I. The Purpose of the Collection
This collection of reprinted articles and translated primary sources is, like D. S. Potter and D. J. Mattingly, edd. Life, Death, and Entertainment in the Roman Empire (1999), intended to replace the notorious course packet in undergraduate courses on classical civilization. The photocopied course packet has become legally problematic and increasingly expensive; the teacher must now prepare it far in advance, and the student finds it difficult to return or resell. It is tempting to replace packets with books.
One is partially misled by the sweeping title of McClure’s, Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World : “Representations of Sexuality and Gender” would have been more appropriate due to the focus on literature. McClure emphasizes the literary representation of sexuality and gender in classical antiquity (both canonical and non-canonical texts), stressing myth, legend, drama, and poetry, but also non-canonical sources such as medical writing, emphasizing the construction of ideologies. Many courses on classical family and sexuality have a broader scope, with a greater emphasis on social history, stressing practices as well as ideologies. Social history of women and the family need no longer be positivistic, but takes into account the social and cultural biases in the evidence, for instance law. McClure’s collection would have benefited from articles about Greek and Roman law, which are major sources on women, family, and sexuality in antiquity. The collection Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture, edd. Sheila Murnaghan and Sandra R. Joshel, suggests how social history may be integrated with literary representation. It is evidence of the growth and vitality of the field that one feels that dozens of other articles could have been chosen for this collection. Hopefully, more reprint collections are in the offing, and this reviewer’s griping will be nullified.
The decision to compose the book from reprints of scholarly articles, rather than commissioned survey articles as in Potter and Mattingly, edd. (1999), means that the teacher must actively incorporate McClure into the curriculum. Scholarly articles are usually narrow and specific in focus, not addressed to a general audience. The teacher using McClure must plan an extensive survey of the general context and lead a discussion of the relevance of the article and sources to the general context. The editor’s introduction will help in this respect, but commentary in general is thin. Many teachers and students will not be satisfied with the translated sources in McClure, finding them a snack instead of a feast; McClure should be taught alongside Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant, edd. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation (second ed. 1992).
II. General Emphasis
McClure is a book that emphasizes women, despite the title Sexuality and Gender implying both genders (though not multiple sexualities). Though masculinity and male sexual roles have also been subjects of gendered analysis, especially in the last decade, few of the articles in McClure make men, masculinity, or male sexual roles their main subject. The use of Kenneth Dover’s “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior” (McClure 19-33) does not represent the enormous growth in studies of classical “homosexuality.” The student might find most accessible in this area, David M. Halperin, “The democratic body: prostitution and citizenship in classical Athens”, in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality, 88-112 or Maud W. Gleason, “Elite male identity in the Roman empire” in Potter and Mattingly, edd. (1999), 67-84, which also covers Greek culture in the imperial period. The gendering of social and political structures in classical antiquity was farther-reaching than a focus on “women” tends to suggest. Is an ideological conflict between classical “men’s studies” (including homosexuality) and classical feminist studies guiding the emphasis of McClure on women? (See Marilyn B. Skinner, “Zeus and Leda: The Sexuality Wars in Contemporary Classical Scholarship,” Thamyris 3.1 (1996), 103-123)
III. Content
A. General Remarks
McClure stresses that the reprinted essays have “played a formative role in shaping the field of ancient gender studies” (2). Testing this claim is not as easy as it is for researchers in other disciplines, such as medicine, the sciences, or social sciences, which maintain citation indexes; the Arts and Humanities Citation Index is notoriously skimpy for classical studies. The inclusion of a paper in syllabuses suggests its popularity and usefulness; on-line syllabuses can be searched. Entering the titles of the articles yields the following hits:
Dover “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior” 42
Winkler “Double Consciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics” 33
King “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women” 32
Zeitlin “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine” 88 (some of which are for her book)
Finley “The Silent Women of Rome” 23
Joshel “The Body Female and the Body Politic” 24
Wyke “Mistress and Metaphor in Augustan Elegy” 27
Richlin ” Pliny’s Brassiere” 11
Joplin “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours” 17 (narrowed by use of name)
These hits are from web syllabi of university courses in sexuality and gender, which predominate, or bibliographies such as Diotima. This rather random test suggests that most of these essays have been valuable in the field. Only the inclusion of Richlin, “Pliny’s Brassiere” seems quixotic; Richlin’s “Not before homosexuality: the materiality of the cinaedus and the Roman law against love between men,” JHSex 3.4 (1993), 523-73 has gained far more attention — some of it negative, but that is what discussion is for.
