https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1038 Numéros fr mer., 15 juin 2022 11:38:50 +0200 mer., 15 juin 2022 11:38:50 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1038 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1039 La publication récente d’un papyrus recueilli à Cologne a permis de compléter un poème de Sappho connu par quelques vers seulement. Portant sur la vieillesse, ce poème évoque l’exemple « mythique » de l’amour éprouvé par Aurore pour le jeune Phaon, qu’elle enlève. Du point de vue du genre entendu comme système, dans une culture particulière, des identités de sexe et des relations fondées sur les représentations de sexe à partir du donné biologique, ce poème est doublement intéressant : d’une part parce qu’il recourt à une langue poétique qui n’est pas spécifiquement marquée du point de vue féminin ; d’autre part en ce que que la relation que Sappho établit avec son un groupe de jeunes filles, destinataires du poème, n’est pas homologue à l’amour d’Eôs pour le jeune homme. Ce qui semble compter c’est le dépassement des maux de l’âge par la lumière de la beauté chantée dans une poésie à portée rituelle. mer., 15 juin 2022 12:01:46 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1039 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1047 This is a comparison of Agathon’s role, in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae and Plato’s Symposium. Firstly, I examine the platonic version, and the unique, idiosyncratic part Plato gives Agathon to play, as a host to all, and a hostage to Socrates. Secondly, I discuss his interaction with Inlaw, the ordinary Athenian, in Aristophanes’ play. Such parallel reading allows us not only to refine our outlook on the dramatic construction both of the “talking party” and of the comic performance, but also to capture how really poikilos, for better or worse, that urban love could be. Finally, I analyze the significance of this juxtaposition, as an intertext. Plato, I argue, produces a proper palinode of Agathon, as an erotikos and a mimetic poet. By taking seriously the face-to-face between Agathon and Agathon, two dissonant, and yet compatible, variations on one man, our picture of Athenian erotic culture emerges sharper, and in greater detail. jeu., 16 juin 2022 08:31:02 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1047 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1054 Aristotle is more straightforward than his interpreters. A number of scholars have championed an Aristotle guided by pure inductive observation to reach a theory of the inferiority of women and slaves. This view, however, is contrary both to Aristotle’s expressed method and his stated purpose. He begins from the phainomena and his explicit goal is to defend them and the advantages of master and husband. The current power structure is founded on nature and is and must be logically and genetically superior to the arguments he makes in its favor. In general, scholars have explicated either the argument about slaves or that about women. However, each is inescapably fettered to the other. The unquestioned inferiority of slaves is the analogical basis for the hierarchy of male over female (e.g. 1252a31). The unquestioned natural inferiority of women the basis of the proof of the existence of the natural slave (54b12-16). Aristotle reveals the uncertain heart of his argument in a series of unanswered rhetorical questions (59b23-37). There are three parts to his defense. The philosophical move is to reject Plato’s unity of virtue. Mere difference in quantity (Plato’s solution) provides contingent not absolute rule. The teleological move argues from different virtues to different essences for women and slaves. Aristotle creates separate entities to be ruled. The rhetorical move is to blend analogies based on the “natural” difference between male and female with the hierarchical difference between master and slave. Thus we reach the master trope of Western philosophy: man is spirit/culture, woman is matter/nature. A series of misreadings of Aristotle’s purposes and arguments reveal how successful he has been in anchoring ideology in a politicized nature. Philosophy is not a purely intellectual exercise; it is also a call to moral action. We must ask and answer Aristotle’s rhetorical questions. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:12:17 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1054 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1058 While in Virgil’s Aeneid mothers are evoked sporadically only to be marginalized by the epic’s forward narrative thrust, in his Metamorphoses Ovid pushes mothers centre stage, as subjects and protagonists of their own extended narratives, privileging rather than repressing their voices. This article surveys some of the interpretive and thematic possibilities of placing the maternal at the heart of a reading of Ovid’s epic. It argues that Ovid exploits the metamorphic potential of maternity, its conflation of the boundaries of the body, inside and outside, self and other, and its association with paradoxical roles and extreme passions, to explore and redefine aesthetics and personal relations in the Augustan era. The intense psychic struggles and emotional monologues of Ovid’s mothers, which are linked to motherhood as physical and bodily process, become key elements in this poem’s unprecedented exploration of the contradictory and multiple nature of subjectivity itself. