I. Real women: discourses and social realities

One of the most difficult straits to navigate when studying ancient Greek societies is the relationship between representations and the actual lives of real people. In the study of ancient women, this question is particularly acute given our mostly male-authored literary source material. If much previous scholarship on women (with some exceptions) has coalesced around the former, the past decade or so has seen a distinct push to examine the latter.Footnote ¹

The two poles are expertly brought together by Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet’s Artémise: une femme capitaine de vaisseaux dans l’antiquité grecque. Artemisia, ruler of Halikarnassos, is known for her involvement in the Battle of Salamis, fighting on the side of the Persians. As such, she has typically been interpreted as an exceptional figure: a woman doing man’s things, a barbarian fighting against Greeks. Sebillotte Cuchet argues, however, that this picture is shaped by two strands of thought: Plutarch’s moralizing conception of the classical past and 20th-century understandings of gender which emphasize sexual difference (that is, differences between men and women). For 20th-century readers, Artemisia was an exceptional admiral because she was a woman; for Herodotos, however, she was exceptional because of her commitment to war and her andreia (‘courage’). Herodotos is more interested in her deeds than her gender, which gives rise to the underlying argument of the book: there were more flexible understandings of gender in the ancient Greek world, different gender regimes (régimes de genre) that cannot be reduced to an overdetermined opposition between men and women, but need to be understood in relation to other interacting measures of social distinction and scales of operation.Footnote ² Artemisia’s status (her membership of the civic community through kinship) and wealth are more important than her femaleness in this context, an observation that is expanded for other Greek women elsewhere.

In order to elucidate this, Sebillotte Cuchet traces the reception of the Artemisia story in antiquity and shows there are contrasting views of her. On the one hand, she was certainly seen in a negative light: this version in which her gender became important was predominant in Athens, partly as a result of Athenian imperialist ambitions since her actions (a woman fighting) evoked the Amazons. But there were other traditions in which she was seen in a more neutral or even positive light, in which the fact that she was a woman was not pertinent. Here, as in Herodotos, it is her andreia that is commented upon, not her gender. Plutarch effectively writes her out of history because, for him, the past had a moralistic, didactic function that was marshalled to create models of exemplary behaviour within a civic community and as a result, because she fought with the Persians and not for the freedom of the Greeks, she did nothing of note.Footnote ³ It is here, then, that we see the beginning of the tradition that constructed her as doubly problematic (a woman and a barbarian), readily followed in 20th-century scholarship, but this was just one view among many (and one, moreover, that misrepresents Halikarnassian politics and the position of Karia within the ancient world).

One of the most important conclusions here is that attitudes to women that we see in one context cannot be readily generalized, and transposed, to another. We should not assume that Athenian or Plutarchean views of Artemisia were universal across time or space, nor their ideas about what a woman ‘should’ do or be; indeed, the roots of their views are entirely different, as Sebillotte Cuchet demonstrates. This makes intuitive sense over the chronological and geographical diversity of the Greek world, but Sebillotte Cuchet also marshals a great deal of evidence to demonstrate this, too: from the polysemic voices detectable in the reception of Artemisia to the different views of the Amazons outside Athens, to the varying discourses about the relationship of male and female bodies to masculine and feminine behaviours, to the politics of Karia in comparison with other Greek cities. Here she shows different gender regimes at work and at odds with one another. This allows her to argue that Artemisia was not exceptional at all, she was an entirely ordinary woman. It is gender stereotypes about her, ones that are shaped by the construction of her as a barbarian, that portray her as exceptional, but Sebillotte Cuchet persuasively argues that historians should not take these at face value or universalize them.

What emerges here, then, is a view of Greek women’s authority and political capabilities that was written off in 20th-century scholarship. The post-structuralist polarities of late 20th-century historical inquiry have, it seems, obscured as much as they have revealed, but what is clear here is that Artemisia, and other female citizens, were not always subjected to male domination; indeed they often subjected others to their own domination and were more similar to male citizens than scholars have often recognized. Sebillotte Cuchet’s book therefore is a significant contribution to debates on women, gender and power, as well as the shaping of historical memory and the changing regional dynamics of Karia.

