In The Feminine Matrix of Sex and Gender in Classical Athens, Kate Gilhuly explores the relationship between the prostitute, the wife, and the ritual performer in Athenian literature. She suggests that these three roles formed a symbolic continuum that served as an alternative to a binary conception of gender in classical Athens and provided a framework for assessing both masculine and feminine civic behaviour. Grounded in close readings of four texts, 'Against Neaira', Plato's Symposium, Xenophon's Symposium, and Aristophanes' Lysistrata, this book draws upon observations from gender studies and the history of sexuality in ancient Greece to illuminate the relevance of these representations of women to civic behaviour, pederasty, philosophy, and politics. In these original readings, Gilhuly casts a new light on the complexity of the classical Athenian sex/gender system, demonstrating how various and even opposing strategies worked together to articulate different facets of the Athenian subject.

Many of the women whose names are known to history from Classical Athens were metics or immigrants, linked in the literature with assumptions of being ‘sexually exploitable.’ Despite recent scholarship on women in Athens beyond notions of the ‘citizen wife’ and the ‘common prostitute,’ the scholarship on women, both citizen and foreign, is focused almost exclusively on women in the reproductive and sexual economy of the city. This book examines the position of metic women in Classical Athens, to understand the social and economic role of metic women in the city, beyond the sexual labor market. This book contributes to two important aspects of the history of life in 5th century Athens: it explores our knowledge of metics, a little-researched group, and contributes to the study if women in antiquity, which has traditionally divided women socially between citizen-wives and everyone else. This tradition has wrongly situated metic women, because they could not legally be wives, as some variety of whores. Author Rebecca Kennedy critiques the traditional approach to the study of women through an examination of primary literature on non-citizen women in the Classical period. She then constructs new approaches to the study of metic women in Classical Athens that fit the evidence and open up further paths for exploration. This leading-edge volume advances the study of women beyond their sexual status and breaks down the ideological constraints that both Victorians and feminist scholars reacting to them have historically relied upon throughout the study of women in antiquity.

Oratory is a valuable source for reconstructing the practices, legalities, and attitudes surrounding sexual labor in classical Athens. It provides evidence of male and female sex laborers, sex slaves, brothels, sex traffickers, the cost of sex, contracts for sexual labor, and manumission practices for sex slaves. Yet the witty, wealthy, free, and independent hetaira well-known from other genres, does not feature. Its detailed narratives and character portrayals provide a unique discourse on sexual labor and reveal the complex relationship between such labor and Athenian society. Through a holistic examination of five key speeches, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts considers how portrayals of sex laborers intersected with gender, the body, sexuality, the family, urban spaces, and the polis in the context of the Athenian courts. Drawing on gender theory and exploring questions of space, place, and mobility, Allison Glazebrook shows how sex laborers represented a diverse set of anxieties concerning social legitimacy and how the public discourse about them is in fact a discourse on Athenian society, values, and institutions.

Athenian democracy was distinguished from other ancient constitutions by its emphasis on freedom. This was understood, Naomi T. Campa argues, as being able to do 'whatever one wished,' a widely attested phrase. Citizen agency and power constituted the core of democratic ideology and institutions. Rather than create anarchy, as ancient critics claimed, positive freedom underpinned a system that ideally protected both the individual and the collective. Even freedom, however, can be dangerous. The notion of citizen autonomy both empowered and oppressed individuals within a democratic hierarchy. These topics strike at the heart of democracies ancient and modern, from the discursive principles that structure political procedures to the citizen's navigation between the limitations of law and expression of individual will to the status of noncitizens within a state. This title is part of the Flip it Open Programme and may also be available Open Access. Check our website Cambridge Core for details.

Looking at sex and sexuality from a variety of historical, sociological and theoretical perspectives, as represented in a variety of media, Sex in Antiquity represents a vibrant picture of the discipline of ancient gender and sexuality studies, showcasing the work of leading international scholars as well as that of emerging talents and new voices. Sexuality and gender in the ancient world is an area of research that has grown quickly with often sudden shifts in focus and theoretical standpoints. This volume contextualises these shifts while putting in place new ideas and avenues of exploration that further develop this lively field or set of disciplines. This broad study also includes studies of gender and sexuality in the Ancient Near East which not only provide rich consideration of those areas but also provide a comparative perspective not often found in such collections. Sex in Antiquity is a major contribution to the field of ancient gender and sexuality studies.

This book brings together a collection of original essays that engage with cultural geography and landscape studies to produce new ways of understanding place, space, and landscape in Greek literature from the fifth and fourth centuries BCE. The authors draw on an eclectic collection of contemporary approaches to bring the study of ancient Greek literature into dialogue with the burgeoning discussion of spatial theory in the humanities. The essays in this volume treat a variety of textual spaces, from the intimate to the expansive: the bedroom, ritual space, the law courts, theatrical space, the poetics of the city, and the landscape of war. And yet, all of the contributions are united by an interest in recuperating some of the many ways in which the ancient Greeks in the archaic and classical periods invested places with meaning and in how the representation of place links texts to social practices.

This book is an addition to the burgeoning secondary literature on ancient emotions. Its primary aim is to suggest possible ways in which recent approaches to emotions can help us understand significant aspects of persuasion in classical antiquity and, especially audiences' psychological manipulation in the civic procedures of classical Athens. Based on cognitive approaches to emotions, Skinner's theoretical work on the language of ideology, or ancient theories about enargeia, the book examines pivotal aspects of psychological manipulation in ancient rhetorical theory and practice. At the same time, the book looks into possible ways in which the emotive potentialities of vision -both sights and mental images- are explained or deployed by orators. The book includes substantial discussion of Gorgias' approach to sights ' emotional qualities and their implications for persuasion and deception and the importance of visuality for Thucydides' analysis of emotions' role in the polis' public communication. It also looks into the deployment of enargeia in forensic narratives revolving around violence. The book also focuses on the ideological implications of envy for the political discourse of classical Athens and emphasizes the rhetorical strategies employed by self-praising speakers who want to preempt their listeners' loathing. The book is therefore a useful addition to the burgeoning secondary literature on ancient emotions. Despite the prominence of emotions in classicists' scholarly work, their implications for persuasion is undeservedly under-researched. By employing appraisal-oriented analysis of emotions this books suggests new methodological approaches to ancient pathopoiia. These approaches take into consideration the wider ideological or cultural contexts which determine individual speakers' rhetorical strategies. This book is the second volume of Ancient Emotions, edited by George Kazantzidis and Dimos Spatharas within the series Trends in Classics. Supplementary Volumes. This project investigates the history of emotions in classical antiquity, providing a home for interdisciplinary approaches to ancient emotions, and exploring the inter-faces between emotions and significant aspects of ancient literature and culture