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1 PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS: WOMEN AND RITUAL IN ANCIENT GREECE. By Joan Breton Connelly. Princeton University Press Pp. xv, 415; figs. 109, color pls. 27. $ ISBN: In the aftermath of the Greek defeat of Troy, Andromache, the wife of Troy s defender Hector, laments her impending slavery to the son of her husband s murderer.... I, who aimed the arrows of ambition high at honor, and made them good, see now how far I fall, I, who in Hector s house worked out all custom that brings discretion s name to women.... to leave the house and walk abroad I longed to do it, but put the longing side and stayed always within the enclosure of my own house and court.... I knew when my will must have its way over his, knew also how to give way to him in turn. Men learned of this; I was talked of in the Achaean camp, and reputation has destroyed me now. Richard Lattimore (translator) After reading Andromache s words as they appear in Euripides s Trojan Women, we might be tempted to revise any interpretation that she or her real-life counterparts were obedient wives, compelled to monitor their speech and actions to fit into a patriarchal society. We might instead view such women as capable of actions that will win personal and familial public honor. In this way, Andromache seems to give voice to ancient priestesses as Joan Breton Connelly describes them in her book Portrait of a Priestess. Andromache is not simply manipulated by a system that subjected [her] to the requirements of a male-dominated society (20) but exhibits agency, not unlike Connelly s priestesses, who through the performance of religious duties gained personal and familial honor in the public sphere. It is primarily around the question of women s agency that Connelly marshals her analysis of ancient priestesses in Ancient Greece. 101

2 102 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XXIII Connelly aims to discern and trace priestesses agency in neglected archaeological and epigraphic evidence that Connelly also seeks to spotlight. (3) A quick glance at this beautifully produced volume brimming with illustrations convinces the reader that Connelly has expended much effort to present the authority of the archaeological record. (3) Because Connelly s archaeological material is found in a broad geographical sweep from South Italy to Asia Minor, it is true that this book is about cities. (7) Similarly, because Connelly considers evidence from archaic times to Roman Imperial times (6), as well as priestesses life cycles, and their unique period in history, this study is about time. (24) Additionally Connelly locates her work within a third-wave deconstructive feminism because she will pursue priestesses individuality attested in the ancient record. (22) This individuality is linked to their agency, a term whose definition Connelly leaves the reader to infer from the work cited in her numerous and abundant footnotes, as well as from the historians, archaeologists, sociologists and anthropologists she briefly mentions. For example, she notes, Following Bourdieu, I shall consider the ways in which priestesses used social, cultural, and symbolic capital to propel their agency and to work as effective players within the micropolitics of the Greek city. (22) Connelly s overarching goal is to restore some measure of humanity to the women behind the evidence and sketch portraits of actual lives lived. (25) How does Connelly compose her portrait of Greek priestesses in view of her diverse materials, various theoretical agendas and restorative aims? Connelly organizes the chapters of her book by following the life of Greek priestesses from youth to death. Chapter Two focuses on the various religious activities young girls and women performed. These activities are understood as the sort of training priestesses received before becoming priestesses. Chapter Three examines four specific priesthoods for which there is relatively abundant evidence. Chapters Four through Seven document priestesses various attributes, their representation in religious sanctuaries, their religious activities, and the privileges that inhered in their offices or that priestesses could garner. Chapter Eight looks at the monuments and memorials of priestesses, while Chapter Nine provides a glimpse of female leadership in early Christian communities. Each chapter s brief conclusion gestures toward Connelly s theoretical agenda. Chapter Two traces girls and women s paths through ritual agency (55) and is typical of Connelly s treatment of women s agency.

