Greek Girls Gone Wild? Mycenaean Women in Celebratory Roles

Julie A. Hruby (Grand Valley State University)

The institution of feasting in the Bronze Age Aegean has been the subject of considerable recent scholarship, with a broad consensus that feasts provided a locus for the negotiation and performance of sociopolitical hierarchy. Gender, however, remains a largely unexplored aspect of this institution and hierarchy.

Textual and archaeological evidence indicates that women participated in at least some public festivals. Quantities of food and drink allocated to feasts in the Linear B tablets from Pylos suggest that the entire population, male and female, might have attended some feasts, held throughout the countryside. The Ta tablets may also imply that elite women participated in feasts that had more limited attendance; their inventory includes footstools, which are associated iconographically with females, in a context that may suggest feasting. Mycenaean feasts therefore appear to have offered opportunities for female participation.

Both the production of feasts and the practice of feasting were, however, gendered activities. The iconography of feasting seems to grant substantially more prominent placement to men. Textual evidence also indicates that men were probably the principal sponsors of feasts. Among the personnel responsible for the labor behind a feast, gendered division of labor was characteristic, with many of the less respected, more menial tasks assigned to females (often slaves), and the higher-ranking and more specialized tasks fulfilled by males (mostly free). Hence, gender interacted with other factors such as social status to establish the roles played by individuals, and those roles in turn created and reinforced conceptions of gender. If Bronze Age Greek girls sometimes went wild at Mycenaean feasts, therefore, they did so constrained by both class and gender.