URL originale : https://books.openedition.org/editionsehess/30314
The Eurykleia Database
A Tool to Provide a History of Antiquity Across Sexual Lines
La base de données Eurykleia, un outil au service d’une histoire mixte de l’Antiquité
Sandra Boehringer, Adeline Grand-Clément, Sandra Péré-Noguès et Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet
p. I-XVIII
Résumés
This contribution exposes the method used to create a digital tool to provide a history of Antiquity across sexual lines. The originality of this database is, first, to retrieve and compile mentions of women under their own name (as transmitted on diverse media) and to analyze what these mentions tell us regarding the presence and action of women in ancient societies. Particular attention is paid to the discursive practices and to the modalization to which each document belongs, in order to determine the interactions that sexual identity has–or has not–with a function or a social activity, and in which measure it influences the reception of the actions realized by women. This project allows for a social history, as it considers gender in a given chrono-cultural context and in its interactions with other forms of differentiation such as political status, socio-economic position, kinship.
Cet article présente la méthode qui préside à la création d’un outil numérique au service d’une histoire mixte de l’Antiquité. L’originalité de la base de données en question réside tout d’abord dans le fait de repérer et de rassembler les mentions de femmes désignées par leur nom (transmis sur divers supports) et d’analyser ce que ces mentions nous apprennent de la présence et de l’action des femmes dans les sociétés antiques. Une attention particulière est portée à la pratique discursive et à la modalisation auxquelles se rattache chaque document, afin de déterminer la manière dont l’identité de sexe entre en lien – ou non – avec une fonction ou une activité sociale, et dans quelle pro- portion elle influence la réception des actions réalisées. Le projet permet ainsi de mener une histoire sociale en considérant le genre dans un contexte chrono-culturel donné et dans ses interactions avec les autres formes de différenciations que sont, entre autres, le statut politique, le positionnement socio-économique, l’ancrage dans la parenté.
Entrées d’index
Mots-clés : genre, femmes, humanités numériques, histoire sociale, méthodologie
Keywords : gender, women, digital humanities, social history, methodology
Texte intégral
1When, in the winter of 430 BCE, Pericles delivered his eulogy for the citizens lost in the war, he was addressing the entire Athenian community, including women citizens and foreigners, gathered in the public cemetery of the Kerameikos.1 Thucydides has left us a more or less faithful version of the strategist’s speech.2 After pointing out the virtues of the men who fell for the homeland, Pericles successively addresses those bereft of a son or a father: they should seek solace in the ‘beautiful renown’ (eukleia) that their relatives found on the battlefield. The speech goes on to target widows more specifically:
If I must say anything on the subject of female excellence (γυναικείας τι ἀρετῆς), to those of you who will now be in widowhood, it will be all comprised in this brief exhortation. Great will be your glory (μεγάλη ἡ δόξα) in not falling short of your natural character (φύσεως), and greatest will be hers who is least talked of among the men whether for good or for bad (καὶ ἧς ἂν ἐπ´ἐλάχιστον ἀρετῆς πέρι ἢ ψόγου ἐν τοῖς ἄρσεσι κλέος ᾖ).3
2Pericles’s statement, as reported by Thucydides, is inscribed in quite a specific context: that of a weakened city at war with Sparta. The state of emergency dictated the mobilisation of one and all, and the orator’s words to widows bear a prescriptive value. In no way do they summarise the usual attitude of the Greeks regarding the name and renown (kleos) of the women around them.4 The quote, however, has been popular among modern historians, so that the statement has tended to be taken out of context and generalised. It has been wrongly concluded that all Greek women are invisible in our source materials, and that the only ones likely to escape anonymity were ‘disreputable’ women. The corpus left by Attic orators supports this view: in 1977, for instance, David Schaps emphasised how carefully orators avoided naming directly the wives, sisters, mothers and daughters of citizens, instead referring to them by the name of their masculine kin: “my mother was daughter of so-and-so”.5 According to Schaps, this meant that the women named in trials belonged to one of three categories: female relatives of a political opponent, deceased women, and what he called ‘women of shady reputation’.6 David Schaps explained the silence surrounding the name of women in judicial contexts through reference to “forms of etiquette current in Athens”.7
3Should we conclude that kleos–or renown8–was a man’s prerogative, while the name of a woman ought not to be spoken in the public sphere? Our database project aims to do away with this misconception. We have intentionally named it Eurykleia: “she whose kleos rings from afar”.9 The database itself will allow us to reexamine the women’s names we have collected by banishing both ancient and modern preconceptions, and by broadening our focus to cover other Greek cities and other types of discursive practices: what were the social, economic, and political fields of action in which women played a part? What practices gave them visibility and what were those in which, although active, they remained less visible? Foregoing the all too global idea of ‘masculine domination’, our investigation emphasises the relation between discursive practices and the mention of women’s names, allowing us to uncover the individual logic relative to each context. We aim to provide a tool for comparing cases in terms not only of what we know about men, but also what we know about women, who can even prove to be more notorious. Our purpose is to constitute a balanced corpus that is representative of ancient societies and that may lead the way to novel analyses. Granting women equal footing, it will allow for the writing of a truly gender-balanced history of Antiquity.
