Believing Ancient Women: A Feminist Epistemology for Greece and Rome

In modern imaginations, ancient Mediterranean societies are often depicted as both dens of debauchery and as societies with vastly unequal power structures. The combination of these tropes frequently leads to scenes of sexual harassment and assault against women and sometimes men.

This paper examines the inset narrative of Leucothoe’s rape by Sol in Ovid’s Metamorphoses and its relationship to the modern concept of testimonial injustice in the context of dominant Roman cultural ideology about gender and the Roman legal framework. It argues that the narrator of Leucothoe’s rape encourages the audience(s) to assess Leucothoe’s legal culpability for the crime adulterium.

Plautus’ Truculentus and Terence’s Hecyra have the same plot, an ideal locus for examining their authors’ social commentaries on citizen, masculine power and women’s limited ability to assert truth and be believed. They share an unwanted marriage, rape, a baby boy, involvement of citizen women in hiding and disposing of him, angry fathers, and the crucial role of a meretrix’s household in the resolution.

This paper builds on work about violence against women (Llewellyn-Jones 2011, Omitowoju 2016) and women’s use of gossip (Hunter 1990, McHardy 2018) to investigate women’s use of public complaints following acts of violence. I examine the case of Zobia a metic woman in Athens who experienced domestic violence at the hands of Aristogeiton according to Demosthenes’ Against Aristogeiton (25.56-8).

It is widely recognized that Plato holds radical views about women’s intellectual abilities (Annas 1976, Okin 1979, Tuana 1994, etc.). Republic V declares that men and women have the same natures (455d5-6), and that the best women might rule alongside the best men (456a5). Similarly, the standard reading of the Symposium attributes Plato’s own views to Diotima, affirming that some women are as intellectually capable as men.

Io’s prominence in Prometheus Bound and the attention she brings to Zeus’ sexual predation have long been read as underscoring Zeus’ political tyranny (Gagarin, Gantz, Griffith, and Swanson; for a contrary view, see White).