CLST 295 / WSGS 295: Women in the Classical World Fall Semester 2011 Dr. Jacqueline Long

Study Questions

Questions about upcoming readings generally flag text I expect will be important in class discussions. Questions referring back to class discussions tries to pick up threads from important issues I expect us to be discussing. But the questions do not merely summarize our discussions (summary is a worthwhile, but different, kind of studying), nor do they necessarily forecast exam questions very closely. Rather, they invite you to develop interesting lines of thought. One thing exams will ask you to do is to discuss specific ideas about Classical Greek and Roman women in terms of concrete evidence in our course material. Therefore you will find it useful, as you think about even very wide-ranging questions, to identify specific pieces of evidence in the material we are covering that help demonstrate your observations and prove your insights, and to be able to explain clearly just how those pieces of evidence validate the conclusions you draw.

file in progress - perennially

The study questions in this file will be updated through the course of the semester from study questions used the last time this course was taught, when it made a slightly different arrangement of the material. Dates and emphases will be updated to fit the current class. Not that the old questions aren't still worth thinking about, just that you should double-check again later.

Wednesday 12 October

From today's class:

• What conventional social values relating to women and marriage, including usually-derogatory stereotypes, does Aristophanes make use of in Lysistrata?
  • How do (some of?) these ideas help make Aristophanes' comic fantasy plausible? How do (some of?) these ideas help make Aristophanes' comic fantasy absurd and therefore funny? Where and how do the two sets of ideas overlap?
  • How does Aristophanes make conventional ideas about women serve Lysistrata's plan and the commentary this play makes about the Peloponnesian War?
  • How do these ideas serve the broader agenda typically addressed by Athenian Old Comedy?
• What stake does Lysistrata affirm women have in the war? What stakes does Lysistrata affirm women have in the Athenian city-state?

• What expectations does the speaker of On the Murder of Eratosthenes indicate he brought to his marriage? What facts changed his prior expectations, over the history of the tale he tells? When he cites laws, how do they relate to his own status as the defendant of a murder-trial?
• What challenges does Euphiletos face in arguing that his killing his wife's lover did not amount technically to murder? What expectations and social attitudes relating to women does he invoke in order to help present his own character in a favorable light? What use does he make of laws relevant to his case - and how does he twist his interpretation of these laws from the significance the legislators presumably intended?
• What is Neaera's past profession alleged to have entailed?
  • What information does the speech give us about the profession of prostitution?
  • Why is this account of Neaera's past being aired in court now? What relevance does it have to the case against Stephanus, the real defendant?
• What information about Athenian social attitudes does the speech report in connection with Lysias's desire to have Metaneira initiated in the Eleusinian mysteries? Why does he go about it the way he does?
• Trace Phano's marital history: what problems do her marriages create? What about her makes them problems? Who is concerned in the problems? Why?

Friday 14 October

From today's class:

• What concerns about women's sexual activity did enough Athenians identify as potentially causing substantial problems for the civic body of Athens, that they enacted laws so as to help regulate women's sexual activity? N.b.: the question includes not only laws saying "women must not do [whatever]," but also laws that immediately address somebody else's activity in which women's sexual activity is involved secondarily - what other people's activities did they connect to women's sexual activity?
• In addition to legal sanctions connected with women's sexual activity, what looser social attitudes and practices at Athens do these court-cases show surrounded women's sexual activity in classical Athens?
• What interest does the speaker of Against Neaera claim Athenian women will take in the case? What does his claim show about Athenian women's sense of connection with the Athenian state?
• What Athenian male anxieties about women and their sexual activity does the speaker of Against Neaera call on at the conclusion of the speech in order to motivate the jurors to protect their own interests by condemning Stephanus? Given that these doomsday scenarios are exaggerated, why would they have seemed worth making?

• What attitudes, values, and methods of inquiry does Xenophon attribute to Socrates, as he writes about him? What sort of a figure is this literary creation, Xenophon's Socrates, as a lens through which to re-evaluate Athenian attitudes towards women (and other topics)?
• What base-line attitudes, before Socrates' interventions, are exhibited by the men with whom Socrates converses in Xenophon's works in which Socrates figures as a character? What do they do with women? What do they expect women to do? What changes do their conversations with Socrates propose they make? What reasons does Xenophon's text give to justify these hypothetical changes?

Monday 17 October

• How does Xenophon use Socrates, in his dialogues, as a figure to de-familiarize and re-examine Athenian social values? What typical Athenian assumptions can you see functioning in the selections of dialogues we have read? (Identify where concepts relating to these assumptions appear in the dialogues - directly or indirectly; and what evidence -in the dialogue and elsewhere in our study-material- lets you know they are typical assumptions for Classical Athens.) Which ones does Xenophon's Socrates acknowledge? Which does he ignore? What reasoning seems to inform his choices? Note particularly:
  • assumptions about gender and class in item 236
  • assumptions about gender and marital relations in item 303
• In item 267, where Xenophon's Socrates is channeling other characters as authorities, what claims for male and female capacities are asserted by Ischomachus? In what ways does he suppose men and women are similar? In what ways does he claim they are "naturally" different? How do these essentialized characteristics correlate with the jobs he assigns each sex in the household? Compare and contrast both his assumptions and the conclusions he draws to other evidence for Athenian views on gender and households, and to evidence for other Greek views on gender and households.
• What interest does Ischomachus assert husband and wife each have in the marital household? How does he say each should act so as to support her or his interest?
• How does Ischomachus suggest power can be distributed within the relationship of husband and wife? What is to be the basis of this distribution?
• How does Ischomachus assess women's material contributions to the household and its prosperity? Compare and contrast to other evidence for Athenian views and for other Greek views on women and the economy of the home.

