posted with permission:

On Greek Religion. By Robert Parker. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2011. Pp. xiii + 309. Hardcover, $78.95/£48.95. ISBN 978-0-8014-4948-2. Paperback, $29.95/£18.50, ISBN 978-0-8014-7735-5.

Reviewed by Jon D. Mikalson, University of Virginia

On Greek Religion contains the seven Townsend Lectures Robert Parker delivered at Cornell in 2008, enriched with extensive notes, bibliography, index, and five appendices. It has all the virtues we have come to appreciate in his writings: a fruitful blend of the factual and theoretical; a simultaneous inclination towards and distrust of categories, schemes, and generalities; scrupulous attention to detail; an awareness of what we do and do not and cannot know about Greek religion; precise and generous but not uncritical discussions of others’ views; the integration of literary and epigraphical sources; common sense; and a lively style with touches of whimsy. Here the range in topics, time, locales, and sources will be familiar to those who know his articles, less so to those who know only his books.

Beginning from the fact that Greek religion did not have a sacred, “revealed,” book, Parker, in Chapter 1 (“Why Believe without Revelation?”), gives a number of “evidences” that led Greeks to believe the gods exist, the foremost being that pseudo-empirically they concluded that for their ancestors, and hence for them, “piety worked,” “pious behavior was rewarded.” And, through oracles, they did in fact have significant revelation, especially concerning cultic behaviors. And, of course, they had texts describing the gods, first Homer and Hesiod, and Parker describes how these and others did effect their religious conceptions. Here, somewhat surprisingly, he makes the claim that everything a Greek heard or saw and remembered about gods and heroes was part of his conception of the gods. The discussion of texts then segues into a fairly long (ca. one-half of the chapter) and sophisticated discussion of myth/religion and of ritual/belief.

Chapter 2 (“Religion without a Church”) is devoted to ascertaining the authority the polis and its institutions and magistrates held over religion, and is in many ways an elaboration and defense of the claims of the late Sourvinou-Inwood (to whom the book is dedicated) in her 1990 article “What is Polis Religion?,” an article strongly asserting the authority of the polis, an article Parker terms “probably the most influential single item in the study of Greek religion since the early studies of Burkert and Vernant.” Much of Parker’s discussion here focusses on the role and authority of priests vis-à-vis other components of the polis.

In Chapter 3 (“Analyzing Greek Gods”) Parker shows the possibilities and difficulties of the various schemes of classifying deities, through epithets, by type (natural forces, abstractions, human, etc.), and as chthonic vs. Olympian. He offers an excellent discussion of the usually futile attempts to find a single concept that unites the various manifestations and timai of each Olympian deity. Here he introduces seven propositions of the structuralist approach and, in a very Parkeresque way, describes both the contributions and limitations of each proposition. Most interesting is what he labels the “snowball” theory, one which he seems himself to favor, i.e., “the idea that as a god rolls down through history it picks up new functions and powers that need not cohere with its original nature or with one another.”

Chapter 4 (“The Power and Nature of Heroes”) explores the various natures and functions of heroes, encapsulated in the type of incisive statements and metaphors one happily finds often in Parker, “biographically dead mortals, functionally minor gods”; “The variations in cult are oscillations on the line between dead mortal and minor god”; and “The particularity of heroes made them an ideal focus for group loyalty, the rennet around which social groups coagulated.” Here Parker persistently questions the popular ascription of political purposes to ­all hero cults, not rejecting it completely but limiting it severely. He opens this critique with the sly “It would doubtless be crude to use the pious ancient understanding as a stick with which to chastise the unimaginatively secular assumptions of modern scholarship. … But it is certainly worth beginning from the evidence of Herodotus …” And so, rightly, he does.

The title (“Killing, Dining, Communicating”) of Chapter 5 nicely captures Parker’s major emphases on the topic of sacrifice. He features the “alimentary” sacrifice, that which is followed by a banquet and which contains elements of gift-giving to the god, communication with the deity, and the sharing of the victim between the deity and the human, all fully explored. Other forms of sacrifice (holocausts and moirocausts) he sees as variants on the alimentary (less food to the humans) and separates out only ritual killings, as in oath and purificatory offerings. He offers detailed criticisms of Vernant’s theory that the sacrifice and banquet marked the distinction between god and humans (for Parker they formed, rather, a bridge between them) and of the Meuli/Burkert theory of hunter-based ritual killing and comedy of innocence, of the “violence” of sacrifice. The varieties of sacrifice do not coalesce around one concept except for the killing of an animal, and for Parker there is no indication that the act of killing itself had major significance in the dominant and normative alimentary sacrifice.

