Dartmouth Events

A Maiden's Consent: Romance and Sexual Ethics at the Dawn of Christianity

Professor Tim Whitmarsh, University of Cambridge, presents the Classics Department's annual Benefactors' Lecture.

Thursday, May 7, 2015
4:00pm – 5:30pm
Room 003, Rockefeller Center
Intended Audience(s): Public
Categories: Lectures & Seminars

Professor Tim Whitmarsh, University of Cambridge, joined the Faculty as Leventis Professor of Greek Culture in October 2014, after holding professorial posts in Oxford and Exeter.   He works on all areas of Greek literature and culture, specialising particularly in the world of Greeks under the Roman Empire. He has also written a book on atheism in the ancient world, which will be out with Faber and Faber in 2015.

For moderns, the issue of female consent in sexual relationships is paramount. Most critics have insisted that Greek and Roman legislators and moralists, by contrast, were largely uninterested in women’s perspectives; that the only consent that mattered was between guardian males. In the later Roman Empire, however, evidence begins to emerge in the artistic, poetic, narrative and legal records that suggests the picture was becoming more complex. At the dawn of Christianity, women’s consent was indeed beginning to matter - but not for the reasons that we might have expected.

For more information, contact:
Classics Department
603-646-3394

Events are free and open to the public unless otherwise noted.