Conclusion

This survey has, I hope, demonstrated clearly the richness of the evidence which pottery has to offer in its depiction of women. Women form part of painters’ themes at all periods and in all fabrics, and Athenian painters illustrated women with their family, working, participating in ritual, at leisure, dressing, partying, with animals, courting and trading, fulfilling a wide variety of roles in contexts both public and private. The very diversity of the material, however, has highlighted a central problem of approach in that it is not a neutral act to bring together a series of pots to illustrate an overarching theme. It is one of the paradoxes of iconographic study that the imposition of order is necessary to make sense of the profusion of images, yet any imposition of order prejudges the question of which scenes belong to a group. In studying images of women we have identified a group of scenes united by the significant factor of a female figure, but such a choice inevitably discounts other potential groupings, whether generic or thematic. The departure scene, for instance, constitutes a coherent and very well-defined theme in Attic black- and red-figure, in which a warrior takes leave of his family. A female figure is sometimes, but not always, present: does the presence of a woman in an image justify considering it in isolation from its genre? On the other hand, many scenes which include female figures have been excluded from this study: images from drama, for instance, which form a substantial group of scenes, and very many images of mythological women. The rationale for this exclusion is their lack of relevance to the everyday – can an image of Andromeda or Helen tell us anything practical about female experience? – but it highlights how difficult it would be to consider every female image. ¹