Propertius uses another reanimated female voice to narrate the very final poem of his collection: that of Cornelia, a figure whose status as an upper-class wife (indeed, we can identify her as Augustus’ stepdaughter) brings sharp contrast with Cynthia. In 4.11, ‘a formal piece in good rhetorical tradition’,100 Cornelia addresses her husband Paullus, while also presenting a ‘defence’ of her life to the gods of the Underworld, a life distinguished by its connections to noble ancestors, her blameless conduct, the survival of her children and marriage to a single husband (29–68). ‘This is the highest wage [merces] of a woman’s triumph,’ she says, ‘when free opinion praises her well-deserved marriage bed’ (71–72). Readers over the centuries have praised the poem’s depiction of Cornelia as a faithful and self-sacrificing wife;101 Richardson, however, detects darker themes at work, suggesting that it
is not only indictment of the cruelty of the untimely death of a much admired young woman of the highest Roman aristocracy, but more significantly it amounts to an indictment of the life Rome required of the women of its nobility.102
Cornelia’s voice, then, seems to function as a kind of reproach to the conventional values attached to marriage, provocatively presenting her virtue in economic terms (as a ‘fee’ or merces), a characterization that might suggest her similarity to the courtesans of love poetry, who, as we shall see, are located through their own set of material relations.
The female voice, then, seems to allow the puella a means of self-expression that places female experience in the spotlight, but what about the possibility of desire as a basis of female subjectivity? Another woman in Propertius’ Book 4 gives voice to female desire more directly, presenting it as a serious challenge to both the state and male order.
Voicing Female Desire
Although love poetry pivots on ego’s alleged attempts to ensure that the puella is faithful in loving him, her actual desires are rarely considered.103 When female desire is evoked, it is generally presented as either dangerously misplaced or excessive, the lack of female self-control being a common trope in ancient writing. Presumably responding to Cynthia, Propertius decrees in 3.19, ‘You always throw my desire [libido] back at me; believe me, yours orders you around even more’ (1–2).104 Catullus is much more blunt in his attack on his puella’s desire when it is ostensibly directed elsewhere, sending a message that she ‘live and be well’, while ‘busting the balls’ of her three hundred lovers (11.17–20). Ovid’s Ars Amatoria also presents female desire as a manifest threat,105 although in one passage he seems to perceive it more positively when he implies that sexual union with women, as opposed to boys, is advantageous precisely because it satisfies both parties (2.681–684) – a passage we shall return to.
But there are also occasions in Latin love poetry that seem to contemplate female desire and its relation to oppressive social structures more sympathetically. Sulpicia’s poetry, for example, gives direct voice to the desires of a female ego thus ‘reveal[ing] an acute sensitivity to the transgressive role of female sexuality in Roman society and literature, while […] deftly articulat[ing] a far less restrictive vision of female passion’.106 When Ovid turns to address his female readers in Book 3 of his Ars Amatoria, he casts them as Amazons, a mythical group notoriously emblematic of female power and self-sufficiency.107 Propertius mentions Amazons four times in his poetry (including 3.11.13–16, 3.14.13–14, and 4.3.43–44), but it is his use of the Amazons as a model for Tarpeia in Book 4 that announces well her role as a ‘spokesperson’ for the dangerously disruptive nature of female desire (4.4.71–72).108
Tarpeia’s Fatal Passion
The myth of Tarpeia is distinctly Roman. As the story goes, the Sabine forces were besieging Rome in response to the rape of the Sabine women (see Chapter 5); Tarpeia agreed to open the Capitoline citadel to them and their leader Titus Tatius in exchange for what was on their arms, presumably meaning the gold bracelets and other jewellery they wore. Having gained access to the Roman fortress, however, the Sabines rewarded Tarpeia by offering an alternate interpretation of her request and instead crushed her to death with their shields.109 Tarpeia’s story, set in Rome’s distant past, became a kind of paradigmatic account of civic betrayal for the Romans,110 and evidence suggests that images of Tarpeia were especially resonant in the Augustan era with its growing focus on public morality.111
Propertius begins his own version of Tarpeia’s story with conspicuous focus on the topography of Rome, a focus characteristic of the entire book, proclaiming that the poem will explain the ‘Tarpeian grove and the shameful grave of Tarpeia’ (4.4.1).112 Propertius calls attention to Rome’s appearance in former times and draws heavily on the meaning attached to various spaces in the city. Indeed, Tarpeia’s problem ensues in part because she is caught symbolically between two prominent sites: the Roman forum, where the Sabines are based, and, above that, the Capitoline, where the Roman fortress stands.113 Like the Roman writer Varro (116–27 BCE), Propertius makes Tarpeia a Vestal Virgin, ‘a public role that emphasizes her duty to the state and raises the heinousness of her treason’.114 In assigning her an office that was both sacred and civic – one that required, among other things, the chastity of women holding the position115 – Propertius conceives Tarpeia’s desires as subordinated to, even the property of, the Roman state. Thus, her status as Vestal Virgin complicates the main motive Propertius attributes to her betrayal, for Propertius makes love for Tatius the basis for Tarpeia’s traitorous act.
