CLST/WSGS 295-WI: Women in the Classical World Spring Semester 2008 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, with different emphases and a different arrangement of material. If the days are off, it's because the questions haven't yet been checked against the current progress and interests of the class. Not that the old questions aren't still worth thinking about, just that you should double-check again later.

Tuesday 11 March

• Compare and contrast the conclusions Xenophon, Plato, and Aristotle draw about women and their abilities each of them to conventional ancient Greek and particularly Classical Athenian views we have seen in our study-material, and to one another.
  • What basic assumptions does each author make about what male and female persons have to do with one another?
  • What basic assumptions does each author make about how male and female persons are different from one another?
  • What basic assumptions does each author make about any capacity male and female persons both have?
  • What consequences do each author's assumptions create for their pictures of how male and female persons can best interact with one another?

• Sort the primary-source evidence supplied by WCW and our selections in L&F into categories: about what spheres of women's lives do we have evidence from the Hellenistic world?
• How much did ideologies of women's lives shift from the Classical to the Hellenistic period? How did political changes relate to these social changes? Support your arguments from legal documents of "ordinary women" as well as from literature relating to queens and elite women.
• In what ways were the social position and life experience of Hellenistic queens (Berenice II and Cleopatra VII for examples) shaped by the political position of the men in their lives? How much were they influenced by ideologies that applied to women more generally in the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world? How can you tell?

Thursday 13 March

• What time-span and what social and cultural landscape are defined as "the Hellenistic period"? What trends of this time, in the society that called itself "Greek" in some sense, did the most to change these people's cultural experience from what they would have had in the Classical period? Think especially about gender, class, and ethnicity.
• How did royalty, as an institution of political power, change the scope of "public" and "private" life, at least for members of the royal family? Identify specific examples of change within our study-material and be able to discuss distinctive features of the examples.
• How did non-Greek social and cultural practices adopted by Hellenistic ruling populations change women's experience within the period? Identify specific examples of change within our study-material and be able to discuss distinctive features of the examples.
• What social and cultural practices remained consistent from the Classical to the Hellenistic period? Identify specific examples of continuity within our study-material and be able to discuss distinctive features of the examples.

• Compare and contrast the images of women's concerns presented by surviving examples of poetry by female and male authors of the Hellenistic period to one another, and to examples of women's poetry from earlier periods.
  • What similar or different situations are envisaged?
  • What similar or different relationships and interactions are depicted?
  • What similar or different aesthetics inform the poetry?
  • What similar or different social and cultural values are reflected?
• What sort of a social figure did Hipparchia present herself as being? Compare and contrast her behavior to traditional Greek ideas about of women's behavior.
• How was consciousness of the female body reflected in the enterprises and artifacts of the Hellenistic world?

Tuesday 18 March

• Identify trends and be able to discuss specific illustrations, of how the changed social circumstances of the Hellenistic world stand reflected in changed interests and emphases of artistic representations within the Hellenistic world, by comparison with Classical society and art -- especially as artistic representations touched on women and women's concerns. (Consider both visual/material and verbal art.)
• How did Anyte and Nossis in their epigrams develop themes and concerns associated with epigram in earlier periods? How do their works relate to aesthetic developments of the Hellenistic period, more generally? How do their works make declarations for female voices, increasingly publicly in the Hellenistic world?
• What indications do these examples of male-authored poetry give about the parameters of women's lives in third-century Alexandria, when their husbands were not at home? According to what the poets envisage, whom did the women see? Where did they go? What did they do? What did they worry about? How do these texts suggest women experienced their partnership in the home (both economic and parental), the big, busy cosmopolis, commerce, slave-owning, the supernatural - and not-so-supernatural experiences connected with worship, aesthetic pleasure (where did they look for beauty or cultural knowledge, for starters)?
• What objectives do the poets who presented these scenes to their readers seem to have been pursuing? What interests in women's experience do these texts represent? How does the development of these interests correlate with other artistic developments of the Hellenistic world?

• Compare and contrast the images of women's concerns presented by surviving examples of poetry by female and male authors of the Hellenistic period to one another, and to examples of women's poetry from earlier periods.
  • What similar or different situations are envisaged?
  • What similar or different relationships and interactions are depicted?
  • What similar or different aesthetics inform the poetry?
  • What similar or different social and cultural values are reflected?
• What sort of a social figure did Hipparchia present herself as being? Compare and contrast her behavior to traditional Greek ideas about of women's behavior.
• How was consciousness of the female body reflected in the enterprises and artifacts of the Hellenistic world?

