Sexuality and Gender in Greece and Rome

How many sexes were there in the ancient world? How many genders? What's the difference? When is a man not a man or a woman not a woman? What can we really know about the lives of women in antiquity, and what is the relationship between the way women lived and the way men wrote about them, painted them, sculpted them or legislated for them? This paper tackles one of the most fundamental historical questions of all- what it means, in a particular time and place, to be male or female. From the archaic Greek world to the later Roman Empire, it looks at how gender affected everyday life, what was and was not acceptable sexual behaviour, and how writers and artists expressed, joked about, subverted or reinvented the views of those around them. Relatively well-known evidence from literature and art is put side by side with medical writings, magic, laws and graffiti. The subject ends with the rise of Christianity and asks whether this new religion brought women emancipation from men, or both sexes emancipation from sex, or just altered the meaning of gender completely. Texts are set in translation, though it is, as always, desirable to read them in the original where possible. Scholarship in this area of Classics has been developing fast in recent years, and you will also read some of the cutting-edge literature on gender and sexuality by contemporary non-Classicist theorists.

If you offer this topic, you are expected to show a familiarity with the texts listed in the appended Examination Regulations, in translation. Lectures for this topic normally take place in Michaelmas Term.

Choosing your combinations - gender and sexuality as objects of study raise questions of importance to many parts of the Greats course, and this paper involves issues of theory and methodology which will be of interest to people working on literary theory and moral philosophy. The broad chronological scope of the paper - which concerns itself with the whole sweep of classical antiquity - also increases its appeal. The essentially historical objective of explaining change between different places and periods remains an essential part of the framework, and background knowledge of various historical Greek and Roman contexts, whether derived from the study of Ancient History period papers or from Greek and Latin literature, is invaluable if the debates in this paper are to be understood.