For it is the custom for all women especially... to dedicate whatever is near and to vow sacrifices and to promise shrines for the gods and daemons and children of the gods. . . And they fill all the houses and all the towns with altars and shrines, setting them up both in open spaces and wherever these happenings occur
(Plato, Laws 909e-910a)
Uncovering evidence of private female lives is a notoriously difficult task. The subjects of ‘‘women’’ and ‘‘home’’ are not of enormous interest to ancient authors. As a result, the views that texts offer us are tantalizingly incomplete. Who are the women referred to by Plato in the passage above? What form did their domestic shrines take? Textual narratives raise more questions than they answer. Yet if we turn to material sources for enlightenment, we face a similar wall of invisibility. We can view the detritus of life, including religious artifacts, in the wells and on the floors of houses, but we cannot link artifacts to female users or identify specific patterns of female behavior in the material record. Similarly, whilst domestic excavations have unearthed an array of female images in the form of statuettes or on vases, many of which show women performing religious acts, we cannot use this evidence to ask or answer specific questions. We do not know whether the scenes are set in a house or temple. We cannot understand what meaning the images had for the householder. We cannot say what type of woman, free or slave, respectable or marginal, is performing the acts. The images are generic, showing exempla of female behavior, not realities (S. Lewis 2002). We are left with a tangled web of images and ideas. How do we begin to unravel the relationship between women, religion, and the home?
World History
