C`HAPTER 2` Rescripting Phaedra for an Elegiac Role

In chapter 1 we explored the semiotics of mythology in Ovid’s erotodidactic poem Ars Amatoria. Ovid’s narrator manipulates mythological exempla as signs within this semiotic system (or, as Segal has termed it, the megatext) in order to communicate lessons to his reader-pupils.¹ The relations of these signs to each other, to the narrative frame, and to the total system, however, creates meaning sometimes in excess of his intentions. The lists of heroines deployed for the purpose of instruction about seduction and love affairs also reveal female desire to be excessive and bestial. Applying the concept of the abject as formulated by Kristeva and Butler in the previous chapter, we may see how such a construction defines normative desiring subjects by means of their opposites, “threatening spectres,” to borrow Butler’s term (1993, 104), whose desires define the borders beyond which desire is no longer recognizable as human.² In this chapter, we will examine Ovid’s representations of Phaedra (Her. 4) and Byblis (Met. 9.439–665) as authors speaking the same language of myth that constructed their own exemplarity as abject in the Ars Amatoria. I continue to use the term “abject,” following Kristeva and Butler, to describe subjects who define the limits of normal gender roles and generic conventions by embodying what is unacceptable, and who serve as a warning to others not to follow suit.

Phaedra’s account appears in a collection of elegiac epistles written by mythological heroines to their beloveds, possibly predating the Ars. Byblis’s metamorphic story is woven into Ovid’s epic, circulating sometime in the years between Ovid’s Ars and his relegation.³ The heroines share a desire for a family member: Phaedra is famously in love with her stepson, Hippolytus; Byblis’s story resembles the Euripidean Phaedra’s, but her beloved is her twin brother, Caunus. Phaedra’s myth is most famous from Greek tragedy, and Byblis reprises Phaedra’s role, but both heroines choose the elegiac code in order to redefine their relationships to their beloveds. Each hopes this new elegiac expression within a system which valorizes desire will provide a universe in which she is recognized as a lover and not repudiated as a monster. The elegiac epistolary form that they choose offers control over their self-presentation. Ovid, however, is holding the pen. Phaedra’s own relation to the examples she uses undermines her attempts to alter her symbolic meaning. Byblis is thwarted not only by the language she uses in her letter but also by the language of the narrator, who defines and then reiterates her exemplary meaning in the frame.

Conte argues that the Roman erotic elegists redefined Augustan discourse to suit the world of lovers.⁴ “Thus, elegy’s need for recuperation induces it to welcome within itself the values of fides, pietas, and sanctitas.… The fides of elegy is named by a language of love, the chastity requested of Cynthia is not the one a wife and mother austerely displays, and so forth” (Conte 1994a, 39–40). In the world of elegy, Phaedra’s desire for Hippolytus above all other men, and her husband in particular, could potentially be understood as the reciprocal and faithful love that the elegiac lover hopes for from his beloved. The suffering she has endured is a proof of this constancy, and her silence about this desire is not a means of self-denial but a strategy for deceiving those who would stand in the way of the two lovers.⁵ Such a shift in symbolic meaning is possible because words and symbols (such as the meaning of a heroine like Phaedra in the symbolic system of mythology) carry with them multiple connotations (Phaedra is a girl in love, an adulterous wife, a loving mother to her biological sons, and an evil stepmother). The context of the speaker’s utterance and the identity of the speaker using these words guide the audience member toward the connotation appropriate to the occasion and usage. As Conte notes, an elegiac setting privileges an erotic definition of a word like fides.

Julia Kristeva has theorized a process whereby poets exploit the inherent polysemy of words and symbols. She argues that, through this process, poetry may permanently alter a symbolic system. Her understanding of the special power of poetry to disrupt and reconfigure discourses as formulated in her 1974 thesis, La Révolution du Langage Poétique, suggests a way of understanding the power of Ovid’s poem to destabilize discourses of desire while simultaneously representing and reinscribing the Augustan ideologies which they reproduce.⁶ Kristeva borrows the term chora from Plato’s Timaeus to describe her theoretical space in which, before the meanings of words and symbols have been differentiated and established, semiotic relations and categories are in flux, continually formed and dismantled and reformed. This semiotic chora is presymbolic, that is, before meaning, but it is under the influence of the symbolic in the form of psychology and culture.⁷ What separates this space from the order of the symbolic, in which signification and meaning take place, is the lack of differentiation between a speaking or writing subject and other words, things, and subjects. In order for a subject to signify and thereby communicate using language or some other symbolic system, there must be a thesis of a subject, that is, the differentiation of the subject from everything else currently undifferentiated in the semiotic chora (Kristeva 1984, 34–36, 43–45).⁸ She calls this moment the thetic stage, a term I use in this chapter to describe Ovid’s representation of the heroines’ own process of self-identification and self-representation.⁹ Phaedra’s and Byblis’s projects are all about making difference out of sameness (same family; twin brother).¹⁰

The process of signification—using a symbolic system like language to communicate—implies a level of agency because the speaker chooses how they fit into this cultural and linguistic system. Successful communication requires that a speaker assume an identity—in Byblis’s case, sister or lover, for language derives meaning as much from the speaker and their relation to the addressee as from the words they use. Augustan cultural norms would set an expectation that the proclamation of love from a sister to her brother carries a different meaning than the same declaration from a girl to a boy who is not her sibling. Because the positing of the subject that is required in the thetic phase for signification differentiates the subject from and thereby defines an other, “the signifier [of this other thing or person] represents the subject—not the thetic ego but the very process by which it is posited” (Kristeva 1984, 67). In order for the signifier “brother” to refer to Caunus when it is uttered by Byblis, Byblis must first identify herself as a subject who would be a sister in relation to Caunus. This self-identification is a thesis, and situates her simultaneously in the various other kinship relations this position entails: daughter to Miletus and Cyane, granddaughter to Maeander and Apollo, etc. She must make Caunus the other; however, their relations as “desiring subject” and “object of desire” are countermanded by their positions in the symbolic system of kinship. Kristeva’s formulation of the thetic stage reveals the crucial role that an addressee and their culturally determined expectations play in the success of language (or the reader to an author’s text). The identities available to the speaker are constrained by cultural norms and limit the number of speaking positions from which a subject can be “heard” by other members of her community.¹¹

As noted above, both heroines in the episodes we will consider employ the elegiac code in their love letters. Kristeva calls such a generic shift a transposition because it “involves an altering of the thetic position—the destruction of the old position and the formation of a new one. The new signifying system may be produced with the same signifying material” (Kristeva 1984, 59). While Phaedra and Byblis do indeed posit themselves in new relations to their kindred beloveds, the continuity of signifying material—the mythic, tragic, and Augustan symbolic systems—works in reverse to limit and circumscribe the positions a Phaedra or Byblis may take, imprisoning them in the same stereotypes from which they wish to break free. This is the result of the “ordering” Kristeva describes in the semiotic chora: “Its vocal and gestural organization is subject to what we shall call an objective ordering [ordonnancement], which is dictated by natural or socio-historical constraints.… We may therefore posit that social organization, always already symbolic, imprints its constraint in a mediated form which organizes the chora” (Kristeva 1984, 26–27; emphasis added). Phaedra and Byblis take on new elegiac roles, but their choices have already been prescribed by the discourses of myth and female desire which tragedy, elegy, and epic all reproduce. Ovid, the true author of the verses written by Phaedra and Byblis, guarantees their failure. He inserts reminders for their readers of their “tragic” provenance into the epistles which the heroines write and, in the case of Byblis, the narrative frame of her poetry.

Heroides 4 is an example of what Elizabeth Harvey has called “transvestite ventriloquism,” that is, a male author writing in the guise of a woman.¹² She argues, furthermore, that transvestite ventriloquism has a “double-voice,” the “interaction” between the constructed female voice and the male author speaking through that voice.¹³ In the Metamorphoses, Byblis’s letter is created within the story itself. This is not an example of transvestite ventriloquism, for there is no question that the letter is part of Ovid’s epic poem and not the verse of Byblis. I would argue that, because it represents a fictional example of a girl’s letter, the type of letter someone like Byblis or Phaedra would write, her embedded letter has the same double-voice as Phaedra’s Heroidean epistle.¹⁴ Her voice, manipulated by the male author writing it, seems to sabotage its own elegiac thesis. Ovid’s poems demonstrate the uncontrollability and destructive potential of female desire, while simultaneously revealing the limits of the elegiac genre.¹⁵ Although love is the telos of this genre, not all desires are welcome. Phaedra-like desire, as her letter proves, is one such unwelcome love.

Phaedra was the subject of three Attic Greek tragic plays: the fragmentary Euripides’s Hippolytus (Hipp. I) and Sophocles’s Phaedra; and Euripides’s second, extant Hippolytus (Hipp. II).¹⁶ She is the fourth writer in Ovid’s epistolary poems, Heroides. Barchiesi and Kennedy have observed that the Heroides engage with their “source text(s)” and create a tension between the letter writers’ hopes and expectations for their future and the predetermined literary outcome of their stories.¹⁷ At issue in Euripides’s Hippolytus II is the discourse of shame in relation to kinship structures—specifically the shame required to preserve reputation for the sake of the family Phaedra has with Theseus, and especially to preserve their sons’ future status as Athenian citizens. Phaedra’s desire to keep silent is directly related to the παρρησία (“freedom of speech”) of the men in her family.¹⁸ Should Phaedra speak about her incestuous desire, she would invite gossip, damaging the public image of her male kin.

We may be seeing in the extant Phaedra’s violent rejection of female dissimulation, and her self-destructive adherence to traditional roles, a direct response to (or correction of) Euripides’s earlier Hippolytus I, which depicted a Phaedra who approached Hippolytus herself and made her accusations against him to Theseus in person, committing suicide only after Hippolytus is killed. It is this first play (and/or Sophocles’s Phaedra) which seems to be the primary “source text” for Heroides 4, but the epistles in the collection often engage multiple “source texts” and, more broadly, the literary tradition as a whole.¹⁹ Heroides 4 contains multiple echoes of Hipp. II;²⁰ therefore, looking back to the extant Euripidean Phaedra is fruitful for understanding her self-presentation in the Ovidian epistle in terms of its relation to her literary tradition.²¹

Like Phaedra, Byblis is already known to Ovid’s readers as a mythological heroine who is in various ways implicated in an incestuous desire for her brother.²² She has also been identified as a paradigm of female desire by the poet-praeceptor in the first list of mythological heroines considered in chapter 1 alongside Phaedra.²³ Allusive cues direct the reader to assimilate Ovid’s presentation of Byblis’s story to Phaedra’s from the Attic tragedies of Euripides and Sophocles. We may see correspondences to Phaedra’s Ovidian epistle, which offers a mediating text through its own allusive play with the Attic plays. Moreover, as we noted in the introduction, Byblis’s narrative frame also participates in this allusive play, for Caunus is a Hippolytus-like figure, whose (over)reaction recalls that of Euripides’s character in Hipp. II. In Hipp. II, Hippolytus calls the nurse’s message about Phaedra’s desire “unspeakable words” (λόγων ἄρρητον εἰϲήκουϲ᾽ ὄπα, Eur., Hipp. II, 602) and “terrible things” (δείν᾽, 604), and orders the nurse not to touch him (οὐ μὴ προϲοίϲειϲ χεῖρα μηδ᾽ ἅψηι πέπλων, 606), before launching into a speech defending his misogyny (616–67). Caunus reacts with equal horror to the letter Byblis’s messenger has given him. Where Hippolytus orders the nurse to keep her hands off of him, Caunus nearly lays (violent) hands upon the messenger (“and, scarcely holding back his hands from the face of the trembling servant,” uixque manus retinens trepidantis ab ore ministri, Met. 9.576), calls him the “wicked author of a forbidden desire” (o uetitae scelerate libidinis auctor, 577), and orders him to flee (effuge, 578), recalling Theseus’s orders for Hippolytus in Hipp. II (893). Like Hippolytus, Caunus too goes into exile, but of his own accord. We are told that “he flees his fatherland and the unspeakable crime” (patriam fugit ille nefasque, Met., 9.633). Patriam recalls the father’s involvement in Hippolytus’s exile, while nefas echoes the nurse’s “unspeakable words” to which Hippolytus reacts. Finally, Byblis, like the Heroidean Phaedra and other heroines in Ovid’s poetry, rehearses the conflict between love and shame which, although mediated by Hellenistic sources to some degree, Curley and Larmour trace back to the representations of Phaedra in tragedy, and which we will consider in more detail below.²⁴

`Phaedra,` `Heroides` `4`

In Heroides 4, Ovid’s Phaedra rewrites herself in elegiac couplets, relying on the genre to reinterpret her famous story by redefining her exemplary status. She says that her Euripidean pudor must be blended with elegiac amor (pudor est miscendus amori, 9). Her verse (“secrets are carried over land and sea with this writing,” his arcana notis terra pelagoque feruntur, 5), therefore, takes on a metapoetic significance. The text (notis) containing her “secrets,” which are “carried over land and sea,” is moving in both directions, from Phaedra’s writing location toward Hippolytus and from Greece toward Ovid’s writing location, Rome. Feruntur simultaneously expresses four ideas: a physical transfer from Greece to Rome (“land and sea,” terra pelagoque); a translation (translatio) from the Greek; borrowing from a source model, as feruntur often indicates a citation;²⁵ and a translation from tragedy to elegy.

