Volume 54, Number 11 · June 28, 2007
The Women and the Gods
By Peter Green
Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece
by Joan Breton Connelly
Princeton University Press, 415 pp., $39.50
In a surviving fragment of his lost play The Captive Melanippe, Euripides puts in his heroine's mouth a vigorous claim for the primacy of women when it comes to religious affairs, from oracular pronouncements to the service of various deities. Sophocles' Antigone risks death rather than leave her brother Polyneices without burial rites. Plato, in the Laws, describes women as the leaders in all religious activities. For Ischomachus, in Xenophon's Oeconomicus, God has assigned to women, as the weaker sex, 'indoor tasks' such as nurturing babies, instructing house slaves, managing the budget, and tending the sick. The Augustan geographer Strabo (during a discussion of Thracian polygamy) asserts:
Review, 4110 words
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