BONUS POST | Enraptured: Reading Ovidian Sexual Violence in Early Modern Literature
Content Warning: This post discusses topics that range from sexual violence and suicidal ideation to body horror and dismemberment. Please read with caution and care.
Author’s Note:
Last week I wrote a retrospective about giving a conference presentation at Columbia University in 2020. This week I’m providing the text to the actual talk. I wrote this piece nearly three years ago for a conference called “Our Voices for Inclusive Classics Pedagogy.”
As I write on my About page, this Substack is devoted to both reflective and scholarly writing. One of the values I hold nearest and dearest is publicly available scholarship, and I figured it’s time to live up to the standards to which I hold others in my field.
To gain full context of this project reproduced below, I recommend reading my previous post “Searching for Our Voices” first.
Content Warning: This post discusses topics that range from sexual violence and suicidal ideation to body horror and dismemberment. Please read with caution and care.
The Art of Remembering
Remembering: the state of having or bringing to mind an awareness of someone or something that one has seen, known, or experienced in the past
Before we begin, I want to be completely transparent and add some context to my professional background. In a lot of ways, this talk will be about my status as an informed outsider to the field of classics. To start, as I’m sure you have already gathered, I am not a classics scholar. I study early modern English literature and new Latin through the context of seventeenth-century astronomy.
As an early modernist I have a special relationship to the concept of “remembering,” a concept that I bring to the fore today. Most of the tropes and supposed inventions that are markers of the early modern world are in fact reconfigurations of classical antiquity. Indeed, when Renaissance humanists first began their manuscript hunting, they sought to recapture the ancient Rome in which Cicero, Quintilian, Vergil, and Ovid lived, walked, and wrote.
In their pursuit of la rinascita, the rebirth of classical culture, they engaged in a very specific task: the project of remembering, of recapitulating the past through careful exegesis and textual analysis. Second, I am not a master Latinist. Most of my Latin vocabulary is steeped in the realm of early modern history of science. In other words: very technical, more-than-a-little-crazy philosophical texts; a wild west of speculative philosophy, so to speak.
By and large, these works delve into early modern transmission and adaptations of both classical authors, like Ovid and Vergil, and something called prisca theologia:
prisca theologia (ancient theology): the view that one single, true theology exists in the world, and all religions, including Christianity, answer the same truths that ancient “pagan” religions do.
What this research focus really requires on the one hand, is a very basic familiarity with classical texts as works of literature, rather than how I have encountered them in the classroom: as syntactical puzzles to solve. In other words, I think through how early modern authors co-opt, adapt, and in a lot of ways rewrite these classical stories.
Much of that research relies on etymological study, digging into the bowels of not only the Oxford English Dictionary, but also the Oxford Latin Dictionary, Lewis and Short, and on a few mind-numbing occasions, the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. On the other hand, since I am a literary scholar, my primary pedagogical and research methods are always in service of answering bigger, more speculative questions: why do certain literary tropes persist, what about them is valuable for our understanding of our cultural history, and why are they such powerful symbols for early modern authors to mimic, imitate, and adapt?
In the fall 2018 semester, I found a rare opportunity. For one, I had the unwavering support of a faculty member who was excited to co-teach with a graduate student. A precious resource, a classics professor at Rice expressed an interest in developing and teaching a Renaissance Latin course with me.
There was no other course like it on the books in the Department of Classics and European Studies, and I was determined to teach another class at Rice, an institution with a very small student-to-teacher ratio where graduate student teaching is difficult to come by. I took the lead on course development (another rare opportunity!) and drafted a syllabus with reading assignments, both in Latin and English, and some sample assignments (prose composition, short essays, a couple of reading quizzes).
We met several times before the spring semester started, endlessly revising the syllabus, reading assignments, and course expectations. By January 2019, we were off to the races, ready to embark on a brand new course, New Latin, and above all else, new knowledge.
Remembering Hierarchies
Hierarchy: a system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority
As an early-career female researcher, I am acutely aware of my position in the classroom. Even though I have been teaching as instructor of record in the college classroom since 2011, the fact remains that I am closer in age to my undergraduate students than they are to their tenured professors for other classes. On day one of the spring 2019 semester, however, I was more aware of my subject position than usual, for I was reminded—perhaps for the first time since I began teaching in higher education—that my subject position as teacher, subject matter expert, and authority figure felt more tenuous than it had for quite some time.
