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Article

Hypatia  

Henriette Harich-Schwarzbauer

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 December 2015
Subjects:
  1. Gender Studies
  2. Science, Technology, and Medicine
  3. Philosophy
The philosopher Hypatia (350/370–415 ce) is one of the outstanding figures in the intellectual life of Late Antiquity. She is considered a symbol of the transformation of science and philosophy under the Christian bishops in Alexandria at the end of the 4th century ce. Her life and her works are well documented in different literary genres and by famous authors, namely by Synesius of Cyrene in his letters. The extant testimonies on her work prove that she was the guiding light of astronomy in Alexandria, where she was held in high esteem. Unsurprisingly, she became the target of aggression, and she was murdered ferociously in 415. Hypatia has been commemorated in the Byzantine and the Western traditions. She has experienced an impressive revival since the Enlightenment; even in the 21st century she is depicted as a heroine in fiction and film.Hypatia appears to have spent her entire life in her hometown of .

Article

Lucretia  

Rebecca Langlands

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
07 March 2016
Subjects:
  1. Roman History and Historiography

Lucretia, the virtuous wife of Collatinus, was raped by a royal prince, Sextus Tarquinius, and killed herself after reporting the crime to her father and husband. Her death and the vengeance it inspired marked a turning point in Roman history in 509 bce, when Lucius Junius Brutus led the expulsion from Rome of the tyrannical Tarquinii, putting an end to monarchical rule, and founding the Roman republic; Brutus and Lucretia’s father Collatinus were elected the first pair of consuls. The avengers of Lucretia’s rape are thus champions of liberty, freeing Rome from tyranny. This is the core of one of Rome’s more powerful and enduring foundation legends. Although the episode is set in the 6th century bce, our most extensive early ancient accounts were written in the 1st centuries bce and ce by Livy, Ovid, and Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Augustan authors for whom Lucretia’s fate was a distant legend. Since antiquity, the story has been reworked and reinterpreted many times, in scholarship, political thought and philosophy, and literature and arts. It has been used to explore a wide range of political and moral ideas, including the ethical ramifications of both rape and suicide.

Article

rape  

Sharon James

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
30 April 2020
Subjects:
  1. Gender Studies
  2. Greek Law
  3. Roman Law

Only the rape of citizens was taken seriously by law. Sexual assaults on non-citizens were lesser matters. Rape of enslaved persons, a daily reality, was a crime only if committed by someone other than their owner. Rape of citizen males damaged their reputations; rape of citizen females could render them ineligible for marriage. Ancient myth features almost countless stories of rape, usually of human females by divine males. These tales were common subjects in ancient art and literature. Overwhelmingly, the victims are unmarried girls, who may suffer brutal treatment afterward and frequently bear miraculous offspring, some of whom establish cities (e.g., Romulus and Remus). Rape by human men is rarer in myth; rape of a wife causes massive militarized response (e.g., Helen of Troy, Lucretia). War-rape and post-war rape were standard practice around the Mediterranean.

Rape in antiquity was a matter of social and civic class. As a crime, it was understood as happening only to citizens: sexual assault of non-citizens was not a concern of law. The law took rape of citizens very seriously. Rape of citizen girls and women was a violation against the men who were responsible for them—father, husband, brother, guardian—but female victims would have experienced it as a personal violation first, rather than damage to their guardian’s ownership of their sexuality.

Article

folktale  

William Hansen

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
27 February 2017
Subjects:
  1. Greek Literature
  2. Greek Myth and Religion
  3. Latin Literature
  4. Roman Myth and Religion

Folktales are traditional fictional stories. Unlike works of original literary fiction, they are normally anonymous narratives that have been transmitted from one teller to another over an uncertain period of time, and have been shaped by multiple narrators into the form and style that are characteristic of oral narratives. The transmission of traditional tales is predominantly oral, but in literate societies such as Greece and Rome, transmission also takes place via written works.

“Folktale” is an umbrella term for a number of subgenres: the wonder tale (commonly known as the fairytale), the religious tale, the novella, the humorous tale (with its subforms the joke and the tall tale), the animal tale, and the fable. Since there was no ancient notion of folktales as such, no compilation of folktales exists from antiquity—only compilations of particular genres of folktales such as the fable and the joke.

Unlike myths and legends, folktales are narrative fictions, make no serious claim to historicity, and are not ordinarily accorded credence. They differ from myths and especially from legends in their handling of the supernatural.

Article

Alexander the Great, reception of  

Diana Spencer

Article

Publication History:

Published online:
22 November 2019
Subjects:
  1. Christianity
  2. Greek History and Historiography
  3. Late Antiquity
  4. Near East
  5. Reception
  6. Roman History and Historiography
What makes Alexander Great? His story has captured the imagination of authors, artists, philosophers, and politicians across more than two millennia. He has provided a point of convergence for religious and spiritual thinkers, he has been co-opted as a champion for gender and sexual openness, he represents a paradigm for would-be charismatic dictators (and their opponents), he gives us scientific imperialism and justification for conquistadorial dreaming, and he exemplifies the risks of cultural appropriation. To understand why Alexander resonates so widely across so many different fields of study, interest groups, and media, is an exercise in reception. This Alexander who has captured the imagination is triumphantly equivocal and it is in the plurality of traditions through which this complexity is expressed that his enduring “greatness” lies. The imaginary quality of Alexander is unsurprising because more profoundly than for any comparable individual from classical antiquity, his history is a product of reception from the start: every encounter with Alexander the Great is part of a conversation that depends substantially on accounts and narrative evidence from long after his death, and at the least at one remove from the historians who first and contemporaneously chronicled his life and achievements.