of women in a text. In his youthful handbook on rhetoric, De Inventione, Cicero relates how the citizens of Croton once engaged Zeuxis, the most illustrious painter of his time, to decorate
their temple of Hera (“Juno”).1 The artist decided to include a portrait of Helen among these commissioned works, and when he
asked the townspeople if there were any young women in the city who could serve as his models, the citizens “immediately” conducted
him to the palaestra, where the boys of the town were exercising nude. The painter was struck by the physical beauty of the
youths (“puerorum . . . formas et corpora”),and the townsmen assured him that the boys’ sisters were equally comely (Inv. Rhet. 2.1.2): “You can guess at the girls’ merit from these boys” (qua sint illae dignitate, potes ex his suspicari). Here, by directing our gazes
toward the unclothed youths, Cicero temporarily suppresses a slightly indecorous feature of the story—namely, that these respectable young girls (“sorores . . . virgines”) will also be exposed to the artist’s gaze as he paints his “Helen.” Like Zeuxis at the wrestling
school, Cicero’s readers first “see” the girls of Croton only as they are reflected in and through male proxies, their brothers.
The decorum that attempts to shield the girls of Croton from our view in Cicero’s text may serve elsewhere to mute the female
voice, to render inaudible its particular timbres and concerns. In Roman works that treat women’s conduct in the public sphere, propriety
of speech is often equated with propriety of dress. Valerius Maximus’ discussion of women orators (8.3.1–3), which has been
perceptively analyzed by Judith Hallett (1989), illustrates this tendency very neatly. The discussion begins, in fact, with a sartorial
metaphor: the three women speakers whom Valerius proposes to treat were, as he puts it, inhibited neither by their sex nor by the “modesty of the stola” (verecundia stolae) from pleading their cases before the public. But though Valerius is highly ambivalent about
such incursions by women into the public sphere, as Hallett (1989, 66) points out, and though he has particularly harsh things to say about Gaia Afrania, he nonetheless reserves high praise for a speech given by Hortensia, the daughter of the jurist Quintus Hortensius.
Hortensia’s speech (8.3.3), he asserts, not only displayed her father’s gift with language, (“patris facundia”); it also brought him figuratively back to life: “Quintus Hortensius lived again . . . in his female offspring and inspired his daughter’s words” (Revixit . . . muliebri stirpe Q. Hortensius verbisque filiae aspiravit). Hallett (1989, 66, 67) observes that Valerius’ respect for Hortensia’s oratorical skill
“was inseparable from his esteem for that of her late father,” and that their close familial bond helped to “legitimate” her potentially
transgressive participation in an activity normally reserved for men.
If we are obliged to see women “through” male proxies in Cicero’s handbook, Valerius Maximus strongly encourages us to view Hortensia
as an extension—or a female likeness—of Hortensius, to see her “as” her famous parent.2 Or, to invoke Valerius’ sartorial metaphor,
we might say that he makes Hortensia’s public speaking more respectable by clothing her in the discourse, the verba and facundia, of her father. As a norm of conduct, then, Valerius’ verecundia stolae signifies a socially approved aversion to public display, whether of the body or through the act of asserting oneself in speech. For a Roman woman, to be reticent in the public realm was to be decently attired, whereas to speak freely was to risk being exposed to ridicule or censure. Hence when the elegiac poet Sulpicia (Corpus Tibull. 3.13.2) uses an image of disrobing to describe the act of writing her love poetry, “[amorem] nudasse,” the verbal gesture is both daring and rich in implication.
When she states at 1–2 that it would be more shameful to hide a love like hers than to “lay it bare,” the narrator insists on being “seen” and heard, on making visible the passion that she presents as her own. Significantly, however, her choice of metaphor is also at least partially determined by the conventions of genre. Her assertion of candor deftly reworks a recurrent structuring image in Roman elegy—that of the partially or provocatively clothed woman. In the
work of Ovid and Propertius, for instance, as recent scholarship has shown, the beloved’s features and attire may serve as metaphors for
the poet’s literary allegiances and “writing practices.”6 The ideal mistress and the exemplary elegiac poem share similar attributes and attract the same vocabulary of praise: both are refined, tender, seductive. The fictions of erotic elegy—including its programmatic fictions—are organized around a carefully regulated display of the female body. Sulpicia alludes to this convention in the opening couplet of 3.13, but she subverts its procedures, translating the image of the
unclothed puella into a figure of speech. What will be revealed here is not a woman’s body, but the story of her love.