BiCo Classics Senior Seminar

I spent most of the summer considering possible thesis topics, but the only thing I knew for certain was that I wanted to do something related to tragedy and possibly history. I read through almost all of the surviving tragedies from the three major tragedians over the course of a few months, and I was particularly drawn to titles I had not studied in my previous CSTS courses. Additionally, the significant role that grief plays in almost every tragedy and the language used to describe this emotion were points of interest I found myself repeatedly coming back to. Both of these interests led me to focus on two plays in particular: The Persians by Aeschylus and Trojan Women by Euripides. These works both focus on a main cast of non-Greeks following a war they lost, meaning that grief is at the center of each story. However, the differences in how grief is depicted between these two plays are somewhat surprising—Andromache and the cast of women in Trojan Women are treated quite similarly to a cast of Greek women in terms of their grief. They tear at their hair, beat their breasts, scratch their faces, and make the typical sounds associated with mourning. On the other hand, Xerxes and the men in the Persians do not grieve like the Greek men seen in popular works like the Iliad. Instead, they also tear at their hair, beat their chests, scratch their faces, and make the typical mourning sounds.

I found myself thinking over the gendered language of grief and Euripides and Aeschylus’ varied depictions of the mourning of non-Greeks often, inspiring me to pursue a thesis centered on this theme. How would Greeks in the audience have reacted to each cast of characters? What are the historical implications of these tragedies? Is it significant that the Persian men are essentially feminized in their grief while the Trojan women stay true to the audience’s views of Greek women? As a double major in history and classics, I also wanted to focus on the historical contexts of these plays. These two authors are a generation apart, with Aeschylus living and fighting in the Persian War and Euripides experiencing the Peloponnesian War at the end of his life. How have these monumental events—as well as the social and political environment of Athens during their lifetimes—influenced these works? I plan to reference other plays by these two authors (and possibly Sophocles), in addition to historical sources like Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon to answer these questions. 

I see myself facing some challenges solidifying my topic and deciding which sources to use, particularly secondary sources. I have already struggled to find works that discuss the Persians and Trojan Women, so I can see that providing some issues. Additionally, I will be balancing my history thesis work and seminar on top of this one, so I will need to be careful with time management. However, I think it is very important to explore the tragedies that are often overlooked by others in classics, particularly due to their heavy historical implications and their role as the few tragedies focused on non-Greek peoples in the classical world. 

I spent the summer working on a research fellowship that will be the basis for my senior thesis. The project was a study of the language used to describe gender in the Orphic Hymns, and specifically of gender fluidity. I was interested in the ways that the gods are described as transcending a seeming human gender binary, and that their ability to transcend and fluctuate on the gender binary allowed them greater power than available in the human realm. I worked with theory about embodiment, or the physical ways in which a being embodies gender, and how performance of gender, both human and divine, is reliant on a body as a vessel. I also looked at how divine multiplicity, or the capacity of the gods to be multiple different selves at once allows them a more expansive experience of gender. I worked with the Hymns, but also other primary sources including Hesiod, the Aristotelian Physiognomonica, and the Bacchae. I applied methodology from Edmonds’ books on magic and Orphism, as well as Butlerian theory about the performativity of gender, and Boyer’s cognitive theories about how religions construct their divine. 

I intend to carry these ideas through into a more in-depth analysis of the literary cues of gender fluidity and their impact. My idea is to expand my study into “Orphic” literature, which is marked for its strange depiction and bending of familiar characters and stories. Of course, this is a category larger than I could ever hope to work through this year. I would like to include some study of Nonnos’ Dionysiaka (also too large for this project), which has direct correlations to the examples I studied in the Hymns. I’d also like to address the Derveni papyrus, the Orphic fragments, and a recently discovered Sinai palimpsest fragment, among other things. I would also like to get more into the modern gender theory methodology. 

These ideas come from my work throughout the last two years with Prof. Edmonds, who directed me towards the Hymns. There is very little scholarship about the Hymns, and none about its depiction of gender, meaning that this is relatively uncharted territory. I believe it offers fascinating insight into the powers allotted to the gods in “Orphic” literature, and how Orphic texts bend these characters beyond norms and binaries. Bringing gender to the study of Orphism (however loose it is) is inspired by a larger movement of gender and queer theory’s application to Classics. Although there is a rich history of feminism and classics, the application of queer theory and study of gender beyond the binary in the ancient world is still relatively new and developing. 

I’m balancing a campus job, two grad seminars, and my work with SPEAC. I anticipate being extremely busy, which will be a bit of a challenge. My topic is also still too large in scope, and I need to narrow down exactly what I’m looking for and in which texts. But I’m excited to start!

I confess that my thesis ideas are still vague and in development. I know that I am particularly interested in Medieval, Christian Latin (possibly moving back into Late Antique, depending on what texts I end up with), and Classical reception in more recent times. I am not sure what direction to go in, because there are several things that I’m interested in that are not all necessarily related, and I think I would need to decide on just one of the topics to pursue.

I am interested in constructions of friendship in letters from Medieval women (the two letters I’ve previously worked with were from abbesses, but it might be interesting to expand focus slightly to compare and contrast women in different social station). How did ideas of friendship change over time? How did these women place themselves into cultures of literary/letter-based friendship that were often male-dominated? How did they understand their social position?

