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Theater of Zoom: Women of Trachis for Frontline Medical Providers

Online Tragedy in a Tragic Time

Envisioning Past Theatre for the Future

The COVID-19 pandemic pushed performers seeking an audience towards web-based platforms. This shift provides a unique opportunity for ancient theatre practitioners to think about how to deliver their ideas for future audiences. Streaming audiences are more likely to be younger and more diverse (Live-to-Digital). Given the challenges to Classics, now seems a particularly crucial time to think about the productive possibilities of presenting ancient theatre in digital formats.

Hecyra in Performance

Under the constraints of a pandemic, few would expect that a student production of Terence’s Hecyra on Zoom would yield any insights into Terence’s stagecraft.  Yet a December 2020 Zoom performance of select scenes of Terence’s Hecyra by students in intermediate Latin delivered insights into Terence’s plot construction, blocking in a video environment, and Terence’s unique use of asides and monologues. 

Why do we think Hippokrates has anything to say about pandemics today? Despite an initial surge in public and academic interest in classical plagues, it has been argued that COVID-19 has presented “limit cases” to the relevance of Classics (Chaudhari & Dexter 2021). Nonetheless, the impulse to compare past and present has become a virus itself, “spreading rapidly along modern channels of communication, turning those infected into dribbling zombies writing op-eds about how current events demonstrate the eternal relevance of Thucydides” and the Athenian plague (Morley 2020).

If identifying enslaved individuals in the epigraphic record is difficult (Chanoitis 2018), identifying
enslaved women is even more challenging. Not only do few primary sources make their status clear, but
due to their intersectional identity as both women and enslaved people (Crenshaw 1991), enslaved
women continue to be overlooked in scholarship that focuses on gender or enslavement. For this reason, I
assert, curse tablets provide an exciting opportunity to access information about this marginalized group.

The goddess Feronia, identified by Varro as Sabine in origin (LL V, 74), is still largely a mystery. A handful of studies have analyzed individual inscriptions naming Feronia or specific cult locations (Torelli 1973; Sanzi di Mino and Staffa 1996), but only a single monograph has been dedicated to her overall archaeological presence in Italy (Di Fazio 2013), and many aspects of her cult remain unknown. This paper focuses on the analysis of Feronia’s female worshippers, through the study of votive inscriptions dating from the 3rd century BCE through the 2nd century CE.

This paper aims to address, through epigraphy, the relationships between gender identities and mobility in Roman Antiquity, with a focus on female mobility in the Western Empire during the Principate. It will analyze the methodology leading to identifying women travelers and migrants in inscriptions, and will show that this documentation, albeit fragmentary, sheds light on female experiences of mobility. Epigraphy reveals that two main factors played on women’ ability, or obligation, to take the road: slave traffic and family migration. 

While most modern scholars would agree that many Roman women worked both in the field and in production (e.g. Becker 2016; Culham 2014: 138–142; Dixon 2004; Groen-Vallinga 2013; Hemelrijk 2016; Holleran 2013; Larsson Lovén 2016; Medina Quintana 2017; Pomeroy 1995: 150–164; Roth 2007; Scheidel 1995, 1996; Treggiari 1976, 1979), very little is known about the lives and identities of ancient working women.

In this paper we present a review of the data and an analysis of gender in the artisanal society known through the epigraphy of stamps on olive oil amphoras from the Roman province of Baetica. The geographical zone studied is the territory of Corduba, capital of the province of Baetica, where more than twenty workshops have benefited from an important renewal of archeological data in last years.