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This work is the first complete corpus of Greek inscriptions issued by city institutions in honour of their female citizens and foreigners, with the exclusion of Hellenistic queens and women belonging to families of the Roman magistrates. The corpus lists 1131 women fulfilling such criteria. The Greek texts are accompanied by lemmata, English translations and relevant commentaries. Based on the collected evidence, the authors analyse the phenomenon of honorific inscriptions for women as an important symptom of change of citizen mentality. Pointing to the political context in which such honours were bestowed, the phrasing of the texts, character of praiseworthy actions, and the fact that these honours were carved in stone and set up in conspicuous places in cities all reflect what the male part of the city populace thought about women in general and their presence in public spaces in particular. The book is a helpful resource for all those interested in ancient history, social history, and gender studies.
This work is the first complete corpus of Greek inscriptions issued by the city institutions in honour of their co-citizenesses or female foreigners, with the exclusion of Hellenistic queens and women belonging to families of the Roman magistrates. The corpus lists 1131 women fulfilling such criteria. The Greek texts are accompanied by lemmata, English translations and relevant commentaries. Basing on the collected evidence, the authors analyse the phenomenon of honorific inscriptions for women as an important symptom of change of citizen mentality. For political context of such honours, the phrasing of the texts, character of praiseworthy actions, and the sheer fact that the honours were carved in stone and set up in conspicuous places in cities all reflect what the male part of the city populace thought about women in general and their presence in public space in particular. The book is a helpful resource for all those interested in ancient history, social history, and gender studies.
Largely excluded from any public role, the women of ancient Greece nonetheless appear in various guises in the art and writing of the period, and in legal documents. These representations, in Sue Blundell's analysis, reveal a great deal about women's day-to-day experience as well as their legal and economic position - and how they were regarded by men.
Examines women whose influence was positive, as well as those whose reputations were more notoriousSupremely well researched from many different historical sourcesSuperbly illustrated with photographs and drawings Women in Ancient Greece is a much-needed analysis of how women behaved in Greek society, how they were regarded, and the restrictions imposed on their actions. Given that ancient Greece was very much a man’s world, most books on ancient Greek society tend to focus on men; this book redresses the imbalance by shining the spotlight on that neglected other half. Women had significant roles to play in Greek society and culture – this book illuminates those roles. Women in Ancient Greece asks the controversial question: how far is the assumption that women were secluded and excluded just an illusion? It answers it by exploring the treatment of women in Greek myth and epic; their treatment by playwrights, poets and philosophers; and the actions of liberated women in Minoan Crete, Sparta and the Hellenistic era when some elite women were politically prominent. It covers women in Athens, Sparta and in other city states; describes women writers, philosophers, artists and scientists; it explores love, marriage and adultery, the virtuous and the meretricious; and the roles women played in death and religion. Crucially, the book is people-based, drawing much of its evidence and many of its conclusions from lives lived by historical Greek women.
Among ancient writers Aristotle offers the most profound analysis of the ancient Greek household and its relationship to the state. The household was not the family in the modern sense of the term, but a much more powerful entity with significant economic, political, social, and educational resources. The success of the polis in all its forms lay in the reliability of households to provide it with the kinds of citizens it needed to ensure its functioning. In turn, the state offered the members of its households a unique opportunity for humans to flourish. This 2006 book explains how Aristotle thought household and state interacted within the polis.
This book takes as its starting-point the images of women in the Parthenon sculptures, in order to investigate two levels of feminine experience in Classical Athens, the human and the divine. The inter-play between women's religious prominence and their domestic obscurity is examined in relation to the young citizen women who lead the procession; while the great goddesses represented in the frieze are studies in terms of their relationships with their human worshippers and, on a symbolic level, with the mythological females, such as the Amazons, who appear in the metopes. Finally, the book turns to a third aspect of th e feminine experience, and looks at the women who do not appear in the Parthenon sculptures - the prostitutes, slaves and alien women who made a vital economic and ideological contribution to the Athenian achievement.
