The fantastic age of the old women attacked in Roman invective is conventionally expressed by a list of hyperbolic comparisons with heroes and heroines of Greek mythology. Some examples:14
quae forsan potuisset esse nutrix
Tithoni Priamique Nestorisque,
illis ni pueris anus fuisset
who perhaps could have been the nurse
of Tithonus, Priam, and Nestor,
if she hadn’t been an old woman when they were boys
(Pr. 57.3–5)
Pyrrhae filia, Nestoris noverca,
quam vidit Niobe puella canam,
Laertes aviam senex vocavit,
nutricem Priamus, socrum Thyestes
Daughter of Pyrrha, stepmother of Nestor,
a woman whom Niobe as a girl saw white-haired,
Laertes as an old man called his grandmother,
Priam his nurse, Thyestes his mother-in-law
(Mart. 10.67.1–4)
istud … belle
non mater facit Hectoris, sed uxor.
This … thing
not Hector’s mother does becomingly, but his wife.
(Mart. 10.90.5–6)
The lists share a basic structural characteristic: they define the women in terms of family relationships. Not only are these old women coevals of the proverbially elderly, they are part of the family, and they are not wives. They are daughter, stepmother, grandmother (also in Mart. 3.93.22, contrasted with wife), mother-in-law, sister (Pr. 12.2), wetnurse, even mother (specifically contrasted with wife, Mart. 10.90, 11.23.14). At Pr. 57.7–8 and Mart.10.90.3 (cf. 8.79), the old woman is also specifically denied to be a girl, puella. The point of this definition of the old woman is that in each case she remains extremely eager for sexual intercourse, often directly rejected as a partner by the narrator, and in the crudest terms: ne desim sibi, me rogat, fututor, “she begs me that I not desert her as her fucker” (Pr. 57.6, cf. 12.5–7); vis futui gratis, cum sis deformis anusque, “you want to be fucked for free, when you’re ugly and an old woman!” (Mart. 7.75.1). The woman in Mart. 10.90 is reproached for depilating her crotch, and told this activity is proper to wives, not mothers. Thus in each case old women are marked off from sexual union with men (wifehood) by a demonstration of disgust at sexuality in old women, and the statement is clearly made that sexuality is attractive only in young women (wives).
As the fantastic age and non-marital family status of old women bars them from intercourse, so the bestial ugliness of all repulsive women in satire stigmatizes intercourse with them as disgusting (though not inconceivable). Animal invective is unusual in Latin15 by far the most extreme examples apply to women.16 At its mildest such invective compares old women to crows, proverbially long-lived;17 the woman who persists in depilating her crotch is told not “to pluck the beard of a dead lion” (Mart. 10.90.10).
The invective becomes more specific when it deals with a woman’s physical flaws, either part by part or focusing on a single part. The most notable examples of the part-by-part technique18 are Horace’s Epodes 8 and 12: in 8, the woman is described as old (1–2), black-toothed and wrinkle-browed (3–4), with flabby stomach and misshapen, swollen legs (9–10), with an anus like that of a cow with diarrhea (5–6) and breasts like a mare’s teats (7–8); in 12, she is “fit for black elephants” (1), and smells like an octopus or a goat (5), bedaubed with cosmetics made from crocodile dung (11). Martial (3.93) compares a woman with grasshoppers, ants, spider-webs, crocodiles, frogs, gnats, owls, goats, and ducks. When a poet focuses on a single part, it is generally the woman’s genitalia: often depicted as filthy and loose (compared with the buttocks of the statue of a horse, the gullet of a pelican, and a salt fishpond, Mart.11.21.1, 10, 11, with other, non-bestial comparisons; described as crawling with worms, Pr. 46.10); sometimes too bony (Mart. 3.93.13, 11.100.4); sometimes white-haired (Mart. 2.34.3, 9.37.7); too noisy (Mart. 7.18).
