Jenifer Neils’s lavishly illustrated new book aims to provide non-specialist readers with an introduction to the women of the ancient world as they are revealed through images and other artifacts held in the British Museum. The “ancient world” here is broadly defined, stretching from the Neolithic period to the late Roman empire and from Italy and northern Africa to modern Iran, although the discussion generally concentrates on the periods and regions for which there exists the best evidence. Neils does not pretend to cover her topic comprehensively; the evidence is too incomplete, and as she notes in the introduction, what has survived tends to skew toward the wealthier strata of society (13). Her goal, rather, is to shed light on the stereotypes and social roles that were most strongly associated with women in antiquity, and the thematic organization of the book serves this program well. An introductory chapter entitled “Real Women” is followed by the chapters “Female Stereotypes,” “Mothers and Mourners,” “Working Women,” “The Body Beautiful,” “Women and Religion,” and “Royal Women.” The timelines of individual regions and the map of the Mediterranean and Near East will be useful to lay readers, as will much of the glossary, although plural forms of foreign words are provided inconsistently (and “gynai” is given incorrectly as the plural of gyne). The section “Further Reading” includes a combination of general and specialized bibliography on ancient women, as well as a list of suggested readings on objects in the British Museum.

The choice and quality of the illustrations are, in my opinion, the greatest strengths of this book. The two hundred color images are beautifully printed, and they include a good balance of well-known pieces (e.g., the “Garden Party” relief of Assurbanipal (188)) and objects that are less likely to be familiar to the non-scholar; in the latter category, the fragmentary Apulian image of a tattooed woman breastfeeding a child is especially striking (101). The captions are informative, although the illustrations themselves at times seem disconnected from the main text. In fact, although the stated goal of the book is “to reveal how the imagery of women in the ancient world contributes to our understanding of their lives and roles in society” (13), individual images are often not the focus of the discussion, which instead tends to concentrate on presenting general information about ancient women gleaned from a variety of literary, visual, and material sources. Such information provides useful context for the illustrations; although with some exceptions (e.g., the late Roman casket of Projecta illustrated on page 12), it does not shed much light on individual objects or images.

Any book of this nature has an enormous amount of territory to survey, and the sheer breadth of coverage may seem to preclude detailed consideration of specific examples. In a book that purports to focus on visual evidence, however, it seems reasonable to expect that readers will be given some sense of the ways in which scholars approach such evidence. Yet for the most part, Neils steers clear of the interpretive problems raised by her material, and captions tend to stress the documentary value of the images, rather than treating them as complex representations. This approach leads her at times to gloss over important problems in the evidence, as for example in the treatment of a red-figure stamnos that appears in the chapter on women and religion. This vessel is decorated with a scene of two women ladling wine next to a rustic-looking idol of the god Dionysos, and the caption relates that it “shows women involved in a ritual in honour of Dionysos” (175). What is not mentioned in the caption or the accompanying text is that this vase, along with a number of others like it (the so-called “Lenaia vases”), has been a subject of vigorous and longstanding controversy—scholars have been unable to agree upon what festival is represented here, or even whether the actions illustrated on such vases had counterparts in real Athenian ritual practice. Those who study ancient art frequently point to the hazards in assuming that images are simply documents of real-life practices, but this message will not be evident to readers of this book.

A different approach is adopted for a group of black-figure hydriae discussed at the conclusion of the chapter on working women; here a real effort is made to enlighten readers about the complex character of ancient visual representations (116–21). These late sixth-century vessels Neils examines are decorated with groups of well-dressed women fetching water from a fountain house, a scenario that looks utterly ordinary at first glance but that is incompatible with what we know of Athenian customs in this period. Neils takes readers through a handful of proposed solutions to the problems these images raise, and these pages stand out for the clear view they provide of the difficulties faced by those who try to understand the ancient world through its visual material. I found myself wishing that Neils had treated more of her evidence in this manner. Such an approach would no doubt result in a more disjointed text than the one she has written, but I suspect that it would also offer readers a more accurate sense of what images and objects can—and cannot—communicate about the ancient world.

A focus on questions and problems raised by specific objects could also have allowed for a more nuanced look at the cultures under consideration. Throughout the book, similarities among ancient societies are emphasized, and women from distinct cultures are grouped together as wives, mothers, prostitutes, and so on. In some cases, this strategy is quite effective: the second chapter, for instance, takes readers through a number of ancient stereotypes about women, and the synthetic approach here underscores the power and persistence of these stereotypes. At other times, however, crucial details about individual cultures fall to the wayside. To take just one example, most scholars of Greek sexuality would agree that it is impossible to understand how relationships between men and women worked in that society (whether in the context of marriage or of prostitution) unless one is also aware of the importance of male homoerotic relationships in Greek sexuality; the latter, however, are not discussed in this book. This is, of course, neither a book about ancient men nor one about the history of homosexuality, but without some mention of those, readers are likely to receive a distorted view of how Greek culture constructed the gender and sexuality of its women.

Let me conclude by reiterating, in view of these criticisms, that there is a great deal of good information in this book, together with numerous very valuable illustrations. A tremendous range of material is covered, and Neils takes her reader through several important facets of ancient women’s lives; the section on pregnancy and childbirth is fascinating (69–78), and controversial topics such as sacred prostitution are treated with healthy skepticism (163–64). Readers looking for an introduction to the subject of women in antiquity are certain to find much that is of interest in this book.