ABSTRACT
In the introduction to her ground-breaking work on women in the ancient world, Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves, Sarah Pomeroy comments on ancient Greek and Roman civilization, ‘rarely has there been a wider discrepancy between the cultural rewards a society had to offer and women’s participation in that culture’ (1975: 9). As illustration of her terms ‘cultural rewards’ and ‘culture’ she offers the examples of the philosophy of Socrates and the histories of Herodotus and Thucydides, the linguistic products of elite society. The textual traces of these kinds of products are precisely the sources which classicists today scrutinize in our search to understand ancient cultures. Yet almost all the texts written in ancient Greece and Rome which survive today were written by men, and the implications of this have long been appreciated; the texts offer male perspectives on their cultures; they do not allow the reader direct access to women’s voices; they contain no expression of women’s ideas.
