New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World, 2021
Becoming Visible was a classic in the new feminist history of the 1970s, but for some historical ... more Becoming Visible was a classic in the new feminist history of the 1970s, but for some historical periods visibility has been slow in coming. Current treatments of Roman political culture tend to erase not only women but poor people and slaves. 1 We know women were always there and always constituted half the population, more or less; yet, for long stretches of history, they are invisible. This is a wrong that must be righted. The problem was stated best by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, as her heroine, Catherine Morland, explains why it is that she does not like to read history: "I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good-for-nothing, and hardly any women at all-it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." Just so. It is not just that women are omitted; it is clear that they are deliberately omitted, since historians are the ones who choose what they put in. Even Livy complained about the tendency of historians to fib; as he put it,
and subsequently the journals that review them, should select reviewers who do not themselves wri... more and subsequently the journals that review them, should select reviewers who do not themselves write commentaries . . ., hence are not part of the guild’ (p. 85). Like Hunter (p. 94 n. 9), I must declare a di¶erent interest, as an editor of Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries (the orange series). It accounts for my silence about Gibson’s piece on Ars amatoria 3 and may well disqualify me from reviewing books on commentaries. Too late. As for the ‘guild’, are there scholars who would not be seen dead in it, or is it just that extra est quem nemo rogavit? I end with two commentators that I have a soft spot for, H. C. Goodhart on Thucydides 8 (London 1893) and Servius on Virgil. My school o¶ered a Thucydides Prize, for which in my year the assignment was Book 8; I badly needed help, and Goodhart, by giving me that and much else, made me a fan of commentaries and of the copia that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht extols in the tailpiece to the earlier volume. Servius I read stretches of when I had classical literature to teach after the distractions of history and philosophy; though I turned to him because he brings in a number of things otherwise unattested, it proved more important that very little escapes unlemmatized, so that he forced me to look at pretty well every word. Heartfelt thanks to these two members of the guild and to all others, past, present, and future.
New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World
Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the stree... more Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the streets of Rome and throughout Italy in the war-torn mid-Republic. Comedy is the best contemporary witness, developing as it did from the 270s BCE onward. City sackings entailed rape, enslavement, loss of kin, and the movement of refugees across Italy, and the resulting issues inflect the content of comedy, emblematized in a slave-woman’s fake jewelry in the shape of the goddess Victoria. Comedy addresses women in the audience, while, onstage, women move through the city and participate in political actions and discourse, laying claim to rights. In Livy’s later accounts of the Punic Wars, women appear in religious worship and reacting to war news, demonstrating bereavement like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They even join in the fighting, in ways seen in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, or as Cicero’s wife Terentia defended her own home.
Argues that slavery was the basis for the ancient sex/gender system and that, this being so, ther... more Argues that slavery was the basis for the ancient sex/gender system and that, this being so, there was in practice no lower age limit on persons used for sex; presents the evidence for the sexual use of persons below the age of puberty. This constitutes a major change in my previously stated opinions.
Surveys the king names that appear in Plautus's comedies and considers the geopolitics an... more Surveys the king names that appear in Plautus's comedies and considers the geopolitics and history they appealed to in the audience, especially as compared with the king names and geography of the Life of Aesop, and in connection with the many stories of contemporary traveling comedians and their misadventures (sometimes fatal) at the courts of Hellenistic kings, as seen in Athenaeus and Machon.
Discusses the attitudes towards sexuality and the body expressed in the Meditations; then surveys... more Discusses the attitudes towards sexuality and the body expressed in the Meditations; then surveys the biographical tradition on Marcus Aurelius from the eighteenth century to the present, with its stress on MA's purity and saintliness. Part of an ongoing project on the reception of the Fronto/Marcus letters and their separation from the biographical tradition.
... "Anglo" women in England's former colonies have used the classics in a more co... more ... "Anglo" women in England's former colonies have used the classics in a more complicated way, to express an alienation ... 279 Page 16. implicit in the names Louie chooses for her main characters: Anteios and Megara. Louie explains to Sam that "there are two actors.. . ...
