Eta Sigma Phi undergraduate colloquium
Department: Classics
Date and Time: May 9, 2016 | 4:00 PM-5:30 PMEvent Location: KH 400D
Event Details
Lecture by Teresa Yates, PhD candidate in Classics
Title: Adultery, Ritual, and Social Control in Ancient Greek Rhetoric
This presentation investigates the role of women in ancient Greek socio-legal constructs, focusing particularly on how adultery could affect female social status. Male authors often represent women, whose social roles were often limited to religious participation, as appropriating or perverting ritual custom in their commission of, or response to, adultery. Two Greek orators in particular, Demosthenes and Lysias, frame their accounts of adultery with ritual space or activity, which focus on how female adultery has a negative effect upon the city-state as a whole.