S2E8: From Athens to Ethiopia: Race and Gender in Ancient Greek Literature
With Dr. Jackie Murray
People groups, power, hierarchy, and othering—big themes in Homer’s Odyssey and Iliad. In this episode, we learn from Dr. Jackie Murray about what race was and wasn’t in Ancient Greek literature. We see how gender and class intersected with race. We’ll learn about a Greek novel The Aethiopica, what a metic was, and what this all has to do with some recent Hollywood controversies.
“Race as an idea is something that is completely malleable to whatever the historical situation is.”
BIO
Dr. Jackie Murray is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University at Buffalo. She earned her PhD from the University of Washington, after degrees from the University of Guelph and the University of Western Ontario. Jackie has a book forthcoming with Harvard University Press on Neikos: Apollonius and the Poetics of Controversy and another book on Race and Racecraft in Ancient Greek and Roman Epic. Ongoing collaborative projects include a textbook on race and ethnicity in antiquity (with Rebecca Futo Kennedy), a project on slavery and Plato (with David Kauffman), and a teacher-training guide on Antiracist Teaching in Ancient Mediterranean Studies (with Kelly Dugan and Shelley Haley). She has held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, and the American Academy in Berlin.
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[Music]
[Introduction]
Rebekah Haigh: Welcome to Women Who Went Before, a gynocentric quest into the ancient world! I'm Rebekah Haigh–
Emily Chesley: And I'm Emily Chesley–
Rebekah: Scholars, friends, and your hosts!
[Music]
Rebekah: In today’s episode, “From Athens to Ethiopia: Race and Gender in Ancient Greek Literature,” we talk with Dr. Jackie Murray about why Achilles can cry but women can’t, why you might want to avoid sex in an art museum, and how race is made.
[music]
Emily: Once upon a time in a land far away there was a girl named Charikleia. She grew up in Delphi, the most important ritual center of ancient Greece, and her father was a priest of Delphi. Charikleia spoke Greek, dressed like a Greek, looked like a Greek—even became a priestess of the Greek goddess Artemis. But Charikleia was actually Aethiopian. Her birth parents were the king and queen of Aethiopia, and a strange turn of events had her raised by a foster-father in Delphi. She isn’t a historical woman, but a character in a novel by Heliodorus of Emesa.[1] And that story gives us a window into the complexities of ethnicity and gender in the Greek literary tradition and the ancient Mediterranean, and how each one could be performed. Up to a point.
Rebekah: There is a challenge in studying something that is so important and central to our modern world like race or ethnicity because if we’re not careful we can inadvertently import our modern frameworks onto the past. We might assume (wrongly) that skin tone and associations of that operate in the same way in Homeric Greece as they do in Baltimore or Minneapolis today. Ancient conceptions of race and ethnicity were not the same as our modern ones. Race didn’t operate the same way or at least not all the time in other cultures. But through novels and stories, we can see some ideas and assumptions about social differences that authors like Heliodorus and Homer also saw within their worlds.
Emily: TheIliad and TheOdyssey are in the running for oldest works of literature to still make regular sales at Barnes and Noble. (Though the Bible probably still wins on that point.) These epic poems are attributed to Homer, and we’ll talk about the first book in our upcoming conversation. TheIliad tells the legendary story of a group of Mycenaean Greek states embarking on a ten-year war against the city of Troy… all over a woman. Helen was the stunningly beautiful wife of Menelaus, king of Sparta. One day, she suddenly disappeared with the Trojan prince Paris. Menelaus’s older brother Agamemnon, king of Mycenae, super sensibly and rationally and not emotionally at all advises him to start a war over his lost wife. Greek gods get involved, some siding with the Mycenaeans and some with the Trojans. And of course, there are the heroes like Hector, a prince of Troy and its greatest warrior, and Achilles, the mostly-immortal commander of the Myrmidons and the strongest warrior on the Mycenaean coalition’s side.
Rebekah: Maybe you’ve seen Hollywood adaptions or read mythic fantasy retellings of some of his stories, like the movies Troy (2004) and The Return (2024) or novels like James Joyce’s Ulysses and Madeline Miller’s Circe and The Song of Achilles. If you have, you might remember famous moments like the soldiers sneaking into Troy hidden in a massive wooden horse. In the 2004 adaption, we saw Brad Pitt as Achilles, taking revenge for the death of his friend Patroclus by killing Hector and dragging his corpse around the city in rage.[2] Ancient peoples were just as gripped by these stories as we are. In the 1st century BCE, the Roman poet Virgil wrote a sequel, narrating how Aeneus, a Trojan warrior with a bit part in Homer, ends up founding Rome. It was a new national myth, painting the Roman Empire as the gods’ chosen successor to the Greeks.
Emily: The ancient Mediterranean was populated with a variety of ethnic groups, cultures, appearances, and skin tones. But in that multicultural, multicolored world, power and privilege were not necessarily tied to the color of your skin or your place of birth. Scholar Jackie Murray explains, “The ancient Greeks may have considered themselves superior to non-Greeks, and some Greeks to other Greeks, but what they certainly did not do was see themselves as part of a superior white race. Whiteness connoted femininity, i.e., inferiority, and foreignness, i.e., uncivilized barbarity.”[3] Not that the ancient Greeks weren’t stereotyping people. The Roman architect Vitruvius, following in the footsteps of Hippocrates and Aristotle, believed that climate created personality. “Those … who are nearest to the southern climes and under the sun’s orbit, owing to his violence, have a smaller stature, dark complexion, curly hair, black eyes, strong legs, and thinness of blood. Therefore, also, because of their thin blood, they fear to resist the sword, but endure heat and fever without fear, because their limbs are nourished by heat. Those persons who are born under a northern sky, are weak and more timid in face of fever, but fearlessly resist the sword owing to their fullness of blood” (Vitruvius, De Architectura 6.1.4, trans. Granger 1934).[4] (You know, I almost wish that was true. Growing up in a desert may have given me dark hair, but I’ve been trying for thirty years to get it to curl in vain!)
Rebekah: If you moved to ancient Athens now, you would likely be what’s called a metic (not a doctor, “metic” with a “t”). Metics were foreigners who lived within the city-state, temporarily or permanently, but they couldn’t hold citizenship or own land.[5] Some metics were children born to one Athenian and one non-citizen parent. Other metics were freed, formerly enslaved persons. Still others were immigrants, born elsewhere. Now, in ancient Athens “foreign” just meant “not Athenian.” You might have come from the island of Samos or from the region of Thrace, both of which are now in the nation of Greece, or you might have travelled from further away like Egypt. In the Athenian worldview, you could never become Athenian because it all came down to blood. And metic women, especially, posed a danger to that strong Athenian blood because they were both foreign and women. Rebecca Futo Kennedy explains, “The metic woman was the ultimate Other and the gravest threat to Athenian exceptionalism and democracy.”[6] This double negative of ethnicity and sex is not just a phenomenon of ancient Athens or even the ancient world.
