%0 Journal Article
%T RHETORIC AND THE FEMININE CHARACTER: CICERO¡¯S PORTRAYAL OF SASSIA , CLODIA AND FULVIA
%A S. Ige
%J Akroterion
%D 2012
%I Stellenbosch University
%R 10.7445/48-0-98
%X The role of women in the ancient world has been extensively debated and a significant amount of work has been done in this area. Included in the texts that have received attention are Cicero¡¯s speeches which refer to women. All the women who feature in Cicero¡¯s speeches were those who have been acknowledged to have made their presence felt in the Roman public domain. Although Roman society regulated its socio-political activities around masculine values, it is nevertheless difficult to explain why so few women appear in such a voluminous corpus like Cicero¡¯s.1 What is certain is that Ciceronian rhetoric is characterised by the use of invective and vituperation.2 In this article, I shall argue that the women who were negatively portrayed in Cicero¡¯s speeches were victims of an already standardised form of communication within the hegemonic male order that dominated the Roman public domain in first century BC.
%U http://akroterion.journals.ac.za/pub/article/view/98