Prometheus Bound, composed by Aeschylus or a near contemporary, has long been considered an extended meditation on the limits of knowledge and power, but the way gender intersects with, complicates and shapes this discourse has attracted less scholarly attention. Although a group of inquisitive women who want to know all about what Prometheus has experienced is on stage guiding the discussion for most of the play, the Oceanids’ combination of curiosity, kindness and restraint is often read as little more than girlish naïveté with little bearing on the plot of the play. This chapter argues, on the contrary, that the chorus's eager, engaged listening works to carve out a welcoming space in which Prometheus can explore his thinking about humans, tyranny and authoritarianism. The Oceanids are not merely passive onlookers; rather, they play an essential role as witnesses of Prometheus's suffering and actively shape the contest of epistemic authority the tragedy stages.

A central tenet of feminist epistemology claims that marginalised groups are socially situated in ways that can render them well attuned to issues of knowledge construction and authority. Moreover, marginalised individuals might cooperate with others to form bonds of epistemic resistance to defy, thwart or challenge established cultural narratives. There are three concepts that offer useful tools for analysing the dynamics of knowledge construction in the play: (1) feminist standpoint theory, an approach that argues marginalised groups are socially situated in ways that can render them particularly adept at knowledge construction; (2) epistemic resistance, defined as the use of epistemic resources by marginalised knowers to defy, thwart or challenge established authority; and (3) epistemic vice, defined as the acquisition of character traits that systematically impair an individual's ability to learn and teach. By using these frameworks to structure close readings of key passages in the tragedy, I aim to reclaim the Oceanids’ participation in the stories told by Prometheus and Io as an important mode of knowledge production and to highlight the pivotal role they play in facilitating the exchange of ideas between Prometheus, themselves and, later, Io. By foregrounding the Oceanids’ encouragement of Prometheus and their tact in navigating the dualism of the Zeus–Prometheus power dynamic, the Prometheus Bound poet stages a series of encounters that foreground the value of enquiry, communication, sympathy and epistemic humility.

Before launching into the speculative details of Alexander the Great's exces¬sive grieving (ὅσα ὑπϵραƛγήσας) on the death of his friend and Companion Hephaestion, the historian Arrian notes his scepticism of the ‘varied accounts’ recorded by his fellow historians. Arrian's critique captures many recurring motifs regarding Macedonia that are attested in antiquity and still resonate today. Alexander was a controversial figure, often evoking strong emotions; his character still appeals to many, inspiring movies and even playing a central role in modern ethnic and political tensions. His behaviour was seen as excessive and melodramatic by Arrian and others, in stark contrast to the Stoicism that would emerge as a leading philosophical trend shortly after his death. This view of Macedonians as prone to excess is echoed by other ancient sources and, in a refined form, can be seen even now in how modern scholars emphasise lavish Macedonian gold treasures and contrast them with Athenian austerity.

It is widely recognised that Plato holds radical views about women's intellectual abilities. For example, Republic V declares that men and women have the same natures (455d5–6) and that the best women are therefore capable of ruling alongside the best men (456a5). Other works from roughly the same period cast women as inferior and impose ultra-restrictive norms prohibiting their participation in the public sphere. This paper investigates another of Plato's views that has received less attention as a potential protofeminist account: he sometimes draws an analogy between philosophy and childbirth. In the Theaetetus, for instance, Socrates compares the midwives’ techne in birthing physical offspring to his philosophical techne in birthing psychic offspring (151c1–2). The Symposium claims that all humans are pregnant (κυοῦσιν, 206c1) in body or soul and that philosophical activity is a form of psychic reproduction arising from the desire to beget beautiful ideas (209a2–212c2). This paper asks how we ought to interpret these reproduction metaphors. What does Plato find valuable about women's expertise with gestation, childbirth and childrearing? Is their expertise a potential source of epistemic insight? And, if so, to what extent is this a radical or protofeminist view?

Perhaps the strongest reason to doubt that Plato imbues women's reproductive expertise with epistemic importance lies in the fact that reproduction is a deeply bodily act. Plato is well known for his ‘psychophilia’ and ‘somatophobia’.

These tendencies are pronounced in the Theaetetus, where Socrates’ techne is superior to that of the midwives because his concerns ‘delivering men, not women, and in tending to the begetting of their souls, not their bodies’ (150b8–9). The midwife analogy does narrowly endorse the midwives’ techne. However, since their proficiency is with bodily birth, it is supposedly less valuable than Socrates’ philosophical skill.