Thursday 20 March

• Identify trends and be able to discuss specific illustrations, of how the changed social circumstances of the Hellenistic world stand reflected in changed interests and emphases of artistic representations within the Hellenistic world, by comparison with Classical society and art -- especially as artistic representations touched on women and women's concerns. (Consider both visual/material and verbal art.)
• How did Anyte and Nossis in their epigrams develop themes and concerns associated with epigram in earlier periods? How do their works relate to aesthetic developments of the Hellenistic period, more generally? How do their works make declarations for female voices, increasingly publicly in the Hellenistic world?
• What indications do these examples of male-authored poetry give about the parameters of women's lives in third-century Alexandria, when their husbands were not at home? According to what the poets envisage, whom did the women see? Where did they go? What did they do? What did they worry about? How do these texts suggest women experienced their partnership in the home (both economic and parental), the big, busy cosmopolis, commerce, slave-owning, the supernatural - and not-so-supernatural experiences connected with worship, aesthetic pleasure (where did they look for beauty or cultural knowledge, for starters)?
• What objectives do the poets who presented these scenes to their readers seem to have been pursuing? What interests in women's experience do these texts represent? How does the development of these interests correlate with other artistic developments of the Hellenistic world?

• On what fields of experience did ancient Greek medical texts draw as a basis for their thinking about women? Did the relationship of experience to understanding change over time?
• What conceptions about women, beyond practical experience of women and concerns about women's health, informed ancient Greek medical thinking about women? Did trends and understandings shift over time? Compare and contrast with other material we have considered.

Tuesday 25 March

• If a woman in the ancient Greek or Roman world experienced concerns about her health, what resources would have been available to her? Where did the doctors who wrote medical treatises fit in to the network of practices and understandings about women's being and physical and mental health?
• What real-life observations of women's bodies do the authors of the Hippocratic corpus seem to be using as the basis for their ideas about women's physical being? What concepts governed the way these writers interpreted their observations, in order to develop their theories? Be able to explain concretely what was entailed by Hippocratic theories about the differences between female flesh and male flesh, conception, and menstruation and other activities of the womb.
• What real-life observations -about women and about what else?- did Arisotle use as the basis for his ideas about women's physical being? What concepts governed the way he interpreted his observations, in order to develop his theories? Be able to explain concretely what was entailed by Aristotelian theories about "vital heat" and "concoction", and the consequences these principles entailed for conception and menstruation.
• Be able to explain briefly how Hierophilus, Soranus, Aretaeus, and Galen each built on Hippocratic or Aristotelian elements as they developed their ideas about women's bodies, health, disease, and reproductive functioning. What new information, new interpretations, or new applications of their understandings did these medical writers make?
• Speculative question: how do ideas about what a woman is, physically, relate to ideas about who she can be, as a person?

Review your reading, your notes, the Study Questions in this file and the other file, the Study Guide for Exam 2, and in short all material assigned to date since Exam 1, for Exam 2 on Thursday.

• What are major concerns we have been focusing on? What important ideas about women and gender do our sources present? 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, Hellenistic, and medical 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 and the other 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.

Thursday 27 March

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

• When, according to legendary tradition, was the city-state of Rome founded? Think of how Roman history and social development, especially concerning women, compares to contemporary developments in the Greek world. What contacts did Romans have with other peoples, including Greek ones, in the early period of its history?
• Identify important figures of women in Rome's legends of its beginnings. What ideas about Rome as a nascent community, and about women's place in the Roman community, are implied by these traditional stories? What ideas about Roman society and its gender-values are implied? Consider particularly the legends of the Sabine Women, Tarpeia, Lucretia, and Cloelia.
• What principles organized Roman family life and women's position in Roman families? Be able to define the concepts gens, patria potestas, and manus. How did fertility and child-bearing figure in Roman customs concerning marriage and families?
• In what ways did Roman women participate in religious observances on behalf of the Roman state?

