https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1103 Numéros fr jeu., 16 juin 2022 10:25:54 +0200 jeu., 16 juin 2022 10:25:54 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1103 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1104 This essay looks at rape in Greek tragedy through the lens of several moments of feminist theorizing and activism about rape. Starting with a study of second and third wave feminist approaches, it analyzes those plays that seem closest to modern ideas of rape (non‑consensual sexual contact) – Aeschylus ‘Suppliants, Euripides’ Ion and Hippolytos, as well as the Trojan War plays, Trojan Women and Andromache. It shows that in each case there is ambiguity between rape and marriage. In the end, it asks the question of how should we read and teach these texts? The ambiguous discourse supports the notion that the plays, like epic, are part of the normalization of rape (that is, establishing a rape culture), but if read with care, we can avoid reproducing that effect for ourselves and our students. jeu., 16 juin 2022 11:20:16 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1104 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1111 This article analyzes the strategic representation of an elegiac mistress (puella), Gallus’ Lycoris, and her putative inspiration, the freedwoman and mime‑actress Volumnia Cytheris, across a number of Latin literary genres, both verse (elegy, bucolic, epigram) and prose (political invective, informal epistles, inscriptions). It argues that the investigation of ancient literary and material evidence together can illuminate our understanding of ancient attitudes to women, in this case to the figure of a Greek courtesan in late republican Rome, and enrich our knowledge of women’s lived experience in Roman antiquity. lun., 20 juin 2022 09:58:50 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1111 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1117 Feminist reading of the classics requires a difficult negotiation between the struggle to be heard and the struggle to avoid appropriation. The aim of this paper is to explore some few words of Virgil, especially those reacting to the mother of Euryalus’ reaction to her son’s death, and those of his readers through the ages, as a paradigm case of a wide theoretical and philosophical issue in feminist literary criticism. The fundamental question asked in this paper is whether feminist readers of the classics should concentrate on listening to differentiated female voices or on arguing for some form of what we might metaphorically call “equal rights” among the protagonists of ancient literature. lun., 20 juin 2022 10:08:50 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1117 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1121 This discussion examines literary depictions of several Roman women who shared a name, and presumably membership in the same aristocratic family, with the Augustan elegist Sulpicia: by Livy in 39.8-10, in his account of the Bacchanalian conspiracy in 186 BCE; by Valerius Maximus, in an episode dated to 43/42 BCE that is also related by Appian at BC 4.39; and by Valerius Maximus again at 8.15.12, in an episode dated to the third century BCE that is also related in part by the elder Pliny in NH 7.120, and treated by Ovid at Fasti 2.157-160. It considers how these scenarios featuring these other Sulpiciae, mostly by authors with a moralizing message, help to contextualize the eleven Sulpicia elegies and their later Roman reception. It also considers why Ovid, who seems to have known Sulpicia and her work, never refers to a contemporary female elegist of this name. lun., 20 juin 2022 10:33:55 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1121 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1124 Aux livres 3 et 4 des Métamorphoses, Ovide raconte la fondation de Thèbes par Cadmus et les histoires de ses descendants sous la forme d’un cycle dont la construction narrative témoigne de l’influence des pratiques mythographiques en même temps que de sa lecture d’Œdipe-Roi et des Bacchantes. La thématique qu’il propose est focalisée sur la sexualité, le désir et le plaisir des femmes en tant qu’objets de la curiosité des hommes, susceptibles de les conduire à des violences, tentatives de transgressions et punitions. Le choix de cette perspective est à rattacher au rôle qu’a alors la littérature en tant qu’espace de réflexions sur tout ce qui fait débat dans la culture romaine et particulièrement sur une question dont les Lois Juliennes attestent aussi l’actualité : celle de la morale et la sexualité. Le cycle thébain des Métamorphoses est, plus largement, à verser au dossier de l’histoire des rapports de sexe en Occident, où la contribution d’Ovide a été fondamentale. lun., 20 juin 2022 10:45:13 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1124 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1133 Tacitus kennt Geschlecht nicht als Kategorie der historischen Analyse. Und dennoch schreibt sich Geschlecht in seinen Text ein und