Love and Marriage?

Pseudo-Demosthenes’ Against Neaera

Against Neaera 2

Agenda

Academic Honesty Angelique Jenks-Brown, BU Libraries

Butler or Foucault? Women’s eros in Sappho fr. 31

Athenian Women A Quote Dissected…

Apollodorus’ Against Neaera Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric, Realities

Will the Real Neaera Please Stand up?

2013-10-03

Butler or Foucault?

Women’s eros in Sappho fr. 31

The man seems to me strong as a god, the man who sits across from you and listens to your sweet talk nearby

and your lovely laughter — which, when I hear it, strikes fear in the heart in my breast. For whenever I glance at you, it seems that I can say nothing at all

but my tongue is broken in silence, and that instant a light fire rushes beneath my skin, I can no longer see anything in my eyes and my ears are thundering,

and cold sweat pours down me, and shuddering grasps me all over, and I am greener than grass, and I seem to myself to be little short of death

But all is endurable, since even a poor man ... (Sappho fr. 31)

Butler or Foucault?

“Sexual-Social Isomorphism”

male ~ femalemasculine ~ feminine

penetrator ~ penetratedactive ~ passive

dominant ~ submissivesenior (in status) ~ junior (in status)

moderate (sōphrōn) ~ immoderate (akolastos)free ~ slave

aka “asymmetry hypothesis”

Against Neaera 6

Butler on Social Construction

“To publish one’s act in language is in some sense the completion of the act” (Butler AC)

"... gender [but maybe sexuality too?] is an act which has been rehearsed, much as a script … requires individual actors” (“Performative Acts,” in Performing Feminisms 1990)

http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/genderandsex/modules/butlerperformativity.html

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Against Neaera 7

Discussion

Butler? sappho seems to be

performing feminine gender the how of her reactions

seeming performed anti-butler

s born that way

Foucault? f’s asymmetry

man and strength sappho exhibits passivity

poem a speech restricted by dichotomy laid out by fouc, thereby confining her sex etc. in the fictive reality

self-control

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Against Neaera 8

Biblio Note: Theory

Butler, Judith. Antigone’s Claim: Kinship between Life & Death. New York: Columbia University Press, 2000. Print.

---. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. Thinking Gender. New York: Routledge, 1990. Print.

---. The Judith Butler Reader. Ed. Sara Salih. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2004. Print.

Felluga, Dino. Introduction to Theories of Gender and Sex. Purdue University. 2 October 2013 (2002): Web site. <http://www.cla.purdue.edu/english/theory/genderandsex/>

Foxhall, Lin. “Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.” Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity. Eds. David H. J. Larmour, Paul Allen Miller, and Charles Platter. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. 122–37. Print.

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Against Neaera 9

Biblio Note: Women, Neaera

Blundell, Sue. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1995.

---. Women in Classical Athens. London: Bristol Classical Press, 1998.

Cohen, David. Law, Sexuality and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991

Hamel, Debra. Trying Neaira: The True Story of a Courtesan’s Scandalous Life in Ancient Greece. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2003

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Against Neaera 10

Biblio Note: Gender (& masculinity)

Bassi, Karen. Acting like Men: Gender, Drama, and Nostalgia in Ancient Greece. Ann Arbor, Mich.: University of Michigan Press, 1998. Print.

Foxhall, Lin. Studying Gender in Classical Antiquity. Key Themes in Ancient History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Print.

Foxhall, Lin and J. B. Salmon, eds. When Men were Men: Masculinity, Power and Identity in Classical Antiquity. London and New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

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Athenian Women

A Quote Dissected…

“We [Athenian men] have prostitutes for the sake of pleasure, concubines for

meeting our bodily needs day-to-day, but wives for having legitimate children”

(Against Neaera p. 191)

Against Neaera 13

Do They “Jive”?

1. “We [Athenian men] have prostitutes (hetairai) for the sake of pleasure, concubines (pallakai) for meeting our bodily needs day-to-day, but wives (gunaikes) for having legitimate children” (Against Neaera p. 191)

2. “This Candaules, then, fell in love with (erasthe) his own wife, so much so that he believed her to be by far the most beautiful woman in the world; and believing this, he praised her beauty beyond measure to Gyges son of Dascylus” (Herodotus 1.8)

3. “Niceratus too, so I am told, is in love with (erai) his wife and finds his love reciprocated (she anterai him)” (Xenophon Symposium 8.3)

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Apollodorus’ Against Neaera

Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric, Realities

Against Neaera 15

Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric

Fraudulent…citizen-marriagecitizen-offspring

ImpietyCheapened

enfranchisementJury shaming

Bread-making, phallus-bird, c. 500 BCE. Athenian

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Against Neaera 16

Realities: Athenian Wives et al.

Marriage Adultery (moikheia) Divorce Seclusion?

ideology v. actuality oikia, andronitis,

gunaikonitis

Guardianship kurios and oikos court representation

Property dowry inheritance

epikleros, ankhisteia

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Against Neaera 18

Realities: Prostitutes, Concubines

Hetaira (plur. hetairai)expenserelationship

Porne (plur. pornai)publicitycommodification

Pallake (plur. pallakai)“kept” slave woman

Old man & hetaira. Athenian, c.500-490(Inscription reads Panaitios kalos, “Panaetius”

[man’s name] is beautiful.”)

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Will the Real Neaera Please Stand up?

Whore? Courtesan? Concubine? Wife?

“We [Athenian men] have prostitutes for the sake of pleasure, concubines for

meeting our bodily needs day-to-day, but wives for having legitimate children”

(Against Neaera p. 191)

Was Neaera a…- porne? -

- hetaira? -- pallake? -

- citizen wife? -

Against Neaera 21

Discussion

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