The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy

(Hardback)

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Athens dominates textbook accounts of ancient Greece. But was it, for the Greeks themselves, a model city-state or a creative, even a corrupt departure from the model Or was there a model This book reveals Epizephyrian Locri - a Greek colony on the Adriatic coast of Italy - as a third way in Greek culture, neither Athens nor Sparta. Drawing on a wide range of literary and archaeological evidence, James Redfield offers an account of this poorly understood Greek city-state, and in particular the distinctive role of women and marriage therein. Redfield devotes much of the book to placing Locri within a more general account of Greek culture, particularly as to the institution of marriage in relation to private property, to sexual identity and to the fate of the soul. He begins by considering the annual practice of sending two maidens from old-world Locris, the putative place of origin of the Italian Locrians, to serve in the temple of Athena at Ilion, finding here some key themes of Locrian culture. He goes on to provide a detailed overview of the Italian city; in a set of iconographic essays he suggests that marriage was seen in Locri as a life-transformation akin to the eternal bliss hoped for after death. Nothing less than a general re-evaluation of classical Greek society in both its political and theological dimensions, "The Locrian Maidens" should prove useful reading for students and scholars of classics, while being accessible and of particular interest to those in women's studies and to anyone seeking a broader understanding of ancient Greece.

Reviews

"The Locrian Maidens actually uncovers something new in the heavily trodden terrain of the classics, and in today's academy that amounts to a rara avis."--Tom Meaney, New Criterion "In this engrossing report on a quarter century of work, James Redfield reconstructs the distinctive culture of Epizephyrian Locri from rubble, rumors, and art to offer an unsuspected model of Greek social organization... The book shows a rare combination of rigorous documentation and theoretical imagination... This is a book of great learning and great charm."--Frederick T. Griffiths, New England Classical Journal

Author Bio

James M. Redfield is the Edward Olson Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Classics, the Committee on Social Thought, the Committee on the Ancient Mediterranean World, and the College at the University of Chicago. He is the author of "Nature and Culture in the Iliad".