by Maria Tatar
CHAPTER 2
SILENCE AND SPEECH
From Myth to #MeToo
There is the tale of Jupiter, contriving to lie with Danae by becoming a shower of gold; a story, which, as we understand it, signifies the corruption of a woman’s chastity by gold. Whoever devised such stories . . . presumed that there is in the hearts of men a degree of evil which it is impossible to describe, for they believed that men could endure such lies with patience. And men have, indeed, embraced them with joy.
—SAINT AUGUSTINE, The City of God
As a reader, I claim the right to believe in the meaning of a story beyond the particulars of a narrative, without swearing to the existence of a fairy godmother or a wicked wolf. Cinderella and Little Red Riding Hood don’t need to have been real people for me to believe in their truths.
—ALBERTO MANGUEL, Curiosity
Persephone, Europa, and Danaë: Seduced and Silent
Many of our most familiar Greek myths—stories about Leda, Danaë, or Europa—swirl with so much violent energy that they seem resistant to social messaging of any kind at all. Some educators have argued for banning them in classrooms for the young or, at the least, adding trigger warnings to them. These are not tragedies of heroic defiance or of human failings, but tales of assault and abduction, injury and trauma. For many decades they produced virtually no moral panic at all on the part of those repurposing the myths for the young, in large part because we live in an era that reveres ancient culture for its timeless beauty, wisdom, and truth. We have generally recoiled from judging the gods, especially when they are Greek or Roman.
Where does the story of Persephone and her abduction by Hades land in Edith Hamilton’s table of contents for her bestselling Mythology (for decades a standard fixture in the U.S. high school curriculum) but in a section entitled “Flower-Myths: Narcissus, Hyacinth, Adonis”? And what kind of story is it? There is no talk of randy gods with a sense of entitlement. Instead one brother named Zeus is described as generously “helping out” another named Hades. Zeus thoughtfully fashions the delicate beauty of the narcissus as a strategy for luring Persephone away from her friends, thereby enabling Hades to “carry away the maiden he had fallen in love with.”1 Not a word is said about the compulsive philandering of both Titans, nor is there any sympathy for the plight of the girl who is the target of an “abduction” or “rape.” Hades needs a queen, and who on earth, aside from Persephone’s mother, would object to the abduction?
Persephone is, to say the least, a reluctant bride. She cries out for her father and, once in the lower world, she longs to see her mother again. Only in deference to Zeus’s command does Hades allow Persephone to return home. And even then, it is only for a limited period, the spring and summer months of every year, for Hades has tricked his abducted bride into eating a pomegranate seed (a diabolically clever version of a date rape drug) that will force her to return to the gloom of the lower world. “He secretly put the seed in my mouth, a sweet morsel, and forced me to eat it against my will,” Persephone tells her mother.2 Superior physical strength and sorcery collude to keep Persephone captive, away from light and far from the delights of life on earth.
Edith Hamilton, a model of mythological erudition in her time, had no trouble at all including a full-page illustration entitled “The Rape of Europa” in her Mythology. It shows the moment of Europa’s capture as one of rapture, a frolic on the high seas, complete with dolphins, mermaids, and the figure of Poseidon all cheerfully participating in aquatic pageantry. Europa, we read, was “exceedingly fortunate”: “Except for a few moments of terror when she found herself crossing the deep sea on the back of a bull she did not suffer at all.” And as for the bull, he is “so gentle, as well as so lovely, that the girls were not frightened at his coming, but gathered around to caress him and to breathe the heavenly fragrance that came from him.”3
Frederic Leighton, The Return of Persephone, 1891
Note that Edith Hamilton’s Mythology promises timeless tales of gods and heroes in its subtitle. The heroines in many of these tales are eminently forgettable, effaced and erased in their status as victims. They may be able to procreate, but they are barred from the more creative antics carried out by the pantheon of Greek heroes, shining examples of those who test the limits of human intelligence, cunning, determination, and criminal behavior. Daedalus designs the Labyrinth. Prometheus steals divine fire. Jason recovers the Golden Fleece. Perseus slays Medusa.
