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The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome: Rural Labour and Women's Life in The Ancient World (II)1.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Walter Scheidel
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Extract

How can these ideas be linked to the ancient sources? Focusing first of all on women's contribution to arable cultivation and arboriculture, we immediately face the first of many blanks. To the best of my knowledge, we do not have any explicit evidence of ploughing by women in the Greco-Roman world. Only two lines from Hesiod's Works and Days seem to establish a connection between women and ploughing: according to Hesiod, a proper head of a household would need ‘first of all a house, and then a woman and oxen for ploughing – a slave woman, not a wife, to follow the oxen [or: to care for the oxen]’ (405 f.). In the fourth century B.C., however, the second line that specifies the status and the function of the desired woman was apparently not yet part of the received text, since Aristotle could still regard her as a free woman (Pol. 1252a llff). Not until the first century B.C. did Philodemos of Gadara quote and defend the reading that defined Hesiod's woman as a slave labourer. Even so, the wording does not make it clear whether this woman was meant to follow the harnessed oxen, that is, to do the ploughing, or to care for the oxen in the stable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , April 1996 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1996

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References

NOTES

2. Philod, . Oik. col. VIII 35–40Google Scholar(ed. Jensen). Cf. Timaios, FGrHisi 566 F 157Google Scholar.

3. See Scheidel, , Gymnasium 97 (1990), 416 n. 51Google Scholar for discussion. The two iron ploughshares deposited at the sanctuary dedicated to Demeter in Bitalemi (cf. G&R 42 [1995], 216 n. 41Google Scholar) may have had only ritual significance and in any case need not have been dedicated by women: Kron, U., Arch. Anzeiger 1992, 636–8, 649Google Scholar. By way of contrast, however, a greater number of hoes of various sizes came to light there (op. cit., 638 f.), which could be suggestive of women who cared for vegetable beds or covered the seed with earth after the sowing. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, only one sickle was found among more than 20,000 votive offerings: op. cit., 637 fig. 10.

4. Aristoph, . fr. 829 (PCG III. 2. 329)Google Scholar; Poll, . Onom. 1. 222Google Scholar.

5. Archippos fr. 44 (I. 806 Edmonds); Hesychios and Photios, s.v. poaslriai.

6. Magnes, fr. 5 (PCG V. 630)Google Scholar; Phrynichos, fr. 39–45 (PCG VII. 412)Google Scholar. The apparent frequency of these references seems to rule out the possibility that female gleaners and weeders were mere phantoms equivalent to the ‘Ekklesiazusai’.

7. Poll, . Onom. 1. 222Google Scholar; Hesychios s.v. kalamelris; Plut, . Mor. 784aGoogle Scholar.

8. Athen. 14. 619a;Hinrichs, J., De Operariorum Camilenis Graecis (Darmstadt, 1908), 15fGoogle Scholar.: Biicher, K., Arbeit und Rhylhmus (Leipzig, 1919), 170f. Cf. also Longos 3. 30. 2Google Scholar.

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12. I will treat this in greater detail in a future comparative study of plantation management and rural chattel slavery in classical antiquity and the American South. Cf. also my ‘Reflections on the Differential Valuation of Slaves in Diocletian's Price Edict and in the United States’, MBAH (forthcoming).

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17. Campbell, J. K., Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford, 1964), 29, 32Google Scholar.

18. The children of such slave women would also help to tend animals: Varro, R. R. 2. 10. 1 and 3; 3. 17. 6; cf. Geoponica 18. 1. 5Google Scholar.

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21. Golden, M., EMC 36 (1992), 318Google Scholar rightly stresses the limited representative value of this reference, derived as it is from a ‘notoriously problematic piece of advocacy’.

22. Herfst, P., Le travail de la femme dans la Grèce ancienne (Utrecht, 1922), 91–5Google Scholar; Schaps, D. M., Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh, 1979), 18Google Scholar; cf. Gallant, T. W., Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1991), 133f., 164fGoogle Scholar.

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25. Kitteringham, J. in Village Life and Labour (London, 1975), 129fGoogle Scholar.

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27. Ter, . Ad. 847–9Google Scholar; Theocr, . Idyll. 3. 35Google Scholar; Hor, . Epod. 2. 41f.Google Scholar; Anlh. Pal. 9. 89. Cf. Aristot, . Gen. Animal. 1. 20. 728aGoogle Scholar for the idea that females are often fair-skinned and thereby feminine, whereas males are darker and masculine.

28. Heracleides Lembos fr. 53 (ed. Dilts); Iustin. 44. 3. 5.

29. Ember, C. R., American Anthropologist 85 (1983), 297fGoogle Scholar.

30. Cf. Saxena, N. C., ‘Women in Forestry’, Social Action 37 (1987), 153, referring to contractors in India who employ, along with male workers, women to undertake earthwork for digging pits for plantationsGoogle Scholar.

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32. Precheur-Canonge, T., La vie rurale en Afrique romaine d'après les mosaiques (Paris, 1962), 38fGoogle Scholar; Dunbabin, K. M. D., The Mosaics of Roman North Africa (Oxford, 1978), 114fGoogle Scholar. Highly idealized depictions of women as personifications of the seasons constitute the only exceptions: Parrish, D., Season Mosaics of Roman North Africa (Rome, 1984)Google Scholar.

33. Dunbabin, , op. cit., plate 109Google Scholar; cf. Rostovtzeff, M., The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1957 2), 528Google Scholar.

34. For this concept, see Patterson, O., Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1982), 1–13Google Scholar.