Citizens of the third millennium will not understand (our children already do not understand) that for millennia, half of humanity—the female half—was mistreated in culture and excluded from politics. At the rate things are going, with the help of female politicians and parity, we are starting to minimize this age-old discrimination that has no problem ostracizing from humanity those who are nevertheless the mothers of the species. We have a tendency to forget that awareness of this exclusion has only been expressed for barely a century, first by various feminist currents, then by certain observers looking at culture in a new, stunned, politely scandalized way, so as to try to propose a history of mentalities attentive to this exclusion. François Charpin is among them. An engaged historian? A Latinist seduced by Simone de Beauvoir and bitten by the psychoanalysis bug? Not really.
This man—whose tentative smile and affably stooped posture I can see now, whose voice I can hear with its reverential gentleness, the gentleness of a scholar filled with fraternal respect for the texts—cast his anxious blue gaze on tradition, wanting to analyze the past with the critical demands of our era, without forgetting their specific meanings and the constraints of time. The work that his colleagues have chosen to publish is a preliminary draft of the research he was engaged in, alongside work of much more technical precision, which his demanding mind would certainly have found to be imperfect.
1 Nevertheless, to my mind, this outline bears witness to a deeply ethical, modern inspiration, which, as a result of knowing ancient history to the letter, attempts to open it up again to the minds of readers today.
We could also read these pages as François Charpin’s novel: a sort of personal selection, no doubt inspired by his own history and dreams, that presents a bouquet gathered at leisure in the gardens of Greek and Roman Antiquity. We knew that the Greeks, though very complacent toward virile beauty and control, disdained neither the goddesses nor the hetaera. Nevertheless, in his own way, François Charpin emphasizes the active role of the Greek woman as she appeared to him in The Odyssey: a true actor, particularly in the reconstruction of the character of Ulysses. The young and beautiful Nausicaa washes the hero and allows him to be reborn; while the faithful Penelope seems less a subservient wife than a rather clever political leader. She does not merely wait; she governs after her husband’s departure, with the support of the people and the gods, while also sustaining the hope of suitors; then, having gotten a taste of freedom, she refuses to identify Ulysses upon his return, which is in fact a very insolent independence! The couple finally reunited will be free of illusions, and, if their union lasts, it is because it is devoted to this strange power involving the management of memory. We are a long way from the Song of Songs, Tristan and Iseult, and Romeo and Juliet!
It is thus to Rome that François Charpin will attribute the true casting aside of the second sex that our modernity will condemn and combat. Indeed, the historian sees a static and grievous universe in The Aeneid that establishes the durability of Being, contrary to its Greek flow. The women of this static time are no longer actors but mere extras of history: no Circe, no Calypso, no Nausicaa. Savage virgins and Amazon warriors replace them, or else absent, forgotten women. Such as Creusa, who follows her husband Aeneas from afar, as they flee into exile, and who disappears without anyone noticing: a wife who effaces herself without reproach, with the most obliging discretion. The subsequent marriage of Aeneas and Lavinia will essentially be a political matter, from which affective and physical motives will be entirely absent.
In fact, this eviction of feminine subjectivity is not without consequence for the male ego itself. Fashioned according to the canons of virtue and the demands of paternal authority, Aeneas’s Ego is not really developed, our historian-analyst observes, after counting the use of the pronoun ego in the text. In a more complex way (Freud would say perverse), the power of the patres that neglects women when it does not culpabilize their desire (aren’t they the only inspiring ones, thereby threatening the solidity of male political control?), leaves the man to his drives and so transforms the supposed absolute master into a slave of his own desires. So a leader like Caesar may indeed appear to be “the husband of all wives and the wife of all husbands,” as Suetonius said, and the tyrant’s homosexuality may be passionately praised; in François Charpin’s lucid observations, men with unbridled desires are revealed to be unhappy children, abandoned by their mothers or else hated by them. The monstrosities of Nero, Caligula, and Tiberius reveal these “personality disorders” that cannot conceal the distress of the unloved little boys they once were, which their abject behaviors attempt to abreact. Yet, as the logic of perversion requires, even in their most immoral fantasies they are not free but demand these fantasies be ordered by law and dictated by supreme power.
