Public and private
Authors
Mantas, KonstantinosPublisher
Universidad de Alcalá de Henares. Servicio de Publicaciones
Date
2000Bibliographic citation
Polis : revista de ideas y formas políticas de la antigüedad clásica, 2000, n.12, p. 181-228. ISSN 1130-0728
Document type
info:eu-repo/semantics/article
Access rights
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Abstract
In this article we will try to give an answer to the question of changes in the
visibility of women in the public sphere. The fact that élite women played a
more energetic role in public life firom the late Hellenistic epoch on has been
established by our research on the available sources (mostly epigraphical) in
some regions of the Greco-Roman East, in particular W. Asia Minor (lonia and
Caria) and in Aegean islands such as Lesbos, Chios, Samos, Teños, Syros and
Paros.
Nevertheless, the inscriptions, being brief summaries of the decrees which
were put in the archives, fail to comment on the issue of the honorand's actual
fiílfilment of the office, though sometimes they give indirect information on
the lady's presence, eg in the stadium. But even if the female raagistrates were
visible, did that have any effect on other women? Did the free, or at least the
citizen women in the cities of the Román East enjoy more freedom in their
raovement outside the oikos? Could women move freely in the agora, the theatre
or any other public place? And if they did so, what about their mingling with
men and regulations about their clothes and personal behaviour? Literature is
important on that subject because it provides indirect information on all the
aspects of the problem, but the archaising style and subject matter of many literary works, the hallmark of the Second Sophistic, throws doubt on their
relevance to the era in which our research is located. Notwithstanding those
problems, the combination of literary texts and inscriptions sheds some light
on the obscure subject of women's presence in the pubUc sphere.
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Files | Size | Format |
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Public and Private.pdf | 2.249Mb |
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