The Hiereiai priestesses were an influence in how the priestess office were conducted in Roman religion, which was heavily influenced by Greek traditions. The Greek priestesses continued to hold office until the Roman Empire became Christian, although the name of the office holders are only fragmentary preserved. This richly illustrated and beautifully produced exploration of an underdeveloped topic by seasoned archaeologist Connelly applies the full array of theoretical tools to produce a volume that portrays the lifelong role of real women, realized in public but mastered in the home, in sacred service to the ancient Greek polis....This accessible volume significantly contributes to the ongoing reshaping of scholars' and students' understanding of the social realities of ancient Greek women." ---J.C. Hanges, Choice In this sphere of polis life the priestess clearly played a leading and fundamental role. This makes it all the more astonishing that Joan Breton Connely's Portrait of a Priestess is, as she rightly claims, the first full-length work to take the Greek priestess specifically as its subject. . . . Connelly has run down inscriptions--honorific, funerary, financial, or cult-related--all over the Mediterranean. She has studied a plethora of statues and vase paintings in collections from Samos to St. Petersburg, from Messene to Munich, from Thebes to Toledo. Her indexes of monuments and inscriptions testify to the prodigious amount of work that has gone into this volume. . . . Portrait of a Priestess is a remarkable triumph against heavy odds." ---Peter Green, New York Review of Books As “cultic citizens,” women participated in state festivals at Athens alongside men and celebrated their own rituals apart from them, at shrines within the house and in cults outside the house in the company of other women. Their association with fertility made them indispensable performers of rites connected with the agricultural year. Women also served as priestesses, as dedicators, and as euergetai (benefactors). At home, their rituals accompanied nuptial 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 community that it was sanctioned by law and financed by the polis. 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 polis. 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. The office of priestess of a temple had great prestige and high status, and priestesses were given many official privileges by their cities, such as reserved seats at public theaters and similar honors otherwise mainly given to male political and military figures. [13]

Portrait of a Priestess is an impressively long book. It is beautifully produced. . . . It is also affordable and easy to use, but the book anticipates a specialist, scholarly readership. . . . [T]he author does a superb job of juggling such a massive amount of data. It is very likely that her publication will become a standard study of women and religion, serving as both monograph and reference work." ---Tyler Jo Smith, Museum Anthropology This is a striking hypothesis—one that brings scholarship on women's religious roles into line with current understandings of their domestic influence."—Susan Deacy, Journal of Hellenic Studies The priestess was the custodian of the keys to the temple. She was the caretaker of the cult statue of the temple. She was the chief of lesser office holders in the temple, such as temporary female temple servants who often served for shorter periods of time, and had a say in who should be appointed to such posts. [2] She officiated at sacred rituals, presided over and led rituals of worship, and performed ritual sacrifice. My research focuses on Greek religion of the fourth and fifth centuries BC, primarily in Athens, although I am also interested in earlier Greek religion and the emergence of the more familiar Classical religious system. The project that I am currently engaged in is to explore ways of conceptualising a religion that does not emphasise belief or faith without recourse to the traditional dichotomy of religions of belief vs. religions of performance. This older framework reflects key debates in the Early Modern period - particularly the impacts of the Reformation and early Enlightenment study of religion on the concepts of religion and belief - but provides a problematic model for Greek religion. In place of an approach based on belief and ritual, I am attempting to develop an perspective based on recent anthropological work on concepts of perception, skill and experience. Connelly’s careful and erudite scholarship shows up the limited conceptual space in which our cultural imagination moves in modern times – to this recensionist’s knowledge, there has never been a Disney movie starring a priestess as protagonist! Why? For a girl to grow up to become a priestess in action [agendo] must rest upon a sound foundation of heartfelt and tenacious piety, yet among all the virtues piety happens to be the one most furiously despised and contemned by post-modern feminists and secular liberal ideologues. In point of fact, Aquinas in the Summa theologiae ii-ii, q. 81, a. 6 contends that piety is the greatest virtue of all, preeminent even over the classical foursome of prudence, justice, courage and temperance! For as Aquinas states loc. cit., a. 3, ‘Now it belongs to religion to show reverence to one God under one aspect, namely, as the first principle of the creation and government of things’ – but unfortunately to show reverence towards God as the first principle of the government of things would necessarily entail a resolve to obey the commandments, and here is where the liberal must part company – who at all events could tolerate having to accept the teaching of the magisterium? Yet as John the evangelist declares in the prologue to his gospel:Connelly builds this history through a pioneering examination of archaeological evidence in the broader context of literary sources, inscriptions, sculpture, and vase painting. Ranging from southern Italy to Asia Minor, and from the late Bronze Age to the fifth century A.D., she brings the priestesses to life--their social origins, how they progressed through many sacred roles on the path to priesthood, and even how they dressed. She sheds light on the rituals they performed, the political power they wielded, their systems of patronage and compensation, and how they were honored, including in death. Connelly shows that understanding the complexity of priestesses' lives requires us to look past the simple lines we draw today between public and private, sacred and secular. Until Joan Breton Connelly's wonderful volume, Portrait of a Priestess, was published the prominent role of Greek priestesses in ancient Greek society was ignored, or even denied, by most (male) commentators. . . . Her compelling book challenges our assumptions about the role of priestesses, and more generally the role of women, in a far-off world that retains the fascination of countless readers." urn:lcp:portraitofpriest00conn:epub:3a02a5fb-16d1-4d80-a5b8-0471ebf7b85b Extramarc University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (PZ) Foldoutcount 0 Identifier portraitofpriest00conn Identifier-ark ark:/13960/t9v12t35t Isbn 0691127468

In Chapter 9, “The End of the Line,” Connelly concludes with a brief, but eloquent and thoroughly researched, consideration of the fate of female sacred servants in early Christianity and late antique Judaism. This is also the end of the line for the illustrations, which stop with Chapter 8.

