11/06/2025

The Colloquium for Ancient Rhetoric Works-in-Progress Series

The Colloquium for Ancient Rhetoric invites you to a fall session of the virtual Works-in-Progress series, on Thursday, November 13 at 12:00-1:00 PM (EST). 

Dr. Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld (University of Pittsburgh) is sharing their chapter on “Living in the Enslaver’s House: Gendered Slaving Strategies in Lysias’s On the Murder of Eratosthenes.” Dr. Hilary Lehmann (Knox College) will offer a response preceding open discussion. 

• Abstract: On the Murder of Eratosthenes (Lysias 1) depicts an Athenian marital couple in crisis – a wife caught in the act of adultery and a husband accused of that adulterer’s murder. In the background, however, is an enslaved woman forced to act as an instrument and messenger in the conflict between her male and female enslavers. This paper uses Lysias 1 as a case study for exploring the social dynamics between male citizen enslavers, their wives, and the enslaved domestic laborers living in the house. Drawing upon recent scholarship on female slave-owners in the ancient and modern worlds (Eckhart 2008, Harper 2017, Gaca 2021, Jones-Rogers 2019), this paper argues that Lysias 1 attests to a phenomenon of “double mastery”: the divided but complementary authority of citizen husbands and wives over the same enslaved laborers. With close readings of key passages from the speech alongside Xenophon’s Oikonomikos, the paper compares Euphiletos’s violent and sexually coercive interactions with the enslaved therapaina and his wife’s different but equally violent style of slave management. Unlike her husband, Euphiletos’s wife successfully weaponizes her direct oversight of this enslaved woman’s daily routine to coerce the therapaina into facilitating the citizen woman’s affair. Overall, I demonstrate that “double mastery” profoundly impacted the lived experiences of domestic laborers forced to work in their enslavers’ households.   

If you would like to attend this event, please register for the Zoom at this link.

If you would like to receive updates on CAR, please join our Google group at this link.

Registered participants will receive a confirmation with a link to the PDF chapter. Please do not hesitate to contact us if you have any questions or challenges with registration.

Sincerely,

Jackie Arthur-Montagne (U. Virginia) and Giulia Maltagliati (Cambridge)