S.B. Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity, first published in 1975, was a ground-breaking volume that enlightened a new field of study in Classics: women's history in the ancient world. As stated by the author ‘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’ (Pomeroy [1975], p. ix). There is no doubt that the methodological issues and the perspectives opened by Pomeroy's works contributed substantially to the importance progressively given to women's history, showing to future generations of scholars the value of interdisciplinarity in this sector, particularly, the need to interrogate and to intertwine multiple sources and methodologies to reconstruct women's lived reality. Acknowledging Pomeroy's great contribution to the field and following the 45th anniversary of the 1975 book, Ancona and Tsouvala chose to publish a collection of essays in her honour with the aim to highlight her important role in the now well-established field of study.
The perspective adopted in the volume is well explained by the authors: ‘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’ (p. 2). The volume aims to outline the different approaches to the history of women in the ancient world, providing not a summarising historiographical work on the topic, but a helpful tool sketching the next necessary steps and questions to be answered in this area.
In this respect the ‘new directions’ of the title underline the purpose of the collection: ‘new’ suggests attention to what is new in the field, i.e. new information, new female figures, new methodologies, new time periods, new scientific approaches, new sources of information. ‘Directions’ indicates two aspects: the contributors are specialists in different fields, including historians, philologists, archaeologists, experts in subfields (ancient law, medicine, papyrology, epigraphy), and each of them has a different approach to the study of women in the ancient world. This heterogeneous group of scholars provides readers with different methodological approaches in a multidisciplinary field; each of them offers a specific contribution to recover ‘women's lived reality’ treating interesting issues from a broad perspective: indeed, some problems connected with the theoretical approach to the study of the history of women will be essential not only for the ancient world but also for its intersections with the present. Although the essays touch on a variety of inextricably intersecting problems, five macro-threads, linking together the different contributions, can be identified.
The first two essays, ‘Goddesses, a Whore-Wife and a Slave: Euripides’ Hippolytus and Epistemic Injustice toward Women’ by E. Hall and ‘Periphrôn Pênelopeia: the Reception of Penelope in Fifth-Century Athens’ by H.A. Shapiro, enlighten a very important methodological issue: the intersection of the past with current social and political questions. The first contribution focuses on false accusations of rape. Using the example of Phaedra's false accusation of rape against Hippolytus, Hall follows the development of the common idea in the ancient tradition that women are less trustworthy than men, proving that this ‘epistemic injustice’ is closely connected with current issues as shown by the ‘MeToo’ movement. Shapiro's essay, inspired by the reception of Penelope's figure in classical Athens, uses literary and archaeological data to reconstruct diplomatic relations between the city and Persia, showing the intercultural uses of this well-known literary figure.
The second group of essays focuses on the historical female figure. E.D. Carney, in ‘The First basilissa: Phila, Daughter of Antipater and Wife of Demetrius Poliorcetes’, explores the life of a Hellenistic queen, the first to whom the title of basilissa was given. Another royal woman, Artemisia II of Caria, is the focus of W.D. Penrose's essay, ‘Power and Patronage: Rethinking the Legacy of Artemisia II’: her role in the construction and in the survival of the Hecatomnids’ power suggests a leading role in the political and cultural landscape of the fourth century bce. Another historical figure is the focus of B. Levick's essay ‘The Murder of Apronia’: Apronia was the wife of M. Plautius Silvanus and a close friend of Urgulania, of whom her close friendship with Livia was well known. The analysis of Apronia's murder by her husband is an opportunity for Levick to review some political connections that lead directly to the domus Augusta. These three essays show how a better understanding of terminology combined with a new approach to ancient texts could highlight different interpretations and warn against the biases of modern historiography.
The third group of essays shifts focus from higher social classes to other groups in order to reshape our knowledge of women's lived reality in a wider sense. This is the aim of Tsouvala's essay ‘Female Athletes in the Late Hellenistic and Roman Greek World’: using literary and epigraphic evidence, she tries to enlighten the dynamics of women's participation in Greek athletic events during the Hellenistic and Early Imperial period. Intertwining episodes from the past and recent public events and offering new interpretations of some passages of the literary tradition, E. Richlin, in ‘The Woman in the Street: Becoming Visible in Mid-Republican Rome’, focuses attention on public political activity with a bottom-up view and uncovers an increasing space for women to interfere in political activity as a group.
Three essays are concerned with methodological issues and the use of different kinds of data: R.S. Bagnall, in ‘A Century of Women's History from the Papyri’, retraces the development in the use of papyri to improve our knowledge of women's history in Hellenistic Egypt. A.E. Hanson, in ‘Cosmetics in Daily Life’, examines papyri and other sources of evidence from a diachronic perspective, showing how the use of cosmetics is closely related to a wider question, the perception of women in society. The re-reading of a passage of Cassius Dio's Roman History (54.16.2) is the starting point of K. Milnor's ‘Social Laws and Social Facts’. This well-known passage is used by Milnor to raise epistemological questions on the correct use of the information given by the ancient tradition and the correct interpretation of the silence of our sources.
The contribution of juridical studies is shown well in B.W. Frier and M.B. Skinner's essays. Frier, in ‘Normalizing Illegality? The Roman Jurists and Underage Marriage’, explores legal matters concerning underage marriage: his analysis shows the progressive legitimisation of some practices with the fallout on economic and political matters. Skinner, in ‘Augustus and the Economics of Adultery’, dealing with economic, legal and moral aspects, illustrates how marriage customs and Augustan adultery legislation relate to the increase in women's autonomy and wealth. Both essays show the importance of decoding the legal system to deepen our knowledge of women's lived reality.
A rich bibliography finishes the volume: although the choice to assemble all bibliographic references at the end of the book is a little problematic for readers, it allows the creation of a rich bibliographic handbook on the different aspects of the history of women in the ancient world.
Readers of the volume, following the ‘new directions’ in the study of women in the ancient word, guided through new approaches, new methodologies and new fields, are led to new questions requiring an increasingly interdisciplinary approach, showing how Pomeroy's perspective, suggested in 1975, has become axiomatic in this research field. Surely, from this point of view the task is well done.
