Missing Mothers: Maternal Absence in Antiquity: Volume 22 (Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion) [1 ed.] 9042943130, 9789042943131

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INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES

IN

ANCIENT CULTURE

AND

RELIGION

22 MISSING MOTHERS MATERNAL ABSENCE IN ANTIQUITY

edited by SABINE R. HUEBNER AND DAVID M. RATZAN

PEETERS

MISSING MOTHERS

INTERDISCIPLINARY STUDIES IN ANCIENT CULTURE AND RELIGION

EDITOR Leonard V. Rutgers (Utrecht) EDITORIAL BOARD Béatrice Caseau (Paris) Wolfram Kinzig (Bonn) Blake Leyerle (Notre Dame, IN) Paolo Liverani (Florence) Anne Marie Luijendijk (Princeton, NJ) Jodi Magness (Chapel Hill, NC) David Satran (Jerusalem)

Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion 22

MISSING MOTHERS MATERNAL ABSENCE

IN

ANTIQUITY

EDITED BY

SABINE R. HUEBNER AND DAVID M. RATZAN

PEETERS LEUVEN – PARIS – BRISTOL, CT

2021

A catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress. © Peeters, Bondgenotenlaan 153, B-3000 Leuven ISBN: 978-90-429-4313-1 eISBN: 978-90-429-4314-8 D/2021/0602/119

matribus optimis, cultricibus fautricibusque constantissimis

TABLE OF CONTENTS  1. Motherless Antiquity: An introduction . . . . . . . . Sabine R. HUEBNER (Basel) and David M. RATZAN (NYU)

1

Part I. Born Motherless  2. Motherless infancy in the Roman and the late ancient world Christian LAES (University of Manchester)  3. Every woman counts: Rethinking maternal mortality in the bioarchaeological context. . . . . . . . . . . . Chryssi BOURBOU (University of Fribourg)

15

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Part II. Growing up Motherless  4. Was the Athenian state in the classical period indifferent to maternal absence? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Rosalia HATZILAMBROU (National and Kapodistrian University

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of Athens)

 5. The risk of violence towards motherless children in ancient Greece . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . Fiona MCHARDY (University of Roehampton)

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 6. The last will of Alcestis: Motherless children and their widowed fathers in Graeco-Roman Egypt . . . . . . . Sabine R. HUEBNER (University of Basel)

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 7. A long way from home: Motherless children in slave sale contracts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 105 Judith EVANS GRUBBS (Emory University)  8. Fact, fiction, and family: Stepmothers in the ValentinianTheodosian dynasty . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 127 Geoffrey NATHAN (University of New South Wales)

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

Part III. Minding the Gap: Representing Mother Absence  9. Absent mothers by choice: Upper class women in classical Attic vase painting . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 143 Susanne MORAW (Leipzig University) 10. Motherly absence in Euripides’ family reunion plays . . 167 Angeliki TZANETOU (University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign) 11. Maternal absence and heroic identity in Virgil’s Aeneid . . 187 Elina PYY (University of Helsinki) 12. Missing Motherhood: Envisioning the Childless Empress of the Trajanic-Hadrianic Era . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Margaret WOODHULL (University of Colorado Denver) Part IV. Filling the Void: Mother Absence and Memory 13. Moses: Motherless with two Mothers . . . . . . . . 237 René BLOCH (University of Bern) 14. Ascetic Absentees: Late ancient reading strategies in pursuit of the maternal ideal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 251 Maria DOERFLER (Yale University) 15. Topographies of mother loss and mother absence in late antique Palestine: A view from rabbinic and liturgical sources . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 267 Sarit KATTAN GRIBETZ (Fordham University) BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 287 ABOUT

THE

EDITORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 321

THE CONTRIBUTORS . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 323 INDEX

OF

TEXTS CITED . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 327

GENERAL INDEX . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 343

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS It gives us great pleasure to acknowledge the individuals and institutions without whose considerable support this publication would not have been possible. This volume is based on an international and interdisciplinary conference which took place in Basel, Switzerland in May 2016. We would like to thank the various funders of the event: we are grateful to the Swiss National Science Foundation, the Max Geldner Foundation Basel, the Freie Akademische Gesellschaft Basel and the Institute or the Study of the Ancient World for their generous financial support. In addition, we would like to thank everyone involved in the organization of the conference, especially Florence Anliker, Ricarda Berthold, Marie Besso, Dario Giacometti, Monika Henzen, Victoria Landau, Denis Rakazovic, and Audric Wannaz. We also wish to thank our contributors for submitting their chapters in a timely manner and for their patience during the editing and production process. Finally, we thank the anonymous peer reviewers for their very helpful comments, Leonard V. Rutgers for accepting the volume to the ISACR series, and Bert Verrept at Peeters seeing the volume swiftly through the production process. Basel and New York, March 2020 Sabine R. HUEBNER and David M. RATZAN

1. MOTHERLESS ANTIQUITY: AN INTRODUCTION Sabine R. HUEBNER (University of Basel), and David M. RATZAN (New York University) The last forty years have witnessed a vast reclamation project in ancient history, as scholars worked to recover the lives of historically muted groups, particularly women, children, and slaves.1 At the same time, the social history of the ancient family has been transformed by an allied revolution, with a generation of ancient historians beginning in the 1980s adopting the agenda of scholars like Peter Laslett and thereby seeking to pose new questions and exploit new types of evidence with the aim of making ancient family life a properly historical object.2 The result today is an impressive body of work on ancient social and family life, as well as a sophisticated epistemology of the biases, gaps, and silences in the historical, literary, and archaeological records.3 Ancient mothers are no exception here; indeed, Suzanne Dixon’s pioneering work on Roman mothers established mothering early on as a subject in need of serious historical and anthropological revision, and volumes dedicated to ancient mothers (as opposed to the ancient family more generally) continue to appear.4 1

 E.g., Kampen 1981; Skinner 1987; Golden 1990 [2nd ed. 2015]; Joshel 1992; Hawley and Levick 1995; Scheidel 1995; Scheidel 1996; Dixon 2001; Schumacher 2001; Thompson 2003; Cohen and Rutter 2007; Laes 2011; Mayer 2012; Huebner 2013; Huebner and Nathan 2016; Huebner and Laes 2019. 2  See Rawson (1986) for a dated but still useful summary of the historiography of the (Roman) family in the 20th century. 3  Besides the now voluminous literature on women, children, and the family in antiquity, the sourcebooks, companions, and handbooks devoted to these topics are the most recent testament to the success of this research agenda. See, e.g., Rowlandson 1998; Bagnall and Cribiore 2006; Rawson 2010; Bradley and Cartledge 2011; Evans Grubbs and Parkin 2013; and Budin and Turfa 2016. 4  Dixon 1987. For works specifically dedicated to mothers and mothering, see Demand 1994; Augoustakis 2010; Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell 2012; McAuley 2016.

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– D.M. RATZAN

From these dual perspectives, women’s studies and the history of the family, the absence of ancient mothers has typically represented an inescapable evidentiary reality, a methodological hurdle to overcome in the pursuit of a positivist agenda of the recovery of the lives of ancient women—but rarely a subject of study in its own right. However, this same new research into the ancient world points conclusively to the fact that mother absence was not merely a secondary artifact of patriarchy, a bias we find reflected in documentary practice and literary, artistic, and historiographical conventions; it was also a primary demographic condition of antiquity, one whose root causes, social articulations, and psychological effects have never been fully described or explored in the existing scholarly literature, even as it has become clear that they had profound effects on ancient family life and the experience of childhood. This volume is therefore dedicated to studying not the absence of mothers from the historical record so much as historical mother absence. Its contributors thus engage in exploring negative historical space, studying the gaps left by absent mothers and how individuals, families, and societies articulated and dealt with those gaps, practically, psychologically, artistically, and politically. In approaching the causes, forms, and effects of ancient mother absence it is important to recognize that we now stand to benefit not only from the last five decades of research into the ancient and premodern family, but also from the study of contemporary mother absence. The chief cause of ancient mother absence was, of course, death, with the result that a significant proportion of ancient children grew up without their biological mothers. In the contemporary West, by contrast, mother absence is increasingly the product of the number of working and career mothers (now two-thirds to three-quarters of all mothers in Germany, Switzerland, France, and the U.S.), a social revolution that is rapidly transforming the practices, economics, ideals, and politics of mothering. Cameron Macdonald’s Shadow Mothers: Nannies, Au Pairs, and the Micropolitics of Mothering (2011), for example, investigates the ways in which mother-work has been commoditized, outsourced, and negotiated between mothers and “shadow mothers” in the United States. Macdonald’s account of the social tensions and strategic postures shaping the relationships between contemporary mothers and a quasi-professionalized class of surrogates is a thought-provoking read for anyone acquainted with the various “shadow mothers” of antiquity. This and similar research suggests

MOTHERLESS ANTIQUITY: AN INTRODUCTION

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that students of antiquity would do well to see the phenomenon of ancient mother absence as a continuum, ranging from its obvious manifestation in the total absence of maternal death, to the partial absences of maternal separation brought about by economic necessity, divorce, slavery, social conventions, and, on occasion, even choice. It also provides us with a potential framework within which to understand the ways different family members cognized and responded to maternal absence, from the children who grew up to varying degrees without their mothers, to those individuals who stepped in or were employed or commanded to mother children they had not birthed, a patchwork cast of stepmothers, siblings, relatives, wet nurses, and domestic slaves. In certain cases, we may even be able extend this analysis to the absent mothers themselves, insofar as we can recover or reconstruct their experiences. None of the works cited in the notes above specifically address mother absence, except in passing or, as suggested above, as a methodological problem. The one important exception is the demographic literature, which discusses the incidence of female death and some of its effects, e.g., on infant survival or remarriage.5 The object of that literature, however, is typically to analyze broad demographic patterns, and so it often stops short of drawing out the implications of particular phenomena for the families and individuals living in the demographic regimes it reconstructs. For similar reasons, this literature also only rarely explores the various ways in which demographic mother absence was expressed culturally or connected to forms of non-demographic, partial mother absence. This volume is therefore the first to examine ancient mother absence phenomenologically across the spectrum of its manifestations, drawing together hitherto disparate threads of research into in comprehensive and multimodal view of this ancient phenomenon. * * * We have arranged the contributions into four thematic sections. The first two deal with what one might call the realities of mother absence, 5  E.g., Hopkins 1966; Saller and Shaw 1984; Shaw 1984; Hansen 1986; Saller 1987; Shaw 1987; Parkin 1992; Saller 1994; Scheidel 1996 (with Scheidel 1997); Bagnall and Frier 1994 [2nd ed. 2006]; Shaw 1996; Scheidel 2001; and Holleran and Pudsey 2011.

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while the third and fourth treat various social and cultural aspects or reflections of mother absence. The first section, BORN MOTHERLESS, contains two essays on the root cause of ancient mother absence, or mortality related to complications in childbirth, and its immediate effects on children and family life. The volume begins with a wide-ranging essay sketching the immediate impact of maternal death on families in the Roman and late antique worlds from the perspective of our textual evidence (LAES, Chapter 2). Laes not only collects and represents the variety of reactions and actions taken in the wake of maternal death, he also has a particular methodological objective in this chapter, aiming to contextualize his ancient material with parallels from comparative ethnographic and anthropological literature on mother loss and absence. The second essay in this section shifts to investigate the material realities of pregnancy, childbirth, and maternal and infant death as revealed by the skeletal remains (BOURBOU, Chapter 3). From these remains bioarchaeologists are able to reconstruct various aspects of maternal death during pregnancy and childbirth, or related to postpartum complications. The kind of research discussed by Bourbou only rarely figures in discussions of the ancient family outside of physical anthropology journals and it is included here as a step towards embedding bioarchaeology more firmly into the discussion of the history of the ancient family. The essays of the second section, GROWING UP MOTHERLESS, explore the effects of maternal absence on family life after the crucial period of infancy in five chapters. HATZILAMBROU (Chapter 4) reviews the position of motherless children from the perspective of the law in classical Athens. She argues that while the Athenian state evinced a typically patriarchal lack of concern about a mother’s loss or departure, leaving arrangements within the family entirely up to the father, it nevertheless vindicated the reciprocal legal bonds linking sons and mothers. In other words, motherhood in classical Athens had legal consequences, at least for citizen sons, and the state stepped in to defend those legal rights even in her absence. MCHARDY (Chapter 5) maintains the focus on classical Greece, but pierces the veil of the public-facing consequences of mother absence as expressed in law to get to the private experience of motherless children in the oikos. Starting from modern comparative studies on the outcomes of children being raised by non-biological parents, McHardy assembles an impressive

MOTHERLESS ANTIQUITY: AN INTRODUCTION

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array of evidence and sifts it for what it can tell us about paternal decision-making in the absence of a biological mother and the likely effects of remarriage on Athenian family dynamics and child outcomes. In her view, the widespread cultural belief in the vulnerability of motherless children may very well have been grounded in fact, with the crucial determinant affecting outcomes for children being the structural changes in the relative power dynamics in the family. The third essay in this section tackles the topic of remarriage headon by tracing maternal absence and remarriage in the families via the census returns of Roman Egypt, one of our best sources for the social history of the family in the ancient Mediterranean. HUEBNER (Chapter 6) quickly summarizes the current consensus on the demographic regime in Roman Egypt, where we can reasonably confident that nearly a third of children could expect to lose their children by age 15, and what the returns reveal about rates of remarriage for men and women. She then discusses the consequences of the intersection of demography and the specific cultural practices of marriage and remarriage, including evidence for single-father parenting and examples of the sorts of disputes that arose as a consequence of mother absence, at least insofar as they are preserved in petitions. EVANS GRUBBS (Chapter 7) follows with a necessarily impressionistic discussion of the fate of those children who experienced mother absence by virtue of being enslaved and deracinated from their biological families at an early age. The basis of her discussion is a corpus she assembled of nearly 60 documentary sales contracts for children under 14 from the first to the seventh centuries CE. As Evans Grubbs notes, the evidence does not permit a systematic analysis, but she demonstrates that in the hands of a skilled social historian these contracts are sobering windows onto a world of trafficked children, some sold multiple times before the age of 10. In the final essay of this section NATHAN (Chapter 8) returns to the issue of remarriage but transports us to late antiquity and the highest echelons of the imperial society, as he explores the reality and representation of remarriage in the Valentinian-Theodosian dynasties. Nathan shows not only how the potential of being painted as the evil stepmother (noverca saeva) remained a latent threat in contemporary politics and late antique historiography, but also how politically adept imperial women could successfully engage in a sort of kinship diplomacy by acting as—and advertising their acting as—virtuous and dutiful mothers in patchwork imperial families.

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S.R. HUEBNER

– D.M. RATZAN

The volume now turns from the realities of motherlessness, insofar as we can recover them, to the various social and cultural modes of negotiating and representing mother absence in the third section, MINDING THE GAP: REPRESENTING MOTHER ABSENCE. Indeed, this theme was already broached by Nathan’s chapter, since it is as much a study of representation as it is of the underlying reality of late antique imperial mothering and the dynamic relationship between two (i.e., image-conscious imperial mothers were well aware of the cultural and political ideologies and vocabularies of motherhood and stepmotherhood). The four essays in this section, however, focus on motherlessness as a motif in art, literature, and historiography. The opening essay of this section returns us to classical Athens, as MORAW (Chapter 9) argues that élite Athenian married women preferred to see themselves as nubile Aphrodites rather than as dutiful matrons in the painted ceramics they commissioned or had purchased for use in their private spaces. This domestic imagery stood in stark contrast to the public representations of these same women in Athens, which emphasized their motherhood. TZANETOU (Chapter 10) discusses mother absence as a psychological and political trope in Euripides’ fragmentary “reunion” tragedies, which revolve around the recognition of sons by long-absent mothers and the redemption of motherhood both psychologically and in the Athenian political imaginary at the close of the fifth century. The state of preservation of these tragedies makes for tricky work, but TZANETOU offers convincing readings that show a consistent thematization of the essential and enduring value of maternal ponoi by portraying the suffering of mothers who fell afoul of Athenian civic ideology, often for reasons beyond their control (e.g., rape, enslavement, etc.). This contribution thus complements HATZILAMBROU’S essay (Chapter 4), in that it dramatizes those bonds of motherhood that Athenians believed survived literal and social death. The next chapter moves us to the Roman world, as seen from the perspective of Latin epic. Most scholars of the Aeneid see Virgil structuring his story of the genesis of Rome through a succession of male, patrilineal relationships, with women representing various existential threats to Rome’s future greatness, which need to be suppressed, controlled, or overcome. PYY (Chapter 11) extends this line of interpretation by focusing on the effects of mother absence on the children of the Aeneid. She argues convincingly that the missing mothers of the Aeneid in fact experience a sort of epic Nachleben, continuing

MOTHERLESS ANTIQUITY: AN INTRODUCTION

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to shape the heroic identities of Ascanius and his Italian foils in the second half of the poem through their absence. The relationship of these young warriors to their missing mothers dramatizes in microcosm the particularly Augustan preoccupation with the ways in which both individuals and cultures necessarily carry their pasts with them into their futures and the intimate, dynamic, and troubling intertwingling of the private and the domestic with the public and the political. WOODHULL (Chapter 12) shifts focus to explore the link between mother absence, politics, and imperial imagery in the second century. The failure of Trajaniac and Antonine couples to produce heirs presented an iconographic challenge to imperial image-makers. Woodhall reconstructs a history of the semiotics of imperial compensation, showing how early portrait types suggesting an aspirational dynastic fecundity gave way over time to types that deployed “visual strategies of verism and concealment … to deflect the empress’ childlessness.” If NATHAN (Chapter 8) traces a late antique response by imperial women asking how they should act and or what image they should project as mothers and stepmothers raising the potential heirs to the Roman world, Woodhall illuminates the imperial response to childlessness, a retreat from and near erasure of maternal imagery altogether. The fourth and final section, FILLING THE VOID: MOTHER ABSENCE AND MEMORY, offers three examples of strategies for remembering and reintegrating absent mothers, all from Judeo-Christian cultural milieux. The themes discussed in these chapters will be familiar from earlier chapters—loss, memory, memorialization, guilt, compensation, identity—but the chapters in this section are united by a new and shared interpretative imperative: the understanding of motherlessness or mother absence in the lives of biblical stories as a central thematic problem in need of explication and resolution. They thus represent a search for closure and reintegration on multiple levels, a desire to fill the void left by missing mothers psychologically, textually, and culturally. The first essay by BLOCH (Chapter 13) explores the figure of Moses, whose archetypal, heroic motherlessness was compensated for by a multiplication of mothers (recalling PYY’S discussion of Virgil’s treatment of Ascanius in Chapter 11), and the ways in which this condition was elaborated and explained by Hellenistic and subsequent commentators. DOERFLER’S essay (Chapter 14) deals with a similar process of narratological gap-filling, this time by Christian exegetes.

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DOERFLER focuses on a difference she perceives in the communication strategies employed by late antique Christian authors depending on audience: while they often advocated an ascetic retreat from motherhood for élite women, DOERFLER suggests that in their sermons they adopted a different message and narrative strategy, one more in line with the experiences of the majority of families and mothers in their congregations, for whom ascetic renunciation was not a realistic option. In these texts we instead find them teaching biblical stories at the level of contemporary family dynamics, wrestling with such questions as why Sarah was absent—and seemingly not consulted—at the sacrifice of Isaac. The answers are no less revealing than the apparent necessity of having to ask the question, for what they suggest about late antique Christian expectations and attitudes towards mothers and their presence or absence in the family. The final essay of the book by KATTAN GRIBETZ (Chapter 15) explores the themes of absence and reintegration by exploring late antique Jewish “exegetical practices in populating a land with absent mothers” and whose conclusion, which reflects on several of the other contributions, serves as a fitting coda for the volume. In a series of penetrating readings of genres that range from theological commentary to lyric poetry, she explores what one might call the textual strategies of elegy, or how exegetes modelled mourning and memory for missing mothers and nurses through biblical texts. She connects this exegetical practice to the cultural memory of matriarchal tombs, showing how “maternal loss, mourning, and longing” were “grounded in geography and topography” and “mapped onto the physical, geographical landscape through narratives and their associated shrines.” * * * Taken as a whole, this volume shows what is to be gained by gathering and synthesizing our various types of evidence for mother absence, by using literary texts, for instance, as spurs to thinking through some of the social or familial implications of the demography of mother absence, or the in the other direction, by practicing a literary or art historical criticism informed by demographic realities or our documentary evidence. This volume is also somewhat unusual in its inclusion of material from a wide range of Jewish and Christian sources, which together reveal or represent a set of concerns with missing

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mothers either grounded in a different ancient Mediterranean tradition or mediated by the newly central status of a set of sacred scriptures and their exegesis. One result of pulling this material together may be found in points of unexpected consilience. Take, for example, what appears to be a recurrence of the importance of the age of two for mother absence. In both Greek and Roman cultures there were several overlapping systems of significant ages. The age of legal majority in Roman law, for instance, was fixed at 14 or 25 for various capacities. There was also a well-established traditional division of life into hebdomads, which was continuously elaborated from the classical Greek period down to late antiquity.6 Several contributions in this volume, however, have pointed to the age of two as a liminal one. It is, as LAES describes, a significant age for the cessation of wet nursing. HUEBNER in her contribution cites comparative research that demonstrates that maternal death after the age of 2 has no effect on the survival of the child when thinking about the patterns of family formation and remarriage. It is also, and relatedly, the age at which EVANS GRUBBS finds our first slave sales attested, suggesting that this was earliest point at which a child could be sold away from his or her biological mother and survive. The importance of ages two to three as a liminal age has been debated in the past, particularly as new words seem to appear in the first century CE to mark this age (e.g., bimus or bimulus, CIL 6.5861, 6.6031, 6.16739);7 but it may be time to revisit this question, given the advances in our documentary, demographic, and bioarchaeological evidence over the past three decades, as we can now add to what has been largely a philological discussion the evidence of material culture and social practice from various parts of the ancient Mediterranean world. While demography must remain the starting point of any discussion of ancient mother absence, this volume also points to other causes of what one might call institutional mother absence. So, for instance, HATZLIMBROU, LAES, and HUEBNER all discuss the effects that patriarchal, virilocal family patterns had on children’s contact with their mothers after divorce. The other side of this coin is remarriage. Here, too, patriarchy had a definite effect on internal family dynamics and inheritance, with important implications for the relationships between 6

 For a full discussion, see Laes 2011b, Ch. 2.5.  See Dasen 2011, 292 for the debate and literature.

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stepmothers or other surrogate mothers and children whose biological mothers were absent. Of course, the other most significant institutional cause of ancient mother absence was slavery. Here we can only speculate as to the experience or the effects, guided by the judicious use of comparative evidence and ethnography, since the sort of data that survives, as exemplified by the corpus EVANS GRUBBS assembled, records only the legal facts relevant to their status as property, not persons. Finally on this theme, we glimpse a new institutional pressure on mothers in late antiquity in DOERFLER’S contribution: Christian asceticism and its attendant renunciation of the worldly family. This was not DOERFLER’S main interest, and she sees this ideal as applying only to a small set of élites who could afford spectacular displays of Christian moral virtuosity. She is no doubt correct on this score. And yet, monastic writings from the fourth and fifth centuries, such as the Apopthegmata patrum and the surviving texts from the Pachomian koinonia, incidentally refer to the presence of young children. Monastic settings have also produced a wealth of sources testifying to fatherless and motherless children.8 Recovering how monasteries and other early Christian institutions approached the raising of such children—and the experiences of those who grew up in such settings—remains an avenue for further research. Together, the contributions of this volume raise an interesting methodological question. Death and commemoration practices are well studied in ancient studies in no small part because they leave such distinctive remains; but how do we study the unremarkable and largely unrecorded phenomenon of survival? One area for future research could lie in attempting to read what we know of ongoing pathology and disability related to the after-effects of childbirth in our ancient archaeological and textual record. That is, we have developed, as BOURBOU discusses in this volume, a good sense of the medical conditions that attended pregnancy in the ancient world, and it stands to reason that many women suffered short-term and long-term disabilities, physical and psychological (e.g., postpartum depression) from complications related to childbirth.9 Harder to trace, as several 8  Schroeder 2012; Greenfield 2009; Giordia 2016; Cojocaru 2016b. See most recently the essays edited by Larsen and Rubenson (2019). 9  For instance, there are now interesting studies about the incidence, effects, and treatment of postnatal posttraumatic stress disorder following a traumatic childbirth

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contributors note, is the archaeology of family stress and conflicts, which were rarely recorded; and when they were, typically only when disputes erupted into public view and were translated into legal documents as, for example, problems of succession (discussed by HATZILAMBROU, MCHARDY, and HUEBNER). The unrecorded nature of the ancient family—or perhaps the predominantly public view we get of this complex domestic institution—is one reason why so many of our contributors turn to comparative evidence to model the internal dynamics of the family in the wake of a mother’s loss. And, of course, even when we have texts that describe or dramatize the experience of family life, they tend to represent the perspectives of the men who authored them. It was a man’s world, after all: this explains not only the erasure of ancient women’s and children’s perspectives, interests, and experiences from the textual record, but also why the textual evidence we do have for the consequences of ancient mother absence typically reflects adult male concerns.10 PYY’S contribution is a case in point: a mother’s absence is valorized in the Aeneid, but largely to the extent that impacts the fates of the young men busy with the labor of birthing the Roman imperial world. In a related vein, WOODHALL’S and NATHAN’S essays can be read in part as case studies of élite women negotiating the public expression of their motherhood, or lack thereof, against a background of masculine interests and prejudice. Again, it was men who set to the filling of the gaps left by absent mothers in the biblical stories, often in ways that reflect their education, experience, and concerns, as discussed by BLOCH, DOERFLER, and KATTAN GRIBETZ. The one possible exception to this general rule is to be found in MORAW’S contribution, in which she seems to recover a distinctly female, private preference evinced by Athenian women of property for the sort of imagery they consumed in the home. And yet, even here the imagery was that of the sexualized beauty object, almost certainly manufactured and retailed to women by Athenian men. This, of course, makes great sense: men largely controlled the discourse of cultural and sexual ideals in classical Athens, and why should we believe that in very different cultural settings, e.g., Modarres et al. 2012; James 2015; Anderson 2017; and Sandoz 2019. 10  See esp. Dixon 2001, Chs. 7-8 on the effects of patriarchy on the representation of women in the Roman world, with broad application to antiquity in general.

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Athenian daughters and wives would not have internalized and identified with these ideals and gender roles to some extent? Whatever one makes of MORAW’S particular case, her work nevertheless points to the complex methodological and hermeneutical challenges in recovering something like an authentic ancient female perspective on motherhood. Another shared interest of the contributions in this volume lies in the exploration of the limits of surrogacy. MCHARDY’S contribution makes an excellent case that while we should be, following Patricia Watson, suspicious of the idea that the ancient world was awash in evil stepmothers, we should not therefore be particularly sanguine about the outcomes for children, on average, who were raised by a surrogate instead of a biological mother. Quantifying such outcomes, of course, is all but impossible for the ancient world; yet it is also true that our models of ancient demography suggest that it was a relatively common experience. HUEBNER finds a relatively high number of single men in the Roman Egyptian census returns apparently raising young children. This could reflect their failure on the marriage market or perhaps a tacit acknowledgement by all parties that the benefits of marriage had to be weighed carefully against the potential complications related to introducing a stepmother into the home. A final point of consilience. It was not the aim of this book to discover or explore the ancient cultural semiotics of motherhood, and yet several contributions point to salient mythic and cultural tropes related to mother absence in the ancient Mediterranean. Absent mothers repeatedly figure in stories and allegories of social dissolution and dislocation, as, for instance, in the portrayal of social “others” like slaves and nurses as mothers in the plays of Euripides discussed by TZANETOU. Virgil seems to use missing mothers in a similarly symbolic fashion, thematizing through them loss and abandonment as part of a particularly Roman, masculine process of personal, cultural, and historical maturation. WOODHALL’S important essay essentially translates this discourse into a Roman visual vocabulary of mother absence. It is tempting here to see a variation on the choice of iconographic paradigms between mother and wife discussed by MORAW. In a way, it is the availability of alternative, if interconnected, versions of female virtue that allows one to represent motherlessness as such: the decision to represent women as not mothers only acquires meaning in a cultural and semiotic context in which motherhood was the ideal.

PART I. BORN MOTHERLESS

2. MOTHERLESS INFANCY IN THE ROMAN AND THE LATE ANCIENT WORLD Christian LAES (University of Manchester)

INTRODUCTION: A

TELLING LATE ANCIENT NOVEL

When the young noble Apollonius embarked on a journey by boat from Libyan Cyrenaica to his hometown Phoenician Tyre, he took his young spouse, by then six months pregnant, with him. All measures were taken for the long and potentially dangerous trip: the girl’s nurse Lycoris accompanied the couple on the ship, together with a skilled midwife.1 Pregnancy took place at the right time, on the boat. A girl was born. Then things went wrong. The mother was suffocated by the coagulation of the blood of the afterbirth that congealed her blood. At the screaming of the surrounding servants, Apollonius approached the scene, only to find out that nothing could be done to save his young wife.2 As it was not possible to keep a dead body on board, he was forced to have her buried in a improvised coffin, in which jewels and a huge amount of coins were put, together with a written message, expressing the hope that those who found the coffin drifted ashore would spent half of the amount for a decent funeral, and keep the rest of it as a recompense for their deed. With bitter tears, Apollonius entrusted the coffin to the sea, took the baby in his hands (in the commotion the new-born child had probably been put aside in an improvised cradle) and decided to raise the child as his only consolation in sad days.3 When the ship reached Tarsus, Apollonius 1  Hist. Ap. 25, RA 2-4. Kortekaas 2007, 337 mentions the curious fact that the midwife is not mentioned again in the story, despite the complicated delivery. Others have suggested that Lycoris was both the nurse and the midwife. See Cairon 2009, 50. Indeed, the functions of a nurse and a midwife sometimes merged. See Laes 2011a, 69. 2  Hist. Ap. 25, RA 8-11. 3  Hist. Ap. 25, RA 29-32.

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entrusted the nurse Lycoris and the little baby girl to his old acquaintances Stranguillio and Dionysias, a couple that already had a daughter themselves, named Philomusia. Only then did he decide to give the baby a name: Tharsia, after the city in which she would now be raised. He swore an oath not to cut his beard, hair, or nails till his daughter was given away in marriage.4 He himself continued his journey. Years passed by. Only at age fourteen did Tharsia find out about her tragic history. She returned from school and found Lycoris in agony. On her deathbed, the old nurse revealed the whole story. After the burial, Tharsia would mourn a whole year over her. The honors Lycoris received came close to those a daughter would pay to her mother.5 Tharsia’s struggles had only just begun. Walking around the streets of Tarsus on a festival day, accompanied by her stepmother Dionysias and her stepsister Philomusia, she was praised by noble men and citizens for her outstanding beauty, while Philomusia was openly reproached for being ugly and a disgrace to the family. At this point, family honor comes in. The evil stepmother Dionysias realizes that, after fourteen years, Apollonius would probably never return to claim his daughter. She decided to get rid of Tharsia and ordered her steward to execute the horrible deed. In a true Snow White plot, the steward did not obey, though he pretended to have done so. In reality, Tharsia survived, because she was captured by pirates.6 As always happens in ancient novels, eventually all ends well. Tharsia is rescued from captivity by her biological father and is even reunited with her mother, who turned out only to have been comatose after the difficult delivery. She had been revived by a young physician who had found the coffin and she had lived for many years as a priestess of Diana in Ephesus. A VITAL THOUGH

MUCH UNDERSTUDIED SUBJECT

The first section plunged the readers in medias res, for a theme that is hardly ever dealt with in detail by ancient writers. The late ancient Historia Apollonii Regis Tyri, a short novel which is only preserved in  Hist. Ap. 28.  Hist. Ap. 30, RA 4-8. 6  Hist. Ap. 31-32. 4 5

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two possibly shortened redactions, offers an unexpectedly detailed account of the life and whereabouts of a young girl, whose mother had presumably died in childbed.7 Indeed, the survival of a baby after maternal death in childbirth or with a mother suffering from precarious health conditions has been labelled as “a catastrophic situation” by ethnologists and anthropologists.8 Apart from the emotions that rise from the strong clash between new life and sudden death, quick and vital decisions need to be made on nurturing and taking care of the child. More often than not, such measures quite drastically change the composition of a household and the emotional involvement of the members of it. Also, the situation carries the potential of tensions in the future: the introduction of a stepmother, the position of the child in the family, and in the broader environment. To historians of the Roman family the issue opens a fascinating window onto a set of questions on early infancy which are seldom answered by the ancient sources. First, we may ask about the occurrence of the matter. What was the demographic frequency of mothers dying in childbed with the baby surviving in Roman society? Second, medical issues turn up: did the infant’s survival depend on medical intervention during the event of a perilous delivery and its aftermath? Closely connected to this question is the option of abandonment or even infanticide in this particular emergency situation. Third, the question of strategies for the newborn’s survival comes in: the role of the obstetrix and the nutrix, the decision and the agency of the father, and the role of family, kin or friends who were considered suitable to take up demanding tasks and responsibilities. Choices and preferences can even impact later life: the child whose mother had died in childbed might be despised, undernourished or less taken care of, even stigmatized in later life—in a certain way socially disabled. Finally, religious motives may change the way the issue was viewed and dealt with, as, for example, with the Christian concept of motherhood and the right to life of newborns. For these four different questions, gender and/or social class may turn out to be decisive factors in the process of making choices. 7  Kortekaas 2007 offers an invaluable and rich commentary, based on his editio maior from 1984. The two different redactions are abbreviated by Kortekaas as RA and RB. 8  Hrdy 2009, 259.

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In this paper, I take up these questions for Roman and Late Antiquity. I study the situation of infants up to age three after maternal death or with a mother suffering from severely bad health, which makes it impossible for her to accomplish her caring tasks. Age three often turns up in ancient sources as a limit for age of weaning and as the end of early infancy. Nowadays anthropologists also widely accept it as a demarcation for the early phase of infancy.9 More often than not, these vital questions are not answered by the traditional sources available to ancient historians. Archaeological excavations have revealed instances of women who did not survive the perils of delivery. When the infant is not buried together with the mother, we may suspect that it survived. Beyond doubt, similar cases will be excavated in the years to come, but such evidence will remain patchy and anecdotal at best.10 Literary sources on the matter exist in all genres and contexts. Death in childbirth even was a literary motive in the late Anthologia Palatina. Some fifteen epigrams from this collection offer touching details on the mother, the survival of the newborns and the emotions of those who were left behind.11 Moreover, a not insignificant number of Greek and Latin literary fragments mention the condition of young orphans raised without their mothers. Often the sources do not indicate the exact age of the child or the reasons for its being motherless. It is mostly unclear whether the mother’s death had happened in childbed or in the early infancy years.12 Funerary epigrams and prose inscriptions for women who died in childbed were part of both the Greek and the Latin epigraphical tradition.13 The inscriptions put strong emphasis on the tragic death of the mother and the emotions of those who survived them. They 9  Laes 2011a, 80-82 (ancient sources); Hewlett and Winn 2014, 222 (anthropology). 10  Laes 2011a, 55-56 for some examples from the East and the West of the Roman Empire. 11  Krause 1994-1995, vol. I: 41 note 116 offers a full list. 12  Krause 1994-1995 has systematically and painstakingly screened the written sources (including the papyrological and the epigraphical records) for cases of orphanhood and widowhood up to Late Antiquity. For Christian cases, see also Vuolanto 2015 and Cojocaru 2016. 13  Instances, both Greek and Latin, are collected in Krause 1994-1995, vol. 1: 41 with note 116. For Greek epigraphy, see particularly Vedder 1988, 183-89. For Latin epigraphy, see Wijnants 2016a and b. See also Carroll 2018, 55-66 including iconography and epigraphic evidence.

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rarely pay attention to the fate of the baby and in most cases do not mention the newborn at all.14 Possibly, we should understand such inscriptions to imply that the infant had died with the mother, since the survival of the child would have been mentioned as a special accomplishment to be proud of. Papyrological material offers more than thirty surviving wet nursing contracts and a considerably number of letters pertaining to family life, though these documents very rarely point to the situation of a deceased mother with a surviving baby.15 MATERNAL MORTALITY

WITH INFANT SURVIVAL: HOW COMMON WAS IT?

In striking contrast with historians of modern history, ancient historians lack any viable set of data on maternal mortality, the number of live births after maternal death, or the proportion of babies entrusted to wetnurses in the case of such event.16 At their turn, modern historians might deplore the lack of rich data as employed by modern ethnologists: the Human Relations Area Files (eHRAF), a digital database of 258 cultures from around the world, provides rich documentation on such issues as non-maternal breastfeeding.17 In addition to demographic statistics, such ethnological databases also build on interviews and questionaries, again a source of information beyond reach for the ancient records. Ancient historians largely agree on high maternal mortality due to childbirth, with estimates ranging from 1,000 to 1,700 deaths per 100,000 live births.18 Such figures match with what we know about present-day “worst cases.”19 For ancient society, some factors may have 14

 Vedder 1988, 185-86.  De Splenter 1989; Rowlandson 1998; Huebner 2013. For grandmothers and child care in the papyri, see Vuolanto 2017, 380 and 388. 16  Woods 2007 is an outstanding comparative study on ancient and early modern mortality. For antiquity, Parkin 1992 remains a classic. See Laes 2011a, 23-27, with focus on Roman childhood. 17  Such database has been the starting point for fundamental studies as Hewlett 1991; Hrdy 1992 and 2009; Hewlett and Winn 2014. 18  Parkin 1992, 104-5; Erdkamp 2000, 168; Rawson 2003, 103; Laes 2011a, 50. 19  While the Maternital Mortality Ratio has been steadingly decreasing all over the world in the last fifteen years (with 546 per 100,000 as the highest rate in 15

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aggravated these already negative numbers. The risk factors increase in milieux where women are forced to return to physical labor too soon after delivery—one may imagine such scenarios in an Empire where about 80 % of the population lived in more or less rural environments.20 Also the existence of the so-called “mother-in-law-belt” did not have a positive effect on the numbers. Anthropologists have pointed out that pregnant wives, separated from their own families and under the oppressive and presumably highly stressful surveillance of their husband’s mother, were more likely to produce stillbirths or to be in danger themselves during delivery.21 Comparative studies indicate how married women sometimes returned to their natal homes when they were about to give birth, in order to escape the stressful environment of their husband’s house—papyri from Roman Egypt occasionally point to a similar situation. Surely, things must have been worse for those who had no such choice.22 No global statistics exist on chances of a child’s survival in the case of a mother dying in childbed, but case studies on rural Tanzania and rural South Africa have repeatedly suggested a significant child survival effect in the case of maternal death. Such studies distinguish between early maternal death (before or during delivery or within 42 days of childbirth) and late maternal death (within 43-365 days of most recent childbirth). For Tanzania, children orphaned by an early mother’s death only had a chance of 51% of surviving to their first birthday (60% in the late maternal death group), compared to 94% probability for children of surviving mothers. The South African case mentions newborns who experienced an early maternal death at fifteen sub-Saharan Africa), the WHO recommends immediate action to meet ambitious targets for 2030. See http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT/countries and http://www.who.int/gho/maternal_health/countries/en/ [seen 10th of May 2018]. Also, nowadays registration of exact numbers seems problematic, with estimates for 2008 of respectively 1,140, 1,570 and 1,575 per 100,000 for the “worst” cases, namely Malawi, Central African Republic, and Afghanistan circulating on the internet. See http://www.theguardian.com/news/datablog/2010/apr/12/maternalmortality-rates-millennium-development-goals [seen 10th of May 2018]. 20  Scheidel 1995 on household and working patterns in segregrated rural communities. 21  Hrdy 2009, 263. 22  Huebner 2013, 141-61 for insightful remarks on the “mother-in-law belt” in ancient society, and especially 147-49 for childbirth not taking place in the husband’s home, as in O. Max. inv. 267 and O. Florida 14.

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times the risk of dying compared to children whose mother survived.23 These are cases of cultures largely condoning allomaternal nursing, in the same way as Roman society did.24 If one accepts the estimate that on average about 67% of newborns in the Roman Empire would reach their first birthday,25 it seems a fair guess that a Roman baby born out of a mother who died in childbirth only had a 40% chance of surviving for one year. Surely, ancient families did not need statistics to know that there was a potential danger to each delivery. In fact, people in pre-modern societies have always realized the risk, as is illustrated by the Alsatian saying Jede Kindbettere hät e Fues im Grab.26 Throughout antiquity, amulets, gems, rings, oracle sayings, votive tablets and offerings all testify of this omnipresent fear for the perils of pregnancy and childbirth.27 Some inscriptions mention extraordinary numbers of births, in which case the survival of the mother was clearly seen as spectacular. Eventually, the last delivery could turn out to be fatal, as was the case for Festa, who died in the third day after her tenth delivery, leaving her husband and five surviving children behind, whom she had breastfed herself.28 The birth of twins or multiplets enhanced the risk, 23  Finlay et al. 2015 (Tanzania); Clark et al. 2013 (South Africa); ZureickBrown et al. 2013 (global); Hrdy 1992, 436 for striking contrasts with the Ache in Paraguay between infants whose mother had died and those who still had a mother. Centlivres Challet 2017, 900 mentions research from rural Ghana, stating that significant percentages from 16% to 22% can be avoided if the baby is breastfed respectively from the first day or the first hour. 24  Hewlett, Winn 2014, 212 and 225 on cultures who disapprove of allomaternal nursing—in which case the infants are almost surely bound to die after maternal death. 25  Parkin 1992, 67-90. Woods 2007 states that such estimations somehow overestimate infant mortality and underestimate mortality in later years. However, also Woods sticks to high infant mortality as 200 per 1,000. 26  Quoted in Dasen 2015, 284, who refers to the number or 3% of women dying because of the perils of childbed. See also Erdkamp 2000, 168. 27  Dasen 2015, 25-52, 113-52, 281-318. 28  See CLEAfrique 168 = AE 1995, 1793 (Mauretania Caesariensis, 1st-3rd cent. CE). See also CIL 10.2597 (Puteoli, 1st-3rd cent. CE) a mother died at age 32, after having given birth to eighteen children. It is unclear whether the eighteenth delivery was the cause of her death. In both cases, we may suppose that at least some young infants were left without mother. On inscriptions with records of numbers of birth, see Parkin 1992, 94-95 and Laes 2004, 168.

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as testified in an epigram by Antipater of Thessalonice on Polyxo who had her entrails broken by triplets—while she died in the hands of the midwife, the babies survived.29 People in antiquity likely realized that youth or advanced age of the mother increased the risk, for both mother and child.30 From Ankara comes a unique witness with respect to a certain Aeturnia Zotica, wife of a lictor of the praetorian legate, who is commemorated by her husband and died at age fifteen. It was her first delivery, and while she passed away sixteen days after the event, it is explicitly stated that the child, a son, survived.31 Teimonis from Crete is mentioned as having died at a very young age (νέαν πάνυ). She left two little orphan children, and only her parents are mentioned as deeply mourning.32 The case of the mother dying with the baby surviving was sensed as a paradoxical situation: one and the same event brought life and death. Some inscriptions explicitly elaborate on this theme, most explicitly in a Hellenistic epigram from Erythrae, mentioning a mother aged sixteen. On her birthday, she died in childbirth: on the same calendar date, the Moira and the maia (midwife) brought her a joyful day and death. Though it is not stated explicitly, we may surmise that the phrase βιοτὰν εὔτοκον means that the baby survived.33 Even more explicit on the cruel coincidence of fate is a Jewish epitaph from Egyptian Leontopolis. As an infant, Arsinoe had been left motherless with her father. Once she had reached the prime of youth, she was married out by her father ... and died, while giving birth to her first born, who would now in turn perpetuate the cycle of motherlessness.34

29  AP 7.168. There is no mention of who is going to take care of the infants, as the emphasis is on the exceptional triplets. See Dasen 2015, 242. 30  Early motherhood is a factor for death in childbirth rates in present-day developing countries too, as is underage marriage for mortality and health statistics of girls. See Frier 2015 on Roman antiquity, with many comparative views. Musca (1988, 158 and 165) has identified 23 inscriptions from the city of Rome in which a deceased wife had married before age twelve—none of these, however, mentions death in childbirth. 31  CIL 3.6759 (Ankara, second half 2nd cent. CE). 32  SEG 32.896 (2nd/1st cent. BCE). 33  IEry 308 (4th cent. BCE). See Samama 2003, 8 and Dasen 2015, 242. 34  CIJUD 2.1510 (5? BCE).

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ANCIENT PHYSICIANS’ SILENCE

23

ON THE MATTER

In the seven books of the Hippocratic Epidemics, pregnancy-related cases occupy between 3.4% (Book 8) and 38% (Book 3) of the total cases.35 For the present chapter, I listed the cases which probably point to maternal death with the baby’s survival. Reference

Mother’s surroundings

Baby surviving

Details

1. Epid. 1, Isle of Thasos. Daughter, Fever and rigor only started case 4 (2, 684, 10 - Husband most probably the fourteenth day after 688, 8 Littré) mentioned. surviving. delivery, with maternal death on the twentieth day of the illness. 2. Epid. 1, Husband case 11 (2, 708, 6 - mentioned. 710, 11 Littré)

Daughter, After normal delivery, fever most probably started on the second day, surviving. with maternal death on the sixth day of the illness.

3. Epid. 3, No relatives case 12 (3, 62, 11 - mentioned. 66, 11 Littré)

Son, probably The mother was about surviving. seventeen years of age, and lay sick by the Liar’s Market, after giving birth in a first and painful delivery. Death on the fourteenth day.

4. Epid. 3, case 2 (second series) (3, 108, 5 112, 12 Littré)

Isle of Thasos. Daughter, The mother lay sick by the No relatives most probably Cold Water. Acute fever mentioned. surviving. started on the third day after delivery. However, for a long time before delivery she had been suffering from fever, being confined to bed and averse to food. She died on the eightieth day.

5. Epid. 3, case 14 (second series) (3, 140, 14 142, 4 Littré)

City of Cyzicus. No relatives mentioned.

35

Twin daughters, probably surviving.

Difficult labor, resulting in acute fever from the first day, and death on the seventeenth day.

 Demand 1994, 168-83 has collected and translated all passages; see p. 167 for the statistics.

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The listed cases offer glimpses of realities not often described in other ancient sources. When the delivery is reported as normal, with problems only starting some days later, we have every reason to suspect that the child survived (cases 1, 2, and 4). In the cases of the delivery being mentioned as difficult, the probability of the baby not surviving is somewhat higher (3 and 5), though the opposite may well also be true. What stands out, however, is that the Hippocratic doctors do not bother to mention the child’s survival at all. Social historians are particularly struck by the young woman with a son lying sick by the Liar’s Market. She died after fourteen days (3). No husband or relatives are mentioned, so her conditions might have been very bleak, and one wonders what would have happened with her baby son. Even more tragic is the mother lying sick by the Cold Water in Thasos, again apparently unmarried. She had been ill for a long time before the delivery. Since acute fever started after the third day, and her struggle would go on for another eighty days, she was not in any position to take care of her infant daughter (4). Scholars have noted a strong predominance of female offspring in cases of maternal death. One wonders whether this can be linked to the ancient association of male with the right side as being quicker to develop and move in the womb, and thus causing the child to be stronger and better able to get out.36 A Hippocratic aphorism states that if a woman is pregnant with a male child, she has a good complexion. A poor complexion means a female child.37 Some scholars have hypothesized that this reflects how in reality post-partum care was lower if the baby was a girl. While such is attested by anthropologists as far as baby girls are concerned, it remains unclear how this would affect mothers, who had to be kept healthy in order to have a boy in a following delivery.38 The Hippocratic collection was part and parcel of the intellectual heritage of physicians in the Roman Empire, who commented extensively on writings such as the Epidemics. However, no instances of maternal death with infant survival occur in the extensive works of Galen.39 36

 Flemming 2002, 107.  Hippoc. Aph. 5.42 (4.546 Littré). 38  Demand 1994, 49 (less post-partum care); Flemming 2002, 107 (nuancing for mothers). 39  Mattern 2008, 195 (n270) and 202 (n350) on remarkable cases of miscarriage, not mentioned in the Hippocratic collection. 37

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The same counts for Soranus, who in the fourth book of his Gynaecology devotes considerable attention to the critical situation of difficult childbirth (dystokia).40 Soranus points to the importance of the life of the mother. Even if one loses the infant, it is necessary to care for the mother.41 In the seventh century CE, Paul of Aegina comments upon embryotomy: “if the woman might be saved, let us do it; if not, we will not intervene.”42 Only talmudic sources explicitly discuss the ethical issue as to which life has to be given priority, the mother’s or the baby’s. If a woman had great difficulty in giving birth, cutting up the child within her womb was allowed, because her life had priority over the child’s. However, once the head of the baby had passed the mother’s genitals, it was considered a living being, and the operation was therefore no longer permissible. The Jewish sources are very much in line with the Graeco-Roman physicians in recognizing the great perils of embryotomy.43 The Caesarean section comes up as an obvious scenario for the mother dying with the baby surviving. For antiquity, the procedure is mainly mentioned in tales of mythology. In real life, it was performed on animals. Very few actual human cases from antiquity are known, though there is the well-known story about an ancestor of Julius Caesar and a general named Manilius being born in this way. In these cases, the death of the mother was understood as obvious.44 Roman legislation mentions the possibility of the excision of an infant from the mother’s womb, but only after the mother’s death. According to this law, it was forbidden to bury a pregnant woman before the embryo had been excised: otherwise such would clearly cause “the promise of life to perish” with the mother.45 40  See Gourevitch 1995 and 2004 for extensive and thorough studies on the matter. 41  Sor. Gyn. 4.9. 42  Paul Aeg. 3.74. 43  Kottek, Baader 2000, 94-95. See Mishnah, Oholot 7:6 on the ethical issue. 44  Gladigow 1995; Gourevitch 2004. See Plin. NH 7.47 on an ancestor of Caesar and on Manlius. See Servius, In Aen. 1.286 on Julius Caesar born after a Caesarean section, a highly unlikely statement, since Caesar’s mother survived her son’s birth. Some Jewish texts and commentaries from the Mishnah and the Talmud, second century CE, suggest being “born through the belly wall” with the mother surviving. See Boss 1961, referring to M. Kerithoth 1:5. 45  Dig. 11.8.2. The law, called the lex regia, was ascribed to king Numa Pompilius.

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In many cultures worldwide, people have been known to be prepared for such emergencies as a helpless baby and a mother dying. However, this always seems to be a matter of concern for families or sometimes even the broader community. It never was an issue for doctors.46 In the same way, many such cases and vital decisions undoubtedly passed by unmentioned in the medical records. Soranus does not cite maternal death as a reason for considering a baby “not worth the rearing” after inspection by the midwife.47

TWO SITUATIONS RARELY DESCRIBED: (1) ABANDONMENT OR INFANTICIDE AFTER MATERNAL DEATH An extensive sample of sixty cultures in the eHRAF identifies a set of circumstances that typically lead to child exposure or infanticide. Maternal death is ranked among the motives, together with other circumstances such as: an infant sired by a man other than the mother’s current partner; a defective neonate or a baby which according to cultural interpretations was considered weak (like one pair of twins); insufficient interbirth intervals; or the absence of male support combined with poor economic conditions.48 Though no certainty can be obtained about exact numbers for ancient society, there is no doubt that the frequency of child abandonment and infanticide was high enough to be shocking to modern sensibilities.49 Though all scenarios as described in the eHRAF are encountered in the ancient sources, the case of maternal death leading to the decision of exposure or infanticide is never mentioned at all. Needless to say, absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, especially in matters which are preferably not discussed in the written record. As such, the ethnographical surveys can be indicative of a situation which must have occurred in antiquity, too.

46

 Hewlett, Winn 2014, 218-19; Hrdy 1992, 436.  Sor. Gyn. 2.10 on which see Laes 2004, 95-96. 48  Hrdy 1992, 431-32 (infanticide); 436 (abandonment). 49  Harris 1994 is a classic on the subject and still the best survey. A good overview of hypotheses and estimations in McKeown 2007, 124-40. 47

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TWO SITUATIONS RARELY DESCRIBED: (2) ANIMAL MILK AS A SOLUTION IN CRISIS SITUATIONS Our documentation is almost completely silent on the subject of animal milk as first nurture, a possibility which comes to the mind in the case of absence or grave illness of the mother. At first sight, the silence of the sources may seem odd, given that the Roman foundation legend on Romulus and Remus fed by a she-wolf describes a situation which comes close.50 Possibly the fear of transmitting animal features through the milk seems to have been a major inhibiting factor for at least the upper class (to the moralists, the danger of transferring servile qualities was an argument against breastfeeding by a wet nurse).51 Throughout history, the only societies that routinely consume mammal’s milk into adulthood and, presumably from early infancy on, are lactose-tolerant are nomadic pastoralists who use the milk from their herds. Before the era of pasteurization, the consumption of animal milk was considerably risky.52 Occasionally, ancient sources do refer to infants taking in animal milk.53 Surely, in the Mediterranean regions goat’s milk was much preferred over cow’s milk. Due to storage issues in hot climates, yogurt or cheese consumption prevailed over simple milk. Bioarchaeologists have linked porotic hyperorstosis in children’s and adults’ bones in Greece with goat’s milk’s anemia. 50  On Romulus and the absence of maternal breastfeeding, see e.g. Prop. 2.6.1920 and 4.4.53-54. Kruschwitz 2002, 195 rightly refers to the blaming of the mother in the latter passage. See also Salzmann-Mitchel 2012, 152-53 on Livy 1.4.6-7 (where Livy himself tells us that the image of the lupa may have been a deformation of Acca Laurentia, who happened to be a prostitute or lupa). Infants suckling an animal’s teats are also mentioned in the Talmud, Yebamoth 114a and in France up to the 20th century, but risks for bacterial infection are high. See Centlivres Challet 2017, 901. 51  Prop. 2.6.19-20 indeed connects the “hard” character of the she-wolf with the fierce psychology of Romulus. See Kruschwitz 2002, 195 and Laes 2011a, 76. 52  Centlivres Challet 2017, 900-1 mentions mortality from 60% to 90% with infants fed with cow’s milk in French foundling hospitals in the 19th century. In all, before pasteurization, animal milk was from three to five times more dangerous than mother’s milk. See Salzman-Mitchell 2012, 155-56 on animals as a source of milk, in Latin literature mostly in a bucolic context of peacefullness of nature and abundance. Only Verg. Aen. 11.570-72 mentions Metabus nursing his infant daughter Camilla with mare’s milk. 53  Hdt. 2.2. One wonders what happened on the occasion that an infant was not able to suck milk from the breast, a case reported by Cael. Aurel., Morb. ac. 3.105.

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Archaeologists have found baby bottles, but most seem to have been used at the somewhat later age of weaning. The possibility cannot be ruled out that in certain environments where maternal milk was unavailable, animal milk was used as a last solution.54 THE FATHER’S AGENCY:

IN SEARCH OF MILK

The death of the mother in childbirth with the child surviving made the father more strongly involved in the decision making, since the evidence suggests that in normal circumstances, childbirth was often considered an exclusively female affair.55 When confronting this precarious situation, the father could seek the immediate help of a wetnurse. Ancient society was an environment which largely condoned allomaternal nursing, and the available evidence suggests that calling upon a wet nurse was common practice, at least in the middle classes and the higher echelons of society.56 Possibly, this higher-class custom lead to imitation by the people of the lower classes, who in their turn had their children breastfed by others.57 Ethnologists have pointed to dramatic situations of scarcity of allomaternal milk and wet nurses, which lead to the death of an infant after a desperate search by the father, who often lacked financial means to solve the situation. A late ancient source offers a glimpse of such a critical situation. A touching story reports on the birth of a baby whose mother died. The father, viewing the child as the only 54

 Fox 2012, 419 on goat milk; Jaeggi 2019 on feeding bottles.  Laes 2011a, 58-61. A passage in Plutarch strongly suggest that fathers among others were not supposed to see their own infant children, because of the possible influence of the evil eye. Plut. Quaest. Conv. 5.7.4, 681f-82a, also mentioning male friends and relatives. See Dasen 2015, 287. Plutarch is not just thinking of encounters just after the delivery. 56  Laes 2011a, 69-70. Specific mentions of lactation by the mother herself are much more frequent in Greek than in Latin literature. Available material starting from Homer to the tragic writers and the Athenian orators suggests that high- and middle-class mothers breastfed their children. See Salzmann-Mitchell 2012, 144-51, with Lys. 1.9-10 about Euphiletus’ wife, who is represented as actively and exclusively involved in the nursing of her baby. 57  As is widely attested from the modern period on. See Hrdy 1992, 415-21 (citing 90% of the infants being born in Paris or Lyon nursed by women other than the biological mother); Hewlett and Win 2014, 212 for anthropological parallels. 55

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memorial of his love for his wife, searched for a wet nurse. The woman unfortunately could not provide enough milk, but nevertheless carried on breastfeeding the child for almost a year. When the severely emaciated and weakened child almost died from fever, his desperate father took him to Saint Martin’s church in order to have him baptised. The baptism did not seem to offer much help but, covered with tears, the poor man laid the child near Saint Martin’s grave, after which it recovered.58 A Christian epitaph, heavily damaged, seems to testify of the same desperate efforts taken by a father to secure food for his little baby.59 In a papyrus contract from Alexandria in 5 BCE we read about a freedwoman Kallityche who was ill and so no longer able to continue breastfeeding. It was her female patron who decided to hand over the baby girl to a slave wet nurse belonging to Gaius Ignatius Maximus.60 THE FATHER’S

AGENCY: THE FATHER’S ACTS AND EMOTIONS

A funerary inscription from Paros mentions the “unstoppable Fury of the newborn infant,” which led to his nineteen-year-old mother’s death by a fatal hemorrhage. The child also died, never making it out of the mother’s womb. The father was left with one surviving little boy. This is the only example of the blaming of the fetus, whose fetal agency is described as the ultimate cause of the fatal event, in this case for both mother and child.61 No signs of differential treatment of a child who was in a way held responsible for the death of its mother have survived in the ancient sources.62 Some epitaphs rather soberly comment that the father was left with the child after the mother’s death in childbirth, as was the case with eighteen-year-old Theophila, who died on the isle of Syros.63 In 58  Gregory of Tours, VM 2.43. See Laes 2011b, 45. See Hewlett and Win 2014, 218 for anthropological parallels. 59  ICUR 2.5492. 60  P. Berol. inv. 13103R. See Manca Masciadri and Montevecchi 1984, 86-88. 61  Hong 2012, 81-85 on the medical discourse of the “battle in the womb,” with similar blaming strategies of the fetus. See IG 12.5.310 (Paros, 2nd cent. CE). 62  Hrdy 1992, 426-27 on differential treatment of wet-nursed charges in the Middle Ages and the modern period. 63  IG 12.5.675 (3rd cent. CE).

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Phrygian Hierapolis, Apollonia left behind her newborn infant and her husband Apollonius, who in utter despair ran to her bedroom. Her body is said to have been boiling and hot in order to be prepared to fulfil the task of breastfeeding.64 An inscription from Crete mentions the illness of a young woman, who left her husband with a young infant.65 Other inscriptions elaborate on the father’s difficult situation and the way he tried to cope with maternal death and a surviving baby.66 A Christian inscription from Mauretania Caesariensis mentions bad luck and delivery as the reason for the death of Rusticeia Matrona. Her husband is encouraged to cherish their son as a remembrance of their union.67 A most touching example comes from Carthage. The stone mentions the slave couple Hermes and Daphnis. It is explicitly said that the master had not wished her to become pregnant. When she was dying in childbirth, he manumitted her, while Hermes was meant to be freed before her. In despair, she asks who is now supposed to nurse the baby and to secure a longer life for the child.68 The dramatic character of the situation was even more strongly accentuated when a father turned out to be left with more than one child to take care of. Hippodamia from the city of Apt died in childbirth: her husband Apolaustus was left with twins.69 In the Anthologia Palatina, the theme of the mother dying with one twin, with the other twin being left to the father occurs, in two epigrams.70 A third-century inscription from Picenum mentions a woman dying at age eighteen and leaving behind her three children. Undoubtedly, the husband took care of finding appropriate allomaternal nursing for at least some of the children.71  SEG 62.1227 (150-100 BCE).  IC 3.4.39 (1st cent. BCE). 66  See already CIL 3.6759. Epigrams from the Anthologia Palatina frequently mention the father’s despair and sorrow when he was left with the baby. See AP 6.348; 7.163 (father left with another child, three years old), 164 and 165 (same subject) 67  CIL 8.20288. Cf. above on the child as memorial of conjugal love. 68  CIL 8.24734. 69  ILN 4.32 = AE 1973.326. 70  AP 7.464 and 465. There is no suggestion of one part of the twins being considered the “evil” part, as is attested in ethnographic records. 71  AE 1985.355. See also CIL 8.24967a: par]vulis filiis du[obus ---] / [--- rel]ictis decess[it ---] / [--- Pri]mitiv[us], but the fragmentary state of the inscription does not make it clear whether it was the father or the mother who had died. 64 65

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An epitaph from Spoleto from the year 420 CE mentions Exuperia, who died at age 26 after a marriage of ten years, leaving behind her children—mind the plural—whom she was breastfeeding herself, and her husband, who now had “to fullfil the sad task of double parenthood” (triste ministerium gemini solvere parentis).72 Five-year-old Apollinaris, son of a soldier named Longinus Iullus from the Legio XV in Carnuntum, is said to have been nourished without his mother, with the saliva of his father.73 This unique attestation probably refers to the father administring the pre-chewed food, after a period of breastfeeding by a wet nurse. Many cultures with an extended lactation period of about three years as Roman society tend to diminish the role of a wet nurse or other allomaternal caretaker after the age of one—the mother or another close family member then takes over.74 This case strongly reminds us of the Byzantine example of the father of Theodore Tiron. A touching instance from the cemetery of Cyriaca ad sanctum Laurentium in Rome concerns a father yearning for his sweet, nine-year-old boy Dalmatius. As an infant, the boy had been nourished by his father, without the help of the mother.75 A father taking care of infants, whether forced by circumstances of maternal death or just of his own free will, brings up the topic of gender. While in the higher classes the education of little children undoubtedly belonged to the female sphere of servants, there are also instances of Roman aristocratic men, fathers or grandfathers, who are depicted as showing deep love and affection for little babies. In this sense, there is no need to presume that Romans considered a father performing such duties as “abnormal” or “utterly strange.”76 What we do not find in the Roman records, are fathers who by means of their 72

 CIL 11.4969.  CSE 16 (Carnuntum, second half of the first century CE): Festio [--] / Longini / Iulli mil(itis) leg(ionis) / XV Apol(linaris) f(ilius) h(ic) s(itus) e(st) / an(norum) V nutritu[s] / sine matre / salivis suis / spes et corona / fuit patris sui / Fatus et Fortuna / iniquiter iudicavit / p(ater) f(aciendum) c(uravit). 74  Kruschwitz 2002, 195-96 suggests that Festio’s mother had died in childbed and also interpretes the reference to saliva as chewing of the food by the father, referring to Scholia in Ar. Eq. 717 and Arist. Rh. 1407a. He points to studies on saliva in antiquity and the possibility that the expression salivis suis nutriri belongs to the sermo castrensis and indicates growing up at own strength. 75  ICUR 7.17431. 76  Laes 2011a, 100-6 on the sentimental discourse concerning fathers and young children. 73

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breast act as pacifiers of little children—a situation which has been observed in the case of a missing mother in many cultures.77 Still, there might be reminders of it in the observations of parallels between the anatomy of the male and female breasts, and the equation between fathers and nutrices with Greek and Latin writers.78 Artemidorus mentions the dream of a childless husband. He saw his own breasts producing milk, and the dream came true by the fact that the couple indeed got children.79 All this does not detract from the fact that most people viewed the situation of young children left with only their fathers as unusual. Propertius has phrased most touchingly how a deceased wife would address her husband who was left with three children, though not directly in the context of orphans at a very young age.80 A similar situation is depicted in late ancient literary evidence by Sidonius Apollinaris. Lady Filimatia was nearly thirty years old when she died, leaving behind her husband and five orphaned children. The cause of her death was in all likelihood pregnancy or the consequences of it. Apollinaris explicitly states that had the mother survived, and the invalid father taken, the little ones would seem less helpless than now.81 The same writer also mentions a widower who was left with his little daughter, who is called the sole pledge of his lost wife’s love. In his kind way of upbringing, he combined the tasks of the tender grandfather, the caring mother, and the kind father.82 THE ROLE

OF OTHER AGENTS

For richer households, we can safely assume the presence of a reservoir of female slaves who could immediately act as wet nurses in cases of maternal death. Tens of inscriptions by nurslings for their nurses 77

 Hewlett and Witt 2014, 204 and 213.  Laes 2011a, 76. 79  A kind of solidarity between husband and wife is suggested, making him symphatetic towards her, since he had to go through the same difficulties as a woman who has to raise and feed children. See Artem. 1.16. 80  Prop. 4.11.75-85: the father now has to perform the mother’s duties; he has to kiss their tears away. If he himself weeps, he needs to do without the children seeing it. 81  Sid. Apoll. Epist. 2.8. 82  Sid. Apoll. Epist. 4.9.4. 78

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or vice versa survive and have been studied intensely—they very rarely provide information on employment of a wet nurse after maternal death, though some suggest a scenario that comes very close to it. A one-year-old slave girl Athenais is commemorated by her wet nurse Hilara, her father Eutychus, and a certain man named Thesmus. It is highly probable that this girl had never been nursed by her mother, who probably had died; though, likely being a slave herself, the mother may also have been taken away by the master who wanted her to perform other jobs.83 Despite the considerable number of sources we have at our disposal, it is almost impossible to find an unambiguous instance of a wet nurse of a baby who had lost his mother.84 Elevenmonth-old Eminens is only commemorated by his nutrix Valeria Hygia, as is two-year old Ammonius by his wet nurse Memmia Ephesia. In these instances it cannot be stated with certainty that the nursling’s mother was no longer alive when the child died, though it is a possibility.85 Two-year-old Iuvenalis is gratefully remembered by his grandmother and his wet nurse; no parents are refered to.86 Sometimes, the sources give more insight into servants’ agency. In the novel Chaereas and Callirhoe, we read about a certain Leonas, who was responsible for taking care of the very young child of his master Dionysius, since the mother had unfortunately died. Leonas is presented with an offer to buy a Sybarite slave woman and to present her to Dionysius as the ideal care taker of the little child. In this way he could himself remain influential to the education of the child, before a stepmother would come into the scene.87 Stepparenting and fostering were obvious possibilities in communities where instant help after the death of a mother was provided by close kin or other people 83  CIL 6.12600. See Bradley 1986, 208 and Dasen 2015, 252 for possible scenarios. Theoretically, the word nutrix may also have been used to indicate the biological mother, though this is most unlikely in the present case. See Dasen 2015, 10. 84  For the literary record, Heliod. Aeth. 5.8.17 mentions a father Tyrrhenus living with two sons (the eldest sons were already married and kept a house themselves) and their nurse, because their mother had died but a while ago. Nowhere is it stated at what age these two sons became orphans, though the fact that they slept with their father in the same room, while the nurse had a room by herself, suggests that they were already teenagers. In this case, the nurse did not enter the scene when they were infants. 85  CIL 6.17157; CIL 6.34383. 86  CIL 6.20938. 87  Charit. 1.12.6-10.

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available for support in proximity.88 The situation is suggested in the Senecan Controversia 4.6.89 Artemidorus mentions a slave who dreamt that he received a boiled egg from his mistress, which he immediately shelled. After this, he threw the shell away. In real life, his mistress gave birth and died, and the servant was ordered by his master to take over the responsibility of raising the baby. The logic of the dream is explained as follows: as a shell, the mother vanished; but the egg itself, that is the baby, survived and secured a living for the slave who saw the dream.90 These are the only literary instances in which male servant’s agency in the case of young children without mother is so explicitly mentioned. The epigraphical record suggests more. Again, the tantalizingly obscure character of Roman epitaphs makes a full understanding of individual circumstances difficult to attain. Alexander, a five-month-old infant was commemorated by his father Marinus and Anthus, who is called his tata. The three of them were slaves, and the absence of a mother is striking. She may have predeceased the young child.91 Other female caretakers of infant orphans have almost completely gone under the radar of the ancient sources.92 Ethnologists and anthropologists have pointed to lactating grandmothers as a very frequent solution in the case of a mother’s defiency to breastfeed. There must have been such grandmothers in Roman antiquity, just as there were in European history until recently.93 Some women were young 88

 Hewlett 1991, 19-23 for the pattern in many pre-industrial societies.  Watson 1995, 4-5. A father had sent his two sons by different wives to the countryside. The mother of the former child had died in childbirth. Years later, the young men are recalled; the second wife wants to know which of the children is her own, but the half-brothers cannot be distinguished by their appearance. Watson 1995, 136 suggests that the number of stepmothers created through death (e.g., in childbirth) would not have been inconsiderable. However, she does not cite any further evidence about stepmothers coming in during the first few years of childhood. 90  Artem. 5.85. 91  CIL 6.11395. See Bradley 1991b, 73. 92  Orib. 15.7 (Daremberg 3, 130) mentions Mnesitheus of Cyzicus saying that if a mother cannot breastfeed, help of a lactating friend, relative, or woman resembling the mother was needed. See Centlivres Challet 2017, 902. 93  Hewlett and Win 2014, 203-8 on the eHRAf, stating that in ten of the thirty cultures where mother death was the reason for allomaternal nursing grandmothers were identified as the ones providing nursing. Hrdy 2009, 233-72 (global and historical). See also Sear and Mace 2008. 89

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enough to have grandchildren and still not have reached menopause. Wet nurses might have been trained to give milk over an extended period of time, even to different generations of children. Even women passed the age of menopause are sometimes able to give milk. Two Roman inscriptions mention an avia nutrix. Though it is not too difficult to find other instances of young children being raised by grandmothers, there is not a single instance that suggests the grandmother was the one who nursed the child.94 A declamation exercise, however, seems to come quite close. A young husband is described as being too obedient towards his wife. Immediately after birth, he sends his little son to the grandmother so that she might raise and nourish him. Only after his father’s death, does the boy (puer) return home after many adventures. Before that, however, he had been considered lost, the victim of pirates. In a typical scene of recognition, it is the grandmother who recognizes the boy. When a corpse washed ashore, the mother had it buried as if it were her son, and when the boy turned up in a slave market, only the grandmother, who had developed deep maternal feelings for him, was able to recognize him. Given the general lack of appreciation of Roman aristocrats for breastfeeding, it is rather unlikely that in such a milieu a grandmother’s nurturing would have included providing lactation herself (or if it were the case, it was not a thing to be mentioned).95 What remains is the possibility of exclusive involvement of the grandmother in the taking care of the baby, while the mother was completely absent. Though obviously not meant to be taken as a “true story,” Quintilian’s audience of students of rhetoric must have recognized it as a possible scenario.96 A bereaved husband who took over the care of the infant together with the grandparents after the death of a young mother is explicitly attested in a Greek inscription from Acarnia. Two surviving children are mentioned.97  AE 2007.298 (Isola Sacra) and CIL 5.3710 (Verona); see Laes 2015. For literary and papyrological instances of grandmothers taking care of little children with the mother alive (and also caring), see Vuolanto 2015, 149 and Vuolanto 2017, 380 and 388. 95  Laes 2011a, 69-70, also pointing to exceptions, with women explicitly acknowledging breastfeeding of their baby as in CIL 6.19128 (Rome, 2nd-3rd cent. CE). 96  Quint. Decl. min. 388 pr. 1. See also Decl. min. 388.9-10, a fierce attack against aristocratic maternal behavior, with a pointed comparison to the animal world, where mothers care for their offspring. 97  IG 9.1² 2.312a lines 5-6 (2nd cent. BCE). 94

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Grandfathers are also attested as being closely involved in the upbringing of very young children. In Ausonius’s case, such was again connected with the absence of the mother, though there is no indication that she was incapable of early upbringing for one reason or another.98 The later emperor Antoninus Pius was known to have spent his early childhood years with his grandfathers, both paternal and maternal; and Marcus Aurelius had fond childhood memories of his grandfather (and even great-grandfather). In both cases, no absence or death of the mother is implied.99 When aunts lived in close proximity, they could play a vital role in the survival of an infant. The information we have on Seneca’s earliest childhood years is meager, but he mentions how he was carried to Rome in the arms of his mother’s stepsister. Is this mere rhetorical exaggeration? Seneca in any case continues by saying that it was by his aunt’s “devoted and motherly nursing” that he recovered from a lengthy illness (illius pio maternoque nutricio per longum tempus aeger convalui). She is also said to share maternal feelings for the whole family. She lived on to support Seneca later on when he went for the quaestorship ... as did his mother Helvia, to whom he wrote the consolation named after her. While it was surely not maternal absence due to death that caused the aunt’s involvement, it remains a mystery why she became so intimately involved to the point of being vital for the young child’s survival.100 Two inscriptions are again both striking for the absence of the mother—and frustrating since we cannot possibly reconstruct the whole context (let alone prove involvement in the first childhood years): a father and an aunt are commemorating a deceased child.101 Other sources indeed suggest close involvement of aunts (even of a milk-sister) when a child is born, also in cases when the mother is alive and well.102 We may imagine that they would surely do so in cases of emergency.  Auson. Par. 4 (grandfather); Par. 5 (grandmother).  SHA Ant. Pius 1. 8-9; M. Aur. Med. 1.17 even mentions good grandparents and good parents as a thing for which one should show gratitude to the gods. 100  Sen. Helv. 19.2. 101  CIL 12.5866 (Vienna, Gallia Narbonensis) though the mother might be mentioned in the lost part of the inscription); CIL 9.899 (Lucera, Apulia) aunt and tata. 102  Pers. 2.31-34 (grandmother and aunt in birth ritual); Apul. Met. 2.3.1 (milk-sister Byrrhena was involved in the early education of Lucius); Apul. Met. 5.14.2 (sisters are ready to help Psyche as a young mother). 98 99

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On a final note, a letter by Sidonius Apollinaris from the year 472 CE to his friend Aper mentions the land of the Avernians as the homeland of Aper’s grandfather Fronto and grandmother Auspicia “who from a single heart after her daughter’s death gave to the helpless orphan a devotion great enough for two.” A maternal aunt Frontina, a virgin holier than a nun, is also mentioned—all three of took care of Aper when he had become an orphan—again, we do not know at what age exactly.103 MEROVINGIAN

AND BYZANTINE EVIDENCE: CONTINUITY AND CHANGE?

