https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/563 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/550 This article provides a gender perspective on the Roman imago, the male ancestor mask, by arguing that imagines were deeply entangled in elite women’s lives in the Republic and Empire. When an elite woman was a filia, they were a vivid and didactic presence in the atrium of her natal home. When she was a nupta and uxor, copies of her patrilineal and matrilineal imagines were transferred from her natal home to her marital home. When she was a matrona and mater, her marital home could accrue more imagines when her male relatives attained the aedileship (or the higher curule magistracies) and she herself could use them didactically with her children. If an elite woman’s marriage was dissolved by death or divorce, any surviving children might inherit copies of her bridal imagines. When an elite woman died, a pompa imaginum could be part of her funus. Finally, a female maior and her patrilineal and matrilineal imagines could constitute and signify elite identities. I argue that these imagines and accompanying tituli could function as an inheritance and dos for an elite woman, and as a deposit of symbolic capital, embodying her social position and status. The imagines were an important mechanism for transferring elite female social position and status between families, and an elite woman’s own commendatio maiorum. mar., 14 juin 2022 08:57:10 +0200 lun., 16 oct. 2023 15:45:13 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/550 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