Download PDF | Guy D. Middleton - Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World_ From the Palaeolithic to the Byzantines-Cambridge University Press (2023).
315 Pages
WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT MEDITERRANEAN WORLD
In this book, Guy D. Middleton explores the fascinating lives of thirty real women of the ancient Mediterranean from the Palaeolithic to the Byzantine era. They include queens and aristocrats, such as the Pharoah Hatshepsut and the Etruscan noblewoman Seianti; Eritha and Karpathia, Bronze Age priestesses from the Aegean; a Pompeiian prostitute called Eutychis; the pagan philosopher Hypatia and the Christian saint Perpetua, from North Africa, as well as women from smaller communities. Middleton uses a wide range of archaeological and historical evidence, including burials and funerary practices, graffiti, inscriptions, painted pottery, handprints, human remains, and a variety of historical texts, as well as the latest modern research. His volume weaves together the stories of real women, placing them firmly in the spotlight of history. Engagingly written and up to date in its scholarship, Middleton’s book offers new insights for students and researchers in Ancient History, Archaeology and Mediterranean Studies, as well as in Women’s History.
Guy D. Middleton completed his PhD in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. He is the author of Understanding Collapse: Ancient History and Modern Myths (Cambridge University Press, 2017) and is Visiting Fellow at Newcastle University as well as a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society.
PREFACE
In 1361-1362, the Italian writer Boccaccio wrote his De Mulieribus Claris, or Famous Women — a book, he explained in the dedication to Lady Andrea Acciauoli of Florence, ‘in praise of women’.' This was the first book in the Western tradition to exclusively compile women’s biographies — to save a record of their lives and in particular their great deeds for posterity. The book, which is still in print, consists of 106 lives of women, mythical and real, mostly drawn from the ‘pagan’ Graeco-Roman tradition. Arranged in chronological order, Boccaccio starts with the biblical Eve and ends with Joanna, queen of Sicily. Giving details of their origins and describing why each woman became famous, the lives are not simple factual biographies; they identify virtue and vice, assign praise and blame, and draw moral judgements.* Praiseworthy women are often called ‘manly’, whilst weak men are ‘womanly’. The book provides examples for how women ought and ought not to behave, written from a male perspective.
Four decades later, in 1405, an Italian émigré to France, Christine de Pizan, also published a book of women’s lives — The Book of the City of Ladies.* Although much of the material appears to derive from Boccaccio, de Pizan’s work is somewhat more complex than Boccaccio’s and we read in it a woman’s own reaction to ‘all manner of philosophers, poets and orators too numerous to mention, who all seem to speak with one voice and are unanimous in their view that female nature is wholly given up to vice’.* Perhaps with some irony, she explains how, through reading the works on women of so many ‘learned men, who seemed to be endowed with such great intelligence’ and not listening to her own judgement, knowledge, and experience, she fell into despair about herself and women in general. So many wise men could not be wrong. De Pizan prayed and three women appeared to her: Reason, Rectitude, and Justice. They persuaded her that she and the learned men were wrong, that women had lacked a true defender, and they bid her create, in ‘the field of Letters’, a City of Ladies — ‘a walled city, sturdy and impregnable’.°
Christine de Pizan is perhaps the first female ‘defender’ of women; she argued that men had got it wrong, and she used the lives she wrote to show this. But like Boccaccio, and many more ancient authors, she is very much concerned with demonstrating moral behaviour and providing examples of it. The city is only for ‘ladies who are of good reputation and worthy of praise’. At the end of her book, when the city has been built and populated, she explains that women now have ‘every reason to rejoice — in a suitably devout and respectable manner’, the city will ‘defend and protect you against your attackers and assailants’.° She advises wives on how to deal with their husbands, whether good, average, or bad; advises all women to avoid gossip, jealousies, and scandalous behaviour; recommends young girls to be pure and modest and widows to be respectable. She stresses that all women, of all rank, should look out for sexually predatory men and guard their chastity — pursue virtue and shun vice. Is she simply reinforcing male views of how women should be in society, criticising men for their actions, or giving practical advice to women in general so that they can better survive in society and can undermine negative characterisations of women? The problems and the debates have not gone away.
Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World is also a book of lives, in which I try to piece together archaeological and historical evidence to tell the stories of some of the real women who lived in the Mediterranean region from the Palaeolithic to the beginning of the Byzantine Empire in the time of Justinian and Theodora. Unlike Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan, the selection does not depend on judgements of virtue or vice, on high status or on_ historical ‘achievements’. It is not only the good, or rulers, or the elite who are worthy of remembrance, although the sources bias us to those more visible people. Also, unlike them, I have not included goddesses or mythical figures, because, whilst they may tell us something about attitudes to women and the feminine, the focus is on real women. The important principle here is simply raising the fact of these women’s existence; I hope to bring to life these women in the present and where possible relate their words, bodies, images, and life experiences.
Women are still less visible in archaeology and history than men, mirroring a society that is still, in many ways, more used to considering the male as the reference point,’ though there are plenty of researchers and plenty of books and articles seeking to rectify this. Illustrative of this bias is the story of a recently discovered Etruscan tomb from Tarquinia, an ancient town northwest of Rome. When the intact tomb was found in 2013, news of the find quickly spread through the press.* It was reported that the tomb held the remains of an Etruscan prince, placed on a bench along with a spear and brooches, and the cremated remains of his wife interred with him on the opposite bench. Yet, as later analysis of the remains showed, the skeleton with the spear was that of a woman of around forty, while the cremated body was that of a man.? The identification and characterisation, based on assumptions about sex and gender roles in which weapons are ‘male’ and males take priority, had been the wrong way around and were informed by long-standing ingrained prejudice.
Intellectually, I have long been aware of this androcentric bias, but when I found out that my partner and I were going to have a daughter, I realised much more viscerally just how ‘male’ the past still is. I wondered how she might feel hearing or reading mostly about men or a mass of ‘faceless blobs’, to borrow Ruth Tringham’s phrase.'° What impact would history largely without women have on a girl growing up? I know she enjoyed The Jungle Book much more when I read Mowgli as a girl — at her insistence; would she be more interested in history if girls and women were more visible? What impact might this awareness of women in history have on her character and personality, her identity as a woman? I did not want her to grow up thinking that history was just what men did a long time ago and that there were no ‘real women’, noble or normal, good or bad, in history. This book has been written in the first place for her, for when she 1s older and we can read it together, and now for her little sister too, and for any other reader who would like to learn a little about some of the real women of the ancient Mediterranean and how we can study them.
The women whose stories I tell — or more precisely my stories about them — have been chosen to cover a broad swath of time and space but are not used to tell a narrative history of the Mediterranean. The point is the lives themselves and, secondarily, the ways in which we can access and construct them. To some extent, the choices have been dictated by the availability of evidence or accessible research, as well as my own background, experience, and interests: Greece and Rome are there but including Aegean prehistory and non-Roman Italians; so is North Africa, Iberia, and Gozo, the Celts of France; and the Egyptians and Hittites, Levantines, Cypriots, and Mesopotamians are included too; we dig into the deep past of the Palaeolithic and Neolithic as well as historical times. And whilst there are some obvious choices that could be made about which real women to include in a book like this, I have tried to avoid too many of these and to include less well-known characters and women from a variety of social positions as well. For example, I have preferred Cleopatra Selene to her better-known mother; I find the story of the orphaned children of a deposed queen and a foreign soldier and political chancer, who grew up in exile amongst ‘the enemy’ and dispossessed of her inheritance — Egypt — but who ended up as a queen elsewhere, where she could celebrate her ancestry, to be both fascinating and poignant and worth exploring.
Boccaccio and Christine de Pizan relied primarily on the works of classical authors, the Bible, and writers in the Christian tradition. Each story in this book is pieced together from whatever sources are available. Archaeological, artistic, bureaucratic, iconographic, literary, and scientific evidence all play a role in uncovering the ancient person. As a starting point, sometimes we have just a name, sometimes just a body, sometimes some other aspect of material culture. Other times we may have narrative historical evidence that allows amore complete biographical sketch to be made, with the caveats that come with using such sources. The stories I tell here reflect this diversity in evidence and I hope that, as well as bringing real women of the ancient Mediterranean into focus, they will also enable readers to see how archaeologists and historians work at recreating the past. The difficulties of reconstructing ancient lives will be a recurring feature, but herein lies some of the excitement of doing archaeology and history, where we have tantalising glimpses of people and events and different interpretations of the evidence. Many stories could be told. Where possible, the words and physical existence of the women chosen will be presented, where not, other material aspects of their lives (or deaths) will be surveyed.
