Joan Breton Connelly
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS
Women and ritual in ancient Greece
456pp. Princeton University Press. £26.95.
9780691127460
Ancient Greek women lived lives that would be far more recognizable to the
women of Iran or Saudi Arabia today than to the women of the modern West.
Their skin was pale from a life in the shadows. When they were not indoors
they covered up with a veil. Hence part of the preparations of the
cross-dressing, coup-plotting women of Aristophanes’ Ecclesiazusae consists
of letting their skin get tanned by secret exposure to the unaccustomed rays
of the sun. Men kept well away from women they were not related to, and even
husbands and wives often slept in different, sex-separated, parts of the
house. Decent women were not supposed even to be spoken of in the public
world of men, according to the funeral speech penned for Pericles by
Thucydides. For a woman even to allow herself to be seen at a window or
leaning over the sill of a Dutch door was dangerous for her reputation, and
eulogists at weddings were advised to preface their praise of the beauty of
the bride with an “I have heard”. In Crete the fine an adulterer had to pay
was halved if the woman was seduced in a house that was not her home, and in
Athens no charges at all could be laid against a man who seduced a woman who
went to and fro “showingly”; as if by the very fact of appearing in public
she was announcing that she was anybody’s.
Given this background, it is perhaps not surprising that funerals were viewed
as dangerous opportunities for men with adulterous intent. They provided
rare occasions for a man actually to get a look at another man’s women, and
for a woman to see what might be on offer instead of her old man (who was
often a cousin or an uncle and usually twenty years older than her – a man
her father had arranged for her to marry when she was a little girl and
without, of course, asking her opinion). At least, when the go-between
arrived with a secret proposition, she might remember a handsome young face
in the mournful crowd that smiled at her when nobody was looking, and might
not be disappointed when on a subsequent night, her husband away, she held a
lamp up to the face of the intruder the slave-girl had been asked to let in,
hoping to see same face again.
Greek women were marginal in more substantial ways than being kept out of
sight and unspoken of. They could own only personal possessions, such as
clothes, jewels and hand-maidens, but not land or houses or businesses. They
could not file lawsuits or defend themselves, and even trivial transactions
had to be effected by means of their official male representative or kyrios.
They had, of course, no vote, no role at all in politics, and were
mistresses only of their own domain, their home, its servants and its
containers.
On the other hand, there were the priestesses. And there were rather a lot of
them, centre-stage in some of the Greek world’s most important cults.
Generally speaking, the sex of the priest reflected the gender of the
divinity: for every cult of a lady-god, a lady-priest was in charge. And
Greece had some mighty goddesses, notably Hera, Athena, Artemis and
Aphrodite. The most important cult in manly Argos, therefore, was presided
over by the priestess of Hera, and the figure who led the worship of Athena
Polias, the central city-cult of woman-marginalizing Athens, was a woman.
Not only were their names known, but they also had a public role in these
intrinsically political festivals. The “regnal” year of the priestess of
Hera at Argos could be used to date historical events.
So, famously, Thucydides notes that the Peloponnesian war began “in the
forty-eighth year of the priesthood of Chrysis, in the ephorate of Aenesias
at Sparta, and in the last month but two of the archonship of Pythodorus in
Athens”. Some years later Chrysis dozed off in the temple, having left a
lamp too close to some desiccated wreaths. The temple burnt down around her
and she fled to neighbouring Phlius which had a famous grove of asylum,
afraid of what the men of Argos would do: “she had been priestess for eight
years of the war and half of the ninth when she fled”. The Argives invoked a
law that allowed them to replace her, and a new priestess, Phaeinis, was
installed. The fact that Chrysis is named alongside archons and ephors, that
she is forced to flee for fear of what the Argives will do to her, that the
Argives have a law in place that allows them to sack her for dereliction of
duty, underlines the fact that priesthood was a public responsibility, that
priestesses were “sacred officials” of the state. Centuries later, in 106/5
bc, her happier namesake, a priestess of Athena Polias, was voted a crown
and other quite extraordinary honours by the people of Delphi for her role
in an exceptionally lavish sacred pilgrimage from Athens (Pythais), an award
to the sacred representative of her entire community.