As a Vestal Virgin, Tarpeia descends the Capitoline hill daily to collect her ritual water, and it is when she is drawing water for Vesta that she catches sight of Tatius and falls instantly in love, ominously dropping her urn in the process (15 ff.). Once Tarpeia falls in love – and feigns reasons for going down to seek water – Propertius reports that on her climb back up the hill, her arms are now torn by brambles (27–28), using the scars on her body as a physical record of her growing incompatibility with both the city and her sacred task. It is from the slope of the Capitoline that Tarpeia gives her lengthy monologue,116 and it is from here that Tarpeia laments, as the narrator phrases it, the ‘wounds [of love] that were not endured by nearby Jupiter’ (29–30).
Tarpeia begins her speech by proclaiming her willingness to serve as a captive of the Sabines (31–34), then bids goodbye to Rome and Vesta (35–36). Musing that Tatius is more deserving of power than Romulus, ‘who, orphaned, was nurtured by the harsh breast of the animal she-wolf’ (54–55), Tarpeia adamantly appropriates the idea of marriage, calling Rome’s betrayal ‘her dowry’ (56). Later, after she has betrayed the city gate (87), Tarpeia asks Tatius to name the day of their wedding (88); he responds by telling her to ‘marry and climb my royal bed’ (89–90), the word ‘climb’ meant to recall their treacherous ascent of the Capitoline. He then crushes her beneath the shields of his companions. Echoing Tarpeia’s earlier language, the narrator professes that ‘this, maiden, was the fitting dowry for your deeds’ (92). The poem closes with the reminder that the hill thereafter took its name from Tarpeia, notifying a ‘watcher’ (presumably Jupiter) that ‘you have the reward of an unjust fate’ (93–94), a sentiment that, while it may refer to the undue capture of the citadel, may also signal that Tarpeia’s end is undeserved.117
The poem raises a multitude of questions as Tarpeia struggles unsuccessfully to ‘reconcile the irreconcilable: her private passions and the needs of the state’.118 Her attempt to redefine marriage, one the narrator throws back at her in reuse of the idea of a dowry, seems barbed in the context of Augustan marriage law, but, as Propertius shows us in his final poem of Book 4, even involvement in a marriage that satisfies the demands of the state does not ensure a happy outcome. By allowing Tarpeia to express her own perspective and desires, many scholars maintain that Propertius’ poem ultimately shows clear sympathy for her plight and, in so doing, presents a fundamental challenge to the structures of power that order Tarpeia’s world.119 We might even say that in Propertius’ poem Tarpeia is ‘
an example not of how the individual threatens the state, but rather how the state threatens the individual’.120
Traces of Tarpeia resurface in Book 4 when Propertius associates one of the women at his impromptu dinner party with the ‘groves of Tarpeia’ (4.8.31–32). When Ovid evokes Tarpeia in the Amores, however, he returns to the more familiar motive associated with her: her alleged desire for financial reward (1.10.49–50), an accusation often levied against love poetry’s puella, as we shall see next chapter. In deliberating the intersections of gender and state power, however, Propertius employs another crucial figure in Book 4: the mythical Hercules. And for Hercules the dilemma is not so much the contingencies of female desire, but rather the very boundaries of gender itself.
