Department of Classical StudiesCongratulations to Victoria Greene ‘19! She has received a Rose Award for her Senior Research Paper in Ancient History, entitled "Recovering Lost Voices: The Experiences of Women during the Peloponnesian War”, supervised by Prof. Jeremy McInerney.
Here is how Victoria summarizes her project: "Thucydides’ Histories provides a detailed and gripping narrative of the Peloponnesian War, full of dramatic battles, mesmerizing oratory, and striking descriptions of human suffering. However, one side of the story that is glaringly absent from Thucydides’ account is that of women. This project aims to piece together the experiences of women during the Peloponnesian War, a subject for which there is little evidence and existing scholarship. In order to deal with this dearth of source material, as well as the problem of male authorship, I put various forms of evidence into dialogue with each other, supplementing Thucydides’ account of the war with Xenophon’s Hellenica, contemporary plays from Euripides and Aristophanes, legal cases, the inscriptional record, and works of art. Based on a close examination of this body of evidence, I argue that the lives of women were deeply entangled with the war and that they suffered its consequences heavily, enduring displacement from their homes, entrapment in besieged cities, capture, enslavement, rape, widowhood, and the loss of their children."