Women's religious office

What is attested

Women held named, defined religious offices in Greek and Roman cities, and the evidence for this is documentary rather than anecdotal. Inscriptions record priestesses by name, with the deity served, the term of service, the honours voted to them and sometimes the buildings they paid for. The priesthood of Athena Polias at Athens, drawn from the genos of the Eteoboutadai and held for life, is the best-known Greek case. Lysimache, who held it, is attested both by a statue base from the Acropolis (IG II² 3453) and by Pliny the Elder, who records that the sculptor Demetrios made a portrait of a priestess of Athena who served sixty-four years. The stone itself carries the sixty-four years, so the convergence of an inscribed base and an independent literary notice on the same office and the same span of service is real — the kind of corroboration this subject rarely gets. The base is a private family dedication, probably made by her son, rather than a civic honour.

At Rome the Vestals are documented in legal as well as antiquarian terms, which is unusual for any priesthood and rare for a female one. Aulus Gellius, writing in the second century AD and citing the jurist Antistius Labeo as the most careful authority on the subject, sets out the requirements: a candidate must be no younger than six and no older than ten, must have both parents living, must be free of any speech or hearing impediment or other bodily defect, and must not have been released from paternal authority. On being taken by the pontifex maximus and conducted to the House of Vesta, she passed out of her father's power without the formalities of emancipation and without loss of civil status, and acquired the capacity to make a will. This is a technical description of legal consequences, and it establishes something that the rhetoric about Roman women's incapacity obscures: a religious office could alter a woman's civil position.

The same office carried a lethal sanction. A Vestal convicted of incestum was, according to the procedure Plutarch describes, stripped of her insignia, placed in a closed litter and carried through the Forum with the observances of a funeral to a site near the Colline gate, and put into an underground chamber furnished with a couch, a lamp and token quantities of food, which was then closed over. Plutarch is writing at the turn of the first and second centuries AD about a procedure of much greater antiquity, and his account is shaped by the paradox he is explaining — how to execute a consecrated person without shedding her blood and how to place her in the ground without burying anyone inside the city. It should be read as a Greek intellectual's account of a Roman institution, not as a protocol.

Office-holding by women is also visible in the physical fabric of cities. At Pompeii, Eumachia, described in her own inscriptions as a public priestess, paid for a large building on the east side of the forum, and a statue of her was set up there by the fullers. In Hellenistic Asia Minor, priesthoods including women's were in some cities sold, which means they appear in civic financial documents. Imperial-cult priesthoods held by women — flaminicae and their Greek equivalents — are attested epigraphically across the western and eastern provinces. In every case the evidence is of a public role, publicly recorded, with money and civic honour attached.

Against all this stands a category of ritual from which men were excluded and about which, in consequence, the surviving reporting is systematically compromised. The Athenian Thesmophoria, in honour of Demeter and Kore, was celebrated by citizen wives; Isaios can argue in a fourth-century inheritance case that his client's mother must have been a legitimate citizen daughter because the women of the deme chose her, together with the wife of another named man, to preside over the festival and perform the rites with her. That is excellent evidence — a contemporary forensic speech using festival office as proof of status before an Athenian jury who would know whether the argument was plausible. It tells us that the office existed, that in the deme at issue in that case the demesmen's wives are said to have chosen her, that the role was prestigious, and that it was usable in court as a marker of citizen status. Whether that manner of choosing reflects a general Attic procedure is not recoverable from a single speech delivered to persuade. The speech tells us nothing whatever about what was done at the festival. Herodotus, discussing the rite's supposed transmission, explicitly declines to describe it. The ritual content of the Thesmophoria was withheld from the record by the people who knew it.

How the rite worked

Routes into office varied and are documented separately for each. Some Greek priesthoods were hereditary within a genos and held for life, as with Athena Polias at Athens. Some were allotted or elected annually. Some, in Hellenistic cities of Asia Minor, were sold, with the purchase price, the perquisites and the exemptions written into the sale document. Roman public priestesses could be appointed by decree of the local council. The Vestals were taken by the pontifex maximus from a pool of eligible girls under the criteria Gellius records, and served a term conventionally given as thirty years. Requirements of bodily wholeness, parentage and legitimate citizen birth recur across these systems.

The duties that can be documented are concrete: custody of the temple and its keys, care of the cult image and its clothing, supervision of sacrifice, receipt of the priestly portion of the victim, administration of the sanctuary's property, and appearance at civic ceremonies. The temple key is prominent enough as an emblem that women are shown holding an oversized key on grave monuments — the visual shorthand for kleidouchos, key-holder. Perquisites were specified in writing: sacred laws list which cuts of a sacrificial animal, which skins, and which cash payments went to the priestess.

Payment and expenditure flowed both ways. A priestess received fees and portions; she was also expected, in the Hellenistic and Roman periods especially, to spend on the community — funding sacrifices, feasts, repairs and buildings — and to be honoured for it with decrees, crowns and statues. Eumachia's building at Pompeii is the visible end of this exchange. The honorific inscription is therefore a genre with its own conventions, and it records what the community chose to praise rather than what the officeholder actually did day to day.

For the women-only festivals the working detail is exactly what is missing, and the sources that appear to supply it are late or generically unsuitable. What looks like the fullest account of the Thesmophoria's ritual mechanics — the pits, the piglets, the women who went down after them — is not an Athenian document at all. It is a scholion on Lucian's Dialogues of the Courtesans, preserved in a Vatican manuscript, written many centuries after the classical festival, with ultimate sources unknown, and delivering its ritual description interleaved with a myth about a swineherd swallowed up with his pigs at Persephone's abduction. What the scholiast says is set out in this brief as what he says, and nowhere as procedure. He is the reason the piglets appear in every modern account of the Thesmophoria, and he is not classical Athenian evidence.