Phaedra’s famous mythological tradition has defined her as wife of Theseus, making her stepmother of Hippolytus. This thesis as a speaking subject necessarily circumscribes the meaning of words which she utters. Amor in particular, when spoken by Phaedra to Theseus, may be erotic, in agreement with her relationship with him in the system of kinship. When spoken to Hippolytus, it may mean affectionate or maternal love, in agreement with their kinship relations. If she speaks it to Hippolytus erotically, she is speaking adultery and incest, social taboos which contravene the rules governing family roles and their interrelationships. Her strong generic tradition further inflects amor when she speaks. In many plays which survive, erotic love expressed by women on the tragic stage leads to disaster.²⁶ Phaedra, in particular, represents the most destructive kind of tragic, female erotic desire. Her amor, once spoken, not only dissolves the family but also the very body of the young man to whom the utterance is directed.

In the opening lines of the epistle (“a wish for good health, which she herself will lack unless you give it, the Cretan girl sends to the Amazonian man,” Qua,²⁷ nisi tu dederis, caritura est ipsa, salutem / Mittit Amazonio Cressa puella viro, 1–2) we may see Phaedra’s solution. The word puella (2) beginning her elegiac letter makes Phaedra’s new generic thesis clear. With this description, she claims the poetic identity of elegiac beloved.²⁸ By repositioning herself as an elegiac speaker, Phaedra claims a new thesis and therefore hopes to shift the connotative meaning of important words and symbols in her story.²⁹ We may see that throughout her epistle, Phaedra manipulates kinship roles or uses the names that determine those roles through kinship relations to dissimulate adultery. She calls them nomina vana, demonstrating that, in her opinion, names signifying symbolic roles are arbitrary and meaningless in themselves. Her new thesis claims that desire (Venus) determines kinship roles (“the chain of family on which Venus herself has placed her own bonds,” generis … catena, / imposuit nodos cui Venus ipsa suos, 135–36). Phaedra’s poetic semiosis, however, is directed only at Hippolytus as internal reader. This new thesis allows Phaedra to modify Theseus’s role in her story. The elegiac position she claims for both Hippolytus and herself in line 2 (puella viro) leaves Theseus only a marginal, unacknowledged role or nonexistent role as husband since the status of the elegiac puella is always obscure. She exists somewhere in the interstices between adulterous wife to a cuckolded husband and avaricious meretrix loyal only to the lover with the most pleasing gifts.³⁰ Phaedra does not even mention Theseus until line 65 and there he is named as a player in Ariadne’s myth, not Phaedra’s (4.63–66).

Phaedra does not speak of Theseus as her husband until line 111, where she enumerates his failures to perform his kinship role as husband and father properly.³¹ Theseus’s name is surrounded by repeated iterations of the name of Pirithous, love for whom has superseded that felt for Phaedra and Hippolytus: “the coast of his dear Pirithous holds him; Theseus has put Pirithous before Phaedra, Pirithous before you, unless we deny what is obvious” (Illum Pirithoi detinet ora sui; / Praeposuit Theseus, nisi si manifesta negamus, / Pirithoum Phaedrae Pirithoumque tibi, 110–12). In line 112 Phaedra equates herself with Hippolytus grammatically. They both endure exactly the same fate, the same suffering, which Phaedra calls iniuria (113).³² She emphasizes their shared suffering by referring to herself and Hippolytus in the first person plural, with plural pronouns (nos, 113; uterque sumus, 114), and by enumerating the iniuriae committed by Theseus against each of their families.

Prima securigeras inter virtute puellas

Te peperit, nati digna vigore parens.

Si quaeras, ubi sit, Theseus latus ense peregit:

Nec tanto mater pignore tuta fuit. 120

At ne nupta quidem taedaque accepta iugali;

Cur, nisi ne caperes regna paterna nothus? (117–22)

The first in martial virtue among the axe-bearing girls bore you, a parent worthy of her son’s vigor. If you ask where she is, Theseus pierced her side with his sword: nor as a mother was she safe because of so great a pledge. But she was not even married and had not been welcomed with the wedding torch; why not, unless so that you, a bastard, would not take his father’s throne?

Phaedra’s accusations that Theseus is not performing his kinship roles properly (implicitly) justify her refusal to perform her own role as wife, mother,³³ and (step)mother properly and (explicitly) authorize the role she suggests for Hippolytus: “Go now, honor your father’s bed as he deserves, the bed which he himself shuns and renounces by his own deeds” (I nunc, sic meriti lectum reverere parentis, / Quem fugit et factis abdicat ipse suis, 127–28).³⁴ In Phaedra’s estimation, Theseus’s bad performance (sic meriti) and the abdication of his role (abdicare) demand a new set of relations within the kinship structure.³⁵

We may see elegiac vocabulary and themes throughout Phaedra’s letter. For example, among the iniuriae Phaedra lists is Hippolyta’s murder. In the elegiac code, Phaedra’s description of Hippoyta has an erotic connotation. Compare prima … inter … puellas to the opening lines of Propertius’s Monobiblos, Cynthia prima (Prop. 1.1). Phaedra calls her a parent worthy of Hippolytus’s vigor. Digna is an adjective which is traced back to the first elegiac poet, Gallus, who tells Caesar that the Muses have finally written poems which he could call worthy of his mistress (Hollis 2007, fr. 145, 7).³⁶ By describing Hippolyta’s relationship to her son in terms which in the elegiac code are sexualized and used to describe the beloved and her relationship to the amator, Phaedra is setting a precedent for her own eroticized performance of mater to natus. Earlier in her letter, moreover, Phaedra claims she will not break her marriage bonds because of nequitia (Non ego nequitia socialia foedera rumpam, Her. 4.17). This word is an elegiac marker, which Jacobson notes is found in no other letter in this collection but is familiar from Ovid’s Amores.³⁷

The elegiac Phaedra claims she is compelled to write elegiac verse by Amor.³⁸

Quidquid Amor iussit, non est contemnere tutum:

Regnat et in dominos ius habet ille deos.

Ille mihi primo dubitanti scribere dixit:

“Scribe: dabit victas ferreus ille manus.” (11–14)

Whatever Love has ordered, it is not safe to disregard: he rules and has control over the gods, our masters. He said to me, when at first I was hesitating to write: “Write: that steely one will hand over his conquered hands.”

She assumes a programmatic masculine elegiac position expressed in the opening poems of Propertius and Ovid’s Amores.³⁹ Phaedra’s generic engagement, nevertheless, is motivated by a desire to maintain a feminine position. Unlike the amator of Amores 1.2, who surrenders to Cupid and joins his triumphal parade as a captive (“Look, I confess, I am your new prize; I offer my conquered hands to your laws,” en ego, confiteor, tua sum noua praeda, Cupido; / porrigimus uictas ad tua iura manus, 19–20), Phaedra will not be the captive of Amor; Hippolytus will be her captive (“that steely one will hand over his conquered hands,” dabit victas ferreus ille manus, 14). This position is in line with the feminine elegiac position of the puella-domina.⁴⁰ In addition, Phaedra invokes the programmatic themes of elegiac furta, eluding a husband or guard: “during the night you will not have to unlock the door of a stern husband, you will not have to trick the guard” (Non tibi per tenebras duri reseranda mariti / Ianua, non custos decipiendus erit, 141–42).

Phaedra, however, follows the example of Propertius’s masculine elegiac amator, who claims his elegiac incipit is also his erotic initiation: “Cynthia first captured me with her eyes, wretched me, who had been touched by no Desires before” (Cynthia prima suis miserum me cepit ocellis, / contactum nullis ante Cupidinibus, Prop. 1.1.1–2).⁴¹ Like Propertius’s amator, Phaedra represents herself as innocent, new to the love which orders her to write.

Non ego nequitia socialia foedera rumpam;

Fama, velim quaeras, crimine nostra vacat.

Venit amor gravius, quo serius: urimur intus;

Urimur, et caecum pectora vulnus habent.

Scilicet ut teneros laedunt iuga prima iuvencos,

Frenaque vix patitur de grege captus equus,

Sic male vixque subit primos rude pectus amores,

Sarcinaque haec animo non sedet apta meo.

Ars fit, ubi a teneris crimen condiscitur annis;

Quae venit exacto tempore, peius amat.

Tu nova servatae capies libamina famae, (Her. 4.17–27)
I will not break my marriage contract because of wantonness; our reputation, I wish you would ask, is without reproach. Love came on more deeply because it was later: I am burning inside; I am burning, and my heart holds an unseen wound. To be sure, just like yokes applied for the first time hurt tender young bulls, and a horse captured from the herd endures bridles with difficulty, the untried heart submits to first love poorly and with difficulty, and this burden sits uncomfortably on my mind; she who comes to love later in life loves more intensely. You will take the first fruits of a guarded reputation,

Phaedra claims her reputation is without reproach (18) and well guarded (27), and she characterizes her love as late-coming (19, 26), a first love (23, 27), which lacks artifice (25).⁴²

Phaedra urges Hippolytus to be more elegiac himself.
Tu modo duritiam silvis depone iugosis:

Non sum militia digna perire tua.

Quid iuvat incinctae studia exercere Dianae

Et Veneri numeros eripuisse suos?

Quod caret alterna requie, durabile non est:

Haec reparat vires fessaque membra novat.

Arcus, et arma tuae tibi sunt imitanda Dianae,

Si numquam cesses tendere, mollis erit. (Her. 4.85–92).

You just put down your hardness in the mountainous forest: I do not deserve to be destroyed by your military campaign. What is the use of showing devotion to girded Diana and taking from Venus her own rhythms? Work without occasional rest is not sustainable: rest revives strength and restores tired limbs. You must imitate your dear Diana’s weapons. Your bow will be soft, if you never stop stretching it.

