https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/234 Entrées d’index fr 0 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 jeu., 25 juin 2026 12:10:08 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1604 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 ven., 08 déc. 2023 12:43:00 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1058 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/881 This paper offers a reassessment of the character of Livia in Ovid’s poetry, in particular with regard to her repeated appearances over the course of the exile epistles. Whereas a majority of previous scholars have identified Ovid’s Livia as being excessively prominent and treated with an unwarranted level of panegyric, this paper uses other primary sources of information from the period to demonstrate that Ovid’s Livia is grounded in the discourse of the period and Ovid’s Livia is an appropriate reflection of her evolving status in the late Augustan and early Tiberian periods. mar., 14 juin 2022 11:49:57 +0200 ven., 08 déc. 2023 11:51:09 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/881 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/442 In Lucretius’ thoroughgoing materialism, hearing, like sight or taste, is tactile. Atomic material must issue from a source, move through space, and enter a receptacle in order for these sense perceptions to operate. I argue that Lucretius uses sexual language and erotic figures to depict the mechanics of these atomic processes. However, what is perhaps more remarkable is the way in which Lucretius manipulates rather straightforward sexual imagery into a scandalous proposition: Mars, Memmius, and the largely male, Roman audience are turned into effeminized repositories of semen-like verse and philosophy. The source of this verbalized material is Lucretius, while ears and mouths become receptacles. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:50:32 +0200 jeu., 07 déc. 2023 16:26:07 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/442 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/356 Once upon a time, the body had no sex. This is the story that has long been told about the history of the sexed body in “the West” under the influence of Thomas Laqueur’s book Making Sex: Body and Gender from the Greeks to Freud, published in 1990. It has continued to be told across disciplines, despite incisive critiques of Laqueur’s use of evidence and historical analysis, most recently in Helen King’s The One-Sex Body on Trial (2013). We need to let go of this story once and for all. This article again marshals the historical evidence against Laqueur’s story alongside a critique of that story’s historiographical tropes, a critique indebted to two decades of work in queer theory and the history of sexuality on logics of alterity and affinity in narratives about the premodern past. Laqueur’s account, it is argued, relies on the mutually reinforcing support of two binaries: sex vs. gender and modern vs. premodern. By interrogating each of these binaries, the article proposes new directions in the history of the sexed body within the many traditions of knowledge and practice in dialogue with learned Greek medical texts. It is first shown that, freed from a later twentieth-century opposition of sex and gender, the evidence from the ancient Greek medical and philosophical tradition yields views of the sexed body that often bring together a commitment to sexual difference as physically embodied with a commitment to therapeutic and normative techniques of gender designed to correct for the waywardness of matter. These views, moreover, are many and diverse. The second half of the essay aims to disrupt the monolithic categories of “premodern” and “modern” by emphasizing the diasporic and non-linear nature of the reception of Greek medical texts and the complications of what Ahmed Ragab evocatively calls the “sexscape” that they produce; the importance of situating accounts of “the Greeks” within the dynamics of various historical moments, especially in the early modern period, so pivotal for Laqueur’s story; and the persistent influence of a Foucault-influenced narrative of the premodern past’s radical alterity on the history of the sexed body. The article argues for reading the complexity of the premodern past together with the complexity of our relation to that past. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:39:40 +0200 mar., 17 oct. 2023 13:31:53 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/356 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/840 Current scholarship typically views the ancient Greek prostitute/courtesan figure as an artificially manipulated, sexualized body motivated by material profit. By examining fragments of Middle Comedy and their echoes in post-classical antiquity, this article proposes an alternative view of courtesans and prostitutes as professionals of emotional labor. Through narrative analysis, I show that the Greek comic portrayal of courtesans is multifaceted and not sufficiently illuminated by discussions of their subjectivity, aesthetic modifications, and greed but also extends to the realm of their emotions. Intersecting gender and humor theories with the concept of Emotional Labor (Hochschild 1983), I then argue that these figures can be seen to comically modify their appearance and behavior in order to reflect contemporary ideological and cultural standards of female sexual conduct. Viewing humor as a communicative tool for social hierarchies consequently facilitates a more complex analysis of attitudes towards the commercialization of bodies and emotions in Greek literature and culture. mar., 14 juin 2022 