Some generalizations can be made about the referents chosen. Many of the animal referents are outlandish, and have unusual shapes and sizes as well (elephant, octopus, crocodile, pelican); insects are even further removed from humanity. The descriptions often allude to diseases, smell, and/or fecal matter, and relate the woman to one of an animal’s orifices, especially mouth or anus (cf. Cat. 97.7–8, where the mouth of a male victim is compared with the vagina of a urinating she-mule). At the same time the idea of decay is also often present (putidam, putres, Hor. Epod. 8.1, 7; putida, Pr. 57.2; putidula, Mart. 4.20.4), so that the worms of Pr. 46.10 are surely those of decomposition, despite the fact that the woman is addressed as puella (Pr. 46.1). Old women themselves are repeatedly addressed as corpses, from the imagined funeral of Horace Epod. 8 to direct equation (caries vetusque bustum, “decay and old tomb,” Pr. 57.1; mortua, non vetula, “a dead woman, not an old one,” Mart. 3.32.2); one woman is imagined as lusting in her grave (Mart.10.67). What is more startling, the genitals themselves are treated as the women’s relics or tombs (inter avos … tuos, “among your ancestors,” Mart.9.37.8; busti cineres, “the ashes of your funeral pyre,” Mart. 10.90.2), and Martial concocts an elaborately grotesque funeral/wedding, ending with the line intrare in istum sola fax potest cunnum, “only a funeral torch can get into that cunt of yours” (3.93.27). It might be postulated that the disgust attributed specifically to the female genitalia, as an outlandish, foul-smelling, possibly diseased or decayed, and bestial orifice, is generalized in satire to the woman as a whole, and especially when the narrator wishes to reject her sexuality.
In fact old women evoke the most intense expressions of fear and disgust, along with a sense that they constitute a sort of uncanny other. The role of old women in ancient literature includes a range separate from the role of mother – old nurse and adviser, madam, witch; and the sphere of activity of the witches/nurses/advisers in Latin literature is primarily sexual and perverse. Like the aged nurses of tragedy and epic who lead Phaedra and Myrrha astray, Dipsas in Ovid’s Amores (1.8), the lena of Tibullus 1.5, and Acanthis in Propertius 4.5 serve as the companion of the poet’s mistress and advise her to be promiscuous. Their function is to remove the attractive young woman from the poet’s exclusive control and to pervert the sexual behavior of the mistress; the old woman’s role easily combines that of witch and madam (cf. Mart.9.29.9–10). Witches also have the ability to charm a beloved (Vergil Aeneid 4.478–521; Hor. Epod. 5.81–82). But their charms include abortifacients (Juv. 6.595–597; cf. Ovid Am. 2.14.27–8) and poisons (Juv. 6.610–617), so that they pervert the traditional female functions of procreation and feeding and make them deadly.
Moreover, witches can directly threaten male characters. Horace’s awful Canidia tortures a little boy (Epod 5). The witches in Hor. S. 1.8 perform fearsome magic rites near the statue of Priapus, plucking poisonous herbs with which to control people’s feelings; he frightens them away by farting, and undercuts their importance by revealing them as old women with false teeth and hair (46–50). The crones at the end of the Satyricon (134–138) try to bring Encolpius back to sexual potency with an eye to their own satisfaction, finally inserting in his rectum a leather phallus anointed with a mixture of oil, pepper, and nettleseed. And the witches of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses embody wrongful knowledge: Meroc, who urinates on the narrator and causes the horrible death of the man who tries to desert her, the narrator’s friend Socrates (M. 1.11–19); the anonymous witches who cut off Thelyphron’s nose (M. 2.30);19 and, paramount, Lucius’ dangerous hostess, whose arts provide the means whereby his mistress turns him into an ass (M. 3.24–26). Old women in these cases represent a side of female behavior that maliciously threatens males with cuckoldry, sterility, usurpation, rape, or death, all of which activities any male would presumably wish to discourage, and all of which weaken the assumption of male control over women.
The same sort of threat appears to emanate from female genitalia.20 As has been shown, the genitals form a major vehicle for invective based on animal metaphors, and disgust for them reaches the point of a perce
ption of them as decayed or dead. It should be noted that nowhere in Latin is there a favorable direct portrayal of female genitalia;21 they are described only as part of repulsive women.
The outstanding example of such a description forms part of the Priapic poem from the Virgilian Appendix, listed in the Oxford text (151–53) as Priapeum “Quid Hoc Novi Est?” (83 Bücheler). The poet threatens his recalcitrant penis: instead of lovely boys (21–23) and girls (24–25), the penis will be forced to enter the horrible vagina of a very old woman (26–37):
bidens amica Romuli senis memor
paratur, inter atra cuius inguina
latet iacente pantice abditus specus
vagaque pelle tectus annuo gelu
araneosus obsidet forem situs. 30
tibi haec paratur, ut tuum ter aut quarter
voret profunda fossa lubricum caput.
licebit aeger, angue lentior, cubes,
tereris usque donec, a, miser, miser
triplexque quadruplexque compleas specum. 35
superbia ista proderit nihil, simul
vagum sonante merseris luto caput.
