Barrett finds lines 1010–15 difficult. He says that ‘hovers between “an heiress as my wife” and “marriage with an heiress”’, that ‘a Greek heiress did not inherit property as her own: it passed not to her but with her, to her husband and ultimately to her children.—In Attic law a widow was never : a man's property went to his legitimate children.

This paper argues that there were women involved with philosophy on a fairly constant basis throughout Greek antiquity. It does so by tracing the lives and where extant the writings of these women. However, since the sources, both ancient and modern, from which we derive our knowledge about these women are so sexist and easily distort our view of these women and their accomplishments, the paper also discusses the manner in which their histories come down (...) to us as well as the histories themselves. It discusses in detail the following women: the Pythagorean women philosophers of the 6th and 5th centuries B.C., Aspasia and Diotima of the 5th century B.C., Arete, Hipparchia, Pamphile and the women Epicureans-all from the 4th century B.C. the five logician daughters of a famous Stoic philosopher of the 3rd century B.C., and finally Hypatia who lived in the 4th century A.D. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Women Poets and the Origin of the Greek Hexameter W. ROBERT CONNOR A very considerable question has arisen, as to what was the origin of poetry. —Pliny the Elder, Natural History 7.57 i. a road trip with pausanias Tennyson called the dactylic hexameter “the stateliest measure / ever moulded by the lips of man,” but he did not say whose lips first did the moulding. Despite much (...) arguing we do not know for sure where it came from, or who developed it. But some ancient Greeks did, or thought they did. For them, the hexameter came with a personal history, a legendary one to be sure, but no less powerful for that. The legend, moreover, started with a woman poet. The trail that leads to this is a long and devious one, but a good guide presents himself, Pausanias, author of A Greek Guidebook (Hellados Periegesis). Although he is now valued primarily as a quarry cordoned off for topographers and archaeologists, he had a strong interest in poets, especially women ones. These include Sappho, of course, the valiant Telesilla of Argos of whom he tells two stories (2.20.8, and 2.35.2), and Praxilla of Sicyon (3.13.5). In his account of Boeotia he mentions another woman poet of the fifth century before our era, Corinna of Tanagra. She, he says (9.22.3f.), once defeated Pindar in a poetry contest, and was, he thinks, the most beautiful woman of her time, judging by a statue of her he had seen. He also speaks of Myro of Byzantium (9.5.8). Pausanias was confident that she had written epic and elegiac verse. arion 27.2 fall 2019 Pausanias chooses, moreover, to end his work with an enigmatic story about another woman poet, Anyte of Tegea. He had not mentioned her in his lengthy account of her home town in the mountains of Arcadia, but now her story seems to speak to him. It is set at a ruined shrine of Asclepius near the port town of Naupactus. The reason that Anyte had come there was a strange one: She had had, he says, a vision—not a dream, but a real vision—at the end of which she found herself holding a sealed tablet addressed to one Phalysius of Naupactus. He was, it turns out, a prosperous citizen of the town, but was going blind. Anyte made the journey, surely not an easy one, and delivered the tablet. As soon as Phalysius broke its seal, he found he could make out the letters—a wondrous improvement in his vision, which he attributed to the healing god Asclepius. That is why he built the shrine that Pausanias saw many years later. And the content of the message? Give Anyte two thousand gold staters. Phalysius did so. End of story. End of the Guidebook. So, indeed, Pausanias paid attention to women poets, and there were plenty of them to pay attention to. There is good evidence of a vibrant tradition of women’s poetry among the ancient Greeks. Pausanias is not the only writer of his time to note this. In fact, if on his journeys Pausanias had encountered the well-travelled rhetorician Tatian, the two near-contemporaries could have challenged one another to see who could name the largest number of women poets and identify the sculptors of statues honoring them. Tatian might have won, to judge from his Address to the Greeks, ch 33. But then, Tatian had an agenda. As a convert to a “barbarian” cult he wanted to show that his co-religionists had precedents for respecting women’s intellects: “My object in referring to these women is, that you may not regard as something strange what you find among us, and that, comparing the statues which are before your eyes, you may not treat the women with scorn who among us pursue philosophy.” So much for the Christian Tatian. Did Pausanias have an agenda, too? His stories of two women from Delphi, Boio 86 women poets and the origin of the greek hexameter and Phemonoe, help answer that question. ii. boio’s disruptive poetry when pausanias’s work describes Delphi, the plot thickens. In... (shrink)

