CHAPTER 1 Signs of Abject Desire in Ars Amatoria
Throughout Ovid’s poetry, Phaedra and Medea appear as paradigms in exemplary catalogues of mythological figures meant to teach, warn, or encourage the auditor or reader. In his erotodidactic poetry alone, Phaedra and Medea appear in ten lists.1 Their pedagogical efficacy relies on the audience’s shared knowledge of their myths from which, the author can assume, a common logical association will be drawn. These lists serve as a convenient beginning to our exploration of Phaedra- and Medea-like figures in Ovid’s texts. Ostensibly distilled to their central exemplarity as items in a list, we may see how Ovid manipulates their true polysemic connotation, sometimes in tension with the purported lesson presented by the narrator, or poet-praeceptor, of the didactic poem. This chapter will focus on two lists from the books of the Ars Amatoria instructing male lovers (1.283–340; 2.381–84, 399–408).2 The catalogues of women are inflected by gender stereotypes of feminine irrationality and generic codes from tragedy. Each example, therefore, fundamentally stands for the theme of Phaedra’s and Medea’s tragic plays—the danger to men posed by destructive female passion. In a metapoetic register, these figures embody the generic introduction of tragic elements to elegy.
The idea of the “abject” subject, as defined by Kristeva and Butler, is a useful lens through which to look at Ovid’s paradigms. If we use the abject to think about these lists, we can see what kind of ideological work they are doing. The Kristevan abject subject is a fictitious other who absorbs all of the qualities which are socially repugnant but, nevertheless, originate in members of the community. This imaginary subject is constructed in order to produce a complementary and equally imaginary normative subject with which respectable members of society may self-identify.3 Butler further theorizes the abject, once constructed, as a cautionary figure who embodies the exclusion and punishment one may suffer if one fails to eliminate or successfully suppress those repudiated qualities the abject subject embodies. Because the abject figure simultaneously demarcates the limits of normal and acceptable behaviors for members of a community and acts as a warning continuously regulating this behavior, its existence is essential.4 With this definition in mind, it is possible to understand the abject female desire described by the poet-praeceptor as both a cautionary tale—a warning for the Augustan subject of how not to act—and the definition of what male desire is not. Indeed, the structure of the catalogue constructs a male desire which is by contrast human, in control, and civilized. Nevertheless, these figures in Ovid’s verse illustrate the porous nature of the boundary between us and them; male and female; tragedy and elegy; for what is constructed as abject originates in, but is disavowed by, the ideal subject and is reassigned as a characteristic of the abject.
Each of the individual mythological heroines in the two catalogues under consideration can be understood as similarly abjected, for they participate in what Charles Segal has identified as a semiotics of myth, “a coded system of virtually interchangeable symbols,”5 whose paradigmatic relationship is emphasized by the structure of a poetic catalogue. He argues for a “megatext” of myth at work in ancient literature.6 The total system of myth acts like a language in the ancient world, and, in this language, mythological characters act like words. A mythological figure like Medea, for example, represents more than just the specific character Medea. She may also represent the concept of “revenge,” or stand for a woman who kills her children. Moreover, the symbolic meanings created in myth sometimes reaffirm social expectations and cultural norms—for example, warnings about taboos (e.g., Oedipus and incest) or examples of virtuous behavior (Penelope and the ideal wife) (Segal 1986, 49).
Because this language is unconscious, but shared, Ovid can assume that his audience can “read” the megatext (Segal 1986, 58). We can see how this language of myth is “spoken” in tragedy when characters use other mythological characters as examples of certain behaviors. In Euripides’s Hippolytus, for example, the nurse and the chorus offer to Phaedra, as models for self-forgiveness, Zeus and Dawn (451–57) and Iole and Semele (545–64), and thereby identify mythological examples which are paradigms in a given category.7 The nurse suggests to Phaedra divine examples, who carried on after shameful love affairs, in order to dissuade her from her plans of suicide. The persuasiveness of her examples relies on the familiarity of the internal audience (Phaedra) and the external audience with these myths.
The discourse which represented and reified stereotypes about female passion was produced by a powerful patriarchal structure. A Roman woman’s father determined her identity in the family (she was named after her father), and her father ultimately decided whom she would marry. The discourse of marriage reflects the passive position of the women, who were “led into, held in, or given in” marriage (in matrimonium ducere / in matrimonio habere / in matrimonium dare / collocare; OLD, matrimonium, 1.a–d.). Marriage established important familial and social relationships between men, creating affinitates between families.8 Women whose adultery threatened the family economically (i.e., through a potential extramarital pregnancy which disrupted inheritance rights) or socially (i.e., by dissolving the alliance between two families) were punished in kind by the lex Julia de adulteriis coercendis, a law most likely passed around 18 BCE.9 Adulteresses lost inheritance rights and were no longer marriageable under the terms of the lex Julia, but took on the status of “prostitute” under the law.10 Their bodies were also dressed for the part. They were no longer allowed to wear the stola, the traditional dress of a matrona. Instead, they were made to wear the toga, the costume of a man and of a prostitute.11 No longer recognized as matronae, their bodies were outwardly marked and defined by their transgressive sexuality. The corporeal signification of the toga for the adulteress and the prostitute, a man’s costume, supports the argument that active sexuality is gendered masculine in Roman discourses of desire; hence, women who made their own decisions about their sexual partners were behaving like men and were not recognizable as women. These laws constituted a statutory abjection by excluding women who disrupted social norms from Roman society as women while serving to define normative feminine sexuality as passive. Furthermore, men were expected under the law to police the sexuality of their wives. If a husband did not take action after discovering his wife’s transgressions, he was considered a pimp under the lex Julia.12 The legal abjection of male subjects who did not police normative sexual mores also delineated the proper performance of masculinity, and their punishment, like that of transgressive women, served as a warning for others to remain within the boundaries these abject subjects drew. Our reading will reveal that the punishments for sexual indiscretion meted out to the heroines, which are carefully catalogued in the poet-praeceptor’s list, reflect these social and legal realities of Ovid’s time.
