This blog got started when Kate and I read an essay by Annette Kolodny, entitled “Dancing Through the Minefield.” We were both struck by the following statement:

The (usually male) reader who, both by experience and by reading, has never made acquaintance with those [unique literary traditions and sex-related] contexts — historically, the lying-in room, the parlor, the nursery, the kitchen, the laundry, and so on — will necessarily lack the capacity to fully interpret the dialogue or action embedded therein; for, as every good novelist knows, the meaning of any character’s action or statement is inescapably a function of the specific situation in which it is embedded. Virginia Woolf therefore quite properly anticipated the male reader’s disposition to write off what he could not understand, abandoning women’s writings as offering “not merely a difference of view, but a view that is weak, or trivial, or sentimental because it differs from his own.”

Sitting together, we exclaimed over how well it summed up what we had wished to tell people time and again. Upon reading Mrs. Dalloway in class and having to defend the story of a woman’s ordinary day, I wanted to say just this to my (male) detractors; I wanted to point out to them that their world view was necessarily different from mine simply due to the fact that I have been categorized as “woman,” with all its attendant duties and expectations, from the moment of my birth.

This is not to say that men do not have the capacity to understand a feminine view — quite the opposite. Women have been taught to understand a male view for time immemorial, in the ivory towers of this world. It is not to say that the female view ought to be privileged above the male, though there would be a poetic justice in that, after three thousand years. Instead, it is to say that men have the obligation to attempt to understand women’s writers and women’s concerns, and that we must recognize that as academics we do not exist in a genderless vacuum.

There are other important issues tied up in this too. Kate and I are classicists; we exist in a vacuum, all right, and that’s a vacuum in which there are no women. Medea, Electra, Helen, Antigone, Dido — these are the women we find in the classics. Occasionally a philosopher has a dialogue with a hetaera, a high-class prostitute, and that’s about the extent of our knowledge of a woman who might possibly have been a real person (and even then, a prostitute and a philosopher discussing the world was likely a rhetorical strategy). Historical women, like Cleopatra and Clodia Metelli, are reviled; the ones for whom the evidence is less biased, like Tullia (daughter of Cicero), are largely absent from scholarly work. In archaeological digs, women’s relics have been ignored, packed away in boxes because they are “insignificant.”

But the study of classics is important, and not only for old white men. I believe (and here I’m definitely not speaking for Kate; I have no idea how she feels on this issue) that one must understand the dominant culture before one can fight it. In certain circles, the circles that are often reviled by feminists as “academented ivory towers,” that means understanding classics. The Western canon that today includes so few women was created on a foundation of classical education. What’s more, the Roman empire provides an eerie foreshadowing of the modern U.S.A. (see Kate’s post on the Quiverfull movement). As Santayana said, those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

I hope we can remember it, and effect positive change using the lessons we learn. I hope we can somehow create not a feminist poetics but a female poetics, and also a female history, one which does not attempt to artificially inflate women’s influence on politics nor marginalize them but instead redefine, to some extent, what is important about history — what is worth our notice. Something that can stand along side men’s history and the male poetics that has historically been our outlook on literature. Something that, someday, will be unnecessary, as we move towards a holistic view of humanity.

While meandering around the classical blogosphere this morning, I came across a spectacular piece of commentary by Mary Beard, a well-known Cambridge classicist. Here’s an excerpt:

The real challenge, to take my own case, is how to stop men thinking that it is still on the margins of acceptability to pick up an exhausted student on Milan railway station, buy her a bed in a Wagon Lit, and then have (unwanted) sex with her on the way to Rome. Prosecution isn’t the only point.

Regular readers of this blog will now be expecting the ancient angle on all this. In fact the ancient debates were almost as complicated as our own, though concerned with rather different issues.

It is often said that in Athens, at least, the idea of women’s consent played no part in the control of sexual violence. That is true in the sense that the attitude of the woman’s guardian was what seems to have counted: even heterosexual rape in Athens was an issue between men. Some Athenians could even claim that seduction was worse than rape – in the sense that seducers actually won over the mind of the woman (another man’s property) to themselves.

But across the ancient world (and even in Athens) it wasn’t quite so simple.

In examining the potential problems with new consent laws in Britain, Mary Beard describes some of the most troubling and intriguing issues that surrounded rape in the ancient world. It’s well worth reading.

While I was initially troubled by her negative reaction to a law that would make it impossible for a woman to legally give consent when drunk, I can see that legislation might not be the best response to the issue of consent. This is not to say that someone can give consent when drunk, of course– rather, that the problem would be better dealt with by making people aware that drunken consent is not consent. Legislation in this case, I fear, would simply restrict behavior without necessarily reducing the number of rapes. Mary Beard’s comment on the ad campaign (see right) being conducted by the British government— “the ‘no entry’ sign stamped on the woman’s pants still suggests that the main reason you might not have sex with her is simply that you might find yourself in the dock if you did”— goes just as well for this particular piece of rape law. It would stop someone from committing rape only by inculcating a fear of being convicted, not by any increase in the general understanding of why non-consensual sex is wrong. We need to educate people, not simply describe women as “off-limits”.

