CLST/WSGS 295-WI: Women in the Classical World Fall Semester 2009 Dr. Jacqueline Long

Study Questions

Questions about upcoming readings generally flag text I expect will be important in class discussions. Questions referring back to class discussions tries to pick up threads from important issues I expect us to be discussing. But the questions do not merely summarize our discussions (summary is a worthwhile, but different, kind of studying), nor do they necessarily forecast exam questions very closely. Rather, they invite you to develop interesting lines of thought. One thing exams will ask you to do is to discuss specific ideas about Classical Greek and Roman women in terms of concrete evidence in our course material. Therefore you will find it useful, as you think about even very wide-ranging questions, to identify specific pieces of evidence in the material we are covering that help demonstrate your observations and prove your insights, and to be able to explain clearly just how those pieces of evidence validate the conclusions you draw.

file in progress - perennially

The study questions in this file will be updated through the course of the semester from study questions used the last time this course was taught, when it made a slightly different arrangement of the material. Dates and emphases will be updated to fit the current class. Not that the old questions aren't still worth thinking about, just that you should double-check again later.

Monday 24 August

• For convenience of reference, be sure you comfortably recognize the distinction between:
  • "sex" and "gender"
  • "difference" and "diversity"
  • "primary sources" and "secondary sources"
• Again for general reference (we will introduce relevant specifics when we come to them), loosely trace the trajectory of "Classical" culture through the main periods in which its development is conventionally studied: Bronze Age; Archaic; Classical Greek; Hellenistic; Roman. (Later we'll break "Roman" down into Regal; Republican; Early Imperial; Later Imperial.)
• What challenges can we expect our evidence to pose to our endeavor to learn about women in the Classical world?

• Hesiod's Theogony is a complex text that presents a wealth of detail relating to many things besides the capacities and roles of female beings as Classical tradition conceived of its mythological origins. Don't get swamped! Read for a general impression of the work as a whole.
  • What story, overall, is this text telling?
  • What processes of generation are used? Can "male" and "female" sex be distinguished in these processes? How? What considerations sometimes complicate the distinctions?
• Focus in particular on the following characters.
  • Who are they? Even more important, what kinds of information does Hesiod give you so as to tell you "who" these characters are?
  • How do they each come into being?
  • How do they each contribute to advancing the story-line? What do they do, or what actions happen surrounding them? What kinds of powers do they utilize? What objectives do they pursue?
  • What patterns of action emerge in connection with them?

    Gaia

    Aphrodite

    Zeus

    Metis and Athene

Wednesday 26 August

• What acts identify figures in Hesiod's Theogony as female? What relationship does the ascription of these acts to female divinities bear to observable real-world facts about female humans or animals? the real-world entities with which Hesiod's divinities are identified? What does ascribing a female identity to Earth, Night, etc., do for the way the Theogony prompts its audiences to perceive female humans or animals - and for the way the Theogony prompts its audiences to perceive elements of the natural world?
• Besides biological characteristics such as the capacity to generate life within the female body, what other traits does the Theogony identify with female gender? What conceptions about gender does the Theogony articulate and reinforce for its audiences? Be able to support and explain your answers in terms of specific examples.

• Strunk and White's "Elementary Rules of Usage" and "Matters of Form" are standards of American prose writing. Make sure your habits conform.
• General point of reference: what times and places are at issue when we refer to "Archaic Greece"?
• What types of evidence do we possess about unmarried women in Archaic Greece? What sort of activities does this evidence associated with unmarried women? Begin to compare and contrast to the conceptions associated with female divinities in Hesiod's Theogony.
• What indications does Alcman's poem give of the performance it prompts readers to think it received? Who participated? What concerns seem to engage the participants' interests?

