https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/707 Numéros fr mar., 14 juin 2022 09:10:43 +0200 mar., 14 juin 2022 09:10:43 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/707 0 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/708 The bust of Queen Nefertiti is a brilliant piece of artisan craftsmanship. Despite its ancient origins, the piece still perpetuates the same sensual allure and intrigue it undoubtedly did upon its creation around 1340 BCE. This article will propose that the enduring fame of the Bust of Nefertiti can be directly traced to the androgynous qualities of the Queen’s portrait. Nefertiti’s likeness possesses masculine features and this sexual ambivalence has contributed to the public’s continued fascination with this statue. Employing the writings of art historians Rudolf Anthes and Dorothea Arnold, as well as theorist Camille Paglia, this article will establish the sexual hybridization present within the bust and its role in the celebrity of the sculpture. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:11:07 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/708 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 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/716 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/735 This essay provides a reassessment of the view that the young wives of Aristophanes’ Lysistrata are modeled on hetaeras. It begins by examining a parallel debate in contemporary Attic red-figure vase paintings of women at home to show that displays of female sexuality are not incompatible with marriageable maidens and free citizen wives. Aristophanes similarly situates his female characters within a domestic context as the site of sexual and social legitimacy. A detailed analysis of clothing, footwear and grooming practices deployed in the sex strike demonstrates that they represent the standard accoutrements of housewives rather than of hetaeras. Their domesticated eroticism, while enabling the male spectators a voyeuristic glimpse of other men’s wives, reinforces their procreative function as mothers and producers of future Athenian citizens. The importance of sexual desire within marriage for the production of legitimate offspring is dramatically reinforced by the onstage presence of the boy child in the thwarted sexual encounter of Myrrhine and Cinesias. Aristophanes’ Lysistrata fits with a pattern of heightened interest in women and domestic ideology at the end of the fifth century BCE. The centrality of marriage in the play may represent a response to the erosion of Pericles' citizenship law in response to the depletion of Athenian men in the waning years of the Peloponnesian war. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:11:54 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/735 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/746 A 2004 article argues that the word kitharisma as it appears on the defixio 22(A) Ziebarth refers to a variety of sexual foreplay. The argument is that a reading of kitharisma as ‘a piece of music for the cithara’ in an erotic curse is not germane to the context. Based on a semantic analysis of kitharisma, evidence for female lyre-players in ancient Greek culture, and the longstanding connections both historical and metaphorical between lyre music and sex, I argue that kitharisma should be understood literally as ‘a piece of music for the cithara’, which allows a contextualization of another obscure word on the curse, parodos, which should mean ‘a public recital’. In the course of this argument I address the dynamics of musico-sexual metaphors in ancient Greek literature in general with reference to conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). mar., 14 juin 2022 09:12:43 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/746 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/755 This article examines the appearance of the term κίναιδος in Greek documentary sources from Egypt and asks what these sources can contribute to our understanding of a figure who is so often presented in Greek and Latin literary texts as a sexual or gender deviant. The first half of this paper presents and contextualizes one ostrakon and six papyri which use the term κίναιδος and argues that this word is employed predominantly as an occupational term to denote some kind of performer. On one occasion, however, it is used as a pejorative term although the particular negative sense of this use is ambiguous. The second half of this paper compares these documents to mentions of the kinaidos/cinaedus in literary and documentary evidence from outside Egypt which most often, but not always, connect this figure with sexual deviancy and only occasionally with his role as a performer. A comparison is also made with documentary sources from within Hellenistic and Roman Egypt which mention effeminacy, homoerotic activity, and anal penetration. This analysis suggests that similar concerns over the correct observance of homoerotic protocols are evident in Greek, Roman, and Hellenistic and Roman Egyptian contexts; but whereas the kinaidos/cinaedus serves as a locus for such concerns elsewhere, he does not appear to be connected with any such anxieties in the Egyptian context. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:13:02 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/755 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/766 This paper analyses the homoerotic aspect of Propertius 1.20 and its presentation of the myth of Hylas, the lost beloved of Hercules. It argues that Propertius reacts to the portrait of ‘Greek love’ that is found in the two surviving lengthy versions of this myth in Apollonius’ Argonautica and Theocritus’ Idylls, increasing the homoerotic ambience of the myth and encouraging his readers to look back to his models for traces of the approach that he himself takes. It also interrogates Propertius’ domestication of his Greek models’ narratives in a contemporary Roman and particularly elegiac context, and argues that the poem is better integrated into Propertius’ elegiac universe than is often acknowledged. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:13:20 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/766 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 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/774 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/793 The fortieth anniversary of Sarah Pomeroy’s groundbreaking Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (1975) is an occasion for recognizing Pomeroy’s thoughtful and flexible approach to the methodological problem of using male-authored fictional texts, such as the Homeric epics and Athenian tragedy, as sources for ancient women’s history. In her chapter on the women of tragedy, Pomeroy acknowledges the limits of tragic texts as testimony to women’s lives but still makes careful use of them, sometimes as fearful male fantasies or “nightmares of the victors”, sometimes as reflections of women’s actual roles in religious and domestic life, sometimes as expressions of sympathy for women’s difficult circumstances. Ten years later, Phyllis Culham initiated a vigorous debate among feminist classicists by calling for the exclusion of literary evidence in favor of material and subliterary sources that could give more direct access to ancient women’s lived realities. Culham’s call was answered by a series of rebuttals and two decades of scholarship that followed Pomeroy’s lead in identifying connections between tragic texts and the gendered experiences of actual Athenians. The recent turn to reception in classical literary studies offers the opportunity to consider ancient male-authored fictions in relation to the real experiences of modern women. This discussion focuses on two wartime memoirs by twentieth century women, Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth (1933) and the anonymously-published A Woman in Berlin: Eight Weeks in the Captured City (1954). Each woman’s story echoes the Homeric epics and confirms two important points made by critics responding to Culham: that lived experience cannot be extricated from the ordering patterns of fiction or myth-making; and that the stories told by male authors are sometimes stories that women might tell. mar., 14 juin 2022 09:13:55 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/793 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1195 In passato alcuni studiosi hanno sostenuto che le donne greche, come quelle romane descritte da Sorano, non allattassero personalmente i loro figli, preferendo assumere nutrici a questo scopo. Sorano, però, parlava di una “moda” in voga soltanto nella Roma imperiale. Da un’attenta analisi delle fonti greche, infatti, si può intuire che le madri nella Grecia di epoca arcaica e classica tendenzialmente allattassero. Probabilmente per questa ragione le fonti greche non si sono mai soffermate su problemi al contrario molto dibattuti a Roma, come le conseguenze che poteva avere un latte alieno sul bambino, e, di conseguenza, sull’intero genos. Scandagliano però con attenzione le testimonianze greche possiamo cogliere anche in esse qualche riferimento, seppure meno esplicito, all’esistenza di latti con caratteristiche diverse e in grado di veicolare determinati caratteri genetici. Una volta stabilito che le donne elleniche allattavano, si è cercato di dare una spiegazione alla rarità di immagini di donne che allattano nella Grecia continentale, individuando principalmente tre motivi: il concetto molto radicato nella cultura greca di aidós, la teoria dell’emogenesi dal latte materno dal sangue mestruale e un più generico sentimento di “scaramanzia” e paura connessi con alcuni momenti molto delicati della vita della donna e del bambino (si pendi a esempio al malocchio). Contemporaneamente, si è cercato di prendere le distanze da concetti molto abusati in passato, come tabù, magia e misoginia. mar., 28 juin 2022 08:40:27 +0200 https://www.peren-revues.fr/eugesta/1195