Teaching Documents by Rebecca Futo Kennedy
A collection of syllabi (my own and those of others), links, and modules for teaching issues asso... more A collection of syllabi (my own and those of others), links, and modules for teaching issues associated with race and ethnicity in antiquity, including immigration and migration and classical and colonialism.
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An evolving bibliography
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Books by Rebecca Futo Kennedy
A new sourcebook for the study of women in ancient Greece and Rome, the volume will include a wid... more A new sourcebook for the study of women in ancient Greece and Rome, the volume will include a wide range of material not included in other such anthologies, inscriptions, papyri, and large, contextualized passages from the medical writers, historians, orators, novels, philosophy, poetry, letters, and drama. The material will be structured to allow maximum flexibility for instructors in building their syllabi. Price point is below $25.
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Table of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Author Biographies
... more Table of contents
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Author Biographies
Introduction: The Reception of Aeschylus
Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Part 1: Pre-Modern Receptions
1 The Reception of Aeschylus in Sicily
David G. Smith
2 The Comedians’ Aeschylus
David Rosenbloom
3 Aristotle’s Reception of Aeschylus: Reserved Without Malice
Dana Lacourse Munteanu
4 Aeschylus in the Hellenistic Period
Sebastiana Nervegna
5 Aeschylus in the Roman Empire
George W. M. Harrison
6 Aeschylus in Byzantium
Christos Simelidis
Part 2: Modern Receptions
7 Aeschylus and Opera
Michael Ewans
8 Aeschylus in Germany
Theodore Ziolkowski
9 Inglorious Barbarians: Court Intrigue and Military Disaster Strike Xerxes, “The Sick Man of Europe”
Gonda Van Steen
10 Transtextual Transformations of Prometheus Bound in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: Prometheus’ Gifts to Humankind
Fabien Desset
11 Aeschylus and Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley
Ana González-Rivas Fernández
12 An Aeschylean Waterloo: Responding to War from the Oresteia to Vanity Fair
Barbara Witucki
13 Form and Money in Wagner’s Ring and Aeschylean Tragedy
Richard Seaford
14 Eumenides and Newmenides: Academic Furies in Edwardian Cambridge
Patrick J. Murphy and Fredrick Porcheddu
15 The Broadhead Hypothesis: Did Aeschylus Perform Word Repetition in Persians?
Stratos E. Constantinidis
16 Persians On French Television: An Opera—Oratorio Echoing the Algerian War
Gabriel Sevilla
17 Aeschylus’ Oresteia on British Television
Amanda Wrigley
18 Orestes On Trial in Africa: Pasolini’s Appunti Per un’Orestiade Africana and Sissako’s Bamako
Tom Hawkins
19 Reception of the Plays of Aeschylus in Africa
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
20 In Search of Prometheus: Aeschylean Wanderings in Latin America
Jacques A. Bromberg
21 Avatars of Aeschylus: O’Neill to Herzog/Golder
Marianne McDonald
22 The Overlooked οἰκονομία of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
Geoffrey Bakewell
23 “Now Harkonnen Shall Kill Harkonnen”: Aeschylus, Dynastic Violence, and Twofold Tragedies in Frank Herbert’s Dune
Brett M. Rogers
24 “Save Our City”: The Curious Absence of Aeschylus in Modern Political Thought
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
25 Political Theory in Aeschylean Drama: Ancient Themes and their Contemporary Reception
Larissa Atkison and Ryan K. Balot
Index
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The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds explo... more The Routledge Handbook of Identity and the Environment in the Classical and Medieval Worlds explores the various ways in which environment was considered to define and shape ethnicity and identity, taking its cues from developments in early natural philosophers and historical ethnographies. Defining ‘environment’ broadly to include not only physical but cultural environments, natural and constructed, the volume includes contributions on a diverse range of topics that address the multifarious ways in which environment was understood to shape culture and physical characteristics of peoples as well as the ways in which the ancients manipulated their environments to achieve a desired identity. The volume includes studies not only of the Greco-Roman world, but also ancient China and the European, Jewish and Arab inheritors and transmitters of classical thought.