Tuesday 1 April

• Understand the distinction between the verifiable, archaeologically-based account of how Rome first developed as a community, and the stories that Romans told and believed of their pre-history and earliest development.
• How did Romans tie ideas about women and their possible contributions to a people in with their culturally-defining legends of their origins? Be able to trace how gender-values, values of national identity, violence, personal responsibility, and justice come together to shape Roman legendary narratives. What does the way the Romans derived these stories tell you about Roman cultural values?
• How did the authority of the father in Roman families (paterfamilias) shape the family as a social unit within itself, and as a source of identity in Roman public life? What considerations and what social structures moderated men's authority over women within the family?
• In what positions did women participate in the Roman family? Distinguish and consider separately both day-to-day experience and juridical status and capacity for acting at law.

• How did laws attributed to Rome's earliest, legendary kings set up parameters for women's lives? What social and cultural values are implied by these laws?
• What additional refinements in regulationof women's rights and status were introduced when traditional Roman law was codified in the Twelve Tables?
• What other values and principles are reflected in early Roman men's treatment of women - on the basis of things they understood to be within their rights, whether or not those rights had yet been formally codified in laws? Consider the anecdotes recorded by Valerius Maximus, the antiquities recorded (L&F 110) and the speech of Cato extracted by Aulus Gellius, and the protest recorded by Livy.
• What measures did the Roman state enact so as to control the cult of Bacchus? How do considerations of gender figure within this decree?

Thursday 3 April

• How did the texts we read as Rome's earliest legislation actually come to be constructed? What do they represent in the evolution of Roman social practice and national self-image?
• What central concerns about women are reflected in the discourse of Rome's early-traditional legal thought and practice? What presumptions and priorities are reflected in these concerns: what impression do they give of early Roman society and its values? Be able to explain how you go about identifying the concerns from the texts, and how you add up those concerns to form your impression. Topics include regulating fertility, marriage and divorce, property rights - and what else can you identify as important?
• How do the two sides in the debate over the Oppian Law both present themselves as relying on Roman traditions? What impressions of those traditions do the sides each give? What anxieties and what values stand behind the invocations of tradition on either side? Be able to show how evidence supports your analysis.
• Analyze how the measures the Senate enacted against Bacchic cults in Italy add up to show what, exactly, the Senate was most worried about in the practice of these cults. What considerations relevant to women appear within their measures? What other considerations relevant to women can your broader familiarity with early Roman cultural values suggest may have lurked in the back of Senators' minds (identify sources and analysis for the connections you are making).

• How did the political and economic changes Rome underwent in the later Republican period change the range of activities and social roles accessible to Roman women? What new and what old ideologies about women's behavior were enunciated in reaction to these changes?
• Who was Cornelia? To what men important for Roman history was she related? How does the Roman tradition claim (validly or not) that she regarded their political stances? What forms of recognition did the Roman state and historical tradition accord to her?
• What other aristocratic Roman women of the later Republic became, in some sense, figures of public perception? What did individual women do? In what ways was a woman's influence sometimes felt or claimed?
• What work did Roman women outside the aristocracy do, while their men were away fighting Rome's wars?
• What avenues were open to freed slaves, female and male, for social and economic advancement and self-promotion during the later Republic? In what ways did freedpersons put their private lives on public view?
• What constraints shaped the life of a female slave during the later Roman republic?
• What identity did Roman culture assign to Bona Dea, the "Good Goddess"? With what practices of worship did the Romans honor her? What did Clodius do, in 62 BC, to profane these rites?

Tuesday 8 April

• How did Rome's political and economic circumstances change during the second and first centuries BC, and what pressures did these changes exert on Roman society, especially where Roman women were concerned? Identify episodes where long-standing Roman presumptions and anxieties about women became newly prominent.
  • What different trends of Roman thinking about these changes can you identify in our evidence for this period? What presumptions about women, social power, and social orderliness do the different schools of thought each hold, and how can you tell?
  • Trace and explain how parties to these concerns looked to the past (whether they used the real past or an idealized version) in order to claim authority for ideas they were advocating in their present.
• What distinctively Roman ideologies did collective Roman memory suggest that Cornelia internalized? How do anecdotes and other commemoration of her demonstrate these ideologies in action? What competencies and values did Cornelia's life reflect?
  • What does the fact her identity and social significance was appropriated polemically, against the political aims of her son, suggest about Cornelia? about Roman "family values" within Roman politics?

