All the assessment tasks are compulsory components of this unit and must be submitted on time.

Guidelines for the assessment tasks, assessment criteria (rubrics), and standards for grading each of the tasks are available on the unit iLearn site.

1. SEMINAR PAPER: Topics for discussion and written assignment are set out under each week on the unit's iLearn site. ONE written assignment (seminar paper) is to be submitted for assessment by FRIDAY OCTOBER 5th by 11.59 pm. It will count for 20% of the final mark. (Preparation for each tutorial, however, is advised, since your digestion of the material covered in seminars will be examined, including the topics in the latter part of the unit).

The appropriate length of seminar papers will vary with the topic but should not exceed 1000 words. The paper must be documented and based on a direct examination of the ancient sources. If modern scholarship is used, a bibliography should be attached.

A marker shall be assessing:

(i) the degree to which you answer the question(s) set (within the word limit);

(ii) the degree to which you cite the ancient evidence in support of your arguments; and

(iii) the clarity of your presentation and written expression.

Marking rubrics and guidelines for referencing will also be provided on the iLearn site.

2. ESSAY: One essay, counting for 40% of the final mark, is required. It should not exceed 2000 words. IT IS DUE FRIDAY OCTOBER 19th by 11.59pm. Topics will be handed out early in the session. Students planning to write an essay in the field of Roman or Early Christian studies (which may not have been covered in lectures) should consult the appropriate lecturers or the course convenor.

To reiterate, a marker will be assessing:

(i) the degree to which you answer the question(s) set (within the word limit);

(ii) the degree to which you cite the ancient evidence in support of your arguments and;

(iii) the clarity of your presentation and written expression.

Marking rubrics and guidelines for referencing will also be provided on the iLearn site.

3. EXAMINATION:

There is a two-hour examination worth 40% of the final assessment.

Important: The University Examination period in 2nd session 2018 is from 12th of November to 30th of November.

You are expected to present yourself for examination at the time and place designated in the University Examination Timetable. The timetable will be available in draft form approximately eight weeks before the commencement of the examinations and in final form approximately four weeks before the commencement of the examinations at: <http://students.mq.edu.au/ student_admin/timetables>. The only exception to sitting an examination at the designated time is because of documented illness or unavoidable disruption. In these circumstances you may wish to consider applying for Special Consideration. You are advised that it is Macquarie University policy not to set early examinations for individuals or groups of students. All students are expected to ensure that they are available until the end of the teaching semester, that is, the final day of the official examination period.

GRADING

Criteria and standards required for the assessment tasks will be found on the iLearn site.

The grade a student receives will signify their overall performance in meeting the learning outcomes of the unit. Grades will not be awarded by reference to the achievement of other students nor allocated to fit a predetermined distribution. In determining a grade, due weight will be given to the learning outcomes and level of the unit. Markers in the unit will use the following grades:

HD = High Distinction 85–100

D = Distinction 75–84

Cr = Credit 65–74

P = Pass 50–64

F = Fail 0–49

ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSION AND RETURN

All written work (apart from that undertaken in the examination) must be submitted through the iLearn website. Please upload your assignment to the relevant drop-box. Please save your assignment as a pdf file. All assignment files should be saved with your full name in the label of the file. All assignments should include the following at the start: Student name; Student number; Assessment Task Title or Question.

The Seminar Paper and Essay will be returned via the Turnitin tool on the iLearn site and will contain feedback from the marker. Every effort will be made to return assignments in a timely fashion. Information about how to submit work online can be accessed through the iLearn site.

Over the course of AHIS340 your work will be marked by at least two members of staff.

N.B. (NOTA BENE), i.e. NOTE WELL: You should always keep a copy of completed assignment tasks in case of loss.

ASSIGNMENT LENGTH

Markers will not read assignments which are more than 10% over the specified word length. Please note that footnotes and bibliography do not count in the word length in this particular unit. (You should not expect that this will be the case in other units that you are undertaking.)

EXTENSIONS AND PENALTIES FOR LATE SUBMISSION OF ASSESSMENT TASKS

Extensions for assignments can only be granted for serious and unavoidable disruptions that arise after a study period has commenced and may only be sought with the support of documentary evidence. If you anticipate any difficulty in meeting due dates for assignments then it is important that you contact the unit convenor as early as possible and before the deadline. Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, (a) a penalty for lateness will apply – two (2) marks out of 100 will be deducted per day for assignments submitted after the due date – and (b) no assignment will be accepted more than seven (7) days (incl. weekends) after the original submission deadline. No late submissions will be accepted for timed assessments – e.g. quizzes, online tests.