After his usual caveats about what we do not know, Parker in Chapter 6 (“The Experience of Festivals”) attempts, in his own words, “to sketch some broad outlines, trace common characteristics, identify possibilities.” He begins with Greek associations with festivals—the pleasures of eating and drinking, refreshment, well-being, and such—and then takes up modern concepts of the “plots” of festivals, particularly those involving a god’s arrival, departure, search for, or even death. He severely limits or rejects old favorite “plots” of sacred marriage, new years’, and fertility festivals. Here and in the conclusion of the chapter he offers valuable insights on ancient aetiologies of festivals, some tied to the heroic age, some to historical events, some to both. He treats city festivals extensively, stressing that they were both an “honoring of a god” and a celebration of the city, with no contradiction between the two or between piety and spectacle. He concludes with those festivals, distinct from the above, that had weird modes of sacrifice, foul and abusive language, “dirty dancing,” social reversal, or mock battles. Every category is richly documented (as is, of course, everything), with, e.g., twelve festivals described in the three pages on festivals of social reversal. One complaint here: it is surprising that Parker, who is always so precise with religious terminology, is content with the unGreek term “festival” to cover this huge variety of rituals. He might, to begin, have separated out heortai as a category.

This whole lecture series is about variety in Greek religion, seeking patterns and categories into which to place the various elements and recognizing their exceptions, limitations, and overlaps. The last chapter (“The Varieties of Greek Religious Experience”) focusses on the variations by locale (different gods fulfilling different roles in different cities, with some truly unusual cases—Persephone at Locri Epizephyrii, Hermes and Aphrodite at Kato Symi), social position (noteworthy lack of class distinction in cults, usual exclusion of slaves and metics but with exceptions), and gender (role of women, men and women with different gods for different roles). Then the individual emerges more clearly, choosing among the state cults, joining private societies of orgiastic or other deities, initiation in, especially, Eleusinian and Samothracian Mysteries, participating in, or most usually not, a cult promising a special afterlife, and using “magic” or curse tablets. The final section, “What You Will,” emphasizes the amount of latitude open to an individual in his/her religious choices, and this last lecture closes with a “modest statement” of Greek religion’s virtues, the first and last of which offer (for me, at least) a telling contrast to our currently polarized religious world: “Greek religion provided a strong framework of social cohesion; it met a human need by opening channels of communication with that unseen world most humans believe to exist: but it did these things without insisting on any particular set of speculations about the character of that unseen world.”

posted with permission:

Everyday Writing in the Graeco-Roman East. By Roger S. Bagnall. Sather Classical Lectures, Volume 69. Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2011. Pp. xi + 179. Hardcover, $49.95/£39.85. ISBN 978-0-520-26702-2.

Reviewed by Panagiotis Filos, University of Ioannina, Greece

This latest, small-sized but elegantly produced book by R. S. Bagnall is the revised form of the author’s Sather lectures at the University of California, Berkeley in 2005.

The book consists of six main chapters plus a short “Introduction,” brief “Conclusions” and lengthy “Endnotes.” The book topic, as indicated by the title too, is “everyday writing in the Graeco-Roman East.” But terms must be taken in a somewhat broader sense: “everyday writing” is defined as a subject larger than the “commonly denominated documentary texts” or the so-called “private” (vs. “public”) texts given that document type boundaries are not always clear; as Bagnall argues, “physical form and social usages are more important than content” (3). On the other hand, “Graeco-Roman East” may at times refer to places like Dura-Europos in Mesopotamia or even take into account data from remote areas like Bactria in modern-day Afghanistan (cf. Ch. 5).

The six book chapters may be read individually, but can also be grouped into larger “sections” (e.g. Chs. 1, 2–3, 4–5, 6) with several common thematic threads running through many of them (e.g. document corpora analysis, language contact, etc.).

