|
| rape
of lucretia |
Date:
Fri, 11 Dec 1992
From:
Dan Tompkins
Subject:
Livy on rape
I
have been teaching Livy this fall, to intermediate students. My
first run at Livy in years, and I came into the course thinking it
would be a day at the beach (see Geoffrey Wolff's terrific new
collection of essays by this title). Suddenly I found odd leaps in
thought, moments when, as in Tacitus, the Latin of a passage would
be perspicuous but you still couldn't understand it (recall
Wittgenstein: if lions could speak English we still couldn't
understand them). I also found in book one, as you might expect, an
attempt to lay down the foundations of a culture not just a city. We
read both the Sabine women passage and the rape of Lucretia. Here's
an item that struck me. In 1.9.15, pleading with the Sabine women to
accept their lot, Romulus is said to say: mollirent modo iras et
quibus fors CORPORAdedisset, darent ANIMOS Then, describing
Lucretia, Livy says she says (of her rape by Sextus Tarq.): Ceterum
CORPUS est tantum violatum, ANIMUS insons: mors testis erit. What
strikes one here is that in both cases the body is deemed
negligible, the animus special. I'm interested in learning whether
this pattern, if such it is, persists elsewhere in Livy and in other
Latin texts. (J O'D has already filled me in on Augustine.) It's
interesting that women are involved both times. Gary Miles has
written some wonderful stuff on the Sabine passage, but i don't
believe he mentions this bit.
Date:
Fri, 11 Dec 1992 20:58:30
From:
Mark Williams
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
Jim
Arieti of Hampden Sydney College (VA) did a nice article on the
theme of rape in Livy some years ago--I believe that it appeared in
_Clio_--but I do not recall his dealing in this article with the
corpus-animus distinction Dan raises.
Date:
Fri, 11 Dec 1992 2
From: James EG Zetzel
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
I'm
not sure if I quite understood Dan's question, but the body/mind
antithesis in Livy comes in part from the preface to Sallust, BC, in
part, I suspect, from Cicero, De republica--where Livy got a good
bit of his early Roman history-interpretations--esp., in this case,
the Somnium Scipionis. The dualism is not peculiar to rape scenes.
Or did I miss the point of the question?
Date:
Fri, 11 Dec 1992
From:
Dan Tompkins
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
Thanks
to Jim Z, and I'm sorry for the fogginess of my query, which was
foggy partly 'cuz I'm not sure where the observation leads. The
mind-body dualism takes a particular shape in the two Livy passages,
with women's minds treated as far more significant than their
corpora. I'll check out the Sallust preface etc, and agree that they
fit here somehow, but I'm wondering if Livy is suggesting something
about feminine virtue. Lucretia goes on to say that *mentem
peccare,* not (this from memory) the corpus. I'll try to get more
precise.
Date:
Sat, 12 Dec 1992
From:
Barbara Rodgers
Subject:
Livy on rape
I
don't suppose Dan Tompkins is thinking of Hippolytus?
Date:
Sat, 12 Dec 1992
From:
Charles Hedrick
Subject:
rape and text. crit.
REGARDING
rape and text. crit. Re: DT's exchange with JEGZ about rape in Livy.
One of the best things I've read recently is a book by Stephanie
Jed, called Chaste thinking. It is about sex and violence (part.
rape), politics and textual criticism in the Renaissance. Especially
good on the connection of rape and emendation in humanist lit. The
point of departure for all this is a (Livy inspired) text by
Salutati on the rape of Lucretia. Some of the politics/text stuff, I
think, can be carried back at least to late antiquity (I confess,
I'm not convinced by JEGZ's arguments that text crit in the 4th is
strictly a private activity). And there may be something here, too,
for those interested in Livy's attitudes toward his history.
Date:
Sat, 12 Dec 1992
From:
Lowell Edmunds
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
The sentence about Lucretia that you quoted is an allusion to,
perhaps even a paraphrase of, of a law on rape. It is Justinian but
I can't tell you where. Of course there could still be the pattern
you hypothesize.
Date:
Sun, 13 Dec 1992
From:
MARY LEFKOWITZ
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
Is
the passage Lowell Edmunds has in mind Justinian Codex. 9.9.20: "the
laws punish the detestable wickedness of women who prostitute their
chastit to the lusts of others, but do not hold those liable who are
violated by force and against their will"? Cf. *Women's Life in
Greece & Rome* Ed 2, p.119.
