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Medea is one of the most memorable characters in Greek mythology. She is powerful, has associations with magic, and capable of taking drastic action. Most people are familiar with the version of Medea crafted by the Athenian playwright Euripides, but today we turn to a lesser known interpretation.

Special Episode – Seneca’s Medea with MythTake

A quick synopsis may be handy before diving into the episode!

Medea is a semi-divine princess of Colchis (a land on the shores of the Black Sea). As a young woman, Medea fell in love with Jason while he is on his quest for the Golden Fleece. Medea used her gifts to aid Jason in completing the impossible tasks set by her father, King Aeëtes. Medea helped Jason to yoke the fiery bulls, win a competition with the giants, and slay the dragon that guarded the Fleece. In her love for Jason, she defied her father and decides to run away with him to Greece. To escape unnoticed from Cholcis, Medea kills her brother to distract her father. From there Jason and Medea travelled together to meet Pelias, king of Iolcus, who had agreed to give Jason his throne if he returned with the Fleece. But when Pelias saw the Fleece he refused to fulfil the agreement. Jason and Medea then worked together to bring about the downfall of Pelias, but needed to flee Iolcus after suspicion falls upon them. They finally settled in Corinth and have two sons.

So Jason and Medea are bound together, not only by their children and their marriage, but by acts of violence which were often planned together but executed by Medea with her semi-divine skills and pharmaka (knowledge of herbs and drugs). A healthy relationship, this is not!

Jump ahead a few years and, in order to climb the political ladder, Jason decides to leave his marriage with Medea to marry Creusa the daughter of King Kreon of Thebes. The play opens with Medea cursing both Creusa and Kreon and seeking time to prepare for her exile. Kreon grants Medea one day before she is exiled which she immediately uses to plan her revenge on Jason for leaving her after everything they’ve been through together.

She laces a stunning robe with poison and sends it to Creusa as a gift for her wedding with Jason. The Chorus describe Medea’s rage and frustration in great detail and pray to the gods that Jason is spared from her vengeance. But Medea’s pharmaka is extensive and the robe kills Creusa by catching on fire when she puts it on. Kreon tries to save his daughter but he catches on fire too when he touches the robe. But in the wake of their deaths, Medea does not feel any better; her need for vengeance remains. Medea resolves to sacrifice their children in a final act to help Jason understand the depth of pain he has caused by leaving her. This blood sacrifice seems to transform her and to reveal her divine form, as Medea escapes in a dragon chariot while she throws the bodies of the boys down to Jason. Jason observes that there are no gods because otherwise such acts would be impossible.

Seneca the Younger was a Stoic philosopher who witnessed a lot of the ups and downs of the Julio-Claudian emperors during his lifetime. After a couple of trips into exile, Seneca ended up rising to a position of immense influence. He was appointed tutor of Nero, the son of Agrippina the Younger and adopted heir of her husband, the emperor Claudius. When Nero succeeded Claudius, Seneca experienced a career high in the early years of his reign. However, stability was not a feature of Nero’s rule, and Seneca was eventually forced to commit suicide by his former pupil. As we consider Seneca’s Medea, it’s worth considering how his context influenced his work. Certainly he has plenty of strong women to draw upon from his own experience and the recent politics of ancient Rome!

If there’s two things that we love, it’s women in the ancient world and the Julio-Claudian period in Rome. So understandably, we jumped at the chance to talk to Alison Innes and Darrin Sunstrum from the MythTake podcast about Seneca the Younger’s interpretation of Medea. 

What did this man make of Medea’s story? Tune in to find out!

Thanks as always to our Patreon and Ko-fi supporters.

Thanks to the lovely Bettina Joy de Guzman for our theme music.

Frederick Sandys between 1866 and 1868. Medea
Medea has a connection with pharmaka and this idea sets up her early interaction with Jason and has numerous consequences.

John Downman 1750-1824 An Episode from the Story of Jason and Medea.
Medea ascends to a higher plane after her suffering and Jason is left to bear the consequences of his choices.

John William Waterhouse 1907. Jason and Medea
Jason watches on as Medea utilises her skills in pharmaka in order to aide his quest to obtain the golden fleece.

Generated by Otter AI with some light editing! We know the Greek and Latin can be tough for automated transcripts, so apologies in advance for inadvertent mistakes (hopefully they’ll make you giggle!).

Dr Rad 0:15
Welcome to a special episode of The Partial Historians. Today we sit down with the hosts of the amazing podcast MythTake to discuss all aspects of Seneca the Younger’s Medea. We hope that you enjoy

Alison Innes 0:40
Good morning.

Darrin Sunstrum 0:41
Good afternoon.

Alison Innes 0:42
Good evening,

Darrin Sunstrum 0:43
and good night.

Alison Innes 0:45
Welcome to a another episode of MythTake,

Darrin Sunstrum 0:48
A fresh take on ancient myths.

Alison Innes 0:50
We still got it, Darren.

Darrin Sunstrum 0:53
It’s been a while. I forgot.

Alison Innes 0:54
It has been it has been a little while since we have done an episode. But I am really excited about tonight’s episode. We have two special guests from halfway around the world joining us by the virtue of or by the miracle of technology. We have Dr. Fiona Radford and Dr. Peta Greenfield from The Partial Historians podcast. They are experts in ancient Rome, which we are very much not experts. They look at various aspects of Roman life and reception in their own podcast Partial Historians. So we’re very pleased to have you. Hello.

Dr Rad 1:31
Hey, thank you so much for having us.

Dr G 1:34
That was Dr Rad!

Dr Rad 1:36
To distinguish my voice.

Dr G 1:38
We’ll just set that up straight. Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:40
Any stupid thing said by this voice are the property of Dr. Radford.

Dr G 1:45
And I’m Dr. G, thank you so much for having us.

Alison Innes 1:48
Well, we are very pleased to be connecting with you and I’m glad that we could work out the timezone difference. We’re recording from Canada, as usual, in Ontario, and you’re all the way around in Australia. So I we’re very glad to be connecting with you.

Dr Rad 2:01
It’s a it’s a Commonwealth podcast.

Alison Innes 2:04
Yes. Yes, that truly international.

Dr Rad 2:06
Exactly.

Alison Innes 2:07
And I’m also excited to have you because we are going to talk about Medea, which everybody who listens to this probably knows by now is one of my favourite characters, but we’re going to do it a little bit differently and have a look at Seneca’s, Medea, and Darren and I are not as strong. Well, Darren, Darren knows knows this play better than I do. I have never formally taught or really studied this play. So I’m kind of, I’m the real student here. But we are really excited to have some Roman experts on board for this conversation.

Dr Rad 2:38
Excellent. Let’s get into it.

Dr G 2:40
Yeah, so I think we should start with just a consideration briefly of who is Medea. Let’s locate Seneca within the context of the subject matter.

Dr Rad 2:50
Yeah, true.

Alison Innes 2:51
All right. Well, Medea goes back a very long ways. Darren, do you want to give us a quick rundown on on her mythology?

Darrin Sunstrum 2:58
Well, in Medea, yeah. Like you said, she’s one of those sort of older characters that that, you know, been probably kicking around since the Archaic period, more than likely. We, we encounter her at least on the Greek side of things in Euripides work about 431 BC. There were other playwrights like Nephron, for example, that wrote about Medea as a figure from this woman from Colchis from the Black Sea region, who is a foreigner, barbarian and mysterious sort of “Other” type character with associations and magic. And then her relationship with Jason and the Argonauts, which is a very old myth. Right, is picked up and, you know, use time and time again. So we see Medea, you know, in different iterations and tragedy, and lyric poetry, you know, here in our discussion with Seneca all the way into the Imperial Roman period, which I don’t live in very much, but so it’s a long stretch of time to have, you know, one sort of character called Medea. And you know what she is, and I think everyone knows what she’s probably most responsible for, or her infamy or her fame. So, you know, she’s a non-Greek character, but a very compelling and powerful female heroine in a catalogue of heroes that are primarily male.

Dr Rad 4:26
Yeah, the Romans seem to really be attracted to the story of Medea. I mean, obviously, when I say attracted, I don’t necessarily mean in a hugely positive way. Because as you say, she is quite infamous. But yeah, they definitely seem to enjoy going back and back to the story of Medea.

Dr G 4:43
And I think there’s something very compelling about Medea’s story as well because bound up with it is the whole spectrum of human feeling. From everything from intense attraction and affection and love to like the bitterest of human sorrow possible. And she captures this within the arc of her life. And so there are so many elements of her story, I think, that people can hook into and repurpose. And when we talk about attraction, I think it’s that compulsion. It’s almost like things become so devastating in her life and in her mythic tales, that it’s hard to look away.

Alison Innes 5:24
Yeah. And there’s there are some key events that all of the different authors who we have, and presumably, from what I’ve read, there were a lot more plays and tales about Medea in the ancient world than survive that then have come down to us. But the broad outline, of course, is that Jason shows up with his Argonauts and he needs to get the Golden Fleece. Medea betrays her father and helps them out and in their flight from Chlocis back to Greece with Jason. She marries him and kills her brother. And then we are of course, located in Corinth, where Jason is now married the princess, but depending on which author you have, there’s different nuances and different interpretations and different details for each of those. So it’s a really flexible story that gets retold in a lot of different ways.

Dr G 6:22
Yeah, and I think we see this coming through with Seneca’s Medea, it’s a very formal kind of play. Very Roman, I would say in its structure. If we’re, inevitably people will make comparisons with Seneca’s work with the very famous Euripides play. And they’re very different in structure, even though some of the messaging is similar. They get to the conclusion in very different ways. And one of the things that I think that tells us about Medea is just how she can be reinterpreted consistently over time for different audiences, while keeping some core features of the story. But while also shifting a lot of the contextual details around how that story unfolds,

Darrin Sunstrum 7:08
I like that because like, like, like any good myth, it’s true. It’s sort of adapts its dynamic, and it sort of serves its shape sort of fills the vessel in. And by that, I mean, it serves the audience at the time, or at least the narrator’s agenda, whatever that might be. So I think the Medea characters are really plastic in that way.

Dr G 7:26
Yeah. So I think it’s probably a good place to think about just the basic plot of Seneca’s play. And we sort of we start off with a conversation happening outside between Medea she’s alone on stage, actually, I should say, it’s not a conversation just yet. But she’s sort of like locating herself through this kind of soliloquy.

Dr Rad 7:52
She does like to have conversations with herself,

Dr G 7:54
She does like to have conversations, there’s, it’s a very, it’s a very ancient play thing to do. Popular all the way through for centuries, really discussing sort of positioning the audience to understand history in a particular way, and help everybody come to grips with where we’re at where we’re up to in her life. And she’s in Corinth. And this is a very typical place for plays about Medea to start as well. But from there, we sort of get into a whole sequence of events. And Seneca seems to like a sort of a really particular structure to his plays. And some editors of the Latin collections do like to divide it up like that, as well. So it feels like that we have distinct scenes, even though we’re not really sure what any of the stage directions might have been. And so one of the really important character devices in Seneca’s Medea is the role of the Chorus and the way that they tend to set up how you might interpret a particular set of action. And they also tend to be a marker point for a change of scene as well, either towards the end or towards the beginning. So the chorus has a lot to do with this. And we see this sort of like ebb and flow between Medea expressing herself having a conversation with Kreon, the king of Corinth about needing time before her exile takes place, having a conversation with Jason, where he’s kind of like, you gotta get out of here. And she’s like, I need more time to get organised. Where am I gonna go how I’m gonna live my life? And it’s like, it’s really important that you leave. And she’s like, you know, You dumped me, right? I don’t know that I should necessarily be bearing the brunt of your poor decision making because the reason why she has been asked to leave is she’s now the third wheel, essentially, in her own life.

Dr Rad 9:48
Yeah, Jason no longer needs her. I mean, he’s he’s got a new wife and you shiny wife,

Dr G 9:51
Jason’s about to marry a woman. He hasn’t really told Medea about that. She’s found out because she’s about to be exiled. Like you need to leave and she’s like, Excuse me?

Dr Rad 10:00
if only all breakups could go this way.

Alison Innes 10:04
Medea is really front and centre in this play too. Not only does she start off with the with the opening, but I have cannot put my finger on the exact statistic at the moment, but she has the vast majority of speaking lines in this play. So it’s very much her driving the story.

Dr Rad 10:22
Oh, massively, it’s definitely the Medea show. It definitely puts her more forward than you Euripides did, even though obviously, she’s a huge part of Euripides as well.

Dr G 10:32
But we do get some sense from the sort of secondary characters that there are some concerns about how she’s coping with the situation that she finds herself in. Rightly so as it turns out, so there’s some good foreshadowing presented through the character of the Nurse, and discussions that happen that relate to the tutor of the children, they’ve got some concerns about what’s happening. And fair enough. She’s not taking things well. And she makes that abundantly clear through her spoken time on stage as well. But she does manage to negotiate with Kreon to have a day to get herself organised. And she makes it pretty clear early on that she’s going to use this for vengeance. This is a pretty standard moment for Medea in terms of her representation in literature, first of all, buying the time, and then being like, Alright, now for the plan. And she does the grand reveal of well, the plan is this, it’s going to be bad. And I’m looking forward to it, you know, I’m going to find a way to poison that new wife. And then I’m going to take things to the next level because you know, who’s really responsible here, Jason? Jason is the real issue.

Dr Rad 11:44
I kind of disagree with her in someways.

Dr G 11:46
In that sense. It’s a very modern kind of representation as well. She refuses to take a sort of a victim blaming position. I mean, she does take vengeance against the second wife. Yeah, that is all part of her plan to take down Jason. It inevitably, it goes well, in the sense that it all happens.

Dr Rad 12:07
Yeah, the plan works!

Dr G 12:08
The plan works. That might be the worst part of all, perhaps.

Dr Rad 12:12
And bonus points. She takes out Kreon when she takes out the new wife. Oh, yeah, they go down together. Yeah.

Dr G 12:21
Father steps into try to save the daughter: doesn’t go well. This is all described vividly by people who come into the play to like deliver messages. And we end up at this final set piece, which is the moment where she executes the children that she and Jason have produced together. One of them directly in front of Jason.

Dr Rad 12:44
Which again, is in contrast to what happens in Euripides’ play as far as we can tell where the murder of the children would happen offstage.

Dr G 12:53
Yeah. So there is a transition of the violence to the stage.

Alison Innes 12:58
Yeah, and Jason’s Jason’s a very different character as well in Seneca as I know, we’re trying not to compare but it’s really really it’s very difficult not to but he’s been his circumstances different he’s not marrying the princess so much out of love or desire to step up in the world. But he can only get safety for them if from Kreon if he is marrying Kreon’s daughter. So there’s, there’s a different there’s a different motivation behind the marriage, correct?

Darrin Sunstrum 13:29
Yeah, there’s something like that going on self preservation, the mood is very different, right, the function that fibre framework is very different from an Attic drama, like Medea is in your face, like right at the very beginning, and she doesn’t leave your face, till you know, she’s stepping in the chariot. So like, you know, you get a little Jason and you get a little Kreon and you get some Chorus thrown in, but, you know, she’s right your eyes for the whole play. And it’s not like Euripides where, you know, some of there’s some circular motion lines and characters are coming and going slightly. And there’s negotiation with chorus. But But here in Seneca’, it’s Medea from from beginning to end. And it’s extremely compelling. But like I said, there’s a very different type of Jason that’s being presented here. A lot of people like to throw a lot of dirt on Jason and Euripides. I’m not a big fan of that. But here in Seneca he’s a pretty sympathetic character, at least from my reading of it, you know, he’s he can’t do much of anything but but suffer. Right? But you know, that in the face of such overwhelming hatred and violence, what can what can one man do you know, even if he is the hero of the Argo, right? Who Medea lays out quite plainly in Seneca that not only does Jason, owe his success as a hero, but so does every single Argonaut on that expedition also, you know, all their success to her, you know that that’s pretty hard to overlook.

Alison Innes 15:02
And so many of them have come to unfortunate ends.

Darrin Sunstrum 15:04
And they have. Medea in the Seneca play too. There’s something strange and about it in the sense that you can get overwhelmed with lots of the magic and the details and the artefacts and so on in the terrible ferocity of that character. That sort of when I use the word terrible I don’t mean in a in a moralistic way I mean awe inspiring power. And she has a number of moments of that are transformative within the play itself. Euripides’ Medea is much more of a slow reveal. I think Seneca is is has those but there’s blinding flashes where she’s no longer herself in the play become something much more terrible. I use that word again. So yeah, I just like I like the contrasting element of and I really did enjoy revisiting Seneca’s Medea again.

Alison Innes 15:54
Well, his Medea is much more emotional and passionate right from the beginning, I would say and, and I wonder, does this have to do with Senecas own philosophical leanings?

Dr Rad 16:07
Yeah, I think I think this is probably a good time to talk a little bit about who Seneca actually was, and maybe give him a bit of historical context, because that could possibly help us to decode his interpretation of Medea a little bit. So as I think you guys mentioned earlier, Seneca is writing much later than Euripides. He was born as far as we can tell, towards the end part of Augustus’ life, and therefore he got to see a little bit of Augustus, but he was probably, obviously a child, then he certainly would have experienced the reigns of Tiberius, Caligula, and then most famously, Claudius and Nero. Now, it’s probably worth mentioning that there has been a bit of dispute about whether Seneca actually authored a lot of these plays that are ascribed to him, but we weren’t worried going into that.

Dr G 16:56
Let’s not create too much touble for ourselves!

Dr Rad 16:58
We’re not gonna go into that. But presuming that he did write this particular play that we’re looking at. It’s very possibly something that he wrote, whilst he was in exile during the first half of the Emperor Claudius’ reign.

He had gotten himself into a little bit of trouble.

Alison Innes 17:17
Yes, adultery was-

Dr Rad 17:20
Yeah, he fell afoul of both Caligula and Claudius, for very different reasons. As at least, that’s what the sources tell us. There is something I think to be said for the fact that he might be exploring certain themes relating to his own experiences under the Julio-Claudians, which we can come back to in a sec. But he’s also most famous, obviously, and this is probably what you were getting at Alison, for his very stoic philosophy, is that what you were referring to in terms of his own beliefs?

Dr G 17:48
Yeah, and, and so like that stoicism that is coming, that sort of underpins a lot of his writing, I think we can see the effects of this in terms of the way that he structures his plays, and also the kinds of messages he might be trying to have the audience take away. The one of the key ideas that really drives the Stoic framework is like how you think about the way that you feel really shapes everything about your world. And that becomes like, a piece of advice as a stepping stone for like, well, how can I think about the world and my feelings in a way that might be reasonable and useful to me. And what we see in Medea is a character, and indeed, a whole cast of characters very much bound up in their emotions and trying to figure out how to respond to them. And while Medea is obviously the central figure in all of this, she is by no means the only character who is trying to figure out how to respond to their feelings about the world. She eventually places Jason in that position. And he also details moments of his own struggle with reaching the decision to take another woman as a wife. And we also see Kreon and his concerns about you know, wanting to have a stable situation, which is only possible if Medea is no longer there physically in the city.

Dr Rad 19:19
How interesting that she was being exiled while Seneca was himself in exile…

Dr G 19:26
Could there be a parallel?

Alison Innes 19:29
And Seneca had an interesting life in the course of his kind of rise to prominence and exile and return because he’s he was originally from Spain, was he not? And he spent time in Egypt as well. So presumably, he would have been exposed to various versions of this story from various sources from different places.

Dr G 19:52
Yeah, so he, I mean, he ends up in Rome as a child and is educated there. But as you say, he is born in Hispania. And so there is a sense in which this is a period in Roman history where there’s a lot of shifting from the periphery into the centre. And we get a sense that one of the ways that you could read this play is also through that idea of the outsider versus the insider. And Seneca, for all of his education, to what extent does he consider himself absolutely a Roman? is a good question to ask. And he becomes very involved in the imperial family and the legacy. And this might play into things as well. So like being close to power, how you self identify could produce interesting resonances for how he thinks about Medea. And to what extent he might empathise with her situation, on a certain level.

