Portrait of a Priestess – Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece

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urn:lcp:portraitofpriest2007conn:epub:a1eaaca7-6d69-4004-bf2f-21eb61c36fed Foldoutcount 0 Identifier portraitofpriest2007conn Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t1jj2477g Invoice 1652 Isbn 0691127468 Until Joan Breton Connelly's wonderful volume, Portrait of a Priestess, was published the prominent role of Greek priestesses in ancient Greek society was ignored, or even denied, by most (male) commentators. . . . Her compelling book challenges our assumptions about the role of priestesses, and more generally the role of women, in a far-off world that retains the fascination of countless readers." There were mainly three methods in which a priestess was appointed: allotment, appointment, or inheritance. Regardless of method, a religious official was normally chosen from among the elite class and aristocracy, as such an office had great prestige. Princeton University Press must be thanked and complimented for offering such a significant and persuasive revisionist study, very generously illustrated, at so modest a price, making it affordable not just for university libraries and specialists, but for others who wish to gain 'state-of-the-question' understanding of female elites and leaders in the Greco-Roman world." ---Victor Castellani, European Legacy A]lmost 20 years in the making, this is a remarkable book. It is easy to believe that al1 anyone has ever wanted to know about priestesses in the ancient Greek world is contained here. . . . Connelly's achievement is to put between two covers of an attractive book a storehouse of data."—Robin Osborne, Cambridge Archaeological Journal

Winner of the 2007 Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Classics and Ancient History, Association of American Publishers" In this sphere of polis life the priestess clearly played a leading and fundamental role. This makes it all the more astonishing that Joan Breton Connely's Portrait of a Priestess is, as she rightly claims, the first full-length work to take the Greek priestess specifically as its subject. . . . Connelly has run down inscriptions--honorific, funerary, financial, or cult-related--all over the Mediterranean. She has studied a plethora of statues and vase paintings in collections from Samos to St. Petersburg, from Messene to Munich, from Thebes to Toledo. Her indexes of monuments and inscriptions testify to the prodigious amount of work that has gone into this volume. . . . Portrait of a Priestess is a remarkable triumph against heavy odds." ---Peter Green, New York Review of Books This book relies heavily upon bibliography cited in individual footnotes rather than the bibliography at the end. Most of the citations of bibliographic items and of inscriptions in the footnotes are helpful and accurate. Readers should beware, though, of some references that got garbled somewhere along the way. These are the following: This richly illustrated and beautifully produced exploration of an underdeveloped topic by seasoned archaeologist Connelly applies the full array of theoretical tools to produce a volume that portrays the lifelong role of real women, realized in public but mastered in the home, in sacred service to the ancient Greek polis....This accessible volume significantly contributes to the ongoing reshaping of scholars' and students' understanding of the social realities of ancient Greek women." ---J.C. Hanges, Choice

In this Book

Ancient Greek female priestess title The Pythia, or Oracle of Delphi, the perhaps most known type of Hiereiai, red-figure kylix, 440–430 BC, Kodros Painter, Berlin F 2538, 141668 1842 – Byzantine Museum, Athens – Priestess Isvardia (4th century) – Photo by Giovanni Dall'Orto, Nov 1 Ancient Greece marble statue (28465843826) The practice of honoring priestesses was widespread in ancient Greece. They were publicly recognized with golden crowns, portrait statues, and decrees. Usually close male relatives, such as fathers, husbands, and sons, or sometimes both parents and, very occasionally, the mother alone, set up honorary statues for sacerdotal women. A priestess might dedicate a statue in her own honor, but with the permission of the city, as in the case of the statues of the priestesses of Athena Polias erected on the Athenian Acropolis. The base of one such statue describes the honored priestess as the daughter of Drakontides of Bate, who, at eighty-eight years old, had held the office for sixty-four years, from 430–365 bce. She is most likely a woman called Lysimache and possibly the prototype for Lysistrata in Aristophanes’s same-name play produced well within her term of service in 411 bce. A] detailed and nuanced portrait of the priestress in Ancient Greece." ---Reinhart Ceulemans, INTAMS Review Well written, beautifully illustrated, and superabundantly documented, it will richly reward the reader's effort."—Ann Plogsterth, Wellesley