10:33:03 +0200 lun., 16 oct. 2023 11:41:44 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/840 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/226 May the bones of my patron rest well; he wanted me to be a man among men, (Patrono meo ossa bene quiescant, qui me hominem inter homines voluit esse), Petron. Sat. 39.4. These are the words of the famous freedman Trimalchio, expressing that he is now able to enjoy the good life and that he is part of society, he is “a man among men”. But what does this “a man among men” mean and why was it important for a freedman to be seen as a man? In the Greco-Roman world the slave was seen as a boy and manumission was perceived as a maturity process, where the manumitted slave could be seen as coming of age. This article examines how age can be used as a means to study how Roman male freedmen were positioned in relation to the ideal Roman masculinity and how this positioning can be seen as an expression of (gender) identity and status. The article addresses these questions by doing a critical close reading of a sample of Late Republican and Early Imperial Roman textual, iconographic and epigraphic sources, applying masculinity theory and drawing on modern conceptions and constructions of masculinity. As a key concept to discuss the material, Connell’s concept “hegemonic masculinity”, as an ideal and normative masculinity, is used. The article provides conclusions on why age was important for Roman freedmen. It is also pointed out that, as a phenomenon, Roman freedmen are interesting when studying intersections of age and gender, because they illustrate the way age can be perceived as a social category. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:35:31 +0200 ven., 24 mars 2023 10:47:28 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/226 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/308 This paper reconsiders the narrative of his own death delivered by the shade of Deiphobus in Aeneid 6 (509-530). This episode is usually compared to Agamemnon’s encounter with Odysseus in the first nekuia of the Odyssey, but I argue that the underworld meeting of Agamemnon and Amphimedon in the second nekuia (Odyssey 24.121-190) is also an important intertextual model. Deiphobus and Amphimedon both accuse a woman – Helen, Penelope – of conspiring with their sexual rivals – Menelaus, Odysseus – to bring about their deaths. Yet comparison of Amphimedon’s and Deiphobus’ narratives highlights the misleading and self-aggrandizing character of their rhetoric and raises questions about how women are represented by male narrators and by the epic tradition more broadly. This paper suggests that Deiphobus’ narrative works together with other competing and contradictory views of Helen within the Aeneid in order to fracture the epic tradition’s univocal representation of her – and women more generally – as casus belli. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:38:22 +0200 jeu., 23 mars 2023 09:48:34 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/308 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/885 The Letters of Pliny the Younger are notable both for their portraits of outstanding women and for their thoughtful treatment of exemplarity. This article explores Pliny’s innovative portrayal in his Letters of women as moral exempla within his new framework of exemplarity, and the challenge he poses to traditional Roman gender stereotyping. Among the contemporaries whom Pliny and his friends admire and emulate there are many female exempla as well as male, and in his letters he systematically plays down the difference between the sexes at the level of abstract virtue (if not at the level of social role). Exemplary men and women are represented as sharing the same moral qualities and as having the same rhetorical force. Indeed Pliny deliberately subverts the traditional gender tropes found in earlier authors in order to draw attention to his new emphasis on the moral equivalence of the sexes. Pliny’s treatment of female exempla substantially develops possibilities already evident in earlier epistolary works, sets him apart from his friend Tacitus and his teacher Quintilian, and may have been influential on subsequent authors, and even perhaps in the lives of Roman men and women. mar., 14 juin 2022 11:58:40 +0200 ven., 17 mars 2023 09:22:55 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/885 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/448 Recent innovative readings have shown that Horace’s Epodes is an experimental contribution to the iambic tradition using impotence as a structuring trope. In the light of those analyses, one corollary problem demanding re-examination is the Augustan poet’s relationship to his “suppressed precursor” Catullus, who in the Epodes as in the Odes goes unacknowledged although his presence is constantly felt. When composing iambics Horace apparently employs Catullus’ unorthodox generic practices as foils. Contextually distorted echoes may therefore call attention to neoteric conventions from which Horace dissociates himself. This paper tests that premise by attempting to clarify one hitherto unexplained detail of Epode 12: its mention of a go-between named “Lesbia”, who in the reported words of the speaker’s mistress is blamed for making the match. It argues that the epode mocks Cornelius Gallus’ and perhaps Propertius’ elegiac constructs of masculinity by tracing them back, through a network of allusions, to their Catullan origins and so exposing the absurdity at their core. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:50:59 +0200 jeu., 16 mars 2023 10:23:08 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/448