SPECIAL CONSIDERATION

The granting of extensions is subject to the University's Special Consideration Policy.

A student who has experienced unexpected, unavoidable, and serious circumstances affecting their assessable work may lodge an application for Special Consideration.

Applications will only be accepted in the following circumstances:

• where academic work has been hampered to a substantial degree by illness or other cause; and
• the circumstances are serious and unavoidable and beyond the student’s control; and
• the application for Special Consideration is lodged no later than five (5) working days after the assessment task due date or examination date.

https://staff.mq.edu.au/work/strategy-planning-and-governance/university-policies-and-procedures/policies/special-consideration

IMPORTANT NOTE ON FINAL MARKS

Please note with respect to the marks you receive for work during the session: the marks given are indicative only; final marks will be determined after moderation. See further the note on Results in the Policies and Procedures section below.

DIFFICULTIES

If you have any difficulties submitting assessments, please do not hesitate to contact the unit convenor: lea.beness@mq.edu.au

UNIT REQUIREMENTS AND EXPECTATIONS

Classes

For lecture times and classrooms please consult the MQ Timetable website: <http://www.timetables.mq.edu.au>. This website will display up-to-date information on your classes and classroom locations.

Lectures: There are two lectures a week for most weeks of the session. The importance of regular attendance is that in the lectures we signal the topics that we deem significant. We shall expect you to discuss these topics in the historiographical section of the examination.

Seminars: There is a seminar for most weeks of the session.

Students are expected to attend two lectures and one seminar each week. It is also expected that each student will have undertaken the reading for each week’s seminar and will contribute to the best of her or his ability to the discussion. A unit like this, drawing on such a broad range of material and different perspectives, works best when everyone brings their thoughts to the table. Participation in seminars is considered a vital and hopefully rewarding part of the unit, but you should attend only if you have completed the reading prescribed for the week.

Required and Recommended Texts

The areas covered in this unit are too broad for a single set text. Students will, however, be asked to purchase a Book of Readings which will be used for specific seminars, in lectures and in examination preparation.

In this course emphasis is placed upon the direct examination of the ancient sources and evidence. Students are expected to base all their work on a personal examination of these sources. It will not be sufficient simply to read modern studies on any topic, however sound and highly recommended these are: it will be essential to look first at the ancient sources on which all modern studies are necessarily based.

The work which marked a major change in the academic landscape, Sarah B. Pomeroy's Goddesses, Whores, Wives and Slaves. Women in Classical Antiquity (New York, Schocken Books, 1975) treats many of the periods covered by this unit. An electronic copy of Pomeroy is available via the library website.

Highly recommended for purchase (and a book which most students interested in this subject will want to have in their own libraries) is Mary R. Lefkowitz and Maureen B. Fant's Women's Life in Greece and Rome: a sourcebook in translation (any edition).

The literature is now immense, and growing annually. Students can pick their own ways through the bibliographies which will open up with the reading of each new work. Every time I taught this course, I used to issue a new bibliography, and it was out of date before the session finished. I shall now direct you to certain readings as the sessions unfolds. Overall, I point you to the Diotima site: <http://www.stoa.org/diotima/> which contains a wealth of bibliographical material published before 2011. There you will find far more than you hoped for (!)—and we shall all start sharing exciting new finds.

Other internet sites are discussed by John Younger 'Gender and Sexuality on the Internet' in Maria Wyke (ed.) Gender and the Body in the Ancient Mediterranean (Oxford 1998) 209–213. Please share with us any useful sites found.

Other general coverages will be found in Eva Cantarella's Pandora's Daughters. The Roles and Status of Women in Greek and Roman Antiquity (Baltimore & London 1987) and Bisexuality in the Ancient World (1988, Eng. trans. Cormac Ó Cuilleanáin, New Haven 1992). There is also a general survey of the subject in Gillian Clark's Women in the Ancient World (Greece & Rome. New Surveys in the Classics 21 (Oxford 1989). See also Susan Treggiari, Women of the Ancient World vol. 1 (London 2007); Brook Holmes, Gender. Antiquity and its Legacy (London 2012); Sharon L. James and Sheila Dillon (eds), A Companion to Women in the Ancient World (Chichester, West Sussex 2012); Janet H. Tulloch (ed.), A Cultural History of Women in Antiquity (London  2013); Thomas K. Hubbard (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities (Chichester, West Sussex 2014); Mark Masterson, Nancy Sorkin Rabinowitz and James Robson (eds), Sex in Antiquity: Exploring Gender and Sexuality in the Ancient World. Rewriting Antiquity (London & New York  2015); and S.L. Budin and J. MacIntosh Turfa (eds), Women in Antiquity: Real Women Across the Ancient World (London 2016).

