Like Man, Like Woman: Roman Women, Gender Qualities and Conjugal Relationships at the Turn of the First Century
Modern scholarship often discusses Roman women in terms of
their difference from their male counterparts, frequently defining them
as ‘other’. This book shows how Roman male writers at the turn of the
first century actually described women as not so different from men: the
same qualities and abilities pertaining to the domains of parenthood,
intellect and morals are ascribed by writers to women as well as to men.
There are two voices, however: a traditional, ideal voice and an
individual, realistic voice. This creates a duality of representations
of women, which recurs across literary genres and reflects a duality of
mentality. How can we interpret the paradoxical information about Roman
women given by the male-authored texts? How does this duality of
mentality inform us about gender roles and gender hierarchy?
This work analyses well-known, as well as overlooked, passages from
the writings of Pliny the Younger, Tacitus, Suetonius, Quintilian,
Statius, Martial and Juvenal and sheds new light on Roman views of women
and their abilities, on the notions of private and public and on
conjugal relationships. In the process, the famous sixth satire of
Juvenal is revisited and its topic reassessed, providing further
insights into the complex issues of gender roles, marriage and emotions.
By contrasting representations of women across a broad spectrum of
literary genres, this book provides consistent findings that have wide
significance for the study of Latin literature and the social history of
the late first and early second centuries
- ISBN: 978-3-0353-0486-2
- DOI: https://doi.org/10.3726/978-3-0353-0486-2
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