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Keepers of the Faith
By STEVE COATES
Published: July 1, 2007 The New York Times
In the summer of 423 B.C., Chrysis, the priestess of Hera at Argos, fell asleep
inside the goddess’s great temple, and a torch she had left ablaze set fire to the
sacred garlands there, burning the building to the ground. This spectacular case of
custodial negligence drew the attention of the historian Thucydides, a man with
scant interest in religion or women. But he had mentioned Chrysis once before:
the official lists of Hera’s priestesses at Argos provided a way of dating historical
events in the Greek world, and Thucydides formally marked the beginning of the
Peloponnesian War with Chrysis’ name and year of tenure, together with the
names of consequential male officeholders from Athens and Sparta.
Toledo Museum of Art
A vase painting of a woman at sacrifice.
PORTRAIT OF A PRIESTESS
Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece.
By Joan Breton Connelly.
During the same upheaval, in 411, Thucydides’ fellow Athenian Aristophanes
staged his comedy “Lysistrata,” with a heroine who tries to bring the war to an end
by leading a sex strike. There is reason to believe that Lysistrata herself is drawn in
part from a contemporary historical figure, Lysimache, the priestess of Athena
Polias on the Acropolis. If so, she joins such pre-eminent Athenians as Pericles,
Euripides and Socrates as an object of Aristophanes’ lampoons. On a much bigger
stage in 480 B.C., before the battle of Salamis, one of Lysimache’s predecessors
helped persuade the Athenians to take to their ships and evacuate the city ahead of
the Persian invaders — a policy that very likely saved Greece — announcing that
Athena’s sacred snake had failed to eat its honey cake, a sign that the goddess had
already departed.
These are just some of the influential women visible through the cracks of
conventional history in Joan Breton Connelly’s eye-opening “Portrait of a
Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece.” Her portrait is not in fact that of
an individual priestess, but of a formidable class of women scattered over the
Greek world and across a thousand years of history, down to the day in A.D. 393
when the Christian emperor Theodosius banned the polytheistic cults. It is
remarkable, in this age of gender studies, that this is the first comprehensive
treatment of the subject, especially since, as Connelly persuasively argues,
religious office was, exceptionally, an “arena in which Greek women assumed roles
equal ... to those of men.” Roman society could make no such boast, nor can ours.
Despite powerful but ambiguous depictions in Greek tragedy, no single ancient
source extensively documents priestesses, and Connelly, a professor at New York
University, builds her canvas from material gleaned from scattered literary
references, ancient artifacts and inscriptions, and representations in sculpture and
vase painting. Her book shows generations of women enjoying all the influence,
prestige, honor and respect that ancient priesthoods entailed. Few were as exalted
as the Pythia, who sat entranced on a tripod at Delphi and revealed the oracular
will of Apollo, in hexameter verse, to individuals and to states. But Connelly finds
priestesses who were paid for cult services, awarded public portrait statues, given
elaborate state funerals, consulted on political matters and acknowledged as
sources of cultural wisdom and authority by open-minded men like the historian
Herodotus. With separation of church and state an inconceivable notion in the
world’s first democracy, all priesthoods, including those held by women, were
essentially political offices, Connelly maintains. Nor did sacred service mean selfabnegation. “Virgin” priestesses like Rome’s Vestals were alien to the Greek
conception. Few cults called for permanent sexual abstinence, and those that did
tended to appoint women already beyond childbearing age; some of the most
powerful priesthoods were held by married women with children, leading
“normal” lives.
The Greeks don’t deserve their reputation as rationalists. Religion and ritual
permeated the world of the city-states, where, Connelly notes, “there was no area
of life that lacked a religious aspect.” She cites one estimate that 2,000 cults
operated during the classical period in the territory of Athens alone; the city’s
roughly 170 festival days would have brought women out in public in great
numbers and in conspicuous roles. “Ritual fueled the visibility of Greek women
within this system,” Connelly writes, sending them across their cities to
sanctuaries, shrines and cemeteries, so that the picture that emerges “is one of farranging mobility for women across the polis landscape.”
These aspects of Connelly’s well-documented, meticulously assembled portrait
may not seem that remarkable on the surface, but they largely contradict what has
long been the most broadly accepted vision of the women of ancient Greece,
particularly Athens, as dependent, cloistered, invisible and mute, relegated almost
exclusively to housekeeping and child rearing — a view that at its most extreme
maintains that the names of respectable Athenian women were not spoken aloud
in public or that women were essentially housebound.
Connelly traces the tenacity of this idea to several sources, including the
paradoxically convergent ideologies of Victorian gentlemen scholars and 20thcentury feminists and a modern tendency to discount the real-world force of
religion, a notion now under powerful empirical adjustment. But another cause is
a professional divide between classicists and archaeologists. In their consideration
of a woman’s place, classicists emphasize certain well-known texts, the most
notorious being Thucydides’ rendition of Pericles’ great oration over the first
Athenian dead of the Peloponnesian War, which had this terse advice for their
widows: “If I must say anything on the subject of female excellence, ... greatest will
be her glory who is least talked of among men, whether in praise or in criticism.”
Connelly, though, is an archaeologist, and she insists that her evidence be allowed
to speak for itself, something it does with forceful eloquence. Far from the names
of respectable women being suppressed, it seems clear that great effort was made
to ensure that the names of many of these women would never be forgotten:
Connelly can cite more than 150 historical Greek priestesses by name. Archaeology
also speaks through beauty: “Portrait of a Priestess” is an excellent thematic case
study in vase painting and sculpture, with striking images of spirited women, at
altars or leading men in procession, many marked as priestesses by the great metal
temple key they carry, signifying not admission to heaven but the pragmatic
responsibility that Chrysis so notoriously betrayed in Argos.
Greek religion is a vast and complex subject, and “Portrait of a Priestess,” by
concentrating on one of its most concretely human aspects, offers an engrossing
point of entry. It’s not clear how far this lavishly produced book was intended for
general audiences; a map, a glossary and expanded captions would surely have
been welcome. But Connelly’s style is clear, often elegant and occasionally stirring.
And while she shows a fertile disregard for received wisdom — her astonishingly
radical reinterpretation of the Parthenon’s sculptural frieze, conceived in the early
1990s while she was researching this book, helped her win a MacArthur fellowship
— she is no polemicist, a fact that has the effect of strengthening her more
provocative points. Polytheism’s presumed spiritual failures may eventually have
led to the Christian ascendancy, but Connelly shows that the system long sustained
and nourished Greek women and their communities. In turn, women habituated
to religious privilege and influence in the pre-Christian era eagerly lent their
expertise and energy to the early church. But with one male god in sole reign in
heaven, women’s direct connection with deity became suspect, and they were
methodically edged out of formal religious power.
“There may be no finer tribute to the potency of the Greek priestess than the
discomfort that her position caused the church fathers,” Connelly writes in her
understated way. Her priestesses may be ancient history, but the consequences of
the discomfort they caused endure to this day.