UNIVERSITY OF CINCINNATI

   Department of Classics



   TYTUS SUMMER RESIDENCY PROGRAM









The University of Cincinnati Classics Department is pleased to
announce the Margo Tytus Summer Residency Program.    Tytus Summer
Residents, in the fields of philology, history and archaeology  will
come to Cincinnati for a  minimum of one month and a maximum of
three  during the summer.   Applicants must have the Ph.D. in hand at
the time of application.   Apart from residence in Cincinnati during
term, the only obligation of Tytus Summer Residents is to pursue
their own research.     They will receive  free university housing.
They will also receive office space and enjoy the use of the
University of Cincinnati and Hebrew Union College Libraries.



The University of Cincinnati Burnam Classics Library (http://
www.libraries.uc.edu/libraries/classics/) is one of the world's
premier collections in the field of Classical Studies.  Comprising
240,000 volumes and other research materials, the library covers all
aspects of the Classics: the languages and literatures, history,
civilization, art, and archaeology.  Of special value for scholars is
both the richness of the collection and its accessibility -- almost
any avenue of research in the classics can be pursued deeply and
broadly under a single roof.  The unusually comprehensive core
collection, which is maintained by three professional classicist
librarians, is augmented by several special collections such as
15,000 nineteenth century German Programmschriften, extensive
holdings in Palaeography,   Byzantine and Modern Greek Studies.   At
neighboring Hebrew Union College, the Klau  Library (http://
library.cn.huc.edu/), with holdings  in excess of 450,000 volumes and
other research materials, is rich in Judaica  and Near Eastern Studies.



                Application Deadline:  February 15.



A description of the Tytus Summer Residency Program and an
application form is available online at  http://classics.uc.edu/
index.php/tytus.   Questions can be directed to
program.coordinator@....








--
Getzel M. Cohen
Professor of Classics and History
Director, Tytus Visiting Scholars Program
Phone: 513-556-1951; Fax: 513-631-1715
Dept. of Classics, 410 Blegen Library, University of Cincinnati,
Cincinnati, Ohio 45221-0226




[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

Apologies as always for the necessity of cross-posting...

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Friends and colleagues: India is a country where the ancient and the modern
are partners.  Over its span of 2500 years, the practice of Buddhism there
has generated many remarkable monumental sites, many of which are still
venerated, as described in *The Jewel in the Lotus*, the latest video
feature on our nonprofit streaming-media Web site, *The Archaeology Channel*(
http://www.archaeologychannel.org).

Buddhism in India has yielded a legacy of many remarkable cultural
heritagesites, many of which are an active part of the country’s
living fabric.
Founded by Siddhartha Gautama in the Sixth Century B.C., Buddhism spread
throughout India and beyond over the following centuries.  Its followers
built temples, shrines and monuments all over the country.  This film
details the story of Siddhartha and the subsequent spread of Buddhism,
creating a context for the many Buddhist sites that today comprise a highly
visible part of India’s cultural legacy.

This and other programs are available on TAC for your use and enjoyment.  We
urge you to support this public service by participating in our Membership (
http://www.archaeologychannel.org/member.html) and Underwriting (
http://www.archaeologychannel.org/sponsor.shtml) programs.  Only with your
help can we continue and enhance our nonprofit public-education and
visitor-supported programming.  We also welcome new content partners as we
reach out to the world community.

Please forward this message to others who may be interested.

Richard M. Pettigrew, Ph.D., RPA
President and Executive Director
Archaeological Legacy Institute
http://www.archaeologychannel.org

********************************************************************************\
*****


Meara Butler

Meara.Butler@...

Archaeological Legacy Institute List Serve Coordinator


[Non-text portions of this message have been removed]

From
<http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01arch.html?_r=1&pagewanted=print
>:
==================================================================

December 1, 2009
A Lost European Culture, Pulled From Obscurity
By JOHN NOBLE WILFORD

Before the glory that was Greece and Rome, even before the first
cities of Mesopotamia or temples along the Nile, there lived in the
Lower Danube Valley and the Balkan foothills people who were ahead of
their time in art, technology and long-distance trade.

