CHAPTER 3 Medean Disruptions in Epic and Elegy

Hypsipyle, Heroides 6

Heroides 6 is a letter written by Hypsipyle, queen of Lemnos, to Jason just after she learned of his affair with Medea. Ovid’s own retelling of Hypsipyle’s and Medea’s myths shows the impact, in particular, of Apollonius’s Argonautica and Euripides’s Medea, but we also may see influences from a variety of additional sources, including the Greek tragic treatments of the Hypsipyle myth by Aeschylus (Hypsipyle, TrGF 3. 247–48), Sophocles (Lemniae, TrGF 4.384–89),⁷ Euripides (Hypsipyle, TrGF 5.2.752–70), and the Roman tragic treatments of the Medea myth by Ennius (Joc. frr. 103–16) and Accius (Dangel frr. 467–99).⁸ According to the mythological tradition, the women of Lemnos kill the men of their island out of erotic jealousy. The men have preferred Thracian women taken captive in an earlier conflict. Hypsipyle is the only woman of her city who does not take revenge.⁹ Instead she piously preserves her father’s life at her own risk. In her letter, however, Hypsipyle reminds Jason that every mythological woman’s amor contains the potential for ira.

While Phaedra’s letter explored the potential for redefining symbolic gender and genre roles through performance, Hypsipyle’s letter approaches this topic textually.¹⁰ The overriding theme of Heroides 6 is the literary canon and its reception.¹¹ Hypsipyle is not concerned with performance alone. Ovid ventriloquizes a Hypsipyle who exploits the process of abjection, which Ovid’s poet-praeceptor and epic narrator have employed. Hypsipyle constructs a Medean ira as innately tragic. Her own epistolary persona is defined implicitly by contrast. This process allows her to claim a generic identity in accordance with Jason’s own epic heroic tradition.¹² At the same time, she threatens to move from her normative subject position into Medea’s abject space as a punishment for Jason’s transgressions.¹³ In her elegiac letter, Jason’s erotic decision is presented by Hypsipyle as a generic choice which will determine his gender status. As we shall see, choosing Hypsipyle is presented as rescuing his epic heroic masculinity. In this formula, Hypsipyle plays the normative matrona. Should he choose Medea, he will slide into the abject subjectivity defined by the tragic tradition, in which his masculinity is appropriated by Medea. Her threat to become Medea demonstrates that the tragic tradition, if Jason chooses Medea, will draw them all into the genre which demands feminized heroes, masculine heroines, and their destructive passions. This process, however, also exposes the tragic potential of all female desire. As a literary lover, Hypsipyle’s love, transformed into anger, can only manifest itself as Medean ira—by nature a threat to the masculine subject.

Hypsipyle repeatedly displays her literacy and familiarity with tragedy, and in particular Euripides’s Medea.¹⁴ As Jacobson (1974, 103) notes, “It is quite as if Hypsipyle had read Euripides’s Medea.”¹⁵ Hypsipyle relies on Jason’s own literacy in order to give her threats weight. Without a knowledge of both Hypsipyle’s and Medea’s literary tradition, Jason would not understand the full import of her threat to become a Medea to Medea.

Pelicis ipsa meos implessem sanguine vultus,

Quosque veneficiis abstulit illa suis.

Medeae Medea forem … (149–51)

Myself, I would have covered my face and the face she stole with her poison with my rival’s blood. I would be a Medea to Medea.

Her threat to be a Medea could refer to the murder Medea has already committed—the murder of her brother, Apsyrtus. Hypsipyle has already mentioned this murder as one reason for her fear of Medea. Such a reference would fit chronologically into this part of their myths.

Medeam timui: plus est Medea noverca;

Medeae faciunt ad scelus omne manus.

Spargere quae fratris potuit lacerata per agros

Corpora, pignoribus parceret illa meis? (127–30)

I feared Medea: Medea is more than a stepmother; Medea’s hands are suited to every crime. Would she, who was capable of scattering her brother’s lacerated body across the fields, spare my children?

Chronologically, Medea’s ira has not surfaced, and the innocent victims of her revenge, her sons, may not yet be conceived. Nevertheless, Hypsipyle’s threat to become Medea functions as the type of rhetorical citation used by the poet-praeceptor in Ovid’s Ars 2.372–86, where Medea, along with Procne, is cited as an example of an angry woman betrayed by her lover.¹⁶ The threat against a paelex (149), moreover, reminds the literary reader of Medea’s own murder of a rival at the end of Euripides’s play, a connection strengthened by other correspondences throughout the letter, which I will discuss further below.¹⁷ These correspondences are not coincidental. Like the poet-praeceptor in Ars 2, who expects his (young) pupils to recognize unnamed Medeas and Procnes through allusive details from their myths, Hypsipyle assumes that her reader(s) will recognize Euripides’s Medea¹⁸ in the ironic guise of her accidental similarities.¹⁹ Her implicit message to Jason (and Medea, it seems) is: “You know what Medea does to Creusa and her own sons at the end of that play. I am capable of the same.”

