Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece

Acknowledgments

Acknowledgments My main goal in writing this book has been to argue for deeper connections between work and poetics in different genres of ancient Greek texts and to highlight some of the channels through which oral discourse shaped and transformed ancient daily experience and the way it is refracted in our sources. I am grateful to a number of people who helped me formulate many of the ideas expressed in this book and the institutions that embraced my project. Richard Martin patiently read and provided constructive feedback on numerous versions of this book, as well as related work of mine, from the earliest version of my dissertation until now. His criticism and belief in my work sustained me in many ways. He helped me find my own voice even when I thought there was nothing more to say. Josiah Ober was the first to direct me to the topic of the neglected yet arguably ubiquitous lore of work songs and often rerouted my thinking while generously reading earlier drafts. He has enriched my thinking in numerous ways, and he has helped me look for hidden processes and ask questions about their recording. I have relied on and cherished their lifelong mentoring , always an exemplum for me to follow. I benefited from the comments of colleagues who offered insightful suggestions for improvement in several areas. Greg Nagy read an earlier version of this book; I thank him for his criticism and his perceptive encouragement, as he provided me with several anthropological comparanda, a fount to draw from. Anton Bierl kindly read an earlier draft and offered detailed and substantive comments. David Konstan offered criticism that helped me solidify my methodological approach. Laura McClure and Ruth Scodel made astute comments based on their rigorous reading in the final phase of this work. They made me question earlier premises and turned my attention to details of my argumentation . Melissa Mueller, Jenny Richardson, Nicholas Richardson, and Angeliki Tzanetou discussed and read individual chapters and helped me formulate some of the ideas. Dom Bailey offered his insights and helped me revise several chapters. x Ack nowledgments His incisive comments, livened by a most memorable and eclectic British humor , saved me from several mishaps. Dimitri Gondicas eagerly helped with the modern Greek tradition and has been a constant source of inspiration. My focus on children’s songs and lore benefited from Seth Lerer’s work and his reading of my draft on the tortoise game. Eleni Hasaki, Nassos Papalexandrou, and Andreas Vlachopoulos were always there to inform me with archaeological references. I owe a lot to the corazón of Vicki Ruiz, former dean of humanities at UC Irvine, for her support and for her own intellectual interest in female workers and the poetics of work. Reading her work has helped me find my identity. I was fortunate to have a colleague who, in a different dimension of time, I think of as Socrates’s best disciple: Zina Giannopoulou, always inquisitive, insistently searching for true meanings, helped me find myself in various moments of this project and others. I owe more to our dialogues than I can possibly acknowledge here. In the long gestational period, several people read parts of this work or offered advice and creative suggestions in our discussions, with an intellectual generosity that has meant more to me than they may realize: Paolo Asso, Antonis Augustakis, Ewen Bowie, Jan Bremmer, Joy Connolly, Lisa H. Cooper, Leslie English, Douglas Frame, David Frankfurter, Mary and Jerry Gutenschwager, Karen Hersch, Michael Herzfeld, Vayos Liapis, Margie Miles, Robin Mitchell-Boyask, Reviel Netz, Yannis Papadogiannakis, Maryline Parca, Anastasia-Erasmia Peponi, Andrej and Ivana Petrovic, Piero Pucci, Daniel Richter, Gonda Van Steen, and Froma Zeitlin. I received generous support from the Department of Classics and the Program in Hellenic Studies at Princeton University early on, and a Mellon Foundation Humanities Fellowship from Stanford University. At my home institution, UC Irvine, students enlarged my thinking and asked some of the most intelligent questions. They helped me shape my vision of antiquity. The most pleasant task in writing this book was the one that lies at the foundation of my thinking: I interviewed several people and recorded hundreds of folk songs (primarily threshing songs) in the region of Thessaly in Greece and in southern Italy. Although this work is not at the forefront of this book and lies in its invisible structure, it made me think in more depth about the practices that I have been looking for in textual evidence...