The echoing chamber of Persephone

A marble monument from the early fourth century bc displays a seated, mournful Athenian woman whose life is celebrated in the inscribed epigram: "Mnesarete, daughter of Socrates. This woman left a husband and siblings, and grief to her mother, and a child and an ageless renown for great virtue. Here the chamber of Persephone holds Mnesarete, who has arrived at the goal of all virtue."

The description of monument and epigram with which Women in the Classical World opens sets the tone for this volume. Like the ancient source, this modern sourcebook constructs a "chamber of Persephone" designed to provide a permanent testimony to deathless womanly achievement. A buoyant account follows of how Greek women evaded seclusion in the home through participation in public religious ritual, Hellenistic women achieved substantial independence from the social and economic constraints of the oikos and Roman women claimed for themselves indulgence in sexual pleasures and, under the empire, obtained significant political responsibilities. This collaborative volume stakes a place for itself in the ever-expanding publication lists on women in antiquity as a novel kind of sourcebook. In contrast, to the earlier collation of texts in translation by M. R. Lefkowitz and M. B. Fant, Women's Life in Greece and Rome, this volume gives considerable weight to visual as well as written material and attempts to set both within a coherent and contextualising account of the lives of ancient women that begins with evidence from Archaic Greece and ends with the later Roman Empire, before the fresh complexities imposed by the impact of Christianity. With its lavish and attractive illustrations, its juxtaposition of vase-paintings with Greek poetry, coins with Roman historiography, the book is now likely to supersede that of Lefkowitz and Fant and be of considerable bibliographic use to students new to the field. But perhaps inevitably it is somewhat more unsatisfying for other readers.

The provision of an overarching narrative that searches out broad developments in the social status of women in Greece and Rome limits the space available for adequate analysis of evidentiary problems, historical methodologies or even the nuances of individual sources. The preface, meanwhile, acknowledges that the volume does not offer a comprehensive introduction to the lives of women in Greece and Rome and suggests it be used alongside a work of social history such as S. B. Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves: Women in classical antiquity. The selection of a sister text some 20 years old is suggestive, for this present volume originates in a pamphlet of texts and commentary put together in 1983 to support new courses on women in classical antiquity that were themselves largely an outcome of the enormous success of Pomeroy's intervention in the field of ancient history. As a graduate student in the early 1980s, I remember being a grateful recipient of that very pamphlet. But the discipline has shifted and changed markedly in the intervening years, and the almost total absence from this volume of any address to the relational construction of ancient women and men - to issues of gender - is one of several indications that this sourcebook has not wholly responded to changed times.

Maria Wyke is a lecturer in classics, University of Reading.