 Labour-Power Machines 
This paper focuses on two social relations of appropriation that characterize Classical Athens –chattel slavery and male domination of free female citizens – through the analytical lens provided by Colette Guillaumin. Ancient sources are scrutinized in order to show the early literary depiction of the “feminine race” and the subsequent medical and philosophical encoding of women and slaves as “naturally” inferior. The examination of these two forms of social appropriation confirms the logical/chronological relationship highlighted by Guillaumin between slavery and sexage on the one hand, and ideological justification through the “idea of nature” on the other. Materialist feminism proves therefore to be a fruitful conceptual tool for antiquity studies, as it detects the material dimension of social relations in contrast to the main trends in contemporary historiography of classical antiquity, which tend instead to emphasize the symbolic and identitarian dimensions and to overstate ancient women’s agency.