Dr Rad 20:52
We’re especially dealing with Kreon as well, I believe there might be some messages there as well about how a ruler conducts themselves, which as I said, probably might have might have had something to do with his personal situation because he does seem to fall afoul of Caligula, perhaps because he’s a little too good with the words.

Dr G 21:10
Hello!

Dr Rad 21:11
Yeah. And then And then, of course, he seems to be caught up in some sort of sexual scandal or at least suspected sexual scandal with Claudius’ nieces and Caligula sisters aren’t really-

Dr G 21:24
You always have to be careful of those sorts of notions. And yeah, political invective, often takes the form of this kind of sexual innuendo. Yeah, and sort of salacious accusations. So it’s hard to know.

Dr Rad 21:38
I think it’s fair to say, though, based on his other writings, because he did obviously take a lot of this time, eight years to write, he definitely wasn’t happy about being exiled. And funnily enough, you know, he might have been channelling a bit of Ovid, who also read extensively about Medea and was exiled.

Dr G 21:56
And if there’s anything that we know about Seneca is that he is a very literary man,

Dr Rad 22:01
Definitely.

Dr G 22:01
And he structures a lot of his writings, Stoic and otherwise it seems, around a conscious engagement with literary tradition. So I think it’s a real shame, actually, that we don’t have Ovid’s Medea as a point of comparison. Ovid is a very engaging and nuanced writer. And to be able to compare those two plays from a Roman perspective would be amazing, I think, for all of the things that are very interesting about Seneca’s play, if you asked me. If I wanted to go to the theatre to watch Seneca’s production of Medea I would probably say no.

Darrin Sunstrum 22:39
For what reason?

Dr G 22:41
I don’t find her a psychologically compelling version of Medea in this play. And it’s weird because it’s not like the plot is necessarily different. Yeah, in all of its sort of overarching points from say Euripides, but reading Euripides, together with Seneca, I would go and see Euripides’ Medea, in an instant, it feels like there is a real psychological insight and development of character of Medea onstage in Euripides. And I feel like what we get in Seneca, for me as a as a modern person in the 21st century, it doesn’t feel psychologically compelling. It feels very literary. And it feels very Imperial Roman, and I can appreciate it on those levels. But it doesn’t feel powerful in that way.

Dr Rad 23:30
That does raise the question as well about how much Seneca actually ever envisioned this play being performed, per se as a play? And how much was it meant to be recited or read? If you know what I mean.

Alison Innes 23:44
I was just about to ask. I was just about to ask him about that. And you beat me to it. Yeah. So it seems that it was a bit of a trend as well that at some point, literary men would dabble in writing, writing a tragedy, but it wasn’t necessarily intended for performance and sometimes intended for reading, which is would be a slightly different approach.

Dr G 24:09
Yeah. And I think we can see that almost instantly in the depth of like intertextual and mythological referencing that’s going on in Seneca’s piece. Like, it’s not an easy read. I went into this preparation, thinking, Ah, you know, I’ll sit down with Euripides, I’ll sit down with Seneca and then I was like, oh, no, oh, no, I got to Seneca and I was like, I need a critical edition of this work. Like there is it is very dense in the sort of information that it’s offering line by line, in some cases, in whole speeches where you’re like, Okay, if I can’t piece together this whole mythological web that is being offered to me, I’m going to have a very difficult time understanding the nuance of what Seneca is trying to get at here. And that makes it a play that is not for people who are just going to the theatre for a good time, or people who are not really quite across all of this mythological depth that Seneca is bringing to the table here.

Alison Innes 25:14
Yeah, it’s like he’s showing off a little bit about his own depth and breadth of knowledge of the myth. And you mentioned Ovid earlier. And we unfortunately don’t have his Medea. That’s what that that’s one of those plays that, you know, if you could save one thing from the ancient world, right, but he does deal with the myth as well, in the Metamorphosis, and in Heroides as well. And I know Darren is pretty familiar with those sources.

Darrin Sunstrum 25:42
Well, yeah, a little bit. I reread Heroides 12. You know, we’re not talking about it exclusively today. But like in that, in that sort of, era, you know, in that area, as far as a Roman author who’s concerned dealing with this topic, it’s not a play, obviously, it’s the letters, you know, the between Jason and Medea, in this case, it’s Medea writing to Jason. That’s a very different one and very different to, to speak about, because it’s, there’s not a lot of agreement on whether or not it’s of even a tragic tone. Some people think that it’s that it’s a more satirical or comic but you know, there’s, there’s definitely no love lost between the two, that’s for sure, in that letter.

Dr G 26:28
Yeah, this is true. And and I think the thing to me that’s really interesting about the way that Ovid is navigating Medea in that letter is that it does feel like she’s attempting to come to grips with everything about her life in a way that that does encompass some of the anger. But letter writing itself allows for moments of reflection, which when we think about what happens with a play, a play is more like, well, we’ve got to jump from the thought to the action quite quickly. Having people write letters, for instance, or have a journal doesn’t really work so much on stage. And so the letter is able to accomplish something that I’d be interested to. Yeah, now I need Ovid’s Medea: the play.

Alison Innes 27:20
Maybe somebody will be unwrapping a mummy somewhere and they will find, will find it!

Darrin Sunstrum 27:26
You know, what struck me as I read, the sequence that we read them sometimes affects your perception of them. So I had read Heroides 12 in preparation, and then a couple of days passed, and then I read over the course of two nights, Seneca’s play, and that one two punch there was very striking in the sense that one I have Euripides, of course, in my mind. But when I read Heroides 12, when I read Ovid, Medea, in that one is leaving the door open very often for a return to this sort of idealised husband and wife situation to she wants Jason to come back to her on a number of occasions. And I was kind of struck by that. And then when I went into Seneca, you know, you don’t really get it, there’s like a line, there’s like one line, after you know, Kreon comes and Medea talks to him. And Jason comes back and she says something like, “Castus is coming. One King is against us, there’s another. Come with me. And, you know, the two of us together will will will flee, right?” And I went whoa, really? Even after all that magic and hatred and passion and, and everything else. She still she still says to Jason like one line. Let’s let’s leave together. Jason says, No, obviously. But her her response to him there I thought was like wild because everything else is all snakes and fire. And then in one line she’s like, but you might want to come in it’ll, it’ll preserve you right now preserve you.

Dr G 29:07
And I think that’s the thing about Medea that that makes her such a compelling character, to be honest, because that what she has always longed for, is to be with Jason. And that has shaped the way that she behaves in response to everybody around her. And so there’s this sort of compulsive codependency for her, which she she finds it impossible to break and despite her anger and her frustration and the remorse that seems to be quite genuine at times that she feels for the acts that she has committed in pursuit of this relationship. She still ultimately it doesn’t mean anything for her if he doesn’t stay and in a way that that gives her I mean, that’s part of the tragedy of it. But it also gives us a really keen insight into into her state of mind. She has to double down and when she can’t, and that that’s taken away from her as well. It sort of pushes her beyond the sort of thresholds of morality as we tend to see them.

Dr Rad 30:21
But that’s why I agree. I actually do agree with you, Dr. G. I have I when I read I read both Euripides’ Medea and I read Seneca’s Medea in preparation for this episode. And I have to agree with you that even though there are some interesting elements to Seneca, I agree with you that I don’t find Medea as psychologically compelling, because she just comes out all guns blazing from the get go. She is so strong, and she is less sympathetic. I think, for me, looking back, I know Euripides is very complicated and the way that he handles her status both as you know, as a potential barbarian as this person who’s not exactly like what you you know, like a mortal woman or anything, like there’s obviously a lot of complexity there, which I just think is lacking in Seneca to a certain extent and I think feel

Dr G 30:42
Because you don’t get that character build

Dr Rad 31:16
No and you don’t get that arc of her actions, you know, of what path is she actually going to take. But I see much more coming through Seneca’s Medea, him dealing with that classic Stoic idea of the need to moderate emotion to, to learn how to deal with an emotion as powerful as anger, and the disaster that can result if people don’t learn to, to handle that in a in a productive way or, or a way of handling your emotions, in a sense of what point is that in getting so worked up over situations that you yourself, have no control over? You cannot control? What you know what the king is doing. You can’t control what Jason is doing here? Why are you getting yourself so worked up about this, look at what happens when you allow emotions like love and rage to run rampant?

Alison Innes 32:13
Yeah. And I think he’s definitely showing us the danger of passionate love that it’s a very, it’s it and this violent anger are two sides of the same coin. And that in some ways, her anger shows how deeply she loves, as you say, she’s she’s unable to step back from that and to, to detach herself that she’s, she, when one source I read described it as she’s opened a hole in in in the wall of herself. And that both lets Jason in, but it also means that it makes her weaker for that. And that. So she turns to these to this passionate anger, when that love doesn’t work out how she wants it to.

Darrin Sunstrum 32:58
Well, you know, there’s something about that Medea and Seneca that I think we’re either overlooking or attributing to something else. And, you know, I think simply might be, you know, it’s uniquely Roman in the sense that especially a connected Roman, like Seneca, who’s used to being in the presence of powerful figures, like an emperor like Nero, you know, like, you got to know how to walk around these guys, you got to know how to talk, you got to know how to keep them, you know, at bay, but because they they’re extremely powerful, like with a whim, like Medea, they could destroy you. And we’ve seen We’ve seen what’s happened there, their hair triggers, they’re like the opposite at times of what it means to be Stoic. So like if a character like Medea in this play is someone who’s like bottled lightning, you know, they’re a lot like a Roman imperial figure themselves. And the character of Jason and Kreon and all the rest of them are just the people that are in the orbit of someone with incredible imperial power. You know, you, they Medea goes through a transformation at the beginning, she asked herself, who am I? And then about, I don’t know, like Act Four, I guess she says, I am Medea. And that means something completely different. When we look at that concept, there’s that heroic concept or theological concept called Art to Kea, right. And that means, like a complete sort of release of freedom, a shedding of the bonds, where you become something that is, you know, that requires no support, you know, like, like, what does an emperor need? Nothing, because they have everything. Right. So that’s a transformative moment. That’s something that struck me when when I read Seneca along with all the witchcraft and the crazy stuff that was in there, too, but

Dr G 34:49
I think this is a fantastic sort of perspective to to adopt this idea of Medea as like the Imperial figure,

Dr Rad 34:57
and how intriguing that she that Seneca might have used a track like Medea to try and teach nearer to, you know, reign it in, reign it in.

Dr G 35:05
but also as a warning to like because this allows you then to read Jason, as the guy that bumbles through the Imperial Court, and is the Senecan figure who gets himself exiled.

Darrin Sunstrum 35:20
feel like, well correct me if I’m wrong, but doesn’t Ovid sort of do the same sort of thing, when like in his Metamorphosis as an overarching theme, is it not really sort of like a treatment in some ways about: Be careful who you upset because, you know, if they transform you like the gods themselves, right, these encounters with these powerful beings, sometimes they’re good, sometimes they’re bad, but they’re always met them. They’re always changing. They’re always about metamorphosis, right? Like, that could also apply if we use that as a, as a model for Seneca in some regards as a somewhat of that era. Maybe

Dr G 35:58
Definitely. And Medea herself is, is going through her own transformation all the time. And this is something that Seneca has definitely leveraged from Euripides and surely has been popular from Euripides onwards, this idea that Medea is not simply a mortal woman, that she that the divine streak in her is significant, and it will have really particular effects. And it means that she goes beyond in many respects, what anybody thinks that she could be capable of.

Dr Rad 36:34
I think that’s one thing that did strike me more front and centre in Seneca is that emphasis on on the witchcraft and the connections to like Hecate and that kind of thing. Whilst Euripides doesn’t obviously neglect to mention those aspects to Medea, I feel like she comes across as much more of a quote unquote, “normal woman” in the situation that she’s in, up into the point up to the point where she flies away.

Alison Innes 36:59
Yeah, it’s interesting. There’s, there’s almost a continuum from Euripides’ Medea Medea through to Apollonius Rhodius’ Argonautica. And then to this play, like building on that, on that witchcraft. In Apollonius, he pulls out a lot more of that magic aspect of her. Now granted, it’s not this episode that he’s dealing with but with with the other episodes he deals with, he he pulls out that magic, but it’s almost an innocent mass. And like almost as though she’s a young girl who doesn’t quite know what she’s doing. Whereas here in Seneca’s Medea, we have a mature Medea, who knows exactly what she’s exactly what she’s doing. And, and the magic, the way it’s described feels much more nefarious to me and then than it did in the Argonautica.

Dr Rad 37:55
I think it’s so interesting that Seneca is emphasising that angle. I mean, it’d be completely anachronistic, obviously to say anything about Agrippina the Younger here, because of course, it’s before she potentially murders Claudius using those sorts of elements. But certainly, what Seneca might have witnessed in Imperial Rome, I mean, this is the age of Lucasta, the poisoner, you know, it’s not like these methods of particularly women, eliminating people that wouldn’t be unknown to him, I would say.

Dr G 38:26
Yeah, there are definitely rumours about this kind of thing. And there are definitely you there are street corners, where you can find these people selling their skill set, as it were. But I do like this consideration of the fact that Medea in Seneca’s play and also in Euripides, because well, we’re seeing her at that edge in both of these plays, is that she is in the mature phase of her life, you know, she has become a mother herself. She’s married, you know, she’s lived a good deal of her adult life. Whereas the thing that is the landmark for her in terms of how her life unfolds, is potentially a mistake of a young woman, potentially on the cusp of adulthood, taking a risk for a boy that she liked. And it being the mistake that sets off in consequence, the rest of her life in a tragic fashion. And because the mistakes start to build,

Dr Rad 39:30
oh, don’t look, I mean, it’s I’m being completely anachronistic, but I can’t help but look at it through the eyes of, you know, a modern person and it does it does sound like that old story of that girl that got mixed up with that guy started doing things that she didn’t really want to, you know, didn’t not knows maybe not and didn’t want to do but start doing things that she might not have done if not for him. And Medea does seem to she does dwell on those things that she did, obviously, as you said earlier, she does keep thinking about, “But I did these things for you; I did these things for us. And And now where are we?”

Dr G 40:03
Yeah, so she gets trapped in like a sort of a young woman psychology where she hasn’t come into her full sense of herself. And she does make a choice, which, initially, I mean, it doesn’t seem so bad. You know, she’s helping a boy out that the monsters are involved. And it’s like, you know, there’s no, there’s no big risks there. I mean, the monsters are risky, but like in terms of like, the moral question, yeah, like, you can overlook that and be like, well, you know, somebody had to deal with the dragon. But that sort of slides into like, Okay, well, how are we going to get out of here? We now need to leave.

Dr Rad 40:38
Yeah.

Dr G 40:38
And that leads to a really pivotal moment,

Dr Rad 40:42
Which totally haunts her definitely.

Dr G 40:44
Yeah. And she’s, she does seem to be haunted by the treatment of her brother and how she has navigated that. And that’s the thing that really cements that situation between Jason and Medea, I think far more so than the acquisition of the Fleece itself.

Alison Innes 41:00
And it’s interesting that her story with Jason begins with subduing the monster, the monster serpent guarding the and then she becomes a monster herself in the way that Seneca presents it. She is monstrous, and she goes off, she she calls on serpents again. And this this serpent angle, I think is really interesting. But she calls on serpents again, and the winged chariot and all of that, and she becomes something monstrous herself.

Dr G 41:34
Yeah, there’s this lovely motif of serpents that is running through Seneca’s Medea and which is obviously supposed to remind the audience of that initial moment between her and Jason and and what she has done there. And then we start to see that sort of visualisation of Medea in the serpent chariot, which is coming through in vaseware from like, even like, sort of like, at the same time as we’re getting Euripides play in Greece, we’re seeing red figure ware from Southern Italy, which has the same kind of imagery on it. So it’s just astounding, the way that that serpent motif continues to develop and evolve.

Darrin Sunstrum 42:16
Yeah, it was all sorts of monsters and scaled horrors, and different types of poisons, and different sort of iterations of the power of fire, that struck me as interesting. You know, about how, you know, venom and fire and poison in flame, were all sort of part of the same sort of kind of complex of like, magic that was able to destroy Medea’s as enemies, whether it be a building or a person, or whatever it was she, you know, she had it all down, like, the way that the magic worked. Like you were drawing lines between what she said and almost every hero that you could come across. She had an artefact that linked it to Herakles, all sorts of different monsters, the Chimaera, everything was all in there the Charybdis and Scylla. You know, they all had she all had a fang or a scale, or the ash, or something that was just filled with this, this powerful force that that only she could channel and use to destroy her enemies. And I thought it was just like, overwhelming in it’s detail.

Dr G 43:30
Yeah, Seneca is amazing for the detail.

Alison Innes 43:35
And he uses those serpents as a as a motif or a representation of sexual passion in particular, but also calling on these ancient connotations going right back to Typhaon and Python and the Hydra like those ancient stories of of serpents.

Darrin Sunstrum 43:57
You know, the other thing too, was, I don’t know how much the Romans were into ghosts. But I read a lot about ghosts more about ghosts in the Roman context than I did in the Greek context. So my, my instinct is that they’re, you know, they’re fascinated by them. The Greeks probably were too but in the idea here, I don’t know, like you said, like, if you’re reading it or watching it performed, but that scene, where Medea is confronting or confronted by a ghost that she doesn’t recognise. And then she said, then she sees that it’s absurd as her brother, and then the play just sort of just goes into, like, overdrive at that particular moment. When she realises now what she has to do. I kept thinking about Shakespeare’s Hamlet, but that’s at the beginning. It’s not like three quarters of the way through. You don’t like it, but still, I’ve never had like Euripides doesn’t have ghosts in it for crying out loud, like, but this one does, right? Everything else is there so why not throw a ghost Do right.

Alison Innes 45:01
And the theories are there as well.

Dr G 45:04
The Romans have a lot of interest in ghosts. This is true, they, they spend a lot of time thinking about the dead. And what is happening at that intersection where you can get in contact with Hecate. And there are festivals set up specifically to deal with placating the dead spirits at times of the year where the barriers between the planes of the world are quite thin. And so for Medea to see a ghost would not be out of keeping it all from a Roman perspective.

Dr Rad 45:38
And the Romans are just so obsessed with their ancestors as well. You know, they, they have obviously they keep those funeral masks and they come out, you know, for certain occasions like that they are so connected to the people that come before.

Dr G 45:49
Always having to walk past the imagos of the past

Dr Rad 45:52
So yeah, Medea being fixated on her brother in particular

Dr G 45:57
It does make sense from a Roman perspective for sure.

Alison Innes 45:59
Does that make her crime of killing Jason’s father that much worse to a Roman?

Dr G 46:07
Not necessarily, because Medea is not herself from the region. So in the sense that like, it would be a problem for Jason definitely, for Jason finds ways to not be the one who’s actually absolutely involved. So the stain is really on Jason rather than her. Certainly she carries a lot of blood guilt related to her own family, which would be looked upon terribly. And I mean, she’s not going to come out of it well, from a Roman perspective, anyway.

Dr Rad 46:41
No all the murder, still not good.

Dr G 46:46
Even if we’re reading it through that Roman reading it through a Greek lens, then she’s sort of behaved in ways that don’t represent piety in any way. And she’s been driven by ambition. And all of this is rendered more monstrous from a Roman perspective, because she is a woman.

