https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/398 Numéros fr mar., 14 juin 2022 08:41:37 +0200 mar., 14 juin 2022 08:41:37 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/398 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/399 The famous dedication by Xenokrateia to the river god Kephisos and other divinities not far from the city of Athens in c. 400 BC (NM 2756; IG I3 987; IG II2 4547) is a rare example of a sizeable, public ego-document by a citizen woman. Close reading of the iconography of the votive relief, of the dedicatory epigram and the inscribed offering list, and comparison with other private foundations allow reconstructing Xenokrateia’s sense of her identity and the religious, intellectual and economic competences she must have had to bring this dedication about. As a literate, self-confident and pious Athenian citizen, mother, widow and heiress, she spent on estimation several hundred drachmas on her dedication, pace the law quoted at Is. 10.10. The plot of land involved was either her own property or a place already sacred to Kephisos and the Nymphs, to which she added her own dedication. For the latter possibility, a double relief dedicated by Kephisodotos to the hero Echelos and other deities (NM 1783) provides additional evidence. Xenokrateia’s dedication is exceptional for the detailed, qualitative analysis it allows, but it is not exceptional in quantitative terms: numerous dedications by women show them using similar competences. This approach to the evidence, initiated in recent scholarship, may open new windows on women’s agency in classical Athens. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:42:24 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/399 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/413 In this paper, I am interested by Plato’s three waves in Republic Book V, in which Socrates makes three daring proposals for his ideal city: first, inclusion of women in the guardian class and their education (Pl. Resp. 453e-454e); second, abolition of private property and family (Pl. Resp. 457b-c); lastly, that philosophers should be kings and kings, philosophers (Pl. Resp. 472c-e). I explore the unexploited potential and probe the significance of the liquid imagery by applying Deleuzian paradigms to Book V of Plato’s Republic, in order to shed new light on the ancient text, and, thereby, understand these waves to be truly sensuous and material. I intervene in a scholarly debate known as “Plato’s feminism” and identify the feminine principle of becoming and flux, exemplified by the fluid and cathartic presence of the waves. I argue that the presence of the sea, which opens up into feminine space and attracts bodies to itself, mediates the “utopian experience” and sets into motion what I identity to be a cinematic movement, a gendered movement. The sea creates the utopian aesthetic, which is also a cinematic one, because this medium, both fluid and sensuous, invites the reader into its landscape and links up a series of images into the narrative. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:49:27 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/413 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/421 L’article s’intéresse au rôle de la matrice dans les théories de la génération des médecins grecs d’époque classique principalement. L’utérus est parfois représenté chez eux avec une fonction active. On trouve même des éloges de la force d’achèvement et de perfectionnement propre à la matrice. Dans la médecine postérieure à celle d’Hippocrate, on la rencontre aussi étroitement liée aux prodiges qu’accomplit la nature. Quel sens donner à des discours de ce type ? L’admiration parfois visible pour la conception embryonnaire n’engage pas pour autant une réhabilitation du principe féminin de la génération, mais relève plutôt d’une tendance à l’éloge de la nature. En outre ces discours mineurs cohabitent sans contradiction apparente, dans la médecine hippocratique, avec la violence des traitements utérins qui sont rapportés. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:49:40 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/421 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/433 Glubit is one of the more infamous words in the Catullan corpus and for good reason. The verb represents a rare (at least in extant literature) piece of Roman sexual slang and it delivers the punch line for an insult poem belonging to the Lesbia cycle. Scholarship on glubere in Catullus has tended to focus on its vulgarity and which (if any) specific sex act the word denotes. Here, I revisit the word to interpret the implications of its agricultural origins. My own concern is not over which particular sex act the verb signifies but rather for the polysemic meanings imported by the slang metaphor’s literal definition. I do not aim to challenge or supplant the efforts of others to define glubere but instead to suggest an additional layer of meaning to its usage. I offer that the verb glubit introduces the specter of violence into the poem and serves to intensify and invert dynamics of power, portraying Lesbia as an overly active, dominant, and dangerous sexual being while compromising the masculinity of the Roman men she services. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:49:56 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/433 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 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/442 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 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/448 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/454 L’articolo offre alcune riflessioni sul rapporto tra potere, genere ed eros nella poesia imperiale romana: interpretando testi elegiaci ed epici di Ovidio e di Stazio, indaga il linguaggio della politica e del potere, il suo uso in relazione al genere e il suo rapporto con idee, linguaggio ed immagini, e codificazioni letterarie dell’amore. Si analizza in primo luogo una declinazione al femminile del linguaggio dell’ambizione politica nelle Epistulae ex Ponto di Ovidio, nella Consolatio ad Helviam matrem di Seneca e nella Tebaide di Stazio (il modello di una donna ambitiosa pro – a favore di – un uomo amato, opposto al paradigma della donna ambitiosa per – per mezzo di – un congiunto); in secondo luogo, l’amore del potere attribuito alla dea dell’amore nella rappresentazione ovidiana di una Venere imperialista nelle Metamorfosi; infine, la matrice elegiaca del desiderio maschile di potere come desiderio erotico nella Tebaide, dove il ritratto platonico del tiranno come schiavo si trasforma nel servitium amoris del tiranno. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:51:15 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/454 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/479 This paper examines Suetonius’ representation of Tiberius and sex on Capri at Vita Tiberii 43-44. Many of the features of Suetonius’ narrative move through normative elements of Roman sex culture: brothels and prostitutes, sex manuals, erotic paintings in domestic spaces, pederasty and elite garden spaces. But each element is reconstituted as something dehumanizing and dangerous in Suetonius’ telling. Tiberius constructs a radical sexuality, in which the closer an individual orbits the emperor, the more Roman notions of sex become deconstructed, atomized and reassembled in ways that expose a destructive and dangerous pathology. Nearly every structuring category that might delineate and demarcate Roman sexuality is distorted, obscured and blurred. Bodies are controlled and transformed. New functions and constructions of human embodiment are conceived. States of being become iterative replications of images imprinted in paint or on stone. Children become “bracelet workers”, little fishes or hybrid, hooved deities or woodland goddesses. Normative stages and transitions of human development are obliterated and replaced by an assemblage of activity that orbits the sexual organs of the emperor. Tiberius transforms traditional Roman sex culture and assembles an admixture of extreme and complex performances of a particularly disruptive and corrosive sexuality that confounds categories and frameworks. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:51:51 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/479 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/486 Identifying an allusion to classical Greco-Roman poetry in a monologue (or prosopopoeia) of a cowherd by the fourth century Latin poet, Paulinus of Nola (c. 18.276-80), this article explains the emergence of the category of labor as a response to a process of Christian radicalization from the representation of erotic paroxysm in Sappho (fr. 31: “I see nothing in my eyes”), through the classical Latin poets Catullus (c. 51) and Horace (c. 1.13, 22). In view of Paulinus’ renunciation of wealth and repurposing of elite culture for the poor, his reception of Sappho suggests that ancient men of property could recognize the perspectives of their subordinates and resist their own political interests through poetic production, and specifically metapoetics, as a result of the ambiguity of embodiment and sensation posited in the modern philosophy of phenomenology and commonalities of gender and class explicated in post/modern social theory. Attributing the combination of these factors to a “deviation” in “focalization” (D. Fowler) and a “doubling” of “consciousness” (J. Winkler) in the producer of the poem (Paulinus), the article uses the Marxist-feminist concept of standpoint to develop a phenomenological approach to literary history, which promises to recover, not the experience of the poor and marginal (or “subaltern”) in ancient literature, but the form of their experience, as an “imputation of consciousness” (G. Lukács), which may well be a distinctive mark of literature. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:52:49 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/486