Emotion, Genre and Gender in Classical Antiquity 9781472555663, 9780715638958, 9781472504487

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Acknowledgments This collection of essays stems from a conference panel entitled ‘Emotion, Gender and Literary Genre in Antiquity’ that I organized in 2008 at the Classical Association (Liverpool, UK). The initial audience was so enthusiastic about the subject that I was convinced it deserved further consideration. I would like to thank all of my contributors for all their hard work and devotion to the project. I am very grateful to Deborah Blake, Editorial Director, Bristol Classical Press, for her patience and help. The University of Cincinnati, Department of Classics, offered me a research scholarship (2008-2009) to work on this book, and for that I am grateful. In addition, I owe much for the support provided by my new colleagues in the Department of Classics at Ohio State University, which I joined in the autumn of 2009, and where there is a strong interest in gender studies. Finally, on the Newark campus of Ohio State, I would like to thank the Associate Dean, Paul Sanders, for accommodating my teaching schedule, and the Library Director, Susan Scott, for responding promptly to all of my bibliographical requests. Dana LaCourse Munteanu

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Contributors Peter J. Anderson is Associate Professor of Classics at Grand Valley State University. His main interests are in the field of Latin poetry and prose of the early empire. His forthcoming book is entitled Seneca, Selections (Indianapolis: Hackett). Douglas L. Cairns is Professor of Classics at the University of Edinburgh. His work concentrates on ancient society and ethics, particularly on the emotions in early Greek poetry and tragedy. He is the author of Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature (Oxford, 1993), the editor of Oxford Readings in Homer’s Iliad (Oxford, 2001) and the co-editor of numerous volumes, such as Body Language in the Greek and Roman Worlds (Swansea, 2005). Dorota Dutsch is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. She specializes in social performance, understood broadly from funeral rites to comedy. She is the author of Feminine Discourses in Roman Comedy: On Echoes and Voices (Oxford, 2008). Laurel Fulkerson is Associate Professor of Classics at Florida State University. Her research focuses on gender in antiquity and Latin and Greek poetry. She is the author of The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides (Cambridge, 2005). Margaret Graver is Professor of Classical Studies at Dartmouth College. Her expertise is in Greek and Roman philosophy, especially Stoicism. She is the author of Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3 and 4 (Chicago, 2002) and Stoicism and Emotion (Chicago, 2007). David Konstan is Professor Emeritus of Classics at Brown University and Professor, Department of Classics, New York University. He has published extensively on a variety of subjects in Greek literature. Among the books dedicated to the study of the emotions, he is the author of The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature (Toronto, 2006), Pity Transformed (London, 2001), as well as co-editor of Envy, Spite, and Jealousy: The Rivalrous Emotions in the Ancient Greece (Edinburgh, 2003).

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Contributors Anna McCullough is Assistant Professor, Department of Greek and Latin, Ohio State University. Her interests are in the area of Latin poetry and gender studies. Her book in preparation is entitled Gender and Public Image in Imperial Rome. Dana LaCourse Munteanu is Assistant Professor, Department of Greek and Latin, Ohio State University (Newark). Her research concentrates on Greek drama and philosophy. Her forthcoming book is entitled Tragic Pathos: Pity and Fear in Greek Philosophy and Tragedy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Évelyne Prioux is Researcher at the Université de Paris. Her work focuses on Hellenistic literature and art. She is the author of Regards alexandrins. Histoire et théorie des arts dans l’épigramme hellénistique (Hellenistica Groningana 12) (Louvain, 2007) and Petits musées en vers: épigrammes et discours sur les collections antiques (Paris, 2008). Zara Martirosova Torlone is Associate Professor at Miami University. Her research focuses primarily on Latin poetry and the modern reception of the classics. She is the author of Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse (London, 2009) and the co-editor of Insiders and Outsiders in Russian Cinema (Bloomington, 2008). Jessica Wissmann taught at the University of Iowa and is currently affiliated with the Rheinische Friedrich-Wilhelms-Universität Bonn. Her research concentrates on Homer and Greek tragedy. She is the author of Motivation und Schmähung: Feigheit in der Ilias und in der griechischen Tragödie (Stuttgart, 1997).

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Introduction Emotion in Literature: Genre and Gender Dana LaCourse Munteanu Studies of ancient emotions have flourished in recent years.1 In these, expressions of emotion in literature have been seen as reflections of social interactions and values. In the Iliad, for example, displays of pity naturally lead to collaboration and reconciliation. At the same time, feeling pity for a fallen companion can lead to anger and an intensified desire to fight.2 Additionally, literary and philosophical texts have been used to discuss changes in viewing particular emotions in various cultures. Both our definitions and our attitudes toward pity, for instance, have varied over the centuries in Western culture.3 While acknowledging the importance of these contributions to the field, our approach is different. We plan to analyze two less explored aspects of the subject: (1) connections between genres and emotions and (2) gender-based peculiarities of emotions, as described in various genres. Genre and emotion4 The term ‘genre’ has a long and complicated history, as well as ever changing connotations in contemporary literary theory.5 For our purposes, it will suffice to offer a basic and generally accepted definition. Genre can be defined as: ‘a recurring type or category of text as defined by structural, thematic and/or functional criteria; a term increasingly used in the classification of non-literary (and non-written) as well as literary texts; notably films and media’.6 We use genre mostly as a literary category that has been recognized by Greek and Roman writers for a set of conventional features, such as tragedy, comedy, epic and epigram.7 Certainly such generic features were not set in stone, nor was the classification of genres and subgenres invariable throughout antiquity.8 We do not focus, however, on the elements of diachronic changes or critical disagreements about genres. Rather, we are interested in examining how ancient testimonies emphasize the particular abilities of genres to represent and arouse emotions. In addition to the traditional literary types, our collection includes a discussion of styles in ancient painting, which could be seen as artistic genres, since they follow certain techniques and create specific expectations in Hellenistic critics.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu Ancient associations between certain emotions and genres have been long noted: Greek tragedy was expected to arouse pity, while elegy expressed the grief of loss and love.9 But beyond this idea of dominant expression of emotion, how did emotions and genres relate? We intend to examine two matters especially: (1) the manner in which particular emotions were expressed in various genres and (2) the kind of emotions that genres were believed to stir in their audiences. Do literary and artistic contexts impose artificial features on the representation of emotions? In a fascinating recent article, Roggen has argued, by comparing Lucretius and Juvenal, that literary genre influences the level of complexity of a text, especially in regards to the way in which a text conveys meaning to readers.10 This argument can raise another, closely related, question. Does genre influence the way in which emotions are presented in a literary text, and thus the way in which we understand them? Ancient critics, for example, suggest that comedy should represent less intense emotions than does tragedy.11 Ought our understanding of the ancient ‘anger’ to depend on whether we are reading Euripides or Menander? One of the purposes of our volume is to decipher the degree to which expression of emotion in ancient literature becomes an artistic construct rather than a mere reflection of society. By this, we do not deny, of course, that literary depictions of emotions may and do convey social realities. Rather, we intend to emphasize that genres can impose idiosyncratic modes of presentation on descriptions of emotions. Furthermore, we want to explore the ways in which artists and critics see in genre a unique medium, able to convey select emotions, which can produce their own social effect. Some genres, such as comedy and epigram, stirred emotions that were not permitted unbridled expression in society. A poet can underscore the uniqueness of his creation precisely by comparing its generic ability to arouse certain emotions to other genres. Juvenal, a poet who famously ascribes his work to indignation over social shortcomings,12 ends the programmatic poem 1.1 with the conviction that his chosen genre, satire, can stir stronger and more authentic emotions in his audiences than epic ever could: securus licet Aenean Rutulumque ferocem committas, nulli gravis est percussus Achilles aut multum quaesitus Hylas urnamque secutus: ense velut stricto quotiens Lucilius ardens infremuit, rubet auditor cui frigida mens est criminibus, tacita sudant praecordia culpa. inde ira et lacrimae. tecum prius ergo voluta haec animo ante tubas: galeatum sero duelli paenitet. (1.162-70) You may safely set Aeneas and the fierce Rutulian against each other in a fight; no one will take it hard that Achilles was wounded to death or that Hylas was searched for when he was looking for his pitcher. However,

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Introduction whenever Lucilius rages, inflamed, as if with a sword in his hand, the listener, who has a cold mind with crimes, grows red. He sweats with secret realization of his offences. Hence anger and tears; so turn these things over in your mind before the trumpets, once the helmet is taken on, it is too late to repent of the battle.

While epic is unable to vex anyone with its old stories, satire maintains an extraordinary ability to inflame the audience with strong passions, even when the poet (Lucilius) and his targets are no longer alive. A poet is ‘safe’ (securus) in writing epic, because the audience is not bothered by the sufferings of an Aeneas. The superior emotional effect of Juvenal’s poetry over the listeners is part of a broader recusatio of the epic form, a common practice for the writers of elegy or satire.13 The implication is not that the listener remains entirely passive at hearing the sufferings of the epic hero,14 but that he is not directly affected by the epic or emotionally bound to the poet. The audience can thus listen to an epic battle detachedly but will have to be directly involved in the satirist’s attack. The satirist resembles an epic hero who fights a never-ending battle with the vices of his listeners and always vanquishes those who are morally depraved. But what kind of emotions does the satirist stir? Strikingly, the passage depicts the physical aspects of the reactions of the listener (auditor): he ‘turns red’ (rubet), presumably because of shame, ‘sweats’ (sudat), presumably for fear of being exposed and later sheds tears (lacrimae), perhaps out of remorse for his deeds or out of annoyance for being exposed. The only emotion directly named here is anger (ira). Yet the poet warns the reader to avoid the fight with the satirist before it is too late. But if the listener stays pure, indeed, away from vice, as recommended, what will he feel when reading the poetry of this genre? Nothing, we infer, but it should not matter: imagining what he might experience emotionally can serve as a keeper of virtue. Whether satire shames the guilty reader or prevents the innocent from going astray for fear that he might be shamed, the result ought to be moral betterment. Satire’s emotions therefore prevail over epic in three respects: object (as the listener himself, not a remote character, feels that he might be the target of an attack – even though he is not directly named ), timing (as the emotions caused by satire concern the present not the past, since vices remain deathless) and moral effect (as they improve the listener, either by correcting or by preventing vice). The manner in which ancient authors or critics display this type of awareness of the potential of genres to arouse unique emotions, often in contrast to other genres, is at the centre of our analysis (Anderson, Munteanu, Prioux). Emotion and gender Secondly, we aim to understand associations between gender and emotion within the frame of genres.15 Early on, the Greeks acknowledged that one

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu gender can feel an emotion more strongly than can the other or, at least, appears to express it more openly than does the other gender. Susceptibility to grief, for instance, was coded as feminine in the ancient Greek culture. Societal organization can offer an explanation for this: men had to fight on the battlefield while women mourned and buried the dead.16 Indeed, women would commonly perform rituals of mourning.17 But biological explanations were also offered for associating the expression of grief with women in classical Greece.18 A medical treatise dated toward the end of the fifth century BCE, The Diseases of Young Girls, clearly advances the idea that biological differences between the genders can account for women’s inclination to plunge into sorrow.19 Certain nightmares and day visions are so horrifying, we read, that they may drive people to committing suicide. In these instances women kill themselves more frequently because they experience anguish more deeply than men: Because of this kind of [frightening] vision, many have hanged themselves, more women than men, for female nature (physis gynaikeiê) is more easily disheartened and more easily distressed [than that of the male]. (8-10)

Indeed, classical scholars have noted and discussed gender-based differences in the expressions of certain emotions, such as shame, anger and fear.20 We intend to broaden the analysis of gender in the literary representation of emotions and to connect it to genres. Particularly, we propose to examine whether emotions expressed by men and women appear uniformly described within one genre or across genres, and, when we observe differences, try to explain the reasons. I shall select only a few examples in this introduction, but hope that the patient reader will find many more stimulating ways of thinking about the subject upon finishing our volume. Are women’s emotions consistently represented in the New Comedy of Menander, Plautus and Terence (Konstan-Dutsch)? In this case, inconsistencies in the depictions of female emotions can certainly come from moving from Greek to Roman culture. But what happens when Plautus and Terence differ in their depictions of female anger, an emotion presented in detail by the authors? Again, the most obvious cause is that one of the playwrights follows more closely Greek models, while the other draws inspiration from Roman society, but other explanations are also possible. Moreover, we would perhaps be aware of neither differences nor causes for inconsistencies, unless we are willing to consider both gender and genre in our examination. When a mythical woman, the famed Helen, recounts her affair, she always – and across genres – attempts to obscure her erotic desire, a manifestation of illicit love, whereas this does not seem to be a concern for the heroine’s male counterpart, Paris (Fulkerson). Such a strikingly systematic description of unacknowledged female desire across genres probably testifies to a widespread social uneasiness in accepting women’s active role in choosing a lover. Finally, later reception

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Introduction sometimes filters the meaning of classical texts through a set of expectations for genre and gender that does not always align with the ancient context (Torlone), a matter that has consequences beyond the literary reworking of ancient texts, as it points to our modern interpretative biases. While we do not claim to have all the answers to the questions we raise, we do hope to present new ways of understanding the subject so that scholars will continue to develop it in the future. Overall, we hope that some important observations emerge from the essays of this collection: (a) In any evaluation of the social aspects of the literary expressions of emotion, we need to consider generic conventions. Genres represent emotional responses within a limited situational setting, in which interactions often lead to predictable outcomes (for example, New Comedy confines the characters’ emotions to the domestic realm). While this is, of course, known to modern scholars, the implications of these generic limitations are not always strictly considered. (b) Sometimes authors represent emotions unrealistically, and may acknowledge this (for the amusement of the audiences, angry wives in Roman Comedy are given more liberty to express their emotions in front of their husbands than they would be given in real life); but such instances should make us wary of times when an emotion is presented in an exaggerated manner without any specific acknowledgment. (c) Genres were often expected to arouse specific emotions in the audiences. Writers and critics defined those specific generic emotions by comparing genres, either to underscore the contrast (comedy versus tragedy), or to proclaim the superiority of one genre over another (for example, satire over epic). (d) At times, authors openly guided the audiences toward the desired emotional responses to their work. In the case of the genres that may contain offensive material – such as epigram, satire, and comedy – the poet may prescribe not only how the spectator or reader ought to feel, but also what emotions to avoid in response to the possible offence. (e) Ancient critics developed ways of analyzing how emotions are represented in literary works and visual arts, as well as how literary text and art might interact to affect the reader or viewer. (f) Genre can play a role in the way in which the emotions of men and women are depicted. Greek tragedy, for example, raises questions about fear, courage and gender in a manner that allows female characters to ponder the meaning of heroism and the overcoming of fear. (g) Invariable presentation of gendered differences in displaying or hiding emotions across genres and cultures likely derives from social norms and moral expectations for proper behaviour. (h) Unusual manifestations of emotions, especially when they involve dissolving expected behavioural differences between genders (as, for instance, in Stoicism) can easily be misread within the same culture and beyond.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu (i) Our own interpretations of gender differences in the expressions of emotions in ancient texts are, at times, based on preconceived ideas about how men and women ought to feel and interact. (j) Representations of gendered emotions in literary texts can not only reflect but also encourage social change, by promoting new ideals of ‘masculinity’ (such as familial devotion in Statius) or ‘femininity’. Contents The essays in this collection can be roughly divided into three categories: (1) studies of expressions of particular emotion(s) within a genre or across genres (Cairns, Wissmann); (2) examinations of specific emotions that genres were expected to produce according to ancient authors and critics (Anderson, Munteanu, Prioux); (3) analyses of emotions according to their gender characteristics within a genre or across genres (Fulkerson, Graver, Konstan/Dutsch, McCullough, and, with an emphasis on reception, Torlone). There are many overlaps, since most contributors to this volume consider both gender and genre in their approach, but one aspect may prevail over another. The order will more or less follow chronology. The collection opens with two essays on Greek tragedy, one on sorrow and veiling (Cairns), the other on fear and cowardice in Homer and tragedy (Wissmann); next, two essays on Greek and Roman comedy, one on women’s emotions in New Comedy (Konstan-Dutsch), the other on the types of emotions stirred by comedy (Munteanu); an analysis of female erotic desire (Helen’s), spanning across genres and cultures, from Homer to Ovid follows (Fulkerson); an essay on emotions in Hellenistic art (Prioux); three essays on Roman material: male expressions of grief in the epic of Statius (McCullough); removal of reader’s unwanted emotions in epigram (Anderson); and a strange account of the gender(less) Stoic emotion in Lucan (Graver); finally, a paper on the gendered reception of the love affair between Dido and Aeneas in Virgil’s Aeneid (Torlone). Cairns, ‘Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage’, examines the gesture of veiling as an expression of sorrow, or of extreme sorrow (mourning), in Greek tragedy. From a gender perspective, the gesture of veiling in mourning is associated with femininity, and, by veiling themselves men may want to conceal their pain, which, if expressed openly could be interpreted as feminine behaviour. Nevertheless, covering one’s head to hide tears of sorrow is a more self-controlled gesture than other types of behaviour (such as tearing the hair) for both men and women. Wissmann, ‘Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy’, shows that, in Homer, male warriors are reluctant to express fear that can lead to accusations of cowardice; but in tragedy, occasionally, women also seem concerned about appearing cowardly. The essay raises questions about gendered notions of courage versus cowardice. It ends with an

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Introduction appraisal of the extent to which women appropriate male heroic status in tragedies by avoiding the label of cowardice. Dutsch and Konstan, ‘Women’s Emotions in New Comedy’, explore, as the title suggests, women’s emotions by type and characteristics in New Comedy. The study is designed diachronically, from Greek to Roman comedy: Menander, Plautus and Terence. Special emphasis is placed on the differences in the expression of women’s anger among the three playwrights, as well as the possible causes for the variations. The study discusses both what is specifically consistent and what is variable for the gendered expression of emotion within the genre. Munteanu, ‘Comic Emotions: Shamelessness and Envy (Schadenfreude); Moderate Emotions’, assesses types of emotions associated with the audiences’ responses to comedy. According to ancient testimonies, Old Comedy removes rather than stirs an emotion, namely shame, for both its characters and its audiences. Comic shamelessness is described as similar to tragic pity in Plato’s Republic. Given that comedy as genre encourages the spectators to abandon their decency temporarily, it strange that women in the plays of Aristophanes protest against Euripides’ portrayal of shameless, Phaedra-type characters. Moreover, comedy can fuel the spectators’ envy, understood as pleasure at another’s misfortune (caused by ignorance) in Plato’s Philebus. By contrast, in the case of New Comedy (Menander and Terence), critics describe the emotions expressed within the genre (rather than aroused by the genre) as similar, yet less intense, than those expressed in tragedy. In general, comic emotions are linked to ethical matters. Fulkerson, ‘Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim: Remorse and the Opacity of Female Desire’, demonstrates in a tour de force through genres that Helen obscures her erotic desire for Paris, which creates moral ambiguity. If she does not acknowledge her love in the affair, then should she feel guilt for eloping with Paris, or should she rather proclaim her innocence? Fulkerson further discusses the significance of this mythical paradigm for our understanding of women’s actions and responsibility in antiquity. Prioux, ‘Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism’, traces ancient theories about the representation of emotions in visual arts. Artists used various means in order to represent emotions: contrasting colours, meaningful gestures and specific techniques to represent the characters’ eyes. The study concentrates on the ancient reception of the artists’ ability to represent and trigger emotions. In this respect, a source of special interest is the Eicones of Philostratus the Elder, a series of ecphraseis in which the painted representation of the various emotions of mythical characters and the emotional responses of the viewers form one of the author’s major concerns. Rather than associating particular emotions with visual arts, as in the case of literary genres, descriptions of paintings and sculptures seem to concentrate on the intensity of the expressions of emotions in art, and then link those to the styles of the individual artists. McCullough, ‘One Wife, One Love: Coniugalis Amor, Grief and Mascu-

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu linity in Statius’ Silvae’, examines extraordinary examples, in which men display love and devotion toward their wives, while they are alive, and then extreme grief at their death. The essay argues that these models of devoted husbands become part of a broader discourse on masculinity occurring at the time in Rome. The imperial era imposed restrictions on men’s achievements in the public arena, in which masculinity had been displayed traditionally. Therefore, the ideals of Roman masculinity had to be redefined. The application of what was normally considered feminine virtue and emotion, such as conjugal love, to men presents an alternative to previous conceptualizations of Roman virtue. Statius’ use of the gendered dynamics of emotion transforms the traditional definition of Roman manliness. Anderson, ‘Absit Malignus Interpres: Martial’s Preface to Book One of the Epigrams and the Construction of Audience Response’, argues that Martial attempts to guide the readers’ emotional and aesthetic responses to his epigrammata. Through careful use of key terms and through precise articulation of generic expectations, the ‘Preface’ offers a model of interaction between author and reader that eliminates the dangers of certain undesirable emotional responses, such as angry irritation (iracundia). The nature of Martial’s epigram, in many ways a vehicle for social critique, is such that we often find Martial discussed alongside the satirists, with the often-quoted parcere de personis, dicere de vitiis (Mart. 10.33). But epigram as a genre is quite distinct from satire, both since abusive epigram by convention includes the name of the target and since the vocabulary of epigram is considerably more obscene and less euphemistic than that of satire. Anderson explains how Martial’s discourse justifies the potentially offensive material of the genre. Graver, ‘De Bello Civili 2.326-91: Cato Gets Married’, concentrates on the incredibly unemotional figure of Cato on the occasion of his remarriage to Marcia in Lucan’s De Bello Civili. This description of an affectless Cato points to the Stoic imperturbability (apatheia), but seems to be an exaggerated version of it. In fact, the Stoic sage allows emotional expression, when appropriate: he can show joy, love, or even cry, as in Cicero’s account of grief (Tusculan Disputations) and in several of Seneca’s letters. In contrast to these, Lucan’s Cato seems to be unsuitably inflexible on this occasion, when a Stoic sage should have probably experienced the eupathic response of joy. Furthermore, Marcia is not depicted as Cato’s opposite, despite the gender polarity. Her psychological features are in fact remarkably similar to those of her husband’s. As the female counterpart to Cato’s bizarre character, Marcia appears to complete Lucan’s version of a Stoic human being that has the same recognizable character in both its male and female components. The wedding between the two lacks the appropriate time, ritual and sexual dimension of a normal Roman ceremony. And, although the wedding ought to draw attention to the differences of gender roles, those differences dissolve into the strange, sexless characters of husband and wife.

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Introduction Torlone, ‘Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s Dido and Aeneas’, considers the reception of the love affair in Vergil’s Aeneid. The famous Roman epic already offers different male and female perspectives on love and heroic duty. Yet, later interpreters reconstruct the significance of the love episode between Dido and Aeneas, according to their own poetic concerns. Torlone concentrates on Joseph Brodsky’ lyric poem ‘Dido and Aeneas’ which surprises the reader in several ways. While the poet specifies his other influences (Henry Purcell’s opera and a poem by Anna Akhmatova), he departs from these sources of inspiration, which emphasize feminine passion. Furthermore, despite the expectations for the genre – lyric embraces love’s loss, while epic deals with heroic quest – Brodsky underscores in his lyric poem the masculine creativity that sacrifices feminine love. Notes 1. Among the essential works published in the last decade, I would like to mention studies of ancient philosophers’ accounts of emotions, such as Sorabji (2000), Graver (2002) and (2007); studies of individual emotions: anger – Harris (2001), the collection edited by Braund and Most (2004); pity – Konstan (2001) the collection edited by Sternberg (2005) and Sternberg’s subsequent book (2006); envy – the collection edited by Konstan and Rutter (2004); more generally, the reappraisal of the emotions of ancient Greeks (Konstan, 2006), an analysis of several emotions in Roman culture Toohey (2004) and Kaster (2005). This is only the tip of the iceberg in the classical scholarship of emotions. As Kaster (2006) has put it, the work of Fortenbaugh (1975) was followed by ‘a virtual flood that began in 1993’ of book-length studies on the emotions of the ancients (see Kaster (2006) nn. 1 and 2 for extensive bibliography on the topic). 2. For the social and moral implications of pity in the Iliad, see, for example, Crotty (1994) 42-69, Kim (2000) 35-68, Hammer (2002) and Most (2004), who emphasizes particularly the connections between pity for a fallen friend and anger against the enemy. 3. Konstan (2001). 4. As is the case with the multifaceted notion of ‘genre’, which we explore only briefly in this introduction, one could write volumes (and many have) attempting to explain two other words in the title of our collection: ‘emotion’ and ‘classical’. An emotion is a response to stimuli that usually involves a psychological appraisal and causes physiological changes. But this is to provide a simple definition to an extremely complex notion, which has produced fierce debates among biologists, sociologists and philosophers; useful introductions to some of the controversies surrounding emotions are, for example, Calhoun and Solomon (1984) and Ben-Ze’ev (2001) 1-78. By ‘classical’ antiquity we generally mean Greco-Roman antiquity, understood very broadly. Porter (2005) 37-40, however, shows that any attempt to pinpoint the beginning and the end of such period proves to be elusive, as well as assesses the meanings that ‘classics’ and ‘classical’ can cover – (in our case too, besides the general use of the term for Greco-Roman antiquity, Prioux employs a more specialized meaning of ‘Classical’, i.e. fifth-century Greek, versus ‘Hellenistic’ art and Torlone focuses on modern interpretations of a ‘classical’ text, Vergil’s Aeneid).

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu 5. Duff (2000) 1-24 offers an excellent historical survey of genre theories as well as the theoretical objections to the notion of genre, including origins, Russian Formalism, Sociologies of genre, Structuralism and recent developments. For the practical aspects of genre theory, see Dean (2008). 6. Duff (2000) xiii. 7. On elements of generic continuity and change in Greek and Roman poetry, see Cairns (1972) and Conte (1994). The collection of essays edited by Depew and Obbink (2000) has been dedicated to genres in Greco-Roman antiquity, and has primarily concentrated on the role of authors and performance in defining generic expectations. Citroni (2006) 204-34 argues that the idea of canonical authors, who remain emblematic for various genres, was already functional in ancient Rome. 8. Classicists have discussed problems related to genre definition and terminology: e.g. Hainsworth (1991) 1-10, concentrating on epic; Mastronarde (1999-2000) 24-6, with special emphasis on dramatic elements seen by ancient critics as tragic or comic; Branham (2005) dealing with the ancient novel; Revermann (2006) 95-106, evaluating how typical of genre is Aristophanes’ comedy. 9. I shall limit my bibliographical references to one representative discussion for each genre. For the ancient audiences’ expectations that tragedy should stir pity, see Heath (1987) 5-89; on elegy expressing loss, sorrow and love, see, for example, James (2003), with extensive bibliography (n. 1), as well as an interesting analysis of gender expectations for showing such emotions (usually male) and Ovid’s innovation in this respect. 10. Roggen (2008) applies modern linguistic theory and methodology to the style of Lucretius and Juvenal to evaluate how each author conveys meaning, and concludes that satire (unlike didactic poetry) obscures meaning and encourages diverse interpretations. 11. See the second half of my essay in this collection. 12. On Juvenal’s indignatio, see especially Anderson (1982) 293-361 and Braund (1988) 1-23. 13. Cf. Ov. Am. 1.1-3; Hor. Sat. 2.1. Braund (1996) 110-15 places Juvenal’s Satire 1 in the tradition of programmatic poems using recusatio and apologia as justifications for not writing epic. 14. The listener seems to remain indifferent toward the adventures of the epic heroes, I think, only by comparison to how he reacts to satire. Generally, see Halliwell (2002) 218, for the expectations that audiences feel pity in Greek culture, and Smith (1997) 137-96, who proposes that Vergil directs his audiences how to feel for Aeneas and his quest by creating internal models of response. 15. Modern theory discusses gender and genre together, particularly from a feminist perspective (concentrating on either the authorship of women or on the representation of women in literature); for a good overview of the scholarship on this topic, see Eagleton (2000). An interesting classicist examination of Latin literature from the angles of both genre and gender is provided in the collection edited by Bastone and Tissol (2005). 16. Halliwell (1988) 146 provides literary evidence that emphasizes the link between expressions of grief and women (e.g. Archil. fr. 13.10 West; Soph. Aj. 580; Pl. R. 3.387e, 389e, Phd.117d-e, Ap. 35b3). 17. Crucial treatments of women’s laments in ancient Greece can be found in Alexiou (1974), Holst-Warhaft (1992), McClure (1999) 40-7, Foley (2001); for a recent reappraisal of the topic, see the collection of essays edited by Suter (2008). 18. By the fourth century BCE, Ps-Aristotle’s Oeconomica (1.3.4.1, 334a) states that biological differences between the sexes naturally lead to a social hierarchy

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Introduction and the division of labour between men and women. For a revealing discussion of this passage and more evidence on the subject, see Brulé (2003) 74-99. 19. Flemming and Hanson (1998) publish the text, translation, and commentary of this Hippocratic text. 20. To give only a few examples of studies of gendered differences in the expression of emotion: on shame, in Greece, see Cairns (1993) 48-146, in Rome, see Kaster (2005) 25-6; on anger, see Harris (2004) 264-84; on fear, see McNiven (2000) who analyzes vase images but cites literary evidence as well.

Bibliography Alexiou, Margaret B. 1974. The Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition. London: Cambridge University Press. Anderson, William S. 1982. Essays on Roman Satire. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bastone, William and Garth, Tissol (eds). 2005. Defining Genre and Gender in Latin Literature: Essays Presented to William S. Anderson on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday. New York: Peter Lang. Ben-Ze’ev, Aharon. 2001. The Subtlety of Emotions. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Branham, Bracht. 2005. ‘The Poetics of Genre: Bakhtin, Menippus, Petronius.’ In Defining Genre and Gender in Latin Literature: Essays Presented to William S. Anderson on His Seventy-Fifth Birthday, ed. William Bastone and Garth Tissol, 113-38. New York: Peter Lang. Braund, Susanna. 1988. Beyond Anger: A Study of Juvenal’s Third Book of Satires. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braund, Susanna (ed.). 1996. Juvenal Satires. Book I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Braund, Susanna and Most, Glenn (eds). 2003. Ancient Anger. Perspectives from Homer to Galen. Yale Classical Studies 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brulé, Pierre. 2003. Women of Ancient Greece, tr. A. Nevill. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Cairns, Douglas. 1993. Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in the Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Cairns, Francis. 1972. Generic Composition in Greek and Roman Poetry. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Calhoun, Cheshire and Robert, Solomon (eds). 1984. What is an Emotion? Classical Readings in Philosophical Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press. Citroni, Mario. 2006. ‘The Concept of the Classical and the Canons of Model Authors in Roman Literature.’ In Classical Pasts: The Classical Traditions of Greece and Rome, ed. James I. Porter, 204-34. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Conte, Gian Biagio. 1994. Genres and Readers: Lucretius, Love Elegy, Pliny’s Encyclopedia, tr. Glenn W. Most, with a foreword by Charles Segal. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Crotty, Kevin. 1994. The Poetics of Supplication. Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Dean, Deborah. 2008. Genre Theory. Teaching, Writing, and Being. Urbana, IL: National Council of Teachers of English. Depew, Mary and Dirk, Obbink (eds). 2000. Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons and Society. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu Duff, David (ed.). 2000. Modern Genre Theory. Harlow, England; New York: Longman. Flemming, R. and Hanson, A.E. 1998. ‘Hippocrates’ Peri Partheniôn (“Diseases of Young Girls”): Text and Translation.’ Early Science and Medicine 3: 241-52. Fortenbaugh, William W. 1975. Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and Ethics. London: Duckworth. Eagleton, Mary. 2000. ‘Genre and Gender.’ In Modern Genre Theory, ed. D. Duff, 210-18. Harlow: Longman. Foley, Helene P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Graver, Margaret. 2002. Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputation 3 and 4, Translated with A Commentary. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Graver, Margaret. 2007. Stoicism and Emotion. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Hainsworth, John B. 1991. The Idea of Epic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 1988. Plato. Republic Book 10; with Translation and Commentary. Warminster: Aris and Phillips. Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. The Aesthetics of Mimesis: Ancient Texts and Modern Problems. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hammer, Dean. 2002. ‘The Iliad as Ethical Thinking: Politics, Pity, and the Operation of Esteem.’ Arethusa 35: 203-35. Harris, William V. 2001. Restraining Rage. The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, William V. 2004. ‘The Rage of Women.’ In Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. Susanna Braund and Glenn W. Most, 121-143. Yale Classical Studies 32. Cambridge, New York: Cambridge University Press. Heath, Malcolm. 1987. The Poetics of Greek Tragedy. London: Duckworth. Holst-Warhaft, Gail. 1992. Dangerous Voices: Women’s Laments and Greek Literature. London: Routledge. James, Sharon. 2003. ‘Her Turn to Cry: The Politics of Weeping in Roman Love Elegy.’ TAPA 133: 99-122. Kaster, Robert. 2005. Emotion, Restraint, and Community in Ancient Rome. London, New York: Oxford University Press. Kaster, Robert. 2006. Review of David Konstan, Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature: Notre Dame Philosophical Review. http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=7523. Kim, Jinyo. 2000. The Pity of Achilles: Oral Style and the Unity of the Iliad. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Konstan, David. 2001. Pity Transformed. London: Duckworth. Konstan, David and Keith, Rutter. 2003. Envy, Spite and Jealousy: the Rivalrous Emotions in Ancient Greece. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Konstan, David. 2006. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Mastronarde, Donald. 1999-2000. ‘Euripidean Tragedy and Its Genre: The Terminology and its Problems.’ ICS 24-5: 23-39. McClure, Laura. 1999. Spoken like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press. McNiven, Timothy. 2000. ‘Fear and Gender in Greek Art.’ In Reading the Body: Representations and Remains in the Archaeological Record, ed. Alison Rautman, 124-31. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Most, Glenn W. 2004. ‘Anger and Pity in Homer’s Iliad.’ In Ancient Anger:

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Introduction Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. Susanna Braund and Glenn W. Most, 51-75. Yale Classical Studies 32. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Porter, James I. 2005. ‘What is Classical about Classical Antiquity? Eight Propositions.’ Arion 13: 27-62. Revermann, Martin. 2006. Comic Business. Theatricality, Dramatic Technique, and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roggen, Vibeke. 2008. ‘The Effects of Genre on the Value of Words: Didactic Poetry Versus Satire.’ CQ 58: 547-64. Smith, Robert A. 1997. Poetic Allusion and Poetic Embrace in Ovid and Virgil. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Sorabji, Richard. 2000. Emotion and the Peace of Mind. From Stoic Agitation to Christian Temptation. Oxford, New York: Oxford University Press. Sternberg, Rachel H. (ed.). 2005. Pity and Power in Ancient Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sternberg, Rachel. 2006. Tragedy Offstage: Suffering and Sympathy in Ancient Athens. Austin: University of Texas Press. Suter, Ann (ed.). 2008. Lament: Studies in the Ancient Mediterranean and Beyond. New York: Oxford University Press. Toohey, Peter. 2004. Melancholy, Love, and Time: Boundaries of the Self in Ancient Literature. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

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1

Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage* Douglas L. Cairns Characters in tragedy veil (i.e. cover their heads and sometimes their faces with a garment) in a variety of situations – to indicate shame, to comply with the demands of modesty, to express anger, to signify that they feel themselves polluted and as a sign or accompaniment of grief.1 The dramatic possibilities of veiling were famously exploited by Aeschylus, according to his opponent, Euripides, in a well-known passage of Aristophanes’ Frogs (907-26, esp. 911-13): EU. toàton d5 prît’ 1l2gxw, æj Ãn ¢lazën ka< f2nax o∑oij te to)j qeat>j 1xhp£ta mèrouj labën par> Frun8cü traf2ntaj. prètista m5n g>r 3na tin, .n kaqe√sen 1gkalÚyaj, ,Acill2a tin, À NiÒbhn, tÕ prÒswpon oÙc< deiknÚj, prÒschma tÁj tragüd8aj, grÚzontaj oÙd5 tout8. (908-13) ... [ d5 corÒj g, |reiden [rmaqo)j .n melîn 1fexÁj t2ttaraj xunecîj ¥n: o; d, 1s8gwn. (914-15) ... DI. t8 d5 taàt, 4dras, [ de√na; EU. Øp, ¢lazone8aj, ∑n, [ qeat]j prosdokîn kaqÍto, [pÒq, = NiÒbh ti fq2gxetai: tÕ dr©ma d, .n diÇei. (918-20) ... EU. k¥peit, 1peid] taàta lhrˇseie ka< tÕ dr©ma |dh meso8h, "ˇmat, .n bÒeia dèdek, e!pen, Ñfràj 4conta ka< lÒfouj, de8n, ¥tta mormorwp£, ¥gnwta to√j qewm2noij. (923-6) Euripides: First I’ll prove that my opponent was a fraud and an impostor, and how he took the spectators brought up on Phrynichus and deceived them like fools. First, he’d wrap up someone or other and sit them on stage, Achilles, maybe, or Niobe, not showing the face, a mere pretence of tragedy, not making even this much of a murmur ... And then the chorus would hurl forth four strings of lyrics, one after another, without stopping: but they kept quiet ... Dionysus: Why did the so-and-so do this? Euripides: Sheer pretentiousness, so the spectator would sit there waiting for Niobe to say something. And the play would go on ...

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Douglas L. Cairns And then after he’d finished with this nonsense, and the play was already half over, he’d speak a dozen bullish words all eyebrows and crests, some dreadful gorgon-faced things, unknown to the audience.

On at least two occasions, it seems, Aeschylus opened a play, and possibly an entire trilogy, with a tableau featuring a single veiled and silent figure: Niobe’s veiling will certainly have been motivated by grief at the loss of her children; that of Achilles may have expressed anger, if the play in question is the Myrmidons, or grief, if it is Phrygians.2 In either case, the solitary veiled figure paradoxically monopolizes the attention of the audience by means of a gesture intended to cut that individual off from face-to-face interaction with others; the veiled figure hides him/herself, but simultaneously puts that concealment on display. In this paper I want to explore some of the theatrical and cultural implications of this, with particular reference to tragedy’s use of the veil to present and display visually the emotion of grief, both men’s and women’s. Though it is Euripides in Aristophanes’ play who castigates Aeschylus for opening his plays with a tableau of silent veiling, Euripides the Athenian dramatist in fact does something similar on more than one occasion. The whole of the dialogue between Athena and Poseidon that constitutes the prologue of Troades (1-97) takes place with a third character on stage; Poseidon identifies that character as Hecuba, who lies weeping before the gates of the stage-building: PO. t]n d, ¢ql8an tˇnd, e∏ tij e9sor©n q2lei, p£restin +Ek£bh keim2nh pulîn p£roj, d£krua c2ousa poll> ka< pollîn Ûper. (36-8) Poseidon: And if you wish to look upon this wretched figure, Hecuba, here she lies before the gates, shedding many tears for many sorrows.

At 98-9 she speaks: EK. ¥na, dÚsdaimon: pedÒqen kefal]n 1p£eire d2rhn . Hecuba: Up, unhappy one; lift your head and neck from the ground.

Because masked actors cannot shed tears, it is commonplace for characters to refer verbally to their own or others’ tears; but as we shall see, verbal reference is very often supplemented by visual representation, i.e. by the covering of the head, and so it is very likely that Hecuba lies covered up throughout the prologue in this case. For a parallel, we need only compare the prologue of Supplices. Here the weeping of the Argive leader Adrastus is indicated by Aethra at 21-2 (-Adrastoj Ômma d£krusin t2ggwn

16

1. Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage Óde / ke√tai, ‘Here lies Adrastus on the ground, his eyes wet with tears’), but Adrastus remains speechless until addressed by Theseus at 110-11 (s5 tÕn katˇrh clanid8oij ¢nistorî / l2g, 1kkalÚyaj kr©ta ka< p£rej gÒon, ‘You there, wrapped in your mantle, I’m talking to you; unveil your head, give up your lamentation and speak’). Here the Athenian king’s words reveal to the reader what will have been apparent from the outset to the spectator – that Adrastus’ grief and specifically his tears are represented by his lying with his head completely covered by his garments. The difference between these two tableaux and those attested in lost plays of Aeschylus is that in Euripides the veiled character is not alone; in Euripides, the person lies apart; his/her veiling signifies separation from the other characters, forms an alternative focus of the audience’s visual attention and creates suspense about what the character will do next.3 Euripides also exploits the dramatic possibilities of the veil within, as well as at the beginning of, his tragedies. In Heraclidae, Iolaus requests that his head be covered as an expression of his extreme grief at the imminent sacrifice of Heracles’ daughter: IO. ( pa√dej, o9cÒmesqa: lÚetai m2lh lÚpV: l£besqe k¢j 3dran m, 1re8sate aÙtoà p2ploisi to√sde krÚyantej, t2kna. (602-4) Iolaus: My children, I am destroyed. My limbs give way in grief. Take hold of me and lean me against the altar, right here, covering my head with my garments, children.

He then lies silent and veiled throughout the subsequent choral ode (608-29), as we see from the Servant’s question at 633: t8 crÁma ke√sai ka< kathf5j Ômm, 4ceij; (‘Why are you lying down? Why is your face downcast?’) In the Hecuba, Hecuba’s daughter Polyxena similarly asks for her head to be covered, before she is led off, veiled, to her death: PO. kÒmiz,, ,Odusseà, m, ¢mfiqe cqonÕj molèn; f2r,, ¢mf< krat< perib£lw skÒton < >.12 a9scÚnomai g>r to√j dedram2noij kako√j, ka< tùde prostrÒpaion aƒma prosbalën oÙd5n kakîsai to)j ¢nait8ouj q2lw. (1157-62) What am I to do? Where am I to find seclusion from troubles: by taking wing or by passing below the earth? Come, let me envelop my head in the darkness [of robes?]. For I’m ashamed of the wrongs I’ve done, and I have no wish to harm the innocent by involving him in the pollution of murder.

Both Theseus and Amphitryon then urge Heracles to uncover himself, the former observing that ‘no darkness has a cloud dark enough to hide the disaster of [his] misfortunes’ (1215-17). The primary motives for Heracles’ veiling are his shame and his concern for pollution (see Amphitryon at 1199-201, as well as Heracles himself at 1160-2), but grief is also part of his reaction, and there is a direct link between the cloud of lamentation that represents the initial shock of grief and the literal covering of Heracles’ head, a gesture that Theseus describes as an attempt to hide his misfortunes in cloud and darkness.13 When an actual veil is used to express grief, the analogy with the ‘dark cloud’ that constitutes the onset of the emotion suggests that veiling does not merely conceal grief, does not even merely display grief, but can actually represent it symbolically and metaphorically.14 The grief itself is the cloud or the concealing garment of which the literal garment is the external visual symbol. We can appreciate this,

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1. Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage because for us, too, grief is an emotion that makes us feel separate from other people. We, too, emphasize that emotion by physically cutting ourselves off; and there is a close parallel to the Greek sense of the emotion as an all-enveloping garment in a passage from C.S. Lewis’s record of his grief at the death of his wife: There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.15

The use of the veil as a symbol of grief gets us quite close to the sense of what grief actually feels like; but the point about the Greek evidence is that the metaphor of grief as a veil or cloud and the use of an actual veil to manifest grief mutually reinforce each other, and this makes the links between the subjective sense of what the emotion feels like, the metaphors used to express that sense and the expression of the emotion in gestures and physical behaviour that are visible to others much closer for the Greeks than they are for us. But there is more to be said about the specific cultural associations of veiling and grief in ancient Greek and their reflection in tragedy. Already in many of the cases that we have looked at there is an element of ritualization of emotional behaviour. This element is of course more pronounced when veiling accompanies ritual mourning rather than spontaneous sorrow. Veiling is certainly not a necessary element of funerary ritual, but its use in the context of ritual mourning is nevertheless well attested. A clear example in tragedy would be the veiling of the chorus at Aeschylus, Choephori 81-3: CO. dakrÚw d, Øf, e;m£twn mata8oisi despot©n tÚcaij, krufa8oij p2nqesin pacnoum2na. Chorus: But I weep beneath my veil over the senseless fate of my lord, my heart chilled by secret grief.

Though the tears that the women’s garments conceal are in fact for the sufferings of Agamemnon’s oikos, their veiling itself is probably part of the death ritual which they have been commanded to perform by Clytemnestra.16 As a gesture of mourning, veiling is clearly a ritualized form of the self-concealment that accompanies the spontaneous emotion of grief. Though mourning itself is regarded as an obligation, veiling is not an obligatory part of the ritual performance; it is frequently represented as a gesture of one or more, but not all, of a group of mourners, and its variable occurrence in such scenes no doubt reflects the fact that in actual mourning practice whether or not to veil was a matter of the preference and sensitivity of the individuals concerned.

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Douglas L. Cairns Veiling, grief and mourning each exhibit gendered characteristics in ancient Greek societies,17 but their intersection, perhaps especially in tragedy, reveals no straightforward male-female dichotomy. Hecuba (in both Hecuba and Troades) may be seen as an archetypal veiled female mourner, but as we have seen, Iolaus in Heraclidae, Adrastus in Supplices and Agamemnon in Iphigenia at Aulis all perform the same fundamental gesture.18 The depiction of veiled mourners in art may begin in the late Geometric period, or at least in the early Protoattic.19 The gesture then becomes common from the Archaic period on, more so in the case of women than in that of men.20 But male mourners do veil, in art as in poetry.21 On one level, this involves men in behaviour that is in general more readily associated with women, for women in Greek societies routinely covered their heads when they appeared in public.22 This must mean that veiling is a more marked gesture for a man than for a woman. For a man to cover his head (or both head and face) indicates a temporary state, especially an emotional state, such as shame, anger or grief;23 a woman’s veil can be a simple sign of her female status as such (or an aspect of it, such as that of wife or marriageable maiden). Accordingly, the disruption to one’s normal self-presentation and social identity that a man can demonstrate by covering his head or face can be manifested by a woman in the removal or loss of her veil or head-dress,24 as in Euripides’ Phoenissae, where Antigone’s grief for her mother and brothers causes her to discard the veil that normally expresses her maidenly aidôs: oÙ prokaluptom2na botruèdeoj ¡br> parÍdoj oÙd, ØpÕ parqen8aj tÕn ØpÕ blef£roij fo8nik,, 1rÚqhma prosèpou, a9dom2na f2romai b£kca nekÚwn, kr£demna dikoàsa kÒmaj ¢p, 1m©j, stol8doj krokÒessan ¢ne√sa truf£n, ¡gemÒneuma nekro√si polÚstonon. (1485-92)25 Without veiling my tender cheek, shaded with curls, or feeling aidôs, as a maiden might, at the crimson beneath my eyes, the blush upon my face, I am borne like a bacchant of the dead, casting my krêdemnon (‘head-dress’) from my locks and letting my delicate saffron robe fly loose, a much-lamenting escort to the dead.

Similarly, in hexameter poetry, Hecuba, Andromache and Demeter all discard the veil that symbolizes their role as mother or wife to express their grief at the loss of a child or mother.26 But Demeter in particular immediately replaces the krêdemnon that symbolizes her status as matron and mother with a dark kalumma (‘veil’) that betokens her grief and anger at the abduction of Persephone, and she keeps her head covered by this garment until these emotions are finally dispelled.27 In this, she is like all the other females, in art and in poetry, who use their veils to indicate that

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1. Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage they are in a state of grief or mourning, and unveiling as an initial reaction, signifying the sudden disruption of one’s everyday existence, is clearly compatible with veiling as a sign of the persistent state of grief. Though clearly a normally unveiled man has first to cover himself if his veiling is to indicate grief, while a veiled woman might have to replace one head covering with another (or to emphasize in some other way, e.g. by her degree of concealment or her general posture, that her veil now serves as a sign of mourning), men and women are fundamentally alike in using the veil to indicate the separation from others that grief and mourning entail.28 Despite the association of the covering of the head with femininity, then, it is in practice difficult to assign the practice of veiling in grief a single, determinate position on the axis of stereotypically ‘male’ versus ‘female’ behaviours. As a way of coping with grief, men’s veiling can belong with a sense that open display is shameful and womanish, as for example in the case of Plato’s Phaedo (Phd. 117c-e; cf. n. 7 above), who describes how he covered his head to conceal the irresistible tears which welled up as Socrates drank the hemlock, a reaction clearly conditioned by the disapproval of Socrates himself, whose implicit comparison of his companions’ emotionality with that of the women whom he had just sent away (1gë m2ntoi oÙc }kista toÚtou 3neka t>j guna√kaj ¢p2pemya, ∑na m] toiaàta plhmmelo√en, ‘this was one of my main reasons for sending away the women, so that they would not create such a disturbance’, 117de) makes them all feel ashamed (=me√j ¢koÚsantej ÆscÚnqhm2n te ka< 1p2scomen toà dakrÚein, ‘when we heard this we felt ashamed, and kept our tears in check’).29 In Book 8 of the Odyssey, however, the comparison of a weeping and probably veiled Odysseus to a woman (8.523-30, cf. his earlier veiling at 8.83-95, expressing the aidôs that he feels at disturbing the Phaeacians’ festivity) seems less to stigmatize Odysseus’ tears as reprehensibly feminine as to use the suffering of the woman in the simile as a paradigm that both expresses the intensity of Odysseus’ feelings and links them to an Iliadic perspective on the sufferings that war brings to both men and women, victors and vanquished.30 This, of course, is epic, and one might argue that the norms and display rules that govern male weeping in the fifth-century milieu in which tragedy was performed are rather different; but in fact, as Ann Suter has recently demonstrated, men lament and weep frequently in tragedy, and though this can sometimes be presented negatively, as undignified or unmanly, it need not be.31 It is, indeed, a fundamental paradox about veiling in grief or mourning that, though the gesture itself is fundamentally associated with femininity, and though men who deploy it may thereby be expressing their shame at what could be regarded as inappropriately feminine behaviour, none the less covering one’s head to conceal one’s tears is one of the more self-controlled gestures of grief or mourning, contrasting with less inhibited forms of behaviour such as tearing the hair or cheeks.32 The Greek stereotype

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Douglas L. Cairns was that self-control was easier for men than women,33 and evidence suggests that, on the whole, women’s mourning might take more unrestrained forms than men’s.34 Yet men, even sympathetically presented and heroic men, can also indulge in the less restrained gestures of grief,35 and the self-restraint of veiling can co-occur with more extreme forms of mourning, as in the case of Priam at Il. 24.159-65, where he is wrapped tightly in his mantle after rolling in the filth of the courtyard.36 And if veiling signals self-restraint it bears repetition that as a gesture of mourning it is more commonly associated with women in art than with men. Grief and lamentation provided an arena for female self-control too, and it is not unlikely that the veiling of a female mourner conveyed similar messages about feminine virtue to those that are associated with female veiling in general: Demeter’s downcast demeanour, including her veiling, both contains and advertises her distress at the disappearance of her daughter, enacting her withdrawal from gods and men, but it is also the behaviour from which Metanira conjectures a sense of aidôs appropriate in the high-born at h. Cer. 213-15.37 The fact that both male and female characters in tragedy veil to conceal their tears and express their grief is only one of several indications that Greek norms with regard to veiling and the expression of emotion are less straightforwardly gendered than one might assume. The deployment of veiling in ritualized contexts of mourning as well as in spontaneous expressions of grief highlights the ritual and symbolic aspects of the gesture. The corpse or the bones for burial are also covered,38 and so the veiling of the mourner is part of that identification between mourner and deceased which is also apparent in the mourner’s haircutting, self-mutilation and ritual defilement.39 Thus the veiling of the mourner is part of the general parallelism between dying and mourning as complementary rites of passage. This complementarity is particularly apparent in tragedy, in which the heads and faces of both mourners and deceased may be covered. This raises an interesting question about the precise relation between tragic dramaturgy and real funerary practice. The dead bodies displayed on stage in Sophocles’ Ajax (915-19, 1003-4) and Electra (1468-75) are without doubt completely covered: Ajax’s concubine, Tecmessa, says as much at Ajax 915-16, and his brother, Teucer, has to uncover the body in order to look upon Ajax’s face at 1003-4; similarly, Aegisthus explicitly refers to the kalumma that covers the face of the corpse at Electra 1468, and of course the considerable coup de théâtre of that scene requires that the corpse of Clytemnestra can be taken by Aegisthus for that of Orestes, which is possible only if the mask is invisible.40 It is likely too that Electra and Orestes cover the whole of their mother’s body in Euripides’ Electra (1227-32), because, though the text does not say that the face is covered, the imminent arrival of the Dioscuri and the prohibition against gods’ looking upon corpses suggests that it should be. Parallels can be found in the visual arts for the complete

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1. Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage concealment of the corpse, including the face;41 but there is also evidence (from art and from funerary legislation) for the covering of the corpse except for the head during both prothesis and ekphora, i.e. the laying out and display of the corpse and the procession to the grave.42 Actual funerary practice may have differed, perhaps from place to place and from period to period, but perhaps also between individual performances and even successive stages of the ritual. But there is also some evidence that the complete concealment of the corpse, including the face, was both particularly associated with tragedy and also practised in life. In Menander’s Aspis, the slave, Daos, introduces his plot to fake Chaerestratus’ death with a clear reference to tragic stagecraft (329-30): the family must engage in a strange, quasi-tragic performance (de√ tragüdÁsai p£qoj ¢llo√on Øm©j, ‘you must stage a strange display of grief’, 329-30) which will involve the prothesis of a veiled dummy (scÁma d, 1n m2sü nekroà / kekalumm2non proske8seta8 sou, ‘a veiled dummy of your corpse will be laid out in public’, 345-6). The explicit and implicit (schêma) allusions to tragic dramaturgy are unmistakable, but even as a piece of paratragedy the stratagem would have no point unless corpses were sometimes completely covered during the prothesis. In Euripides’ Hippolytus it is the dying Hippolytus himself who requests that his face be covered: IP. kekart2rhtai t¥m,: Ôlwla g£r, p£ter. krÚyon d2 mou prÒswpon æj t£coj p2ploij. (1457-8) Hippolytus: My struggle is over, father, for I am destroyed. Cover my face as swiftly as possible with my robes.

This action thus symbolically enacts the experience which Hippolytus describes in line 1444 as the descent of darkness upon his eyes (a9a√, kat, Ôsswn kigc£nei m, |dh skÒtoj).43 As in the case of veiling in grief, the gesture is used as an external visual symbol of a subjective experience – what the character does with his garments represents externally and visually his sense of what is happening to him, his pathos, mentally and physically; but the gesture’s deployment by an individual on the point of death – for which there are many parallels44 – also serves to illustrate its fundamental symbolic function as a marker of separation, a symbol of the transition from one identity to another. So if we remember the scene from Euripides’ Hecuba (432ff., above) in which both Polyxena and Hecuba cover their heads, Polyxena as she is led off to be sacrificed, and Hecuba in mourning for her daughter, we can observe not only the characteristic parallel between death and mourning as complementary rites of passage, but also the symbolic separation that is brought about between mother and daughter and the profound changes in status and social identity that this separation entails. Veiling in these situations bears close comparison with its use in other rites of passage – not only death and mourning, but also

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Douglas L. Cairns weddings and mystic initiation.45 In these cases, as in the case of tragic grief and mourning, the veil is at once an action in a social drama, a visible manifestation of an internal emotional state and a symbolic enactment of the transition from one state and one status to another.46 The underlying similarity in the structure of these processes, of course, permits the creative conflation of ritual processes – especially those of weddings and funerals – at which tragedy is so adept.47 We see this, for example, in the scene from Sophocles’ Electra that we have already discussed – on uncovering the face of the corpse that he believes to be that of Orestes, Aegisthus in fact finds his wife, Clytemnestra, and so re-enacts the lifting of the veil that he will have performed at some stage in their wedding celebrations. There is, then, no hard and fast disjunction between tragic and nontragic veiling: the on-stage dramaturgy of which tragic veiling is an element is just a representation of the social dramaturgy which stagemanages everyday emotional crises and recurrent ritual processes. Tragic veiling exploits for its own dramatic purposes an emotional and symbolic significance which is already quasi-dramatic, and draws on the rich associations of the gesture in the social interaction and ritual culture of contemporary Athens. Veiling is a remarkably versatile symbolic gesture; it marks a number of transitions and crises, both emotional and ritual. The crucial common ground in its manifestations is the issue of social status and identity: the use of the veil typically constitutes a visible, symbolic marker of a scenario in which a person’s social self and public identity are challenged or threatened. The spatial separation that it emblematizes may be immediate and emotional or it may be abstract and symbolic. Thus this apparently simple gesture has a significant role to play in the creation of a fictive selfhood and social identity in the characters of the tragic stage, a function that derives from its everyday power to set before the eyes a number of related messages about status, emotion and inner experience – in short, to make thought visible.48 Notes * I am very grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding the research project from which this chapter derives. 1. Shame: e.g. E. Hipp. 243-6; Her. 1159-60; 1198-1201; Or. 459-69; modesty: e.g. E. IT 372-6; Ph. 1485-92; anger: e.g. E. Med. 1144-9; miasma: E. Her. 1159-62, 1231-4. See Cairns (1993), (2001), (2002). 2. For the reference of 912 to A. Myrmidons (rather than Phrygians) see fr. 132bR and Taplin (1972), esp. 62-76; cf. Dover (1993) 307. 3. The phenomenon is not discussed as such by Mastronarde (1979), but these and the following cases would seem to form a subset of his category of ‘partial contact’ (23-6). 4. Cf. Schauer (2002) 136-7 n. 239, 298-9; cf. pp. 137-58 in general on the interaction of visual and verbal in the presentation of suffering in tragedy.

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1. Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage 5. See further Cairns (2009). 6. This begins with its depiction by the fourth-century painter Timanthes (Cic. Orat. 74; Plin. Nat. 35.73; Quint. Inst. 2.13.13; Val. Max. 8.11 ext. 6); cf. the mural from the House of the Tragic Poet, Pompeii, Naples Mus. Naz. 9112, LIMC i, Agamemnon 41 (also the mosaic from Ampurias, LIMC i, Agamemnon 42, and the Altar of Cleomenes, Florence, Uffizi, 612), with Weitzmann (1949) 182-4 and pl. 27). The fact that Timanthes has taken Ag.’s pose from the tradition represented in E.’s IA shows that Pliny was wrong to suggest that it was adopted faute de mieux: it was clearly a deliberate choice of a characteristic ancient expression of grief. On the interpretation of Pliny’s story and Timanthes’ painting, see Montagu (1994). 7. See (e.g.) Il. 24.93-4 (ìj ¥ra fwnˇsasa k£lumm, 3le d√a qe£wn / ku£neon, toà d, oÜ ti mel£nteron 4pleto 4sqoj,‘So saying, the bright goddess took a dark veil, than which no garment was blacker’); Od. 4.114-16 (d£kru d, ¢pÕ blef£rwn cam£dij b£le patrÕj ¢koÚsaj, / cla√nan porfur2hn ¥nt, Ôfqalmo√in ¢nascën / ¢mfot2rVsin cers8, ‘He let tears fall from his eyelids to the ground, when he heard his father’s name, and with both hands held up his purple cloak before his eyes’); 8.83-6 (,Odusse)j / porfÚreon m2ga f©roj 0lën cers< stibarÍsi / k>k kefalÁj e∏russe, k£luye d5 kal> prÒswpa: / a∏deto g£r Fa8hkaj Øp, ÑfrÚsi d£krua le8bwn, ‘Odysseus grasped his great purple cloak with his stout hands, drew it down over his head and hid his comely face; for he was ashamed before the Phaeacians as he poured tears from beneath his eyebrows’); h. Cer. 42 (ku£neon d5 k£lumma kat, ¢mfot2rwn b£let, êmwn, ‘Her dark cloak she cast down over both her shoulders’), 197 (4nqa kaqezom2nh prokat2sceto cers< kalÚptrhn, ‘Then she sat down and held her veil in her hands before her face’); Pl. Phd. 117c (¢ll, 1moà ge b8v ka< aÙtoà ¢stakt< 1cèrei t> d£krua, éste 1gkaluy£menoj ¢p2klaon 1mautÒn, ‘But in spite of myself my tears rolled down in floods, so that I wrapped my face in my cloak and wept for myself’). 8. See Kenner (1960); Huber (2001). Sojc (2005) discusses the ‘isolation’ of seated and sometimes veiled female figures, normally representing the deceased, on Attic grave stelae (see esp. 74-84), but does not explicitly discuss veiling as an expression of sadness. 9. See Cairns (2009). 10. In Goffman’s terms (Goffman 1967), veiling in grief or sorrow indicates, as does the same gesture in other contexts (Cairns 2002), a drastic shift in demeanour and a recalibration of one’s claims to deference in a situation in which the self (Goffman’s ‘sacred self’, i.e. the social identity brought to bear and constructed in the ritual of social interaction) is vulnerable. 11. Il. 18.22; 17.591 = Od. 24.315 (ìj f£to, tÕn d, ¥ceoj nef2lh 1k£luye m2laina, ‘So he spoke, and a black cloud of grief veiled him’). Cf. Il. 20.421 (achlys). 12. Pflugk (apud Diggle, OCT app. crit.) suggests skÒton in 1159; Diggle himself has a slight preference for p2plwn skÒton, comparing Or. 1457. 13. Cf. E. Or. 459-69: Orestes feels aidôs at the approach of Tyndareus (460-1) and so casts around for some ‘darkness’ (skotos, 467), some ‘cloud’ (nephos, 468), which will hide his face from the old man’s gaze. Again, the ‘cloud’ is presented as if it were a garment, though in its own way a garment would itself be a metaphor for the social invisibility that Orestes seeks; cf. Onians (1951) 421. For the same phenomenon, in which the veil/mantle is not merely an expression but actually a symbol of the emotion (aidôs), compare Gyges’ observation on the aidôs of Candaules’ wife (Hdt. 1.8.3) or, with a twist, Achilles’ allegation that Agamemnon is so nakedly shameless that his garment is anaideiê, not aidôs (Il. 1. 148-51), with Cairns (1996a); Ferrari (2002) 54-6, 72-81. Cf. Paus. 3.20.10-11, where a sculptural

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Douglas L. Cairns representation of a woman veiling in aidôs is construed as a representation of personified Aidos herself (Cairns 1996b, 153-4). 14. The veil and the cloud would thus both constitute conceptual or cognitive metaphors for the emotion of grief. On cognitive metaphor (as a fundamental way of thinking about and constructing a concept, rather than merely of talking about it) see Lakoff and Johnson (1980); Pinker (2007) 235-78 and passim. 15. Lewis (2001) 3. 16. This passage, in fact, illustrates the potential for separating the ritual and abstract from the emotional and spontaneous: the Chorus appear with their heads veiled as an element of the death ritual which they have been commanded to perform by Clytemnestra, regardless of their own feelings; but the tears that their garments conceal are an expression of their own private and genuine sorrow for the ills of the house of Agamemnon; thus they appropriate ritual veiling qua social performance and transform it into a marker of spontaneous emotion. 17. On the gendered nature of Greek mourning rituals, esp. as represented in vase-painting, see Shapiro (1991) (esp. 634-9 on prothesis scenes on black-figure vases); Stears (1998) = (2008). On women’s laments, see Alexiou (1974); HolstWarhaft (1992); with particular reference to tragedy, see Foley (1993) and Schauer (2002), with Suter (2008b) on male laments. 18. Cf. Telemachus, Odysseus and Phaedo in n. 7 above. 19. Geometric: see Llewellyn-Jones (2003) 44-5 with figs. 16-17; the early Protoattic depictions (Reading Univ. 54.8.1 and Mainz Univ. 156 krater D = Llewellyn-Jones (2003) 50-1 and figs. 25-6) at least appear certain. 20. See Kenner (1960) 14, 17, 30, 35-6, 47, 49, 51-2, 58; Huber (2001) 120, 121, 123-5, 135, 144, 146, 149, 155-8, 178, 180-3, 194, 200, 206-9 (with ill., pp. 254, 258-64, 267-9). For the persistence and continuity of the relevant gestures from archaic Greece to the Roman period, see Kenner (1960) 56; Huber (2001) 211. 21. See e.g. Priam on a Melian relief, Toronto 926.32 (Huber (2001) 147 and 260 no. 226); mourning father, white-ground lekythos, New York 07.286.50 (ARV2 846. 190; Huber (2001) 138; cf. Oakley (2004) 77 and pl. 2); Achilles over Patroclus on various red-figure vases (Kenner (1960) 26; Huber (2001) 132). Cf. in general (with further examples) Kenner (1960) 26-7, 38; Huber (2001) 130-2, 145, 149, 183; see also her illustrations nos. 162, 165-8, 185-6, 205, 346; further discussion and refs. in Cairns (2009). 22. See Llewellyn-Jones (2003). 23. For male (and female) veiling in shame or anger, see (resp.) Cairns (1996b), (2001); cf. Cairns (2002) 75. 24. See Llewellyn-Jones (2003) 303-5. 25. Diggle’s (OCT) text, with Mastronarde’s explanation (1994: 563) of Porson’s botruèdeoj in 1485-6. 26. See Il. 22. 406-7 (Hecuba), 468-72 (Andromache), h. Cer. 40-2 (Demeter). 27. See h. Cer. 180-3, 192-205 (note her downcast eyes, 194, silence, 194, 198, refusal of food and drink, 200). With Demeter’s replacement of an everyday, matronly veil with a veil that symbolizes anger and grief, we might compare the figurative ‘veil’ of dark night that covers (1k£luyen) Andromache’s eyes at Il. 22.466. 28. Thus Llewellyn-Jones (2003) 303-5 is not quite right to regard male veiling as purely an initial stage in the rite of mourning analogous to female unveiling as an initial response to bereavement; veiling accompanies the liminal stage of mourning, the break with quotidian reality and relations, for both men and women.

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1. Veiling Grief on the Tragic Stage 29. For the idea that it is shameful or womanish for a man to weep, cf. e.g. Archil. fr. 13 West; S. Tr. 1070-5; E. Hel. 948-9, 991-2; IA 991-2; and for tears as stereotypically feminine, cf. S. Aj. 579-80; E. Med. 928. Similarly, Sophocles’ Ajax represents pity (oiktos, a word which has connotations of lamentation in Greek) as feminizing at Aj. 650-3; earlier in the play his concubine had reported his view that lamentation (oimôgê) was fit only for the ‘bad’ and ‘heavy-souled’ (319-20). See further Van Wees (1998), but NB the important criticisms of Suter (2009). 30. See Cairns (2009) 43-5. 31. See Suter (2008b) on laments, (2009) on weeping. Not all of Suter’s examples are unassailable, but there are enough of them to indicate that the few tragic passages which do stigmatize male tears or lamentation as effeminate (cf. n. 29 above, with Suter (2009) 68-9, 71, 78-9) do not by any means tell the whole story. 32. For veiling as a gesture of self-control, see Cairns (1996b) 155, (2001), esp. 25-7 (esp. re anger). 33. See e.g. Dover (1974) 98-102. 34. Such, for example, is the implication of the limits placed upon female mourning in Solon’s funerary legislation (see Garland (1989) 3-5; Foley (1993) 102; Stears (1998) 117 = (2008) 143), and it is borne out by the typical distinction between the hair-tearing of female mourners and the comparative restraint of male mourners in Attic black-figure representations of the prothesis: Shapiro (1991) 634-9; Stears (1998) 121 = (2008) 147. As Shapiro also demonstrates, however (1991: 649-55), fifth-century representations (e.g. white-ground lekythoi) depict similarly restrained responses in both men and women. 35. Above all Achilles at Il. 18.22-7. 36. On the combination of ‘drastic’ and ‘restrained’ gestures in a single scene cf. further Huber (2001) 150. 37. Cf. Cairns (1993) 157-8. On the importance of female modesty and self-control in funerary ritual cf. Stears (1998) 122 = (2008) 148. 38. For the covering of the corpse, see e.g. Il. 18.352-3, 24.587-8, with Andronikos (1968) 7-9; and for the covering of the bones for burial, see Il. 23.254, 24.795-6; for this as a historical practice, see Kurtz and Boardman (1971) 186. On the shroud (4nduma) and additional coverings (1piblˇmata), see Kurtz and Boardman (1971) 144, 200-1 (refs. p. 363), Garland (1985) 24-5, 32, 36 (refs. p. 139). 39. See e.g. Achilles at Il. 18.22-7 (n. 35 above), Priam at Il. 24. 159-65 (text to n. 36 above). 40. We might compare Christus Patiens 1470 (use of a woman’s veil to cover a male corpse’s face), which may derive from the mutilated conclusion to E. Ba. 41. Complete covering of the corpse is regular in Geometric representations of the prothesis (Ahlberg 1971, 62-3, 214) and found also in the ekphora (Ahlberg 1971, 224); for total concealment of the body in the ekphora, cf. the well-known terracotta representation from Vari in Attica (Kurtz and Boardman 1971, pl. 16). 42. In classical art, often the entire body of the corpse except the head is covered (Kurtz and Boardman 1971: 145; Garland 1985: 32); cf. the fifth-century law of Iulis (Sokolowski 1969: 97 A. 6-8 re the ekphora). Prohibitions on the open display of the corpse in the street (Pl. Leg. 960a, the law of the Labyads at Delphi, Sokolowski 1969, 77 C. 13-19) need not imply that at that stage of the ekphora even the head is covered, as the Iulis law (97 A. 10-11) has such a prohibition, and it requires that the head be uncovered during the ekphora. 43. Cf. the use of cloud (etc.) metaphors for death: Il. 5.696, 16.344, 16.350, 20.417-18, 23.184-92; Od. 4.180, 22.88; death itself is a garment which envelops

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Douglas L. Cairns the dying at Il. 5.68, 553, 12.116, 16.502, 855, 22.361; Hes. WD 166; cf. S. OC 1701 (( tÕn ¢e< kat> g©j skÒton e;m2noj); similarly ‘black night’ covers (kalÚptein) the eyes of the dying at Il. 5.310, 659, 11.356, 13.425, 14.438-9, 22.466; cf. skÒtoj Ôsse k£luyen, Il. 4.461, 503, 526, 6.11, 13.575, 14.519, 15.578, 16.316, 325, 20.393, 471, 21.181; skÒtoj eƒle(n), Il. 5.47, 13.672, 16.607; cf. E. Hipp. 250-1 (krÚptw: tÕ d, 1mÕn pÒte d] q£natoj sîma kalÚyei;). The earth which covers the remains of the deceased is another ‘garment’ which conceals the dead and completes the separation from the world of the living: Il. 6.464 (¢ll£ me teqnhîta cut] kat> ga√a kalÚptoi), 14.114 (Tud2oj, {n QˇbVsi cut] kat> ga√a kalÚptei); cf. esp. Pi. N. 11.13-16: ‘but if a man has wealth and surpasses others in form, and in contests demonstrates his strength by winning, let him remember that the limbs he clothes are mortal and that the last of all garments he will put on is earth’ (ka< teleut>n ¡p£ntwn g©n 1piessÒmenoj). 44. Cf. Socrates at Pl. Phd. 118a, Anaxagoras at Plut. Per. 16. 8, Caesar at Plut. Caes. 66. 12 and Cicero at Plut. Cic. 47. 9-10; with a twist, cf. Demosthenes at Plut. Demosth. 28.2-29.4. See also Llewellyn-Jones (2003) 303. 45. Wedding ritual: Oakley and Sinos (1993), esp. 25-6, 30-2, 44; LlewellynJones (2003) 219-47; specifically on the symbolism of the veil see Ferrari (2003). Mystic initiation: see h. Cer. 192-205; Ar. Nub. 254-68; Lovatelli Urn (LIMC iv, Ceres 145; cf. the relief, LIMC iv, Ceres 147); Torre Nova Sarcophagus (LIMC iv, Ceres 146); wall paintings in the Mithraeum at Capua Vetere, Merkelbach (1984) 136, figs. 29-30. For various accounts of the relation of these literary and artistic representations to cult reality, see Roussel (1930); Burkert (1983) 266-9; Clinton (1992) 137-8; Kinney (1994) 64-96; Clinton (2003), esp. 50, 59, 65-6; Edmonds (2006). For veiling in rites of passage in general, see Van Gennep (1960) 168. 46. On the metaphorical nature of van Gennep’s model of rites of passage, see Dowden (1999), esp. 228-9, 238-9; cf. Calame (1999) 280-3; Graf (2003) 19; for social drama, liminality and ‘symbols’, see Turner (1969), (1974). 47. See Seaford (1987); Rehm (1994). 48. Hence this paper is a footnote to a much bigger subject, the relation between gesture and language as vehicles of thought. The general issues (though largely in so far as they concern spontaneous and unconscious hand gestures) may be explored via McNeill (2005).

