Nossis
and Women’s Cult at Locri
Eleven, or possibly twelve, epigrams by the third century B.C.E.
woman poet Nossis, a native of Epizephyrian Locri in Magna Graecia,
have been preserved in the Greek Anthology. Originally
excerpted from a larger authorial collection by the anthologist
Meleager, these quatrains were until recently ignored by
English-speaking classicists. Now, however, they have caught the
attention of American feminist scholars, who praise Nossis’
artistic delicacy, wit, and learning, point to her aspirations for
public recognition, and define her contribution to the organizational
conventions of later Hellenistic poetry books (Skinner 1989 and 1991;
Bowman; Gutzwiller 74–88).
On the other hand, Italian archaeologists, no less than Italian
students of Greek verse, have always paid close attention to Nossis.
Her testimony to the existence of a temple of Aphrodite in her native
city prompted investigators to identify what was clearly one of its
major shrines, the archaic sanctuary at Marasà Sud, as that of
the goddess. Aphrodite’s presence at Locri is now confirmed by
a graffito and an inscription from another site, a sanctuary complex
at Centocamere, outside the city walls (Barra Bagnasco 1990, 1992:
14–15, 1996). Marcello Gigante noted other significant
correspondences between the archaeological evidence and Nossis’
dedicatory epigrams, including iconographic details from the famous
fifth century B.C.E. Locrian votive pinakes (1974).
Despite the fact that most of them memorialize cult offerings by
women, though, Nossis’ epigrams have not been adequately
consulted as a source of information about the demonstrably unusual
aspects of religious practice at Locri. In his monumental new study
The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy (2003),
James M. Redfield posits that the social organization of Locri
Epizephyrii was radically distinct from that of other leading archaic
Greek states, because it grounded its solidarity upon the mediation
of sexual difference and the closed exchange of elite women in
marriage. For understanding such a system as he theorizes, the
testimony of an “insider,” a female member of the
nobility with first-hand knowledge of women’s rituals, would,
one assumes, be of inestimable value to a researcher—yet
Redfield confines his interest in Nossis to just one footnote (n. 47
on p. 265), in which he cites her autobiographical mention of mother
and grandmother to corroborate the historian Polybius’ report
(12.5) that the matriline was crucial to status differentiation. More
use of Nossis can surely be made. In this paper, I bring historical
and archaeological evidence of Locrian cult activity to bear on four
of her poems, namely the dedicatory quatrains numbered 3 through 6 in
Gow and Page’s Hellenistic Epigrams. After analyzing
their implications, I will conclude with remarks upon the internal
audience of women worshippers Nossis constructs in these poems and
its relationship to the external audience she is addressing.
B
efore
I discuss Nossis’ poetry, however, let me acquaint you with the
history and topography of her native city and summarize some of the
curious features of its cults. As the name indicates, Locri was
founded by the Opuntian Locrians of central Greece, possibly with
Spartan collaboration (Paus. 3.3.1), in the early seventh century
B.C.E. Rivalry with the neighboring cities of Regium and Croton
(Figure 1) led it to expand its territory; at the height of
its power, in the early decades of the fifth century, Locri had
founded its own subsidiary colonies, such as Medma, and controlled a
large swathe of land all the way to the Tyrrhenian Sea. Its governing
class maintained close ties with Syracuse in Sicily; when Dionysius
II, tyrant of Syracuse, was expelled in 356, he was given asylum by
the Locrian aristocracy. Dionysius’ subsequent seizure of
political power at Locri was followed by a popular revolt and the
establishment of a democracy. The Locrians sided with Pyrrhus, king
of Epirus, in his wars against Rome, and defected to Hannibal during
the Second Punic War; later, however, the city was recaptured by
Scipio and passed under Rome’s sway permanently. As a Roman
municipium, it thereafter remained prosperous and locally
influential until its decline in late antiquity.
