This article surveys the discussion around teaching and reading Ovid's upsetting stories of sexual violence, especially in the context of the #MeToo era, and suggests that such stories offer modern readers the opportunity to investigate the power dynamics that allow such acts to happen at all. The case study for this approach is the myth of Philomela, Tereus, and Procne in Metamorphoses 6, and by applying a narratological lens to the passage, we can see how characters like Philomela are empowered through speech and communication, while aggressors like Tereus, deprived of direct speech, are stripped of agency by the narrator.
In the 2019-20 academic year, we undertook a full redesign of our introductory Latin curriculum at the College of the Holy Cross in order to provide students with a more meaningful encounter with the Latin language. We primed our students to work with real, unedited Latin texts within their first year of study by highlighting Latin grammatical concepts that were frequent, complex, and unfamiliar to English speakers, which meant introducing topics like the passive voice, the subjunctive, third-declension adjectives, and indirect statement that are foundational to the Latin language much earlier than we had previously.
This article analyzes the agency (or lack thereof) in the verbs of the speech of Cremutius Cordus at Tacitus Annals 4.34-5. Cordus divests himself of agency in order to grant it to written works of literature, which can carry an author’s legacy and authority into posterity even if the author himself is punished with death. By their very existence, such works, imbued with agency and power by their authors, stymie the efforts of book-burners and the authors’ enemies to efface cultural memory.
THE PERVIGILIUM VENERIS IN A NEW EDITION - (W.M.) Barton (ed., trans.) The Pervigilium Veneris. A New Critical Text, Translation and Commentary. Pp. x + 153. London and New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2018. Cased, £85, US$114. ISBN: 978-1-350-04053-3. - Volume 69 Issue 1
This note offers two related arguments. First, I supplement the existing scholarly consensus that the speaker of Sophocles’ Tereus fr. 588 Radt is Procne by suggesting that her addressee is a shepherd (henceforth ‘Shepherd’), whose existence was recently discovered and confirmed by a new papyrus for fr. 583. Second, I attempt to contextualize P.J. Finglass's placement of fr. 583 in the first episode of the play and to respond to the ‘internment’ problem posited by David Fitzpatrick by suggesting that the play takes place on an anniversary or some sort of commemoration of Philomela's supposed death. This proposal justifies the doleful tenor of the fragment and its generalizing subject-matter, the lonely plight of married women torn from their natal families, and resolves the question of Procne's state of knowledge about her sister's fate; and it allows for the internment of Philomela to figure into the play's plot by making Philomela's ‘death’ an established event before the play begins, as Gregory Dobrov suggests.
In this paper, I apply the methodology of narratological focalization to Ovid’s account of Medea in the Metamorphoses (7.1–424), an episode that many scholars have acknowledged as marked by jarring shifts. Focalization allows the reader to trace more subtly and appreciate more fully the step-by-step progression in Medea’s character, as the audience’s sympathy is gradually alienated from the young girl in love by means of shifting focalizations. I also investigate the neglected Liber vignette (7.294–296) as an important signpost for the murder of Pelias, rather than a retrospective close to the Aeson episode.
