Sibling Relationships: Sources and Context of Canace’s Letter

Canace is not the most famous of Ovid’s heroines, but her letter has been said to be more refined in artistic and literary terms than most of the others.² The number of extant sources for Canace’s narrative is rather low: it is generally agreed that the one with the most influence on Ovid’s account is likely to have been Euripides’s lost tragedy Aeolus.³ The main plot of this tragedy can be gathered from an incomplete hypothesis reported by POxy. 2457, discovered in 1961, as well as from later sources, especially (pseudo-)Plutarch (Mor. 312c-d = Parallela minora 28) and Stobaeus (Flor. 4.20.71–72).⁴ According to these sources, Canace, one of the daughters of Aeolus, is seduced or, in other cases, raped by her brother, Macareus. In this respect, the version of POxy. 2457 is highly ambiguous, since the Greek verb it reports, διέφθειρεν, can be translated as either “seduced” or “raped.”⁵ It seems, therefore, that Euripides portrayed Macareus as “a forceful and aggressive brother,”⁶ whereas Ovid depicts Canace and Macareus’s relationship as a requited love.

Although the pronoun ipsa (“I myself”) and the conjunction quoque (“too”) emphasize Canace’s willingness to engage in a relationship with her brother, “quoque does suggest that it was Macareus who took the initiative” and therefore alludes to the alternative, possibly Euripidean, version of their story.⁷ After having sexual intercourse with her brother, Canace becomes pregnant but manages to hide her pregnancy from her father by pretending to be ill. In the meantime, Macareus, having succeeded in persuading Aeolus to arrange marriages between his daughters and sons, reassures Canace about their future. However, Aeolus decides to draw lots to determine which of his sons will marry which of his daughters, and the lots fail to assign Canace to Macareus.

After Aeolus discovers Canace’s childbirth, he orders his grandchild to be killed and sends a sword to Canace, as an apparent invitation to commit suicide. At this point, it seems that Macareus again succeeds in persuading his father to spare Canace and the child, but the heroine, unaware of these events, kills herself with the sword nonetheless. The moment preceding the suicide is precisely when the Ovidian Canace writes her letter. After Macareus discovers that Canace has committed suicide, he also kills himself with the same sword.⁸ This conclusion of Canace’s narrative highlights the dramatic irony intrinsic to Heroides 11. While knowledgeable readers of Ovid are aware that the heroine is going to kill herself immediately after she is finished writing her letter, as her final words suggest (“mandatis obsequar ipsa patris,” I shall myself perform my father’s orders; 128), they also know that this suicide is “both ill-timed and unnecessary,” since both Canace’s child and Macareus could have been safe.⁹ Canace’s anticipation of her suicide produces a metaliterary effect, whereby Canace’s survival is strictly tied to the writing of her letter: Canace survives while she writes, but she will die (by self-murder) after having finished her epistle. Canace’s writing is what keeps her alive, whereas the interruption of the process of writing implies the interruption of her life.

Like Phaedra’s letter, Heroides 11 can also be profitably interpreted vis-à-vis narrative theory. As a female storyteller and writer, Canace is comparable to the female narrator par excellence, Scheherazade, who is the (fictional) storyteller of the Middle Eastern collection of tales known as One Thousand and One Nights. As Adriana Cavarero shows, Scheherazade lives in order to tell stories and is alive because of storytelling itself: through her strategy of delaying the stories she is narrating, which arouse the curiosity of the prince who is keeping her prisoner, Scheherazade not only escapes death but also creates life (by giving birth to three children).¹⁰ By contrast, it is precisely a kind of suspension or interruption (of writing) that foreshadows Canace’s suicide in Heroides 11. While Canace’s suicide is also a consequence of her child’s death, the result of Scheherazade’s storytelling is her giving birth. Therefore, the proliferation of texts corresponds to a proliferation of stories and life; conversely, an interruption of text/writing corresponds to a disruption of stories and life.¹¹ But is this proliferation a never-ending (re)generation of stories? Is Canace’s (or Scheherazade’s) storytelling due to end? Does the story truly finish with, or because of, Canace’s suicide?

As Heroides 11 stages a story that is told subjectively, its narrative ends only for the narrating self, but the educated reader knows that a sequel does exist.¹² As is usually the case within the Heroides, which, as we have seen, open a window on many different versions of the same story (see the introduction, above), Ovid’s Canace suggests that this conclusion is only one of many possible endings to her narrative. The interruption of this story from the perspective of the intradiegetic and subjective narrator (Canace) opens up the opportunity for the reader to imagine various outcomes. In this respect, Ovid has Canace exploit an intrinsic feature of ancient mythology, which is not fixed, univocal, and indisputable, as, for instance, the Judeo-Christian tradition of the Bible is supposed to be, but changeable, fluid, and often subject to plurality. Ancient mythology continuously proposes alternative versions to those that are best known. The range of possible alternatives makes the story and the “body” of the text particularly malleable, plastic, and adaptable to alterations. The materiality of such a multifarious and variable text leads to its transformation into a different corporeal entity in Heroides 11, namely, Canace’s child, whose inclusion within Canace’s narrative changes the body of the letter into an actual body—that is, the body of her child.¹³ The possibility that Aeolus would have spared the child in an alternative version of Canace’s story¹⁴ suggests that this double corporeal entity (the text and the child) is what survives Canace’s death both ontologically, as a material body, and discursively, as a literary text.

Another principal actor within Heroides 11, Canace’s father, Aeolus, apparently plays the role of the villain within the narrative of the heroine, who shows her rage against him through the letter.¹⁵ This rebellious attitude culminates in the heroine’s suicide. As we shall see, the suicide materializes Canace’s abjection of herself (to put it in Kristeva’s terms), which is ultimately aimed at restoring her control over her own body. Self-appropriation through suicide is a consequence of Canace’s internal conflict, which derives not only from her struggle with her father, but also from an unresolved relationship with her motherhood, as well as her (maternal) body. Canace’s body is constantly recalled throughout her letter, from its very beginning,¹⁶ where the heroine refers to her own blood, which may stain the libellus she is writing.

The traditional tears that articulate the topos of illegibility of the characters are changed into more macabre blood spots and anticipate the heroine’s subsequent suicide, thereby creating a ring composition with the conclusion of the epistle (see line 128).¹⁷ Canace, like other Ovidian heroines (e.g., Dido in Her. 7.184–185), writes while holding, at the same time, a pen and a sword: “dextra tenet calamum, strictum tenet altera ferrum” (My right hand holds the pen; the other hand holds a drawn sword; 3).¹⁸ This connection between the pen and the sword is very significant, since both objects are notably phallic symbols. From the very beginning of her letter, Canace therefore performs, or forecasts, acts that are not aligned with the expected female tasks, namely, literary composition and heroic self-murder by sword (which Canace maintains she will enact after finishing her letter).