In 1824 Eduard Gans, in the course of a study of inheritance law, had occasion to deal with the class of women known in Athens as epikleroi—daughters of a deceased man who, in the absence of sons, were married to their nearest relative, with the estate of the deceased passing to the son or sons of the new union. ‘For these,’ he wrote, ‘… the basic concept throughout is not that, in the absence of descendants, they themselves appear as (...) inheritors, but rather that they are inherited along with the property by the collaterals.’. (shrink)

This study presents scientific theories about the female body in Greece of the 5th and 4th centuries BC. It demonstrates the influence of cultural preconceptions on such theories, and of scientific theories on cultural attitudes.

An eleventh-century manuscript in the Biblioteca Laurenziana in Florence preserves a short excerpt of a calendar outlining stages in the development of the foetus. It is headed Δαμναστού έκ τού Περί κυουσών καί βρεΦών θεραπείας, ‘Damnastes, from On the Care of Pregnant Women and of Infants’. Though its existence has long been noted, it has not been previously edited or published.

Alors même que les Grecs, dans l’Égypte des Ptolémées (323-330 av. nè), se trouvaient globalement dans une situation de « minorité dominante », il est généralement admis que la condition des femmes grecques était inférieure à celle des femmes égyptiennes en raison de l’obligation qui leur était faite d’être assistées en certaines matières par un représentant légal, leur kurios. Dans la pratique néanmoins, le kurios n’est pas nécessairement le signe d’une incapacité juridique de la Grecque d’Égypte. Avoir un kurios pouvait (...) même être le moyen d’afficher une appartenance à l’élite de la société ptolémaïque. (shrink)

Although recent empirical research suggests that there is a gender gap in Anglophone philosophy, no research has been done on the representation of women in non‐Anglophone philosophy. The present study constitutes a first step toward filling this void in the literature by providing empirical evidence on the representation of female students and female faculty members in Greek universities' departments of philosophy. Our findings indicate that the underrepresentation of female students in philosophy is not a universal phenomenon, since female (...) students constitute the majority of philosophy students in Greece at both the undergraduate and the graduate levels. However, our findings also suggest that the low number of women in philosophy at the faculty level is not a problem unique to Anglophone philosophy, since female faculty members comprise, on average, only 29% of philosophy faculty members in Greece. In order to explain these findings, we argue, first, that the teaching of philosophy at the secondary level may motivate female students in Greece to enter and persist in philosophy, and, second, that since the gender gap at the faculty level in Greece cannot be attributed to the low number of female students in the philosophy pipeline, the causes of women's poor participation in philosophy at the faculty level should be looked for elsewhere. (shrink)

An essential reference source for cutting-edge scholarship on women/gender and philosophy in Greek antiquity. The volume features original research that crosses disciplines, offering readers an accessible guide to new methods, new sources, and new questions in the study of ancient Greek philosophy and its multiple afterlives.