A two-toothed mistress who remembers old Romulus
is ready, amidst whose dark loins
lies a cave hidden by a flaccid paunch,
and, covered by skin wandering in year-long cold,
cobwebbed filth obstructs the door.
She’s ready for you, so that three or four times
this deep ditch can devour your slimy head.
Although you’ll lie there weak, slower than a snake,
you’ll be ground repeatedly until – o wretch, wretch,
you fill that cave three times and four times over.
This pride of yours will get you nowhere, as soon as
your errant head is plunged in her noisy muck.
In this poem the threat embodied by the vagina is abundantly clear. It is to be feared by the personified phallus; it is foisted off onto a repulsive person, the aged woman, while the attractive boy and girl in 21–25 tempt the reader with only external parts of their bodies. The vagina is sinister (latet, abditus,28) and physically dangerous; a cave or deep ditch (specus, 28, 35; profunda fossa, 32), it will devour and grind the phallus (voret, 32; tereris, 34) for which the author expresses pity (a, miser, miser, 34). It is filthy; hidden by the belly (iacente pantice, 28) and covered by folds of skin (vagaque pelle tectus, 29), it collects dirt over the years (araneosus … situs, 30). It is also intrinsically foul – cold (annuo gelu, 29) and mucky (sonante … luto, 37).
Latin is weak in metaphorical obscenities,22 and the presence of any consistent sexual analogy is worthy of notice. As has been seen, female genitalia are compared in Latin with foul, wet, enclosed spaces and with the enclosure of the tomb, the perception which accords well with that of “Quid Hoc Novi Est”; other terms for the female genitalia include fossa, “ditch” (Pr. 46.9, 78.6; cf. Juv. 2.10); barathrum, “abyss” (Mart. 3.81.1); recessus, “inner parts” (Mart.7.35.7). This negative view places the writers of invective in an ambivalent position. They can discover the genitalia, exposing what really lies inside the shell of a woman, as does this Pompeiian graffitist, who wrote on a doorway (CIL 4.1516):
hic ego nu
laudata a multis set lutus intus eerat
Here I now fucked a gril beatiful to see,
prased by many, but she wass muck inside.
But this implies personal experience; the narrator has touched the foul substance. Alternatively, he can define female genitalia out of the realm of the sexual, as does Martial (10.90.7–8):
erras si tibi cunnus hic videtur,
ad quem mentula pertinere desit.
You are wrong if this seems to you to be a cunt,
to which a prick has ceased to pertain.
Cunnus then = id ad quod mentula pertinet; but no more specific positive description exists in Latin. The heterosexual satirist must then experience what he despises in order to expose it, or reject it without explaining what he would prefer.
Roman humorists thus use two stances when writing invective against repulsive women: rejection, in which the male narrator refuses to have anything to do with the woman beyond describing her; and revelation, in which the male narrator describes the loathsome features of a woman with whom he has had intercourse. The first stance seems logical, separating the narrator from the foul qualities he enumerates. The premise is that the woman begs the narrator to have intercourse with her, and he tells her to go away; for example, Pr. 12, in which the god spends the first six lines on the great age of the woman, 7–9 describing her prayer that the god’s mentula not desert her, and the last six lines speaking his command to her. He tells her to remove her genitalia from his presence: tolle … procul et iube latere, “take it far away and order it to hide …” (12. 10).23 But the disgust and desire for separation evinced by such a stance are somewhat undercut by the narrator’s attention to detail, for the reader is obviously meant to be fascinated as well as repelled; the moralistic speaker of Mart. 10.90 uses some of the crudest obscenities in Latin.
And so in Horace Epod. 12, as in other poems,24 the narrator specifically describes himself as in bed with the woman he loathes. This imagined coupling has great force, repeatedly and graphically exposing the reader to smell, sound, and feeling, as well as to sight. The writer commonly rejects the woman not only verbally but physically, boasting that she cannot arouse him; whereas normally impotence is cause for shame and chagrin (e.g., Ovid Am. 3.7), here it is a sign of the woman’s failure. Appropriately, it is the writer’s genitalia which reject such women on his behalf.25 Yet the writer is somehow sexually involved with the woman; in “Quid Hoc Novi Est,” the act of being ground up paradoxically (and, in the poem, regrettably) causes the penis to grow (33–35).