3 101] BOOK REVIEW 103 Among a number of recent books on women and ritual in ancient Greece, Barbara Goff s Citizen Bacchae: Women s Ritual in Ancient Greece, 1 like Connelly s, aims to articulate women s agency in ritual through the lens of theorists such as Bourdieu and Giddens. In comparable sections where Connelly and Goff look at the nature of women s ritual activity outside of priesthoods, Goff details the intersection of women s ritual activities with domestic labor. Quoting Giddens on how social constraints operate through the active involvement of the agents concerned, Goff interrogates four ways women s ritual and domestic duties are related to one another in order to determine how women s performance of both sets of duties shapes and reinforces a conventionally sanctioned female identity particular to the society in which they operate. (59-60) In this regard, Goff s understanding of agency comports with that of archaeologists such as John Barrett, who has argued that ideas from sociology and anthropology are necessary to interrogate the archaeological record. Barrett defines agency as the means by which things are achieved... human agency operates knowledgeably and reflexively. Agents are therefore accepted as monitoring their own actions as well as the actions of others in the construction of their world and themselves culturally and socially. 2 While knowledgeable and reflexive agents know the rules of their society, they do not necessarily know or share the perspective of those who study them. In fact, Bourdieu often argued that what individuals do not know, what remains hidden about their society to them and by extension often to those who study them, may be more important than what they know. Their actions are reflexive, that is, a largely unconsidered consequence of following social rules that they in turn monitor and recreate, even as these rules constrain them. In Goff s analysis, women s agency stands for a more complex notion than simply a capacity to act or to act knowingly. Rather, agency refers to a practice of acting that is informed by and then informs social structures and mores, a practice implicated in the larger social structures Goff also studies. Connelly s notion of agency, in contrast to Goff s, is far less nuanced and often seems to indicate little more than the capacity for action and/or the participation in social practices. 1. Barbara Goff, Citizen Bacchae: Women s Ritual in Ancient Greece (U. Cal. Press 2004). 2. J.C. Barrett, Agency, the Duality of Structure, and the Problem of the Archaeological Record, page 141 in Archaeological Theory Today (Ian Hodder ed., Polity 2001). Although Connelly cites Barrett (292 n. 126), she does not discuss the analysis of agency he offers.

4 104 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XXIII In Chapter Two, Connelly notes that women s ritual practices, while similar to women s domestic chores, trained girls and women for priesthoods conferred by birth or lottery or obtained by purchase. Connelly believes attention to these ritual practices, which correspond with different stages of women s lives, will correct modern culturally determined assumptions that emphasize the lack of training of ancient priestesses and priests. (28) Most of the ritual activities from the fifth and fourth centuries, such as participation in choruses or bearing implements in processions, would have been pursued by mostly, though not exclusively, elite girls and women, not just priestesses. Such practices were widespread and not, at least from the evidence we have and despite efforts to redescribe them, closely linked to training or holding the office of priestess. Indeed, girls choruses from the seventh century BCE were central to the education and socialization of women from childhood and maturity (29) but they seem quite different from a zakoros, a priestess s assistant, established by decree in the second century BCE. This is the era when one begins to see evidence that there was anything approaching the sort of training Connelly suggests might have obtained in earlier centuries. (50) Connelly concludes this chapter by claiming that political and economic developments changed cult practices and therefore also women s paths through ritual agency. Even if we are willing to allow that such paths existed in any meaningful way before the second century, it is hard to accept its corollary But one thing remained constant across time and space: girls, maidens, and mature and elderly women could rely throughout life on female divinities who especially understood them. These women found fulfillment, learning, and pleasure in serving their goddesses and, in return, gave these goddesses honor and delight. (55) Connelly implies that religious practices bear no relationship to religious postures, attitudes, and sentiments, since she proposes that religious practices change while religious sentiments remain constant. Many will find this notion startling and unpersuasive without further argument. Additionally, her claim also makes it difficult to understand what ritual agency might mean if it can be divorced from its changing political, economic and social context. In Connelly s survey of girls and women s ritual practices, then, agency does not seem to be a theoretically inflected term grounded in a historical analysis. Ritual agency seems to refer to something more like ritual competency. Because Connelly provides little historical contextualization, and

5 101] BOOK REVIEW 105 no direct citations or discussion of theoretical work cited, agency seems to stand for action, competence, or the capacity to act. Connelly describes the agency of the kanephoros [basket-bearer] [that] was held in such high esteem that the maidens were awarded portions of the sacrificial meat, (34) for example. Although one is persuaded that the post of kanephoros was rewarded because it was valued, we are left to wonder if it was the agency of the kanephoros that was valued, or the elite family from which she was most likely chosen. More to the point, the kanephoros agency seems to mean simply her fulfillment of her duties in the inscription that records this reward. The story Connelly reports before she refers to the kanephoros reward demonstrates that elite girls who fulfilled the role of kanephoroi were used in the political gamesmanship of their male kin. One cannot help but wonder if proof of agency that would require greater analysis of the micropolitics of the relevant cities and sanctuaries than can be managed given the temporal scope of time and number of places Connelly covers. It may be that the diversity of Connelly s materials demands a telescopic view of priestesses and women s ritual. While there are surely gains from such an approach one is the ability to find continuities, i.e., forests where others see only trees there are also risks, such as Connelly s tendency to project later practices onto earlier material. In Chapter Five, Connelly examines implements and statues from sanctuaries in order to assess the possibilities of priestesses, that is, the scope of social action available to priestesses. (118) Connelly presents her evidence from sanctuaries chronologically and then organizes the Hellenistic period geographically in order to cover the far greater amount of material from this late period. In the archaic period, korai (female statues) can be identified variously as goddesses, nymphs, worshippers, cult attendants and votaries. These sculptural blanks that are capable of meaning whatever their dedicator wishes have never been examined within the greater context of statutes of standing draped women set up in sanctuaries throughout the classical and Hellenistic periods. (127) If we accept that later epigraphic habits that identify sanctuary statues of women as priestesses can be projected on earlier ones (127), if we do not ask for any reasons to justify such a projection other than religious conservatism ( ), and if we do not ask how the ubiquitous koroi (archaic male statues) might be interpreted in light of Connelly s hypothesis, then we are able to locate portraits of unnamed priestesses in the archaic period and to find this broad chronological context of significance. Yet, korai are tethered to the statues of priestesses from Hellenistic wealthy cities in the second Deleted:,