Ars Amatoria 1.283–340
The first catalogue we will consider is found at 1.283–340, where the poet-praeceptor offers a list of women in love: Byblis, Myrrha, Pasiphae, Aerope, Scylla, Clytemnestra, Medea, Phthia, Phaedra, and Phineus’s wife. Although our poet-praeceptor tells us the purpose of his list—to assure the “hunting” lover of a catch because the prey wants to be caught (haec quoque, quam poteris credere nolle, uolet, 274)—a careful reading of this passage and its narrative frame demonstrates that, for a literary pupil with knowledge of earlier, more elaborated treatments of these myths, their function as exempla exceeds the intent of our teacher and his lesson. Instead, the mythological desiring women in Ovid’s Ars construct normative desiring subjects both through their function as cautionary tales and through their alterity—subjects whose desires define, through their opposition, desires that are considered normative in the Augustan world. As we saw from the Euripidean lists, paradigmatic relationships may be long established.13 Ovid’s audience likely could generate a list of paradigms of female desire on their own. The list under consideration has been compared to Propertius 3.19.1–28, whose collection of elegies was published perhaps twenty years before the first two books of Ovid’s Ars.14 Propertius 3.19 constructs a very similar list of desiring women (Pasiphae, Tyro, Myrrha, Medea, Clytemnestra, and Scylla, in that order) as proof to his beloved, Cynthia, that women’s sexual appetite (libido) is out of control.
These paradigms are established in the plastic arts as well. Let us consider, as examples, two groups of frescoes painted after Ovid’s poetry was published. Three frescoes featuring Medea, Phaedra, and Helen were found in an inner room of the Pompeian House of Jason, dating from 10 to 20 CE. Two of these heroines appear in Ovid’s list, one in Propertius’s. Medea sits to the side of the composition, head in hand, holding a dagger, and looking toward her children who take up the rest of the panel. Phaedra reclines in the center of her panel, her nurse on one side holding a wax tablet, an attendant on the other holding a jewelry box. Helen is depicted standing beside a seated Paris with Cupid in the center. The panels offer viewers a moment when the heroine makes her crucial decision.15 A series of frescoes from the Villa of Munatia Procula at Tor Marancia near Rome, which dates to a little over a century after Ovid’s death, resembles even more closely the list in Ars Amatoria because of the brevity of each representation. It depicts five women, four of which appear in Ovid’s list and three in Propertius’s: Canace, Myrrha, Pasiphae, Phaedra, and Scylla.16 Each woman floats on a plain background, is accompanied by her name and, in most instances, holds a prop. Canace holds a sword, Myrrha runs (from her father?), Pasiphae stands by the bull, Scylla is on the wall of Megara holding her father’s lock of hair, and Phaedra (see figure) holds a noose. Both collections of painted figures function as a literary list of examples, giving only the most necessary information, but inviting the viewer to create a thematic association between the heroines and their myths. Groupings such as those found in the House of Jason and the Villa of Munatia Procula attest to the long-lived role these mythological characters held as paradigms in the Roman mind.17 The groupings may also speak to the influence of the poetic depictions, especially Ovid’s Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses, for each of these characters is memorably “painted” by the poet in these poems.18
Wall-painting of Phaedra from the Villa of Munatia Procula, Tor Marancia, Vatican, sala delle Nozze Aldobrandini inv. 79636. Photograph courtesy of B. Bergmann, all rights reserved. Reproduced from Bettina Bergmann, “The Lineup: Passion, Transgression, and Mythical Women in Roman Painting,” EuGeSta 7, 2017, fig. 5.
When Ovid’s poet-praeceptor calls upon these familiar paradigms of desiring women, he maintains the list is meant to bolster the confidence of his reader-pupil of a future erotic conquest. When the poet-praeceptor speaks the language of myth in this passage, his stated lesson—that all women are sex crazed—is in productive tension with a list of paradigms whose passions do not lead to the sort of romantic and pleasurable affairs the pupil may seek. Instead, their stories have disastrous outcomes. The first five examples—Byblis, Myrrha, Pasiphae, Aerope, and Scylla—destroy the family by violating normative kinship roles. These examples are focalized through the perspective of the woman, perhaps justifying their inclusion in a list of eager lovers. Despite themselves, they could not fight their desire. When the narrator shifts perspective with Agamemnon and begins to offer examples from the point of view of the women’s victims—Agamemnon, Creusa, Phoenix, Hippolytus, and Phineus—the catalogue demonstrates that women’s excessive sexual passion is complemented by their excessive rage. The catalogue is structured in the following way:
- 283–84: Byblis
- 285–88: Myrrha
- 289–326: Pasiphae
- 327–30: Aerope
- 331–32: Scylla
- 333–34: Agamemnon
- 335–36: Medea
- 337: Phoenix
- 338: Hippolytus
- 339–40: Phineus
The frame of the catalogue organizes gender categories into normative and abject. Before the narrator introduces his exemplary heroines, the reader is primed to oppose rational man to irrational woman/beast.
prima tuae menti ueniat fiducia, cunctas
posse capi: capies, tu modo tende plagas.
uere prius uolucres taceant, aestate cicadae,
Maenalius lepori det sua terga canis,
femina quam iuueni blande temptata repugnet;
haec quoque, quam poteris credere nolle, uolet.
utque uiro furtiua Venus, sic grata puellae;
uir male dissimulat, tectius illa cupit.
conueniat maribus ne quam nos ante rogemus,
femina iam partes uicta rogantis aget.19
mollibus in pratis admugit femina tauro,
femina cornipedi semper adhinnit equo.
parcior in nobis nec tam furiosa libido;
legitimum finem flamma uirilis habet. (Ars 1.269–82)
First let confidence enter your mind, all women can be caught: you will catch them, merely spread your nets. Birds would be silent in the spring, cicadas in the summer, the Maenalian hound would turn her back to the hare, before a woman who is charmingly approached would resist a young man; she also, whom you can believe is not willing, will be willing. And just as secret love is pleasing to a man, so it is to a girl; a man is not good at feigning, she desires in a more covert way. Should it suit us men not to ask her first, the woman, already overcome, will play the part of the asker. The female moos at the bull in the soft meadows, the female always neighs to the hoofed horse. Desire is more moderate in us and not so full of madness; the manly flame has a lawful limit.
The exclusivity of the didactic “we” (nos, 277; in nobis, 281; nostra, 342) creates a closed circle which includes the poet-praeceptor and the student in a unified category. This category is identified as male by the direct address in line 267: “whoever and wherever you are, men, direct teachable minds” (quiquis ubique, uiri, dociles aduertite mentes). The category “Man” (uir) is opposed to the excluded femina who is the object of study. Furthermore, Ovid uses a series of comparatives (tectius, 276; parcior, 281; acrior … nostra plusque, 342), marking the difference between the two categories by degrees. The us-them dichotomy is further reinforced by examples from the animal world which frame the assuring statements that women will be caught because they actively desire, although they appear otherwise. In fact, the natural behavior of animals (birds, cicadas, hunting dogs) is more likely to be reversed (271–73) than a femina would refuse her suitor (repugnet, 273). If men don’t ask them first (ante rogemus, 277), women will act the part of the suitor (278). The comparison of aggressive female sexuality to natural animal behavior and the repetition of the word femina in three successive lines, even in the same metrical position (278–80), equates women’s sexuality with animal sexuality. Such a strategy further differentiates men from women, but more importantly excludes female sexuality from human sexuality, relegating it to the lower order of beast.