Emily: The famous American abolitionist and preacher Sojourner Truth noticed something similar. In her 1851 speech “Aint I a Woman?” she challenged white suffragettes to pay attention to the extra burdens that Black women had to bear because they were both women and Black.[7] In 1989, scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality” to explain this social phenomenon: how gender and race layer upon one another and create a unique experience of the world.[8] It’s a life situation where 1 plus 1 creates 3.
Rebekah: Heliodorus of Emesa’s novel, TheAethiopica is about ethnicity, but ethnicity isn’t directly related to skin color.[9] Sarah Derbew terms this “the plasticity of identity.”[10] The story was written in the 4th century CE,but set 900 years earlier in an imagined and imaginative world of ancient Greece, Egypt, and Aethiopia. It follows Charikleia’s journey to discover her roots, and (to skip over lots of the plot) she travels with her lover Theagenes from Delphi to Aethiopia along a very circuitous path filled with kidnappings and impersonations. Charikleia code switches, by turns performing the roles of a sister, priestess, goddess, and Grecian woman. At one point, she disguises herself with soot and mud to pass as a beggar (Aeth. 6.11.3). In the climax of the novel, Charikleia finally makes it to Aethiopia as a captive, but the king almost sacrifices her because killing virgins is a great way to celebrate a military victory… In the nick of time, it’s revealed that Charikleia is the king’s own daughter. It turns out, the queen had seen a pale-skinned painting of Andromeda at the moment of conception, and as a result Charikleia was born light-skinned and golden-haired. Though she has been passing all this time, she is by birth an Aethiopian. Over the course of the story Charikleia enculturates herself with multiple groups, sometimes relying on skin tone assumptions but also by changing her dress, speaking a different language, and assuming different personas. [11]
Emily: Classics scholar Suzanne Lye explains that in the Aethiopica gender is leveraged to create ethnic stereotypes, so stereotypically feminine qualities like softness, sexuality, and luxury code non-Greek ethnicities (like Persian, Egyptian, and Aethiopian) in negative lights.[12] However, while ethnicity and gender are both performative categories of identity, gender is the more stable and determinative one.[13] In other words, Charikleia can perform different ethnicities flexibly by changing her dress or language, but her gender cannot be changed so easily (within the world of the novel). Femininity is negatively coded, and it makes more of a difference in determining a person’s character than their ethnicity; so that, for Charikleia, “being a woman creates difficulties for her in a way that being non-Greek does not.”[14] On the scales of ethnicity and gender, gender is the more negatively-charged and the more permanent. As Froma I. Zeitlin points out, with the exception of Charikleia, “every female figure in the text is negatively represented.”[15] Charikleia’s otherness and her vulnerability to violation are bound up with her gender and changing access to power.[16]
Rebekah: While the ancient world didn’t construct race around skin and essence like modern discourse, they (like us) did separate themselves out into “our group” and “not our group.” In the ancient Greek world, dehumanization of others often came down to aspects of status like gender, foreignness, poverty, or finding yourself on the losing side of a war. Today’s guest, Jackie Murray, would explain this dynamic with the term “alienated or alienable humanity.”[17] Think of the Declaration of Independence, and its “inalienable rights” — rights that you have just by virtue of being born. Or at least, in 1776, by being born a free, white, landowning man. Alienated humanity, is the opposite: rights you don’t have, by nature. To the Greeks, women by nature were “alienable,” meaning their humanity was not viewed as something intrinsic to themselves, but dependent on how a man treated them. Jackie writes, “What remains stable through time about race is that one group is presumed to be quintessentially human and others are deemed in some way to be non-human or subhuman.”[18]
Emily: To unpack all these concepts more, we are joined today by Dr. Jackie Murray. She is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the University at Buffalo. She earned her PhD from the University of Washington, after degrees from the University of Guelph and the University of Western Ontario. Jackie has a book forthcoming with Harvard University Press on Neikos: Apollonius and the Poetics of Controversy and another book on Race and Racecraft in Ancient Greek and Roman Epic. Some of her ongoing collaborative projects include a textbook on race and ethnicity in antiquity with Rebecca Futo Kennedy, a project on slavery and Plato with David Kauffman, and a teacher-training guide on Antiracist Teaching in Ancient Mediterranean Studies with Kelly Dugan and Shelley Haley. She has held fellowships at the American Academy in Rome, Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies, and the American Academy in Berlin, among others. It’s a pleasure to welcome her to the show!
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[Interview]
Rebekah: The ancient Greeks and Romans had a variety of words that get translated race, like ethnos or populus. But what did these words mean for them. And how did their conceptions differ from or align with our modern ideas of race?
Dr. Jackie Murray: So the terms in general tend to mean people or distinct people or distinct population, group of people. And sometimes it can mean race - but then you have to talk about, well, what is race.
So in antiquity, what makes a population a distinct group is what you're talking about, so they see it as a distinct ethnos or populace or whatever. It could be class. It could be a particular group of people who live in a specific place, who have certain cultural concepts, etcetera.
But, like, for us, anything that's any group that's distinct is a race and that's sort of part of the way racecraft works for us in that we believe that there are such things as distinct races that are almost like species. And so you see a lot of racists actually using species rhetoric when they talk about “white people are more superior to black people, etcetera,” right? And so when we see the ancients using language that is referring to a specific group of people, we just automatically without thinking, import our own understanding of that. And also, built into our own understanding is [a] divorce between race as a socially constructed phenomenon that human beings constantly construct, and the idea that there are such things as races out there in the world. So I think these terms can be used – or abused rather –
It's important then to think about where is our idea of race come from. And that comes from the African slave trade for sure. It's a potent justification for enslaving Africans as a group, and identifying them as natural slaves, right? Skin color and physical features that are typically associated with Africans, that is where our idea of race comes from.
Race as an idea is something that is completely malleable to whatever the historical situation is. If we need to have slaves yet our religion is saying that, “Well, slavery's kind of bad,” well, what if there are beings that are not really human, that could be a slave? How about that?” Then we just designate the Africans as these humans who are not really human and therefore they can be enslaved. So our idea of race ultimately comes out of this need to establish a group of enslaveable-by-nature people, and establishing that as Africans.
That's quite different from what the ancients thought. The ancients didn't think that there needed to be natural slaves. Aristotle is actually arguing against the whole other wing of thinking. The ancients didn't need any justification for slavery. [laughs] Like they enslaved everybody. Conquest was their justification. They didn’t have any powerful people within the system who would say, “hey, maybe it's not great.” (I'm pretty convinced that the slaves thought it wasn't great, but I don't think that they mattered)
So at the end of the day, we to a certain extent inherit certain ideas from the ancient Greeks and that were deliberately sort of part of our idea of race. But at the same time it's, they're not the same ideas of race.
Rebekah: So how then did people in the ancient world think about and express shared identity, if we can't use this idea of race that is a modern one?
