the household and into the community, bringing household interests to public
attention (Goff 2004:27). Their movement reflects the mutual concern of house
and family at birth, death, and marriage: the shared desire to ensure that the family
endures and the need to maintain order.
Women and Boundaries
Women’s ritual actions at birth, death, and marriage create and break down bound-
aries. As we have seen, they create separated spaces within the house by surrounding
and enclosing the corpse, bride, and woman in labor. This allows the vulnerable
individual to be placed apart in a protected ritual space. Women can also move
through boundaries, to attend to those in a state of transition or to collapse the
divisions between public and private, bringing household interests into the public
sphere. Ritual space is created, defined, and dissolved by the bodies of the women.
Women therefore become visible in our sources on occasions where ritual boundaries
play an important role in religious behavior, whether in public or private contexts.
At the public festival of the Plynteria the women of the city come out of the house
to participate in the preparations for the Panathenaea by disrobing and washing the
statue of Athena (Burkert 1985:79). The women escort the statue of Athena to
the sea for purification before returning it to her temple to await the presentation
of the peplos at the Panathenaea. The women’s actions here are not focused on
breaking down social or ritual boundaries but on creating them. The belief that
the gods themselves inhabited statues makes the washing of a statue a potentially
dangerous act (Schnapp 1994). In surrounding the statue the women’s bodies form a
boundary that contains the danger. It also preserves the modesty of the disrobed
virgin goddess. The presence and position of the women mirror their actions in
surrounding bride, corpse, and woman in labor. They enclose and protect those
within and without the circle. Women’s participation here does not reflect a mixing
of home and community but a separation of space: they create a ritual boundary to
protect goddess and community.
Women also construct ritual boundaries in the domestic context. A passage from
Menander’sGhostoffers us interesting insights into how such boundaries are created
and the actions of women in creating them. Here, the character Pheidias has fallen in
love with what he believes to be a female apparition, seen at a household shrine. His
servant Syros suggests somewhat sarcastically that the best way to rid Pheidias of his
sickness is for him to undergo a purification:
What do I advise? I say this. If this had been a real problem, Pheidias, you would have had
to seek a real remedy for this. But yet you have not, so find a fake medicine for your fake
illness and believe that it helps you. Let the women in a circle wipe all around you and
burn incense around you. Sprinkle around water from three springs, throwing on salt,
lentils...(Menander,Ghost24–31)The women place themselves around the body of Pheidias, just as a chorus circles the
altar (Lonsdale 1993:120). They then mark the space around him with water. This
has the effect of purifying both Pheidias and the area in which the ritual will take
308 Janett Morgan