Pausanias’ Careful Language of Sexual Violence

Jody Ellyn Cundy

doi:10.1163/1568525x-12342731

Abstract

Abstract This article considers the vocabulary of sexual violence in the Periegesis Hellados. The vocabulary of sexual assault in the Periegesis encompasses the related noun and verb pairings ἁρπαγή and ἁρπάζω, αἰσχύνη and αἰσχύνω, βία and βιάζω, and ὕβρις, ὑβρίζω. All denote ‘rape’ defined as ‘nonconsensual sex’ (though matters of consent are sometimes ambiguous), but they are not used interchangeably in the text. Several patterns emerge from this analysis: first, the language of violence and sacrilege correlates with suffering in Pausanias’ usage, so the more explicitly violent and transgressive the sexual assault, the more likely it is that aspects of the victim’s experience and agency will be included in the account. Second, racial formation is a key operator in the narratives of sexual assault, so Greek stereotypes about barbarian alterity are amplified in the representations of rape in Pausanias’ text.

Highlights

If they take the ship, they’ll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing
Several patterns emerge from this analysis: first, the language of violence and sacrilege correlates with suffering in Pausanias’ usage, so the more explicitly violent and transgressive the sexual assault, the more likely it is that aspects of the victim’s experience and agency will be included in the account
Racial formation is a key operator in these narratives, so Greek stereotypes about barbarian alterity are amplified in the representations of rape in the Periegesis Hellados

Summary

Introduction

If they take the ship, they’ll rape us to death, eat our flesh, and sew our skins into their clothing. It is not coincidental that in his account of the rape of Molpia and Hippo, Pausanias qualifies the finite verb βιάζονται with prepositional phrase παρὰ θέμιδα, which he glosses as ὕβρις, and this suggests that in the Periegesis that ὕβρις and ὑβρίζω connote rape that is imagined to be depraved, violent and sacrilegious, and as further analysis will show, fundamentally dehumanizing for both perpetrator(s) and victim(s) Despite his own narration of the rapes of Molpia and Hippo by Lacedaemonians, and of the Spartan maidens at the festival of Artemis Limnata by Messenians, Pausanias distances violent sexual assault from Hellenic mores. 63 It might be suggested that ‘barbarian’ here implies that she is a slave, but the narrative does not comment on her status, only her non-Greek identity, so racial formation seems to the operative criterion

64 Victims explicitly identified as parthenoi

Conclusion