This chapter contributes to the growing scholarly literature on violence against women in classical Athens by considering the case of Zobia, a metic woman who experienced violence at the hands of a man named Aristogeiton according to Demosthenes’ Against Aristogeiton (25.56–8). The idea of intersectional oppression as developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw underpins this research in that it highlights the particular plight of women of metic status in ancient Athens – a group especially exposed to intersectional oppression based on their gender, non-citizenship and social status. My focus is on the way that Zobia uses public complaints regarding Aristogeiton's violent behaviour, and it is inspired by consideration of women's public vocalisation of their experiences of sexual violence and harassment through the #MeToo movement in recent years. This study is informed by scholarship in feminist epistemology, in particular Alison Bailey's exploration of anger and epistemic injustice, and Karyn Freedman's discussion of the epistemic significance of the #MeToo movement. As I go on to discuss, Zobia's decision to speak out about the violence she has suffered places her at considerable risk of retaliation by a powerful man, and there is no evidence that speaking openly about offences against them yielded direct results for women at Athens. Yet, Zobia's ability to gain justice for herself was otherwise limited, and as Alison Bailey argues, employing a ‘knowing resistant anger’ can be a powerful tool for the marginalised to oppose epistemic injustices. Bailey explains: ‘Silence is a condition of oppression, and part of resisting oppression is finding a voice that effectively pushes back against the weight of imposed silences’. By voicing her complaints openly as she does, Zobia resists the systematic silencing and her gossip enters the public sphere where it has the potential to influence people's perceptions of this man and his suitability for public office.

Etched onto the surface of a limestone base, this epigram, written in the voice of Cynisca, marks her triumph as the first woman to have winning horses at an Olympic chariot-racing event in both 396 and 392 bce. Found just north of the Prytaneum, the fragmentary base was once a pedestal for a monumental installation that would have stood amongst heroes, gods and kings within the sacred Altis at Olympia. Writing of these monumental honours almost five centuries later, the traveller and historian Pausanias offers more clues about what the bronze sculptural installation may have looked like. Pausanias tells us that Cynisca's victory monument stood next to the statue of the triumphant Olympic equestrian athlete Troilus and nearby the Temple of Hera (where other votives to Spartan kings and heroes could be found); archaeologically, Hera's temple was located near the Prytaneum, where the base was recovered. The monument was crafted by the sculptor Apelleas and included a portrait statue of Cynisca, a horse jockey and four horses dragging a chariot (quadriga).3 As Pausanias continues to describe his tour of the Altis, he mentions another sculptural monument of bronze horses that was dedicated by Cynisca as a token of her Olympic victory within the Temple of Zeus; some scholars think that a small base that was also inscribed with Apelleas's name and excavated from the pronaos of Zeus's sanctuary may have been this very dedication.

Among the more startling evidence for ancient gender relations are defixiones such as this, the binding spells with which ancients attacked rivals and enemies. Defixiones appeared in Greece in the fifth century bce, probably inspired by earlier Egyptian and Near Eastern traditions of cursing, and were in widespread use into late antiquity. Surviving examples include texts in Greek, Latin, Demotic and Coptic. They are found in ancient spellbooks in the form of recipes into which a magician may insert personalised details and as fully enacted spells written on lead tablets, papyri and ostraka personalised with the names of the spellcaster and target. A large number of the surviving binding spells deal with erotic matters: the acquisition of lovers, the separation of couples and sometimes both at once.

Defixiones which attempt to unite or divide lovers – sometimes nostalgically called love spells, but more accurately erotic curses – were a popular way of overcoming sexual disappointment in classical antiquity and were used by both men and women. Spells cast with the intention of forcing a victim to desire the spellcaster show many gender configurations of caster and target: the largest number of enacted curses involve men attempting to attract women, a smaller but still sizeable proportion are written by women to attract men, and a handful of homoerotic curses are preserved in which women try to attract women or men try to attract men.

My paper takes its title from the 1992 film A League of their Own, which is about women in professional sports during the mid-twentieth century.After Tom Hanks’ coach snarls at one of the players, she begins to cry; he is shocked, as ‘there's no crying in baseball!’. The quote was included on the American Film Institute's top 100 quotes of all time. A similar attitude towards tears is also visible in ancient Roman material: they are the province of women, rather than men. Amy Richlin has argued that male displays of grief were avoided as ‘womanish’, although men clearly felt emotion; Darja Šterbenc Erker has demonstrated that even at funerals, when grief was expected, the expected female (emotional, crying) role was differentiated from the expected male (rational, speaking/processing) role. These norms, which are grounded in gender, already demonstrate hegemonic masculinity: male rationality supports men's superiority as heads of household and heads of state. But behaviours that exceed the bounds of hegemonic masculinity may be toxic. In Rome, the hegemonic male was not expected to mourn excessively; was male suppression of grief then a toxic behaviour?

