The Use of Threat as a Rhetorical Strategy in Women’s Papyrus Letters

Abstract

Women’s papyrus letters provide us with rich information about their everyday experiences, emotions, social attitudes and rhetorical strategies. A new monograph about women letter-writers in antiquity, including an updated corpus of women’s letters preserved on Greek papyri and ostraca (250 items so-far), has just been published. The aim of the present paper is twofold: first to analyze the use of threats in women’s letters as expression of their emotions and their rhetorical strategies, and secondly to compare women’s threats to those addressed by men in their letters focusing on gender differentiation.