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Serious study of ancient Greco-Roman women, informed by feminist theory and the recognition of gender as an important analytical concept, took hold in Germany twenty years ago. Research in ancient history, archaeology and philology initially advanced at different paces. Wagner-Hasel's historiographical investigations into the ideas of matriarchy and oriental seclusion galvanized ancient historians into questioning the idea of public and private in antiquity. German translation in the early 1990s of the works of Loraux and the Histoire des femmes, vol.

Located both geographically and conceptually between the USA and Continental Europe, UK Classics has at times been strongly influenced or revived by approaches coming from parts of Europe: e.g. Germany (philology), France (structuralism). But the poor British record on modern language means that we tend to look toward the USA more.

In North American universities, gender studies rapidly received academic recognition. The social construction of gender in different cultures and historical contexts in its intersecions with race, ethnicity, or ability; the representation of multiple gender identities in various forms of knowledge; the normative discourse on femininity and masculinity; the history and anthropology of sexuality have found a robust institutional legitimacy here.

Since the 1970s North American study of gender in classical antiquity has undergone dramatic changes. Originally focused on representations of ancient Greco-Roman women, it has expanded to include masculinity and sexual identities. Innovative theoretical approaches--from humanities disciplines (narratology, new historicism) and the social sciences (cultural anthropology, linguistics)--have also proven influential, as have the new fields of Queer and Reception studies.

Academic research on women in France developed in connection with the militant feminism of the 1970s, and the social and political advances which resulted. In 1970 H. Cixous created a center of women's studies at Vincennes (Paris 8), where the founder of EuGeStA received her MA in French literature. The current director also oversees the GIS Institut de Genre, a major interdisciplinary project launched by the CNRS (Centre National de la recherche scientifique) in 2011.

As I, and others, have recently argued, the ten books of Symmachus’s letters were published in increments and not in imitation of Pliny’s alleged ten-book epistolary collection. Moreover, Symmachus published Book 1 soon after he left the office of urban prefect in 384. This is one of the first books of letters to have been circulated in the Latin west in the fourth century; and Symmachus published his letters, in my view, to promote his and his family’s prestige and values. Twenty years later, between 402-408, Symmachus’s son, Q.

Many scholars, most recently Whitton, have explored the sympathy between Pliny’s Letters and Tacitus’ works. Tacitus looms large in these studies. As Whitton puts it, “For many readers of Tacitus, Pliny is a convenient but disposable witness” (346). But suppose we could push Tacitus the author to the side and look instead at Tacitus the friend of Pliny. Pliny’s letters to Tacitus are especially concerned with binding their literary legacies together, often manifesting in an atmosphere of “friendly competition” (Griffin 142; Ludolph 80-81; Lefèvre 81).

The function of Pliny’s letters as vehicles for self-representation is now well-traveled scholarly territory, with almost universal consensus that he has his sights set on immortal fame, as he himself readily admits (Ep. 9.3). Achieving and maintaining social and political prominence in Pliny’s time generally required careful balancing of global and local obligations and duties, particularly for elite men who hailed from districts removed from the immediate orbit of Rome.

This paper addresses aspects of epistolarity (Altman 1982) in the letters of Fronto, focusing on one thematic strand, “linguistic competence,” as a form of symbolic capital (Bourdieu 1982). I show how Fronto self-consciously manipulates the flexible, dialogic nature of (didactic) letter-writing to direct the readers’ gaze upon himself as the preeminent, successful tutor (magister) of Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus and as the authoritative commander of the Latin language.

In her seminal article “The Ciceronian Bi-Marcus”, Eleanor Winsor Leach perceptively explores the disorientation that Caesar’s policy of clementia produced on Cicero’s sense of self in 46 BCE. In passing, she notes that Cicero experiences “a kind of symbolic death” in the disordered world of Caesar’s dictatorship (Leach 1999: 162). Cicero had already described his exile as a living death or overliving in letters to Atticus and his family.