Women in Ancient Literature
- These documents were brought together from various sources to be used in conjunction with the Lehman College course Women in Antiquity (HIA 311).
Primary Source Readings
Aeschylos / from Eumenides
The Book of Esther
Euripides / from The Bacchae
Euripides / from Medea
Gilgamesh, Introduction
Gilgamesh, Tablet 1: The Coming of Enkidu
Gilgamesh, Tablet 2: The Taming of Enkidu
Gilgamesh, Tablet 6: Ishtar and the Bull of Heaven
Herodotos / from The Histories
Hesiod / Theogony
Hesiod / Works and Days
Homer / “Agamemnon’s Insult” (from Iliad)
Homer / “Nausicaa and the Stranger” (from Odyssey)
Homer / “The Artifice of Penelope” (from Odyssey)
Sappho / Selected Poems
“The Birth of Hatshepsut”
Epitaph of Kheredankh, Daughter of Shepmin
Livy / “Cato on the Oppian Law”
Livy / “The Capture of the Sabine Women”
Livy / “The Rape of Lucretia”
Ovid / selections from Metamorphoses
Pliny the Younger / selected letters
Plutarch / “Advice to the Bride and Groom”
Plutarch / “Sayings of Spartan Women”
Plutarch / Roman Accounts of Cleopatra
The Book of Ruth
Sophocles / from Antigone
Theocritus / “The Women at the Adonis Festival”, from Idylls
The Twelve Tables, fragments
Secondary Source Readings
Abusch / “Ishtar’s Proposal and Gilgamesh’s Refusal”
Archer / “Notions of Community and the Exclusion of the Female in Jewish History…”
Archer / “The Role of Jewish Women in the Religion, Ritual, and Cult of Graeco-Roman Palestine”
Arthur / “Early Greece: The Origins of the Western Attitude Toward Women”
Arthur / “The Divided World of Iliad VI”
Bailey / “Initiation and the Primal Woman in Gilgamesh and Genesis 2-3”
Beard / “Re-reading (Vestal) Virginity”
Boatwright / “Women and Gender in the Forum Romanum”
Brock / “Reading Between the Lines: Sarah and the Sacrifice of Isaac (Genesis, Chapter 22)”
Burton / “Women’s Commensality in the Ancient Greek World”
Carp / “Two Matrons of the Late Republic”
Clark / “Roman Women”
Corbier / “Male Power … Through Women Under the Julio-Claudians”
Curran / “Rape and Rape Victims in The Metamorphoses”
Depla / “Women in Ancient Egyptian Wisdom Literature”
Dewald / “Women and Culture in Herodotus’s Histories”
Dover / “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior”
Dowden / “Approaching Women Through Myth: Vital Tool or Self-Delusion?”
Fantham / “Aemilia Pudentilla: Or the Wealthy Widow’s Choice”
Fischler / “Social Stereotypes and Historical Analysis: … Imperial Women at Rome”
Fisher / “Theodora and Antonina in the Historia Arcana: History and/or Fiction?”
Foley / “The Conception of Women in Athenian Drama”
Foxhall / “Women’s Ritual and Men’s Work in Ancient Athens”
Hallett / “The Role of Women in Roman Elegy: Counter-Cultural Feminism”, with responses
Harris / “Inanna-Ishtar as Paradox and a Coincidence of Opposites”
Heath / “Women’s Work: Female Transmission of Mythical Narrative”
Katz / “Ideology and the ‘Status of Women’ in Ancient Greece”
King / “Self-Help, Self-Knowledge: … Patient in Hippocratic Gynaecology”
Lambropoulou / “Some Pythagorean Female Virtues”
Lefkowitz / “Influential Women”
Lesko / “Women’s Monumental Mark on Ancient Egypt”
Marry / “Sappho and the Heroic Ideal”
Nixon / “The Cults of Demeter and Kore”
Ortner / “Is Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?”
Perkell / “On Creusa, Dido, and the Quality of Victory in Virgil’s Aeneid”
Pomeroy / “Infanticide in Hellenistic Greece”
Pomeroy / “Spartan Women among the Romans: Adapting Models, Forging Identities”
Pomeroy / “Women’s Identity and the Family in the Classical Polis”
Robins / “The God’s Wife of Amun in the 18th Dynasty in Egypt”
Roehrig (ed.) / Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh [packet of selected articles]
Roller / “Horizontal Women: Posture and Sex in the Roman Convivium”
Savunen / “Women and Elections in Pompeii”
Segal / “The Menace of Dionysus: Sex Roles and Reversals in Euripides’ The Bacchae”
Slater / “The Greek Family in History and Myth”
Stigers / “Sappho’s Private World”
Thonemann / “The Women of Akmoneia”
Venit / “Women in Their Cups”
Walker / “Women and Housing in Classical Greece: The Archaeological Evidence”
Warren / “The Women of Etruria”
Zeitlin / “Signifying Difference: The Myth of Pandora”
Zeitlin / “The Dynamics of Misogyny: Myth and Mythmaking in the Oresteia”