In recent years work in this area has been confined mostly to the discussion of texts that reflect an approach to the barbarian as ‘other’. This volume takes the discussion of ethnicity on a fresh course. The theories represented in this volume contextual the concept of the barbarian within rational discourses such as cartography, medicine, and mathematical sciences, an approach that allows us to better see the more varied and nuanced approaches to ethnic identity that abounded in antiquity. The innovative and thought-provoking material in this volume realise new directions of study for identity in the Classical and Medieval worlds.
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Table of Contents and Introduction Attached.
"This is a book about immigrant women in classica... more Table of Contents and Introduction Attached.
"This is a book about immigrant women in classical Athens. It may be somewhat misleading to refer to these women as immigrants. While some were recent immigrants to the city, others had been taken to Athens as slaves while still others were second or third generation residents. What they had in common, however, was that their legal status in Athens was “metic.” A metic was a ‘resident foreigner’ or ‘resident alien,’ a permanent non-Athenian who lived in Attica. Metics were defined in antiquity as those who needed to register with a city official and pay the metic tax (metoikion). This bare definition hardly captures the paradoxes and complexity of the lives of metic women or their various roles in and contributions to Classical Athenian society. Metic women play a role at almost every social and economic level of the polis. Despite their many contributions to the economic life of the city especially, metic women were extremely vulnerable in law and were often the subject of seemingly malicious slander and prosecution.
In his classic study of the legal and social status of metics in classical Athens, Whitehead claims that there were too few metic women to have any appreciable impact on Athenian ideas and allots only a few sentences to women in his monograph. Scholars interested in metics tend to dismiss the women as a non-influential and nearly invisible aspect of the community. And yet metic woman constitute the majority of women whose names are known from classical Athenian literary sources and they make up as well a significant portion of the individuals whose professions and lives are commemorated in inscriptions. Metic women were frequent targets of lawsuits and invective, more so than metic men, and they were targeted much in the same way that political enemies among citizens tended to be targeted, for sexual misbehavior. Scholars who focus on women in classical Athens have obscured the realities of metic women by assimilating them to prostitutes, following a troubling dichotomy that categorizes all women who do not fall under the penumbra of ‘citizen wife’ as prostitutes or ‘sexually exploitable’ women, the ‘not respectable.’ As a result, metic women have been almost exclusively discussed as sexual labor. Metic women lived lives outside of the discourse of prostitution. What were their lives like and why is it that so many of these women have been considered prostitutes? These are my concern. In order to understand better the lives and reputations of metic women, the reality of metic life needs to be distinguished from citizen ideologies or generalized attitudes towards women, foreigners, and certain types of labor in the classical polis. What was it about metic women that made them the targets of so many attacks by citizen men? Understanding the nature of these attacks is the first step to revealing the real lives of the women who suffered them. "
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"Athena is recognized as an allegory or representative of Athens in most Athenian public art exce... more "Athena is recognized as an allegory or representative of Athens in most Athenian public art except in tragedy. Perhaps this is because tragedy is rarely studied as a public art form or, perhaps, because her character is not static in tragedy. Although Athenas characterization changes to fit the needs of a particular drama, her clear connection with justice remains true throughout and suggests that she is always the representative of the city and its institutions. Athens, the city Athena protected, experienced a dramatic transformation in the fifth century: its political institutions, physical landscape, military power and international prestige underwent dynamic change. Athena, its goddess and its symbol, simultaneously transformed as well, although not always for the better.
Athenas Justice follows the question of civic identity and ideology in Athenian tragedy, focusing specifically on the link between tragedy and its influence upon identity creation and promotion during the period when Athens was asserting itself as an imperial power. Through examination of tragedies in which Athena appears, this book traces the process by which Athens came to identify itself with its legal system, symbolized by Athena on stage, and then suffered the corruption of that system by the exercise of imperial power. Athenas Justice is essential reading not just for classicists and ancient historians, but for anyone interested in the interaction between art and politics and the process by which human beings in any period seek to shape their identity as a people."