• What attitudes, values, and methods of inquiry does Plato attribute to Socrates, as he writes about him? What sort of a figure is this literary creation, Plato's Socrates, as a lens through which to re-evaluate Athenian attitudes towards women (and other topics)?
• What sorts of thing is Plato's Socrates willing to consider as a basis for making inferences he can apply to the question of women and their abilities? What presumptions are built in to the starting-points he takes for his reasoning?
• What information does item 216 record about Plato's relationships with women who took an interest in his philosophical ideas?
• What sorts of thing is Aristotle (item 72) willing to consider as a basis for making inferences he can apply to the question of women and their abilities? What presumptions are built in to the starting-points he takes for his reasoning?
• Compare and contrast the conclusions Plato and Aristotle draw about women and their abilities.

Wednesday 19 October

• Compare and contrast, with Xenophon, especially in the Oeconomicus (item 267), with one another, and with the knowledge you have formed about how Athenians typically understood male and female capacity (identify specific sources and be aware of what you are doing to interpret those sources), how Plato and Aristotle each thought the irreducible biological difference between the male and female sexes extends to men's and women's other capabilities.
  • What does each source identify as different between women and men? What does each source identify as the same? Does the source qualify the difference or the sameness in any way?
  • On what evidence, and with what reasoning, does the source derive the understanding of men and women that it presents? Consider both what evidence and what reasoning the source explicitly acknowledges using, and what evidence and what reasoning are needed to arrive at the views the source reports, but which the source doesn't explicitly acknowledge using - note which parts of the source's derivation are acknowledged and which are not.
  • How does the source apply its understanding of differences and commonalities between the sexes: what consequences does the source suggest are entailed by the understanding of sex and gender it presents? Again, distinguish and consider both what the source says explicitly and what it sets up but does not contemplate consciously.

• In what ways were the social position and life experience of Hellenistic queens (Berenice II and Cleopatra VII for examples) shaped by the political position of the men in their lives? How much were they influenced by ideologies that applied to women more generally in the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world?
• Sort the primary-source evidence supplied by WCW and our selections in L&F into categories: about what spheres of women's lives do we have evidence from the Hellenistic world?
• How much did ideologies of women's lives shift from the Classical to the Hellenistic period? How did political changes relate to these social changes? Support your arguments from legal documents of "ordinary women" as well as from literature relating to queens and elite women.

Friday 21 October

• What is meant by saying "the Hellenistic period"? What trends of this time, in the society that called itself "Greek" in some sense, did the most to change these people's cultural experience from what they would have had in the Classical period? Think especially about parameters of gender, class, and ethnicity.
• How did royalty, as an institution of political power, change the scope of "public" and "private" life, at least for members of the royal family?
  • Special case: What did the Ptolemies do for themselves as rulers in Egypt, by adopting earlier Egyptian kings' practice of sibling marriage? Think both of the purposes at which they aimed and of wider consequences.
• How did Eurydice make her acquisition of literacy (L&F # 213) into a public statement? What cultural values did she appropriate to her own purposes?
• How did what happened to the "Lock of Berenice" (astrologically, poetically, and religiously and societally) manipulate cultural values to political and social ends? What changes in the social position of women does this cultural artifact reflect?

• Continue tracing the variety our evidence attests in women's experience of the Hellenistic world. What continuities can you identify with women's experience of the Classical world? What changes appear?
• How did women poets of the Hellenistic period reflect upon their lives? What qualities and experiences did they emphasize? Compare and contrast to poetic representations of women from other periods.
• How was consciousness of the female body reflected in the enterprises and artifacts of the Hellenistic world?

Monday 24 October

• Identify trends and be able to discuss specific illustrations, of how the changed social circumstances of the Hellenistic world stand reflected in changed interests and emphases of artistic representations within the Hellenistic world, by comparison with Classical society and art - especially as artistic representations touched on women and women's concerns. (Consider both visual/material and verbal art.)
• How did Anyte and Nossis in their epigrams develop themes and concerns associated with epigram in earlier periods? (It may be useful to sort out different themes that cluster together within individual examples of the literary form, epigram: civic, dedicatory, funerary, ecphrastic, etc.) How do their Anyte's and Nossis's works relate to aesthetic developments of the Hellenistic period, more generally? How do their works make declarations for female voices, increasingly publicly in the Hellenistic world?
• What evidence do we have, in Anyte's and Nossis's poems and elsewhere, that helps reconstruct the social environment in which they composed and presented their poems?
• What was Cynicism, as an intellectual movement, and how did Hipparchia appropriate its doctrines? What gender-values did she associate with her Cynicism? What values of traditional Greek society and culture did she reject?