The reprinted essays have not been edited or altered by McClure, except to add an individual bibliography (as with Joshel, “The body female”) where the original collection had a cumulative bibliography. McClure’s habit of presenting authors’ first names as initials can result in confusion (Alan or Averil Cameron? Jeffrey or John Henderson?) and ironically obliterates the gender of the authors. As a student the reviewer often hoped that scholars using first-name initials were female, and was disappointed when most (still) proved to be male.
Following each reprint essay McClure includes a short selection of translated primary sources; comments as to the appropriateness of each selection appear below following comments on the reprint.
B. Remarks on Individual Reprints in McClure (all page numbers are McClure’s unless indicated)
Editor’s Introduction (1-15) the work “invites undergraduate students to reflect on the lives of ancient women and the social and political forces that shaped them” (1) McClure briefly reviews the development of the sub-field of “women in antiquity.” Earlier surveys such as Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves (1975) focused on the material conditions or “real-life circumstances” (4) of women in antiquity, but M. favors the shift to analysis of ideologies that shape representations of women, regarding Zeitlin, “Playing the Other,” reprinted in McClure, as pioneering in this respect. M. reviews structuralism’s influence on studies of classical myth (5). She reviews the impact of Foucault’s History of Sexuality series and the important Foucaultian studies of classical Greek sexuality by Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin. Foucault was subjected to challenge by feminist scholars, such as Amy Richlin, “Zeus and Metis: Foucault, feminism, classics,” Helios 18(1991), 160-79, who claim that he and his followers erased women’s contributions (7); he has been subjected to critique by David Larmour, Paul Allen Miller and Charles Platter, edd. Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity (1998). M. also briefly surveys recent work on the body in antiquity (7).
Part I: Greece
Kenneth J. Dover, “Classical Greek Attitudes to Sexual Behavior,” 19-33, original published in Women in the Ancient World: The Arethusa Papers (1984), ed. John Peradotto and J. P. (sic) Sullivan, 143-57 (pagination not given by M.) Comments are provided by McClure in her introduction (6-7); she remarks that Dover’s article and his Greek Homosexuality (1978) opened up the study of Greek homoerotic practices. Dover discusses areas of Greek sexual inhibition, largely in religion and “high” genres; gender segregation; prostitution. Dover emphasizes the asymmetrical, age-dependent nature of Greek “homosexuality,” in which slightly older males courted and pursued younger (adolescent) boys, who resisted the pursuit (25-27). Dover relates sexuality to politics (prostitution disqualified the citizen male from politics) and class (he associates pederasty with aristocracy). Reviewer’s remarks: Dover emphasizes, as a social historian, the material and social constraints which produced Greek male sexual behavior, e.g. the seclusion of women and their early marriage meant that youths had little opportunity for legitimate erotic interaction with women unless prostitutes; homoerotic relationships filled the void. The teacher should discuss the quite different approach of Foucault, who theorizes that Greek sexualities are constructed through discourse and discursive practices in order to sustain relations of power (elite male dominance over women and socially inferior males). This view was exaggerated by David M. Halperin in One Hundred Years of Homosexuality and Other Essays on Greek Love (1990), in which, for instance in “The democratic body,” it would seem that Athenian men viewed the sexual penetration of social inferiors as a patriotic act; see Dover (McClure 23-25) on mores of self-restraint. Foucault himself stresses self-restraint as an ethic, The Use of Pleasure (1985 tr.), 63ff.
Source: Plato, Symp. 189d7-192a1. M. provides little discussion of the context of the work. The “myth” provides an alternate account of Greek sexualities in which males who love males and females who love females would seem to be essentially different from males who love females; however, three sexualities, not two, are suggested; there is no sign of age-differentiation. See Halperin (1990), 18-21. (Age-differentiation is also challenged by Martha Nussbaum, “Twenty-eight candles,” in The Sleep of Reason (2002), on the sexual ethics of Stoicism.)
