Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth

Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth Also available from Bloomsbury Dancing for Hathor, Carolyn Graves-Brown Greek and Roman Sexualities: A Sourcebook, Jennifer Larson Women in Ancient Greece, Bonnie MacLachlan Women in Greek Myth, Mary R. Lefkowitz Women’s Life in Greece and Rome, Mary R. Lefkowitz Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth Ariadne Konstantinou Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc LON DON • OX F O R D • N E W YO R K • N E W D E L H I • SY DN EY Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square 1385 Broadway London New York WC1B 3DP NY 10018 UK USA www.bloomsbury.com BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2018 © Ariadne Konstantinou, 2018 Ariadne Konstantinou has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Author of this work. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. ISBN: HB: ePDF: ePub: 978-1-4742-5676-6 978-1-4742-5678-0 978-1-4742-5677-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Konstantinou, Ariadne, author. Title: Female mobility and gendered space in ancient Greek myth / Ariadne Konstantinou. Description: London : Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2017031926 | ISBN 9781474256766 (hardback) | ISBN 9781474256773 (epub) Subjects: LCSH: Greek literature–History and criticism. | Women in literature. | Goddesses, Greek, in literature. | Goddesses, Greek. | Mythology, Greek. Classification: LCC PA3015.W65 K66 2018 | DDC 880.9/3522–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017031926 Cover design: Terry Woodley Cover image © RMN-Grand Palais (musée du Louvre)/Franck Raux Typeset by Integra Software Services Pvt. Ltd. To find out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com. Here you will find extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters. ‫לשלומי‬ Contents List of figures Acknowledgements Note Introduction viii ix xi 1 Part 1 Goddesses on the move 21 1 To move or not to move: The mobility of virgin goddesses 27 2 The mobility of Olympian wives and mothers 49 Part 2 Heroines on the move 79 3 Away from the paternal hearth: Mobile heroines in Greek tragedy 81 4 Female mobility and gendered spaces between myth and ritual 113 5 From female mobility to gendered spaces: ‘Glass walls’ and the limits of mythic imagination 145 Conclusion References Index 155 159 183 List of figures 1 2 3 Map of Greece. The wedding of Peleus and Thetis, detail. Attic black-figure dinos, signed by Sophilos, London, British Museum 1971.11-1.1. © Trustees of the British Museum. The rape of Persephone, detail. Wall painting at the ‘Tomb of Persephone’, Vergina. © Art Collection 2/Alamy Stock Photo. xiii 31 59 Acknowledgements This book grew out of my doctoral dissertation, submitted to the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2013, and written with the generous support of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation and Hebrew University’s Humanities PhD Honours Program (‘President’s Fellowship’). I am grateful to Deborah Gera for her continuous teaching, close supervision and great patience during that time. Since then, the book’s content has been substantially reorganized, revised and expanded. I have been fortunate to obtain post-doctoral fellowships at the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University and Bar Ilan University, which allowed me to revise the material and prepare it for publication. Andrea Rotstein served as sponsor during a postdoctoral year at Tel Aviv University; her generosity and sincere interest in my work were indispensable. I also benefited from the advice and support of several colleagues and friends. Early on, Rachel Zelnick-Abramovitz shared over coffee with me much useful advice on how to revise the material towards publication and made many helpful suggestions at the crucial stage of preparing the book proposal. She was also the one to recommend Bloomsbury Academic and I am extremely thankful to her for helping me find the most appropriate home for my book. I am deeply grateful to Margalit Finkelberg for her invaluable comments on several chapters of the book, for her interest in my work and progress, and for her generous guidance and encouragement on all things academic, way beyond the book. Chloe Balla provided constant support and advice, always a phone call or email away, and always ready to read and criticise my work with much love and skill. I am also thankful to Daniela Dueck, Alexandra Trachsel and Jonathan Cahana, who each read and commented on a chapter of the book, and to Talia Trainin and Su Schachter who helped with my English. I would also like to thank Alice Wright and her colleagues at Bloomsbury Academic for their professionalism and care during the long process of turning a manuscript into a book. Clara Herberg’s guidance and assistance at the final stages was instrumental. Of course, I am the only one responsible for the outcome. x Acknowledgements Some of the material on Hestia in Chapter 2 has been previously published in my 2016 article ‘Hestia and Eos: Mapping Female Mobility and Sexuality in Greek Mythic Thought’, American Journal of Philology, 137: 1–24, while certain ideas on maenads discussed in Chapter 4 also appear in my article ‘“To the Mountain”: The Ritual Space of Maenadism