40 Years of Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women’s History in Classics

Sarah Pomeroy’s ground-breaking 1975 book Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves ends with a chapter entitled “The Elusive Women of Classical Antiquity” – a conscious or unconscious tip of the hat to Moses Finley’s famous 1965 article “The Silent Women of Rome”. Both Pomeroy and Finley are interested in our lack of knowledge about ancient women’s lives, where it comes from and whether it might be redressed. Pomeroy opens her chapter by noting Cassius Dio’s assertion that, at Rome in 18 BCE, there were more men among the upper classes than women.

Among the pioneering features of Goddesses, Slaves, Wives, and Whores is Pomeroy’s serious attempt to grapple with the problem of how to use fictional female characters as sources for the history of women. Although she ends her book by asserting that she has “attempted to find out about the realities of women’s existence . . . rather than concentrate on the images that men had of women” (229), she cannot avoid this abundant body of material and devotes an entire chapter to “Images of Women in the Literature of Classical Athens” (93-119).

Roman legal sources strongly indicate that women could not marry before age 12. This age restriction derived from general observation of female pubescence; women aged 12 were, as a rule, thought to have become physically capable of having regular sexual relations with men (viripotens) and of bearing children, and both regular sexual activity and childbearing were thought of as typically occurring within marriage, as a woman moved from virgo to mulier and thereby attained adulthood.

Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves is good to think with, as Claude Levi-Strauss would say. I suspect that many of us can recall times when Sarah’s female quartet was good to think with and influential in the narratives we ourselves were crafting. When gathering materials for Women & Society in Greek & Roman Egypt back in the mid-1990s, Sarah was my guide for information historians with wide-reaching interests would hope to discover in the third and sixth chapters Peter van Minnen and I were writing together.