6 106 JOURNAL OF LAW & RELIGION [Vol. XXIII century by way of one priestess s portrait, Lysimache s, in the midfourth century. (130) To place one of the most puzzling features of archaic religion, namely the koroi and korai, in such a trajectory potentially blanches out what is distinctive about archaic religion. If setting up statues of priestesses in such different times and places could be shown to be a constant practice, it would still beg the question: how do statues in sanctuaries in different historical settings convey the possibilities of priestesses or their agency, if these possibilities are necessarily a function of the micropolitics of each sanctuary and its region or city? To return to where we began, after Andromache bemoans the rewards of her good reputation, she and Hecuba, Hector s mother, try to imagine how Andromache might negotiate her new life as a slave in the family of Hector s murderer. Hecuba urges that Andromache garner her master s good will if only to protect her son, Astyanax. Two scenes later, these ruminations are rendered pointless because the Greek victors have determined to kill her child. (One can view this scene where Andromache, played by Vanessa Redgrave, relinquishes her son to certain death in Michael Cacoyannis 1983 movie Trojan Women, available of all places on YouTube.) Agency, it seems, cannot be fully understood from one action, one choice, one statue, or one dedication. To put it another way, agency acquires significance and meaning only in its varying relationship to the social constraints and structures in which it operates. It would be nothing less than a Herculean task, then, to demonstrate how items such as dedications indicate agency without considering how such agency is shaped by the micropolitics of its setting, given the range of places and times in which Connelly s material is found. Connelly s impressive collection and organization of evidence will be of great utility to everyone interested in women in antiquity. In a field that encourages and values even multiple collections of the same materials, whether textual, archaeological or epigraphical, this book is a particularly valuable contribution. A precursory glance at any chapter s subdivisions (which one hopes will be included in the table of contents in the next edition that will surely follow) indicates that Connelly organizes her materials under rubrics that are largely descriptive not theoretical. The religious activities of priestesses listed in chapter six, for example, are organized in the following categories: procession (167), prayer (173), libation (176), sacrifice (179), ritual feasting (190) and benefactions (192). One might find such categories, and they are comprehensive and clear, in a handbook on Greek religion whose goal is

7 101] BOOK REVIEW 107 to present and document a general outline of religious practices. And indeed one is tempted to evaluate Connelly s book in terms of second wave feminism, of the 1970s and 1980s, when women s studies, gender studies, and other newly established fields sought out long-neglected source material. (21) The separation of data from interpretation implicit in such an approach may be unacceptable in our current academic climate. And Connelly s attempt to contextualize this evidence in terms of modern critical theory is not wholly persuasive. Yet, where the evidence has continued to suffer scholarly neglect precisely because it has not been collected in accessible volumes and sometimes has not been translated, one can appreciate not only the sheer labor of Connelly s effort but also the contribution this book offers in the study of women in antiquity. Connelly has pursued a bold fusion of sophisticated methodologies and a survey of ancient materials that have not previously been brought together. The broad vision and monumentality of the task itself impresses. Every one of Connelly s chapters will provoke and generate specialized studies and raise significant questions about ancient priestesses. Thus, Connelly s book succeeds in placing priestesses on the historical stage in ancient Greece. Portrait of a Priestess will become a valuable reference book for the volume of material collected, for the lengthy footnotes, which contain citations beyond its already deep bibliography. It will also be invaluable for the areas of inquiry Connelly presents not least, how scholars might best understand the uneasy fit between fragments from the distant past and our own desires to make sense of them in a coherent theoretical whole or in a historical trajectory. Lisa Maurizio * * Associate Professor, Classical and Medieval Studies, Bates College, Lewiston, Maine.