I am also, quite unrelated, interested in St. Patrick’s Confessio, how it can be read as a tool of conversion/Christianization, and how St. Patrick is received by later Irish writers. How did St. Patrick write his own story, and how was the Confessio written as a way to encourage Christian conversion and community? How did Irish writers understand him, his impact, and their own histories?

The third and final thing I’m interested, and the idea that I feel is most relevant to contemporary issues but the hardest to find texts for, is the reception of Classics at Bryn Mawr. I worked over the summer on Who Built Bryn Mawr? and did some work with Classical reception at the early college, and I found it to be really worthwhile work that made my interests feel important to the modern day. However, it is by far the most difficult in that I have no ideas for what texts to use and how to use them. I wonder if this idea could in some way be folded into or retooled to relate to my other ideas.

To that end, I think one of the biggest challenges that I anticipate is making sure that whatever I pick feels relevant to the modern day and to Classics. I love to learn things for their own sake, but I also want to ground what I’m doing in contemporary relevance in some way. Another major challenge I anticipate is making sure that whatever topic I work on feels grounded in Classics, since I anticipate working with later texts. Lastly, I of course need to define and narrow my research questions and arguments!

I am balancing some other obligations, including my job and continuing work with the internship I did over the summer, but I don’t anticipate being extremely busy. I’m very excited to refine my ideas and hear what everyone else is working on!

            Throughout classical literature, we see a variety of characterizations of dogs and wolves that motivate many, often opposing, instances of symbolism, which come together in a rich and convoluted depiction of canines as at once savage and nurturing, fickle and loyal, tireless and lazy, stupid and intelligent. Compare the dogs rending the bodies of fallen men in the Iliad’s proem to the nurturing nature of the “she-wolf” that brought up Romulus and Remus; or the steadfastness of Argos’ loyalty to Odysseus to the depiction of the Cynics. Through war and Hades, dogs are often associated with death and destruction, as Cerberus, whereas the Catullan mononym represents a tendency to regard them as loving, even doting, in a way that belies their prevalent fierceness in epic and myth. At other times, the depictions seem to complement one another; could Helen’s self-ascribed epithet of dog-faced be interpreted alongside the proem to form a cohesive image of savage, untrustworthy beasts? Might even the conflicting representations agree and come together to form a cohesive narrative through some Hegelian process of synthesis? How, if at all, might the mindset surrounding dogs and wolves have evolved in the ancient world, and how might such evolutions have affected long-term cultural considerations of dogs in the Mediterranean as the classical era was left behind?  I hope to answer these questions and explore their consequences through a thorough and contemplative analysis of instances of dogs and dog-imagery present through epic, mythology, theatre, and poetry in the classical world.

            One particular challenge is the concurrent composition of my math thesis, and applications for graduate school in mathematics, but I have centered my schedule to the best of my ability around the majority of my time being spent on my theses, so I do not anticipate any major hindrance from this. I also want to be wary of mixing Greek and Roman texts too hastily and drawing conclusions on tenuous grounds by comparing disparate, while related, cultures. That being said, I do think a degree of cross-cultural examinations would be fruitful, especially if differences in perception are in some cases notable and worthy of further discussion. Lastly, I recognize that this is a broad and perhaps overly ambitious project in scope as presented here, so that perhaps I ought to focus on fewer genres and go deeper than expanding the scope of my investigation. It is difficult for me to gauge which genres might be more fruitful than others in this endeavor at this moment, but I imagine that in the research process I will naturally gravitate towards particular types of works, or even particular individual works.

A couple of years ago I did a class called ‘Gender and Sexuality in Islam’. One of the topics I found most interesting in this class was the idea that in homosexual sexual relationships, it is sometimes only the passive partner who receives public shame and who is emasculated. When I discovered the Carmina Priapea, a set of poems dedicated to or in the voice of Priapus, the phallic god of fertility, I was interested in the idea of penetration being used as a form of punishment, as a way to publicly shame or emasculate an individual. I’ve chosen to focus solely on the homosexual occurrences in the Priapea for two reasons: the first is that, as a gay man in modern society, I often see similar sentiments about the passive partner in homosexual relationships being emasculated and shamed; and the second is that I think that this is not a uniquely Roman idea – I would argue that similar sentiments may be found across cultures. To me, the idea that this concept has been seen in many societies throughout the course of history is intensely interesting, and I’m hoping that by analysing the Roman reason for this I might be better able to understand it.

I believe that this will not be a straightforward task. Having done some preliminary research on the Priapea, I have not found much of use for my purposes, and have in fact found very little in general. I think the principal reason for this is the contents of the poems. They are bawdy, and many would find them appalling. For this reason, I believe that they have been mostly ignored in scholarly discussion, despite their importance in the discussion of homosexuality in Ancient Rome. Indeed, it might be because of their importance for the discussion of homosexuality that there is a lack of detailed discussion on them. This will mean I will mostly be referring to sources paying no direct attention to the priapea, and so will be forming my own links and parallels in this vast subject area.

Overall, I am very excited to pursue this topic, and to delve deeper into a subject I find so interesting. As I mentioned, I don’t believe this idea is solely Roman, and by extension the relevance of it is not just important to Classicists. The ramifications of passivity in homosexual relationships being seen as emasculating and shameful opens up all kinds of discussions about gender and homosexuality as a whole, and it will be interesting to see what further discussions are prompted through my research.