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Violence and Vulnerability in Ovid's Amores 1.5–8
- American Journal of Philology
- Johns Hopkins University Press
- Volume 142, Number 2 (Whole Number 566), Summer 2021
- pp. 259-286
- 10.1353/ajp.2021.0006
- Article
- Additional Information
Abstract:
This essay analyzes a series of close verbal echoes in descriptions of violence against slaves and violence against the female beloved in Book 1 of Ovid's Amores. Poems 1.5 and 1.7 describe sexualized violence against Corinna, while poems 1.6 and 1.8 threaten violence against a chained ianitor and a dependent retired courtesan. This arrangement juxtaposes the vulnerable body of the beloved puella with the vulnerable bodies of her social inferiors and therefore, I argue, works to highlight the elegiac woman's embodied vulnerability in comparison with the corporal and social mastery of the elegiac speaker.