COLUMBIA FORUM
The Unmediated Voices of Ancient Women?

A specialist in Hellenistic history, Professor of Classics and History Roger S. Bagnall has written widely on Greek epigraphy and papyrology and the Roman East. His publications include Egypt in Late Antiquity (1993), The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994) and Reading Papyri, Writing Ancient History (1995). In this article based on his presentation at Dean’s Day in April, Bagnall describes some of the challenges of his current research project (in collaboration with Raffaella Cribiore): women’s letter writing in Hellenistic Egypt.

A letter of Apollonous to Thermouthas, her mother, in colloquial Greek, with corrections and writing in the right margin, first century A.D. COURTESY UNIVERSITY LIBRARIES, RARE BOOK AND MANUSCRIPT LIBRARY

We have few opportunities for direct contact with the thoughts of women of antiquity. Most of what we know about them comes from male writers, and it is hard to find sources in which we can hear the women unfiltered by men. A unique, and until now hardly studied, exception to this rule is private letters from women, found in Egypt and dating to the period from about 250 bce to 700 ce. There are about 250 such letters in Greek edited so far. Letters in general make up one of the largest categories in the body of surviving texts on papyrus (a term we use as shorthand to include texts written in ink on potsherds and stone flakes).

These letters have for more than a century caught the attention of scholars from a range of disciplines, as well as of a broader public. Their immediacy and sense of direct access to the personal lives of people who lived two millennia ago account for part of their appeal. Along with this appreciation, however, has come a degree of ambivalence, particularly among professional papyrologists. Part of this reserve stems from the difficulties that the letters pose to the editor. Imagine reading correspondence written in a foreign language you don’t speak like a native, in crabbed handwriting and with a lot of bad spelling. Then suppose that these letters are rubbed, torn and partly lost. Even once the letters have been read, however, the scholar is often frustrated, because much of the time they just don’t seem to tell us what we want to know. Out of this frustration has been born neglect.

There is no doubt that the papyrus letters rarely display that willingness to put the author’s inner life down on paper that we find in many modern letters and that we value so highly. The modern eye is formed by the fondness for self-revelation in letters written since the middle of the 17th century. Ancient letters, instead, are filled with greetings, including those to everyone in the household; inquiries after and information about the health of the writer, recipient and their families; information and instructions about goods acquired, received, to be dispatched or to be sought; and exhortations to write back or complaints about previous failures to do so. In this respect, however, they are not greatly different from early modern letters. Rather, the ancient letters differ in usually coming to us in isolation. Only a few of them constitute large enough groups for us to come to know the individuals.

Before we consider what the letters tell us, the assumption that in the private letters we can hear the unmediated voices of ancient women must be called into question. There are two critical technical issues. Did women write these letters themselves? And if they did not, how likely are they to represent the actual words of the nominal authors?

These are extremely difficult questions. It is by now widely accepted that the vast majority of the ancient population was unable to write; women were even less likely to be literate than were men. In looking at women’s letters, therefore, we may feel compelled to start from the assumption that in most cases, they did not write the letters themselves. It turns out to be remarkably difficult to be sure in many cases. Some women were able to write with ease; but they also were those who could afford to own or hire a secretary. It is, ironically, those most capable of writing who are least likely to do so; like wealthy people of other periods, they tend to limit their own writing to greetings and signatures on letters prepared by others, just like modern secretaries taking dictation. The hands of those secretaries are often recognizable by their regularity. Highly educated writers who were not professional secretaries did not use these regular, scribal hands very much. The person dictating the letter might be a fast writer, but not a neat or regular one, just like me.

Much more difficult are the letters written in less polished hands, especially those toward the lower end of the penmanship spectrum, resembling a second grader’s work. Many women who had to write letters themselves, for want of an amanuensis, were not very skilled at writing and thus did it awkwardly. But it’s hard to tell them apart from women using family members to do the writing for them; many men also did not reach very high levels of education.

On the whole, the results of the palaeographic study of the letters tends to be negative or agnostic for the question of actual female handwriting, but the examination of the language leads us believe that in most cases the interposition of an amanuensis did not change the words of the author very much. As the words are more important for the larger project of recovering what women had to say about their lives, our conclusion is thus broadly optimistic.

That optimism, however, concerns only part of society, a portion of the women of Hellenistic and Roman Egypt. Gender is one of the most important characteristics through which we may understand individuals and groups, but statements assuming that all women — or all men — shared any particular set of experiences are almost certain to be wide of the mark. Differences among women, rather than uniformity, has become the crucial focus of recent study. It is doubtful that people in antiquity thought of themselves as sliced up in modern-style affinity groups. By and large, ancient society was organized around families, and beyond the family there were complex networks of patronage and dependence, means of linking together those occupying higher and lower stations in a highly stratified world.

Status, however, was always on people’s minds, and status groups certainly had a keen sense of themselves. There is no doubt, in any case, that ancient societies were very hierarchical, with differentiation by economic standing and social order playing a large part in determining everyone’s life experience. No matter what measure one uses, the indications of the women’s letters clearly are that their authors predominantly belonged to the elite. Both direct and indirect marks of wealth are found in a large number of the letters, and mentions of family tenure of public offices confirm the sense that we are dealing with the top part of society. But high economic standing is not to be assumed uncritically; there are, in fact, some letters where little or nothing tells us about the writers’ wealth or status, and some where the indicators are ambiguous.

Despite all these reservations, the letters allow us to get closer than any other category of document to a significant part of the ancient female population: not those who sat on the throne, and not peasants either, but a considerable segment of the propertied and literate population. They were not middle class; they were upper class and upper-middle class, in modern terms. The contents of the letters show them active in managing family property and business, highly outspoken and frequent travelers.

After many centuries in which women’s letters form a stable part of the Greek papyri, from the fifth century ce on these letters virtually vanish. Women simply disappear as writers of letters in Greek. Instead, we begin to find a considerable number of women’s letters in Coptic, more than 60 identified so far. Coptic was the last form in which the ancient Egyptian language was written, in a script made up of the Greek alphabet plus seven characters derived from an earlier stage of the cursive writing that ultimately comes from hieroglyphs. These letters survive largely on ostraka [Editor’s note: Ostraka are inscriptions on clay, wood, metal and other hard materials, often potsherds.] found at monastic sites in the nearer desert, very male environments, and a few from village and city sites.

Why would women switch from Greek to Coptic more than men did? One possibility is that men operated extensively in the public world, where Greek was — still in late antiquity — the language of administration, power, commerce, the world at large. Women’s lives were, although by no means confined to the home, much more defined by the domestic world, where Egyptian was at least on a par with Greek and perhaps dominant. This male/female, outside/inside, public/private binary opposition should not be pushed too far. One does not need to see it in absolute terms. Indeed, we are inclined to think that women of the social strata responsible for most of the letter-writing had far more freedom of movement and action than modern scholars have generally been willing to ascribe to ancient women. But that there was a difference in the proportion of time spent in the spheres is at least plausible. Women in upper-class families in Roman Egypt were more likely to have Egyptian names than the men of the same families, perhaps an indicator of a cultural tendency to associate femaleness with Egyptianness.

We should not end with too starkly differentiated an impression. Undoubtedly, most of the women in that upper stratum that produced most of the letters spoke Greek. Some of them could write and read Greek, too. A few reached high levels of Greek education. But for many members of this bicultural society, an advertising slogan formerly used by a Spanish-language newspaper here in New York may have expressed their feelings: "You can read it in English, but it means more in Spanish."

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