Marcella Farioli’s volume offers an analysis of the numerous figures of dangerous women attested in the literary and iconographic sources of ancient Greece, with particular attention to Classical Athens, and aims to elucidate their functions as well as the reasons for their distinctive development in relation to the political, economic, and social context that produced them.
The book is divided into three chapters, preceded by a brief preface.
The first chapter (Les femmes grecques et leurs représentations) serves as a general introduction to the topic, followed by a presentation of the methodology, theoretical framework, and principal analytical categories employed in the study. The author then surveys the development of gender studies in the historiography of the ancient world over the past fifty years, discussing the validity of the various theoretical approaches within this field, which is now characterized by the predominance of culturalist and psychologizing interpretations of power relations. A brief status quaestionis follows, addressing the debate on the status and activities of female citizens in antiquity, their representations, and gender relations in the poleis of ancient Greece, with particular reference to Athens. The chapter concludes with an analysis of the formation, through mythico-religious thought, of the concept of the “genos of women” as a separate group endowed with a specific nature, and of its subsequent canonization in medical, biological, and philosophical theories.
This introductory section is not merely a prelude to the subsequent analysis but advances theoretical reflections that constitute one of the most significant contributions of the book. It develops a powerful methodological reflection that, one may hope, will leave a lasting mark on the field. Farioli’s theoretical trajectory unfolds through a sustained and engaging dialogue with the various strands of contemporary feminism, as well as with gender studies. This approach has the important merit of rescuing the study of women in the ancient world from the marginal niche into which it risks falling—a niche that in Italy, as Farioli observes, sometimes retreats behind a presumed neutrality of the sources without engaging with the core of contemporary debate. Moving beyond this apparently neutral, and perhaps somewhat opaque, refuge is a necessary step in reactivating reflection on this aspect of antiquity and making it part of the shared intellectual heritage of all those concerned with Greek civilization.
The second chapter (Des femmes dangereuses) examines the various types of dangerous women attested in the sources and their evolution over time. These are predominantly figures drawn from mythology, alongside several examples taken from history or pseudo-history. The first category consists of women associated with warfare and political power, followed by female figures responsible for crimes against men, especially male relatives: husband killers, filicidal mothers, murderous stepmothers, parricides, avenging mothers, and homicidal Maenads. The analysis then turns to women who escape the socially assigned roles of wife and mother: adulteresses and seductresses, lovestruck stepmothers featuring in narratives structured around the Potiphar motif, pharmakides, and enchantresses situated within the blurred sphere between seduction and magic. The discussion continues with parthenoi who refuse marriage or kill their husbands after the wedding and concludes with monstrous female creatures and the mormolykeia.
Farioli shows that the representations of these figures—around seventy in number—display recurring features and develop over time along similar trajectories, with few exceptions: in the transition from the Archaic to the Classical period, in parallel with the consolidation of the democratic polis, these characters become progressively more dangerous, their responsibilities increase, and their motivations grow more ignoble. Some figures of wicked women are created ex novo and inserted into preexisting mythic narratives. By contrast, dangerous male figures display neither recurring traits nor comparable developmental patterns.
In tracing the “biography” of these female figures, Farioli works with great sensitivity to the literary evidence (without neglecting fragmentary texts) and with due caution to the iconographic material. The result is an analysis of considerable richness, in which all elements contribute to defining each of these female figures, including those at the intersection of different typologies. However, I perceive a certain difficulty from this perspective. On the one hand, both the premises and conclusion of the book rightly emphasize the necessary connection between female deviance and the theater as a historical product of the context of Athenian democracy in the second half of the fifth century. By contrast, Farioli draws on a much broader body of sources. The intention is clear, and it serves to highlight the gap, in terms of representation, between an Archaic tradition and the milieu in which gynaikophobia and its ideological driving forces are most intelligible. However, one may wonder whether it would have been useful to sacrifice part of the material to bring this representational gap into sharper focus within the theatrical corpus. Farioli also refers to other types of texts, which are useful for assessing the concrete effectiveness of certain mechanisms (for example, in terms of legislation on adultery or inheritance). Some of these texts might have been exploited even more fruitfully. One example may suffice: Pericles’ Funeral Oration, whose performative dimension is evident in Thucydides’ description of the ritual framework of patrios nomos.
The third chapter (Les femmes dangereuses et la cité), which functions as a conclusion, offers an overall interpretation of the phenomenon of the negative evolution of dangerous female figures that emerges from the analysis of sources. The author relates this development to the gradual transformation of social sex relations, as well as forms of marriage, inheritance, and dowry in Athens, in connection with broader changes in political structures, forms of citizenship, and the laws of the city between the Archaic and Classical periods. Through an analysis of the laws attributed to Draco and Solon, as well as post-Solonian legislation, Farioli identifies an increasing commitment on the part of the state to control women’s freedom and morality to ensure that the legitimacy of offspring and the transmission of family property were not compromised by female intemperance. The regulation of inheritance, in turn, aimed to preserve the balance between families and the stability of landed property, while at the same time perpetuating economic inequality between the two social sexes and preventing women’s economic autonomy, since they were excluded from the ownership of the means of production. Such a rigid system required a powerful ideological apparatus to justify it. According to Farioli, the representation of female danger in the Classical period was one of the many devices that served to reinforce the ideology of the polis in the exercise of its two fundamental functions: to ensure the cohesion and reproduction of the system and to ground those power relations essential to its survival and freedom. This representation of female danger, however, remains in tension with the polis’ self-representation as a “city of equals,” as do the devices of slavery, the subordinate status of metics and women, and economic inequality among citizens.