Dr Rad 47:06
Yeah, I mean, like, to be honest, I’m totally speaking off the top of my head here. I haven’t I hadn’t really thought about this until it came up in conversation. But, of course, by this stage in Rome, as well, women had, most women would have had those kinds of marriages, where they still had very strong connections to their family of birth than their husband’s family. Whilst Of course, they become more and more tied to their husband’s family, you know, when they have children and that kind of thing. And they obviously want their children to succeed. And that’s their main goal in life, etc, etc. At the same time, they do maintain extremely strong ties to their family of birth. And they’re own pater familias. So I think I think Medea having that that strong loyalty to her own family would make sense in the Roman context, more than what happened with Jason’s family.

Darrin Sunstrum 47:56
Yeah, like always a daughter and always a sister like having a brother, right? Like, that’s a pretty important relationship and a Roman woman’s life is the relationship that she has with of course her father, but also with her brothers. Right?

Dr Rad 48:10
Yes.

Darrin Sunstrum 48:11
And even during marriage right there, like I’ve heard, it said that they’re always a daughter. You know what I mean, right

Dr Rad 48:18
I think that’s true. And he would have actually, he would have, he would have heard about that firsthand, of course, because in spite of the fact that, you know, for hazy reasons, but maybe something is serious is trying to overthrow him. He saw Caligula who he knew, exile his two sisters, and, and then constantly threatened to kill them. And then in spite of all of that, he would have heard about them or seeing them coming back to Rome. And one of the first things they did was make sure that Caligula’s body or remains, I should say, was properly buried and had and had the Honours due to it. So you know, they were sisters. Yeah. To the end. Yeah.

Alison Innes 48:57
And I think that that difference is something worth teasing out a little bit because for the Romans, again, like Medea’s and Jason’s marriage is gonna stand out because of the passion element. Whereas in ancient marriage, generally and maybe I’m over-generalising here the marriage is not love match, necessarily, right?

Dr G 49:20
That’s right. Yeah. And this is one of the fundamental problems, I think, for Medea and Jason is that everything about the way their relationship begins, means that from a moralistic perspective, for the Greeks and the Romans, this can’t succeed. If this relationship was a success, it would break the moral fabric that has been set up in terms of how marriage should operate, who should control it, and all of those patriarchal structures are undermined.

Alison Innes 49:49
As the meme goes, I I saw a meme circulating on Twitter about marriages is is an agreement between two men for a Roman woman, but she’s not necessarily involved. It’s her father and her groom, possibly. And certainly the groom’s father as well who are making that agreement. And here, you have a couple who made that decision for themselves in in this passion.

Dr Rad 50:16
Oh, yeah. And with Medea choosing Jason as well, it seems like she really makes that choice.

Alison Innes 50:21
Yeah. And then further complicating it, too, is that the women like we have a tendency in our modern society, or Western society at any rate, to think of, of children as belonging to their mothers, sometimes even more so than to the fathers. But legally, for the Romans, children belonged to the father, so they’re not even really her children.

Dr G 50:48
Oh, yeah. And Jason kind of makes that clear as well. That, you know, these, these are children that are going to, ideally, it’d be better if the children stayed with him, because then he can incorporate them into the new family.

Dr Rad 51:01
And that definitely seems to be something that Medea is striking against, I think really, in Euripides, as well, but certainly in Seneca about she’s striking at the house of Jason, you know, she’s she’s striking it. I don’t know how you

Dr G 51:13
That legacy. Patriarchical structure itself, which is which flows from father to son.

Dr Rad 51:18
Yeah, it’s not about you never, even though Jason is a very different character, as you highlighted in Euripides, to Seneca, there’s never, I think a scene where you see really strong emotional connections between Jason and his children. That’s, that’s not really a focus, it does seem to be much more about that, that legacy aspect

Darrin Sunstrum 51:38
is definitely not given a lot of time to discuss how that works. Yeah, considering into the play, it’s, it’s a few lines here or there. And then, you know, your, your into the terrible stuff, you know, it’s been said to in the Greek context that a marriage is, of course, a marriage ritual, that it’s just as much a community affair as it is between two individuals. And that is successful marriage, at least from the religious side of things, as far as Greek religion is concerned, if it goes off without a hitch, then everything’s okay. Because the bride and the bridegroom have transitioned from what they were into what they will become. And that’s good for them. But it’s also good for the community. So if we consider this from a point of view of Medea and Jason, here’s a marriage, you know, that was begun outside of the Greek world. And in that is, you know, steeped in I don’t know what blood murder, right. And less than convenient circumstances, that was never really allowed to transition into the Greek world, and it’s out of context and out of sync with was just about everything that we would come to understand about what we might call a proper Greek marriage. So not only not only do they suffer, but the whole community suffers as a result of the being in close proximity to these characters that are much in flux, specifically, Medea in particular.

Dr Rad 53:08
Yeah, and I think even if you look at it in, in the Roman context at Seneca is, is dealing with now that you’ve got this imperial system, I mean, the imperial system is very much set up, like it’s almost like a larger version of that familial unit structure, you know, the, the way that people like Augustus get the title, you know, “father of the country”, and that becomes a very sought after way of looking at him. And he’s almost like this giant pater familias for the Empire. And the family is such a key unit, even before the empire that the family is always such a key building block in the Roman state, and the way that their society has to function. And, and it’s very much that idea of when a woman is acting out, if she doesn’t have a strong man to control her, if she doesn’t have a strong man to control her. If she doesn’t have a strong pater familias, chaos will ensue. Women can’t be entrusted to have that kind of independence. And as you say, it is it is bad for society if you don’t have the structures in place like you’re supposed to.

Darrin Sunstrum 54:09
Right, right. Yeah.

Alison Innes 54:11
And that is similar to, to looking at Euripides’ version in the Greek model is that this is this is what can happen if if a woman doesn’t have her curios if she doesn’t have somebody overseeing her a male somebody overseeing her.

Dr G 54:25
Yeah. And I think as for Medea, and the way that she operates in society, it is perhaps convenient in terms of the theatre, but also fascinating in terms of the psychology that she is still able to find allegiances with other men in times of trouble

Dr Rad 54:45
and she escapes

Dr G 54:46
Yes she does Yeah, gets out of there

Dr Rad 54:47
She gets away.

Dr G 54:49
But being able to wrangle her way to securing some alliances and some promises of aid from other powerful men, despite the fact that she clearly, in some senses, is being set up as a symbolic “No Go Zone” like – this is how you don’t do womanhood – is itself really interesting because within the terms of the play itself, she’s, she’s always pushing back against it and sometimes it’s working out.

Dr Rad 55:20
Absolutely.

Darrin Sunstrum 55:20
Yeah.

Alison Innes 55:21
It’s interesting that the king of Athens doesn’t put in an appearance in Seneca’s version. What what do you make of that difference?

Dr G 55:31
In a way, it’s kind of like skipping to the chase, isn’t it? Because we’ve started at that really like that fever pitch of anger, which is a quality that the Romans tend to deplore anyway, and she’s running with that throughout most of this play. Like, it’s almost like her transformation is pushed forward as a result, it’s like the anger is building and building and building. And all of a sudden, it’s not a surprise that she’s there in a chariot. Yeah, it’s like, it’s kind of like it’s reached such a point, that she doesn’t need that external point of safety anymore. She’s discovered it within herself. And that was probably going to happen in Euripides anyway. And we see that unfold in a slightly different way. But yeah, she’s kind of self contained.

Dr Rad 56:25
It does seem like more of a play on it to have Madea in Euripides, you know, going oh, but but how will I get out of this? Like, what’s my escape plan to have to have the character dealing with those sorts of issues does seem like more what you’d expect in something that’s going to be performed, I suppose, as the audience is like, oh, what she’s going to do? What has a plan going to unfold? It adds to the tension, I suppose.

Dr G 56:46
Yeah. Whereas by the time we get to Seneca, maybe the audience doesn’t need that. And they’re like, You know what, let’s just go for gold, go for the big stuff.

Alison Innes 56:54
Well, and it leaves her at the end of of Seneca’s play with nowhere to go, she can’t go back. Anywhere that she’s been, or to any family that she’s had. And she doesn’t really have a place to go forward to either she just kind of goes into the heavens.

Darrin Sunstrum 57:12
Yeah just into the into the heavens. And then Jason says there are no gods.

Alison Innes 57:16
Yeah. So there’s not even really a place there.

Darrin Sunstrum 57:18
And then you’re at your knees. But yeah, I don’t know. I thought that part was quite compelling. Actually. It’s not just a change of address part.

Alison Innes 57:27
Yeah, I’m not saying it’s not it’s it’s not compelling. But it leaves her in a different – I don’t know. It’s just it has a very different feeling compared to like, when we finish with Euripides’ Medea, we know that yes, she’s taking off in anger. But this is the next step in her plan. We see her taking off in anger. And that’s it. You know, there’s there’s not, there’s not a hint or a clue or any idea of where she belongs, like she may have found herself. But has she found where she belongs?

Darrin Sunstrum 58:02
Yeah, she is all she has her own place.

Dr G 58:05
And I think in a way that makes sense for Seneca if we’re thinking about like the Stoic sort of positioning as well, is that for Jason to be like, there are no gods. I think that’s him trying to just deal with the trauma that he’s just just taken on in witnessing the murder of one of his children, because she’s clearly leaving. And she’s clearly in a chariot and there are clearly serpents involved. So good luck to her buddy. I mean, she’s, she’s off and away. But for this whole thing to be just a crescendo level of anger, I think that speaks a lot to what Seneca is driving at,

Dr Rad 58:47
Definitely.

Dr G 58:48
What does it mean to hold that kind of rage? And how can it ever be dissipated? And it seems like the answer that Seneca comes to is that that it can’t – that level of rage belongs beyond the human experience.

Dr Rad 59:06
And what kind of life are you are you leading? You know, where’s where is it leading you? Even though Medea is much more set on revenge throughout Seneca, she still does have those moments where she’s kind of like, Wow, am I really doing this? Am I really going to murder my own children? She still has those moments.

Dr G 59:23
Yeah, where she has to buck herself up being like, I can do this.

Dr Rad 59:26
Yeah.

Darrin Sunstrum 59:26
I have a couple thoughts she vacillates between the decision making process or not, and that’s something that they share that Seneca and Euripides share, at least in that moment of psychology and Medea. It’s not very long. But one of the things that I was I found missing. Now correct me if I’m wrong, but what I found missing about Seneca, of course, it’s very relentless. We’ve talked about that. But the idea is that there’s almost no sort of rhetorical repartee. And by that I mean, Medea doesn’t use her gift of rhetoric to convince or manipulate like she does in Euripides. Right? Nor does there seem to be any sympathy with – which Euripides often does in other plays – But even in the Medea, Euripides’ Medea any sympathetic portrayal of anyone on the outside, whether it be other women or slaves or children themselves, or you know, marginalised characters, right, Nor is there any sort of, you know, you portray the gods as less than powerful, right or questioned their power, right, and their effect. So Seneca doesn’t get anywhere near those particular things, because rhetoric is not what it was or in, you know, fifth century Athens. Right. There’s something else that’s important to him, I imagine here, Medea is not about to trying to change anybody’s mind that I can see.

Dr G 1:00:52
I think I think I would accept that up to a point. I think it’s probably dangerous to say that the Romans aren’t interested in rhetoric. It’s just that their style is very different. And the way that Seneca is showcasing Medea through long set speeches, without giving other characters a real entry point is, in a way very much in keeping with trying to focus in on a particular feeling and rhetoric for the Romans as well, and to a certain extent for the Greek, centres around speechifying rather than conversation. So you might look at I spent a lot of time at the moment reading Dionysius of Halicarnassus. So bear with me, but he is always even at that point, writing in Greek, always trying to put together set speeches for rhetorical effect. And so they’re persuasive, not just in terms of their length, but for the arguments contained within that length. And this might be an argument for saying that Seneca isn’t writing so much a play as he’s writing some sort of document for circulation. He’s not trying to build that conversational oratory into it at all. Medea does convince Kreon which is a necessary element for the forwarding of the plot. So that does happen early on in Seneca. But it’s not the style I think, I think there’s something to be said about the differences in the way that Greeks in Euripides’ time are pursuing rhetoric and the way that Romans in the first century of the empire are pursuing rhetoric.

Dr Rad 1:02:40
I agree with you, Darrin, about the lacking of Medea’s persuasiveness, until almost like in Euripides her persuasiveness is one of her fearful powers because she, yeah, she is able to snake her way through situations and again, I think it does add to the dramatic element of of the play in Euripides. It is the way that the way that she works her magic,

Alison Innes 1:03:02
Yeah her danger there is not just her magic, and maybe not even primarily her magic, but her ability to use her words and to use what is a manly skill in rhetoric. Whereas in Seneca’s Medea her magic is her most, well her magic and her anger coupled together are the most fearsome aspect rather than her words. There’s there’s not the agon “the contest” of words that we see in a Greek play.

Dr G 1:03:12
Which is interesting as well because incantation in conjunction with pharmaka is usually very important. So it is striking and it’s not there.

Darrin Sunstrum 1:03:50
They even reference that in the play, she talks about the power of her word, right, but it’s used in reference to the incantation process, the magic itself. I remember that. I made a little note, but I can’t remember where it is. But wow, again, there’s the power of words, right. But then it was just about magic talk. Right, like speech.

Dr G 1:04:14
Mm. So I guess we could say that Seneca is then making a real differentiation between speech and the potential of rhetoric, and incantation as just very different modes of speaking.

Alison Innes 1:04:26
So were there any other angles that we wanted to explore?

Dr Rad 1:04:30
Yeah, no, I feel like I’ve felt like I’ve said,

Alison Innes 1:04:34
I feel like we’ve kind of come to a natural point and natural conclusion. All right. So thank you very much for joining us. This has been a really interesting conversation.

Dr G 1:04:43
Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

Darrin Sunstrum 1:04:45
Thank you very much, guys.

Dr Rad 1:04:50
Thank you for listening to this special episode of The Partial Historians co hosted with MythTake and until next time, we are yours in ancient Rome.

The post Special Episode – Seneca’s Medea with MythTake appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We sat down recently with Associate Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy to talk all about Ancient Greek women, specifically in relation to Athens.

Futo Kennedy teaches in Classical Studies, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Environmental Studies at Denison University. Kennedy holds a BA in Classical Studies, an MA in Greek and Latin, and completed her PhD on the representation of Athena in the tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles at Ohio State University. Kennedy’s most recent monograph is entitled Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City.

Special Episode – Ancient Greek Women with Rebecca Futo Kennedy

In this conversation we explore the terminology and semantic fields of meaning connected with women in Ancient Greece including some of the persistent misconceptions and assumptions that come along with language. For example, the word hetaira is quite well-known, but what did the ancient Greeks really mean when they used the term?

How did women fit into the social structures and hierarchies of the ancient Greek city of Athens? What were women’s lives like and what does the remaining evidence suggest about how they lived and the meaning they saw in their own experiences?

We also delve into the complexities attendant upon understanding metics – foreigners in Athens and what this category meant when you were also a woman. And the conversation rounds out with a consideration of poverty in ancient Athens and the challenges in studying this subject.

A number of sources and scholars are mentioned in this episode. Here’s a few that come up: 

Jean-Leon Gerome Greek Interior 1848

Woman playing kottabos. Painting attributed to the Bryn Mawr Painter, c. 480 BCE

Thanks to the thrilling Bettina Joy de Guzman for our theme music.

We’re playing around with auto-generated transcripts. This one was generated by Otter AI.

Dr Rad 0:16
Welcome to the Partial Historians,

Dr G 0:20
we explore all the details of ancient Rome.

Dr Rad 0:23
Everything from the political scandals, the love of ours, that battles waged, and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr. Rad.

Dr G 0:34
And I’m Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Roman Sword by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Dr Rad 0:43
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 0:57
Thank you so much for joining us. Dr. Rad and I are super thrilled to welcome Associate Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy to the show. Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy teaches in Classical Studies, women and gender studies and environmental studies at Denison University. Kennedy holds a BA in Classical Studies, and MA in Greek and Latin and completed her PhD on the representation of Athena in the trailer tragedies of Aeschylus and Sophocles at Ohio State University. Kennedy’s most recent monograph is entitled immigrant women in Athens, gender, ethnicity, and citizenship in the classical city. And it’s the subject of Athenian women and non Athenian women, that will be the subject of the conversation that we have today. So thank you so much for joining us, Rebecca.

Professor Futo Kennedy 1:52
Thank you for having me on. I really appreciate it. And I appreciate the the logistics of scheduling with such vast timezone differences. Yeah, I was looking at it today, it’s like a 14 hour time difference. So it’s somewhat of a miracle that we mathematically were able to work it out at all, to be honest. I know, I know, when we should have scheduled – when I was in Greece.

Dr G 2:18
To get started on this subject of Athenian women, and also non Athenian women, I want to talk to you about language as a first step, because it’s a really important window on to how we understand society. And this is true as much today as it was in ancient Greece, words carry certain connotations, and they start to reveal certain values to us and sense of community start to emerge from that usage as well. So as a first step, I wanted to ask you about what are some of the terms that are used for women in ancient Greece? How are women socially coded?

Professor Futo Kennedy 2:56
Yeah, it’s actually a really interesting thing. One of the things I discovered back when I was a graduate student, many, many years ago, is that there is no word for woman default, you have the word octopus, which is the word for either man or human. And you can throw a feminine article in front of it, but it’s actually very rarely done. We see it in medical texts, when you’re really just talking about a body, right? Or the female. Like there’s a word for female, but that works for humans and Non Humans, like. So the fact that you don’t really have a general word, to just say woman is, is, of course, a quite interesting thing. So what you actually have are a series of words that basically code them by marital status or relationship to children.

So the word parthenos, for example, which we often translate as virgin actually doesn’t mean virgin. It’s an unmarried girl who hasn’t had a child yet. But you can’t actually the problem is you have to think about what the word means versus how you translate it. And there’s always a gap between there because for translations, we always look for it. They all sort of pity, like one word or a short phrase. And this inevitably warps what the word actually means in context, right? So parthenos is for your sort of younger set. These are the girls who would wear their hair down and wear sleeveless tunics, and often short tuna, but it’s really for unmarried girls. And one of the things that, that some scholars have talked about is that you don’t switch over to being a gyne, which is the word that we is they often translated as woman, but it really means life is it’s childbirth, that actually does the transition, not marriage versus not married. Once you once you have a child, that’s your sort of coming of age, and that usually would have occurred in Athens, which is different from other cities sometime around 14 or 15 or 16. That’s sort of the zone for marriage for girls. We would come So there’s that child marriage now. But this is just, it’s just this it was basically, okay, they have had puberty and now it’s like a little bit out. So you’re a parthenos, you know, 13 to 14 year old. And then by the time she sort of gets married and has her first child, then she would switch to being gyne.

And then you have widows, which is pretty easy to you have a word for old women, which isn’t necessarily have any, that’s one of the ones that’s really good to grouse. It doesn’t actually have much to do with marriage status or not marriage status, it’s just old. Right, just old people. When you see it in context, it’s often used of formerly enslaved women. So you’ll see it in like the Odyssey of the old nurse of Odysseus, or in tragedy of these older former nannies for more wet nurses, characters, and then you have a series of words that are for people who are outside of the marriage track. And those can be super confusing. So one of them is the word Paula kiss or Paula Kay. There’s actually two spelling of the word. And that word is often translated as concubine. And the reason why it is translated that way is because our dictionaries are made with 19th century. Right?