The binary categories of active and passive are established by the grammar and syntax of the poet-praeceptor’s frame. The female is the active desirer, which aligns the male with the passive position—and it is this reversal which is aligned with natural animal behavior (271–73, cited above) and opposed to human behavior. Also set in opposition are the natures of masculine and feminine desires. Women are like men in that they enjoy illicit affairs (furtiua, 275), but they are different in their experience of desire. They are better at disguising it (276). Their desire (libido) is less sparing (parcior, 281), is keener (acrior, 342), and has more madness (furiosa, 281; plus furoris, 342).20 The comparatives articulate the presence of excess.21 The “more than” masculine desire of women is constructed in such a way as to define female desire as what male desire is not, and vice versa. What the pupil learns is that “we” men are more sincere in our love (in comparison to the dissimulation of women), more in control, less fierce and less insane. The final line in the last couplet (282) before we move into the list defines male desire definitively: legitimum finem flamma uirilis habet. A man’s love “burns,” so to speak, it is a flame (flamma) but it burns within legitimate or legal boundaries. The abject sexuality constructed by the poet-praeceptor’s frame is one which an individual cannot control, which does not have a legitimate boundary, but which instead controls the individual, rendering it abject—excluded from what counts as human, but set as a limit of the very sexuality which it exceeds. Such desires are associated exclusively with women in this passage, implying that men do not experience such desire because their sexuality is under control.
As noted above, the poet-praeceptor confidently states that “should it suit us men not to ask her first, the woman, already overcome, will play the part of the asker” (conueniat maribus ne quam nos ante rogemus, / femina iam partes uicta rogantis aget, 277–78). The phrase partes … agere not only signals an active role for women but is also used to describe acting a role onstage, and Ovid’s use of this dramatic language here reminds us of his list’s engagement with tragedy and its themes.22 This semantic context acts as a cue for the reader who was more sensitive to representations of any of these heroines which may have been or were currently found on the tragic stage.23 While the first two exempla, Byblis and Myrrha, were not, so far as we know, subjects of tragedies, the remaining eight examples were.24 Such a reminder complicates the meaning of the poet-praeceptor’s list by introducing to the mind of his audience the complex and manifold representations of each heroine offered by both Greek and Roman tragedians.25 The catalogue which follows can be understood as a list of the “roles” available to women. They, that is, women, are the same as the paradigms.
Like the floating figures of the imperial fresco in Tor Marancia, Ovid’s list provides only the most necessary identifiers to readers—a mere one to four lines. These examples frame an extended Pasiphae narrative (thirty-eight lines). Byblis (283–84) and Myrrha (285–88), the examples preceding the Pasiphae passage, share a similar structure with some variation.
Byblida quid referam, uetito quae fratris amore
arsit et est laqueo fortiter ulta nefas?
Myrrha patrem, sed non qua filia debet, amauit,
et nunc obducto cortice pressa latet;
illius lacrimis, quas arbore fundit odora,
unguimur, et dominae nomina gutta tenet. (Ars 1.283–88)
Why should I mention Byblis, who burned with a forbidden love for her brother and bravely avenged her unspeakable crime with a noose? Myrrha loved her father, but not as a daughter should, and now she is hidden, constrained beneath enveloping bark; with her tears, which she sheds from a fragrant tree, we anoint ourselves, and the oil retains its mistress’s name.
The first hexameter of each example begins with a proper name, names a kinship role which has been distorted, and ends with amor/amare, the aspect of the relationship which is in crisis. In both cases, the kinship role (brother and father) is positioned next to the noun or pronoun which identifies the girl, emphasizing by proximity a close relationship which has become too close. Enclosed by the proper names and names of family position are words indicating both the existence of rules (the incest taboo) and their transgression (“forbidden,” uetito, 283; “not as a daughter should,” non … filia debet, 285).
The remaining lines of each example indicate the punishment for this transgression. Byblis becomes an avenger (ulta) of her own crime; the punishment she exacts is suicide (laqueo). Her suicide, accomplished in a feminine manner (hanging), returns her to a normative status; however, her status as criminal and avenger—a combination of opposing roles—reflects her incestuous position.26 Incest forces Myrrha and her father to inhabit two separate kinship relationships at once (daughter to father as well as wife to husband), a paradoxical state akin to lawbreaker and law enforcer (“avenged her unspeakable crime,” est … ulta nefas, 284). Myrrha’s crime is now hidden and constrained by her new form (nunc obducto cortice pressa latet, 286). The additional couplet indicates that her name (her identity as a human who once lived) and her sorrow (represented by her tears, lacrimis, 287) now belong to the sap of a tree. Both women are removed from the human realm as punishment, thereby rendered abject.
The extended treatment of Pasiphae which disrupts the catalogue further defines the exemplarity of Byblis, Myrrha, and the heroines that follow.27 It also explores in detail the themes of gender violation and its punishment, while introducing tragedy as a generic theme, both with Pasiphae’s previous tragic role and with bacchic imagery and vocabulary. Her object of desire—the bull—connects the list to its frame by reprising the association of female desire with animal sexuality.