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Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy Jessica Wissmann Defining cowardice Cowardice is a somewhat peculiar concept. It is undisputedly negative – no one wants to be, or be called, a coward. It is also clear that it has to do with a response to fear that is regarded as inappropriate. Aristotle, for instance, in his discussion of courage as a mean between excessive boldness and cowardice in the Nicomachean Ethics, explains that cowardice is both a deficiency of confidence and an excess of fear (EN 1115b33-1116a3; cf. also EN 1109a). The excess is constituted by fearing the wrong things and in the wrong manner, as the coward is afraid of everything.1 What Aristotle has in mind is a certain disposition and habituation in dealing with fear.2 But what exactly it is appropriate to fear, and to what degree, is not defined. Aristotle discusses instances of what one should not fear (poverty, disease, or any evil that is not the result of baseness or due to ourselves, EN 1115a17-18), asserts that one who fears insult to his family is not a coward (1115a22-3) and acknowledges that there are things that are ‘fearful to everyone in his right mind’, although the degree to which individuals of different dispositions are afraid can vary (1115b7-17). But he does not tell us exactly what the appropriate response is, what ‘too much’ or ‘too little’ is, and which exactly ‘the right things’ to fear are, and which not. Instead, he introduces a factor that, at first sight, does not contribute to a definition of cowardice: that of ‘the noble’ (to kalon). Consequently, Aristotle does not regard all kinds of facing fear as acts of courage, even if they occur when death is to be feared: it is only ‘the noblest form of death’, in battle, in which courage is shown. The reason for this restriction lies in the fact that in battle a man can defend himself by means of his prowess (alkê) or die nobly (EN 1115a24-b6).3 By implication, then, cowardice should be something ignoble. Yet even though in his discussion of political courage Aristotle acknowledges that avoiding the reproach of being a coward is a motivating force for Homeric heroes, he does not regard this as an expression of true courage (EN 1116a15-b3). This type of pseudo-courage is essentially rooted in a fear of sanctions, not in an uncalculated nobility.4 Aristotle here characterizes exactly the principle on which the heroic code (as most prominently

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Jessica Wissmann displayed in the Iliad) is based: a Homeric warrior is constantly concerned with his reputation, with what other people – both friend and foe – might say about his quality as a warrior.5 As I have shown elsewhere, this principle is subject to certain pitfalls with regard to the criteria on which such judgments are based.6 Whereas it is relatively easy to assess a particular behaviour (such as facing the enemy and holding one’s ground) as an act of courage or bravery, behaviours such as fleeing or retreating can be accepted as the right thing to do or as acts of cowardice. Who is to say which of the two it is? The problem is by no means unique to Homeric warrior ethics. Even in legal contexts, where one would expect to find the most accurate criteria for assessing a particular conduct as cowardly, especially when it is severely punished, the picture is somewhat muddled. In the US Uniform Code of Military Justice (henceforth abbreviated as UCMJ), for instance, ‘cowardly conduct’ appears as part of the article on ‘Misbehavior before the Enemy’ (Subchapter X, Article 99) as only one provision in a list that also includes punishment for the one who (1) ‘runs away’, (2) ‘shamefully abandons, surrenders, or delivers up any command, unit, place, or military property which it is his duty to defend’, or (4) ‘casts away his arms or ammunition’, actions that a layperson would regard as being instances of ‘cowardly conduct’. The UCMJ does not, however, give any definition as to what ‘cowardly conduct’ is. The reason for this seems to be that actions such as running away need not be induced by cowardice but can be motivated by other reasons, such as treachery.7 What would define running away and other forms of misconduct as acts of cowardice is a ‘showing of fear’. Yet even that is not easy to determine, as indicators of fear can also be caused by other factors. At any rate, what this law and its interpretations in the prosecution of individuals make clear is that cowardice is found in the realm of a fear-induced behaviour that is viewed as misconduct, i.e. as being detrimental to the interests of the military force to which the soldier belongs. Athenian law, too, included provisions that involve cowardice and actions that could be seen as having been induced by cowardice. Here again, the definitions are far from being unequivocal. Aeschines states: +O g>r SÒlwn [ palaiÕj nomoq2thj 1n to√j aÙto√j 1pitim8oij õeto de√n 1n2cesqai tÕn ¢str£teuton ka< tÕn leloipÒta t]n t£xin ka< tÕn deilÕn [mo8wj: e9s< g>r ka< deil8aj grafa8. (3.175) The ancient legislator Solon believed that the same penalties should apply to the man who fails to serve and the man who has deserted his post and the coward alike, for there are indictments for cowardice, too.8

As in the UCMJ, two types of misconduct – draft evasion and desertion – are listed alongside cowardice as the third. In Lysias’ version of the law(s)

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy in question (a combination of his paraphrasing taken from two different speeches) the types of misconduct associated with cowardice are characterized as follows: ‘if someone deserts the post towards the rear on account of cowardice, while the others are fighting’ (14.5) ... ‘or flees while casting away his shield’ (10.12). Here, cowardice is seen as the force that motivates the action, in a manner similar to the legal interpretations of the UCMJ mentioned above.9 What these legal definitions do, then, is to provide a list of actions – abandoning one’s post, casting away one’s arms, evading draft etc. – in combination with an assumption that is made about the reason why a soldier would act in such a way. The reason is that of cowardice; at the same time, the conduct itself is supposed to give the clue as to what has motivated it. Running away is assumed to be induced by cowardice; therefore it constitutes an act of cowardice. Yet running away can be motivated by other factors, hence it must be induced by cowardice in order to be a misconduct.10 Perhaps it is due to this particular lack of a strict definition and the element of assumption (possibly even arbitrariness) that the notion of cowardice proves to be such an effective rhetorical tool in a context in which reputation is everything, in particular that of warrior ethics. For if one cannot be entirely sure whether or not a particular course of action could be judged as cowardice, an individual that is concerned with his reputation would rather try to be on the safe side and not run the risk of being called a coward. The rhetoric of cowardice Closely linked with this aspect of uncertainty in the definition is another feature that makes the notion of cowardice different from that of courage: to say that someone is or could be called a coward is not a mere statement of a fact. Rather, the speaker pursues a specific objective with such an utterance. As I have shown elsewhere, the speakers’ intentions can be seen very clearly in the Iliad, where the notion of cowardice is used in certain types of speeches.11 One type is that of abuse: the speaker wants to undermine the status or authority of the addressee by calling him a coward. The most prominent example is Achilles’ calling Agamemnon a coward: You wine sack, with a dog’s eyes, with a deer’s heart. Never once have you taken courage in your heart to arm with your people for battle, or go into ambuscade with the best of the Achaians. No, for in such things you see death. (Il. 1.225-8; tr. Lattimore)

As the quarrel between Achilles and Agamemnon is very much about status, Achilles attacks Agamemnon’s status as leader of the Greek army:

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Jessica Wissmann Agamemnon does not deserve to be in charge, and his demands for rewards are in no proportion to his qualification as warrior.12 While abuse of all kinds occurs in verbal pre-combat exchanges, the so-called ‘flyting’,13 it only rarely happens that one fighter calls another a ‘coward’.14 Cowardice also appears in a so-called ‘Triumphrede’ (a vaunt following the defeat of an opponent), in which Hector boasts of his having thwarted Diomedes’ attack: Son of Tydeus, beyond other the fast-mounted Danaans honoured you with pride of place, the choice meats and the filled wine-cups. But now they will disgrace you, who are no better than a woman. Down with you, you poor doll (kakê glênê). You shall not storm our battlements with me giving way before you, you shall not carry our women home in your ships; before that comes I will give you your destiny. (Il. 8.161-6)

This abuse was anticipated by Diomedes, who is reluctant to withdraw after Zeus has thundered threateningly, for he fears that one day Hector will vaunt that Diomedes has fled from him (Il. 8.146-50).15 Nestor assures him that no one will believe Hector, should he call Diomedes a ‘coward and man of no strength’ (kakos kai analkis), as his deeds contradict this (8.152-6). It is of little surprise, then, that after Hector has spoken exactly as predicted, Diomedes feels even more compelled to prove that he is not a coward; only Zeus’ repeated thundering eventually forces him to retreat. At another occasion, Diomedes counters Paris’ triumphant boasting of having struck him with an arrow not physically, but verbally, abusing him as ‘archer, foul fighter, lovely in your locks, eyer of young girls’ (Il. 11.385) whose weapon is that ‘of a useless man, no fighter’, and whose success is nothing in comparison with what usually happens when Diomedes lashes out (11.386-95).16 The point of Diomedes’ speech is to downplay Paris’ success by undermining his valour and, at the same time, to assert his own valour. Interestingly, the narrator himself (usually reluctant to judge his characters) points out that Diomedes is not at all frightened, and we do not learn what Paris’ reaction is. Paris is, after all, a special case among all the warriors, since he does not seem to be overly committed to the heroic code. Taunting an enemy by calling him a coward is, unless the addressee is a Paris, potentially risky because it can challenge the taunted warrior to prove the opposite. This has to do with a second central function of using the notion of cowardice in a speech, the hortatory (or paraenetic) one. Whereas many exhortations do not make use of the notion of (potential) cowardice in order to boost the morale of the fighters, those in which fighters are addressed as ‘cowards’ are intended to counteract a particular behaviour and instigate the addressees to change their course of action.17 Both types of exhortation occur as part of Agamemnon’s Epipolesis in Iliad 4. Initially, he encourages (tharsyneske) those who already fight eagerly to

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy continue to do so (Il. 4.232-9), but then he reprimands (neikeieske) those who hang back: Argives, you arrow-fighters, have you no shame, you abuses (elenchees)? Why are you simply standing there bewildered, like young deer who after they are tired from running through a great meadow stand there still, and there is no heart of courage within them? Thus you are standing still bewildered and are not fighting. Or are you waiting for the Trojans to come close ...? (Il. 4.242-7)

Since Agamemnon is the centre of attention here, we do not hear of the responses to his speeches; but there are several instances from which it becomes clear that the only acceptable response to such rebukes is to prove that one is not a coward. This usually happens by doing exactly the opposite of what has been criticized as ‘cowardly’ action. A case in point is Diomedes’ reaction after Agamemnon has reprimanded him and Sthenelus for ‘cowering’, ‘spying out the outworks of battle’ and ‘lurking in the background’ (Il. 4.370-3).18 Sthenelus reacts angrily, regarding Agamemnon’s imputation as inappropriate, but Diomedes censures him, pointing out that it is Agamemnon’s job to exhort everyone, and changes his course of action by leaping from the chariot right into combat (Il. 4.401-21). The efficiency of this rhetorical tool is based on an individual’s concern with how other people will judge him. If an action could be judged as cowardly, a Homeric hero would rather decide against it. When Andromache tries to persuade Hector to stay inside the walls and not return to battle, Hector explains: ... I would also feel deep shame (aideomai) before the Trojans, and the Trojan women with trailing garments, if like a coward (kakos) I were to shrink aside from the fighting; and the spirit will not let me, since I have learned to be valiant and to fight always among the foremost ranks of the Trojans, winning for my own self great glory, and for my father. (Il. 6.441-6)

Faced with two options, Hector rejects the one that would damage his reputation and returns to the battleground. As the example of Diomedes in Iliad 8 shows, not only the opinion of friends, but also that of enemies is important. What ‘someone may say’ is also an important part of a warrior’s deliberation when he is facing the enemy on his own.19 When, during the fight for Patroclus’ body, Menelaus suddenly finds himself all alone, one option he ponders is to stay ‘for shame’ (aidestheis), which means that fleeing would be seen as a disgraceful action. He does not wish to be seen fleeing by any other Greek, even though he acknowledges that he would have good reason to flee, since Hector fights with divine assistance (Il. 17.91-105). Odysseus, in a similar situation, rejects his first impulse to flee:

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Jessica Wissmann Since I know that it is cowards who walk out of the fighting, but if one is to win honour in battle, he must by all means stand his ground strongly, whether he be struck or strike down another. (Il. 11.408-10)

Again, the course of action is determined by the anxiousness not to appear a coward. Cowardice and gender As becomes clear from even this rather brief sketch, the notion of cowardice is used in Homer in the context of war and among men, both as speakers and as addressees. Women are mentioned as part of a wider, unspecific audience, as when Hector says that he would ‘feel shame before the Trojans, and the Trojan women’.20 It is of no concern whether women are courageous or cowards. Rather, as some of the words and phrases used to describe the notion of cowardice in the Iliad suggest, cowardice is equated with femininity: thus, for example, in Hector’s taunting of Diomedes (mentioned above), or when Menelaus scolds the Greeks, none of whom has the courage to face Hector in single combat, as being ‘brave in words, you women, not men, of Achaia’ (Il. 7.96). In other words: a cowardly man is a woman. Furthermore, a woman can make a man cowardly: Hector not only rejects Andromache’s suggestion that he stay away from the battlefield by using the potential reproach of cowardice (Il. 6.441-3, quoted above), but also declines Hecuba’s suggestion to recuperate from the battlefield exhaustion by having some wine, as she may make him ‘forget his courage’ (Il. 6.265). Such a gender-oriented distribution of courage and cowardice continued to exist in Greek tragedy. Ajax of Sophocles’ play by that name, for instance, deceives Tecmessa and the others by saying ‘even I, who earlier showed such hardness, like iron when it has been dipped, have had my words made soft by this woman; and I feel pity’ (Aj. 650-2; tr. Lloyd-Jones). According to Tecmessa’s testimony, Ajax used to discard such emotions: ‘For he always used to teach that such weeping was the mark of a cowardly and spiritless man’ (Aj. 319-20). The idea that cowardly men are ‘women’ is reflected in Euripides’ Alcestis, where Admetus abuses his father, who has not volunteered to die in his son’s stead, telling him: ‘your heart is cowardly, not a man’s at all’ (kakon to lêma kouk en andrasin to son, Alc. 723).21 After all, one of the common words for ‘cowardice’ especially in Greek tragedy, is ‘unmanliness’ (anandria). Accordingly, the influence of women on a man, especially in the context of war, could be seen as dangerous in that it was detrimental to the morale of the male citizens. In a notoriously misogynistic speech in Aeschylus’ Seven against Thebes, Eteocles tries to silence the frightened young women of the chorus because their ‘clamour has spread panic and coward-

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy ice among the citizens’ (Th. 191-2; tr. Sommerstein). The women’s fearful behaviour, displayed in a more public space than Eteocles is willing to grant them, is thus depicted as having the potential to turn the male citizens into cowards.22 Consequently, when right before the battle the chorus tries to admonish Eteocles: ‘don’t be provoked! You will not be called a coward if you find an honourable way to stay alive’ (Th. 698-9), it does not do anything to change his resolve to fight his brother.23 There are numerous women in Greek tragedy, however, that transgress gender boundaries. With regard to the notion of cowardice, specifically, this means that some female characters not only no longer fit the stereotype of ‘cowardly’ women. Instead, they show themselves brave and, at the same time, they are as anxious not to be or appear cowardly as are the warriors of the Iliad. The most famous example of such a female character is Medea in Euripides’ play.24 Like a Homeric hero or the Sophoclean Ajax, she is concerned that her enemies might laugh at her, and very much like a Homeric hero deliberating two courses of action with himself, Medea, while pondering whether or not to kill her children, rejects one option by calling it cowardice: But what is coming over me? Do I wish to suffer mockery, letting my enemies go unpunished? Must I put up with that? No, it is mere weakness (thus Kovacs; kakês, ‘cowardice’) in me even to admit such tender words into my heart. (Med. 1049-52)

Medea clearly uses the notion of cowardice as a tool to overcome her scruples – scruples that are associated with her feminine side as a mother.25 She does the same thing when she is about to kill the children, this time exhorting her hand to take the sword with the words: ‘don’t become cowardly’, encouraging herself to forget her love of the children for this one day, to be allowed to be a grieving woman after everything is over (Med. 1246-7). Another character that uses the notion of cowardice in order to justify her own actions is Sophocles’ Electra. While Medea weighs two sides of her personality against one another, Electra has a more ‘feminine’ counterpart in her sister, Chrysothemis, who tries to talk her out of taking action against Clytaemnestra and Aegisthus. Chrysothemis represents the type of woman that accepts that women are weak and thus points out to her sister: ‘Do you not see? You are a woman, not a man, and your strength is less than that of your adversaries’ (El. 997-8). Electra, however, time and again reproaches her sister for cowardice: ‘Does this not add to your woes, the reproach of being a coward?’ (El. 351); ‘These are the kinds of words cowards approve of’ (401); ‘I envy your good sense, but I hate you for your cowardice’ (1027). Chrysothemis, however, consistently responds with mere indifference. Distancing herself from another woman by calling her conduct ‘cowardly’ contributes to Electra’s appropriation of a male role. Electra fills the ‘heroic vacuum’ left by the absence of Orestes, relapsing into a more feminine behaviour as soon as he returns. After this moment,

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Jessica Wissmann she continues to help her brother but no longer takes the lead in the revenge plot.26 The abruptness with which she relapses into the traditional pattern indicates how great an effort it has been for her to adopt the role of the heroic male. Yet there is a type of female character – the sacrificed woman – who seeks to combine a rejection of cowardice with remaining feminine. The woman killed in a sacrifice is presumed to be ‘passive’ because she is killed without resisting.27 She accepts her death partly because a fulfilled woman’s life is not possible, partly because she does not want to appear as cowardly by clinging to life. Polyxena in Euripides’ Hecuba offers a good example of this combination of the two arguments. She first assures Odysseus, who has come to fetch her to be sacrificed to the dead Achilles, that she is not going to beg him for her life but will follow him willingly: ‘if I refuse to die, I will show myself to be a craven and cowardly (kakê kai philopsychos) woman’ (Hec. 347-8); then she notes that her life is that of slave, anyway. The whole speech is infused with the idea of nobility, which obliges her to reject both cowardly behaviour and a life deprived of freedom – both arguments that could come just as well from males. However, she forfeits a woman’s life, which revolves around the hope to marry one day (Hec. 351-6). With a typical woman’s life taken away from her, she now makes the best of the situation by adapting to male standards of behaviour. Yet when she is killed, her nobility is particularly feminine: on the one hand, she does not suffer to be held during the sacrifice but will offer her neck so as to die a free person; on the other hand, she bares her breast so that her sex could hardly be more obvious (Hec. 546-65). The daughter of Heracles in Euripides’ Heraclidae is another female character who dies a ‘female’ death but uses the criteria of ‘male’ heroism in order to justify it.28 Having literally stepped outside the boundaries set to her as woman (Heracl. 474-83), she volunteers to be sacrificed to Persephone in order to save the city and the family of Heracles, arguing that her life – without her brothers, unwed and in exile – would be worthless (Heracl. 515-24). Her primary motivation, however, is to live up to heroic standards: would it not be a shame, she asks, to run away when the city that has received the Heraclidae is willing to fight on their behalf (Heracl. 503-6)? She also emphasizes the thought that noblesse oblige on account of her father, which makes an ignominious death insufferable (507-14), thus clearly adhering to a male role model. When she imagines a life in shame and being turned away as refugee on account of her cowardice, she uses the word philopsychein, which recurs frequently in Euripides’ tragedies of self-sacrifice and suggests an inappropriate clinging to life (Heracl. 517-19).29 The idea that, if death is unavoidable, it should be noble, is also expressed by Iphigenia in Euripides’ Iphigenia at Aulis. After much back and forth, it is a settled matter that she should be sacrificed, and Iphigenia finally decides ‘to do so (i.e. to die) gloriously – that is the thing I want to

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy do, clearing myself from all taint of baseness’ (IA 1375-6). Iphigenia not only identifies with male standards of heroism, first and foremost the rejection of cowardice; she even uses this very rejection as an argument against another woman’s attempts to dissuade her from her resolve to die when she tries to reason with her mother: ‘truly it is not right that I should be too in love with my life: you bore me for all the Greeks in common, not for yourself alone’ (IA 1385-6). Later, in response to Clytaemnestra’s laments, Iphigenia seeks to avert the threat to her resolve by telling her mother: ‘don’t make me a coward (mê kakize), rather do as I say’ (IA 1435). In counteracting a woman and her feminizing influence by characterizing it as something that would lead to cowardice, Iphigenia resembles heroic males, such as Hector (who does exactly this in his response to Andromache in Iliad 6). While in the previously discussed examples women, to various degrees, apply the notion of cowardice to their own actions, other female characters use it according to the Homeric model as part of exhortations of others. As seen, women in the Iliad could be seen as members of the more or less anonymous group that would judge a man’s valour, and by whom someone like Hector would not want to be considered a coward. Some women in Euripidean drama play this card effectively, using the notion of cowardice in order to induce a male addressee to act as desired. Electra does this rather rigorously: when Orestes is still absent, she envisions him acting heroically,30 but when Orestes turns out to hesitate to kill his mother, she spurs him on: ‘don’t play the coward and be unmanly but go to practise the same guile on her as you used to kill Aegisthus, her husband’ (E. El. 982-4). She has used the most effective argument, for this is what ends the debate and induces Orestes to announce that he will go inside and kill Clytaemnestra; apparently the wish not to appear cowardly is stronger than any scruples in killing one’s own mother. A subtler version of this kind of speech is Aethra’s exhortation to her son, Theseus, in Euripides’ Suppliants. Theseus is depicted as a responsible ruler, who is reluctant to throw Athens into the same danger as Adrastus has recklessly done when he supported the side of the Seven against Thebes and then, after the battle, tried to retrieve their bodies from the Thebans (Supp. 245-9). While Adrastus’ plea for help falls on deaf ears, Theseus is eventually persuaded by his mother to fight for the mothers of the epigoni. As she herself admits, it is quite unusual for a woman to try and give good advice openly (Supp. 297-300); yet, her transgressing of the gender boundaries is done in all modesty and at the invitation of Theseus. Although she starts her line of argument with hinting at the religious aspect of not helping the supplicants, the weight of her speech is on Theseus’ honour. After mentioning the great renown that Theseus will achieve if he were to help the supplicants reclaim and bury their dead (Supp. 304-13), she then turns toward the potential disgrace that Theseus might incur if he were not to lend his support:

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Jessica Wissmann Furthermore someone will say that you timidly stood aside out of physical cowardice (anandriai kherôn), although you could have won for the city a crown of glory. They will say that you struggled against a wild boar, a trivial labour, but where you ought to have struggled through in the face of enemy helmets and spear points, you showed yourself a coward. You are my child, son – do not act thus! Don’t you see? Your country, when it is taunted with rashness, turns its fierce visage against its taunters. It flourishes in strenuous action. Cities that keep quiet and do no deed of glory have no glory in their glances but only caution. (Supp. 314-25)

Her speech then concludes with an exhortation and words of encouragement. Theseus’ answer makes it clear that it is the perspective of being seen as a coward that makes him rethink his decision, even though he still stands by his condemnation of Adrastus’ recklessness. The words that immediately precede his resolution to act are: Yet I can also see what you say to me, that it is not like me to run from danger. By many glorious deeds I have demonstrated to the Greeks that my custom is always to be a punisher of the wicked. So I cannot refuse hard tasks. What will my enemies say about me when you, who bore me and would naturally be worried about me, are the first to urge me to undertake this toil? Here is what I shall do ... (Supp. 337-46)

Because Aethra artfully combines a womanly modesty with a rebuke usually found among males, and the idea of a ‘just war’ with that of personal reputation, her words fall on fertile ground. Theseus’ words reflect both his mother’s concern about his reputation and the notion of justice (by envisioning himself as the punisher of the wicked). Yet even as he addresses the issue of justice, Theseus is concerned with what his enemies might say, as though he feared that if they thought him to be a coward he would be less successful in his role as punisher of the wicked. It is hard to decide whether Aethra is genuinely worried about her son’s reputation or uses the notion of cowardice to induce him to act as she would like him to. Whichever of the two is the case, she made the best possible use of her female role by using the threat of cowardice. Theseus, on the other hand, has been described as being ‘not merely a young man who refuses to act like one’ but also having a character that ‘is shown to be an integration of the qualities of young and old, courage and counsel’.31 What makes Theseus a good ruler is his caution – yet he is anxious not to appear cowardly. This distinguishes him from many another ruler or powerful character in Greek tragedy. The powerful coward In the final part of this paper, I shall explore how the notion of cowardice is applied to and used by the type of ‘powerful villain’ embodied by characters such as Lycus in Euripides’ Heracles or Menelaus in the Orestes

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy and the Andromache. The way in which these characters deal with the notion of cowardice particularly shows that their political power lacks a true basis; conversely, their physically inferior victims display a heroism that emerges most clearly when it comes to avoiding the reproach of cowardice. The prototype of the powerful villain and coward is Aegisthus, who is hardly ever credited with any other features. In Aeschylus’ Agamemnon Aegisthus is described by Cassandra as a ‘cowardly lion’, a phrase that indicates his powerful position, yet weak disposition, or what he ought to be, but is not.32 Later, the chorus calls him a ‘woman’ (A. 1625), an insult that is echoed in the Choephori; here Orestes speaks of a ‘pair of women’ that subjects the citizens, and threatens that Aegisthus shall ‘soon know whether he really has a woman’s heart or not’ (Ch. 304-5). Aegisthus is called a coward for several reasons. One is that he has stayed at home when others, especially Agamemnon, went to war (A. 1224-5).33 Secondly, as the lines from the Choephori indicate, he has reached his powerful position only thanks to a woman, Clytaemnestra, to whom he is, if not inferior, certainly not superior. Finally, he is called a coward because he did not kill Agamemnon himself (A. 1643). Even when Aegisthus has been in power for many years, his actions allow the Sophoclean Electra to say of him and Clytaemnestra: ‘she barks out words like these, and her noble husband stands by her to encourage her, this utter coward, this total plague, this man who fights battles with women’s aid’ (El. 299-302). As discussed above, to be in any way under a woman’s influence is usually rejected by men as cowardly; and even an Aegisthus can only take so much. In his verbal altercation with the chorus, he indeed feels a need to justify Clytaemnestra’s leading role in killing Agamemnon by claiming that it was the woman’s job to dupe (A. 1635-6). And after the chorus called him cowardly for not having killed Agamemnon himself (A. 1643-4), Aegisthus is sufficiently provoked to threaten physical violence. It is, however, not he himself but his armed men who are supposed to attack the old men of the chorus (A. 1650). Clearly enough, his response to the name ‘coward’ indicates a lack of true heroism and valour. The old men of the chorus, consequently, refuse to cringe before a coward like him (1665). This altercation shows features that recur in other scenes between politically and physically powerless and powerful, but villainous, characters. In the Agamemnon, the chorus’ tirades against Aegisthus are a substitute for a physical assaulting, which would mean the old men’s end. By abusing Aegisthus as a coward, the chorus can at least attack him verbally and try to undermine his powerful position as something he does not truly deserve. This substitution of a physical by a verbal attack (although Agamemnon is not a ‘villain’ and Achilles not a feeble old man) echoes, to some degree, the quarrel of Agamemnon and Achilles in Iliad 1. Achilles refrains from using physical violence against Agamemnon, albeit not for fear for his life but in accordance with Athena’s intervention (Il.

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Jessica Wissmann 1.193-222). As a surrogate, he insults Agamemnon by calling him a coward; by vitiating his status as warrior, he seeks to undermine Agamemnon’s powerful position. In tragedies, this pattern has developed into a tool used by the powerless. In Euripides’ Orestes, for instance, the protagonist uses notions of cowardice similar to those applied to Aegisthus, when he insults Menelaus (who is not in the most powerful position, yet certainly in the position to help Orestes and Electra) in his absence: ‘coward, no good at defending your kin except by leading an army to get back a woman, are you turning away from me and running?’ (Or. 717-21). Similarly, Orestes explains to Pylades that Menelaus is ‘cowardly, where my sister and I are concerned’ (Or. 736). Like Aegisthus, Menelaus is depicted as being under a woman’s influence and not being a true warrior (754).34 It is significant that Orestes does not call Menelaus a coward to his face, and thus does not use this reproach in order to induce Menelaus to take action on his behalf. However, this is certainly an expression of his deep disappointment with his uncle. More importantly, Orestes is not unequivocally heroic himself:35 it takes Pylades (traditionally, a rather taciturn character)36 some persuasion to make his friend see that he should not just cowardly wait for something to happen but take action (Or. 778-86). That he does so, even though the success is more than doubtful, is due to this newly found heroic spirit, which was inspired by Menelaus’ cowardly behaviour in two ways. First, since there was no one left to help, there was no point in waiting for help any longer. Secondly, Menelaus’ cowardice serves as a negative foil from which Orestes distances himself; this is necessary since, as has been noted, his actions are that of a desperado and need some justification.37 Electra urges Orestes and Pylades, who are inside the house, to threaten Hermione with the sword, ‘so that Menelaus may see that he has met with real men, not with cowardly Phrygians, and has fared as a coward ought to fare’ (Or. 1350-1). This sums up the two foils from which Orestes and his companions seek to distance themselves.38 In Euripides’ Andromache, Menelaus is cast more straightforwardly as the powerful yet unheroic villain, who, for fear of his daughter’s status, plots with Hermione against Andromache and her little son by Neoptolemus. Like Lycus in Euripides’ Heracles or Eurystheus in the Heraclidae, he exerts his power over those who are weaker – women, children and old people. These physically weaker characters, however, are morally superior, and display a heroic attitude toward suffering. What distinguishes them from their opposite, the powerful villain, is how they deal with the notion of cowardice, which is a concern to them strong enough to guide their actions. Conversely, the physical power which the ‘powerful villains’ exert would not exist if they played fair; their superiority is temporary, since no male protector of their victims is present. In the case of Menelaus in the Andromache, it is the absence of Neoptolemus that allows him to go about killing his daughter’s rival.39 The villains’ physical power also relies

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy on the armed entourage, which is due to their political status, but even this advantage can have its limits.40 Menelaus is on the brink of using violence against Peleus (Andr. 589), but when the latter actually takes action and unbinds Andromache, he does not put up a fight; instead, he makes some remarks about returning after a battle against some unidentified city and then dealing with Neoptolemus ‘man to man’ (729-46).41 Menelaus felt provoked to try and save his face because Peleus previously taunted Menelaus, asking why he tied Andromache’s hands so cruelly (was it because he thought he was binding a beast, or was he afraid that Andromache might go after him with a sword?), and generally ridiculed the Spartans’ renown for war (Andr. 719-26). Whether kakiste (719) is to be taken as ‘villain’ or ‘coward’ – Peleus obviously mocks Menelaus for using excessive violence against a weak woman. Most of the instances in which the weaker parties accuse the villain of cowardice are more complex than the scene analyzed above. Frequently, such accusations are made in order to maintain one’s own status and dignity, physical inferiority notwithstanding. When Menelaus first threatens to kill her son in order to make her surrender herself, Andromache casts doubts on Menelaus’ valour regarding his generalship at Troy and alludes to Menelaus in his ‘role’ as a man acting like a woman (i.e. playing tricks) and being henpecked by women (Andr. 319-63). After she has surrendered herself and finds out that Menelaus is going to leave any decision about her son’s life to Hermione, her immediate response is an outburst against Spartans as ‘treacherous plotters and all other kinds of villainy’ (445-52). There is no mention of cowardice, even though Menelaus’ actions could most certainly be described as cowardly. The second part of Andromache’s tirade, however, focuses on herself, who no longer cares about her life since Hector was killed, my glorious husband whose spear often changed you from a coward (kakon) on land to one on shipboard. And now you appear against a woman in grim warrior garb and are killing me! Kill on! For I shall leave you without uttering one word of truckling flattery to you or your daughter. Though you are great in Sparta, yet I was great in Troy, and if my fortune now is evil, do not make this your boast: yours may be so as well. (Andr. 456-63)

Andromache calls Menelaus a coward on account of his actions at Troy, not with regard to the present situation. By doing so, especially by contrasting Menelaus with her husband, Hector, she can preserve some of her status and the true nobility that makes her superior to Menelaus. Conversely, even though he has the upper hand now, Menelaus remains the coward he was at Troy.42 The difference that existed between Andromache and Menelaus at Troy is made relevant for the present situation in that Andromache can now present Menelaus’ actions against herself, a woman, as cowardly because it corresponds to his conduct at Troy. Menelaus thus

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Jessica Wissmann becomes a negative foil from which she can distance herself. It is very telling that he does not care to respond to this. Does he have nothing to say that could refute Andromache’s accusations, or is she so unimportant that he does not care what she thinks of him?43 In his altercation with Peleus, however, Menelaus feels compelled to defend his role in the war against Troy. In this context, it becomes even clearer than in the argument with Andromache how closely connected Menelaus’ political power is with his claim to manliness. When Peleus orders Menelaus’ servants to release Andromache, Menelaus forbids it, pointing out: ‘I am in other ways your superior and have much more authority over her’ (Andr. 579-80). As Kovacs explains, ‘the first is a veiled threat of force, the second a claim of jurisdiction’; once the latter claim has been made void in the following exchange (which means that Menelaus’ authority has all but disappeared), all that remains for Menelaus, as Kovacs shows, is to resort to the threat of physical violence: ‘come over here and touch me: you’ll find out’ (589), but this attempt is eventually thwarted, too. For even though Peleus is in no position to take up this challenge, being a rather feeble old man, he undermines ‘that threat and the claim to manliness that it represents’ by showing that this claim has no foundation in Menelaus’ past and present. 44 The opening words already set the tone: ‘what, do you belong with the men, then, you utter coward (kakiste ek kakôn)?’ (Andr. 590). Peleus emphasizes the fact that Menelaus went to war for a woman and was duped by the same woman after the war was over, ‘proving no match, coward (kakiste) that you are, for Aphrodite’s power’ (631). After responding to the other accusations made by Peleus, Menelaus justifies the war: it finally turned the Greeks into a people of warriors. He further defends his sparing Helen’s life as an act of self-control (681-7). Clearly, his explanations seem unconvincing, yet it is interesting that here, in contrast with his lack of response to Andromache’s insults, Menelaus cares to justify his actions and to repudiate the idea that he is a coward. But he does not respond by actually showing himself as no coward and putting his threat into action. What prevents him could be the fact that he is reluctant to ‘lay hands on the king of Phthia’ (cf. 730-1) or that Peleus has an army ready at hand.45 The first reason is indicative of a difference in status and authority, the second of a difference of physical power, which prevents Menelaus from even trying to prove that he is no coward. In essence, this is an act of cowardice in itself. Menelaus is defeated when Peleus for the second time commands that Andromache be untied, and his command is obeyed (717-26). Having been defeated in deed, Menelaus tries to save his face in word, by pointing ‘once again to the aspect of himself which he has stressed all along, his generalship’,46 asserting that he needs to deal with some people before he can return and deal more sensibly with Neoptolemus (729-46). By now, if not before, it has become clear that his claims both to political authority and to manliness exist merely as words and have no basis in reality.47 What

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy characterizes Menelaus is not only the lack of manliness but also the lack of proper response to being called a coward, which could only be an attempt to prove the opposite in deed. By contrast, characters such as Andromache and Peleus, although physically weaker, show more heroic spirit: Andromache by facing death nobly, Peleus by acting as though he still were the young hero he used to be. When Andromache warns Peleus of possible ambushes, he rebukes her: No more of woman’s craven (deilon) speech! March on! Who will touch you? He that does so shall smart of it! For by the gods’ grace I rule over a great army of cavalry and foot soldiers in Phthia. And I myself stand erect and am no greybeard, as you suppose. I have only to cast a cross glance at that sort of man to send him flying, old man though I am. Even a greybeard, if he be brave (eupsychos), is more than a match for many young men. What use is bodily vigour if one is a coward (deilon)? (Andr. 757-65)

As it soon turns out, Andromache was right to worry about an ambush;48 Peleus uses these words uttered by a woman, however, in order to preserve his own manliness (he is no coward to worry about an ambush) as well as his role of male protector and commander. His speech begins with the rejection of Andromache’s ‘cowardly’ words and ends with the cowardice of Menelaus – two figures presented in contrast with his own disposition and status. The more important of the two is, of course, Menelaus: when Peleus triumphs over him, his words come as close to a Homeric ‘Triumphrede’ as circumstances permit.49 Clearly, then, a hierarchy of the weak but heroic characters becomes visible when the old man, who has lost much of his masculinity, tries to regain at least some of his prowess by distancing himself from a woman.50 But the fact that the weak almost seem to be in competition about who is the most heroic and the least cowardly, not just in words but in deeds, underlines again the baseness of Menelaus, who relies entirely on words, particularly on threats and empty boasts. Moreover, the different kinds of interaction between these two men with women also underline the fundamental difference in valour and status: Menelaus is said to be all but a servant to his wife and his daughter, and all there is of his valour is to use violence against a woman. By contrast, Peleus fulfils the role of a woman’s protector and, in his view, puts her into the right place when she tries to influence him in a way that would threaten his valour and masculinity. Therefore, Peleus is the main foil against which Menelaus’ cowardice emerges:51 both characters are continuations of their past selves. Menelaus is still the slave to his wife and the coward that he was at Troy; Peleus is praised by the chorus as one of the Argonauts and one of the allies of the Lapiths against the Centaurs (Andr. 790-801).

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Jessica Wissmann Conclusion In some respects, the notion of cowardice has come a long way from the Homeric pattern: in Greek tragedy, it is no longer only men that are anxious to avoid the appearance of cowardice, women, too, as in the cases of Medea or the Sophoclean Electra, are motivated by this anxiousness. Women also use the threat of potential cowardice in order to motivate men to overcome misgivings and perform certain actions (as Aethra does with Theseus or the Euripidean Electra with Orestes). Women no longer necessarily stay out of action but engage in it. Yet some aspects of cowardice have undergone none or only slight modifications. The influence of women can still be regarded as detrimental to a man’s masculinity; Eteocles and the chorus in Aeschylus’ Seven Against Thebes, Ajax and Tecmessa, and of course Menelaus and Helen or Hermione follow the pattern set by Hector’s interaction with Hecuba and Andromache in Iliad 6. It is, however, not only male warriors that tend to distance themselves from females and the potential cowardice they might cause. ‘Weaker’ (i.e. less masculine) characters do the same. Peleus in the Andromache is an example of this need to reaffirm one’s masculinity, even though not much is left of it. Women, too, distance themselves from other women (as Iphigenia from Clytaemnestra or Sophocles’ Electra from Chrysothemis) if they have decided to follow the (male) heroic code and reject ‘feminine’ fear as cowardice. But this identification with male standards is not complete: Electra relapses into a female role as helper as soon as Orestes has returned; victims, such as Iphigenia and Polyxena, who face certain death, argue heroically but die a feminine (i.e. passive) death. It seems that women, even though they step outside some gender boundaries, continue to set the standard of what is ‘weak’ and ‘cowardly’. With regard to both women and men, the close link of valour and status, and correspondingly cowardice and lowliness are prevalent. Both male and female characters feel bound to reject cowardice on grounds of their noble descent. The baseness of the notorious cowards, such as Aegisthus or Menelaus, is exacerbated by the discrepancy between their noble descent and cowardly behaviour. What remains unchanged is the rhetoric of cowardice. The uses typically found in the Iliad – abuse, exhortation and self-exhortation – recur in Greek tragedy, even if the gender of the speakers and addressees is no longer exclusively male. This shows not only the adaptability of the notion of cowardice but, even more importantly, what a powerful rhetorical tool it was – and still is today. Notes 1. Especially Aristotle’s discussion of courage has generated some debate as to whether it could indeed be seen as a triad (consisting in a mean between two extremes). Ross (1949) 204-7 argues for two dyads on the grounds that while

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy Aristotle refers to both rashness and cowardice as opposites to courage, ‘the opposite of courage is cowardice, and the opposite of rashness discretion’. See also Urmson (1983) 169-70 and the more recent study on courage in Aristotle by Deslauriers (2003), pp. 188-92 specifically on EN. 2. Courage is associated with knowledge in Plato: cowards commit an error concerning what needs to be feared (Prt. 360b-c); courage is, among other things, defined as some kind of knowledge (La. 194c-197d, cf. Arist. EN 1116b3-5). On the role of knowledge in both Plato’s and Aristotle’s discussion of courage, see Fortenbaugh (1975) 63-7. 3. Nevertheless, Aristotle lists five types of types of character that are often regarded as courageous, even though he does not agree (EN 1116a15-1117a29). 4. On calculation (logismos) as opposed to êthos and the importance of this opposition for Aristotle’s definition of cowardice, see Fortenbaugh (1975) 70-4. 5. Aristotle uses aidôs, a word with many nuances (Cairns 1993), in order to characterize an underlying principle: in the specific context of political courage, it means a ‘desire for the noble (i.e. for honour) and desire to avoid reproach, which is shameful’ (EN 1116a29-30). 6. Cf. Wissmann (1997) 26-31. Thucydides’ description of the events in Cercyra, which lead to a shift in terminology concerning boldness, courage and cowardice (3.82-3), is an especially good example of the lack of strict criteria for cowardice; Bassi (2003) 27-32 discusses this passage. 7. For this and the following, see Miller (2000) 94-105; the same principle holds for casting away one’s arms or retreating. 8. Tr. Carey. 9. Cf. EN 1116b17-18: ‘enduring’ or ‘facing’ a danger is the typical behaviour of the courageous man, whereas ‘running away’ is the characteristic of the coward. 10. An interesting description of the outward signs of a coward (deilos) when lying in ambush is given by Idomeneus (Il. 13.279-83): ‘the skin of the coward (kakou) changes colour one way and another, and the heart inside him has no control to make him sit steady, but he shifts his weight from one foot to another, then settles firmly on both feet, and the heart inside his chest pounds violent as he thinks of the death spirits, and his teeth chatter together.’ Tr. (here and throughout this paper) Lattimore. 11. Wissmann (1997) 31-76. 12. Deer, whose strategy to save their lives is fleeing, frequently serve to illustrate cowardly behaviour in the Iliad: e.g. the comparison Poseidon makes of the Trojans with deer (Il. 13.101-4), or expressions such as ‘panicky like young deer’ (Il. 22.1). 13. On this feature of heroic epic, see Parks (1990). 14. The only speech of that type is Tlepolemus’ abuse of Sarpedon (Il. 5.633-46). 15. This passage is mentioned by Aristotle (EN 1116a21-9) as an instance of political courage. 16. Archers can easily be regarded as ‘cowards’ because they can injure or kill without being right in the thick of battle or involved in single combat (Il. 13.38595); cf. Il. 4.242 (quoted below), the mocking of Teucer (S. Aj. 1120) and of Heracles (E. Her. 157-64, with Amphitryon’s response 188-203). 17. On the types of exhortations, see von Trojan (1928) 24-8; Oppenheimer (1933) 85-96; Latacz (1977) 21-6; Leimbach (1978) 268. 18. ‘Cowering’ (ptôssein) is typically associated with cowardice: LfgrE, s.v. ptèssw; Wissmann (1997) 28-9. 19. On such ‘potential tis-speeches’, see Wilson (1979) 2; de Jong (1987) 83.

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Jessica Wissmann 20. The only instance of a woman giving a negative verdict on a man’s performance in combat is Helen, who scolds Paris for having ‘come back’ from fighting, comparing him unfavourably to Menelaus, whom she advises Paris rather not to fight again (Il. 3.428-36). Paris later represents this to Hector as ‘soft words’ with which Helen has ‘won him over’ and ‘urged’ him to return to battle (Il. 6.337-8). 21. Similarly, Peleus insults Menelaus: ‘do you belong with the men, then, you utter coward?’ (Andr. 590). Translations of Euripides’ plays used throughout this paper are by Kovacs (1994-2003). 22. On women’s free speech in tragedy and its implications, see Roisman (2004), especially 95-7 for Th.; the interaction between Eteocles and the female chorus is discussed extensively by Brown (1977). 23. A similar rejection of a woman’s influence is Peleus’ rebuff of Andromache’s warnings (E. Andr. 757, discussed below); in Euripides’ Helen, Menelaus rejects Helen’s suggestion to flee as cowardice (E. Hel. 808). 24. On Medea’s concern with cowardice and the use she makes of this notion in her quarrel with Jason, see Wissmann (1997) 125-47. 25. Foley (1989) discusses the division of Medea’s character into a feminine and a masculine side. 26. Wissmann (1997) 197-226. 27. By contrast, Menoeceus (E.’s Ph.) kills himself as sacrifice for the sake of the city, thus showing himself to be more ‘active’ than his female counterparts. 28. On ‘female’ ways of death, see especially the study by Loraux (1987). 29. Philopsychein, the corresponding noun (philopsychia) and adjective (philopsychos) do not necessarily imply cowardice, but they are certainly often very closely associated with it, starting with Tyrtaeus. Another important connotation is the idea that to overcome philopsychia contributes to the welfare of the community; on this, see Wissmann (1997) 97-105. 30. Electra rejects the old tutor’s suggestion that Orestes returned secretly by pointing out that her ‘brave brother’ would not do such a thing for fear of Aegisthus (E. El. 524-6). 31. Shaw (1982) 6. 32. A. 1224-5; Denniston-Page (1957) interpret the expression as emphasizing Aegisthus’ savagery (on 1224); Fraenkel (1962) points out that he has ‘been able to find no evidence that a king or person of princely rank could as such be termed a “lion”’ (on 1224), which would speak against interpreting the phrase as referring to political position and character. But it is significant that Agamemnon is likened to a lion (1259), which forms a contrast with the expression ‘cowardly lion’ (1224). 33. Cf. Electra’s remark to Clytaemnestra: ‘you had a man as your husband who was superior (ou kakion) to Aegisthus’ whom Greece had chosen as leader in war’ (E. El. 1081-2). 34. Orestes later points out that not Menelaus brought Helen but she brought him to this place (Or. 742). 35. How shaky Orestes’ heroism is becomes clear from his attempt to ward off Electra’s ‘womanish laments’ (Or. 1022-3), telling her not to cover him with cowardice (anandria, 1031) by making him weep, but eventually giving in: ‘You have made me melt, you know! I want to return your embrace. Why let myself, poor man that I am, be checked by shame (aidoumai)?’ (Or. 1047-8). Willink (1986) on 754 points out the dramatic irony: Orestes and Pylades themselves show their strength among women and effeminate slaves. 36. Usually, Pylades is ‘like a shadow of Orestes’ – Radke (1959) 2081. On Pylades’ role, see also Porter (1994) 79-82.

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy 37. Willink (1986) xxxii briefly summarizes the possible reasons for Electra’s and Orestes’ decision to resort to violence and murder. Arguments that would justify the actions of Orestes, Electra and Pylades are discussed by Porter (1994) 82-9. 38. For a discussion of Menelaus in Euripides’ plays, see Harbsmeier (1968) 132-48, who also addresses the question of anti-Spartan propaganda. The Phrygians as stereotypes of cowards recur in Or. 1447b; 1514. 39. In Heracles, Lycus acts against Megara, Amphitryon and her children, while no Heracles is there to help; in Heraclidae., Demophon is willing to protect the refugees, but how well he can protect them depends on the sacrifice of a young girl. 40. Cf. Andr. 425-6; HF 240-6; in Heracl. 274-83, the herald announces that Eurystheus will lead his army against Demophon. 41. Similarly to the dismayed Orestes, Hermione explains Menelaus’ lack of resistance as being induced by his aidôs (E. Or. 918). 42. As it has been pointed out time and again, in the Iliad Menelaus is not depicted as a coward. Apollo once speaks of him as a ‘soft spear fighter’ (Il. 17.588), but this down-playing of Menelaus’ valour is due to Apollo’s intention to encourage Hector, to whom his speech is addressed. 43. Not only Hector is contrasted with Menelaus. Andromache mentions Neoptolemus in her first speech against Menelaus, pointing out that ‘Troy does not call him such a coward’ as to not avenge his son’s death (340-1), which implies that Troy might call others (such as Menelaus) cowards. The shift from Neoptolemus as model of heroism (in her first speech against Menelaus) to Hector in her second speech increases the intensity of her attack: Menelaus comes off even worse when compared to Hector. 44. Kovacs (1980) 66. 45. Both motivations are suggested by Kovacs (1980) 70. 46. Kovacs (1980) 70. 47. As Stevens (1971) on Andr. 729-46 notes, Menelaus’ tone here has not much left of the arrogance displayed in the preceding speeches: ‘it seems to be the intention of Eur[ipides] to present the Spartan Menelaus first as a bully, then as a weakling.’ 48. Neoptolemus is killed in the ambush laid by Orestes (Andr. 1114-60). 49. Of course this state does not persist: the news of Neoptolemus’ death turns Peleus into a broken old man (1077-84). In the end, Thetis brings as much happiness as possible. For the contrast between the confident Peleus and Peleus as shattered old man, see also Harbsmeier (1968) 26-7. 50. By contrast, in Euripides’ Heracles, Amphitryon clings to life, while Megara advocates male heroic values and chooses a noble death over passive waiting to be killed. Amphitryon tries to justify his actions with a few aphorisms: ‘the bravest man is he who always puts his trust in hope. To surrender to helplessness is the mark of a coward’ (Her. 105-6). Megara’s position is eventually accepted. 51. On this function of Peleus, see Harbsmeier (1968) 29. He rightly points out, however, that Peleus’ role is not restricted to this function.

Bibliography Allan, William. 2000. The Andromache and Euripidean Tragedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bassi, Karen. 2003. ‘The Semantics of Manliness in Ancient Greece.’ In Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ralph M. Rosen and Ineke Sluiter, 25-58. Leiden: Brill.

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Jessica Wissmann Brown, A.L. 1977. ‘Eteocles and the Chorus in the Seven against Thebes.’ Phoenix 31: 300-18. Cairns, Douglas. 1993. Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Carey, Chris (tr.). 2000. Aeschines. Austin: University of Texas Press. Christ, Matthew R. 2006. The Bad Citizen in Classical Athens, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Denniston, John D. and Page, D.L. (eds). 1957. Aeschylus: Agamemnon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Deslauriers, Marguerite. 2003. ‘Aristotle on Andreia, Divine and Sub-human Virtues.’ In Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ralph M. Rosen and Ineke Sluiter, 187-211. Leiden: Brill. Foley, Helene. P. 1989. ‘Medea’s Divided Self.’ CA 8: 61-85. Fortenbaugh, William W. 1975. Aristotle on Emotion: A Contribution to Philosophical Psychology, Rhetoric, Poetics, Politics, and Ethics. London: Duckworth. Fraenkel, Eduard (ed.). 1962. Aeschylus: Agamemnon. 2nd edn. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Harbsmeier, Dietrich. G. 1968. Die alten Menschen bei Euripides. Mit einem Anhang über Menelaos und Helena bei Euripides. Diss. Göttingen. de Jong, Irene J.F. 1987: ‘The Voice of Anonymity: tis-Speeches in the Iliad.’ Eranos 85: 69-84. Kovacs, P. David. 1980. The Andromache of Euripides: An Interpretation. Chico, CA: Scholars Press. Kovacs, David. 1994-2003: Euripides. Edited and Translated. 6 vols. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Latacz, Joachim. 1977. Kampfparänese, Kampfdarstellung und Kampfwirklichkeit in der Ilias, bei Kallinos und Tyrtaios. Munich: Beck. Lattimore, Richmond (tr.). 1951. The Iliad of Homer. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Leimbach, R. 1978. ‘Kallinos und die Polis’. Hermes 106: 265-79. LfgrE: Lexikon des frühgriechischen Epos. Göttingen 1955ff. Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Lloyd-Jones, Hugh. 1994-1996: Sophocles. Edited and Translated. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Loraux, Nicole. 1987. Tragic Ways of Killing a Woman, tr. Anthony Forster. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. First published 1985 as Façons tragiques de tuer une femme. Paris: Hachette. Miller, William I. 2000. The Mystery of Courage, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Oppenheimer, Klaus. 1933. Zwei attische Epitaphien. Berlin: E. Ebering. Parks, Ward. 1990. Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and Old English Traditions. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Porter, John R. 1994. Studies in Euripides’ Orestes. Leiden: Brill. Radke, G. 1959. ‘Pylades.’ RE 46: 2077-81. Roisman, Hanna. 2004. ‘Women’s Free Speech in Greek Tragedy.’ In Free Speech in Classical Antiquity, ed. Ineke Sluiter and Ralph M. Rosen, 91-114. Leiden: Brill. Rosen, Ralph M. and Sluiter, Ineke (eds) 2003. Andreia: Studies in Manliness and Courage in Classical Antiquity. Leiden: Brill. Ross, David W. 1949. Aristotle. London: Methuen. Shaw, Michael H. 1982. ‘The Êthos of Theseus in the Suppliant Women.’ Hermes 110: 3-19.

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3. Cowardice and Gender in the Iliad and Greek Tragedy Sommerstein, Alan. 2008. Aeschylus. Edited and Translated. Persians, Seven Against Thebes, Suppliants, Prometheus Bond. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Stevens, P.T. 1971. Euripides: Andromache. Edited with Introduction and Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. von Trojan, Felix. 1928. Handlungstypen im Epos: Die Homerische Ilias. Munich: M. Hueber. Urmson, J.O. 1980. ‘Aristotle’s Doctrine of the Mean.’ In Essays on Aristotle’s Ethics, ed. Amélie O. Rorty, 157-70. Berkeley: University of California Press. Willink, C.W. 1986. Euripides: Orestes. With Introduction and Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Wilson, John R. 1979. ‘KAI KE TIS WD, EREEI: An Homeric Device in Greek Literature.’ ICS 4: 1-15. Wissmann, Jessica. 1997. Motivation und Schmähung: Feigheit in der Ilias und in der griechischen Tragödie. Stuttgart: M&P.

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3

Women’s Emotions in New Comedy Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan While the study of emotions in classical antiquity has made great strides in the past ten years, with the publication of numerous books and articles, relatively little attention has been paid to the role of gender in the representation of emotions. To be sure, there have been studies of romantic sensibility in elegiac poetry, and treatments of emotion in the context of other genres (e.g. tragedy) that touch on the gendering of emotion, but treatments that focus specifically on women’s emotions are still rare. In this chapter, we investigate some of the ways that men’s and women’s emotions are represented in New Comedy. The choice of this genre is a natural one: in classical literature, New Comedy comes closest to representing everyday behaviour in an idiom that resembles, even if it does not coincide with, ordinary speech, and the plots favoured by the New Comic writers (particularly in the comedies that survive today) involve domestic situations in which women of various social statuses play important roles. There is also a large body of material on which to draw, including substantial portions of half a dozen or more dramas by Menander, recovered on papyrus over the past century, and twenty-six Latin adaptations of Greek models. We may begin by examining the representation of anger, an emotion which was closely bound up with rank and power in classical antiquity. Aristotle, for example, who understands anger to be a desire for revenge in response to a slight or insult, affirms that we grow calm ‘towards those who admit their fault and are sorry, since we accept their grief at what they have done as satisfaction’ (Rh. 2.3.1380a14-16), and he continues: ‘The punishment of slaves shows this: those who contradict us and deny their offence we punish all the more, but we cease to be incensed against those who agree that they deserved their punishment’ (1380a16-19). As Aristotle explains: ‘The reason is that it is shameless to deny what is obvious, and those who are shameless towards us slight us and show contempt for us’ (1380a19-21). Aristotle goes on to note that we give over our anger at those who ‘humble themselves before us and do not gainsay us; we feel that they thus admit themselves our inferiors, and inferiors feel fear, and nobody can slight any one so long as he feels afraid of him’ (1380a22-4). The pronoun ‘we’ that Aristotle employs so casually here clearly refers to the class of free citizen slave masters, who interpret even

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan an effort to defend themselves on the part of their slaves as an affront to their dignity, since it suggests that they are being treated as equals rather than as superiors. Of course, they would accept such excuses from their peers: this is just what Aristotle recommends as the best means of assuaging anger. Some scholars, indeed, have argued that the right to be angry was among the defining characteristics of adult male citizens in classical Athens. Aristotle also notes that people do not experience anger toward those whom they fear or respect: ‘for it is impossible to be afraid and angry at the same time’ (1380a33-4). In the same spirit, he affirms that, since anger is by definition a desire for revenge (his full definition runs: ‘Let anger be a desire, accompanied by pain, for a perceived revenge, on account of a perceived slight on the part of people who are not fit to slight one or one’s own’, Rh. 2.2.1378a31-3), where it is impossible to avenge an insult, it is correspondingly impossible to experience anger: ‘No one gets angry at someone when it is impossible to achieve revenge, and with those who are far superior in power than themselves people get angry either not at all or less so’ (Rh. 2.2.1370b13-15). This would suggest that slaves are in principle incapable of being angry with their masters, whom they rightly fear. Slaves, then, must swallow their ire, if indeed they so much as feel it.1 What, then, about women’s anger? In classical Greece and Rome, women too were very often in a weak position relative to men: did they have more inhibitions about expressing their ire? In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis, Deianira, the wife of Heracles, is understandably upset when her husband brings home from a campaign a captive princess with whom he is in love, and proposes to install her in his house. This would seem cause enough for anger, and yet Deianira, who is aware that Heracles has had other affairs before, declares: ‘It is not decent [kalon] for a sensible woman to be angry’ (552-3; cf. 543). Is it because she is not in a position to exact revenge? In contrast, Medea, in Euripides’ tragedy, who suffers a comparable if not worse mistreatment when Jason decides to abandon her in order to wed the daughter of the king of Corinth, is justifiably furious. As her nurse puts it in the prologue: ‘Fierce is the temper of tyrants, and though they start small, because their power is great they curtail their anger with difficulty’ (Med. 119-21; cf. the chorus’ comment at 176-7). Jason too denounces Medea’s anger (446-7; cf. kholos, 590), and he counsels her to control her temper for her own good (615). Indeed, she makes a pretence of giving over her anger, until she is sure that she can escape Corinth safely, thanks to the asylum offered by the Athenian king Aegeus. With this, she puts into action her plan for vengeance, killing the Corinthian princess and, further to hurt Jason, the two children she has borne him. Medea, unlike Deianira, is a woman who is capable of exacting revenge, and hence, according to Aristotle, of harbouring anger. We may, then, note a close connection between power and anger: anger is natural to monarchs, including women, nor is it surprising that a free

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy woman should manifest her rage against a slave, who is entirely under her authority. The physician Galen, who seems to have been traumatized by the furious tantrums of his mother, reports in On the Passions and Errors of the Soul that ‘at times she bit her slaves’, and that ‘she continually scolded my father and fought with him, even more than Xanthippe with Socrates’ (5.41; see, in general, 5.16-24). And yet, this is not the entire story. At one point in Euripides’ Medea, Jason consents to forgive Medea for her outbursts; he observes that ‘women are predictably given to anger’ (eikos gar orgas thêlu poieisthai genos, 909), adding for good measure that this is especially the case when their husbands marry another woman (this latter verse has been suspected of being a later interpolation, but even so it reflects what will have been common wisdom on the topic). How are we to explain the apparent contradiction, according to which anger in response to a slight is the sign of a free adult male, and yet a disposition to anger is characteristic of women? Now, although Aristotle maintains that anger is a perfectly legitimate passion, and indeed that a person who fails to respond angrily to a slight is not so much tolerant as servile (EN 1126a4-8), he nevertheless recognizes that too quick a disposition to anger is just as bad as total impassivity. Irascibility is an indication of a lack of self-control, which in turn is a sign of softness (malakos) or effeminacy (EN 1103b19). In popular ethics as well as in Aristotle, such an absence of restraint was thought to be especially typical of women (cf. EN 1148b31-3, 1150b14-16; Plutarch, On Controlling Anger 8.457A-B on women’s greater disposition to anger as a consequence of their weaker natures; Harris 2001, 264-74). Thus, although some, according to Aristotle, think that a fierce temper is a sign of masculinity and indeed a necessary quality in a ruler (EN 1126b1-2), it can just as well be seen as an unstable and womanly trait. In investigating the representation of anger in New Comedy, then, and indeed of other emotions as well, it is necessary to inquire what kinds of women might feel anger, and under what conditions; to what extent, moreover, is the attribution of anger to women a function of the requirements of the plot? What is more, if women attempted to suppress their irritation, were there ways in which it might manifest itself indirectly? And when they were openly angry, did women express their feelings in the same way that men did, or were there differences in respect to gender? It is important to note, moreover, that the conventions that defined the genre of New Comedy were particularly exacting, and this put considerable restrictions both on the kinds of characters who might appear on stage and the ways they might be represented. While the range of personalities is not as limited or as stereotyped as may initially appear, or indeed as Terence himself suggests in the prologue to his Eunuch (36-43), where he lists the running slave, good matron, scheming courtesan and hungry parasite as the indispensable props of the genre (cf. the prologue to Heautontimorumenus 37-9), they are nevertheless far from reflecting the

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan variety of temperaments and behaviours of real life. Not only characters, moreover, but also plots were subject to generic constraints. Terence, in the passage just cited, mentions the substitution of an infant and the deception of an old man by a slave, along with love, hatred, and suspicion, as staples of the form. Plutarch (Table Talk 7.8.711F), for his part, notes the absence of pederasty in New Comedy, and adds that if virgins are raped, they end up decently married to the man who violated them; correspondingly, associations with arrogant courtesans are terminated, whereas those who are truly in love are commonly revealed to be citizens, upon the discovery of their legitimate father. In line with these norms, unmarried citizen girls, for example, are never represented as the subjects of erotic desire, which would be seen as a violation of moral propriety; hence, sexual passion and jealousy are never ascribed to them – indeed, it is rare that they have a speaking part at all in New Comedy. This strict code is relaxed somewhat in the case of married women, or of widows and elderly female slaves, and courtesans in particular have more freedom of expression. But this restricted range of roles and themes means that the emotions of citizen women are for the most part represented in domestic situations, and more precisely in response to the behaviour of their husbands, whereas courtesans, and the female slaves attached to them, are shown reacting chiefly to lovers, who are almost always themselves free citizens. There is little room in these scripts for the expression of emotions such as shame or pity, which figure importantly in the repertoire of sentiments discussed in the rhetorical handbooks. This is why the discussion that follows concentrates on a limited number of passions, and first and foremost anger. It was a commonplace that women who brought a large dowry to a marriage had a tendency to lord it over their husbands (Arist. EN 1161a13): their money, which upon divorce would return to their natal family, gave them a special leverage, reversing what was considered to be the normal power relation between husbands and wives. This was a productive theme in New Comedy (cf. e.g. Plautus, Asinaria, Terence, Phormio), allowing for the depiction of a certain degree of fear on the part of wayward husbands, as well as of anger in the offended wives. No play centring on this theme survives by Menander, but he was certainly aware of its possibilities. He evidently exploited the topos in his comedy entitled The Necklace (Plocium: adapted in Latin by Caecilius, cf. fr. 293-310 K-A; Aulus Gellius 2.23.8-13), where a man refers to his wife as his owner or tyrant (despoina), and in a play of unknown title (adesp. 804 K-A, quoted in Stobaeus 4.22.119), Menander advises paying particular attention, in the selection of a wife, to her character rather than the size of the dowry, for fear of acquiring a wife who is ‘foolish, irascible [orgilê], harsh-tempered [khalepê], or talkative.’ Menander’s Arbitrants (Epitrepontes), on the contrary, portrays a recently wed wife who, despite her husband’s decision to leave her, responds

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy with undiminished loyalty to him. His motive for abandoning his home is the discovery that Pamphila, the wife, has been raped prior to their marriage and had a child. Though she tried to hide the event by exposing the infant, which was born while Charisius, the husband, was away on a business trip, the child is rescued, and a slave, Onesimus, reveals the story to Charisius. As the reader will have guessed, the child turns out to be Charisius’ own, since it was he who violated Pamphila, and all turns out for the best, according to the conventions of New Comedy. Pamphila’s father, an old miser named Smicrines, tries to persuade his daughter to divorce her husband, in part because Charisius is wasting money, as he believes, on a courtesan, whom a friend of his has hired to distract him from his sorrow: ‘there is an irreconcilable war’, he says, ‘between a whore [pornê] and a free wife’ (793-4, new fragment). She, however, staunchly refuses, in a passage that has only recently been recovered on papyrus (801-35; cf. 714-15), explaining that she did not wed Charisius in good fortune, but equally in bad, and that if he has erred, she is prepared to bear it (815-21).2 Soon afterwards, Pamphila learns the true identity of the child (it is the courtesan who works out the puzzle), but before they can inform Charisius, Onesimus enters, and describes his master’s behaviour upon overhearing the dialogue between Pamphila and her father:3 ‘O my love, to speak such words,’ he cried, and punched himself hard on his head. ‘What a wife I’ve married, and I’m in this wretched mess!’ When finally he’d heard the whole tale out, he fled indoors. Then – wailing, tearing of hair, raging lunacy within. He went on saying, ‘Look at me, the villain. I myself commit a crime like this, and am the father of a bastard child. Yet I felt not a scrap of mercy, showed none to that woman in the same sad fortune. I’m a heartless brute.’ Fiercely he damns himself, eyes bloodshot, overwrought. (890-900)

At this point Charisius himself emerges from the house, and says: A faultless man, eyes fixed on his good name, a judge of what is right and what is wrong in his own life pure and beyond reproach – my image, which some power above has well and quite correctly shattered. Here I showed that I was human. ‘Wretched worm (Charisius imagines the daimonion saying), in pose and talk so bumptious, you won’t tolerate a woman’s forced misfortune. I shall show that you have stumbled just the same yourself.

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan then she will treat you tenderly, while you insult her. You’ll appear unlucky, rude, a heartless brute, too, all at once.’ (Then in his own voice) Did she address her father then [as] you’d have done? ‘I’m here,’ [she said (?)], ‘to share his life. Mishaps occur. I mustn’t run away.’ (To himself) You’re too superior. (908-22)

Here the papyrus breaks off. There is some contention among scholars about just what Charisius sees as the parallel between his situation and that of Pamphila, after her rape, but it is clear that he is deeply moved by his wife’s devotion, in spite of his treatment of her, and repents of having reacted so differently when he learned of her misfortune. Of course, it is possible that Menander is simply illustrating two distinct personalities, but it is more likely that he is showing how a humble, submissive posture on the part of a wife succeeds, as Aristotle recommends, in assuaging the wrath of a husband, who conceives of himself as the principal party to have been injured or insulted. On the basis of a traditional distribution of roles with respect to anger or indignation, in which Charisius rages while Pamphila endures and accepts, Menander has staged a remarkable moment of self-awareness in a man, by which he comes to perceive his wife’s comportment as more befitting the mutual commitment that should define a marriage, and decides to adopt it as his own. That his self-reproach is immediately obviated by the revelation that the baby is his in no way undercuts the power of this scene in promoting an equality and symmetry in the emotional behaviour of men and women alike. In Menander’s Samia, or Woman of Samos, a young man named Moschion has raped the daughter of a neighbour, Niceratus, while his own stepfather, Demeas, and Niceratus were on a business trip in the area of Byzantium. The daughter gives birth in the meantime, and to conceal this from their fathers, the young couple conspire with Demeas’ concubine, Chrysis, to pretend that she is the mother. When the two older men return to Athens, Moschion is terrified of their reaction, and also worried that his father will be angry (khalepainei, 80) with Chrysis for raising the child, rather than exposing it. Chrysis answers confidently that he will soon get over it, since he is in love, and ‘this soon reconciles even the most irritable man’ (82-3). Demeas is indeed annoyed when he finds out, as revealed by his scowl (skuthrôpazeis, 129): a concubine has no business acting as though she were a legitimate wife, and raising a bastard child – that is, one that will not have citizen rights in Athens since it is the offspring of mixed parentage, Athenian and foreign – and he decides to expel her and the infant from his home (130-4). Moschion protests that there is no difference between legitimacy and illegitimacy: morally speaking, a good person is genuine, a bad person a bastard. It’s a radical argument, but for this or some other reason (the papyrus is lacunose here), Demeas gives

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy over his wrath against Chrysis. When, however, Demeas accidentally learns that the child is actually Moschion’s, he concludes that the boy had an affair with Chrysis, and explodes in anger, not against him, whom he finds reasons to exonerate, but at her, for having, as he believes, seduced an innocent and vulnerable lad. With this, he reverts to his plan of banishing her from his home, on the pretext that she has raised the child without his approval, so as to spare his son the shame of having his affair with Chrysis become public knowledge. Demeas reminds Chrysis that he took her in when she had barely a cloak to cover her (377-9), and yet, angry as he is, he allows her to take with her the maids that he had given her (381-2). Still, he reminds her that she will from now on have to hustle ten drachmas at symposia, drinking hard liquor (that is, wine unmixed with water) till she dies, if she’s to avoid starvation (390-6). Chrysis laments her misfortune (398), and at this point Niceratus arrives and, puzzled at Demeas’ sudden rage, commits Chrysis to the care of his wife, until Demeas’ rage should pass, which he chalks up to the unhealthy atmosphere of the Black Sea. The Samia is a play full of anger, but it is predominantly the anger of old men, that is, of Demeas, in reaction to what he takes to be Chrysis’ presumption in not abandoning a child she has borne to him or, later, for having seduced his son, or of Niceratus, first when he learns of Demeas’ suspicions concerning Moschion and Chrysis, and then when he discovers that the child is really his own daughter’s. In the final act, when all the misapprehensions have been resolved and Niceratus is conciliated by the assurance that Moschion will marry his daughter, there is yet another twist, when Moschion comes on stage in a fury at the very idea that his father should have suspected him of such an offense against his concubine. Demeas, rather unexpectedly, confesses his offence, and begs Moschion to give over his anger. This surprising finale is Menander’s way of indicating that Moschion has come of age – he is, after all, on the point of marrying, and will now be a head of household, complete with child, in his own right: as an adult, he is entitled to express indignation at what he takes to be an insult, and if his reaction is exaggerated, this may be chalked up to his youth and inexperience.4 Anger is thus represented as the prerogative of free adult males. Chrysis, by contrast, can do no more than bewail her fate: she is not in a position to exact revenge or demand compensation, and must humbly submit to Demeas’ decision. The power is all his, and so too the right to be angry. We may contrast the representation of Chrysis in the Samia with that of Glycera in Menander’s Periceiromene or Girl Whose Hair Is Shorn. Glycera, like Chrysis, is a woman of (apparent) non-citizen status, who has been living as a concubine or pallakê with a male citizen, in this case a mercenary soldier in Corinth. When the soldier, Polemon, hears that Glycera has allowed a strange man to embrace her in the street, he reacts with fury and cuts off her hair, an insult tantamount to treating her as

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan a slave and comparable in offensiveness, perhaps, to stripping a woman naked in public today. What Polemon does not know, however, is that the boy who kissed Glycera is in fact her brother: he had been exposed along with her in infancy, and rescued, like Glycera, by an old woman. The woman had, however, been able to place him with a good family, who treated him as their own son, hiding from him his adoptive status, though for Glycera the best she could do, evidently, was to entrust her as a concubine to the soldier. In a fury at the way the soldier has treated her, Glycera leaves his house and takes refuge with the neighbours, that is, in the home where her brother, Moschion, had been raised – a point that only exacerbates Polemon’s indignation, at the same time as it gives Moschion, who, unlike his sister, is ignorant of their relationship, hopes of having an affair with her. Polemon himself, in the meantime, has moved in with a friend (like Charisius in the Epitrepontes) named Pataecus, in search of solace. When Pataecus helps Glycera to gather her possessions from Polemon’s house, he recognizes some items she has kept since infancy, and is revealed as Glycera’s and Moschion’s father. With this, he is in a position to give her in wedlock to Polemon, provided that Glycera is willing to be reconciled with him; and since her future, should she not be agreeable, would be uncertain – a citizen girl who has lived with a man as concubine would not be marriageable to anyone but him, according to the conventions of New Comedy – the audience could anticipate a satisfactory resolution. There is no question but that Polemon is angry at Glycera’s indiscreet behaviour. The prologue, spoken by the goddess ‘Ignorance’ or ‘Misapprehension’ (Agnoia), explains that she deliberately provoked the soldier’s orgê or rage, ‘even though he is not such a person by nature’ (163-5), so as to bring about the recognition. And in fact, far from nursing resentment, Polemon is so deeply distraught that his own slave takes pity on him (eleein, 358), and is angry on his master’s behalf (orgizesthai, 367-8), declaring before Moschion’s own slave that Polemon and his entourage are men (andres), and full of fury (kholê, 379-80). But this is boastful banter between slaves, and does not reflect Polemon’s own sentiments. When Polemon himself arrives on the scene, Pataecus easily convinces him to abandon any thought of reclaiming Glycera by force, since she is a free woman and has the right to leave him, given the way he mistreated her (490-3), and in any case violence now would undermine any legal action he might take against Moschion for seduction (497-503). With this, Polemon begs Pataecus to intercede for him with Glycera, which leads directly to the recognition. In the end, when he betroths Glycera formally to Polemon, Pataecus admonishes him not to act impulsively [propetes] in the future, even if he is a professional soldier, and Polemon eagerly consents, adding that he will not find fault with her for anything, provided only that she be reconciled with him (1016-20). Even earlier, when he realized that it was her brother whom Glycera had kissed and not some seducer, he lamented that he was a miserable, possessive fellow (alastôr kai zêlotupos), and that

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy he had acted like a lunatic (paroinôn, 986-8). A disposition to anger may be a masculine trait, but the message of the comedy would seem to be that it must be moderated and kept under control if domestic relations are to prosper. Polemon is in any case a sentimental chap, and the dominant tone of his feelings in the play is one of deep love for Glycera and sorrow for what he did to her. But what about Glycera’s response to Polemon? In what survives of the text, there is no explicit reference to anger on her part, but she clearly feels injured by Polemon’s aggression; as she puts it, in response to Pataecus’ pleading: ‘Let him commit violence [hubrizetô] from now on [against some other woman]’ (722-3; the last words, in brackets, are an editorial supplement). Pataecus tries to diminish the extent of the offence (‘it wasn’t so terrible’, 723-4), but Glycera will have none of it: it was ‘impious’ (anosion), she replies, and to Pataecus’ further pleas, she declares: ‘I know my own business best’ (749). Once she learns that Pataecus is her father, and that it was he who exposed her and her brother in infancy (her reaction to this news is strangely muted, 800-10), she is presumably more inclined to accept his counsel; at all events, the next we see of her, she is entering with Pataecus, who praises her decision to be reconciled, declaring that ‘to accept atonement [dikê] when you are flourishing – that is the sign of a Greek character’ (1006-8). Either Pataecus or Glycera herself adds that the fact that Polemon’s folly led to a good outcome is the reason why he has obtained forgiveness (1021-3). Glycera too, then, must give up her resentment, in response to Polemon’s evident contrition, and no doubt also because he had acted in ignorance of the true situation – a standard reason for granting pardon (sungnômê) for misconduct according to the ancient rhetoricians, and noted by Aristotle as well (EN 1109b30-4, where justifiable ignorance is said to render an action involuntary). Demeas too, in the Samia, had accused Chrysis falsely, on the basis of partial information; but though he was in love with her, he was determined to suppress his passion, and end the relationship (349-50). As long as the misunderstanding is not cleared up, Chrysis has no leverage over Demeas, and since she cannot avenge the injustice, there is no reason to represent her as angry. In the Periceiromene, however, Polemon is far more vulnerable, and Glycera’s voluntary departure from his house gives her the upper hand. But in a way it is a fragile victory, since her independence is, as Pataecus avows to Polemon, a function of her status as a concubine, who has not been given properly in wedlock. The contrast with Pamphila’s response in the Epitrepontes is notable – and it may be no accident that Glycera’s own willingness to be reconciled with Polemon follows upon her realization that she is now in a position to become his lawful wife. Turning now to the Latin adaptations of Greek New Comedy, we begin with Terence, since he is universally acknowledged to have been on the whole more faithful to his Greek models than his predecessor Plautus,

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan though Terence too introduced significant changes, sometimes combining scenes from two different originals to produce a novel arrangement or even a wholly new structure, if, as is plausible, at least some of the double plots that he favoured are his own invention. The Phormio, which is based on an original by Apollodorus, one of Menander’s successors, illustrates the justifiable anger of a wife who has been deceived by her husband, who has fathered a daughter in a secret relationship with a woman abroad (cf. verse 910 of Euripides’ Medea, mentioned above). But this is not all. The wife, Nausistrata, came to the marriage with a considerable dowry, in the form of a property on the island of Lemnos that produced a substantial income. It was while her husband, Chremes, was visiting the estate that he met and raped the other woman (1017-18), and since then he has been supporting her and her daughter out of the earnings, with the result that the yield on the property seemed to have declined. To keep the affair hidden, Chremes had arranged to marry this daughter to his brother’s son, but his plans are forestalled when the boy falls in love with another girl. As luck would have it, that girl is none other than Chremes’ daughter, whom her mother had brought to Athens (soon after arriving, the mother died), but Chremes is still terrified of Nausistrata’s reaction, should she find out the truth. As he puts it when he meets up with the girl’s nurse, ‘I have a fierce (saeva) wife enclosed inside the house’ (774). In fact, she is not so much ferocious as prudent. When Chremes’ brother, Demea, asks her for some money, she replies: ‘Happily – but it’ll be less than I think right, through the fault of my husband, since he’s been careless in maintaining what my father acquired. He used to get two talents out of that estate. What a difference between one man and another!’ (787-90). And she adds: ‘I wish I’d been born a man – I’d show them!’ (792-3). Nausistrata, then, is portrayed as having a masculine temperament, as well as being the victim of her husband’s two-timing. Things come to a head, however, when Phormio, the parasite who has dominated the rather complex plot from the beginning and has got wind of Chremes’ situation, decides to expose the entire matter to Nausistrata, rather than put up with abuse from Demea. When Nausistrata comes out of her house, in answer to Phormio’s cries, Chremes goes cold with fright (994, 997-9), but it is too late to save the day: Phormio tells all. Nausistrata now realizes why her estate in Lemnos suddenly went dry (1013), and refuses to take it calmly, as Demea urges (1020-1). ‘Do you think’, she asks him, ‘I have deserved this?’, to which Demea replies: ‘Least of all people’ (1033), but since there is no way of undoing what is done, he adds, it is best that she pardon her husband. Nausistrata reluctantly agrees, but at Phormio’s prodding resolves to invite him to dinner, which will, as Phormio affirms, delight him and torment Chremes (1052-3). With this, the comedy comes to a close. Nausistrata may pardon her husband, but she is indignant to the end: she has none of the submissiveness of Pamphila in Menander’s Epitrepontes, or of Sophocles’ Deianira, for that matter. The image of her as a

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy powerful, independent-minded woman who is not inclined to put up with her husband’s shenanigans is conveyed both by her status as an heiress, who has brought her own wealth to the marriage, and by her manly intelligence and business sense. Chremes has reason to fear her for having violated her trust. In the end, she gives over her anger, however justified it was; but it is noteworthy that her capacity to be angry, and to inspire fear in her husband, is at least in part represented as a function of her masculine character. When a woman assumes the dominant role, even if temporarily and in special circumstances, she is subtly assimilated to the opposite gender, and her indignation becomes the more plausible. The portrait of Sostrata, the wife of a man also called Chremes in Terence’s Heautontimorumenus or Self-Punisher, is quite different from that of Nausistrata. Her husband is self-assured, even smug, and he is condescending in the extreme toward his wife, who humbly puts up with his insults without a trace of irritation.5 Her offence was that, when Chremes wished her to expose – that is, to kill – her infant daughter, instead of carrying out the task herself, she charged an old woman to undertake it (626-30). Chremes is indignant at her stupidity (inscitia), and when Sostrata affirms that she acted in ignorance (insciens, 632) – one of the standard reasons, as we have seen, for granting pardon – Chremes brusquely replies that she does everything out of ignorance and folly. He allows that maternal pity (misericordia) might partly excuse her disobedience of his orders (637) – this, then, is a sentiment to which mothers are imagined to be typically prone; but such instinctive sentimentality is misguided, he insists, since the child might have been sold into slavery or forced into some other obnoxious occupation that would be worse than death. Sostrata confesses her error (peccavi, 644), and begs that he, in his superior wisdom, pardon her foolishness. Her error, however, has a positive outcome: for thanks to her pious decision to leave some trinkets with the exposed child, she is recognized as the girl with whom their neighbour’s son is in love, and in the end, now that her citizen identity has been discovered, the two will be able to marry. As Chremes crisply states, ‘now’s a time when I want a daughter; then, absolutely not’ (667). Sostrata will again display a fatuous sentimental streak toward the end of the play, when her son professes to suspect his parentage, because Chremes will not allow him to continue his affair with the high-priced courtesan Bacchis; Sostrata, in her credulity, takes him seriously, and Chremes is as contemptuous of her as ever (1003-44); in the end, his hard line with his son wins the day. Chremes’ scorn for his wife’s intelligence, to which she responds with craven petitions for forgiveness, are evidently meant to amuse the audience, and would seem to reflect popular expectations of the emotional dynamics between husband and wife, albeit exaggerated for comic effect. It is men who are irate in this play – indeed, paternal anger and discipline constitute its central theme; women, or at least wives, are expected to yield passively to their husband’s wishes.

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan Two other women have speaking roles in the play: Bacchis, with whom Chremes’ and Sostrata’s son is in love, and Antiphila, the girl who has been decently raised by the old woman who rescued her, and who turns out to be both the girlfriend of Clitopho, the son of Menedemus (the self-tormentor of the play’s title), and the abandoned daughter of Chremes and Sostrata. Bacchis is unabashedly mercenary, and if she is not paid on the spot, she withdraws her favours (736-8). Bacchis enters for the first time accompanied by Antiphila, with whom she is engaged in dialogue (381-409): ‘I really admire you’, she says to Antiphila, ‘and think you are lucky, in that you have taken care to have your character conform to your good looks. No wonder, bless me, that everyone wants you for his own’ (381-3).6 Bacchis states that women like herself depend only on their beauty, and so have to accumulate wealth while they are still attractive. ‘For your kind [vobis], however’, she continues, ‘once you’ve decided to spend your life with one man, whose character is just like your own, they attach themselves to you, and thanks to this you are each truly bound to the other so that no misfortune can ever befall your love.’ To this, Antiphila demurely replies: ‘I don’t know about the rest; I do know that I, at least, have always made sure that my interests depended on his’ (392-7). This scenario is puzzling, since a woman in Antiphila’s position – she is a foundling, after all, without citizen credentials – can hardly count on a life-long relationship with a single man, or at least not in legitimate wedlock. But she will, as we know, prove to be marriageable after all, and the image of a loyal woman, who waits patiently for her man while he is away on campaign, both points up the contrast with the professional courtesan’s selfishness and affirms the ideal of a faithful, submissive wife, whose virtue consists in conformity to her husband’s wishes. The only emotion she exhibits – and it is one that a proper citizen girl could not express on the New Comic stage – is her intense passion for her lover, when, upon catching sight of him, she all but faints with excitement (403-5). Terence’s Eunuch exhibits still another facet of the courtesan’s range of emotions. Thais is, like Bacchis, self-employed, and, again like Bacchis, what she sells is not simply sex, the way one might purchase the services of a common prostitute (pornê in Greek, scortum in Latin), who would normally be a brothel slave, but rather the experience of a passionate affair: for her clients are typically, in New Comedy, madly in love with her, and eager to retain what they take to be her affection, as well as her sexual availability, by lavish gifts – the idea of gift-giving partially obscures the commercial basis of the exchange. The tension between romantic sentiment and a down-to-earth business relation is what gives the figure of the courtesan (hetaira in Greek; Roman comic playwrights use meretrix as the closest Latin equivalent) a special salience in the cultural imagination of classical Athens, and in a derivative form, of Rome. Does she really love her clients, or is she merely exploiting them? Young or novice courtesans

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy may be moved by sincere sentiment (for example, Antiphila in the Heautontimorumenus), and if they are engaged in their first sexual experience with a man, like Antiphila or like Glycera in the Periceiromene, they may ultimately be recognized as citizens after all, and the affair converted into a legitimate marriage. But older and wiser professionals, like Bacchis, are not vulnerable to such sentimental motives, and may counsel novices to adopt a strictly mercantile attitude in their work.7 We have begun with this account of the complex, indeed contradictory role of the courtesan in the classical world because it is relevant to the way Thais’ sentiments are represented in the Eunuch. The story is that Phaedria, a young man still under his father’s authority and economically dependent on him, is propfoundly enamoured of Thais; she, in turn, curries favour with him because she is newly arrived in Athens and needs the protection of well-placed citizens, such as Phaedria’s father. As it happens, there is also a young girl, still a virgin, who was raised alongside her, and who, as she has just discovered, is also in Athens – and owned by a mercenary soldier who is also in love with Thais, and bestows lavish gifts upon her. Thais wishes to recover the girl, in part out of affection, it may be, but also because she has reason to believe that she is of citizen origin, and if she can return her to her family she can gain additional patronage by this service (770, 871). Thais manages to persuade Phaedria to give her a few days alone with the soldier, so that she may wheedle him into giving her the girl as a present, which he does.8 A difficulty arises, however, when Phaedria’s brother, Chaerea, sees the girl as she is being transferred to Thais’ establishment, and conceives an instant passion for her: in the ideological world of New Comedy, such a desire can pass for falling in love (erôs, amor), which is commonly represented as happening at first sight.9 Chaerea disguises himself as a eunuch, taking the place of the decrepit eunuch that Phaedria had sent to Thais as his offering (to counter the soldier’s benefaction), and having gained entry into Thais’ house, he rapes the girl. As a result, her family – in this case, her brother – may no longer wish to reclaim her, and so Thais’ scheme is spoiled. She is understandably upset at Chaerea’s behaviour, and we take up our analysis at this point in the action. It is Thais’ slave, Pythias, who first discovers the rape, and she is furious: she hopes to find the perpetrator and scratch his eyes out (647-8). She is perplexed that a eunuch could have committed the deed, but the facts speak for themselves: the girl was found weeping (656-9). The truth about the substitution is soon revealed, however, and when Thais finds out, she is furious, in the first instance with Pythias, at whom she swears roundly, albeit unjustly (817-33): it is easy to take out one’s frustration on a slave. When it comes to confronting Chaerea, however, she adopts a different tone. He is conscious of his guilt, but when he attempts to pass it off as a trifle, Thais fires back that it is no small matter to rape a citizen girl (857-8). He lamely replies that he thought she was a fellow slave

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan (conservam, 858), putting himself in the position of the eunuch he pretended to be, at which Pythias is on the point of pulling his hair out, until Thais orders her off, calling her crazy (insana, 861) into the bargain. Thais retains her self-control, and prefers to appeal to Chaerea’s sense of decency; she limits herself to saying that such an act was not worthy of him, and even if she herself deserved to be so treated, he ought not to have behaved that way (864-6). Chaerea, however, asserts that he intended no insult to Thais, but acted out of love (877-88), upon which Thais graciously pardons him, since she is not hard-hearted, and she understands love’s power.10 Now that Chaerea knows that the girl is a citizen, moreover, he declares his desire to marry her. Thais accepts his offer in good faith, and asks him to await her in his house, at which Pythias protests once again, since she is not at all convinced that he will not make another attempt upon the girl. But the way is now prepared for a happy denouement, and the confrontation ends peacefully. In a sense, Pythias serves as the symbol of Thais’ repressed anger: as a slave, she is not expected to have the self-discipline to deal pragmatically with Chaerea, keeping in mind the balance of power and the need to retain his good will.11 Thais is a strong woman: she was distressed earlier when the girl’s brother seemed too timid (formidulosus, 756) to stick around and help her, at the time when the soldier, suspicious of Thais’ intentions, came seeking to take the girl back, though he was, as she points out, a foreigner and so in a relatively weak position, without friends and supporters (759-60). One might have expected that Thais, as a more or less defenceless woman, would have been afraid, rather than the girl’s brother, who is, after all, a male citizen with the resources that his status implies – though in the end, he does find the pluck to confront the soldier, declaring that the girl is a free citizen and his sister [805-6], and the soldier, who is a coward in his own right, backs down. But a woman like Thais, who is making her fortune on her own, and in a strange city to boot, has to be tough and independent. And in this case, it means being in control of her emotions, not letting love, or fear, or anger get in the way of her advancement. Her self-restraint is a sign of her autonomy and psychological maturity, but at the same time it reflects her relative powerlessness in a community where citizen men have all the rights – including the right to be angry when they feel they have been slighted. It is this sense of injury that Thais is obliged to swallow, and so her very willpower, which makes of her so compelling a figure, simultaneously reveals her social inferiority. This is one more aspect of the complex emotional landscape of classical society. Just as in Menander and Terence, anger in Plautus apparently befits those characters who hold power over others. The senex iratus remains a stock figure, whose mood is often feared (Am. 988, Bac. 222). Plautine characters represent anger (ira) as an overwhelming emotion and ascribe it quite often to gods.12 People feel it as a burden (Poen. 813) or a burning sensation (Ps. 201), which in extreme cases may result in weakness and

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy loss of identity (Am. 844). It usually falls to slaves (both male and female) to inspire this dangerous feeling in the Plautine senex. When goaded into anger the most jovial of old men can turn into a monster threatening to knock out his victim’s brain.13 However, the relationship dynamics that we observe, for example, in Menander’s Epitrepontes or Terence’s Heautontimorumenus, in which submissive wives accept their husbands’ mistreatment in graceful silence is never represented on the Plautine stage.14 The ideal of wifely submission is reflected in the portrayal of the two lonely wives in the Stichus and to some degree in the lines of the tragicomic heroine Alcumena (see below),15 but all comic wives in Plautus shown in interaction with their husbands happen to be wealthy and assertive.16 The figure of a dowered and domineering wife has roots in Greek comedy.17 However, Plautus has a particular predilection for the spectacle of the irate matron who humiliates her husband. This interest in women’s wrath and its potential implications for the Roman family dynamics calls for a closer investigation.18 Let us begin with the Amphitruo, a tragicomedy rather than comedy, which offers the closest parallel to the angry men from Menander’s Samia and Periceiromene. Amphitruo comes back home as a victorious general, expecting a warm welcome from his virtuous wife Alcumena. Little does he know that on the previous night Alcumena welcomed Jupiter, who came to the couple’s house disguised as Amphitruo. Believing that her husband has left only hours ago to rejoin his army, Alcumena now expresses her surprise to see him back so soon. As husband and wife compare notes, the audience can observe Amphitruo’s growing anger; within one scene his feelings about his wife change from longing and adulation to furious rejection. At first, Amphitruo is merely upset because Alcumena failed to greet him properly, and scolds her harshly: ‘So, tell me, what has come upon you, an attack of stupidity or self-importance?’ (709) His anger increases as his wife recounts how she kissed the mystery visitor, how the warrior took a bath and shared a meal with her reclining on the same couch, and how finally he shared her bed. Amphitruo concludes that his wife’s chastity has been compromised and exclaims that the news has killed him (809). During this conversation, Amphitruo’s slave Sosia keeps insulting his master’s wife, calling her a frenzied bacchant and insinuating that she has lost her mind (Am. 703-6). His master does not protest and even allows the following joke that, as Alcumena observes (720-2), constitutes a very bad omen for the child she caries:19 SO. Amphitruo, speraui ego istam tibi parituram filium; uerum non est puero grauida. AM. quid igitur? SO. Insania. (718-19) SO. Amphitruo, I hoped that that woman would bear you a son; but she is not heavy with a child. AM. What with then? SO. Lunacy.

