Home Training: Rhetorical (Hellenist-Roman-Afra) Feminism

SEXISM

Julius Ceasar was a sexist man, as William Shakespeare portrays him. (See “Making a Woman and Other Institutionalized Diversions,” by Jeanne Addison Roberts and “O, what men dare do” by Anthony Sampson).

And generally men in ancient Rome were chauvanists, according Cheryl Glenn: “A particular point of Roman male pride seems to have been the deliberate exclusion of women from civil and public duties” (See Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance page, 61).

FEMINISM

But we must retell this history, a bit more, a bit differently. First, the facts we all know (from the cradle):

Julius Caesar was born to Gaius Caesar, the patrician, and to Aurelia Cotta, the plebian. The baby boy was born after two girls, Julia Caesaris the Elder and Julia Caesaris the Younger.

The historical facts show that Aurelia Cotta perfectly fulfilled the Roman “ideal of the domina, of the strong privatized woman” (Glenn 72). Aurelia Cotta was “very influential in her son’s upbringing and security” while her husband “was often away.” Thus, the “historian Tacitus, considers her as an ideal Roman matron and thinks highly of her. Plutarch describes her as a ‘strict and respectable’ woman. Highly intelligent, independent and renowned for her beauty and common sense, Aurelia was held in high regard throughout Rome” (See her history being written at Wikipedia.)

HINTS OF HELLENIST-ROMAN-AFRA RHETORICAL FEMINISM

But we must retell this story a bit more, and quite a bit differently. Second, the earliest factual accounts we tend to overlook (to the grave):

Julius Caesar had the presence of mind to speak and act when he was assassinated. Let’s review then rewind from Shakespeare’s (16 century A.D.) version of what he said:

“Et tu, Brute? Then fall Caesar!”

Let’s go back to and then beyond snippets of Plutarch’s (1st century A.D.) version (and of the 20th century A.D. English translations) of what he said and did:

πρῶτος δὲ Κάσκας ξίφει παίει παρὰ τὸν αὐχένα πληγὴν οὐ θανατηφόρον οὐδὲ βαθεῖαν, ἀλλ’ ὡς εἰκὸς ἐν ἀρχῇ τολμήματος μεγάλου ταραχθείς, ὥστε καὶ τὸν Καίσαρα μεταστραφέντα τοῦ ἐγχειριδίου λαβέσθαι καὶ κατασχεῖν.

It was Casca who gave him the first blow with his dagger, in the neck, not a mortal would, nor even a deep one, for which he was too much confused, as was natural at the beginning of a deed of great daring; so that Caesar turned about, grasped the knife, and held it fast.

ἅμα δέ πως ἐξεφώνησαν, ὁ μὲν πληγεὶς Ῥωμαϊστί· „μιαρώτατε Κάσκα, τί ποιεῖς;“ ὁ δὲ πλήξας Ἑλληνιστὶ πρὸς τὸν ἀδελφόν· „ἀδελφέ, βοήθει“.

At almost the same instant both cried out, the smitten man in Latin: "Accursed Casca, what does thou?" and the smiter, in Greek, to his brother: "Brother, help!"

διὸ καὶ Βροῦτος αὐτῷ πληγὴν ἐνέβαλε μίαν εἰς τὸν βουβῶνα. λέγεται δ’ ὑπό τινων, ὡς ἄρα πρὸς τοὺς ἄλλους ἀπομαχόμενος καὶ διαφέρων δεῦρο κἀκεῖ τὸ σῶμα καὶ κεκραγώς, ὅτε Βροῦτον εἶδεν ἐσπασμένον τὸ ξίφος, ἐφειλκύσατο κατὰ τῆς κεφαλῆς τὸ ἱμάτιον καὶ παρῆκεν ἑαυτόν, εἴτ’ ἀπὸ τύχης εἴθ’ ὑπὸ τῶν κτεινόντων ἀπωσθεὶς πρὸς τὴν βάσιν ἐφ’ ἧς ὁ Πομπηΐου βέβηκεν ἀνδριάς.