Of course, the ancients (as Mary Beard astutely points out) had entirely different concerns in the question of rape. A woman’s marriage status (in both Greece and Rome) had far more influence than any question of consent on whether the act was permissible. A particularly disturbing case, unmentioned by Mary Beard, is that of Lucretia, best-known through Livy’s discussion in the Ab Urbe Condita. Her rape occurs at the end of the reign of Tarquinius Superbus, the tyrannous last king of Rome, and is actually a major catalyst for his removal from power.

Livy describes the king’s son Sextus Tarquinius getting together with several of his friends, all of whom boast about how faithful and diligent their wives are. To settle the contest, the young men go and visit each of the wives, all of whom are feasting and enjoying themselves without their husbands— except for Lucretia, the wife of Collatinus, who is still diligently working at her loom despite the time. Sextus immediately decides to have sex with Lucretia, and so the next night, when he knows Collatinus will be away, he returns to Lucretia’s home. Having gone into her bedroom, he threatens her with a sword, stating that he’ll kill her if she does not have sex with him. Lucretia, however, refuses. Sextus then threatens to kill her, kill one of her slaves, and leave the body next to her— which would imply that he found the pair in adultery, and killed them both. Lucretia, far more afraid of this potential dishonor, is then raped by Sextus. The next day, she calls for her father and her husband Collatinus to come to her, and tells them everything that has happened.

They all successively pledged their word, and tried to console the distracted woman , by turning the guilt from the victim of the outrage to the perpetrator, and urging that it is the mind that sins not the body, and where there has been no consent there is no guilt.

‘It is for you,’ she said, ‘to see that he gets his deserts: although I acquit myself of the sin, I do not free myself from the penalty; no unchaste woman shall henceforth live and plead Lucretia’s example.’

She had a knife concealed in her dress which she plunged into her, heart, and fell dying on the floor. Her father and husband raised the death-cry.
(Ab Urbe Condita I.58, Livy, trans. Canon Roberts.)

This story’s outcome is deeply troubling. On the one hand, Lucretia’s father and husband are well ahead of their time in assuring Lucretia that she isn’t guilty of adultery, since she didn’t consent– a concept plenty of people still have trouble with today. The fact that she needs their assurances of her innocence, however, is disconcerting. She describes the incident to Collatinus by saying that “the mark of another is in your bed”– an indication that rape was considered more of a violation of a husband’s property than a woman’s body and mind. Yet there is still an onus of guilt on Lucretia to pay for the dishonor, and she frames her suicide in the idea of preventing other, less honorable women from abusing such an “excuse” for their own crimes. Lucretia’s suicide is also deeply necessary to Livy’s history– Collatinus goes on to swear revenge on the Tarquins for their offense against his wife, and becomes one of the first two Consuls of Rome after Tarquinius Superbus is expelled. Despite all of her family’s assurances that she need not die, the sense that Lucretia’s suicide is somehow “right” or “necessary” is solidly embedded in the story– she is considered even more honorable for having punished herself, and she provides the necessary catalyst for the rebellion against Tarquinius Superbus.

I’ve never quite been sure what to make of Livy’s story of Lucretia. I enjoy Livy’s history immensely (I am evidently among the few in that regard), yet I find this particular legend as repulsive as can be. One is left wondering whether Lucretia killed herself out of shame, or whether her suicide was coerced in some more subtle manner; her character is so clearly molded to Roman ideals that it is difficult to tell whether her motivations can be real in any way. Regardless, most of the facts at the root of the legend were probably lost long before Livy researched his history. Whatever understanding we glean from the legend is, unfortunately, limited by the unreliability of our source in Livy, and of Livy’s original sources.

It’s a frustrating topic to examine, given that we have no sources describing a woman’s perspective of rape in the ancient world. Male authors occasionally came to some truly staggering conclusions, including this gem from Lysias:

Thus, o jurors, did the lawgiver think that rapists were worthy of less punishment than seducers… considering that those who achieve their ends by force are hated by those forced, while the seducers destroy the souls of those seduced, thus making others’ wives more attached to them than to their husbands…
(Orations I.32-33, Lysias, trans. me.)

How do we accurately interpret an ancient perspective that says it’s better for a woman to be raped than seduced? How do we overcome the immediate, visceral disgust at that idea and make scholarly judgments about ancient treatment of women without being affected by emotion?

I’m honestly not sure yet. We can at least be grateful, though, that the problems in rape and consent law today are a far cry from those in the Athenian courts during Lysias’ time, or in Rome before and during the Republic. By no means should we belittle the tangled legal and social issues surrounding rape that still need to be worked out in our own societies, but I can’t help but say we’ve made some progress. Now we just need to make more.

