UCD Research Seminar (Suzanne Lynch, 2nd December 2022)

Suzanne Lynch

UCD School of Classics

The Language of Sexual Violence in Greek Tragedy

Tragedy is a rich source for the study of sexual violence in Ancient Greece as it portrays a wide range of sexually violent behaviours and contexts: women are sexually enslaved to enemy soldiers, raped by gods, abducted from their homes, and forced into unwanted marriages; some even falsely accuse men of rape. Yet tragedy often goes overlooked in the scholarship on sexual violence in antiquity, in large part because the language it employs is viewed as inherently ambiguous (Scafuro 1990, Rabinowitz 2011). Scholars expect instances of sexual violence to be described by the language of force, particularly the terms bia (force, violence) and hybris (outrage), as these are the terms used to denote rape under Athenian law. Tragedy, however, tends to employ terminology that is much more euphemistic and non-descript. The language of marriage is particularly prominent: words such as gamos (wedding), numphe (bride), and damar (wife) are all frequently employed to describe the sexual enslavement of war captives to enemy soldiers and the rape of women by gods. This language has been the source of much contention in the scholarship on sexual violence in antiquity: several scholars take the use of marital language as evidence of consent, while many others are reluctant to label as rape any acts not described by the terms bia or hybris. This paper addresses the following questions: why is ambiguous and non-descript language so often used to describe instances of sexual violence in Greek tragedy? Does the terminology of marriage carry an implication of consent? And how do we go about identifying instances of sexual violence in the first place, when the language seems so ambiguous

This is a hybrid event: in-person in Meeting Room 5 in the UCD Village on the Belfield campus; live-streamed on Zoom.