in the Athenian Imaginary’, in W. Friese, S. Handberg and T. M. Kristensen (eds), Ascending and Descending the Acropolis: Sacred Travel in Ancient Attica and its Borderland, Aarhus: Aarhus University Press. My father Vasilis read the whole manuscript in the role of a general (but, alas, non-objective) reader, and my siblings Anna and Alexander and their families always had a word of encouragement at hard times. My father and his partner Dorilea Ioakimidou have been loving and supportive in every possible way, and for two summers in Thessaloniki created the perfect conditions which allowed me to focus on my work. My mother Ilana passed away shortly after I narrowed down the topic of the dissertation more than ten years ago, so we only had the briefest chance to talk about it. I miss her advice and unique perspective on things every day. I would never have been able to complete this book and the dissertation it grew out of without the love and support of my spouse Shlomi Peled, who constantly balances me by showing me the half-full glass in life and always encourages me to aim higher. Raising our children Daphne and David is hard work and endless joy for us. There are no words to express my love and gratitude and so this book is dedicated to him. Note Unless otherwise noted, the quoted Greek texts are from the most recent edition of the Oxford Classical Texts series and the translations are mine. Translations aim at clarity rather than elegance. References to Classical texts follow the abbreviations of S. Hornblower, A. Spawforth and E. Eidinow, eds (2012), The Oxford Classical Dictionary, 4th edition, Oxford: Oxford University Press. Transliteration of Greek names is a problem many classicists encounter, often suggesting idiosyncratic solutions. I opted to write the more common names in their more familiar Latinized forms, and have kept stricter transliteration rules for what I thought were more uncommon names. Bosporus MACEDONIA THRACE Amphipolis Vergina CHALCIDICE Propontis Samothrace Hellespont Imbros Mt. Olympus PIERIA Lemnos Troy THESSALY Lesbos Aegean Sea AEOLIS EU Delphi BO BO EO TIA Thebes Corinth ELIS Olympia Argos ARCADIA Sparta Ionian Sea EA Chalkis LYDIA IONIA ATTICA Athens Brauron Thorikos Eleusis Klaros Delos CY CLA Seriphos Naxos DE S Sea of Crete Crete 0 0 50 50 100 miles 100 kilometres Figure 1 Map of Greece. Miletus CARIA Halicarnassus Rhodes Introduction A few years ago, I happened to see from the balcony of our apartment at the heart of cosmopolitan Tel Aviv people dancing in the streets during the Jewish festivity of Simchat Torah. The holiday celebrates the end of the one-year cycle of Torah reading and marks the beginning of the new cycle. The tradition of Hakafot, during which the Torah scrolls are taken out of the ark and carried around the synagogue seven times, often also spills over to dancing in the nearby streets. This, of course, was not the first time I had witnessed religious celebrations in the streets: growing up in Greece, I had plenty of opportunities to watch or participate in religious processions. What was strikingly different on this specific occasion was my perspective. The balcony of our second-floor apartment opens up into a small street, both close enough for every detail to be visible, yet distant enough to yield a general impression. This heightened viewpoint is somewhat different from that of an onlooker standing at street level while the celebrants pass by. Rather than the festive atmosphere of this happy celebration, what caught my attention was the realization that the very familiar, yet public area of the small street just outside my apartment building temporarily metamorphosed into a ritual space. Not only was all traffic suspended to give way to the procession, but the ritual space was also divided by gender, seeming to follow the segregation still prevalent in the majority of Orthodox synagogues. The men, all dressed in festive white shirts, led the procession, singing and dancing around the Torah scrolls, while the women and children trailed at the back, chatting and taking care of the younger children with strollers.1 Whoever has partaken in or witnessed this or similar processions might find nothing striking in this description; on the contrary, it even verges on the banal. And yet, it evoked in me at the time the realization that my particular 2 Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth perspective on this procession might serve as an apt equivalent to imagining gendered spaces in ancient Greek contexts, be it within ritual contexts or beyond them. The Simchat Torah procession outside my home revealed to me how a public and familiar location may momentarily become a ritual space. My own standing at the window looking out resembled, for a moment, my scholarly work on the ancient Greek material of my study – close enough and far removed at the same time. The gender segregation observed in the festivity of the congregation is virtually non-existent in the secular modern life of Tel Aviv, yet it felt as though there were a huge ‘glass wall’ separating male and female celebrants and, though invisible to me, everyone partaking in the procession was familiar enough with the tradition and seemed content to preserve it. The incongruous (to my eyes) gender segregation in a public space and the huge ‘glass