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992
From:
Lowell Edmunds
Subject:
Mary L.'s ref. to Justinian
Yes,
that is exactly the passage I had in mind. But nearly everyone will
wonder why I was mentioned, because I had written by private e-mail
to Dan T. about Lucretia. Since I am on the subject, the Justinian
passage shows that she did not have to commit suicide. Neither her
husband nor her kinsmen would have lost face if she had remained
amongst the living. Why, then, did she commit suicide? How does one
understand her reasoning?
Date:
Sun, 13 Dec 1992
From:
James EG Zetzel
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
I have some strange views on feminine virtue in Livy (derived only
from teaching the same passages Dan has several times). In the first
place, women seem in the first five books anyway to serve not
particularly as the repositories of feminine virtue, but of civic
virtue. Many of the major crises (Sabines, Lucretia, Verginia in
particular) are signalled by offenses against women: a tyrant's
attack on women (Lucretia, Verginia) marks the ultimate offense
against citizens, and the violation of the fundamental distinction
between public and private. In the second place, the role of women
seems to be peculiarly reinforced by the role of the *cloaca*
(drains are very private things) in the first five books: Tarquin
compels the plebs to dig the cloaca maxima; Verginia is killed next
to the shrine of Venus CLoacina; and the very last bit of Book 5, on
the rapid helter-skelter rebuilding of Rome after the Gallic sack,
says that that is why the public sewers run under private houses.
Make what you will of that; but I think that Livy is making a point
(or several) about the proper roles of public and private in civic
life.
Date: Sun, 13 Dec 1992
From:
Dan Tompkins
Subject:
Re: Mary L.'s ref. to Justinian
I
believe Lowell's message to me was sent to the list. Anyhow, I'm
grateful both to Lowell and Mary for their help. Lowell does have
the real question: why did Livy's Lucretia do what Jack P. hasn't
yet done, despite his threat?
Date:
Sun, 13 Dec 1992 20:39:49
From:
James EG Zetzel
Subject:
Re: rape and text. crit.
don't know the Jed book, but I'm happy to subscribe (as a
non-emender myself)to the idea that emendation is akin to rape. Much
of it--certainly the Housman variety--involves a fairly vicious sort
of textual stereotyping (not unlike, I suspect, Augustine's violence
to poor Lucretia in the opening sections of Cityof God). By the way,
I don't think that textcrit in the fourth c. is strictly private,
merely that the examples I discussed are private, and that there is
no sort of control over how any textcrit was done. My straw man (and
it probably was too much of a straw man) was the idea that our MSS
descend from some ancient equivalent of the OCT, carefully
supervised by an editorial committee, and possibly approved by a
tenure committee too. The first MS that I know that can be shown to
have been produced for the milieu in which it was written, and
perhaps with some sort of control, is an ecclesiastical text (I
forget which) written by one Ursicinus *lector* of the Verona church
in the early 6th c, and still there.
Date:
Sun, 13 Dec 1992
From:
Dan Tompkins
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
Jim
Zetzel's got a good point about women and *civic* not just feminine
virtue. But why should it be women? There must be a reason. As to
the cloacal bit, I don't have a clue.
Date:
Mon, 14 Dec 1992
From:
Don Fowler
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
Anyone
interested in the symbolic significance of drains in Roman culture
should get in touch with Emily Gowers at University College, London.
It's a by-product of her interest in food (see her forthcoming
book).
From:
David Meadows
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
Sorry
I took so long to leap into this thread ... our vax went down and I
have had to wade through hundreds of pieces of mail to establish
what has and hasn't been said. First off, bravo to ML for figuring
out the reference to CJ 9.9.20 (the ancient equivalent of `No means
no'). I think, however, we are on the wrong track in trying to find
some sort of `virtue' in either of the Livian passages. All we have
is the time-honoured notion of consent, in this case either to
marriage (the Sabines) or a crime (Lucretia; consent would be
adulterium ... there probably is some of the lex Julia lurking in
here). A marriage without the `consent' of the parties involved
would not be a marriage in Roman readers' eyes nor would Lucretia's
rape be considered adulterium without her consent; it was stuprum.
And, just to underscore the `unspecialness' of the juxtaposition of
`mind and body' consider the following passage from Paul (Digest
41.2.3): Possideri autem possunt, quae sunt corpalia. Et adipiscimur
possess- ionem CORPORE ET ANIMO, neque per se ANIMO aut per se
CORPORE. quod autem diximus et CORPORE ET ANIMO adquirere nos debere
possessionem, non utique ita accipiendum est, ut qui fundum
possidere velit, omes glebas circumabulet: sed sufficit quamlibet
partem eius fundi introire, cum mente et cogitatione hac sit, uti
totum fundum usque ad terminum velit possidere... I seem to hear
someone saying, `But a marriage was defined by continuing adfectu
maritalis; the word used for consent to marriage was, of course,
consensus'. That is true, but Paul continues in the same passage
(following an opinion of Neratius and Proculus): Ideoque si
thensaurum in fundo meo positum sciam, continuo me possidere, simul
atque POSSIDENDI AFFECTUM habuero, quia quod desit naturali
possessioni, id ANIMUS implet. That is, adfectio maritalis is
intimately tied to animus and animus is clearly tied to our modern
notion of intent (and by extension, consent).