Those of you interested in what survives of women's own writings from antiquity (all too little) might buy a copy of Macquarie's own Ian Plant, Women Writers of Ancient Greece and Rome (London 2004).

Technology Used and Required

The unit has an iLearn page which can be accessed at: <https://ilearn.mq.edu.au/login/MQ/>. PC and internet access are therefore required. Basic computer skills (e.g., internet browsing) and skills in word processing are also a requirement. Please consult teaching staff for any further, more specific requirements.

Satisfactory Completion of Unit

Students will be expected to attempt each of the assessment tasks, attend lectures, participate in tutorial discussion and achieve an overall mark of 50% or above to complete the unit satisfactorily.

Week 1 (Wednesday 1^st August)  

2.00 Introductory lecture I (Dr Lea Beness)

3.00 Introductory lecture II (Ancient and Modern Disjunctions) (Dr Lea Beness)

Tutorial: There is no tutorial this week.

Week 2 (Wednesday 8^th August)

2.00 Bronze Age Women (Dr Susan Lupack)

3.00 Homeric Women (Ms Elizabeth Stockdale)

Tutorial: Introductory

Week 3 (Wednesday 15^th August)

2.00 Modern Women on the Ancient World (Dr Lea Beness)

3.00 The Archaic Greek World: Hesiod, Sappho and Simonides (Assoc. Prof. Tom Hillard)

Tutorial: Women in Herodotus and Thucydides

Week 4 (Wednesday 22^nd August)

2.00 Greek Sexuality I (Dr Ian Plant)

3.00 Greek Sexuality II (Dr Ian Plant)

Tutorial: Euripides’ Medea

Week 5 (Wednesday 29^th August)

2.00 Images of Athenian Women and the Evidence I (Dr Lea Beness)

3.00 Images of Athenian Women and the Evidence II (Dr Lea Beness)

Tutorial: Aristophanes’ Lysistrata

Week 6 (Wednesday 5^th September)

2.00 Her-story versus His-story: New Insights into Early Dynastic Egyptian Women (Ms Sue Kelly)

3.00 Egyptian Child Burials (Assoc. Prof. Ronika Power)

Tutorial: Xenophon and Attic Oratory

Week 7 (Wednesday 12^th September)

2.00 The Family in Ancient Egypt I (Prof. Naguib Kanawati)

3.00 The Family in Ancient Egypt II (Prof. Naguib Kanawati)

Tutorial: There are no tutorials this week.

Week 8 (Wednesday October 3^rd)

2.00 The Construction of Gender in Ancient Egyptian Visual Culture: Context, Principles and Decorum (Dr Alex Woods)

3.00 Case Studies in Interpretation: Re-assessing the tomb of Niankhkhnum and Khnumhotep at Saqqara and the mortuary temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari (Dr Alex Woods)

Tutorial: The Maxims (Instructions) of Ptahhotep

Week 9 (Wednesday 10^th October)

2.00 Women in the Hellenistic Period (Dr Chris Forbes)

3.00 Roman Women and the Roman familia (Dr Lea Beness)

Tutorial: Sources on Roman Sexuality

Week 10 (Wednesday 17^th October)

2.00 Women in Roman politics (Assoc. Prof. Tom Hillard)

3.00 Fulvia (Assoc. Prof. Peter Keegan)

Tutorial: Ovid’s Art of Love

Week 11 (Wednesday 24^th October)

2.00 Cleopatra (Assoc. Prof. Tom Hillard)

3.00 Roman female head-covering practices (Ms Liz Smith)

Tutorial: Sulpicia

Week 12 (Wednesday 31^st October)

2.00 Imperial Women in the Principate (Livia to the Tetrarchy) (Dr Caillan Davenport)

3.00 Women & Early Christianity I (Dr Chris Forbes)

Tutorial: Juvenal’s Satire 6

Week 13 (Wednesday 7^th November)

2.00 Women & Early Christianity II (Dr Chris Forbes)

3.00 Byzantine Empresses (Dr Meaghan McEvoy)

Tutorial: Jerome

**Please note that this schedule may be altered according to the availability of guest speakers.

The Egyptian content has increased and a number of new staff are enriching the unit by contributing new lectures.

