Mnesarete, daughter of Socrates.
This woman left a husband and siblings, and grief to her mother,
and a child and an ageless renown for great virtue (aretê).
Here the chamber of Persephone holds Mnesarete,
who has arrived at the goal of all virtue (aretê).
Inscriptiones Graecae II/III2
Ed. J. Kirchner, 1916-1935 (Berlin) = W. Peek,
Griechische Vers-Inschriften 1962 (Berlin, 1955)
This epigram celebrates the life of an early fourth-century B.C.E. Athenian woman, Mnesarete, who has lived up to the promise of her name, which means “remembering (mnes-) virtue or excellence (aretê).” The poem balances the sorrow that she has left to her husband, siblings (the word adelphoi, which ordinarily means brothers, includes sisters in some cases), and above all to her mother against her imperishable reputation for great virtue. In the presence of the goddess of the underworld Persephone, Mnesarete will continue to receive divine honor in the world of death. The marble grave stele on which this epigram appears (Fig. 1) shows the dead Mnesarete seated on the right, her head bowed in mourning and her left arm wrapped in her mantle. On the left she is observed by a standing (and probably still living) young woman dressed in a thin chiton with long sleeves. The identity of this second woman is uncertain; various scholars have suggested that she is the daughter, younger sister, or less probably the slave of Mnesarete, who apparently contemplates and absorbs this example of deathless womanly achievement. Both the poem and the physical beauty of the monument, with its graceful curved and vertical lines and its moving composition, aim to create a permanent testimony to the excellence of a woman who still links her natal and marital family in grief and admiration.
This stele is one of the best preserved of its type: many are fragmentary, inscriptions lost or obliterated. It preserves not only the full epigram, but also two names neatly carved on a ledge above the epigram, that of Mnesarete herself and of her father, Socrates. The use of the patronymic, long after Mnesarete’s marriage and the death of her father (he is not mentioned as alive in the epigram), suggests that a woman was thought to belong to her natal family, and especially to her father, throughout her life. Socrates was a common name in Athens (Mnesarete’s father must have been a close contemporary of the famous philosopher), and this man is not known from other sources, but sometimes such inscriptions help us to reconstruct the family tree of a woman who would otherwise be unknown to us. This was obviously an affluent family, judging from the large size of the monument (about five feet in height) and the high quality of the carving. The stele is said to have been found in the Attic countryside, in an area where several prominent Athenian families are known to have owned property. Such rural cemeteries have yielded some of the most impressive archaic and classical grave monuments (see Chapter 1).
Figure 1. Marble stele of Mnesarete. Attic (Early 4th century B.C.E.).
Although this book aims to bring together visual, written, and archaeological evidence for the lives of ancient women, history rarely provides us, as in this case, with all three in conjunction. Normally we are left with even less substantial fragments, mute unnamed images without precise historical provenance, tantalizing passing references in works that do not make the lives and concerns of women their central area of investigation, or named women who play a role in the imaginary creations of artists and poets that may bear only an oblique or distorted relation to the lives of actual women in Archaic, Classical, or Hellenistic Greece. Even a relatively undamaged grave monument such as this one may be deceptive and leave us with difficult questions that go far beyond the identity of the standing woman and her function on the monument.
To read it properly we would need to know, for example, what virtues brought a woman renown in Classical Athens. Paradoxically, our other sources suggest that the virtues for which Mnesarete receives eternal public recognition in death would in life have been known only to her family and probably to some women friends, and that her name would not have been publicly announced while she was alive. Ideally, every man in the Classical period spent his life aiming to establish a permanent honorable reputation for himself and his city. But his relatively secluded wife avoided a public reputation and turned her energies above all to familial concerns, to producing children and to caring for her household. Yet the same monument, if it were dated to another time or place in the Greek world, might hint at greater public recognition of a living wife’s virtues. We know that a girl who died a virgin was often said to become a symbolic “bride of Hades,” lord of the underworld, and thus to acquire in death the marriage that would have given full meaning to her life. It is more difficult to interpret Persephone’s welcoming reception of the virtuous, married mother Mnesarete. Was Mnesarete to be recognized for her excellence by Persephone, who in one myth at least, was said to have sent the noble queen Alcestis back to the upperworld in admiration for her courage in dying for her husband? Or was she, perhaps, guaranteed this reception through her initiation into the Eleusinian Mysteries, which promised the initiate a better life in the world below? The grief that Mnesarete bequeathes to her mother in particular reflects the generic sorrow felt by parents who live to mourn a child and perhaps in addition the special role that Greek women had in mourning the dead.
