Transcript Pseudo-Demosthenes Against Neaera

Love and Marriage?
Pseudo-Demosthenes’ Against Neaera
Agenda
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Academic Honesty
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Butler or Foucault?
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A Quote Dissected…
Apollodorus’ Against Neaera
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Women’s eros in Sappho fr. 31
Athenian Women
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Angelique Jenks-Brown, BU Libraries
Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric, Realities
Will the Real Neaera Please Stand up?
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Against Neaera
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Butler or Foucault?
Women’s eros in Sappho fr. 31
Butler or Foucault?
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)
“Sexual-Social Isomorphism”
male ~ female
masculine ~ feminine
penetrator
active
dominant
senior (in status)
~
~
~
~
penetrated
passive
submissive
junior (in status)
moderate (sōphrōn) ~ immoderate (akolastos)
free ~ slave
aka “asymmetry hypothesis”
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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Discussion
Butler?
 sappho seems to be
performing feminine
gender


the how of her reactions
seeming performed
Foucault?
 f’s asymmetry


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anti-butler

s born that way

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Against Neaera
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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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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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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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)
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
Charges, Ideologies, Rhetoric

Fraudulent…
citizen-marriage
 citizen-offspring
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Impiety
 Cheapened
enfranchisement
 Jury shaming
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Bread-making, phallus-bird, c. 500
BCE. Athenian
Against Neaera
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Realities: Athenian Wives et al.
Marriage
 Adultery (moikheia)
 Divorce
 Seclusion?
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Guardianship
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Property
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ideology v. actuality
oikia, andronitis,
gunaikonitis
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kurios and oikos
court representation
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dowry
inheritance
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Against Neaera
epikleros, ankhisteia
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Realities: Prostitutes, Concubines
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Hetaira (plur. hetairai)
expense
 relationship
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Porne (plur. pornai)
publicity
 commodification
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
Pallake (plur. pallakai)

“kept” slave woman
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Old man & hetaira. Athenian, c.500-490
(Inscription reads Panaitios kalos, “Panaetius”
[man’s name] is beautiful.”)
Against Neaera
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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? -
Discussion
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