Therefore Brutus also gave him one blow in the groin. And it is said by some writers that although Caesar defended himself against the rest and darted this way and that and cried aloud, when he saw that Brutus had drawn his dagger, he pulled his toga down over his head and sank, either by chance or because pushed there by his murderers, against the pedestal on which the statue of Pompey stood.

Let’s now read what the Roman historian Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus writes (in our earliest 1st century account, with a later 20th century translation):

Atque ita tribus et viginti plagis confossus est uno modo ad primum ictum gemitu sine voce edito, etsi tradiderunt quidam Marco Bruto irruenti dixisse: καὶ σὑ τὲκνον;

And in this wise he was stabbed with three and twenty wounds, uttering not a word, but merely a groan at the first stroke, though some have written that when Marcus Brutus rushed at him, he said in Greek, “You too, my child?”

Now, let’s reconsider.

What if Julius Caesar’s dying words were not Latin (as Shakespeare and Plutarch have suggested)?

What if, in the Hellenist language, Caesar said to Brutus (as the Latin-writing but then Hellenist-alphabet writing-historian Suetonius reports from his other earlier sources): καὶ σὑ τὲκνον?

Where would Julius have gotten those Hellenist utterances? Who would have trained him so viscerally in this other mother tongue?

HOME TRAINING

So we retell this a bit more, a good bit differently. Third, then, here are some things we do well to hear (feminist rhetorics of resistance):

Aurelia Cotta was the trainer of those in her home. She was the mother of Julia Caesaris the Elder, Julia Caesaris the Younger, and Gaius Julius Caesar. She was the bodily present parent. She was the plebian parent (not one of the patricians, like her husband). She told stories. She was educated. She read Homer, Hesiod, and Sappho, and spoke the Hellenist tongue.

It is not too far fetched to imagine Aurelia Cotta reading the Illiad in her home place. It is likely to have been some act of resistance. Resistance to being silenced, as a woman, as a plebian, as a mother, in Rome! (Glenn reminds us here that:

Because the Romans clung to the ideal of the domina, of the strong privatized woman, they [i.e., the Roman men] often reacted with perplexity or disgust at the women who pursued intellectual or political aspirations. Unlike the very few Greek women who found acceptance and admiration in the public domain, no Roman woman seems to have succeeded in establishing herself as a public figure in her own right. [72])

It is not too difficult to think that little Julius hears his mother's Hellenistic words of resistance profoundly. He hears them as the Hellenist hero Achilles, the son, hears them from his own mother, Thetis. (James J. Murphy says little Roman boys profoundly learned lots of Hellenistic rhetoric: "The young lad who begins with a simple fable of Aesop ends up years later as a young adult doing the same thing with a complex speech of Demosthenes . . ." [61]. Feminist history explains the role of the mothers).

Listen as if to Aurelia Cotta reading and reciting to her children the Hellenist words of Thebis to her child (from the Illiad, Book 1, Line 414):

τὸν δ' ήμεἰβετ' ἐπειτα Θέτις κατά δάκρυ χἐουσα:
Thetis answered him then letting the tears fall: 'Ah me,

ὥ μοι τἐκνον ἐμὸν, τἰ νὑ σ' ἐτρεφον αἰνά τεκοῦσα;
my child. Your birth was bitterness. Why did I raise you?

It is not impossible that “ὥ μοι τἐκνον ἐμὸν” [“ah me, my child”] is heard and heard and recited and recited and spoken again by young Julius. So it is not impossible that “καὶ σὑ τὲκνον” [“and you? child”] rolls off the tongue of the dying man, Julius Caesar. He is a son who repeatedly heard his parent, his mother. When a dying man, as a parent (perhaps even the parent of Brutus) he now identifies with and repeats the words of his mother, those words of Thetis, who was (also) betrayed by a son.