Rhetorical handbooks lay out what should happen-what is the ideal; exercises show what is being t... more Rhetorical handbooks lay out what should happen-what is the ideal; exercises show what is being taught. Possibly other sorts of texts might suggest what happened in actuality, among named individuals whose lives have left multiple traces: in particular, the letters of orators from Cicero to Sidonius Apollinaris. Here, I would argue, we can see the bumpy, un-ideal workings of male bonding in the Roman forum, in a culture where older men trained younger men, and lifelong friendships were formed-and enmities as well; where manhood was contested, a prize status, to be earned through rites of passage, initiations, testing, challenges; and where, at the end of the Republic, these contests escalated into violence and that violence turned deadly. It might be argued that it is only too easy to see how this model fits Rome. The country is the patria; the family is ruled by patria potestas; the paterfamilias has, in theory, the right of life and death over family members; the worst crime is parricide; Roman law is a male game, office holding is a male game, the army is a male game, and all of them are agonistic, structured as contests. Relations of power are figured, often, as relations between father and son, as in a letter from Caelius to Cicero from 51 b.c.e. (Fam. 8.8.9): Caelius is reporting a discussion in the senate in which someone asked Pompey, "What if Caesar wants to stay consul and keep his army?" And Pompey replies, Quid, si filius meus fustem mihi impingere volet? ("What if my son should wish to hit me over the head with a club?"). Everything here is a function of relationships between males: the male pen pals (though, we should note, typically so in Cicero's letter-books only because his letters from women were not included-no coincidence); the discussion in the senate; the renegade army commander; Pompey figuring himself as father, threatened by Caesar as undutiful son. Which is complicated by the fact that, a few years before this conversation took place, Pompey had been Caesar's son-in-law. Stories about the socialization of real young men into the world of the forum showcase a special kind of teaching in which elite men train their replacements; predictable tensions arise. It is certainly the case that Roman young men were introduced to the forum in a way their sisters were not. It is not that women were not educated; what Virginia Woolf called the "daughters of educated men" were about as educated as their brothers were. A few women are even on record as orators. 3 Cicero's friend Caerellia read (Cicero's) philosophical writings, although she had to scrounge them (Att. 13.21a.2), and his
New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World, 2021
Becoming Visible was a classic in the new feminist history of the 1970s, but for some historical ... more Becoming Visible was a classic in the new feminist history of the 1970s, but for some historical periods visibility has been slow in coming. Current treatments of Roman political culture tend to erase not only women but poor people and slaves. 1 We know women were always there and always constituted half the population, more or less; yet, for long stretches of history, they are invisible. This is a wrong that must be righted. The problem was stated best by Jane Austen in Northanger Abbey, as her heroine, Catherine Morland, explains why it is that she does not like to read history: "I read it a little as a duty, but it tells me nothing that does not either vex or weary me. The quarrels of popes and kings, with wars or pestilences, in every page; the men all so good-for-nothing, and hardly any women at all-it is very tiresome; and yet I often think it odd that it should be so dull, for a great deal of it must be invention." Just so. It is not just that women are omitted; it is clear that they are deliberately omitted, since historians are the ones who choose what they put in. Even Livy complained about the tendency of historians to fib; as he put it,
and subsequently the journals that review them, should select reviewers who do not themselves wri... more and subsequently the journals that review them, should select reviewers who do not themselves write commentaries . . ., hence are not part of the guild’ (p. 85). Like Hunter (p. 94 n. 9), I must declare a di¶erent interest, as an editor of Cambridge Classical Texts and Commentaries (the orange series). It accounts for my silence about Gibson’s piece on Ars amatoria 3 and may well disqualify me from reviewing books on commentaries. Too late. As for the ‘guild’, are there scholars who would not be seen dead in it, or is it just that extra est quem nemo rogavit? I end with two commentators that I have a soft spot for, H. C. Goodhart on Thucydides 8 (London 1893) and Servius on Virgil. My school o¶ered a Thucydides Prize, for which in my year the assignment was Book 8; I badly needed help, and Goodhart, by giving me that and much else, made me a fan of commentaries and of the copia that Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht extols in the tailpiece to the earlier volume. Servius I read stretches of when I had classical literature to teach after the distractions of history and philosophy; though I turned to him because he brings in a number of things otherwise unattested, it proved more important that very little escapes unlemmatized, so that he forced me to look at pretty well every word. Heartfelt thanks to these two members of the guild and to all others, past, present, and future.