• What concerns of women are focused on in these examples of Alexandrian poetry written by men? How does literature enter a (formerly?) "private space" of women?
• How do the women in these poems relate to one another? to their children? to their slaves? to divinities? What are their positions in their social nexuses?
• What points of comparison can you identify between these images of women and texts we have read representing the Archaic or Classical periods? Are these women's lives, as pictured, very similar or very different from possibilities available to women elsewhere or formerly?

Wednesday 26 October

• What indications do these examples of male-authored poetry give about the parameters of women's lives in third-century Alexandria, when their husbands were not at home? According to what the poets envisage, whom did the women see? Where did they go? What did they do? What did they worry about? How do these texts suggest women experienced their partnership in the home (both economic and parental), the big, busy cosmopolis, commerce, slave-owning, the supernatural - and not-so-supernatural experiences connected with worship, aesthetic pleasure (where did they look for beauty or cultural knowledge, for starters)?
• What objectives do the poets who presented these scenes to their readers seem to have been pursuing? What interests in women's experience do these texts represent? How does the development of these interests correlate with other artistic developments of the Hellenistic world?

• On what fields of experience did ancient Greek medical texts draw as a basis for their thinking about women? Did the relationship of experience to understanding change over time?
• What conceptions about women, beyond practical experience of women and concerns about women's health, informed ancient Greek medical thinking about women? Did trends and understandings shift over time? Compare and contrast with other material we have considered.

Friday 28 October

• If a woman in the ancient Greek or Roman world experienced concerns about her health, what resources would have been available to her? Where did the doctors who wrote medical treatises fit in to the network of practices and understandings about women's being and physical and mental health?
• What real-life observations of women's bodies do the authors of the Hippocratic corpus seem to be using as the basis for their ideas about women's physical being? What concepts governed the way these writers interpreted their observations, in order to develop their theories? Be able to explain concretely what was entailed by Hippocratic theories about the differences between female flesh and male flesh, conception, and menstruation and other activities of the womb.
• What real-life observations -about women and about what else?- did Arisotle use as the basis for his ideas about women's physical being? What concepts governed the way he interpreted his observations, in order to develop his theories? Be able to explain concretely what was entailed by Aristotelian theories about "vital heat" and "concoction", and the consequences these principles entailed for conception and menstruation.
• Be able to explain briefly how Hierophilus, Soranus, Aretaeus, and Galen each built on Hippocratic or Aristotelian elements as they developed their ideas about women's bodies, health, disease, and reproductive functioning. What new information, new interpretations, or new applications of their understandings did these medical writers make?
• Speculative question: how do ideas about what a woman is, physically, relate to ideas about who she can be, as a person?

Review your reading, your notes, the Study Questions in this file and the other file, the Study Guide for Exam 2, and in short all material assigned to date since Exam 1, for Exam 2 on Monday.

• What are major concerns we have been focusing on? What important ideas about women and gender do our sources present? What pieces of evidence, textual or material, especially well illustrate important concepts and patterns of understanding? These key items will be good things to refer to, supporting your interpretations, as you explain your ideas on your exam.
• What types of analysis have we brought to bear on Classical, Hellenistic, and medical cultural and social practice relating to women? You can apply techniques of analysis we have used on one source to another source, and get still more out of it. On the exam, you should explain clearly how the evidence you are citing helps to support your insights.
• Study Questions in this e-file and the other file flag important issues within the material we are studying. Typically they are fairly open-ended: they encourage you to think through the implications of our material, and explore the connections you find. Exam questions will suggest a tighter focus, in the interests of being possible to answer within the confines of an in-class exercise. But if you have been thinking about the issues raised by class discussions and the study questions, and noting passages of our texts that provide important evidence, you will be well prepared to write concrete, specific, persuasive essays on the exam.
• Assessment on the exam relates to your familiarity with the material to the extent that you need to know what you're talking about in order to say meaningful things about it. And you do have to make clear what you're referring to, in order to get your argument across. But the main emphasis of the assessment will be on the skills of critical thinking in the realm of societal and cultural knowledge and on your effectively communicating your knowledge, ideas, and reasoning. Be sure to distinguish clearly between what the source "says" (in words or otherwise, for material evidence) and what it means, why it matters that it "says" what it "says" - then explain how reasoning takes you from one to the other.

Monday 31 October

• CONGRATULATIONS! You have completed the second examination.
• Keep thinking about the exam questions: in an even-more-perfect world, what more could you say about these topics?

• When, according to legendary tradition, was the city-state of Rome founded? Think of how Roman history and social development, especially concerning women, compares to contemporary developments in the Greek world. What contacts did Romans have with other peoples, including Greek ones, in the early period of its history?
• Identify important figures of women in Rome's legends of its beginnings. We will address several of them in future meetings; for now, think about how they connect in the context of Rome's legendary history generally.
• What principles organized Roman family life and women's position in Roman families? Be able to define the concepts gens, patria potestas, and manus. How did fertility and child-bearing figure in Roman customs concerning marriage and families?
• What social classes did the early Romans recognize? How did class figure in Roman customs and law concerning marriage and families?
• In what ways did Roman women participate in religious observances on behalf of the Roman state?