Jackie: Race, whether modern or ancient, has to have a degree of power differential, right. One group has to think of itself or see itself as superior to another group. Now, they don't have to be the dominating group; they just have to be a group that does this right. And were they given the power, maybe they would then treat everybody else— So with the laws we pass, the customs we have, the rituals we perform, all of that and.
And so in antiquity race manifests differently because A, they don't need a discourse about physical difference to justify race, or to justify why they're treating certain groups within their population or going to war against other groups and treating them as subhuman. The justification is going to look different in antiquity because the different context, different historical setup.
Emily: Yeah, that goes really nicely into the next question I have dealing with power. Homer's story of the Trojan war is filled with heroes and heroines, and one of the chapters in this epic tells the story of Chryseis.
Jackie: Yeah
Emily: The daughter of a priest of Apollo from Troy, she's taken captive and given as a sex slave to Agamemnon king of Mycenae. As a Trojan, and as a woman in particular, Chryseis is ripe for violent dehumanization. And as you've written and introduced us to just now, racecrafting in ancient Greece has to do with power against those with alienable humanity.[19] Women are raced by their differences from men and by their lack of power. Can you talk about this story a little bit? And what does gender have to do with racecraft in Greek literature? How do these believed power differentials manifest in the way women's bodies are treated?
Jackie: Well, if you go back to what I was trying to say earlier about race being an ideology that kind of governs how people treat each other in a society. What is actually going on in the Iliad? It's a war, the siege and wars are site number one for racemaking for sure. Because to justify what you're doing to this other group of people, you need some kind of explanation as to why they are just murdering people for no reason. There's work by Kathy Gaca I highly recommend. She also has a chapter or an article on the Iliad, which I found very, very fascinating, and it totally changed the way I teach the Iliad now.
The point that she makes is that the goal of war, primary goal of war for the Greeks, was to capture slaves. The economic factor was to generate slaves, and most of the slaves were always women, and children. Nubile women and children. Girls that is, not even boys. Because boys could come back and get you.
One aspect of the Iliad that I think is an important racializing factor is the fact that martial rape is condoned and normalized in the Iliad. That's what's happening in that scene where Agamemnon is claiming— First of all, they're diving up the girls, presumably for martial rape. Raping these captives is a precursor to their enslavement. So you dehumanize them. They're made to submit, and they are going to be enslaved. So this is the threat that Agamemnon is suggesting against Chryses, her father, [laughs wryly] because she doesn't really matter in the whole nine yards, right. At the end of the day it's about the men, right? And he's like, he's asserting his power over this priest and saying, “look, you don't have the power to stop me from dehumanizing your daughter. So shut up.” But, of course, Chryses has Apollo as his backup. So so turns out happy ending. But the point is, that discourse I think is a racializing discourse.
Now, what does gender play into? It is because all the women, except for Helen, all the women in Greek epic can be racialized. Every single one of them can be enslaved. And we find that out at the end, like where all the Trojan heroines are enslaved. So women by “nature,” quote-un-quote, are “enslave-able.” They have what I call an “alienable humanity.” So if they are connected to a powerful man who can protect them, sure their humanity is intact. That's basically the difference between the enslaved women and the women who are the queens and whatever in the epics, is that the enslaved women have no male protector. So it reinforces the whole patriarchal setup at the intersection of race and patriarchy as well, right?
And that is part of how you're a hero, is that you are able to protect your community. And so Hector, for example, the sign of how what an important hero he is, is how much is lamented and the destruction that's going to come to the women now that he's gone, right. And then, of course Achilles’ treatment of his body is an attempt to racialize him as well, to bring him down to the status of a non hero. By anyway, the point is that yeah, that that women, regardless of status is subject to dehumanization if they don't have a male protector.
Emily: Yeah, I'm thinking about even women whose supposed-to-be-protectors don't, like Cassandra and–
Jackie: Right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.
Emily: You know, just having a father doesn't necessarily mean you'll be protected.
Jackie: Right! Yeah, He, your father, needs to be powerful enough, right? So Chryseis’ father appears to Agamemnon not to be somebody he needs to pay attention to because, “He's just a priest. Eh”! The story implies that the gods are somehow involved in in policing the how, what, kind of racialization goes on. So Apollo kicks in here to prevent Agamemnon from taking Chryseis, right? And Apollo kicks in when Achilles is stepping over the line with how he's treating Hector. [laughs]
But what I think is super interesting is that there is a critique of it. There is a critique of the dehumanization that goes along with war, the way in which heroes, warriors on the battlefield treat each other as well as how women are abused in war. There is actually a critique in Homer.
Rebekah: As you were, as you were discussing, epic, I was thinking so many stories in the Hebrew Bible that around war and conquest, you can read them through the sort of this lens of racializing these other people groups, winning captives, the ways that women are, you know, women captive.
Jackie: And all of those dynamics are kind of really interesting too.
Rebekah: Well, as much as I want to keep talking about this, so let's move on, cause we've got some really great questions. [they laugh]
So unlike in our world, questions of race and social difference in the ancient Mediterranean rarely had to do with skin color. But when skin color does come up in text, it is often in conjunction with gender differences. So in ancient Egyptian art, for instance men are often painted with red tones and women with yellow.[20] So when Greeks and Romans write about skin tone, who do they associate with different shades, and what are the authors typically trying to communicate through their mentions of skin color?
Jackie: Well, so one thing is that—I wanna makes sure that there's no misconception– that obviously the ancient people did see skin color. [laughs] It’s not as connected often to where people are from, so, and mostly environmentally thinking. So people from the South tend to be darker, people from the north to be lighter.
And what's interesting is that certainly from the Greek and Roman, both Greek and Roman perspective, white skin in men was a negative, right. It's a sign of inferiority, the barbarians in the north. So this is really important to get: they did not think of themselves as white northern Europeans at all. And in fact they associated whiteness with femininity, as a negative, right in a male. So having fair skin, it's important to get, is something that's associated from the male dominant perspective as a bad thing for men.
Right. So that is an interesting thing. When we see that consistently in these patriarchal societies, the idea that what's– the beautiful woman is fair skinned. I think that's a perfect example of racecraft, where you're magically embracing the idea of beauty and whiteness and inferiority at the same time. And so yeah, so we see this consistent tendency in both the Greeks, Romans and Egyptians, of making women in art have fair skin.
I actually argue in the chapter on women in my book that this is a monsterfication of women, in that it's one of the sort of physical markers that's supposed to point to their inferiority, the monsters that they really are on the inside. And that's why they can be dehumanized, right.. And so the description of Pandora in Hesiod that is set in a story that's full of monstrous womenm like monstrous female beings, right? How is that not incorporated into that, some imagination of what she represents? Right. And of course, she is dangerous. She's presented as extremely dangerous in that. So that so that's one thing.