L
ocri
was famous in antiquity for its strict code of laws, attributed to
the seventh-century Pythagorean sage Zaleucus, for its hereditary
oligarchy, and, above all, for its several leading sanctuaries
(Figure 2). One of the oldest, probably coterminous with the
foundation of the city in the 7th century B.C.E., is the
Ionic temple at Marasá, which, as I said earlier, has
plausibly been assigned to Aphrodite. Close by is the extra-mural
precinct at Centocamere), also dating back to the 7th
century and also belonging to Aphrodite. A temple closer to the
central part of the city, at Casa Marafioti, may have been that of
Zeus. Another extra-mural place of worship is located at Grotta
Caruso, sacred in Hellenistic times to Pan and the water nymphs.
Further west, on the hill of Mannella, there are remains of a temple
of Athena. Unfortunately, the ruins of Locri’s most famous
shrine, the temple of Persephone, have not been discovered, but its
presence in a valley below the same hill, to the north and outside
the wall, is suggested by a large deposit of pinakes found
nearby.
A
ccording
to Diodorus Siculus (27.4.2), Persephone’s sanctuary was
considered “the most renowned temple in Italy, preserved as
holy for all time by the inhabitants.” Livy (29.18.3) reports
that in 204 B.C.E. envoys from Locri addressing the Roman Senate
could assume that their audience was fully aware of its religious
importance. One of the most striking aspects of the worship of
Persephone at Locri, at least to modern observers, is its conflation
with the cult of Aphrodite, as evidenced by the type-scenes found on
the pinakes. In this series of images, which are manifestly
associated with the ritual activities of women and are frequently
regarded as “wedding ex-votos” (MacLachlan 210), the
symbolism of the two deities is amalgamated, often provoking
considerable controversy as to which goddess is meant. In this plaque
(Figure 3), for example, a girl presents a ball and a rooster
to a seated divinity, while a goose flexes its wings beneath an
offering table. While roosters are chthonic birds prominently linked
to Persephone on the Locrian pinakes, geese are elsewhere
closely tied to Aphrodite—although at Locri they have
connections with Persephone as well (Sourvinou-Inwood 109). The
perceived identity of the goddess then determines the import of this
scene, which has become the focus of several conflicting readings.
Interaction between Persephone and Aphrodite is likewise subject to
opposing interpretations. Is the relation of the two antithetical,
with Persephone presiding over the domain of legitimate marriage and
child rearing, and Aphrodite standing for socially “illicit and
‘aberrant’” modes of sexuality, as Sourvinou-Inwood
(120) proposes? Or are their operations wholly integrated, so that
the goddesses, in MacLachlan’s formulation, “meet at the
intersection of death and sexuality” (218)? Redfield postulates
that the Locrian fusion of nuptial and funerary imagery reflects an
Orphic concept of marriage and death as parallel rites of passage,
each involving transformation to a blessed state (367–69,
384–85). Certainly the unique character of women’s
religious activity there, involving joint worship of deities normally
treated as quite distinct, confirms the importance of
Sourvinou-Inwood’s stipulation (101–03) that study of
Greek divine personalities must take account of local
difference and base its findings upon a non-Panhellenic,
community-oriented approach to cult. When we turn to Nossis’
epigrams we should bear such issues in mind.
Let us begin with poem 3 (AP 6.265), commemorating the
donation of a linen robe to Hera by the author and her mother:
Most reverend Hera, you who often descending from heaven
behold your Lacinian shrine fragrant with incense,
receive the linen wrap that with her noble child Nossis
Theophilis daughter of Cleocha wove for you.
P
arallels
are often drawn with the pinax types 16 and 17 Prückner,
showing a priestess and four maidens bearing a robe, most likely as a
votive gift (Figure 4). Nossis cannot be expressly referring
to the Locrian ritual on the tablet, because she states that the
garment was presented in the temple of Lacanian Hera at Croton,
almost a hundred miles east along the Ionian coast. However, her
epigram is evidence for the indigenous custom of dedicating an
article of clothing on the occasion of a girl’s wedding.
Nossis’ self-identification through the maternal line—at
Locri, a marker of nobility (Polyb. 12.5.6)—and her
collaboration with her mother in producing an artifact intended for
the divine patroness of marriage establish conclusively that she is
participating in a pre-nuptial rite. This, then, would suggest that
the context of the Locrian peplophoria scene is also a
wedding. One other noteworthy item is the phrase Nossis uses of
herself in line 3, pais agaua (“noble child”).