It is the incompatibility between men and women that stands out in this sober research, and a tragic impression emerges, which, as we may suspect, has diagnosed the war of the sexes since the dawn of time as well as its aggravation in Roman Antiquity. The exclusion of women in the life of the city will be the major symptom, and François Charpin deciphers it in the three figures of Roman femininity he brings to the fore: the forgotten woman, the effaced woman, and the woman slave.
Who remembers the mother of Romulus and Remus? Her name was Rhea Silvia; she was a Vestal Virgin who was raped (by the god Mars or by her uncle Amulius?). After giving birth, Rhea Silvia simply disappears from history—the now famous Roman female wolf replaces her in the imaginary. In a somewhat similar way, the Sabines are kidnapped by Roman men and hauled away as loot. Deprived of all subjectivity, they must surrender their hearts after surrendering their bodies, so that the Stoic ideology of power can gradually be established: “ego, parentes, patria.” Not without opposing the war and later bringing peace to the two states! For the feminine can change its spots, blending in and bringing peace, provided we know how to read.
But it is the passage from the monarchic regime to the Republic in 509 that most incurs the historian’s wrath, reading Livy. An impeccable revolution, the ancient writer claims. Perhaps, Charpin replies, provided we exclude Lucretia’s suicide. But it’s over for free women, those princesses devoted to literature, languages, divination. The Republic now relies on the housewife; it takes away speech, and politics is reserved for men more than ever. Lucretia’s last words imply that the adulterous and violated woman must die: the sacrifice of the heroine is necessary to republican virtue.
There are other analyses, sketched out, cast aside, that resonate with other revolutions, the French Revolution, to begin with. Didn’t the Tennis Court Oath, the fraternity of men proclaimed by the republican motto—Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité—erase half of humanity, too, in their own way?
Finally, Monica, St. Augustine’s mother, provides material for the portrait of the woman slave. No less than the Republic, the Christian Church is called on to answer for its own exclusion of women before the court of reading. Denounced as extravagant, unfaithful, arrogant, the women in City of God prolong the fate of Roman women, already considered the “flawed sex.” Commonly beaten as a result, and without protest. Not even Monica protests, she who is so beloved by her son: doesn’t he owe her everything, particularly his conversion, and even his ecstasies? But he only describes her as a “holy woman” insofar as she is “in service to her husband as a slave is in service to his master.” Because to be married, up to and including the Christian code, is to be a servant. The historian’s perspective and his unfinished work oblige him to neglect the material and spiritual benefits the Christian family contributed to women and children. Among other things. And it ends with Augustine’s (all in all intellectual) rehabilitation of Monica, who was not so slavish as all that. Charpin’s commentaries here are far from being an exhaustive opus, as we have said: it is a draft that raises thorny problems and opens the possibility for research.
Because, in the end, can we be certain that these Roman or Christian archaisms have been left in the past, have been surpassed and overcome in our world, which is proud of its female politicians and its parity? Reading the anxieties of our colleague and consulting our own, we are convinced that he is speaking of us, he is speaking to us—through Lucretia, Monica, the Sabines, and Rhea Silvia. Not to reassure us—or discourage us!—by showing us the extent to which the current exclusion of women is rooted in a past that hasn’t really passed, but to find the logic of this mythic thought of the excluded feminine, and the historical context of its elaboration, so as to allow us to keep our distance from it within ourselves and in the society around us. Charpin’s Roman men and women are, alas, our contemporaries. Alas and so much the better! This writing, halfway between the vigilant study of texts and the anxieties of a man in modern life, takes hold of us in our most secret depths and appeals to our everyday struggles.