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Papers by Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Polarized Pasts: Heritage and Belonging in Times of Political Polarization, edited by E. Niklasson , 2023
One day, my stepson, a senior in high school, was watching clips of the Zack Snyder film 300. One... more One day, my stepson, a senior in high school, was watching clips of the Zack Snyder film 300. One clip showed an almost 8 ft-tall, mostly naked, bodypierced King Xerxes of Persia on a giant throne-platform being carried on the backs of enslaved peoples. When I asked him why he was watching the clips, he informed me that it was for a homework question for his AP World History 1 class. He was supposed to answer the question: 'What can the film 300 tell us about the armies of ancient Persia?' The correct answer, of course, is nothing. There were no armoured rhinos; the Immortals did not wear dramatic masks; and a giant Xerxes certainly did not lead his armies around the Mediterranean sporting a large number of body piercings and a bedazzled loincloth. I am an ancient historian who researches the varieties of cultures and peoples who lived and interacted in the ancient Mediterranean. I am also an ancient historian who was seriously irritated that a teacher would think it appropriate to use this film in this manner. It is bad enough that, as scholars have long recognized, the graphic novel by Frank Miller and the movie adaptation get ancient Persia wrong (Basu et al. 2007; Jenkins 2015). 2 Much worse is how the film has been embraced by fascist and neo-Nazi groups, and how it supports their polarizing view of the world. Over the last few decades, the public has primarily encountered the Greco-Roman Mediterranean through such popular culture representations. Whether through films, comics, graphic novels, memes, the inappropriately named History Channel or video games like 'Rome: Total Warfare or Assassins Creed: Odyssey', students enter the classroom with a knowledge of the past that relies on representations that are not shaped
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Authority: Ancient Models, Modern Questions edited by F. Santangelo and J. Bastos Marques , 2023
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Companion to Aeschylus, edited by Jacques Bromberg and Peter Burian, 2023
Aeschylus's Suppliants was first performed around 463 bce and tells of the arrival at Argos of a ... more Aeschylus's Suppliants was first performed around 463 bce and tells of the arrival at Argos of a group of refugees from Egypt (the Danaids, daughters of Danaos) who are fleeing marriages with their cousins, the sons of Aegyptus. They claim refuge on the basis of having been descended from an Argive woman named Io. The play enacts them persuading the king and people of Argos that they are "Greek enough" to be admitted to the city. Central to the play are the differences of the Danaids, who are marked physically as black-skinned and of foreign dress but who are able to gain Greek status through their performance of shared cultural rituals. In March of 2019, a student production of Aeschylus's Suppliants at the Sorbonne in France was closed due to protests over the perceived racism of the costuming (Carpentier 2019). In the climate of a major refugee crisis, this play likely seemed timely. The issue raised by the French staging, however, involved the performers painting their bodies with dark skin paint (something often assumed to have been done in ancient productions), which protesters labelled "blackface", a practice with a long racist history in the United States and a colonialist one in France and other parts of Europe. In a statement, the protestors highlighted the racist history of "blackface" (CRAN 2019), but the performance had defenders. The Sorbonne officially defended it, calling racist associations with blackface an "American problem" (Ministry of Culture, France 2019). Classicists defended the staging, citing Vernant and the tradition of "playing the Other" (Noel 2019), a discourse with its own colonial connotations. Underlying these defences was the assumption that Aeschylus's Suppliants was empathetic to and created sympathy for refugees and immigrants. This assumption supposedly meant, therefore, that the play could not be used for racist ends. The protestors, however, did view this performance as potentially reflecting xenophobia. Was it only the use of "blackface"? Or was it something more? The dispute over the play's staging raised the question of whether this play could be performed without being perceived as racist in postcolonial Europe. This question angered some, especially given previous productions. Ingred Rowland, writing for the New York Review of Books in 2015, emphasised the welcoming and pro-refugee potential of Suppliants, discussing Moni Ovadia's productions in Sicily in the summer of 2015. Rowland opens her essay with the following:
