Led by The Unnamed Woman (Laudatio Turiae) Simulacrum
About this course
One of the two Thematic Study options of OCR GCSE Classical Civilisation (J199/12), taught by a voice that embodies the subject's central problem. The host is the woman of the Laudatio Turiae — a real Roman wife whose husband carved a long eulogy praising everything she did, and whose own name is broken off the stone. She teaches precisely because she shows the difficulty: almost everything we know of ancient women was written by men, and the women themselves are praised, blamed, or silent.
The component studies women in Athens and Republican Rome, with material from Sparta and Pompeii: legendary women and what they reveal about each culture; the education and marriage of young women; women in the home and their legal position; 'improper' women; and women in religion and power — combining literary and material sources and comparing Greece and Rome.
The Unnamed Woman leads, joined by Sulpicia Simulacrum — the one Roman woman whose own love-elegy survives — for the work on women's voices, and by Hypatia of Alexandria Simulacrum for the learned woman.
This is a text-and-source course. Four modules, ending with the student able to explain the lives and representations of women in Greece and Rome, compare the two cultures, and read a largely male-authored record critically.
Led by The Unnamed Woman (Laudatio Turiae) Simulacrum
The question
A culture's legendary women are a mirror of what it wanted real women to be — and feared they were. The student studies the Greek figures (Pandora, the beautiful evil made as a punishment; Helen, whose blame the poets could never settle) and the Roman ones (the Sabine women seized to breed a city; Lucretia, whose rape and suicide bring down the monarchy), asking of each whether she is praised or blamed and for what. The host — herself praised in stone for exactly the virtues these stories teach — leads the comparison of Greek and Roman legendary women and what the differences reveal about each culture's view of female nature.
Outcome
The student can describe the prescribed legendary women, explain what each reveals about her culture's view of female virtue, and compare the Greek and Roman figures as evidence for attitudes to gender.
Sub-units
Led by The Unnamed Woman (Laudatio Turiae) Simulacrum
The question
From legend to the real girl, and what was made of her. In Athens a girl learned at home only what prepared her for marriage; in Sparta — strangely — she trained her body almost as a boy did, for Sparta wanted strong mothers; in Rome some girls were taught their letters. The student studies the varieties of Roman marriage (confarreatio, coemptio, usus) and the crucial distinction between cum manu and sine manu — whether a wife passed into her husband's power or stayed under her father's — and grasps that this was not a dry technicality but the thing that decided whether her property was her own and whether she could keep her children.
Outcome
The student can describe and compare the upbringing of young women across Athens, Sparta and Rome, and explain the forms of Roman marriage and the cum manu / sine manu distinction and its consequences.
Sub-units
Led by The Unnamed Woman (Laudatio Turiae) Simulacrum
The question
The household is the host's own country — and where she was praised. The student studies the ideal wife, the Athenian kyria and the Roman matrona, who ran the house and was spoken of as little as possible, using the Hegeso and Ampharete steles and the Pudicitia statue as evidence for the ideal of virtue. Then the other women the same society condemned — the unmarried who took lovers, and the poets like Sulpicia who wrote down their own desire when women were not supposed to have any. To understand women in the ancient world the student must hold both: the honoured matron and the woman who would not stay silent.
Outcome
The student can explain the roles and legal position of women in the Greek and Roman household, use material sources as evidence for the ideal wife, and explain attitudes to 'improper' women alongside the rare survival of a woman's own voice in Sulpicia.
Sub-units
Led by The Unnamed Woman (Laudatio Turiae) Simulacrum
The question
There was one arena where a woman could hold real authority — the temple. The priestess of Athena, the Pythia who spoke for Apollo at Delphi, the Vestals who guarded Rome's sacred fire and whose virginity was the city's safety, all held power no assembly gave them — yet even here the line held: the Vestal who broke her vow was buried alive. The student studies women's religious roles in both cultures and the few indirect routes to worldly power, then weighs the component's concluding judgement honestly: in a world that gave women no vote and little voice, where did real female power lie, and what did it cost?
Outcome
The student can explain women's roles in Greek and Roman religion and what they reveal about women's status, account for figures like the Vestals and the Pythia, and reach a substantiated judgement on the nature and limits of female power in the ancient world.
Sub-units