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan Blinded by anger, Amphitruo not only suffers his slave to insult his wife and refuses to listen to her oaths, but also is unable to consider the implications of the material evidence of her truthfulness, when Alcumena produces the gift he had planned to offer her. Amphitruo’s only concession to rationality is his promise to hold an inquiry into the matter before officially divorcing his wife. Anger has clearly taken a heavy toll on Amphitruo’s ability to think and act rationally; in the end, he feels diminished and exhausted (delinitus, 844). The next scene enhances the comic effects of Amphitruo’s wrath by juxtaposing with it Jupiter’s sublime self-control and skilled flattery (882-955). When the god comes back on stage disguised as Amphitruo, he has to face the results of the man’s anger: Alcumena refuses to look at her husband(’s double), rejects his advances and requests him to call off his accusations. Jupiter, who, by means of his thunderbolt, could easily turn our tragicomedy into a tragedy, remains calm and ardently begs for forgiveness: per dexteram tuam te, Alcumena, oro, opsecro, da mi hanc ueniam, ignosce, irata ne sies. (923-4) By your right hand, Alcumena, I beg you, I beseech you, please pardon me, forgive me, do not be angry.

This act of apology reassures Alcumena that Amphitruo wants to be forgiven, but she finds his request for forgiveness still lacking in repentance (he did not withdraw his accusations yet), and so she prepares to leave, pronouncing (quite famously) the divorce formula: nunc, quando factis me inpudicis abstini, ab inpudicis dictis auorti uolo: ualeas, tibi reas habeas tuas, reddas meas. (926-8): Now, since I have refrained from vile acts, I want to be exonerated from vile words: goodbye; keep your property and restore mine.20

The god is willing to humble himself further before Alcumena and with ultimate composure utters the following oath: mane. arbitratu tuo ius iurandum dabo me meam pudicam esse uxorem arbitrarier. id ego si fallo, tum te, summe Iupiter, quaeso Amphitruoni ut semper iratus sies. (931-4) Wait! According to your wish, I will swear that my wife I consider to be chaste. If I am lying, then, o supreme Jove, I beg you to be eternally angry at Amphitruo!

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy To the audience or reader, this pledge of repentance may appear to be an artifice of deception: not only is Jupiter speaking of a mere willingness to express – in the future – his conviction of his own wife’s chastity, but he also threatens to punish Amphitruo, should his oath be disingenuous. More interesting is the reason that this pseudo-oath appeases Alcumena. Since the god does not yet swear that he considers his wife to be beyond suspicion, the efficacious part of his words must be the curse that threatens divine anger upon Amphitruo’s head. Whereas Amphitruo, when blinded by anger, allowed his slave to utter an ill omen for his wife and their child, Alcumena cannot accept the curse against her husband, and relents. She offers this summary of her reasoning: ‘You should not have insulted me in the first place, but since you yourself withdraw (purges, 945) your own words, I must bear it.’ Alcumena’s forgiveness rests on an error of perception: Jupiter is not the man who insulted her nor does he revoke his own words, but the principle that a wife ‘must bear’ her husband’s anger is familiar from Greek drama.21 Amphitruo, for his part, finally relents only after learning that it was Jupiter himself who shared his wife’s bed. One cannot hold a grudge against one’s superiors. Rather than his wife’s innocence (i.e. her conviction that she was with Amphitruo), it is the prestigious identity of his rival that makes Amphitruo change his mind; curiously, and comically, he seems almost proud of the newly coined connection and gives no further thought to Alcumena’s reputation: ... AM. pol me hau paenitet si licet boni dimidium mihi diuidere cum Iove. (1124-5) ... I do not regret at all to have had the opportunity to share half of the good thing with Jupiter.

No thought at all is given to the wife’s point of view. We will never learn whether she would have been angry (this time at Jupiter) or have considered herself defiled like Lucretia (whom second-century Roman audiences would have seen on the tragic stage),22 or whether she would have been delighted to have discovered her lover’s identity. Thus, in the Amphitruo, we first meet an angry husband, then an angry wife; the husband suspects that his wife has slept with another man; the wife is angered by his suspicions; both take steps to dissolve their marriage. The wife’s anger appears to be a mirror image of the husband’s anger: she is angry that he thinks that he has reason to be angry with her. In the end, she does manage (with considerable help from her divine lover) to control her wrath. Given the extraordinary generic status of the Amphitruo, as a tragicomedy based on mythical motifs, it is hard to speculate on the rationale behind Alcumena’s restraint.23 One thing is certain, however, her self-control is by no means typical of irate female characters

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan in Plautus, who allows married women, especially those accompanied by handsome dowries, to express their rage quite freely. Whereas Alcumena’s anger was merely an indignant response to her husband’s suspicions, the irate uxores dotatae in other plays – Artemona in the Asinaria, Cleustrata in the Casina, Matrona in the Menaechmi and Dorippa in the Mercator – resemble Amphitruo even more than Alcumena. Like him, they are goaded by suspicions about their spouses’ infidelity and choose to initiate hostilities.24 Next let us consider Dorippa, whose hurt pride and willingness to dissolve her marriage make her the least grotesque and most Alcumenalike of the comedic wives. Dorippa’s story is linked to the main plot of the Mercator, a play that casts a father and a son as rivals. The son brings back from abroad a prostitute whom he loves and tries to pass off as a maid destined to be a gift for his mother; however, his father, Demipho, sees the pretty girl disembarking, immediately falls in love with her, and asks a friend to buy her for him and hide her in his house. The friend in question, Dorippa’s husband, Lysimachus, reluctantly agrees to oblige him. Thus, the girl takes residence in his house where Demipho, having announced to his son that he has sold the would-be maid, hopes to visit her. Enter Dorippa. Surprised by her husband’s prolonged visit to the city, she decides to check up on him. She comes on stage accompanied by her eighty-year-old nurse Syra. It is Syra who first enters the house, finds the girl and suspects that she is Lysimachus’ girlfriend. Dorippa concludes that the girlfriend is the reason why her husband wants to spend time in the city, and she responds with a curious mixture of anger, disappointment and self-pity: Miserior mulier me nec fiet nec fuit, tali uiro quae nupserim. heu miserae mihi! em quoi te et tua quae tu habeas commendes uiro, em quoi decem talenta dotis detuli, haec ut uiderem, ut ferrem has contumelias! (700-4) No woman will ever be or has been more pitiful than I, who have been married to this man. Oh ... wretched me! A husband to whom you trust yourself and all you have ... this husband to whom I brought a dowry of ten talents ... that I should see such things and bear such a humiliation!

Lysimachus comes out of the house and is frightened to notice his wife: [LY.] accedam proprius. DO. uae miserae mi! LY. immo mihi. DO. disperii! LY. equidem hercle oppido perii miser! (708-9) [LY.] I will come closer. DO. Ahhhh! Take pity on wretched me! LY. Or rather, me. DO. I am finished! LY. Gee, actually I am the poor soul who is done for.

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy As the nurse reminds the audience, Lysimachus is not doing anything illegal, and it is far more common for the wives to be mistreated than for the husbands: SY. Ecastor lege dura uiuont mulieres multoque iniquiore miserae quam uiri. nam si uir scortum duxit clam uxorem suam, id si resciuit uxor, inpune est uiro; uxor uiro si clam domo egressa est foras, uiro fit caussa, exigitur matrumonio. (817-22) SY. God, we poor women live by a harsh law, one far more unforgiving than the law for men. For, when a man hires a whore in secret from his wife and the wife learns about it, there is no punishment for him. But if a wife leaves the house to go out in secret from her husband, he is in the right and she is shut her out of the marriage.

Dorippa is therefore quite careful and the ensuing conversation, although tense, is rather witty and intimate; the couple share a sense of humour and have apparently spent some time discussing their respective preferences for country and city. ‘So the country folk have moved into the city?’ (714) asks the husband, expressing surprise at his wife’s decision to follow him. ‘Well, what they do is more modest than the actions of the city folk who refuse to visit the country’ (714-15), replies the wife, suggesting that her desire to keep her husband company is more honourable than his wish to spend time with a prostitute. This sample exchange seems to give a picture of a healthy relationship, which perhaps justifies the sense of betrayal and disappointment in Dorippa’s reaction. Sentiments aside, however, the matron bravely and mercilessly directs the conversation towards the pretty girl and the question of her ownership. Alas, Lysimachus, bound as he is by his oath to Demipho, cannot tell her the truth. The presence of the prostitute in her own house upsets Dorippa so much that she is ready to end the marriage:25 nec pol ego patiar seic me nuptam tam male measque in aedis seic scorta obductarier. Syra, i, rogato meum paterm uerbeis meeis ut ueniat at me ... (785-8) I will not suffer to be so unhappily married and to have prostitutes hired in my own house. Syra, go and ask my father on my behalf to come here to me ...

Luckily, Syra does not find the old gentleman at home, but instead bumps into Dorippa’s and Lysimachus’ son Eutychus who helps resolve all the

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan conflicts of the play. He reconciles his parents, explaining to his mother that it was their neighbour Demipho who purchased the girl, and persuades Demipho to give the girl back to his lovesick son. Lysimachus enters the house accompanied by his son and Demipho (who is ready to bear witness to his friend’s innocence), but is nevertheless still fearful that his wife may be incensed (succensere, 1012), and requires repeated reassurance from his son. The Mercator thus represents at least one husband who does not feel entitled to consort with prostitutes or, at least, to have one in his own house because he fears to offend his wife. We can assume that the motives the Roman audience would have ascribed to this husband include dependence on her dowry and fear of her anger, but it is also tempting to speculate, based on his genuine distress after she leaves (789-802), that he might actually value their relationship for its own sake. While Dorippa’s expectation of her husband’s fidelity can find parallels outside Plautine comedy, (for example, in the feelings of Nausistrata in Terence’s Phormio), no such parallel can be found for the husband-wife relationship portrayed in the Asinaria. In this play, Argyrippus, the son of poor Demaenetus and wealthy Artemona, is in love with a prostitute named Philaenium, who happens to be devoted to him rather than to his wealthy rival Diabolus. At Demaenetus’ instigation, two slaves steal enough of his wife’s money to purchase Philaenium’s services, apparently for his son, before she signs a long-term contract that Diabolus and his parasite have carefully prepared. This contract itself deserves attention as a testimony to a possessive feeling as closely reminiscent of jealousy as is possible in a culture that had no name for this emotion.26 The mock-legislation is rather long (750-808) and stipulates the youth’s exclusive rights to Philaenium, forbidding her contact with other men. Not only is she prohibited from receiving in her house, talking to, or looking at any man; she is forbidden to own any writing material. She cannot even pray to male gods: deam inuocet sibi quam libebit propitiam, deum nullum; si magis religiosa fuerit, tibi dicat: tu pro illa ores ut sit propitius. (782-4) Let her call upon any goddess she wishes to placate, but no god; should she feel particularly devout, let her tell you [Diabolus]; you will ask his goodwill on her behalf.

Thanks to Artemona’s money, Philaenium avoids this restrictive contract, yet there remains one considerable obstacle to the young couple’s happiness: the father, it now turns out, requires a compensation for his help; he too wants to enjoy the girl’s company. Meanwhile Diabolus, frustrated in his intentions, sends his parasite to fetch Artemona. As the party of three

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy prepares to recline (it is the father who is to share the couch with Philaenium), Artemona and the parasitus arrive to eavesdrop on the dinner conversation. The materfamilias is, unsurprisingly, outraged, and quite explicitly discusses the lack of attention she has recently felt: ibi labore delassatum noctem totam stertere: ille opere foris faciendo lassus noctu advenit; fundum alienum arat, incultum familiarem deserit. is etiam corruptus porro suom corrumpit filium. (872-5) [I thought] ... that exhausted by his labour there [in the forum] he would snore all night long. Tired from helping outside the house he came to me at night. So he ploughs another’s field and leaves un-ploughed the one at home. Himself depraved, he further depraves his son.

Unlike Dorippa, who seemed mostly hurt in her pride, this matron is a pragmatic proprietor who puts her plight in a language strongly reminiscent of slave ownership.27 Her complaint, coming as it does two short scenes after Diabolus’ contract, would have invited comparisons between the type of control a man would have exercised over a hired meretrix and Artemona’s assumption that she and no one else is entitled to her husband’s sexual services. The husband is thus symbolically reduced to the position of a female slave whose duty is to serve her mistress before doing any labour outside the household. Artemona’s perception of her rights would have found no support in the Roman law on adultery or in popular morality, as the troupe reminds the audience at the end of the play.28 And yet, not only does Artemona speak as though she had economic power over her husband, she also usurps for herself the moral authority of a judge of his behaviour, holding him to a standard usually expected of chaste wives:29 At scelesta ego praeter alios meum uirum frugi rata, siccum, frugi, continentem, amantem uxoris maxume. (856-7) Wretched, I thought that my husband was parsimonious, sparing, cautious, prudent and devoted to his wife.

When she finally confronts him, Artemona addresses her wayward husband from a position of absolute authority: ‘get up, lover boy, and go home’ is the refrain she repeats (921; 924; 925) in answer to all his explanations. In her unwillingness to take note of anything he has to say in his defence the matron brings to mind ways in which adults address children.30 Artemona is also quite frank about her desire to teach her husband a lesson (recall Aristotle’s definition of anger) and contrives a truly diaboli-

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan cal plan. When eavesdropping on her husband’s conversation with the prostitute, she heard him complain about her bad breath, so she decides, accordingly, to punish him with her kisses (903).31 Artemona is the fiercest of the Plautine wives because she leaves her home to seize her husband in a house where business between citizens and prostitutes is legitimately conducted. Her motives are represented as economic rather than emotional: she realizes that in addition to failing in his bedroom duties, her husband must have been behind a series of thefts of which she suspected her maids and for which she tortured them (887-8). The issue of property is also represented as a wife’s legitimate complaint in the Menaechmi when a father, utterly unconcerned about his son-inlaw’s infidelities (790-1), comes to his daughter’s aid as soon as he learns that Menaechmus also stole from his wife (805-6). We might therefore suspect that some people in the audience would have considered stealing from a wife a far worse offence and a more powerful reason for anger than infidelity. Whatever sympathy Artemona’s plight might have elicited from the play’s audience, at the end the actors carefully dissociate themselves from her point of view, reminding everyone that the old man ‘did not do anything new or unusual or different from what other men do’ (943) and that it is entirely natural for everyone to seek pleasure whenever an opportunity arises (cf. 942-5). This point of view expressed by the troupe would entail an approval for the actions of Lysidamus in the Casina, although his wife Cleustrata would beg to disagree. While Artemona is furious to discover that her husband has been wasting his energy and her money, Cleustrata has even more reasons to be upset: the object of her husband’s sexual appetites is a maidservant whom she herself brought up as her own daughter and who happens to be their son’s love interest. (He is, as we learn from the closing lines, to marry her later (1014), so the patriarch’s intentions have an incestuous twist to them.) Lysidamus is thus guilty not only of neglecting his spouse, but also of interfering with the girl who belongs to Cleustrata’s sphere of influence and of acting against their son’s desires (149-51); these infractions call for revenge.32 His wife instructs her servants that Lysidamus should find no dinner waiting for him when he comes home and promises to give him the treatment he deserves: ego illum fame, ego illum siti, maledictis malefactis amatorem ulciscar. ego pol illum probe incommodis dictis angam; (155-7) with hunger, with thirst, with malicious words and deeds – I will pay back this lover-boy, I will suffocate him properly with maddening remarks.

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy Before the audience can appreciate the power of the matron’s rage and her formidable intellect, they are reminded that a wife has no right to be angry.33 As Cleustrata complains to her neighbour Myrrhina that she cannot get her husband to respect her wishes, that he wants her to give Casina to his steward (while he has a crush on her himself), Myrrhina reminds Cleustrata – and the audience – that a wife belongs to her husband and that she should therefore accommodate all his whims in fear of divorce. But the heroine does not change her mind, and launches a fearless attack at her husband. She criticizes his abuse of perfume, and, cleverly picking up on his weak spots, calls him a greying mosquito and repeatedly reminds him of his age (240, 244, 260) and irresponsible management of family finances: ‘go ahead, do as you like, drink, ruin yourself’. Throughout her invective, however, the audience would have kept in mind the earlier conversation between Cleustrata and her neighbour Myrrhina that made it clear that an average Roman wife would have been too frightened of divorce to express her anger freely to her husband. Indeed, when sufficiently annoyed, Lysidamus simply tells his wife to shut up: ‘Enough of this, wife, restrain yourself, too much of this buzzing; keep some part of your speech for tomorrow so that you can continue to argue with me’ (249-50), and she obeys. However, the rest of the play is devoted to the execution of her intricate revenge. After the couple draws lots to decide who will be Casina’s husband, and Lysidamus’ steward Olympio wins, Cleustrata disguises her candidate, Chalinus, as the desirable Casina. After a failed attempt to bed the ‘bride’, Lysidamus runs on stage in utter distress, followed by Chalinus. His plan is now exposed and he is obliged to beg his wife’s forgiveness, in words that allude to a typical punishment feared by servants and thus once more represent the husband, symbolically, as his wife’s slave: sed, uxor, da uiro hanc ueniam : Myrrhina, ora Cleustratam: si umquam posthac aut amasso Casinam aut occepso modo, ne ut eam amasso, si ego umquam adeo posthac tale admisero, nulla caussa quin pendentem me, uirgis uerberes. (1000-3) But, wife, grant me, your husband, the following favour: Myrrhina please beg Cleustrata: If ever afterwards I fall in love, or even begin to fall in love with Casina, In order that I do not fall in love, if I ever commit anything like that, By all means, do hang me and lash me with twigs.

Cleustrata concedes, in order not to make a long play even longer, and announces that she is not angry. Her magnanimous gesture does not make female anger any less formidable. If we are to judge the emotions of Roman women by Plautus’ representation of them in the Casina, a wife’s suppressed anger may resurface in the least expected ways – ways which are

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan particularly painful for an offending husband and particularly amusing for the audience. In the play’s closing lines, the troupe grants those spectators who give the Casina a long and hearty applause the right to hire a hooker (scortum) in secret from their wives. Whereas short-term arrangements with low-ranking prostitutes (scorta), like the one mentioned at the end of the Casina, might have furnished relatively few occasions for Roman men to deal with female anger, long-term relationships would have been far less safe for the men in question.34 Another Plautine comedy, the Menaechmi, tells the story of a man who (along with his identical twin) inadvertently causes the anger of both his wife and his girlfriend, a successful prostitute, named Erotium. The quid pro quo here is loosely reminiscent of what we have seen in the Amphitruo. Searching the world for his lost twin brother, Menaechmus II visits the city of Epidamnus, where his brother, Menaechmus I, happens to reside; the visiting Menaechmus first encounters his twin’s girlfriend, then an intimate male friend, the parasite Peniculus, and finally, his wife, the nameless Matrona. Needless to say, the hero never wonders why so many people in town seem to recognize him, nor does he connect their odd antics with his long-lost twin brother. The plot serves as pretext for the audience to contemplate what happens when everyone becomes furious at the local Menaechmus. The wife is angry from the beginning, as she suspects that her husband is having an affair. But the girlfriend and the sponger are originally very well disposed toward their benefactor: Erotium is delighted to have received a sumptuous mantle that Menaechmus I has stolen from his wife, and the parasite has been invited to dinner. Alas, the twin brother (Menaechmus II) ruins these plans. Invited inside, he enjoys an early dinner with Erotium and tells Peniculus, whom he encounters in front of the house, that he neither knows him nor cares that he has been deprived of his meal. The parasite, whose role is usually to support his patron, becomes enraged and runs to inform Matrona of the theft of her mantle. While Menaechmus II walks away from Erotium’s house with the mantle that she had entrusted to him in the expectation he would take it to an embroiderer to add further adornments, and a bracelet to be taken to the goldsmith, Menaechmus I comes back after a long day in the forum only to face his angry wife, who accuses him of the theft of her mantle. Her style is different from the dictatorial outburst of Artemona (‘get up, lover boy, go home’) or the imaginative insults of Cleustrata (‘greying mosquito’). This matron is passively aggressive and her anger is steeped in self-pity. After one clear threat (‘be sure you will pay and with interest on what you have taken away from me!’), she merely complains about being unhappily married and relentlessly presses the question of her garment. Menaechmus tries to humour her, but finally has no choice but to say that he merely lent her mantle to someone and will bring it back. As soon as the wife leaves, telling him not to come back home without

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy the mantle, Menaechmus reveals to the audience that she in fact is doing him a service: he will spend his time at a much nicer place, the house of Erotium. Alas, he is up for a major surprise. When he asks Erotium if he can take the mantle from her to return it to his wife, she is shocked. As far as she knows she has already entrusted the garment to him. When he denies it, she draws the obvious conclusion that her client wants to take her gifts away in order to bestow them on ... his wife. What Erotium imagines is a precise reversal of the usual situation: instead of stealing from wife to bestow gifts on the puella, Menaechmus would be stealing from the girl and giving to the wife. When she loses her temper we expect her to play her part and speak like an angry wife, and she does so, but with a twist: tute ultro ad me detulisti, dedisti eam dono mihi; eandem nunc reposcis: patiar. tibi habe, aufer, utere uel tu uel tua uxor, uel etiam in loculos compingite. tu huc post hunc diem pedem intro non feres, ne frustra sis; quando tu me bene merentem tibi habes despicatui. nisi feres argentum frustra me ductare non potes. aliam post inuenito quam habeas frustratui. (689-95) You yourself brought it to me. You gave it to me as a gift. Now you want it back: OK. You keep it, take it away, wear it yourself,35 Or let your wife wear it, or lock it up in a safe. But from this day you’ll not set foot in this house; don’t deceive yourself. Since you abuse me in spite of my kindness, Unless you bring cash – you will not get my service for free. Find yourself another girl to cheat.

The prostitute’s vocabulary of despicatus and frustratus imitates that of an angry matron (despicatur me domi, Cas. 185-6; me habet despicatam, 189), only to remind us that her services are, after all, for sale. Erotium punishes Menaechmus by denying him as much as she can afford to deny; she refuses to receive him in exchange for gifts, rather than money. The joke, (‘You can never have free access to my services – unless you pay cash’), is quite successful, but it is also a crude reminder that in Greece and Rome the right to be angry was deemed to be directly proportional to power. In the end, it is the men who have the last laugh in the Menaechmi. The brothers, with the help of an intelligent slave (Messenio), realize that they are twins and decide to go back to home to Syracuse after having sold all the possessions of Menaechmus in Epidamnus; they joke that the wife will also be put on sale, though chances that she finds a buyer are apparently slim.36 The ending of the Menaechmi represents a wish-fulfilment, in which the two men walk off into the sunset, leaving all emotional concerns behind in what is meant to come across as ‘the beginning of a beautiful friendship’, very much like Rick Blane and Prefect Simon Renault do in Michael

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan Curtiz’s Casablanca. Instead of re-establishing the integrity of the marital household (as later happens in Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors), here the reunion of the brothers takes its place. This ending, in which the angry wife does not receive some kind of satisfaction, differs from all the other Plautine plays we have discussed. Alcumena’s honesty is vindicated; Dorippa obtains proof that her suspicions were unfounded; Cleustrata obtains profuse apologies and the right to whip her husband if ever he seems to relapse; Artemona drags her husband back home with the intention to kiss him at will (his opinion about the sweetness of her breath notwithstanding). What can we make of the farcical ending of the Menaechmi? This particular play, because of its repetitive structure,37 shows more characteristics of the native Italian improvised performance than other Plautine comedies do. The hypothesis that the Menaechmi represents a Greek rather than Roman perception of the wife’s right to be angry would not be plausible. Instead, it seems reasonable to connect the ending of the Menaechmi with the reminders, which we found in all Plautine plays featuring angry wives, that ordinary matrons do not (or at least should not) enjoy privileges comparable to those represented on stage. These reminders suggest that the space granted to the dowered wife in Roman plays cannot simply reflect the relative freedom that wives would have been granted under the legal conditions of the Roman marriage, nor the historical importance of the repeal of the Oppian law,38 as some scholars have argued. On the contrary, the roles ascribed to dowered wives present a very complex phenomenon.39 Before we propose an alternative reading of the uxor dotata, it will be useful to compare the representation of wives in the palliata to that offered by the fragments of the togata, a genre that is believed to reflect more closely the dynamics of Roman family life.40 One play in particular, Titinius’ Gemina, or possibly, given the interest in twins in the in native Italian plays, Geminae,41 appears to show patterns somewhat similar to those we have found in Plautus. While the plot of the play is impossible to reconstruct at present, the remnants strongly suggest that it featured a dysfunctional marriage. Like Dorippa and Lysimachus, the couple apparently owns two houses, one in the country and the other in the city. The husband is accused of visiting his city house only unwillingly, because this is where his wife stays (fr. 2 and 3), the opposite of the situation in the Mercator. One of the things he complains about is his wife’s diet: ... libram aiebant satis esse ambobus farris intritae plus comes sola, uxor. (fr. 1) ... they used to say that one pound of oatmeal was sufficient for both,42 but you alone eat up a pound of untreated oats, wife.

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy If the wife was represented as overweight, this remark can be compared to a comment in the Amphitruo, in which Sosia, seeing his heavily pregnant mistress, suggests that she has eaten everything in the house (667). It is reasonable to speculate that the unhappy wife herself speaks this line that brings to mind Cleustrata’s petty ways of annoying Lysidamus: Si rus cum scorto constituit ire, clauis illico abstrudi iubeo, rusticae togae ne sit copia. (fr. 5) If he decides to go to the country with his whore, I immediately order that the keys be hidden, so that he has no supply of a rustic disguise.43

Someone, quite likely the wife again, tries to make sure that the man of the house finds it difficult to organize parties and consort with pimps and parasites (fr. 6 and 7). Someone also pronounces accusations that are very much in line with those uttered by Cleustrata; thundering against a lazy man (fr. 8) who is too eager a patron of young women (fr. 9), and presumably neglects his wife. Then the title character Gemina (or one of the two title characters) is thrown out of the house (fr. 11), some woman bewails her mistreatment by a man (fr. 13), and a decision is made to speak soothingly to a woman (fr. 14). Finally, a wife (probably the one who is so fond of oatmeal) utters this extremely conciliatory line: Sin forma nunc sum, tandem ut moribus placeam uiro. (fr. 15) Even if my appearance now causes disgust, let me nevertheless please my husband with my character!

Many conjectures can be made about how the play really ended. If we could be sure that fr. 15 comes from the final part of the play and is indeed spoken by the wife rather than by her husband imagining how she should speak, this wife’s self-deprecatory comment on her appearance and her willingness to please her husband would make this matron from the togata far more submissive than the fierce heroines of the palliata.44 The (hypothetical) final resolution of the conflict in the Gemina(e) notwithstanding, the fragments of Titinius bear witness to a dynamic similar to the one found in Plautus. Wives, whether or not legally entitled to their husbands’ fidelity, expect to be appreciated and loved and feel entitled to be angry if they are not. Plautus’ willingness to represent irate wives on stage with their hurt pride and petty attempts to thwart their husbands’ infidelity must bespeak his audience’s vivid interest in such conflicts. Even if the world in which wives divorce their husbands and the husbands (or even divine lovers) humbly beg for forgiveness is a comic fiction, a world upside-down, it is a fiction that gives a voice to women’s suppressed anger and wishful thinking. One could hardly put these emotions better than Plautus did in the lines of the octogenarian nurse Syra in the Mercator:

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan utinam lex esset eadem quae uxori est uiro; nam uxor contenta est quae bona est uno uiro: qui minus uir una uxore contentus siet? (823-5) If only there were the same law for the husband as there is for the wife. For a wife, if she is good, is happy with one husband. Why should a husband be less happy with one wife?

Comedy is a polyphonic genre that intertwines diverse discourses; one must, therefore, beware of identifying any voice or set of voices as authoritative opinions.45 However, if women attended the theatre, as they almost certainly did,46 it is legitimate to wonder how the women in the audience would have responded to the actions of irate Artemona or to monologues, such as that of Syra, and it is tempting to speculate that many Roman matrons would have been sympathetic. The scripts, as we pointed out (see above on the Asinaria and the Casina), often contain disclaimers through which the playwrights and players make sure that they do not appear too keen on representing women’s point of view. Yet, the fact that angry – and triumphant – wives are shown on stage so often makes it conceivable that New Comedy, at least in its Plautine version, could serve as a vehicle for representing – among many other viewpoints – women’s sense of their rights in marriage. It seems then that we are justified in thinking that, in addition to historical considerations that scholars, such as Treggiari (1991) and Moore (1998), have brought up to explain Platutus’ interest in imperious wives, the concerns of the women in the audience – especially their suppressed anger at their husbands’ legally sanctioned infidelities – influenced the choices that Roman comic writers made in adapting and modifying Greek plays. Notes 1. For a fuller discussion of slaves in Menandrean comedy, see Konstan (forthcoming). 2. For the new fragments, see Austin (2008). Arnott (2004) 276-8 notes the rhetorical sophistication of Pamphile in her debate with her father, which contributes substantially to the representation of her as a woman of dignity and determination. 3. We are using the translation by Geoffrey Arnott in the Loeb Library edition. 4. See Konstan (2008) and Konstan (forthcoming). 5. Chremes’ character has, in our view, been painted too negatively by scholars, e.g. Nardo (1967-68) 137, 150-1; Jocelyn (1973) 23-4; Fantham (1971) 979-81; Lefèvre (1986) 40; Goldberg (1986) 137. 6. For reasons that one of us (Konstan 1995, 123-5) has argued elsewhere, this scene is likely to be an addition by Terence to the Greek original. 7. Cf. Pl. Cist., esp. 78-81. 8. Thais reassures Phaedria of her affection by declaring that she will do anything rather than have him as an enemy, 173-4 – a pragmatic motive rather than one based on amorous feelings. When he consents to grant her a couple of days with the soldier, she says: ‘there’s good reason why I love you: you treat me

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy well’ (merito te amo; bene facis, 186). After Phaedria exits, Thais declares, in a soliloquy that is probably a Terentian addition (Konstan 1995, 136), that no one is dearer to her than Phaedria (200-1), and she has sent him away solely in order to gain possession of the girl. She has not, of course, said that she is exclusively enamoured of Phaedria, but she does insist that she was honest in her avowals to him, and that in this, she differs from the normal run of courtesans (197-8). Thais may be good-hearted, but she is a professional first and foremost; if there is any deep emotion she is feeling here, it is anxiety over her need to keep both Phaedria’s and the soldier’s affections, rather than erotic passion. 9. See Bartsch (2006) 67-83. 10. Enamourment was one of the standard excuses for misbehaviour, according to the rhetoricians, e.g. Cic. (Inv. 1.41); Quint. (Dec. 291.3). 11. Pythias has another scene in which she terrifies Parmeno, the slave who participated in Chaerea’s deception, that he will be punished mercilessly; slaves can tease and humiliate other slaves without fear of reprisal. 12. Cf. Am. 392, 1022, Mi. 314, Per. 666, Poen. 645, and Ru. 1146. 13. In Cas. 644 Lysidamus threatens to beat up Pardalisca unless she tells him what is going on inside the house. 14. Plautine prostitutes, conversely, express willingness to submit to any treatment the senes may want to inflict on them, beating included (cf. Bac. 1172-3: ‘it will not hurt me at all that you hit me’). 15. The two married women in the Stichus are shown waiting for their absent husbands and rejecting their father’s suggestions that they re-marry. But the meeting between the longing wives and the husbands is never staged. Instead, Plautus prefers to show us how the pretty boy Pinacium and the parasite Gelasimus slowly dole out the news about her husband’s and brother-in-law’s arrival to one of the wives, Panegyris (326-401). 16. To this gallery of assertive wives we may add the wife whom Daemones fears in the Rudens. See Moore’s useful characterization of Plautine wives (1998) 158-9. 17. See above all extant fragments of New Comedy; cf. Frankel’s addenda (2007) 405-6 and Treggiari’s analysis of the type of the uxor dotata as a naturalized Greek figure (1991) 209-10. 18. On women’s propensity to self-pity, see Dutsch (2008) 108-11. 19. Amphitruo’s behaviour is in stark contrast to Jupiter’s enactment of a good husband (one who can hardly suffer a slave to address his spouse even if it is to flatter her) earlier in the play (499-550). 20. See Rosenmeyer 1995. 21. See the above discussion. 22. E.g. in Accius’ (170-86 BCE) Brutus and later in Cassius’ (85-42 BCE) Lucretia. 23. The Amphitruo shows the influence of Middle Comedy and of native Italian farce with mythological themes, as well as echoes of tragedy. Stewart (1958) is still the best discussion of the Greek background of the Amphitruo; cf. also Stewart (2000); on the Roman elements, see Galinsky (1966), and McDonnell (1986). 24. As Sharon James (personal communication) points out, all these women are mothers of adult sons, and tend to remind their husbands of their position as mothers of sons; mothers of daughters tend to be far less daring. 25. In this respect her feelings are reminiscent of those of Deianira in Sophocles’ Trachiniae. Cf. the previous discussion of the Sophoclean play in this chapter. 26. See Konstan (2006) 237-43. 27. See Henderson’s (2006) 210-11 perceptive comments identifying the matron as the eponymous donkey-driver asinaria in this play.

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan 28. Even in Augustus’ lex Iuilia de adulteris, the man’s marital status was irrelevant when it came to stuprum; only the woman’s marriageable or married status mattered (cf. Gardner 1986, 123-4). 29. See e.g. Tac. 1.33. on Agrippina, Germanicus’ wife as amans mariti. 30. On Plautine women’s propensity to used polite modifiers, see Dutsch (2008) 50-5. 31. Plautus possibly draws attention to the success of this plan in 921: A. Surge amator i domum D. abscede ergo paululum istuc. (A. Get up, lover-boy, go home! D. So, please, step aside over there.) 32. As Slater argued (1985) 75-93, in the portrayal of this matron who takes on the role of the clever slave, Plautus challenges his audience’s perceptions of and reactions to the stock type of uxor dotata. 33. In both Greek and Roman imagination, women are particularly susceptible to anger, and consequently are often admonished that they need to control their wrath; cf. Harris (2003) 131-2. 34. Diniarchus in the Truculentus is very much afraid of his girlfriend’s moods, as is the soldier Stratophanes in the same play. 35. For Menaechmus’ penchant for cross-dressing, see Men. (140-50). 36. The motif of selling the wife also appears in the Philogelos (cf. 446). 37. Cf. Stärk (1989) passim. 38. On the legal implications of marriages cum- and sine manu, see Gardner (1991) 11-14; even in marriage cum manu the wife’s property was often in practice separated from that of her husband: see Dixon (1992) 52. 39. Schuhmann (1977, 1978) argues that Plautus is criticizing the growing number of marriages sine manu; Treggiari (1991) 329-31 connects the imperious matron of Plautine comedy with the matrons’ protests against lex Oppia in 195 BCE, but also (ibid.: 209-10) recognizes that the dotata was a naturalized figure from Greek comedy; Moore (1998) 160-1 emphasizes the historical conditions rather than literary precedents; Stärk 1990 (passim) suggests influence of popular farce, which view does not seem very convincing in the light of the evidence of the togata. 40. Cf. Daviault (1981) 24-31. Braund (2005) 40 correctly stresses the importance of marriage and divorce for the Roman comic drama outside the palliata . 41. See Stärk’s references (1989) 186. 42. Daviault’s translation of ambobus as ‘elles deux’ does not seem justified. 43. As Nonnius Marcellus 653L points out, toga is here a double entendre referring to disguise; cf. McGinn (2003) 158. 44. This was the view advanced by J.T. Welsh in his APA paper on Roman wives in the togata (2008). 45. On the complex interplay of multiple discourses in the palliata, see Dutsch (2008) 41-7. 46. See Marshall (2006) 86-8; the chief evidence is derived from the prologue to Plautus’ Poenulus (28-35) that advises women to be silent (cf. Slater 1992); less persuasive may be the reference to clamor mulierum that followed the cancellation of the first performance of the Hecyra (35).

Bibliography Arnott, W.G. (ed.). 1979-2000. Menander of Athens. Plays. English and Greek. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Arnott, William G. 2004. ‘Menander’s Epitrepontes in the Light of the New Papyri.’ In Law, Rhetoric, and Comedy in Classical Athens: Essays in Honour of Douglas

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3. Women’s Emotions in New Comedy M. MacDowell, ed. Douglas L. Cairns and R.A. Knox, 269-92. Swansea: Classical Press of Wales. Austin, Colin. 2008. ‘Marriage on the Rocks: Pamphile in Menander’s Epitrepontes.’ Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae 48: 19-27. Bartsch, Shadi. 2006. The Mirror of the Self: Sexuality, Self-Knowledge, and the Gaze in the Early Roman Empire. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Braund, Susanna M. 2005. ‘Marriage, Adultery, and Divorce in Roman Comic Drama.’ In Satiric Advice on Women and Marriage: from Plautus to Chaucer, ed. Warren S. Smith, 39-70. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Daviault, André. 1981. Comoedia Togata: Fragments. Paris: Les Belles Lettres. Dixon, Suzanne. 1992. The Roman Family. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Dutsch, Dorota. 2008. Feminine Discourse in Roman Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Fantham, Elaine. 1971. ‘Heautontimorumenos and Adelphoe: A Study of Fatherhood in Terence and Menander.’ Latomus 30: 970-98. Fraenkel, Eduard. 2007. Plautine Elements in Plautus, tr. Thomas Drevokovsky and Frances Muecke. Oxford: Oxford University Press. First published as Plautinisches im Plautus. 1922. Frier, Bruce and McGinn, Thomas A. 2003. A Casebook on Roman Family Law. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Galinsky, Karl. 1966. ‘Scipionic Themes in Plautus’ Amphitruo.’ TAPA 97: 203-35. Gardner, Jane. 1986. Women in Roman Law and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Goldberg, Sander M. 1986. Understanding Terence. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Harris, William V. 2001. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Harris, William. 2003. ‘The Rage of Women.’ In Ancient Anger: Perspectives from Homer to Galen, ed. Susanna Braund and Glenn W. Most, 121-43. Cambridge: Yale Classical Studies. Henderson, John. 2006. Plautus, Asinaria: The One about the Asses. tr. with a commentary by John Henderson. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Jocelyn, H.D. 1973. ‘Homo sum: humani nihil a me alienum puto (Terence, Heauton Timorumenos 77).’ Antichthon 7: 14-42. Konstan, David. 1995. Greek Comedy and Ideology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Konstan, David. 2006. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Konstan, David. 2008. ‘Assuaging Rage: Remorse, Repentance and Forgiveness in the Classical World.’ Phoenix 62: 243-54. Konstan, David. Forthcoming. ‘Menander’s Slaves.’ In Slaves in Attic Comedy, ed. Ben Akrigg and Rob Tordoff. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press Lefèvre, Eckard. 1986. ‘Ich bin ein Mensch, nichts Menschliches is mir fremd.’ In Wegweisende Antike: Zur Aktualität humanistischer Bildung = Humanistische Bildung Beiheft 1: 39-49. Marshall, C.W. 2006. The Stagecraft and Performance of Roman Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McDonnell, Myles. 1986. ‘Ambitus and Plautus Amphitruo 65-81.’ AJP 107: 56476.

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Dorota Dutsch and David Konstan Moore, Timothy J. 1998. The Theater of Plautus: Playing to the Audience. Austin: University of Texas Press. Nardo, Dante. 1967-8. ‘Terenzio e l’ironizzazione del sapiens.’ Atti del Istituto Veneto di scienze, lettere, ed arti 126: 131-74. Rosenmeyer, Patricia A. 1995. ‘Enacting the Law: Plautus’ Use of the Divorce Formula on Stage.’ Phoenix 49: 201-17. Schuhmann, Elisabeth. 1977. ‘Der Typ der uxor dotata in de Komödien des Plautus.’ Philologus 121: 45-65. Schuhmann, Elisabeth. 1978. ‘Zur soziallen Stellung der Frau in den Komödien des Plautus.’ Altertum 24: 97-105. Slater, Niall W. 1985. Plautus in Performance: The Theater of the Mind. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Slater, Niall W. 1992. ‘Plautine Negotiations: the Poenulus Prologue Unpacked,’ YCS 29: 131-46. Stärk, Ekkehard. 1989. Die Menaechmi des Plautus und kein griechisches Original. Tübingen: G. Narr. Stärk, Ekkehard. 1990. ‘Plautus’ uxores dotatae im Spannungsfeld literarischer Fiktion und gesellschaftlicher Realität.’ In Theater und Gesellschaft im Imperium Romanum, ed. Jürgen Blänsdorf, 69-79. Tübingen: Francke. Stewart, Zeph. 1958. ‘The Amphitruo of Plautus and Euripides’ Bacchae.’ TAPA 89: 348-73. Stewart, Zeph. 2000. ‘Plautus’ Amphitruo: Three Problems.’ HSCP 100: 293-99. Treggiari, Susan. 1991. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges from the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Welsh, Jarred T. 2008. ‘Marriage and Divorce in the Fabula Togata.’ APA, http://www.apaclassics.org/AnnualMeeting/08mtg/abstracts/welsh.pdf.

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Comic Emotions: Shamelessness and Envy (Schadenfreude); Moderate Emotion Dana LaCourse Munteanu By the fifth century BCE, cultural expectations that tragic performances should elicit specific emotions from their audiences were clearly documented in Greece. But was this true of tragedy alone? Or had similar expectations been formed with respect to other genres as well? This study broadly examines ancient texts, from classical Athens to Rome, that associate comedy with particular emotions of audiences, or generally with emotions. I. Old Comedy1 (a) Shamelessness: from stage to audience Fifth-century sources link comedy (Old Comedy) not to an emotion but to the absence of one – namely shame, in the sense of modesty, or decency.2 Our analysis will concentrate on the audience’s temporary abandonment of modesty as a reaction to the shameless behaviour displayed by the characters of comedy. Of particular interest is Plato’s view that describes the foregoing of shame of the spectator of comedy as corresponding to tragic pity. While the degree to which the origin of Attic comedy should be placed in rituals of fertility remains uncertain,3 it is clear that both comedy and ritual allowed displays of obscenity and shameless talk (aischrologia).4 Removal of shame in such contexts does not seem to be an exclusive Greek feature but likely has deep roots in Indo-European practices. In this respect, ancient Indian drama and ritual offer a good parallel: The ancient satirical farce as described by Bharata may well have developed, in part at least, out of still older Vedic rituals, just as Attic Greek comedy seems to have evolved, through folk drama, out of more archaic Indo-European rituals, particularly seasonal rites of renewal ... The conquest of the old by the new, the beginning of spring, the lengthening of days, was celebrated with marriages and orgiastic processions. Attic Comedy, and the Sanskrit satirical farce and monologue play, retained the verbal abuse and mock battles, the obscenities and the lewd gestures of ancient ritual.5

But how do obscene gestures and language on the stage affect the specta-

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu tor? An Indian treatise dated as early as the third century BCE, the Natyasastra, offers a sophisticated analysis of the emotions (rasas) stirred by various forms of drama.6 It lists the ‘showing of an unseemly dress or ornament’ and ‘impudence’ on stage as causes for the spectators’ laughter, which ultimately produces hasya rasa, an emotion derived from humour (6.47-8). In the case of Old Comedy too, theatrical obscenity on stage appears to stir the spectator’s laughter,7 and classicists suggested various reasons for which it was so. In his pioneering study, The Maculate Muse, Henderson argues that obscenity aroused laughter because it exposed (and often degraded) ‘a loser’, which the spectators enjoyed together with the winning character without the fear of being exposed themselves.8 More recently, Robson has reviewed Henderson’s analysis, drawing upon modern theories of humour (formalist-cognitive, social and psychological) and Bakhtin’s account of carnival laughter.9 He proposes that the amusement derived from comic obscenity could provide social cohesion by allowing public discussion of topics that would usually be kept in private. Without rejecting Henderson’s model of the winner exposing the loser, Robson argues that the character who appears to be a ‘loser’, who is exposed, and at whose expense the audience laughs, should not be considered a victim, as he is not entirely excluded from the group; in fact he also benefits from the apotropaic function of obscene exposure.10 Though obscenity was usually socially unacceptable, it was allowed temporarily, on special occasions, and was even expected in Old Comedy.11 And, to a degree, today’s comedians still have the licence to handle offensive material, which otherwise would be unacceptable in society.12 Finally, Robson notes that, from a psychological perspective, shamelessness on comic stage breaks social taboos and is thus pleasurable.13 Does, however, the audience’s forgoing of shame, while hearing the foul language and observing the shameless behaviour of the comic characters, qualify as an emotion? A certain complicity between the actors and the audience has to be established: when comic characters act shamelessly, the spectators abandon their common sense of decency, shun their inhibitions and laugh. Plato treats this lack of modesty as the equivalent of tragic pity. In the Republic, he condemns both the arousal of pity at tragic performances and the abandonment of shame as the result of watching comedies. Both tragic pity and comic lack of shame are conducive to psychological effects that ought to be avoided in real life. Here is how he describes the effect of comedy: oÙc [ aÙtÒj lÒgoj ka< per< toà gelo8ou; Óti .n aÙtÕj a9scÚnoio gelwtopoiîn, 1n mimˇsei d5 kwmJdikÍ, À ka< 9d8v ¢koÚwn sfÒdra carÍj ka< m] misÍj æj ponhr£, taÙtÕn poie√j Óper 1n to√j 1l2oij; { g>r tù lÒgü aâ kate√cej 1n sautù boulÒmenon gelwtopoie√n foboÚmenoj dÒxan bwmoloc8aj, tÒt, aâ ¢n8hj, ka< 1ke√ neanikÕn poiˇsaj 4laqej poll£kij 1n to√j o9ke8oij éste kwmJdopoiÕj gen2sqai. (R. 10.606c2-9) Does not the same apply to humour? For, if there are jokes that you yourself

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4. Comic Emotions would be ashamed (aischynoio) to tell, but enjoy much when you hear them imitated in comedy or even in private, and that you do not hate as something inappropriate (ponêra), aren’t you doing the same as with the things you pity? For the part of you that wanted to tell jokes (gelôtopoiein), but which you held back because of reason, because you were afraid of being considered a clown, you now release (aniês); and, after making that part [of yourself] strong in that manner, it escapes you that you have become a comedian in your own life.

Strangely then, Plato presents the audience’s ‘shamelessness’ as a kind of emotion, bearing striking similarities to tragic pity (R. 10.604-6). To summarize the argument on pity, everyone subdues his desire to grieve, especially in public, rather than yield to it (R. 10.604c). Nevertheless, the performances of tragedy trick us into forgetting our control: If you consider, the part (of the soul) that is barely controlled in our own personal misfortunes and has been anxious to weep and to lament sufficiently, as it is, by nature, desirous of this, this is the very part that receives fulfilment from poets and enjoys it. The part which is best in us, if not educated through rationality and habit, relaxes its guard (aniêsin tên phylakên) over this type of lamentation (thrênôdous), because it watches over the sufferings of another, and it is no shame (ouden aischron) for itself if it praises and pities another man if he [tragic actor/tragic character], saying that he is good, grieves excessively. Furthermore, there is, one thinks, a certain gain, namely pleasure, and he [the spectator] would not like being deprived of it, by despising the whole drama. Only a few reflect, I think, that this enjoyment will be transferred from the spectacle of another’s suffering to one’s own, and the one who has nurtured and strengthened the part of him that feels pity at those [dramas] will not find it easy to restrain it at the time of his own misfortune. (R. 10.606a2-b8)

Here are the similarities between the pity of tragedy (R. 10.606a2-b8) and the lack of shame of comedy (R. 10.606c1-8): (1) In general, people refrain from lamenting (thrênôdous), just as they refrain from telling indecent jokes (gelôtopoiein). The assumption is that, in both cases, there is a natural impulse to express sorrow or shamelessness, but reason controls this impulse. (2) Nevertheless, tragic and comic mimeses fool the audiences into thinking that it is permissible to pity others and to laugh at their buffooneries instead of condemning both lamentations and shameless jokes. (3) The rational part of the spectator’s soul is thus caught off guard so that it will then be unable to contain personal sorrow or prevent a shameless joke from manifesting publicly in real life. (4) Both comic lack of shame and tragic pity release (aniês, 606c7 and aniêsin, 606a8) suppressed feelings, which, in Plato’s opinion, should remain suppressed. Of course, there is a major difference between tragic pity and comic shamelessness. On the one hand, according to Plato, we are dealing with an emotion (pity) that may have harmful social effects; on the other, with the

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu suppression of an emotion (shame in the sense of modesty) that leads to appropriate social behaviour .14 This account in the Republic matches well with modern theories (Robson 2006) that link shameless humour to the release of both social and psychological taboos. Plato does not believe that such a comic release is necessary at all, and wishes to eliminate shamelessness altogether, for it serves no rational purpose – whether expressed in comedy or not.15 Though not concerned with describing the psychology of spectator’s listening to obscene jokes, Aristotle seems to accept the necessity of comic release but wants to limit it.16 He suggests that exposure to ritual or comic indecency should be permissible for a mature audience but it is not recommended for the young, who might be too impressionable and develop bad habits. For example, in his Politics (7.1336b), Aristotle recommends that the lawgiver banish all indecent talk, except at the temple of certain gods. Yet, the very young ought not to be permitted to worship in such cases that feature scurrility; nor should they attend iambic verses or comedy, although these are perfectly acceptable for adult male spectators.17 An excursus: genre signals gender problem: the ‘shamelessness’ of tragic women As a practical illustration, we will briefly examine an accusation found in the Aristophanic comedies that women in Euripides’ tragedies show no shame. This comic indignation about shamelessness in tragedy, we suggest, has interesting implications for both genre and gender. Old Comedy allows its characters and audience to display shamelessness, which seemed socially acceptable in this specific context. It seems particularly strange, therefore, to find a recurrent accusation in Aristophanes’ comedies: that tragedy, specifically Euripidean tragedy, portrays women as shameless, which brings ill repute to real women. In the Frogs, during the agon between famous dead tragedians, Aeschylus accuses Euripides of driving decent women to suicide on account of the shameful behaviour of his famous adulterous female characters, such as Stheneboea or Phaedra: EU. ka< t8 bl£ptous,, ( sc2tli, ¢ndrîn, t]n pÒlin ¡ma< Sqen2boiai; AI. Óti genna8aj ka< genna to)j so)j BellerofÒntaj. (Ra. 1049-51) Euripides: And how do my Stheneboeae, you rascal, harm the community? Aeschylus: Since you have driven decent women, wives of decent men, to drink hemlock, because they were ashamed on account of your Bellerophons.

Euripides replies that he has not invented the story of Phaedra. To this, Aeschylus protests that it is the duty of a poet to conceal what is ‘depraved’

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4. Comic Emotions (ponêron, 1053), not to teach it. The mythical women that Euripides puts on stage thus appear to lack an essential moral feature of decent Greek women: shame, in the sense of modesty and loyalty to husbands.18 In the Thesmophoriazusae, women are angry with Euripides because he abuses them in his tragedies (as the poet himself acknowledges, 85; 182);19 more specifically, in her public speech, Mica lists the offences: t8 g>r oátoj =m©j oÙk 1pismÍ tîn kakîn; poà d, oÙc< diab2blhc,, Ópouper 4mbracu e9sj moicotrÒpouj, t>j ¢ndrerastr8aj kalîn, t>j o9nop8paj, t>j prodÒtidaj, t>j l£louj, t>j oÙd5n Øgi2j, t>j m2g, ¢ndr£sin kakÒn; (389-94) Has he not hit us enough with slanders Where has he not denigrated us? In short, does he not do so wherever are spectators, tragedians and choruses, calling us prone to adultery and prone to falling in love with men, drunks, treacherous, garrulous, utter filth and great misfortune to our husbands?

Naturally, the point that women are an evil to mankind (394) is a common observation, widespread in Greek thought, found as early as the misogynistic myth of Pandora in Hesiod.20 But there is more than the usual generalization about women. As in the previous passage from the Frogs, the first and probably most aggravating accusations against Euripides’ portrayal of women concern adultery, referred to by two compounds that are not otherwise found: ‘prone to adultery’ (moichotropous) and ‘inclined to fall in love with men’ (andrerastria).21 Mnesilochus, disguised as a woman, defends Euripides by arguing that women behave much worse than the tragedian suggests. He asks: ‘If he abuses Phaedra, what is that to us?’ (497-8). Afterwards, he continues with the ‘defence’ (499-501): in fact, Euripides did not mention how a woman shows her husband her woven cloak to admire by the light while sending her lover away, with his head veiled, a much more damaging example, which – luckily for women – does not come up in tragedy.22 We want to reconsider here, indeed, Mnesilochus’ question. Why do women in Aristophanic comedy care that Euripides brings Phaedra on the stage and dramatizes female adultery? While women in the Thesmophoriazusae do not protest that the Euripides’ claims about women are untrue,23 or that Mnesilochus’ outrageous inventions could not have taken place, they clearly resent the fact that the tragedian chooses to describe the adulterous women, such as Phaedra, instead of the virtuous, such as Penelope. Scholars have commented on the social ‘truth’ of Mnesilochus’ stories concerning female debaucheries; those stories, of course, are not true but rather a creation of the male discourse.24 But our interest is more

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu specifically linked to a genre-gender perspective. Why are women portrayed as so indignant over the fact that Euripides exposes female ‘shamelessness’ in Old Comedy, a genre in which characters freely display shamelessness? Does not comedy portray shameless women too? Yes and no. While men are often portrayed as adulterous or inclined to love-making,25 topics that prompt verbal obscenities, as Halliwell remarks, ‘no wife in Aristophanes admits to adultery; the closest thing – and it is not very close – is perhaps the innuendo of Lys. 107’.26 In fact, in the Thesmophoriazusae, women are extremely reserved about uttering obscenities (not one obscenity surfaces during their assembly, lines 295-330, or in the account of Euripides’ insults, lines 331-465).27 Why is this so? We know that cultic aischrologia, likely including talk of illicit love, was present, for example, at the women’s festivals of Demeter.28 Was obscenity spoken by women more restricted in Old Comedy than obscenity spoken by men? Indeed, this seems to be the case. In an essay entitled ‘The Language of Athenian Women’, Sommerstein has analyzed obscene language from a gendered perspective in the comedies of Aristophanes.29 He classifies obscene language into primary (unequivocally obscene terms, regarding a ‘sexual or excretory organ, state or activity’) and secondary (euphemisms, which Henderson includes).30 Women (when compared to men) rarely utter obscenities, and, when they do, mostly in the presence of other women and only exceptionally in the presence of men.31 It is perhaps significant that, during the festival of Thesmophoria, women utter ritual aischrologia only in the presence of other women,32 and comic discourse also appears to limit obscene female talk. Specifically, then, women in Aristophanic comedy do not discuss shameless themes (their sexual fantasies and extra-marital affairs) to the extent to which men do, and usually not in the presence of men. It seems thus that female characters maintain in fact a good degree of ‘decency’ (only when compared to male characters, of course) in their speech in comedy while they protest against the indiscretions of the tragedian.33 Finally, in both Aristophanic plays, the worry is that tragedy might reveal something that ought to remain hidden, or ought to remain hidden from men. In the Frogs, the character of Aeschylus suggests that Euripidean tragedy should not depict women like Phaedra because doing so can ‘teach’ bad behaviour; similarly, in the Thesmophoriazusae, Euripides should not depict ‘bad girls’, this time because he alerts the male audience to the dangerous nature of their wives.34 Euripidean heroines who dream of adultery surpass even the brazen comic characters for whom the topic remains mostly untouched and who find it scandalous – especially in the presence of men. If this is the case, however, it seems strange that Euripides is singled out, since tragedy represented adulterous women long before his plays. Certainly, Clytaemnestra, one of the most famous adulterous women, appears already in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon. The affair with Aegisthus, however, is depicted as a fait accompli. In the two versions

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4. Comic Emotions of Euripides’ Hippolytus, as well as in the Stheneboea,35 the heroines are consumed by their illicit passion for a young male, and this passion is discussed at length.36 In the surviving Hippolytus, the Nurse reveals the anatomy of secret female desire and a justification for adultery37 – topics that seem to offend Aristophanic women, because they should remain secret. In complaining about the ‘shamelessness’ of Euripides’ women, the characters of Aristophanes suggest that tragedy might have transgressed not only the ‘normal’ limits of decency but also the amount of indecency allowed to women in comedy. (b) Envy (Schadenfreude) According to Plato’s Philebus (47e-50b), the spectators of comedy experience ‘envy’ (phthonos).38 Let us review the context. Socrates labels several emotions, such as anger, fear, emulation and envy as ‘pains of the soul’ (Phlb. 47e).39 As soon as the interlocutor, Protarchus, concurs with this premise, Socrates suggests that all these painful emotions should produce pleasure as well. He exemplifies with anger and adds that dirges and longings contain pleasure mixed with pains (47e-48a).40 An illustration of the last point is provided: when people watch tragedies, they weep while rejoicing; similarly, comedies trigger a mixture of pain and pleasure in our soul. While Protarchus readily agrees with the mixed pleasures of tragedy, he requests further explanations for the assertions made about comedy. Socrates returns to a previously mentioned painful emotion, envy in the sense of Schadenfreude, which produces the pleasure of delighting in the neighbours’ misfortune (48b). Such pleasure of envy (phthonos) relates to the nature of the ‘laughable’ (geloion). Laughter can be occasioned by other peoples’ misfortunes (may they be neighbours), especially when these troubles occur because of ignorance concerning wealth, physical appearance and wisdom (Phlb. 48c-49a). The targets of our bad feelings fall into two types (49b-c): (1) those who cannot take revenge on us and, therefore, display weakness (this type leads to the ridiculous)41 and (2) those who are capable of taking revenge, display power and frighten us (this type leads to the hateful). Thus, the ignorant weak are ridiculous, while the strong are hateful. Whichever the case, ignorance ought never to appear amusing, since it is always a terrible condition of the soul (49e). This brief account of mixed pleasures in the Philebus provides us with important observations regarding phthonos, envy (Schadenfreude), the only comic emotion named in classical texts. First, the mixed pleasure of comedy derived from this emotion is specifically presented as a counterpart of the mixed pleasure of tragedy. In this dialogue, tragic pleasure appears to be similar to that of dirges and longing, but there is no mention of any specific tragic emotion. We know from the Republic, however, that the emotion related to tragic pleasure is pity. Plato, then, implicitly pairs here pity, the quintessential tragic emotion, leading to tragic pleasure,

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu with envy (Schadenfreude), the comic emotion leading to comic pleasure. While Aristotle does not explicitly link envy to comedy, in his Rhetoric he seems to view phthonos (though the emotion is defined differently from Plato’s Philebus) as somewhat the opposite of pity: envy (phthonos) is a pain brought on by the good fortune of others (Rh. 2.9.1386b16-19),42 whereas pity is a pain brought on by the undeserved misfortune of others (Rh. 2.8.1385b13-15). Secondly, to return to Plato, as in the case of tragic pity in the Republic, Socrates implies in the Philebus that comic envy cannot be contained in the theatrical domain, but is an unwanted emotion that affects spectators in real life. As Socrates says precisely, mixed pleasures (linked to specific emotions) affect us not only in dramas, but in the entire tragedy and comedy of life (Phlb. 50b).43 Why is this so? No explanation is offered for comedy, but perhaps one can be inferred by an analogy with tragedy. In the last Book of the Republic, tragic pity leads to pleasure, which loosens the spectators’ guard over the rational part of the soul and which thus makes people unable to control their desire for lamentation in real life. Similarly, comic envy can lead to pleasure and laughter; thus it encourages spectators to believe that there may be a kind of harmless ignorance. Yet this ignorance is anything but harmless, for it entices people to accept a state of ignorance in their own lives. Several questions, however, remain unanswered after reading the Philebus. Was envy (Schadenfreude) seen as a comic emotion in general, or does Plato here simply construct a parallel for tragedy? Clearly, in both the Republic and the Philebus, Plato tries to demonstrate that the audience’s reactions to comedy and tragedy are similar, so the latter hypothesis is certainly plausible. The evidence for pity as expected response to tragedy (and linked to tragic pleasure) in ancient Athens is overwhelming;44 this obviously is not the case with envy and comedy. Furthermore, the surprised reaction of Protarchus, when Socrates mentions the mixed pleasure of comedy, suggests that this connection between envy (which contains pain and pleasure) and comic pleasure was not obvious to everyone. But there may be more to the association between phthonos and comedy. Some scholars are inclined to believe that a lost part of Aristotle’s Poetics proposed envy as the comic counterpart of tragic pity.45 Yet, there seem to be striking differences between the way in which Plato and Aristotle generally understand envy. While in the Rhetoric Aristotle describes envy as a pain provoked by the good fortune of another, Plato does not offer a formal definition in the Philebus; but, while both Socrates and Protarchus agree (without any explanation) that envy is a pain of the soul (48b), it also arouses the joy.46 The implication in this Platonic dialogue is, perhaps, that envy (phthonos) has two levels; first level (which is never explained but may be assumed): people feel pain when others have more money, beauty or wisdom than they do, but, second level: they feel happy at the thought that others (neighbours, friends) may in fact make a mistake in thinking that they have more than they do (or

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4. Comic Emotions make a mistake that costs them the advantage). At any rate, the envious person, according to Aristotle, is pained by the success of another; but, according to Plato, he is also be gladdened by the prospects of the trouble for the ignorant. Even without speculating about Aristotle, why are the spectators of comedy ‘envious’? One interpretation proposes that the Athenian audiences might have enjoyed seeing prominent political figures (e.g. Cleon) ridiculed in Old Comedy.47 While this view fits Plato’s description of comic envy as joy caused by other people’s (i.e. arrogant politicians) inflated self-image, it does not seem to support the argument regarding ignorance appearing ridiculous in weak people but hateful in powerful people. The pleasure derived from envy that we feel when the weak – and probably socially insignificant – err, when such error seems inconsequential, leads to the ridiculous, and thus to our laughter.48 Perhaps the type of comic envy described in the Philebus fits better the spectator of New Comedy who watches the troubles coming from ignorance of lower class characters:49 the misadventures of such characters do not last, and there is a happy ending after the initial ignorance is surmounted. Although no specific examples ensue, the Philebus presents laughter itself as unsound, for ignorance is never inconsequential and ought never to please us. If comedy is to survive as a genre, then, according to Plato’s Laws (816d-e), it should not be because it makes us laugh, but rather because it can teach us to avoid committing ludicrous acts out of ignorance (di’ agnoian),50 as its characters do. II. New Comedy: moderate emotion Quintilian: ethos of comedy,51 pathos of tragedy In the Institutio Oratoria (1.8.7-8), Quintilian recommends that comedy be placed on the reading list of the young, because it can ‘contribute greatly to eloquence’ (plurimum conferre ad eloquentiam potest), ‘since it is concerned with all types of characters and emotions’ (cum per omnis et personas et adfectus eat). The context in which this statement occurs is a general appraisal of the value of various genres in the education of future orators. Overall, comedy can convey any kind of emotion, and the word used here, adfectus, is the usual Latin term to designate ‘emotion’. Later (6.2.8-24), however, Quintilian uses a different, more specific term, ethos, in reference to the emotion expressed in comedy, which he contrasts with pathos, a term more suitable for tragedy. This comparison serves to explain ethos. Quintilian starts from a rather traditional distinction between pathos, which is understood as emotion (adfectus), and ethos, which can be loosely translated as ‘moral character’ or ‘moral characteristics’ (mores), although it lacks a proper Latin term in his opinion (6.2.8).52 He passes then to what seems to be his own interpretation, in which both pathos and ethos are varieties of emotions:

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu Sed ipsam rei naturam spectanti mihi non tam mores significari videntur quam morum quaedam proprietas; nam ipsis quidem omnis habitus mentis continetur. Cautiores voluntatem complecti quam nomina interpretari maluerunt. Adfectus igitur [pathos] hos concitatos, [ethos] illos mites atque compositos esse dixerunt: in altero vehementes motus, in altero lenes, denique hos imperare, illos persuadere, hos ad perturbationem, illos ad benevolentiam praevalere. Adiciunt quidam ethos perpetuum, pathos temporale esse. (6.2.9-10) But it seems to me, after considering the essence of the matter, that it is not quite ‘morals’ that is meant, but certain attributes of the morals; for the word (mores) even includes all (kinds) of dispositions of the mind. The more careful writers have preferred to explain the sense of the term rather than to translate it into Latin. They therefore explain pathos as describing the more violent emotions and ethos as designating those which are calm and gentle: in the one case the passions are violent, in the other light; the former command, the latter persuade; the former lead to disturbance; the latter to kindness. Some add that ethos is long-lasting, while pathos is momentary.

According to this account, both pathos and ethos can be defined as emotions, but they differ in intensity (violent/calm), effect (producing disturbance/friendly feeling) and duration (momentary/long-lasting). A later observation regarding the duration appears to anticipate the modern distinction between ‘emotion’ (pathos) and ‘emotional disposition’ (ethos). For example, love can be classified as passionate emotion in its initial impulse and as emotional disposition when continuous affection develops between family members; the two notions are similar in nature but different in degree.53 Perhaps the most significant difference lies in the effect produced by ethos and, respectively, pathos: the former leads to harmony, the latter to disturbance. As a consequence of these opposite results, I believe, Quintilian associates pathos with tragedy and ethos with comedy: Diversum est huic quod pathos dicitur quodque nos adfectum proprie vocamus, et, ut proxime utriusque differentiam signem, illud comoediae, hoc tragoediae magis simile. Haec pars circa iram odium metum invidiam miserationem fere tota versatur. (6.2.20) The pathos of the Greeks, which we correctly translate as ‘emotion’, is of a different character, and I could not indicate the nature of the difference better than by saying that ethos rather resembles the emotion represented in comedy and pathos the emotion represented in tragedy. For pathos is almost entirely concerned with anger, dislike, fear, hatred and pity.

In fact, violent or disquieting emotions, such as those listed here under the domain of pathos (anger, hatred, pity), are commonly displayed by tragic characters (often members of the same family); they lead to irreconcilable

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4. Comic Emotions conflicts in tragedies.54 By contrast, ethos pertains to a ‘gentler’ type of emotion that relatives and friends might display in New Comedy: Quod est sine dubio inter coniunctas maxime personas, quotiens ferimus ignoscimus satisfacimus monemus, procul ab ira, procul ab odio. (6.2.14) This kind of ethos should be especially displayed in cases where the persons concerned are intimately connected, whenever we tolerate or pardon any act or offer satisfaction or admonition, in all of such cases there should be no trace of anger or hatred.

In this example ethos relates to situations that are, indeed, reminiscent of the plots of New Comedy, in which family members pardon rather than take revenge on their kin. In fact, Quintilian continues to link ethos to behaviours that characterize relationships between relatives or friends in New Comedy: ethos relates to ‘moderation shown between father and son, tutor and pupil, husband and wife’ (patris adversus filium, tutoris adversus pupillum, mariti adversus uxorem moderatio est, 6.2.14). Similar, though less intense, is the emotion to be displayed when we ask pardon for the errors of the young.55 Tragic emotions, therefore, pertain to familial dissolution, whereas comic emotions lead toward reconciliation, a positive social outcome that can, perhaps, explain the orator’s interest in comedy. Quintilian’s complex analysis of ethos articulates a recurrent idea in Roman literary criticism: comedy (i.e. New Comedy) ought to express a type of emotion that is reminiscent of tragic pathos, albeit a calmer and less destructive type than its tragic counterpart. Gellius and Evanthius: a comic emotion should not become tragic When Roman critics appraise comic writers, they sometimes reflect on the degree to which the expression of emotions in comedy relates to tragedy, and, accordingly, pass on praise or blame. In the Attic Nights, after closely comparing passages from Menander’s Plocium and Caecilius’ adaptation of this play,56 Aulus Gellius favours the Greek comic writer (2.23),57 and explains to a degree his preference by comparing how a comic character voices his emotions in the Greek original and in the Latin version of the play. Gellius provides some background concerning the plot of Plocium as follows: a poor man’s daughter is raped during a religious festival; at the time of the childbirth, a slave, completely unaware of the situation, hears the screams and prayers of the girl in labour; this house-slave reacts to the unusual situation and expresses several emotions.58 Here is Gellius’ evaluation: timet, irascitur, suspicatur, miseretur, dolet. Hi omnes motus eius affectionesque animi in Graeca quidem comoedia mirabiliter acres et illustres, apud Caecilium autem pigra istaec omnia et a rerum dignitate atque gratia vacua sunt. (2.23.18-19)

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu He shows fear, becomes angry and suspicious, shows pity and grief. In the Greek comedy all his movements of the soul and emotions are amazingly precise and glorious, but in Caecilius they are all dull and without any grace and dignity of expression.

Clearly both the character in the Greek comedy and his Latin correspondent show similar emotions: fear, anger, pity and grief. Yet, the manner of presentation differs considerably, and it receives opposite epithets: the same emotions appear to be ‘crisp’ (literally, ‘slender’, acres) and ‘glorious’ or ‘dignified’ (illustres) in Menander’s play, whereas they seem to Gellius ‘dull’ (literally ‘fat’, pigra) and ‘lacking dignity and grace’ (dignitate atque gratia vacua) in Caecilius’ comedy.59 What exactly does this mean? The ‘slender-fat’ (acres-pigra) pair of adjectives suggests that Caecilius’ character might overdo his emotional outburst. However, the opposition of the adjectives ‘glorious’ and ‘lacking dignity’ is more puzzling. Perhaps Gellius considers, in this case, again the ‘right’ language for the situation or even for the comic genre. Indeed, this seems to be the case when we examine Gellius’ next point, a direct and more specific comparison. In Menander, when the slave finds out what happened to his master’s girl, he laments in this way: Alas! thrice wretched (tris kakodaimon) the man who weds, though poor, and even has children. How foolish (alogistos) is the man who keeps no watch over his necessities. If, having met with bad luck (atychêsei), one cannot use his wealth to cover his problems, hit by storms, he lives sharing all grievous things, but no blessings. Thus, while suffering (algôn) on behalf of one man, I warn all people.60

Caecilius’ equivalent lamentation receives rebuke from Gellius: Ad horum autem sinceritatem veritatemque verborum an adspiraverit Caecilius, consideremus. Versus sunt hi Caecili trunca quaedam ex Menandro dicentis et consarcinantis verba tragici tumoris: is demum infortunatus est homo, pauper qui educit in egestatem liberos, cui fortuna et res ut est continuo patet. Nam opulento famam facile occultat factio. (2.23.21) Let us consider whether Caecilius was sufficiently inspired to approach the sincerity and realism of these words. These are the lines of Caecilius, cutting some fragments from Menander, stitching them with the language of tragic bombast: That man, surely, is unfortunate, who, poor, begets children in his poverty. His fortune and his state at once are clear. Wealth hides easily the bad reputation for the rich.

The concrete comparison seems to have shifted focus from a discussion of emotions to a discussion of style, since no specific emotion is named here

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4. Comic Emotions in the Greek original or in Latin. Yet, the speaker in Menander’s comedy indicates that he is suffering (algôn) on behalf of his poor master and others like him. Let us say therefore that the comparison concerns the slave’s expression of sadness for his poor master and for all who are in such sorry plight. Gellius finds the Latin lines to be closer to tragic diction than he considers appropriate and complains about ‘words characteristic of tragic bombast’ (verba tragici tumoris). The word tumor itself denotes excessive growth, linguistic swelling. It can be connected, on the one hand, with the previously mentioned notion of ‘fat’ (pigra, 2.23.19), and, on the other, with the ‘swelling’ (ongkos) often used in reference to the mask of tragedy. Obviously, the same idea is expressed in both Greek and Latin: poverty cannot alleviate the troubles associated with parenthood. Furthermore, in both cases, the lines resemble gnomic statements that often occur in tragedies. Why then does Caecilius’ character sound ‘more tragic’ than Menander’s?61 To modern readers, the answer is not obvious. It is so, perhaps, because Caecilius’ slave is more concise and impersonal than Menander’s or, perhaps, because he generalizes more than does his Greek model, who reminds us that he started from a particular case.62 Regardless of the reasons for Gellius’ critique, an important point emerges: expressions of emotions as well as diction in New Comedy should not be perceived as ‘too’ tragic, though they may be reminiscent of tragedy. Menander is often praised by Roman critics for using the appropriate emotional tone in his comedy, which ought to be tamer than that used in tragedy. Interestingly, an examination of Menander’s comedies reveals in fact frequent allusions to the tragic pathos; his characters voice boisterous emotions that would befit tragic scenes. Samia, for example, ‘subverts’ the expressions of tragic anger (especially between father and son), an emotion with horrific consequences in tragedies, yet with less devastating consequences in this play.63 Niceratus advises Demeas that it is not appropriate to yield to ‘rage’ (orgêi, 461-2). Wrongly assuming that his son fathered the child of his courtesan in his absence, Demeas feels justified to let his anger explode. In fact, we may safely assume that a special comic effect in Menandrean comedy arises from the discrepancy between the reality of the comic plot and the characters’ beliefs, which inadvertently lead them to excessive – though later tempered – agitations of the soul. Thus, Moschion’s supposed ‘crime’ of seducing his father’s lover is described as worse than the incestuous acts of Tereus, Oedipus and Thyestes (495-7), the most famous cases of sexual misconduct in tragedy. Comic characters give disproportionate, ‘tragic’ magnitude to the causes of their emotions and, consequently, feel exaggerated emotions; but those emotions are ‘tempered’ when the initial reasons prove to be mistaken. Indeed, Demeas’ assumptions that provoke his anger in the Samia prove to be wrong. Moschion did not impregnate his father’s courtesan at all, but a neighbour’s daughter whom he intends to marry. While close textual analysis is beyond our purpose here,64 it is essential to note that, by inviting compari-

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu sons with tragedies, Menandrean plays appear to have directly prompted critical descriptions of comic emotion as a tempered version of tragic pathos. In the same vein of critical tradition, Evanthius praises the comedy of Terence in a fourth-century treatise, De fabula, for its decorum, appropriateness, verisimilitude – and not in the least for its accuracy in expressing emotions proper to the genre.65 Specifically, on the subject of the emotions, he notes: Haec cum artificiosissima Terentius fecerit, tum illud est admirandum, quod et morem retinuit, ut comoediam scriberet, et temperavit affectum, ne in tragoediam transiliret. (3.5.29-31) While Terence has accomplished these things magnificently, this feature of his writing should be especially admired, that he both preserved the mores, in order to compose comedy, and calmed down the emotion, not to jump over to tragedy.

Gellius’ rebuke of Caecilius’ style and Evanthius’ praise of Terence rely on the same idea; namely, that emotions in (New) Comedy ought to be expressed in such a way that they do not transgress the genre.66 But what guarantees that these emotions remain ‘comic’, though they may be comparable to their tragic counterparts? Interestingly, a certain ‘moderation’ in the playwright’s description of emotion: as Evanthius puts it, Terence ‘calmed down the emotion’ (temperavit affectum) to prevent it from crossing over to tragedy, while Gellius used the terms ‘crisp’ (acres) and ‘dignified’ (illustres) to refer to the proper comic emotions. Indeed, immediately after the reference to the comic emotions, Evanthius concludes with an emphasis on Terence’s moderation in style, a great virtue, which places his comedy in the middle, between high tragic style and low humour: Illud quoque inter Terentianas virtutes mirabile, quod eius fabulae eo sunt temperamento ut neque extumescat ad tragicam celsitudinem neque abiciantur ad mimicam vilitatem. (5.33-6) Among Terence’s qualities, this is particularly amazing: that his plays contain such moderation that they do not swell to tragic loftiness, nor do they fall into vile humour.

But why is it so important that comic emotions do not fully develop into violent displays? It is perhaps appropriate to consider here the indirect testimony of Cicero regarding humour in oratory. Cicero prefaces his advice to the orators on the use of humour with an inquiry into the nature of laughter (de Orat. 2.58-71).67 The matters listed for examination include the nature of laughter, its source, the appropriateness of humour in

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4. Comic Emotions oratory, the degree to which humour ought to be used in speeches and the different types of ridiculousness. Although Cicero is not interested in comedy per se, but rather in the use of comic elements in rhetorical speeches, he presents an interesting case for our study by separating laughter from the arousal of certain emotions. The topic of the extent to which the laughable elements should be carried by the orator (quatenus autem sint ridicula tractanda oratori) contains a series of restrictions:68 Nam nec insignis improbitas et scelere iuncta nec rursus miseria insignis agitata ridetur: facinorosos maiore quadam vi quam ridiculi volnerari volunt; miseros inludi nolunt, nisi se forte iactant; parcendum autem maxime est caritati hominum, ne temere in eos dicas qui diliguntur. Haec igitur adhibenda est primum in iocando moderatio, itaque ea facillime luduntur quae neque odio magno neque misericordia maxima digna sunt. (2.58.23759.238) For neither great wickedness, especially when linked to crime, nor great misery should be laughed at. People want criminals to be hurt with some greater force than ridicule; they do not want to make fun of the unfortunate, unless perhaps[they laugh at] those who behave arrogantly. You must yield to the kindness of mankind so that you do not speak against those who are loved. Moderation is thus chiefly to be achieved while telling jokes; and those things most easily stir laughter that are worthy neither of great hatred nor of greatest pity.