This emphasis on the act of writing continues in the subsequent couplet, which is also characterized by the mention of Canace’s genealogical background. By defining herself as Aeolidos fratri scribentis imago (“the image of Aeolus’s daughter writing to her brother,” 5), the heroine openly refers to her father (Aeolidos), and mentions her brother as the supposed recipient of the letter (fratri), as well as her self-representation as the writer of her letter (scribentis imago).¹⁹ By acting “in this way” (sic), Canace thinks she may be able to please her “harsh father” (duro … patri, 6), which is a conventional expression to indicate a programmatic, and negative, character in elegy, just as in comedy.²⁰ Canace then wishes that her father could be a spectator of her death (necis … nostrae, 7), thereby pointing out that her suicide is a direct result of Aeolus’s will.²¹ However, the following line, “auctorisque oculis exigeretur opus” (And the opus were done before the eyes of him who orders it; 8), is phrased very equivocally, as the substantive opus is too vague—and at the same time too emphatic—to be seen exclusively as a reference to Canace’s suicide. This term, which Grant Showerman generically translates as “deed,” can also be employed in the sense of “creation,” “work (of art),”²² so that it may be understood as a broader reference to Canace’s dead body in its entirety and not necessarily as a specific reference to her suicide, as long as Canace is Aeolus’s opus, that is, his daughter. Moreover, Canace seems to play with the multiple meanings of the word auctor, which can be translated both as “author” (or as the “person responsible” for something) and as “parent” or “ancestor,” so that auctoris … opus may refer either to the result of Aeolus’s will, the “creation” (opus) of Aeolus as a father (Canace, her daughter), or to the opus as literary work, namely, the creation of the “author,” Canace.²³ By producing an overlap between literature (opus as a literary work) and reality (opus as a result of Aeolus’s will, that is, Canace’s suicide; or, as Aeolus’s offspring, Canace herself), the heroine merges the ontological with the linguistic, her storytelling with the actual events happening within her story, her letter with her life.

Canace’s ambiguous discourse characterizes her rhetorical strategy as well as her language throughout her letter. After having ironically highlighted that Aeolus is able to rule over the winds but not control his own ira (“anger”; see 15–16), the heroine refers to her ancestry: even though her lineage seems to be very noble (it goes back to Jupiter), this is completely useless in her present situation (17–18).²⁴ Canace’s mention of her ancestry activates a link with Phaedra (Her. 4.53–62; see chapter 3, above), whose reference to her lineage, however, was meant to genealogically justify her cursed love. Moreover, while Phaedra skillfully uses Jupiter and Juno to validate her incest (Her. 4.131–136), Canace, rather curiously, does not openly refer to Jupiter’s incestuous relationship. By implying that having Jupiter as an ancestor is useless to justify her own incestuous liaison with Macareus to his father, Aeolus, Canace departs from an aspect of Phaedra’s rhetorical strategy that we saw at work in Heroides 4 (i.e., the mention of Jupiter—and Juno—as a means of legitimating her incest).²⁵ Canace’s interplay with the arguments of a fellow heroine is further evidence of the variety and originality that characterize the Heroides as a collection. In fact, Canace’s divine ancestry would not change Aeolus’s decision and does not make the sword the heroine is holding in her hand less effective.

The line-long hyperbaton feminea … manu (20) establishes an opposition between feminea (“feminine”) and ferrum, the sword, which is a man’s weapon. This opposition is enhanced by the expression non mea tela (20), which can be translated as either “weapons not suited for me” or “weapons not belonging to me.” While the literal meaning of the substantive telum would be “spear” or “javelin,” metaphorically it can also mean “male member.”²⁶ As the sword is both a weapon suited to men and the concrete object that has been sent to Canace by her father (see funebria munera, 19: with tragic irony implied in the adjective funebria) to prompt her suicide, such a lexical ambivalence underlines Aeolus’s control over Canace’s body and sexuality, as well as hinting at a different kind of incest, that between father and daughter. This connotation would suggest that a form of jealousy on Aeolus’s part might well have come into play when he decided to punish Canace so harshly for her relationship with Macareus.

Furthermore, the word tela, because of its homography with the first declension substantive tela (gen. telae; see above, chapter 2), may also be interpreted as a pun, which alludes to a more appropriate activity for a woman, spinning.²⁷ The opposition between sword and web is one way to translate symbolically the opposition between male and female genders in antiquity and—perhaps even more so—in Ovid’s poetry.²⁸ Sword and web, however, together with symbolic body acts and attitudes, must be interpreted only as performative markers of expression of a gender, which is in fact determined by social and ideological categories. By holding a pen and a sword in her hands, Canace performs tasks that are more appropriate for men, thereby destabilizing gender categories.²⁹ The next section shows how, along with the subversive interpretation of gender dynamics, Canace’s reappropriation of her maternal experience enables the heroine to depart from the objectified version of herself.

Ovid’s Canace: Ill-Fated Mother, Insolent Daughter

From Aeolus’s point of view, Canace’s transgression is not determined by her incest with Macareus but by the clandestine and illicit nature of her affair:³⁰ indeed, by keeping her relationship with Macareus concealed, Canace escapes her father’s control. Evidence of this affair can only be seen at a later stage, in Canace’s pregnancy and childbirth, which the heroine does not manage to keep hidden from her father. While relating her falling in love with Macareus, at lines 27–30 Canace begins listing what appears to be a series of traditional symptoms of lovesickness. However, the symptoms are depicted in such an ambiguous way that they can be interpreted as the result of either lovesickness or pregnancy. Accordingly, if paleness, thinness (27), and loss of appetite (28), as well as insomnia and groans (29–30),³¹ are programmatic patterns of lovesickness in erotic poetry, these can also be the result of pregnancy.³² Since Canace (the narrating “I”) has already given birth before writing the letter and, as the omniscient narrator, is aware that she would have conceived, we may read these ambivalent symptoms as a rhetorical attempt to blur the boundaries between her falling in love and becoming pregnant. If we accept this ambiguity between lovesickness and pregnancy, the sequence of events appears particularly confused, since the heroine describes her pregnancy as though it happened before she fell in love, thereby generating a sort of hysteron proteron, a reversal in the progression of the story.

The overlap between different temporal dimensions and narrators increases when the heroine distances herself from the moment of the story she is narrating at lines 27–30 and openly acknowledges that the reason for her illness was love: “nec noram, quid amans esset; at illud eram” (I did not know what it was to be in love, but I was in love; 32).³³ After the nurse also remarks that the cause of Canace’s condition was love (“‘Aeoli,’ dixit, ‘amas,’” She said: “Daughter of Aeolus, you are in love”; 34),³⁴ the heroine looks at her belly (35): this act is said to be satis … signa (“sufficient signs,” 36) of her confession. Although Canace’s looking down at her belly may be interpreted simply as a reaction determined by her pudor, the choice of the affective as well as anatomical word gremium (gremio, “belly,” 35) points to the heroine’s lengthy description of her pregnancy and childbirth beginning at line 37 (see venter), which has a strong focus on physical details.³⁵ By using the conjunction iam (“presently,” “now,” 37, with an emphatic value determined by its repetition at line 45), Canace introduces this description rather abruptly, thereby enhancing the overlap between the moment of her falling in love and the beginning of her pregnancy. Falling in love and pregnancy are therefore juxtaposed in the memory of the heroine, who appears to be no longer able to distinguish between the two events. Perceived as a traumatic experience, pregnancy leads Canace to become alienated, and depart, from her body and what is growing within her, the fetus. The rejection that her offspring generates is an initial abjection of her motherhood, and of her (pregnant) body.