Rice being the small institution that it is, all of my students had taken class from my co-instructor many times over; he walked into the room already knowing the contours of their academic and extracurricular lives. We were about to dive into the syllabus before I had to remind the class that one of their professors was not yet acquainted with them. And for the first time since I began teaching, I felt like I was the one who had to explain what I was doing there.
There were also other adjustments. The demographics of my students was unusual. First, the class was small; 5 students total, one of whom was auditing. And, second, all males, only one of whom is a person of color. I was literally the token female. Even as an instructor of the English Renaissance, the demographic divide among my students is pretty even—if not along the lines of race and minority identities, then at the very least fairly evenly split among genders. There was also the fact that my teaching philosophy was completely different than the department upon which I was interloping. Furthermore, my own teaching philosophy is decidedly non-hierarchical. When I walk into the classroom, I am more invested in the students’ readings of the texts. This pedagogical method is fairly standard in modern language literary studies.
After all, the author is dead, we don’t have an Ouija board, the text says what it says, let’s discuss!
In other words, I emphasize that textual authority is dependent on the readers themselves; everyone in the classroom has the same access to the same text. The difference arises in our subject positions. This is the part where things usually get interesting. How Student A, from an affluent background in the Northeast, reads a sonnet will differ from the reading of Student B, a first-generation student from rural Texas.
These are the moments I live for in the classroom—not only because they reveal the important differences in our everyday lived experiences, but also because they displace my hierarchical role of “authority” in the room.
As such, my classroom is not a top-down pecking order, a hierarchy, and while I am technically more informed than my students (I have, after all, been studying this stuff for well over a decade), our time in the classroom is not about me. If they want my reading of the text, they will ask for it. (They almost never do.)
I fundamentally believe that my job as the instructor is to ask the probing questions and to teach students how to answer questions critically, mindfully, and creatively. I emphasize that I am not here to give the “right” answer; instead, I underscore my role as a resource for the technical stuff: guidance on writing, acquiring research skills, developing projects, etc.
However, in my fervor to teach the literary aspects of these classical texts, I forgot that this class, LATI 309, was first and foremost a language class. Not every session can be modeled after the de-hierarchical model, and in some ways this de-hierarchy is a direct hindrance to course outcomes: i.e., a cohesive, birds-eye view of the 400 or so years that we now call “the Renaissance” and “early modern” studies.
My co-teacher was instrumental in this regard because there are instances where a right answer is necessary. He is a phenomenal, supportive pedagogue, and he showed by example the importance of asking students to name the principle parts of a verb, the purpose of a subjunctive, and wait a second, is that the passive periphrastic or a gerundive?
There were other times when our students wanted one particular answer to translations; and as everyone in this room knows, while some translations are easy, others are more difficult to parse. And no small wonder, either. A major component of my Latin language education has emphasized authoritative translation—marked deliberation that shows a duty to the text, its central meaning, and its interpretive force in a modern language. These are all valuable outcomes, ones that I do not disparage or discount. However, my being a literary scholar who is interested in the gray areas of language, I knew that these moments were teachable, moments that are sometimes taken for granted when syntactical precision becomes the sole purpose of the undergraduate classroom.
Case in point: Our very first reading of the semester, Flavio Biondo’s proemium to Roma Triumphans.
In it, Flavio wistfully longs for the days of ancient Rome:
[Q]uod imperii maiestate orbi terrarum communicata societas festae pacis omnium[] … Romani enim maximan orbis partem suae subactam dictioni ita pacaverunt cultamque bonis moribus et artibus reddiderunt, ut disiunctae mari montibusque et fluminibus separatae gentes ac linguis litteraturaque differentes populi per Latinae linguae communionem perque communes omnibus Romanos magistratus una eademque civitas sint effecti.[1]
[B]y the greatness of its empire the world has come to share in joyful peace … After the Romans had brought the largest part of the world under their sway, they made it so peaceful and so civilized with good customs and conduct that races divided by sea and mountain and kept apart by rivers and peoples who had different languages and ways of writing were made one and the same state, through sharing the Latin language.
Given the fact that this conference is called Our Voices for Inclusive Classics, I doubt I am the only one here whose first inclination is to play the game, “Spot the Apologist of Imperialism.” After we got through the grammar and syntax (gratias tibi ago, Magister Scotte!). I asked my students their first impressions of reading as we began to dive into the cultural context of Flavio’s 1459 treatise.
