Isis-Thoeris at Karanis" A New Reading and Interpretation of a Painted Female Figure from Karanis

The symphonic suite Scheherazade (1888) attracts attention not only because of the beauty or oriental exoticism of Rimsky-Korsakov’s music. This programmatic musical narrative about a female narrator sparks the imagination itself. Moreover, the subject matter of this extraordinary work is primarily about the power of creative fantasy and equally about the ability of fiction to shape both human character and reality itself. All the more surprising is such a postmodern interpretation of the female figure in a work belonging to a national school of the 19th century. Or, in the terms of contemporary knowledge, this symphonic suite, having as its subject some stories from the famous collection 1001 nights, reveals itself as a genuine psychodrama in which the intelligence of a young woman wins in a merciless confrontation for survival, but by even curing the man who was going to kill her. In the end, it is surprising the case of this compositional conception, which without losing its expressive freshness, proves both its actuality and, above all, its fecundity through the ability to accommodate several hermeneutic scenarios in the same sound form.

The paper analyses passages from Latin treatises de re rustica dedicated to woman’s role in the rural context. Based on these passages, light is shed not only on the various tasks woman is entrusted with in ancient Roman agricultural life but also on the moralistic trends and traditional paradigms characterizing the interpretation of the female figure by Latin agronomic sources as well as on the meaning of the patriarchal model of the Roman familia, which is focussed by them too.