One might be tempted to place Artémise: une femme capitaine as part of a trend visible also in Roman history, that is, a biographical turn that has placed greater emphasis on the lives of individual women. The advantage of this approach is that it draws attention to the multiplicity of roles that women occupied, the relations of power in which, and through which, they operated, making visible their lives through often fragmentary evidence, though this kind of biographical approach can also be criticized for its focus on elite women.Footnote ⁴ To some extent, the books under review here attempt to negate such criticism. For Sebillotte Cuchet (who is, in fact, very clear that her book is not a biography), the gender regimes highlighted through the study of Artemisia allow her to see how gender operates differently on different scales: for citizen women like Artemisia, their wealth and kinship not only provided them with capacities for action, but also authority over slaves, over whom a different gender regime operated.

For Guy D. Middleton, in Women in the Ancient Mediterranean World: From the Palaeolithic to the Byzantines, which explicitly focuses on biography as a means through which ‘to put thirty “real” women … back into history’, the aim is both ‘to present their lives and critically consider the evidence from which these can be reconstructed’.Footnote ⁵ His choices are noteworthy: alongside Olympias, Hypatia and Theodora, (on the Greek side) Aristonike, the Pythia at Delphi in 480, whose prophecies encouraged the Athenians to evacuate the city and prepare for the Battle of Salamis, where they fought Artemisia; Neaira, for whom a ‘biography’ of sorts appears in [Demosthenes] 59; Phanostrate, commemorated posthumously as a midwife and doctor;Footnote ⁶ and Eutychis, possibly an enslaved Greek woman recorded in a graffito in Pompeii. The choices are admirable; the execution often reliant on the interpretations of others, perhaps inevitable in a volume with such a broad chronological span. Moreover, Middleton tends to be better when analysing archaeological sources than textual ones. Although he rightly points out the adversarial context of the speech through which we learn of Neaira, he takes at face value the story of her childhood, consigning her forever to be the prostitute concocted by Apollodoros.Footnote ⁷ But why should we believe Apollodoros on this count? Given that the speech intentionally and gleefully slanders Neaira, shouldn’t these details also be argued, rather than assumed to be true?

The volume does, however, successfully present a wide range of women’s lives and should be applauded in this regard. It also raises the question about what counts as biography for people for whom little evidence survives: both Neaira and Eutychis are contextualized through discussions of prostitution (though at least Middleton discusses the possibility that Eutychis was not a prostitute). The same question arises in both of the volumes published on Phryne in 2024: Laura McClure’s Phryne of Thespiae: Courtesan, Muse, Myth and Melissa Funke’s Phryne: A Life in Fragments. Like Middleton, what is noteworthy about these volumes is the shift from scholarship on unquestionably elite women to those whose lives were, arguably, precarious in different ways. Phryne was a metic hetaira in Athens, originally from Thespiai. Possibly a refugee, she made a name for herself and was prosecuted for impiety, perhaps in the 340s, and acquitted when Hypereides exposed her breasts to the courtroom. Her fame was cemented by her association with Praxiteles, allegedly serving as a model for, among other works, his Knidian Aphrodite, as well as inspiring Apelles’ Anadymene. At least, this is what we think we know from Plutarch and Athenaios.

McClure’s volume destabilizes this biography, however, pointing out what it actually is: reception. By foregrounding the reception of Phryne in 18th- and 19th-century art, she reminds the reader that precisely the same processes of transformational myth-making are operational in antiquity, fundamentally shaping the historical record as it comes down to us today. Funke likewise rightly places Phryne in a Roman Imperial context in ‘a kind of visual nostalgia’ predicated on her body, though she is less successful, in my view, than McClure in exploring the dynamics of this.Footnote ⁸ Funke also devotes a chapter to the receptions of Phryne and while her discussion encompasses more genres than McClure, including an interesting analysis of 20th-century Italian film, the placement of this as the final chapter (rather than the first, as in McClure) results in the reader seeing the development of an image of Phryne over time, rather than a deep consideration of how that image has shaped understanding of the woman herself.