Wednesday 2 November

• Understand the distinction between the verifiable, archaeologically-based account of how Rome first developed as a community, and the stories that Romans told and believed of their pre-history and earliest development.
  • Where did they get the ideas that they used in their stories, since it wasn't from historical fact in any simple sense? What does the way they derived these stories tell you about Roman cultural values?
  • How do gender and its values figure in Rome's primary foundation-legends?
• How did the authority of the father in Roman families shape the family as a social unit within itself, and as a source of identity in Roman public life? What considerations and what social structures moderated men's authority over women within the family?
• In what positions did women participate in the Roman family? Distinguish and consider separately both day-to-day experience and juridical status and capacity for acting at law.

• What ideas about Rome as a nascent community, and about women's place in the Roman community, are implied by the legendary Rape of the Sabine Women? What ideas about female psychology are implied?
• How does Livy explain Tarpeia's betraying the Roman state? What possible motives does he suggest she may have had?
• According to the legend, what happened to Lucretia, what did she do in response, and how does her personal history relate to the history of the Roman state? What ideals of female conduct does she embody?
• According to the legend, what happened to Cloelia, what did she do in response, and how does her personal history relate to the history of the Roman state? What ideals does she embody?
• How did the Romans organize their female priesthood of Vesta: what principles and ideas, and what formal rules, governed the selection and activities of the priestesses? What duties were bound on them, and what privileges did they enjoy, as a result of their status?

Friday 4 November

• In what stages, and for what reasons, does the legend of the Sabine Women show them subscribing to Roman society and its goals? (Trace the whole story to understand its emphases: not only the Rape, but also the aftermath.) What objectives do the Sabine Women follow? What facts -and what assumptions about women and their desires, in the legend-tellers' minds- motivate them to form these desires? How do they achieve them? What assumptions about the connections between personal emotions and public policy explains their success? What does the legend suggest about Rome as a state?
• What ideas about women, vulnerability, loyalty and treachery compose the legend of Tarpeia? What does Livy do for her story by introducing a debate about her motives?
• With what interests are the men of Lucretia's story boasting about their wives, or Sextus Tarquinius violating Lucretia's chastity: how does male social competition appropriate the character of women to its own ends? What values and principles motivate Lucretia, as the story develops? What significance for the Roman state does Lucretia's story bear - what does it suggest about Roman social and cultural values that such a cataclysmic personal event becomes the spark igniting a political explosion?
• What feminine, and what Roman, ideals does Cloelia uphold? In what ways does she transcend expectations for her gender? What value does her transcendence have in Roman legend?
• Trace how the social status of Rome's Vestal Virgins translates to the level of the state ideas about the condition and role of respectable Roman daughters in the household.

• How did laws attributed to Rome's earliest, legendary kings set up parameters for women's lives? What social and cultural values are implied by these laws?
• What additional refinements in regulation of women's rights and status were introduced when traditional Roman law was codified in the Twelve Tables?
• What other values and principles are reflected in early Roman men's treatment of women - on the basis of things they understood to be within their rights, whether or not those rights had yet been formally codified in laws? Consider the anecdotes recorded by Valerius Maximus, the antiquities recorded (L&F 110) and the speech of Cato extracted by Aulus Gellius, and the protest recorded by Livy.
• What measures did the Roman state enact so as to control the cult of Bacchus? How do considerations of gender figure within this decree?

Monday 7 November

• What societal and cultural processes actually constructed the texts we read as Rome's earliest legislation (3 categories of items regarded as laws, more formally, plus 2 categories of more general discourse)? What do they represent in the evolution of Roman social practice and national self-image?
• What central concerns about women are reflected in the discourse of Rome's early-traditional legal thought and practice? What presumptions and priorities are reflected in these concerns: what impression do they give of early Roman society and its values? Be able to explain how you go about identifying the concerns from the texts, and how you add up those concerns to form your impression. Topics include regulating fertility, marriage and divorce, property rights - and what else can you identify as important?
• How do the two sides in the debate over the Oppian Law both present themselves as relying on Roman traditions? What impressions of those traditions do the sides each give? What anxieties and what values stand behind the invocations of tradition on either side? Be able to show how evidence supports your analysis.
• Analyze how the measures the Senate enacted against Bacchic cults in Italy add up to show what, exactly, the Senate was most worried about in the practice of these cults. What considerations relevant to women appear within their measures? What other considerations relevant to women can your broader familiarity with early Roman cultural values suggest may have lurked in the back of Senators' minds (identify sources and analysis for the connections you are making).

• How did the political and economic changes Rome underwent in the later Republican period change the range of activities and social roles accessible to Roman women? What new and what old ideologies about women's behavior were enunciated in reaction to these changes?
• Who was Cornelia? To what men important for Roman history was she related? How does the Roman tradition claim (validly or not) that she regarded their political stances? What forms of recognition did the Roman state and historical tradition accord to her?
• What other aristocratic Roman women of the later Republic became, in some sense, figures of public perception? What did individual women do? In what ways was a woman's influence sometimes felt or claimed?
• What work did Roman women outside the aristocracy do, while their men were away fighting Rome's wars?
• What avenues were open to freed slaves, female and male, for social and economic advancement and self-promotion during the later Republic? In what ways did freedpersons put their private lives on public view?
• What constraints shaped the life of a female slave during the later Roman republic?