For 1,500 years, starting earlier than 5000 B.C., they farmed and
built sizable towns, a few with as many as 2,000 dwellings. They
mastered large-scale copper smelting, the new technology of the age.
Their graves held an impressive array of exquisite headdresses and
necklaces and, in one cemetery, the earliest major assemblage of gold
artifacts to be found anywhere in the world.

The striking designs of their pottery speak of the refinement of the
culture's visual language. Until recent discoveries, the most
intriguing artifacts were the ubiquitous terracotta "goddess"
figurines, originally interpreted as evidence of the spiritual and
political power of women in society.

New research, archaeologists and historians say, has broadened
understanding of this long overlooked culture, which seemed to have
approached the threshold of "civilization" status. Writing had yet to
be invented, and so no one knows what the people called themselves. To
some scholars, the people and the region are simply Old Europe.

The little-known culture is being rescued from obscurity in an
exhibition, "The Lost World of Old Europe: the Danube Valley,
5000-3500 B.C.," which opened last month at the Institute for the
Study of the Ancient World at New York University. More than 250
artifacts from museums in Bulgaria, Moldova and Romania are on display
for the first time in the United States. The show will run through
April 25.

At its peak, around 4500 B.C., said David W. Anthony, the exhibition's
guest curator, "Old Europe was among the most sophisticated and
technologically advanced places in the world" and was developing "many
of the political, technological and ideological signs of
civilization."

Dr. Anthony is a professor of anthropology at Hartwick College in
Oneonta, N.Y., and author of "The Horse, the Wheel, and Language: How
Bronze-Age Riders from the Eurasian Steppes Shaped the Modern World."
Historians suggest that the arrival in southeastern Europe of people
from the steppes may have contributed to the collapse of the Old
Europe culture by 3500 B.C.

At the exhibition preview, Roger S. Bagnall, director of the
institute, confessed that until now "a great many archaeologists had
not heard of these Old Europe cultures." Admiring the colorful
ceramics, Dr. Bagnall, a specialist in Egyptian archaeology, remarked
that at the time "Egyptians were certainly not making pottery like
this."

A show catalog, published by Princeton University Press, is the first
compendium in English of research on Old Europe discoveries. The book,
edited by Dr. Anthony, with Jennifer Y. Chi, the institute's associate
director for exhibitions, includes essays by experts from Britain,
France, Germany, the United States and the countries where the culture
existed.

Dr. Chi said the exhibition reflected the institute's interest in
studying the relationships of well-known cultures and the
"underappreciated ones."

Although excavations over the last century uncovered traces of ancient
settlements and the goddess figurines, it was not until local
archaeologists in 1972 discovered a large fifth-millennium B.C.
cemetery at Varna, Bulgaria, that they began to suspect these were not
poor people living in unstructured egalitarian societies. Even then,
confined in cold war isolation behind the Iron Curtain, Bulgarians and
Romanians were unable to spread their knowledge to the West.

The story now emerging is of pioneer farmers after about 6200 B.C.
moving north into Old Europe from Greece and Macedonia, bringing wheat
and barley seeds and domesticated cattle and sheep. They established
colonies along the Black Sea and in the river plains and hills, and
these evolved into related but somewhat distinct cultures,
archaeologists have learned. The settlements maintained close contact
through networks of trade in copper and gold and also shared patterns
of ceramics.

The Spondylus shell from the Aegean Sea was a special item of trade.
Perhaps the shells, used in pendants and bracelets, were symbols of
their Aegean ancestors. Other scholars view such long-distance
acquisitions as being motivated in part by ideology in which goods are
not commodities in the modern sense but rather "valuables," symbols of
status and recognition.

Noting the diffusion of these shells at this time, Michel Louis
Seferiades, an anthropologist at the National Center for Scientific
Research in France, suspects "the objects were part of a halo of
mysteries, an ensemble of beliefs and myths."

In any event, Dr. Seferiades wrote in the exhibition catalog that the
prevalence of the shells suggested the culture had links to "a network
of access routes and a social framework of elaborate exchange systems
- including bartering, gift exchange and reciprocity."

Over a wide area of what is now Bulgaria and Romania, the people
settled into villages of single- and multiroom houses crowded inside
palisades. The houses, some with two stories, were framed in wood with
clay-plaster walls and beaten-earth floors. For some reason, the
people liked making fired clay models of multilevel dwellings,
examples of which are exhibited.

