Cet article se propose d’étudier comment, dans le monde grec antique, les femmes étaient nommées et comment s’articulait la différence des sexes en fonction du contexte d’apparition de leur nom. Il s’appuie sur la documentation épigraphique et plus particulièrement sur les décrets honorifiques – des textes gravés sur pierre souvent affichés dans l’espace public – qui honoraient une personne pour ses actions en faveur de la cité. Les femmes étaient honorées dans ces documents notamment lorsqu’elles exerçaient une charge religieuse, comme (...) celle de prêtresse. Cette étude, en partant d’un décret athénien honorant une prêtresse du nom de Timokritè, se demande où se joue le genre, en s’intéressant à la manière dont les prêtresses étaient désignées et en observant ce que la façon de les nommer indiquait sur leur statut et leur fonction. Il s’agit de montrer comment certaines femmes, en tant que prêtresses, occupaient grâce à leur statut de citoyennes des fonctions politiques de magistrates. (shrink)

A scholiast's note on Lysistrata mentions that there was an alternative title to the play: Adôniazousai. A close reading of the play with this title in mind reveals that Lysistrata and her allies metaphorically hold an Adonis festival atop the Acropolis. The Adonia, a festival that is typically regarded as “marginal” and “private” by modern scholars, thus becomes symbolically central and public as the sex-strike held by the women halts the Peloponnesian war. The public space of the Acropolis becomes, notionally, (...) a private rooftop, and Adonia-like activity proliferates; boars, myrrh, Aphrodite, “gardens of Adonis,” and lamentation all play important roles. The notion that the women of Lysistrata hold an unexpected Adonis festival on the Acropolis, at the very heart of the Athenian polis, provides a more nuanced reading of the play and forces us to rethink the place of the Adonia at Athens as well as, more generally, the distinction between public and private festivals. (shrink)

While it is sometimes thought that free Athenian women were hemmed in by surveillance within the oikos, this article argues that the obstacle that impeded them when they attempted to control property was that they were excluded from the impersonal and formal systems of surveillance of male citizens. Athenian public life, lived in the view of others, dramatically extended the agency of those within it. While women could compensate for their legal incapacities by cultivating the personal trust of men, this (...) required them to treat some of the people closest to them instrumentally, thus transforming their affectionate relationships. (shrink)

One of the ironies of literary history is that the survival of Aristophanic comedy and indeed of all Greek drama is due to the more or less faithful transmission of a written text. Reading a play and watching one, after all, are very different sorts of activities. Unlike a book, in which the reader can leaf backward for reminders of what has already happened or forward for information about what is to come, a play onstage can be experienced in one (...) direction only, from ‘beginning’ to ‘end’. Nor can a play be put down and picked up again at one's leisure or interrupted while the audience puzzles over a difficult or intriguing passage. Live theatre is an ephemeral and essentially independent thing, which must be experienced in its own time and on its own terms or not at all, and as a result we modern readers, dependent on the written page, are at a marked disadvantage in understanding ancient drama. Taplin's study of staging in Aeschylus has shed considerable light on the dramatic technique of Athenian tragedy. Stage-practice in Aristophanic comedy, and in particular the ways in which names and naming are used there, has received much less attention. (shrink)

Demosthenes' client Euxitheos is attempting to defend his claim to citizenship, and finds himself obliged to counteract the prejudice raised by his opponent Euboulides from the fact that his mother works, and has worked, in menial wage labour. The implication is that no citizen woman would sink so low; therefore, she is no citizen, and so neither is he. His response is defensive: he acknowledges that such labour is a source of prejudice , but argues that people often find themselves (...) obliged to undertake such demeaning work through poverty, which is deserving of the jury's sympathy, and in any case has no bearing on questions of citizenship . He does not challenge the assumptions behind the prejudice, suggesting that he expects the jury to share them, and this might encourage us to extrapolate from the passage to a set of common values held by Athenian citizens, namely that paid work by women is degrading, embarrassing and only acceptable as a temporary expedient under the compulsion of poverty. If we then align these attitudes with the implications elsewhere in the orators that women led lives of seclusion, usually confined indoors and largely separated from the exterior male world, we might be inclined to conclude that the labour of women was also confined to the oikos and almost entirely distinct from the labour of males, not least in having little or no monetary aspect, a point which the usual view of the economic capacity of Athenian women appears to confirm. (shrink)

La brillante Aspasie doit sa célébrité à deux hommes. Elle fut la compagne aimée et respectée de Périclès, le plus puissant et le plus prestigieux des Athéniens à l’époque de sa splendeur (« le siècle de Périclès » : 460-430) et l’interlocutrice privilégiée et admirée de Socrate. Sa situation de compagne valorisée et d’intellectuelle reconnue, exceptionnelle dans une cité où la norme voulait que la plus grande gloire d’une femme soit l’invisibilité et le silence, fut sans doute liée à son (...) statut de métèque (étrangère résidente) : celui-ci, tout en lui interdisant d’être l’épouse légitime de l’homme dont elle partageait la vie, lui accordait, au risque d’une réputation un peu sulfureuse, la liberté de se montrer, de penser et de s’exprimer. La belle Milésienne est restée muette mais, à condition de considérer que les obscénités dont elle fut couverte visaient essentiellement le chef des démocrates qu’était son amant, les sources dont nous disposons nous permettent d’étudier ses relations avec Socrate et Périclès. (shrink)

Pindar's Eighth Olympian celebrates the victory of Alkimedon of Aigina in the boys' wrestling at Olympia in 460. This victory was the sixth won by a member of this family . The absence of detail about most of these victories suggests that the family had had little success in the great Panhellenic competitions and that the majority were won at minor festivals. However, one of the remaining five victories was certainly won in one of the four festivals which made up (...) the periodos. In lines 15–18, after preparatory generalizations about the diversity of paths to achievement, all with divine aid, Pindar describes the path of achievement, and the source of divine aid, which features in the victor's family: Tιμσθενες, μμε δ' κλρωσεν πτμος Zην γενεθλωι. ς σ μν Nεμαι πρπατον, 'Aλκιμδοντα δ πρ κρνου λ៹φωι θκεν 'Oλυμπινκαν. Timosthenes, in your case fate allotted you to Zeus as your family god, who made you pre-eminent at Nemea and Alkimedon Olympic victor by the Hill of Kronos. (shrink)

Cet article se propose d’étudier comment, dans le monde grec antique, les femmes étaient nommées et comment s’articulait la différence des sexes en fonction du contexte d’apparition de leur nom. Il s’appuie sur la documentation épigraphique et plus particulièrement sur les décrets honorifiques – des textes gravés sur pierre souvent affichés dans l’espace public – qui honoraient une personne pour ses actions en faveur de la cité. Les femmes étaient honorées dans ces documents notamment lorsqu’elles exerçaient une charge religieuse, comme (...) celle de prêtresse. Cette étude, en partant d’un décret athénien honorant une prêtresse du nom de Timokritè, se demande où se joue le genre, en s’intéressant à la manière dont les prêtresses étaient désignées et en observant ce que la façon de les nommer indiquait sur leur statut et leur fonction. Il s’agit de montrer comment certaines femmes, en tant que prêtresses, occupaient grâce à leur statut de citoyennes des fonctions politiques de magistrates. (shrink)