Dr Rad 6:23
Right, yeah. And there’s Victorians. Yeah, so

Professor Futo Kennedy 6:26
they refer to them, because it appears in Herodotus in the context of in one particular context of the Persian harem. And so it gets coded as concubine. But then you see it in lots of different Greek contexts and Roman Greek contexts. So we have some Roman era inscriptions, in which the word appears, that are actually probably temple attendance. Because it’s a it’s a generational inscription at a temple, saying, you know, thanking the Goddess. And definitely Boudin has argued, based on the context for this, that these can’t have been generations of concubines, in the same family or us, sometimes scholars will just say, oh, it just means prostitute. Like everything is code for prostitute if it’s not wife. And so and so, it seems to actually be an attendant or a companion to the Goddess, right, as you will. And then you see it in Athenian context, where you’ll see it in tragedy to refer to and drama key. And so this idea that she’s the concubine of Achilles, son, me autonomous in the play. But and then you see is founded on a tombstone, which is super rare. And I think what it has to be that because there’s only a couple of words that go, if you’re missing letters, we’re missing some major. So apparently, when a tomb was first study, published in the 1920s, there were more letters there. But it’s in the Piraeus museum. And who knows, you know, during World War Two, they hid all the objects and tried to like hide all the different strap all the objects down when the Nazis were marching. And so I’m sure damage occurred to some of the objects but there’s a big hole where there used to be a letter. So I’m pretty sure it says politicus, because the only other option is really pull Lacus, which just means often and you wouldn’t put that on your tombstone, to list your status in relationship to a man I am often have a man talking to work. So translation pavlakis, here and also into other contexts in a CDN. Court speeches, suggests that the term also means a contracted relationship. So a not a marriage, like relationships for people who can’t actually contract a marriage. Some scholars have argued that it’s a powerless relationship. But most of the ones that I found are of non citizen women in a relationship, but there was a law in Athens. That goes back apparently to Solon, where this particular type of woman, it was a legally binding contract, and children were considered legitimate. Even if they weren’t citizens, they were still legitimate children. So arguments have been made that these were enslaved women, typically, but they wouldn’t have been able to have legitimate children, with a with their owner with their own flavour, if it was such. So I think there’s that word has like three different meanings. But everybody conflates it to concubine, thanks to our dictionaries. And then of course, probably the most well known and most contentious one is hiera, which everybody translates as core design, which is not necessarily, again, 19th century dictionary. You know, often I asked my students like, Do you know what a concubine is? Do you know two quarters of this? And they’re like, no idea.

Dr G 9:45
Yeah, like, what’s the fine grain of nuance there for the 19th century that were missing?

Professor Futo Kennedy 9:49
Yeah, right. And in the shade, it seems to be between those two words in the 19th century is one is a Turkish woman in the Ottoman Empire as foreign and one Is your your sort of grind horizontally your demi-monde girlfriend or something? But that’s the 19th century? Not, you know?

Dr G 10:11
Yeah. How do we get that into ancient Athens? Really?

Dr Rad 10:15
Yeah, absolutely. Perhaps you could tell us a little bit about how the definition of hetaira has changed over time.

Professor Futo Kennedy 10:23
Yeah, it’s a funny one too, because the got coded in the 19th century by our lexicon writers, you know, Liddell and Scott and Jones as courtesans. But in like 1929, Gong wrote an article that was like, there was no like, trained finishing school for like, fine courtesans, ends and assets, like no such thing like, you know, so even in the 1920s, people were like, this is ridiculous. But it got really picked up in the 1980s by feminist scholars in the field, as part of a movement to sort of bring for scholarship of non elite women. And so this whole industry basically developed around studying prostitution in the ancient world. Part of this is part of the modern movement to de stigmatise sex work. But what they ended up doing was taking all these women who are called hetaira, in any context, even being called this thing by people who are attacking them in court, right, and treating it as a status category. First off, and then treating a cortisone as an independent, educated woman, as if they were sort of looking for, you know, someone like these 19th century women, who often were able to live outside of marriages and, and held salons and things you know, in Paris, and in London, I often think of a good example is Elizabeth Armitage, who ended up marrying a former prime minister and we had so many legacies left to her by her former partners that she was able to buy her own house in the countryside and sort of lived out her life, happily married to the man of her dreams, to an aristocrat, you know, etc. So they sort of imagined this grand courtesan, educated, liberated, and they use a spacia as the sort of model for this. Basically, misunderstanding, Athenian law. And the leading Plutarch, who 700 years after she had lived, basically said that she held a she random harem in Paris Leazes house after telling us the territories was so worried about public opinion that he wouldn’t even go to party and drink.

Dr G 12:32
So if it’s over here, this is fine.

Professor Futo Kennedy 12:34
Yeah. The harem like, she’s, she’s running, she’s running a brothel out of his living room.

Dr Rad 12:40
But you don’t have one of these, you gotta get

Professor Futo Kennedy 12:42
A girl’s gotta get educated. Right, so everybody became a hetaira. And then of course, we had this famous article in the 90s from Leslie Kirk, which is like inventing the hetaira, where she like makes this grand distinction between the courtesan and the hetaira. Oh, porne is another word for women, which she classified as the sort of streetwalker, sort of the really poor, lower class, sex worker versus the hetaira who was the high class. But, you know, you’ve looked at these dictionaries, and these words have like one word listed. The new Cambridge lexicon, actually has a really nice full definition of attire that takes into consideration the last like three decades of four decades of scholarship. So that’s one nice thing that they’ve done in that. But you see that like, The Word Appears in Sappho. And it refers to Artemis and Hera is like, hetairae. So clearly, they’re not courtesans. So it has to mean something else. So what are the things that you see that in earlier texts, a lot of contexts, it probably just means girlfriend, as in your friends who are girls on the equivalent of the word hetairos, which is your buddies that you hang out, listen to requests at parties, and we actually have this whole class of women in the sort of early fifth century, late sixth century and Athens who were like the wives and sisters and daughters of the wealthiest of the wealthy. People like Pisistratus’ daughter Coesyra, people like Elpinice, who was Miltiades, the general’s daughter and the sister of Kimon and she was married to the wealthiest man in Athens. They are not courtesans but they’re we you know, they’re clearly public figures. And we have inscriptions referring to them ostracism inscriptions, like they want their husbands or their brothers or their sons to be kicked out of the city. They’re like, take your mother with you. Take your sister with you. And so there’s all these rumours they have bad reputations like, openly gay supposedly like was having an affair with Pollack noticed the painter gasp scandal and there’s actually a vase painting in the Naples museum storage facility that at one point had her name carved on it, a painting a painting by Polacnotis. My ad shows a woman playing a flute while dancing girls are dancing and a man is looking on. Someone’s like this is a brothel scene. It’s like it’s probably a music school or a school for Young girls

Dr G 15:04
this is a bit like it’s pillow fights at a slumber party. And it’s like that’s not what the girls are doing.

Professor Futo Kennedy 15:10
It sort of reminds me though of a famous painting by Jerome called Greek interior, which basically has a bunch of, of Greek, odourless style women like you know, Aphrodite, the needy and Aphrodite posed women like all standing around naked with each other. In their bedroom. It’s like, Yeah, this is what happened in the interiors of the Divi homes,

Dr Rad 15:29
right? Yeah, as you do. That’s why no one else is allowed inside.

Professor Futo Kennedy 15:33
What’s interesting about the word had hetaira is that by the fourth century, we see it showing up in oratory. And on the comic stage. In the comic stage, it seems to refer to a transmitted as girlfriend like a girl you date, but you can’t marry or that you wouldn’t marry like the kind of girl you wouldn’t take home to mom. And but then, in the orations, it’s often an accusation. And so it seems to have this by the time you get to this to the fourth century, it seems to carry the connotation of it could be sex worker, but it could also just be a sort of all around, disreputable woman, I often translate it when I see it as whore, because it sort of captures the negative connotation, like, the one thing she had to talk to think about when you deal with this kind of material is it isn’t actually about sex work, when you’re dealing in the orations, right? It’s actually about people who are trying to attack these women and make their lives miserable, and in some cases have been sold into enslavement. So it’s can’t be you can’t translate his high res sex worker. And the idea that they’re calling these women hetaira, they can’t be these like high class respectable corazones educated women, that’s got to be imaginary. These are women who are outside of the marriage circuit, for some reason or other, and women whose whose status within the city is really tentative and fraught, and, and very dangerous, that they can be open to these tax. So it sort of moves and loses this sort of meaning of like, you know, goddesses hanging out with each other rich girls hanging out with each other. But I almost feel like, if you follow the evidence around the, the things that we see that happen, because about you know, seventh century later in the second sophistic, with people like Lucien and Athenaeus, and Plutarch, you see, you know, agonises dinner parties, all of these ideas, chord isms, quote, unquote, hentai hanging out. And same thing with Lucien has satire, the chattering quarters, and that there’s this imaginary past in Athens, which is essentially that they’re imagining in the second century CE, of the grand salon, and of all these sort of women sitting around, educated and witty, you know, women sitting around, but you can all like, drop in and dine with, you know, and you sort of have, you know, Socrates being able to sort of like, drop in and, and, and have a conversation. So you have the sort of imaginary world, that the word, that’s where it really gets this meaning, I think the court is on as we imagine it in the 19th century, it’s that’s not in our earlier texts. But what you actually have is a bunch of probably rich women whose hard headed up and, and we’re pretty public figures and like, sort of pushed against the boundaries of what was acceptable behaviour. And then by the time you get to the fourth century, that word, that behaviour is like, being the leader of women who have no choice but to be in public. Right. And so they’re, they’re sort of hitting them with this accusation of being publicly available women, as it were.

Dr Rad 16:19
Yeah, that’s so fascinating, because it kind of flies in the face of, I suppose the popular image of what an Athenian citizen woman would do in her in her life. I mean, we usually have this image of their being highly secluded, and very modest, and, you know, really, really toeing the line.

Professor Futo Kennedy 18:52
Yeah, I mean, that’s rich women, rich women probably, right. There’s a there’s a double edged sword there. So and this is one of the things that you learn when you read oration and spend a lot of time trying to deal with Athenian inheritance law, is that because married women were expected to remain mostly within that the compound to the home, right? I mean, most weeding probably took place outside they weren’t like stuck in a bedroom, or like in locked into quarters. You set up the big looms out on your outdoor space, because they’re like six feet, eight feet, and you can’t just like, take that down when you’re gonna go to bed. So in the summertime, and when weather was appropriate, they would set them up outside. And then there’s also evidence of like women going to each other’s houses in their neighbourhoods, right? So they weren’t completely secluded, but they always had a companion with them of some sort. And they did veil when they went out in public if you were a married woman, so like, if you went to a ritual, an important ritual or something, or you went out to visit a grave, which was your duty to go out and visit great, you would wear a veil. But then you have this whole world of women Who actually fill public spaces? But in the inheritance cases, what happens is that so many marriages are mismatched, right? So you got a guy who’s like, originally, original marriage might be first marriage for a man might be 35 or 40. And the girls like 15, right? Well, guy wants a second marriage, maybe his wife died in childbirth, right? So he marries again. And he’s married another 15 year old and now he’s, you know, 50. All right. So you have these mismatch in ages that you see these inheritance cases where there’s a woman, a young woman with an incident or a small child, who inherits the child is inheriting right, and it’s coming to the marriage with a woman. And they’re trying to attach a woman to prove like district cousins all come out of the woodwork. And they’re like, just like magically appearing cousins. And they are trying to prove that this woman is in fact, not the wife of this person. In some cases, they’re trying to prove that the woman never doesn’t exist, like you can claim citizenship to your grandmother, but that woman never existed. Because what happens is that these women live their lives separated off from the public spaces, they’re not presented to the Diems. For citizen registration, there are no records of their citizenship, you have the option, if you’re like, super wealthy guy, you might present your wife, or your daughter to your tribe. But that’s a sec, that’s about a civic organisation. It’s more of kinship groups. And so everything is dependent on witnesses. And there are no witnesses, because all your witnesses are like 70 years old, and you know, and they’ve died by the time you’re inheriting or your child is inheriting this. And there’s nobody to witness their lives. Because neither women, nor children, nor the enslaved count as witnesses, they don’t count. So it has to be adult citizen men. So there’s, it’s a double edged sword, where you have this whole class of women who are public and outside who are denigrated for that very thing. And then you have the women who are where property moves through in the city who are constantly in a precarious status, if they don’t have male protectors, because their lives are meant to be lived in private.

Dr G 22:02
So I think this really heads in towards this idea of like, how do we understand where women sort of sit in Athenian society, because we’ve got these like fine grained distinctions for citizen women, where it seems like the situation that you’ve just described to us is like, even when they are doing everything, right. And let’s say that they’re living a relatively secluded life, they’ve entered marriage at the appropriate age, they’re not seeing that much in public. But when they go into public, they veil themselves, nobody has a chance to really witness what is going on. Is one woman just simply replaceable for another in that kind of scenario? Like how do you distinguish individuality if they’re never really properly seen? And, and if they don’t have brothers that might also be looking after them in some way, and they don’t survive? Whatever reason, it seems hugely problematic. But there are other categories as well. And you’ve hinted at some of them already. And I was wondering if you could expand a little bit on it, like we see things like citizen women, but we’ve also hinted at that there are non citizen women. There’s definitely poor women and there’s enslaved women, and what sort of positions are we thinking about within if we’re thinking holistically about Athenian society and what it looks like for women? What are the sort of realms they inhabit?

Professor Futo Kennedy 23:20
Yeah, so one of the things that’s important is that women were in public everywhere. We talked about public versus private, but it doesn’t mean isolated in a space in a house. Right? Versus being outside. When we talk about public spaces, we mean civic spaces. So like, women were not allowed to go within a certain zone within the agora. Right? Foreigners were not allowed to go in Oh, the only citizen men could go in, but that was not the space where the markets weren’t necessarily or warehouses where that’s the space where the assembly Administration Building was, right. So you know, there are fountain houses in what we call the Athenian agora today, but the boundary stones for what counts as the Agra civic space versus the entourage generally is very different. So we have to remember that women will be outside. So over unmarried girls, they do go to the fountain houses, they you know, they do go to public rituals. They’re not veiled, they’re not hidden away. And then once you have your first child, so this is really interesting speech. Lipsius one against Aristophanes. Aristophanes was caught having an affair with the speaker’s wife. And the law in Athens is that if you are caught having an affair, if you’re caught in the act in bed with your someone’s wife, she can kill you on the spot. And this is a this family brings the lawsuit though, because he didn’t kill it or toss these in bed. He learned that his wife had a guest over and the thing we learned about is the setup of the house and how the sort of structures and he goes and gets witnesses brings them back and then children as he’s getting out of bed, and so The family sues and says what’s not in the act. So you committed murder. So it’s on our atrocities. But what we learned in there is that he tells the story of how his wife got freedoms basically to, like, well, you know, we married and then you know, she was a good girl and my mother lives in the house and she had to live with her mother in law. So just imagine a space where you will your father is like, 90 and your mother is like 30. So, your mother’s 40 year, you know, whatever. So you these women are going to be because the marriage age mismatches, there’s gonna be a lot of mother in law’s wife. And you know, as we learn from things like Xenophon texts, this idea is that the older woman would train the younger woman to run a household, right kind of thing. So she’s living with her mother in law, she’s behaving herself. Mother-in-law goes out with her whenever she goes somewhere. And then she has her first child, right? So she has the first child. And at that point, he decides that it’s okay for her. She’s proven herself basically. So it’s okay for her to like, she’s become a proper gyne. She’s no longer a parthenos. So she can do stuff. And one thing she does though, is that she will be here in the sense that she goes over to a neighbor’s house at night to get candles, you know, my cat, our wax burnt out. So I needed to go get, so my wick burnt down, so I had to go to the neighbor’s house and borrow a wick or something, right. So we learned that they have this sort of mobility around the neighbourhoods, right. And then we also learn that he actually switched bedrooms with her. So we often imagine the women’s quarters on the second floor, the door locks from the outside, not from the inside. But he swapped with her because the baby didn’t live in the room with her, the baby was downstairs with with others, and she needed to be able to move back and forth to nurse at night. So he switched bedrooms with her and he moved into the upstairs room, and she moved into the downstairs room. But so what we will we get a picture of a household and this deck. So we also learned about the other women who live in the house, some of whom would have been enslaved, but some of whom were not. So one of the main characters is this old woman who used to work for the household but doesn’t anymore. And she’s now free. And she’s the one who rents the wife out.

The husband, but also we learned that the wife met Aristosphanes at a funeral with her mother, like she went with her mother in law to a funeral. And that’s where she were Aristosphanes first met and saw her behind her veil. And this is when they began their affair. So it’s a sort of tale but you sort of little, all these little details. There’s like there’s still these women who live in the houses, right, then there’s their neighbours and the people who live in their neighbourhoods, and they’re all gonna have varying levels of status and income, right. Some of the houses are two stories, some of them are only one story, right? Depending on on who you are, and where you are. Property can only land land and houses can only be owned by citizens. They can be rented, though, by people we call medics who are the resident, foreigners. And the metaclass is made up of anyone who is either an immigrant or an initial immigrant. If you’re there for something like 10 days or two weeks, you have to register in the city or you risk sale into enslavement if you’re sort of hiding out in the city. It’s made up of people who are multi generations like their their grandparents immigrated, you can’t there’s no pathway to citizenship, you’re a perennial immigrant or perpetual immigrant. And then there’s anybody who is freed from enslavement enters this class as well. So you can have people from ranging from Lipsius, who, whose father was invited to the city of Athens by terraclean, to set up a factory, he made cheap, they’re extremely wealthy, they made shields for the hoplites. And they were extremely wealthy, to, you know, a formerly a former enslaved woman from a brothel, who is just like making a life trying to make a life for herself in the port of forest. So it can sort of have this vast range of people that can exist in it. And back in the 1970s, when people first started really sort of paying attention to medics than Athens. They basically they were dismissed in the one book that had really been written on it to you dismisses medic, women’s like, we’re not gonna talk with him because they’re like an insignificant part of the population and didn’t really impact it. But then if you look at inscriptions over time, the population of medics seems to become more and more women. And this is probably because one freed slaves, the the freedom, freeing women from enslavement, because we know that women were targeted more directly in warfare for enslavement, women and girls for sale into the market. So you’re going to have more women who are enslaved versus men, you’re typically going to kill the men of military age. In a city when you take it or in battle. You’re not going to leave them alive and enslave them, but you’re going to target and collect women and pregnant women were especially valuable because they would be nursing. Right? And then you could have have a wet nurse, but then you’re gonna have them freed after they no longer need a nanny in the house or you know, for various reasons. Feel free them, they enter into the pot, so the medic population, and there seem to be more and more of them. But also importantly, the laws around citizenship and acids, which evolved over the course of the fifth and fourth centuries, explicitly target the women, men and women by trying to exclude them from marriage and exclude them from the ability to have children with citizen men. And so you don’t target laws at a population that doesn’t exist. It’s just not going to happen. So we have a lot of inscriptions, for women who sort of are on this line between like, we’re not sure if they’re free immigrants, or if they were formerly enslaved, they’re clearly no longer slaves. Because the inscriptions, there’s this group of Inscriptions called the Fiat lie inscriptions, which for decades, people have thought they were Manumission decrees. But Elizabeth Meyer argued a few years ago that they’re more likely actually dedications by people who won lawsuits by people who were trying to claim that they were not really free. So there’s a law in Athens, that a former owner or anyone actually, it doesn’t have to be your former and slaver. It can be any citizen can say that you are actually only pretending to be free, but you’re actually enslaved. And they can turn you in. And if they win the lawsuit, they get half the sale amount, from selling you into enslavement, back.

Dr G 31:28
This seems hugely problematic.

