Roman Women

Dickison, Sheila K. and  Hallett, Judith P.   A Roman Women Reader: Selections from the Second Century BCE through Second Century CE
ISBN: 978-0-86516-662-2 Bolchazy-Carducci Publishers 2015
Paperback  $19.00 

This reader is part of a series from Bolchazy for intermediate and advanced students of Latin.  Some are conventional, based on extracts from a particular author (Cicero, Livy, Propertius etc.), but this a thematic selection about the life of women in Rome based on a wide variety of texts.  It aims to and succeeds in extending the range of the students’ reading beyond the usual suspects to inscriptions, archaeological finds and unusual texts found in extracts from Aulus Gellius.  It contains an excellent introduction to Sulpicia or rather the two Sulpicias who are among the few authentic women’s voices we have.  Extracts are short and can give only a glimpse into the complex texts which are included, such as the attack on Clodia in Cicero’s pro Caelio, or the story of Nero’s disastrous relations with his mother Agrippina, which is told here in the version of Suetonius rather than the better known one of Tacitus.  However, a picture of the way women were seen by men begins to emerge from the selection.  Men’s attitudes tend to dominate of course as men have written the majority of the texts, but the selection and the extensive and well-judged commentary enables us to begin to hear the women’s voices.  Cornelia on her son Gaius Gracchus, the strong character of Sophoniba in Livy, the few poems of Sulpicia (found in Tibullus) and several funeral inscriptions show some of what life was like for women right through the Roman period.  The epigraphic and archaeological material is particularly welcome, especially Claudia Severa’s birthday party invitation, found in Vindolanda by Hadrian’s Wall and now in the British Museum.  This recently found text is quickly establishing itself as standard reading for Latin students.  The attitudes found in some extracts will be quite shocking to younger readers encountering, for example, the full fury of Juvenal’s misogyny perhaps for the first time.  In addition, the texts and commentary are not reticent about including material of a sexual nature which will demand mature reactions from the young readers at whom this book is aimed.  Some teachers may well feel more comfortable setting some passages for private reading rather than dealing with them in class, but Dickison and Hallett deserve credit for giving us the full picture.  This is a manageable and student-friendly selection with a full vocabulary and notes that explain most difficulties and give a full context to each section, which move from Plautus to Juvenal.  It will lead students off into new directions, but does not itself need a lot of extra material and resources to be worked through.   I found this an exciting and significant development in the way material is presented to students.  We should no longer rely on (or prescribe as set texts) the traditional commentary on a whole book of Cicero or even Virgil. This selection is more attractive and manageable with the inevitable time constraints imposed on over-worked teachers who will find that a lot of the work of searching out and editing suitable material has already been done for them, and a whole new aspect of the ancient world has been opened up for their students.

Orfeo at the Roundhouse

Orfeo: Royal Opera at the Roundhouse

There are multiple layers in this production.  Underneath it all lies the Greek myth of Orpheus and his wife Eurydice, the best known version of which is in Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin.  She dies, Orpheus the mythical singer-songwriter goes down to the underworld to ask for her back, Pluto agrees but sets a condition that Orpheus must not look back at her as they emerge from Hades, he does, she dies again, Orpheus meets a strange end.  Next layer is the renaissance opera form invented by Monteverdi in Italy in 1607; then the recreation by a modern opera company in an English translation and finally the relocation of the Royal Opera from its home in Covent Garden to the more hip area of Camden.  Add to these diverse elements a local community dance group of young people performing acrobatics and dance sequences (they become the gates of hell at one point and the river Styx at another), a band of musicians playing authentic instruments of the period of Monteverdi, and an interpretation by the director and designer which places everything into a Christian context where Orfeo becomes a Christ-like figure and the whole drama is played out apparently in a Christian court with institutionalised figures (orphans, prisoners?) taking on the dramatic roles.  In the original country setting of acts 1 and 2 the pastori  (shepherds) become pastors or Catholic priests sinisterly dressed in black soutanes.  This is an attempt at outreach by the Royal Opera which is trying to bring opera to a new audience, and the night I attended this seemed to be successful.  A mixed audience in the sold-out former engine turning shed in Chalk Farm, representative of the whole of London, was there with only a few regular Covent Garden patrons looking confused.  Peeling back these layers you eventually come down to the original Greek myth.  Perhaps opera as a new genre was inspired by Greek tragedy and the new enthusiasm for Greek and Latin culture at the time.  While this production moves far from a traditional view of Classical culture it is still nonetheless there and this shows perhaps the fundamental position of the classical world in western culture, even in such a modern contemporary take on it as this. 

The Ides of April

Davis Lindsey, The Ides of April  Paperback 368 pages Hodder Paperbacks 2013 ISBN 978-1444755848 £5.99

Lindsey Davis is best known for her series featuring the Roman detective M. Didius Falco.  She has now started a new series with a fresh central character: Flavia Albia.  This may seem to be nothing more than a shrewd marketing move, as after all women read fiction more than men and may be presumed to like the idea of a woman in the leading role.  It also fits in with 21^st century ideas, even in Classics research, which seeks to find out and listen to the female voice in the ancient world.  Flavia Albia is, however, not a politically-correct figure who is just a back-projection of contemporary feminism onto an imperial Roman canvas.  Lindsey Davis is concerned to give her a proper back-story and an on-going concern throughout the book of her insecure and dangerous place as an investigator in a male-dominated world.  She is always concerned with her safety and her social position, forever calculating how far she can push the boundaries to get away with something outrageous in pursuit of her case.  Her world is the teeming inner city chaos of Domitian’s Rome, with a selection of cheats, drunks, social climbers and lazy officials as her surrounding companions.  All this is convincingly done; her world is far from the elite governing class known from cultural histories of Rome and to the great credit of the author there is scarcely a character in the plot who is known to us from history.  We are far closer here to a wall-painting from a bar in a museum exhibition of life in Pompeii than to the pages of Tacitus or Suetonius.  This gives the author the opportunity to create figures who have a life of their own, but who do not have three archaeological or literary footnotes attached to back up every little detail of their lives.   The plot is well-constructed (though not too difficult to solve) and involves a serial killer on the loose in the local streets of the Aventine.  Flavia uses her skills and intuition and the fact that she is a woman to gain access to the female witnesses and victims to help the professional investigators, some of whom are blundering males.  This book is the first in a new series (already there are two more titles) which can be recommended to students and young people who would like to enter the ancient world imaginatively, and to engage with life in Rome from ground level, and not only from the elite world of the surviving literature.  Such engagement can only be positive and appealing to young people’s love of entering a different world through the written word.  Flavia Albia’s world has the advantage of being a real, historical one rather than a fantasy.