As observed, the reference to Canace’s pregnancy comes unexpectedly (iamque, 37).³⁶ The unlawful nature of her relationship with Macareus is recalled only implicitly through the expression vitiati pondera ventris (“the burden of my corrupted belly,” 37), where the participle vitiati (“corrupted”) refers to her incestuous intercourse, as well as hinting at the version of the narrative portraying Macareus as her sister’s rapist.³⁷ This connotation is reinforced in the following line (38), characterized by the parallel construction aegraque furtivum membra … onus (“weakened limbs”/“secret load”), where the iunctura of furtivum … onus (“secret load”) indicates the clandestine nature of Canace’s pregnancy, as well as her need to keep it concealed.³⁸ The next six lines (38–44) refer to the heroine’s frustrated attempts at ending her pregnancy through herbs or medicines that the nurse (nutrix, 39) has given and applied to her (attulit … supposuitque, 40), in order to eradicate from her belly the crescens onus, “increasing burden” (41–42).³⁹ Whether the reference to Canace’s abortion attempts is an Ovidian invention or not,⁴⁰ it is worth noting that abortion is an unusually recurring feature within Ovid’s elegiac poetry (particularly when compared to other elegiac poets; see Am. 2.13, 2.14).⁴¹ Pregnancy (or motherhood) is noticeably antithetical to elegiac love, and abortion represents for the puella a means to both preserve her beauty and (perhaps more importantly) keep her adulterous affair(s) hidden from her husband.

Remarkably, in Canace’s epistle the role of the “legitimate” husband is played by Canace’s father, who is the one who becomes angry after his discovery of Canace’s affair and pregnancy. This overlap between paternal authority and sexual jealousy is a subtle allusion to Aeolus’s ambiguous role within Canace’s epistle and narrative. As mentioned, Aeolus’s jealousy seems to go beyond his preoccupation with maintaining control over his children’s sexual relationships, and may imply an erotic inclination toward his daughter. A historical and legal reading of abortion, which could have been a reason for divorce according to Roman law but was not considered to be a strictly illegal act, suggests that Canace’s actions are not only a way to escape her father’s judgment and jealousy, but may have also been at variance with the norms established by Augustus’s family policy encouraging procreation and parenthood.⁴² Considered a way for women to control their procreative capability, as well as depriving their husbands of offspring, abortion must have appeared particularly threatening to the male Roman citizen.⁴³ The emphasis on Canace’s abortion articulates both the patriarchal (ancestral) preoccupation with female control over procreation and the more contemporary Roman, and Augustan, concern with parenthood and childbirth.⁴⁴

In the fictional universe of the Ovidian letter, Canace’s abortion attempt, however, does not succeed (43–44): while representing a sort of personification of the fetus, the expression nimium vivax … infans (43) also suggests that Canace is, at least unconsciously, proud of the strength of her child, who manages to resist the attempts to abort him. These coexisting feelings at such an early stage within Canace’s narrative reveal an inner conflict between the heroine’s desire (and need) to separate from her depersonalized self (that is materialized by her child) and the maternal affection she feels for her unborn baby.⁴⁵ Canace’s ambivalent attitudes can be read as an expression of the abjection of her pregnant body. Caused by something that is perceived as disturbing for the incorruptibility and stability of the self, abjection—as theorized by Julia Kristeva—is manifested by the need to expel a part of one’s own body that is felt to be “unclean.”⁴⁶ This abject element is not recognized immediately, but is acknowledged in the symptoms, as is Canace’s pregnancy; it is suspended between the inside and outside, and delimits the borders of the body; its nature is highly ambiguous and liminal—as liminal as the condition of the fetus.⁴⁷

Thus, the still unborn corporeal entity growing within her body represents for Canace a part of herself that she needs to forgo, to abort. The fetus is the expression of an “other(-ness)” that is still within her body but needs to be either eliminated or expelled. The unborn child embodies a sort of abject “other,” which has already been appropriated, and determined, by patriarchal norms: to be objectified and materialized as this “other,” the child needs to be generated (that is, expelled). Accordingly, by giving birth, that is, by expelling the “abject other,” Canace is able to define her subjectivity within a male-dominated context as a counterpart of the objectivity that she generates (the child).⁴⁸ Therefore, Canace’s contradictory attitude toward her own pregnant body arises from the combination of her willingness to eliminate (i.e., abort) the abject part of herself (the fetus) and her desire to expel and objectify it (as a child).

This expulsion is enacted through childbirth, which is described from line 49 onward. At lines 49–50, Canace observes that her secret childbirth was assisted by the nurse, who prevented her groans: the word crimina (“crime,” “guilt,” 49), because of its indeterminacy, may refer both to incestuous intercourse and pregnancy.⁴⁹ Concurrently, since crimen is also widely used to indicate adulterous and illicit relationships (as we saw above), crimina may hint here at the incestuous nature of Canace’s liaison with her brother, as well as implying that it goes against Aeolus’s will. Line 49 (“nec tenui vocem. ‘quid,’ ait, ‘tua crimina prodis?’” along with line 64, below) recalls Phaedra’s reference to her mother’s monstrous childbirth in Heroides 4.58 (“enixa est utero crimen onusque suo,” [She] brought forth in travail her crime and burden), but Canace uses crimen to allude to either her own affair or her pregnancy (or both). Thus, the word crimen recalls both the incestuous and adulterous connotation that also characterizes Phaedra’s letter.

To conceal this crimen, Canace has to stifle her groans, in spite of the pain she feels: timor et nutrix et pudor ipse (“fear, the nurse, and shame itself,” 52), rhetorically marked by a syllepsis, are said to inhibit Canace’s cries.⁵⁰ This tricolon is paralleled by the content of the following lines, where three reactions to the labor are also mentioned: “groans” (gemitus, 53), “words”/“screams” (verba, 53), and “tears” (lacrimas, 54).⁵¹ Aside from being interpreted as typical reactions to the pain of childbirth, these attitudes also articulate Canace’s struggle against a part of herself that she now sees as abject. As the “inability to assume with sufficient strength the imperative act of excluding,”⁵² abjection leads Canace to her attitude fluctuating between the need to keep herself united (by eliminating the abject element from her body) and her desire to expel, engender, and objectify this (abject) part of herself (that is, the child as an-other-self) in order to define and establish the borders of her subjective identity.

In this respect, when the heroine states that she has to stifle her groans and words as well as force herself to drink her tears (lacrimas conbibere … meas, 54), it seems as though the necessity to expel the fetus is balanced by the need to hold together the various parts of herself—here represented by her groans, screams, and tears. In particular, the reference to the gemitus and lacrimae hints at a kind of abjection that manifests itself as corporeal fluids flowing from her body.⁵³ To expel the undetermined and indistinct “fluidity” that the fetus represents, Canace needs to retain, to (re-)include, other fluids produced by her body.⁵⁴ This process of compensation enables the existence of a balance between the “I” and the “other,” interiority and exteriority, inside and outside. At the same time, the acknowledgment of the “abject” element implies a process of self-destruction and regeneration, death and rebirth. This progression from life to death and vice versa is actually experienced by the heroine in the following couplet (55–56), where she describes mors as an epiphany (“mors erat ante oculos,” Death was before my eyes; 55)⁵⁵ and states that Lucina, the goddess of childbirth, did not help her (55). This death, however, does not represent an escape, but would be a crimen itself (with crimen being used twice in the space of a few lines), since it would reveal Canace’s pregnancy (56). Canace’s figurative and metaphorical death is followed by a form of rebirth: the actual birth of her child.

