https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/319 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1485 The Nux depicts the complaints of a walnut tree, pelted with stones and beaten with rods when she bears fruit. Discussion of the Nux, however, has largely centred on its authorship. Recognising its deep engagement with Ovid’s work, this article sets aside the question of authorship and takes a critical ecofeminist approach to explore the poem’s concerns with fertility, nature, the female, and violence. It argues that the walnut tree is feminised and humanised so that her complaints that fertility brings pain and her criticism of trees who sabotage their fertility to be beautiful have meaning for Roman women, and in particular for those women living under the Principate. It aims to demonstrate that the Nux figures the domination of nature and the oppression of women as outcomes of the same harmful ideology. jeu., 04 janv. 2024 11:20:41 +0100 mer., 17 janv. 2024 09:13:42 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1485 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/685 This paper explores evidence for female authorship terminology in extant poetic texts written in Latin by women. It begins by first considering male authorship in Latin literature, before moving on to three case studies of women’s writing: an elegy by Sulpicia, an anonymous graffito from Pompeii, and the Virgilian cento of Proba. By foregrounding the ‘subversive mask’ of female poetic speech in Rome, the paper uncovers a subtextual rhetoric of authorship where female poets both respond to and subvert male authorship paradigms. It thus argues for the importance of analyzing authorship terminology in Latin literature through the lens of gender. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:09:44 +0200 ven., 08 déc. 2023 10:09:38 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/685 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1054 Aristotle is more straightforward than his interpreters. A number of scholars have championed an Aristotle guided by pure inductive observation to reach a theory of the inferiority of women and slaves. This view, however, is contrary both to Aristotle’s expressed method and his stated purpose. He begins from the phainomena and his explicit goal is to defend them and the advantages of master and husband. The current power structure is founded on nature and is and must be logically and genetically superior to the arguments he makes in its favor. In general, scholars have explicated either the argument about slaves or that about women. However, each is inescapably fettered to the other. The unquestioned inferiority of slaves is the analogical basis for the hierarchy of male over female (e.g. 1252a31). The unquestioned natural inferiority of women the basis of the proof of the existence of the natural slave (54b12-16). Aristotle reveals the uncertain heart of his argument in a series of unanswered rhetorical questions (59b23-37). There are three parts to his defense. The philosophical move is to reject Plato’s unity of virtue. Mere difference in quantity (Plato’s solution) provides contingent not absolute rule. The teleological move argues from different virtues to different essences for women and slaves. Aristotle creates separate entities to be ruled. The rhetorical move is to blend analogies based on the “natural” difference between male and female with the hierarchical difference between master and slave. Thus we reach the master trope of Western philosophy: man is spirit/culture, woman is matter/nature. A series of misreadings of Aristotle’s purposes and arguments reveal how successful he has been in anchoring ideology in a politicized nature. Philosophy is not a purely intellectual exercise; it is also a call to moral action. We must ask and answer Aristotle’s rhetorical questions. jeu., 16 juin 2022 09:12:17 +0200 ven., 13 oct. 2023 10:43:53 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1054 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 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/1121 This discussion examines literary depictions of several Roman women who shared a name, and presumably membership in the same aristocratic family, with the Augustan elegist Sulpicia: by Livy in 39.8-10, in his account of the Bacchanalian conspiracy in 186 BCE; by Valerius Maximus, in an episode dated to 43/42 BCE that is also related by Appian at BC 4.39; and by Valerius Maximus again at 8.15.12, in an episode dated to the third century BCE that is also related in part by the elder Pliny in NH 7.120, and treated by Ovid at Fasti 2.157-160. It considers how these scenarios featuring these other Sulpiciae, mostly by authors with a moralizing message, help to contextualize the eleven Sulpicia elegies and their later Roman reception. It also considers why Ovid, who seems to have known Sulpicia and her work, never refers to a contemporary female elegist of this name. lun., 20 juin 2022 10:33:55 +0200 mer., 08 mars 2023 10:25:25 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1121