Amores 1.7 has elicited different reactions from its readers. Saara Lilja, for one, believes that ‘Ovid is as shocked at his violent fit of jealousy as if he had committed an atrocious crime.’66 Other critics, however, are not as persuaded by Ovid’s alleged remorse and self-disgust,67 especially since he himself callously flashes back to the scene in the Ars Amatoria (2.169 ff.). Calling attention to Ovid’s extensive use of myth (a feature of love poetry that we shall examine in the next chapter) and other literary devices, Ellen Greene contends that he ‘metaphorizes the woman right out of sentient existence and again diverts attention from his violent behavior to his poetic virtuosity’.68 Ovid’s use of imperatives in demanding that Corinna seek revenge likewise points to his continuing attempts to control her,69 a control unmasked as well by the cold final request that she at least clean herself up.
Like Cahoon, Greene argues that Ovid’s poetry depicts the life of the lover not as an alternative to the demands of the dominant culture at Rome (a main pretence of elegy, as we have seen), but rather its complement; or, as she phrases it, in Ovid ‘amor often reiterates the mercantilist and imperialist values in Augustan culture’.70 Fredrick, on the other hand, finds in elegy’s violence a quite different relation to contemporary Roman society, namely that it records Roman men’s ‘vanishing capacity for political action’ under the new Augustan regime rather than their propensity for domination.71 In effect, for Fredrick, the puella’s body presents a site for documenting contemporary male frustration (a thesis that may, of course, be of little comfort to the puella herself) – a broader social and political disempowerment that, as we shall see, is potentially reenacted on the male body itself in Catullus’ Attis poem. In charting gender and power in terms of physical force, however, it may be important to determine whether violence is ever reciprocal: does ego ever suffer abuse at the hands of the puella, as Ovid demands of Corinna?
In 1.6, Tibullus accepts for himself ‘harsh laws’, namely that if he praises another woman, he may be attacked in his eyes or by his hair, even thrown into the street (69–72); but Propertius goes the furthest of all the love poets when he makes Cynthia the aggressor in two important poems. In the first, Propertius claims to be thrilled by a night-time brawl (rixa) with his enraged lover (3.8). Recounting the event, Propertius dares Cynthia to go beyond simply throwing things at him by directly assaulting his body (5–8). All these marks of violence, he asserts, will furnish him with ‘signs’ of her deep passion (9). Calling himself a ‘true interpreter’ (17), Propertius excitedly hopes that his male contemporaries will witness his ‘wounds’ (21–22), and so understand Cynthia’s ‘real’ feelings. James Butrica notes that ‘violence as proof of sincerity was well established in ancient erotic lore, but Propertius here hammers at the theme with an intensity and exaggeration unparallelled elsewhere’.72 Moreover, we should underscore two points of contrast with Ovid’s attack on Corinna: firstly, Propertius places his own wounded body in the reader’s gaze, and secondly, he believes that its public display will elicit envy rather than shame.
The contrast between the abused Propertius and the abusive Cynthia is taken to its extreme in poem 4.8 when Cynthia assumes almost superhuman powers in seeking revenge on the poet who foolishly holds a dinner party in her absence.73 Cynthia appears in only two of the poems in Propertius’ final book (4.7 and 4.8), and her presence there confounds the oft-repeated dictum that Propertius wishes to move away from Cynthia and elegy itself in his fourth book (an idea that will be discussed further in chapters 4 and 5). Propertius begins 4.8 in dramatic fashion: ‘listen to what put the well-watered Esquiline to flight and sent the peoples living near by scurrying’ (1–2). He explains that Cynthia had departed for Lanuvium and in response to her abandonment he decided to hold his own party with two young women. Suddenly a loud sound issues from the gates: Cynthia has returned (49–50). The next twenty lines describe the havoc Cynthia wreaks on the party-goers (51–70), a scene Propertius compares to the spectacle of a city being sacked (56).74
Cynthia first goes after the two women (57–62), then, ‘like a conqueror’, she attacks the poet himself, striking his face with the back of her hand and bloodying his neck by biting it (63–66). Cynthia eventually turns to Lygdamus, the slave we saw in Chapter 1, who pleads in vain to Propertius for help (67–70). In the final part of the poem, initiated by Propertius’ own act of supplication, the two lovers settle their terms, a scenario meant to resemble a formal surrender (73–74). Forbidding Propertius the sites and activities that will put him in contact with other women (such as Pompey’s colonnade, the forum during festivals and the theatre), Cynthia also demands that Lygdamus be shackled and sold (75–80). Propertius immediately accepts her conditions, leaving Cynthia to laugh rather ominously, ‘made arrogant with power [imperium] handed over to her’ (82). The two then purify the house, ultimately ‘laying down their arms on the well-known couch’ (88).
