Women and the Polis: Public Honorific Inscriptions for Women in the Greek Cities from the Late Classical to the Roman Period

Przemyslaw Siekierka, Krystyna Stebnicka, and Aleksander Wolicki, Women and the Polis: Public Honorific Inscriptions for Women in the Greek Cities from the Late Classical to the Roman Period, 2 vols. (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2021).

Women and the Polis is a two-volume work containing a select collection of Greek inscriptions (writing engraved most commonly on stone) attesting to public honors that political bodies of Greek cities bestowed upon “women-citizens” from the late Classical to the Roman periods and the evolution of those honors during these periods. Thus, this anthology is not comprehensive, but focused on women who possessed (limited) civic rights in Greek communities and the surviving epigraphic sources testifying that Greek political bodies—the civic council (boulē), the collective citizen-body (dēmos), colleges of civic officials, tribes (phylae), divisions of a city’s citizen-body (demes), priestly colleges, and, in the Roman period, provincial assemblies—honored such persons. To this end, Siekierka’s, Stebnicka’s, and Wolicki’s dataset omits honorary inscriptions from Greek cities that are associated with Hellenistic queens and Roman women such as empresses. The book is divided into two parts. The first, which is found in volume one, consists of six chapters and contains cursory, yet informed discussions of public honors for benefactresses from a chronological perspective. Chapter one surveys the earliest cases of bodies politic in Greek cities publicly honoring women. It concludes that such activity was an internal evolution in the late Classical period, which emerged from developing ideas about the status of women, especially from their munificence to the public cults within their communities. In the second chapter, Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki explore public honors for women-citizens during the Hellenistic period. They note that Greek communities continued to bestow these honors on women for their benefactions connected to civic cults, but this era witnesses an evolution to public honors for women. For the first time in the epigraphic record, women-citizens are lauded for munificence not directly tied to public divine honors.

Chapter three (as well as chapter four) pauses the chronological survey to examine the language of the public Hellenistic honorary inscriptions for benefactresses. Similar to honorary decrees for citizen-benefactors, these sources identify women by the names of their fathers, husbands, and in some cases grandfathers. The types of honors that Greek cities bestowed upon women mirrored those they provided for men, for “[t]here are no privileges specific to women only” (p. 86).[1] In the same manner, the virtues for which Greek communities lauded women resembled those for which they honored men: eusebeia (piety), eunoia (goodwill), aretē (virtue), sōphrsyne (prudence), and a host of virtues beginning with the Greek prefix phil- (love) such as philagathia (lover of good), etc. In chapter four, Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki investigate the evolution of the relationship between Greek cities, women, and their families during the Hellenistic period. They conclude that the public honoring of women-citizens allowed for the promotion of the public careers of their male relatives and their family units as a whole within their communities. To this end, there are cases in which cities honored women because they honored their fathers, brothers, sons, and/or their entire family lines.

Returning to their chronological survey of the evidence in chapter five, the authors analyze public honors for Greek benefactresses in the Roman period, which evinces an increase in such honors, especially in the erection of honorary statues of women. Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki attribute this increase to two factors: (1) public benefactions of women in the Roman imperial household, which encouraged women-citizens in the empire to imitate them and (2) cities relying more on wealthy members of their communities to meet their financial needs. The first section’s final chapter explores the professional accomplishments for which cities lauded women, which are rare in our sources. Nevertheless, these data indicate that Greek political bodies honored women for being poets, harpists, rhetors, and even doctors.

The second part of Women and the Polis, which spans the bulk of volume one and all of volume two, consists of 1,228 honorary Greek inscriptions dated between the fifth century BCE and 212 CE from Greek cities spread all over Europe, Asia, and North Africa.[2] Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki have organized these epigraphs according to geography to highlight “regional differences” and evolutions in “the treatment of women” in these areas (p. vii). Moreover, they have placed the cities in a given region in alphabetical order and presented the honored benefactresses in chronological order. For each entry, the authors provide their own numbering system, the name of the honorand (if unknown they note that the woman is “Anonymous”), her father’s and/or husband’s name and possibly information about the woman’s family, the date of the epigraph, the Greek text, a translation (which is usually not their own), and a concise commentary (p. vii).[3] To provide a random example, number 431 consists of a Greek inscription engraved on a marble statue base from the island city of Samos that was dedicated to its patron goddess Hera. The epigraph dates to the first half of the first century CE and indicates that, “The council and the people (honoured) Iulia daughter of the late Gaius Iulius Epikrates. (Dedicated) to Hera.” The work’s final portion consists of two indices—one that provides an alphabetical index of the women discussed in the volume and another of select Greek terms—and a bibliography.

Women and the Polis is a welcomed addition to the scholarly conversation not only about ancient Greek benefactresses in particular but also about ancient Greek benefaction in general. Most importantly, it underscores the historical reality that while women in the Hellenistic and Roman eras did not have equal rights with men, they were not shut up in their homes and their voices were not muted. Rather, women were active in public spaces using their wealth to meet the needs of their communities and, at the same time, advancing their reputations and that of their families. Such a portrait of women’s activities differs from the one that many scholars of ancient Judaism and Christianity use in their historical reconstructions, which they derive mostly from literary texts. The producers of these documents are largely ancient aristocratic men who, for various reasons, were uninterested in ancient benefactresses. Consequently, scholars of ancient religious texts could use the material that Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki have collected with its contextuality and demonstration of the regional differences to provide nuanced readings of ancient Jewish and Christian texts whose provenances are known such as Galatians and 1 Corinthians. Though some scholars will quibble about the selection of material and what Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki have omitted, this work is a major undertaking that will advance the conversation about ancient Greek benefactresses and generate new ideas and insights about them for years to come!

D. Clint Burnett is a visiting scholar at Boston College (Chestnut Hill, MA) who focuses on using ancient material culture and inscriptions in particular to reconstruct nascent Christianity in the cities in which Paul the apostle established it. He is the author of three books, his most recent of which (March 2024) focuses on the relationship between imperial cults and early Christianity in Philippi, Thessalonica, and Corinth and offers a much-needed corrective to the scholarly contention that the nascent Christian message was anti-Roman. 

[1] “The standard formula of honouring was identical in the case of either sex: praise (epainos), crowning (usually with an olive crown, occasionally a golden one), and announcement (on one or repeated customs) (anaggelia, anagoreusis) of the honour by a herald during religious ceremonies (agons, panegyreis)” (p. 86).

[2] The authors’ rationale for ending their collection at 212 CE is the Roman emperor Carcalla’s grant of Roman citizenship to every free person in the Roman Empire in that year. However, they have included some third century CE epigraphs that may date after 212 CE. Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki admit that such an inclusion is arbitrary and was done on a case-by-case basis (vi). 

[3]Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki use the standard editions of inscriptions and typically the most recent epigraphic edition. If various editions of the same epigraph differ, they note which edition they have followed (vii-viii). Sometimes Siekierka, Stebnicka, and Wolicki propose their own restorations and/or corrections of inscriptions, but only when a text is incomprehensible. When they can, they have used existing English translations, which they occasionally alter to bring continuity to the entire corpus. If such is the case, they note the alteration in the entry in question (viii).