Joan Breton Connelly’s Portrait of a Priestess is the biggest, fullest and
most up-to-date study of these important women from the time of Homer
through to the early years of Christianity. Beautifully illustrated and
substantially documented, it is also highly argumentative and certainly more
ambitious than merely a catalogue of known priestesses, their images and a
description of their functions, which would have been enough of a subject in
itself. For Connelly, “on the other hand, there were the priestesses” does
not mean that these were exceptions to the rule, nor even that the
prominence of women at the level of the sacred somehow compensates for their
invisibility elsewhere, but that our picture of the place of Greek women in
society as a whole must be substantially adjusted. That decent women were
not supposed to be talked about is a literary mirage, according to Connelly,
shown to be false by the fact that the names of priestesses appear in
inscriptions; I suspect that Thucydides, who mentions Chrysis and next to no
other woman, might have been less than bowled over by such an inconsistency.
The question of whether women could attend the Athenian theatre gives a good
flavour of her approach. On the European side of the Atlantic at least, it
is generally, though not universally, agreed that they were not, as a rule,
among the audience. If a woman appearing at a door or at a funeral caused so
much anxiety, if women seen drinking with men were branded prostitutes, one
would surely have heard about it if women spent hours and hours a day each
year squeezed among the tiddly crowds of sweaty men (with no separate toilet
facilities) during the days-long festivals of Dionysus, giggling at
satyr-phalluses and Aristophanic obscenities about their adulteries, or
bored enough to allow their eyes to wander during one of Sophocles’ choral
odes to make eye contact with someone of the opposite sex. It would have
been a uniquely remarkable experience for both sexes, and one that surely
would have been remarked upon. For Connelly, however, the fact that some
important priestesses had front-row seats in the Hellenistic theatre on
which their offices were inscribed is an argument in favour of the belief
that women who were not priestesses did indeed attend the theatre. Only our
cultural biases prevent us from seeing this truth.
And these women were not merely not as publicly repressed as we have been led
to believe; they were also sassy, bossy and opinionated. The existence of
dress codes at the sanctuary of Andania proves that women were not
“shrinking violets”, and had to be constrained by law from flashy dressing.
The fact that the “independent-minded” priestess of the Eleusinian goddesses
was said to have refused to issue a public curse against Alcibiades on the
grounds that she was “not a cursing priestess” provides an “image of
the self-directed priestess . . . probably influenced by an ancient reality
in which the priestesses were accustomed to speaking their own minds”. The
fact that a speech attributed to Dinarchus was entitled “Diadikasia
\[adjudication of rival claims\] of the priestess of Demeter against the
hierophant” shows that “priestesses had the authority to take legal action
against those who over-reached into areas of their control”.
The “forward-looking” David Lewis managed to cut through his cultural biases
to see the truth that Aristophanes’ Lysistrata would necessarily have called
to mind Lysimache, the long-serving priestess of Athena Polias. What is
more, a late anecdote says that one Lysimache, possibly the same one,
refused to give water to the muleteers who had carried the sacred things to
the Acropolis, lest her action become “ancestral tradition”. For Connelly
this reveals a “clever, fun, wisecracking Lysimache”, whose fun-loving
character would have been known to her fellow citizens and recognized – “the
inside joke” – in Aristophanes’ Lysistrata. For me, on the other hand, this
anecdote reveals (along with many others that Connelly cites) women who knew
their sacred responsibilities and, in public at least, immersed themselves
in their role.
Connelly presents her vision of Greek women – she shows little interest in
distinguishing between women of different times and places – as a new
forward-thinking wave in feminist studies of antiquity, a move away from
moaning about repression and oppression. That Connelly is riding a wave
seems indisputable. Upbeat visions of ancient Greek women have been all the
rage for some years now. But that this move represents “forward-thinking” I
don’t believe. There is an unpleasant side to this jolly new
identification-feminism that Connelly so blithely embraces, proudly partial,
selectively subjective.
For an upbeat vision seems to mean “women like us”, “women” meaning “decent
women”, and “like us” meaning “like modern Western women”, wise-cracking,
independent, opinionated, stylishly dressed. That means that a lot of women
in the modern and in the ancient world are not welcome at this cheerleaders’
party. It is a door policy that becomes especially obvious when Connelly
nose-holdingly deigns to touch upon the religious role of the girls who are
less than fully decent, the courtesans: “A third area of popular
preoccupation merits only the briefest mention. This is the ‘myth’ of Greek
priestesses in the service of sacred prostitution, for which there is no
firm evidence”. In fact, a lot of evidence, constantly added to, has been
adduced to confirm that there were indeed some rather direct links between
prostitutes, courtesans and the sacred in the Greek world. Although one
might well spend a little useful time wondering if such evidence is “firm”
or whether the male sources who tell us straightforwardly that sacred
prostitution existed were, qua male, simply slandering the Other as usual,
it should at least be talked about in a book subtitled Women and ritual in
ancient Greece. Sacred prostitution is not yet a myth, nor even a “myth”, in
the ordinary understanding of that term, however much modern scholars wish
it were.
