Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity

This volume offers new insights into ancient figurations of temporality by focusing on the relationship between gender and time across a range of genres.Each chapter in this collection places gender at the center of its exploration of time, and the volume includes time in treatises, genealogical lists, calendars, prophetic literature, ritual practice and historical and poetic narratives from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and why time is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male. Relying on theorists who offer ways to explore the connections between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots, pronouns, images or metaphors, the contributors tease out how time and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and Roman thought. Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity provides a rich and provocative theoretical analysis of time—and its relationship to gender—in ancient texts. It will be of interest to anyone working on time in the ancient world, or students of gender in antiquity.

About the Author

Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol, UK. She has particular interest in ancient Greek religion and magic, and her publications include Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks (2007), Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy (2010), and Envy, Poison, and Death : Women on Trial in Classical Athens (2016). She is interested in using anthropological and cognitive approaches to ancient evidence, and is the co-founder and co-editor in chief of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography .

Lisa Maurizio is Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College, Maine. She is interested in interplay between gender, oral poetry, and Greek religion, and she has published articles on Delphic divination as well as Classical Mythology in Context (2015). Her adaptations of Greek tragedies Tereus in Fragments and the Memory of Salt have been produced by the Animus Ensemble in Boston. She is currently working on a dgtl edition of Delphic oracles that acknowledges their oral composition and transmission.