Gender and Cross-Dressing
Elegy undertakes an important examination of gender boundaries on the few occasions when it depicts acts of cross-dressing or transvestitism. Unlike some of Shakespeare’s memorable heroines, the puella herself never appears in men’s or boy’s clothing; the possibility is imagined entirely from the male perspective and features two prominent figures from Greek myth: Achilles and Hercules.121 According to myth, as a young man, Achilles was dressed in girls’ clothing at his mother’s behest and hidden on the island of Scyros to avoid being identified and taken along to the Trojan War. Ovid labels Achilles’ act of ‘disguising his manhood’ ‘shameful’ in the Ars Amatoria (1.689–696), but, by chance, Ovid continues, there was a young girl in the bedroom, and ‘she discovered he was a man through his rape of her’ (698). Ovid then pronounces the foul sentiment that Deidamia wanted to be raped and begged Achilles to stay (Ars 1.703–706). Beyond its skewed notions of female consent, what seems most significant in this passage is Ovid’s attempt to repudiate any ambiguity in Achilles’ gender-bending disguise: the line between ‘man’ and ‘woman’ is firm for Ovid despite any surface role-playing; Achilles ultimately shows (or rather confirms) his ‘true nature’ in his sexual domination. Propertius, on the other hand, is much more open-ended in his portrayal of Hercules (4.9), exposing rather than fortifying the tenuous boundary separating masculinity and femininity.
Hercules on the Edge
Hercules is not the only character in Book 4 associated with cross-dressing; the narrator of poem 2, a statue of the god Vertumnus, demonstrates his shape-shifting abilities by claiming his suitability for both the garment of the puella and the toga worn by men (4.2.21–24), a duality that epitomizes the view of many scholars that the entire book probes the line between ‘masculine’ epic (epitomized by Rome or Roma) and ‘feminine’ elegy (love or amor).122 The myth of Hercules was prominent in the Augustan era, connoting both Hercules’ strength and his role as a civilizing force; he was at various times appropriated by both Mark Antony and Octavian.123 As one of the book’s many aetiological poems, poem 4.9 specifically recounts the origins of the Ara Maxima in the Forum Boarium, a story involving the theft of Geryon’s cattle by Cacus and Hercules’ subsequent punishment of him, a story also told in Virgil’s Aeneid (8.185–275). Although Hercules does not speak in the Aeneid, Propertius expressly gives him a voice in 4.9, and while this Hercules speaks ‘with Vergilian grace and dignity’, ‘what he says is something else again’.124
Propertius’ poem is meant to explain the origin of the Ara Maxima, but he departs from that story to focus on a subsequent event: Hercules’ attempts to quench the thirst he acquired from killing Cacus at the sanctuary of the Bona Dea. While worship at the Ara Maxima was limited to Roman men, the celebration of the Bona Dea was pointedly restricted to upper-class women.125 In the Augustan era, the restoration of the sanctuary of the Bona Dea was attributed with great fanfare to Augustus’ wife, Livia, suggesting its prominence within the Augustan programme of moral reform.126 Propertius’ allusion to both these rites, then, provides the crux of the argument that the poem is strongly invested in responding to the Augustan regime by dismantling contemporary ideas about gender.