In this chapter, I examine the role played by visible grief in the early Roman exempla of Romulus and Brutus and its relation to hegemonic and toxic masculinity in the Roman world. The governing assumption of my analysis is that the actions I discuss are ‘toxic’ from the perspective of modern Western society; the murder of family members in particular is not normal. The question I address is whether the protagonists’ responses to these actions were toxic from the perspective of the Romans: in particular, whether the protagonists’ suppression of tears functioned as an authorial judgement that this behaviour is toxic.

Modern studies of masculinity suggest that the primary distinction between standard male behaviours and ‘toxic’ male behaviour(s) lies in the social consequences of any given act.

Plautus's Truculentus and Terence's Hecyra are not often analysed together. The former is an uproarious celebration of a sex labourer's comic malitia (badness) at the expense of numerous citizen men, while Hecyra is an unfunny showcase of domestic abuse. A survey of the scholarship indicates that Truculentus's triumphant mercenary women are disturbing to modern readers and Hecyra (as well as most of Terence's oeuvre) is a real downer. But while their tones are wildly different, the plays’ contents are strikingly similar: Hecyra is essentially a full-length expansion of the citizen rape subplot in Truculentus. In Plautus's play, in the background of the comic shenanigans, a young man has raped and impregnated a citizen woman and broken off his engagement to her to spend more time with his amica (girlfriend), the meretrix (sex labourer) Phronesium. Through the actions of this meretrix and her familia (household), the rape and pregnancy are revealed and the young man weds the citizen girl. In Hecyra a young man rapes and impregnates a citizen girl, is forced to marry, resents the marriage and lost time with his amica, but is eventually reconciled with his wife through the meretrix's revelation that it was his own wife he once raped. In both plays, citizen women are treated abusively and non-citizen meretrices and their households are threatened by citizen men.

Because Truculentus and Hecyra share a plot, they are an ideal locus for examining their authors’ social commentaries on citizen, masculine power and women's limited ability to voice their truths credibly. Examining the plays side by side reveals their similarities and throws the authors’ explorations of gendered epistemology into relief. Both plays ultimately demonstrate that women's credibility is measured only by the service it does for patriarchal authority.

In this chapter, I will discuss how masculinity was represented in two examples of Attic theatre from the second half of the fifth century: Sophocles’ Antigone and Aristophanes’ Lysistrata.* I highlight how the ideal of masculinity shaped not only the self-representation of Athenian (and Greek) men, but was also recognised as a reason for behaviours which were excessive and thus frowned on – in other words, features of masculinity which today we would define as ‘toxic’

First, a brief summary of how Athenians conceptualised manliness and ideal masculinity. As Bassi points out, the spread of elite cultural values and virtues to a greater diversity of people had a profound influence on Greek culture(s). This is also true for masculinity. The traditional aristocratic ethos and values, as presented in Homer, could still be recognised in many aspects of the Classical Athenian ideal masculinity: independence, courage, honour. However, the harshness of some behaviours associated with these values was in many cases toned down to a more urbane fashion. There was less emphasis on physical prowess; sophrosyne – temperance – and self-mastery became more prominent, and citizens were expected to comply with the rules and laws of the city.

Men were expected to adhere to the social expectations of their role and characteristics. The notion of aidōs, the sense of shame which pushed men to act according to the paradigm so as not to lose their honour, well encapsulates the social pressures placed on Athenian men. Being perceived as an anēr agathos – a ‘good’ man, but also a ‘real’ man – was high praise, used to exalt the war dead but also to motivate men, especially before a fight.

Not only was one's personal honour at stake, but also one's identity as a man. Xenophon makes a distinction in the philosophical dialogue Hiero between andres and anthropoi. While the former adhere to the ideal of masculinity, pursuing a public role and personal honour, the anthropos lives a simpler, unambitious and almost animal-like life.