Professor Futo Kennedy 31:31
Yes. And we have evidence of that, like people who did this, like who like that’s how they made their money. And some of them are interesting because this one guy Arista guidance, he may actually be the son of a man who had made assistance. So his parents had been medics, because his mother was sold into enslavement, according to Democrates, for pretending to be a citizen. And he investigated himself tried to sell his sister to enslavement, but his other brother apparently tried to stop them. Totally disreputable. So they all these women on these inscriptions. So either they are they won their emancipation case, or they won against charges, they were pretending to be free. So they’re all in this population. And there are something like 192 Women listed on this, I can’t remember the exact there was like 172, or 192. And they all almost all of them have occupations listed next to them. And they most of them are woodworkers, textile workers, weavers, and but then there’s also women who are clearly working as part of a family business because you’ve got three people in a row listed as definitely sellers, or perfume sellers. So you have like a man, a woman and a child like this is a family sort of a small family business. Right. But my favourite thing about those inscriptions is that one scholar argued that you couldn’t possibly need that many Weaver’s and so the word Weaver must also be code for prostitute.

Dr Rad 33:02
Ah, that’s harsh.

Professor Futo Kennedy 33:06
But as I saw, I’m like, wow, so that means that you need for sex workers per citizen man. In order like if this is the correct magic, but nobody needs clothing. Because they imagined

Dr Rad 33:18
as a prostitute you don’t?

Dr G 33:22
Um, you certainly don’t need

Professor Futo Kennedy 33:25
I’ve seen as your own painting. I know they all hang out in the house naked.

Dr Rad 33:29
Exactly. Yeah.

Professor Futo Kennedy 33:31
Weavers. But it but it’s a funny thing, right? Because they all imagine this world where these wives all live in seclusion in their houses, and all they do is sit around with their slaves waiting, right? It’s Penelope. They’re all Penelope. But it takes like weeks to make a single like six foot cloth.

Dr G 33:51
Yeah, this is people who haven’t thought about the complexities of actually waving. I think

Professor Futo Kennedy 33:56
what this is the other thing too, is that we have inscriptions that list people who are seamstresses, like why do you need seamstresses, you’re all making your own clothes.

Dr Rad 34:07
There after something more fun.

Professor Futo Kennedy 34:10
We also have an industry where it’s like you’d have to make like 300 sales a year and both seem to have new rope rigging and things like the sailors aren’t taking the off season and like making ropes. Like that’s not what they’re doing. Right. So I’m pretty sure there’s industrial scale, weaving down in Piraeus and a lot of these women who maybe they were enslaved, initially, right, so we have this big population of enslaved people who are being brought in to do work. But then at some point, they’re freed and they enter into the non citizen population. And some of them are having relationships with citizens. And some of them are having relationships with other medics, and some of them are marrying other freed slaves, who are also medics, but we have evidence of all of those things going on. But marriage is not banned between citizens and non citizen women. Until like this 380. So there’s this whole period of starting in 451, where a medical woman could not give birth to a citizen child. But they were still, they were still allowed to marry, and they were still having relationships with citizens. And there are a lot of reasons why you would do this particular citizen inheritance law, you have to, you’re required by law to divide your property amongst all of your male children. So if you have two male children, but you’re like 50, and your wife dies, or you don’t like your wife anymore, as in the case of Pericles, he actually helped his wife find a new husband, the academics are curious. And then he married dysphasia, because you don’t want any more citizen children, because you already have two who are going to divide the property. Empirically this case, his two citizen sons died in the play. But he had to son by this foreign woman, who was his wife, who he petitioned the court to make a citizen and they didn’t just make his son a citizen, they made a law that basically said that if your citizen sons die, right, any child that you have, by another marriage, can be made a citizen to inherit. And so we had this whole period during the Peloponnesian War, when foreign women’s children, from marriages with citizen men were being made citizens to, you know, in the emergency situation. And then in 380, they finally just banned marriage because they’re not in this crisis of a 30 year war anymore. So it’s interesting that the law passes after not just the Peloponnesian War, but a second set of war that we call the Corinthian War, that doesn’t end until 387. And then all of a sudden, now you’ve got this law passed. So there must be this population of women who are marrying the citizens. And we always think that this is an elite practice. But the inscriptions tell us that these women are working in shops, you know, as shopkeepers, they’re working as tavern keepers, like they’re working in family businesses. So you know, this is probably happening at all levels of society. Because the other thing too, is that when the marriage ban is pulled out, and the citizenship laws ended, in the second century, we start seeing a slew of tombstones, particularly of my Legion women. So they’re, they’re in tune with them as my leader, but they’re married to a senior. So like it starts happening immediately after the law was repealed. So they’re having all this stuff having just all this interaction, they’re out in the shops, they’re working in temples, they’re working as your wet nurses, we have these wonderful stories of citizen men like in Athens, there’s a whole slew of tombs that have the word tip day on them. These are citizen people who are making tombs for the woman who was their witness who dies. Right? We have one story of a guy who is a citizen, man, wealthy, he was in the highest tax bracket, his old wet nurse, she had been fried, she got married her husband and died. So she had her move back in the house with a family. Right. So sort of all these sort of different relationships, we imagine these elite sort of secluded citizen women and and then or as Pomeroy put it, you know, goddesses, wives, slaves and horrors. But you know, really, the slaves and horrors are sort of the same category. And in the public imagination, anybody who’s not a married woman is like, sort of over here. But we have this sort of integrated into all walks of life, in the city and into the fabric of the economy, whether it’s as property in the case of the enslaved women, or as actual workers in the economy, and part of the people who actually make the economy run in assets, because obviously, your citizen wife is not out selling you perfume, but you need a woman to sell your wife for fuel. Because you can’t go buy it from that

Dr Rad 38:40
damn straight you do. So you’ve highlighted really well, I think, in your work, and in that outline, that when you go looking for them, there are these nuances and women everywhere. And there’s just such a huge diversity of experience, you know, in terms in terms of the class that they might be sent to occupy in terms of whether they were wealthy or whether they were poor, whether they had really tight connections to the citizen body or not. But regardless of where they were, as these non citizen people as these metrics, they were still really vulnerable, weren’t they?

Professor Futo Kennedy 39:16
Yeah, so, I mean, obviously, they’re, you know, there are laws of start getting targeted at them. Starting around the four 451 is like the most famous, which is the citizenship loss hair, please. The irony being that he had to have a trial by a foreign woman made US citizen. But that’s the law that basically said that to be a citizen. You have to have to citizen parents. Now, some people have imagined, Robin Osborn wrote on this that when this happened, citizen women’s lives got better, because they were more valuable, but in fact, they probably got worse, because they were now more valuable. You don’t have DNA testing. How do you prove a child as yours? Well, you don’t let your wife talk to any man. Ever. Good. to relatives. So you have, you have these laws, and then you have the laws relaxed at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War is relaxed again, later on. Some people think that this law that happened after the Sicilian disaster in 411 was actually a law allowing bigamy, but it’s actually just allowing, basically seems to be the case where it’s just allowing any person who has a child, regardless of whether the person is a citizen or not, is gets to be the act of one citizen parent. Because then in 404, they sort of reinforced the law. And then you have the abandoned marriage is not till 380. So what seems to be happening this century, there seems to be some laxity about the laws. And we don’t have a lot of evidence. One of the biggest problems is we don’t have any courtroom documents in the courtroom speeches from the fifth century, other than like, on the mysteries from and often, and that’s like at the tail end of the fifth century. So we don’t have sort of the beef of that period. So there’s not a lot of evidence for what these women were doing. Most of the women that we see who are medics are actually being represented on the tragic stage. And you see different types of women represented there from the heroic daughter of Hera Cleves who’s going to sacrifice herself to save the city of Athens from like, during the Peloponnesian War period, to people like Chandramukhi, who’s enslaved. So there’s a sort of Oh, very, Matthias probably the most famous medic onstage in Athens out there, killing everybody. But she, but what’s interesting about the play that she’s invited to Athens, right to come and help the king, at this period at the beginning of the Peloponnesian War, when the law is being relaxed,

and he or she is being brought in to help. So it’s a very strange thing. But then starting in the fourth century, things seem to be getting more draconian, like that’s when the marriage restrictions are passed. And we see a lot of prosecutions and we have three laws on the books, they variously target medics or the enslaved. So there’s a law, that if you don’t register, as a medic, and you’re reported, you can be taken into custody and sold into enslavement. So you have to register, you have to law those people who are pretending they are pretending to be free, but aren’t really. And then you have the one for one away in Slate. So these are three laws that are used, basically to police the population, and to keep them in check. And so you have a these laws are being more highly enforced. We see in court speeches, a lot of accusations of this kind of thing against women, we see citizen women being very precarious as well, because they can’t prove who their father was, or they can’t prove they have no brothers, they have no father, they can’t prove who they are. Then when this inheritance is stripped from them, it’s almost always strict on the grounds that they’re not really a citizen. And so what’s happening to them? Are they being sold into enslavement, right, for pretending to be a citizen. So you have all these lots of targets. And I think what’s actually happening is that, because the inscriptions seem to pick up, we have a lot more tombstones for foreign women. In the fourth centuries, I think we actually have a larger population of foreign women in the city. And maybe that’s because Athens is the major economic hub of that part of the GN at this time. And so you have a lot of women, we know women coming from Ventura, we have women coming from Korea, we have women coming from mostly coming from my Letus. And so here we have generations of people coming starting the fifth century, some are refugees. So you have refugee families coming, but then also, my Letus is slowly losing its port. It had three ports when the city was founded in the seventh century. By the time you get to the Roman period, it’s like half a port left, because it’s like silting up from the river. And so its economy seems to be in shambles at various points. And of course, there’s always threats of war from over there. So we have this influx of population. So by the time we get to the second century, we have a huge explosion of my Legion, women who are getting 45 of them who are getting married to Athenian citizens, and like over 400 inscriptions for my Legion women. So I think as the population became more women, and we probably have the population is more free freed women are entering into the population. And so as your medic population becomes less wealthy people being invited into the city to support the economy and more free free women and migrant women coming for work, the laws get more restrictive. And so we dcci inscriptions are almost all from the fourth century. There are over 400 of them extant, but it was a much larger, we’re not exactly sure how we got this inscription. But it may have been that in the 320s the actual dedications themselves were melted down, and so they re recorded the inscriptions, but we’re missing hundreds of them. So there are probably 1000 You know, hundreds, as many as 1000 of these inscribed dedications, that means a lot of court prosecutions of these people. And if our percentage, just in those 460 So are it’s about 30% women. So you know, what’s the tipping point when I don’t think there are too many women in the space, right? Usually it’s one if there’s one woman in the space or too many away, you’re scooting all the men from the conversation.

Dr G 45:13
I think this leads us really nicely to like the wrap up question, actually, because we’ve talked a lot about how this population that sort of outside the citizenship is having real consequences for how Athens tries to understand itself and how it tries to define itself. And thinking about minority representation within that, or perhaps the least represented in particular ways is the study of how poverty is operating. In a in a big city like this, where we’ve got quite a diverse population, we’ve got lots of people coming in, it’s clearly an economic hub, we’ve got a really large non citizen population sometimes being targeted by legislation, sometimes quite severely over long periods of time. How is poverty coming through in the evidence for us in this as well?

Professor Futo Kennedy 46:00
Yeah, so poverty is actually really hard to study. Because one, there’s like, sort of varying definitions of what poverty is. And the other thing is, is that, how do you identify it? How do you see it? Right? So Claire, Taylor has done a lot of work on this. She recently has been doing more work on gender and poverty. So when it came time, she’s reading the cultural history of poverty. And she’s like, Rebecca, can you write the chapter about women in poverty, but so she so she, she asked me to write it. So it was nice, I could go back and review a lot of the evidence, especially looking at it sort of, in the long span of time, like all the way from the earliest representations of women and poverty in Hesiod, all the way up into the Roman period with Christian texts and Jewish texts and, and et cetera. So that was kind of nice. But the big problem is, how do you how do you do it? So Claire’s Taylor, and then let you catch that also does poverty in Athens, they sort of divided poverty into two sort of types of poverty. So there’s, there’s actual, you know, economic poverty, right? From the lack of anything, are we talking about? Penry is sort of like completely, devastatingly poor no money? Or is poverty sort of like below a subsistence level or below, right? So economic poverty can have a wide range of definitions. But you know, you sort of situate it like, we can think about an Athens or, generally in I think Athens, in particular, I don’t want to speak to like the whole of the ancient world. But you know, there is a negative discourse around work for women in sort of all of our ancient texts, this idea of women who work as somehow inferior, of course, this because this is being written by elite men, for the most part. So I don’t think though people, women who are working thought of themselves as lesser for their spouses or their neighbours, and all the people who live with them in the communities, but there is a negative stigma in a lot of our sources attached to work in the Athenian sources working is actually used as evidence in court that you’re a foreign. So that gives you that sort of idea that the idea that you’re a citizen woman, and you work, that’s bad if you’re a foreign woman and work that’s expected. Right. So we’re How do you find poverty when you have this stigma against work? Can you say that every working woman is therefore technically in economic poverty, because she has to work? I mean, that’s a discourse we have in the modern world as well, you know, as well, especially like when I was growing up in the 70s. I was born in 74. And my mom went to work in like when I started kindergarten in 79. But it was because we were poor. Right? Like, the idea of the middle class ideal, from the 1950s. And stuff is that you only your wife only worked if she had to, you didn’t work if you didn’t have to. So we still have this discourse. I think a lot of places were working women are working because they’re poor. I’m not sure if you can make that equation, though, with foreign population to the city where they have no choice, but to work, right. So there’s ideals and there’s reality. So that’s a little difficult to actually say, and they’re even scientists trying to identify malnutrition, in bones, in art and bio archaeology. But the problem is, is that lacking certain nutrients, it could just be a factor of regional diet, it can actually be a factor of gender, because we do know that in some places, women were given different food portions. In festivals in the city, meat is distributed during a successful well, sometimes you brought the meat home to share with your family, but other times you just ate in the public spaces with your friends. And you didn’t show me so women aren’t getting lots of meat, right? In their diet. So you can’t it’s really hard to tell if you even if you have the right bones left to do the analysis. It’s hard to tell if your lack of vitamin C is because of poverty or if it’s because of diet or if it’s because of environment. Right? We all know that if you’re not outside of the Sun enough vitamin D can be a problem, right? So again, Then the difficulty of actually finding it on the level of the body is even impossible in some cases. But the other type of poverty that Claire and Lucia and others talk about is, and this is also in, in the sociology of poverty. Scholarship in the modern world is social poverty. And here women, especially, such are situated, because their very existence is sort of dependent on a social network. They don’t have that you’re only ever one step away from losing your citizenship if you have it from being caught and sold. If you are free woman without proper protection, like one of the cases that we know of, from an Athenian context is a woman named Sophia. Again, Arista Guyton, this sort of like total jerk. He returns, it’s like the return of the repressed, you can not repress it with the guy.

But he borrowed money from her. So she had a truck that she lent him, that’s actually quite a lot of money. The medic tax for for an independent woman is six ovals per year. But she had a drama, which, if you’re a female musician, you can get paid as a as a last player, you can make four ovals a night, or if you do a women’s festival, or you do a funeral or something, you can make four ovals per performance. So eight drama is not a ridiculous sum of money. It is that’s your savings rate. For a year, you’re probably living pretty poor. But she lent it to him along the cloak. Whether she willing to lend it to him or not, we don’t know. But she tried to get it back from him. And that’s when he reported her to the to the official saying she’s actually a runaway slave.

Dr Rad 51:44
Dude, let it do so.

Professor Futo Kennedy 51:48
Fortunately for her, though, her sponsor, so every medical city has to have a sponsor, her sponsor stood up for her. And the official at the medic office where you pay your fees that no she paid I have right here listed as having paid her. So you know, we know there are people out there trying to do that. So you’re always sort of like always one step away, maybe from enslavement. One of the other problems too, is that, you know, since you can’t even tell poverty in the bones. How do you know someone died from starvation, you can’t always can’t tell. There’s a new cemetery that was discovered about six years ago. But anyway, they found 1000s of skeletons, no inscriptions. So this is probably not a wealthy, or even middling class grave. And they are slowly starting to publish the results. So hopefully, we’ll find something in there may potentially, that can help us if we can see patterns over large numbers of bodies, or how nutrition shows up or malnutrition shows up, maybe we can start to say something. But it’s even hard to gender bones. Sometimes if you don’t have the right bones if you don’t have the hips. And if the woman never had children, the hips might not have slid. Like, there’s just all these sorts of different ways that you can’t tell from a skeleton.

Dr Rad 53:09
Right, the hips don’t lie, they don’t lie. They don’t lie at all.

Professor Futo Kennedy 53:14
But yeah, so poverty can be hard to find. But social poverty is probably endemic in the population of women, not just in Athens, but it’s also you see it in the Roman world. In Christian and Jewish texts, there’s a specific concern for widows in the knowledge that once that husband dies, like, because the marriages are so mismatched and age, typically, you’re going to have widows, lots of widows. And when you’re in a world where you know, the Greek mainland Greeks, and the I and the islands, they’re like it dwarfs, yours, right? Like the entirety of the fifth century is a history of war, and most of the fourth century, so a lot of death, a lot of widows a lot of orphans. And love, the Athenians never did anything about this. We do have inscriptions from other places in the Greek world, where there’s like a after a specific war has ended, particularly with the wives of Roman emperors. We see inscriptions from some Greek cities, where they have set up a fund for orphans, or things like that. So there’s a recognition of of destitution and precarity. For these people, and in Jewish contexts. It’s what we call relative poverty. But the idea is that the widow and the orphan should be maintained by the community at the level that they were before the death of the father or the husband or whatever. So they understand the concept of poverty, right. I think this is actually what’s been one of the big problems in poverty studies is they don’t focus in on things like gender, because they’re more concerned. And this goes back to Peter Brown, and his work on Late Antiquity is identifying a class of people called the poor. That’s just not real. It’s a category that someone’s made up Poverty can be all over the place. So this is one of the big problems, though it’s hard to find them. But we can can’t say that working women are all poor. But we can say that there’s a social ideal that women who aren’t poor don’t work. So that like for women work, and poor women work, but nobody else. We have a text, another speech from the fourth century, that actually, it’s about events in the fifth century, where the guy is saying that no, I’m not. My father was a citizen, my mother’s not foreign. We were poor, because my father had been captured in war. And so she sold ribbons, and fled herself out as a wet nurse. And that’s not because she’s not a citizen, it’s because my father was a war prisoner, and we were broke, and I was a kid. So we had to work for that. So there, we do have that kind of evidence. But social poverty, I think, is endemic to women in a way that it just isn’t when you cannot own property, right. You can’t own land, you can’t own house, and you can’t inherit, you have restrictions on inheritance, then you’re going to have social poverty. Romans can alleviate this by the fact that women can actually own stuff, and inheriting

Dr Rad 56:12
why I chose to study the Romans over the Greeks because I think, looking at the Athenian context, in particular, I would suffer night terrors from how vulnerable so many people in that society were. Yeah,

Professor Futo Kennedy 56:24
and that’s our model for modern democracy, right?

Dr Rad 56:28
That’s idealic.

Professor Futo Kennedy 56:30
I mean, there’s a whole slew of I’m doing a new project right now, where I’m basically courting every in tune inscription I can find in the Greek language between like 600 and BCE and 400 CE, that has a an ethnic marker on it. So suggesting that the person is buried somewhere where they didn’t come from, who’s a woman, and then I’m going to identify other zones for analysis. Rhodes has hundreds of these things. So there’s something going on at Rhodes. But you know, of course, in the period, when these inscriptions kick up, this is when they were sort of favoured status by the Romans. And so the lawsuit sort of lost its status as a port and Rosa kicked up. But my Venus is again, also a fascinating place, because not only do we have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of documents of my legions leaving going to Athens. We also have inscription grants, where they’re giving out citizenship, like candy. Especially in the second century, there was a whole wall of citizenship grants, but they’re giving them out to Korean mercenaries, in particular, because they’re worried about the solutions coming from one end. And so they settled these mercenaries there, but they brought their wives and their children, people often think mercenaries travel alone, but these ones travelled with their whole families. But there are also women on there who are listed by themselves independent. So what’s going on there like are these foreign women who are married to citizens, so they’re being given citizens are these children of a citizen who are now being given citizenship? So there are other places to study this that might make it less sort of zero sum game, like app. But if you’re giving citizenship to women, that’s a different level of social structure for women that you just don’t see an athlete’s because we don’t even know. If you’re a medic, and your husband is given citizenship. There’s a raging debate amongst like the seven of us who do this work. Whether or not the wives got citizen status, permission, or whether they had temporary citizenship that ended when your spouse dies. We know that the citizenship grants often read that the man and his children, right, so the wife can make citizens,

Dr G 58:43
which can’t be one.