This rebirth is facilitated by the arrival of Macareus, who suddenly appears on the literary stage of the epistle and comforts Canace, both physically and psychologically (57–63). In his words, Macareus candidly refers to Canace as a sister (“vive, soror, soror o carissima”; 59) without refraining from hinting at the incestuous nature of their relationship (see Canace at line 23: “plus me, frater, quam frater amasti”).⁵⁶ After having stated that she was dead (mortua, 63) and came back to life again at Macareus’s words (“ad tua verba revixi”; 63), the heroine says that finally she gave birth: “et positum est uteri crimen onusque mei” (And I laid down the crime and burden of my womb; 64).⁵⁷ Canace’s “reinvigoration” or “rebirth” after Macareus’s words is closely followed by the childbirth: this is described through certain lexical choices recurrent within Heroides 11 in reference to either her pregnancy or her unborn child, particularly crimen and onus (“crime” and “burden”; see 49, 38, 42), which create a chiastic construction with uteri … mei (64). As a form of rite of passage, Canace’s childbirth marks the death and rebirth of the heroine herself, thereby paving the way to the creation of her new subjective identity.⁵⁸

Canace’s subjective rebirth overlaps with the actual childbirth, which results in the generation and expulsion of Canace’s abject self, that is, the body of her child. As the result of Canace’s relationship with her brother, this child is both loved and hated by his mother. As an external object and manifestation of an “abject” otherness, the child both allows the heroine to acknowledge and distinguish her own subjectivity, and to (de)limit it. In Kristeva’s words,

[This] abject simultaneously beseeches and pulverizes the subject[:] one can understand that it is experienced at the peak of its strength when that subject, weary of fruitless attempts to identify with something on the outside, finds the impossible within; when it finds that the impossible constitutes its very being, that it is none other than abject.⁵⁹

By fixing the borders of Canace’s body, the abject body of her child leads the heroine to an acknowledgment of her own corporeality and, accordingly, subjectivity. Moving to the events subsequent to the childbirth, Canace relates her attempts to conceal the baby with the help of the nurse (65–70). The heroine states that the crimina (this is the fourth, and last, occurrence of this word in the epistle), namely, the child that has resulted from her illicit/incestuous affair, is to be removed from Aeolus’s sight: see oculis … patris (“from the eyes … of the father,” 66), with a possible ambiguity between Aeolus as Canace’s father and Macareus as the father of Canace’s child.⁶⁰ At this point, Aeolus’s role within the story starts to become more significant and active than before.

As soon as Aeolus has discovered the newborn, he fills up the court with his cries (73–74). Thereafter, he suddenly bursts into Canace’s bedchamber; she breaks into tears, but is powerless and unable to speak: the expression “nostrum vulgat clamore pudorem” (With cries, he makes known my/our shame to all; 79), with what seems to be an intended ambivalence of the plurale maiestatis, nostrum, together with the adjective pudibunda (“ashamed,” 81), emphasizes Canace’s concern with her reputation, which makes her cry (81). While this mention of tears (lacrimas, 81) may recall the previous scene of childbirth (54), the tears appear in this case to have been caused not only by fear, but mostly because of shame. Aeolus’s irruption into Canace’s bedchamber represents the quasi-obsessive control that “the Father” wants over his daughter’s life and sexuality, as well as her reproductive capability. This concern over Canace’s childbirth confirms that Aeolus’s anger is caused not (only) by incest per se, but by his ignorance of, and lack of control over, Canace’s affair with Macareus.⁶¹

Aeolus’s attitude alludes once more to his putative jealousy with respect to Canace, which does not find a counterbalance in his feelings for Macareus.⁶² Only Canace will be given the sword to commit suicide, whereas Macareus appears to have been able to persuade his father to spare their child (see lines 60–61, above). Canace, by contrast, is not allowed to defend herself with words but remains silent, her only weapon being her letter, her written expression (see Phaedra in the previous chapter). Not only does the heroine appear to be silenced by her father, but her self-expression is paradoxically also limited by the intervention of her brother. Despite acting for her benefit, Macareus moves within the borders of the same patriarchal system as his father, so there seems to be no space for Canace’s intervention; her words would be useless and hopeless.⁶³ By remaining silent, the heroine makes it clear that she needs the intermediary of another male character (that is, Macareus) to gain a chance to be spared: Canace’s expression does not truly matter. Her suicide, therefore, has to be seen as a rebellious counteraction (the only one possible besides her epistle) to the limitations imposed by this male-dominated system, which is hypostasized by her father and brother/lover, rather than simply as a reaction to her father’s order or her child’s death.

The death of Canace’s child is introduced at lines 89–90, where the heroine states that an undefined inimicus (“enemy”) brought her child (mea … viscera, 89–90) into the deep forests (silvas in altas, with anastrophe, 89) “to be eaten” (edenda, 90) by the wolves. According to certain scholars, the inimicus cannot be Aeolus, while others state that he must be Canace’s father.⁶⁴ Whoever the inimicus is, Canace’s report gives rise to questions about the extent of her knowledge of her child’s death. In other words, from what she says, it seems that Canace actually witnesses her child being taken away from her (89), but cannot know with certainty what really happens in the aftermath (91–92).⁶⁵ Therefore, as this death is only anticipated and forecast—but not witnessed—by Canace, the child’s unfortunate destiny may just be seen as her projection of future events, which may or may not have happened. As a rhetorical construction of the heroine, the child’s death would be functional to her attempt to shape her version of the story, thereby escaping the constraints of the paternal, and patriarchal, authority.

The word viscera, an “emotive term for a child,” does not seem to be attested before Ovid to mean “offspring” or “child.”⁶⁶ The overlap between the literal meaning of viscera, which ranges from “flesh” to “internal organs,” and the metaphorical one, “offspring,” enhances the affective identification of Canace with her child. Concurrently, the meaning of viscera as “flesh” articulates the reification of Canace’s child at this point in her letter, in addition to anticipating the sinister transformation of the child into food for wild beasts (see 111–112, 118).⁶⁷ In fact, viscera is only one of many generic, yet metaphorical, ways in which Canace refers either to the fetus or to the newborn throughout the epistle. Beyond being poetic variationes, these alternatives contribute to enhancing the indeterminacy and objectification of the “other” whom Canace is referring to: see pondera ventris (37), onus (38, 42), and infans (43), before the childbirth; onus (64), crimen (64, 66), infans (67, 73, 119), nepotem (83), viscera (90, 118), puer (107), natus (108, 111, 113, 122), and pignus (113), after the childbirth. These terms are characterized in most cases by the neuter, with a few exceptions: infans … tutus (43–44), parvum … nepotem (83), puer (107), natus (108, 111, 113, 122). The prevalent use of generic terms, as well as the neuter forms, confirms that Canace constructs the fetus as an “otherness” with respect to her body. At the same time, her mourning for the (supposed) death of her child in the last part of her letter (111–128) conveys the heroine’s affection for him, thereby showing how Canace’s son is a depersonalized, alien object to be expelled from her body, but at the same time a subject, a person, a child to love. The acknowledgment of her son as a different, external being allows the heroine to recognize herself as a subject on her own.