She claims that she is not an appropriate participant in his military exercises, recalling the opposition set up by the Roman elegists between actual military duty and their own “military duty of love” (militia amoris).⁴³ She chides him for not resting from his service to Diana through service to Venus. Palmer translates numeros as “dues,” taking it to mean parts of a process or an exercise, but the linguistic play of numeros, which can also refer to poetic meter (OLD, numerus, 14), and alterna, especially when the numeri belong to Venus, calls to mind the alternating verses of the elegiac couplet.⁴⁴ Phaedra’s words liken Hippolytus’s hunting with the virgin goddess Diana to sex (incinctae studia exercere Dianae, 87; Arcus … Si numquam cesses tendere, mollis erit, 91–92), and sex (Veneri, 88) to rest, which allows his fessa membra to become durabilis once again.⁴⁵

Should her intended audience, Hippolytus, accept her new generic identity, the meaning of Phaedra as symbol in the megatext will privilege her erotic over her destructive connotations according to the elegiac code. As a result of her new poetic thesis as an elegiac puella, Theseus is relegated to a blocking figure, preventing the lovers from being together. His inuriae, connoting sexual infidelity in an elegiac context, committed against her further justifies her affair. The proposed extramarital affair is the privileged site for love and fidelity. Pudor may be understood as an obstacle to achieving true elegiac virtue—becoming a loyal beloved to her lover. Her lovesickness is no longer a symptom of madness but an indicator of her unfailing love. Phaedra’s desire is no longer the punishment of a vindictive Aphrodite but a playful Cupid who compels her to express this desire in a poetic epistle.⁴⁶

Phaedra recognizes that the behavior of lover and beloved still look like normative family relations to others who are not interpreting their actions through an elegiac code. Here we may see how gesture and performance act as signs. Just as the elegists employed words associated in other contexts with the masculine institution of amicitia, such as inuriae and fides, to describe their love affairs, so Phaedra relies on the expectation of her audience to perform one relationship (an elegiac extramarital affair) while appearing to perform another (a normative mother-son relationship in the context of a family). Phaedra suggests that she and Hippolytus put on a performance in order to conceal their affair. The reference to acting, however, is another reminder of her dramatic origins. Phaedra attempts to demonstrate to Hippolytus that the performance of normative kinship roles, noverca and provignus, at least, closely resembles the performance of the very incest taboo which circumscribes them—embracing (amplexos, 139), living in the same house (143), kissing (oscula, 144), and sharing a bed (in lecto … meo, 146). In this she anticipates Judith Butler, who theorizes gender and kinship roles as an effect of their performance.⁴⁷ One does not behave like a stepmother because one is a stepmother; one is a stepmother because one performs the role in ways that makes her recognizable as a stepmother. Meaning is provided by the “audience”—in the case of Phaedra’s letter, either by the other members of the household or Ovid’s readers. Phaedra stresses the power of this audience to bestow meaning on a name (videar, 129; laudabimur, 139; dicar, 140; merebere, 145), as she imagines a positive response to their duplicitous performance. Such a revelation is in part a continuation of the theme of appearance and reputation which is so important to Euripides’s play, but in Ovid, because Phaedra demands that Hippolytus reconceptualize her performance through the discourse of elegy, appearance and reputation are now inextricably linked to generic codes and interpretation.⁴⁸

Once she has established Theseus’s renunciation of his own role in the family (cited above), Phaedra begins to redefine her own.

Nec, quia privigno videar coitura noverca,

Terruerint animos nomina vana tuos.

Ista vetus pietas, aevo moritura futuro,

Rustica Saturno regna tenente fuit.⁴⁹ (Her. 4.129–32)

And do not let meaningless names frighten your mind because I seem like a stepmother about to have sex with her stepson. That ancient piety, destined to die in a future generation, was rustic even when Saturn held power.

In this passage more than any other in the letter, the intersection between the past generic performances of the “role” of Phaedra on the tragic stage and the performance of gender and kinship roles is made manifest. The names, as Phaedra demonstrates, are meaningless (vana, 130) in themselves. The behavior of a “stepmother who will have sex with her stepson” (privigno … coitura noverca, 129), as it is performed by the character Phaedra familiar from tragedy, and that of her opposite, a “stepmother who is faithful to [her] stepson” (privigno fida noverca meo, 140), are almost indistinguishable.⁵⁰

As Phaedra points out to Hippolytus, although she has “translated” their role from tragedy to elegy, there will be no need to rehearse the elegiac plot of furta. Only Hippolytus, who has been informed of her new elegiac thesis, will know the code with which to decipher her performance. Other lookers-on, she presumes, will interpret her performance and utterance of amor in the terms of a normative kinship structure (cognato nomine, 138).

Nec labor est celare, licet peccemus, amorem:

Cognato poterit nomine culpa tegi.

Viderit amplexos aliquis, laudabimur ambo:

Dicar privigno fida noverca meo.

Non tibi per tenebras duri reseranda mariti

Ianua, non custos decipiendus erit.

Ut tenuit domus una duos, domus una tenebit;

Oscula aperta dabas, oscula aperta dabis;

Tutus eris mecum laudemque merebere culpa,

Tu licet in lecto conspiciare meo. (Her. 4.137–46)

And it is not a labor to hide our love, although we transgress: the crime can be concealed by the name of kinship. Let someone see our embraces, we will both be praised: I will be called a stepmother who is faithful to my stepson. And during the night you will not have to unlock the door of a stern husband, you will not have to trick the guard. Just as a single house has held us both, a single house will hold us; you used to give kisses openly, you will give kisses openly; you will be safe with me and, although you will be seen in my bed, you will earn praise for the crime.

Phaedra wishes to be called a “faithful stepmother” (fida noverca, 140). This title plays with the stock character of the saeva noverca (“wicked stepmother”), an evil stepmother who plots against her husband’s children.⁵¹ This is a role Phaedra refuses by claiming its opposite, the fida noverca; yet her reputation is based on a misinterpretation of her incestuous erotic affection as maternal affection. She is transferring appearances and interpretation, not performance. Such a move is doubly elegiac. The strategy accords with the elegiac trope of deceiving one’s ward in order to carry on an affair. Fides, moreover, when read with elegy’s tradition of employing Roman virtues in erotic relationships, takes on added erotic meaning. Performativity and dramatic performance, however, are reminders to her reader of her tragic tradition.

The failure of Phaedra’s poetic project arises from the larger context of her letter’s authorship, namely Ovid’s “transvestite ventriloquism.” Her failure, because she is the ostensible author of this text, makes her complicit in her own abjection. Her tragic tradition is her true nature. Ovid has given Phaedra an opportunity to express, in “her own voice,” herself and her poetic tradition in the terms of elegy.⁵² Instead, she repeatedly reminds us of her Euripidean source. As a tragic subject, generically, she does not belong to elegy. Her generic identity instead helps define what elegy is not. Moreover, the amator with whom Phaedra self-identifies is the male amator of Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid.⁵³ As a woman she is not recognized as an amator. As an amator, she is not recognizable as feminine. Reminders of her tragic tradition can be found throughout her epistle in the form of props and themes from the plays themselves as well as references to dramatic performances and the genre of tragedy in general. We will consider only a few examples.

The very form of Phaedra’s communication, a letter, appears in at least one of the tragic versions of her tale. In her elegiac epistle, she commands Hippolytus to read the whole thing.

Perlege, quodcumque est: quid epistola lecta nocebit?

Te quoque in hac aliquid quod iuvet esse potest. (Her. 4.3–4)

Read to the end, whatever is there: What harm will come from reading a letter? In this letter there could be something that pleases you as well.

The extant Hippolytus contains a most harmful letter, the one written to Theseus by Phaedra and read after her suicide, charging Hippolytus with rape.⁵⁴ Rosenmeyer, following Jost, categorizes Phaedra’s Euripidean letter as a “kinetic” letter because it functions as an agent in the plot, affecting the outcome of the play.⁵⁵ The letter is like an actor, giving voice to Phaedra’s lifeless body which remains onstage.⁵⁶ Rosenmeyer suggests that Euripides introduces the letter in his second Hippolytus for the sake of propriety, “a way to mute, at least temporarily, the disturbing implications of Phaedra’s passion” (Rosenmeyer 2001, 90). The delay of the peripeteia, however, is only momentary, for the letter itself acts as a token which initiates the anagnorisis. The letter’s function in the tragedy as a device for recognition makes it a symbol of the outcome of the recognition—Phaedra’s accusation, Theseus’s curse, and Hippolytus’s death.

The Ovidian Phaedra unwittingly activates the allusion, ironically by asking what harm a letter can do (quid epistola lecta nocebit, 3) in the opening of her letter of seduction. This allusion acts as an interpretive guide for the external reader who is unable, or able only with difficulty, to read Phaedra’s account of her desire without assuming that it holds the same destructive power as the Euripidean (and/or Sophoclean) Phaedra’s desire. Furthermore, representations of this myth in Roman art suggest that some version of Phaedra’s story included a seduction letter to Hippolytus.⁵⁷ Perlege perhaps points to this letter, anticipating Hippolytus’s (former) refusal to finish reading or, perhaps, Hippolytus’s (former) refusal to hear Phaedra out in person.⁵⁸ Such an allusion further multiplies the possible meaning of the lines, adding to the interpretive frame the tragic connotation of sexually aggressive and transgressive behavior (the attempts of a woman to seduce a man, and a member of her family openly), for an affair between Phaedra and Hippolytus would have been legally incestuous under Roman law.⁵⁹

In the second Hippolytus, the audience must guess the contents of her letter based on Theseus’s reaction. He reports her charges against Hippolytus, but not her words. Because the audience has watched the events unfold earlier in the play, they know that her charges are unfounded even if Theseus does not. By contrast, Heroides 4 offers unmediated access to Phaedra’s Ovidian letter. While Phaedra is writing a confession, so to speak, one which takes pleasure in expressing her desire and may even, she supposes, give pleasure (“there could be something that pleases,” quod iuvet esse potest, 4), she is in fact providing evidence against herself. Ovid’s engagement with Phaedra’s tragic heritage once again acts as an interpretive guide, inviting the audience/reader to question the authority of her new elegiac thesis.⁶⁰

Shame as a theme has already been mentioned. It is central to the extant Euripidean play and very likely to the lost plays of Euripides and Sophocles. The theme of silence and revelation familiar from the Euripidean play is also expressed in Phaedra’s opening lines.⁶¹ While the greeting refers to the lineage of both the writer and the addressee (“the Cretan girl to the Amazonian man,” Amazonio Cressa puella viro, 2), Phaedra avoids naming either of them as she does in the Euripidean play, delaying until line 36 to do so.⁶² Amazonio … viro also recalls the moment in Euripides’s play where Phaedra avoids naming Hippolytus even as she reveals to the nurse her desire for him by calling him “whoever he is, the son of the Amazon.”⁶³ The phrase Cressa puella echoes the words of the chorus, who address Phaedra with “Oh unhappy Cretan girl” just after her revelation.⁶⁴

Like the Euripidean Phaedra, whose silence is a strategy for preserving a reputation which is governed by shame, the Ovidian Phaedra’s speech is constrained by her concern for pudor.⁶⁵

His arcana notis terra pelagoque feruntur;

Inspicit acceptas hostis ab hoste notas.

Ter tecum conata loqui ter inutilis haesit

Lingua, ter in primo destitit ore sonus.

Qua licet et sequitur, pudor est miscendus amori;

Dicere quae puduit, scribere iussit amor.

Quidquid Amor iussit, non est contemnere tutum;

Regnat et in dominos ius habet ille deos. (Her. 4.5–12)

Secrets are carried over land and sea with this writing; even an enemy looks over writings received from their enemy. Three times I tried to speak to you, three times my useless tongue was frozen, three times my voice stopped at my lips. Shame must be mixed with love when it properly arises; what love has ordered me to write brings shame to speak. It is not safe to disregard what Love has ordered; he rules and has control over the gods our masters.

As Kaster has noted, the Roman virtue of pudor resembles the Greek emotion of αἰδώς.⁶⁶ Both rely on the notion of a judging community or audience for their function and govern individual behavior through constraint and a desire to appear socially normative.⁶⁷ While αἰδώς is generally understood to be an anticipatory emotion, preventing bad behavior, pudor, Kaster notes, tends to be reactive.⁶⁸ So for Phaedra to say she is ashamed to speak something (Dicere quae puduit, 10) is to imply that she is aware that what she is ashamed to speak amounts to behavior which will incur social censure. Also implicit in her pudor is the awareness that she is sexually transgressive. For women, pudor, says Kaster, “was largely limited to a single frame of reference, the sexual … congruent with their pudicitia” (Kaster 1997, 9).⁶⁹

Again following the example of Euripides’s Phaedra, the Ovidian Phaedra claims that divine injunction is responsible for her revelation (scribere iussit amor, 10). The Euripidean Phaedra of Hipp. II resists speaking her desire throughout the play, and would die in silence, Aphrodite announces, were the goddess not to reveal it.⁷⁰ While both Sophocles’s Phaedra and Euripides’s Hippolytus II express the idea that Eros cannot be conquered, in Euripides’s first Hippolytus, dialogue attributed to Phaedra identifies the god as her “teacher of daring and courage.”⁷¹ This echoes Phaedra’s elegiac claim of divine injunction and serves as proof of her true tragic source through its allusion. In contrast to her Euripidean counterpart, she admits previous attempts to express her desire of her own volition (ter tecum conata loqui, 7). This admission itself may be an ironic reference to tragic Phaedras. Casali (1995, 4) points out that the Ovidian Phaedra’s three attempts to speak her desire correspond to the Euripidean Phaedra’s attempts to suppress her desire—through silence, self-control, and finally suicide—in previous tragic incarnations.⁷²

Tragedy lurks behind even her ostensibly positive messages. Phaedra, following the elegiac example of Ovid’s poet-praeceptor, constructs two elegant Hellenistic lists of exempla (53–66; 93–104), despite her claim that the qualitative difference of her late-coming love is its lack of ars (25). Phaedra has already hinted at her admiration of ars with her praise of Hippolytus’s own success in following the poet-praeceptor’s advice on masculine cultus (75–78).⁷³ Like the poet-praeceptor, or perhaps imitating him, Phaedra uses mythological exempla in the form of catalogues as a didactic strategy. She offers a list of Cretan women as an apology for her hereditary desire.⁷⁴ In both cases, her examples carry with them more reminders of her tragic origin.⁷⁵

Let us consider the first catalogue.⁷⁶

Forsitan hunc generis fato reddamus amorem,

Et Venus ex tota gente tributa petat.