This exclusion of an entire class of ancient women from the category of
“women” naturally leaves some startling gaps in Connelly’s account. One of
her most interesting chapters concerns priestesses playing the role of their
goddesses and being depicted in those roles. Immediately one thinks of the
hetaira (courtesan) Phryne, described as zakoros (temple-attendant) and
prophetis (representative) of Aphrodite, known to have taken on the ritual
role of the goddess “coming out of the water” in a festival on Aegina –
sight of which provided the model, it was said, for Praxiteles’ famous
Aphrodite “Coming out of the Water”, the “first female nude”. A statue of
the courtesan (as herself) was placed beside that of Aphrodite in Thespiae
in the Temple of Eros, the city’s most important cult, a cult that many
think Phryne founded. Unaccountably, Connelly omits to mention any of this
very relevant material.
Similarly, the book opens with a famous image from the inside of a
drinking-cup, of a woman carrying a sacrificial basket pouring a libation at
a flaming altar. Connelly uses her as a launchpad for discussion of
“problems of signification” and the need to be “open to signifiers that have
previously gone unrecognized”. She neglects to mention that the
incense-burner behind the woman is a pretty strong signifier for one
particular cult, that of Aphrodite, which may help to explain the scene on
the other side of the cup, which likewise passes without mention: men
offering bags of money to courtesans and “flute-girls”. The cultural bias
here is the assumption that sex and the sacred do not mix. But for a man who
drank from this cup in a men’s room, a flute-girl in the offing, a courtesan
on his lap, the image of a woman at an altar might not have seemed so
untoward a subject, when he noted what kind of goddess the woman was
worshipping – and when maybe he thought what kind of woman might devote
herself to such a goddess, and what kind of favour she might be hoping for.
The problem with Portait of a Priestess is that by using the priestess as a
raft to rescue Greek women in general from “oriental seclusion” and restore
them to the genealogies of the West, Connelly plays down the anomalousness
of the priestess and therefore does not need to deal with it. And yet – if
we can suspend the difficult questions of whether the male public sphere is
necessarily the only guarantee of dignity, responsibility and significance,
whether it is better to be mentioned in public speeches than to be ignored
by them, and whether separation necessarily implies oppression – it is not
too hard to see how the priestess fits into the general pattern of gendered
space.
On the positive side, priestesses are pre-eminently associated with, and
indeed shown with, keys to the temple interiors, guardians of what is
inside, and therefore with the inviolability of the residence of the
city-goddess as if of the city itself. On the negative side, a woman with no
public personality may provide a safer representative of the community on a
transcendental level, a more secure signifier of a degree of separation of
Church from State. Putting the keys to the temple in the hands of a powerful
politician with enemies and interests and well-known opinions about war and
peace could have caused all kinds of conflicts. A woman might better be seen
to represent a more purely sacred interest, a blanker page, an emptier
vessel, as far as the men were concerned, to fill a more purely religious
role. If a man voiced the words of Apollo at Delphi, one might well wonder
who was speaking; when an uneducated woman uttered prophecies in hexameters,
it seemed that one was hearing the voice of god. Indeed, the male prophets
of Apollo at Didyma came to be hated by the citizens of Miletus for some
betrayal of sacred trust, and were slaughtered by Alexander with the
Milesians’ apparent approval. When the prophets were replaced, it was a
woman who took on their role. Thereafter the oracle prospered.
Yet thinking about how the priestess might emerge as a city’s sacred
representative not in spite of, but because of, the general exclusion of
women from public life, does nothing to mitigate the priestess’s
significance, and we should be grateful to Connelly for gathering together
so many texts and (especially) images, as well as offering some interesting
theories about this striking phenomenon. Her final observations about the
new world of Christianity – “the end of the line” – underline how much
effort was needed to make it seem strange to see a woman standing next to an
altar in the role of chief mediator between the community of believers and
their god. Greek women may have led lives that would be more recognizable to
the women of Saudi Arabia and Iran, but there is no equivalent of the
ancient priestess to be found among the ranks of the mullahs and imams. If
there were, who can doubt that for both the women and the men, it would make
a very considerable difference?
James Davidson is Reader in Ancient History at the University of
Warwick and author of Courtesans and Fishcakes: The consuming passions of
classical Athens, which was published in 1997. He is currently working on
The Greeks and Greek Love and a translation of some Attic speeches.
