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Introduction 3 alison keith, mairéad mcauley, and alison sharrock 2 Uncanny Mothers in Roman Literature 26 mairéad mcauley Section 1: Mothers and Young Children 47 3 From Body to Behaviour: Maternal Transmission in the Ancient Greek World 49 florence gherchanoc 4 Νωδυνία: L'Oubli des Souffrances Maternelles et le Chant Théocritéen: d'Alcmène (Id. 24) à Bérénice (Id. 17) 63 florence klein 5 "Nimis … mater": Mother Plot and Epic Deviation in the Achilleid 80 federica bessone 6 Augustan Maternal Ideology: The Blended Families of Octavia and Venus 113 judith p. hallett Section 2: Mothers and Their Children's Marriages 127 7 Motherhood in Roman Epithalamia 129 henriette harich-schwarzbauer vi Contents 8 The Roman Mother-In-Law 140 alison sharrock Section 3: Mothers and Their Adult Children 167 9 Maximum Thebis (Romae?) scelus / maternus amor est (Oed. 629-30): Amour de la Mère et Inceste chez Sénèque 169 jacqueline fabre-serris 10 Mighty Mothers: Female Political Theorists in Euripides' Suppliant Women and Phoenician Women 193 giulia sissa 11 Wife, Mother, Philosopher: On the Symbolic Function of Augustine's Monnica 224 therese fuhrer Section 4: Mothers and the Death of Their Children 241 12 Virgilian Matres: From Maternal Lament to Female Sedition in the Aeneid 243 alison keith 13 Octavia: A Roman Mother in Mourning 270 valerie hope 14 Mothers as Dedicators 296 olympia bobou Abbreviations 321 Works Cited 323 Contributors 361 Index Locorum 363 General Index 373 MATERNAL CONCEPTIONS IN CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY This page intentionally left blank 10 Contents 10 Alison Keith, Mairéad McAuley, and Alison Sharrockout our anxiety, giving that zone of anguish a name: femininity, nonlanguage, body. But the name we give it before all others, the one we really hold answerable for it, is the mother." 20 The "mother" here stands for both the notion of a coherent self and testimony to its inherent instability, as demonstrated by the inevitable inadequacy or "falling short" of language as communication and signification.Kristeva is redescribing here, in psychoanalytic terms, a philosophical problem with the mother that has troubled modern feminist theory since its origins in the early twentieth century. What does motherhood mean -or rather, what is motherhood's relationship to meaning, particularly as it is defined by "patriarchal discourses" of the self, such as philosophy and literature? At the beginning of The Second Sex, her foundational work of feminist theory, Simone de Beauvoir sketched out the metaphorical meanings of the mother figure in Western culture:The Woman-Mother has a face of shadows: she is the chaos whence all have come and whither all must one day return; she is Nothingness. In the Night are confused together the multiple aspects of the world which daylight reveals: night of spirit confined in the generality and opacity of matter, night of sleep and of nothingness. In the deeps of the sea it is night: woman is the Mare tenebrarum, dreaded by navigators of old; it is night in the entrails of the earth....
Introduction 3 alison keith, mairéad mcauley, and alison sharrock 2 Uncanny Mothers in Roman Literature 26 mairéad mcauley Section 1: Mothers and Young Children 47 3 From Body to Behaviour: Maternal Transmission in the Ancient Greek World 49 florence gherchanoc 4 Νωδυνία: L'Oubli des Souffrances Maternelles et le Chant Théocritéen: d'Alcmène (Id. 24) à Bérénice (Id. 17) 63 florence klein 5 "Nimis … mater": Mother Plot and Epic Deviation in the Achilleid 80 federica bessone 6 Augustan Maternal Ideology: The Blended Families of Octavia and Venus 113 judith p. hallett Section 2: Mothers and Their Children's Marriages 127 7 Motherhood in Roman Epithalamia 129 henriette harich-schwarzbauer vi Contents 8 The Roman Mother-In-Law 140 alison sharrock Section 3: Mothers and Their Adult Children 167 9 Maximum Thebis (Romae?) scelus / maternus amor est (Oed. 629-30): Amour de la Mère et Inceste chez Sénèque 169 jacqueline fabre-serris 10 Mighty Mothers: Female Political Theorists in Euripides' Suppliant Women and Phoenician Women 193 giulia sissa 11 Wife, Mother, Philosopher: On the Symbolic Function of Augustine's Monnica 224 therese fuhrer Section 4: Mothers and the Death of Their Children 241 12 Virgilian Matres: From Maternal Lament to Female Sedition in the Aeneid 243 alison keith 13 Octavia: A Roman Mother in Mourning 270 valerie hope 14 Mothers as Dedicators 296 olympia bobou Abbreviations 321 Works Cited 323 Contributors 361 Index Locorum 363 General Index 373 MATERNAL CONCEPTIONS IN CLASSICAL LITERATURE AND PHILOSOPHY This page intentionally left blank 10 Contents 10 Alison Keith, Mairéad McAuley, and Alison Sharrockout our anxiety, giving that zone of anguish a name: femininity, nonlanguage, body. But the name we give it before all others, the one we really hold answerable for it, is the mother." 20 The "mother" here stands for both the notion of a coherent self and testimony to its inherent instability, as demonstrated by the inevitable inadequacy or "falling short" of language as communication and signification.Kristeva is redescribing here, in psychoanalytic terms, a philosophical problem with the mother that has troubled modern feminist theory since its origins in the early twentieth century. What does motherhood mean -or rather, what is motherhood's relationship to meaning, particularly as it is defined by "patriarchal discourses" of the self, such as philosophy and literature? At the beginning of The Second Sex, her foundational work of feminist theory, Simone de Beauvoir sketched out the metaphorical meanings of the mother figure in Western culture:The Woman-Mother has a face of shadows: she is the chaos whence all have come and whither all must one day return; she is Nothingness. In the Night are confused together the multiple aspects of the world which daylight reveals: night of spirit confined in the generality and opacity of matter, night of sleep and of nothingness. In the deeps of the sea it is night: woman is the Mare tenebrarum, dreaded by navigators of old; it is night in the entrails of the earth....
Similes are a prominent feature of epithalamia, with poets comparing the bride and groom to characters from myth or to elements of the natural world. Catullus wrote two epithalamia (61 and 62), together with two other poems with marked epithalamian characteristics (64 and 68). This paper examines the question of why similes are so important to the genre of epithalamium, concentrating on Catullus 61, which is particularly rich in its deployment of comparison. The paper argues that comparison is crucial to the themes of Roman marriage: similes locate the human institution of marriage between the poles of myth and nature, and they afford a vehicle for considering the way marriage links together the disparate terms of male and female.It has long been recognised that Catullus is an aficionado of the simile form: as Richard Hunter puts it, 'Catullus, more perhaps than any other Roman poet, seems to have seized the opportunities for self-conscious experimentation which the simile form offered.'1 The important study of Svennung (1945) charted the corpus, pointing out in the process interesting patterns of clustering and absence. There are only three similes in the polymetrics (2b, 7.3-8, 17.18-21), and only two in the epigrams (72.3-4 and 97.7-8); 2 developed similes clump in the longer poems, specifically in 61, 62, 64, 65 and 68. 3 It is significant that all these simile-rich poems share an intense interest in the theme of marriage as focused through the moment of the wedding. 4 Svennung already remarked *
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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