Believing Ancient Women

Megan Elena Bowen received a PhD in Classics from the University of Virginia in 2018. She specialises in Roman literature and culture and has published on prayer and sexual violence in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Classical Journal, 2020). She is especially interested in issues related to gender and power in ancient texts and their reception. Mary Hamil Gilbert is an Assistant Professor of Classics at Mississippi State University. Her research focuses on Greek and Roman drama, classical reception in early modern France, and women and gender studies. She has published articles and chapters on Aeschylus, Euripides, Seneca, and early modern French tragedien Jean Racine's reception of Greek and Roman drama including ‘Engaging Ancient Tragedy: Troy Falls Again in Jean Racine’s Andromaque’ (Classical Receptions Journal, 2018), ‘Je sentis tout mon corps et transir et brûler’: Sublimating Ancient Sexuality in Jean Racine’s Phèdre et Hippolyte in The Routledge Companion to the Reception of Ancient Greek and Roman Gender (2022), and ‘Policing Women’s Anger in the Roman Tragedy Octavia’ (forthcoming). She has also translated Anyte of Tegea’s animal epigrams into English (Ancient Exchanges, 2020). Edith Gwendolyn Nally is an Assistant Professor of Philosophy and an Associate Faculty member in the Classics Program and the Race, Ethnic, and Gender Studies Department at the University of Missouri, Kansas City. She specialises in Ancient Greek Philosophy, Epistemology, and Feminist Philosophy and is the author of several articles and chapters on Plato’s erotic philosophising, including ‘A Case for Platonic Love’ in The Philosophy of Love and Sex (Oxford University Press, Forthcoming), ‘Philosophy’s Workmate: Erōs and the erōtica in Plato’s Symposium’ (Aperion, De Gruyter Press, 2021), and ‘The Telos Problem in Plato’s Symposium’ in Wisdom, Love and Friendship in Ancient Philosophy (De Gruyter Press, 2021).

• List of Illustrations AcknowledgementsList of Contributors 1. Believing Ancient Women: An Introduction and Feminist Epistemological Field Guide Edith G. Nally, Mary H. Gilbert and Megan E. Bowen2. ‘For you know how we cared for you’: Sappho and Queer Epistemology Erika L. Weiberg3. En-gendering Knowledge with the Oceanids in Prometheus Bound Mary H. Gilbert4. Women’s Complaints about Violence at Athens: Zobia and Aristogeiton Fiona McHardy5. Bodies of Knowledge: Diotima’s Reproductive Expertise in the Symposium Edith G. Nally6. Monumental Presence and Absence: Approaching the Material Traces of Historical Women in the Classical World Patricia Eunji Kim7. Plautus’s Truculentus and Terence’s Hecyra: Patriarchal Authority and Women’s CredibilitySerena S. Witzke8. Incidental Women in the Letters of Cicero Kristina Milnor9. Signifying Dido: Constructs of Race and Gender in AugustanRome Shelley P. Haley10. But She Didn’t Complain: Ovid’s Leucothoe, Rape Myths andHermeneutical Injustice Megan E. Bowen11. ‘Feebly fighting back’: Stuprum in Eumolpus’s Pergamene Boy Debra Freas12. The Viability of Feminist Stoicism: On the Compatibility of Stoic and Feminist Epistemology Chelsea Bowden13. What Everyone Knows: Hermeneutical Injustice in theMedieval Iphis Jessica Hines14. Religious Authority and Classical Reception in Baroque Rome: Martha Marchina’s Musa Posthuma and Feminist Epistemologies of Care Erika Zimmermann Damer15. ‘Grey’ Rape on the Silver Screen: Rapes of Enslaved People in Mass Media about the Ancient World Anise K. StrongSelected BibliographyIndex

[Believing Ancient Women] serves as a useful primer for feminist epistemologies, its key architects, related concepts, and where they overlap with and diverge from other systems of knowledge. It educates readers on the usefulness of feminist epistemology for excavating texts and objects to reveal the gendered perspectives and knowledge within. This book is informative and full of insights that illuminate the significance of gender in ancient ways of knowing.