The text below is meant to be read aloud at the start of the discussion section. It compresses the week's lecture into a few minutes and hands the room to the four tasks. The fuller notes that follow are for setting each task up in turn. The lecture's method is the thread to keep hold of throughout: most of our evidence about women was made by men, for men, about women, and the skill the tasks practise is reading that absence.
This week's lecture opened on a woman tearing her hair at a graveside — the mourner who dominates the great Athenian funeral vases of around 750 BCE — and then on the same scene two centuries later, where a single woman stands silent and composed, her wild gestures gone. Between the two images lies a law: Solon's restriction of female lamentation, the state reaching into a female-controlled space to discipline it. That gesture set the lecture's thesis: the feminine is the generative power the Greek world could not do without — the harvest, the afterlife, the line of citizens — and could not allow to speak, and it was contained at every level, from the cosmos to the household.
We asked first who counted as a citizen, in Athens, Sparta, and Corinth: the free adult male, the body widening downward to the poor but never to the unfree, the foreigner, the child, or the woman. The citizen wife was the hinge — indispensable, because after 451 only she could bear citizens, and invisible, because so much depended on the legitimacy of her children that she was placed under a permanent male guardian. With the women in view, we leapt back to the goddesses: Gaia, the primordial generative force, subordinated to Zeus by the end of Hesiod's poem; Zeus swallowing the goddess Metis and then giving birth to Athena from his own head, the generative function taken up into the male. That motherless daughter returns at the climax of the Oresteia, where Athena votes to acquit a son of killing his mother on the ground that she had no mother herself — the myth made into the law of patriarchy.
From there the lecture moved through the institutions: the oikos and Xenophon's ideal wife, set against the working women of the marketplace, to expose the gap between what men prescribed and what women did; the world outside the oikos, where the elegant word "courtesan" hides a slave economy and where Neaira is narrated in obsessive detail yet never allowed to speak; Sappho, the one female voice that survived, and only because she was aristocratic, non-Athenian, and ceremonially licensed; the tragic stage, where Athenian men rehearsed their fear of female power and then contained it; and Sparta and the Hellenistic queens, the exceptions that prove the Athenian claim — that women by nature cannot exercise power — was always ideology, never biology. The four tasks take you into the sources where each of these arguments is made.
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Setting up the four tasks
The four tasks each pair a visual or material source with a text, and each moves through the same four-stage arc — Observe, Contextualise, Compare, Argue — from close looking to a defensible claim. Together they trace the arc of the lecture: from the disciplining of the mourner (A), through the prescriptive ideal of the wife and the practice it conceals (B), to the legal and erotic erasure of the woman outside the oikos (C), and finally to the single surviving female voice and the problem of why it survived (D). The thread across all four is the one the lecture turned on: the gap between what the sources say and what they leave out is itself the evidence.
Task AThe disappearing mourner — the Geometric amphora and the Shapiro method
This is the art-historical task, worked in pairs, pairing the Attic Geometric prothesis amphora (c. 750 BCE; Met 14.130.14) with H. A. Shapiro's study of mourning iconography. Groups observe the vase first without interpretation — counting figures, distinguishing male from female by the conventional triangular torsos, identifying the lamentation gesture of both hands raised to the head — then read Shapiro for the "art-historical baseline" he establishes: that around 760–700 BCE female lamentation was publicly authorised, prominent, and central. The comparison is with a white-ground lekythos of c. 440 BCE, where the same women stand composed and silent, and the analytical pivot is whether that change is artistic fashion or the visible trace of Solon's funerary legislation of 594. The stage-four claims sharpen this: that the disappearance is primarily a matter of changing style, not law (to be attacked using Shapiro and the images); that the Geometric vase shows us what mourning "really looked like" (a claim whose methodological assumptions Shapiro helps expose); and that reading the visual record as social history requires assuming art and society change in step — an assumption to test and try to falsify. Shapiro's move, using the datable visual record to track undocumented social change, is the methodological model for the whole unit.
Task BPrescription and practice — Xenophon's ideal wife and the loom
This is the ideology-versus-practice task, worked in groups of three or four, pairing Xenophon's Oeconomicus 7–10 — Ischomachus describing how he trained his fourteen-year-old bride to manage the household, stay indoors, and present herself becomingly, comparing her to the queen bee — with red-figure vases of women at the loom. Groups list everything Ischomachus says a wife should do and be, then ask what the visual record confirms, what it omits, and what it shows that he never mentions. The contextual question is why Xenophon casts his ideal as the speech of a fictional gentleman rather than his own view, and what the dialogue form licenses. The comparison turns on the white-ground lekythoi of Task A, which show women moving freely to grave sites — real evidence that contradicts the prescription of total seclusion. The stage-four claims run from "the Oeconomicus is valuable evidence about how women really lived" (what would it take to defend that?) to "it tells us about male ideology, not female reality, and is therefore not evidence about women at all" (too strong — evidence of what, exactly?), to the proposition that the gap between prescription and practice is itself the most important evidence we have. The bridge is to Pericles' line that a woman's glory is to go unspoken of, and Ischomachus's claim that his wife was a blank slate he trained: both define female virtue as what women do not do and do not say.
Task CAgainst Neaira and the symposium vase — visibility and voice
This is the erasure task, worked in groups, pairing [Demosthenes] Against Neaira — the most detailed account of any woman's life in classical Athens, and one from which her own voice is entirely absent — with the Brygos Painter's symposium kylix (c. 490 BCE; Munich 2645), showing a woman playing the pipes among reclining men. Groups read the opening of the speech to establish who is speaking (Apollodoros), who is accused, and what the charge really is — not prostitution but citizen impersonation — then look at the cup to ask what can be known from the image alone and what cannot. The comparison turns on the distinction between visibility and voice: the hetaira on the cup is visible but nameless and silent; Neaira is named and narrated in obsessive detail and equally silent, because the narration is entirely a man's. The central claim to defend or attack is that "the trial of Neaira is not really about Neaira" — and if not, what it is about, what it reveals about the Athenian construction of the respectable woman by prosecuting everything she was not, and what it tells us about Neaira's own life. The methodological question — how does one read for a voice that is absent? — connects directly to the slavery unit, where Neaira reappears as an economic asset.
Task DSappho Fragment 31 and the transmission problem
This is the survival-and-silence task, worked in groups, pairing Sappho's Fragment 31 — the catalogue of desire's physical symptoms, preserved only because Longinus quoted it six centuries later as a stylistic specimen — with Anne Carson's translation, whose bracketed lacunae print the losses on the page. Groups read the poem twice, map the relationship between its three figures and the order of the symptoms, and register what Carson's brackets do to the experience of reading. The contextual question is why the poem survives at all — that its survival depended entirely on a male critic's decision to use it as a grammatical example — and how the 2004 and 2014 papyrus finds were recovered. The comparison sets Sappho's first-person voice against the silence of Xenophon's wife and Apollodoros's Neaira, and asks what conditions Sappho had that they did not: aristocratic birth, a home outside Athens, and a ceremonial tradition that licensed women's performance. The stage-four claims test whether Fragment 31 is evidence of Sappho's personal emotional life (and whether the lyric "I" is the author at all); whether the loss of her nine books proves deliberate suppression or reflects the ordinary attrition of manuscripts; and whether Carson's bracketed gaps are a better historical education than a smoothed reconstruction. The bridge notes that Sappho — poet — fits none of Pomeroy's four categories, and asks whether that absence is itself a piece of evidence.