Childbirth coexists with death within the last section of Heroides 11, as Canace’s suicide and her child’s (putative) death suggest. As if they were on a theatrical stage, after Aeolus leaves, another character enters Canace’s bedchamber, the messenger. Introduced through a chiastic construction, “patrius vultu maerente satelles” (With a sorrowful expression came one of my father’s guards; 93), the messenger is said to pronounce “shameful words” (94), namely, Aeolus’s message, while also bringing a sword to the heroine: these words and this object are meant to make her pursue self-murder. According to James Reeson,⁶⁸ Aeolus has the sword delivered to Canace (instead of giving it to her in person) in order to avoid the miasma (μίασμα) deriving from her death, as well as confining her killing to a spatially distant dimension (see Creon in the Antigone). Moreover, the emphasis on the sword, which is repeated twice in the same case and line (“‘Aeolus hunc ensem mittit tibi’—tradidit ensem”; “Aeolus sends this sword to you”—he handed me the sword; 95),⁶⁹ suggests that the choice of such a weapon is not incidental. As the sword is both a weapon suited for men and a phallic symbol, this insistence on such an object, along with the (possibly) sexually connoted condo in the expression “pectoribus condam dona paterna meis” (I shall bury in my breast my father’s gifts; 98), contributes to the depiction of Canace’s death as an act of symbolic sexual penetration, which is metaphorically perpetrated by Aeolus as an expression of both his power and his (incestuous) sexual desire for his daughter.⁷⁰

At the same time, an anthropological reading would suggest that the ensis (“sword”), indicated as “paternal gift” (dona paterna, 98), recalls the context of an exchange culture and reciprocation, insofar as Canace is forced to give away the child and receives a sword in replacement.⁷¹ The product of her womb, the child, which has been expelled from her body, is exchanged for an object, the sword, which is meant to penetrate her. By saying that she is going to “bury” (condo, 98) the sword in her breast (pectoribus … meis, with one-line long hyperbaton, 98), Canace implies a double meaning (along with the sexual innuendo entailed by the verb condo), that is, to take her father’s gifts to heart both literally (by pursuing her suicide) and metaphorically—with a certain irony implied in this latter sense, as the paternal gifts are certainly not going to please her.⁷² The sword (the paternal gift) represents the dowry that her father (genitor, 99) has prepared for her: line 100 (“hac tua dote, pater, filia dives erit?” With this dowry from you, father, will your daughter be made rich?) shows an evident antiphrasis between pater and filia, which are placed next to each other.⁷³ The coexistence of death (Canace’s suicide) and marriage (see dona paterna, dote) is a leitmotif in the depiction of female characters, particularly in the tragic genre.⁷⁴ Moreover, by recalling the context of Roman marriage, the dos (tua dote, 100), which is traditionally provided by the father of the bride, represents another expression of the patriarchal system, as well as a way to control female members of the family.⁷⁵

Besides hinting at the contemporary legal and social context, the reference to marriage (mea … conubia, 99) alludes to Canace’s possible awareness of the marriage lottery arranged by Aeolus between his daughters and sons.⁷⁶ As Gareth Williams and Sergio Casali point out, if Canace is not, Ovid’s knowledgeable readers are supposedly aware of the tragic irony that the episode implies:⁷⁷ having been able to persuade Aeolus to marry himself to his sister, Macareus might well have also convinced his father to spare the child (and Canace, too). What if Canace were aware of this outcome while pretending not to be? What if the self-murder initially ordered by Aeolus represented, after the following development of events, Canace’s subversive act? Could this ironic connotation be implied in the poetic discourse of (Ovid’s) Canace? The heroine’s insistence on the topic of marriage through her remark that the wedding torches have been replaced by the torches of “the dark Furies” (Erinyes atrae, 103), as well as her wish for a better marriage for her sisters (105–106),⁷⁸ seems to hint at Canace’s knowledge of the existence of a marriage lottery and, accordingly, a possible alternative outcome for her story, and life. This alternative outcome is suggested, but never openly addressed within Heroides 11.

Accordingly, Canace only implicitly refers to such awareness and ends her letter by focusing on the death of her child and her own self-murder. The heroine mentions her unlucky child as a puer (107), which is a rather inappropriate word for a newborn, particularly vis-à-vis Penelope’s choice of addressing Telemachus with the same word at Heroides 1.97.⁷⁹ Continuing her references to her infant, Canace appeals to him with the vocative nate, in anaphoric repetition (111, 113). Canace’s invocations have been linked to Euripides’s Rhesus 896–897, where Terpsichore laments her dead son, while holding his body in her arms.⁸⁰ In this case, however, Canace underlines that she has no corpse that she can mourn, because her child has been given (at least from what she can gather) to the wild beasts to be devoured: rabidarum praeda ferarum … natali dilacerate tuo (“prey of the ravening beasts … torn limb from limb on the day of birth”; 111–112).⁸¹ The emphasis on the child as a pignus (113) plays with the ambivalent meaning of the Latin word (as was the case with Phaedra at 4.120), which can mean both “pledge” and “child.”⁸² The newborn, therefore, is both a pledge (and accordingly evidence of culpability) and the actual “offspring” that results from Canace and Macareus’s union.

The physicality, and materiality, expressed by Canace in the description of her child’s (theoretical) death is increasingly pointed toward the end of the letter (119–128). Canace’s repeated use of viscera (literally, “innards” or “flesh”) to refer to her child (90, 118: viscera nostra) contributes to the heroine’s identification of her child with a part of her own body.⁸³ This is not a part of herself that she only desires or loves, but an entity that both determines her subjectivity and places limitations on it, by giving it a definition. Building on the implications of Canace’s possible knowledge of Aeolus’s change of mind, her suicide is both a rebellious act against the ultimate will of her father and a way to depart from what she perceives as abject, thereby pursuing a reappropriation of her body as well as her subjective identity. This separation, reappropriation, and final identification with her child continues to the end of the letter.

Since the heroine implies that she will kill herself after finishing her letter (128), these lines represent Canace’s last words. By accompanying her dead child to the underworld (see 119),⁸⁴ that is, by killing herself, she maintains that she will neither be called mother nor be bereaved any longer (120). That Canace refuses the name, along with the categories of “mother” and “bereaved,” attributed to her by others (see fuero dicta, “I will have been called”) articulates the heroine’s attempt to take control of her subjectivity. Canace’s death represents not only the end of her life but also the objectified, depersonalized notion of motherhood, as well as grief for her dead child. In this couplet, Canace appears to consider her motherhood a necessary condition for her own existence: the childbirth has determined the development of her subjectivity, not only linguistically and psychologically, but also ontologically. The negation of jouissance that stems from motherhood, which takes place within the patriarchal order, is here amplified by the actual removal of the object of this motherhood, Canace’s child.⁸⁵ At the same time, no one can be sure that Canace’s child has actually died. By contrast, as educated readers, we are allowed to think that the heroine is aware of Macareus’s (successful) attempts to persuade Aeolus to spare his sister and their child too (see Macareus’s words at 61–62). While Canace’s knowledge of the events of her narrative cannot be demonstrated and therefore remains ambiguous, a knowledgeable reader would know about Aeolus’s possible change of mind concerning Canace’s death. In this light, Canace’s suicide would thus represent an act of disobedience against her father’s ultimate will.⁸⁶ With her suicide, Canace therefore challenges the concept of motherhood as it is labeled within a patriarchal frame, by literally neutralizing it.