The first chapter (“Informal Writing in a Public Place”) is the only chapter that focuses on a “medley” of epigraphic texts, i.e. graffiti from the basement of a Roman-era basilica in the agora of Smyrna. Of particular interest are two rare word/text types: Greek names (re-)written in numbers (isopsephism), e.g. ATH=1,308=ΤΥΧΗ (A=1000, Τ=300, Η=8, Υ=400, Χ=600); letter squares, i.e. palindromes read both horizontally and vertically, e.g. MΗΛΟΝ–ΗΔΟΝΗ–ΛΟΓΟΣ–ΟΝΟΜΑ–ΝΗΣΑΣ. But what matters most is the larger picture: ancient graffiti, be it in Smyrna, Pompeii or elsewhere, offer a completely different perspective on literacy in ancient societies from that provided by literature or public inscriptions: here, it is the wider “literate” public writing for the readership of “literate” passers-by.

The next two chapters (“The Ubiquity of Documents in the Hellenistic East,” “Documenting Slavery in Hellenistic and Roman Egypt”) are devoted to an impressive, in depth and breadth, discussion of papyrus corpora. The overarching point is that fluctuation in document numbers, both in absolute terms and per document category, century or area, is a common phenomenon; but no safe statistical conclusions are possible without prior analysis of the archaeological context. For instance, the numbers of surviving document corpora often relate to whether they were (not) meant to be preserved in antiquity (cf. e.g. discarded documents in rubbish heaps vs. contracts kept in habitation sites), the conditions of their subsequent preservation (cf. taphonomy) and finally, the conditions of their discovery (organized excavations, pillaging, chance discovery of troves). Similarly, changes in the number of certain types of documents, e.g. documents pertaining to slavery (slave contracts, land leases etc.), do not necessarily reflect social changes since statistical “distortion” is a common phenomenon for a number of factors: provenance and nature of document finds, e.g. troves, archives, but also modern editors’ priorities, etc. People keen on statistical counts of papyrus documents will find Bagnall’s learned and methodological analysis a stark reminder of the statistical hazards—even though I am somewhat sceptical whether such a detailed analysis of mass data is always practically feasible, however desirable.

Chapters 4–5 (“Greek and Coptic in Late Antique Egypt,” “Greek and Syriac in the Roman Near East”) touch upon language contact between a metropolitan language like Greek and native languages like Coptic and Syriac. Bagnall navigates through an ocean of corpora from Roman and late antique Egypt, the Near East, but also Mesopotamia (cf. Dura-Europos) and Bactria in an attempt to point out similarities and dissimilarities in document language usage between these two language areas. Despite some obvious differences between Egypt and the Semitic-speaking areas—for instance, written Coptic emerged under clear Greek and Christian influence in the late 3rd century AD, but flourished much later; by contrast, the predecessor of Syriac, i.e. Aramaic, had been used in public and private documents even before the Hellenistic period—there are also some unmistakable similarities: the use of Greek was probably more widespread in cities and towns and less common in the countryside even though Greek was not completely absent from villages either, particularly in Egypt. Once again, statistical figures may be impressionistic since e.g. a large archive find can distort the numbers for a particular document type, area and/or century. Nevertheless, unlike the unquestionable dominance of Greek in document types such as contracts, everyday documents like letters, however small their number, reveal the ever-increasing role of epichoric languages in writing alongside Greek and reflect their strong position in oral communication, even though with a certain degree of bilingualism in several places.

The last chapter (“Writing on Ostraca”) could be deemed a thorough overview of “Ostracology.” This ubiquitous type of texts from Graeco-Roman Egypt (and elsewhere) were meant to be ephemeral but turned out most durable. Bagnall rightfully underlines the importance of large ostraca corpora for the study of ancient society, economy, etc.; but ostraca can be of great importance in any numbers since their elliptic and often “ungrammatical” texts provide crucial evidence for everyday language use (cf. important linguistic data on ostraca from Bu Njem, Mons Claudianus, etc.).

In conclusion, this is an enjoyable, but also highly scholarly book, professionally produced (misprints are hard to spot), which will be of interest to both experts and non-specialists: the former will find an expert and up-to-date discussion of an inter-disciplinary subject, but above all will be prompted to (re-)think over various issues relating to chance and predilection in the discovery, publication and use of large document corpora, which may in turn affect statistical figures significantly; the latter will be initiated in an authoritative manner into the complicated and fascinating subject of everyday writing in the multilingual societies of the Graeco-Roman East.