This section looks at the evidence for Merovingian Gaul for the Latin West and the Byzantine East up to the year 800. It does not come as a surprise that scholars of the early medieval period have also pointed to the accumulated risk run by Merovingian women, due to the early first age at marriage, frequent pregnancy and post-natal infections.104 Death in childbirth is also a theme that is mentioned in the Byzantine sources.105 For both the Merovingian and the Byzantine dossier, the theme of death in childbirth turns up in hagiographical and historiographical texts. Also, the perils of pregnancy and delivery are often used as an argument to persuade young girls to dedicate themselves to virginity.106 Most revealing for late ancient thought is a decree from 531 in the Justinianic Code, claiming special legal protection for women, as compensation for the dangers of pregnancy and delivery.107 The Byzantine records offer the richest documentation for the present theme. When his mother had died during labor, a certain Theodore’s father started to feed his son with a gruel made from wheat, barley and  Sid. Apoll. Epist. 4.21.4.  Wood 1998, 168-69; Halsall 2010, 383-412, esp. 390 and 411. Mereira 2000, 175-76 mentions Merovingian women as fearful of childbirth in their dreams and visions. 105  It appears as an entry in the indices of Papaconstantinou and Talbot 2009, 317. 106  See Krause 1994-1995, vol. I: 41-42 for useful lists of references. 107  Cod. Iust. 8.17.12.5. In Inst. 3.3.4, Justinian explicitly mentions this as an extension of rights granted to women in the times of Emperor Hadrian in the senatusconsultum Tertullianum. 103

104

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honey, which he administred to the baby in a glass vessel with a nippleshaped pin. There are late antique archaeological finds in child burials which have also been identified as baby feeders. When the weaning period started, Theodore began chewing bread, made of the finest wheat flour and soaked in white wine, which his father fed him with a spoon.108 Since the mother had died, the father Erythrius did not want to take the risk of hiring a nurse who by means of her milk could pass her pagan beliefs and customs to the little child. 109 An aversion for “stranger’s milk” by a wet nurse comes up regularly in Byzantine sources, as in the case of the tragic life of the boy Michael who had to be nurtured on it, since his mother had died in childbirth.110 While pleas for maternal breastfeeding appear in writing of philosophers and moralists from the Roman Empire on, late ancient and Byzantine literature strongly emphasizes it as a means to strengthen family cohesion and emotional bonds, as well as transmitting maternal values to the child. This makes maternal death in labor a very peculiar situation, as is clear from a fourth-century epitaph for a young Christian women from Athens. She died, and the consequence of this tragedy is highlighted by the observation that her infants will have to go unsuckled from then on.111 Theophano, the later wife of Emperor Leo VI (886-912), lost her mother at the time she was still breastfeeding. After several unsuccessful attempts to find a substitute, her father was able to find only one servant who could please little Theophano, and she continued breastfeeding her for several years.112 Two Byzantine sources mention a grandmother taking care of a baby after the death of the mother—again the verb τρέφειν refers to nourishment, though it might have been wet nurses who provided 108  Pitarakis 2009, 215 for a rich bibliography on this passage and on baby feeders. The life of Theodore may be traced in AASS Nov. 4.49:3. See Cojocaru 2016, 133. In more than one way, Oana-Maria Cojocaru (University of Umeå) has been helpful with my search through Byzantine sources. I owe her many thanks for this. 109  Herter 1964. 110  Talbot 2009, 29. The source is from 1208: Kolovou 2001 (Michaelis Choniatae epistulae), Epist. 100 and 101. Possibly, the early sickness of the child in the form of a tumorous swelling on the forehead was viewed as a consequence of such nurture. 111  Extensive surveys of sources on Byzantine infants and breastfeeding in Beaucamp 1982 and Pitarakis 2009, 211. The epitaph is presented by PapanikolaBakirtzi 2002, 484-85. 112  Life of Theophano 4: ed. Kurtz 1898, 1-24.

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lactation, rather than the grandmother herself.113 Famous Byzantine cases of death in childbirth with the baby surviving also include Theodora’s of Thessalonice mother, who died some days after Theodora was born, and Michael Psellos’ sister, who died shortly after she gave birth to her baby who survived.114 Less rich in detail, the Merovingian sources nevertheless have something to tell on this theme. The remarkable story of the father with the emaciated baby due to the bad nurturing by a wet nurse (cf. supra p. 29) reveals not only some distrust of wet nurses, but also that the child was viewed as the pledge of the deep, mutual conjugal love. The richest testimony is an epitaph consisting of 160 verses by Venantius Fortunatus for Vilithuta. This noble girl, who was as an orphan educated by her grandmother, was married out at about age thirteen. She died three years later in childbirth, together with the baby, who was buried with her. There is no single poem in Latin literature which so extensively describes the high hopes and the bitter grief of the surviving father.115 Also for the Latin West from the fourth century on, the sources reveal an increasing emphasis on the importance of maternal breastfeeding, and a decrease of mentions on the importance of wet nurses, who obviously continued to exist.116 CONCLUSION In this chapter, I bring together sources from diverse genres, periods and contexts—snippets of information that, taken together, provide  Life of Niketas of Medikion 4-5 (his mother died eight days after the boy’s birth, and he was raised by his grandmother). See ed. Delehaye 1886 (Vita Nicetae hegumeni Medicii auctore Theostericto. Acta Sanctorum: Apr. I. 3rd edition, Brussels), p. 19. 114  Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 4 (See ed. Paschalides 1991 (Ὁ βίος τῆς ὁσιομυροβλύτιδος Θεοδώρας τῆς ἐν Θεσσαλονίκῃ. Διήγηση περὶ τῆς μεταθέσεως τοῦ τιμίου λειψάνου τῆς ὁσίας Θεοδώρας. Thessaloniki), 73. See also Cojocaru 2016, 77 and 100). Michael Psellos, Encomium for his mother 14d. See also “The Most Wise and Hypertimos Psellos, Encomium for his Mother,” in Kaldellis 2006, 29-109, 75. 115  Venant. Fortunat., Carm. 4.26. See in particular 33-34 (grandmother); 35-36 (marriage at age thirteen); 49-56 (death of mother and child in childbirth); 63-66 (father’s grief). 116  Harper 2011, 226-48 and Laes 2016, 190-92. 113

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information about different scenarios, options, and choices in a situation that was all too common in antiquity, as we may surmise on the basis of parallels from ethnological and anthropological research. The sources do not permit to quantify the phenomenon of motherless and its consequences in any way. Hellenistic epitaphs and Latin inscriptions are the most explicit testimonies on motherless infancy. As such, both the occurrence of the phenomenon and the literary theme seem to be very much subjects of the longue durée. However, a case for change can be made. Some scholars have argued that between the Roman period and the High Middle Ages things changed in the dominant conception of motherhood. The change was fuelled by Christianity.117 In the Christian discourse, both in the East and the West, from the fourth century on, women became more visible. This surely is to be attributed to the popularity of the image of the caring biological and spiritual mother, cradling her child and giving milk herself, like the Virgin Mary. “A mother is so called because something is made from her”: nurturing, strenghtening, protective and loving was the idealized mother.118 In this way, the mother dying in childbirth and/or being unable to take care of the surviving infant, meant that she was unable to take up and fulfill one of her most fundamental duties. One may possibly also suspect a greater sense of guilt or failure regarding those who were not able to fulfill their maternal duties. Although this is certainly a possibility, one always needs to be careful with broad generalizations. After all, this was more a matter of discourse. We have neither personal reports of women, nor first-person documentary accounts on which to build such a case that on a personal level having allomaternal alternatives as a norm would make things emotionally less heavy than a context which strongly emphasized personal maternal duties. Personal grief and bewilderment cannot ever be measured by the standard expectations of a culture.119 For a large part of the population, not much changed with the coming of Christianity. The change was more in discourse and imagery. For schemes and solutions of everyday life, ethnology and 117

 Southon 2017 (not clear on which level the change actually took place— reality or ideology); Atkinson 1991 (making a case for change); Nathan 2000 (stressing both continuity and endurance of tradition). 118  Isid., Etym. 9.5.6: Mater dicitur, quod exinde efficiatur aliquid; cf. Southon 2017, 173-83. 119  Rollet 2001, 32-34.

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anthropology are the disciplines to which we must make recourse for our sketch of vital aspects of ancient life, which are often not narrated in the sources. The contours are offered by comparative research, and the written sources we have at our disposal enable us to add color and texture to the picture. Sketchy as is our evidence on maternal death with infant survival, it nonetheless opens a window on both the discourse and the practice of growing up motherless in antiquity. Even an unfinished painting is worth studying.

3. EVERY WOMAN COUNTS: RETHINKING MATERNAL MORTALITY IN THE BIOARCHAEOLOGICAL CONTEXT Chryssi BOURBOU (University of Fribourg)

MOTHERS

AT RISK: A MILLENNIA-LONG AFFAIR

In 2014, the editors of TIME magazine selected Salome Karwah for the cover of the 2014 “Person of the Year” issue. Salome was an Ebola survivor who, after her recovery, devoted herself to supporting other sufferers, but unfortunately died in 2017 at the age of 29 from complications in childbirth. The irony behind her death is overwhelming: Salome managed to escape the deadly disease devastating her country, only to fall victim years later to the alarming and persistently high rate of maternal mortality in Liberia, West Africa. Worldwide data on maternal mortality, that is data referring to death during pregnancy, birth, or the subsequent 42 days, give a consistent picture of the high risks encountered particularly in the developing countries, where 99% of maternal deaths occur. The World Health Organization reports that 810 women died every day in 2017 from preventable causes related to pregnancy and childbirth.1 The numbers for 2017 are distressing: approximately 295,000 women died during and following pregnancy and childbirth, and the vast majority of these deaths (94%) occurred in low-income countries (the number of maternal deaths per 100,000 live births is 11 versus 462 in high- and low-income countries, respectively), with young adolescent females (ages 10-14) being at the highest risk. 75% of all maternal deaths are attributed to complications, which include severe bleeding (mostly after birth), infections (e.g., malaria), and unsafe abortions. 1

 WHO 2019.

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It stands to reason that maternal mortality has equally troubled past societies: if we project the above-mentioned striking numbers into the past, millions of women must have also died due to pregnancy and delivery complications in the preceding millennia. In cultures across different geographic reasons and historical periods birth has always been considered a powerful event, loaded with cultural meaning as an important rite of passage in the female life cycle. Both pregnancy and delivery have traditionally considered delicate stages and the archaeological record provides rich material evidence of the fear and hope surrounding the fate of pregnant women and their offspring.2 If maternal mortality is a major concern for our own societies and times, and improvement of maternal health a key priority of global policymakers, what could the situation have been in the past? Do we have evidence of childbirth-related burials, medical interventions, and pathological conditions associated with maternal death in the past? This chapter aims to present from a bioarchaeological perspective an outline of the complex interplay of factors surrounding the perilous time of pregnancy and delivery, particularly as they relate to maternal mortality in the past. Due to the scarcity of available studies and constraints of the chapter’s length, I will focus on the Roman era, but also have occasion in the discussion to refer to research relevant to other periods. THE “OBSTETRIC DILEMMA”: A HEAVY

PRICE PAID?

The “obstetric dilemma” hypothesis was outlined by Krogman and Wasburn as a way of conceptualizing the hazardous nature of childbirth, and the term has subsequently been adopted in several scientific fields, e.g., biomedicine and anthropology.3 In order to underscore the fact that human birth has always been difficult, the hypothesis has focused on the evolutionary changes in humans that led simultaneously to a smaller bipedal pelvis and larger-brained offspring: the head of a neonate is approximately 102% the size of the average width of the female pelvic inlet.4 Are evolutionary changes such as 2

 Dasen 2015.  Krogman 1951; Washburn 1960. For a review, see Rosenberg 1992; Trevathan 2011; Wells et al. 2012; and Stone 2016. 4  Rosenberg 1992. 3

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these the primary contributing factors to obstructed labor and the most common causes of maternal deaths? Stone has compared data on pelvic metric analysis of archaeological populations and current standards and concluded that there has been little historical variation and thus challenged us to consider the totality of “women’s lives in the past beyond their reproductive bodies.”5 She also pointed out that pelvic data are always more useful when analyzed together with other parameters that speak to the complexity of the female experience in specific environmental and cultural contexts. Pathological conditions, activity patterns, dietary habits, and cultural practices can all reveal a wealth of information about the risks to which females were subjected, especially during pregnancy and childbirth.6 For example, social expectations of the female body during the Victorian era and environmental conditions likely had a profound effect on the overall female health of all classes: nutritional stress (the prototype of a small, delicate “feminine” body achieved by eating very little), low sun exposure (due to poor industrial air quality combined with the desire for a white pallor), fashion ideals (the use of a corset, starting at the age of 10 years), all had severe health consequences. Nutritional deficiencies (especially rickets, from the lack of vitamin D), coupled with cultural practices (beauty ideals and dress code) resulted in flattened pelvic shape, which was recognized as the primary risk factor for obstetric labor and the major cause of maternal mortality in the 19th century. Thus, the risk in parturition and maternal mortality are better understood as a biocultural construction, in which perspective the difficult nature of childbirth is more than a mere biproduct of human evolution.7 THE MOTHER-FETUS

PAIR IN BIOARCHAEOLOGY

Bioarchaeologists interested in reconstructing childbirth in the past focus on several different lines of investigation: age at death distribution in a human skeletal assemblage; burials of mothers and their fetuses; historical records documenting births and deaths; and evidence of 5

 Stone 2016, 162 with Tab. 1.  Goodman and Martin 2002; Gowland and Knüsel 2006; Agarwal and Glencross 2011; and Stone 2012. 7  Loudon 1997 and Brickley and Ives 2008. 6

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medical instruments and interventions. Still, many of the mothers who died during childbirth will remain invisible to us, particularly if only the soft tissues were affected or the cause of death left no skeletal evidence (e.g., hemorrhage).8 The usually younger age at death of females compared with males in a past population is often attributed primarily to comparatively high female reproductive mortality.9 This broadly accepted view of female vulnerability notwithstanding, direct evidence of deaths at childbirth (e.g., cases of a fetus preserved in the pelvic cavity) are only rarely reported in archaeological contexts, resulting in a rather fragmentary distribution pattern across time and cultures and thus making difficult any real statistical assessment of the true incidence of maternal mortality in the past.10 We should note in this connection that the burials of twins are rare in the archaeological record, and those that have been discovered have more typically been recovered from post-birth contexts;11 very rarely twin fetuses have been discovered still in utero.12 Several factors could account for this archaeological distribution. For example, differences in the time of death of the mother and the fetus during or after childbirth, coupled with possible differences in mortuary treatment, could very well mean that the mother-fetus pair do not enter the burial record simultaneously or with any connection we can trace archaeologically. In fact, childhood in both Greek and Roman cultures was marked by clearly defined rites of passages with respect to the familial acceptance and social debut of the child.13 Thus, it is not surprising that fetuses and perinates were not always buried in the community cemetery, but often in less culturally significant places, like abandoned buildings, domestic spaces, 8  Mummified remains can provide clearer evidence for death during or attributable to childbirth (e.g., Ashworth et al. 1976 and Arriaza et al. 1988). 9  See, e.g., Šlaus 2000; Tocheri et al. 2005; and Shapland et al. 2015. 10  See, e.g., Sjøvold et al. 1974; Hawkes and Wells 1975; Wells 1978; Owsley and Bradtmiller 1983; Persson and Persson 1984; Högberg et al. 1987; Agustí and Codina 1992; Pol et al. 1992; Campillo et al. 1998; Alduc-Le Bagousse and Blondiaux 2002; Malgosa et al. 2004; Liston and Papadopoulos 2004; Seguí et al. 2005; Flores and Sánchez 2007; Kinaston et al. 2009; Cruz and Codinha 2010; Sayer and Dickinson 2013; Willis and Oxenham 2013; Lieverse et al. 2015; and Dupras et al. 2015. 11  See, e.g., Einwögerer et al. 2006; Halcrow et al. 2012; and Flohr 2014. 12  Owsley and Bradtmiller 1983 and Lieverse et al. 2015. 13  Laes 2014 and Dasen 2015.

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workshops, silos, and foundations.14 Furthermore, it is also possible that in many cases fetal remains, which are by nature more fragile, are missed during excavation, despite being preserved in the pelvic cavity, mistaken for the small bones of the hands or animal bones or discovered only later commingled with adult remains during laboratory analysis.15 The archaeological record has also provided us with important—albeit again limited—evidence for possible complications during childbirth through the recovery of calcified objects of biological origin found in female skeletons (above all in the pelvic region). With the aid of advanced imaging techniques (e.g., radiology and computed tomography), scanning electron microscopy, histological analysis, and aDNA analysis, it is now possible to identify specific pathological conditions with potentially fatal consequences for ancient mothers.16 TEXTS

AND BONES: THE

ROMAN

CASE

Medical writers in antiquity, and above all Soranus of Ephesus (2nd century CE), have been studied extensively for their contributions to the gynecological advances of their time. Soranus’s well-known Gynaecology is a meticulous study of the nature of women and the care that ought to be given before and during pregnancy and delivery to both the mother and the newborn. According to Soranus, care for the pregnant woman may be divided into three stages or objectives: (1) maintenance of the pregnancy (recognizing the inherent risks, especially during the first semester); (2) easing symptoms (e.g., pica and a variety of symptoms associated with the expected turmoil of the 14  See, e.g., Blaizot et al. 2003; Baills-Talbi and Blanchard 2006; Alapont Martin and Bouneau 2010; Carroll 2011; Brkojewitsh et al. 2014; and Millet and Gowland 2015. 15  See, e.g., Ingvarsson-Sundström 2003 and Wills and Oxenham 2013. 16  Komar and Buikstra 2003; Isidro et al. 2005; Antikas and Wynn-Antikas 2016; and Devault et al. 2017. Calcified objects (e.g., ovarian teratomas) are also found in Roman contexts (e.g., Charlier et al. 2009 and Armentano et al. 2012). Development of an ovarian teratoma (a type of benign tumor, usually asymptomatic) occasionally results in disturbances of adjacent organs, infection, hemolytic anemia, and may during pregnancy be the cause of an obstructed labor (Armentano et al. 2012, 238).

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stomach and appetite during the first months); and (3) preparation for childbirth.17 In Book II he describes in great detail not only all of the signs announcing an upcoming delivery, but also all of the equipment needed for a normal labor, if one is to be well prepared in advance: “olive oil, warm water, warm fomentations, soft sea sponges, pieces of wool, bandages, a pillow, things to smell, a midwife’s stool or chair, two beds, and a proper room.”18 Similarly precise recommendations are provided for the time of delivery, paying special attention that the persons assisting should “gently allay the anxiety of the gravida” before and after labor.19 Of special importance is the way in which Soranus discusses cases of difficult labor after his description of some common pathological conditions of the uterus, their symptoms, causes, and proposed remedies (e.g., inflammation, hemorrhage). His review of what was considered a difficult labor based on current medical knowledge is thorough, accounting for some of the frequently encountered problems, ranging from the physiology of the pregnant woman to conditions affecting the fetus itself, including: abnormal size (an extremely large body or part of it, e.g., the head); death in utero or abnormal positioning (e.g., breech presentation, i.e., fetus presenting feet first);20 multiple births; and “if a monster has been conceived” (i.e., genetic conditions or deformity).21 If such unfortunate circumstances occur, Soranus provides detailed advice for dealing with such kinds of difficult labor. For example, in the case of breech presentation, he gives detailed and careful instructions for the maneuvers required to alter and straighten the position of the fetus.22 However, there were also cases when extreme practices, such as embryotomy,23 were thought necessary: “if the fetus does not respond to manual traction, because of its size, or death, or impaction in any manner whatsoever, one must proceed to the more forceful methods, those of extraction by hooks and  Sor. Gyn. 1.14-16 (Temkin 1991, 45-57).  Sor. Gyn. 2.1-2 (Temkin 1991, 69-72). 19  Sor. Gyn. 2.4-5 (Temkin 1991, 76-79). 20  Around the thirty-second week a healthy fetus will change presentation to cephalic (Cunningham and Williams 2001, 296). 21  Sor. Gyn. 4.1 (Temkin 1991, 175-83). 22  Sor. Gyn. 4.2 (Temkin 1991, 184-89). 23  Embryotomy refers to the mutilation of a fetus in order to facilitate its removal from the uterus when natural delivery is not possible. 17 18

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embryotomy. For even if one loses the infant, it is still necessary to take care of the mother.”24 At present, our knowledge of the perilous time of childbirth during the Roman period is gradually being enriched by combining different data sets: documentary, archaeological, paleoenvironmental, and biological data. In addition to information provided by the relevant medical texts, artifacts found in the archaeological context, such as surgical instruments or evidence for the administration of substances, such as cannabis to ease the childbirth, permit us to reconstruct aspects of the conditions surrounding pregnancy and delivery.25 Although it is not an easy task to demonstrate the fragile relationship between the mother-fetus pair during the period in question, we will focus on two bioarchaeological studies that have given us a better understanding of maternal and perinatal stress, as well as direct evidence for medical interventions and the sort of complications mothers and children experienced: Aventicum (modern Switzerland, 1st-3rd cents. CE) and the Kellis 2 cemetery in the Dakhleh Oasis (Egypt, ca. 100-450 CE).26 At Aventicum, the capital city of the territory of the Helvetii, the mortality and disease patterns of the perinates, representing 71% of the total non-adult sample (66/93), suggests that pregnancy and the time around birth were extremely challenging. It is argued that environmental constraints, e.g., the risk of infectious diseases, such as malaria, and natural phenomena, such as recurring floods, produced resource scarcity, which in turn could have had a negative impact on the health of the mother-fetus pair. The diagnosis of possible cases of neonatal scurvy could have been the result of undernourished pregnant or lactating women, since the only source of vitamin C for these perinates would have been maternal, via either the placenta or breast milk.27 The Kellis 2 cemetery offers the modern researcher unique insight into the seasonality of conception, neonate morbidity and mortality, and medical complications attending childbirth.28 The authors of  Sor. Gyn. 4.3.9 (Temkin 1991, 189-90).  Instruments: see, e.g., the vaginal speculum in Fig. 1 below (p. 51); evidence of the administration of medicinal cannabis. see Zias et al. 1993 and Zias 1995. 26  Aventicum: https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/177495; Kellis: https://pleiades. stoa.org/places/776189. 27  Bourbou 2018 and Bourbou et al. 2019. 28  Dupras et al. 2015. 24 25

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the most recent studies have noted that over half (53%) of the adult females in the cemetery’s population were of childbearing age, suggesting that many of them could have died from complications during pregnancy and delivery. Such a hypothesis finds further support in Burial 513, in which a newborn was discovered located between the femora of a female, most probably indicating death near or during childbirth. The cemetery also provides evidence of a twin burial, adding to the few cases recovered from Roman context.29 Additionally, a wide range of fractures on the non-adult skeletons is most likely evidence of childbirth-related trauma, frequently observed in cases of difficult birth, particularly when a fetus has to be removed from the uterus by force.30 Some of the bones most commonly affected by birth-related trauma have been documented in the Kellis 2 population, including the clavicle, humerus, cervical vertebrae, and ribs. Such skeletal evidence almost serves as an admonitory illustration of Soranus’s text (see above), in which he specifically describes the care that must be taken in the application of maneuvers required by a difficult labor, so as not to harm the fetus. The majority of the individuals who sustained birth-related fractures likely survived the delivery process;31 and in some cases researchers were able to see the long-term effects of postnatal trauma in adult skeletons. 32 While these individuals might have survived difficult births with a few broken bones, almost certainly many fetuses and neonates did not, whenever an exceptionally difficult labor required more extreme interventions, like embryotomy. We may find evidence of this practice in the cut marks seen on the femoral shaft in a 35-37 week-old fetus from Yewden villa at Hambleden, UK (1st-4th cents. CE),33 as well as in the scattered cut marks to the axial and appendicular skeleton of a full-term fetus discovered at Poundbury Camp in Dorset (4th cent CE).

29

 Crespo et al. 2011.  Cases of difficult birth include, inter alia, a prolonged or obstructed labor (e.g. shoulder dystocia) and breech position. 31  The only exception was a 25-week old fetus, who sustained two rib fractures (Dupras et al. 2015, 64). 32  Molto 2000. 33  Hambleden (https://pleiades.stoa.org/places/79500): Mays et al. 2014; Poundbury Camp: Molleson and Cox 1988. 30

EVERY WOMAN COUNTS

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Figure 1. Replica of a 1st cent CE vaginal speculum. Courtesy of Historical Collections & Services, Claude Moore Health Sciences Library, University of Virginia.

MOTHERLESS IN

ANTIQUITY: SOME FUTURE PERSPECTIVES

Understanding maternal mortality in the past is a difficult task. However, studies of deaths due to pregnancy or childbirth complications represent an exciting new avenue of research with great potential for understanding past lives, since many of the medical conditions and processes are well understood. To this extent, bioarchaeology has much to offer. Yet, in order to extract as much as possible information from the burial record, careful excavation is essential, particularly with respect to the position of the fetus and the meticulous documentation of the overall context. Furthermore, in order to maximize the chances of collecting evidence of female reproductive pathology, careful recovery of materials from the skeleton is also essential. Such materials, like calcified objects (see above), can provide a glimpse into pathological conditions that could not be inferred directly from the study of skeletal remains. Co-burial of a female and a non-adult individual does not always necessarily imply that death was due to delivery complications or a

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genetic condition.34 Differentiating such co-burial contexts is important for better understanding aspects surrounding the perilous times of pregnancy and birth for both the mother and the fetus. Thus, a distinction should be made between cases of in utero, post-birth, and post mortem fetuses.35 Skeletal remains of fetuses found in crouched positions in the pelvis of a female (thus in utero) typically indicate that she died due to complications during pregnancy, before, or during childbirth. In post-birth cases the remains of the non-adult are usually found alongside or on the chest of the adult, with the mortuary arrangement positioned after delivery. Cases of placement on the chest can be archaeologically identified if the majority of the non-adult remains are in the adult pelvic cavity, the legs extended and/or the cranium is inside the ribcage.36 The detailed description of such cases is very important, since they can be often misinterpreted as delivery in breech position.37 Finally, post mortem birth or, as it is sometimes called, “coffin birth,” typically presents with the fetus still in utero when the mother died and subsequently extruded after decomposition, usually between 48-72 hours after her death.38 Post mortem births in the archaeological record can be identified if fetal remains are complete, located inferiorly to and in line with the pelvis outlet, with the head in the opposite direction to the mother.39 Few publications report the overall maternal health status of mothers, but such a systematic consideration is fundamental, since some pre-existing medical conditions, which can be exacerbated by pregnancy and potentially contribute to complications or death, leave skeletal traces (e.g., infectious diseases, anemia, dental disease, congenital anomalies).40 For example, Willis and Oxenham have argued of a female under study from Neolithic Vietnam that the observed dental pathologies, physiological stress in childhood, small size and 34  E.g., the Anglican tradition of interring fetuses not with mothers but adult women who died around the same time (Roberts and Cox 2003, 253). Nowadays DNA analysis can help clarify such relations. 35  Lewis 2007, 33-37; Halcrow et al. 2018, 87-93. 36  Lewis 2007, 34. 37  Halcrow at al. 2018, 91. 38  Lewis 2007, 36; see also Sayer and Dickinson 2013. 39  O’Donovan and Geber 2009. 40  E.g., Owsley and Bradtmiller 1983; Malgosa et al. 2004; Seguí et al. 2005; Flores and Sánchez 2007; Cruz and Codinha 2010; Willis and Oxenham 2013.

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the contracted pelvis might have all been factors in her death and the death of her child.41 It is thus important to explore a wide range of possible factors that can contribute to the observed maternal and fetal deaths. The biological role of women as child-bearers includes significant morbidity and mortality risks, both direct and indirect. The scattered cases of mother-fetus pairs attested in the bioarchaeological record provide a glimpse of pregnancy and birth-related mortality in the past, and occasionally evidence for a more detailed account of the cause underlying mortality. Although maternal mortality in past communities is still far from being well documented and understood, it is undoubtedly an important aspect of life and death that needs to be further explored.

41

 Willis and Oxenham 2013.

PART II. GROWING UP MOTHERLESS

4. WAS THE ATHENIAN STATE IN THE CLASSICAL PERIOD INDIFFERENT TO MATERNAL ABSENCE? Rosalia HATZILAMBROU (National and Kapodistrian University of Athens)

INTRODUCTION In the legislation of classical Athens the term orphanos always denotes a child whose father has died.1 According to the Athēnaion Politeia the arkhōn had a duty to look after the interests of orphanoi, epiklēroi (“heiresses”), and pregnant widows, while suits could be initiated against the epitropos (“guardian”) to protect the interests of the fatherless orphan.2 Special officials, the orphanophylakes (“guardians of orphans”), are attested to have been responsible at one time for the dole of fatherless war-orphans.3 However, no chapter or even paragraph in the handbooks of Athenian law is devoted to the legal protection of motherless children per se. Indeed, extant evidence suggests that the frequent reality of maternal loss in classical Athens was not expressly addressed through specific legal provisions.4 Thus, an argumentum e silentio is plausibly advanced, namely that the Athenian state in the classical period was indifferent to maternal absence. This chapter argues that the Athenian state took some interest in maternal loss, at least regarding Athenian citizens,5 and that this concern  The term orphanos should be specified in the texts by means of a supplement, in order to denote the motherless child, see for instance Isoc. 16.45, and Hyp. fr. 164 (ed. Jensen). 2  [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56.6-7; see also [Dem.] 43.75, and [Dem.] 35.48, Dem. 37.46, Aes. 1.158, Isae. 3.46 and 7.30. 3  The term is attested in Xen. Vect. 2.7. On ophanophylakes and on public support of war-orphans in Athens in general, see Stroud 1971. 4  On maternal loss at childbirth or soon after it, see Demand 1994, passim. 5  The Athenian state was also interested in the oikoi of the metics, whose affairs were the responsibility of a separate arkhōn, the polemarkhos. Any legal issues connected with maternal absence in the households of metics would likely have been 1

R. HATZILAMBROU

58

is reflected in stipulations mostly regulating protection of the maternal life, succession, adoption, and marriage. These represent expressions of the interests that the Athenian state had in what happened in the private realm of Athenian oikoi, the composite households of people and property, which included in a sense the dead ancestors through the rites due to them, and constituted the economic and social foundation of the polis. Although it is impossible to estimate how many children in classical Athens grew up without their biological mothers, since there were no census returns at the time,6 the evidence and comparative demographic research suggest that a significant share of Athenians minors would have experienced the loss, total or partial, of their mother, a reality to which the Athenian state had to respond.7 A

MATTER OF HOUSEHOLD INTEREST

At first glance, the state’s response to maternal absence is not perceptible, since the loss of a mother did not alter the legal or political status of her children. Children were legally and effectively under the control and protection of their father as kyrios, their legal representative, as indeed was their mother, so long as she was a member of his oikos. It is well established that an Athenian woman was never sui iuris (i.e., legally independent), but remained under male tutelage all her life. When she married, her husband became her kyrios. Her kyrios, in principle, had to validate any transactions into which she entered that exceeded a certain (small) amount of money.8 Similarly, an Athenian woman was not qualified to make a will. A general reflection of this patriarchal system is evident in the practice adopted by the Athenian democracy at the end of the sixth century of identifying addressed in a similar way to that stipulated for the Athenian citizens, the major difference being the arkhōn in charge. 6  Cf. Bagnall and Frier 1994, 75-90 on the mortality of young Egyptian females, based on their study of census returns in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Female death rates in Athens many centuries before would not have been vastly different. 7  On the sources of any study that pertains to the legal and social history of classical Athens, that is, inscriptions, orations, comedies, and biographies, see Rubinstein 1993, 4-7; Cox 1998, xix-xx. 8  Isae. 10.10, where it is stated that the law expressly forbade any child or woman to contract for the disposal of more than a bushel of barley. This was worth about 3 drakhmai, see Markle 1985, 293.

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59

citizens merely by patronymic and dēmotikon. Thus, for administrative purposes, only the father counted. Indicative of the father’s dominant role within his oikos, and the state’s attitude towards him, is the fact that even in the classical period Athenian law still did not compel the father to raise all his children.9 That is to say that the father could unilaterally render them motherless (as well as fatherless) through exposure, supposing, of course, that they survived such treatment.10 Exposure in classical Athens, which should perhaps be considered a euphemism for infanticide, is still a controversial topic among scholars, who have not reached consensus regarding the extent to which it was practiced or the scholarly view that girls were at greater risk of exposure than boys.11 Deformity and extreme poverty are plausible circumstances that could lead a married couple to resort to child exposure.12 However, two passages, one in Plato’s Theaetetus and the other by the thirdcentury comic poet Posidippus, show that even healthy children born within legitimate marriages may be exposed.13 The finder of an exposed child might at his discretion treat it as slave or free; but he acquired no rights over it, and he could not adopt it, since adoption of a minor was a reciprocal transaction between the adopter and the adopted child’s father or legal representative. In the case of maternal loss, therefore, it was not the Athenian state that appointed a surrogate mother, but the father, in his capacity as the kyrios of the oikos. As long as the father lived, the child, at least according to Athenian law, needed no other legal protection or parental supervision save his. Any relevant obligations that might have been imposed on the father by the law (e.g., regarding the appointment of 9  Up to the time of Solon a father had also the legal right to sell his children, and presumably to pledge them against a debt. According to Plutarch (Sol. 13.23), Solon limited this right where a father (or a brother) had caught his daughter (or sister) in the act of sexual intercourse with a man, but there is no evidence of this penalty being employed in the classical period. See Harrison 1968, 73. 10  A newborn baby may be exposed with the prior consent of both parents, but the final decision was presumably taken by the father. 11  See, for instance, Golden 1981, 316-31; Patterson 1985, 103-23; Garland 1990, 84-93; Ingalls 2002, 246-54. 12  Illegitimacy might be another reason for the exposure, but presumably of children born out of wedlock. 13  Pl. Tht. 149a-161a; Posidippus fr. 11E (= Stob. Flor. 77.7).

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a specific surrogate mother) would have been inconceivable, and could have caused internal dissension in the oikos, whose preservation and well-being certainly concerned the Athenian state. By the same token, because of their judicial and political status, Athenian women could never exercise legal control over legitimate citizen children, since they remained attached to the father’s oikos while he lived. The scant relevant evidence for divorce14 suggests that, once a woman had left her husband’s oikos (for Athenian marriage was virilocal), the father retained custody of the children.15 A divorcée returned to her original kyrios and was expected to remarry, since the prospect of growing old unmarried was undesirable.16 More complicated, and certainly more traumatic, was the case of the motherless and fatherless children.17 However, in such cases the institution of the epitropos (“guardian”) was in place. Fatherless children were appointed guardians, who were legally responsible for their wards’ maintenance, education, property, and legal representation, as well as marriage, especially if the ward was an epiklēros daughter. Such guardians were accountable to the arkhōn, who appears to have had significant executive duties regarding the guardianship of fatherless minors. Furthermore, private causes of actions were available to orphans and their relatives against negligent or fraudulent guardians, such as kakōsis orphanōn (“maltreatment of orphans”), kakōsis epiklērou (“maltreatment of an epiklēros”), and kakōsis oikou orphanikou (“maltreatment of the estate of an orphan”), with initiation through the procedure of eisangelia (“impeachment”).18 The establishment of this procedure as the means of introducing these actions is indicative of the state’s concern to protect the most vulnerable section of its citizen population: impeachments were open to the boulomenos (“the volunteer plaintiff or prosecutor”), and involved no risk for the prosecutor who withdrew his case or failed to win one-fifth of the dicastic vote.19 14  The evidence consists of nine cases of divorce, which are collected and studied by Cohn-Haft 1995. He plausibly suggests (1995, 14), pace Isager 1981-82, 87, that divorce was relatively infrequent in classical Athens. 15  Dem. 57.40-43. On this passage, see also Cohn-Haft 1995, 9. 16  See Thompson 1972. 17  Cf., for instance, Isoc. 16.45. 18  Cf. note 2 above. There is also scanty evidence about another procedure initiated through phasis, namely phasis oikou orphanikou; see Harrison 1968, 115-17. 19  See Harrison 1968, 97-121; Cudjoe 2010, 165-271.

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61

Paternal loss was often followed by maternal absence, at least partial. Remarriage normally followed widowhood, at least for young and childbearing widows, even if they had borne children to their deceased husband.20 Extant evidence suggests that no widow of childbearing age remained in her husband’s house. She either remarried immediately;21 resided with her children at her husband’s house for a fairly short period of time; or returned to her natal kin and resided with them, always with the intention to remarry in the future. A widow remarrying would often leave her children with a surrogate mother and their guardian, who was normally a relative or a friend of the deceased father, sometimes appointed by the latter himself before his death or by will;22 or she would take the children with her to be reared by a stepfather23 or a maternal uncle.24 The separation of the children from their mother was avoided, however, if she married the guardian appointed for the children. This would have been the case, for instance, had Aphobus married Cleoboule, Demosthenes’ mother. That said, there is little evidence for such arrangements and perhaps they occurred only rarely. In all this, it is important to bear in mind that Athenian law did not include provisions regulating family matters, such as the proper environment for the upbringing of the children of a deceased Athenian citizen. That is, it was entirely silent on whether the children of a widow who remarried or intended to remarry should remain in the father’s house, move with the mother, or reside with their guardian. Yet the absence of relevant stipulations should not be simply considered as a lack of concern on the part of Athenian law, but rather as a flexible way of addressing matters within Athenian oikoi, which would (or at least should) have worked in each case to the benefit of the oikos and the people involved, that is, the children and the widowed mother, always in conformity to established attitudes and beliefs. Whenever evidence is available, it shows that this flexibility 20

 See again Thompson 1972, and Hunter 1989a.  Especially if her husband had already selected his successor. See Dem. 27.5, 28.15-16, 29.43, 45.28, [Dem.] 36.8, and Thompson 1972, 224. 22  Lys. 32.8, and [Dem.] 40.6-8. Also, Isae. 7.6-7. 23  On stepfathers in classical antiquity and their relations to their stepchildren see Cox 1998, 89-92; Hübner 2009, 65-66. 24  Evidence is collected by Hunter 1989a, 296-98, 303-5, 307-8. 21

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concerning the arrangement of the residence of fatherless children worked well.25 The only point on which Athenian law explicitly intervened in the oikos with respect to mothers per se concerned widows who claimed to be pregnant at the time of their husbands’ deaths.26 But it is not clear whether the pregnant widow was therefore bound to stay at her deceased husband’s house or whether she had a choice regarding her residential status until she gave birth.27 In any case, children of parents whose marriages were dissolved, either by divorce or the husband’s death, lost their right to their mother’s dowry, which reverted to her natal kin, since she returned to her original kyrios.28 Legal remedy through the dikē proikos (“lawsuit for a dowry”) and dikē sitou (“lawsuit for maintenance”) was available to enforce its repayment, so that the dowry could be given to her second husband, and ultimately devolve to the children born to her second marriage.29 In the event of maternal loss because of death or divorce, a surrogate mother entered the life of motherless children. This could be a nurse,30 or a female relative, or a stepmother. Furthermore, this role could be shared between more than one person from these groups. The appointment of a surrogate mother was the responsibility of the father, who had (or should have had) the duty to check and “rectify,” if necessary, her behavior towards his children. As above, the state would not descend to intervene in the household over such a matter, because it trusted that the father would exercise his parental authority not only for the benefit of his children but also for his own, since children secure the preservation and well-being of one’s oikos, and are legally bound as future Athenian citizens to provide for their parents’ maintenance and proper burial. The practical utility of children had certainly been realized by the Athenians in the classical period.31 25

 Isae. 7.5-7, 15, 9.27-30; cf. Huebner 2009, 65-66.  See lex ap. [Dem.] 43.75 (cf. note 2 above). 27  On pregnant widows see Cudjoe 2010, 123-39. 28  See Harrison 1968, 55-57; Schaps 1979, 106-7; Hunter 1989a, 301. 29  See Harrison 1968, 57-60. 30  See Garland 1990, 113-18. For the strong emotional tie that could be developed between a boy, for whom there is no indication that he is motherless, and his nurse, see [Dem.] 47.55-73, and Golden 1990, 145-48. 31  See Golden 1990, 92-93, who asserts that “children were a prudent investment in a society that knew no pension plans and in which burial and tendance of 26

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Among surrogate mothers, stepmothers were the ones who faced pervasive prejudice and attracted hatred for mistreating their stepchildren, at least in Greek myth.32 Evidence from the classical period confirms that stepmothers were a common occurrence in the Athenian oikoi, but does not reveal much about relations between stepmothers and their stepchildren.33 Only in Isae. 12.5 it is explicitly stated that “it is generally customary for there to be disputes between stepmothers and stepdaughters.” In Lys. 32.17 also, the daughter’s hostility towards her stepmother is clearly expressed. Since the speaker in both cases seems to play on the audience’s prejudices against stepmothers, we may assume that conflicts between stepmothers and stepdaughters were at any rate not uncommon in Athens. It is remarkable that in both these cases resentment appears to be felt by the stepdaughter, not the stepmother, but the former may have had her reasons.34 The father, of course, had the duty for the sake of his oikos to supervise the behavior of its members. However, since the potential for serious mistreatment of stepchildren by stepmothers could have its roots in the inheritance issue, Athenian law at least ensured that stepmothers had little motivation for plotting the death of their stepsons in particular.35 Firstly, Athenian wives in the classical period could not inherit from their husbands, so any relevant arrangements would be for their children rather than themselves. No notion of primogeniture was active in Athenian inheritance law. According to the rules of succession the inheritance was shared equally between all legitimate male offspring, while nothoi (“bastards”) could not inherit. An Athenian father could not disinherit any of his legitimate sons. The sons of an epiklēros stepmother would inherit from her father upon their majority, a right that could not be threatened by the presence of any stepchildren. For a stepmother to do away with her stepchildren, in order to establish a son from her previous marriage the grave were important responsibilities of the one’s descendants; and individual Athenians were well aware of it.” 32  Watson 1995, 20-49. 33  Watson 1995, 50-51. 34  The first speech by Antiphon concerns the prosecution of an anonymous stepmother by her stepson for poisoning his father (and not a stepchild) and their neighbour. But this is an extreme case, while her motivation for the crime is not made clear. 35  For a more detailed account see Watson 1995, 58-62.

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as the heir to her current husband’s estate through adoption, would be an incredibly foolhardy act. Firstly, she would be the primary suspect, while if the adoption of her own child was testamentary, the will would probably be challenged by a blood relative and be declared invalid, if it could be shown that the adopter acted under the influence of a woman.36 Finally, a stepmother could secure her own daughter’s future by arranging the latter’s marriage to her stepson, since marriage was allowed in Athens between homopatric (but not homometric) siblings.37 THE

UNBREAKABLE LEGAL BOND

Public concern for the motherless individual is chiefly detected in the legal provisions regulating inheritance of any property connected with the mother. The loss of a mother did not affect an Athenian’s right to any property accruing to her through intestate succession. In other words, the Athenian legal system permitted inheritance through a female line, and an Athenian woman had rights of inheritance ab intestato within her ankhisteia (“close kin”).38 The father would plausibly have control of any property passing to the son through his mother until the son’s majority, for, like women, minors did not have the legal capacity to enter into contracts.39 As for a woman’s dowry, if a married woman died leaving sons, her dowry was not automatically assimilated into the husband’s estate, but her sons were entitled to become kyrioi of her dowry upon attaining legal majority. In Dem. 40, sons by different wives are attested to have taken their mother’s dowries out of the father’s estate first, and then to have divided the remainder.40

36  Watson 1995, 60-62. The relevant Solonian law is cited at [Dem.] 46.14; cf. also Isae. 2.1, 4.16, 6.9, Hyp. Athen. 17. 37  An example could be the marriage between homopatric siblings referred to at Dem. 57.20; see Watson 1995, 60. 38  Lex ap. [Dem.] 43.51, however the authenticity of the document has been questioned, see Canevaro 2013, 204-5 n.72; but see Isae. 11.1-5, and Harrison 1968, 144-49. 39  Isae. 10.10 (cf. note 8 above). 40  See Harrison 1968, 57.

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Nevertheless, the loss of the mother could affect her son’s inheritance rights, if the mother was a brotherless daughter and predeceased her father. In 8.31 Isaeus argues that if the speaker’s mother had outlived his grandfather (her father), whose estate was being adjudicated, she would have become epiklēros, and her father’s property would have gone to her children two years after completing puberty. However, the speaker’s mother predeceased her father, thus she never became epiklēros. Her sons certainly inherited her dowry, but it is doubtful that they also inherited rights to her father’s estate. An explicit provision on this particular issue was in all probability not included in Athenian legislation. Additionally, in the event of the mother’s death and of the father’s subsequent remarriage, the sons of the family had an additional grievance: having being brought up in the expectation of inheriting their father’s whole estate, they might see a second wife produce children, with whom their inheritance would have to be shared.41 Similarly, the position of the epiklēros daughter may change upon the death of her mother; her father may marry again and beget an heir.42 Moreover, the loss of the mother did not affect the right of an Athenian citizen to his father’s estate, even if the latter had remarried and had children of different marriages, for the rule of equal division of property between sons of different marriages was in effect. The same rule possibly applied to the rights to the property of the mother (excluding her dowry), if she had remarried and had children from different husbands. In [Dem.] 36.32 Apollodorus is alleged to have claimed a share in the estate of his mother, based on the principle of equal divisions between her sons by Pasion and those by Phormion. Thus, in the aforementioned legal provisions it is made obvious that the inheritance rights of the motherless Athenian both to the paternal and maternal property were absolutely respected. Respect for the rights to the maternal property is observed in the statutes of another part of the Athenian inheritance law, namely the rules regulating adoption. These offer clear evidence that the legal bond between an Athenian and his mother could not be broken. Thus adoption, while removing the adoptee from the oikos of his natural father, did not sever his legal relationship with his mother as 41

 See, for instance, [Dem.] 48.10, Isae. 6, and 12.  See, for instance, Lys. 32.17.

42

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it did in the case his father.43 In Isae. 7.25 the following rule is cited: “the act of adoption into another family does not detach a son from his mother; she is his mother just the same, whether he remains in his father’s house or is adopted out of it.”44 Thus, in this speech Thrasybulus, who had been adopted into another oikos, that of Hippolochides, could still have claimed the estate of Apollodorus as next of kin, since his relationship to him was through his mother. Furthermore, in [Dem.] 43.15 two brothers appear to retain in law their blood relationship through their mother, after one of them had been adopted out of the paternal oikos. Similarly, a son would possibly not be deprived of his legal attachment to his mother in the case of his apokyrēxis (“renounciation”), that is, the putative legal right of the father to expel a son from his household, which would perhaps exclude the son from his share in the inheritance of his father’s property,45 but not of his mother’s. However, apokyrēxis in classical Athens is a controversial issue, since most evidence about it is late, and there is no agreement among scholars regarding its meaning and consequences. Evidence that in the Athenian legal system the legal bond with the mother is never broken is further provided by the fact that the son had to act as his mother’s kyrios and appear in her defence in court, even in cases in which his mother was accused of poisoning his father, as it happens in the first speech by Antiphon “Against the Stepmother.” The character of the legal bond between Athenian mothers and sons is drawn in the sharpest relief by the stipulations that defined and enforced the legal duties of a son towards his mother. Athenian law prohibited the son to behave in a way that could result in the loss of 43  It is useful to recall that adoption in classical Athens did not usually make a child lose its biological mother, even partially, since as a rule the adoptees were adults; the adoption of an adult would better serve the fulfilment of the purposes of the institution, see Rubinstein 1993, 62-86. One certain adoption of a minor is known, the one attested in Men. Sam. 695-99, which shows that adoption inter vivos of minors was a possibility at Menander’s time. Additionally, a minor may have been adopted in Isae. 5.6-7, 11.41, [Dem.] 43.12, 77, and 58.31; see Cox 1998, 126 n77. 44  Interestingly, in Isae. 7.14 it is reported that a mother’s permission for adoption into another oikos had been sought and obtained. But I doubt that her consent was mandatory in law, and that the adoption could not have proceeded without her agreement. 45  See Harrison 1968, 75-77; Cox 1998, 82.

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his mother. The law recognized and punished not only the mētroktonos (“matricide”), but also the man who maltreated and neglected his mother. Maltreatment might consist in beating her, as well as failure to provide her with housing and sustenance (gērotrophia) or funeral rites.46 If parents were maltreated, direct descendants were liable to prosecution for kakōsis (“neglect”). To be found guilty in the trial arising from such a prosecution could result in atimia (“disfranchisement”).47 A son, even if he was poor, had the particular duty to maintain and legally protect his old widowed mother.48 Mētraloias, “mother-beater,” was actually among the “forbidden words,” which, if used against anyone, living or dead, would provide grounds for a prosecution by a dikē kakēgorias (“lawsuit for defamation”).49 Finally, I would like to draw attention to the lack of action on the part of Athenian officialdom in cases where the subject of dispute was maternal legitimacy and citizenship in general, and the dead mother’s legitimacy and citizenship in particular.50 We may observe that the death of the mother could result in a dispute over her legitimacy and citizen status, on which the citizenship of her children depended. For example, in Isaeus 8 the issue is clearly the establishment of the legitimacy and the citizen status of the speaker’s dead mother.51 Additionally, a mother’s death could give rise to a dispute about the legitimacy of her children. This is indeed what is argued in Dem. 40.2627.52 However, by not issuing birth and marriage certificates, and by not entering women’s names in the lists of citizens, the Athenian state indirectly encouraged disputes over mothers’ legitimacy and citizenship: female legitimacy and citizenship were difficult to prove. Even though witnesses were normally present at a girl’s birth and marriage, this testimony could be refuted. Such arguments were often put forward in inheritance cases, since illegitimate offspring and descendants had no inheritance rights in Athens, especially after the 46  See [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 56.6 (cf. note 2 above), Lys. 13.91, Isae. 8.32, Aeschin. 1.13, Dem. 10.40, 24.103-7, Hyp. Euxen. 6, Aeschin. 1.28, Harp. s.v. kakōseōs, Plut. Sol. 22. 47  Andoc. 1.74. 48  Cf. Lys. 24.6. On the protection of older widows, see Hunter 1989a, 300-1. 49  Lys. 10.8. 50  Cf. Demand 1994, 149-51. 51  Isae. 8.1, 6, 43. 52  [Dem.] 40.27.

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reforms of Pericles in the middle of the fifth century,53 when the definition of illegitimacy was extended to include children born of non-Athenian mothers.54 CONCLUSION The attitude of the Athenian state towards maternal absence in the families of Athenian citizens may be reduced to two principles. According to the first of these the state in some sense delegated to the father the duty to care for and protect his motherless children. The state shared with the father, the kyrios of the oikos, the incentive to preserve and perpetuate his oikos. Thus, the father had to address the issue of mother-absence within his household, to appoint a surrogate mother and supervise the latter’s behavior towards his children. The state would not interfere with paternal authority in such matters. Given the defective legal and political status of women in classical Athens, children were attached to the father as long as he was alive. Therefore, in the case of divorce, the children remained with their father. The Athenian legal and social system considered the (at least) partial loss of the biological mother less significant than the continued protection, both legal and physical, afforded to children by their father as heirs to the paternal oikos. In the case of both maternal and paternal loss in a household, the state assumed responsibility through legislation concerning the fatherless orphans, and the arkhōn was responsible for its observance. Additionally, Athenian law allowed much flexibility over the decision concerning the residential status of children of a deceased father and his remarrying widow. Children were not compelled by law to remain in the oikos of their deceased father without their biological mother; this was certainly just an option. Evidence shows that this flexibility would work for the benefit of the children. The attitude of the Athenian state towards maternal absence embodies another principle: the notion that the legal bond of a child, in particular of a son, with the mother is never broken. This principle 53  [Arist.] Ath. Pol. 26.4. Also, in Plu. Per. 37.2-5, Ael. V.H. 6.10 and 13.24, Suda Δ451 s.v. dēmopoiētos. 54  See Isae. 3, 6, and 8.

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is mainly reflected in stipulations regulating inheritance, gērotrophia, and legal representation of the mother. Thus, on one hand, the inheritance rights of an Athenian to his mother’s property were absolutely respected, and on the other the law obliged an adult son to protect his mother’s life. Perhaps it would not be an exaggeration to say that an individual could not be legally separated from his mother, or that nobody could be rendered legally motherless in classical Athens. So, the picture to be gleaned is that although maternal absence was one of the most private and intimate issues to be addressed in an oikos, in Athenian family law there were stipulations that regulated some of its aspects. This in turn suggests that the private reality of motherabsence had some public significance. Athenian inheritance law in particular compelled respect of the inheritance rights of motherless individuals both to their maternal and paternal property, while it ensured some protection for the motherless (male) children’s life at least against a malicious stepmother, since in Athenian law a father could not disinherit his children. Huebner and Ratzan concluded in the volume on father-absence in antiquity that “the Greeks and Romans did not generally see the support of [fatherless] orphans and their widowed mothers as a public duty, but rather as a private obligation deserving public protection.”55 But as regards motherless orphans, we may more accurately speak of a private obligation attracting public concern mostly with respect to the maintenance of the legal bond with the mother. In a society which obviously “was anything but child-oriented and made very little provision for the needs and wants of a child,” it would have been utopian to have expected the state to provide anything more for the motherless child.56

55

 Hübner and Ratzan 2009, 13.  Garland 1990, 161.

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5. THE RISK OF VIOLENCE TOWARDS MOTHERLESS CHILDREN IN ANCIENT GREECE Fiona MCHARDY (University of Roehampton)

In this chapter I explore the extent to which ancient Greek children growing up without a mother were at increased risk of violence, abuse, or neglect. The idea for this study was based on modern statistics, which show strikingly low survival rates of infants raised without a mother compared to those who have lost a father.1 Further, while there is no gender difference in survival rates of infants younger than three who have lost their mother, the loss of a mother can have an impact on the wellbeing of older girls in particular.2 Building on these modern studies, I discuss the extent to which maternal versus paternal approaches to childrearing affect the survival chances of ancient Greek neonates who have lost their mother. I then examine the evidence for violence and neglect in cases where a biological mother is replaced by a stepmother. Like the modern studies, my findings suggest that Athenian children who have lost their mothers would have been more likely to suffer from neglect and hardship, and the loss was perceived to have been felt most keenly by girls. The first part of the chapter considers neonates and enters the much discussed and disputed territory of the exposure of infants. In this section, I build on research I have been undertaking about the 1  See most recently Chikhungu et al. 2017. In their cross-cultural study, Sear and Mace (2008, 8) note that “the consequences of losing a mother in very early life are catastrophic.” Cf. Akerman et al. (1996) who observe: “in Linko-ping, Sweden, in the nineteenth century, 60 percent of the children who had lost their mothers before their first birthdays died before age fifteen, as opposed to 30 percent of those who had lost their fathers, and 25 percent of those who still had both parents.” Allocare is essential to the survival of neonates who have lost a mother (Pavard et al. 2006, 1155; cf. Sear et al. 2008, 31). See further below on wet nursing. Cf. also Laes in this volume. 2  Pavard et al. 2005, 224.

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extent to which decision-making concerning whether to rear a newborn or not was gendered, meaning that fathers and mothers would not have had the same priorities in making this decision. I add to this idea by suggesting that maternal decision-making might ensure the survival of certain neonates, whereas paternal decision-making might prefer them to be exposed. The theory put forward is that in the absence of a mother, certain neonates would have been at increased risk. In the second part of the chapter, I consider the extent to which older children were believed to be at risk of violence or neglect in the absence of their biological mothers. In a society where there was a higher likelihood of premature death in childbirth or from illness, and where it was not infrequent for divorce to separate mothers from their children, we should expect that a significant number of children grew up in households with a stepmother.3 While Watson has suggested that views of stepmothers were based on misogynistic attitudes towards women in general,4 the sentiments which appear in a range of Greek texts are consistent with the idea that stepmothers would not typically prioritize the needs of a former wife’s children. While myths tend to suggest extreme violence by stepmothers, passive infanticide through neglect is more likely.5 At the same time, a consideration of the behavior of biological fathers who have remarried suggests that there was some expectation that they would tend to prioritize and be more protective towards their new wife and her children. The main focus of my discussion is the beliefs and expectations of people in classical Athens. The two key sources for this study are Attic oratory and tragic myth, although I also consider some non-Athenian sources to add further perspectives. Each of these sources has its own inherent difficulties. Within oratory, there is a focus on the experience of the élite engaged in disputes over citizenship and inheritance, leading 3  On remarriage at Athens, see Isager 1981-82; Thompson 1972. Roy (1999, 7) makes the point that because men typically married at a more advanced age than their wives, there would have been a proportion of children who had lost both parents before reaching 18 in need of help from kinsmen. On this, see Scheidel 2009. 4  Watson 1995. 5  “Progenicide” as used by McKee 1984; cf. Scrimshaw (1984, 441-42) on passive infanticide and neglect and 444 on reduced biological support. On antiquity, see Golden 1981, 326; Pomeroy 1983, 208; Patterson 1985, 121; Rose 2003, 48. Xen. Lac. 1.3 suggests differentiation between girls and boys in nutrition, supporting the idea that girls may have experienced a higher degree of malnourishment in certain circumstances.

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to a rhetorical emphasis that may not reflect everyday practice. In addition, there is a lack of emphasis on orphans who have lost a mother rather than a father in legal proceedings. Fatherless orphans are in need of legal protection through guardianship and hence legal provision is made for them and discussed through the courts.6 Children left with a father were deemed to have access to the law through their father and so are missing from the cases. The tragic evidence, on the other hand, does feature motherless orphans whose fathers survive, allowing for exploration of the emotional angle of losing a mother.7 However, the scenarios that are depicted are typically excessive in their violence. While these mythical versions tend towards showing fantastic situations and extreme brutality, including animals suckling children, violent killings, or blindings, underlying these tales some patterns recur, in particular concerning decisions made to care for, treat harshly, or neglect an infant or older child. Put together, this evidence suggests that children were thought to be at greater risk of suffering violence or neglect in the absence of their biological mother. NEONATES Ancient Greek sources (Xen. Oec. 7.24 cf. Eur. Fr. 1015 N2, Arist. Gen. An. 3.759b7-8) suggest that mothers cared for their babies and had a close bond with them, as Golden has discussed in depth.8 In his article, Golden suggests that Greek parents loved their children and the loss of an infant would not have been easier to bear at a time when infant mortality was high.9 He considers that exposure of infants, while not illegal, would not have been very common.10 Indeed, the 6

 MacDowell 1978, 93-95.  Griffith Williams (2012, 148) compares the evidence for fatherless orphans in oratory to motherless orphans in tragedy, but does not comment on the gender distinction. 8  Golden 1988. See also Golden 2004. 9  Contra Finley 1981, 159. 10  Cf. Ingalls 2002. See Roy 1997 for discussion of the lack of legal interest at Athens in infant exposure. On the legal position regarding infant exposure, see the differing views of MacDowell 1978, 91; Harrison 1968, 71; Patterson 1985, 105 and Todd 1993, 209. Enslaving citizen children was illegal, and infant exposure may have been used as a way to bypass these laws (Engels 1984, 391; Todd 1993, 182, n27). 7

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inclusion of exposure in the list of typical tragic storylines by Isocrates (Panath. 122) suggests that it might not have been common practice at Athens, especially within marriage.11 Golden argues that where exposure occurred the motivations of a woman might well have been to ensure the survival and prosperity of herself and her other children.12 Golden’s focus here is on maternal decision-making, underpinned by the idea that unmarried mothers are more likely to be compelled into making a decision to rear or expose.13 Within marriage, or in a concubine relationship, the assumption is often that the decision to raise or expose a newborn would be made by its father.14 Pomeroy has consistently argued for the importance of this male decision-making as part of patriarchal society, suggesting that through this process, men controlled the beginning of the life cycle.15 Part of the reason that this conclusion has been reached is because of the emphasis placed on the significance of determining legitimacy in classical Athens (as recognized by Patterson).16 The importance for a father of having legitimate offspring who can inherit and who will be full citizens is enshrined in Attic law.17 Certainly, Demosthenes (39.22) suggests that a father would not give his child a name at the tenth-day naming ceremony unless he considered it to be his own (ἐγὼ δ᾽ οὐδέν᾽ ὑμῶν ἀγνοεῖν οἴομαι, ὅτι οὔτ᾽ ἂν ἐποίησε δεκάτην οὐδεὶς παιδίου μὴ νομίζων αὑτοῦ δικαίως εἶναι, οὔτε ποιήσας καὶ στέρξας, ὡς ἂν υἱόν τις στέρξαι, πάλιν ἔξαρνος ἐτόλμησε γενέσθαι).18 11

 Cf. Bolkestein 1922, 237; van Hook 1920.  Golden 1988, 158. 13  See Ar. Nub. 530-32. Cf. van Hook 1920, 138; Patterson 1985, 115-16. 14  See e.g. Garland 1985, 80; Harrison 1968, 71; Pomeroy 1997, 68. Van Hook (1920, 134) lists examples of earlier commentators stressing the rights of fathers in making this decision. 15  Pomeroy 1975, 69; 1983, 207; 1997, 121. Cf. Cameron 1932. Demand (1994, 6) also sees it as part of the role of kyrios to decide on the child’s fate. She uses medical evidence to argue for the male desire to control female reproductive capabilities. 16  Patterson 1985. 17  Blok 2017, 105; Bourbou 2001, 188; Foxhall 1989, 28-29; Roy 1999, 5. On Pericles’ citizenship law, see Ath. Pol. 26.4, 42.1; Patterson 1981; cf. Demand 1994, 148-50; Todd 1993, 177-79. 18  The dekatē is feast for the child on the tenth day at which Athenian fathers recognized their offspring publicly according to the Attic orators (Is. 3.30, 70; Dem. 39.22, 40.28; see also Ar. Av. 494-95, 922-23; Eur. Fr. 2N2). Cf. MacDowell 1978, 91; Todd 1993, 179. The ancient scholia (schol. Lys. 757, schol. Pl. Tht. 160e and Hesychius) conflate the dekatē and the amphidromia, a ritual ceremony possibly 12

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This argument is presented in the context of a dispute over paternity. Each son alleges that the same father held the feast for him and named him on the tenth day. The source implies that a father who did not accept the child was his would not have held the feast. Here the decision of the father may well relate to the significance of recognizing his sons as heirs, as argued by Davies.19 However, this source says nothing about whether a father would make the decision that a child would not be raised, even in cases where he did not recognize the child as his own. Indeed, the speaker in this case implies that his opponent is lying about the existence of his dekatē, yet we know that he was raised.20 Similarly, Isaeus (8.20) implies that children would be raised without being recognized when he says that if their mother were not legitimate and a citizen, things would be hushed up (ἀποκρύψασθαι ταῦτα πάντα). Patterson has suggested that mothers might not have disposed of illegitimate children as much as some commentators believe.21 Cox has also pointed out that legally marginal women, such as prostitutes or concubines, might have aimed to gain a share of their lovers’ wealth or try to pass off their children as legitimate.22 The lack of official registers and emphasis on the ability to produce witnesses to prove legitimacy could have helped these women achieve their goals.23 In such circumstances Isaeus (12.9) connected to purification, testing, or initiation (Hamilton 1984, 244), leading some to link the amphidromia with paternal recognition of the infant (see e.g. Blok 2017, 111). Notably, though, the orators never mention the amphidromia as evidence of legitimacy in connection with disputes over inheritance or citizenship, but instead they make use of the dekatē for this purpose. The confusion in discussion of this topic is compounded by the frequent assumption that fathers (rather than mothers, or parents together) would make the decision about whether to raise weak infants (see n12 above), an assumption which finds little support in the scant ancient evidence on the topic (see below n21). 19  Davies 1977-78. 20  Humphreys (1989) suggests that this father was deliberately blurring the situation to avoid family debts. Thompson (1972, 215 n32) hypothesizes that Mantias started with one wife, divorced her and moved onto the other, and then drifted back to the first. On the difficulties of interpreting the details of this case, see Miles 1951; Rudhardt 1962. 21  Patterson 1985, 116. 22  Cox 1998, xviii. 23  Hunter 1990, 317-18; Kamen 2013, 95; Todd 1993, 181. See Is. 6.21 where the speaker alleges that Euctemon was in his old age persuaded by Alce to introduce her two sons by a freedman as his own. Cf. also Is. 2.19 for a case in which it is disputed whether a man’s sister influenced her husband into adopting her brother

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notes that a mother was thought to be best placed to recognize her children, even ahead of a father (καίτοι τίνα προσῆκε μᾶλλον αὐτῆς ἐκείνης τοῦτο εἰδέναι; … ὁ πατὴρ ὁ ἡμέτερος, ὃν εἰκός ἐστι μετὰ τὴν τούτου μητέρα ἄριστα τὸν αὑτοῦ ὑὸν γιγνώσκειν), while Aristotle comments that in matters of parentage women always discern the truth.24 Commentators have made the point that a mother’s oath regarding paternity would have held weight.25 This evidence suggests that while fathers might have had a keen interest in the legitimacy of their children, it does not follow that their thoughts on this topic would necessarily have overruled a mother’s declarations or decisions about her baby.26 Evidence of how a child might be considered for rearing or exposure is given in a metaphor in Plato’s’ Theaetetus (160e-161a), which suggests an early maternal decision-making process together with a midwife concerning the viability of an infant.27 In this example, the emphasis is placed on the idea of the importance of a first-born infant, demonstrating that there was current an idea that the firstborn child was very likely to be raised. Garland has suggested that the passage may reflect a general reluctance to dispose of a first-born, even if it were sickly.28 However, a question would remain about the chances of a sickly first-born child that had lost its mother. The as his legitimate heir. The speaker argues that he was not adopted “under the influence of a woman,” which would have cast doubt on the legitimacy of the adoption. Cf. Harrison 1968, 87 n2; MacDowell 1978, 101; Todd 1993, 225 n26. 24  Arist. Rh. 2.23.11: περὶ τῶν τέκνων αἱ γυναῖκες πανταχοῦ διορίζουσι τἀληθές; see Dem. 39.3; 40.11. Cf. Miles 1951, 40. Isaeus (6.20) states simply that Alce named Dion as the father of her children. 25  Edwards 2007, 195; Usher 1999, 168-69; Wilgaux 2017. 26  Cf. Foxhall (1989, 24) on the interplay between different individuals’ interests in decision-making concerning property in the oikos. She argues that there would have been disagreements and a need for compromise. Cf. also Roy (1999), who argues that Athenian men would not have been keen to highlight adultery by their wives, and so would have kept it quiet. 27  Cf. Hamilton (1984, 245) who also interprets Theaetetus as mother and Socrates as midwife. Notably the other contemporary reference to the amphidromia in Aristophanes Lysistrata (747) suggests that the amphidromia would be held among a group of women. Cf. Scrimshaw (1984, 448-49) who notes that the decision about neonaticide is most frequently taken by the mother, sometimes with the help of the midwife. 28  Garland 1995, 15. Cf. Rose 2003, 30. Patterson (1985, 113) suggests decisions would have been made depending on all the factors within a family.

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general expectation might have been that a weak infant would not have survived more than a few days, as Aristotle (Hist. An. 588a8-10) suggests when he explains that infants were normally named after reaching one week old because their chances of survival were then deemed to be higher (τὰ πλεῖστα δ’ ἀναιρεῖται πρὸ τῆς ἑβδόμης· διὸ καὶ τὰ ὀνόματα τότε τίθενται, ὡς πιστεύοντες ἤδη μᾶλλον τῇ σωτηρίᾳ).29 He refers to those born prematurely as being most unlikely to prosper in Greece (584b1-14) and comments on the poor viability rate for male / female twins in humans (585a1-2). Dasen suggests that lack of female twins in myth may suggest poor viability, neglect, or exposure of a weaker female twin.30 This evidence, combined with the emphasis in the Platonic passage on the superior status of the first born, provides a hint that later born children (or the second born / weaker born of a multiple birth) might not have been raised or might have died early through neglect. Here parental decision-making prioritizes older children who have received greater parental investment and have passed through the early days of life in which infant mortality was high.31 Another scenario in which scholars have hypothesized that fathers would have made a decision to expose a child is in the case of preference for sons over daughters. Pomeroy, in particular, has argued for female-selective infanticide in Greece (with the exception of Sparta) in the context of patriarchal decision-making and priorities surrounding inheritance.32 As part of her evidence for tolerance towards infanticide in Hellenistic Greece, Pomeroy cites a letter dated June, 1 BCE, in which Hilarion comments on throwing out a female child, but leaving a male child (ἐὰν | πολλὰ πολλῶν τέκῃς ἐὰν ἦν ἄρσε|νον ἄφες, 29

 Cf. Bourbou 2001, 193; Cameron 1932, 107.  Dasen 1997, 55-56. Cf. Pomeroy 1975, 69; Scrimshaw 1984, 446. 31  On possible rates of infant mortality in ancient Greece, see Golden 1988, 155; Ingalls 2002. Isager (1981-82, 89) suggests that the frequency of legal evidence concerning adoption of heirs implies that there were notable problems of childhood mortality. On the significance of birth order, see Scrimshaw 1984; Sullaway 2008. 32  She comments (1975, 228) that it appears to have been more frequent in Hellenistic than in classical Greece. As Ingalls (2002) has argued, there is a lack of evidence for female-selective infanticide at Athens. Cf. Engels 1980; Isager 1981-82, 88-90; Patterson 1985, 119-20; Scheidel 2010, 1. Garland (1985, 81; 1990, 86-87) notes the lack of evidence concerning exposure of girls versus boys at Athens. Cf. Demand (1994, 6). Girls might well have died in greater numbers through passive neglect or “progenicide” (see above n4). 30

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ἐὰν ἦν θήλεα ἔκβαλε, P. Oxy. 4.744.8-10).33 The letter contains a number of difficulties for interpreters, including lack of certainty over whose child is being discussed.34 Further, it is by no means certain, as West has pointed out, that a mother would have listened to such requests about her newborn infant.35 Certainly, where this plotline occurs in Terence, the mother does not listen to a father’s directives concerning exposing a female child.36 Nevertheless, supposing that some men had a tendency towards such sentiments in particular circumstances, in the absence of a mother, these female children would potentially be in great danger. The evidence cited so far suggests that maternal and paternal views on the costs and benefits of rearing a particular baby would not necessarily have been the same. Men might have feared suppositious children, fake pregnancies, and adultery (cf. Ar. Thesm. 502-16, 564-65).37 Men are in a risky position because of hidden ovulation and conception in human females. They might therefore have been hesitant to raise a child they had doubts was their own, in particular the child of a concubine, who might have been conceived of as less likely to be faithful.38 At the same time, a man’s interest in passing on inheritance to legitimate children might have created problems for such a child. Fathers, too, might have been more worried about preserving wealth within the family, and potentially about not spreading their material resources too thinly. This might create issues for fathers with multiple families, and potentially (though this is not certain) for girls. On top of this, West has suggested that men might not have wanted their concubines to become mothers if it would mean that they were not available for sex because they were busy breastfeeding.39 33

 Pomeroy 1983, 208.  See West 1998; McKechnie 1999 for discussion of some of the difficulties in interpreting these lines. 35  West 1998, 168. See also McKechnie (1999, 158-59), who suggests that it could be the mother in this case who is contemplating exposure of her children because of poverty. 36  Terence Heauton Timoroumenos 626 is a translation from a play by Menander. Cf. Ovid Met 9.678, Ap. Met. 10.23. Cameron (1932, 106) comments on these examples to illustrate the point that infant exposure was a possibility. 37  Demand 1994, 146; 1995, 286. 38  Cf. Sealey 1984. 39  West 1991, 14 n19. 34

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Women, on the other hand, appear to be more interested in the potential for support from a male partner or from her natal kin. An unmarried woman would have been in a weak position and might have thought that she had inadequate resources to provide for a child.40 We get a hint of this thinking from a portion of the law code at Gortyn (iii.45-iv.23), which stipulates that a baby which is born to a divorced mother must first be brought to its father, who can decide whether to take it. If he does not, the mother may choose whether to raise or expose it. This law suggests mothers are thought more likely to incline towards exposure when they have lost male support through death or divorce. However, this evidence also indicates that women could decide to raise a child that had been rejected by its father. It is not the case that the father compels the child to be exposed. Another issue which might have influenced maternal decision-making is the spacing of infants (an issue not much discussed by scholars on ancient Greece).41 With reliance on breastfeeding, a mother might feel she is unable to provide sufficiently for two children who are born close together or for twins.42 Here, birth order is important in determining parental preference.43 Mothers also gain social status and support from having children and they may not have wanted to be rid of their social backbone.44 By this analysis babies born of unmarried women, prostitutes, or concubines would be particularly vulnerable if their mother died. An infant whose father refused to recognize it and who had lost its mother would have no one to turn to. Mythical tales of missing mothers tend to focus on these categories of women: unmarried mothers who lack the support of their fathers or brothers and decide to expose their babies (typically sons whose fathers are gods). This theme made regular appearances in the plays of Euripides, including 40  See n11 above. Demand (1994, 30) suggests that based on medical writings, prostitutes were more likely to seek abortions than married women. Cf. McKechnie 1999, 160 on Ashkelon. 41  See Scrimshaw 1984 for discussion of the possible impact of birth intervals and birth order in maternal decision-making. 42  Cf. Dasen 1997, 51 on the economic burden of twins. Pedrucci (2016, 308-9 n4) notes the frequency of exposure of twins in myth. 43  Scrimshaw 1984, 447; cf. Golden 2004, 140. 44  On sons protecting widowed mothers, see Demand 1995, 29; Hunter 1989a; 1989b. Cf. MacDowell 1978, 88-89.