Moreover, by killing herself by the sword—a phallic symbol—Canace can be said to use both a real and metaphoric “phallus” to destroy an entity manufactured by the law of the Father, namely, the patriarchal idea of motherhood that finds concrete expression in her own (pregnant) body.⁸⁷ However, the phallogocentric system is not only represented by a material object, the sword, but also by Canace’s child, who was incorporated within the symbolic space of patriarchy immediately after his birth. By asking Macareus to bury her with her child (123–124),⁸⁸ the heroine performs a sort of reappropriation of her own offspring, alongside the very moment of childbirth, which has determined the start of her motherhood. In this way, Canace seems to deny a certain construction of the body (particularly the female one) pursued by the cultural context, as well as expressing the reappropriation of her own body, which is performed through an active and subversive bodily expression, that is, her suicide.⁸⁹ This subversive act leads to a deconstruction of the symbolic system established by the patriarchal order, as well as to a (re)conceptualization of her maternal jouissance.

Canace’s redetermination of her identity is accomplished in the last lines of Heroides 11, where she asks Macareus to collect the sparsa … membra (“scattered members,” 122) of their child (the hyperbaton emphasizes the fact that the parts of the body are scattered),⁹⁰ imagining him to have undergone a sort of sparagmos. Such a disintegration of the body of the newborn, be it imagined or not, is part of a process that leads to the heroine’s conceptual reconstruction and, accordingly, her reappropriation of the “othered” body of the child. Indeed, this sparagmos recalls other myths where women act violently against men or their own sons (as in Euripides’s Bacchae), thereby subverting traditional social norms. Furthermore, the substantive membrum itself has a significant sexual connotation, since it may refer to the male member.⁹¹ In light of this innuendo, Canace’s reference to the sparsa … nati … membra tui seems to actualize and materialize the heroine’s deconstruction, her verbal reshaping and appropriation of paternal, and patriarchal, discourse.

Before finishing her letter, Canace prays (rogo, 127) again to her brother/lover to carry out her requests (mandata sororis / perfice, 127–128), while she accomplishes her father’s order (mandatis, repeated with a polyptoton at 128).⁹² The closing word of the epistle is, not incidentally, father (pater, 128), which articulates Canace’s final rebellion against the patriarchal order, as well as her own father. Concurrently, “father” as the last word reminds us that her rebellion is ultimately frustrated, as Aeolus is the one who causes her death. By taking her life, however, Canace remains a symbol of a challenge against both the abstract law of the Father(s) and the more concrete and tangible law/rules of her father. This challenge goes through many steps, as we have seen: the abjection of her own body and, accordingly, of her childbirth, as a product manufactured by the patriarchal order; her use of the sword as a weapon, as well as a phallic symbol, to appropriate the symbolic order of the/her father; the imaginary projection of the death of her child; and finally her reappropriation of the child after his supposed—and her own—death. This physical reappropriation of her own, and her child’s, body would in fact not have taken place if Macareus had also killed himself in the aftermath, as the previous literary tradition suggests. The achievement of a more personal and subjective concept of motherhood, therefore, can be pursued and secured only through an unfailing means, that is, the writing of the epistle. It is Canace’s writing that eventually allows the heroine to rebel against the established patriarchal order, independent of how the story actually ends outside of the fiction. However, the fiction—the written text—is what really counts from the subjective point of view of the heroine. Within the Heroides, this subjective perspective is the only perspective, the only voice. Heroides 11 is not simply Canace’s version of the story; it is the only possible one.⁹³

1. Zimmermann Damer (2019) provides one of the most innovative studies on the materiality of elegiac bodies through the lenses of Grosz’s theorization, but she does not examine the Heroides (see 256n13).

2. See the discussion in Jacobson 1974, 159.

3. For the myth, see Scherling in RE X 1853–1855, s.v. “Kanake”; see also Jacobson 1974, 159–175; Verducci 1985, 198–207; Reeson 2001, 38; also Labate 1977, 583–593; Knox 1995, 257–258; Philippides 1996, 426.

4. The papyrus was studied by Lloyd-Jones (1963, 433–455). It seems that the accounts of (pseudo-)Plutarch and Stobaeus drew on a longer work, namely, the Tyrrhenica, authored by one Sostratus: see Knox 1995, 258; Reeson 2001, 38.

5. See schol. Ar. Nub. 1371: φθείρoντα; Stob. 4.20.72: ἐβιάσατο, with Jacobson 1974, 162–163; Verducci 1985, 198; Casali 1998, 701.

6. Jacobson 1974, 163.

7. Knox 1995, 263. See Hyg. Fab. 243: “propter amorem Macarei fratris” (because of her love for her brother Macareus); Ov. Tr. 2.384: “nobilis est Canace fratris amore sui” (Canace is well known due to her love for her brother), with Jacobson 1974, 163.

8. According to an alternative tradition (Hes. Cat. fr. 10.99–107; Callim. Hymn 6.98–99; Apollod. Bibl. 1.7.4; Diod. Sic. 5.61; Ov. Met. 6.115–116), Canace bears a child to Poseidon; see Reeson 2001, 48.

9. Williams 1992, 201. For the variant readings of line 128, see Knox 1995, 77.

10. Cavarero 2000, 123: “The tale not only stops death, but also gains the time to generate life. Within the narrative scene of the relation, despite its terrifying side, eros and storytelling obey a single rhythm.”

11. Cavarero 2000, 122–127.

12. As Stanley (1992, 246) puts it, “At a certain point, surely, we must accept that material reality exists, that it continually knocks up against us, that texts are not the only thing” (quoted in Cavarero 2000, 127).

13. Drawing from Barthes’s theorization, Cavarero (2000, 127) stresses the equivalence between storytelling and childbirth: “She [Scheherazade] tells, in the text, how the body of the book is the only thing that facilitates the love-making of The Arabian Nights, giving birth to three sons.”

14. Williams 1992, 201–209; Fulkerson 2005, 70.

15. Jacobson 1974, 166–167; also Verducci 1985, 209–210; Fulkerson 2005, 70.

16. A minority of manuscripts report an opening formula (“Aeolis Aeolidae quam non habet ipsa salutem / mittit et armata verba notata manu,” The daughter of Aeolus sends to the son of Aeolus that wish of well-being, which she does not have, along with words written with an armed hand), which has been considered spurious by, e.g., Knox 1995, 73, 258–259; Goold 1977, 132; contra Rosati 1984, 417–426; Reeson 2001, 39–40.

17. For tears of female letter writers, see Her. 3.3; 15.97–98; Prop. 4.3.3–6; see Verducci 1985, 209.

18. See Met. 9.522; see Casanova-Robin 2009, 55–56.

19. The word imago introduces the metaphorical frame of the creation of a visual work of art. These lines contain other hints at this performative context: see videor, placere (6), spectator (7), auctoris, oculis, opus (8), with Casanova-Robin 2009, 63. Such an intrinsic theatricality may result from the influence of artistic sources: see the Vatican fresco (presumably reproducing earlier Hellenistic models) wherein Canace is portrayed together with other female characters from mythology, including Myrrha (see Berger-Doer in LIMC V 1.950–951, s.v. “Kanake”). Canace’s episode might have been influenced also by pantomime (Anth. Pal. 11.254 is evidence for the existence of a pantomime about Canace): see Knox 1995, 258–260; Reeson 2001, 42–43.