Hypsipyle signals her expectation of her reader’s literary literacy linguistically, structurally, and intertextually throughout the letter. She tells Jason that she has heard the “story” (fama prior, 9) about Jason and Medea, related in, for example, Euripides’s play or Apollonius’s epic.²⁰ Hypsipyle chides Jason for not writing to update her about his exploits in Colchis (4–16). She must hear it from a Thessalian traveler (23–40). Hypsipyle frequently uses words which refer to writing or telling a story (diceris, 2, 132; scripto tuo, 4; signatur, 7; missa, 8; littera, fama prior, 9; scripsit, 16; narratur, 19; dicar, 21; narrat, 32, 39; memini, 64; feror, 114).²¹ The ubiquity of the language of reading and writing sets a metapoetic tone for the entire epistle. I would argue in addition that, in Hypsipyle’s literary letter, all words connoting storytelling and writing (cited above) act as Alexandrian footnotes, signaling allusions to other literary works.²² A word such as “it is told” (narratur, 19)²³ “underlines the allusiveness of the verses, and intensifies their demand to be interpreted as a system of allusion” (Hinds 1998, 2). We can identify a number of footnotes in Hypsipyle’s letter. In the first instance, Hypsipyle asks: “Why did the rumor come to me before your own letter?” (Cur mihi fama prior de te quam littera venit?, 9). She follows this question with a summary of the story she has heard in indirect speech. The fama prior she summarizes may be interpreted as a former (prior) treatment(s) of Jason’s myth, such as Apollonius’s or Accius’s. Toward the end of her letter, moreover, Hypsipyle says: “I am called the daughter of Minoan Thoas” (ego Minoo nata Thoante feror, 114). Here she cites her traditional genealogy. In these ways Hypsipyle draws her reader’s attention to specific treatments of her myth.

The words connoting writing (cited above) also suggest a concern about authorial control—who is allowed to write the authoritative version of a story. While many heroines in Ovid’s collection are represented as attempting to innovate within their literary tradition and thereby take authorial control, the Ovidian Hypsipyle reminds Jason only of the canonical versions of their myths. Of the thirteen instances of words connoting storytelling cited above, Hypsipyle is the active subject of only one—memini (64). Ovid uses memini in particular elsewhere to cite specific passages, a usage that Conte (1986, 57–69) has termed a “reflective allusion.” We may see a very clear example of this type of allusion with memini at Met. 14.812–16, where Mars quotes (Ennius’s) Jupiter to himself (Ennius’s Annales, 54–55 Sk.).²⁴ In his Ars Amatoria 2.169–72, Ovid’s praeceptor “remembers” (memini) his anger in Amores 1.7.²⁵ In Hypsipyle’s letter, what she remembers is listening to Jason: “I recall that you could not speak the rest” (Cetera te memini non potuisse loqui, 64). It is noteworthy that, as a storyteller, he was inadequate, for he could not finish his tale.²⁶

Not surprisingly, storytelling and gossip play an important role in her letter. The letter opens with Hypsipyle’s embittered announcement that she has learned about him from another. Her source, we learn soon, is a traveler.

Nuper ab Haemoniis hospes mihi Thessalus oris

Venerat et tactum vix bene limen erat,

“Aesonides” dixi “quid agit meus?” ille pudore

Haesit in opposita lumina fixus humo.

Protinus exilui tunicisque a pectore ruptis

“Vivit? an” exclamo “me quoque fata vocant?”

“Vivit” ait timidus: timidum iurare coegi:

Vix mihi teste deo credita vita tua est.

Ut rediit animus, tua facta requirere coepi. (23–31)

Recently a Thessalian stranger had come to me from Haemonian shores, and he had scarcely touched my threshold when I said “How is my son of Aeson?” He was frozen with shame and fixed his eyes on the ground before him. Right away I jumped to my feet and, after tearing my tunic from my breast, I shouted “Is he alive? Or do the fates also call me?” Timidly he said: “He is alive.” I forced the timid man to swear: scarcely did I trust you lived although the god acted as witness. When my soul recovered, I began to ask after your deeds.

The stranger is particularly literary in his role, recalling as he does the many hospites from whom Greek heroines of both epic and tragedy receive information about their absent heroes. Most famously, Homer’s Penelope begs for information from the Cretan stranger about her own beloved hero abroad in Homer’s Odyssey (19.92–95). Hypsipyle’s Thessalian stranger further resembles Penelope’s if we consider the allusion at 25–26 to Apollonius’s epic Argonautica 1.784, where Thessalian Jason fixes his eyes upon the ground just as the stranger does here.²⁷ Hypsipyle’s stranger allusively evokes Jason; Penelope’s is Odysseus himself. We also find the figure of the stranger in tragedy. Aeschylus’s Clytemnestra, for example, tells the chorus that she has heard many injurious reports (πολλὰς κλύουσαν κληδόνας παλιγκότους, Ag. 863) about Agamemnon’s fate.²⁸ Hypsipyle’s stranger also recalls the formulaic messenger speeches in tragedy.²⁹ These speeches traditionally describe the dramatic events which lead to the hero’s or heroine’s death.³⁰ Here, Hypsipyle’s stranger, if we are to accept lines 32–38 as authentic,³¹ tells us an equally dramatic story. Although it does not result in the death of the hero, its outcome—Jason’s alliance with Medea—leaves Hypsipyle in the same helpless state which drove Sophocles’s Deianira to suicide.