4Our project falls into the particular field of gender studies that postulates the historicity of men/women categories and the socio-cultural dimension of identities. As a tool, gender enables us to break free from the stereotypes passed down from generation to generation of historians. The research in this field also aims to shed light on other types of differentiation that specific to ancient societies, in particular the paramount importance of the distinction between free individuals and slaves. Although no social dynamic (neither gender nor free/slave status) can fully determine the field of human interaction, these elements form an inextricable part of its structure.10 Based on such analysis, our project takes into consideration the totality of social relationships. Paying close attention to the discursive context in which women’s names appear also helps uncover the variety of settings where individual actions occur. Consequently, the project also offers the possibility of shedding light on the coexistence of, and dynamics between, contradictory, or even polemical, interpretations, regarding the actions and social value of women.
5Eurykleia’s novel corpus will open the way to quantitative studies based on well-defined study samples.11 Based since its inception on new interrogations and an original methodology, the database will provide new, fruitful avenues for research, as illustrated by some of the articles collected in this special issue.12
Taking Stock of Women Figures
6Building a database on the ancient women whose names were recorded is a fundamental and necessary task: it brings to light the figures made anonymous by the scholars who did not find them of sufficient historical interest. We should remember that, in the field of ancient studies, databases of individuals initially took the form of prosopographical catalogues limited to the masculine urban elites and filtering out women as well as lower social classes.
7As for the Roman world, the three-volume Prosopographia Imperii Romani edited in Berlin between 1897 and 1898 aimed to index the highest characters in the empire.13 Now available online in supplemented and revised form, it has remained faithful to its original goal: to establish bibliographical notices of emperors, senators, equites, and certain freed slaves.14 In the cases where these notices describe strategies in terms of matrimony or general family alliance, some women are occasionally recorded. Illustrious careers in the Imperial administration provided the first data to be collected, and this material was later enriched by the records of men holding similar functions during the Republic. The Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic (DPRR), which opened to the public in June 2018, makes bibliographical information available to the academic community as regards the historical figures who assumed public office (especially of the religious kind) before the Principate. As a result, it promotes work that was published in print much before, from the 1950s onwards, and conducted on the public figures of the Roman Republic.15
8The situation differs somewhat for the Greek world, where elitist logic retained a civic dimension. Johannes Kirchner’s seminal work Prosopographia Attica (1901 and 1903) lists the Athenian citizens that were known in his time.16 Following the Athenian excavations conducted from the 1930s by Benjamin D. Meritt, particularly on the Agora, the number of identified Athenians underwent exponential growth due to archaeological advances. Taking stock of individuals became an altogether different task, although it kept its focus on the masculine elite in the Attic city.17 However, one exception should be pointed out: in 1920, Helen MacClees produced the first catalogue of women named in ancient inscriptions, a pioneering enterprise that failed to gain recognition.18
9Gradually, prosopography developed and broadened its scope beyond Athens until it culminated, at the end of the 1980s, in the publication of the first printed volume of a British Academy-funded project: the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, devoted to the Aegean islands, Cyprus, and Cyrenaica.19 Today, the Lexicon of Greek Personal Names (LGPN)20 database has become a major research tool, collecting names across the Greek-speaking world and from the first recorded traces of alphabetic Greek up to the 6th century CE.
10The Eurykleia database, however, proceeds from quite a different logic. Women being our main subjects of study, this investigation allows for historiographical readjustment.21 It should also be noted that the great prosopographical corpora mentioned above are exclusively dedicated to the Hellenistic and Imperial eras, relating to the development of epigraphic practice in those periods. The period from the 8th to the 4th century BCE is far less known, even though the Women’s Catalogue appeared as a poetic genre as early as the Archaic era and was still in practice by the Imperial period.22 Lastly, women’s names are now often scattered across thematic collections that, however useful, are not enough to correct the historiographical unbalance.23
11Our investigation deliberately deviates from the prosopographic model and instead promotes the study of the specific texts and of the materials from which we collect women’s names, allowing us to establish varied interrelations between documents that tradition regards as thematically foreign one from the other. Rather than prescribing a specific approach, it raises multiple questions and opens numerous avenues of research. It relies on the constitution of an original corpus, collected according to a method that emphasises the specificity of individual documents as well as the context in which they were produced.
Collecting an Original Corpus
12The Eurykleia project covers a vast geographical area, encompassing the whole Mediterranean region and including the eastern and western additions made by the Macedonian and Roman conquests. Our long time frame extends from the 8th century BCE to late Antiquity. Although this choice may seem ambitious, it aims to foster comparison across eras as well as encourage the participation of any researcher who shares an interest in our research questions.