By and large, their reactions were innocuous: “Flavio loves Latin! And Rome! And antiquity!” And then down came the lexicography. I distributed a handout with two dictionary entries, one from the OED on “civilize, v.” and one from the OLD on “cīvīlis ~is ~e.”
What does it mean to civilize a people? I asked.
The students diligently took to the handout, (note that I paraphrase here and condense for clarity):
STUDENT 1: Well in this case it clearly means sense 4 in the OLD: “Determined by law, legal, civil.”
ALM: What’s “this case”? How do you “civilize” a group of people? How do you convince them to give up their languages and cultures? There’s a lot that Flavio elides here—and it’s not pretty, or an innocent love of the language.
STUDENT 1: He’s clearly not talking about that.
ALM: He isn’t?
STUDENT 1: No.
ALM: How do you know?
STUDENT 1: Because it’s clearly implied that he’s talking about language, not violence.
ALM: That’s a great a point. Can language be violent? [pause] Turn to your yellow sheet. Can I get a volunteer to read sense 1a from the OED?
STUDENT 2: “To bring (a person, place, group of people, etc.) to a stage of social development considered to be more advanced, esp. by bringing to conformity with the social norms of a developed society; to enlighten, refine, and educate; to make more cultured and sophisticated.”
ALM: Fair enough. Now can someone read sense 1b?
STUDENT 3: “to tame or domesticate (an animal)”
Another silence fell over the classroom. Once more, I asked a series of questions:
What does it mean to civilize?
What does it mean to tame or domesticate?
What, or who, is classified as an animal?
More to the point, for what reasons do the classics of Roman antiquity have a say in the supposed development of the modern human?
We had run out of time by this point in the class session, so I wrote a message to my students after class on Canvas. In it, I emphasized the prescience of my in-class questions and that one can draw a line in the course of Western history between the traditional meaning of “civilized,” that which props up and attends to the needs of the state, and the more sinister implications of compulsory compliance and erasure of difference.
Furthermore, I highlighted that as the engines of merchant economies morphed into early modern capitalism, knowledge systems that began as the earnest and uncynical seeds of Renaissance humanism ended up being used to subjugate non-Europeans in the name of “civility” and perceived cultural superiority.
I also underscored that the humanities as a discipline of fields, from classics to comparative literature, still bears the bruises of this historical past. And while it may seem distant when we discuss these moments of presentism in the classroom, I accentuated through a series of URL links that those contusions are still very much a part of our cultural heritage.
The questions I posed remained unanswered on Day 2, but my overall goal for the course was to have my students develop their own answers to these questions, based on the comparative analysis with which we would be frequently engaging.
What this example illustrates in miniature is the potential pitfall we risk falling into when precise translation technique becomes more valuable than the content and message of the literature itself. Indeed, in some cases, definitive translation functions directly at odds with connotative nuance.
In my approach to de-hierarchize the classroom, the hierarchy—the system or organization in which people or groups are ranked one above the other according to status or authority—becomes a more egalitarian environment for students; not only do students have the opportunity to reevaluate the cultural and political context of word choice in literary works, but also they can reconceptualize their own role in the classroom itself: inquisitive young scholars thinking critically about the complex material in front of them.
Remembering Dismemberment
Dismemberment: the action of cutting off a person’s or animal’s limbs; the action of partitioning or dividing up a territory or organization
By week 7, my students eventually came around to accepting—if not relishing in—the gray areas. And we had gotten into a good groove. The first half of the class delved into the concrete elements of the course (my co-instructor’s expertise: precise translations, syntactical questions, historical overview), while the last half of class was my domain: ambiguity in the written word. In the three weeks prior to midterms, our conversation had turned to tales of Ovidian sexual violence.
This decision was not for the sake of shock value alone; rather, I designed this unit, titled “Ovid, Rome, and the Renaissance” around the fashionable trend among Elizabethan poets: Ovidian poetry, particularly the kind that emphasizes violence against women.
In this unit we read stories of Lucretia’s rape in Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita and Ovid’s Fasti, as well as Philomela’s dismemberment in book 6 of Ovid’s Metamorphoses in Latin. In English, we read Arthur Golding’s translation of the Metamorphoses (the very first English translation), Shakespeare’s long narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece, as well as his bloodiest and most gruesome play, the Roman-inspired Titus Andronicus.
