Brides, Mourners, Bacchae: Women's Rituals in Roman Literature by Vassiliki Panoussi

Phoenix ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 74 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 173-175
Author(s):  
Darja Šterbenc Erker
Keyword(s):  
Ramus ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 16 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 1-3
Author(s):  
A.J. Boyle

oratio certam regulam non habet; consuetudo illam ciuitatis, quae numquam in eodem diu stetit, uersat.Style has no fixed rules; the usage of society changes it, which never stays still for long.Seneca Epistle 114.13This is the first of two volumes of critical essays on Latin literature of the imperial period from Ovid to late antiquity. The focus is upon the main postclassical period (A.D. 1-150), especially the authors of the Neronian and Flavian principates (A.D. 54-96), several of whom, though recently the subject of substantial investigation and reassessment, remain largely unread, at best improperly understood. The change which took place in Roman literature between the late republic/early Augustan period and the post-Augustan empire, between the ‘classicism’ of Cicero, Virgil, Horace, Livy and the ‘postclassicism’ of Seneca, Lucan, Persius, Tacitus is conventionally misdescribed (albeit sometimes with qualifications) as the movement from Golden to Silver Latin. The description misleads on many counts, not least because it misconstrues a change in literary and poetic sensibility, in the mental sets of reader and audience, and in the political environment of writing itself, as a change in literary value. What in fact happened awaits adequate description, but it seems clear that the change began with Ovid (43 B.C. to A.D. 17), whose rejection of Augustan classicism (especially its concept of decorum or ‘appropriateness’), cultivation of generic disorder and experimentation (witness, e.g., Ars Amatoria and Metamorphoses), love of paradox, absurdity, incongruity, hyperbole, wit, and focus on extreme emotional states, influenced everything that followed. Ovid also witnessed and suffered from the increasing political repression of the principate; he was banished for — among other things — his words, carmen. And political repression seems to have been a signal factor, if difficult to evaluate, in the formation of the postclassical style.


Mnemosyne ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 65 (2) ◽  
pp. 219-237
Author(s):  
Christoph Pieper

Abstract The article analyses how Ovid in the 10th letter of his Heroides experiments with the concept of a female voice within Roman literature. Ovid constructs Ariadne as a literary speaker against the background of (1) the Augustan elegiac tradition with its mostly male speakers, (2) the earlier phases of the Ariadne-myth in which Ariadne’s fate is determined by men (Theseus and Bacchus), and (3) the reception of this myth in Catullus’ famous ecphrasis in carmen 64. In the beginning of Heroides 10, Ovid shows how Ariadne develops consciousness of her own ability to speak. She develops from a heterodiegetic (epic) narrator to a homodiegetic (elegiac) speaker. In a second step, however, Ovid demonstrates that Ariadne is not only generally inexperienced in the field of literature, but that her attempt to re-shape her own story from a female perspective must necessarily fail. Her literary character cannot be separated from the previous (male) myth. At the end of the letter, she accepts her own literary immaturity when she asks Theseus to be the future narrator of her own fate. By showing that Ovid in his Ariadne-letter actually stages the failure of his protagonist’s attempt to free herself from a male literary tradition, I suggest that the Heroides should not be read as female literature, but as texts which reaffirm male dominance within Roman literary society.


Author(s):  
Aaron J. Kachuck

The Solitary Sphere in the Age of Virgil uses an enriched tripartite model of Roman culture—touching not only the public and the private, but also the solitary—in order to present a new interpretation of Latin literature and of the historical causes of this third sphere’s relative invisibility in scholarship. By connecting Cosmos and Imperium to the Individual, the solitary sphere was not so much a way of avoiding politics as a political education in itself. As reimagined by literature in this age, this sphere was an essential space for the formation of the new Roman citizen of the Augustan revolution, and was behind many of the notable features of the literary revolution of Virgil’s age: the expansion of the possibilities of the book of poetry, the birth of the literary cursus, new coordinations of cosmology and politics within strictly organized schemes, the attraction of first-person genres, and the subjective style. Through close readings of Cicero’s late works and the oeuvres of Virgil, Horace, and Propertius and the works of other authors in the age of Virgil, The Solitary Sphere thus presents a radical reinterpretation of classical Roman literature, and contributes to the study of premodern culture more generally, especially for traditions that have taken antiquity as too fixed a point in their own literary, religious, and cultural histories.


1992 ◽  
pp. 231-232
Author(s):  
Janet Meyer Everts
Keyword(s):  

Mnemosyne ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 61 (3) ◽  
pp. 414-435 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dunstan Lowe

AbstractThis article will show that Ovid's well-known innovations in the use of personification allegory combine closely with those of Virgil, to form a distinctive 'Augustan' phase in the development of allegory in classical literature. Both Ovid and Virgil make fictional abstractions concrete and ontologically ambiguous. Innovations common to both the Aeneid and Metamorphoses constitute an important stage in the emergence of 'compositional allegory', in the wake of the Roman adoption of Stoicising interpretative reading practices in the course of the first century BC. Both epics involve Furies as models for their major personified abstractions, both in narrative role and in concrete detail. Uniquely in and to Roman literature, Furies changed from supernatural beings into personified abstractions. This change, enabled by the semantic replacement of proper names such as Erinys or Eumenis with the word Furia ('frenzy'), produced new depth and complexity in the form and metaliterary function of personifications in Roman epic and later literary traditions.


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