Table of Contents

As scholars of women in antiquity have long recognized, religious rituals provided women with a critical public role in ancient Greece, challenging the popular notion that “proper” women in Greek society were to be neither seen nor heard. Connelly’s book provides significant new evidence for the importance of women’s leadership in Greek cult. Her work follows the approach of Lewis’ The Athenian Woman (London and New York 2002) in emphasizing the value of the visual record to supplement and correct ideas regarding women in antiquity derived primarily from literary and epigraphic sources. This book represents an important addition to other recent studies of the role of women in Greek religion that rely largely on written evidence, such as Goff’s Citizen Bacchae (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London 2004), Dillon’s Girls and Women in Classical Greek Religion (London and New York 2002), and Kraemer’s Her Share of the Blessings (New York and Oxford 1992). It was common for the priestesses to be commemorated in public portrait statues at the temple in which they served, as well as elaborate public state funerals. [14] Career [ edit ] After an introduction outlining theoretical and methodological issues, Connelly takes the reader along women’s path through priesthood, covering the preparation for the office, its requirements, and the manner of its acquisition; the performance of priestly duties, including costuming, the use of ritual implements, and the execution of ritual; the exercise of priestly privilege and authority; and the commemoration of priestesses after death. One chapter focuses on the female priesthoods for which we have the most evidence: Athena Polias at Athens, Demeter and Kore at Eleusis, Hera at Argos, and Apollo at Delphi. A fascinating coda to the book looks at the evidence for the leadership roles of women in the early Christian church and suggests comparisons with the role of the Greek priestess. Winner of the 2007 Best Professional/Scholarly Book in Classics and Ancient History, Association of American Publishers" This book offers a rich mine of information about women's lives through their participation in religion and will be a valuable addition to school and university libraries." ---Janet Watson, Journal of Classics Teaching

In this passage from Aristophanes’s Lysistrata, the chorus of older women detail their cultic service to the city as the daughters of prominent citizens, referring first to the position of arrhephoros, then to their involvement in the rites of Brauron, and finally to the role of kanephoros (basket-carrier). The Arrhephoria was a ritual open only to young girls from aristocratic Athenian families. Two or four girls between the ages of seven and eleven were selected by the Archon Basileus and financed by the official state liturgy to reside for a year not far from the temple of Athena Polias on the Acropolis. There they assisted the priestess of Athena Polias in performing rites in honor of the goddess. They set up the loom threads on which were woven the peplos (garment) presented to Athena as part of the annual procession of the Panathenaia. A section of the Parthenon frieze appears to depict a portion of this ceremony. At the left, two girls, possibly the Arrhephori, carry objects on their heads, and two men at the right handle the sacred peplos (marble relief, slab V from the East Frieze of the Parthenon, c. 480 bce, British Museum 1816,0610.19). To mark the end of their service, the girls performed a secret nocturnal rite. The priestess placed items “unknown to the girls and to herself” on their heads (Paus. 1.27.3). They then descended through an underground passage to a shrine, possibly that of Aphrodite. There they left whatever they were carrying and returned with other covered objects to the Acropolis. Although little is known about the culminating rite, it may have commemorated Athena’s transfer of the infant Erichthonius to the care of Cecrops’s daughters, enjoining them not to look inside the basket. Scholars have hypothesized that the objects carried down may have been snakes and that those carried up may have been images of swaddled infants as part of an initiation rite.The precise role of the female cultic functionaries of antiquity is elusive. There is nothing quite like it in contemporary society, and it is difficult to imagine. Many of those things were not systematically recorded or described, but were assumed or habitually repeated without comment, except obliquely, without explanation, assuming the readers or listeners would know the rest. It is frustrating for us, for we do not, and have little to work upon. Dr Connolly fills in the gaps as far as humanly possible by surveying epigraphic, textual, and artistic evidence to build up a compelling case for the recreation of those roles and functions within the polis of Hellenistic antiquity, and gives a much more full and coloured image with which to compliment our understanding of all aspects of Classical antiquity. Within the domestic context, the most important religious obligation for women was the performance of funerary ritual. Although activities such as mourning, caring for the dead, and visiting tombs were not exclusive to women, they tend to predominate in the abundance of textual and artistic representations of death. 8 While women’s two religious primary roles—that of promoting life and of supervising death—may seem contradictory, the two in fact were connected in the Greek mid, for the beginning of life implied its end. The hero Achilles, for instance, will suffer “such things as Destiny wove with the strand of his birth that day his mother bore him” (Hom., Il. 20.128). The mother thus engenders the condition of mortality in her child since fate or death accompanies an individual at birth. As has been well documented, funerary procedures carried out by women shared many similarities with nuptial rituals, including the bathing and dressing of the corpse before interment and participation in funerary procession. 9 In classical Athens, the funeral had three parts: the prothesis (lying in state), the ekphora (procession to the grave), and interment in the grave. Although the legal responsibility of the deceased’s relatives, particularly sons, women were actively involved in all stages of funerary ritual.