20. See, e.g., Ter. Ad. 64; Haut. 439 (also 204–205); Ov. Am. 1.15.17; Rem. am. 563–564.

21. According to Williams’s reading (1992, 207–209) of Ovid’s dramatic irony in Her. 11 vis-à-vis other sources of Canace’s mythological narrative, Macareus was able to persuade Aeolus to forgive Canace, as well as sparing her child (with Casali 1995b, 510–511), at the very moment of Canace’s suicidal act. The implied consequence of this reconstruction is that Canace’s suicide would go against Aeolus’s ultimate will.

22. For Canace as a “work of art,” see Reeson 2001, 42; also Showerman in Goold 1977, 132; Ehlers and Lumpe in TLL online, IX 2, 840–862, s.v. “opus.”

23. See Bögel in TLL online, II 0, 1194–1213, s.v. “auctor.”

24. Here, Ovid refers to a mythological tradition where Canace is Jupiter’s great-granddaughter, but Canace’s ancestry (as well as her offspring) differs according to the sources: see Reeson 2001, 47–48; Knox 1995, 262.

25. See Casali 1998, 707–710; Fulkerson 2005, 71–72.

26. See, e.g., Priapea 9.14, 55.4; Mart. 11.78.6; also Am. 2.9.34; Ars am. 3.734; Her. 2.39–40 (as a possible allusion or metaphor), with Adams 1982, 19–22.

27. See Knox 1995, 263; Reeson 2001, 49; see Penelope at Her. 1.9–10; also Hypermestra at Her. 14.65; Ov. Am. 3.9.30, Pont. 3.1.113.

28. See, most notably, Philomela at Met. 6.549–586, with Richlin 1992b, 162–165; Kamil and Martorana, forthcoming. Within the Heroides, see Dido holding Aeneas’s sword at Her. 7.184, Hermione at Her. 8.60; also Her. 9.115–116, where Omphale is said to hold Hercules’s tela (see chapter 2).

29. On how gender is constructed through performative acts, see Butler (1993, xix): “As a sedimented effect of a reiterative or ritual practice, sex acquires its naturalized effect, and, yet, it is also by virtue of this reiteration that gaps and fissures are opened up as the constitutive instabilities in such constructions… . This instability is the deconstituting possibility in the very process of repetition, the power that undoes the very effects by which ‘sex’ is stabilized, the possibility to put the consolidation of the norms of ‘sex’ into a potentially productive crisis.”

30. See Philippides 1996, 426–439, on (Ovid’s) “normalization” of Canace’s incest (contra Verducci 1985, 221–222); also Reeson 2001, 49–50.

31. For paleness, see Am. 2.11.28; Ars am. 1.120, 729; 2.446, 450; for thinness, see Ars am. 1.733; Met. 3.397, 9.536, 11.793; for insomnia, see Am. 1.2.1–4; Met. 3.396, with Reeson 2001, 53–56.

32. To support this argument, Casali (1998, 703–704) refers to Soranus’s Women’s Diseases (1.17), which lists some effects of pregnancy that occur also in Her. 11 (see also Hipp. Mul. 1.25–34). For a general discussion on the circulation of Greek medical writings within the Roman world, see Nutton 2004, 160–173.

33. For the alternation between the form eram and erat in the manuscripts, as well as related philological issues, see Reeson 2001, 57.

34. The nurse as a love-confidante is quite programmatic in the tragic genre. In Euripides’s Aeolus, the presence of the τροφός is attested by the hypothesis: see Reeson 2001, 57.

35. See Häfner in TLL online, VI 2, 2318–2324, s.v. “gremium”; OLD, s.v. “venter,” 4. The choice of the word gremium enhances the ambiguity of Canace’s behavior, who both looks at her belly and becomes red (beyond being an expression of pudor, the form erubui might also indicate a symptom of pregnancy); see Casali 1998, 702–705.

36. Verducci 1985, 213; Reeson 2001, 59.

37.OLD, s.v. “uitio,” 3: “to impair by violating the virginity of, deflower.” This allusion opposes what Canace said at 25 (ipsa quoque incalui), which led Knox (1995, 263) to maintain: “O. pointedly rejects the version of the myth in which Macareus forces himself upon his sister.”

38. See Rubenbauer in TLL online, VI 1, 1643–1645, s.v. “furtivus”; Knox 1995, 266.

39.Suppono is a specific medical term, which may hint at the nurse’s experience in pregnancies; see OLD, s.v. “suppono,” 2b; also Am. 2.14.27 (subiectis … telis), with Reeson 2001, 61.

40. See Verducci 1985, 214; Knox 1995, 266.

41. See Gamel 1989, 183–206; Kapparis 2002, 117–118, 142; also Watts 1973, 89–101, on Ovid’s abortion poems vis-à-vis Roman legislation. For abortion in ancient medical writings (see, e.g., Hipp. Mul. 1.72), see Nutton 2004, 22, 67, 101–102, 200–202; also Flemming 2000, 169–170, 368–369.

42. See Martorana 2020a, 65–75. Although abortion was not strictly illegal, it was sanctioned by social norms, since it went against the principles of the mos maiorum: see Cic. Clu. 32–35; Fast. 1.621–624; Quint. Inst. 8.4.11–12; Tac. Ann. 14.63.1; Juv. 6.594–601; see Knox 1995, 266; Kapparis 2002, 102, 138–139, 193–194; Treggiari 1991, 406–407, with notes; Dixon 2001, 62–63; for an overview, see Riddle 1992, 7–10. For the relationship between abortion and the preservation of female beauty within the Greco-Roman world, see Kapparis 2002, 113–120; Richlin 2014, 176.

43. Treggiari 1991, 406–407.

44. Kristeva 1982, 77–79.

45. Jacobson 1974, 170.

46. Kristeva 1982, 3–4: “It is no longer I who expel, ‘I’ is expelled. The border has become an object… . Abject. It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object.”

47. Kristeva 1982, 11; also Grosz 1990, 87: “The abject is that part of the subject … which it attempts to expel. The abject is the symptom of the object’s failure to fill the subject or to define and anchor the subject.”

48. As Creed (1993, 37) puts it in her Kristevan reading of the monstrous feminine, the “abject represents that which ‘disturbs identity, system, order (Kristeva 1982, 4). Analysis of the abject centres on ways in which the ‘clean and proper self’ is constructed. The abject is that which must be expelled or excluded in the construction of that self.” See also Grosz (1990, 94): “Abjection is the subject’s and culture’s revolt against the corporeality of subjectivity.”

49. See OLD, s.v. “crimen”; Reeson 2001, 67.

50. This tricolon has been defined as a syllepsis, which, in this case, “places the abstract nouns timor and pudor on the same plane as the nutrix” (Reeson 2001, 69); see Ov. Ars am. 1.551, 3.614.

51. For the handling of parturition and labor in the Roman context, see Tatarkiewicz 2023, 106–136.

52. Kristeva (1982, 64), while quoting and commenting on Georges Bataille’s words.

53. For feminine fluids and related theories in the ancient world, see, e.g., Hipp. Mul. 1 (“Also, because a woman’s flesh is softer, when her body fills up with blood, unless the blood is then discharged from her body, the filling and warming of her tissues that ensue will provoke pain”; for the translation, see Potter 2018, 13); see Nutton 2004, 47–48, 78–80. For a recent study on bodily fluids in antiquity, see Bradley, Leonard, and Totelin 2021.

54. Speaking about the symptoms of abjection, Kristeva (1982, 11) defines it as “a language that gives up, a structure within the body, a non-assimilable alien, a monster, a tumor, a cancer that the listening devices of the unconscious do not hear, for its strayed subject is huddled outside the paths of desire”; see also Grosz 1990, 90–93.