A few towns of the Cucuteni people, a later and apparently robust
culture in the north of Old Europe, grew to more than 800 acres, which
archaeologists consider larger than any other known human settlements
at the time. But excavations have yet to turn up definitive evidence
of palaces, temples or large civic buildings. Archaeologists concluded
that rituals of belief seemed to be practiced in the homes, where
cultic artifacts have been found.

The household pottery decorated in diverse, complex styles suggested
the practice of elaborate at-home dining rituals. Huge serving bowls
on stands were typical of the culture's "socializing of food
presentation," Dr. Chi said.

At first, the absence of elite architecture led scholars to assume
that Old Europe had little or no hierarchical power structure. This
was dispelled by the graves in the Varna cemetery. For two decades
after 1972, archaeologists found 310 graves dated to about 4500 B.C.
Dr. Anthony said this was "the best evidence for the existence of a
clearly distinct upper social and political rank."

Vladimir Slavchev, a curator at the Varna Regional Museum of History,
said the "richness and variety of the Varna grave gifts was a
surprise," even to the Bulgarian archaeologist Ivan Ivanov, who
directed the discoveries. "Varna is the oldest cemetery yet found
where humans were buried with golden ornaments," Dr. Slavchev said.

More than 3,000 pieces of gold were found in 62 of the graves, along
with copper weapons and tools, and ornaments, necklaces and bracelets
of the prized Aegean shells. "The concentration of imported prestige
objects in a distinct minority of graves suggest that
institutionalized higher ranks did exist," exhibition curators noted
in a text panel accompanying the Varna gold.

Yet it is puzzling that the elite seemed not to indulge in private
lives of excess. "The people who donned gold costumes for public
events while they were alive," Dr. Anthony wrote, "went home to fairly
ordinary houses."

Copper, not gold, may have been the main source of Old Europe's
economic success, Dr. Anthony said. As copper smelting developed about
5400 B.C., the Old Europe cultures tapped abundant ores in Bulgaria
and what is now Serbia and learned the high-heat technique of
extracting pure metallic copper.

Smelted copper, cast as axes, hammered into knife blades and coiled in
bracelets, became valuable exports. Old Europe copper pieces have been
found in graves along the Volga River, 1,200 miles east of Bulgaria.
Archaeologists have recovered more than five tons of pieces from Old
Europe sites.

An entire gallery is devoted to the figurines, the more familiar and
provocative of the culture's treasures. They have been found in
virtually every Old Europe culture and in several contexts: in graves,
house shrines and other possibly "religious spaces."

One of the best known is the fired clay figure of a seated man, his
shoulders bent and hands to his face in apparent contemplation. Called
the "Thinker," the piece and a comparable female figurine were found
in a cemetery of the Hamangia culture, in Romania. Were they thinking,
or mourning?

Many of the figurines represent women in stylized abstraction, with
truncated or elongated bodies and heaping breasts and expansive hips.
The explicit sexuality of these figurines invites interpretations
relating to earthly and human fertility.

An arresting set of 21 small female figurines, seated in a circle, was
found at a pre-Cucuteni village site in northeastern Romania. "It is
not difficult to imagine," said Douglass W. Bailey of San Francisco
State University, the Old Europe people "arranging sets of seated
figurines into one or several groups of miniature activities, perhaps
with the smaller figurines at the feet or even on the laps of the
larger, seated ones."

Others imagined the figurines as the "Council of Goddesses." In her
influential books three decades ago, Marija Gimbutas, an
anthropologist at the University of California, Los Angeles, offered
these and other so-called Venus figurines as representatives of
divinities in cults to a Mother Goddess that reigned in prehistoric
Europe.

Although the late Dr. Gimbutas still has an ardent following, many
scholars hew to more conservative, nondivine explanations. The power
of the objects, Dr. Bailey said, was not in any specific reference to
the divine, but in "a shared understanding of group identity."

As Dr. Bailey wrote in the exhibition catalog, the figurines should
perhaps be defined only in terms of their actual appearance:
miniature, representational depictions of the human form. He thus
"assumed (as is justified by our knowledge of human evolution) that
the ability to make, use and understand symbolic objects such as
figurines is an ability that is shared by all modern humans and thus
is a capability that connects you, me, Neolithic men, women and
children, and the Paleolithic painters in caves."

