Katherine Backler

Right now I’m writing a book about women in Classical Athens: how they built up social networks as their lives progressed and changed; how they influenced family and social structure in Athens; how they interacted with the people they kept in slavery in their homes; how paid work affected their relationships; how they developed and described their friendships. The book gives us a sense of the richness of women’s social lives in Classical Athens and shows how women shaped the society in which they lived.

I’m also working on a new edition in English of the speeches of the ancient Greek speechwriter Lysias. Lysias was a second-generation immigrant in Athens. His speeches, written for the law-courts, give us a vivid picture of the fraught and complex social world of Athens after its defeat in the Peloponnesian War and two political coups.

I’m particularly interested in the lives and perspectives of girls and women in ancient Greece. I’ve recently written an article on how Athenians thought about family relationships, particularly relationships between sisters in childhood and adulthood, and relationships between enslaved people. This year I’m starting a research project on female authorship of inscriptions (texts carved in stone or metal). Did women who paid for inscriptions come up with the texts themselves? If not, how much influence did they have over those texts? Do we have many more female authors from the ancient world than we realised?

I teach all the Greek history papers and one or two Roman history papers on the Classics course and the Ancient and Modern History course. I most enjoy teaching papers on Archaic and Classical Greece and on sexuality and gender in the ancient Mediterranean. I lecture for the Faculty of Classics on Aristophanes’ Political Comedy and on Thucydides and the West. I’ve recently supervised theses on sexual violence and ethnicity in Herodotus and on the status, sexualisation, and socio-political significance of hetairai (girlfriends? expensive prostitutes? sexual companions?) in fifth-century BC Athens.

My research, which sits between history and literature, has two related strands. First, I work to recover the perspectives and experiences of ancient women—and to reconsider how we might access those perspectives. Second, I work outwards from the study of individual relationships to re-examine larger-scale social structures.

I specialise in the social history of the Archaic and Classical Greek world, with a particular focus on women, kinship, and enslavement. My interest in how people from marginalised groups in the ancient Greek world described themselves means that I do a lot of work with epigraphy (texts carved in stone or metal).

Sisterhood, affection and enslavement in Hyperides’ Against Timandrus’, Classical Quarterly 72.2 (December 2022), 1-18.

Review of Allison Glazebrook, Sexual Labor in the Athenian Courts, for Rhetorica 41.2 (Spring 2023), 209-12.

Athena’s Sisters: Reclaiming the Women of Classical Athens (forthcoming with CUP).

Lysias: Speeches (Oxford World’s Classics), translated by Martin Hammond with an introduction and notes by Katherine Backler (forthcoming with OUP).