S2E3: Veiled But Not Hidden in Ancient Greece
With Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
The veil is something many women in the distant past (as today) wore as they moved through society. As we discuss with Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones in Episode 3, veiling can mean many things to many people. It can be a means of patriarchal control, a sensual turn on, or a practical choice in a hot climate.
In this episode, we explore the role of the veil–of displaying or not displaying one’s hair–in ancient Greek culture: from weddings to acts of piety and expressions of grief. Veils, as Lloyd reminds us, were part of many ancient women’s embodied experiences.
“[The veil] fetishizes as much as it conceals. So that rare moment when you get a glimpse of the female body becomes all things to all men. ... I think that women who are confident enough with their use of the veil can play it out to their own advantage.”
BIO
Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones is Professor in Ancient History at the University of Cardiff. Lloyd’s expertise crosses fields from ancient Iran to Greek socio-cultural history, from textiles and clothing, to gender and sexuality. He is Chair in Ancient History at Cardiff University and directs the Ancient Iran Program for the British Institute of Persian Studies. Lloyd has received multiple awards, including an Iran Heritage grant and a Carnegie Trust Award. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited more than 17 books, including Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Women of Ancient Greece, Greek and Roman Dress from A-Z (written with Liza Cleland and Glenys Davies), and Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther. Order his recent release now, The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt. He is a regular contributor to BBC History Magazine, History Today, and World History. He earned his bachelors from the University of Hull and his masters and PhD in Ancient History at Cardiff University.
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[Opening Music]
Emily Chesley: Welcome to Women Who Went Before, a gynocentric quest into the ancient world. I’m Emily Chesley–
Rebekah Haigh: – and I’m Rebekah Haigh–
Emily: –scholars, friends, and your hosts.
[music continues, then stops]
Emily: In today’s episode, “Veiled But Not Hidden in Ancient Greece,” we talk with Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones about elaborate Greek weddings, ancient Assyrian concubines, and how to protect your hair from the sun.
[Music]
Rebekah: What do Queen Elizabeth II, Malala, and Priyanka Chopra Jonas have in common? At various points in time, for different reasons, they all wore headcoverings or veils. When we talk of veils or headcoverings today, many people immediately think of a religious motivation. After all, many Muslim women cover their hair throughout their lives, unveiling only when with other women or their husband. Some Orthodox Jewish women wear wigs so that their natural hair is hidden. And some Christian women don veils for worship. But headcoverings can also be worn temporarily and for purely practical or cultural reasons. Queen Elizabeth often sported a Hermès scarf tied under her chin.[1] Many brides choose to wear a veil for their wedding, although most aren’t 75 feet long, setting a world record like Priyanka’s![2]
Emily: Why are we talking about veils in our season on women’s bodies? Well, the veil is a highly gendered article of clothing, covering the body. But more importantly, since we’re trying to access women’s embodied lives, the veil is something many women wore as they moved through society. It’s part of what it meant to be a woman in the ancient Mediterranean world — not a hundred percent of the time, but maybe eighty or ninety percent. It was fairly ubiquitous across cultures, from the ancient Hittites to Christian Rome.
Rebekah: Wearing a veil meant different things in different times and places. In Middle Assyria, for instance, a hair covering could signal one’s status as a married woman.[3] If an Assyrian prostitute dared to wear a veil, she would be punished severely and publicly. But, in the biblical story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38, Judah assumes his daughter-in-law Tamar is a sex worker precisely because she has covered her face with a veil (Gen 38:14-15). This custom was the exact opposite from the Assyrian one.
Emily: While veils are often understood as pious symbols in today’s major world religions, that wasn’t necessarily the case in antiquity. Some early Christian authors tried to make veiling a distinctive mark of Christian piety, as Grace Stafford has argued. These men faced a challenge, though, in converting the veil into a religious symbol: late antique women like their mothers and grandmothers continued to wear and not wear veils for many different reasons.[4] Not purely pious ones. In the ancient world as today, a woman might veil herself for purely practical reasons. In her 2013 book, 101 Reasons Why I’m Glad I Wear a Hijab, Mona Ebrahim points out that women choose a scarf to shield themselves from bugs, dust, bird poo, and sun damage.[5]
Rebekah: Just as veiling could signify a lot of things, unveiling could do the same. In the book of Esther, Queen Vashti is famously dethroned by King Ahasuerus because she refuses to attend his banquet and display her beauty (Esther 1:10–22).One interpretation of the story is that Vashti didn’t want to remove her veil before his drunken, male guests.[6] After all, a woman’s hair was a sign of her womanhood and beauty. To forcibly expose it was to humiliate her. It could have marked her as a woman of shameful behavior (Numbers 5:18).[7]
3 Maccabees describes how king Ptolemy IV Philopater rounded up Egyptian Jews intending to execute them. The text laments that brides traded wedding veils for anguish. They “exchanged joy for wailing, their myrrh-perfumed hair sprinkled with ashes, and [they] were carried away unveiled, all together raising a lament instead of a wedding song” (3 Maccabees 4:6, NRSV). Ptolemaic captors unveiled these young brides, rather than their husbands on their wedding night. In different circumstances, women sometimes chose to uncover or dishevel their hair to express grief.[8]
Emily: Throughout ancient Greece, lots of women wore veils, and different styles came into fashion in different regions and times.[9]
Rebekah: From the mid-fifth century BCE on, several veils specifically designed to cover the face came into fashion.[10] Some women wore a tegidion.[11] The tegidion had eyes holes cut in a rectangular piece of fabric, similar to the niqab.[12] A third-century BCE traveler Heraclides Criticus seems to describe this style of veil worn by women in Thebes. “The covering of their clothes on their head is such that the whole face seems to be covered by a mask, with only the eyes showing through” (On the Towns of Greece 1.18, trans. Llewellyn-Jones).[13] He calls Theban women the tallest, most graceful, and most beautiful women in all of Greece (1.17). How he knows that when he can’t see their faces, he doesn’t explain!
