Abstract
There are two reasons for comparing sacrifice and citizenship in the case of women (especially Athenians). The first is the ongoing debate among Greek historians about female citizenship. To put it briefly and interrogatively: can we speak of "female citizens" in ancient Greece, or should we limit ourselves to saying that they were "wives or daughters or mothers of citizens"? In this debate, religious and sacrificial questions are an important issue. The institutional definitions proposed by Aristotle satisfy the political approach, which excludes women from citizenship. Approaches that privilege politics as a civic way of life find reasons in the speakers to widen the focus by bringing women into citizenship: the terms politis, astē, even the toponymic adjective Athēnaia, already attest to this on their own, but the importance of "sacred affairs" (hiera) in the implications of citizenship support this observation. The second reason relates to the involvement of women at every stage of the sacrificial process, which didn't really pose a problem for modern researchers until Marcel Detienne, in La Cuisine du sacrifice en pays grec (1979), concluded that they were kept "away from altars, meat and blood". We briefly present the historiography of the theme since this turning point at the end of the 1970s.