Or else the "Thinker," for instance, is the image of you, me, the
archaeologists and historians confronted and perplexed by a "lost"
culture in southeastern Europe that had quite a go with life back
before a single word was written or a wheel turned.

New book of interest.  -Stephanie Budin


Embroidered Garments
Priests and Gender in Biblical Israel
Edited by Deborah W. Rooke
Series: Hebrew Bible Monographs, 25
978-1-906055-77-6 hardback
xii + 169 pp.
£22.50 / $37.50 / €30
Scholar's Price
£45 / $75 / €60
<http://www.sheffieldphoenix.com/showbook.asp?bkid=143>


This collection of essays, the proceedings of an international
conference held at King’s College London in 2008, explores issues in
the construction of gender that appear in the Hebrew Bible both in
relation to priesthood itself and in literature with a priestly
world-view (the P source, Chronicles, Ezra–Nehemiah, Ezekiel). Topics
covered include female religious functionaries and their absence from
the Hebrew Bible, masculinity and femininity as seen through the lens
of priestly purity legislation, priestly genealogies as an expression
of Jacques Derrida’s ‘archive fever’, the definition of masculinity
that is evidenced by priests’ clothing, and the marginalization of
women in priestly ideologies of nationality and kinship.

This is the second volume in the sub-series King's College London
Studies in the Bible and Gender. The first was A Question of Sex:
Gender and Difference in the Hebrew Bible and Beyond (2007).

Deborah W. Rooke is Lecturer in Old Testament Studies, King’s College, London.



Contents
PART I: GENDERING PRIESTLY PERSONNEL

Athalya Brenner
Gender in Prophecy, Magic and Priesthood: From Sumer to Ancient Israel

Deborah W. Rooke
Breeches of the Covenant: Gender, Garments and the Priesthood

PART II: EVIDENCE AND ABSENCE: PRIESTLY PICTURES OF MEN AND WOMEN

Tarja Philip
Gender Matters: Priestly Writing on Impurity

Ingeborg Löwisch
Gender and Ambiguity in the Genesis Genealogies: Tracing Absence and
Subversion through the Lens of Derrida’s Archive Fever

Elizabeth Goldstein
Genealogy, Gynecology, and Gender: The Priestly Writer’s Portrait of a Woman

PART III: NUMBERING THE PEOPLE: WOMEN AND THE PRIESTLY NATION

Rachel Havrelock
Outside the Lines: The Place of Women in Priestly Nationalism

Diana Lipton
Feeding the Green-Eyed Monster: Bitter Waters, Flood Waters, and the
Theology of Exile

Claudia V. Camp
The Problem with Sisters: Anthropological Perspectives on Priestly
Kinship Ideology in Numbers

Hanna Tervanotko
Miriam’s Mistake: Numbers 12 Renarrated in Demetrius the
Chronographer, 4Q377 (Apocryphon Pentateuch b), Legum allegoriae and
the Pentateuchal Targumim

PART IV: PRIESTS OF HUMAN (WOMAN) SACRIFICE

Alicia Ostriker
Fathers and Daughters: The Jephthah Issue and the Scream




"Maybe we can link up with someone who's meditating and download
enlightenment!" -Tachikoma

S. Larson review of


       Kate Gilhuly, /The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical
       Athens/

http://bmcr.brynmawr.edu/2009/2009-11-23.html

All good wishes,

Judith

--
Visit Zenobia's blog at Empress of the East
<http://judithweingarten.blogspot.com>

<http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b
&id=fe50d71c0f&e=a74ab719fa> Bryn Mawr Classical Review




Bryn Mawr Classical Review 2009.11.23

   _____


Kate Gilhuly, The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens.
Cambridge/New York:  Cambridge University Press, 2009.  Pp. xii, 208.  ISBN
9780521899987.  $80.00.