Iuppiter Europen, prima est ea gentis origo,

Dilexit, tauro dissimulante deum;

Pasiphae mater, decepto subdita tauro,

Enixa est utero crimen onusque suo;

Perfidus Aegides, ducentia fila secutus,

Curva meae fugit tecta sororis ope.

En, ego nunc, ne forte parum Minoia credar,

In socias leges ultima gentis eo.

Hoc quoque fatale est: placuit domus una duabus;

Me tua forma capit, capta parente soror.

Thesides Theseusque duas rapuere sorores:

Ponite de nostra bina tropaea domo. (Her. 4.53–66).

Perhaps we may be repeating this love because of our family’s destiny, and Venus demands her tribute from the entire family. Jupiter loved Europa, the first of our family, when a bull form disguised the god; My mother Pasiphae slept with a bull whom she tricked, and bore her crime and her burden in her womb; the lying son of Aegeus, after he followed the guiding thread, fled the twisted prison with the help of my sister. And now I, the last of our line, follow the laws of our family in case I am not considered Minoan enough. This too is destined: one house has pleased two women; me your beauty captured, captured by your father was my sister. The son of Theseus and Theseus ran away with two sisters: erect double trophies over our house.

This list echoes and elaborates on the examples given by Phaedra in Hipp. II, just before the nurse discovers her desire for Hippolytus. Here Phaedra introduces her mother (337) and Ariadne (339) as examples of the evils from which she will fashion good by her suicide. The stichomythia of Euripides’s text is mirrored by Ovid’s hexameter lines:

ΦΑΊΔΡΑ: ὦ τλῆμον, οἷον, μῆτερ, ἠράϲθηϲ ἔρον.

ΤΡΟΦΌϹ: ὃν ἔϲχε ταύρου, τέκνον; ἢ τί φὴιϲ τόδε;

ΦΑΊΔΡΑ: ϲύ τ᾽, ὦ τάλαιν᾽ ὅμαιμε, Διονύϲου δάμαρ.

ΤΡΟΦΌϹ: τέκνον, τί πάϲχειϲ; ϲυγγόνουϲ κακορροθεῖϲ;

ΦΑΊΔΡΑ: τρίτη δ᾽ ἐγὼ δύστηνοϲ ὡϲ ἀπόλλυμαι. (Eur. Hipp. II, 337–41)

PHAEDRA: Unhappy mother, what a love you loved.

NURSE: The one she had for the bull, child? Or what is it you say?

PHAEDRA: And you, wretched sister, Dionysus’s bride.

NURSE: What do you suffer, child? Do you speak badly about your relatives?

PHAEDRA: And I the third, how wretchedly I die.

The Ovidian Phaedra follows her tragic model by placing herself as the final exemplar in the list of Cretan women. When she calls herself the “last of the line” (ultima gentis, 62), she is in a sense speaking of Euripides’s Phaedra, who not only intends to be the last through her suicide but does indeed accomplish this at the end of the play. The Ovidian Phaedra, by contrast, interprets her membership in such a family as a challenge to live up to their reputation: “in case I am not considered Minoan enough” (ne forte parum Minoia credar, 61). She also uses it as a justification for her forwardness.

Phaedra’s identification as a victim of Aphrodite, like the other women of her family, rehearses the motivating plot of Euripides’s extant play, where Aphrodite opens the play by announcing her intention to use Phaedra as a human weapon against Hippolytus (1–57). Phaedra never learns this fact, although the chorus suggests it in their own catalogue of rhetorical examples (545–64, quoted in n. 75 above). The subjects of each couplet alternate, male lover to female lover—Iuppiter (55), Pasiphae (57), perfidus Aegides (59), En, ego nunc (61)—but the alternation implicitly establishes a paradigmatic status between the four examples. Their similarity is further reinforced by the content of the couplets. Jupiter, Pasiphae, Theseus, and Phaedra herself are the active lovers who use deceit to attain their desires. Although Theseus is only said to escape the labyrinth with the help of Phaedra’s sister, his epithet, perfidus (59), and the description of the curva tecta (60), literally “curved and covered things,” suggest deceit and concealment.⁷⁷ At the close of her letter, Phaedra makes her paradigmatic relation with her mother explicit: “My mother could seduce the bull: Will you be fiercer than a savage bull?” (potuit corrumpere taurum / Mater: eris tauro saevior ipse truci, 165–66). The couplet also draws an explicit comparison between Hippolytus and Pasiphae’s bull, ostensibly challenging him to be more human(e) to Phaedra and her desire than was Pasiphae’s bull. The comparison, of course, has the opposite effect of aligning Phaedra’s desire with her mother’s bestial desire. It also makes painfully clear Phaedra’s true intent, “to seduce” (corrumpere), while recalling both mother’s and daughter’s tragic origin, through the same verb whose root, rumpere, recalls the tragic death of Hippolytus.⁷⁸

Generic markers also guide her readers to interpret her poetry using the tragic code, not the elegiac code. If we look closely at Phaedra’s language, her “voice” sounds tragic even as it speaks in an elegiac code. Take, for example, Phaedra’s claim that she will not break her marriage contract because of elegiac nequitia (17). Phaedra simultaneously identifies with elegy by speaking in its code, and distances herself from it by refusing to embrace the elegiac life of nequitia. She claims that she is no ordinary amator. Her amor is “more than” what is experienced by the elegiac crowd. Her degree of difference is responsible for a more burdensome (gravius, 19), more serious (serius, 19), and more intense (peius, 26) experience of love as a fire (19, 20) and wound (20, 21). Young lovers become jaded. Their love is merely ars (25). The language in this passage is heavy, so to speak, with metapoetic signals. If McKeown’s conjecture is correct,⁷⁹ and the Ars Amatoria and Heroides were being written at the same time, Ovid is again constructing a Phaedra who reveals herself to Ovid’s external readers as the “tragic” Phaedra while writing what is meant to be her elegiac self, for Phaedra is essentially saying, “I am not the amator of the Amores, who goes on to teach his Ars Amatoria later in life. My amor is not associated with light (levis) elegiac nequitia, it is more serious (gravius).” Gravis, in generic terms, is set in opposition to elegy in Ovid, and most frequently describes epic, but Ovid already used this adjective to describe tragedy in opposition to elegy in Am. 3.1.⁸⁰ The personified Elegy describes herself as levis: “I am but light, and along with me Cupid, my love, is light” (sum leuis, et mecum leuis est, mea cura, Cupido, 3.1.41). Tragedy, by contrast, urges Ovid: “It is time for you to be moved by the stroke of the more serious thyrsus” (tempus erat thyrso pulsum grauiore moueri, 3.1.23; cf. also 35, 36), characterizing herself as a gravis genre.⁸¹

In the end Phaedra concedes that her performance is deceitful: “And it is not a labor to hide our love … the crime can be concealed by the name of kinship” (Nec labor est celare … / Cognato poterit nomine culpa tegi, 137–38). Shame, which prevents both the Euripidean and Ovidian Phaedra from speaking to Hippolytus directly, is again invoked as a corrective emotion, guiding the proper performance of behavior within the system of kinship. The figure of covering a crime invokes the Greek visual and literary metaphor of “shame” (αἰδώς) as a mantle, which surfaces in Euripides’s Hipp. II, and repeats the Roman Augustan associations of feminine shame (pudor) (or lack of) with the figure of covering and uncovering.⁸² Phaedra later contends that shame has been routed by love: “No lover sees what is proper. He has lost all sense of shame and shame, in its flight, has abandoned its standards” (quid deceat, non videt ullus amans. / Depuduit, profugusque pudor sua signa reliquit, 154–55). Nevertheless, shame (pudor) is generically marked in this letter as tragic and is in a dialectic relationship with elegiac love. The irrepressible tragic “source” acts as a metaphor for abject female desire. While Phaedra’s elegiac performance of her tragic role—that of noverca—as a tactic for the dissimulation of her performance of her elegiac role may rely on their similar performativity, she is ultimately unable to disguise her source text.⁸³

In addition to the repetition of the key themes of silence and shame from Attic tragedy, her letter carries a number of metapoetic signals which suggest that Phaedra, despite her attempted elegiac thesis, never left the tragic stage. Her poetic form, the letter, is itself an important actor in her tragic tradition. Her didactic catalogues, which, at first glance, resemble catalogues found in the elegies of Propertius (e.g., 3.19) and Ovid (e.g., Ars am. 1.283–340), are, upon closer inspection, allusions to hers and others’ tragedies.⁸⁴ Furthermore, the description of and references to dramatic performances and words with strong connotations of the tragic genre compromise her elegiac thesis. As Barchiesi (1993, 342) notes, Phaedra’s injunction finge videre (4.176) at the close of her letter emphasizes the metatheatricality of her epistle, evoking the role of spectator while also echoing Hippolytus’s own wish to look at himself: “Alas, if only it was possible for me to step back and look upon myself, so that I might weep over the wrongs we are suffering” (Hipp. II, 1077–79).⁸⁵ In the end Phaedra’s poetic transposition is unsuccessful.⁸⁶ Phaedra’s generic “core” is naturalized by Ovid’s text, which demonstrates that Phaedra, as a tragic exemplum, has only one thesis available to her.⁸⁷ Presenting Phaedra’s construction as her own is proof of this, for, as Harvey argues in the case of Erasmus’s ventriloquized Folly, “she, too, enacts the folly she personifies through the disruptions of her rhetoric” (Harvey 1992, 60).⁸⁸

At no point does Ovid take off the “Phaedra” mask or slip out of character, but, as we have seen, while he writes her writing about performance and performativity, he speaks through her to the audience, ironically reminding them, with her own loaded words, of representations of her which were performed on the stage. He also reminds the audience through this process of his own literary performance, playing the part of a woman, who, while trying to switch roles before an audience expecting the familiar “tragic” Phaedra, puts on an ill-fitting elegiac costume which shows the tragic costume beneath. What we are left with is a formula that naturalizes Phaedra’s desire as “essentially” destructive through its inextricable connection to genre. Ovid’s text constructs Phaedra’s unimaginable tragic desire in such a way that it cannot be reimagined, rearticulated, or rescued from the margins of intelligibility—the realm of the abject—through a generic translation. At the end of the letter, she invites Hippolytus to create another audience: “You are reading the words of a suppliant, imagine also that you see my tears” (verba precantis / Perlegis, et lacrimas finge videre meas, 175–76). After attempting to manipulate language by using it in another generic code and failing, Phaedra relents and allows herself to become what she always was, the tragic spectacle of a suffering female body.⁸⁹ Her suffering is the result of and the punishment for her violation of the incest taboo. Her visibility in Ovid’s “tragic” epistle is a form of social control, warning those who may stray from cultural gender norms. Her failed thesis in a new genre is also a means of defining generic norms—Phaedra’s “tragic” desire can only appear in elegy as a “monster,” belonging as it does beyond the code of elegy and instead on the tragic stage.

`Byblis,` `Metamorphosis` `9.439–665`

Byblis’s story in the Metamorphoses narrates the process of Phaedra’s poetic thesis and its reception.⁹⁰ Her name, in fact, means “papyrus leaves” or “book” in Greek (Byblos), a pun which draws attention to her multiple literary associations: the subject of books, a writer of books, and a reader of books.⁹¹ In Ovid’s tale, Byblis is overcome with desire for her twin brother, Caunus, and writes him a love letter. This intratextuality between Heroides 4 and Byblis’s story in book 9 of the Metamorphoses is signaled by the correspondences between themes as well as the very similar structure of the letter Byblis writes, which opens with nearly the same line as Phaedra’s: “a wish for good health, which she will not have, unless you give it,” quam, nisi tu dederis, non est habitura salutem, Met. 9.530 (cf. “a wish for good health, which she herself will lack, unless you give it,” Qua, nisi tu dederis, caritura est ipsa, salutem, Her. 4.1). In the Metamorphoses, the letter is “written” in the narrative of a male poet, who is given the power to emphasize or suppress what elements he chooses.⁹² The insincerity or perhaps the ars which we suspect behind Phaedra’s emotional plea to Hippolytus is revealed by the narrator of Byblis’s tale, and we are privy to the rhetorical strategies in the Heroidean letter which is the centerpiece of the passage.