In classical Greece women were almost entirely excluded from public life. Yet the feminine was accorded a central place in religious thought and ritual.This volume explores the often paradoxical centrality of the feminine in Greek culture, showing how out of sight was not out of mind. The contributors adopt perspectives from a wide range of disciplines, such as archaeology, art history, psychology and anthropology, in order to investigate various aspects of religion and cult. They include the part played by women in death ritual, the role of heroines, and the fact that goddesses had no childhood, at the same time posing questions about how we know what rituals meant to their participants. The Sacred and the Feminine in Ancient Greece is a lively and colourful exploration of the ways in which religion and ritual reveal women's importance in the Greek polis, showing how ideologies about female roles and behaviour were both endorsed and challenged in the realm of the sacred.
It has often been thought that participation in fertility rituals was women's most important religious activity in classical Greece. Matthew Dillon's wide-ranging study makes it clear that women engaged in numerous other rites and cults, and that their role in Greek religion was actually more important than that of men. Women invoked the gods' help in becoming pregnant, venerated the god of wine, worshipped new and exotic deities, used magic for both erotic and pain-relieving purposes, and far more besides. Clear and comprehensive, this volume challenges many stereotypes of Greek women and offers unexpected insights into their experience of religion. With more than fifty illustrations, and translated extracts from contemporary texts, this is an essential resource for the study of women and religion in classical Greece.
Although Classical Athenian ideology did not permit women to exercise legal, economic, and social autonomy, the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides often represent them as influential social and moral forces in their own right. Scholars have struggled to explain this seeming contradiction. Helene Foley shows how Greek tragedy uses gender relations to explore specific issues in the development of the social, political, and intellectual life in the polis. She investigates three central and problematic areas in which tragic heroines act independently of men: death ritual and lamentation, marriage, and the making of significant ethical choices. Her anthropological approach, together with her literary analysis, allows for an unusually rich context in which to understand gender relations in ancient Greece. This book examines, for example, the tragic response to legislation regulating family life that may have begun as early as the sixth century. It also draws upon contemporary studies of virtue ethics and upon feminist reconsiderations of the Western ethical tradition. Foley maintains that by viewing public issues through the lens of the family, tragedy asks whether public and private morality can operate on the same terms. Moreover, the plays use women to represent significant moral alternatives. Tragedy thus exploits, reinforces, and questions cultural clichés about women and gender in a fashion that resonates with contemporary Athenian social and political issues.
Women of the Republic views the American Revolution through women's eyes. Previous histories have rarely recognized that the battle for independence was also a woman's war. The "women of the army" toiled in army hospitals, kitchens, and laundries. Civilian women were spies, fund raisers, innkeepers, suppliers of food and clothing. Recruiters, whether patriot or tory, found men more willing to join the army when their wives and daughters could be counted on to keep the farms in operation and to resist enchroachment from squatters. "I have Don as much to Carrey on the warr as maney that Sett Now at the healm of government," wrote one impoverished woman, and she was right. Women of the Republic is the result of a seven-year search for women's diaries, letters, and legal records. Achieving a remarkable comprehensiveness, it describes women's participation in the war, evaluates changes in their education in the late eighteenth century, describes the novels and histories women read and wrote, and analyzes their status in law and society. The rhetoric of the Revolution, full of insistence on rights and freedom in opposition to dictatorial masters, posed questions about the position of women in marriage as well as in the polity, but few of the implications of this rhetoric were recognized. How much liberty and equality for women? How much pursuit of happiness? How much justice? When American political theory failed to define a program for the participation of women in the public arena, women themselves had to develop an ideology of female patriotism. They promoted the notion that women could guarantee the continuing health of the republic by nurturing public-spirited sons and husbands. This limited ideology of "Republican Motherhood" is a measure of the political and social conservatism of the Revolution. The subsequent history of women in America is the story of women's efforts to accomplish for themselves what the Revolution did not.