Comments on: Sometimes It’s the Little Things

By: The Electra Slide - The Pursuit of Harpyness

The Electra Slide - The Pursuit of Harpyness — Mon, 29 Jun 2009 15:01:36 +0000

[...] have been a wee bit wary of my lit professor since the first week of summer classes, when he falsely asserted that everyone was allowed to vote in ancient Athens (except that the womenfolk weren’t!). [...]

By: Jessica

Jessica — Sun, 07 Jun 2009 22:31:20 +0000

Add me to the list of people who are totally shocked that a person could become a professor teaching about ancient Greece without knowing this.

By: An Update on Those “Little Things” - The Pursuit of Harpyness

An Update on Those “Little Things” - The Pursuit of Harpyness — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 18:30:39 +0000

[...] this week I wrote about my lit professor’s astounding faux pas about what constituted that so-called universal franchise in ancient Athens. If you missed the [...]

By: LJ

LJ — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 17:33:57 +0000

I’m a Classics major, and the thought of anyone teaching anything related to Classics not knowing that women (and slaves, and metics) couldn’t vote in Athens completely boggles my mind. But teaching Athenian tragedy in particular…I really don’t think it can be studied or understood without at least a passing acknowledgment of the social and political context. Medea, for example, has issues about social and political rights of women and foreigners all over it (or Electra, or as above, the Lysistrata, or, or, or…).

Please, please include the fact he didn’t know this in your course evaluation.

By: aspiringexpatriate

aspiringexpatriate — Thu, 04 Jun 2009 11:45:12 +0000

The American founders–and most political theorists of the Enlightenment–actually saw Athens as a *cautionary* example; “democracy” was a dirty word until the 19th century, associated with mob rule and demagogues. They preferred Rome and its elite-dominated “mixed constitution.”

That is funny, as even after the US opened the floor to non-landowners, it followed the Roman system of getting the rabble drunk so they’d vote for you.

By: SarahMC

SarahMC — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:28:06 +0000

Endora, he is possibly the dorkiest person I’ve ever come across. It’s basically three hours of being embarassed on his behalf.

OK, so we have this guy over here, right? And then this fella, the y, is over here… Now, would we call him a function?

By: Magistra

Magistra — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 20:10:26 +0000

This man is a moron. The hot new trend in classics is to study things from the perspective of the marginalized, particularly women. Any classicist worth his salt knows that Greek and Roman society was dripping with racism and misogyny. We don’t study the classics because we value this, but because we are in awe of the influence these cultures have had upon our own, both positive and negative. Analyses of gender roles and cultural interactions permeate the current scholarship. How this guy could manage to become a professor without being aware of this baffles me. He must live in a really deep hole.

By: sarah.of.a.lesser.god

sarah.of.a.lesser.god — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:58:53 +0000

@Endora: And when X ends up intersecting Y, you have a gay porn story.

By: Endora

Endora — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:10:50 +0000

@SarahMC: he uses the male pronoun to refer to COORDINATES??? How utterly odd…

By: Endora

Endora — Wed, 03 Jun 2009 19:08:49 +0000

I find it shocking that he, as a classics professor, didn’t know that. And if I’m not mistaken, there were a lot of men (slaves) who couldn’t vote either.

Women are still shockingly marginalized in a lot of academic work, it drives me crazy.