[NB This review was published in The Classical Journal 100 (2004-05), pp.

312-15]
Spartan Women. By Sarah B. Pomeroy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. Pp. xi + 198.
Hardback $65.00; paperback $19.95.
Sarah Pomeroy opens this book with the justifiable claim (p. vii) that it is the first fulllength historical study of Spartan women and she uses the opportunity to discuss a wide range of
aspects of female life. The rationale behind the plan of the book nowhere explained is somewhat
unclear. Early chapters consider the development of womens lives. Ch.1 examines female
education, including such diverse aspects as literacy, learned women, mousike, physical education,
horsemanship, competitions, athletic nudity and weaving. Chapter 2 discusses Becoming a Wife,
ch.3 The Creation of Mothers. However, instead of continuing on to old women not least
widows, who figure prominently in hellenistic Spartan history the plan then changes from a
developmental to a sociological tack, with chapters on elite women (ch.4) and omitting ordinary
Spartiate women helots and free non-citizens in a chapter (ch.5) entitled The Lower Classes. The
focus then alters again, with a separate discussion (ch.6) on Women and Religion. A short
Conclusion entitled Women and Ethnicity is followed, finally, by the longest chapter of the book,
a substantial Appendix on Sources for the History of Spartan Women.
The volumes plan is indicative of its strengths and weaknesses. The books merits are its
emphases upon the sheer range of available evidence (albeit often difficult and fragmentary) and
upon the diverse contexts of Spartan womens lives in a society too often viewed in narrowly
militaristic terms. P. rightly argues that historians should take seriously womens perspectives on
and contributions to Spartan society. She is especially sensitive to the key role of motherhood and
draws attention to other female contributions, including understudied ones such as womens
participation in cult.
P.s discussions of the significance of female roles, however, have severe analytical
limitations. Some have their roots in the volumes plan. The volume is organised in such a way that
full discussion of points asserted is frequently deferred to later chapters, especially to the long
Appendix a practice which, at best, hinders the readers capacity to scrutinise her arguments
critically and, at worst, leaves major arguments dependent upon dogmatic assertion. For example,
she asserts that the educational goals of the state and the girls curriculum are reflected in the lyrics
written by Alcman (p.6). There then follows the translated text of Partheneia 1 & 3, but no
discussion of the content of the lyrics or their educational implications; only in Appendix is there a
brief, but hardly sufficient, discussion of the context of the poems performance. Similarly, on p.35,
when accepting Plutarchs account of the assignment of kleroi to newly-born males, she relegates
mention of scholarly criticism of Plutarchs evidence to a footnote (n.6), which merely refers the
reader to a footnote in a later chapter (p.93, n.61), which itself refers on to a discussion in the
Appendix.
The most significant example, however, is her presentation of the view that there was a
major change in the classical period which, by giving citizens the right for the first time to alienate
and bequeath their property, increased womens potential to own immovable property. This idea is
first broached in the Preface, with the assertion (p. x) that major economic changes occurred at
the end of the fifth or in the early fourth century (see chap. 4). Before ch.4 is reached, however, the
reality of the alleged changes is already assumed, in order to support the notion (without foundation
in any evidence) that private citizens usurped the right to conduct the scrutiny of male infants
(p.36), to date the (otherwise undatable) introduction of husband-doubling arrangements (p.46), and
to justify the claim that women now had increased incentives to develop inheritance strategies and
regulate their fertility (p.71). When ch.4 finally arrives, the supposed demonstration of the alleged
changes (pp.78-80) is founded upon sand. Acknowledging that our knowledge of Spartan land
tenure is uncertain, P. evades discussion of the controversies by stating that I will sketch a likely
scenario, a procedure through which she asserts precisely the points which require argument.
Despite P.s evidently wide knowledge of the diverse source material, her critical
engagement with source problems is minimal. She avows that my tendency is to grant more

