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Summary
Summary
In this sumptuously illustrated book, Joan Breton Connelly gives us the first comprehensive cultural history of priestesses in the ancient Greek world. Connelly presents the fullest and most vivid picture yet of how priestesses lived and worked, from the most famous and sacred of them--the Delphic Oracle and the priestess of Athena Polias--to basket bearers and handmaidens. Along the way, she challenges long-held beliefs to show that priestesses played far more significant public roles in ancient Greece than previously acknowledged.
Connelly builds this history through a pioneering examination of archaeological evidence in the broader context of literary sources, inscriptions, sculpture, and vase painting. Ranging from southern Italy to Asia Minor, and from the late Bronze Age to the fifth century A.D., she brings the priestesses to life--their social origins, how they progressed through many sacred roles on the path to priesthood, and even how they dressed. She sheds light on the rituals they performed, the political power they wielded, their systems of patronage and compensation, and how they were honored, including in death. Connelly shows that understanding the complexity of priestesses' lives requires us to look past the simple lines we draw today between public and private, sacred and secular.
The remarkable picture that emerges reveals that women in religious office were not as secluded and marginalized as we have thought--that religious office was one arena in ancient Greece where women enjoyed privileges and authority comparable to that of men. Connelly concludes by examining women's roles in early Christianity, taking on the larger issue of the exclusion of women from the Christian priesthood. This paperback edition includes additional maps and a glossary for student use.
Summary
Esta decimoctava edición del Código Penal de 1995 se ofrece �en lo que a sus concordancias se refiere-- completamente actualizada a julio de 2012. Se incluye con las modificaciones efectuadas por la Ley Orgánica 3/2011, de 28 de enero, y en notas a pie de página se reproducen los textos derogados por la LO 5/2010, de 22 de junio, por lo que el lector tiene a la vista, simultáneamente, las dos redacciones de vigencia sucesiva. Además, como apéndices figuran reproducidas, total o parcialmente, las siguientes normas: • Ley de Indulto. • Ley 40/1979, de 10 de diciembre, sobre Régimen Jurídico de Control de Cambios, modificada por la LO 10/1983, de 16 de agosto, y por la Ley 19/2003, de 4 de julio. • Ley Orgánica 12/1995, de 12 de diciembre, de Represión del Contrabando, con la reciente modificación efectuada por la LO 6/2011, de 30 de junio. • Ley 4/1985, de 21 de marzo, de Extradición Pasiva. • Ley 3/2003, de 14 de marzo, sobre la orden europea. de detención y entrega; y Ley Orgánica 2/2003, de 14 de marzo, complementaria de la anterior. • Ley Orgánica 5/1985, de 19 de junio, del Régimen Electoral General, modificada por la LO 2/2011, de 28 de enero. • Ley Orgánica 5/1995, de 22 de mayo, del Tribunal del Jurado. • Ley Orgánica 5/2000, de 12 de enero, reguladora de la responsabilidad penal de los menores, modificada por las Leyes Orgánicas 7 y 9/2000, ambas de 22 de diciembre; 15/2003, de 25 de noviembre, y 8/2006, de 4 de diciembre), que se reproduce íntegramente. • Ley Orgánica 2/2010, de 3 de marzo, de salud sexual y reproductiva y de la interrupción voluntaria del embarazo.