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his Ion, in which Creusa is raped by Apollo and exposes her son Ion.45 Other heroes who were exposed at birth and raised away from their mother include Amphion and Zethus, twin sons of Antiope and Zeus; Aeolus and Boeotus, twin sons of Melanippe and Poseidon; Pelias and Neleus, twin sons of Tyro and Poseidon; Hippothoön, son of Alope and Poseidon; and Oedipus, son of Iocaste and Laius.46 Several of these myths reflect the key difficulty in survival for these neonates, which is lack of access to breastfeeding.47 Through divine intervention the children in these stories are saved by suckling from animals.48 Another myth which is underpinned by interesting reflections on this theme is a variant on the birth story of Hercules. Diodorus Siculus (4.9.6-7) says that Hercules was exposed by his mother, as she was afraid of the wrath of his stepmother Hera. Athena and Hera then happened upon the abandoned infant and Athena persuaded Hera to breastfeed him. However, Hera was unable to bear the pain of breastfeeding such a violent baby and cast him aside. This story comments on the great strength of Hercules even as a baby, but at the same time reflects the need for maternal patience in breastfeeding. In the absence of a mother, an infant would need a willing wet nurse in order to survive.49 That a stepmother would be unlikely to fill this role is made explicit by Diodorus, who notes the natural inclination of a child’s mother to love and care for her own child against the natural hostility of a stepmother, which is reversed momentarily in this tale.50 The maternal decision-making process in which Alcmene considers that 45  Ion comments (Ion 109) that he was raised without father or mother (ὡς γὰρ ἀμήτωρ ἀπάτωρ τε γεγὼς; cf. 839). See further below on the use of the term ἀμήτωρ (motherless) in tragedy. Cf. also Tzanetou in this volume. 46  See Huys 1995 for a detailed study of these myths in Euripidean tragedy. Cf. Tzanetou in this volume. The incidence of twins in these tales is noteworthy. Cf. also Romulus and Remus. 47  For discussion of attitudes towards breastfeeding in archaic and classical Greece, see Pedrucci 2015a. 48  See Pedrucci 2016 for discussion of examples including mythical and historical characters. Cf. also Laes in this volume. 49  Pedrucci 2015a, 36 discusses the evidence of Aristophanes of Byzantium (Fr. 295-297B de Gruyter) on availability of wet nurses across social strata. Cf. Garland 1990, 113-18; Laes in this volume. 50  Note, though, Andromache’s claims to have been a virtuous wife by breastfeeding the bastard children of her husband Hector (Eur. Andr. 224-25).

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raising Hercules will be dangerous because of Hera’s anger about her husband’s affair matches the idea that a child might be threatened by the life situation of its mother, especially in cases where the child is not the offspring of marriage. That a stepmother would be hostile to her stepchild is, in this example, said to be caused by jealousy generated by the relationship of Zeus with another woman. That the stepmother figure lacks the dedication to sustain the child and ensure what is right for it also comes out clearly from this tale, reinforcing the idea that I have suggested that infants not being cared for by their mother might suffer mistreatment or neglect. STEPMOTHERS Throughout ancient Greek sources stepmothers have a reputation for poor or openly hostile relationships with their stepchildren, which was proverbial. In her survey of instances, Watson found little evidence for abusive relationships between stepmothers and their stepchildren at classical Athens, and no examples of murderous violence.51 She argues that the stereotypes found in discussions of stepmothers and their portrayal in myth relate generally to misogynistic feelings in Greece and Rome. Daly and Wilson, on the other hand, have suggested that the folktale motif of the violent and abusive stepmother contains an element of truth.52 They make use of comparative statistics to argue that the mythic story patterns and proverbs reflect a reality that there is a higher rate of abuse of children by stepparents (including stepmothers) than by biological parents.53 They explain this by expounding a theory of parental nepotism, whereby biological relatives are more likely to invest effort and care in raising their children than non-relatives. While there is a lack of evidence concerning levels of physical abuse by stepparents at Athens, there is some indication that stepmothers were less likely to be proactive in protecting and 51

 Watson 1995; cf. also Hatzilambrou in this volume, p. 63f.  Daly and Wilson 2007. 53  Weekes-Shackelford and Shackelford (2004), in a study based on US homicide, note differences in the ways stepparents kill their stepchildren (typically violent attacks such as beating and bludgeoning) compared with biological parents (typically asphyxiation or shooting). 52

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fighting for their stepchildren than a biological mother, and that stepchildren were more prone to unfavorable treatment and neglect. Athenian evidence suggests that mothers were thought to act protectively towards children, trying to ensure their best interests. A striking rhetorical example appears in Lysias 32 Against Diogeiton where the speaker maintains that two sons, whose father died when they were children, turn first to their mother for help when their guardian, who is their maternal grandfather and paternal uncle, does not give them the full share of their inheritance when the oldest boy comes of age (32.10). The speaker (who is the boys’ sister’s husband) paints a picture of the way in which this man has chosen to neglect these children in favor of his second wife and her sons by reporting an impassioned speech which their mother is said to have addressed to her father defending the rights of her sons (32.12-17). In this example, a mother who has remarried and had further children by a new husband, is said to be the one to defend the rights of her sons, whereas it is suggested that their closest male relative is trying to avoid sharing the inheritance with these children in the hopes of giving more to his own sons.54 At the same time, this case also reveals an example in which the interests of a daughter whose father has a new wife are neglected in favor of the new family. As Carey has argued, the way in which the daughter refers to her father’s wife as her stepmother (32.17) may well be calculated to play on the jury’s sense of poor relationships between stepmothers and their stepdaughters (cf. Is. 12.5).55 The issues of multiple families arise also in Demosthenes’ pair of speeches against Boeotus (Dem. 39 and 40).56 In Demosthenes 40 Against Boeotus II, the speaker Mantitheus claims that following the death of his mother, he was at a disadvantage in the eyes of their father, who would be more likely to act in favor of a woman who was still alive and able to persuade him (Dem. 40.27). Making an argument from probability, he suggests that a man would be more likely to dishonor the sons of a dead mother than those of a living woman with whom he was having a relationship. This argument demonstrates 54

 Todd 1993, 205 points out that the remarriages seem to have caused the issues for this family. Cf. Thompson 1972, 212, who suggests Diogeiton’s children from his second marriage are stepchildren. 55  Carey 1989, 10. Cf. Todd 1993, 203; Watson 1995, 53. 56  See above on issues of legitimacy discussed in Dem. 39 Against Boeotus I.

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again the extent to which mothers were perceived to protect their sons, especially in cases where their father or male guardian had another family. In the absence of his mother, this man claims that his rights are not fully protected. Similar suggestions appear in literary evidence.57 In Euripides’ Hippolytus (305-10) the nurse argues that if Phaedra dies, her sons will no longer be protected and will lose out to their older stepbrother.58 It is possible that comparable ideas underlie the attack made by the speaker of Antiphon 1 (On the Poisoning by the Stepmother), who goes to court against his stepbrothers alleging that their mother (his stepmother) was responsible for killing their father. It is not clear in this case which of the sons is the oldest or what has happened to the speaker’s mother. However, it seems possible, as Gagarin has suggested, that a dispute over inheritance has led to the current case.59 This case contains the clearest statement of violence perpetrated by a stepmother in the Athenian evidence, but it is directed against a husband, not a child as Watson has noted.60 Notably within the speech the speaker (Antiph. 1.17) compares his stepmother to Clytemnestra, the notorious husband-killer, and in so doing compares himself to Orestes who avenged his father’s death. However, what is absent from this comparison is the dilemma of Orestes in attacking his own mother, as depicted in particular in Aeschylus’s version of the myth where Orestes asks Pylades whether he can kill his mother (Cho. 899: Πυλάδη τί δράσω; μητέρ᾽ αἰδεσθῶ κτανεῖν;). Clytemnestra is Orestes’ biological mother, but in Aeschylus’s play, alternative mothers are presented conflicting with Clytemnestra in her presentation of motherliness towards Orestes when she shows him her breast and refers to breastfeeding him (896-98). The nurse (747-62) discusses how she received Orestes from his father and took care of all his needs. Orestes has also been raised in the home of Strophius, his father’s guestfriend, cared for by Pylades’ mother and family. Electra (190-91) says Clytemnestra is not like a mother, and instead calls Orestes her mother and father (240). These contradictions are encapsulated by the 57

 On the protective role of mothers in ancient literature see McClure 2006, 75-77. 58  See Goff 1990, 7. 59  Gagarin 1997, 106. 60  Watson 1995, 55.

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Sophoclean Electra who says (1154) that although Clytemnestra is her mother, she is without a mother (μήτηρ ἀμήτωρ), because her behavior is not motherly, but threatening. In these tragic depictions, Clytemnestra is horrifying to her children precisely because she subverts the expectation of a mother to protect her offspring. The extent to which the tragic Clytemnestra is a manlike figure mimicking the paternal tendency to neglect the offspring of a first marriage when moving onto a second marriage is a point worthy of consideration. Clytemnestra’s threat to her son, because he is the heir to the throne and the household property and therefore in direct conflict with her sons by Aegisthus, is sufficient to mean that he has been sent abroad to grow up.61 Her daughter Electra has remained at home, but her marriage prospects have been adversely affected, as depicted by all three playwrights. In this respect, Clytemnestra’s actions are more akin to other mythical stepmothers than to mothers. Diodorus Siculus (12.14.3) notes that stepmothers have a reputation for causing quarrels between fathers and their children and further that tragic dramatists make much of this reputation in their plotlines. In Euripides’ Alcestis, Alcestis fears what a stepmother would do to her children and asks her husband Admetus not to marry again, but to take on the maternal role himself (377). Alcestis makes clear (3047) her fears of what a stepmother would do, making her children subservient to her and “out of envy” (φθόνῳ) inflicting violence on them (τοῖς σοῖσι κἀμοῖς παισὶ χεῖρα προσβαλεῖ). The play implies that something is lost by having no mother, and that a daughter in particular will suffer because of the lack of a mother.62 Alcestis outlines the threat in terms of a stepmother failing to secure a good marriage for her daughter, or more excessively actively thwarting a good marriage through slurs on her daughter’s character (315-17).63 She also hints that her daughter will struggle more in childbirth in the absence of her mother (319-20).64 These fears about the effect on the children articulated in the Alcestis, but never realized, are played out in other stories and myths where 61

 See McHardy 2008, Ch. 5 on Orestes’ desire to regain his inheritance.  Cf. Dyson 1988, 16. 63  Cf. Cohen 1991, 161. 64  Sear and Mace 2008 find that help from maternal grandmothers improves the survival rates of their daughter’s offspring. 62

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young women have lost their mothers. Herodotus recounts the tale of Phronime, whose father remarries after the death of his wife. His new wife is said to contrive many plots against her stepdaughter, culminating in persuading her husband to kill his daughter because of lewdness. As Herodotus tells it (4.154), this father not only fails to protect his daughter from ill-treatment by her stepmother, but even joins with her in threatening the well-being of the girl when he gives her to his guest-friend to drown. Herodotus tells us (4.154-55) that this man refused to kill the girl, but took her to Thera, where Polymnestus took her as a concubine (ἐπαλλακεύετο). This ending to the story, while not fatal, indicates again the difficulties for stepdaughters in attaining a good marriage. Young women who had lost their mothers were also depicted suffering from violence and being threatened with death in tragic myth.65 Both Sophocles and Euripides depicted young women suffering violence at the hands of their stepmothers, or uncles’ wives. In recounting the treatment of Tyro by her stepmother Sidero, Diodorus Siculus (4.68.2) tells us that it is typical of a stepmother to treat her stepdaughter harshly (αὕτη δὲ χαλεπῶς διετέθη πρὸς τὴν Τυρώ, ὡς ἂν μητρυιά). The tale was treated by Sophocles in two plays about Tyro, of which only fragments survive. The tragic mask of Tyro featuring her beaten cheeks is described by Pollux (4.141) and a fragment from one of the plays appears to describe how Tyro’s hair was shorn as part of a humiliating attack on her (fr. 659 Radt).66 Euripides depicted Antiope threated with a brutal punishment at the hands of Dirce before being rescued by her own sons (see Hyg. Fab. 8).67 A theme underlying these depictions of stepmothers is the idea of jealousy over the beauty and innocence of a young girl, leading to interference in the marriage of a stepdaughter, perhaps by preventing a good marriage. Potentially, these attitudes reflect an idea beyond the anger and jealousy of the stepmother, if we conceive of dowries given to brides as resources that a stepmother might want to use for her own 65

 For discussion of the examples, see Watson 1995, Appendix I.  See Clark (2003) for detailed discussion of this fragment and Sophocles’ play. Watson (1995, 27) notes that the marring of the beauty of Tyro through the attacks of Sidero indicate that she was jealous of Tyro’s physical features and famous fair complexion. 67  For detailed discussion of the violence in these myths see McHardy 2020. 66

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children.68 The failure of the girl’s kyrios to protect her adequately is key to this story line as well. A second mythical story pattern features the threats of a stepmother towards her stepsons. This story pattern typically features lust on the part of the stepmother towards her stepsons and therefore features older male children. In the most famous example of this plotline, Phaedra accuses her stepson Hippolytus of sexual assault, driving Theseus to curse his son in his anger. Tennes (Diod. Sic. 5.83) is said to have been slandered by his stepmother, causing his father to put him in a box and cast it into the sea. In one variant of the myth, probably based on a lost tragedy, Phoenix is said to have been slandered by his father’s concubine, leading to him being blinded (Apollod. 3.13.8). In the Iliad Phoenix is cursed with infertility by his father for seducing his concubine at the instigation of his mother (Il. 9.437-84). In one variant of the story of Phineus, he blinds his own sons at the instigation of his wife, their stepmother (Apollod. 1.9.21). We are told by Apollodorus that she falsely accused her stepsons of seducing her, causing their father to attack them (Apollod. 3.15.3).69 In these stories the stepmother is depicted as a physical threat to her stepchildren through the way she can manipulate their father against them. In another variant of this myth, the stepmother attacks her stepsons herself, blinding them with her shuttle (Soph. Ant. 969ff.). The use of blinding to symbolize castration is connected elsewhere with punishment for sexual crimes (and notably in the myth of Phoenix the stories vary between infertility and blinding).70 This symbolism also suggests the father’s rejection or neglect of his children by his first marriage. Diodorus Siculus (4.44.3) also mentions that the sons of Phineus were accused falsely by their stepmother, and he describes a punishment in which they are whipped continually in an underground prison. He emphasizes that their father failed to protect them out of desire for his new wife. Here the implication is that they are treated as slaves rather than free 68  Cf. Foxhall 1989. Sealey (1984, 117) has suggested that citizens might have given their daughters as concubines if they were too poor to pay dowry. If this is correct, it would be a possibility also if a man wanted to avoid splitting his wealth between two families. 69  One of Sophocles’ fragmentary Phineus plays dealt with the punishment of Phineus for blinding his sons. 70  See McHardy 2008, 43.

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men as their position in their household is challenged by their stepmother. In the absence of their mother, their father reacts to the wishes of his second wife rather than protecting the interests of his sons. CONCLUSION In this chapter, I have considered how the rhetorical stances taken in Attic oratory and the violence depicted on the tragic stage might reflect some areas of anxiety around the extent to which children who had lost their mother were vulnerable to neglect, abuse, or premature death. Neonates who had lost a mother would have been particularly vulnerable because of rates of infant mortality, and those who did not have other close relatives to support them would have been at risk. In cases where fathers would have been less inclined to raise a child, such as questionable legitimacy or a large family, the loss of a mother would have been particularly dangerous. Those who survived infancy were still perceived to be vulnerable in the absence of a mother, particularly if their father had remarried. In both Attic oratory and tragic myth, speakers reflect on the disadvantaged position of motherless children whose father had more than one family. In these cases, where the tragic plotlines show excessive violence, the parallel tales which appear in Attic oratory suggest that children who had lost a mother might feel that they are being neglected or disadvantaged amid paternal concerns over inheritance and continuing the family line within multiple families. The myths and speeches make clear that the threat comes not so much from the stepmother figure, though she takes a substantial portion of the blame, but from the choices of the father. As in the case of decisions over rearing children, the absence of a mother to stand up for her children placed them at a disadvantage when faced with their father’s decision-making processes. In the case of daughters, it would appear that concerns over providing a dowry might be a particular area of anxiety. The evidence hints that daughters who had lost a mother had reduced prospects of a good marriage and a higher chance of being given as a concubine. The evidence for physical violence towards older children at Athens is lacking, so potentially mythic story patterns which depict situations of extreme violence should be dismissed as untypical and not reflective of reality.

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However, the patterns which emerge from a comparison of rhetorical and mythical examples suggest instead that children without a mother, and particularly those in certain vulnerable categories, were thought to be at increased risk of neglect, diminished chances of prosperity, and, in infancy in particular, in danger of premature death.

6. THE LAST WILL OF ALCESTIS: MOTHERLESS CHILDREN AND THEIR WIDOWED FATHERS IN GRAECO-ROMAN EGYPT Sabine R. HUEBNER (University of Basel)

For you love these children as much as I do, if you are in your senses. Keep them as lords of my house and do not marry again, putting over them a stepmother, who will be less noble than I and out of envy will lay a hostile hand to your children and mine. No, do not do it, I beg you. Euripides, Alcestis 304-9 (transl. Markantonatos 2013, 72).

INTRODUCTION Alcestis in Euripides’ tragedy offered her life for her husband; yet on her deathbed she clearly struggles with leaving behind her children more than with leaving her husband. The main concerns of the dying Alcestis are her children and the dangers that await them when their mother is gone and cannot protect them anymore.1 The personification of these futures dangers—Alcestis leaves no doubt—is the woman her husband would marry once she is dead. The poet offers in this short scene an entire array of malevolent characteristics ascribed to a stepmother.2 Alcestis therefore implores Admetus not to impose a stepmother on her children, instead reminding him to be grateful 1

 Parker 2007, 112-19; Seeck 2008, 97-103; Dale 1954, 74-75.  Eurip., Alc. 309-19: For a stepmother comes in as a foe to the former children, no kinder than a viper. And though a son has in his father a bulwark of defense, how will you, my daughter, grow to an honored womanhood? What sort of stepmother will you get? I fear she will cast some disgraceful slur on your reputation and in the prime of your youth destroy your chances of marriage. For your mother will never see you married, never stand by to encourage you in childbirth, my daughter, where nothing is better than a mother’s goodwill (Markantonatos 2013, 72). 2

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for what she did for him during his life and now through her voluntary death. Stepmothers occur frequently in Euripides’ tragedies and always as treacherous, malevolent creatures ready to assault their stepchildren.3 Watson has therefore argued that we find in the plays of the tragedians a reflection of a certain uneasiness in fifth-century Athenian society with respect to the remarriage of widowed fathers. We might wonder how the tragedies of Euripides were read and interpreted in later centuries? From papyrus finds in Egypt we know that no ancient author (except Homer) was more widely read in Graeco-Roman and late antique Egypt than Euripides. The tragedies of Euripides were also an integral part of the school curriculum, not just in Roman Egypt, but very likely also everywhere else in the Greek-speaking, eastern Roman Empire. How many of the schoolchildren who read these plays in their school hours had already lost their mothers? How many of them had seen their father remarry? And how far could they relate to the picture Euripides paints in his tragedies of the evil stepmother? THE

SINGLE FATHER WITH MINOR CHILDREN

Many studies have been devoted to the fate of widows and their minor children in antiquity; indeed, widowhood has become basically synonymous with female widowhood.4 Male widowhood, on the other hand, is a severely understudied phenomenon. In European folktales the widower usually remarries quickly in order to replace the wife and mother. Remarriage for widowers was generally expected and even recommended. Minor children needed a mother, it was argued: a man could not cope singlehandedly with work and raising his children successfully. For this reason remarriage rates of widowers were high. We might well expect to find the same pattern prevailing in the patriarchal Roman Empire: men quickly contracting another marriage when their first wife had died. 3

 The stepmother who falls in love with her stepson and tries to seduce him is much less common and hardly plays any role in Greek myth and tragedy in comparison to the evil murderous stepmother, and hardly ever occurs in Roman literature (Cf. Watson 1995). 4  E.g. Krause 1994-95; Huebner and Ratzan 2009.

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However, before we discuss remarriage rates, let us first consider the percentage of children who likely lost their mothers during their childhood years. Women in the Roman world married husbands on average 5-10 years older than they, and were younger at the birth of their children and therefore had a slightly higher chance of seeing them mature into adulthood.5 As we stressed in our previous volume, Growing up Fatherless in Antiquity, the percentage of children who grew up without a father was substantial. Already on their fifth birthday approximately 12% of all children had lost their fathers to death; in comparison, almost 10% of all children had already lost their mothers to death at age 5. By age 10 about a quarter of all children had lost their fathers while just about a fifth (19%) had lost their mothers. Almost two-fifth of all children (38%) had lost their fathers to death when they reached 15 years of age, and nearly 30% their mothers. On average, 11% had lost both parents at this point. When reaching full legal majority at age 25, a full two-thirds of young adults had lost their fathers and half had lost their mothers, with a quarter having lost both parents.6 While children could thus expect to enjoy their time with their mothers a few years longer, the percentage of motherless minors in antiquity was considerable. By way of comparison, today only one percent of children in the UK lose their mothers to death by their sixteenth birthday.7 MATERNAL MORTALITY While mothers were younger at their children’s birth than fathers and therefore more often could expect to witness children growing up and getting married, high maternal death rates offset this advantage to a certain degree. Maternal death is defined as the death of a woman while pregnant or within 42 days of termination of pregnancy. 5

 Saller 1987; Shaw 1987; Scheidel 2009; Parkin 2010.  Saller generated a Roman model population by using modern model life tabels and computer simulations by adding some basic parameters about Roman age at first marriage for males and females. Cf. Saller 1994, 43-69 and the tables 48-53 (“female and male, ordinary, Level 3 West”). On the usefulness and limitations of using model life tables for the ancient world, see most recently Barber 2020. 7  Office for National Statistics, https://blog.ons.gov.uk/2019/02/22/how-manychildren-experience-the-death-of-their-mother/ (accessed Sept. 14, 2020). 6

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Women in the poorest, most underdeveloped countries today run a one-in-six risk of dying as a result of pregnancy or childbirth over the course of their reproductive lives. Every woman in Sierra Leone, for instance, who brings a pregnancy to term has 1-2% chance of not surviving the postpartum period.8 These are substantial risks, if we assume that the worst survival rates today mirror the average risk of maternal mortality in antiquity. However, mothers were still much more likely to survive than their new-born children, who only had a two-in-three chance of living to their first birthday.9 Maternal mortality—though high—still fell significantly short of infant mortality. Of course, if a mother died in childbirth and the child survived the traumatic birth, the child carried an even more elevated risk of dying, at least for the first two years of life. Lahdenperä and his colleagues studied multiple preindustrial societies and came to the surprising conclusion that it was only in the first 24 months that mothers made a difference in the survival of their children. Apparently, the death of the mother after weaning, i.e., around the age of two, apparently had little to no effect on the survival of the child.10 Lahdenperä and his colleagues conclude: “We suggest that although mothers are required to ensure offspring survival preweaning in humans, maternal loss thereafter can be compensated by other family members.”11 However, since the employment of wet nurses for the first two to three years seem to have been the norm at least among élite families in the Roman period, a mother’s death during childbirth or due to postpartum infections in fact might have made even less of a difference in the survival of her newborn.12 This might have been considerably 8  See WHO, UNICEF, UNFPA, The World Bank, and the United Nations Population Division. Trends in Maternal Mortality: 1990 to 2015. Geneva, World Health Organization, 2015. http://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.STA.MMRT (accessed March 15, 2020). For the sake of comparison, the risk of maternal death in Switzerland today is just 5 out of every 100,000 life births. 9  Hopkins 1966; Garnsey 1991, 51-52; Frier 2000; Scheidel 2001; Carroll 2011. 10  Lahdenperä et al. 2011. 11  Lahdenperä et al. 2011, 476-89. Studies of developing countries affected by high rates of HIV also show an exceedingly high mortality rate of motherless children, especially during the first years of life, attributed to premature weaning (Nguyen et al. 2019). 12  Bradley 1980, 1991a, 1991b, 1992; Dasen 2010.

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different in the lower social strata of society where families could not afford to hire a wet nurse.13 Nevertheless, if the mother did not die in childbirth, but a few years later, her death indubitably had a tremendous impact on her children’s emotional well-being. Indeed, children at this stage of life might have experienced their mother’s death as even more devastating than that of their father, since mothers were much more closely involved in the upbringing of small children.14 This emotional upheaval was likely only compounded if the widowed father decided to remarry. Marriage in Roman Egypt was typically virilocal.15 Co-residence between fatherless children and a stepfather was very rare.16 On the other hand, if a widower remarried, the stepmother would regularly come to live with him and his motherless children. In practice, this meant that children who had recently lost their mother had to see their mother’s place usurped by a stranger, sitting at their father’s side and sleeping in his bed. It is not hard to see how this might engender resistance and opposition to the stepmother. ABSENT MOTHERS

DUE TO DIVORCE

Divorce was another phenomenon that severed the bonds between children and their mothers. If we believe the census returns from Roman Egypt, divorce seems to have been quite common among the middle social strata in the province.17 When a marriage ended in divorce, the children in the majority of cases remained in their father’s household. According to Roman law, but also to Graeco-Egyptian custom (recalling that the majority of the population were not Roman citizens before 212 CE), it was the fathers who generally kept custody of children in case of divorce, since mothers could not exercise legal custody over their children.18 A divorcée returned to her original 13

 Parkin 2013, 50-57.  Garnsey 1991; Rawson 1991; Rawson 2003, 157, 197, 228; Cohick 2009, 143-44; McAuley 2016, 38. 15  Huebner 2013, 48-50. 16  Huebner 2009. 17  Bagnall and Frier 2006, 123-25; Huebner 2013, 78-79. 18  Frier and McGinn 2004, 227-37 on custody and maintenance in Roman law. On law and legal practice in Roman Egypt, see Huebner 2013, 166. 14

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household and would remain there or was expected to remarry.19 Only under exeptional circumstances would mothers be granted custody, such as when children were still very young and needed to be breastfed, and then only for a limited period of time. In the few cases in the Roman census returns from which we know details about the living situation of women who kept their children permanently after a divorce, we find that these women were home-owners in their own right, not living with their parents or relatives.20 That means that women who took their children with them most probably did so only if they could offer them a place to live, and that the woman’s natal family or the second husband often were not willing to take her and her children in from a previous union. However, divorce did not absolve the absent parent from his or her obligations to provide for existing children. Whatever the living situation of the children, at least according to later Roman law, the absent parent was nonetheless still responsible for their maintenance.21 Even if the wife and mother lost all custody rights in case of divorce, her former husband could retain parts of his ex-wife’s dowry and use it for maintenance and education of their children.22 In those rare cases in which children remained with their mothers, fathers were also obliged to provide maintenance. A certain Dionysos from late second- or early third-century CE Oxyrhynchus, for instance, pledges in his divorce settlement to provide for his children until they come of age.23 From a papyrus of second-century Neilopolis in the Arsinoite nome we know of a couple that divorced not long after the birth of their son Horion. The mother kept the little boy and her ex-husband 19

 See Thompson 1972; Huebner 2013, 78-79.  Bagnall and Frier 2006, 145-Ar-1, 145-Ar-2, 187-Ar-29. For the place of residence for the divorced wife, cf. Barker 1997; Huebner 2009; Huebner 2013, 78 and chap. 5. 21  Dig. 25.3.5.14 (Ulpian); cf. C.Iust 5.24.1 (294 CE): Divortio facto apud quem liberi morari vel educari debent. [1] Imperatores Diocletianus, Maximianus. Licet neque nostra neque divorum parentium nostrorum ulla constitutione caveatur, ut per sexum liberorum inter parentes divisio celebretur, competens tamen iudex aestimabit, utrum apud patrem an apud matrem matrimonio separato filii morari ac nutriri debent. See Huebner 2013, 78-79. 22  P.Oxy. 2.265 from 81-95 CE. See Huebner 2013, 79. 23  P.Oxy. 6.906: ὁ δὲ Δ[ι]ογένης καὶ ἐπιχορηγή[σ]ε ι ἀπὸ τοῦ νῦν τὰ [δ]έ οντα τοῖς αὐτοῖς υἱοῖς αὐτῶν παρ᾽ αὑτῷ διαιτωμέν[ο]ις ἄχρι ἡλικίας. Cf. Taubenschlag 1936, 508. 20

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reimbursed her for the costs of clothing and food.24 We have a similar case from late sixth-century Syene. After the divorce the mother kept the little daughter, while the father gave his ex-wife four solidi for her maintenance. Later, however, the mother remarried and threw her daughter out, who then returned to her father. The daughter consequently sued her mother for those four solidi her father had once paid for her upbringing.25 Legal sources do not mention visitation rights for the absent parent who did not keep the children or agreements for joint maintenance and living arrangements.26 We can assume that if the mothers went to live with their parents or new spouse in another village, children would see their mothers only very rarely. Absent did not therefore always mean dead. An example of an absent mother who was very much alive was the mother of the twins Thaues and Tages. The twins figure prominently in the archive of Ptolemaios, the son of a Macedonian soldier who lived in the middle of the second century BCE in the Ptolemaic Serapeum close to Memphis. When the girls were still children, their mother Nephoris has an adulterous relationship with a Greek soldier and persuaded him to kill her husband. Hargynoutis, the girls’ father, fled but later died of a broken heart (or so we hear from his daughters).27 After the breakup, Nephoris seized her husband’s property, rented out the family home, and threw out the three daughters she had by him.28 Abandoned and starving, the twins Thaues and Taous, and their younger sister Tathemis, found refuge with Ptolemaios, an old friend of their late fater and a recluse in the Serapeum, who took the three minor girls under his wing.29 By begging (and perhaps by prostitution) the girls collected at the temple of the Syrian goddess a not inconsiderable amount of money. A fellow recluse at the Serapeum called Harmais, who shared a cell with Ptolemaios, drafted a petition for Tathemis, the youngest sister, who had also entrusted her savings to him. The girls’ estranged mother offered to see to it that 24

 P.Strasb. 7.666 from 145 CE (cf. Krause 1994-95, vol. 1: 128 n70, 251).  P.Lond. 5.1731 from 585 CE; Rowlandson 1998, 79-80, no. 62. 26  Frier and McGinn 2004, 227. 27  UPZ 1.19 from 163 BCE. 28  UPZ 1.18 and 1.19, both from 163 BCE. See Rowlandson 1998, 60-61, 101-2; Chaveau 2000, 127. 29  P.Lond. 1.2; cf. Rowlandson 1998, 99-100, no. 78. On hieroduly more generally, see Delekat 1964. 25

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Tathemis was circumcised and provided with a dowry and a wedding garment in order to prepare her for marriage. Harmais fell into the depraved mother’s trap (the wording of the petition) and handed over to her the 1,300 drachmas which the girl had collected at the Serapeum and entrusted to him for safekeeping. Nephoris, however, neglected to do any of the things she had promised, but instead embezzled her daughter’s money. Under these circumstances, Tathemis asked Harmais to assist her in dealing with her mother and to start legal proceedings against her. Most probably together, they composed a formal Greek petition to the local strategos, asking him to force Nephoris to return her daughter’s money. No notoriously evil stepmother or mother-in-law could get much worse than this biological mother. TENSIONS AND

CONFLICTS BETWEEN STEPCHILDREN AND STEPMOTHERS

Most domestic conflicts left no record in the written sources and this is certainly true when it comes to the tensions and conflicts between stepmothers and stepchildren. However, one event in a patchwork family’s life cycle occasionally did leave some trace: inheritance disputes. In fact, the main reason for conflicts between stepmothers and stepchildren—as reflected in the papyri—was the transmission of paternal property. Yet the father’s inheritance was not always or only the one at stake: sometimes the late mother’s dowry was the bone of contention, since according to Roman law, as well as Hellenistic-Egyptian legal practice, it belonged to her children, not her widowed husband, his new wife, and their subsequent heirs.30 We have several cases in which a widower kept the dowry his late wife had brought into the marriage, which then later, on his own death, devolved to his second wife, the children’s stepmother. In the case of P.Meyer 8 (151 CE), belonging to the archive of Aphrodisius from the village of Theadelphia in the Arsinoite nome, the children from the first marriage petitioned to have their bona materna (maternal goods) returned to them. Philippos und Chariton were still minors when in 30

 Huebner 2013, 103; 123.

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around 130 CE their mother died and left them a sizeable property, including land, stores, and eight slaves. We know that the slaves were registered in the census of 131/2 CE as belonging to the siblings. From the following census of 145/6 CE, however, we learn that the slaves were now registered in the children’s father’s name. In their petition the children colored this transfer of their property as an outright “seizure.” Sometime after 145/6 the children’s father Aphrodisius took a new wife and transferred to her the children’s maternal property. This was the last straw for the siblings, provoking them to submit their petition and to ask for restitution of their property, including the usufruct that their father had wrongfully enjoyed over the years.31 Four centuries later, the well-known lawyer Dioscorus from sixth-century Aphrodito in the Thebaid found himself in a similar dispute with his stepmother: he submitted a petition against her, since she had received his late mother’s dowry as wedding gift from Dioscorus’s father.32 More commonly, motherless children fought with their stepmothers over the paternal inheritance. The first case concerns a certain Tasemis, living in late second-century BCE Thebes, who submitted a petition to the Ptolemaic epistates after her father’s death, claiming that her stepmother had appropriated her rightful inheritance for herself and her own biological children. The legacy consisted of two estates, including furniture and cattle, as well as the rights to the profits made from the priestly profession.33 Nearly 400 years later, two sisters submitted a petition accusing their stepmother of a similar fraud. The sisters’ father had died and the stepmother was trying to take possession of at least parts of the girls’ inheritance. It seems that the stepmother was making sure that the dowry she had brought to the union was returned to her and she thus claimed parts of the late husband’s flock of sheep, some gold, and a half interest in a slave girl.34 The two sisters, Taesis and Kyrillous, in their petition to the beneficarius accused their stepmother of theft, 31

 See for a dicussion Lewis 2001, 25-27.  P.Cair.Masp. 1.67028 from 551 CE. Cf. P.Cair.Masp. 1.72266. See for a discussion Van Minnen 2003, 115-33; Zuckerman 2004, 79-80. 33  UPZ 2.189 = P.Tor.Choach. 3 from after 112 BCE. See for a discussion Scheerlinck 2012, 169. 34  P.Cair.Isid. 62 = SB 6.9167 (Karanis; Sept. 5, 297). For discussion: Thomas 1977, 233-40. 32

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false assertions, and forgery of documents.35 They state that before their father’s death their stepmother had admitted that her husband owed her nothing. Yet she nevertheless removed after her husband’s death twenty-seven sheep from his flocks. She then claimed that the deceased had also owed her a certain amount of gold, for which claim she failed to provide any evidence. Finally, she produced a contract allegedly drawn up by her late husband, which assigned to her a half interest in a slave girl as security for her dowry.36 The sisters claimed that none of this was true. As so often, we lack the arguments of the other side and so cannot begin to judge the merits of their case. An extreme case of stepmotherly intrigue comes from early fourthcentury CE Theadelphia in the Arsinoite nome. Kamution induced her husband to dissolve her stepdaughter’s happy marriage because she wanted to marry the girl to her own nephew. The girl’s current father-in-law Melas, however, petitioned the prefect in his son’s name, who pleaded desperately that the separation was illegitimate and that his lawful wife be returned to him. To Aurelius Amonios, the most eminent prefect of Egypt, from Aurelius Melas, son of Herakleides, from the village of Theadelphia in the Arsinoite nome. Unlawful and audacious acts perpetrated in the localities, my lord prefect, are suppressed by none other than your Worthiness, who abhors wickedness. Now as I had betrothed my son Zoilos to my aunt(..)’s daughter, Taues by name, while she was still an infant with a view to a matrimonial alliance; and that in the meantime the said (aunt) died and her husband, Sakaon, took another companion in life, Kamoution by name. I took the said girl after her mother had died and looked after her all this while as if she had been my own daughter; and not to make a long story of the marriage, I invited friends and married the children performing all that is customary. Now this Sakaon, at the instigation of his wife Kamoution, has resolved to confound the marriage, which had been performed …, on the pretext of the marriage gifts, claiming that he did not receive any; and in consequence of this he abducted the girl and keeps her in his own house. Now since this said son of mine Zoilos, is sitologos, the village being totally deserted, he contributes a 35  From other documents in the family archive we know that Taesis was ready to stand for her rights and was not afraid to submit petitions to officials in several cases when she thought she had been unjustly treated (cf. Thomas 1977). 36  P.Cair.Isid. 62.

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large amount of dues to the sacred revenues, and because of that, I, fearful lest as a result of the wrong done him he might resort to flight or that … (I have heard that Kamoution wishes to give the said wife of Zoilos in marriage to her nephew Sarmates.)37

In this way Melas asks the Prefect to restore his son’s wife. In all events, conflicts of this kind were probably the exception rather than the rule. In many cases we learn of widowers or divorcées remarrying merely because paternal half-siblings with two different mothers occur in our papyrological record.38 If some of these patchwork families did experience any tensions, they left no trace in our sources. We even have some evidence of affectionate relationships between stepmothers and their stepchildren, with some stepmothers adopting their stepsons and leaving to them their inheritance.39 CONFLICTS BETWEEN MOTHERLESS CHILDREN AND OTHER RELATIVES

A mother did not only play an important emotional and social part in her child’s life; if the children had previously lost their fathers, she also often undertook the duties of an unofficial guardian, managing and protecting her minor children’s patrimony.40 If children had lost both mother and father, it was not unusual for the orphans to reside with their paternal or maternal relatives who took custody of them. For example, in a census return from early third-century Roman Soknopaiou Nesos in the Arsinoite nome, two 8- and 10-year old sisters, who had lost both their mother and father, were living in their paternal uncles’ household with aunts and several cousins.41 That the villain in a motherless child’s life was not necessarily always the stepmother is proven by several other cases in the papyri. 37

 P.Sakaon 38 from 312 CE, transl. Parassoglou 1978.  E.g., PSI 8.914 (1st cent. CE); BGU 2.644 (69 CE); P.Fay. 97 (78 CE); BGU 1.350; BGU 1.232 (108 CE); P.Mil.Vogl. 2.99 (119 CE); P.Oxy. 12.1452 (127/8 CE); P.Köln 2.100 (133 CE); P.Gen. 2.111 (mid-2nd cent. CE); PSI 8.921 (143/4 CE). For more examples, see Krause 1994, vol. 1, 244-49. 39  Huebner 2013, 178 with n86. 40  Krause 1994-95, Vol. 3, 258-60; Huebner 2009. 41  Bagnall and Frier 2006, 215-Ar-3. 38

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In a case from third-century Roman Oxyrhynchus some maternal uncles had taken custody of a minor girl after her mother’s death, since her father had already died at an earlier date. However, instead of protecting the orphan’s inheritance, they squandered it and even evicted their niece from their joint household: It is a difficult matter to be wronged by strangers, but to be wronged by kin is worst of all. My mother’s father Dioskoros had three children in all—Theon, Dioskoros, and Ploutarche, my mother—who inherited from him when he died. After some time, my mother also died, while I was under-age and already an orphan (…) For all the things from the inheritance devolving upon us (for it was a single household and one family) were in the house there in which they were living—that is, the slaves, the immovable, the furnishings, and movable goods were all there undivided. In the meantime my mother’s brothers from the same mother plotted together with useless and foolish stupidity, intending to cheat me. Each one grabbed whatever he wanted of the slaves and all the rest, paying no attention to me whatsoever, but, so to speak, even pushing me off from the third part of the inheritance that falls to me (…)42

Apart from the paternal or maternal family, who sometimes took advantage of an orphan’s vulnerable position, we also have evidence that parents-in-law or husbands exploited a young woman lacking support from her natal family.43 REMARRIAGE FOR

SINGLE FATHERS

Let us try to estimate what proportion of fathers who lost their first wives either to divorce or death remarried and therefore imposed a stepmother on their children. The Roman Egyptian census returns give us a rough overview of the frequency of remarriage for widowers or divorcés with children. Distinguishing between remarriage rates for divorced and widowed men is impossible, unfortunately, as the census return only tell us whether a couple was still living together, and thus we often cannot tell whether the first wife was still alive or not. Be that as it may, some widowed or divorced men with children 42  P.Oxy. 34.2713 (297 CE; transl. Rowlandson 1998, 94-95). For a discussion of this papyrus, see also Huebner 2013, 51, 55, 99, 102, 104; Huebner 2014. 43  See for examples Krause 1994-95, vol. 3, 273-75.

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did remarry and they seem to have remarried up to a much later point in life than widowed or divorced women.44 Whereas women had only a slim chance of finding another husband after age 30 (or chose to remain alone), often remaining single and raising their children on their own, men apparently remarried well into their 50s and even their 60s.45 And yet, they comprise only a very small minority. An astonishingly large number of single men with minor children in the Roman Egyptian census returns had—at least at the moment when the census was drawn up—not remarried and were raising their motherless children on their own or with the help of other family members or slaves. In total, less than 8% of minor children recorded in the surviving copies of the Roman Egyptian census returns who had lost their mother—to death or divorce, we do not know—found themselves living with a stepmother. In return, more than four-fifth of motherless children were raised by their single fathers, with some other small percentage by relatives or older siblings.46 In a record drawn up in the Roman Egyptian census of 11/12 CE, we find a 55-year-old man Harthotes living with his 70-year-old mother and his 9-year-old son.47 Harthotes also had a 7-year-old daughter, but he had sent her away to another household in the neighboring village Philagris to work at an imperial oil mill, as we know from several service contracts that survive.48 The family of Harthothes is recorded already 14 years earlier in the previopus census of 3 BCE.49 From that return we learn that Harthotes had previously been married to a woman named Taanchorimphis, who must have died or divorced him between the birth of their last child in 5 CE and the time when the next census record was drawn up in 12 CE. After his wife had left the household, Hartothes had welcomed back his mother Esersythis into the house. Evidently, Harthotes used two strategies for raising his kids in the absence of their mother: leaving the care of his son to his aged mother and essentially outsourcing the care of his daughter to another individual. 44

 Huebner 2009.  Bagnall and Frier 2006, 126-27; Huebner 2013, 92-106. 46  Cf. Huebner 2019. 47  SB 20.14440; Bagnall and Frier 2006, 11-Ar-1. 48  Claytor, Litinas, and Nabney 2016. 49  Claytor and Bagnall 2015. 45

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In a census return from early third-century Roman Oxyrhynchus, we have a 15-year-old motherless girl living with her father. The 48-yearold Ploution had decided not to remarry after his divorce or the death of his spouse, but raised his two daughters on his own. The older girl, then 20 years old, was already married when the census return was drawn up in 202/203 CE, while the 15-year-old girl was living with her father. The father owned four slaves, two male and two female ones, who, supervised by the daughter as mistress of the household, would have been able to take over all the household chores.50 Comparative studies on the propensity for remarriage of widowers have shown that household composition at the time of death of the wife had a great influence on the decision to remarry.51 However, household composition in Roman Egypt does not seem to have played a decisive role in determining whether a widower with minor children remarried or not. On the one hand, we find many widowers with several small children raising them on their own without having any other support in the household. On the other hand, we also have cases in which widowers living in a large multiple-family household remarried soon after their first wife’s death, even though there apparently were several other female relatives around who could have taken over the late mother’s role. Economic conditions therefore might have been more of a factor than household composition. Wellto-do men seem to have found it easier to get married again quickly, while many widowers of lesser means were less successful in the marriage market the second time around. These widowers in their 30s and 40s would have been competing with younger men entering the marriage market for the first time and for the same tier of young women, roughly between the ages of 15 and 25. Widowed women their own age, who according to our demographic models should have been available as marriage partners, as we have already discussed above did not remarry with any frequency after the age of 30-35.52 50  P.Oxy. 12.1548 = Bagnall and Frier 2006, 201-Ox-1. For motherless children living with their father without any further support in the household see Bagnall and Frier 2006,  ???-Me-1 (3-year-old boy living alone with his father); 131-Ar-14 (7-yearold girl, 10-year old girl, 15-year-old boy, motherless, living with their father and adult (?) brother). 51  Cf. Kuroso, Lundh, and Breschi 2014. 52  Huebner 2009; Huebner 2013.

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Many of the single fathers in the census returns from Roman Egypt might have actually hoped to remarry, but were not in a position to attract a new bride. While an elevated socio-economic position might have protected a widow from the need to remarry, it might have helped a widower to remarry more quickly—if we may so infer from cross-cultural comparative studies that this is what widowed men and women respectively hoped for themselves.53 CONCLUSION The dire fate of motherless children that we encounter in the tragedies of Euripides seem to have rung a bell also with children living in Graeco-Roman Egypt. Almost one in three children lost their mothers to death before they turned 15; in addition, others lost touch with their mothers when their parents got divorced. However, most single fathers we meet in the Roman Egyptian census returns seem to have heeded Alcestis’s advice, so to speak, and refrained from imposing a stepmother on their motherless children—whether by choice or by circumstance is difficult for us to tell.54 Less than a tenth of all motherless minors recorded in the Roman Egyptian census returns were living with a stepmother. However, we also learn that if fathers did remarry, the transmission of maternal or paternal property could give rise to conflict between motherless orphans and their stepmothers, stepsiblings, or other relatives that occasionally spilled outside the home and into the public sphere, as preserved in our petitions.

53

 See for instance Kuroso, Lundh, and Breschi 2014, 173-91.  Watson 1995, 2.

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7. A LONG WAY FROM HOME: MOTHERLESS CHILDREN IN SLAVE SALE CONTRACTS Judith EVANS GRUBBS (Emory University)

INTRODUCTION “Sometimes I feel like a motherless child, a long way from home.” So goes an African American spiritual, describing the slave’s anguish and grief as akin to the lonesomeness of an orphaned child.1 Of all enslaved people, both in the antebellum US South and in the Roman Empire, the most pitiable were the children who were not only torn from their mothers but also taken from their homeland and sold, perhaps multiple times, into slavery to strangers. These motherless children, deracinated and alienated, truly suffered “social death” in the words of Orlando Patterson.2 This chapter draws on about sixty sale contracts and related documents that illuminate the fate of children from the first to the early seventh century. These contracts, preserved on papyri or tablets, have never been discussed as a group. Recent work has mainly focused on their typologies and the legal procedures used, or on what their prices tell us about the cost of labor.3 In this chapter, however, the emphasis is on the animate objects of the sales themselves: the children who were bought and sold like beasts of burden and entered, or continued on, a life of service to and dependence on masters who had complete control over 1  Best Loved American Folk Songs, collected and arranged by J. A. and A. Lomax (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1947), 368-69; see also 339-41 for commentary. 2  Patterson 1982. 3  For Egypt to the 4th cent. CE, see Straus 2004; the first half is devoted to analyzing the typologies of sale documents, but the second half focuses on the buyers and sellers of slaves, and the enslaved themselves. See also Biezunska-Malowist 1977; Straus 2000; Arzt-Grabner 2010. For the law of the Latin documents from the Bay of Naples, see Camodeca 1999 and 2000. Prices: Scheidel 2005; Harper 2010.

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them. Such an approach must necessarily be descriptive and essentially anecdotal. Given the unevenness of the evidence base and the length of time covered, statistical analysis is not feasible. Documentation exists for only a small fraction of the millions of slave sales that occurred in the Roman Empire, and it is impossible to say what proportion of the total number sold was children, or whether children were more likely to be sold by professional traders or exchanged between private owners. Even for Egypt, by far the richest source, the evidence is skewed, due not only to the vagaries of preservation but also to changes in documentary practices over time, and to the choices made by archaeologists, private dealers, and editors.4 Nevertheless, examination of extant slave sale documents from throughout the Roman imperial world can be used to shed light on what is even today a tragic and all too frequent phenomenon—the enslavement of children. “Children” here are defined as males and females age fourteen and below.5 The sale documents in Greek generally mention the age of the slave being sold (usually qualified as “more or less”), though often the papyrus is fragmentary and the age is missing. Many papyri do offer sufficient data for determining not just the age but also the provenance of the slave, and sometimes the names of previous owners and dates of previous sales. The (far fewer) Latin documents are less specific and it is often not possible to be sure that the slave being sold was a child. References to enslaved homines and mulieres clearly denote adult men and women respectively, but the Latin words for male and female child, puer and puella, could also be used to designate slaves of adult age, in keeping with the near universal practice of referring contemptuously or patronizingly to enslaved men and women as “boys” and “girls.” In the rare instances where the age of the puer or puella is specified, however, they are very young children.6 The documents studied here range in date from the reign of Augustus to the early seventh century, and so post-date the period of Rome’s expansion from the later third to the mid-first centuries BCE, when 4

 On all of which see Bagnall 2011, 54-74.  Following Bradley 1978 and Straus 2004. Now see Mitthof and Papathomas 2015, 113-14 (on a sale contract of a 13-year-old boy): 14 years appears to mark transition from childhood to adulthood. 6  T.Dacia 6 = FIRA 3.87 (Dacia, 139 CE): 6-year-old puella; P.Lond. 2.229 = FIRA 3.132 (Seleucia Pieria, 166 CE): 7-year-old puer; T.Alb. 2 (N. Africa, 494 CE; in Courtois et al. 1952): 6-year-old puer. 5

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Roman conquests throughout the Mediterranean brought hundreds of thousands of slaves from Greece, Asia Minor, Syria, Carthage, and Gaul into Italy and Sicily. But under the Empire there continued to be intermittent spurts of mass enslavement after revolt or warfare, for instance after the Jewish revolts of the first and early second centuries CE and the conquest of Dacia in the late first century. Moreover, almost continual fighting against “barbarians” along the Rhine and Danube or the Saharan frontier as well as larger-scale wars against the Parthians and (later) the Sassanians along the Euphrates ensured a steady stream of enslaved captives into the Empire.7 Enslaved men, women, and children traversed the Mediterranean as part of larger cargoes devoted to a variety of merchandise, as when the fictional entrepreneur Trimalchio (himself an ex-slave) included slaves in his shipments along with wine, bacon, beans and Seplasian unguents.8 On land, coffles of chained slaves on their way to market were a feature of provincial life, transported by traders such as the “merchant of bodies” (somatenporos) Aulus Caprilius Timotheos, freedman of Aulus. Caprilius’s grave stele was found at Amphipolis in northeastern Greece (near the mouth of the Strymon River) and probably dates to the reign of Augustus. Its bottom register depicts such a chain of slaves, at the end of which are two women accompanied by two young girls.9 Some of Caprilius’s human merchandise may have been sold in regional markets like the one the second-century traveler Pausanias saw at Tithonea near Delphi, where a festival to Isis was held twice a year and “on the last of the three days they hold a fair, selling slaves (andrapoda), cattle of all kinds, and also clothing and silver and gold.”10 Or they may have traveled further, to end up at a large commercial city like Ephesus or Side, where they would be auctioned off on the statarion, the platform on which human merchandise was displayed.11 7  Bradley 2004 stresses the continuity of external warfare as a regular source of slaves even under the “Pax Romana.” See also Lenski 2011 on war with the Sassanids; Harper 2011, 67-99 for sources of slaves in the later Empire. 8  Petronius, Satyricon 76: Oneravi rursus vinum, lardum, fabam, seplasium, manicipia. On the slave trade in the late Republic and Principate, see Harris 1980 and Bodel 2005. 9  On the stele see Duchêne 1986, who dates it “au début de l’Empire, vers le 1er siècle” (521) rather than the 2nd cent. BCE, as suggested by others. 10  Paus. 10.32.15 (Loeb vol. 297, pp. 562-63). 11  See Bodel 2005, 183-84 on the statarion/statarium.

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THE

DOCUMENTS

Egypt provides the vast majority of extant slave sale contracts from the Roman period, not because slavery was more prevalent there than elsewhere in the Empire but because soil conditions, combined with limited precipitation, have enabled the preservation of documentary evidence from towns and villages along the Nile to a degree unparalleled elsewhere in the Mediterranean.12 Unlike Roman Italy and Sicily, Roman Egypt is not usually considered a “slave society” because agriculture was largely in the hands of free peasants and slavery was not a major driver of the economy.13 Census documents from Hellenistic and Roman Egypt indicate that slave ownership was found mainly in the Greek metropoleis, and was less common among native Egyptians.14 But there was still a substantial number of slaves in Roman Egypt, including many children, both those born in the household and those who had been bought or otherwise acquired. Alexandria, the second largest city of the Empire and home to a large Greek population, no doubt also had the largest number of slaves. But virtually no papyri from Alexandria are extant; Alexandrian documents that do survive were found elsewhere in Egypt.15 Likewise, Rome has yielded no documentary material—except, of course, the thousands of inscriptions preserved on stone, mostly funerary inscriptions. Many of these commemorate former slaves (who indeed appear to be over-represented). But although manumission is often recorded on epitaphs, sale into slavery was not an 12

 Straus 2004, 345-49 lists 154 sale documents (some recording the sale of more than one slave) from 28 BCE to 362 CE. See P.Worp 21 and P.Cair.Preis.2 1 for updates to his list. For Byzantine Egypt, see Hoogendijk 1996; Pierce 1995; Urbanik 2010. 13  According to the distinction made by M. I. Finley and Keith Hopkins, a “slave society” is one “in which slaves play an important role in production and form a high proportion (say, over 20%) of the population” (Hopkins 1978, 99; cf. Finley 1980 [1998], passim). By this definition Roman Egypt was a “society with slaves” rather than a “slave society.” 14  Clarysse and Thompson 2006 for Hellenistic Egypt; Bagnall and Frier 1994 for Roman Egypt. 15  E.g., BGU 4.1059 (reign of Augustus), sale of a 35-year-old female; P.Col. 8.219 (140 CE), sale of a female, age unknown; P.Ammon 2.48 (post-348 CE), sale of a large batch of male and female slaves (including one child).

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experience that most freedmen and freedwomen wished to commemorate.16 Therefore, despite extensive literary, legal, and epigraphic evidence for large numbers of slaves and former slaves in Roman Italy, the number of slave sale documents is quite small. Several caches of wax tablets have been discovered in Pompeii and Herculaneum, preserved in the destruction of those towns by the eruption of Vesuvius in 79 CE. They cast a great deal of light on the activities of slaves and freedmen in the early Empire, and include about ten documents relating to the sale of slaves. Children (pueri and puellae) are among those sold or used as fiduciary pledges for loans. For instance, a tablet announces the auction in Puteoli in 51 CE of a group of six slaves: three homines, two mulieres, and one puer named Ampliatus, clearly a child.17 Other slave sale documents have been found on the periphery of the Empire by archaeologists or by chance. A fir tablet found in London, dating from the reign of Domitian or Trajan, records the sale of the puella Fortunata for 600 denarii.18 She came from the Diablintes people, who lived in the area between modern Brittany and Normandy, and so had been transported across the Channel. The buyer was Vegetius, the vicarius of the imperial slave Montanus; thus Fortunata became the slave of a slave.19 Among the twenty-five wax tablets recording transactions among members of the Illyrian immigrant community who came to work at the gold-mines at Alburnus Maior 16

 The epitaph composed for his tomb by Gaius Julius Mydonius (ILS 1980) is an interesting exception: see below. On freedmen, manumission and inscriptions, see Mouritsen 2005 and Mouritsen 2011, 123-36. 17  T.Sulpicii 85 and 87 = TP 19 and 39 (in Camodeca 1999, 190-96). In FIRA 3.91 = CIL 4.3340.155 (from Pompeii, 79 CE), two pueri are put up as security for a loan, with the lender taking the slaves until the loan is repaid. TH 60 (pre-63/4 CE) and TH 62 (47 CE), both from Herculaneum, are sale contracts for puellae (see Camodeca 2000). Ages are not given, but since other slaves are characterized as homines or mulieres, I believe these are all children. On slaves and freedmen in the Campanian towns, see Lintott 2002. 18  Her age is not mentioned. Tomlin (2003, 47) notes that her price suggests she was an adult; cf. below on the puer Apalaustus in Dacia, who also sold for 600 denarii. 19  Tomlin 2003; Camodeca 2006 gives a revised reading. See also Korporowicz 2011. Slaves and former slaves are also documented in the Vindolanda tablets and now in the Bloomberg Tablets from London, which date to the earliest years of the Roman conquest.

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in Dacia are three Latin triptychs documenting sales of slaves: one is an adult female (mulier) named Theudotis, originally from Crete, and another a Greek puer who, like Fortunata, sold for 600 denarii. The third is a six-year-old girl, Passia, described as a sportellaria, “basket girl,” sold by Dasio son of Verzo to Maximus son of Bato for 205 denarii.20 A trove of mid-third century documents found along the Middle Euphrates includes several contracts written on parchment recording the sale of three slaves, including two children. One of these, a thirteen-year-old girl named Immedabou, originally from the territory of Nisibis, was being resold after only nine months with her current owner. Both seller and buyer were men.21 One of the very earliest preserved documents in Syriac is a papyrus written in Edessa in Mesopotamia and found at Dura Europos. Dated 243 CE, it records the sale of a 28-year-old female—not a child at the time of this transaction, but she may have been in slavery for some years.22 Although most extant sale documents date to the first four centuries of the Empire, a wooden tablet found among the so-called Albertini Tablets from late fifth century Vandal Africa preserves the instrumentum, contract of sale, of a six-year-old boy named Fortino by two men to another man in 494 CE. The tablet is in Latin, as are the other documents from this remote community of Romano-Berbers who lived in what is now southeastern Algeria, and it follows the conventions of Roman law even under barbarian rule. Fortino is described as candidus, “white,” which suggests he may have been from further north, perhaps a victim of the upheavals in the Mediterranean that accompanied the break-up of the western half of the Empire.23  T.Dacia 6 = FIRA 3.87 (sale of Passia, empta sportellaria, 139 CE); T.Dacia 5 = FIRA 3.88 (sale of the puer Apalaustus, 142 CE); T.Dacia 25 = FIRA 3.89 (sale of Cretan mulier Theudotis, 160 CE, for 420 denarii). I cite from the edition by Noeske 1977. On the meaning of sportellaria, see below. 21  Immedabou: P.Euphr. 8 (Beth Phouraia, 251 CE, in Greek). There are no subscriptions or witnesses named; the editor concludes that this was not a valid document of sale. See also P.Euphr. 6 and 7 (Marcopolis, 249, Greek with witness subscriptions in Syriac and Greek): a boy Apsalmas, on whom see below; and P.Euphr. 9 (Beth Phouraia, 252 CE, in Greek): sale of a female, Ouardanaia, called Diane, from the Ortenes people north of the Euphrates. See the editions and commentary in Feissel et al. 1997. 22  P.Dura 28 in Goldstein 1966; see below. 23  T.Alb. 2 (494 CE, in the Fundus Tuletianos [sic]), published in Courtois et al. 1952. About 65 years earlier, Augustine of Hippo had described how marauding 20

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Finally, a handful of documents from sixth and seventh century Egypt and Palestine show that an active trade in enslaved children over long distances continued in the late Byzantine period.24 In short, wherever in the Roman world documentary evidence is found, from all centuries of the Empire, slaves were being bought and sold, and very often those slaves were motherless children. BECOMING A SLAVE Legally a child of born to a slave mother was ipso facto also a slave, and in the Roman imperial period, slave-breeding was the main contributor to the slave supply.25 Of all the millions of enslaved children who lived under the Roman Empire, those who have been the most studied are the vernae, the “homeborn” slaves of classical Rome, because they are well documented in inscriptions and frequently referred to in Latin literature and Roman law.26 But if homeborn slaves remained in the household where they had been born, they would leave no record of their individual existence except perhaps an epitaph upon their death—and even then only a small number of slaves were commemorated, usually those who had been freed and had managed to establish family relationships. In general, the only slaves who would be documented before their death were those sold or passed on to new owners through inheritance or gift. Exceptions are those who were brought to the attention of the authorities—like mangones (slavedealers), disguised as barbarians or Roman soldiers, would swoop down on isolated communities along the coast and seize unprotected inhabitants, including children (Epistle *10 in Divjak 1987, now dated to 428; see Harper 2011, 93-95). 24  Egypt: SB 24.15969 (Hermopolis, 491-518 CE; see Hoogendijk 1996); P.Cair.Masp. 1.67120 (Antinoopolis, 567-568 CE; see Urbanik 2010); SB 18.13173 (629? CE; see Pierce 1995). Palestine: P.Ness. 89 (late 6th-early 7th cent. CE); P.Petra 3.28 (559 CE); P.Petra 5.57 (post-569 CE) is some sort of agreement regarding a pais named Kalemeros, who is probably a slave (eleutheria, “freedom,” is mentioned several times), though not necessarily a child; P.Petra 5.58 (prob. 565-575 CE) is also an agreement of some sort mentioning slaves, but it is too fragmentary to determine more. 25  There is still debate over the relative proportion of homebred slaves to the overall slave supply, as opposed to slaves acquired by capture or abandoned newborns enslaved by their rescuer. See Scheidel 1997 and 2011; Harris 1994 and 1999; and Bradley 2004. In the last two centuries of the Republic, slaves were more likely to be first generation captives from Rome’s wars abroad. 26  Hermann-Otto 1994; Rawson 1986 and 2010.

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Philip, the 14-year-old “white-skinned, badly-speaking, broad-nosed” boy, dressed in a coarse wool tunic, who ran away from his master and is known to us through the notice seeking his return, or Damais, the 13-year-old girl who was manumitted by her master and received her peculium along with a quarter of the “slave home” he owned.27 Not all homeborn slaves were cherished by their owners, and some were sold or changed owners when still very young. The contracts in Greek from Egypt and elsewhere sometimes state that the slave being sold was an oikogenes, “born in the house.”28 A first-century contract from the Arsinoite nome in Egypt records the sale of a six-year-old female oikogenes; in this case, buyer and seller may have been brothers and if the girl’s mother was still alive, she may have been able to keep in touch with her.29 Two parchment documents from the Middle Euphrates record the sale by one woman to another of a thirteen-yearold doulos oikogenes, Apsalmas, whose mother is identified as Mathseine.30 The transaction was between private owners, not slavedealers, who may have lived in the same neighborhood, and Apsalmas had been brought up in the household of his birth, probably by his own mother. Thus he cannot be said to have been “motherless” (unless his mother had died when he was little), but he was taken from his family and his home while still young, with no say in the matter. The death of the mother of an oikogenes might precipitate the child’s sale, particularly in small households where there was no other enslaved woman to care for the child. This is probably the story behind the intended sale at Elephantine of an eight-year-old boy, Narcissus, the son of the deceased slavewoman Aphrodite.31 Sometimes oikogeneis entered other households  Philip: P.Oxy. 51.3616; Damais: PSI 9.1040 = FIRA 3.10; both from 3rd cent. Oxyrhynchus. PSI 9.1040 is an extract from the master’s will, which Damais probably carried around with her to prove her free status. 28  It should be noted that oikogenes does not necessarily imply birth in the house of the person currently selling the slave, but rather, having been born to a master, i.e., slaveborn, rather than having been captured and enslaved in war or otherwise enslaved after birth. See Straus 2004, 235-39. 29  SB 22.15702 = P.Colon.Inv. 4781v (Ptolemais Euergetis, 65 CE), published by Borkowski and Straus 1993. Both buyer and seller are sons of Maron. 30  P.Euphr. 6 and 7 (Marcopolis, 249 CE); there are two copies, evidently one for the buyer and one for the municipal archives. Cf. BGU 1.193 col. II = M.Chr. 268 (Ptolemais Euergetis, 136 CE): 8-year-old boy, sold by one woman to another. 31  SB 5.7573 (Elephantine, 116 CE), a mandate from Narcissus’s owner, a woman named Taouerseous, to sell the boy and hand over the price to her. 27

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not through sale but through family inheritance or as gifts or dowry, where they might at least have already known their new owners.32 A small number of enslaved children, usually infants, were sold with their mother.33 In one case from Oxyrhynchus a man named Aurelius Asklepiades bought a 21-year-old woman, Tereus, along with her infant son, still hypotithios, “under the breast.” Asklepidades’ mother had sold Tereus several years earlier, and he was buying her back along with her baby—who was perhaps his baby too. One would like to think that Asklepiades then freed both mother and son and they lived as a family, but this is not revealed in the document.34 Other children, however, never knew their mother even as infants. They were exposed, left as newborns on a dung-heap or other place where they would either die quickly or be picked up by someone. Those who were picked up were almost always raised as slaves. This required an initial investment of a wetnurse to feed the child for (on average) about two years. There are now at least forty-five papyri known from Roman Egypt that relate to the hiring of a wetnurse, most of which concern the nursing of slave infants. Fourteen of the thirty-one slaves for whom a wetnurse is hired are designated as anairetoi, “picked-up ones” from the dung heap.35 In a sale 32  P.Mich. 5.343 (Tebtunis, 54/55 CE): 5-year-old girl as dowry. Cf. P.Petra 3.28 (559 CE): division of property, where one party gets a 6-year-old boy and the other gets a 4-year-old. 33  P.Oxy. 2.375 (Oxyrhynchus, 79 CE): 35-year-old mother with daughter (age missing) and 1-year-old son, published by Benaissa 2011; SB 24.16002 (Ptolemais Euergetis, 186-190 CE): mother and daughter (see Sijpesteijn 1996); P.Worp 21 (Ptolemais Euergetis, 198/199?): woman sells a mother (also houseborn) and offspring to her daughter; P.Ammon 2.48 (Alexandria, after Dec. 9, 348): sale of a large batch of male and female slaves, including the paidion of one of the females; P.Cairo Masp. 1.167120 (Antinoopolis, 567-568 CE): sale of mother and daughter oikogeneis. 34  P.Oxy. 9.1209 (252 or 253 CE); see Straus 1991 on the date. Something similar may have been going on with the quite complex case of the 3-year-old oikegenes doulikon sold by L. Vibius Kasianus to Ammonios, whose slave Demetrous had breastfed and fostered the boy from the age of 5 months, with the cost of nursing counted against the purchase price: BGU 3.859, republished as C.Pap.Gr. 1.34 (161-163 CE; Arsinoite nome) by Masciadri and Montevecchi 1984. I do not interpret it, as they do, as a case where the father (Kasianus) sold his child by a slave; rather, I think the father was Ammonios, who had previously bought Demetrous and was now buying his son by her. 35  The original list of wetnursing documents in Masciadri and Montevecchi 1984, 32-35 has now been updated by Parca 2017, whose statistics I use. There is

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contract from mid-fourth century Kellis, a couple sells a slave child picked up “from the ground.” The wife had breastfed the child herself, thus saving the cost of a wetnurse. Either she had nursed both the slave infant and her own baby together, or had taken up the slave child after her own baby had died.36 The age of the girl is not mentioned, though she was probably still quite young; in a document of the late first century, a woman registers her “slavegirl picked up from the dung-heap,” now seven years old, probably with a view to selling her.37 Some scholars have thought that the six-yearold Passia from Dacia, whose sale contract describes her as a “bought basket girl” (empta sportellaria), was also a foundling.38 But the adjective sportellaria, presumably derived from sportela (or sportula, basket), does not appear in any other extant source. The idea that Passia was a foundling arises from a supposition that abandoned infants were left in baskets, but the only attestation of such a practice in Roman sources is the story of the legendary expositi Romulus and Remus, whose floating container is called an alveus, not a sportela.39 I suggest another explanation for the hapax legomenon sportellaria below. Apart from noting “houseborn” or “picked-up” status, the sale contracts give little information about how a child became a slave. Some may have been captured in war or border hostilities, particularly along the Euphrates or Danube frontiers. In the first century Gaius Julius Mydonius, in old age, erected his own tombstone with an epitaph proudly recounting his life’s progress: “a freeborn Parthian by birth, captured in youth, given to the land of Rome … made a Roman only one known nursing contract from Ptolemaic Egypt (C.Pap.Gr. I.1, 232 BCE); the rest date between 15 BCE and 308 CE. See now Straus 2018 on the documents. On enslaved expositi, see Evans Grubbs 2010 and 2013a. The contribution of expositi to the overall slave population is debated: see the articles by Scheidel and Harris cited above. 36  P.Kellis Gr. 1.8 (362 CE) in Bagnall 1997. The word used to describe the infant is chamairetos. 37  P.Oxy. 1.73 (94 CE), registration before the agoranomoi. See Straus 2004, 52-56. 38  T.Dacia 6 = FIRA 3.87; see above. Noeske 1977 assumes (as do others) that sportellaria indicated that Passia was an exposita, but see Sigismund-Nielsen 2013. 39  Livy 1.4.6: fluitantem alveum, quo iam expositi erant pueri. The other famous ancient example of an abandoned baby left adrift is of course the ancient Hebrew Moses, on which see Bloch, this volume.

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citizen with the help of fate.”40 A Latin contract dated 166 CE, found in the Arsinoite nome in Egypt but drawn up at Seleucia Pieria near Antioch in Syria, records the sale of a seven-year-old boy named Abbas by one member of the fleet stationed at Tigris to another. The boy, also known as Eutyches (“Lucky”), is said to be “from the nation of those across the river,” that is, the other side of the Euphrates.41 The Romans had no compunction about enslaving children of the enemy, and indeed celebrated it, as their triumphal monuments and columns show.42 Other children may have been captured not in “legitimate” war, but by kidnappers and pirates who preyed on unprotected provincials, especially in regions near the frontier like Pontus or Mauretania. Of course, the contracts do not state that the merchandise being conveyed was obtained illegally and sellers might not know how the person being sold had become a slave, even if they knew the slave’s original provenance. Victims of kidnapping would be sold away from their place of origin and might change hands several times, so that although they were legally free, their chances of recovering their original status were virtually non-existent.43 In the Greek novel Chaereas and Callirhoe, Callirhoe, a well-born young woman of Syracuse who was thought to be dead and was buried in a lavish mausoleum by the sea, is taken by the pirates who raid her tomb and sold into slavery in Asia, eventually ending up in the Persian Empire.44 The story is fictional, but some of the children in the slave contracts endured journeys that were just as long and just as horrific. 40  ILS 1980 (= CIL XI.137): generi Parthus natus ingenuus, capt. pubis aetate, dat. in terra Romana: qui, dum factus cives R., iuvente fato … Found at Ravenna, not Rome. He was manumitted presumably by Augustus or Tiberius. 41  P.Lond. 2.229 = CPL 120 = FIRA 3.132 (166 CE). The contract was written on papyrus (not a tablet) at the fleet’s winter camp at Seleucia Pieria. 42  Uzzi 2005. Note also the Syriac document from Edessa attesting the sale of a 28-year-old woman purchased “from her captors” by the seller, Marcia Aurelia Mat-Tar’atha. She had probably been captured by Roman soldiers in fighting with the Sassanids, perhaps while still a child (P.Dura 28, 243 CE). P.Hamb. 1.63 (Thebaid, 125/126 CE) is the sale of two enslaved war captives (doulika somata doratokteta). 43  On the enslavement of freeborn people, see Evans Grubbs 2013b. 44  The novel is dated to the period between ca. 50 BCE-50 CE. Capture and sale into slavery by pirates (or, on land, bandits) is a theme of several ancient novels, but it clearly happened in “real life” also.