Constant companions and sources of inspiration in the writing of this book have been Stephanie Lynn Budin and Jean Macintosh Turfa’s Women in Antiquity: Real Women across the Ancient World (Routledge, 2016) and Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon’s A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (Wiley-Blackwell, 2012), both of which contain many chapters on women in different cultures based on both material and textual evidence. Joyce Salisbury’s Encyclopedia of Women in the Ancient World (ABC-Clio, 2001) was very helpful as were books in the Oxford University Press series “Women in Antiquity’.
Also to be mentioned are Jennifer Neil’s accessible and gloriously illustrated Women in the Ancient World (British Museum Press, 2011) and Emily Hemelryk’s fascinating sourcebook of inscriptions touching on the lives of so many real women, Women and Society in the Roman World (Cambridge University Press, 2020). The first book I (and many others) read on the topic of women in the ancient world, and one to which all interested readers should turn, is Sarah Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves in Classical Antiquity (Bodley Head, 2015; first published in 1975). All of these can be heartily recommended for learning much more about real women in history — and I have learnt a great deal from them.
This book is somewhat different in scope and intent to those but owes much to them and to many other authors and researchers. I have aimed to gather together and present lives in a book that can be dipped into or read from first to last, to provide a useful introduction to the study of women in the ancient past, and a resource that can lead readers on to further study. As when writing about any subject, I have found that the more you explore the more you find, the more you think and the more you would like to share; I have tried to strike a balance in this book with the number of lives, the various social positions of the women discussed, the depth and breadth of discussion, the periods and places covered, and the style of presentation (accessible but with notes).
Finally, I make no apology for being a man doing ‘women’s history’ or for speaking up for these ‘real women’; this is human history and should be open to all students and writers regardless of sex or gender. I think this book will fill a gap on the bookshelf and I hope it will serve to foreground women in history for as wide an audience as possible. I do not claim to speak for these women but rather to draw attention to the fact that they existed and that they once lived lives of their own that are worth remembering and that we can learn more about.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This book was written for my daughter Ellie, so I thank her most of all for pushing me in this direction of study. In the final stages of preparation, my second daughter Charlotte appeared — and so the book is equally for her. For her constant support and positivity, I must also thank my partner Yoshie, without whom the work would not be possible. My family is full of strong women: I would like to thank my mother Jennifer, who brought me up, took me to ancient places, and gave me my first archaeology books; my elder sister Sarah, who has been such a positive influence; my aunt Elspeth, who lived for many years in Greece and understood my own passion for the place; and my aunt Judy, another émigré. They have shown me, throughout my life, that women are strong, capable, and resilient — I have never doubted it.
In the preparation of this book, I have been helped in different ways by many kind souls. Here, I would like to thank Sabrina Agarwal, Ellen Belcher, Stephanie Lynn Budin, Karina Croucher, Svetlana Egorova, Silvia Ferrara, Ana Delgado Herves, Despina Ignatiadou, Eva Kappel, Maria Liston, Ecaterina Lung, Caroline Malone, Meritxell Ferrer Martin, Petar MiloSevic, Claudia Valeria Alonso Moreno, Libby Mulqueeny, Jonathan Musgrave, John Papadopoulos, Ludivine Pechoux, Rafael Mico Perez, John Prag, Lucia Rinolfi, Jason Quinlan, Carol Stein, Simon Stoddart, and Jannis Zyganitidis, and the librarians of the Philip Robinson Library at Newcastle University.
I would also like to acknowledge the kindness and support of Miroslav Barta and Ladislav Bares of the Czech Institute of Egyptology at Charles University, Prague, where, until Brexit, I held a part-time post funded by the European Regional Development Fund project ‘Creativity and Adaptability as Conditions of the Success of Europe in an Interrelated World’ (no. CZ.02.1.01/0.0/0.0/16_019/0000734). This project benefitted from that association.
At Cambridge University Press, I would like to thank Beatrice Rehl for her enthusiasm and ongoing support for this project as well as all the team that saw the book through to publication, especially Aiswarya Narayanan and Trent Hancock. Thanks also to the anonymous reviewers of my initial proposal for seeing its potential and for the positive response to the final manuscript.
This work, which gathers together evidence, ideas, and comment from many sources into an original and critical synthesis, rests on the hard and often painstaking work of many researchers, often in very specialist fields; it is thanks to them that this book could be written. I hope not to have misrepresented their findings and ideas and kindly acknowledge my indebtedness to them here and in the endnotes. I would urge any interested reader to dive into the sources referenced to find out more about particular individuals, topics, or themes. Any errors and infelicities in the book remain the responsibility of the author.
