Contemporary studies demonstrate the enormous impact rape myths (that is, false cultural narratives about rape) can have both on a rape victim's own ability to understand their experience(s) of sexual violence1 and other parties’ (including perpetrators’) interpretations of sexual encounters. For instance, a prominent 2004 study found that women who accepted the rape myth ‘if women don't fight back, it's not rape’ were less likely to conceptualise their own experience of sexual violation as rape if they themselves did not fight back.3 Similarly, a 2020 study determined that respondents who identified as male were less likely to reject rape myths and as a result were less likely to conceptualise their own unwanted sexual experiences as rape. This suggests that the myth that ‘only women can be sexually assaulted’ can influence the ability of victims who aren't women to understand their unwanted sexual experiences as rape.

In response to this phenomenon where victims do not apply the term rape to their own experiences, Katherine Jenkins argues that rape myths (and sexual abuse myths) constitute hermeneutical injustices. According to Miranda Fricker's influential definition, hermeneutical injustice is:

Jenkins argues that ‘myths mean that victims hold a problematic operative concept, or working understanding, which prevents them from identifying their experience as one of rape or domestic abuse. Since victims in this situation lack the conceptual resources needed to render their experience sufficiently intelligible, they are suffering a form of hermeneutical injustice’.the ‘operative concept’ as ‘widely shared informal and implicit working understandings that people have’ about rape.

As suggested by the title Believing Ancient Women, this volume takes recent global movements to address inequities in credibility as its impetus. For instance, studies have found that in US law courts women expert witnesses who are cross-examined are perceived as ‘less confident, trustworthy, likeable, believable, and credible’ than their male counterparts. In healthcare settings, women typically report more pain than men but receive less treatment. Deficits in perceived credibility also routinely endanger maternal and foetal health; the US CDC's ‘HEAR HER’ campaign, part of the organisation's response to high maternal mortality rates, urges ‘partners, friends, family, co-workers, and providers – anyone who supports pregnant and postpartum women – to really listen when she tells you something does not feel right’. This credibility deficit is especially visible in cases of sexual violence. Police officers in both the US and UK routinely overestimate the frequency of false rape allegations. Similar attitudes pervade media coverage and societal opinion. As demonstrated by the #MeToo and #BelieveWomen movements, it can take scores of women coming forward with similar accounts for their claims to be taken seriously.

Feminist epistemologists have pointed to the credibility deficit as a particularly clear instance of how epistemic concepts – which are often treated by academics as highly steadfast notions, beyond the pale of social and political interference – are in fact shaped by systems of domination and subordination. Credibility is, however, only one among many epistemic concepts that are sensitive to power relations. As such, the case studies included in this volume address a variety of epistemic concepts from Greco-Roman antiquity and its reception. All use feminist epistemological theories to demonstrate how a range of epistemic notions are impacted by social and political identities and their intersections. To succinctly illustrate the spirit of this project, we begin with two cases not analysed elsewhere in the volume. These cases, though admittedly too brief to do justice to both the identities and the epistemic views they express, nevertheless serve to motivate this project. Each demonstrates how exploring the intricate ways that systems of power infiltrate the epistemic realm promises to uncover rich and fertile ground for future scholarship about the classical world and its reception.

Traditionally, the theory and method chapter has been what separates anthropological from classical archaeology. While the former centres it, sometimes at the cost of the archaeological material, the latter has sometimes eschewed it altogether, leaving unclear the broader relevance of the archaeologi¬cal material. For me, both extremes were manifested in graduate school: one as a fellow archaeology student told me that if his scholarship didn't lead to universal models, it would be useless; the other through reading about some of the finer points of Attic pottery chronology and leaving with little appreciation of their significance.

At the end of the day, I find theory a necessary and fun tool, and I hope this chapter illustrates that. A theoretical framework is necessary because it informs scholarship in at least two distinct ways: as a zeitgeist, influencing how we per¬ceive the world around us, and as a tool, inspiring our organisation of these observations. In other words, theory affects both the questions we ask and how we answer them. This chapter accordingly focuses on illuminating what kinds of questions this book asks and why, followed by a discussion of how they are answered. In the first section, I aim to make transparent many of the underlying questions, premises and lenses guiding the analysis, as identity and feminist theories drive much of the work but often in ways that are implied rather than explicit. The second part discusses currents within mortuary archaeology that inform many of the approaches used. The final section outlines the implica¬tions of these approaches for the study of Macedonian burials and the specific methods used. While this chapter might be review for those familiar with the approaches discussed, I hope that it will be interesting to those new to it – and yes, even a bit fun.

