Maybe it's Finals, maybe it's the Warriors poised on the brink of elimination from the NBA Playoffs, maybe it's just the change in the weather. Whatever it is, there is a weird feeling in the air today. The loud, obnoxious middle-schoolers on BART were louder, the homeless people talking to themselves are angrier, the drivers are more aggressive, and I feel my own hackles up higher than usual, my defenses thinner, my frustrations closer to the surface. It's been cloudy and windy all day, a gray formless layer of uncertain height and a cool wet wind off the Bay. I biked to the Downtown branch of the Berkeley Library and had to BART home after checking out too many books. Okay, time to face up to my last obligation to Hungarian: the dreaded final exam. Then I'll take my five academic credits and skedaddle, thank you very much.
I mentioned below that Prof. Diane Lipsett delivered a wonderful lecture on the conversation currently taking place between New Testament scholars, family historians, social archaeologists and the like. The title of this post is actually the title of en entire semester-long course taught by Prof. Lipsett, so for our, geez, ninety minute session she condensed her focus to Men, Women, and Children in Ancient Rome. With her permission, I am posting my notes from this lecture below, tweaked a little for readability. Prof. Lipsett is interested in studies of gender formation among non-elites as well as elites, those people about whom we know much less because they did not have the resources or clout to commemorate and study themselves, generally speaking. Roman households were much broader than we conceive of in modern terms, with a wide spectrum of people connected by family and employment living under one roof (the terms domus/eikos/ikea capture this idea of an indiscriminate household
Comments