Wednesday 9 November

• How did Rome's political and economic circumstances change during the second and first centuries BC, and what pressures did these changes exert on Roman society, especially where Roman women were concerned? Identify episodes where long-standing Roman presumptions and anxieties about women became newly prominent.
  • What different trends of Roman thinking about these changes can you identify in our evidence for this period? What presumptions about women, social power, and social orderliness do the different schools of thought each hold, and how can you tell?
  • Trace and explain how parties to these concerns looked to the past (whether they used the real past or an idealized version) in order to claim authority for ideas they were advocating in their present.
• What distinctively Roman ideologies did collective Roman memory suggest that Cornelia internalized? How do anecdotes and other commemoration of her demonstrate these ideologies in action? What competencies and values did Cornelia's life reflect?
  • What does the fact her identity and social significance was appropriated polemically, against the political aims of her sons, suggest about Cornelia? about Roman "family values" within Roman politics?

• What acts, what qualities, and what relationships do these selections from L&F show deceased women -at Rome and elsewhere in the Mediterranean region- being commemorated for in the first century BC?
• What identity did Roman culture assign to Bona Dea, the "Good Goddess"? With what practices of worship did the Romans honor her? What did Clodius do, in 62 BC, to profane these rites?

Friday 11 November - Happy Veterans' Day!

• Compare and contrast trends in funerary memorials of the first century BC, at Rome and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, to funerary memorials we have considered from other periods and other specific locations about the Mediterranean. What social and cultural considerations help explain their continuities and changes?
• In what ways did Roman practices of manumission change a former slave's status and capacities? How did a freed person's status, capacities, and relationships differ under Roman law from a free person's status, capacities, and relationships?
  • What naming-practices typically marked a manumission? How do these practices show up in freed persons' subsequent life and memorials - whether or not their freed status is mentioned explicitly?
  • Why did freed status apparently make funerary memorials an especially important practice for former slaves?
• What first-century BC Roman trends in women's rights, activities, and values are reflected in Murdia's son's memorial of her: the extent of his commemoration is exceptional, but in what ways did Murdia herself fit into broader patterns of Roman social development? Identify trends and the evidence that reveals them, and explain how Murdia connects.
• Why was worship of the Bona Dea important to the Roman state, and why were women important to worship of the Bona Dea? In what ways did this cult serve to connect women with Roman politics?

• What power do Cicero, Sallust, and Plutarch claim that Clodia, Sempronia, and Cleopatra possessed? How did they each exercise their power in the real world?
• What images does each author attach to the women he is writing about? What, besides the "facts", does he try to suggest about the women and their exercise of power?
• What contemporary concerns about women, power, and social order does each author seem to be responding to in his account of these women: what factors influence him to try to portray the women in the way he does?

Monday 14 November

• To what extent, on Sallust's showing, was Sempronia actually implicated in the Catilinarian conspiracy? Trace how Roman invective of moral accusation, using Roman cultural values of female decorum, built Sempronia's real culpability into something far more dangerous. What effects did Sallust get for his portrait of Sempronia by emphasizing both the good and the bad of her character - what light does Sallust's portrait of Sempronia cast on the whole conspiracy of Catiline?
• What did Clodia represent for the prosecution's argument against Marcus Caelius Rufus? What expectations about women did the prosecution seek to utilize through her testimony? How did Cicero turn these expectations around to redefine the case he was arguing? What additional Roman ideas about women and about Roman family heritage did Cicero introduce for the jury to consider?
• What qualities does Plutarch emphasize in his portrait of Cleopatra? What effect does she have on the men around her? How do the characteristics he assigns to her fit in with Greek and Roman ideals? How does Plutarch's characterization of Cleopatra fit with his general picture of Greek and Roman cultural relations?

• Compare and contrast the women and ideas discussed in WCW II.10 with the women and ideas of about the same period, the "end of the Republic" during the first century BC, discussed in WCW II.9. How do the non-eroticized views of women relate to the eroticized images?
• What qualities did the "New Woman" of later first-century BC Rome display? How did Rome's prosperity and respect for education, growing and embracing elite women, contribute to developing the role-model of the "New Woman" (whether a given observer admired or deplored such women)?
• Is Sulpicia a "New Woman"? How does what she says about herself in her poetry fit or not-fit this image?
  • How much does Sulpicia's image of herself as a lover fit the image of the male lover in men's erotic poetry of this general period (Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid), as discussed in WCW II.10?
  • Compare and contrast Sulpicia's portrait of herself and her love, in her six elegies, with Hellenistic and with Archaic Greek women poets and their self-portraits.

