Women and Agency

Three documents of the Collectio Avellana’s dossier of the Bonifatian-Eulalian schism of 418-419 are docketed as letters of the Western emperor Honorius, but express their thoughts markedly differently from Honorius’s other letters in the group. Two of the three refer to domni germani mei Augusti principis (Coll.Av. 27.2, 28.3), plainly correcting the docketer: they were written not by Honorius but by his sister Galla Placidia, at that date also a member of Honorius’s court.

In so many Greek and Roman comedies, a slave woman saves the day. Of the surviving plays of Menander, Terence, and Plautus, thirteen involve the reunion of a lost-daughter with her citizen family. Slave women are responsible, intentionally or unintentionally, for bringing about the recognition in ten of these thirteen plays. Focusing on the nurse, Giddenis, in Plautus’ Poenulus, this paper examines why the playwrights imbue characters of such low status with such power.

Pamphila of Epidaurus, a polymath and Greek author of the mid-1^st cent. CE, is now best known as an early miscellanist who influenced the likes of Aulus Gellius and Apuleius (Müller-Reineke, 2006; Klotz and Oikonomopoulou, 2011). Not included by Jacoby in his magisterial Fragmente der Griechischen Historiker (even though she appeared in Müller’s older Fragmenta Historicorum Graecorum (Müller, 1849 vol. 3, 520-1)), Pamphila has received hardly any recognition as a historian (Cagnazzi 1997 is a notable exception).

This paper re-examines the assessment that Roman women were barred from attendance at literary recitations, and, therefore, from participating in one of the most important avenues of intellectual life. Recent work on the education of Roman women and their production of literature (e.g., Hemelrijk (1999) and Shelton (2013)) frequently assumes, with comparatively little discussion, that conventions of feminine modesty would have prevented women from even attending recitationes, let alone presenting their work at these gatherings.

In the opening of the Hippocratic treatise the Peri Partheniōn, the author explains that there are certain fears that people dread so exceedingly that they go out of their minds and behave as if they see hostile daimones both day and night. This affliction can happen to both men and women, though more commonly to women, and it is especially common in young girls of marriageable age who are approaching menarche.

Plutarch has a professed interested in recording women’s speech and women’s deeds, and the women he records often do not fit into the gender expectations set by his predecessors. Yet at the same time, I argue in this paper, Plutarch follows the long-standing literary tradition of not allowing women to speak in their own voice in philosophical dialogues, seen most spectacularly in his dialogues the Amatorius and the Symposium of the Seven Sages.