Ultra Veritatem Muliebris Vis: Women Classicists at and beyond Washington University in the Dawning of Post-Bellum America

Abstract: To contextualize the all-female American production of Plautus’ Rudens at Washington University in St. Louis in 1884 by the university’s Ladies’ Literary Society, my discussion considers the topic of Plautus’ comedy—freeborn Greeks threatened with enslavement—and the historical circumstances of its first staging in ca. 200 BCE; the historical circumstances surrounding the production, in a former slave state, less than two decades after the US Civil War; and, to illuminate the milieu in which the female students revised and performed Plautus’ text, the lives and professional contributions of five prominent American women classicists educated between 1865 and 1917.