Feb 26: The Virgin in the Whorehouse: Fantasies of Enslavement in the Ancient Novel

Ancient fresco depicting a woman reclining beside a man on a bed, with worn colors.

Sproul 912

Carissa Chappell, PhD Candidate, Department of Classis, UCSB

“The Virgin in the Whorehouse: Fantasies of Enslavement in the Ancient Novel.”

The "virgin in the whorehouse" trope appears throughout the Ancient Greek novels: a free-born, chaste heroine is enslaved in a brothel and must devise a way to survive without compromising her virginity. These scenes are not just part of the novels’ erotic discourse, as scholars have argued. Rather, as this talk will demonstrate, they recreate enslavers’ fantasies of control and solidify the narrative structures of enslavement in the novels and the Roman Empire more broadly.

Event poster featuring a faded painting of a woman, with details on a lecture.