Judy Ann Turner, Hiereiai: acquisition of feminine priesthoods in ancient Greece, University of California, Santa Barbara, 1983 This is the first full presentation in English or in any language of the female priest in the ancient Greek world. Connelly adduces evidence that women all over the Greek world had, as priestesses, positions of great public influence in their communities. I predict this study will have a wide readership by general classicists as well as those interested in ancient religion, ancient society, and women in ancient Greece, not to mention by art historians. This promises to be a landmark study." --Stephen V. Tracy, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, author of Athens and Macedon: Attic Letter-Cutters of 300 to 229 B.C. While the duties of a priest or priestess differed between the local temples in which they served, there were some common similarities. During the public festival of the divinity, the priestess participated in the sacred procession to the temple, often carrying sacred objects. [3] Upon arrival to the temple, she performed a public prayer on behalf of the city. [4] Before the prayer, she performed a libation (drink sacrifice). [5] She continued with a dedication or consecration, usually divided into the chernips or lustration (chernips), the throwing of barley groats (oulochytai), and then performed the prayer itself. [6] After this, the sacrifice was performed with the slaughter of the sacrificial animal. The slaughter was sometimes followed by the search of omen. After this, the flesh was divided between the god (by being burned at the altar) and the humans, which was followed by a holy public feast in which the people present dined in the presence of the divinity. The three-day festival was held on the eleventh of Pyanepsion, in late September or early October, a period that coincided with the fall planting of winter wheat, barley, and legumes. In the days before it was preceded by two other Demetrian festivals. First, citizen wives traveled to neighboring Halimus to celebrate the local version of the Thesmophoria, where they danced and offered sacrifice. At the Stenia, a preliminary feast to the Athenian Thesmophoria held two days earlier, they gathered and engaged in a type of ritual joking about sex, referred to as aischrologia. Thus five festival days during the early fall were set aside for women, from which men were excluded. These festivals of Demeter all occurred at seedtime and all aimed to promote agrarian and human fertility. Women’s religious activities at this time reinforced men’s labor in the fields by attempting to ensure the growth of the newly sown crops they planted. It must have been a busy ritual time for female citizens and perhaps a welcome break from domestic responsibilities and the demands of caring for their families. In Chapter 9, “The End of the Line,” Connelly concludes with a brief, but eloquent and thoroughly researched, consideration of the fate of female sacred servants in early Christianity and late antique Judaism. This is also the end of the line for the illustrations, which stop with Chapter 8.

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In this passage from Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the chorus of older women detail their cultic service to the city as the daughters of prominent citizens, referring first to the position of arrhephoros, then to their involvement in the rites of Brauron, and finally to the role of kanephoros (basket-carrier). The Arrhephoria was a ritual open only to young girls from aristocratic Athenian families. Two or four girls between the ages of seven and eleven were selected by the Archon Basileus and financed by the official state liturgy to reside for a year not far from the temple of Athena Polias on the Acropolis. There they assisted the priestess of Athena Polias in performing rites in honor of the goddess. They set up the loom threads on which were woven the peplos (garment) presented to Athena as part of the annual procession of the Panathenaia. A section of the Parthenon frieze appears to depict a portion of this ceremony. At the left, two girls, possibly the Arrhephori, carry objects on their heads, and two men at the right handle the sacred peplos (marble relief, slab V from the East Frieze of the Parthenon, c. 480 bce, British Museum 1816,0610.19). To mark the end of their service, the girls performed a secret nocturnal rite. The priestess placed items “unknown to the girls and to herself” on their heads (Paus. 1.27.3). They then descended through an underground passage to a shrine, possibly that of Aphrodite. There they left whatever they were carrying and returned with other covered objects to the Acropolis. Although little is known about the culminating rite, it may have commemorated Athena’s transfer of the infant Erichthonius to the care of Cecrops’s daughters, enjoining them not to look inside the basket. Scholars have hypothesized that the objects carried down may have been snakes and that those carried up may have been images of swaddled infants as part of an initiation rite. Joan Connelly . . . has produced a fascinating book on the central role of priestesses in ancient Greek society. Her survey is fully documented and beautifully illustrated. One cannot but admire her enthusiasm for the subject and her deft handling of the evidence."—Colin Austin, University of Cambridge, coeditor of Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae This is the first full presentation in English or in any language of the female priest in the ancient Greek world. Connelly adduces evidence that women all over the Greek world had, as priestesses, positions of great public influence in their communities. I predict this study will have a wide readership by general classicists as well as those interested in ancient religion, ancient society, and women in ancient Greece, not to mention by art historians. This promises to be a landmark study."—Stephen V. Tracy, American School of Classical Studies at Athens, author of Athens and Macedon: Attic Letter-Cutters of 300 to 229 B.C.