wall’ disappeared the moment the celebrants faded away at the end of the street. They probably returned to their synagogue and continued their celebrations, while our small and familiar side street reverted to its dull existence of hosting cars and pedestrians in the busy city centre. I return to this idea of ‘glass walls’ in Chapter 5, a metaphor coined by feminists to describe the invisible barriers that prevent the advancement of women and other minorities at work. It is used in this context as a constructive metaphor through which to think about the limits of female mobility in ancient Greek mythic thought. This personal anecdote does not imply that gendered spaces of our times, within ritual contexts and beyond them, operate in the same manner as those from classical antiquity. This scene, nevertheless, compelled me to reconsider my own standpoint towards the topic of my study. Since then, I often revisit in my thoughts that instantiation of gendered spaces and the temporary metamorphosis of public space into ritual and, in this case, also gendered space. At the same time, I have since recognized many gendered spaces all around me or have even come to re-evaluate some past experiences of gendered spaces. This book focuses on female mobility and gendered spaces in ancient Greece and, specifically, in ancient Greek myth. Whereas I once thought that it was perhaps the asymmetry of gender relations in modern Greece that triggered my interest in this topic in the first place, there is no doubt that the intersection of gender and space has become in recent decades a flourishing field of study, with gender often being regarded as inscribed in the production of spaces. Introduction 3 Female mobility and gendered spaces are thus a constructive lens through which to study the asymmetry of power between genders, in a way that crosses cultural and historical boundaries. Just as feminist geographers study society and space through the lenses of feminist thought, seeking to uncover regimes of power in everyday life,2 this book aims to provide an analogous perspective on ancient Greece and thus contribute to our understanding of ancient Greek cultural history. Nonetheless, the discussion in what follows is twice removed from the object of study of feminist geographers. It is detached in time, since the focus of the book is on ancient Greece, with all the implications related to studying past rather than present times. It is also detached from actual reality or lived experience, because it primarily focuses on myth. Before plunging into the deep waters of Greek myth, and into the complexities and methodological caveats of working through myth, I wish to open with some remarks on the perspective of the book on the topic of women and space in ancient Greece. Perspectives on women and space in ancient Greece There are, at least, two major social phenomena in antiquity which make it difficult for some contemporary classicists (and possibly for social historians in particular) to feel the same reverence and adoration for Greek civilization that many of the previous generations experienced: slavery and the status of women. It is hard to ignore that the same culture and society which produced works of literature, theatre, history, science and philosophy that stand at the foundations of what is commonly named ‘western civilization’ is also a society heavily based on slavery and one in which women were silenced and held little or no public role.3 Classicists seem to respond differently to this ethical problem. Regarding ancient women, feminist classicists have sometimes been categorized as either pessimists or optimists, depending on their attitude to and epistemological view on such issues (Richlin 1993; Rabinowitz 2004). To reduce the discourse to the bare bones – the pessimists assess antiquity through modern scales of value, referring to patriarchy and oppression, while the optimists struggle to locate traces of female agency, identifying different models of sexuality, and 4 Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth seeking to give ancient women a voice. It is from this latter perspective that this book aims to approach the topic of women in ancient Greece. The last few decades have witnessed the publication of many works on women and gender in antiquity. Many of them adopt a historical perspective in an effort to throw some light on ancient women’s lives, rendered invisible and relegated to the dark dusty corners of mainstream ancient history for many generations. Some scholars also attempt to grant ancient Greek women a voice, since the large majority of classical literature was created by and for men (what has been named the ‘male bias’).4 A significant step in giving Greek women a voice or putting their history back into mainstream history entails addressing the relationship between gender and space in ancient Greek culture and, especially, female mobility in relation to the household. By mobility I refer to the freedom or ability of women to move from place to place, to their potential for mobility, and the social ideology related to it, and not to social mobility, when social status and citizenship are added up as factors besides gender, as in the case of former courtesan Neaira.5 Working definitions of these key terms will be discussed in the following section. An