Date:
Mon, 14 Dec 1992
From: Cynthia Bannon
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
on
women and the domus as symbols of virtue at the intersection of
public and private, there are the last few pages of an article by
richard saller, "familia, domus and the roman conception of the
family," phoenix 38 (1984).
Date:
Tue, 15 Dec 1992
From:
Lowell Edmunds
Subject:
rape of Lucretia
I
like very much Jim Zetzel's point about the exteriorization of
female virtue into the civic sphere in Livy. I also am intrigued by
the observation about the cloaca, but for now will react to the
first point. The theme of the Lucretia passage is pudicitia. It is a
private virtue that a woman expresses by staying at home, minding
her business, and being invisible. The trouble starts prcisely
because Lucretia's pudicitia becomes visible, thanks to the
husbands' competitiveness. Since pudicitia is the prime female
virtue, the most desireable virtue, shall we say, Lucretia becomes
desired when she is seen as the pudica that she is. (cum forma tum
spectata castitas incitat) Paradox 1: In order to get the pudica,
Tarquin has to destroy her pudicitia. Paradox 2: Her pudicitia lost,
she has to kill herself, even though from the civic point of view,
legally and morally, she is innocent. She has to kill herself
because she takes the same view as Tarquin and her husband: her
virtue must be seen. She must be an object lesson (Lucretiae
exemplo). By being dead, she can be this object. Cf. Prop.
4.11.41-42, 50, 71-72. The vestigia viri alieni (Livy 1.58.7), with
its allusion to the infidelity of the mistress, shows the complete
indifference of Lucretia's own intentions, with respect to which she
could regard herself as innocent. She is now simply a member of the
larger category of unfaithful woman, no matter how her
unfaithfulness came about.
Date:
Mon, 14 Dec 1992
From:
Owen Cramer
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
I still haven't re-read the ch. in Richlin's new vol.; but I still
think it's relevant here. The rhetoric of Livy's account (and also
of his account later of Verginia's parallel death (at her father's
hands) in the face of threatened rape by Ap. Claudius the decemvir,
is that the victim is precisely not blamed, and indeed were she to
remain alive the rape could be dismissed from mind. By dying, she
becomes an unanswerable argument against the rapist. Much of early
Roman hist. is, acc. to Livy, motivated by these unanswerable
gestures on the part of women, a kind of rhetoric of the
non-franchised.
Date:
Tue, 15 Dec 1992 2
From:
Dan Tompkins
Subject:
Re: rape of Lucretia
"Unfaithful
women?" But she says that means that *mentem peccare,* &
hers didn't. Otherwise I'm intrigued by Lowell's comment. Of course,
she announces her rape--summons the men, gives an operatic speech,
points to vestigia. Lots to think about here.
Date:
Wed, 16 Dec 1992
From:
Lowell Edmunds
Subject:
lucretia
Dan
T. quite plausibly misunderstood my obscure remark on the vestigia
of Roman elegy in the vestigia in Lucretia's bed. First, yes, of
course, she is innocent. (1) From her own point of view. She says
it. (2) From her male kinsmen's point of view. They try to console
her. (3) From the legal point of view. Cf. the Justinian passage to
which I referred to Dan privately and which Mary L. identified on
the list. The problem, then, as it presents itself to us, is: why
does she kill herself? We instinctively pose the question in terms
of motivation. But the motivation is perhaps (I hope for discussion)
the monumentality of Lucretia with which Livy starts. For Livy,
Lucretia is now an object lession in female virtue, she is the
exemplum that, within the narrative, she says she will become, she
is monumental, and this monumentality is retrojected into the
narrative, so that she acts like an exemplum. Now, how can I
reconcile the intertextuality of the passage with elegy with this
line of thought?
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992
From:
Patrick Rourke
Subject:
Lucretia's suicide
I
don't know a thing about Livy, really, but Prof. Edmunds' "question"
leads me to ask: does Lucretia kill herself, despite the fact that
she is "innocent", because she has been "shamed"?