New Directions in the Study of Women in the Greco-Roman World
Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the stree... more Although ignored in current treatments of Roman political culture, women were active in the streets of Rome and throughout Italy in the war-torn mid-Republic. Comedy is the best contemporary witness, developing as it did from the 270s BCE onward. City sackings entailed rape, enslavement, loss of kin, and the movement of refugees across Italy, and the resulting issues inflect the content of comedy, emblematized in a slave-woman’s fake jewelry in the shape of the goddess Victoria. Comedy addresses women in the audience, while, onstage, women move through the city and participate in political actions and discourse, laying claim to rights. In Livy’s later accounts of the Punic Wars, women appear in religious worship and reacting to war news, demonstrating bereavement like the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo. They even join in the fighting, in ways seen in Vietnam and Northern Ireland, or as Cicero’s wife Terentia defended her own home.
Argues that slavery was the basis for the ancient sex/gender system and that, this being so, ther... more Argues that slavery was the basis for the ancient sex/gender system and that, this being so, there was in practice no lower age limit on persons used for sex; presents the evidence for the sexual use of persons below the age of puberty. This constitutes a major change in my previously stated opinions.
Surveys the king names that appear in Plautus's comedies and considers the geopolitics an... more Surveys the king names that appear in Plautus's comedies and considers the geopolitics and history they appealed to in the audience, especially as compared with the king names and geography of the Life of Aesop, and in connection with the many stories of contemporary traveling comedians and their misadventures (sometimes fatal) at the courts of Hellenistic kings, as seen in Athenaeus and Machon.
Discusses the attitudes towards sexuality and the body expressed in the Meditations; then surveys... more Discusses the attitudes towards sexuality and the body expressed in the Meditations; then surveys the biographical tradition on Marcus Aurelius from the eighteenth century to the present, with its stress on MA's purity and saintliness. Part of an ongoing project on the reception of the Fronto/Marcus letters and their separation from the biographical tradition.
... "Anglo" women in England's former colonies have used the classics in a more co... more ... "Anglo" women in England's former colonies have used the classics in a more complicated way, to express an alienation ... 279 Page 16. implicit in the names Louie chooses for her main characters: Anteios and Megara. Louie explains to Sam that "there are two actors.. . ...
Rhetorical handbooks lay out what should happen-what is the ideal; exercises show what is being t... more Rhetorical handbooks lay out what should happen-what is the ideal; exercises show what is being taught. Possibly other sorts of texts might suggest what happened in actuality, among named individuals whose lives have left multiple traces: in particular, the letters of orators from Cicero to Sidonius Apollinaris. Here, I would argue, we can see the bumpy, un-ideal workings of male bonding in the Roman forum, in a culture where older men trained younger men, and lifelong friendships were formed-and enmities as well; where manhood was contested, a prize status, to be earned through rites of passage, initiations, testing, challenges; and where, at the end of the Republic, these contests escalated into violence and that violence turned deadly. It might be argued that it is only too easy to see how this model fits Rome. The country is the patria; the family is ruled by patria potestas; the paterfamilias has, in theory, the right of life and death over family members; the worst crime is parricide; Roman law is a male game, office holding is a male game, the army is a male game, and all of them are agonistic, structured as contests. Relations of power are figured, often, as relations between father and son, as in a letter from Caelius to Cicero from 51 b.c.e. (Fam. 8.8.9): Caelius is reporting a discussion in the senate in which someone asked Pompey, "What if Caesar wants to stay consul and keep his army?" And Pompey replies, Quid, si filius meus fustem mihi impingere volet? ("What if my son should wish to hit me over the head with a club?"). Everything here is a function of relationships between males: the male pen pals (though, we should note, typically so in Cicero's letter-books only because his letters from women were not included-no coincidence); the discussion in the senate; the renegade army commander; Pompey figuring himself as father, threatened by Caesar as undutiful son. Which is complicated by the fact that, a few years before this conversation took place, Pompey had been Caesar's son-in-law. Stories about the socialization of real young men into the world of the forum showcase a special kind of teaching in which elite men train their replacements; predictable tensions arise. It is certainly the case that Roman young men were introduced to the forum in a way their sisters were not. It is not that women were not educated; what Virginia Woolf called the "daughters of educated men" were about as educated as their brothers were. A few women are even on record as orators. 3 Cicero's friend Caerellia read (Cicero's) philosophical writings, although she had to scrounge them (Att. 13.21a.2), and his
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