I am not trying to suggest that Julius Caesar was not sexist. Or that ancient Roman (or Greek) men generally were not chauvinists.

Rather, I am hoping to show that such simple categorizations of ancient men hardly shows the profound impact of ancient women on such boys and men (from cradle to grave). The impact is in the rhetorics these women found and used.

HOMEGROWN FEMINIST RHETORICS

(Feminist) rhetorician, Patricia Bizzell, praises the “afrafeminist ideology” of Jacqueline Jones Royster as good “feminist rhetorical methodology.” And Royster says the following as she wonders how non-African American scholars can so speak for her, an African American woman (in her article, "When the First Voice You Hear is Not Your Own"):

People in the neighborhood where I grew up would say, “Where is their home training?” Imbedded in the question is the idea that when you visit other people’s “home places,” especially when you have not been invited, you simply can not go tramping around the house like you own the place, no matter how smart you are, or how much imagination you can muster, or how much authority and entitlement outside that home you may be privileged to hold. (32)

bell hooks, another Afrafeminist, puts it this way (in "Homeplace: a Site of Resistance"):

Throughout our history, African-Americans have recognized the subversive value of homeplace, of having access to private space where we do not directly encounter white racist agression. Whatever the shape and direction of black liberation struggle (civil rights reform or black power movement), domestic space has been a crucial site for organizing, for forming political solidarity.

In our young minds houses belonged to women, were their special domain, not as property, but as places where all that truly mattered in life took place—the warmth and comfort of shelter, the feeding of our bodies, the nurturing of our souls. There we learned dignity, integrity of being; there we learned to have faith. The folks who made this life possible, who were our primary guides and teachers, were black women . . . [who fostered] a radical political dimension . . . [and who created] a site of resistance and liberation struggle (47).

I shall never forget the sense of shared history, of common anguish, I felt when first reading about the plight of black women domestic servants in South Africa, black women domestic servants in South Africa, black women laboring in white homes. Their stories evoked vivid memories of our African-Amerocian past. . .

I want to remember these black women today. The act of remembrance is a conscious gesture honoring their struggle, their effort to keep something for their own. I want us to respect and understand that this effort has been and continues to be a radically subversive political gesture. For those who dominate and oppress us benefit most when we have nothing to give our own, when they have so taken from us our dignity, our humaness that we have nothing left, no “homeplace” where we can recover ourselves. I want us to remember these black women today, both past and present. (42-43)

Let's make the connections, between women (Africans, African Americans, Hellenists [goddesses and humans] and Romans) and men. How profound our histories, our passionate bodily rhetoric of memory:

Aurelia Cotta bore and raised Julius Caesar. But most later (merely sexist, even "feminist") histories have him simply living and dying as a sexist.

What gets missed in such historying (i.e., historiography) is the Hellenist-Roman-Afra-feminism of Aurelia Cotta and of the Hellenist Thebis that influenced Caesar to his dying words. His words, because of his mother's rhetorical influence, have him, at the very end, identifying with the pain, and the loss, of a mother.

Feminist retelling of feminist rhetorics (such as that of Sappho, of Aurelia Cotta, of Laura Cereta, of Christine de Pizan, of Cheryl Glenn, of Patricia Bizzell, of bell hooks, and of Jacqueline Jones Royster's) indicate the power of the woman. The woman's power is in resistance. Her power is in rhetorically telling and retelling histories more fully, with our profound identification with the pain, and the loss, of a mother separated from her child. The ultimate uttered response to such betrayal runs deep in boys and men and girls and women trained in her home place.

PIMPING, ACADEMICALLY

We academics use funny language. We use methods ironically. Some Hellenists in ancient times called what we do with language ῥητορική (or potion cookery) and what we do methodically ὑποκριτική (or pretending ourselves so we can judge others). So we feminist academics tend to hate that exposure by dead Greek men. What we refuse to believe is this: we feminists in the academy often like to switch places of power with masculinist sexists.