That much of what we think we know about Phryne is a product of literary invention has been noted before, indeed both authors explore this aspect well. But whilst Funke rightly notes, for example, the rhetoric of the courtroom disrobing story in its Roman Imperial context, it is McClure who, importantly, explains the process through which this story, and others, came into being. She is able to account for this, and various other elements of Phryne’s narrative, through careful study of the reception of the works of Greek art associated with her in the Roman world. Through this, she lucidly accounts for the more salacious episodes: the sexual relationship between Praxiteles and Phryne, for example, is read as a trope of the Roman era, coming into being as a result of the eroticization of female nudity generated by Roman fascination with what had by then come to be considered to be great artworks (fourth-century female nudity by contrast was, crucially, like male nudity, idealized, not sexualized). It was this that generated the ‘literary fantasies’ of Phryne that we see in the Second Sophistic, turning her into Praxiteles’ lover.

These are not incidences that tell us much about the life of Phryne, but romanticized products of Second Sophistic fantasy, which misinterpret Phryne’s social networks, her benefactions and material success. McClure excavates these away and from an archetype of shamefulness, and Phryne becomes respectable. Funke, on the other hand, tends to assume that Phryne was a ‘foreign sex worker’, and ‘muse’ made vulnerable by not fitting into ‘Athenian identity categories’ without much historicization of any of these terms.Footnote ⁹

In an important sense, then, both of these books are, like Sebillotte Cuchet’s, not biographies, but attempts to understand how women become discursive objects, how they enter the historical record and how they are transformed by it. The Phrynes of, for example, Jean-Léon Gérôme or Camille Saint-Saëns have little to do with fourth-century Athenian sensibilities and a lot to do with 19th-century sexual politics (something that is well brought out by Funke), but equally the Phrynes of Athenaios or Plutarch, who fundamentally shape our understanding of her as historians, are just as far removed from the fourth-century context (something that is well brought out by McClure). The value of these works, then, is the focus on the multiple receptions of Phryne and how they shape the making of the historical tradition.

Biography, on the other hand, is what the contributors to Ancient Women Philosophers: Recovered Ideas and New Perspectives are trying to get away from as it has dominated study of female thinkers in antiquity. Their aim, by contrast, is to view women as philosophers in their own right.Footnote ¹⁰ They are well aware of the difficulties involved in such an endeavour: no ancient philosophical text survives that was written by a (named) woman, but we know they existed and we know women were part of philosophical communities. The volume cogently outlines a variety of ways in which their ideas might be reconstructed, in part by pointing out the mechanisms through which they have been lost (for instance, through disregard, ancient and modern), and in part by re-evaluating assumptions about what it meant to be a philosopher. This results both in the introduction of ‘new figures to the academic discourse’ on philosophy (for example, the Cyrenaic Arete, Pythagorean women), as well as a focus on women (for example, Epicureans, Stoics) who chose to live in communities of philosophical practice, transmitting their knowledge to others. Modern assumptions about philosophical practice that place greater emphasis on innovation, writing and originality than practice, preservation of tradition or conservatorship are therefore challenged.Footnote ¹¹

A consistent theme running through many of the volumes under review is that of exceptionality. For Sebillotte Cuchet, as noted above, Artemisia was not exceptional in many important ways, nor were the women philosophers. Similarly, Melanie Meaker uses the frame of exceptionality constructed around Kyniska, Olympic victor and Spartan royal, to argue that female participation in equestrian competition was more widespread than hitherto suggested. Many previous scholars have viewed Kyniska, like Artemisia, as exceptional because of her gender; they have understood her victories in terms of her family relations (as if men were not part of families, too), or explained them away as indirect, because equestrian victors did not ride the horses themselves and so their victories were vicarious (as if the men celebrating victories were jockeys rather than owners). Meaker shows that female participants were in fact not unusual, that the motivations of men and women cannot be shown to be different and that scholars too frequently view women’s victories only through the lens of their male relatives. As she notes, ‘it seems impossible for some scholars to wrap their heads around female engagement in the “male” world of agonistics’.Footnote ¹²

One might legitimately agree or disagree with interpretations of Artemisia, Kyniska or Phryne (or anyone else) being exceptional, typical or something in between, but we should be wary of getting mired in this kind of debate; this question is rarely, if ever, asked of ancient men.