13The corpus gathers the names of historical women, i.e. those the Ancients thought of as pertaining to ‘their world’, ‘their time’; the time of the “Iron Race” in Hesiodic terminology. Consequently, we have left out the goddesses, nymphs, and other figures of poetic tradition–tragedy included–associated with the Age of Heroes or with the divine world.24
14The aim of the project is not to elaborate a new lexicon of ancient women’s names, nor to produce yet another biographical or prosopographical register. Our approach is different, and its originality relies on the painstaking collection and presentation of individual documents, each of which names one woman. Thus the goal is to identify and collect the documents where women’s names appear, in any medium. This latter point allows us to broaden our enquiry to fields that have received less attention than the Athenian context, which has overwhelmingly served as the benchmark for studying the Greek world. Works focusing on regional players, on cities of lesser political or military importance, on fields of activities held as secondary or altogether unrecognised (local cults, magic practices, land leases, slave trade, etc.) have foregrounded the women who acted in fields as varied as politics (dynasts), economics (estate management), or self-expression (funerary steles, sanctuary dedications). The database will allow users to interrelate their respective entries.25
15When the same woman figure appears in several sources, it is essential to consider each description in an isolated way: this allows us to distinguish between the various sets of information, and to read each description in its historical and social context. This enables us, then, to formulate interpretations without interference or influence from information contained in other documents which, although they name the same woman, were produced in different contexts and according to other types of logic. Reckoning with each document individually also facilitates the collection of corpora based not on the named woman herself, but on other aspects of the document, such as her actions or status. This point will be developed further on.
16Admittedly, considering its geographic and chronological scopes, the database cannot be expected to be exhaustive. On the long term, however, its gradual expansion through the inspection of collections already edited as well as original sources will offer the possibility of a statistical approach following various criteria: type of document, period, function, age, and so on. This quantitative approach should however be counterbalanced by a qualitative approach, one that takes into account the conceptions that determined the sampling on which calculations are based: the nature of the texts under study, ancient uses for designating individuals, and the current state of our corpora, themselves the result of modern historiographical choices. Such types of bias make it particularly complex to establish a sex ratio.
17Following this, when one seeks to compare the presence of men and women in funerary inscriptions for a given region at a given time, on should take into account the artificial ‘doubling’ of masculine names owing to anthroponymic usage (patronym, andronym, papponym, and so on) in epitaphs both masculine and feminine. This figure should then be related to the standardized formulation of this kind of inscriptions. The same goes for the study of honorary decrees. Let us take the following example: in the early 1st Century BCE, in or around Halicarnassus, Menestratê received a monument, in her name, from the people and the group of Romans who had ‘taken care of city affairs’ (pragmateuomenoi). Menestratê (Μενεστράτη) is referred to as the daughter of Melanthios, himself son of Drakon, and wife of Demetrios Korragos, son of Neon. The monument was signed by the artist Menophanês, son of Lusanios of Sinope. Thus six men are named on an inscription produced in honour of a single woman, Menestratê–who, uncommonly, also has a nickname: Chôtis (Χωτίς).26 A purely quantitative calculation would suggest a ratio of women/men of two to six. Qualitative analysis enables us to weight the result by underlining the difference in value between the names of the six men and the two names of the one woman in question. Such effort should apply to all statistics available, often on the level of a city or a region. Although they are based solely on the number of times names are mentioned, these statistics are often interpreted and presented as if they indicated the proportion of men and women identified in all the available documentation. Yet in the light of ancient nomination customs, the presence of women and men in the public space cannot be measured by the frequency with which their anthroponyms appear.
Studying Discursive Practices: A New Contribution to Research
18This project has raised important questions: how is a woman’s name a ‘statement’? What information do these statements provide about the women they name? What actions did they undertake, and in what capacity are they named? What were their behaviour, speech, and their civic involvement? What do we learn (or deduce) from our source material about their status, involvement in collective life or place in the economic sphere? With whom did they interact? Were they criticised or admired? What were their history and their place in the history of ancient societies? Obviously, the documents do not deliver ‘raw’ information, and the task of a researcher consists in studying each statement both in its historical context and within the discursive practice that produced it.
19An important point should be clarified at this stage: the elements and the questions that constitute our study and that will be defined in the following paragraphs are in no way specific to women’s history;27 this approach is equally necessary when it comes to any document that names a man. Nevertheless, it is important to underline these elements again insofar as interpretative shortcuts and misreadings have occurred more frequently in the case of women figures, for the historiographical reasons laid out above.
20The primary specificity of our database is to shed light on all the stages of the reasoning through which we may arrive at interpretation. This will also enable future readers to detect biased or anachronistic passages. Its originality resides in the fact that we pay careful attention to modalities of enunciation, avoiding taking statements on women at face value and instead studying the guiding logics behind the action of giving visibility to a name.
