Aspects of Ancient History

The ancient world was a difficult place to live, and without aid services, anyone unable or unwilling to adapt and provide for themselves their families would not survive long. This was specifically the case of strangers, of newcomers in a new city. The flight of refugees to another area in the Classical Period appears to have been an organized event, with a coherent plan for departure from their home on the part of the refugees and prior agreement of acceptance on the part of the receiving city. A new full, revised version as an additional analysis for the study of ancient history and marginalization.

The crucial task of this book has been to lay the theoretical foundations for new reading approaches to the ancient novels across world literature. New strategies are used for integrating the study of the ancient novels with the literature of slavery. This book has focused much more on the cultural aspects of reception rather than the idiosyncratic ones, and thus it has prioritized the exploration of the literary milieu of Roman Africa and the East and our own position as readers of ancient texts who have inherited the legacy of American slavery. As readers of the ancient novel and products of the Anglo-American cultural experience, we are in multiple dialogs with the past when we approach these texts. Though their word may be garbled, the dead are speaking whether we listen or not. A new full, revised version as an additional analysis for the study of ancient history and marginalization.

Women, both real and mythical, should progress through certain stages of liminality in their lives in the Ancient Classical period. These stages of varying liminality and distance from status society are, interestingly, incorporated within the structures of status society as regularized and necessary periods within it. In classical Athenian society, women normatively shed their blood as they move through stages, from childhood to menarche to marriage to motherhood. Some parts of women's lives, particularly the biological, transcend the purely social. However, in many ways the female body itself is a social construct and is manipulated by society in order that women should reproduce in a socially acceptable format. There are social expectations of a woman's role that combine the purely biological with the purely social: procreation within the marriage situation with access to social status. Women in myth often forestall these bleeding and the transitions they indicate. These failures to move through the normatively conceptualized rites of passage ensure that the woman maintains her social virginity. A new full, revised version as an additional analysis for the study of ancient history and marginalization.