7pm EDT
Josh Beer
Via Zoom – Please contact Gail Larose at glarose0@gmail.com for Zoom link details.

Pericles’ citizenship law of 451-450 BC and women in 5th century BC Athens – problems of interpretation

From c.1970 onwards, with the rise of modern feminism, much interest has been shown in the lives of women in ancient democratic Athens. But modern problems of understanding go back at least to the French Revolution at the end of the 18th century. Beginning with a discussion of the Periclean Citizenship Law which affected the citizenship status of both women and their children, Josh Beer will try to disentangle some of the central issues of interpretation.

At the end of the talk, Gail Larose will deliver part of a speech by Medea in Euripides’ tragedy of the same name to illustrate what a great Athenian playwright has a woman say about a woman’s lot in life.

Josh Beer is an adjunct professor at Carleton University, after having taught there for 50 years. On his retirement he founded and is currently a co-chair of OSFAS. His book Sophocles and the Tragedy of Athenian Democracy was published in 2004.  Since 2020 he has been publishing annually  academic articles on the tragedies of the Greek playwrights Sophocles and Euripides. For the past three years he has written articles on tragedy for a more general audience in the magazine Argo, published by the Hellenic Society in the UK. These have included ‘A Pot of Surprises’ and ‘Plagued by Love’.  For over twelve years, he directed students of the College of Humanities in dramatic readings of Greek tragedy which were highly praised, not least by His Excellency Eleftherios Anghelopoulos, the former Greek Ambassador to Canada.