As Richardson notes, ‘the tone throughout the poem is mock-epic’75 and its rich play with the idea of militia amoris is evident. Propertius, however, subverts the usual expectations by making Cynthia rather than the male ego the soldier or, here, conquering general. Cynthia’s acceptance of imperium, the specific power or authority granted to Roman military leaders, affirms the superiority of her position for contemporary Romans, meaning that if Roman imperial power indeed serves to structure the amor of love poetry, Cynthia is clearly its beneficiary in this poem. So, too, by making Cynthia humorously re-enact Odysseus’ homecoming and revenge on Penelope’s suitors, Propertius effortlessly slides Cynthia into the role of one of the most famous male heroes of myth.
In a celebrated poem from Book 1, Propertius seems to do the precise opposite, using myth instead to enshrine Cynthia’s passivity (1.3); as the poem progresses, however, any inherent alignment between gender identity and the active role in love is brought seriously into question.
Cynthia Wakes
Propertius begins 1.3 by comparing his sleeping lover to a series of mythological women: Ariadne resting after Theseus’ abandonment, Andromeda sleeping after her rescue and a maenad worn out by her ‘incessant dance’ (1–8).76 While each woman has a different source of slumber, Propertius’ descriptions cumulatively call attention to female inactivity. Many critics have argued further that, by drawing on these specific moments from myth, Propertius is intentionally referencing popular scenes in Roman art, creating an over-determined tableau of female flesh as he enthusiastically invites the reader to join with him in gazing on Cynthia’s inert form.77 In addition, Propertius’ use of myth serves to establish an elevated tone for the scene, a means of idealizing Cynthia.
Having set the stage, Propertius then recounts his own drunken approach, a depiction of male action as ineffectual and inappropriate. Compelled by desire, he thinks to act upon Cynthia’s supine body, that is, ‘to take up kisses and arms’ (16), a phrase that signals his potentially violent intentions; however, he admits that he is afraid to disturb her (17–18). As Propertius phrases it, he instead merely looks upon her like Argus, who guarded Io with his one hundred eyes (19–20). The objectification of Cynthia continues as Propertius attempts to arrange and decorate her static body (21–26); he claims that he himself froze every time she stirred, fearing that she was dreaming about an aggressor who wanted to force her against her will (27–30), a mirror of his own initial reactions to her vulnerable state.
But the moon soon falls across the window, and it wakes Cynthia, whose rebuke of Propertius fills the remainder of the poem. As one critic writes of the turn the poem takes,
Cynthia’s dream-shattering speech that concludes the poem is made to reuse elements of the wording of the elaborately idealistic opening section. The ironical effect of this is clear: Cynthia, crushingly and conclusively, flings back in Propertius’ face his own idealization of her.78
Or, as another critic phrases it, ‘When she begins to speak, Cynthia seems to wrest control from the narrator and take over her own focalization.’79 A s
imilar dynamic occurs in 2.29b, when Cynthia punctures Propertius’ rapturous description of her sleeping form by voicing her own perception of the scene; perhaps most significantly, she ridicules Propertius’ pleasure in watching her by calling him a speculator or ‘spy’ (31), an insult that casts watching (or possessing the gaze) not as a position of power, but as one deserving contempt.
In both these poems, Cynthia has the final word and Propertius seems to be offering his readers a glimpse of what it might look like (pardon the pun) for the puella to ‘speak back’ to the events taking place.80 So if the female body is often presented as passive in love poetry, as an object of the gaze or even abuse, does Propertius’ poem suggest that speaking grants the puella greater access to power and subjectivity?
