https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/504 Entrées d’index fr 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/499 In depicting scenes of youths in the company of a herm, the painters of Athenian sympotic pottery ostensibly portray a scene of daily life. Some, however, construct these scenes for viewing through an erotic lens, drawing on the fact that the two key iconographic elements of the stone herm, the bearded male head and the erect phallus, recall the iconography of the ἐραστής, the older male lover in traditional Greek pederasty. Representing herms in the company of young males thus allows the artists to play on the iconographic schemes of pederastic courtship while implicating the symposiast’s gaze, which becomes equated with the herm’s. The fact that the erotic interplay in the scenes takes place between a living ἐρώμενος (the desirable boy) and inanimate ἐραστής (the herm) is also significant, for it consciously inverts another interplay of person and object: the adult male symposiast who views and handles the sympotic vase. In the latter relationship, the roles are reversed, for now the lover is alive, and the vase, with its painted youth, is the object of the erotic gaze. In light of this allusive power, the herm serves as one of a series of signs through which vase painters show an awareness of their own power to manipulate desire for the symposiasts who engage with their work. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:55:46 +0200 jeu., 27 août 2026 09:36:27 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/499 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/846 This article invites a reading of Cydippe’s medical case in the third book of Callimachus’ Aetia (fr.75.10-19) in light of Hippocratic gynecology. In the first part, I discuss in detail Cydippe’s three illnesses, focusing on their rich medical allusions and illustrating how they all create a coherent medical record. While on the face of it Cydippe’s clinical symptoms resemble descriptions of lovesickness in Hellenistic poetry, it is precisely her absence of expressed desire, as I argue, that makes her sick in Callimachus, and thus differentiates her from other suffering female figures such as Medea in Apollonius Rhodius or Simaetha in Theocritus. In the second part, I move on to examine Callimachus’ problematisation of desire as an exclusively male prerogative in the narrative (that of Acontius) and I attempt to explain Cydippe’s dissociation from it by looking closely at the sexual politics of Hippocratic medicine: Cydippe’s silent transition from virgin to wife, and the illnesses that affect her so long as this transition is suspended evoke, as I illustrate, medical discussions on when and how virginity should be surrendered for a young girl to remain healthy ([Hipp.] De virginum morbis) as well as the Hippocratic notion that absence of desire defines both an adult woman’s sexual life but also the critical moment of her first sexual experience. mar., 14 juin 2022 10:44:05 +0200 mer., 13 déc. 2023 10:11:55 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/846 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/716 It is argued that Sappho, in fr. 16, affirms that whereas some regard cavalry, infantry, or a fleet as the finest thing (this is the sense of κάλλιστον), she herself maintains that what is finest is that which one loves, i.e., that which one finds most beautiful (i.e., possessing κάλλος). Desire for the beautiful is contrasted with appreciation for other things, which however are not said to be beautiful or to inspire erotic desire. The key to interpreting the poem is the contrast between κάλλος meaning “beauty” and καλός meaning “fine” or “excellent”; only the former is closely associated with ἔρως. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:11:22 +0200 ven., 01 déc. 2023 15:36:47 +0100 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/716 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/774 “Preposterous Poetics and the Erotics of Death” looks at two crucial issues of late antique poetics and the representation of gender through the Dionysiaca of Nonnus. First, it discusses how Nonnus constructs a narrative which links mythic stories in a willfully confused chronological patterning, which allows events in the future of narrative time to bear on the current story-telling. This is explored both in its aesthetics of exemplarity and in its theological understanding of narrative time. “Preposterous” is understood thus in its etymological sense of the confusion of the “pre-” and the “post-”. Second, this article explores through such a model of poetics how Nonnus represents a bizarre and un-paralleled scene of necrophiliac desire on the battle-field. On the one hand, this disturbing scene of corrupt erotic desire in action is expressed through the model of Achilles and Penthesileia (an event far in the future for the time of the Dionysiaca); on the other hand, it utilizes a strange narrative technique of the narrator describing the scene, followed immediately by the desire-stuck soldier also describing the scene from another perspective. The article explores how this doubled representation opens a question – a question that goes to the heart of late antique poetics – of what it means to repeat, to paraphrase, to rehearse the inherited language of classical, epic sexual desire in the new world of the Christian empire. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:13:37 +0200 lun., 16 oct. 2023 14:29:04 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/774 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1168 This paper offers a close reading of the ancient Greek and Roman texts which Rachel Maines (The Technology of Orgasm, 1999) used as evidence for therapeutic masturbation in the ancient world, and thus presented as precursors for the vibrator. Examining the evidence of the Hippocratic corpus, Celsus, Soranus and Galen, it shows that the lines of transmission between the ancient sources, and in their later reception, are far more complex than her work suggests, and thus challenges her claims for the normality of massage to orgasm in Western medicine. While Maines herself has subsequently insisted that she proposed a ‘hypothesis’ rather than a ‘fact’, in the popular reception of her book this distinction has been almost entirely overlooked, leading to an obscuring of female agency – both as patients, and as healers. lun., 20 juin 2022 11:28:24 +0200 jeu., 12 oct. 2023 14:34:02 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1168