Wednesday 16 November

• How truly "new", in Rome of the later first century BC, was the "New Woman" discussed in WCW II.10? Compare and contrast other evidence we have seen for Roman attitudes, values, and social practices relating to women. Identify specific pieces of evidence that relate to the question, and be able to explain what the evidence shows you and how.
  • What patterns of thought did Roman people habitually apply to women's ability to exercise personal choice, especially as it related to their sexuality?
  • What patterns of thought did Roman people habitually apply to women's erudition and ability to appreciate literature?
  • What patterns of thought did Roman people habitually apply to women's ability to control their personal property and economic condition?
• How does Sulpicia adopt and adapt the situations and concerns of Roman love-poetry, as developed by men who wrote during her lifetime, to her own circumstances and unique poetic voice? Identify themes and concerns of first century BC-first century AD male-authored poetry of personal amorous involvements from WCW II.10 and from class discussion, and compare and contrast to Sulpicia's work.
  • How does Sulpicia bow to "classic" female-and-erotic poets like Sappho, and the concerns of their poetry? How does she align and/or distinguish her poetry from theirs: does the fact of their being female, of their being concerned particularly with love, or of their writing itself, of their being poets, seem to hold the greatest importance for Sulpicia? How can you tell?
  • How do the constraints that typically shaped the lives of elite Roman women figure in Sulpicia's poetry? How does she claim her social position shapes her life (or, really, the life of her poetic persona)? What reactions to her social rank and its constraints does she record in her poetry?
  • How do the expectations of an erotic relationship figure in Sulpicia's poetry? What weight does she put on her lover's attachment to her, and what weight does she put on her own feelings? How can you tell?

• What social crises were provoked by the civil wars of the 40s and 30s BC? Particularly, how did the civil wars and the Triumvirate of Antony, Octavian [later known as Caesar Augustus], and Lepidus (note the names in order to help following the readings) affect women's lives? What dangers did they face? What means did they use to face them?
• How did this period and these women figure in subsequent Roman memory?

Friday 18 November

• In the context of Roman political history, to what process and what consequences does the term "proscription" refer? What did the Triumviral proscriptions do for the atmosphere of Roman public life in this period - and what aspects of the women's actions presented by our study-material for today does this context throw into especially sharp relief, even beyond the ordinary expectations of the women's gender in the late-Republican Roman world?
• What other challenges did these women face in this period, and how did they meet them?
• Which of these women's activities in this period, or which aspects of these women's activities, tend to conform to standard gender-expectations of Republican Roman culture, as we have studied it so far? Which of these women's activities, or which aspects of these women's activities, tend to transcend standard gender-expectations? What considerations make these women's departures from standard gender-expectations evaluated favorably or disapprovingly?

• What ideas about marriage and the family did Augustus try to promote, as he sought to steer the Roman state out of the crises of the last century? What means did he use to promote his platform of "family values"? (Of course, he tried other measures besides promoting "family values" too.)
• How did poets and artists respond to the Augustan familial ideology?
• How did Augustus endeavor to have female members of his family live examples of his familial ideals? How much did they comply? How did subsequent generations of imperial women conform to, diverge from, and modify Augustus's family program?
• How is the Augustan familial ideology reflected in the lives of other women of this period?

Monday 21 November

• Why were marriage and family an important part of Augustus's program for the Roman state? Analyze policies in terms of their practical effects: what could each measure really do? Consider both concrete, material ways the policies were able to advance their objectives and (especially when measures would not be able to advance their objectives materially) indirect ways the policies contributed to a social discourse over related goals.
• How did Augustus endeavor to co-opt in the promotion of his social and political policies, both aesthetic discourse (visual and literary) and public performance (ceremonial and informal)? Identify specific ways that images of female beings and ideology of the family figured in these not-always-obviously political media, and be able to explain how they conformed with Augustan policy as delivered more overtly through other means.

• How did Augustus's legislation and public statements (that is, specific statements of policy, as well as the broader aesthetic and gestural means of promoting related ideas we were dealing with most recently) seek to enforce marriage and childbearing, especially on Rome's political classes? Compare and contrast these explicit statements with the other implicit suggestions: what goals do they seek? by what means do they operate so as to promote those goals?
• Compare and contrast the attitudes to Julia and her behavior exemplified by Seneca's and Macrobius's reports of her. On what scale of values is she condemned? On what scale of values does she appear as an attractive figure? In what ways do her virtues and flaws moderate one another?
• What awareness of her own status and role in public life do Julia's reported jokes reflect?

Monday 28 November

• How did Augustus use considerations of property and legal control in his legislation to encourage marriage and childbearing? What assumptions about what women can do, and what assumptions about what women would want to do, do his measures reflect? What extensions of women's rights did this legislation grant, on what conditions?
• What traditional considerations of how social class might relate to marriage did Augustus's legislation enshrine? How far did this legitimation extend, and where did Augustus's legislation draw the line and not permit such considerations to bar marriages? How does this legislation, with its prohibitions and permissions, endeavor to change social practice about class and marriage?
• How did Augustus's legislation about marriage and childbearing change the boundaries of "public" and "private" life?
• What considerations made Julia's fecundity and marital fidelity (or not) public concerns, rather than just sources of pride or shame for her family in a private way?
• How did Julia react to public scrutiny of her chastity and comportment? What critiques of her father's government and its aims did her reported jokes make? How did she use generally-accepted social codes to subvert what he was trying to make her do as a public figure?