By extrapolating this observation to comedy, we may infer that stirring certain strong (note the degree here: magno odio, maxima misericordia!) emotions for the characters cannot be compatible with laughter. When comic characters display strong emotions, perhaps they also arouse powerful (or too powerful) emotions, and this prevents the audience from enjoying the play. Roman critics thus seem to have formed clear expectations regarding emotional expressions in New Comedy. Comic emotions resemble the tragic pathê, but they should be tamer in expression and more beneficial in outcome than their tragic counterparts. Comic emotions lead characters to happiness and harmony within drama, while tragic emotions drive characters to dissolution and destruction. As we have seen, ancient testimonies discussing the emotions of New Comedy, unlike those dealing with Old Comedy, concentrate on the internal expressions of emotions and not on the responses of the audiences. Nevertheless, they imply that observing the ‘moderate’ emotions of the comic characters can provide benefits. Quintilian’s connection between ethos and comic emotion appears to have a practical purpose. By understanding the qualitative differences between comic ethos and tragic pathos, the orator can learn how to convey lighter emotional attitudes to an audience and, thus, perhaps, to prompt wiser political actions.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu General conclusions Ancient authors often contrast comic and tragic emotions. It does not follow, however, that comic emotions were regarded as opposites of tragic emotions. In both the Republic and the Philebus, Plato repeatedly emphasizes that comedy, with its emotions, affects the spectators in a manner similar to tragedy. Both tragic pity and comic shamelessness dangerously loosen the hold of the rational soul; both tragedy (through pity) and comedy (through envy-Schadenfreude), offer the spectators mixed pleasures. Expressions of emotions in New Comedy are seen as similar to – yet less intensive than – expressions of emotions in tragedy. Secondly, there is no detailed analysis of the connection between the spectator’s laughter and the emotions aroused by comedy. In the Philebus, Plato suggests that, through phthonos (understood as joy at another’s mishap) the spectators laugh at the apparently harmless ignorance that brings the comic characters into trouble. Finally, comic emotions were linked to ethics. Old Comedy, as Plato often complains, stirs in the audience emotions that are not morally desirable in people’s lives. By contrast, Roman commentators, such as Quintilian, see moral advantages for audiences in the transformation of tragic emotions from wild to mild in New Comedy: as characters seem to ‘temper’ their wilder, tragic affects, so their observers can learn how to imitate this process and thereby become happier human beings. Notes 1. I conventionally separate here Old and New Comedy for the analysis of emotions, although Csapo (2000) argues that these labels are to a great extent artificial and should give way to a different classification. Yet, for lack of better terms to replace the old, I keep the traditional labels here (with the caveat). For a reappraisal of the terms ‘Old’, ‘Middle’ and ‘New’, see also Olson (2007) 22-6. 2. Wierzbicka (1999) 286-92 lists ‘shame-like’ words together with ‘fear-like’ and ‘anger-like’ notions, all these forming linguistic testimonies of universal emotions. At 289, ‘shame’ is generally defined by the following reasoning: ‘people can think something bad about me. I do not want this to happen’ – shame can incorporate thus ‘embarrassment’, ‘shyness’, even ‘respect’. Contemporary English, as Wierzbicka (1999) 109 interestingly notes, has lost the positive connotation of ‘shame’ (i.e. modesty, decency), though it maintained its antonym ‘shamelessness’. Williams (1993) 194 provides a useful summary of the ancient Greek terms that designate various nuances of the concept of ‘shame’. 3. The early hypothesis of Cornford (1914) on the origin of comedy in rituals of fertility has received much criticism; see, for example, Rozik (2002) 49-68 for a review of the objections to Cornford and a reappraisal of ritual theories of Greek comedy; Bowie (1993) has examined how Aristophanic comedy reflects rituals. A nuanced approach to the origin of comedy is proposed by Rothwell (2007), who shows that the assumption that certain elements, such as choruses of animals, always derive from rituals, proves not to be always correct; other useful surveys of the topic are offered by Rusten (2006) and Olson (2007) 2-12. 4. Halliwell (2008) 215-63 provides an excellent discussion, with bibliography.

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4. Comic Emotions 5. Siegel (1987) 77. 6. Rangacharya (1996) xvii-xxiii for a concise introduction to Natyasastra and problems of dating. For a general comparison between Greek and Indian theory of drama, see Gupt (2006). 7. Willli (2002) 10-11 offers a comprehensive review of the scholarly interpretations of obscenity, vulgarity and terms of abuse in Aristophanes and other comic authors. 8. Henderson (1975) 1-29. 9. Robson (2006) 70-94. On other elements of Attic comedy that are similar to the features of carnival laughter analyzed by Bakhtin, such as ugliness, see also Revermann (2006) 145-59. 10. Robson (2006) 91. 11. Heraclit. (B15DK) notes that singing a song to genitals (aidoia, ‘shameful parts’) would have been most shameful, if it had not been done in honour of Dionysus. On this, see Halliwell (2002) 123-4 and (1999) 66-7 for additional ancient testimony (especially Plato and Aristotle) of ritual justifying aischrologia. 12. Carr and Greeves (2006) 165-86 offer a useful and humorous introduction to the question of why we permit offensive material (including obscenity) in today’s comedy. The authors open the chapter with a famous quotation from George Orwell: ‘The aim of a joke is not to degrade the human being, but to remind him that he is already degraded.’ 13. For an earlier similar suggestion, see e.g. Wit-Tak (1968) 358, who notes that a general function of Aristophanic comedy may be to liberate the spectator from social constraints. 14. Yet, in a way, allowing oneself to feel pity presupposes the removal of shame too in the previously mentioned passage on pity: tragedy tricks the spectator into thinking that there is ‘nothing shameful’ (ouden aischron, R. 606b2) in letting their desire for lamentation manifest. 15. For example, gods should not be portrayed as prone to shameful acts, as they often are in the myths created by poets (R. 2.377-8). 16. At times, Aristotle appears to dislike comic vulgarity: he notes, for example, that the uneducated man likes it (EN 1128a17ff.); cf. Ussher (1977) 71-2. However, as Heath (2008) warns, our evidence is insufficient to judge Aristotle’s views on comic obscenity in depth; to a great extent Aristotle takes for granted the presence of abuse and obscenity in Old Comedy. Although obscenity was an expected feature of Old Comedy, sometimes even comic poets seem to have tried to excuse or diminish it: Aristophanes claims that he avoids vulgarity and lowness, unlike his contemporary rivals; cf. Henderson (1975) 9 for discussion and examples. 17. See Heath (1989) for a summary of Aristotle’s discussion of comedy. 18. As Cairns (1993) 306 has well put it: ‘Women’s aidôs is most regularly concerned with the requirements of loyalty to husband or father and freedom from any imputation of sexual impropriety, the best way to avoid any such imputation lying in the limitation of the woman’s opportunity for contact with the opposite sex.’ 19. For Ar.’s Th., I am using the edition of Austin and Olson (2004). Silk (2001) 327 observes: ‘If we turn to Euripides’ actual offence against the women, we encounter a surprising lack of definition about the precise charges.’ Silk notes that Euripidean slanders in the Th. can be summed up in the connection between women and sexuality. 20. Zeitlin’s analysis (1996) 53-72 on this topic remains essential. 21. In their commentary, Austin and Olson (2004) 178 ad loc., point out that these words may be Aristophanic coinage.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu 22. Cowan (2008) suggests ways in which Mnesilochus’ scenario here might allude to Euripides’ Hippolytus Veiled. 23. On women’s adultery as social reality in classical Athens, see Roy (1997). Robson (2008) 179 argues that Mnesilochus makes a convincing ‘woman’ and gives a plausible feminine point of view once he wears women’s clothes. 24. E.g. Zeitlin (1981) 169-217, Slater (2002) 162. Ormand (2009) 66 notes: ‘again, however, we must remember that this is a depiction not of real women, but of men’s fears about women’. 25. E.g. male gods were seen as adulterers (Av. 556-60), old men fantasize about sexual liberty (Av. 137-42). 26. Halliwell (2002) 136; cf. Henderson (1996) 27. 27. Cf. Henderson (1975) 87, discussing Ar.’s Th. and Lys. 28. McClure (1999) 47-52 and O’Higgins (2003) 15-36 offer convenient summaries of the sources describing cultic obscenities at the festivals for Demeter, and interesting discussions of gender and the use of aischrologia in Athens. There is some uncertainty concerning the women allowed to participate in the festivals of Demeter, cf. Winkler (1989) 193-202. However, the participants in the Thesmophoria were expected to be decent women, as Glazebrook (2006) 129, notes, quoting Isaeus (6.48): a law forbade adulterous women, slaves and prostitutes from participating in the festival. 29. Sommerstein (2009) 15-42 ( = (1995) 61-85), especially 31-3 for obscene language. 30. 2009, 31. 31. Sommerstein (2009) 32 counts 75 primary obscenities in the Lys., Th. and Ec.; out of these 55 uttered by men while only 20 by women, although women have leading speeches in these plays. As he concludes at 37: ‘women were expected to avoid grossness of language in speaking to men, who, however, were under no duty to reciprocate such restraint’. For political implications of use of obscenity and gender in Aristophanic comedy, see McClure (1999) 205-48. 32. Cf. McClure (1999) 215-16. 33. Though not directly concerned with the topic of shamelessness, Tzanetou (2002) develops a similar argument by considering how Thesmophoriasuzae evaluates the representation of women in comic and tragic mimesis, as well as the role of gender in domestic and political matters in Athens; see especially pp. 335-7, for the idea that Aristophanes’ parody of women and the mysteries of Thesmophoria is mild and positive, but women find fault with Euripides, who portrays them unfavourably (in ways in which comedy does not do). 34. As Austin and Olson (2004) 175 have put it (regarding Th. 384-432): ‘Mika does not deny the validity of Eur.’s accusations but instead blames him for having revealed the truth to the city’s men.’ 35. For a synopsis and a brief analysis of Stheneboea, see, for example, Sommerstein (2002) 91-2. 36. In her analysis of E.’s Hipp., Craik (1993) 254-61 notes that the language of the play contains overt talk of sexuality and physical feminine desire. She toys with the term ‘comic’ sex in the title of the essay, then notes at 262 that the language of certain Euripidean plays is ‘erotic’, but hesitates to call it ‘obscene’, because the latter term can ‘have unfortunate implications’; she concludes with an emphasis on how difficult it is to characterize such language. 37. Benardete (2000) 86-9 analyzes the steps of the argument for Phaedra’s choice of action: adultery or suicide. Interestingly, in the Euripidean play, Phaedra’s shame – not of her actions but of her thoughts of adultery – compels her to

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4. Comic Emotions desire death; the link between shame and suicide in tragedy is well emphasized by Williams (1993) 75-102. 38. Russell (2005) 189 n. 47, takes the word here as ‘malice’, while he lists other scholars who render the term as ‘envy’. I translate the term as envy here, as Hokenson (2006) 25 puts it, in the sense of Schadenfreude. Indeed, the emotion described in the Philebus resembles our definition of malice (joy at another’s mishap), while the same word in Aristotle designates an emotion that fits our view of envy. I mention the differences between Plato and Aristotle regarding this matter subsequently. 39. The list includes not only emotions per se, by our modern definition, but also ‘longing’, which we might place in the category of desires, and ‘dirge’, which we should perhaps classify as a socialized expression of sorrow. 40. Plato seems very selective here in choosing anger to exemplify his point. Indeed, in Greek culture anger presupposes the pain of an insult and the pleasure of future retaliation; this appears already to be so in the quotation from Homer (Il. 18.108-9) offered as illustration in the Phlb., and it is stated specifically later by Aristotle in the definition of the emotion (Rh. 2.1378a30-1). However, how does fear, which Socrates has just listed, fit this mixture of pleasure and pain? Socrates offers no explanation. 41. Two elements in this passage from the Philebus seem to be in agreement with the later Aristotelian definition of the ‘laughable’ (Po. 1449a32-5): the inability to produce harm and the link to some kind of error. 42. Konstan (2006) 111-13 provides a subtle analysis of ‘envy’ (phthonos) as an emotion similar, yet slightly different from ‘indignation’ (to nemesan) in Arist.’s Rh.: although the two are related, envy is pain felt at another’s good fortune (not necessarily because the person is undeserving), whereas indignation is pain felt at another’s undeserved good fortune (cf. pity felt for the undeserved misfortune). 43. As Benardete (1993) 60, with n. 109 observes, this is the first time the two dramatic genres characterize life itself. 44. Cf. Heath (1987) 11-36. 45. Cooper (1922) 60-98 proposes anger and envy as the pair of emotions that Aristotle could have associated with comedy to balance the pity and fear of tragedy. For a lucid reappraisal of scholarly speculations on the comic emotions in Aristotle, see Halliwell (1998) 275 n. 33. 46. Kahn (1996) 395 calls the description of envy (phthonos) in the Philebus ‘rather artificial’ and dominated by Plato’s interest in the idea of mixed pleasure. 47. Sutton (1994) 69-94; 115-18, using Cleon specifically for an example, proposes several possible ‘bad feelings’ (including anxiety) that the ancient spectator might release while watching comedy. He also attempts to analyze the psychology of enjoyment at the expense of another, from a Freudian perspective. 48. Here people’s mistaken judgments about themselves do not have serious consequences in order to produce laughter. This again seems to concur with Aristotle’s view that comic error is not destructive. For a useful comparison between the comic and tragic hamartia in the Poetics, see, for example, Janko (1987) 79, ad loc. (49a34). 49. For this suggestion, see Russell (2005) 189-90, with bibliography. 50. Restrictions for comic mimesis remain, however: the performers ought to be slaves and foreigners, never free citizens (Lg. 816e). Palumbo (2001) 101 emphasizes the positive force of fear/reverence that should help the spectators of comedy learn ‘the serious’ from the counter example of ‘the ludicrous’ in this passage from the Laws.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu 51. In the following section, I am not transliterating êthos from Greek, but using the Latin version of the term, ethos, so the long vowel will remain unmarked. 52. Gill (1984) places the comparison between pathos and ethos in the rhetorical and critical tradition already found in Aristotle (Po. 24.1459b13-15), and continued by Cicero, Quintilian and Dionysius of Halicarnassus. 53. quin illud adhuc adicio, pathos atque ethos esse interim ex eadem natura, ita ut illud maius sit, hoc minus, ut amor pathos, caritas ethos (6.2.12). 54. On the frequency and importance of plots based on conflicts among the kin in Greek tragedy, see Belfiore (2000). 55. Sunt et illa ex eadem natura, sed motus adhuc minoris, veniam petere adulescentiae, defendere amores (6.2.15). 56. Gellius presents his judgment on Caecilius and Menander as a result of a group reading, perhaps during a party; on this, see Handley (2002) 170-1 and Gunderson (2009) 142-3. 57. On the origin and development of the comparative literary criticism that Gellius adopts, see Vardi 1996 and Jensen 1997. Holford-Strevens (2003) 232-7 generally presents Gellius’ critical methods and interests in epic, lyric and dramatic poetry. Overall, in comparisons between Greek and Latin models, Gellius prefers the original, as Vardi (1996, 503-7) has noted. Nevertheless, occasionally, Roman imitations are found to be pleasant, e.g. Noct. Att. 9.9, Virgil’s (Ecl. 9.23-5) imitation of Theocritus (Id. 3.3-5). Beyond the literary preferences, Keulen (2009) 24-35 argues that Gellius does not favour the Greeks, but inclines toward the Roman way of education and cultural patronage and surpasses the Greek or Roman alternatives offered by his predecessors. 58. A fuller outline of the plot of the Plocium is provided by Duckworth (1994) 47. A young man seduced a girl and was later engaged to her. Neither realized that they had met previously, and that the man impregnated his fiancée. An ugly, rich wife suspected her husband, the father of a young man, of keeping the young woman as a mistress. The birth of the baby postpones the wedding of the young couple, but a token (necklace) prompts the recognition scene between the young man and woman. 59. Clearly these terms were invested with aesthetic connotations already, e.g. Callimachus’ prologue to Aetia (23-4), Apollo recommends that the poet fatten the sacrificial victim but keep the Muse slender. 60. Out of space considerations, I am only including the translation and some Greek key-terms. 61. According to Horace it is reported (dicitur, Epist. 2.1.57) that ‘Caecilius prevails through seriousness’ (vincere Caecilius gravitate, 2.1.59), while Terence wins through his skill, art (arte), a term that can certainly suggest tragic grandeur in style. Brink (1982) 110 connects Horace’s reference to gravitas to a fragment from Varro (fr. 3 Skutsch), in which the Caecilius was praised for his ability to arouse emotions; Varro (Men. 399 Buecheller), like Horace, credits each of the famous Roman comic writers with some special talent: Caecilius is best in creating plots (argumentis), Terence is best when it comes to characters (ethesin), Plautus shines in conversations (sermonibus). 62. Albrecht (1997) 211 believes that social realities in Rome caused Caecilus to give expression to ‘tragic pathos’; in this particular case, the Roman playwright emphasizes more the contrast between the rich and the poor parent: ‘Caecilus’ manner here is harsher and more accusatory than Menander’s. In the last line Roman ideas are in play (factio).’ 63. On anger in the Samia, see Groton 1987 and, most extensively, Iversen

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4. Comic Emotions (1998) 166-98. Iversen (1998) 172 lists the instances in which references to anger and madness are found throughout the play: the orgê root (six times); chalepainô (five times); mania (four times), etc. 64. Konstan/Dutsch (above) offer a more detailed discussion of the emotions displayed in this Menandrean play. 65. Carlson (1984) 26-7, for example, places Evanthius’ De fabula in the tradition of classical Roman literary criticism (Horace, Quintilian, Cicero) and compares it to Donatus’ contemporary treatise, De comoedia. 66. Donatus also recommends the removal of this (kind of tragic) emotion from comedy (hic adfectus a comoediis removedus est, ad Phorm. 7). On Evanthius’ and Donatus’ critical judgments of Plautus and Terence, see Bianco (2007) 55-6, with earlier bibliography. 67. For a great introduction to Cicero’s theoretical and practical approaches to humour, see Corbeill (1996) 3-13. 68. On possible connections between Cicero’s discussion of humour in De Oratore and the Tractatus Coislinianus, see Grant (1948). Fantham (2006) 192-3 provides the broader context of the problem raised here: the (appropriate) limits of humour. It is interesting to note that, while Cicero emphasizes that the orator should not mock those who are too weak or too strong, he finds nothing wrong with mockery of deformity (diformitas) and ugliness (turpitudo), the latter understood as a subcategory of the shameful that is not harmful; cf. Aristotle’s definition of the laughable (to geloion, Po. 1449a33).

Bibliography Albrecht, Michael von. 1997. A History of Roman Literature: from Livius Andronicus to Boethius, with Special Regard to Its Influence on World Literature; revised by Gareth Schmeling and by the author, vol. 1. New York: Brill. Austin, Colin and S. Douglas Olson (eds). 2004. Aristophanes Thesmophoriazusae. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Belfiore, Elizabeth. 2000. Murder Among Friends: Violation of Philia in Greek Tragedy. New York: Oxford University Press. Benardete, Seth. 1993. The Tragedy and Comedy of Life. Plato’s Philebus, Translated with Commentary. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Benardete, Seth. 2000. The Argument of the Action: Essays on Greek Poetry and Philosophy, ed. with an introduction by Ronna Burger and Michael Davis. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Bianco, Maurizio M. 2007. Interdum Vocem Comoedia Tollit. Paratragedia ‘al Femminile’ nella Commedia Plautina. Bologna: Patron. Bowie, A.M. 1993. Aristophanes: Myth, Ritual and Comedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Brink, C.O. 1982. Horace on Poetry, Book 2. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cairns, Douglas. 1993. Aidôs: The Psychology and Ethics of Honour and Shame in Ancient Greek Literature. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Carlson, Marvin. 1984. Theories of the Theatre: A Historical and Critical Survey, From the Greeks to the Present. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Carr, Jimmy and Greeves, Lucy. 2006. Only Joking. What’s So Funny About Making People Laugh? New York: Gotham Books. Corbeill, Anthony. 1996. Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cornford, Francis M. 1914. The Origin of Attic Comedy. London: E. Arnold.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu Cooper, Lane. 1922. An Aristotelian Theory of Comedy, with an Adaptation of the Poetics, and a Translation of the Tractatus Coislinianus. New York: Brace and Company. Cowan, R. 2008. ‘Nothing to Do With Phaedra? Aristophanes, Thesmophoriazusae 497-501.’ CQ 58: 315-19. Craik, Elizabeth. 1993. ‘Tragic Love, Comic Sex?’ In Tragedy, Comedy and the Polis. Papers from the Greek Drama Conference Nottingham, 18-20 July 1990, ed. Alan Sommerstein et al., 253-62. Bari: Levante Editori. Csapo, Eric. 2000. ‘From Aristophanes to Menander? Genre Transformation in Greek Comedy.’ In Matrices of Genre: Authors, Canons, and Society, ed. Mary Depew and Dirk Obbink, 115-34. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Duckworth, George E. 1994. The Nature of Roman Comedy: A Study in Popular Entertainment; with a Foreword and Bibliographical Appendix by Richard Hunter. 2nd edn. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Fantham, Elaine. 2006. The Roman World of Cicero’s De Oratore. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gill, Christopher. 1984. ‘The Ethos/Pathos Distinction in Rhetorical and Literary Criticism.’ CQ 34: 149-66. Glazebrook, Allison. 2006. ‘The Bad Girls of Athens. The Image and Function of Hetairai in Judicial Oratory.’ In Prostitutes and Courtesans in the Ancient World, ed. Christopher A. Faraone and Laura K. McClure, 125-38. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Grant, Leonard W. 1948. ‘Cicero and the Tractatus Coislinianus.’ AJP 69: 80-6. Groton, Anne. 1987. ‘Anger in Menander’s Samia.’ AJP 108: 437-43. Gunderson, Erik. 2009. Nox Philologiae: Aulus Gellius and the Fantasy of the Roman Library. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Gupt, Bharat. 1994. Dramatic Concepts: Greek and Indian. A Study of the Poetics and the Natyasastra. New Delhi: D.K. Printworld. Edmonds, John M. 1957. The Fragments of Attic Comedy after Meineke, Bergk, and Kock. Leiden: Brill. Halliwell, Stephen. 1991. ‘Comic Satire and Freedom of Speech in Classical Athens.’ JHS 111: 48-70. Halliwell, Stephen. 1998. Aristotle’s Poetics. With a New Introduction by the Author. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 2002. ‘Aristophanic Sex: The Erotics of Shamelessness.’ In The Sleep of Reason: Erotic Experience and Sexual Ethics in Ancient Greece and Rome, ed. Martha C. Nussbaum and Juha Sihvola, 120-42. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Halliwell, Stephen. 2008. Greek Laughter: A Study of Cultural Psychology from Homer to Early Christianity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Handley, Eric. 2002. ‘Acting, Action and Words in New Comedy.’ In Greek and Roman Actors. Aspects of an Ancient Profession, eds. Pat Easterling and Edith Hall, 165-88. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Heath, Malcolm. 1987. The Poetics of Greek Tragedy. London: Duckworth. Heath, Malcolm. 1989. ‘Aristotelian Comedy.’ CQ 39: 344-54. Heath, Malcolm. 2008. ‘Aristotle on Comedy’ Technosophia: 1-5. http://www.leeds.ac.uk/classics/heath/Aristotle%20on%20comedy.pdf. Henderson, Jeffrey. 1975. The Maculate Muse: Obscene Language in Attic Comedy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Henderson, Jeffrey (tr. and ed.). 1996. Three Plays by Aristophanes: Staging Women. New York: Routledge.

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4. Comic Emotions Hokenson, Jan W. 2006. The Idea of Comedy. History, Theory, Critique. Madison [NJ]: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. Holford-Strevens, Leofranc. 2003. Aulus Gellius: An Antonine Scholar and his Achievement, rev. edn. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Iversen, Paul A. 1998. Menander and the Subversion of Tragedy. PhD dissertation, OSU. Janko, Richard. 1987. Aristotle Poetics I with the Tractatus Coislinianus. A Hypothetical Reconstruction of Poetics II. The Fragments on Poets. Indianapolis: Hackett. Jensen, Jens P. 1997. ‘Aulus Gellius als Literaturkritiker: Impressionist oder Systematiker? Versuch einer Aufstellung seiner literaturkritischen Werttypologie.’ C&M 48: 359-88. Kahn, Charles. 1996. Plato and the Socratic Dialogue. The Philosophical Use of a Literary Form. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Keulen, Wytse. 2009. Gellius the Satirist. Roman Cultural Authority in Attic Nights. Leiden, Boston: Brill. Konstan, David. 2006. The Emotions of the Ancient Greeks: Studies in Aristotle and Classical Literature. Toronto: Toronto University Press. O’Higgins, Laurie. 2003. Women and Humor in Classical Greece. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. McClure, Laura. 1999. Spoken like a Woman: Speech and Gender in Athenian Drama. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Olson, Douglas S. 2007. Broken Laughter: Select Fragments of Greek Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ormand, Kirk. 2009. Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Westport, CN: Praeger. Palumbo, Lidia. 2001. Eros, Phobos, Epithymia: Sulla natura dell’ emozione in alcuni dialoghi di Platone. Naples: Loffredo. Rangacharya, Adya. 1996. The Natyasastra. English Translation with Classical Notes. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Publishers. Revermann, Martin. 2006. Comic Business. Theatricality, Dramatic Technique and Performance Contexts of Aristophanic Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robson, James. 2006. Humor, Obscenity and Aristophanes. Tübingen: Narr. Robson, James. 2008. ‘Aristophanes on How to Write Tragedy.’ In Lost Dramas of Classical Athens, ed. Fiona McHardy et al., 173-88. Reprinted (first edition 2005). Exeter: University of Exeter Press. Rothwell, Kenneth S. 2007. Nature, Culture, and the Origins of Greek Comedy: A Study of Animal Choruses. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Roy, J. 1997. ‘An Alternative Sexual Morality for Classical Athenians.’ G&R 44: 11-27. Rozik, Eli. 2002. The Roots of Theatre: Rethinking Ritual and Other Theories of Origin. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press. Russell, Daniel C. 2005. Plato on Pleasure and the Good Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rusten, Jeffrey S. 2006. ‘Who Invented Comedy? The Ancient Candidates for the Origins of Comedy and the Visual Evidence.’ AJP 127: 37-66. Siegel, Lee. 1987. Laughing Matters: Comic Tradition in India. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Silk, Michael. 2002. Aristophanes and the Definition of Comedy. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Dana LaCourse Munteanu Slater, Niall W. 2002. Spectator Politics: Metatheatre and Performance in Aristophanes. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sommerstein, Alan H. 2002. Greek Drama and Dramatists. London: Routledge. Sommerstein, Alan H. 2009. Talking about Laughter: And Other Studies in Greek Comedy. Oxford/New York: Oxford University Press. Chapter 1 discussed here, ‘The Language of Athenian Women,’ 15-42. (First published in 1995, Lo spettacolo delle voci, ed. Francesco de Martino and Alan Sommerstein, 61-85. Bari: Levante.) Sutton, Dana F. 1994. The Catharsis of Comedy. Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers. Tzanetou, Angeliki. 2002. ‘Something to Do with Demeter: Ritual and Performance in Aristophanes’ Women at the Thesmophoria.’ AJP 123: 329-67. Ussher, R.G. 1977. ‘Old Comedy and “Character”: Some Comments.’ G&R 24: 71-9. Vardi, Amiel D. 1996. ‘Diiudicatio Locorum: Gellius and the History of a Mode in Ancient Comparative Criticism.’ CQ 46: 492-514. Wierzbicka, Anna. 1999. Emotions Across Languages and Cultures. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Willi, Andreas. 2002. ‘The Language of Greek Comedy: Introduction and Bibliographical Sketch.’ In The Language of Greek Comedy, ed. A. Willli, 1-33. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Bernard. 1993. Shame and Necessity. Berkeley: University of California Press. Winkler, John. 1989. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece. New York: Routledge. Wit-Tak, Thalien de. 1968. ‘The Function of Obscenity in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae and Ecclesiazusae.’ Mnemosyne 21: 357-65. Zeitlin, Froma. 1981. ‘Travesties of Gender and Genre in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae.’ In Reflections of Women in Antiquity, ed. Helene P. Foley, 169-217. New York: Gordon and Breach Science Publishers. Zeitlin, Froma. 1996. Playing the Other: Gender and Society in Classical Greek Literature. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

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5

Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim: Remorse and the Opacity of Female Desire* Laurel Fulkerson ‘The great question ... which I have not been able to answer ... is, “What does a woman want?”’ Freud once said.1 Ancient writers ask a similar question about Helen, who serves as a focal point for male anxieties about female desire, and they have the same difficulty with it as Freud did. For Helen, the question is simply unanswerable, in part because all of our texts but one treat the story of Helen only after she has already arrived in Troy. Some have suggested that this is because, like Freud, these authors did not comprehend female subjectivity. This may well be true, but it may also derive from the difficulty of portraying such a key moment in the history of desire. Be that as it may, I wish in this chapter to explore what I hope will be a more fruitful avenue, the subject, not of what a woman, or Helen, wants, but rather of how it has often been in women’s interests to veil their own desires and emotions, and how some of the texts about Helen have colluded in that project, enabling her inner life to remain obscure. I suggest that Helen is most successful precisely where her agency is most opaque: through a series of emotional performances, she preserves her reputation while simultaneously convincing her audience not that she has made the right or wrong choice, but that she has made none at all. The results both reinforce the traditional portrayal of Paris and show it in a new light. The opacity of Helen’s choice derives directly from the fact that she is a woman.2 Because much of the ancient world was structured around the dichotomy between male/ public/active and female/private/passive, nearly any decision made by a woman could be seen as problematic, particularly if it was viewed as having larger, public implications. This is all the more so because the vast majority of our sources are men, who often have little access to the reality of women’s lives. So for them, women become a category, Woman, which is rendered incomprehensible by its complexity. We see this nowhere more clearly than in the case of Helen, alternately goddess and whore: even when she is exonerated of blame, suspicion clings to her. It is not simply that ancient men did not trust women; rather, their thought structures seem to have rendered any woman who made decisions, even those about her own person, into a quasi-man.3 The fact that

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Laurel Fulkerson Helen might have freely chosen to leave her husband is deeply troubling, the more disturbing the better she is able to dissemble her desire. But, with one key exception (Ovid’s Heroides 16 and 17), the authors who discuss Helen do not portray her as she makes her decision, but only retrospectively. The result is a series of narratives that obscure both her agency and her desire, and this move both serves dominant patriarchal interests by making women’s desire invisible and monstrous, and redounds to Helen’s own advantage, for she has everything to gain by rendering herself opaque. I therefore examine how the uncertainty surrounding Helen can be seen as a result of her own deliberate strategy, in particular how her expressions of remorse and refusal to express it further exonerate her from the guilt accruing to her as the cause of the Trojan War. The story of Helen is well-known, so I offer only a brief summary.4 Helen, the most beautiful woman in the world, was married to Menelaus after his victory in some kind of competition among her numerous suitors. In many versions of the story, the other suitors swore to come to her husband’s aid should anyone not honour the result of the competition. After her wedding (long enough after for her to have given birth to a daughter, Hermione, and probably much longer), the Trojan prince Paris came to Sparta and left with her and, in some versions, with quite a lot of material possessions as well. But it was not merely Helen’s reputation for beauty that drew Paris – he had been appointed the arbiter of a beauty contest among the three Olympian goddesses, Hera, Athena and Aphrodite, each of whom promised him a reward appropriate to her attributes in return for victory. Aphrodite promised him Helen; he took this bribe, declared Aphrodite the winner, and sailed to Sparta to pick up his prize. The couple sail to Troy, whereupon the Greeks come after them and wage war for ten years. Once the Greeks have sacked Troy, Helen is returned to her proper husband, who in some variants of the story plans to put her to death but is stopped in his tracks at the sight of her. A minority strand of the myth features a virtuous Helen who has not run off; rather, she has been replaced by an eidôlon, an image or statue of herself, which was what Paris took. In this variant, Helen remains chastely in Egypt waiting for her husband to claim her. The story provides ample room for authorial innovation, especially in the matter of Helen’s decision-making; among the possibilities are a kidnapped Helen, a husband-abandoning Helen, a Helen somewhere in between, a husband-abandoning but soon regretful Helen, a wholly unrepentant Helen, and a wholly innocent Helen. Helen’s choice, although mythical, is crucial, for the Greeks considered the Trojan War to be the most important event of history, Thucydides 1.9-11 notwithstanding. Her action brought with it many consequences, and modern notions of causality might find her responsible for some of those consequences, particularly if they could reasonably have been foreseen (as, in some versions, the attack by the Greeks in fulfilment of their

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim oath was). But ancient views of decision-making, as we have seen, are less clear about where responsibility lies, and Helen’s gender renders the question immensely more complicated for our sources. In Helen’s case, the decision often serves as the touchstone by which all women are to be judged and so, perhaps unsurprisingly, there are as many possible answers as there are authors treating the subject.5 Some of our sources see Helen as a vixen, some as victim. These two positions implicitly stake opposite claims about Helen’s subjectivity – for if she is a victim then she is by definition innocent, whereas if she is a vixen then she can even be seen as the seducer of Paris, as some of the sources suggest. Such behaviour on the part of women is generally viewed as monstrous, but the hostility expressed toward Helen is regularly tempered by the assertion of excuses. Further, some of our sources also suggest that Helen is both vixen and victim, thus collapsing the two normally incompatible categories into one another. I shall suggest that in some cases, this peculiar move may be the result of Helen’s own manipulation of her audience, for she automatically gains by a narrative that leaves open the possibility of her innocence.6 As I shall show, she gains sympathy particularly through her deployment of the emotion of remorse, but there are also texts in which she – again deliberately – chooses not to express remorse, and here as well her strategy succeeds.7 Helen is discussed by an extremely large number of authors, particularly Greek ones. I concentrate on those works in which Helen herself expresses a retrospective opinion about her responsibility for the Trojan War, including one text that takes us back to the moment of decision, but which is clearly written with an eye to the question of her future reputation.8 The versions treated here, at greater or less length, include the Iliad, two plays of Euripides, a speech by Gorgias, and a poem by Ovid. My chosen texts have the virtue of exemplifying two general trends in the Helen myth, which tend either to deny Helen’s agency, in a sympathetic or unsympathetic manner, or to paint her as wholly amoral but inescapably alluring. At the same time, my focus on Helen’s subjectivity is perhaps misleading, as she herself seeks to occlude the suggestion that she is anything but a victim. There are thus two conflicting impulses in my readings of Helen, reflecting the two strategies our sources employ: she either deploys remorse as a way of reintegrating herself into her community, or very conspicuously does not do so, instead deflecting the responsibility for her actions onto others, most prominently Paris and the gods, but sometimes even Hecuba, Priam and Menelaus. When she makes this move, however, it also serves to demonstrate her membership in a different kind of community, that of innocent but outraged bystanders. From her first appearance in literature, in Homer’s Iliad, Helen is a deeply ambiguous figure. In the epic, as many have noted, Helen is sometimes blamed for causing the Trojan War; peculiarly, however, that blame is always voiced by her and not by the narrator or any other

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Laurel Fulkerson character in the poem. In fact, even as they wish she would leave, the Trojans explicitly claim that they cannot blame those who would fight to have her: ‘there is no nemesis that the Trojans and well-greaved Achaeans suffer these woes for a long time for such a woman’ (oÙ n2mesij, Trîaj ka< 1ãknˇmidaj ,Acaio)j / toiÍd, ¢mf< gunaik< pol)n crÒnon ¥lgea p£scein, 3.156-7).9 In the epic, Helen seems to accept some degree of responsibility for her adultery, perhaps hinting that she left her husband willingly, but she never admits this unambiguously,10 and neither Greeks nor Trojans ever blame her for the war. Their unwillingness to blame her is partly due to the Homeric habit of ‘double motivation’11 but it cannot be wholly so, as Paris is held responsible for the larger consequences of his actions (Il. 7, 14, 29); this difference between them is crucial. In her first appearance in the poem, when she goes to the city walls to see the battle, Helen presents herself as willing to assume responsibility for her actions via the attribution of blame to herself.12 She claims to wish she had died when she left home:13 ‘Would that wretched death had appealed to me when I followed your son here, leaving my bed and my relatives and my beloved daughter and my girlish companions’ (éj Ôfelen q£natÒj moi ¡de√n kakÒj, [ppÒte deàro / u;2; sù 0pÒmhn, q£lamon gnwtoÚj te lipoàsa / pa√d£ te thlug2thn, ka< Ñmhlik8hn 1rateinˇn, 3.173-5). Lipousa, and, to a lesser extent, hepomên, suggest that she left willingly; in keeping with this interpretation is the fact that she regularly expresses regret for the consequences of her behaviour (see especially 3.180, where she calls herself kynôpidos, ‘dog-faced’).14 Yet somehow this acknowledgement of responsibility does not seem to result in others blaming Helen: in fact, it has precisely the opposite function, as we have already seen with the Trojan men, and as also occurs with Priam, who at 3.164-5 had absolved Helen of responsibility for the war. As many critics note, Helen is exquisitely sensitive to public opinion about herself: she knows that people disapprove of her, and she reflects that disapproval back to them, which causes them to become more approving.15 Later in Book 3, the poem offers a dramatic excuse for Helen, in the person of Aphrodite, who makes an appearance explicitly to show her power over Helen. After a duel between Paris and Menelaus, Aphrodite rescues Paris and returns him to his room (3.373-83). She then appears to Helen and instructs her to go to him. To the goddess’ command, Helen responds by suggesting that Aphrodite herself go to him if she finds him attractive; for her own part, she refuses to share Paris’ bed, because it would be shameful (literally, ‘causing nemesis’), and all the Trojan women would blame her (ke√se d, 1gën oÙk e!mi, nemmeshtÕn d2 ken e∏h, / ke8nou porsan2ousa l2coj; Trwa< d2 m, Ñp8ssw / p©sai mwmˇsontai, 3.410-12). At this, Aphrodite grows angry and threatens her, and Helen, frightened (eddeisen, 3.418), does her bidding. It is not clear from this scene whether Helen has only now come to regret her decision or whether this is a repeated vignette between mortal

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim and goddess, but either way most readers feel both sympathy and admiration for her. As sometimes occurs in ancient literature, Helen’s remorse is used to demonstrate either moral competence or moral growth:16 she knows her behaviour has been shameful, and she is accordingly ashamed. As Groten notes, the scene itself seems designed to reference some original interaction between Aphrodite and Helen, and thus it suggests that we cannot rightly blame Helen for her inability to resist the goddess, for Aphrodite is omnipotent: Helen can never have had a real choice in the matter.17 Helen, like us but seemingly unlike Paris – for whom the question never arises – lives in a world not wholly of her choosing, and her behaviour underlines the difficulty of human life, for her choice is not free but she must still face the consequences of it. In this, she is reminiscent of Achilles, and such a comparison can only redound to her credit. Yet at the same time, the very forwardness of Helen’s speech to the goddess may raise suspicions about her claim to powerlessness, for not even Achilles dares to speak to gods so freely; Helen’s speech may indicate the intimacy of their relationship18 rather than her own frustration. And, if Helen is unlike Paris in her careful attention to public opinion, she is like him in enjoying impunity for her acts. To some suspicious readers,19 Helen’s inner life remains obscure: she refuses to go to Paris’ bed, but does so nonetheless. In Worman’s reading, this scene is nothing but a performance, allowing Helen to publicly distance herself from both Aphrodite and Paris. Is she really forced to do so, or is she merely acting out her own unwillingness in front of an audience? Does she, knowing how the scene will end, take this opportunity to register her dissent and shunt responsibility onto Aphrodite? The fact that this scene may replicate a previous, more decisive, interaction with Aphrodite makes it all the more important to our judgment of Helen. By enacting her own, perhaps feigned, reluctance, Helen can simultaneously continue to enjoy Paris’ company and receive credit for better impulses. Paris, of course, is not portrayed – least of all by Helen – as having better impulses. Through her disagreement with Aphrodite and also her self-blaming speech to Priam, Helen reaffirms that she is part of the community, and at the same time she skilfully deflects responsibility for her second marriage onto Aphrodite and also, implicitly, onto Paris. In Iliad 6 Helen is more explicit about her dissatisfaction and innocence, but here too she exhibits remorseful behaviour.20 During a conversation with Hector at which Paris is present, Helen speaks slightingly of her husband, deliberately setting herself apart from him on moral grounds.21 She claims to wish she had died on the day she was born or, failing that, that she had a better husband than Paris, one with greater sensitivity to his position; alas, Paris lacks this ability (6.345-53; again the key word nemesis is used). By disassociating herself from Paris, who is (she suggests) genuinely responsible for the war but who refuses to accept that fact, Helen shows that she is more Trojan than he, that she under-

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Laurel Fulkerson stands the norms of his community. Neither she nor the Trojan elders approve of his behaviour, but they must all put up with it.22 The emphasis on the difference between the two lovers is surely deliberate on the part of the poet (or, as I would suggest, Helen), and suggests that Helen is being portrayed as a more fully moral individual than Paris, because she is able to understand the larger contexts of her actions, even where those actions were constrained. Paris, on the other hand, comes off badly, as he is consistently characterized in the Iliad as thinking of nothing but his own pleasure.23 Never does he apologize, never does he show cognizance that his behaviour has effects for others. It may well be the case that he does not need to, that his own status in the community is so secure that he does not worry about it, but the disjunction between the behaviour of the couple is noteworthy. Kakridis reads the Iliad’s ambiguous presentation of Helen as evidence of different stages in the myth’s development, the reconciliation of which should not trouble us,24 but most readers are indeed troubled. In some places, Helen manifests the kind of repentance we would expect of her if she were guilty, but she never unambiguously accepts responsibility for causing the war, and the presumption of much of the rest of the poem is that she has not been consulted and that Paris bears most, if not all of, the blame.25 It is difficult to determine whether her emotion is genuine or merely expeditious, and we may be surprised by the divorce of emotion (real or feigned) from responsibility. In any case, Helen manages both to acknowledge that she is partly responsible and simultaneously to disavow all responsibility by pointing the finger at the guilty parties; she thus portrays herself sympathetically, as the innocent victim of Paris and Aphrodite who nonetheless has searched her conscience to discover any way she might have been at fault. In the three scenes of the poem discussed here,26 Helen displays a keen awareness of her role in the war, and a regret that many critics find becoming.27 At the same time, however, this portrait of Helen as (mostly) blameless need reflect nothing more than Helen’s own skill in the careful depiction of herself.28 As Helen herself notes, the women of Troy all hate her, and she must know that her safety lies with the men. It is therefore to her advantage to state as clearly as she can without being explicit that she is genuinely virtuous, and so worth fighting for, and also to pay especial attention to her standing among the warriors of Troy, given that she is an ‘uninvited guest.’29 Even in her interaction with Aphrodite, usually read sympathetically, her behaviour has the qualities of a carefully staged performance. In Book 6 too, Helen is at some pains to portray herself as having no authority, as merely an object to be acted upon.30 Helen’s strategy is twofold and uniform: she suggests that none of this is really her fault, and makes clear whom she blames (Paris and Aphrodite) but also recognizes that there may be residual blame attached to her, which she accepts as a sign of her identification with the values of her

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim (adoptive) community. So her displays of remorse serve a larger goal, of reaffirming her own morality in the face of challenges to it.31 For the most part, the Iliad treats Helen with great sympathy even if (or because) the question of her responsibility is deferred or occluded. This may be a result of Helen’s own skill, or may be Homer’s way of acknowledging her responsibility while allowing her to remain relatively innocent. For the poet, it also avoids the uncomfortable question of why the Trojans fight over her, for presumably if they did not think Helen was worth it, they might simply have given her back to the Greeks and ended the war (in fact, a duel between Menelaus and Paris, which would do precisely this, is attempted in Iliad 3, but it is – and must be – inconclusive).32 Through indeterminacy, Helen remains safe: by accepting blame, she proves that she belongs, but by hinting that she is not to blame, she gains additional sympathy. Helen does not speak in Gorgias’ Encomium of Helen, but the work is likely to have been influential on Euripides’ portrayal of Helen in the Troades, so merits brief treatment here.33 Gorgias of Leontini, a Sophist active in Athens after 427, wrote the Encomium in the 410s. He claimed to teach people to speak persuasively; he seems to have assumed that students would use these skills to benefit others but in Athens at least he faced the suspicion that his pupils would benefit only themselves.34 We have only a fraction of Gorgias’ writings, but a number of fragments suggest that he was deliberately provocative in any number of ways. The Encomium of Helen, written in this vein, says that it will exculpate its subject of all guilt not only for the Trojan War, but for her original decision; the result of Gorgias’ speech is to lay the blame for the kidnap of Helen on the gods, and also on Paris, although this latter happens only at some cost to logic. Gorgias argues that Helen cannot be held responsible for her journey to Troy for one of four reasons, each of which renders her incapable of choice. She left her husband either (1) by the will of Fate or necessity and/or some decision of gods, or (2) by force or (3) after being seduced by words or (4) having been possessed by desire.35 Some of these excuses are more persuasive than others, but in fact no one of them automatically exculpates Helen, despite what critics – and Gorgias himself – say. If Helen was influenced by fate or divine necessity, Gorgias claims that we cannot blame her as she did not have free will. Initially, this may seem a plausible claim, but it wreaks havoc with any theory of causation,36 primarily because of human inability to determining when the gods have taken over. And Homer had already dispensed with this as an excuse by suggesting that even when a god explicitly intervenes (the most clear-cut case), the human agent is still responsible, as discussed in our prior analysis. So Gorgias’ first point in fact upends normal discourse and denies the possibility of all choice, for according to his claim, all human action could be seen as fated.37 In any single instance, it is available to the agent to claim that he was divinely inspired or, barring that, that his act

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Laurel Fulkerson was fated. Beyond the troubling aspect of Gorgias’ claim, however, is the fact that this argument also serves to exculpate Paris, a side effect that Gorgias does not want, as we shall see.38 But Gorgias is far from done. He then asserts (7) that if Helen was taken by violence, this is the fault of her rapist, and that she deserves pity rather than blame. Again, this is a reasonable thing to say. But Gorgias has already in his first excuse suggested a way for the rapist himself to avoid blame, by claiming that it was fate or the gods. Perhaps more to the point, however self-evident it seems to us that victims are not to blame for the crimes perpetrated on them, is that Athenian law thought differently, at least in the case of adultery, for it was considered such a subversive crime that normal rules of determining responsibility did not apply: in order not to allow women who had been caught in adultery to falsely claim that they had been raped, the law normally considered both parties responsible.39 And there is some evidence that a rapist was thought of as less guilty than a seducer, because the latter alienated a woman’s affection from her husband.40 Athenian legal views matter in this context because Gorgias was speaking in Athens at the time, and he would have sought to persuade his audience based on what they already believed. Helen, if she were in Athens, would be seen as equally guilty of adultery as Paris, and both of them would be held legally responsible for it, regardless of how the act came to happen. So another excuse that seemed plausible in fact undermines what Gorgias’ audience would have felt as true. In his third and fourth excuses, Gorgias claims that when logos persuades or deceives someone (e9 d2 lÒgoj pe8saj ka< t]n yuc]n ¢patˇsaj, 8), or if someone was possessed by love (e9 g>r 4rwj Ãn [ taàta pr£xaj, 15), she is innocent. Both speech (8) and emotion, particularly love (15), are all-powerful, a fact he demonstrates by reference to emotional responses to poetry and to magical incantations, each of which, though not physical, ‘makes’ people behave in certain ways (9-10).41 If Helen was persuaded by Paris’ deceptive speech to believe something that turned out not to be true (12), she is, again, to be pitied rather than censured for her mistake (15). If she was in love, she was more or less victim to a disease, and so was incapable of judgment (19). Here too Gorgias radically undercuts notions of responsibility; if we are not held accountable for things we do on the advice of others, it is difficult to know what we would be accountable for. And again, Gorgias does not take into account the possibility that Paris might invoke love to avoid blame for his action, or that the logos of Aphrodite might have seduced him into his behaviour. These arguments provide the broadest base of excuse yet, for any person can simply claim that he did a deed because the impulse to do so was simply overwhelming. This series of defences may be found more or less plausible in rendering Helen innocent; its primary effect, however, is to deny Helen any agency whatsoever.42 But it also should do so for Paris, although he remains unmentioned in the speech. Gorgias’ arguments, in fact, if accepted,

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim radically destabilize the notion of personal responsibility. Yet Gorgias seems to suggest that such a series of arguments is applicable only to (people like) Helen, that is, perhaps, only to women.43 His focus on the way Helen was ‘forced’ to do what she did implies the standard ancient distinction between active masculinity and passive femininity.44 It thus flattens out the Homeric Helen’s careful portrait of herself as a morally if not legally responsible agent. Apparently, for Gorgias, the only way to render Helen innocent is to turn her into a victim, of Paris, the gods, bad luck, or a disease. The fact that his excuses for Helen place much of the blame on Paris is thus not merely accidental paradox. Helen and Paris, according to Gorgias, are fundamentally different: Helen’s passivity reaffirms Paris’ – and by implication, men’s – agency.45 For Gorgias, Helen’s gender seems to render her exercise of the power of choice inherently problematic. So in his speech the frightening possibility of female desire, of female agency, is short-circuited, even at cost to logic. Helen has been defended in such a way as to call into question the very foundations of free will, for both men and women, but this implication is deliberately ignored. Needless to say, there is no room in his speech for Helen to express remorse, or anything else; she is simply the passive object of powerful forces. We do not know how this speech was received, or whether Gorgias’ illogical arguments were accepted by his audience. But there is evidence that other people in fifth-century Athens were struggling with similar questions of responsibility, and that these questions were rendered particularly problematic once gender was taken into account.46 We now turn to poetry contemporary to Gorgias, and to an author very much influenced by the kinds of questions that interested him, although one who comes up with very different answers. The tragic playwright Euripides wrote two plays of importance for us: the first, the Troades, was performed in 415 and the second, Helen, in 412. Their three-year separation and authorship by a single individual does not, however, mean that they paint a similar portrait of Helen; in fact quite the contrary is true. Euripides’ Troades is set in Troy just after its defeat by the Greeks, and Helen is as beautiful as ever and still unwilling to take responsibility, and she takes a leaf out of Gorgias’ book to do so. The part of the Troades that concerns us occurs after most of the captive women have been assigned to their new masters. Menelaus enters, stating his intent to kill Helen (860-79) and, at the request of the former Trojan queen Hecuba, agrees to be the judge of a debate between herself and Helen about Helen’s responsibility for the war, the result of which will determine whether Helen lives or dies. The scene is not merely agonistic, but is set up specifically as a trial, with the peculiarity that the defence speech comes before the prosecution.47 But, instead of delivering an apology, Helen takes the offensive (914-65). First, she blames Hecuba for the war, since she bore Paris, and then she accuses Priam, who did not kill him once he was born. Further, she claims that the Greeks owe her a debt of gratitude because if Paris had

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Laurel Fulkerson chosen otherwise in his judgment of the goddesses (i.e. victory in war or political power), Greece would have been ruled by barbarians (933). Helen suffered a loss of reputation, she suggests, so that the Greeks could be free (here alone she takes responsibility, as if she had made the decision). Then she asserts that she was compelled to follow Paris because he had Aphrodite with him, and blames Menelaus for leaving her alone with him. She glosses over most of her time in Troy, ending her speech with the assertion that Paris married her ‘by force’ (biai, 962),48 and stating that the gods are ultimately responsible for all that has happened. Helen’s strategy is again twofold, but not as beneficial for her reputation as that of her Homeric counterpart. On the one hand, she seeks to show that her acts were beneficial to Greece, and maintains that she deserves a reward (‘a crown upon her head’, stephanon epi karai, 937).49 On the other hand, the Helen of the Troades denies that she acted at all, insisting that she was merely the victim of force and the gods. The combination of Paris and Aphrodite was overwhelming: she simply, and literally, had no choice in the matter. By this statement, she calls into question the very notions of responsibility by which she would be convicted. And yet, the two parts of her speech work to undermine one another: the first claims credit for what the second denies responsibility for; she is either innocent because she lacked agency or her action was beneficial and so she is responsible, and praiseworthy.50 In an exact reversal of the Homeric Helen’s self-deprecating strategy, which was to assert that she felt guilty and bore no responsibility, this Helen suggests both that there is nothing to be sorry for and that she had nothing to do with it. She not only exhibits no remorse for her deeds, her claims undercut two of the main criteria for remorse, namely an acceptance of responsibility and a recognition that the action was wrong or unfortunate. Hecuba counters by arguing, first that the beauty contest was spurious, second that Helen conveniently deifies her own lust as ‘Aphrodite’ and third that she should have struggled against this ‘force’ she adduces (969-1001). There were no gods, only Helen’s desire. Hecuba sees Helen’s choice not only as unconstrained, but also as motivated by lust and greed. The remainder of her speech contradicts Helen’s account of her behaviour in Troy (1002-21). Critics usually regard Helen’s speech as weak and superficial by contrast to Hecuba’s,51 but there are also difficulties with Hecuba’s speech,52 and Worman makes clear that Helen simply offers a different view of the world from Hecuba’s.53 Hecuba contends that Helen is responsible for her own choice, and so ascribes it to selfish motives,54 but Helen has already explained that there was not only no choice, but also there were no motives, no conscious thought at all. At the end of the two women’s interchange, Menelaus declares that he will indeed put Helen to death, but most critics are suspicious.55 The play nowhere explicitly gainsays his assertion, although it does hint at it in 1049-52. Yet in the rest of the mythical tradition, Helen lives and eventu-

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim ally becomes a goddess. So the audience might well suspect that the trial scene had no real effect on Menelaus: he began by intending to kill her, and finished the same way, but perhaps to no avail, as he is an extremely weak character.56 If he does not kill Helen, Menelaus will validate Gorgias’ nihilistic views of free will, extending them to men as well. Menelaus’ susceptibility to irrational forces despite his best intentions has alarming implications for traditional morality.57 For to let Helen live despite her betrayal of him entails granting her amoral premise that the force of desire is stronger than all else. In this play, then, Helen’s lack of remorse marks her out not as deviant, but as just like her husband. For some, this means merely that they deserve each other, but others extend the implications to Greek society as a whole, suggesting that the play concludes that might is right, and that remorse is an emotion appropriate only for the losers.58 In either case, Helen shows once again a keen awareness of, and facility with, the emotional display most suited to the occasion. In Euripides’ Helen, by contrast to his Troades, Helen is not a siren or temptress – she is in fact wholly innocent (Whitman finds her ‘the image of feminine perfection’)59 – but again at the cost of her agency. Here we see the opposite side of the Gorgianic coin from that presented in the Troades. For in this play, Euripides uses a variant version of the myth that had Helen never going to Troy at all; instead, she remained faithful to her husband in Egypt, being replaced by a twin phantom. It is unclear whether this was Euripides’ innovation (most would date it to the seventh-century poet Stesichorus),60 but whoever came up with the idea, the turning of Homer’s Helen into a phantom merely makes clear what had always been implicit: Helen’s main purpose is to remain obscure, and just when the reader thinks to have pinned her down, she escapes. For although Helen looks in this version of her story to have been reduced simply to the status of innocent victim, parts of the play suggest otherwise. In fact, this Helen may be merely a more skilled version of her previous Euripidean incarnation, for she has managed to manipulate the situation so that the question of her chastity is posed in such a way as not even to involve her in a choice. Helen has been safe in Egypt all along, but suffering the agonies of a ruined reputation61 as her phantom provoked scandal; according to most critics, she is ‘quite simply a different woman’ from the standard version of her.62 This new, chaste Helen is being besieged by the Egyptian king Theoclymenus, who wants her to marry him. Yet she still hopes to be reunited with her husband, and so puts her suitor off. Menelaus soon arrives, shipwrecked and bedraggled, and after a tense scene in which Helen tries to convince him that the woman he fought for was but a phantom, they are reconciled. All that remains is for them to escape the king, and Helen comes up with a plan: Menelaus will falsely report his own death, and Helen will conduct funeral rites in a ship provided by Theo-

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Laurel Fulkerson clymenus. They will then steal the ship and sail home, killing any Egyptian attendants that come along, and live happily ever after. But there is heated debate among critics about just how innocent this ‘innocent’ Helen is: while there is a strain of criticism that sees the play as lighthearted comedy,63 some see in her the shadow of the wicked Helen.64 These readers suggest that in her new setting, where she has been given the possibility of an untarnished reputation, Helen is willing to play along and to return to her husband, but traces of the old Helen leak out, especially in her willingness to ‘act out’ the adultery plot in order to escape with Menelaus.65 Schmiel, in fact, is uncomfortable even before the plan is outlined, suggesting that the ‘recognition scene’ leaves Menelaus unconvinced of Helen’s story, and that he accepts it only provisionally and because the Helen he fought for is now gone.66 Further, a reading of the play as comic requires glossing over both its exposure of the Trojan War as needless67 and the killing of innocent Egyptians that Helen’s plan requires – and enacts.68 Helen devises an escape plan, which requires her to pretend that her husband is dead and to agree to marry the Egyptian king Theoclymenus. Like the (re-)enactment of the initial seduction scene, played out in the Iliad between Aphrodite and Helen, Helen’s suggestion in the Helen that she feign unfaithfulness to her husband is over-determined. She could not act otherwise, even if here she has a virtuous reason for so doing.69 The interactions between Helen and Menelaus are simultaneously reminiscent of a ‘new marriage’ untainted by the old stories70 and a refiguring of the same old seduction and escape scene, only this time with Helen’s husband as her seducer. Helen’s ability here in providing Menelaus with a plan that makes him the hero may suggest, in the teeth of the version this play privileges, that she has been here before, that she knows just how to seduce while looking like she is being seduced. Given that the tradition has already separated Helen’s responsibility from her remorse, it is puzzling that, despite Helen’s annoyance at her bad reputation, she is willing, even eager, to enact precisely the scenario that gave it to her in the first place. But at least on the surface, Helen is as different from her counterpart in the Troades as she could possibly be. This separation of Helen into a guilty version and an innocent one, although it has taken many forms, is familiar by now. This play, and the phantom-Helen tradition as a whole, suggests that the only way to redeem a figure like Helen is by not giving her any choice, for if she were to make a choice it would inevitably be the wrong one.71 It is likely that Helen herself would think this dodge worth it providing it saved her reputation, but locking her up in Egypt where she cannot make a choice does not really exculpate her, it merely prevents the question from being asked.72 Our final author, Ovid, returns to the Homeric viewpoint, but with a characteristic twist. Ovid’s Helen, as she appears in the Heroides, is in

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim many ways the most interesting incarnation yet. In fact, Ovid is the only author to put Helen on view before she has made her decision, before the Trojan War while she is still in Sparta and being courted by Paris. Yet he too offers no resolution, but does so in a way with grave implications for an audience looking back at the rest of the Helen-tradition. Heroides 16 and 17, a love-letter written by Paris to Helen and her response to him, look like they might answer all of our questions. Here at last we may hope to find the ‘truth’ about Helen of Troy, but here too that hope is frustrated; we cannot reliably judge Helen’s character from these letters.73 A single example is telling: the most recent commentator suggests that it is deliberate rather than accidental that Helen’s tunic is loose enough for Paris to see into it (Paris, of course, suspects nothing).74 I agree, but it is impossible to prove either way, and this is the point; Helen will always be able to claim (and to let Paris think) that he has taken advantage of her. Helen’s behaviour in Ovid, as reflected in both Paris’ letter and her own, is open to multiple interpretations and we can judge only based on pre-existing bias for or against her. Many readers of the poems follow Rand in thinking that Helen’s choice is made long before she writes her letter; according to him, the opening lines are ‘surrender; the rest is apology’.75 Other critics find Helen a more likeable or virtuous character,76 and again the fact that there is debate matters far more than the solution to that debate. Here, as throughout her other literary narratives, Helen moves carefully, creating a situation that is just ambiguous enough for Paris to be unsure what she wants. For, although it is certainly possible to understand Helen’s behaviour in the letter as shameless, it nonetheless keeps most of its secrets. Paris’ letter, by contrast, is wholly without guile: we know exactly what he wants. In some ways Ovid’s poems provide the only possible answer to the question of Helen’s agency, for it is one that varies with the reader’s own preconceptions. But the way this happens is worth examining, for Paris seems in his letter to be encouraging Helen to make her own choice. She, however, deftly deflects the request back onto him.77 Because she retains in Ovid a Homeric consciousness of the importance of her own reputation,78 Helen seeks to silence the criticism of the ages by suggesting that Paris take her by force: quod male persuades, utinam bene cogere posses! vi mea rusticitas excutienda foret. utilis interdum est ipsis iniuria passis: sic certe felix esse coacta forem. (17.185-8) Would that you were able to force better than you persuade! My innocence should be struck out by violence. Sometimes an assault is useful even to the very sufferers; to be sure I could be forced to be happy.79

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Laurel Fulkerson This is, as many have noted, something Ovid says elsewhere (Ars 1.671-8), but it is also extremely appropriate from the pen of Helen, as she thereby lets both the reader and Paris know that she will not accept responsibility for the Trojan War.80 Refusing to choose leaves her own role in the matter as obscure as ever, but with the difference that now we see what she has been up to all along.81 In the end, Ovid’s Helen declines to tell us what we want to know, asserting only that women prefer not to have a choice in such matters. She adroitly, coquettishly informs us that we will never know the truth. At the same time, her coquetry has been exposed, and it becomes increasingly difficult to believe that her response was not always carefully chosen rather than reflecting some genuine emotion. The figure of Helen is always difficult to pin down. I have suggested that this is no mere accident, but that it is a deliberate strategy on the part of Helen and her authors to leave obscure her agency in the matter of the Trojan War. For Helen, this opacity offers the only opportunity of claiming innocence. For her authors it serves two different purposes: earlier writers see in Helen an opportunity to discourse on what human responsibility means, while fifth-century Athenian writers view Helen as emblematic of contemporary difficulties with women. Ovid, our final author, suggests that even to attempt penetration of women’s psyches is a fruitless task. Helen expresses (something close to) remorse for her acts only in the Iliad, and only does so in a context that divorces her act from the responsibility for it; she uses the performance of remorse in order to demonstrate her own moral stature and to blame Paris. In the Troades, by contrast, she adopts a different strategy, eschewing remorse in favour of brazen self-interest. This works to her advantage as well, as her husband has the same principles. In other texts, notably Euripides’ Helen and Ovid’s Heroides 17, Helen shows an even more carefully honed understanding of what emotional display will be most to her advantage, as she obscures the moment of her choosing so successfully as to not even allow the question of her remorse to be asked. Indeed, the majority of the texts that discuss Helen simply glide over the question, leaving it forever unanswered and unanswerable. Notes *Thanks to Kenneth Reckford for reading this chapter, and for extremely useful discussions on decision-making in ancient drama. 1. Letter to Marie Bonaparte, as quoted in Jones (1955), ch. 16. 2. On women as moral agents in Greek tragedy, see Foley (2001), especially 127 for Penelope’s equality to Odysseus. There were debates in ancient philosophy about whether women were competent to make rational decisions; this suggests that they were seen as not wholly reliable – and also as not wholly comprehensible; see Worman (1997) 151 on the oddity of Helen’s position as a desiring subject. 3. See previous note and, among the ancient evidence, the Oresteia’s regular fashioning of Clytaemnestra into a man (A. 11, 258-60, 348, 351, 590-2, with Aegisthus consequently portrayed as a woman (1625).

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim 4. The most complete detailing of tales of Helen is to be found in Homeyer (1977), with ancient texts treated on pp. 1-88. 5. On the complexity of assigning responsibility in literary rape-narratives, see Wright (2005) 118 n. 185; the very verbs used invite ambiguity. 6. I do not of course mean that Helen herself manipulates others (although for convenience I will phrase it thus), rather that our authors envision her as so slippery a character they create for her a series of complex manoeuvres to ensure that her own inner life is never revealed. 7. A definition of remorse: the unpleasant complex of feelings and actions that are the regular accompaniment of poor decision-making, typically including the assessment of an action as wrong/unfortunate; an expression of sorrow or pain, sometimes including severe negative self-assessment; an acceptance of at least some degree of responsibility for that action; and the attempt or statement of a wish to repair or undo the wrong. Remorse is most often felt for offences perceived as serious (and these are usually irreparable). While it has much in common with how the doing of an evil deed affects oneself or one’s self-perception (i.e. with shame and guilt), it is distinct in combining this inner recognition of a wrong with a focus on its effect on another. Because of this, where possible, the agent will most often attempt reparative action (even in cases where the offense was committed unintentionally or without full knowledge of consequences). The social function of remorse is both to indicate that someone has transgressed the boundaries of community and to affirm the values of that community; it is this aspect of remorse as it affects communal life that proves most significant in the study of Helen (definition adapted from Fulkerson 2004). 8. Lindsay (1974) and Adams (1988) are thorough on the subject of Helen, the former exhaustively so, and the latter sharing my focus on the question of Helen’s responsibility for her adultery and for the Trojan War; she sees the question of Helen’s responsibility as becoming ‘more and more central’ to the Greek tradition (1). 9. Translations throughout are my own. Groten (1968) 33 notes that both Nestor and Menelaus presume Helen’s abduction (Il. 2.354-6, 590), but it serves their interests to do so. See too Collins (1988) 41 on the ambiguities in the Iliad about whether the war is being fought only for Helen and whether it would end if she were returned. 10. Adams (1988) 22 and 31. 11. On the subject, an extremely complex one, see Lesky (1961) and Adkins (1983) 11-17, 23-5, and my subsequent discussion. I note here the clearest Homeric example, when Agamemnon asserts at Iliad 19.86-7 and 137-8 that Zeus-sent atê is the cause of his mistake but still takes responsibility for it at 19.115. 12. See Graver (1995) 41-2 for citations of Helen’s self-insults, Ebbot (1999) 4 and Groten (1968) 35 on her self-characterization, and Reckford (1964) 12 on the connections between Helen’s shame, loneliness, and sensitivity to how other people treat her. 13. As Worman (2001) 25 notes, Helen uses the ‘would-that-I-had-died’ construction five times, more often than anyone else in the Iliad, as a vehicle to express ‘despair and scorn’. 14. Of the discussions of the significance of kynôpis, Graver (1995) is the most useful, suggesting that ‘dogginess’ is ‘integral to Helen’s characterization’ (41) and linking it to greed, particularly about the possessions of others and one’s place in relation to those others (51-3). Insofar as it refers to sexuality, Helen’s ‘dogginess’ again signifies avarice, for she has taken more male attention than is her share (54).

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Laurel Fulkerson 15. E.g. Collins (1988) 45. 16. Fulkerson 2004 and 2006. 17. Groten (1968) 36. Reckford (1964) 12 notes that ‘Helen is distinguished in the Iliad not for inspiring passion, but for experiencing it’. 18. Clader (1976) 13. 19. See especially Worman (1997) 164. 20. Hohendahl-Zoetelief (1980) treats this scene as one of his two examples of ‘self-accusation’ in the Homeric poems, but notes that Helen only assumes the outward ‘attitude of a repentant sinner, without humiliating herself’ (31). 21. Collins (1988) 58; Worman (2002) 54. 22. See further Worman (2002) 55 on the stylistic methods by which Helen fashions herself as deviant-but-repentant member of the community as a way to deflect blame from herself. 23. Hohendahl-Zoetelief (1980) 32 notes that in her ‘self-accusation’, Helen ‘manages to accuse Paris more than herself’. Worman (2001) 27 observes that her tone differs in this book: ‘now she speaks with a post-coital combination of enticement and gentle abuse.’ 24. Kakridis (1971) 45. 25. ‘Contrary to the general picture of the repentant guilty woman, as she characterizes herself, there are other passages where she is spoken of as an innocent woman who weeps in distress because she was taken away from her kinsfolk, and finally there are other passages which present her as a res, without feelings whatever’, Kakridis (1971) 27. 26. Helen appears elsewhere in the poem, most memorably at the funeral lament for Hector (24.761-75). There she delivers the last speech (a noteworthy position given Homeric practice), claiming that Hector alone of the Trojans was always kind to her and, as usual, reflecting the world through herself. According to Ryan (1965) 116, her words here ‘do a great deal to redeem her character’. 27. Cf. e.g. Kakridis (1971) 25. 28. Ryan (1965) 115; Worman (2002) passim. 29. Worman (2002) 47. So too Graver (1995) suggests that Helen’s naming of herself as shameless simultaneously deflects the attacks of others and distances herself from ‘past misdeeds – just as to call oneself “shameless” implies that one (now) feels a becoming sense of shame for one’s actions’ (59). 30. Worman (1997) 156. 31. See, most recently, Graver (1995) 53-9 on the ‘negative Helen-tradition’ alluded to but elided in Homer. 32. Austin (1994) 31. See especially Ebbott (1999) 17, 20 on the way the expected community reaction against her is focalised through Helen herself, and the difficulties the Trojan (and Greek) warriors would have in denigrating the one for whom they fight. 33. On the relative dating of the two, see Lloyd (1984) and Worman (2002), who argue opposite sides. Lloyd (1992) 100-1 believes that it is impossible to tell whether the encomium influenced Euripides. Worman (2002) 123-55, on the other hand, outlines the relationship between the two (bibliographic notes at 123). 34. See e.g. Plato’s Gorgias, written in the early fourth century, which has [the fictionalized] Gorgias admitting that he cannot make people virtuous, only persuasive. 35. Helen 6; this option does not actually appear in the text, but must be supplied from the rest of the speech. 36. As Wardy (1996) 34 notes, ‘the case is not quite so unproblematic as he

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim pretends, since there is plentiful evidence, at least for earlier times, that Greeks tolerated an overdetermined scheme for the explanation of behaviour; one and the same act might be attributed to both a human agent and the intervention of a supernatural being, without divine influence necessarily freeing the human agent from the consequences of his or her action’. 37. In this speech, ‘personal responsibility based on the possibility of establishing a causal and logical connection between past, present and future is entirely excluded’ (Untersteiner (1954) 120). Cf. too Adkins (1983) 112: ‘to “make a mistake” that is a moral error is not normally regarded as excusable in Greek; and Gorgias offers no reasons for a different evaluation’. 38. Adkins (1983) 122-3 agrees that Gorgias’ arguments could be used to absolve Paris, or anyone at all, from responsibility, but implausibly suggests that Gorgias himself might not have recognized this further implication. 39. For the connection of these two points see Adams (1988) 353-4. 40. See, in general, Just (1989) 68-70 and Cohen (1991) 100-1, who takes issue with this standard interpretation. 41. Drugs are mentioned as an analogy to speech at 14. 42. Shaffer (1998) 250. See e.g. Suzuki (1989) 15 on the ways the narrative exculpates Helen ‘only because it considers her not as a subject who willed her own actions but as a passive object – not least of his own rhetorical exercise’. 43. See especially Wardy (1996) 43-4 on the key role played in the speech by gender. 44. See Worman (1997) 176. Gorgias’ speech on Palamedes, while similarly seeking to exculpate its subject, makes no such claims about the impossibility of agency, focusing instead on the implausibility of the charge and the malice of his accuser. This difference suggests that Gorgias considered two different sorts of defence as appropriate to men and women. 45. Gorgias’ speech may victimize not only Helen, but his listener; Wardy (1996) 43 discusses the (unexpressed) masculine subjects of many of Gorgias’ verbs as both Paris and the force of speech (logos), and the feminine objects as both Helen and the soul – not just Helen’s soul, but that of Gorgias’ audience (psychê). This suggests that Gorgias is intending to feminize his audience (ibid. 139). 46. See too Foley (2001) on the complexities of fifth-century tragedy’s understanding of female decision-making capacities. 47. Usually in tragedy the virtuous are attacked, and so get the last word; by placing Helen first, Euripides may be suggesting the illegitimacy of her cause. 48. See Gregory (1991) 173 on the importance of compulsion to Helen’s speech. 49. In his encomium of Helen, Isocrates goes even further in this vein, claiming that Greek dominance over the barbarians is thanks to Helen (67-8). 50. See Barlow (1986) 207 on the ways Helen argues that she is a victim in such a way as to demonstrate her control over the situation. 51. Lindsay (1974) 143 is emblematic of the critical response to this Helen: to him, she is ‘a completely odious character’. 52. On these difficulties, see Gregory (1991), Adams (1988) 240-2, and Barlow (1986) 205-6. 53. Worman (1997) 182-3; Gumpert (2001) 71-2. 54. On the importance of greed as a ‘rational’ motive, counteracting Helen’s assertion that her behaviour was irrational, see Meridor (2000) 19. 55. See e.g. Meridor (2000) 24-6, and the play’s chorus at 1114-15. 56. See Lee (1976) 220 on the characterization of Menelaus. 57. Scodel (1980) 98-9; Worman (1997) 197.

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Laurel Fulkerson 58. Barlow (1986) 206 interprets Helen’s speech similarly. 59. Whitman (1974) 43. 60. The version with a phantom Helen may well have been invented by Stesichorus (c. 600 BCE), but as we have only one fragment of a palinode he is supposed to have written apologizing for a previous poem that blamed Helen (or possibly two fragments, and possibly from two different poems – cf. Woodbury (1967)), we can say next to nothing about how or even if he viewed her as making her own decision; cf. Bowra (1963). Bassi (1993) offers a persuasive interpretation of Stesichorus’ Helen which calls into question its redemptive force from a gendered perspective; for her, the text is far from revisionary, as it draws attention to the dominant paradigms of women’s misbehaviour. In a recent discussion of the Stesichoran ‘palinode’ Wright (2005) 86-110 argues that it is irrelevant to the Euripidean play. 61. Pippin (1960) 153. 62. Dale (1967) viii. 63. Notably Burnett (1971) 79 and passim. 64. See e.g. Juffras (1993) 46, 57. Papi (1987) 34-6 finds this Helen in key ways reminiscent of the Helen of the Trojan Women, and wonders whether she is simply willing to change her behaviour in order to preserve her reputation. 65. Verrall (1905) 49 is disturbed by the play’s lack of interest in Helen’s virtue. See too Wright (2005) 304-5 on the slippage between new and old Helens, and especially on Menelaus’ distrust of this ‘new’ one. 66. Schmiel (1972) 276-9. 67. Dimock (1977) 6; Papi (1987) 28. 68. A number of critics see Euripides in this play as pacifistic (e.g. Kannicht (1969)) passim; the Sicilian expedition immediately preceding its performance, lends support to this notion. See too Juffras (1993) 57 on Helen’s lighthearted espousal of a plan which will, once again, destroy innocent lives. 69. Austin (1994) 40 well observes that her myth is ‘a story of bride competition repeated again and again’. 70. See e.g. Foley (2001). 71. Such a notion is implicit in much scholarship on Stesichorus; see especially Bassi (1993). 72. See e.g. the comments of Holmberg (1995) 26 and 33 on Euripides’ cooptation and refashioning of female subjectivity via the eidôlon. 73. My arguments here are in general agreement with those of Belfiore (1980-1) 136-9, who sees Helen as planning her own rape and as manipulating Paris into taking responsibility for it. 74. Michalopoulos (2006) at 16.249-50. 75. Rand (1963) 30; see too Kenney (1996) 3. 76. Cf. Anderson (1973) 78. 77. Michalopoulos (2006) 24 suggests that the two letters are structured around a ‘power-game’ between the two figures, wherein he structures discourse and she alters it. He concludes that the two are eventually ‘absolved’ of responsibility by the reader because they act in ignorance, whereas I see the letters as debating the question of who will have to bear the responsibility for their deeds; ibid. 26: where he sees indecisiveness, I see coyness designed once again to hide Helen’s subjectivity. 78. This is noted by Michalopoulos (2006) as a key feature of the letter. 79. Rand (1961) 31; Belfiore (1980-1) 142. Like Kenney (1996), I believe that Helen is a willing correspondent (and ‘rape victim’), but I focus here explicitly on

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim the question of who is to bear responsibility for the decision. Perhaps she gets the idea from Paris’ use of the word rapta in 16.341, which depicts her as a passive object, or from his use of exempla (see Michalopoulos (2006) at 16.326, and Belfiore (1980-1) 141). 80. Michalopoulos (2006) suggests that the lines express Helen’s frustration. I think they rather instruct Paris as to his next move. 81. This is a very Ovidian approach to canonical stories of myth, and is here used brilliantly – Helen refuses to give Paris, but also us, a straight answer.

Bibliography Adams, Alison M. 1988. ‘Helen in Greek Literature, Homer to Euripides.’ Diss. Aberystwyth. Adkins, Arthur W.H. 1983. ‘Form and Content in Gorgias’ Helen and Palamedes: Rhetoric, Philosophy, Inconsistency and Invalid Argument in Some Greek Thinkers.’ In Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy II, ed. John P. Anton and Anthony Preus, 107-28. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Anderson, W.S. 1973. ‘The Heroides.’ In Ovid, ed. J.W. Binns, 49-83. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul. Austin, Norman. 1994. Helen of Troy and her Shameless Phantom. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Barlow, Shirley A. (ed.). 1986. Euripides: Trojan Women. Warminster: Aris & Phillips. Bassi, Karen. 1993. ‘Helen and the Discourse of Denial in Stesichorus’ Palinode.’ Arethusa 26: 51-75. Belfiore, Elizabeth. 1980-1981. ‘Ovid’s Encomium of Helen.’ CJ 76: 136-48. Bowra, C.M. 1963. ‘The Two Palinodes of Stesichorus.’ CR 13: 245-52. Burnett, Anne Pippin. 1971. Catastrophe Survived: Euripides’ Plays of Mixed Reversal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Clader, Linda Lee. 1976. Helen: The Evolution from Divine to Heroic in Greek Epic Tradition. Mnemosyne Supplement 42. Leiden: Brill. Cohen, David. 1991. Law, Sexuality, and Society: The Enforcement of Morals in Classical Athens. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Collins, Leslie. 1988. Studies in Characterization in the Iliad. Athenäum Monografien Band 189. Frankfurt: Athenäum. Croally, N.T. 1994. Euripidean Polemic: The Trojan Women and the Function of Tragedy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dale, A.M. 1967. Euripides: Helen. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dimock, George E. 1977. ‘God, or not God, or between the Two?’ Euripides’ Helen. Northampton, MA: Katharine Asher Engel lectures. Ebbott, Mary. 1999. ‘The Wrath of Helen: Self-Blame and Nemesis in the Iliad.’ In Nine Essays on Homer, ed. Miriam Carlisle and Olga Levaniouk, 3-20. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Foley, Helene P. 2001. Female Acts in Greek Tragedy. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Fulkerson, Laurel. ‘Metameleia: Remorse and Repentance in 5th and 4th Century Athenian Oratory.’ Phoenix 58 (2004): 241-59. Fulkerson, Laurel. 2006. ‘Apollo, Paenitentia, and Ovid’s Metamorphoses.’ Mnemosyne 59: 388-402. Ghali-Kahil, Lilly B. 1955. Les enlèvements et le retour d’Hélène dans les testes et les documents figurés. 2 vols. Paris: E. de Boccard.

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Laurel Fulkerson Graver, Margaret. 1995: ‘Dog-Helen and Homeric Insult.’ CA 14: 41-61. Gregory Justina. 1991. Euripides and the Instruction of the Athenians. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Griffin, Jasper. 1980. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Groten, F.J., Jr. 1968. ‘Homer’s Helen.’ G&R 15: 33-9. Gumpert, Matthew. 2001. Grafting Helen: the Abduction of the Classical Past. Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press. Hohendahl-Zoetelief, I.M. 1980. Manners in the Homeric Epic. (Mnemosyne Supplementum 63). Leiden: Brill. Holmberg, Ingrid E. 1995. ‘Euripides’ Helen: Most Noble and Most Chaste.’ AJP 116: 19-42. Homeyer, Helene. 1977. Die Spartanische Helene und der Trojanische Krieg: Wandlungen und Wanderungen eines Sagen-Kreisis vom Altertum bis zur Gegenwart. Palingensia XII. Weisbaden: Steiner. Jones, Ernest. 1953. The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud. Vol. 2. New York: Basic Books. Juffras, Diane M. 1993. ‘Helen and Other Victims in Euripides’ Helen.’ Hermes 121: 45-57. Just, Roger. 1989. Women in Athenian Law and Life. New York: Routledge. Kakridis, Johannes Th. 1971. Homer Revisited. 25-53. Lund: Gleerup. Kannicht, Richard. 1969. Euripides Helena. 2 vols. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Kenney, E.J. 1996. Ovid Heroides XVI-XXI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, K.H. 1976. Euripides: Troades. Bristol: Bristol Classical Press. Lesky, Albin. 1961. Göttliche und menschliche Motivation im homerischen Epos. Heidelberg: C. Winter. Lindsay, Jack. 1974. Helen of Troy: Woman and Goddess. London: Constable. Lloyd, Michael. 1984. ‘The Helen Scene in Euripides’ Troades.’ CQ 34: 303-13. Lloyd, Michael. 1992. The Agon in Euripides. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Meridor, Ra’anana. 2000. ‘Creative Rhetoric in Euripides’ Troades: Some Notes on Hecuba’s Speech.’ CQ 50: 16-29. Michalopoulos, Andreas N. 2006. Ovid Heroides 16 and 17: Introduction, Text and Commentary. Cambridge: Francis Cairns Publications. Papi, Donatella Galeotti. 1987. ‘Victors and Sufferers in Euripides’ Helen.’ AJP 108: 27-40. Pippin, Anne Newton. 1960. ‘Euripides’ “Helen”: A Comedy of Ideas.’ CP 55: 151-63. Poulakos, John. 1983. ‘Gorgias’ Encomium to Helen and the Defense of Rhetoric.’ Rhetorica 1.2: 1-16. Rand, Edward Kennard. 1963. Ovid and His Influence. New York: Cooper Square Publishers. Reckford, Kenneth J. 1964. ‘Helen in the Iliad.’ GRBS 5: 5-20. Ryan, George J. 1965. ‘Helen in Homer.’ CJ 61: 115-17. Schmiel, Robert. 1972. ‘The Recognition Duo in Euripides’ Helen.’ Hermes 100: 274-94. Scodel, Ruth. 1980. The Trojan Trilogy of Euripides. Hypomnemata 60. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck und Ruprecht. Segal, Charles. 1971. ‘The Two Worlds of Euripides’ Helen.’ TAPA 102: 553-614. Shaffer, Diana. 1998. ‘The Shadow of Helen: The Status of the Visual Image in Gorgias’s Encomium to Helen.’ Rhetorica 16: 243-57. Sprague, Rosamond Kent. 1972. The Older Sophists: A Complete Translation by

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5. Helen as Vixen, Helen as Victim Several Hands of the Fragments in Die Fragmente der Vorsokratiker (translations of Gorgias by George Kennedy). Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Suzuki, Mihoko. 1989. Metamorphoses of Helen. Authority, Difference, and the Epic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Untersteiner, Mario. 1954. The Sophists, tr. from the Italian by Kathleen Freeman. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Verrall, A.W. 1905. Essays on Four Plays of Euripides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wardy, Robert. 1996. The Birth of Rhetoric: Gorgias, Plato and their Successors. London: Routledge. Whitman, Cedric H. 1974. Euripides and the Full Circle of Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Woodbury, Leonard. 1967. ‘Helen and the Palinode.’ Phoenix 21: 157-76. Worman, Nancy. 1997. ‘The Body as Argument: Helen in Four Greek Texts.’ CA 16: 151-203. Worman, Nancy. 2001. ‘This Voice Which Is Not One: Helen’s Verbal Guises in Homeric Epic.’ In Making Silence Speak: Women’s Voices in Greek Literature and Society, ed. André Lardinois and Laura McClure, Laura, 19-37. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Worman, Nancy. 2002. The Cast of Character: Style in Greek Literature. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Wright, Matthew. 2005. Euripides’ Escape-Tragedies: A Study of Helen, Andromeda and Iphigenia among the Taurians. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wright, Matthew. 2006. ‘Orestes: A Euripidean Sequel.’ CQ 56: 33-47.

