As a father of three and the husband of an amazing woman, I know that one day a year is far too little to recognize everything mothers do. But my work as a scholar of ancient Greek literature has shown me how much harder it was to be a mother in antiquity.
The ancient Greeks may not have had the kind of Mother’s Day celebrated in the United States and United Kingdom today – holidays that began at the turn of the 20th century and in the Middle Ages, respectively. But they did have festivals to honor motherhood, focused primarily on the goddess Hera or the earth mother Cybele – though more often than not, women did the lion’s share of the labor for those events.