Emily: The veil played a vital role in ancient Greek weddings, signaling a girl’s transition to womanhood. The soon-to-be-married girl would undergo a prenuptial bath and make a dedicatory offering of veils to a goddess.[14] The bride donned a crown and a reddish veil, which she wore throughout the multi-day marriage rituals. The bride would have been ceremonially veiled and unveiled throughout this process, proving her identity while also preserving her face and body for her new husband. She was publicly unveiled at her parent’s home during the bridal feast, and then re-veiled for the joyous procession to the groom’s home. As a married woman, she was now the property of one man and his eyes alone.[15] When the night came to a close, the groom led his bride to the bridal chamber and her final unveiling. There, he also performed the most intimate unveiling of all: breaching the “veil” of her virginity.[16] Ultimately, the veiling and unveiling of the bride rendered her an “object of fetish” for the male gaze.[17]
Rebekah: It was not all passive, though. Women could use their veils to attract the eyes of others.The bride’s red veil would have grabbed attention as she processed through town. Associated with “ripeness and fertility,” the color red was seen as erotic, our guest points out, especially when paired with descriptions of shining cloth.[18] The Roman historian Tacitus says that Nero’s second wife, empress Poppaea Sabina, rarely went out in public. But when she did, it was “with her face half-veiled, so as not quite to satiate the beholder,—or, possibly, because it so became her” (Tacitus, Annals 13.45, trans. Jackson).[19] As today’s guest puts it, “veiling temporarily denies men access to women’s sexuality, but the rebuff itself is an erotic turn-on.”[20] Women like Nero’s wife could manipulate their veils in a host of different ways: to highlight or to hide their bodies at will, to express emotions of grief, anger, resistance, or desire.
Emily: Speaking with us about Greek veiling practices and their underlying meanings is Dr. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones. Professor in Ancient History at the University of Cardiff, Lloyd’s expertise crosses fields from ancient Iran to Greek socio-cultural history, from textiles and clothing to gender and sexuality. He earned his bachelors from the University of Hull, and his masters and PhD in Ancient History at Cardiff University. He has received multiple awards, including an Iran Heritage grant and a Carnegie Trust Award. He has authored, co-authored, and co-edited more than 17 books, including Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Women of Ancient Greece, Dress in Greece and Rome A-Z [editor’s note: Greek and Roman Dress from A-Z, written with Liza Cleland and Glenys Davies], and Ancient Persia and the Book of Esther. Order his most recent release, The Cleopatras: The Forgotten Queens of Egypt. We’re excited to share this conversation with you!
[podcast theme music interludes]
Rebekah: This season is all about ancient women's bodies throughout their life cycles. We are really excited to talk to you about your work on veiling in ancient Greece because of what that practice both conceals and reveals about women's bodies. Greek had lots of words for “veil.” When we talk about a veil for ancient Greece, what are we talking about?
Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones: Let's begin with some definitions that I had to tackle when I was doing my research on this, about how am I going to define a veil.
Actually the first thing I did was to think in terms of anthropology, and how do different veil societies reference the veil themselves. To do that, actually, I was greatly helped by a colleague and friend of mine, Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, who runs the Textile Research Centre in the University of Leiden in the Netherlands. And she has a huge collection there of Middle Eastern garments. And so I went to see her initially, and talked about the variety of styles that just were in that one collection alone, which you know had come to Leiden from everywhere: from Syria right the way through to Pakistan and North Africa as well. And I was amazed straight away by the huge variety of styles there were, which are all labeled under our English heading “veil.”
For me then, what I came down to was that the veil that I'm talking about in Greece is of essentially three types.
First of all, there is a short head veil. So think of it like maybe like a bath towel or something. So simply a rectangle of fabric which sits on the head, maybe hangs down to the shoulders, but little more than that. Following an Arabic convention, where I saw that veil referred to as the shaal, this is what I've entitled that in my book Aphrodite’s Tortoise, because I lacked a specific Greek term for it. But I could see it in the iconography, for instance. So I've called that the shaal veil.
More familiar, however, is a very long head veil. A head veil that goes across the head and right the way down to the ankles, sometimes thrown around the body like a modern day sari. And that of course is essentially the Greek himation. So this wrap-around garment, a corner of which can be pulled up over the head as a veil and then also can be manipulated so that folds of that head veil can be drawn across the face and held in place by a hand as well. So for me that was the himation veil.
Then a final veiling form began to appear at the end of the 4th century [BCE]. That's the earliest evidence I found for it. And this from the Greek text suggests it was called the tegidion. That’s a corruption of the word word tagos of course. So it means a “little roof.” And that is formed by a kind of kerchief which is tied to the head, folded back off the face, but then can be folded forward over the face. And it has eye holes punctuated into it. So this is actually a full face veil, and I think that was usually worn in conjunction with the himation veil. So when the himation is over the head and the tegidion was in its fixed place over the face, that meant there was an extreme form of veiling, completely veiled woman. You know, the body becomes shapeless, the face is lost, much like we see in garments such as the burka, for instance. Otherwise, I think the closest we can get to the Greek veil, the himation veil is either a sari or else the Iranian chador.
There was no necessity, I think, for it to be dark or featureless or pattern-less. And certainly from the iconography, you can see that the veil could be made from a thick weave or a wool, right the way down to the finest linens with some kind of diaphanous quality to it.
So I think status, personal preference, could all be suggested and played out in the veil itself. But I don't think the ability to abandon the veil was ever an option. So you had to work within the parameters, which were clearly established by the patriarchy but also by women in that society as well. There were expectations that women placed on other women about the appropriateness of veiling. But within that there was, I think, a certain modicum of choice and freedom.
Frustratingly, we don't hear a great deal about that kind of choice in the Greek sources. I want to draw your attention to one Latin source though, and this is Tacitus speaking about Nero's wife, Poppea. You know and the Roman world was very different. Women didn't have to veil in the Roman world, more conservative women did. But Tacita says, “Oh Poppea chose to wear the veil, the head veil, because it suited her,” he says. You know, it's something that she just looks good in. But I don't think that was ever the question for women in Greece, which was far more traditional and confined in their movement.
Emily: And these three different types of veils, are they connected to specific social moments and places as to which one was chosen in those instances, or is it purely a matter of the woman's own choice when she left the house?
Lloyd: That's interesting too. I mean, you do see images of the short shaal veil in social contexts outside. But you know, it's very hard to read an image on a vase or something as a photographic image, you know. I mean, there's so much –
Emily: [agreeing] Yeah
Lloyd: [continuing] –debate that goes on about, you know, are these images actually supposed to be titillating, you know, of a woman going outside anyway. You know, what level of authenticity of life is really being depicted in these things?
My feeling is, and this is simply from the amount of references which talk about concealment, full concealment—I think that mostly when women went outdoors they wore the himation veil very often pulled around their faces as well. And then at home, maybe the shaal veil, which is easy to throw on, should a male visitor suddenly come into the home, something like that.
The tegidion is a really interesting development though—that as I say, it doesn't really appear until the end of the 4th century [BCE] and then it becomes very popular. We see it quite a lot in the terracottas of the Hellenistic Period. We have lots of evidence of it from Alexandria and the Greek-speaking cities of North Africa. So I'm not sure how far-flung the the tegidion went. But what's really interesting about that is that as a way of covering women, it also gave them a little more freedom as well. Because if you think about it, since the woman is not engaged in holding a fold of cloth over her lower face (this is being done for her), it actually allows her hands to operate with a greater freedom in a bizarre kind of way. And I think that may equate with the amount of sudden evidence we get in Hellenistic literature for women publicly shopping a lot more and doing things—you know, going to art galleries and this kind of stuff. So it's a kind of– It's a really odd scenario, I suppose, because in a way the veil– the heavier the veiling, sometimes the greater freedom that gives a woman. Which seems to be an absolute paradox, doesn't it? But it seems something is going on like that.