II. Agency: women in action

Meaker’s chapter appears within a volume focused on women’s agency, Female Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean World, and a concern with agency runs through almost all of the volumes under consideration.Footnote ¹³

What is meant by agency? The contributors to Female Agency in the Ancient Mediterranean World assume that women were active participants in shaping aspects of their own lives (i.e. social agents). Karolina Frank, whose chapter focuses on women’s enquiries at the oracle of Dodona, shows beautifully the concerns that drove women to seek divine help. This vast and important body of evidence is increasingly being exploited by social historians and historians of religion and gender for good reason. Unlike other evidence, it arguably provides an insight into what real people actually thought and what they tried to control. As Frank notes, the tablets ‘reveal some of the strategies the women used to address their problems and ensure they succeeded in their undertakings’.Footnote ¹⁴ Questions about marriage and children are made more often by men than women, though women did ask questions about these topics, too, in some cases asking whether having sex with a specific man will result in children.Footnote ¹⁵ But they also asked about matters of inheritance, family finances, financial security and prosperity, slave issues, health and ritual practices. What emerges here, then, is that women ‘actively sought control over their situation through divination meant to incite divine intervention’.Footnote ¹⁶

The Introduction to this volume provides a useful overview of feminist scholarship on agency outside of the ancient world. Ultimately, however, the editors settle on a ‘bare bones definition’, as described by Judith Hallett in the Epilogue, as a woman’s ‘power and capacity to act as she chooses’.Footnote ¹⁷ Envisioned as a multidimensional and relational concept, collective as much as individual, the operational definition seems in practice to fall back on the idea that women are social agents. Perhaps this is necessary given the geographical and temporal range of the case studies, but one wonders whether the evidence could be pushed further. In the two Greek-centred chapters (Meaker and Frank) at least, we do not really see evidence for multidimensionality or relationality as the case studies do not tackle these aspects in a sustained fashion.Footnote ¹⁸ Work for the future no doubt.

New materialisms also offer a way of thinking about agency. As Lilah Grace Canevaro points out, there is a tension between the flat ontology of new materialism, which aims to collapse distinctions between subject and object and feminist debates about objectification (women and objects versus women as objects, as she puts it).Footnote ¹⁹ She argues that this provides the conceptual space to focus on agency through objects in literature, which are understood not as symbols but as ‘material manifestations of agency, characterization, of emotion, of memory, of communication’.Footnote ²⁰ The contributors to Women and Objects in Antiquity likewise draw on new materialisms. Florence Gherchanoc, for example, argues that bridal gifts of jewellery have a persuasive force and are markers of value with the capacity to both bring order and emphasize social bonds between families. They also bring danger, as is demonstrated through the myth of Eriphyle. Analysis of women and objects builds on the work of Beate Wagner-Hasel, who explored the politics of gift exchange in the Homeric poems to great effect.Footnote ²¹

Jewellery also forms a central part of discussion for a number of chapters in Secular Byzantine Women: Art, Archaeology, and Ethnography of Female Material Culture from Late Roman to Post-Byzantine Times. This volume aims to shed light on working women (as opposed to saints, aristocrats or other elites) through expressions of femininity. Florentia Evangelatou-Notara and Kalliope Mavrommati discuss copper alloy and iron rings (mostly bought on the antiques market), that is, rings made with cheaper materials and suggested to be the possessions of non-elite women and men.Footnote ²² Some perhaps were exchanged on betrothal or marriage, others were likely heirlooms passed down between mothers and daughters, others bought at panēgureis, but in each case they provided visible symbols of a person’s social status. Susanne Metaxas offers an intriguing discussion of children’s earrings and their gendered associations in funerary archaeology: she argues that girls’ ears were pierced young and as a result pairs of earrings beside a skull in a funerary context provide a way to distinguish the burials of girls and boys (osteological sexing is not possible for the bones of young children). Boys were typically buried with belts (leaving behind a buckle) or wore only one earring.Footnote ²³ Earrings were therefore used as markers of gender.

