There was a time when becoming a mother meant no loss of a woman’s role in vital forms of public life. In Ancient Greece, a woman was maiden, bride and then, after childbirth, mature female. This was hardly a life of freedom. Young girls of thirteen and fourteen were married off to men in their thirties. Women, like slaves, were not citizens (the woman/slave analogy eloquent in itself). A woman could fulfil her destiny only as a mother. But according to one account of Greek motherhood, in doing so she did not cease to be involved in civic space, notably in the community of women who participated in religious ceremonies.1 It was the single arena in which women enjoyed parity or even superiority vis-à-vis men. Women held priestly office and performed ceremonial duties, such as at the Eleusinian Mysteries in honour of the goddess Demeter and at the Panathenian festivals that celebrated the Athenian patron goddess Athena (they appear everywhere in the Ionic frieze of the Parthenon, the most important religious building in the city).2 Women played an important role in the cult activity that fostered the welfare of the household (oikos) and city, including the ritual commemoration of the dead.3 Such activity enabled them to intervene in the politics of their community, granting them, in the words of classics scholar Barbara Goff, ‘significant presence and agency in the public realm’ (as she also points out, ritual itself was a type of work).4 Although ancient Athens was undoubtedly a patriarchal society, scholars have argued that names, property and priesthoods could all travel through the female line.5

Visits to temples both before and after the birth of a child gave the mother considerable access to the community beyond the domestic boundaries of the home.6 On becoming a mother, the woman therefore maintained her ties to a realm that exceeded the domain of motherhood itself, an idea that modern times seem progressively to have lost. ‘Parenthood is not a transition,’ Rachel Cusk writes in A Life’s Work: On Becoming a Mother (2001), ‘but a defection, a political act.’7 After the birth of her first child, Cusk felt she had been left stranded on the far shore of any viable political life. Her horizons narrowed. She was cut down to size. Cusk is pointing out that this isolation from the wider world – separate spheres, as it was first defined in the nineteenth century – is as sudden as it is absolute (this regardless of whether today’s mother eventually returns to work). But it is neither natural nor eternal. It is a piece of history, and should be recognised both as personally damaging and as a fully political fact.

A few years earlier, in 1998, Melissa Benn wrote of the way modern mothers seem ‘encased in a new silence … We know what we do, but we don’t talk about it publicly.’8 She praised the new-found forms of community and solidarity she encountered among mothers while researching her book, but she also noted the restricted compass of mothers talking mainly, sometimes only, to each other. In fact, in the UK and the US, a mother’s separation from the polity has by no means always been the norm. There is a long tradition going back to the eighteenth century of seeing motherhood as part of civic life. The role of the mother was to generate the new citizen, and the nation’s stability was seen to reside in the civic virtue she cultivated in her child – although, since the mother was confined to the home, this only granted her, in historian Linda Colley’s words, a ‘public role of a kind’.9

In 451–450 BC, Pericles, orator, statesman and a general of Athens, passed a law that made citizenship conditional on descent from an Athenian mother as well as a father, excluding all xenos, or foreign ‘outsiders’.10 The Athenian mother therefore played a key role in transmitting the citizenship from which she herself was debarred (that she was being used to block the civic status of alien mothers has a chilling resonance in today’s anti-migrant world). Scholars are divided as to whether this increased or lowered her status, as they are as to whether the virtue of the mother’s femininity in relation to husband and child was freighted with the duty of securing the viability of nation and city space.

Either way, as classics scholar Edith Hall has pointed out, the frequency with which Greek men enunciated their ideal of femininity suggests that women by no means always conformed to it.11 Athenian women uttering obscenities and handling pastry models of genitalia during the winter Haloa festival at Eleusis may have acted as a safety valve, but such practices also indicate that the dominant codes aimed at securing the role of successful wife and mother for women were, as Goff puts it, ‘always at risk’.12 According to Thucydides, women joined in the fourth-century revolution in Kerkyra (Corfu), throwing tiles onto the heads of the oligarchs from the roofs (this also appears to have been viewed as an acceptable activity for women in times of siege).13 Speeches from the ancient courts of law show women, despite the severest restrictions on their legal rights, determined to do all they could to maximise their influence.14

Attic drama suggests this independent spirit was nowhere more present than in relation to mothers, who are portrayed as citizens, chorus, subjects on the world’s stage. This can help us – it certainly has helped me – to envisage alternative ways of thinking about the real and imagined political selfhood of being a mother. At moments, Greece and Rome – with Shakespeare in a walk-on part – will appear as inspirational, at others as scarily familiar. Not for nothing is Greece, in the famously Eurocentric formula, referred to as ‘cradle’ or ‘birthplace’ of the West – or ‘the mother of us all’, as one might say. We should be wary, of course – classical culture is not the only way of tracking the path from now to then. But, as scholars from Mary Beard to Edith Hall have convincingly argued, the Greeks are still with us today, even as Beard issues the salutary caution that our grip on classical times is fragile. As ancient historian Esther Eidinow writes, the sparse evidence throws ‘only the faintest of silhouettes down through time’, even while her study of witch trials in fourth-century Athens is aimed at retrieving the agency and power of these women.15

There are, however, few testimonies available from the mothers of Ancient Greece themselves, who, in the words of Lauren Hackworth Petersen and Patricia Salzman-Mitchell, editors of a volume on the topic, ‘left little trace of their own existence’ (a lot of examples are taken by necessity from funeral urns).16 Hence my focus on drama, which has survived more or less intact and where different versions of motherhood, for better or worse, could be tried out for size, admittedly written by men. My engagement with classical culture on the subject of mothers has left me alternately cheering and tearing my hair (although, as we will see, by the time I have finished the two responses start to coalesce).

In Euripides’ The Suppliant Women, Aethra pleads with her son Theseus to be allowed to speak on behalf of the Argive mothers whose fallen sons lie unburied. The play can be read as a mother-centred version of the better-known Antigone, whose more famous heroine insists on her brother’s sacred right to due burial against unjust man-made law. In The Suppliant Women, Aethra makes her plea, not for a brother against the state, but in the name of the city and on behalf of mothers who are not her kin. When Theseus first objects that these grieving women of Argos are foreigners, she replies: ‘You do not belong to them. Shall I say something, my son, that brings honour to you and the city?’17 Defying him in the name of a cross-national community of mothers, she presents her case in terms of the contribution women make to the civic good: if he ignores their plea, the city over which he rules will be destroyed.

Aethra is drawing on the authority owing to her as mother of the Athenian king. Theseus concedes, and then proceeds to a passionate defence of democracy: ‘This city is free, and ruled by no one man. The people reign in annual alterations. / And they do not yield their power to the rich; / the poor man has an equal share in it.’18 As if to say: in relation to democracy, listening to the voice of bereaved, disenfranchised mothers is the true litmus test. The modern world could helpfully take note. In November 2016, the Mothers of the Movement, bereaved mothers of some of the highest-profile black victims of police violence in the US, started travelling the country to tell the stories of their dead children and to speak out on police racism, gun violence and criminal justice reform. ‘I had to change my mourning into a movement, my pain into purpose and sorrow into a strategy,’ states Gwen Carr, mother of Eric Garner, killed on Staten Island, New York, in 2014, aged forty-three. ‘I know it’s too late for Eric but we have to save the unborn.’ ‘When it’s time to speak, I go forth. I’m not a politics person. I mean, I guess I am now, in some ways’ – the words of Valerie Bell, mother of Sean Bell, shot in Queens, New York, in 2006, aged twenty-three.19 Another modern instance of mothers forging a...