Then,
terrified by her faith, tragic Dido prays for death,
sickened to see the vaulting sky above her.
And to steel her new resolve to leave the light,
she sees, laying gifts on the altars steaming incense –
shudder to hear it now — the holy water going black
and the wine she pours congeals in bloody filth.
(Aeneid, Virgil, trans. Robert Fagles)

The title of this blog comes from the Aeneid — specifically the fourth book of the Aeneid. It’s no surprise to anyone that classical literature is sexist, but the story of the widow Dido in particular encapsulates many of the topics we want to cover here.

If you are unfamiliar with the story, it follows from the Iliad: Greece has just conquered the city of Troy, and Aeneas leads the survivors of the city’s sack away from the ruin. He is fated to found Rome and a new empire, but before he does so he travels around the ancient world. The most significant place he and his followers halt is Carthage in North Africa, a city which was to become arch-rivals with Rome. It has just been founded and is ruled by a queen, Dido. Her husband, whom she loved dearly, had been killed by her brother (with whom she shared rulership of their father’s kingdom), and therefore she and her followers had fled her homeland to found a new city. The kings surrounding all want to marry her in order to control her kingdom, but she rejects them. But when Aeneas lands on her shores, she takes him in; she lives with him as though they were married, though no ceremony takes place. Ultimately, the gods tell Aeneas to move on and found Rome, although he’s begun a life with Dido. He does so, and in her despair (since she rejected the surrounding kings for Aeneas, they will probably attack her city now) she commits suicide.

The largest problem with this story is that the onus of the tragedy is all put on Dido. In a tragic play, the point of this story would be that Aeneas (as the tragic hero) was overcome by lust; lust would have been his tragic flaw, or possibly hubris, in that he believed he could escape his destiny and stay at Carthage. But Aeneas is the epic hero of the Aeneid. He is supposed to be emulated. He is described as “pious Aeneas,” celebrating his actions in leaving Dido.*

This story has been told and retold throughout history. Dido is condemned to the second circle of Hell in Dante’s Inferno — the circle of the lustful. But it also was a piece of commentary on history when Vergil wrote it. Dido’s story echoes Cleopatra’s: she is a beautiful, powerful African queen, the effective sole ruler of her people. A Roman leader falls in love with her. Ultimately, she commits suicide. The two queens are the major symbols of Africa in Roman literature; they represent Africa as female and therefore penetrable and conquerable (to the Roman mind, to the Western mind; we all know their feelings about women).

So, Dido revisited. This time, with 100% more feminism.**

*Aeneas, to be fair, doesn’t get a great deal either. The gods kind of use him as a foosball. But at least he gets to live.

**Which is not to say that this blog is only about feminism. But it is about gender interactions and we’re coming at gender from a feminist perspective.

The Quiverfull movement is a small Christian sect which believes in having as many children as possible– that is, using no birth control or methods of family planning. They’ve been covered recently by many excellent blogs, all of whom commented on the disturbing nature of the group’s beliefs and practices.

What I find particularly interesting– and evocative of some of the movement’s disconcerting intentions– are the close similarities between Quiverfull’s stated goals and those of the Augustan marriage legislation of 18 and 17 B.C.E. (the Leges Juliae). While Augustus’ marriage laws are perhaps most famous for his attempt to outlaw adultery (a resounding failure that later forced him to exile his adulterous daughter Julia), they also included the Ius Trium Liberorum, a law that provided special rights and privileges for the parents of more than three children and penalized those who could procreate but were not doing so.

Augustus’ rationale for supporting this legislation, so far as we know, was to increase the falling birth rate in Rome and separate the intermingling social classes by restricting intermarriage. The similarities to Quiverfull are clear– their movement seeks to provide “weapons for the culture wars” in the form of numerous children raised strictly within their ideology, just as Augustus hoped to encourage “traditional values” in Rome by reducing the mixing of social classes. As Amanda at Pandagon aptly points out, Quiverfull carries a strong undertone of race consciousness; Augustus likewise hoped to bolster the native Roman population in the face of a swelling population of foreign freedmen.

The implications for the status of women are, in both cases, also quite worrying. The Quiverfull movement believes in the full submission of women to their fathers until marriage and their husbands afterwards, a regression to social practice common both in the Roman world and earlier. We also know that gaining the ius trium liberorum in Rome didn’t always increase the status of the “honored” woman. Instead, since married women or widows with fewer than three children were punished by the law, having three or more children simply became the expected norm in Augustan and post-Augustan Rome. While Quiverfull adherents are careful to claim that there is no “competition” among themselves to see who can have the largest family, it isn’t difficult to imagine the social problems that might arise for a Quiverfull woman or couple struggling with infertility.

Perhaps it shouldn’t be surprising that there is such a correspondence between these two cultures, but there’s some comfort in the fact that the Quiverfull people would likely be disconcerted by the similarities between their movement and Roman legislation. After all, it’s telling that a movement supposedly predicated on the ideals and history of Christianity isn’t substantially different from an ancient movement predicated on the religion and history of pagan Rome. What holds each of these cultures together, modern and ancient, is their attitude towards women as little more than bearers of children, not the sincerity of their different faiths.