How does Livy explore and subvert Roman morality in his narrative of the rape and suicide of Lucretia?
Raffy Marshall Shakespeare called her ‘Chaste Lucretia… this earthly Saint’, early feminist Thomas Day, seeking to mould a 12 year French orphan into his ideal Rousseauian wife named the child after her while Benjamin Britten’s Opera The Rape of Lucretia (1946) appropriates Lucretia’s purity to explore Christian sacrifice. 1 Livy’s Lucretia is seared into the public imagination as a passive and submissive ideal of Roman womanhood. The moral ambiguity and complexity of Livy’s Lucretian tragedy can become lost amongst assumption and simplification. Lucretia is defined by her tragic dilemma she faces and the internal contradictions she comes to embody; perceptive readers must reconstruct and reconsider Lucretia’s dilemmas while grappling with the spectre of female irrationality which threatens her responses. By exploring the tragedy through three encounters with men, recording Lucretia’s thought as perceived by these male viewers, Livy mystifies Lucretia’s motives and emotions forcing readers to perceive her as an inexplicable and potentially irrational ‘other’. Livy’s voyeuristic tragedy constructs, examines and subverts Roman moral structures with extraordinary subtlety and incision plunging readers into contemporary debate about the roman state and the role of the female in its moral structures. Foundational and civic myth constituted ‘a vector for the culture of the state and an embodiment of its values and sense of identity’ and a medium for the exploration and subversion of morality 2 . Perceiving a decline in Roman morality and identity Livy reconstructed the distant past as a didactic weapon. This appropriation occurred within a murderous struggle to control and define the Roman state: Livy’s contemporary Augustus celebrated his Principate as a restoration of traditional Roman morality and government, while for opponents it devalued and mocked Rome’s ancient political institutions. Roman male morality focused upon the application and control of violence; unregulated violence and warfare threatened the state and peace was considered an enervating threat to the public morality. In 157 BC the Senate declared war on Dalmatia to avoid the moral corruption of peace while Livy’s Manilius Torquatus executed his victorious son for illegally giving battle. 3 To adapt Jean- Pierre Vernant (talking of the ancient Greeks) marriage was to a Roman woman as war was to a man 4 . The exchange of sexual access to women among fathers and husbands ‘defused hostility among men’, while enabling the birth of new citizens. 5 The Sabine Women embody this complex role; objects in an (involuntary) exchange of sexual access, they prevent conflict by interposing their bodies between their warring fathers and husbands while evoking the combatants’ shared love for their potential children (Livy 1.13). To the Roman mind unbridled female sexuality was a destructive as uncontrolled warfare; promiscuity threatened the exchange of sexual access and the birth of legitimate children. While the institutions of state warfare contained male violence, female sexuality was co-opted within patriarchal marriage institutions. Marriage institutions emphasized female submission and women’s exclusion from the political, military and literary spheres but women could gain agency through compliance 6 . A trusted wife exercised authority within the domestic sphere and might influence the 1 Shakespeare, The Rape of Lucretia A History of Britain - Volume 3, the Fate of Empire, Simon Schama Renewal in Britten’s Rape of Lucretia, Michael Fuller 2 Dora C. Pozzi and John M. Wickersham, Introduction, Myth and the Polis (New York; Cornell University Press) 1991. HMS Drew Conceiving the role of Women in Livy’s narratives of the Early Roman State 3 P10, William V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome 327-70BC ( Oxford, Oxford University Press) 1979 and Joshel, S. R. The Body Female and the Body Politic: Livy's Lucretia and Verginia, in Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World (ed L. K. McClure), Blackwell Publishers Ltd, Oxford (2002) 4 Vernant 1980b:23 quoted in Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton and Woodstock; Princeton University Press) 2001. 5 Helene P. Foley, Female Acts in Greek Tragedy (Princeton and Woodstock; Princeton University Press) 2001 6 Conceiving the role of women in Livy’s narratives of the early roman state, HMS Drew
60
Made with FlippingBook - Online Brochure Maker