NOTE on ancient names: I have tried to be consistent with names, using the most well-known or easy versions. When quoting sources, however, I have not changed the spellings of translators, which sometimes means a variety of spellings appear in a single chapter. This admittedly can be confusing, even jarring, and apologies are offered in advance.
HISTORICAL CONTEXTS
This book takes us to many places around the ancient Mediterranean Sea, and the stories told take place from the deep past of the Palaeolithic down to the early Byzantine Empire of Justinian and Theodora. As such, some kind of broader historical context may be useful, into which the lives of the women explored in the book can be placed. So, before we meet the women, a brief note about the Mediterranean region will be given, followed by a sketch of Mediterranean history concerning only the areas relevant to the book (citations refer to helpful general works).
Like the book, this sketch is divided into five parts, which follow and work back from the Greco-Roman-based chronology that I am most familiar with, and which, for all it can be criticised, I think is the most accessible and helpful to a wide range of readers. These five parts are: Part I, The Deep Past; Part H, The Bronze Age; Part II, The Iron Age; Part IV, The Hellenistic Worlds; and Part V, The Age of Empire.
THE MEDITERRANEAN
The Mediterranean climate, the Mediterranean diet, the Mediterranean temperament — the Mediterranean is, in Western culture, a well-recognised unit that hangs together in our minds and conjures up many shared ideas and images. Perhaps this is a problem — a kind of orientalism in which a construct is set up by observers and critics of all kinds and takes on its own set of constructed realities.
The roots of such a construction could be traced at least in part to the British Romantics and later authors and travellers who idolised the people, lands, and antique cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. John Pemble has written of “The Mediterranean Passion’ of Victorian and Edwardian British, for example." The view of the Mediterranean as a region in which people had more in common with each other than with those farther from the sea has been critiqued by many, including Joao de Pina-Cabral, who argues that ‘the notion of the Mediterranean Basin as a “culture area” is more useful as a means of distancing Anglo-American scholars from the populations they study than as a way of making sense of the cultural homogeneities and differences that characterise the region’.
Even so, the Mediterranean is a distinct unit — lands around a single sea, which not only separated communities and cultures but brought them together. As Plato said of the Greeks and the Mediterranean, they lived like frogs around a pond, with settlements planted in the west at Marseille and the east, in Egypt. Mobility has long been a feature of Mediterranean life — famous of course are the Greeks themselves and the Phoenicians and Carthaginians with whom they eventually competed. People from these cultures travelled from the far east of the sea, the Levant, to the far west, the Straits of Gibraltar.
In the central Mediterranean, the Etruscans adventured on the sea for military purposes and in prehistory, the Nuraghic people of Sardinia may also have travelled far. The Romans called the Mediterranean Mare Nostrum — Our Sea — and their empire surrounded it. None of this is to say that the lands around the sea were or are identical — sub-regions and microregions exist, and there are, of course, inland areas too, where there may be little or no daily contact or connection with the sea.
As a region, the Mediterranean has been the subject of many histories — Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip I (English translation 1976), being a landmark work. There are more recent works that treat the whole, such as Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea (2000) and Cyprian Broodbank’s The Making of the Middle Sea (2013). Braudel focused on a very narrow period and was interested especially in the geography of the region, the difference between plain and mountain. Horden and Purcell’s work travels from the early first millennium BC to beyond the turn of the first millennium Bc; it emphasises Mediterranean diversity within unity and the connective nature of the sea.* It is undeniably important and has generated significant discussion about ‘the Mediterranean’ .
Broodbank’s magisterial work surveys the region from its geological formation to the Battle of Salamis in 480 BC, with a focus on archaeology and coverage that examines many local cultures and sites around the sea whilst also maintaining a broader context. His book 1s inclusive in the sense that it eschews a focus on the classical regions and aspires to be a ‘barbarian history’.° In all of these works, the Mediterranean is understood as a world in itself — a world distinctive and interconnected by the sea that defines it.
This book is not a history ‘of the Mediterranean region as opposed to history ‘in’ the Mediterranean region; it does not make the kind of claims, comparisons, or contrasts that might render ‘Mediterranean’ a problematic term, so the questions raised above can be left for others to discuss. Rather, this is a book about some of the people who lived by the Mediterranean or connected to it, broadly taken; in this case, the Mediterranean forms a convenient link between cultures and communities diverse in time and space yet connected by this important and constant feature.
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