Goddesses and Mothers, Hetairai and Wives

The Hirschfeld Workshop krater in the Metropolitan Museum stands a little over a metre high. Made around 750–735 BC as a grave marker, it shows a dead man on a bier, surrounded by mourners raising their hands towards their heads. Chariots and armed figures below associate him with wealth and heroic distinction. Women’s organised lament helps present this man’s death to the living. About a century earlier, another Athenian household cremated a woman with costly offerings. Re-examination of her burnt bones identified a pregnancy close to term, recovering an experience that the grave goods alone had not revealed.

Preparing bodies, leading lament and tending graves brought women into gatherings through which households displayed their connections. Male lawmakers sought to regulate this work. Restrictions attributed to Solon concerned expenditure, bodily injury and lament; later rules limited which women could attend. Changing funerary images cannot simply be read as the results of these laws. A late sixth-century plaque still combines a funeral with chariot racing. Smaller fifth-century oil vessels often show a few figures meeting or exchanging offerings. Their different uses and compositions contributed to the change.

Hesiod makes Zeus’s swallowing of Metis and Athena’s birth part of the establishment of male divine sovereignty. In the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, Zeus authorises Persephone’s abduction without consulting her mother. Demeter withholds the harvest and forces negotiation. The resulting reunion leaves Persephone below for one-third of the year; the familiar half-year belongs to Ovid’s later account. Mortal women also exercised religious authority. Athens paid its priestess of Athena Nike, while Lysimache’s monument recorded sixty-four years as priestess of Athena Polias. These offices existed within arrangements established by male civic bodies and privileged families.

Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/0 BC made an Athenian mother’s ancestry necessary to her children’s standing without giving her a vote. Male guardians and relatives represented women’s interests, arranged marriages and managed dowries. Childcare was distributed among mothers, relatives and paid or enslaved nurses. At Kylindra on Astypalaia, microscopic growth in infant teeth distinguishes some children who survived birth: five of thirty-six infants examined showed postnatal growth. The selected sample cannot provide an island-wide mortality rate. Shared inherited DNA has also identified a mother and daughter in Hellenistic Amvrakia, recovering a biological relationship without their names or legal circumstances.

Melitta’s late fourth-century grave stele records the obligations created by care. A nurse from a resident foreign family, she is commemorated through words attributed to Hippostrate, whom she had cared for. Hippostrate promises continuing honours and hopes that Melitta will receive a reward beside Persephone and Pluto. Nursing did not itself identify an enslaved woman. Here an inscription names an attachment between two women and extends its obligations beyond death.

Xenophon’s Ischomachus assigns his young wife the management of stores and workers, presenting his division of responsibilities as natural. She commands others within a sphere he defines. Spinning, weaving, grinding grain and obtaining water required skill and exertion; poorer women also sold goods and services. At Olynthus, plant remains and chemical traces survive on house floors. Starch was recovered from five of twenty-six samples in one investigation, adding evidence of food-related activity to the surviving rooms. Such residues locate work without identifying the sex or status of the workers.

Bones record cumulative physical demands through changes in joints, muscle attachments and long-bone structure. At Menainon in Sicily, analysis of seventy-nine males and sixty-five females indicated broadly comparable demands, consistent with both participating in agriculture. Work at Thebes supplies a related comparison. Neither study assigns an occupation to every skeleton. Xenophon, meanwhile, describes a bolted door intended to prevent enslaved workers having children without the owners’ knowledge. A citizen wife’s supervision could extend to controlling another woman’s reproduction. Her dependence on her husband coexisted with authority over enslaved people.

Against Neaira, delivered around 340 BC, describes ownership and sexual labour through the prosecution’s account. Nikarete, herself a freedwoman, allegedly bought seven girls, presented them as her daughters and took their earnings. Two clients later purchased Neaira for thirty minae. When they planned to marry, they offered release for twenty, conditional on her no longer practising in Corinth. Neaira assembled contributions and money of her own, with Phrynion supplying the balance. Her owners set the terms. Subsequent violence and attempts to seize her show that release did not end her vulnerability.

The word hetaira, “companion”, did not guarantee freedom. Ownership, control of earnings and the ability to refuse service distinguish circumstances that “courtesan” can obscure. Apollodoros’s allocation of companions to pleasure and wives to legitimate children tells male jurors what women are for. Yet Nikarete’s ownership shows that women could enforce these arrangements too. Another of her women, Metaneira, received initiation at Eleusis through a client who distinguished its benefit to her from payments appropriated by her owner. Initiation did not emancipate her.

Sappho’s poetry preserves a female poetic perspective on desire, separation and marriage. Fragment 31 survives through quotation in On the Sublime; other poems depend on damaged papyri. Their survival does not establish a formal school around Sappho or make every lyric speaker autobiographical. Euripides’ Medea gives a woman an account of dependence within marriage through a male playwright and performers. After Alexander, dynastic institutions enlarged some women’s power. Arsinoe II’s image continued on coins generations after her death, without establishing equivalent opportunities for women working in households and fields.

The closing Apulian volute krater, Naples 81666, was made around 360–340 BC and found at Altamura. Persephone sits beside Hades in their palace, approached by figures including Orpheus. Conservation has distinguished ancient details from nineteenth-century additions; ancient crossed torches support comparison with Demeter, Persephone and initiation. At Pelinna around the transition to the Hellenistic period, mourners placed two gold leaves against a woman’s body, instructing her to address Persephone. The opening krater shows women preparing a man’s passage through ritual action. Here a woman receives words for her own passage to the goddess whose authority operates within a marriage imposed by men: “Tell Persephone that Bacchios himself has released you.”

Lecture summary: 999 words