Staged as a letter written by Briseis to Achilles, Ovid's Heroides 3 features an ambiguous version of the Homeric hero, who is suspended between epic and elegy, the performance of manhood and more stereotypically feminine attitudes. This chapter demonstrates how Briseis’ portrait of Achilles helps us to reassess the contemporary sociological concept of toxic masculinity in relation to Ovid's Heroides according to a more fluid, and less binary, view of gender relationships. While Achilles’ epic attitudes can be seen as an example of hegemonic masculinity, which has been defined as an affirmation of men's dominant position and the subordination of others (see Donaldson 1993 and Connell 2005), the description of his behaviour in Her. 3 places him more within the contemporary category of toxic masculinity (Kupers 2005), in that it harms Achilles himself and the community to which he belongs.

This toxicity is evident in certain passages of the Ovidian epistle, where Achilles’ greed and violence are depicted as being dangerous and harmful, whereas other activities (linked to the elegiac sphere) are presented as preferable (cf., for instance, line 116; see below). Achilles’ hegemonic attitudes thus coexist with his more toxic behaviour. Being problematised within Briseis’ fictional narrative in Her. 3, the notion of toxic masculinity that Achilles appears to embody will be reinterpreted vis-à-vis the recent sociological and theoretical development around the concept of ‘masculinities’, which has become more fluid and unstable. This fluidity and instability represent a challenge to what we would define as heteronormativity and gender binarism.

Binarism and heteronormativity are recent concepts, so these terms cannot be imposed wholesale upon the ancient world but need to be reassessed in the context of the Greco-Roman world.

Although toxic masculinity as a concept is relatively new, the acts and ideology that define toxic masculinity have been present in different forms in various cultures and times; there have always been acts of manhood that foster socially regressive practices. Toxic masculinity refers to specific socially destructive aspects of hegemonic masculinity, a concept developed and defined by Raewyn Connell in the 1980s as the dominant notion of masculinity in a particular historical setting. Hegemonic masculinity, ‘as the configuration of gender practice … which guarantees (or is taken to guarantee) the dominant position of men and the subordination of women’, is a product of interconnected and mutually reinforcing power relations. Other masculinities exist along with hegemonic masculinity, including subordinate, complicit and marginalised, in which there are intersecting factors that prevent some men from equal access to the qualities that define hegemony. Thus when analysing masculinities, both modern and ancient, we must discuss access, power, inequality and the institutions that reproduce toxic gender relations. Along with hegemonic masculinity, Connell developed the concept of emphasised femininity, defined as women's compliance with subordination and orientation to accommodating the interests and desires of men. Hegemonic masculinity is dependent upon emphasised femininity's existence, which it sustains through various controlling methods.

In this chapter, then, utilising the theoretical framework of hegemonic masculinity, I argue that in Petronius’ Satyrica, a Roman novel most likely written in the latter half of the first century ce, subordinate and marginalised individuals and groups of men engage in compensatory manhood acts, which are acts that include displays of exaggerated masculinity in order to emulate the most dominant form of masculinity in society. The effect of these compensatory acts is the continual re-establishment of gender stereotypes as policing mechanisms and the subordination of women. Because of their own subordinate status in society, certain groups of men in the Satyrica are prohibited from positions of institutionalised power and the cultural masculine ideal, which leads them to compensate for their marginalised status.

Plutarch makes Fulvia sound like quite the villain, like an evil queen from a fairy tale. But does this tell us anything about the real Fulvia, a historical figure who lived and died in the first century BCE? The rejection of the quintessential woman's task, weaving, and the lust for power are not specific to Fulvia. Instead, they are clichés in ancient literature, used when an author wants to characterise a woman as deviant and harmful. Getting a sense of the real Fulvia from such a description is like trying to reconstruct a realistic portrait from a cartoon caricature. Furthermore, ancient authors often included women like Fulvia in historical accounts less for their own sake, and more in order to help readers understand the men with whom they were associated. Fulvia's character is only described in order to reveal a flaw in Mark Antony’s, because he voluntarily made himself a subject of several gynocratic regimes.

