Mary Beard, “Who Was Cleopatra’s Daughter? The perils of searching for feminist heroes in antiquity,” The Atlantic 331 no. 5 (June, 2023), 75:
I hope that I am as keen as [Jane]Draycott that classics as a discipline should find ways of engaging with diverse communities and also being enriched by them. And she is admirably judicious on the controversial question of whether Cleopatra, mother or daughter, was in our terms Black (answer: We don’t know). But I am suspicious in general of finding exemplary figures for our own times in the distant past. After all, one of the things that we now rightly find problematic about the 19th-century study of classics was that elite white men did claim to see themselves in the ancient world, and they presented antiquity in their own image, not as a strange and different place. It doesn’t help us understand either the ancient world or ourselves to supplant one set of such role models with another. More than that, to hold up as an ideal for today’s young people a woman about whom we know next to nothing is to promote fantasy over fact.
Historians should certainly try to uncover the forgotten women of classical antiquity, and to spot those whose strength has been overlooked. Sometimes that has been done with great success. The ancient account, for instance, of the martyrdom of Perpetua – a young Christian woman put to death in North Africa in the early third century A.D. – has been given new life in the past few decades, after centuries of being scarcely noticed by historians. The neglect was extraordinary, given that Perpetua left us her own words, preserved in her prison diaries, describing her trial and imprisonment: a rare example of a woman’s voice surviving from the Roman empire.
But understanding how women in the ancient world were silenced is equally important. What social mechanisms and cultural assumptions help explain why those who may have claimed some power were overlooked – or, alternatively, demonized?
The Amateur Exegete 