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For instance, one contract, found at Oxyrhynchus but written on the Aegean island of Rhodes, records the sale by auction of a teenage girl whose name is only partially preserved. But she was not from Rhodes: she is called a Mauron korasion, so was originally from Mauretania or possibly even further south.45 The boy named Abbas/ Eutyches, who changed hands between two sailors in Syria after being brought from across the Euphrates, ended up in Egypt along with his sale contract.46 A contract drawn up at Askalon (Ashkelon), documents the sale in 359 CE of Argoutis, a fourteen-year old boy from Gaul. His new owner, a soldier, then took Argoutis to Egypt, where his sale document was found at Arsinoe.47 Some children experienced more than one sale before they reached their mid-teens. A nine-year-old boy Zoilos, originally from Macedonia, was imported by boat into Egypt and had already had at least two previous owners before his current owner, a woman named Aurelia Didymarion, bought him.48 A recently published papyrus from Oxyrhynchus records the sale in 282 CE of a twelve-year-old Syrian girl originally named Zonena, but now called by the more Greek name of Zoe. The buyer, a woman named Aurelia Aias, became Zoe’s third owner.49 A wax tablet, written in Latin but with Greek letters, records the sale at Ravenna of a puella (whose age is not given, as is often the case with Latin sale contracts) to a soldier stationed with the Roman fleet there. She is called Marmori(c)a, that is from Marmora, located betwen Cyrene and Egypt, and is described as “betrane,” that is, veterana, indicating that she had already been sold at least once before. Her seller is from Miletus, in all probability a professional slave dealer. Since her contract was found in the Arsinoite nome, she must have crossed the Mediterranean once more to Egypt with her new owner, perhaps upon his retirement.50 Probably she was bought for her 45  P.Oxy. 50.3593 (238-244 CE), on which see Oates 1969. Her seller was an Aurelius Epimachos of Caesarea, presumably Caesarea in Mauretania; the girl’s name is only partially preserved. Cf. Harper 2011, 86-87 on Mauretania as a source of slaves; he believes both Epimachos and the buyer were slavedealers. 46  P.Lond. 2.229 = CPL 120 = FIRA 3.132 (166 CE); see above. 47  BGU 1.316 = FIRA 3.135. The buyer is Flavius Bitalianos. 48  PSI 12.1254 (Alexandria, 237 CE), a request for an anakrisis of Zoilos by Aurelia Didymarion. Translation in Keenan et al. 2014, 457. 49  Manchester Museum inv. 10894; published in Benaissa 2010. 50  SB 3.6304 = FIRA 3.134 (mid-2nd cent. CE). The extant tablet is evidently the third leaf of a triptych. For discussion see Migliardi Zingale and Amelotti 2002.

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sexual services, becoming the soldier’s concubine and, possibly, his wife after his release from service.51 Other slaves were “imported” from Paphlagonia and Pontus in Asia Minor.52 Two sale contracts, written within a decade of each other in the agora in Side, Pamphylia, were both found in Egypt under different circumstances. In the first, a ten-year-old Galatian girl named Abaskantis was sold in 142 CE by a certain Artemidoros son of Aristokles to a man from Alexandria named Pamphilos (also known as Kanops), the son of Aigyptos. Nine years later, a twelve-year-old girl from Phrygia, originally named Sambatis but known by the Greek name of Athenais, was sold by a certain Lucius Julius Protoktetos, a Roman citizen, to another Alexandrian man, Artemidoros son of Kaisios.53 The Alexandrian men were probably slavedealers who travelled to Side, returning home with their human merchandise and selling them in the Egyptian chora, where the girls’ sale contracts ended up.54 In all these cases, the child had undergone long journeys across land and sea and found him or herself in a strange country with people whose language and customs were different from those of their birthplace. In addition to the psychological trauma of separation, they may have suffered physical or sexual abuse along the way or from the person who ultimately purchased them.

She sold for 685 denarii, which would be high for a child under 12, but not unreasonable for a nubile young woman in her mid-teens. 51  On soldiers’ concubines and wives, see Phang 2001, esp. 229-44. Cf. Fortunata, the puella whose sale tablet was found in London (she cost 600 denarii); see Tomlin 2003. 52  Paphlagonia: P.Mich. 11.546 = SB 5.7563 (Pompeiopolis, 207 CE; found at Karanis): sale of an 11-year-old-girl; and P.Turner 40 (3rd cent.): female slave, age not preserved, findspot unknown, but the contract was drawn up in Alexandria. Pontus: SB 6.9145 (184-192 CE), female, age 13, also drawn up in Alexandria, but the buyer was from the Arsinoite nome; and BGU 3.937 (250 CE, Herakleopolis Magna), a 13-year-old boy. (All these cases point to professional slavedealers, in my opinion). 53  P.Turner 22 (142 CE): sale of the Galatian Abaskantis age 10; BGU 3.887 = FIRA 3.133 = M.Chr. 272 (151 CE): Phrygian girl Sambatis aka Athenais, age 12. Republished by Nollé 2001, 617-22. 54  Sambutis’s contract, very similar in wording to Abaskantis’s, ended up in the Arsinoite nome, so Artemidoros must have sold her on to a buyer who brought her there. The findspot of Abaskantis’s contract is not known, but it must also have been in the chora since no papyri survive from Alexandria. Presumably she too was sold to another owner.

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Even quite young children could be sold multiple times, ending up far from home. The most egregious example of such resale appears in a contract dated 221 found in Herakleopolis. Aurelia Herais from Antinoopolis buys a female slave from another woman from a village in the Arsinoite nome, who had bought the girl three years earlier from a woman from Antinoopolis, who had bought her a year before from a man from Herakleopolis, who had bought her a year before that from another man, who had himself bought her a short time before that. Finally, the contract tells us the name of this poor girl: Euodeia, “Good Journey” or perhaps “Well-travelled”! She was fourteen years old, the daugher of Ammonaria, and a native of Eygpt. And she was being sold for the fourth time in five years.55 At least Euodeia, unlike Abaskantis and Sambutis, was not transported outside the province of her birth but was sold only within Egypt. One hopes that Aurelia Herais was her final owner, but of course that was not guaranteed. So many resales in such a short period of time suggest, but do not prove, that Euodeia was passing through the hands of professional slave merchants.56 Perhaps she was a particularly “difficult” slave—and an adolescent girl who had suffered repeated sale (and perhaps repeated abuse) within a short time might well be less than obliging. EMPLOYMENT AND

EXPLOITATION

Most of the child slaves who were sold alone were between the ages of eleven and fourteen, although this was not always their first sale. But there are also sales of two three-year-olds (a boy and a girl), two girls and two boys who were six years old (one sold at least once before), a seven-year-old boy and two eight-year-olds, a girl and a boy.57 In another case, a six-year-old girl and a two-year-old boy were  P.Vindob. Boswinkel 7. Note also Stud. Pal. 20.71 = SB 1.5151 (Hermopolis, 269 or 270 CE): sale of a 13-year-old female, a “bought slave” (i.e., not oikogenes), sold by a cavalryman to a woman; previously she had been owned by a priest of Apollo. See Straus 1991, 297, 301-2 on the dates of both of these contracts. 56  Straus 2004, 313; cf. Biezunksa-Malowist 1977, 39-40. Note, however, that her third and fourth sales were by women sellers. 57  3-year-olds: P. Bodl. 1.44 (310 CE; location unknown), evidently a girl; BGU 3.859 = C.Pap.Gr. 1.34 (161-163 CE; Arsinoite nome): oikogenes boy (though the 55

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sold together: they were probably siblings, though this is not actually said.58 How were such small children employed by their owner? Roman law did not consider very young child slaves (below the age of five) to have any real monetary value.59 Presumably they were seen as an investment for the future, requiring some initial outlay (for a wetnurse, unless their master also owned their mother or another lactating woman) but able to do light chores under supervision. The “usefulness” of older child slaves is more obvious. Christian Laes has gathered the literary, epigraphic and legal evidence on jobs for children under age fourteen: they range from agricultural and pastoral work in the countryside, to employment as nomenclatores (who announced the names of guests and clients) and secretaries in large élite households, to pages in the imperial familia.60 In Egypt some slave children, including girls, were apprenticed to a trade; this would obviously make them more valuable.61 Most were not involved in heavy industry, but child workers are attested in ancient mines, where small stature was an advantage.62 I suggest that Passia, the six-year-old “bought basket girl” (empta sportellaria) from circumstances are peculiar; see above). Six-year-olds: P.Colon. Inv. 4781 (female oikogenes, Ptolemais Euergetis, 65 CE); P.Oxy. 60.4058 (boy, 158/9 CE; not his first sale); T.Dacia 6 = FIRA 3.87 (Dacia, 139 CE, the girl Passia); T.Alb. 2 (Algeria, 494 CE, the boy Fortino). Seven-year-old: P.Lond. 2.229 = FIRA 3.132 (Seleucia Pieria, 166 CE, boy natione Transfluminianum, i.e., from across the Euphrates). Eight-year-old: PSI 12.1254 (237 CE, the Macedonian boy Zoilos); P.Oxy. 2.263 (77 CE): girl sold by one woman to another. 58  P.Mich. 5.279 (Tebtunis, ca. 30 CE) published by Straus 2004, no. 1 of his Annexe 1. 59  Note Dig. 7.7.6.1 (Ulpian) and Dig. 7.1.55 (Pomponius); Laes 2008, 241-42. 60  Laes 2008; see also Sigismund Nielsen 2013. 61  Stud. Pal. 22.40 (150 CE, Soknopaiou Nesos); P.Oxy. 14.1647 (late 2nd cent. CE); and SB 18.13305 (271 CE, Karanis) are apprenticeship contracts for girl slaves to weavers. P.Oxy. 4.724 (155 CE) apprentices a slave boy to a shorthand-writer. 62  Laes 2008, 250-52 cites a harrowing description of goldminers in the secondcentury BCE writer Agatharchides (preserved in Diodorus Siculus and Photius), including children. T.Dacia 10 (= FIRA 3.150), a labor contract for a free man Memmius Asclepi, may preserve evidence for children working in the Dacian goldmines, if the original reading liberisque is accepted (as it is by Noeske 1977, 402-3) rather than Carcopino’s conjecture cibarisque (which has met with acceptance by many; see esp. Berger 1948, 236-38). This does not really affect Passia’s case, as she is clearly a slave and not a free man’s child. For slaves in Greek and Roman mining, see Thompson 2003, 131-86 and note his Fig. 45 for a child in the mines.

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Dacia, was so called because of her function: she carried baskets of ore through the narrow tunnels of the gold mines. It is usually thought that the slaves attested at Alburnus Maior were all domestic slaves, but we know women and children worked in mines elsewhere in the Roman world and Passia’s small size would have suited her for such work.63 As she grew older Passia could take on other aspects of the grueling work in the mines, though she may not have lived that long: mining was then, as now, one of the most dangerous and deadly occupations known. Their young age and small size did not protect children from extreme and crippling physical labor, as the skeletal remains found at Herculaneum demonstrate. A number of those who vainly attempted to escape the eruption of Vesuvius at Herculaneum and were trapped on the beach waiting for a rescue boat were children, whose bodies already showed such wear and tear and trauma that scholars assume they must have been slaves.64 If she lasted until puberty, Passia could have assumed another role common to most female slaves at some point in their lives. Almost forty years ago Keith Bradley tabulated the age at time of sale of female slaves known from Egypt in the first three centuries CE. Since he wrote the number of sale contracts known has increased substantially. But his conclusion still holds good: most female slaves whose age at sale is known were in their child-bearing years, between thirteen and thirty-five, and were bought for their reproductive capacity.65 The sale contract of Euodeia, the girl who had changed hands five times before she turned fifteen, states that her latest buyer, Aurelia Herais, has the right to her and to any children she bore in the future, and this clause is found in other contracts for females of child-bearing age. In fact, one reason for Euodeia’s rapid resales may have been that she had reached puberty and her presumed fertility had increased her market value. As the Galatian girl Abaskantis and the Phrygian girl Sambatis (renamed Athenais) got older, their value too would increase: Sambatis, age twelve, sold for 20% more than Abaskantis, age ten.66 63  Noeske 1977 assumes the slaves attested at Dacia were domestic, but cf. Thompson 2003, 179. 64  See Laes 2008, 275-77 for a catalog with descriptions of the physical traumas. 65  Bradley 1978. 66  Euodeia: P. Vindob. Boswinkel 7 (221 CE). Abaskantis: P. Turner 22 (142 CE). Sambatis: BGU 3.887 = FIRA 3.133 (151 CE). All are discussed above.

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Of course, nubile girls often had another purpose, prior to or along with reproduction: sexual service to their male owners. This was probably the case for all the girls between eleven and fourteen who changed hands between men. It is the fate suggested by the editor of the sale tablet found in London for the puella Fortunata, from the Diablintes people, who was bought by the vicarius of an imperial slave.67 A bilingual contract in Latin and Greek records the sale of an Arab female, Nike also called Saprikis or Metethen, at the winter quarters of the 2nd Legion Traiana.68 The sale occurred in 267, but a reference to the handing over of (in)strumenta, documents, from previous sales, indicates that Nike (whose age is not preserved) had already changed hands twice before in the previous two years. Her alternative names mean something like “corrupted” or “rotten.”69 That, plus the fact that she was bought and sold by members of the military, strongly suggests that her purpose was sexual exploitation. Girls purchased by women, particularly widows without male family members, may have been more fortunate and intended for companionship and as support in old age. So at least claimed one slaveowner from Oxyrhynchus, Thermouthion, whose petition to the strategos complains that her “little houseborn servant girl” (therapainidion oikogenes) Peina, whom she loved and cared for “as a daughter,” had been hit and gravely injured by a donkey-cart on her way to singing lessons.70 Young adolescent boys were certainly not immune from the possibility of sex slavery either, particularly in a male-dominated environment like the military. One wonders about the “white-skinned” 67

 Tomlin 2003 (see above). Her age is not given and Tomlin assumes she was not a child, but it is pretty clear that the Romans considered girls (and boys) in their early teens or even preteen to be suitable for sexual use. 68  P.Oxy. 41.2951 (267 CE); the seller, Marias Barsimes, was probably an Arab also. Barsimes was a cataphract and the buyer was an optio, thus explaining the location of the sale. Biezunska-Malowist 1977, 34 remarks such rapid resale could indicate professional slave merchants, although in any case soldiers might have reasons to want to resell a slave pretty quickly. 69  See the review of P.Oxy. 41 by D. Del Corro and M. Vandoni in Gnomon 48 (1976); Lenski 2011, 262. On the reading Megethen (rather than Metethen), see Daniel 2007. 70  P.Oxy. 50.3555 (1st-2nd cent.). Peina was being escorted to her lesson by the freedwoman of Longinus, and the donkey-cart’s driver was also a slave. This suggests a significant population of slaves in Oxyryhnchus at this time. Peina’s age is not given.

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fourteen-year-old Argoutis from Gaul who was sold at Askalon to a soldier in 359, or the “black-skinned” twelve year old named Nepheros sold for a substantial amount by two soldiers who had previously bought him from another soldier.71 Some attractive youths were consigned to a life of exploitation as eunuchs. Although emperors repeatedly banned castration of boys within the Empire, imports from beyond the frontier were certainly not forbidden. There is no doubt that boys, particularly on the margins of the Empire, did end up as eunuch slaves.72 None of the males in the sale contracts is said to be castrated, perhaps because that would betray an illegal act, but also because the extant documents do not involve high-end sales to the élite who could afford to buy a luxury item like a eunuch. In 530 a law of the emperor Justinian regulated the valuation of slaves owned in common (whose manumission price might be disputed), classifying them according to age and skills. Eunuchs ten years and older were valued at up to fifty (if unskilled) or even seventy solidi (if skilled); eunuchs below ten were valued at thirty solidi—three times what their unmutilated age-mates were worth.73 Discussions of eunuchs in ancient Rome and Byzantium focus on the power and ambiguous status of adult eunuchs employed in the imperial household. But the most highly prized eunuchs were those who had been castrated before sexual maturity, when they were still children, and they would have undergone appalling suffering quite apart from the long journeys many would have made from beyond the borders of the Empire. Another law of Justinian bans the making of eunuchs within the Empire and frees all eunuchs already in the realm, citing testimony (evidently by surviving eunuchs themselves) that of ninety who endured the process of castration, scarcely three would survive.74

71  Argoutis: BGU 1.316 = FIRA 3.135 (Askalon, 359 CE). Nepheros: SB 24.15969 (Hermopolis Magna, 491-518 CE); see Hoogendijk 1996. 72  On eunuchs, see Bodel 2005, 184; Laes 2008, 245. 73  CJust. 7.7.1.5 (530 CE). For recent discussion of imperial eunuchs, see Rotman 2015. 74  Novel 142 (558 CE). Earlier imperial bans on castration within the Empire go back to Domitian; cf. also CJust. 4.42.1 (Constantine, 307-337 CE) and 4.42.2 (Leo, 457-465 CE). For the sufferings involved in the trade in eunuchs in the Middle Ages, see Hogendorn 1999.

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CONCLUSION The last known slave sale contract from Byzantine Egypt was found at Hermopolis Magna and is now dated to about 629 CE, only a decade before the Arab conquest.75 It represents both continuity with centuries of enslavement and the sale of enslaved people in Greek and Roman antiquity, and change in regard to the sources of such slaves. Aurelia Isidora, a “well-born” (eugenestate) woman who was most probably a widow, purchased a twelve-year-old girl, originally from the Nubian kingdom of Alwah (Alodia). Her original name was Atalous but, as often with slaves, she was given a Greek name: Eutychia—“Lucky”—a name bestowed (without apparent irony) on many enslaved girls and boys. Atalous is described as maura, a word which in antiquity was used of those from Roman Mauretania in northwest Africa (modern Morocco), but which here must refer to the color of her skin, “black,” as in the medieval and modern Greek word mavros.76 That is because Atalous is clearly not from Mauretania: she was sold to Aurelia Isidora by two men of Hermopolis Magna, who had got her from “slavetraders of the Ethiopians” further south. Although in earlier centuries also sub-Saharan Africa had provided slaves for inhabitants of the Roman Empire, child slaves might come from anywhere—from Gaul, or Pontus on the Black Sea, or from across the Euphrates, or from the local dung-heap. The trade in Nubian slaves became much more important and frequent in the seventh century and later, after the Arab conquest, when the baqt, a treaty between Muslim Arabs in Egypt and the Christian Nubians, required that the Nubians send at least 300 slaves a year in exchange for grains and textiles.77 Arabic slave sale contracts from ninth and 75  SB 18.13173, on which see Pierce 1995, who dates it to the late 6th cent. CE, but now see Keenan et al. 2014, 444-45, dating it to “AD 629?” For more on slaves and related “unfree” or semi-free statuses in late Byzantine Egypt, see Evans Grubbs 2020. 76  Cf. Isidore of Seville, Etymologiae 9.2.122 on the Greek mavros/a as a synonym for Latin niger/nigra. 77  For sub-Saharan trade, see Pierce 1995, 150-52 (who describes the two Hermopolitan sellers as “middle-men” for the long-distance trade from further south; Harper 2011, 86-91; and Bradley 2012. “Of the Ethiopians” could mean that the sellers themselves were Ethiopian or that their human merchandise was; I believe both were the case. Cf. P.Ness. 89 (Palestine) from the same period, where a traveling trading company record the purchase of a korasion (girl) and pedion (= paidion, boy)

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tenth century Egypt reflect the greater importance of Nubian and other “black” slaves in Muslim Egypt.78 But the circumstances that brought about the enormous Trans-Atlantic trade in sub-Saharan slaves a millenium later did not arise until long after Atalous’s sale. We do not know what Atalous’s life was after she was acquired by Aurelia Isidora, although since her new owner was a financially welloff woman without a husband, a young female slave could hope at least to avoid sexual abuse and malnutrition. Perhaps she even became a quasi-daughter, like Peina, the slave girl whose music lessons were cut short by a tragic cart-accident.79 However, we cannot know Atalous’s fears and hopes, any more than we can know the thoughts of any enslaved child in antiquity, for they are the most silent of all the silent majority in the ancient world. Something can be gleaned from accounts written 1,500 years later by former American slaves whose “slave narratives” have been preserved and were widely read in the 19th centuries, and from interviews conducted in the 1930s by the Federal Writers Project, a New Deal initiative to preserve and disseminate American history and culture.80 Childhood recollections of these former slaves include: capture by slavers and the Trans-Atlantic passage; extreme hunger and exposure to the cold (with inadequate clothing); physical abuse they or (more often) their older family members experienced; horrific violence perpetrated by female as well as en route. Baqt (from Greek pakton = Latin pactum): Burstein 2009, 149-54; Perry 2014: 32-33. 78  Ragib 2002, contracts 1-XI. Likewise, the Cairo Geniza papyri of Fatimid Egypt show a preponderance of Nubian, female slaves: see Perry 2014, 38-42 and 225-30. 79  Peina: P.Oxy. 50.3555 (1st-2nd cent. CE); see above. 80  Much has been written on the 19th cent. slave narratives, which were composed by former slaves in order to illustrate the evils of slavery and support the abolitionist movement. For a brief introduction, see Gates 1987, ix-xviii. The Federal Writers Project interviews (under the umbrella of F.D. Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration) are much shorter and less known, but extremely valuable because they preserve the recollections of former slaves who were not as literate and articulate (or famous) as the authors of extended narratives, and were collected from all over the U.S. South and the lower Midwest. Naturally, those former slaves who survived to be interviewed in the 1930s (seventy years after the American Civil War ended slavery) were quite young during slavery times and recall their experiences and observations as enslaved children. A good sample of these interviews (which can be found in many collections) is Yetman 1970/2000.

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male owners, including murder of weaker slaves; the sale and transport elsewhere of other slaves, including family members; sexual predation by male members of the owner’s family; and—often at a young age—the loss of a mother.81 All of these hardships would have been known to child slaves in the Roman world also; there is no reason to think that Roman masters were any better (or worse) than American. But in the Roman Empire there was no audience for such a narrative, no abolitionist movement hoping to use such accounts to incite others to resist slavery by personalizing its abuses, and no objection to children being used in the most degrading and dangerous ways—if they were slaves. The sale contracts from the Roman Empire, insufficient as they are for a complete understanding of the lives of ancient slaves, can at least give a glimpse of their experiences and their journeys (geographic and psychological), a long way from home.

81  Capture and transport from Africa: The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano [Gustavus Vassa] in Gates 1987. Extreme hunger and exposure: Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (in Gates 1987). Physical abuse: found in all the narratives without exception. Murder: Douglass, Chapter IV, recounts the blow given by the wife of a neighboring slaveowner to her slavegirl, aged 15-16 years, for falling asleep and allowing the mistress’s baby to cry; even more horrific is the recollection of 91-year-old Mary Armstrong, of the brutal whipping given to her 9-month-old baby sister by her mistress, enraged by the baby’s crying, which resulted in the infant’s death (Yetman 1970/2000: 18-19). Sale and transport: found in numerous narratives from Maryland (e.g., Douglass), Virginia, and North Carolina; destinations were the Deep South and further west, after cotton and sugar replaced tobacco as the major products of the slave states. Sexual predation: a common theme in the 19th cent. narratives, included also to fan Victorian anti-slavery sensibilities; a well-known example is Harriet Jacobs [Linda Brent], Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (in Gates 1987). Loss of a mother: note Douglass’s observation (Chapter 1) that slaveowners deliberately separate children from their mothers at a very early age (even when they remain in the same household), probably in order to weaken the mother/child bond.

8. FACT, FICTION, AND FAMILY: STEPMOTHERS IN THE VALENTINIAN-THEODOSIAN DYNASTY Geoffrey NATHAN (University of New South Wales)

Household form greatly affects family relations and the interdependency of kin members, helping to define the roles each member plays in the family. The sudden disappearance of any family member necessarily results in multiple dislocations and readjustments, particularly when that member is as central to a family as the father. Huebner and Ratzan 2009, 3.

This statement, introducing a volume looking at the phenomenon of fatherless households, has equal if not greater application to the mother, whose role in the Roman family in many ways surpassed that of her spouse. The domus was the province of women, and a harmonious marriage and household, as Tacitus noted when praising his mother-in-law Domitia Decidiana, was far more dependent on the materfamilias than upon her husband.1 While this paper does not deal with the relative worth of fathers and mothers, it is an important reminder that behind the literary representations of stepmothers, their spouses and their spouse’s children—which is the focus here—lay the realities of fragmented and blended families. Surrogate parenthood of course was often a logical result of losing one or both parents. So, before examining the literary wicked stepmother in the late antique world, it is worth affirming that, misogynistic stereotypes notwithstanding, the Romans recognized the importance of women who bore no biological relation to their spouses’ progeny and might even have children of their own. Part of that recognition was based on basic demographic realities of Roman marriage patterns. Working from age differentials between  Tac., Agr. 6.1.

1

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men and women in their first marital unions, Susan Treggiari has estimated one élite woman in three might be single within ten years, with a new union very likely as long as a woman was of childbearing age.2 If that figure is even close to accurate, we may readily accept the ubiquity of remarriage and the likelihood of blended families. So, stepmothers were not only common, but also served a necessary and positive role in a family’s survival. Augustus’s sister Octavia is perhaps the most notable example of the bona noverca: she raised the children of Fulvia and Cleopatra, women who had been wed to her husband Antony, while rearing her own son, Marcellus.3 As this paper will focus not just on stepmothers, but also on the portrayal of stepmothers in the imperial household in Late Antiquity, it is important to keep in mind the tension between the literary tropes of historians and moralists and the social and practical expectations of women who had replaced dead or absent mothers. These tensions were exacerbated, or at least accentuated, when placed in a dynastic or political context. The notorious example of Agrippina the Younger has a long history and historiography behind it—an example that was repeated in multiple iterations of Roman biographical history.4 The intention of this paper is to consider the role these cultural constructs of the stepmother played in the fused dynasties of Valentinian and Theodosius.5 It bears mentioning that in the case of the Theodosian line, we are not only speaking of an imperial family more successful and long-lasting than any save the Julio-Claudians, but of one that also utilized a number of novel strategies to ensure its survival. Indeed, even after the death of Valentinian III in 455, its descendants were still important markers of imperial legitimacy well into the sixth century. If we accept a merging of the Valentinian and Theodosian dynasties into a single ruling house, it eclipsed even the longevity of Augustus and his successors. Part of the Valentinian-Theodosian success rested on remarriage when necessary, and the important symbiosis of legitimacy forged 2

 Treggiari 1991, 45-46.  Watson 1995, 197-206. 4  Mommsen 1878; Meise 1969; Griffin 1985; Eck 1993; Barrett 1990 and 1996 (the latter with extensive bibliography); Champlin 2003; and Ginsburg 2006. 5  A concept that has been accepted by a number of historians: e.g., Sivan 2011, 170; Rebenich 1985; Traina 2011, 42; although cf. Dagron 2003, 25-26. 3

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between stepparents and stepchildren, and more broadly stepfamilies. In some cases, it was used to achieve an imperial appointment, as when Marcian married Pulcheria in 450 to secure the Eastern throne and to make his daughter Marcia Euphemia a de facto member of the Theodosian family as stepdaughter to the Augusta; or to make an imperial connection that might yield useful political capital, as was the case of Galla Placidia’s second marriage to the general Constantius. While there were a number of marriages that created complex degrees of relationship, I want here to focus on three stepmothers in this extended and blended family: Justina, stepmother to the emperor Gratian and his sisters; Flavia Galla, Theodoisus’s second wife and stepmother to Arcadius and Honorius; and Serena, cousin and de facto stepmother to Honorius and Galla Placidia. These choices have little to do with the amount of surviving source material about any of them, which is relatively meagre, but because they each had under-aged stepchildren as well as their own. Their individual circumstances thus collectively represented situations where the potential tensions of a blended family would most likely manifest themselves. Also pertinent to the issue of representation, they provided an opportunity to see how the literati of Late Antiquity employed and modified traditional literary motifs of the stepmother, both good and bad. Such an examination initially requires a brief understanding of the status of stepmothers in Roman society. We know from the above quoted volume on fatherlessness in antiquity that stepfathers had no legal connection or control over their spouses’ children.6 This, too, applied to novercae, but there was an additional legal distinction: stepmothers were not included in the exhaustive group of relatives whose murder would constitute parricide.7 While stepfathers and stepchildren were included in the Lex Pompeia on family murders, stepmothers along with fiancées were specifically excluded.8 In some ways, this is a relatively minor legal difference, as it only enlarges upon the principle that stepmothers did not enjoy the legal privileges a mother possessed.9 For Late Antiquity in particular, David Noy has  Huebner and Ratzan 2009, passim.  Dig. 48.9.1. 8  Dig. 48.9.3. 9  E.g., the right to leave property intestate to one’s biological children; Dig. 38.17.1.pr, 2 and 9. 6 7

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also highlighted greater protections in late ancient jurisprudence for children vis-à-vis maternal inheritances and discouraging widows from remarrying, in part to “defend” families against the surrogate interloper.10 But more significant is the status of the stepmother in regard to the amorphous social norms of obsequium and pietas owed by a child to his or her parents.11 These laws imply that stepmothers fell outside the family’s emotional symmetry of devotion and support. In contrast, the vitricius might not possess potestas over his spouse’s children, but as Sabine Huebner has noted, the ancient world lacked an analogous stereotype of the wicked stepfather.12 Pietas and fides could be forged if a surrogate took on the duties of a “real” father.13 Commemorations for stepmothers in other contexts mimic this legal separation. Michel Humbert in his still quite important monograph on Roman remarriage finds only ten inscriptions from CIL VI that mention or imply a noverca,14 although Watson makes an argument for another eleven.15 And while this may not prove emotional distance between stepmothers and stepchildren, the use of terms like coniunx and coniunx eius in sons’ epitaphs for their fathers’ spouses certainly expressed it. Indeed, the term noverca itself—literally newcomer—etymologically implies something extrinsic. Almost all scholars agree that in the Roman world, this antipathy derived in considerable part from an importation of negative stereotypes found in Greek literature and mythology. Michael Gray-Fow also suggests that it was partially based on legal historical traditions, where manus marriage had important implications for intestate inheritances.16 Whatever its specific origins, by the early Empire, distinct types of the noverca saeva had been well established and utilized in Roman poetry, historiography, and dramatic productions. Watson argues for three basic types: the stepmother as murderess (usually by poison, a common topos), the amorous stepmother (slightly rarer, but in certain contexts more distasteful than the first), and the stepmother 10

 Noy 1991.  Saller 1994, 105-14. 12  Huebner and Ratzan 2009, 61-82. 13  Harders 2009. 14  Humbert 1972, 202-3. 15  Watson 1995, 266-68. 16  Gray-Fow 1988. 11

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as persecutor of stepdaughters (present almost exclusively in the Greek traditions).17 But Watson also notes that these figures were often limited to works of literary fiction and rhetorical declamations; real life examples of wicked novercae are somewhat more difficult to find. While there may have been the odd instance of murder over many centuries or improper relations between stepmothers and step-children, as may have been the case with the emperor Constantine’s wife Fausta and his son Crispus,18 a much more common and realistic fear seems to have been a stepchild’s potential disinheritance or being cheated of his patrimony. It is for these eventualities that late Roman legislation seems most concerned. The classical historiographical tradition of Roman authors—notably Tacitus and to a lesser degree others—maintained the use of these literary paradigms. Livia and Agrippina were early subjects of Tacitus’s malevolence,19 and the stock character of the wicked stepmother survives well into Late Antiquity. The fourth century Epitome de Caesaribus, for example, almost echoes Tacitus’s language when discussing Augustus’s wife; the Historia Augusta’s biography of Marcus Aurelius echoes exactly the words of Suetonius’s life of Vespasian, where the emperor took up a concubine rather than putting a stepmother over his children (… ne tot liberis superduceret novercam).20 Philostorgius utilizes the amorous stepmother to condemn Fausta and Crispus (Ep. 2.4);21 so, too, did Eutropius in claiming that Caracalla married his own stepmother, Julia (Brev. 8.20; see also Jer. Chron. 2230.6). Christian authors took up these stereotypes as well.22 Lactantius in his Divine Institutes, for example, employs the murderous and sinful stepmother in his condemnation of certain pagan myths (1.17), as did John Chrysostom in censuring tragic drama (Hom. 5.4). For the most part, however, Christian antipathy towards novercae was indirect: there were scriptural injunctions against remarriage after divorce,23 from 17

 Watson 1995, 208.  Zos. 2.29.1-2. and Zon. 13.2.38-41; but see Drijvers 1992. 19  He almost always used the term noverca negatively; see Strunk 2014, 140. 20  SHA Marc. Aur. 29; Suet. Ves. 3. 21  This story was probably based on an earlier tradition; see the Calendar of 354’s Chronicle; MGH Chronica Minora I, p. 147. 22  For an overview see: Kötting 1988, 22-32. 23  Mt. 19:1-9; but cf. 1 Cor. 7:8-9 and 39 on remarriage for widows under specific circumstances. 18

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whence traditional objections to the “hated name” of stepmothers were redeployed.24 Thus, Jerome could argue that a widow considering remarriage ready herself to be labelled the “wickedest of stepmothers.”25 The attraction between generations was particularly maligned: again, John Chrysostom (Hom. 15.2) and later Pope Gregory (Ep. 64, q. 6) both would employ the amorous stepmother figure to forbid marriages to their stepsons. This would also be the impetus for a host of proscriptions found in late antique and early medieval canon law.26 With these stereotypes still fully in use in the late fourth and fifth centuries, we find a surprisingly complex and often ambiguous attitude towards a number of novercae in Late Antiquity. With the end of Constantine’s dynasty in the 360s, the split between the eastern and western halves of the Empire remained permanent, save for a few months under Theodosius I, and the opportunity for multiple marriages within and between the two houses increased dramatically. Turning first to Justina, a woman who may have descended from Constantine27 and apparently so beautiful that in later centuries she was thought to have inspired Valentinian I to legalize bigamy,28 she in many ways seemed a perfect candidate for the noverca saeva. The second wife of Valentinian I, herself the widow of a hated usurper, Justina bore her husband four children while her stepson Gratian and his sisters were coming of age. While all made it into adulthood, two were particularly important: a son, the future Valentinian II and a daughter, Galla, who would later wed Theodosius I. Justina’s stepson Gratian was still a youth when his father died, and that in part led to the army proclaiming the infant Valentinian emperor as well.29 Most of the sources are agreed that Gratian chose to accept this with considerable grace, promising to insure his younger brother’s education and confirming Justina’s authority over her young son. In return, Justina’s behavior vis-à-vis her stepson was to be strongly supportive of the emperor’s decisions in splitting up the Western Empire. Despite serious religious differences, about which I  τὸ ἐπαχθὲϛ ὄνομα; Asterius, Hom. 5, PG 40:236D.  novercam saevissimam; Ep. 54.15. 26  E.g., Agde 506, can. 61; Epaone 517, can. 30; Auvergne 533, can. 12; Second Council of Orleans 538, can. 10. 27  Woods 2004. 28  Jor. Rom. 310. 29  Amm. Mar. 30.10.5, Cons. Const. s.a. 375. 24 25

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will discuss shortly, she moreover made no attempt to influence events outside of her son’s territory. When Gratian was murdered by the usurper, Magnus Maximus in August 383, Justina apparently appealed to Theodosius for help.30 This came to nothing—Theodosius accepted the new political state of affairs—but this showed a certain degree of motherly piety to Justina’s slain stepson. And when she appealed for help to the eastern emperor again in 387, she not only asked him to save the young Valentinian, but also to avenge Gratian’s death.31 In sum, she seems to have consistently acted as a bona noverca. Set against her good behavior, however, was her portrayal in several sources as a manipulator of her own children. The church historian Theodoret’s account of the empress-mother has certain parallels with Agrippina’s manipulation of events behind the scenes in Claudius’s and Nero’s reigns. He and other Christian writers make Justina out to be heterodox, wishing to put into effect the Arian creed formulated at the Council of Rimini in 359,32 and moreover tricking her young son into forwarding her agenda with the full force of his office.33 In the imperial capital of Milan this resulted in a showdown with Ambrose, only ending abruptly with the murder of Gratian in 383.34 And when Maximus invaded Italy four years later, accusing the young emperor of abandoning the true faith as his justification, Justina was forced to flee with Valentinian II to Thessalonica and to Theodosius.35 Once there, as Zosimus relates it, she practically threw her daughter Galla at the eastern emperor, weeping at his feet.36 Purportedly smitten with her beauty, Theodosius asked for her hand in marriage, and Justina agreed if he would help them defeat Maximus.37 Justina, in sum, ironically displayed many of the characteristics of the manipulative, scheming stepmother with regards to her own progeny, using them to further her own self-interested ends.

30

 Williams and Friell 2005, 25-28.  Zos. 4.44.2-3. 32  Soc. Eccl. Hist. 2.37. 33  Theodoret Eccl. Hist. 5.13; it is significant that the law CTh 16.1.4 seems to have been enacted with her contrivance. 34  Soz. Eccl. Hist. 7.13. 35  Ep. imperatores 39 in CSEL 35:1-2. 36  Zos. 4.44.2-4. 37  See also Holum 1982, 44-47. 31

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The marriage between Galla and Theodosius of course brought the Eastern emperor into the family of Valentinian, and would have important implications for rulership in the West, both during Theodosius’s life and after. The demise of Valentinian II in 392, whether by murder or suicide, placed familial obligations upon his brother-in-law to avenge that death and of course presented great political opportunity. The event also introduces Galla herself as a player in these events, the second of our three stepmothers. Like her mother, Galla was supposedly beautiful, an attribute that occasionally characterized amorous stepmothers in Roman literature, using their looks to better control their husbands.38 Her marriage to Theodosius, as I have just noted, was presented as an act of manipulation of a slightly gullible man, and one in which Galla took a willing part. To reinforce the alliance, they named their first son Gratian, an important link to the empress’s half-brother, father and grandfather, who had also been named Gratian.39 Unlike Justina or Serena (our third stepmother), however, there is practically no information about Galla’s marriage or relations with her stepchildren, nor in fact much about Galla herself. Again, according to Zosimus, she very publicly mourned the death of Valentinian II in 392, so much so that it divided the court on how to respond and moved the emperor to such a degree that he felt the need to avenge his brother-in-law.40 We must also look at her husband’s activities during their marriage to understand something about it. For much of her marriage, Galla was left alone in Constantinople as Theodosius dealt with problems in the Western Empire. Extended absences and under-aged stepchildren probably meant that she had greater latitude of authority than she might have had otherwise if her husband been present. And there was friction between Galla and Arcadius (or at least those who represented his interests): in 390, the thirteen-year-old Augustus had his stepmother thrown out of the palace and perhaps Constantinople as well.41 The event is too briefly mentioned to read much into it, but  E.g., Val. Max. 5.9.1, Apul. Met. 10.2. Watson 1995, 259 n8 mentions this only in passing. 39  Amm. Mar. 30.7.1-3. 40  Zos. 4.55.1; John Ant., Fr. 187. 41  Marc. Chron. s.a. 390 [Ind. iii]. 38

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it was apparently a bad enough dispute that it contributed to Theodosius’s early return from Italy in November of that same year.42 Galla’s death in childbirth in 394 probably prevented any further conflict of note, and the death of both Gratian and a second stillborn son meant that there would be no competition for Honorius and Arcadius to their father’s patrimony of empire. Galla is admittedly something less than a character sketch, but several things about her notices stand out. First, she became a wife and stepmother through duplicitous means, an indication of questionable moral character. Second, her place in Constantinople caused conflict and consternation within the imperial household—another feature of an overbearing stepmother. Finally, Galla and her stepson had a sufficiently rancorous dispute that it resulted in her ejection from that household, reinforcing the notion of her being an unwanted interloper. With a son of her own, she may have been perceived as a threat; she certainly would have been seen as forwarding the young Gratian’s interests. The stepmother for whom we have the most material was not technically a stepmother at all: the niece of Theodosius I, Serena. The poet Claudian, in his many works praising her husband Stilicho, made her out to be a guardian and de facto parent of her cousin, the emperor Honorius, as well as his younger half-sister, Galla Placidia, who likely lived in Serena’s household in Rome.43 In what was probably an early poem, Claudian calls her Honorius’s “sister,” undoubtedly to imply Serena’s own filial bond to her uncle-father (Carm. Min. 48.1, 11-12). But in later works, her relationship towards Honorius, who would wed her two daughters, was depicted as that of a mother (Carm. Min. 46.14-15; 47.13-15). And the feeling was characterized as mutual: in describing Honorius’s marriage to his first wife Maria, the poet claims that the young emperor saw Stilicho and Serena as his true parents (Epith. 30). Indeed, Claudian throughout his oeuvre never missed an opportunity to call the general the young emperor’s stepfather, father, guardian or father-in-law (or sometimes all of these at once), which by extension made Serena his stepmother. Much of this was of course propaganda designed to further the ambitions and pretensions of Stilicho, but there is some indication 42

 Seeck 1920, 234.  Sivan 2011, 28-29, Salisbury 2015, 34-36.

43

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from Zosimus’s account of the 390s and 400s that this surrogate parent-child relationship received acceptance amongst a relatively broad audience—at least by the mid-fifth century. 44 While the pagan historian was highly critical of the Theodosian house for its rigorous religious policies, and Serena was certainly singled out for her impiety towards the old gods, he offers a curious set of criticisms in regards to this surrogate relationship. Zosimus portrays this de facto stepmother as deeply concerned about Honorius’s marriage to her daughter Maria on account of her youth. Serena supposedly employed a woman who secretly drugged the emperor for years, making him impotent and thus preserving her daughter’s virginity (Zos. 5.27). The plan worked too well, for Maria died suddenly in late 407 or early 408 without issue (Zos. 5.28.1). Honorius was then hastily wed to her second daughter, Thermantia, apparently over the objections of Stilicho, who both contemporary and later historians argue was interested in forwarding his own son Eucherius as a potential candidate for the throne.45 That the general had engineered a betrothal between his son and Galla Placidia some time before gave credence to this rumor (Claud., de Cons. Stil. 2.37587).46 But Serena wanted a grandson or granddaughter through her cousin, in part to remain influential at court, and prevailed in having Thermantia married off to Honorius (Zos. 5.28.1). Ironically, Zosimus’s account echoes a hope found in the final lines of a Claudian poem celebrating the nuptials of her de facto stepson: “… may a little Honorius rest in his grandfather’s lap” (Claud., Epith. 340-41). This sequence of affairs both articulates and rejects many of the features of the classical wicked noverca. On the one hand, Serena is a modified version of the scheming poisoner, putting the interests of her own child above that of her stepson. On the other hand, it contradicts convention in that she does so for a moral good, to protect the chastity of her under-aged daughter. The subsequent marriage to Thermantia also shows a stepmother’s scheming, working against the interests of her husband, but curiously inverted: she favors Honorius over her own son. Ultimately, however, it is an action consistent with the noverca saeva: she puts the interests of her own family over those 44

 Paschoud 2006, 217-18; Liebeschuetz 2003.  Oros. 7.38.1; Soz. 9.4.1; and Zos. 5.32.1. 46  See Cameron 1970, 47-48, 54. 45

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of her husband. The young emperor after all is a Theodosian, both cousin and brother; her son, Eucherius, is not. This familial piety is confirmed elsewhere: as Zosimus tells it, Serena was much more solicitous of her cousin’s safety than Stilicho himself, even on occasion opposing the wishes of her husband (Zos. 5.29.8 and 5.30.2). The historian’s account also incidentally paints Stilicho as a manipulative stepfather, a picture probably closer to the truth than the tales spun by Claudian. Two curious last notes about Zosimus’s Serena. After her husband’s fall from power and execution in 408, Honorius immediately divorced Thermantia (Zos. 5.37.4-5). She was first sent to her mother and later to a monastery, dying in Constantinople in 415 (Chron. Pasch. s.a. 415). This is hardly surprising given the political realities of the age (Eucherius had also been executed; in one account, expressly at Honorius’s orders, Philost., HE 12.3), but it reinforced the historian’s claim that the marriage was a political match made by a scheming stepmother. Second and perhaps more interesting, in the following year, Serena herself was accused by the Senate of conspiring with the Visigoths to invade Rome and was subsequently convicted and executed. And her greatest detractor, mentioned by name, was Galla Placidia, probably 17 or 18 at the time, who argued that she be put to death for the current emergency (Zos. 5.38-39).47 The enmity was likely to have been real, perhaps made worse by the fact she been largely raised by Serena, but this reinforced the picture of a stepchild under the authority of a hated guardian.48 It also implicitly employs the Greek stock figure of the wicked stepmother persecuting a stepdaughter. Taken as a whole, these three women’s representation in the sources articulate a number of what seem to be contradictory and convoluted views of stepmothers. While many of the features of stepmothers, good and bad, are deployed in late antique historiography and poetics, they are by no means consistently applied. That said, there are several clear visible patterns in the deployment of the trope. First, we should note that the degree of detail is a key factor in portrayal. When a stepmother is barely or briefly mentioned, she seems to conform more closely to the literary noverca saeva. Such was the  Rebenich 1985; cf. PLRE 1.888.  See Demandt and Brummer 1977; Sivan 2011, 28-29, also notes the enmity may have to do with Serena’s relationship to Melania the Younger. 47 48

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case with Galla. In contrast, women who feature more prominently in these narratives exhibit more diverse behaviors, motivations and characteristics. Zosimus negatively and Claudian positively both create a complex and nuanced Serena. In the historian’s account, many of the features of the wicked stepmother are reconfigured to meet the political, social and religious context of her life in particular and the period in general. In the poet’s, she is a virtuous, protective, and loving guardian of her young cousin as part of a broader landscape of pro-Stilicho propaganda. We must additionally tie these features to broader misogynistic themes found in ancient literature. Agrippina the Younger, again, was vilified not only as a stepmother, but also as a scheming wife and manipulative mother. These characterizations are consistent with a general discomfort of women too actively or visibly partaking in public life. It is true that by the fourth century there was a greater familiarity with prominent women from the imperial household, and Theodosian women from the dual reigns of Arcadius and Honorius onwards would gain a degree of notoriety and influence not seen in the past.49 But that said, they were nevertheless circumscribed by the traditions of the domestic sphere and those of an Augusta, whose public activities were largely limited to building, general patronage, and public largesse.50 Criticism inevitably arose when they deviated from these proscribed functions, as was the case of Aelia Eudoxia’s very public feud with John Chrysostom. This afforded writers an opportunity to recycle and reiterate familiar rhetorical invective.51 We should lastly consider the relationship of these women to their stepsons and daughters. In almost every instance, the lives of these women as novercae reflect a continuing anxiety about their motivations and the potential harm they might cause their wards. Even when doing something good for their stepchildren, as when Justina appealed to Theodosius to avenge the emperor Gratian, it was also done as much for her own (and her own children’s) survival. Similarly, the ultimate and most rational fear was not murder or other unsavory acts, but disinheritance and family continuity. Such concern took on 49

 Holum 1982.  Angelova 2015, esp. 161-82; see also Hemelrijk 2015 for a recent general discussion of “public” women. 51  Mayer 1998. 50

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political and dynastic dimensions when contextualized in the ruling houses of empire and in turn reinforced and extended broader cultural fears associated with bond between stepchild and stepparent. In a panegyric delivered in the late 380s, the rhetorician Themistius claimed that Theodosius placed kinship (ἀγχιστεία) above excellence (ἀρετή; Or. 16.203D). It was of course a partial rationale to take advantage of the eastern emperor’s new relationship to the house of Valentinian. It also signified that men and women found value in creating not just relationships, but obligations between stepparents, stepchildren and stepfamilies. This value, however, remained largely gender specific: what was virtue in a vitricius was malevolence in a noverca.

PART III. MINDING THE GAP: REPRESENTING MOTHER ABSENCE

9. ABSENT MOTHERS BY CHOICE: UPPER CLASS WOMEN IN CLASSICAL ATTIC VASE PAINTING Susanne MORAW (Leipzig University)

In his Oeconomicus, the Athenian writer Xenophon defined the different spheres and duties allotted to husband and wife in a wealthy household of the fourth century BCE. He described the husband’s work outside the house, agriculture and cattle-breeding, and then continued with the work indoors that is allotted to the lady of the house: As soon as these [products of the field] are brought into the shelter, then someone else is needed to look after them and to perform the work that requires shelters. The nursing of newborn children requires shelters, and so does the preparation of bread from grain, and likewise, making clothing out of wool. (Xen. Oec. 7.21; transl. Pomeroy 1994)

Managing the stores, caring for children, preparing food and working wool appear as important tasks of an Athenian upper-class housewife. These tasks were not done by her alone but with the help of slaves whom she had to oversee. Other duties would have involved cleaning the house and courtyard, keeping a kitchen garden, and taking care of the sick.1 Taking care of children is just one item of many on that list—and not one that is given special attention. This may be somewhat surprising, because in Classical Athens bearing children was considered a free woman’s main obligation to her husband and her city. According to Menander, an Athenian bride was handed over to the groom by her father with the following words: “for the purpose of the plowing of legitimate children.”2 No less famous is the dictum pronounced in Demosthenes’ Against Neaera: For this is what living with a woman as one’s wife means—to have children by her and to introduce the sons to the members of the clan 1

 Demand 1994, 22-23.  Men. Dys. 842. For further references, see Taraskiewcz 2012, 60 n5.

2

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and of the deme, and to betroth the daughters to husbands as one’s own. Mistresses we keep for the sake of pleasure, concubines for the daily care of our persons, but wives to bear us legitimate children and to be faithful guardians of our households. (Dem. Or. 59.122; transl. DeWitt & DeWitt 1949)

Accordingly, modern scholarship often sees “motherhood as teleia” for any ancient Greek woman, or at least for those who did not end up as slaves, prostitutes, or concubines.3 ABSENT MOTHERS IN

FOURTH-CENTURY

ATTIC

VASE PAINTING

If we look at Athenian vases from the fourth century BCE, a different picture emerges. Depictions of women’s quarters, the gynaikonitis, are most often to be found on containers for cosmetics or jewelry, which were designed for and used by élite women.4 Strictly speaking, the women depicted on theses vases are not portraits.5 Rather, they are generic female figures with whom a female viewer could identify, a kind of ideal self. A typical image is represented in Figure 1, which (together with other fragments not reproduced here) decorated the lid of a so-called lekanis, a shallow bowl with two horizontal handles and most likely used to hold food, perfumed unguents, or cosmetics. The lekanis was also a vase shape that was specifically used for holding and presenting gifts to a newly-wed bride.6 (We will return to this function below.) Depicted on this lid is a total of seven women, four 3

 Hence the title of Taraskiewcz 2012. Cf. Demand 1994, 1: “… classical Greece, where women’s central role was as childbearers and little other evidence exists for them.” (italics added). After Pericles’ citizenship law in 451 BCE, the maternal role became even more important for an Athenian female (i.e., the daughter of an Athenian citizen), because now it was she who guaranteed her children’s (and so any legitimate heir’s) citizenship. If an Athenian citizen married the “wrong” kind of woman, his children would not obtain citizen status. Cf. Damet 2015, 8-9 and Ernoult 2015, 5-10. 4  For shapes, names, and functions of Athenian vases, see Richter and Milne 1935; Gericke 1970; or Boardman 1989, 237-40. For depictions of women’s quarters, see Götte 1957. On Attic vases that were designed primarily for men (e.g., cups or kraters) we discern different themes, e.g., banqueting, hunting, fighting, sports (cf. Bérard et al. 1989). 5  Cf. Sutton 2004, 329-30. 6  Richter and Milne 1935, 23-24; Lioutas 1987, 11-16; Oakley and Sinos 2002, 38.

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Fig. 1: Attic red-figure lekanis lid, 4th century BCE. Tübingen, Antikensammlung des Archäologischen Instituts S./101665 (and other fragments now in Florence); Beazley 1963: ARV 2 1498.10 (© Archäologisches Institut der Universität Tübingen).

of them standing and three seated, each on an elegant chair. On this fragment one can see two seated ladies attended by standing servants. The servant on the left presents a mirror; the one in the middle carries a box, perhaps containing clothes, and an alabastron, a container for unguent. The seated women do nothing. They are mainly concerned with their own beauty, idly talking to each other. By leaving their upper body naked—against the dress code of real life—the vase painter represents these ladies as beautiful and alluring Aphrodites.7 Most surprising is the fact that any kind of work is completely absent. There are not even slaves in the background who would be doing the necessary household tasks. Instead, the female contemporary of Xenophon who once owned this painted vase preferred to see her ideal self as a divine beauty unmolested by household, husband, and children. Apparently, these women were absent mothers—and absent mothers by choice. For them, Stephanie Budin’s main conclusion in her important book on Images of Women and Child from the 7

 Moraw 2003, 40-43. For female beauty and attractiveness in Classical art, see Sojc 2005, 86-100.

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Bronze Age holds true: “The image of woman and child is neither eternal nor universal, nor even necessarily common.” 8 Why was this so? In an attempt to answer this question, at least with respect to Classical Athens, I will offer two strands of explanation. The first relates to changes in the cultural concept of maternity, the other to norms of self-representation in classical Greek art. THE

MATERNITY CONCEPT

The historicity of the maternity concept is related to questions such as how the ideal mother should look in a given society, or what maternity means in a given culture. Behind all this looms the basic question: “What is a mother?” In 1980 Elisabeth Badinter, building on earlier research, wrote a highly influential book entitled L’amour en plus: L’histoire de l’amour maternel [XVIIe-XXe siècle]. According to Badinter, maternity, or maternal love, is not merely a natural feeling, the product of genetics and hormones; it is also a social concept, and therefore to some extent culturally constructed. The contemporary concept of a unique, close, and deeply loving relationship between mother and child stems mainly from the late 18th century. And, one should add, it was a role forced upon 18th century women only after fierce ideological battles. From Badinter’s point of view, family is a battlefield, on which the one party (the child) won at the expense of another (the mother). By being tied to their children so closely, modern women lost a good deal of their personal freedom and are today struggling to combine the roles of being perfect mother with that of being a successful worker or professional.9 Recent research on the maternity concept of ancient Greece acknowledges this twofold nature as a “réalité biologique” and a “construction sociale.”10 Ancient Greek poets, orators and philosophers expressed the idea that maternal love comes naturally to women.11 Women, in their view, were a φιλότεκνον γένος, “a child-loving race.”12 8

 Budin 2011, 346.  For the difficulties of this project, see the excellent study of Macdonald 2010. For the ideological battles over breastfeeding, see Seichter 2014. 10  Gherchanoc 2015, 4; cf. Räuchle 2016, 12. 11  Räuchle 2016, 68-71. 12  Eur. Phoen. 356. 9

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On the other hand, as we saw in Xenophon, childcare was just one of a housewife’s many tasks in Classical Athens. Furthermore, childcare was organized in a so-called “alloparental” way.13 In her excellent dissertation, Viktoria Räuchle demonstrated that an Athenian upperclass mother had first of all the tasks of fostering her children’s mental capacities and providing a suitable role model for her daughters.14 However, while the child was still a baby and in need of intensive care, much of the actual work was done by female attendants. A wet nurse, specifically hired for this purpose or simply a slave in the household, did the breastfeeding and probably many other basic tasks, like bathing and cleaning.15 Other female members of the oikos, slaves or relatives, also assisted with the care of the children. Therefore, in a certain way an (élite) Athenian mother was always partly absent. Unlike so many modern working mothers, however, she did not need to have a guilty conscience about it, because the child was well cared for in the oikos by a cast of attachment figures. Usually, these attachment figures will have been long-term ones, household slaves or unmarried female relatives. This saved the child (as well as the attachment figure) the pain of separation and loss, as it is so often the case with modern children and their “shadow mothers.”16 Furthermore, as everyone—children, birth mother, and surrogates—resided in one and the same oikos, an Athenian mother was able to see her child whenever she wanted to. THE NORMS OF ARTISTIC (SELF-)REPRESENTATION IN CLASSICAL GREECE Now let us turn to the second strand of explanation: the norms of artistic representation and self-representation in classical Greece. Such 13  Cf. Räuchle 2015, 4 and Räuchle 2016, 257-60. Alloparental care strategy is characterized by several attachment figures for one child and by constant physical contact but shared attention. The didactic aim/socialization goal involved would be relational adaption, i.e., subordination to the community. 14  Mothers and early childcare: Räuchle 2016, 67-131; mothers and education for children age 3 to 14: Räuchle 2016, 133-87. Cf. the summaries in Räuchle 2015. I am much obliged to Viktoria Räuchle for generously sharing the results of her dissertation before publication. 15  Räuchle 2016, 71-75. 16  Macdonald 2010, e.g. 117-18.

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norms are obviously subject to historical change, though the pace of change seems to be much faster than in the case of cultural norms. We have already observed that in vase painting of the fourth century BCE there are virtually no Athenian mothers represented at all. In the fifth century, however, things were slightly different. In tracing the development of fifth-century vase painting, one finds an explanation for the fourth century status quo. According to Räuchle’s statistics, only 25 out of the more than 2,000 images of women’s quarters on fifth-century Attic vases depict a small infant; another 10 depict an older child.17 Taken together, these instances represent just 1.75 percent—not very much, as had been already observed by other scholars.18 Unlike in the fourth century, these images are not necessarily on forms that were used exclusively by women or for female beauty care. Rather, as we shall see, the vases in question include a variety of shapes and uses. They also include a variety of images. Indeed, there are no fixed or well-defined iconographic types, as is so often the case in Attic vase painting.19 Instead, we face a collection of individual pieces that can be roughly divided into three groups. The first group is comprised of images of women who seem to be mothers and children.20 I will start with a precious cup dated to around 460-450 BCE (Fig. 2) and part of a rich and special pottery assembly deposited in the grave of an Athenian lady.21 In the cup’s tondo a luxuriously dressed woman sits on a chair and gestures towards a toddler in a highchair or perhaps a potty. The little one kicks his 17

 Räuchle 2016, 266-69: cat. nos. V1-V25, V44-53. Cf. Räuchle 2015, 3.  E.g. Rühfel 1984, 29: “Nur selten führen uns die Vasenmaler in den eigentlichen häuslichen Bereich. … Die Kunst der ersten Hälfte des fünften Jahrhunderts, die dem realistischen Genre weit aufgeschlossener gegenüberstand als jede andere Epoche vor dem Hellenismus, gab wieder Einblicke in die Gynaikeia, die Frauenwohnung, die gleichzeitig auch Kinderstube war.” Bonfante 1997, 175: “Greek art shows many scenes of private life, so that the absence of the motif of the nursing mother is particularly striking. Nor is the motif of mother and child frequent” (italics added). Sutton 2004, 337: “Generally it is the inclusion of a child together with a man and woman that securely identifies a family group, but such scenes are not common. Even women are rarely shown with children or engaged in child care, and even fewer vases show both parents and child.” 19  See, e.g., the chapters in Bérard et al. 1989. 20  Cf. Räuchle 2016, 266-69: cat. nos. V1-V6, V44-V47. 21  On the so-called “Sotades Tomb,” see Tsingaridou 2012. 18

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Fig. 2: Attic cup, 460-450 BCE. Brussels, Musées Royaux d’Art et d’Histoire A 890; Beazley 1963: ARV 2 771.1; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. V1 (© Royal Museums of Art and History).

legs back and forth while reaching out for his mother. Both mother and infant are looking at each other. Eye contact and communication via gestures, as can be observed here, are characteristic of the representation of the mother-child relationship.22 They are more or less a privilege of this relationship, at least as it is depicted in art. Räuchle terms this a “distal parenting style,” with the didactic aim of fostering the child’s psychological autonomy.23 Physical contact, on the other hand, is not always depicted. As will be shown below, it is more often provided by other female attendants. Never depicted are the most physical aspects of childcare, such as breastfeeding or changing diapers.24 Such tasks were considered menial and as such did not befit the image of cultivated maternal affection which the ideal in Classical Athens.25 22

 Räuchle 2015, 2; Räuchle 2016, 84.  Räuchle 2015, 4. 24  Räuchle 2016, 123-27, with just one exception to the rule. In Classical art, breastfeeding was depicted when the subjects were mythical, e.g., the characterization of the dysfunctional oikos of Amphiaraos (Sutton 2004, 345-46). For negative connotations of breastfeeding in Greek and Latin literature, see Salzman-Mitchell 2012. In other cultures, the depiction of breastfeeding was not such a taboo, see, e.g., Budin 2011, 38-88 for Bronze Age Egypt; Bonfante 1997 for Italy; and Pedrucci 2015 for Sicily. 25  Räuchle 2016, 261-62. Things contradicting this ideal—like too much affection or no affection at all—could only be depicted in the mythical realm: goddesses and their offspring in affectionate embrace (e.g., in the Erechtheion frieze; cf. 23

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On a red-figure cup destined for banqueting, a young, naked boy approaches a female figure, who seems ready to embrace him and to cover him gently with her mantle (Fig. 3). Because the mutual gestures and eye contact are comparable to the image in Figure 2, most scholars are inclined to identify the female figure as the boy’s mother.26 John Beazley, on the other hand, termed the female figure “nurse,” most likey because, as we shall see, there are so many images in which the child’s attachment figure is most certainly not the mother.27 Such a case, for instance, is found in a small red-figure jug, which belongs to a group of vessels, usually identified as choes, that depict little children in a cultic context.28 On this chous, a female figure gently lifts an infant so that he may grab a bunch of grapes (Fig. 4). The figure’s mantle, painted in white, is tied only around her waist, and not also around her upper body, as would be characteristic of a depiction of the lady of the house.29 Over the upper part of her chiton, she is wearing a crossband instead, an item characteristic of girls.30 Consequently, she should be most likely understood as representing an older daughter or a servant,31 not the mother.32 The ambiguity of the female figure and the resulting difficulty in identifying her with confidence is, in fact, a characteristic trait of this first group of images.33 Therefore, Viktoria Räuchle is probably right in assuming Räuchle 2016, 185-87); maenads tearing their children apart (e.g., Attic red-figure pyxis in London, British Museum E 775; cf. Moraw 1998, 156-57, cat. no. 466 fig. 57; ca. 410-400 BCE). For children in danger or suffering violence, see also Oakley 2013, 159-61. 26  E.g., Räuchle 2016, 142-43. 27  Beazley 1963: ARV 2 644.134; cf. Rühfel 1984, 32. 28  Van Hoorn (1951) opted for the anthesteria; Seifert (2011, 108-38) suggests the apaturia. Cf. Oakley 2013, 166. 29  Cf. Fig. 2. 30  Meyer 2014, 227. 31  In Classical Greek art it is often difficult or impossible to distinguish a female slave from a free-born girl, because both groups are defined as being different from adult free women by similar visual markers (Räuchle 2014, 237). 32  Räuchle 2016, 81. Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell equivocate: “mother (or caregiver)” (2012, 5). 33  As a further example may be mentioned in an alabastron in Providence, Rhode Island School of Design 25.088; Beazley 1963: ARV2 624.88; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. V2. One side pictures a couple (a seated young man with a staff and standing woman with a mirror), the other a standing woman with two children: the smaller one is sleeping on her shoulder, the older one is standing next to her and grasping

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Fig. 3: Attic red-figure cup, ca. 470 BCE. Formerly in Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz V.I. 4282; Beazley 1963: ARV 2 644.134; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. V47 (from H. Rühfel, Kinderleben im klassischen Athen (Mainz 1984), fig. 17).

Fig. 4: Attic red-figure chous, ca. 420 BCE; Erlangen, Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg I 321; van Hoorn 1951, 126, no. 511 (Photo credit: Georg Pöhlein; © Antikensammlung der FriedrichAlexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg).

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that the main focus of these images was on the child: a child that—if rendered naked—was clearly identifiable as male, and thus a future citizen.34 By the same token, one may also conclude that the motherchild-relationship was not the object of focus. The second group of images depicts mother, father, and child, i.e., the modern nuclear family. As a sole subject, with no other figures added, the nuclear family is most rare in Classical Attic vase painting.35 The only unambiguous example can be found on a red-figure pelikē, a container for liquids, like wine or oil (Fig. 5). On one can see a naked, chubby infant boy, who pushes his chest up by straightening his arms. Most probably, he is learning to crawl. A woman in front of him encourages his attempts with her gaze and her extended hands. As on the cup seen above (Fig. 2), the vase painter obviously considered it the mother’s task to foster her child’s abilities via eye her clothes. One has to ask if the vessel’s two images are related to each other; and if so, how? Is the woman with the children meant to be the mother—and the young man the husband and father, who is visiting a hetaira? Or, is the woman with the children meant to be a female servant, while the couple on the other side is lord and lady of the house (cf. Neils and Oakley 2003, 236)? And who should we imagine owned the alabastron, a container mainly for perfumed oil? A wife and mother? A hetaira? 34  Räuchle 2016, 81-82: “In diesen Bildern geht es nicht um das Lob der Frau, sondern um die Darstellung des kleinen Bürgers in seinem natürlichen Umfeld, dem von der weiblichen Hausgemeinschaft bevölkerten Oikos.” 35  Räuchle 2016, 267 gives four catalog entries for families with infant child: V22-V25. Three of them, however, are disputable: V22 (red-figure amphora, London, British Museum E 282) is a variation of the “departing warrior” motif: not a happy, family get-together of the oikos, but an image of the oikos destroyed by war (cf. Gherchanoc 2015, 1-2). This message is made explicit on V23, where the same motif is rendered on a white-ground lekythos (Berlin, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin, Preussischer Kulturbesitz F 2444), a vessel intended for funeral rites (cf. Seifert 2011, 72). V25 (red-figure lebes gamikos, Athens, National Museum 1250) finally shows the nuclear family, not alone, but in the midst of a wedding preparation: a visualization of what is wished for the young bride (cf. Sutton 2004, 338). Räuchle’s three catalog entries for families with older child/son are also somewhat problematic: V53 (red-figure hydria, Munich, Antikensammlungen SL 476) includes a second female figure, to whom the little boy turns his attention (cf. Sutton 2004, 340-41); V52 (red-figure hydria, Tampa, Museum of Art 1986.070) depicts a seated woman facing three males of different ages—a scene that can be interpreted in many ways (cf. Meier 1988). The best candidate for a family scene is actually V51 (red-figure pelikē, Münster, University 66): a naked little boy standing on a chair between a standing man with staff and a woman fastening her girdle.

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Fig. 5: Attic red figure pelikē, ca. 430-420 BCE; London, British Museum E 396; Beazley 1963: ARV 2 1134.6; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. V24 (© 2020 The Trustees of the British Museum; all rights reserved).

contact and gestures. The bearded husband and father, standing somewhat aloof on the very left, observes the scene with benevolence. Like in the images of female person and child only, it is the little future citizen—placed not only in the center of his parents’ attention, but also in the center of the image itself—that is object of attention. The third and biggest group of images does not show just mother and child or the nuclear family. Instead, the vase painters insert additional female figures: slave girls, relatives, visitors, or females of unknown status.36 The husband and father is sometimes present, sometimes not. The number of additional females depends, inter alia, on size and shape of the vase. The images of Groups 1 and 2 are found on a variety of 36

 Räuchle 2016, cat. nos. V7-V21 (infants), V48-V50 (older children). One should add V25 and V53.

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shape-types, not only those used especially by women; but this changes in Group 3. Here, most of the images are depicted on vases designed particularly for female use:37 the lekythos, a container for perfumed oil; the hydria or kalpis, a container for water; the pyxis, a cylindrical box for cosmetics or jewelry; the lebes gamikos, a vase used in marriage ceremonies and especially related to the bride.38 Let us start with a three-figure scene on a lekythos (Fig. 6). On the right, the lady of the house is sitting on a chair, the iconographic formula for representing her authority over the household. A mirror hanging on the wall behind alludes to her beauty. The lady extends her arms invitingly to a naked baby boy who has been brought to her by a young female attendant. The attendant’s hair style, the long braid on her back, characterizes her as a parthenos, a free, young girl.39 Thus, she is probably meant to be either an older sister of the baby boy or a younger sister of the lord (or the lady) of the house. As such, she is part of the oikos’s alloparental system of childcare. On a hydria from Athens (Fig. 7), the figures surrounding mother and child are of a slightly different nature. On the very right, the vase painter inserted the figure of a youthful husband standing behind his wife’s chair. She, in turn, exchanges glances with a young woman standing in front of her, to whom she passes a baby boy. The woman is wearing a dress with long sleeves, which indicates that she is a slave of Thracian origin. Perhaps she is the baby’s wet nurse.40 In all events, the infant does not focus on his mother, but gladly accepts the other female’s embrace. On the left, a loom alludes to the art of weaving, which represented an important instrument of wool-working in the household. Yet the seated lady is no more occupied with weaving than she is with any of the manual aspects of childcare. Instead, she is the one who delegates both childcare and wool-working to others. The vase painter depicts her as a manager, not as a worker—and a beautiful one: the wreath hanging above alludes to the lady’s flowerlike beauty, which is also admired by the youthful husband nearby. 37

 See n4 above, cf. Sutton 2004, 344.  An exception from the rule are the two choes V49-50: The belong to the sphere of cult and, accordingly, depict ritual scenes (cf. Räuchle 2016, 149-51, with the observation that older children tend to be depicted not inside the women’s quarters, but in cultic contexts like marriage, processions, etc.). 39  Räuchle 2016, 83. 40  Räuchle 2016, 83-84. 38

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Fig. 6: Attic red-figure lekythos, ca. 475-450 BCE; Athens, National Museum 1304; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. V8 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports / Archaeological Resources Fund [Law 3028/2002]).

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Fig. 7: Atttic red-figure hydria, ca. 430 BCE; Cambridge, Mass., Arthur M. Sackler Museum 1960.342; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. V13 (© President and Fellows of Harvard College).

The Athenian woman who once owned this hydria no doubt easily identified with such a flattering image.41 Children, wool-working, and female beauty are also the ingredients of the multi-figured friezes that adorn round boxes or pyxides. On a specimen today in Athens, the scene develops between to seated women (Fig. 8).42 The domestic setting is indicated by three Doric columns 41  Cf. Sutton 2004, 327: “These generic family portraits are found primarily on vase shapes used by women, and their family imagery was apparently intended to honor a wife’s contribution to the household.” 42  An example with a female-only scene full of connotations referring to beauty, marital love, and domestic duties may be seen on an Attic red-figure pyxis in the Dallas Museum of Fine Arts (1968.28; Räuchle 2016, 143-44 cat. no. V48 fig. 45): Five female figures are chatting and playing with pet birds. One of them carries a

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and an architrave; two mirrors suspended in the background hint at the women’s beauty. As sitting is the iconographic formula for female authority over the household, the two women are best interpreted as the wife and widowed mother of the kyrios.43 The woman on the left is approached by a young man who holds out a pomegranate to her. This love-token identifies the two of them as the lord and lady of the house, who are rendered in an eroticized way, comparable to the youthful married couple on the hydria seen above in Figure 7.44 Unlike the lady on the hydria, however, this one is not seated idly, but is instead depicted as busy. She is spinning, and at her side one can see a big kalathos, a basket for wool. Four female attendants are also busy. One of them carries another kalathos, perhaps planning to refill it with wool; two others, standing around a third kalathos, are dealing with packs of wool. The fourth attendant, a somewhat smaller figure in simple dress, carries a little baby on her shoulder. The baby gestures towards his parents, or maybe towards his mother, on the left, like some of the infants already seen (e.g., Figs. 2 and 6). A second infant, slightly older, crawls towards the seated woman on the right, stretching out his arm in a demanding gesture. If this woman is the kyrios’s mother, as suggested above, she would be the little boy’s grandmother.45 Living in the same oikos as her son and his family, she would help the young mother with the more challenging tasks of childcare and education. bowl and a chest, perhaps filled with beauty items or refreshments. A kalathos remains unnoticed. A little boy, who has just learned to walk, seeks the attention of a standing woman. As the lady of the house should be the seated woman on the left, the woman addressed by the child is probably not his mother. 43  An Athenian citizen was legally bound to render his parents gerotrophia, i.e., to provide them with food and shelter, and to show them respect: Damet 2015, 2-5. For the mother of the kyrios, his wife’s mother-in-law, see Demand 1994, 15-17. According to Demand, mothers-in-law are almost invisible in the textual evidence—and the same goes for vase painting. If my interpretation is correct, the pyxis discussed here provides a rare exception from that rule. 44  Cf. Sutton 2004, 341-42 (referring to this vase) and Sojc 2005, 60 (referring to the new semantic value that the old formula of seated woman and standing young man acquired in Classical art). 45  The fact that she does not show signs of old age does not refute this suggestion: in Classical Greek art, old age is only very rarely depicted in females (Pfisterer-Haas 1989); cf. the famous funerary stele of Ampharete and her baby grandson: Athens, Kerameikos Museum P695; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. G 71 fig. 38; ca. 400 BCE.