Although Byblis’s letter is embedded in an epic poem, Byblis tries to introduce into the symbolic kinship roles of sister and brother an erotic valence through the introduction of the elegiac code, as Phaedra has in her Ovidian letter. As we saw in the case of Phaedra’s letter (Her. 4), in order for Byblis to express her desire in a way which Caunus will “understand,” and accept as “desire,” she must define who she is in relation to Caunus and to the kinship system in which they participate.⁹³ In the process, Byblis also defines her own signifying power as exemplum in the megatext of myth. Phaedra’s letter attempts such a redefinition but fails. Her “true” tragic nature cannot be suppressed by a new generic code, for her tradition cannot be reinterpreted in the elegiac world. It is unintelligible, an abject passion excluded from the generic universe of elegy. In Ovid’s epic, the narration of the process of signification reveals that the place of enunciation for Byblis (and therefore Phaedra, whose writing instance she enacts) is overdetermined by literary tradition. Ovid’s tale relies on theses (in this case, the mythological thesis which establishes Byblis’s exemplarity in the mythic megatext and the theses of various positions in the system of kinship) and draws attention both to the foundation of these positions and to those positions which are necessarily excluded in the process. Ovid, however, is successful in positing himself as a writing subject through the process of her generic repudiation and tragic abjection.

As Ovid presents the story, Byblis’s dreams reveal her true nature, her innate meaning as a sign in the megatext of myth, in much the same way Phaedra’s words in her letter betray her (poorly) repressed tragic core.⁹⁴ As noted above and in chapter 1, correspondences to the Greek tragedies featuring Phaedra, Ovid’s Heroides 4, and the Scylla and Myrrha episodes which surround Byblis’s story in books 8 and 10 connect Byblis to the Phaedra of Greek tragedy.⁹⁵ Byblis does not recognize her own tragic model until she sees a performance in her dreams.

spes tamen obscenas animo demittere non est
ausa suo uigilans; placida resoluta quiete
saepe uidet quod amat; uisa est quoque iungere fratri
corpus et erubuit, quamuis sopita iacebat.
somnus abit; silet illa diu repetitque quietis
ipsa suae speciem, dubiaque ita mente profatur:
“me miseram! tacitae quid uult sibi noctis imago?
quam nolim rata sit! cur haec ego somnia uidi?” (Met. 9.468–75)
Nevertheless, she did not dare to admit obscene hopes into her mind while awake; after she is relaxed in peaceful rest she often sees what she loves; she seemed even to join her body with her brother and she blushed, although she was sleeping in her bed. Sleep departs; she is quiet for a long time and she herself recalls the image of her own slumber, and she speaks with an uncertain mind in this way: “Poor me! what does the night’s vision wish for itself? If only I did not think it! Why did I see these dreams?”

Byblis’s hopes (spes) are premature. We are told only that she is “burning inside” (aestuat intus, 465) and has an aversion to the names of kinship (nomina sanguinis, 466). Although her desire is not yet apparent to her (manifesta sibi, 464), nevertheless, her hopes are “indecent” (obscenas, 468).⁹⁶ The straightforward meaning of the adjective, with a specifically sexual connotation, proleptically describes Byblis’s desire. A less overt, but equally important meaning, I would suggest, is attached to this adjective. Varro (Ling. 7.96) tells us obsc(a)enus is derived from scaena, “the stage” (Obscaenum dictum ab scaena). It comes to mean shameful (turpe) because it describes what should only be said on the stage (in scaena).⁹⁷ Here I believe the secondary meaning works in conjunction with the language of spectacle (uidet, uisa est, 470; repetit … speciem, 472–73; imago, 474; uidi, 475) to reinforce the idea that Byblis is watching a dramatic performance (uidet quod amat, 470) in which she is the player (uisa est, 470). The passive of video, of course, is commonly used to indicate dreams, but its juxtaposition with the active in the same line, as well as the frequency of looking, seeing, and image words, puts the literal meaning in play.⁹⁸

Kristeva locates the initiation of the thetic stage in the Lacanian mirror stage. Lacan’s mirror stage describes the moment when a child, seeing her own image in the mirror for the first time, conceives of herself as a whole, coherent body and distinguishes her body from other objects. This moment sets in motion her entry into the world of language and symbolism, as the ability to distinguish also introduces the ability to name the now differentiated objects. According to Kristeva, “Positing the imaged ego leads to the positing of the object, which is, likewise, separate and signifiable” (Kristeva 1984, 46). The thesis of the body image is necessary for this naming process, for naming an object necessarily names the subject’s symbolic relation to that object. Byblis returns to the thetic stage as a result of seeing an image (imago) of herself. Byblis’s moment of recognition establishes her as both a sign in the symbolic system of myth (for Byblis’s imago is one familiar to Ovid’s readers) and as a reader of this language, specifically a reader of Ovid’s text in the language of myth (for her recognition of her own imago demonstrates that she is also familiar with what she sees).

Byblis is faced with the contradiction introduced by her “tragic” desire. A (Roman) woman is the object of desire, a beloved, not a lover. Her normative position in the sexual dyad, as we have discussed in the previous chapter, is passive. Furthermore, a sister, according to the relations governed by the kinship system, is prohibited from any erotic relationship with her brother, be it active or passive. Kristeva identifies such a contradictory position as a characteristic of the signifying subject.⁹⁹ Each individual who engages in a symbolic system is faced at the thetic stage with the “heterogeneous contradiction” (Kristeva 1984, 82) of all the possible and undifferentiated identities and the one identity which excludes these possibilities. In the thetic stage, through the positing of the subject, one chooses a symbolic position from which to relate to objects, and excludes various other possibilities for the subject, thereby (temporarily) eliminating any ambiguity in an individual’s identity as a speaking, communicating, and writing subject.

Byblis’s thesis is both symbolic and literary, narrative levels which are sometimes indistinguishable in the episode and are in constant tension. The tension between her tragic literary tradition and the role with which she self-identifies, sister, creates a desire to renegotiate her relationship to her brother linguistically.¹⁰⁰ As a subject speaking from her current position in the kinship system, sister, her desire appears (or is “read”) by Caunus as incest. For this reason, Byblis must make Caunus a very specific other, or rather not an other who is excluded from those with whom sex is permitted by the kinship system. She can only do this through a new thesis of her mythological identity. As the narrating voice tells us at the opening of the tale: “Byblis is set as an example for girls to love what is permitted” (Byblis in exemplo est ut ament concessa puellae, 454).¹⁰¹ Nevertheless, we are invited to read (or hear) a tale which describes her struggle against her already determined and fixed value as an exemplum of destructive female desire by attempting to shift her position in the kinship system and thereby reorient her relations with Caunus. A new positionality would redefine her desire as concessum and change the implied meaning of the narrator’s statement (quoted above) from “a [negative] example [cautioning] girls to love what is permitted” to “a [positive] example for girls to love what is permitted [in emulation].” Kristeva theorizes that the poetic process reveals the process of signification.¹⁰² “The thetic—that crucial place on the basis of which the human being constitutes himself as signifying and/or social—is the very place textual experience aims toward.… But at the same time and as a result, textual experience reaches the very foundation of the social—that which is exploited by sociality but which elaborates and can go beyond it, either destroying or transforming it” (Kristeva 1984, 67).

We are told in the framing narrative, “Now [Byblis] calls him master, now she hates the names of kinship, and now she wishes him to call her Byblis rather than sister” (iam dominum appellat, iam nomina sanguinis odit, / Byblida iam mauult quam se uocet ille sororem, 466–67). Raval (2001, 293) notes that the position of her name and her kinship role (first and last in line 467, respectively) reflects Byblis’s conception of the distance between the two roles. Her grammatical position as subject of all three verbs demonstrates her agency in the project of renaming, even before she is aware of why she has begun. This line also expresses Byblis’s wish (mauult) for a discursive metamorphosis, a spatial and temporal movement away from kinship relations. Her hoped-for outcome, to be Byblis to Caunus, not sister to brother, is foregrounded syntactically. In addition to her search for a new relationship to Caunus, Byblis, as Jenkins has noted, cites the variants of her myth during her soliloquy (Caunus as lover: 9.511–12, Nicaenetus quoted by Parthenius 11.3; Byblis’s confession in person: 513–14, Parthenius 11.3; and Ovid’s innovative epistle: 515–16, Jenkins 2000, 441), suggesting that she is diving back into the chora, so to speak, of her literary tradition for a mythic position.

Kristeva theorizes a fully embodied writing subject, whose composition is produced by the experiences of her individual material existence (e.g., sex, class, ethnicity). Ovid presents Byblis in just this way. He situates her genealogically (daughter of Miletus and Cyane, 447–53), geographically (Miletus in Asia Minor, 448–49),¹⁰³ and materially (vividly describing her body as she writes her letter, 517–29).¹⁰⁴ Since she is a literary construction, however, Byblis’s representation as a writer reflects Ovid’s ideological universe and the anxieties which it represses or displaces onto marginal figures.

Anxiety over the future is signaled at the very beginning of her letter.

“quam, nisi tu dederis, non est habitura salutem,
hanc tibi mittit amans; pudet, a, pudet edere nomen!
et si quid cupiam quaeris, sine nomine uellem
posset agi mea causa meo, nec cognita Byblis
ante forem quam spes uotorum certa fuisset.” (Met. 9.530–34)
“This wish for good health which she will not have, unless you give it, a lover sends to you; I am ashamed, ah, ashamed to say the name! And if you are asking what I want, I wish my case could be pleaded anonymously and I would not be recognized as Byblis before the hope for my prayers has been assured.”

Fear over the consequences of her letter of confession is the ostensible reason for her wish to warp time or see into the future to determine whether things turn out the way she hopes (spes … certa fuisset, 534) before she signs the love letter (sine nomine uellem / posset agi mea causa meo, nec cognita Byblis, 532–33). The epistolary genre, as Rosenmeyer (2001, 74–75) notes, is concerned with time, seeking to bridge the temporal distance between the moment the letter was written and the future in which the addressee will read it by creating a sense of the present in the language itself. Byblis expresses a wish to move past the moment of reception to the time when Caunus has finished her letter and made a judgment about its contents. In its dialogue with Ovid’s Heroides, Byblis’s “future” resembles the ironic tension in the heroines’ epistles, whose literary futures predict the very outcome the heroines struggle to prevent.¹⁰⁵ Her unattainable wish, however, suggests that she is aware of her limited control over Caunus’s reaction to her poetic epistle and, therefore, her literary reception.

This greeting, in fact, expresses a connection between time and identity. “And should you ask what I desire, without a name I would prefer” (532). Respectability, reputation, and chastity—normative feminine behavior all falling under the virtue pudicitia—excludes, as I have argued, any active sexuality, let alone an incestuous one. For this reason, Byblis says that it shames her to give it a name (pudet edere nomen, 531). Feminine desire is an absence of desire, leaving “what I want” (quid cupiam), for Byblis, “nameless” and “not recognized” (sine nomine, nec cognita). The future tense (habitura, 530), which suspends Byblis somewhere in time between the present and the unknowable future, also reflects her liminality. For time belongs to the symbolic world to which she cannot belong as long as she refuses her own symbolic identity: “I wish my case could be pleaded anonymously and I would not be recognized as Byblis before the hope for my prayers has been assured” (sine nomine uellem / posset agi mea causa meo, nec cognita Byblis, 532–33).¹⁰⁶ The narrator, of course, has defined the symbolic identity Byblis seeks to avoid (454); nevertheless, she is represented as unaware of her exemplarity. The repetition of the first-person possessive adjective implicitly connects the nouns the adjectives modify (nomen and causa) and emphasizes Byblis’s perceived control over her identity both through the repetition and through the conceptual connection. It is her name to use or not and her case to plead.