Reviews (2)
New York Review of Books Review
In the summer of 423 B.C., Chrysis, the priestess of Hera at Argos, fell asleep inside the goddess¿s great temple, and a torch she had left ablaze set fire to the sacred garlands there, burning the building to the ground. This spectacular case of custodial negligence drew the attention of the historian Thucydides, a man with scant interest in religion or women. But he had mentioned Chrysis once before: the official lists of Hera¿s priestesses at Argos provided a way of dating historical events in the Greek world, and Thucydides formally marked the beginning of the Peloponnesian War with Chrysis¿ name and year of tenure, together with the names of consequential male officeholders from Athens and Sparta. During the same upheaval, in 411, Thucydides¿ fellow Athenian Aristophanes staged his comedy ¿Lysistrata,¿ with a heroine who tries to bring the war to an end by leading a sex strike. There is reason to believe that Lysistrata herself is drawn in part from a contemporary historical figure, Lysimache, the priestess of Athena Polias on the Acropolis. If so, she joins such pre-eminent Athenians as Pericles, Euripides and Socrates as an object of Aristophanes¿ lampoons. On a much bigger stage in 480 B.C., before the battle of Salamis, one of Lysimache¿s predecessors helped persuade the Athenians to take to their ships and evacuate the city ahead of the Persian invaders ¿ a policy that very likely saved Greece ¿ announcing that Athena¿s sacred snake had failed to eat its honey cake, a sign that the goddess had already departed. These are just some of the influential women visible through the cracks of conventional history in Joan Breton Connelly¿s eye-opening ¿Portrait of a Priestess: Women and Ritual in Ancient Greece.¿ Her portrait is not in fact that of an individual priestess, but of a formidable class of women scattered over the Greek world and across a thousand years of history, down to the day in A.D. 393 when the Christian emperor Theodosius banned the polytheistic cults. It is remarkable, in this age of gender studies, that this is the first comprehensive treatment of the subject, especially since, as Connelly persuasively argues, religious office was, exceptionally, an ¿arena in which Greek women assumed roles equal ... to those of men.¿ Roman society could make no such boast, nor can ours. Despite powerful but ambiguous depictions in Greek tragedy, no single ancient source extensively documents priestesses, and Connelly, a professor at New York University, builds her canvas from material gleaned from scattered literary references, ancient artifacts and inscriptions, and representations in sculpture and vase painting. Her book shows generations of women enjoying all the influence, prestige, honor and respect that ancient priesthoods entailed. Few were as exalted as the Pythia, who sat entranced on a tripod at Delphi and revealed the oracular will of Apollo, in hexameter verse, to individuals and to states. But Connelly finds priestesses who were paid for cult services, awarded public portrait statues, given elaborate state funerals, consulted on political matters and acknowledged as sources of cultural wisdom and authority by open-minded men like the historian Herodotus. With separation of church and state an inconceivable notion in the world¿s first democracy, all priesthoods, including those held by women, were essentially political offices, Connelly maintains. Nor did sacred service mean self-abnegation. ¿Virgin¿ priestesses like Rome¿s Vestals were alien to the Greek conception. Few cults called for permanent sexual abstinence, and those that did tended to appoint women already beyond childbearing age; some of the most powerful priesthoods were held by married women with children, leading ¿normal¿ lives. Photo A vase painting of a woman at sacrifice. CreditToledo Museum of Art The Greeks don¿t deserve their reputation as rationalists. Religion and ritual permeated the world of the city-states, where, Connelly notes, ¿there was no area of life that lacked a religious aspect.¿ She cites one estimate that 2,000 cults operated during the classical period in the territory of Athens alone; the city¿s roughly 170 festival days would have brought women out in public in great numbers and in conspicuous roles. ¿Ritual fueled the visibility of Greek women within this system,¿ Connelly writes, sending them across their cities to sanctuaries, shrines and cemeteries, so that the picture that emerges ¿is one of far-ranging mobility for women across the polis landscape.¿ These aspects of Connelly¿s well-documented, meticulously assembled portrait may not seem that remarkable on the surface, but they largely contradict what has long been the most broadly accepted vision of the women of ancient Greece, particularly Athens, as dependent, cloistered, invisible and mute, relegated almost exclusively to housekeeping and child rearing ¿ a view that at its most extreme maintains that the names of respectable Athenian women were not spoken aloud in public or that women were essentially housebound. Continue reading the main story RELATED COVERAGE FIRST CHAPTER `Portrait of a Priestess¿ JULY 1, 2007 ADVERTISEMENT Connelly traces the tenacity of this idea to several sources, including the paradoxically convergent ideologies of Victorian gentlemen scholars and 20th-century feminists and a modern tendency to discount the real-world force of religion, a notion now under powerful empirical adjustment. But another cause is a professional divide between classicists and archaeologists. In their consideration of a woman¿s place, classicists emphasize certain well-known texts, the most notorious being Thucydides¿ rendition of Pericles¿ great oration over the first Athenian dead of the Peloponnesian War, which had this terse advice for their widows: ¿If I must say anything on the subject of female excellence, ... greatest will be her glory who is least talked of among men, whether in praise or in criticism.