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The Classical Outlook Volume 97, Number 1
I feel it is best to begin with recognition that some readers are currently living in states that... more I feel it is best to begin with recognition that some readers are currently living in states that already have or are in the process of passing legislation that will restrict teaching of subjects related to "race" and its history under the misguided notions that 1. any discussion of "race" and its history = Critical Race Theory, 2. Critical Race Theory is widely taught in schools below the university level, 3. Critical Race Theory is some sort of anti-white ideology, and 4. if we continue to ignore the history of race, then racism will go away. Under these conditions, it is important to address some of the misconceptions about what it means to teach race and ethnicity and how looking at their manifestations in antiquity can actually help students and teachers alike break out of the white supremacist ideologies that are behind this attempt to block teaching about race and its history in our public schools and universities. 1
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Oxford Classical Dictionary Online, 2018
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Ramus, 2013
The frequent assumption that they [the Persians] were as greatly concerned on these levels [histo... more The frequent assumption that they [the Persians] were as greatly concerned on these levels [historically, culturally, strategically] with Greece [as they were with the east] is a misconception which stems from our own western view of the world and from the unfortunate fact that Greece has given us our main literary sources of information on the Achaemenids. It was the Greeks who were fascinated by Persia, by Persian mores, and, yes, by Persian court art and luxury goods—not the reverse. If only the Persians had spawned the likes of Aeschylus and Herodotus, our perceptions of their preoccupations would be quite different.Athenians were indeed fascinated by Persia as their art and literature attest. The fascination was both cultural and political, but not without tensions. Part of that fascination manifested itself in the allure of Persian kings and what they represented. The kings ruled over a vast empire, larger than any the Mediterranean world had yet seen. They sought in their ico...
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Polis, The Journal for Ancient Greek Political Thought, 2015
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Helios, 2015
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Classical Antiquity, 2006
This paper argues that Aeschylus' Eumenides presents a coherent geography that, when associat... more This paper argues that Aeschylus' Eumenides presents a coherent geography that, when associated with the play's judicial proceedings, forms the basis of an imperial ideology. The geography of Eumenides constitutes a form of mapping, and mapping is associated with imperial power. The significance of this mapping becomes clear when linked to fifth-century Athens' growing judicial imperialism. The creation of the court inEumenides, in the view of most scholars, refers only to Ephialtes' reforms of 462 BC. But in the larger context, Athenian courts in the mid-fifth century are a form of imperial control. When geographically specific jurisdiction combines with new courts, it supports and even creates a developing imperial ideology. Moreover, the figure of Athena and the role she gives the Athenian jury emphasizes a passionate pro-Athenian nationalism, a nationalism that the text connects to Athens' geographic and judicial superiority. This imperial ideology did not sp...
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Screening Love and War in Troy: Fall of a City, 2022
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Uploads
Teaching Documents by Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Books by Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Author Biographies
Introduction: The Reception of Aeschylus
Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Part 1: Pre-Modern Receptions
1 The Reception of Aeschylus in Sicily
David G. Smith
2 The Comedians’ Aeschylus
David Rosenbloom
3 Aristotle’s Reception of Aeschylus: Reserved Without Malice
Dana Lacourse Munteanu
4 Aeschylus in the Hellenistic Period
Sebastiana Nervegna
5 Aeschylus in the Roman Empire
George W. M. Harrison
6 Aeschylus in Byzantium
Christos Simelidis
Part 2: Modern Receptions
7 Aeschylus and Opera
Michael Ewans
8 Aeschylus in Germany
Theodore Ziolkowski
9 Inglorious Barbarians: Court Intrigue and Military Disaster Strike Xerxes, “The Sick Man of Europe”
Gonda Van Steen
10 Transtextual Transformations of Prometheus Bound in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: Prometheus’ Gifts to Humankind