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Fig. 8: Attic red-figure pyxis, ca. 460 BCE; Athens, 3rd Ephorate of Prehistoric and Classical Antiquities 1623; Beazley 1971, 391, 88bis; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. V16 (© Hellenic Ministry of Culture and Sports, Euphorate of Antiquities of City of Athens).

As a rule of thumb for these fifth-century vase paintings, one might say that a mother is depicted as fully engaged with her child(ren) only when she and the child are the only subjects. As soon as another female figure is introduced, the child is given away to this attendant (or in some images taken back from her) to free the mother up for woolworking, beautification, or oikos management. By painting the image in this way, the vase painters illustrated the alloparental care techniques

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that actual Athenian mothers employed. In vase painting as well as in real life children were part of the women’s quarters. As such, they served iconographically to characterize the women’s quarters, as did implements for wool-working or beauty items. Together, they constituted a visual vocabulary for a trinity of household productivity, procreation, and beauty, all related to the lady of the house. This ideology did not only serve to please the male owners or viewers of vases like the abovementioned cup (Fig. 3) or perhaps the pelikē (Fig. 5); it also likely pleased the children who received a chous like the one discussed here (Fig. 4). And, last but not least, it also likely pleased the fifth-century Athenian women who owned most of these vases. They could easily identify with a lady of the house depicted in this way. When we turn to fourth-century vase painting, we find two important changes. First, images related to the oikos are by now almost exclusively depicted on vases designed for female use. Second, in oikos scenes the aspect of household productivity as well as of procreation virtually disappears: only the aspect of beauty remains.46 To illustrate this shift, let us return to the image of women’s quarters with which we began (Fig.1). As already stated, we find neither wool-working nor children, just beauty care. The female figures handle two boxes, two mirrors, two plēmochoai (containers for perfume), and one alabastron—almost all adorned with richly decorated ribbons. Wool-working is only hinted at by the kalathos in front of the third seated women (on a fragment not reproduced here)—and completely neglected by her in favor of the plēmochoē she is receiving. Unlike in most fifthcentury scenes of women’s quarters, there is no clear indication of who is meant to be the lady of the house: none of the three seated female figures is clearly distinguished from the other. The only observable difference in status between seated and standing figures. The shift in focus from household tasks to body care is facilitated by indications suggesting that this assembly of idle beauties is in fact a pre-wedding gathering. Behind the chair of the seated woman to the right, the vase painter has placed a lebes gamikos, a lidded bowl exclusively used in wedding ceremonies.47 Indeed, this very vase that we are analyzing was likely once itself a wedding gift for an Athenian 46

 See Räuchle 2016, 90 for disappearance of infants in vase painting around 420 BCE from the women’s quarters and their “replacement” with erōtes. 47  Richter and Milne 1935, 11; Oakley and Sinos 2002, 6 (noting the fact that the exact use is still unknown).

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bride, designed to remind her of this moment in her own life, as young, beautiful, and carefree. Fourth-century vase imagery designed for females idealized the wedding and disregarded the daily routine of marriage, household chores, and childcare.48 Also ignored is the actual age difference between bride and groom: Athenian girls were given in marriage at a very young age to men typically in their thirties.49 Ischomachus’s exemplary wife in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus was only 14 when she was married.50 This age difference naturally led to a difference in knowledge and hierarchy that is fully exploited in the Oeconomicus: I [scil. Socrates] said, ‘I should very much like you to tell me, Ischomachus, whether you yourself trained your wife to become the sort of woman that she ought to be, or whether she already knew how to carry out her duties when you took her as your wife from her father and mother.’ ‘What could she have known when I took her as my wife, Socrates? She was not yet fifteen when she came to me, and had spent her previous years under careful supervision so that she might see and hear and speak as little as possible. Don’t you think it was adequate if she came to me knowing only how to take wool and produce a cloak, and had seen how spinning tasks are allocated to the slaves? And besides, she had been very well trained to control her appetites, Socrates […]’ ‘Ischomachus,’ I asked, ‘did you train your wife yourself in other respects so that she would be competent to deal with matters that concern her?’ ‘No, by Zeus,’ said Ischomachus, ‘at least, not until I had sacrificed to the gods and prayed that I might be successful in teaching and she in learning what was best for both of us.’ ‘Did your wife sacrifice along with you and offer the same prayers?’, I asked. ‘Oh, yes, very much so, and she vowed and prayed fervently to the gods that she might become the sort of woman that she ought to be, and she made it clear that she would not neglect what she had been taught.’ (Xen. Oec. 7.4-8; transl. Pomeroy 1994)

When it came to pregnancy, the early age of marriage, combined with a certain degree of undernourishment, frequently contributed to the 48

 Oakley and Sinos 2002, 45-47; Moraw 2004, 40-41.  Demand 1994, 10-11. 50  Xen. Oec. 7.5. 49

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high mortality rate of both mother and child.51 Today, so-called “child marriages” are considered a form of gender-based violence;52 but in Classical Athens, social and medical discourse promoted an early marriage age for females.53 Be that as it may, in fourth-century vase painting the bride is never depicted as an insecure and immature child. Instead, the painters present her as a fully grown, confident woman. This escapism, as one may call it, is also underlined by the fact that the bride and her companions are rendered half-naked—not as they would have been dressed in actual life, but as a pictorial assimilation to contemporary images of Aphrodite.54 These images depict a housewife in the making, not the actual tasks and daily routine of an Athenian oikos. Apparently, this was the way an Athenian woman of the fourth century BCE wished to look at her fictional self.55 Children, or maternity, are facts irrelevant to this fiction. Within the scope of contemporary medium-related discourses on femininity, vase painting designed for female use constitutes the positive extreme—the negative extreme being fourth-century philosophy.56 In between these extremes, other discourses are situated, e.g., the one that can be found on grave reliefs. Grave reliefs were not only representations of grief and loss, but were also projections of the oikos in public. They combine more or less generic figures with an inscription that specifies the person(s) depicted, and thus gives them a genuine individuality.57 Grave reliefs 51  For hints at undernourishment, see Demand 1994, 8. For the dangers of an early marriage age, see Demand 1994, 102. They were already known in antiquity (e.g. Arist. Pol. 1335a13-23). 52  A useful starting point is the UNICEF website on child marriage: https:// www.unicef.org/protection/harmful-practices (Mar. 18, 2020). 53  Demand 1994; cf. Hong 2012, 72. 54  In fourth-century vase painting, the originally unconnected motifs of wedding preparation and of Aphrodite with her circle are often fused: Burn 1987, 30-31, 81-82 (for the late fifth century); Oakley and Sinos 2002, 45-47; Moraw 2003, 40-43. 55  Why was the fictional female self in vase painting constructed in such a new way, leaving the ideology of the fifth century behind? An answer to this question is unfortunately beyond the scope of this chapter. Here, it is just possible to trace the iconographic changes. 56  Moraw 2003, 38-43. 57  Sojc 2005, 125-39.

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were commissioned either by the dead women’s husband or, especially if the wife had died at a young age, by the family she had been born into.58 In both cases, one can find numerous visual markers of the deceased woman’s maternal role: these images represent dead mothers.59 The first group of images is as small as it is special: it depicts young women in labor.60 The most expressive image is that on the stele for a certain Plangon, daughter of Tolmides (Fig. 9). Plangon, in the image’s center, is depicted partly seated, partly reclined, with her hair and clothing loosened. Her contorted body clearly displays the pain of labor. On the right, a simply clad woman, probably a midwife, supports Plangon. On the left, one can see a couple in citizen’s attire: a man with the gesture of mourning and a woman, who desperately reaches out for the dying young mother. These are most probably Plangon’s parents, who commissioned the tombstone for her.61 Were they aware of the fact that, by marrying off Plangon so early, they might have contributed to their daughter’s death? A second group of grave reliefs may hint at death in childbirth as well.62 They depict a seated young woman as the lady of the house, just as in vase painting. The defining detail in these grave reliefs, however, is a swaddled baby who is held by a female attendant figure. One example of this group is provided by a naiskos now in New York (Fig. 10). The seated young woman does not react to the baby’s presence but seems to remain in a sphere of her own, unaware of the world.63 Viktoria Räuchle and others have suggested, probably correctly, that the swaddled baby could be used as a symbol for death in childbirth, i.e., representing the death of the mother and in some cases that of the child as well.64 Thus, these images do not represent a happy young 58

 Sojc 2005, 130 and 132; cf. Räuchle 2016, 63-65.  See the catalog entries in Räuchle 2016, 270-83 cat. nos. G1-G372(!). If we consider the total of 2,700 Attic grave reliefs from ca. 430 to 310 BCE (cf. Räuchle 2015, 3), this represents 13.8%. 60  Demand 1994, 122-26; Räuchle 2016, cat. nos. G1-G12. 61  Räuchle 2016, 61. In the inscription, only the father is named. For the “untimely death,” i.e. children dying before their parents, see Räuchle 2016, 197-200. 62  Räuchle 2016, cat. nos. G13-G70. 63  This was one of the options that an Athenian artist had when he attempted to represent the unrepresentable: death. For an in-depth analysis, see Sojc 2005, 56-58, 71-72, and passim. 64  Räuchle 2016, 99 (death of the mother), 110 and 120 (death of the mother and child). 59

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Fig. 9: Attic grave stele, ca. 330-320 Fig. 10: Attic grave naiskos, ca. BCE; Athens, National Museum 749; 390-360 BCE; New York, Shelby Clairmont 1993-1995, CAT 4.470; White and Leon Levy Coll.; Inscription: IG II2 10096; Demand Clairmont 1993-1995, CAT 2.780a; 1994, 124 no. 5; Räuchle 2016, Räuchle 2016, cat. no. G19. cat. no. G5 (© Hellenic Ministry of No inscription survives Culture and Sports, Archaeological (Private collection, New York. Resources Fund [Law 3008/2002]). Used by permission).

mother with her baby, but a baby as the cause for his (or her) mother’s death. The third and fourth groups depict dead mothers with pre-adolescent and adolescent children.65 These grave markers are more often commissioned by the dead woman’s husband.66 The husband may be present in these images too, thus transforming the image into one of 65  Räuchle 2016, cat. nos. G71-G226 (mother and pre-adolescent child/children) and cat. nos. G. 227-G354 (mother with adolescent child/children; in this group, the image’s focus may be on the grown-up child). 66  See note 57 above.

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Fig. 11: Attic grave naiskos, ca. 360-330 BCE; current whereabouts unknown; Clairmont 1993-1995, CAT 3.911; Räuchle 2016, cat. no. G152; 360-330 BC. No inscription survives (From A. Conze, Die attischen Grabreliefs I [Berlin 1893], pl. 103 no. 462).

harmonious family life.67 On a grave naiskos, the seated wife and her standing husband shake hands and bid calmly farewell (Fig. 11).68 A mourning female servant is rendered in the background. The most expressive figure is a naked little boy who is clings to the dead women’s knees, facing the viewer. Especially through him the sculptor made visible the terrible loss that had befallen the oikos: the loss of the beautiful wife who had dutifully provided husband and polis with a 67

 Räuchle 2016, 165.  For the manifold meanings of dexiōsis, see Sojc 2005, 100-24.

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male heir, of the benevolent mistress, of the loving mother.69 As stated above, images like this do not only talk about the exemplary oikos, but also about personal grief. In such a context, the depiction of children made sense. CONCLUSION In fourth-century Athens, bearing children to her husband was still a wife’s main task. Similarly important was her role in overseeing the children’s raising, providing them with emotional support and fostering their mental development. As such, the (dead) Athenian wife was celebrated on numerous tombstones designed to display the exemplary oikos to the public. But as soon as a woman had the capacity to determine the manner of her self-representation, the kind of woman she wanted to identify with, her choice fell upon the carefree, young bride and her companions, not the stolid matron. For Athenian women, children, it seems, belonged to the category of duty (like spinning, weaving, and the rest of household works), not to the category of pleasure (like beauty care and gathering with female friends). Her concept of maternity was quite different from our modern one, with its “ideology of intensive mothering.”70 In ancient Athens, motherhood was no more idealized or romanticized than marriage.

69  Cf. Räuchle 2016, 121. Would the deceased have agreed with that depiction of herself? Most likely, yes (cf. Sojc 2005, 31), even if she preferred the images presented by contemporary vase painters. 70  Macdonald 2010, 6.

10. MOTHERLY ABSENCE IN EURIPIDES’ FAMILY REUNION PLAYS Angeliki TZANETOU (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)

PRELIMINARIES The fragmentary plays of Euripides bear the names of their title heroines and are visibly concerned with the trials and tribulations of young unmarried women such as Melanippe, Antiope, Auge, Danae and many others, who become mothers after being raped, typically by a god, and are heavily punished on the presumption of immorality. They give birth alone and are separated from their infant sons, usually after exposing them, while they in turn live in servitude or captivity.1 The dramatic plots of these plays highlight the consequences of their rape and the suffering it engenders, as these mothers, bereft of their children, lament their lives in exile and their vulnerability. Like their sons, they too come close to dying, but are saved in the nick of time by their long-lost sons. Pathos-filled recognition scenes with lyrical exchanges between mothers and sons were a key formal element of such plots. Detailed attention has been given to the infants’ exposure and their heroic careers.2 Varied interpretations—folkloric, religious, and psychological—have shed light on the pervasive tale of the hero who was exposed at birth, the title of Marc Huys’ comprehensive study, along 1  Huys 1995 offers the most comprehensive study of these plays. Huys discusses the antecedents of this plot type in Aeschylus and Sophocles (69-84) and outlines the main dramatic motifs of the Euripidean plays of this type (40-41, 62-69). He divides the plays in two categories, depending on their focus on specific motifs of the Euripidean plot pattern. Antiope, Melanippe Desmotis and Hypsipyle belong to the first category, because they dramatize chiefly the recognition (104-7) and Melanippe Sophe? to the second category of plays, which dramatize the exposure of the children (110-13). 2  Huys 1995, 13-14.

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with other formal studies on the generic features of these plays, classified as tragicomedies, romantic comedies, or recognition plays, notably that of Kjeld Mathiessen.3 Interest in the predicament of tragic female protagonists has increased, owing both to the varied and sophisticated scholarship on women and gender in antiquity since the late 1970s and to the recent important editions, commentaries, and publications on tragic fragments, most notably Richard Kannicht’s masterly edition of Euripides’ fragments.4 Current scholarship on the fragmentary plays is not limited to plot reconstruction, but has also begun to approach their literary pedigree with reference to the social and political culture of fifth-century Athenian theater. For example, Ioanna Karamanou has recently argued that the prominence of family reunion in some of these plays can be understood as a response to the toll that the Peloponnesian war had taken upon Athenians and their families.5 PUTTING THE MOTHER FIRST My own foray into Euripides’ fragmentary plays takes its cue from the work done in the area of politics and gender in drama.6 Specifically, I wish to explore a shift of emphasis away from the trials (ponoi) of the heroes to those of their mothers, whose prominence in the escape-recognition plots has yet to be addressed from a socio-historical and gender perspective.7 In this chapter I advance a series of related 3

 Matthiessen 1964; Burnett 1971.  Kannicht 2004. See also, Kambitsis 1972; Bond 1981; Cockle 1987; Jouan and van Looy 1998-2003. For the reconstruction of the tragic fragments of the plays under discussion, I have relied primarily on two volumes of Euripidean fragments by Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995 and Collard, Cropp, and Gibert 2004. All translations are from Collard and Cropp 2008. 5  Karamanou 2011a discusses the same plays with the addition of Danae and argues that their plot offers the basis for an escapist fantasy in which the salvation of the family functions as a polis-saving strategy. But her emphasis is less on gender and the political uses of female characters in tragedy. 6  On politics and drama, see more recently Carter 2011 and Markantonatos 2011. Major studies on women and gender in tragedy include Rabinowitz 1993; Zeitlin 1996; Foley 2001; McClure 1999; Mendelsohn 2002. 7  McClure 2015 is the first study to address the recognition scenes of Greek tragedy from the perspective of gender and explore the roles women play in preserving and defining male identity in tragedy. 4

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arguments that together point to the centrality of the absent mother in the rape-escape-reunion plot, which allows us to delve deeper into the seemingly “happy endings” of these plays.8 The similarities of their dramatic circumstances allow us to build an argument focusing on the character-type of the absent mother, based on an analysis of her trials (ponoi) and her pivotal role in restoring her long-lost sons to their patrimony. In this connection, the portrayal of suspended family bonds is grounded and negotiated against the background of the social and legal realities informing birth legitimacy and citizenship in Athens. This is a political argument through and through—the rise and fall of royal families is the stuff of tragedy (Arist. Poet. 1453b 15-24) and its interweaving of family and politics is a hallmark of the genre.9 Specifically, the political argument in these plays turns on familial imbalances, threatening to disrupt generational succession, not through infanticide, as, for example, in Euripides’ Medea or Heracles, but on account of the violation of the norms of sex and marriage. These plays appear to tap into fears about the vagaries of fortune and power on account of the weakening of Athenian power in the 410s. Such fears are projected onto escape dramas, which expose such anxieties in the realm of the family and attempt to resolve them by playing out scenarios in which the unlikely restoration of family bonds that takes place serves to promote fictions of imperial power, secured by dynastic bonds. This chapter lends priority to the pivotal figure of the absent mother and explores the dramatic negotiation of illegitimate motherhood with special reference to Antiope, Melanippe Sophe, Melanippe Desmotis, and Hypsipyle. Specifically, the infants’ exposure and the mothers’ separation from them—a generic feature of these plots10— cast motherly norms through their opposite.11 While the unlikely adventures of these mothers deviate from traditional standards of motherhood, the plays resist facile characterization by casting their lead characters as “good” or “bad” mothers. At stake here is the construction 8  The story of Creusa in Euripides’ Ion has received more focused attention in this regard: see Zacharia 2003. 9  See, for example, Maitland 1992. 10  On the plot pattern of “the girl’s tragedy,” enacted in Antiope and the Melanippe plays, see the detailed discussion of Karamanou 2011b. 11  On exposure in classical Athens, see Patterson 1985.

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of the image of disrupted motherhood, and as critics we can begin to interpret their short-lived experiences of motherhood through accounts of arduous labor (tokos) and suspended nurture (trophē).12 This is not simply to say that the plays bear the imprint of fifth-century Athenian society. It is possible to go further and show how their scenarios of rapes by gods demystify older tales of sacred marriage and by way of such juxtaposition expose the fallibility built into sex and marriage norms. The portrayal of unwanted pregnancies in Euripides’ plays is radical on a number of levels. To begin with, the plays show the young women fleeing their homes in order to avoid penalties for their presumed sexual misconduct. The plays represent their female protagonists’ vulnerability in civic terms, since the specific troubles they encounter after leaving home do not simply represent the fallout from the loss of paternal protection. Antiope is imprisoned by the tyrant of Thebes, Lycus, and mistreated by his evil wife Dirce. Melanippe is blinded and imprisoned by her father Aeolus who exposes her infant sons (Hygin. Fab. 186), while Hypsipyle is sold as a slave to Lycurgus, a priest of Zeus at a sanctuary in Nemea (F 759a. 1619-23), after she flees Lemnos to escape death for saving her father, Thoas. As a slave, she is charged with the care of Opheltes, the son of Lycurgus and his wife, Eurydice (F 752h.26-28). Girls who lost their virginity brought dishonor on their families and harmed them financially by shortchanging their prospects of marriage. This is reflected in the plots of New Comedy, where fathers try to marry off daughters who have been seduced to preserve the family’s honor. There is no extant legal evidence from classical Athens concerning the seduction of virgins. It appears that in archaic Athens, fathers could disown them and treat them as slaves, if we trust Plutarch’s account of Solon’s legislation.13 The punishments that the female 12  On Athenian motherhood, see Räuchle 2016 who offers a more balanced interpretation of the representation of mothers in Athenian art and literature than does the earlier work of Demand 1994. On motherhood and mothering in antiquity, see Petersen and Salzman-Mitchell 2012. 13  Plut. Sol.: ἔτι δ᾽ οὔτε θυγατέρας πωλεῖν οὔτ’ ἀδελφὰς δίδωσι, πλὴν ἂν μὴ λάβῃ παρθένον ἀνδρὶ συγγεγενημένην (“and further still the law does not permit that one sell one’s daughters or sisters, unless a virgin is found out to have had sex with a man”). However, we have no sources from the Classical period record the law regarding the seduction of virgins. For the evidence from New Comedy, see

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characters suffer in these plays appear to be closer in form to these earlier penalties, especially since fathers (except for Hypsipyle’s father) incarcerate or force their daughters to leave home. As exiles, then, these girls are disenfranchised and become slaves or captives. What is more, the plays capitalized on the ambiguities of rape and seduction under Athenian law, portraying the unmarried young daughters (parthenoi) as victims of rape, fearful of being punished by their fathers for dishonoring their family, yet reluctant to speak of rape at all, no less of having been raped by a god. Thus, while the recognition of the young girl as the mother of the heroes follows the established pattern of Hesiodic genealogies of the birth of Heracles, Helen, and Perseus, and numerous others known from the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, the ascription of divine parentage does not pay tribute to the fiction of sacred marriage (hieros gamos).14 The latter is acknowledged in the genealogical ties outlined at the closural rhēseis of the plays. These, however, deploy the myths of virgin rapes to address different issues and concerns, germane to Athenian interests in the realm of power politics. This analysis, however, suggests, that the anxieties about the status of the empire emerge through the plays’ preoccupation with fractured family ties. The negotiation of birth legitimacy and dynastic succession thus lends voice to fears about the attenuation of Athenian power.15 MOTHERS

ON THE FRINGE:

ANTIOPE

The biographies of these women, given in the Hellenistic hypotheseis of the plays or in their tattered prologues, allow them to come to life on the stage as suffering mothers and as captives and slaves. Their Scafuro 1997, 232-78. On rape, adultery, and seduction, see Omitowuju 2002 who takes issue with earlier views on these topics, especially those of Cohen 1990. Rabinowitz 2011 explores the representation of rape with attention to female desire in tragedy with a comprehensive bibliography on the topic. 14  On gender ideology in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, see Ormand 2014. On the fiction of the sacred marriage and illegitimacy, see Huys 1995, 90-94. 15  On the use of genealogical claims in Athenian imperial ideology, see Rosenbloom 2011. For the ideological uses of dramatic form in Euripides, see Wohl 2015. For a reading of Euripides’ Ion in light of Athenian democratic and imperial ideology, see Dougherty 1996, whose approach I share.

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dislocation, as they attempt to forestall shame and dishonor, is also juxtaposed to the toils of their displaced sons that eventually bring them heroic renown. The plays set in relief their endless ponoi (trials and sufferings) and their stories of traumatic motherhood come to life through accounts of problematic pregnancies and childbirth, followed by infant exposure. For example, in the prologue of Antiope,16 it is the herdsman who found and raised Antiope’s sons, Amphion and Zethus, and who recalls her ordeal in delivering her babies alone on the slopes of Mt. Cithaeron close to the town of Eleutherae, right on the border with Attica, in barely a line and a half of surviving text:17 τὸν μὲν κικλήσκω Ζῆθον· ἐζήτησε γὰρ τόκοισιν εὐμάρειαν ἡ τεκοῦσά νιν … (τὸν δὲ … Ἀμφίονα) … παρὰ τὸ ἀμφ᾿ ὁδὸν … γεννηθῆναι. (fr. 181-82) I call the one Zethus; for his mother sought a place of comfort for his birthing … (and the other Amphion) … from his being born by the roadside.

The memory of her difficult childbirth, euphemistically recalled through the collocation “searched” (ἐζήτησε) for comfort (εὐμάρειαν), evokes the pain of childbirth and the acute childbirth pangs that accompanied this momentous event in any woman’s life. Antiope’s experience, however, inverts normative expectations of motherhood. As a mother-to-be, she faces significant trials: she escapes briefly from Thebes to deliver and “save” her babies from death; their questionable paternity by Zeus sets in motion a series of events that follow their exposure: her flight to Sicyon to avoid her father Nycteus’s punishment and subsequent captivity by Lycus, the tyrannical king of Thebes, after he murders her husband, Epopeus of Sicyon, was summarized 16  For complete testimonia and discussion, see Collard, Cropp and Gibert 2004, 259-66; Kannicht 2005, 5.1, 274-312. Antiope, like Hypsipyle, is dated to 410-409 BCE, based on the scholion to Ar. Frogs 53, though its rate of metrical resolutions place it earlier in the 420s. The story before Euripides occurs in Hom. Od. 11.260-65. Subsequently, it appears in Anth. Pal. 3.7; Hygin. Fab. 8; Apollod. 3.5.5; Schol. Ap. Rhod. 4.1090; Prop. 3.15.11-42; Ov. Met. 6.110-11; Paus. 2.6.1-2. 17  For numbering and reconstruction of the fragments of the four plays, I follow Kannicht 1995; Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995; Collard, Cropp, and Gibert 2004.

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by Hyginus, whose version appears to follow Euripides’ play (Hyg. Fab. 8.1-5).18 The complex genealogical fabric typical of these dramas aside, the play’s first audience would have understood Antiope’s precarious situation in light of the legal consequences of illegitimate birth. Athenian law would have debarred her sons from proper succession of name, property, and citizenship.19 Thus, the dramatic handling of the myth recasts the outcome of the rape in contemporary terms and her perceived sexual transgression sets in motion her sons’ ponoi, those of their birth and exposure, and the perils she faces as a result. But tragedy was not committed to an unfailing reproduction of Athenian civic norms and does not undermine Antiope’s status as a mother, highlighting instead the complexities inherent in her situation. Significantly, the herdsman’s reference to Antiope’s search for a safe place to deliver the babies recalls Leto’s protracted search and her difficult labor on Delos in the Homeric Hymn to Apollo. The Hymn to Apollo offers a detailed account of Leto’s labor: αὐτὰρ ἐπεί ῥ᾿ ὄμοσέν τε τελεύτησέν τε τὸν ὅρκον, Δῆλος μὲν μάλα χαῖρε γόνωι Ἑκάτοιο ἄνακτος· Λητὼ δ᾿ ἐννῆμάρ τε καὶ ἐννέα νύκτας ἀέλπτοις ὠδίνεσσι πέπαρτο. (Hymn. Hom. Ap. 3.89-92) when she had sworn and completed the oath, Delos rejoiced over the birth of lord Far-shooter, while Leto for nine days and nine nights was pierced by unutterable birth pangs.

Leto’s story furnishes the best-known mythical example of childbirth in Greek literature. Her violent persecution by Hera provides a model and precedent for the motif of the mother-in-flight from her opponent that we encounter in escape-recognition dramas. The narrative of childbirth, given in the hymn, follows the generic requirements of the hymnic genre: the account of Leto’s difficult childbirth forms part of the birth stories of the gods, typical of hymns. In tragedy, the commemoration of women’s birth pangs takes on a different form and draws its significance from the roles women played in the larger political community in Athens. Tragic mothers recall the pain of childbirth, 18

 Collard, Cropp, Gibert 2004, 261.  Ogden 1996, 151-88.

19

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when they lose a child, lamenting the futility of their toil in songs of grief:20 ἰὼ τέκνον, δυστυχῆ σ᾿ ἔτρεφον ἔφερον ὑφ᾿ ἥπατος πόνους ἐνεγκοῦσ᾿ ἐν ὠδῖσι· καὶ νῦν τὸν ἐμὸν Ἀίδα ἔχει μόχθον ἀθλίας, ἐγὼ δὲ γηροβοσκὸν οὐκ ἔχω, τεκοῦσ᾿ ἁ τάλαινα παῖδα. (Eur. Supp. 918-24) Alas, my son, it was for misery that I carried you next to my heart and nourished you, bearing the pain of childbirth! And now Hades has taken the fruits of my labor, wretch that I am, and I have no one to tend my old age, though I, unhappy one, have borne a child!

Mothers lament the loss of their children and protest against the cost of war that claims their lives. The expression of female grief was perceived as undercutting the praise due Athens’s war dead. In Athens, female relatives were not allowed to express their grief publicly, but were expected to exercise utmost restraint, as most famously admonished by Pericles (Thuc. 2.45.2). And yet, mothers’ voices in tragedy are consequential in their own right; references to their labor pangs are a mark of the authority their voices carry, even when they are positioning themselves against men’s actions, private or public. We may now return to the fragmentary excerpt quoted above where it is the shepherd, not Antiope, who refers to her difficult labor. His encoding of Antiope’s painful story into her children’s names ensures the mother-child bond for later in the play, but also creates a memorial of her becoming a mother on the fringe (on the slopes of Mt. Cithaeron and by the roadside), cast out from a society that would have denied her any recognition on this count. But her maternal ponos is memorialized nonetheless; it is inscribed in Zethos’s and Amphion’s names. As with Leto, Antiope’s labor emphasizes her offsprings’ strong connections to their mother, preserving the memory of her ordeal. The recognition of her sons by Antiope is thus prepared 20

 In tragedy, the pain of childbirth and breastfeeding typically evoke the bond between mother and child: Cho. 896-98; Eur. Med. 1029-35; Supp. 920; Phoen. 353, 1434, 1527, 1568. On labor pangs, see King 1998.

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for dramatically by way of the boys’ naming by the shepherd. Zethus’s and Amphion’s names carry the imprint of their mother’s suffering. More significantly for Antiope’s portrait as an absent mother, the shepherd’s account of her difficult childbirth does not attach blame to her character. Rather, it affords us the opportunity to situate her maternal identity within the idiom of civic motherhood in tragedy by valorizing her ponoi. CONFRONTING THE MOTHER’S RAPE: MELANIPPE SOPHE AND MELANIPPE DESMOTIS Viewed from a different angle, however, Antiope’s story and those of Melanippe and Hypsipyle ran counter to the expectations and customs accompanying the normative model of Athenian motherhood. Mothers gave birth and raised their children at home; their sons’ paternity was ascertained in the naming ceremony of the Amphidromia, probably held on the tenth day after birth in the presence of witnesses.21 While divine rapes and exposure was the stuff of legend, the dramatic accounts of illicit pregnancies were far from unproblematic for their male audiences. It is therefore necessary to inquire into how the subject matter of these tragedies addressed contemporary norms, especially at a time when Athens’s power was being tested. The issues of questionable paternity and civic legitimacy that these plays dramatized were germane to Athenian democratic society. Pericles’ citizenship law of 451/450 BCE that made descent from an Athenian father and mother a requirement for Athenian citizenship,22 and the laws that barred non-legitimate offspring of an Athenian citizen from his inheritance, are most pertinent.23 The dramas, however, probe these matters in a different way as well, allowing for the absent mother’s perspective to enter into dialogue with the norms by which she is found lacking. By presenting women in sexually charged situations that left them bereft of support, the plays engage their audiences’ sympathy for the protagonists who voice their perspective on women’s subordination to the family’s interests. Melanippe Sophe dramatizes Melanippe’s rape by Poseidon after which she gives birth to twin boys, 21

 For the timing and sources of the Amphidromia, see Hamilton 1984.  Patterson 1981. 23  Ogden 1996, esp. 151-88. 22

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Aeolus and Boeotus, in a barn.24 A cowherd discovers them and, thinking that they are the monstrous issue of a cow, he brings them to Melanippe’s father, Aeolus, who prepares to have them killed. Melanippe speaks against her father, attempting to thwart his plan: εἰ δὲ παρθένος φθαρεῖσα ἐξέθηκε τὰ παιδία καὶ φοβουμένη τὸν πατέρα, σὺ φόνον δράσεις; (F 485) But if a girl exposed the children because she had been raped (phthareisa) and was in fear of her father, will you then commit murder?”

Euripides endows his character with a rhetorical agency that matches her title eponym, sōphē (“the wise”). More significantly, this fragment offers one example of how the female characters of these plays voiced their opposition to male violence and defended themselves against the common assumption that they were seduced, not coerced. Creusa in Ion attacks the rapist himself, the god Apollo, in a robust speech of blame (Ion 881-86) that recounts her rape and the exposure of the infant Ion (Ion 859-922, esp. 916-22). Of similar importance for our argument is Creusa’s resolve to break her silence, as she makes the point that she held the rape as a secret out of fear of her mother (859-80).25 Thus, unlike virgins in New Comedy, who never speak up against their rapes, Euripides poignantly portrays his characters as going against the grain and breaching the norms of silence. Like Melanippe and Creusa, female characters in these plays speak publicly in a manner that matches the parrhēsia (“freedom of speech”) of male characters about matters personal and political. In Melanippe Desmotis, furthermore, Melanippe gives a famous speech rebuking men for casting aspersions against women. Melanippe gives a defense of women’s sound financial judgment as well as of their primacy in the sphere of religion. She concludes her speech with a rejection of misogyny:26 Will the vain censures of men not cease (οὐχὶ παύσεται ψόγος / μάταιος ἀνδρῶν) †and those excessively thinking† if just one is found to be bad, 24

 Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, 240-41; Kannicht 1995, 5.1, 525-36 (Melanippe Sophe), 537-53 (Melanippe Desmotis). Collard and Cropp 2008, 570-71 discuss the dating of the play in the late 410s on the basis of quotations in Aristophanes’ plays of 411 BCE. 25  Huys 1995, 108-9. 26  Female characters in tragedy also echo misogynistic tropes, as does Melanippe, defending her intelligence: ἐγὼ γυνὴ μέν εἰμι, νοῦς δ᾿ ἔνεστί μοι (F 482: “I am a woman, but I have intelligence”).

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to condemn all women alike? For my part I will make a distinction: on the one hand nothing is worse than a bad woman, but on the other nothing excels a good one in goodness. The natures of each are different. (F 494.22-29)

Melanippe counters men’s blame against women with praise, enumerating women’s civic contributions. Her praise of women’s singular privileges highlights their role in the political community. Her statement “everything flourishes in the hands of women” (F 494.20-21) summarizes women’s excellence in the sphere of religion as priestesses of important cults, of Apollo at Delphi, Zeus at Dodona, and of the Eumenides (F 494.9-20). In fifth-century Athens, despite their being debarred from politics proper, women had a limited share in public life as wives and mothers, notably, in religious festivals, in funerary commemoration,27 and their contributions to the community form the basis for the discourse of female praise in tragedy. But what character types did Melanippe and her sisters represent for their audiences? Aristophanes censured Euripides for creating female heroines that model deviant behavior. He singles out his Melanippe (Ar. Thesm. 546-48), Sthenoboea, and Phaedra (Ar. Ran. 1043-44) as examples of wanton, immodest behavior. But the picture is in fact more complicated. Aristophanes attacks Euripides on moral grounds by blurring the very boundaries that Euripides is attempting to clarify. For, as we have seen, the plays’ commentary on rape questions stereotypes of women’s uncontrolled sexual desire. Whereas Aristophanes depicts comic women as partaking in all kind of vices, he also turns the tables on Euripides by having the female characters of Women at the Thesmophoria protest against Euripides’ misogyny (Ar. Thesm. 38397). Aristophanes’ social commentary is of a different type. Old Comedy addresses men’s and women’s character foibles from a comic perspective: their proclivity for sex, eating, and drinking derives from the iambic tradition and the spirit of the kōmos (“revel”) in honor of Dionysos.28 Euripides’ female characters in his seriocomic plays, on the other hand, decry the violence done them by the gods and by their fathers. In so doing, he affords the audience the opportunity to engage with the dramatic commentary on sex and gender norms. 27

 For the connections between Athenian religion and women’s citizenship, see especially Goff 2004; Tzanetou 2007; Patterson 2009. 28  Henderson 2010, 12-15.

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MOURNING, SURROGACY,

AND

MOTHERHOOD: HYPSIPYLE

As exiles and slaves, the displaced Euripidean mothers lament the premature loss of the children they bore and abandoned. The fragments of Hypsipyle furnish evidence for the mother’s lament for her troubles; their reconstruction allows us to make plausible inferences about how the plays depicted the absent mother as a mourning mother.29 Hypsipyle leaves Lemnos to avoid punishment for sparing her father during the man-slaughtering spree of the Lemnian women that left no other man alive. She now tends to the young son of Lycurgus, Opheltes, as a slave nurse in Nemea.30 Her laments at the opening of the play do not survive in full, but what remains is indicative. The chorus in the parodos admonish her to leave the past behind and forego singing about the heroes of the Argo: τί σὺ παρὰ προθύροις, φίλα; πότερα δώματος εἰσόδους σαίρει[ς], ἢ δρόσον ἐπὶ πέδῳ βάλλεις οἷά τε δούλα; ἦ τὰν Ἀργὼ τὰν διὰ σοῦ στόματος αἰεὶ κλῃζομέναν ἱερὸν δέρος ... (F 754: ~202-10) Why are you here at the doorway, dear friend? Are you sweeping the house’s entrance, or sprinkling water on the ground, as a slave-woman will? Are you singing now of Argo, that fifty-oared vessel that your voice is always celebrating, or the sacred golden fleece . . .

They console Hypsipyle by mentioning other female exiles such as Europa, who settled on the island of Crete and earned renown as the mother of the founders of Crete’s ruling dynasty. The praise the 29

 Antiope’s lament was perhaps part of the play’s second episode; see further, Collard, Cropp, and Gibert 2004, 263. On captives’ laments in tragedy, see Dué 2006. 30  For plot summary and reconstruction of the surviving fragments of Hypsipyle, see Collard, Cropp and Gibert 2004, 170-76; Kannicht 2005, 5.2, 736-97. The play was likely to have been performed between 410-409 BCE, based on the evidence of Schol. to Ar. Ran. 53 (TrGF DID C15c), who mentions that it was produced “a short while ago,” that is shortly before 405 BCE. For the introduction of the story of the Lemnian Hypsipyle to the pre-existing traditions about the death of Opheltes, see Collard, Cropp, Gibert 2004, 177-80.

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chorus accords to Europa as a mother creates a particular connection with the distinctive history of the island, known for having nurtured Zeus and the warlike Curetes (Διοτρόφον Κρήταν ἱερὰν/ Κουρήτων τροφὸν ἀνδρῶν, F 725.272-73).31 Europa’s successful motherhood is paradigmatic and its end result, the nurture of men, is emblematic of the uses of motherhood in civic ideology (F 725.267-76). Europa’s rape story is idealized, as retold here, focusing only on her being settled in a foreign land. The chorus single out the positive side of her story, namely, the recognition she receives as the mother of city rulers. The safety that Crete afforded the infant Zeus, when Rhea hid him in a cave to save him from Cronus’s violence, lies in the background and is alluded to by way of linking Zeus’s story in Crete with that of Europa. Choosing Europa as a model of motherhood, fit for Hypsipyle, the chorus reproduce tenets of Athenian civic ideology which affirmed female nurture, but suppressed women’s toil and suffering in contexts of praise. Hypsipyle, on the other hand, rejects the chorus’s attempt at consolation. She cites the example of Procris, killed by her husband, Cephalus as a fate superior to hers (F 725.310-14).32 For, unlike Procris, whose untimely death is commemorated in epic song, Hypsipyle’s abiding pain remains unsung and hence unknown. As Hypsipyle puts it:      τὰ δ᾿ ἐμὰ πάθε[α τίς ἂν ἢ γόος ἢ μέλος ἢ κιθάρας ἐπὶ δάκρυσι μοῦσ᾿ ἀνοδυρομένα μετὰ Καλλιόπας ἐπὶ πόνους ἂν ἔλθοι; (F 725.314-17) but my sufferings—what cry or song or lyre’s music, lamenting them beside my tears with Calliope’s aid, will come to mourn my troubles?

Hypsipyle here expresses the wish that her own suffering (τὰ δ᾿ ἐμὰ πάθε[α, 314) be commemorated in plaintive mode, as befits a mother in mourning. She wants her suffering to be known, but her anonymity as a slave precludes the commemoration of her toils. The laments of a slave go unheard, she implies, because they lack a powerful ally in song such as the Muse of epic poetry. 31

 Collard, Cropp, and Gibert 2004, 234-35.  On Procris, see Apollod. 3.15.1 and Gantz 1996, 245-46.

32

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It is against this background that the plays also engage with another aspect of the absent mothers’ loss by examining the meanings attached to the suspension of nurture (trophē). The latter was vital to the definition of motherhood and to the social valuation of maternal character. Mothers in tragedy at large are portrayed as “good” or “evil” based on the care they provide for their children. At one extreme stand Clytemnestra, Medea, and Procne, who kill husbands or sons.33 But even in the case of Clytemnestra nurture emerges as a key feature of her characterization as a mother. Her dream of nursing Orestes as a serpent at her bosom carries with it the haunting image of blood clots mixed in the milk that flows from her breast and is a case in point (Aesch. Cho. 524-34). Clytemnestra herself is an absent mother in a different sense: she does not leave home, but sends her son away to be raised by Strophios in Phocis (Aesch. Ag. 779-86). But her maternal affection is placed under scrutiny in the second play of the trilogy. In Libation Bearers, Cilissa, Orestes’ nurse, thinking that Orestes has perished, laments the child that she has raised, blaming Clytemnestra as a mother who is no mother (Aesch. Cho. 736-40), and recounts her own toils as Orestes’ nurse: ἀλλ’ οὔτι πω τοιόνδε πῆμ’ ἀνεσχόμην· τὰ μὲν γὰρ ἄλλα τλημόνως ἤντλουν κακά, φίλον δ’ Ὀρέστην, τῆς ἐμῆς ψυχῆς τριβήν, ὃν ἐξέθρεψα μητρόθεν δεδεγμένη καὶ νυκτιπλάγκτων ὀρθίων κελευμάτων

καὶ πολλὰ καὶ μοχθήρ’ ἀνωφέλητ’ ἐμοὶ (752) τλάσηι· (Aesch. Cho. 747-53) I have never yet had to endure a sorrow like this. Under the other troubles I patiently bore up. But dear Orestes, who wore away my life with toil, whom I reared after receiving him straight from his mother’s womb! his shrill, imperative cries, which forced me to wander around at night many disagreeable tasks which I had to endure and which did me no good.

Cilissa here vies with Clytemnestra for the title of mother by claiming for herself the toil of Orestes’ nurture (τῆς ἐμῆς ψυχῆς τριβήν,/ ὃν ἐξέθρεψα μητρόθεν δεδεγμένη, 749-50). The opposition between 33

 Loraux 1998 offers a psychoanalytic reading of mothers who kill their sons and mourn them thereafter forever.

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biological mothers and surrogates, placed in charge of motherless children, not surprisingly gains prominence in Euripides’ family plays. The absent mothers of his plays are no Clytemnestras; their abject plight and the sympathy Euripides garners for them precludes ready-made, misogynistic portrayals of neglect of motherly duties. But it is significant that the plays assess the role that surrogates play in raising the abandoned children. Interestingly, male figures, mostly non-kin, either humble characters such as the herdsman in Antiope or distinctive ones such as Orpheus in Hypsipyle who raises Euneus and Thoas, fare better than women. It is not surprising to find male characters, discharging kourotrophic roles: nurturing infants was part of Dionysian mythology, as we know especially from satyr-plays, which often incorporated a pastoral context with Dionysian elements.34 But because these plays work toward rehabilitating the absent mother, they include evaluative comparisons between the women who serve as surrogates and their biological mothers. Here too we find stock elements. Euripides avails himself of the negative stereotypes attaching to “evil” stepmothers who persecute a rival’s offspring either to secure the throne for their own children, as does the evil Dirce in Antiope, or plot death against the absent mothers’ children, as Metapontus’s wife does in Melanippe Captive, because her husband adopts them.35 Antiope and Melanippe also find their own lives threatened. Their sons, who save their mothers and punish their female antagonist, rehabilitate them fully, resolving any doubts about her loyalty and affection for them. The pathos-filled recognition scenes of these plays, as far as we can ascertain from both Euripides’ Ion and Hypsipyle, also fall in line with the widely-held belief that mothers above all others love their children, because they have labored more than their fathers in giving birth to them (Arist. Eth. Nic.1168a20-26). Euripides’ Hypsipyle offers a complex picture of maternal surrogacy, exploring the absent mother’s feelings of lack and deficiency through Hypsipyle’s role as nurse. We do not have good evidence for 34  For the rearing of divine infants or heroes by satyrs as a motif of satyr plays, see Storey and Allan 2005, 162-63. There are numerous Dionysian elements in these plays, as Karamanou 2011 notes. Note also Dionysus’s divine epiphany at the end of Hypsipyle to announce Euneus’s founding of the Euneidae in Athens (F 759a.673). 35  On stepmothers in Greek thought and in classical Athens, see Watson 1997, 1-91.

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the employment of nurses in classical Athens, as we do, for example, for Hellenistic and Roman Egypt, to help us assess the historical context of wet nursing.36 There are, however, significant literary antecedents for nurses in tragedy, such as Eurycleia in the Odyssey and even Demeter in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter.37 In addition to rivalry, as in the mother-nurse pair of Libation Bearers, we see in Hypsipyle a nurse who causes the death of the baby in her care, ostensibly by neglect. The play paints a picture of Hypsipyle as a devoted nurse: she appears onstage holding the baby Opheltes, early in the play, when her two sons arrive, seeking refuge for the night, and she is next seen singing lullabies to the baby: οὐ τάδε πήνας, οὐ τάδε κερκίδος ἱστοτόνου παραμύθια Λήμνια Μοῦσα θέλει με κρέκειν, ὅτι δ᾿ εἰς ὕπνον ἢ χάριν ἢ θεραπεύματα πρόσφορα π]αιδὶ πρέπει νεαρῷ τάδε μελῳδὸς αὐδῶ. (F 752 F, 196-201) These are not Lemnian songs, relieving the labor of weft-thread and web-stretching shuttle, that the Muse desires me to sing, but what serves for a tender young boy, to lull him or charm him or tend to his needs—this is the song I tunefully sing.

Her tendance of Opheltes appears to be soothing to her as well: he takes the place of the children she left at a young age, as she later tells Euneus (“yes, just lately weaned as you were from my breast [ἀπομαστίδιόν γ᾿ ἐμῶν στέρνων!],” F 759a). The visual image of their close attachment, as she carries the baby onstage, may thus also have conveyed to the audience her abiding sorrow for her suspended charge of raising her own children. As commentators have noted, Euripides combines Hypsipyle’s story with the fated expedition of the Argives against Thebes and the death of Opheltes. According to the reconstructed plot, Hypsipyle meets the seer Amphiaraus who asks her to show him to a spring; Hypsipyle puts down the baby for a moment to give directions to the seer. She places Opheltes on the ground close to the spring, a natural territory for snakes. Then, when Opheltes wanders away, picking 36

 See Parca 2017.  Karydas 1998; Marshall 2017.

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flowers at an adjacent meadow, he is bitten by a poisonous snake (F 754, 754a).38 His death, a chance accident, is overlaid with folkloric motifs that connect maternal anxieties about infant death with snakes and other creatures. As Corinne Pache argues, such was the stuff mothers sang about in lullabies, seeking to allay their fears and avert evil.39 The dramatization of the incident may not readily point to maternal anxieties. Opheltes’ death acquires supernatural significance, as it is interpreted by the seer Amphiaraus as a bad omen (F 757.910) for the Argive expedition against Thebes. And in the established tradition, which Euripides follows, Opheltes’ premature loss is commemorated in a hero cult, dedicated in his honor with the founding of funeral games inaugurated by Amphiaraus, in Euripides’ play (F 757 N). By linking the Lemnian Hypsipyle with the myths and cult surrounding Opheltes, Euripides also avails himself of the opportunity to explore the contours of maternal surrogacy by pitting mother against nurse. In the dramatic altercation that follows when Eurydice finds out that her son is dead, the bereaved mother blames the slave nurse for the death of her son (F 757.831-36). Hypsipyle responds by defending her innocence, arguing that the death was an accident. As she explains, she only put the baby down in order to assist the Argive seer Amphiaraus in need of water to perform a purification for the army’s crossing into a new territory (F 757.886-93). Amphiaraus corroborates Hypsipyle’s account and succeeds in persuading the queen not to harm Hypsipyle. Eurydice’s compliance is remarkable, as she yields to the seer Amphiaraus (F 757.881-85), but perhaps in line with the play’s denouement, which follows the established tradition of the foundation of the Nemean games and shapes the story of Hypsipyle accordingly. Nonetheless, the rehabilitation of Hypsipyle on the grounds of Opheltes’ “accidental death” is not without problems: is it not an act of neglect, as Eurydice suggests? Even as an innocent mistake by Hypsipyle who laments his loss, saying that she was in every way his mother, except for not having given birth to him (F 757.840-43), how are we to interpret Euripides’ depiction of her mother-surrogate portrait? We can only 38  For plot and summary and reconstruction of Hypsipyle, see Collard, Cropp and Gibert 2004, 170-76. For the founding of the games, as instructed by Amphiaraus, see Bacchyl. 9.10-17, Pind. Nem. 8.51, 10.28. 39  Pache 2004, 111-13.

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outline some possibilities, arising from the fusion of the many mythical traditions which the play combines, that of the Argonauts, the story of the Lemnian women, the expedition of the Argives against Thebes, and the story of the Nemean Opheltes. Hypsipyle’s troubled past converges with the present at this very juncture that further points to uncertainties and fears about an impending disastrous war. If Hypsipyle was distracted by the new expedition coming through Nemea on route to Thebes, does her eagerness to be of help to the expeditionary force also suggest that male heroic ventures cause women to suffer misfortunes? For Hypsipyle, we must answer affirmatively, since she was abandoned by Jason and the Argonauts and she recalls the passage of the Argo in her despair, when Eurydice rejects her defense (F 757.844-45). The surviving text does not help us answer this question; but Hypsipyle’s culpability may be tied to her Lemnian heritage: though not a man-killer herself, she unwittingly destroys the male line of Lycurgus’ house. The play may have also underscored the tragedy of a woman who lost yet another child in her care. Read in this way, Hypsipyle’s portrayal as a bereaved, tragic mother points to the renewal of the trauma, triggered anew by losing another child.40 Be that as it may, the recognition scene with Euneus and Thoas rehabilitates Hypsipyle. Her sons listen to their mother’s singular trials and validate her story (F 759a.1591-1610). Euneus too laments his mother’s suffering: “Alas for your hardships,” while Hypsipyle in turn responds by endorsing the end of her troubles: “Don’t grieve at what turned out well!” (F 759a.1610-11). CONCLUSION It is important to comment briefly on the plays’ “happy” endings in relation to the roles mothers discharged in Athenian civic ideology. Indeed, the plays rehabilitate the absent mother and affirm her share in civic motherhood. Specifically, the recognition between mothers and sons precedes the plays’ aetiologies and sheds light on the political import of the roles that Antiope, Melanippe, and Hypsipyle play as the mothers of eponymous founding heroes or  On Statius’s depiction of Hypsipyle and her protracted laments as a mother, see Augoustakis 2006, 37-61. 40

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clans. The genealogies, announced by gods at the end of these plays, point up important political connections between Athens, Thebes, Metapontum, and Nemea, all places of importance to Athenian interests in the 410s.41 Thus, the restoration of the female protagonists of these plays falls in line with their ascribed roles as mothers of future rulers and heroes in myths that serve Athenian imperial ideology. More specifically, however, the rehabilitation of the family that the recognition between mothers and sons brings about in these plays carries many further meanings, dramatic, social, and political. With regard to the mothers’ absence from their children, often an enforced separation, as we have seen, the weight that restoration carries in these plays can be read in multiple ways. For one, the family reunion rehabilitates the mother and the household to which she belongs.42 Far from bringing dishonor upon their families, the lead characters in Antiope and the Melanippe plays and their suffering is acknowledged, family honor is restored, and its continuity is preserved by allowing the mother to confer civic legitimacy upon her offspring. At the same time, however, the mother has a civic role to play—that amounts to an inversion of the process of recognizing the legitimacy of male children which fell upon the guardian of the household in Athens and was carried out, to mention one major example, through participation in the festival of the Apatouria, where boys were introduced to the phratry. Their participation acknowledged their kinship ties publicly, ensuring in this way their eligibility for Athenian citizenship. By contrast, the inversion we observe in these plays constitutes an aberration and provides a resolution to scenarios of households where extraordinary circumstances unsettle the expectation that the city’s stakes in  Just as Ion at the end of Euripides’ Ion becomes the founder of the Ionian race, so the connection of the Lemnian tale with the Nemean aetiological myth of the hero cult of Opheltes-Archemoros served to promote Athens’ connection with the games at Nemea around 411 BCE and the establishment of the genos of the Euneidae in Athens (Collard, Cropp, and Gibert 2004, 177-78). Interest in the Aeolian Melanippe’s marriage to Metapontus was relevant to Athenian interests in Metapontum at the same time; the Melanippe plays may also have been performed in the theater of neighboring Heraclea (Collard, Cropp, and Lee 1995, 245). 42  On the motifs of destruction or restoration of the family, see further Karamanou 2016. On the reconstruction of the plot pattern of the “girl’s tragedy,” see Karamanou 2011b. 41

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Athenian households were best served by their male representatives in their capacity as citizens. Though each play points to a different set of historical circumstances as immediately relevant for contextualizing further the shared motif of the missing mother, it is probably more fitting to conclude this discussion by highlighting the interpretative possibilities that arise, when considering motherly absence and return. Euripides’ plays generate a number of questions about the civic potentialities of motherhood, effect a critique of patriarchal norms, and also prompt us to think more deeply about the profound impact that the ongoing Peloponnesian war gradually had on the family and its place under Athens’ imperial democracy. In the end, the dramas’ negotiation of the many facets of the absent mothers’ experiences and of their ponoi offers a politically engaged commentary on the social and legal realities of Athenian motherhood. Furthermore, their rich and layered articulations of motherly absence disrupt dominant ideologies of maternal subjection to civic norms, creating opportunities for exploring the psychosocial meanings that motherhood held for their audiences.

11. MATERNAL ABSENCE AND HEROIC IDENTITY IN VIRGIL’S AENEID Elina PYY (University of Helsinki)

INTRODUCTION This paper discusses maternal absence in what was perhaps the most crucial literary work for the construction of Roman identity in the early Principate: the Aeneid. In its attempt to restore the unity shattered by the civil wars, Virgil’s epic redefined the collective cultural identity and largely set the tone for the Augustan, ideological basis for Romanness.1 Being a patriotic poem centered around warfare and fashioned after the Homeric models, it does so with a distinctly male-centered voice, and with the emphasis strongly on masculine heroism and male subjectivity. Gender dynamics as one of the mechanisms through which the Aeneid constructs Roman-ness has been a relatively popular topic of research in the past few decades. In particular, scholars have noted the importance of patrilineal succession to the drive of Virgil’s epic narrative.2 As one can easily observe in the paradigmatic speeches of the Aeneid, patrilineal reproduction and generational succession through the male line are represented as the key issues behind the prophesied Roman future.3 Furthermore, as Alison Keith, Ellen Oliensis, and Brent Hannah have pointed out, Virgil’s poem tends to associate the ideal of patrilineal succession strongly with the epic’s teleological narrative.4 It has been argued that in the dynamics of the Aeneid, the masculine is generally associated with “progress towards ends,” while the feminine, in contrast, is connected to “regressive 1

 Burck 1981; Hardie 1989; Hardie 1993; Putnam 1995 and 2011.  See Hardie 1993, 98-119. 3  1.257-96, 6.752-853. 4  Oliensis 1997, 303; Keith 2000, passim; and Hannah 2004, 156. 2

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origins.”5 Consequently, in the epic worldview of the Aeneid, individual women often appear as hindrances or obstacles to the male heroic quest. It is a deeply-rooted idea in classical literary criticism that in his attempt to construct Roman identity, Virgil (as well as his epic successors) tends to erase women from the narrative, turning them into ideas, landscapes, or “the ground or site for masculine achievement.”6 The relative lack of female subjectivity in Roman war-centered epic is, of course, primarily due to the socio-cultural environment in which these poems were written. It goes without saying that when examining constructions of femininity and masculinity in any Roman literary sources, we are dealing with élite-male-constructed representations of gender dynamics, written not only by, but also primarily for, men.7 Therefore, many phenomena primarily associated with the female sphere—such as motherhood—are in these works strongly marked as a male invention, and the female experience, in turn, is lacking.8 Examined in relation to the patrilineal reproduction that the Aeneid lays stress on, it is particularly intriguing to examine how mothers and motherhood are handled in the epic. As many scholars have noted, mothers are almost completely absent from the poem’s great prophetic passages about the glorious future of the Roman people: Jupiter’s speech in book 1, and that of Anchises in book 6. Their role as the origin of the Roman grandeur or as the guarantee of its continuity is barely mentioned, and certainly not stressed. In this respect, as in many others, these episodes are programmatic for the whole epic. Curiously, maternal absence is something that seems to mark the Aeneid throughout, from the disappearance of Creusa in the beginning of the poem to the no-show of Lavinia at the end.9 As for the few remarkable and memorable mother figures in between (such as Amata, or Euryalus’s mourning mother), they seem to be systematically removed from the scene and erased from the narrative in order to allow Aeneas’s heroic quest to continue.10 5

 Oliensis 1997, 303. See also Perkell 1981; Nugent 1999.  McAuley 2016, 30; see Keith 2000, 47-84. 7  Keith 2000, 1; Habinek 1998, 122-36. 8  McAuley 2016, 4. 9  See Perkell 1981, 360-61. 10  See, e.g., Perkell 1981, 356-57, 370; Nugent 1999; Dietrich 1999, 47-48; Keith 1999; Keith 2000, esp. 36-63; Wiltshire 1999, 172-76; and Wiltshire 2000, 191-93. 6

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In most of the feminist literary criticism of the Aeneid, the emphasis, quite appropriately, is on the perspective of these erased mothers themselves. Scholars such as Alison Keith, Antony Augoustakis, Ellen Oliensis, and Mairéad McAuley have perceptively discussed the phenomenon, laying stress on female subjectivity or the lack thereof in Roman epics.11 In this paper, my perspective is somewhat different, as I will be focusing on the other side of maternal absence in the Aeneid— on the viewpoint of those who are left motherless. I will be suggesting that in Virgil’s epic the omnipresent theme of mother absence creates a frame within which the poet discusses the experience of abandonment and of not belonging—feelings that leave a deep mark in the heroes of the epic and are crucial to the ways in which they construct their heroic, proto-Roman, identity. The indissoluble relationship between the past and the future, and between remembering and forgetting, become explicit in the theme of mother absence, and turn out to be crucial to the ways in which Virgil’s epic (re)constructs Roman identity. DISGUISE AND DECEPTION: AENEAS AND VENUS’ MOTHER-SON

BOND

One of the most evident cases where the theme of mother absence can be observed in the Aeneid is the most central mother-son relationship of the epic, that between Venus and Aeneas. While the hero’s divine mother tirelessly protects her son’s epic mission, her motherly love, however, is far from being gratuitous or altruistic. As Eleanor Leach has pointed out, Venus seems to be much more concerned about the dynastic continuity of her own family line and about the future empire than she is about the personal well-being of her son.12 When defending Aeneas’s case among the gods, Venus speaks of fata meorum—that is, the Roman race, and the Julian line in particular. The emphasis is on the future, less so on Aeneas himself. Likewise, the armor she has Vulcan make for her son is decorated with the glorious representation of the Roman future.13 Admittedly, its function is to keep Aeneas safe in battle; nevertheless, the reader feels that it is not 11  Oliensis 1997; Keith 1999; Keith 2000; Augoustakis 2010; and McAuley 2016. 12  Leach 1997, 365. 13  8.626-731.

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so much for his sake as for that of future generations—so that he could father the wondrous people and ensure the succession of heroes depicted on the shield. The most blatant example of Venus’s indifference towards her son’s personal suffering can be found in book 4, where she joins forces with Juno and kindles the romance between Aeneas and Dido. Obviously, it is a plan that was never supposed to make her son happy, but merely to grant him a temporary asylum and ensure the continuance of his epic mission.14 The eventual separation of the lovers, Dido’s death and Aeneas’s heartbreak which mark Venus’s triumph over Juno, are the successful outcomes of the plans that she has made for her son. Thus, Virgil’s Venus appears to the reader as an archetypal, politically-oriented Roman matrona.15 Driven by her desire to become the genetrix of a glorious family line, she uses her son as a pawn in a game against other gods. Granted, she does everything in her power to advance Aeneas’s mission, but maternal love and affection—those do not seem to be part of the pact. The most characteristic feature of the relationship between Venus and Aeneas is that the mother is more or less constantly absent and unreachable. Her divine status prescribes that their communication take place entirely on her terms, and in the course of Aeneas’s journey, she appears to her son when and how it pleases her, often leaving him puzzled or anxious upon her departure.16 Every encounter between Venus and Aeneas ends with her vanishing into thin air, and with him left looking for his mother. In book 2, when she appears to her son in the midst of burning Troy, Venus explicitly promises to guide his steps and not to leave him; however, barely has she uttered these words when she is already gone, “vanished in the thick shades of night.”17 In book 1, Aeneas expresses his frustration at his mother’s behavior: quid natum totiens, crudelis tu quoque, falsis ludis imaginibus? cur dextrae iungere dextram non datur ac veras audire et reddere voces? (1.407-9) 14

 For further discussion, see, e.g., Skinner 2005, 234-35.  Leach 1997, 365. 16  In her article on the rhetorical performance in the Aeneid, Fuhrer (2010, 1-75) examines the deficient rhetorical skills of both Venus and Aeneas in their miscarried communication. See also Wilhelm 1987; Reckford 1995-96; and Skinner 2005, 236-37. 17  spissis noctis se condidit umbris (2.620-21). Translation of the Aeneid by H. R. Fairclough. 15

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Why, cruel like others, do you so often mock your son with vain phantoms? Why am I not allowed to clasp hand in hand, and hear and utter words unfeigned?

The hero feels not only abandoned, but also—and quite rightly—misled and deceived by his mother. McAuley has fittingly described the scene as “an egregious instance of emotionally distant parenting.”18 Notably, Venus is described as being happy and delighted with her deceptive disguise.19 Her successful deception brings her joy that prevents her from noticing her son’s anguish.20 This emotional distance, and this flickering presence of the mother throughout the epic, are the touchstones of Aeneas’s journey: he must go on with his seemingly impossible task, counting on divine guidance and support, even as the motherly support and affection remain inadequate to say the least. Technically speaking, Aeneas is not a motherless hero, but could just as well be, at least when it comes to the emotional bond between them. The lack of a mother-son bond becomes more evident still, when we compare it to the affectionate relationship that the hero has with his father. When Aeneas meets Anchises in the underworld, the mutual joy and affection of the father and the son appear as an antic reverse to the encounters between Aeneas and his mother: Isque ubi tendentem adversum per gramina vidit Aenean, alacris palmas utrasque tetendit, effusaeque genis lacrimae et vox excidit ore: venisti tandem, tuaque exspectata parenti vicit iter durum pietas? datur ora tueri, nate, tua et notas audire et reddere voces? sic equidem ducebam animo rebarque futurum tempora dinumerans, nec me mea cura fefellit. quas ego te terras et quanta per aequora vectum accipio! quantis iactatum, nate, periclis! quam metui ne quid Libyae tibi regna nocerent! (6.684-94) And as he saw Aeneas coming towards him over the sward, he eagerly stretched forth both hands, while tears streamed from his eyes and a cry fell from his lips: “Have you come at last, and has the duty that your father expected vanquished the toilsome way? Is it given me to see your face, my son, and hear and utter familiar tones? Even so I mused 18

 McAuley 2016, 61.  1.415-16. 20  Oliensis 2009, 67-68; McAuley 2016, 61. 19

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and deemed the hour would come, counting the days, nor has my yearning failed me. Over what lands, what wide seas have you journeyed to my welcome! What dangers have beset you, my son! How I feared the realm of Libya might work you harm!”

Anchises’ affection for his son and his joy upon seeing him appear as sincere and genuine. And why should they not be: unlike Aeneas’s mother, he does have a strong emotional bond with his son, having been present for most of his life. His feelings of fear and his anxiety, too, are grounded, since—again, unlike the hero’s mother—he has no power over Aeneas’s fate or his mission. Thus, very different from Venus’s emotionally distant parenting, Anchises has both genuine human feelings for his son and a means to express them. Aeneas’s reply is, if possible, even more revealing in terms of his mother issues. He responds: … tua me, genitor, tua tristis imago saepius occurrens haec limina tendere adegit; stant sale Tyrrheno classes. da iungere dextram, da, genitor, teque amplexu ne subtrahe nostro. (6.695-98) Your shade, father, your sad shade, meeting me repeatedly, drove me to seek these portals. My ships ride the Tuscan sea. Grant me to clasp your hand, grant me, father, and withdraw not from my embrace!

Aeneas’s desperate attempt to reach for his father’s hand and to feel his touch is, of course, rich in Homeric intertext. However, simultaneously the episode clearly recalls the hero’s speech to his mother in book 1, where he was wondering cur dextrae iungere dextram / non datur (4089). Anchises’ constant presence in Aeneas’s life, the grief caused by his passing, and their affectionate encounter therefore clearly reflect the distant mother-son relationship in the epic, and lay stress on the absence of the mother in the hero’s life. Left without a proper relationship with his mother, Aeneas decisively constructs his identity on the ideal of patrilineal succession. Naturally, it is important to notice that ideas such as a parent-child bond, or familial affection, are always culturally constructed: any definition of a mother-child bond that one finds in Roman imperial poetry does not necessarily comply to the ideals of the modern Western nuclear family.21 As Suzanne Dixon has pointed out, the gentle, 21

 McAuley 2016, 38.

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nurturing (and powerless) mother-figure is a product of much later cultural contexts; the mother that one comes across in Roman literature is first and foremost “a formidable figure,” awakening awe and respect in her grown-up children.22 One should therefore not expect to find a similar relationship between the proto-Roman hero and his divine mother in Virgil’s Augustan epic or one we might regard as “healthy” today. Nevertheless, it can be argued that Aeneas’s character—which is naturally strongly marked by feelings of not belonging and detachment, due to his status as a refugee in search of a new identity—is up to a certain point defined by the mother absence, and by the frustration that he feels over this matter.23 I would suggest that the theme appears as a narratological tool that the poet utilizes to emphasize the unfinished and uncertain stage of the hero’s life and journey. Furthermore, as I will argue below, it is a matter that is reflected directly and developed further in the character of Aeneas’s motherless son, Ascanius. FORGETTING THE MOTHER: ASCANIUS’S PURSUIT OF HEROIC IDENTITY Like father, like son. The theme of mother absence, evident in Aeneas’s complex relationship with Venus, is taken to the next level in the story of young Ascanius, who is by far the best example of “growing up motherless” in Virgil’s epic. From the beginning of the poem, Ascanius is defined exclusively in respect to his father—he is the mirror image of Aeneas, the destined heir to his father’s mission, and the future ancestor of the Roman people. There is no escaping this destiny. Ascanius has to grow into becoming an epic hero in the shadow of his father—but, at the same time, in the absence of his mother. Creusa’s disappearance in book 2 is a disturbing episode, and in scholarly debates it is often mentioned as a prime example of the way in which the Aeneid tends to erase individual women from the narrative. As Christine Perkell and Georgia Nugent have pointed out, the paradigmatic image of the epic—Aeneas carrying his father on his 22

 Dixon 1988, xiv.  Note also Aeneas’s grief over the death of his nurse Caieta, a mother figure of a sort: 7.1-7. 23

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shoulders, holding his son’s hand in his own—is marked by the mother “who isn’t there.”24 This tableau, as McAuley has noted, held great significance and cultural value in the Augustan and postAugustan Rome, being one of the literary-visual cornerstones of the cultural identity and of the shared understanding of the origins of the Roman people.25 All too easily, it seems, Creusa is excluded from this tableau of generational continuity and written out of the narrative of the Roman establishment. Afterwards, this erasure of the mother is awkwardly explained as Aeneas encounters Creusa’s ghost in the midst of a burning Troy. Giving her blessing to Aeneas’s epic mission, she states that … lacrimas dilectae pelle Creusae. non ego Myrmidonum sedes Dolopumve superbas aspiciam aut Grais servitum matribus ibo, Dardanis et divae Veneris nurus; sed me magna deum genetrix his detinet oris. iamque vale et nati serva communis amorem. (2.784-89) Banish tears for your beloved Creusa. I shall never look upon the proud homes of the Myrmidons or Dolopians, or go to be the slave of Greek matrons, I, a Dardan woman and wife of the son of divine Venus; but the mighty mother of the gods keeps me on these shores. And now farewell, and guard your love for our common child.

Creusa’s speech is significant for the topic of this chapter, as, in addition to absolving Aeneas of his guilt, it seems to strengthen the epic pattern whereby a mother-child relationship is rendered unnecessary and replaceable with a strong father-son bond. In effect, Creusa’s ghost appears to let go of her son quite easily, and from this moment on, it is as if Ascanius’s mother never existed in the first place. Anchises, Aeneas, and Ascanius form a generational triad, a paradigmatic image of the patrilineal succession that defines the destiny of future Rome. Nevertheless, it is crucial to notice that they do not do so out of their own will, but because they have no other option—because both Aeneas and Ascanius have been “abandoned” by their mothers. However, as much as these heroes try to repress the memory of Ascanius’s late mother, the poet does not let them forget that easily. As many scholars have noted, the traumatic memory recurs over and 24

 Nugent 1999, 264; Perkell 1981, 358-60.  See McAuley 2016, 30, 71.

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over again in the course of the epic, in the presence of other characters, and on the level of intertext, metaphor, and allusion.26 One of the storylines in which Creusa’s presence can be felt most strongly is the complicated relationship between Ascanius and Dido. In book 4, it becomes evident that not being a mother is an issue that strongly defines Dido’s self-perception. The queen mourns the fact that her marriage to Sychaeus has left her with no children and seeks to form a bond with Ascanius, willing to make him a foster child and an heir of sorts. Intriguingly, Dido’s love for Aeneas is in the first place generated by her love for his son: when Venus sends Cupid, disguised as Ascanius, to greet the queen, we hear that ille ubi complexu Aeneae colloque pependit et magnum falsi implevit genitoris amorem, reginam petit. haec oculis, haec pectore toto haeret et interdum gremio fovet, inscia Dido, insidat quantus miserae deus. … (1.715-19) He, when he has hung in embrace on Aeneas’s neck and satisfied the deluded father’s deep love, goes to the queen. With her eyes, with all her heart she clings to him and repeatedly fondles him in her lap, knowing not, poor Dido, how great a god settles there to her sorrow.

In book 4, when Dido’s love pains are depicted in more detail, it is stated that … illum absens absentem auditque videtque, aut gremio Ascanium genitoris imagine capta detinet, infandum si fallere possit amorem. (4.83-85) Though absent, each from each, she hears him, she sees him, or, captivated by his look of his father, she holds Ascanius on her lap, in case she may beguile a passion beyond all utterance.

These episodes stress the assimilation between the father and the son. The absence of the mother stands out as Ascanius is depicted as a spitting image of Aeneas—there is no trace of Creusa about him. Hence, Dido’s transcendence of emotion seems understandable, as does the troubling fact that her maternal love for the son is somehow indistinguishable from her erotic passion for the father.27 26

 See Perkell 1981, 355-77; Nugent 1999, 264-66.  The disturbing Oedipal overtones in this tableau have been discussed in further detail in Reckford 1995-6; Oliensis 2009; and McAuley 2016. 27

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Virgil plays with the same theme later on, when Dido and Aeneas’s liaison is drawing to a close. Desperate about Aeneas’s impending departure, Dido states that saltem si qua mihi de te suscepta fuisset ante fugam suboles, si quis mihi parvulus aula luderet Aeneas, qui te tamen ore referret, non equidem omnino capta ac deserta viderer. (4.327-330) At least, if before your flight a child of yours had been born to me, if in my hall a baby Aeneas were playing, whose face, in spite of all, would bring back yours, I should not think myself utterly vanquished and forlorn.