It's also interesting to note as well in Greek art, in the history of Greek art, just as Aphrodite was going naked for the first time, you know in sculpture, so her mortal worshippers, the women of the Greek world, were covering up more and more as well. The story of the veil is full of paradoxes of that kind of nature, I feel.
Emily: Yeah. This is actually a perfect segue to talking about some of these Aphrodite-related rituals. Because you talk about in your book how different kinds of veils and sashes marked a girl’s transition between different life stages. Antipator of Sidon, whom you quote, wrote about some dedications that five girls gave to Aphrodite. And I just wanted to share a little bit of that quote and then we can talk about it.
“Bitinna gives these sandals, a great comfort for her feet, the pretty work of skilled shoe-makers;
Philaenis, the net, dyed with sea-purple, that binds tight her long hair;
Antikleia, her fan;
lovely Herakleia, her face-veil, as sheer as a spider’s web;
and the daughter of Aristotle, who bears her father’s name, her coiled snake, the gold ornament of her slim ankles.
We girl companions, all of one age give gifts to Ourania.” (Anth. Pal. 6.206, trans. Llewellyn-Jones)[21]
So this is a lovely little vignette, a glimpse into five young girls and their offerings to the goddess of marriage. What can you tell us about these rituals of transition to puberty and marriage and the role veils played in them?
Lloyd: The feeling that I got from your lovely reading of that… There's an excitement in it, isn't there? You know, it's not just purely a dedication. This is a beautiful little verse that is written. There's a delight and a pride in the things that each of these girls are giving away to the goddess. If we were to reverse that, it's almost the kind of joy and happiness and companionship that young girls get when they go to their prom, picking out dresses, you know, being very specific about what they want. I think that you can see there's an element of that about it: camaraderie, togetherness. There's something of an excitement about maturing at this point and using your clothing to suggest that maturity has arrived.
Now, I think that these girls are giving obviously very fine garments to the goddess. For two reasons, I suppose. First of all, it's a preemptive strike. As every young girl knows, going from the realm of Artemis, the goddess of chastity, into the realm of Aphrodite, the goddess of sexual pleasure, is something that has to be negotiated very, very carefully. As Euripides tells us, you know, in Hippolytus, this is a dangerous transitory time. So I think these gifts are given as offerings to the goddess to say, “Here I come. Please look after me, you know. Don't abandon me now because I need you to protect me against Artemis, who could do dreadful things.”
We find a lot of these offerings given to the goddess Artemis as well. So that's a preemptive strike in another way. “Look, I'm going on to the realm of Aphrodite now, and please don't hurt me, you know, for doing that. I'm not betraying you. I'm just doing what should be done.”
But secondly, these garments that are given to goddesses, we have inscriptions of this kind of thing all across the Greek world, and we know they're going on from at least the Early Archaic Period. So they're very, very common indeed. And it's a way also, I think, of families showing something of their status to the rest of their communities as well. And Liza Cleland has done some remarkable work on the Brauroninscriptions from the sanctuary of Aphrodite at Athens.[22] And there she's done a great analysis on the types of garment, but also the color coding that goes with them as well. And of course, you know, we think of the Greek world as white marble, but of course clothing wasn't like that. It was multi-colored. And a lot of attention is given in the clothes, in the clothes’’ descriptions to the shape and to the coloring and the decoration.
And I think that's all done there, not so it can be logged by some cataloguer in the temples, but actually as a kind of display text for the community to acknowledge when those texts are read out. Purple dyes, deep green dyes: These are all difficult dyes to achieve in antiquity, and therefore there's an element of showing off. This is prestige stuff that they're showing.
So I think there's two levels in which we can approach those texts. I do like the idea of communality of girls that's recorded in the beautiful little poem and this kind of excitement of acknowledging they go to a next stage in their life.
Rebekah: I know in the ancient world, like, for instance Greece, there's this huge debate about what color was the wedding veil. Was it orange, was it red, you know, but it probably wasn't white.
Lloyd: No.
Rebekah: So thinking about the different kinds of veils a girl might wear across her lifetime—is that [variation] something that happened, or is it just all the same? If you're a woman you're wearing the same veil? Or does the veil kind of change?
Lloyd: I think, yeah, I think the veil does change, and I think that the wedding veil is a unique garment, probably treasured and even handed down through a family as well. Red is a very, very difficult color to achieve, takes a lot of dye. And from the wording that we get, we get words like porphyris (πορφυρίς) through to krokos (κρόκος). So that's a color range from deep imperial purple through to yellow, essentially. And anything on that spectrum, you know, including all of the reds and all of the oranges are sort of, up for, you know, for a chance there, really– And we can't be really more specific than that.
I think that more than the actual hue that bothered them, it's the intensity of color that really grabs the Greeks. Because things like fulling—you know, to achieve a real whiteness—and dying were so difficult and so costly in antiquity, one of the things that they really appreciate is the depth of saturation of a dye. In Homer, for instance, we hear several times of a garment being “thrice-dipped” or “thrice-dyed.” That means it goes through the whole dyeing process three times, which means that in a world without any fixative, that's as kind of deep and as perfect a dye as you can get. And I think that's what's going on with the wedding veil, which is clearly, you know, a huge status symbol.
And the other thing I've noticed as well, is very often in the texts, wedding veils are defined as liparos(λιπαρός), which means “shining, bright.” And I think that's a reference to the color. But I also think it might be a reference to a further element of the dyeing process for special garments, and that's the perfuming of garments as well. So from the Homeric Age onwards, we know that perfume could be added to a dye, and that would give it a sheen, like a satin-like sheen, even to linen or wool.
And then more interestingly, I think in (or in combination with) all of this, when we look at some 5th- and 4th-century vase painting scenes of wedding entourages and so forth, the bride's veil, which is always conspicuous because it's being held up or, you know, draped on the bride's head at that point—it's very often covered with sort of crosshatches which look like stars. And I don't think that's meant to be embroidery or a woven design. I think that is meant to emphasize this idea of it is a shining thing. You know, it's a luminescence that is being shown there, a vividness of color, I suppose.
It's a really interesting concept that the artist uses there, you know, working with a very restricted palate of orange and black and a little bit of white, essentially. He manages to get out a sense of color through a kind of code instead, and I think it all comes together with this idea that it's some kind of vibrant red.
