Priestesses and the Intersection of Gender, Religion, and Power in Classical Athens By Isobel Barlow-Busch

About the Author Isobel is currently in the fourth year of a Biochemistry Co-op program at the University of Guelph, with a minor in Classical Studies. Although she is a scientist at heart, Isobel is fascinated by the influence that Ancient Greece’s cultural legacy exerts—for better or for worse—on modern society. Written for CLAS*3000: “The Rise and Fall of Athens,” this article seeks to illuminate the intersectional nature of gender, power, and spiritual belief in Classical Athens, while drawing connections with contemporary social justice issues. Five years from now, Isobel hopes to be wrapping up grad school, but she is in no hurry.

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Introduction Few would argue that the intellectual and artistic legacies of classical Athens are anything less than dazzling. However, as identified by Sarah Pomeroy, “rarely has there been a wider discrepancy between the cultural rewards a society had to offer and women’s participation in that culture.”1 Athenian women were excluded from nearly all areas of public life with significant cultural value, including politics, law, commerce, and art, with one notable exception: the realm of religion.2 Through the office of priestesshood, women were afforded unparalleled visibility and social status. This paper will explore the “evidentiary paradox” of the study of women in classical Athens,3 the unique role that Athenian women and priestesses played in religious life, and how male anxieties about the status of priestesses were expressed in literature, specifically illustrated through Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. Thus, it will be argued that classical Athenian priestesses wielded power in society both despite their gender and because of it, demonstrating a state of cognitive dissonance regarding the status of women in society that echoes forward to the modern era.

The Study of Athenian Women The paucity of ancient source material on classical Athenian women poses a significant challenge in this area of study. There are no surviving literary accounts of women’s lives that can be attributed to women; all sources documenting their existence—whether literary, epigraphic, or visual—were created by men, thus reflecting their attitudes towards women, and cannot be used to elucidate the thoughts and experiences of their subjects.4 This void in the source material can be explained by the attitudes expressed by Pericles when addressing the widows of the Peloponnesian War in his funeral oration: “Great will be your glory in not falling short of your natural character; and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad.”5 This oration, including Pericles’ exhortation for the cultural invisibility of women, is generally held to express the ideals which Pericles aspired to implement in Athens—however, ideals are not to be conflated with reality.6 Modern scholarship has moved beyond the idea that women occupied a truly disparate world from those of men in classical Athenian

1 Sarah B. Pomeroy, Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity (New York: Schocken Books, 1975), ix. 2 Barbara E. Goff, Citizen Bacchae: Women’s Ritual Practice in Ancient Greece (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1. 3 David Pritchard, “The Position of Attic Women in Democratic Athens,” Greece and Rome 61, no. 2 (2014): 174. 4 Raphael Sealey, Women and Law in Classical Greece (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1990), 4. 5 Thuc. 2.45.2. 6 J.B. Bury, A History of Greece to the Death of Alexander the Great (New York: Random House, 1937), 387. For a detailed interpretation of Thuc. 2.45.2, refer to Bennett Tyrrell, “Pericles’ Muting of Women’s Voices in Thuc. 2.45.2,” The Classical Journal 95, no. 1 (1999): 37–51. 40 culture.7 As demonstrated in Aristotle’s Politics, poor women, having no slaves, were required to leave the house to complete tasks such as fetching water, assisting with farming, or attending to a variety of other chores.8 This is not to say that women’s mobility was unrestricted within the public sphere; as illustrated by a variety of passages from other literary sources,9 their status was unequivocally that of a second-class citizen—if indeed they can rightly be referred to as citizens at all. Women could not participate in the debates or judicial processes that, according to Aristotle, formed the basis of Athenian citizenship.10 The closest approximation of citizenship offered to a woman of Attic descent was the status of astē (pl. astoi). This title developed significant importance following the enactment of Pericles’ law of 451 BCE, which ensured that each Athenian citizen was descended from parents who belonged to the city.11According to John Gould, this created a legal situation “which appears internally contradictory and with definitions that seem internally circular.”12 While women were excluded from society, they were simultaneously essential to it. The exclusion of women from political citizenship is by no means a memory from the distant past: New Zealand became the first sovereign nation to grant citizenship to women in 1907, and it wasn’t until the 1970s that nearly all (94%) of sovereign countries achieved female suffrage.13 As of 2003, barely 10% of countries worldwide had achieved 30% female representation in parliament.14 One might wonder if modern society truly is as divorced from the gender ideals of classical Athens as we might hope.

