This book investigates how varying practices of gender shaped people's lives and experiences across the societies of ancient Greece and Rome. Exploring how gender was linked with other socio-political characteristics such as wealth, status, age and life-stage as well as with individual choices, in the very different world of classical antiquity, is fascinating in its own right. But later perceptions of ancient literature and art have profoundly influenced the development of gendered ideologies and hierarchies in the West, and influenced the study of gender itself. Questioning how best to untangle and interpret difficult sources is a key aim. This book exploits a wide range of archaeological, material cultural, visual, spatial, demographic, epigraphical and literary evidence to consider households, families, life-cycles and the engendering of time, legal and political institutions, beliefs about bodies, sex and sexuality, gender and space, the economic implications of engendered practices, and gender in religion and magic.
Author(s): Lin Foxhall
Series: Key Themes in Ancient History
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Year: 2013
Language: English
Pages: 200
City: Cambridge
Cover
Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity
Series
Title
Copyright
Contents
Illustrations
Tables
Acknowledgements
Chapter 1 Gender and the study of classical antiquity
1 Introduction
2 What’s so special about gender?
3 The discovery of gender in the past
4 Taking gender for granted: can we still study it in a ‘post-feminist’ world?
5 Sources and critical approaches
Generic issues
Written sources
Archaeology and material culture
6 The structure of this book
Chapter 2 Households
1 Household and family
Households in Greece
Roman households
2 Marriage, household, gender and social order
3 Marriage in Greek city states
Athens
Gortyn
4 Roman marriages
The Augustan legislation
Roman law and social practice
Unmarried partners: ‘concubines’
5 Adultery
Moicheia and legitimacy in classical Athens
Adultery in Roman law and practice
6 Conclusions
Chapter 3 Demography
1 Family ‘life cycles’ and ‘life courses’
2 Genealogy
3 Accepting and rejecting children
4 Growing up gendered: socialization, gender and sexuality
Greek childhood
Roman childhood
5 Commemoration, succession and transmission
Death and commemoration
6 Conclusions: families in time
Chapter 4 Bodies
1 Gender and the ‘natural’ body
2 The ‘biology’ of gender and reproduction
3 Greek medical texts and the construction of gendered human bodies
4 Achieving masculinity: the regimen
5 Roman portraiture: picturing the individual
6 Sexual behaviour and the political body in Athens
7 Violence and warfare
Women at war
War, masculinity and communities
8 Conclusion
Chapter 5 Wealth
1 The economics of gender
2 Wealth, inheritance and gender
The transmission of property in archaic and classical Greece
Gender and Roman laws of succession
3 Guardianship of women
4 Work and labour
5 Gendered ideologies of work and labour
6 Prostitution
7 The social life of things: gender and materiality
Clothing, adornment and personal wealth in Greece
Roman dress and clothing
8 Conclusion
Chapter 6 Space
1 Space and social interaction
2 ‘Domestic’ space and houses
Understanding gender in classical Greek houses
Gender and space in Roman houses: public and private
Gender and space in Pompeian houses
3 Training space in classical Greece
4 Roman bathing culture
5 Conclusions
Chapter 7 Religion
1 Religion and society
2 Sacrifice
3 Greek civic cult: the Athenian Panathenaic festival
4 Gender, religion and the state in Rome
5 Men’s words, women’s rites
Greece: the Thesmophoria
Rome: Bona Dea and Bacchic cult
6 Votive dedications
7 Curses and magic
8 Conclusion
chapter 8 Conclusions
Bibliographic essay
1 Gender and the study of classical antiquity
2 Households
3 Demography
4 Bodies
5 Wealth
6 Space
7 Religion
Bibliography
Index