The narrator describes in detail Byblis’s struggle to compose her letter (518–29). She “writes and deletes; changes, criticizes, and approves” (et notat et delet; mutat culpatque probatque, 524) what she has written in an attempt to find a means of representing her desire to her addressee. “She had written ‘sister’; ‘sister’ it seemed best to erase” (scripta “soror” fuerat; uisum est delere sororem, 528). The alliteration of s in the beginning and end of the line, along with the word “soror” in the second and last position, draws attention to her kinship role to Caunus. Scripta soror, moreover, evokes the scripta puella of Roman erotic elegy, the significance of which we will discuss below. The narrative represents a writing process in which Byblis is both author (“having considered … she composed the words,” meditata … componit verba, 521) and material of her poem. As a writer in the epistolary genre in the style of the Heroides, Byblis can be understood as representing herself in a self-conscious way to her beloved addressee.¹⁰⁷ This re-presentation, here as in the Heroides, amounts to an attempt to rewrite her own literary tradition.¹⁰⁸ She “had been written as a sister [by Ovid, Parthenius, and Apollonius, among others¹⁰⁹], but it seemed good to erase [herself as] sister” and write a new role for herself.

As noted above, the first line of Byblis’s letter also closely reworks that of Phaedra’s: Qua, nisi tu dederis, caritura est ipsa, salutem (Her. 4.1), as does her story. Byblis, despite her young age, resembles the tragic Phaedra, and, in Ovid’s epic (re)interpretation of the epistle, his tale of Byblis claims its tragic model with references to the Ovidian mediating text of Phaedra’s epistle and to Euripidean themes and correspondences.¹¹⁰ Like Phaedra, Byblis’s aim is to seduce her beloved (513–14). In both cases, the beloved is a relative; in the story of Byblis, the kinship is stronger—they are not only blood relatives but twins (prolem … gemellam, 453). Moreover, Byblis and Caunus are children of Miletus, who, we are told a few lines earlier (439–49), fled Crete in order to allay Minos’s fears of a coup from a younger rival. The connection to Minos reminds the reader of Phaedra, his daughter, and, perhaps, the inheritance (or curse, if we believe Phaedra’s claim) of Cretan women’s abject sexuality.¹¹¹

Byblis’s preoccupation with appearance is directly linked to her concern for preserving reputation governed by pudor, a virtue which, for Roman women, was directed toward governing proper sexual behavior and the reputation which resulted from their behavior.¹¹² As noted above, this theme of concealment/revelation as it intersects with reputation/appearance is an important one in Euripides’s Hipp. II. We also saw how this theme is doubly significant to the Ovidian Phaedra’s construction (Her. 4) because of its centrality to her tragic source text(s) and its currency and engagement in Augustan literature. Perhaps following the Ovidian Phaedra’s example, Byblis claims to Caunus that she is compelled to write what pudor prevents her from saying. Both Phaedra and Byblis choose to write letters in order to overcome their shame. Phaedra tells her reader that her tongue is useless (utilis, Her. 4.7) and she blames pudor (9–10) for her inability to speak. Similarly, Byblis questions whether pudor will prevent her from confessing her love in person: “Will you be able to speak? Will you be able to confess? Love will compel me, I will be able to; or, if shame holds my tongue, a secret letter will confess my hidden passion” (poterisne loqui? poterisne fateri? / coget amor, potero; uel, si pudor ora tenebit, / littera celatos arcana fatebitur ignes, Met. 9.514–16). Phaedra says that her letter carries “secrets” (his arcana notis, Her. 4.5); Byblis says that her “secret” letter will confess her hidden passion (littera celatos arcana fatebitur ignes, Met. 9.516).

Despite her insistence that she feels a sense of shame in confessing at the beginning of her letter, she later claims to have no regard for reputation (reuerentia famae, 556). Byblis here offers a condensed version of Phaedra’s argument in Heroides 4 for privileging appearance. In both letters the women point out how the performance of their proper kinship roles is similar enough to be confused for the improper, incestuous, performance. Compare Her. 4.137–46 (quoted above) to Met. 9.556–60:

nec nos aut durus pater aut reuerentia famae
aut timor impediet; tamen ut sit causa timendi,
dulcia fraterno sub nomine furta tegemus.
est mihi libertas tecum secreta loquendi,
et damus amplexus et iungimus oscula coram;
And neither a harsh father nor regard for reputation nor fear will hold us back; nevertheless, should there be a reason for fearing, we will hide our sweet stolen moments under the name of brother. I am free to speak privately with you, and we embrace and kiss out in the open;

Both letter writers note that there are no authority figures standing in the way; however, their argument only draws attention to the very figure whose kinship relation should prevent the sexual liaison they desire (husband, mariti, Her. 4.141; father, pater, Met. 9.556). Byblis’s language of deception echoes Phaedra’s. The idea of physically covering (tegi, Her. 4.138; tegemus, Met. 9.558), coupled with its abstract cover, a name (nomine, Her. 4.138; nomine, Met. 9.558), suggests a disguise.¹¹³ The name of “relative” (cognato, Her. 4.138) or “brother” (fraterno, Met. 9.558) is a role accompanied by the costume of behavior which covers (tego) the player, disguising the actor beneath. Both women note that such a performance will afford them and their lovers the freedom (libertas, Met. 9.559) of privacy (in lecto meo, Her. 4.146; libertas … secreta loquendi, Met. 9.559) as well as the opportunity for public displays of affection, that is, kissing in full view (aperta, Her. 4.144; coram, Met. 9.560).

The narrator’s frame presents Byblis as a would-be elegiac poet. As we watch her begin her composition, the narrator’s phrase scripta “soror” (528) echoes scripta puella, the traditional beloved of Roman erotic elegy.¹¹⁴ Byblis is described as writing on wax writing tablets (tabellas, 523; ceris, 529), the constant companion and confidant of an elegiac lover and beloved.¹¹⁵ Early in the passage, the narrator hints at her elegiac project. Her careful cultus (462–63) is reminiscent not only of Pasiphae’s absurd preparations in the Ars (1.289–326) but also the well-manicured puellae of Roman erotic elegy.¹¹⁶ In fact, a woman’s care for her appearance as a means of catching and keeping the attention of a man is the poet-praeceptor’s primary lesson for his female readers in book 3 of the Ars.¹¹⁷ In addition to the elegiac language of her letter (amans, 531, 547; uiolenta Cupidinis arma, 543; dura/-us, 545, 556), Byblis adds the neoteric exclamation “a” (9.531), echoing the sympathetic narrator’s response to the plaints of maidens like Calvus’s Io, and more recently Vergil’s and Ovid’s Pasiphae (Ecl. 6.47, 52; Ars am. 1.313).¹¹⁸ Byblis strengthens her neoteric associations with a second Catullan allusion, although faint, in her description of the old men whose concern is lawful behavior. Like Catullus and Lesbia in Catull. 5,¹¹⁹ who seek to confuse the senum seueriorum with their uncountable number of kisses, Byblis, in a series of jussive subjunctives (“Let old men know the laws … seek after … preserve,” iura senes norint … inquirant … seruent, Met. 9.551–52), playfully bids Caunus disregard the senes and embrace the philosophy “ignorance is bliss” (“What is allowed we still do not know and we believe all things are allowed,” quid liceat nescimus adhuc et cuncta licere / credimus, 554–55).¹²⁰

Byblis calls Caunus dominus (iam dominum appellat, 466), a role describing the enslavement of the lover to the beloved. Servitium amoris in elegy, however, is always the predicament of the male amator; the puella often plays the part of the domina who rules over his heart.¹²¹ For Byblis to call Caunus a dominus aligns him with the feminine role, her with the masculine, and indicates to the readers familiar with the elegiac code that Byblis’s attempt to fit her desire into the elegiac paradigm may be problematic.¹²² Like Phaedra, Byblis claims that she will be compelled to write a letter of seduction by Amor (“love will compel me,” coget amor, 515; “Unhappily and for a long time I have fought to escape the violent weapons of Cupid … overcome, I am compelled to confess,” pugnauique diu uiolenta Cupidinis arma / effugere infelix … superata fateri / cogor, 543–44, 545–46; “not about to confess, if extreme passion were not compelling me,” non fassurae, nisi cogeret ultimus ardor, 562). Yet, as we noted above, this is a programmatic claim made by the male authors of Roman erotic elegy. This claim, therefore, aligns both Phaedra and Byblis with a masculine elegiac subjectivity. Byblis’s epic letter, nevertheless, demonstrates a more successful self-presentation as a feminine subject than Phaedra’s. To this end, Byblis invites Caunus to look at her, making herself the object of his masculine gaze,¹²³ and she draws attention to her feminine weakness: “I endured more difficulties than you think a woman could bear” (plus quam ferre puellam / posse putes ego dura¹²⁴ tuli, 544–45).¹²⁵

Byblis’s play with signification by exploiting, not negating, the instability of signs—her mythical symbolism and kinship roles in general—depends on another (i.e., Caunus) to recognize her new elegiac thesis. Kristeva maintains that poetry effects a “revolution in poetic language.” Poetry’s language is informed by the multiple meanings of signs it reintroduces into the symbolic economy from the semiotic chora. In order for poetry to affect language, however, the newly introduced meaning must be accepted into linguistic and symbolic systems by others. The narrator introduces Byblis’s story as an example (Byblis in exemplo est, 9.454), focusing the reader’s attention on one specific meaning her myth holds as a sign in the megatext of myth. If Caunus does not successfully interpret (or refuses to read) Byblis’s words, her new “role” as elegiac lover-beloved will be socially illegible. Likewise, if Ovid’s reader does not accept Byblis’s translation into a new genre, her signifying power as a mythological sign remains unchanged.¹²⁶

Even before she picks up the pen Byblis can “imagine” how the “vision from her sleep” (quietis / … suae speciem, 472–73), which she takes pleasure in recalling (repetit, 472), will seem and be seen by Caunus, the reader of her letter. Byblis realizes signification—the process by which signs take on symbolic meaning—requires “two judges” (“Nevertheless that act requires the decision of two,” tamen arbitrium quaerit res ista duorum, 505). For this reason, she does not know yet what the symbolic meaning of the “things seen” “signif[ies]” (“What therefore do my dreams signify for me,” quid mihi significant ergo mea uisa, 495). She is both the generator and interpreter of the visual signs. Without a “second judge,” an other to complete the circuit (i.e., a successful communication including the receipt of her message and the verification of its meaning through a shared understanding), her intentional meaning as author is not confirmed.

Ovid’s text acknowledges that an author needs a reader. It also acknowledges the potential for the reader to assign to the signs of a text a meaning which differs from the intended meaning of the author. Byblis’s inner monologue clearly expresses this anxiety—“Imagine it is pleasing to me; it will seem to be a crime to him” (finge placere mihi; scelus esse uidebitur illi, 506). Ovid artfully renders the conflicting positions of author and reader through grammatical structure, which juxtaposes mihi in the last position before the caesura to illi at the end of the line. In line 506, the phrase belonging to Caunus’s imagined reaction is a full foot longer (scelus esse uidebitur illi, 506), indicating perhaps that the role of reader has more sway over the meaning of a text. It is certainly true that Hippolytus’s reaction to Phaedra’s message in Euripides’s tragic dramatization of her myth strongly informs her symbolic meaning in the megatext of Greek myth, and the only interpretation of Phaedra as a paradigm in the Metamorphoses is that of Hippolytus/Virbius (15.497–546). Caunus, however, refuses to be a reader of her text, throwing the tablets down only partially read (lecta sibi parte, 575).

After the failure of her letter, Byblis privileges physical performance over the textual. Byblis learns that a reader’s mental images are much harder to control, and therefore the meaning of the text is even more unstable. By writing the letter, Byblis creates proof of her desire which her dream performance lacked: “Why indeed did I rashly create evidence of this wound?” (quid enim temeraria uulneris huius / indicium feci, 585–86). Her words, she determines, have to be hidden (celanda … uerba, 586–87) from Caunus, as much as their affair has to be hidden from others (furta tegemus, 558).

et tamen ipsa loqui nec me committere cerae
debueram praesensque meos aperire furores.
uidisset lacrimas, uultum uidisset amantis;
plura loqui poteram, quam quae cepere tabellae;
inuito potui circumdare bracchia collo
et, si reicerer, potui moritura uideri
amplectique pedes adfusaque poscere uitam.
omnia fecissem, quorum si singula duram
flectere non poterant, potuissent omnia, mentem. (Met. 9.601–9)
Nevertheless, I myself should have spoken and not entrusted myself to wax tablets and revealed my passion in person. He would have seen my tears, he would have seen the face of his lover; I could have said more than what the tablets held; I could have put my arms around his reluctant neck and, if I was rejected, I could have seemed to be on the verge of death and I could have embraced his feet and, prostrate, begged for my life. I would have done it all, if each of these things individually could not change his unfeeling mind, everything would have been possible.

