Antiquities Lecture: Women & Religion in Classical Athens
2025-02-16 14:00 - 15:00 (America/New_York) | Tampa Museum of Art, 120 W Gasparilla Plaza, Tampa, FL, 33602, United States
Antiquities Lecture: Women & Religion in Classical Athens
Despite their lack of political and economic rights, women were critical to maintaining the religious system of classical Athens. As ‘cultic citizens,’ they joined men in honoring the gods and the city, as well as celebrated their own rituals in both domestic and civic contexts in the company of other women. Their association with fertility and reproduction made them indispensable performers of rites connected with the agricultural year. Women also served as priestesses, as dedicators, and as public benefactors.
At home, their ritual practices accompanied wedding preparations, the laying out of the dead, and the departure of soldiers for war. Female religious activity was considered so critical to the welfare of the Athenian community that it was sanctioned by law and financed by the city-state. Religion further allowed women’s widespread movement throughout the city as they left their homes to participate in processions and festivals, visit shrines, sanctuaries, and cemeteries. By performing rituals on behalf of the city, Athenian women distinguished themselves from female foreigners and slaves as rightful citizens of the city-state.
Women-only festivals further offered opportunities to build and strengthen female social networks, to act autonomously and perhaps even to subvert social norms. Domestic rituals accomplished by women in turn helped to mark the life stages and strengthen familial identity. This talk will discuss a few examples of women’s religious activities in classical Athens, drawing on some of the vases from the collection of Joseph Veach Noble as well as TMA’s permanent collection as illustrations.
Lectures are offered:

Art+ Museum Members: Free
Not-Yet-Members: $25
College Students: Free

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Laura McClure is Halls-Bascom Professor of Classical Literature Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in Classical Languages and Literatures with a dissertation on the plays of Euripides. Her research focuses on Athenian drama, especially Greek tragedy, women and gender in ancient Greece, and the ways women have shaped Hellenism in the modern world. Her books include Spoken Like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama (Princeton, 1999), Courtesans at Table: Gender and Greek Literary Culture in Athenaeus (Routledge, 2003), and a biography of the Athenian courtesan, Phryne, for Oxford’s Women in Antiquity series (2024). Professor McClure has just completed a book on women’s receptions of the Greek chorus in the early twentieth century, Modernist Women and the Greek Chorus, which explores how the cultic and dramatic chorus inspired the work of Jane Ellen Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and Hilda Doolittle (H.D.), forthcoming from Oxford in 2025.
Image: Woman with Wool Basket. Red-figure lekythos (ceramic oil vessel); Attica, Greece; Classical period, ca. 480-470 ʙᴄᴇ. Tampa Museum of Art, Joseph Veach Noble Collection, 1986.081
