ABSTRACT
Menander’s drama has been much studied for social and legal attitudes toward rape in ancient Athens. 1 These studies have typically aimed to identify more or less official attitudes toward rape and sexual violence—what could be said aloud, what was said aloud, what was performed on stage. 2 I seek here instead, with Menander’s assistance, evidence for unofficial views, specifically those of rape victims. Even more important to my inquiry is the female experience of rape in Athens, a subject less related than we might expect to the public, social, and legal attitudes. Non-Western modern evidence can help us to find in Menander a consciousness of the way Athenian women actually experienced, and felt about, rape. This material suggests that Menander’s treatment of rape is impossibly sentimental in some respects but remarkably realistic in others. Using these comparanda, I will argue that Menander shows partial recognition of the female experience of rape, and that scholarship should include the perspectives of victims, when attempting to comprehend Athenian attitudes toward rape and in considering how even to denominate the phenomenon of sexual assault in Athens. 3