I think red is the color because there is a lot of emphasis on the virginal blood of a young married girl. There's also a play on words as well. So for instance, the most common Greek word for a veil is kredemnon (κρήδεμνον), and kredemnon is also the word that is used for a city wall, so a rampart. It's also the word that's used for the cover of a bottle—so a cloth that goes over the the neck of a bottle, which of course is, you know, likened to the hymen. So the tearing or the ripping or the breaking down of the hymen equals the taking off of the veil, and so forth.
And we really see that come to a head in the magnificent sequence in Odyssey 24, where Andromache is told of Hector's death, and she throws off her head veil because now she has no guardian. She has no walls around her anymore. She is open game for violation. And I think all of this is definitely connected.
There's been a lot of [debate] of course, about the whole idea of virginity and the idea of even the presence of the hymen.[23] But I would say in this kind of context, folk etymologies and folk ritual actually surpasses anything that the scientists, the Hippocratic schools or Aristotle was writing about it. Sometimes we need to find our medical “information,” as it were (inverted commas) in other places, you know. And I think that's something to be alive to as well. Some of our male sources just don't go down that route whatsoever.
And also, it’s actually kind of interesting. You know, traditionally across the world red wedding veils are the most common color, still, because there's something about red which is blood and joy and fire and sexuality and all that kind of thing.
Emily: [joking] Queen Victoria messed it up! [laughing]
Lloyd: Completely. That's us. We wouldn't even be questioning of this now.
Emily: I love this idea that veils kind of track the moments in a life cycle.
Lloyd: Yeah
Emily: As a girl comes to puberty putting on this sash, and when she comes to marriage, taking off the sash, putting on the spectacular wedding veil.
Lloyd: That’s right. And the rituals surrounding the wedding veil, of course, are enormously important and symbolic. There is a ritual called the anakalypteria (ἀνακαλυπτήρια). (Kalyptra (κάλυπτρα)is another word for veil.) So it means, you know, “the unveiling,” or the removal of the veil, or the lifting up of the veil. I think that this probably happened not once but several times during the three- or four-day wedding rituals in which the bride played a very minimal role really. She was basically a kind of totem dressed in all this splendor, her face and head completely covered by this gleaming veil, who were sort of led around. First of all by her father, and then given to her husband, who took her by the wrist and walked her around the fire of the new house, and so forth.
And at certain points—I think, to confirm that this was the woman he was indeed going to marry—the bridal veil would be lifted, and he would take a quick look at his wife’s face before the veil was lowered again. Very much in tandem with the kind of traditional weddings that we get in Hindu society and so forth, where really the bride is inactive. I mean, she's dripping in family wealth, but has nothing really to do with the ceremony itself. It's a complete contradiction to our Western idea of what a bride should be, you know. “Oh it's my day,” or bridezilla or anything like that [chuckles]. You know, there's no concept of that in the ancient Greek world at all.
Rebekah: So veils by their very nature conceal key parts of the body: the face, the body itself, the hair. But they also conceal those things that are potentially arousing or sexually evocative for the men. As you put it, the veil acted as a “symbolic barrier which renders the wearer socially invisible.”[24] Writing about the Spartans, Plutarch says, “When someone asked why they took their girls into public areas unveiled, but their married women veiled, he [Kharillos] said, ‘Because the girls have to find husbands, and the married women have to keep those who have them!’” (Sayings of the Spartans, Mor 232C, trans. Llewellyn-Jones).[25] [She and Lloyd laugh] What was the veil intended to do in ancient Greece, and to what extent was it used for social control?
Lloyd:: We've gotta take everything, anything written on Sparta with a huge pinch of salt, as you know, okay!
So here we have, you know, Plutarch probably picking up from Xenophon all the other classical writers, saying, “Sparta was so out there. [Rebekah laughs] It was so bizarre that they were basically parading their daughters around half naked or certainly with their cloth– their heads uncovered, so that men could see them and marry them.” You know there's no truth with that. And in fact, in an article I wrote afterAphrodite’s Tortoise, I specifically addressed the Sparta question, and I went back to the material evidence from Sparta itself.[26] And what we find in Spartan evidence from the Archaic [period], right the way through the end of the Classical Period: is veiled women. Lots and lots of iconography of veiled women doing exactly as their Athenian sisters were doing. So I think we can blow the myth of the Spartan thing. [Rebekah laughs] And in fact, they acted pretty much like other women in all parts of Greece.
So on the one level, then, that, the veil was a container, as it were. That's there in the word kalyptra, for instance, which can mean a, you know, a covering. And it was supposed to keep that sort of miasmic nature of women quite literally under wraps. So to stop them spreading their miasmic properties into the male world. It was also there because while men were naturally sophron (σώφρων), so had a kind of self-awareness, women were said not to have that. And so they literally have their boundaries created for them by this garment.
There is this definite pejorative look at what the veil is supposed to do, together with the body language, which the veil then encourages. That means closed body structure, you know, so the arms close to the side, usually clutching at parts of cloth very often to make sure it's in place. If you've ever seen a woman wearing a sari, you know, and trying to get on with her daily business, I mean, it's constantly in the state of flux, and she's constantly adjusting it. And this is, I think, what women were expected to do as well.
Lots of really great anthropology I read over the years on the nature of the living element of the veil. How does it really work? Well, it is a silencer. You put it on and you're meant to be silent within it.
There is a code of honor that works with it as well. So you're allowed to be unveiled for any man who is in your home, in your marital home. But of course, if somebody comes into that home, then the woman is expected to veil and to disappear as quickly as possible. So you know, this is why I suppose the andron is there as a kind you know –if we follow the archaeologists on this– as a kind of safe zone. So women and men will not mix. But not everybody could have afforded that.
There's a really interesting report that was written by a brilliant Arab feminist called Fatima Mernissi.[27] And she argued that actually there was an expectation on men too, to observe a certain decorum when veiled women were around. You know, you shouldn't interfere in their space, you know. So as a gendered set of operational tactics, I suppose, everybody went out of the way to ensure that there was physical and emotional space between males and females. But sometimes you know that was completely challenged by both sexes.
So the thing I worked on after Aphrodite’s Tortoise was on something that arose out of my PhD supervisor’s work—Nick Fisher. I wanted to explore some of the themes that he looked at and then continue with my research. And so I looked at the issue of domestic violence in ancient Greece. One of the hardest things I've ever worked on, not only in terms of trying to find the evidence, but also the nature of the evidence itself. And using my usual way of looking at anthropology as well. So I was looking at instances in Iran, Iraq, Pakistan and so forth as comparative.
Well, what I found there was that the [ancient] Greeks don't speak of domestic violence a great deal. And of course they had no word for it whatsoever, no term for it whatsoever. My final conclusion was that's not because it didn't happen. It's just because it was so common that it doesn't warrant any mention whatsoever. It is a normal part of life.