Women were often represented on grave monuments with the child (above all, the male child—here the word teknon does not allow us to specify the child’s sex) who signified a fulfilled life; if the young woman on this monument, however, is not Mnesarete’s daughter or sister or a female slave, we have no way of knowing why she is there. Perhaps the family chose a ready-made design that does not accurately reflect this particular woman’s case (the scheme of seated woman and standing attendant occurs often on gravestones [see Fig. 3.1], and this particular design reappears elsewhere). Nevertheless, it seems possible that image and epigram were designed to complement each other, and that Mnesarete is indeed meant to serve as a model for a younger, unmarried woman (such as a sister or daughter) who has not yet reached the goal of a woman’s life.
The monument suggests how visual and written evidence can reinforce each other (if we had found the offerings and grave goods in her tomb, or, as is less likely, the physical remains of Mnesarete herself, yet another piece could have been added to the puzzle) and how carefully we must use our nevertheless fragmentary knowledge from other sources to interpret its possible meaning. By contextualizing as much as possible the visual, physical, and written evidence for women in the Greek world from the eighth through the first centuries B.C.E., and by considering what problems and questions our sources present, we aim to provide the groundwork for a study of women in this period. We are concerned as much with the poet’s, prose writer’s, or artist’s image of women as with reconstructing “reality,” and we have tried to present our material in the context of a narrative that stresses what we believe are the issues concerning women that are central to each of three shorter periods within this larger time-span.
In Chapter 1 (the Archaic period, late eighth-early fifth centuries B.C.E.), for example, we have little more than poetry, sculpture, and vase painting scattered over the whole Greek world to examine. Hence we chose to emphasize what sources throughout the Greek world aimed to praise or blame in all women, and to examine how these texts and monuments represented the major phases of a generic (and above all aristocratic) woman’s passage through life. All the Greek excurses (Chapters 2, 4, and 6) present material from all three of our historical periods. Chapter 2 uses evidence that begins in the Archaic period in order to offer a more detailed picture of women in the changing context of a particular, important Greek city-state, Sparta, which differs considerably from our next focus of concern, Classical Athens.
In the Classical period (early fifth-late fourth centuries B.C.E.) we have concentrated on Athens, in large part because it is the city-state about which we know the most. Legislation that began to be passed in the Archaic period and continued into the Classical period apparently aimed to control family life and the relation of public to private life in Athens far more precisely than before. We have organized our often highly tendentious and contradictory evidence on women’s lives in the light of the historical transition to democracy and the social and ideological changes that accompanied it. Chapter 4 explores the way that representations of the mythical Amazons served in part to define by inversion the proper role of Athenian women. Whereas Athenian women took no part in war and politics and served to reproduce children of their husbands’ lineage, Amazons rejected marriage and domesticity, perpetuated their line through female children, engaged in war, and ruled their own societies.
Chapter 5 concentrates above all on the lives of women in Hellenistic Egypt. From after the death of Alexander the Great in 323 B.C.E. and until the defeat of the Ptolemaic queen Cleopatra by Roman forces under Octavian in 31 B.C.E., Greek culture was imposed on Egypt (as well as on other parts of the Eastern Mediterranean) by ruling Macedonian kings. This international context contributed to changes in the role of women in all social classes. The preservation in the dry climate of Egypt of written documents on papyrus enables us to study more closely the lives and transactions of ordinary citizens as well as queens; the art and literature of the period also expresses interest in the experiences of a greater range of social classes. Chapter 6 stresses the important gynecological discoveries of Herophilus, who, under the patronage of the Ptolemies, dissected human cadavers for the first time, and examines the ways that Greek medical and biological theories in both the Greek and Greco-Roman worlds shaped attitudes to female biology and to childbirth practices (and vice versa). Thus Chapters 5 and 6 also serve as a bridge to the study of women in the Roman world.