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6

Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism Évelyne Prioux When confronted with the question of the depiction of emotions in Ancient art, the modern scholar may immediately recall well-known statuary groups, whose conception and archetypes go back to the Hellenistic period, such as the Ludovisi Gaul, the Farnese Bull or the Hanging Marsyas. The artists of the Hellenistic period were deeply interested in representing the emotions of the characters that they painted or sculpted and in triggering emotional responses in their viewers’ minds. It would be difficult, though, to compare these images with literary testimonies pertaining to the depiction of emotions in the visual arts. Most of the literary testimonies that have been preserved on this topic are indeed related to the works of fifthand fourth-century painters and late Classical sculptors. The reasons for the difficulty that we face are quite clear. As it is well-known, Hellenistic art occupies a very restricted place in the Elder Pliny’s chapters on mineralogy, that is to say in our major source on ancient art history: the encyclopaedist’s presentation of the history of Greek art is indeed based on the assumption that ‘art ceased’ (cessauit ars) around 290 BCE.1 Whatever the motivations for this assertion may have been, Pliny provides little information on the artists of the period between 290 and 150 BCE. Among the other literary sources that we can call on to reconstruct the ancient view of Greek art and, more specifically, on the depiction of emotions in art, we can cite the many ecphrastic epigrams of the Greek Anthology that emphasize the idea that a work of art was a clever depiction of a certain emotion or had the ability to solicit a specific emotional response on the part of the viewer. And yet, the ecphrastic epigrams of the Palatine and Planudean Anthologies tend to focus on the works of the Classical period and provide us with very little information on later creations.2 The same can be said for many of the literary testimonies on ancient depictions of emotion in the visual arts. Though most of these literary testimonies date to the Hellenistic or to the Imperial period, the visual images that they describe are generally assigned to an earlier period. In certain cases, we are also confronted with the ecphraseis of works of art that cannot be proved to have existed, and that may draw on many sources of inspiration: this is the case for the Eicones of the Elder Philostratus, an author who was deeply interested in the depiction of characters and emotions. My purpose in this chapter is to analyze the ways in which ancient

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Évelyne Prioux viewers used to read the emotional content of works of art. And yet, it appears to be rather difficult to compare the works that we still perceive as clearly representing pathos with the ancient testimonies on the representation of emotions in art. If we want to restrict our enquiry within clear chronological boundaries, we will be confronted with two major difficulties: first, the need to gain a better comprehension of the visual codes used by the artists of the Classical period to represent emotions, and, secondly, the problem of understanding how ancient viewers would themselves have reacted to the representation of emotions in works of art, which were sometimes designed several centuries before they were born. How did they understand or misunderstand the intents of earlier artists and how did they reconstruct a history of the representations of pathê in art? What theoretical tools did they apply in reconstructing the process through which an artist would create an emotional scene? And, finally, how did their knowledge of works of art representing emotions and their conception of the place of emotion in the reading of an artwork influence their own creations and ecphraseis? The rendering of emotions in ancient art: some questions of methodology Any attempt to analyze the representation of emotions in the visual arts poses the problem of interpreting visible elements (gestures, positions, faces and bodies) as a series of signs pointing to invisible elements (feelings and emotions). Several difficulties arise from this challenging task. First, it should be noted that the iconographic codes used in representing emotions have changed considerably over time and that it is thus possible to misunderstand the nature or intensity of the emotional contents of a given scene by the improper application of the visual codes of one culture and period to another. One of the most striking examples is the difference between Winckelmann’s perception of the Laocoon and our own. In the Geschichte der Kunst des Altertums, Winckelmann expresses the view that Greek art successfully avoided excessive sentimentalism and the forms of ostentatiousness that his contemporaries would have associated with Baroque art.3 Winckelmann admired the Laocoon for its restraint in the expression of feelings and emotions, a point of view that seems strange to our own contemporaries, who are inclined to stress the Laocoon’s expressivity.4 Secondly, the interpretation of emotions in ancient works of art is often influenced by a reading of ancient art that opposes the supposed ‘idealism’ of the Classical period to the so-called ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’ of the Hellenistic period. It is indeed tempting to oppose the expressive faces and features of Hellenistic sculptures to the impassive faces of Classical works. Knowing that late Classical and Hellenistic artists gave increasing importance to the representation of pathê in facial features,5 we may find it

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism especially telling that Roman taste (as reflected in the copies of the Greek works found in Roman villas and in the writings of Cicero and Quintilian on the evolution of Greek sculpture) preferred the style of fifth-century artists for representing gods, heroes and athletes (with references to Polycleitus’ decor supra uerum). The Romans believed that the art of portraiture reached its climax with the so-called ‘Second Classicism’ of fourth-century artists (Lysippus and Praxiteles) and that the statues of giants, satyrs and centaurs were mostly inspired by Hellenistic artists, who, with their ueritas, gave an exceptional importance to expressing emotions through facial features.6 The view that Classical portraits and their unmoved faces should be considered as idealizing images has been challenged by the work of Hölscher, who stressed that this interpretation was largely due to the contrast that later viewers noted between fifth-century sculptures and late Classical or Hellenistic works.7 Rather than interpreting the differences between Classical and Hellenistic works on the basis of an opposition between idealistic representations of the human face and body and more naturalistic depictions, we should simply connect the iconographic codes of Classical art with the ethical codes of the same period. Winckelmann explained the ‘calm’ features of Classical statues as an attempt to represent an ideal body; he saw in the abstract representation of man a desire to represent the essential form of the body by refusing to introduce emotional details in the image. In fact, we should probably connect this apparent ‘calm’ with the fifth-century Greek ideal education: impassive features were probably perceived as a sign of ‘wisdom’, sôphrosynê. The same can probably be said of the codified standing position and ‘archaic smile’ of many kouroi and korai.8 For evident reasons, the portraits of statesmen and orators were also supposed to convey a dignified image through an appropriate choice of posture and facial expression, even through the folds of the drapery, since the figure’s garment can be seen as an element that emphasizes and amplifies the movements of the body.9 The strong bounds that existed between ethics and aesthetics probably caused the Classical sculptures representing men, heroes or gods not to display facial distress. Even when facing terrible difficulties, a man was expected to control his features. This idea receives confirmation in the study of the well-known Centauromachy that decorates the western pediment of the temple of Zeus in Olympia: tensions, efforts and physical pain are shown in the faces of the centaurs but not in the facial features of their human opponents.10 When approaching the study of emotions in ancient works of art, it may prove especially difficult not to refer to the supposed antagonism between Classical ‘idealism’ and Hellenistic ‘naturalism’: the reason for this methodological problem may well be that we expect pathos to be principally expressed through the facial features and looks of the protagonists, whereas the emotional contents of Archaic and Classical images are usually conveyed through the choice of expressive postures involving the

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Fig. 1a-b. Myron’s Athena and Marsyas, after the plaster casts preserved in the Archäologisches Institut Göttingen (inv. no A71 and A73). Casts taken after the following Roman replicas: Athena: Frankfurt am Main, Liebighaus, inv. no. 195 (prov. Rome, Via Gregoriana; marble; height: 1.73 m); Marsyas: Rome, Musei Vaticani, Mus. Greg. Prof., inv. no. 9974 (prov. Rome, Esquilino; marble). © Archäologisches Institut der Universität Göttingen / Photo Stephan Eckardt.

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Évelyne Prioux figure’s legs and arms, rather than facial expression.11 Similar misunderstandings already occurred in Antiquity as Hellenistic and Roman scholars reflected on the evolution of Greek art. One can cite, for example, Pliny’s judgment on Myron (NH 34.58): ‘exclusively preoccupied with the bodies, he did not express the feelings of the soul’ (ipse tamen corporum tenus curiosus animi sensus non expressisse). How are we to reconcile such a judgment with the well-known reconstruction (Fig. 1a and 1b) of the group representing Marsyas and Athena, Minerva and a Satyr Admiring the Flutes, which Pliny cites in the same passage (NH 34.57: satyrum admirantem tibias et Mineruam)? In this group, the satyr starts backwards in a posture of intense amazement and wonder.12 A seminal concept for understanding the representation of emotions in Archaic and Classical art was forged by Warburg in his essay on the posture of the dying Orpheus.13 This essay introduces the notion of Pathosformel, which might be translated loosely as ‘form or formula expressing an emotional content’. When studying Greek art, one can indeed identify a repertoire of meaningful body postures that are used in order to convey the pathos and to stress the dramatic tone of the person represented. Although the notion of Pathosformel has been rarely used in further essays on ancient art (with the notable exception of Gombrich,14 an examination of wounded figures and their evolution during the course of time can only lead to the conclusion that fifth-century artists mostly rendered pathos through body postures, whereas the rendering of emotions through facial expressions was used more extensively in later works.15 Significantly, Ridgway’s short essay on ‘Wounded Figures in Greek Sculpture’ (1965) argues that Classical art is idealizing art. For instance, when commenting on the motif of the helping comrade supporting a wounded friend, a theme that introduces a climate of concern and human compassion in the image, Ridgway states that ‘the surviving monuments dilute pain with Classical coldness’. As for the Wounded Amazons of Ephesus, which were originally conceived by Phidias, Polycleitus, Cresilas and Phradmon and of which we know through Roman copies, they are labelled by Ridgway as ‘Stoic women unconcerned about their injury or barely aware of its existence’ (1965, 51). These classical works are then opposed to the ‘emotional outburst’ and ‘break-through of emotionalism’ of the Hellenistic period, which the modern viewer can still easily perceive in the Laocoon or in other famous examples (the Ludovisi Gaul killing himself and his wife or the Pasquino Group) or in the facial expressions of wounded figures of the Early Hellenistic Period, such as Amazons, Persians, Giants, Galatians). The recent work of Franzoni on the notion of Pathosformel leads us to a very different approach of the Ephesus Amazons: for instance, the Sciarra Amazon (Fig. 2), who is variously attributed to Cresilas or to Polycleitus, and is wounded near her right breast, rests her right arm on her head.16 When read in the light of Pathosformeln, her pose may remind us of other images and of several iconographic types in which a character is affected by an over-

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Fig. 2. ‘Sciarra’ Amazon. Plaster cast preserved in the Archäologisches Institut Göttingen (inv. no. A1338). Cast taken after the following Roman replica: Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, Copenhagen, inv. K176. © Archäologisches Institut der Universität Göttingen / Photo Stephan Eckardt.

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Évelyne Prioux whelming emotion, or by a feeling or state of mind that one cannot control (see, for instance the suffering Philoctetes on the Hoby silver cup or the abandoned posture of Narcissus, a character overwhelmed by passion, in the Pompeian frescoes of the first century CE): if this reading is correct, this Amazon would in fact express intense physical pain. Codified schemata (body postures) appear to have been used in the visual arts to show emotional expressions in Classical art. Several vase paintings seem to suggest that similar schemata were also used on the stage (Fig. 3a and 3b).17 These schemata are not systematically associated with a given iconographic type or with a given meaning. On the contrary, one schema or Pathosformel can be applied to a variety of situations and to different mythological figures. It can also be used to render different emotions and its interpretation will depend on the context in which it appears. There is no strict correspondence between a gesture or posture and a given meaning, but the use of one of these codified gestures seems to indicate the presence of a strong emotional content in the image and is Fig. 3a. Telephus on an altar, threatening to kill Orestes. Lost Apulian krater, formerly in the Hamilton Collection. After J.H.W. Tischbein, Collection of Engravings from Ancient Vases Discovered in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies between 1789-90, Naples, 1791-1795.

Fig. 3b. Scene inspired by the parody of Euripides’ Telephus in Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae. Apulian bell krater by the Schiller Painter (c. 370 BCE), Würzburg, Martin von Wagner Museum der Universität Würzburg, inv. no. H 5697 = RVAp 65, 4/4 a. Drawing by A. Piqueux, after O. Taplin, Comic Angels, Oxford, 1993, fig. 11.4.

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Fig. 4: Perseus contemplating Andromeda, chained to a rock. Drawing after a krater with white background (Agrigento, Museo Archeologico Regionale, inv. AG7). Phiale painter, c. 440 BCE. Drawing by A. Brighi = Franzoni (2006) fig. 81.

probably meant to call the viewer’s attention to the dramatic tone of the scene. Recurring examples of these schemata are the motif of the hero resting on a bended knee while his other leg is in extension, the seated and meditating hero, the standing hero with an arm resting above his head, the leaning hero or the standing hero who has one foot raised on a little stone (see, for instance, Fig. 4, with a seemingly incongruous Perseus who discovers Andromeda and poses with his foot raised on a stone, instead of confronting the monster). One of Franzoni’s important contributions to the study of Pathosformeln is the observation that the Greek artists not only used codified schemata to convey pathos but also to render the êthos of certain figures (one could thus identify a series of ‘Ethosformeln’, often designed to translate in visual codes the character’s ‘wisdom’, sophrosynê).18 By using these schemata the artists created a number of images that would seem perfectly incongruous if one tried to interpret the images in the light of ‘realism’. Art historians are for instance familiar with Greek

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Évelyne Prioux stelae representing the dead person in a seated and dejected pose, as he mourns his own death,19 or brave soldiers shown in their ‘heroic nudity’ but wearing helmets and greaves – rather pointless accessories if the chest and stomach are left unprotected. Of course, the purpose of art that depicts a dead man mourning is to convey pathos and the purpose of art that displays ‘heroic nudity’ is to show the courage and remarkable êthos of the soldier. The iconographic codes and conventions, that were used in representing the body’s posture, gestures and movements and that were sometimes enhanced by the presence of elements of landscape (for example a little rock, on which the character raises his leg) enabled the artists to make emotions visible, or to express certain moral principles. As Franzoni notes in the concluding pages of his monograph, the use of Pathosformeln can be compared to the use of masks in tragedy: while introducing a further element of distance between the representation and reality, the use of these codified devices enabled the artist or writer to provide further emotional intensity to the scene and to solicit the viewer’s emotional response. As I stated earlier, my purpose is to analyze the ways in which ancient viewers used to read the emotional contents of works of art. One of the key elements in such a study is understanding how later viewers reacted to earlier codifications and to the evolution that they could observe in the visual rendering of emotions in Greek art. Since Roman artists used frequent citations of earlier works and allusions to the various phases of the history of Greek painting and sculpture, Roman viewers were likely to note certain connections between the stylistic characteristics of a given image and its references to a precise moment of the history of Greek art. A good example of this interaction between the choice of a given style and the rendering of emotions can be found in the cycles of mythological paintings that adorn rooms (n) and (p) of the Casa dei Vettii in Pompeii. This example will also enable us to discuss the problem of the use of colour in the expression of pathos in art, whereas earlier examples have led us to focus on the problem of gestures, body postures and facial expressions. Rooms (n) and (p) of the Casa dei Vettii were conceived as miniature pinacothecae and as architectural pendants (Fig. 5).20 Room (n), the ‘Theban room’, has three major paintings, all representing violent episodes that involve Zeus’ sons (Hercules, Dionysus, Amphion and Zethus): baby Hercules strangling the snakes sent to kill him under the eyes of his amazed father and his terrified mother (Fig. 7a), Pentheus dismembered by his raving aunts and mother (Fig. 7b), and Amphion and Zethus punishing Dirce by tying her to a wild bull (Fig. 7c). Room (p), the ‘Cretan room’, has three other paintings that also deal with the fate or punishment of various mythological characters: the first painting shows Pasiphae in love with the Cretan bull, waiting for the brazen heifer to be completed by Daedalus (Fig. 6a), the second shows Ixion attached to the eternally burning wheel under the eyes of Hera (Fig. 6b), the third shows Dionysus

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Fig. 5. General plan of the Vettii house in Pompeii, published by Mau (1907) 322, fig. 158.

discovering the sleeping Ariadne (Fig. 6c). The six paintings are connected by numerous thematic relationships: a recurring theme would be the punishment of treason or impiety. While two paintings evoke unexpected paths to immortality (Pasiphae’s brazen heifer echoes Dirce’s bull, the punishment of Ixion echoes the punishment of Pentheus, and both paintings involve the same number of characters; besides, Hercules’ future bears some similarities to the apotheosis of Ariadne). And yet, both cycles are painted in very different styles, as if the owner of the house had wanted to draw a comparison between two ways of painting (emotionally) ‘violent’ scenes. The characters of the Cretan room are almost motionless and their faces have little or no expression, whereas the scenes in the Theban room are full of motion and expressions of fear (one can also note the use of

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Fig. 6a. Pompeii, Vettii house, room (p), north wall: Pasiphae and Daedalus. © Wikimedia Commons.

Fig. 6b. Pompeii, Vettii house, room (p), east wall: Ixion’s punishment. © Wikimedia Commons.

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Fig. 7a: Pompeii, Vettii house, room (n), north wall: Herakliskus strangling the serpents. © Wikimedia Commons.

Fig. 7b: Pompeii, Vettii house, room (n), east wall: Pentheus’ punishment. © Wikimedia Commons.

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Fig. 6c. Pompeii, Vettii house, room (p), south wall: Ariadne discovered by Dionysus. © UMR 7041 équipe ESPRI.

Pathosformel in the Pentheus scene: Pentheus reproduces the well-known schema of the hero with one bended knee and one leg in extension). The choice of colours also differs significantly: the main figures of the Cretan room illustrate a preference for warm colours, perhaps slightly reminiscent of the Greek paintings of the Classical Period, whereas the Theban room’s paintings display the typical colours of Hellenistic masterpieces with a pervasive use of green and blue. As a matter of fact, the testimony of several ancient authors does suggest that the use of strongly contrasting colours was one of the techniques that ancient artists could use to confer more pathos to a painted scene.21 A confirmation of the emotional intensity associated with violent contrasts of colours can be sought in Hellenistic and Imperial poetry and in ecphraseis. Apollonius of Rhodes evokes strong contrasts of colour and achieves striking visual effects when describing the death of Apsyrtus.22 Philostratus the Elder shows a clear interest in chiaroscuro in two of the most emotional scenes of his Eicones: the death of Cassandra (2.10) and Antigone burying Polynices by night-time (2.29). Sculptors also played with contrasts of colour by creating special alloys. For example, when representing Jocasta’s face, Silanion (second half of the fourth-century BCE) added silver to the bronze in order to give her the appearance of a dying person.23 Ancient critics stress the pleasure that they took in contemplating this effective representation of death.24 The Rhodian

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Fig. 7c: Pompeii, Vettii house, room (n), south wall: Amphion and Zethus punishing Dirce. © Wikimedia Commons.

artist Aristonidas (one of Silanion’s contemporaries) wanted to represent the madness of Athamas giving way to remorse after he had hurled his son Learchus from the rocks ; in order to do so, he added iron to the bronze in order to obtain, through rust, a colour associated with shame.25 A further technique to convey the pathos of a scene resides in the appeal to the viewer’s imagination in order to supplement elements that are not visible in the image.26 A well-known example is Timanthes’ Sacrifice of Iphigenia:27 according to the literary sources on this painting, Timanthes had cleverly represented the various degrees of affliction experienced by the Greek heroes who were about to attend the sacrifice of Iphigenia. Menelaus’ expression and grief was thought to surpass all other visible expressions of pathos in the image, but Timanthes was especially admired for the trick he invented when he had to represent the unspeakable grief of a Agamemnon, the victim’s father. Knowing that all attempts to represent his suffering were bound to failure, Timanthes decided to veil Agamemnon’s head.28 Cicero’s account of this anecdote is particularly interesting since it connects the problem of representing emotions with stylistic and ethical problems: Timanthes’ attitude reminded Cicero of the theories on theatre and the debates on the appropriateness of representing certain episodes on the stage, but it also served as a parallel illustrating how the orator should, in his turn, reflect on the style of diction that would fit the various parts of his speech.

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Évelyne Prioux Êthê and pathê in ancient sources on art history and in ancient art theory As we have seen, the study of êthê and pathê in ancient art represents a challenging task for the modern art historian. We have also noted the evolution of visual codes during Antiquity had sometimes caused the ancient viewers to give a probably mistaken interpretation of the intentions and preoccupations of earlier artists: the Elder Pliny thus believed that Myron’s statues did not express the feelings of the soul.29 In the following pages, I would like to turn my attention to the way in which the visual representations of êthê and pathê were perceived and analyzed by ancient writers. Two major approaches will require our attention: the philosophers’ approach to the visual arts and the approach of the ancient amateur of art works. We will try to study these contrasting approaches by considering three aspects of the ancient theories on the visual representation of êthê and pathê: (1) How did ancient viewers conceive the relationship between the representation of êthê and the representation of pathê? (2) How did they perceive the history and evolution of ‘ethical’ and ‘emotional’ representations? (3) How did they conceive the relationship involving mimêsis (imitation), phantasia (imagination) and pathê? Representing êthê and pathê The view of the philosophers The use of the words êthos and pathos in ancient art criticism has been studied by Pollitt in his seminal work on Greek and Latin aesthetic vocabulary.30 Êthos is employed in the sense of character, good or bad,31 and is distinct from pathos, a word used to designate all forms of human emotional reactions produced by external circumstances. While pathos is a response to external stimuli, êthos is ‘part of a man’s inner makeup’.32 As noted by Pollitt, ancient critics referred much more frequently to the notion of êthos than to the notion of pathos, and it may at first seem rather difficult to trace back ancient theories about the representation of emotions in the visual arts. For instance, Aristotle provides us with a few passages dealing with êthê in connection with painting (this is not the case for sculpture),33 but there is no mention of pathê in connection with the visual arts in the treatises that we know. This establishes a strong contrast between visual arts and other art forms, such as tragedy, music and dance, which are all credited with the power to imitate the pathê and to provoke emotional responses on part of the hearer/viewer.34 The difficulties that we face when reconstructing ancient theories on emotions in visual arts only echo a wider problem: the loss of the major theoretical treatises on colour, painting and sculpture. This relative absence of documentation makes the testimony of Xenophon all the more remarkable, since this author provides an isolated, early attempt to theorize the

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism representation of characters and emotions in the visual arts.35 The third Book of the Memorabilia, indeed, preserves two dialogues, in which Socrates successively reflects on painting with the famous painter Parrhasius and on sculpture with an otherwise unknown artist named Cleiton.36 In the first dialogue, Socrates presents Parrhasius with the idea that the art of painting also involves the attempt to represent ‘characters’ (êthê). Parrhasius first replies that painting can only represent the visible, but Socrates immediately suggests that looks and facial expressions vary according to character. Socrates then concludes that, by linking ethics to aesthetics, the most pleasant paintings will be the ones that represent men who are blessed with a good, beautiful and loveable character. In the second dialogue, Socrates turns his attention to sculpture. He focuses on the problem of how the sculptor manages to give his statues the appearance of life. Socrates and Cleiton both agree that the sculptor achieves this effect by reproducing in a precise manner the forms (eidê) of living beings, as well as the various parts of their bodies and their positions. The idea that sculpture is supposed to reproduce the movements of the body enables Socrates to introduce the idea according to which this art should also reproduce the movements of the soul, that is to say its emotions and feelings, for instance the threatening eyes of a warrior or the triumphant air of a victorious man. As a result, the dialogue concludes that the sculptor’s task consists in ‘rendering through the external appearance’ (tù e∏dei proseik£zein) ‘the very activity of the soul’ (t> tÁj yucÁj 4rga), thus producing a sculpted image of the pathê that will provide pleasure (terpsis) to the viewer (Mem. 3.10).37 Theory  and practice The dichotomy established by Socrates between painting and sculpture, and between the art of representing the pathê and the art of representing the êthê, probably results from an attempt to distinguish the aims of two art forms, whose techniques and expressive means may seem very different. His approach may indeed reflect an awareness of the effect of Pathosformeln in fifth-century sculpture and suggests an interest in the applications of colour and contour to represent the eyes and the looks that befit a given character in painting. And yet, this dichotomy is blurred if one considers the various literary sources that describe ancient works of art. Although a significant amount of testimonies focus on the representation of êthê in fifth-century painting, ancient art criticism recognizes the ability of both arts to represent characters and emotions,38 and the first part of this chapter has cited examples of êthê and pathê in fifth-century sculpture. As a matter of fact, Parrhasius was himself known to be a master in the representation of pathê. He was even said to have tortured and tormented to death an elderly slave in order to provide a vivid representation of the physical pain endured by Prometheus.39 Of course, we can only long for the lost treatises on art history that were composed at the turn of the fourth and third-centuries BCE and that would

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Évelyne Prioux have shed a much desired light on the evolution of the theoretical approaches to ancient painting and sculpture. Third-century epigrams, however, provide important examples of the ability of sculptors to render character or emotions in portraits, and they demonstrate the poets’ understanding of the iconographical codes involved by both tasks.40 Recent works on Greek portraits have shed light on the seminal distinction between ‘retrospective portraits’ and ‘real portraits’.41 The ‘retrospective portraits’ are the portraits of poets of the distant past whose features were no longer known by the time the sculptural archetype was conceived. In creating these portraits, the artist’s task apparently consisted in introducing in the image a series of clues that would reflect the poet’s biography. A good example is provided by the Old Lyric Poet of Copenhagen, a portrait whose archetype was probably conceived in the late third or early second century BCE.42 This poet is characterized by a passionate expression and by a marked torsion of the body. Visual clues to identify him were probably provided by his ivy crown, his old age and his obvious physical strength: we should probably imagine a poet who had lived many years and was known both for symposiastic and war songs. By seeing the image of this enthusiastic poet, the ancient viewers would have immediately known that he belonged to the distant past. On the contrary, the ‘real portraits’ showed the images of poets who were still alive by the time of their statue’s dedication, or who had died shortly before. In such cases, the poet, who could be recognized thanks to the portrait’s physical resemblance to the model, was represented as a good citizen, appropriately dressed and comfortably seated: good examples would be the portraits of Menander and of Posidippus (the Comic?).43 I argue next that the differences between both types of portraits can be analyzed in terms of differences between portraits mainly exhibiting the pathê of a given figure and portraits mainly exhibiting the êthos. In my opinion, this distinction was understood in this way by the Greek poets of the third century BCE who evoked such portraits in their miniature ecphraseis. Leonidas of Tarentum indeed provides us with a vivid ecphrasis of a picture of Anacreon, which seems to have been designed as a case study of ‘retrospective portraits’.44 The poet is drunk and in love: his eyes are damp and he has lost a shoe. He also holds up his lyre and seems to be about to fall because of his drunkenness. Leonidas clearly invites his reader to connect the visual details that he picks up, giving the illusion of movement, with the pathê affecting the poet. Conversely, the recently discovered epigram of Posidippus on a portrait of the poet Philitas by Hecataeus (epigram 63 A-B. = P. Mil. Vogl. VIII, 309, col. X, 16-25) provides us with an example of the reception of one of the ‘real portraits’ by a contemporary viewer.45 Posidippus’ entire description is based on an analogy between the portrait’s style, the character of the sculptor Hecataeus and the character and physical appearance of the poet Philitas: all four elements are characterized by their leptotês, and the minuteness and

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism extreme care of the bronze worker clearly echoes Philitas’ own reputation of akribeia, as well as his taste for the endless study of words.46 If the reading poikilletai êthei is correct, Posidippus states that the bronze ‘is resplendent thanks to the character’. One of the keys to understand this passage in the analogy between Philitas’ character and Hecataeus’ style: the poet and the sculptor are both perfectionists, and it is the exceptional minuteness (precision, akribeia) of Hecataeus that has allowed Philitas’ portrait to become a beautiful rendering of the poet’s well-known taste for perfection and exactness, that is to say of the poet’s êthos. The history of ‘ethical’ and ‘emotional’ works of art The ancient sources on the painted and sculpted representations of êthê and pathê suggest that certain painters and sculptors were perceived as masters in their fields. We will focus on testimonies concerning certain prominent artists, who were believed to represent major steps in the historical evolution of the visual arts. The good êthographoi Two fifth-century artists were singled out and praised for their ability to represent characters and emotions:47 Polygnotus of Thasos48 and his imitator, Dionysius of Colophon. The Elder Pliny and Aelian provide us with parallel testimonies that seem to indicate that they were drawing on the same tradition:49 Polygnotus Thasius qui primus mulieres tralucida ueste pinxit, capita earum mitris uersicoloribus operuit, plurimumque picturae primus contulit, siquidem instituit os adaperire, dentes ostendere, uoltum ab antiquo rigore uariare. (Pliny NH 35.58) Polygnotus the Thasian who was the first to paint women with transparent garments and cover their heads with headgears of varied colours and who was also the first to enhance his paintings with great improvements such as representing his characters with opened mouths or showing their teeth or providing them with varied expressions, thus abandoning the rigidity of ancient times. PolÚgnwtoj [ Q£sioj ka< DionÚsioj [ Kolofènioj graf2e |sthn. Ka< [ m5n PolÚgnwtoj 4graye t> meg£la, ka< 1n to√j tele8oij e9rg£zeto t> «qla. t> d5 toà Dionus8ou, pl]n toà meg2qouj, t]n toà Polugnètou t2cnhn 1mime√to e9j t]n ¢kr8beian, p£qoj ka< Ãqoj ka< schm£twn crÁsin ka< ;mat8wn leptÒthtaj, ka< t> loip£. (Ael. VH 4.3) Polygnotus the Thasian and Dionysius of Colophon were both painters. Polygnotus painted large scenes and executed his works with perfect detail. The works of Dionysius, though lacking Polygnotus’ grandeur, imitate his

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Évelyne Prioux art in its precision, expression of emotion and character, use of patterns of composition, lightness of the drapery and the like.50

In both texts, the cleaver depiction of the êthê and pathê depends on the painter’s ability to represent thin and transparent draperies and fine details with precision (akribeia). As we noted before, the representation of garments and folds in draperies was one of the means used by artists to depict character or emotion. Lucian’s portrait of the ideal woman provides us with further clues to understand the lightness of Polygnotus’ draperies.51 Lucian wants Polygnotus to provide his ideal portrait with the modesty of the eyebrows and the blush of the Cassandra whom he painted in his Ilioupersis; he also expects the painter ‘to work at the depiction of the garment so as to reach the extreme lightness that will make it adhere where it is necessary, while letting most of it flutter in the breeze’ (Luc. Im. 7). Pausanias describes the same scene as follows: ‘Ajax, the son of Oileus, holding a shield, stands by an altar, taking an oath about the outrage on Cassandra. Cassandra is sitting on the ground, and holds the image of Athena, for she had pulled the wooden image down from its base when Ajax was dragging her away from her place as a suppliant’ (Paus. 10.26.3). A comparison between the testimonies of Lucian and Pausanias encourages us to reconstruct the image of Cassandra as a clever combination between movement and immobility: the sitting position of the dejected Cassandra contrasts with the movement suggested by the fluttering drapery. This clever combination between a static scene and an impression of dynamism probably enabled the ancient viewer to perceive both the emotional state of the character and the narrative development of the story. This appreciation of the contrasting and balanced qualities of Polygnotus’ art, which apparently combines the akribeia of details and precision of draperies with grandeur, should probably encourage us to relate the judgment of the authors of the Imperial period to one of the early Hellenistic treatises on art history. A similar appreciation may indeed be at stake in the case of Myron’s Tydeus in Posidippus’ newly discovered epigrams on sculpture, a series of poems that likely presents strong affinities with the lost treatises of Xenocrates of Athens and Duris of Samos on Greek art. As I suggested elsewhere, Posidippus indeed appears to entertain the idea of achieving, in the same work, the effects of akribeia and megethos, or of admiring both leptotês and semnotês.52 One of his examples was the treatment of the garment in Myron’s Tydeus. It seems to me peculiarly telling that Pliny, Aelian and Lucian are also interested in the himatiôn leptotêtes / tralucida uestis achieved by a fifth-century artist. The consistency of the terminology in these testimonies, combined with Posidippus’ epigram, suggests that this analysis of Polygnotus’ ability to depict character and emotions might have been originally formulated in one of the lost treatises on art history composed in the early Hellenistic period.

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism Apart from helping us to gain a better understanding of Polygnotus’ specific way of representing garments, the example of the scene from Ilioupersis, with Ajax and Cassandra, sheds light on one of the reasons that may have encouraged ancient viewers to consider Polygnotus as a prominent êthographos. The scene painted by Polygnotus indeed happened after Ajax’s rape of Cassandra. The characters can thus give the illusion that they are reflecting on their previous actions and on the decisions that they have made in the past. Ajax and Cassandra were not an isolated case in Polygnotus’ works. The Nekyia obviously provided many scenes in which the dead were reflecting on their past, and Pausanias noted that Neoptolemus was the only character of the Ilioupersis that was represented in the act of killing the Trojans (all other scenes were in fact posterior to the sack itself).53 The moments that Polygnotus selected in mythological narrations to become the topics of his paintings could thus be felt to have been peculiarly adapted to the representation of êthê.54 Another important issue raised by Aelian’s testimony on Polygnotus and Dionysius pertains to the connection between style and the representation of characters and emotions. Aelian suggests that Dionysius of Colophon failed to achieve grandeur in his works, although he was as clever as Polygnotus in depicting characters and emotions.55 This opinion can be compared with other judgments on the style of Dionysius. Aristotle states that both painters achieved different types of mimêsis, since Polygnotus depicted men as nobler than they were and Pauson depicted them as they were.56 Of course, this testimony also suggests a significant difference in style between the painters and places the ability to achieve megethos on the side of Polygnotus. Interestingly, a further testimony provided by Plutarch compares the painting style of Dionysius and the poetic style of his fellow citizen Antimachus of Colophon, an author of elegies whose works apparently became an object of debate for the thirdcentury Alexandrian poets:57 +H m5n ,Antim£cou po8hsij ka< t> Dionus8ou zwgrafˇmata tîn Kolofwn8wn 9sc)n 4conta ka< tÒnon 1kbebiasm2noij ka< katapÒnoij 4oike: ta√j d5 Nikom£cou grafa√j ka< to√j +Omˇrou st8coij met> tÁj ¥llhj dun£mewj ka< c£ritoj prÒsesti tÕ doke√n eÙcerîj ka< "vd8wj ¢peirg£sqai. (Plu. Tim. 36) The poetry of Antimachus of Colophon and the pictures made by Dionysius, his fellow citizen, though full of strength and intensity, do look as if they had been produced with pain and effort. On the contrary, the paintings of Nicomachus and the lines of Homer have, along with all their power and charm, the advantage of having seemingly been composed readily and with ease.58

According to Plutarch’s testimony, the style of Dionysius could thus be compared to the style of Antimachus that was apparently characterized, on the one hand, by its austere seriousness and, on the other, by its

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Évelyne Prioux painstakingly studied technê. The stylistic differences between Dionysus’ and Polygnotus’ paintings show that the question of style, though connected to the problem of rendering emotions and characters, does not strictly overlap with it.59 Later artists were also renowned for their ability to represent characters or emotions. The fourth-century painter Aristides of Thebes was known, for instance, for his image of a baby drinking the milk of his mother, who had been wounded to death during the sack of a city.60 Of course, such a topic clearly involved pathos but also characterization: Pliny remarks that the dying mother seems to perceive her baby’s attempt to drink and appears to fear that she will provide him blood instead of milk. Motherly instinct is thus preserved at the very doorstep of death and gives rise to a specific fear. One will also wonder how Aristides’ use of colour possibly contributed to expressing pathetic scenes. Pliny notes that he was ‘somewhat harsh in his colors’ (durior paulo in coloribus). Pliny adds: is omnium primus animum pinxit et sensus hominis expressit, quae uocant Graeci ethe, item perturbationes (he was the first to express the disposition and consciousness of man, which the Greeks call êthê, and also the emotions).61 In conclusion, I would like to mention Theon of Samos, an early thirdcentury painter whose ability to play with the viewer’s imagination (phantasia) was explicitly connected to his success in soliciting an emotional response to his paintings,62 and Timomachus of Byzantium, a painter whose activity has been variously dated to the third century BCE and the mid first century BCE. Timomachus was a painter whose topics were apparently largely inspired by Greek tragedy. He was much celebrated in the epigrams of the Greek Anthology for his ability to depict the battle between emotion and reason in Medea’s mind.63 Interestingly, his Medea and his Ajax were dedicated by Caesar as a diptych in the temple of Venus Genetrix, a temple whose construction was followed by the battle of Pharsalus. In a recent paper, Sauron has convincingly argued that the political meaning given to both paintings was the following: Medea’s wrath was the result of Jason’s injustice, just as Ajax’s suicide followed the unjust decision made during the Judgment of the Arms.64 For both characters, reason was overcome by emotions because of the unbearable contrast between their own dedication (to Jason or to the expedition against Troy) and the unjust way in which they were treated (Medea was abandoned and Ajax did not inherit Achilles’ arms). According to Sauron, Caesar’s point was to underscore the injustice he suffered: this injustice had caused him to cross the Rubicon and to start the Civil War, but he was ‘saved’ from becoming insane, like Medea or Ajax, thanks to his piety towards Venus Genetrix. The political reading of both paintings proposed by Sauron thus involves an ambitious reflection on the causes of extreme emotions and tragic crimes: it also presents the advantage of reconciling the philosophical meaning that ancient readers used to decipher in Timomachus’ Medea with political explanation for the pictorial programme of the temple.

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism A brief history of pathê in sculpture Certain sculptors were celebrated for their ability to express pathê. Allusions to the depiction of characters and passions in fifth-century sculpture are very rare in Hellenistic and Imperial literary sources, but four fourthcentury artists were especially renowned for their representations of emotions: Scopas, Praxiteles,65 Silanion and Aristodamas. Although Scopas and Praxiteles created many works in which emotions were represented, the ancient viewers’ attention tended to focus on a small number of statues: Scopas’ Maenad, the Cnidian Aphrodite and the Thespian Eros of Praxiteles.66 Most of the sources describing the emotional effects of these art works are Greek epigrams. One of the explanations for this phenomenon resides in the well-known process of epigrammatic imitation, by which later epigrams replicated the themes of earlier ones and were conceived as clever variations on their hypotexts. The work of the ancient anthologists, which forms the basis on which epigrams were transmitted to us, probably tended to accentuate this phenomenon by selecting a series of epigrams that treated the same topic with clever variations. Of course, other works of the same artists, though less celebrated in the ancient sources, or not specifically praised for their emotional contents, were also representations of the pathê. The example of Scopas’ Pothos (a personification of nostalgic desire and longing) is essential for our analysis.67 The posture of Pothos can indeed be assimilated to one of the Pathosformeln: leaning sideways appears to indicate a relationship (attention or, as is the case here, desire) between the leaning character and another figure. The legs are crossed, as if Pothos was resting, but this impression is immediately counterbalanced by the impression of instability that is also conveyed by this very position: the posture of the Pothos must therefore be read as the expression of an inner tension and emotion.68 Although the sculptural reception of the Pothos in later imitations and copies was very important, there is no trace of its reception as a representation of emotion in the literary sources. Of course, it is impossible to decide whether this lack of documentation is the mere result of the loss of many ancient sources dealing with art works or whether the Pothos never gave rise to literary commentaries about its emotional content. The cases of Silanion and Aristodamas are linked to each other, to a certain extent, since both artists were believed to have achieved impressive representations of physical or moral suffering by joining various metals to the bronze alloy that they used in order to modify or enhance the colour of certain details or to give an unusual skin colour to their statues.69 Silanion was also famous for his portrait of a fellow artist, Apollodorus, who would smash his own sculptures because he could not satisfy himself with the results that he obtained. Pliny states that Silanion captured the

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Évelyne Prioux emotion of his colleague so well that his portrait became an image of anger (iracundiam) itself (NH 34.81). The case of Praxiteles, whose Thespian Eros and Cnidian Aphrodite were believed to have the power of inspiring love to their viewers because the artist had designed them after his own knowledge of love, or out of love for Phryne, posits another problem, namely the relationship between phantasia, mimêsis and pathê. Phantasia, mimêsis and pathê Among the painters and sculptors discussed previously, Theon of Samos and Praxiteles must be singled out because of their place in ancient theories pertaining to the relationship between phantasia, mimêsis and pathê.70 Quintilian states that Theon had reached excellence in bringing into play the viewers’ imagination (phantasia) and that this achievement also enabled him to manipulate their emotions.71 Aelian mentions his painting representing an attacking soldier, whose eyes were terrifying and threatening. The painter had represented nothing else in his painting, but expected his viewers to complete in their imagination the whole battle scene as he revealed his painting to the public and hired a trumpeter to sound the charge for the occasion.72 Aelian’s testimony not only provides us with a clear illustration of the process described by Quintilian: it also shows that phantasiai were thought to be stronger when they involved more than one sense at the time. Just as the anecdotes on Theon, the epigrams on Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite and Thespian Eros appear to be ‘rooted in the theories of perception and artistic creativity that were developing from the fourth century on’.73 As an image of embodied emotion, of desire itself, the Thespian Eros presents ancient writers with the challenging task of explaining how the sculptor created its image and managed to depict his love for Phryne in physical form. As noted by Gutzwiller, ancient epigrams suggest that Praxiteles used the ‘impression’ or phantasia that Eros had made on his own soul as a model.74 Accordingly, the Thespian Eros could be said to produce desire merely by his gaze. Extreme examples of the seduction produced by statues were the cases of agalmatophilia (the fact of falling in love with a statue), some of which were linked to Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite. In such cases, the viewer appeared to loose their awareness of the boundaries between the real world and the world of images.75 On the contrary, authors display awareness of the boundaries between art and reality in the subsequent examples. In certain cases, ancient critics noted that the emotional contents of a work of art did not match the conditions under which this art work was produced, as in the case of Protogenes’ Anapauomenos, a composition renowned for having been conceived during the siege of Rhodes and for depicting the state of complete tranquillity of a satyr absorbed by music.76

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism I argue that such an anecdote was probably intended to celebrate the artist’s power of imagination, his phantasia. This is not the only case that shows the clear awareness that ancient viewers had of the differences between the emotions stirred by an image and the emotions stirred by reality. As a matter of fact, a number of ancient sources present us with the idea according to which human beings are capable of enjoying the representations of objects that would only inspire fear or repulsion if they were real.77 Recurrent examples are: (1) the representation of physical pain and the dying or dead body;78 (2) the representation of vile and animals.79 A starting point for investigating such examples is provided by Aristotle’s reflections on the notion of mimêsis in Poetics 4 (1448b6-19, tr. Butcher):80 First, the instinct of imitation is implanted in man from childhood (...); and no less universal is the pleasure felt in things imitated. We have evidence of this in the facts of experience. Objects which in themselves we view with pain, we delight to contemplate when reproduced with minute fidelity [§ g>r aÙt> luphrîj [rîmen, toÚtwn t>j e9kÒnaj t>j m£lista ºkribwm2naj ca8romen qewroàntej]: such as the forms of the most ignoble animals and of dead bodies [qhr8wn te morf>j tîn ¢timot£twn ka< nekrîn]. The cause of this again is that to learn gives the liveliest pleasure, not only to philosophers but to men in general, whose capacity, however, of learning is more limited. Thus the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness [ca8rousi t>j e9kÒnaj [rîntej] is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning or inferring and saying perhaps, ‘Ah, that is he.’ For if you happen not to have seen the original, the pleasure will be due not to the imitation [m8mhma] as such, but to the execution [t]n ¢pergas8an], the colouring [t]n croi£n], or some such other cause.

In this passage, Aristotle distinguishes between two types of pleasure provided by the contemplation of the images of objects that would be unpleasant to see in reality: the pleasure of knowledge (the image solicits man’s ability to learn, to reason and to recognize an object) and the pleasure provided by the artistic qualities of the image (execution, colour). Later philosophical texts also establish an important distinction between the point of view of the ‘regular viewer’ and that of the philosopher. The originality of the philosopher’s approach to vile objects comes from in his ability to appreciate the very models of the images and to find pleasure in contemplating the animals that other men may only appreciate in artistic depictions and despise in reality.81 Later on, for the Stoics, this approach is based on the idea that certain animals, deprived of beauty, are the ‘necessary concomitants’ of the intentional activity of Nature.82 These philosophical approaches to the problem of the complex relationships between mimêsis and emotions enable us to realize the amount of interest that ancient viewers may have had in the paradoxical emotional responses involved by the images of vile or terrifying objects. The interest in the representation of dead and dying bodies or of vile animals is quite manifest in the surviving works of the Hellenistic period,83 but many

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Évelyne Prioux earlier examples can be cited, such as the fifth-century engraved gems of Dexamenus that represented quite a variety of vile insects and maybe the works of the late fourth-century painter Piraecus, known as the ‘rhyparographos’ (painter of vile objects).84 As for the interest in the graphic representations of dead and wounded bodies, it has been extensively documented, not only through the numerous examples known from archaeology, but also thanks to ecphraseis. We will see that a number of scenes of slaughter are gathered, for instance, in the second book of the Elder Philostratus’ Eicones. However, interestingly, the literary sources mentioning the rendering of êthê and pathê in the visual arts remain rather scarce if one focuses on Hellenistic and Early Imperial texts. Keen interest in the pictorial or sculptural representations of emotions seems to arise in the ecphraseis of the third century CE, as becomes clear when reading the works of Philostratus the Elder, Philostratus the Younger and Callistratus.85 It is difficult to say if this tendency reflects a new cultural phenomenon or if these imperial ecphraseis reflect earlier approaches to the images of which little has been preserved. I shall examine next the examples provided by Philostratus the Elder’s Eicones and to study how the notations concerning êthê and pathê provide relevant clues to understand the aesthetics and maybe the stylistic project of this author. Emotions in the Eicones of Philostratus the Elder The pictorial rendering of êthê and pathê It is well known that Philostratus’ Eicones suggest that paintings and literary works should be judged according to the same criteria. As a matter of fact, the Eicones establish a clear connection between the success of a painting and the painter’s ability to depict emotions:86 the prologue thus underlines the remarkable ability of a painting to vary the look of the characters and the emotions expressed by the characters’ eyes (fury, sorrow, joy) by simply playing on the use of colours (Prooem. 2). According to the narrator, painting is superior to other visual arts since it accomplishes more with this one mean (the play on colours) than all the other arts with many means. This point is repeatedly stressed in the treatise: the quality of the painting depends more on its ability to represent the character’s êthê and pathê (for instance, Dionysus’ love for Ariadne in 1.15.2) than it depends on representing the beauty and perfection of the human body. Many artists are able to depict a beautiful body, but the most difficult task of the painter is to express emotions and characters. One should especially admire the ‘spiritedness’ (phronêma) of a painted hunter; this deserves more praise than his body and clothes, even though the painter conceived everything in an admirable manner (1.28.4). Similarly, the rhetor will not praise the painter for his choice of colours and proportions when representing the eyes of Pantheia,87 but for his ability to lend

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism them the vividness of a complex interlace of emotions (pity, love, gladness) and to capture Pantheia’s êthos in detail (2.9.5).88 One of the recurring devices used by Philostratus in the Eicones consists in describing paintings that represent various characters whose êthê are strongly contrasted or focussing on the changing appearance of a given character who is successively affected by various emotions. The ecphraseis 2.20 to 2.25 thus represent Heracles in a variety of situations and emotional states; Poseidon is first shown as the god who will hurl his trident with wrath and smash a mass of rock into pieces, along with the body of the shipwrecked Ajax (2.13), or as a god who smiles to the little Palaemon (2.16). The Eicones also underscores contrasting episodes of the life of a given character, such as Achilles (2.2) and Polyphemus (2.18), whose fierce êthos is temporarily subdued by love.89 Ecphraseis 2.11 and 2.12 form an interesting pair, with two different representations of Pan: painting 2.11 shows a god full of anger against the Nymphs who have just captured him, while the next painting shows a radiant Pan (‘his nostril has no expression of anger’) dancing for baby Pindar (2.12). Ecphrasis 2.7 describes the varied êthê of the Achaeans, who are all affected by terror while assisting to the death of Antilochus. The varied visual effects of an emotion that affects different characters may remind us of the literary descriptions of Timanthes’ Sacrifice of Iphigenia,90 or of Campanian paintings showing the varied reactions of different characters when discovering the body of the Minotaur slain by Theseus.91 The technique that consists in depicting the contrasted reactions of different characters to a same event is repeatedly mentioned by Philostratus in the Eicones.92 Emotions of the characters, emotions of the viewers The Eicones discuss the complex relationships between the emotions of the artist, the emotions represented within the painting and the emotional response of the viewer.93 As a matter of fact, the narrator repeatedly comments on the emotions that govern the various stages of the artistic creation: while painting his ‘Perseus’, the artist admires and praises Perseus and shows his pity for Andromeda (1.29.2). Some paintings are admired for the representation of the protagonists’ emotions, others for their rendering of the emotional response of side characters, whose emotions may or may not coincide with the reactions of the viewers who visit the gallery;94 other times the painted landscape itself participates in the emotional responses of the protagonist or of the viewers.95 In order to analyze Philostratus’ outline of the emotional responses of the viewers to a emotional scene, special attention should be given to the second book of the Eicones, which deals with several killing scenes and violent deaths.96 In these ecphraseis, the author repeatedly plays on a comparison between the emotions of the painted characters and the emotions of the viewers. Ecphrasis 2.5 describes the joy of Rhodogoune,

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Évelyne Prioux triumphing over the Armenians: her proud and radiant look contrasts strongly with the scene of slaughter and desolation that surrounds her; and yet, as the narrator notes, aesthetic pleasure is produced by the colors of the dead bodies and by the colours of their garment, by the look of terror of Rhodogoune’s enemies and by the varied positions of the fallen soldiers.97 Ecphrasis 2.9 describes a picture of Pantheia committing suicide on the dead body of Abradates. The topic may have reminded the ancient readers of the composition of the Ludovisi Gaul (in this group, the Gaul is still standing and plunges a sword into his own breast while supporting the kneeling body of his dying wife with his left arm), even if, in Pantheia’s case, the composition is ‘inverted’ – the female character is still living while her husband is already dead and is shown lying on the ground. According to Philostratus’ description, the heroine has already driven the dagger through her breast and still presses on it. The narrator underlines Pantheia’s joy and notes that she does not seem to suffer. The sight of her throat, which she has torn in her grief, provides aesthetic pleasure: the self-inflicted marks made by her finger-nails are indeed deemed ‘more charming than a painting’ (=d8w grafÁj, 2.9.5). Even if this phrase may at first seem absurd in the context of an ecphrasis, it probably plays on the constant illusion that the viewer is in fact looking at a real scene. Moreover, this phrase may encourage the ancient reader to recall of another tragic scene, namely the sacrifice of Iphigenia ‘fair as a pictured form’ (pr2pous£ q,æj 1n grafa√j) that is commemorated by the chorus of Argive elders in Aeschylus’ Agamemnon (242). The emotional response of Philostratus’ reader is thus implicitly compared to the feelings that a tragedy could inspire to its readers. Characters, emotions and style Some of the ecphraseis provide faint hints on the style that would be appropriate for a pathetic scene. We have already mentioned the taste for chiaroscuro,98 but the Eicones are especially concerned with matters of poetic and rhetorical style. The reader is left to invent a theory of pictorial style on the basis of an analogy with literary style. Ecphrasis 2.4 (‘Hippolytus’) clearly links the pictorial rendering of emotions to literary style: ‘the painting itself mourns thee, having composed a sort of poetic lament in your honour’ (çdÚrato ka< = graf] qrÁnÒn tina poihtikÕn 1p< so< xunqe√sa, 2.4.3). Does Philostratus’ treatment of characters and emotions help us understand his stylistic and aesthetic project? As we noted previously, Philostratus often relies on the effects of contrast.99 The very composition of the Eicones expresses the idea of contrast, as becomes clear when one studies the topics and treatment of the various paintings:100 cunningly organized patterns can be recognized in mythological or historical narratives (such ecphraseis are likely to involve pathos, or elements of grand style)101 and in narratives that are conceived

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism as a kind of ‘divertimento’.102 These different sorts of ecphraseis should lead to different aesthetic responses and emotions on the part of the viewer or reader. To conclude this presentation of Philostratus’ reflections on the rendering of emotions and on its possible connections with his theories on style, I would like to suggest that several images of the Eicones were conceived as emblems of the author’s aesthetic theories. Hybrid creatures such as the ‘Female Centaurs’ (2.3) were possibly meant to symbolize a taste for constant contrast and for a mixture of styles. The ‘Orientalist’ paintings and especially of two Persian princesses,103 Pantheia (2.9) and Rhodogoune (2.5), were possibly meant to invite the reader’s reflection on pathos and its connections with the grand style. The subtle charm of Pantheia thus contrasts with the horribly mutilated body of her husband; her joy and her determination (the courage ‘of reason rather than of rashness’)104 contrasts with the pathos of the scene. As for the painting representing Rhodogoune’s triumph, one can note, with Polanski (2005), that ‘Philostratus constructed a veritable hierarchy of contradictions and opposites. A young, graceful lady on horseback was dressed in male armour, and represented in a scene of triumph over the vanquished male sex. Her hair was partly decently fastened up, but partly hanging loose in disarray. Her girlish joy contrasted with her haughtiness and authority as a queen.’ In my opinion, the well-known detail of Rhodogoune’s strange hairdo105 may have prompted Philostratus to choose this topic, since it was suitable to provide a visual symbol for a juxtaposition of contrasting styles. The series of contrasts that we noted in this ecphrasis likely provided the reader with a visual allegory of a grand style tempered by elements of plain style. Philostratus thus seems to have considered this mixture of forms to be the most effective means for rendering both pathê and êthê. Appendix A Emotions and characters in painting (literary sources on masterpieces of the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic periods) A.1. Pictorial depictions of the êthê and pathê Aristophon’s Wounded Ankaios: Pliny NH 35.130; Polygnotus’ Ilioupersis (scenes happening near Antenor’s house): Paus. 10.27.3; Polygnotus’ Ilioupersis (the grieving Helenus): Paus. 10.25.3; Polygnotus’ Ilioupersis (the figure of Cassandra): Luc. Im. 7; the grieving Hector in Polygnotus’ Nekyia: Paus. 10.31.3; the torments of Tantalus in Polygnotus’ Nekyia: Paus. 10.31.12; Polygnotus’ Polyxena: Paus. 1.22.6-7; APl 150; Polygnotus’ Capaneus: APl 106; Polygnotus’ (and Dionysus of Colophon’s) pictorial styles and their unique interest in the depiction of êthê: Pliny NH 35.58; Ael. VH 4.3; Arist. Pol. 1340a35ff.; Po. 1450a24ff.; Zeuxis’ Penelope as a visual image of virtue: Pliny NH 35.63; Zeuxis’ Menelaus pouring libations and crying: Tzetz. Chil. 8.388-391; Parrhasius’ dialogue with

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Évelyne Prioux Socrates (on the depiction of êthê in painting): X. Mem. 3.10.1ff.; Parrhasius’ Philoctetes: APl 111, 113; Parrhasius’ Prometheus: Sen. Con. 10.5; Parrhasius’ Athenian Demos: Pliny NH 35.63; Timanthes of Cythnus’ Sacrifice of Iphigenia: Pliny NH 35.73; Cic. Orat. 22.74; Quint. Inst. 2.13.12; V. Max. 8.11 ext. 6; Aetna, 597-9; Eustath. ad Il., p. 1343,60; Aristeides of Thebes’ style and his painting representing a fallen city: Pliny NH 35.98; the personifications in Apelles’ Calumny (images of êthê and pathê): Luc. Calumn. 5; Protogenes’ Anapauomenos: Pliny NH 35.105-106; APl 244 (?) ; Timomachus’ Ajax: APl 83; Timomachus’ Medea: APl 135-138, 141; paintings revealing the character of the figures in the treatment of the eyes: Plu. Alex. 1.3. A.2 The viewer’s emotional reactions Aristophon’s Philoctetus: Plu. De aud. poet. 3.30; Quaest. conv. 5.1.2; how Zeuxis died laughing in front of one his own paintings representing an old woman: Pliny NH 35.64; Timanthes of Cythnus’ Sacrifice of Iphigenia: V. Max. 8.11 ext. 6; a painting by Ctesilochus (an amusing and satiric representation of Zeus’ birth pangs as he gave birth to Dionysus): Pliny NH 35.140; Theon of Samos: Quint. Inst. 12.10.6; Ael. VH 2.44; Theon of Samos’ Orestes: Pliny NH 35.144; the pleasure provided by Piraicus’ paintings on humble topics: Pliny NH 35.112. A.3 The painter’s state of mind Protogenes’ Anapauomenos (a painting realized during the siege of Rhodes): Pliny NH 35.105-6.

Appendix B Emotions and characters in painting (literary sources on masterpieces of the Archaic, Classical and Hellenistic period) B.1. Representing the pathê in sculpture

Chest of Cypselus (Amphiaraus’ wrath): Paus. 5.17.8; a statue of Artemis by Bupalus and Athenis that seemed to have a sad look when one entered the temple and a radiant look when one left: Pliny NH 36.11; Myron’s style: Pliny NH 34.57; Socrates’ dialogue with Cleiton (= Polycleitus?): X. Mem. 3.10.6ff.; Scopas’ raving Maenad: AP 9.774; APl 57; APl 58; APl 60; Callistr. Ecphr. 2; Praxiteles’ style: DS 26.1.1; Praxiteles’ Dionysus: Callistr. Ecphr. 8; Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite taken as the image of Ares’ desire for the goddess: APl 160; Praxiteles’ Eros (unknown location): Callistr. Ecphr. 3; a statue of a youth by Praxiteles: Callistr. Ecphr. 11; statues of a crying woman and a laughing one by Praxiteles: Pliny NH 34.70; Silanion’s Jocasta: Plut. Quaest. con. 5.1.2; Silanion’s portrait of a sculptor known as ‘Apollodorus the madman’: Pliny NH 34.81; Lysippus’ Heracles: APl 103-104; Nicet. Choniat. p. 650, 3ff.; Nicet. Choniat p. 519, 48/9; portrait of the drunken Anacreon in love with Bathyllus: APl 306-7; statue of Maronis, a drunken old woman (possibly the archetype of a well-known Trunkene Alte, Munich, Glyptothek/Musei Capitolini): AP 7.353, 455; Aristonidas’ Athamas: Pliny NH 34.140; physical pain in the statue of a dying man commissioned by Medeius of Olynthus: Posidipp. Pell. 95 A.-B.; pathetic representations of the Gauls and of the Tantalids on the doors of Apollo Palatinus’ temple in Rome: Prop. 2.31.

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism B.2. Representing the êthê in sculpture Numerous epigraphic testimonies on the sophrosynê or courage of the character represented in a statue are known (see, for instance, the portrait of Telemnastus: IG 4.1.1117). This appendix focuses on the testimonies linked with famous statues and portraits. Portrait of Solon in Salamis: D. De falsa leg. 251; portrait of Themistocles: Plu. Them. 22; portrait of Chabrias: Nep. Chabr. 1.2; DS 15.3; Leochares’ portrait of Lyciscus the slave-merchant: Pliny NH 34.79; Lysippus’ portraits of Alexander: Plu. De Alex. fort. 2.2; Bryaxis’ Pasiphae and her aselgeia: Tatian. Oratio ad Graecos, 35; Hecatæus’ portrait of Philitas: Posidipp. Pell. 62 A.-B. B.3a The viewer’s emotional reactions The pleasure provided by Phidias’ statues of Athena (the Parthenos, the Promachos, the Lemnian): Arist. Orat. 50; the emotions provided by the contemplation of Phidias’ Olympian Zeus: D. Chr. 12.25; how Phidias’ Olympian Zeus soothes the distressed soul: D. Chr. 12.51; the pleasure provided by the sculptural representations of the pathê: X. Mem. 3.10.6; the desire inspired by Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite and/or his Thespian Eros: APl 159, 167; BCH 50, 1926, pp. 383-462, no. 20 (Herennia Procula’s epigram); Praxiteles’ Thespian Eros as a ransom for the Thespians’ erotic desires: APl 206; Phryne’s reaction to the Thespian Eros: APl 205; the pleasure provided by Silanion’s Jocasta: Plu. Quaest. con. 5.1.2; De aud. poet. 3.30; the aesthetic pleasure provided by Lysippus’ Kairos: Callistr. Ecphr. 6; the fearsome spectacle of a portrait of Alcibiades by Polycles (the arms of the statue have been lopped off): D. Chr. 37.40; the pleasure provided by the contemplation of images (painted of sculpted?) of dead bodies or of vile animals: Arist. Po. 1448b6-19; PA 645a16; M. Aur. 3.2. B.3b Cases of agalmatophilia Pliny NH 7.127, 36.20, 36.23; V. Max. 8.11, ext. 4; Ael. VH 9.39; Ath. 13.605f. B.4 The sculptor’s state of mind The creation of Praxiteles’ Thespian Eros and the suffering inflicted by love on the artist: Ath. 13.591a = APl 204; APl 206; Callistr. Ecphr. 3; Praxiteles’ love for Phryne: Ath. 13.590f.; APl 204-205; AP VI, 260; Pliny NH 34.70; Praxiteles’ love for Cratine: Clem. Alex. Protrept. 53; Praxiteles and love: AP 12.56-57; ‘Apollodorus the madman’: Pliny NH 3.1.

Notes 1. Pliny NH 34.51-2. 2. See e.g. Schwarz (1971). 3. See e.g. Franzoni (2006) xx-xxi. 4. Winckelmann significantly dated the Laocoon to the classical period, in order to associate this masterpiece with the supposed akmê of ancient art; cf. Décultot (2000) 124. 5. Zanker (2004) 144-67 offers a thorough introduction on the various devices used by Hellenistic artists to represent pleasure and pain and an attempt to compare those devices with the techniques of Alexandrian poets. 6. Hölscher (1987) 58.

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Évelyne Prioux 7. Hölscher (1971). The recently discovered epigrams of Posidippus tend to show that this approach to the history of Greek sculpture probably finds its roots in early Hellenistic reflections on style and art history; on this, see Prioux (2008a) 251-2. 8. Franzoni (2006) 63-8, 179-94. 9. For this view, see Franzoni (2006) 235-7. 10. Ridgway (1965) 49 discusses the representation of physical pain in these sculptures, especially with respect to the pediments of the temple of Zeus in Olympia; cf. Franzoni (2006) 200. 11. See Schäfer (1989) and Franzoni (2006). 12. Franzoni (2006) 198-9. 13. Warburg (1905). 14. See e.g. Gombrich (2002). 15. Ridgway (1965). 16. Franzoni (2006) 153-61. 17. Franzoni (2006) 75-105 analyzes at length the use of the ‘Death of Orpheus’ formula (the character is represented with one leg in extension, while the weight is carried by the bended knee of the other leg) on an Apulian crater representing a scene of Aristophanes’ Thesmophoriazusae. Aristophanes’ scene was identified as a parody of a scene of Euripides’ Telephus, in which Telephus pretended that he was about to kill the young Orestes. Significantly, the painted representations of Telephus threatening to kill Orestes are based on the same iconographic scheme. It is impossible to know how theatre and visual images interacted with each other, but it seems clear that the same body schemata were likely to be shared by both art forms. 18. Franzoni (2006) 245. 19. Cf. Callistratus’ description of a statue of Narcissus (Ecphr. 5): ‘In the nature of the eyes art had put an indication of grief, so that the image might represent not only Narcissus but also his fate.’ 20. See the analysis of Brilliant (1984) 71-3 and the useful synopsis provided by Clarke (2007) ch. 7 (table). 21. Plu. Quomodo adolescens poetas audire debeat 16b; Philostr. Im. (prooem.). 22. A.R. 4.471-4, with the commentary of Phinney (1967). 23. Plu. Quaest. conviv. 5.1.2. 24. Plu. De aud. poet. 3.30. 25. Pliny NH 34.140. 26. On ‘viewer supplementation’ in Hellenistic art, see Zanker (2004) 72-102. 27. Pliny NH 35.73 ; Cic. Orat. 22 ; Quint. Inst. 2.13.12 ; V. Max. 8.11 ext. 6; Aetna, 597-8; Eustath. ad Il., p. 1343, 60. For the reception of this anecdote in modern times, see, for instance, Alberti, De pictura, 1435; D’Aubigné, Les Tragiques, I, 561-2. 28. Coudreuse and Delignon (1997) draw an interesting parallel between the lost (though famous) Sacrifice of Iphigenia and Masaccio’s fresco showing Adam and Eve Expelled from Paradise (Florence, Santa Maria del Carmine, Capella Brancacci), which shows the contrasting expressions of pain of both characters: Masaccio explicitly represented the sorrow of the crying Eve, whose facial expression eloquently expresses pain. On the contrary, Adam conceals his face with both hands, keeping us from seeing his expression. 29. Pliny NH 34.58. 30. Pollitt (1974) 184-9. See also Pollitt (1976). The usual Latin equivalents for the words êthê and pathê are mores and pertubationes. See for instance Reinach (1985) 272, n. 3. Pollitt (1974) 184-9 quotes the most relevant passages for

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism understanding the significance of the words êthê and pathê in ancient art criticism. Thanks to the discovery of the ‘New Posidippus’, we can now add Posidipp. Pell. 63 A.-B. My appendices A and B aim to provide the reader with a somewhat exhaustive list of relevant sources on characters and emotions in ancient art: most of the sources I cite do not explicitly employ the words êthos or pathos, but they do all engage, at various degrees, with the problem of representing characters or emotions in the visual arts. These appendices were compiled on the basis of the sources on ancient art edited by Overbeck (1868) and Reinach (1985). Some additions are occasionally made for texts discovered during the twentieth century, or for other literary sources, which were overlooked by Overbeck and Reinach, but which I consider important for this subject. 31. Pollitt (1974) 184-9 and (1976) notes that earlier commentaries on the notion of êthos in painting did tend to interpret the word as ‘loftiness of character’, an interpretation that must probably be rejected, but that probably results from an attempt to reconstruct Aristotle’s theories on Polygnotus’ painting on the basis of the scant allusions provided in several passages of his works. See my subsequent discussion. 32. Pollitt (1974) 184-9. 33. Arist. Po. 1450a24; Pol. 1340a35. It should be noted, though, that imitation of character through visual sensations is deemed to be less effective than imitation of character in music: see Arist. Pol. 1340a28-39, with the commentary of Brancacci (1995) 104. 34. See Brancacci (1995) 105 and Arist. Po. 1447a20-23, 1456a38-b2; Pol. 1340a7-12, 1341b32-1342a16, 1342b1-3. 35. X. Mem. 3.10; cf. Brancacci (1995). 36. Modern commentaries have often assumed the name Cleiton to be a kind of ‘nickname’ for Polycleitus, but, of course, this theory is impossible to prove. See Brancacci (1995) 109, with earlier bibliography. 37. See the important concluding remarks of Brancacci (1995) 126: ‘Distinti dagli êthê della pittura, i pathê della scultura non presentano per questo uno status estetico diverso da quello dei primi: l’impressione che essi provocano in chi osserva la statua è ancora una volta descritta in termini di piacere (terpsis), e il piacere stesso non è direttamente connesso alla pura esibizione dei pathê, ma, più sottilmente, all’imitazione dei pathê dei corpi realizzata dallo scultore. Questi ultimi sono dunque proprietà dell’opera d’arte, o anche effetto emotivo incluso nell’opera d’arte, ma non, evidentemente, emozione risultante dalla sua contemplazione, come conferma il fatto che l’eidos plastico, cioè la pura fisicità della statua, è considerata da Socrate veicolo di tal rappresentazione.’ 38. See Appendices A and B. 39. Sen. Con. 10.5. On Parrhasius’ taste for the representation of physical pain, see also APl 111; 113 and Rouveret (2003). 40. See Prioux (2007) 7-18. 41. As was shown by Zanker (1995) 146-9, this distinction is very important to understand the iconographical codes of the portraits of intellectuals conceived in the early Hellenistic period. 42. Ny Carlsberg Glyptotek, inv. no.1563. 43. Both portraits are known through a variety of copies: see Richter (1965) ad loc. For Posidippus’ portraits, see Fittschen’s cast and reconstitution in the Archeological Institute of the University of Göttingen. 44. APl 306-7. 45. In Philitas’ case we are fortunate enough to know both the description and

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Évelyne Prioux a possible copy of the portrait originally elaborated in the early third century BCE; on this, see Prioux (2008b). 46. Prioux (2007) 19-74. 47. On all painters cited below, see the apposite commentaries in Rouveret (1989). 48. Arist. Po. 1450a24ff.; Pol. 1340a35ff. The first passage characterizes Polygnotus as a good ‘painter of characters’ (êthographos) and compares him with Zeuxis who is thought to leave no place to the depiction of character in his paintings. The second passage indicates that young people should look at the paintings of Polygnotus or of any other painter who was preoccupied with depicting characters, and avoid the paintings of Pauson, a painter known for his caricatures (cf. Arist. Po. 1448a5ff.; Polygnotus depicted men nobler than they were, Pauson depicted them as worse than they were). 49. Pollitt (1974) 189. 50. I am using my own translation. In his translation of this passage, Pollitt (1974) understands the difference between the two painters as being a matter of ‘size’ (Polygnotus painted large scenes and Dionysus imitated his art, except in the case of size), but I prefer to adopt a translation that interprets this difference as pertaining both to size and to painting styles (Polygnotus achieved effects of grandeur). Cf. Arist. Po. 1448a5ff.; Polygnotus depicted men nobler than they were, whereas Dionysus represented them as they were. As noted by Pollitt (1974) 184-9, the reason for which Aristotle calls Polygnotus an êthikos artist in the Politics was not because all the characters in his works were noble, but because his work showed different types of characters engaged in scenes where moral rights and wrongs were at stake. One could therefore learn moral lessons from his paintings. 51. Franzoni (2006) 236. 52. Prioux (2008a) 159-252, and Prioux (2008c). 53. Paus. 10.26.4 (Neoptolemus). 54. See Arist. Po. 1450b8ff.: êthos is what demonstrates a choice (i.e. the decision to choose something or to flee from something). On êthos in the scenes happening after the action itself in Polygnotus’ paintings, see Franzoni (2006) 239-40 and Pollitt (1974) 184-9. 55. Ael. VH 4.3. 56. Arist. Po. 1448a5ff. 57. On Antimachus and the place of his elegies in the ‘Telchines’ quarrel’, see Cameron (1995); Prioux (2007) 75-130. On Antimachus’ style and Plutarch’s quotation, see esp. Lombardi (1997). 58. Pliny NH 35.108 describes Nicomachus’ ‘celeritas’. 59. It would be interesting to compare this result with the views about the links between style and the rendering of emotions and characters in literature. Ancient testimonies often associate pathos with Asianism and the grand style, as Gill (1984) has suggested. 60. Pliny NH 35.98. A similar topic was apparently represented in the Hellenistic group of the dying Gauls, of which we have already mentioned the Ludovisi Gaul and his wife. A Renaissance drawing shows that a female character restored as a wounded and lying Amazon was in fact a dying mother nursing her infant. See Coarelli (1995). 61. I am using the translation of Pollitt. As was noted by Pollitt, a possible explanation for this testimony is that Aristides was the first to paint stock characters, like those in the Characters of Theophrastus or in the Tropoi of the New Posidippus.

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism 62. Quint. Instit. 12.10.6; Ael. VH 2.44. On Theon’s compositions as representative of Hellenistic art, see Zanker (2004) 72-3. See my subsequent analysis. 63. Gutzwiller (2004b) has studied the connection between the ancient readings of this painting and Hellenistic philosophy (esp. the conception of the soul promoted by Chrysippus). 64. Sauron (2001). 65. D.S. 26.1.1: nor did Praxiteles who instilled the very passions of the soul into works of stone (transl. Pollitt). 66. Scopas’ Maenad: AP 9.774; APl 57; APl 58; APl 60; Callistr. Ecphr. 2; Praxiteles’ Cnidian Aphrodite: AP 12.56-7; APl 159, 160, 167; Praxiteles’ Thespian Eros: APl 167, 204, 205, 206; Callistr. Ecphr. 3; BCH 50, 1926, pp. 383-462, no. 20. 67. Pothos was part of a group adorning the temple of Aphrodite in Megara: Scopas had also designed a statue of Eros (love) and a statue of Himeros (erotic desire for someone who is close). See Paus. 1.43.6. Another group with Aphrodite and Pothos was apparently designed by the same artist for Samothrace: Pliny NH 36.25. 68. See Becatti (1941) 405ff.; Franzoni (2006) 172-3. 69. See my previous discussion in this chapter. Cf. the renowned example of a play on various alloys in the ‘Pugile delle Terme di Diocleziano’ now kept in the Museo Nazionale Romano (Palazzo Massimo). 70. On mimêsis and phantasia, see e.g. Naas (2004-2005) passim and esp. p. 240 n. 23 on the connection of both notions with emotion. 71. Quint. Instit. 12.10.6. 72. Ael. VH 2.44. 73. Gutzwiller (2004a) 401. 74. Gutzwiller (2004a) 402: ‘the Thespian Eros, because it was accurately made from the mold (arkhetupon) in Praxiteles’ heart, a mold made by the impression (tupôsis) of his erôs for Phryne, could in turn produce the feeling of pothos in those who observed it’ – on this see also Robert (1992) and Gutzwiller (2003). 75. On the cases of agalmatophilia, see Robert (1992) and Hersey (2009) [non uidi]. 76. Pliny NH 35.105-6: sequiturque tabulam illius temporis haec fama, quod eam Protogenes sub gladio pinxerit. Satyrus hic est quem anapauomenon uocant, ne quid desit temporis eius securitati, tenentem tibias ‘the painting that Protogenes painted under these circumstances is renowned for having been painted beneath the sword; this work is the Satyr known as the anapauomenos; in order to mark the sense of security that he felt, the painter has placed a pair of pipes in his hand’. 77. For sources on specific artworks, Plu. Quaest. 5.1.2; De aud. poet. 3.30; Pliny NH 35.112. For philosophical sources, see Arist. Po. 1448b6-19; PA 645a16; M. Aur. 3.2. 78. Rouveret (2003). 79. Trinquier (2008). 80. Arist. Po. 1448b6-19 (tr. Butcher). 81. Trinquier (2008). 82. Chrysipp. fr. 1145 Dufour = SVF 2.1163 von Arnim and M. Aur. 3.2. Generally on this topic, see Halliwell (2002). 83. For the representation of vile animals, see, for instance, the mosaic depicting an asarotos oikos by Sosus of Pergamon: Pliny NH 36.184. A replica signed by a certain Heraclitus was found in a villa located on the Aventine in Rome. 84. Pliny NH 35.112. 85. See, for instance, Philostratus the Younger, Eicones, preface, 5. The clearest example is provided by Callistr. Ecphr. 14: almost all his descriptions involve depictions of emotions. See especially the following descriptions (tr. Fairbanks):

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Évelyne Prioux ‘and one could see the bronze coming under the sway of passion and willingly receiving the representation of laughter’ (3.2); ‘and the bronze feigned to represent the emotions’ (8.3); ‘at any rate it (Memnon’s colossus) both had grief in its composition and again it was possessed by a feeling of pleasure according as it was affected by each emotion’ (9.2). Examples of emotions within the image: Ecphr. 2 (the Bacchic furor of Scopas’ Maenad), 3 (the joy and laughing of Praxiteles’ Eros), 4 (statue of a drunken Indian), 5 (a sculpture of Narcissus, whose glance expresses a mixture of joy, exultation and grief), 8 (Praxiteles’ Dionysus as a representation of joy and Bacchic furor: the god ‘melts with desire’ (8.3), as in Euripides’ description [Bacchae, 233f.]), 9 (Memnon’s colossus who sings of joy at the arrival of day and sings sadly at its departure), 11 (Praxiteles’ portrait of a youth: an image of desire and passion), 13 (a statue of Medea: a mixture of reasoning, passion and grief made in the imitation of Euripides’ drama – the ability to depict two contrasting emotions is one of the topoi of ecphrastic epigram; for the examples concerning Timomachus’ Medea, see Gutzwiller (2004b)), 14 (an encaustic painting of Athamas, ‘filled with consternation’ (14.1) and with ‘his eye distraught’ (14.1), and of the terrified Ino). Examples of aesthetic pleasure depicted within the image: Ecphr. 1 (a satyr playing the flute and the reactions of Pan and a nymph to the music), 7 (Orpheus playing the lyre and the enchantment of pleasure of the animals). Examples of aesthetic pleasure or deep impression on part of the viewer: Ecphr. 6 (Lysippus’ Kairos), 10 (a statue of Paean that ‘enthralls the senses’ [10.2]). Should we think that Callistratus’ strong interest in pathê is linked to the type of works that he comments (mostly statues)? As we have seen (see my previous discussion), the Socratic dialogues preserved by Xenophon indeed connected painting with the art of representing êthê and sculpture with the art of representing pathê. 86. On the interest for êthê and pathê in the ecphraseis of the Second Sophistic, see for instance Quet (2006) 31-4. 87. See Manieri (1999) 118. 88. Ecphrasis 2.9 also praises the imagination (phantasia) of the painter that enables him to invent a physical image corresponding to Xenophon’s moral portrait of Pantheia, that is to say to paint her êthos; from the very beginning of his ecphrasis, the rhetor indeed connects the painting representing Pantheia with Xenophon’s account of Pantheia’s story (Cyr. 6.1.31ff.; 5.1.6; 6.4.6). 89. ‘He thinks, because he is in love that his glance is gentle, but it is wild and stealthy still, like that of wild beasts subdued under the force of necessity’ (Philostr. Im. 2.18.3. tr. Fairbanks; ed. Loeb). 90. Pliny NH 35.73 ; Cic. Orat. 22 ; Quint. Instit. 2.13.12 ; V. Max. 8.11 ext. 6 ; Eustath. ad Il., p. 1343, 60. 91. Pompeii, Casa di Gavius Rufus (ins. VII.2.16-17, exedra (o)). Naples, MANN, Inv. 9043. 92. 1.28 (‘Hunters’: all hunters are in love with the youth who is about to slay a wild boar, but Philostratus describes their varied êthê); 2.15 (‘Glaucus Pontius’: all the Argonauts, except Hercules, are afraid at Glaucus’ apparition; the rhetor especially focuses on Lynceus’ fear); 2.27 (‘The Birth of Athena’: the rhetor describes the emotions of the various gods). Ecphrasis 2.21 contrasts the êthê of the insolent Antaeus and of Hercules (who seems a little fearful and tries to control his anger so as to be able to act cautiously). In a different vein, 1.30 describes the varied characters of Pelops’ horses, while 2.3 provides an account of the varied êthê and emotions of the baby Centaurs. See also 1.4 (‘Menoeceus’) and Beall (1993) 359-60: ‘In other words, (Philostratus) replaces the visible landscape with a kind of moral landscape whose relationship to an actual siege operation is far from clear.’