21Each document where a name appears is first introduced in terms of the discursive practice that produced it. Rather than resorting to contemporary literary categories, it is crucial to align our typology with that of ancient norms: this enables us to contextualise the enunciative act (and understand what was at stake), and to avoid anachronistic and contemporary divisions into various literary or discursive genres, which carry a different significance today. Each document requires defining the enunciative act precisely and independently from the material on which it appears and using the terminology of anthropologists specialized in Antiquity. This means referring to such genres as melic poetry, written history, philosophical dialogue, honorific decree, epitaphs, dedications, and so on.
22Defining the enunciative context is crucial to a better understanding of any excerpt and helps identify the ways in which information is given, and how it is voiced. Analysis first focuses on the enunciative voice (who is speaking?), then on the time of enunciation (when is this being told with respect to the events?), its space, and finally the enunciative perspective (whose perception filters the statement, and how?) Without these elements, research cannot orient itself around the information contained in the document about a given woman. Access to this information is not always possible. In such cases, mentioning their absence allows us to avoid shortcuts and hasty conclusions based on the commonplace representations that have been passed down by generations of historians.
23Particular attention is paid to modalities of expression in order to identify the context in which a woman appears and the implicit or explicit judgement passed on that figure. It may be neutral, disparaging or laudatory; the excerpt may be part of an embedded text, or found in a context in which, for several institutional or contextual reasons, individuals are conventionally introduced in such or such a way (e.g. at a trial). Only an exhaustive understanding of the discursive practice, of the excerpt, and of the logic specific to the work or to the enunciation can allow for proper analysis and keep us from taking for granted the claims of certain authoritative pronouncements, which are held as such owing to their number and their status in cultural history.
24An important initial step is to collect the documents in which women are praised for their action towards the community. In the case of honorary decrees, it is interesting to notice that women who practiced euergetism received praise in the same terms as male citizens: the individual was praised, sometimes crowned, and the decree displayed in a public place, visible by all.28
25Likewise, in order to appreciate the financial resources and social capital that some women enjoyed, we should compare their praise with similar discourse regarding men. In both cases, the intensity of the praise (their qualities, donations to the cities, or reputable filiation) is not necessarily a marker of anything in itself: in this field, formulaic expression encouraged laudatory intensity.
26Let us take another example of modalisation in the discursive context. The statements that positively qualify a woman within forms of discourse that generally do not substantially and positively refer to women should be interpreted according to the same logic: if the praise is subtle, it goes on to take great significance in this unadvantageous or neutral context. Thus the appearance of Sappho’s name in Socrates is revealing: Socrates admits that he has ‘filled himself from foreign sources, like a jug’: “From the admirable Sappho, from the wise Anacreon, or even from some prosodist or other.”29 The term kalê here takes on the same meaning as that given to kalos in a philosophical context. While the passage is short and with emphasis on only one word, this token of his admiration is of tremendous importance.
27In the cases of historical women fictionalised by historians, the analytical method follows the same logic. Thus when Xenophon evokes Mania, Aeolia’s Greek governor under the Great King near the end of the Peloponnesian war, he adopts the altogether neutral perspective of an omniscient narrator.30 It is Xenophon’s characters themselves who make various judgments on Mania, as on the other protagonists from the warring region. Xenophon’s audience can only observe the overwhelming share of positive appraisal towards Mania and her actions, her political cunning, her involvement in the war, and her generosity and fidelity towards her allies. The neutrality of the general enunciative context enables the historian to develop the positive viewpoint widely shared among his individual or collective protagonists (Aeolia’s army and city). In other words, Mania’s largely positive appraisal gains further depth in that it isn’t marked by a biased, laudatory intent that would make it suspicious. Thus the historian displays a powerful woman who elicits the admiration of contemporary official and institutional figures.
28Finally, in the case of Attic trials mentioned earlier, the same method applies. When women are described by plaintiffs or accusers as women of ‘shady reputation’, should the claimants be taken at their word? Given that the enunciative context necessarily conditions the negative representation of the women either brought to trial or closely related to a man brought to trial, the work of the historian lies in distinguishing between one person’s actual status and the ill repute attributed to that individual.31 Besides, we should bear in mind that these women are rarely at the heart of the trial; rather they are mentioned as one of the many elements that come up to support the argument.
29Our approach owes a great debt to the field of subaltern studies: women, even when they are named, are not themselves the focus of the statement. Their names emerge in the context of a different discourse, prompting the historian to read against the grain32 of the source material; to identify and collect informational elements that are not specifically what the enunciator meant to transmit. Similarly, this approach also allows us to reconsider quantitative issues relative through the analysis of the processes that led certain documents to be seen as ‘historical’, and others to be disregarded.
30Application of these general principles and thorough analysis of enunciative acts can help develop more reliable interpretations and provide the basis for interrelating various elements within the database. We can learn the names and/or nicknames of the women who appear33 their status, their geographical origin, their age bracket, the various adjectives or substantives used in reference to them, their personal situation, and the names of their kin (ascendants or descendants). Particular attention is paid to women’s actions, functions, and place in collective life (role or responsibility; social, economic, religious, and political activity). As gender studies have shown, extensive engagement with women’s actions brings about a new way of apprehending the ‘facts’ of social and political history.