7 J. Micheal Padgett, “Not Silent in Church: Athenian Women and Religion,” American Journal of Archaeology 113, no. 4 (2009): 643. 8 See Arist. Pol. 6.1323a.5–7 for logistical difficulties associated with seclusion for poor women; for water-carrying, see Ar. Lys. 327–331 and Eur. El. 102–103; for farming, see Men. Dys. 329–34. 9 See Xen. Oec. 7.5–7.6 for the confinement of women to the oikos and Hes. Theog. 381–392 for the supposedly burdensome nature of women. See Eur. Tro. 644–656 for further support of the ideal of seclusion. See Plut. Sol. 21.5 for Solon’s regulations pertaining to the public appearance of women. 10 Arist. Pol. 3.1275a–b; additionally, see Arist. Pol. 1.1260a regarding the inherent irrationality of women as a cause for their exclusion from politics. 11 Arist. Ath. Pol. 26.3; Plut. Per. 37.3; Arist. Pol. 3.1278a.26–34. 12 John Gould, “Law, Custom and Myth: Aspects of the Social Position of Women in Classical Athens,” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 100 (1980): 46. 13 Pamela Paxton, Melanie M. Hughes, and Jennifer L. Green, “The International Women’s Movement and Women’s Political Representation, 1893–2003,” American Sociological Review 71, no. 6 (2006): 909. See 910 for a graph illustrating the proportion of sovereign nations achieving suffrage and female representation in politics between 1893 and 2003. 14 Ibid, 898. 41

Athenian Women in Religion In 480 BCE, after the Greek forces fell at the battle of Thermopylae, Themistocles ordered the evacuation of Attica in anticipation of the approaching Persian army.15 Herodotus (8.42) describes how, to encourage the Athenians to flee the city before it was razed, the priestess of Athena Polias announced that the sacred snake living on the Acropolis had rejected its monthly offering of a honey cake. She interpreted this portent as an indication that Athena herself had abandoned the city and everyone should follow suit. The ability of the priestess to affect community action through the collision of political and religious power demonstrates that there was one arena in which Athenian women could attain preeminent social status comparable to that of men—religion.16 Women’s ritual activities fell within two categories: rituals involving unmarried girls (parthenoi) and married, adult women (gynaikes).17 Parthenoi could participate in festivals such as the Arrhephoria and the Arkteia or act as a basket-bearer (kanephoros) in ritual processions.18 Adult women participated in a regular cycle of festivals such as the Thesmophoria, Adonia, Haloa, Skira, and Stenia, all of which addressed sexual or reproductive themes.19 Additionally, gynaikes could serve as a priestess (hiereia) for goddesses including, but not limited to, Athena, Artemis, Agleuros, Pandrosos, Kourotrophos, Bendis, and Cybele.20 An inscription from the deme of Halai Axionides lists seven additional priestesses (IG II2 1356): this suggests that numerous religious offices of lesser