Ovid depicts his Pasiphae leaving the marriage chamber and being carried into the wilderness (“The queen has left behind her marriage bed and is carried into the grove and forest like a bacchante, driven by the Aonian god,” in nemus et saltus thalamo regina relicto/ fertur, ut Aonio concita Baccha deo, Ars 1.311–12).28 The mountains, on the margins of culture, are the requisite space for bacchantes to whom the poet-praeceptor compares Pasiphae in the pentameter. Desiring women are often characterized by furor in Ovid, as they are in the frame (furiosa, 281; plus furoris, 342), or they are associated with the worship of Dionysus, as Pasiphae is.29 In fact, similes likening any woman acting passionately or irrationally to bacchantes are numerous.30 His worship was also closely associated with drunkenness and sexual promiscuity in both Greece and Rome.31 In addition, the presence of Dionysus and his worship in Roman poetry often signals the presence of tragic elements in other genres.32 Mention of Dionysus not only alerts the reader-pupil to the ecstatic nature of the women’s desire but also reminds him of the context in which this destructive desire became canonical, at the tragic competitions of the City Dionysia in Athens.33 As noted earlier, eight of the ten heroines featured in this list were depicted on the Attic stage. Pasiphae herself was the subject of Euripides’s (now fragmentary) Cretans, which told the story of Minos’s discovery of the birth of the Minotaur.34 While worshippers of Bacchus in real life returned to their normative social roles, the tragic bacchantes inflicted damage upon their kin, ravaged homes, and in particular destroyed the men in those homes.35
For the Romans, moreover, the threat posed by worshippers of Bacchus had a historic context. Early in the second century BCE, the worship of Dionysus in Rome fell under the suspicion of the Senate. Of particular concern were the Greek origins of the cult and the unsupervised gatherings of people where gender and class distinctions were blurred.36 As Seaford puts it: “The intensity of the cult, together with the secret initiation and oath of loyalty to which its members were subjected, may have been—or seemed to be—a focus of identity that transcended, and so threatened loyalty to, the existing structures of the Roman order” (Seaford 2006, 60–61).37 A senatus consultum was passed in 186 BCE restricting assemblies, but individual worship was allowed to continue. As a result of the suppression and its legacy, Roman literary references to bacchantes resonate particularly strongly with the context of social disorder.38 Still a generic marker, the bacchantes also and especially represented the wild, often violent, extralegal frenzy of a foreign religion, the ecstasy of the other. In the Aeneid, for instance, bacchic frenzy is inspired not by Bacchus but by a fury, Allecto, or is simulated in order to work against male order and undermine homosocial alliances.39 Velleius Paterculus (2.82.4) tells us that in 34 BCE, Antony presented himself as the New Dionysus in his triumph over the Armenians in Alexandria. Antony’s performance, Miller argues, “was precisely the kind of ‘eastern excess’ that allowed Augustus to portray himself as the defender of traditional Roman order against the dangers of an orientalizing and effeminate tyranny” (Miller 2004, 167).40 In short, women who behave like bacchantes resemble women in tragedies and symbolize a threat to the Roman family and state.
Also like the bacchantes of tragedy, Pasiphae can no longer discern oppositional categories. She describes the bull as if he were a man, calling him domino … meo (314), ipsum (315), and again meo (322).41 The poet-praeceptor urges Pasiphae to make a distinction: “If you prefer to deceive your man/husband, deceive [him] with a man” (siue uirum mauis fallere, falle uiro, 310). The line relies on the two meanings for the word vir, both “man” and “husband,” further emphasizing the exclusive nature of the role of husband—one must be a man to be a vir.42 Ovid’s Pasiphae treats the female cows as if they were humans, and behaves vindictively and jealously as if they were paelices (320, 321), iterating the alignment of women with animals that the animal comparanda in the frame articulates (271–73, 278–80).
Another reminder of tragedy is Pasiphae’s inability to recognize who she is—both her human form and her status as human wife and queen—a programmatic dilemma of Attic Greek tragedy.43 The poet-praeceptor draws attention to this when he addresses Pasiphae:
ille tuus nullas sentit adulter opes.
quid tibi cum speculo montana armenta petenti?
quid totiens positas fingis inepta comas?
crede tamen speculo, quod te negat esse iuuencam: (Ars, 1.304–7)
That lover of yours does not notice any riches. What good does a mirror do you if you are seeking out the herd in the mountains? Why do you, silly woman, style your hair so often? Nevertheless, trust your mirror which denies that you are a cow.
She is unable to “see” herself, despite the mirror in her hand, nor does she realize that the bull is unable to feel the influence of (sentit, 304; OLD, sentire, 5) her careful cultus. The poet-praeceptor represents a Pasiphae who longs to be a virgo, drawing upon the mythological exempla of the victimized maidens Europa and Io (“And now she asks to become Europa, now Io, one because she is a cow, the other because she was carried by a cow,” et modo se Europen fieri, modo postulat Io, / altera quod bos est, altera uecta boue, Ars am. 1.323–24), the former pursued by Zeus in the form of a bull, the latter transformed into a cow by Zeus. Pasiphae the mythological character is a desiring wife pursuing the object of her desire, but she wants to be a mythological, victimized maiden who is pursued as an object of desire.
Like the first two examples of desiring women in the poet-praeceptor’s list, Pasiphae is represented as behaving in a way which is normal for neither her social role as wife/queen nor her gender role as woman, and her story describes in more detail the threat this poses to men in her family. We are told that the concern (cura, 301), which she should have for her husband, does not delay her from running off to the herd: “She accompanies the herd, nor does love for her husband delay her from going, and Minos was conquered by a bull” (it comes armentis, nec ituram cura moratur / coniugis, et Minos a boue uictus erat, 301–2). The structure of the couplet and the enjambment of coniugis in the pentameter reinforces the displacement of her cura. Instead of appearing in its proper place with her husband, Minos, identified twice in the following line (coniugis, Minos), cura shares the hexameter line with armentis. In line 302, both his familial role (husband) and proper name are given and fill the first hemistich of the pentameter, drawing our attention to him. The second hemistich describes the outcome of her displaced cura as Minos, her human husband, is made the vanquished enemy of a cow: Minos a boue uictus erat. The outcome overturns the proper hierarchy of man and beast.44 Furthermore, by leaving the marriage chamber (thalamo regina relicto, 311), which is a symbol of the relationship to her husband and the household which he controls, Pasiphae steps over the threshold of normative family roles. This movement spatially signifies her transgression and her movement toward a position outside of society and the traditional rules which govern its members. Pasiphae’s desire is no longer part of civilization but is located in the wilderness.
In the frame the poet-praeceptor compares women with cows, claiming that, like female cows that pursue a bull, a woman will eventually pursue a man: “The woman, already overcome, will play the part of the asker. The female moos at the bull in the soft meadows” (femina iam partes uicta rogantis aget. / mollibus in pratis admugit femina tauro, 278–79). In the Pasiphae passage, the poet-praeceptor tells the story of a woman who literally equates women with cows, a woman who wants to be a cow, and a woman who equates a bull with a man. Pasiphae must perform the role of a beast to satisfy her unnatural (i.e., abnormal) desire. Active female desire, for which Pasiphae is an exemplum, makes men into beasts as well. Because it reverses a fundamental Roman gender binary—active/masculine vs. passive/feminine—active female desire is also associated with and represented as reversing other fundamental categories such as family roles (through incest and adultery) and the hierarchy of man and beast. The ultimate product of Pasiphae’s consummated desire is the monstrous Minotaur, half-bull, half-man. He is not explicitly named in this passage, but he gives away his father (partu proditus auctor erat, 1.326), hinting at his biform nature. Her offspring epitomizes the results when categories are dissolved and the abject irrupts into normative society.45
Closing the frame of the lengthy Pasiphae passage are more brief exempla: Aerope, Scylla, Clytemnestra, Medea, Phthia, Phaedra, and a mythological heroine whose name is lost.