Taken literally, the adjective simply reinforces her claim to good
birth. However, agauê is applied to Persephone herself
as queen of the dead at Od. 11.213; and, in an admittedly late
Orphic hymn (Orphei
Hymni3 41.5–6 ed. Quandt), the goddess is even
described as agauê Persephoneia, hagnos pais. Resort to
an epithet formulaically associated with Persephone in literary and
sacred texts might therefore be a way of mapping one goddess upon the
other: mention of Hera defines the circumstances, for outsiders, as
matrimonial, while allusion to Persephone, protector of brides at
Locri, gives this ceremony a local significance.
Nossis’ epigrams 4 through 6 also commemorate votive offerings,
but the recipient is in each case Aphrodite. Since the dedicants, as
we will see, are hetairai, these poems have been brought to
bear on another highly controversial matter—the historical
practice of sacred prostitution at Locri. In his epitome of the
first-century B.C.E. Philippic Histories of Pompeius Trogus,
the late Imperial writer Justin preserves the report of a vow taken
by the Locrians in 477/6 B.C.E.: besieged by Leophron, tyrant of
Rhegium, they promised to prostitute their virgin daughters at the
festival of Aphrodite if their resistance proved successful (21.3).
Clearchus of Soli (ap. Ath. 12.516a) claimed that such a
ritual practice was in fact customary at Epizephyrian Locri, though
he could be generalizing from that one extraordinary incident.
Archaeological evidence has been adduced to bolster literary
testimony. At Centocamere, the seaside precinct sacred to Aphrodite,
individual cubicles of a U-shaped stoa built in the archaic period
have been identified as prostitutes’ cribs, although similar
facilities at other religious sites are commonly recognized as
chambers for ritual banqueting. Prückner advanced an overall
reading of the iconography of the pinakes, relating the
majority to the festival of Aphrodite at which girls were allegedly
prostituted and explaining those images as depictions of successive
stages of the event. His interpretation, however, has met with
considerable resistance.
Having dealt with that contextual background, we may now discuss the
three epigrams. In poem 4 (AP 9.332), Nossis invites her
audience—made up exclusively of women, as we learn from the
feminine participle elthoisai in line 1—to come and view
the gilded statue that the courtesan Polyarchis had set up in the
temple of Aphrodite, which was paid for by the wealth she earned from
her own body:
Let us go to Aphrodite’s temple to see her
statue,
how finely it is embellished with gold.
Polyarchis
dedicated it, having made a great fortune
out of the splendor
of her own body.
S
ince
the original shrine of Aphrodite at Centocamere was destroyed around
the middle of the 4th century B.C.E. (Barra Bagnasco 1996:
27–28), the temple to be visited should be identified with the
one at Marasà (Figure 5). Within the same temple, no
doubt, the Samytha of poem 5 (AP 6.275) presents an
elaborately worked headdress to the goddess. Mention of Aphrodite’s
consort Adonis in line 4 must allude to Samytha’s celebration
of the Adonia, a festive occasion for courtesans and favored clients
(Skinner 1991: 25):
Joyfully indeed, I
think, Aphrodite receives this gift,
a headdress from Samytha’s own hair.
For it is elaborate, and smells sweetly in some way of
nectar.
With this she too anoints the beautiful Adonis.
Although in fifth-century Locri Hermes and Aphrodite were enshrined
together as joint embodiments of anarchic sexuality (Prückner’s
pinax type 2; cf. Sourvinou-Inwood 119–20), this epigram
proves that by Nossis’ lifetime Adonis had also been recognized
as Aphrodite’s erotic partner. It is consequently intriguing
that Barra Bagnasco now classifies the so-called “Casa dei
Leoni,” a large Hellenistic edifice constructed upon the
foundations of the archaic shrine to Aphrodite, as a sacral building
dedicated to the rites of Adonis (1996:28–29).