Our access to reliable information about women thinkers who might be classified as philosophers of ancient Greece is fragmentary at best. Drawing from the texts of Herodotus, Plato, Aristotle, Diogenes Laertius, Iamblicus, Clement of Alexandria, Plutarch, Porphyry, Suidas, and many other sources, Gilles Ménage published a History of Women Philosophers in Latin in 1690. His aim was to refute the long‐standing and widely held view that there were not and never had been any women philosophers (or at (...) most only a very few). He attempted to classify (by “school” of thought) and cited by name about twenty Greek women thinkers who lived between about the twelfth century BCE and the death of Aristotle (322 BCE) or shortly afterward. Beatrice H. Zedler has translated Ménage's book into English (1984) and has provided a useful introduction, with helpful notes and appendices. (shrink)

The literature on the gender dimension of far-right politics has established the constitutive role of gender and women’s involvement in the far right. However, knowledge about how far-right women negotiate and condition their agency within their parties and how they relate to gender, gender equality and feminism remains limited. This article builds on literature on conservative and far-right women’s agency, and on feminism’s employment by the far right. Based on interviews with female politicians and seasoned activists of (...) the Greek Golden Dawn and the Greek-Cypriot National Popular Front, it examines how highly engaged far-right women construct their political agency at the intersections of often contradictory discourses and how, in doing so, they impact understandings of gender, gender equality and feminism. The analysis of the interview material identifies three different formulations of political agency the participants refer to: radical motherhood; female political militancy/political militant femininity and troubling of far-right gender roles. I argue that these different formulations of political agency show how, by using elements of feminism, far-right women construct flexible and versatile far-right gender discourses, which challenge gender essentialist positions that their parties convey. Moreover, they challenge delineations of far-right women’s political agency based on the compliance/(feminist) resistance dichotomy and expose the processes through which far-right women contest feminism by drawing on it. The article further argues that these formulations of political agency and far-right gender discourses may contribute to the far right’s appeal among women with diverse views on gender, gender equality, feminism and politics, as they may respond to an array of interests and demands that can be made from many different positions. Therefore, beyond contributing to discussions about the role of women, gender and feminism in far-right politics, the article demonstrates the importance of studying far-right women’s views for gaining a well-rounded understanding of this issue. (shrink)

This article tackles the media experience of ten Swedish women living in Greece. It focuses on the relation between their media experience and culture. This is examined by looking specifically at their use of Greek media during their first years in Greece as a way of learning a new culture, how they use Swedish media to maintain a link with Swedish culture and society, their concerns about children's media use, and how they view the importance of media in (...) introducing the Swedish culture and language to their children. Finally, the presence of culture in these women's media experience is also seen in how they perceive Greek media output, which is discussed in terms of violent contents, sensational news, public service versus commercial channels, and the representation of women. (shrink)

A wealth of political literature has survived, from political theory by Plato and Aristotle to the variety of prose and verse literature that more broadly demonstrate political thinking. However, despite the extent of this legacy, it can be surprisingly hard to say how ancient Greek political thought has made its influence present, or whether this influence has been sustained across the centuries. This volume includes a range of disciplinary responses to issues surrounding the legacy of Greek political thought, (...) demonstrating the ways in which political thinking has evolved from antiquity to the present day. (shrink)

Richard Shusterman, Ars Erotica: Sex and Somaesthetics in the Classical Arts of Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021), 436 pages./ Like other contributors, I would like to begin by expressing my respect and admiration for the scale and scope of Richard Shusterman’s achievement in Ars Erotica. The Preface acknowledges “the vast amount of material” involved in this project of charting “the history of erotic theory in the world’s most influential premodern cultures,” with each chapter on a different cultural tradition potentially (...) meriting its own monograph (AE, x, xi). As a scholar who has worked in depth on the work of Pierre Hadot, as well as Michel Foucault’s works on the practices of philosophy conceived as an art or craft (technê) of living in the Western tradition, my response will necessarily be more limited. It will address in detail just the first major chapter of the book – especially as I note with appreciation the piece in this symposium by Marta Faustino on the relations between the ars vivendi and ars erotica. I take some comfort in accepting these limitations from the statement of a particular debt that Shusterman proffers in his Preface to Foucault’s works in the finally-not-completed History of Sexuality series. The author notes both what he owes to Foucault on sexuality, particularly in his studies on the ancient Greeks and Romans, as well as his differences from Foucault’s work. (shrink)

Pythagorean Women Philosophers argues for a rewriting of Greek philosophical history so as to include female intellectuals. Dutsch presents testimonies regarding the role of women in the Pythagorean school as demonstrating their active contribution to the philosophical tradition.

