From the classical period to the height of the Roman empire, the poleis of the eastern Mediterranean saw a significant shift in the roles of women in society, especially as they related to public life. The changing social and cultural expectations for women, their relationships with and legal rights to money and property, and their involvement in civic cults, building projects and associations, especially from the classical into the Hellenistic and Roman periods, are not always easy to trace, especially since few of the ancient sources directly address these topics. This two-volume work seeks to provide one tool for better understanding the role of women in and their relationship to the Greek polis over the course of nearly 600 years by focusing on a select category of epigraphic evidence.
The authors of this ambitious project bring together all the public inscriptions honouring women in the Greek cities of the ancient Mediterranean from the fifth century bce to 212 ce (with a certain ‘margin of error’ for inscriptions lacking details for precise dating). Because the aim is to examine women who reside in and are citizens of Greek cities, the collection omits inscriptions honouring royal women, women of the Domus Augusti and wives of Roman officials. By focusing on the public honours for ‘citizennesses’ rather than on texts set up by women themselves or on private honours and memorials dedicated to them, the authors aim to illuminate the relationship that citizennesses had with the Greek poleis and, more precisely, to examine how the Greek cities and other key civic bodies viewed these women and their contributions. Within the category of ‘public honours’ the authors’ qualifications are rather liberal, as they include texts for women who are citizens of the polis in question as well as those set up for women who hold citizenship in other poleis. The authors also define ‘public’ inscriptions with some flexibility, including not only those set up by the boulē or the demes, but also those set up by other public bodies such as priestly colleges and provincial assemblies. Although not explicitly stated, the authors are interested only in Greek public honours within these cities. In the case of poleis that were colonised by the Romans, the corpus contains texts set up by Greek bodies, but omits texts set up by colonial bodies (which generally appear in Latin or Latin-Greek bilinguals). For example, no. 947 records a Greek honour for a certain Ulpia Rutiliana Longilla, set up by the boulē and demos in Kremna, but a Latin honour for an unknown local woman set up by the colonia of the same city (IK 57, no. 45) is not included.
The book comprises two main parts: a six-chapter introduction and the corpus of texts that records the honours of over 1,100 women, followed by an alphabetical index of women and an index of select Greek terms. Although not explicitly stated, Volume 1 effectively covers mainland Greece and the western Greek cities, Volume 2 the texts from the eastern Greek cities of Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and Cyrene, roughly following the order of regions adopted by the editors of the SEG.
The introduction provides an overview of the types of texts that readers will encounter in the corpus and gives some preliminary thoughts on the history and development of public honours for women from the classical period to the High Empire. The quality of the chapters is uneven; although the authors state clearly in their preface that they do not intend for the introductory chapters ‘to serve as an exhaustive monograph of the subject matter’ (p. vii), some chapters present arguments that would be better explored in a longer and more thorough study than is possible here. Regardless, the overviews provided on the typologies of the texts, the specific honours and titles granted, and the shifting importance of secondary factors such as family connections and religious affiliations in the honouring of women, especially in comparison to honours for men, provides a useful framework for readers regarding what to expect as they approach the corpus. The initial analyses also serve as an important starting point for larger discussions about female honours, their development and their function.
The corpus is laid out in a visually accessible manner, with the text, translation and commentary easily distinguishable from each other. Each numbered entry represents a specific woman (named or anonymous) rather than a specific text, and in cases where there are multiple texts attesting to a particular woman, they are included as sub-entries, allowing readers to trace more easily individual women in the epigraphic record. The entries are relatively conventional, including overview and date of each text, citation of the standard edition of the text (which the authors used as the basis for their own text except in situations where there were significant differences between editions [pp. vii–viii]) and a description of the object, dimensions and its findspot. Rarely included are citations of other editions of the text, and the entries lack other physical details such as size and appearance of the lettering. English translations have been adapted with a critical eye from existing translations when available, but have been altered to achieve uniformity in translation of formulae etc. The commentaries vary in length, but where possible give useful overviews and citations of relevant prosopographical, historical and epigraphical items as well as cross-references within the volume, to flush out the context of the text.
The primary strength of the volume is its consideration of a specific theme over a broad period of time. Many thematic projects exploring the culture and society of the eastern Mediterranean, whether epigraphically focused or not, tend to use tighter chronological limits, such as the Greek period or the Roman period, with the Hellenistic period frequently being appended to one or the other or left out altogether. Yet especially in the Greek East, where the arrival of the Romans created a cultural shift distinct from what we see in the western provinces and where Hellenistic culture played a significant role in the development of Roman provincial society, such a broad chronological study provides an essential tool for tracing and understanding the continuities and discontinuities in women's public roles over time. The publication has the potential to facilitate important diachronic studies of women, their social status and civic attitudes towards them throughout the region.
The authors’ focus on the public honorific inscription is likewise useful because the inscriptions of women, especially those showing public honours for women, are easily drowned out in the vast corpus of inscriptions from the east. This volume helps magnify the voices and messaging of these honorific texts by separating them out from the honorific inscriptions to men as well as from other types of inscriptions for women, most notably tombstones, thereby allowing readers to focus on women as citizennesses separate from their roles in their households.
Aside from a series of disruptive typos, minor errors and inconsistencies (particularly in the introduction), which are attributable more to the copy-editing process than the authors, this book provides a useful tool for the study of women as participants in the public lives of their cities.
