Epizephyrian Locri is a no man’s land for classicists. Those who study this strange Greek colony on the Italian peninsula—and few do—tend to begin with the Locrian sage Zaleucas, the earliest known lawgiver in ancient Greece. Zaleucas made some very good laws for Epizephyrian Locri. His laws were so good, in fact, that when Pythagoras came to offer his services to the city, the citizens met Pythagoras at the border and said:
We, Pythagoras, hear that you are a man both wise and able. But since we find no fault with our own laws, we for our part will try to stand by our established order. Therefore go somewhere else, taking from us anything you might need.
Thanks, but no thanks. The Locrians were content to sit civilly on the sidelines of Greek civilization and fan the glory of their neighbor Syracuse. As James M. Redfield writes in his new book, The Locrian Maidens: Love and Death in Greek Italy, “When all the other great Greek cities were deeply engaged in making history—which is to say, in the struggle for power—the Locrians seem to have been content to settle for happiness.” The Locrians looked neither to Sparta nor to Athens for cultural guidance. They had their own distinct way of being Greek.
The Locrians were one of the original Greek peoples. According to Pindar, they were the offspring of the rocks that Deucalion—the Greek Noah—brought down with him from Parnassus after the great flood. Old-world Locris was comprised of two discontinuous territories on the Greek mainland, stretching from Euboea to the Corinthian gulf. In the seventh century B.C., these people founded one of the earliest colonies in Southern Italy: Epizephyrian Locri. This colony became one of the major cities on the western frontier.
Redfield sees little similarity between the Locrian colony and the motherland.
Redfield sees little similarity between the Locrian colony and the motherland, although he contends that the two cities acknowledged the same foundational myth—that of the Locrian maidens (of his book’s title). The legend goes that during the sack of Troy, the “lesser” Locrian Ajax, who plays second fiddle to the “greater” Telamonian Ajax in the Iliad, tried to rape Cassandra while she held on to the Palladium, a wooden statue of Athena given to the Trojans by the gods. The rape itself would have presented few problems to the Greek conscience, were not Cassandra clutching the figure of Athena so tightly that Ajax knocked the statue off its plinth. The scene is a favorite among black figure vase painters—Cassandra holds on, the Palladium tumbles, and Ajax gets cursed by the Goddess. To atone for the sins of Ajax, the old-world Locrians sent two maidens to serve at the temple of Athena at Troy. They then promised to replace them each year for 1,000 years.
Redfield reads the ritual as a form of social reconstructive surgery: the maidens serve to repair Cassandra’s virginity, and the male citizens who accompany them are When these maidens returned home each year, they became the most coveted brides in the land. Their sacred service amplified their virginity, and the special protection granted to them by Athena made them living symbols of integrity for the entire community.
The Epizephyrian Locrians didn’t send virgins to sea, but they invested their women with a certain preciousness. Redfield points to the preponderance of women’s effects in Epizephyrian graves—hand mirrors, perfume bottles, cosmetics—which suggests an emphasis on femininity that goes beyond what archaeologists typically dig up on the Greek mainland. The Locrians pinakes (painted terracotta tablets unique to the Locrians) depict marriage celebrations, intimate illustrations of wives with their husbands, and other domestic scenes rare in the rest of Greece.
The myth presents a tenuous relationship, maybe, between the two Locri, but Redfield sees it as shaping a common model for wives in the two Locri: not quite “free agents” like Spartan women, nor cloistered like Athenian wives, but somewhere in between the two. The Athenians were so obsessed with citizenship—Pericles told the Athenians to treat the city like a lover—that marital bliss seems to have been a secondary concern. (We have to wait until Menander, after the politically charged fifth century is over, before we get any boy-meets-girl romances in Greek literature.) For the Spartans, meanwhile, women were basically flawed male citizens, capable of steering the state only in times of emergency.
The problem with sociological books that borrow from structural anthropology is that they risk imposing their own rules of behavior on their subjects. Redfield avoids this trap with his keep appreciation of the ambiguities at stake in the texts and iconographic evidence. The book also includes valuable essays on Orphic death rites and Greek economic development in general. The Locrian Maidens actually uncovers something new in the heavily trodden terrain of the classics, and in today’s academy that amounts to a rara avis.
