Hostname: page-component-586b7cd67f-t7czq Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-11-22T05:07:15.111Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

The Most Silent Women of Greece and Rome: Rural Labour and Women's Life in The Ancient World (II)1.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  07 September 2009

Walter Scheidel
Get access Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Extract

How can these ideas be linked to the ancient sources? Focusing first of all on women's contribution to arable cultivation and arboriculture, we immediately face the first of many blanks. To the best of my knowledge, we do not have any explicit evidence of ploughing by women in the Greco-Roman world. Only two lines from Hesiod's Works and Days seem to establish a connection between women and ploughing: according to Hesiod, a proper head of a household would need ‘first of all a house, and then a woman and oxen for ploughing – a slave woman, not a wife, to follow the oxen [or: to care for the oxen]’ (405 f.). In the fourth century B.C., however, the second line that specifies the status and the function of the desired woman was apparently not yet part of the received text, since Aristotle could still regard her as a free woman (Pol. 1252a llff). Not until the first century B.C. did Philodemos of Gadara quote and defend the reading that defined Hesiod's woman as a slave labourer. Even so, the wording does not make it clear whether this woman was meant to follow the harnessed oxen, that is, to do the ploughing, or to care for the oxen in the stable.

Type
Research Article
Information
Greece & Rome , Volume 43 , Issue 1 , April 1996 , pp. 1 - 10
Copyright
Copyright © The Classical Association 1996

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

NOTES

2. Philod, . Oik. col. VIII 35–40Google Scholar(ed. Jensen). Cf. Timaios, FGrHisi 566 F 157Google Scholar.

3. See Scheidel, , Gymnasium 97 (1990), 416 n. 51Google Scholar for discussion. The two iron ploughshares deposited at the sanctuary dedicated to Demeter in Bitalemi (cf. G&R 42 [1995], 216 n. 41Google Scholar) may have had only ritual significance and in any case need not have been dedicated by women: Kron, U., Arch. Anzeiger 1992, 636–8, 649Google Scholar. By way of contrast, however, a greater number of hoes of various sizes came to light there (op. cit., 638 f.), which could be suggestive of women who cared for vegetable beds or covered the seed with earth after the sowing. Perhaps somewhat surprisingly, only one sickle was found among more than 20,000 votive offerings: op. cit., 637 fig. 10.

4. Aristoph, . fr. 829 (PCG III. 2. 329)Google Scholar; Poll, . Onom. 1. 222Google Scholar.

5. Archippos fr. 44 (I. 806 Edmonds); Hesychios and Photios, s.v. poaslriai.

6. Magnes, fr. 5 (PCG V. 630)Google Scholar; Phrynichos, fr. 39–45 (PCG VII. 412)Google Scholar. The apparent frequency of these references seems to rule out the possibility that female gleaners and weeders were mere phantoms equivalent to the ‘Ekklesiazusai’.

7. Poll, . Onom. 1. 222Google Scholar; Hesychios s.v. kalamelris; Plut, . Mor. 784aGoogle Scholar.

8. Athen. 14. 619a;Hinrichs, J., De Operariorum Camilenis Graecis (Darmstadt, 1908), 15fGoogle Scholar.: Biicher, K., Arbeit und Rhylhmus (Leipzig, 1919), 170f. Cf. also Longos 3. 30. 2Google Scholar.

9. See, e.g.,Friedl, E., Vasilika, a Village in Modern Greece (New York, 1962), 20Google Scholar.

10. Hengstl, J., Private Arbeilsverhdllnisse freier Personen in den hellenislischen Papyri bis Dioklclian (Bonn, 1972), 40Google Scholar.

11. Demosth. 57. 45; Dio Chrys. 7. 114; Poll. Onom. s. v. trygelriai.

12. I will treat this in greater detail in a future comparative study of plantation management and rural chattel slavery in classical antiquity and the American South. Cf. also my ‘Reflections on the Differential Valuation of Slaves in Diocletian's Price Edict and in the United States’, MBAH (forthcoming).

13. Bradley, K. R., ‘Child Labour in the Roman World’, Historical Reflections 12 (1985), 325fGoogle Scholar. (now in Discovering the Roman Family [Oxford, 1991], 114Google Scholar); Wiedemann, T., Adults and Children in the Roman Empire (London, 1989), 155Google Scholar.