31Our aim is to enable the user of this database to assess how gender (as indicated by the personal name)34 appears, whether it is related to a function or social activity, and to what extent it influences the reception of the character’s actions. Ultimately, the project aims not to highlight the difference between men and women (whether to indict, exaggerate, or undermine this difference) but rather to observe how gender in ancient societies interacts with other modes of differentiation such as political and socio-economic status, as well as family affiliation within a given chrono-cultural context.
32This database thus serves a double purpose: to restore visibility to the women left out of past or contemporary scholarship, while producing concrete elements liable to facilitate and nurture further research.35
Gender and Social Involvement: New Avenues for Research
33We expect to gather multiple scientific insights from the database. Its first contribution, which may be of particular interest to scholars of antiquity, has to do with the nature and the amplitude of the documents. Eurykleia will shed light on unknown or neglected documents, such as agricultural land leases or deeds of sales involving women, or the petitions of Hellenistic Egypt in which women address state authorities.36 The oracle-inscriptions at Dodona, a certain number of which have recently been published, and in which we witness requests made to Zeus or Dione by pilgrims to the sanctuary, also provide us with a significant amount of names and original information.37 Ariadni Gartziou-Tatti analysis in this special issue brings light on women’s involvement in the oracular sanctuary. Her examination of the names that appear in the lead tablets provides the basis for new research on the plurality of the functions carried out by women at Dodona.
34As for the documents we already know, such as the writings of ancient historians or the corpus of Attic orators, the aim will be to renew our interpretation of them by conducting unprejudiced analysis and paying due consideration to the discursive context. By promoting contrasting and mutually informative readings, the database will not prioritise one type of document over another. Claire Taylor’s article “Onomastic patterns of so-called hetaira names in the Greek world” offers an analysis of different types of documentation where women’s names appear: inscriptions on vases (names preceded by kalê of the kalos name type), texts from the Second Sophistic, comedy, Attic lawsuits, various inscriptions including emancipation phials, and so on. The interrelation of our sources shows how modern historians have come to constitute an artificial repertoire of ‘courtesan’s names’, and thus to claim they could deduce the morality of a historical figure on the sole basis of her anthroponym.
35Taking into account the diversity of viewpoints, without erasing variation or paradox (which frequently results from the practice of biographical notices), the database offers the means to carry out case studies that account for both the complexity of the discourse and of the ancient society that produced it. In this special issue Claudia Beltrao examines three women philosophers brought up and named by Cicero in his philosophical treatises. An analysis of the argumentative patterns that justify the very mention of these figures reveals that the praise and criticism of women rests neither on Cicero’s personal viewpoint nor on these women’s ‘reputation’ in his lifetime, but rather on the theoretical point that is defended or attacked in every argumentative context. This type of analysis thus highlights the presence of intellectual women figures playing a role in the culture and knowledge of Republican Rome, while drawing attention to the nature of the judgments passed on them: these judgments cannot be picked up such as they are, without warning or contextualisation, as in a bibliographical notice.
36Finally, the analyses carried out on the documents itemised in the database will help scholars cast a fresh look on all materials in which women appear without reference to their personal name, but who exercise some kind of social agency: those who claim an inheritance, sue a neighbour or call for what is rightfully theirs, and who lie in the background of Attic orators’ speeches.38
37The database offers another asset, which is likely to be of interest to any scholar taking the field of gender studies to any other period or discipline. Scholars working from an intersectional perspective will for instance be able to determine the relative status given to gender and measure it against other determining elements such as age, social and juridical status, and ethnic origin. To that end, testimonials of women setting up perpetual foundations sub modo (under certain conditions) allow us to understand what made their involvement in civic life possible, from the Hellenistic to the Imperial period. The inscriptions collected by Sophia Aneziri for this special issue shed light on certain women’s ability to manage their wealth in both moveable assets and estate capital, including in their will, and to direct their revenue or invested capital towards actions in no way specifically related to womanhood. This might include a celebration, sometimes referred to by the name of the benefactress (as was the case for Echenike at Delos); the restoration of public structures, as in the case of Archippe at Kyme; or the upkeep of a personal funerary cult, especially during the Imperial period. These testimonials will facilitate future research on the ‘legal tutelage’ of Ancient women.