Elina Salminen also draws on funerary evidence to understand various axes of social distinction in Archaic and Classical Macedonia and jewellery forms one avenue of investigation here. By pulling together a large amount of data published in a variety of disparate venues and subject to different standards and constraints, Salminen has provided scholarship a huge service.Footnote ²⁴ She slices and dices the evidence in various ways: most pertinent here is the comparison between osteological studies which have determined biological sex in surviving skeletal remains and those with graves containing assemblages which have been considered ‘masculine’ or ‘feminine’. Typically, jewellery appears in women’s graves, but a small number of burials contain both weapons and jewellery.Footnote ²⁵ Interestingly, Salminen’s conclusions echo the findings of Sebillotte Cuchet: elite women’s burials show more affinities with male burials than with poorer women’s burials. Wealth and kinship are more important markers of social distinction than gender difference. What Salminen demonstrates is variation within each social group: ‘masculine and adult symbols had prestige, but this prestige could be tapped into by people not actually falling into the social categories of “male” or “adult”’.Footnote ²⁶ Paraskevi Tritsaroli comes to similar conclusions about the early Christian and early Ottoman osteological data: variations between male and female skeletal remains are better explained by socio-economic and urban/rural differences than gender differences.Footnote ²⁷

For many of the contributors to Ancient Women Philosophers, agency implicitly resides in competencies, that is, skills, knowledge and authority that derive from a woman’s actions.Footnote ²⁸ Sophia Connell (Reference Connell, O’Reilly and Pellò2023), for example, discusses women doctors, demonstrating that male doctors saw them as competitors, and as such they must have possessed theoretical knowledge and authority on a range of medical matters, which they both practised and taught to others (including male doctors and other philosophers). Indeed, women doctors occasionally received public honours, as can be seen in the collection of evidence superbly brought together by Przemyslaw Siekierka et al. in Women and the Polis: Public Honorific Inscriptions for Women in the Greek Cities from the Late Classical to the Roman Period.Footnote ²⁹ Though not explicitly framed in terms of agency, the aim of the volume is to bring together epigraphic examples of honorific decrees involving women, and the body of material decisively demonstrates the array of competencies women possessed, from financial management to cult administration to ensuring the correct sacrifices were performed. However, it is disappointing that despite the wealth of evidence at their fingertips, the introductory chapters are rather conservative in outlook: for example, honours given to the priestess of Athena Polias, [Lysistra]te or [Phanostra]te, which also mention her husband (IG II³ 1, 1026; no. 11), are interpreted as evidence that he ‘sponsored all the listed expenses of his wife in [the] term of her office and everybody must have known the real degree of [his] involvement in the matter’.Footnote ³⁰ The argument appears to be based on an assumption that Athenian women could not own property, when this was not really the case,Footnote ³¹ but the effect is that this thinking does not see her agency in the performance of her priestly duties, it denies her competencies, in contrast to the recognition given to her by the polis.

The operative phrase here is ἐκ τῶν ἰδίων, which could conceivably mean ‘from their own property’, but given that only [Lysistra]te/[Phanostra]te has been mentioned up to this point, it could just as well mean ‘from her own property’ as it clearly does elsewhere.Footnote ³² Regardless, she clearly had the ability to dispose of it for this purpose; if this was not the case, why advertise it? Why not just honour her husband? The distinction between his, hers or theirs does not matter from the point of view of the Boule (the awarding body): what is important to them is that the property is not the sanctuary’s and is therefore a donation. But the distinction does matter from an etic point of view: why assume that this member of the prestigious genos of the Eteoboutadai needed her husband’s permission to perform the religious role into which she had been born? This is not how the kurieia works.Footnote ³³

To what extent does this wealth of evidence show women operating within the confines of patriarchal norms and to what extent were the latter disrupted, reshaping gender regimes themselves? Emily Hauser suggests the latter in How Women Became Poets: A Gender History of Greek Literature, arguing that through the construction of the authorial voice and the terms used to describe their craft, women poets challenged gender norms. The book is a rich journey through Greek literature, in particular how poets defined themselves as poets through gendered language. Women poets, Hauser argues, rejected male poet-terms, innovated their own forms of self-definition and as such ‘wrote back against’ strategies that understood them and their work only in relation to men. Greek literature is then understood as ‘a continuously negotiated contest of gender’,Footnote ³⁴ and as a result, like Sebillotte Cuchet’s work, this is an important book for thinking about gender as a concept and the agency of women to redefine this.