Many years after Ovid described Europa mounted on a bull, looking back in panic at the shoreline, and the second-century Greek poet Moschus gave an account of Europa’s kidnapping, European artists weirdly reveled in the opportunity to show a bull running off with a girl on his back. Zeus and Europa are found on paintings, prints, Italian wedding chests known as cassoni, enamel snuff boxes, and much else. “The Abduction of Europa” or “The Rape of Europa,” as it was sometimes called, became the subject of paintings by countless artists over the centuries. There is Rembrandt, who in 1632 gave us a Europa turning her gaze backward (terrified, astonished, or just bewildered?) to the fading shore, where her friends helplessly gape while a ferocious-looking white bull with serpentine tail upright flees with his victim. One art historian insists that there is “never any question of violence or rape,” but the expression on Europa’s face in many works of art clearly refutes that assertion.4
The reaction of critics to this assault? Here is one representative voice: “A master of visual effects, Rembrandt took pleasure in describing the varied textures of sumptuous costumes and glittering gold highlights on the carriage and dresses.”5 An unshakable commitment to aesthetics and faith in the power of art to transcend its subject matter, no matter how sordid, has somehow blinded critics to the violence of the event depicted. To be sure, twentieth-century art historians were famously more invested in questions about form and style than in content, but it seems odd that there was, up until the twenty-first century, virtually no discussion of the distraught woman in the scenes depicted, particularly given the outrageousness of the subject matter.6
Rembrandt, The Abduction of Europa, 1632 Digital image courtesy of the Getty’s Open Content Program
Titian’s priceless “The Rape of Europa,” painted in the 1560s, is on display at Boston’s Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum, where the god who spirits the girl away is described as “mischievous.” The commentary further alerts us to Gardner’s enraptured pleasure in the purchase: “I am back here tonight . . . after a two days’ orgy. The orgy was drinking myself drunk with Europa and then sitting for hours in my Italian Garden at Brookline, thinking and dreaming about her.”7 Spiritual elation is here equated unguardedly with bodily ecstasy. Gardner’s breezy observation reminds us that “rape” and “rapture” are not only etymologically related but also that rapture, in a now obsolete inflection, could mean “the act of carrying off a woman by force,” according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Inscribed in those paintings and their titles about the rape of Europa is the notion that the abduction of the girl is less sexual assault than a euphoric elevation of her spirit and, perversely, also that of the beholder.
Titian, The Rape of Europa, 1562
Here is the art-historical commentary on a 1716 The Abduction of Europa: “This delightful painting by Jean-François de Troy . . . portrays the climactic moment from Ovid’s story in Metamorphoses. . . . Jupiter has transformed himself into a handsome bull to lure the lovely princess Europa onto his back and carry her away to Crete, where she would bear him three sons.”8 A handsome bull? What traits turn a ferocious beast into a handsome creature? Never mind that the abductor is a bull. And is that all it takes to entice a lovely princess to ride off into the waters? And how is it that a scene of forcible capture, known in modern parlance as rape, comes to be described as “delightful”?
The titles of the parade of European paintings featuring Zeus and Europa routinely refer to the scene euphemistically as an abduction rather than a “kidnapping” or “rape.” After
all, these are gods accustomed to having their way with mortals, and the protective cloak of abduction helps to conceal what was most likely the reality of sexual assault. There are many who even resist the idea that capture implies violence. As one scholar in the field of classics insisted some years ago, “We should talk about abduction or seduction rather than rape, because the gods see to it that the experience, however transient, is pleasant for the mortals. Moreover, the consequences of the unions usually bring glory to the families of the mortals involved, despite and even because of the suffering that individual members of the family may undergo.”9 Even this critic, who refers to a “union” rather than a rape and insists on exonerating the gods by asserting that they were allowed to engage in behaviors that were “reprehensible” when committed by mortals, registers some misgivings by recognizing the “suffering” that may be present in the “pleasant” experience. Europa rarely speaks in accounts that have been handed down to us, but she does say “a few words” in Aeschylus’s Kares. Her report is terse, and she alludes only fleetingly to Zeus’s “trick” of using a “flourishing meadow” to attract her, focusing instead on her procreative powers: fertility, the “travails” of labor, and her distinguished offspring.