38Finally, close analysis of the corpora and inclusion of new documents into the database will be attended by a reexamination of the academic literature. For example: what led so many historians to believe that a woman whose name appears on a ceramic work was a prostitute?39 As we pointed out earlier in the text, Claire Taylor’s study is ample evidence that personal names do not enable us to deduce the ‘respectability’ of the women who bear them. Even though antonomastic practices did exist (as, for instance, in the theatre), this set of names was given to women at large throughout Antiquity: the category known as ‘courtesans’ names’ is a modern invention. Along the same lines, the database fosters an analytical method aiming to deconstruct interpretations that are hasty and based on anachronistic or arbitrary bias, but also to illuminate the historiographical processes that, since Antiquity, have led to certain interpretations gaining credence, while others have been disregarded.40
39Enrique Nieto’s article, for instance, forewarns us of a potential risk for the historian: the systematic prejudice that men hold a particular status within the systems of name transmission among kin. His investigation, published in this special issue, reveals that ancient practices of name transmission turn out to be much more complex. The nomination of women, similarly to that of men, went according to family logics that took the bilaterality of filiation into account: the eldest daughter frequently received the name of her maternal grandmother, while the two younger children inherited names more randomly obtained from the stock of names collected from the families of both parents. In this case, the change of suffix was enough to transfer to a woman a name previously borne by a man, and vice-versa. Both women and men thus had ‘family’ names, such as Alexandra and Alexandros, Andromachê and Andromachos, Kleoboulê and Kleoboulos. The semantics of the names above, which have to do, respectively, with war (-machê), fame (kleo-), advisedness (-boulê), preservation (alex-), and virility (andro-), were indicative of kinship rather than a set of values embodied by the person bearing that name and by his/her gender.
40Let us conclude on why we called our project Eurykleia: we chose to name our project after a woman who, regardless of what Pericles states in Thucydides, was well known among the Ancients and whose name continues to ring, even today, in the ear of any reader of the Odyssey: she was the nurse of Ulysses, who unlike anyone else in the palace recognised him in his beggar’s clothes. In poetic tradition, the name suggests fame, renown (kleos) that is far-spreading (euru-). This name is doubly charged with meaning, simultaneously contrasting with her subservient status and pointing out her pivotal role in the narrative economy as Ulysses is preparing to regain his rightful position in Ithaca. The name of Eurykleia, although referring to a fictional character, seemed a fitting emblem for this scholarly undertaking. To a large extent the practice of document transmission, together with both ancient and modern historiographical biases, relegated women to anonymity: now to restore their visibility is an initial and indispensable step towards a gender-balanced history of ancient societies.41
Bibliographie
Abbreviations
DPRR : Digital Prosopography of the Roman Republic; Department of Classics and Department of Digital Humanities du King’s College, London, http://romanrepublic.ac.uk/
LGPN : Lexicon of Greek Personal Names, Oxford, www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk
LGPN I : Peter Fraser, Elaine Matthews, The Aegean Islands, Cyprus, Cyrenaica, Oxford, [1987] 1996.
LGPN II : Michael J. Osborne, Sean G. Byrne, Attica, Oxford, [1994] 2007.
LGPN IIIA : Peter Fraser, Elaine Matthews, Peloponnese, Western Greece, Sicily et Magna Grecia, Oxford, 1997.
LGPN IIIB : Peter Fraser, Elaine Matthews, Central Greece, From the Megarid to Thessaly, Oxford, 2000.
LGPN IV : Peter Fraser, Elaine Matthews, Macedonia, Thrace, Northern Regions of the Black Sea, Oxford, 2005.
LGPN Va : Thomas Corsten, Coastal Asia Minor: Pontos to Ionia, Oxford, 2010.
LGPN Vb : Jean-Sébastien Balzat, Richard W. V. Catling, Édouard Chiricat, Fabienne Marchand (éd.), Coastal Asia Minor: Caria to Cilicia, Oxford, 2014.
PIR : Elimar Klebs, Hermann Dessau, Paul von Rohden, Prosopographia Imperii Romani, I, II, III, Berlin, 1897-1898.
PIR2 : Edmund Groag, Arthur Stein, Leiva Petersen, Klaus Wachtel et alii, Prosopographia Imperii Romani, I, II, III, Berlin, 1933-; http://pir.bbaw.de/
General Bibliography
Augier 2015: Marie Augier, “Gestion d’un patrimoine, gestion d’un sanctuaire : ces femmes dont le nom s’affiche dans la cité”, in Sandra Boehringer, Adeline Grand-Clément, Sandra Péré-Noguès, Violaine Sebillote Cuchet (ed.), Laisser son nom : femmes et actes de mémoire dans les sociétés anciennes, Pallas 99, p. 77-100.
— 2018: Marie Augier (ed.) Des femmes publiques. Genre, visibilité et sociabilité dans l’Antiquité grecque et romaine, Archimède. Archéologie et histoire ancienne [en ligne] 5, p. 108-184. URL: http://archimede.unistra.fr/revue-archimede/archimede-5-2018).
Avram 2013: Alexandru Avram, Prosopographia Ponti Euxini Externa, Leuven-Paris.
Bielman 2002: Anne Bielman, Femmes en public dans le monde hellénistique, Paris.
Boehringer et al. 2015: Sandra Boehringer, Adeline Grand-Clément, Sandra Péré-Noguès, Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet (ed.), Laisser son nom : femmes et actes de mémoire dans les sociétés anciennes, Pallas 99, p. 9-131 (https://journals.openedition.org/pallas/2968).
Boehringer, Sebillotte Cuchet 2013 : Sandra Boehringer, Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet (ed.), Des femmes en action. L’individu et la fonction en Grèce antique, Mètis Hors Série, Paris.
