[Usyd_Classics_Events] REMINDER: USYD Classics Research Seminar: March 24 Simona Martorana

[Ben Brown]

Dear Friends of Classics and Ancient History,

We are delighted to invite you to the second presentation of Semester 1, 2025 in our Classics and Ancient History research seminar series.

March 24th (Monday, 12.15pm UTC+11) in the VGCC Boardroom
Zoom link: https://uni-sydney.zoom.us/j/83159864939

Simona Martorana (Australian National University)

The Monstrous Famine: Abjection and Ecofeminism in Ovid’s Erysichthon (Met. 8)

The myth of Erysichthon in Ovid’s Metamorphoses (8.738-878) has been interrogated through a variety of approaches, including anthropological, philosophical, and intertextual readings (Massetti 2021; Henneböhl 2013; Piazzi 2019). By examining the Ovidian episode through ecofeminist lenses and Kristeva’s theories of abjection, this paper rereads Erysichthon as an articulation of “the monstrous feminine”. Following his profanation of a highly feminized tree sacred to Ceres, Erysichthon is persecuted by Fames (“Famine/Hunger”), and grows an insatiable appetite. Famine’s penetration in Erysichthon’s bedroom (814-822) recalls the attitudes of male deities (particularly Jupiter) as they seize and rape young women in the Metamorphoses. Erysichthon’s bodily penetrability and fragmentation resonate with Kristeva’s notion of abjection as a woman’s departure from her body, which is accompanied by corporeal self-acknowledgment through the discharge and reappropriation of bodily fluids (Kristeva 1982). In the case of Erysichthon, the continuous introduction of food leads to a distorted reappropriation of his “abject” body, that is, to self-cannibalism. Erysichthon’s emasculated, fragmented, and (self-)mutilated body eventually merges with that same natural, feminized world he had previously violated (875-878). Drawing on ecofeminism (e.g. Vakoch 2012), this paper further demonstrates that the incorporation of Erysichthon’s “monstrous” body into the natural world dismantles well-established ontological hierarchies, along with gender categories.

Works Cited
Henneböhl, R. 2013. “Adpositis queritur ieiunia mensis: Erysichthon als Beispiel existenzieller Darstellung bei Ovid.” Der Altsprachliche Unterricht 56.4–5: 52–58.
Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. L. S. Roudiez. New York.
Massetti, L. 2021. “Erysichthon’s Crime and Punishment: The Prehistory of a Famine Demon.” The Journal of Indo-European Studies 49.1–2: 67–103.
Piazzi, L. 2019. “Il modello di Lucrezio nell’episodio ovidiano di Erisittone.” Materiali e Discussioni per l’analisi dei testi classici 82: 9–21.
Vakoch, D. A. 2012. Feminist Ecocriticism: Environment, Women, and Literature. Lanham, MD.

Simona Martorana is Lecturer in Classics at the Australian National University. Her main research focus on Latin verse combines philological rigor in attention to the detail of the texts with contemporary theoretical and interdisciplinary approaches to antiquity (gender; posthumanism; environmental and medical humanities; legal theory). Her publications include a monograph on Ovid’s Heroides (Seeking the Mothers in Ovid’s Heroides, Cornell UP, 2024), a critical edition of a collection of Medieval fables (Il Romulus della Recensio Gallicana, Sismel, 2024), as well as a number of articles and book chapters focusing mainly on Latin authors from the late-republican and early imperial age.


For further information please reply to this email off-list.

All best, Ben

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