   _____



Reviewed by S. Larson, Bucknell University (slarson@...)
Word count: 3024 words

Table
<http://brynmawr.us1.list-manage.com/track/click?u=c302ee634698194cc76ef8a8b
&id=a069fbbc73&e=a74ab719fa>  of Contents

In this volume, Kate Gilhuly presents a number of case studies helpful in
understanding the various roles assigned to females in the Athenian
imagination. This matrix, as she calls it, centers upon three categories of
the feminine: the prostitute, the wife, and the ritual agent. In varying
manifestations, hierarchies and conflations, this structure not only informs
our understanding of how the Athenians envisioned the female but also
directly pertains to issues of Athenian civic identities and attitudes
toward sexuality, exchange, and female performance. Additionally, it is by
examining the constantly contested and negotiated roles of the female in
literary production that we can better explicate evolving Athenian
constructions of masculine subjectivity; it is in this focus that Gilhuly's
book excels.

Gilhuly's Introduction contains a notable although brief tracing of
classical scholarship on women to date. She deftly discusses the interplay
between these works and concomitant and recent trends in studies of ancient
pederasty, homosexuality, and sexuality; here she stresses the importance of
the often ignored discourse of heterosexuality and rightly categorizes her
own work as an all-encompassing study both in constructions of gender and in
the history of sexuality. Her work concentrates not on the reality of
ancient sexualities as much as on the imagination of social reality and the
construction and maintenance of it through the malleable categories and
performance of these three female roles. Here Gilhuly also demonstrates the
polysemy involved in each role. She notes broad contexts in which each
wide-ranging category served a useful function: e.g., the prostitute in
conversations about conflict and instability; the ritual performer in
contexts of historical upheaval between elite and demos; the wife in the
middle as the seeming lack between both these public roles.

Gilhuly's Introduction is the weakest section of the book. Here some of
Gilhuly's attempts at theorizing these three female roles fall into what
seem like already well-understood categories. After discussing the varied
roles that both the prostitute and the ritual performer enact, for example,
Gilhuly states "both the prostitute and the ritual agent played a public
role and could therefore signify different facets of public feminine
performance" (19). It is not clear why this relatively obvious conclusion
needed so much background comment, except to serve as a possible foil to
Gilhuly's next point about the wife envisioned as the female occupying the
space between these two more public roles. Gilhuly's Introduction also
suffers from a problem common enough in preludes to more complicated
accounts: condensed versions of upcoming chapters often fail to convince
because they must omit so much of the real core of the argument; the
supporting details fall through the cracks and the conclusions begin to
sound like assumptions.

Gilhuly's chapters are stronger individually. In Chapter Two she discusses
pseudo-Demosthenes' Against Neaira and demonstrates how the speech regulates
masculine identity and its associations with various types of transactions
through the lens of the "tripartitite discourse of the feminine." Gilhuly
opens by noting that the same three divisions of the feminine outlined in
her Introduction also operate within the Athenian penalty of atimia, the
very charge which the accused Stephanos tried to impose upon Apollodoros,
the prosecutor of the speech. That this evidence comes from outside the
literary works that Gilhuly discusses in this book adds credence to her
argument; she could have emphasized this point more strongly.

In this chapter Gilhuly also notes the synchronicity between Apollodoros's
portrayal of Stephanos's dealings with women and each of the three spheres
of the feminine. She argues that through consistent portrayals of
Stephanos's exchanges of women as short-term transactions, the prosecution
essentially accuses Stephanos of disregarding Athenian social ideals of
exchange and democratic citizenship. Apollodoros establishes both his own
and Stephanos's masculine subjectivity through lengthy analysis of the kind
of transactions of women both men make; this focus helps explain the
speech's obsessively detailed narration of the story of Neaira and Phano.
Gilhuly also finally and persuasively contextualizes Apollodoros's
description of Pausanias, the infamous Spartan king, who appears in this
speech linked to Plataia, the Boiotian city-state allied to Athens that
received harsh treatment at Theban and Spartan hands both in Apollodoros's
narrative and in Thucydides (although the two accounts differ on noteworthy
points). Gilhuly argues that Pausanias's appearance in the speech,
juxtaposed with the emphasis on Plataian loyalty to Athens, historically
grounds the present opposition between Apollodoros and Stephanos; the insane
medizer Pausanias corresponds to Stephanos in terms of his extremism and his
threat to the stable order of civic life; Plataia, Athens' faithful friend
since the late sixth century, mirrors Apollodoros's character as a victim of
aggression still loyal to the long-term goals of the Athenian community.
Gilhuly's reading provides a coherent and meaningful way in which to read
the speech as a whole and those parts of it that have troubled previous
commentators in terms of their length and relevance to the charge.