John J. Winkler, “Double Consciousness in Sappho’s Lyrics,” 39-71, originally published in The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece (1990), 162-187 and 233-5. Winkler offers a “feminist, anthropological, pro-lesbian” reading of Sappho. He stresses the unusualness of a female subject and writer expressing her own sexuality and analyzes the use of “public” and “private” space and genres. Sappho resists categorization as a lyric poet, presenting many personal perspectives. In frs. 1 and 16 Sappho revalues Homeric (Iliad) themes, thus both referring to men’s (malestream) literature and writing a women’s literature. Winkler reads Sappho’s garden poetry (frs. 2, 81b, 94, 96) as alluding to women’s genital anatomy and their sexuality, drawing on Greek medical terminology; the emotional “friendship” poems are read as expressing erotic intimacy (fr. 94), a specifically female sexuality.
The source selections helpfully include Homer, Iliad 5.114-32 and Odyssey 6.139-85 with Sappho 1 and 31.
Reviewer’s remarks: not every reading of Sappho confidently asserts lesbianism in a poet so fragmentary and about whose life so little is reliable (the testimonia are all much later in date), as cautions Andre Lardinois, “Lesbian Sappho and Sappho of Lesbos,” in From Sappho to De Sade (1989), ed. J. Bremmer, 15-35; cf. Pamela Gordon, “The Lover’s Voice in Heroides 15, or, Why is Sappho a Man?” in Roman Sexualities (1997), ed. Judith P. Hallett and Marilyn B. Skinner, 274-91, who argues that “lesbian Sappho” is largely a creation of later male authors such as Ovid in Heroides 15.
Helen King, “Bound to Bleed: Artemis and Greek Women,” 77-97, original published in Reflections of Women in Antiquity (1983), ed. Averil Cameron and Amélie Kuhrt, 109-27. M. views this article as illustrating female agency and resistance to “male systems of control” (8). King discusses the problem of approaching Greek women through male-authored sources and takes a structuralist approach to women’s roles: the unmarried girl, parthenos, located conceptually “outside” male society, must be taken “inside” and assimilated into the male-run household as a wife, gyne. Since Greek women were married shortly after menarche, King examines the construction of menstruation in Greek gynecological treatises, in which the inhibition of menstruation makes young girls physically ill and mentally disturbed; the “cure” is marriage and pregnancy. A medical discourse thus legitimized a social practice (early marriage). King analyzes the medical and structuralist etiology of “hysteria”, a specifically female disorder in which the uterus roamed around the body and caused suffocation. King adds a bibliographical update.
The sources passage invites a reading of Euripides Hippolytus 59-105, which suggests the ambivalence of female virginity, with Hippocrates, On Unmarried Girls.
Froma I. Zeitlin, “Playing the Other: Theater, Theatricality, and the Feminine in Greek Drama,” 103-138, original published in Representations 11 (1985) (not 1995), 65-94. M. views this essay as “elucidating … the function of gender categories in classical Athens.” (8). Zeitlin examines the location of the feminine in Greek tragedy: male actors played feminine roles in tragedy, and drama was sacred to Dionysus, a god with feminine traits. Z. stresses the presence of Dionysian ambiguities and gender reversals in an ostensibly masculine, male-dominated culture and genre (105). Female characters in tragedy “serve as anti-models as well as hidden models for the masculine self” (108). Z. analyzes the use of theatrical space and its violation in tragedy, plot and irony, role-playing. She discusses the ambivalent attitude of philosophers such as Plato to tragedy, who find it potentially effeminate, fearing its subversive qualities.
McClure’s sources depicting potential gender-subversion are Sophocles Women of Trachis 531-87 and 1046-84, Deianeira’s resolve to kill Heracles and Heracles’ dying speech; Euripides Bacchae 912-44, the scene in which Pentheus appears onstage dressed as a woman.