Friday 28 August

• Identify specific primary-source evidence we can use to learn about how the Archaic Greek world, overall, viewed young, unmarried women. Look for patterns.
  • What types of sources are available?
  • To what perspectives on young women do these sources give access?
  • What indications about young women's identities and experience do the sources give? Do different sources or kinds of sources give very different information - if so, what factors may cause the differences? Do common elements between different sources of kinds of sources give us license to generalize?
• In what spheres of activity did young women normally engage? From what types of activity were they normally protected? What special occasions legitimated what kinds of activity in what additional spheres? How did age, marital status, social class, and wealth affect women's activity and how it was regarded? Identify specific sources for your information and compare and contrast the information of different sources.
• What connections to a wider community than their immediate families did women (apparently, normally) have? What did they do that recognized these links?
• When and why was eroticism appropriate?

• What persona does Sappho create as the fictive "self" in Poem 1 (L&F³ 1: not actually a fragment, but the one poem of Sappho whose text survives complete)? Who is she? What does she want?
• Whom does the fictive "self" address in Sappho's Poem 1? What information does the poem give about the relationship she and "Sappho" have had in the past? What information does the poem give about how they feel about one another and are prepared to behave toward one another now?
• Compare and contrast Sappho, Poem 1, with Alcman, fr. 1.5-101 (L&F³ 401): what imagery, characterizations, and themes do these poetic texts share? In what elements do they differ?
• Applying Koeller's template for analyzing primary sources to Sappho, Poem 1, as far as possible, what information does the poem give you that enables you to contextualize, classify, understand, and evaluate the poem as a source? What information do you need to get from outside of the poem itself?

Monday 31 August

• How does Sappho's Poem 1 fit in to traditions of invocations of a divinity (kletic hymns)? celebrations of the powers of a divinity (aretalogies)? ideas about sexual and emotional desire?
• What evidence does Sappho's Poem 1 provide about Archaic Greek ideas about gender in each of the above connections?

• Extend the consideration of concerns Sappho raises in her poetry from what you began with Poem 1 now also to fragments 16, 31, 44, 94, 96 (L&F³ 2-6).
  • What experiences, emotions, and relationships does Sappho assign to the fictive "self" of her poems? How consistent is this profile from poem to poem?
  • How does the fictive "self" of Sappho's poems connect with the others she addresses? What experiences and what concerns does each poem expect the poet-persona and the addressee to share?
  • What concerns with other forms of poetry can you identify in Sappho's poems?
• Prepare Source-Exercise 1 for class Wednesday 9/2.

Wednesday 2 September

• What evidence do Sappho's poems provide of an Archaic Greek female emotional world? Be able to describe this world in concrete, specific terms (what sort of characters populate this world? what do they do? what do they care about? what do they say?) and to explain what details in the poems support your description.
• How does Sappho position herself, as a poet working in lyric monody, in relationship to other genres of poetry, such as hymn, heroic epic, and choral lyric? What forms of discourse does she borrow from other literary genres? How does she make them her own? How does Sappho's appropriation of some elements of other genres' conventional practice serve to suggest ideas about systems of values with which she personally and "her" genre conventionally are concerned?

• Besides unmarried women, what other categories did Archaic Greek culture generally recognize women as occupying? How are the categories defined (e.g., by life-stage, activity, social class apart from sex and gender - what other considerations also seem to have been regarded as significant in classifying female identities)?
• What forms of evidence are available? What techniques can make the evidence yield useful insight to our inquiry? What considerations should inform our use of the evidence?
• What concerns seem to have been most important in shaping women's lives, within each recognized category: what interests did Archaic Greek societies generally take in women's lives in their different categories? What did people generally try to do about these interests?

Friday 4 September

• Be able to identify specific sources, textual or material, representational or functional, that indicate how Archaic Greek societies thought about female persons' identities and social interactions, and be able to explain how the source reveals underlying concepts.
• What anxieties were typically directed at young women: what vulnerabilites did Archaic Greek society identify and worry about protecting? What considerations protected young women in socially "safe" zones?
• What ideals did Archaic Greek society typically attach to a woman's role in marriage? What responsibilities did a wife typically bear? What understandings of women's capacities and what expectations for women's choices operated within a wife's responsibilities?
• What responsibilities did Archaic Greek women typically enact to larger communities beyond their natal or marital families? How did cultural understandings of women's capacities for action or their vulnerabilities function in these publicly-oriented responsibiities of women?
• What capacities were women recognized by Archaic Greek culture as having, that made them seem especially suitable for duty as mourners? What anxieties and confidences about death and life are reflected?