The last epigram we will consider here, poem 6 (AP 9.605) at
first appears to correlate neatly with earlier archaeological
evidence, since it honors a young woman’s consecration of a
pinax at Aphrodite’s sanctuary.
This tablet Callo set
up in the house of blonde Aphrodite,
a portrait she had
painted, like her in every way.
How
tenderly she stands! See how greatly her charm blooms!
May she
fare well: her way of life is blameless.
But Callo is not a maiden on the brink of marriage. Since Nossis
makes a point of affirming that she bears no blame for her way of
life (biota), she must be a courtesan. That pronouncement
recalls Pindar’s admonition (fr. 122 Snell) to the hundred
slave girls purchased by Xenophon of Corinth and presented as a
victory-offering to Aphrodite’s temple on the acropolis: sun
d’ anankai pan kalon (fr. 122.9). Nossis certainly knew her
Pindar; yet it would be going too far to infer, solely because she
expresses a comparable sentiment, that Callo was a hierodoulê,
like Xenophon’s “herd of girls.” It seems
improbable that hierodoulai, no doubt slaves, would be
interested in commissioning epigrams celebrating dedications. Hence
these three quatrains do not support a claim that the Locrians
practiced sacred prostitution.
Nossis composed four epigrams containing an ecphrasis of a votive
pinax. Besides the courtesan Callo, her three other pinax
dedicants are a young mistress of a household (poem 7), another young
woman, probably unmarried (poem 8), and a mature lady (poem 9). These
poems describe encaustic portraits and insist upon the verisimilitude
of the likeness. They are not depictions of coroplastic type-scenes.
Using them to confirm the survival of the fifth-century B.C.E. custom
of presenting pinakes to a deity is possible, then, only if we
posit a change in the content and material of the votive object and
assume that the original nuptial setting of such dedications was
broadened considerably. In contrast to the tradition of the
peplophoria, there seems a radical break in continuity here.
All the same, these epigrams intimate that a code of sexual ethics
odd by classical Athenian standards continues in force at
Epizypherian Locri. Nossis’ warm eulogies of courtesans and
their profession are unparalleled. Contrast Pindar’s affected
embarrassment at composing a tribute for Xenophon’s temple
gift: “What will the masters of the Isthmus say about me?”
Other epigrams memorializing donations made by hetairai, real
or fictive, either concentrate discreetly on the votive object,
barely mentioning the giver, or moralize about the ephemerality of
beauty. Nossis’ poems raise a question about the blurring of
rigid caste distinctions between respectable and non-respectable
women in her native city (Skinner 1991: 27). Fifth-century material
evidence for cult practice seems to corroborate that absence of
discrimination against the prostitute, refreshingly at odds with the
prejudice expressed by Apollodorus in Against Neaera (Dem.
59). On the two sides of the Ludovisi throne—securely
attributed on artistic grounds to a Locrian sculptor and even
ascribed a provenience from the temple at Marasà—two
female figures are shown worshipping the goddess. On the left side, a
n
aked
hetaira playing an aulos (Figure 5) represents
Aphrodite Pandemos, who oversees those pleasures that do not further
the interests of the family and the community. On the right side, a
heavily draped matron burning incense in a thymiaterion (Figure 6)
exemplifies the sphere of Aphrodite Ourania, the legitimate exercise
of sexuality within marriage. Their roles are not hostile but
complementary: each pleases the goddess as she performs her specific
function (Dillon 203). At Locri, then, Aphrodite seems to have been
publicly venerated under these two harmonious aspects.
I
n
the pinakes, Aphrodite’s most secure attribute is the
dove, recognized throughout Greece as a love-bird (Sourvinou-Inwood
119). A statuette from Medma depicts her seated with doves perched,
one on each side, on the back of her throne (
Figure
7). Similarly, a pinax from Mannella shows the metope of a
temple flanked by doves (Figure 8), and below, a
goddess on the left being serenaded by a female aulos-player. The
goddess must be Aphrodite, while the status of the musician is
implied by her iconographic likeness to the flute-player on the
Ludovisi throne. This performer is clothed—yet note the
similarity between the two turbans, a kind of headgear often worn by
hetairai on Attic vases. Since the scene is set in a temple,
can this pinax serve as evidence of sacred prostitution?
