https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/310 Entrées d’index fr 0 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/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