Hypsipyle comments on the Thessalian’s gifted storytelling. His ingenium exposes her heartache: “While he recounts each thing one by one, he exposes our broken heart with his own natural talent in the swift course of telling his tale” (Singula dum narrat, studio cursuque loquendi / Detegit ingenio vulnera nostra suo, 39–40). It is tempting to see Ovid behind the mask, so to speak, of this storyteller. His story follows the version Ovid will later compose in his epic Metamorphoses. The stranger describes the bronze-hoofed oxen of Mars (Narrat aeripedes Martis arasse boves, 6.32; aeripedes tauri tactaeque uaporibus herbae, Met. 7.105), sowing the serpent’s teeth (Vipereos dentes in humum pro semine iactos, 6.33; uipereos dentes et aratos spargit in agros, Met. 7.122), the sudden “crop” of armed men (6.34; Met. 7.124–33), and their “civil war” (Terrigenas populos civili Marte peremptos / Inplesse aetatis fata diurna suae, 6.35–36; terrigenae pereunt per mutua uulnera fratres / ciuilique cadunt acie, Met. 7.141–42). It may also correspond to the version Ovid told or will soon dramatize in his own Medea. We may even see Hypsipyle echo a line delivered by Medea in this very play: Huc feror, et lacrimis osque sinusque madent (Her. 6.70); feror huc illuc, ut plena deo (Sen. Suas. 3.7).³² The metapoetic resonance of such a comment draws attention both to the fiction of Hypsipyle’s epistle—Ovid is, of course, the ventriloquist behind Hypsipyle, who exposes her heartache in this fictional letter—and to Hypsipyle as a fictional character. The stranger is but one of a number of tellers of her vulnera.

Hypsipyle also quotes gossip that is spreading about Jason’s acta.

Adde, quod adscribi factis procerumque tuisque

Se cavet³³ et titulo coniugis uxor obest.

Atque aliquis Peliae de partibus acta venenis

Imputat et populum, qui sibi credat, habet:

“Non haec Aesonides, sed Phasias Aeetine

Aurea Phrixeae terga revellit ovis.” (99–104)

Add the fact that she orders that she be credited for yours and your companions’ achievements and she the wife obstructs the honor of her husband. And someone from Pelias’s faction attributed the achievement to her poison and swayed the people who believe them: “These deeds are not those of Aeson’s son, but the Phasian daughter of Aeetes plucked the golden hide from the Phrixean sheep.”

According to an unnamed source associated with Pelias, Medea’s magic is responsible for the heroic deeds of Jason and his Argonauts. The gossip, quoted directly, identifies Medea, not Jason, as the “plucker” (revellit, 104) of the Golden Fleece (103–4). As a literary figure, Medea’s fama consists of the plays, poems, and prose accounts which tell her story. The language of this passage recommends this metapoetic reading again. Hypsipyle claims that Medea “orders that she be written in addition to [adscribi, 99] the exploits of the Argonauts,” that is, that her heroism be included in the literary tradition of Jason and his band of heroes. She also states that Medea “damages her husband’s inscription of honor [titulo, 100].” In both cases Medea is characterized as attempting to control the textual record of hers and Jason’s myth, which is figured as gossip in Hypsipyle’s metapoetic letter.

The metaphor of the mask, which I employed above, is strongly suggested by Hypsipyle’s letter. This dramatic tone serves as a further citation and an indication that tragedy is the literary tradition which should act as the fama prior for Ovid’s reader of Hypsipyle’s epistle. As we saw in Ovid’s treatment of Phaedra-like figures in previous chapters, Hypsipyle’s letter is dramatic both structurally and linguistically. In addition to the stranger’s “messenger speech,” discussed above, there are several instances of direct speech in her letter, suggestive of dramatic dialogue—four partial and six full lines (16, 25, 29–30, 59–62, 103–4).³⁴ Among the quotes in the letter, Hypsipyle reports Jason’s four lines, where he makes his empty promises, signaling the citation with memini.³⁵

Tertia messis erat, cum tu dare vela coactus

Implesti lacrimis talia verba tuis:

“Abstrahor, Hypsipyle, sed dent modo fata recursus.

Vir tuus hinc abeo, vir tibi semper ero.

Quod tamen e nobis gravida celatur in alvo,

Vivat, et eiusdem simus uterque parens.”

Hactenus: et lacrimis in falsa cadentibus ora

Cetera te memini non potuisse loqui. (57–64)

It was the third harvest when you were forced to set sail and you filled such words as these with your tears: “I am torn away, Hypsipyle, but if only the fates will grant a return. I leave here your husband, a husband to you I will always be. Nevertheless, because our burden is hidden in your womb, let him live, and let us both become a parent of the same child.” So you said: and as tears fell on your lying face I recall that you could not speak the rest.

She quotes this performance again later in the letter. Compare lines 59–60 to 111–12:

Abstrahor, Hypsipyle. sed dent modo fata recursus.

Vir tuus hinc abeo, vir tibi semper ero.

Vir meus hinc ieras, cur non meus inde redisti?

Sim reducis coniunx, sicut euntis eram.

You went away my husband, why no longer my husband did you return? Let me be your wife as you return, just as I was when you left.

