In the display covering Greek life, art and religion, women play important, vibrant roles, as do their goddesses
- from lover to priestess to political peacemaker to protagonist of public festivals.
"Today's woman has more in common with the woman of ancient Athens than one imagines," said curator Stella Chryssoulaki. She pointed to a vase showing a group of women who escaped city life, getting together in the countryside for a three-day festival honoring their beloved god Dionysius. They talked and shared lots of wine, leaving their husbands behind.
Contrary to the popular perception of the Athenian female rituals as wild orgies, "there was no sex."
It was a religious rite, but also "a way to get out of the house and talk and exchange feelings," Chryssoulaki said. "It was kind of like group therapy
- and then they went home relaxed and ready for the stresses of daily life."
Resentful husbands gave these gatherings a bad name, but actually Dionysius "was a gentle god, both somewhat masculine and feminine," she said
The 155 artifacts illuminated in cases and on pedestals in the Manhattan exhibit are mostly from Greece, with contributions from the Vatican, Russia's Hermitage Museum, New York's Metropolitan Museum of Art and other top art sources in Italy and Germany.
Just steps from Fifth Avenue, "Worshiping Women" is located in the Onassis Cultural Center in the basement of a modern Manhattan skyscraper, Olympic Tower, that on a higher floor houses the American offices of the Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation. It's named after the son of the late Greek shipping magnate Aristotle Onassis, who was married to Jacqueline Kennedy; his son and heir, Alexander, had died young in a plane crash.
The center's mission is to promote Hellenic culture, and it sponsors exhibitions in the underground gallery such as "Worshiping Women," which opened Dec. 10 and runs through May 9. The show was conceived by Nikolaos Kaltsas, director of the National Archaeological Museum of Greece in Athens, and Alan Shapiro, professor of archaeology at Johns Hopkins University.
While women in Athens couldn't vote and were told whom to marry, the exhibit is packed with objects that attest to their vital roles in everything from food and sex to birth and death.
Women were part of both politics and religion, which in those days overlapped.
A large earthen vessel depicts a scene from Homer's "Iliad" in which a Trojan priestess receives Greek warriors who had come to recover Helen from Troy. "The priestess secures the peace," said the curator.
A key depicted on another vase was kept only by a woman who opened the door to the treasures in the temple of the priestesses.
