摘要

The role of women in the ancient world has been extensively debated and a significant amount of work has been done in this area. Included in the texts that have received attention are Cicero*s speeches which refer to women. All the women who feature in Cicero*s speeches were those who have been acknowledged to have made their presence felt in the Roman public domain. Although Roman society regulated its socio-political activities around masculine values, it is nevertheless difficult to explain why so few women appear in such a voluminous corpus like Cicero*s.1 What is certain is that Ciceronian rhetoric is characterised by the use of invective and vituperation.2 In this article, I shall argue that the women who were negatively portrayed in Cicero*s speeches were victims of an already standardised form of communication within the hegemonic male order that dominated the Roman public domain in first century BC.

  • 单位
    Stellenbosch University

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