• What different types of information about women's lives did the eruption of Vesuvius preserve? Identify good examples of different kinds of material object available in the ruins of Pompeii, and trace how they reflect facets of lived experience in that community.
• Compare and contrast social and cultural life in Pompeii, as an example of a Roman town in the first century AD, with what social and cultural life would have been like in Rome itself in this period: what social and cultural experiences were specific to Pompeii or generic to a town as opposed to what Romans called "the city", and what social and cultural opportunities and resources can we believed all Romans experienced, more or less?
• In what ways for which Pompeii provides evidence did women participate in the public and political life of their communities, during the first century AD in the Roman world?
• What less edifying activities of women and men do graffiti at Pompeii also record? Why should they matter to serious study of social and cultural life?

Wednesday 30 November

• Briefly outline the geology and history of Pompeii, so as to understand what information does this archaeological site preserve about the lives of women in a Roman town of the first century AD, and why.
• In what ways did women participate in public life in Pompeii, even though they did not vote or hold political office? What does the fact of these women's participation imply about social and cultural attitudes in a Roman community of the first century AD? Identify and be able to discuss specific examples of different kinds of participation by women.
• In what kinds of commercial activity does Pompeii preserve evidence of women's participating? What does the fact of these women's commercial activity imply about women's property-rights and social attitudes concerning women and business in a Roman community of the first century AD? Identify and be able to discuss specific examples.
• Discuss specific examples so as to characterize the different kinds of domestic space in which women (and men) lived in Pompeii in the first century: to what extent do they show gender-zoning within the household and its activities? What aesthetic and cultural values are apparent in domestic decoration-schemes preserved at Pompeii?
• How did women at Pompeii participate in memorialization of the dead? What aesthetic, social, and cultural values did they put on display? Identify and be able to discuss specific examples.

• How were ideals of women's behavior perpetuated within the Roman world of the later first and subsequent centuries AD? What ideals were most emphasized? How was the degree to which a royal or noble woman lived up to these ideals considered to relate to her husband and to men's public concerns?
• Who was Julia Domna, and why did Dio Cassius consider her a particularly remarkable woman?
• What political power were royal and aristocratic women able to exercise in the high and later Roman empire? How did they do it? How were they commemorated for doing it?
• What concerns and social values does Pliny "the Younger" (as opposed to his uncle, who was suffocated by the fumes of Vesuvius's eruption in 79) put on display in his letters (our selections from a large corpus, L&F 243-247, 262-263)?

Friday 2 December

• What activities and what relationships put elite women (imperial and aristocratic) prominently in the public eye during the High Empire? In what ways did these activities and relationships function, so as to serve multiple interest-groups? Consider the different perspectives of the women themselves, male members of the women's families (including the emperors), special interest-groups directly concerned in the activity or relationship, and the public at large.
• Identifying and discussing specific concrete examples, trace how themes emphasized in the public presentation of imperial women, including rhetoric, coins and monuments, imperial acts of beneficence (what else?) not only portray the women themselves in certain ways but also imply ideas about the emperors with whom they have intimate relationships. How did Roman concerns with the nature of imperial monarchy help shape the high-imperial ideology of women's conduct?
• Compare and contrast the ideology of personal relationships presented in the context of imperial marriages of the High Empire, with the ideology reflected, for example, by the correspondence of Pliny the Younger. How closely did imperial and other elite marriages correspond in this period, at least as far as ideology paints them? How might such relationships have felt to their partners?

• Compare and contrast the lives of less wealthy or less well-born women to the lives of royal and aristocratic women - consider the selected primary-source documents selected in L&F as well as the interpretations and summaries of WCW:
  • What material conditions and what social conditions did these women face?
  • In what range of activities did these women engage, privately or professionally? How did their material and legal status shape their lives?
  • How much did elite ideologies carry over to women of lower status? In terms of what ideals were their lives measured by the people they encountered?
• Compare and contrast the lives of non-Roman women who interacted with the Roman world of the high and later empire with the lives of Roman women of this period. How did their gender relate to the activities they pursued and the impact they had on Romans?

Monday 5 December

• Identify pertinent examples, and be able to discuss in concrete detail, how regional social and cultural practices (for example, practices in treatment of the dead) within the geographical territory of the Roman Empire could persist and intersect with practices and values of the politically and administratively dominant Greek and Roman cultures. How far do these bodies of evidence about specific practices authorize us to generalize our understanding about women within the space and time of the high Empire?
• Compare and contrast evidence for women's work beyond their own private households, during and across the high Empire, with evidence we have seen for earlier periods in the same geographic areas: have patterns changed? What sorts of finacially-compensated work do we see women doing?
• Compare and contrast evidence for women's activities of domestic management with evidence we have seen for earlier periods: have patterns changed? What sorts of concerns do we see women engaged with?
• How does the emergent institution of the Christian church change dynamics of social concerns with which women could be engaged: what new sources of social authority become elements in social relations of the high and later Empire?
• How did legal changes of the high Empire affect women's (and men's) citizenship in the Roman Empire? How did other legal changes of this period cause women's (and men's) social status to affect how they could expect to be treated under Roman law?

Vibia Perpetua, daughter of an upper-class Roman family in the Roman province of Africa, was executed in the arena in Carthage on 7 March 203. The account of her martyrdom (technically called a "Passion") is one of the earliest pieces of writing by a Christian woman.

