“Someone Get a Whip!” Enslaved Women and Violence in Athenian Oratory, Comedy, and Curses

Abstract

This dissertation examines physical and sexual violence against enslaved women in Athens in the 5th and 4th centuries BCE. Because work on Greco-Roman slavery too often prioritizes the narratives of enslaved men, and work on gender issues nearly exclusively examines the position of citizen women, enslaved women continue to be omitted from scholarly analysis of violence. I focus on the neglected people at the intersection of these identities (Crenshaw 1991), using court cases, comedies, and curse tablets to investigate the substantial abuse that enslaved women suffered at the hands of others. I argue that despite the paucity of our sources, we can identify the specific circumstances that would have been dangerous for enslaved women, and studies which do not highlight this violence risk further misrepresenting and silencing their histories. Chapter One investigates Athenian lawcourt speeches, using Demosthenes’s On the False Embassy and Apollodoros’s Against Neaira as case studies to show that the accounts of abuse in these speeches reflect broader patterns of violence. Chapter Two examines enslaved women on the Athenian comic stage, comparing depictions in Aristophanes’s Acharnians and Wasps, Menander’s Epitrepontes, and Terence’s Eunuchus (based on a Menandrian original). I explore the potential for using comedy as a lens through which to view the daily experiences of enslaved women, and especially their susceptibility to violence. Chapter Three interrogates the portrayal of sex laborers on curse tablets from the 4th century BCE. Examining the curse tablet DT 68, which targets a woman named Theodora, I track evidence for marginalized women using curse tablets in order to improve their social and legal standing. In this way, I argue, curse tablets like DT 68 demonstrate that enslaved and manumitted women could become not just the victims of others’ violence, but agents in their own lives.