In her third chapter Gilhuly turns to Plato's Symposium, a work so
overanalyzed that taking it on here voluntarily makes a bold statement in
itself. Gilhuly concentrates, however, not only on Diotima, whose identity
has encouraged countless speculations, but also on the other women in the
text. To Gilhuly the auletris, the women inside the house (but outside the
symposium), and Diotima herself offer a structural continuum of the feminine
that simultaneously informs Plato's model of pederasty. Gilhuly's
Introduction to this chapter, much like her Introduction to the work as a
whole, foreshadows her upcoming conclusions too briefly; this reviewer would
have rather seen less a general prelude than an immediate beginning to the
argument, which Gilhuly takes up only after nearly ten pages of introductory
comment.

Gilhuly ultimately observes that by structuring the masculine identities of
the Symposium against this feminine matrix (which includes the present but
absent Diotima), Plato's Socrates offers a more complex image of masculinity
than merely the binary opposition often found in analyses of this dialogue.
She nicely explicates the first triad of speeches (of Phaedrus, Pausanias,
and Eryximachos) as ultimately espousing a negative, often hostile attitude
toward women and a binary understanding of female sexuality in opposition to
the purest expression of physical eros through homosexuality. The speeches
of Aristophanes, Agathon and Socrates, however, are shown to offer a more
nuanced approach to eros by complicating the canonical gender categories in
the first triad of speeches. After persuasively problematizing the case for
modern positivistic acceptance of Aristophanes' famous speech, Gilhuly
argues that, by speaking through Diotima, Socrates presents the feminine
matrix in the service of defining the eros of the philosopher, an eros which
should be seen as the transcendent apex of metaphysical contemplation, much
as Diotima's role as female ritual agent symbolizes the topmost position in
the feminine matrix imagined in the Symposium. Further, Diotima's status in
this speech as a "discursive absence," rather than as a person imagined as
attending this gathering, emphasizes the absent (but also formulaically
real) realm of philosophic eros which Socrates espouses. This vertical
hierarchy of the feminine also informs the model of pederasty, which should
thus be seen as more of a mutual path of ascent toward what is
philosophically beautiful and beyond the polis as opposed to a more
canonically interpreted binary power relationship. The chapter as a whole is
undoubtedly interesting, but to this reviewer at times the conclusions did
not seem fully proven but rather more suggested by the discussion offered.

Gilhuly follows her interpretation of Plato by resuscitating Xenophon's
Symposium, a work which has historically suffered in comparison (Chapter
Four). Here Gilhuly argues that the feminine continuum, moving from the
prostitute to the priestess, structures Socrates' argument for improved
relations between the demos and the elite of the polis. In doing so she
details how aristocratic masculine identity is figured in the text as a
spectacle with both public and private viewing in mind. Gilhuly's
descriptions of the characters involved and each spectacle make this chapter
a good candidate as a reading for advanced undergraduates and graduate
students. In her first section and through direct reading of the text,
Gilhuly nicely explicates the latent (and historical) hostility between
Socrates, Kallias, and various other guests at the party; she deftly
illustrates Xenophon's creation of the erotic spectacle and the symposiasts
as objects of the text's gaze; and she contextualizes the difficult position
of Autolykos, the eroticized performer who both needs to exhibit elite
decorum as a passive recipient of the symposiasts' gaze but also to display
his individual prowess as an athletic victor and thus as a visible actor in
his own right. Throughout Gilhuly pays close attention to scholarship on
civic viewing in other works by Xenophon, in other genres, and also in an
Athenian context generally. She argues that Xenophon objectifies the
symposium itself as a means of allowing this elite gathering to function
comfortably within the now democratic civic gaze.

