Gender and Violence in Latin Poetry

The Magna Mater's Uncanny Ease in the Aeneid

The tenth poem of Prudentius’ Peristephanon, the account of a martyr who miraculously continues to speak after the removal of his tongue, is a tour de force celebration of the corporeal rhetoric of violence. In addition to rich engagement with his literary predecessors (e.g. Malamud 1989, Levine 1991, Fux 2013), the works in this collection equate the bodies of the martyrs they commemorate with texts and with the poems themselves, creating a complex relationship between written, oral, and corporeal communication (see e.g. Ross 1995, Ballengee 2009, Fielding 2014).

The bucolic landscape as we know it is a peaceful paradise far from the troubles and toils of city life—for men. Our prevailing notion of the pastoral is based on a scholarly tradition that is almost as male as the ancient authors themselves. From the perspectives of women, I argue, the pastoral world is a much darker place, where sexual violence is the rule, not the exception.

Cogor amare: Embodied Compulsion and Elegiac Passivity