In many cults, a priestess served only for a limited time. This was especially true of virgin priestesses. Priestesses required to be unmarried virgins during their tenure served for a limited time prior to marriage, often only a year, after which their successor was appointed. The priestesses serving the cult of Athena Alea of Tegea, Artemis of Aigeira, Artemis Triklaria of Patrai, Artemis of Ephesus and Poseidon of Kalaureia all served only for a short time between that of reaching adulthood until their wedding.Joan Connelly . . . has produced a fascinating book on the central role of priestesses in ancient Greek society. Her survey is fully documented and beautifully illustrated. One cannot but admire her enthusiasm for the subject and her deft handling of the evidence." —Colin Austin, University of Cambridge, coeditor of Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae Until Joan Breton Connelly's wonderful volume, Portrait of a Priestess, was published the prominent role of Greek priestesses in ancient Greek society was ignored, or even denied, by most (male) commentators. . . . Her compelling book challenges our assumptions about the role of priestesses, and more generally the role of women, in a far-off world that retains the fascination of countless readers."— The Book Depository All that being said, you would think I would give it a one star. And honestly this staring was hard because all that said, it was a two. But there are some aspects of this book that are worthy of five stars. Connelly has brought together a large body of evidence about priestesses and posed new questions about them that move forward the study of priesthoods in antiquity. Many questions still remain, and further analysis of the epigraphical evidence in particular is much needed. This beautifully illustrated book will be the starting point for future research on the subject."—Margaret M. Miles, Journal of the American Academy of Religion

Connelly builds this history through a pioneering examination of archaeological evidence in the broader context of literary sources, inscriptions, sculpture, and vase painting. Ranging from southern Italy to Asia Minor, and from the late Bronze Age to the fifth century A.D., she brings the priestesses to life--their social origins, how they progressed through many sacred roles on the path to priesthood, and even how they dressed. She sheds light on the rituals they performed, the political power they wielded, their systems of patronage and compensation, and how they were honored, including in death. Connelly shows that understanding the complexity of priestesses' lives requires us to look past the simple lines we draw today between public and private, sacred and secular. I loved this book. Perhaps, at least partially, because it purported a theory I've held myself; namely that women in Ancient Greece had more of a life outside of the home than we have been led to understand. It is worth noting, however, that by far most of the evidence for this is from the 5th Century BCE through the Hellenistic and even Roman times. There is little evidence before that. On the first day, Anodos (Going Up), citizen women assembled and hiked up to the Thesmophorion shrine carrying the implements necessary to perform their rituals and the provisions for their stay. Their departure must have caused a disruption, for on the middle day of the festival neither the law courts nor the Assembly met. There they set up temporary quarters, abstaining from sex and rigorously banning all men. Women from each deme chose two archousai (rulers) to preside over the festival. While obligatory for married citizen women, virgins could not attend because they had not yet achieved sexual maturity. On the second day, Nesteia (Fasting), the women fasted, sitting on mats composed of special plants believed to suppress sexual desire, symbolically commemorating Demeter’s refusal to eat out of grief for the loss of her daughter, as represented in the myth of her abduction. On the third day, Kalligeneia (Fair Birth), the women feasted, partaking of the meat of the sacrificial pigs, offering cakes in the shape of genitals, and eating pomegranates. After remembering the sorrows of a mother who had lost her only child, the women celebrated the gift of childbirth and children. The fertility of the earth at seedtime was closely linked to the bearing of fine children within the Athenian community.Within the domestic context, the most important religious obligation for women was the performance of funerary ritual. Although activities such as mourning, caring for the dead, and visiting tombs were not exclusive to women, they tend to predominate in the abundance of textual and artistic representations of death. 8 While women’s two religious primary roles—that of promoting life and of supervising death—may seem contradictory, the two in fact were connected in the Greek mid, for the beginning of life implied its end. The hero Achilles, for instance, will suffer “such things as Destiny wove with the strand of his birth that day his mother bore him” (Hom., Il. 20.128). The mother thus engenders the condition of mortality in her child since fate or death accompanies an individual at birth. As has been well documented, funerary procedures carried out by women shared many similarities with nuptial rituals, including the bathing and dressing of the corpse before interment and participation in funerary procession. 9 In classical Athens, the funeral had three parts: the prothesis (lying in state), the ekphora (procession to the grave), and interment in the grave. Although the legal responsibility of the deceased’s relatives, particularly sons, women were actively involved in all stages of funerary ritual. And what of the missing Pythia portraits? The Delphic Pythia was not a civic figure in the sense that the priestess of Athena Polias in Athens was; more importantly, her family did not acquire status and prominence as a result of her sacred service. Neither of these considerations implies that the Pythia herself was not important. The great majority of the portraits and gravestones for priestesses considered in this book were erected not by the priestesses themselves, but by members of their families. To say that Greek priestesses tended to be honored in public and commemorated for posterity because of their family ties does not diminish their accomplishment as individuals. In my opinion, Connelly’s scholarly accomplishment in this book would emerge with greater clarity if she were willing to concede this point, and to accept the primacy of the epigraphical evidence in the book she has written: after all, how many of the 150 priestesses mentioned here would we know by name without inscriptions?