In the Iliad, Ajax (the ‘greater’ Ajax, that is) is the ‘bulwark of the Achaeans’, the greatest warrior on the Greek side after Achilles, and a prominent figure in both council and war. But the story for which he is most famous is his quarrel with Odysseus over the armour of Achilles and his subsequent madness and suicide. Confident that he, as the greatest fighter in the Greek ranks, deserves to inherit Achilles’ divine armour after the hero's death, Ajax is enraged and humiliated when the Greek army decides to award the armour to Odysseus instead, a reaction that mirrors Achilles’ own rage when he suffered the loss of his war prize (the enslaved woman Briseis) at the beginning of the Iliad. Ajax tries to take revenge for this humiliation – just as Achilles initially wanted to do when confronting Agamemnon – but the goddess Athena, instead of preventing violence and counselling restraint, as she did with Achilles in that earlier episode, facilitates Ajax's violence but turns it against the flocks and herds of the Greeks instead of the Greek leaders by driving Ajax temporarily mad. This further humiliates the hero, whose ability as a fighter is used against him. His reputation, in his own eyes, is irreparably damaged, and there is only one way he can live up to his own ideal of manhood: as he puts it in Sophocles’ play Ajax, ‘A truly noble man must live with honour/or die with honour’ (Ajax 479–80). And so Ajax kills himself. The very things that made Ajax a great hero – his strength, his pride, his anger and his drive to win glory at any cost – are also the cause of his self-destruction.

This paradox – that the qualities that are required for ideal manhood might also have harmful and even tragic effects – is an illustration of the high stakes of masculinity in the ancient world. Ajax stands as an example of the cost of male competition, the drawbacks of an honour-based culture and the dangers of a world in which violence is an acceptable answer to most problems; the Sophocles play, along with many other ancient references to his story, presents him as a cautionary tale to its contemporary audience of elite citizen men.

The English adjective ‘stoic’ suggests an ability to endure pain, injury and/or adversity without the display of physical or emotional suffering. It traces its origin to the disimpassioned Stoic philosophers of ancient Greece and Rome, whose approach to moral philosophy often called for the suppression of bodily and emotional vulnerability. This outlook looms large in the vast and diverse literary corpus of Seneca the Younger, a first-century ce Roman philosopher, dramatist and political adviser and a major source for modern conceptions of Stoic thought. While Seneca's works acknowledge the frailties of the human body and vicissitudes of the human condition, they nevertheless valorise a way of life that subjugates the experience of distress and the expression of emotions, regarding them as manifestations of personal weakness. Evaluated not only in terms of their conceptualisation, but also their uses of rhetoric and their modern analogues, Seneca's works inscribe a viewpoint and a lifestyle that are as machoistic as they are masochistic.

In this chapter, I examine the machismo and the misogyny that are bound up in the rhetoric with which Seneca presents his approach to bodily and emotional vulnerability. Focusing on selections from Seneca's philosophical prose where this sort of rhetoric is especially prevalent, the Moral Letters to Lucilius and On the Firmness of the Wise Man, I show that Seneca repeatedly correlates physical and emotional stability with both moral virtue and masculinity, including hypermasculine figures from ancient history and literature; these works conversely disparage physical and mental illness, injury and supposed moral lapses as feminine or emasculating. Despite Stoicism's reputation for being one of the most feminist of ancient philosophical systems, I contend that Seneca's rhetoric exposes an attitude towards both the emotions and the body that was and is toxic in its sexist tropes, its misogyny and its repression and shaming of the emotions. Like other chapters in this volume, my analysis illustrates how toxic masculinity can manifest itself as a hegemonic system that morally justifies ideologies and practices which are, in fact, harmful to both the individual and society, while stigmatising mindsets and ways of being that are healthier and more constructive.

The closing scene of Plautus’ Miles Gloriosus makes for an exhilarating finale: the pompous General Pyrgopolinices gets his comeuppance. Throughout the play, he has boasted of unearned military exploits, sneered at the plebs and pursued a married woman. The play's climax has the woman's husband and slave tie him down and beat him with a cudgel in mockery of the fustuarium, the traditional military punishment for those who receive anal sex on campaign, thus violating his bodily integrity and ‘unmanning’ him.1 Finally, threatened with castration, the general is released only after promising ‘to hurt no one’ (5.19: me nociturum nemini) evermore. Pyrgopolinices is the onstage embodiment of the most destructive male values ancient Rome had to offer: hypersexual aggression, martial brutalisation and the pursuit of individual distinction at the expense of the common good. It is because of these traits that he is punished.2

