Celotto, G. ed. 2023. Classical World 117.1: Women’s Voice in the Early Roman Empire.
The aim of this special issue is to discuss some episodes, taken from the literature of the early Roman Empire, in which fictional and actual women break the thick curtain of silence that surrounds them, thus reaffirming their identity and reclaiming their role in the community. Giulio Celotto highlights the analogy between the themes of rape and silencing in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The tales of Io and Philomela can be repurposed to amplify the powerful message of the recently developed Me Too movement, as they emphasize the importance for women victims of sexual assaults to speak up and denounce the violence they have suffered, in spite of their assaulters’ attempts to mute them. Focusing on the portrait of Circe in the Aeneid, the Metamorphoses, and the Argonautica, Jessica Blum-Sorensen points out that Vergil, Ovid, and Valerius Flaccus employ the voice of dangerous and unsettling women to deconstruct the dominant narratives of their days. Circe’s rewriting of Rome’s foundational myth demonstrates that, in order to make history, women must tell their stories in their own voices, at cost of disrupting the norms. Laura Zientek examines the unique character of Erictho’s prophecy in the Bellum civile from an ecofeminist perspective, and argues that, unlike all the other vatic figures in the poem, who are presented by Lucan as mouthpieces of the gods, the witch speaks in her own peculiar voice. Erictho’s transgressive carmina, which display her total control over the natural world, break the pattern of men’s subjugation of women and earth, making it clear that women gain power by finding their own voices. Finally, Caitlin Gillespie analyzes women’s movement in the early Imperial Age as they are described by Tacitus to show that, once deprived of their voices, women use a different instrument to make their requests heard: their bodies. These narratives provide clear evidence that collective action has the power to draw the attention of the world to issues of gender inequality and advocate for change.