The Romans generally did not conceptualise what in the modern day we term ‘social history’ – that is, a history which prioritises the evolution of societal relations and identities rather than the story of public events. Thus, when historians such as Livy or Tacitus incorporate women or other socially marginalised people into their writings, they do so to the degree their activities are connected to those of the men around them. Sometimes those women's activities are understood as furthering the movement of public history, such as when at the end of AUC 1, Lucretia's rape spurs the Roman state to shift from monarchic governance to a republic; sometimes they appear to resist or sidestep male political processes, as when the co-conspirator Plancina in Annals 3 is saved from the fate of her husband by the intercession of the empress Livia. To a certain degree, the stories we can tell about ancient women will always be framed by the male-authored sources on which we depend and will therefore always appear in this ‘relational’ frame. Here, however, I would like to approach the historical role of women from a different standpoint, one which prioritises not the ways that women fit into traditional historical narratives but rather moments when they disrupt them.

While frequently depicting the ancient Mediterranean world as a sexually debauched society of wealthy elites dominating households full of submissive enslaved people, modern mass media often refuses to address the question of whether enslaved people can ever meaningfully consent to sex with their enslavers. Even more problematically, sex with enslaved women is often used in these films and television series as a means of softening or romanticising the treatment of slavery itself. Love and sex provides an easy means for such characters to escape the evils of forced labour and abuse, without consideration of the assault on their bodily integrity and their inability to consent. The multiple intersecting identities of such characters as enslaved people, as women and, frequently, as dark-skinned women are often inscribed on the screen to reinforce a visual representation of them as subordinate, inferior and willing. Yet while they initially appear to serve as epistemic objects of a presumed male gaze, such women often, as theorised by Cahill and Pohlhaus Jr, instead follow the model of the derivatised. They may appear initially to exist only within the contexts that service and pleasure the male protagonist characters, yet they are capable of defying those limits, even if it then causes them to be perceived as ‘dangerously rebellious’.

Both eroticised, sentimentalised versions of forcible intercourse as well as violent, highly negative depictions of rape and sexual abuse form key parts of the reception of sexual violence and the ancient world. However, in this chapter I mostly focus on the depiction of allegedly romantic master–slave relationships and how such narratives complicate issues of the representation of consent, desire and objectification, both in antiquity and in modern understandings.

In Petronius's Satyrica, Eumolpus tells Encolpius the story of the Pergamene Boy, which recounts his former sexual relationship with a pupil. This chapter argues that the narrator Eumolpus trivialises and suppresses his victimisation of the boy by strategically ignoring Roman legal and social custom when presenting this sexual relationship through the literary and cultural lens of Athenian pederasty, specifically by parodying Plato's Symposium. The framing of the tale through the lens of Athenian rather than Roman social customs is so successful, in fact, that scholarly assessments largely fail to acknowledge that Eumolpus's actions amount to stuprum, a legal charge governing unsanctioned sexual relations with Roman boys, women, widows and girls. I argue that Eumolpus commits a type of epistemic injustice – contributory injustice – by utilising prejudiced hermeneutical resources that harm the epistemic agency of the boy and his parents. By applying the concept of contributory injustice to a literary narrative from ancient Rome, my aim is to show how narration raises epistemological issues related to authority, reliability and privilege that are particularly relevant for the legal and cultural recognition of sexual violence. After identifying the contributory injustice done to the family, I apply the modern concept of child grooming to the story to improve our understanding of the victims’ experience that is largely silenced in the abuser's narrative.

In arguing that Eumolpus as interpreter and narrator does epistemic harm to the Pergamene boy and his parents, this chapter builds on Fricker's foundational work on epistemic injustice, which she further breaks into testimonial and hermeneutical categories. Subsequent theorists object to Fricker's notion that hermeneutical injustice is structural and nonagential, and Pohlhaus Jr proposes that hermeneutical injustice also exists in the distinct form of wilful hermeneutical ignorance, ‘when dominantly situated knowers refuse to acknowledge epistemic tools developed from the experienced world of those situated marginally’.

Nearly all of Ovid's books of poetry highlight narrators and characters who, to ensure dominance, commit toxic and regressive acts of manhood, including their support of, and participation in, sexualised and intimate partner violence. Men take part in nearly a hundred acts of sexualised abuse in the poet's corpus.1 The violence Ovid portrays is not only representative of his own Roman misogynistic and patriarchal context, but also resembles the pervasive levels of male violence against women we experience in North America and other parts of the Global North today (within which I am limiting my analysis). For this reason, many feminist Ovidian scholars have made connections between his work and our own misogynistic present.2 As of yet, however, no scholarly work has explored at length the role of the ‘nice guy’ phenomenon in Ovid and its connections to male violence and the poet's larger project.