Fabien Desset
11 Aeschylus and Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley
Ana González-Rivas Fernández
12 An Aeschylean Waterloo: Responding to War from the Oresteia to Vanity Fair
Barbara Witucki
13 Form and Money in Wagner’s Ring and Aeschylean Tragedy
Richard Seaford
14 Eumenides and Newmenides: Academic Furies in Edwardian Cambridge
Patrick J. Murphy and Fredrick Porcheddu
15 The Broadhead Hypothesis: Did Aeschylus Perform Word Repetition in Persians?
Stratos E. Constantinidis
16 Persians On French Television: An Opera—Oratorio Echoing the Algerian War
Gabriel Sevilla
17 Aeschylus’ Oresteia on British Television
Amanda Wrigley
18 Orestes On Trial in Africa: Pasolini’s Appunti Per un’Orestiade Africana and Sissako’s Bamako
Tom Hawkins
19 Reception of the Plays of Aeschylus in Africa
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
20 In Search of Prometheus: Aeschylean Wanderings in Latin America
Jacques A. Bromberg
21 Avatars of Aeschylus: O’Neill to Herzog/Golder
Marianne McDonald
22 The Overlooked οἰκονομία of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
Geoffrey Bakewell
23 “Now Harkonnen Shall Kill Harkonnen”: Aeschylus, Dynastic Violence, and Twofold Tragedies in Frank Herbert’s Dune
Brett M. Rogers
24 “Save Our City”: The Curious Absence of Aeschylus in Modern Political Thought
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
25 Political Theory in Aeschylean Drama: Ancient Themes and their Contemporary Reception
Larissa Atkison and Ryan K. Balot
Index
In recent years work in this area has been confined mostly to the discussion of texts that reflect an approach to the barbarian as ‘other’. This volume takes the discussion of ethnicity on a fresh course. The theories represented in this volume contextual the concept of the barbarian within rational discourses such as cartography, medicine, and mathematical sciences, an approach that allows us to better see the more varied and nuanced approaches to ethnic identity that abounded in antiquity. The innovative and thought-provoking material in this volume realise new directions of study for identity in the Classical and Medieval worlds.
"This is a book about immigrant women in classical Athens. It may be somewhat misleading to refer to these women as immigrants. While some were recent immigrants to the city, others had been taken to Athens as slaves while still others were second or third generation residents. What they had in common, however, was that their legal status in Athens was “metic.” A metic was a ‘resident foreigner’ or ‘resident alien,’ a permanent non-Athenian who lived in Attica. Metics were defined in antiquity as those who needed to register with a city official and pay the metic tax (metoikion). This bare definition hardly captures the paradoxes and complexity of the lives of metic women or their various roles in and contributions to Classical Athenian society. Metic women play a role at almost every social and economic level of the polis. Despite their many contributions to the economic life of the city especially, metic women were extremely vulnerable in law and were often the subject of seemingly malicious slander and prosecution.
In his classic study of the legal and social status of metics in classical Athens, Whitehead claims that there were too few metic women to have any appreciable impact on Athenian ideas and allots only a few sentences to women in his monograph. Scholars interested in metics tend to dismiss the women as a non-influential and nearly invisible aspect of the community. And yet metic woman constitute the majority of women whose names are known from classical Athenian literary sources and they make up as well a significant portion of the individuals whose professions and lives are commemorated in inscriptions. Metic women were frequent targets of lawsuits and invective, more so than metic men, and they were targeted much in the same way that political enemies among citizens tended to be targeted, for sexual misbehavior. Scholars who focus on women in classical Athens have obscured the realities of metic women by assimilating them to prostitutes, following a troubling dichotomy that categorizes all women who do not fall under the penumbra of ‘citizen wife’ as prostitutes or ‘sexually exploitable’ women, the ‘not respectable.’ As a result, metic women have been almost exclusively discussed as sexual labor. Metic women lived lives outside of the discourse of prostitution. What were their lives like and why is it that so many of these women have been considered prostitutes? These are my concern. In order to understand better the lives and reputations of metic women, the reality of metic life needs to be distinguished from citizen ideologies or generalized attitudes towards women, foreigners, and certain types of labor in the classical polis. What was it about metic women that made them the targets of so many attacks by citizen men? Understanding the nature of these attacks is the first step to revealing the real lives of the women who suffered them. "
Athenas Justice follows the question of civic identity and ideology in Athenian tragedy, focusing specifically on the link between tragedy and its influence upon identity creation and promotion during the period when Athens was asserting itself as an imperial power. Through examination of tragedies in which Athena appears, this book traces the process by which Athens came to identify itself with its legal system, symbolized by Athena on stage, and then suffered the corruption of that system by the exercise of imperial power. Athenas Justice is essential reading not just for classicists and ancient historians, but for anyone interested in the interaction between art and politics and the process by which human beings in any period seek to shape their identity as a people."
