A Stranger in a Strange Land: Medea in Roman Republican Tragedy 1

Cowan, Robert

doi:10.4324/9781315084466-3

Cited by 13 publications

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“…14.Cowan (2013), 340; cf. also Cowan (2010). Manuwald (2011), 213f., calls the chariot ‘a special scenic effect’, without addressing the potential of its staging; cf.…”

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confidence: 93%

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Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Campbell¹

2019

Ramus

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Recent investigations of Seneca's Medea have found consistently fascinating the way in which Medea progressively flags her realization of enacted identity and selfhood. She self-consciously pierces the fabric of her drama with identifying declarations, colored by especial reference to her name: the announcement Medea superest (‘Medea remains’, 166) and bald statement of fiam (‘I will be’, 171) in response to hearing her own name lead to the supreme utterance of Medea nunc sum (‘now I am Medea’, 910). Medea conjures herself into being with these three identifications, stepping fully into the troubling contours she knows of not only her own mythology, but also her literary history. Medea's dominating focus on her name allows this layered acknowledgement of self, of Medea as both mythological figure and literary fixture. In resultant discussions, the weight given to her name in precipitating this sense of identity within her play has, quite naturally, led to a proportionate emphasis upon who Medea is. In some ways, Medea's notably self-annotative process of becoming ‘Medea’ eclipses other useful interrogative frameworks of her identity: the spotlight on the ‘who’ of Medea comes somewhat at the expense of the ‘what’, or the ‘how’. This is not to say that such categories are not mutually informative or intertwined, for Medea (by Seneca's time) does, in fact, have a defining act: the murder of her children. Who Medea is stems from what she does, the sentiment vividly expressed by Medea nunc sum. In light of these considerations, I would suggest a different perspective from which to conceptualize Medea's identity, one that takes into account the paired aspects of being and doing that together comprise an understanding of character, especially within drama. This perspective departs from a framework dependent on progressive structural characterization, as represented by the trio of passages cited above, and focuses instead on characterization via demonstrated patterns of linguistic tendency, on both macroscopic and microscopic levels. From the beginning, Medea displays measured consistency with her relentless knowledge of self as she transforms these categories of identification and action: as the play develops, her sense of ‘this is who I am’ becomes ‘this is what I do’.

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“…14.Cowan (2013), 340; cf. also Cowan (2010). Manuwald (2011), 213f., calls the chariot ‘a special scenic effect’, without addressing the potential of its staging; cf.…”

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confidence: 93%

“…Upon which see Cowan (2010) and (2013); Manuwald (2011), 289, and (2015), 176–9. On Medea's transformation throughout Roman literature, see Manuwald (2013) and Corrigan (2013), as well as the collected Ramus volume 41 on ‘Roman Medea’, Boyle (2012); for her role in Ovid specifically, the treatment of Hinds (1993) is seminal.…”

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confidence: 99%

Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Campbell¹

2019

Ramus

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Disorienting Empire

Dufallo¹

2021

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Disorienting Empire is the first book to examine Republican Latin poetry’s recurring interest in characters who become lost. The book explains the prevalence of this theme with reference to the rapid expansion of Rome’s empire in the Middle and Late Republic. It was both a threatening and an enticing prospect, the book argues, to imagine the ever-widening spaces of Roman power as a place where one could become disoriented, both in terms of geographical wandering and in a more abstract sense connected with identity and identification, especially as it concerned gender and sexuality. Plautus, Terence, Lucretius, and Catullus, as well as the “triumviral” Horace of Satires, book 1, all reveal an interest in such experiences, particularly in relation to journeys into the Greek world from which these writers drew their source material. Fragmentary authors such as Naevius, Ennius, and Lucilius, as well as prose historians including Polybius and Livy, add depth and context to the discussion. Setting the Republican poets in dialogue with queer theory and postcolonial theory, the book brings to light both anxieties latent in the theme and the exuberance it suggests over new creative possibilities opened up by reorienting oneself toward new horizons and new identifications—by discovering with pleasure that one could be other than one thought. Further, in showing that the Republican poets had been experimenting with such techniques for generations before the Augustan Age, Disorienting Empire offers its close readings as a preface to the interpretation of Aeneas’s wandering journey in Vergil’s Aeneid.

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Dufallo

2021

Disorienting Empire

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A Stranger in a Strange Land: Medea in Roman Republican Tragedy 1

Cited by 13 publications

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Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Medea's Sol-Ipsism: Language, Power and Identity in Seneca's Medea

Disorienting Empire

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