Aphrodite's Tortoise. The veiled woman of Ancient Greece
by Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones
ISBN-13: 978-1-905125-42-5 ISBN-10: 1-905125-42-9, paperback, GB £28
ISBN-13: 978-0-9543845-3-1 ISBN-10: 0-9543845-3-9, hardback, x+358 pp., 173 figs., 2003, GB £45.00
 
Greek women routinely wore the veil. That is the unexpected finding of this major study. The Greeks, rightly credited with the invention of civic openness, are revealed as also part of a more eastern tradition of seclusion. From the iconography as well as the literature of Greece, Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones shows that full veiling of face and head was commonplace. He analyses the elaborate Greek vocabulary for veiling, and explores what the veil was meant to achieve. He also uses Greek and more recent - mainly Islamic - evidence to show how women could exploit and subvert the veil to achieve eloquent, sometimes emotional, communication.
The author: Lloyd Llewellyn-Jones has established himself as an authority on the representation and dress of Greek women. He is editor of Women's Dress in the Ancient Greek World (Classical Press of Wales, 2002).
 


"This book is arguably the most important study of Greek female dress in recent years. It deserves to be very widely read."

- Sheila Dillon, The Classical Review, Vol 55, No 2, 2005, pp282-284


 

CONTENTS
Preface and acknowledgements
1. Veiling the ancient Greeks
2. Defining the veil
3. Veil-styles in the ancient Greek world
4. Revealing the veil: problems in the iconography of veiling
5. Who veils? Veiling and social identity in the ancient Greek sources
6. Veiled and ashamed
7. Aphrodite's Tortoise: veiling, social separation and domestic space
8. From parthenos to gyne: veiling and the female life cycle
9. Veiling the polluted woman
10. The white and the black: conspicuous veiling
11. Conclusion
Bibliography
Index