Edited by Elina Pyy
Rome, 2025.
PDF: Ancient rape cultures: sexual violence in the Greek, Roman, Jewish, and early Christian world
Introduction: Elina Pyy
Rape in Greek Culture and Thought
Suzanne Lynch, Rape Culture in Classical Athens 21
Sarah Brucia Breitenfeld, Taking Thratta’s Cherry: The Rape of Enslaved Domestic Laborers in
Aristophanes 47
Brian McPhee, Rape Normalization and Menandrian Apologetics in Callimachus’ Acontius and
Cydippe
Rape Narratives in Roman Literature
Simona Martorana, Medusa in Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Refracted Rapes
Ben Jerue, An Ancient Greek Custom? Reading the Rape of the Sabine Women in Dionysius of
Halicarnassus, Antiquitates Romanae 2, 30
Ash Finn, Sexual Violence and the So-called ‘Gains of Vengeance’ in Ancient Rome
Imperial Ideology and Colonial Discourses
Eleanor Newman, The Sexual Exploitation of African Males in Roman Material Culture
Antti Lampinen, Boudica’s Daughters: Conquest and Rape in the Ancient Roman Discourse
Francesca Bellei, Donna or domina? Manipulating Italia’s gender from ancient Rome to 19th-century Italian colonialism
Revolutions of Rape Culture in Late Antiquity
Judith Evans-Grubbs, Rape and the Christian Virgin: St. Thekla’s Power against Sexual Assault
Alexander Thies, For the Good of the Empire: A Wedding in Milan, Imperial Succession, and the
Creation of Ritualised Rape Culture in the Late Antique Court
Biblical Receptions
Louis Zweig, Listening for Dinah in Abelard’s Planctus and Other Latin Poems
Chris Greenough, Sexual Violence Against Men in the Bible
Ancient rape Cultures on the Contemporary Screen
Briana King, From Antiquity to Screen: Sexual Violence in Greco-Roman Art and its Modern
Representations in Caligula (1979) and Spartacus (2010-2013)
Elina Pyy, Ovid’s Pygmalion and Daphne Myths in 21st-Century Body Horror Film: Pedro
Almodóvar’s The Skin I Live In and Lim Woo-Seong’s Vegetarian
List of contributors