essential aspect of the spatial production of gender concerns the binary opposition between public and private. Greek thinking abounds in binary oppositions (Lloyd 1966), and this is, perhaps, one of the reasons for the effectiveness of structuralist approaches to myth in the case of ancient Greek culture. Public space is traditionally mapped as masculine, while the private (which is often domestic) is considered feminine. This categorization has deep roots and might present variations in different historical and cultural settings (Hanson 2010; Cresswell and Uteng 2008). Regarding ancient Greece, the very usefulness of distinguishing between public and private has been successfully put into question, be it or not with reference to women.6 Nevertheless, binary oppositions related to gender and space still seem to prevail. For example, space and movement are examined via a gender binary in Vernant’s (2006: 156–96) analysis of the gods Hestia and Hermes, which will be further discussed in Chapter 1. I will briefly mention here that, according to this analysis, Hestia is related to fixity in domains traditionally identified as private, domestic and presumably female, whereas Hermes is endowed with the ability to mobilize space, and is located particularly in spheres regarded as public, civic and 5 Introduction presumably male.7 This gendered spatial binary reflects a broader Greek ideology of female sophrosyne – the decorum of moderation and self-control – according to which Greek women are also commonly identified with passivity and immobility, qualities that are related to the space of the house. An apparent exception to this gendered spatial binary stems from the field of Greek philosophical thinking, but seems to have been partly overlooked in the discussion on the fashioning of gender and space in Greek thought. In the Pythagorean table of opposites (Arist. Metaph. 986a22; Huffman 2016), ‘motion’ (κινούμενον) features on the same side as ‘female’, ‘left’, ‘crooked’, ‘darkness’ and ‘bad’. The idea behind this is that ‘rest’ (ἠρεμοῦν), which features on the same side as ‘male’, is assessed as a nobler quality than motion. This Pythagorean classification seems to contradict the identification of the feminine with immobility. But it would be misleading to think that this classification reflects Greek social values. From Parmenides onward, Greek philosophers have connected stability with truth on epistemological grounds. Conversely, things that are in motion, lacking the stability that is required by any object of knowledge, are treated with suspicion.8 To return to the concept of female decorum, many Greek texts imply rigid social expectations regarding the behaviour of women. A famous comment relating to women’s reputation appears in Pericles’ funeral oration in Thucydides. εἰ δέ με δεῖ καὶ γυναικείας τι ἀρετῆς, ὅσαι νῦν ἐν χηρείᾳ ἔσονται, μνησθῆναι, βραχείᾳ παραινέσει ἅπαν σημανῶ. τῆς τε γὰρ ὑπαρχούσης φύσεως μὴ χείροσι γενέσθαι ὑμῖν μεγάλη ἡ δόξα καὶ ἧς ἂν ἐπ᾽ἐλάχιστον ἀρετῆς πέρι ἢ ψόγου ἐν τοῖς ἄρσεσι κλέος ᾖ. (Thuc. 2.45.2) And if I must make some mention of female virtue, to those who will now be widows, I will declare everything in this short address. For it will be great honour for you not to fall short of your proper nature and of whom there is least talk among the men either for praise or blame. The passage is notorious for its suggestion that the greatest honour these widows-to-be can aspire for is to be least talked about.9 Such stereotyping, whether it refers to all Athenian women or only to widows, not only concerns 6 Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth women’s passive conduct in matters of action, voice or gaze, but often also encompasses their mobility: respectable women are expected to remain indoors. Side by side with passivity and invisibility, immobility also appears to form part of expected proper female behaviour. Xenophon’s Oeconomicus provides us with further ample references related to such stereotyping. For example, when Ischomachus’ wife first arrives at her husband’s home, it seems to him that ‘in times before she lived under much care so as to see as little as possible, hear as little as possible and ask as little as possible’ (τὸν δ’ ἔμπροσθεν χρόνον ἔζη ὑπὸ πολλῆς ἐπιμελείας ὅπως ὡς ἐλάχιστα μὲν ὄψοιτο, ἐλάχιστα δ’ ἀκούσοιτο, ἐλάχιστα δ’ ἔροιτο, Xen. Oec. 7.5). Ischomachus then proceeds to describe at length the first conversation with his wife, during which emerges his view of a gendered division of labour in house economics, according to which women are expected to take care of the house and stay inside, while men go out and take care of things (Xen. Oec. 7.10–43). Among his mottos, we hear that τῇ μὲν γὰρ γυναικὶ κάλλιον ἔνδον μένειν ἢ θυραυλεῖν, τῷ δὲ ἀνδρὶ αἴσχιον ἔνδον μένειν ἢ τῶν ἔξω ἐπιμελεῖσθαι. (Xen. Oec. 7.30) For a woman it is nobler to stay inside rather than live in the open air, for a man it is more shameful to stay inside than to take care of things outside. Nevertheless, taking care of indoor activities does not necessarily mean that women were completely restricted inside the house or that they hardly ever left it. Greek women played a very central role in the household. They were indispensable in textile production and in household management of food and slaves. They assumed, in addition, an important