The Response of Subaltern Women to Threats in Roman Comedy

Roman Comedy is notable for its volume of subaltern women’s speech, a strikingly high percentage of which is occupied by the female characters’ responses to threats ranging from minor to significant, from passing to repeated and structural. Although these threats have been little studied, they form a large, significant, complex set of materials within the corpus of Roman Comedy. Because many of those shown as making threats would have had the social power to enact their threats if the circumstances had taken place in actual Roman life, and because from antiquity on, the plays have been seen as representing genuine Roman social realities, these staged conflicts may reflect what Roman ancillae and meretrices would have encountered in real life. Roman Comedy provides us a rare opportunity to read and hear words that successfully convinced Roman audiences that a woman would say them. Such success confers legitimacy on this staged female speech even though none of the words was written or spoken by a Roman woman. On the same principle, the types and formulations of staged threats against women were likely to seem realistic to viewers. By examining these staged threats, we can learn much about the everyday language of threats and violence, as well as about what threats and violence Roman women from all walks of life may have encountered every day. In this thesis, I want to study the way subaltern women verbally respond to threats, using analyses both formal and contextual, in hopes of better understanding female speech as a whole, the experiences of Roman women, and the vulnerability of Roman women in general.Bachelor of Art