Elaine Fantham

Elaine Fantham was a classical scholar and teacher whose research ranged across Roman comedy, rhetoric, Latin epic, religion, and the social history of Roman women. She joined Princeton in 1986 as Giger Professor of Latin and later chaired its Classics department. Women in the Classical World, published by Oxford University Press in 1994, was written with Helene Foley, Natalie Kampen, Sarah Pomeroy, and H. Alan Shapiro. Its full subtitle, Image and Text, describes the collaborative method: literary and legal sources appear beside vase painting, sculpture, architecture, coins, inscriptions, and funerary art. The book traces women's lives and representations from archaic Greece through late antiquity while distinguishing evidence from different periods and regions. Fantham's chapters helped make Roman women's lived experience central to classical study and brought her expertise in Latin literature into an interdisciplinary project. Women in the Classical World remains an important meeting point between her expertise in Latin literature and a broader interdisciplinary history built by five scholars.