ASSIGNMENT SUBMISSION

All written work (apart from that generated in the examination) must be submitted through the iLearn website. Please upload your assignment to the relevant drop-box. Save your assignment as a pdf. All assignment files should be saved with your full name in the label of the file. All assignments should include the following at the start: Student name; Student number; Assessment Task Title or Question.

Information about how to submit work online can be accessed through the iLearn unit site.

ASSIGNMENT LENGTH

Markers will not read assignments which are more than 10% over the specified word length. Please note that footnotes and bibliography do not count in the word length in this particular unit. (You should not expect that this will be the case in other units that you are undertaking.)

ASSIGNMENT RETURN

Feedback on tutorial papers and major essays will be returned via the Turnitin tool on the iLearn Unit site and will contain feedback from the marker. Every effort will be made to return assignments in a timely fashion.

EXTENSIONS AND PENALTIES FOR LATE SUBMISSION OF ASSESSMENT TASKS

Extensions for assignments can only be granted for serious and unavoidable disruptions that arise after a study period has commenced and may only be sought with the support of documentary evidence. If you anticipate any difficulty in meeting due dates for assignments then it is important that you contact the unit convenor as early as possible and before the deadline. Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, (a) a penalty for lateness will apply – two (2) marks out of 100 will be deducted per day for assignments submitted after the due date – and (b) no assignment will be accepted more than seven (7) days (incl. weekends) after the original submission deadline. No late submissions will be accepted for timed assessments – e.g. quizzes, online tests.

"The fall of the Roman Empire was the outward manifestation of the fact that classical culture, that manner of life and thought originating in Greece and adapted to a non-Greek world, had perished.  This was evident even before the breaking of that iron ring of legions which had held together in security the lands where this culture had flourished.  Germans inherited the ruins, while the Christian Church continued to propagate the idea, in the spiritual domain, of an universal empire, now as the corpus Christianum.  Church and empire, the two conceptions which dominated the Middle Ages, had their origin in this ancient world.  In the schools and their teaching, in church language and theology, methods and ideas survived, transformed, sometimes even deformed, which derived from the classical world.  They provided points of departure, and contact for the revival in the Renaissance, which might dream of a renewal of the world of the ancients viewed as an ideal but which was in reality the beginning of a new era and the basis of that culture which we now know as the Western European or Atlantic.  This culture differs greatly from its model, but nevertheless it bears both internal and external traces of its origin. 

Whenever the nations of Europe reflect upon the common link which distinguishes their culture from that of other peoples, they find that it is the teachings of Greece and Rome, together with Christianity which have determined the fundamental differences in thought and feeling.  We are so steeped in the ideas of classical antiquity that many regard these foundations as so natural to us that they tend to forget that they are merely inherited.

The Graeco-Roman world and culture are things of the past.  Their works, however, live on, sometimes as models, and they survive as living teachers for all who are conscious of having inherited this classical tradition.  In this manner Greece and Rome have become intrinsic parts of Western European life.  Without them the modern world could not have acquired its present form.  What is more, in the ancient world deeds were done and ideas formulated which, however much a part of their native life and environment, outlived this origin and inspired all mankind."

A.A.M. Van der Heyden and H.H. Scullard (eds) Atlas of the Classical World (London 1959) 176

"How difficult, but also how rewarding, it is for us in the late twentieth century to think of the ancient Greeks as astoundingly alien from ourselves ... their daemonology and biology are very different from ours, and play a role in Greek ideas about the self that matches little in our experience."

Ruth Padel In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self (Princeton University Press, 1992), 10, 12

"I shall stress some unacknowledged similarities between Greek conceptions and our own ... [concerning] the concepts that we use in interpreting our own and other peoples' feelings and actions ... We are, in our ethical situation, more like human beings in antiquity than any Western people have been in the meantime."

Bernard Williams Shame and Necessity (Berkeley and Los Angeles, University of California Press, 1993), 2, 166

"Elsewhere I have spelled out my own position ... taking up a position with some feminists and opposing Foucault.  The issue in question ... whereas Foucault stresses radical discontinuities between ancient and modern sexual systems, I stress continuity.  He is interested in differences between ancient and modern definitions of male-male sexuality, I am interested in the persistence of misogyny and homophobia.  Questions of method and approach arise.  I have argued that Foucault's errors and omissions stem from his selection of sources ...".

Amy Richlin 'Towards a History of the Body', in M. Golden and P. Toohey (eds) Inventing Ancient Culture (London, 1997), 19–20