Once again, the poet assimilates the father with the (this time, potential) son—they are identical, indistinguishable to the extent that borders on being implausible. On this occasion, as in Ascanius’s case, all traces of the mother have been entirely erased from the physical form of the child. More importantly, in Dido’s speech we can observe the fundamental reason for the failure of the Dido-Ascanius bond: no matter how much she tries to love him, Ascanius is not the son Dido really wants, nor is she the mother whom Ascanius longs for. Their relationship is from the beginning based on surrogacy and on mutual deceit. In this manner, the absence of the “real” mother is made painstakingly evident—the ghost of Creusa penetrates the narrative and reminds the reader of the painful past. The fallout between Dido and Ascanius is thus inevitable—and, as their relationship reflects in all respects the relationship between Dido and Aeneas, this breakup, too, has grim and violent overtones. When she realizes that the bond between the father and the son is unbreakable (unlike the bond between herself and Aeneas), Dido turns her rage towards both. In a manner of a tragic infanticidal mother, she asks herself: non potui abreptum divellere corpus et undis spargere? non socios, non ipsum absumere ferro Ascanium patriisque epulandum ponere mensis? … faces in castra tulissem implessemque foros flammis natumque patremque cum genere exstinxem, memet super ipsa dedissem. (4.600-2, 604-6) Could I not have seized him, torn him limb from limb, and scattered the pieces on the waves? Could I not have put his men to the sword, and Ascanius himself, and served him up as a meal at his father’s table?

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… I should have carried fire into his camp, filled his decks with flame, blotted out father and son together with the whole race, and immolated myself on top of all.

Dido’s failure to play the part of a mother to Ascanius culminates in this violent frenzy, where the son, Aeneas’s mirror image and duplicate, comes to pay for his father’s misplaced affections and for his change of heart. At the same time, Dido’s unfulfilled desire to become a mother reflects Ascanius’s lack of one. In the tragic Dido-Aeneas-Ascanius triangle, the silence of the absent mother screams, and Creusa’s underlying presence becomes one of the main players in this drama. In Aeneas’s male-only, patrilineal family, there is clearly a mother-sized void. Yet it is a void that is quite impossible to fill, as Dido bitterly discovers only too late. In these episodes, it is Dido’s viewpoint that dominates the narrative. It is her unfulfilled desire to become a mother, her inadequate maternal love for Ascanius, her frustration and anger towards the father and the son. Nowhere in these passages do we hear Ascanius’s voice, just as we did not hear it when his mother went missing. Ascanius’s status as a child is emphasized by his lack of epic subjectivity. Yet his emotions and thoughts concerning his mother are vitally important for our understanding of mother absence and its functions in the Aeneid. Fortunately, the issue is briefly touched upon in book 3. When Aeneas’s band of fugitives accidentally strays to Buthrica, they are surprised to find a parva Troia there, a replica of their former city founded by another Trojan refugee, Helenus. It quickly turns out that Helenus’s consort queen Andromache—a mourning mother herself— is devastated by the loss of her former life, and finds it difficult to move on. Intriguingly, in her conversation with Aeneas, she suddenly asks: quid puer Ascanius? superatne et vescitur aura? quem tibi iam Troia — ecqua tamen puero est amissae cura parentis? (3.339-41) What of the boy Ascanius? Lives he yet and feeds he on the air of heaven? Whom now, lo, when Troy… Has the lad none the less some love for his lost mother?

Notably, Andromache refuses to subscribe to the male-centered epic worldview, and to the definition of family that is based exclusively on patrilineal succession. She tears open the old wounds, brings back the

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memory of Creusa and demands grief and commemoration. McAuley has analyzed Andromache’s attitude as “obsessive memorialization,” a behavior that falls short of the progressive, future-oriented narrative required from Virgil’s epic.28 Whereas for Andromache, forgetting is fatal and commemoration essential, for Aeneas—the future-oriented hero destined to survive and live on—the situation is exactly the opposite. Andromache’s question, I would suggest, is of crucial importance when we think about the narrative of the Aeneid as a whole. While Ascanius, as Aeneas’s heir, clearly represents the future in the poem, his Trojan mother can be viewed as a representative of the past. In her speech to Aeneas in book 2, Creusa’s ghost explicitly stresses that she is not to leave the shores of Troy. Her identity is strongly tied to the place and the people who have already fallen. In the symbolic structure of the epic, Creusa stands for Troy, as the “ancient mother,” just as Lavinia stands for Italy, the new “mother of the people”—Ascanius’s late mother is a tangible symbol for the Trojan past and Trojan-ness that Aeneas’s people must let go of in order to become children of Italy. It would appear that through Creusa’s identification with Troy and Trojan-ness, the theme of mother absence comes to shape the ways of thinking about the past and the future that are crucial to Virgil’s construction of Roman identity. The relationship between Ascanius and Creusa, therefore, is more than just a mother-son bond, or a lack thereof—in the Aeneid it stands for the connection between the past and the future. Is there one? Or is it gone already? What about the child, does he still remember his mother? The complex relationship between the past and the future that was crucial to the generation of Romans torn apart by the civil wars is encapsulated in this relationship. McAuley in her study of the Aeneid has pointed out how motherhood in Augustan Rome operated as a reassuring symbol of permanence and continuity after a time of social rupture.29 While this is certainly true, I would argue that in this particular case motherhood instead works as a metaphor for a transition and change. Is it at all possible to build a future without concern for the past, the poet seems to ask—or are the memory and the awareness of the past 28

 McAuley 2016, 84-85.  McAuley 2016, 34.

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the very obstacles that prevent us from moving on? To Andromache, who desperately clings to a Troy that is long gone, the past is of vital importance; to Aeneas, who is trying to move on, it is painful and hindering. Intriguingly, Andromache’s question is left hanging in the air. Their conversation is interrupted when Helenus enters, and Andromache becomes yet another mourning mother who is subtly pushed into the epic background. More importantly, her question remains unanswered on a larger scale of the narrative, for at no point does the poet explicitly reveal Ascanius’s thoughts to the reader. We rarely hear him speak at all, and the only brief mention of his late mother can be found in book 9, where Euryalus, another young Trojan warrior, is embarking on a fatally dangerous quest across the enemy lines. Sensing his impending doom, he begs Ascanius to take care of his mother, the only Trojan matron who made it to Italy. Ascanius’s response is deeply touching: … percussa mente dedere Dardanidae lacrimas, ante omnis pulcher Iulus, atque animum patriae strinxit pietatis imago. tum sic effatur: sponde digna tuis ingentibus omnia coeptis. namque erit ista mihi genetrix nomenque Creusae solum defuerit … (9.292-98) Touched to the heart, the Dardanians shed tears—fair Iulus more than all, and the picture of filial love touched his heart. Then he spoke thus: “Assure yourself that all I do shall be worthy of your mighty enterprise; for she shall be a mother to me, lacking but the name Creusa.

It would therefore seem that Ascanius does indeed remember, and that the connection between the child and the mother, between the future and the past, has not been lost after all—at least not yet. However, the story soon gets a tragic twist: when Euryalus’s death is announced, his mother goes out of her mind for grief. Her violent lamentation weakens the soldiers’ morale and forces the men to remove her from the scene. Ironically, this episode seems to fulfill Ascanius’s prophecy: as Euryalus’s mother gets dragged away, she becomes exactly like Creusa to him—an erased, suppressed, and vague character that is made invisible, yet a disturbing memory that one cannot completely repress. For Ascanius, this event seems to trigger emotions that have been

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bubbling under the surface since the beginning of their journey. The poet states that hoc fletu concussi animi, maestusque per omnis it gemitus, torpent infractae ad proelia vires. illam incendentem luctus Idaeus et Actor Ilionei monitu et multum lacrimantis Iuli corripiunt interque manus sub tecta reponunt. (9.498-502) At that wailing their spirits were shaken, and a groan of sorrow passed through all; their strength for battle is numbed and crushed; and as thus she kindles grief, Idaeus and Actor, bidden by Ilioneus and the sorely weeping Iulus, catch her up and carry her indoors in their arms.

The passage is one of the most often discussed when it comes to studying gender dynamics in the Aeneid. Euryalus’s mother has been interpreted as unable to understand the inevitability of events, and her over-emotional outburst has been considered uncontrolled behavior typical of epic women.30 Dietrich, for one, has argued that the mourning mother represents the antithesis to the dynamic, future-oriented drive of the epic, and that her removal from the scene is a prime example of Virgil’s tendency to erase individual women from the narrative in order for Aeneas’s great founding mission to continue.31 While this explanation is highly plausible, what seems crucial to me in this passage—and what has rarely been paid as much attention to as the irrational behavior of the mother—is Ascanius’s emotional breakdown. Notably, in book 9 Aeneas is out of the picture and Ascanius is made leader of the Trojan youngsters. He is responsible for everything that goes on in the camp—yet, the decision to drag the mourning mother away does not come from him. Rather, it would appear that his brothers-in-arms make the call because Ascanius is crying his eyes out. The mother trauma is evoked as Troy comes back to haunt him, and—importantly—this makes him unable to function as a leader, as a warrior, and as an epic hero. However, after this cathartic moment, Ascanius swiftly gets a grip of himself. Merely two hundred lines later, we see his initiation into 30

 See, e.g., Wiltshire, who states that “for this mother the official themes of epic—arma virumque cano—cease to exist. She experiences only the costs” (2000, 191-93). See also Wiltshire 1999, 172-76. Thus, also Nugent 1999, passim; Dietrich 1999, 47-48. 31  Dietrich 1999, 47-48.

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the world of war, as he makes his first kill, slaying the Rutulian warrior Numanus. This is a significant moment as it marks Ascanius’s growth into full manhood. By showing his valor in battle, he reclaims his position as the rightful heir to his father’s mission. Apollo’s praise of the young man is particularly telling: macte nova virtute, puer, sic itur ad astra, dis genite et geniture deos. iure omnia bella gente sub Assaraci fato ventura resident, nec te Troia capit. (9.641-44) A blessing, boy, on your young valor! So man scales the stars, you son of gods and sire of gods to be! All the wars that fate may bring will justly cease under the house of Assaracus; nor can Troy contain you.

Besides laying stress on the patrilineal generation, Apollo explicitly states that nec te Troia capit. He thus confirms what the reader might have already suspected: that the youth has found a way to move on from the painful past, and from his late mother who stands for it. I would suggest that book 9 of the Aeneid can be read as an embedded narrative of Ascanius’s confronting and resolving the issues related to the absence of his mother and thereby attaining a heroic epic identity. In this book the boy is finally able to deal with the abandonment and the loss—a process which culminates in his cathartic breakdown at the sight of Euryalus’s mourning mother. The mother-son bond that is evident in the relationship between Euryalus and his mother is something that Ascanius himself will never experience—his mother is gone and cannot be replaced, as we saw by Dido’s futile attempt. By breaking free from this trauma, Ascanius is finally able to attain the heroic identity he has been striving for. Leaving behind both the mother and Troy, he ceases to be Ascanius and truly becomes Iulus, an ancestor worthy of Rome. FALLEN HEROES AND ABSENT MOTHERS: PALLAS, LAUSUS, AND CAMILLA Ascanius’s story is the best expression of the multilayered significance of mother absence in the Aeneid. However, as if to emphasize the theme, in the latter part of the epic Virgil introduces three young Italian warriors who seem to reflect and complement Ascanius’s story:

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Pallas, Lausus, and Camilla. What is common to all three is that they are courageous but inexperienced warriors on their first serious military mission. Moreover, all are described as having been brought up by their fathers. The motherlessness of these young heroes is not explicitly emphasized but rather mentioned in passing. Pallas’s father is Evander, king of Pallantium and Aeneas’s most important ally in the Latin war. The king’s late wife is referred to twice in the epic. First, in book 7, when Evander forms alliance with Aeneas, he mentions that his son is partly of Sabine origin, through his mother (7.510). The second reference occurs in book 11, when Evander is mourning Pallas’s death in battle (11.158-59). As for Camilla and Lausus, it is told that they are both offspring of violent tyrants exiled by their own people: in Lausus’s case, the Etruscans (8.481-82), and in Camilla’s, the Volsci (11.540-43). The children followed their fathers into exile, and were raised by them. Lausus’s mother is mentioned only once, in his dying scene; as for Camilla’s, it is briefly stated that her father named the child after the mother, “slightly altering” the name.32 In the same manner as Aeneas and Ascanius, these young Italian warriors seem to have replaced the lacking mother-child relationship with a strong bond with their fathers. This is most evident in the case of Pallas and Evander. Evander addresses his son as his “beloved boy” and as his “late and only joy,” praying the gods to keep him safe and admitting to his own reluctance to live on should the boy perish.33 The relationship between Lausus and his father Mezentius is described in less detail, but appears to be very similar to that between Evander and Lausus. When Aeneas wounds Mezentius in battle, Lausus defends his father relentlessly, and it is stated that “Lausus, seeing it, groaned heavily for love of his father, and tears rolled down his cheeks.”34 The violent deaths of Pallas and Lausus in the very same battle are described as being crushing to their fathers, whose grief is depicted in moving detail.35 As for Camilla, the Volscian warrior maiden, she too appears to have had an exceptionally close relationship with her father when  matrisque vocavit / nomine Casmillae mutata parte Camillam (11.542-43).  care puer, mea sola et sera voluptas (8.581). 34  ingemuit cari graviter genitoris amore, / ut vidit, Lausus, lacrimaeque per ora volutae (10.789-90). 35  10.139-81, 10.833-56. 32 33

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growing up. In Diana’s account of Camilla’s childhood in book 11, the violent tyrant Metabus is depicted as gently taking care of his infant daughter alone in the wilderness, feeding her with the milk of wild beasts.36 Indeed, it would appear that these exceptional circumstances of her early childhood are what enables Camilla to pursue a heroic warrior identity. Raised by her father alone, she has been indoctrinated into the male world of war form an early age. The poet relates that utque pedum primis infans vestigia plantis institerat, iaculo palmas armavit acuto spiculaque ex umero parvae suspendit et arcum. pro crinali auro, pro longae tegmine pallae tigridis exuviae per dorsum a vertice pendent. tela manu iam tum tenera puerilia torsit et fundam tereti circum caput egit habena Strymoniamque gruem aut album deiecit olorem. (11.573-80) And as soon as the baby had taken her earliest footsteps, he armed her hands with a pointed lance, and hung quiver and bow from the little child’s shoulder. In place of gold to clasp her hair, in place of long trailing robe, there hung from her head and down her back a tiger’s spoils. Even then with tender hand she hurled her childish spears, swung round her head the smooth-thonged sling, and struck down Strymonian crane or snowy swan.

The absence of the mother, therefore, has made possible Camilla’s rejection of her prescribed social gender role and enabled her to pursue a heroic identity and play an active part in the male-centred world of war epic. It is explicitly pointed out, at her first appearance, that her hands were “not trained to Minerva’s distaff, and basket of wool, but toughened to endure a fight”—lacking a mother figure, Camilla’s training in the traditional feminine duties has remained less than adequate.37 Thus, unlike for Ascanius, for whom the experience of motherlessness represented an obstacle to his assuming of a heroic identity—an obstacle that needed to be confronted and overcome— for Camilla, her motherlessness is instead a great enabler and contributes to her exceptional position in the gender dynamics of the poem. 36

 11.570-72.  bellatrix, non illa colo calathisve Minervae / femineas adsueta manus, sed proelia virgo / dura pati (7.805-7). 37

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As Nicholas Horsfall, for one, has pointed out, Virgil depicts Camilla as one of the most valiant warriors in the entire Latin war: she fights skillfully and courageously, leading her own cavalry (11.648-724); and in the catalogue of Italian heroes, the poet reserves for her the last place, a position that normally in the genre belongs to the most heroic of the warriors.38 In book 11, Turnus praises the maiden as decus Italiae virgo (11.508). As decus is an epic attribute typically used to glorify a particularly valiant warrior and to characterize him as a representative of his entire social group, this expression fittingly confirms Camilla as a plenipotentiary participant in the community of warriors.39 Camilla’s motherlessness, therefore, clearly is an asset in her striving towards epic heroism. It is noteworthy that the two other young motherless warriors, Pallas and Lausus, do not seem to suffer for their motherlessness either. Whereas Creusa’s presence can be felt throughout books 1 through 9, dragging Ascanius down and preventing him from growing into full manhood, for these young Italian heroes the situation is seemingly quite different. Pallas and Lausus are both consistently defined in relation to their fathers, and their late mothers—or rather, their mother absence—are not mentioned at all. In book 10, they both fight courageously and valiantly, without their motherlessness hindering their pursuit of epic glory (10.353-509).40 It is told that hinc Pallas instat et urget, hinc contra Lausus, nec multum discrepat aetas, egregii forma, sed quis Fortuna negarat in patriam reditus. (10.433-436) Here, Pallas presses and strains; there Lausus confronts him; the two were nearly matched in years, and peerless in beauty, but to them Fortune had denied return to their homeland.

However, unlike Ascanius, these young men are ultimately doomed to fall short of the requirements of epic heroism, as they both are destined to fall in their very first battle. Most intriguingly, it is at that 38

 Horsfall 2000, 519-20. See also Boyd 1992, 214; Becker 1997, 2.  For the use of the attribute in the Aeneid, see 4.150, 5.262, 6.546, 7.472, 8.301, 9.18, 9.405, 10.135, 10.507, 10.858, 11.155, 11.657 (applied to Camilla’s group of warrior women), 12.58, 12.83, 12.142; cf. μέγα κῦδος ᾽Αχαιῶν in Hom. Od. 12.184. Horsfall (2003, 301) considers the expression, when applied to Camilla, as a “fine traditional phrasing.” 40  10.353-509. 39

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specific moment of failure in the heroic role that the poet finally recalls their absent mothers. When Pallas’s lifeless body is carried to his father, the forlorn king exclaims that “[h]appy were you, o my most sacred spouse, in a death that saved you from this pain!”41 As for Lausus, when Aeneas finally strikes him down, we hear that validum namque exigit ensem per medium Aeneas iuvenem totumque recondit; transiit et parmam mucro, levia arma minacis, et tunicam molli mater quam neverat auro, implevitque sinum sanguis; tum vita per auras concessit maesta ad Manis corpusque reliquit. (10.815-20) For Aeneas drives the sword sheer through the youth’s body, and buries it to the hilt. The point pierced the target—frail armor for one so threatening—and the tunic his mother had woven him of pliant gold; blood filled his breast, then through the air the life fled sorrowing to the Shades, and left the body.

I would suggest that the fates of these young motherless warriors actually work as an epic reverse to the story of Ascanius’s growing into full manhood. Whereas Ascanius is haunted by the presence of his absent mother throughout his childhood, until he finally confronts the issue and attains heroic identity by overcoming his loss, for Pallas and Lausus the situation is the opposite. Their mothers seem to be truly absent from their lives and seemingly do not hinder their initiation into the world of war; yet, at the crucial moment when they fall and fail at their pursuit of heroic glory, the latent mothers are brought back into the narrative. It is thus implied that even in death Pallas’s and Lausus’s status as epic heroes remain inadequate, as there is no wailing mother to wash the body and perform the mourning rites. The issue of motherhood, or lack thereof, is at least as strongly present in the death of Camilla, too, yet with the warrior maiden’s complex position in the gender dynamics of the poem adding a peculiar touch of tragedy. West has interpreted Camilla’s death as a failure in the role of an epic warrior, arguing it to be a result of her desire for beautiful spoils; something that “betrays” her innate femininity.42 41  tuque, o sanctissima coniunx, / felix morte tua neque in hunc servata dolorem! (11.158-59). 42  West 1985, 24-25. See also Rosenmeyer 1960, 161 and Becker 1997, 7. Horsfall (2003, 417), on the other hand, has argued that the desire for spoils is a

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Other scholars have also noted the graphic way in which the poet paints the warrior maiden’s fall, and in particular the rich erotic imagery in the scene. Virgil relates that nihil ipsa nec aurae nec sonitus memor aut venientis ab aethere teli, hasta sub exsertam donec perlata papillam haesit virgineumque alte bibit acta cruorem. … illa manu moriens telum trahit, ossa sed inter ferreus ad costas alto stat vulnere mucro. labitur exsanguis, labuntur frigida leto lumina, purpureus quondam color ora reliquit. … linquebat habenas ad terram non sponte fluens. tum frigida toto paulatim exsoluit se corpore, lentaque colla et captum leto posuit caput, arma relinquens, vitaque cum gemitu fugit indignata sub umbras. (11.801-4, 816-19, 827-31) She herself noticed neither air nor sound nor weapon coming from the sky till the spear, borne home, found lodging beneath the bare breast and, driven deep, drank her maiden blood. … She tugs at the weapon with dying hand but in the deep wound the iron point stands fast between the bones, close to the ribs. Bloodless she sinks; her eyes sink, chill with death; the once radiant hue has left her face. … She dropped the reins, slipping helplessly to earth. Then, growing chill, she slowly freed herself from all the body’s bonds, drooped her nerveless neck and the head which Death had seized, letting fall her weapons, and with a moan her life fled resentfully to the Shades below.

The lines that describe the spear penetrating Camilla’s breast and “drinking” her virginal blood have been interpreted as an allusion to yet another kind of non-existent motherhood: Camilla’s own unfulfilled potential for it.43 The metaphorical defloration of a bride and the “nursing” of the enemy spear point to the lost opportunities: in addition to never having known a mother, Camilla will never become one. Thus, once again, at the moment where the young feature characteristic of the male role of an epic warrior. For my more detailed analysis of the passage, see Pyy 2010, 196-200. 43  Fowler 1987, 195-96.

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warrior’s quest for epic heroism ends, the theme of motherhood is brought up. As Don Fowler points out, the imagery and the vocabulary that the poet employs in the death scenes of Pallas, Lausus and Camilla are strikingly similar. The combination of aesthetic, erotic, and tragic elements emphasizes the powerlessness and fragility of the young warriors, while also casting them in the role of a deflowered bride, or even in that of a sacrificial animal.44 In a sense, their tragic and elaborately depicted deaths can be read as metaphorical initiation rites, in which, instead of proceeding from childhood to adulthood, the young protagonists are transferred to death from the epic world of war where they could never quite find their place. While their motherlessness did not seem to hinder their upbringing as warriors or their pursuit of glory, at the moment of death the fact that there is not mother to wash their wounds and to send them to the afterlife, is a bitter reminder of their inadequacy as epic heroes. CONCLUSION In Virgil’s male-dominated epic narrative, mother absence appears as one of the most crucial, defining themes. The most central motherson relationships in the poem—that between Aeneas and Venus, and between Ascanius and Creusa—are strongly marked by the absence of the mother, which turns out to have a special significance for the protagonists’ identities. On the one hand, the poet appears to argue that breaking free from one’s mother is an essential step in the formation of a heroic identity; on the other, he shows that the attempt to repress the trauma of losing one’s mother, and to replace a maternal bond altogether with the ideal of patrilineal succession, might not be a tenable solution. Ascanius’s and Aeneas’s stories are complemented by those of the motherless Italian warriors Pallas, Lausus, and Camilla, whose heroic inadequacy appears as a tragic reverse of Ascanius’s successful growth into full manhood. All in all, in the Aeneid, motherhood is a crucial part of the discussion concerning the transition from childhood to adulthood and the transformation from 44

 Fowler 1987, 188-92; also noted by Van Nortwick 2013, 149.

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a private person into a political agent. Moreover, underlying all this, one can observe what is perhaps a characteristically Augustan anxiety: the effort to balance the family and the state, the male political community on the one hand, and the dynastic principle that is based on maternal generation on the other. Most importantly, however, as Ascanius’s story clearly shows, motherhood is crucially and irreversibly connected to the complex relationship between the past and the present that is at the core of Virgil’s epic and of his construction of Roman-ness.

12. MISSING MOTHERHOOD: ENVISIONING THE CHILDLESS EMPRESS OF THE TRAJANIC-HADRIANIC ERA* Margaret L. WOODHULL (University of Colorado Denver)

INTRODUCTION Scholarship since the time of Edward Gibbon has, by and large, held up the so-called “era of the adoptive emperor” as a pinnacle of Rome’s imperial history. Dating from the reign of Marcus Cocceius Nerva (96-98 CE) to that of Marcus Aurelius (161-180 CE), the period saw imperial succession shift from a model heavily dependent on the dynastic principle, in which a blood heir or close-kin family member inherited power, to one that ostensibly favored a succession based on merit. This change from close-kin family succession to the rise of rulers, who placed the welfare of the empire above strictly family interests, addressed, in part, a spate of often calamitous rulers who gained power merely by birth. Although adoption had been employed for succession during the Julio-Claudian era, the adoptees were all close-kin and inner-family blood relations of the existing emperor. Yet, in the wake of Domitian’s tyranny and the elderly, childless Nerva’s lack of close relations, Rome’s monarchy was forced to adapt, turning to adoption as a strategy for succession, a model that proved preferable to members of the Senate, especially.1 Ancient authors, most of whom were of this élite class, reinforced an “adoptive” ideology that promulgated this new succession model that circumvented * My thanks to Prof. Sabine Huebner and Dr. David Ratzan for their insightful comments. Thanks are due also to colleagues at the University of Colorado Denver who read drafts and gave generous feedback. All have made this a better essay. Gratitude is overdue to Chaddie Kruger, who started me down this path: Gratias tibi ago, Magna Mater et Magister. This essay is dedicated to Camilla. 1  Bennett 1997, 42-44.

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dynasty and its dependence on the reproductive body of the imperial woman. Pliny the Younger, for example, in his Panegyricus of 100 CE, eulogizing Trajan (98-117 CE), wrote: Indeed, [yours was] a novel route to the principate, unheard of heretofore! … This is the only fitting way to adopt a son if the adopter is an emperor; for when it is a case of transferring the Senate and the people of Rome, armies, provinces, and allies to a single successor, would you look to a wife to provide him, or seek no further than the four walls of your home?2

In Pliny’s praise of Trajan’s succession, women have no place. Hard work and experience make the man. Pliny further extols him, “Your merits did indeed call for your adoption as successor long ago; but had you been adopted then, we should never have known the empire’s debt to you.”3 Rome may have been better off had Trajan arrived at court sooner, but experience and the honors he thereby merited made him a better princeps. 4 The run of “good” adopted emperors—Trajan, Hadrian, Antoninus Pius, and Marcus Aurelius—is often cited as evidence that Romans themselves saw merit-based succession as the better model.5 Indeed, echoing Pliny nearly a century later, Cassius Dio points to the benefit of adoption over bloodline when he has Hadrian explain Marcus Aurelius’s adoption: I, my friends, have not been permitted by nature to have a son, but you have made it possible by legal enactment. Now there is this difference between the two methods—that a begotten son turns out to be whatever sort of person Heaven pleases, whereas one that is adopted, a man takes to himself as the result of a deliberate selection…6

Hadrian blames nature for his lack of male issue. It did not cooperate in providing him an heir in the regular manner, but, he continues, natural children do not always cooperate either. Both passages work 2  Plin. Pan. 7.1-8 (All translations are from the Loeb edition, unless otherwise noted.). 3  Plin. Pan. 6.3-5. 4  It was nearly a year before Trajan arrived in Rome from Germany after officially succeeding Nerva in 98 CE. 5  Hekster 2001, 35. 6  Cass. Dio 69.20.

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hard to obscure the rupture to traditional imperial inheritance that the absence of a dynastic heir produced in succession planning by proclaiming the benefits of adoption.7 And, yet, if only nature had cooperated. Both Trajan and Hadrian had barren marriages. The reasons why can never be known, but what can be investigated is how the court dealt with the absence of issue. The literature noted above reveals how it dealt with the image of the emperor; it provides hints, too, as shall be seen below, of how it molded the literary images of the barren empress. How it managed the absence of motherhood in the public images of its empresses, however, has received less attention. The present chapter addresses this question by examining portraits of Pompeia Plotina and Vibia Sabina, Trajan’s and Hadrian’s empresses, respectively.8 For some time now, scholars have observed that the TrajanicHadrian empresses Pompeia Plotina and Vibia Sabina experienced court life very differently from their first-century counterparts, specifically those of the Julio-Claudian era. Whereas Rome’s first empresses, like Livia Drusilla or Agrippina Minor, played significant roles and left extensive material evidence of their public activities, their secondcentury successors led dramatically diminished public lives.9 Scholars associate the unprecedented public engagement of Julio-Claudian women with the developing politics of dynastic inheritance and the production of heirs. However, with no children to their names, Plotina and Sabina received conspicuously less attention in epigraphic, art historical, archaeological, and literary representations. Almost no traces of the sort of publica magnificentia provided by their first-century predecessors is attributed to their hands.10 Absence of motherhood appears to have figured high among the causes of their decreased visibility in public, suggesting a relationship between nulliparity and imperial women’s public image. In short, in the eyes of the court, the reproductive female no longer assured dynastic continuity.11 7

 Hekster 2001, 35.  Raepsaet-Charlier 1987, 511, no. 631, Pompeia Plotina, and 624, no. 802, (Vibia) Sabina. 9  Boatwright 1991, passim. 10  For an overview of public benefactions of the Julio-Claudian women, see Woodhull 2012. 11  Corbier 1995, 178-93 on the political importance of the imperial woman’s reproductive capacity to dynastic monarchy. 8

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As several essays in this collection indicate, mother absence took many forms. For some, the loss of mothers to childbirth constitutes mother absence; for others, identification as wife over mother suggests a resistance to motherhood and the maternal. For others still, an absent mother shapes the lives of heroes in literary narratives. Evidence for these diverse conceptions of mother absence comes from archaeology, literary studies, epigraphy, and demographic data. In an effort to complement the spectrum of rich perspectives represented here, this essay turns to the plastic arts to consider mother absence in the portraits of the nulliparous empress of the Trajanic-Hadrianic era in light of motherhood’s absence. If, as Pliny and Dio suggest, the court promulgated a new ideology of succession by adoption, the—admittedly small—corpora of portraits for Plotina and Sabina are more equivocal. An examination of the portrait types and iconographies of these Trajanic-Hadrianic empresses indicates that the Trajanic-Hadrianic courts initially fostered an ideology of dynastic inheritance until it was forced to adapt to the realities presented by the childlessness of two successive reigns. Considered diachronically, the portraits of Pompeia Plotina and Vibia Sabina, I suggest, tell a story of court artists grappling with the phenomenon of nulliparity. The following pages, thus, explore visual strategies developed by Rome to deflect the empresses’ (disappointing) childlessness, the absence of motherhood, and the fragility of succession by bloodline. HOPING FOR MOTHERHOOD

IN

POMPEIA PLOTINA’S PORTRAITS

When Pompeia Plotina wed M. Ulpius Traianus ca. 78 CE, she likely never expected to find herself ascending the steps of the domus Augustana on Rome’s Palatine Hill two decades later.12 Born in the Romanized colony of Augusta Nemausus (modern Nîmes), Plotina grew up among the provincial élite, bred to conform to the typical expectations of a Roman woman of her station. Little is known of Plotina’s early world before her elevation to empress. However, her marriage to Trajan, the son of an ambitious Iberian family, who began his rise through the senatorial cursus in Rome in the mid 70s CE, was as much a coup for the young Plotina and her provincial family, whose 12

 Bennett 1997, 24.

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1

2

Fig. 1. Bust of Pompeia Plotina. Fig. 2. Bust of Pompeia Plotina (profile), Marble, 112-123 CE, inv. no. MC439. Rome, Palazzo Massimo alle Terme. (Photo credits, Sergey Sosnovkiy, CC BY-SA 4.0; © Commune di Roma-Sovraintendenza Beni Culturali, Museo Nazionale Romano).

social and political importance surely improved, as it was for Trajan, who gained a wife of substantial wealth. As a woman who numbered among the rapidly ascending provincial élite, child-bearing and rearing would have been Plotina’s primary job. Yet, when in 98 an aging Nerva, shortly before dying, adopted her husband as his successor, Plotina remained childless as she was catapulted from élite daughter of the provinces to first lady of Rome. Plotina’s most iconic court portrait, now in Rome’s Palazzo Massimo alle Terme, represents the empress as an older matron (figs. 1 and 2). The image dates to ca. 112 CE and would remain her primary portrait type until her death (ca. 123 CE). The image comports with the portrait that writers, like Pliny the Younger and Cassius Dio, paint of the empress in the literary tradition. For example, in his Panegyricus, Pliny the Younger celebrates Plotina for virtues of modesty and devotion: “From your position she claims nothing for herself but the pleasure it gives her, unswerving in her devotion not to your power

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but to yourself.”13 She prefers to be nothing more than a dutiful wife in the service of her husband’s glory and honor. She asks nothing, is unassuming, silent, and finds pleasure in obedience to her husband. Plotina is in fact so silent as to be present in Pliny’s encomium only as uxor, not named, and she makes an appearance only briefly at the end of the work. Pliny further recounts an anecdote of Plotina’s humble rejection of the honorific Augusta, when the Senate voted it for her in 98 CE; she only acquiesced years later, ca. 105 CE.14 Plotina’s pudicitia established her idealized character for generations to come. Nearly a century after her death, the historian Cassius Dio extolled the feminine modesty of Trajan’s house in an anecdote recounting Plotina’s arrival at the imperial palace: “When Plotina, his wife, first entered the palace, she turned round so as to face the stairway and the populace and said: ‘I enter here just the sort of woman as I mean to be when I leave.’”15 Evoked in these descriptions, Pliny’s particularly, is the tradition of the funerary laudatio. A staple of the Roman funeral, laudationes funebres were elegiac commemorations delivering praise of the deceased. Popular in the late Republic and early Empire, they typically inventoried the ideal qualities of the departed figure, and in the case of women, a catalog of familiar virtues was practically compulsory. Traits, such as modesty, morality, obedience, loyalty, frugality, woolworking, and familial and uxorial devotion headlined these lists. Especially famous, the Laudatio Turiae presents an unknown husband’s eulogy for his (also unknown) wife inscribed on the woman’s tombstone.16 In it, the reader finds the biography of the woman, including her sober attire, modesty of appearance, but also the couple’s lack of children and his wife’s altruistic offer to divorce him and find him a new wife with a fertile body through whom he might bear offspring.17 Though not a funeral oration, Pliny’s praise for the very-muchalive Plotina does highlight the same classic virtues; but where the  Plin. Pan. 83.6-8.  Plin. Pan. 84. 15  Cass. Dio. 68.5.5. See too Temporini 1978, 123. 16  CIL 6.1527. For a fresh analysis on the Laudatio Turiae and the laudatio funebris generally, see Osgood 2014, passim. 17  Laud. Tur., fragment 1.30ff and fragment 2.31ff. 13 14

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Laudatio Turiae shows the husband openly acknowledging the couple’s barrenness, reference to motherhood’s absence in Pliny is notably omitted. Pliny is silent on the emperor and empress’s dearth of children, emphasizing instead those qualities that made Plotina a good wife. She selflessly dedicates herself to his glory, doing only for him: “Your own wife contributes to your honor and glory, a supreme model of ancient virtues…”18 In this she follows the standards of an earlier era, the customs of an older Rome (quid antiquius), whereby women were obedient and undemanding—one senses that Pliny here favors this more sober imperial woman. Thus, the author admirably portrays this first empress from the provinces with distinctly antiquated characteristics, recalling Republican tradition. So emphatic is Pliny’s emphasis on uxorial virtue that the reader fails to notice the absence of that other character of female virtue, the Roman mother. As the idealized, old-fashioned wife, Plotina is invested with romanitas, which rising members of the provincial élite, whose numbers were growing in Rome in Pliny’s day, took pains to demonastrate as their true Roman inheritance. Plotina’s mature-type portrait captures this sober, uxorial image of the empress well. These portraits are typically dated post 112 CE based on the hairstyle, which is shared by Plotina’s earliest numismatic portraits, minted upon Ulpia Marciana’s death and consecration that year. While a terminus post quem of 112 does not preclude the existence of this more aged image in her earlier years as empress, it does problematize Plotina’s portraiture because it departs so dramatically from an iconography of youthfulness that characterized imperial women’s portraits for the previous 120 years. Livia’s well-known posthumous full-length portrait now in Copenhagen exemplifies this latter quality (fig. 8). Since the empress lived well into her 80s, it beggars belief that she remained a beautiful, twenty-something until her death in 29 CE. Yet, the youthful portrayal, to this day, eternalizes the empress in her prime, child-bearing years. An empress routinely enjoyed multiple portrait types during her tenure as the emperor’s wife. New models might be issued for major events in the life of the imperial family. Faustina the Younger, for example, has nine identified portrait types, which has led scholars to speculate that she received a new portrait type upon the birth of each  Plin. Pan. 83.5.

18

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of her children; and these might have numbered as many as fourteen!19 Given this convention, Plotina must have warranted a new portrait when the death and deification of her older—perhaps by a generation—sister-in-law, Ulpia Marciana, with whom Plotina had been close, positioned the empress to become the imperial family’s senior female. Since by 112 CE, the empress was probably closing in on 50 years old, a more mature representation of the empress should be expected. This older image of Plotina, then, accounts for the Capitoline portrait examined above and must represent a change from an earlier type. What this earlier portrait might have looked like is perhaps exhibited in the portrait of a young woman dated to the Trajanic era and known in three copies (two of which are considered here, figs. 3 and 4). It is tempting to see in this young female portrait type, copies of which are in Rome, Munich, and Newby Hall in North Yorkshire, a youthful Plotina, for it increases the paltry corpus of her secure sculpted images—numbering only ten compared to the nearly hundred known for Livia.20 Based on the high-quality of workmanship seen in all three copies and the fact that the portrait is multiply replicated, scholars generally agree that the portrait depicts a woman of the imperial house. But whom it represents has been debated. Variously identified as Marciana or Matidia Minor—sister-in-law and great niece to Plotina, respectively—the portrait type, Klaus Fittschen and Paul Zanker have recently argued, shares similarities in workmanship to the emperor’s portraits from the time and, thus, suggest a common workshop. Although Fittschen and Zanker concede that workmanship is a relatively weak basis for the portrait’s re-identification, other circumstantial observations reinforce their suggestion and resolve the puzzling lacuna of early portraits for the empress.21 Whereas scholars consider the impoverished corpus for Plotina a reflection of a broader scarcity of material evidence for the second-century barren empresses, we must assume that Plotina, having arrived in Rome in 98 CE, where it was de rigeur for the court to produce an official portrait for the empress, 19  On Faustina the Younger’s portrait types, see Fittschen 1982. On the number of children Faustina bore, Levick 2014, 112-18. 20  Fittschen and Zanker, 1983, 7, plates 7 and 8. Bartman 1998 catalogs 91 busts and full-length portraits for Livia. 21  Ibid.

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Fig. 3. Bust of Plotina (probable), marble, ca. 112-123, CE, inv. no. MC440, Capitoline Museums, Rome (Photo: Musei Capitolini, by permission © Commune di Roma-Sovraintendenza Beni Culturali, Musei Capitolini). Fig. 4. Bust of Plotina (probable), marble, ca. 98-112 CE, inv. no. 405. Glyptothek, Munich. (Photo: © Carole Raddato, adapted to B/W, CC BY-SA 4.0; by permission Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich).

had an image from these early years; she cannot have been bereft of court images during the fourteen years that preceded her mature type portrait of 112. Moreover, still only in her mid-thirties in 98, it is reasonable to assume that the court had hopes that Plotina might yet produce an heir. If so, it seems all the more likely that an official portrait of a young Plotina would reinforce this ideal. Finally, while it is plausible, for example, that something like a discordant marriage might provoke the court to hinder production of an early portrait, Trajan and Plotina, by all accounts, were a mutually loving and devoted couple (and even Hadrian and Sabina’s presumably unhappy marriage produced at least four portrait types for Sabina). Consequently, the sum of these factors increases the odds that our young Trajanic woman, in the end, represents Plotina.

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What, then, can we surmise about court politics and, for our purposes, motherhood from this early portrait type for Plotina? Designed while she was likely in her early thirties, the image is striking for its overt youthfulness and substantial adornment, uncharacteristic qualities for Plotina’s iconic matronly reserve and sobriety. These qualities point to an early date in Plotina’s tenure as empress for several reasons. In the copies in Rome and Munich, Plotina’s fleshy full face recalls the clear, soft visages familiar in Julio-Claudian women’s portraits and suggests an alignment with the values of female youthfulness from an earlier era. The tight firm line of Plotina’s brow and her long aquiline nose, especially in the Rome copy, suggest court artists looked to timeless models of feminine beauty, like those found in statues of Greco-Roman goddesses. This classicizing quality marked a departure from the portraiture of Rome’s previous imperial family, the Flavians, who favored heavy verism to distinguish its court imagery. Retained by court artists, however, was the Flavian hairstyle, which Plotina bears, like a crown. Although a much-simplified version of the ostentatious bouffant from earlier eras, Plotina’s ornate, stylized rolls of hair crest above her forehead in a similar fashion. At its height, the Flavian “do” was created by massing layers of curls high atop a woman’s head to frame her face, as demonstrated by a bust of Domitian’s widow, Domitia Longina (fig. 5). Surviving her late husband by some thirty years, Domitia Longina commanded much respect from both Nervan and the Ulpian adminstrations. It is tempting to see her portraiture as an empress inspiring Plotina’s early image during the latter’s early years as Domitia’s successor. Plotina’s modified Flavian style creates a confection of concentric circles for curls to frame the smooth, gently curving planes of her youthful face. The contrast between the soft flesh and the incised linear geometry of the crested curls is visually pleasing. These stylized rolls form tiers—two in the case of the Capitoline portrait—and one tier backed by a lunate diadem in the case of the Munich image— that rise above a folded corona of parenthesis-shaped hair that frames the empress’s unlined brow. Drill work in the curls is limited to the center of each stylized spiral instead of the heavily concentrated drilling of the high Flavian era coiffure (ca. 90 CE), but such a simplification perhaps nodded to the new court values of frugality and modesty.

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Fig. 5. Bust of Domitia Longina, ca. 80-96 CE, inv. no. 86.134.99, Denman Collection, San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, Texas (Photo: San Antonio Museum of Art, by permission).

What makes the Flavian hairstyle so visually powerful is the masterful drill work and carving executed by the sculptor to achieve the decorative play of light and dark, indicating the texture of the curls. For its female subject, the effect was a rich adornment and animation of the face that immediately attracted viewers’ attention. In fact, the Flavian hairdo is best understood in the context of female status, ornamentation, and objectification. Such elaborate coiffures signaled a woman with both the wealth, slaves, and leisure time to devote to sitting for the long hours the process of styling the hair demanded. Moreover, like jewelry, the hairstyle was a way of adorning the body to garner the attention of the (theoretically male) gaze, thereby making the woman an object to be admired. With its iconography of youth and ornamentation, a wholly different message, distinct from Plotina’s later mature-type portraits, emerges. As in the case of her Julio-Claudian predecessors—particularly Livia

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who died at the age of 88, but remained the portrait of ever-generative beauty—youth was an index of female fecundity and potential. In Plotina’s portraits youth and ornamental hair invited viewers to gaze at the empress and see in her the same uberous portrayal seen in yesteryear’s empresses. The impressive, visually fetching image betrays, I believe, the hope at court, in those initial years of Trajan’s reign, that Plotina might yet bear the emperor an heir and his Ulpian ancestry, dynastic progeny. In time, however, the hope for motherhood faded for the imperial couple. Plotina’s youthful image gave way to a mature vision of Roman matronhood, best exemplified in the mature style bust above (figs. 1 and 2). Here the skin of the empress’s narrow, long face shows signs of flaccidity. Naso-labial lines begin to sink into the flesh of her upper lip, while the heavy shadow cast by the ridge of her sunken orbital sockets reflects the loss of elasticity in her eyelids. A slight puffiness below the eyes and sagging wattle below the empress’s chin, likewise, indicate her advancing years. To Roman viewers of the day, Plotina’s aging countenance clearly nodded to the veristic tradition of Republican portraiture, where agedness signified virtues of Roman self-restraint and wisdom borne of a life lived according to the expectations of ancestral and feminine tradition. Her portrait no longer spoke of the hope for motherhood and childbearing, but, instead, cast her as Rome’s highest-ranking exemplar of stolid, uxorial virtues.22 Although Plotina’s childless body forced a change in the nature of her portraiture from youthful to aged over time, concerns for an empress to produce heirs remained at court. Having orchestrated the marriage between Trajan’s promising ward, Publius Aelius Hadrianus, and her husband’s great-niece, Vibia Sabina, Plotina might now offload the burden of procreation to the younger woman.23 Sabina offered an ideal proxy for the childless Plotina. Her descent from Trajan through his sister, Marciana, Sabina’s grandmother, assured that Trajan’s own bloodline might continue. Thus, responsibility for a new generation fell to Sabina.24 But until she could fulfill this 22

 Cf. D’Ambra 1996, 219-32 for discussion of similar characteristics in nude female portraits of the Flavian era. 23  SHA, Hadrian 2.10. 24  Boatwright 1991, 518 for details of family lineages and accomplishments that merited standing in Rome.

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promise, the honors of motherhood were deflected from the nulliparous empress Plotina and lavished on her sister-in-law and niece (by marriage), Ulpia Marciana and the elder Matidia, respectively. As the only women of Trajan’s household to bear offspring—albeit daughters—through whom an Ulpian dynasty could be forged, Matidia and Marciana were recognized with extraordinary measures for fulfilling this all-important duty. Upon her death in 112 CE, Ulpia Marciana became the first Trajanic woman to be officially consecrated a diva of the imperial cult. When her daughter Matidia the Elder died seven years later, she, too, was consecrated, and Hadrian took the unparalleled step of erecting for them the first official temple complex devoted solely to divae of the imperial family.25 Motherhood, thus, gained these imperial women greater honors than Plotina would ever enjoy. The absence of motherhood, arguably, also made an impact on Plotina’s posthumous memory, for relative to her sister in law and niece, Matidia received what amounts to relatively token posthumous honors. Hadrian provided Plotina a lavish public funeral upon her death. He consecrated his “adoptive mother,” marked her death with nine days of public mourning, commissioned special funerary hymns in her honor, and delivered a public laudatio.26 In his praise for her, the emperor proclaimed: ‘Though she asked much of me, she was never refused anything…” So little did she ask of the emperor, according to Cassius Dio, that “her requests were of such a character that they neither burdened [the emperor] nor afforded [him] any justification for opposing them.”27 Hadrian’s eulogy of the empress thus reinscribes the image of a woman who, like her body, refrained from interventions that might disrupt the novel politics of adoptive successsion. To this point, it is worth recalling that, in the few instances when Plotina is shown displaying political agency—e.g., her interventions to arrange Hadrian’s marriage and his elevation at Trajan’s deathbed—ancient writers disparage her actions or cast aspersions on her motivations. For example, after crediting Plotina with 25

 An image of the complex on a rare Hadrianic medallion dated to ca. 120-121 CE is the principal evidence for the date and building. Woodhull 2012, 234-35 and fig. 11.5; Boatwright 1987, 44-45. 26  Cass. Dio 69.10.3. 27  Cass. Dio 69.10.3a.

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arranging Hadrian’s marriage to Sabina (by which he secured the throne), Hadrian’s Historia Augusta biographer intimates the emperor’s displeasure at the arrangement—and, by transference, Plotina’s interference; it was a marriage “little desired by Trajan himself…”28 Similarly, when Plotina acts to elevate Hadrian upon Trajan’s death, it is motivated by illicit love; in bad faith, she forges the letter to the Senate that will secure his imperium.29 Thus, by taking action she fails to comport with the image of passive devotion so crucial to succession by merit. Plotina received other minor honors. She was figured with Trajan as Hadrian’s adoptive parent on a series of gold aurei, minted in 136 CE, with jugate busts of Trajan and Plotina as DIVIS PARENTIBUS, for example.30 Despite these honors, however, the memory of the childless Plotina was, in the end, accessory to Trajan, and, even in this, her importance is ambiguous, for it remains unclear if Hadrian rededicated the temple he erected for his late, adoptive father, Divus Traianus, to include the new Diva Plotina so that she might join her late husband as an honorand in his imperial cult temple. When one considers that, by contrast, the imperial mothers, Marciana and Matidia the Elder, enjoyed an enduring, sacred presence in the monumental complex set in one of Rome’s most politically charged spaces, the Campus Martius, it is clear that biological motherhood, in the end, failed Plotina, as did its benefits, and, so, the pressures of procreation were passed to her successor, Vibia Sabina. VIBIA SABINA AND

THE

NULLIPAROUS BODY

When Trajan died, Sabina succeeded Plotina as empress, and Plotina slipped into her final role as a dowager empress until her death. Upon her husband’s accession, Sabina, like her predecessor, was only in her early thirties and thus liable to reproduce. Hopes at court must have been high for delivery of an heir.31 Yet, as in Trajan and Plotina’s marriage, the new imperial couple remained barren. The precise reasons—the unhappy marriage, Hadrian’s preference for young men,  HA, Hadrian 2.10.  Cass. Dio 69.1.1-3. 30  E.g., RIC 2.1926, 367, no. 232a and 232b. 31  Brennan 2018, passim. 28 29

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infertility—can never be known. Sabina’s death around 136/7, a year or so before the emperor’s, left Hadrian, himself ill, casting about for an heir. His attention quickly lighted on a young Marcus Aurelius. As Marcus Aurelius was too young to rule at the time, Hadrian adopted Antoninus Pius, whom he required to adopt Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus.32 Thereupon Hadrian promptly died in July 138 CE.33 Sabina, in contrast to Plotina, so far as sources reveal, had no hand in succession planning nor was she ever explicitly honored as a parent of any sort. Indeed, not only did Sabina suffer the absence of motherhood, but for all intents and purposes, she demonstrated little in the way of agency as well.34 How, then, did the court manage the image of yet another barren empress? Given the impoverished written sources portraying Sabina with any sort of autonomy, the quantity of her portraits is impressively numerous. Outnumbering Plotina’s some six to one, Vibia Sabina’s presence reached across the Empire in the form of her sculpted image.35 The heaviest concentration of her portraits are generally held to date from 128 CE and later, the year the empress was awarded the titular “Augusta,” and was in her early 40s when little possibility of childbirth remained.36 Yet, if motherhood was absent at court in Rome, the broader population at the farthest reaches of the Empire might be surprised, for in contrast to the dour sobriety of the elderly Plotina, Sabina’s countenance remained eternally young, frozen in a state of “fictive fertility” (cf. fig. 10). As argued by Penelope Davies, the empress’s youthfulness was the visual signifier of her fertility, real or not, devised to maintain “the fiction of dynastic continuity and legitimized … rule.”37 By Davies’ account, this was a fiction borne not just by Sabina, but traceable to images of Rome’s first empress, 32  Cass. Dio 69.20.1-5 relates an account of Hadrian’s adoption proceedings. For useful analysis, Birley 2008, 184, who suggests that Hadrian followed a precedent set by Augustus in 4 CE, when he required Tiberius to adopt Germanicus for succession purposes. 33  Boatwright 2008, 155-80, for a succinct account of Hadrian’s life and reign. 34  Epigraphic evidence does indicate that Sabina made a dedication to Rome’s matronae, CIL 6.997 = ILS 324, as in Boatwright 1991, 523. 35  Although the number is likely higher, this figure is based loosely on Carandini 1969. 36  Boatwright 1991, 523 n37. 37  Davies 2000, 102-19, who adopts the phrase and discusses the concept relative to imperial women, especially Livia and Vibia Sabina.

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Livia, whose representation on the Ara Pacis Augustae (13-9 BCE), for example, aligns compositionally with that of the maternal goddess on the monument’s end panel. Despite the reality that Livia and Augustus’s marriage had been fruitless, the visual connection “had the subtle power to rewrite the truth.”38 And Livia’s proximity to the children on the relief further empowers the fiction.39 Although both Livia’s and Sabina’s marriages were barren, their roles relative to their reigning spouses were radically different. Whereas Livia was actively engaged in politics, public beneficence, and enjoyed the power of her extraordinary wealth, Sabina almost never figures in the sources as taking action in any of these ways. Little about her financial resources comes down to us, aside from some ambiguous references to brickworks, a few slaves, and a possible home in Rome.40 A host of historical circumstances distinguish Livia from Sabina, but one in particular stands out: despite her barren marriage to Augustus, Livia had produced children; her body was fecund; and she had been a mother. Thus, if an empress’s fictional fertility was, at times, a strategic fantasy, then in Sabina’s case it was less about the barren marriage than the barren female body. Sabina, although represented repeatedly in art and numismatic images, had never enjoyed the sort of active engagement in the public life that put Livia on the public stage. Childlessness, as Boatwright has observed, played a critical role in the void of agency of the empresses of the early second century.41 To appreciate the extent to which their portraits might have provided a visual indicator of their power, Livia’s and Sabina’s full-length portraits repays examination. For both empresses, court artists adopted stock torso types, but significant distinctions emerge which, I contend, correlate to the presence or absence of the reproductive body of the empress. Starting with an examination of Livia’s known full-length portraits allows us to establish an iconographic baseline to which to compare Sabina’s full-length statues. In the corpus of Livia’s portraits, one especially characteristic representation, dated by Elizabeth Bartman to the last decade BCE,42 shows the empress in a strong 38

 Davies 2000, 113.  Many thanks to Chaddie Kruger for this observation. 40  Boatwright 1991, 523 lists the known property and possible munificence for Sabina. 41  Ibid. 42  Contra Rose 1997, 97-98, cat. 25, pl. 89, who suggests early Tiberian date. 39

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Fig. 6. Portrait Statue of Livia Drusilla, ca. 10 BCE-10 CE, inv. no. 637, Vatican Museums, Vatican City. (Photo: Marco DiMauro, CC BY-SA 4.0; by permission of the Musei Vaticani). Fig. 7. Portrait statue of Livia, head missing, 14-37 CE, inv. no. 367, Glyptothek, Munich (Photo: Joe Geranio, CC BY-SA 4.0; by permission of Antikensammlungen und Glyptothek, Munich).

frontal stance, weight on her left leg while the right extends slightly forward (fig. 6). Her mantle veils her head and falls behind her right shoulder and just over her left.43 From here, it crosses her waist (portions restored), to wrap over and around her left arm. In the original statue, Livia’s arms opened outward (perhaps less enthusiastically than appears in the eighteenth-century restored orans gesture), inviting viewers to address the empress as they faced her. A similar openness of composition and attitude characterizes a statue from Falerone of Tiberian date (fig. 7).44 Here the lines of the mantle are similar, with the front drape hanging lower on Livia’s torso revealing more of her mid-section beneath the draped stola. Her tunic and stola hang 43

 Bartman 1998, 8-9, figs. 9-10; 155-56, cat. no. 22.  Bartman 1998, 41, cat. 18.

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Fig. 8. Portrait Statue of Livia, Claudian, inv. no. 1643, Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen (Photo: Roger Ulrich, CC BY-SA 4.0; by permission of the Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek).

suggestively from her right shoulder over her breast, calling attention to the nurturing body beneath. Like the majority of Livia’s statues in the round, these exhibit an awareness of the full potential of the female body emphasized by the open composition of the figure’s drapery.45 At the time of the portrait’s execution, Livia would have been at least in her early seventies; yet, her portrait betrays no decrepitude, only the body that bore Augustus’s successor. This same design marks a number of Livia’s images which assimilate her to fertility goddesses. A particularly exquisite example of Livia as Ceres-Fortuna, originally from Puteoli, now in Copenhagen, offers a posthumous rendering of the empress produced after the emperor 45

 For comparison of the open composition in other specimens, see Bartman 1998, cat. nos. 3, 18, 20, 28, 33, 60, 67, 71, 74, 84, 88, with respective images.

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Claudius deified her in 42 CE (fig. 8). In this Ceres-type portrait, the empress’s arms are bent and extend away from the body. Her left hand holds an overflowing cornucopia resting in the crook of her left elbow, while her right arm originally proffered chaffs of wheat, corn, and poppies, attributes of the goddess. Livia’s diaphanous tunic reveals the full curves of the diva’s breasts and torso before falling into elaborate, belted folds. Over this, her stola veils her head and flows down her back to be swept up under her right arm, across her pelvis, and draped over her left arm beneath the cornucopia. As in the figures described above, here Livia’s arms open in a wide angle from the plane of her torso. Even her left arm rotates outwards from the shoulder joint to prevent the cornucopia from obscuring her body. This open, unobstructed view of Livia’s torso characterizes artistic conceptions of Rome’s first empress, revealing the sensitivity to maintaining views that highlighted her ever-fecund body. One has the sense that in the case of Livia’s full-length portraits, the torso is more than a delivery device for her individualized face; it is the portrait of the body that had in fact produced two sons (one of whom, in the end, had succeeded Augustus), eternalized in stone. If Livia’s portrait statues celebrate the maternal body, how was Sabina’s body conceived as she rose to the status of empress? The corpus of Sabina’s full portraits shares developmental similarities with Plotina’s and conceptual ones with Livia, but departs from both as well. Like Plotina, few images of Sabina are extant from her early years as empress. One rare portrait, however, from the so-called Seat of the Augustales in Ostia, ca. 117 CE, indicates, as in Plotina’s case, a hope that Sabina—probably only in her late twenties or early thirties at the time—would produce issue. In the portrait, Sabina is assimilated to Venus Genetrix (fig. 9),46 significantly, the ancestral goddess-mother of the gens Iulia. The torso was based on a fifth-century BCE original of the goddess by the Greek sculptor, Kallimachos. By the second century CE, Romans were well acculturated to the Genetrix type. A century and a half earlier, Julius Caesar had claimed the goddess as the founding divinity of the Julian line and dedicated a temple and his forum to her in the heart of the capital.47 Once described “as a

46

 Bartman 1998, 105, cat. 28.  Suet. Iul. 78.2; Cass. Dio 43.43.2-3.

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Fig. 9. Full-length Portrait of Vibia Sabina as Venus Genetrix, ca. 113-117 CE, Antiquarium, Ostia (Photo: © Carole Raddato, adapted to B/W, CC BY-SA 4.0; by permission Sovraintendenza di Ostia Antica). Fig. 10. Full-length Portrait of Vibia Sabina, ca. 122 CE, Musée Theo Desplan, Vaison-la-Romaine, France (Photo: © Carole Raddato, adapted to B/W, CC BY-SA 4.0).

wife exiting the nuptial chamber,”48 the statue of Venus Genetrix featured prominently in the complex, and the type quickly became popular as a symbol of the Julian family and its divine ancestry. Sabina’s portrait utilizes the classic chiastic composition of the statue. A clinging, diaphanous chiton hugs the full, feminine body as it falls precariously from her left shoulder. Her weight rests on her left leg, left hip tilted up, while her right leg bends slightly forward to create the dynamic S-shaped curve from her left shoulder to right foot, the iconic fifth-century Greek form. The right hand raises her chiton 48

 Ravaisson [1892] 2016, 215.

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from behind and over her right shoulder as if to cover her ripe sexuality. Like Livia’s portraits discussed above, then, the unobstructed view and open composition of this early image of Hadrian’s empress exposed Sabina-Genetrix’s fecund body to viewers. Its message? Rome’s imperial family and, with it, the stability of the dynastic principle were alive and well, and Sabina was its iconic symbol, her fleshy, full body an index of her—and its—potentiality. Within a few short years, however, Sabina’s portrait statues would dramatically change composition. In contrast to the youthful sexuality of the Genetrix type, a new format characterized by closure and concealment was employed in the new empress’s standing portraits. Such is the case for an image, dated by Carandini to ca. 122 CE, from the Roman theater at Vaison, France (fig. 10).49 Known as the “Pudicitia” type, here Sabina’s right arm is bent to cross over her right breast; the arm is swathed in the mantle that envelopes her shoulders and drapes down her front, covering her breasts and falling to below her knees. Her left arm crosses her torso to anchor the cloak across her body. The lines of this statue type are closely related to the well-known small Herculaneum Woman-type, first created in the Hellenistic East and popularized in the Augustan era and later.50 The second century saw a spike in the use of Pudicitia, Small and Large Herculaneum Women types, and variants for public honorific portraiture celebrating civic beneficence by women, which escalated at this time. Around this same time, we find that a variant of the Small Herculaneum type was adapted for use in images of Ceres and frequently used by élite patrons across the empire. Sometime after 122 CE, Sabina’s official portraiture adopted a Ceres type torso as well (fig. 11).51 What makes this model surprising in the context of imperial portraiture is its dramatic departure from the Ceres type employed regularly for Livia’s image. Aside from the divine attributes, Sabina’s Ceres-type is characterized by concealment rather than revelation. A variant of Small Herculaneum Woman type, here the empress’s body is swathed and her right arm crooked, not unlike her Vaison 49

 Carandini 1969, 141, fig. 16, cat 3.  Trimble 2011, 18-32. 51  Also cf. related observations about gender and stock types for Roman women’s portrait statues in Davies 2008, 207-20. 50

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Fig. 11. Portrait Statue of Vibia Sabina as Ceres, ca. 128 CE, from Carthage, Bardo Museum, Tunis, (after Carandini 1969, pl. 32, p. 329).

portrait. In contrast to Livia as Ceres-Fortuna, where the empress’s mantle drapes on the outside of her shoulders to reveal her pert breasts, Sabina is seen pulling her mantle taught across her mid torso. The cloak then drapes in a series of catenated folds down her front to rests on the right calf before the bottom edge hikes up in a dramatic angle to her left hand, which grasps the edge of her mantle, clutching simultaneously a bouquet of corn and poppies (now missing). This format became standard in Sabina’s portrait statues.52 Her arms reach across her torso, holding tight to the cloak, ensuring that eyes are deflected from the body. Relative to her early Genetrix type and Livia as Ceres, the heavy cloaking, protective arms, and tight envelopment foreclose the possibility of seeing Sabina’s potent sexuality. Instead, her sexuality is suppressed, and, while this dovetails with the ideals of modesty championed by many élite women’s honorific portraits 52

 Cf. Carandini 1969, cat. 10, 12-13, 15-16, 65.

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traditionally, in the context of the empress’s portrait, it obfuscates any visual indicator of generative potential. Because this new image of Sabina represents an appropriation of the Herculaneum types, it is worth understanding how this torso type functioned. Recent scholarship has endeavored to understand the spike in popularity of these closely related forms. Jennifer Trimble, for example, in her studies of the Herculaneum Women types, has argued that the composition worked not to emphasize the body; rather, these were formulaic, stock torsos that indexed membership in a certain social stratum. According to Trimble, “[e]xcluding the subject’s actual body was part of depicting high social status,” for it was an index of female modesty and virtue.53 The uniformity of the torsos, recognizable at a glance, marked élite status, while the portrait individualized the figure whose identity would typically be detailed in a dedicatory inscription. Together stock body type and individualized head signified a standardized message of female virtue and empowerment that tied the unique woman to a larger élite social collective.54 By Trimble’s logic, then, artists suppressed visual emphasis from the sexualized, corporeal body in favor of evoking abstract (immaterial) virtues, appropriate to the upper classes who commissioned these honorific images for public display. Given the ubiquity of this type, how might we understand its employment in Sabina’s portraits? What accounts for its adoption and such a dramatic shift away from the empress’s previous, dynasticmother/Venus Genetrix type? In light of Trimble’s work, Sabina’s new portrait type represents an updated, desexualized modesty, perhaps inspired by the frequent appearance of these stock Herculaneum types and their variants, which functioned simply as a sign of her élite station. Sabina, however, was not simply an élite woman; she was more than a provincial celebrity. She was the empress of Rome’s vast empire, and a new portrait type signaled a new conception of the empress. It can be no mere coincidence that, when, in the late 120s, Sabina’s body still had yielded no issue, her image changed. Moving from a portrait of sexual plenitude, it shifted to a composition that signaled envelopment and closure. This change, I suggest, in Sabina’s 53

 Trimble 2013, 6. See too Trimble 2011; and Daehner 2007.  Trimble 2013, 7.

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case, reflected more than a change in fashion toward depictions of female modesty, as the broad geographic preference for the Large and Small Herculaneum Women statue types suggest. Rather, by masking the empress’s body, the court artist’s employment of this new composition suggests an intention to deflect viewer attention away from the reality of Sabina’s childless body. The heavy cloaking of her figure and the folding of her arms in a self-protective gesture drew viewers’ attention away from the body that had failed to produce an heir and invited them instead to consider alternative identities for the empress wherein motherhood’s absence did not loom its head. Vibia Sabina’s death in 136 CE saw her consecrated, as had been the case with her predecessor, Plotina. The newest member of the imperial pantheon received a new portrait in which her hair style likened her to Greek goddesses and set her in a timeless realm where her image would endure beyond the disappointing vicissitudes of the living flesh. CONCLUSION Although beyond the scope of the present study, a return to the open, revealing forms of Rome’s earliest empress and images of fecundity found in Julio-Claudian women are characteristic of the portraits of Plotina’s and Sabina’s successors, the two Faustinas and Julia Domna, suggesting that indeed court artists of the Trajanic Hadrianic reigns struggled to figure the motherless empresses of the TrajanicHadrianic courts.55 Did Plotina or Sabina regret their lack of children? Did either feel the sinking hopes of the court when motherhood passed them by? Their private thoughts on the topic of mothering will likely never be known. Although publicly much praise of meritbased succession circulated during the era, at court pressures to produce issue was never far afield. Despite the proclaimed benefits of extra-familial adoption for the well-being of empire, portraits of Pompeia Plotina and Vibia Sabina tell a different story, one suggesting that dynasty achieved through blood descent remained a potent ideal at court. This essay explored the visual evidence of Plotina’s and 55

 I thank the anonymous reader who posed this consideration.

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Sabina’s portraits in consideration of this alternative narrative. Studied with an eye to the pressure to bear an heir, images of both Plotina and Sabina, I suggested, indicate that the court fostered the ideal of dynastic inheritance in the early portraits of the two empresses where youth and overt sexuality signaled a (hoped for) fecundity. As motherhood failed to materialize for both, the court and its artists grappled with the reality of the nulliparous Plotina and Sabina with visual strategies of verism and concealment, respectively, each employed to deflect the empresses’ childlessness. While adoption succeeded for several generations, in the end the undeniable strength of dynastic inheritance left Rome’s imperial house uncomfortably subject to the woman whose body seemed, to the gatekeepers of imperial power, to resist this principle.

PART IV. FILLING THE VOID: MOTHER ABSENCE AND MEMORY

13. MOSES: MOTHERLESS WITH TWO MOTHERS René BLOCH (University of Bern)

In Judaism there is no other figure like Moses. The Torah, which is to some extent also simply a biography of Moses, closes by stating that: “Never since has there arisen a prophet in Israel like Moses, whom the Lord knew face to face” (Deut 34:10, trans. The New Oxford Annotated Bible). The very same statement is repeated in synagogues in the daily prayer Yigdal. In the Judaism of antiquity, but also of later periods, Moses goes beyond the imaginable. It is hardly a coincidence that, a few exceptions aside, until the end of Late Antiquity naming a child “Moses” remained a taboo in Jewish communities both in Palestine and in the Diaspora. In Judaism Moses is big—even in a literal sense: When the Bible, in Ex 2:10-11, states that Moses had “grown up,” the rabbis explained this apparently unnecessary piece of information as follows: “And Moses had grown up—does not every child grow up? In order to tell you that Moses did not grow up just like everybody else.”1 According to the rabbis, but also, as we will see later, to Jewish-Hellenistic authors, Moses grew to an unimaginable size. The biblical story of Moses is told along the lines of that of an ancient mythological hero: as a young child he is exposed, later he commits murder (Ex 2:11-12), and becomes the leader of his people. If there is no explicit apotheosis at the end of his life, there is certainly a tendency to divinization (Ex 4:16, 7:1).2 What is particularly remarkable in the Moses myth, as it is told in the Bible, is Moses’s heavy dependence on the help of women. In Moses’s birth story of Ex 2 all protagonists, with the exception of Moses, are female: 2

The woman conceived and bore a son; and when she saw that he was a fine baby, she hid him three months. 3 When she could hide him no  Ex. Rab. Ex 1.26.  Bloch 2015a, 29-47.

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longer she got a papyrus basket for him, and plastered it with bitumen and pitch; she put the child in it and placed it among the reeds on the bank of the river. 4 His sister stood at a distance, to see what would happen to him. 5 The daughter of Pharaoh came down to bathe at the river, while her attendants walked beside the river. She saw the basket among the reeds and sent her maid to bring it. 6 When she opened it, she saw the child. He was crying, and she took pity on him. “This must be one of the Hebrews’ children,” she said. 7 Then his sister said to Pharaoh’s daughter, “Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?” 8 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Yes.” So the girl went and called the child’s mother. 9 Pharaoh’s daughter said to her, “Take this child away and nurse it for me, and I will give you your wages.” So the woman took the child and nursed it. 10 When the child grew up, she brought him to Pharaoh’s daughter, and she took him as her son. She named him Moses, “because,” she said, “I drew him out of the water.” (Ex 2:2-10, transl. The New Oxford Annotated Bible)

In Hebrew where feminine verb forms differ from masculine ones in most cases, it becomes even more obvious than in the English translation how much the biblical story of Moses’s birth is directed by women. In the Hebrew original there are no less than 33 female verb forms in these eight Biblical verses. Indeed, the action around Moses’s birth is steered by women only. Who is on stage? There is “the woman” in verse 2: This is Yochebed, Moses’s mother, followed by “his sister” Miriam in verse 4, and “the daughter of Pharaoh” and her “attendants” in verse 5. Then, in verse 7, there is mention of a possible “nurse from the Hebrew women.” That nurse will later turn out to be Moses’s mother Yochebed. In this short passage there is thus mention of four female individuals (Moses’s mother, his sister, Pharaoh’s daughter, the nurse) and of two female groups (the princess’s attendants and the Hebrew women). This abundantly female passage in Ex 2:2-10 is remarkable and taken by itself does not easily fit into the otherwise rather patriarchal world of the Hebrew Bible. Moses’s life lies in the hands of women. To the female figures already mentioned we should add the Hebrew midwives Shiphrah and Puah (Ex 1:15-21), who ignore Pharaoh’s decree to kill all Hebrew boys. A little later in the book of Exodus, Ex 4:24-26, this aspect of the biblical Moses biography reaches its peak. In a brief, fascinating, and rather enigmatic passage, Moses is confronted by God at some lodging

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place; there God tries to kill Moses. And there, again, it is a woman, this time Moses’s wife Zipporah, who saves his life: On the way, at a place where they spent the night, the LORD met him and tried to kill him. 25 But Zipporah took a flint and cut off her son’s foreskin, and touched Moses’s feet with it, and said, “Truly you are a bridegroom of blood to me!” 26 So he let him alone. It was then she said, “A bridegroom of blood by circumcision.” (The New Oxford Annotated Bible) 24

The meaning of this passage is intensely debated among biblical scholars.3 It seems that the episode is meant to underline the importance of the circumcision of newborn sons—by circumcising their son, Zipporah saves Moses from God’s attack—but it also simply continues the story of Moses relying on women. Feminine support for male heroic figures is not an unusual feature of ancient mythologies. Here, too, the biblical Moses myth follows the ancient paradigm of mythological heroes. One may think of Aeneas who in Virgil’s Aeneid counts on the continuing aid and protection by his mother Venus.4 In the parallel myth of Romulus and Remus it is a she-wolf who guarantees the survival of the twin boys. And in Homer’s Odyssey Athena consistently stands by Odysseus’s side. Had Moses in the divine attack of Ex 4 been Odysseus, he would have been saved by Athena. Heroic figures who are guarded by women—humans, goddesses, female animals—are thus nothing extraordinary per se. What is rather unusual in the Moses myth, and this leads us right into the topic of this volume, is the double mothering that is bestowed on Moses and which, as we will see, led to different readings in Rabbinic and Jewish-Hellenistic literature. One of the consequences of the doubling of Moses’s mother, I would like to argue, is that it obscures Moses’s origins. Because it remains unclear who his actual mother is, Moses becomes motherless. At the same time, it is this very ambivalence of Moses’s ancestry that makes him an attractive and productive source of hybrid interpretations of the biblical story. I will first discuss some rabbinic comments on Moses’s mother(s) and then focus on Jewish-Hellenistic readings. Let us first take a look at the Moses-Yochebed story in Rabbinic sources. A key passage is Sotah 12a-13a in the Babylonian Talmud, 3

 Among recent commentaries cf. Albertz 2012, 94-98.  Cf. the contribution by Elina Pyy in this volume.