• Compare and contrast the overall emphasis of Hesiod's Works and Days to that of his Theogony: what is the central concern of each poem? What does this focus imply about the ways the poem can be expected to relate to Archaic Greek cultural attitudes about human women?
• Compare and contrast how Hesiod relates the myth of Pandora in Works and Days to how he tells the myth in Theogony.
  • In each poem, how does the myth relate to the status of gods and humans in the cosmos, and to the relationships between these groups?
  • What ideas about human women does Pandora illustrate in each poem?
• Compare and contrast other things Hesiod says about human women in Works and Days to what he says about Pandora: how does he envisage men and women operating in relationship to one another in the real world?

Wednesday 9 September

• Godly does not mean "having the quality of being a god." Godly does not mean "god-like." Godliness is a human quality: piety. (The adage "cleanliness is next to godliness" means that having appropriate religious and spiritual values and habits is more important than having appropriate physical personal habits, but that the two sets of good habits are nonetheless both very high priorities in making it possible to live with you. It would be silly to say that you become nearly divine by keeping yourself well bathed.)

• What does Hesiod identify as the basic facts of women's existence? Be ready to cite specific passages on which you base your conclusions, and to explain how they support your ideas.
  • What is a woman for: why can't a man live without her?
  • What features of a woman's existence and function inevitably, even in the best of all possible human fortunes, make her disadvantageous for the man who can't live without her: why can't he live with her, either?
• Analyze how Hesiod tells the myth of Pandora in Theogony and in Works and Days. What elements of the story correspond to ideas he identifies as basic facts of human existence? How does the story interpret those ideas? Consider both misogynistic judgments included in the tale and more positive ideas.
• What real-life activities and roles of women does Hesiod reflect in Works and Days? What advice does he deliver to his male audience about dealing with women? What anxieties about women does he reflect, and how does his advice address the anxieties?

• What activity is being represented in Archilochos, P. Colon. 7511? Who are the persons involved, and how do they relate to one another? How does the language of the poetic fragment convey this idea?
• Note the different "types" of woman Semonides lists in his Poem 7? To what does he compare them? How do the qualities correlate?

Friday 11 September

• What different jokes can potentially be read from Archilochos, P. Colon. 7511? Trace how social values relating to women, men, sexuality, and gender operate on each joking scenario you identify.
• What different jokes can potentially be read from Semonides 7? Trace how social values relating to women, men, animals, sexuality, gender, and literary ingenuity operate on each joking scenario you identify.
• Apart from the poems' value as humor, what activities or characteristics of women are objects of approval in Archilochos, P. Colon. 7511 and Semonides 7? what activities or characteristics of women are objects of disapproval? Compare and contrast these values to other ideas about women that we have identified as circulating in the Archaic Greek world.

• What relationships does the Homeric Hymn to Demeter depict as involved in the ultimate formation of a union between Hades and Persephone? How does the Hymn depict the members of those relationships: what do they each initially identify as their own interests and responsibilities? what happens over the course of the hymn's story to challenge their initial identifications? how is a new arrangement arrived at?
• How does the Homeric Hymn to Demeter depict Demeter's interests in children - both Persephone and Demophon? With each of them, what does Demeter desire? what does she do?
• What ritual practices of humans are authorized within the course of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter? In what of them is gender involved? In what of them is gender not apparently at issue?

