https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/252 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/247 The innovative character of Juno in Statius’ Thebaid seems to challenge and correct the previous portrayals of the goddess in Virgil’s Aeneid and Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The present article argues that Statius goes further in this challenge than has so far been recognised, by making both Juno’s ineffective speech and her speechlessness and inaction indicative of the gender imbalance that has long caused her suffering, and her vindictive features, in the epic literary tradition. Statius’ Thebaid casts Juno as a woman wounded from the very start of her existence, and suggests that it is precisely out of this feminine wound that both the goddess and the poem can achieve a productive reconciliation in the epic’s closure. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:36:01 +0200 jeu., 07 déc. 2023 16:22:51 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/247 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 jeu., 12 oct. 2023 16:19:54 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1117 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/975 The aim of this paper is to put to ancient texts of the Roman period a question about which they themselves are remarkably coy: what makes a good (or bad) husband, or what are the characteristics that we would expect to see in such a creature? I begin by warning the reader of the trap which awaits both ancient texts and modern commentators, which is that discussions of what makes a good husband very quickly slip into discussions of what makes a good wife, as if it were more the duty of a woman to be a good wife than it is of a man to be a good husband. Despite the efforts of ancient texts to keep the focus away from the question of what makes a good husband, I attempt to interrogate a number of texts on a number of related questions. I begin and end with a well-known moment in Virgil’s Aeneid, when Mercury uses the word uxorius to disparage Aeneas’ behaviour in directing building work in Dido’s Carthage. The messenger god clearly intends the adjective as an insult, but my wider investigations suggest that in doing so he is drawing on only one end of the range of meaning available in this word. When I return to Aeneas’ husbandly credentials at the end of the paper, I suggest that the kind of Roman reader who would sympathise with Mercury’s scornful twist to the term uxorius might in fact see in the coldly political future husband of Lavinia the “ideal Roman husband”. Other Roman readers, however, would also be able to find justification in their culture for a more positive reading of his earlier manifestations: the bereaved husband of Creusa, who went back into the destroyed Troy to search for the wife he had lost (it has to be admitted, carelessly, if not misogynistically), and the almost-husband of Dido, whom he almost-loved in an almost-perfect almost-marriage, until Mercury came and spoiled everything. That Roman reader, however, would have to face the fact of a strong value in Roman discourse which emphasises above all else control of the self and especially of the emotions. It is this need for control that can undermine other Roman values and stop them from showing through the texts as much they otherwise might. One such value, surprisingly, is for love and tenderness as part of what makes a good husband. An element in my paper, therefore, is to contribute towards a challenge to the common modern notion that ancient marriage has nothing to do with love. mar., 14 juin 2022 14:44:03 +0200 jeu., 23 févr. 2023 10:21:03 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/975