The Puella Speaks (Puella Loquens)
Female speech is, of course, not the only means for unsettling dominant male narratives. When Dido refuses to respond to Aeneas in Book 6 of Virgil’s Aeneid, her silence serves as a powerful form of resistance, a refusal to validate Aeneas’ version of events.81 Yet, as one scholar has remarked, ‘the representation of speech is commonly conceived as one, if not the only, way for a literary text to represent something beyond itself.’82 So can the puella locate herself beyond the bounds of love poetry through her speech?
In examining the role of the female voice in Catullus’ poetry, Judith Hallett provides a helpful list of passages in which women are cited in direct quotation, a list that includes the deflating comments that so provoke Catullus in poem 10, as well as the many allusions Catullus makes to the work of Sappho.83 Significantly, while Catullus refers to Lesbia’s conversation seven times in his text, he never records her actual speech.84 The most famous example of female speech in Catullus’ poetry falls outside his love poetry per se, although the poem provides an important model for later Latin love poetry.
Ariadne’s Lament
Written as what is often called an ‘epyllion’ or mini epic, Catullus 64 features two interlocking stories: that of the wedding of Peleus and Thetis (Achilles’ parents) and that of Ariadne, who helped the hero Theseus navigate the Minotaur’s labyrinth only to be subsequently abandoned by him on a deserted island. Moreover, the poem incorporates the story of Ariadne and Theseus through an ingenious device: the description of a coverlet on Peleus’ and Thetis’ marriage bed which is decorated with the scene of Ariadne standing distraught on the beach as she watches Theseus sail away.85 As one critic notes, ‘Looking, gazing, watching – seeing – is Ariadne’s most characteristic activity’ in the poem,86 and the reader’s first encounter with Ariadne plays openly with the idea of vision, since even as the reader’s gaze is directed towards Ariadne, she herself is shown actively watching Theseus. Although Ariadne seems to claim a kind of subjectivity through her vision, the narrator constantly reminds the reader that Ariadne is simultaneously the object of our gaze, describing her hair in disarray and her body exposed, her clothes falling off as she forlornly wades into the water (63–67).
Temporarily digressing to explain Ariadne’s plight (76–115), the poem soon records her famous seventy-line reproach of the absent Theseus (132–201). In her speech, Ariadne expresses her considerable bitterness towards Theseus, while also reminding him of his earlier dependency on her. She concludes with a curse that Theseus bring death to himself and his family with the same mindset that allowed him to abandon her (192–201), namely his ‘forgetfulness’ or ‘carelessness’ (cf. 248). Ariadne despairs of the futility of her speech, but, in fact, her words hold considerable power since the narrator tells us that the ruler of the heavens nods assent. The poem then shows the fulfilment of her wishes as Theseus, arriving home, forgets to change his sails, making his own father believe he is dead. Despondent, Theseus’ father hurls himself from the rocks, causing Theseus, as the poem states, to feel the same grief he brought to Ariadne (246–250).
As a formidable piece of female self-expression, Ariadne’s speech resonates throughout later literature; Catullus’ Ariadne provides a model for Virgil’s Dido, and Ovid imports her directly into his Heroides (7). Critics have also identified the poem’s influence on Propertius 1.3, which begins with a kind of ecphrasis of the sleeping Cynthia (one that compares her explicitly to the abandoned Ariadne), but soon yields to her voice.87 Cynthia even gives an Ariadne-like curse when she calls for symmetry between male and female experience, specifically that Propertius endure nights like hers (39–40). Gardner links Ariadne to love poetry’s puella in even more fundamental ways, suggesting Ariadne ‘represents a disruptive force’; she expands that Ariadne ‘anticipates the puella’s marginalized position and thus better identifies the elements of female subjectivity that Catullus hands down to his elegiac successors’.88 For Gardner, Ariadne’s isolation epitomizes women’s distinct relationship to space and time.89 We would like, however, to continue emphasizing the specific links between female voice and subjectivity by returning once again to Propertius’ Book 4.