As Hercules first approaches the sanctuary of the Bona Dea, Propertius calls attention to its seclusion and the secrecy of its rites in regard to men (4.9.23–26). Hercules nevertheless approaches the doors and gives a speech requesting entry, one meant to mirror the pleas of the excluded lover in the stock paraclausithyron.127 While extolling his accomplishments, Hercules urges that if anyone inside is frightened by his appearance, they should remember that he wore a ‘Sidonian gown’ and worked the distaff; ‘a soft [mollis] band,’ he says, ‘bound my hairy chest and even with rough [duris] hands I was a fitting girl’ (45–50). In claiming the identity of a puella, Hercules refers to his time as the slave of Omphale, Queen of Lydia, service that involved their explicit exchange of gender roles.128 Far from disavowing that episode, however, Hercules seems to embrace the ‘authenticity’ with which he managed both genders; his careful use of language claims mastery of both ‘softness’ and ‘hardness’.129
In response, the priestess of the rites denies Hercules entry, reminding him that the site is forbidden to men and that water flows only for girls (53–60). Hercules, in turn, breaks down the door violently, drinks his fill, and issues a proclamation that the Ara Maxima, won so gloriously by him, subsequently be closed to puellae ‘so that the thirst of the outsider Hercules not go unavenged’ (67–70). Given Hercules’ own claims to a fluid or plural gender identity, this ‘resolution’ has invited considerable debate: does Hercules, to borrow Ovid’s phrasing, ultimately ‘prove’ his manhood by crashing down the doors and imposing his own restrictions on worship?130 Or is Hercules’ vigorous ‘reassertion’ at the end unable to dissolve all the uncertainty that has been introduced? Does ‘the perfumed scent of the god’s feminine boudoir [linger] in the Roman monument’?131 Janan argues that Propertius’ poem, in the end, seeks to expose the conceptual failings of gender itself as a system, for even though Hercules may try to bar women from his altar, his own experiences suggest the futility of any attempt to demarcate a precise boundary between women and men.132
Perhaps the most shocking violation of gender boundaries occurs in Catullus 63, a poem outside the main body of Catullus’ love poetry, which begins with the self-castration of a young man named Attis during a ritual frenzy provoked by the goddess Cybele. The lengthy poem portrays an anguished Attis trying to come to terms with his act, while also carefully exploring the meaning of his bodily loss on gender identity and even language itself.133 Skinner suggests that the poem portrays ‘the personal and social consequences of an aborted ephebic transition’: that is, Attis’ failure to leave behind his boyhood in socially appropriate terms.134 Reading the poem ‘as a response to political conditions’, while also adhering to Michel Foucault’s insistence on ‘a causal connection between changes in Roman political conditions and new modes of subjectivity’, Skinner further contends that Attis’ abject relationship to the powerful Cybele ‘reflects elite alarm over perceived restrictions on personal autonomy and diminished capacity for meaningful public action during the agonized death throes of the Roman Republic’.135 In contrast to earlier ideas about violence and the puella’s body in the Augustan Age, then, Skinner sees Attis’ disenfranchisement as a Roman citizen being performed through the mutilation of his own (male) body.
The possibility of male loss written exclusively on the male body invites us to turn to another critical feature of Latin love poetry: its recurring reference to the world of men.
In the Company of Men
Although Latin love poetry clearly places the romantic pursuit of the puella at centre stage, it persistently references the role of other men in witnessing these affairs; as we saw earlier, Propertius delights in the bruises Cynthia gives him precisely because he can show them off to other men (3.8.21–22). Even more, the love poets frequently address various male friends or acquaintances, situating them, in effect, as the internal audience or ideal reader. In Propertius’ Book 1 alone, over half the poems are addressed to other men, including some that are otherwise seemingly ‘about’ Cynthia.136 By making men the arbi
ters of one another’s affairs, love provides the means for establishing not merely an erotic bond with the puella, but also social bonds within a wider male community; as one critics phrases it, in Propertius’ poetry ‘a relationship with Cynthia is a shared relationship between men’, one ‘that even rivalry can reinforce’.137 In similar ways, when Ovid negotiates with Corinna’s husband in Amores 2.19 and 3.4, the puella becomes simply a tool ‘in the process of establishing male relationships of mutual interest and solidarity’.138 Scholars have often termed such male-centric networks ‘homosocial’, and Eve Sedgwick, in her seminal study, writes that ‘in any male-dominated society, there is a special relationship between male homosocial (including homosexual) desire and the structures for maintaining and transmitting patriarchal power’.139
A man named Gallus is addressed in four poems in Propertius’ first book (poems 5, 10, 13 and 20), while an epitaph is given to someone of that name in 1.21 and a seeming reference made to the dead man in 1.22, the latter two part of Propertius’ contemplation of the Perusine War in the closing of Book 1.140 Gallus is perhaps the most intriguing of the many male figures evoked in Propertius’ poetry, with critics divided over whether he should be read as the earlier love poet Cornelius Gallus.141 Moreover, there is not even consensus as to whether all of these references to ‘Gallus’ should be taken as the same man given the numerous inconsistencies across the poems.142 As Miller points out, one of the ‘problems’ with Gallus’ representation in Propertius is his seeming association with homosexual desire in 1.20, a form of passion that is otherwise unattested in the surviving writings about and by the poet Gallus.143
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