Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture

Differential Equations

Sandra R. Joshel, Sheila Murnaghan

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781134716760
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Ancient History
• Index: History

Women and Slaves in Classical Culture examines how ancient societies were organized around slave-holding and the subordination of women to reveal how women and slaves interacted with one another in both the cultural representations and the social realities of the Greco-Roman world.
The contributors explore a broad range of evidence including:
* the mythical constructions of epic and drama
* the love poems of Ovid
* the Greek medical writers
* Augustine's autobiography
* a haunting account of an unnamed Roman slave
* the archaeological remains of a slave mining camp near Athens.
They argue that the distinctions between male and female and servile and free were inextricably connected.
This erudite and well-documented book provokes questions about how we can hope to recapture the experience and subjectivity of ancient women and slaves and addresses the ways in which femaleness and servility interacted with other forms of difference, such as class, gender and status. Women and Slaves in Classical Culture offers a stimulating and frequently controversial insight into the complexities of gender and status in the Greco-Roman world.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Notes on contributors
• 1 Introduction: Differential equations
• 2 Female slaves in the Odyssey
• 3 “I, whom she detested so bitterly”: Slavery and the violent division of women in Aeschylus’ Oresteia
• 4 Slaves with slaves: Women and class in Euripidean tragedy
• 5 Women and slaves as Hippocratic patients
• 6 Symbols of gender and status hierarchies in the Roman household
• 7 Villains, wives, and slaves in the comedies of Plautus
• 8 Women, slaves and the hierarchies of domestic violence: The family of St Augustine
• 9 Mastering corruption: constructions of identity in Roman oratory
• 10 Loyal slaves and loyal wives: The crisis of the outsider-within and Roman exemplum literature
• 11 Servitium amoris: Amor servitii
• 12 Remaining invisible: The archaeology of the excluded in Classical Athens
• 13 Cracking the code of silence: Athenian legal oratory and the histories of slaves and women
• 14 Notes on a membrum disiectum
• Bibliography
• Index