I’ve been reading Aristotle’s Rhetoric, translated by George Kennedy. I alternate between reading a few pages and falling asleep (ancient prose in translation is kind of a drag). Recently, though, I read a passage that made me think, and reminded me of what my Latin teacher told me all those years ago: there is nothing new under the sun.
This is from Book 2, when he writes of the emotions and how speakers might use emotion in their speeches. Specifically, this is from “The definition and causes of shame.” Aristotle writes: “People feel shame when they suffer or have suffered or are going to suffer such things as contribute to dishonor and censures, and these are things that include providing the services of the body or engaging in shameful actions, of which being physically violated is one (and though actions voluntary and involuntary are a part of licentiousness, the involuntary are done by force); for submission and lack of resistance comes from effeminacy or cowardice” (II.6.13).
I should disclose that I can’t read Greek, but reading this translation I see that while Aristotle writes of bodies, he doesn’t specify the gender. Or is it that the translator doesn’t specify gender? Feeling shame comes, in part, from physical violation, specifically being physically violated. Someone is positioned in the passive, and my mind automatically sees a woman. I know that in the ancient world, the issue was more of whether you were a top or a bottom. Tops were powerful and masculine. Bottoms were associated with the effeminate, although not necessarily always a woman, and that was bad. So, in a sense, it makes sense that Aristotle doesn’t specify that it would be a woman who necessarily was the only one to feel shame upon physical violation, men could be violated, could be made to feel effeminate, too. In the sense of rhetoric, though, men would be violated in public, where women would be violated in private. For men, the emotion of shame Aristotle is talking about has to do specifically with the public art of oratory. And still, my mind goes to women.
After Aristotle there were the Romans, who had their own approach to rhetoric and to women. The history of Rome, in LIvy’s Ab Urbe Condita, begins with the founding of Rome (by Aeneas after the Trojan War), followed by the Roman Monarchy. Mary Beard reminds us that rape “symbolically” bookends the period of the Monarchy: beginning with the rape of the Sabines, and ending with the rape of Lucretia (SPQR, 121).
I used to teach the story of Lucretia, always struck by the very end (even if it is altered somewhat to make for a good text to teach with) and the use of the reflexive pronoun, se, so that we know that it is Lucretia who kills herself. Se is such a small word, yet it is meant to encompass the entirety of Lucretia’s selfhood. Why does she kill herself? After all, she is a virtuous woman who stays home and weaves, while the wives of other men in her husband’s circle go out and party. Lucretia is raped, while her husband is out. And despite the act not being her fault, not even being consensual, she feels sufficient shame, and so she commits suicide.
The Metamorphoses is full of stories where women get raped and then transformed. Often, in translations, because of Latin vocabulary around rape, the act isn’t even really translated as rape. I always think about Daphne and Apollo. Daphne undergoes the kind of transformation so that she doesn’t have to consciously feel or remember what happened. Like Daphne’s laurel tree, shame has grown roots.
I wonder sometimes about how we got here. Often this comes back to Greek and Roman myth for me, whether I like it or not, those myths and histories (which are also mostly myth) are the foundations for our own culture. They are also rhetorical, writers crafting stories that argue for the supremacy and power of Rome or Greece. Is this the start of shame? Is this where it comes from and why it is so ingrained in us? The beauty of myth is that it explains how and why we believe something, or how and why something exists. The histories are foundations for Graeco-Roman culture, and for our own. I imagine Lucretia wearing jeans, playing video games, cooking dinner, watching television, keeping house, ironing, folding laundry, staying home while her man goes out. The point is – I can see the same story today.
I spent a lot of the last year looking at Luciano Garbati’s Medusa with the Head of Perseus. Before seeing this sculpture, I didn’t even really know that Medusa had been raped (despite this being one instance in translations where translators use the word “rape” – there are so many stories like hers, and I think this one story got lost). A lot of the conversation around Garbati’s sculpture had to do with the way that women handle the shame of sexual assault and rape. Women blame themselves because that is what we have been taught to do.
Here is another reason that we must begin using ancient texts primarily as a means to make and teach something subversive, otherwise those masculine, hegemonic ideas get ingrained and we don’t even realize, or we don’t know how to articulate the problem. It is comforting to me not just knowing the origins of things, that I can find them in ancient texts, but that people are doing something about them, that I can now find stories subverted, retold, reimagined, reinterpreted and that look a little more like something that I can believe in.
Aristotle. On Rhetoric. Translated by George Kennedy. Oxford University Press. 2007.
Beard, Mary. SPQR. Liveright. 2015.
Alexandra Sladky 