• What events happen to Perpetua?
• Before whom is Perpetua empowered to make her case? How does she set about making it?
• What relationships are important to Perpetua? Which ones does she consider more important, which less important? What principles inform her choices?
• What position does Perpetua seem to hold within the community of her fellow-martyrs? For what reasons?

Wednesday 7 December

• Briefly trace how elements of diversity figured in the development of Christian communities during the first three centuries of the "common era": ethnicity, class, and gender. For what social reasons did upper-class males not tend to embrace this new faith?
• What forms of social organization common in this early period of Christian development figure in Perpetua's and Felicity's experiences? How do members of their group get access to social power: what do they endeavor to do, and how do they manage to do it? How does their Christian identity figure -or not figure- in their actions and the results they obtain? What things do they have the power to do, in principle, but they refuse to make the choices actually to do?
• What spiritual power is conferred on Perpetua by virtue of her prospects of undergoing death for her faith in the near future? How does she recognize this power? How do other Christians or sympathizers-with-Christians recognize this power? Identify specific acts and facts, and explain how they demonstrate specifically spiritual power and its recognition.
• What did Perpetua's father and the governor Hilarian expect of Perpetua in view of her gender, her position as daughter of an upper-class Roman citizen, and the death-sentence she faced as a Christian? Can you tell which factor influences various expectations the most? How? How far does Perpetua conform to the men's expectations: how much does she feel governed by the values traditionally associated with her gender and social class, and how much does she feel that her religion changes her values?
• In what ways do Perpetua's and Felicity's relationships with their Christian "brothers" and "sisters" support, weaken, or replace family ties of blood? Be able to identify and to discuss specific instances.

• What information can you gather identifying Praetextatus and Paulina in connection with their marriage and what they each mean to one another personally, and in connection with their various religious activities and what those activities mean to them each. For Praetextatus, distinguish also secular civic offices, official positions in state cults, and positions of rank in private, "Eastern" religions?
• What facts about Hypatia serve to give her an identity meaningful to contemporary readers? The question asks not only, who is she, but also what elements of her being constitute a significant social or personal identity - and, implicitly, why should these elements in particular receive so much attention?
• Who was Sosipatra? What activities made her remarkable? What attitude do the remarks take towards her? How did her gender relate to her stature in her society?
• What did Hypatia do? How did she pursue her intellectual career? How did she acquire and exercise political influence? How did her gender relate to her professional and political stature?
• Why did Hypatia die? What reaction(s) did her death cause? Compare and contrast the attitudes of the different authors whose texts are represented in L&F's selection.

Friday 9 December

• Compare and contrast how Fabia Aconia Paulina is presented on the three monuments L&F's selections represent. What social relations are highlighted? What ideas about Paulina, her character and her stature, do they imply? How do the ideas fit into cultural patterns we have seen among Romans at earlier periods: how "traditional" a Roman matron was Paulina?
• What established ideals and images of women did Hypatia embody or transgress? To what extent did her gender contribute (or not contribute) to her work, to her position in late-fourth and early-fifth century Alexandrian society during her life, and to her death?
• What established ideals and images of women did Sosipatra embody or transgress? To what extent did her gender contribute (or not contribute) to her work, to her position in the society of fourth-century Sardis, and to her memory?

Review your reading, your notes, the Study Questions in this file and the other file, the Study Guide for the final examination, and in short all material assigned to date, for the final examination next Friday. The exam will focus on material we have covered since Exam 2, but you may find interesting comparisons, among study-material or lines of thought we developed in studying, from the earlier sections of our work.

• What are major concerns we have been focusing on? What important ideas about women and gender do our sources present? What pieces of evidence, textual or material, especially well illustrate important concepts and patterns of understanding? These key items will be good things to refer to, supporting your interpretations, as you explain your ideas on your exam.
• What types of analysis have we brought to bear on Roman cultural and social practice relating to women (in the periods of legend, Republic, Principate, and late Empire)? You can apply techniques of analysis we have used on one source to another source, and get still more out of it. On the exam, you should explain clearly how the evidence you are citing helps to support your insights.
• Study Questions in this e-file and the other file flag important issues within the material we are studying. Typically they are fairly open-ended: they encourage you to think through the implications of our material, and explore the connections you find. Exam questions will suggest a tighter focus, in the interests of being possible to answer within the confines of an in-class exercise. But if you have been thinking about the issues raised by class discussions and the study questions, and noting passages of our texts that provide important evidence, you will be well prepared to write concrete, specific, persuasive essays on the exam.
• Assessment on the exam relates to your familiarity with the material to the extent that you need to know what you're talking about in order to say meaningful things about it. And you do have to make clear what you're referring to, in order to get your argument across. But the main emphasis of the assessment will be on the skills of critical thinking in the realm of societal and cultural knowledge and on your effectively communicating your knowledge, ideas, and reasoning. Be sure to distinguish clearly between what the source "says" (in words or otherwise, for material evidence) and what it means, why it matters that it "says" what it "says" - then explain how reasoning takes you from one to the other.

Good luck with the exam, and thanks for a good semester!

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