Sponsored by the Women's Classical Caucus
Organized by Serena S. Witzke, Wake Forest University, and Sharon L. James, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill
The year 2014 marked the two thousandth anniversary of the death of Julia the Elder, and 2016 marks that of her mother Scribonia, who gave up her safety and pleasures in Rome to spend the remainder of her life in exile with her daughter, whom she had rarely seen. Nevertheless, Scribonia risked Augustus’ displeasure to give her daughter succor in exile. 2017 is a fitting date, then, for considering mother-daughter relationships in antiquity. Much is made of the importance of sons in the passing down of wealth, property, and power and the value of sons to fathers. But mothers and daughters shared a primal bond, in myth, drama, and social history, that defied gods (Demeter and Persephone), marital relations (Myrrhine defying Laches in Menander’s Heros), divorce (Terentia and Tullia), law (Neaira and Phano), and even death (Clytemnestra and Iphigenia). Numerous inscriptions demonstrate the mutual attachment of mothers and daughters. Even the pseudo-maternal lenae of elegy look out for the safety and interests of their young puellae. Violation of the mother-daughter bond is equally intense: see, e.g., Chrysilla running off with her daughter’s husband Callias, mothers and daughters of the Macedonian royal house clashing in both palace and battlefield, the freed slaves Acte and Euphrosynus using their dead daughter Iunia’s tombstone to air their grievances, Cleareta prostituting her reluctant daughter Philaenium in Plautus’ Asinaria, and stepmother Agrippina Minor plotting against Octavia after marrying Claudius.
Mother-daughter relationships have mostly been ignored in scholarship: the lives of women, who did not write and were not major subjects of male writing, are hard to see. The primacy of the father-son relationship eclipses the ties of mothers and daughters, in both ancient materials and classical scholarship. But this female relationship can be found in numerous media (e.g., art, archaeology, literature, philosophy, epigraphy) and approaches (socio-cultural, philological, theoretical) across ancient Mediterranean cultures. We seek abstracts on the mother-daughter bond in antiquity, in its multiform aspects.
Please send abstracts that follow the guidelines for individual abstracts (see the SCS website) by email to Ted Gellar-Goad (thmgg@wfu.edu), by March 1, 2016. Please do not identify yourself anywhere in the abstract, as submissions will be blind-refereed.