Cynthia and Cornelia
Ovid records only brief glimpses of the puella’s voice in his Amores (e.g. 2.18.8 and 3.7.77–80, the latter chiding him for his impotency), although he personifies the genres of tragedy and elegy as women who speak in 3.1, a poem that we shall look at in the next chapter. Propertius, as we have seen, gives Cynthia a voice in 1.3 and 2.29b, but there are only two other passages in the first three books that record her voice directly (2.15.8 and 3.6.19–34). On the other hand, Propertius occasionally plays with the spectre of Cynthia’s voice: in 2.8, he accuses her of never saying ‘I love you’ (12), casting not her speech, but its withholding as sadistic;90 in 2.24b, he conversely (and self-servingly) puts words into her mouth, fantasizing that she will praise him in elaborate fashion when he is dead (35–38).
Propertius’ most extensive experimentation with the female voice, however, occurs in Book 4, where he presents an unprecedented series of speaking women. The dramatic changes of Propertius’ fourth book have long produced divided opinions over how it pertains to the rest of his work: is Book 4 a departure from his earlier love poetry or a means of expanding its boundaries? Maria Wyke proposes that ‘the range of women who speak in the fourth book […] contribute[s] to an innovatory, bipolar poetics’ creating ‘a range of elegiac tones that oscillates between the aetiological and the amatory, the public and the private, the grand and the sorrowful’.91 Among its other devices, Book 4 features the return from the dead of that most loquacious of all puellae: Cynthia, who most definitely has more to say.
Cynthia appears in a dream to Propertius in poem 4.7, a poem that has elicited immense scholarly interest.92 Puzzling through the difficult juxtaposition of a poem pronouncing Cynthia dead (4.7) with one showing her very much alive (4.8), Wyke suggests that the pair intentionally responds to epic models, balancing an allusion to the Iliad and the appearance of Patroclus’ ghost in 4.7 with the return of Odysseus from the Odyssey in 4.8.93 Writing about the poem in 1949, William Helmbold focuses on the ways that Propertius seeks in the poem to find a pointed kind of closure with his puella, observing wryly: ‘It is clear that Propertius is uneasy about his treatment of his former mistress, both before and after her death, and hopes to clear his conscience by making her posthumously exonerate him […] This, in modern jargon, is called Wishful Thinking.’94 Others have taken the poem as an ending not with his puella, but with the genre of elegy itself.95 However, beyond the questions of poetics (to which we shall return in the next chapter), what does it mean that Cynthia does not merely return from the dead, but so emphatically speaks?
In a striking reversal of 1.3, the poem begins with Propertius rather than Cynthia in sleep; Propertius is a passive participant throughout: ‘things happen to him. He is lying in bed, the “dream” appears, speaks, vanishes.’96 When Cynthia materializes before him, Propertius describes first how ravaged her body is; she appears as she was in burial, no longer possessing the idealized body of the puella (7–10). Cynthia’s voice has patently ‘outlasted’ her body (11–12) and she
proceeds to deliver an impassioned speech of eighty-two lines. Still, she alludes to the corporeality of the two lovers’ relationship before she departs, ominously laying claim to Propertius’ own body by boasting that she will eventually grind his bones with her own (93–94).97
Earlier in the speech, Cynthia emphatically inverts the standard accusations of female ‘levity’ by accusing Propertius of being inconstant and using ‘deceitful words’ (21) and later insisting on her own faithfulness (51–54). But it is Cynthia’s self-consciousness about her own place in Propertius’ poetry that perhaps best indicates her potential power, for Cynthia forcefully states that ‘long was my reign in your work’ (50). Soon after, she commands the actual destruction of his poetry: ‘And whatever verses you have made in my name, burn them. Stop taking honours through me’ (77–78), thus attempting to wrest her representation from his control. She orders him instead to tend her grave near the Anio River, and even dictates a song, or carmen, to place on it (85–86). The destruction of Propertius’ poetry – demanded, of course, within that poetry – remains a complicated injunction,98 but as Flaschenriem asserts, ‘when she “composes” her own grave monument […] Cynthia adopts a polemical, and highly authoritative, mode of discourse, one that was reserved in Books 1–3 solely for the male speaker. She becomes an authorial figure in her own right, a rival narrator within the text.’99 In essence, Cynthia seems to acquire at least temporarily the ‘power to’ dictate her own role in – and departure from – Propertius’ love poetry.
Latin Love Poetry Page 9