The ancient society of Athens generated forms of democracy, theatre, and philosophy; it also put slaves in chains and free women behind doors. The Roman empire brought the world aqueducts, underwater concrete and the alphabet you’re reading right now; Rome, too, sat on a foundation of social inequality.
In this course we study the literature of ancient Greece and Rome to understand how sex, gender and sexuality interconnected with power in the ancient world. Literature played a key role in societies in antiquity just as it does now, in shaping minds, ideas and public debate about social problems and morality. Some writers, singers, playwrights, and poets of Greece and Rome used their writing to reinforce dominant ideologies about women’s weaknesses/roles and the corresponding rights of men. Other writers challenged mainstream ideas and questioned the existing power imbalances between men and women, free people and slaves, citizens and foreigners.
The texts in the course deal with war, justice, love, religion, murder, marriage, same-sex desire, slavery, and more. We will pay particular attention to how literature enables political and social interventions; how it can either uphold, shape, or challenge the status quo. We will examine the depiction of gender and sexuality across a wide range of genres (e.g. epic and tragedy). We will consider how the constraints of genre shape what authors can say about a topic and what tools they can use to say it. We will read literature by both men and women and discuss the possible historical and literary values in gynocriticism (the study of women writers). And we will contextualise the study of women, gender, and sexuality in antiquity in the changing world of the academy, exploring how this field went from being marginal to accepted within our discipline(s).
As well as developing their understanding of the ancient world, students will consider how sex and/or power remain relevant to today’s world and their experiences now.
All texts will be read in translation.