2002). This kind of investigative approach offers us the chance to compare and
contrast the religious behavior of women in different times and places. Yet it carries
an implicit danger: in gathering a wide range of information we run the risk of
homogenizing female religious behavior. No matter how carefully and cautiously
we present our research, when we cast with a wide net we cannot avoid gathering
women together, masking the wide range of age groups and social backgrounds that
the term ‘‘women’’ is capable of containing (Katz 1995). We risk grouping together
mistress and slave, matron and maiden, without discrimination. The final result is a
composite picture of female lives which ignores the differences that place, time, social
status, and political system can bring to religious experiences.
One solution to this problem is for us to control our investigation by directing it at
a specific group of women. The obvious candidates are the women of classical and
early hellenistic Athens, a place and time for which we have a substantial body of
information accumulated from material and textual sources. Yet in doing this, we run
into three problems. First, we must accept that we cannot understand the religious
lives of all women in the community; we can only see the women that our sources
allow us to. As a result our view will be skewed. Even within a single community,
women’s religious experiences and behavior can be very different. Financial consid-
erations will dictate not only the roles played by women in a family but also the
quality and range of materials used for religious acts. Social position can influence the
ability of an individual to participate in ritual occasions, as well as affecting the tenor
of the whole experience. Our study will never fully reflect the variety of experiences
that must have existed.
Secondly, our ability to investigate female religious behavior in the private
sphere will be constrained by the quality of our sources. Most evidence for the
religious lives of women focuses on their actions in the public sphere: we have little
evidence for practices in the home. When references to women and domestic life do
appear in texts, they are tangential to wider narratives: again, our view is skewed
rather than direct. Even where we do stumble across a description of private female
worship, we have no idea how it fits into a wider context of women’s religious
behavior. Menander’s description of a mother worshiping at a domestic shrine offers
us no clue as to whether the scene reflects a common or exceptional practice; it is
the only example that we have (Ghost49–56). Equally, we do not know how far
Menander and other authors exaggerate female behavior to suit the needs of their
narrative.
Our third problem is one of perspective: the view that our sources offer us comes
through male eyes. As Plato’s comments at the start of this chapter show, women are
narrative tools in the hands of an author. They become visible in our sources when
their lives or religious behavior reflect or reinforce male ideology (Just 1989:2–4).
How far a man could understand or represent female life is a matter of some debate
(Cartledge 1993:65). We must accept the possibility that we may be viewing an
ideal of female life and that the view offered to us by texts has little bearing on the
day-to-day existence of women. Most Athenian texts divide women into two clean
and clear categories: the good citizen wife and the rest. Citizen wives are expected to
be modest and invisible, not to draw attention to themselves (Salmenkivi 1997:186–7).
They should be like Andromache, wife of Hector, who records how she led a modest
life, avoiding the gossip of women and pleasing her husband (Euripides,Trojan
298 Janett Morgan