Ancient Classics

This talk discusses Demosthenes’ Against Euboulides, a law court speech which focuses on the crucial issue of Athenian citizenship in the mid-fourth century BC. The case arose from an official decision to review citizen status in every Attic deme. The speaker was stripped of his citizenship but chose to appeal before a jury and enlisted Demosthenes to compose his defence. The speech illuminates a number of topics vital to our understanding of classical Athenian legislation, but several problems remain: classifying the suit as either a public or private action is difficult, particularly due to the appearance of the water clock in the course of the speech, and also knowing what exactly the penalty was for a failed appeal and whether the disfranchised speaker would then face slavery.

With a primary focus on citizen women, the purpose of this paper is to construct an image of female labour in classical Athens. Such a study involved the creation of a general survey to challenge the still fairly standard ideological belief that citizen women were secluded from Athenian society and restricted in terms of mobility in public spaces. As is the case with many aspects of Greek social history, the source material is frequently dispersed throughout a large number of ancient texts. By gathering these varied references, I can offer a complementary view to the ‘respectable’ role of citizen women by painting a picture of the lesser-discussed female social group, those who worked in order to make a living for themselves and their families. These women were compelled by poverty or the social hardship of war. Indeed, war was a continuous feature in the classical period: with the Greco-Persian Wars and the Peloponnesian War of the fifth century, and the Corinthian War of the fourth century. This paper cannot deal exhaustively with the matter of the economic roles available to Athenian citizen women. Instead, I will attempt to present a brief overview of my research with particular reference to Demosthenes’ oration, Against Euboulides; a speech which offers a secure starting point for the appreciation of the complexity of the public female role in Classical Athens. Euxitheos, the citizen for whom the speech was written in either the year 346 or 345 BC, was disfranchised by his deme and was attempting to persuade the jury in an appeal to reinstate him as a citizen. The accusations against him particularly concerned his mother, Nicarete, and her employment in menial labour. In the past, she was employed as a wet-nurse, and according to the speech, she then assumed employment in the sale of ribbons. It is the purpose of this paper to briefly discuss these professions and others specifically highlighted by Euxitheos as being undertaken by women in similar situations.

My paper examines the contents of an Athenian lawcourt speech, dating to the middle of the fourth century. This speech, number 57 in Demosthenic canon, and entitled 'Against Euboulides', is worthy of study for its focus on Athenian citizenship and its reflection on the citizenry’s attitudes and indeed prejudices regarding status. In Athens’ blood-based regime, in which citizenship was limited to those born of two citizen parents, ancestry was all that mattered if you wanted to share in the rights and responsibilities of the state. But how did you prove something that, as of yet, wasn’t scientifically provable? More specifically, for the purpose of this paper, how does a citizen with an accomplished political record prove that he really was born to two Athenian parents, when he has suddenly found himself disfranchised by the very community that he served for around twenty years? The aims of this paper are to present an overview of the legal standing regarding citizenship from the mid-fifth century BC until the mid-fourth, before examining the particular details contained within Demosthenes’ speech. In a system that relied on witness testimonies and collective knowledge to prove kinship connections, I want to evaluate the importance of public acts of citizenship, or indeed “Athenian behaviour”, as a key piece of evidence to validate what couldn’t be seen: a belief in Athenian blood-ties.

The figure of Octavia in the drama of the same name is made up of leading female characters from Greek and Roman tragedy and Roman literature more than she is a reflection of historical reality. The unknown author was influenced by Seneca and drew extensively on his tragedies and philosophical works. This paper will examine Seneca's influence primarily, but will also look at the author's debts to Sophocles and Euripides. Although these writers had differing ideas about the nature of tragedy, their female characters shared some defining traits: passion, obstinacy, the preference for death over indignity, loyalty to familial bonds and wrath if these are broken, and self-awareness. The author's use of these traits in creating his Octavia was affected by the play's genre, 'fabula praetexta', and his putative intent to demonise Nero. In order to examine the character Octavia effectively, it is also necessary to consider the roles played by Poppaea and Agrippina.

In 2004, Catullus scholars gathered in the Treehouse at The University of Newcastle to talk Catullus. This memorable event, aptly named ‘Catullus in the Treehouse,’ resulted in the first Special Issue of Antichthon, ‘Catullus in Contemporary Perspective’ in 2006.

After 14 years, and due to popular demand, it’s time to revisit ‘Catullus in the Treehouse’ with another one-day conference to celebrate Catullus, his poetry, his life and his legacy.

Catullus’ poem 48 has barely been studied, except as the “less interesting” sibling of the family of kiss poems. It continues the characterisation of Juventius as an aristocratic young man in the flower of his youth (flosculus … Iuventiorum, 24.1), but it complicates this image with agricultural imagery which suggests that the boy is on the cusp of manhood, making a transition from smooth-cheeked spring to bristly summer. Juventius’ honey-sweet eyes and kisses like thick crops of the dry beards of grain evoke the ‘young man with the first down’, a figure with a long and conflicting literary pedigree. A better understanding of the literary background of this imagery illuminates poem 48 as a complex and passionate celebration of the fragility of youthful beauty, but it also reveals more clearly just how the poem participates in the persuasive rhetoric of the kiss poems.

sat es beatus (Catull. 23.27) In the aggressively philosophical poem 23, Catullus attempts to change Furius’ mind about how he perceives his poverty, ‘advice’ which has been identified as either Stoic or Epicurean. Irrespective of the precise school of thought, it is clear that the poet ridicules Furius in eudaimonistic language. The poet of social commentary seeks to define the beatus uir. In fact, the term beatus has rich philosophical resonance and Catullus uses it in several other poems where attitudes to wealth form a significant backdrop to the poet's social posturing. Catullus was no philosopher. He employs the language and ideas of different schools, and, while his work does not reflect a coherent philosophical position, he was writing at a time when public discourse increasingly drew upon philosophical language and topoi. I will examine Catullus’ use of the term beatus in poems 9, 10, 22 and 23 to demonstrate that the poet draws a contrast between its different meanings...

Many have recognised poem 63 as a study in contrasts – light versus darkness, masculine versus feminine, rationality versus madness, animal versus human, culture versus nature. Caught between these polarities is the figure of Attis, removed from everything bright, male, sane, human, and civilised by one impassioned act. The poem suggests that it is partly the nature of the place, its quasi-Hippocratic airs, waters, and places, that emasculates Attis, making him like a notha mulier, iuvenca, and famula. This article will use ecofeminist theory – in particular, Val Plumwood's Feminism and the Mastery of Nature – to investigate the logic of domination running between the poem's polarities and to show how a foreign ‘Eastern’ wilderness effeminises Greek Attis. Moreover, it will be shown that the characterisation of Attis and the galli as a dux and his comites associates the story with the Roman imperial endeavour, suggesting that we can read the poem alongside others that portray conquest (11, 29) and the experience of young men abroad on provincial cohorts (10, 28, 47). In this way, Catullus implies that the imperial project is also made weak and feminine by its very contact with foreign places.

The Nux depicts the complaints of a walnut tree, pelted with stones and beaten with rods when she bears fruit. Discussion of the Nux, however, has largely centred on its authorship. Recognising its deep engagement with Ovid’s work, this article sets aside the question of authorship and takes a critical ecofeminist approach to explore the poem’s concerns with fertility, nature, the female, and violence. It argues that the walnut tree is feminised and humanised so that her complaints that fertility brings pain and her criticism of trees who sabotage their fertility to be beautiful have meaning for Roman women, and in particular for those women living under the Principate. It aims to demonstrate that the Nux figures the domination of nature and the oppression of women as outcomes of the same harmful ideology.