• 2012.11.33:  M. L. West, Hellenica: Selected Papers on Greek Literature and Thought. Volume I: Epic.
• 2012.11.32:  A. Borrut, M. Debié​, A. Papaconstantinou, D. Pieri, J.-P. Sodini, Le Proche-orient De Justinien aux Abbassides: peuplement et dynamiques spatiales. Actes du colloque “Continuités de l’Occupation entre les Périodes Byzantine et Abbasside au Proche-Orient, VIIe-IXe Siècles”, Paris, 18-20 octobre 2007. Bibliothèque de l’antiquité tardive, 19​.
• 2012.11.31:  Clifford Ando, Imperial Rome AD 193 to 284: the Critical Century. Edinburgh History of Ancient Rome.
• 2012.11.30:  Frank Stini, Plenum exiliis mare: Untersuchungen zum Exil in der römischen Kaiserzeit. Geographica Historica, Bd 27.
• 2012.11.29:  Hélène​ Cuvigny, Didymoi: une garnison romaine dans le désert oriental d’Égypte. II – les textes. Fouilles de l’Ifao, 67​.
• 2012.11.28:  Paola Volpe Cacciatore, Seminario di studi su Richard Porson. Università degli studi di Salerno, 5-6 dicembre 2008. Collectanea, 28.
• 2012.11.27:  Josefine Kitzbichler, Katja Lubitz, Nina Mindt, Dokumente zur Theorie der Übersetzung antiker Literatur in Deutschland seit 1800. Transformationen der Antike Bd. 10​.
  Josefine Kitzbichler, Katja Lubitz, Nina Mindt, Theorie der Übersetzung antiker Literatur in Deutschland seit 1800. Transformationen der Antike Bd. 9​.
• 2012.11.26:  Leonardo Tarán​, Dimitri Gutas, Aristotle Poetics: Editio Maior of the Greek text with Historical Introductions and Philological Commentaries. Mnemosyne supplements. Monographs on Greek and Latin language and literature, 338.
• 2012.11.25:  Serge N. Mouraviev, Heraclitea, IV.A. Refectio: Liber ut a nobis restitutus. A. Textus, translationes, adnotationes (second edition; first published 1991).
• 2012.11.24:  Brooke Holmes, W. H. Shearin, Dynamic Reading: Studies in the Reception of Epicureanism. Classical presences.
• 2012.11.23:  Barrie Fleet, Plotinus. Ennead IV.8: On the Descent of the Soul into Bodies. The Enneads of Plotinus with philosophical commentaries.
• 2012.11.22:  Alfredo Casamento, Seneca. Fedra. Classici, 14.
• 2012.11.21:  Malte Liesner, Arbeitsbuch zur lateinischen historischen Phonologie.
• 2012.11.20:  David L. Balch, Annette Weissenrieder, Contested Spaces: Houses and Temples in Roman Antiquity and New Testament. Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 285.
• 2012.11.19:  Roger Rees, Latin Panegyric. Oxford readings in classical studies.

posted with permission:

The Lucretian Renaissance: Philology and the Afterlife of a Tradition. By Gerard Passannante. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press, 2011. Pp. 250. Hardcover, $45.00/£29.00. ISBN 978-0-226-64849-1.

Reviewed by Caroline Stark, Ohio Wesleyan University

Targeting an audience interested in Lucretian reception and book history in the early modern period, The Lucretian Renaissance aims to “tie the history of materialism in the Renaissance to a history of literature and the material text” (4).

Drawing on Lucretius’ playful analogy of atoms as letters, Passannante sets out to narrate a history of De rerum natura (hereafter DRN) that performs this analogy in the literary imitation, transmission, and dissemination of the text, and thereby to demonstrate an interest in “materialism”. While clever and original, its usefulness is limited by the author’s frequent recourse to imaginative reconstruction that is then later turned into “fact”. A detailed example of this is presented below. The evidence that justifies Passannante’s approach only surfaces in the final chapter of the book when Pierre Gassendi (1592–1655) admits that he has taken Lucretius’ DRN apart to serve his own ends in reconstructing Epicurus’ philosophy (175–8).

The greatest asset of the book is its vast scope, which both draws attention to the importance of Lucretius’ DRN from its rediscovery by Poggio Bracciolini in 1417 to the early eighteenth century and provides sketches of major figures in Lucretian reception, such as Angelo Poliziano, Denys Lambin, Michel de Montaigne, Francis Bacon, Pierre Gassendi, and Isaac Newton, as well as of minor figures who serve to enliven the narrative. Passannante has a penchant for dramatic storytelling; his anecdotes are rich in visual metaphor and replete with irony.