Cressa Thyesteo si se abstinuisset amore
(et quantum est uno posse carere uiro?),
non medium rupisset iter curruque retorto
Auroram uersis Phoebus adisset equis.
filia purpureos Niso furata capillos
pube premit rabidos inguinibusque canes.
qui Martem terra, Neptunum effugit in undis,
coniugis Atrides uictima dira fuit.
cui non defleta est Ephyraeae flamma Creusae
et nece natorum sanguinolenta parens?
fleuit Amyntorides per inania lumina Phoenix;
Hippolytum rabidi diripuistis equi.
quid fodis immeritis, Phineu, sua lumina natis?
poena reuersura est in caput ista tuum.
omnia feminea sunt ista libidine mota;
acrior est nostra plusque furoris habet. (Ars am. 1.327–42)
If the Cretan woman had abstained from love for Thyestes (and is it so much to be able to stay away from one man?), Phoebus would not have broken his journey midway, changed course in his chariot and approached Aurora with rerouted horses. Because his daughter stole the red lock from Nisus’ hair, she holds back savage dogs with her groin and abdomen. The son of Atreus, who fled Mars by land, Neptune on the waves, was the dreadful victim of his wife. Who has not wept over the flames of Ephyrean Creusa and the mother bloodied by the murder of her sons? The son of Amyntor, Phoenix, wept through empty eyes; you, savage horses, tore apart Hippolytus. Why do you dig out the eyes of your innocent sons, Phineus? That punishment will be turned onto your head. All of those things were motivated by female desire; it is keener than ours and has more madness.
Again, in these brief examples, our poet-praeceptor foregrounds family relationships. This focus highlights the failure of each woman to perform properly her kinship role of wife, daughter, or mother. Aerope (327–30) is named only by her nationality (Cressa, 327) and role as adulteress with Thyestes (Thyesteo, 327). This sort of learned reference is a Hellenistic feature characteristic of the Roman elegists, but it also suggests that Aerope’s recognition relies on these two defining positions with which the heroine is in conflict. Following Aerope is a hybrid Scylla (331–32), combining both the daughter of Nisus and the biform monster.46 The failure to perform her kinship role properly, due to her active desire, is given prominence by placing filia in the first position, in close proximity to the name of her father, but separated by the very thing whose theft ultimately disrupts her performance of daughter, the purpureos … capillos (331). Her abject sexuality is manifested in her monstrous body around her genitals (pube inguinibusque, 332).
Clytemnestra (333–34) is also only named through her kinship role (coniugis Atrides, 334), and is, moreover, denied a subject position (Agamemnon holds this place). Likewise, Medea’s (335–36) name is suppressed—she is known only by her murder of Creusa (flamma Creusae, 335) and by her role as parens (336), which is delayed until the last position, qualified by the destruction she has wrought.47 Line 337 describes the victim of Phthia, her son-in-law. Both the father (Amyntor) and the son (Phoenix) are named in the single line. The disastrous outcome resulting directly from Phthia’s active desire (inania lumina, 337) stands in for her.48 Phaedra (338), too, is displaced by the result of her desire, while Hippolytus’s name takes first position. The list finishes with a story (339–40) nearly identical to Phthia’s (337), whose result—the blinding of a son by a father, Phineus—replaces the name of the woman.49 Phineus is addressed by the poet-praeceptor, in the vocative case, and holds a central position in the first line (339).
The structure of the list increases its psychological proximity to the reader-pupil. The names of the heroines gradually disappear, and they are identified only by their crime or their punishment.50 The list begins with five tales that focus on the consequences for the desiring woman (283–332), but the focus shifts with Clytemnestra to the consequences for the male victims of her desire (333–40). The last three examples describe the mutilation of young men (337–40), close in age and lineage to Ovid’s ideal readers. All this amounts to an implicit lesson for the reader-pupil—a woman who does not contain, repress, and dissimulate her “naturally” intemperate desire will visit destruction upon the male members of her family and will be punished. The direct address to Hippolytus’s horses (diripuistis equi, 338) and Phineus (fodis … Phineu, 339) draws attention to the male reader-pupil’s own risk in the face of female desire and his own responsibility for resisting and repressing this female desire. Even in the shortest examples, we get a sense of what is at stake—the dissolution of normative kinship relations and normative gendered positions of active and passive, the same tensions which were explored in Greek tragedies such as Hippolytus.51
The frame ends with an implicit alignment of women with tragedy, constructing both gender and genre as abject.
omnia feminea sunt ista libidine mota;
acrior est nostra plusque furoris habet.
ergo age, ne dubita cunctas sperare puellas:
uix erit e multis, quae neget, una, tibi. (Ars am. 1.341–44)
All of those things were motivated by female desire; it is keener than ours and has more madness. Therefore come, do not hesitate to hope for all the girls: scarcely will there be one girl out of the many who would say no to you.
