Hunter H. Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2013
- Published Online:
- May 2013
- ISBN:
- 9780199652396
- eISBN:
- 9780191745782
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199652396.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Poetry and Poets: Classical, Early, and Medieval
This project examines how and why time is gendered in Latin love elegy, so that it appears to affect men and women differently. Drawing on recent efforts to situate the elegies of Propertius, ...
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This project examines how and why time is gendered in Latin love elegy, so that it appears to affect men and women differently. Drawing on recent efforts to situate the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid in their social and political milieu, the book considers the genre’s brief flowering during the Augustan Principate. Part one argues that imperatives of the new regime, encouraging a younger generation of loyalists to participate in the machinery of government, put temporal pressures on the elite male that shape the amator’s (or “poet-lover’s”) resistance to entering a course of civil service and prompt his withdrawal into the arms of a courtesan, and therefore unmarriageable, beloved. Part two of the book examines the divergent temporal experiences of the amator and his beloved puella (“girl”) through the lens of “women’s time” (le temps des femmes) and the chora as theorized by psycholinguist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s model of feminine subjectivity as defined by repetition, cyclicality, and eternity allows us to understand better how the beloved’s marginalization from the realm of historical time proves advantageous to her amator wishing to defer entrance into civic life. The antithesis between the properties of “women’s time” and the linear momentum that defines masculine subjectivity, moreover, demonstrates how “women’s time” ultimately thwarts the amator’s often promised generic evolution.Less
This project examines how and why time is gendered in Latin love elegy, so that it appears to affect men and women differently. Drawing on recent efforts to situate the elegies of Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid in their social and political milieu, the book considers the genre’s brief flowering during the Augustan Principate. Part one argues that imperatives of the new regime, encouraging a younger generation of loyalists to participate in the machinery of government, put temporal pressures on the elite male that shape the amator’s (or “poet-lover’s”) resistance to entering a course of civil service and prompt his withdrawal into the arms of a courtesan, and therefore unmarriageable, beloved. Part two of the book examines the divergent temporal experiences of the amator and his beloved puella (“girl”) through the lens of “women’s time” (le temps des femmes) and the chora as theorized by psycholinguist Julia Kristeva. Kristeva’s model of feminine subjectivity as defined by repetition, cyclicality, and eternity allows us to understand better how the beloved’s marginalization from the realm of historical time proves advantageous to her amator wishing to defer entrance into civic life. The antithesis between the properties of “women’s time” and the linear momentum that defines masculine subjectivity, moreover, demonstrates how “women’s time” ultimately thwarts the amator’s often promised generic evolution.
Hunter H. Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198796428
- eISBN:
- 9780191837708
- Item type:
- chapter
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198796428.003.0005
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
We can better understand Vergil’s equivocations toward plague and its remedies as a solution to civil war by turning to Ovid’s account of plague in Metamorphoses 7.490–660: in Ovid’s narrative the ...
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We can better understand Vergil’s equivocations toward plague and its remedies as a solution to civil war by turning to Ovid’s account of plague in Metamorphoses 7.490–660: in Ovid’s narrative the citizens of Aegina, nearly eradicated from a pestilence sent by Juno, are replaced by ant-born men, the Myrmidons, characterized in a manner reminiscent of collectively oriented, uniform apian community in the Georgics. I argue that the episode should be read as a reflection of Ovid’s cynical attitude toward Augustus’ attempt to restore a war-depleted population by replacing it with a new generation of loyalists. The ant-born population of Myrmidons, bound to serve as soldiers in the war between Athens and Crete, constitute a new citizenry dreamt into existence by king Aeacus after he receives signs from Jupiter in the form of ants filing up a nearby oak tree. The privileges (grants of land) and functions (serving in war) awarded to this new population effectively sort out the confused heaps of those rotting cadavera of kin and acquaintances left in the wake of contagion. The poet’s narrative of recovery thus broaches the political utility of pestilence, in such a way that not only confronts the open-ended post-apocalyptic visions of his predecessors, but also questions the rigorous mechanisms of recovery, often in the form of population controls, implemented by the Augustan Principate.Less
We can better understand Vergil’s equivocations toward plague and its remedies as a solution to civil war by turning to Ovid’s account of plague in Metamorphoses 7.490–660: in Ovid’s narrative the citizens of Aegina, nearly eradicated from a pestilence sent by Juno, are replaced by ant-born men, the Myrmidons, characterized in a manner reminiscent of collectively oriented, uniform apian community in the Georgics. I argue that the episode should be read as a reflection of Ovid’s cynical attitude toward Augustus’ attempt to restore a war-depleted population by replacing it with a new generation of loyalists. The ant-born population of Myrmidons, bound to serve as soldiers in the war between Athens and Crete, constitute a new citizenry dreamt into existence by king Aeacus after he receives signs from Jupiter in the form of ants filing up a nearby oak tree. The privileges (grants of land) and functions (serving in war) awarded to this new population effectively sort out the confused heaps of those rotting cadavera of kin and acquaintances left in the wake of contagion. The poet’s narrative of recovery thus broaches the political utility of pestilence, in such a way that not only confronts the open-ended post-apocalyptic visions of his predecessors, but also questions the rigorous mechanisms of recovery, often in the form of population controls, implemented by the Augustan Principate.
Hunter H. Gardner
- Published in print:
- 2019
- Published Online:
- August 2019
- ISBN:
- 9780198796428
- eISBN:
- 9780191837708
- Item type:
- book
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
- DOI:
- 10.1093/oso/9780198796428.001.0001
- Subject:
- Classical Studies, Literary Studies: Classical, Early, and Medieval
Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution ...
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Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.Less
Lucretius, Vergil, and Ovid developed important conventions of the Western plague narrative as a response to the breakdown of the Roman res publica in the mid-first century CE and the reconstitution of stabilized government under the Augustan Principate (31 BCE–14 CE). Relying on the metaphoric relationship between the human body and the body politic, these authors use largely fictive representations of epidemic disease to address the collapse of the social order and suggest remedies for its recovery. Plague as such functions frequently in Roman texts to enact a drama in which the concerns of the individual must be weighed against those of the collective. In order to understand the figurative potential of plague, this book evaluates the reality of epidemic disease in Rome, in light of twentieth-century theories of plague discourse, those of Artaud, Foucault, Sontag, and Girard, in particular. Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature identifies consistent features of the outbreaks described by Roman epic poets, charting the emergence of Golden-Age imagery, emphasis on bodily dissolution, and poignant accounts of broken familial bonds. Such features are expressed through Roman idioms that provocatively recall the discourse of civil strife that characterized the last century of the Roman Republic. The final chapters examine key moments in the resurgence of Roman plague topoi, beginning with early imperial poets (Lucan, Seneca, and Silius Italicus), and concluding with discussion of late antique Christian poetry, paintings of the late Italian Renaissance, and Anglo-American novels and films.