¿ Connelly, though, is an archaeologist, and she insists that her evidence be allowed to speak for itself, something it does with forceful eloquence. Far from the names of respectable women being suppressed, it seems clear that great effort was made to ensure that the names of many of these women would never be forgotten: Connelly can cite more than 150 historical Greek priestesses by name. Archaeology also speaks through beauty: ¿Portrait of a Priestess¿ is an excellent thematic case study in vase painting and sculpture, with striking images of spirited women, at altars or leading men in procession, many marked as priestesses by the great metal temple key they carry, signifying not admission to heaven but the pragmatic responsibility that Chrysis so notoriously betrayed in Argos. Greek religion is a vast and complex subject, and ¿Portrait of a Priestess,¿ by concentrating on one of its most concretely human aspects, offers an engrossing point of entry. It¿s not clear how far this lavishly produced book was intended for general audiences; a map, a glossary and expanded captions would surely have been welcome. But Connelly¿s style is clear, often elegant and occasionally stirring. And while she shows a fertile disregard for received wisdom ¿ her astonishingly radical reinterpretation of the Parthenon¿s sculptural frieze, conceived in the early 1990s while she was researching this book, helped her win a MacArthur fellowship ¿ she is no polemicist, a fact that has the effect of strengthening her more provocative points. Polytheism¿s presumed spiritual failures may eventually have led to the Christian ascendancy, but Connelly shows that the system long sustained and nourished Greek women and their communities. In turn, women habituated to religious privilege and influence in the pre-Christian era eagerly lent their expertise and energy to the early church. But with one male god in sole reign in heaven, women¿s direct connection with deity became suspect, and they were methodically edged out of formal religious power. ¿There may be no finer tribute to the potency of the Greek priestess than the discomfort that her position caused the church fathers,¿ Connelly writes in her understated way. Her priestesses may be ancient history, but the consequences of the discomfort they caused endure to this day. Steve Coates is an editor at the Book Review.
Choice Review
This richly illustrated and beautifully produced exploration of an underdeveloped topic by seasoned archaeologist Connelly (NYU) applies the full array of theoretical tools to produce a volume that portrays the lifelong role of real women, realized in public but mastered in the home, in sacred service to the ancient Greek polis. From its theoretical and methodological introduction, this volume tacks far and wide, assembling an archaeology of feminine priesthoods distilled from images and inscriptions surviving on pottery and honorary or funerary monuments. Insisting on the independence of the archaeological evidence, the author follows the path of specific women from childhood to maturity and finally death, correlating each stage with the numerous opportunities for public sacral service open to women at all stages of life, and revealing the connection (equally for men and women) between these opportunities and wealth and pedigree. Readers learn that women's sacred service, no less than men's, was crucial to polis governance, and that priestesses were public figures, served public roles, and received public honors. This accessible volume significantly contributes to the ongoing reshaping of scholars' and students' understanding of the social realities of ancient Greek women. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-level undergraduates through faculty/researchers; general readers. J. C. Hanges Miami University
Table of Contents
| Acknowledgments | p. ix |
| List of Abbreviations | p. xiii |
| Chapter 1 Introduction: Time, Space, Source Material, and Methods | p. 1 |
| Chapter 2 Paths to Priesthood: Preparation, Requirements, and Acquisition | p. 27 |
| Chapter 3 Priesthoods of Prominence: Athena Polias at Athens, Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, Hera at Argos, and Apollo at Delphi | p. 57 |
| Chapter 4 Dressing the Part: Costume, Attribute, and Mimesis | p. 85 |
| Chapter 5 The Priestess in the Sanctuary: Implements, Portraits, and Patronage | p. 117 |
| Chapter 6 The Priestess in Action: Procession, Sacrifice, and Benefaction | p. 165 |
| Chapter 7 Priestly Privilege: Perquisites, Honors, and Authority | p. 197 |
| Chapter 8 Death of the Priestess: Grave Monuments, Epitaphs, and Public Burial | p. 223 |
| Chapter 9 The End of the Line: The Coming of Christianity | p. 259 |
| Chapter 10 Conclusions | p. 275 |
| Notes | p. 283 |
| Bibliography | p. 365 |
| Index of Monuments | p. 383 |
| Index of Inscriptions | p. 387 |
| Index of Priestesses | p. 393 |
| General Index | p. 399" |