Papers by Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Acknowledgements
List of Figures
List of Abbreviations
Author Biographies
Introduction: The Reception of Aeschylus
Rebecca Futo Kennedy
Part 1: Pre-Modern Receptions
1 The Reception of Aeschylus in Sicily
David G. Smith
2 The Comedians’ Aeschylus
David Rosenbloom
3 Aristotle’s Reception of Aeschylus: Reserved Without Malice
Dana Lacourse Munteanu
4 Aeschylus in the Hellenistic Period
Sebastiana Nervegna
5 Aeschylus in the Roman Empire
George W. M. Harrison
6 Aeschylus in Byzantium
Christos Simelidis
Part 2: Modern Receptions
7 Aeschylus and Opera
Michael Ewans
8 Aeschylus in Germany
Theodore Ziolkowski
9 Inglorious Barbarians: Court Intrigue and Military Disaster Strike Xerxes, “The Sick Man of Europe”
Gonda Van Steen
10 Transtextual Transformations of Prometheus Bound in Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound: Prometheus’ Gifts to Humankind
Fabien Desset
11 Aeschylus and Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley
Ana González-Rivas Fernández
12 An Aeschylean Waterloo: Responding to War from the Oresteia to Vanity Fair
Barbara Witucki
13 Form and Money in Wagner’s Ring and Aeschylean Tragedy
Richard Seaford
14 Eumenides and Newmenides: Academic Furies in Edwardian Cambridge
Patrick J. Murphy and Fredrick Porcheddu
15 The Broadhead Hypothesis: Did Aeschylus Perform Word Repetition in Persians?
Stratos E. Constantinidis
16 Persians On French Television: An Opera—Oratorio Echoing the Algerian War
Gabriel Sevilla
17 Aeschylus’ Oresteia on British Television
Amanda Wrigley
18 Orestes On Trial in Africa: Pasolini’s Appunti Per un’Orestiade Africana and Sissako’s Bamako
Tom Hawkins
19 Reception of the Plays of Aeschylus in Africa
Kevin J. Wetmore, Jr.
20 In Search of Prometheus: Aeschylean Wanderings in Latin America
Jacques A. Bromberg
21 Avatars of Aeschylus: O’Neill to Herzog/Golder
Marianne McDonald
22 The Overlooked οἰκονομία of Aeschylus’ Agamemnon and Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining
Geoffrey Bakewell
23 “Now Harkonnen Shall Kill Harkonnen”: Aeschylus, Dynastic Violence, and Twofold Tragedies in Frank Herbert’s Dune
Brett M. Rogers
24 “Save Our City”: The Curious Absence of Aeschylus in Modern Political Thought
Arlene W. Saxonhouse
25 Political Theory in Aeschylean Drama: Ancient Themes and their Contemporary Reception
Larissa Atkison and Ryan K. Balot
Index
In recent years work in this area has been confined mostly to the discussion of texts that reflect an approach to the barbarian as ‘other’. This volume takes the discussion of ethnicity on a fresh course. The theories represented in this volume contextual the concept of the barbarian within rational discourses such as cartography, medicine, and mathematical sciences, an approach that allows us to better see the more varied and nuanced approaches to ethnic identity that abounded in antiquity. The innovative and thought-provoking material in this volume realise new directions of study for identity in the Classical and Medieval worlds.