Monday 14 September

• As the Homeric Hymn to Demeter uses mythological storytelling so as to explore common Greek presumptions about social relations concerned in a marriage, what tensions does the Hymn identify for the different parties involved? How do different rights and obligations come into conflict? How are the tensions resolved: who presses whom to give something, how is the pressure exerted, and what accommodations effect a new balance?
• What rights, obligations, and resources for the parties of the Hymn are specific to their being gods? What elements of the gods' circumstances in the Hymn have equivalents for humans party to a human marriage being formed? How can you connect other ancient evidence we have seen to what the Hymn suggests about marriage and the parties concerned in putting a marriage together?
• In what senses could Demeter-Doso's relationship with Demophon serve as some kind of replacement for the relationship the abduction of Persephone severed for Demeter? If Demeter had achieved this replacement, rather than being interrupted, what problems does the Hymn suggest the replacement could create? What importance does the Hymn suggest human mortality has for the relationship of a mother and a child? What other ideas and values concerned with motherhood (both Demeter's and Metaneira's motherhoods as specific instances of motherhood in general) does this part of the Hymn suggest?
• What recognition for their importance and abilities as divinities does the action of the Hymn secure for Demeter and for Persephone - from other divinities and from humans?
• In what ways can you apply the Hymn to connect ideas about gender to Demeter and Persephone and each one of their being the specific divinity she is, with the authority she has? Be able to explain how the Hymn supports the connections you draw.

• What ideas and practices seem to have made Spartan women's lives different from the lives of other Greek women? What in their lives seems to have been similar to other Greek women's experience? What is our evidence?
• What ideals about women, and about society generally, did ancient accounts of Spartan women uphold? How sympathetic to the Spartans' ideology of women's lives do Xenophon and Plutarch appear to be, as they report about Spartan women?

Wednesday 16 September

• What is meant by the term polis, and why is it an important concept if you want to think about how ancient Greeks defined their own identity (men especially, but women too)?
  • How was the polis contrasted with the oikos (household) and thought of as being a distinctively "male" enterprise? How would such thinking about the polis promote the idea that the oikos was a distinctively "female" enterprise? (Note, even though ancient Greeks made this dichotomy, they also recognized female roles within the polis and male roles within the oikos: don't let them push you into over-schematizing!)
  • How could thinking about differences between the societies and cultures of different poleis (plural of polis) interpenetrate thinking about gender-differences? In particular, how did other, non-Spartan Greeks' thinking about Sparta use their own cultures' presumptions about women and gender in order to construct images of "Spartan womanhood"?
• Distinguish from one another, then compare and contrast to one another, ideas about the relationship of [Spartan] women and wealth or luxury that are presented by Alcman, Xenophon, Aristotle, and Plutarch (among others).
  • How much could this author know about the realities of Spartan women's lives?
  • What considerations, besides a desire to represent reality or perceived reality, might make this author present the interpretations of Spartan women's relationship to material luxury that he does? For example, how could this author's assertions serve as a critique of social values laid on gender? of social values laid on pleasure? of social values laid on materialism?
  • How can we combine evidence from different sources in order to judge what other cultures' ideological projections may reflect about the realities of Spartan women's lives and the ideologies amidst which Spartan women lived?
• Be able to analyze how specific remarks and attitudes placed in Spartan women's mouths by the anecdotes Plutarch collected support supposedly "Spartan" ideologies. What do they say? How does the remark promote a value? How does the idea the remarkers were women, not men, relate to the ideological significance of the anecdotes?
• Xenophon and other ancient non-Spartan authors identified eugenics as a crucial motive behind Spartan cultural and social practices regarding women which they considered odd: why would they think eugenics was a plausible explanation for oddity? what other effects of the practices or motivations for them can you discern, from a modern perspective? What considerations make your alternative analysis plausible? How can you decide which analysis, Xenophon's and Plutarch's or yours, might reflect Spartan realities more accurately - what other ancient evidence is relevant?

Review your reading, your notes, the Study Questions in this file, the Study Guide for Exam 1, and in short all material assigned to date, for Exam 1 on Friday.