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism 93. As was noted by Manieri (1999) 119, the emotional response of the viewer seems to be stronger when the painter manages to give the illusion that several senses are stimulated by the image, through the evocation of colours, sounds and perfumes (e.g. 1.28.2). Similarly, in Callistratus’ Ecphraseis the most vivid images are those that produce sound or give the illusion of doing so (Ecphr. 1 and 8: are both descriptions connected by their allusions to the singing colossus of Memnon in Aethiopia). 94. For instance, in 1.28 (‘Hunters’), the narrator implicitly compares the emotional response of the viewers who visit the gallery to the emotions of the side characters: all the hunters are in love with the youth who is trying to kill the wild boar, and this emotion causes them to ‘stand in astonishment and gaze at this scene as though it were a picture’ (1.28.8). Their response to the hunting scene is thus an aesthetic one, just as if they were external viewers of the painting. This reaction parallels the narrator’s initial belief that he can address the hunters and expect an answer from them: ‘How I have been deceived! I was deluded by the painting into thinking that the figures were not painted but were real beings, moving and loving’ (1.28.2: tr. Fairbanks); for analysis see Webb (2006). 95. In 2.4 (‘Hippolytus’): the personified landscape is described as lamenting and grieving. 96. Apart from the examples cited below, see 2.10; 2.19; 2.23; 2.25; 2.30. 2.10 (‘Cassandra’) is inspired by Agamemnon’s account of his own death and of the murder of Cassandra in the Nekyia (Od. 11.405-34): Philostratus’ extends the Homeric scene to the proportions of a massive slaughter. 2.19 describes the savage êthos of Phorbas; the emotional response of the viewer is only implicitly suggested by the mention of a dreadful landscape, with cut-off heads suspended from the trees and swinging in the breeze. Ecphrasis 2.23 describes an emotional scene in terms that are largely inspired by Euripides’ Heracles: Heracles killing Megara’s children. Philostratus provides us with a careful description of the physical effects of madness on Heracles’ body (dilated neck, swelling veins, bellowing throat, grim and alien smile – to be compared with the ‘maniac laugh’ of E. Her. 935) and a graphic description of the bodies of Megara’s dead children. Ecphrasis 2.25 depicts the emotions of Heracles grieving on Abdera’s body amidst the corpses of the victims of Diomedes’ man-eating mares: as in ecphrasis 2.23, the emotional response of the viewer is implicitly suggested by the character of the scene. Ecphrasis 2.30 echoes the painting representing Pantheia (2.9): Evadne throws herself in the flames of her husband Capaneus’ funeral pyre. A very interesting effect is noticed by Philostratus: Evadne ‘has no piteous look’ (2.30.2) and is surrounded by Cupids who seem to rejoice in kindling the pyre with their torches ‘and claim that they do not defile their fire but that they will find it sweeter and more pure, when they have used it in the burial of those who have dealt so well with love’ (2.30.3; tr. Fairbanks). Of, course, these observations can be expected to contrast in a strong manner with the pity that the viewer/reader may feel when confronted with such a scene. 97. Im. 2.5.1 (tr. Fairbanks): ‘The blood and also the bronze weapons and the purple garments lend a certain glamour to the battle-scene, and a pleasing feature of the painting is the men who have fallen in different postures, and horses running wildly in terror ...’. 98. See my previous analysis in this chapter. 99. Cf. also Polanski (2005). 100. Braginskaya-Leonov (2006) have shed light on the strictly codified effect of alternation between short descriptions, long descriptions and descriptions of average length in Philostratus’ first book.

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Évelyne Prioux 101. E.g. 1.1 (‘Scamander’) or 1.4 (‘Menoeceus’). 102. Relevant examples are 1.2 ‘Comus’, 1.5; ‘The cubits’ or 1.6 ‘Cupids’, or landscapes such as 1.12-1.13 ‘Bosphorus’. 103. On Philostratus’ ‘Oriental’ paintings, see Polanski (2005). 104. Im. 2.9.5 105. The news of the Armenian rebellion was indeed supposed to have arrived while the princess was combing her hair, and Rhodogoune was believed to have left the palace immediately in order to put this rebellion to an end. See V. Max. Mem. 9.3 ext. 4.

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6. Emotions in Ecphrasis and Art Criticism Hersey, George L. 2009. Falling in Love with Statues: Artificial Humans from Pygmalion to the Present. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Hölscher, Tonio. 1971. Ideal und Wirklichkeit in den Bildnissen Alexanders des Großen. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Hölscher, Tonio. 1987. Römische Bildsprache als semantisches System. Heidelberg: Carl Winter. Lehmann, Karl. 1941. ‘The Imagines of the Elder Philostratus.’ The Art Bulletin 23: 16-44. Lombardi, Michela. 1997. ‘Tradizione e innovazione nell’epica prealessandrina: Antimaco di Colofone e Cherilo di Samo.’ QUCC 56: 89-104. McCombie, Duncan. 2002. ‘Philostratus, Histoi (Imagines 2.28): Ekphrasis and the Web of Illusion.’ Ramus 31: 146–57. Manieri, Alessandra. 1999. ‘Colori, Suoni e Profumi nelle Imagines: Principi dell’Estetica Filostratea.’ QUCC 63: 111-21. Mau, August. 1907. Pompeii: Its Life and Art. New York: MacMillan and Co. (2nd edn, tr. F.W. Kelsey). Naas, Valérie. 2004-2005. ‘De la Mimesis à la Phantasia: Le Discours sur l’art d’après Pline l’Ancien.’ Incontri triestini di filologia classica 4: 235-56. Overbeck, Johannes A. 1868. Die antiken Schriftquellen zur Geschichte der bildenden Künste bei den Griechen. Leipzig: Verlag von Wilhelm Engelmann. Polanski, Tomasz. 2005. ‘Two Persian Princesses in the Paintings of the Greek “Orientalists”.’ Grazer Beiträge 24: 197-212. Phinney, Edward, Jr. 1967. ‘Hellenistic Painting and the Poetic Style of Apollonius.’ CJ 62: 145-9. Pollitt, Jerome Jordan. 1974. The Ancient View of Greek Art: Criticism, History, and Terminology. New Haven: Yale University Press. Pollitt, Jerome Jordan. 1976. ‘The Êthos of Polygnotos and Aristeides.’ In In Memoriam Otto J. Brendel: Essays in Archaeology and the Humanities, ed. Larissa Bonfante and Helga von Heintze, 49-54. Mainz: Verlag Philipp von Zabern. Prioux, Évelyne. 2007. Regards alexandrins: Histoire et théorie des arts dans l’épigramme hellénistique. Louvain: Peeters. Prioux, Évelyne. 2008a. Petits musées en vers: épigramme et discours sur les collections antiques. Paris: CTHS Editions. Prioux, Évelyne. 2008b. ‘Le Portrait perdu et retrouvé du poète Philitas de Cos: Posidippe 63 A.-B. et IG XIV, 2486.’ ZPE 166: 66-72. Prioux, Évelyne. 2008c. ‘Le Drapé, le colosse, la pierre et le fleuve: quelques métaphores du style chez Posidippe et Callimaque.’ AA 4 (2004): 19-38. Pouzadoux, Claude. 2008. ‘Comment (ne pas) se passer des images.’ La Part de l’œil 23: 131-5. Quet, Marie-Henriette. 2006. ‘Voir, entendre, se ressouvenir.’ In Le Défi de l’art. Philostrate, Callistrate et l’image sophistique, ed. Michel Costantini et al., 31-61. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Reinach, Adolphe. 1985. Recueil Milliet (Textes grecs et latins relatifs à l’histoire de la peinture ancienne). 2nd edn. Introduction and notes by Agnès Rouveret, Paris: Macula. First published 1921. Richter, Gisela M.A. 1965. The Portraits of the Greeks. 3 vols. London: Phaidon Press. Ridgway, Brunilde Sismondo. 1965. ‘Wounded Figures in Greek Sculpture.’ Archaeology 18: 47-54. Robert, Renaud. 1992. ‘Ars Regenda Amore: Séduction Érotique et Plaisir Esthétique.’ MEFRA 104: 373-437.

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Évelyne Prioux Rouveret, Agnès. 1989. Histoire et Imaginaire de la peinture ancienne,Ve siècle av. J.C.-Ier siècle ap. J.C. Rome: École française de Rome. Rouveret, Agnès. 2003. ‘Parrhasios ou le peintre assassin.’ In Ars et Ratio: Sciences, art et métiers dans la philosophie hellénistique et romaine (Collection Latomus, 273), ed. Carlos Lévy et al., 184-93. Bruxelles: Éditions Latomus. Sauron, Gilles. 2001. ‘Vénus entre deux fous au forum de César.’ In Rome et ses Provinces. genèse et diffusion d’une image du pouvoir. Hommages à Jean-Charles Balty, ed. Cécile Evers and Athéna Tsingarida, 187-99. Bruxelles. Schäfer, Jörg. 1989. ‘Über die Darstellung von Emotion, Gefühl und Stimmung in der früheren griechischen Malerei’, Ariadne 5: 85-91. Schwarz, Gerda. 1971. Die griechische Kunst des 5. und 4. Jahrhunderts v. Chr. im Spiegel der Anthologia Graeca, Wien. Settis, Salvatore. 1975. ‘Immagini della meditazione, dell’incertezza e del pentimento nell’arte antica’, Prospettiva 2: 4-18. Trinquier, Jean. 2008. ‘Mimésis et connaissance dans la réflexion antique: l’exemple des animaux sans noblesse et de leur représentation’, La Part de l’œil 23: 75-103. Warburg, Aby. 1905. Dürer und die italienische Antike. In Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Gertrud Bing, Leipzig-Berlin, 1932: II, 445-9. Webb, Ruth. 2006. ‘The Imagines as a Fictional Text: Ekphrasis, Apatê and Illusion.’ In Le Défi de l’art. Philostrate, Callistrate et l’image sophistique, ed. Michel Costantini et al., 113-36. Rennes: Presses Universitaires de Rennes. Zanker, Graham. 2004. Modes of Viewing in Hellenistic Poetry and Art. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press. Zanker, Paul. 1995. The Mask of Socrates: The Image of the Intellectual in Antiquity, tr. Alan Shapiro. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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One Wife, One Love: Coniugalis Amor, Grief and Masculinity in Statius’ Silvae Anna McCullough In the preface to book five of the Silvae, Statius addresses his friend Flavius Abascantus, who has recently lost his wife Priscilla, the subject of a consolatory poem (5.1). Statius lauds Abascantus as an exemplum, especially for husbands, for the depth of his mourning and the pietas he shows to Priscilla in his grief (5.Pref.2). From this exemplum, Statius draws the moral lesson that ‘indeed, to love a living wife is pleasure, to love a dead wife is religion’ (uxorem enim vivam amare voluptas est, defunctam religio, 5.Pref.4-5). Two emotions collide in this statement: conjugal love and grief. Statius is approaching both on untraditional terms: only real men love their wives (and often only one wife) and only real men mourn them to excess. Their extreme grief is an extension of the devotion they felt in life, a conjugal love that turns to pietas and religio after death. These ideas are problematic in light of general Roman conventions on men’s behaviour in conjugal relationships and mourning. Love, while an admired and even desired quality of marriages, was not necessarily part of expectations of marriage, nor a primary motivation for marrying. Spousal devotion and loyalty were virtues more commonly attributed to women, and their chastity was more critical to the marriage.1 Moreover, tradition associated extreme mourning with women and womanishness; men were not supposed to grieve excessively, much less publicly,2 in contrast to Statius’ portrayal of Abascantus’ grief. But in the Silvae, such male displays of grief as well as love are offered and read as evidence of a man’s fine character and strong masculinity, rather than as proof of his weakness or femininity. In flouting these conventions, Statius must therefore find a context in which to fit his men, to create a flattering portrait for his patrons, and through which his audience would understand his subjects were good Romans. After all, his addressees expected Statius to show them in a favourable light, not in an effeminizing or questionable one. He finds such a structure in an ideal traditionally held for women, but rarely attributed to men: the ideal of the univira, the one-man woman. In Statius, men who are monogamous and devoted to their wives are often portrayed as paral-

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Anna McCullough leling the female title and stereotype of the univira. On the surface, this seems a feminizing gesture, since the one-man woman was traditionally, well, a woman. But in using the language and symbolic power of the univira, Statius is in fact emphasizing certain traditional masculine virtues while simultaneously lauding and displaying the intense devotion felt by the men in question. This also explains and justifies their extreme grief – men are mourning just as female univirae might upon the deaths of their husbands. The univira ideal was an ancient one in Roman culture; it emphasized female monogamy and purity.3 A univira was a woman who had only been married once, never divorced. It was used in two senses: one, if her husband was still living, and two, if she predeceased her husband, since death was the final guarantor of chastity, as her husband would be in life.4 The latter sense was used by all social ranks by the imperial era, with the former reserved for women of elite status.5 Univirae were accorded special religious significance; certain rites and ceremonies, notably those connected with Fortuna, could only be performed by univirae, and not by women who had been married more than once.6 Lightman and Zeisel argue the application of univira to widows who refused to remarry was a Christian innovation via Tertullian and Jerome,7 while other scholars seem to accept that those widows whose first husbands have died and thereafter refuse to remarry count as univira while living.8 Since widowhood in pagan Rome lacked the ritual purity of a true univira,9 as she was not able to participate in the rituals univirae with living husbands were allowed, it would seem that once-married celibate widows did not count as univirae; and indeed, the usual language describing them – solus, unus, uno marito / matrimonio, uni nupta10 – is not applied to widows. Nevertheless, such widows were also honoured in Roman society with language emphasizing values of loyalty and chastity.11 Either way, the univira ideal was a peculiarly Roman concept, and one which persisted into the fourth-century CE, despite both Augustan legislation and, more broadly, social conditions existing from the late Republic on, that encouraged remarriage and made the ideal difficult to translate into everyday reality.12 Even in Catullus and the Augustan elegiac poets, an ideal of pure conjugal love and total loyalty still had power, ‘unforgotten if unfashionable’, seen in both the portrayals of the authors’ own relationships and in heroines who preferred to die rather than remarry.13 These values inherent in the univira ideal, while in the main applied to women, were appropriated by a few Roman authors to describe men. In this alternative vision of masculinity, conjugal devotion and loyalty were valued, and men demonstrated the highest realization of the traditional masculine value of self-discipline – restricting sexual and marital activity to one woman. Such a vision was ‘alternative’ since men were not expected by society to only satisfy sexual desire within marriage, and could have relations before marriage.14 This general perception is reflected in honor-

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7. One Wife, One Love ary inscriptions, where in descriptions of personal character, ‘the virtues attributed to men ... are primarily those of modesty and discretion (e.g. modestia), while those ascribed to women signify sexual purity (e.g. pudicitia)’.15 In fact, evidence for men as monogamists is rare; in a few inscriptions, some husbands ‘regarded themselves as inconsolable’ on the death of a wife, while generally it was ‘good fortune if a man only married once’.16 One of the first significant examples is in the Consolatio Ad Liviam, in which Drusus and Antonia’s marriage is depicted as unusually close. In addressing consolatory remarks (299-328) to Antonia, the author assures her: ‘You submitted to him, you were his only and last love’ (tu concessus amor, tu solus et ultimus illi, Cons. Ad Liv. 305). As previously mentioned, this use of solus is characteristic of language describing a univira.17 Conversely, she is his perfect match, a female version of Drusus, and she is Drusus’ first, last and only love; his last words are of her. This scene also recalls a common portrayal of a loyal spouse on his/her deathbed, who only wishes to see or speak to her husband or his wife at the end in a last demonstration of conjugal love. Germanicus’ final advice to his wife Agrippina before expiring is in this tradition (Tac. Ann. 2.72), as is Priscilla’s death in the Silvae; she is on her deathbed when she recognizes ‘only the voice of her husband’ (vox sola mariti, 5.1.171), and her last words and instructions are for him: ‘At that moment, dying, in this way she comforted the only one she loved’ (tum sic unanimum moriens solatur amantem, 5.1.176). Such scenes emphasize both the nature of the marriage and the character of the individual spouses, here their love, loyalty and monogamy. Indeed, Germanicus is later acclaimed as a male univira by Tacitus; when compared with Alexander the Great, he notes that in contrast, Germanicus ‘had conducted himself with kindness towards friends and moderation in his pleasures, married once, with children of indisputable parentage ...’ (mitem erga amicos, modicum voluptatum, uno matrimonio, certis liberis egisse ..., Ann. 2.73.3). Antonia’s Drusus is portrayed in the same vein by Valerius Maximus: ‘He had held his sexual experience confined within his affection for his wife’ (usum veneris intra coniugis caritatem clausum tenuisse, 4.3.3). In this example, inserted in his chapter on abstinence, Valerius wants the reader to understand ‘Drusus’ behaviour as embodying the strength of mind to resist other sexual temptations to which most men would succumb’.18 He is thus a model of masculine self-discipline, abstinentia, but in a sexual sense that conjures up the more feminine virtue of castitas as well. Finally, Cato the Younger’s father, Laelius, was also noted by Plutarch for only having one wife and confining his sexual activity to his marriage (Cato Min. 7.3). All these examples serve to demonstrate that there was a thread in Roman culture identifying, valuing and praising monogamous love on the part of men.19 Statius’ application of specifically univira language to men is more extensive than previous authors; instead of single anecdotes, three (possi-

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Anna McCullough bly four) of the men in his poems are presented as univirae. Statius uses this ideal and its language to consistently draw a picture of spousal love and devotion not just on the wife’s part, but also on the husband’s, expanding the ideal of male monogamy and devotion as few authors did. One such couple are Stella and Violentilla, whose marriage is celebrated in Silv. 1.2. Violentilla is rightly honoured as an excellent woman, possessing not just the superficial virtues of birth, beauty and wealth (1.2.107-9 and 112-15), but also those of good character: ‘Although I [Venus] have given her the gift of generous wealth, she conquers riches with her spirit’ (huic quamvis census dederim largita beatos, / vincit opes animo, Stat. Silv. 1.2.121-2). More significantly, though this is her second marriage, she remains chaste and loyal to her first husband’s memory, denying all suitors, but yielding to this one only because of Venus’ pressure and her own virtuous feelings for Stella: ... thalami quamvis iuga ferre secundi saepe neget maerens. ipsam iam cedere sensi inque vicem tepuisse viro. (Silv.1.2.138-40) ... although she often refuses to bear the yoke of a second marriage, still mourning. But already she is giving in to her feelings and is warming to the man in turn.

Just a few lines later, Statius continues to urge her to give up her grief and accept this second marriage: ‘Just how much longer for this sleep and modest emptiness of couch ... what limit to custom and loyalty? Or will you never yield to the yoke of a man?’ (Quonam hic usque sopor vacuique modestia lecti ... quis morum fideique modus? numquamne virili / summittere iugo?, Silv. 1.2.162, 164-5). This reluctance is a further indication of her virtuous character; if not for the entry of Stella into her life, she might have died a true univira, forever the chaste and loyal matron portrayed here. For Stella’s part, it is implied that this is his first marriage; in Cupid’s appeal to Venus to bless the marriage, he notes: ‘no matter how much Ausonian matrons sought him as son-in-law, I conquered the invincible and ordered him to bear the yoke of a powerful mistress and to look forward through long years’ (quamvis Ausoniis multum gener ille petitus / matribus, edomui victum dominaeque potentis / ferre iugum et longos iussi sperare per annos, Silv. 1.2.76-8). Despite being pursued as a potential bridegroom by many, therefore, Stella neither committed to nor loved anyone until the arrival of Violentilla, who bears the promise of a stable and long-lived marriage. Once struck by the arrow, ‘This man is dedicated to you with his whole life, loves and admires you among all ...’ (hic tibi sanguine toto / deditus unam omnes inter miratur amat ..., Silv. 1.2.170-1). The language here once again echoes univira descriptions, with unam applied to the object of his affections, his one and only

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7. One Wife, One Love wife and the woman to whom he is completely dedicated. He even shuns more traditional masculine topics, like war or heroic deeds, for his poetry, choosing to focus only on his love for Violentilla (1.2.96-9). It is not that he is an effeminate man, however, or contemptuous of public duties – far from it, as Statius notes that Stella was a member of the Quindecimviri, was in charge of Domitian’s triumphal games in 89, and predicts he would become consul before the legal age (1.2.174-81). Rather, Stella cannot be faulted in either his private or public affairs, and indeed his extreme love and monogamous devotion for his new wife is not the least of his virtues. The male univira metaphor is extended more explicitly in Statius’ discussion of his own marriage in 3.5 and that of his father in 5.3. Throughout 3.5, Statius presents himself as the junior partner in the relationship; he claims to belong to his wife, rather than she to him, implying himself as a male univira: etenim tua, nempe benigna quam mihi sorte Venus iunctam florentibus annis servat et in senium, tua, quae me vulnere primo intactum thalamis et adhuc iuvenile vagantem fixisti, tua frena libens docilisque recepi, et semel insertas non mutaturus habenas usque premo. (Silv. 3.5.22-8) For of course it is you, whom Venus joined to me by a kind fate in the budding of my years and preserves in my old age, you who pierced me with my first wound (untouched by marriage and still a youthful wanderer) our reins I accepted easily and willingly, and once inserted I press the bit continuously and shall never change.

He will never divorce this woman he has known from his youth, and their marriage is both harmonious and full of love – his first wound from Cupid never fully healed. In this respect he is like his father, of whom he says at 5.3.240-1: ‘You knew marriage by a single torch, yours was a single love’ (una tibi cognita taeda / conubia, unus amor). As previously discussed, this use of unus is characteristic of descriptions of univirae in inscriptions and literature,20 and its repetition here is emphatic; there is no doubt about his father’s virtue. In reflection of this male univira sentiment, Statius declares that Naples ‘created me for you, bound me fast as your companion for many long years’ (creavit / me tibi, me socium longos astrinxit in annos, Stat. Silv. 3.5.106-7), echoing the long years (longos annos) Stella anticipates for his marriage in 1.2.78. His wife Claudia, however, is not univira; she was previously married to an unknown man, for whom (like Violentilla) she continued to mourn:

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Anna McCullough sic certe cineres umbramque priorem quaeris adhuc, sic exsequias amplexa canori coniugis ingentes iterasti pectore planctus iam mea. (Silv. 3.5.51-4) So of course you still seek his ashes and the shade of him, so you pursued embracing your musical husband, beating your breast heavily again and again, when even now you were mine.

Nevertheless, she is completely faithful to Statius, and if they were in the roles of Odysseus and Penelope, she would not be secretly loyal to her husband, but ‘openly, and would refuse marriages armed’ (palam, thalamosque armata negasses, 3.5.10). Statius and Claudia are perhaps what Stella and Violentilla will be twenty years ahead; their conjugal harmony, concordia, is complete, and they are of one mind – even as he attempts to persuade her their move to Naples is best, he realizes he is ‘ungrateful’ (ingratus) for merely doubting his dearest wife’s (carissima coniunx) commitment and character (3.5.109-10). One might speculate that Statius’ use of the univira ideal is meant to be metaphorical, not literal, given that the wives have been married more than once and Roman men are rarely noted for their monogamy or chastity. But whether or not the men were truly virgins upon marrying and stayed loyal to that first wife, it was certainly the image Statius projects for his patrons and addressees, and as such it sent specific messages about their characters. This is accomplished through the transformative power of emotion in these couples’ marriages, specifically that of conjugal love. Though Claudia and Violentilla were dedicated and loyal to their previous husbands, in being so they were simply fulfilling their duties as virtuous wives. Though these marriages would in theory disqualify them from univira status, they are saved by love. It is love that transforms them into univirae and makes them truly married – their second marriages are their real destinies and their second husbands their real spouses. This is seen even more clearly in the case of Priscilla, Abascantus’ wife. Once again, like Violentilla or Claudia, Priscilla cannot technically qualify as a univira; though she has predeceased Abascantus, as univirae can do, he was her second marriage. Nevertheless, Statius uses unus (again in emphatic repetition, as before when he describes his father in similar terms) to describe Priscilla: ‘But you she cherished as if she was a virgin bride, embracing you with her entire flesh and soul ... Greater is the honour from within yourself, to spend your life in only one bed, with one flame inside your secret, innermost parts’ (sed tu ceu virginitate iugatum / visceribus totis animaque amplexa fovebat ... ex te maior honos, unum novisse cubile, / unum secretis agitare sub ossibus ignem, Silv. 5.1.46-7, 55-6). Statius emphasizes how Priscilla was still (emotionally) like a virgin coming into her second marriage, with Abascantus the true love and the

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7. One Wife, One Love real marriage. So, as a ‘virgin’ and therefore still naive and girlish, it is implied that Priscilla is willing to take Abascantus’ lead and be formed as a wife by him, as it was expected a husband would do in a girl’s [first] marriage.21 Indeed, though none of these women are physically virgins, nor are they brides for the first time, they qualify as univira through their love and devotion for their husbands – living examples of Pliny’s declaration regarding his own wife, Calpurnia: ‘She loves me, which is proof of her chastity’ (Amat me, quod castitatis indicium est, Ep. 4.19). The male univirae differ in that these women are their first spouses, but the transformative power of love operates inside them as well. Statius places great emphasis on the fact that these women are also their husbands’ first loves; it is that love which inspires Stella to marry, and Statius and his father to never divorce, and all to remain faithful and chaste within their marriages. Love changes them into monogamous, devoted husbands – into male univirae. Conjugal love is therefore a binding force upon both men and women in the Silvae, one which inspires both virtue itself and the display of virtuous behaviour. The significance of conjugal love is also highlighted by its presence in marriages which do not include mention of the univira ideal. The value of concordia, a harmony between husband and wife that was ‘one of the cardinal characteristics of a good Roman marriage’, 22 was often praised and celebrated, particularly after a spouse’s death. This is also evident in the marriage of Pollius Felix and Polla (Silv. 2.2). While univira language is not in evidence with this relationship, in all other respects it parallels other Silvan marriages in that the key values of marital harmony and love are front and centre. The villa is the main subject of 2.2, with everything inside it being put on display by Statius, turning Pollius’ private world (and his character) inside out for viewing. Included in the contents is, of course, Pollius’ wife, Polla. Statius displays her at the end of the poem, closing the litany of ornaments of the villa, implying that she is perhaps the greatest ornament of all. Speaking directly to her, Statius says: Tuque, nurus inter longe praecordia curae, non frontem vertere minae, sed candida semper gaudia et in vultu curarum ignara voluptas: non tibi sepositas infelix strangulat arca divitias avidique animum dispendia torquent fenoris ... ... non ulla deo meliore cohaerent pectora, non alias docuit Concordia mentes ...(Silv. 2.2.147-53; 154-5) And you, by far among cares have not changed your heart, nor threats your brow, but who always carries bright joy and unsuspecting pleasure in your expression:

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Anna McCullough for you an unfruitful chest doesn’t strangle reserved riches, nor do the costs of greedy interest twist your spirit ... No hearts are more blessed by the gods in harmony, no other minds have Concordia so instructed ...

The key to this passage is concordia. Here harmony in marriage is emphasized, both the husband and wife are ideal and work in unison. Moreover, her mind (mens) is equal to and in perfect agreement with his; they are two halves of the same whole, or each is an extension of the other. However it should be visualized, clearly Pollius and Polla enjoy an ideal (and idealized) conjugal love and harmony. They might be a mature Stella and Violentilla, for whose wedding the goddess Concordia was present and carried the double torch (1.2.240). The feeling also joined Abascantus and Priscilla: ‘concordia joined you by a long, unbreakable chain, merging joined hearts’ (vos collato pectore mixtos / iunxit inabrupta concordia longa catena, 5.1.43-4). Conjugal love is therefore a key value in the Silvae; every relationship presented has it, and concordia in particular is featured as both evidence of and a nurturing influence on that love.23 But what exactly happens when the perfect marriage is ended by the death of a spouse? A fuller portrait of a husband’s grief is given in Silvae 5.1, the consolation to Abascantus on the death of Priscilla. This poem encases both of the emotions under examination: grief, and spousal devotion. Like the other couples under examination, concordia defines their marriage, Priscilla was a twice-married univira (as discussed above) and Abascantus [likely] a male univira – Priscilla may have been Abascantus’ only wife, since she was older than him (5.1.181-2) and he is described at various places as a iuvenis (5.1.197, 247), reminiscent of Statius’ own youth (florentibus annis, 3.5.23) upon his marriage to Claudia. The reader may infer from the parallels of this couple with the others that Abascantus’ extreme reaction to the death of his wife could as easily have been displayed by Statius himself, Stella, or the other devoted husbands of the Silvae who had wives equally devoted to them and the concordia of their marriages. Though they may exercise extreme self-discipline in being sexually and emotionally loyal to their wives, upon the loss of such wives, the Silvan men lose that self-restraint and grieve without limit. Abascantus’ extreme grief is represented as almost like that of a woman: he weeps endlessly, tears his clothes and finds no respite from his bereavement (5.1.1-42). Such behaviours were more stereotypically female, since women were generally perceived by the Romans to be uncontrolled and irrational in their grief; according to this gendered division, women did the public, physical mourning of tearing their hair and clothes, beating their breasts and weeping, while men were supposed to avoid extremes and maintain firm control of their emotions.24 So, for men, any ‘overt expression of grief is a manifestation of the weakness of

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7. One Wife, One Love women in enduring pain and loss’.25 Such hysterical mourning is precisely what Seneca advises his mother to avoid when mourning his exile: Non est quod utaris excusatione muliebris nominis, cui paene concessum est immoderatum in lacrimas ius, non immensum tamen. (Helv. 16.1) It is not that you should use the excuse of being a woman, to whom the right of immoderation in tears is granted, though not infinite weeping.

Contrary to any expectations generated by such womanish associations, however, Abascantus’ methods of mourning and the depth of his grief are praised by Statius and viewed by the onlookers in the poem as evidence of loyalty and piety. Indeed, despite the fact that Abascantus’ incessant weeping and rending of garments are more typically female behaviours in mourning, Statius actually encourages their display as a form of consolation different from philosophical consolations such as Seneca’s.26 In the Silvae, grief is assuaged not by rational argument or philosophical precepts, but rather by the author, audience and onlookers within the poems sharing the mourner’s grief.27 For this form of consolation to work, such womanish lamentation must also be performed publicly, thereby violating another precept of male mourning behaviour. However, public observation of Abascantus’ display only confirms the legitimacy of both his grief and the manner of its expression. First and foremost, the imperial gaze sees and approves of Abascantus’ conjugal devotion: maerentemque videt, lectique arcana ministri hinc etiam documenta capit, quod diligis umbram et colis exsequias. hic est castissimus ardor, hic amor a domino meritus censore probari. (Silv. 5.1.39-42) ... and he sees you grieving, and takes from this private proof indeed of his reserved servant, that you love her shade and perform your worship. This is a most chaste passion, this a love deserving of commendation by the chief censor.

In other words, his behaviour reflects his true moral character, its chastity and loyalty, and therefore improves his public image – one officially approved by the emperor (and censor) Domitian. At the funeral itself, the public gaze also studies him and passes similar judgment: sed toto spectatur in agmine coniunx solus, in hunc magnae flectuntur lumina Romae ceu iuvenes natos suprema ad busta ferentem. (Silv. 5.1.216-18) But in the whole procession, the husband alone was watched, the eyes of great Rome directed upon him as though he was carrying young sons to the final tomb.

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Anna McCullough Abascantus’ womanish, excessive display of grief (rivalling that of the arguably more irreplaceable loss of sons) is thus accepted and approved by imperial and public eyes as an indication of his good masculine virtues; it demonstrates that he is a reliable, loyal, moral man whose private life is chaste (a male univira), and who therefore must also be loyal (to his emperor) and moral in his public duties. This grief even leads Abascantus to contemplation of the most extreme demonstration of spousal devotion: suicide, to follow one’s spouse into death. In this desire he resembles such heroines as Porcia and Arria who preferred to follow their spouses into death, rather than live without them.28 While he stops short of implementing this wish, it is made clear that he preferred suicide but stayed his hand because of loyalty to Domitian (5.1.205-8). Save for this loyalty to the emperor trumping his loyalty to his wife, Abscantus would prove his univira status beyond doubt. While death was often the proving grounds for true female univirae, the final confirmation of single marriage and unsullied chastity (pudicitia),29 this appears to generally hold true for male univirae as well. Statius’ father, Drusus and Germanicus all died before their wives, therefore fulfilling this part of the ideal, while Stella’s and Statius’ spouses are still living, also meeting requirements for univira status. In fact, the case of Abascantus is the only example of a Statian male univira surviving his wife. So, rather than his own death proving his univira status, the legitimizing gaze of the emperor and people grant him that honour instead by witnessing the emotional display of his chastity and loyalty. The case of Abascantus also demonstrates a cultural theme connected to the narrower univira ideal, but broader in scope: that marital virtues like conjugal love and pudicitia (including cases of univirae) are most fully expressed in the event of a spouse’s death, especially through the survivor’s grief and mourning behaviour.30 This idea is examined in Valerius Maximus 4.6 (De Amore Coniugali); all its examples show the greatest demonstration of conjugal love in the death of a spouse, save for Caesar’s daughter Julia (as Pompey was not actually dead). Valerius comments that this emotion of conjugal love is equally as honourable as modesty, but ‘considerably more intense and excited’ (aliquanto ardentiorem et concitatiorem, 4.6.Pref). Indeed, the anecdotes he relates focus on the immediate and physical impact of the emotion upon the spouses in question. For women’s part, Julia fainted and miscarried when faced with (misleading) evidence that Pompey was dead, and Cato’s daughter, Porcia, swallowed coals after the death of her husband Brutus at Philippi (4.6.4-5). But the husbands are the most extensive exempla. Tiberius Gracchus, when two prophetic snakes were caught in his house, was faced with the choice of either he or his wife perishing; he chose to die himself rather than Cornelia, and so ordered the male snake killed (4.6.1). One C. Plautius Numida’s attempted suicide upon his wife’s death proved his love beyond all doubt: ‘for having heard of the death of his wife, with no control over

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7. One Wife, One Love his grief, he struck himself in the breast with a sword’ (morte enim uxoris audita doloris impotens, pectus suum gladio percussit, 4.6.2). When his slaves bound up the wound and kept him from death, he tore off the bandages and reopened the wound, finally expiring: ‘by such a violent death, he testified to how great a nuptial flame he had held hidden in his heart’ (tam violenta morte testatus quantum maritalis flammae illo pectore clausum habuisset, 4.6.2). Similarly, M. Plautius (perhaps M. Plautius Hypsaeus, legate of Sulla) fell on his sword during the funeral of his beloved wife Orestilla; their friends cremated the two together (4.6.3). The moral? ‘And truly, where love is exactly this, both at its greatest and most honourable, it is considerably superior to be joined by death than severed by life’ (Saneque, ubi idem et maximus et honestissimus amor est, aliquanto praestat morte iungi quam distrahi vita, V. Max. 4.6.3). This lesson in love and loyalty is also part of a larger context, that is the moral environment of the Silvae as a whole, which generally values expressions of emotion (especially grief) as proof of good character. So, Abascantus’ mourning behaviours are not unusual for men in the Silvae at large. 3.3 is another consolation, addressed to Claudius Etruscus on the death of his father. The elder Etruscus was once a slave, freed by Tiberius, and subsequently served the emperors, with Vespasian making him a knight; he was exiled by Domitian for unclear reasons. When he was later pardoned, the elder Etruscus returned to Rome and died shortly thereafter. The son’s public grief at the funeral was a model of piety, the virtue being emphasized from the first line by Statius’ call to Pietas to witness Etruscus’ pious tears (pios fletus, 3.3.7); later Statius also trumpets, ‘Bravo your pious groans!’ (macte pio gemitu, 3.3.31). Incidentally, Etruscus’ piety at the pyre is also a model of excessive lamentation: nam quis inexpleto rumpentem pectora questu complexumque rogos incumbentemque favillis aspiciens non aut primaevae funera plangi coniugis aut nati modo pubescentia credat ora rapi flammis? (Silv. 3.3.8-12)31 For who looked at him, tearing his breast with insatiable lament, and embracing the pyre, and falling on the ashes, and did not believe he lamented either the funeral of a young wife or the flames consuming the face of a son only recently pubescent?

Interestingly, this statement establishes a set of relationships within which grief demands or expects extreme lamentation: husband and wife, child for parent, and parent for child, all relationships characterized by pietas as well.32 In fact, all the consolations in the Silvae deal with one of these three types of relationships; Abascantus for his wife Priscilla and Etruscus for his father have been two examples thus far. Statius also speaks of his own ‘great suffering’ (magno dolori, 5.3.28) at the death of

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Anna McCullough his father, and his inability to write or work on account of continuing his mourning and tears for over three months past the funeral (5.3.29-35). He urges his father to ‘take the groans and wounds and tears of your son, which few parents have ever had’ (sume gemitus et vulnera nati / et lacrimas, rari quas umquam habuere parentes, 3.45-6) This grief, like Etruscus’, was public: ‘my anxious group of companions saw it, my mother saw and rejoicing noted the example’ (comitum manus anxia vidit, / vidit et exemplum genetrix gavisaque novit, 5.3.262-3). All these actions are products of Statius’ pietas for his father (cf. 5.3.254), and his imagined songs about his father’s morals and deeds would have earned him esteem in the eyes of the goddess Pietas (5.3.61-3, 71-2). Indeed, Statius’ and Etruscus’ intense mourning is partially justified because they are expressing supreme pietas. This bolsters their moral rightness in grieving hysterically like women, for at the funeral ceremonies and rites for a parental authority, ‘deeds, not words, display piety’.33 Extreme grief in the service of this virtue, therefore, is no crime of effeminacy, but rather a proper tribute and even duty to the dead. Why the emphasis on this particular virtue of pietas? Perhaps because Statius associates it with the ultimate arbiter of power and morals in the Silvae, the emperor and censor Domitian, ‘by whose authority Pietas returned and revisited the earth’ (quo Pietas auctore redit terrasque revisit, 5.2.91). Pietas also plays a role in the grief of parents for children,34 which is no less extreme. Statius’ grief is overwhelming at the death of a boy in 5.5, born a slave but given his freedom by Statius while still an infant (5.5.6975); though not his natural son, still the poet wails, ‘so fierce, so mad is my mourning’ (tanta mihi feritas, tanta est insania luctus, 5.5.23). His tears continue for a month after the funeral, though his blows have ceased (5.5.24-7), and he is inconsolable. Atedius Melior lost his foster-son Glaucias, and resists any attempts at consolation: ‘you prefer beating your breast and loud lamentations’ (tu planctus lamentaque fortia mavis, 2.1.6). Instead of immediately dissuading Melior from expressing his ‘crazed grief’ (demens luctus, 2.1.12-13), Statius instead tells him, ‘no one forbids it; glut yourself on your ills and subdue painful grief by its free rein’ (nemo vetat; satiare malis aegrumque dolorem / libertate doma, 2.1.14-15). In grieving this way, Melior is the model of the pious foster-father (pius altor, 2.1.69). Finally, one Flavius Ursus grieves at the death of a slave, and Statius urges on his groans and tears: ‘do not check your crying, do not be ashamed; let pain snap the reins ...’ (ne comprime fletus, / ne pudeat; rumpat frenos dolor ..., 2.6.12-13). But since the dead man is a slave, and not a wife or father, Statius can end the poem by reminding Flavius that, after all, such a slave is replaceable, and so, he asks, ‘I pray, set aside laments’ (pone, precor, questus, 2.6.103). Did these men truly grieve in the ways and to the excesses Statius describes? Markus doubts they did, and attributes Statius’ images of ‘grotesque mourning’ to his expanded use of previous Roman consolation

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7. One Wife, One Love forms (e.g. the Consolatio ad Liviam and Horace Carm. 1.24), which focused on the person mourning, not on praise of the dead, and exhorted their addressees to indulge their grief.35 That is, Statius is following a Roman literary precedent for not only excessive public lament, but also men weeping in public. However, such examples are Augustan era or later, and so this precedent was one created in the imperial era; for reasons why, one may look to Cicero’s grief over the death of his daughter Tullia in 45 BCE. He withdrew to his villa in the country and was criticized for remaining there, outside the public eye.36 Though he was expected to bear his pain in manly fashion and exit the mourning period in a timely fashion, this failure to perform his mastery of grief was traumatizing for Cicero on an emotional level: ‘The publicly observed refusal to grieve demonstratively was a ritualized, decorous form of mourning for Roman fathers. What is honourable is consolatory ....’37 More crucially, not only did Cicero decline to publicly display his control of grief, but he felt he could not, as he lacked a public role after reconciliation with a victorious Caesar and therefore was lacking any opportunity for solace in public duties.38 Without dignity (dignitas) or the opportunity of political activity, ‘Cicero could not decorously mourn his daughter, nor could he recuperate from the loss of face that resulted from his lack of visibility.’39 In other words, he cannot perform virtue, nor can it be granted to him, nor can it be recognized in him, without a venue and an audience, and he is thus inconsolable. The loss of Tullia represents the loss of his one peace left in the world after the fall of the Republic, and now both home and forum are full of sorrow for Cicero – hence his extreme grief.40 Cicero’s dilemma was only exacerbated under Augustus and his successors. For example, triumphs, the public acclamation of glory and courage, were the sole prerogative of the emperor after Augustus, denying aristocratic men the chance to publicly display their virtus by showing what it has accomplished on the battlefield. Public oratory was similarly constrained, as the emperor carried out many duties and made many of the decisions oratory once decided in the courts and senate.41 Bans or limits placed on these activities and the abilities of aristocratic men to perform them therefore also put constraints on their abilities to be men, declare their masculinity, perform it and be judged as men by the public and their peers. A Cicero thus bereft of a public forum encapsulates the problem that imperial men later faced: with a lack of any significant or meaningful public role under an emperor due to restrictions on the use of the traditional public sphere for proving and demonstrating masculinity, how could they perform virtue and prove themselves to be good Roman men, in grief or joy alike? As a result of such a dilemma, the ideals of Roman manhood had to be renegotiated and redefined, and the Silvae are part of this larger cultural discourse. Statius offers one response to this problem by valuing private emotion

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Anna McCullough and putting private life on display;42 in a sense, this echoes the new prominence and visibility of the emperor’s own household and private life, a necessary side-effect of any dynastic government.43 Through this valuation and display, Statius makes the private sphere a locus for the performance of virtue and thereby granting it public recognition through his poetic audiences. Within this context, a Roman man’s private emotions, relationships, and even possessions, are emphasized over public duties and offices, and his public appearances in Rome are often centred around such private matters. Such displays of men’s private lives and behaviour were therefore meant to signal their good moral and political character in an era of diminished political agency.44 Statius’ display of his patrons’ sorrows, loves and marriages is done with just that intent; Abascantus shows his loyalty to Domitian in ultimately deciding not to commit suicide after his wife’s death, and the emperor notes and approves of his pious public grieving as censor, taking it as proof of good morals (5.1.37-42). Etruscus’ outsized demonstration of pietas in his extreme public lamentations for his father is a rare display of traditional devotion in corrupt times (3.313-21). Stella is chaste in his love and committed to service of Rome and Domitian, and Statius himself shows both conjugal love for Claudia (3.5) and pious lamentations galore for his father (5.3) and adopted son (5.5), lending him a moral authority equal to that of his subjects. The display (whether literary or real) of emotions such as love, grief and love in grief is therefore expected of the good Statian father, husband and son, and significant to the emperor and other audience members as representative of the specific virtue of pietas. So, by combining the imperial trend of emphasizing emotional display with the more rare but extant one of applying the univira ideal to men, Statius crafts an ideal in which men fulfil their masculine roles as husband, father and son by feeling and displaying their emotions to the extreme. The public witnesses, legitimizes and approves these displays, and recognizes that these men have paid the ultimate tribute to pietas (and its master, Domitian). Public performance of private emotion thus becomes a signal to society that the man ‘on stage’ is a good Roman vir and citizen. This application to men of normally feminine virtues (e.g. monogamy) and emotions (e.g. hysterical grief), and their assimilation into masculine and moral ideals, thus emphasizes and develops a hitherto rarely acknowledged alternative to more mainstream Roman conceptualizations of virtus and masculinity. This alternative tradition of spousal love and loyalty, demonstrated during life in chaste monogamy and after death in extreme grief, challenged other contemporary categorizations of manliness. Statius’ use of the gendered dynamics of emotion therefore complicates what can safely be identified as an ideal Roman man.

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7. One Wife, One Love Notes 1. Treggiari (1991) 232-3. 2. Treggiari (1998) 14; Pomeroy (1995) 215. 3. V. Max. 2.1.3; Gagé (1963) 120-2. 4. Treggiari (1991) 233-4; Lightman and Zeisel (1977) 19-21. 5. Lightman and Zeisel (1977) 22-6. 6. Williams (1958) 23-5; Lightman and Zeisel (1977) 19-20; Pomeroy (1995) 161 and 207-8. 7. Lightman and Zeisel (1977) 32. 8. E.g. Langlands (2006) 64. 9. Gardner (1986) 51. 10. Schoonhoven (1992) 160; Williams (1958) 23. 11. Cf. Treggiari (1991) 236; Drusus’ widow, Antonia, in V. Max. 4.3.3 is lauded for remaining a chaste widow; so too Lucan’s widow, Polla, who continued efforts to maintain her dead husband’s reputation and memory and commissioned Stat. Silv. 2.7 on the occasion of Lucan’s birthday. The poem represents her as an ideal matrona, the loyal widow who continues to focus her life around her dead husband, e.g. 2.7.124-5, 131: Haec te non thiasis procax dolosis / falsi numinis induit figura, / ipsum sed colit et frequenta ipsum ... (‘She covers you in the form of a false god not with a brash, deceitful Bacchic dance, but reveres you yourself and visits you yourself ...’). It is not clear if she ever remarried; some have argued she was the Polla of Silv. 2.2, remarried to Pollius Felix, but analysis is inconclusive. Also notable is Statius’ mother, who continues her loyalty after his father’s death, 5.3.241-3: certe seiungere matrem / iam gelidis nequeo bustis; te sentit habetque, / te videt et tumulos ortuque obituque salutat. (‘It is certain that I am unable to separate my mother from your now cold tomb; she feels and has you, sees you and greets your grave at sunrise and sunset’). 12. Dixon (1985) 358 and 360; Treggiari (1991) 235; Bradley (1991) 161-2. 13. Griffin (1985) 141. 14. Treggiari (1991) 11-12. 15. Forbis (1996) 83. 16. Treggiari (1991) 235. 17. Schoonhoven (1992) 160. 18. Langlands (2006) 63. 19. Cf. Treggiari (1991) 235. 20. Williams (1958) 23. 21. The wife/pupil and husband/teacher theme emerged in the late first/early second centuries CE and reflected an emphasis on marital harmony and open love and devotion between spouses (Hemelrijk (2004) 33-4). Cf. Plin. Ep. 4.19 on his education of his wife Calpurnia, and 1.16 on Pompeius Saturninus’ wife, who writes letters so erudite and polished that quae sive uxoris sunt ut adfirmat, sive ipsius ut negat, pari gloria dignus, qui aut illa componat, aut uxorem quam virginem accepit, tam doctam politamque reddiderit (‘whether they were by his wife as he asserted, or by himself as he denies, the glory and honour can be given to him, either if he composed them, or if he welcomed his wife as virgin, then teaching and polishing her’). 22. Bradley (1991) 6; cf. Lattimore (1962) 279. 23. Cf. Lattimore (1962) 277 on expressions of spousal devotion in inscriptions. 24. Corbeill (2004) 76-83; Treggiari (1998) 14-15. 25. Corbeill (2004) 85.

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Anna McCullough 26. Markus (2004) 126-30. 27. Markus (2004) 130-1. 28. For Porcia, see V. Max. 4.6.5; for Arria, see Plin. Ep. 3.16. 29. Langlands (2006) 64. Cf. also the above discussion of the ambiguous status of widows who have been married once, and do not remarry. 30. Cf. n. 11; in the case of widows, a refusal to remarry signifies their continuing pudicitia, while withholding the label of univira until after their deaths indicates that only after they can no longer remarry (being dead), are they truly proved to be univira, simultaneously proving their pudicitia beyond doubt (Langlands (2006) 63-4). 31. The womanish physicality of Etruscus’ grief is also emphasized at 3.3.176-7: heu quantis lassantem bracchia vidi / planctibus et prono fusum super oscula vultu! (‘Ah, with how many blows of grief did I see him exhausting his arms, and spread out with face bent over for kisses!’). 32. This statement also echoes the preface of Book 5, in which Statius describes pietas as binding wife and husband. 33. Ochs (1993) 87. 34. Cf. Stat. Silv. 5.3.239-40, addressing his father: Nec solum larga memet pietate fovebas: talis et in thalamus ...’ (Nor did you cherish only me with profuse pietas: such you were also in marriage ...’). Though it is Statius grieving for his father, and not the other way around, this makes it clear that his father was bound by and felt pietas for both his child (Statius) and his wife. 35. Markus (2004) 127-9. 36. Treggiari (1998) 17-21. 37. Wilcox (2005) 272. 38. Wilcox (2005) 270-1. 39. Wilcox (2005) 273. 40. Wilcox (2005) 280-1; Cic. Fam. 4.6.2. 41. Millar (1977) 228-40. 42. Cf. Markus (2004) 131-2; while she identifies the blurring of boundaries between public and private in imperial Rome, Markus considers this as a problem for Statius, one for which he had no solution. In contrast, I argue that Statius’ emphasis on the private is in fact his solution to the collapse of the public sphere into the person and office of the emperor – private is the new public, black the new white. 43. Milnor (2005) 1-27 and 285-304. 44. Severy (2003); Milnor (2005) for women as part of this domestic image for men.

Bibliography Bradley, Keith R. 1991. Discovering the Roman Family: Studies in Roman Social History. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Corbeill, Anthony. 2004. Nature Embodied: Gesture in Ancient Rome. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dixon, Suzanne. 1985. ‘The Marriage Alliance in the Roman Elite.’ Journal of Family History 10: 353-78. Forbis, Elizabeth. 1996. Municipal Virtues in the Roman Empire: The Evidence of Italian Honorary Inscriptions. Leipzig: Teubner. Gagé, Jean. 1963. Matronalia: Essai sur les dévotions et les organisations cultuelles des femmes dans l’ancienne Rome. Collection Latomus, vol. 60. Brussels: Berchem.

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7. One Wife, One Love Gardner, Jane F. 1986. Women in Roman Law and Society. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Griffin, Jasper. 1985. Latin Poets and Roman Life. London: Duckworth. Hemelrijk, Emily. 2004. Matrona Docta: Educated Women in the Roman Elite from Cornelia to Julia Domna. London: Routledge. Langlands, Rebecca. 2006. Sexual Morality in Ancient Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lattimore, Richmond. 1962. Themes in Greek and Latin Epitaphs. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. First published 1942. Lightman, Marjorie and Zeisel, William. 1977. ‘Univira: An Example of Continuity and Change in Roman Society.’ Church History 46: 19-32. Markus, Donka D. 2004. ‘Grim Pleasures: Statius’ Poetic Consolationes.’ Arethusa 37: 105-35. Millar, Fergus. 1977. The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC-AD 337). London: Duckworth. Milnor, Kristina. 2005. Gender, Domesticity, and the Age of Augustus: Inventing Private Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Ochs, Donovan J. 1993. Consolatory Rhetoric: Grief, Symbol, and Ritual in the Greco-Roman Era. Studies in Rhetoric/Communication, ed. Thomas W. Benson. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press. Pomeroy, Sarah B. 1995. Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves: Women in Classical Antiquity. New York: Schocken Books. First published 1975. Schoonhoven, Henk. 1992. The Pseudo-Ovidian Ad Liviam de Morte Drusi: A Critical Text with Introduction and Commentary. Groningen: E. Forsten. Severy, Beth. 2003. Augustus and the Family at the Birth of the Roman Empire. New York: Routledge. Treggiari, Susan. 1991 [2002]. Roman Marriage: Iusti Coniuges From the Time of Cicero to the Time of Ulpian. Oxford: Clarendon. Treggiari, Susan. 1998. ‘Home and Forum: Cicero Between “Public” and “Private”.’ TAPA 128: 1-23. Wilcox, Amanda. 2005. ‘Paternal Grief and the Public Eye: Cicero Ad Familiares 4.6.’ Phoenix 59: 267-87. Williams, Gordon. 1958. ‘Some Aspects of Roman Marriage Ceremonies and Ideals.’ JRS 48: 16-29.

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8

Absit Malignus Interpres: Martial’s Preface to Book One of the Epigrams and the Construction of Audience Response Peter J. Anderson Martial1 illustrates a variety of emotional responses to epigram in his Epigrams, some of which he claims to desire to evoke, others to avoid or at least deflect. Chief among the emotional responses he sought to avoid was the anger of readers and of targets of his abusive poems; this anger is in turn a response to injury, real or perceived. Although the consensus view has been that Martial lessens the dangers associated with his ‘harmless wit’ (innocuos sales, cf. 2.99) by using pseudonyms and by pointing to the reader’s own conscience, evidence from within the Epigrams themselves seems to at the very least create, if not represent, a dialogue between author and those affected by his poems – including those in whom his poems have generated potentially dangerous emotions. My chapter analyzes the author’s guidance for the reader’s emotions, suggesting that the Preface to Book 1 of the Epigrams presents both Martial’s literary and his ethical apologia. Verbal and contextual allusions to two key philosophical texts (Cicero’s De Officiis and Seneca’s De Constantia Sapientis) that deal with the wise man’s reaction to jokes (ioci) provide an ethical framework within which to read Martial’s literary agenda. This apology offers to the readers a model for reading the Epigrams that seeks to pre-empt dangerous emotions. The emotive force of Martial’s epigrams Martial is an interesting case in the study of the emotive force of literature, since he is quite explicit about the effect of his poems on his readers. Pleasure, envy (invidia and livor), laughter, shame or embarrassment (rubor) and anger (ira) are all portrayed by Martial as emotional responses to epigram, his own or others. In 1.68, for example, Martial’s poetry has effected a change in the emotional state for Naevia, and perhaps for her ‘man’ (vir): Quidquid agit Rufus, nihil est nisi Naeuia Rufo. Si gaudet, si flet, si tacet, hanc loquitur.

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Peter J. Anderson Cenat, propinat, poscit, negat, innuit: una est Naeuia; si non sit Naeuia, mutus erit. Scriberet hesterna patri cum luce salutem, ‘Naeuia lux’ inquit ‘Naeuia lumen, haue.’ Haec legit et ridet demisso Naeuia uultu. Naeuia non una est: quid, uir inepte, furis? Whatever Rufus is doing, for Rufus there is nothing but Naevia. Joyful, weeping, silent, he speaks of her. When he dines, makes toasts, demands, denies, agrees, there is one Naevia. Should there be no Naevia, he will be mute. When he was starting a letter to Father yesterday morning, he began, ‘Naevia, my daylight! Naevia, my lamp! Greetings!’ Naevia reads these lines and, although she was sad, laughs. There’s not just one Naevia: why, you foolish man, be mad?

The man (vir) is maddened by something. It could be that the poem about Naevia and Rufus (cf. 1.106, 2.9, 2.26, 3.13) prompts the man to think that he is a cuckold, and so precipitates his rage. The final wit of the epigram, then, is to tease him with the suggestion that it may not in fact be his Naevia to whom Martial refers, ‘There’s not just one Naevia’: his rage (furor) is proven groundless and ridiculous – or at least hasty. More likely, however, the maddened man is Rufus himself.2 The echo in the final line of the enjambment ‘there is one / Naevia’ (una est / Naevia) in lines 3 and 4 seems calculated to remind us of Rufus’ obsession with Naevia, and intimations of a fruitless love interest come up again in 1.106. Rufus’ rage (furor), then, is precipitated by Naevia, not by the poem. But it is Naevia’s reaction that is more interesting. Haec in line 7 is generally taken to refer to the preceding lines of the epigram; her laughter derives from Martial’s exposure of Rufus’ infatuation. The interlocking word order of ‘and, although she was sad, laughs’ (et ridet demisso Naeuia uultu) emphasizes both the sudden laughter and her prior expression, which I suggest describes some kind of depressed state.3 Martial’s verses effect a transformation of Naevia’s emotional state from, say, sadness to laughter.4 The well-known 6.60 lists the effects Martial prefers to have on his readers. Laudat, amat, cantat nostros mea Roma libellos, meque sinus omnes, me manus omnis habet. Ecce rubet quidam, pallet, stupet, oscitat, odit. Hoc uolo: nunc nobis carmina nostra placent. My Rome praises, loves, sings my little songs, and every pocket and every hand has me in it. Look! someone is blushing, growing pale, astonished, yawning, hating. This is what I want: now my songs are pleasing to me.

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres The shame, terror, astonishment, boredom and hatred of his readers generate, in turn, pleasure for Martial. We can also see the actions that result from readers’ reactions, for which there is a more subtle cause in an emotional state. In 5.33, for example, Martial complains that a lawyer has been moved to criticize his poetry: Carpere causidicus fertur mea carmina: qui sit nescio. Si sciero, uae tibi, causidice. A lawyer is said to be picking on my poems: who he is I don’t know. If I find out, lawyer, you’ll be sorry.

Although it is not clear here – or in a similar poem, 11.24 – what has motivated the lawyer to act, 11.94 ties carpere to a dangerous emotion, malicious envy (livor). This is, in fact, what one would expect, since the verb ‘to pick on’ (carpere), when used as it is in these three poems, is connected to varieties of hatred or ill-feeling. Martial’s poetry and his success as a poet, then, precipitate malicious envy (livor), which in turn motivates the malicious criticism of his detractor. There are quite a number of poems in which Martial celebrates his success, and many of them draw attention to the malice and envy (livor; invidia) of others that his success engenders. Epigram 9.97, with its anaphora ‘he is ruined by envy’ (rumpitur invidia) is hardly subtle; 4.27 too revels in how Caesar’s approval of Martial’s poems causes another to become envious (invidus, 4.27.2) and pale with envy (lividus, 4.27.5) and to feel pain (dolor, 4.27.6). In 10.33, however, envy (invidia and livor) comes to represent a danger for Martial: because of malicious envy (livor), harmful poems ‘verses tainted with bilious jealousy’ (viridi tinctos aerugine versus, 10.33.5) have been attributed to him. The anxiety to claim authorship and ownership of his epigrams is a common theme, especially in the early books,5 and often used as a trope to assert Martial’s talent or to deride another’s. But here Martial, as in 7.12 and 7.72 (and perhaps also 7.26 and 10.5), is at pains to counter claims that harmful poems are from his hand where before he rejected bad poems. Could his jealous rivals have realized that Martial is most easily harmed by the anger of those abused in ‘his’ poems? It is perhaps easier to see how the malice and envy (livor and invidia) Martial’s poems prompt in others might be dangerous to the poet himself. But it is also true that the shame (rubor) a reader feels from reading his poem might result in danger for Martial. 4.17.1-2 links the shaming effect of his epigrams to the potential for the target’s anger: Facere in Lyciscam, Paule, me iubes versus, quibus illa lectis rubeat et sit irata ... You ask me to write verses about Lycisca so that after reading them she might blush and become angry ...

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Peter J. Anderson Lascivia and licentia are avoided in Book 5, asserts Martial in 5.2, because they cause Domitian to blush: this conceit is developed more fully in the Preface to Book 8. Given the right (or wrong?) audience, even his wanton words (lasciva verba) might be dangerous, since the reader’s shame (rubor) might lead him to act against the poet. For instance, the implication of 3.97 is that Chione will seek vengeance against Martial because she was harmed by reading his libellus: Ne legat hunc Chione, mando tibi, Rufe, libellum. carmine lasesa meo est, laedere et illa potest. I leave it to you, Rufus, to stop Chione from reading this little book. She has been harmed by my song; she also is able to harm.

The kind of abuse Chione suffers in 3.34.2 ‘You are frigid and dark: you are not, and you are, Snowy’ (frigida es et nigra es: non es et es Chione),6 is certainly dependent on lasciva verba. There is nothing else harmful in them. It seems that the potential for harm Martial’s poems carry (as we saw above in connection with invidia) is not easily laughed away. Everywhere we look in the Epigrammata, in spite of the protestations of such poems as 3.99.2 ‘your trade, not your life, was harmed by my poem’ (ars tua non vita est carmine laesa meo.), 5.15.1-2 ‘no one complains harmed by my poem’ (queritur laesus carmine nemo meo) and 10.33.10 ‘to spare persons, to speak about vices’ (parcere personis, dicere de vitiis) – not to mention the Preface to Book 1 – it is obvious that Martial is well aware his poems walk a fine line between entertainment and harm, and slip over the line too. The practical emotional result of the harm his poems can give is anger and the desire for vengeance. 3.97 and 4.17, for instance, leave little to the imagination in that regard, and the poems that discuss envy (livor and invidia) are similarly charged. The Postumus cycle in Book 2 uses Postumus’ vengeance as the subject of the final jokes in 2.22 and 2.23 and, in another brief cycle, 3.99 shows quite clearly that an earlier poem (3.16) has caused anger through ‘harmless wit’ innocuos sales (‘You ought not to grow angry, cobbler, at my booklet’ irasci nostro non debes, cerdo, libello, 3.99.1).7 6.64 very clearly articulates the latent iambic power of Martial’s and his detractor’s verse8 (cf. 12.61 for a more lighthearted version), as much as 7.12 seeks to diffuse it with claims of innocence that echo important themes from the Preface to Book 1. By Book 7, as we have seen with 7.12, 7.26 and 7.72, the tension between wit and harm has reached a dangerous level. Shame, envy, malice and anger (rubor, invidia, livor and ira) are all explicitly connected to attempts to harm Martial in turn, to take vengeance. In Books 8 and 9 (8.29, 8.59, 9.60, 9.81), and especially in the Preface to Book 8, Martial seems most concerned to bring attention again, as he had in 3.1, 5.15 and

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres 6.60, to the pleasure his epigrams provide as other effects on readers disappear. But by Book 10, the problems connected with harmful epigrams come to the fore again (10.5, 10.9, 10.33 and 10.64),9 and we see Martial defending himself from criticism and malicious impersonation. Perhaps under the new freedom (libertas) of Nerva, this anxiety is absent from Book 11, in spite of that Book’s more aggressive character. Martial’s trifles quite clearly carried the power to harm and to cause anger, as the poet acknowledges. The poems in which Martial deals directly with this danger all carry important echoes of the Preface: in them we see rumour (fama, rumor) and envy (invidia/livor), critics of his poetry, those ill-intentioned toward him, wit and harm, wantonness (lascivia), his own moral character and the readers as well as the targets of abusive poems. As we shall see, in the Preface Martial establishes the reader’s awareness of epigram as a genre and his own ethical deportment as the safeguard against danger and as the criteria against which his epigrams (with their frequent abuse and lascivious language) should be judged. Iniuria, ira and ioci The effectiveness of abusive wit did not confine itself to the forum and the law-court.10 Roman anecdotal history is replete with urbane insulting comebacks and jokes from a range of social contexts. But there were boundaries for this form of social discourse, defined by context and by the participants in the joke themselves, and the suitability of certain kinds of jokes in certain kinds of situations was up for interpretation.11 This seems particularly true of abusive verses. There is not much information on actions against abusive poems of this type under the Republic; it may be that the response was generally in kind, or pursued through other avenues of vengeance than the law set out in the Twelve Tables.12 The Twelve Tables prescribed death for invidious and scurrilous carmina.13 Although the definition of carmina at this time is problematically broad, that is of no concern to our discussion here, since aggressive epigram and other libelous poetry clearly fall within the semantic boundaries of the term. From at least Tiberius on, libellous poems carried a significant risk for the author, especially when the verses centred on the princeps or important members of the nobility.14 For poets under Domitian, significantly, the dangers were no less great.15 Though the consequences for abusive poems against those other than the Emperor and his immediate circle might not have been as severe as death, for the rest of his targets a question remains. Martial’s scurrilous poems risked angering his targets, even given the claims of innocuousness, with potentially dangerous consequences.16 But then again, could the intent of the poet be a factor? Could that be what Martial means, ‘spare the persons, talk about the vices’ (parcere personis, dicere de vitiis, 10.33)?17 Nicholas asserts that iniuria ‘included not merely physical assaults and

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Peter J. Anderson oral or written insults and abuse, but any affront to another’s dignity or reputation and any disregard of another’s public or private rights, provided always that the act was done wilfully and with contumelious intent’.18 Satire from its inception in the Roman literary tradition demonstrates a certain anxiety about the legal dangers of abusive poetry. As Keane suggests, ‘the individual satiric apologiae are pieces of a history of “satiric law”, which depict the genre’s evolution as intertwined with the evolution of law itself.’19 The satirists’ excuses (apologiae) dramatize and control the charges of the opponent (adversarius) as within the context of legal proceedings.20 But this is only after the injury is done and the charge laid. Martial’s apologia in the Preface sets a dramatic context for epigram, a ‘theatre’, similar to that which Keane describes,21 but his strategy is to protect himself ahead of time by controlling the dangerous emotional reaction consequent to the reader’s anger (ira). For Seneca in the De Ira, ‘insults’ maledicta of various sorts, including verses, are a clear example of injury (iniuria), a ‘legitimized pretext for anger’.22 But this is subject to the controls provided by human reason.23 Martial removes grounds for the charge by articulating a poetic and ethical persona that seeks not to harm and a mode of reading that does not allow for it. The examples discussed above demonstrate this public effort to short-circuit or deflect the anger (ira) of the reader or target of his poetry. Many have pointed out that Martial’s poems describe or are directed at character types, or, at least, at particular individuals hidden behind pseudonyms.24 If this is true, then the grounds for charges of injury (iniuria) are tenuous at best. But I am not convinced that this is so: some poems seem to have only lightly masked the identity of the target, if at all, but others are more difficult to pin down than generally acknowledged.25 We are, in either case, in a very poor position to judge such things.26 The general tendency in the scholarship to identify the recipients of ‘nice’ poems but construe recipients of abusive poems as fictional is not satisfying. Even if Martial has invented fictions in these poems and there was no real target, the literary construct still depends on a social reality which allows for reactions both from an abused target and an audience.27 If we look again at the social context of the poetry, which was probably performed at banquets (convivia) and/or circulated privately before it was rendered in the form we possess, a question ensues. Could Martial have performed these epigrams initially with the target present? If so, the apparent anonymity of pseudonyms (if this in fact a valid suggestion at all) is further compromised, raising again the potential for a negative reaction: this time from the actual target. Postumus of Book 2 may be an individual or character type with only marginal importance for Martial as a friend (amicus) – (recall that the social context evoked in those poems is suggested by the degree of familiarity expressed in greeting), but Martial also insults and abuses hosts, in the dramatic context of the banquet itself.28 There seems enough room for

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres charges of injury against Martial; or, if not legal action, then vengeance of another sort. The argument may be made that we can never truly understand the dynamic of this sort of abusive banter and wit, divorced as it is from its socio-historical context, and lacking both the poet and the original audience/reader. I suggest that a similar problem was faced by Martial’s ancient readers: the extant books are collections of poems intended for a wide readership (and, as such, they lack an author who is physically present), but the poems in them portray more private conversations.29 In other words, the relationship between author and target, as well as between author and audience is completely abstracted:30 because the audience has become a readership without social context, the identity of the ‘real’ target may be confused, the risk for misidentification of the target increased and the risks for the poet compounded. Martial knew that he would have an audience for his books, and the Preface points clearly to anxiety over his poems’ reception; it is impossible to read it otherwise.31 But to interpret the preface as an attempt to diffuse bad feelings on the part of an audience only seems a trifle lacking, because this strategy does not explicitly include the abused second party, from whom danger would have arisen. And as we shall see, this is not Martial’s only concern for his poems’ reception. He has literary concerns also. Martial’s Apologia Pro Epigrammatis Suis32 Martial opens his Preface by stating that he hopes his moderate disposition (temperamentum)33 in the epigrams will not cause ‘whoever has sound views about himself’ quisquis de se bene senserit to complain. He then asserts that his poetry books, unlike those of older poets, play without harming reverence (reverentia). The phrase ‘This respect was so deficient for authors of old that they exploited not only genuine names but also great ones’ (quae adeo antiquis auctoribus defuit ut nominibus non tantum veris abusi sint sed et magnis), by strongly emphasizing magnis34 not veris, seems to suggest that Martial’s point of departure from the older practice is not in creating fake names (falsa, i.e. non vera, nomina), but rather in not using ‘great names’ (magna nomina).35 This fits with what we know about actions taken because of abusive poems against great nobles (nobiles) or the imperial family. In any case, the rhetorical stance in this initial portion of the preface is that a reader who does complain ‘does not have sound views about himself’ (de se non bene (id est male) sentit). This elaboration has been the basis for the assertion found in the commentaries that Martial here is pointing to the reader’s conscience: only the guilty will complain.36 I think this assertion has been wrongly influenced by association with a passage from Juvenal 1.166-7, or perhaps from Horace Epistles 1.1.60-1.37 Now, Martial does indicate later in 6.60 and elsewhere38 that this very effect is a measure

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Peter J. Anderson of his success, but he does not suggest it is a measure of the reader’s guilt. In fact, ‘to think well about someone’ (bene sentire de aliquo) seems to point to the formulation of sound views about someone or something, rather than to any notion of clear conscience. There are many examples to support this reading, but perhaps two will suffice.39 In a thematically wide-ranging letter, Ep. 102, Seneca writes to Lucilius and addresses, among other things, the issue of status and renown in the eyes of others. Seneca exhorts Lucilius to reject the good opinion of the many (who manifestly cannot have a clear conscience about someone else): si de me bene vir bonus sentit, eodem loco sum, quo si omnes boni idem sentirent; omnes enim, si me cognoverint, idem sentient. (Sen. Ep. 102.12.4-8) If one good man has a sound view about me, I am as well off as if all good men thought the same; for all, if they knew me, would think similarly.

A similar comment in Pliny Ep. 9.13.17 helps mark the distinction between bene sentire and judgment in respect to guilt: ‘Puto’ inquit [Satirius Rufus] ‘iniuriam factam Publicio Certo, si non absolvitur; nominatus est ab amicis Arriae et Fanniae, nominatus ab amicis suis. Nec debemus solliciti esse; idem enim nos, qui bene sentimus de homine, et iudicaturi sumus. Si innocens est, sicut et spero et malo et, donec aliquid probetur, credo, poteritis absolvere.’ ‘I think’ he said, ‘that there is injury for Publicius Certus if he is not acquitted. He was named by friends of Arria and Fannia, named by his own friends. Nor ought we to be anxious. We, you see, who have sound views about the man, are also about to judge him. If he is innocent, as I hope and want to believe and – until he is shown guilty somehow – believe, you will be able to acquit him.’

I suggest that, while it may have been true enough that only the guilty will complain, Martial is not attempting to avoid retribution or criticism by playing on a complex psychology in which a target of abuse admits guilt by reacting, or denies guilt by not reacting. This is a version of the juvenile ‘he who smelt it, dealt it’. Rather, Martial is here signalling his ideal reader. The reader who ‘thinks well about himself’ is not simply one who has a good opinion of himself, but one who thinks and feels about himself in the appropriate and sound manner, just as Martial has composed his poems according to a moderate disposition (temperamentum). The elements of the sentence thus are coherent on the notion of self-knowledge and moderation, since Martial is guided by his temperamentum and the reader understands bene de se. Furthermore, the phrase ‘to have sounds views about oneself’ (de se bene sentire) is exceptionally rare. An intriguing passage in Cicero’s De Officiis

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres 1.99 is one of the very few loci in which the phrase de se sentire occurs at all;40 in addition to the key verbal parallel, Cicero also here emphasizes the importance of temperantia and reverentia (key words in the preface) and addresses the subject of the reaction of the ‘wise man’, the sapiens, to jokes (ioci). These parallels alone demand closer scrutiny and lend considerable support to this reading of the initial portion of the Preface, but the surrounding discussion in the De Officiis adds considerably greater depth to the allusion – as does a similar discussion in Seneca. Cicero De Officiis and ioci The verbal allusions at Cicero (Off. 1.99) are found in a longer section (Cic. Off. 1.93-151), which is contextually very suggestive, dealing as it does with the notion of ‘the appropriate action’ (in Cicero’s terms decorum, honestum and in the Greek to kathekon or to prepon, namely that which it is the proper thing to do, either without exception, or in certain defined circumstances). De Officiis 1.93-9 is plagued by some structural and terminological difficulties, but Cicero begins from a definition of decorum on the basis of four cardinal virtues: sense of shame, moderation, sobriety and calm passions (verecundia, temperantia, modestia and sedatio perturbationum). The following paragraphs to 99, ‘perhaps the most difficult section in the entire essay’,41 are a complicated introduction to the topic of decorum. Here, as elsewhere, Cicero emphasizes the importance of moderation and calm passions (temperantia and sedatio perturbationum) as key elements of proper behaviour. In 1.97-8 Cicero introduces a critical simile, that of poets and moral agents, to which he returns later in his discussions of personae.42 The poet is a moral agent in his use of dramatic personae as well as in propria persona. Appropriate action (decorum) arises naturally out of the perfect, rational understanding held by the wise man, and thus out of his ability to control his passions through the exercise of virtue. Indeed, it is assumed to be inherent in every virtue, but the decorum peculiar to the wise, who are in harmony with nature, is manifest through moderate behaviour (moderatio and temperantia): quae autem pars subiecta generi est, eam sic definiunt, ut id decorum velint esse, quod ita naturae consentaneum sit, ut in eo moderatio et temperantia appareat cum specie quadam liberali. (Cic. Off 1.96) Now the type which is subordinate to the general they define in the following way: that they wish this decorum to be that which harmonizes with nature such that in it moderate behaviour is manifest, with a certain civilized appearance.

Cicero then proceeds to adduce an example from dramatic poetry in the next two sections: poets are constrained to give their characters words

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Peter J. Anderson appropriate to their individual natures. But for people, Cicero continues, it is nature that gives to each his ‘part’, not a poet; and it is the part of the wise man to act with steadfastness, moderate behaviour and sense of shame (constantia, moderatio, temperantia and verecundia). If this decorum is shown in all one’s actions and words, one will attract the approbation of those with whom one lives, a desirable consequence.43 Cicero concludes: Adhibenda est igitur quaedam reverentia adversus homines et optimi cuiusque et reliquorum. Nam neglegere quid de se quisque sentiat, non solum arrogantis est sed etiam omnino dissoluti. Est autem quod differat in hominum ratione habenda inter iustitiam et verecundiam. Iustitiae partes sunt non violare homines, verecundiae non offendere. (1.99) Therefore a certain reverentia ought to be put into practice toward humankind, both of the best and of the rest, since to disregard what each thinks about himself is not only the act of an arrogant man, but also of an entirely dissolute one. There is a difference in the exercise of human reason as it should be understood between uprightness (iustitia) and shame (verecundia): the property of uprightness is not to violate human beings, of shame to not offend.

Thus, to maintain moderate behaviour (temperantia and moderatio) and to preserve reverence (reverentia) are the key goals of the moral agent; the result is virtue (virtus) and approval (approbatio). 1.97-9 marks a transition from general comments about decorum to specific arguments about duties due to the community from the wise man, for which he receives approval. Dyck, commenting on 1.99, writes, ‘The approbatio of one’s fellows is that consequence of virtuous action which gives it weight in the realm of utile.’44 Beyond the key theme of approbation from others, two items of significance come out of this passage: first is reverence (reverentia) and the introduction by Cicero into Panaetius’ argument of the distinction ‘the best and the rest’ (optimi cuiusque et reliquorum); second is the phrase ‘what each thinks about himself’ (quid de se quisque sentiat). Curious, then, that the problem Cicero raises next in the De Officiis is the place of ioci in the wise man’s life, or the problem of the liberal jest. For Cicero, it is not so much that jokes have no place in the wise man’s life, but that only a specific kind, in a specific context, are appropriate. There are ‘two varieties of jokes’ (duplex omnino est iocandi genus Cic. Off. 1.104), noble and ignoble (ingenuis and inliberalis); among the former, Cicero mentions Plautus, Attic comedy, the bons mots of the Socratic authors and other such clever phrases (facete dicta). For us, perhaps, the distinction between these kinds of jokes might be difficult to discern, since in Cicero’s dichotomy the quips of Plautus and Attic Comedy occupy the same space as those of the Socratic writers. But for Cicero in 1.104 the distinction is clear:

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres Facilis igitur est distinctio ingenui et inliberalis ioci. Alter est, si tempore fit, ut si remisso animo, homine dignus, alter ne libero quidem, si rerum turpitudo adhibetur et verborum obscenitas. Ludendi etiam est quidam modus retinendus, ut ne nimis omnia profundamus elatique voluptate in aliquam turpitudinem delabamur. Suppeditant autem et campus noster et studia venandi honesta exempla ludendi. The distinction between a cultured and uncultured joke is a ready one: the former, at the right time, as during relaxation, is worthy of even the most rigid man, the latter, if it exhibits immorality in its subject matter, or obscenity in its diction, is unworthy of any free man. There is likewise a certain limit to be observed, even in sport, so that we do not throw everything away, and carried away by our pleasure lapse into immorality. Our Campus (Martius) and the pursuit of hunting supply appropriate examples for sport.

For Cicero, obscene subject matter and diction (turpitudo and verborum obscenitas) are characteristic of the ignoble joke. This kind of joke, then, does not observe moderate behaviour (temperantia and moderatio), or preserve reverence (reverentia). The attention to moderate behaviour in the context of decorum is not surprising: these are two of the cardinal virtues described by Cicero at the beginning of this section. But the attention paid here to reverentia by contrast is significant, because now the wise man – as well as having a care for maintaining the dignity of others through reverence – is motivated by a concern for how he himself is perceived among his peers. Jokes present a danger for this balance. Dyck suggests that this argument signals a shift from Panaetius, Cicero’s source, and is nuanced to Cicero’s own concerns,45 since it seems to go contrary to mainstream Stoic thought (in which the wise man usually acts according to his natural reason and not specific social concerns).46 For Cicero, then, I dare say, many of Martial’s poetic jokes would have been the epitome of the type of joke to avoid. Martial, I suggest, is reacting to this particular passage in Cicero’s De Officiis, not just to the general problem of the ‘liberal jest’.47 The exceptional rarity of the phrase de se sentire should give us reason enough for pause. But the use of reverentia (Off. 1.99 is the solitary example in the whole Ciceronian corpus) is also significant. Indeed, Martial himself only uses moderate disposition (temperamentum, or a related word) twice in all his poems, here in the Preface to Book 1, and in the Preface to Book 12 (intemperanter, 12.pr.5). What’s more, the first sentence in Martial’s Preface is a mirror image of Cicero’s thought in 1.99 from adhibenda est to dissoluti. But it is the context of the philosophical discussion that cements the allusion, and informs my reading of the Preface. The place of jokes in the wise man’s life, or the problem of the ‘liberal jest’, is, as we saw above, a point of danger in human action and relations. Two comments are in order. First, Cicero has at least promoted this topic from its place in Panaetius, and probably altered it;48 this section more

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Peter J. Anderson naturally belongs at 1.134 in a discussion of the proper use of conversation (sermo) among friends.49 Thus it seems peculiar to Cicero that these two topics – approval (approbatio) in light of both moderation (temperantia) and reverence (reverentia) and the appropriate use of jokes – have been juxtaposed, as in fact they are in Martial. Secondly, Cicero’s concern for the place of ioci in his public life was important for him, the consular comic (consularis scurra).50 The bad sort of joke can provoke desires and reactions in other people that harm them by attacking their control of their soul (sedatio animi).51 But if one shows moderation (temperantia) in jokes, one maintains decorum, displaying a proper spirit (probum ingenium), and not offending reverence (reverentia): ipsumque genus iocandi non profusum nec immodestum, sed ingenuum et facetum esse debet. ut enim pueris non omnem ludendi licentiam damus, sed eam, quae ab honestatis actionibus non sit aliena, sic in ipso ioco aliquod probi ingenii lumen eluceat. (Off. 1.103b-4) The kind of joking itself should not be extravagant or immoderate, but refined and witty. Just as we do not give our children unlimited freedom to play, but freedom which is not incompatible with noble conduct, so also in our jokes the light of a pure character should shine forth.

