Women And War In Roman Epic

In Women and War in Roman Epic, Elina Pyy discusses the narrative and ideological functions of gender in the works of Virgil, Lucan, Statius, Silius Italicus and Valerius Flaccus. By examining the themes of violence, death, guilt, grief, and anger in their epics, she offers an account of the intertextual tradition of the genre and its socio-political background. Through a combination of classical narratology and Julia Kristeva’s subjectivity theory, Pyy scrutinises how gendered marginality is constructed in the genre and how it contributes to the fashioning of Roman imperial identity. Focusing on the ambiguous elements of epic, the study looks beyond the binary oppositions between the Self and the Other, male and female, and Roman and barbarian.

Women in ancient Greece and Rome played a much more active role in battle than previously assumed. The martial virtues—courage, loyalty, cunning, and strength—were central to male identity in the ancient world, and antique literature is replete with depictions of men cultivating and exercising these virtues on the battlefield. In Women and War in Antiquity, sixteen scholars reexamine classical sources to uncover the complex but hitherto unexplored relationship between women and war in ancient Greece and Rome. They reveal that women played a much more active role in battle than previously assumed, embodying martial virtues in both real and mythological combat. The essays in the collection, taken from the first meeting of the European Research Network on Gender Studies in Antiquity, approach the topic from philological, historical, and material culture perspectives. The contributors examine discussions of women and war in works that span the ancient canon, from Homer’s epics and the major tragedies in Greece to Seneca’s stoic writings in first-century Rome. They consider a vast panorama of scenes in which women are portrayed as spectators, critics, victims, causes, and beneficiaries of war. This deft volume, which ultimately challenges the conventional scholarly opposition of standards of masculinity and femininity, will appeal to scholars and students of the classical world, European warfare, and gender studies.

Heroism has long been recognised by readers and critics of Roman epic as a central theme of the genre from Virgil and Ovid to Lucan and Statius. However the crucial role female characters play in the constitution and negotiation of the heroism on display in epic has received scant attention in the critical literature. This study represents an attempt to restore female characters to visibility in Roman epic and to examine the discursive operations that effect their marginalisation within both the genre and the critical tradition it has given rise to. The five chapters can be read either as self-contained essays or as a cumulative exploration of the gender dynamics of the Roman epic tradition. The issues addressed are of interest not just to classicists but also to students of gender studies.

A look at how warfare affected—and was affected by—women in ancient times. Although the conduct of war was generally monopolized by men in the Greco-Roman world, there were plenty of exceptions, with women directly involved in its direction and even as combatants—Artemisia, Olympias, Cleopatra, and Agrippina the Elder being famous examples. And both Greeks and Romans encountered women among their barbarian enemies, such as Tomyris, Boudicca, and Zenobia. More commonly, of course, women were directly affected as noncombatant victims of rape and enslavement as spoils of war, and this makes up an important strand of the author’s discussion. The portrayal of female warriors and goddesses in classical mythology and literature, and the use of war to justify gender roles and hierarchies, are also considered. Overall, this is a landmark survey of women’s role in, and experience of, war in the Classical world.

The literary memory of the Great War is dominated by the writings of Sassoon and Owen, Graves and Blunden. The voice is a male voice. This book is a study of what women wrote about militarism and world war 1

J.K. Evans’ pioneering work explores the profound changes in the social, economic and legal condition of Roman women, which, it is argued, were necessary consequences of two centuries of near-continuous warfare as Rome expanded from city-state to empire. Bridging the gap that has isolated the specialised studies of Roman women and children from the more traditional political and social concerns of historians, J.K. Evans’ investigation ranges from Cicero’s wife Terentia to the anonymous spouse of the peasant-soldier Ligustinus, charting the severe erosion of the very institutions that kept women and children in thrall. War, Women and Children in Ancient Rome will be of interest not only to classicists and historians of antiquity but also to sociologists and anthropologists, while it will similarly prove an indispensable reference work for historians of women and the family.

Lysistrata is a comedy by Aristophanes. Originally performed in classical Athens in 411 BC, it is a comic account of one woman's extraordinary mission to end the Peloponnesian War. Lysistrata persuades the women of Greece to withhold sexual privileges from their husbands and lovers as a means of forcing the men to negotiate peace—a strategy, however, that inflames the battle between the sexes. The play is notable for being an early exposé of sexual relations in a male-dominated society.[citation needed] Additionally, its dramatic structure represents a shift from the conventions of Old Comedy, a trend typical of the author's career. It was produced in the same year as the Thesmophoriazusae, another play with a focus on gender-based issues, just two years after Athens' catastrophic defeat in the Sicilian Expedition.

Monumental epic poem tells the heroic story of Aeneas, a Trojan who escaped the burning ruins of Troy to found Lavinium, the parent city of Rome, in the west.