ABSTRACT
Many of the deities worshipped by Greek girls and women in the classical period were very much a part of mainstream religious beliefs, particularly those dealt with in Chapters 2 and 4. But there were other deities which held a marginal place in classical Greece because of their exotic nature, or whose worship undercut the values of the polis and women’s place in it. Of the latter, the most important was women’s worship of the god Dionysos, and as part of their worship they were subjected to madness, mania, by the god. But in most senses Dionysos was an ‘acceptable’ god, admitted into the festivals of the state, with maenads (his women followers) at Athens clearly involved in drawing the wine at the Anthesteria festival. Maenads are nevertheless at the margins, they test the polis’ acceptance of rites which are in many ways extraordinary: wild dancing, unescorted journeys into the hills, and clearly some wine drinking. Women in other cults also occupied the fringes of Greek religion. The women followers of Pythagoras were ridiculed, perhaps partly because of the ritual practices of Pythagoreanism but probably because as women taking on a philosophical mantle they were easy targets of ridicule. A picture of women involved in the rites of the foreign god Sabazios could be conjured up in a law speech to damage an opponent’s reputation. The worship of Adonis entered Athens sometime in the fifth century BC; women’s activities in this cult were tolerated but his festival, informal and somewhat exotic, was never accepted into the state calendar; worshipped by women on rooftops rather than in conventional temples, his rites were marginal and aloof from the polis in the most literal of senses. Hekate, goddess of the crossroads, was liminal in many ways, and worshipped by both men and women, but was considered to be particularly important to women who practised sorcery; spells and incantations were employed in her name, but when a certain boundary was passed, the woman practitioner of the magical arts could face a death sentence.