• What are major concerns we have been focusing on? What are important ideas in our sources that relate to women and gender in the Classical world? What pieces of evidence, textual or material, especially well illustrate important concepts and patterns of understanding? These key items will be good things to refer to, supporting your interpretations, as you explain your ideas on your exam.
• What types of analysis have we brought to bear on Classical sources of cultural and social practice relating to women? You can apply techniques of analysis we have used on one source to another source, and get still more out of it. On the exam, you should explain clearly how the evidence you are citing helps to support your insights.
• Study Questions in this e-file flag important issues within the material we are studying. Typically they are fairly open-ended: they encourage you to think through the implications of our material, and explore the connections you find. Exam questions will suggest a tighter focus, in the interests of being possible to answer within the confines of an in-class exercise. But if you have been thinking about the issues raised by class discussions and the study questions, and noting passages of our texts that provide important evidence, you will be well prepared to write concrete, specific, persuasive essays on the exam.
• Assessment on the exam relates to your familiarity with the material to the extent that you need to know what you're talking about in order to say meaningful things about it. And you do have to make clear what you're referring to, in order to get your argument across. But the main emphasis of the assessment will be on the skills of critical thinking in the realm of societal and cultural knowledge and on your effectively communicating your knowledge, ideas, and reasoning. Be sure to distinguish clearly between what the source "says" (in words or otherwise, for material evidence) and what it means, why it matters that it "says" what it "says" - then explain how reasoning takes you from one to the other.

Friday 18 September

• CONGRATULATIONS! You have completed the first examination.
• Keep thinking about the exam questions: in an even-more-perfect world, what more could you say about these topics?

• Small point of definition (p. 69): what is meant by "Classical" Athens?
• What new kinds of evidence are available for women in Classical Athens, compared to the evidence for women in Archaic Greece or Spartan women? What kinds of information do our sources give? From what perspectives? For what sorts of bias or incompleteness will we have to be on the lookout? How do more-or-less fictional literary works of this period (such as Classical Athenian tragedy or comedy) connect with contemporary concerns about women and gender in daily life?
• What roles and activities do our sources for Classical Athens identify for women? Distinguish familial/domestic roles and activities (such as care for the household, or mourning for family members) from public roles and activites (such as religious activities) - but then also note where private and public spheres of women's activity overlapped. Compare and contrast to the evidence for women in Archaic Greece or for Spartan women.
• Admittedly, our sample is a tiny one, but as far as it goes what qualities, activities, and relationships of women got commemorated publicly in the form of inscriptions? Who did the commemorating? When? What attitudes and values do these inscriptions reflect?

Monday 21 September

• How did Classical Athens' political ideology correspond to its production of preservable records of discourse about civic, social, humanistic, and other shared concerns of male citizens -- including women? How might the (comparatively) egalitarian participation of male citizen Athenians in public life correlate to Athenian norms for women?
• In what ways did Athenian women participate in the shared life of the whole Athenian community, directly or indirectly? What communities of women can be recognized at Athens? How do they correlate to the Athenian state? to women's domestic concerns?
• When are the pieces of evidence we have from Classical Athens reporting women's acts and existence, and when are they recommending norms for women's conduct? For what other purposes beyond factual reporting could woment's conduct be invoked in Athenian public discourse?

• Trace how Euripides' play emphasizes themes of difference in telling the story of Medea's failed marriage to Jason.
  • What characters and what characteristics are identified as foreign or barbarian? What characters and characteristics are identified as native or Greek? (Special for Athenian audiences of a play set in Corinth but written for performance at Athens, does Euripides let you achieve a measure of comfort with the disturbing subject matter because the story is set somewhere else?)
  • What distinctions are drawn between the experience of women and of men? Who draws them? Do different characters draw different distinctions? Does the same character ever draw different distinctions at different times, and if there is a change, what seems to cause it?
• How does Medea define her relationship as a wife? What responsibilities does she see herself as having undertaken, and what rights does she expect to enjoy? Why? How differently does Jason define their relationship - what ideas form the basis of his understanding and expectations?
• How does Medea see her relationship as a mother? How does she value her affection for her children? Do not rely on inference, but very carefully trace exactly what she actually says - especially on highly charged topics, you need to be sure you do not import cultural values from another time and place before you understand social interactions in their own context. Once you have established a contextualized understanding, then you can re-evaluate the action from other perspectives. It is good that you should examine ethical questions from different vantages. Just keep straight which perspective is which, and how far it extends.
• Trace over the course of the play how the Chorus evaluates Medea. What considerations function uppermost in their minds at different times? How do they relate their own experiences and general, normative, Classical Greek social values to Medea and her actions?