15 See EM 13330 and Thuc. 1.18.2 for Themistocles’ decree. For a detailed interpretation of Thucydides’ account of the evacuation, see Mikael Johansson, “Thucydides on the evacuation of Athens in 480 B.C.” Museum Helveticum 60, no. 1 (2003):1–5. 16 See Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess, 61 for more detail on the role of the priestess in the evacuation of Athens. Also see Pritchard, The Position of Attic Women, 189. 17 Goff, Citizen Bacchae, 84. 18 The Arrhephoria was an obscure rite described by Pausanias (1.27.3) that involved a chorus of two young girls, selected from among the Eupatrid families of Athens, who delivered sacred objects through an underground passage in the city. See Goff, Citizen Bacchae, 99 for more on this festival. The Arkteia, “The Playing of the Bear,” was a rite of passage in honour of Artemis where girls, dressed as bears, would serve in a sanctuary of the goddess. See Chryssanthi Papadopoulou, “A Brief, Phenomenological Reading of the Arkteia” in AEGIS: Essays in Mediterranean Archaeology, ed. Zetta Theodoropoulou Polychroniadis and Doniert Evely (Oxford: Archaeopress Publishing Ltd., 2015), 147. The role of the kanephoros was to lead the procession to sacrifice during religious festivals while carrying a basket on her head. Only a small number of girls would be selected as kanephoroi; thus, it was a highly desirable and sought-after honour. Many visual representations of this role are preserved to this day: see Linda Jones Roccos, “The Kanephoros and Her Festival Mantle in Greek Art” American Journal of Archaeology 99, no. 4 (1995), 641. 19 Goff, Citizen Bacchae, 121. Goff points out that while Greek sources discussed these rituals in terms of fertility and fecundity, they may have held different nuances of meaning to the women involved. However, the absence of sources attributed to Athenian women makes this nearly impossible to determine. 20 It is worth mentioning that the English translation of hiereia as ‘priestess’ is, in many ways, an inadequate description of the role. Hiereia may be directly translated as “those who take care of the holy things” while ‘priest’ is derived from the contraction of presbuteros, meaning “elder.” See Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess, 8. For a list of Attic priestesshoods, see Goff, Citizen Bacchae, 62. 42 status were available to Attic women. This conclusion is not unreasonable, given that approximately 2000 cults were estimated to operate in Attica during the classical period.21 The duties of a priestess primarily involved temple administration or were associated with public worship, adherence to correct ritual procedures, participation in ritual purification, offering prayers on behalf of the city, overseeing visitors to the temple, and maintaining the cult statue.22 In contrast to the ideal of seclusion voiced by Pericles, these duties granted women substantial power and sanctioned their frequent appearance in public settings. Athenian priestesses were permitted exceptional status in religion based on three cultural beliefs, as described by Pritchard in The Position of Attic Women in Democratic Athens: the age and gender of a cult member should reflect the corresponding object of worship; a religious undertaking would only be successful if it was supported by the god or goddess who exerted control over the realm in question; and, given the analogy drawn in Athenian belief systems between agriculture and human fertility, women were more capable than men of attaining the support of the gods in matters pertaining to farming and childbirth.23 However, an Athenian inscription from the imperial period, IG II2 1346, provides an account of the household duties required of priestesses. In many ways these duties reproduced the role of a housewife in the oikos, thus indicating that priestesses were not fully unshackled from the gender roles of the period despite their elevated cultural status.24 Analogous circumstances are at play in modern society, where the upward mobility of women in professional contexts may be limited due to their disproportionate responsibility for domestic and caring labour in the family.25

Athenian Priestesses as Influential Cultural Symbols Perhaps the most renowned and best-documented Athenian priestess was Lysimache, who, as recorded on her funerary inscription IG II2 3415, served as high priestess in the cult of Athena Polias for sixty-four years and lived to the age of eighty-eight. David M. Lewis proposed in 1955 that the eponymous heroine of Aristophanes’ comedy Lysistrata was intended to be associated with Lysimache; this theory has generally been accepted as a reasonable conjecture.26 Both names

21 See Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess, 10. 22 Angeliki Kosmopoulou, “‘Working Women’: Female Professionals on Classical Attic Gravestones,” Annual of the British School at Athens 96 (2001): 293. 23 Pritchard, The Position of Attic Women, 189. See Eur. Supp. 28–31 for women’s roles in agricultural religious practices. 24 Goff, Citizen Bacchae, 62. 25 Standing Wattis, “Mothers and Work-Life Balance: Exploring the Contradictions and Complexities Involved in Work-Family Negotiation,” Community, Work & Family 16, no. 1 (2013): 3. 26 David M. Lewis, "Notes on Attic Inscriptions (II): XXIII. Who Was Lysistrata?" The Annual of the British School at Athens 50 (1955): 4. For a discussion of the controversial nature of Lysistrata’s 43 are etymologically similar: Lysimache means “she who delivers us from battles” and Lysistrata means “she who delivers us from armies”, a likeness which would not have escaped notice by the audience of the period.27 Additionally, the chronology is appropriate. Given that Lysimache’s tenure as the priestess of Athena Polias spans ca. 420–365 BCE, she would have held office when Lysistrata was first performed in February of 411 BCE.28 Lysistrata and Lysimache are also united in being the only two examples “in all of Greek comedy of a respectable woman being publicly named by a free man not related to her.”29 Lysistrata is called by name by the first Athenian Delegate on three occasions, while Lysimache is directly named on one occasion in Aristophanes’ Peace.30 The naming of these women is significant; even in court cases, women’s names were suppressed in favour of addressing the male members of her family—although, when a woman was central to the case at hand, this occasionally necessitated exceptionally circuitous speech.31 Thus, by naming two priestesses, one fictional and one actual, through the speech of men, Aristophanes would have been committing a taboo if not for the fact that priestesshood had exempted these women from ordinary protocol.32 Sommerstein concurs, stating that “the naming of Lysistrata…implies that she is no ordinary woman.”33 However, while Lysimache can be recognized through her reimagination as Lysistrata, the actual details of her inner life have been lost to history. This quandary is representative of the foremost difficulty in studying women from classical literature: articulate and forthright female characters are ultimately the puppets of their authors, portraying the male gaze through which they are rendered.34 Lysistrata is a comedy, and comedy is frequently used to illuminate