This volume of essays retrieves the largely unresearched thought and the original ideas of ancient women philosophers and carves out a space for them in the canon. The broad focus includes women thinkers in ancient Indian, Chinese, and Arabic philosophy as well as in the Greek and Roman philosophical traditions.

This chapter is about women and ancient Pythagorean philosophy. Specifically, the focus is on the letters and treatises written in the Hellenistic and Imperial Age under the name of Pythagorean female authors. Scholars have primarily raised two objections against these texts: first, they are likely to be spurious and might not have been authored by women, but rather male philosophers writing under female pseudonyms. Second, these texts are not philosophical. After a brief introduction to the role of (...) class='Hi'>women in Pythagoreanism and overview of the authorship issue, I show that, regardless of the original authors, these texts are written for women who are considered capable of reading philosophy. As such, they establish women’s philosophical potential in two ways: on the one hand, they ascribe philosophical arguments to female authors and, on the other hand, they encourage women to pursue philosophy. This makes the texts the first case of philosophical prose ascribed to Greek women and, I argue, an early example of female philosophical protreptics. (shrink)

In Pythagorean Women, classical scholar Sarah B. Pomeroy discusses the groundbreaking principles that Pythagoras established for family life in Archaic Greece, such as constituting a single standard of sexual conduct for women and men. Among the Pythagoreans, women played an important role and participated actively in the philosophical life. While Pythagoras encouraged women to be submissive to men, his reasoning was based on the desire to preserve harmony in the home. -/- Pythagorean Women provides English (...) translations of all the earliest extant examples of literary Greek prose by Neopythagorean women, shedding light on their attitudes about marriage, the home, music, and the cosmos. Pomeroy sets the Pythagorean and Neopythagorean women vividly in their historical, ecological, and intellectual contexts, illustrated with original photographs of sites and artifacts known to these women. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:The Talking Greeks: Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and PlatoJo-Ann SheltonJohn Heath. The Talking Greeks: Speech, Animals, and the Other in Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. viii + 392 pp. Cloth, $90.In The Talking Greeks, John Heath has produced a provocative exploration of the significance of language capacity in ancient Greek society. In his Introduction, he investigates how the Greeks (...) came to associate speech—the word he uses to denote language capacity—with rationality and how, correspondingly, logos came to mean not simply the articulation of a thought, but the thought itself. Heath presents three major theses about the Greeks and speech. First, the Greeks believed that the most important difference between themselves and other animals was that humans were capable of speech and animals were not. They thus considered speech to be a defining characteristic of humanity. The dichotomy of the talking man and the speechless animal was established early on and persisted in Greek thought of all periods. Heath contends that the speechless animal Other also became the primary metaphor for Other humans—women, slaves, and non-Greeks, for example—who, though capable of speaking, were considered to be incapable of the effective use of speech. In turn, the seeming inability of these Others to be "fully human" (a phrase that Heath uses frequently) provided Greek men with the justification to relegate them to subordinate positions and, in effect, to silence them. Heath maintains that language capacity was central to all judgments about status, and that the Greeks granted authority to their leaders on the basis of mastery of speech.Second, the Greeks believed that speech enabled humans to create culture and thus evolve away from the bestial. Speech was fundamental to the development of systems of justice and morality and therefore to the rise of the polis.Third, because men in Greece, and in Athens in particular, attached such great value to the mastery of speech, they were keen to engage in debates. Heath asserts that one of the most important legacies of the ancient Greek world is its emphasis on open inquiry about political, social, and cultural traditions. He chides scholars who focus negatively on the Greek construction of dichotomies and hierarchies and therefore fail to acknowledge that the Greeks continually challenged these very constructions. Heath insists that we have inherited from them a pattern of public self-criticism, and that this pattern has brought about progress in the modern western world in improving the status of the "muted" members of the community.These three propositions underlie Heath's discussions throughout the book as he examines the ways in which Homer, Aeschylus, and Plato used the [End Page 603] metaphorical framework of the talking human and the speechless animal to explore the definition of humanity. Heath recognizes that the terms "mastery of speech" and "fully human" resist easy definition, and he devotes the book to illustrating how the Greeks variously employed these terms. Throughout, as Heath develops his own arguments, he draws on and provides extensive discussions of the work of many other scholars in a wide range of disciplines. His arguments are also reinforced by his close philological analyses of the Greek texts.In chapter 1, Heath begins his investigations of speech and human status in Homer. He notes that, in the many animal similes in the Iliad and the Odyssey, Homer attributes to the animals the same motivations for actions as the humans with whom they are being compared. The animals, however, are not capable of communicating their thoughts through speech. Within the human community, it is control over speech that characterizes humans with authority and distinguishes them from men of lower status and from non-Greeks, women, and slaves. The Trojans, when engaged in attack, for example, are depicted as bleating like sheep. And, according to Heath, Helen is portrayed as speaking impetuously and inappropriately. The voices of even royal Greek women carry no authority in public matters. In Homer, a hero is a person who is accomplished both at speaking words and at doing deeds, and only a man has the potential to combine these skills.Heath maintains in chapter... (shrink)

