S&G Classes 2015-16:

essay titles, presentation topics, and passages for guided readings

1. Lovemaking
Essay title: What is love? Illustrate your answer with reference to the prescribed texts.
Presentation: Is Sapphos vision of love distinctively feminine?
Guided reading: Ovid, Ars Amatoria (Loeb)
2. Sexuality and gender in Greek and Roman humour
Essay title: What do comic texts about male-female relations tell us about Greek and
Roman men?
Presentation: Comparing Aristophanes picture of women in the three set plays
Guided reading: Aristophanes, Ecclesiazusae
3. Homoeroticism
Essay: Is Foucault right that homoeroticism was the paradigmatic sexual
discourse in some places and times in the ancient world?
Presentation: Idealizations of homoeroticism in texts and images
Guided reading: Aeschines 1, Against Timarchus
4. The gendered body
Essay: How and why do Graeco-Roman medical theory and practice treat women and
men differently?
Presentation: Creation myths: the invention of gender?
Guided reading: Soranus, Gynaecology (tr. O. Temkin, Baltimore 1956)
5. Masculinities
Essay: What made a man in the Greek and/or Roman world?
Presentation: Why cant a Greek or Roman woman be more like a man?
Guided reading: Sophocles, Philoctetes
6 . Gender at home
Essay: Do our sources allow us to understand anything of womens experience of
domesticity in the ancient world?
Presentation: Visions of a happy home
Guided reading: Aeschylus, Agamemnon
7. Gender at work
Essay: How and why does the epigraphic evidence of womens work differ from
literary evidence?
Presentation: Gender relations at work
Guided reading: [Demosthenes] 59, Against Neaira?
8. Sex, gender and religion
Essay: Did virginity and celibacy empower fourth century men and women?
Presentation: The gendering of martyrdom
Guided reading: Senatusconsultum de Bacchanalibus