NICE GUYS, VIOLENCE AND MANHOOD ACTS

The term ‘nice guy’, first used in this sense by online feminists such as ‘Heartless Bitch International’ (2002), can refer to men who style themselves as chivalrous, generous and even compassionate towards the women they pursue sexually. Some adopt the pretence of niceness in the explicit hope of gaining sexual success, while others sincerely believe themselves to be ‘nice’. In both cases, they view their own niceness as part of a larger heterosexual transaction, in which their purportedly ‘less threatening masculinity’ – to use the words of Michele White (2019) – merits sexual rewards from grateful women.3 Currently, there are few academic pieces on the phenomenon, but recent scholarship has been catching up.4 This is true even in our field, as Donna Zuckerberg (2018) has analysed the role of ‘beta males’ and ‘incels’, often equivalent to and conflated with ‘nice guys’, in the ‘manosphere’, a constellation of misogynist men online.5 My analysis of the phenomenon is influenced by the popular definition enshrined, fostered and criticised on the internet and in the media and by the scholarship of White (2019) on ‘nice guys’ and that of Manne (2018), Schrock (2009), Schwalbe (2009; 2014) and Kimmel (2013), who all investigate the connections among men, misogyny, entitlement and restorative violence when one's status as a man is threatened.

As I was preparing a paper for another publication, I came across the following description of a Black woman in the apocryphal Acts of Peter 22. In it, Marcellus relays to Peter a dream Marcellus has just had:

A hip-hop duo from Atlanta might seem an odd inspiration for this chap¬ter, but the few short lines have surprising resonance with the study of Macedonian mortuary behaviour. The previous chapter noted the challenges much of this book grapples with: How can we hear voices beyond the loud clamour of wealth? Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but what can we read into the silence? Like Rae Sremmurd, Macedonians believed that wealth mattered, but unlike the trap music group, they also very much believed they could take their wealth to the grave with them. (As we’ll see below, they also sometimes chose to have great wealth blow away in ashes as part of cremations.) Macedonians didn't have a monopoly on conspicuous consumption nor were all of their graves lavish, but they were clearly different from southern Greeks in their willingness to deposit expensive objects in graves and to build monumental tombs during a time of mortuary modesty in places such as Athens.1 In light of this and other differ¬ences, it's important to establish what Macedonian mortuary behaviour looked like in general before delving into discussions of specific groups of people.Much anthropological and archaeological discussion has been devoted to the challenges and limitations of reconstructing mortuary behaviour based on archaeological remains; Chapter 1 addressed some of these issues. In the case of Macedonia, literary sources are of limited utility as well: descriptions exist of grandiose pyres, funerary games and the transportation of the body of Alexander the Great, but there is little to go on for earlier periods or for less exceptional funerals.

At Hellenica 5.4.20–33 Xenophon writes that, in order to turn Athens against Sparta, the Thebans manipulated the Spartan harmost Sphodrias into invading Attica during peacetime. Sphodrias’ subsequent failed attempt to capture the Piraeus left the Athenians calling for his blood and Spartan envoys in Athens promising that Sparta would provide it. However, Xenophon goes on to narrate how events transpired which resulted in Sparta exonerating Sphodrias at trial – despite his obvious guilt. Xenophon recounts that Sphodrias appealed to his son Cleonymus to advocate on his behalf to the boy's erastes,1 Archidamus. Archidamus, in turn, agreed to beseech his father, King Agesilaus, to endorse Sphodrias’ acquittal. While Xenophon asserts that Agesilaus was initially unreceptive to his son's efforts, Archidamus’ persistent efforts initiated a thought process by which Agesilaus eventually came to support Sphodrias’ acquittal (5.4. 24–33). Once so disposed, Agesilaus employed discourse centred on Sphodrias’ personal excellence and achievement as justification of his endorsement and, due largely to Agesilaus’ support, Sphodrias was pardoned. Cleonymus expressed his gratitude to Archidamus by vowing to never give him cause for shame in their friendship – a vow which Xenophon proclaims that Cleonymus kept, dying heroically at Leuctra in defence of the king. In the following analysis, it is not my intention to impose modern definitions of toxic masculinity onto this text. Rather, my aim is to explore it as an episode where an ancient author appears to identify and problematise certain Spartan masculine ideals.

The Sphodrias episode illuminates several ways in which Spartan masculine values, and the practices and institutions which promote them, prove detrimental to both individual Spartan men and Spartan society as a whole. First, Xenophon's treatment of the pederastic relationship shows the educational function of quasi-institutionalised Spartan pederasty, associated with the transmission of masculine values, being superseded by valorisation of male homosocial bonds (also associated with masculine excellence), which are manipulated for the circumvention of justice.