When John Keats, a frequent visitor to the British Museum, looked at Grecian urns or studied sketches of the ones showing bulls pursuing young women, he was unsettled enough to write in his famous ode: “What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?”10 Unlike many contemporary critics and commentators on the abductions hanging in art galleries today, the early nineteenth-century British poet understood that the maidens portrayed were not necessarily eager to consent to the desires of bulls and other beasts. Still, he also wrote about “wild ecstasy” even as he revered the “still unravish’d bride of quietness” that is the urn on which the abductions are portrayed. An object that is the “foster-child of silence,” the urn is mute yet also a “sylvan historian” that tells tales. Keats’s poem takes up and boldly but also cryptically reinterprets the tropes of silenced victims and speaking images that haunt the cultural history of the classical age.
There is another consideration here, one that links the rape of Europa to geopolitical concerns at the most fundamental level, even if it is not entirely clear that there is a direct connection between Europe and Europa. Consider that Europe as continent and the European Union as a larger entity have both claimed Europa, the victim of an abduction, as a namesake. There is some unsettling irony in the title of a recent book by Lynn H. Nicholas about the Nazi looting of art: The Rape of Europa: The Fate of Europe’s Treasures in the Third Reich and the Second World War (1994). Benita Ferrero-Waldner, Austria’s European commissioner, understood the strange oddity of the European continent priding itself on its connection with a myth about abduction, and she actually made it worse by suggesting that Europe’s namesake had been a promiscuous young woman. “You could of course be forgiven for the myth analogy,” she said. “Our very name is rooted in mythology—Europe being a beautiful maiden carried off by the God Zeus in the guise of a bull. But today’s Europe, beautiful though she may be, is no longer that kind of girl.”11 It is hardly surprising that most European policymakers and politicians rarely draw a connection between the continent on which they live and the woman abducted by Zeus, yet the building that houses the Council of the European Union in Brussels has on display a statue featuring Europa riding a bull bareback as it triumphantly leaps forward.
Mary Beard reminds us that the first documented instance of a man silencing a woman—telling her that it is unseemly for women to speak in public—appears in Homer’s Odyssey. Here is what was written down in a scene that begins with Penelope leaving her chambers and entering the palace’s great hall, where a bard is singing about the challenges facing Greek heroes on their journeys back home. Penelope asks for an encouraging account and is met with a powerful rebuke. Her son Telemachus orders her to return to her quarters and to “take up your own work, the loom and the distaff. . . . Speech will be the business of men, all men, and of me most of all.”12 This humiliating admonition, delivered from son to mother, may not necessarily reflect Homer’s worldview, but it tells us much about how women in Greek and Roman antiquity may have had voices yet were not allowed to use them in anything that resembled the public sphere, even when that space was at home. And what was their business? Spinning, weaving, and other forms of handiwork.
Léon de Pas, Europa Riding the Bull, 1997, at the entrance of the Justus Lipsius headquarters of the EU Council of Ministers in Brussels
As late as the eighteenth century the sage Samuel Johnson was telling his biographer Boswell, “Sir, a woman’s preaching is like a dog’s walking on his hind legs. It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all.”13 Women may not have been officially banned from speaking in public, but when they did the result was perceived to be comical, for it is evidently not in their genetic makeup to do what comes so naturally to men.
