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When the Roman philosopher Seneca explained the meaning of the phrase “liberal studies” (liberalia studia), he etymologized the Latin adjective liberalis as a term diametrically opposed to the status of enslaved persons, saying these studies are called liberal “because they are worthy of a free man” (quia homine libero digna sunt) (Ep. 88.2). What we today call “classics” also takes root in a form of exclusion and marginalization: the western European Renaissance education of elites.

Some troubling conclusions emerge when one examines Roman-era kidnapping and enslavement through the modern prism of human trafficking. The Forschungen zur antiken Sklaverei project has addressed certain aspects of these issues (e.g. Heinz 2008), while other recent works cover subtopics such as sex-trafficking terms in Latin literature (Richlin 2021, Witzke 2015).

Long before the movie Black Panther, early modern Europeans embraced a different kind of “Black avenger”, one largely constructed by White abolitionists who drew upon select motifs, models, and myths plucked from the annals of Roman history.

The proposed paper builds upon the author’s doctoral research in Queer Theory and the cult of Bacchus within the Late Roman Republic and Early Imperial Period, to advocate the use of Queer Theory in Classics as a model of disruption. The author proposes that by analysing figures from antiquity through a Queer theoretical lens, it is possible to re-evaluate concepts of supposed gender identity through removing normative contemporary expectations of gender.

The purpose of this conference presentation is twofold. First, as a contribution to theory, it builds on recent classics engagements with transgender studies, with the explicit goal of increasing the visibility and inclusion of non-binary, or enby, people in the literature about gender in the ancient Mediterranean.

The aim of this paper is to explain how the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice can be interpreted as a journey to self-knowledge in relation to a transgender identity. The multifaceted readings that have been done of the myth such as a heteronormative romance between a husband and wife or as the origin myth for the birth of homosexuality in Ancient Greek culture, provide space to take this interpretation in yet another direction. Specifically, as a journey towards self-knowledge for a transgender identity.

Passing through a gendered transition period from which he emerges a man and citizen (anēr), caught in a seemingly perpetual state of becoming, the Greek ephebe carries significant resonances for the modern trans masculine individual.

The figure of the tribas in literature under the Roman empire has often been understood as an extremely negative stereotype, developed and directed primarily against female homoeroticism (Hallett [1989=] 1997; Brooten 1996; Skinner 2005; Boehringer 2021), or women who engaged in active, penetrative sexual acts with persons of any sex (Ormand 2005).

In fr. 81 DK, Empedocles says that “wine is water from the bark (?) rotten in wood” (οἶνος ἀπὸ φλοιοῦ πέλεται σαπὲν ἐν ξύλῳ ὕδωρ). This apparently simple definition has received less attention than it deserves. Perhaps the first question that we must address is: What is this “wood”? Modern editors have given two answers: Wright reasonably takes it to be the wood of a cask or vat in which juice is fermented into wine; Gallavotti, Bollack, and Diels say that it is the wood of the vine.

Commentators beginning with Aristotle and Plato described many fifth-century inquirers, including Empedocles and Philolaus, as phusikoi or investigators of phusis. Empedocles and Philolaus both used forms of ‘phusis’ and ‘phuo’ to speak of at least some of the subject of their accounts of what is and of what is right or appropriate.