After laying out the basic groundwork for a discussion of Renaissance imitatio, Chapter 1 explores the notion of indirect (or unintentional) transmission of Lucretius as “contagion” by focusing on plague narratives (both Virgil’s use of DRN 6 in Georgics 3 and Macrobius’ analysis of both authors in his Saturnalia). By dramatizing what he sees as attraction to and rejection of Lucretius (revisited in later chapters), Passannante unconvincingly argues that Lucretius’ philosophy “contaminates” the thought of Petrarch and Poliziano through their use of Macrobius and Virgil. This and later discussions are hampered by Passannante’s lack of engagement with current scholarship on the Renaissance’s ambivalent response to DRN, especially the rhetorical distancing that scholars such as Valentina Prosperi (2007) have called a “dissimulatory code”.

Chapter 2 addresses DRN’s textual history and its physical reconstruction, passing briefly over Karl Lachmann and Giovan Battista Pio’s first commentary in 1511 to focus on Denys Lambin as an editor and commentator of Lucretius (1563–97) and on Michel de Montaigne as a sympathetic reader of the poet and his commentator. (Montaigne’s annotated text of Lambin’s edition resurfaced in 1987.) Conceding the importance of DRN for textual criticism, Passannante does not dwell on scholarly or methodological reasons for textual emendations. Instead he highlights the marginal play by Lambin and Montaigne of the passage at DRN 3.847–51, in which Lucretius dismisses the idea of the existence of the soul’s memory in its hypothetical reconstitution. In Lambin’s and Montaigne’s projection of themselves reassembled at a later time, Passannante sees a comparable analogy to the later “reconstruction” of DRN.

Chapter 3 claims to demonstrate how “the poetry of materialism” influenced the principles of modern science, technologies of transmission, and the idea of a continuity of knowledge by examining the works of Francis Bacon (1857–74). This chapter is full of elliptical logic and imaginative reconstructions. For example, imagining Bacon reading Montaigne: “One can almost imagine the text of ‘Des coches’ before Bacon’s eyes as he worked through the skeptic’s unsettling arguments about matter, colonialism, and the invention of printing. Bacon’s use of the word ‘cast,’ for example, as in ‘cast their seeds in the minds of others,’ recalls Florio’s translation of the passage misquoted from Cicero that we looked at earlier—a picture of textual history yielding to an Epicurean void” (134). Later, Passannante claims, “Bacon appears to be responding to Montaigne’s image of the void” (135). Chapter 4 asserts a concept of literary influence that is both “invisible and everywhere” by tracing Lucretian presence in the works of Edmund Spenser, Pierre Gassendi, and Henry More.

The epilogue is devoted to quotations of DRN in Isaac Newton’s classical scholia. Passannante argues that Newton’s inclusion of clinamen in a discussion of the rate of atoms falling through void is a meditation on innovation in the transmission of ideas. By elucidating natural philosophy through the language of mathematics, Newton emulates Lucretius.

While some classicists may be disappointed with the book’s lack of substantive engagement with DRN itself, the value of Passannante’s book lies in its narrative of problematic intersections between readers and a text whose controversial content aroused conflicting emotions. Under the guise of a thematic tie to DRN, Passannante raises important questions regarding literary allusion and influence. What is the nature of “influence” at these junctures: indirect/accidental transmission (Petrarch/Poliziano), “inspired” emendations (Lambin), deliberate misquoting (Montaigne), conscious fragmentation and recombination (Gassendi), and the most elusive of all: pervasive yet invisible influence (Spenser)? These questions are well worth further consideration.

There are a number of errors and oversights in the book that deserve mention: several incorrect entries both in the notes and in the bibliography; a number of misspellings of authors and figures (including Poggio Bracciolini); original text and translation do not always correspond; and a lack of adequate cross-referencing in the text and notes, especially as the author frequently refers to his earlier conclusions.