But I did find some of the occasions when it was mentioned. Obviously it was so shocking because it broke the norms and taboos. So for instance, there's a passage in Plutarch which may come from a much earlier source, and this is to do with Alcibiades. His wife one day tries to walk across the agora [the marketplace] to petition for a divorce. And he is so angry at this that he tears off the veil from her head, and he drags her by the hair through the agora back home. And that is breaking all sorts of norms, you know. I mean, she goes out with her head covered, which is the right thing to do. He uncovers her and shames her and drags her home as well.
Likewise, in the earliest of the Greek romances, Callirrhoe. The novel opens with Callirrhoe running to her beloved, Chaereas, who is already believing that she is a wicked woman because he's listening to a lot of gossip about her. Because she's so beautiful, you know, men are constantly trying to look at her, maul her, take her veil off, and so forth. And he beats her with such ferocity that he leaves her for dead. And that's the beginning of a romance for the Greeks!
So there are moments when there is clearly transgression, and this upsets the Greeks so much on both sides of the spectrum.
So because of that, women (I don't think) dared go out without the correct covering, anymore than they would under the height of the Taliban in the early 2000s. Maybe sadly, again today. Daniel Ogden has done a lot of work on this institution called the gynaikonomoi, which are the controllers of women. Which has a lot, I think, of shared characteristics with some of the Taliban regime. So that these men went around the streets of Greek cities making sure that women's behavior was correct. And by that, of course, it meant showing the correct amount of aidos (αἰδώς), of modesty, of shame, not speaking loudly, not laughing in public, certainly not uncovering their heads. They had the right to beat them with sticks.
But worst of all, the names of the women's fathers or husbands would then be written up in the public space. And that, of course, is where the shame element comes in. A woman cannot have aidos herself. She doesn't warrant it, of course, because she is aischron (αἰσχρόν). She is a shameless creature. But the men of her family feel the shame. And this —in my argument on domestic violence— is where honor beatings and even honor killings would have come in, just as we see today. Plus ça change, sadly.
So I think that the decision to ever remove a veil in public is never taken lightly. But men sometimes certainly dishonor women by doing that with them. You remember there's that famous line in Herodotus in Histories in Book 1, where Gyges’ wife, you know, she– Gyges wants his best friend to see her naked. And the line is “a woman takes off her aidos (her modesty) with her clothes.” You know, so the concealment of the veil is something that keeps everything in order on both sides of the sexual divide.
However, the veil is also a sexual turn-on for men. That's the irony of the whole thing as well. [Chuckles] I remember when I was writing my book, I discovered this image in a Playboy magazine from the 80s. And it kind of showed some sort of, I don't know, religious mullah pouring over this Playboy magazine. And it shows a woman who is completely and utterly veiled. Only her eyes can be seen and a little glimpse of her ankle. And, you know, and he's drooling over this one part of her body that he's able to see. And I think this is what the veil does. It fetishises as much as it conceals. So that rare moment when you get a glimpse of the female body, becomes all things to all men.
So therefore I think that women who are confident enough with their use of the veil can play it to their own advantage. I think the master manipulator of all of this is Penelope in TheOdyssey, when I think on eight occasions Homer says that she wanders into the megaron (you know, the main hall of her home) and just at the last moment she whips her veil in front of her face. Just enough time for the men to see her beauty before it's denied them. And every time, Homer then says, the knees of her suitors went weak. [Rebekah laughs] I just love it.
So in this garment, which is so disabling, it's also, again, paradoxically, enabling as well. This is what I find fascinating about veiling in general. And I can tell you, as I was working on all of this, you know, for my PhD and so forth—oh my jaw used to hit the desk sometimes, you know, ways in which women operate within a system which is so very confining.
Rebekah: So thinking about control, I'm wondering —and also the, even just the story of having multiple suitors and living in a wealthy house. So we expect these women to be veiled. But what about laborers? Women in lower economic situations? Would they have gone about their daily life, veiled in the same way? What does veiling have to do with sort of social strata?
Lloyd: Yeah, it's so hard to access the voice of the very poor in antiquity. My feeling is, from anthropological research, that women did veil, even working the fields just as we see in Bangladesh and so forth today. And again, drawing on what Fatima Mernissi said, women who are out in the fields and who are say, you know, picking grain or vegetables or whatever it might might be, if they're approached by a man it's actually up to the man to turn their back [Lloyd corrects himself] his back on them rather [than] for them to feel ashamed. And I think there's an element of that that was possibly going on.
Prostitutes could certainly be veiled because they are playing this peekaboo game all the time, of course. Even the sort of lowest street walkers are aspirational, and are picking up on what the client wants. And the client wants—as Eva Keuls said many, many decades ago now—they want to buy the fantasy of the citizen life, in a way. And so, you know, prostitutes and certainly the highest hetairai are conspicuously veiled. In fact, you know, there are some of those wonderful quips in Athenaeus which talk about some of these great courtesans being more difficult to see than the King of Persia. [Rebekah chuckles] You know they're behind closed doors of the brothels or their homes that they live in. They’re behind their clothing. They’re behind their veils and fans and all of this kind of stuff.
But slaves, I don't think, were veiled. And most of the time when we look at slave girls—and again there's a lot of fantasy in the artwork, of course—they tend to have cropped hair, don’t they. And I think there's a bit of a fixation on that. (That’s the kind of other extreme of veiling, I suppose, is to crop the hair.)
And one of the things I wondered about when I was working on this is— I'm not really into sort of origin stories at all. You know, I don't think there's need to pursue those kind of things. That very often they're kind of a thankless task. When I was first working on Homer, I did think about, okay, what's the wider sort of world in Homer's age, let’s say, you know, anything from the 10th… you know, 1000 BC to seven or 600 BC, something like that.
So I was kind of thinking, okay what's the rest of the world doing at this point when it comes to veiling. And I did find a lot of great evidence in Assyria. So in the Middle Assyrian period, so that's about 1000 to 800 BCE, we have a series of the first veiling laws known to human societies. They became a fascinating touchstone for me, just to think about the codification of dress rules.
So in these texts it says if the wife of an Assyrian man (so that means a kind of independent wealthy man), goes out, she must be veiled. If a concubine of the man goes out, she must be veiled in honor of the wife. If a slave of a man goes out, she must not veil. And if she is discovered veiling, she'll have her ears cut off. And then, a prostitute must not veil, and if she is discovered veiling, then she will have her head shaved and pitch, tar, will be poured on her head as a mark of disfigurement then.
I found those laws really fascinating, and I started questioning who are these laws written for? Who are the benefactors of these laws? And I don't think it's men. I think actually it's the elite women of Assyria. Because what they're doing is protecting their own interests there. You know, men would have no interest if a woman, you know, your wife, your concubine, or a prostitute is veiled, and we see that in Greece. But in Assyria it was obviously something that really mattered to them.