Part II: Rome
Moses I. Finley, “The Silent Women of Rome,” 147-56, originally published in Finley, Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies (not Discoveries and Controversies) (1968), 129-42. This was re-edited in Aspects of Antiquity: Discoveries and Controversies second edition (1977), 124-136. Roman women are almost always represented by men; even their self-representations in epitaphs are stylized to reflect an ideal of female behavior. Women were highly subordinated in marriage to the power of the paterfamilias, whether their husbands in the older form of marriage (in which the wife entered her husband’s family) or their fathers in the “free” form of marriage. Marriage was negotiated by male heads of household; women could be married at age twelve. There was a marked double standard in Roman codes of sexual behavior; marriage was socially expected, but fidelity in the male was not expected. Finley suggests that lower class women were freer, “more widely accepted as persons in their own right” and “far less inhibited by legal definitions of marriage or legitimacy” (153). Finley sketches the harsh mortality conditions of ancient Rome, in which women tended to die early and both sexes frequently remarried after the loss of a spouse. Finley suggests that one way in which women asserted themselves was through religion (154), especially Christianity.
McClure appends as sources various Latin funerary inscriptions.
Reviewer’s remarks: Students would benefit from more material in Lefkowitz and Fant, including the epitaph of “Turia,” ILS 8393, Lefkowitz and Fant no. 168, an example of one of the aristocratic wives who actively defended their husbands during the proscriptions of the triumviral period (literary instances in Appian B.Civ. 4.39-40, Lefkowitz and Fant no. 167).
A great deal of Finley’s picture has been revised by Roman social historians. See Natalie Boymel Kampen, Image and Status: Roman Working Women in Ostia (1981) on women’s self-representation in funerary monuments; on the epitaphs of the lower strata in general, who do not otherwise speak for themselves, see Sandra Joshel, Work, Identity, and Legal Status in the Roman Empire (1992). Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage (1991), 442-44 argues that both manus and patria potestas had less effect in practical terms over elite Roman women’s lives; marriage without manus was usual by the late Republic, and most adult women would have lost their fathers, becoming independent. Elite women usually brought property (as dowry) to marriage and inherited property. Marriage at age twelve was a notional legal minimum; inscriptions suggest that women began to be married in their mid-teens. Philosophers in the late first and second centuries AD articulated a single standard of sexual morality. That lower-class women were less bound by conventional morality seems to be a modern cliché, a gendering of class conflict.
Ancient demography has received detailed statistical study in the last decade: for a general introduction see Tim Parkin, Demography and Roman Society (1991); Roger S. Bagnall and Bruce W. Frier, The Demography of Roman Egypt (1994) is based on census documents for taxation purposes; focused studies by Walter Scheidel, Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire (1996) and Scheidel, ed. Debating Ancient Demography (2001); in modern nations women’s shorter average life expectancy is an index of repressive conditions for women.
Sandra R. Joshel, “The Body Female and the Body Politic: Livy’s Lucretia and Verginia,” 163-87, originally published in Amy Richlin, ed. Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (1992) , 112-130. M. views this article as placing literary representations of women in Rome in a political context (8). Joshel sets the Augustan background briefly and views Livy as an Augustan propagandist, “offering up a blueprint for the imperial present” (167). Roman history served as moral instruction for the political class (166-7). Joshel reviews the stories of Lucretia (Livy 1.57-60) and Verginia (3.44-58). She argues that Roman masculinity was constructed through discipline, control over the self to exclude all forms of pleasure, weakness, or sentimental feelings; exemplary aristocrats even put their sons to death (Torquatus, Livy 8.7.15-19). In Livy, according to Joshel, Lucretia and Verginia are done to death (Lucretia by suicide, Verginia by her father) to preserve their chastity, thus eliminating the female desiring subject in order to maintain patriarchal order. Joshel discusses the association of male honor and female chastity (174-5) and argues that female chastity constructed gendered space; their unchastity or violation transgresses household and state boundaries and is a cause for war, as the rape of Lucretia provoked the overthrow of the monarchy (176-77). Joshel closely reads the rapes of Lucretia and Verginia as silencing women (183-84). Gender is reproduced through violence against women.
McClure appends as source Livy’s narrative of Lucretia.
Reviewer’s remarks: Today’s students will be baffled by Joshel’s late 1980s references to Vanna White and Iran-Contra (undergraduates would have been about six years old at the time). Joshel’s is a rather one-sided view of women even in Livy. The Sabine women are also “rape victims,” yet their marriage to their captors (the formerly womanless followers of Romulus) results in assimilation and the reproduction of the Roman people; see Robert Brown, “Livy’s Sabine women and the ideal of concordia,” TAPA 125 (1995), 291-319; rape, but also assimilation, is stressed by Carol Dougherty, “Sowing the seeds of violence: rape, women, and the land,” in Parchments of Gender (1998), ed. Maria Wyke, 267-84.