Byblis cannot control the intended meaning of her poetry; she should have performed it herself.¹²⁷ This inability of an author to control the reception of her text surfaces in the repetition of forms of mitto. When she is awake, transmitting her desires is equivalent to admitting her desire to herself and taking on a Phaedra-like role. Byblis does not dare to cause her obscene hopes to enter her mind (literally “send down,” demittere, 468). As long as she refuses this role while awake (“So long as I do not try to do any of it awake,” dummodo tale nihil uigilans committere temptem, 479), her desire remains safely hidden from an audience (testis, 481). As discussed above, Byblis modifies the formulaic epistolary greeting, in a way which also betrays her anxiety over “sending” her text to her reader. “This wish for good health which she will not have, unless you give it, a lover sends to you” (quam, nisi tu dederis, non est habitura salutem, / hanc tibi mittit amans, 530–31). The salutem as text relies on the reciprocity of the receiver.¹²⁸ A bad omen accompanies the physical sending of her text. The tablets fall, “nevertheless she sent [them]” (misit tamen, 572).¹²⁹ In contrast to Byblis’s desires, for which she requires the recognition of an other, the omen of the falling tablet constitutes “sure signs” (signaque certa, 600), which she was not mentally fit to interpret. She realizes too late that the omen should have prevented her from committing (committere, 601) herself to wax, and considers whether her choice of dissemination affected the reception of her text (forsitan et missi sit quaedam culpa ministri, 610).¹³⁰ “Sending” her desire in various media is the site of Byblis’s vulnerability—the moment between utterance and reception, when her position as a writing subject is in jeopardy. Once sent, there is nothing left which the text has not said, nothing “unspeakable” left to send (“Now I am not able to do anything unspeakable,” iam nequeo nil commisisse nefandum, 626).

Regardless of the efforts Byblis makes in the narrative, the introduction to her tale has already established Byblis’s meaning as a mythic sign representing incest (“Byblis is set as an example for girls to love what is permitted,” Byblis in exemplo est ut ament concessa puellae, 454). The passage begins by defining each character through their kinship relations.

Hic tibi, dum sequitur patriae curuamina ripae,
filia Maeandri totiens redeuntis eodem
cognita Cyanee praestanti corpora forma,
Byblida cum Cauno, prolem est enixa gemellam.
Byblis in exemplo est ut ament concessa puellae,
Byblis Apollinei correpta cupidine fratris.
[non soror ut fratrem nec qua debebat amabat.] (Met. 9.450–56)
Here Cyane, of exceptional physical beauty, the daughter of the river Maeander, who returns so many times to the same place, while she was following the bends of her father’s banks, was known by you, and gave birth to twin offspring, Byblis along with Caunus. Byblis is set as an example for girls to love what is permitted. Byblis was seized by a desire for her Apolline brother. [The sister did not love him as a brother and not in the way she should.]

Cyane is identified as the daughter of Maeander (filia Maeandri, 451) and the mother of Byblis and Caunus (prolem est enixa gemellam, 453). Here cognita (452) as a sexual euphemism creates a direct link between sexual relations and kinship relations which are “recognizable” within the family and as a family. Byblis and Caunus’s relationship as twins is also established. The next line positions Byblis in a greater mythic megatext. Byblis’s exemplary status in this megatext makes her always already a signifier of abject desire, and Ovid’s language constructs her in just such a way (“Byblis is set as an example,” Byblis in exemplo est, 454). She is not allowed to fall in love with her brother gradually; she always was, even before she knew it.

illa quidem primo nullos intellegit ignes
nec peccare putat, quod saepius oscula iungat,
quod sua fraterno circumdet bracchia collo,
…
sed nondum manifesta sibi est nullumque sub illo
igne facit uotum; uerumtamen aestuat intus. (Met. 9.457–59, 464–65)
At first, indeed, she recognizes none of the fires of love, nor does she think she is making a mistake because she kisses him more often, because she throws her arms around her brother’s neck,

…

But she is not yet aware of her own desire and she makes no prayer for that fire of love; however, it burns inside her.

Byblis is represented as incestuous by nature. We are told Byblis has deceived herself: “and for a long time she is deceived by the false appearance of piety” (mendacique diu pietatis fallitur umbra, 460).

As in the case of Phaedra, Byblis’s cultural abjection is augmented by her generic abjection—a tragic heroine in an epic poem. From the beginning, she is represented as performing the role of the incestuous lover Phaedra, not the kinship role of loving sister. In her letter, Phaedra recommends the performance of “a stepmother who is faithful to my stepson” (privigno fida noverca meo, Her. 4.140) in order to hide (celare, 137) the role of a “stepmother who will have sex with her step-son” (privigno … coitura noverca, 129) beneath the cover of the name “relative” (“the crime can be concealed by the name of kinship,” cognato poterit nomine culpa tegi, 138). Culpa, moreover, carries the connotation of “affair” in late republican and Augustan poetry.¹³¹ These multiple meanings encapsulate Byblis’s and Phaedra’s double violation—they desire a lover who is outside of marriage and also within their own family. Among the activities common to both, Phaedra lists openly kissing and lying in the same bed (“you used to give kisses openly, you will give kisses openly; you will be safe with me and, although you will be seen in my bed, you will earn praise for the crime,” Oscula aperta dabas, oscula aperta dabis; / Tutus eris mecum laudemque merebere culpa, / Tu licet in lecto conspiciare meo, Her. 4.144–46). So, too, Byblis, even before she knows why, takes advantage of the affection afforded to siblings by indulging in one too many kisses (“she kisses him more often,” saepius oscula iungat, Met. 9.458) and throwing her arms about her brother’s neck (sua fraterno circumdet bracchia collo, 459). She even primps (“preparing herself to see her brother,” uisuraque fratrem / culta, 461–62) in order to catch his eye.¹³²

At the close of her letter in the Heroides, Phaedra invites Hippolytus to be an audience to her suffering body (“You are reading the words of a suppliant, imagine also that you see my tears” (verba precantis / Perlegis, et lacrimas finge videre meas, 175–76). Ovid constructs a similar tragic spectacle in book 9 of his Metamorphoses by painting a vivid picture of Byblis beginning the letter (517–29): her posture (“She raises up on her side and, leaning upon her left elbow,” in latus erigitur cubitoque innixa sinistro, 518), talking to herself in direct speech (519–20), and her trembling hand (manu trementi, 521) as it writes, erases, and rewrites. Phaedra tells Hippolytus that “shame must be mixed with love” (pudor est miscendus amori, Her. 4.9). In this line, elegiac amor is juxtaposed with Phaedra’s traditional shame, indicating that she infuses her tragic symbolism with elegiac meaning. Byblis’s own fusion is announced by the narrator. She wears her generic persona on her face like a mask (“boldness is mixed with shame on her face,” in uultu est audacia mixta pudori, 527). We imagine Byblis’s suffering as a performance, as Phaedra has asked Hippolytus to do (“imagine my tears,” Her. 4.176), and as Byblis has watched her own performance in her dreams (474–86). Her suffering female body resembles Phaedra’s on the tragic stage.¹³³ As noted above, Phaedra accomplishes little in Euripides’s Hipp. II besides suffering. Her two other acts are writing a letter and committing suicide. Adding to the dramatic quality of Byblis’s epic tale is the quantity of direct speech which makes up a large portion of the narrative—128 of the 227 lines.¹³⁴

Her tragic “nature” is fortified by association with Dionysus’s followers, maenads, an association we see attributed to other tragic heroines.¹³⁵ The rhetorical question in her incipit, “Where am I carried?” (quo feror?, 509), is acoustically similar to the noun furor, the linguistic signal of a woman out of control, or rather, under the control of sexual desire.¹³⁶ The passive feror also introduces the image of a subject literally under the control of something other—being dragged—with no knowledge of the outcome or destination (quo?). Her desire is described by the narrator using the traditional image of a fire (ignes, 457; igne, aestuat intus, 465), one common to both men and women. Her fire, however, even though she does not recognize it (“At first, indeed, she recognizes none of the fires of love,” illa quidem primo nullos intellegit ignes, 457), is gendered in its excessiveness. The particular feminine excess of her desire is signaled by the comparative saepius (458), the adverb nimium (462), the qualification of her hope as obscenas (468), and the element of deceit (“false appearance of piety,” mendaci … pietatis … umbra, 460), even if Byblis is lying only to herself.

The narrator’s language recalls the discourse employed by the poet-praeceptor in Ars 1, where he characterizes feminine desire as “more moderate in us and not so full of madness” (parcior in nobis nec tam furiosa libido, 281) and “keener than ours and has more madness” (acrior est nostra plusque furoris habet, 342). The “obscene” nature of women’s lust is demonstrated by the list he provides, starting with Byblis herself (Ars am. 1. 283–84). In the Metamorphosis, Byblis dissimulates her desire, illustrating another lesson to male pupils that women cover their desire better than men (“a man is not good at feigning, she desires in a more covert way,” uir male dissimulat, tectius illa cupit, 1.276). After reading part of her letter, Caunus calls her desire uetitae (“wicked author of a forbidden love,” o uetitae scelerate libidinis auctor, Met. 9.577), mimicking the poet-praeceptor’s own assessment of Byblis (“Why should I mention Byblis, who burned with a forbidden love for her brother and bravely avenged her unspeakable crime with a noose?” Byblida quid referam, uetito quae fratris amore / arsit et est laqueo fortiter ulta nefas, Ars am. 1.283–84). The narrator of the Metamorphoses calls Byblis’s desire “madness” (furores, 9.583) and Byblis herself “maddened” (furibunda, 637) and “insane” (demens, 638), echoing again the description of women’s desire in Ars 1 (281, 342, quoted above). The language of madness precedes a simile likening Byblis to a bacchant (“like Ismarian bacchantes celebrate triennial rites, driven by your thyrsus, son of Semele,” utque tuo motae, proles Semeleia, thyrso / Ismariae celebrant repetita triennia Bacchae, Met. 9.641–42), as it does in the poet-praeceptor’s description of Pasiphae (“and is carried, like a bacchante, driven by the Aonian god,” fertur, ut Aonio concita Baccha deo, Ars am.1.312). Again, we are reminded of Byblis’s tragic inheritance of Phaedra’s destructive desire.

When Byblis begins her monologue, she adopts the same discourse. She describes her feminine desire as madness (quae male sum, 493), an “obscene flame” (obscenae … flammae, 509), and one that is deceptively hidden (celatos … ignes, 516). In her letter, she figures her desire as a sickness generated by a wound which has visible symptoms, both physical and behavioral. She describes her desire, combining all of these metaphors in one sentence—“a fiery madness burning inside,” and an illness against which she has fought and lost (540–42).

esse quidem laesi poterat tibi pectoris index
et color et macies et uultus et umida saepe
lumina nec causa suspiria mota patenti
et crebri amplexus et quae, si forte notasti,
oscula sentiri non esse sororia possent.
ipsa tamen, quamuis animi graue uulnus habebam,
quamuis intus erat furor igneus, omnia feci
(sunt mihi di testes) ut tandem sanior essem. (Met. 9.535–42)
In fact, both my pallor and thin frame and expression and often teary eyes and breathlessness caused by no evident reason and frequent embraces and the sort of kisses, if by chance you noticed, that could not be perceived as sisterly, were able to be proof of an ailing heart. Nevertheless, although I was suffering a serious wound to my spirit, although there was a fiery madness inside me, I myself did everything (the gods are my witnesses) to be well at last.