— [2011] 2017 : Sandra Boehringer, Violaine Sebillotte Cuchet (ed.), Hommes et femmes dans l’Antiquité. Le genre : méthodes et documents, Paris.
Bremen 1996: Riet van Bremen, The Limits of Participation. Women and Civic Life in the Greek East in the Hellenistic and Roman Periods, Amsterdam.
Bridenthal, Koonz 1977: Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, Becoming visible, Boston.
Broughton 1951-1952: Thomas Robert Shannon Broughton, with Marcia L. Patterson, The Magistrates of the Roman Republic, New York.
Carney 2000: Elizabeth Carney, Women and Monarchy in Macedonia, Norman.
Cohen 2005: David Cohen, “Women in Public: Gender, Citizenship, and Social Status in Classical Athens”, in Michael Gagarin, Robert W. Wallace (ed.), Symposion 2001, Vorträge zur griechischen und hellenistischen Rechtsgeschichte, Vienna, p. 33-46.
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Davies 1971: John K. Davies, Athenian Propertied Families 600–300 B.C., Oxford.
French 1984: David H. French, Epigraphica Anatolica: Zeitschrift für Epigraphik und historische Geographie Anatoliens 4, p. 75-83.
Frija 2010: Gabrielle Frija, Prosopographie des prêtres du culte impérial dans les cités de la province romaine d’Asie (base de données). URL: http://www.pretres-civiques.org
— 2012: Gabrielle Frija, Les Prêtres des empereurs : le culte impérial civique dans la province romaine d'Asie, Rennes.
Gera 1997: Deborah Levine Gera, Warrior Women, The Anonymous Tractatus de Mulieribus, Leiden.
Grand-Clément 2016: Adeline Grand-Clément, “Les femmes nommées… toutes des prostituées ?”, in Eurykleia [en ligne]. URL: https://eurykleia.hypotheses.org/373
Grand-Clément, Guillon 2020: Adeline Grand-Clément, Élodie Guillon, “L’apport scientifique des bases de données : réflexion croisée sur les programmes MAP (Mapping Ancient Polytheisms) et Eurykleia”, Anabases 31, p. 198-204.
Hunter 2005: Richard L. Hunter (ed.), The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, Constructions and Reconstructions, Cambridge.
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Lhôte 2006 : Emmanuel Lhôte, Les lamelles oraculaires de Dodone, Genève.
Loraux 1991: Nicole Loraux, “Qu’est-ce qu’une déesse ?”, in Pauline Schmitt Pantel (ed.), Histoire des femmes en Occident, vol. 1. L’Antiquité, Paris, p. 31-63.
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Notes de bas de page
1 Thucydides, II, 34, 4: ξυνεκφέρει δὲ ὁ βουλόμενος καὶ ἀστῶν καὶ ξένων, καὶ γυναῖκες πάρεισιν αἱ προσήκουσαι ἐπὶ τὸν τάφον ὀλοφυρόμεναι.
2 Thucydides, II, 45, 2.
3 Translation by Richard Crawley: The Peloponnesian War, London-New York, 1910.
4 This has already been pointed out by William B. Tyrrell et Larry J. Bennett: Tyrell, Bennett 1999.
5 Schaps 1977.
6 Ibid., p. 328.
7 Ibid., p. 330.
8 Regarding kleos, this radiant sound in which the memory of the deceased is preserved, see Jesper Svenbro’s writings on the name of a young Athenian woman in the mid-6th century BCE, Phrasikleia (“She who draws attention to kleos”), whose funerary monument is now housed in the National Archaeological Monument, Athens. As the author reminds us about the epigram engraved on the base of the statue, “each reading thus audibly blooms with the meaning, which is to say, with the kleos.” Svenbro 1988, p. 30; for the entire analysis see p. 13-32.
9 On Eurykleia’s character, see infra.
10 Kergoat 2010, particularly p. 62. In 1993, Claude Mossé had argued for the necessity of paying due consideration to these various types of social relations in the field of ancient studies: Mossé 1993.
11 Conceived by Flavien Monnier (a CNRS engineer and member of UMR 8210 ANHIMA), the database is under development at the time of writing.
12 The articles in this special issue result from the scientific exchanges that occurred during the events organized as part of the Eurykleia project, particularly the International Conference Women who Matter: Gender and Digital Classics that took place in Paris on November 17-18, 2018. This event was a joint effort with PICS ANGAN (ANHIMA NEREIDA Gender and Antiquity Network), which supported collaboration between French and Brazilian research teams (https://eurykleia.hypotheses.org/angan) between 2017 and 2019.
13 PIR. The second edition volumes were published in Berlin between 1933 and 2015.
14 PIR and PIR2.
15 The DPRR relies in particular on Broughton 1951-1952, and on Rüpke 2008.
16 Kirchner 1901-1903, in which 15.588 Athenians are recorded.
17 See Traill 1994-2012 and John S. Traill, The Athenian Project, Toronto, 2012: http://atheniansproject.com; Davies 1971.