"This is a book about immigrant women in classical Athens. It may be somewhat misleading to refer to these women as immigrants. While some were recent immigrants to the city, others had been taken to Athens as slaves while still others were second or third generation residents. What they had in common, however, was that their legal status in Athens was “metic.” A metic was a ‘resident foreigner’ or ‘resident alien,’ a permanent non-Athenian who lived in Attica. Metics were defined in antiquity as those who needed to register with a city official and pay the metic tax (metoikion). This bare definition hardly captures the paradoxes and complexity of the lives of metic women or their various roles in and contributions to Classical Athenian society. Metic women play a role at almost every social and economic level of the polis. Despite their many contributions to the economic life of the city especially, metic women were extremely vulnerable in law and were often the subject of seemingly malicious slander and prosecution.
In his classic study of the legal and social status of metics in classical Athens, Whitehead claims that there were too few metic women to have any appreciable impact on Athenian ideas and allots only a few sentences to women in his monograph. Scholars interested in metics tend to dismiss the women as a non-influential and nearly invisible aspect of the community. And yet metic woman constitute the majority of women whose names are known from classical Athenian literary sources and they make up as well a significant portion of the individuals whose professions and lives are commemorated in inscriptions. Metic women were frequent targets of lawsuits and invective, more so than metic men, and they were targeted much in the same way that political enemies among citizens tended to be targeted, for sexual misbehavior. Scholars who focus on women in classical Athens have obscured the realities of metic women by assimilating them to prostitutes, following a troubling dichotomy that categorizes all women who do not fall under the penumbra of ‘citizen wife’ as prostitutes or ‘sexually exploitable’ women, the ‘not respectable.’ As a result, metic women have been almost exclusively discussed as sexual labor. Metic women lived lives outside of the discourse of prostitution. What were their lives like and why is it that so many of these women have been considered prostitutes? These are my concern. In order to understand better the lives and reputations of metic women, the reality of metic life needs to be distinguished from citizen ideologies or generalized attitudes towards women, foreigners, and certain types of labor in the classical polis. What was it about metic women that made them the targets of so many attacks by citizen men? Understanding the nature of these attacks is the first step to revealing the real lives of the women who suffered them. "
Athenas Justice follows the question of civic identity and ideology in Athenian tragedy, focusing specifically on the link between tragedy and its influence upon identity creation and promotion during the period when Athens was asserting itself as an imperial power. Through examination of tragedies in which Athena appears, this book traces the process by which Athens came to identify itself with its legal system, symbolized by Athena on stage, and then suffered the corruption of that system by the exercise of imperial power. Athenas Justice is essential reading not just for classicists and ancient historians, but for anyone interested in the interaction between art and politics and the process by which human beings in any period seek to shape their identity as a people."
Papers:
1. Autochthony, Environmental Determinism and the Discourse of Displacement in Greek Geographical and Ethnic Thought. Philip Kaplan (University of North Florida)
2. Ethnicity as the Basis for Greek Geographical Thought. Duane W. Roller (The Ohio State University)
3. Ethnography and the Ecology of Health. Clara Bosak-Schroeder (University of Michigan)
4. Barbarous Peacocks and Hellenized Elephants: Geography and Identity in Aelian's History of Animals. Jared Secord (The University of Chicago)
5. Hot Climates Make Cowardly Soldiers: On Vegetius' De Re Militaris. Georgia L. Irby (The College of William and Mary)
6. Blood to the Shade: The Fabrication of Late Roman Identity through the Architecture of the Word in Procopius's Peri Ktismaton. Brian Duvick (University of Colorado)
Full abstract at: http://apaclassics.org/index.php/annual_meeting/abstracts/2011_annual_meeting_abstracts