14. [Theocr, .] Idyll. 20. 34fGoogle Scholar; Varro, R.R. 2.10. 6fGoogle Scholar; Verg, . Eel. 7. 14fGoogle Scholar; Ov, . Fast. 4. 511Google Scholar; Dio Chrys. 1. 54; Longos, 1.7.2; 1. 8. 2f; 1.27.2; 1. 28. 2f.;2. 34. 1. For women's contribution to animal husbandry, see Bodson, L., ‘Le rôle de la femme dans l'élevage antique’, in Les femmes el l'élevage (Elhnozootechnie 38, Paris, 1986), 5–19Google Scholar; Grassl, H., ‘Zur Rolle der Frau in antiken Hirtenkulturen’, Laverna 1 (1990), 13–17Google Scholar; ‘Women in Ancient Pastoralism’, unpubl. paper read at the 12th International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences, Zagreb, 06 24–31 1988Google Scholar.

15. Philostr, . Soph. 2. 554 is the only reference to milking by a woman I have come acrossGoogle Scholar.

16. Nothing can be said about the presupposed status of herdswomen in bucolic poetry: Grassl, , op. cit., 17 n. 11Google Scholar.

17. Campbell, J. K., Honour, Family and Patronage (Oxford, 1964), 29, 32Google Scholar.

18. The children of such slave women would also help to tend animals: Varro, R. R. 2. 10. 1 and 3; 3. 17. 6; cf. Geoponica 18. 1. 5Google Scholar.

19. Varro, R.R. 1. 17. 5Google Scholar; on which see Martin, R., ‘La vie sexuelle des esclaves d'aprés les Dialogues Rustiques de Varron’, in Collart, J. (ed.), Varron, grammaire antique el slylislique latine (Paris, 1978), 117. Cf. the case of the Sarakatsani referred to aboveGoogle Scholar.

20. Martin, , op. cit., 120fGoogle Scholar. Cf. White, D. G., Arn't la Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York and London, 1985), 66Google Scholar.

21. Golden, M., EMC 36 (1992), 318Google Scholar rightly stresses the limited representative value of this reference, derived as it is from a ‘notoriously problematic piece of advocacy’.

22. Herfst, P., Le travail de la femme dans la Grèce ancienne (Utrecht, 1922), 91–5Google Scholar; Schaps, D. M., Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece (Edinburgh, 1979), 18Google Scholar; cf. Gallant, T. W., Risk and Survival in Ancient Greece (Cambridge, 1991), 133f., 164fGoogle Scholar.

23. E.g., de Ste, G. E. M.. Croix, , The Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World from the Archaic Age 10 the Arab Conquests (London, 1981), 185fGoogle Scholar.; Mrozek, S., Lohnarbeit im klassischen Altenum (Bonn, 1989), 46–53Google Scholar.

24. Thus Fitton-Brown, A. D., LCM 9 (1984), 73Google Scholar. On echoes in Old Comedy of the anxiety of common Athenian citizens over the potential of their wives to engage in extramarital sexual activity, see Gardner, J. F., ‘Aristophanes and Male Anxiety: the Defence of the Oikos’ G&R 34 (1989), 51–62Google Scholar.

25. Kitteringham, J. in Village Life and Labour (London, 1975), 129fGoogle Scholar.

26. Said, S., ‘La société rurale dans le roman grec ou La campagne vue de la ville’, in Frezouls, E. (ed.), Sociélés urbaines, sociélés rurales dans l'Asie Mineure et la Syrie hellenistiques et romaines (Strasbourg, 1987), 151–4Google Scholar.

27. Ter, . Ad. 847–9Google Scholar; Theocr, . Idyll. 3. 35Google Scholar; Hor, . Epod. 2. 41f.Google Scholar; Anlh. Pal. 9. 89. Cf. Aristot, . Gen. Animal. 1. 20. 728aGoogle Scholar for the idea that females are often fair-skinned and thereby feminine, whereas males are darker and masculine.

28. Heracleides Lembos fr. 53 (ed. Dilts); Iustin. 44. 3. 5.

29. Ember, C. R., American Anthropologist 85 (1983), 297fGoogle Scholar.

30. Cf. Saxena, N. C., ‘Women in Forestry’, Social Action 37 (1987), 153, referring to contractors in India who employ, along with male workers, women to undertake earthwork for digging pits for plantationsGoogle Scholar.

31. Epperlein, E., JWG (1976) I, 196–200Google Scholar.

32. Precheur-Canonge, T., La vie rurale en Afrique romaine d'après les mosaiques (Paris, 1962), 38fGoogle Scholar; Dunbabin, K. M. D., The Mosaics of Roman North Africa (Oxford, 1978), 114fGoogle Scholar. Highly idealized depictions of women as personifications of the seasons constitute the only exceptions: Parrish, D., Season Mosaics of Roman North Africa (Rome, 1984)Google Scholar.

33. Dunbabin, , op. cit., plate 109Google Scholar; cf. Rostovtzeff, M., The Social and Economic History of the Roman Empire (Oxford, 1957 2), 528Google Scholar.

34. For this concept, see Patterson, O., Slavery and Social Death (Cambridge, Mass, and London, 1982), 1–13Google Scholar.