The Deltos Project

Highlighted Modules

Etruscan Women

By Tristen Alizée Leone

Inspired by scholarship that has often incorrectly assumed gender based on found grave goods in Etruria, this module on the Etruscans invites students to challenge their ideas of what archaeological evidence can tell us about lived experience of women in the ancient world.

Juvenal, Satire 6

By Chiara Sulprizio & Sarah H. Blake

Juvenal’s 6^th Satire is famous for its misogyny. In this module, we highlight key passages, suggest useful companion texts to pair with the Satire, and offer a set of discussion questions focusing on misogyny in the Imperial Roman context. A sample lecture and PowerPoint is included.

The Dowry in Comedy

By Lorelei Haave

What was the ancient Greco-Roman dowry, and how did it appear in representations of marriages? This module examines the dowry as well as the relationships between husbands and wives as characters in the comedy of Greece and Rome, particularly Menander and Plautus.

Homeric Hymn to Demeter

By Devon Harlow & Jody Valentine

This module centers the Homeric Hymn to Demeter as a literary text. We offer suggestions for how to draw on the Hymn for discussions about gender, family, and social practices in the archaic Greek world. We also share some possibilities for inviting students into imaginative engagement with the ritual context of the text.

The Amazons

By Jody Valentine

With hundreds of Greek pots and many textual references depicting the Amazons, yet with no direct or verifiable information available, surviving evidence for these famed ancient female warriors requires careful scrutiny and critical inquiry. This module presents an intersectional feminist approach that illuminates how misogyny and ethnic othering dovetail in ancient Greek visual and textual accounts of the Amazons.

About The Deltos Project

This website provides free, open source Modules for educators and scholars who teach and study gender and sexuality in the ancient Mediterranean. The site is a work in progress that aims to increase access and to support the development of ethical and inclusive methodologies. Please Explore Our Modules for a full list of published and forthcoming modules.

Modules include:

Topics (e.g., prostitution at Pompeii, Roman love elegy, Classical reception in Victorian literature)
Specific texts, objects, or sites (e.g., Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, the Cnidian Aphrodite, The Getty Villa)
Individual figures (e.g., Sappho, Cleopatra, Sulpicia)
Theoretical/pedagogical approaches (e.g., Critical Race Theory, trans theory, transformative pedagogy)

Each individual module may be incorporated into a larger course and taught by a non-expert. For example, the Juvenal, Satire 6 module could be taught as part of a course on comedy and satire. Soon, our library of Modules will be extensive enough to provide the building blocks for full courses. You don’t have to be a gender studies scholar to teach this material.

Deltos Project Modules are created collaboratively by diverse scholars in our growing community. We are actively working to expand the scope of the project geographically and chronologically. We welcome suggestions and submissions!

All Deltos Project materials are licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/