In addition to the performances of the Thessalian stranger and Jason, there are two “choruses” in the form of Hypsipyle’s imagined incredulous interrogators (timide credentibus, 15) and the supporters of Pelias (populum, qui sibi credat, 102). In addition to correspondences with Euripides’s Medea as well as the echo of Ovid’s own tragedy, Hypsipyle also alludes to Accius’s Medea at the close of her letter, when she wishes for Medea to “wander helpless, hopeless, bloodied by her own act of murder” (Erret inops, exspes, caede cruenta sua, 162). Accius’s Medea may be making a similar wish for Jason to become “an exile among enemies, a hopeless, destitute, lonely vagabond” (exul inter hostes, expes expers desertus vagus, Acc. Med. Dangel fr. 492).³⁶ This is itself a reworking of Euripides’s Hippolytus 1028–31, where Hippolytus wishes this fate upon himself if he forswears his oath that he never touched Phaedra.³⁷ Her language, moreover, echoes that of the Greek tragic heroine’s “desperation speech” in, for instance, Euripides’s Hecuba.³⁸ Through her specific allusion to Accius and the Greek tragic tradition more generally, Hypsipyle is directing her internal audience, and Ovid’s larger audience, to the Roman and Greek tragic tradition as her intended generic code.³⁹

But Hypsipyle simultaneously and explicitly differentiates her story from Medea’s tragedy.⁴⁰ She constructs Medea as what she is not. This is the process of abjection familiar from the poet-praeceptor’s us-against-them rhetoric in the Ars Amatoria and the Remedia Amoris.⁴¹ Given Hypsipyle’s literary knowledge, it is no surprise that she makes an elegiac gesture with a sort of recusatio near the beginning and end of her letter. After listing the furies as attendants at her wedding (45–46), Hypsipyle disavows Jason’s myth as her own, linking him instead to Medea’s. Hypsipyle’s questions, arranged in a rising tricolon, ask what the Argo, and by metonymy, Jason’s mythic adventure, has to do with her: “What do the Minyans have to do with me, what does the pine of Dodona have to do with me? What does my fatherland have to do with you, sailor Tiphys?” (Quid mihi cum Minyis, quid cum Dodonide pinu? / Quid tibi cum patria, navita Tiphy, mea?, 47–48).⁴² She follows this with a couplet defining her location as not Colchis, implying that Lemnos never should have been included in Jason’s voyage since it was not the goal of the hero’s quest: “Lemnos was not the ram remarkable because of its golden fleece, and not the kingdom of old Aeetes” (Non erat hic aries villo spectabilis aureo, / Nec senis Aeetae regia Lemnos erat, 49–50). Her geography is ill suited to Jason’s epic. Hypsipyle ironically uses tragic rhetoric to explain her reluctant participation in the myth: “At first I was determined to drive out the enemy camp with a band of women, but my fates were drawing me away” (Certa fui primo, sed me mea fata trahebant, / Hospita feminea pellere castra manu, 51–52). Hypsipyle’s evil fate—tragic erotic passion—pulls her, like the destinies of so many tragic heroines before her, away from acting in her own best interest.⁴³ In this instance, her best interest required her to act like an epic hero defending her fatherland, not a tragic heroine. Later we find an even closer analog to the elegiac recusatio, for, like the elegists who claim they were just about to write epic, Hypsipyle claims she was about to perform the role of Medea. She almost (paene) sent her two boys to their future stepmother, as Medea does in Euripides’s play (Ov. Her. 6.125; Eur. Med. 945–58). Unlike Medea, who does not need to fear Creusa, Hypsipyle knows what Medea is capable of (127–30), since her role extends beyond that of stepmother (plus est Medea noverca, 127).

Following Euripides’s Medea, Hypsipyle frames Jason’s betrayal as both political and national by foregrounding Medea’s non-Greek status. In fact, the first time she refers to Medea, Hypsipyle calls her barbara: “The barbarian poisoner is said to have come with you, welcomed into the share of the marriage bed promised to me” (Barbara narratur venisse venefica tecum, / In mihi promissi parte recepta tori, 19–20).⁴⁴ She balances the hexameter line with Medea (barbara) as the first word and Jason (tecum) the last. This separation and contrast highlights Jason’s difference from Medea even as Hypsipyle identifies them as companions. The qualifying adjective, venefica, emphasizes her otherness as a witch, and, through its proximity to tecum, her potential (and future) threat to Jason. Hypsipyle returns to this theme at 83–96, where she lingers on Medea’s magical abilities and asks Jason how he can sleep next to such a powerful witch (95–96). The theme also offers Hypsipyle another opportunity for differentiating herself from Medea, when she claims to have no knowledge of magical arts (93).⁴⁵ As noted above, narratur acts as an allusive signal. Perhaps guided by the hexameter, we may think of Medea’s aid in Apollonius to Jason in the form of spells and ointments and their subsequent voyage from Colchis, but venefica also reminds the well-read Jason of Medea’s poison used against Creusa on the Euripidean stage (τοιοῖσδε φαρμάκοις, 789). In this play, Jason’s betrayal of Medea is motivated, ostensibly, by Jason’s desire for a Greek wife and legitimate sons. Her non-Greek status is central to her suffering because it is the cause of her abandonment, her general isolation in Corinth, and her lack of recourse.⁴⁶ Hypsipyle also emphasizes Medea’s foreignness geographically, for she is identified by the river (Phasias, 103)⁴⁷ in her remote, inclement country (a gelido … axe, 106).⁴⁸ More geographic place names and descriptions fill the couplet in which Hypsipyle commands Medea to seek a husband in her own part of the world: “Let her seek a husband for herself from Tanais and the swamps of watery Scythia and even her fatherland of Phasis” (Illa sibi a Tanai Scythiaeque paludibus udae / Quaerat et a patria Phasidis usque virum, 107–8).