And that opened my eyes to the fact that women can be just as or sometimes even more demanding on women than men can be. And I found a lot of evidence, then, in the Greek sources for especially within marital households, the mother-in-law, for instance, dominating the young daughter-in-law who was just married into this household. You know very much away from her own blood family. And that the way in which the mother-in-law and neighbors will bully this girl, will have expectations on her, and to completely cover herself and so forth. And a lot, a lot of criticism from other women about not being sufficiently veiled, decorous enough, showing enough aidos—all of this kind of stuff. So there's a lot of censure that also comes from women within this as well. Which, you know, the anthropology then went and really helped me with as well.
Emily: Let's also talk about moments in ancient Greece, where women reclaimed the veil for other purposes. They couldn't take it off entirely, but they could manipulate it or present it for other aims. The fifth-century Christian writer Aristaenetus (fifth century CE, that is) was disturbed by the ways a woman [hetaira] named Thelxinoe used her veil for sexual allure. So he writes, “A woman named Thelxinoe, drawing the gleaming veil over her eyes, like a respectable woman, and looking out from under the rather narrow opening, misleads young men by her tricks, as a wolf is like a dog – a very wild thing like the most gentle thing. Pamphilios was swiftly smitten at the first sight of the beauty emanating through the eyes, like a cow struck by a gadfly” (Aristaenetus 2.18.1–8, trans. Llewellyn-Jones).[28]
[all chuckle]
Lloyd: It's so wonderful. It's so cool. You know, but behind that is a thousand advertisements that we still live with, you know, for ohh, I don't know, bath salts, Turkish delight, you name it. You know, where we fantasize about the woman behind the veil. It's a seductive image for us.
When I first started my work on the veiling I started collecting lots of journalists’ articles. You know, anything that was written on it. And I realized the veil was marketed in the West in two ways: either as a symbol of oppression and of Islamic militancy, or as a complete and utter turn-on. And there's no in between. There's no gray area in that whatsoever.
Emily: Clearly, Aristaenetus did not approve of Thelxinoe’s charm offensive, but she had one nonetheless. So how could women use their veils to render themselves visible?
Lloyd: That's a fascinating question, and it's something that I had to ponder for a long time. So there's obviously the sexual ploy that you can use. So [Jacques] Lacan, the great sociologist, talks about the attractiveness of what he calls “the rim.” So anything which has a kind of a cut off point, we want to know what's behind it all of the time. And of course the veil is the ultimate for that. And if you think about the story of Penelope, the way that she manipulates her silver or gleaming veil in front of her suitors, that just at the last moment she will cover part of her face and take away the beauty that they are longing to see. That drives them crazy.
Equally, the veil– To be conspicuous, the veil can be utilized in a very different way as well. So while on the whole the veil is supposed to keep a woman silent and invisible, at moments of inversion– So, for instance, following death or bad news, a woman can conspicuously throw off her veil, let down her hair, and shriek. You know, lamentation is all about the complete inversion of normality. And of course, what happens then with men— And we see this most clearly of course, with Achilles in Iliad—is he becomes silent, he draws his himation over his head and becomes woman-like in his invisibility, refusal or inability to take part in the social world, the cultural and the the warlike world around him.
So as a sexual ploy, it's there, but also as a marker of a change in status of some kind. It can be played out in that way, too.
Emily: Yeah, an inversion.
Rebekah: Yeah, that's really interesting. Sort of emotional expression through the veil.
Lloyd: Yeah, yeah. And it does seem as well that during mourning periods, women did wear black clothing as well. There's quite a lot of evidence for, you know, traditional mourning black in the Greek world, associated with grief, with anger as well. Just as they wore wedding veils, there seemed to have been mourning clothes.
And you know the way that Greece always works on that kind of, always the polarities isn't it, you know, your wild tamed city, country and all of this kind of stuff. So that's just another version of that really, isn't it, you know the switching around of the norms at times of great crisis.
Rebekah: So you emphasize that veiling of women is not a cultural practice unique to Greece, which you've already kind of hinted at. But finds echoes in other ancient Mediterranean societies. Can you tell us about some of these other representations and instantiations of the veil in cultures like the Sumerians, the Hittites, the Israelites, the Assyrians as you said, and the Persians.
Lloyd: Interesting question and one I could write a book about. [all laugh] Maybe I will one day.
Emily: We'll just add it to your prolific list! [all laugh]
Lloyd:All of those societies wear veils at certain points. The Assyrians most certainly in the Middle Assyrian period. By the New Assyrian period or the Neoassyrian period, seems to have dropped out. And so there is a fashion sometimes in this as well.
The Achaemenid Persians are interesting. We don't have many representations of women in Achaemenid art, which immediately says something about the status of women. They were very important, and they could be very wealthy, certainly if they were attached to the royal court. But they don't have a public face whatsoever. So you know that says something straight away,
But on the few seal images that we do have, there are some striking differences in the veiling styles. There is a kind of long enveloping chador-like veil that is worn by older women at the court. Younger women at the court seem to wear a shorter veil which covers the back of the head and goes down maybe to the waist. This kind of distinction maybe is demarcating status and rank within the royal harem, for instance. The only woman who really could be the head of the harem is the king's mother. While the great king of Persia could have many wives and even more concubines, only one blood mother, [he could] have of course.
And maybe on the cylinder seals, what we're seeing is this woman being really enveloped in a lot of cloth, which of course in itself is a show of of wealth. Maybe that is the mother, and the other women in shorter veils are wives.
Of course we get a great deal of evidence about veiling from the Hebrew Bible as well as the New Testament. And in the New Testament, of course, what we're dealing with there is a very interesting mashup of very often rather staid Hebrew, Jewish ideas of what veiling should be and what women should be, with the newfangled Roman ideas of the free woman. And then, of course, meeting very often on Greek soil with a rather conservative attitude to veiling as well. So it's really fascinating.
I think the letter of Saint Paul, first letter of Saint Paul to the Corinthians, where there's a great deal of attention given in his letter to the problem of women not veiling in the Corinthian church. Now Corinth, of course, was a long standing Roman city by the time Paul got there. Being one of the first cities to be conquered by the Romans in Greece had a big, big Roman population. So you could imagine that already there was this kind of division between, you know, the more conventional Hellenic families, you know the older families, and maybe the nouveau-riche Roman types who are moving in, and their wives doing very different things.
What Paul gets really concerned about is that within the ecclesia, within the congregation of the hurch itself, the women are not covering their heads. And he says specifically, it's not about showing hair. He says that they are opening themselves up to the angels. In other words, it means that the Holy Spirit can enter them because they have no barrier around them. And of course, what they're doing with that is that they're speaking, they're speaking in tongues. They're speaking aloud in a male gathering. And this, for Paul, is just too much to bear. [Rebekah chuckles] You know, so you know women cover your heads.