For example, we feminist academics use funny fancy words for the whore, and for the pimp and the john: she’s “an odalisque” or “the harem girl”; and they’re the “objectifying” males; if they’re gay men, and if at least one is bisexual, then the man sleeping with the female “odalisque” is also the pimping man’s “arrogant, dissolute, untrustworthy love object..” That’s our “rhetoric.”

The method that we then claim as “ours” is this: While we despise how bigoted European men portray and use “the harem girl,” we “refigure” her but we ourselves pimp them. We wear the feminist mask so no one (not even ourself-s) will easily see that we're as interested in the whore (so we can pimp the pimp) as any john. (Just to be clear, nonetheless, several afrafeminists and Hellefeminists choose kinder, gentler methods than our “hypocrisy.”)

Let’s see if I can illustrate. And then, dear reader, please consider with me whether we (you and I) are (in our bodies) ourselves not also pimping our own whores, academically.


HOME WORK

Enter the academic world. Read the following very important works of academic feminists. Then let’s talk.

Carol Poster’s “(Re)positioning Pedagogy: A Feminist Historiography of Aristotle's Rhetorica.”

Gesa E. Kirsch’s and Joy S. Ritchie’s “Beyond the Personal: Theorizing a Politics of Location in Composition Research.”

Elizabeth Fletcher’s “Women in the Bible.”

Cheryl Glenn’s Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance.

Patricia Bizzell’s “Feminist Methods of Research in the History of Rhetoric: What Difference Do they make?”

Marjorie B. Garbor’s Academic Instincts.

Nancy Mairs’ Voice Lessons: On Becoming a (Woman) Writer.

Jacqueline Jones Royster’s “When the First Voice You Hear Is Not Your Own.”

A FEMINIST PIMPING OF ARISTOTLE

Now, I know I sound harsh, but some of the feminists whose work you’ve just read have sacrificed their heroism for whoring.

Look at Carol Poster’s own masculinist methods. Look at what she calls for. She calls for this:

. . . for “displacing Aristotle’s philosophical treatise [on rhetoric] to the margins of the discipline” (328)

. . . because, Poster says, “Aristotle has not, and in my opinion, should not be appropriated for feminist rhetoric” (343).

Poster’s opinion is that

recovering Aristotle for rhetoric would be to use his prestige to authorize the marginalized discipline of pedagogy. The notion that rhetoric needs some canonical patriarch as an originary figure in order to legitimize itself within the academy is utterly antithetical to feminist ideals. For feminist rhetoric to reclaim Aristotle as some sort of male mother would be, ipso facto, for rhetoric to accede to the traditional patriarchal judgment of its (feminine) inferiority, and to rely on the reflected prestige of Aristotle to associate itself with the higher prestige, traditionally masculine discipline of philosophy rather than asserting the (perhaps separate but) equal validity of the traditionally feminine discipline of pedagogy. Relying on Aristotle to authorize feminist rhetoric would be to participate in a cultural logic that denies the legitimacy of areas of cultural and economic production traditionally associated with women. (343)

Funny how Poster ignores that Aristotle is a great champion of “the marginalized discipline of pedagogy.” Hypocritically, Poster herself actually uses “the reflected prestige of Aristotle” in order “to authorize feminist rhetoric” by her portrayals. In writing her article as the representative of rhetoric among feminist academics (in Cynthia Anne Freeland’s otherwise fine book, Feminist Interpretations of Aristotle), Poster actually relies on “Aristotle” and participates in his “cultural logic” to attack reliance on Aristotle and his method.

WHEN THE (CHRISTIAN) PERSONAL GETS TOO PERSONAL AND EQUALITY GETS TOO EQUAL

Now recall how Gesa E. Kirsch and Joy S. Ritchie argue that feminist academics must often go beyond the personal. Kirsch and Ritchie would rightly have us all tear down the dividing walls of cultural and gendered constructs.

