Listen to Mummy! Epic Mother Speech and Persuasion from Homer to Nonnus

In Book 3 of Apollonius’ Argonautica, Aphrodite famously persuades her son Eros to aim his arrows at Medea and Jason. In Nonnus’ Dionysiaca this passage is, characteristically, imitated not just once but several times, in different guises. While it is clear that Nonnus is toying with the model of Apollonius, he also seems to experiment with the modes of persuasion in relation to the family ties between his characters. Thus, Aphrodite addresses Eros to convince him to incite love with his arrows in Books 33 and 41 but strangely, she disguises herself as Peisinoe in Book 4 to persuade her own daughter Harmonia to marry Cadmus. Elsewhere, Iris purposefully disguises herself as Hypnus’ mother Nyx in order to use motherly arguments to convince him. Iliad 14 (the Deception of Zeus) and Aeneid 1 (Venus as huntress to her son Aeneas) provide further intertexts. In this chapter we combine an analysis of the rhetorical strategies and intertextual allusions of these passages with a distant reading approach to “mother speech” in Greek and Latin epic using the DICES database of Greek and Latin Epic Speech.
Drawing on external data from MANTO, Wikidata and the Perseus Digital Library, we automate the selection of a broadly inclusive corpus of epic speeches between mothers and sons. This corpus is both used for further manual comparison and subjected to computational stylometric analysis using two natural language processing packages. In this way, we embed and quantify our observations on Nonnus’ persuasive (would be) mothers and children in the broader context of epic mother speech from Homer onwards.