bestimmt sein historisches Urteil: In der Darstellung männlicher und weiblicher Figuren verwendet Tacitus die Konzepte von Weiblichkeit und Männlichkeit des Geschlechtsdiskurses seiner Zeit. Er konstruiert seine Figuren, indem er ihnen bestimmte Konzepte aus dem breiten Spektrum der Bilder, mit denen die Kultur des Prinzipats die Vorstellungen von Geschlecht verbindet, zuordnet. Damit lassen sich aus den taciteischen Texten zwar normative Konzepte von Männlichkeit und Weiblichkeit erkennen, aber kein Idealtypus einer römischen Frau oder eines römischen Mannes. Aus der Untersuchung der Darstellung des Todes der zwei Kaiser Otho und Vitellius in den Historien, der biographischen Konstruktion im Agricola und der Ausgestaltung von weiblichen und männlichen Figuren in den Annalen entwickelt der Beitrag die These, dass die im Text dargestellten Figuren Ergebnis einer narrativen Performanz sind, in der Geschlechtsvorstellungen mit gesellschaftlichen, politischen und situativen Positionen verknüpft werden. Und er postuliert, dass diese intersektionale narrative Performanz auf eine Performanz von Geschlecht in der gesellschaftlichen Realität verweist. lun., 20 juin 2022 10:53:11 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1133 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1155 The letter-book of Marcus Cornelius Fronto shows a quadrilateral relationship involving not only Fronto and the young Marcus Aurelius but Fronto’s wife Cratia and Marcus’s mother Domitia Lucilla. Perhaps, as Marcia commemorated Cremutius Cordus, so it was Fronto and Cratia’s daughter Cratia who put the letter-book together, centered as it is on family and emotions rather than on politics. Fronto and Marcus inhabit a kind of closet, in which Domitia Lucilla serves as what Eve Sedgwick called «the omnipotent, unknowing mother»; she dwells in the margins of the letters, especially in the closings, and she and Cratia both feature in letters where Marcus and Fronto express their feelings for each other. The letters also attest to a friendship between the two women, although it seems to have ended when the relationship between Marcus and Fronto cooled off. Could this relationship fall into Judith Bennett’s category of the «lesbian-like»? The historical evidence for the lives of these two women is reconsidered, and the now standard account of Cratia is challenged on several points: her name might as well be «Gratia» as «Cratia», nor does either necessarily mean she was «Greek», much less from a prominent family from Ephesus; the possible date of her marriage to Fronto and her age at marriage must be revised; the Sorrento inscription might be hers rather than her daughter’s, nor need it be funerary, nor need it have come from Fronto’s house, nor does it prove the location of Fronto’s house. The salient fact of Cratia’s life is her loss of five children in infancy; she may well have come from the circle of families tied to Fronto’s in North Africa, and her family may have been connected to that of Domitia Lucilla through the brick industry. Domitia Lucilla, much better known, contrasts with her (much younger?) friend on all points – power, success in childbearing, family – but had her own problems within the house of the Caesars. lun., 20 juin 2022 11:16:27 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1155 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1168 This paper offers a close reading of the ancient Greek and Roman texts which Rachel Maines (The Technology of Orgasm, 1999) used as evidence for therapeutic masturbation in the ancient world, and thus presented as precursors for the vibrator. Examining the evidence of the Hippocratic corpus, Celsus, Soranus and Galen, it shows that the lines of transmission between the ancient sources, and in their later reception, are far more complex than her work suggests, and thus challenges her claims for the normality of massage to orgasm in Western medicine. While Maines herself has subsequently insisted that she proposed a ‘hypothesis’ rather than a ‘fact’, in the popular reception of her book this distinction has been almost entirely overlooked, leading to an obscuring of female agency – both as patients, and as healers. lun., 20 juin 2022 11:28:24 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1168 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1177 Perpetua’s Passio, a prison diary or narrative, tells the remarkable story of a young Roman Christian woman awaiting martyrdom in the arena in Carthage. This article focuses on the gender ambiguities and fluctuations in the Passio, both in language and in narrative structure. With a particular focus on Perpetua’s fourth vision, in which she “becomes male” (masculus), the article explores the gendered language of the text, the implications of Perpetua’s brief transformation into a male body, the different gender choices made by Perpetua and by her editor, and the role that gender plays as a structuring narratological device. lun., 20 juin 2022 11:47:26 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1177