Thucydides’ history is first and foremost a story of men. While masculinity's role in political culture has been recognised by sociologists and political scientists, its role in shaping both men's behaviour and the structure of Thucydides’ history remains relatively unexplored. As Gregory Crane has observed, Thucydides’ focus on military and political events ensured their prominence in history as a discipline. If Thucydides’ history, the story of the war fought between Athens, Sparta and their respective allies, is, in fact, a story of men, it stands to reason that the text has much to offer our understanding of masculinity. As sociologists have warned, conflating women and gender has led to analyses that overlook how politics is shaped by masculinity and men's interests, and, perhaps most importantly, by competition between a plurality of masculinities. Recently focus has shifted from hegemonic – the ‘masculinity that occupies the hegemonic position in a given pattern of gender relations, a position always contestable’ – to toxic masculinity – those qualities of hegemonic masculinity that are ‘socially destructive, such as misogyny, homophobia, greed, and violent domination’. While the qualities associated with hegemonic masculinity represent the ideal in accordance with which ‘men organize their lives, either by aspiring to the hegemonic ideal or deviating from it’, hegemonic masculinity need not be toxic. As Connell and Messerschmidt note, a future in which a ‘more humane, less oppressive’ version of manhood becomes the hegemonic norm is possible.

Historically and culturally contingent, masculinity only seems transhistorical because patriarchy engenders inequality, thereby producing identities similar enough across times and cultures to appear natural. Take, for example, ‘heteronormativity’, a defining feature of both hegemonic and toxic masculinity. A fifth-century Greek man who penetrated the body of a male slave would not be heteronormative by modern standards, yet penetration of bodies – be they women or male slaves – did not necessarily mitigate his hegemonic status.

The difficult question of what women writing Latin looks like is richly answered in early modern Italian states. Where in the classical period we have a profound scarcity of texts, and turn to Perpetua's passio and Egeria's Peregrinatio in late antiquity to find full books (likely) written by a woman, Martha Marchina's (1600–1646) posthumous book of poetry and correspondence, Musa Posthuma (1662), finds surer footing. What is apparent from her contemporaries, from her editor and in her own published correspondence is that Martha Marchina was internationally lauded in her time as an exemplary Latin poet, for her piety and for her status as a working-class educated Roman woman.

The sixteenth century saw a flourishing of women writing in Italian and Latin, displaying deep humanist learning of classical antiquity. In the past, scholars argued that the seventeenth century, or the period of the Baroque, was much more hostile to women writers and overtly misogynist in the views of Counter-Reformation Catholicism. Virginia Cox has challenged that view, showing that the flourishing of women's writing in Italian continued and even expanded in the Counter-Reformation, while Jane Stevenson's foundational work has demonstrated how many women have written Latin poetry since antiquity. This essay points readers to the poetry of the nearly unknown Martha Marchina and celebrates its elegance and Latinity. I explore her woman-centred Catholic writing, which prioritises embodied experience, critically engages emerging seventeenth-century scientific understandings of the world through the lens of faith, and reinvents patriarchal classical epic and lyric models by advancing woman-centred, caregivers’ perspectives focused on Mary or women saints.

Heraclitus's famous quote, or rather one variation of it, is a useful reminder as this book nears its conclusion. Whether Styx or Lethe, the waters navigated by the dead were in constant motion, yet somehow maintained their essence. Similarly, the chronological and geographic scope of this work is vast enough to accommodate many changes and differences despite some persistent elements. While I have touched on diachronic and regional variation in many places, I haven't done so systematically, with particularly regional variation receiving short shrift. Frequently, I’ve grouped together burials from different areas and peri¬ods to gain a representative picture, particularly to emphasise groups – such as children – who are reported on rarely enough that studying them by site and by period is difficult. This chapter splits the data along chronological and regional lines in order to complement this picture. Of course, the two axes intersect, and these intersections are in places made explicit, even if for heuristic reasons most of the discussion focuses on one variable at a time. The focus is on regional variation, as I’ve already touched on diachronic change in many of the chapters.

First, however, the chronological and regional divisions need to be justified. The chronological divide into the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic period might seem uncontroversial, but shifts in material culture rarely coincide with histor¬ical events such as the death of Alexander the Great. In the case of Macedonia, the Archaic-Classical boundary is both clearer and more vexing because of a scarcity of burials from the early Classical period (480–450 BCE). Future exca¬vations and publications will hopefully shed light on this transitional period, but it seems relatively clear that the Classical burials seen from 450 onward are quite different from the Archaic ones from Arkhontiko and Sindos.

A look at the latter part of the Peloponnesian War, especially the commemoration of figures like Gylippus and Lysander.

A look at Spartan commemoration in the Peloponnesian War, focusing on Brasidas and the rhetoric of liberation. Brasidas was a new kind of Spartan that put freedom in the forefront, which led to Brasidas receiving more lavish commemoration but also drew Sparta into more wars.

A look at the commemoration of the Persian Wars, especially the Battle of Thermopylae, through commemorative epigrams. A comparison of Spartan commemoration with that of other Greeks, concluding that initially the Spartans did not frame Thermopylae or the Persian Wars as a struggle for Greece or freedom, but as an arena for demonstrating excellence and winning glory.