Professor Futo Kennedy 58:44
But we don’t know that right? Because there’s some evidence that suggests that, like what do you do with a guy like ERISA guidance, whose father seems to have been a citizen, and died in debtors prison, and it was a guy who is a citizen and his brother’s a citizen, but his mother was sold for failure to register as a medic. So did she did he get citizen the husband get citizenship? She thought she has citizenship. And then when he died, she lost it. And then why doesn’t the doctor has to this is first a guy who can sell his sister, like, like so. So there’s the evidence is super confusing. We just don’t know. Josh Rosen, who’s one of the people who like does really good work on laws and medics in the city is trying to study the case of there’s a famous banker named for Meo in Athens, who was made a citizen he had been a slave. But he married those the wife of his former owner who had when he died, he willed his wife to Formula triangle. Well, part of is that it’s a banking family and so banks are kept in the family. Right? And but Apollo, Doris, the guy who famously prosecuted the IRA, he’s the Elder son, and he was born before citizenship was granted. And the younger son passively was born

Dr Rad 1:00:06
with citizenship. That’s kind of a rivalry.

Professor Futo Kennedy 1:00:09
Well, they decided to divide these pathways kept the bank out the bank, under formulas, like formula was his guardian. And he’s like in passes with it and apologise to the furniture store, and apparently the furniture, he didn’t manage it well, and it’s the wind. So he spent all his life like suing people in the court. Because of course, it may IRA in this famous case, if she loses, he gets money from selling her. She’s like 65 At this point, like the girl, but he sued his stepfather there like multiple cases against his stepfather for Bo, to the point where he lost so badly that he was prevented by Athenian law from suing his stepfather again, but those cases are super interesting because he goes from my mother was seduced by the sky to my mother helped plan my father’s murder like so but we don’t know what her status is. And so Josh is trying to figure this out and trying to sort of to do some more detailed dive because there’s like seven speeches to against formula, but then Apollo doors when he can’t do formula anymore, starts doing all his, like friends. And so he’s trying to figure this out, because he don’t know like, like, could these women keep citizenship? We don’t even know that, like we don’t even know at a basic level.

Dr Rad 1:01:23
Because a lot of pressure on relationships, you know, if your citizenship is dependent upon that guy, keep breathing every day. And this

Professor Futo Kennedy 1:01:31
is why this concept of social poverty is so important for us to keep on the radar. Because you are literally one death away, right? Or, or divorce away from not even having citizenship anymore. If you had it to begin with.

Dr Rad 1:01:47
Like, it sounds it I can absolutely terrifying thrill ride through life.

Professor Futo Kennedy 1:01:51
I always try to tell people like, you know, the scene in such a scene, like some people say, like senior women has the worst of any women in history. And I’m like, I would I would hate to go that far. I would never say that. But it’s hard for me to say they had a good, but who knows, like right lived experience is so hard to find,

Dr Rad 1:02:06
particularly in a sort of a society where most of the material is in the hands of men, and particularly a certain class of men.

Professor Futo Kennedy 1:02:15
And inscriptions can tell us names and maybe tell us, you know, how they identified themselves? Did they identify themselves, or how they were identified on the team? Like, you don’t even need to make your own tomb? Right? But did you identify as a wife? Did you identify as a public key? Did you identify as my Legion? Did you identify as you know, as a person else? Or were you identified as these things? That’s still pretty miniscule evidence for for the richness of life. And then of course, like Roman inscriptions, Roman tombs are like so much more forthcoming. Greek tomb standards are like, we don’t even care how old you were, we don’t just name date and serial number. It’s like, the bare minimum information. Like if you get a tomb that has a husband and a father listed, it’s like goldmine.

Dr G 1:03:00
We’ve got all the info, guys, I think it’s fascinating, because it does make me think about the way in which what we don’t know about the way women were relating with each other. Because it sounds like when we’re thinking about ancient Athens, that actually there’s probably not a balanced population. It sounds to me like having talked about it with you that maybe there are more women just generally speaking, as part of that population living in that city, citizen or otherwise. And potentially, there’s a whole culture of women’s connection with each other that we just haven’t been able to trace very effectively. Yeah. Because

Professor Futo Kennedy 1:03:35
I mean, what’s our evidence, right, just before a zoo, sigh or something like, can you take these comic representations of what women get up to when they’re alone together? Can you take that as evidence? I think you could take it as evidence that they did get up to stuff together, that they weren’t allowed to get together. Again, I think this is one of the reasons why I push back so hard on all the scholars who basically like again, I understand like wanting to talk about sex work in the ancient world and and destigmatize it, but they’re not actually talking about sex work. They’re just identifying people as prostitutes, which is a very different thing. Sometimes we’re able to actually like what can you say from a comic play about the life of a sex worker in the city? Right. But we, you know, my spouse wrote an article on our last players, which have often been conflated with with sex work, and of course, a free, our player could choose to do sex work as well. And enslaved aulos player has no choice is her owner wants to rent her out for sex he had, she had no choice, but she’s more valuable as an aulos player. She makes like three times the amount of money for her owner or for herself as playing the outlaws. But we know that they had women only gatherings. Right? And so you know, one of the texts that tells us this is Plato’s Symposium, actually, people forget, like ignore this like you have to find your tiny little tiny tidbits. There’s like these like three lines or something where they are trying to decide what to do after the outlaws player has played, for the pouring of the every symposium has to have an outlet player for the ritual of initiating the foreign the wine. And then they say, well, let’s send her to the ladies. So the ladies can listen to the player and we’ll get to talking. Like we’re not we’re not going to be a music night for us. Tonight is going to be a, an intellectual discussion night. So let’s send her to the ladies. Well, who are these ladies? Did they bring their wives with them? And the women are hanging out together? Is it the neighbour ladies? Is it just the women of the household? We don’t know. But they’re clearly thinking of a gathering of women. But also we have these base paintings, which everybody says, Oh, these are hetaira. Again, this sort of words that has made meaning of women together at symposia. And I said yes, I argued. Yeah, they aren’t a hetaira, but they’re like women, these are rich women. Because one of the most important bases it has these two women on the top, they’re playing kottabos, right, the game where you throw your refuse into a cup net, positive with a cup into a spittoon. And they’re gazing down at the the call off boy at the bottom. And they’re calling him call off. It’s not. Yeah, it’s not prostitutes, like, you know, core designs like, these are probably rich women like, this is a vase that they have. It’s from a woman’s tomb and the Etruscan context. But I argued that no, this is actually like rich women had this lifestyle, too. They got together with their friends, and they drink too. And we have evidence of women’s drinking rituals. And of course, women went to tombs together to do service to the dead, in lots of different cities. We have a lot of evidence for this to Nagra being one that there’s a lot of evidence for this. But if this is a ritual that women are supposed to perform regularly, and they’re going out together to the tombs, and they have to pour libations. And they have to do these things. And they’re probably, you know, they have to go out with a day trip. So these are groups of women going places together, and doing rituals. So there is a little pieces of evidence all over for like the lives that women had. And these inscriptions, like especially things like CCLI inscriptions, we can imagine, well, they were prosecuted in court. But we also could imagine they had jobs that they were probably proud of, because this is what they chose to put on the inscription. They chose to say I’m a lever, right? I am a seamstress. I’m a sesame seed seller, right? It’s not just an identifier. So people know who they are, but also something that they’ve chosen as a label for themselves. So there are places for us to build and imagine what their lives might have been like, outside of the sort of gaze of elite men. But oftentimes, you have to read against the evidence, or you have to read through the evidence, like these women that Demosthenes is telling us that it was the guy who is attacking, he’s sympathetic to them. But is he correctly representing their situation? Well, who knows if that was really Zobia’s life, but he has to create a plausible situation, that the members of the jury who are not going to be rich dudes, right? The members of the jury has to think that this is plausible. So we can at least say that it is in the realm of possibility that people lived, had these experiences and lived these lives. So that’s, I think, the best we can do, but I think it’s a lot more than people think it is. Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:08:22
Yeah. Really,

Dr G 1:08:24
I want to thank you so much for your time. This has been a really fascinating conversation and delving into the complexities of this kind of stuff has been fantastic. So thank you so much for joining us.

Professor Futo Kennedy 1:08:35
Well, thanks so much for having me on. It’s really great. I’m glad we can make it worked out

Transcribed by https://otter.ai

The post Special Episode – Ancient Athenian Women with Associate Professor Rebecca Futo Kennedy appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We were absolutely delighted to sit down recently with Professor Liv Yarrow to talk all about ancient Roman coinage from the republican period.

Special Episode – Roman Republican Coinage with Professor Liv Yarrow

Liv Yarrow is a professor at the City University of New York (CUNY). She holds a BA from the George Washington University and an MPhil and DPhil from the University of Oxford. Her scholarship spans the areas of ancient historiography and numismatics. In 2006 she published Historiography at the End of the Republic: Provincial Perspectives on Roman Rule (Oxford 2006) and in 2020 her book The Republic to 49 BCE: Using Coins as Sources came out with Cambridge University Press. She is also a co-director of the Roman Republican Die Project with the American Numismatic Society.

In this conversation we explore a range of topics, including:

Yarrow weaves a number of coin issues into the conversation, here’s some examples that we discuss: 

Denarius of Sulla. ANS 1944.100.1502. Obverse: L·MANLI [PRO]·Q – Helmeted head of Roma right. Border of dots. Reverse: L·SVLLA·IM – Triumphator, crowned by flying Victory, in quadriga right, holding reins in left hand and caduceus in right hand. Border of dots. 

Silver tetradrachm of Mithradates VI, Pontus, 120 BC – 63 BCE. 1944.100.41480. Obverse: head of Mithradates VI. Reverse: stag feeding 

Silver Coin, Rome, 55 BCE 1944.100.2636 ANS 1944.100.2636. RRC 428/3. Obverse: Head of Genius Populi Romani right, with sceptre over shoulder. Border of dots. Reverse: Q·CASSIVS – Eagle on thunderbolt right; on left, lituus; on right, jug . Border of dots. Just one example of a wild haired deity on Roman coinage, echoing Mithridates’ aesthetic! 

Silver Coin, Rome, 97 BCE 1937.158.59. Obverse: L·POMPON·MOLO – Laureate head of Apollo right; around, inscription. Border of dots. Reverse: NVMA·POMPIL – Lighted altar; to left, Numa Pompilius holding lituus; to right, youth (victimarius) leading goat. Border of dots. Numa sacrificing with his head unveiled in the Greek fashion. 

Silver Coin, Rome, 64 B.C. 1944.100.2352. Obverse: L·ROSCI – Head of Juno Sospita right; behind, control mark . Border of dots. Reverse: FABATI – Girl and snake facing each other; on left, control mark. Border of dots. 

Bibliothèque nationale de France, REP-17578. RRC 379/1. Juno Sospita on reverse – note the pointy shoes!

Thanks to the thrilling Bettina Joy de Guzman for our theme music.

We’re exploring automated transcripts for our episodes. This one was produced by Otter AI:

Dr Rad 0:16
Welcome to the Partial Historians,

we explore all the details of ancient Rome.

Everything from the political scandals, the love of ours, that battles waged, and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr. Rad

and I’m Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Romans saw it by reading different authors from the ancient past and comparing their stories.

Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Welcome, everybody to a very special episode of the Partial Historians. We are fabulously excited today to be sitting down with Professor Liv Yarrow from CUNY, the City University of New York, who has classics background at Brooklyn College and classics in history at the graduate centre. She holds a BA from George Washington University and an MPhil and D. Phil from the University of Oxford. So her scholarship spans the areas of ancient historiography and numismatics. In 2006, she published historiography at the end of the Republic, provincial perspectives on Roman rule with Oxford, and in 2020, her book, The Republic 249 BCE, using coins as sources came out with the Cambridge University Press. She is also the co director of the Roman republican dye project with the American numismatic society. So this is a huge honour, we’re super excited, because this means that we’re going to be learning more about Roman coins and coinage and concepts to do with numismatics in the ancient Roman world. And I’m just really thrilled to have you here. Thank you so much for joining us.

Professor Yarrow 2:17
Thanks a lot. I’m really excited about this. I hope it inspires everyone to go look at some actual coins, not just listen to our fun words.

Dr Rad 2:28
I think it will for sure because I mean, as much as we will talk about specific coins, I’m sure in the process of this conversation, we’ll definitely need to have that visual with us in order to like really appreciate what’s going on with coinage. There’s such a fascinating type of evidence,

Professor Yarrow 2:45
we’ll get to curate a little gallery for everybody. It’ll be fun.

Dr Rad 2:49
Exciting. All right, so let’s jump in. So in your latest book, The Republic 249 BCE, using coins as sources, it’s designed to help guide students and scholars on the approach to the study of coinage. To get us started what is a sort of foundational idea for people who are interested in ancient coinage if they’re looking to sort of develop their expertise in this area.

Professor Yarrow 3:15
So the first thing to appreciate about ancient coinage is that it is one of the only visual mass produced media from antiquity. By which I mean that a team of men, maybe three men, working at a single workstation could produce anywhere from 10 to 40,000 coins with all with the same exact image in one day. And we think issue sizes and the Roman Republic that means coins where they might be using slightly different dyes. But the intention in the pre modern era is that they all look pretty much identical might be in the terms of millions of coins. And that’s a type of dissemination of visual imagery that we just don’t have with any other media In antiquity or really until we get to the printing press.

Dr Rad 4:19
Absolutely. So in the introduction to your book, you noted that different types of scholars will approach interpreting coins differently. So for example, and archaeologists will come with different questions from a socio political historian. How might this difference look in practice?

Professor Yarrow 4:36
Sure, so archaeologists love coins because they are more confident about the dating of those coins and they rely on us numismatist provide a handy dandy list of what date that coin was made at. And our catalogues are really confident about this coin was is made and this year, and we’re really good at dating coins. But in the Roman Republic being really good at dating coins means with a five year plus or minus error. So one of the things that we need to be really aware of is that not every date ascribed to every coin is as rock solid as we might want. So that in archaeology using a coin to date, a layer of stratigraphy is a very common approach. Another way that associate political person might look at is can I look at the person who made this coin? And can I connect this coin to the textual narrative that I receive? An art historian might look at a coin and say, Is this image representative of a statue group? And was that statue group well known? And what did it mean in the public display? And why is there that connection between the image on the coin and a famous or semi famous public image.

Dr Rad 6:15
So this sounds like it’s sort of coins have so much sort of condensed information that they might provide to somebody who’s interested in the ancient past, regardless of what perspective, they’re coming from it. And when we’re thinking about ancient Rome, we actually understand that coinage emerges relatively late in their society. So you talk about it coming, coming out in sort of the late fourth century BCE, and this is late compared to other Mediterranean societies. So I’m really interested in what sort of factors might have influenced Rome, one to adopt coinage, but also why they might have been so late to adopt coinage comparatively speaking.

Professor Yarrow 6:55
So as in so many ways, the ancient Romans were at a crossroads and a cultural crossroads, and a very literal crossroads. In terms of the peninsular Italy. They connected the cultures of the coastal areas, the sea, travelling communities and the interior. There, the Tiber was a very important point of connection. And then also, to cross the Tiber, the situation of the city of Rome, we always need to remember is where it was easiest to get across this major river. So the river is at once a conduit for travel, but also a barrier that needs to be overcome. And so the Romans are this cross cultural community from very early on. And this is especially true in terms of money. So to back up a little bit. Money is the first human invention, you might think that without coins, or some other tangible form of money, that everything is about barter. But in fact, the first invention is the intellectual exercise of realising that if you have a shared unit of exchange, or store of value, or measure of a measure of value store of wealth, that you can make transactions between individuals easier because you have a shared system of understanding, wealth and value and exchange. And that doesn’t depend on a physical object or a piece of money, even if it’s expressed that way. So shackles exist before we have a physical thing that we call a shackle. And so, Roman Italy, and Italy and wider. Indigenous Italy was fully monetized before the coming of coinage and their monetary system is based on measures of value tied to the Roman pound, and particularly to bronze and to not just the Roman pound the Roman pound in Rome, but the pound in any other community with their own systems of weights and measures. And there’s some really exciting work being done on this idea of how different systems of information and information knowledge like standardisation of weights and measures reflect social change. And so I just nod towards like the work of Andrew Rigsby on this sort of thing that’s very influential to destabilise what we think we know that the pound isn’t so fixed as we might want it to be in a modern world when we go back into antiquity these things are a little bit more flexible and changeable both in terms of space and time. But coming back to my thread of money and the switch from money to coinage, the money and the physical money of Peninsular Italy among indigenous communities was primarily what we now call a scholars eyes rude, which just means crude bronze or eyes for mahtim. And that’s again a made up Latin phrase just meeting, bronze that has been moulded into a shape. But the shape isn’t standardised. So the Romans were already participating in an indigenous is monetary system. But they were highly aware of their Greek neighbours who were colonists primarily in the south and primarily on the coast. And travelling and meeting other Greeks through those coastal communities, that they had a monetary tradition that derives from this, the tradition of coinage that started in the kingdom of Lydia, and that’s in southern modern day Turkey. And that started about the seventh century BC and that’s the monetary tradition that we still participate of coinage today. Just for full perspective, we have to remember that coinage was also invented by the Chinese in about the same century. And when these two traditions of coinage meet on the central steps, they recognise each other. And we have Chinese texts from the Han Dynasty, talking about how funny the coins are from the Mediterranean, because they have faces on them, and they use these precious metals. And that’s so weird, because that’s not what our money the Chinese money looks like. But they’re parallel inventions to solve a common problem. Coins are just a really easy way to solve the tangibility of money and to turn the invention of money into something that’s easily and readily used by everyone in the community. So that Romans at this crossroads, are participating into monetary systems. And they’re participating at first simultaneously. So the first coin that has the name Rome on it is made in ancient Minneapolis, what we call Naples, and we date that to 326 BCE. And we date it to the moment at which Rome enters into a treaty with Naples, after Naples has sided with their other enemies of the moment in southern Italy. But Naples is also one of these cross cultural communities of central but coastal Italy. And it’s not surprising, because Naples is already making coins for many of its neighbours. It’s a service that provides that one of the things they might offer to the Romans at this first moment moment of coming into a legal established relationship is to make them some coins. And those first coins look just like bronzes of Naples, they have the head of Apollo, they have the man faced bull. And we are pretty confident that we can link the coin that says, of the Romans and Greek to the moment of the treaty, because we have a pretty decent seriation of the Naples series. And we can sort of slot in stylistically that that it confirms the logic based on the texts that these coins share all of these habits. And so, in that first instance, the Romans are conceding and not in a particularly financially useful way that earliest Roman struck coins are made by Greek communities for the Romans in the name of the Romans, but they’re not made in such large quantities that they would have been of particular use. The Romans themselves at Rome, itself really seem to dive into the making of physical money in the run up to the First Punic War. And that’s where we get a kind of coin that has a another made up Latin phrase name, which is ice scrub, which just means heavy bronze, the heavy bronze. And, and a scholar named Burnett has this hypothesis that I think is very convincing that what I scrub represents is a combination of the sensibilities of the southern Italian Greek tradition of using coins, that a coin should have a face on one side and a design on the other, and it should be round. And it should have a fixed weight with a fixed denomination. So all of these features that are common within the Greek monetary tradition, coinage tradition, and the traditions of Central Italy, that money should be substantial and should be a bronze. And that it should have this weight. And so it seems that in this first, their first making of this mixed cultural tradition of money, they’re trying to keep what’s culturally important about both traditions.

