A familiar theme in Greek myth is that of the deadly gift that passes between a man and a woman. Analysis of exchanges between men and women reveals the gendered nature of exchange in ancient Greek mythic thinking. Using the anthropological categories of male and female wealth , it is possible to arrive at an understanding of the protocols of exchange as they relate to men and especially to women. These protocols, which are based in part on the distinction between (...) metals and other durable goods as "male" and textiles as "female," are closely related to the gendered division of labor. Anxiety about women as exchangers derives in part from their status as objects exchanged in marriage , and partly from a misogynist and pessimistic strand of Greek thought that discounts any female economic contribution to the oikos. Indeed, the majority of destructive exchanges take place within the context of marital crisis. While some texts, beginning with the Odyssey, show the positive side of women's economic role, tragedy tends to follow the Hesiodic distrust of women as exchange partners. Passages from the Agamemnon and the Trachiniai are analyzed to show how in situations of perverted reciprocity brought about by marital discord, even women's traditional gifts of textiles may become deadly. (shrink)

This paper explores the aesthetics of miniaturization in Statius’ Silvae 2.7, in relation to Statius’ unexpected decision to write a tribute to the dead epic poet Lucan in hendecasyllables. The choice of a meter associated with irreverence, ephemerality, speed, and fun has been variously justified as expressing the poet’s ambivalent mood—mourning and celebration combined—or encapsulating his subject’s brief life. This paper builds on these explanations from a different angle. The epitome of miniature, playful poetry in the Silvae is the pseudo-Virgilian (...) Culex, mentioned first in Statius’ opening preface as a model for his collection and then in the tribute to Lucan as a yardstick for the young poet’s precocity. This is no casual coincidence. Statius’ résumé of baby Lucan’s future career uses techniques of retrospective prophecy similar to those with which the Culex-poet anticipates and absorbs Virgil’s entire oeuvre. Other clues suggest that Statius is engaging with the faked juvenile work more than sporadically, writing the equivalent for Lucan in the smallest meter imaginable while aiming to surpass both Virgil and Lucan as a poet of speed and synoptic vision. (shrink)

Recent work on trauma, especially in the field of Holocaust studies, has tackled the question of how the “generation after” relates, and relates to, the trauma of its immediate ancestors as it navigates between the poles of remembrance and appropriation. Other studies have shifted focus towards the effects of trauma upon narration, in part through critiquing the prevailing psycho-analytic model of trauma as an unrepresentable event that evades/forecloses language. Aeschylus’ Suppliants, with its chorus of fifty female Danaids who react to (...) their traumatic present by recourse to tales of the traumatic past of their ancestor Io and her son Epaphos, offers a productive stage for testing the applicability of these theoretical frames to the genre of ancient Greek tragedy. The Danaids’ turn to the past explores the agency of an ancestral trauma that reaches into their present, and in doing so highlights the unsteady inheritance of trauma both for those who relate and for those who witness these acts of testimony. The act of supplication itself is defined in part by physical contact between the suppliant and the supplicandus, yet this ritual emphasis on touch is amplified by the play’s consistent focus upon a series of real and hypothesized touches, from the traumatic to the salvific. Through this engagement with the haptic context of trauma and traumatic recall, Aeschylus’ play proposes an enlarged aetiology of touch—across cognitive, affective, and physical registers—for the ritual of supplication itself. (shrink)