The teacher should provide more links to Roman social history, to correct Joshel’s exaggeration of Augustan cultural politics. The marriage legislation made the control of female sexuality a real political issue. The lex Iulia de adulteriis provided for the father’s (not husband’s) killing of an adulterous daughter caught in the act, but real-life instances of killing are quite rare. Jurists’ remarks on killing must be rulings upon specific, real-life cases, not statements of legal principle: D. 48.5.33.pr.; CJ 9.9.4 (Alexander Severus). In cases involving aristocrats, the usual penalties for adultery were divorce, confiscation, and exile; Augustus’ adulterous daughter Julia was exiled for adultery. Some legal sources are found in Lefkowitz and Fant (1992), nos. 120-128; see Treggiari, Roman Marriage (1991), 277-98. Furthermore historical Roman fathers did not necessarily suppress their tender feelings or act brutally towards their children; see Richard Saller, Patriarchy, Property, and Death in the Roman Family (1994), especially the chapter “Pietas and patria potestas.” The marriage ban for common soldiers, probably another Augustan enactment, suggests that women did not have to be killed to maintain patriarchal order (here the community of male soldiers), merely excluded in law and sometimes in practice (Sara Elise Phang, The Marriage of Roman Soldiers, 13 BC – AD 235: Law and Family in the Imperial Army (2001), esp. 379-81).
Maria Wyke, “Mistress and Metaphor in Augustan Elegy,”193-219, originally published in Helios 16 (1989), 25-47 (pagination not given by M.). Does Augustan love poetry represent the “real” experience of poets and women, who display unorthodox gender roles, or should we regard elegy as purely artificial representation? Some stratum of reality is usually sought beneath the “veneer of poetic devices” (195). Wyke argues that “realism” itself is a literary convention; she stresses the artificial aspects of Propertian elegy and its inconsistencies; many supposedly “real” details are intertextual allusions. “The realist devices of the Propertian corpus map out only a precarious pathway to the realities of women’s lives in Augustan society and often direct us instead toward the features and habits of characters in other Augustan texts” (202). Elegaic discourse particularly stressed the gender inversion of servitium amoris, in which the elegaic lover is “enslaved” by devotion to his masterful mistress, a discourse that emphasizes the narrator’s rejection of conventional social and political roles. The representation of female sexuality was frequently a political discourse, female “independence” being associated with political destabilization (210). Wyke leaves open the question of female poets and readers of elegy. Sources: Propertius 1.8a, 8b, 2.5. McClure contrasts Cicero Pro Caelio 20.47-21.50, invective on “Clodia,” which illustrates the conventional attitude towards unrestricted female sexuality.
Reviewer’s remarks: The reading of Augustan elegy as fundamentally “political” became very popular but this position has been rejected by Duncan Cloud, “Roman poetry and anti-militarism,” in War and Society in the Roman World (1993), ed. John Rich and Graham Shipley, 113-38 and criticized by Monica R. Gale, “Propertius 2.7: Militia amoris and the ironies of elegy,” JRS 87 (1997), 77-91.
Amy Richlin, “Pliny’s Brassiere,” 225-52, originally published in Roman Sexualities (1997), edd. Judith P. Hallett (not Hallet) and Marilyn B. Skinner, 197-220. M. views this article as illustrating women’s means of resistance (8). Richlin investigates women’s representation in Roman medical writing such as Pliny the Elder’s Natural History, Pompeius Festus, and Columella the agricultural writer. These writings catalogued a wide range of folk remedies and charms, e.g. Pliny NH 28.76 confesses to wearing a woman’s breast band (a long, narrow, unshaped strip of cloth) around his head to cure headaches. Richlin argues that she can locate “women’s culture” and agency in these accounts of cures (129). Roman men believed that the female body had an “uncanny” power, its effluvia able to cure or pollute. Menstruation was above all viewed as polluting, but a menstruating woman might be used to kill an infestation of insects (230-1). Sometimes women are the agents in folk cures, preparing them; Richlin cites evidence for women preparing their own contraceptives or abortives.
Sources: McClure includes Pliny, NH 28.70-72.