Dr Rad 16:26
As they look, I think that’s so fascinating, because one of the things that I often talk about with my students, both ancient and modern history is how money is essentially a human invention. And that’s particularly funny in Australia, because I don’t know if you’re aware, but our money essentially looks like Monopoly money when we’re talking about our notes. So I’m like, You do realise that this is just plastic. And the only reason why it has a value is because we say it has.

Professor Yarrow 16:53
You know, but in some ways, it’s getting easier to teach that particularly with touchless payments, and the popularity of touchless payments, even growing in the backwards Land of the United States, in the course of the pandemic, to reduce our physical money, or our swiping of cards or the use of tap, because it helps us all understand the degree to which we say $1 or a pound, or any other monetary unit, but we’re really just measuring some abstract concept of value. And it can be nice to have something physical to, to hold, we all like getting, you know, a couple bills in our in our birthday card, maybe from grandma, if we still get that, but we’re quickly going to add that to our very untenable pot of credit with a with a bank.

Dr Rad 17:57
Absolutely. So you talked about the design of those early coins and how it evolved and that sort of thing. So if we’re thinking about the artistry involved in coins, there’s quite a wide range when we’re looking at the examples that you have studied. What are some that you think are particularly striking from the Republican period that the Romans made and what makes them particularly noteworthy for you?

Professor Yarrow 18:20
This is so hard, because my research partner is Lucida Carboni. And she’s the curator of Roman coins at the ANS with me on the Roman republican diet project. And we co teach a lot because we have a lot of student interns and volunteers. And whenever I talk about beautiful Roman coins, she’s like, No, no, you go quiet, and this come from Sicily, and they’re Greek. And then she goes into the vault and brings out something stunningly beautiful. You have to remember her family’s from Sicily. So even though we’re working on this die project, she has some concerns. But there is a little bit of truth to that, in that within the Greek tradition of bigger money. So that Tetra DRAM upwards, we’re looking at something that’s really substantial in your hand, and we’re looking at a tradition of Engraving and striking that is concerned with aesthetics. So there they have high relief, meaning that a lot of force has been used to drive that impression on to the blank flan of metal and they attempt to centre it and they take all of this extra care in the production, the Roman mins once we’re into its period of production of the denarius, so that’s anytime past 211 b. See with introduction is inclined to work less rapidly and in shallow relief. And they don’t seem to care about errors that we just don’t see on other coin edges. So it might be struck a little bit off flan. Sometimes one coin gets stuck in the die, and they just keep striking. And then we get these double headed coins that we call blockages. And it seems that other mints that had a greater aesthetic control, that these sorts of mint errors would be thrown out so I can answer your question about beautiful coins. But first, we have to accept that it wasn’t beauty. That was the number one requirement for the Romans of running a practice their denarii. So what is a what is a truly beautiful coin? I’ll talk to a little bit about a beat what I think is as a beautiful and interesting trend. And it seems to be directly influenced by the war with Mithra days. Okay, so Mithridates is this eastern king. He’s in relation with the Romans from the one hundreds, but he only really starts to become problematic in about the year 90, and so it’s 88 that they send Salah out to try and put him in their place. But he’s a very recalcitrant King, he’s not easy for the Romans to control. So he then dominates the narrative of the first half of the first century BCE. Mr. Davies presented himself as the successor to both the Persian Dynasty and the Macedonian dynasty. And so he wanted to be seen as a particularly charismatic saviour figure. And his coins are exquisitely beautiful. And one of the ways in which they’re exquisitely beautiful, is the rendering of his hair. His hair is not just this curly, Hellenistic locks of Alexander, but it’s really flowing and dynamic and full of energy with these curly Q’s that are escaping that Daya dam and this rugged yet youthful face that sort of looks up to heaven as if you want to follow him on campaign. As the great descendant of these two royal houses, this coinage seems to have made a really big impression on the Romans. And it’s not surprising, they brought a lot of money home from those wars, and some of that they probably brought home, not just as raw bullion, but in actual struck method, attic coinage. And some of that’s going to have ended up in the treasury. And now we’re in the realm of fantasy, but we can imagine those mythopoetic coins being taken to be melted down to make new flans. To start up, strike, Roman Denari. And so you have meant workers handling these beautiful coins. And all of a sudden, the Roman coins start using this same crazy hair. And they don’t use it to represent Mr. Davies, but they use it for sun gods and Quirinus. And all sorts of divinities of the late Republic start looking a little bit like Mithridates days with this extremely charismatic hairstyle and sensitive facial feature rendering on their arm versus So yeah, if I had to pick a aesthetic characteristic that I admire about the Romans, I’d go with them.

Dr Rad 24:23
That sounds sad because it kind of sounds like me in the morning. So I think this leads really nicely actually into my next question for you, which is thinking about the iconography on coinage, we’ve got this really sort of compressed moment, not just sort of pressed but also compressed imagery in which to demonstrate something and part of that is leaning into fashion a little bit and I think the hair also takes us in that direction already, but are there too changes or ways in which clothing and adornment is represented on coinage that might be worth looking out for. If we’re thinking about the Republic,

Professor Yarrow 25:11
I wish I could say yes, but the clothing is deeply conservative and symbolic. And so if you get a citizen male being represented on a Roman coin, he’s really only going to be represented in one or two ways. If he’s being represented as his status as a citizen, he’s going to be in a toga. And if he is being represented as a warrior, than usually he’s going to be wearing the standard garb of a member of the cavalry of the Roman cavalry. So the question then is, what does it mean when they’re not dressed like that. And those exceptions are really interesting. So there’s a coin that shows the king NUMA sacrifice sacrificing a goat are about to sacrifice a goat. And normally we would imagine a Roman about to offer sacrifice would have his toga over his head, because that’s how Roman citizen men pray and offer sacrifice. And it’s an interesting moment, because that’s not what NUMA looks like, in that picture. So and he’s clearly labelled with his name. So we know he’s the Roman king, and we’re having a Roman sacrifice. My hypothesis is that it’s because Apollo is the God on the omniverse. And the goat being sacrificed is being sacrificed to Apollo. And at Rome, the cult of Apollo follows the Greek, right. And the uncovered bear head is part of a legitimate ation of this particular type of Roman ritual being celebrated in a slightly alien or foreign manner.

Dr Rad 27:20
Wow, oh, that is very cool. I mean, because this is also tying into this idea that as we get into the further into the Republic, they’re not just interested in representing themselves necessarily, they’re interested in representing their whole history, as well. They’re like, we’ve got some coins now. But our history predates coinage, who would we like to represent? Let’s get a newcomer in there. He’s having he’s having a great time. Presumably,

Professor Yarrow 27:49
Numa has a remarkable number of coins more than any other king

Dr Rad 27:54
How bizarre.

Professor Yarrow 27:55
He’s doing well for himself, considering you didn’t miss any of them.

Exactly, exactly.

Dr Rad 28:02
So thinking about fashion, I suppose we can also think about something else that often appears on Roman coinage, and that is buildings. So what can we learn about the buildings of Rome from their depiction on coins? And maybe, what are some of the limitations of using coins to speak back to Rome’s typography?

Professor Yarrow 28:22
Okay, so there are people who know way more than me on this. And so I hope that someday down. So I hope at one point, you invite my colleague, Nate Elkins on to have a proper conversation about this. And he will tell you many, many more fun stories. But to get us started, I want to say that architecture on coin is maybe not uniquely a Roman phenomena, but it’s very difficult to find substantive precedent. And it really becomes a much more typical Roman motif than we would have ever seen on Greek or Persian coinage or any other of the pre existing monetary traditions within the Mediterranean realm. Why? I would argue that it’s because what goes on a coin is celebrating the success of the Roman state. And the Roman self conception is a conception of themselves, as in harmony with the gods. And so Romans preserve the packs day or on the peace of the gods, by fulfilling their obligations to the gods, and in turn, the gods provide them with success and war. And so every success in war becomes proof of Divine Favour and every past action to honour the gods is part of what has brought about the success of the Roman state and ensured its perpetual endurance into the future. And for the Romans, certain acts such as the erection of temples or monuments, or the holding of festivals are an essential part of how they show their honour to the gods, and particularly given the fact that many temples are vowed by generals in a moment of crisis. And then once the crisis is alleviated through the fake favour of the gods, and then the building is approved by the community as a whole, and then funded and dedicated, it becomes evidence, the temple itself, or whatever physical monument, it is, is proof that the gods answered the vow of the ancestor, that the ancestor fulfilled the vow so upheld their commitment to the Divine, and that that interaction between the person who made the original vow and the gods was sanctioned and honoured by the community. And so to put any religious monument and almost all monuments are religious in the Roman world view on a coin is celebrating numerous acts of piety and serve as justification for the, for the Roman state and the role of the individual money or is family with in that success.

Dr Rad 31:55
Oh, that’s very cool. I like that we’re like we’re, we’re bringing in the people who are doing the coin creation as well, like this is another act, another pious act representing that building, that has been a substantial part of that history. For so long build upon that relationship with the gods over time, you think about the need for the construction of those things, and how long that takes, and all of those particular elements. And now it’s represented on this coin as well. So it’s sending out that message even further, and sort of distributing it.

Professor Yarrow 32:26
There are monuments that exist on coins long before they’re actually built, because it takes a long time to build a monument and the most famous of these are the future Augustus young Caesar, you might know him as Octarians temple to the deified Julius, and it appears he might also be doing the same thing with the Temple of Mars altar. Some people think the circular temple of Mars altar that appears on the coinage is a second one. But I think it’s likely that he learned his lesson that you can make a temple real, even before it manifests on the ground by putting it on the coins.

Dr Rad 33:11
Typical Augustus, such a show pony

Ahead of you

Let’s face it, maybe maybe it was just his way of announcing, like, you know, this is the building plan. Objection. Now if you don’t like the design.

Professor Yarrow 33:25
Exactly.

Dr G 33:26
Amazing. So thinking about the way that politics is getting particularly complicated in the late Republican period, it’s becoming not that it wasn’t always the case, but prominent families and prominent individuals within families are really stepping forward, particularly when we get into that last century of the Republic. And this prominence of individuals, is this being reflected in coinage in any particular way? And can we trace the changes in Rome’s politics through the coinage and the way it’s represented?

Professor Yarrow 34:01
Absolutely, and it’s a really thorny and debated issue. So one of the simplest ways of reading the prominence of individuals on the coins and the greatest diversity that we see on the coins is that there’s heightened competition, and that these changes in design are specifically about electioneering. To react to this, and people often in that form of argumentation point to the fact that the coins start to become far more diverse at the same moment that the secret ballot is put into place. I would push back for this. Yes, any individual who wishes to seek higher office wants to prove their worthiness to be further elected on beyond the money or ship by doing a good job as a money or. But I don’t think that Romans would necessarily have conceptualised what they were doing as directly competitive, that what they’re attempting to do on the coin designs is articulate, much like we just said, it might answer the previous question, the way in which their individual families have participated in the success of Rome, and that there is no distinction between the individual and the state, if the individual is acting on behalf of the state, particularly in terms of exercising we are to Sir military ism, or in terms of honouring the gods, and because it is the ultimate act of piety, to not only honour the gods, but honour your ancestors, you’re fulfilling both responsibilities of an acting, how a good Roman should act, the kind of Roman that should be elected further on as exemplary of what’s good in the community, by performing these acts of piety that celebrate both your ancestors and your ancestors, service to the state specifically. So I’d say all of it is patriotic, it am, but it is also performative of a familial connection to the actions that have ensured Rome’s status.

Dr Rad 36:54
So it sounds like they’re kind of mobile propaganda, then are there any particularly notable examples that are like promoting someone’s career or promoting the family? Or trying to remind people hey, we did this?

Professor Yarrow 37:07
Sure. I’m just gonna say I’m allergic to the word propaganda.

Dr Rad 37:12
Yeah, no, I knew I was being a bit…

Professor Yarrow 37:14
No, no. And I will concede that many of my colleagues will freely use the term propaganda. And I’ve even concede that maybe I’m a little too rigid about it. But propaganda in the 20th and 21st century, nods specifically to a moment in which mass media was harnessed in very distinctive ways to promote very specific ideologies and often ideologies that were Factional or competing against other ideologies. And quite often, when our students hear the word propaganda, they associate it with things like brainwashing or lies or distortions of the truth. And I’m not sure for all coins are certainly a form of political speech, that they fit many of the connotations of propaganda, that at least our students or our contemporaries, in casual non academic settings might associate with it. But what is a what is a moment of political speech on Roman coins that sends a clear contemporary message. One of my favourites is the coins of Salah as he marches on Rome. So our moment in time is that he has had his first march in Rome and 88. He’s gone out to beat up Mithridates but in the interim, Sinha has taken control of the city and set up a completely separate political regime. So we have an effect to Roman governments in the 80s and the Sinan regime in Rome is sending out competing generals to fight Mithridates as well. So we have multiple marauding generals in the East. And so it becomes very clear that he cannot succeed in this war without securing the homefront. And so he comes to an arrangement with Mithridates he’s at the Dardanelles, that’s the mouth of the Hellespont just north of where it Troy is to get your geography so this key crossroads…

Dr Rad 39:56
Gallipoli for Australian listeners

Professor Yarrow 40:00
At Gallipoli. Absolutely. It’s this key crossroad between Asia and Europe. And they meet and they come to an agreement. We have multiple accounts of this agreement. And later writers in the remenham. pyre like Appian really want to show this as solid extracting concessions from the beaten Mithra days. But if we look at more contemporary accounts, my favourite is a local Black Sea historian named Memnon of her clan. That agreement looks very much like a mutual treaty to ensure the success of both in their ongoing political ventures, namely that Mr. Davies provides a good deal of monetary support to underwrite sellers March on Rome. So what does he do with this wealth? A lot of it gets taken to Athens Athens becomes his base of operations, and he harnesses the Athenian mint to create a coinage in his name. One of those coins, pictures him as a triumph font or so someone who is going to celebrate or has celebrated a triumph, but he hasn’t yet. How do we tell a tree on fire tour from any other dude writing in a cart before horse drawn chariot. We tell the difference on Roman coins by talking about the fast and the slow horses so do the horse horses of the gods tend to be charging into the sky and so we call that a fast quadriga. A slow quadriga is one that is on parade with the horses are high stepping and very sedate. The other difference, of course, is the dude in the car is wearing a toga, so we know that they’re a Roman. But instead of holding a palm branch or even a sceptre, or some other triumphal regard, Alia. He holds a caduceus. This is the Herald staff. And we have victory flying into the scene to crown him. So we have this melding of the divine world and the mortal world. But the caduceus really speaks to me because, yes, it’s about the messenger. And so the person who brings the news the Herald and usually, that news is good news. So the caduceus is a symbol of packs peace, a felicitas divine blessing, sometimes even shading into Concordia, the right ordering of society. And this coin, because it’s minted before he ever triumphs says very clearly, I’m coming to triumph. And I am going to get into that chariot. And I am going to celebrate in this way when I get there. But it’s anticipatory, rather than celebratory. So other coinage that has triumphal imagery. And so we have a coin that we think refers to the triumph of Marius over the Cimbri and the Teutones is and it seems to show Marius riding in his triumphal car with his son on the trace horse. That’s celebratory of a religious festival that’s already taken place. Whereas solace coin says very clearly, I have expectations and you will fulfil them.

Dr Rad 44:13
Love it. So this is a perfect way to ask about this moment of political speech, would Sulla have been the one coming up with the design ideas, you know, going in to see you know, a mentor and being like, Okay, so here’s my concept, guys, I want to look at this way. And I want these types of horses because I’m really trying to send a message here. How exactly would these different coin designs come about?

Professor Yarrow 44:37
We don’t know. That’s the short answer, but I can speculate, I would say that there is an underappreciated connection between seal rings and numismatic designs. So there is a preexisting vocabulary of individuals in both the Greek and Hellenistic world By associating their personal identity with a small image often engraved on a small circular design about the size of a coin, and that that badge of identity is going to be used both on letters but also on business contracts. And so that it is a way in which you prove something as yours and you say that it is authentic. And we have a number of instances where we can connect very specific coin designs to literary testimony about the seal rings of different individuals. And so we have other coins of Salah that have his trophies and we’re told that on occasion, he used his battlefield trophies as his signet ring. And so we can connect that with that design, or we have other testimony that he carved into a signet ring, the moment in which Bacchus surrenders Jugurtha to him when he was a questor his first great political success, and his son puts that design on one of his coin celebrating his father. Same with Pompey, we were told Pompey imitates sell his seal ring by having three trophies as opposed to two trophies. And again, we have coins that celebrate Pompey successes, using the three trophies and onwards to Salah. So that’s with literary evidence. I have a really fun article on glass pastes, which are fake gems. Plenty is very rude about poor people who use these deceptive glass intaglios. And how dare they think they’re worthy of signing contracts and participating in business if they can’t afford a real gem. But plenty aside, we have ample evidence for the fact that many Romans of middle middling financial ability, wanted to have a seal ring, to mark their letters to sign their business contracts to engage in everyday life and associate those images with their own identity as markers of self. And there is an incredibly strong connection between the designs we find on Roman republican, glass intaglios. And coin designs where you can say, Oh, look, that one looks like this one, that one looks like this one, tick, tick, have a nice little chart in the back of the article. What I like about this is it suggests a number of things, it suggests that people were looking at the coins, that they found the coin iconography compelling enough that they wanted to adopt it as markers of their own identity. And then it’s likely that even in places where we don’t have literary testimony, the designs we’re seeing on the coin may very well echoed designs of steel rings used by the money or the money or family because it is the most obvious small visual design that’s pre existing to mark themselves and how they conceive of themselves. So there’s a pre existing visual language out there that we can only recover a small bit of.

Dr Rad 48:41
And I think that makes sense, in many respects, because the artistry involved in producing those seals would also be a similar technology. I would know

Professor Yarrow 48:52
100% Probably even the same sort of people. You know that. If you become a money or and you have a particular engraver you like he doesn’t tell us, maybe you bring them along with you the mitt?

Dr Rad 49:03
Yeah, it’d be like, This guy does great work.

Professor Yarrow 49:09
Exactly, exactly.

Dr Rad 49:12
And I think this ties in really nicely to our final question, which sort of touches on a couple of things that have come up so far as well. So you’ve got this great sentence, which I think is fantastic for students coming into this sort of thing. Coins were the only mass produced visual medium in antiquity. And you talked already about how we’re talking millions sometimes have a particular designs coming through. What are some of the consequences for this in terms of the Roman Republic? Are there some examples where we have so many copies of a particular design that we’re like, what’s going on? And is this a standout message or do we just not have enough coins to know?