Like the women whom the writer does not touch, these women beg, offer gifts (Hor. Epod. 12.2), and even promise large amounts of money. The ludicrous monster in Hor. Epod. 12 reverses the norms of elegy, comparing herself with the beast of prey and her lover with the fleeing lamb or kid (12.25–26). She has the alarming strength of a wild animal; so, too, the writers attribute strength to the offers of money, which can be persuasive.26 Thus this theme is tied with that of captatio of wealthy old women by impecunious suitors (e.g., Juv. 1.37–44).
The revelatory descriptions, then, aim at exposing and vitiating female attempts to control a sexual situation in a male way. Where the woman offers money (as male lovers in epigram often do), the narrator wants to make it clear that the money itself is the only attraction – the woman is worthless in herself, and the narrator is doing her a favor even to touch her. Where the woman offers only herself, the narrator again wants to make it clear that the initiative rests with him: he decides whether the woman should be rated as human or bestial, and without his arousal there is no intercourse. The underlying message here is not one of fear but of assertion. In the social situation of love-making, the male retains control by his right to choose how he will perceive the female.
Conclusions
The nature of Roman invective against women leads to three generalizations. First, at the most elemental level, invective against women flows from the wellspring of satire, fear of the other: in this case, female genitalia and old women other than wives and mothers. Fear produces mockery, which disguises the fear as contempt (fear plus power), adds the further disguise of humor, stratifies the situation (the satirist has the better of his victim), and establishes an otherwise unattainable control over the feared object. The practice of depilation by Roman women demonstrates their cooperation with the male anxiety expressed in invective.27 The female genitalia, which apparently swallow up the male, and the anomalous old woman (too old to be a wife, yet not a mother), once stereotyped and castigated no longer have as much power over the male. They are re-created to conform with the satirist’s fantasies: thus he controls them. For the issue is not primarily one of sex, but of power – or it is sexual only ins
ofar as sex can be used to implement and signify power. The reduction of women, first separated into “attractive” and “repulsive,” to stereotypes viewed part by part enables the satirist to view women as intrinsically vile, both morally and physically. (And surely, when the elegists invert this relationship between normative male and flawed woman, the change is only superficial; the relationship remains preoccupied with power, the woman viewed part by part is controlled by the viewer, dominance pairs off with submission, and the inversion serves mainly to titillate poet and reader.)28
The more specific significance of the female genitalia can be seen by comparison with invective against male homosexuals. The beautiful boy is the male equivalent of the attractive woman, and the anal area of such boys is often described and praised, unlike the genital area of attractive women.29 Adult “pathic” homosexuals are the male equivalent of old and/or repulsive women, and the anal orifice of such men is often attacked in terms similar to those used of repulsive female genitalia.30 Only very rarely are male genitalia described as disgusting (an old man’s penis. Catullus 25.3; Mart. 11.46). It is clear that an orifice which is penetrated by the penis, or which submits to the penis, becomes disgusting when the one who submits is one who is normally barred by age from such submission. Being penetrated always signifies submission; but where it is proper, in Roman culture, for young women and boys to submit to adult males, it is not proper for old women and adult males to do so. Hence their orifices are perceived as improbably over-used and stained; hence it is the word puella, “young girl,” which is very commonly used to mean “mistress” or “prostitute.” But why is there no praise for the genitalia of the young woman? The answer seems to be that, in fact, there is only a cunnus when the mentula does not pertain to it (when the woman is old); the cunnus of the mistress, wife, and mother simply does not exist. Cunnus in relation to a sexually attractive woman signifies an undescribed but inferior orifice (Mart. 11.43.11–12); the contaminator of the cunnilinctor (common in graffiti; cf. Mart. 12.59); or, by pejorative synecdoche, the woman herself (Mart. 6.45.1; cf. Hor. S. 1.2, 69–71, Pr. 68.9–10). In short the negative perception of the female genitalia precludes their specific association with attractive women – just as breasts are seldom explicitly mentioned except in derogatory contexts.31 Conversely, the anal and genital orifices conveniently represent people deemed inappropriate as sexual partners – old women and adult males.
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