• What acts, what qualities, and what relationships do the funerary inscriptions, L&F 40-42, 254, show deceased women in the Roman world during the first century BC being commemorated for?
• What power do Cicero, Sallust, and Plutarch claim that Clodia, Sempronia, and Cleopatra possessed? How did they each exercise their power in the real world?
• What images does each author attach to the women he is writing about? What, besides the "facts", does he try to suggest about the women and their exercise of power?
• What contemporary concerns about women, power, and social order does each author seem to be responding to in his account of these women: what factors influence him to try to portray the women in the way he does?

Thursday 10 April

• Compare and contrast trends in funerary memorials of the first century BC, at Rome and elsewhere in the Mediterranean, to funerary memorials we have considered from other periods and other specific locations about the Mediterranean. What social and cultural considerations help explain their continuities and changes?
• In what ways did Roman practices of manumission change a former slave's status and capacities? How did a freed person's status, capacities, and relationships differ under Roman law from a free person's status, capacities, and relationships? Why did freed status apparently make funerary memorials an especially important practice for former slaves, and what can their memorials tell us about the conditions of their lives under servitude and after it?
• What first-century BC Roman trends in women's rights, activities, and values are reflected in Murdia's son's memorial of her: the extent of his commemoration is exceptional, but in what ways did Murdia herself fit into broader patterns of Roman social development? Identify trends and the evidence that reveals them, and explain how Murdia connects.
• Compare and contrast what Sempronia and Clodia appear actually to have done (in the Catilinarian conspiracy and in the court-case in which Cicero defends Marcus Caelius Rufus, respectively), to the ideas that Sallust and Cicero, respectively, emphasize in their presentation of these two women. How relevant to the practical considerations at issue are the ideas presented? What ideals and values relating to women do Sallust's and Cicero's portraits nonetheless deploy? Why do they use them?
• What qualities does Plutarch emphasize in his portrait of Cleopatra? What effect does she have on the men around her? How do the characteristics he assigns to her fit in with Greek and Roman ideals? How does Plutarch's characterization of Cleopatra fit with his general picture of Greek and Roman cultural relations?

• Compare and contrast the women and ideas discussed in WCW II.10 with the women and ideas of about the same period, the "end of the Republic" during the first century BC, discussed in WCW II.9. How do the non-eroticized views of women relate to the eroticized images?
• What qualities did the "New Woman" of later first-century BC Rome display? How did Rome's prosperity and respect for education, growing and embracing elite women, contribute to developing the role-model of the "New Woman" (whether a given observer admired or deplored such women)?
• Is Sulpicia a "New Woman"? How does what she says about herself in her poetry fit or not-fit this image?
  • How much does Sulpicia's image of herself as a lover fit the image of the male lover in men's erotic poetry of this general period (Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid), as discussed in WCW II.10?
  • Compare and contrast Sulpicia's portrait of herself and her love, in her six elegies, with Hellenistic and with Archaic Greek women poets and their self-portraits.
• What social crises were provoked by the civil wars of the 40s and 30s BC? Particularly, how did the civil wars and the Triumvirate of Antony, Octavian [later known as Caesar Augustus], and Lepidus (note the names in order to help following the readings) affect women's lives? What dangers did they face? What means did they use to face them?
• How did this period and these women figure in subsequent Roman memory?

Tuesday 15 April

• How truly "new", in Rome of the later first century BC, was the "New Woman" discussed in WCW II.10? Compare and contrast other evidence we have seen for Roman attitudes, values, and social practices relating to women. Identify specific pieces of evidence that relate to the question, and be able to explain what the evidence shows you and how.
  • What patterns of thought did Roman people habitually apply to women's ability to exercise personal choice, especially as it related to their sexuality?
  • What patterns of thought did Roman people habitually apply to women's erudition and ability to appreciate literature?
  • What patterns of thought did Roman people habitually apply to women's ability to control their personal property and economic condition?
• How does Sulpicia adopt and adapt the situations and concerns of Roman love-poetry, as developed by men who wrote during her lifetime, to her own circumstances and unique poetic voice? Identify themes and concerns of first century BC-first century AD male-authored poetry of personal amorous involvements from WCW II.10 and from class discussion, and compare and contrast to Sulpicia's work. How do the male poets and Sulpicia deal with circumstances and values that relate to their sex and gender? with their literary achievement as poets (including the relationship they claim with "classic" erotic poets like Sappho)? with social class? with love, both as a concern of their own feelings and as a situation in which they depend on somebody else's judgment of their worth?
• In the context of Roman political history, to what process and what consequences does the term "proscription" refer? What did the Triumviral proscriptions do for the atmosphere of Roman public life in this period - and what aspects of the women's actions presented by our study-material for today does this context throw into especially sharp relief, even beyond the ordinary expectations of the women's gender in the late-Republican Roman world?
• What other challenges did these women face in this period, and how did they meet them?
• Which of these women's activities in this period, or which aspects of these women's activities, tend to conform to standard gender-expectations of Republican Roman culture, as we have studied it so far? Which of these women's activities, or which aspects of these women's activities, tend to transcend standard gender-expectations? What considerations make these women's departures from standard gender-expectations evaluated favorably or disapprovingly?

