There are many ways of understanding the culture and history of civilizations – literary sources, archaeological remains, art, architecture etc, and each type can offer us different aspects of their lives. In this article, I wish to look at the history and significance of women’s lamps and torches from the Late Archaic and Classical periods of ancient Greece to determine what information they may offer us.
Let us determine, first of all, when these periods took place and what we will be discussing. 650 – 480 BCE is the generally accepted period of Archaic Greece, and the Classical period c. 500 – 323 BCE. For this article, I will be examining the images of Athenian women and their activities that were illuminated by lamps and torches, and whether a different type of lighting device can offer us other aspects of Athenian women’s’ lives.
Aristophanes claims that the lamps is ‘the all-seeing witness of the domestic female world’ (, p.19) in the prologue of the Ecclesiazousai. The lamp reflects the female aspect of domestic life in the ancient Greek world, whereas torches reflect the male features of the house. We can see the social representations of this in vase paintings – in one Athenian vase the female holds a lamp, the male a torch. Torches represented the outside ‘brighter’ world of men, lamps the ‘darker’ inside wide o ... Read More
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