55. In terms of figures of speech, such a description can be said to be a hypostasis, i.e., a particular kind of personification.

56. See Knox 1995, 268, on soror at 59: “The choice of address is poignant, since his attentions are more than brotherly”; also Philippides 1996, 434. In Met. 9.466–467 and 487–488, by contrast, Byblis is not keen on addressing Caunus as her brother and wishes to not be his sister.

57. Some editors, including Burman and Palmer, who quote Catull. 34.9 and Phaedr. 1.18.5, 1.19.4, print depositum instead of positum: for a discussion, see Reeson 2001, 74–75.

58. See Kristeva (1982, 3): “‘I’ am in the process of becoming an other at the expense of my own death. During that course in which ‘I’ become, I give birth to myself amid the violence of sobs, of vomit.”

59. Kristeva 1982, 5.

60.Crimina “may be taken as metaphor for the heroine’s infant, the spring [sic] of an illicit love affair” (Philippides 1996, 433).

61. Jacobson 1974, 168; Philippides 1996, 435.

62. According to the version reported by (pseudo-)Plutarch (Mor. 312c-d) and Stobaeus (4.20.71–72), Macareus’s death occurs because of his suicide, after the discovery of Canace’s dead body—and not because of Aeolus’s will: see Williams 1992, 203–204.

63. With respect to the limitations of female speech within a male-based context, particularly in antiquity, see, e.g., Skinner 1993, 129.

64. While Knox (1995, 272) believes that this inimicus is Aeolus, Reeson (2001, 88–89) thinks that he may be one of Aeolus’s servants.

65. On the plausibility that Canace’s child could be spared, see Casali 1995b, 510.

66. See Reeson 2001, 89; Hines 2018, 20–30; OLD, s.v. “uiscus”; see Ov. Am. 2.14.27; Rem. am. 59; Met. 5.18–19, 6.651, 8.478, 10.465; also Tr. 1.7.20. This meaning may derive from the Greek σπλάγχνα, which is used not only for womb but also for offspring: see Artem. 1.44, with Hines 2018, 39.

67. Hines 2018, 45–50.

68. Reeson 2001, 94.

69. The parenthetic of line 95 increases the pathos of the scene and shows a certain empathy of the author toward the heroine; for a similar repetition of the same word in the same case, see Met. 1.590–591, 5.281–282.

70. A similar sexual connotation of condo can be found in, e.g., Plaut. Poen. 1269; Ov. Am. 3.14.23; see Spelthahn in TLL online, IV 0, 148–152, s.v. “condo.”

71. At the same time, the sword may be ironically interpreted as a sort of childbirth gift for the mother, Canace, which would mark an important moment of passage as well as the acquisition of a role, such as motherhood: on the transcultural meaning of gift-giving for the construction of social roles, see Sherry 1983, 158–159.

72. For (in) pectore condo as “to take to heart,” see Plaut. Pseud. 575–576, 941; Sen. Tro. 580; Apul. Met. 11.25.

73. Knox 1995, 273.

74. On this topos, see Seaford 1987, 106–107; also Hersch 2010, 42, on marriage in Rome; for a broader study, see Rehm 1994.

75. The Latin word dos comes from the same root as the verb dare (cf. Wolff in TLL online, V 1, 2041–2053), which demonstrates how the dowry was closely related to a reciprocation system of giving and/or exchanging gifts: see Lévi-Strauss 1969, 52–69.

76. This lottery was mentioned in the hypothesis of Euripides’s Aeolus (see Lloyd-Jones 1963, 443–444). Following what is reported by this hypothesis, Knox (1995, 273–274) sees in this passage, and in the following lines (101–106), a possible reference to the (Euripidean) marriage lottery, whereas Jacobson (1974, 161) and Verducci (1985, 221–222) think it more generalized.

77. Williams 1992, 201–209; Casali 1995b, 509–511.

78. For “black” or “dark” Furies in Latin poetry, see, e.g., Verg. Aen. 7.329; Sil. Pun. 2.529 and 13.575; Stat. Theb. 11.75, with Reeson 2001, 97–100; some scholars (e.g., Knox 1995, 274), however, have suggested the emendation atras—agreeing with faces.

79. See Harlow and Laurence 2002, 35–43.

80. See Eur. Rhes. 896–897: τέκνον, σ᾿ ὀλοφύρομαι, ὦ / ματρὸς ἄλγος (I weep for you, my child, cause of a mother’s grief); also 886–888: τίς ὑπὲρ κεφαλῆς θεός, ὦ βασιλεῦ, / τὸν νεόκμητον νεκρὸν ἐν χειροῖν / φοράδην πέμπει; (My lord, what goddess above our heads is carrying in her arms a newly slain corpse?).

81. There is an alternation in the manuscripts between rapidarum and rabidarum: see Goold 1977, 140; Knox 1995, 275.

82. Ottink in TLL online, X 1, 2120–2128, s.v. “pignus.”

83. For a similar ambiguity in Tereus’s reference to his son’s flesh as viscera after his infantophagy in Met. 6.651, see Kamil and Martorana, forthcoming; also Hines 2018, 42–43.

84. For prosequor hinting at a funeral context, see, e.g., Am. 1.4.61–62, Tr. 1.8.14. The emendation proposed by some scholars of vulnere with funere (see Reeson 2001, 107) would increase the ambiguity of the line.

85. See Moi (1986, 138) on Kristeva’s essay “About Chinese Women”: “Motherhood is perceived as a conspicuous sign of the jouissance of the female (or maternal) body, a pleasure that must at all costs be repressed: the function of procreation must be kept strictly subordinated to the rule of the Father’s Name.”

86. Fulkerson (2005, 84–85) suggests that Canace’s letter might have changed Aeolus’s decision and saved her child’s and her own life. On the Heroides as “windows” to alternative outcomes of mythological narratives, see Liveley 2008, 86–102; Barchiesi 2001, 29–47.

87. Moi 1986, 154–156; for the (female) body as social inscription and expression of signs, see Grosz 1994, 118–119. On the phallic symbolism of Dido’s suicide, see Desmond 1994, 31.

88. Canace’s request may have been drawn from Euripides’s Aeolus (see Reeson 2001, 108); it also recalls Eur. Med. 1220–1221, where Creon’s and Creusa’s bodies are described as holding each other; see also Sen. Med. 880. A more programmatic version of this topos is represented by the pair of lovers buried together: see, e.g., Met. 4.166 (Pyramus and Thisbe), 11.705–707 (Ceyx and Alcyone).

89. On how “subversive bodily acts” contribute to the construction of one’s gender identity, see Butler 1990, 101–180.

90. See Hypsipyle’s reference to Medea’s sparagmos of Absyrtus in Her. 6.129–130.

91. See Hofmann in TLL online, VIII 0, 633–645, s.v. “membrum”; OLD, s.v. “membrum.”

92. The word mandatum is drawn from legal language and can refer to the last will of a dying person (see Knox 1995, 276–277): see Her. 13.165; Fast. 4.193; Pont. 2.2.43.

93. Casanova-Robin 2009, 65: “La parole est libérée de la contingence, gommant le moi pour mieux le sublimer. La fusion avec l’autre se trouve enfin réalisée, dans un ailleurs fantasmé concédé par l’écriture poétique.”