women

Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics

This text first considers the character of Penelope from the Odyssey as the object of male gazes and as a subject acting from her own desire, and then it develops the notion of “possible plots” as structures in the poem that co-exist with the plots Penelope actually plays out. “This book explores Homer’s construction of the character of Penelope, and his more general theory of poetic production and reception. Read more

In Her Own Words: The Life and Poetry of Aelia Eudocia

In Her Own Words: The Life and Poetry of Aelia Eudocia is the first full-length study to examine Eudocia’s writings as a unified whole and to situate them within their wider fifth-century literary, social, and religious contexts. Responsible for over 3,000 lines of extant poetry, Eudocia is one of the best-preserved ancient female poets. Because she wrote in a literary mode frequently suppressed by proto-orthodox (male) leaders, much of her… Read more

Herodotus on queens and courtesans of Egypt

[This essay was originally published in Herodotus: Narrator, Scientist, Historian , ed. Ewen Bowie, 109–122. Trends in Classics 59. Berlin: de Gruyter, 2018. It is published here with permission of de Gruyter. In this online edition, the original page numbers of the print edition will be indicated within braces (“{” and “}”). For example, “{109|110}” indicates where p. 109 of the print edition ends and p. 110 begins.] [… Read more

Embroidered with Gold, Strung with Pearls: The Traditional Ballads of Bosnian Women

Bosnian traditional ballads have intrigued many by their beauty and eloquence, from Goethe’s poetic interest in them in the eighteenth century to the work of twentieth-century scholars such as Milman Parry and Albert Lord. These songs are now available to the English reader in a bilingual edition offering a selection of never before translated or published materials from Harvard University’s Parry Collection. The forty oral ballads, many appearing in multiple… Read more

Choruses of Young Women in Ancient Greece: Their Morphology, Religious Roles, and Social Functions

New and revised edition, translated by Derek Collins and Janice Orion In this groundbreaking work, Claude Calame argues that the songs sung by choruses of young girls in ancient Greek poetry are more than literary texts; rather, they functioned as initiatory rituals in Greek cult practices. Using semiotic and anthropologic theory, Calame reconstructs the religious and social institutions surrounding the songs, demonstrating their function in an aesthetic education that permitted… Read more

Homeric Variations on a Lament by Briseis

Casey Dué examines the figure of Briseis, the concubine of Achilles in the Iliad, as an example of the traditional artistry enabled by a complex and self-contained oral poetic system. Briseis’ lament for Patroclus in Iliad 19 hints at her role in the larger epic tradition. Dué argues that Briseis’ role in the Iliad is enormously compressed, both in relation to the Iliad and the entire tradition of the epic cycle. Through a… Read more

The Tears of Achilles

Warrior, hero, super-male—Achilles, by the protocols of Western culture, should never cry. And yet Homeric epic if full of his tears and those of his companions at Troy. This path-blazing study by Hélène Monsacré shows how later ideals of stoically inexpressive manhood run contrary to the poetic vision presented in the Iliad and Odyssey. The epic protagonists, as larger-than-life figures who transcend gender categories, are precisely the men most likely… Read more

Sappho in the Making: The Early Reception

This book offers the first interdisciplinary and in-depth study of the cultural practices and ideological paradigms that conditioned the politics of the “reading” of Sappho’s songs in the early and most pivotal stages of her reception. In this wide-ranging synthesis, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis investigates visual representations and ancient texts in their synchronic and diachronic multilayeredness to trace the discursive nexuses that defined the making of “Sappho” in the late archaic, classical,… Read more