CS3310G: Women in Ancient Greece

This volume is an essential resource, supplying a compilation of source material in translation, along with suggestions for further reading, a general bibliography, and an index of ancient authors and works.

Here Sian Lewis considers the full range of female existence in classical Greece--childhood and old age, unfree and foreign status, and the ageless woman characteristic of Athenian red-figure painting. Ceramics are an unparalleled resource for women's lives in ancient Greece, since they show a huge number of female types and activities. Yet it can be difficult to interpret the meanings of these images, especially when they seem to conflict with literary sources.

Sex in ancient Hellenic culture assumed a variety of social and political meanings, whereas the modern development of a sex-centered model of personality now leads us to view sex as the key to understanding the individual. Drawing on both the Anglo-American tradition of cultural anthropology and the French tradition of les sciences humaines, these essays explore the iconography, politics, ethics, poetry, and medical practices that made sex in ancient Greece not a paradise of liberation, but an exotic locale hardly recognizable to visitors from the modern world.

A Companion to Families in the Greek and Roman Worlds draws from both established and current scholarship to offer a broad overview of the field, engages in contemporary debates, and poses stimulating questions about future development in the study of families.

What was childhood like in ancient Greece? What activities and games did Greek children embrace? How were they schooled and what religious and ceremonial rites of passage were key to their development? These questions and many more are answered in this study, which features and discusses imagery and artefacts relating to childhood in ancient Greece.

This book provides a comprehensive account of the Athenians' conception of women during the classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries BC. Though nothing remains that represents the authentic voice of the women themselves, there is a wealth of evidence showing how men sought to define women. By working through a range of material, from the provisions of Athenian law through to the representations of tragedy and comedy, the author builds up a coherent and integrated picture of the Athenians "notion of woman."

Women's and men's worlds were largely separate in ancient Mediterranean societies, and, in consequence, many women's deepest personal relationships were with other women. Yet relatively little scholarly or popular attention has focused on women's relationships in antiquity, in contrast to recent interest in the relationships between men in ancient Greece and Rome. The essays in this book seek to close this gap by exploring a wide variety of textual and archaeological evidence for women's homosocial and homoerotic relationships from prehistoric Greece to fifth-century CE Egypt.