As an abject desire, that of the active desiring woman delineates normative desire by representing what normative desire is not. Her desire defines the border beyond which the desire of men and women ceases to be counted as socially and culturally acceptable and begins to resemble the desire of the nonhuman. Her wild, irrational love circumscribes the lawful, finite (legitimus finis, 282), and moderate (parcior, 281) desire of Roman men, which, although still a flame (flamma uirilis, 282), is contained. Female desire is described only as the antithesis of male desire (through the use of negatives and comparatives as we see in line 281, parcior in nobis nec tam furiosa libido). The list, moreover, demonstrates that female desire obstructs normative masculinity in general and normative masculine desire in particular by “playing the part of the asker” (partes … rogantis aget, 1.278). In order for masculine desire to function, feminine desire must only be apparent as a nondesire, one so successfully dissimulated it cannot be detected (“whom you can believe is not willing,” quam poteris credere nolle, 274; “a man is not good at feigning, she desires in a more covert way,” uir male dissimulat, tectius illa cupit, 276). The two categories—masculine and feminine—are themselves opposed (active vs. passive) but they are linked in their relational status as normative roles within the discursive economy of Ovid’s ideal readers. These borders of normative and abject desire are policed by the threat of punishment. For the desiring female subject, the punishment is monstrosity, madness, or death. For the desiring man, the punishment is a feminized position. For the man who fails to control active female desire, the punishment is destruction. In all cases, the punishment refuses the mythological woman or man a livable life, one which is an identity intelligible as a human woman or man within the symbolic gendered system of Ovid’s time.52
The destructive potential of women’s erotic desires, furthermore, constructs all female passion in a continuum, with erotic desire balancing rage. Valladares (2021, 169–71) points to this very tension in her discussion of the frescoes in the House of Jason, discussed above. Here the myths of Helen and Phaedra guide a viewer to recall the erotic elements of Medea’s myth. At the same time, the central position of Medea reminds a viewer of the violent denouement of all three heroines’ stories. On this continuum, all women in love are also always already capable of murderous revenge. In Ovid’s catalogue, this potential is signaled by the first entry of the list with Byblis’s reflexive vengeance. She is said to have “bravely avenged her unspeakable crime” (fortiter ulta nefas, 284). As we have observed, Pasiphae’s comic ira is taken out on her paelices, the cows of the herd. While her revenge is no threat to any human men in her life, the excess of her jealous rage foreshadows the human victims of later examples. She is said to hold the entrails of her rivals in her hands in victory and dare them to “please my lord” (et tenuit laeta paelicis exta manu. / paelicibus quotiens placauit numina caesis/ atque ait exta tenens “ite, placete meo,” 320–22), in a parody of perverted ritual sacrifices familiar from the tragic stage. The description of her revenge, which is disguised as sacrifices (commentaque sacra, 319), is introduced by a simile comparing Pasiphae’s psychological state to an ecstatic maenad (312), marking her vengeance, like her lust, as generically tragic.53 Aerope’s lust is called Thyestean (327), guiding the pupil back to the tragic stage where, in both Greek and Roman drama, Thyestes was the victim of Atreus’s mad revenge.54 Following Aerope, the revenge associated with the examples in the catalogue are noted explicitly and become the focus of the entries. Agamemnon is called the “dire victim” of his wife (Clytemnestra, 334), the subject of Aeschylus’s tragedy Agamemnon among others. Creusa’s flame, by which Medea kills her, is lamented (335), while the parent (Medea) is described as spattered by her children’s blood (336), as she was on Euripides’s tragic stage. Phoenix, blinded (337), Hippolytus, dismembered (338), and Phineus, blinder of his own son (339–40), finish off the list.55
Ars Amatoria 2.381–408
If we look ahead to book 2, likely published with book 1, we may see two of the characters included in the list of women in love, in a shorter list of women enraged.56 The poet-praeceptor employs the same strategies to construct these passions as natural, but wild and inhuman; disruptive to normative gender roles; and generically tragic—an abject rage which defines the limits of a normative, righteous anger. This companion book instructs the successful lover in maintaining his newly acquired relationship. At 2.349–408, the lesson turns to absence, its benefits and dangers. Phyllis, Penelope, and Laodamia are all deployed as examples of women whose hearts grew fonder while their lovers were away (353–56). The poet-praeceptor warns, with the example of Helen, that too much absence offers an opportunity for adultery (357–72). He then abruptly turns to men’s philandering with cautionary examples of women’s rage (ira, 373) when they catch their lovers cheating (377). Our three examples are Medea, Procne, and Clytemnestra.
The short catalogues are structured in the following way:
- 353–54: Phyllis
- 355: Penelope
- 356: Laodamia
- 357–72: Helen
- 381–82: Medea
- 383–84: Procne
- 399–408: Clytemnestra
Let us first consider the short introduction to the list of enraged women.
sed neque fuluus aper media tam saeuus in ira est,
fulmineo rabidos cum rotat ore canes,
nec lea, cum catulis lactentibus ubera praebet,
nec breuis ignaro uipera laesa pede
femina quam socii deprensa paelice lecti:
ardet et in uultu pignora mentis habet.
in ferrum flammasque ruit positoque decore
fertur, ut Aonii cornibus icta dei. (373–80)
But neither is the golden bull as savage in the midst of rage, when he rolls fierce dogs with a lightning jaw, nor the lioness, when she offers her udders to nursing cubs, nor the small snake harmed by an ignorant foot, as a woman when a rival for her shared bed is caught: she burns and wears proof of her feelings on her face. She rushes for sword and flames and, after putting aside her honor, is carried away like she has been struck by the horns of the Aonian god.
As the poet-praeceptor does in the previous book, he marks the excessive nature of a woman’s passion by a comparative simile and by a description of its irrationality. Her rage is more savage than wild animals’ (neque … tam saevus in ira … femina quam). She puts aside honor (positoque decore, 379) as she heedlessly faces death (in ferrum flammasque, 379). Women’s wild passion is again constructed as innate and aligned with the behavior of animals, not humans. In the list of desiring women in book 1, a woman in love is as natural as birds singing (271) and resembles the sexual behavior of cows or horses (279–80). In this list, however, a woman’s passion exceeds the natural rage of wild animals. She is more savage than a boar fighting for its life (and winning: rotat ore canes, 374), a nursing lion (375), or a snake accidentally trampled (376).57 Like erotic passion, ira is figured as a flame (ardet, 378). Compare, for example, the same verb used to describe Phyllis’s erotic desire at 2.354: “When his sails were set she burned more intensely” (exarsit uelis acrius illa datis). Unlike erotic passion, her anger is not disguised but is visible on her face (378).58 Nowhere is the blame associated with her lover. The context of the animal comparanda does not suggest intended harm (from the point of view of a Roman). The first context suggests, but does not identify, a boar hunt with no trace of the human hunters. The second notes only that the lioness is a mother but does not go further. The final example is offered as an accidental injury. Woman, rounding off the comparison, is enraged because she has caught another woman (paelice, 377) in the bed she shares, but the cheating lover is only suggested by lecti’s modifier, socii (377). The rage of a woman is therefore constructed as more savage than savage beasts and not justly motivated by an intentional injury. Her rival, like the ignaro … pede treading the snake, is an oversight that should be avoided by a careful lover.
As we saw in the catalogue of desiring women from book 1, this short catalogue, along with its frame, demonstrates the destructiveness of a woman’s passion. While this insight is more surprising when discovered in a set of examples assuring a pupil will find a girl than in a list of jealous women, this particular anger is motivated by her love and reinforces the earlier, implicit lesson that all female passions—erotic and enraged—are connected. They are, furthermore, excessive and disruptive, threatening not only the rival but also the male members of her family in general. They exceed the bounds of the human because her emotions are like an animal’s. They also exceed the bounds of civil society and its laws because her emotions motivate her to punish without just cause. Consider Medea and Procne, whose brief entries highlight their importance as examples.
coniugis admissum uiolataque iura marita est
barbara per natos Phasias ulta suos.
altera dira parens haec est, quam cernis, hirundo:
aspice, signatum sanguine pectus habet. (381–84)
The barbarian of Phasis avenged her spouse’s crime and the violated oaths of marriage by means of her own children. Another terrible parent is this swallow that you see: look, her breast is marked by blood.
