Women in the Classical World: Image and Text
It's no easy task to assemble accurate portraits of the women of ancient Greece and Rome. Fantham and her collaborators--all professors of classics, history, art history, or Latin--have conducted diligent searches of surviving sources, both literary and visual, to chronicle the lives of women both famous and anonymous, aristocratic and indentured, worshiped and abused. The result is a unique illustrated chronological survey of women's lives built upon a foundation of vivid cultural and social history and laced with poetry, anecdotes, and original interpretations. Women are portrayed within the contexts of household customs, sexual mores, experiences in marriage, outlets for creativity, religion, motherhood, and politics. Each sphere is illuminated in surprising detail, the result of careful yet passionate study of all kinds of texts, from medical treatises to trade documents and literature, as well as by astute scrutiny of images found on monuments, decorative arts, murals, and sculptures. Fantham and company have achieved an exciting and invaluable synthesis of visual and literary materials, a triumph, in sum, of scholarship and analysis.Donna Seaman