Hypsipyle does not name Medea until line 75, and then immediately directs Jason’s attention back to her foreign birth (79–81).⁴⁹ By withholding her name, Hypsipyle denies Medea an identity beyond her definition as Hypsipyle’s opposite. When Medea’s name finally appears, moreover, it mirrors Hypsipyle’s ego, both located second, before and after the caesura: “Should I fulfill the vows? Will Medea enjoy the vows?” (vota ego persolvam? votis Medea fruetur?, 75). This line again sets up Medea as Hypsipyle’s opposite, enjoying the fruits of vows made by Hypsipyle. Hypsipyle presents herself as a loyal and pious woman, whose dedication is exploited by a barbarian without these virtues.

Hypsipyle also presents herself as a normative feminine subject, performing appropriate kinship roles and directing her chaste, imperceptible desire toward an appropriate match. Near the close of her letter, Hipsipyle carefully compares and contrasts in alternating verses and chiastic lines her chaste virtue to Medea’s shamelessness.⁵⁰

Turpiter illa virum cognovit adultera virgo:

Me tibi teque mihi taeda pudica dedit;

Prodidit illa patrem: rapui de clade Thoanta;

Deseruit Colchos: me mea Lemnos habet.

Quid refert, scelerata piam si vincit et ipso

Crimine dotata est emeruitque virum? (133–38)

That adulterous maiden came to know her man shamefully: a chaste wedding torch gave me to you and you to me; she betrayed her father: I saved Thoas from disaster; she deserted Colchis: my own Lemnos holds me. Why mention whether the criminal overcame her piety and was dowered and earned her husband by this very crime?

In the first two couplets, the demonstrative adjective which describes Medea (illa) is qualified immediately by her inferiority to Hypsipyle: turpiter illa (133); prodidit illa (135). In the first instance, moreover, Medea’s sexual deviance is highlighted syntactically by the central position of the euphemistic cognovit and her further description as an adulterous maiden. Medea and her deviance surround Jason, the virum (133), replicating her control over him and his status as man, hero, and husband, for vir connotes all of these masculinities. These lines further surround the pentameter in which Hipysipyle’s pronoun stands in the first position, and surrounds with anaphora another anaphora of Jason’s pronoun, followed by her gift to him, a chaste marriage. The unmodified me (134) reflects her honest and guileless behavior toward Jason. At 135–36 Medea is contrasted in chiastic lines to Hypsipyle. “She betrayed her father, I saved mine. She left her homeland, I remain at home.” A couplet follows in which Hypsipyle adds to the list, through praeteritio, the victory of her criminal rival over her own piety (137) and Medea’s ability to earn her husband with a dowry won by crime (138). While cursing Medea, Hypsipyle calls the marriage “ours” (lecti nostri), and Medea the “marriage robber/inferior bride/bridal proxy” (subnuba): “what Hypsipyle laments, let the marriage robber of our bed also mourn and let her be subject to her own terms” (Quod gemit Hypsipyle, lecti quoque subnuba nostri / Maereat et leges sentiat ipsa suas, 153–54). She cites Medean law (leges suas) to differentiate a marriage made under Greek laws from one contracted under the “laws” of an autonomous, non-Greek woman. Hypsipyle refers to Medea as uxor, but one who deprives Jason of his honor (100).

By contrast, Hypsipyle represents herself as a Roman matrona, who, as Verducci notes, is particularly Augustan in her status as a mother of two: “I am also blessed in number and, with Lucina favoring, I offered twin offspring as a twofold pledge of our love” (Felix in numero quoque sum, prolemque gemellam, / Pignora Lucina bina favente dedi, 121–22).⁵¹ She claims a legitimate marriage to Jason. Unlike Medea, who “knows” Jason shamefully (turpiter, 133), Hypsipyle’s intimacy (cognita) with Jason is not adultery (furto) but legitimate marriage attended by the appropriate gods, Juno and Hymen: “You did not come to know me in secret: Juno was present as a marriage attendant and Hymen bound his temples with wreaths” (Non ego sum furto tibi cognita: pronuba Iuno / Adfuit et sertis tempora vinctus Hymen, 43–44). She quotes Jason’s promise to remain her vir, a word she appears to interpret as “husband”⁵²: “I leave here your husband, a husband to you I will always be” (Vir tuus hinc abeo, vir tibi semper ero, 60). As noted above, however, Jason may have intended another interpretation of vir, that is, “man.” Yet Hypsipyle’s letter charges that Jason’s failure to remain her husband also resulted in his failure to maintain his masculinity and his heroic status, since he has relinquished these to Medea. By contrast, Hypsipyle’s successful birth of two boys constitutes her proper performance of this marriage, for, in addition to the implicit goal of creating alliances between families, the explicit goal of marriage is offspring. The twins’ similarity to Jason testifies to her fidelity (123–24), and therefore to her proper performance of another aspect of the role of “wife,” chastity. Lindheim (2003, 121) notes that Hypsipyle expresses strong maternal feelings in order to represent herself as a good wife and mother in opposition to Medea, for Hypsipyle decides not to send them as ambassadors out of fear for their safety: “Whom I almost allowed to be brought as ambassadors on their mother’s behalf, but the savage stepmother held me back from my original course” (Legatos quos paene dedi pro matre ferendos, / Sed tenuit coeptas saeva noverca vias, 125–26).