But that has such a lasting effect in the Christian church. You know, even today there are some Christian communities where, you know, even in the West, where women will always wear hats in church. And so forth. You know, this idea of covering up because of the angels, it goes really, really deep.
So I think there's a lot more work to be done actually on early Christianity and the legacy of Greek and Hebrew veiling as well. Lots of good work is being done indeed on Christian dress, but the head veil is not really being addressed as much as it could be. So there's a great PhD topic out there for somebody.
Emily: Your work looks to contemporary ethnographic examples of veiling cultures to fill some of the gaps of evidence in the ancient world. You talk about clothing examples from India, Jewish communities, Muslim communities, certain Christian communities. How does this help us understand the complexities of veiling a woman's body across time?
Lloyd: Sure. I know that there are people who are very reluctant to use anthropology, or are perturbed, or even do not know where to start with it.
For me, I think it's an appropriate thing to do, because what I wanted my study of the veil to be was as much about a woman's perspective of the garment as any male source that we have. And that's all we have, of course, are male sources. So in order to do that, or in order to put flesh onto these rather bare bones, I think it's been right for me to look at comparative sources.
I've only gone for what we call traditional “veil societies.” Some great anthropological work done on this by some French anthropologists working in Arab states talking about “covered civilizations” and “uncovered civilizations.” So the areas of the world that they identified as covered civilizations so more what we would call “traditional” civilizations are the ones I went to look at. Without ever suggesting that A+B must always equal C. We can never say that this is the way it was.
But by looking at different responses to veiling, both from the male and the female view in a variety of anthropological settings, at least we can ask some further questions that arise from the gaps that we have in the Greek sources. Or even begin to interpret the texts and images in a more nuanced way.
So I would always encourage the use of anthropology, in gender studies in particular, where we're only at ever best are going to get 50% of the evidence.
And even then, with the anthropology, I used it so carefully. I tended to use female anthropologists who could speak to women, because as most anthropologists will tell you, there's very often a gender divide that goes on within anthropology itself, where men don't get access to women's experiences themselves. So even within the huge corpus of anthropology I was very, very careful in choosing the kinds of materials I needed to look at as well.
But I think it was a worthwhile adventure, and it's something that really helped me deal with my work on domestic violence. And indeed, I still use anthropology virtually for every project I do ever since.
Emily: Yeah, I mean, there are so many comparatives that come to light when you're just looking at a different time and place. And even, you know, thinking about this idea of the veil counterintuitively also being used for sexual allure— I think of the work being done today on sort of contemporary western evangelical spaces and purity culture.
Lloyd: Absolutely.
Emily: How strong cultures of covering the body can actually create more desire on the part of the viewer and in the imagination.
Lloyd: You're absolutely right. I think it has huge resonances.
I'd like to point out that, you know it's been twenty-odd years since Aphrodite’s Tortoise hs was published. It's, a paperback version is just about to come out again, maybe next year. You know, at the time nobody had looked at the veil at all. And I remember in the introduction to Aphrodite’s Tortoise I talk about it as “the V word” because I was getting a lot of pushback from other scholars who just didn't want to accept that Greece was a veil society.
What really took my work into another stratosphere, really, was when French academics started picking up on it and sort of corresponding with me and engaging with some of my arguments in their own work. And of course, France has been in a protracted, long difficult debate about the hijab within French society. And I think my book really appealed to them.
Now, it's bizarre. Twenty-odd years on, the veil is absolutely fine. It's no longer a difficult term for classicists and ancient historians to deal with. But when I wrote this, nobody was saying it. Nobody wanted to think of, you know, the birth of democracy being so much like the early Islamic world or the Taliban today.
But I think we've become more at ease with depicting the harsh realities of Greek culture and Greek society. I think we're doing wonderful jobs on that. We've got a long way to go still. But I think it shows that we've turned a corner and are dealing with something which is, it's hard to face sometimes. For those of us who love our ancient societies and want them to be examples, but they're not examples of shining lights or how society should work.
Emily: As a side note, we see how the classical past can get misused in the present for completely concerning aims. And so in that regard, when we are able to dissect some of these complexities of the Greco-Roman past especially, it actually takes away some of the fodder for misinterpretations in the present.
Lloyd: It takes away something of the shine, something of the glamor about it–
Emily: Yeah
Lloyd: —which a lot of people still buy into, in the Roman past in particular. I think so. And I think we need to keep, as academics, keep policing our discipline and making sure that we are doing that.
Rebekah: What do you want audiences to take away from, you know, your work on veiling and the work that's coming out unveiling and the way they think about failing in the past and failing in the present?
Lloyd: I suppose when we think about Greek society, we immediately go to the cultural highlights. So we go to Aeschylus and Euripides and we go to Aristotle. And rightly so, because you know they are foundational stones within human civilization.
However, there's another world that goes on as well, and this is the world of women. And it's much more difficult to access. But we need to put the hard work in to get those lives revealed. We'll never recover their voices fully, but we can begin to access them if we think about them in different ways and ask different questions.
So I suppose what the study is all about and what I'd like people to take away from this is to think in different dimensions. Look around historical corners because there are other ways of thinking and other questions that can be asked from the minutiae of life.
When we think that we've been studying the ancient Greek world for 2,500 years, we've still got questions to ask. We haven't even skimmed the top of the surface of this yet. There's so much more to be revealed. And it's not all going to be about warfare and great philosophy and tragic drama.
[music interlude]
Rebekah: The paradox of the veil is that it both renders a woman socially invisible and, at the same time, could render her visible. On the one hand, a veil shrouded a woman’s body and sometimes her face. On the other hand, it allowed her freedom to step out into society and go where she wished—perhaps not unlike a celebrity putting on giant sunglasses, a baseball cap, and a face mask to go to the grocery store without attracting attention.
Emily: Like all things, veiling can be used as a form of control by patriarchal systems, forcing women to dress as male authorities want. When a particular form of dress is mandated, it’s difficult to access or discuss women’s agency around how they present their bodies to the world. But, as we have seen, veiling has a much larger history than external control.
Rebekah: We don’t know how individual women in ancient Athens thought about the veils that they wore. A fashion statement? An erotic turn on? A protective measure? But what we can guess is that for most women in veiling societies, their bodily progression through the world would have been shaped by wearing the veil. Ever-present yet endlessly adaptable. It accompanied her transition from girlhood to wedding and followed her through to her death.
[podcast theme music plays over the outro]
Rebekah: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website, womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore.
This podcast is written and produced and edited by us, Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
The podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all at Princeton University.
Emily: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before. And don’t forget:
Both: Women were there!