And the other thing is that there are moments, historical moments for sure, where skin color would be weaponized against whoever we're fighting against, right? So the Gauls being white skinned; the Romans talk about that a lot. It's part of their monsterfication of the Germans and the Gauls, etcetera. And similarly the Egyptians when they go to war or when they're at war with the Nubians, they actually do talk about them being darker, or at least they represent them as being darker. So I think that you can imagine that they're weaponizing the darker skin in that particular context, right.
So when we have a need to exploit this particular group of people and bring some of them in as slaves, then of course we're going to have a skin-color related racial dynamic. But what's different between ours and antiquity is that it's not the primary thing, right. It wouldn't have been the primary thing, and they wouldn't look at everybody with that particular skin color as a potential slave or something like that.
And then another thing too is that I think the process of racialization in, always I think, of of groups of people is to negate their ethnic identity. You just wipe them out. So yeah, there are moments indeed where skin color sure could have been weaponized as part of the discourse of war against a particular group of people that we want to take their stuff and enslave them, etcetera, right. So we can't say that no, they never use skin color. But it was not the norm, right, is what I'm getting at. It depended on who you were fighting at the time. So, yeah, the Romans with the Carthaginians. Yeah, they might emphasize their quote-un-quote “red” color, right. Why? Well, mainly because we're gonna, we're going after them.
No Greek or Roman for sure would have seen themselves as white. They identified white skin with femininity, and a sort of negative, inferior femininity when it had to do with men. That goes into the whole issue of gender and race, right. And so it's another way in which women are, I think, marked off as different. So when we see it in art. It's part of the racecraft, it's reinforcing, repeating the stereotype of the beautiful but weak and inferior woman, right.
Rebekah: Would you say it's fair to think about when it comes to like skin color and gender, there's also a social component there or an elite component there? In that, I'm imagining women who were out in the fields, they could do very little about looking like their husbands.
Jackie: Right
Rebekah: But a woman who could live a privileged life inside, away from the sun, could preserve that white skin. Is there also, like a class dynamic involved in this?
Jackie: So yeah, absolutely. So I definitely think there is a social status, and it may, as you say, have to do with folks stay inside, versus folks stay outside. Similarly, I can say this for the Caribbean as well, having lighter skin does have to do with social status, or at least is perceived to have something to do with social status. So there’s a colorism there. So yeah, I definitely think that you attach it to beauty, you attach it to social status, and so then everyone tries reinforces that idea.
At the other end of it is, this distinction of women as inferior to men, right.
Rebekah:: [speaking over]Yeah
Jackie: And so therefore problematic power dynamics are established.
Emily: Yeah. Continuing on this thread on foreignness and insider-outsider status, I'm curious about how this racializing of outsider status manifested in society, particularly as the mistrust of foreigners. Rebecca Futo Kennedy has shown that women who immigrated to Athens, even from other regions of Greece were seen as a grave threat to Athenian society.[21] These women, they might have been visibly indistinguishable from Athenian-born women in their facial features, or even their clothing, but they werenevertheless marked as foreign and barred from legal privileges of citizenship. What were some of these familial and social stakes of this marking and guarding against foreign women?
Jackie: I think that, you know, Rebecca [Futo Kennedy] would probably agree with me that the point isn't so much where they come from, but the fact that they are not from here. Or made to be not from here.
And we see this in some of the trials against Naiaira, etcetera. There is definitely a racializing prejudice against people from, not us, right? So the most famous trial against Naiaira is a woman who is usually considered to be a courtesan, a foreign woman. She's married to an Athenian, but their marriage is… sort of condoned, i's not allowed in that you're not supposed to marry foreign women. And then, their children in the family… Some of the children most likely were from his previous marriage. There is a daughter that she apparently had. But anyway, the issue is that he gets into trouble because ten, thirty years later the enemy is able to dig up dirt to claim that he tried to marry off his non-citizen wife[’s] daughter to an actual citizen male. We don't know how that trial panned out because we only have one side of it, but it shows a lot about what's at stake, or what least people thought was wrong, with marrying noncitizen women.
The issue is really to do with the idea that this foreign element (we see this today), this foreign element is going to contaminate the pure citizen body, right. And so the children that will be born– First of all, what it does is, my guy Apollonius, actually [laughs], has a really good episode i in the Argonautica where the stakes are explicit for the women. Is that these foreign women set up sexual competition against the local women, right. And so marrying your daughter off to, you know, a fancy citizen becomes problematic if he's allowed to marry more than just the pool of women that are available in the citizen body, right. So there's just an economy here of who's available to marry.
I can't remember if Rebecca talks about this, but it's really important to bear in mind that there was an over glut of women with the Peloponnesian Wars and stuff. There's a lot of citizen women because their husbands and sons are off fighting this unending war. And so you have displaced women, or women who are just coming in because they are rich and whatever, but women coming in from outside Athens now competing in the marriage market. That's one thing, right. And so that's an issue for maintaining family wealth. And then how it's talked about is of course in terms of this contamination, infiltration, and invasion, and great replacement, and all of that.
Then the other thing is that the children that they're gonna produce are not gonna be worthy citizens. There's a sort of imagination of something as a “pure Athenian.” We only want pure Athenians voting and directing the state. The sort of imagination that there's some foreign element coming in and directing our state is sort of lurking there in the sort of concern about who the children are. And it might even align well with their obsession with adultery as well, where they're worried about the guys coming in and sleeping with the wives and producing children. So there's an obsession with having illegitimate children. You're taking care of somebody else's actual child because your wife slept with somebody else.
Or that this woman who belongs to this other community, who has other ancestral ties and probably ancestral interests, is now bringing those into the community. So they do think that coming from a different community is somehow bringing some aspect of that community into our community. That I think is what's happening there.
Rebekah: As we've already talked about, your conception of race has to do with power. And slavery is an ultimate dehumanizing means of creating race. You've pointed before to this passage in the Odyssey: “....for Zeus, whose voice is borne afar, takes away half his worth from a man when the day of slavery comes upon him” (Homer, Odyssey 17.322–3, trans. Murray 1919).[22] What do we gain by analyzing race through this lens? And how does our understanding of race in the classical world expand by thinking about race through power instead of through cultural difference or places of origin.
Jackie: Well, I think that to think of race as a process is a much more capacious and probably more accurate way of understanding what is going on. Even today! Like, it's a process. So, and we know it's a process because we see people being racialized right in front of us. [laughs]
Emily: [murmuring over] Right.
Jackie: Like all of a sudden groups of people move into different racial categories over just even one generation that we can see this happening. The point of the sort of racecraft that goes on with race is telling you that these races always existed, and that there is no movement. That's the point of, that's the magic that racecraft casts, is the idea that it's always been like this. And not not talking about it as how people relate to each other.
So certain processes are important to recognize that they create the hierarchical structure. So, going out and raiding the Grecian coast and bringing back enslaved women and girls into your community creates a racial hierarchy of the enslaved women and the regular women. And its this action of enslaving them, especially when you think about what Kathy Gatz has to say when it comes to the women, the action involves raping them. So they're being dehumanized in a very physical act that is seen as polluting and all these other ways.