Working off of Kurke (1999),1 <>  Gilhuly returns to the categories of the
feminine by arguing that Xenophon uses the three levels of the feminine
matrix to delineate the Athenian demos. She makes a particularly nice point
about the demos (who historically judged Socrates) cast as the hired
entertainment (read: prostitutes) and thus as a malleable group interested
in furthering its own interest with the elite; the entire trial and
condemnation of Socrates is thus subtly called into question. Moreover, she
suggests that the entertainers embody the full range of the female
continuum: from the porne as acrobat to the ritual agent as wife, seen in
the basilinna-like re-creation of the marriage between Dionysos and Ariadne.
Gilhuly thus also suggests that the troupe, in playing the role of the
demos, offers a image of itself as hetairai in relation to the elite, a
still-restricted status which limits any true reciprocity between the two.
In the end, however, to Gilhuly Socrates constructs a new vision of the
proper relationship between the demos and the elite in his concluding speech
(and here I do a disservice to the complexity of Gilhuly's argument): the
philosopher becomes the erastes of the city itself, and the demos becomes a
subject desiring elite culture. Complementing Socrates' redefinition of the
city into a pederastic polis, at the same time Xenophon offers a speech in
which the female entertainer is transformed into the quasi-ritual agent (as
wife of Dionysos), thereby emphasizing the importance of heterosexual norms
on which the citizenry is based.

Gilhuly's final and most convincing chapter treats Aristophanes' Lysistrata.
Gilhuly nicely historicizes the play as she unpacks the multiplicity of
meanings behind its display of cultic and erotic roles for women; she
rightly often sees both roles as embodied within one character, such as
Myrrhine. Elaborating on the work of Stroup and Faraone, Gilhuly suggests
that the play's confusion of female categories, such as the cultic figure
and the prostitute, leads to their convergence via complementary sacrificial
and symposiastic imagery. Further, in interpreting female ritual practice in
terms of potential political implications, Gilhuly argues that the ritual
agents Lysistrata (as Eteoboutad Lysimache) and Myrrhine (associated with
Athena Nike, chosen by lot) present an Aristophanic model of successful
interaction between the elite and demos respectively. Lysistrata controls
Myrrhine much as the elite ought to direct the demos; here Gilhuly draws the
reader to Aristophanes' Frogs where the poet may be espousing a similar view
of an inclusive demos with elite leadership. Further, Gilhuly reads
Lysistrata's weaving metaphor both as evidence for the conflation of
different roles of women through habitual engagement in the same pastime and
also as a positive political prescription for inclusivity. This reviewer
would have liked to hear more on the weaving metaphor, as the brevity of
Gilhuly's account did not answer a niggling concern I have always had with
its appearance: how might the Athenian audience have perceived a feminine
weaving metaphor applied to the demos in 411? Could a positive message from
Aristophanes about inclusivity (via imagery of female weaving) really have
resonated at this time?

Gilhuly's historical analysis of the Lysistrata, however, remains
impressively convincing. The convergence between ritual and sexual agents,
together with Gilhuly's plausible identification of Lampito as an allegory
for Sparta (through the very real Agis II) also suggests to Gilhuly that the
women from Sparta, Boiotia, and Corinth introduced in the beginning of the
play represent Athens' main enemies at the time of the play's production.
This supposition is nothing new, but Gilhuly's reading of these historical
enemies through the lens of the sacrificial imagery that is involved in the
language of relevant passages as well as through the identities of
Lysistrata and other Athenian characters as ritual agents, underscores a
dark yet simultaneously comic brutality against Athens' enemies inherent in
Aristophanes' presentation. Likewise the language denoting the Spartan,
Boiotian and Corinthian women transforms from hetairai-like descriptions to
their literal embodiment at the end of the play as Diallage, an anatomically
and geographically-divided porne and thus as a "sacrificial surrogate" for
the earlier women; the end result of these embodied women is a complete
physical objectification and thus metaphorical subjugation of Athens'
traditional enemies. On the basis of these and other details of the play,
then, Gilhuly concludes that the while the women of Greece presented in the
Lysistrata are overtly involved in suggesting peace with Sparta, in a less
obvious but deeper way, the women at the same time present a dark critique
of the enemy in terms of ritual sacrifice and subjugation.

In this chapter Gilhuly also details the various animals with which women
are associated and explicates the sacrificial and sexualized imagery that
each animal evokes in the play: the heifer, the Boiotian eel, and the white
horse. By unpacking various references to the eel in both the play and other
literature, Gilhuly argues for the eel as symbol of the female as a
sexualized ritual victim. Gilhuly also nicely contextualizes Lysistrata's
joking about acquiring a white horse as a reference to Spartan women: not
only to the Leukippides but also to the white horse involved in Tyndareus'
oath before marrying Helen, as described by Pausanias.

