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Browsing by Author "Romney, Jessica"

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    Ordering empire: visions of imperial space in Herodotus’ Histories
    (2024) Romney, Jessica; de Oliveira Silva, Maria Aparecida; de Fátima Silva, Maria
    In Aeschylus’ Persians, the Messenger’s account of the battle of Salamis presents a chaotic list of the subject peoples of the Persian King: over approximately thirty lines (302‑330), the Messenger crisscrosses the expanse of the Persian Empire, doubling back and pivoting, to create the sense of a conglomerate behemoth of an army confronting the small alliance of Greek poleis. Not a generation later, Herodotus would take on the same task of detailing the peoples subject to the Great King of Persia, but unlike Aeschylus, the historian proceeds in an orderly fashion, moving from the Persian centre outwards in, sweeping from north to east, south to west, in ever increasing distance from the Persian heartland (Hdt. 7.61‑100). This progression through the ethnē in Xerxes’ army and fleet functions similarly to the description of the map of the oikoumenē given in 4.36‑45, where Herodotus likewise begins at a Persian centre to move north and east, then south and west, in his description of the continents of Asia and Libya. The map of the oikoumenē in book 4 destablizes a Helleno‑centric geographic consciousness centred on Delphi; the detailing of the ethnē serving under Xerxes fills the geographical void that, on earlier Greek maps, hugged the edges of the oikoumenē. The result of these geographical exercises is that Herodotus presents his audience with an image of imperial space that is vast and overwhelming, in this case due to the level of detail and the orderly progression from point to point. By combining this effect with the new geographical consciousness that the Histories offers, Herodotus turns the idea and space of the Persian Empire into a thōma, something wondrous and terrible to behold in its totality.
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    Political identity and space in Alcaeus 130b
    (2019) Romney, Jessica
    In a lament on the rustic life of an exile, the persona loquens of Alcaeus 130b progresses through three spaces: the polis, esxatiai, and a temenos. The first is explicitly political, but the persona cannot occupy its territory; the latter two, where the persona can dwell, are apolitical while the temenos in particular is gendered in line with the Lesbian women who hold their beauty contests within its borders. In this article I argue that fragment 130b organizes the spaces through which the persona travels so that it can reject the apolitical life of the esxatiai and temenos, allowing the persona loquens to maintain his political identity as a citizen man even while in exile. The poem accomplishes this by connecting the persona to several social groups and then by removing him from them; this push and pull of exile and return creates an in-between space where the persona's social identity is safe from the dangers of exile. In the context of the male-dominated symposion and the political stasis afflicting archaic Mytilene, the persona's ability to maintain his political identity even in exile presents a powerful argument to Alcaeus's audience(s) that regardless of any setbacks, including exile, they too should maintain their identity as politically efficacious citizens and continue any stasis that they have begun.
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    Women in an ancient Greek history course: from cameo to part of the whole
    (2021) Romney, Jessica
    Current pedagogical models for ancient history/civilization courses treat women as a "tourist topic" (Mohanty 2003) as they are slotted into the course with little to no connection to the course of Greek/Roman history. Despite any intentions to diversify survey courses, tourist topics reinforce unquestioned binaries of power whereby (citizen) men act in ancient history while women (and others) are objects acted upon. This paper reviews current pedagogical models for ancient survey courses alongside C. T. Mohanty's Tourist model of teaching before turning to strategies for integrating non-hegemonic groups into survey courses in a consistent fashion.