But if it's a man, it’s talking about, this process happens. And it's an acknowledgement that, yeah, the process is how you become dehumanized. It's not that you were born dehumanized or you were born to be dehumanized. No. There is a process that made you so. TheOdyssey acknowledges that at least, right. And I think that that's important to think about – just in general, so we can like, just to so we can see it in our own, what's going on today in our own world, right. But when we look back we can see what the, very multifaceted processes that are involved in racemaking in antiquity. Because it gives us a I think a better perspective that, oh it's not just “oh they're foreigners over there. They create the barbarian by opposing them.” That's one process. But it's also how they give metics no citizen rights and the potential to be enslaved if they do anything off the, you know, that people just don't like, having their property seized, you know, although they don't have all the rights, you know?
I do think it's a really useful lens to look at it as, looking at race not as static formation, but looking at it as the process that produces that formation, right. I think that's much more help[ful], because then you can actually, you have a better sense of when race is happening in the text. You don't have to say, “Oh, it's a racist text.” It's not necessarily a racist text. There are moments where race is happening in the text, and you can spot those moments if you focus on the process.
So, as I said, when Achilles drags Hector, you know around the walls of Troy, that's a moment where race is happening. Question is, is it gonna go on, and establish a new order of things. Well, the gods don’t allow it. But in general the process starts, and then the issue is how do you keep that process going. Yeah, so I think it's really useful because it doesn't let you off the hook when you're reading all the stuff, all the violence that goes on in these ancient texts. If you don't know the, if you're translating a Roman text and you don't know the word, just try “kill,” see if it works. [all three laugh] It totally works, yeah. [laugh] We get so inured to that, right? But this way, you, you're forced to stop and think about, what's this violence? What is happening here? What is it doing? What is it saying about this society that is gonna emerge after this, right?
One of the things that I find interesting, looking at the Aenead, in the end where Aeneus gets to kill Turnus, Aeneus has this thought where maybe he doesn't kill him, maybe he does. And then he just does, right. He does it out of this rage, similar to Achilles’ rage over Patroclus. Right. And, I think, you're supposed to compare that moment to when Hector is killed and then dragged around and mistreated by Achilles, right. But what's interesting, I think, is that it actually is not the same kind of action, right. It's a, you know, battlefield action where the soldier kills another soldier. (We're supposed to be okay with that, right.) But it’s not the same dehumanization. Certainly what's going on in the Iliad, I would absolutely, is an attempt at racializing Hector, making him inferior to Achilles, and also to make Achilles superior to all the other heroes on the battlefield, etcetera.
That's not what– When you think about it that way, then you apply that lens to this death of Hector [editor: Turnus], you don't get that. You get that okay, this is a foundation of the state, of course. But there's no dragging the body around. We don't know! We're not told what he does with the body at the end. So we're left with the idea that well, okay he just killed him. Which is interesting, given that Turnus is an Italian and, you know, it's part of the whole incorporation of the Trojan element into the Roman system. And all of that like, so then the foundation of Rome, in this particular moment, is not based in any kind of racial animosity toward the indigenous Italians. It's just the war [laughs], right. So you see what– So it actually does have an interesting way of nuancing our normal comparison between Hector and Achilles and Turnus.
Rebekah: Obviously before Alexander the Great, the Greek world is much smaller, more uniform. And under the Romans we have this sort of vast expanseof the Mediterranean that was united under a single state, and thisMediterranean world was obviously deeply connected, deeply diverse, culturally, ethnically, linguistically, and religiously. So how were race and ethnicity conceptualized or enacted differently in the Roman world, then?
Jackie: I always have to shock my students, like, the Greeks did not see themselves as one unified thing, right. [laughs] Like the Athenians saw themselves as Athenians, Spartans saw themselves as Spartans, Corinthians, Corinthians, people in Syracuse… They didn't see themselves as a unity. So that's very different when we come to the Romans, who are unity.
With the Greeks, we see a lot of inter-Greek fighting. That's why the Greeks, that’s why it's a discourse during Plato and Aristotle about whether or not to enslave Greeks, because they're doing it! [laughs] Right. But is there some ethnic– They're trying to claim, is there some kind of commonality that maybe should, we should have amongst ourselves that could then maybe make the other people worthy of being enslaved? That's what Aristotle’s trying to get at.
So the Romans, though, have a sense of “we’re Rome.” They have their own calendar. Like every Greek state, throw a rock at it, they had a different calendar, like, seriously. That's a sign you're not in the same community, when you don't even have the same timepieces working! Romans have a lot that makes them a unit, right.
And so when they then expand out, they have certain attitudes towards certain groups of people. So like the folks on the peninsula, they incorporate them into Romanness. Sicily, not so much. Outside of that area, not so much. A lot of the territories that they acquire, they then, they're racialized in a certain sense, because the populations when they're conquered, they're often displaced. Like the Carthaginians, they scatter them. Whenever they conquer a place they tend to want to get rid of the problematic elites who rally up the people to fight against them. You're gonna put a Roman governor in, and Roman elites are gonna be at the top of the food chain, and maybe the local elites if they play nice they can be in the next rung, and then everybody else is just subject to Roman rule, to a certain extent. So yeah, so in the end you get the sense that, yeah, the Romans seem much more aggressive in their construction of themselves and the construction of others.
But yeah, their attitude is quite different in that as the empire gets bigger and bigger, more and more people become citizens. I guess they're much more malleable in their idea of what is Rome and what is Roman. They certainly think that people who are from [the] Italic peninsula, who are Italian, who have Latin culturally, are superior. But at the same time they're not so superior that we won't steal how to build a ship from them, [everyone laughs], or how to build a temple, how to write poetry.
Emily: So, picking a more broader perspective, we've taken for granted that talking about race and gender in the Classical world is important. But it's not only important for understanding the historical past, it's also important for the present. TV shows and movies have created certain stereotypes about what the ancient world looked like or sounded like.
Jackie: Mmmhm.
Emily: You've discussed the 2018 BBC Netflix series Troy:Fall of the City, whose multiracial casting choices triggered some backlash.[23] And in a potentially contrasting example, last year's Cleopatra series on Netflix also generated intense online discussion about how historical figures should be represented on screen.
Jackie: Mmm.
Emily: What do these ongoing cultural conversations about representation in art or on screen tell us about why scholarly work on race and gender in the Classical world matters?
Jackie: Yeah! That's a great question. I like the, your point about what does it tell us about today. I think it has a lot to do with what is at stake. The backlashes actually reveal the pillars of our society that are built on use of the past, right. And which is a very fascist [chuckles] way of setting up, that we have this perfect past that we imagine that we've sort of declined from, and we want to get back to it.
So the Western imagination, that's been built since the 1300s or whatever, has imagined the Greek and Roman world– Well, actually I wanna plug for Nisha McSweeney's book The West—very good book of like looking at different ways in which the story of the West has been narrated from different people from all over. And that it's not just this trajectory that we understand in our American understanding of like, “the Greeks, the Romans, us,” kind of trajectory. The current North-dominating global world is an heir to the Roman Empire,” that kind of thing.