I.e., are we dealing with a "shame culture" judgment? (I
hope I'm not showing my education to be hopelessly outmoded) An
interesting contrast, as far as guilt and rape, is Hardy's "Tess
of the D'Urbervilles", in which Tess's husband considers her
guilty of some moral failing because D'Urberville's rape of her was
successful. I.e., Hardy explores both the guilt and the shame
aspects of her rape.
Date:
Wed, 16 Dec 1992
From:
Don Lateiner
Subject:
Re: rape of Lucretia
I think Lowell Edmunds' comments on the subject/object Lucretia are
a model of thoughtfulness and clarity. In a much less insightful
mode, the substance reminds me of VietNam and archaeology, both of
which have to destroy the material that they are trying to help in
order to save it. (Read for VietNam: former U.S. policy towards
VietNam). On a more inflammatory note, there may be interesting
parallels between Anita Hill and Lucretia, both of whom had to
publish their shame in order to uphold a higher ideal. Of course,
one has to unpack the concept of shame (perhaps patriarchal, perhaps
religious, perhaps legal) in that sentence, before one can accept it
--if one can accept it.
Date:
Wed, 16 Dec 1992
From:
Dougal Blyth
Subject:
Re: lucretia
Richardson's
heroine Clarissa is an interesting partial parallel to Lucretia (I
have been watching the English TV video - reading "Pamela"
was enough for me). Clarissa, starving herself to death after being
raped by an aristocratic rake, rejects Augustine's principle that
because she did not consent, the purity of her mind is
uncontaminated although her body has been ravished. On reflection, I
suspect she (unlike Lucretia) feels her mind has been contaminated,
since she had been attracted to the rake, and consequently allowed
him to get into a position of trust. Peculiarly, she (like Lucretia)
is portrayed as a martyr for female virtue. Note that Aristotle
denies that shame (or at any rate aidws) is a virtue, as such.
Perhaps Jane Austin, a better Aristotelian than Richardson, wouldn't
have made such a hash of it.
Date:
Wed, 16 Dec 1992
From:
ghargrea@SFU.CA
Subject:
Re: lucretia I
Lucretia's suffering is being located solely among literary and
juridical texts in this discussion. Aren't there plenty of rapes
still being committed out in the real world? Don't rape victims
suffer emotional agonies after their experience, but how many
counselors would try to staunch the pain by consoling the victims
with references to philosophy, law, and fiction? Don't some real
rape-victims actually commit suicide? Justinian notwithstanding?
Date: Wed, 16 Dec 1992
From:
James EG Zetzel
Subject:
Re: lucretia I
Certainly
rape and ensuing agonies exist--and if there ever was a Lucretia,
she presumably suffered them. But it seems unlikely that Livy ever
did, and what he writes is the ideas on the subject of (to me) a
rather stuffy Augustan male, not those of a rape victim. The whole
literary incident (forget any putative or mythological actual event)
is structured in terms of literary motifs and legal procedures--and
on the latter aspect of the scene, I think that Alan Watson said
something about the husband's consilium and its legal context in one
of his books on archaic law.
Date:
Thu, 17 Dec 1992
From:
Cynthia Bannon
Subject:
Re: Livy on rape
coincidently,
the papers i've been grading give me something to contribute to this
discussion. the topic was a comparison of Livy's treatment of the
Lucretia story with Petronius' treatment (one of those last minute
ideas that i was afraid would fly back in my face, but has worked
out happily enough - most students made some good headway in
discussions of genre, social commentary and gender roles ...) - the
comparison points out livy's schematization (cf. the ambiguities in
petronius) and Lucretia's nearly inconceivable emotional control by
contrast with Giton's hysteria and futility - he seems to act out
the shame that lucretia avoids through suicide. i guess i might
venture that it's her ability to maintain control over the situation
that shows that she has not sinned in her heart (so to speak) even
though her body is violated. the physical violation doesn't seem to
be the point in the case of Giton either, (he seems to let himself
be violated willy nilly) but rather the way he uses the rape to
manipulate Encolpius and Ascyltus could be seen as a kind of mentem
peccare, shameful emotional betrayal. and i can't resist sending
this along (from the same set of papers): "Was Brutus the
avenger for the death of Lucretia because Collatinus was weak, or
was it for an alternative reason; perhaps Brutus and Lucretia were
secretly seeing each other, and the rape would have brought it out
in the open so she kills herself and Brutus is the avenger. (But
this is purely speculation, maybe you know?)" seems to me the
two reasons could be related. or should i be more concerned that
this student seems to think i run some kind of national enquirer of
the roman world? one last one ... the name in petronius are
difficult, but i like this hybrid "eucolpius." holiday
cheer to all. |
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