After her epistolary proposition is refused, Byblis calls her desire a wound (uulneris, 585), and something that must be hidden (quae celanda fuerunt, 586). She blames her poor judgment on her lovesickness (si non male sana fuissem, 600). Like Phaedra, Byblis’s impulse to conceal her libido reflects Augustan gender norms which demand that a woman uphold a pudicitia that exhibits no active desire on her part.¹³⁷

The tale itself offers Byblis as a dramatic performance to the external reader as well as to Byblis herself. The word umbra (“shadow,” 460), used to describe the false appearance of familial virtue (mendacique … pietatis, 460), engages with the idea of vision through the contrast of light and dark. It is ironic that the “shadows” of the day are deceptive, while the imagines noctis (474, 480) make manifest (483) what the umbrae could not (460). As discussed above, the dream is described in language evocative of a play. Byblis is both the audience (“she sees,” uidet, 470; “she seeks the image again,” repetitque … speciem, 472–73; “I saw,” uidi, 475; “my visions,” mea uisa, 495) and costar with her brother, Caunus (“she seemed even to join her body with her brother,” uisa est quoque iungere fratri / corpus, 470–71; “He is indeed beautiful to eyes, even though they are hostile, and he is pleasing,” ille quidem est oculis quamuis formosus iniquis / et placet, 476–77). She takes pleasure in the “visions” because she is the sole audience member. There is no one to act as witness (testis, 481) to her dreams in the trial and judgment of her desire. After her dream, however, she (alone) becomes a credible witness (testis) and can recognize the criminal desire (manifesta libido, 483). Manifesta engages this idea of being “caught in the act” when others are looking, since mani- comes from manus (OLD, manifestus [app. MANUS + festus]). Nor does Byblis “catch” herself red-handed before her dream because she does not recognize her behavior as symptomatic of sexual desire.

She tells herself to make a mental picture (“imagine it is pleasing to me,” finge placere mihi, 506), which includes Caunus as an audience member (“it will seem to be a crime to him,” scelus esse uidebitur illi, 506). The language of the passage blurs the function of the senses—seeing and hearing—and their role for an audience member or a reader. One both sees a performance and hears the dialogue spoken by the actors. In the ancient world, one saw the words of a text and heard them because they were read aloud. But when a written text engages with the rhetoric of dramatic performance, the idea of “seeing” the meaning of a text goes beyond seeing the individual letters which make up words; the reader sees the performance which she imagines in her head. Phaedra closes her letter to Hippolytus with a request to create a mental image of what she describes in her letter (“You are reading the words of a suppliant, imagine also that you see my tears,” verba precantis / Perlegis, et lacrimas finge videre meas, Her. 4.175–76). As she begins to write her letter, Byblis says, “a secret letter will confess my hidden passion” (littera celatos arcana fatebitur ignes, Met. 9.516), and “let him see: let us confess our insane love” (uiderit; insanos … fateamur amores, 519).¹³⁸ Her confession, like Phaedra’s, is a written one, but the sense of her statement is that Caunus will come to know about her desire by visualizing what she confesses in writing because the letter is a sort of mediating “actor.” The text itself “speaks,” performing the amores which Byblis could not confess aloud. Byblis’s letter resembles the letter of Euripidean Phaedra, whose letter is said to cry out to Theseus.¹³⁹

As we demonstrated above, Byblis shares with many literary Augustan women in love, such as Dido and the Ovidian Phaedra, the metaphors of female desire as wildness, madness, or sickness, and as uncontrollable or excessive. The excess of Byblis’s letter, filling up even the margins of the tablets (“her hand, which was writing such things to no purpose, handed over the full wax tablets, and the last line clung to its margin,” Talia nequiquam perarantem plena reliquit / cera manum summusque in margine uersus adhaesit, 564–65), replicates the excess of her desire. As Raval notes, Byblis’s desire, like her text, transgresses the normative borders defined by the incest taboo.¹⁴⁰ Janan considers Byblis’s excessive text a metaphor for poetic expansiveness, employed as a tool for differentiation from literary predecessors.¹⁴¹ Her expansive tendencies, argues Janan (1991, 248–55), resemble Ovid’s; her textual failure “points to [expansion’s] logical conclusion, the using up of all new possibilities … the exhaustion of the Roman literary tradition, struggling with its own sense of belatedness.”¹⁴² The representation of Byblis’s desire as excessive (even her own as it spills into the margins) takes up the ideological work of characterizing her desire as both generically and culturally abject.

With this line in the introductory frame, “Byblis seized by a desire for her Apolline brother” (Byblis Apollinei correpta cupidine fratris, 455), the narrator makes clear Byblis’s positionality in relation to Caunus, who is identified as the son of Apollo. Apollo was most closely associated with the rational and temperate. One thinks immediately of the inscriptions on his Delphic temple: μηδὲν ἄγαν (“nothing in excess,” Pausanias, 10.24.1). Line 455 neatly and thickly weaves together these connotations, which had been constructed and reinforced through mythic discourses, in five short words. Apollonei writes Caunus as the rational, masculine subject, fittingly qualified by his role, properly performed, as brother in the symbolic order of kinship. Byblis stands in opposition, a woman whose sexuality is both out of control (signaled by the passive participle, correpta) and in violation of the symbolic order of kinship because it is sexual desire for a brother. After she is safely silenced and contained through metamorphosis, the narrator calls her “Phoebean Byblis” (Phoebeia Byblis, 663), acknowledging for the first time her own kinship with the god of reason, Apollo. The epithet also signals her normativizing incorporation into the landscape, a process of feminization of both woman and earth common in Latin epic.¹⁴³ Byblis’s metamorphosis into a stream also results in a metamorphosis from tragic subject into an Apollonian font (of poetry), but at the cost of her voice. We may imagine the font as Ovid’s Apollonian (and Callimachean) poetic source, mastering and transforming the tragic material.

Pausanias tells us, moreover, that there was another inscription on Apollo’s temple: γνῶθι σαυτόν (“know thyself”). Tragedy dramatizes the danger of female sexuality to the male subject, but it also dramatizes the danger of the return of the abject to that same, rational subject. Euripides’s Bacchae explicitly articulates the need to know one’s inner Dionysus. Nicaenetus’s version of Byblis’s story seems to teach this very lesson. Caunus, whose epithet in the passage quoted by Parthenius is “always loving justice/laws” (ἀεί φιλέοντα θέμιστας, 11.2), is in love with Byblis and flees Miletus to avoid his desire. This version, moreover, demonstrates that Byblis’s desire—represented in Ovid’s poem as not permitted within the definition of her normative kinship role—is also the desire of Parthenius’s Caunus. Ovid’s Caunus is, in terms of gender and sexuality, the normative twin of Byblis. Byblis has quite literally “crossed the line” (modumque / exit, 631–32) in her pursuit of Caunus.¹⁴⁴ As his abjected doppelgänger, Byblis cannot position herself as subject to Caunus’s other because they are, in fact, the same. The story anticipates Kristeva’s and Butler’s definitions of the abject—something internal to the self which is repudiated and transformed, psychologically and linguistically, into a fearsome other.¹⁴⁵

In her soliloquy, Byblis comments on what a perfect family they would make because, of course, they are already a family and share everything.

O ego, si liceat mutato nomine iungi,
quam bene, Caune, tuo poteram nurus esse parenti!
quam bene, Caune, meo poteras gener esse parenti!
omnia di facerent essent communia nobis,
praeter auos; tu me vellem generosior esses. (Met. 9.487–91)
If my name were changed and I could be joined to you, how good a daughter-in-law I could be to your father, Caunus! How good a son-in-law you could be to mine, Caunus! Should the gods make it happen, everything would be shared by us, except our grandparents; I would want you to have a higher status than I.

Her elegiac thesis introduces alternative kinship bonds in which she becomes her brother’s wife, her father’s daughter-in-law. Removing the common grandparents, as Byblis wishes to do in this passage, would normalize this new family but also remove it. Byblis and Caunus exist corporeally only through the grandparents, whose symbolic kinship roles define Byblis’s family relationship with Caunus as sister, not wife. The elegiac thesis of her literary model, Phaedra, similarly disturbs normal family relations. Her citation of the role of (step)mother redefines her as her husband’s daughter and her lover’s mother, and father and son are replicated as father-in-law and son-in-law.¹⁴⁶ In addition to the aspect of performativity already inherent in the familial position, behaving in a way that approximates a sister or (step)mother, Phaedra’s literary heritage introduces a dramatic performance for both—her tragic role.

`Conclusion`

As we discussed earlier, Kristeva theorizes a temporal space which she names the semiotic chora and in which the speaking self has not been distinguished from the other. The chora is already ordered by the symbolic, limiting the potential theses available to certain speaking subjects. Adopting her approach, we have seen how the mythological and literary chora to which Phaedra and Byblis return is already ordered by the Augustan system of kinship and generic codes. Certain gender and genre combinations are foreclosed because they will not be comprehensible to the other whom the speaker attempts to address in her thesis as subject. Both Phaedra and Byblis return to the thetic stage in order to speak from another thesis, but their chosen combination of female elegiac amator of their male kin is forbidden by the incest taboo and by the elegiac universe. Their identity is only visible as abject—what a stepmother, sister, and elegiac amator or puella is not.¹⁴⁷ Ovid’s ventriloquism confirms this ordering and obstructs their ability to successfully perform a transposition which may lead to a reordering, as Kristeva affirms poetry has the ability to do. He does this by disrupting a potential completed circuit between heroine and external audience that would introduce a radical new subject, employing the same strategies used by his poet-praeceptor in the Ars. These disruptive strategies guide the heroines’ audience back to the tragic tradition they seek to escape through their new thesis.

In the case of Phaedra’s poetic epistle, we do not know if Hippolytus, her addressee, will “hear” her utterance as an elegiac amator, thereby acknowledging this new thesis she proposes. Ovid’s reminders of tragedy—lexical and thematic—make it difficult to imagine that Hippolytus would see her as anything but her Euripidean instantiation. In the case of Byblis, the epic narrator describes her writing process, including her self-recognition as a Phaedra-like figure, her return to the thetic stage, her choice of a new voice, the writing of her epistle, and her failure to successfully reposition herself in terms of kinship and genre. Before telling her story, the narrator defines her meaning in the megatext of myth, making clear that she was not able to rewrite her story. In the story itself, the same strategies apparent in Phaedra’s ventriloquized letter also construct Byblis as an abject gendered and generic subject in order to explain and justify her final silencing and banishment from the human—Phaedra through suicide, Byblis through metamorphosis.

Phaedra’s and Byblis’s roles as “alterae Ovid,” to borrow Janan’s phrase, function as part of a larger project which shifts anxieties over poetic failure and the inability to control the meaning of one’s text onto the abject body of the desiring woman, designated other, and safely removed from the poetics of the male author behind her representation.¹⁴⁸ The reason Phaedra and Byblis are unsuccessful and cannot secure a position from which to create a meaningful poem with the power to persuade (or charm) is their “nature.” Neither can find an intelligible position from which to use language because neither were ever (nor ever can be) inside the symbolic system. Their poetry, in the end, is received by their (and therefore Ovid’s) audience, not as an erotic elegy, but as a poetic monstrum.¹⁴⁹ Their poetry “sounds” like an unsuccessful attempt to sing elegy in a tragic register. They are repudiated for their excess and threat to kinship systems; but, along with their sexual body, Ovid successfully sloughs the constraints of literary influence, poetic limitations, and mortality.¹⁵⁰ As noted earlier, Phaedra finally concedes and invites Hippolytus and her external readers to look at her suffering body (Her. 4.176). Likewise, Ovid’s epic narrator focuses on Byblis’s suffering body while also foregrounding her as the type of writing subject Kristeva describes. Ovid forces us to interpret her as an author in her specific material context, not as a disembodied poetic voice. These representations do not remind us that Ovid is also embodied. Rather they shift materiality onto the body of the fictional female author, relieving Ovid of his corporeality. By aligning the negative aspects of poetry and his own writing instance with these abject figures, Ovid is able to disembody his own corpus.¹⁵¹

3. Medean Disruptions in Epic and Elegy

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Notes

C`HAPTER 2` Rescripting Phaedra for an Elegiac Role

`Phaedra,` `Heroides` `4`

`Byblis,` `Metamorphosis` `9.439–665`

`Conclusion`

Annotate

Phaedra, Heroides 4

Byblis, Metamorphosis 9.439–665

Conclusion

`Phaedra,` `Heroides` `4`

`Byblis,` `Metamorphosis` `9.439–665`

`Conclusion`