Patterns of Marriage Dedications Made by Girls and Women in Greek Sacred Spaces, 500-300 BCE

Abstract

My thesis is primarily a discussion of the range of marriage votives in sacred contexts from various regions of the ancient Greek world from 500 to 300 BCE and focuses on information about the marriage ceremony, identification of potentially relevant artifacts, evaluation of the relevant iconography and primary sources, and an overview of the available literature on both marriage and its associated dedications. Current research on the Greek wedding is fragmentary and scattered throughout larger corpora on the lives of women, and is rarely treated in isolation, with only a handful of relevant monographs on the subject. I have compiled a general inventory of the available dedications at a selection of sacred sites, including those which are only known through literary and epigraphical evidence. In doing so, I establish some preliminary patterns of worship across the Greek world, analyze the available material evidence within a broader context, investigate the significance of the various deities related to marriage, and explore discrepancies between the textual and archaeological record. I utilize literary, epigraphical, and archaeological sources from excavation reports to identify when in the marriage ceremony dedications occur, in what manner they are expected to appease or propitiate their respective deity, and what aspects of a woman’s life they might represent. For issues of length, my scope is limited to Late Archaic, Classical, and Early Hellenistic items from 500–300 BCE and with concrete proveniences from sanctuary sites. The geographic scope is limited to mainland Greece, the Peloponnesos, and the Aegean islands, with other objects considered for points of comparison. All such items are included in a selective catalogue, organized according to type of evidence, deity, site, then object type. This catalogue is used to analyze the patterns in worship and votive practices and provide an overview to the nature of the available evidence.