Quiz 1 Study Guide

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Readings — All via Bb PDFs

• LEFKOWITZ "Women's Voices," pp. 1-15
• PAUL-ZINSERLING "Classical Period: Women of Athens," all. Notes:
  • That funeral oration quote at the beginning of the chapter has to do with the first year of the Peloponnesian War, not the Samian War of several years earlier
  • When Paul-Zinzerling says "Attic," what she means is "Athenian"

These readings will provide us with evidence of women's lives, and of their lives interpreted through the lens of female and male sensibility. They also help reconstruct the social history of women in archaic, classical, and Hellenistic Greece and Athens (ca. 650-250 BCE).

As you read you will doubtless have questions: record them and bring to class. You should not expect everything to be self-evident on first encounter; rather, that first encounter will provide a starting point for understanding and questioning.

Journal Entries

I invite you to respond freely to these texts. That can include some really good questions for the class.

Preliminary Notes

The Paul-Zinserling reading provides important and useful background for the literary and artistic evidence we'll be looking at during this phase of the course, especially for Athens during the period 500-300 BCE. By contrast, the poems and passages from poems, most (not all) of it by women, in Lefkowitz are much more difficult to work with. You'll want to read Lefkowitz's preferatory remarks along with discussion just below on this page. But not all of that will help a great deal. Sappho and others are folks we just don't know a great deal about. I'd really like you to offer us your own thoughts!

Primary Sources: Authors, etc. Questions

Sappho. 500s BCE, aristocratic poet, wife, mother living on the Aegean island of Lesbos. Wrote much poetry, much (not all!) homoerotic in character.

QUESTION: Is desire in Sappho inflected differently from that in evidence in our male authors so far? Can desire be "gendered" in ancient Greece?

Corinna. 400s BCE (??). Poet, woman. We know very little about her.

Praxilla. 400s BCE. Poet, woman. Ditto.

QUESTION: Is fragment 747 actually silly?

Erinna. 300s BCE. Ditto.

Anyte, Nossis. Both poets, both women living-working 200s BCE. Wrote EPIGRAMS, brief poems, pithy in thought and often elegiac or witty in mood. Epigrams often were — or imitated — grave inscriptions.

General Issues

• Literature as evidence What do you pick up from the primary-text readings (in Hubbard and Lefkowitz) as regards the lives of real women? What do you pick up as regards attitudes, whether male-held, female-held, or generally held? Are we dealing with realistic snapshots or with ideologically fraught representations? (Some of the readings represent authentic women's voices; some, men poets writing in a woman's voice)
• The "asymmetry hypothesis" Basically, Foucault's theory of ancient Greek sexuality and gender. Where do you/don't you see evidence supporting/contradicting the "asymmetry hypothesis"? This views various social, sexual, political etc. relationships as analogously structured along such lines as:
  • male~female (sex)
  • masculine~feminine (gender)
  • dominator~dominated
  • penetrator~penetrated
  • active~passive
  • desiring subject~desired object
  • senior~junior
  • free~slave
  • citizen~non-citizen
  And so on. Since the sources we'll be reading have to do with women, we perhaps should not expect to see too much of this male-female modeled asymmetry going on, especially when dealing with women's love for women. (It will, though, figure in men's love for men.) Still, one can validly ask whether women writing on eros (passionate love) write differently from men writing on same, especially when we seem to have both a woman and a man (Sappho and Alcman) doing so. More generally, does the above "get" ancient Greek/Athenian/Roman sexuality and gender? Is it too reductive? Does it cover the necessary ground or leave out anything important?
• Reciprocity What sorts of reciprocity (give and take, sexual and otherwise) do you detect, and in what sorts of contexts? Is there evidence for symmetrical reciprocity in contrast to the asymmetry just described?