All these abducted mythical women, deprived of access to language and protest, are also presented not just as voiceless but also as mindless, for the tellers of tales avoid letting us see how victims of assault process what happens to them. Take the story of how Zeus begot Perseus by impregnating the beautiful Danaë, an account written down in the first or second century CE in a mythographical work known as the Bibliotheca, or Library. Acrisius, the father of Danaë, learns from the oracle that his daughter is destined to give birth to a son who will kill him: “For fear of this, Acrisius built a bronze chamber beneath the ground and kept Danaë guarded within it. She was seduced none the less, some say by Proitos [her uncle] while according to others, Zeus had intercourse with her by transforming himself into a shower of gold and pouring through the roof into Danaë’s lap.”14 As Edith Hamilton reminds us, we are never told how it was revealed to Danaë that it was Zeus who visited her nor do we learn anything at all about her experience of that visitation.15 Imprisoned through no fault of her own, impregnated without her consent, and set afloat with her son in the open seas, Danaë is the repeated victim of patriarchal authority in the form of her own biological father and also the father of the gods. And yet, we learn nothing about her inner life. In a recently published, authoritative encyclopedic work called The Classical Tradition, her identity is captured with the phrase: the “lover of Zeus.”16
In the post-classical West, Danaë’s story enjoyed a rich and provocative afterlife. On the one hand, Danaë was seen as a symbol of modesty, and the sunken chamber (often changed to a tower) that “protected” her became an allegorical representation of Chastity. But in 1388 things began to take a different turn, when a Dominican cleric named Franciscus de Retza wrote, “If Danaë conceived from Jupiter through a golden shower, why should the Virgin not give birth when impregnated by the Holy Spirit?”17 In other words, Danaë is, as the renowned art historian Irwin Panofsky argued, a pagan prefiguration of the Virgin Mary, another way of suggesting a strange cultural-repetition compulsion. By emphasizing conception, even if immaculate in at least one case, the monk opened the door to curiosity about the unusual form of sexual congress in the biblical story.
Artemisia Gentileschi, Danaë, 1612
In The Genealogy of the Gods, written in the late fourteenth century, Boccaccio added momentum to a medieval swerve from chastity to licentiousness in the story of Danaë by repeating scholastic rumors that the Greek maiden had been corrupted by gold or that, pragmatically minded, she had bribed Zeus to help her break out of her prison. She made a bargain with Zeus, “at the price of intercourse with him.”18 With one stroke, it is easier to understand what was behind a portrait painted in 1799 by the French artist Anne-Louis Girodet. To get even with a famed actress for refusing to pay for an earlier portrait, Girodet retaliated by painting her this time as Danaë, catching gold coins (presumably from her lovers) in her lap. What we have in the reception of the Danaë story is an almost literal enactment of the Madonna/whore dich
otomy, with the Greek woman deprived of any voice at all in the story and in how it was read through the centuries.
Philomela Weaves a Story
Let us return to Ovid, for an even more shocking incident of silencing, by looking at his story about Tereus, Procne, and Philomela, once referred to as the “ur-text for women without tongues.”19 On the way from Athens to visit her sister Procne, Philomela is violated by her brother-in-law, Tereus. He drags her into an isolated hut deep in the woods and rapes her. She threatens her brother-in-law with payback in the form of a public denunciation. “Somehow or other I will punish you,” she announces. Though imprisoned, her voice “will fill the trees / and wring great sobs of grief from senseless rocks.”20 Note here Philomela’s determination to cast aside decorum and to speak out. She will use her voice in ways that will not only move others but also evoke grief from inanimate objects, even from the stones that we shall later see as “patient” listeners in folkloric inventions.
How does Tereus respond? With savage violence in the style of a scene from a horror film, he uses pincers to grab Philomela’s tongue and cuts it out, even as she is still struggling to speak. Spared no details, we read on as Ovid tells us: “Its stump throbs in her mouth, while the tongue itself / falls to the black earth trembling and murmuring, / and twitching as it flings itself about.” Even after his appalling act, Tereus continues (“they say”) to violate Philomela’s mutilated body. In this moment of utter desolation, “they say” becomes a beacon of hope, signaling that some are now finally telling Philomela’s story and filling the woods with denunciations.