[outro music concludes]
[1] Lauren Hubbard, “The Brand of Scarves Queen Elizabeth Adores,”Town & Country, November 13, 2021, accessed November 10, 2024.
[2] Kaitlyn Frey, “See Priyanka Chopra's 75-Foot Veil from Above as She Walks Down the Aisle Toward a Teary Nick Jonas,”People, December 4, 2018, accessed November 11, 2024.
[3] Frederick Mario Fales, “Veiling in Ancient Near Eastern Legal Contexts, Antichistica 30, Studi orientali 12 (2021): 89–100. “If a man intends to veil his concubine, he shall assemble five or six of his comrades, he shall veil her in their presence, he shall declare ‘She is my aššutu-wif’; she is his aššutu-wife. A concubine who is not veiled in the presence of the people, whose husband did not declare ‘She is my aššutu-wife,’ she is not a aššutu-wife, she is indeed a concubine” (MAL A ¶ 41, edition and translation in Martha Tobi Roth, Harry A Hoffner, and Piotr Michałowski, Law Collections From Mesopotamia and Asia Minor, 2nd ed [Atlanta, GA.: Scholars Press, 1997], 169).
[4] Grace Stafford, “Veiling and Head-Covering in Late Antiquity: Between Ideology, Aesthetics and Practicality,”Past & Present, 263, no. 1 (2024): 3–46.
[5] Mona Ebrahim, 101 Reasons Why I’m Glad I Wear Hijab: The Fabulous and Fun Frills of the ‘Veil’ (Santa Cruz, 2013), cited in Sahar Amer, What Is Veiling? (Chapel Hill, NC: The University of North Carolina Press, 2014), 148.
[6] Mohja Kahf, “From Her Royal Body the Robe Was Removed: The Blessings of the Veil and the Trauma of Forced Unveilings in the Middle East,” in The Veil: Women Writers on Its History, Lore, and Politics, ed. Jennifer Heath (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008), 30–31.
[7] Atar Livneh, “Tresses and Distresses: Literary and Social Aspects of Women’s Hair in Second Temple Jewish Literature,” Journal of Ancient Judaism 14, no. 3 (2023), 428–432. Some examples that Livneh points to include the Sotah ritual in A. J. 3.270 and Num 5:18; Philo SPEC 3.5; the story of the captives, 11Q19 10–15, and the story of Job’s wife T. Job 23–24.
[8] Livneh, “Tresses and Distresses,” 426-427.
[9] Our guest today, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, studies veiling in Greece from the eighth through third centuries BCE. [In his book Aphrodite’s Tortoise,] He groups veils into two general categories: outerwraps (epiblēmata) that cover the body, and veils that primarily cover the face. The himation and the pharos were two outerwraps, large rectangles of fabric similar to an Indian sari or Egyptian miláyeh. A woman anchored her himation around her torso and swept it over her shoulders; she could also pull it over her head if she wanted. The pharos, she would have draped over her head and shoulders, and sometimes wrapped around her body. Shoulder-length veils came into popularity ca. 520 through 420 BCE. Women would take a fabric square, pleat it, and fasten it at the crown of her head, falling in neat folds to her shoulders. (Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise: The Veiled Women of Ancient Greece (Swansea, Wales: Classical Press of Wales, 2003), 49–56.
[10] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 61.
[11] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 65–66. Two other types of veils, Lloyd calls the lithma-style and maghmuq style, after the contemporary Arabic names for similar fashions.
[12] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 62–63.
[13] Heraclides Criticus (?), On the Towns of Greece, 1.18, trans. Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 62. The author of the text is disputed, but is sometimes identified as Heraclides Criticus (Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 81n130).
[14] In one epigram, Timarete dedicated her tambourine, a toy, a lock of hair, and her hair net to Artemis (Anth. Pal. 6.260). John Howard Oakley and Rebecca H. Sinos, The Wedding In Ancient Athens (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1993), 14.
[15] “The veil signifies a woman's sexual maturity and protected status; once a woman reached marriageable age, she covered her head whenever she went out in public. Thus the bride's unveiling to her husband was a significant point in her transformation from maiden to wife, who would uncover herself to this man alone.” (Oakley and Sinos, The Wedding in Ancient Athens, 30-32). Llewellyn-Jones points out that there is debate on when this unveiling happened—in the beginning, middle, or end of the wedding festival—and whether the unveiling was public or private. Instead, he suggests that there was not one definitive veiling, but “a series of unveilings which began in the public sphere and ended in a wholly private act” (Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 227–47, 229).
[16] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 238.
[17] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 248.
[18] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, quote at 227.
[19] Tacitus, Annals: Books 13-16, trans. John Jackson, Loeb Classical Library 322 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1937),81.
[20] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 293–298, esp. 298.
[21] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 218.
[22] Liza Cleland, The Brauron Clothing Catalogues: Text, Analysis, Glossary and Translation(Oxford: John and Erica Hedges Ltd., 2005).
[23] For a conversation about Greco-Roman and early Christian ideas about the hymen, see “Virginity and the Hype About Hymens with Julia Kelto Lillis,” Women Who Went Before, Season 2 Episode 2, October 31, 2024, https://www.womenwhowentbefore.com/episodes/virginity-and-the-hype-about-hymens.
[24] Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 283.
[25] Plutarch, Sayings of the Spartans, Mor 232C, trans. Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 176.
[26] Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones, “Veiling the Spartan Woman,” in Dress and Identity, ed. Mary Harlow, IAA Interdisciplinary Studies in Archaeology, History, Literature and Art, vol. 2, (BAR Publishing: 2012), pp. 17–35.
[27] Fatima Mernissi published 20 books, which have been translated into numerous languages. On veiling, see especially The Veil and the Male Elite: A Feminist Interpretation of Women’s Rights in Islam, English trans. by Mary Jo Lakeland(Addison Wesley, 1991); and Beyond the Veil: Male and Female Dynamics in a Modern Muslim Society, rev. ed. (Indiana University Press, 1987).
[28] Aristaenetus 2.18.1–8, trans. Llewellyn-Jones, Aphrodite’s Tortoise, 286.
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Cover Art
This funeral stone is our only testimony to the life of Nabuna, a woman from the late-second or early-third century CE who lived in Palmyra, a great trading city in modern-day Syria and at the time a vassal state to Rome. Like many women throughout the ancient Mediterranean world, Nabuna wore a veil. Her elaborate headdress shows the local style.
Image Credit: Funerary relief of Nabuna, daughter of Abuna. Palmyra. Ca. 170-230 CE. Limestone with traces of pigment. Yale University Art Gallery, gift of Edward B. Greene, B.A. 1900, accession number 1930.6. No copyright. Photograph by Emily Chesley.
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Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. Music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity at Princeton University
Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.