We argue that it is not enough to claim the personal and locate ourselves in scholarship and research. In doing so, we risk creating another set of “master narratives,” risk speaking for and essentializing others, and risk being blinded by our own culturally determined world views. . . . (8)

It is not enough, then to begin locating ourselves and our experiences. In doing so naively, we risk ignoring hierarchies and creating the same unifying and totalizing master narratives that feminist scholars have sought to revise and oppose. More specifically, we risk defining gender biologically rather than recognizing it as a varied set of relationships. We risk limiting our definitions to a binary of male and female as opposite, inherently different human beings, without seeing the multiple permutations of gendered experience. (11)

But Kirsch and Ritchie (“naively”?) erect their own totalizing walls of difference when they express concern that one of their students became “increasingly committed to a Christian perspective and was, therefore, uncomfortable with the feminist theoretical framework the other two of us favored” (12). Kirsch and Ritchie conclude, “therefore,” some logical cause and effect: that the student cannot be comfortable as a feminist if more comfortable as a Christian.

The academic feminists, Kirsch and Ritchie, reject what first-wave (Christian) feminists including Elizabeth Cady Stanton worked so personally for: equality endowed by their Creator.

Read again Kirsch’s and Ritchie’s conclusions:

[W]e prefer, along with Tronto, ‘a moral theory that can recognize and identify these issues [i.e., problems of otherness, privilege, and paternalism]…to a moral theory that because it presumes that all people are equal, is unable even to recognize them’ (Moral Boundaries 147) (22).

In presuming to go beyond the personal, Kirsch and Ritchie must go beyond the feminists who insist on equality despite personal difference. Such feminists include the first-wave feminists who insisted on equality. And such feminists also include notable, contemporary feminists such as these:

Phyllis Chesler, “a liberal feminist second-waver who's the author of a book called The Death of Feminism,” and who opposes those who “oppose the ideals of dignity and equality for women” [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

and Jennifer Baumgardner and Amy Richards, who model their “Third-Wave Manifesta: A Thirteen Point Agenda” after the equal-rights document, the “Declaration of Sentiments”).

Christian feminist Elizabeth Fletcher would surely find strange the “moral theory” of Kirsch and Ritchie. Their theory rejects the presumption that all people are equal; it is the theory of the pimp; in the case of academic feminists Kirsch and Ritchie, it tries to hold on, rather impersonally, to a “feminist theoretical framework” that they must force, by binary logic, to conclude this: that there has to be essential divisive differences between a Christian and a feminist.

CHRISTIANS ESSENTIALIZING HELLENISTS AS ANTI-WOMEN, ANTI-SEMITES

But look again at how Fletcher erects her own binary logic to divide Jewish / Christian feminism from Greek sexism. Fletcher essentializes the “Greek culture” as misogynistic when she discusses male portrayals of Mary Magdalene. The Greekish towns, “the ideal of Roman womanhood,” the anti-semitic male historians, all conspired with or bought (into) Plato’s “Platonic dualism” pimped by Alexander the Great. And the result of the conspiracy: “Throughout the centuries, Mary Magdalene was incorrectly portrayed in literature and art as a reformed prostitute.” Today, even, she’s Dan Brown’s Jesus’ woman, if a wife, the one buried in Brown’s “Da Vinci code.”

Fletcher does give a nod to how the Hellene language is used to write Mary’s story in the first place. Jewish, Greekish, Christian males write the following, as Fletcher explains it (from “John 20:11-18, Mark 16:1-11, Luke 24:1-11, Matthew 28:1-10”):

At the tomb, Mary was given instructions. She was told by Jesus or by the angel to “Go to my brothers and say to them….” Mary then ‘went and announced’. With these words Mary was commissioned as an apostle of Jesus (‘go and tell’ is apostellein in Greek). She was an apostle in the same way as the men (the Twelve and the other disciples) who were commissioned to spread the story of Jesus.