credence to the primary sources than some contemporary hypercritical Spartanologists are wont to
do (p. viii). Too often this entails ignoring the key phenomenon of the Spartan mirage in favour of
uncritical acceptance of unverifiable statements by late authors, which are then used as the
unwarranted basis for larger hypotheses. For example, her assertion (p.63-4) that women rejected
the burden of continuous child production is based merely on a verse by an unknown Latin poet
quoted by Cicero, Tusc. 2.36; yet the passage soon becomes the basis for the unprovable claim
(p.65) that womens control over reproduction was a significant biological reason for Spartan
oliganthropia. Her reading of sources is frequently shaky. At pp.59-60, she seems unaware that the
military anecdotes involving mothers burying their sons must be hellenistic in date, since in
classical times dead Spartan warriors were invariably buried abroad. Sometimes poor source
criticism stems from a tendency to impose anthropologically-attested customs onto Spartan
practice: thus she insists on viewing the husband-doubling arrangements in terms of partible
paternity, despite the fact that her main source (Xen. Lak, Pol. 1.9) indicates that each man made a
clear distinction between his own and the others sons. There are also elementary howlers: e.g.
misreading Hdt. 5.41.3 as saying the first wife of Anaxandridas I gave birth to male triplets (p.74),
and misreporting Hdt. 6.61-3 as indicating that King Ariston practiced bigamy, if not trigamy
(p.75): in fact, Herodotus states explicitly that Ariston divorced his second wife on taking his third,
and there is no reason to believe that he did anything differently with his first wife (cf. Hdt. 5.40).
P. is often equally cavalier in her treatment of previous historiography. She announces that
the longstanding lack of serious scholarship on the history of Spartan women has meant that there
has been less impetus than is usual to take into account previous studies (p. viii). These
comments ignore the existence of major ongoing debates about the position of Spartan women
throughout the 1980s and 1990s, which are represented in her bibliography by over 20 scholarly
articles. Her discussion of the secondary literature in the Appendix (pp.159-61) fails to provide a
balanced assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the range of recent work. There is no
acknowledgement of previous scholars who have advanced similar views to her own; no mention
either of important articles by female scholars. Instead, her discussion is mainly personalised pointscoring against certain historians who have viewed Spartan women through the lens of the mirage
and produced more nuanced or cautious assessments of female roles than are asserted here.
Indeed, P.s depiction of Spartan women, as elaborated in her Conclusion, is over-idealised.
Their role model is Helen: beautiful, tall, well-fed and liberated in their dress, they are vocal and
articulate, possessing considerable freedom of sexual expression and exercising control over their
reproductive capacity, as also over property. They are active partners in marriage and enforce
societal norms, wielding the power of life and death over their adult sons and even controlling the
testing of male babies. Several of these conclusions are mere assertions, nowhere properly proven;
some are direct products of the Spartan mirage. Others may have been true for some Spartan
women, some of the time; but P.s overall picture, dominated by images of youthful Western-style
empowerment, is too one-sided. There is little place in her account for the aged, even for widows
(who receive only the briefest of comment on pp.76 & 87); still less for the veiled Spartan women
(there is one sentence on the veil on p.42, but no references in the Index) recently studied by Lloyd
Llewellyn-Jones.1
This is a book which academics will be inclined to use in their teaching as a convenient
exposition of the evidence; but personal experience with my own students indicates that it is as
likely to mislead as to illuminate. A serious scholarly account of womens contributions to Spartan
society requires a more critical and analytical approach to the evidence and a more realistic
assessment of both the opportunities and the limitations which Spartan women of diverse statuses
and ages experienced in the course of their lives.
Stephen Hodkinson
University of Nottingham
1

Aphrodite's Tortoise: The veiled woman of ancient Greece (Swansea, 2003) 46, 51-2, 97, 99-101, 107; The Veiled
Women of Sparta, in E.G. Millender (ed.), Spartan Women Unveiled (Swansea, forthcoming).