But the point is that this vision of the West, claiming of the Greek and Roman cultures by European cultures, particularly British or American and Canadian purposes is (the British and then British Empire claiming of it) that imagines the Greeks and the Romans as white! And as I said, that would have been extremely problematic for them because they knew where Europe was. [laughs] They were not in it. Europe is where the Barbarians are, [all laugh] the Brits are.
Rebekah: God forbid we be a barbarian! [laughs]
Jackie: Right. And the British and the Germans were barbarians! Like, they were literally the barbarians. There's a kind of finessing going on in the Western narrative whereby the center of civilization moves north to Europe and England.
And once it did, then every presentation of the ancient world, especially once you start to get like television and film and stuff—more people can see this image—then it becomes this very white world, right. Where A, if there are black people in there, they're consistently slaves. So if you just think of the old Cleopatra movies or any sort of sandal movie to date—except for the Spartacus, where somehow all the slaves are white, but okay, [laughs] which is probably more, most accurate version, right? [laughs]
But what's really at stake is the white supremacist idea that out of Africa came no civilization. And if there were any civilization, it was brought in by external people coming down from the north and produces it. So the Egyptians are white. Any culture we find in the ancient Africa must be white. And so it's that narrative that they're—that myth—that's constantly being repeated in every representation of the ancient world, that doesn't have any black people or that has black people always in the servile position, which was not the case! But it's got a modern ideological message when Cleopatra rolls into the (I think Liz Taylor, one of my favorites), Liz Taylor’s Cleopatra rolls into Rome and all these really super, probably painted, dark skinned enslaved people are carrying her in. There an ideological message going on in the 60s about that.
For me what's interesting about the Cleopatra Netflix version isn't so much the accuracy or not or. That's not what I think is really going on. What's going on is that every iteration of Cleopatra in movies or TV, she's always white, right. Maybe the HBO Rome is probably most accurately representing, where she's looks racially ambiguous and. But in general, every representation assumes a white Cleopatra.
So there's a narrative in America anyway, that’s the African American counternarrative, which is, “No, Cleopatra is black. She's African, so she's black.” And they're presumably going with the one drop rule. But the point is that she's an African queen, so she's black. So what you have in at Netflix is the first instance of a in a major production—I think Jada Pinkett Smith deliberately as a producer wanted—the African American perspective, right. And so you get the African American reception of Classics, of Cleopatra, and Black people don't have a right to talk about the ancient world, right.
Because that's another thing. In the way in which race is constructed in America, it has a lot to do with who controls the narrative, but also ancient narrative. You have this sort of, the first time you're getting a flare up of the subaltern narrative, and of course it's supposed to be suppressed by the whole establishment, right. That makes sense to me.
But what doesn't make sense to me is the way in which the Egyptians in Egypt react to it, right. Because that's the first time we've had this whole thing. It’s interesting ‘cause it fits into their own discourse about race vis à vis the Nubians, right. They reject the Netflix version because it’s gonna go against their own internal narrative about what's going on in Egypt right now. And also there is a sort of clinging to whiteness that Arabs have, like they’re losing control of it, but there's definitely an association or an attempt to be white, right. That in Africa, right, being a country in Africa, and especially on a country that has been, was under British colonial and you know French colonial fingertips or whatever. So they want Cleopatra to be white, not that they want her to be Egyptian (though again, there's some controversy over that).
Rebekah: I was going to say, one of the things I think is really interesting about the controversy, last season we talked with Dr. Solange Ashby about Nubia, about Meroe–
Jackie: [speaking over]Yes, okay yeah.
Rebekah: —and this obsession with sort of trying to reclaim, thinking about power in your discussion, right, you have this powerful Ptolemaic queen, who was part of this dynasty that's subjugated the native Egyptians and then other populations that are there, and this fascination with this moment and this woman—ignoring the fact that there is, if you could just move down, right, in Meroe this amazing moment in history, where you have these powerful women who are ruling and warring and have their own dynasty and culture. And it's not interesting to Hollywood.
Jackie: Yeah. And another– I was actually just wrapping up a course on powerful, women in power, and the last bit is Cleopatra and her sisters—in the sense of the other women that were ruling around her as models for female power, right. Yeah! And indeed, it's like this obsession with Cleopatra as if she's a unicum in this system, right. Like, she's not the– first of all, she's not the only woman to rule Egypt. And then, yeah, your, the point about the other women in Egypt or Lower Egypt or in Meroe etcetera: again, we can bring in this race and gender issue, it's as if women, when they rise to this moment of being in charge of a country, it's an anomaly, right. There's only gonna be one, right? [laughs wryly] So that's the story. We don't want to see a world where, no, actually, there's quite a lot of women ruling dynasties. But we focus on the one because we want to pretend that there's only one. We can't allow too many women to get, give the idea that women could actually run a country.
Emily: Yeah, the idea that it is a unique [experience] is helpful for supremacist narratives, right.
Jackie: Oh yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Definitely. Because again, if the if we think about the white supremacist narrative as a really a male patriarchal narrative, too, right—so it’s male supremacists and white supremacists—then obviously women, regardless of whether they're white or not, are in this alienable category, right. And so they're not doing what we need them to do. They can be dehumanized. It’s super interesting how everything sort of is enmeshed together.
[musical interlude]
[Conclusion]
Rebekah: Our contemporary American ideas of race were born out of (ironically) Enlightenment Europe and a socio-political need to justify the supposed inferiority of enslaved Africans. This drive to find any possible justification for enslavement prompted new, shall we say “creative,” interpretations of history, religion, culture, and texts. One such “creative” interpretation came from Thomas Jefferson, the author of the Declaration of Independence—that promise of inalienable rights. Jefferson knew his Homer, like plenty of other Founding Fathers. As Jackie has written, he also knew a very specific line in the Odyssey: “Half of his excellence broad-seeing Zeus removes from a man, whensoever the day of slavery overpowers him” (Odyssey 17.322–23, trans. Murray 2023).[24] The ancient poem is making a point that no human is a slave bynature; humans are made slaves by captivity, war, or poverty. If anything, the line speaks to how humans enslave others. But Jefferson claimed a different reading so that his chattel slavery plantation wouldn’t contradict his Greek poet. Jefferson assumed that only white people could be free by nature. In Notes of the State of Virginia in 1782, he wrote, “the slaves of which Homer speaks were whites.”[25] Jefferson read his own racecraft into the Homeric texts, deciding that Black people could be slaves by nature.[26] By implication, his enslavement of Africans wasn’t a contradiction of rights.
