Gender is a linguistic as well as a cultural construct. This volume, born from a EuGeStA conference, addresses the relationship between language ​​and gender in Greek and Roman culture interrogating texts from archaic epic to late antiquity. How do literary codifications reflect, recreate, or question the idea of​​ gender? How is this idea configured in the system of literary genres, in its evolution, and in the development of traditional languages?

The eighteen papers deal with women writers (Sapphus, Sulpicia) and books ‘for women’ (Ars amatoria 3), male philosophers’ discourse on women’s role, the terminology of the arts and crafts, female speech in Attic tragedy, the language of iambus and forensic oratory; they analyse female voices in Catullus and Seneca, gendered imagery in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, medical language in Petronius, absent presences in bucolic discourse, male and female lament in the Epicedion Drusi, code-switching and gender in Martial, the role of the feminised vates in the Achilleid and of the eunuch in Claudian.

Studying the relation between gender and languages in the ancient world, this book takes part in a contemporary debate, and is of interest to scholars and students of Classics, Gender Studies, and History.