Jason is called only coniugis (381), but his responsibility in the form of a possessive genitive governs the hexameter line which describes their violated marriage vows. This is followed by a pentameter dedicated to Medea and her infanticidal vengeance. She is identified twice by her nationality at the start of each hemistich (barbara … Phasias, 382), signaling her ethnic difference from Ovid’s readers. Her act, ulta, is followed by the final word suos, responding to the initial possessive coniugis at the start of the couplet and implicitly comparing Medea’s guilt with Jason’s. Unnamed husband is guilty of broken wedding vows, but the Phasian took revenge with the lives of her own children.59 Procne, “the other fearful parent,” is the alternate (altera, 383) Medea, and therefore augments, by her own exemplary repetition, the infanticide, which is only alluded to by her descriptor parens, her postmetamorphic form hirundo (383), and the blood which marks her chest. Her exemplarity is particularly visible. The poet-praeceptor points out the swallow in view of the pupil (quam cernis, 383) and enjoins him to look at (aspice, 384) the mark of her crime.60 Unlike Medea’s entry, Procne’s guilty husband is missing entirely. Jason must stand for both his crime and Tereus’s, attenuating the responsibility of both and magnifying the guilt of the women.
These two examples are strongly marked generically by their famous dramatic tradition. Both have been treated multiple times by Greek and Roman tragic playwrights.61 They also contain generic markers in the verse. The short list is introduced by a simile comparing angry women to maenads inspired by the god of tragedy: “She is carried away, like she has been struck by the horns of the Aonian god” (fertur, ut Aonii cornibus icta dei, 2.380). Compare this line to the simile, discussed above, which likens Pasiphae to a maenad at 1.312: “She is carried, like a bacchante, driven by the Aonian god” (fertur, ut Aonio concita Baccha deo).62 Reinforcing the generic association with tragedy are the suggestions of costuming. Woman is said to wear proof of her feelings “on her face” (in uultu, 378), as if wearing a mask, while Procne, dressed as a swallow, is adorned with bloody marks (384).
The poet-praeceptor pauses before moving on to the third, expanded example of Clytemnestra, to note that “this” hoc is a threat to “well-composed” and “strong” amores (“This breaks up loves that are well composed, this breaks up loves that are strong; cautious husbands must fear those crimes,” hoc bene compositos, hoc firmos soluit amores; / crimina sunt cautis ista timenda uiris, 385–86). When read with a sensitivity to generic cues, this couplet appears to oppose tragic female anger not only to normative, stable sexuality but also to elegy, for both Ovid and his predecessor Gallus wrote five books of elegies titled Amores. Hoc, by proximity, appears to refer, not to a lover’s infidelity, but to the subject of the last six couplets—the boar, the lion, Woman, Medea, Procne. Hoc equates all five and synthesizes them into “wild tragic Woman,” an antithesis to orderly sexual relationships and the elegiac project. Her crimes, not Jason’s or the unmentioned Tereus’s, “must be feared by cautious men.” The poet-praeceptor assures his students before moving on to his third example that a cautious man may cheat with impunity. Just as in the catalogue of book 1, discussed above, the poet-praeceptor constructs women’s desire as abject, absorbing the negative aspects of desire which normative male desire disavows. Her desire is what his is not—animalistic, out of control, and socially destructive. However, as the frame introducing women’s infidelity and Clytemnestra’s entry demonstrate, it is a man’s duty to maintain normative amores, and men who fail to punish and remove abject female desire from society themselves move outside of the defined boundaries of normative masculinity and into abjection.
The Atreidae, Menelaus and Agamemnon, serve as examples of poorly performed masculinity because they are unable to regulate their wives’ passions. Rounding off the examples of women whose hearts grew fonder with absence and introducing the list of enraged women, Medea, Procne, and Clytemnestra, is the cautionary example of Helen, who was left alone too long. The poet-praeceptor explicitly blames Menelaus for her infidelity (“In no way does Helen sin; in no way is this adulterer to blame,” nil Helene peccat, nihil hic committit adulter, 365; “By giving time and place you are compelling adultery,” cogis adulterium dando tempusque locumque, 367; “I absolve Helen from blame,” Helenen ego crimine soluo, 371), while deriding him with name-calling in direct address (“What stupidity was this, Menelaus,” qui stupor hic, Menelae, fuit, 361; “Madman, do you trust,” credis, furiose, 363) (357–72). The abuse directed toward “you, Menelaus” (361–68) places the pupil in an unstable position as a participant in the bullying. This position, however, always threatens to slip into the role of bullied, as the second person singular has been the didactic address to the pupil throughout his lessons. The insecurity of the reader’s identity reflects the insecurity of his masculinity, which he is implicitly urged to police through the regulation of his gendered other—Woman. Again, we see a woman compared to animals (“Madman, do you trust timid doves to a hawk, do you trust a full sheepfold to a mountain wolf?,” accipitri timidas credis, furiose, columbas, / plenum montano credis ouile lupo?, 363–64). By failing to police her gender role, Menelaus has threatened his own, which now suffers the punishment of abjection, for he is called furiose (363), a characterization frequently associated with the wild, tragic woman.
The example of Clytemnestra ends the list of vengeful women. While Menelaus’s failure makes him an object of ridicule, his brother’s punishment is far more frightening. Here, abject female sexuality and the vengeance which results are expressed by an example from tragedy and are explicitly connected to the mistake of the husband. As in the case of Helen and Menelaus, the poet-praeceptor removes fault, and with it, agency, from Clytemnestra. The example is introduced by a couplet identifying a woman’s adultery as divine retribution: “If Venus is injured she brandishes just weapons and she hurls back the spear and she causes you yourself to complain about what she just now complained” (laesa Venus iusta arma mouet telumque remittit / et, modo quod questa est, ipse querare, facit, 397–98). Clytemnestra’s story follows.
dum fuit Atrides una contentus, et illa
casta fuit; uitio est improba facta uiri.
audierat laurumque manu uittasque ferentem
pro nata Chrysen non ualuisse sua;
audierat, Lyrnesi, tuos, abducta, dolores,
bellaque per turpis longius isse moras.
haec tamen audierat; Priameida uiderat ipsa:
uictor erat praedae praeda pudenda suae.
inde Thyestiaden animo thalamoque recepit
et male peccantem Tyndaris ulta uirum. (399–408)
While Atreus’s son was happy with one woman, she also was chaste; she became shameless because of her husband’s fault. She had heard that Chryses, although he carried the laurel in his hand and he wore the fillets, had not prevailed on behalf of his own daughter; she had heard about your grief, Lyrnesian captive, and how the wars had lasted longer because of shameful delays. Nevertheless, she had heard these things; Priam’s daughter she had seen herself: the conqueror was the shameful prize of his own prize. From this point she welcomed Thyestes’s son into her heart and her marriage bed and Tyndareus’s daughter took revenge on her husband who made a terrible mistake.