representation of Lysimache, see “Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata” and the Two Acropolis Priestesses,” The International Journal of Literary Humanities 15 (2017): 35–40. 27 Smith, Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” 5. A similar idea is expressed by Alan H. Sommerstein, Talking About Laughter and Other Studies in Greek Comedy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009), 235. 28 For a defence of the inscription belonging to Lysimache, see Catherine M. Keesling, “Syeris, Diakonos of the Priestess Lysimache on the Athenian Acropolis (IG II2 3464),” Hesperia: The Journal of the American School of Classical Studies at Athens 81, no. 3 (2012): 470–472; see Paus. 1.27.4 for confirmation of this inscription, as well as Plin. Nat. 273 and Connelly, Portrait of a Priestess, 62 for Lysimache’s span of office. See Lewis, “Notes on Attic Inscriptions,” 6 for the inaugural performance date of Lysistrata. 29 Jeffrey Henderson, Aristophanes, Lysistrata (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987), xxxix. 30 For Lysistrata being called by name, see Ar. Lys. 1086, 1103, and 1147. For Lysimache being addressed by name, see Ar. Peace. 992 and Smith, Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” 37. 31 David Schaps, “The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and Women’s Names,” Classical Quarterly 27, no. 2 (1977): 323. See Isae. 10.4–7 for an example of this phenomenon. 32 Henderson, Lysistrata, xxxix. 33 Smith, Aristophanes’ “Lysistrata,” 37. 34 Pritchard, The Position of Attic Women, 174. Also see Gould, Law, Custom and Myth, 38–39 for the poignant observation that “it does require a constant effort of thought and imagination to 44 sources of cultural anxiety and expose what is hidden in conventional discourse.35 As a result, Lysistrata’s characterization focuses on what is most salient to the patriarchy: the danger posed by uniting women’s cultic agency with erotic agency.36 This is illustrated beautifully in Lysistrata’s plot to establish peace through sexual and financial coercion—or, as coined by Sommerstein, “political reverse rape.”37 Aristophanes recognized the synergistic influence of religion, power, and gender in his society, and used it to craft a character who continues to resonate with audiences to this day.38

Conclusion Athenian priestesses occupied a singular niche in classical Athens. Despite the challenges presented by a profound absence of primary sources attributed to women, so great was the cultural influence of women occupying the office of priestesshood that, through the subversion of taboo, fragments of their identities were preserved. The convergence of gender, religion, and power in the office of priestesshood in classical Athens has been discussed. It bears mentioning that this legacy and the cultural structures which elevate a handful of privileged women to social pre-eminence while alienating much of the population is one which, unfortunately, survives to this day.39 The question of women’s status in classical Greece was instrumental in the debate over the structure and nature of society in the 18th century, which in turn forms the cornerstone of modern Western society.40 Therefore, enquiry into the status of women in ancient Greece is not merely an attempt to reconstruct a forgone way of life, but a “discourse over women’s place in modern bourgeois society which had its beginnings in the Enlightenment and has continued up until the present time.”41

remember that the words of a Lysistrata or a Medea, for example, are the product of a man’s imagination and addressed to men.” Antigone is another example of such a character. 35 Anna Foka and Jonas Liliequist, Laughter, Humor, and the (un)Making of Gender: Historical and Cultural Perspectives (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 163. 36 Kate Gilhuly, “Sex and Sacrifice in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata,” in The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 142. 37 Sommerstein, Talking About Laughter, 214–215. 38 Meghan Brodie, “Lysistrata, #MeToo, and Consent: A Case Study,” Theater Topics 29, no.3 (2019): 183. Brodie discusses how Lysistrata can be reinterpreted as a commentary on consent in this current century. 39 Marilyn Katz, “Ideology and the status of women in ancient Greece,” History and Theory 31, no. 4 (1992): 70. 40 Ibid, 84. 41 Ibid, 81–82. 45

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