There are two ways, therefore, to think about the proliferation of studies that explore aspects of women’s agency: one is to celebrate the vast array of evidence and contexts that consider this question, highlighting the many ways women were active in Greek societies. The other is despair that this is not already the basic assumption of scholars.

III. Women, history and historiography

As noted above, what is of interest in this review article is the question of how we can write histories of women in the ancient Greek world. One issue brought out well is how the processes of historical record-making have not only shaped the survival of the evidence, but its interpretations. It is abundantly clear now that the survival of evidence is neither neutral nor entirely random, but is rather an active process shaped by various factors. This results in a historical record that is fragmentary, unrepresentative and weighted towards elites of various sorts. Moreover, how scholars approach that evidence is shaped by a range of discourses, assumptions and approaches that are fundamentally modern.

The contributors to the brilliantly titled Believing Ancient Women: Feminist Epistemologies for Greece and Rome collectively investigate some of these issues, focusing in particular on the epistemological gaps in the historical record. As the editors point out in the Introduction, ‘the epistemic realm’, by which they mean concepts such as knowledge, truth, evidence, authority, expertise and so forth, are ‘not immune to systems of power’, and investigating how these operate in antiquity and its receptions provides a means to ‘reseed the field of classics with oppressed, ignored and otherwise marginalised voices’.Footnote ³⁵ It is non-dominant standpoints that are of interest here, and the ways in which texts, and scholarship, produce silences in different ways.

The broader question that emerges here is what do we learn about ancient women if we follow the logic of the historical record and how do we deal with its gaps? Kristina Milnor’s chapter, ‘Incidental women in the letters of Cicero’, thinks through this tension and as such is a thought-provoking reflection on the epistemology of both history and historiography that is worth reading even for the most ardent Hellenist. Milnor shows that what makes a woman ‘incidental’ in Cicero’s letters is conditioned by both knowledge and ignorance, framed by ‘regimes of truth’.Footnote ³⁶ Sometimes the search for ‘real’ women can only uncover symbols and stereotypes even if those women demonstrably existed. Helvia, Cicero’s mother, whose knowledge about the workings of the household is passed over by her sons, is ‘a figure who simultaneously offers and withholds knowledge about the past’, ‘the vanishing point of historical epistemology’,Footnote ³⁷ whereas Teucris emerges as ‘a cultural fantasy’.Footnote ³⁸ Both women are therefore contained within stereotypes which are exceedingly difficult to read beyond.

‘Incidental’ women are also found in Attic oratory and Fiona McHardy’s chapter, ‘Women’s complaints about violence at Athens: Zobia and Aristogeiton’, focuses on one of them: a metic named Zobia whose story of assault is relayed in [Demosthenes] 25. McHardy points out that the accounts of women in oratory were used by men in the courtroom for their own purposes, epistemically silencing them. In contrast, Zobia was able to resist her silencing through complaining about her treatment, which came to the attention of the prosecuting speaker through gossip.

Since the chapters in this collection are for the most part firmly rooted in the world of the text, they are more interested in ‘reading otherwise’ from a cultural-historical standpoint than uncovering social practices and behaviours. McHardy’s chapter is a good example. Concentrating on the representation of Zobia, though revealing in one sense, causes difficulty in terms of locating her in time and space (the speech is considered to be a later rhetorical exercise), but McHardy argues that debates about the speech’s authenticity are not important here given that there are similarities in style, imagery and argument with fourth-century speeches. Decontextualization, which results in the collapsing of time and place, is therefore a reasonable pay-off for ‘reading otherwise’. Perhaps for the literary scholar. But for the social historian trying to understand the lives of metic women in fourth-century Athens, the ‘real’ women whom this speech purports to show, this does matter. It matters whether the system of payment for the metoikion still existed in ways that informed the imagination of the composer of the exercise; it matters whether we can rely on him to understand correctly what was at stake with a graphē aprostasiou;Footnote ³⁹ it matters whether ideologies about women and citizenship had changed between the fourth century and (say) the first; and, as McClure and Funke point out with regard to Phryne, and Sebillotte Cuchet with regard to Artemisia, it matters how Hellenistic or Roman-era men understood the past. The question, then, is not one of fourth-century Athenian society, but of the processes through which the historical record is formed.

