In all of the reading for my comprehensive exams I found the seed of a small part of my Latin education, and that is the role of rape in Latin and rhetorical pedagogy. This is something more like the beginnings of questionings, the start of the reclaiming.
In ancient rhetorical education one of the exercises is the declamationes. Using hypothetical court cases, young rhetors built arguments around legal situations, some of which involved rape and rapists and women wronged by that violence. There are many declamationes attributed to Quintilian. When I first read about this, I thought that perhaps much of our culture’s chronic issue of violence against women (and, maybe even the resulting consequences, like, say, abortion and arguments around abortion) could be traced back to the idea that women’s issues have always been something for men to argue over and never for women to speak about, share experiences, let their voices be heard.
It seems strange that rape would be the topic, essentially, of a writing exercise for young men. But, as Marjorie Curry Woods points out, the “rape scenes function in this tradition as the paradigmatic site for working out issues of power and powerlessness” (“Rape,” 73). The issue in the ancient school room was not so much the rape itself (and we might say that this issue has followed us into the present moment, where professors tend to focus less on the actual action that is being performed in the text, and more on the imagery, the beauty of the language, the metaphors, the figures of speech). The issue was, rather, the way that the situation left one with power and one without. Power and powerlessness is also what concerned orators in antiquity, so it makes sense that this theme was foundational for rhetorical exercises.
Then later, in the Middle Ages, we move from declaiming in rhetorical education to studying, reading, writing about, responding to the stories of Vergil and Ovid, stories that portray rape. So, we go from using rape as a situation around which to build an argument, to reading and responding to stories about rape. Woods also points out that “boys learned to recite and express themselves in an acquired language by temporarily acquiring the emotions of characters, often female characters. They learned to interpret and perform characters in ways appropriate to each” (Weeping, 111). Boys recited parts of poems and built emotions around stories that even made young boys feel feelings and respond to those violent situations – even relate to female characters such as Dido.
Much more recently, there was the article in the Columbia Spectator about Ovid and trigger warnings, and the need to warn people of the violence that myths such as those contained in the Metamorphoses describe. More than that, there is a need to acknowledge what really happens in those stories, there is a need to acknowledge the action.
I’ve thought about the idea that we’ve used these stories of rape and violence against women in classrooms for a long time, I’ve attempted to address the truth of what’s going on, attempted to talk about the actions that powerful characters take. As I started teaching these stories in my own classroom, I wondered about the ways that I should be addressing these issues, although I never really could articulate the feelings that I had about these stories, and the increasing need that I felt that I should address it somehow (but how? with teenagers?) It wasn’t until now that I discovered I wasn’t alone in thinking these things – and in fact, the issue is as old as the texts that I taught. The need to justify teaching and reading these stories continues to grow and so does the need to explain these stories and their significance to the young people who read those stories. The stories are influential to nearly every other piece of literature in the Western world, and they are also some of the ways that we are exposed to violent acts against women. The stories, the acts need to be called out and talked about. Not only do we need to read and talk about the stories, but we can also take action ourselves: retell, retranslate, recraft, re-see, reinterpret those stories; change the literary and artistic landscape.
Sources
Woods, Marjorie Curry. “Rape andthe Pedagogical Rhetoric of Sexual Violence.” Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages, edited by Rita Copeland. Cambridge University Press. 1996.
—. Weeping for Dido: The Classics in the Medieval Classroom. Princeton University Press. 2019.
Alexandra Sladky 