Spectacle And Society In Livy’s History Discussion Help
Question Description
I need an original post that is at least 200 words responding to Part A. Then I need three student responses to post, at least 100 words, that can be found in Part B. Please respond to student response like you are talking to them directly. Do not say ” I agree with this student”¦.this student’s use of “¦..etc”¦” Chicago Style Format
PART A
Please read the course materials for week two and then participate in this discussion.
Mary Beard in her excellent account of Roman history, SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome (New York, 2015) makes the following observation about Lucretia:
“Lucretia’s story remained an extraordinarily powerful image in Roman moral culture ever after. For many Romans, it represented a defining moment of female virtue. Lucretia voluntarily paid with her life for losing, as Livy put it, her pudicitia – her “˜chastity, or better the “˜fidelity”, on the woman’s part at least, that defined the relationship between Roman wife and husband. Yet other ancient writers found the story more difficult. There were poets and satirists who predictably questioned whether pudicitia was really what a man wanted in a wife. In one bawdy epigram, Marcus Valerius Martialis (“˜Martial’ for short), who wrote a whole series of clever, sparky and rude verses at the end of the first century CE, jokes that his wife can be a Lucretia by day if she wants, so long as she is a whore by night. In another quip, he wonders whether Lucretias are ever quite what they seem: even the famous Lucretia, he fantasizes, enjoyed risque poems when her husband wasn’t looking. More serious was the issue of Lucretia’s culpability and the reasons for her suicide. To some Romans, it looked as if she was more concerned with her reputation than with real pudicitia– which surely resided in the guilt or innocence of her mind, not her body, and would not have been remotely affected by false allegations of sex with a slave. In the early fifth century en, St Augustine, who was well versed in the pagan classics, wondered if Lucretia had been raped at all: for had she not, in the end, consented? It is not hard to detect here versions of some of our own arguments about rape and the issues of responsibility it raises.” [122-123]
Read the selection from St. Augustine’s City of God in Week Two Content. How does Augustine’s analysis of the Lucretia story differ from the highly colored and dramatic account of Livy? What fundamental moral and ethical issues does Augustine raise that Livy does not? What does this reveal about the differences between so-called “pagan” Rome and the Christian Rome of the later Empire?
PART B
1
“The beginning of the differences in the analyses of Lucretia’s tale as told by both Augustine and Livy are the rhetorical reasons for the retelling of the tale. Where Livy is desiring to show the historical significance of the woman’s life and death, Augustine is using the tale as evidence for a case to use before the Senate, arguing for punishments to be more closely adequate to crimes committed. He argues that Lucretia punished herself, committing no crime, while the actual perpetrator was, in essence, released penalty-less. The two authors end goals are not the same, so their analyses seek to pull the details that are most pertinent to their causes. Augustine cross-examines Lucretia’s logic behind killing herself; the author asking the Senate if they thought she might have sinned unmentioned in the tale.
Due to Livy’s focus on Lucretia’s desire to keep her blood-tie’s honours, he doesn’t present the same thoughts as Augustine, who, as mentioned earlier, wonders if Lucretia committed suicide to regain her familial honours due to her own sins, and not simply the indiscretions of her tormentor. Livy’s historical reasonings and desire for beauty in rhetoric gives Lucretia a heroic take, while Augustine’s alternate focus desires to give Lucretia a human form, arguing that she, like any other person, might have sinful desires as much as any man. Additionally, Augustine, unlike Livy, casts a negative light on the suicide itself, in essence referring to it as the easy way out, that Lucretia was weak where so many other “Christian women” live their lives carrying on their shame.
Livy and Augustine show how times change the way people criticize any work or story. Early Rome saw Lucretia as almost the forebear of their modern Rome, the reason that brought families together to end Etruscan rule and unite the budding nation. Lucretia is described as a chaste and innocent woman who would rather honourably go about womanly duties than attend feasts and cause raucous with others. Her rape is shown as the work of a tyrant king who had no place in Rome. Her suicide is seen as an act of virtuousness for its soldier-like fortitude. She brought honour to her family and its blood ties, despite others’ words of co