Slave Theater in the Roman Republic: Plautus and Popular Comedy

Amy Richlin is Professor of Classics at the University of California, Los Angeles. She is a path-breaking historian of Roman sexuality. From the time of her first book, The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor (1983), she has searched for the subcultures of muted groups and outgroups outside the literary canon. Her many articles include 'Hijacking the Palladion', 'Not before Homosexuality', and 'Pliny's Brassiere'; in 'Boy-Love and Child-Love' (2015), rethinking Roman pederasty, she argued that the Greco-Roman slave system enabled child sex slavery. Her book Marcus Aurelius in Love (2006) translated the love letters of Cornelius Fronto and his student, the young future emperor. An outspoken feminist, she edited Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (1992) and co-edited Feminist Theory and the Classics (1993); her essays on Roman women's history are collected in Arguments with Silence (2014). Since 2000, she has been working on Roman comedy, and addressed the need to teach about ancient Orientalism in Rome and the Mysterious Orient: Three Plays by Plautus (2005).