To be clear, Shakespeare’s iteration of the ancient city in Titus collapses both Roman history and myth into a macabre caricature in every sense of word. Borrowing heavily on the rape and mutilation of Philomela and Virginia, the play follows the exploits of the disgraced titular character and his family as they navigate the brutality of the “barbarians,” the Goths, that have invaded the Roman state. We had read the stories of Philomela from book 6 of The Metamorphoses and Lucretia in book 2 of the Fasti, going through the contours and nuances of Ovid and ancient Rome.
The dehumanization of Philomela’s rape and mutilation are exaggerated to the point of caricature in Titus, a specific sub-genre we might call “torture porn” today. The questions for my class were:
Why Ovid, and why is the suffering and traumatization of women in particular the go-to snapshot of violence across the expanses of time?
Do we delight in women’s pain?
Is their pain less sympathetic?
Why is the traumatized body always female or feminized?
Moreover, there were plenty of gruesome tales Shakespeare could have chosen for his source material, a fair amount of which were from his own contemporary moment. Remember that this was the era of drawing and quartering, of burning heretics alive in the public streets. Put another way, the literal sight and smell of torture was pervasive in 16th-century London. Compellingly, Lavinia’s fate is more brutal than Philomela’s. Chiron and Demetrius, the two sons of Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, ensnare Lavinia in a hunting trap, violently rape her and cut out her tongue in act 2.
But being the now “civilized” new Romans that they are, they are also well versed in Latin language and literature. They learned Tereus’s lesson from Ovid; Philomela was still able to communicate the brutality through her artisan weaving, so in order to keep Lavinia from similarly weaving a tapestry to describe her mutilation, Chiron and Demetrius also cut off Lavinia’s hands, heightening and exaggerating the Ovidian violence in the process. By act 4, a visibly mutilated Lavinia is seen running after her little brother, Lucius:
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Lucius, what book is that she tosseth so?
Young LUCIUS
Grandsire, ’tis Ovid’s Metamorphoses;
My mother gave it me.
MARCUS ANDRONICUS
For love of her that’s gone,
Perhaps she cull’d it from among the rest.
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Soft! see how busily she turns the leaves!
What would she find? Lavinia, shall I read?
This is the tragic tale of Philomel,
And treats of Tereus' treason and his rape:
And rape, I fear, was root of thine annoy.
MARCUS ANDRONICUS
See, brother, see; note how she quotes the leaves.
TITUS ANDRONICUS
Lavinia, wert thou thus surprised, sweet girl,
Ravish’d and wrong’d, as Philomela was,
Forced in the ruthless, vast, and gloomy woods? See, see!
Ay, such a place there is, where we did hunt—
O, had we never, never hunted there!—
Pattern’d by that the poet here describes,
By nature made for murders and for rapes.
In response to this passage, one student pointed out the cultural and political power that knowing Ovid provides. In this scene, Lavinia uses her stumps to turn to book 6 of the Metamorphoses in order to draw a distinct parallel between her own suffering and Philomela’s.
Moreover, Lavinia’s only ability to communicate is through the poetry of Ovid itself because she knows it; the original Latin in this dramatic staging thus mimics what poetry does for us as readers: it becomes an agent to communicate the pain of those whose voices are typically stripped from the conversation. In turn this exercise impelled my students to think about how the text is itself an agentive force, how it confronts us with the brutal, physical realities of ephemeral conceptual language like “violence,” “misogyny,” and “vulnerability.”
My co-instructor led the charge in discussing the historical milieu of Ovid’s gory violence in the classical world.
By assigning Glenn Most’s essay, “Disiecti membra poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment in Neronian Poetry,” we were provided with the vocabulary to discuss in depth the ramifications of personhood not just in our readings of Ovid, but also in Senecan tragedy, the tropes from which Shakespeare certainly culled as he drafted Titus. In particular, Most highlights the cultural significance of gladiatorial matches to which Senecan tragedy responds:
These shows provided the repeated sight of the drastic animalization of human beings: even when they were not covered by animal skins, the sufferers were treated in a way, and endured injuries of a sort, familiar to most people only in the case of animals. Viewing their torments, many spectators could be thrilled to feel superior, intact, a survivor: for the relation of a man to an animal is like that of god to man.
