https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/281 Entrées d’index fr 0 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/735 This essay provides a reassessment of the view that the young wives of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are modeled on hetaeras. It begins by examining a parallel debate in contemporary Attic red-figure vase paintings of women at home to show that displays of female sexuality are not incompatible with marriageable maidens and free citizen wives. Aristophanes similarly situates his female characters within a domestic context as the site of sexual and social legitimacy. A detailed analysis of clothing, footwear and grooming practices deployed in the sex strike demonstrates that they represent the standard accoutrements of housewives rather than of hetaeras. Their domesticated eroticism, while enabling the male spectators a voyeuristic glimpse of other men’s wives, reinforces their procreative function as mothers and producers of future Athenian citizens. The importance of sexual desire within marriage for the production of legitimate offspring is dramatically reinforced by the onstage presence of the boy child in the thwarted sexual encounter of Myrrhine and Cinesias. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata fits with a pattern of heightened interest in women and domestic ideology at the end of the fifth century BCE. The centrality of marriage in the play may represent a response to the erosion of Pericles' citizenship law in response to the depletion of Athenian men in the waning years of the Peloponnesian war. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:11:54 +0200 mer., 18 oct. 2023 11:45:15 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/735 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/257 The article focuses on a Roman portrait of a young woman in the Metropolitan Museum of Art from the early second century C.E. The marble head, though striking for its beauty and high quality of craftsmanship, cannot be identified. It is also a fragment from a statue without an archaeological context or findspot. How do we approach a sculpture about which so much cannot be known? A visual analysis of related portraits, along with a discussion of the tradition of epitaphs, literary accounts, and artefacts of girls’ lives, such as dolls, suggest how maidens were commemorated and valued in Rome. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:36:16 +0200 jeu., 23 mars 2023 15:34:07 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/257 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