role in the realm of religious activity.10 Priestesses, for example, were women who fulfilled public roles and in this way also occupied public space.11 This is a good example, albeit an exception, that somehow balances the general absence of women in the public realm in ancient Greece. Nevertheless, the question of how to understand the comments on women’s seclusion still seems to remain open. While generations of scholars have taken the statements regarding women’s lack of mobility at face value,12 more recent scholarship has successfully shown Introduction 7 that we should better understand remarks such as those of Xenophon as an expression of social ideology rather than of actual praxis. A decisive shift towards this direction was undertaken by Cohen (1989; 1991: 133–70), who drew on anthropological material from traditional Mediterranean societies, including modern rural Greece. His research led him to suggest that rather than women’s seclusion in the household, we should assume a more general gender separation in many areas of everyday life in ancient Greece. Other works in the fields of social history and archaeology have continued to explore the ramifications of subtler perspectives on gender and space in ancient Greek contexts.13 The assumption that women in Greece, and especially in Athens, were kept locked behind closed doors has given way in recent years to a far more nuanced understanding of their realities. Three important insights stem from surveying current literature on this subject. The first has to do with the realization that there was variety in the experience of women, while the second and third insights concern the concepts of time and (concrete) space, which are important parameters in the analysis of mobility. First, following the shift in feminist studies from the category of ‘women’ in general to that of ‘woman’ – the study of individual women – it is now assumed that different groups of women enjoyed different kinds of mobility in ancient Greece. Women’s freedom to move must have varied according to age, social status and urban or rural milieu. A young upper-class urban woman must have enjoyed a different freedom of movement compared to an older widow or a female slave. In Lysias 1, for example, Eratosthenes, the adulterer, first contacts Euphiletos’ wife via her female slave. This slave, we must assume, was presumably able to go out to the market with more freedom than Euphiletos’ wife herself (Lys. 1.8). Moreover, as we shall see in Chapter 2, Demeter’s wandering in search of her abducted daughter in the guise of an old woman has generated a scholarly discussion on whether older post-menopausal women in ancient Greece were freer to move than women belonging to younger age groups. Women’s labour in rural areas, and hence their possible mobility, still remains a rather obscure topic due to the scarcity of extant sources. It seems that in this case we should assume a relative variety, which ultimately allowed for some freedom of movement.14 A second insight from recent scholarship concerns the parameter of time, irrespective of public or private spaces, or even of whether we adopt the 8 Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth more sceptical view that seeks to discard this dichotomy regarding antiquity altogether. Blok (2001) introduces the concept of ‘coordinated choreography’ in order to elucidate ancient Greek practices of women’s movement in space. The term describes the relative use of gendered spaces in Mediterranean societies. In her view, similarly to space, time is also a relative concept, since we can speak of changing seasons, time during the year and time of the day. One of her important conclusions is that ‘provided it was the right time and the right occasion, women were perfectly entitled to be in public space; they would not by definition lose their respectability by being there, nor was the public area suddenly changed into a feminized sphere’ (Blok 2001: 116, emphasis in the original).15 A third insight that carries important implications for our reconstruction of female mobility in ancient Greece comes from the field of social archaeology. The literature specializing on the Greek household, where women, as it were, spent much of their days, has flourished in particular, yielding a rather nuanced view of gendered spaces and women’s realities inside the house.16 Some first works tackling the topic of gender and space within the Greek household divided the rooms according to gender, following the categorization of men’s and women’s quarters.17 Putting aside some of the textual sources, especially Lysias 1, and looking afresh at the archaeological findings has led social archaeologists to develop and argue for a less rigid differentiation. Lisa Nevett, for example, uses the archaeology of domestic spaces and settlements to explore broad social and cultural issues. One of the insights, which seems to have gradually become the new consensus view in this field, is that household space must have been defined according to the gender of its users and not vice versa. Houses were asymmetrically gendered, with the public area defined as a male space and the rest of the house as an area allotted for women and men but closed to male outsiders. If correct, this picture also entails some freedom for women to manoeuvre between