Probably not; but, at the same time, the woman who dedicated it was
perhaps not a bride.
One final piece to add to the jigsaw. As I mentioned earlier, in the
mid-fourth century, or approximately fifty or so years before Nossis
was born, Dionysius II of Syracuse withdrew to Locri after being
deposed in a coup d’état led by his uncle Dion.
Once established there, he began to behave, according to Clearchus
(ap. Ath. 12.541d), in predictable tyrant fashion by
debauching noble virgins. Strabo has a bizarre variation on the same
theme (6.1.8):
After they [the Locrians] had lived under good laws for a very long
time, Dionysius, on being banished from the country of the
Syracusans, abused them most lawlessly of all men. For he would sneak
into the bed-chambers of the girls after they had been dressed up for
their wedding, and lie with them before their marriage; and he would
gather together the girls who were ripe for marriage, let loose doves
with cropped wings upon them in the midst of the banquets, and then
bid the girls waltz around unclad, and also bid some of them, shod
with sandals that were not mates (one high and the other low), chase
the doves around—all for the sheer indecency of it. (trans.
Jones)
Here the scoundrel not only exercises the droit du seigneur
but also forces maidens to dance naked and to chase doves around
while wearing mismatched shoes. Redfield plausibly explains that
maiden-violation features prominently in accounts of Dionysius’
sojourn among the Locrians because it reflects the special position
of marriageable girls in that society (288–89).
Correspondingly, the peculiar details of the atrocities Strabo
reports seem like much-distorted reminiscences of an initiatory rite
performed in honor of Aphrodite—the combination of doves and
dancing surely points in that direction—though I haven’t
a clue how the shoes fit in.
As a literary scholar rather than a historian of ancient religion,
I’m not adequately prepared to explain the idiosyncrasies of
women’s cult at Locri. Intuitively, however, the various secure
bits of data—assimilation of symbolic motifs of Persephone’s
and Aphrodite’s cults on votive plaques; worship of Aphrodite
under two corresponding and equally appropriate aspects; general
agreement of outside witnesses (leaving aside sensational details)
that something weird goes on over there having to do with young
virgins; Nossis’ tantalizing insider information—all
these things seem to hang together, giving the vague impression of a
meaningful picture. I can only hazard a guess that, so far, the
pieces haven’t been assembled right.
Finally, what light does this attempt to read Nossis in the context
of hypothetical religious observances by the women of her community
cast upon her artistic strategies for self-presentation to her
intended audience? Here, I think, we can speak more confidently. From
both internal and external evidence, it is obvious that Nossis’
fictive audience, as constructed within the poems, is to be
imagined as a group of other women. Use of the matronymic in poem
3—which, apart from marking her aristocratic bloodline, is a
gender-specific speech trait—and employment of the feminine
participle in poem 4 define that audience as specifically female.
Antipater of Thessalonica’s descriptive epithet for her,
thêlyglôssos (AP 9.26.7), and Herodas’
burlesque of her epigrams in Mimiamb 4, wherein one woman,
like Nossis, displays to another a collection of art in a temple,
indicate that ancient readers visualized that scenario when perusing
her book of epigrams (Skinner 2001: 216–21). Bowman has
recently argued, though, that Nossis’ external
audience—the readership she actually wrote for—was the
educated, predominantly male reading public of the Hellenistic world.
That contention is undoubtedly correct, but it need not rule out
allusion to local custom. I have suggested that poem 3 gestures
toward Persephone’s peculiar Locrian position as nuptial deity
while employing Hera, the Panhellenic goddess of marriage, to define
this peplophoria as a prenuptial rite for those not in the
know. Hopes of wide popular dissemination, then, would not preclude
reference to religious protocols characteristic of Locri. Indeed, the
prevailing scholarly interest in aetiological myth and regional cult
practice might well have induced Nossis to give poetic expression to
the forms and institutions of her female community—especially
if they would strike a male Alexandrian academic as unconventional,
and therefore exotic.
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