The historical record is formed in a different, though no less contentious, way through the epigraphic and archaeological records, and one wonders whether the former in particular has more to offer than has been hitherto exploited. Frank’s Dodona chapter arguably points the way here and there are other bodies of epigraphic evidence (dedications and other types of religious texts, curses, funerary epigraphy and so forth), that would be worth considering in this light. Typically women have been neglected in this material; they are there if we look for them. The extent to which epigraphic sources are shaped by local traditions, access to resources or social status is also worth considering in greater depth.

Perhaps, therefore, an advantage of this focus on real women and their agency, and the ways in which the historical record is formed and has been read, is that it allows women to emerge from the source material in ways that men are often assumed to be able to do. On the other hand, whilst we often lament the fragmentary evidence for women’s lives, it is true that fragmentation also governs the histories of the vast majority of ancient men, too. Focusing on how both women and men operate within various social networks and differing contexts can potentially provide a way to understand how these processes of fragmentation come about and shape historical knowledge. But fragmentation is simply the reality of (ancient) history.

A number of recent volumes, not all of them reviewed here, place Greek women within a wider ancient context, whether that is the Graeco-Roman world,Footnote ⁴⁰ the MediterraneanFootnote ⁴¹ or more broadly situated.Footnote ⁴² This provides, on the one hand, a wide range of case studies over a broadly transhistorical context, and is implicitly comparative. There is certainly value in seeing, for example, women’s agency, however defined, operating in multiple different contexts. However, pretty much all of the comparative work in all of these volumes is, in fact, left to the reader, which leads one to wonder whether what drives this trend is a problem of scanty evidence rather than a commitment to comparative or transhistorical histories. One might uncharitably suggest that the effect is reification of the category of ‘woman’, a position that most studies eschew nowadays.

What do we lose when we place, for example, women visiting the Dodona sanctuary to ask about their health side by side with female benefactors in the Latin west? Or depictions of a female metic in imitation Attic oratory side by side with medieval receptions of Ovid? Two important things we lose are historicization and deep contextualization. Given that one recent trend in the field is understanding the interplay between local, regional and panhellenic scales of analysis, this would seem to be rather important.Footnote ⁴³ And given that the volumes discussed here demonstrate the importance of Roman receptions to understanding the lives of Greek women, historicization would seem, in fact, rather urgent.

But the issue of contextualization also relies on the direction, or categories of evidence, one contextualizes with. McClure shows the value of contextualizing Phryne with other women who commissioned monuments in Athens, rather than simply within the world of prostitution. Sebillotte Cuchet contextualizes Artemisia with other Greek citizen women, thereby undermining the tradition that others her. The reflex to contextualize women’s lives in terms of families, but not men’s lives, is frequently exposed:Footnote ⁴⁴ as Frank shows, men were very much interested in marriage and children.Footnote ⁴⁵

In all these cases what is clear is that the historiographical frame is critical and we need to be careful, as a field, not to reproduce (ancient or modern) assumptions about gender. Repeatedly contributors point out the ways in which ancient women are conceptualized betrays what can only be described as double standards in the use of evidence. Caterina Pellò and Katharine O’Reilly show that criteria that exclude women from being considered philosophers might be better applied to the Presocratics.Footnote ⁴⁶ Patricia Kim shows that interpreting Kyniska as an ‘exemplary woman’, an inspiration for the women and girls of Sparta, who somehow identified with her femininity, is problematic: Kyniska’s claims to honour were, by contrast, exclusive and dynastic.Footnote ⁴⁷ Did Spartan men emulate her brother Agesilaos because of his masculinity? I have yet to see a scholar make this kind of claim. Middleton highlights the gap between how ancient sources understood the words of the Pythia and how modern scholars have interpreted her.Footnote ⁴⁸ Meaker shows that the idea of indirect participation in equestrian events is applied more to women than men.Footnote ⁴⁹ Hauser demonstrates how women poets are often judged in relation to men rather than in terms of their own poetic innovations.Footnote ⁵⁰ Perhaps the frequency of such observations serves as a warning to us all to think carefully about the nature of our assumptions when approaching the past.