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but one could also refer to very similar passages in the Midrash Exodus rabba and in the Chronique of Moses (Divre ha-yamim shel Moshe).5 The rabbis take up Ex 2:1: “Now a man from the house of Levi went and married a Levite woman.” This is the verse preceding the passage that we cited before. As in the following verses here, too, no names are mentioned. Only eventually does the Torah disclose the names of Moses’s family members: Amram is his father and Yochebed his mother (Ex 6:20), Miriam his sister.6 But this is not what the rabbis are interested in here. Instead they are trying to clarify the pre-history of Moses’s birth: And there went a man of the house of Levi (Ex 2:1). Where did he go? Rabbi Judah ben Zebina said that he went in the counsel of his daughter. It is taught: Amram was the greatest man of his generation; when he saw that the wicked Pharaoh had decreed Every boy that is born to the Hebrews you shall throw into the Nile (Ex 1:22), he said, “In vain do we labor.” He arose and divorced his wife. All (the Israelites) thereupon arose and divorced their wives. His daughter said to him, “Father, your decree is more severe than Pharaoh’s; because Pharaoh decreed only against the males, whereas you have decreed against the males and females. Pharaoh only decreed concerning this world, whereas you have decreed concerning this world and the World to Come [unborn children cannot be resurrected]. In the case of the wicked Pharaoh there is a doubt whether his decree will be fulfilled or not, whereas in your case, since you are righteous, it is certain that your decree will be fulfilled, as it is said, You will decide on a matter, and it will be established for you! (Job 22:28). He arose and took his wife back; and they all arose and took their wives back. And took to wife (Ex 2:1): it should have read “and took back!” Rabbi Judah ben Zebina said: “He acted towards her as though it had been the first marriage; he seated her in a palanquin, Aaron and Miriam danced before her, and the Ministering Angels proclaimed, A joyful mother of children (Ps 113:9: ‫)אם־הבנים שמחה‬. (Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 12a, Soncino, slightly adjusted)

This is an intriguing passage. It extends what we have observed already in the biblical text: women play an important role in Moses’s birth story. It is again Miriam who intervenes on Moses’s behalf. While in the Bible she is advising the Egyptian princess as well as her mother, here she now also counsels her father Amram. And he, too, listens to 5

 Cf. Stemberger 2016, 17.48.  The whole family is mentioned in Num 26:59.

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her. In the light of Pharaoh’s decree to kill all newborn Hebrew children, Amram had divorced his wife Yochebed in order to prevent the children “who are asking to be born” (to use a phrase from the late songwriter Leonard Cohen). As a matter of fact, in another Rabbinic version of the story, transmitted in the Midrash Exodus Rabbah, Amram divorced his wife when she was already three months pregnant with Moses.7 Amram wanted Moses to remain motherless, so to speak— and along with him all possible future Hebrew children. Amram, of course, wanted to prevent the murder of newborn Hebrew boys, but thereby becomes Pharaoh’s accomplice and Miriam’s adversary.8 In this rabbinic version, the biblical story of the Pharaoh trying to kill the Hebrew newborns and Miriam contributing to Moses’s survival is thus expanded to include a suggestive prehistory. Miriam’s argument that Amram’s order that the Hebrew men divorce their wives was worse than Pharaoh’s is also interesting from a gender perspective. What Miriam is saying, or at least implying, is that Pharaoh was wrong in thinking that it is enough to kill only the boys in order to prevent the Hebrews from becoming a stronger people. Amram’s decree went further than Pharaoh’s, Miriam argues, because it would also prevent the birth of girls and would thus truly lead to the end of the Hebrew people. Ultimately, Amram is convinced by his perceptive daughter and takes Yochebed back. This—in the brilliant reading of the rabbis—is the true meaning of the “went and took” a woman in Ex 2:1: Amram “went in the counsel of his daughter” and “took his wife back” again, that is, remarried her. If one includes other midrashic material on the biblical report on Moses’s birth, such as Exodus Rabbah, in which it is said that Amram divorced his wife when she was already three months pregnant with Moses, the ambiguity of Moses’s mother becomes even more pronounced. In this version of the narrative, Moses for some time loses his mother before he is born. Taken together, Bible and Midrash tell a story which maneuvers between a Moses who has no mother and a Moses who has two mothers. First Yochebed is not supposed to give 7

 Ex.Rab. 1.13.20.  In Pseudo-Philo (a first- or second-century CE author who wrote in Hebrew, but whose work has been transmitted only in Latin) 9.2-9 it is “the elders of the people” who resolve “that a man should not approach his wife lest the fruit of their wombs be defiled and our offspring serve idols” (transl. Howard Jacobson) and Amram who successfully fights this decree. 8

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birth to Moses (because of her husband’s decree and his divorcing her); then she gives birth anyway only to expose the child, who in turn is taken up by Pharaoh’s daughter, but only briefly: the Egyptian princess returns the baby to Yochebed to nurse the child. But again, only for a limited time: when the child is grown up, the Egyptian princess takes him back. Young Moses was thus repeatedly passed back and forth between his two mothers (Sigmund Freud discusses the twofold origins of Moses at the beginning of his study Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion).9 Ex 2:2 seems to be explicit about the identity of Moses’s mother: “The woman” (this is the Levite woman mentioned in Ex 2:1, thus Yochebed) “conceived and bore a son.” But only a few verses later, in Ex 2:10, the text states: “she took him as her son.” Pharaoh’s daughter is not only an adoptive mother: it is she who gives the child his name, and in that respect—after all, in the Hebrew Bible children are regularly named by their mothers—she is his real mother.10 And so, at birth Moses is betwixt and between: he has, at the same time, two mothers and no mother. In the version of Pseudo-Philo, which is parallel to later Midrashim, the correspondence between doubling mothers and being therefore motherless is even more obvious: When she [Pharaoh’s daughter] saw the boy and noticed that he was covenantal (that is, he was in the covenant of the flesh), she said, “He is one of the Hebrew children.” She took him and nursed him. And he became her own son (et factus est ei filius), and she called him by the name Moses. But his mother called him Melchiel (mater autem eius vocavit eum Melchiel). The child grew up and became glorious above all other men, and through him God freed the sons of Israel as he had said. (PseudoPhilo, Liber Antiquitatum Biblicarum 9.15-16, transl. H. Jacobson)

Here Yochebed also names the child, who then has two names: Moses and Melchiel. Pseudo-Philo thus reflects a problem that is evident already in the biblical version: Moses is an Egyptian name. The Egyptian root that lies behind the name of Moses (ms/msj), known from several Pharaonic names, means to “give birth.” Moses is “the one who was born,” or simply “the son.” In the biblical story the naming 9

 Freud 1975, 25-32.  Cf. Bridge 2014.

10

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by the Egyptian princess explains and justifies the Egyptian name of the boy.11 But also in the biblical version Moses has, in a way, two names. While Moses may be an Egyptian name, the etymology offered in Ex 2 is a Hebrew one: the name Mosche stems from Hebrew maschah, to pull out (of the water). This double identity of the young Moses, represented by his two mothers, became an important topic in Jewish-Hellenistic literature. Jewish-Hellenistic authors reinvented Moses in the image of a hero who certainly has a good deal in common with the biblical character, but transcends it and exceeds the demands of a typical heroic curriculum vitae. In JewishHellenistic literature Moses is a far more convincing hero and he is heavily embedded both in Jewish and Greek (Egyptian) culture. For instance, in the Exodus drama Exagoge by the tragic poet Ezekiel (fr. 1-2), to whom we will return shortly, Moses enters the stage right away with a prologue in Greek and shows no rhetorical weakness. Authors such as Artapanus (2nd century BCE) and Josephus portray Moses as a successful military leader. Several Jewish authors from the second century BCE onwards make Moses the prōtos heuretēs, the author of a whole series of achievements (such as the invention of scripture, weapons, and philosophy), and Plato is said to have plagiarized Moses.12 A particularly interesting case is the Jewish theologian and philosopher Philo of Alexandria, writing in the first half of the first century CE. Philo presents Moses as the ideal legislator and philosopher, addressing not only the Jews, but in fact all nations. Philo has much more to say about Moses’s youth than the Bible. But before discussing Moses’s mothers in Philo, let me expand briefly on Philo’s use of the term “motherless” in general. Remarkably, in Philo’s oeuvre the Greek word for “motherless” (ἀμήτωρ) appears no less than eleven times. There is no other ancient author who uses the word “motherless” more frequently than Philo.13 This, however, is not because Philo had a particular interest in family, mothers, or orphans; rather, most of Philo’s references to “being motherless” are linked to his strong interest in the symbolic meaning of numbers. A number of particular importance to Philo is the number 11

 Willi-Plein 1991. Cf. also van Ruiten 2005 and Brenner 1986.  Eus. P.E. 9.27.4 (Artapanus); Jos. Ap. 2.257. 13  Only the late antique Christian author John Chrysostom uses the word more frequently (29 times, often referring to Jesus). 12

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seven, which is immanent and omnipresent in the world: the creation of the world came to an end on the seventh day and the holy Sabbath is a continuing reminder of this. The Menora, “the sacred candlestick,” has seven branches, “symbols of the planets.”14 According to Philo, the human body is organized in clusters of seven pieces.15 Most important, however, is the deeper meaning of the seventh day of the week, the Sabbath, which, in Philo’s reading of biblical legislation, was introduced by Moses: (…) the prophet magnified the holy seventh day, seeing with his keener vision its marvelous beauty stamped upon heaven and the whole world and enshrined in nature itself. For he found that she [the number seven] was in the first place motherless (ἀμήτορα), exempt from female parentage, begotten by the Father alone, without begetting, brought to the birth, yet not carried in the womb. Secondly, he saw not only these, that she was all lovely and motherless (ἀμήτωρ), but that she was also ever virgin, neither born of a mother nor a mother herself (οὔτ᾿ ἐκ μητρὸς οὔτε μήτηρ), neither bred from corruption nor doomed to suffer corruption.16

In Philo’s reading, which is heavily influenced by Pythagorean thinking (as he states himself),17 seven is a prime number that stands for consistency, which cannot produce nor be produced, and in that sense it is symbol of the Lord of the universe.18 Philo does not hesitate, again openly referring to earlier sources, to relate this insight to Greek myth. Other philosophers, Philo states, have compared the number seven to the “motherless Nike” (ἀμήτορι Νίκῃ), who had sprung from the head of Zeus. Nike is here an epithet of the goddess Athena, who “was born without a mother,” “as not generated by any other,” and “will not generate any other.”19 In Greek myth Athena is motherless and never becomes a mother. Philo calls her also “always-maidenly” (ἀειπάρθενος).20  Philo, Heres 216; Mos. 2.103.  Philo, Op. 118. 16  Philo, Mos. 2.209-10 (all translations of Philo are taken from the Loeb Classical Library). 17  Phil. Op. 100; Leg. 1.15. 18  Op. 100. 19  Leg. 1.15. 20  Mos. 2.210. Cf. Staehle 1931, 34-50; Runia 2001, 273-74. 14 15

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But in Philo there is also a Jewish equivalent to Athena: Sarah, Abraham’s wife. Taking up Genesis 20:12, where Abraham explains to Abimelech (to whom he had presented his wife Sarah as his sister) that “she is indeed my sister, the daughter of my father but not the daughter of my mother,” Philo concludes that Sarah grew up motherless: [Sarah] is declared, too, to be without a mother (ἀμήτωρ), and to have inherited her kinship only on the father’s side and not on the mother’s (οὐ πρὸς μητρός), and thus to have no part in female parentage. For we find it said, “Indeed she is my sister, the daughter of my father but not of my mother” (ἀλλ᾽ οὐκ ἐκ μητρός: Gen 20:12). She is not born of that material substance perceptible to our senses, ever in a state of formation and dissolution, the material which is called mother or fostermother or nurse of created things (μητέρα καὶ τροφὸν καὶ τιθήνην τῶν ποιητῶν) by those in whom first the young plant of wisdom grew; she is born of the Father and Cause of all things.21

Although Philo does not explicitly compare Sarah with the Greek goddess Athena, the reasoning is strikingly similar: like Athena, Sarah is born out of the highest God alone and has no mother. Philo uses Gen 20:12 to make this point (although it actually only says that Abraham and Sarah had the same father, but not the same mother, adding no further comment). Since to Philo the female stands for the body with its passions, he thus points to Sarah’s virtuous life, a life free of passions, as evidence of her divine parentage.22 In Philo’s reading Sarah is thus characterized as the immediate daughter of God, without any traceable genealogy. What about Philo’s Moses? Philo’s description of Moses’s birth shares with the biblical story its focus on the figure of Moses himself. The names of the other protagonists—his father, mother, and sister—are similarly elided. But Philo has quite a bit more to say about Moses than the book of Exodus. Moses “had for his father and 21  Philo, Ebr. 61. Cf. also Heres 62 where Philo more briefly makes the very same point: “for male descent is the sole claim of her, who is the motherless ruling principle (ἡ ἀμήτωρ ἀρχή) of things, begotten of her father alone, even God the Father of all. For ‘indeed,’ it runs, ‘she is my sister from the father, not from the mother.’ ‘For truly,’ says the scripture, ‘she is my sister by my father’s side, but not by my mother’s’.” 22  This is a point Philo also makes in Cher. 50.

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mother,” Philo writes, “the best of their contemporaries, members of the same tribe, though with them mutual affection was a stronger tie than family connections.”23 Typically, Philo is less interested in the fact, reported in the Bible, that both of his parents belonged to the tribe of Levi. In his telling, Amram and Yochebed married not because of genealogical ties, but rather because they shared the same values. As in the biblical version, so in Philo Moses first was hidden by his mother for three months: “he was kept at home and fed from his mother’s breast for three successive months.”24 But then, Philo adds dramatic color to Moses’s exposure, casting it as a family tragedy. Thus, both parents commit Moses to the Nile and then immediately accuse themselves of being child murderers (αὑτοὺς … τεκνοκτόνους ἀποκαλοῦντες) and reproach themselves for not having exposed the child immediately after birth, when he would have suffered less. When Miriam then comes to help, she does so because she is “moved by family affection“ (ὑπὸ φιλοικείου πάθους).25 The Egyptian princess in Philo’s narrative is also given a deeper psychological motivation: she had been hoping in vain for a child, especially a son, for a very long time. On the day of Moses’s exposure she was particularly sad: Depressed and loud in lamentation she always was, but on this particular day she broke down under the weight of cares; and, though her custom was to remain at home and never even cross the threshold, she set off with her maids to the river, where the child was exposed. Then, as she was preparing to make her ablutions in the purifying water, she saw him lying where the marshland growth was thickest, and bade him be brought to her. Thereupon, surveying him from head to foot, she approved of his beauty and fine condition, and seeing him weeping took pity on him, for her heart was now moved to feel for him as a mother for her own child (ἤδη τῆς ψυχῆς τετραμμένης αὐτῇ πρὸς μητρῷον πάθος ὡς ἐπὶ γνησίῳ παιδί).26

As in the biblical version, also here it is Pharaoh’s daughter who names the child Moses. But the etymology presented for this name is here an Egyptian one: Then she “gave him a name derived from this, and  Phil. Mos.  Phil. Mos. 25  Phil. Mos. 26  Phil. Mos. 23 24

1.7. 1.9. 1.10-12. 1.14-15.

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called him Moses, for Möu is the Egyptian word for water.”27 This Egyptian instead of a Hebrew etymology may be at first sight surprising, but it fits into Philo’s complex relationship to Egypt quite nicely. While the picture of Egypt in Philo is often rather negative (mainly, though, in the context of allegorical interpretations), one should not ignore those passages in which a different, perhaps a more realistic view of Egypt shines through. Indeed, as I have quoted elsewhere (Bloch 2015b), in Philo’s Life of Moses there are also “attempts to stress some sort of an Egyptian-Jewish ‘symbiosis.’ Thus Philo imagines for Moses an international education in Egypt: wise teachers from different parts of the world come to the royal palace to assure a first-class education, starting with the enkyklios paideia and leading to the most important field of study, philosophy. Among Moses’s many teachers Egyptian scholars are mentioned with praise”: “Teachers at once arrived from different parts, some unbidden from the neighboring countries and the provinces of Egypt (…).” And a little later: “Arithmetic, geometry, the lore of the meter, rhythm and harmony, and the whole subject of music as shown by the use of instruments or in textbooks and treatises of a more special character, were imparted to him by learned Egyptians (Αἰγυπτίων οἱ λόγιοι).”28 It should, then, come as no surprise that in Philo’s telling, Moses’s Egyptian mother plays a more prominent role than in the biblical version of the story. The Egyptian princess: (…) conceived for him an even greater fondness than before, and took him for her son (υἱὸν ποιεῖται), having at an earlier time artificially enlarged the figure of her womb to make him pass as her real and not a suppositious child (ἵνα γνήσιος ἀλλὰ μὴ ὑποβολιμαῖος νομισθῇ).29

Philo, who explicitly calls Alexandria his hometown, thus strengthens the role of Moses’s Egyptian mother and does not hesitate to send him to both a Jewish and an Egyptian school.30 Yes, Moses was, as Philo states, “zealous for the discipline and culture of his kinsmen and ancestors,”31 but not only: and so, estimating the claims of his real and his adopted parents (τῶν γεννησάντων καὶ τῶν εἰσποιησαμένων) like an impartial judge, he  Phil. Mos. 1.17.  Phil. Mos. 1.21-23. Bloch 2015b, 361. 29  Phil. Mos. 1.19. 30  Phil. Leg. 150: “our Alexandria.” 31  Phil. Mos. 1.32. 27 28

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requited the former with good feeling and profound affection, the latter with gratitude for their kind treatment of him.32

Philo of Alexandria thus imagines a double education of Moses, with both mothers competing in their care for their young son and each introducing him to her respective culture and history. The biblical plot in Ex 2 proved to be attractive subject matter for Jewish-Hellenistic authors writing in Egypt. Another example is Ezekiel the Tragedian, who probably wrote in the second century BCE. Ezekiel’s Moses also receives two kinds of education: first a Jewish education through his mother, then a pagan one at the Egyptian court. In the prologue to his Exagoge Ezekiel has Moses tell the audience that, before returning to the Egyptian court, his mother had revealed everything to him about his origins: When my infancy had passed, my mother brought me to the princess’s palace, after telling me all about my lineage and God’s gifts. Accordingly, for the period of my youth, the princess gave me a royal upbringing and education, as if I were her own son. ἐπεὶ δὲ καιρὸς νηπίων παρῆλθέ μοι, ἦγέν με μήτηρ βασιλίδος πρὸς δώματα, ἅπαντα μυθεύσασα καὶ λέξασά μοι γένος πατρῷον καὶ θεοῦ δωρήματα. ἕως μὲν οὖν τὸν παιδὸς εἴχομεν χρόνον, τροφαῖσι βασιλικαῖσι καὶ παιδεύμασιν ἅπανθ᾽ ὑπισχνεῖθ᾽, ὡς ἀπὸ σπλάγχνων ἑῶν·33

Both mothers teach what they consider their own son and introduce him to their culture and history. Moses’s education, as described in Ezekiel’s Exagoge, reflects the cultural “hybridity” of the author and Jewish-Hellenistic Alexandria in general. That in Ezekiel it is the Egyptian princess herself, and not one of her slaves as in Ex 2, who rescues Moses strengthens the Egyptian connection from the beginning.34 That foundlings and future heroes have two mothers (or two sets of parents) is nothing unusual in ancient mythologies. Oedipus, for  Phil. Mos. 1.33.  Ezekiel, Exagoge v. 32-38 (transl. H. Jacobson). Cf. Bloch 2005. 34  Miralles Maciá 2014, 153. 32 33

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example, was born to Jocasta and Laios, exposed, and later raised by another royal couple, Polybus and Merope. But the extensive meandering in the myth of Moses is rather unusual, and it turned out to be appealing to Jewish-Hellenistic authors. To the rabbis, this is not what is important. If anything, they make the Egyptian princess Jewish and give her a Hebrew name: Bitjah. The rabbis took this name from the first book of Chronicles, where there is mention of a “Bitjah daughter of Pharaoh,” and interpret the name as “daughter of YHWH.”35 Bitjah is called “the Jewess” (‫)היהודיה‬, “because she repudiated idolatry, as it is written, ‘And the daughter of Pharaoh went down to bathe in the river’; and R. Johanan [commenting on this] said that she went down to cleanse herself from the idols of her father’s house.” In this reading the Egyptian princess converts, so to speak, to Judaism just in time to become one of Moses’s mothers.36 What all texts—Biblical, Jewish-Hellenistic, as well as Rabbinic— have in common is that both of Moses’s mothers, his birth mother and his adoptive mother, play an important role around his birth, but soon after they disappear from the scene. We have seen that in some Rabbinic versions this occurs, in a way, even before Moses’s birth. Moses is no Aeneas, whose relationship to Venus, as Elina Pyy describes in her contribution to this volume, may be complicated, but who nevertheless counts on his mother’s “divine guidance and support.”37 Instead, Moses quickly leaves his mother—or rather his two mothers—behind. According to some spare rabbinic tradition, Yochebed shows up one more time, when Moses has difficulty finding the bones of Joseph before leaving Egypt (the Israelites were only supposed to leave Egypt if they brought Joseph’s bones with them, as he had wished).38 In a different tradition, however, another woman comes to Moses’s aid in this task: Serah bat Asher shows Moses where Joseph was buried.39 Otherwise, Moses acts on his own and in cooperation with God. Moses’s actual parent is God. For Philo, Moses comes very close to being divine: “For he was named god and king of the whole 35

 1 Chr 4:18.  bMegilla 13a (Soncino). Stemberger 2016, 35. 37  Cf. Elina Pyy, in this volume. 38  Sabba, Zeror Ha-Mor, Beshallah: ‫ויוכבד אמו אמרה אני אראך את האיש אשר‬ ‫“( אתה מבקש‬And his mother Yochebed said: “I will show you the man for whom you are searching”). Cf. Ginzberg 1968, 5. 39  bSota 13a; BHM VI, 112-113 Cf. Reiss 2014. 36

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nation.”40 This is reminiscent of Philo’s Sarah, who is “motherless” (ἀμήτωρ), because she is directly “born of the Father and Cause of all things” and of the number seven, “begotten by the Father alone” (Ebr. 61 and Mos. 2.210, see above). According to the Talmud, Yochebed suffered no pain during her pregnancy with Moses or at the delivery, thus exempted from the punishment for all women according to Gen 3:16 (“in pain shall you bear children”).41 It is not only the stories about Moses’s death, but also about his birth, that show a tendency to divinization.42 In both Jewish-Hellenistic and Rabbinic literature, Moses transcends human family ties. A large group of women, starting with the midwives, make the birth of this hero happen. As for Moses’s mothers, it is not the least the very doubling of the image of the mother that erases the figure of Moses’s mother.

 Phil. Mos. 1.158.  bSota 12a. 42  Cf. Stemberger 2016, 29-30, who refers to parallels in the Maria-Jesus story. 40 41

14. ASCETIC ABSENTEES: LATE ANCIENT READING STRATEGIES IN PURSUIT OF THE MATERNAL IDEAL Maria DOERFLER (Yale University)

INTRODUCTION In one of his letters, Jerome, the fourth-century champion of asceticism, famously depicts his companion Paula’s departure from family life in Rome to monastic entrepreneurship in Jerusalem. As Paula’s ship was casting off, Jerome writes, on the shore [Paula’s son] the little Toxotius stretched forth his hands in entreaty. [Paula’s daughter] Rufina, already of age, begged her mother to wait until she was married with silent sobs. But still Paula’s eyes were dry as she turned them heavenwards, overcoming her love for her children by her love for God. She knew herself no more as a mother, that she might prove to be a handmaid of Christ.1

This scene has attracted considerable attention from contemporary scholars of late antiquity. Paula’s abandonment of her children, and the apparently unemotional nature with which she performed it, strike modern readers as shockingly neglectful. Yet Jerome heaps warm praise on her actions—and other early Christian writers both encouraged and celebrated women who similarly left their children to grow up motherless in order to pursue an ascetic vocation. Paulinus of Nola, for example, offered an apposite encomium for Jerome’s senior contemporary, the elder Melania. The latter, like Paula, had left behind a young son when she began her journey into 1  Parvus Toxotius supplices manus tendebat in littore. Ruffina iam nubilis, ut suas exspectaret nuptias, tacens fletibus obsecrabat. Et tamen illa siccos tendebat ad caelum oculos, pietatem in filios, pietate in Deum superans. Nesciebat se matrem, ut Christi probaret ancillam (Jerome, Ep. 108.6 [PL 22:881]).

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the desert.2 Paulinus does not chide her for neglect, but rather compares Melania’s sacrifice to those of biblical heroes and heroines. In particular, he likens Melania to Anna, the mother of the prophet Samuel, who dedicated her still unborn child to divine service. Yet unlike Anna, Paulinus avers, Melania even fulfilled the vow of renunciation in her own person, while her son and heir “enjoys the riches and distinctions of the world.” Instead, “once Melania had torn her one son from her breast … she bestowed no subsequent personal care on him, for she thought it a sin of distrust to give her own attention to one whom she had entrusted to Christ. … She loved the child by neglecting him,” Paulinus concludes, “and kept him by relinquishing him.”3 Offspring, these accounts suggest, reflected an ascetic woman’s prior life, or the fact that her deference to familial expectations had at one time taken precedence over her devotion to Christ. As such, children and the maternal affection they might command were obstacles to be overcome, and late ancient writers praised as exemplary women who had abandoned biological children in favor of spiritual pursuits. Within the complex tapestry of early Christian ideals surrounding the family, the equation of spiritual devotion with maternal neglect was nevertheless only one of several strands. In fact, the very same authors who encouraged ascetic women’s maternal derelictions frequently celebrated mothers as the primary spiritual presence in the lives of children. Ville Vuolanto has recently surveyed the autobiographical accounts of a number of early Christianity’s most prominent figures with an eye towards parents’ purported impact on the fledgling Christians.4 Strikingly, in tales of their youth, fathers are frequently absent, either dead or emotionally and spiritually remote, 2  The elder Melania’s reputation suffered in the course of the so-called Origenist controversy at the end of the fourth century; as such, she appears only by allusion in the vita of her eponymous granddaughter, Melania the Younger. There are nevertheless numerous biographers and encomiasts eager to celebrate her life of renunciation, including Paulinus of Nola’s epistolary biography in Ep. 29, and chapter 46 of Palladius’s Historia Lausiaca, as well as Jerome’s discussion of the elder Melania’s exemplary renunciation of her children in Ep. 39.5. Jerome in later years would become one of Melania’s most strident enemies; in the mid-380s CE, however, he did not hesitate to use her example in his attempts to persuade Paula to join him abroad. 3  Paulinus of Nola, Ep. 29.9. All translations, unless otherwise indicated, Walsh 1967, 109. 4  Vuolanto 2015, 309-24.

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while mothers both model Christian devotion and encourage their sons’ religious pursuits. From Augustine to Chrysostom to the Cappadocians to Theodoret of Cyrrhus, it is precisely their mothers’ failure to embrace ascetic solitude that allowed their sons to become the men of God they were—or so their autobiographical sketches suggest.5 These discourses form the backdrop to conversations about mothering and motherlessness in late antiquity, and the assumptions of normalcy and desirability that underpin them. That is not to say, however, that they grant readers access to history wie es eigentlich gewesen, how children and families in late antiquity actually experienced maternal presence or absence. Like so much of what is preserved from antiquity, they rather trade in rhetorical topoi, including, for example, the monastic unit as a woman’s new family and progeny, or, of influential men’s narratives of spiritual self-actualization.6 This essay considers an alternative approach to examining ancient family dynamics and the desirability of mothers’ presence in or absence from their children’s lives: their exposition in late ancient literary works, particularly sermons intended to draw audiences into the experiences of biblical families. Such writings, no less than ascetic exhortations or episcopal autobiographies, are rhetorically fraught, especially since patristic exegetes, much like their rabbinic contemporaries, frequently treated biblical texts as mere snapshots of a larger narrative, which they, in turn, could expound for their audiences’ benefit and instruction.7 Yet the families they constructed for these purposes were by necessity more catholic in their appeal and intelligibility. The historical mothers who drew the praise of ascetic writers, in other words, did so for the benefit of a relatively limited and 5  Vuolanto notes that this trope appears not only in Christian writings; in Antioch, for example, Libanius in his Oratio I, his so-called Autobiography, presents a similar scenario of motherly indulgence and influence (Vuolanto 2015, 311-12). 6  The tension between an ascetic’s monastic or ecclesiastical family and her family of origin has been amply documented in recent scholarship. See, for example, Doerfler 2016, 71-85; Clark 1995, 356-80; cf. however, for arguments concerning the practical compatibilities and familial strategies of dedicating a child to the monastic life, Vuolanto 2015 and Krawiec 2003, 283-307. 7  For a discussion on biblical exegesis in late antiquity and its role in homiletic practice and the development of Christian society more broadly, see, for example, DiTomasso and Turcescu 2014; Kannengiesser 2004; Young 1995; and Dawson 1991. See the contributions of Bloch and Kattan-Gribetz in this volume.

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largely élite sample of the population: men and women who had committed themselves or at least seriously considered committing themselves to similar feats of renunciation. By contrast, and perhaps paradoxically, the literary mothers of biblical provenance had to appeal or be made to appeal to the at times sizable and typically diverse congregations of the fourth and later centuries.8 This essay examines the homiletic narratives surrounding two such mothers, whose roles in both Scripture and its late ancient exposition provide a glimpse into Christian attitudes towards motherly presence and absence in the lives of their children: the character of Sarah, the wife of Abraham, in the context of Genesis 22, the so-called Akedah, the binding of Isaac; and the figure of the Maccabean mother in Maccabees 2 and 4. SARAH: THE

ABSENT/PRESENT MOTHER

Genesis 22 presents the reader with one of the best-known stories of the Hebrew Bible, a text considered seminal by both Jews and Christians. In it, the aged Israelite patriarch Abraham, some time after having conceived, by divine fiat, an heir with his almost equally aged wife Sarah,9 receives God’s command: “Take your son, your only son, 8  Questions concerning the composition of late ancient audiences for the sermons of particularly preachers in the Greek realm have attracted considerable attention in recent years, and have pointed consistently to diverse congregations, with representatives of all genders, social strata, and even religious affinities. See, for example, concerning evidence for lay attitudes and concerns in John Chrysostom’s sermons, Maxwell 2006; Mayer 2000, 73-87; more generally, concerning Byzantine preaching in the first millennium, Cunningham and Allen 1998. 9  Genesis 22 does not, in fact, make explicit Isaac’s age at the time of the Akedah. The story emerges at the intersection of Isaac’s miraculous conception and birth in Genesis 21 and Sarah’s death in Genesis 23, at which point Isaac would have been 37 years of age. Late ancient exegetes differed in their treatment of Isaac as child or adult, with rabbinic sources tending towards the latter, including, for example, R. Yose’s explanation in Genesis Rabbah 58:5 that Sarah’s death was occasioned by the pain she experienced in learning of Abraham’s intentions. By contrast, as will become apparent below, Christian exegetes tended to describe Isaac as a child, including at times heroic efforts to subvert text-internal evidence to the contrary. A Syriac verse homily, BL Add. 14616 ff. 108a-20a, for example, attributes Isaac’s ability to carry the wood for the sacrifice up Mount Moriah to divine intervention. For a fuller treatment of Abraham and Sarah in late ancient homiletic discourse, see now Doerfler 2020.

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Isaac, whom you love, and go to the land of Moriah, and offer him there as a burnt offering on one of the mountains that I shall show you.”10 Abraham complies, undertakes the journey, and prepares to kill Isaac, until at the last minute angelic intervention prevents the sacrifice and God substitutes a ram in Isaac’s stead.11 Christian readers seized upon the story for many reasons, including most prominently the “type” of the Incarnation they perceived in a father’s surrender of his son. By the same token, the Hebrew Scriptures’ stark account that attributes no emotion—no parental grief, no hesitancy of any sort—to Abraham, allowed exegetes to celebrate him as an exemplar of faith and appropriate surrender towards the divinity. As such, Abraham for late ancient exegetes became a kind of model for fathers’ relinquishment of their children, either to the monastic life or to death. Ambrose of Milan, for example, treats Abraham as a precursor of parents whose children died a martyr’s death: “Each day, fathers offer their sons so that they might die in Christ and will be buried in the Lord. How many fathers whose sons have died martyrs have returned from their grave, filled with joy!”12 Homilists from the fourth century onward similarly treated parents’ surrender of a child to a monastic vocation as re-performing their own version of the Akedah. Gregory of Nazianzus, for example, described his mother’s dedication of his own person to an ascetic life prior to his birth as a sacrifice akin to Abraham’s.13 Abraham in the same way figures as a model for Egyptian monastics, for whom, as Caroline Schroeder has recently argued, the renunciation of family and their lives outside the Pachomian context served to image Abraham’s surrender of his son.14 In stark contrast to Abraham’s prominence in the Akedah, Sarah, his wife and Isaac’s mother, is wholly absent from the narrative, leading feminist biblical scholar Phyllis Trible to describe the story as “the sacrifice of Sarah.” “Patriarchy,” Trible argues “has denied Sarah 10

 Gen 22:2 (NRSV).  For a fuller exposition of the Akedah in Christian familial discourse, see Doerfler 2020, 75-102. 12  Quotidie offerunt patres filios suos, ut moriantur in Christo, et consepeliantur in Domino. Quanti patres, occisis martyrio filiis, laetiores ab eorum tumulo reverterunt! (Abr. 1.8.74 [CSEL 32/1:550]). 13  Gregory of Nazianzus, Ep. sui ipsius 5 (PG 37:1447). 14  Schroeder 2012, 269-302, esp. 281-83. 11

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her story, the opportunity for freedom and blessing. It has excluded her and glorified Abraham.”15 Late ancient exegetes, perhaps surprisingly, manifested similar concerns, showing themselves more than occasionally aware of and troubled by the strange motherlessness of the Akedah. Thus far, ancient homilists noted, Abraham had shared most of the central moments of his journey with his wife, even if he had not always comported himself in a wholly commendable fashion.16 How could the patriarch fail to include her in this most terrible and provident event? Given Isaac’s ambiguous age at the time of the Akedah, and Christian interpreters’ tendency to read him as a young boy, such fatherly slight-of-hand struck interpreters and perhaps their audiences as particularly troubling. Homilists accordingly tended to insert Sarah into the story, either as an interlocutor for Abraham, or at least as a point of consideration for the patriarch, through whose reflections audiences became privy to Sarah’s hypothetical responses. The resulting character was not, however, a mere echo of Abraham’s stolidity; instead Sarah here emerges as a striking maternal counterpart, whose actual or anticipated emotional response serve both to justify the Akedah’s lack of motherly presence and give voice to the real horror of the story: a father’s unquestioning willingness to kill his child—and a god who would demand such a sacrifice. An Antiochene sermon transmitted as part of John Chrysostom’s corpus, for instance, discusses at length Abraham’s decision “to tell his wife nothing concerning the matter,” and argues that “he did so wisely, because he believed his wife to not be strong enough for this business.” A distressed Sarah, moreover, would have likely posed an obstacle to Abraham’s fulfillment of the divine command; indeed, the sermon in question goes on to praise Abraham for realizing that Sarah would be “of no use to give advice [just as] indeed Eve’s counsel was harmful for Adam.”17 15

 Trible 1991, 189.  Patristic exegetes were troubled, for example, by Abraham’s taking multiple wives and concubines, as well as his willingness to relinquish Sarah, his wife, to Pharaoh (Gen 12) and Abimelek (Gen 20), under the pretense that she was his sister rather than his wife. For late ancient reading strategies to address, excuse and rehabilitate for broader Christian audiences such instances of “patriarchs behaving badly,” see, for example, Clark 1999, 177-203. 17  Ἀλλ᾽ οὐδὲ τῇ γαμετῇ περὶ τούτου τι εἶπεν, οὐδ᾽ ἀνεκοινώσατο, σφόδρα χρησίμως ποιῶν· ἀναξιόπιστον γὰρ καὶ ἀσύμφορον αὐτῷ εἰς συμβουλὴν τὸ θῆλυ 16

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This sermon merely hints at objections Sarah might raise and promptly dismisses them as, at best, testimonies to her womanly weakness, and, at worst, Satanic whisperings. Other authors, however, go much farther in detailing Sarah’s concerns—and, indeed, the arguments that they cite strike modern readers as both reasonable and persuasive. Gregory of Nyssa in his Homily on the Divinity of the Son and the Holy Spirit, for example, provides an extensive ethopoeia to narrate Sarah’s eminently practical objections, including Isaac’s youth, the difficulties of his conception, and his status as sole heir, concluding with an impassioned appeal to kill her rather than forcing her to witness her child’s death: “If you lift the knife against him, grant me, the miserable one, grace: use the knife first against me, and then do what you see fit with him. A common burial shall take place for both [mother and son], common dust shall cover the bodies, a common grave marker tell of the suffering. Sarah’s eye shall not see Abraham as the child-killer, nor Isaac as he is murdered in childhood by the hands of the father.”18 Happily, Gregory concludes, Abraham was not swayed by such imagined appeals, and justly kept his plans a secret from Sarah, that she might not “suffer something womanly and motherly and shatter the intensity and purity of Abraham’s love for God.”19 Gregory’s elder contemporary, Amphilochius of Iconium, instead has Sarah raise theological concerns: how could Abraham have so mistaken God’s intentions as to think the divine might require the offer of a child? “[W]ho of your forefathers has made a sacrifice of this kind to God?” Amphilochius has Sarah ask. “Enoch has pleased God, but he did not slay his son. Noah has pleased God, but he did nothing like that. O man, refrain from this act!”20 Such arguments, late ancient exegetes agreed, might have delayed or even cast doubt on Abraham’s resolve. Yet surprisingly, the sheer expediency of keeping διαλογισάμενος· οὐδὲν γὰρ συνήνεγκεν, ἀλλὰ καὶ κατέβλαψε τὸν Ἀδὰμ δεξάμενον τὴν συμβουλὴν τῆς Εὔας (Ps.-Chrysostom, In Abraham et Isaac [PG 56:539]). 18  Gregory of Nyssa, Deit. (GNO X/2:136). 19  Gregory of Nyssa, Deit. (GNO X/2:135). Gregory is not alone in envisioning Sarah offering herself to Abraham’s knife in Isaac’s stead. An East Syrian burial service for children preserves a similar narrative: “Sarah said to Abraham, ‘Where are you taking him, / This one, our only son, whom the Lord gave us? / [If] you are going up to the mountain, I will go up with him. / [If] you seek to kill him—I will die in his stead’” (noted and translated in Hall 1888, 193-200). 20  Amphilochius Iconensis, Or. de Abraham Patriarcha 63-64, Datema 1978, 278.

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Sarah in the dark struck writers as insufficient justification. After all, homilists like Jacob of Serugh argued, Abraham’s omission had effectively excluded Sarah from her share in the blessing Abraham had received. By concealing the moment at which, Jacob argued, Abraham “saw [Jesus’] day and rejoiced” (John 8:56) he had made Sarah a stranger to the mystical symbol.21 Yet perhaps, patristic exegetes suggested, the fact that God had approached Abraham alone and had tasked only him with Isaac’s killing could excuse his inaction. Surely, late ancient authors reasoned, the divine could have informed Sarah in the same fashion, had God wanted her to know. Already Ephrem, writing in the fourth century, notes laconically that Abraham was simply following orders: “He did not inform Sarah because he had not been commanded to inform her.”22 Later Syriac authors agreed: “If God had known that it would have been advantageous to [Sarah] to hear [of the call to sacrifice Isaac],” the author of an anonymous homily has Abraham reason “then He would have told her in the same way as He told me.”23 Such reserve must have been difficult for Abraham, the homilist argued; the patriarch thus accrued merit for himself by his restraint. Arguments from divine silence were, however, vulnerable to being turned on their head. The sixth-century homilist Romanos, for example, envisions Sarah’s claiming rightful authority over the young Isaac. Given Isaac’s age, Romanos suggests, God ought to have taken up matters with his mother rather than with Abraham: “[W]henever He who commanded you [to kill Isaac] wishes him, He will reveal it to me. Formerly, through an angel, He told me of his birth; and again whenever He wills it, He will reveal to me his death.”24 On occasion, late ancient writers even placed concerns about Sarah’s absence in the mouths of other characters in the story. Isaac in particular becomes an advocate for his mother: “If a miracle is being accomplished, one at which angels and humanity will be amazed,” one Syriac dialogue  Jacob of Serugh, Mem. 109 “On Abraham and his Types,” in Bedjan 1908, 68, line 21-70, line 11. For a discussion of typology in Jacob’s homily, see also McCarron 1998. 22  Comm. Gen. 20.2, in Tonneau 1955, 84. 23  B.L. Add. 14616 ff. 117a-b in Brock 1981, 225-60, par. 10 (transl. Brock 1981, 236). 24  Romanos, On Abraham and Isaac ζ in Maas and Trypanis 1963, 324-25; transl. Carpenter 1970, 63. 21

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poem has Isaac question, “what wrong did my aged mother do to you, seeing that you did not tell her what you were going to do?”25 Surely, if Abraham was concerned that Sarah would be distressed by the divine command, it would have been Abraham’s task to console and explain the matter to her. Indeed, Sarah’s anxiety and ignorance might even undermine the aim of presenting a joyful sacrifice, Amphilochius suggests: “[I]f [Sarah] had known [about the nature of the sacrifice], she would not have been reluctant. She is a companion for you [Abraham] at meals (and) she is your counselor … What you want, she wants, in the way as it has happened to us.”26 Both familial and theological reasons, in other words, could be brought to bear against Sarah’s absence and Isaac’s motherlessness in the Akedah. The resulting message and assumptions undergirding it suggest emphatically that in all but the most extreme circumstances—and at times even in those—a mother’s place was with her child. Even the most devoted and saintly of fathers could not compensate for the self-sacrificing care a mother could dispense. Nor, for that matter, did late ancient homilists treat Sarah’s absence as voluntary. Rather, patristic homilies on the Akedah present a mother’s bond with her child as sufficiently strong that Sarah must be prevented, either by Abraham’s authority or by his trickery, from clinging to Isaac. The Hebrew Scriptures neither compelled nor even suggested such a narrative denouement, and late ancient exegetes might have taken their interpretive cues from Sarah’s absence from the biblical text, or presented her as joining Abraham in his eagerness to carry out the divine command. By contrast, these homilies reflect their authors’ and audiences’ ideals of the “good mother,” her role in late ancient family dynamics, the value of her presence to her children, and the tenacity of their relationship. Not all biblical mothers, of course, fit the mold homilists had carved for Sarah. Indeed, Scripture ascribed to one of them “the soul of Abraham,” on account of her apparent pleasure in preparing her sons’ for their martyrdom.27 To her, the nameless Mother of the Maccabees, we now turn. 25

 Brock 1982, 7-12, 10; transl. Brock 1994, 65.  Amphilochius, Or. de Abraham Patriarcha in Datema 1977, 295-97, transl. 294-96. 27  4 Macc 14:20. For an exposition of this theme, see Young 1991, 79-81. 26

260 THE MACCABEAN

M. DOERFLER MARTYRS: THE ASCETIC/AFFECTIVE MOTHER

Few biblical figures seem more suitable as champions for maternal abandonment of one’s children for both their and their mother’s own good than the mother of the Maccabean martyrs. Portrayed first in 2 Maccabees, and, roughly a century later, in greater depth in 4 Maccabees, she is depicted as stoically enduring not only her own death, but those of her offspring.28 The tyrant Antiochus IV Epiphanes, so the Maccabean accounts, sought to compel the pious widow and her seven sons to violate Mosaic dietary rules.29 When they refuse, the king interrogates and brutally executes the children, in order from eldest to youngest, before their mother’s eyes. The latter, however, does not falter in the face of her trials; she rather urges her sons towards martyrdom, reminding them that beyond the present life there lies the hope of being reunited with their ancestors, with Abraham, Isaac and Jacob. After witnessing the death of even her youngest, the mother too dies a martyr.30 Given the narrative’s affectively charged nature and the potential to celebrate its protagonists as proto-martyrs even prior to the Incarnation, it is perhaps not surprising that the Maccabean mother achieved considerable popularity across and beyond the Roman Empire: homilists and hymnodists from Gaul to Syria celebrated her sacrifice and lionized her as a model for women everywhere; as Gregory of Nazianzus assured his audience, the account of the Maccabees provides an “exemplar for people of all stations, the men in Eleazar, the women in the mother … the children in the young Maccabees.”31 The trope of the spiritually motivated mother’s sacrificing both herself and her children proved so popular that it even gave rise to a series of “copycat heroines” in both Christians and, at a later point, Jewish circles.32 In the process, homilists rhetorically enhanced the 28

 The account of the Maccabean martyrs emerges first in 2 Maccabees 7, and, at considerably greater length, in 4 Maccabees 8-18. For an exposition of the mother’s role in these texts, see DeSilva 2006, 251-68; Moore and Anderson 1998, 249-73, Young 1991, 67-81. For the texts’ reception in later Christian sources, see JoslynSiemiatkoski 2009. 29  2 Macc 7:1; 4 Macc 8:2-4. 30  2 Macc 7:41; 4 Macc 17:1. 31  Gregory of Nazianzus, Disc. 15 (PG 35:912-33 at 932). 32  See, for example, the passio of Symphorosa and her alleged confrontation with the Emperor Hadrian (Carduol 1588), or the similar account of the martyrdom of Felicitas of Rome (Ruinart and Dodwell 1713, 25-27). For a discussion of these sources, see Joslyn-Siemiatkoski 2009, 66-72, and particularly Cooper 2007, 224-26,

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Maccabean sources’ depiction of the mother’s enthusiasm for her children’s suffering in light of its anticipated rewards. Gregory of Nazianzus, the first homilist to dedicate a sermon to the Maccabees, portrays her as torn between two passions, joy and fear: “She was filled with joy because of [her sons’] courage and because of what she beheld [namely, their tortures]; with fear, because of what was to come and the excess of punishments.”33 Her true fear, Nazianzen avers, however, only involves the executioners’ slackening in their exertions before the last of her sons had occasion to prove himself.34 Similarly, John Chrysostom depicts her as rejecting all trappings of possible mourning. The natural fire of motherly care and grief had been extinguished by the spiritual fire of her love for God.35 In the Latin realm, too, the Maccabean mother appears as an almost masochistically inclined avatar of maternal abandonment. Peter Chrysologus, the fifth-century bishop of Ravenna, claimed that “she moved with greater joy among the pierced-through bodies of her sons than she had amid their cherished cradles,”36 while his North African contemporary, Valerian of Abbanza, calls up the gruesome scene in vivid detail: “[T]he mother runs about amid many rows of corpses. She is amazed, anxious with cares, stricken with fear and trembling. But, let this fact deceive no one. She trembles indeed, but it is about the victorious outcome, not over the death of her sons. At each investigation she is anxious lest his faith may slip away from any one of the sons, lest human frailty may segregate one from the saintly group.”37 232-38. Christian writers were not the only ones adapting the Maccabean story for later audiences; traditions concerning Rachel of Mainz, a Jewish mother who killed her four children rather than surrendering them to baptism at the hands of the crusaders, for example, similarly deploy the theme of fierce maternal love yielding to fiercer commitment to the divine command against idolatry. For a discussion of these sources, see Joslyn-Siemiatkoski 2012, 127-46. 33  Gregory of Nazianzus, Disc. 15 (PG 35:912-33 at 925); a French translation and commentary is available in Ziadé 2007. 34  Gregory of Nazianzus, Disc. 15 (PG 35:912-33 at 925). 35  Chrysostom, Serm. 1 on the Maccabees (PG 50:617-22, at 620). Similarly, Ambrose depicts the mother as pointedly rejecting all classical expressions of grief (Jac. 12.56). Michael P. McHugh (1971, 183) in the notes to his translation of Jac. here believes to identify a Vergilian intertext, a contrast with the Mother of Euryalus who follows her son to his death with “womanly wailing” and an exorbitant display of grief (Aeneid 9.486-87). 36  Peter Chrysologus, Serm. 134 (CCSL 24B:818-19 at 819). 37  Valerian, Hom. 18 (PL 52:746-49 at 748); transl. Ganss 1953, 419.

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This attitude of divinely inspired rejection of natural desire in favor of an overweening passion for God fits well with late ancient ascetic discourse, and indeed echoes rhetorically constructed scenes of mothers leaving behind children in pursuit of ascetic vocations. Both they and the Maccabean mother are motivated by their zeal for God, so much so, that they are driven to “unnatural” actions: the seeming abandonment of their children to death or deprivation of their maternal presence. The Maccabean mother, of course, does not die until each of her sons has already embraced death in his own right. And yet her presence to the bitter end is not a matter of choice, but an aspect of the tyrant’s scheme to break both mother and sons from their obedience to divine law. Yet Antiochus’s reliance on maternal suasion falters in light of his misunderstanding of a true mother’s duties. His question, as presented in a Syriac retelling of the story, “Why hast thou no heart? Why hast thou no bowels of compassion like [other] women?” hints at the kind of response with which Paulinus’s Melania might have grappled upon abandoning her son in favor of a life of ascetic solitude: only to spiritually informed audiences were the actions of these mothers intelligible as truly maternal.38 Such ascetic affinities notwithstanding, the lessons homilists drew from the Maccabean mother’s story tend to involve not maternal abandonment, nor even—during these comparatively “peaceful times,” as John Chrysostom put it—handing over one’s children to martyrdom.39 They rather served to reinforce mothers’ roles as the spiritual and pedagogical centers of the late ancient family. Perhaps paradoxically, the Maccabean mother, according to 4 Maccabees 18:9, could not take credit for having instilled the principles that led to her sons’ celebrated martyrdom in them; that honor went to her late husband, an otherwise invisible character in the narrative. Late ancient homilists nevertheless used her example to exhort Christian mothers to both teach their children, and to make them receptive to the teaching of ecclesiastical figures. Severus of Antioch, for example, on the basis of the Maccabean mother’s account, instructs the mothers of his congregation to “[h]ear these things and bring up your sons in this way, and let them go to church and urge them to receive the teachings of the priests. And do not smother them with worldly cares, for  Story of Maryam and her Seven Sons, in Bensly and Barnes 1895, 113, transl. xlii.  John Chrysostom, Hom. 2 on the Maccabees (PG 50:623-26 at 626).

38

39

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the visible things are temporal, but the invisible things are eternal.”40 Similarly, Valerian, writing for a North African audience, instructs all loving mothers to “imitate the numerous and brave examples [the Maccabean] mother has left.” Such mothers, accordingly, ought to “instruct [their children] that they may learn to observe the prescriptions of the heavenly laws.” At stake, however, was not the children’s eventual martyrdom, but a more practical course of action: the children, like the rest of Valerian’s congregation, “should spurn the gifts and honors of this world. They deceive human eyes with their alluring vanity. But this is a sacrifice acceptable to the Lord: to prefer the honor of heaven and to begin to despise the world.”41 While most Christians from the fourth century onward would never encounter a this-worldly Antiochus against whom to test their faith, they nevertheless could prove their mettle in battle against the spiritual tyrant, the devil and his demons, and in combating the temptations the world held for them.42 Mothers thus needed to instruct their sons to steer clear of pride and vainglory, to bypass greed and esteem the things of God more highly than those of the world. In all these ways, they could “dedicate their sons to Christ,” as Gregory of Nazianzus urged the mothers of his congregation,43 without either abandoning them or indeed abandoning the role late ancient society ascribed to mothers of all religious stripes: that of the care and foundational training of their offspring. CONCLUSION As will have become apparent, ancient exponents, much more so than their modern-day counterparts, treated the biblical accounts as real, if fragmentary, family stories. Their putative historicity encouraged exegetes to ask pressing questions, including ones concerning characters that were not part of the narrative, but whom they assumed to have been key to the events themselves. Their fragmentary nature,  Severus, Hom. 52 (PO 4:21); transl. Bensly 1895, xxxiii.  Valerian, Hom. 18 (PL 52:746-49 at 748); transl. Ganss 1953, 419. 42  For a characterization of Satan as the eternal, spiritual Antiochus, see, for example, see, for example, Gregory of Nazianzus, Disc. 15 (PG 35:933). 43  Gregory of Nazianzus, Disc. 15 (PG 35:932). 40 41

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moreover, allowed interpreters to fill in the gaps, to round out the narratives, to heighten the drama, and to make intelligible to their audiences otherwise baffling aspects of biblical families’ lives. In these contexts, a mother’s absence or her apparently insufficiently maternal presence was conspicuous, particularly when the narratives involved young children who, in the Roman household, would have been under their mother’s care.44 In expositions of the Akedah, the text’s elision of Sarah, and Abraham’s failure to involve her in a matter directly related to their son’s care, accordingly raised pressing questions for interpreters. In part, patristic anxiety about Isaac’s motherlessness also reflects another salient trait of biblical mothers in late ancient exposition: that of mothers as affective or emotive foci of their families.45 While portrayals of Sarah vary, unlike Abraham, whose “stoicism” becomes the celebrated expression of his submission to divine will, she never appears either aloof or enthusiastic in the face of her son’s impending murder. These narratives assumed the existence of a profound affective bond between mother and offspring; on its basis, ancient expositors could at times excuse Abraham’s reluctance to take Sarah into his confidence: her maternal passion might have endangered not only her own accession to God’s will, but might have obstructed her husband’s. For other exegetes, Sarah’s affect became key to the story’s homiletic retelling, a puzzling piece absent from the Hebrew Scriptures and inserted into the narrative by late ancient Christians eager to expound the biblical text in light of their own apprehensions of family life. The “good mother,” if exponents of Akedah are to be trusted, was thus both intimately connected to her young child, and emotionally involved with his well-being. More than that, patristic retellings of the Maccabean accounts suggest, she was to be her children’s spiritual 44  For a discussion of the mother-child relationship in antiquity and late antiquity, see, inter alia, Rawson 2003; Nathan 2000, 149-54; Dixon 1988. 45  Already 4 Macc. depicts the bond between mothers and children as particularly potent. Each pregnancy deepens the potential for fellow feeling between mother and offspring, any pain experienced in the process strengthening the connection, particularly if a child by appearance and character proves worthy of parental love (4 Macc. 15:4-5). The text also arguably treats mothers as the weaker parent, and as such more susceptible to being swayed by emotions, making the Maccabean mother’s response to observing her children’s suffering even more remarkable (see, for example, Moore and Anderson 1998, 49-73, and Young 1991, 75-76).

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and pedagogical champion. A mother’s success, late ancient exegetes argued, was deeply implicated in her children’s similar triumphs; their heavenly glories would be added to her own, just as the Maccabean mother could be said to have won martyrdom not only on her own behalf, but in each of her sons.46 While late ancient families were unlikely to face such overt trials, a mother’s task, these homilies suggest, was to teach and exhort her children to withstand the temptations life in late ancient society presented: the good mother served as a bulwark between her children and the world at large, recalling them to Christian principles and strengthening them for the spiritual combat particularly élite young men would inevitably face. In late ancient expositions of biblical families, even those potentially congenial to the “ascetic option,” in other words, the surrender of one’s offspring to motherlessness in pursuit of a life unfettered by family obligations, finds little resonance. In their private correspondence or poetic reflection on their own, ascetic lives, late ancient authors could indeed identify biblical intertexts for the value of choosing a spiritual over an earthly family; in homilies and their broader pastoral efforts, however, patristic writers envisioned mothers who doted on their children and prepared them with both their tutelage and their active, affective engagement for a future in the church. Ancient Christians, like their Jewish and “pagan” contemporaries, experienced motherlessness in many guises: death in or after childbirth, sale of mother or offspring among slave families, divorce, or, of course, death in the course of the natural, and, to modern eyes quite abbreviated, life cycle for women in late antiquity. The version most celebrated by Jerome, Paulinus, & Co—that of a mother’s voluntary renunciation of her children in pursuit of a higher calling—by contrast, seems to have intruded but little on the lives of most Christians in late antiquity. Such motherlessness was the dubious privilege of Christian élites, not a model presented for popular emulation. 46  The assertion that the Maccabean mother—and indeed those that had to witness their children’s deaths—gained martyrdom in each of her children, in addition to her own, is common in late antiquity. See, for example, John Chrysostom’s assertion that the mother’s martyrdom exceeded those of her sons (Serm. 1 on the Maccabees [PG 50:617-22, at 620], or Gregory the Great’s claim that Felicitas, one of the Christian “copycat martyrs” had achieved martyrdom in each of her children (PL 76:1086-89, at 1088).

15. TOPOGRAPHIES OF MOTHER LOSS AND MOTHER ABSENCE IN LATE ANTIQUE PALESTINE: A VIEW FROM RABBINIC AND LITURGICAL SOURCES Sarit KATTAN GRIBETZ (Fordham University)

INTRODUCTION The Hebrew Bible, as an anthology, tells the stories of many mothers. Several women—Eve, Sarah, Hagar, Rebekah, Leah, Rachel, Bilhah, and Zilpah—play important, and often decisive, roles as mothers in the narratives of the book of Genesis. This chapter explores the deaths of two of these mothers—Rebekah and Rachel—as they are narrated in the book of Genesis, and the ways in which Jews in late antique Roman Palestine in the early centuries CE interpreted the biblical narratives about their deaths. The book of Genesis portrays the deaths of Rebekah and Rachel in contrasting ways. On the one hand, Genesis does not explicitly narrate Rebekah’s death. The story implies that she lives until a ripe old age and neglects to comment on her passing. Rachel, on the other hand, dies prematurely during childbirth, and her tragic death becomes a central theme and an important turning point in the biblical narrative. How did late antique readers of Genesis interpret these two different accounts of maternal death? In order to explore this question, I examine two genres of texts from the fifth and sixth centuries CE that engage with these biblical stories: (1) late antique rabbinic commentaries on the book of Genesis, which were produced primarily in the scholastic settings of rabbinic study houses and that might have been incorporated into synagogue sermons; and (2) liturgical poetry composed explicitly for synagogue audiences and recited during Sabbath and festival services. I argue that in these different writings, late antique Jews infused narrative detail and emotional depth into the sparse biblical accounts of these maternal deaths, and that through such exegetical and liturgical

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practices, along with local shrines that came to be associated with them, they mapped their memories of these lost mothers onto the geographical landscape of Roman and Byzantine Palestine. Additionally, I suggest that these texts and shrines dedicated to maternal loss and maternal absence likely served as opportunities for mourning and memorializing other mothers as well—both ordinary mothers who left children behind as well as the lost motherland. These texts therefore provide us some access into ancient discourses surrounding maternal loss and mourning in Jewish antiquity. MARKING REBEKAH’S

DEATH AT THE

OAK OF WEEPING

The book of Genesis includes narratives about the death of the first matriarch, Sarah, who is said to have died following her son Isaac’s binding, and of the last matriarch, Rachel, who dies in the throes of labor during the birth of her son Benjamin.1 The deaths of the other two matriarchs, Rebekah and Leah, are not narrated in Genesis, however.2 Because Rebekah plays such a central role in the Jacob-Esau sequence, the silence surrounding her death was especially perplexing for late antique readers of the biblical text. Later rabbinic and liturgical compositions therefore offered different interpretations about when and where Rebekah died as well as how this news was conveyed to her son Jacob, and how he coped with his mother’s passing.3 The rabbinic midrashim Genesis Rabbah and Pesiqta de-Rav Kahanah, as well as a liturgical poem by Yannai, each present interpretive traditions in which the news of Rebekah’s death is disclosed and commemorated in a particular geographical spot in the Palestinian landscape. These texts thus insert the death of Jacob’s mother not only into the 1

 Gen 23:1-20; 35:16-20.  The place of their burial is referenced at the end of Genesis (49:30) but the biblical narrative of their lives provides no account of their passing. 3  Earlier second temple texts also contended with this narrative omission. For example, Jubilees (ch. 35), written in the mid-second century BCE, includes a long exposition about the period leading up to Rebekah’s death. In this account Rebekah uses her final months to mend broken family relations so that her burial becomes a moment of reconciliation and the catalyst for ending brotherly rivalry. Jubilees not only fills in the lacuna of Rebekah’s death; it also gives her death a date. On this narrative in Jubilees, see Feldman, Kugel, and Schiffman 2013, 415-17; White Crawford 2015, 133-51; Bailey 1987, 154-79; Chalier 1986. 2

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biblical narrative but also mark her long-lasting absence onto the land’s sacred topography. Rebekah, once absent from the narrative, becomes exegetically and geographically present through the act of inscribing her death and burial into the text and the land. The fifth-century Palestinian rabbinic midrash Genesis Rabbah employs a rare, clever hermeneutical strategy to acknowledge Rebekah’s death.4 The midrash notes that, despite the absence of Rebekah’s death in the biblical narrative, another maternal death, that of Rebekah’s nurse Deborah, is described in the book of Genesis.5 Following its description of Jacob’s journey from Haran to Bethel, Genesis 35:8 mentions Deborah’s passing: “And Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, died, and she was buried under an oak below Bethel, so it was called allon bachut [lit. “Oak of Weeping”].”6 This is the first and only time in the biblical text that Deborah is named; in the only other time that the biblical narrative mentions this character (Gen 24:59, when Rebekah leaves home along with her nurse to marry Isaac), she is left unnamed.7 Here, Deborah’s death is memorialized with a sacred tree, a tangible memory of her passing rooted in the ground. Noting the peculiarity of mentioning Deborah’s death (a supporting character) without acknowledging Rebekah’s death (a celebrated matriarch), the midrashic exegete interprets Gen 35:8 so as to connect the death of this extra-maternal figure, Deborah, with the absent death of the matriarch Rebekah, reinscribing Rebekah’s death into textual and topographical memory. The midrash explains that the place-name of Deborah’s burial should not be translated from the Hebrew as “Oak of Weeping.” Rather, the word allon (Hebrew for “oak”) should be read as transliterated Greek, ἄλλον, meaning “another one” or “the other,” referring to Jacob’s mother Rebekah.8 Based on this linguistic insight, the midrash elaborates: 4  On Genesis Rabbah, see Kattan Gribetz et al. 2016; references to Genesis Rabbah throughout this paper refer to the text in Theodor and Albeck 1965. 5  Genesis Rabbah 81:5 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 976-77). 6  NRSV. See also Jub 32:30-31, on Deborah’s passing. On the location of this tree and its relationship to other sacred trees mentioned in biblical texts and to the prophet Deborah (described as sitting “under the palm tree of Deborah, between Ramah and Bethel” in Judges 4:5), see Gomes 2006, 121, 135. 7  4QNaphtali (4Q215, line 1 of fragments 1-3); Crawford 2015, 143; Stone 1996, 73-82. 8  See also Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7.2.3 and Tanhuma Ki Teze 4, which interpret “bachut” as plural, referring to Jacob’s multiple losses, on which see Milikowsky

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when Jacob was told about Deborah’s death, he also learned of his own mother’s death, and thus named the place of Deborah’s burial “Another Weeping,” because he was in fact mourning the loss of his mother alongside that of his mother’s nurse. Targum Pseudo-Jonathan includes this midrash in its Aramaic rendering of the passage as well (‫)וברם תמן אתבשר יעקב על מיתת רבקה אימיה‬. This is a remarkable reading: Deborah’s death stands in for Rebekah’s death and allows Jacob to mourn his mother’s passing. (We should note, too, that here Deborah is regarded as parallel to Rebekah in that both women are portrayed as maternal figures—the nurse [‫ ]מינקת רבקה‬is a kind of mother, to Rebekah as well as to Jacob, and she is acknowledged by name only when Jacob mourns her passing.)9 A brief, and admittedly playful, exegetical gloss thus plays a serious interpretive role. In remarking on the genre of aggadic midrash, Marc Hirshman writes: “The heart of rabbinic midrash is the interplay between the biblical text and the rabbinic glosses and musings over the text … The rabbis developed a way of reading scripture whereby the very words and syntax of the Bible were cajoled into saying, by playful exegesis, some of the most serious thoughts which they entertained.”10 This is especially true of this short midrash, which reads a Hebrew word as a Greek one, as if to say that now—now that the Jews of Palestine, living in the Greek-speaking Roman east, can also decipher Greek—there are new possibilities for reading biblical texts and seeing details that were, until then, seemingly absent. 2013, 35. A glossary of word plays, including several involving Greek, is found in Braude and Kapstein 1975, 585-93. On Greek words in Genesis Rabbah, see Hirshman 2010, 21-34; Hirshman 1996, 469-75. 9  In Targum Pseudo-Jonathan on Gen 35:8 (as well as on Gen 24:59), Deborah’s role as Rebekah’s nurse (rendered in the Masoretic texts as ‫ )מינקת רבקה‬is translated into the Aramaic as ‫פידגוגתא דרבקה‬, “the teacher of Rebekah” (from the Greek παιδαγωγός, which itself derives from the words παῖς and ἀγωγός), suggesting an interesting conflation of wet nursing, mothering, and educating in the Aramaic translation that resonates with Greco-Roman notions of parenting and teaching. Onqelos and Neofiti use the biblical root, while the Fragment Targum uses the term ‫מרביתה‬. On wet nursing and other mother substitutes in antiquity, as well as the blurring of boundaries between mothers, those who breastfeed, and those who educate children, see Bradley 1986, 201-29; Dasen 2011, 291-314; McWilliams 2013, 264-85; Penniman 2017. 10  Hirshman 2007, 115. On midrash as filling gaps in the biblical narrative and thereby transforming biblical characters, see also Levinson 2012, 345-67.

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Pesiqta de-Rav Kahanah, a rabbinic commentary roughly contemporaneous with Genesis Rabbah, contains a parallel midrash, though in this text the rabbinic tradition that understands Gen 35:8 as alluding to Rebekah’s death is used to make a different theological point. Pesiqta de-Rav Kahanah seeks not only to insert Rebekah’s death into a passage that does not mention it, as the interpretation in Genesis Rabbah does, but also attempts to explain why her death was absent from the text. The midrash posits that the absence of Rebekah’s death and burial in the biblical text was deliberate. This omission was designed to teach readers that Rebekah’s son Esau was so wicked that even after Rebekah’s death no one wanted him to be associated with his mother. The midrash interprets as follows: As a further instance of Esau’s wickedness, the Rabbis said: Esau brought it about that no public funeral was given to Rebekah. You find that after Rebekah died, people asked: Who is to walk before her bier? Abraham is dead. Isaac whose eyes have grown dim has to stay at home. Jacob has fled from Esau. If the wicked Esau walks before her bier, mortals will say, “Cursed be the dugs that gave suck to such a one.” What did people do? They took her out at night. Because the body of Rebekah was taken out at night and received no public funeral, Rabbi Yosi ben Rabbi Hanina used to say, “scripture records her death obliquely by stating that it was “Deborah, Rebekah’s nurse, [who] died (Gen 35:8) …”11

According to this midrash, the absence of Rebekah’s death from the biblical text indicates that it was better not to acknowledge her death—through burying her privately in the darkness of the night and foregoing a public funeral—than to allow her son Esau, whom the authors of the midrash considered evil, to walk before her bier, because his presence would reflect badly on his deceased mother.12 The biblical text thus does not mention Rebekah’s death and burial, choosing instead simply to allude to it by recording Deborah’s passing. 11  Pesiqta de-Rav Kahanah Zahor; ed. Mandelbaum 1962, 40-41; translation in Braude and Kapstein 1975, 45. Parallels appear in Pesiqta Rabbati 12; Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7:2:3; Tanhuma Ki Teze 4. 12  This midrashic reading contrasts with Jubilees 35, in which Rebekah’s death brings Esau and Jacob together and reforms Esau’s behavior. In Jubilees, it is precisely the moment of Rebekah’s death and funeral that ultimately reconciles her two rival sons, while in Pesiqta de-Rav Kahanah Rebekah is spared a public funeral because such a public event would highlight her own shortcomings as a mother for having raised a son such as Esau.

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The coupling of Rebekah and Deborah’s deaths appears as well in a late antique liturgical piyyut by the poet Yannai. Yannai’s qedushta for Genesis 35:9, which would have been recited at the synagogue during Saturday morning services, is a long meditation about loss, grief, and mourning anchored around these doubled maternal deaths. Yannai writes: The news of Rebekah came, that she had set forth on her journey Not yet at ease from the pain in the soles of his feet— before he had quiet from [Deborah’s] death upon the road the nursemaid of “she who writhed in childbirth” He began to tremble hearing of the death of she who gave him birth He cried out and was grieved, weeping [doubly much] therefore that selfsame place was called “Another Weeping.”13

These stanzas describe how Jacob had not yet recovered from the news of Deborah’s death when he was devastated by the news of his own mother’s passing (her final “journey” in the poetic language). Both figures are portrayed in maternal terms. The poem identifies Deborah as “the nurse of ‘she who writhed in childbirth,” that is, as the nurse of Jacob’s mother, and Rebekah as “she who gave him birth.” The passage emphasizes Deborah and Rebekah’s doubled maternal roles vis-à-vis Jacob, and the nearly simultaneous arrival of the news of both their deaths. The central theme of the piyyut is God’s ability to console those who mourn. The mention of Jacob’s mother’s passing could have served as an attempt to offer comfort to those in the synagogue audience who might have been mourning their own mothers’ (more recent) deaths. On the merging of generalized grief and the stories of the patriarchs and matriarchs in the paytanic tradition, Laura Lieber writes: “Each death, representing a generation, becomes a tessera in life’s mosaic, and in that idea there may be a kind of solace: death is something every individual has in common with even the most exalted ancestors.”14 Through listening to verses about Jacob’s loss and mourning, worshippers would have been able not only to forge bonds 13

 Lieber 2010, 642-45. On Yannai, see Rabinovitz 1985; on the history of the qedushta, see Elizur 2019. 14  Lieber 2016a, 108. Münz-Manor 2006, 344-74 similarly explores Yannai’s development of the matriarch Sarah’s voice and her emotional reflections on barrenness.

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with biblical figures but also to experience the comfort that these figures found in God’s presence. The central biblical passage of the piyyut, Gen 25:9, states that “God appeared again to Jacob when he came from Paddan Aram, and he blessed him.” The piyyut seeks to explain why, in the sequence of biblical passages in the book of Genesis, God’s blessing and renaming of Jacob (Jacob is renamed “Israel”) are placed immediately after the notice of Deborah’s death. The blessing and new name are understood as a form of divine consolation for Jacob’s doubled loss. The piyyut therefore prefaces the episode about Deborah and Rebekah with the following two lines: “Likewise, consoling the bereaved You revealed through the pure one / when, while he was on the road from Paddan, You revealed Yourself to him / ‘The path of all’ – for such is fate – was the nurse-maid’s way” (Lieber 2010, 642-43). The poem explains that God was revealed to Jacob as a form of comfort after the loss of his mother. The episode concludes with praise to God for comforting Jacob: “To the living You appeared, to console him / and with the blessing for mourners You blessed him, on account of his mother / By the coinage of a new name You called him…”15 Here, the piyyut presents God’s blessing of Jacob and the change of Jacob’s name to Israel as a form of comfort in the aftermath of loss and in homage to a deceased mother.16 Though Genesis Rabbah, Pesiqta de-Rav Kahanah, and Yannai’s piyyut make the same exegetical move—they insert Rebekah’s death alongside Deborah’s—the differing genres of the texts, their authors, and their respective audiences shape the way in which they convey their biblical interpretations. This dynamic has been explored at length by Lieber, who writes that “midrashim incorporate homiletical material emerging from the popular, performative world of the synagogue, but are ultimately scholarly; piyyutim, by contrast, incorporate scholarly material but are ultimately a kind of ‘popular,’ performative literature.”17 Moreover, according to Lieber, each genre responds to its audience in particular ways. 15  God comforts Jacob specifically with a mourner’s blessing. On the origins of the mourner’s kaddish, see Shyovitz 2015, 49-73, and on resonant vocabulary found in this piyyut, see Lieber 2010, 652. 16  See also Genesis Rabbah 82:1, which connects Ps 86 with Gen 35:9 to suggest that God comforts through bestowing blessings. 17  Lieber 2016b, 155-73. Rabbinic exegetical texts also insert emotion, extending and changing the biblical narrative in fundamental ways, on which see Levinson

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We might here be able to sense a difference between the two modes of interpretation specifically about Deborah/Rebekah’s deaths: the midrashim solve an exegetical problem with a sophisticated linguistic interpretation, while the piyyut draws on this insight to reflect on the topic of loss and mourning as it touched Jacob on an affective level. It is not that the midrashim lack emotions while the piyyut accentuates an affective dimension—they are both moving in different ways. In Genesis Rabbah, Jacob names the place at which he learned about his mother’s and mother’s nurse’s deaths in reference to his crying and mourning. His sadness is acknowledged and marked, but the episode is short and limited within the exegesis. The piyyut characterizes the losses as deeply personal and individual, and explores them in greater emotional depth (and at greater length).18 The piyyut, performed for worshippers as part of the synagogue liturgy, thus taps into the emotions of maternal loss and absence in a way that would have allowed those who heard it in the synagogue to identify with Jacob.19 Both midrashic literature and liturgical poetry spoke to the direct circumstances that those in antiquity faced and the emotions and theological questions that such times of crises would have evoked. We see here the process by which the work of the rabbis in study houses— as that of Christian exegetes in scholastic, monastic, and other settings—was translated into liturgical texts for use by broader lay audiences and adapted so that it could help congregations and their members make sense of their life situations, in this case the loss of an adult mother, but in other cases as well, such as the loss of mothers at childbirth or during infancy and early childhood. Even if we do not imagine these sources simply to describe contemporaneous views 2005. It is worth noting that some midrashim are more homiletical than others, and not all addressed identical audiences. 18  Lieber 2010, 653-54; Lieber 2016b, 155-73. 19  Lieber 2016a, 123 emphasizes the role of piyyut as a form of instruction for how to mourn. The identification between members of a congregation and the biblical figures brought to life in liturgical pieces is also explored in Doerfler 2020. Susan Ashbrook Harvey 2001, 105-31 explores the figures of the matriarchs in Syriac sources. Liturgical poetry’s broader, and lay, audience, is crucial as well; rabbinic sources were, by and large, specialists’ texts, while poetry for the synagogue reached a larger and more diverse crowd who connected to the material in different ways, on which see Münz-Manor 2013, 271-73.