Professor Yarrow 49:56
Oh, that’s a great question. So I’ve been talking a lot in these lectures I’ve been giving for the AIA That’s the American Institute of Archaeology, about the coins of moneyers, who have a family connection to a Latin town called Lanuvium. Lanuvium is famous for having the sanctuary of Juno Sospita, and Juno Sospita it is a very fun goddess. And she is not like many Goddesses that you may think of. She is a warrior goddess, she’s got a nice big shield and spear. But she also wears really fancy shoes, they curl up like elf. And not only that, she also wears a goat skin headdress much like Hercules where’s the lion one, so she always gets horns and big ears. And she’s often striding into battle. And her cult was also pretty wild. One of my favourite things about the junior sauce, but a cult is that in spring, they would gather up all of the virgins from the local community, and send them down into a dark, dank cave, entrance through the religious sanctuary to feed the evil snake. Now the snake would take food out of the virgins hand only if they were really truly virgins, otherwise it would gobble them up, and they would never make it back to the surface. So once the girls go down into the cave to feed the snake, the parents all wait around anxiously to see if their daughters return. And if their daughters return, there’s a big party, because not only are their girls good and pure, but everything’s going to grow again. And you know, it’s the proof that the earth is fertile. And it’s this cult of the renewal of life. So it’s a pretty wild cold, and the Romans were really excited about it. And so when they conquer Lavinium in 340, they make a Treaty of Mutual alliances, and they incorporate the local community into the Roman citizenship as long as those people agree that the Romans can have a share in the control of this cult, because the cult is extremely popular and extremely politically significant with in lation itself. How does this relate to the coins? Well, we can all have this cool imagery on the coins itself. And so when people from this community are elected money are in Rome, it’s this cult that they want to celebrate. So we even get a picture of a girl feeding the snake, as well as Juno Sospita herself doing all sorts of wild things. However, we also have evidence that when the local cult was throwing parties, they had to make by parties, I mean, religious festivals, they made tokens and tokens are like, well, they’re their tokens, they’re here have a token, this makes sure that everybody gets the same amount of bread or wine or, you know, entrance to the games or the play or whatever. It’s a way of controlling access and keeping track of benefactions and access to benefactions party. So these are the parties down here. Here’s my token. So tokens are not coins, but they look like coins. And so they tend to be made more crudely. They’re often made out of lead because it’s softer and easier to work with. But they’re deeply associated with religious festivals and local communities. So the party tokens from this cult look like the Roman coins made up to 100 years earlier. Because they have this local pride our dude became the money or in Rome. What did he choose? He chose these images, we need to put something on our religious tokens for this next festival. Let’s copy that design. Yeah, so that’s one of my favourites sort of somebody’s paying attention to the coins and they’re paying attention over a long period of time, and it really matters within local communities, even outside of the city of Rome itself.

Dr Rad 54:37
I love that story. I think the next time I’m going to have a party I’m going to send out tokens instead of invitations. Perfect.

Well, this has been a wild ride. I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. Thank you so much for your time leave. It’s been really really amazing. And yeah, Juno sauce Better water water lady

Professor Yarrow 55:01
Maybe it’s the shoes I really want. I mean, I take the coat, but I really want those curly shoes.

Dr G 55:08
Fair enough. I’m with you. We’ll go back in time we’ll find some curly shoes. Amazing. Absolutely.

Thank you for tuning in to this special episode of the Partial Historians. I’m Dr. G. And on behalf of Dr. Rad myself, we would like to send a huge thank you to our Patreon supporters whose support enhances what we have the ability to do with this podcast. Our Patreon supporters receive early access to all of our special episodes, and we are starting to build up some exclusive content over there as well. So if you like what you hear, we would love to have you join our Patreon community. You can also find us on all social media outlets, or at least the old ones, Facebook, Instagram and Twitter. Catch you around.

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There is much less scholarly work on the early Roman Republic than there is on periods like the late Republic or early Empire. This is understandable as there are fewer primary sources, and what we have does not always seem quite as reliable. There are still people who have chosen to focus on this era, and one of our major scholarly sources has been the work of Emeritus Professor Tim Cornell.

Special Episode – Early Rome with Emeritus Professor Tim Cornell

Professor Cornell has held many prestigious academic posts in his long career, working at Christ’s College, Cambridge, the British School at Rome, University College London, the University of Birmingham, the Institute of Classical Studies, and he is currently the President of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies. His book The Beginnings of Rome: Italy and Rome from the Bronze Age to the Punic Wars (c. 1000-264 BC) (1995) is an incredible resource. Another of his major contributions to scholarship was overseeing the multi-volume Fragments of the Roman Historians (2013) which brings all the fragments of scholars for whose works are not extant together in one collection. In short, Cornell’s work has had a huge influence on the field of early Roman history!

We were blown away that Professor Cornell agreed to sit down and chat to us about all the most confusing parts of early Rome. He helped us to address issues such as:

We hope that you enjoy this episode as much as we enjoyed recording it. It certainly helps to draw together a lot of the themes in our episodes so far and paint a more complete picture of this first phase of the Roman Republic.If you are interested in reading more of Professor Cornell’s work, please check out his profile on Academia.Edu. 

Cornell’s work on early Rome is pretty amazing and we recommend you check it out!

View of the Roman Forum from Via di Monte Tarpeo (2017) by Marcel Roblin and courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

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The most famous assassination in Roman history took place during the Ides of March. Julius Caesar, dictator of Rome, was stabbed to death in Pompey’s Senate House by a group of conspirators. What exactly were these men hoping to accomplish? Caesar had been taking up too much air-time and was changing the nature of the Republic into something suspiciously close to monarchy. Well, you can’t have that! What are the other elite Roman men supposed to do if one man rules all?

Since 44 BCE, this assassination has inspired and perhaps plagued many political theorists, filmmakers, playwrights, artists, politicians, and historians. Dr G and Dr Rad sat down to talk about a twenty-first century example of the reverberations of Caesar’s final moments across the centuries. The murder of Jon Snow in the season five finale of Game of Thrones was clearly modelled on the death of the Roman dictator.

Enjoy this mini bonus episode!

Mini Episode – Beware the Ides of Jon Snow…

If this episode tickles your fancy for a little more classical reception, we have explored lots of depictions of ancient Rome on film, which you might enjoy as well 🙂

Jon Snow and Ghost
Image courtesy of https://gartic.com.br/deanwinchester_/desenho-livre/jon-snow

Music by Bettina Joy de Guzman.

The Renaissance bust of Julius Caesar by Andrea di Pietro di Marco Ferrucci c. 1512-14 and a still of Kit Harrington as Jon Snow

The post Mini Episode – Beware the Ides of Jon Snow… appeared first on The Partial Historians - Ancient Roman History with smart ladies.

We are thrilled to bring you an exploration of the relationship between the ancient world and metal music. We’re joined by Dr Jeremy J. Swist an expert in the subject. Dr Swist is a lecturer in the Department of Classical Studies at Brandeis University. He holds a PhD in Classics looking at the Reception of the seven kings of Rome in imperial historiography from Tiberius to Theodosius. His research covers everything from historiography to the classical reception in metal music.

Special Episode – Classical Reception in Metal Music with Dr Jeremy J. Swist

It’s a big topic and we delve into many facets of reception. One important area is thinking about Roman virtus as it is explored in metal. We also consider the connections between metal music and sword-and-sandals cinema. AND the way in which this genre of music can be a way of exploring the edges of human experience.

There may even be a discussion of Spartacus!

There’s lots of bands mentioned including:

Jeremy has very kindly compiled a Spotify list for you to enjoy as well.

The connection between heavy metal and the ancient world is not just about the lyrics or the stylisation on stage though. One of the primary ways classical reception happens is through album artwork.

Consider the depiction of Poseidon on the cover of Wrathblade’s 2017 album God of the Deep Unleashed. 

Poseidon cuts an incredibly fearsome and muscular figure as he looms in a giant wave above to destroy an ancient town.

Meanwhile the French band Autokrator have worked in twists on Roman imperialism with the cover of the eponymous album from 2014 and then their latest album released in 2021. 

The 2014 album is a wash of red colour over a black background. Before the Colosseum is a fearsome, slightly skeletal sculpture of a Roman…

Autokrator’s 2021 album cover for Persecution shifts the colour scheme to greys over a black background.

The building in the background you may just recognise from the Roman forum while the sculpture draws references to Marcus Aurelius.

Neither of us know much about metal music so this was a real treat for us to learn more about the rich references to the ancient world in this genre. So join us for an engaging and insightful conversation.

If you’re looking for even more metal after listening to this episode, you might want to check out the upcoming conference Heavy Metal and Global Premodernity which is being co-run by none other that Dr Jeremy J. Swist and Dr C Naylor Davis.

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We sat down recently to have a conversation with Professor Karen Carr who is Emerita at Portland State University. She holds a doctorate in Classical Art and Archaeology and we were thrilled to discuss the ideas for her latest work. We explore Carr’s research on the connections between women, money, and the economy in the ancient world.

Special Episode – Roman Women and Money with Professor Karen Carr

Carr has an impressive breadth and depth to her research work. She’s the author of Vandals to Visigoths: Rural Settlement Patterns in Early Medieval Spain. Carr also has a book coming out in 2022 called Shifting Currents: A World History of Swimming. However, in this conversation we were focusing on her radical new theories on women and their place in economies. The conversation ranges from the Stone Age through to the modern world! Professor Carr is currently writing a book on this topic that is slated for release in 2023 through the University of Liverpool Press.

Professor Carr suggests that manufacturing, and thus the production of wealth, was initially tied to the work of women. They say that money makes the world go around, so it seems like women were making the world go around since the Stone Age! They helped to produce items like beads and textiles that could be used for trade long before humans invented coinage.

This all started to change when Greeks and Romans started to export silver and gold in larger quantities, especially in the form of coinage. Mining for metals and minting the coins was largely men’s work and this type of money started to be promoted as ‘masculine’, while items like beads and textiles were labelled as ‘feminine’. As parts of the world, such as Asia and Africa, continued to engage in the manufacture of these goods for trade, foreigners also started to be associated with femininity. If you are starting to feel like the economy in the ancient world was complex, you would be correct!

Penelope and the Suitors by J. W. Waterhouse.
Work that wool, Penelope!

Tune in to hear how all of these developments may have contributed to slavery in the ancient and modern world. With the fashion industry being one of the largest contributors to carbon emissions and coming under more scrutiny for the poor conditions of workers, you won’t want to miss Professor Carr’s theories about how contemporary attitudes towards fast fashion may go back further than you think.

Close-up of some of the coins from the Frome Hoard. This hoard contains 52 503 Roman coins which date from 253-305 CE!

The music featured in this episode is an original composition for our podcast by the glorious Bettina Joy de Guzman.

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Disruption is at the heart of great changes in human society. How might we understand disruption? How can we recognise it? And just what historical precedents do we have for successful change? We sit down with Professor David Potter to examine just these kinds of questions!

David Potter is Francis W. Kelsey Collegiate Professor of Greek and Roman History and Arthur F. Thurnau Professor at the University of Michigan and has written extensively on the ancient world. In his latest book Disruption: Why Things Change, Professor Potter considers the disruption in Rome that reverberates today: the rule of Constantine and the relationship of Rome with the Christian Church.

Special Episode – Disruption with David Potter

Setting the stage is the life and times of the Roman Emperor Constantine. He is famous for bringing Christianity into Roman imperialism in a way that would have been unthinkable to Romans of previous generations. Professor Potter takes us through some of the pivotal moments in Constantine’s rule. These are revealing for how Constantine builds towards consensus with Christian bishops.

What does this change look like to the Romans? How did the thinking about Christians change? What steps did Constantine take that separated him from the emperors that came before?

All this and more comes up for discussion in this episode.

Statue of Constantine at York. He became emperor in 306 CE in Roman Eboracum, now modern York.
This statue is a modern piece by the sculptor Philip Jackson and was unveiled in 1998. Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.

One of the key threads in Potter’s book is that there are recognisable patterns for successful moments of disruption. A consideration of Constantine and Christianity in Rome is really just the tip of the iceberg with this text. Potter’s view extends beyond ancient Rome to consider the rise of Islam, the Protestant Reformation, the Enlightenment and French Revolution, as well as disruptive political theories such as those of Marx and Spencer.

What we see by taking a long view of history is that there’s room to consider disruption not just as a culmination of circumstances, but as a potentiality that can be tapped into.

• The writer Eusebius’ enthusiasm for Constantine’s adoption of Christianity
• The Donatist controversy in North Africa involving book burning
• Constantine’s letter to the Praetorian Prefect
• Julian’s Theodoric Neoplatonism!
• The emperor Heraclius and the kings of Persia

• The Origin of Empire: Rome from the Republic to Hadrian
• Constantine the Emperor
• The Victor’s Crown: A History of Ancient Sport from Homer to Byzantium
• Theodora: Actress, Empress, Saint
• Disruption: Why Things Change

Disruption: Why Things Change by David Potter

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We sit down to talk to the fabulous Professor Ray Laurence from Macquarie University in this special episode about urban space in Pompeii and the place of children within the society. These topics are close to his heart as his work mostly focuses on:

• The Roman City
• Communications and Mobility – especially Roman roads
• Age and Ageing in the Roman World

Special Episode – Pompeii with Professor Ray Laurence

You may also recognise his name because, in addition to his scholarly publications, Ray has worked with TEDEd to produce some amazing short videos on the life of children in Ancient Rome. Join us for this fascinating discussion on life in Pompeii!

Pompeii is a very famous site, but there are a lot of misconceptions about what this place was actually like before the eruption. Ray Laurence explains why life in Pompeii was tough and how the built environment reflects the fact that this was a very average town. It had been around for centuries before the eruption in 79 CE and shares the influences of various people who lived in the region, including the Etruscans, the Oscans, the Samnites, and finally, the Romans.

The layout of Pompeii evolved over time and areas like the Forum were used in different ways throughout its existence. We can learn more about how people experienced the urban environment by piecing together a variety of evidence including wheel ruts, the width of streets, graffiti patterns, literature, and the building remains. While Pompeii may not have been especially fancy, it was a bustling town and people spent a lot of time in the streets, conducting business, conversing, stopping at shrines, fetching water, or grabbing some takeaway.

The Forum, Pompeii.

We tend to see Pompeii from the perspective of adults as children leave less evidence – whether this is literary, archaeological or even human remains. Scholars such as Katherine Huntley and Ray Laurence urge us not to discount their experiences as they make up a sizeable proportion of the town. Once we start thinking about the urban layout from their perspective, it is surprising what we can discover.

By using the average heights of adults in Pompeii, we can approximate the growth of children in the towns and thus consider how accessible the amenities were for the smallest residents. For instance, children over six years old would probably be able to access water fountains and the bars, therefore securing their own food and drink! As they grew older, they would have had more ease of access to sacred spaces such as household shrines.

Katherine Huntley has carried out extensive global studies of children’s drawing and applied what they have uncovered to the graffiti of Pompeii. In spite of the differences in time and culture, there are patterns in how children start drawing that can help us to determine which samples of figural graffiti in Pompeii were produced by children.

The Temple of Isis, Pompeii.

There are also famous examples of children, such as Numerius Popidius Celsinus, a six year old who paid for the restoration of the Temple of Isis after it was damaged in the earthquake in 62 CE. In recognition of his contribution, he was elected to the town council! This seems odd to modern eyes, but Ray explains that he was not the only child to become a part of the ordo of decuriones. What we wish we knew was how these children moved around the town as they made their way to meetings! Nonetheless, these examples demonstrate that once we look a little harder, there is a lot that can be learned about the presence of children in Pompeii.

• Huntley, K. V. (2018). ‘Children’s Graffiti in Roman Pompeii and Herculaneum.’ In The Oxford Handbook of the Archaeology of Childhood, edited by Sally Crawford, Dawn M. Hadley & Gillian Shepherd, 376-386. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Laurence, R. (2010). Roman Pompeii: Space and Society. Second Edition, London: Routledge.
• Laurence, R. (2017). ‘Children and the urban environment: Agency in Pompeii.’ In Children and everyday life in the Roman and late antique world, edited by Christian Laes and Ville Vuolanto, 27-42. London & New York: Routledge.

Don’t forget to check out Professor Laurence’s TEDEd videos! You can also follow him on Twitter @raylaurence1 or on Academia.edu

• Four Sisters in Ancient Rome
• A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome

A still from ‘A Glimpse of Teenage Life in Ancient Rome’

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In this very special episode we’re joined by archaeologist Darius Arya. Darius has lived and worked as an archaeologist in Rome for over twenty years! 

Special Episode – The Archaeology of Early Rome with Darius Arya

We wanted to learn more about the archaeological record for the early period of Rome’s history. While we’ve been focused on reading and interpreting the literary sources of Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, there’s a wealth of other evidence for the ancient past to consider. Archaeology is fundamental in revealing elements of the past that aren’t written down. Even more interesting is that the archaeological remains can suggest new interpretations about the past that conflict or add complexity to the literary sources.

You may have seen Darius on television. He’s presented a number of documentaries on the ancient world and we are absolutely thrilled to explore Rome’s early history with his expertise. Things to listen out for in this episode:

• The importance of topography
• The connections between the Etruscan peoples and the Romans
• Discussion of how the Etruscans dominate the archaeological record compared Rome’s other early neighbours, the Volscians and the Aequians
• What we can say about the Sabine peoples
• Key sites of interest when thinking about early Rome and her neighbours

We recommend having a map handy to spot all the places that are touched on in this far-ranging and engaging conversation. The map below has some of places mentioned on it and also provides some guidance on the languages of the different regions. 

The Linguistic Landscape of Central Italy at the beginning of Roman expansion.
Courtesy of Susana Freixeiro~commonswiki via Wikimedia Commons

Darius Arya can be found on social media, posting about Rome and the sites he’s working on and the museums he’s collaborating with. You can catch him on Twitter @DariusAryaDigs, Instagram @dariusaryadigs, and his limited series podcast Darius Arya Digs.He is the director of The American Institute for Roman Culture. Their mission “to preserve and protect Rome’s extraordinary and unique cultural legacy through education, outreach, and action.” He is also the director of Ancient Rome Live which is dedicated to providing free-to-access resources for learning about ancient Rome.

Aequians – the Aequian peoples are an Italic group that inhabited the Apennine mountains east of Rome and to the south of the Sabines.

Albano – in the Castelli Romani region to the south-east of Rome. There is a a lake and a hill named for Albano

Anio, river – The Anio starts in the Apennines east of Rome and flows through Tivoli before joining the Tiber

Antium – south of Rome and slightly east, a coastal city

The Castelli Romani region (please note this is to the south-east not south-west of Rome!) – includes the modern towns which are also ancient sites: Albano, Castel Gandolfo, Frascati, Tusculum. Often associated with the Aequians in the literary sources for the early Republic.

Castel Gandolfo – in the Castelli Romani region to the south-east of Rome. Most famous now as the location of the Pope’s summer residence!

Circeo (ancient Circeii) – South and east of Rome. A coastal site that is further south and further east than Antium. Modern San Felice Circeo, the site is known for its beach. In ancient Rome, this was where a treaty was signed between Carthage and Rome in 509 BCE!

Frascati – in the Castelli Romani region to the south-east of Rome.

Ostia – west of Rome, a port settlement at the mouth of the Tiber river.

Sabines – a peoples living to the east of Rome and north of the river Anio in the mountainous Apennine region

Sant’Omobono – an archaeological site in Rome next to the church of Sant’Omobono, at the junction of the modern via L. Petroselli and il Vico Jugario at the foot of the Campidoglio (the ancient Capitoline hill). This site contains altars and temples to Fortuna and Mater Matuta and is considered very important for understanding the development of urbanisation in Rome. 

The Sant’Omobono archaeological site where temple remains date back to the 7th century BCE!
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons

Tusculum– in the Castelli Romani region to the south-east of Rome. Famous in our written sources for the early Republic as a friend of Rome, but also later famous as where Cicero had a villa.

Pomezia – directly south of Rome. The modern township on the ancient site of Lavinium and located in the Pontine marshes.

Veii – about sixteen kilometres north of Rome. An Etruscan city built on a plateau of tuff and was considered to be in an extremely defensible and strategic location. Veii is the most significant southern city of Etruria.

Volscians – the Volscian peoples are thought to be a group of Osco-Umbrian speakers who inhabited the area south of Rome, which is characterised by hills interspersed with marshes such as the Pontine marshes.

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