"While ancient Greek thought is widely acknowledged as the major source of political ideals such as freedom and equality, ancient Greek practices including slavery, the subordination of women, and imperialism have been condemned as undemocratic and immoral. So is ancient Greek political thought still relevant today? In this wide-ranging history, Ryan Balot shows what ancient Greek political texts might mean to citizens of the twenty-first century."--BOOK JACKET.

This book presents the views of 22 women philosophers from outside the Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian worlds. These eminent thinkers are from Mesopotamia, India, Tibet, China, Korea, Japan, Australia, America, the Philippines and Nigeria. Six philosophers, the earliest of whom predates the Greek pre-Socratics by two thousand years, lived at “the dawn of philosophy”; another six from late Antiquity through the Classical period; five more taught and wrote during the Middle Ages up to the Age of Exploration, and yet (...) five others were active during the modern period to the mid-twentieth century. Most belonged to major philosophical traditions: Hinduism, Buddhism, Confucianism, Taoism, Zen, or Sufism. The chapters of the book describe the life and views of the philosophers, outline the fundamental features of their respective schools, and contain translations of their writings. The book is intended for scholars of philosophy and women’s studies who wish to expand their knowledge of non-Western philosophical traditions and is ideally suited for undergraduate education. Comprehensive multilingual bibliographies of carefully documented sources offer scholars many promising resources for further research. (shrink)

This paper responds to two trends in debates about Plato's view of women in the Republic. First, many scholars argue or assume that Plato seeks to minimize the influence of femininity in the ideal city, and to make guardian women themselves as “masculine” as possible. Second, scholars who address the relationship between Plato's views of women and his psychological theory tend to focus on the reasoning and appetitive parts of the tripartite soul. In response to the first (...) point, we argue that the idea that Plato seeks to masculinize/de-feminize the city oversimplifies his treatment of Greek gender norms. Although he does want to eliminate some traditionally feminine qualities from the city, he also seeks to eliminate many masculine qualities as well. Moreover, while he tries to make guardian women more like men in some respects, he simultaneously aims to make guardian men more like Greek women in important ways. Regarding the second point, we argue that this project of reimagining gender norms is illuminated by Plato's psychology, but instead of emphasizing reason and appetite, we show how his views are connected to his account of the third, “spirited” part of the soul, thumos, and its dual hard/soft or aggressive/gentle nature. (shrink)