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on such losses, we might read them as ancient resources for coping with loss. These midrashim and piyyutim not only responded to loss, but instructed Jews how properly to mourn, and also how to find comfort. RACHEL’S DEATH

AND HER MOTHERLESS CHILDREN

With Deborah’s death Jacob seems to have lost a maternal figure, and with Rebekah’s death his biological mother and a woman who, according to the biblical narrative, played a tremendously influential role in his life. Only eight verses after Deborah’s death is recorded, the biblical text tells of the tragic death of the mother of Jacob’s two beloved sons. Deborah and Rebekah’s deaths occur when Jacob is a grown man; accordingly, the loss is characterized, in the biblical narrative, as sad but not devastating. Almost everyone, after all, becomes an orphan eventually. When Jacob’s wife Rachel dies during childbirth, however, the late antique midrashic sources interpret the absence of this mother on a different emotional register. The sequence of deaths, too, adds dramatic depth to the losses. According to Genesis Rabbah, Jacob loses three maternal figures in a single chapter—he and his sons are triply orphaned, so to speak.20 In the rabbinic commentaries, this series of losses becomes almost unbearable.21 (A slightly later text, Seder Olam, makes this simultaneity even more explicit—it states that Deborah, Rebekah, and Rachel all died at the same time.)22 As we will see below, in Genesis Rabbah’s interpretations of the biblical passages, Rachel’s death and absence are not only mourned by Jacob, but also become defining features of her children’s identities and, it is implied, of the identities of all of the children of Israel, who eventually come to mourn their individual and communal losses at Rachel’s place of burial. 20  Josephus (Ant. I.345-6) mentions Rebekah’s death only briefly: after Jacob mourns Rachel’s passing, he returns to Hebron and learns that his mother had also passed away; Isaac dies shortly thereafter. See also Lieber 2010, 653. 21  On the treatment of Rachel in biblical sources, see also Kozlova 2017, 15796. 22  Seder Olam 2, cited in Ginzberg 2003, 318-19; Milikowsky 2013, Vol. 1, 223, and the commentary in Vol. 2, 35-36. The text reads: “He [Jacob] left [Bethel] and Benjamin was born and Rachel died on the way to Ephrat. In that same period, Rebekah and Deborah both died [as well].”

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Rachel’s death is characterized in rabbinic sources as Jacob’s most challenging loss. According to a tradition attributed to Rabbi Yohanan, in a comment on Gen 48:7 (“And as for me, when I came from Paddan, Rachel died unto me in the land of Canaan on the way … and I buried her there…”), Jacob remarks on his deathbed that, “For me, Rachel’s death was a greater grief than all the misfortunes that befell me.”23 Given the many hardships that Jacob endured in his life, this is a bold statement. In another comment, attributed to Rabbi Abba ben Zutra, Jacob loved Rachel so much that “when he came to bless her son, he treated him as secondary to her, saying ‘Blessings of the breasts, and of the womb’ (Gen 49:25), which means, Blessed be the breasts that suckled such and the womb that issued such.”24 In his parting words to his beloved son Joseph, Jacob cannot help but remember Joseph’s mother and bless his son in reference to his absent mother. According to the biblical text, Rachel, in the course of a difficult labor, succeeds in birthing her second son, but she succumbs to death in childbirth.25 There is narrative irony in Rachel’s death. Gen 30:1 depicts her as barren and begging God: “Give me children, or else I am dead!”26 God does, indeed, give her children, but also—and simultaneously—death. In the moment of agonizing labor, she names her newborn “Ben-oni,” the son of my suffering. This name that Rachel chooses for her son evokes the broken bones and bodily traumas of 23  Genesis Rabbah 97 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 1243). There are several competing endings of Genesis Rabbah; this midrash appears in MS Vatican 30 (with parallels in Midrash Hagadol), which, according to Hirshman, preserves the authentic ending of Genesis Rabbah, but which was later replaced in other manuscripts with material from the Tanhuma; Hirshman 2016, 233-42; Theodor 1915, 148-71. 24  Genesis Rabbah 98.20 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 1270). 25  Genesis 35:16-18; see also Genesis Rabbah 82:9 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 987). Genesis Rabbah 82:7 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 984) adds that three biblical women died of difficult labors—Rachel, the wife of Phinehas, and Michal the daughter of Saul. The rates of maternal death in childbirth were high in late antiquity, on which see Rousselle 1991, 1:321-23; French 1986, 69-84 estimate rates of death during childbirth to be approximately 5-10%. Complications in pregnancy and childbirth were also discussed in ancient medical literature, on which see Marganne 1981, 124-25; Hanson 1991, 73-110. Death of mothers in childbirth is also discussed in rabbinic sources, e.g. m. Shabbat 2:6 and t. Shabbat 2:10. 26  On which see Baskin 2002, 124; Baskin 1989, 101-14; Callaway 1986. Yannai focuses on Rachel’s pleas for children as well, on which see Lieber 2016b, 169-70. See also 4QText concerning Rachel and Joseph, on Rachel’s love of Joseph and her desire for another son, discussed in Crawford 2015, 145; Elgvin 2000, 456-63.

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expectant mothers studied in the late antique cemetery at Kellis in the Dakhla Oasis of Egypt, and the experiences of pain they embody.27 The infant’s mother, in the midst of her suffering and death, gives her son his first name (Ben-Oni), but thereafter the baby’s father, who looks forward to his son’s new life, gives him a different and more uplifting name (Benjamin).28 Rachel’s death left both Joseph, still a boy, and Benjamin, a newborn, motherless. The biblical text does not address the impact of Rachel’s death on her two sons—both motherless children—but later exegetical traditions do. In one early (pre-rabbinic) tradition, Benjamin reflects on his mother’s absence: “And since Rachel my mother died in giving me birth, I had no milk; therefore I was suckled by Bilhah her handmaid.”29 In the act of identifying his parents, Benjamin is quick both to point out his mother’s absence and also to fill it with a substitute, his wet nurse Bilhah.30 Genesis Rabbah also understands Bilhah to be the mother who raised Joseph. When Jacob dreams of his mother and father bowing down to him (Gen 37:9-11), the rabbinic text notes that Jacob must have been incredulous and said to his son: “Rachel is dead, yet you say that I and your mother [will bow down to you]?” The midrash thus responds: “But our ancestor [Jacob] did not know that it applied to Bilhah, Rachel’s handmaid, who raised him [Joseph] like a mother.”31 This rabbinic 27

 Dupras et al. 2014, 41-53. See also Bourbou, this volume.  The significance of this second name, Benjamin, is not mentioned in the biblical passage, but the name can be translated as “the son of my right.” An interpretation in Genesis Rabbah 82.9 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 987) suggests that Jacob thought of Benjamin as a source of comfort in the face of his wife’s death. Josephus (Ant. I. 343-4; LCL, p. 164-65) misreads the biblical passage and explains the name Benjamin as an expression of Jacob’s deep sorrow, rather than Rachel’s, and in his misreading amplifies Jacob’s grief and retains Rachel’s pain in Benjamin’s name. Rachel’s death is also given a date in second temple sources (the day following the conclusion of the harvest), on which see Zvi Ron 2015, 260-67. 29  Testament of Benjamin 1:3. 30  4QNaphtali identifies Zilpah and Bilhah as Deborah’s nieces, which creates genealogical bonds between these three mother substitutes. The Testament of Naphtali builds on this familial association and adds that Bilhah was born on the same day as Rachel, fashioning Rachel and Bilhah as doubles of one another (Crawford 2015, 148-49). 31  Genesis Rabbah 84.13 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 1014). In fragment E69 of his Commentary on Genesis, Origen interprets this verse in reference to a Jewish myth that Rachel might eventually bow down to Joseph at the resurrection, on which see Niehoff 2016, 134; Metzler 2010. 28

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interpretation regards Joseph’s wet nurse as a substitute for his biological mother, in her absence. Even as Bilhah fills a maternal role for Benjamin and Joseph, she does not replace Rachel as their mother. The midrash mentions, in several places, that Rachel’s two sons bonded over their shared maternal loss and that they regarded themselves as motherless children, even as others cared for them. In a comment on Gen 43:30-33 (“And Joseph made haste; for his heart yearned toward his brother; and he sought where to weep; and he entered into his chamber, and wept there … And they sat before him, the firstborn according to his birthright, and the youngest according to his youth; and the men marveled one with another”), Genesis Rabbah directly engages with the theme of Joseph and Benjamin’s shared motherlessness. When Joseph reunites with his younger brother Benjamin after many years apart, the midrash explains their half-brothers’ amazement at the encounter. According to the midrash, Joseph asked each of his brothers to sit in a particular place (e.g., Judah at one head of the table and Reuben at the other, because Joseph identifies them as king and firstborn). Joseph then asks Benjamin to come and sit beside him, because “I have no mother and this youth has no mother, for his mother died on giving birth to him.”32 The brothers’ amazement comes, according to the midrash, from Joseph’s seemingly prophetic intuition about each of his brothers; he seats each of them symbolically at the table and mentions Benjamin’s motherlessness and identifies with it. What is most interesting in the context of ancient mother absence, though, is that the trauma of losing one’s mother is so strong that this is what binds the two brothers together in the midrash—the loss of their mother and their status as motherless children—and it is what Joseph’s character explicitly acknowledges. Motherlessness thus becomes a defining identity for both Benjamin and Joseph and an integral part of their self-perception. The two brothers are also regarded by others as motherless sons. Throughout Genesis Rabbah, Joseph and Benjamin are both perceived as stand-ins for their mother by their widowed father. In a comment on Gen 44:29, for example, when Jacob hesitates to send Benjamin to Egypt for fear of losing him, the midrash elaborates on Jacob’s reasoning: “Thus did our father Jacob say originally: ‘While Benjamin  Genesis Rabbah 92.5 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 1142-43).

32

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is with me my mind is soothed for [the loss of] his brother and his mother; but now I will be as though you had taken away the three of them simultaneously.’ To what might our father Jacob be compared in respect of Benjamin? To a lamp with three mouths; when someone desired to extinguish one of them, he extinguished the whole lamp.”33 The text regards Rachel, and by extension her two sons, as a group, and Jacob, in an attempt to save a part of Rachel, does not want to lose Benjamin. We might imagine that Jacob would not want to lose his son because it is his son, but in the way that the midrash explains the loss of his sons, in each instance they are especially beloved to Jacob because they also remind him of their mother. Here we have a glimpse into how the rabbis imagined Jacob as a widowed and bereaved father. In these rabbinic texts, motherlessness affects Jacob just as much as it did his sons. Perhaps this is the case because the rabbinic texts were composed by men who were just as likely to be widowers as they were to have been motherless children. RACHEL’S

TOMB AND RACHEL’S PRESENCE IN THE ANCIENT LANDSCAPE

The place of Rachel’s burial became a site of mourning and commemoration in late antiquity. In Gen 35:19-20, Jacob buries Rachel “on the road to Efrat” near Bethlehem and erects “a pillar upon her grave” (though 1 Sam 10:2 records an alternate location at Zelzah in the territory of Benjamin).34 The text mentions that “the same is the pillar of Rachel’s grave unto this day,” suggesting that Rachel’s pillar still existed at the time of the composition of the passage. Susan Starr Sered, in her study of Rachel’s tomb, writes that “the marker referred  Genesis Rabbah 93.8 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 1167).  Wilkinson 1977, 56-57; Wilkinson 1999, 5. The location of Rachel’s tomb was disputed in antiquity, and perhaps two places, one in the north and one in the south, came to be associated with her tomb. Wilkinson writes: “There are many instances of a famous person’s death being commemorated in more than one site. In the case of Rachel we may guess at the cause, for the tribe of Benjamin as well as the tribe of Judah would wish to commemorate their ancestress. The word ‘Tomb’ is the difficulty. It is there that questions of authenticity arise. So there would be no problem if it [1 Sam 10:2] were to be translated into the ‘Memorial’ of Rachel” (Wilkinson 1977, 57). 33 34

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to in Genesis may have been some sort of cultic symbol related to women dying in childbirth” or those facing challenges as mothers or would-be mothers.35 It is unlikely that it was a full cult site, but the passage suggests at least a shrine or marked place of burial. Another passage about Rachel’s burial place is found in Jeremiah 31:14: “Thus said the Lord: A voice is heard in Ramah, lamentation, and bitter weeping, Rachel weeping for her children; she refuses to be comforted for her children, because they are not.” The text describes Rachel’s cries to God as she laments her descendants’ exile from the land of Israel. In this text, Rachel has been transformed into a universal mother of all Israel (of all of Jacob’s descendants) and she becomes their representative to God; she weeps for her children.36 In Jeremiah, Rachel is no longer imagined as absent, but rather as a fierce advocate for Israel, calling out to God from her burial place in Ramah. Sered connects Rachel’s eternal presence with the physicality of her burial site: “By dying in childbirth and so … forfeiting the right and pleasure of seeing and raising her own child, she acquired the ability to eternally care for her child(ren), albeit in a less direct manner … the Jeremiah passage may possibly hint that there already was some kind of cultic activity at her grave.”37 Rachel’s presence, as it is described in Jeremiah, is geographical, auditory, and affective—she weeps loudly (her voice is heard in Ramah) and she refuses to stop until God responds. Her cries are also described as effective: her voice is heard and her laments answered by God. When God hears Rachel weeping, God responds: “Keep your voice from weeping, and your eyes from tears; for there is a reward for your work, says the Lord: they shall come back from the land of 35  Sered 1996, 17; see also Sered 1995. Sered treats Gen 35:21 and Jer 31:14 as largely metaphoric, with the possibility of “an earlier (perhaps sporadic) cult centered at Rachel’s tomb,” though perhaps with little or no continuity between that and the later cult site that developed at Rachel’s tomb in the medieval period. On the persistence of Rachel’s tomb as a symbol for mothers and the danger of the birthing process in the Babylonian Talmud, see b. Taanit 2a-b. In the twentieth century, Rachel’s tomb served as a monument dedicated to assisting women in their labor and deliveries, and the key to the tomb began being used as a charm for an easy labor, on which see Sered 1998, 13-14. 36  Rachel becomes the mother of the children of Israel, alongside her husband Jacob (renamed “Israel”), who fathers the twelve tribes (named the “children of Israel”). 37  Sered 1996, 17.

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the enemy; there is hope for your future, says the Lord: your children shall come back to their own country.”38 The link between Rachel’s simultaneous absence as a mother to her two biological sons and her transcendent presence as a universal mother for all of Jacob’s descendants throughout future generations is already articulated in these biblical passages. The landscape itself becomes animated: Rachel laments and weeps for her children who are, in this text, exiles during the Babylonian captivity. Rachel’s identity as an intercessor transforms her into a universal mother advocating on behalf of her children, both individually (e.g., in their requests for fertility, health, etc.) and communally (e.g., for return from exile, redemption, etc.). We can assume that many of these Jewish exiles were quite literally motherless children who were leaving their mothers behind in Jerusalem—children who had lost their mothers in war or were separated from their mothers as they were sold into slavery.39 Rachel, as a transcendent mother, is thus imagined as the figure who could convince God to return these motherless children to their mother city. Rachel’s tomb has a long and fascinating history of interpretation in rabbinic and paytanic literature. In its commentary on Gen 35:19 (“And Rachel died and she was buried on the way to Ephrat”), Genesis Rabbah explains: “What was Jacob’s reason for burying Rachel on the way to Ephrat? Jacob foresaw that the exiles would pass on from there, therefore he buried her there so that she might pray for mercy for them.”40 In Lamentations Rabbah Rachel intercedes on Israel’s behalf after several unsuccessful attempts by other biblical characters. Rachel persuades God and God assures Rachel that her children will eventually return to the land.41 Again, Rachel’s place as the guardian mother is reinforced. These rabbinic interpretations imagine that Jacob chose to bury Rachel in this spot on the road precisely so that Israelites, on their journeys into exile, would pass by her grave and pillar and 38  Jer 31:15-16. In some traditions, including Targum Pseudo-Jonathan, the “House of Israel” is substituted for Rachel in its Aramaic translation of Jeremiah 31:15, on which see Strickert 1989, 21. 39  On this experience, see Evans Grubbs, in this volume. 40  Genesis Rabbah 82.10 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 988). 41  Lamentations Rabbah proem 24. On this passage as well as on the central role of Rachel’s intercession in rabbinic sources, see Kattan Gribetz 2018, 1-34.

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she—the absent mother—would cry out on their behalf.42 Uri Erlich comments on the innovativeness of “the bond posited between the living and the burial place of the dead” in this rabbinic interpretation: Rachel “awakens to the task of entreating mercy for Israel precisely when the Israelites pass by her terrestrial burial place on the road to Efrat. This the first example in rabbinic literature of a link between the ongoing spiritual connection that motivates the patriarchs to pray for their descendants and the physical burial place of the Israelite ancestors.”43 Similarly, late antique piyyutim turn directly to Rachel as an intercessor, especially in requests for the final redemption, drawing on Gen 30:22, which describes God as “remembering” Rachel, hearing her prayers, and opening her womb.44 These traditions about Rachel— her barrenness, her supplications, God’s answering her prayers, and the site of her burial after an untimely death in childbirth—transform her into a heavenly maternal intercessor.45 She is no longer an absent mother, but an ever-present one. Another rabbinic tradition offers a different interpretation about the location of Rachel’s burial. It suggests that Jacob buried Rachel at the spot in which she died because the bodies of women who die in childbirth ought not to be transported.46 If we are to take this midrash as descriptive of local practice, it would mean that the landscape was literally filled with the remains of absent mothers. In the rabbinic texts discussed above, Rachel is portrayed as a mother who was lost in childbirth and who, in subsequent generations, was reclaimed as a mother of Israel whose intercessory powers remained potent and effective, and to whom the motherless (individually and collectively, personally and nationally) could turn for comfort and mediation with the divine. Rachel’s tomb eventually became  Genesis Rabbah 82.10 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 988) argues that the Israelites not only cried to Rachel, but also to her son, Joseph (based on Amos 5:15), and her grandson, Ephraim (based on Jer 31:20). In Genesis Rabbah 93.10 (Theodor and Albeck 1965, 1168-69), Joseph mourns the destruction of both temples. 43  Erlich 2007, 252. 44  Shacham-Rosby 2011. The piyyutim focus on Rachel’s barrenness and the effectiveness of her prayers for children after a period of infertility, but they ignore the fact that her second pregnancy cost her her life (Shacham-Rosby 2011, 64). See also Novick 2013. 45  See the Appendix below. 46  b. Moed Katan 27b-28a. 42

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a national or communal symbol of mother absence and mourning, especially in the context of exile, when Jews fled their motherland and called out to this symbolic mother on the road.47 Rachel became the epitome of a mother—the mother of Israel—but she nonetheless remains an absent mother. In this constellation of texts—biblical, rabbinic, paytanic—maternal loss, mourning, and longing are grounded in geography and topography, and are mapped onto the physical, geographical landscape through narratives and their associated shrines. CONCLUSION This chapter has explored mother absence in a number of senses: the death of mothers both during childbirth and in old age; the subsequent process of mourning for them; and the making present of absent mothers in the symbolic landscape of antiquity through marking the geographical territory with shrines and rituals in their memory. The rabbinic midrashim and Yannai’s piyyut place the news of Rebekah’s death, alongside that of Deborah, at the sacred Oak of Bachut, below Bethel. Rebekah, along with her mother-in-law Sarah and her daughter-in-law Leah, are remembered at the place of their burial, the Cave of Machpelah.48 Rachel’s tomb, placed at Ramah on the way to Ephrat, serves in rabbinic sources both as a memorial for 47  Elaborations of this idea are found in Pesiqta Rabbati 3, later additions to Lamentations Rabbah 24, Midrash Shmuel 11, and Midrash Lekach Tov on Gen 28:7. See Sered 1996, 1-56; Sered 1995, 103-48; Sered 1989, 27-40; and Sered 1986, 7-22. On the history of Rachel’s tomb, see also Strickert 1989. Sered observes that in Jer 31:14, the text refers to Rachel’s children in the past tense, as exiles on their way to Babylonia, while in twelfth-century midrashim, written in the context of renewed pilgrimage to Jerusalem and its environs during the Crusader period, Midrash Lekach Tov states that “her children,” now imagined as pilgrims, will come, in the future tense. Rachel becomes a symbolic mother of all of Israel, who are characterized as orphans—either as exiles or as those who continued to live outside of the land more permanently—both in the past and in the future. 48  The cave of Machpelah, which becomes the place in which the three patriarchs and three of the matriarchs are buried, is first established after Sarah’s death (Gen 23:1-20). Abraham purchases the land and buries her there—again, it is the death of a mother that first marks the spot in the land. In late antiquity, a memorial for Sarah was also established at Mamre, on which see Kofsky 1998, 26.

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Rachel but also as a symbolic center for all of the children of Israel to access a heavenly mother at times when they felt most neglected and alone. It is the intersection of absence and presence that most intrigues me: how the land can at once mark death and preserve memory, and the role of exegetical practices in populating a land with absent mothers (personal mothers, historic mothers, and metaphorical mothers). This intersection seems to me to be especially relevant to the attempt to read these texts in their late antique context—that is, in a context in which mother absence was not only, or primarily, a scriptural phenomenon, but also a lived and experienced reality for so many, as the other chapters of this volume demonstrate in detail. The textual references to tombs of deceased biblical mothers alongside the images of buried mothers discovered in the cemeteries at Kellis and elsewhere might suggest that while living mothers were often absent in antiquity, some of their bodies were not—they might be found, physically and symbolically, in cemeteries and shrines, visited and venerated. In a rabbinic tradition, Joseph is said to have resisted Potiphar’s wife’s advances because of the lasting impact that his mother’s teachings had on him. As he is tempted to sin, an image of his mother Rachel appeared, stopping him from committing adultery.49 Another late medieval rabbinic midrash describes Joseph’s conversation with his mother at her shrine on his way down to Egypt, a window into the emotions and longings of a son who lost his mother too soon.50 Even dead mothers, that is, were not entirely absent. And sometimes, it was, ironically, death itself that made mothers eternally present—we have observed this in the case of Rachel and the marking of the landscape with her tomb, as well as in the cases of other historical and imperial women who died as young mothers and became eternal symbols of motherhood and maternity through their untimely deaths.

 y. Horayot 2:5, 46d; in b. Sotah 36b, Joseph sees an image of his father, discussed in Neis 2013, 149-50. 50  Sefer ha-Yashar, parashat va-yeshev, 82b-84a, 85a-86a (ed. Venice). This midrash is medieval, probably from sixteenth-century Naples, though its precise dating is debated by scholars, on which see Dan 1986; Dan 1976, 197-98. On medieval engagement with Rachel, see also Bernstein 2009, esp. 160-65. In the Testament of Joseph 2:81, Joseph asks that his wife Asenath be brought back to Canaan and buried beside his mother. 49

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So what do we mean by absent mothers, or by mother absence? I wonder whether “absence” and “presence” ought to be thought of not as dichotomous but rather as points on a continuum, where mothers could be—for their children, for ancient readers, and for communities in antiquity and thereafter—both absent and present at once, in different ways. Late antique Jews, and later their medieval Jewish and Christian pilgrim counterparts, could remember the biblical matriarchs, visit them, and pray to them at their supposed places of rest. Their absence from the community of the living made them nonetheless accessible even after death within the ancient landscape. APPENDIX In her study of Rachel in midrash and piyyut, Chana Shacham-Rosby argues that Jews began to reclaim the figure of Rachel as the mother of Israel during the fifth and sixth centuries CE, in part as a response to Christian claims that Rachel, as the younger and more beloved wife of Jacob, was the symbolic ecclesia, the mother church, and that her older and more scorned sister, Leah, represented the Jews as synagoga.51 Rachel, as the prime intercessor of prayers on behalf of Jews, stands in contrast to Christian depictions of Mary as mediator to the divine.52 Rachel is thus the mother of Israel in contrast to the mother of Christ: someone who has direct access to God to whom Jews can pray for their ultimate redemption. The fashioning of Rachel as a universal mother of Israel, while present in Jeremiah, thus became a more central—and contested—theme in the context of the Christianization of the Roman Empire and the Holy Land during and after the reign of Constantine and the influence of his mother Helena. The re-Judaizing of Rachel in light of Christian claims that Rachel symbolized the ecclesia, and in contrast to Mary as mother, might have been another way in which Jews of this period attempted to make this absent mother present again. The focus on Rachel’s tomb and her intercessory powers in Genesis Rabbah and late antique piyyutim corresponds to increased veneration at Rachel’s tomb known to us from Christian sources as 51

 Shacham-Rosby 2011.  This idea is also developed in Rosenberg (forthcoming), building on the work of Hasan-Roken 2014; Himmelfarb 2015; Himmelfarb 1998. 52

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well. Until the fifth century CE, Rachel’s tomb was not a particularly important site for Christian pilgrimage. Egeria’s Itinerarium from the late fourth century does not mention the tomb, though Egeria visits two other places relevant to Rachel’s life.53 Jerome mentions that Paula “paused where Rachel’s tomb stands on the right of the road, the birthplace of Benjamin” but does not suggest that there was much to see or venerate.54 By the time of the Piacenza pilgrim’s journey in the sixth century, however, Rachel’s tomb was an important stop on the way to Jerusalem and included a rock from which sweet water flowed that was connected with Mary’s flight to Egypt.55 According to this account, Rachel’s tomb is associated with a moment in which someone left Jerusalem in exile (the moment, as it is described in the narrative, also might allude to the biblical story of Hagar and Ishmael seeking water in the desert in Gen 16, as Mary is said to have been thirsty on her journey and sits at the spot to drink). Mary, the mother of Christ, is thus associated with Rachel. According to the Piacenza pilgrim’s account, a small church was built near the tomb. Adomnan notes that the tomb itself is “of poor workmanship, unadorned, and protected by a stone rail. Today they point out an inscription giving her name, which Jacob her husband erected over it.”56 Taking all of these Christian pilgrimage texts into account, we see that the midrashim about Rachel’s tomb in Genesis Rabbah point to a location on a map that might have, by the time of the midrash’s composition, become a place of worship for Christians, and one that was also associated with Mary, the mother of Christ, Christians, and Christianity. We might thus even be able to pinpoint the period, around the fifth century CE, when this site started being remembered anew, and perhaps also frequented and venerated by both Jews and Christians, even if it had not yet become the central place of cult worship that it became during and after the Crusades.

53

 Wilkinson 1999, 33.  Ep. 108 to Eustochium, 10.1, transl. in Wilkinson 1977, 84. 55  Piacenza Pilgrim, Pseudo-Antonini Placentini itinerarium, 28, in Wilkinson 1977, 142. 56  The Holy Places, 2.7.1-4, in Wilkinson 1977, 186-87. 54

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ABOUT THE EDITORS Sabine R. Huebner holds the chair of Ancient History at the University of Basel in Switzerland. Her research focuses on the everyday lives of the common people in the Eastern Roman Mediterranean, papyrology, and the social, economic, and religious history of Roman and Byzantine Egypt. Her monographs include The Family in Roman Egypt (Cambridge, 2013) and Papyri and the Social World of the New Testament (Cambridge, 2019), and is co-editor of Growing up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2009), The Encyclopedia of Ancient History (12 vols. Oxford, 2012), Inheritance, Law and Religion in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Paris, 2014), Mediterranean Families in Antiquity (Oxford, 2016), The Single Life in the Roman and Later Roman World (Cambridge, 2019), P.Bas. II, the edition of the Basel papyrus collection (Berlin 2020), and Living the End of Antiquity (Berlin and Boston, 2020). David M. Ratzan is Head of the Library at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. His main research and teaching interests are the social, economic, and administrative history of Greco-Roman antiquity, particularly as documented by the papyri that survive from Egypt. He has published on a wide array of topics related to Roman Egypt, including papyrology, numismatics, ancient law, and magic.

THE CONTRIBUTORS René Bloch is Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Bern (Switzerland), where he holds a joint appointment in the Institute of Jewish Studies and the Institute of Classics. He obtained his Ph.D. (Dr. phil.) as well as his “habilitation” from the University of Basel. Bloch’s most recent publications include: “Philo’s Struggle with Jewish Myth,” “How much Hebrew in Ancient Alexandria?,” and “Jew or Judean: The Latin Evidence.” Chryssi Bourbou is a bioarchaeologist in the Ephorate of Antiquities of Chania (Hellenic Ministry of Culture, Greece). Among her research interests is the study of Greco-Roman and Byzantine populations (focusing on aspects of childhood mortality), disease patterns, and reconstruction of diet through stable isotope analysis. She is the author of Health and Disease in Byzantine Crete (7th-12th c. AD) and the co-editor of New Directions in the Skeletal Biology of Greece. She currently holds a position as a Senior Research Associate at the University of Fribourg (Switzerland), working on Roman populations from Aventicum. Maria E. Doerfler is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. Her recent book, Jephthah’s Daughter, Sarah’s Son: the Death of Children in Late Antiquity (University of California Press, 2020), focuses on the deployment of biblical narratives to address parental bereavement in early Christian communities. She is currently working on a monograph on the intersection of writing law and creating sacred narratives. Judith Evans Grubbs is the Betty Gage Holland Professor of Roman History at Emory University in Atlanta, Georgia. She is the author of Law and Family in Late Antiquity: The Emperor Constantine’s Marriage Legislation (1995) and Women and the Law in the Roman Empire: A Sourcebook on Marriage, Divorce, and Widowhood (2002), and co-editor (with Tim Parkin) of The Oxford Handbook of Childhood and Education in the Classical World (2013). Her current projects include a monograph

324

CONTRIBUTORS

on Children Without Fathers in Roman Imperial Law and Society, and several articles on slavery in the Roman and late antique world. Rosalia Hatzilambrou is Assistant Professor in the Department of Classics at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens. She is the author of Isaeus’ On the Estate of Pyrrhus (2018). Her Ph.D. thesis on a selection of unpublished Greek papyri was published in separate volumes of The Oxyrhynchus Papyri. Her research interests include Attic oratory, Greek rhetoric, and Greek papyrology, and she has published a number of articles in each of these areas. Sarit Kattan Gribetz is Associate Professor in the Theology Department at Fordham University. Her first book is titled Time and Difference in Rabbinic Judaism (Princeton University Press, 2020). She is also the co-editor of Jewish and Christian Cosmogony in Late Antiquity (Mohr Siebeck) and Genesis Rabbah in Text and Context (Mohr Siebeck). She is currently writing a book titled Jerusalem: A Feminist History. Christian Laes is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Manchester (UK). He studies the social and cultural history of Rome and Late Antiquity, paying particular attention to the human life course: childhood; youth; family; slavery; old age; sexuality; and disabilities. His monographs and over 100 contributions have been published by international publishers and journals. Fiona McHardy is Professor of Classics at the University of Roehampton. Her research focuses on aspects of gendered violence in ancient Greek literature, in particular revenge ethics, infanticide, domestic violence, and uxoricide. She is author of Revenge in Athenian Culture (Duckworth, 2008) and has co-edited four volumes: Women’s Influence on Classical Civilization (Routledge, 2004), Lost Dramas of Classical Athens (University of Exeter Press, 2005), From Abortion to Pederasty: Addressing Difficult Topics in the Classics Classroom (Ohio State University Press, 2014), and Revenge and Gender in Classical, Medieval and Renaissance Literature (Edinburgh University Press, 2018). She is currently writing a book on gender violence in ancient Greece for Bloomsbury. Susanne Moraw is a classical archaeologist at Leipzig University who focuses on imagery and culture of Ancient Greece as well as of Late

CONTRIBUTORS

325

Antiquity. She is author of Die Mänade in der attischen Vasenmalerei des 6. und 5. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. – Rezeptionsästhetische Analyse eines antiken Weiblichkeitsentwurfs (Philipp von Zabern, 1998) and of Die Odyssee in der Spätantike. Bildliche und literarische Rezeption (Brepols, 2020). Co-edited volumes include Die andere Seite der Klassik. Gewalt im 5. und 4. Jahrhundert v. Chr. (Steiner, 2005), Bild – Raum – Handlung. Perspektiven der Archäologie (De Gruyter, 2012), and Mädchen im Altertum / Girls in Antiquity (Waxmann, 2014). She is currently preparing a research project on children in Late Antiquity. Geoffrey Nathan is Honorary Senior Lecturer at the University of New South Wales (Sydney) and Lecturer at the University of California, San Diego. His recent publications include Mediterranean Families in Antiquity (ed. with Sabine Huebner, 2017) and “The Jovinianist Controversy and Mary Aiparthenos: Questioning Mary’s Virginity and the Question of Motherhood” in Saeculum 68.2 (2018). He currently is finishing a monograph on refugee crises in Late Antiquity. Elina Pyy completed her PhD in the University of Helsinki in 2014, and is currently working as the vice-director of the Finnish Institute in Rome (Institutum Romanum Finlandiae). Her research interests include Roman imperial poetry, ancient gender studies, and classical reception studies. Apart from several articles on the construction of identity in Roman imperial literature, Pyy’s publications include monographs The Semiotics of Caesar Augustus (Bloomsbury, 2018) and Women and War in Roman Epic (Brill, forthcoming in 2020). Angeliki Tzanetou is Associate Professor of Classics and co-ordinator of Modern Greek Studies at the University of Illinois at UrbanaChampaign. She has served as Director of Graduate Studies and is currently the Editor of Illinois Classical Studies. She previously taught at Case Western Reserve University. Her research interests include Greek drama, Greek political theory, gender and religion, trauma studies, refugees and immigration in antiquity. She is the author of City of Suppliants: Tragedy and the Athenian Empire (University of Texas Press, 2012) and editor of the special issue of Illinois Classical Studies 40.2 (2015) on Greek and Roman Drama. She has co-edited Finding Persephone: Women’s Rituals in the Ancient Mediterranean (Indiana University Press 2007) and Gender, East and West (Classical World 109.2 [2016]). She has published articles in politics, ritual, and

326

CONTRIBUTORS

gender in Greek literature and is currently writing a book on motherhood, trauma, and politics in Athenian drama. Margaret Woodhull is Director of the Master of Humanities program and assistant professor at the University of Colorado Denver. She studies women’s monumental patronage in the Roman world with special interest in the metaphors of embodiment and agency in architectural discourse. She is completing a book manuscript, entitled Women Building Rome: Gender and Architecture in the Capital from the Early to High Empire. Her article, “Building Suessa Aurunca: The Monumental Patronage of Matidia Minor” is forthcoming in the Memoirs of the American Academy in Rome, v. 2019/2020.

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED Inscriptions AE 1973.326 1985.355 2007.298

30 30 35

CSE 16 IC 3.4.39

CIJUD 2.1510

22

CIL 3.6759 4.3340.155 5.3710 6.997 6.1527 6.11395 6.12600 6.17157 6.19128 6.20938 6.34383 8.20288 8.24734 8.24967a 9.899 10.2597 11.137 11.4969 12.5866

22, 30n66 109n17 35 223 214 34 33 33 35 33 33 30 30 30n71 36 21n28 115 31 36

CLEAfrique 168

21n28

31 30

ICUR 2.5492 7.17431

29 31

IEry 308

22

IG 9.12 2.321a 12.5.310 12.5.675 ILN 4.32

35 29n61 29 30

ILS 324 1980

223 109, 115

Laudatio Turiae 1.30ff. 2.31ff.

214 214

SEG 32.896 62.1227

22 30

Papyri BGU 1.232 1.316 1.350

99n38 116, 122 99n38

1.193 col.II 2.644 3.859 3.887

112n30 99n38 113n34, 118 117, 119

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

328 3.937 4.1059 C.Pap.Gr. 1.34 I.1

117 108n15

113n34, 118 113n35

CPL 120

115, 116

M.Chr. 268 272

112n30 117

P.Ammon 2.48

108n15, 113

P.Berol. 13103R

29

P.Bodl. 1.44

118

P.Fay. 97

99n38

P.Gen. 2.111

99n38

P.Hamb. 1.63

115n42

P.Kellis Gr. 1.8

114

P.Köln 2.100

99n38

P.Lond. 1.2 2.229 5.1731

95 106, 115, 116, 119 95

P.Meyer 8

96

119 113 117

P.Cair.Isid. 62

97, 98

P.Cair.Masp. 1.67028 1.67120 1.72266

P.Mich. 5.279 5.343 11.546

97 111, 113 97n32

P.Mil.Vogl. 2.99

99n38

P.Ness. 89

111, 123n77

P.Oxy. 1.73 2.263 2.265 2.375 4.724 4.744.8-10 6.906 9.1209 12.1452 12.1548 14.1647 34.2713

114 119 94 113 119n61 78 94 113 99n38 102 119n61 99n38

P.Col. 8.219

108n15

P.Colon. Inv. 4781 Inv. 4781v

119 112

P.Dura 28

110, 115n42

P.Euphr. 6 7 8 9

110n21, 112 110n21, 112 110 110n21

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

41.2951 50.3555 50.3593 51.3616 60.4058 P.Petra 3.28 5.58

111, 113 111

P.Sakaon 38

99

P.Strasb. 7.666

95

P.Tor.Choach 3

5.7573 6.9145 6.9167 18.13173 18.13305 20.14440 22.15702 24.15969 24.16002

121 121, 124 116 112 119

97

P.Turner 22 40

117, 119 117

P.Vindob.Boswinkel 7

118, 119

P.Worp. 21

113

329 112 117 97 111, 123 119n61 101 112 111, 122 113

Stud.Pal. 20.71 22.40

118 119

T.Alb. 2

106, 110, 119

T.Dacia 5 6 10 25

110 106, 110, 114, 119 119n62 110

TH 60 62

109n17 109n17

19 39

109 109

TP

PSI 8.921 8.914 9.1040 12.1254

99n38 99n38 112 116, 119

T.Sulpicii 85 87

109 109

1.5151 3.6304 5.7563

118 116 117

UPZ 1.18 1.19 2.189

95 95 97

SB

Legal texts Cod. Iust. 4.42.1 4.42.2

122n74 122n74

5.24 7.7.1.5 8.17.12.5

94n21 73 37

330

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

Cod. Theod. 16.1.4

133n33

Constitutum Constantini s.a. 375

132n29

Dig. 7.1.55 7.7.6.1 11.8.2 25.3.5.14 38.17.1 48.9.1 48.9.3

119 119 45 94 129 129 129

FIRA 3.10

112

3.87 3.88 3.89 3.91 3.132 3.133 3.134 3.135 3.150 Inst. Iust. 3.3.4

106, 110, 114, 119 110 110 109n17 106, 115, 116, 119 117, 119 116 116, 122 119n62

37n107

Novellae constitutiones 142 122

Literary and biblical texts 4 Macc. 8:2-4 14:20 15:4-5 17:1 18:9

260 259 264 260 262

4Q Naphtali 4Q215 line 1 frr.1-3

269n7

Aelian VH 6.10 13.24

68n53 68n53

Aeschines 1.13 1.28 1.158

67n46 67n46 57n2

Aeschylus Ag. 779-86 Cho. 190-91 240

180

83 83

524-34 736-40 747-53 747-62 896-98 899 Ambrose Jac. 12.56

180 180 180 83 83, 174n24 83

261

Ammianus Marcellinus 30.7.1-3 134 30.10.5 132n29 Amphilochius Iconensis Or. de Abraham patriarcha 63-64 257, 259 Andocides 1.74

67n47

Anthologia Palatina 3.7 6.438 7.163-65 7.168

172 30n66 30n66 22

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

7.464-65 Antiphon 1 1.17

30

83 83

Apocrypha 2 Macc. 7:1 7:41

260 260

Apollodorus 1.9.21 3.5.5 3.13.8 3.15.1 3.15.3

86 172n16 86 178n32 86

Apollonius Rhodius 4.1090 (schol.)

172n16

Apophthegmata patrum 10 Apuleius Met. 2.3.1 5.14.2 10.2 Aristophanes Av. 494-95, 922-23

36 36 134n38

74n18

Eq. Schol. in 717

31n74

Lys. 747

76n27

546-48 564-65

331 177 78

Aristophanes of Byzantium fr. 295-297B 80 Aristotle Eth. Nic. 1168a20-26

181

Gen. an. 3.759b7-8

73

Hist. an. 584b1-14 585a1-2 588a8-10

77 77 77

Poet. 1453b15-24

169

Pol. 1335a13-23

161

Rh. Schol. in 1407a 2.23.11

31n74 76

ps.-Aristotle Ath. pol. 26.4 42.1 56.6-7

68, 74n17 74n17 57, 67n46

Artemidorus 1.16 5.85

32 34

Asterius Hom. 5, PG 40:236D

132

Ran. 53 53 (schol.) 1043-44

172n16 178n30 177

Augustine of Hippo Epistles 10

110n23

Thesm. 383-97 502-16

177 78

Ausonius Par. 4-5

36

332

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

Bacchylides 9.10-17

183.38

Bet ha Midrash VI, 112-13

249n39

b. Megilla 13a

249

b. Moed Katan 27b-28a

282

b. Sota 12a 12a-13a 13a 36b

240, 250 239 249 284n49

b. Taanit 2a-b

280n35

Caelius Aurelianus Morb. ac. 3.105

27n53

Cassius Dio 68.5.5 69.1.1-3 69.10.3 69.10.3a 69.20 69.20.1-5

214 222 221 221 210 223

Chariton Chaereas and Callirhoe 115 1.12.6-10 33 Claudian Carm. min. 46.14-15 47.13-15 48.1, 11-12

135 135 135

de cons. Stil. 2.375-87

136

Epith. 30 340-41

135 136

CSEL 35:1-2

133

Demosthenes 10.40 24.103-7 27.5 28.15-16 29.43 37.46 39 39.3 39.22 40 40.11 40.26-27 40.27 40.28 45.28 57.20 57.40-43 59.122

67n46 67n46 61n21 61n21 61n21 57n2 82 76n24 74 64, 82 76n24 67 82 74n18 61n21 64n37 60 143-44

ps.-Demosthenes 35.48 36.8 36.32 40.6-8 40.27 43.12 43.15 43.51 43.75 43.77 46.14 47.55-73 48.10 58.31

57n2 61n21 65 61 67n52 66n43 66 64 57n2, 62n26 66n43 64n36 62n30 65n41 66n43

Diodorus Siculus 4.9.6-7 4.44.3 4.68.2 5.83 12.14.3

80 86 85 86 84

Ecclesiastes Rabbah 7.2.3

269n8, 271n11

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

Ephrem Comm. Gen. 20.2

258

Epitome de Caesaribus 131 Euripides Alc. 304-7 304-9 309-19 315-17 319-20 377

84 89 89 84 84 84

Andr. 224-25

80n50

Antiope fr. 181-82

172

Hipp. 305-10

83

Hypsipyle F 725.272-73 F 725.267-76 F 725.310-14 F 725.314-17 F 759a.1619-23 F 752 F, 196-201 F 752h.26-28 F 754 F 754a F 754 ~202-10 F 757.831-36 F 757.840-43 F 757.844-45 F 757.881-85 F 757.886-93 F 757.910 F 757 N F 759a F 759a.673 F 759a.1591-610 F 759a.1610-11

178 178 178 178 170 182 170 183 183 178 183 183 184 183 183 183 183 182 181n34 184 184

333

Ion 109 859-922 881-86

79-80 176 176

Med. 1029-35

174n20

Melanippe Desmotis F 494.9-20 F 494.20-21 F 494.22-29

177 177 177

Melanippe Sophe F 482 F 485

176n26 176

Phoen. 353 356 1434 1527 1568

174n24 146 174n24 174n24 174n24

Supp. 920 928-24

174n20 174

Fragments: fr. 2N2 fr. 1015 N2

74n18 73

Eusebius PE 9.27.4

243

Eutropius Brev. 8.20

131

Ezekiel Exagoge fr.1-2 v. 32-38

243 248

Exodus Rabbah 1.13.20 1.26

241 237

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

334 Genesis Rabbah 81.5 82.1 82.7 82.9 82.10 84.13 92.5 93.8 93.10 97 98.20

269 273 276n25 276n25, 277n28 281, 282 277 278 279 282n42 276 276

Gregory of Nazianus Disc. 15

260, 261, 263

Ep. sui ipsius 5 Gregory of Nyssa Deit. GNO X/2:135 GNO X/2:136 Gregory of Tours VM 2.43

Historia Apollonii regis 25, RA 2-4 25, RA 8-11 25, RA 29-32 28 30, RA 4-8 31–2 Homer Iliad 9.437-84

Tyri 15 15 15 16 16 16

86

255 Odyssey 11.260-65 12.184 257 257

29

Gregory I, Pope Ep. 64 q.6

132

Herodotus 2.2 4.154-55

27n55 85

Heliodorus Aeth. 5.8.17

Epid. 3, case 12   (3, 62, 11 – 66, 11 Littré) 23 Epid. 3, case 2   (3, 108, 5 – 112, 12 Littré) 23 Epid. 3, case 14 (2nd ser.)   (3, 140, 14 – 142, 2 Littré) 23

33n84

Hippocratic Corpus Aph. 5.42 (4.456 Littré) 24n37 Epid. 1, case 4   (2, 684, 10 – 688, 8 Littré) 23 Epid. 1, case 11   (2, 708, 6 – 710, 11 Littré) 23

172n16 204n39

Homeric Hymns Ap. 3.89-92

173

Hyginus Fab. 8 8.1-5 186

85, 172n16 173 170

Hyperides fr.164

57

Athen. 17

64n36

Euxen. 6

67n46

Isaeus 2.1 2.19 3 3.30

64n36 75n23 68n54 74n18

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

3.70 3.46 4.16 5.6-7 6 6.9 6.20 6.21 7.5-7 7.6-7 7.14 7.15 7.25 7.30 8 8.1 8.6 8.20 8.31 8.32 8.43 9.27-30 10.10 11.1-5 11.41 12 12.5 12.9 757 (schol.)

74n18 57n2 64n36 66n43 65n41, 68n54 64n36 76n24 75n23 62 61 66n44 62 66 57n2 68n54 67n51 67n51 75 65 67n46 67n51 62 58, 64 64n38 66n43 65n41 63, 82 75 74n18

123 40

Isocrates 16.45

57n1

Panath. 122 Jerome Chron. 2230.6 Ep. 39.5

54.15 108.6 108.10.1

132 251 286

John Chrysostom Hom. 5.4 15.2

131 132

On the Maccabees 1 2

261, 265 262

ps.-Chrysostom In Abraham et Isaac [PG 56:539] 256-57 John of Antioch fr. 187

134

Jordanes Rom. 310

132n28

Josephus Ant. I.343-44 I.345-46

277n28 275

Ap. 2.257

Isidore of Seville Etym. 9.2.122 9.5.6

335

243

Jubilees 32:30-31 35

269 268n3

74

Lactantius Divine Institutes 1.17

131

131

Lamentations Rabbah proem 24 24

281 283n47

252n2

Libanius Or.I

253

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

336 Life of Niketas of Medikion 4-5 39

Life of Theodora of Thessalonike 4 39 Life of Theophano 4

38

Livy 1.4.6 1.4.6-7

114 27n50

Lysias 1.9-10 10.8 13.91 24.6 32 32.8 32.10 32.12-17 32.17

28n56 67 67n46 67n48 82 61 82 82 63, 65n42, 82

m. Kerithoth 1:5

25n44

Marcellinus Chron. s.a.390

134

Michael Psellos Encomium for his mother 14d 39n114 Midrash Lekach Tov on Gen. 28:7

283n47

Midrash Shmuel 11

283n47

m. Shabbat 2:6

276.25

Oribasius 15.7

34

Origen Commentary on Genesis fr. E69 277n31 Orosius 7.38.1

136n45

Ovid Met. 6.110-11 10.23

172n16 78n36

Palladius Historia Lausiaca 46

252n2

Marcus Aurelius Med. 1.17

36

Paul of Aegina 3.74

25

Menander Dys. 842

143

Paulinus of Nola Ep. 29 29.9

252n2 252

MGH: Chronica Minora I p.147 131

Pausanius 2.6.1-2 10.32.15

172n16 107

Michael Choniates Epist. 100-1

Persius 2.31-34

36

Sam. 695-9

66n43

110

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

Pesiqta de-Rav Kahana Gen. 35:8 271 Pesiqta Rabbati 3 12 Peter Chrysologus Serm. 134 Petronius Satyricon 76 Philo Cher. 50 Ebr. 61 Heres 216

283n47 271

261

107

245

337

Philostorgius Ep. 2.4

131

HE 12.3

137

Piacenza Pilgrim Pseudo-Antonini Placentini itinerarium 2.7.1-4 Pindar Nem. 8.51 10.28

183n38 183n38

Plato Tht. 149a-161a 160e (schol.) 160e-161a

59 74n18 76

Pliny the Elder NH 7.47

25n44

Pliny the Younger Pan. 6.3-5 7.1-8 83.5 83.6-8 84

210 210 215 214 214

Plutarch Quaest. conv. 5.7.4, 681f-82a

28n54

245, 250

244

Leg. 1.15 150

244 247

Mos. 1.7 1.9 1.10-12 1.14-15 1.17 1.19 1.21-23 1.33 1.158 2.103 2.209-10 2.210

246 246 246 246 247 247 247 248 250 244 244 250

Op. 100 118

244 244

Per. 37.2-5

68n53

Sol 13.23 22 23.2

59n9 67n46 170

Pollux 4.141

85

338

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

Posidippus fr.11E

59

Propertius 2.6.19-20 3.15.11-42 4.4.53-54 4.11.75-85

27n50-51 172n16 27n50 32

Pseudo-Philo Liber antiquitatum biblicarum 9.2-9 241n8 9.15-16 242 Quintilian Decl. min. 388 pr.1 388.9-10 Romanos On Abraham and Isaac ζ

35 35n96

258

Sabba Zeror Ha-Mor, Beshallah 249 Seder Olam 2

275

Sefer ha-Yashar parashat va-yeshev 82b-84a, 85a-86a

284

Seneca Helv. 19.2

36

Servius In Aen. 1.286

25n44

Severus of Antioch Hom. 52

263

SHA Ant. Pius 1.8-9

36

Hadr. 2.10

220, 222

Marc. Aur. 29

131

Sidonius Apollinaris Epist. 2.8 4.9.4 4.21.4

32 32 37

Socrates Eccl. hist. 2.37

133

Sophocles Ant. 969ff.

86

El. 1154 fr. 659 Radt

84 85

Soranus Gyn. 1.14-16 2.1-2 2.4-5 2.10 4.1 4.2 4.3.9 4.9

48 48 48 26 48 48 49 25

Sozomen Eccl. hist. 7.13 9.4.1

133 136

Stobaeus Flor. 77.7

59

Story of Maryam and her seven sons 262

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

Suda Δ451 s.v. dēmopoiētos 68n53 Suetonius Iul. 78.2

227

Ves. 3

131

Syriac verse homilies BL Add. 14616ff. 108a-29a 117a-b

254n9 258

t. Shabbat 2:10

276n25

Tacitus Agr. 6.1

127

Tanhuma Ki Teze 4

269n8, 271n11

Fragment Targum 270n9 Targum Pseudo-Jonathan Gen. 24:59 270n9 Gen. 35:8 270n9 Terence Haut. 626

78

Testament of Benjamin 1:3

277

Testament of Joseph 2:81

284n50

Thedoret Eccl. hist. 5.13

133

339

Themistius Or. 16.203D

139

Thucydides 2.45.2

174

Valerian of Abbanza Hom. 18

261, 263

Valerius Maximus 5.9.1

134n38

Venantius Fortunatus Carm. 4.26

39

Vetus Testamentum Gen. 3:16 20:12 22:2 23:1-20 24:59 25:9 30:1 35:8 35:16-18 35:19 35:19-20 37:9-11 43:30-33 48:7 44:29 49:25 49:30

250 245 255 268, 283n48 269 273 276 269 276 281 279 277 278 276 278 276 268

Ex. 1:15-21 2:1 2:2 2:10 2:10-11 2:11-12 4:16 4:24-26

238 241, 242 242 242 237, 238 237 237 238-39

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

340 6:20 7:1 22-23

240 237 254

Numb. 26:59

240n6

Deut. 34:10

237

Judg. 4:5

269n6

1 Sam. 10:2

279

1 Chr. 4:18

249

Ps. 86

273n16

Jer. 31:14 31:20

280 282n42

Amos 5:15

282n42

Virgil Aen. 1.257-96 1.407-9 1.408-9 1.415-16 1.715-19 2.620-21 2.784-89 3.339-41 4.83-85 4.150 4.327-30 4.600-6 5.262 6.546 6.684-94 6.695-98

187 190 192 191 195 190 194 197 195 204n39 196 196 204n39 204n39 191 192

6.752-853 7.472 7.510 7.805-7 8.301 8.481-82 8.581 8.626-731 9.18 9.292-98 9.405 9.486-87 9.498-502 9.641-44 10.135 10.139-81 10.353-509 10.433-36 10.507 10.789-90 10.815-20 10.833-56 10.858 11.155 11.158-59 11.508 11.540-43 11.542-43 11.570-72 11.573-80 11.648-724 11.657 11.801-4 11.816-19 11.827-31 12.58 12.83 12.142 Xenophon Lac. 1.3 Oec. 7.4-8 7.5 7.21

187 204n39 202 203 204n39 202 202 189 204n39 199 204n39 261n35 200 201 204n39 202 204 204 204n39 202 205 202 204n39 204n39 202, 205 204 202 202 27n52, 203 203 204 204n39 206 206 206 204n39 204n39 204n39

72n5

160 160 143

INDEX OF TEXTS CITED

7.24 Vect. 2.7

73

57n3

Yannai qedushta Gen. 35:9

272, 273

Yebamoth 114a

27n50

y. Horayot 2:5, 46d

284

Zosimus 4.44.2-3 4.44.2-4 4.55.1 5.27 5.28.1 5.29.8 5.30.2 5.32.1 5.37.4-5 5.38–39

341 133 133 134 136 136 137 137 136 137 137

GENERAL INDEX absence, maternal (as distinct from death), 93–96, 167–86, 189–93, 237–49, 251– 65 Admetus, see Alcestis adoption, 58–59, 63–66, 75–77, 99, 181 in the Roman imperial family, 209–13, 221–23, 232–33 Aegisthus, 84 Aelia Eudoxia, 138 Aeneas (hero), 188–207, 239, 249 Aeolus and Boeotus (sons of Melanippe and Poseidon), 80, 176 Agamemnon, 83 age, and childhood/infancy, 5, 9, 18, 30n66, 45–46, 71, 91–92, 102, 106, 113– 22, 147n14 and motherhood, 21n28, 22–23, 30– 32, 33n84, 45–46, 61, 120, 215– 20, 223 of women at marriage, 37, 39n115, 91, 101, 127–28, 160–61 Agrippina the Younger, 128, 131, 133, 138, 211 Alcestis, 84, 89–90, 103 Alexandria, 29, 108, 113, 116–17, 247– 48; see also Egypt allocare, 71n1; see also “shadow mothers”; stepmothers Amata (Aeneid), 188 Ampharete stele, 157n45 Amphion and Zethus (sons of Antiope and Zeus), 80, 172, 174–75 Andromache, 80n50, 197–99 Antiochus IV Epiphanes, 260, 262–63 Antiope (mother of Amphion and Aethus), 80, 85, 167, 169–75, 178n29, 181, 184–85 (Marcus Aurelius) Antoninus, see Caracalla Antoninus Pius, 36, 210, 223 Apollonius of Tyre, 15–17

Arcadius (Byzantine emperor), 129, 134– 35, 138 Ascanius (Aeneid), 193–208 Athena, 80, 239, 244–45 Athens, 4, 6, 11–12, 28n56, 38, 57–69, 71–88, 90, 143–65, 168–86 aunts, 36–37, 98–99; see also uncles Benjamin (son of Jacob), 268, 275–79, 286 bigamy, 132 Bilhah, 267, 277–78 bioarchaeology, 18, 27, 38, 44–53, 120 Boeotus, see Aeolus and Boeotus breastfeeding, see also weaning; wetnursing alternatives to, 37–38 grandmothers and, 34–35, 38–39 male, 31–32 maternal, 21, 27–32, 38–39, 49, 79, 83, 94, 113–14, 149, 174, 180, 182, 276 non-maternal, 19, 28, 31–32, 78–80, 147 see also wetnursing Byzantine era, 31, 37–9, 108n12, 111, 122–23, 127–39, 251–65, 267–86 Camilla (Aeneid), 27n52, 202–7 Caracalla, 131 census data, 5, 12, 58, 93–94, 97, 99, 100– 3, 108 Ceres, and Roman imperial portraiture, 226–30 Chaereas and Callirhoe, 33, 115 childbirth, 4, 10, 17, 20–21, 28, 43–53, 84, 89n2, 172–5, 223, 272 age of mother at, see age and motherhood by caesarian section, 25 death in, see death, maternal; infant mortality childlessness, 7, 32, 209–33, 246, 272n14, 276, 282

344

GENERAL INDEX

Christianity, 7–8, 10, 17, 18n12, 29–30, 38, 40, 123, 131, 133, 243, 251–65, 274, 285–86 citizenship, 4, 57–62, 65–68, 72–75, 86n68, 114–15, 117, 144, 152–53, 157, 169, 173, 175, 177n27, 185–86 Cleopatra, 128 Clytemnestra, 83–84, 180–81 concubines, 74–75, 78–79, 85–87, 116–17, 131, 144, 256; see also prostitutes Constantius III, 129 comedy, Greek, 78, 170, 176–77 Creusa (Aeneid), 188, 193–99, 204, 207 Creusa (mother of Ion), 80, 169, 176 daughters, 12, 16, 23, 32, 59n9, 60, 65, 84–87, 95, 101–2, 113, 136–38, 143– 44, 147, 150, 162, 170–71, 221 and stepmothers, 63, 82, 85, 89n1, 98, 130–31, 137 infanticide and exposure of, 77 Pharaoh’s (Exodus), 238, 242, 245, 249 death, see death, maternal; infant mortality; see also bioarchaeology; s.v. “funerary” death, maternal, see also widowers/widowed fathers after childbirth, 19–20, 23–24, 43–53, 93 as biocultural construction, 45 definition of, 91–92 impact on child survival, 3, 9, 17–41, 71–80, 92 in childbirth, 15, 17–26, 28–32, 34n89, 37–40, 43–53, 72, 92–93, 135, 162, 275–76, 278, 280–82, death, paternal, see fatherlessness Deborah (nurse of Rebekah), 269–75, 277n30, 283 Demeter, 182 demography, 2–3, 5, 8–9, 12, 19–20, 58, 127, 212 Dido, 190, 195–97, 201 disability, 10, 48 Dionysian mythology, 177, 181 Dirce, 85, 170, 181 divorce, 3, 9, 60, 62, 68, 72, 75n20, 79, 93–95, 99, 100–3, 131, 137, 214, 240– 42, 265

Domitia Longina, 218–19 fig. 5 dowries, 62, 64–65, 85–87, 94, 96–98, 113 Egypt, 5, 12, 20, 22, 49, 58, 89–103, 105–24, 149n24, 182, 240–43, 246– 49, 255, 277–78, 284, 286 Electra, 83–84 embryotomy, 25, 46–50 Esau, 268, 271 Euneus (son of Hypsipyle), 181–82, 184 eunuchs, 122 Europa (mythology), 178–79 Euryalus, unnamed mother of, 188–201, 261 Eurycleia (nurse to Odysseus), 182 Evander (Aeneid), 202 exposure, infant, 26, 59, 71–74, 77–80, 113–14, 167–76, 237, 242, 246, 249; see also infanticide fatherlessness, 10, 57–63, 71, 73, 82, 91, 93, 127, 129, 132; see also widows/ widowhood Fausta (wife of Constantine I), 131 Faustina the Younger, 215–16, 232 Felicitas (Christian martyr), 260n32, 265 fertility, 86, 120, 214, 223–26, 281–82; see also childlessness Flavia Galla (Byzantine empress), 129 Flavian dynasty, 218–20 Fulvia (wife of Marcus Antonius), 128 funerary archaeology, 38, 148; see also bioarchaeology funerary epigrams, 18–19, 22, 30, 39 funerary monuments, 107, 161–65 figs. 9– 11 funerary inscriptions, 18, 21–22, 29–36, 39–40, 107–9, 114–15, 130, 214 Galen, 24 Galla Placidia, 129, 132–38 gender, 17, 71–73, 139 143, 161, 168, 171, 187–88, 200–5, 214, 218, 229n51, 239, 241 preference and infanticide, 71–72, 77 grandfathers, 31, 36–37, 65, 82, 136 grandmothers, 19n15, 33–39, 101, 157 grief, see mourning

GENERAL INDEX

Gratian (emperor), 129, 132–35, 138 guardians (legal), 57, 60–61, 73, 82–83, 135, 137–38, 185 Hadrian, 37, 209–11, 217, 221–23, 229, 260n32 Hera, 80–81 Hercules/Heracles, 80–81 Hippocratic corpus, 23–24 Hippolytus (mythology), 83, 86 Hippothoön (son of Alope and Poseidon), 80 Honorius (Byzantine emperor), 129, 135– 38 Hypsipyle (mythology), 167, 169–71, 178– 84 illegitimacy, see legitimacy/illegitimacy infant mortality, 4, 9, 18–21, 27n51, 29, 46–50, 52, 71–81, 92, 160–61, 182–83 and naming, 74–75, 77 infanticide, 17, 26, 72, 76–77, 169, 180, 196; see also embryotomy, exposure inheritance, 9, 63–69, 72–78, 82–83, 96–100, 111, 113, 130–31, 138, 175, 211–12, 215, 233, 245 Ion (son of Creusa and Apollo), 80, 169n8, 171n15, 176, 181, 185 Isaac, 8, 254–64, 268–69, 271, 275 Jacob, 260, 268–82, 285–86 Jason (argonaut), 184 Jerome, St., 132, 251–52, 265, 286 Jewish texts, 22, 25, 27n50, 237–86 Joseph (son of Jacob), 249, 276–78, 281n42, 284 Julio-Claudian dynasty, 128, 209, 211, 218–19, 232; see also Agrippina the Younger; Livia Drusilla Justina (Byzantine empress), 129 Karwah, Salome, 43 kyrios (legal), see patriarchy Lausus (Aeneid), 202–7 Lavinia (Aeneid), 188, 198 law and divorce, 93–94

345

and motherless children, 57–69, 73–74, 79, 95–96 and status of women, 37, 58, 75, 129– 30, 170, 186 and unborn children, 25 Athenian, 57–69, 173, 175 canon, 132 Gortyn code, 79 Justinianic code, 37, 94n21, 122 Roman, 93, 96, 111, 119, 131 Solonic code, 59n9, 64n36, 170 legitimacy/illegitimacy (familial), 59–60, 63, 67–68, 74–78, 81, 87, 143–44, 169–75, 185; see also citizenship; inheritance Leto (mythology), 173–74 Livia Drusilla, 131, 211, 215–19, 223n37, 225–27 figs. 6–8, 229–30 Lucius Verus, 223 Magnus Maximus, 133 Marcia Euphemia, 129 Marcian, 129 Marcus Aurelius, 36, 131, 209–10, 223 marriage, 5, 12, 16, 20, 22, 31, 33, 37, 58–67, 82n54, 84–88, 89–103, 127– 39, 144n3, 154, 160–61, 165, 169– 71, 209–33, 240, 246, 251; see also divorce; age, of women at marriage remarriage, 3, 5, 9, 61, 65, 68, 72, 82, 85, 87, 90–91, 93–95, 100–3, 128, 130–32, 241 see also stepfathers, stepmothers martyrdom, 255, 260–65 Mary, the Virgin, 40, 286 maternity, see motherhood Matidia Minor, 216, 221 matricide, 67 Medea, 169, 180 medicine abortion, 79 antenatal, 23–26, 29n61, 44–53, 276n25 and childbirth, 17, 44–53, 276n25 and early marriage, 161 Melania the Elder, St., 251–52, 262 Melania the Younger, 137n48, 252n2 Melanippe (mother of Aeolus and Boethus), 80, 167, 169–70, 175–77, 181, 184–85 Merovingian era, 37–39

346

GENERAL INDEX

Michael Psellos, 39 midwives, 15, 22, 26, 48, 76, 162, 238, 250; see also nurses milk, see also breastfeeding; weaning; wetnursing animal, 27–29, 203 maternal, 34–36, 38, 40, 49, 119, 180, 277 Miriam (sister of Moses), 238–41, 246 miscarriage, 24n39 misogyny, 72, 81, 127, 138, 176–77, 181 mortality, see also s.v. “funerary” maternal, see death, maternal infant, see infant mortality priority of infant or maternal, 25 Moses, 7, 114n39, 237–50 motherhood historiography of, 1-3 as cultural concept, 146–47, 188 and social values, 144–65, 169–75, 179–80, 184–86, 198, 209–33 ideals of contravened, 260–63 mothers-in-law, 96, 127, 157, 283 and maternal stress, 20 mourning household, 161–65 personal, 16, 22, 35, 39–40, 105, 161– 65, 178–84, 188, 192–93, 197–202, 255, 261 public, 134, 221 religious, 8, 205, 261, 268–85 naming, see infant mortality and naming neglect, 60, 67, 71–73, 77, 81–88, 95–96, 182–83, 251–52 Neleus, see Pelias and Neleus neonates, 26, 44, 49–50, 71–72, 80, 87; see also infant mortality, infanticide Nerva, 209–10, 213 nurses, 12, 15–16, 62, 83, 145, 150, 154– 58, 162, 180–83, 193n23, 238, 242, 269–74; see also wetnursing “obstetric dilemma” hypothesis, 44–45 Octavia (sister of Augustus), 128 Odysseus, 239 Oedipus, 80, 248

Opheltes (son of Lycurgus), 170, 178, 182– 85 Orestes, 83–84, 180 Orpheus, 181 Pallas (Aeneid), 202, 204–5, 207 patriarchy, 2, 4, 9, 11, 58–69, 74, 90–91, 186, 238 Hebrew, 254–59, 272, 282 Paula (Christian ascetic), 251–52, 286 Pelias and Neleus (sons of Tyro and Poseidon), 80 Periclean citizenship reforms, 67–68, 74, 144, 174–75 Phaedra, 83, 86, 177 Phineus (mythical Thracian king), 86–87 Phoenix (tutor of Achilles), 86 Pompeia Plotina, 211–23 figs. 1–4, 232–33 postpartum care, see medicine, antenatal postpartum depression, 10 pregnancy, 10, 15, 20–24, 32, 37, 44–53, 62, 78, 91–92, 160, 170, 175, 241, 250, 264n45; see also childbirth Procris (mythology), 179 prostitutes, 29n90, 75, 79, 95, 144; see also concubines Pulcheria (empress), 129 Rachel of Mainz, 261n32 Rachel (wife of Jacob), 267–86 rape, 6, 80, 167–77 Rebekah (wife of Isaac), 267–75, 283 rites funerary/mourning, 58, 67, 152, 205 initiation, 207 of passage, 44, 46 Romulus and Remus 27, 80, 114, 239 Sarah (wife of Abraham), 245, 250, 254– 68, 272n14, 283 Serena (niece of Theodosius I and wife of Stilicho), 129, 135–38 slaves/slavery, 1–12, passim, 143–47, 219, 224, 248; see also wetnursing as nurses, 29, 32–35, 101, 143–65, 170, 178–79, 183, child, 9, 33–34, 59, 105–25

GENERAL INDEX

maternal absence and, 10, 30, 33, 97– 98, 105–25 modern-era, 105, 124–25 sale/transfer of, 10, 29, 35, 100, 105– 25, 265, 281 sexual, 116–17, 121–22 slave-breeding, 111–12, 120 stepfathers, 61, 93, 129–30, 135, 137, 139 stepmothers, 3–12 passim, 16, 33, 34n89, 59–69, 71–72, 89–103, 127–39 181– 82 familial tension and, 17, 96–99 fictional/mythological, 72, 80–81, 194–97 legal status of, 129–30 and negative stereotypes, 72, 81–87, 127, 130–39 Stilicho, 135–38 surrogate mothers, see stepmothers Tennes (eponymous hero of Tenedos), 86 Theodora of Thessalonice, St., 39 Theodosian dynasty, 127–39 Theophano (empress), 38 Theseus, 86 tragedy, Greek, 79, 80, 84–86, 89–90, 167–86 Trajan, 209–17, 220–22 Trimalchio, 107 twins, 21, 23, 30, 46, 50, 77, 80, 95, 175, 239 Tyro (mother of Pelias and Neleus), 85

347

Ulpia Marciana, 215–21 uncles, 61, 82, 85, 99–100, 135; see also aunts Valentinian I, 128, 132, 134 Valentinian I, 132–34 Valentinian III, 128 Venus, 189–95, 207, 239, 249 Genetrix, 227–31 Vibia Sabina, 211–12, 220–23, 228 figs. 9–10, 230 fig. 11, 232 virginity, 37, 136, 170–71, 176, 206 weaning, 9, 18, 28, 37–39, 92, 182 wetnursing, 9, 17, 19, 21, 27–35, 38–39, 71, 80, 92–93, 113–14, 119, 147, 182, 270, 277–28 widowers/widowed fathers, 32, 89–103, 278–79 and passim; see also death, maternal widows/widowhood, 57, 61–62, 79n44, 121, 123, 130–32, 157, 260; see also fatherlessness legal protection of, 67–69 Yochebed (mother of Moses), 238–42, 246, 249–50 Zethus, see Amphion and Zethus Zeus, 80–81, 170, 172, 177, 179, 244 Zipporah (wife of Moses), 239

Interdisciplinary Studies in Ancient Culture and Religion  1. Leonard V. Rutgers, ed., What Athens Has to Do with Jerusalem. Essays on Classical, Jewish, and Early Christian Art and Archaeology in Honor of Gideon Foerster (Leuven: Peeters, 2002).  2. Karin Zetterholm, Portrait of a Villain. Laban the Aramean in Rabbinic Literature (Leuven: Peeters, 2002).  3. Richard Kalmin and Seth Schwartz, eds., Jewish Culture and Society under the Christian Roman Empire (Leuven: Peeters, 2002).  4. Jodi Magness, Debating Qumran. Collected Essays on Its Archaeology (Leuven: Peeters, 2004).  5. Stephen Spencer, The Parting of the Ways: The Roman Church as a Case Study (Leuven: Peeters, 2004).  6. Miriam Pucci Ben Zeev, Diaspora Judaism in Turmoil, 116-117 CE: Ancient Sources and Modern Insights (Leuven: Peeters, 2005).  7. Mireille Hadas-Lebel, Jerusalem against Rome (Leuven: Peeters, 2006).  8. Amos Kloner and Boaz Zissu, The Necropolis of Jerusalem in the Second Temple Period (Leuven: Peeters, 2007).  9. Yaron Z. Eliav, Elise A. Friedland and Sharon Herbert, The Sculptural Environment of the Roman Near East. Reflections on Culture, Ideology, and Power (Leuven: Peeters, 2008). 10. Claudia Sagona, Looking for Mithra in Malta (Leuven: Peeters, 2009). 11. Alexander Evers, Church, Cities, and People. A Study of the Plebs in the Church and Cities of Roman Africa in Late Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). 12. Stephen Mitchell and Peter Van Nuffelen, eds., Monotheism between Pagans and Christians in Late Antiquity (Leuven: Peeters, 2010). 13. Simon C. Mimouni, Early Judaeo-Christianity. Historical Essays (Leuven: Peeters, 2012). 14. Ine Jacobs, ed., Production and Prosperity in the Theodosian Period (Leuven: Peeters, 2014). 15. Christian Laes, Katarina Mustakallio and Ville Vuolanto, eds., Children and Family in Late Antiquity. Life, Death and Interaction (Leuven: Peeters, 2015). 16. Saskia Stevens, City Boundaries and Urban Development in Roman Italy (Leuven: Peeters, 2017).

17. Rolf Strootman, The Birdcage of the Muses. Patronage of the Arts and Sciences at the Ptolemaic Imperial Court, 305-222 BCE (Leuven: Peeters, 2017). 18. Pierliugi Lanfranchi and Joseph Verheyden, eds., Jews and Christians in Antiquity. A Regional Perspective (Leuven: Peeters, 2018). 19. Cristina Pimentel and Nuno Simões Rodrigues, eds., Violence in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Leuven: Peeters, 2018). 20. Mark Van Strydonck, Jeroen Reyniers and Fanny Van Cleven, eds., Relics @ the Lab: An Analytical Approach to the Study of Relics (Leuven: Peeters, 2018). 21. Katell Berthelot and Jonathan Price, eds., In the Crucible of Empire: The Impact of Roman Citizenship upon Greeks, Jews and Christians (Leuven: Peeters, 2019).

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