You are expecting words of comfort? Here’s a scolding instead: “You are taking your son’s death like a woman!” Seneca, Ep. 99.2
In Reading Roman Women, Suzanne Dixon reminds us that one of the principal considerations in the study of gender in ancient Greek and Latin literature is the genre of the text being analyzed.[851] As she puts it, the “excellent mothers, pious daughters and faithful freedwomen on tombstones,” are not the “scheming trollops in history, biography and law-court speeches,” are not the “desirable mistresses in elegiac poetry,” are not the “witches in satire,” are not the “prostitutes in comedy and graffiti,” and so on.[852] In this essay I wish to consider the treatment of women in the literary consolatio, a genre that Dixon does not discuss in any detail, but which provides a rich resource for the study of the ideology of gender in the early Roman Empire.
I will limit my comments to Seneca’s two consolatory essays to women, the Ad Marciam and the Ad Helviam matrem, where he is forced to work out in practice the Stoic theory that woman are by nature equal to men in their capacity for virtue although by training they are much their inferiors.[853] I will begin by briefly describing ancient consolation in general, noting in particular those aspects most relevant to our theme.A.