Wednesday 23 September

• Trace how Euripides connects and contrasts differences of gender (female and male) and differences of culture and ethnicity (Greek and non-Greek, a.k.a. "barbarian"). When do characters shift from reacting to one kind of difference, to the other? How valid does the text of the play as a whole suggest the connections they make really are? Identify specific points of reference in Medea and in the rest of your knowledge of ancient Greek culture that illuminate what Euripides is suggesting to his audience.
• In what ways does Medea define for the Chorus -and the Athenian audience- a concept of heroism for women, comparable to conventional heroic ideals Greek cultural traditions applied to men? Draw the comparisons, and identify the points of similarity and difference.
• To what extent does the Chorus accept the idea that Medea is a talismanic figure for women generally?
  • Why do these women accept it, to the extent that they do? What expectations do they form on the basis of this acceptance: what do they feel Medea will do for them, by avenging herself on Jason?
  • At what point does the Chorus cease to accept it, and why: what line do these women draw between Medea's position and what they will endorse? What considerations explain the difference?
• What considerations govern Medea's thinking, especially on the points that make her evaluate her plans differently from how the Chorus evaluates them? What principles does she build her ideas of marriage upon? Compare and contrast Medea's position on marriage also to Jason's: what conventional ideas about the marriage-union does he hold up for the action of the play to shoot down?

• Continue considering the range of evidence Women in the Classical World identifies for the women of Classical Athens. What types of discourse from this place and time related to conceptions of women and gender? How do the aims of different kinds of discourse affect the kinds of information they can yield?
• What different types of women were recognized by Classical Athens and the discourses conducted there then? What values and expectations were attached to women as opposed to men? What values and expectations were attached to different groups of women - in what ways did a woman's particular status in Classical Athens' social grid affect how gender operated in her case?

• What facets of women's activities and experience were subject to regulation by law, at Athens and elsewhere, in the Classical Greek world? Distinguish which regulations applied to which communities.
  • What concerns of the regulating community are apparent in their regulations?
  • One caveat: the fact an activity is not subject to regulation may mean that it proceeds so uncontroversially in the community that no-one ever has seen the need to regulate it, or that we don't happen to be looking at the relevant section of the community's legislation, rather than that no constraints apply in practice.
• What elements of their households do Pasion (L&F #78) and Aristotle (L&F #79) make provision for in their wills? What considerations are apparent in the provisions they make? Compare and contrast to regulations identified as law at Athens, the community in which both wills are recorded.
• What expectations does the speaker of L&F 88 indicate he brought to his marriage? What facts changed his prior expectations, over the history of the tale he tells? When he cites laws, how do they relate to his own status as the defendant of a murder-trial?

Friday 25 September

• What ideas about women and their place in the family are reflected in the regulations various Classical Greek city-states articulated as their laws? What activities and potentialities of women, in the "private" sphere, were important to the "public" community as a whole? Why? What additional considerations, besides the women's sex and gender, entered in to regulation about women?
• What challenges does Euphiletos face in arguing that his killing his wife's lover did not amount technically to murder? What expectations and social attitudes relating to women does he invoke in order to help present his own character in a favorable light? What use does he make of laws relevant to his case - and how does he twist his interpretation of these laws from the significance the legislators presumably intended?
• What stake in a family did Athenian women have, on the evidence of Athenian laws of intestate succession to family property? What was an epikleros? What did her inheritance of family property do for her? What interests of her own were protected, and how?
• When Athenian property-holders left wills, how did they provide for female members of their families, both in disposition of property and in other ways? How did a woman's connection with the family affect the way property could be left to her, as opposed to men who were not related by blood to the will-maker?

• What facets of women's experience are reflected in the poems of Corinna, Praxilla, and Erinna? What connections can you draw between these poems and other material we have studied?
• What activities of women are commemorated on this sample of inscriptions?
• In what relationship to the state does the authorizing decree establish the priestess of Athena Nike?
• What types of items are women recorded as having dedicated as offerings, in this sample of inscriptions? To what extent do the fact of the dedicators' being women, the specific nature of the divinity and shrine, and other considerations -what gets considered?- each seem to have helped determine the kinds of items dedicated?