• What ideas about marriage and the family did Augustus try to promote, as he sought to steer the Roman state out of the crises of the previous century? (Of course, he took other measures, too.) What means did he use to promote "family values"? How did poets and artists respond?
• How did Augustus endeavor to have female members of his family live examples of his familial ideals? How much did they comply? How did subsequent generations of imperial women conform to, diverge from, and modify Augustus's family program?
• How is the Augustan familial ideology reflected in the lives of other women of this period?
• Compare and contrast the attitudes to Julia and her behavior exemplified by Seneca's and Macrobius's reports of her. On what scale of values is she condemned? On what scale of values does she appear as an attractive figure? In what ways do her virtues and flaws moderate one another?
• What awareness of her own status and role in public life do Julia's reported jokes reflect?

Tuesday 17 April

• Why were marriage and family an important part of Augustus's program for the Roman state? Analyze policies in terms of their practical effects: what could each measure really do? Consider both concrete, material ways the policies were able to advance their objectives and (especially when measures would not be able to advance their objectives materially) indirect ways the policies contributed to a social discourse over related goals.
• How did Augustus use considerations of property and legal control in his legislation to encourage marriage and childbearing? What assumptions about what women can do, and what assumptionas about what women would want to do, do his measures reflect? What extensions of women's rights did this legislation grant, on what conditions?
• What traditional considerations of how social class might relate to marriage did Augustus's legislation enshrine? How far did this legitimation extend, and where did Augustus's legislation draw the line and not permit such considerations to bar marriages? How does this legislation, with its prohibitions and permissions, endeavor to change social practice about class and marriage?
• How did Augustus's legislation about marriage and childbearing change the boundaries of "public" and "private" life?
• What considerations made Julia's fecundity and marital fidelity (or not) public concerns, rather than just sources of pride or shame for her family in a private way?
• How did Julia react to public scrutiny of her chastity and comportment? What critiques of her father's government and its aims did her reported jokes make? How did she use generally-accepted social codes to subvert what he was trying to make her do as a public figure?

• How were ideals of women's behavior perpetuated within the Roman world of the later first and subsequent centuries AD? What ideals were most emphasized? How was the degree to which a royal or noble woman lived up to these ideals considered to relate to her husband and to men's public concerns?
• Who was Julia Domna, and why did Dio Cassius consider her a particularly remarkable woman?
• What political power were royal and aristocratic women able to exercise in the high and later Roman empire? How did they do it? How were they commemorated for doing it?
• What concerns and social values does Pliny "the Younger" (as opposed to his uncle, who was suffocated by the fumes of Vesuvius's eruption in 79) put on display in his letters (our selections from a large corpus, L&F 243-247, 262-263)?
• Compare and contrast the lives of less wealthy or less well-born women to royal and aristocratic women - consider the selected primary-source documents selected in L&F as well as the interpretations and summaries of WCW:
  • What material conditions and what social conditions did these women face?
  • In what range of activities did these women engage, privately or professionally? How did their material and legal status shape their lives?
  • How much did elite ideologies carry over to women of lower status? In terms of what ideals were their lives measured by the people they encountered?
• Compare and contrast the lives of non-Roman women who interacted with the Roman world of the high and later empire with the lives of Roman women of this period. How did their gender relate to the activities they pursued and the impact they had on Romans?

