odd platform to ask such a question, but does anyone have recommendations for (reputable) academic articles & other works that discusses the monstrous feminine in antiquity? xx
the best lines from this research article I had to read:
- “or in the late-summer bloom of academic narcissism, a postmodern literary critic.”
- “all one can do is weep”
- “the same mixture of horror and pride that a father might feel upon learning that his 14 year old son has got a classmate with child”
- “Huh?”
- “of course Latin historians frequently failed to tell the truth”
- “squalls of nonsense from France”
- “we can scream in mirth at the feebleness of the criteria”
- “the study of Latin prose authors was traditionally regarded as the province of dullards”
- “ ‘it wants figs!’ ”
- “a little innocent rhetorical gussying”
- “the result is like the diary of a teenager: riveting only to its creator, repellent to others, and illuminating to none”
- “the ecstasy of parsing!”
- “to John Henderson the Annals were - well, as usual with John Henderson, who can tell?”
- “this sad stuff”
- “the Annales Maximi, about which controversy will never cease”
- “as perverse as it would be to read the New York Times as if it were a novel by John Grisham”
- even the title itself, “historians without history: against roman historiography” (keep in mind that this article is found in a compilation called “the roman historians”, as if the overall salt content of the writing was not already high enough)
its fucked up to me how, like, we as a humanity can forget how to make shit. like how the west forgot how to make glass or some shit for a while.
nobody knows the exact way of creating lots of ancient stuff; greek fire and damascus steel are really well known examples, and material scientists are still studying roman cement because it’s better than modern cement
isnt that so fucked up
politics about women and sexuality today are pretty bad but i’d just like to inform y’all that in cicero’s epistulae ad familiares 9.22 he mentions that the senate was scandalized when a high-rank senator said the phrase ‘illam dicam’ which sounds similar to ‘landica,’ the latin word for clitoris, and cicero himself won’t even use the word in that letter even tho he mentions other obscene words in it. like if you tried to make these lil assholes from 2100 years ago say the word ‘clitoris’ they’d actually have a nervous breakdown so just so you know very little has changed on that front