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Violence against women in ancient Rome: Ideology versus reality
... (Verg. G. 1.189-92; text Williams 1979) If its fruits are abundant, grain crops will follow equally, a great threshing will come with the great heat; but if shade abounds in the overgrowth of its foliage, in vain your floor will thresh stalks rich in chaff. ...
The Nux depicts the complaints of a walnut tree, pelted with stones and beaten with rods when she bears fruit. Discussion of the Nux, however, has largely centred on its authorship. Recognising its deep engagement with Ovid’s work, this article sets aside the question of authorship and takes a critical ecofeminist approach to explore the poem’s concerns with fertility, nature, the female, and violence. It argues that the walnut tree is feminised and humanised so that her complaints that fertility brings pain and her criticism of trees who sabotage their fertility to be beautiful have meaning for Roman women, and in particular for those women living under the Principate. It aims to demonstrate that the Nux figures the domination of nature and the oppression of women as outcomes of the same harmful ideology.
... Cas., and Ter. Eun., James (1997James ( , 1998James ( , 2010, Marshall (2015), and Witzke (2016). 25 -Though Philoumene was "raised separately, as suits a free woman" (ἔτρεφε δὲ χωρὶς ὡς ἐλευθέρᾳ πρέπει), it is unlikely that she had been legally freed (Traill [2008: 18]). ...
This essay argues that character development and self-understanding in Menander’s recognition plots are reserved for men characters: women characters show resolve, but do not develop. Menander’s recognition plot is thus gendered – most observably in Sikyonioi, the only play to show recognitions of an unrelated man and woman in the same play. In this play, a young woman, Philoumene (kidnapped at an early age), finds her father, while a mercenary soldier, Stratophanes, also discovers his true natal family and new role as an Athenian citizen; they marry, and Stratophanes’ brother Moschion loses out. Philoumene protects her respectability, but is otherwise passive and never gains control over her own body. Once recognized by her father, she is engaged to Stratophanes, and her adventure ends. Stratophanes, by contrast, must overcome threats to his finances, identity, and love affair, developing into a responsible citizen. For him, the recognition plot is an adventure that does not end when he finds his parents. Sikyonioi also demonstrates that not everyone wins in the recognition plot: Moschion loses sexual object, sense of self, and status a sole heir. He is forced to develop through the limitations on his privilege. Moreover, the erotic competition highlights the passivity of Philoumene, who is not active participant in a love triangle, but prize. Because Sikyonioi highlights both gender disparity in the recognition plot and the positive and negative repercussions of the plot for male rivals, it is a crucial locus for anyone interested in gender relations in Menander.
... Arrêt sur scène / Scene Focus, 10 | 2021 12 Lavinia's violation also connects her to Daphne, Callisto, and Lucrece: women whose rapes serve a kind of symbolic or ideological order by providing a narrative of origin or the impetus for political reformation. 12 Ovid, among other Latin poets, was prominent in the Latin curriculum of the grammar school; his writing would have contributed greatly to the store of words, often figured as either a treasure-trove or the physical body of the student rhetor, that Erasmus, outlining a process of imitative repetition and differentiation for use in humanistic education, referred to as copia. 13 Copia figures as the collection and development of an arsenal of rhetorical and performative moves. ...
The Claudian conquest of 43 CE and subsequent incorporation of Britain into the Roman Empire until 410 CE, caused a sea-change in the lives of the late Iron Age (first century BCE to first century CE) small-scale, agrarian communities. This chapter focuses on female skeletons with injuries and trauma (i.e. fractures and sharp-force weapons) caused by violent mechanisms, who have been excavated from urban, rural and military inhumation cemeteries from across Roman Britain (first to early fifth centuries CE). Violence was an everyday social tool in the Roman world, with females particularly vulnerable throughout the life course, because of their lower status regardless of wealth or family standing, and the use of violence to maintain social norms. The work draws on three approaches: Black Feminist Archaeology; a web of violence approach; and the poetics of violence. These are used to engage with the osteological data, because they recognise that different forms of violence exist within a society and these are connected (e.g. warfare and intimate partner violence), female bodies are where intersections of violence often play-out, and that the experience of being a woman in Roman Britain was incredibly diverse.
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Few studies have considered the impact of COVID-19 on the domestic violence workforce in the United States, while none have focused on the state of Maine or the challenges experienced by advocates and organizations as the pandemic becomes endemic. To fill these gaps, this study examines the immediate and enduring impacts of COVID-19 on Maine’s domestic violence workforce using semi-structured interviews analyzed thematically using an inductive coding technique. This study reveals (1) the impact of the pandemic on Maine’s the domestic violence workforce, (2) the ways in which adaptations were made in the provision of services, for better and for worse, and (3) the current challenges faced by these organizations as the pandemic becomes endemic.
This thesis examines the representation of the female body in Roman visual culture, exploring a range of images from mainland Italy that date between the late 1st century BC and the 2nd century AD, from three specific contexts of display: the public, domestic, and funerary. It seeks to understand how the two parts of its title – ‘the female body’ and ‘Roman visual culture’ – intersect, examining female bodies as they are represented, and how these bodies are shaped by the act of representation itself: i.e., the limitations, conventions, and priorities of their representative medium, and the context in which they were viewed. Images of female bodies could reify normative expectations of women or, alternatively, carve out space for more fantastical concepts of femininity within Roman culture. As these gendered expectations were relational, this thesis also puts the female body into dialogue with the male and sexually indeterminate body to understand how these images constructed and explored a relative spectrum of femininity and masculinity in terms of appearance, gesture, and behaviour. In this sense, this thesis is interested in Roman ideas about gender, and, critically, how gender was constructed within and through visual representation.
This chapter reveals and dissects a disturbing pattern communicated through women’s bodies in certain Roman adaptations of Greek drama and cinematic adaptations of Anglophone texts. The adaptors in question change their source material in order to heighten violence against women (particularly sexual violence) depicted in the original, or to add such violence not previously present. The movies and television series—including The Hunger Games, Game of Thrones, and 300: Rise of an Empire—do so not for the purposes of social commentary but for mere sensationalism and for the titillation of specific viewers. These “sinister adaptations” stand in marked contrast to the ancient Roman drama of Plautus, Terence, and Seneca, in which heightened violence against women highlights the adaptors’ criticism of their societies.
This article examines motivations for tragic parody in Plautus' Casina, 621 ff. It details how the Casina, and Pardalisca's parodic scene in particular, treat themes common to Greek tragedythe spatial opposition between male and female worlds, the on-stage struggle for power between men and women, and female madnessand also explores Plautus' comic manipulation of Aristotle's tragic theory. Through her tragic performance, Pardalisca provides a very different perspective on the absent Casina from the one provided thus far in the play and believably represents Casina's possible actions and state of mind. Pardalisca transgresses the conventional boundaries between male/outside and female/inside established early in the play, and she uses the public space outside of the house to externalize and legitimize the private concerns of women inside the house, and to rupture the physical and emotional constraints on women through her paratragic scene. The final 'wedding' scene then comically mirrors Pardalisca's tragic scene and provides a glimpse of the sexual violence Casina might have been compelled to endure had she been forced to comply with Lysidamus' plan, yet neatly turns male violence back on male characters and makes them the comic victims, not just of the women characters, but of themselves.