Tuesday 22 April

• Identifying and discussing specific concrete examples, trace how themes emphasized in the public presentation of imperial women, including rhetoric, coins and monuments, imperial acts of beneficence (what else?) not only portray the women themselves in certain ways but also imply ideas about the emperors with whom they have intimate relationships. How did Roman concerns with the nature of imperial monarchy help shape the high-imperial ideology of women's conduct?
• Compare and contrast the ideology of personal relationships presented in the context of imperial marriages of the High Empire, with the ideology reflected, for example, by the correspondence of Pliny the Younger. How closely did imperial and other elite marriages correspond in this period, at least as far as ideology paints them? How might such relationships have felt to their partners?
• Identify pertinent examples, and be able to discuss in concrete detail, how regional social and cultural practices (for example, practices in treatment of the dead) within the geographical territory of the Roman Empire could persist and intersect with practices and values of the politically and administratively dominant Greek and Roman cultures. How far do these bodies of evidence about specific practices authorize us to generalize our understanding about women within the space and time of the high Empire?
• Compare and contrast evidence for women's work beyond their own private households, during and across the high Empire, with evidence we have seen for earlier periods in the same geographic areas: have patterns changed? What sorts of finacially-compensated work do we see women doing?
• Compare and contrast evidence for women's activities of domestic management with evidence we have seen for earlier periods: have patterns changed? What sorts of concerns do we see women engaged with?
• How does the emergent institution of the Christian church change dynamics of social concerns with which women could be engaged: what new sources of social authority become elements in social relations of the high and later Empire?
• How did legal changes of the high Empire affect women's (and men's) citizenship in the Roman Empire? How did other legal changes of this period cause women's (and men's) social status to affect how they could expect to be treated under Roman law?

• Vibia Perpetua, daughter of an upper-class Roman family in the Roman province of Africa, was executed in the arena in Carthage on 7 March 203. The account of her martyrdom (technically called a "Passion") is one of the earliest pieces of writing by a Christian woman.
• What events happen to Perpetua?
• Before whom is Perpetua empowered to make her case? How does she set about making it?
• What relationships are important to Perpetua? Which ones does she consider more important, which less important? What principles inform her choices?
• What position does Perpetua seem to hold within the community of her fellow-martyrs? For what reasons?
• What information can you gather identifying Praetextatus and Paulina in connection with their marriage and what they each mean to one another personally, and in connection with their various religious activities and what those activities mean to them each. For Praetextatus, distinguish also secular civic offices, official positions in state cults, and positions of rank in private, "Eastern" religions.

Thursday 24 April

• Briefly trace how elements of diversity figured in the development of Christian communities during the first three centuries of the "common era": ethnicity, class, and gender. For what social reasons did upper-class males not tend to embrace this new faith?
• What forms of social organization common in this early period of Christian development figure in Perpetua's and Felicity's experiences? How do class, gender, education, wealth, and service-activity figure in relationships between Christians? How do these factors figure in relationships between the Christian group and non-Christian? How do members of the Christian group get access to social power, within the group or on its behalf, beyond it?
• What did Perpetua's father and the governor Hilarian expect of Perpetua in view of her gender, her position as daughter of an upper-class Roman citizen, and the death-sentence she faced as a Christian? Can you tell which factor influences various expectations the most? How? How far does Perpetua conform to the men's expectations: how much does she feel governed by the values traditionally associated with her gender and social class, and how much does she feel that her religion changes her values?
• In what ways do Perpetua's and Felicity's relationships with other Christian support, weaken, or replace family ties? Be able to identify and to discuss specific instances.
• Compare and contrast how Fabia Aconia Paulina is presented on the three monuments L&F's selections represent. What social relations are highlighted? What ideas about Paulina, her character and her stature, do they imply? How do the ideas fit into cultural patterns we have seen among Romans at earlier periods: how "traditional" a Roman matron was Paulina?

Review your reading, your notes, the Study Questions in this file and the other file, the Study Guide for the final examination, and in short all material assigned to date, for the final examination next Friday. The exam will focus on material we have covered since Exam 2, but you may find interesting comparisons, among study-material or lines of thought we developed in studying, from the earlier sections of our work.

• What are major concerns we have been focusing on? What important ideas about women and gender do our sources present? 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 Roman cultural and social practice relating to women (in the periods of legend, Republic, Principate, and late Empire)? 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 and the other 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.

Good luck with the exam, and thanks for a good semester!

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Revised 24 April 2008 by jlong1@luc.edu
http://www.luc.edu/classicalstudies/