In addition to her virtues as matrona and mother, she highlights her family connections—nobilitas generosaque (113)—making clear that hers is a beneficial and therefore appropriate marriage alliance with a royal Greek family (Minoo … Thoante, 114) and divine ancestry (Bacchus avus, 115).⁵³

Si te nobilitas generosaque nomina tangunt,

En ego Minoo nata Thoante feror.

Bacchus avus: Bacchi coniunx redimita corona

Praeradiat stellis signa minora suis.

Dos tibi Lemnos erit, terra ingeniosa colenti;

Me quoque dotalis inter habere potes.

Nunc etiam peperi: gratare ambobus, Iason;

Dulce mihi gravidae fecerat auctor onus.

Felix in numero quoque sum, prolemque gemellam,

Pignora Lucina bina favente dedi.

Si quaeris, cui sint similes, cognosceris illis:

Fallere non norunt, cetera patris habent. (113–24)

If noble birth and honorable names mean something to you, well, I am called the daughter of Minoan Thoas. Bacchus is my grandfather: Bacchus’s crowned wife outshines lesser stars with her own constellation. Your dowry will be Lemnos, a land suited to the farmer; you will be able to count me among your dowry payment as well. Now I have even given birth: congratulate us both, Jason; you as the cause of my pregnancy made the burden sweet for me. I am also blessed in number and, with Lucina favoring, I offered twin offspring as a twofold pledge of our love. If you ask whom they resemble, you will see yourself in them: although they do not know how to lie, they have the rest of your traits.

Hypsipyle is careful to list the benefits which Jason will accrue in a marriage to her in the form of dowry—the kingdom of Lemnos (116) as well herself (118); and her reproductive capacity to which she points in the following line (119).

When Hypsipyle returns to Medea’s foreign status after naming her for the first time, it is to remark on the irony of her previous fears.

Non equidem secura fui, semperque verebar,

Ne pater Argolica sumeret urbe nurum.

Argolidas timui: nocuit mihi barbara pelex:

Non expectata vulnus ab hoste tuli. (79–82)

In fact, I was not without some concern, and I was always afraid that your father would take a daughter-in-law from an Argive city. I feared the daughters of Argos: a barbarian rival did not threaten me. I bear a wound from an enemy I did not expect.

Hypsipyle admits to fearing rivals from mainland Greece (Argolidas, 81), not a “barbarian rival” (barbara pelex, 81).⁵⁴ Hypsipyle may be from the periphery of the Greek world, but Lemnos is still Greek. Colchis, however, belongs to the wild frontier, beyond the civilized world. Moreover, Hypsipyle imagined that Jason’s father would arrange this marriage. Instead, Jason has preferred an alliance with a foreigner, augmenting the impropriety of his choice through his impiety toward his family, to which Hypsipyle returns.

Non probat Alcimede mater tua, consule matrem,

Non pater, a gelido cui venit axe nurus;

Illa sibi a Tanai Scythiaeque paludibus udae

Quaerat et a patria Phasidis usque virum. (105–8)

Your mother, Alcimede, does not approve, ask your mother, nor does your father, whose daughter-in-law came from the icy north. Let her seek a husband for herself from Tanais and the swamps of watery Scythia and even her fatherland of Phasis.

As I noted in chapter 1, marriage was an important avenue for creating political and social alliances in the ancient Greek and Roman world. While Roman grooms might actively seek their own marriage alliances, as Agrippa did by marrying Atticus’s daughter, it would not be surprising for a paterfamilias to look for a bride whose connections could benefit the family.⁵⁵ Hypsipyle urges Jason to consult with his parents on this matter, as they disapprove (non probat, 105) of a barbarian daughter-in-law.⁵⁶ Not only is Medea a frightening witch (83–96), who threatens to eclipse Jason’s heroic status (99–104), she is also a bad match for a Greek aristocrat and, therefore, not an approved bride for Jason. Hypsipyle advises both Jason and Medea to look for mates in their own part of the world (a patria, 108).⁵⁷