Emily: One of the people Jefferson enslaved was named Sally Hemings (1773–1835). She was born an enslaved daughter of John Wayles, a Virginian lawyer and slave trader. Upon his death, Sally became the property of her half-sister Martha and brother-in-law Thomas Jefferson. Over the course of her life, historians think she bore Jefferson at least six children.[27] Since enslaved women had no legal right of consent, we have no way of knowing how she felt.[28] When Jefferson moved his household to France to serve as ambassador, Sally went too. She learned French, moved in aristocratic circles, and was paid extraordinarily high wages, in a moment when France was turning against slavery.[29] Some referred to her as a “mademoiselle.” Her son Madison later recounted, “in France she was free, while if she returned to Virginia she would be re-enslaved.”[30] In Sally’s “Revolutionary” America, beliefs about race made Jefferson treat her like chattel, but her gender made her especially vulnerable to his sexual violence.
Rebekah: Throughout human history, societies have thought about race, ethnicity, and otherness in different ways. But if we’re looking for throughlines: women have almost always been vulnerable as women, perceived as other and exploitable. Even chivalric ideas about treating women as ladies were rooted in beliefs of their inherent vulnerability and need for protection. In ancient Greece, a woman’s status was defined by her gender more than anything else. Metics were “other” not because of skin tone or accent, but because they weren’t children of Athenian citizens. In rare cases, metic men could be granted citizenship if they offered a great service to the city, but not so for metic women.[31] In Athens, all women were barred from citizenship and the vote. Income or manumission might change her relative status, but gender would keep her marginalized no matter what.
Emily: Power isn’t the same thing as strength, though. And women have strength aplenty. In the words of the poet Maya Angelou:
“You may write me down in history,
With your bitter, twisted lies,
You may trod me in the very dirt
But still, like dust, I’ll rise.”[32]
[music plays over outro]
Emily: If you enjoyed our show, please rate and review us on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Audible, or wherever you get your podcasts. Check out our website, womenwhowentbefore.com, or find us on Twitter @womenbefore.
This podcast is written, produced, and edited by us, Emily Chesley and Rebekah Haigh. Our music is composed and produced by Moses Sun. The podcast is sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic studies, the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies, and the Committee for the Study of Late Antiquity, all at Princeton University.
Rebekah: Thanks for listening to Women Who Went Before. And don't forget:
Both: Women were there!
[theme music wraps up]
[1] Heliodorus, TheAethiopica, ed. and trans. by members of The Athenian Society (Athens: The Athenian Society, 1897), accessed 19 April 2025, available at https://archive.org/details/theaethiopicaheliodorusgreengok/mode/2up.
[2] For an analysis of Achilles and his corpse mutilation as a function of racecraft, see Jackie Murray, “Epic Racecraft and the Race of Heroes,” in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic, ed. Emma Greensmith (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024), 267–272.
[3] Jackie Murray, “A Critical Race Studies Approach: Race and Racecraft in Apollonius's Argonautica,” in The Epic World, ed. Pamela Lothspeich (London: Routledge, 2023), 17, drawing upon the work of Denise McCoskey, “Race before ‘Whiteness’: Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Critical Sociology 28 (2002): 13–39, and Jay S. Kaufman, “Race and Science,” in A Cultural History of Race: In Antiquity, ed. Denise Eileen McCoskey, 67–82, vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Race (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021).
[4] Vitruvius, On Architecture, Volume II: Books 6–10, trans. Frank Granger, Loeb Classical Library 280 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1934), 13. See also Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places 16–24; and Aristotle, Politics 7.6/1327b. For further reading see Margaret Talbot, “The Myth of Whiteness in Classical Sculpture,” The New Yorker, 22 October 2018, accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2018/10/29/the-myth-of-whiteness-in-classical-sculpture.
[5] Here and following see: Rebecca Futo Kennedy, Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3–4. After 451 BCE, Athens required citizenship to be doubly-inherited—a person must be born to a citizen father and a free citizen mother to hold citizenship themselves. Paul Cartledge, “Status, legal and social, Greek,” Oxford Classical Dictionary, fifth edition (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), accessed 22 February 2025. For further reading on the status of metics, especially as compared with slaves and freed persons, see Deborah Kamen, Status in Classical Athens (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013), 43–61.
[6] Kennedy, Immigrant Women in Athens, 6. “Women were considered, especially in Aristotle, as the equivalent of slaves. If a metic had been born both a woman and a slave, she was born burdened with two conditions that rendered her inferior by nature” (Kennedy, Immigrant Women in Athens, 4).
[7] Sojourner Truth, “Ain’t I a Woman?” Women's Rights Convention, Akron, Ohio, 1851. Text available from the National Park Service, “Sojourner Truth: Ain't I A Woman?,” accessed 19 April 2025, https://www.nps.gov/articles/sojourner-truth.htm. However, Frances Gage’s more famous transcription changes the speech and falsely casts Truth as speaking in a southern slave dialect. See Leslie Podell, “Compare the Two Speeches,” The Sojourner Truth Project, accessed 14 July 2025, https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-speeches.
[8] Kimberlé W. Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of Chicago Legal Forum 139 (1989): 139–167.
[9] Sarah Derbew analyzes the novel in UntanglingBlackness in Greek Antiquity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022). She summarizes her reading: “This novel, the earliest example written in Greek of a plot in which black skin confers cultural privilege, is not constrained by linguistic, geographic, or temporal boundaries. Its characters grapple with various interpretations of black skin, which some of them believe to be a key determinant of the Aithiopian people. These diverse encounters reveal skin color to be a negotiable ethnographic tool that can, but does not have to, denote one’s identity” (Derbew, UntanglingBlackness in Greek Antiquity, 158–159, emphasis in original).
[10] Derbew, Untangling Blackness, 175, 180.
[11] Derbew, Untangling Blackness, 178.
[12] Suzanne Lye, “Gender and Ethnicity in Heliodorus’ Aithiopika,” Classical World 109, no. 2 (2016): 239–244.
[13] Lye, “Gender and Ethnicity,” 235–262.
[14] Lye, “Gender and Ethnicity,” 237.
[15] Froma I. Zeitlin, “Enter Arsace and Her Entourage! Lust, Gender, Ethnicity, and Class at the Persian Court (Books 7 and 8),” 194, in Reading Heliodorus' Aethiopica, eds. Ian Repath and Tim Whitmarsh (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), online edition accessed 21 April 2022.
[16] Jackie Murray, “Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey” in A Cultural History of Race, vol. 1 In Antiquity, ed. Denise Eileen McCoskey (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 137–156, see especially 151.
[17] Murray explains this idea in one place: “The common denominator in all racial constructs is the presence of a superior race, whose members are presumed to be fully human or even semi-divine because of an imagined metaphysical essence that accounts for their inalienable humanity. By the same token, the inferior race or races are presumed to be not fully human, even monstrous, with a different metaphysical essence that accounts for their alienable or alienated humanity” (Murray, “Epic Racecraft and the Race of Heroes,” 262). See also Murray, “Critical Race Studies Approach,” 18.
[18] Murray, “Critical Race Studies Approach,” 16.