Reviewer’s remarks: It was argued by Ann Ellis Hanson at the New York APA that the Greek medical authors’ gynaecology stemmed from a folk tradition that was produced by men and hostile to women, since it often prescribed “filth therapy” for women, who were treated with substances such as various animal feces. Cf. the general argument that Greek men viewed women as polluted (no detail about gynaikeia) by Ann Carson, “Putting her in her place: woman, dirt, and desire,” in Before Sexuality (1990), ed. Halperin, Winkler, and Zeitlin, 135-170. Bad-smelling substances were often applied to women in the Hippocratic gynaikeia, on the theory that the womb was like an animal and would flee from foul odors and be attracted to sweet odors; see Lefkowitz and Fant (1992), no. 344, 345, 353. That women’s folk use of certain herbs as contraceptives and abortives was effective is argued by John Riddle, Contraception and Abortion from the Ancient World to the Renaissance (1992) but Riddle’s work has been challenged.
Part III: Classical Tradition
Patricia K. Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours,” 259-86, originally published in Stanford Literature Review (not Standford) 1.1 (1984), 25-53. Joplin inquires how female readers and feminists should read myth, focusing on the legend of Philomela, raped by Tereus (he cut out her tongue), who wove an account of her violation into a tapestry, which Sophocles calls “the voice of the shuttle.” Joplin makes this a paradigm for women’s silencing by men, women’s recovering their voices and revealing their violation by men. Male “dominance can only contain, but never successfully destroy, the woman’s voice.” (263) Joplin explores through myth how Greek society and political power depended on the exchange of women in marriage, and emphasizes the “violence implicit in the exchange of women” (268), in which women are raped or sacrificed. Feminist readings and revealings of the violence towards women in classical myth (and in other aspects of culture) are necessary in order for women’s voices to be heard.
Sources: Ovid, Met. 6.424-643.
IV. Bibliography
The bibliography at the end seems intended to be comprehensive on women, gender, and sexuality in classical Greece and Rome, but in fact its selection is limited. McClure’s omissions tend toward public discourses and social history as such. It would be the responsibility of the teacher to correct this and in general to signal very clearly that the McClure collection focuses on literature; it is by no means a total survey of work on women, gender and sexuality in the classical world. The reviewer advises students to consult Diotima, the online bibliography, and for homosexuality the annotated bibliography (covering all of Western homosexuality from antiquity to the present) maintained at Fordham University, which also provides guidance in theory.
Endnotes: Bibliographic Essay
The following bibliographic items are themselves not meant to be comprehensive and terminate in 1999, but they would make an useful addition.
Certain works may have been released too late to appear in McClure: Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, edd. When Men were Men: Masculinity, Power, and Identity in Classical Antiquity (1998); Sandra R. Joshel and Sheila Murnaghan, edd. Women and Slaves in Greco-Roman Culture (1998); D. E. E. Kleiner and S. B. Matheson, edd. I, Claudia II (1999); Thomas A. J. McGinn, Prostitution, Sexuality and the Law in Ancient Rome (1998); Vincent J. Rosivach, When A Young Man Falls in Love: The Sexual Exploitation of Women in New Comedy (1998); Craig A. Williams, Roman Homosexuality: Ideologies of Masculinity in Classical Antiquity (1999); Maria Wyke, ed. Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean. Also omitted is Lin Foxhall and John Salmon, edd. Thinking Men: Masculinity and its Self-Representation in the Classical Tradition (1998).