This notion of the proper spirit (probum ingenium) displayed, as if a light, through jokes has an obvious connection with Cicero’s overall concern for approval, but is just as significant for Martial’s Preface. Noble joke (ingenuis iocus) ought to be governed by moderate behaviour (temperantia and moderatio): it displays its proper spirit (probum ingenium) while preserving reverence (reverentia), winning fame for the speaker and not harming the listener. Seneca De Constantia Sapientis and ioci In the De Constantia Sapientis, Seneca addresses in general the reaction of the ‘the wise man’ to harm, injury and insult (iniuria and contumelia). The concerns of the dialogue are far wider than jokes, but a central passage (Constant. 10-11) deals explicitly with the question of the response of the wise man to insults from words (maledicta and ioci). The wise man receives neither injury nor insult, not because he is physically untouchable, but because he sets his mind apart. Seneca’s distinction of injury from insult is central to the passage concerning ioci, to which I shall turn, for jokes fall under the category of insults (contumelia), a lesser kind of injury (iniuria). Est minor iniuria, quam queri magis quam exequi possumus, quam leges quoque nulla dignam vindicta putaverunt.

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres [Insult] is a lesser injury, which we can complain about rather than avenge, and which the law does not even think worthy of punishment.

Seneca explains at length how injury (iniuria) involves a diminishing of a person’s physical well-being, status, possessions etc., while insult (contumelia) is merely the perception of a diminishment. To paraphrase again, Seneca’s argument is that the wise man, since his only true possession is his virtue and his only true quality his mind, cannot be harmed. His ability to remain unharmed depends entirely on his ability to subordinate his emotional reaction to his rational mind (cf. Cicero’s prerequisite for appropriate action, decorum). Thus the anger aroused by what seems injurious is diffused by the wise person’s recognition of the fact that he, that is his mind, cannot be harmed. Insult is, for Seneca, a lesser form of injury because the damage exists only in the mind, in a person’s perception of what an action, utterance etc means to him. Thus the wise man has no concern for how others perceive him, and he himself can feel no injury arising from malicious words (maledicta):52 this is the central point of variance with Cicero’s arguments in the De Officiis. De Constantia Sapientis 11 applies this basic understanding of the inviolability of the wise man to a ‘real life’ situation. I have cited the most important parts of the passage in full below, but shall summarize the initial portion. In essence, Seneca argues that the corollary of the wise man’s resistance to insult is that no one can treat him with contempt because no one can truly contemn one greater than himself: Sapiens autem a nullo contemnitur, magnitudinem suam novit nullique tantum de se licere renuntiat sibi et omnis has, quas non miserias animorum sed molestias dixerim, non vincit sed ne sentit quidem. (Constant. 11) But the wise man is contemned by no one; he knows his greatness and declares to himself that no one has such power over him. He does not overcome all these things which I would call not afflictions of the spirit but irritations: he does not even feel them.

The observation developed by Seneca from this assertion is extremely valuable for our understanding of how Martial’s Preface may be responding to the position articulated in Cicero. For, as Seneca says, just as we cannot hold a child’s use of bad language as a sign of his or her contempt for us, we cannot put stock in the insults of our slaves at banquets (convivia): Nam et pueri os parentium feriunt et crines matris turbavit laceravitque infans et sputo adspesit aut nudavit in conspectu suorum tegenda et verbis obscenioribus non pepercit, et nihil horum contumeliam dicimus. Eadem causa est, cur nos manicipiorum nostrorum urbanitas in dominos contumeliosa delectet, quorum audacia ita demum sibi in convivias ius facit, si coepit a domino. (Constant. 11.2.6-10)

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Peter J. Anderson Children too, you see, strike their parents’ faces and infants mess and tear a mother’s hair and spew spit on it, or bare what ought to remain covered in front of relatives and do not refrain from obscene words – and we call none of these things contumelia. This is the reason why the urbanitas of our slaves, insulting to their masters, delights; their insolence in fact is allowable at the guests’ expense if it begins with the master’s.

Indeed, some actually purchase slaves who are good at insulting, and even sharpen their skills through training sub magistro for this express purpose (Constant. 11.3.5-8).53 Seneca thus seems to endorse abuse in a convivial context (Cicero hints in De Orat. 2.252 that such jokes are barely suitable for a dinner of citizens, vix convivio liberorum), provided that the master is insulted first. What is more, Seneca points out that although the source of the insult (slave or friend) ought to determine our reaction, this is in fact madness (dementia): Nec has contumelias vocamus, sed argutias: quanta autem dementia est isdem modo delectari, modo offendi, et rem ab amico dictam maledictum vocare, a servulo ioculare convicium. (Constant. 11.3.8-11) Nor do we call these insults, but rather witticisms. What insanity it is to be delighted and insulted by the same thing at different times, and to call what’s said by a friend nasty, by a slave a funny joke!

This comment renders obsolete Cicero’s division of the kinds of jokes and gives ethical ground for jocular abuse, and a reason and social context for writing abusive poems. The perceived importance of the difference between modes of abusive wit (liberal jest or iambic slur) becomes irrelevant. Jokes are simply part of the range of entertainments offered at banquets. For Seneca, then, the wise man can receive no harm from insults because he is unassailable in this regard (ne sentit quidem); furthermore such insults are actually pleasurable in certain contexts, even when directed at guests (provided that the master is insulted first). Seneca’s choice of the word ‘madness’ (dementia) here is important because it signifies in Stoic thought an aberration of reason. Thus Cicero’s stance might be objectionable from Seneca’s point of view: an insult is always an insult, but it always means nothing to the wise man. The extension of this thought is that the social status of the joker does not matter: thus Martial, even though a friend and not a slave, may write jokes without offense being taken. I might point out here that Seneca calls this argutia, a word which Martial uses on occasion to describe his own and Catullus’ poetry.54 Martial’s use of the word reverence (reverentia), which has distinct overtones in the Domitianic period, now takes on special importance. The word is extremely uncommon in the pre-Augustan period. In Ciceronian times the semantic emphasis is closer to the meaning of ‘shame’ and ‘fear’ (pudor and metus), from which derive ‘respect’.55 By the time of Martial,

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres however, reverentia seems to have adopted a meaning much closer to awareness of status, and recognition of worth.56 It is, in fact, a keyword for Martial in expressing his relationship with Domitian in the later books.57 Reverentia becomes a focal point for Martial’s reaction to Cicero. For Cicero in De Officiis (recall that it is the only instance of reverentia in Cicero’s works), reverence was the mediating agent of the wise man’s dealings with other people, of all ranks, through which he maintained uprightness (iustitia) and sense of shame (verecundia): jokes present a danger because they can upset the moderate behaviour (moderatio and temperantia) of the joker as well as the balanced emotional state (sedatio animi) of the audience. But Seneca seems to be suggesting that these distinctions are false, and that jokes cannot affect the emotional state of the wise man (i.e. do not affect him with insult contumelia or injury iniuria). The moderate disposition (temperamentum) which Martial claims to follow should not be to the detriment of reverence (reverentia) just because his little books are full of jokes: by challenging Cicero’s ethical stance against his kind of joke, Martial asserts that the rational excellence of the wise man and his own moral and literary awareness neutralize the damaging effect of the abuse for reverence (reverentia). He does so by stating that his poetry is for people who possess the appropriate frame of mind about themselves (quisquis de se bene sentire): these people will show less concern for others’ perceptions and opinions about themselves; Martial bears no responsibility for their reactions beyond acting according to his own moderate disposition (temperamentum). In addition, Martial’s explicit remarks about his disposition and reverence challenge Cicero’s implication that the ‘bad’ kind of joke observes neither moderation nor reverence. It is not so much that Martial is uncontrolled in his Epigrams; rather he has followed a chosen path (the temperamentum) that has a specific goal (cf. above on Mart. 4.17.2 and 6.60). And it is not so much that Martial has shown no concern for what others think of themselves or for how he himself stands in relation to others; rather he seems to be claiming that for the man who possesses the appropriate frame of mind about himself (de se bene sentit), reverence (reverentia) has been automatically observed – there are no grounds for complaint (queri non possit). This reader will maintain his composure in the face of what will seem to others abuse. The distinct verbal echoes in Martial’s Preface to the Ciceronian passages contextualize these implications concerning the link between moral and literary purposes within the philosophical moral discussion taken up in Cicero’s De Officiis and the genre of epigram. Seneca’s De Constantia Sapientis, closer in time and circumstance to Martial,58 explains another important aspect of the same issue: although the emotive force of jokes runs the risk of generating insult or injury (contumelia or iniuria), the wise reader will see that the poet is just kidding. Martial must present his own ethical and literary persona in such a way as to diffuse the adverse

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Peter J. Anderson emotions. This is what he does in the Preface: by presenting epigrams (which include satirical attacks) as jokes, Martial is tracking against the imbalance between epigram as a genre and the threat of vengeance it represents for the poet. A reading of Martial’s Preface to Book 1 Spero me secutum in libellis meis tale temperamentum ut de illis queri non possit quisquis de se bene senserit, cum salva infimarum quoque personarum reverentia ludant; I hope that I have pursued, in my little books, such a moderate disposition that whoever has sound views about himself may not complain about them, since they play without detriment to the respect due even to persons of low status.

The significance of Martial’s emphasis on moderate disposition (temperamentum) is much greater when it is seen in the light of Ciceronian approval (approbatio), presented here in priamel, ‘that ... may not complain about them’ (ut ... de illis queri non possit). The same is true for reverence (reverentia), which, Martial takes pains to assert, has been preserved. The rarity of de se sentire is suggestive, but much more informative when linked with Cicero’s concern for self-awareness: Martial desires a reader who knows himself just as he knows himself. Furthermore, not only is this first phrase a mirror image of the Ciceronian passage (Off. 1.99), it can also be seen to retain the peculiar distinction (Off. 1.99) between ‘the best and the rest’ (i.e. optimi et reliquorum parallel with infimarum quoque personarum). Indeed, the use of person (persona) in the Preface also takes on a significant nuance in light of Cicero’s discussion (presented above) of moral agency, the poet and persona. As Martial writes in the Preface to Book 1: Quae adeo antiquis auctoribus defuit ut nominibus non tantum veris abusi sint sed et magnis. mihi fama vilius constet et probetur in me novissimum ingenium. This respect was so deficient for authors of old that they exploited not only genuine names but also great ones. For my part let my reputation be less costly and let the innovative talent in me be approved.

Here is an implicit rejection of bad models, as Cicero advises, and more importantly this rejection is linked very tightly not only to reverence (reverentia) of greater and lesser people but also to approval (approbatio in Cicero, fama here in the Preface), which for Cicero was in part the result of moderation (temperantia) and reverence (reverentia). Later in the Preface Martial indicates which specific Roman literary models he will follow,

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres but even here he introduces literary concerns initially through an implicit rejection of ‘authors of old’ antiquis auctoribus. The use of ‘repute’ (fama), too, is suggestive of a literary, not simply a social, concern: fama is a major stated anxiety for almost every Roman poet, from Lucilius on, and as Tacitus’ Aper assures us, the end goal of every poet.59 With the De Officiis in the background, Martial’s literary slant to approval (approbatio, or fama through writing) is reinforced by another clever juxtaposition of moral and literary interests: that the poet’s fame and success be tied to his ingenium is exactly parallel to the Ciceronian concern for approval and talent (ingenium): Martial’s ‘may my talent be approved’ (probetur ... ingenium) echoes strongly Cicero’s ‘proper talent’ (probum ingenium). Martial thus seems to be blending a moral and literary agenda by shifting Ciceronian terms and adducing new terms with semantic ranges that reach literary endeavours. After linking his moral and literary agenda in general, Martial now proceeds to deal with specific concerns that jeopardize his literary project. Absit a iocorum nostrorum simplicitate malignus interpres nec epigrammata mea scribat: inprobe facit qui in alieno libro ingeniosus est. May the ill-intentioned interpreter be removed from the unaffected quality of my jokes nor may he write on my epigrams. It is wrongful behaviour for one to display his talent on another’s book.

In the context of the moral issues raised by Cicero, I suggest that the phrase ‘May the ill-intentioned grammarian be removed from the unaffected quality of my jokes nor may he write on my epigrams’ (absit a iocorum nostrum simplicitate malignus interpres nec epigrammata mea scribat, 1.Pref.6-8) has great significance and highlights Martial’s concerns for his literary project. Simplicitas, as Citroni indicates ad loc., means ingenuousness more than frankness in this context,60 but the ambiguity of the interpretation fits well with the juxtaposition of moral and literary concerns. Indeed, simplicitas is one of the character attributes Cicero explicitly links with the good kind of wit (Off. 1.108-9). By protecting the ‘unaffected quality’ of his jokes from the malicious interpreter (malignus interpres), Martial is clearly tapping into an ethical sensibility. But ‘unaffected quality’ (simplicitas) and ‘straightforward’ (simplex) are also terms used to describe a manner of speaking and writing – plain speech that needs little interpretation – and not only in rhetorical works. In Priapea 3 the author contrasts straightforward (simplex) with obscure (obscurus) in a manner very reminiscent of Martial, and in fact makes a marvellous literary joke – obscurity (obscuritas) is said to be the result of brevity (brevitas), but the briefest statement in the poem is the most straightforward and the many euphemisms most obscure. Martial also explicitly links unaffected quality (simplicitas) to language and Romanitas

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Peter J. Anderson (11.20.10), with an important echo of the Preface both in terms (simplicitas, lascivos, tristis, Latina) and in intent. Thus the tenor of the phrase ‘removed from the unaffected quality of my jokes’ (absit a iocorum nostrum simplicitate) fits precisely within the moral and generic framework. The phrase ‘nor may he write on my epigrams’ (nec epigrammata mea scribat) ties this warning to Martial’s literary concerns. The commentaries focus on ‘nor may he write on my epigrams’ (nec epigrammata mea scribat) as presenting a logical problem (scribat, although the epigrams have already been written).61 But this perceived logical problem is in fact averted by the preceding interpreter (interpres), a term often applied to those who elucidate philosophical writings as well as to grammarians and translators.62 Interpres, then, is not a term usually applied to what we would call a regular ‘reader’, but to a professional exegete. Seneca, with whose works Friedrich (1910) has shown Martial to be very familiar, critiques those who dabble in learning, picking and choosing aphorisms, learning them without ever really knowing them: a man who does this remains like a child, never producing anything of his own. Omnes itaque istos, numquam auctores, semper interpretes, sub aliena umbra latentes, nihil existimo habere generosi numquam ausos aliquando facere quod diu didicerant. Memoriam in alienis exercuerunt. (Sen. Epist. 33.8) And so I judge there to be nothing at all superior in all of those sort, never writers, always interpreters, lying hidden in the shadow of others, never daring to make anything out of what they spent so long learning. They built their place in history on another’s property.

Martial is not warning off the malicious reader, but the malicious exegete, who intends to damage his project.63 This anxiety is very closely related concerns of ownership, envy (invidia), and criticism examined above in connection with 11.94. Scribat here then must mean ‘comment on’ or ‘write about’, or even ‘explain’, rather than ‘re-write’. Perhaps, like Seneca, Martial is suggesting that these types of people wrongly use the work of others as the basis of their own writing (inprobe facit qui in alieno libro ingeniosus est)64 – this must be the sense of ingeniosus. The echo in section 3 of the Preface is very clear (and the criticism paralleled elsewhere in the Epigrams), and I suggest that Martial is indicting many at the same time: those who explain his poems to others, those who take his poems as their own, those who add something to his work, and (if the allusion to Seneca is fair) those who use his epigrams but don’t write their own.65 And in the context of the De Officiis, there is a neat contrast between the clever exegete (ingeniosus interpres), who relies improperly (improbe) on another’s talent to ensure his own fame, and Martial’s own proper talent (probum ingenium) which is innovative (novissimum) and, as he has just suggested in the previous section, expressly not intended to secure repute

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres (fama) at the expense of others ‘For my part let my reputation be less costly and let the innovative talent in me be approved’ (mihi fama vilius constet et probetur in me novissimum ingenium). Lasciuam uerborum ueritatem, id est epigrammaton linguam, excussarem, si meum esset exemplum: sic scribit Catullus, sic Marsus, sic Pedo, sic Gaetulicus, sic quicumque perlegitur. Si quis tamen tam ambitiose tristis est ut apud illum in nulla pagina latine loqui fas sit, potest epistola uel potius titulo contentus esse. (1.Pref.4) I would apologize for the naughty truth of my words – that is, epigrams’ language – if mine where the precedent: Catullus writes thus, and Marsus, and Pedo, and Gaetulicus, and all who are read. But now, if anyone is so ostentatiously austere that in his opinion it is prohibited to use plain Latin on any page, he can be content with this letter or, better, with the title [‘Epigrammata’].

Martial claimed to be avoiding bad models of behaviour of the authors of old (antiquis auctoribus) in order to preserve reverence (reverentia), blending moral and literary concerns. In a similar way, Martial justifies his use of obscene language (a key concern of Cicero) by introducing important literary models: Catullus, Marsus, Pedo, and Gaetulicus. The criticism that Cicero would level against wanton words (lasciva verba) is countered by Martial’s suggesting the appropriateness of such words for epigrammata as a genre and presenting Roman exempla for imitation.66 Although the moral concerns linger (note the use of truth (veritatem), emphasized perhaps by the transferred epithet67), the Preface seems now to have shifted its focus to the literary realm. This transition seems to me effected, appropriately enough, through the word talent (ingenium). Indeed, Martial no longer speaks of jokes (ioci), but epigrams, and he has adduced specific and well-known literary models instead of the ambiguous auctores. Conspicuously absent from his list, however, is Lucilius, the father of abusive epigram. Martial’s reference to authors of old (antiquis auctoribus) earlier in the Preface must at the very least be seen to include Lucilius by default68 (Lucilius was especially notorious by Martial’s time for attacking visible and important public figures69); his absence from the list here, then, is noteworthy, perhaps indicating a specific model Martial is avoiding. Read in this way against the De Officiis, the Preface becomes highly suggestive, and lays out the literary and moral commonplaces we might expect in a satirist: Martial will write poems that are potentially but not intentionally harmful (even if offensive); this intention is guaranteed by his moderate disposition (temperamentum) and his reverence (reverentia); his proper talent (probum ingenium) should be approved, and he, motivated by unaffectedness (simplicitas) and truth (veritas), warns off any who would work against these qualities; his own openness to a charge of impropriety (improbitas) is obviated by the tradition in which he writes,

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Peter J. Anderson where obscene language and topics have been appropriate; objections to this language and style are likely to be raised by those who are annoying (tristis) and ostentatious (ambitiosus). As in 11.20, the issues of unaffectedness (simplicitas) and wantonness (lascivia) in the Preface are not only moral ones. Martial’s stance is a response to potential criticism of his Latinity on the part of the tristis. ‘To speak Latin’ (latine loqui), of course, what is under scrutiny here – not just ‘plain speaking’ (as often in Cicero, and like simplicitas Romana in 11.20), but correct use of language, Latinity.70 Bloomer (1997) argued that Phaedrus’ prologues do not only seek to create a firewall of sorts against accusations of insult (contumelia), they establish Phaedrus’ ‘literary pedigree’ and cultural relevance through Latinity: Latinity is not a simple matter of correct diction and grammar, but a marker of culture and of belonging. This is what Martial seems to be doing in the Preface, especially section 3. Acting as a bridge sentence between ethical and literary concerns, section 3 distils the issue the Preface as a whole is addressing to its essence. Pliny in 4.14 suggests that Paternus will prove himself cultured (eruditus) by recognizing the simple fact that wanton words (lasciva verba) are native to epigram. Martial’s argument, though a little more nuanced, is essentially the same: people who do not understand what he is doing are missing the point of the genre in the first place. And as the rest of the preface intimates, people who do get it should either be ready for a Roman show or put the book down. Epigrammata illis scribuntur qui solent spectare Florales. Non intret Cato theatrum meum, aut si intrauerit, spectet. Videor mihi meo iure facturus si epistolam uersibus clusero: Nosses iocosae dulce cum sacrum Florae festosque lusus et licentiam uolgi, cur in theatrum, Cato seuere, uenisti? an ideo tantum ueneras, ut exires? (1Pref.6-8) Epigrams are written for those who are accustomed to attend the Floralia. Let Cato not enter my theatre, or if he enters, let him watch. I think I shall act within my rights if I close my preface with a poem: Since you knew the sweet rites of saucy Flora, the festival play, and the mob’s wantonness, Why have you come to my theatre, Mr Cato? Or have you come so you can leave, no less?

Not only does Martial continue his rejection of the wrong kind of reader in the exemplum of Cato, but he also makes an explicit assertion of his chosen persona as poet at the same time: with meum theatrum Martial becomes the type of dramatic poet whom Cicero likened to the moral agent. Just as Martial began the Preface with a reference to his moderate disposition (temperamentum), where Cicero began in De Officiis 1.99, he ends the Preface with a declaration of his chosen persona, carefully established by the intervening comments and bolstered by claims about

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres his individual nature and the nature of the genre. What is more, as with the ill-intentioned interpeter (malignus interpres), Martial thrusts the accountability for the accusation of offense or injury – one would expect an austere man (severus) to make – back upon the accuser with the allusion to Cato in the closing epigram.71 Cato, in the tradition, came to a mime performance during the Floralia, but left so that the crowd could better enjoy something he found offensive, fearing his presence might inhibit their enjoyment (Val. Max. 2.10.8; cf. Cic. Off. 1.129). Martial suggests that his performance (theatrum), for which the preface (and even the title, titulus, cf. 1.Pref.14) is the entrance, should be avoided by an austere Cato, since he has had fair warning about the content. The wisest will enter but not be harmed – and so will have no legitimate grounds for anger. Along with his own poetic, ethical, persona, Martial has articulated literary and ethical apologies that work in tandem to establish a mode of discourse between author and reader. The Preface, with ethical and genre concerns intertwined, offers to his readers a model for reading the Epigrams that seeks to pre-empt dangerous emotions by drawing the reader’s attention to Martial’s poetic persona and the imperatives of epigram as a genre. Notes 1. The best parts of the ideas and arguments presented in this chapter are the result of the patient advice and criticism of W. Johnson, A. Spisak, P. Larash, K. Coleman and the editor of the volume. 2. Furor in Martial often describes an unreasonable basis for an action, cf. 1.20, 2.80, 3.76, 9.84, 12.49. Martial ridicules caeci in the Epigrams for bad or destructive choices (3.19, 4.30, 8.9), often in connection with love (3.15, 8.51, 12.22), and the diptych 3.11 and 3.18 plays upon themes similar to those in 1.68. For an explicit connection between furor and the blindness of excessive passion (although outside the specific context of amor, the context is analogous) see the elegant passage in Cic. Dom. 39. 3. This is consistent with usage elsewhere, cf. Ov. Met. 7.133, 15.612; Liv. 9.38.13. 4. Mart. 4.81 demonstrates a similar effect upon a reader, this time apparently prompting Fabulla to feel shame (or anger), while 5.2 and 11.16 both play in opposite ways with the notion that Martial’s poetry can prompt rubor in readers. 5. See Anderson (2006). 6. Cf. 3.83 Ut faciam breviora mones epigrammata, Corde. / ‘fac mihi quod Chione’: non potui brevius and 3.87 Narrat te rumor, Chione, numquam esse fututam / atque nihil cunno purius esse tuo. / Tecta tamen non hac, qua debes, parte lauaris: / si pudor est, transfer subligar in faciem. 7. 4.17 and 4.43 are similarly unabashed. There is a slightly oxymoronic play here with innocuus and sel; see Granarolo (1971) 328-30. 8. Spisak (2007) argues for Martial’s role as iambographer. Lucilius 1083-9 (Warmington) may represent a dialogue between Lucilius and a victim of abuse who accuses him of slander. Keane (2006) 75 argues that Lucilius ‘ “invite[s] him to do his worst” as if to point out that each party is capable of harming the other’. Lucilius seems to have charged a mime-writer for libel (Rhet. Her. 2.19).

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Peter J. Anderson 9. This leads to speculation as to the reason for the revision of Book 10 and might indicate why Martial had to re-publish. 10. See the introduction to Corbeill (1996), especially xii where he cites Cicero’s Strabo in the De Oratore 2.271.1-4 (at the end of his speech about humour in oratory) to demonstrate the pervasiveness (and so hidden danger) of abusive humour. Corbeill has convincingly shown how abusive humour had serious social consequences for the abused, and for this reason was a valued if somewhat double-edged part of the rhetorical arsenal . 11. Cf. for example Cicero’s interesting comment about maledictio in Cael. 6. For a highly successful approach to humour in satire, see Plaza (2006). On the difficulties of terminology in discussions of humour and wit between cultures with reference to the classical world, see Bremmer and Roodenburg (1997) 1-10. Broader discussions of terminology may be found in general studies on humour; a concise summary of views and historical developments, and specifically the delineation of wit vs. humour, may be found in Roeckelein (2002) 24-33. 12. Julius Caesar may provide an interesting early example of open tolerance: see Suet. Iul. 73, but cf. in contrast Suet. Iul. 75. Augustus seems to have attempted to control abusive wit: cf. Tac. Ann. 1.72 in connection with maiestas (cf. 4.21 and Suet. Cal. 16) and Suet. Aug. 55. But, on Augustus allowing licence of speech through his clementia, see Suet. Aug. 51, 54, Dio 52.31.5-8, and on Augustus’ ability to ‘take a joke’ see Macr. Sat. 2.4. 13. Tabula 8, fr. 1a Warmington, cf. Hor. Serm. 2.1.82-3. See also da Nobrega (1974). 14. On Tiberius’ apparently forgiving stance, see Suet. Tib. 28 and Dio 57.22.5; but Aelius Saturninus was thrown off the Tarpeian Rock for versus in Tiberium flectati (cf. Suet. Tib. 61; Tac. 6.29 and Dio 58.24.3-4). For Nero, see Tac. Ann. 14.48-9, 16.21 on a lampoon by Antistius Sosianus (sentence of death proposed). 15. See for example Suet. Dom. 10.4 on Helvidius’ death. In 10.2 we learn that Aelius Lamia was killed for ioci, a charge Suetonius calls levissimum. 16. See Schiesaro (1997) 102-4 for a discussion of Stoic theories on the emotive effects of literature. 17. Interesting to think that Lat. persona is used as a poetic term (‘character’), a legal term (‘legal person’) and an ethical/psychological term (‘self’). 18. Nicholas (1975) 216; see also Frier (1989) 1-2. 19. Keane (2006) 77. See also Smith (1951), LaFleur (1981), Muecke (1995), McGinn (2001). 20. Keane (2006) 75-6. 21. Keane (2006) 13-41. Szelest (1960) sees Martial’s satirical epigrams as stemming from the Greek tradition of invective epigram (for which see also Nisbet (2003)), but the links between Martial and Horace – especially Serm. 1.4 and 2.1 – need to be revisited more systematically (see Duret (1977), Donini (1964)); retrospective connections to Juvenal can be found in Colton (1991). 22. Wycislo (2001) 63. See below on Sen. Constant. 10-11. 23. This is, of course, an enormous topic – I would point first in this context to the discussions in Fowler (1997) 21-4 and Harris (2001). 24. Nauta (2002) 43-7 argues for the use of pseudonyms (non verum nomen), drawing on Mart. 9.95b and suggesting that Martial uses three distinct kinds of vocative address. These seem to me artificial categories to a large extent, and it is certainly quite easy to read 9.95b as ironic (cf. e.g. the Postumus cycle in Book 2 or 3.8 and 3.11); see Rudd (1960).

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres 25. See for example Sullivan’s (1991) 64 discussion of 3.16 and 3.59, the epigrams on the cobbler from Bononia. 26. E.g. in the preface to Book 9, Martial mentions to his absent friend Toranius that the epigram post ordinem paginarum addressing an Avitus was written for Stertinus Avitus (probably consul, 92 CE). Friedländer ad loc. commented that Toranius must have been away from Rome, since Martial advises him (para hospitium). Henriksén (1999) ad loc. counters this suggestion with the observation that, even if he were away, Toranius would know which Avitus Martial meant because of earlier instances of the name (e.g. 1.16, 6.84), and supports White’s (1972) 56 argument that this Avitus must then be a new addressee. Merits aside, I will point out that all three arguments work from the premise that Toranius would identify either addressee with only the cognomen. 27. See e.g. the cycle of poems on Postumus the fellator in Book 2.10, 12, 21-3, where a complex dialogic is elaborated over the cycle. Cf. Williams (2004) ad loc. 28. Cf. 1.20, 1.37, 3.36, 3.50. See Nauta (2002) 166-89 for an interesting discussion of ioci and the symposion in the light of Bakhtin’s ‘carnival’ theories. Here Nauta argues for a certain coherence in the loosening of social boundaries in the symposion as in ritual contexts such as the Floralia and the Saturnalia. Given the end of the Preface (see below), this argument is particularly suggestive. But this whole problem seems to find its solution, as we shall see later, in Seneca. 29. Fitzgerald (2007) 68-105, 139-66 explores this complexity; see Larash (2004) for a more detailed examination of readerships in Martial. 30. Larash (2004) addresses the role and literary precedents for Martial’s use of the anonymous lector. 31. It is intriguing that Statius’ prefaces to Books 1 and 2 of the Silvae likewise seek to address the audience’s reception of the poems in collected book format, as well as of each individual poems. 32. The question of Martial’s apologia and epigram (if the arguments I make here are valid) in comparison with the apologiae of the satirists is an extremely interesting one. Horace 1.4 in particular offers a number of close thematic parallels; it may be that Horace is as strong and important an influence on Martial as Ovid. 33. Galimberti Biffino (2003) argues for the close association of temperamentum and ‘l’uomo ideale’ in the Trajanic period as seen in Pliny’s Epistles. 34. Leumann-Hoffmann-Szantyr 284.a suggest that such constructions (non modo – sed etiam and variations) often indicate a ‘Klimax oder gradatio.’ They furthermore indicate that ‘non tantum ... sed (sogar häufiger als n.t. – s. etiam, s. Axelson Stud. 18)’ is found often in Silver Latin, and that sed (sed etiam, sed et) means in this usage more ‘but rather’ than ‘but also’ (‘sed bedeutet hierbei meist “sondern vielmehr”, seltener abschwächend “sondern auch nur” ’). Citroni (1975) ad loc. points to Manilius 1.36 (Goold) as the first example of this combination: veneranda non species tantum sed et ipsa potentia rerum; certainly in context ‘but rather’ is preferable. There is a possibly earlier example in Ov. Met. 13.318-19 non haec sententia tantum fida, sed et felix, cum sit satis esse fidelem; here again ‘but rather’ makes more sense. See also a clear instance in Tac. Germ. 35.1 tam immensum terrarum spatium non tenent tantum Chauci, sed et implent. Similar examples in Silver Latin may be found at Sen. Contr. 1.Praef.1, Tac. Hist. 1.15, Plin. Hist. Nat. 10.44, 26.29, 29.49, 31.115. 35. Martial plays with the notion of verum nomen in 9.95b. Henriksén (1999) creates a rather involved solution to the epigram’s witty play on verum, and like Nauta (2002) 44 takes this as evidence that Martial is using a made up name here.

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Peter J. Anderson Note that Martial does not say that he is using a false name, but (as in e.g. 1.96, 2.23, 3.11 11.8) his response results from the identification of an individual by the reader. Even Juvenal, whose defence is much more developed, finally says that the people he attacks are the great dead, i.e. those buried along the Viae Flaminia and Latina, Juv. 1.170-1; he refuses to attack the great living, Juv. 1.155ff. 36. See Friedländer (1886), Citroni (1975), and Howell (1980) ad loc. 37. Juv. 1.166-7 rubet auditor cui frigida mens est / criminibus, tacita sudant praecordia culpa; Hor. Ep. 1.1.60-1 hic murus aeneus esto, nil conscire sibi, nulla pallescere culpa. 38. Cf. Mart. 4.17.2. 39. See Forcelini s.v. sentire II.10, and OLD s.v. sentire 8a. There are a number of clear examples of bene sentire de aliquo as formulating sound judgment, e.g. Cic. Fam. 6.1.3.6 (cf. Cic. Fam. 12.6.1.1-3, 15.1.2.12-14, Att. 11.6.1.2. Tib. 1.2.60). Seneca, Quintilian, and Pliny offer contemporary examples, e.g. Sen. Ep. 102.16.1. Compare the negative formulations at Cic. Fam. 10.28.3.3-4, Quint. Inst. 2.2.12.46. 40. Searches performed on PHI Latin #5 CD-ROM using Pandora, Lector, and the Silver Mountain PHI Workplace, and on the BTL database using the CETEDOC software. 41. Dyck (1996) 241. 42. See Gill (1989). 43. This is a paraphrase of Cic. Off. 1.96-8. 44. Dyck (1996) 258. See discussion ad loc. and 248-9 for suggestions as to why and how Cicero fiddled with this portion of Panaetius’ arguments. 45. For the second motivation, see Dyck (1996) 258 ad 1.99 ‘the distinction [i.e. between optimi and reliquorum] is likely to have been introduced by Cicero’. For the third, circumstance of pleasure in iocus, see Dyck (1996) 265 ad 103b-104. 46. Cf. inter multa Sen. Ep. 26.6. 47. Freudenburg (1993) argues for Horace that he attempts in his Sermones to join the supposed civility of the liberal jest as argued by Aristotle with the social function of the iambographer’s abusive wit. For Martial as iambographer, see Spisak (2006). 48. This portion of the argument may be an insertion of Cicero’s deriving from Aristotle’s theory of the liberal jest in the Nichomachean Ethics (4.1127b331128b4); see Dyck ad loc. Aristotle’s division of types of humorous people is three-fold, of course, but he pays little attention to the low end, focusing instead on the cultured gentleman (eutrapelos) and the buffoon (bomolochos) who carries the qualities of the cultured gentleman to extremes. 49. See Dyck (1996) 264 ad 103b-104. 50. See Cic. Phil. 2.39-40. 51. Obscenitas, for Cicero, is the fourth type of the risible in De Orat. 2.252: non modo non foro digna, sed vix convivio liberorum. 52. This is somewhat at odds with how Seneca deals with ioci and maeldicta in the De Ira, where they are clearly an iniuria that leads to ira. Here, however, the sapiens cannot even truly be upset by jokes at his expense that are based on the truth: Seneca suggests that he cannot take offensive at jokes aimed at his baldness, skinny legs or belly (cf. Constant. 16.3-4). Martial in dealing with accusations of unfair criticism usually turns the onus of blame back on the target by intimating that he only expresses the truth (cf. 2.23, 3.11, 9.95b). 53. Cf. Stat. Silv. 2.1.69-75. 54. In adjectival form: of his own poetry cf. Mart.1.1.3, 7.84.2; of Catullus 6.34.7.

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres 55. See Forcellini (1871) s.v. I.1,2. 56. See Forcellini (1871) s.v. II.1-10. 57. Mart. 9.79, 11.5; cf. also 7.52. Compare Stat. Silv. 1.6.45. Mart. 9.37 (et te nulla movet cani reverentia cunni) is a slightly less delicate example, but still to the point. 58. Possibly considerably closer. Kleijwegt (1999) has argued against a close association between Seneca and Martial in the early years, since ‘although both poems [i.e. 4.40, 12.36] introduce Seneca as a generous patron, not here, nor anywhere else in his work, does Martial record details of any particular benefaction which he might have received from the philosopher.’ But most (see Kleijweget [1999] 106, n. 3 for an extensive list) support their relationship before Seneca’s death. Grimal (1999) makes substantial arguments for Martial’s awareness of Senecan thought. 59. Tac. Dial. 10.1, although Aper is perhaps less optimistic on this score than most. Still the best general discussion for this period is Guillemin (1929) 13-22. Martial himself is very clear on his pursuit of renown; on this, see Anderson (2003) 39-182. 60. Cf. Petr. 132.15 quid me spectatis fronte Catones / damnatisque novae simplicitatis opus? / sermonis puri non tristis gratia ridet, / quodque facit populus, candida lingua refert. For an typically Tacitean turn on the word see Tac. Hist. 4.86 (where Domitian affects ingenuousness). 61. Howell (1980) – following Friedlaender – ad loc. ‘the somewhat unsatisfactory balance and rhythm suggest that something may have dropped out before scribat. If the text is right, scribat must have the sense “rewrite” ’. Citroni (1975) ad loc. concurs (with a long note on suggested emendations) and suggests further that scribat may mean inscribat. Tanner (1986) 2665 suggests that it might mean ‘write out an abbreviation in full’). Agreeing that the rhythm and sense is awkward with scribat, I’d like to offer as a conjecture ascribat (a simple haplography – and an aural effect as well as a visual one). Friedlaender and Citroni linked interpres ... scribat very closely to Martial’s later concern for preserving the integrity and authenticity of his epigrams – ascribere builds on this concern, and presents a typically multi-level nuance: as a legal t.t. (which construes well with interpres) ascribere means ‘annotate’, or ‘add to’; but it can also mean to attribute a work to someone (either book, artifact) or impute about someone. 62. The word covers a range of ‘interpreters’ from literary works, to religious matters, to legalities. Nor were interpretes necessarily favourably received (although their services seem to be a recognized need; cf. Quint. Inst.1.6.41), cf. Cic. Fin. 3.15, Fam. 15.19.2, Sen. Dial. 7.2.2. See also TLL s.v. interpres. This leads to an interesting question: could interpres actually mean grammaticus? As Suetonius’ discussion of the ‘terminology of the profession’ in De Gram. 4.1 demonstrates, at some point different terms were customarily applied to those who studied, taught and wrote about language and poetry. The discussion is problematised by some casually drawn distinctions between grammaticus, litterator and litteratus. Certainly, the passage is a critical one for the De Grammaticis. What interests me, however, is that Suetonius separates those who are simply able to speak and write properly (the litterati) from those who are interpretes poetarum, grammatici, the eruditi. Kaster (1995) argues that the cultural interests of the early grammatici were assumed in the first century CE by the élite who were not teachers, while the literary importance of grammatici was overshadowed by the rise of declamation taught by the rhetores. Interpres then, while clearly linked to the activity of expounding upon and explaining the language and meaning of poets,

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Peter J. Anderson is sufficiently broad a term to include all who perform that activity, people such as Pliny and his friends, Suetonius himself and Aulus Gellius. This shift of activity and cultural capital Kaster describes dovetails very neatly with Martial’s deprecatio: these interpretes who may pose a risk to his ethical stance are some of his élite readers, who, like Pliny, seek to own what it is to be eruditus. 63. Martial’s deprecatio might in fact be seen as arising at least in part out of an anxiety that particular individuals not be identified with certain poems. Again, it is not a question of whether there were ‘real’ individuals or fictitious character types, but rather a question of how people (perhaps led by the interpres) might construe poems or seek to identify a target. There is much more work to be done on the importance of the interpres in this regard, but I would offer Ov. Ex Pont. 4.14.39-42, esp. 41-2 as a fair parallel. M. Helzle (personal communication) points to TLL VII.1.2252.47 and suggests that in the context of this poem and the previous poem it is clear that the reference is to ‘a bad commentator who makes him [sc. Ovid] out to say something that he clearly never said’. 64. Scribere is a common use for the work of grammatici: e.g. Sen. Ep. 88.37. cf. Plin. Nat. Hist. 1.Praef. 25.3, Suet. Gram. 11.2.3, Gell. 11.15.3. 65. Grammatici are objects of scorn at Mart. 5.56, 9.73, 10.21, 14.120. Cf. Cic. Fin. 3.15, Fam. 15.19.2, Sen. Dial. 7.2.2. 66. Even Pliny rejected the criticism against the use of lasciva verba in Ep. 4.14. 67. Cicero highlights veritas as an indicator of the person with simplicitas: sunt ... veritatis cultores, Cic. Off. 1.109. 68. As Howell notes ad loc. Catullus, Bibaculus and Marsus all seem, it is true, to direct abuse against individuals (see Buechner (1982) s.v.). 69. See the list with sources in ROL Warmington III.xvi-xix. 70. In that respect, both ambitiose and apud illum are telling. Ambitio is precisely the kind of criticism Seneca, for example, and others level against grammatici and interpretes. And apud is the most frequent way to refer to statements made by writers, and especially by commentators. The tristis here, then, is in effect the interpres of section 3, who represents potential objections to his literary project on the grounds of intent, style, diction and genre. 71. This strategy for accusations of impropriety one can see repeated in e.g. Mart. 2.23, 3.11, 9.95b.

Bibliography Anderson, Peter J. 2003. ‘Fame is the Spur’: Memoria, Gloria, and Poetry Among the Elite in Flavian Rome. diss. University of Cincinnati. Anderson, Peter J. 2006. ‘Martial 1.29: Appearance and Authorship.’ RhM 149: 119-21. Anderson, William S. 1982. ‘Lascivia vs. Ira: Martial and Juvenal.’ in Essays on Roman Satire, 362-95. Princeton: Princeton University Press. First published 1970. Bloomer, W. Martin. 1997. Latinity and Literary Society at Rome. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press. Bremmer, Jan N. and Roodenburg. Herman. 1997. A Cultural History of Humour: From Antiquity to the Present Day. Cambridge, MA: Polity. Bright, D.F. 1980. Elaborate Disarray: The Nature of Statius’ Silvae. Meisenheim am Glan: Hain. Buechner, C. 1982. Fragmenta poetarum Latinorum epicorum et lyricorum praeter Ennium et Lucilium post W. Morel. Leipzig: Teubner.

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres Citroni, Mario. 1975. M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton liber primus. Introduzione, Testo, Apparato Critico e Commento. Firenze: La nuova Italia. Citroni, Mario. 1988. ‘Pubblicazione e diediche dei libri in Marziale.’ Maia 40: 3-39. Colish, Marcia L. 1990. The Stoic Tradition from Antiquity to the Early Middle Ages. I Stoicism in Classical Latin Literature. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Colton, Robert E. 1991. Juvenal’s Use of Martial’s Epigrams: A Study of Literary Influence. Amsterdam: A.M. Hakkert. Corbeill, Anthony. 1996. Controlling Laughter: Political Humor in the Late Roman Republic. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Dau, A. 1887. De M. Valerii Martialis libellorum ratione temporibusque. diss. Rostock. Dyck, Andrew R. 1996. A Commentary on Cicero, De Officiis. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Fitzgerald, William. 2007. Martial: The World of Epigram. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Fowler, D.P. 1997. ‘Epicurean Anger.’ In The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, ed. Susanna M. Braund and Christopher Gill, 16-35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Freudenburg, Kirk. 2001. Satires of Rome: Threatening Poses from Lucilius to Juvenal. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Friedländer, Ludwig. 1886. M. Valerii Martialis Epigrammaton libri. 2 vols. Leipzig. Friedrich, G. 1910. ‘Zu Seneca und Martial.’ Hermes 45: 583-94. Frier, Bruce. 1989. A Casebook on the Roman Law of Delict. Atlanta: Scholars Press. Galimberti Biffino, Giovanna. 2003. ‘Il temperamentum e l’uomo ideale dell’età Traianea.’ In Plinius der Jüngere und seine Zeit, eds. Luigi Castagna and Castagna, L. and Eckard Lefèvre 145-73. Leipzig: B.G. Teubner. Gill, Christopher. 1989. ‘Personhood and Personality: the Four-Personae Theory in Cicero, De Officiis I.’ Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 6: 169-99. Grimal, Pierre. 1989. ‘Martial et la pensée de Sénèque.’ ICS 14: 175-83. Guillemin, Anne-Marie. 1929. Pline et la vie littéraire de son temps. Paris: Société des études latines. Hardie, Alex. 1982. Statius and the Silvae: Poets, Patrons, and Epideixis in the Graeco-Roman World. Liverpool: ARCA. Harris, William V. 2001. Restraining Rage: The Ideology of Anger Control in Classical Antiquity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Henriksén, Christer. 1998-1999. Martial, Book IX. A Commentary. 2 vols. Uppsala: Uppsala University. Holzberg, Niklas. 2002. Martial und das antike Epigramm. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Howell, Peter. 1980. A Commentary on Book One of the Epigrams of Martial. London: Athlone Press. Janson, Tore. 1964. Latin Prose Prefaces. Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell. Kaster, Robert (ed.). 1995. De Grammaticis et rhetoribus. C. Suetonius Tranquillus. Edited with a Translation Introduction and Commentary. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Keane, Catherine. 2006. Figuring Genre in Roman Satire. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kleijwegt, Mark. 1999. ‘A Question of Patronage: Seneca and Martial’, Acta Classica 42: 105-19.

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8. Absit Malignus Interpres LaFleur, R. 1981. ‘Horace and onomasti komodein: The Law of Satire.’ ANRW 2.31.3: 1790-826. Larash, Patricia. 2004. Martial’s Lector, the Practice of Reading, and the Emergence of the General Reader in Flavian Rome. Diss. Berkeley. McGinn, Thomas. 2001. ‘Satire and the Law: The Case of Horace.’ PCPhS 47: 81-102. Muecke, Frances. 1995. ‘Law, Rhetoric, and Genre in Horace, Satires 2.1.’ in Homage to Horace: A Bimillenary Celebration. ed. S.J. Harrison, 203-18. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nauta, Ruurd. 2002. Poetry for Patrons: Literary Communication in the Age of Domitian. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Nicholas, B. 1962. An Introduction to Roman Law. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Nisbet, Gideon. 2003. Greek Epigram in the Roman Empire: Martial’s Forgotten Rivals. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Nobrega, da V.L. 1974. ‘Le carmen famosum et l’occentatio.’ Romanitas 12-13: 324-62. Plaza, Maria. 2006. The Function of Humour in Roman Verse Satire: Laughing and Lying. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Richlin, Amy. 1992. The Garden of Priapus: Sexuality and Aggression in Roman Humor. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Roeckelein, Jon E. 2002. The Psychology of Humor: A Reference Guide and Annotated Bibliography. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press. Rudd, Niall. 1960. ‘The Names in Horace’s Satires.’ CQ 54: 161-78. Rudd, Niall. 1986. Themes in Roman Satire. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press. Schiesaro, A. 1997. ‘Passion, Reason, and Knowledge in Seneca.’ In The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, ed. Susanna M. Braund and Christopher Gill, 89-111. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Smith, R.E. 1951. ‘Law of Libel in Rome.’ CQ 45: 169-79. Spisak, Art L. 2007. Martial: A Social Guide. London: Duckworth. Starr, R.J. 1987. ‘The Circulation of Literary Texts in the Roman World.’ CQ 37: 213-23. Sullivan, John P. 1991. Martial: The Unexpected Classic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Szelest, H. 1960. ‘Die satirische Epigramme des Martials und das griechische Epigram.’ Meander 15: 518-30. Tanner, R.G. 1986. ‘Levels of Intent in Martial.’ ANRW 2.32.4: 2624-77. Ward, Donald. 1973. ‘On the Poets and Poetry of the Indo-Europeans.’ JIES I: 127-44. Warmington, E.H. 1979/1957. Remains of Old Latin. Edited and Translated. Cambridge, MA: Harvard. White, Peter. 1974. ‘The Presentation and Dedication of the Silvae and the Epigrams.’ JRS 64: 40-61. White, Peter. 1975. ‘The Friends of Martial, Statius, and Pliny, and the Dispersal of Patronage.’ HSCP 79: 265-300. Williams, C.A. 2004. Martial, Epigrams Book Two. Edited with Introduction, Text, Translation and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Wycislo, William E. 2001. Seneca’s Epistolary Responsum: The De Ira as Parody. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.

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9

De Bello Civili 2.326-91: Cato Gets Married Margaret Graver Lucan’s version of the Stoic commitment has puzzled and fascinated readers of his epic. We cannot be sure whether the poem’s narrator is a Stoic: in a prominent passage early in the poem, he gives a stronglyworded summary of Stoic cosmology, but makes it only one of two alternative world-views, leaving the authorial position unclear.1 Likewise there is uncertainty among scholars as to how we are to read Lucan’s depiction of Cato, who is as much of a philosophical authority as his poem admits. It is undeniable that the work makes repeated reference to the historical Cato’s long-standing reputation as an adherent of Stoic philosophy. Stoic virtus shapes everything the Lucanian Cato does; he is the man of principle in a world gone mad. Yet his attitudes and personal interactions do not always strike the modern reader as exemplary: for some, this ‘harsh Cato’ (durus Cato) and with him the ‘harsh, unmoved philosophy of Cato’ (duri immota Catonis secta) come across as inflexible to the point of philistinism and repellent rather than admirable.2 One may therefore be inclined to suspect Lucan of being ironic or even subversive in his references to Stoic ethics. The problem is compounded by the odd gender dynamics of BC 2.326-91, the account of Cato’s hasty remarriage to Marcia. The scene is brief, but striking. Marcia’s entrance just as day is dawning interrupts a conference between Cato and Brutus, who has visited his uncle in the small hours to learn his intentions. She has just come from the funeral pyre of her second husband, Q. Hortensius Hortalus, the political ally for whose sake Cato had previously renounced her. Still smeared with ash, with her hair dishevelled and her chest bruised with ritual pounding, Marcia now requests that Cato re-marry her, eliminating any scandal arising from the divorce and giving her an honourable, though hardly comfortable, old age. Cato complies without a word, and the two are united in a perfunctory ceremony, devoid of all customary accoutrements, with Brutus as the sole witness. An additional verse paragraph explains Cato’s impassive expression (duro voltu, 373) on this occasion. Consonant with his philosophical allegiance, he seeks always to ‘preserve the limit’ and to ‘follow nature’: he seeks food only for nourishment, clothing and a house only for shelter, and sex only for procreation, pleasure having no role in his life. Thus in his marriage he experiences no desire for physical intimacy and no joy. By distorting the historical record to show us Marcia still in mourning,

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Margaret Graver Lucan engages briefly with the literary tradition that represents women as especially given to emotion.3 One catches just a hint of Aeneid Book 4, where femininity is Dido, irrational and volatile as a foil for Aeneas’ masculine resolve. At least initially, our sympathies are drawn toward Marcia, in her touching situation, while Cato, like Aeneas, is likely to seem affectively flat, even callous. But the behaviour of both characters proceeds to complicate these facile assumptions. Marcia, though ‘mournful’ (maesta, 337), is hardly distraught with grief. She cooperates with the conventions of mourning expected in her culture, but she also calculates her own interest for the future and demonstrates an impressive self-command in pursuing it. And Cato’s emotional detachment is not uniform. He too is in mourning, though for the human race rather than for an individual, and in token of this he allows his hair and beard to cover his face, a match for her dishevelment. So there is no straightforward alignment of these two aging marriage partners with conventional stereotypes of gender. To make sense of the episode, we have to deal with the reference to Cato’s philosophy, his secta, and with the coded philosophical language ‘to preserve the limit, to hold the boundary, to follow nature’ (servare modum finemque tenere /naturamque sequi, 2.381-2).4 We need to study the affective behaviour of both characters, and also the relationship between them, in light of the Stoic norms that were current among certain of Lucan’s contemporaries. When this information is brought to bear, the remarriage episode becomes more comprehensible in cultural and historical terms. Both Cato and Marcia emerge as recognizably Stoic icons for Lucan’s readers to admire, if not to imitate. But the brand of Stoicism they represent is less careful and less philosophically coherent than what the founders of Athenian Stoicism had propounded. 1 The ethical and psychological thought of the early period of Stoicism has been intensively studied in recent decades, on the basis of fragments of the original treatises and an array of secondhand reports.5 On many points there is now substantial agreement, although it is still important for those consulting the secondary literature on the school to keep in mind that our reconstructions depend upon a limited body of evidence. For Lucan’s own time period and within the Roman milieu we are in a much better position, with a number of comparison texts available in a reasonably complete state of preservation. In addition to the philosophical writings of Lucan’s own uncle, the younger Seneca, we have a valuable contemporary witness in a set of essays by the Roman equestrian Gaius Musonius Rufus.6 From a century earlier, there are the writings of Cicero on Stoicism, although the extent to which Cicero’s more technical writings were known to the Neronians is open to debate. From a generation later there are the discourses of Musonius’ pupil Epictetus. Also relevant, though the dating

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 is only tentative, are several long fragments of a school manual by one Hierocles, writing in Greek at around this period. This rich body of material supports several general observations that are immediately relevant to the scene in Lucan. First, we need to understand what is included in the characteristic injunction to ‘follow nature’. As understood by Stoics, the ethics of following nature requires not only that we try to appreciate and cherish the intelligent design that informs the universe as a whole down to the smallest detail, but also that we try to comprehend our own nature and behave in accordance with it. In simplest terms, this general encouragement to abide by one’s own nature yields some specific precepts that sound very similar to those of Epicurus. For instance, a recognition of one’s own nutritional needs suggests choosing healthy foods and refraining from overindulgence. This is a favourite theme of Seneca: Necesse est enim in immensum exeat cupiditas quae naturalem modum transilit. Ille enim habet suum finem, inania et ex libidine orta sine termino sunt. Necessaria metitur utilitas: supervacua quo redigis? (Ep. 39.5-6) Desires that exceed the limits of nature cannot but go on to infinity. Our nature has its proper boundary, but empty and perverse desires are inherently unbounded. Our needs are measured by utility; beyond that, what line is there to draw?7

But the Stoic account of human nature is more complex than the Epicurean: it includes our needs for intellectual achievement and our capacities for forming attachments to other people.8 The latter is especially relevant here. Close observation of human behaviour – for instance, that theatre-goers come to feel connected to those seated nearby, and that babies smile more often at their parents than at strangers – convinced the Stoics that our ties to family and community are not mere conventions of convenience (as Epicurus held) but have their origin in the very structure and design of the human creature.9 One part of ‘following nature’, then, is to pursue the interests of others with whom we are connected. Another is to develop those ties of affection and concern to the furthest extent circumstances will allow. Hierocles explains by analogy to a set of concentric circles, encompassing first one’s own body, then the nuclear family, then extended families, then city, region, and the world. Our responsibility is to ‘pull the circles toward the centre’, so that we come to regard family members as we do ourselves, community members as family members, and so forth.10 Ties of friendship are especially valued, with a segment of Stoic ethics devoted specifically to the meaning of wise friendship, and friendship also encompasses the wise person’s experience of erotic love. The Stoic sage will be an expert in every sort of love: he will experience ‘cherishing’ (agapêsis) and similar responses toward friends; erotic love (erôs) to-

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Margaret Graver ward ‘young persons who show aptitude for virtue’; and family-love (philostorgia) toward spouse and children.11 Next, we should fix our minds on the ends that are served by the Stoics’ careful scrutiny of the inner life of the individual. The essence of the position is again that one should follow nature, which in this realm means that one should do everything possible to rectify one’s beliefs, judgments of value, volitions, and affective responses by the standards of nature, judging only what is actually true and acting and feeling only on the basis of true judgments. This gives rise to the notorious Stoic view that the emotions as usually understood are incompatible with the ideal life of the wise. Emotions are analyzed as psychic movements engendered by false value judgments. For instance, delight is an ‘uplifting’ of the psychic pneuma engendered by the false belief that some event external to one’s own control (such as winning an election) instantiates a good.12 The Stoic objection is to the falsity of the belief: in their ethics, the only goods for a human being are the virtues and virtuous activities. That the capacity for affective response is not in itself at fault is shown by their concomitant claim that ‘pre-emotions’, involuntary and morally neutral reactions such as blushing, would occur even in a person of ideal virtue.13 Moreover the ideally virtuous person experiences full-blown affective responses in the form of ‘good emotions’ (eupatheiai), which are engendered only by true judgments of value. These include the feelings of friendship and love mentioned above, as well as joy, cheerfulness, caution, reverence and moral shame.14 Information about these psychological dimensions of Stoic ethics was available at Rome from at least the time of Cicero, who provided a detailed account in the Tusculan Disputations including a substantive treatment of the ‘good emotions’ and brief mention of the pre-emotion.15 Seneca, too, displays extensive knowledge of the emotion theory, with a particular interest in the pre-emotion, which he explains several times with numerous examples.16 For Seneca, and undoubtedly for earlier Stoics as well, the occurrence of involuntary feelings toward externals demonstrates that the moral exemplar is recognizably a human being, with all the sensitivities we perceive in ourselves and others whom we know: Non educo sapientem ex hominum numero nec dolores ab illo sicut ab aliqua rupe nullum sensum admittente summoveo. ... Ne extra rerum naturam vagari virtus nostra videatur, et tremet sapiens et dolebit et expallescet; hi enim omnes corporis sensus sunt. (Sen. Ep. 71.27, 29) I do not put the wise person in a separate class from the rest of humankind, and neither do I eliminate pain from him as if he were some sort of rock, not susceptible to any feeling. ... Lest it should seem that what we call virtue strays outside the natural order, the wise person will tremble and feel pain and grow pale. 17

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 On eupathic response Seneca’s information is different from Cicero’s. Seneca is familiar with the assumption that the wise would experience at least one full-scale affective response, for he devotes many pages to descriptions of the joy of the wise, cast in terms which make it clear that he is expanding on material inherited from the Greek Stoic tradition.18 But he does not give any equivalent status to ‘caution’ and ‘wish’, the other principal ‘good emotions’ of the Hellenistic theory, and he possesses no recognizable equivalent for the Greek term eupatheia. The third point we have to consider here is the Stoic position on women.19 Although the texts we have are male-authored and invariably assume a male point of view, the tendency to think about people in terms of the natural capacities of our species suggests at least a readiness to accord women the same intellectual and moral dignity as men. The implication is corroborated by the casual use of female as well as male case studies in Cicero and Epictetus,20 and by Seneca when he addresses two of his consolatory treatises to women. The most explicit witness, however, is Lucan’s contemporary Musonius Rufus, who composed a short treatise on the subject. Musonius argues that women have all the same mental capacities as men, from the five senses to the capacity for rational analysis, the natural inclination for virtue, and the ability to judge right and wrong. Women have received from the gods the same ability to reason that men have. We men employ reasoning in our relations with others and so far as possible in everything we do, whether it is good or bad, or noble or shameful. Likewise women have the same senses as men, sight, hearing, smell, and all the rest. Likewise each has the same parts of the body, and neither sex has more than the other. In addition, it is not men alone who possess eagerness and a natural inclination towards virtue, but women also. Women are pleased no less than men by noble and just deeds, and reject the opposite of such actions. Since that is so, why is it appropriate for men to seek out and examine how they might live well, that is, to practice philosophy, but not women? Is it fitting for men to be good, but not women? 21

Consequently they should be given the same philosophical education as men, even though their weaker constitution and differing responsibilities mean that they will make different use of that education. Taking these points together, we observe in a wide range of Stoic authors and sources a marked interest in maintaining the connections between the ordinary person and the ethical ideal. The wise person is intended as a description of human nature in its fully developed and perfected form; he or she is not supposed to be some alien being none of us would recognize as human. The Stoic conclusions in ethics do cut across conventional practices in some ways, most notably in the suggestion that the welfare of strangers is part of our concern and in the claim that ordinary emotions ought ultimately to be eliminated rather than merely

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Margaret Graver restricted. But the ideal life is not intended to come across as bizarre or freakish. As Seneca has it, the Stoic aim is to transcend human nature but not to leave it behind completely.22 2 This background helps us to observe what is most significant about the scene in De Bello Civili 2. Although Lucan appears elsewhere to be uncertain about the grand cosmological postulates that ground the Stoics’ position on the rightness of nature’s designs, he does make an effort to represent Cato as a living exemplar of the virtuous wise person. As part of the first scene in which Cato comes before the reader’s eye, the marriage episode plays an important role in establishing his character before it is tested in more extreme circumstances. It fills in the picture outlined in the preceding interview with Brutus by showing us Cato’s personal habits, his internal psychological adjustment and the character of his wife. As this amount of domestic information is not included for any other character, we have to believe that Lucan meant here to explore the innermost elements of the ideal life according to Stoicism. But what is it that his narrative conveys about Cato as a Stoic leader? As concerns Cato’s attitude toward food, clothing and shelter, the matter is straightforward enough. We have already noted that the injunction to ‘follow nature’ was understood by Stoics, as well as Epicureans, to include restricting one’s consumption to the requirements of the body, the ‘natural limit’ (naturalis modus).23 In view of the Stoic parallels we should not render Lucan’s expression servare modum (381) as ‘to observe moderation’, but specifically ‘to preserve the limit’.24 Cato’s practice is not to consume a moderate amount of food and other commodities, but to consume just what his body requires, neither more nor less. His curtailment of sexuality to the purposes of procreation likewise finds a parallel in the discourses of Musonius, who is very specific that sex is ordained by nature for the begetting of children, not for pleasure.25 So his asceticism, if that is what it should be called, is fully in accordance with Stoic precepts. Neither is it more restrictive than what we find in other authors of the period. What is startling in the marriage scene is not this, but rather the stiffness – some would say inhumanity – with which he treats Marcia and his failure to respond to her appeal at a personal level. Cato’s lack of tenderness toward Marcia is certainly very striking. Emphatic repetitions hammer the point: his expression is hard (duro voltu, 373); his brow is rigid (rigidam in frontem, 375); he himself is hard (duri Catonis, 380); his creed unmoved (immota secta, 380-1); his honourable conduct rigid (rigidi servator honesti, 389). It is principally for this reason that Johnson (to give but one example) complains of ‘his puritanical extravagance, his unfailing inhumanity’.26 But this unusual degree of domestic sternness has to be put in context

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 with the unusually domestic attitude he adopts toward the city of Rome, a point made both here and in the preceding speech to Brutus. In explaining his decision to adhere to Pompey, Cato employs not only language of general obligation but also terms that indicate a deeply personal kind of involvement. Procul hunc arcete pudorem, o superi, motura Dahas ut clade Getasque securo me Roma cadat. (2.295-7) Keep far from me, o gods, this cause of shame: that when Rome shall fall causing devastating distress to the furthest Scythians and Getes, I should be uncaring.

The particular form his caring takes will be to adopt an attitude of mourning similar to the mourning of a parent for his children: ceu morte parentem natorum orbatum longum producere funus ad tumulo iubet ipse dolor, iuvat ignibus atris inseruisse manus constructoque aggere busti ipsum atras tenuisse faces, non ante revellar exanimem quam te complectar, Roma; tuumque nomen, Libertas, et inanem persequar umbram. (297-303) Just as when his children die grief itself bids a bereaved parent lead the long funeral procession to the tomb; just as he needs to have thrust his hands into the black ashes and held the torches himself where the earth is piled upon the tomb, so shall I not be pulled back before embracing your lifeless body, o Rome, and following to the end your name, o Liberty, and lifeless shade.

Cato mourns the state, then, in the same way as anyone else might mourn a family member, and with the same devastating sense of loss. It is in token of this quasi-familial devotion to the state that he allows his hair and beard to grow long, a ritualized practice of mourning that matches closely with Marcia’s external marks of bereavement. Taken together with Marcia’s mourning garb, Cato’s funereal thoughts and whiskers call to mind the Stoic injunction we noted in Hierocles, that one should ‘pull the circles toward the centre’. Just as she performs the ritual observances for a member of her immediate family, so he will display the same level of devotion toward a wider circle encompassing the entire Roman state. He does not consider Marcia any more deserving of his affection than the community in which he lives. To be sure, it is rather troubling that he does not express any affection for Marcia at all – that his understandable concern for the state seems to result in a lack of personal concern for her. We will have to return to this point. But in the meantime, we cannot say that he fails in his duty as a husband and family member,

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Margaret Graver for in his mind his mourning for Rome is his duty as a family member. His attitude toward the members of his private family has been redefined within the civic context; he is ‘a father in the interests of the city and a husband in the interests of the city’ (urbi pater est urbique maritus, 388).27 3 The most difficult issue we have to confront is the relation of the Lucanian Cato to specific Stoic assertions about the varieties of affective response and the moral implications of each. Cato’s unchanged expression in 2.37280 clearly alludes to the ideal of ‘impassivity’ (apatheia), as do at least two other passages in the poem.28 Yet the Cato Lucan actually shows us is not always free of emotion. In comparing himself to a bereaved parent, he admits to powerful feelings of grief. In BC 2.239-40 he fears for the state, and confesses that fear to Brutus in 2.289-90. Later in the poem he is said to have experienced hatred (9.21) and we watch him give way to anger at a soldier who offers him a helmet of water (9.509-10). These strong feelings on his part raise serious questions about the extent to which Lucan actually engages with Stoic ethics in his treatment of this character. For Cato is not presented to us as just an imperfect person making progress toward wisdom, someone who might suffer an occasional lapse. He is ‘the sole reason now to believe in long-banished virtue’ (olimque fugatae / virtutis iam sola fides, 2.243-4). His utterances are sacred, his breast is a shrine (2.285). So if his affective responses are not in accordance with Stoic reasoning about the normative version of human affective life, we will be forced to conclude that Lucan has made some changes, either intentionally or unintentionally, in what it means to be a Stoic sage. But perhaps arguments can be adduced to show that they are in accordance. Such a case has recently been made by Francesca Behr, in her book Feeling History: Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion. On Behr’s reading of the poem Lucan does indeed represent Cato as ‘a Stoic hero who can teach the Romans political engagement and emotional health’.29 It is just that the Stoic conception of apatheia is a complex notion which allows for some feelings. What seem like emotions on Cato’s part can in some instances be explained as ‘pre-emotions’ like those in Book 2 of Seneca’s De Ira. For example, Cato’s anger at the soldier who offers him water is comparable to the ‘prompting of the mind which is submissive to reason’ in Seneca (motum animi rationi parentem, Ira 2.3.4).30 In most of the relevant passages, however, Behr is more inclined to interpret Cato’s reactions as eupathic responses, which she understands as differing from the pathê (‘passions’) chiefly in that they are less extreme and are guided by reason. Close textual analysis of the Bellum Civile shows that Cato does not reject the emotions but only the passions, the irrational and excessive movements

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 of the soul. His state is characterized by eupatheia, rational joy and other good emotions like benevolence, respect, affection, cheerfulness and mirth.31

For Behr, Cato is firm, but not durus or rigidus: if he displays flatness of affect toward Marcia and on some other occasions, that is because on those occasions he has determined correctly that the circumstances do not affect his true well-being; if he sometimes displays what appear to be emotions, those are not the kinds of emotions Stoics regard as problematic, but the very responses they accepted as belonging to the person of perfect wisdom and virtue. One difficulty with this thesis is that Lucan employs none of the special terminology that is usual with Stoic authors when speaking of the feelings of the sage and of the superficial responses. The eupatheiai in Stoic sources have regularly-occurring names, either the genus-labels ‘joy’ (chara or gaudium), ‘caution’ (eulabeia or cautio) and ‘wish’ (boulêsis or voluntas), or more specific names such as ‘cheerfulness’ (euphrosynê) and ‘moral shame’ (aidôs).32 Only in one instance is Cato connected with any of the responses regularly named as eupathic. This is in 9.402-4, where he exhorts his soldiers: serpens, sitis, ardor harenae dulcia virtuti; gaudet patientia duris; laetius est, quotiens magno sibi constat, honestum. The snake, thirst, the burning sand, are things sweet to virtue; endurance rejoices in what is harsh. Honourable conduct is a happier thing when it comes at great cost.

This does look like a reference to the Stoic conception of eupathic joy (gaudium) as found in numerous passages of Seneca. Other than this, the terms Lucan uses for Cato’s affective responses are exactly the same sadness, fear and anger (luctus, metus, ira) that he and other Latin authors use to refer to the flawed or misdirected affective responses of ordinary people – the regular emotions or pathê. Perhaps, though, we should allow that as an epic poet, Lucan may inhabit an ‘ambiguous linguistic universe’ where terminological precision would be out of place.33 We might still be able to discern his intentions by attending to the way Cato’s responses are characterized, the situations in which they are experienced and the effects they produce. In Stoic thought, the most important substantive distinction between the ordinary passions and the eupathic responses of the sage is that the ordinary passions depend upon mistaken attributions of value (that is, beliefs that external objects are either good or evil); while the eupatheiai attribute value or disvalue only to things that are genuinely good or evil; that is, features of one’s own character or conduct. The substantive distinction between the passions and the pre-emotions is that the latter do not involve assent to

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Margaret Graver what Stoics call an ‘impulsory impression’. Consequently, they are considered involuntary and non-culpable, but they are also of brief duration and never take the form of any morally significant action. Now, when we try to bring these distinctions to the interpretation of those passages of Lucan that refer to Cato’s affective responses, we find that neither of them makes itself felt at all. His feelings never seem to be morally inconsequential as the pre-emotions are; yet with the exception of the one sentence on gaudium just quoted from Book 9, they are also not the kinds of feelings that arise from correct attributions of value, namely, joy in doing the right thing, cautious aversion from doing wrong, reverence toward the gods and affection toward friends. Therefore Lucan is not proceeding in accordance with the Stoic position on affective response as otherwise transmitted. It may be, though, that he still considers himself to be expressing a Stoic view. For the one distinction he does maintain in the way he represents Cato’s emotional life is by no means unrelated to the historical Cato’s known Stoic allegiance. Cato’s powerful reactions and impulses are indeed distinguishable from the passions of other characters in the De Bello Civili in that his are uniformly concerned with the public interest. He is grieved for Rome, frightened for Rome, hates for Rome’s sake and is angered when an action threatens the survival of Rome’s army. By regular Stoic standards these are just ordinary pathê, since the welfare of one’s homeland, like the health of one’s children, lies ultimately outside one’s own control. But the substitution of civic for private interests in Cato’s emotional realm is undeniably related to Stoic norms concerning our responsibilities to the wider community. Meanwhile he is impassive toward Marcia and toward his personal survival because these belong to the private sphere. He is ‘fearing for all, unconcerned for himself’ (cunctisque timentem / securumque sibi, 2.240-1). This brings us to one further and particularly vexatious issue concerning Cato’s apparent emotional adjustment. Problematic as his affective responses may be, they are hardly more problematic than his failure to show any sort of emotional reaction during the episode with Marcia. Given that the Stoic sage is fully capable of certain kinds of affective responses, there is every reason to expect him to exhibit such responses when there is compelling reason for them. Joy, in particular, is appropriate for the sage at any time when a genuine good is present to him, either in his own virtues or in the exercise of those virtues through some good action. Assuming that Cato’s action in re-marrying Marcia is an exercise of generosity or even of justice on his part, we might expect that a Stoic author would be careful to add that he takes joy in that action. It is thus rather startling to find that gaudium is specifically denied to Cato on the occasion of his marriage to Marcia (nec ... duro admisit gaudia voltu, ‘neither did he admit any joy to his impassive expression’, 373). Even more, we might have expected that in this interchange with Marcia, what would

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 ordinarily be considered the most moving sort of interaction with one of his closest personal connections, Cato would experience some at least emotion-like reaction – a change of colour or expression, a sigh, perhaps a tear. For it is on just this kind of occasion that Seneca and several other Stoic authors are careful to specify that the sage does not remain completely unmoved, ‘as if he were some sort of rock, not susceptible to any feeling’.34 These above all are the responses that humanize the Stoic ideal, demonstrating that the sage with his perfected intellectual and moral character does still retain the capacity for affective response. That Cato fails to exhibit them when expected is the primary reason why some commentators have found him to be inhuman and difficult to admire. Lucan makes no effort to counteract this impression; if anything, he augments it by repeatedly stressing the singularity of Cato’s way of engaging with his world. In the initial conversation with Brutus, Cato differs from all other men in matters of politics and ethics. He is the only Roman who has not committed to a side in the present conflict, the only one who if he does commit will not do so for mercenary motives (tibi uni, 255); the only one whose character will never have been compromised by anything but war (accipiunt alios, faciunt te bella nocentem, 259). In the ensuing exchange with Marcia, he is a singular creature at a more intimate and personal level. Marcia’s present appearance is the only way she could look that would please her husband. His beard is unshaven at the impromptu ceremony because he, and he alone (uni quippe, 377), is in mourning for his country, and the reason he is free to do so is that only he is devoid of both zeal and hatred. These expressions serve a purpose: they emphasize Cato’s exceptional virtue in a degenerate society. But they also run the risk of making him into a freak, a monstrum, whose psyche is fundamentally different from other people’s and for that reason morally irrelevant to the reader. What we find in Cato, then, is a Stoic-inspired characterization which is nonetheless philosophically unstable. As Behr realizes, Lucan emphasizes Stoic values, not merely Roman civic values, when he represents Cato as emotionally engaged with the state.35 But Cato’s overall psychological adjustment has not been fully reconciled with the Stoics’ complex position on apatheia and normative response. Instead, Lucan simply allows his hero to respond with the full range of feelings experienced by ordinary persons, so long as those feelings have their basis in his orientation toward the Roman state. We can only conclude that the niceties of Stoic emotion theory are not matters of particular concern to Lucan, even though he must have had exposure to them. Yet insofar as Lucan seeks consistently to portray the emotions of Cato as concerned with public affairs, rather than private ones, his intent to proceed on Stoic lines is clearly discernible. He has merely emphasized one element of Stoic thought at the expense of another.

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Margaret Graver 4 Yet another Stoicizing theme makes its presence known in the representation of Marcia herself. The material cited above from Musonius Rufus gives us some basis for assessing Lucan’s portrait of her in relation to Stoic norms concerning the personhood and responsibilities of women. Brief as it is, the scene is remarkable in the dignity it accords to Marcia as a woman of intelligence and independent agency. In it, we can discern at least the beginnings of an effort on Lucan’s part to re-imagine marriage along Stoic lines. Although Marcia’s role in the epic is much smaller than Cato’s, her behaviour in time of crisis is hardly less singular. Marcia is in fact facing a double crisis. Like every character in the poem, she must determine a course of action for herself amid the dissolution of civic life and the impending chaos of war; then in addition, her personal security has just been shattered by the death of her husband – for although in point of fact Hortensius died several months before the onset of the war, Lucan chooses to represent the two events as concurrent.36 Had Marcia been the emotionally vulnerable woman of the Roman stereotypes that derived mulier from mollior, ‘less capable of self-command’, we might have expected her to express only fear and sorrow at this time. But this is not what we find. In her address to Cato Marcia pursues a complex train of thought, with a cool eye to her own interests. She cannot marry again, for being past childbearing she no longer possesses the primary asset a woman offers to a marriage partner. She does, however, have another asset which can be turned to her advantage. By renouncing their earlier marriage at the request of Hortensius, Cato has created a potential for allegations of infidelity to be levelled against her. Of course, it is quite unlikely that any such scandal would arise so long after the fact; any rumours that circulated at the time ought to have blown over by now. But there is still the potential that an observer taking Marcia’s entire life in review, as one might do when looking at her tombstone, would wonder about her fidelity to her first husband. She therefore has a claim she can advance against Cato even now. Knowing him to be a man who will honour that claim if it is brought to his attention, she demands redress of a legitimate grievance: visceribus lassis partuque exhausta revertor iam nulli tradenda viro. da foedera prisci inlibata tori, da tantum nomen inane conubii; liceat tumulo scripsisse ‘Catonis Marcia,’ nec dubium longo quaeratur in aevo mutarim primas expulsa an tradita taedas. (2.340-5) Now that my womb is worn out; now that I am exhausted with childbearing and cannot be given to any husband, I return. Grant me the contract of our prior bed without consummation; grant the name of marriage devoid of the

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 meaning. Let ‘Cato’s Marcia’ be written upon my tomb, and let it not be in question, in the long age to come, whether I exchanged one marriage for another because I was thrown out or merely because I was given over.

The basis of the appeal is in Marcia’s well-calibrated understanding of the moral particulars of her situation and of the character of her former husband. It is an impressively rational analysis, one that is hardly to be expected from a speaker still streaked with ashes and bruised from self-pummelling. In effect, by adding the dramatic touches of Marcia’s recent mourning behaviour and present sad demeanour (maerens ... maesta), Lucan heightens the contrast between what we expect of a woman in mourning and the calmly reasoned speech Marcia actually delivers. There is even a hint of calculation in her choosing to appear in this way, with the marks and expression of grief still upon her. For this is the only appearance she could present that would be pleasing to Cato (non aliter placitura viro, 337) – and she, with her first-hand knowledge of his character, is undoubtedly aware of this. This is not Dido, a storm of tears expending itself against the craggy oak of Aeneas’ determination. Marcia is similar to Cato himself – at least to Cato on this occasion – in refusing to be driven by emotion and in taking the long view of her life’s achievements. She resembles him also in that she expresses no personal affection for him, any more than he does for her, and expresses no interest in the physical intimacy of the marriage bed. It is by her stipulation, just as much as his, that their second union is to be unconsummated (inlibata), a marriage in name only (nomen inane / conubii).37 In intelligence and courage she is a counterpart to him, not a counterweight. Even their secondary sexual characteristics match: her bruised breasts to his unkempt beard. Should we then regard Marcia as a kind of female version of Cato – the female component, briefly separated out as it were, of Lucan’s bizarre sage-creature? To do so would underestimate her status as an independent agent in this scene. As we have seen, the reasoning that leads to remarriage is hers, not his, and relates primarily to her interests. But there is more, for Marcia also goes on to state her own awareness of Rome’s situation and her decision to participate in the war on Pompey’s side, insofar as her gender will allow: non me laetorum sociam rebusque secundis accipis: in curas venio partemque laborum. da mihi castra sequi: cur tuta in pace relinquar et sit civili propior Cornelia bello? (2.346-9) You do not receive me as a companion of happy times and favourable events: I come into the midst of anxieties and into a share of your trials. Grant me to follow the camp. Why should I be left behind in peace and safety? Why should Cornelia be closer to the war than I?