In addition to Medea’s construction as an ethnic and cultural other, Hypsipyle characterizes Medea as hostile—an enemy (“I bear a wound from an enemy I did not expect,” Non expectata vulnus ab hoste tuli, 82). Hypsipyle commands a Greek army (54), whereas Medea works alone, with spells, on the margins of the world. Hypsipyle also contructs Medea as a political rival, vying for honor among factions. She claims that someone from Pelias’s faction—Jason’s personal and political enemy—holds sway over a credulous populace whom Hypsipyle quotes: “These deeds are not those of Aeson’s son, but the Phasian daughter of Aeetes plucked the golden hide from the Phrixean sheep” (Non haec Aesonides, sed Phasias Aeetine / Aurea Phrixeae terga revellit ovis, 103–4). By identifying Jason and Medea by their patronymics and contrasting them at the end of their respective cola in line 103, she draws attention to the political and national context of their rivalry, for their genealogy marks both their ethnicity and their claim to royal, political power. Medea, however, commands three and half feet of the hexameter, grammatically claiming the titulum she demands. When Hypsipyle threatens to become a Medea to Medea, she reveals her sophisticated understanding of the language of myth and the literary tradition which has handed it down. In order for her threat to have any power over Jason, he too must be versed in this language and tradition. He must recognize, along with the pupil of the Ars, that a mythological woman in love is an avenging woman.⁵⁸

In combination with her allusive generic play with epic and elegy, Hypsipyle offers a superficial self-presentation as a helpless and abandoned woman. Such a self-presentation, familiar from Phaedra’s epistle, is in line with the majority of letters in the collection and, I argue, demonstrates Hypsipyle’s familiarity with not only the mythological roles available to young women but also the collection in which her letter appears. She presents herself specifically as an Ariadne—a naïve, abandoned maiden, watching the water for her lover to return. The alternative role she chooses for herself (67–70), however, is strategic and includes genealogical and mythological connotations which point Jason back to the generically tragic, Medea-like potential of Hypsipyle while serving as an example of the inherent abject nature of female passion.⁵⁹

The image of Hypsipyle looking from a high point over the ocean for Jason’s ship is sufficient to evoke the Catullan Ariadne, who is similarly depicted scanning the sea for Theseus.

Caerula propulsae subducitur unda carinae:

Terra tibi, nobis adspiciuntur aquae.

In latus omne patens turris circumspicit undas:

Huc feror, et lacrimis osque sinusque madent. (Her. 6.67–70)

A blue wave is pressed out from under the speeding ship: you survey the land, I the sea. Visible from all sides a tower scans the waves: I am driven here, and both my face and breast are wet with tears.

saxea ut effigies bacchantis, prospicit, eheu,

prospicit et magnis curarum fluctuat undis, (Catull. 64.61–62)

Like a stone statue of a bacchant, she looks into the distance, alas, she looks into the distance and she tosses with great waves of worry.

ac tum praeruptos tristem conscendere montes,

unde aciem pelagi uastos protenderet aestus, (Catull. 64.126–27)

And then the sad girl ascends the very steep mountains, where she might stretch her gaze over the vast billows of the sea.

Both Catullus’s narrator and Ariadne herself reproach Theseus for his perfidy. Hypsipyle follows this example and casts Jason in the role of Theseus, the breaker of promises.⁶⁰

Mobilis Aesonide vernaque incertior aura,

Cur tua pollicito pondere verba carent? (109–10)

Changeable son of Aeson and more uncertain than the spring breeze, why do your words lack the authority you promised?

immemor at iuuenis fugiens pellit uada remis,

irrita uentosae linquens promissa procellae. (Catull. 64.58–59)

The forgetful youth fled and pressed the waves with his oars, leaving empty promises to the windy storm.

quis dum aliquid cupiens animus praegestit apisci,

nil metuunt iurare, nihil promittere parcunt:

sed simul ac cupidae mentis satiata libido est,

dicta nihil metuere, nihil periuria curant. (Catull. 64.145–48)

[Men], while their mind desires something and wants to obtain it, are not afraid to swear anything, abstain from promising nothing: but as soon as the desire of their greedy mind is satisfied, they do not fear what they said at all, care not at all for their broken promises.

He and his words do not have the weight to ground them, but are changeable (mobilis; verna aura, 109), leading him as vir to leave her, but not yet return in the same capacity (111). Her model, Ariadne, has made the same charges against Theseus, whose forgetfulness (immemor, Catull. 64.58) has rendered his promises meaningless (irrata, Catull. 64.59). When Hypsipyle first quotes Jason’s promises to him, she frames his speech with the image of his tears: Implesti lacrimis talia verba tuis (58); et lacrimis in falsa cadentibus ora (63). After he promises to remain her vir, she notes that the tears that surround “such words” “fall on a lying face.”⁶¹ Theseus, claims Ariadne, has gone further, shamelessly swearing anything to get what he wants (Catull. 64.145–48). Hypsipyle is willing to make allowances for Jason, whose reason has been compromised by barbarian magic; he may still change his mind. Ariadne’s curses against Theseus, that his forgetfulness will be fatal (Catull. 64.200–201), are later realized when he forgets to properly signal his father from the sea, and Aegeus commits suicide from grief (241–45). Likewise, Hypsipyle’s curses against Medea seem to come true on the Euripidean stage.⁶²