When the Miles and other Plautine works were first staged around the turn of the second century bce, Roman political elites, the real life Pyrgopolinices, were becoming masters of the Mediterranean.3 Roman wealth and power grew apace, but theatrical scenes like the one above reveal that the same characteristics that fuelled the flame of Rome's growing Mediterranean imperium could have an ambiguous glow, even in the eyes of the populus who benefited from them. In this chapter, I examine criticism of the conduct of Roman elite men in the political and military spheres during this period, both in prose historical works as well as on the stage. I then investigate how one politician, Publius Cornelius Scipio Aemilianus, navigated this challenging political and social environment as a young man beginning in the 160s. Publicly disavowing the typical manly traits of aggression and competition, Scipio embodied a masculine ethos marked by Greek Stoic philosophy and general moral excellence. His conduct acknowledged the validity of critiques of Roman manly conduct while distinguishing him as singularly worthy of political power.

Feminist scholarship on Sappho in the 1980s and 1990s contributed some of the earliest applications of feminist epistemology to ancient Greek and Roman texts. Although not in direct dialogue with the field of feminist epistemology in philosophy that emerged around the same time, these interventions addressed two central concerns of feminist epistemology. First, they illustrated how an androcentric and misogynistic tradition had warped ancient and modern understandings of Sappho's identity and her poetry, and second, they argued that Sappho's poetry constructed categories of knowledge and strategies of meaningmaking distinct from and even resistant to those found in poetry composed by men. To use the language of feminist epistemology, the first claim delineates the ‘epistemic injustice’ and even ‘epistemic violence’ of a tradition that obscures and silences Sappho's perspective as a woman poet, whereas the second explores how I am grateful to the editors, Megan E. Bowen, Mary H. Gilbert, and Edith G. Nally, as well as the anonymous reviewer, for their helpful feedback on earlier versions of this essay. Sappho's poems pose a kind of ‘epistemic resistance’ to the hegemonic, masculine order of knowledge and power.

This chapter builds on these foundational analyses by exploring the articulation of desire and embodiment in Sappho's poems from the perspective of queer epistemology. Queer theory challenges assumptions about gender and sexuality as fixed and stable markers of identity, both across different cultures and time periods, and within a single person's life. Thinking queerly about epistemic injustice and epistemic resistance in Sappho's poems and the scholarly tradition yields insights into these fragments’ articulation of knowledge, desire and embodiment. By reading the fragments through this lens, this chapter argues that Sappho's poetry can be understood as queer not merely in the sense that many of her poems express desire by women for women. Her poems can also be claimed as queer because they reveal that binary assumptions about gender and sexuality are insufficient for understanding the multifaceted experience of desire that her poetry articulates.

When I sent my editor the first draft of my manuscript for Not All Dead White Men, she responded the next day telling me that it wasn't quite ready to send to readers for peer review. She asked me to first go through, do a search for the word ‘toxic’, and then replace at least half of its instances. Or, alternatively, she suggested that I could dedicate some space to interrogating how I was using the word and what a heavily loaded term like ‘toxic masculinity’ meant to me in the context of the manosphere – or Ovid, for that matter. What were the stakes of viewing classical antiquity and its reception in male-dominated spaces through the lens of such a fraught concept, one that is so often debated, dismissed and misrepresented? The exploration of what toxic masculinity meant in the context of the study and reception of ancient Greece and Rome seemed too complex for a paragraph or a footnote – it deserved its own, in-depth study. It seemed easier to think of a handful of synonyms and go with the find-and-replace option instead.

The essays in this volume take the time to explore the topic with the nuance it deserves. When I was studying the manosphere, I saw how flawed and oversimplified their conceptualisation of ancient masculinity was: Sparta and Rome, in particular, are seen by far-right online communities as a time when men were ‘really’ men, not the beta cuck white knights they are now. The scholars who have contributed to this volume have done us a great service in exploring the edge cases that show how difficult it was for men in antiquity to stay within the rigid confines of normative, hegemonic masculinity. Often, men risked going too far or not far enough in their gender performance and being seen as brutes or weaklings.

Unfortunately, fact-checking and scholarship won't have much of an impact in the communities where toxic masculinity thrives and is valorised. Even the term ‘toxic masculinity’ itself is derided there and misunderstood as an argument that all men, always, are toxic.