Arguments with Silence is a remarkable book in which Amy Richlin traces the course of feminist scholarship in Classics since the 1970s through a retrospective of her own work on Roman women. Processual, it is driven by the conviction that we must move beyond traditional approaches to a discipline that frequently imposes closure on what is knowable. This explains the book's title, reflecting R.'s view that a hermeneutic silence is not obliged by the fragmentary nature of Classical texts and artifacts, something she likens to ‘tattered lace-work’. We must not, she argues, take ‘no’ for an answer, but argue with the silence, often securing details about the real lives of women in Greco-Roman antiquity from unlikely places — including misogynistic texts. Beginning with her doctoral work on satire and invective, she acquired the perspective that the same glass can be both half-empty and half-full.
R.'s personal voice, which readily acknowledges influences on her writing from the work of colleagues as well as from shifts in the scholarly and cultural landscape, informs this presentation of her work. In framing this writing that spans twenty years her self-reflection acknowledges the impact of theoretical models that were developed over this period, and she wields these tools in a manner that is as smooth as it is adept. Stepping away from positivism and closure in scholarship, she insists upon a dynamic model of interpretation and also upon a necessary connection between academic work and activism. R. contends that instructors equipped with the tools of feminist and gender theory, for example, can uncover the misogyny in ancient texts in such a way as to denaturalize it. By opening up the canon to include material to which students are not normally exposed, they can stimulate class discussion but also facilitate social change. This is made possible by the fact that the roots of injustice in the modern environment can be recognized in the ideological underpinnings of systems of gender, class and status in antiquity.
A lively style has always been a mark of R.'s spoken and written work. Among several colourful metaphors she uses in her commentary is that of the lamppost: crossing genres and assembling a variety of sources can avoid the risk of partial vision, and R. likens this to the distortion resulting from standing in the dark and having but one light source. Legal texts such as the Lex Julia criminalized a wife's adultery, and rhetorical texts maligned adulterous women while remaining silent about a husband's infidelity. But these need to be read alongside texts from Roman comedy that supplied a voice for wronged wives (‘Approaches to the Sources on Adultery in Rome’). Another illustration of the benefit of working under several lampposts is the essay ‘Carrying Water in a Sieve’, written in 1994 and emerging from a conference on ‘Women in Goddess Traditions’. This was hosted by colleagues in Religious Studies influenced by second-wave feminism eager to find material supporting the case for women's empowerment in goddess cults. Having read through volumes of CIL supplying evidence for women's religious activity throughout Italy, however, R. brought unwelcome news: class/status divisions between women were often re-inscribed in cult activities, and men performed beside women in goddess-cult activities, even those for the Bona Dea.
The last decades of the twentieth century saw feminists divided over such issues as pornography. In the essay ‘Reading Ovid's Rapes’, which has not lost its traction since she published it in her Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome (1992), R. tackles head-on the claim that sadomasochism is a valid sexual mode, and she questions the necessity of coupling violence and sexuality. The backdrop of the savage aggression to which Romans were exposed in the arena, and the opportunities for sexual abuse by Roman men in a slave-culture might explain — but not excuse — Ovid's sensuous descriptions of rape scenes. R. urges resistance when reading and teaching texts in which this poet normalizes rape and focuses our gaze on the beauty of female victims enhanced by fear of their rapist. Ovid's poetic skill invites the reader to take pleasure in violence, to which R. responds with another colourful image: this is like tying a bow on a slaughterhouse.
‘The Ethnographer's Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age’ is a fitting essay to complete the collection. Its broad theoretical sweep reflects the intellectual ferment of the early 1990s, when post-modernism supplanted totalizing theories and ‘feminism’ was replaced by ‘feminisms’. This threatened another round of silencing, when nothing firm could be concluded about Roman women: evidence supplied by texts and artifacts received multiple and often conflicting readings. At the same time instances of violence against women received attention, and feminists were mounting social protest. This added more fuel to R.'s determination to connect scholarship with the outside world. While she does not give us a roadmap with which to navigate the theoretical shoals, she maintains that there is validity in looking to the past, listening for the voices of women and other subalterns for liberatory models for the present.
For newcomers to the field, as well as for those of us who have journeyed over the same terrain since the 1970s, the book is an important call to agency, no less than that R. discovered under her lampposts.