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Margaret Graver Marcia does not say, ‘I will follow you through any hardships you choose for us to encounter’: she knows already what the hardships will be. It seems she has anticipated the decision Cato has just explained to Brutus, and has taken that into account in making her decision to approach him. She realizes, as Brutus did not, that in adhering to Cato she is committing herself to full engagement in the horrific conflict to come. She takes this role on freely, for the reasons she has already stated to be sure, but also from her own sense of public responsibility. Her choice matches Cato’s, but it is her own nonetheless. She is thus a very fair illustration of the view of women’s nature that is explained in the third discourse of Musonius.38 The marriage between these two, that marriage which lacks every social, ritual, and sexual dimension of a Roman marriage, reflects an understanding of the possibilities of the married relationship that is exceptional for its time. It is a union of intellectual and moral equals, rather than a merely economic and procreative arrangement. The usual Stoic stipulation that the sage should marry and beget children does not go as far as this.39 We do however find a description of the marriage union in terms of similarity of temperament and human potential in Musonius: Without sympathy of mind and character between husband and wife, what marriage can be good, what partnership advantageous? How could two human beings who are base have sympathy of spirit one with the other? Or how could one that is good be in harmony with one that is bad? No more than a crooked piece of wood could be fitted to a straight one, or two crooked ones be put together.40

It is at least arguable that Lucan envisions a union along these lines in the extraordinary match between Cato and Marcia. Here as well, though, Cato’s impassive expression would appear to be at odds with what at least one committed Stoic regards as the ideal form of marriage. For in his failure to shed even a single permissible tear on his wife’s behalf, this strange Stoic lover leaves us with the distinct impression that his own interests – noble ones to be sure – are more important to him than hers. By contrast, Musonius emphasizes not only the similarity of husband and wife, but also the bond of sympathy between them. In marriage there must be complete companionship and concern for each other on the part of both husband and wife ... When such caring for one another is perfect, and the married couple provide it for one another, and each strives to outdo the other, then this is marriage as it ought to be and deserving of emulation, since it is a noble union. But when one partner looks to his own interest alone and neglects the other’s, or (by Zeus) the other is so minded that he lives in the same house, but keeps his mind on what is outside it, and does not wish to pull together with his partner or to cooperate, then inevitably the union is destroyed.41

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 There is no need to belabour the point. Lucan may indeed have in mind an exceptional form of marriage in which the rational nature and Stoic-inflected values of both spouses are the predominant themes. We cannot say, though, that he comprehends the affective dimensions of such a relationship in the way that Musonius does. 5 Lucan is not concerned with humanizing the sage; rather he tries to give a credible realization of (1) the good person’s emotional adjustment to state rather than family, (2) the woman’s rational decision-making agency, (3) marriage as a partnership of rational persons. These are all attested Stoic themes. But Lucan’s version of Stoic moral psychology is not the same as the Greek-inflected Stoicism of his uncle, still less that of Epictetus or Musonius Rufus. His portrait of Cato and of Marcia is deeply tinged with Romanitas, in its references to Roman customs and in its acceptance of a stern masculine ideal. The Cato of De Bello Civili is indeed presented to readers as a model to emulate. Lucan has not, however, completely thought through the implications of his characterization in terms of the Stoic theory of affective response. Cato’s emotional responses are legitimate in Lucan’s eyes because they relate to the public interest, not because they have the structural features of eupathic response as explained in Cicero and Seneca. And while Cato does exhibit a version of apatheia, his imperturbability relates only to his personal safety and comfort and to Marcia as his nearest family member. In these directions, he fails to exhibit even the trivial ‘preliminary’ reactions. The result is a Befremdung of the ethical ideal that risks making that ideal irrelevant to the reader, if not repellent. It is understandable, then, that some readers have been inclined to think of Lucan as a mischief-maker within the Stoic camp, one who undermines his Stoic profession or subtly satirizes it. Again, in the interaction between Cato and Marcia, Lucan shows us a conception of marriage that has some Stoic elements, including some a modern reader may find attractive. Yet the affective vacuity of Cato, and perhaps of Marcia as well, destabilizes that conception. We recognize, of course, that the effect of the passage is created in part by historical changes in the notion of companionate marriage. But the uneasiness the episode creates is also a philosophical uneasiness. Because of Lucan’s failure to work through the implications of the emotion theory upheld by his own school, his moral exemplars are less coherent, and less admirable, than they might otherwise have been.42 Notes 1. The significance of the passage (BC 2.7-15) is explained in Sklenár (2003) 7-8;

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Margaret Graver Narducci (2002) 388. That Lucan had extensive knowledge of Stoicism is well established; a thorough review of the evidence may be found in Schotes (1969). Whether the attitudes expressed in the poem are actually Stoic attitudes is more controversial; for discussion see, besides Sklenár, Due (1970); Bartsch (1997) 101-30; Narducci (2001, 2002); Behr (2007). 2. The range of reactions to Cato is extraordinary. For Ahl (1976) 238, he is ‘a holy and oracular being’; for Leigh ‘an increasingly isolated figure ... unable to make his sermons relevant to the sufferings of his men’ (1997, 273); for Sklenár, ‘a nasty caricature of ... the Stoic sage and the traditional Roman vir bonus’ (2003, 59). For Johnson, who dislikes him (‘a particularly vehement and dangerous enemy of poetry, pleasure, humanity, and freedom ... a cruel cartoon of the Stoic saint’), his ‘zany gaucheries’ are nonetheless campy enough for a laugh (1987, 44-5). 3. Below, n. 36. 4. Text in Shackleton Bailey (1997); translations are my own throughout unless otherwise noted. Concerning the rendering of modum see below, n. 7. 5. Widely available works include Graver (2007), Brennan (2007), Algra et al. (1999), Long and Sedley (1987). 6. See esp. Dillon (2004). A complete text and translation of the Discourses can be found in Lutz (1947). 7. Text in Reynolds (1947); for modus with the meaning ‘limit’ cf. also Ep. 66.8, where the Greek equivalent is horos, not metron. The same thought is expressed by Musonius Rufus in D. 18-20; see Dillon (2004) 19-22. Compare Epicur. Ep. Men. 127-8. 8. Cic. Fin. 3.17, 62. 9. Plu. St. Rep. 1038b; D.L. 7.85, 123; Hierocl. col. 9, 11; Stob. Ecl. 2.7.11m, 109W; Cic. Fin. 3.62-3, 68; secondary literature cited in Graver (2007) 175-8, 250. 10. Hierocl. apud Stob. Ecl. 4.671-3 Hense [LS 67G]. 11. Agapêsis and related feelings: D.L. 7.116; Ps.-Andronicus 6; see Graver (2007) 178-82. Erôs: Stob. Ecl. 2.7.5b9 (65W); 2.7.11s (115W); D.L. 7.113, 130; Cic. Fin. 3.68; Tusc. 4.72; Graver (2007) 183-9. Philostorgia: Epict., e.g. 3.24.58, with Stephens (1996). 12. Stob. 2.10b, 90W; D.L. 7.111-14; see further Graver (2007) 35-60. 13. That Seneca inherited, rather than invented, the pre-emotion concept is shown by Cic. Tusc. 3.83 and by parallels of thought both in the fragments of Zeno and Chrysippus (where the term used is either ‘beginnings’ or ‘bitings’) and in the Alexandrian sources, especially Origen, where the term is propatheia. See Graver (2007) 85-108. 14. D.L. 7.115-16; for the term also Plu. St. Rep. 1037f-38a, Virt. Mor. 449ab. 15. The passages that are most relevant here are Tusc. 3.24-5; 3.83; 4.14-22; and 4.12-14; see Graver (2002). Another detailed summary is in the Greek account recorded in Johannes Stobaeus, which, though not clearly labelled, may be attributable to the Arius who is a court friend of Augustus. 16. Sen. Ira 2.2-4, Cons. Marc. 7, Ep. 11; 57.1-2; 71.27-9; 99.18-19. Seneca does not know the Greek term propatheia but does use the similar expressions principia proludentia adfectibus and primi motus; also the term ‘bitings’ (morsus) used by Cicero and in Greek sources. 17. Dolores here refers to physical pain, not emotional distress. But the continuation makes it clear that Seneca does mean to be talking about psychic as well as corporeal responsiveness. 18. Sen. Tranq. 2; Const. 9; Vit. Beat. 3-4; Ep. 23.2-6, 27.3-4, 59.1-2, 16, 72.4,

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 76.27-9, 98.1, 124.24, 109.5. Cf. Stob. 2.7.5c (69W), 2.7.5k (73W). D.L. 7.94, 86; see Graver (forthcoming). 19. The best general discussion is Reydams-Schils (2005) 143-59. 20. Although examples like Artemisia in Cic. Tusc. 3.75 and Medea in Epict. Diss. 2.18 are critical of those women, they also imply that women’s rational nature is capable of full correction. 21. Muson. D. 3, tr. Lefkowitz and Fant (2005) 51. For discussion see Dillon (2004) 25-34; Reydams-Schils (2005) 153-9. 22. He explains the thought in just a few words in Brev. 14.1, when he remarks that leisure enables us, among other things, ‘to vanquish human nature with the Stoics, with the Cynics to go on beyond it’ (cum Stoicis vincere, cum Cynicis excedere). The Cynics’ apatheia is in his view a harsher conception than the Stoics’ version, more willing to dispense with personal characteristics and habits conventionally regarded as normal. 23. Above, n. 7. 24. So Braund (1992); other published translations are similar. See above, n. 7. 25. Muson. D.12. Hence Sklenár (2003) 76 is mistaken in supposing that Stoics would have regarded Cato’s sexual abstinence as perverse. The sage is expected to marry and beget children, but Cato has already produced two children with Marcia. Given the present situation, further progeny are out of the question. 26. Johnson (1987) 37. 27. Concerning the translation see Sklenár (2003) 74 n. 31. 28. BC 2.240 securus sui; 2.377-8 studiis odiisque carenti; 9.27-8 nec regnum cupiens ... nec seruire timens. 29. Behr (2007) 11. In singling out Behr’s argument for criticism, I mean also to credit her for a valuable and sensitive reading of the epic which is well deserving of this attention. Her essential insight is one that I heartily endorse, namely that Lucan’s relation to the philosophical tradition has to be assessed on the basis of a more specialized knowledge of Stoicism than most readers now possess. Unfortunately Behr herself is misled at a number of points by the complexities of the subject and the uneven quality of the secondary literature on it. I try here to correct her on the most important items. 30. Behr (2007) 134. It is not entirely clear what interpretation of this particular line of Seneca Behr follows at this point. (For the difficulties with the passage, see Graver (2007) 97-8, 238 n. 21.) But her appeal to this portion of Stoic doctrine on 174-7 indicates that she does consider at least some of Cato’s responses to be pre-emotions. 31. Behr (2007) 160. 32. For sources see above, nn. 11, 14, 15. 33. Behr (2007) 134-5. 34. Above, nn. 13, 15, 16. Both Seneca and Epictetus hold that the involuntary reactions are not only permissible in the sage but actually necessary: Sen. Cons. Marc. 7.1; Ep. 99.18-19; Gel. 19.1 = Epictet. fr. 9. 35. Behr (2007) 148, correcting the misconception in Ahl (1976) 244, and Fantham (1992) 125. 36. As Fantham (1992) 140 points out, Hortensius died between the end of April and the beginning of June in 50 BCE (Cic. Att. 6.6.2; Elvers (2009)), whereas BC 2 relates events occurring between January and March of 49. 37. On the interpretation of inlibata see Fantham (1992) 142-3. 38. Quoted above, p. 225. 39. Stob. Ecl. 2.7.11m (109W); D.L. 7.123. 40. Muson. D.13b, tr. Lutz (1947) 91.

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Margaret Graver 41. Muson. D.13a, tr. Lefkowitz and Fant (2005) 54. 42. I would like to thank Dana Munteanu, for her patience with me during the writing process, and also Joy Connolly, who presented an earlier version to the Classical Association on my behalf and sent me a set of very helpful comments.

Bibliography Ahl, Frederick M. 1976. Lucan: An Introduction. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Algra, K., Barnes, J., Mansfield, J. and Schofield, M. (eds). 1999. Cambridge History of Hellenistic Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bartsch, Shadi. 1997. Ideology in Cold Blood. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Behr, D’Alessandro Francesca. 2007. Feeling History: Lucan, Stoicism, and the Poetics of Passion. Columbus: Ohio State University Press. Braund, Susanna (tr.). 1993. Lucan: The Civil War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dillon, J.T. 2004. Musonius Rufus and Education in the Good Life: A Model of Teaching and Living Virtue. Dallas: University Press of America. Due, Otto. 1968. ‘Lucain et la philosophie.’ In Lucain, ed. Marcel Durry. Entretiens de la Fondation Hardt 15. 202-32. Geneva. Elvers, K.L. 2009. Hortensius [7]. Brill’s New Pauly, ed. H. Cancik; H. Schneider. Leiden: Brill. 12 September 2009. http://www.brillonline.nl/subscriber/entry?entry=bnp_e517740 Narducci, Emanuele. 2001. ‘Catone in Lucano (e alcune interpretazioni recenti).’ Athenaeum 89: 171-86. Narducci, Emanuele. 2002. Lucano: un’epica contro l’impero : interpretazione della ‘Pharsalia’. Rome: GLF editori Laterza. Fantham, Elaine (ed.). 1992. Lucan: De Bello Civili II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graver, Margaret. 2002. Cicero on the Emotions: Tusculan Disputations 3-4. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graver, Margaret. 2007. Stoicism and Emotion. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Graver, Margaret. Forthcoming. ‘Action and Emotion.’ In Brill’s Companion to Seneca, ed. Gregor Damschen and Andreas Heil. Leiden: Brill. Johnson, Walter R. 1987. Momentary Monsters: Lucan and his Heroes. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Lefkowitz, Mary and Maureen, Fant. 2005. Women’s Life in Greece and Rome: A Source Book in Translation. 3rd edn. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Leigh, Matthew. 1997. Lucan: Spectacle and Engagement. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Long, A.A., and Sedley, D.N. (eds). 1987. The Hellenistic Philosophers. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lutz, Cora. 1942. ‘Musonius Rufus: The Roman Socrates.’ Yale Classical Studies 10: 3-147. Narducci, Emanuele. 2001. ‘Catone in Lucano (e alcune interpretazioni recenti).’ Athenaeum 89: 171-86. Narducci, Emanuele. 2002. Lucano : un’epica contro l’impero : interpretazione della ‘Pharsalia’. Rome: GLF editori Laterza.

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9. De Bello Civili 2.326-91 Reydams-Schils, Gretchen. 2005. The Roman Stoics: Self, Responsibility, and Affection. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Reynolds, L.D. (ed.). 1965. L. Annaei Senecae Ad Lucilium epistulae morales. 2 vols. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schotes, Hans A. 1969. Stoische Physik, Psychologie und Theologie bei Lucan. Bonn: R Habelt. Shackleton Bailey, D.R. 1997-1988. M. Annai Lucani De Bello Civili Libri X. 2 vol. Stuttgart and Leipzig: Teubner. Sklenár, Robert. 2003. The Taste for Nothingness: A Study of Virtus and Related Themes in Lucan’s Bellum Civile. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Stephens, William O. 1996. ‘Epictetus on How the Stoic Sage Loves.’ Oxford Studies in Ancient Philosophy 14: 193-210.

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Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ Zara Martirosova Torlone ‘Like every human being, a poet has to deal with three questions: how, what for, and in the name of what to live. The Bucolics, the Georgics and the Aeneid answer all three, and these answers apply equally to the Emperor and to his subjects, to antiquity as well as to our times. The modern reader may use Vergil in the same way as Dante used him in his passage through Hell and Purgatory: as a guide.’ So ends Joseph Brodsky’s essay ‘Vergil: Older than Christianity, a Poet for the New Age’.1 This essay belongs to the mature Brodsky, a Russian poet in exile, and it is written in English, the language of his adoptive country. Vergil has a persistent place in Brodsky’s writings as the Russian poet receives his Roman predecessor while contemplating man’s fate of exile, his legacy in the world, his purpose and his losses. This essay analyzes one poem by Joseph Brodsky that illustrates his gendered reception of the Roman poet in the context of other poetic influences and Brodsky’s overall ‘classical’ poetics. It also explores how modern interpretations of expressions of emotion in ancient text (in this case Dido’s love) can betray modern subjectivity in understanding gender roles, and, especially, how Brodsky’s recreation of the encounter between Dido and Aeneas prompts further questions regarding contemporary reading of classical authors. As early as 1969, when Brodsky was only twenty-nine, four years after his exile in the North of Russia and three years before his final departure to the West, he turned his attention to Vergil’s Aeneid. In Didona i Enei (‘Dido and Aeneas’) Brodsky offered his reading of the story: Velikii chelovek smotrel v okno, a dlia nee ves’ mir konchalsia kraem ego shirokoi, grecheskoi tuniki, obil’em skladok pokhodivshei na ostanovivsheesia more. On zhe smotrel v okno, i vzor ego seichas byl tak dalek ot etikh mest, chto guby zastyli, tochno rakovina, gde tailsia gul, i gorizont v bokale byl nepodvizhen.

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Zara Martirosova Torlone A ee liubov’ byla lish’ ryboi – mozhet i sposobnoi pustit’sia v more vsled za korablem i, rassekaia volny gibkim telom, vozmozhno obognat’ ego ... no on – on myslenno uzhe stupil na sushu. I more obernulos’ morem slez. No, kak izvestno, imenno v minutu otchaian’ia i nachinaet dut’ poputnyi veter. I velikii muzh pokinul Karfagen. Ona stoiala Pered kostrom, kotoryi razozhgli pod gorodskoi stenoi ee soldaty, i videla, kak v mareve ego, drozhavshem mezhdu plamenem i dymom, bezzvuchno rassypalsia Karfagen zadolgo do prorochestva Katona.2 The great man stared through the window but her entire world ended with the border of his broad Greek tunic, whose abundant folds resembled the sea on hold. But he stared out through the window, and his gaze was so far away from here, that his lips were immobile like a seashell where the roar is hidden, and the horizon in his goblet was still. But her love was just a fish – which might perhaps plunge into the sea in the pursuit of the ship, and knifing the waves with the supple body, perhaps yet pass it – but he, he in his thoughts already strode upon the land. And the sea became a sea of tears. But, as one knows, precisely at the moment of despair, the auspicious wind begins to blow. And the great man left Carthage. She stood before the bonfire, which her soldiers had kindled by the city walls, and she envisioned looking at the flame and smoke how Carthage silently crumbled ages before Cato’s prophecy.3

In order to understand this poem one must put it first in the context of Joseph Brodsky’s ‘mythological’ poems, specifically his allusions to the heroic myth. Heroes of Greco-Roman mythology attracted Brodsky early in his poetic career because he found in them the well-articulated dilemmas and controversies central to his poetics. By alluding to mythological

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ scenes, Brodsky was able to fill the poem with the subtext, which he did not need to spell out since the hero became a signifier of the theme the poet wanted to explore and often ‘rewrite’. Brodsky’s ancient heroes, such as Odysseus, Hector, Ajax, Theseus, appear in his early poetry with remarkable frequency and are a large and enduring part of his ‘masculine’ poetics.4 These heroic male figures from Greco-Roman mythology almost always are seen as examples of the brutalizing price of any significant achievement, of the realization that, with any heroic journey, victory merges with defeat. Hector and Ajax are the tragic victims of the same irrational destiny of war in which there are no victors and no vanquished. Odysseus is a cynical man who lost his son and his wife and is disoriented in time and space, burdened by a fading desire for homecoming and loss of memory. Theseus, emerging from Minos’ cave with a hide of a beast, is betrayed by Ariadne, who loves not him but Bacchus. His award is exile to Scyros, and he looks forward to facing his darkest hour at the hands of the king Lycomedes. These heroes, whose main ancient narratives are represented by epic or tragedy (Catullus’ 64 is an epyllion relating Ariadne’s abandonment by Theseus), are reconfigured by Brodsky through the prism of his lyric ego, which rejects epic glorification of male heroism as much as it abhors overly dramatized account of heroic predicament. Therefore, Brodsky’s Aeneas must be read in this very context of ‘mythological inversions’, in which is imbedded the impossibility of rewarded heroic endeavour and the inevitability of a significant emotional sacrifice inherent in man’s quest for the meaning of life as he attempts to make deliberate, conscious and often irrevocable choices. At the centre of Brodsky’s mythological poetics is a figure of a lonely man, usually at the end or at the beginning of his heroic feat, tormented by doubt and resigned to his destiny. Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’, however, is a poem that requires careful unwrapping, a palimpsestic reading, as Brodsky subtly moves between ancient and modern influences, between biographical allusions and fictional lyric personae. This poem is one of the most eloquent illustrations of Brodsky’s talent, in the words of Kreps, in ‘making contemporary of myth’.5 Although there is little doubt that Brodsky had read Vergil’s Aeneid (most likely in Russian translation), my argument in no way entails any definitive evidence that Brodsky had any specific lines of Vergil in mind while writing his poem. Furthermore, Brodsky, as his Letter to Horace testifies, read Ovid with as much interest – and perhaps even preference – as he did Vergil.6 He could have been also thinking about the ‘eroticized’ Dido of Heroides 7 when he created his own, although one has to keep mind that Ovid was responding to the Vergilian Dido as well.7 Upon closer reading of Brodsky’s poem, I reached the conclusion that the poet’s verse contains such parallels to Vergil’s text that they may constitute intertextuality in a broader sense. Indeed, Conte emphasized the role of ‘poetic memory’ on the part of both author and reader as a possible intertextual

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Zara Martirosova Torlone discourse that can function independent of subjective intentionality.8 I would like to replace the somewhat formalistic and narrow term intertextuality with a phrase ‘literary filiation’ used by Hubbard in the sense of ‘the author’s choice of specific precursors or precursor with whose work he stands in a special and significant relation’.9 This concept owes much to Bloom’s emphasis on the importance of the creative subject and his intentionality. That intentionality does not necessarily have to be conscious, since any poet is himself or herself a compilation of the texts previously read. Poets can recall unintentionally a text of their precursors and can even creatively ‘misread’ it as a way of drawing from the ‘poetic memory’ while appropriating it for their own individual poetic expression.10 I would like to explore these, perhaps unintentional, evocation and ‘misreading’ of the Aeneid in order to interpret Brodsky’s gendered reception of the Dido and Aeneas story. I will structure my argument in the following way: first, I will analyze Vergil’s and, to a limited degree, Ovid’s treatment of Dido in the context of gender perspective that might have influenced Brodsky’s poem; second, I will discuss how two other much later sources, Anna Akhmatova’s poetic cycle and Henry Purcell’s opera, contributed to the gendered reception of Dido and Aeneas by Brodsky; finally I will analyze Brodsky’s poem in the light of all of his sources. Ross observes that Vergil’s Dido is a composite of several Greek mythological heroines: Nausicaa of the Odyssey, Apollonius’ Medea and Catullus’ Ariadne, betrayed and abandoned by the hero.11 The last two allusions evoke the inevitability of heroic betrayal and the ‘fatal attraction of heroism’, which become Vergil’s main focus.12 Vergil employs all his art to make Dido episode not only an important step in the progress of the hero’s journey but also the pivotal point of reference for understanding his character. The Dido episode stands in clear union with the whole epic. While Book 4 undoubtedly possesses the independent unity of tragedy,13 it is also marked by its reverberation through the rest of the epic.14 Furthermore, to many readers the story of Dido eclipses the plot of the poem as a whole, and the reception of the Aeneid often foregrounds the character of Dido at the expense of Aeneas and despite the poem’s largely ‘patriarchal concerns’.15 In addition, in the Vergilian story of Dido and Aeneas we find all the stages of a literary romance gone awry: the falling in love, its blossoming and fruition, the abandonment and the parting scene, the curse and death. In response to that structure, Ovid, by allowing Dido ‘to indulge her passion’ in Heroides 7, emphasizes Dido’s role as a lover and suppresses her significance as a leader and a founder of a new and formidable city.16 However, throughout all of the stages of Dido’s destructive amor, despite her vulnerability as a woman and notwithstanding her shortcomings as a queen, Vergil’s Dido is never a shadow of Aeneas’ greatness;17 on the contrary, she is his rescuer, his only chance to recover from the

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ devastating effects of the fall of Troy and to continue his search for a new one. Book 4 makes that distribution of power apparent from its first words at regina (‘but the queen’), thus introducing the ‘dominant figure of the book’.18 The contrasting particle at, as Austin suggests, ‘points the antithesis’ between Aeneas’ past sufferings and Dido’s that are about to be set into motion, ‘between his composed silence and her agitation’.19 Initially, Aeneas is only a suppliant at Dido’s mercy, nothing but a guest (hospes) later elevated to the status of a consort and at the end reduced again to the status of a hospes (l. 23). Dido is the queen, one who has the power of choice, which she lives to regret: to succumb to Aeneas’ charm and heroic aura. She is also at the core of the love affair, whether she is confiding her feelings to Anna, confronting Aeneas, or ascending the funeral pyre she built to make her final regal statement. In Book 4 of the Aeneid, for the first time Aeneas’ claim to heroic greatness is called into question, for he seems eclipsed by the character of Dido. Dido’s only weakness is her destructive passion for Aeneas, which drives her to neglect her primary responsibility as a Carthaginian queen: the building of her city, her greatest aspiration and accomplishment (non coeptae adsurgunt turres – ‘the started towers no longer rise’, Aen. 4.86). Even at the time of her suicide, she remains a powerful figure whom Vergil compares in her impassioned madness with the famous male tragic protagonists Pentheus and Orestes. Her role in the love affair is anything but that of a passive victim of the unruly emotion. Her courting of Aeneas is passionate and is manifested early in the book by her persistent desire to hear again and again (iterum ... iterum, 78-9) the story of his travails. Her insatiable curiosity is propelled, as Powell points out, not by her desire for more information about the heroic guest but by her need to ‘protract their time together (noctem ... trahebat) ...; in a modern phrase ... she wants to be close to him’.20 Her physical need for him is also manifested in her desire to lie down on the couch he left, after the feast and his narration end (stratisque relictis incubat, 82) and to hold Ascanius in her lap captivated by his likeness to his father (84-5). This love bordering on pathological obsession eventually becomes coupled with an even stronger emotion, anger, or, as Austin termed it in his commentary, ‘a hissing rage’,21 that by the end of the book escalates into the virtuous, even heroic, Ajax-like madness: ‘Her pangs of love increase, and love rising up again rages and swirls in a great tide of anger’ (ingeminant curae, rursus resurgens saevit amor magnoque irarum fluctuat aestu, 4.530-1). However, as Gill aptly observes, Dido’s madness ‘is not the raving insanity of Pentheus and Orestes because even in her final moments she reviews her life with “rational lucidity” and “cosmic” detachment’ and ‘can still see that her state represents a negation of virtuous rationality that is fundamental to her nature as human being’.22 At no point in her romantic involvement with Aeneas is Dido given to acts of ‘wild impetuosity’.23 Dignified pride and acute awareness of the consequences accompany her decisions first to yield

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Zara Martirosova Torlone to love for Aeneas, entreat him to stay, and then end her life after his departure. Her suicide, conspicuous for its erotic or, as Desmond phrases it, ‘phallic quality’,24 is also not depicted only as an irrational result of mad passion but as the harbinger of Carthage’s future threats to Rome. Although embittered and suicidal, Dido is nonetheless given the power of voicing her anguish and her desire for an avenger, indeed a historical one, Hannibal, of her trampled pride and destroyed regal ambitions (exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor – ‘rise some avenger from our bones’, Aen. 4.625). Thus, her anger, resulting from her betrayed love, must continue even after her death and must have real and devastating ramifications. In her reaction to Aeneas’ betrayal, Vergil’s Dido reflects Aristotle’s understanding of anger (in the Rhetoric and the Nicomachean Ethics) as a stimulant for ‘the virtue of courage’ because ‘“turning the other cheek” is to be despised as simple-minded, servile, and vulnerable to exploitation’.25 Vergilian Dido hardly fits into any of those categories, even at the point of her final beseeching of Aeneas to at least leave a child behind for her to love, which Austin interprets as her most overpowering emotion, that turns her fiercely begun accusation of Aeneas into a ‘soliloquy, barely whispered’.26 It is worth exploring what concerns Vergil and what he deems unimportant or suppresses in this very dramatic book of his epic. Some twentieth-century critics, like Graves for example, tried to attribute to the episode what they perceived as Vergil’s misogyny.27 On the other hand, Knight sees in Vergil a ‘femininity of mind’ that makes his authorial sympathies strongly gravitate towards Dido. Knight even goes as far as to suggest that if less were known of Vergil ‘it might be argued that the poet of the Aeneid ... was a woman’.28 These contradictory opinions represent of course the extremes and suggest the difficulty in our modern decoding of the expression of feminine emotions especially when it comes to the ancient texts. I find it hard to see in the Dido episode lack of sympathy towards his heroine or any misogynistic tendencies on Vergil’s part. On the other hand, Vergil’s ‘feminine’ sensitivity towards his heroine should not be exaggerated: her lovesickness evolving into a lack of self-control in the end becomes akin to Amata’s madness. However, even despite these contrasting assertions, there is perhaps little doubt that Dido’s erotic madness and suicide move the modern reader, like before they did Augustine, beyond tears and elicit unconditional sympathy, but Aeneas’ human emotions are entirely, or almost entirely, glossed over. That is, as Ross argues, ‘Virgil’s whole point – that the anguish felt by Dido’s lover has to be suppressed and cannot be uttered to her or even admitted to himself’.29 This in effect is a reading of the Aeneid as a ‘performance of masculinity’,30 which, as we will see later, Brodsky prefers to any other reading of the episode. The love story about two people separated by divine destiny and led into madness, suicide and,

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ most importantly for Brodsky’s poetics, heroic isolation, is for the Russian poet primarily a story about what constitutes the creation of a true man with an important mission. Despite his admission of Vergil’s empathy for Dido, Otis observes that ‘there could have been no Rome, as Vergil conceived it, without men like Aeneas, men of supreme pietas’.31 Harrison echoes this opinion: ‘Vergil makes it clear that when Aeneas deserts her [Dido] he is thereby displaying his characteristic pietas at the highest level’.32 Williams goes as far as to ‘blame the victim’ by stating that ‘Dido is brought to disaster by her own desire for Aeneas, which she might have resisted more strongly than she did’.33 Such readings of Dido and Aeneas story endorse and emphasize masculine biases that seem to be inherent in the text. However, as McLeish pithily points out, our view of Dido is also filtered through Purcell, Dryden and Berlioz. She remains, despite the bias readings, ‘a three-dimensional character, a real person whose emotions and actions have a roundness, a wholeness, that often seems to be missing in Aeneas himself’.34 There are several instances during the course of the Aeneid where Aeneas’ human side becomes manifested, but every time it is dominated by a sense of duty that surpasses his vulnerability to love or pain. In Book 1, during the storm, Aeneas displays deep emotional upheaval, fearing for his own life and for the lives of his companions. In Book 6 too, he appears shaken and grief-stricken by Dido’s refusal to talk to him. In Book 12 he once again shows his emotions when he sees the belt of Pallas on Turnus but in that final episode of the poem, driven by a sense of revenge and duty, he proceeds to kill his vanquished enemy. In all of these instances, however, his torment is unspoken, suppressed to the degree that renders Aeneas almost ambivalent and earns him a title of a ‘reluctant hero’. However, this was perhaps the sort of man that the age of Augustus admired and that was closely connected, as Bowra demonstrates, with the Roman Stoic ideal.35 The emotional abandon was attributed by Vergil, at least in Book 4, not to Aeneas but to Dido, who ‘by general consent ... is the only truly great character to have emerged from Latin literature’.36 Even Dido’s Greek predecessors, similarly abandoned by their heroes, fade in comparison because ‘the strength of Dido’s personality towers above all the rhetoric’ that was characteristic of Euripides’ Medea who commits the unspeakable acts of filicide, or Catullus’ Ariadne, ‘a silly little thing for all her betrayal’.37 In her darkest hour, Vergil’s Dido calls for and looks forward to an everlasting rivalry and hostility between Carthage and the future city of Rome, as she struggles to regain her dignity as a Carthaginian queen. Dido, and subsequently Carthage, are defeated by destiny, and the failed love between Aeneas and Dido is only a casualty in the process. When measured against the intensity of Dido’s character, Aeneas of Book 4 emerges as less of a hero despite his unwavering sense of duty.38 He is certainly, as Cixous condescendingly formulates it, ‘less of

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Zara Martirosova Torlone a bastard than Jason, less “pure” in plain, brute jouissance than Theseus, more moral’.39 But even despite his good excuses for ‘seeding and shaking off his women’,40 it is Dido who shows moral superiority and conscious (not divinely ordained) understanding of her legacy.41 The reason why Vergilian Dido is so subdued and clearly so understated and muted in Brodsky’s short poem is because he draws from more than one source as he shifts the focus from the leading woman (dux femina facti) to his male protagonist. In his interview with Ann-Marie Brumm Brodsky clearly states what was on his mind when he was writing the poem: Brumm: Who then are your Dido and Aeneas? Brodsky: They are mythical personages ... I remember very well what influenced me. There were two things. The first was Anna Akhmatova’s cycle about Dido and Aeneas. That was a sequence of love poems about her separation from her beloved. She embodied herself in Dido and the man was some kind of Aeneas ... The second thing which more or less moved me to write about that was Henry Purcell’s opera, Dido and Aeneas. There was a certain aria which Dido sings that was so penetrating, so moving, so despairing. I remember this when Elizabeth Schwarzkopf sings, ‘Remember Me’. It sounds absolutely incredible. There were a couple of reasons why I wrote this poem. Moreover, this is not a love poem. ‘Aeneas and Dido’ is a poem about destruction – the destruction of Carthage which happened before it happened in flesh. It’s rather historical poem is some sense. Aeneas left Dido. She didn’t want him to leave her but he did. And, according to the myth, he created Rome whose army in some centuries afterward came to destroy Carthage. So see what love is and what betrayal in love is. The consequences are usually invisible but I was trying to make them more or less visible.42

First of all, Brodsky does not even mention Vergil as one of his sources, perhaps to avoid stating the obvious. He calls both Dido and Aeneas ‘mythological personages’ but there is little doubt that the Russian poet was unfamiliar with two conflicting textual traditions of Dido’s story that troubled Petrarch so much, and was drawing the story from Vergil and perhaps Ovid.43 Here I would like to dwell in a little more detail on the possible influence of the latter for Brodsky’s gendered reception of the story. In his 1995 essay Letter to Horace, Brodsky specifically evokes Ovid’s treatment of the unfortunate love affair calling it more convincing than that of Vergil. Brodsky, however, feels that, although Aeneas emerges in it in ‘unflattering’ light, Ovid, despite such an ‘unpatriotic’ rendition, is, to put it bluntly, more in touch with reality, as far as a relationship between a man and a woman is concerned.44 Ovid in his response to Vergilian Dido essentially engenders yet another long tradition of reading her by marginalizing Aeneas and ‘feminizing’ his version of the story. Although the essay is written significantly later than our poem, it is clear from it that Brodsky wants to look at Ovid’s ‘feminized’ discourse (which he calls a ‘spoof’ on Vergil) again, but this time through the eyes of the abandoning man not the abandoned woman. He was before and still is

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ interested only in masculine perspective on the whole affair, at the centre of which are Vergil’s preoccupation with duty and justification of Aeneas’ complicity in Dido’s suicide. In Brodsky, Aeneas is a detached culprit of a woman’s undoing, whose main fault is her almost pathological passion for a complete stranger. But most interesting are the contradictions in Brodsky’s statement. At first, Brodsky emphasizes that this is not a poem about love but rather destruction. By the end of the statement, however, the two become inextricably linked and the poem becomes then a manifestation of the destruction of love and by love. History becomes the consequence of love, and the historical poem becomes love lyric where Brodsky’s ancient influences (if I may use this term here) are reconfigured in the specific light of gender and genre. In that respect Brodsky’s self-proclaimed influences on this poem merit further analysis. Anna Akhmatova’s lyric cycle that Brodsky refers to here is a 1962 collection of poems Shipovnik tsvetet (‘Wild-rose is Blooming’). The themes explored in this cycle are traditional for Akhmatova’s poetics: the appearance of a mysterious and attractive stranger from another land, unhappy love followed by betrayal and abandonment. The whole cycle was most likely inspired by Akhmatova’s relationship with Isaiah Berlin, her meetings with him in 1945-1946 and the later ‘non-meeting’ ten years later, in 1956, in Moscow, when he came to visit from Berlin.45 The fourteenth poem of that cycle was published in 1962 under the title Govorit Didona (‘Dido Speaks’)46 and it explicitly uses the self-identification of Akhmatova with the Carthaginian queen. The poem had two epigraphs: one is taken from the Aeneid 6.460 – Protiv voli ia tvoi, tsaritsa, bereg pokinul (Invitus, regina, tuo de litore cessi – ‘I left your shore, queen, against my will’), and another was by Akhmatova herself – Romeo ne bylo, Enei, konechno byl (‘Romeo never was, Aeneas was for sure’),47 which reflected the emotional and gender specific message of the poem and the lyric cycle overall: men do not die for love; rather they leave women who love them. The earlier draft of the poem had yet another epigraph from the Aeneid 4.9, Anna, soror!, which had two meanings: as an appeal of Dido to her sister, and as Akhmatova’s own appeal to herself in the past, while she reminisces about her separation from Berlin: 48 Ne pugaisia, – ia eshche pokhozhei Nas teper’ izobrazit’ mogu. Prizrak ty – il’ chelovek prokhozhii, Ten’ tvoiu zachem-to beregu. Byl nedolgo ty moim Eneem, – Ia togda otdelalas’ kostrom, Drug o druge my molchat’ umeem. I zabyl ty moi prokliatyi dom.

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Zara Martirosova Torlone Ty zabyl te, v uzhase i muke, Skvoz’ ogon’ protianutye ruki I nadezhdy okaiannoi vest’. Ty ne znaesh’, chto tebe prostili ... Sozdan Rim, plyvut stada flotilii, I pobedu slavoslovit lest’. Do not be scared, – I can with even more likeness Depict us right now, Although you either are a ghost or a passerby, I, for some reason, keep your shadow. You were not my Aeneas for long, – Back then I got away with bonfire only. We can keep silent about each other. And you have forgotten my cursed house. You have forgotten those hands, Stretched to you in horror and agony, And the damned hope you have forgotten too. You do not know, what has been forgiven ... Rome is built, the herds of fleet are passing, And the flattery glorifies victory.

It is rather strange that Brodsky lists this poem as a source of inspiration for his poem because it appears that he writes from the exact opposite gender perspective. Akhmatova’s poem is an articulation of Dido’s anguish over her abandonment, and Aeneas is only behind the scenes. In Akhmatova, the bonfire is not Dido’s final moment, but in fact a mild punishment for the forbidden passion (‘I got away with bonfire only’).49 She clings to Aeneas’ ghost and her memory of him, while he is presumed to have forgotten everything, even her agony on the pyre. But furthermore, the poem ends on a note of forgiveness, mingled with lingering attachment, certainly unimaginable for the Vergilian Dido, who categorically declares the end of love and initiation of interminable hostility for centuries to come (nullus amor populis nec foedera sunto – ‘let there be neither any love nor truce between our people’, Aen. 4.624). Akhmatova’s Dido sees her house ‘cursed’ and her hope ‘damned’ but she does not curse or damn the beloved who betrayed her. And the last stanza explains why: Rome is built, the great fleet is sailing by and the air resounds with the glory of the man’s achievement. The tragedy of love gone awry brings about the foundation and development of Rome’s imperial power. The high price for it was paid by a woman who is destined to fade into obscurity and insignificance. This sentiment echoes Vergil’s emphasis on Aeneas’ mission at the expense of all of his human ties. I will try to demonstrate that in this sentiment

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ precisely lies Brodsky’s inspiration for his own creative and gendered reading of the Vergilian Dido. Before we move, however, to Brodsky’s poem, I would like to take a closer look at his another self-proclaimed source: Dido’s aria from Purcell’s opera with libretto by Nahum Tate. In his late 1995 essay, entitled In Memory of Stephen Spender, Brodsky mentions some precious items of his former Russian household. Among others he includes a recording of Purcell’s Dido and Aeneas, sent to him by Stephen Spender himself, smuggled to the Soviet Union by Anna Akhmatova after she received an honorary doctorate from Oxford in 1965.50 Two influences on his poem thus come together. The aria Brodsky refers to is ‘When I am Laid in Earth’ also known as ‘Dido’s Lament’ in the third act of the opera. The last lines of the aria, when Dido addresses her confidant, Belinda, are similar in tone to that of Akhmatova: of forgiving and forgetting: When I am laid in earth, May my wrongs create No trouble in thy breast; Remember me, but ah! forget my fate.51

In Purcell’s opera, as well as in Akhmatova’s poem, Dido is resigned to her fate and departs from the stage with no words of reproach. In Purcell’s opera, Dido is also surprisingly passive, and in fact Aeneas is her pursuer, given a strength of passion rather unimaginable for the Vergilian Aeneas: Aeneas has no fate but you! Let Dido smile and I’ll defy The feeble stroke of Destiny.

His abandonment of Dido is full of torment and agony, two passions that the reader of the Aeneid expects in vain to be elicited from Aeneas by Dido’s pleading and beseeching. It is rather clear that both Akhmatova’s and Purcell’s Didos set a stage for Brodksy’s queen as a woman, seduced and abandoned, but not powerful, and most certainly not vengeful. Akhmatova’s Dido has decisively and meekly forgiven all the wrongs done to her, and Purcell’s response of Dido to the news of abandonment evokes Vergilian Dido’s reproaches (Aen. 4.365-7) in an almost comical but not threatening way: Thus on the fatal Banks of Nile, Weeps the deceitful crocodile Thus hypocrites, that murder act, Make Heaven and Gods the authors of the Fact.

Brodsky’s Dido, like Akhmatova’s lyric heroine, is completely marginalized, and the focus is primarily on the man and his mission. Like Purcell’s

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Zara Martirosova Torlone Dido, she expresses no anger and little bitterness as she becomes only a bleak shadow of – and on – his destiny, almost an annoying obstacle to his divinely inspired designs. While Dido is referred to only as ‘she’, Aeneas is twice described as a ‘great man’, and, in a peculiar ironic twist, as Verheul points out, his greatness is especially emphasized when he decisively leaves Carthage and Dido behind.52 Here Brodsky’s classical metaphor evokes in a much more defined way Akhmatova’s and Purcell’s two radically different views of love: ‘his’ and ‘hers’. These views alternate as the poet goes back and forth between the two contrasting perspectives (on zhe – ‘but she’, a ee liubov – ‘but her love’, no on – ‘but he’) described in terms of ‘movement’ and ‘immobility’.53 The caesura in the poetic line that appears before the change in gender perspective serves as a symbolic line, which reflects two different psychological worlds, and two completely different approaches to emotion.54 Furthermore, while his gaze wanders far into the horizon that beckons and awaits him, she cannot see beyond the folds of his tunic, where ‘her world ends’, as we see later in the poem, not only figuratively but literally. Her perspective is limited by the sight of him, and she cannot see anything beyond that. In these two different perspectives lies Brodsky’s archetypal interest in the gendered approach to love. Brodsky in essence chooses the dominant reading of the Aeneid as a ‘performance of masculinity’ and assumes the masculine position in his view of Dido’s tragic demise. A man cannot be limited or restrained in the private world of a personal feeling, even if that guarantees his happiness. He must always remain concerned with the communal good, with a higher goal in the future. A woman, on the other hand, even one entrusted with responsibility, will always choose the world of private happiness at the expense of public duty. As Oliensis states it in her discussion of gender roles in the Aeneid: ‘Where women tend to cling to origins, men are oriented towards ends.’55 For Dido the whole world is the room in which the separation occurs, for Aeneas it is the sight of the sea where his future awaits and to which his longing gaze inevitably turns, as he is about to leave her in the confining space of that room full of tension. The recurrent imagery of the sea, which in Brodsky often appears as a metaphor for freedom,56 intensifies the fact that Aeneas’ immobility is only temporary: his tunic resembles a sea that has stopped its motion (his freedom thus is curtailed by his pause with Dido), his lips resemble a seashell, the horizon reflected in his goblet is a sea horizon and he himself is a ship which Dido (the fish) is ready to follow. In contrast to this picture of his immobility stands the description of Dido’s emotional state. That state completely locked inside is full of motion, speed, and impulsiveness. But as his plans are about to be set into motion, even her inside mobility would freeze. The phrase ‘whole world ends with the border of his ... tunic’ acquires then both temporal and spatial meaning. The folds of his tunic, on which her adoring eyes linger, reflect his temporary halt in time and space, contrary to his predestined duty, and predicts Dido’s limitations

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ and future inability to follow Aeneas on his journey. At the moment of her ultimate despair his ‘auspicious wind begins to blow’. The Vergilian Dido, dux femina facti, who angrily confronts Aeneas after his attempt to secretly leave her, is replaced by Brodsky with a Dido, who only looks on as speechlessly as a fish.57 There is certain irony in such an inverted reception of Dido, the only Vergilian heroine whom Vergil does not write into silence (as he does for instance with Lavinia, Aeneas’ future bride, or Creusa, his Trojan wife, who becomes written out early in the poem). In the Aeneid, Dido makes thirteen speeches, ten of them long and significant. To Aeneas Dido addresses two powerful speeches: first a beseeching reproach (Aen. 4.30530), then followed by a second address, full of hatred and denunciation (4.365-87).58 Brodsky in effect excludes Dido the way Vergil famously excludes all of his female characters of stature. Brodsky juxtaposes ‘he already strode upon the land’ with the comparison of Dido to a fish. Fish do not live on land; Aeneas belongs to a realm where Dido has no natural place. Furthermore, the comparison to the fish has a deeper connotation in Russian evoking a proverb (nem(a) kak ryba, ‘mute as a fish’). Not only Dido is banned from any land where he will settle, she is also deprived of the power to express her anguish, her anger and her determination to retaliate even beyond her grave, the power so articulately and pointedly granted to her by Vergil. By contrast, Brodsky’s Dido is more evocative of the Dido Aeneas encounters in the Underworld (6.450-76), sullen and speechless. However, even in that last encounter of the two lovers in the Aeneid, her superior strength of character is emphasized by Vergil with the simile ‘(she stood there) like a stern rock crag or cliff of Marpesus’ (quam si dura silex aut stet Marpesia cautes, 471). This simile echoes an earlier comparison (4.441-6), as Aeneas is besieged by Dido’s pleas, he resembles an oak tree that cannot be moved even by the gusty winds because it reaches high into the sky with its summit and deep into the earth with its roots. Dido’s comparison with a cliff underlines her immobility, picked up also by Brodsky, but the Vergilian immobility displays her emotional steadfastness, her insistence on never forgiving him even after his impassioned plea of regret. At the end of the episode, however, it is she who takes off in flight (tandem corripuit sese atque inimica refugit, 472), away from him, thus answering his questions (‘whom are you running away from?’, quem fugis?, 466, which in turn echoes her earlier ‘are you running away from me?’, mene fugis?, 4.314). Brodsky’s poem is explicitly and solely concerned with Aeneas’ destiny and duty. The Vergilian hero’s constant characterization as ‘duty-bound’ (pius) and his dedication to destiny and the divine will enable him to endure the loss of his homeland and of every meaningful human connection, and thus to ‘command our great respect’.59 Although the sea of his journey turns out to be the sea made of Dido’s tears (in Russian the idiomatic phrase more slez has a clichéd meaning which Brodsky remedies

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Zara Martirosova Torlone in his poem),60 Brodsky never questions the inevitability or moral virtue of Aeneas’ choice. Outlined already in Akhmatova’s poem, the theme of Aeneas betraying his saviour, Dido, is closely connected with his mission as a founder of Rome. But it is also connected with the gender dichotomy: men must shun emotion because it incapacitates rather than enables them. Aeneas’ adherence to his masculine and heroic mission is juxtaposed to Dido’s female inability to ward off the debilitating passion that leads her to the funeral pyre. If Dido has no place in the future Rome, Aeneas must let her go, leave her defeated, predicting thus the defeat of her city by the race he is about to engender. Unlike Vergil’s heroine, Brodsky’s Dido does not predict Hannibal’s attack on Italy during the Punic Wars, but she foresees even further the undoing of her own city, reduced to ashes at the end of those wars. Her vision foreshadowing Cato’s ‘Carthage must be destroyed’ (Carthago delenda est) is consistent with the character of Dido of the whole poem. Without Aeneas there is no Dido, and without Dido there is no Carthage. The dramatic destruction of the woman predicts the historical catastrophe of the city. In Purcell’s opera the Chorus in the third act connects the two events as well: Destruction’s our delight Delight our greatest sorrow! Elissa dies tonight and Carthage flames tomorrow.

The theme of revenge is completely excised by Brodsky: Dido’s longing for Aeneas does not devolve into hatred or ‘hissing rage’. In this brief poem Dido becomes the passive victim not even of divine ordinances but of the ‘great man’s’ decisions. The tragic monumentality of her final suicidal act, a result of her excessive emotion, all but disappears in Brodsky’s lyric rendition. The Vergilian grandiosity of epic design has no place in Brodsky’s lyric, which, for its entire claim to be a poem about historical destruction of the city, remains the contemplation of an irrevocable separation between a man and a woman. Brodsky, in his 1981 essay on Vergil, mentioned earlier in my chapter, notes that ‘Vergil was a realist; an epic realist to be precise, because speaking numerically, reality in itself is epic’.61 It is clear from this comment that Brodsky does see the separation between Dido and Aeneas as a part of Vergil’s grand design for creating an epic of national rebirth. He merely recasts the idea of epic in a different, more grounded and less politically charged light. For Brodsky the ‘reality’ of life replete with loss of attachments and memory is an epic when viewed diachronically: two lovers on the verge of separation become but a small episode in an epic chain of life that, in the final analysis, must amount to some meaning. In this approach to Dido and Aeneas one can also audibly hear Akhmatova’s gendered interpretation of the unfortunate affair, both Dido’s and her own: men always leave forsaking love for the pursuit of a

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ higher cause, women are always left behind bewailing their fate. This state of affairs becomes also a part of Brodsky’s ‘gendered’ reality. In conclusion, it is necessary to say a few words about the diction of ‘Dido and Aeneas’, which is unusual for Brodsky’s early poetics and facilitates our interpretation of the poem. Brodsky himself indicates that ‘unlike a prose writer, a poet is never defined by his content. A poet, and indeed his content, are defined by the timbre of his voice, by his diction, by the way he chooses and uses his words’.62 First of all the poem is written without any rhyme, a form unusual for Brodsky’s early poetry, and for Russian poetry of that time in general. Its syntax is lucid with almost a colloquial flow, as if Brodsky tries to juxtapose the rhythm and cadence of Vergilian epic diction to the straightforwardness and mundane clarity (‘epic reality’?) of his lyric poem. The poem then, for all its allusions to Vergil’s epic, conveys to us both in its content and diction that we are reading a love story in which the binary juxtaposition of genders is strictly observed: the man has to pay a price of personal loss and forsaken love in order to fulfil his destiny; the woman fails to understand the importance and consequences of that choice, which is never questioned. I am reluctant to draw here any precise biographical parallels. I agree with David Bethea who observes that ‘Brodsky himself would take bitter issue with any outside attempt to place a causal connection (“because,” “as a result of”) between the facts of his life and, as he puts it in an English phrase that owes its birth to the Russian (izgiby stilia), his “twists of language”.’63 The biographical connection I am pursuing here is not causal but rather complementary to the literary interpretation. In 1969, two years before Brodsky’s final exile to the West, the figure of Aeneas might have appeared to the poet as a suitable metaphor of the poet’s own plight and his own looming destiny. The truly Vergilian idea that, in Segal’s words, ‘every conquest carries with it a vanquished human being whose suffering we are made to feel as keenly as the triumph of the victor’ was relevant for Brodsky during his last years in Russia.64 The achievement of the meaningful goal becomes in the poem associated with an ultimate sacrifice of a genuine feeling. Furthermore, this sacrifice also entails the ideal that the hero (or the poet) must act alone, unburdened by any personal attachment. The same idea of Brodsky is expressed in yet another even earlier poem, whose title, ‘The Field Eclogue’ (1963?) alludes to Vergil, and which is explicitly concerned with exile. In it, the idea of any companionship is shunned as impossible for a man who is bound for a journey away from what he loves: V blizorukom velich’e svoem, s koim vzgliad tvoi k prostranstvu prikovan, skryto chuvstvo, chto strannyi ob”em, kak zalog tebe dolgii, darovan, chto ot vsiakoi progulki vdvoem i ot smerti vdvoem – zastrakhovan.

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Zara Martirosova Torlone In its shortsighted greatness, with which your glance is nailed to the horizon, a feeling is hidden, that a strange space is given to you as a long-lasting pledge, that you are insured from any walk together, and from death also if it is with someone else.

In this poem also the glance of a man bound for exile is ‘nailed to the horizon’, like Aeneas’ is, and he must endure even death in complete but stoic loneliness. The rewards for what the Russians call podvizhnichestvo (martyrdom achieved through a heroic feat that is expressed in Russian with a word of the same root as the word for a heroic feat itself – podvig) preclude any personal happiness. Brodsky identifies with Aeneas through the act of podvizhnichestvo but there is a subtle feeling of uneasiness and self-contempt resulting from the hero’s brutalized humanity and abandonment of his human ties. Many years later Brodsky will return to Aeneas, fleetingly, briefly, and yet compellingly offering a closure to interpretation of hero’s longing gaze towards the sea. Brodsky’s 1993 poem ‘Ischia in October’ describes an abandoned beach in the fall, where the lyric protagonist, accompanied by his wife and daughter, contemplates the passage of time. The poem ends with the following stanza: My zdes’ vtroem, i derzhu pari, to, chto vmeste my vidim, v tri raza bezadresnei i sinei, chem to, na chto smotrel Enei. The three of us are here, and I bet, that what we see together, is three times more in need of address and bluer, than what Aeneas was gazing at.

In the earlier poem, Aeneas was looking towards the sea where his destined land was waiting. That land had no name, and no address yet. It was not even visible from the towers of Carthage, lost in the blueness of the sea. The future then did not have any recognizable features. In this later poem, it still does not. The sea retains the mystery of the final destination, although the lyric protagonist is not embarking on it alone any more. It is his future times three, and, in that, the poet finds his consolation and his hope. Notes 1. Brodsky (1981) 180. 2. Brodsky (2001) 313. 3. Unless otherwise specified, all the translations in this essay are my own.

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ 4. A detailed and most recent analysis of Brodsky’s mythological poetics is offered in Torlone (2009) 156-73. 5. Kreps (1984) 147-8. 6. Brodsky (1995) 445. 7. Fulkerson (2005) 26 points out that traditional scholarship on the Heroides ‘has been interested in comparing Ovid’s Dido to Vergil’s – not surprisingly the former almost inevitably comes up short’. I agree with Desmond (1994) 35 that ‘Dido’s lament in Heroides 7 rhetorically amplifies Virgil’s text, even if it is written in hostile reaction to Vergilian Dido’. 8. Conte (1986) 32-40. 9. Hubbard (1998) 11. See also Forrester (2004) 2-3 on distinction between the terms ‘affiliation’ and ‘filiation’ and their use in scholarship on modernist authors. 10. For discussion of Bloom see Hubbard (1998) 11. 11. Ross (2007) 32-3. 12. ibid. 34. 13. See Hardie (1997) 312-13. 14. Ascanius Iulus, for example rides a Sidonian horse that Dido has given him (5.571-2) and promises Eurylaus a reward that was her gift (9.266). Lausus after his death was wrapped in a cloak that she had made (11.72). 15. Desmond (1994) 1. 16. Desmond (1994) 37. 17. For the history of scholarship on the juxtaposition between Dido’s and Aeneas’ characters, see Spence (1999) 80-2. 18. Austin (1955) 25. 19. ibid. 20. Powell (2008) 160. 21. Austin (1955) 98. 22. Gill (1997) 229. 23. Rudd (1990) 147. 24. Desmond (1994) 35. 25. Wright (1997) 177. 26. Austin (1955) 98. 27. Graves (1962) 13-35. 28. Knight (1944) 113-14. 29. Ross (2007) 34. 30. Desmond (1994) 9. 31. Otis (1964) 220. 32. Harrison (1989) 21. 33. Williams (1987) 108. 34. McLeish (1990) 134. 35. Bowra (1933-4). 36. Harrison (1989) 21. See also Covi (1964) and Spence (1999) 80-95. 37. Austin (1955) 98. 38. See Perkell (1981) 221, who, in an implicit response to Otis, argues that Aeneas, unlike Dido, demonstrated ‘incomplete humanity’. See also Monti (1981) 76, who interprets Aeneas’ behaviour in Book 4 as his fall from pietas. 39. From The Newly Born Woman, cited in Desmond (1994) viii. 40. ibid. 41. See Otis (1964) 236, who points out that Dido could be understood as Aeneas’ alter ego – ‘one who has foiled the crime of the past by founding a city of the future,

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Zara Martirosova Torlone one who likewise has an object of pietas (in the dead Sychaeus and in her own mission of empire) – and a tragic figure ...’. 42. Brumm (2002) 15. 43. Desmond (1994) 23. For other sources of the story about Dido see Harrison (1989) 1-3. 44. Brodsky (1995) 445. 45. See Kralin’s commentary in Akhmatova (1990) 419. 46. See Kralin’s commentary in Akhmatova (1990) 421. 47. In the 1976 edition of Akhmatova’s poetry in the well-known series Biblioteka Poeta, the poem is numbered as eleventh in the cycle and the second epigraph is omitted. 48. See Kralin’s commentary in Akhmatova (1990) 421. 49. Akhmatova alludes perhaps here to a decree of 1946, launched by Andrei Zhdanov, in which her poetry was condemned as decadent and civically inappropriate. 50. Brodsky (1995) 460. 51. http://opera.stanford.edu/iu/libretti/dido.html. Last visited 03/22/2011. 52. Verheul (1986) 125. 53. Verheul (1986) 126. 54. Verheul (1986) 124. 55. Oliensis (1997) 303. 56. Loseff (1990) 38. 57. These lines were also evocative of the Nisus and Scylla episode in Ovid (Met. 8). 58. See Highet (1972) 220. 59. See McLeish (1990) 141. 60. See Verheul (1986) 126. 61. Brodsky (1981) 180. 62. ibid. 63. See Bethea (1994) 8, 34. See also Loseff’s (2006) 11-12 recent biography of Brodsky; he observes that Brodsky considered ‘his poems self-sufficient without any need of critical interpretation’, especially if that interpretation included the circumstances of his biography. 64. Segal (1990) 12.

Bibliography Akhmatova, Anna. 1990. Sochineniia v dvukh tomakh, ed. and comm. by M.M. Kralin. 2 vols. Moscow: Pravda. Austin, Roland G. (ed.). 1955. P. Vergilii Maronis Aeneidos Liber Quartus. Edited with a Commentary Oxford: Clarendon Press. Bethea, David M. 1994. Joseph Brodsky and the Creation of Exile. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bowra, Cecil M. 1933-34. ‘Aeneas and the Stoic Ideal.’ Greece and Rome 3: 8-21. Brodsky, Joseph. 1981. ‘Virgil: Older than Christianity, a Poet for the New Age.’ Vogue, October: 178-80. Brodsky, Joseph. 1995. On Grief and Reason. Essays. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Brodsky, Joseph. 2001. (Brodskii Iosif). Sochineniia Iosifa Brodskogo [Collected Works of Joseph Brodsky]. 7 vols, ed. Ia.A. Gordin. St Petersburg: Pushkinskii Fond. Brumm, Anne-Marie. 2002. ‘The Muse in Exile: Conversations with the Russian

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10. Engendering Reception: Joseph Brodsky’s ‘Dido and Aeneas’ Poet, Joseph Brodsky.’ In Joseph Brodsky: Conversations, ed. Cynthia L. Haven, 13-35. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi. Conte, Gian B. 1986. The Rhetoric of Imitation: Genre and Poetic Memory in Virgil and Other Latin Poets, tr. Charles Segal. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Covi, Madeline C. 1964. ‘Dido in Vergil’s Aeneid.’ CJ 60: 57-60. Desmond, Marilynn. 1994. Reading Dido: Gender, Textuality, and the Medieval Aeneid. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Forrester, Sibelan. 2004. ‘Sons, Lovers and the Laius Complex in Russian Modernist Poetry.’ Slavic Review 63: 1-5. Fulkerson, Laurel. 2005. The Ovidian Heroine as Author: Reading, Writing, and Community in the Heroides. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gill, Christopher. 1997. ‘Passion as Madness in Roman Poetry.’ In The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, ed. Susanna M. Braund and Christopher Gill, 213-41. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Graves, Robert. ‘The Virgil Cult.’ Virginia Quarterly Review 38: 13-35. Hardie, Philip. 1997. ‘Virgil and Tragedy.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale, 312-26. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harrison, E.L. 1989. ‘The Tragedy of Dido.’ Echos du Monde Classique/ Classical Views XXXIII, 8: 1-21. Highet, Gilbert. 1972. The Speeches in Vergil’s Aeneid. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Hubbard, Thomas. 1998. The Pipes of Pan: Intertextuality and Literary Filiation in the Pastoral Tradition from Theocritus to Milton. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Knight, William F.J. 1944. Roman Vergil. London: Faber and Faber. Kreps, Michael. 1984. O poezii Iosifa Brodskogo. Ann Arbor: Ardis. Loseff, Lev. 1990. ‘Politics/Poetics.’ In Brodsky’s Poetics and Aesthetics, ed. Lev Loseff, Valentina Polukhina, 34-55. New York: St Martin’s Press. Loseff, Lev. 2006. Iosif Brodsky. Opyt literaturnoi biografii. Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia. Seriia: Zhizn’ zamechatel’nykh liudei. McLeish, Kenneth. 1990. ‘Dido, Aeneas, and the Concept of Pietas.’ In Virgil, ed. Ian McAuslan and Peter Walcott, 134-41. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Monti, Richard C. 1981. ‘The Dido Episode and the Aeneid: Roman Social and Political Values in the Epic.’ Mnemosyne Supplement 66. Leiden. Oliensis, Ellen. 1997. ‘Sons and Lovers: Sexuality and Gender in Virgil’s Poetry.’ In The Cambridge Companion to Virgil, ed. Charles Martindale, 294-311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Otis, Brooks. 1964. Virgil: A Study in Civilized Poetry. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Perkell, Christine. 1981. ‘On Dido and Creusa and the Quality of Victory in Vergil’s Aeneid.’ Women Studies 8: 201-23. Powell, Anton. 2008. Virgil the Partisan: A Study in the Re-Integration of Classics. Swansea: Classical Press of Whales. Ross, David. 2007. Virgil’s Aeneid: A Reader’s Guide. Malden, MA and Oxford: Blackwell. Rudd, Niall. 1990. ‘Dido’s Culpa.’ In Oxford Readings in Vergil’s Aeneid, ed. S.J. Harrison, 145-66. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Segal, Charles. 1990. ‘Dido’s Hesitation in Aeneid 4.’ CW 84.1: 1-12. Spence, Sarah. 1999. ‘Varium et Mutabile: Voices of Authority in Aeneid 4.’ In Reading Vergil’s Aeneid: An Interpretive Guide, ed. Christine Perkell, 80-95. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.

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Zara Martirosova Torlone Torlone, Zara M. 2009. Russia and the Classics: Poetry’s Foreign Muse. London: Duckworth. Verheul, Kees. 1973. ‘Iosif Brodskii’s “Aeneas and Dido”.’ Russian Literature Triquarterly 6. Reprinted in Russian translation (1986) in Poetika Brodskogo, ed. L. Loseff , 121-31. Williams, Robert D. 1987. The Aeneid. London: Allen and Unwin. Wright, M.R. 1997. ‘Ferox Virtus: Anger in Vergil’s Aeneid.’ In The Passions in Roman Thought and Literature, ed. Susanna M. Braund and Christopher Gill, 169-84. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Index

Abascantus 175, 180-5, 188 Abradates 162 abuse (in poetry) 193-9 Achilles 37, 42, 45, 117, 161 Admetus 40 Adrastus 16-17, 22, 43-4 adultery 77, 92-5, 120 Aegeus 58 Aegisthus 26, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 94 Aelian 155, 158 Aeneas 222, 233, 241, 244-56 Aeschines 36 Aeschylus 15-17, 21, 40, 45, 92, 94, 162 Agamemnon 45, 94, 162 Choephori 21, 45 Myrmidons 16 Phrygians 16 Seven Against Thebes 40, 49 Aethra 16, 43-4, 50 Agamemnon 19, 21, 22, 37-9, 45, 46, 149 Agrippina 177 aidôs 22, 24, 229, 243; see also shame Ajax (son of Telamon) 24, 40, 41, 50, 156, 243 Ajax (Lesser, son of Oileus) 155, 161 Akhmatova, A. 244, 249-54 Shipouvnik tsvetet (‘Wild Rose is Blooming’) 249 Govorit Didona (‘Dido Speaks’) 249

akribeia 153-4 Alcumena 71-3, 74, 82 Amata 246 Amphion 144 Amphitruo 71-3 Anacreon 152 Andromache 22, 39, 40, 43, 46-9 Andromeda 161 anger 15, 16, 22, 57, 63, 67, 71, 73, 76-80, 83-4, 92, 95, 98, 101, 103-4, 158, 161, 193, 195-7, 213, 228, 229, 246, 252-3 anguish 246, 250; see also sorrow Antigone 22, 148 Antilochus 161 Antimachus of Colophon 155 Antiphila 69 Antonia 177 apatheia (impassivity) 228, 231, 235 Aper 209 Aphrodite 114, 116, 117, 118, 121 Apollodorus 66, 157 Apollonius 244 Apsyrtus 148 Argyrippus 76 Ariadne 145, 160, 243, 244, 247 Aristides of Thebes 156 Aristodamas 157 Aristonidas 149 Aristophanes 15,16, 92, 93-4

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Index Frogs 15, 92, 94 Thesmophoriazusae 93-4 Aristotle 35, 57-8, 59, 65, 92, 96, 97, 150, 155, 159, 246 Nicomachean Ethics 35, 59, 60, 65, 246 Poetics 96, 159 Politics 92 Rhetoric 57-8, 96, 246 Arria 184 Artemona 74, 76-8, 80 Ascanius 245 Atedius Melior 186 Athamas 149 Athena 45, 114 Athena and Marsyas 138-9 Athenian law 120 audience 18, 67, 71, 73, 77- 80, 83-4, 89, 92, 103-4, 175, 183, 187, 193, 196, 199 Augustan age 176, 187 pre-Augustan 206 Augustus 187 Austin, R.G. 245 Bacchis 68 Bacchus 243; see also Dionysus (god) Behr, F. 228-9, 231 Belinda 251 Berlin, I. 249 Bloomer, W.M. 212 Bowra, M. 247 Brodsky, J. 241-56 Didona i Enei (‘Dido and Aeneas’) 241-3 In Memory of Stephen Spender 251 Ischia in October 256 Letter to Horace 243, 248 The Field Eclogue 255

Brumm, A.-M. 248 Brutus 184, 221, 226-7, 231, 234 Caecilius 60, 99-101, 102 Caesar 156, 184, 187 Callistratus 160 Calpurina 181 Casablanca 82 Casina 79 Cassandra 45, 148, 154, 155 Cato (Elder) 254 Cato (Younger) 177, 184, 212-13, 221-2, 226-35 Catullus 176, 211, 243, 244, 247 Chaerea 69-70 Chaerestratus 25 Chalinus 79 Charisius 61-2 chastity (castitas) 176-7, 184 Chione 196 Chremes 66-8 Chrysis 62-3, 65 Chrysothemis 41 Cicero 102-3, 137, 149, 187, 193, 200-6, 207, 208, 209, 210, 211, 212, 222, 224, 225 De oratore 102-3, 206 De officiis 193, 200-5, 207, 209-12 Tusculanae Disputationes (Tusculan Disputations) 224 Citroni, M. 209 Cixous, H. 247 Classical (art) 135-7, 148 Claudia 179-80, 188 Claudius Etruscus 185-6, 188 Cleiton 151 Cleon 97 Cleustrata 74, 78-9, 80, 82, 83 Clytemnestra 21, 24, 26, 41, 43, 45, 94

262

Index comedy 71, 84, 89-90, 91-2, 95-9, 104, 202 Concordia 182 Consolatio ad Liviam 177, 187 Conte, G.B. 243 Cornelia 184 courage 35, 163, 233 cowardice 35-50 Cresilas 140 crying, 16-19, 23, 40; see also tears Cupid 178-9 Curtiz, M. 82 Daedalus 144 Daos 25 Deianira 58, 66 Demaenetus 76 Demea 66 Demeas 62-3, 65, 101 Demeter 22, 24, 94 Demipho 74-6 desire 78, 87, 96, 113, 122, 243, 246 Desmond, M. 246 Dexamenus 160 Diabolus 76-7 Dido 222, 233, 241, 243-54 Diomedes 38-9 Dionysus (god) 144-5, 160 Dionysius of Colophon 153, 155-6 Dioscuri 24 Dirce 144-5 Domitian 179, 183, 185, 186, 188, 196, 197, 207 Dorippa 74-6, 77, 82 Drusus 177, 184 Dyck, A.R. 202 ecphrasis 135 Electra 24, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50

emotion 19, 21, 24, 26, 57, 60, 68, 76, 79, 89-90, 92, 95, 97-9, 100-2, 155-6, 161, 182, 188, 193, 195, 208, 213, 222, 224-9, 233, 235, 254 emotion in art 135-62 good emotion, see eupatheia pre-emotion 224, 229-30 envy (phthonos) 89, 95-6, 104 as Schadenfreude 95-6, 104 invidia and livor 193, 195-6, 210 epic 23, 229, 243, 246, 254-5 Epictetus 222, 225, 235 Epicurus (and his school) 223, 226 epigram 135, 156-7, 193-4, 197-8, 208, 211, 213 Greek Anthology 135, 156 Palatine Anthology 135 Planudean Anthology 135 Priapea 209 Erotium 80-1 Eteocles 40-1, 50 êthos 97-9, 103, 144, 150-5, 160-3 Ethosformel/Ethosformeln 143 eupatheia (good emotion) 225, 229 Euripides 15-20, 22, 24, 25, 40, 41, 42, 43, 58, 59, 66, 92, 93, 94, 95, 115, 121-4, 126, 247 Alcestis 40 Andromache 45, 46-9, 50 Electra 24, 43 Hecuba 17, 22, 25, 42 Helen 123-4, 126 Heracleidae 17, 42, 46 Heracles 20, 44, 46 Hippolytus 25, 95 Iphigenia at Aulis 19, 22, 42 Medea 41, 58, 59, 66 Orestes 44-6

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Index Phoenissae 22 Stheneboea 95 Supplices 16, 22,43-4 Troades 16, 22, 121-3, 124, 126 Eurystheus 46 Evanthius 102 De fabula 102 Farnese Bull 135 fear 35-6, 41, 43-4, 46, 50, 58, 60, 70, 76, 79, 95, 145, 156, 158, 159, 162, 195, 206, 228, 229-30, 232, 247 female 22, 24, 41, 42, 43, 50, 71, 92, 95, 162, 176, 183, 225, 233 feminine 23, 41, 42, 50, 123, 246 femininity 23, 175; see also female, feminine, woman/women feminizing 43, 176, 248 Flavius Ursus 186 Floralia 213 Fortuna 176 Franzoni, C. 143 Freud, S. 113 Friedrich, G. 210 fury 63, 160 Gaetulicus 211 Galen 59 On the Passions and Errors of the Soul 59 Gellius 60, 99, 102 Gemina 83 gender, gendered 22, 24, 35, 40-3, 50, 121, 182, 188, 221, 233, 251-2, 254-5 genre 84, 92, 94, 97, 197-8, 208, 213 Germanicus 177, 184 Glaucias 186

Glycera 63-5, 69 Gorgias 115, 119-21, 123 Encomium of Helen 119-21 grief 15-18, 16, 20, 21, 22, 24, 25, 91, 162, 175-88, 223, 228, 233, 247 Groten, F.J. 117 Halliwell, S. 94 Hannibal 254 Harris, W.V. 59 hatred 60, 98, 195, 228, 253, 231 Hecataeus 152 Hector 38, 39, 40, 43, 47, 50, 117, 243 Hecuba 16, 17, 22, 25, 40, 50, 115, 121-2 Helen 48, 50, 113-26 Hellenistic 135-7, 148, 154, 157, 225 Henderson, J. 90 Hera 114, 144-5 Heracles/Hercules 17, 20, 42, 58, 144, 161 Hermione 46, 47, 50, 114 Hesiod 93 Hierocles 223, 227 Hippolytus 25 Homer 20, 36, 37, 40, 41, 50, 115-19 Iliad 37-40, 41, 43, 45, 50, 115-19, 126 Odyssey 23, 244 Horace 187, 199 Carmina 187 Epistulae 199 Hortensius Hortalus 221, 232 Hubbard, T. 244 husband 60, 61, 67-8, 71-2, 74-80, 82-4, 93, 162, 176-8, 188, 227-8, 232, 234 ignorance 95, 96, 97 Ignorance (personified, Agnoia) 64

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Index Iolaus 17 Iphigenia 42-3, 50, 149 Ixion 144-5 Jason 58, 59, 156, 248 jealousy 60, 73, 76, 195 Jerome 176 Jocasta 148 jokes (ioci) 197-208, 209, 211 joy 160-1, 163, 221, 224, 229-30 Julia (Caesar’s daughter) 184 Jupiter 71-3 Juvenal 199 Keane, C. 198 Kovacs, D. 48 Kreps, M. 243 Laelius 177 lamentation/ lament 20, 24, 91, 100, 183, 185 Laocoon 136, 140 Learchus 149 Leonidas of Tarentum 152 leptotês 152, 154 Lewis, C.S. 20 Lightman, M. 176 logos 120 love 60, 67-9, 70, 94, 120, 158, 160, 161, 223-4, 241, 244-6, 249-50, 252, 254 conjugal love 175-88 Lucan 221-35 De bello civili 221-35 Lucian 154 Lucilius 200, 209 Lucretia 73 Ludovisi Gaul 135, 140, 162 Lycomedes 243

Lycus 44, 46 lyric 249, 254-5 Lysias 36 Lysidamus 78-9, 83 Lysimachus 74-6, 82 Lysippus 137 male 23, 24, 41, 42, 49, 50, 63, 70, 71, 95, 175, 182, 184, 225, 243 man/men 16, 22, 23, 24, 40, 45, 50, 60, 62, 67, 83, 92-4, 113, 175, 177-8, 185, 187-8, 193, 194, 225, 247, 248, 250, 254; see also male, masculinity manliness 49 Marcia 221-2, 226-35 Markus, D.D. 186 Marpesus 253 marriage 62, 70, 74, 175-88, 221-2, 230, 232-5 Marsus 211 Martial 193-213 Epigrams 193-213 masculine, see masculinity masculinity 50, 66, 175-88, 243, 246, 249, 252 Medea 41, 50, 58, 59, 156, 244, 247 Menaechmus 78, 80, 81 Menaechmus I 80 Menaechmus II 80 Menander 25, 57, 60-5, 66, 70, 71, 99, 100, 101, 152 Aspis 25 Epitrepontes (Arbitrants) 60-2, 65, 66, 71 Periceiromene (Girl Whose Hair Is Shorn) 63, 66, 69, 71 Plocium (Necklace) 60, 99

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Index Samia (Woman of Samos) 62-3, 65, 71, 101 Menelaus 39, 44, 46-9, 50, 114, 115, 116, 121-4, 149 mimesis 158-9 Minerva and a Satyr Admiring the Flutes 140 Minos 243 Minotaur 161 Mnesilochus 93 Moore, T.J. 84 Moschion 62, 63-4, 101 mourning 21-5, 175, 182-3, 185-7, 221, 227-8, 233 Musonius Rufus 222, 225, 234-5 Myron 138, 140, 150, 154 Myrrhina 79 Naevia 193-4 Narcissus 142 Natyasastra 89 Nausicaa 244 Nausistrata 66, 76 Neoptolemus 46-8 Nestor 38 New Comedy 57, 59, 60, 64-5, 68, 84, 97, 99, 101-4 Niceratus 62-3, 101 Niobe 16 obscenity/obscene subject, language 89-90, 94, 203, 212 Odysseus 23, 39, 42, 243 Oedipus 101 Old Comedy 89-90, 94, 97, 103, 104 Old Lyric Poet 152 Olympio 79 Onesimus 61 Oppian law 82

Orestes 24, 26, 41, 43, 45, 46, 50, 245 Orestilla 185 Otis, B. 247 Ovid 114, 115, 124-6, 243-4, 248 Ars amatoria 126 Heroides 114, 124-5, 126, 243 pain 95, 96, 183, 195 Palaemon 161 Pamphila 61-2, 65, 66 Pan 161 Panaetius 202 Pandora 93 Pantheia 160-2, 163 Paris 38, 113-22, 125-6 Parrhasius 151 Pasiphae 144 Pataecus 64-5 Paternus 212 pathos/pathê 25, 97-9, 101, 103, 228, 230, 136-7, 144, 148, 149, 150-1, 153-4, 156-8, 160-3, 229 Pathosformel/Pathosformeln 140, 142-3, 148, 157 Patroclus 39 Pausanias 154 Pauson 155 Pedo 211 Peleus 47-9 Penelope 93 Peniculus 80 Pentheus 144, 148, 245 Persephone 22 Perseus 161 Phaedra 92-3 Phaedria 69 Phaedrus 212 phantasia 156, 158-9 Philaenium 76-7

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Index Philippi 184 Philitas 152-3 Philoctetes 142 Philostratus the Elder 135, 148, 160-3 Eicones 135, 148, 160-3 Phormio 66 Phryne 158 Pindar 161 Piraecus 160 pity 60, 64, 67, 80, 89-91, 95, 96, 98, 104, 161 Plato 23, 90-1, 92, 95-7, 104 Laws 97 Phaedo 23 Philebus 95-7, 104 Republic 90-2, 95, 96, 104 Plautius (Hypsaeus?) 185 Plautius Numida 184 Plautus 60, 65, 70-84, 202 Amphitruo 70-3, 83 Asinaria 60, 74, 76-8, 84 Bacchides 70 Casina 74, 78-80, 84 Menaechmi 74, 78-81, 82 Mercator 74-6, 82, 83, 84 Poenulus 70 Pseudolus 70 Stichus 71 pleasure 95, 96, 159, 162, 193, 195, 197 Pliny the Elder 135, 140, 150, 153, 156, 157 Naturalis Historia 140, 153 Pliny the Younger 181, 200, 212 Epistulae 181, 200 Plutarch 59, 60, 155, 177 Cato Minor 177 Life of Timoleon 155 On Controlling Anger 59 Table Talk 60

Polemon 63-5 Polla 181-2 Pollitt, J.J. 150 Pollius Felix 181-2 Polycleitus 137, 140 Polygnotus of Thasos 153-6 Polynices 148 Polyphemus 161 Polyxena 17, 25, 42, 50 Pompeii 142, 144-9, 161 Pompey 184, 227, 233 Porcia 184 Poseidon 16, 161 Posidippus 152, 154 Postumus 196 Powell, A. 245 Praxiteles 137, 157-8 Cnidian Aphrodite 157-8 Thespian Eros 157-8 Priam 24, 115, 116, 117, 121 Priscilla 175, 177, 180-2, 185 Prometheus 151 Protarchus 95, 96 Protogenes 158 Anapauomenos 158 Purcell, H. 244, 251-2, 254 purity 177; see also chastity Pylades 46 Pythias 69-70 Quindecimviri 179 Quintilian 97-9, 103, 104, 137, 158 Institutio oratoria 97-9 rage 245; see also anger Rand, E.K. 125 reader 61, 73, 162, 193, 196-7, 207, 210, 212-13, 226, 231, 235, 243, 251

267

Index remorse 113, 115, 126 Republic (Roman) 176, 187 Rhodogoune 161-2, 163 Ridgway, B.S. 140 Robson, J. 90, 92 Ross, D. 244, 246 Rufus 194 sacrifice 42, 255 sadness 229 satire/satirist 198 Sauron 156 schemata 142-3 Sciarra Amazon 140-1 Scopas 157 Maenad 157 Pothos 157 Segal, C. 255 Seneca (the Younger) 183, 193, 198, 200, 201, 204-7, 210, 222-3, 224-6, 228, 235 Ad Helviam matrem, de consolatione 183 De constantia sapientis 193, 204-7 De ira 198, 228 Epistulae ad Lucilium 200, 223, 224 Shakespeare 82 Comedy of Errors 82 shame 23, 39, 40, 42, 60, 89, 195, 196, 206 shame as modesty, decency 89-9, 90, 92, 93, 149, 224 shamelessness 89-92, 94, 104 Silanion 148-9, 157-8 slave 58-9, 64, 68-9, 71-2, 73, 76-7, 79, 81, 99, 100, 101, 185, 186, 206 Smicrines 61 Socrates 23, 95, 96, 151

Sophocles 24, 26, 40, 41, 58, 66 Ajax 24, 40 Electra 24, 26, 41 Women of Trachis 58 sorrow 19, 61, 65, 91, 160, 232 Sosia 71, 83 Sostrata 67-8 Spender, S. 251 Statius 175-8 Silvae 175-8 Stella 178-80, 182, 184, 188 Stesichorus 123 Stheneboea 92 Sthenelus 39 Stobaeus 60 Stoic/Stoics, Stoicism 159, 221-6, 228, 230-2, 234-5, 247 suicide 162, 184-5, 246, 249 Sulla 185 Syra 74-5, 83 Tacitus 177, 209 Annales 177 Tate, N. 251 tears 16, 19, 23, 24, 185-6, 233-4, 246, 253 Tecmessa 24, 40, 50 Terence 59, 60, 65, 66-8, 70, 71, 102 Eunuch 59, 69 Heautontimorumenus 59, 67-8, 71 Phormio 60, 66, 76 Tereus 101 terror, see fear Tertullian 176 Teucer 24 Thais 69-70 Theoclymenus 123-4 Theon of Samos 156 Theseus 17, 20, 43-4, 50, 161, 243, 248

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Index Thucydides 114 Thyestes 101 Tiberius 185 Timanthes 149, 161 Sacrifice of Iphigenia 149, 161 Timomachus 156 Medea 156 Titinius 82-3 Gemina(e) 82-3 tragedy 16, 19, 20, 23, 25, 26, 40 44, 50, 91-2, 94-5, 96, 97, 98, 101, 104, 162, 243 Treggiari, S. 84 Triumphrede 38, 49 Trojan War 114, 115, 125, 126, 155 Troy 47, 49, 114, 123, 156, 245 Tullia 187 Twelve Tables 197 univira/univirae 176-82, 184, 188 Valerius Maximus 177, 184, 185 veiling 15-26 Venus (Genetrix) 156, 178 Vergil 241, 243-54 Aeneid 222, 241, 243-7, 250, 252-3 Bucolics 241

Georgics 241 Vespasian 185 Violentilla 178-80, 182 Warburg, A. 140 weeping, see crying wife 26, 49, 60, 62, 66-8, 70-80, 77-9, 82, 162, 175-88, 184, 226, 234, 243 Williams, R.D. 247 Winckelmann, J.J. 136 woman/women 16, 21, 22, 23, 24, 40, 41, 42, 43, 45-7, 50, 57-9, 60, 62, 67, 76, 84, 92-5, 113, 117, 126,182-3, 222, 225, 232, 235, 246, 248-52, 254-5; see also female, feminine, femininity Worman, N. 122 Wounded Amazon 140 wrath, see fury Xenophon 150 Memorabilia 151 Zeisel, W. 176 Zethus 144 Zeus, temple of, at Olympia 137, 144

269