—Glenn W. Most, “Disiecti Membra Poetae: The Rhetoric of Dismemberment in Neronian Poetry,” p. 404.
As several students pointed out in discussion, the contrast between Lavinia and her father in act 4 underscores the former’s comparative lack of “intact-ness” to the latter. Moreover, Ovidian and Senecan dismemberment in Shakespeare reveals the ever-blurred line between the human and the nonhuman.
Dismemberment, as another student pointed out, also functions as shorthand for Lavinia’s and Philomel’s losses of status to their respective in-groups. Lavinia’s copy of Metamorphoses, like Philomela’s tapestry before her, becomes her new language, her way to communicate even though she has lost the human appendages that would allow her to speak, to weave, to write.
In this vein, our class referred back to Ovid’s original Latin. Did we view it differently?
radix micat ultima linguae,
ipsa iacet terraque tremens immurmurat atrae,
utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae,
palpitat et moriens dominae uestigia quaerit.
The mangled root quivers, while the severed tongue lies palpitating on the dark earth, faintly murmuring; and, as the severed tail of a mangled snake is wont to writhe, it twitches convulsively, and with its last dying movement it seeks its mistress’s feet.
—Met. 6.557-60 (translation from the Loeb edition)
The description of Philomela’s quivering, amputated tongue previews the gruesome act shielded from the audience in Titus. It also serves as a reminder that her inability to speak further makes her dependent upon those who can, the “intact” spectator Most describes.
In Titus, we the audience become the spectators to the “drastic animalization of human beings.” Lavinia’s own animalization is apparent in the stage direction: “She takes the staff in her mouth, and guides it with her stumps, and writes.” Lavinia here mimics the actions of Io, the young maiden transformed into a beautiful white calf, scratching into the dirt with her hoof to communicate her fate to her father.
If scenes like these “rupture[] … the distinction between rational man and irrational animal,” as Most suggests, does Lavinia cease to be fully human here after tongue “lies palpitating on the dark earth, faintly murmuring” (ipsa iacet terraque tremens immurmurat atrae)?
The message here is clear: a woman with the ability to speak is patently a danger to the masculinist hierarchy in Lavinia’s and Philomela’s worlds.
The question then transforms into a discussion of Philomela’s subsequent humanity, or supposed lack thereof.
Is the amputated and muted Lavinia now an animal, or at the very least a non-human, because she can no longer speak or write?
Furthermore, to return to my questions on day 2.
Has she been civilized?
Has she been domesticated?
Has she been tamed?
This muddied dialectic between human and nonhuman also recalls the second definition of “dismemberment” I proffered at the beginning of this section: “the action of partitioning or dividing up a territory or organization.” For let us not forget that sexual violence stems from the fundamental belief that women are fundamentally property in these narratives, objects to be used, traded, and discarded to service hegemonic masculine power structures.
This language also reinforces Flavio’s Roma Triumphans, the violence of erasure, the “civilizing” force of una eademque civitas, one and the same state.
It also reminds us that Renaissance humanists—the very people responsible for studying, translating, and disseminating the Latin classics from ancient Rome, for essentially devising modern research methods, our very own fields of study today—told themselves that this language of conquering and imperialism, of coercion and compulsion was a noble goal worth pursuing and perpetuating across the globe.
It also brings to mind the other powerful Roman narrative coopted by Shakespeare and his contemporaries: the rape of Lucretia.
A metaphor for the state itself, Lucretia’s body is not dismembered. Rather, its bloody remnants serve as reminders to the tyranny of an abusive monarch. But what if we read Lucretia as more than just a strict metaphor for the state? What if our class read her as what she literally is: a traumatized woman?
While Livy’s and Ovid’s renditions are fairly sparse in allowing Lucretia to speak, by contrast, Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece shows the raped woman speaking directly back to her attacker, imploring him for dozens of lines to consider her personhood and social status. These comparative pairings highlight the artistic license Shakespeare takes in his own adaptation, to be sure; but they also prioritize re-reading the Latin originals.
Students went back and looked through the Livy and Ovid to see 1) when Lucretia speaks, and 2) what she says. I cannot emphasize enough how powerful this pedagogical practice was. Instead of discussing the necessity of Lucretia’s suicide to ameliorate the unscrupulous monarchy—and to justify the foundation of the Roman republic—my students (remember: all males!) revised their views of Lucretia as a fully human character with her own agency, even though it was violated.
