proceeds impressionistically rather than by a clear framework. In one case, ‘Wife-Abuse’ (pp. 69–70), either the sub-heading needs to be changed or the material selected could better fit the sub-heading.
The material included or omitted in each chapter leaves an uneven grasp of the ancient situation. In her preface MacL. states that ‘This book is intended to supply a survey of [diverse] ancient textual sources … [that] offers several lenses through which to look at the lived experiences’ of women in ancient Greece (p. vi). However, most material is literary with little connection provided to women's ‘lived experiences’. Thus the first four chapters on the Archaic period present unanalysed and uncontextualised literary passages without addressing women's actual lives. Chapter 2 on the goddesses Aphrodite and Demeter presents only their portrayals in their respective major Homeric hymn without providing any ritual or greater cultural context for these literary depictions.
This limited, incomplete picture of the topic continues in other chapters. Chapter 8, ‘Prostitutes’, presents mostly comic depredations of prostitutes or literary views of hetaerae and testaments to the ritual or social status some achieved with little sense of what the real life of most prostitutes and even hetaerae may have been like. Likewise, the section on Amazons in Chapter 13, ‘Warrior Women’, presents only the view of their mythical nature and ignores evidence from the archaeological record and Herodotus' Histories that indicate their likely historical origin.
MacL. employs three principal means of presenting the source material: by providing historical, cultural or other context for the sources; by giving plot summaries of the longer works from which some sources are drawn; and by providing some analysis of some aspects of the sources presented. Unfortunately these are unevenly applied and the text provides no marker to identify which means is being used. The result is a very uneven presentation of the source material. Chapter 5, ‘The Lived Experiences of Girls and Women’, fairly consistently provides the historical and social contexts for the material presented. But Chapters 3 and 10 on women in the Homeric epics and Athenian drama, provide very brief introductory background and then give only plot summaries connecting the Homeric or dramatic passages cited. Such lack of analysis characterises almost all presentation of literary material, leaving the reader without any guidance for understanding how literary images function in the social construction or projection of gender and women's roles.
This lack of analysis can lead to misunderstanding of the source material. The section on ‘Nubile Young Women (“Parthenoi” or “Nymphae”)’ in Chapter 5 (pp. 56–7), in contrast to the rest of that chapter, merely presents some myths connected with parthenoi without any contextualisation here or later in Chapter 9, on women's ritual roles, of these myths within young women's ritual activities or analysis of the myths' ritual meanings. The text does not show how the section on pp. 56–7 connects with what precedes or follows it in its own chapter or with larger themes of women's roles or images and their cultural meanings.
The focus of Chapter 4, ‘Women and Gender in the Melic and Lyric Poets’ (and to some extent for other literary material too), is perplexing. Other than stating that these Archaic female and male poets treat some of the same subjects, MacL. does not address why she suddenly includes gender in her scope in this chapter or why she would include passages from male poets that seem to have no relation to women. It is not the inclusion of this male-authored, male-oriented material that is problematic, it is that MacL. does not establish a framework for addressing gender or male-oriented issues in the scope of her presentation, nor does she analyse the selections she presents again leaving the reader with little or no guidance for interpreting this material.
Some other striking omissions: focused attention to mothers and motherhood in Chapters 5, 11 and the index; at least mention of Demeter and Eurykleia in the section on ‘Older Women’ (pp. 79–81); the Panathenaea and rites for Athena, Aphrodite and Hera in Chapter 9; a glossary of ancient terms. At least one inaccuracy: calling the Pythia at Delphi, who was a prophetess whose supposedly unintelligible utterings were manipulated by the Delphic priests, a ‘highly influential’ priestess (p. 79). Some illustrations would have provided a valuable visual enhancement to the textual sources.
The bibliographies could have been better presented. On the one hand presenting chapter bibliographies at the end of each chapter is convenient. But for greater ease in identifying relevant entries it would have been preferable to have all the bibliographies together, even while preserving their separate chapter grouping. Several bibliographical entries are lacking the publication date, which should have been caught in the editing process: Carey (p. 85), Cohen (twice, pp. 85, 223), Lardinois and McClure (p. 149), Rowlandson (p. 222). Some striking bibliographical omissions: T.M. Falkner, The Poetics of Old Age in Greek Epic, Lyric, and Tragedy (1995); P. Friedrich, The Meaning of Aphrodite (1978); H.P. Karydas, Eurykleia and Her Successors: Female Figures of Authority in Greek Poetics (1998); J. Neils (ed.), Worshipping Athena: Panathenaia & Parthenon (1996); H.W. Parke, Festivals of the Athenians (1977) or E. Simon, Festivals of Attica: an Archaeological Commentary (1983); B. Vivante, Daughters of Gaia: Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World (2008); B. Zweig, ‘The Only Women Who Give Birth to Men: Women in Ancient Sparta’, in M. DeForest (ed.), Woman's Power, Man's Game: Essays on Classical Antiquity in Honor of Joy King (1993).
Despite these weaknesses, this book is valuable for the sources presented and for the readily accessible introductions and historical or social overviews. It makes an important addition to the sourcebooks relating to women's roles in ancient Greece.