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:23:07 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1058 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1069 This essay examines the exemplary force of the women in Livy’s first book. A close reading of the Tarpeia and Horatia episodes reveals that Livy does not permit his reader to come to any firm conclusion about the moral lesson these stories offer. On the contrary: the historian emphasizes the indeterminacy of these episodes in two ways. First, Livy positions Tarpeia and Horatia both as Roman daughters and as potential allies to the foreign men who claim their allegiance; they thus are simultaneously insiders and outsiders and assist Rome’s assimilation of others while also threatening Rome’s integrity. Second, Livy mentions multiple and conflicting versions of the stories themselves, leaving it to the reader to choose and construct a narrative. Like Tarpeia and Horatia, Livy’s readers are faced with a fragmented and fragmentary picture that resists exemplary categorization as good/imitable or bad/inimitable. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:31:45 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1069 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1079 This paper discusses the meaning and function of female kinship titles in the Latin West, focusing on the title of mother of a city or a collegium, on the basis of a small corpus of Latin inscriptions recording mothers of cities and collegia in the cities of – mainly central – Italy and a few cities in the Balkan and Danubian regions in the second and third centuries AD. It is argued that the title of mater implies a lasting and hierarchical relationship between a locally prominent woman of wealth and the city or collegium she fostered. Like the title mater patriae (or mater castrorum et senatus et patriae), which was granted to some women of the imperial family in the second and third centuries, it is characterized both by authority and loving care. Thus, metaphorical motherhood indicated a position of female authority in male institutions, cast in socially acceptable terms. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:40:20 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1079 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1085 This paper investigates the special dramatic role of the combined presence of Tiresias and his daughter, Manto, in Seneca’s Oedipus. An overview of Manto’s relatively rare appearance in both Greek and Latin literature is followed by a detailed examination of Tiresias’ mythological past. Tiresias’ bisexuality, an emblematic trait of his myth, which is intrinsically related to his prophetic power, receives special attention. Learned Seneca proves to be well informed of Tiresias’ bisexuality, possibly through Ovid. The Roman dramatist exploits the father-daughter pair of Tiresias and Manto not only as an on-stage pre-figuration of Oedipus’ future (blind Oedipus guided by his daughter Antigone), but more importantly as a bold dramatic visualization of Tiresias’ own bisexuality. My discussion is rounded off with a section on the multiple connections between Oedipus and Tiresias. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:49:32 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1085 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1092 Cet article se propose de voir dans l’elegidarion capillorum d’Eumolpe, qui fait l’éloge de la chevelure perdue d’Encolpe et de Giton, une attaque contre les afféteries stylistiques des poètes néo-callimachéens dont Ovide était, à l’époque impériale, considéré comme le modèle. Pour cela, le texte du Satiricon s’appuie sur une métaphore genrée de la critique littéraire qui caractérise comme efféminé un style inutilement alambiqué, avec l’image de la coiffure, des bouclettes et des frisottis d’une écriture trop précieuse. Dans cette «  petite élégie capillaire  » qui vise conjointement ses deux modèles «  génériques  », l’élégie d’Amours I, 14 et la Coma Berenices, nous observerons le jeu intertextuel complexe qui se noue par rapport à la poésie ovidienne, à laquelle Eumolpe emprunte non seulement l’utilisation métapoétique du thème de la coiffure en Am. I, 14, mais aussi la distinction genrée entre coiffure virile et coiffure féminine (ou efféminée) prônée par le magister amoris dans l’Art d’Aimer  : en superposant ces deux hypotextes, l’elegidarion capillorum retourne le modèle ovidien contre lui-même, en faisant de la chevelure, qui figurait chez Ovide une poétique callimachéenne érudite et raffinée, la métaphore de l’écriture artificielle et creuse des compositions néo-alexandrines. jeu., 16 juin 2022 10:01:29 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1092 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1093 This article contends that there is a debate in postwar France about the nature of freedom. It argues that an important nexus of that debate can be seen by comparing Marguerite Yourcenar’s Mémoires d’Hadrien with the work of her contemporary, Simone de Beauvoir. It makes the supplementary argument that one can shine a more focused light on this dialogue by observing the way in which Yourcenar’s position anticipates the later arguments of Michel Foucault, Both Yourcenar and Foucault turn to antiquity as a way of strengthening their argument and relativizing the construction of the modern normative subject. jeu., 16 juin 2022 10:21:09 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1093