Epilogue

Summary

When I told a graduate mentor that I was developing a course on women in epic he responded: ‘You don't teach women in epic; you teach women in tragedy. There are no women in epic.’ My aim in this study has been precisely to restore female characters to visibility in Latin epic and to examine the discursive operations that effect their marginalisation within the genre and the critical tradition it has engendered. As the most widely disseminated form of poetry performed by and for an elite Roman male audience, Latin epic constituted an important social technology for the construction and negotiation of gender difference in ancient Rome. The asymmetrical gender relations on display in the genre both reflect, and reflect upon, Roman hierarchies of gender.

Roman epicists repeatedly give voice to female characters and thereby open up for scrutiny the masculine worldview the genre characteristically proposes, even if individual instantiations of epic frequently work to foreclose the production of meanings that may undermine male structures of authority. Stephen Hinds has recently suggested that while women's entry into heroic narrative disturbs the discursive field of Latin epic, the expression of surprise at their presence comes to constitute a normative feature of the genre. The preceding chapters lend support to this paradoxical formulation, for if they have argued that the female is employed by epic texts (and their critics) primarily with reference to the male, they have also documented the genre's pervasive association of women with the ‘public’ sphere, in their cultural and metaphorical relations to Roman imperialism, militarism and colonisation.