Ближний Восток и его соседи

g 104 h Magda El-Nowieemy That is a great lesson to be learnt from Propertius' stimulating poem, even if it is not a heartfelt plea. 21 The poet seems to epitomize his moralizing verdict on the Roman trade with the East. Elsewhere in his poetry, Propertius disapproves strongly of his girl wasting time and money trying to improve her appearance to look her best. 22 He asks her: teque peregrinis vendere muneribus, naturaeque decus mercato perdere cultu, (Prop.1.2.4–5) “(What avails it) to sell yourself for foreign goods, 23 and to destroy the charm of your nature by purchased ornament (cultus).” 24 The poet may be referring to the profits his girl has made out of her lovers. In poem (1.15.6–8) Propertius says that his girl is spending idle hours trying to improve her looks, adorning her breast with oriental gems like a girl who is about to meet her new lover. pleasures have brought in the longing to carry luxury and lust to the point of personal ruin and universal destruction. Wyke (1994) 140f., devotes a good deal of space, as usual, to woman’s body. She declares how Roman discourses ascribe a history to woman's adorned body within a larger narrative of social decline, such that the woman's progressively more adorned body sym- bolizes the progressively more degenerate state. Thus women are given access to the political system as symbols rather than agents. Wyke explains how excessive care for the body is treated as symptomatic of the softening of the state’s moral fiber. She sees that woman's adorned body becomes the visible emblem of a whole network of social vices: luxury, extravagance, corrup- tion, and orientalism. 21 Richardson (1977) 371, thinks that the persona of the satirist ill suits Propertius. The denun- ciations of the moral failure of his generation tend to ring false in the mouth of a self–confessed aesthete and devoted admirer of women. 22 In the same poem Propertius assures his claim that natural beauty is preferable in the follo­ wing words: crede mihi , non ulla tua est medicina figurae. (Prop. 1.2.7) "Believe me there is no medicine for your figure". 23 Wyke (1994) 141, argues that adorned in imported luxuries, the woman whose image is con- structed in the mirror becomes herself a foreign commodity, and is defined through her body as all that is alien and pernicious to the traditionally minded Roman male. S. Harrison, “Drink, Suspi- cion and Comedy in Propertius 1.3”, PCPS 40 (1995) 23, believes that the common reason for the elegiac poet’s objection to extravagance is that the girl is trying to please men other than the poet. 24 The Latin word cultus includes the daily cultivation of the female form before a mirror, wear- ing make-up, perfumes, and external embellishment of jewellery. It also includes the care of the body, in Dupont's words (1992) 262f., it is “the culture of the body”. For an excellent survey of this issue, see: A. Richlin, “The Ethnographer’s Dilemma and the Dream of a Lost Golden Age”, in: N. Rabinowitz et al. (eds.), Feminist Theory and the Classics (Routledge 1993) 291ff. Richlin argues that Roman women had a subculture of their own in the broadest sense of the term, if we read the ancient texts optimistically.