Engendering the Scroll: Girls' and Women's Literacy in Classical Greece

Abstract

A rather tall girl of probably seventeen to eighteen years of age holds her writing tablet kit, complete with stylus, in her right hand. She is being led - perhaps pulled - at her left wrist by another girl, who holds out her left palm face up, as if to indicate the way. With her upper body leaning backward, the former's posture indicates a certain reluctance to follow. Her dress is that of an Athenian citizen, being led by another, older girl who functions as a paedagogus (she is perhaps also a citizen girl), leading her from home where she will receive instruction in literacy (or is she being taken from her class and is returning home reluctantly?). This is the scene portrayed on the interior of an Attic red-figure drinking cup (kylix) by the Painter of Bologna 417, dating to 460-450 BCE (Figure 20.1). Belonging to a series of red-figure scenes that began circa 460 and continued to around 420 BCE, it is one of several vases on which girls and women are shown in a literary setting: that is, with writing implementa (stylus and writing tablet) or with book scrolls. Educating boys was clearly a priority for those Athenian fathers who could afford to do so. But little is heard in the ancient literary sources about education for Athenian, or generally Greek, girls. Yet the iconographical evidence of various Athenian vases from the fifth century BCE - and the very existence of women writers throughout Greece - indicates that some girls definitely learnt not only to read but also to write and continued to read into adulthood.