Star of Stage and Temple

It took quite an effort for a woman to capture attention in Ancient Greece. You could be a beautiful goddess or a savage monster but high profile career options for flesh and blood women were rather thin on the ground. So why has the name of Myrrhine survived for two and a half thousand years?

We can find her name inscribed on a gravestone in the dusty corridors of the Epigraphic Museum in Athens, painted alongside the gods on an enormous funeral vase in the National Archaeology Museum. And she appears as the most cunning of the Greek wives withholding sex from their desperate husbands in the Lysistrata- the best known and most performed of the Ancient Greek comedies.

So who was Myrrhine, how did she achieve her contemporary fame and why does she still speak to us from the stage today? Mary’s search takes her to the peak of the Acropolis.

Producer: Alasdair Cross

Researcher: Anna Charalambou

Expert contributors: Nikolaos Papazarkades of the University of California, Berkeley, Nick Lowe from Royal Holloway University of London and Andronike Makres of the University of the Peloponnese

Special thanks to the British School at Athens and the Hellenic Ministry of Culture