4 of 5 stars

It was great to read about women in Greece and Rome other than the normal ‘she was the empress, she was a manipulative evil one’, ‘she was a prostitute’, ‘she was perfect, bore lots of children, did the housework and then died early’, etc. Sarah Pomeroy delves into woman at all levels, as best as the data will allow. A really great read that was a solid 4 stars until I hit the last chapter, The Role of Woman in the Religion of the Romans, where it jumped to 5 stars. The section “Sovereign Isis: The Loving Mother” in that chapter was excellent but the entire chapter was powerful.

Chapter 6, Images of Women in the Literature of Classical Athens was wonderful. Her analysis of grammar in literature was so cool (pp. 99-100) as was an intriguing thought on the stronger role of brother-sister bond vs. the wife to husband/father bonds (p. 101). I’m also happy that she likes Euripides since I feel his plays are better on many levels compared to Sophocles and Aeschylus (pp. 107-8, 111).

Chapter 8, The Roman Matron of the Late Republic and Early Empire also contains great data and analysis. I was fuming throughout this chapter and cheering for the small and large acts of standing up and talking back against the powerful men in charge.

Her closing line of the book, in the epilogue, is just an airhorn blast to demand we don’t stop the work she’s started: “And this rationalized confinement of women to the domestic sphere, as well as the systematization of anti-female thought by poets and philosophers, are two of the most devastating creations in the classical legacy” (p. 230)