Aside from matters of content, at times Gilhuly's writing confuses the
issues. Occasionally she seems not to return to themes promised in the
beginnings of chapters or describes them obliquely with a confusing result.
In discussing Xenophon, for example, Gilhuly spends many pages dealing with
issues not directly related to this matrix of sex and gender, at least on
the surface. In setting up her argument (Chapter Four, pp. 100-10), then, it
would have been nice for her to reassure her reader how these larger issues
would bear more directly on the themes of the book, since it is not always
clear where the argument is heading. At times this chapter reads more like a
series of erudite discussions than complementary parts of a coherent
picture. The middle sections of Chapter Two in particular would benefit from
reminding the reader how the discussion pertains to the strands of argument
that Gilhuly identifies as her goal in each subsection (pp. 100-19). Such
confusion could have easily been cleared up by adding incisive concluding
commentary at the end of each internal chapter division instead of
immediately turning to the next subsection.

Minor typographical errors are minimal (p. 102, fortitude, in quotation at
top of page; p. 119, problem in printing elision in the first line of the
Greek text; p. 130 aspazomenon printed with a grave accent instead of a
smooth breathing). Certain more substantive errors occur in bibliography and
citation. Kurke is incorrectly cited on p. 112 by both date of publication
and page number for a quote of huge length (footnote 41; the proper citation
should be Kurke 1999, 219). Moreover, at the footnote's end Gilhuly shortly
adds that Xenophon actually inverts the paradigm Kurke outlines in the
quote. To this reader an explanation of this assertion would have been
preferable . In terms of the symposium (not to mention Aristophanes),
Gilhuly is also missing the work of Nick Fisher from Harvey and Wilkins'
collection The Rivals of Aristophanes (London 2000; Chapter 22:
"Symposiasts, fish-eaters and flatterers: social mobility and moral
concerns"), in which Fisher argues that the symposium of the late fifth
century, precisely the time in which both Plato's and Xenophon's works are
set, was not at all an elite event. More also could be made, particularly in
Gilhuly's discussion of Xenophon, of the historical distinctions between the
terms polis and demos, which are not synonyms. Less important but also
missing from the bibliography is my own article on the anonymity of
respectable women in Herodotus (CJ 101.3, 1-20), which, although not
entirely relevant to any of the authors Gilhuly treats per se, would have
strengthened Gilhuly's tangential remarks, made repeatedly throughout the
book, about the general tendency of fifth and fourth-century Athenians to
refrain from naming citizen wives in public.2 <>

Gilhuly's work concentrates on four pieces of literature dating from 411 to
343, but she treats them in a confusing chronological order: Demosthenes
first; followed by Plato; then Xenophon; with Aristophanes last. This order
was not satisfactorily explained, particularly in light of the focus of
Chapters One, Three, and Four on the feminine continuum in relation to
themes of long-term civic order. Chapter Two on Plato's Symposium
understandably rather more concerns the world beyond the polis. The reader
would have liked more of a stated rationale for this thematic and
chronological scheme.

Whatever the weaknesses of the book, however, Gilhuly has written an
admirable study of the interplay between the three female roles of
prostitute, the wife, and the ritual agent in late fifth and fourth-century
Athenian literature. The implications of the combination and conflation of
these roles in the works she has selected should have far-reaching effects
on how we read additional texts that depend on these roles as part of their
cultural code in defining both the female and also the masculine subject
constructed upon it.

Table of Contents

1 Introduction
2 Collapsing Order: Typologies of Women in the Speech "Against Neaira"
3 Was Diotima a Priestess? The Feminine Continuum in Plato's Symposium
4 Bringing the Polis Home: Private Performance and the Civic Gaze in
Xenophon's Symposium
5 Sex and Sacrifice in Aristophanes' Lysistrata
6 Conclusion

   _____

Notes:


1. <>    L. Kurke 1999, Coins, Bodies, Games, and Gold: The Politics of
Meaning in Archaic Greece, Princeton.
2. <>    Cp., D. Schaps 1977, "The Woman Least Mentioned: Etiquette and
Women's Names," CQ 27, 323-331.




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