Until the third century, teachers in the Christian church referred to Mary as an ‘apostle’, and she is still called ‘apostle to the apostles’ by the Eastern Catholic churches. She has been one of the most revered figures in Christian history.

Here Fletcher praises Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John for using one “Greek” word for Mary. But Fletcher denigrates Hellenistic culture generally, and she blames other writers like Paul and Josephus for succumbing to the (supposedely) misogynistic, anti-semitic nature of Greek. (With reference to Josephus’ account of the Moses story, I wish Fletcher had observed how the Septuagint translators of the Jewish scriptures into the Hellenistic language had been much more inclusive of Moses’ sister than the original Hebrew text is! The book of Exodus--or "the Way Out" in Greek language--names Moses’s sister Miriam and his brother in Aaron in the Greek translation, but the Hebrew version only names his brother.)

Let me leave you in our discussion here on Christian feminist perspectives by quoting an academic who really maintains her feminist scholarship without assuming a merely masculinist position. Carolyn Osiek, New Testament historian, neither essentializes patriarchal cultures nor forces any one strain of them to objectivize women. Osiek writes:

Christianity, or at least the teaching of Jesus, contained a spark of new insight that led to the beginnings of an egalitarian movement. . . A danger here is to read Christianity as liberator of women from an oppressive Judaism.

In first century Roman society, a new movement was at work toward greater social freedom for women. Hellenistic Judaism and Christianity happened along at the right time to pick up on these trends which were already in the social air, and thus were not directly inspired by Jesus or Christian thought. I have more sympathy with this position.

We'll come back to Jesus (of Christian tradition) in a moment. If not all can agree that that man is a feminist, then we'll consider some feminist men to be "Jesusy," the term Anne Lamott bandies about.

RETELLING RHETORIC RETOLD: VOICE LESSONS

When you read the first few pages of Cheyl Glenn’s masterful Rhetoric Retold: Regendering the Tradition from Antiquity Through the Renaissance, then you surely recognized her as the one using the funny word, “odelisque.” And recall how she represents artist Jean-Leon Gerome as representing Alcibiades as representing Aspasia as his (Alcibiades’ and now Gerome’s and now our) “harem girl.”

As right as it is for Glenn to retell the history of Aspasia, to rescue her from mere whoredom, I wonder if we academic feminists would do well to give more voice to Hellenistic feminist men. What?! Yes, if we only pimp the Greek males to our students (our johns?), then what good does it do ultimately?

Yes, please consider with me what Marjorie B. Garbor says about the academic feminist needing the voice of the amateur professional and the professional amateur. Yes, take more of the Voice Lessons that Nancy Mairs gives on the “radical and absolute alterity” of those who refuse to pimp and rather give birth to people and to ideas. Yes, note how Patricia Bizzell writes herself into her academic musings on feminist methods, calling Jacqueline Jones Royster’s afrafeminist ideology our ideal method.

Yes, listen to Jacqueline Jones Royster’s voices, her many “own very much authentic voices” (37). Hear her speaking on her “moments of personal challenge that seem to have import for cross-boundary discourse.” Pay close attention to her saying “that the most salient point to acknowledge is that ‘subject’ position really is everything” (29).

Now let me confess to you, dear readers, I am an academic, I am a feminist, and I am a Euro-American man speaking out for men, especially Jesusy Hellenist feminists, who speak out for women and for men equally. Don't we see how our "subject" position (our afrafeminist ideology as equal to good Hellenist feminism) refuses to pimp? We speak and try to listen in cross-boundary discourse.
"Man cannot speak for her," Elizabeth Cady Stanton once declared. So we should acknowledge that woman cannot speak for him. To become a man who refuses to pimp, who insists on equality for men and women, man must speak for man. He clearly must listen to her (and she to him). As we listen carefully, considerately, we each individually have and must use our “own very much authentic voices.”