This volume investigates an important and widespread strategy in Latin literature which has to date received little sustained discussion: the deliberate assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who in fact hold sufficient status not to be forced into this position. Itself widely associated with the markers of imperial hegemony and elite speech, Latin literature comprises a broad range of phenomena that involve the strategic adoption of a markedly disempowered voice: topoi such as recusatio (professing a lack of ability to write in status-conforming, superior genres) and rhetorical devices such ... More

This volume investigates an important and widespread strategy in Latin literature which has to date received little sustained discussion: the deliberate assumption of a weaker voice by speakers who in fact hold sufficient status not to be forced into this position. Itself widely associated with the markers of imperial hegemony and elite speech, Latin literature comprises a broad range of phenomena that involve the strategic adoption of a markedly disempowered voice: topoi such as recusatio (professing a lack of ability to write in status-conforming, superior genres) and rhetorical devices such as prosopopoeia (artfully and strategically adopting a persona to garner favour, even when this means temporarily forfeiting one’s higher status and discursive privileges); works, such as Ovid’s Heroides with its long-silenced female heroines, and entire genres, such as satire with its irreverent take on the great and the good generically framed as articulated ‘from below’; and even large-scale cultural self-positionings such as expressions of Roman cultural inferiority vis-à-vis classical Greece or the tensions that arise between humble (yet spiritually superior) Christian writers and their grand, canonical, and classical (yet pagan) predecessors. This volume is dedicated to the literary and cultural-political possibilities opened up by assuming and speaking in voices of weakness and inferiority. It demonstrates that re-negotiating alleged weakness constitutes a central activity in Latin literature and plays a crucial role in establishing, perpetuating, and challenging hierarchies and values in a wide range of fields: from poetics and choices of genre to social status and intra- and intercultural relations.