Seltman Charles. Women in Antiquity

Muriwai Books, 2018. — 224 p.After touching on the life of women in Palaeolithic and Neolithic times, Dr. Seltman comes to the first urban civilisations in Mesopotamia and Egypt, where the exaltation of women was bound up with the religious attitude towards love-goddesses and mother-goddesses. He discusses nudity and the wearing of clothes; fertility rites and sacred prostitution; heroines of the Bible; the cult of Isis. Fascinating pages deal with the women of Minoan Crete and of the Heroic Age (as described by Homer and confirmed by archaeological discoveries). A chapter on Sparta refers to the custom of exposing feeble infants, the annual flagellation of boys, the athletic prowess of girls, and the social and sexual codes. Coming to Athens, he appraises slavery and gives an imaginary Socratic dialogue to show how a 5th-century Athenian would have felt about some of our present Western ideas. Book titles are sometimes provocative, and perhaps this one deserves the epithet. If it does, one must be precise about terms of reference. “Women.” There is no need to attempt a definition. We are always with them, and they with us. Fortunately. But “Antiquity” should be, for our purpose, defined. It begins in the remoteness of palaeolithic culture; it ends with the Council of Nicaea, when the Emperor Constantine sat down to hear the bishops embattled in their factions, argue, dogmatise, and declaim. My aim in the chapters which follow has been mainly that of a collector and recorder, for I have tried to stand in the wings and let the tragi-comedy of women in the ancient world play itself through. Obviously my final chapter is outside this frame. And yet one must gather the threads, observe what history has woven for womankind, and in fine, assess the fabric of the web as the curtain falls. Inevitably this book is mainly about women in those Mediterranean civilisations which are the roots of ours, but Primitive and Near-Eastern peoples who affected even remotely our background have been briefly considered in early chapters. The net would have been flung altogether too widely had I taken in the life of women among the Northern barbarians and the outer Provincials of the Roman Empire, or Eastern peoples like Persians and Parthians.