In my remaining time, I want to share some of the comparisons I underscored between Shakespeare’s Lucrece and the national conversation we continue to have about survivors of sexual violence, the Me-Too movement, and believing women:
'O,' quoth Lucretius,' I did give that life Which she too early and too late hath spill'd.' 'Woe, woe,' quoth Collatine, 'she was my wife, I owed her, and 'tis mine that she hath kill'd.' 'My daughter' and 'my wife' with clamours fill'd The dispersed air, who, holding Lucrece' life, Answer'd their cries, 'my daughter' and 'my wife’ (lines 1800–1806).
In this instance, the family who mourns Lucretia mourns her role as both wife and daughter, rather than her individual personhood. The near-constant appeals in this section to “my daughter,” “my wife” elides her subjectivity, instead placing emphasis on her ravaged body’s role for the health of a sovereign state.
This adaptation of Ovid’s poetry recalls similar rhetoric in our contemporary debate:
If you have encountered this defense in the wild, you’ve likely realized that it is nearly always well-meaning. But in its determination to ask the reader to sympathize with a survivor of sexual violence, this rhetoric accidentally reveals the role women are still expected to play in our culture: She is not her own person; rather, she is someone’s daughter, someone’s wife.
In this pairing of past versus present, we begin to see that
Lucretia is not just someone’s wife, someone’s daughter.
Lucretia is someone.
Full stop.
When they had sworn to this advised doom, They did conclude to bear dead Lucrece thence; To show her bleeding body thorough Rome, And so to publish Tarquin's foul offence: Which being done with speedy diligence, The Romans plausibly did give consent To Tarquin's everlasting banishment (lines 1849-1855).
How fitting that the very last lines of Rape of Lucrece are the rhyming couplet most clearly entwining the concept of “consent” with sovereignty. Lucretia’s ravaged body, which she sacrificed for the good of the republic, is exhibited through the streets of Rome. Her “bleeding body” is capable of expelling a tyrannical monarchy, at the same time that it “publishes” Tarquin’s “foul offence.”
The “consent” among the Romans to “banish” Tarquin allows the people to avenge the invasion to Lucretia’s body, to give consent to their own body republic to which she was entitled but not granted. Her dead body in these instances is thus more of a person than the one who lived inside it. The bleeding body, therefore, is a site of mitigation, a social contract that promises to uphold the values of the state, a model that still pervades our definition of the term.
“Consent is a state of being. Giving someone your consent — sexually, politically, socially — is a little like giving them your attention. It’s a continuous process. It’s an interaction.”
—Laurie Penny, “The Horizon of Desire,” Longreads
Here with a sigh, as if her heart would break,
She throws forth Tarquin's name; 'He, he,' she says,
But more than 'he' her poor tongue could not speak;
Till after many accents and delays,
Untimely breathings, sick and short assays,
She utters this, 'He, he, fair lords, 'tis he,
That guides this hand to give this wound to me' (lines 1716-1722).
In her appeals to name her abuser, Lucretia’s words, in turn, alleviate the nation-state. With “poor tongue” and a “breaking heart,” she speaks with “many accents,” “delays,” and “untimely breathing.” This moment of self-immolation recalls the drama from another moment in our recent collective memory, Christine Blasey-Ford’s testimony to the Senate Judiciary Committee at Brett Kavanaugh’s hearing for the Supreme Court.
I believe it is my civic duty … The details that bring me here today are the ones I will never forget. They have been seared into my memory and haunted me.
—Christine Blasey-Ford, Testimony to Senate Judiciary Committee
Blasey-Ford may yet be our twenty-first-century Lucretia: a woman haunted by the trauma of her past, her “untimely breathings, sick and short assays” interrupting the rhythm of her powerful testimony that would ultimately make no political difference.
Nevertheless, she persisted.
“I believe it is my civic duty,” she argued, to re-open personal trauma for the continued health of the nation.
In her sacrificial testimony, we hear the faint echoes of Lucretia’s own sworn statement: 'He, he, fair lords, 'tis he, / That guides this hand to give this wound to me.'
Thank you.
[1] Flavio Biondo, Rome in Triumph, ed. Maria Agata Pincelli trans. Frances Muenke (I Tatti 2016)