Agamemnon’s infidelity is blamed for her infidelity (“she became shameless because of her husband’s fault,” vitio est improba facta viri, 400). The two words, ulta virum, close the list and end the lesson. If men are men, women lack passion, both amor (i.e., cheating, 357–72) and ira (373–408). Abject sexual desire and the rage which follows are again aligned with genre in this example, for “she had heard” (audierat) the poets recite Homer’s first book of the Iliad, where Chryses is rebuffed by Agamemnon (Ars am. 2.401–2; Hom. Il. 1.22–32), and, “she had heard” (audierat) the later passage in which Agamemnon takes Briseis from Achilles (Ars am. 2.403–4; Hom. Il. 1.318–48). “Nevertheless these [verses] she had heard: Priam’s daughter [Cassandra] she herself had seen” (405) on the tragic stage. The poet-praeceptor’s charge characterizes Homeric epic as innocuous rumor.63 Her revenge comes only with the spectacle of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon or Accius’s Clytaemestra. The penultimate couplet of this passage alludes to the stage entrance of Agamemnon leading his captive, Cassandra (Aesch. Ag. 783). The pentameter cleverly reverses the roles of possessor and prize syntactically and through the polyptoton of praeda, which traps Agamemnon as prize of his own prize (praedae praeda pudenda suae, 406). The same line also emphasizes the resulting gender reversal through the alliteration of p, uniting Cassandra (praedae) with Agamemnon (praeda), feminized by the adjective pudenda, which was used as a euphemism for female genitalia.64 The same phrase is used in book 3 to describe Cephalus in a short list of goddesses, Luna and Aurora, who shamelessly gratify their desires (nec Cephalus roseae praeda pudenda deae, 3.84). Here Cephalus’s masculinity, compromised by his mortal status and his rape by a female goddess, is emphasized by the adjective-noun phrase “shameful prize.”65 Suae, moreover, repeats the reflexive possessive adjective which ends Medea’s pentameter in a similar phrase (per natos Phasias ulta suos, 2.382), associating Agamemnon with another abjected, tragic woman. Ovid’s couplets, having linked Clytemnestra’s adulterous revenge with two tragedies, Agamemnon and Medea, evokes a third with Aegisthus’s epithet Thyestiaden, a reminder of another tragic murder of children, closely linked in Greek and Roman literature with Procne—Atreus’s murder of Thyestes’s sons and the meal they become.66
Conclusion
As noted in the beginning of this chapter, Ovid’s poet-praeceptor takes part in a long tradition of didactic catalogues of mythological characters. These lists rely on a shared knowledge of the megatext, allowing the poet-praeceptor to speak each heroine like a word.67 The two lists under consideration in this chapter reveal the connotations Phaedra- and Medea-like figures may have held as words of the megatext. However, in our close reading of the poetic contexts that Ovid constructs, we have also observed that, like other languages, symbols are polysemic and their intended connotations are difficult to control. As we saw in the lists from book 1 and 2, Ovid’s verse constructs their passions—erotic and vengeful—as what Kristeva and Butler theorize as abject, embodying the characteristics which are rejected from normative Roman desire. His lists demonstrate, moreover, that their exemplary abject passions threaten normative masculine subjects when they are not contained outside the borders they define, acting as a warning to both men and women.
The exemplary paradigms are introduced in Ars 1 as proof that a male lover will have no trouble finding a willing girlfriend and in Ars 2 as a warning not to be absent too long from a lover or be caught being unfaithful. Ovid, however, intervenes. The frame and the syntactic and linguistic structure of the lists themselves guide the literary reader to introduce meanings in excess of the poet-praeceptor’s ostensible lessons. In the frames introducing and concluding the lessons, Ovid aligns the female examples in both lists with women in general, and women in general with animals. Because these frames also construct the animal-like category of woman in opposition to the male pupil learning this lesson, men are implicitly aligned with the human. Her exclusion from what is human defines and guarantees his humanity. In the frames and the catalogues themselves, Ovid also employs thematic and linguistic cues to connect the Phaedra- and Medea-like figures with their tales most familiar from the tragic stage. The frame and generic signals act as a warning to the literary pupil who would seek to violate the sexual-social taboos and legal constraints governing appropriate gender performances in Augustan Rome.68
Especially following the passage of the lex Julia, masculine desire was defined as one that conformed to the legal restrictions imposed on the Roman man’s sexual appetites, while defining men who did not conform as unmanly or effeminate. Roman marriage customs, furthermore, demanded that a woman remain an object, a “gift,” in order to function as the conduit for creating alliances between men; her desire must constantly be dissimulated. This fiction of woman’s lack of desire helped to maintain the fiction of her body as object and alleviated anxieties about a disruption to this system. Moreover, for a Roman matrona, her sexual partner was restricted to her husband. Active extramarital sexuality was forbidden and severely punished by the lex Julia. The catalogues found in Ars 1 and 2 offered a good Roman woman and man the opportunity to confirm their own inclusion in the community by identifying in opposition to Phaedra- or Medea-like figures, whose active sexuality was directed toward inappropriate bodies and resulted in catastrophe to men and their families. This process resembles the one Feeney (2016) has located in Roman reactions to Greek drama in general, discussed at length in the introduction.69
Ovid’s specific construction of these paradigms as abject subjects inextricably links feminine gender to the tragic genre. The heroines’ aberrant passions define the masculine gender to which they are compared in the Ars 1 and 2 and the elegiac genre in which the lists are deployed. The duplication augments their abjection—belonging in neither the society of the author and his audience nor the genre in which they are inscribed. This compounded repudiation simultaneously increases Ovid’s poetic mastery over theme and form. He introduces into a lighthearted lesson on dating transgressive daughters and wives—two categories decidedly off the list of beloveds for his audience—only to reinvest Augustan norms of sexual behavior.70 The poet-praeceptor and the author who writes him are warning their readers from the very behavior Augustan law punishes. In order for a masculine subject to escape a feminized, abject position, he must constantly be vigilant both of his own sexuality, lest it take control of him, and of the sexuality of the female body, lest he lose control and suffer the consequences of her hidden but always present abject sexual desire. Ovid also demonstrates his mastery over form, for he introduces a destabilizing tragic code into his elegiac verse only to restore generic expectations along with gender norms.