18 McClees 1920.
19 LGPNA I.
20 www.lgpn.ox.ac.uk; printed volumes: LGPN I; LGPN II; LGPN IIIA; LGPN IIIB; LGPN IV; LGPN Va; LGPN Vb.
21 To even the historiographical scales was already a central effort of the first studies in women’s history: Rowbotham 1973; Bridenthal, Koonz 1977; Perrot 1998.
22 Hunter 2005 and Most 2007; MacInerney 2003; Gera 1997.
23 Contemporary studies often focus on a profession (e.g. for medical practitioners in Asia Minor: Nissen 2006) or a function (e.g. for those involved in the imperial cult in Asia: Frija 2010 and 2012). External prosopographies are often built on geographical criteria (for the Euxinos Pontos, see Avram 2013).
24 As Nicole Loraux pointed out, a goddess is not a woman (Loraux 1991). An ERC project led by Corinne Bonnet (Université Jean Jaurès-Toulouse) is working on a database of deities’ epithets, which will enable further research in the field of gender. (Mapping Ancient Polytheisms. Cult Epithets as an Interface between Religious Systems and Human Agency). See Grand-Clément, Guillon 2020, for a comparison of the Eurykleia and MAP projects.
25 See for instance Bremen 1996; Carney 2000; Bielman 2002.
26 SEG XXXIV (1984) 1067: see French 1984.
27 On conducting case studies: Passeron, Revel 2005, particularly p. 10-11: “A case is not only an isolated fact, which one would have remain as such. It is problematic; it calls for a solution, which is to say, the setting up of a new framework of reasoning. Within it, the meaning of the exception may be, if not defined by the established rules from which it departs, at least set in relation with other real or fictitious cases, liable to redefine a new formulation of normalcy and its exceptions” (our translation).
28 See Augier 2015.
29 Plato, Phaedrus 235c.
30 Xenophon, Hellenica, III, 1, 8-28.
31 In Neaera’s case, for instance, see Cohen 2005, particularly p. 37-39. More generally, on the proper method to adopt regarding orators’ speeches, see Claude Mossé’s recommendations (1983).
32 Ranajit Guha, a specialist of colonial India, developed in the 1980s what would become the mainstay procedure of subaltern studies: a method based on a reading ‘against the grain’ of sources produced by an elite, in order to discover, even in the dominant discourse, information regarding marginalised, subjected, and silenced populations. In the field of classical studies, John Winkler’s book The Constraints of Desire contains a subsection titled “Reading against the grain”, as a tribute to Guha’s work. (Winkler 1990).
33 The project connects the documents naming women with the ANR/IUF LGPN-Ling Project, dir. S. Minon (EPHE-PSL/ANHIMA) et R. Parker (Oxford/LGPN), coord. Cl. Le Feuvre and M. Egetmeyer (Paris-Sorbonne/Orient et Méditerranée), which analyses ancient Greek names from a linguistic and philological viewpoint.
34 Determining to what sex an anthroponym refers is not always easy: see Morpurgo Davies 2000, especially p. 20-21.
35 The Eurykleia project (http://eurykleia.huma-num.fr/) has already led to several publications: Boehringer, Sebillotte Cuchet [2011] 2017; Boehringer, Sebillotte Cuchet 2013; Boehringer et al. 2015; Augier 2018. Also noteworthy is the virtual exhibition Sortir du gynécée. Un nouveau regard sur la Grèce antique, 2018 (http://musea.fr/exhibits/show/sortir-du-gynecee/presentation).
36 Pernin 2014; Veisse 2013.
37 Lhôte 2006 and Dakaris et al. 2013. See also https://dodonaonline.com/
38 Thus, in Isaeus, Pyrrhus’s sister files a lawsuit to claim her inheritance from her dead brother, which a woman named Phile is trying to appropriate (III. 2-3) according to a procedure deemed normal (III. 58); Eupolis’s daughter, wife of Pronapes, claims the estate of Apollodoros, (VII. 18), while Euboulides’s daughter sues for that of Hagnias (XI. 9); sisters bar their husbands from testifying in court (XII.5); Euboulides’s daughter and Hagnias’s mother join together against the plaintiff in the hope that the winning party will share her winnings with the loser (XI.21); the plaintiff’s wife owns an estate at Prospalta (XI.49), etc.
39 See the entry on the Eurykleia research log by Adeline Grand-Clément: Grand-Clément 2016.
40 Michelle Perrot emphasises the extent to which the choice of objects determines the way in which history is written. Perrot 1998.
41 The interview with Stella Georgoudi and Pauline Schmitt Pantel (infra, p. 137-148) reminds us of the pioneering work on women in the ancient world that started in the 1970s and has resulted in the development of the notion of gender-balanced history, a history in which women and men are granted equal footing (Association Mnémosyne, La Place des femmes dans l’histoire. Une histoire mixte, Paris, 2010).
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