different spaces. Gendered space and mobility: Working definitions Before proceeding to discuss how myth functions as the selected framework for this book, some remarks regarding the use of the terms gendered space and mobility are in order. The ‘spatial turn’ in the humanities and social sciences Introduction 9 has led many scholars to look anew at the objects of their study through the category of space. Key twentieth-century thinkers have contributed to the development of this branch of knowledge.18 Though definitions may vary, space is often distinguished from place in this literature. Space is commonly understood as the more abstract concept, having to do with social value, while place has to do with the experience of people. And just as these modern terms are fluid, so, Gilhuly and Worman (2014: 4) rightly note, were the relevant Greek terms topos (‘place, site’), choros (‘space, region’) and chora (‘land, countryside’). The discussion that follows refers to gendered spaces rather than places, since it focuses on the imaginary and Greek myth and, much less so, on the actual experience of place by Greek women. Side by side to the scholarship on space, there also emerges, in recent years and especially in the social sciences, a no less fascinating literature focusing on mobility, to the extent that some scholars even refer to a ‘mobility turn’ or a ‘new mobilities paradigm’.19 While space might seem to be a concept ultimately related to fixity, the pairing of space with mobility as the chosen topics of this book aims to furnish the analysis with both static and dynamic components.20 The theoretical background for the concept of mobility draws on this recent literature and especially on the work of Cresswell (2006) entitled On the Move: Mobility in the Modern Western World. According to Cresswell, mobility is socially generated motion and its representation and the practices related to it are what endow it with meaning. It is not abstract, existing in absolute time and space, but it is part of the social production of time and space. Mobility is analogous to place, inasmuch as movement is to space. Mobility, therefore, carries with it meaning and ideology, which needs be neither too specific nor too abstract. There are two caveats related to the study of mobility, both of which are relevant in the context of this book. The first is that the study of mobility is mostly related to the present, and, thus, we also need to find ways to think about mobility in the past. As Cresswell (2011: 168–9) notes, ‘we cannot understand new mobilities . . . without understanding old mobilities’. The second is that one cannot study mobility without also keeping ‘notions of fixity, stasis and immobility in mind’ (Cresswell 2011: 169). Such notions will also be addressed in the context of this book, particularly in the discussion on the goddess Hestia and the traditional association of females with fixity at the household. Indeed, 10 Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth Part One aims to show that Greek goddesses cannot be categorized on the basis of a binary model of either mobility or fixity. Instead, there seems to be a wide spectrum in their potential and ability to move through space. At the same time, the term ‘mobility’ will sometimes be interchanged with ‘movement’ in the book. This change chiefly stems from the practice of classicists to refer to women’s ‘movement’, ‘freedom of movement’, or ‘independence of movement’, rather than ‘mobility’, with reference to ancient Greek culture.21 So far we have seen that the concepts of gender, mobility and space seem to intersect with one another. But what about the historical perspective of the book and the experiences of mobile women? Whereas human geographers working on gendered mobility often focus on the commuting from home to the workplace and on international migrations, drawing on personal interviews, such a material is, of course, lacking on ancient Greece. Indeed, we have little information on how Greek women experienced their mobility or its absence. Still, this does not mean that it is altogether impossible to recover traces of ancient gendered mobilities. The focus must shift from individual experience to ideology and structure. As Hanson (2010: 8) aptly notes: ‘it should be impossible to think about mobility without simultaneously considering social, cultural and geographical context – the specifics of place, time and people’. Gendered mobility in ancient Greek contexts has to do with the ability or potential of women to move physically outside their home, and the social attitudes towards this sort of move. More specifically, the book focuses on how Greek myth maps this ability or potential. In the case of ancient Greece, as in many other cultures, the house, as if a fixed axis, is closely related to the mobility of women. In the mythic material examined in the book, the mobility of female figures often begins from the house or is described in relation to it. This is not at all surprising, since women in ancient Greece were commonly identified with the domestic sphere. Just as there is variety in the use of the terms domos, oikos, hestia, thalamos and parthenon in Greek (Morgan 2010: 52–4), the terms ‘house’, ‘home’, ‘household’, ‘hearth’ and the Greek term oikos, understood both as a social and economic unit