Customer Reviews

Spartan Women

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This is a one-of-a-kind exhaustive study on the lives of Laconian women. As Sparta was a closed society, not a whole lot is known about how the men lived, and even less is known about its female denizens. The sparse availability of primary sources on Spartan women makes any study of them rather difficult.

Sarah Pomeroy has consolidated just about everything we know, we think we know as well as what we might hypothosize about knowing about the lady Spartans. This book is a well-researched treatise on what their lives were, or at least could have been like some 2,500 years ago.

Ironically enough for a militaristic state, Spartan women enjoyed myriad freedoms and rights that were denied basically all other women of the classical age. As we look in hindsight, these factors weigh in to give them much more historical interest than women in other Greek city states. Pomeroy does an excellent job of delineating these various traits that separated them from alternative Greek social norms.

This book is highly recommended for both aficionados as well as persons interested in historical women's studies. Either way, this text has a wealth of information that will elucidate the lives of both Spartan women as well as Spartan men.

In Archaic and Classical Greece (800 to 500, and 500 to 330 B.C.E), there was but one place in the Greek world where women were approximately equal to men: Sparta. Girls were provided with an education that, intellectually, was at least equivalent to that of boys. In contrast to Athens, where girls were "given in marriage" by age 15 by their male guardians to someone at least twice their age, Spartan women had a voice -- a stong one -- in agreeing to the man they would marry. Certainly life was difficult in those times, but women engaged in athletics, hunted in the mountains, and managed the family property when their husbands were away on frequent and extended military duty. Battle deaths for Spartan soldiers were so high in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries that from one-third to 40 percent of property in Sparta was owned by women. Sarah Pomeroy is a leading scholar of the topic and the period, her book is the leader in this field, and I was delighted to receive a copy of it promptly and at a fair price. I recommend it most highly.

Much has been written on Sparta, in both contemporary history (The Spartans: The World of the Warrior-Heroes of Ancient Greece, Sparta), and popular historical fiction (300, Gates of Fire: An Epic Novel of the Battle of Thermopylae.) While women are addressed ancillarily in these works, little has been written about them specifically. Pomeroy does a magnificent job in righting this.

There is a dearth of primary sources on Sparta in particular, let alone women in ancient Sparta. (The Histories, Revised (Penguin Classics) devotes some attention, although his observations are questionable, Lysistrata (Dover Thrift Editions) is considered somewhat prejudicial; The History of the Peloponnesian War: Revised Edition (Penguin Classics) discusses much of early Spartan history, but demonstrates a typcial Greek attitude to women by its absence; On Sparta (Penguin Classics) and PLUTARCH: Lives of the noble Grecians and Romans (Complete and Unabridged) are the most referenced.) Using these sources, as well as art and sociological metrics, Pomeroy writes as complete and detailed a history of women in ancient Sparta as one is likely to find.

To the ancient Greeks, Spartan women were an analomy: they were educated equally to men, they were encouraged to speak up, they had property rights. As a result, many ancient sources were prejudicial in their treatment of them. Pomeroy places these differences within the broader Spartan social context, arguing that given Spartan culture (one that as a matter of state policy subverted individual wants to those of the collective and the state), the treatment of and attitude towards women not only makes sense, but is to be admired. Her discussion of the education of Spartan women and the social roles of wife and mother were the strongest chapters in the book. Her discussion of elite and working-class women (Spartan, Helot and perioikoi) was not as tightly supported.

For those interested in classical history or women's history, I highly recommend this work.

All those intriguing images of Spartan women from art and literature! Of course I wanted to know more about them. But how? Archaeologists and historians have interpreted such facts as survived, along with surviving propaganda written about them at the time – all of it in classical languages that I could not read – according to their own (and often quite male) biases. That is why I am so grateful for Sarah Pomeroy’s book. An expert on women and families in Ancient Greece, Pomeroy is also a resourceful scholar of the utmost integrity and common sense who works her way around and through the omissions and layers of bias to provide a portrait of Spartan women that is richer and more realistic than any hitherto available. This is the most interesting book I have read this year.

This book lacks insight because there is a lack of sources on the topic so it is a lot of guesswork and questionable inferences which bothered me. It also seemed like she generally puts Spartan women on a pedestal and even skews facts at points to make them seem much better than Athenian women. She refused to call having a shared wife wife-sharing, but rather she calls it husband-doubling and techniques like that annoyed me. Overall, I found her technique and writing style lacking.