Monday 28 September

• Why did information about women's work get recorded in the form that it did? How do the motivations for recording the information connect with the information itself, to give a fuller picture of how the world of work involved women at Athens in the Classical period? Our reading for today has included manumission-records, epitaphs, dedications.
• Why did information about women's religious activities get recorded in the form that it did? How do the motivations for recording the information connect with the information itself, to give a fuller picture of how religious observance involved women at Athens and elsewhere in the Classical period? Our reading for today has included dedications, temple-inventories, ritual protocols, cure-records, a decree authorizing a new civic cult, setting up its precinct, and arranging for its temple and priestess.
• What cultural information is reflected in the work (preserved, alas, only very partially) of three female poets who wrote during the Classical period, Corinna, Praxilla, and Erinna? How did these poets connect their work to traditions of other poetry? How did they connect their work to their experience as women, or to values relating to gender?

• What was the relationship between Alce and Euctemon? How does the prosecution allege that Alce used her influence over Euctemon?
• What is Neaera's past profession alleged to have entailed? Why is it being aired in court? What relevance does it have to current events?
• What attitudes towards prostitutes are expressed in items 286, 287, and 288? What other attitudes do the expressors appear to be combating?
• Prepare the Problem-paper for class T 2/26

Wednesday 30 September

• What considerations framed Classical Athenian thinking about prostitution: under what conditions, within or outside what boundaries, was this business not problematical, somewhat uncomfortable, or not socially acceptable? How does this ordering of thought about the business of prostitution help to illuminate Classical Athenian core values regarding family life?
• Compare and contrast how "respectable" women -even Euphiletos's wife- and "non-respectable" women like Phryne and Neaera are spoken about and even treated in public. What values and ideas regarding women does this difference illustrate that "respect" entailed for Classical Athenians?

• How does Lysistrata plan to stop war? What strengths and weaknesses do the women of the Greek city-states bring to achieving her plan?
• What do the two halves of the Chorus think of one another? What common ideas about men and women do they pick up on?
• How does Lysistrata develop traditional assumptions about gender roles in her argument with the Magistrate?
• What ideas are illustrated by the scenes between Lysistrata and the women on the Acropolis, and between Myrrhine and Kinesias? What do men and women have in common?
• How does Lysistrata resolve the negotiations between the Spartan Ambassador and the Athenian Magistrate? How do gender and sex function in this encounter?

Thursday 28 February

• What usually-derogatory stereotypes about women, and what other conventional male Athenian ideas about women and about human nature, does Aristophanes activate in Lysistrata?
  • How do these ideas serve Lysistrata's plan and the particular commentary this play makes about the Peloponnesian War?
  • How do these ideas serve the broader agenda typically addressed by Athenian Old Comedy?
• What stake does Lysistrata affirm women have in the war? What stakes does Lysistrata affirm women have in the Athenian city-state?
• What social values relating to women and marriage does Aristophanes rely on, so as to make Lysistrata plausible as a comedic fantasy: what can the comedy tell us about Classical Athenian real-life?

• What attitudes, values, and methods of inquiry does Xenophon attribute to Socrates, as he writes about him? What sort of a figure is this literary creation, Xenophon's Socrates, as a lens through which to re-evaluate Athenian attitudes towards women (and other topics)?
• What base-line attitudes, before Socrates' interventions, are exhibited by the men with whom Socrates converses in Xenophon's works in which Socrates figures as a character? What do they do with women? What do they expect women to do? What changes do their conversations with Socrates propose they make? What reasons does Xenophon's text give to justify these hypothetical changes?
• What sorts of thing is Plato's Socrates willing to consider as a basis for making inferences he can apply to the question of women and their abilities? What presumptions are built in to the starting-points he takes for his reasoning?
• What sorts of thing is Aristotle (item 72) willing to consider as a basis for making inferences he can apply to the question of women and their abilities? What presumptions are built in to the starting-points he takes for his reasoning?

Revised 22 September 2009 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/