[19] See, for instance, Murray, “Epic Racecraft and the Race of Heroes,” 262, and Murray, “Critical Race Studies Approach,” 16–18.
[20] Gay Robbins, Women in Ancient Egypt (London: British Museum Press, 1993), 180–181. Such visual representations have been attributed to idealized gender distinctions over who was expected to work indoors or outside, itself connected to status and wealth. In certain paintings from the Old Kingdom, some mature male officials are presented with lighter skin. Robbins explains these “could be meant to signify that they had reached a point in their careers when they could sit comfortably in their office all day and send their subordinates out to do the footwork” (pp. 180–181).
[21] Kennedy, Immigrant Women in Athens, 6.
[22] Homer, Odyssey, Volume II: Books 13-24, trans. A. T. Murray, rev. George E. Dimock, Loeb Classical Library 105 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919), 177.
[23] Murray, “Race and Sexuality,” 137–142. See also “No, the BBC is not ‘blackwashing’ Troy: Fall of a City,” RadioTimes, 24 February 2018, accessed 29 June 2025, https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/troy-fall-of-a-city-blackwashing-casting-black-actors-greek-myth/.
[24] Murray, “Critical Race Studies Approach,” 17.
[25] Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia, ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982), 142, discussed by Murray, “Critical Race Studies Approach,” 17. Jefferson’s text was originally circulated in 1781, expanded in the coming years, and ultimately published in Paris in 1785 (William Peden, “Introduction,” to Notes on the State of Virginia, xii–xvi.)
[26] Murray, “Critical Race Studies Approach,” 17.
[27] Catherine Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America (New York: Penguin Random House, 2018), ebook edition, np. Published recollections, oral histories, and DNA evidence link Sally’s children with the Jefferson family. For further reading on Sally and why historians connect her to Jefferson, see “The Life of Sally Hemings,” researched and written by scholars at Monticello, https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/, accessed 19 April 2025; and Annette Gordon-Reed, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy (Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997).
[28] Of course, in modern definitions of consent, a person has to be able to say “no” freely, without repercussion or coercion, in order for it to be true consent. At the time, though, enslaved persons had no legal rights to decline.
[29] Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters, Chapter 5. While she was in France, Jefferson’s older daughter Martha developed an opposition to slavery (Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters, Chapter 5).
[30] Madison Hemings, originally stated in 1873, quoted in Catherine Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters, Chapter 4. To induce Sally to return, Madison says that his father “...promised her extraordinary privileges, and made a solemn pledge that her children should be freed at the age of twenty-one years” (Kerrison, Jefferson’s Daughters, Chapter 4).
[31] Kamen, Status in Classical Athens, 55–61.
[32] Maya Angelou, "Still I Rise," stanza 1. Source: The Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise, accessed 19 April 2025.
-
Angelou, Maya. “Still I Rise.” The Poetry Foundation. Accessed 19 April 2025. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/46446/still-i-rise.
Cartledge, Paul. “Status, legal and social, Greek.” Oxford Classical Dictionary. Fifth edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016. Online edition accessed 22 February 2025.
Crenshaw, Kimberlé W. “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics.”The University of Chicago Legal Forum139 (1989): 139–167.
Derbew, Sarah. UntanglingBlackness in Greek Antiquity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2022.
Gordon-Reed, Annette. Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controversy. Charlottesville, VA: University Press of Virginia, 1997.
Heliodorus. TheAethiopica. Edited and translated by members of The Athenian Society. Athens: The Athenian Society, 1897. Accessed 19 April 2025. Available at https://archive.org/details/theaethiopicaheliodorusgreengok/mode/2up.
Homer. Odyssey, Volume II: Books 13-24. Translated by A. T. Murray. Revised by George E. Dimock. Loeb Classical Library 105. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919.
Jefferson, Thomas. Notes on the State of Virginia. Edited by William Peden. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1982.
Kamen, Deborah. Status in Classical Athens. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013.
Kaufman, Jay S. “Race and Science.” Pp. 67–82 in A Cultural History of Race: In Antiquity. Edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey. Vol. 1 of A Cultural History of Race. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021.
Kennedy, Rebecca Futo. Immigrant Women in Athens: Gender, Ethnicity, and Citizenship in the Classical City. New York: Routledge, 2014.
Kerrison, Catherine. Jefferson’s Daughters: Three Sisters, White and Black, in a Young America. New York: Penguin Random House, 2018.
“The Life of Sally Hemings.” Researched and written by scholars at Monticello. Accessed 19 April 2025. https://www.monticello.org/sallyhemings/.
Lye, Suzanne. “Gender and Ethnicity in Heliodorus’ Aithiopika.” Classical World 109, no. 2 (2016): 235–262.
McCoskey, Denise. “Race before ‘Whiteness’: Studying Identity in Ptolemaic Egypt,” Critical Sociology 28 (2002): 13–39.
Murray, Jackie. “A Critical Race Studies Approach: Race and Racecraft in Apollonius's Argonautica.” Pp. 15–29 in The Epic World, edited by Pamela Lothspeich. London: Routledge, 2023.
———. “Epic Racecraft and the Race of Heroes.” Pp. 258–273, in The Cambridge Companion to Ancient Greek Epic. Edited by Emma Greensmith. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024.
——— “Race and Sexuality: Racecraft in the Odyssey,” in A Cultural History of Race, Volume 1 In Antiquity, edited by Denise Eileen McCoskey, 137–156. London: Bloomsbury, 2021.
“No, the BBC is not ‘blackwashing’ Troy: Fall of a City.” RadioTimes. 24 February 2018. Accessed 29 June 2025. https://www.radiotimes.com/tv/drama/troy-fall-of-a-city-blackwashing-casting-black-actors-greek-myth/.
Podell, Leslie. “Compare the Two Speeches.” The Sojourner Truth Project. Accessed July 14, 2025. https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-speeches.
Robbins, Gay. Women in Ancient Egypt. London: British Museum Press, 1993.
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Cover Image
In this scene from Homer’s Iliad, Chryseis’ father kneels before Agamemnon attempting to ransom her. Earlier in the war, the Trojan woman had been taken prisoner and given to the Mycenaean king as a sex slave. Images like this remind us that race in the ancient Mediterranean operated differently. Dr. Jackie Murray explains in this episode that race had much more to do with power differential, violence, and alienable humanity. Women were especially vulnerable.
Image Attribution
Chryses attempting to ransom his daughter Chryseis from Agamemnon. Side A of an Apulian red-figure volute-crater (vase), ca. 360–350 BCE, found in Taranto, Italy. Currently in the Louvre. Public domain photo.
Women Who Went Before is written, produced, and edited by Rebekah Haigh and Emily Chesley. Music is composed and produced by Moses Sun.
Sponsored by the Center for Culture, Society, and Religion, the Program in Judaic Studies, and the Stanley J. Seeger Center for Hellenic Studies at Princeton University
Views expressed on the podcast are solely those of the individuals, and do not represent Princeton University.