However, other omissions are more inexplicable. For ancient Rome, Richard Bauman, Women and Politics in Ancient Rome (1992); David Cohen, “The Augustan law on adultery” in The Family in Italy from Antiquity to the Present (1991), edd. D. Kertzer and R. Saller; Suzanne Dixon, The Roman Family (1992); Catharine Edwards, The Politics of Immorality in Ancient Rome (1993); John K. Evans, War, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome (1991); Jane F. Gardner, Being a Roman Citizen (1993); Jane F. Gardner, Family and Familia in Roman Law and Life (1998); Maud W. Gleason, “The semiotics of gender: physiognomy and self-fashioning in the second century C.E.” in Before Sexuality (1990), 389-416; Maud W. Gleason, Making Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome (1995); Judith Hallett, “Perusinae glandes and the changing image of Augustus”, AJAH 2 (1977), 151-171; D. E. E. Kleiner and S. B. Matheson, edd. I, Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome: Catalogue of the Exhibition Organized by the Yale University Art Gallery 1996 (1996) Dominic Montserrat, Sex and Society in Graeco-Roman Egypt (1996); Beryl Rawson, ed. The Family in Ancient Rome: New Perspectives (1986); Beryl Rawson, ed. Marriage, Divorce, and Children in Ancient Rome (1991); Beryl Rawson and P. R. C. Weaver, edd. The Roman Family in Italy: Status, Sentiment, Space (1997); Amy Richlin, “Not before homosexuality: the materiality of the cinaedus and the Roman law against love between men”, Journal of the History of Sexuality 3 (1993), 523-73; Francesca Santoro L’hoir, The Rhetoric of Gender Terms: Man, Woman, and the Portrayal of Character in Latin Prose; Brent D. Shaw, “The age of Roman girls at marriage: some reconsiderations,” JRS 77 (1987), 30-46; Rabun Taylor, “Two pathic subcultures in ancient Rome,” Journal of the History of Sexuality 7.3 (1997), 319-71; Susan Treggiari, Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the time of Cicero to the time of Ulpian (1991); B. Verstraete, “Slavery and the social dynamics of male homosexual relations in ancient Rome,” Journal of Homosexuality 5.3 (1980), 227-36.
McClure’s specialization is Greece, to be sure, but even on the Greek side many other authors have written on sexuality, gender, and women. Despite the inclusion of an article on Sappho, Page duBois, Sappho is Burning (1995) is omitted. Also omitted are Sue Blundell, Women in Ancient Greece (1995); Paul Cartledge, The Greeks (1993); Paul Cartledge, “Spartan wives: liberation or licence?”, CQ 31 (1981), 84-105; James Davidson, Courtesans and Fishcakes: The Consuming Passions of Classical Athens (1997); Carol Dougherty, The Poetics of Colonization: From City to Text in Archaic Greece (1993); Page duBois, Centaurs and Amazons (1991); Mark Golden, “Slavery and homosexuality,” Phoenix 38 (1984), 308-24 Edith Hall, Inventing the Barbarian: Greek Self-Definition through Tragedy (1989); G. Holst-Warhaft, Dangerous Voices: women’s Laments in Greek Literature (1992); S. C. Humphreys, The Family, Women and Death (1993); Roger Just, “Freedom, slavery, and the female psyche” in Crux: Essays in Greek History Presented to G.E.M. de Ste. Croix (1985), ed. P. Cartledge, 169-89; Roger Just, Women in Athenian Law and Life (1989); N. Loraux, Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman (tr. 1987); N. Loraux, The Children of Athena: Athenian Ideas about Citizenship and the Division Between the Sexes (1993), tr. C. Levine; Sheila Murnaghan, “How a woman can be more like a man: the dialogue between Ischomachus and his wife in Xenophon’s Oeconomicus”, Helios 15.1 (1988), 9-22; Cynthia Patterson, “Marriage and the married woman in Athenian law”, JHS 100 (1980), 38-59; Cynthia Patterson, “Hai Attikai: the other Athenians,” Helios 13 (1986), 49-67; Cynthia Patterson, The Family in Greek History (1998); Sarah B. Pomeroy, Women in Hellenistic Egypt from Alexander to Cleopatra (1984); Pomeroy, Xenophon Oeconomicus: A Social and Historical Commentary (1994); Ellen D. Reader, ed. Pandora: Women in Classical Greece (1995); David M. Schaps, The Economic Rights of Women in Ancient Greece (1979); Raphael Sealey, Women and Law in Classical Greece (1986); Giulia Sissa, Greek Virginity (tr.1990); Jane M. Snyder, The Woman and the Lyre: Women Writers in Classical Greece and Rome (1989); M. Williamson, Sappho’s Immortal Daughters (1995).
General works omitted: Eva Cantarella, Pandora’s Daughters (1987); Susan Deacy and Karen Peirce, edd. Rape in Antiquity: Sexual Violence in the Greek and Roman Worlds (1997); Simon Goldhill, Foucault’s Virginity: Ancient Erotic Fiction and the History of Sexuality (1995); David Konstan, Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres (1994).