A review article in the TLS  of a number of tomes about motherhood in various ers  includes, inter alia, a review of something in our purview … the salient bits:

A recent collection of essays on motherhood and mothering in antiquity, Mothering and Motherhood in Ancient Greece and Rome, reminds us that questions about what it means to be a mother were also present in ancient Greek and Roman societies, despite some significant differences. Motherhood marked a transition from the father’s house to the husband’s, and from childhood to adulthood; it is worth noting here that many women in antiquity became wives and mothers at an age when they would nowadays still be considered children (like twelve or thirteen – a fact which, as the authors of this collection note, must have done nothing to lower the rates of maternal mortality). Those who didn’t die were made stronger: motherhood was seen (at least in theory, and at least by men) as improving women’s social position. One of the most interesting pieces in this collection discusses the relationship of ancient prostitutes to their daughters – who, as the author (Anise Strong) rightly notes, must mostly have been wanted children, since the use of contraception, abortifacients and exposure were all widespread and perfectly acceptable, at least in many social groups in the ancient world. She emphasizes that prostitutes had not only emotional but also very solid economic reason for wanting daughters: as soon as they hit puberty, they could be sold either as wives or as prostitutes, just as the mother’s market value began to plummet.

The relationship between woman as mother, and woman as sex object in antiquity is also the subject of Genevieve Liveley’s essay, which draws an analogy between the “yummy mummies” and “MILF”s who are popular in contemporary British and American cultural imaginations, and the “sexy mothers” of Augustan Rome. She argues that the depiction of Venus on the Ara Pacis can be seen as an attempt to suggest that motherhood can be not only moral, but also erotic. Lively’s essay is the most explicit in its attempt to draw connections between ancient and modern preoccupations about motherhood. Unfortunately, the analogy is applied in a very haphazard way. Liveley moves from the question raised by a New York Times article in 2005, of whether modern mothers are getting enough sex, straight to the representation of “sexy mothers” in Roman sources – as if subjective and objective models of “sexiness” were entirely the same. Looking sexy is obviously not identical with feeling sexual desire or being sexually satisfied, and it never was, even in antiquity. These male-authored sources, and monuments built by men, cannot tell us much about what Roman women thought or felt about the relationship of sex to motherhood – so the NYT article is entirely irrelevant. They can, however, tell us a great deal about male desires and anxieties about the female body as both erotic and maternal.

Other essays in the collection are more perceptive about the limitations and strengths of the sources. Patricia Salzman-Mitchell’s account of breastfeeding mothers in Greek and Latin literature suggests that these texts articulate a deep fear about the woman’s breast as both nurturing and – incestuously, revoltingly, dangerously – desirable. Clytemnestra, in Aeschylus’ Libation Bearers, dreams that she has given birth to a snake, and that the creature is suckling at her breast; Orestes then kills her, as Salzman-Mitchell suggests, in an attempt to “repress the image . . . of his mother’s semi-naked body”.

She could have pushed rather further on this point: the dream surely shows Clytemnestra’s own fear as much as her son’s. Even male authors of antiquity were aware that motherhood was a very dangerous business, for women as well as for men and babies. Those who survived to adulthood must have been conscious that their mothers could have died giving birth to them; men must have been aware that fathering children on their wives could, and quite likely would, kill them. Orestes, who kills his mother in adulthood, is supposedly justified in his action, because he is avenging his father – and the Oresteia itself can be read as, among other things, an attempt to justify matricide and fatherhood (which are, revealingly, linked together). But the cultural background of the play includes the awareness that children very often “kill” their mothers, simply by being born; and husbands often “kill” their wives by making them pregnant.

Ancient mothers were also very likely to watch their babies die. One estimate, cited in this book, suggests that in the ancient Greek world no more than one in three infants survived. Of course, it often happened, then as now, that both mother and child died in a difficult birth. But in other cases, one lived and the other died – confirming a suspicion that the mother’s interests and the child’s might not always be aligned. The perceived tension between the needs of the mother and the needs of the child is well articulated in an essay by Yurie Hong on “discourses of maternity” in Greek medical writings. Hong suggests that, while some Hippocratic texts see a natural harmony between the body of a pregnant woman and that of her foetus, in others the foetus is described as an agent with the power to damage the mother, or kill her. This perception went well beyond medical writings: a funerary inscription from Paros in the second century speaks with the voices of a dead mother, who is made by the (presumably male) writer to blame her death on her (also dead) baby: “The unstoppable Fury of the newborn infant took me, bitter, from my happy life with a fatal hemorrhage. I did not bring the child to light by my labor pains, but it lies hiding in its mother’s womb among the dead”. The more one reads about motherhood in the ancient world, the more understandable Medea’s famous line becomes in Euripides’ play: “I would rather stand behind the shield three times, than give birth just once”. […]

• via: Three millennia of motherhood (TLS)