https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1591 Numéros fr ven., 25 avril 2025 11:47:01 +0200 ven., 28 nov. 2025 15:19:30 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1591 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1592 Anne Lister (1791-1840), diarist and Yorkshire gentry woman, is often dubbed “the first modern lesbian.” She was also an avid reader of the Classics, despite being denied a formal education in Greek and Latin due to her gender. This article explores Lister’s reading of one Classical author in particular, the 1st c. CE Latin poet Martial. Drawing on her diaries and other private papers, I argue that she sought out and read Martial’s poems “queerly,” for the purposes of self-edification, self-pleasure, flirtation, and even seduction. ven., 25 avril 2025 11:50:50 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1592 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1595 Este trabajo parte de la lectura de dos textos literarios del período imperial, un pasaje de la Historia Natural, de Plinio el Viejo, y una de las epístolas de su sobrino, que invitan a reflexionar acerca de la utilidad de la danza (así como de los llamados dance studies) a la hora de entender el no tan monolítico papel cultural de las mujeres ancianas en la antigua Roma. A partir de una carta-obituario en honor a una provecta matrona promotora de espectáculos de pantomima (epist. 7.24) y una breve anécdota sobre las actuaciones de una bailarina a la edad de 104 años (HN 7.158), pretendo demostrar cómo ambos personajes desafían —al tiempo que también refuerzan— los estereotipos y dicotomías más habituales para la caracterización literaria de las mujeres mayores en Roma. Todo ello a pesar de las enormes diferencias que presentan una y otra en cuanto a su contexto cultural y posición social, su grado de vinculación con la danza escénica y, por supuesto, los condicionamientos impuestos por el medio narrativo.Desde una perspectiva más amplia, los factores interseccionales que se desprenden de estos dos estudios de caso se hacen enormemente significativos para explorar realidades como estas, es decir, las de unas mujeres que, transitando por los márgenes, nos llevan a cuestionar ideas preconcebidas acerca de la agencia, la memoria y el estatus de los cuerpos en la cultura de la danza en Roma. mar., 02 sept. 2025 11:54:42 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1595 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1604 This article argues both that Plautus made use of a comic stock scene featuring all-female space to deepen the characterisation of his meretrices figures, and that Seneca used paracomedy to deploy these conventions and heighten the tragedy in the Troades. Using the concept of the haunted stage laid out by Marvin Carlson, I argue that stagecraft becomes an important intertheatrical practice that offers a new way into thinking about the relationship between Seneca and his comic predecessors. Examples from the Cistellaria and Asinaria illustrate how a stock scene featuring single-gendered theatrical space created a specific set of behavioural conventions and expectations that Plautus exploits in the same way as he does comic stock characters. Interpreting scene four of Seneca’s Troades through a paracomic lens reveals how it is haunted by this spatial template in a way which sharpens the hovering spectre of enslavement awaiting the royal women in Greece. mar., 02 sept. 2025 17:00:33 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1604 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1611 This article examines the architectural remains and ornaments of monumental fountains, wells, and water networks commissioned by non-imperial women in the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, with a focus on contextualizing a particularly unusual well in Buthrotum, which is dedicated by a woman named Junia Rufina and without reference to any family members. This comparison of hydraulic benefactions by women across communities highlights the range of ways that women funded these expensive amenities, from independent sponsorship to joint dedications with husbands and cities to sharing certain aspects of the hydraulic network with a range of family members. A unifying theme across these benefactions is that the dedicatory inscriptions consistently highlight the woman’s civic or religious roles, and that the architectural and decorative remains of the monuments showcase the woman as an important member of her family and community. I suggest that these women used their permanent gifts of potable water not only to commemorate ephemeral roles as priestesses but also to underscore their lifelong responsibilities as caretakers of both their families and communities. mer., 24 sept. 2025 16:14:17 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1611 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1624 In both the Metamorphoses and Fasti Ovid narrates the deification of Ino and her son Melicertes. In the Metamorphoses they become the Greek deities Leucothoe and Palaemon, while in the Fasti they also are identified with the Roman gods Mater Matuta and Portunus. Reading the two Ino passages together brings out the different focus of the Fasti on Roman religious aetiology, but also brings out the poems’ shared interest in deification, and specifically female deification. The two episodes are linked narratologically with the projected divinization of the empress Livia. mar., 14 oct. 2025 10:54:46 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1624 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1631 The elegiac love affair and mistress portrayed by the first century BCE Roman poet Propertius was a more important influence on the sixteenth century poet-courtesan Veronica Franco than has previously been credited. Scholarship has tended to focus on Franco’s reception of Ovid’s works, particularly the Heroides, but Propertius provides an important forerunner for Franco’s speaking subject in his main female character, Cynthia. Although she is an elegiac beloved, Cynthia’s speeches consistently undermine the elegiac worldview, especially the characterization of the lover as suffering and faithful and the beloved as fickle and cruel. Closer attention to Franco’s use of Propertius, through the example of two of her poems, Capitoli 17 and 20, provides a richer understanding of the intertextual relationship between them. At the same time, Franco’s work can add to our understanding of Propertius, as she is one of the earliest readers of Propertius to take his disruption of gender politics and fidelity seriously. ven., 31 oct. 2025 12:13:19 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1631 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1637 In response to ongoing debates about Plato’s view of women, this paper focuses on the source of ambiguities that lead different readers to opposite conclusions. Dealing with the Republic and several passages from the Critias and the Laws, it emphasizes that all the passages that imply some sort of women’s inferiority assume one and only reason, namely that women are weaker than men. I argue that, pace other interpretations, this claim repeatedly points to physical weakness, although some passages, especially in the Laws, moralize this weakness precisely in order to reaffirm male superiority. To disentangle the resulting contradictions in Plato’s position, we must consider Plato’s use of two interconnected kinds of argumentation: the analogy between human procreation and animal breeding; and the craft model of human virtue. At the same time, if these argumentative tools co-determine Plato’s conclusions, a strictly theoretical analysis cannot fully explain those passages that describe the situation of women in both the real and imagined cities from a strikingly male perspective. Besides the narrower interpretation of female “weakness”, the paper also offers a more speculative suggestion that Plato sometimes sees this weakness as a specific reflection of what he describes, more generally, as “weakness of human nature”. mer., 12 nov. 2025 15:43:52 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1637