New Approaches to Classics Lecture: Professor Lauren Ginsberg

Title: Lament for Oechalia: Pastoral’s Imperialist Complicity in the Hercules Oetaeus Description: The anonymous imperial tragedy, Hercules Oetaeus, opens with a bombastic Hercules asserting his right to divinity because of his imperial project of monster killing and world pacification. But directly next comes an unprecedented choral ode by the women who recently experienced this peace-making: the women of Oechalia. As these women look for a final time at their wasted homeland, they sing an angry lament about their country’s future. This lament, I argue, is markedly engaged with the Roman pastoral mode and, through this engagement, presents the pastoral genre as complicit in Hercules' imperialist violence.