Within this framework, Farioli examines, through the analytical tools of materialist feminist anthropology and sociology, the modalities of the sexual division of labor and the extortion of women’s unpaid work. The category of the “domestic mode of production,” proposed by Christine Delphy, is applied to antiquity. The concept of “domestic work,” in fact, aptly describes the dual form of exploitation exerted upon Athenian women in the Classical period: on the one hand, the production of children and housework carried out within the oikos; on the other, labor employed in the economic activities owned by the husband, especially in agriculture. In this context, following Colette Guillaumin, Farioli analyzes the use of the “idea of nature,” in the sources, that is, the conception according to which the oppression of certain social groups is determined kata physin.
The book concludes with a set of images, offering selected examples of the evolution of the iconographic representations of dangerous women in vase painting between the sixth and the fourth centuries BCE. An extensive bibliography and index of names follow.
Farioli’s work is impressive in scope, rich in ideas and theoretical reflections, and written with great clarity and remarkable lucidity. At the same time, it is a work animated by passion and intellectual engagement. The author approaches the subject with rigor and the detached gaze of a scholar, yet she never forgets that she is herself a woman. This does not render her perspective partial or militant; rather, it makes it more truthful. What ultimately makes the difference is the way the author handles the sources, the integrity of her judgment, and her methods. From this perspective, Farioli’s book appears to be a particularly successful example of the fruitful integration of different scholarly traditions. On the one hand, there is her knowledge of and familiarity with ancient texts, her sensitivity to linguistic nuance, and her ability to move with great ease within an enormous literary corpus (from Homer to the Roman imperial period, with occasional forays into other traditions). On the other hand, there is her attentiveness to and engagement with issues central to contemporary debate—questions concerning the construction of social space, identity, and the place of women within modern consciousness. All of this reflects a capacity to engage with present realities and pressing questions to which the field of classical studies is not always inclined to respond. Through a rigorous and clearly articulated approach, the author offers interpretative tools that engage with established traditions of scholarship and lines of thought, bringing them together into a synthesis of remarkable coherence.
One of the major merits of Farioli’s work lies in having restored material conditions to the center of reflection on the construction of social, economic, and cultural categories, in contrast to a contemporary interpretative landscape often marked by the erasure of perspectives attentive to power relations, control over the means of production, and the management and distribution of wealth as constitutive factors of social organization. The result is often an overly irenic account in which conflicts between social groups disappear and the force of ideology is diminished. To return to speaking of class or status, modes of production, appropriation, the dominant and dominated, does not mean remaining tied to a political past, but rather reintroducing into historical analysis fundamental categories of thought that can be productively revitalized. Farioli draws on the analytical tools of materialist feminist sociology and anthropology (C. Delphy, C. Guillaumin, Nicole-Claude Mathieu, Paola Tabet), and the reflections on the different forms of the appropriation of women within a patriarchal system and a domestic mode of production provide an illuminating key for understanding the condition of women in antiquity.
As a historian, I especially appreciate the author’s reading of Athenian democracy, which I fully endorse. The distance between the self-representation of democracy and its actual practice—particularly when force was required—cannot be emphasized enough. This paradoxical dimension is present both externally and internally. Farioli’s work, which makes particularly effective use of the scholarship of Mario Vegetti, aptly highlights this paradox within a social body whose cohesion is essential to the stability of the political body. As she convincingly demonstrates, the increasing rigidity of the Athenian political body leads to a corresponding increase in the normativity of its social coordinates, especially regarding the control of its female component, excluded from citizenship yet essential to its reproduction. The importance of Pericles’ citizenship law is well known, but Farioli’s study reveals its far-reaching consequences in terms of social control, the management of fear, and the representation of the female world—and does so not in vague or purely psychological terms, but within a historically determined system that depends on legitimate reproduction and the transmission of property.
In conclusion, Farioli’s perspective actively contributes to reflection on a series of fundamental questions concerning the institutions and society of the Greek world: including the delicate lexical and conceptual distinction between genos and phylon; the notion of “citizen” (within which women—rightly, in my view, as the author argues—appear as unequal citizens subject to external control); dietary practices; the hierarchy of weapons (in war and in sacrifice); the emergence of extra-domestic labor; and the function and uses of the proix. This is, therefore, a work of history that cannot in any way be confined within the category of “women’s studies,” but rather concerns the universal dimension of the history of humankind.