Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In this article, I provide a close examination of Ovid’s Amores 2.8 that focuses on how the poet-lover’s use of persuasory rhetoric enables him to bully and silence the subaltern Cypassis. My discussion challenges Patricia Watson’s claim (in “Ovid Amores 2.7 and 8: The Disingenuous Defence”) that this poem has comparably less forensic qualities and rhetorical elements than its counterpart (2.7). I argue that forensic and rhetorical elements permeate the text and become increasingly blatant as the poem proceeds. By employing declamatory and oratorical techniques, the poet-lover weaponises his rhetorical education, a privilege afforded to him by his status as an elite Roman male, in order to intimidate, manipulate, and ultimately blackmail Cypassis, the uneducated, defenceless, and mute subaltern. I suggest that it is a mischaracterisation to refer to this approach as a ‘seduction’; it is a calculated exertion of power that enacts gendered violence.
Source: Eugesta
Author: Ryan Shayne
Institution: Université de Lille
Language: English
Topic: Classical Antiquity Studies
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W4406703448