and as the actual dwelling, are alternately used in this book. This is not to imply that the terms are indistinguishable; the shift between them stems from the focus of the book on mobility rather than on the actual space from which the females are imagined to exit. Moreover, I refer to the movement Introduction 11 away from a conceived centre as ‘centrifugal’ (Vernant 2006: 157–96; Calame 2009: 119–51). Its opposite, the movement towards a conceived centre, is called ‘centripetal’, and could ideally describe the movement of the new bride to her husband’s new household. A final point has to do with the moral connotations of mobility. On the one hand, mobility commonly connotes globalization, liberty and freedom. Thinking of modern contexts, tourism and transportation often highlight the positive aspects of mobility, its velocity and the independence it may provide to the individual. On the other hand, the recent refugee crisis in Europe bears witness to the hardship and suffering involved in mobility.22 It therefore seems that mobility in and by itself is neither positive nor negative. Within feminist contexts in particular, female mobility may be considered as a means to bring about liberation from patriarchal attitudes, it may be empowering and provide access to opportunity (Hanson 2010). But do the ancient Greek sources allow for such an anachronistic conceptualization? Does Greek myth mark female mobility in positive or negative terms? It seems that ancient texts do not present a single univocal attitude. The conceptualization of mobility in myth seems to differ, to a certain extent, according to whether the stories involve immortal or mortal female figures. Working through myth, working myth through How is the subject of women connected to Greek myth? In what ways could myth deepen our understanding of women’s spaces and their mobility? While some scholars, like Dowden (1995: 56), would argue that ‘the subject of women in mythology offers better value to the student of mythology than to the student of women’, others are of the opinion that myth may serve as a source for the research of Greek social institutions and ideology.23 Pomeroy’s (1975) pioneering book Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity also addresses the complexity of this issue. It examines images of women in the literature of classical Athens but also raises some important questions on how ancient literary texts may represent ancient women’s realities. The topic is further discussed in Chapter 3, in the context of the representation of female mobility in Greek tragedy. Here it should be mentioned that Pomeroy 12 Female Mobility and Gendered Space in Ancient Greek Myth (1975: xv) posits, in her introduction, that that ‘tragedies cannot be used as an independent source for the life of average women’. This book does not imply otherwise. It does, however, aim to argue that literary testimonies narrating myths, including epic poetry and tragedy, may contribute to the reconstruction of Greek mentalities. It is with this point in mind that the category of myth rather than literature is chosen as the framework for this book. While myth is a far wider category than literature, including, in the case of Greek culture, also visual articulations, it is hard to ignore the fact that it is a modern concept that goes back to the eighteenth century (Graf 1993: 9–34). For the early Greeks, mythos must have been synonymous with ‘word’, ‘story’ (Graf 1993: 1–2) and ‘formulated speech’ (Vernant 1996: 203). In this book, myth is chosen as a constructive lens, a category of study which may open up a window to Greek social attitudes, social assumptions and the imaginary.24 This path of thought was introduced during the twentieth century and creatively pursued by French structuralists, especially by Vidal-Naquet, Vernant, Detienne and Loraux, sometimes collectively referred to as the ‘Paris School’. Among these French structuralists, Gernet (1981) and Vernant (2006: 157–259) address, in particular, the theme of space and movement in Greek mythic thought.25 Their contributions on the spatial organization of the democratic polis and its public hearth, space and movement in early Greek cosmology, and the perception of space and movement in the gods Hestia and Hermes are considered essential. Beyond the work of structuralists, one should also mention two more recent books which address similar topics to the ones of this book. Cole (2004) highlights aspects of gender and space within ritual contexts, while Lyons (1997) focuses on gender and immortality in Greek myth. None of the above, however, seem to have tackled how Greek myth conceptualizes female mobility beyond the household, as well as its representation of gendered spaces. Some relatively new publications aptly demonstrate this gap in existing scholarship: From the perspective of gender studies, Foxhall (2013) practically excludes literary or mythical sources in her investigation of gender in antiquity. While a chapter of her book is dedicated to space, it discusses domestic and athletic spaces rather than ideology or myth. From the perspective of space studies in antiquity, Scott (2012) and Barker, Bouzarovski, Pelling and Isaksen (2016) seem to overlook the topic of gender. It is this gap in the literature that this book aims to address at least in part.