We may see the allusion to Catullus 64 strengthened by verbal correspondences in Catullus. Hypsipyle says that Jason is less reliable than the spring wind (109), an image which recalls Ariadne’s complaint that Theseus has abandoned his promises to the windy storm (Catull. 64.59). Line 162 (“wander helpless, hopeless, bloodied by her own act of murder,” Erret inops, exspes, caede cruenta sua) not only recalls the words of Accius’s Medea but may also be looking back to Catullus 64.197: “I am compelled, helpless, burning, blind because of insane passion” (cogor inops, ardens, amenti caeca furore). Hypsipyle picks up both Accius’s image of wandering as well as the alliteration of e and ex and the adjective expes. She also adopts, in the same sedes, the Catullan Ariadne’s adjective inops, from a line which describes her own psychological wandering. In addition to demonstrating that Hypsipyle is aware of the literary personae available to her and choosing from them strategically, Hypsipyle’s self-representation as Ariadne suggests that she is conscious of being a contributor to a volume of poetic epistles. Fulkerson argues that Phaedra’s letter (Her. 4) follows Ariadne’s (Her. 10) as a model of an abandoned maiden.⁶³ Because Hypsipyle’s self-presentation employs this “poetics of abandonment” (Fulkerson 2005, 2), it appears that, if she has not yet seen a draft of Ariadne’s letter, she has adopted a rhetoric in line with her fellow contributors.⁶⁴

Ariadne, however, carries with her myth of abandonment other connotations to which Hypsipyle subtly alludes. These provide the true message of Hypsipyle’s pose, for they serve as reminders of the vengeance which abandoned maidens frequently seek. Her use of feror in line 70 means literally “carried to this place.” She is driven to the towers by her desire to catch a glimpse of the Argo. It echoes the line from Ovid’s tragedy Medea (quoted above) and repeats the image of being carried by an external force, which we also saw in Met. 9, where Byblis asks: quo feror? (9.509).⁶⁵ Feror is also used as a footnote later in the letter when Hypsipyle identifies her geneaology: “well, I am called the daughter of Minoan Thoas” (En ego Minoo nata Thoante feror, 114). I would argue that the two uses of this form of fero in a letter which is preoccupied with storytelling and reception mutually inform one another. Huc feror carries a secondary meaning: “I am carried over to this passage [in the story of Ariadne, where I reprise her role as maiden, abandoned on an island].” This interpretation is further supported by the intersection of Hypsipyle’s story and Ariadne’s, for, in the second use of feror, Hypsipyle traces her family back to her grandparents, Dionysus and Ariadne (114–16).⁶⁶ Her kinship with Dionysus makes her both genealogically and generically prone to the excessive passions displayed by Phaedras and Medeas.

Feror (114) is suggestive of lack of self-control and is reminiscent of the madness of maenads who wander the mountains as they celebrate Dionysus, as noted above and in earlier chapters.⁶⁷ The Catullan Ariadne is herself likened to a bacchant in the passage cited above (64.61–62). As granddaughter of Dionysus from a Cretan family, Hypsipyle’s literary tradition almost demands that she be “driven” by the forces of an excessive and inappropriate desire, in the fashion of Dionysus’s maenads or her great-aunt Phaedra. She recalls that a fury (Erinys) carried the wedding torch in her wedding to Jason (6.45–46). The presence of a fury also reminds us of the tragic genre, over which Dionysus presides, for the furies are the eponymous antagonists of Aeschylus’s tragedy Eumenides. Their transformation into Erinyes marks the end of a trilogy which documents a familial cycle of revenge, whose origin lay in part in two acts of adultery.⁶⁸

The Catullan Ariadne famously recites the words of the nurse at the opening of Euripides’s and Ennius’s Medea.⁶⁹ Leigh, moreover, has identified an intertext with this very passage in the first couplet of Heroides 6, where litora … tetigisse (Her. 6.1) recalls tetigissent litora (Catull. 64.172).⁷⁰ This acts as another guide for readers to look back to Medea’s tragic tradition. Apollonius’s Jason sets a precedent for comparison when he offers Ariadne as an example to the hesitating Medea (3.997–1007, 1100–1101). Hypsipyle’s learned self-identification with Ariadne may also be understood as a self-identification with Medea through the mediating epic Argonautica. Hypsipyle cites Medea’s mythological youth as told in Apollonius’s epic, in which Medea herself is a maiden in love, who, like Ariadne or Scylla, betrayed her natal family in order to follow her hero.⁷¹ Moreover, she knows, as we do, that some abandoned maidens, with whom Ariadne may be compared and for whom she may be substituted as examples of this paradigm, take revenge for their abandonment later in their stories.⁷²

Ariadne curses Theseus in Catullus’s poem (64.188–201), and Jupiter nods assent (204–6). We know that her curses are fulfilled in the form of Theseus’s fatal forgetfulness. Hypsipyle’s curses predict (or cause) the Euripidean Medea’s fate. In a sense, she writes Euripides’s play. Moreover, her story replays Medea’s in many ways. The “plot” she weaves follows that of Medea’s myth. Both aided Jason in his quest; both have two sons by Jason (61, 119); both are abandoned by Jason. Hypsipyle also appears to be repeating (or anticipating) Medea’s own curses.⁷³ Jacobson points out that Hypsipyle’s final curse, which ends her letter, repeats the language she uses to insult Medea.⁷⁴ Compare “she curses the absent” (devovet absentes, 91) and “live both bride and husband in a cursed marriage bed” (vivite devote nuptaque virque toro, 164). We may even see Medea in attendance at Hypsipyle’s wedding in the form of a fury, for Medea is called a wretched fury in Euripides. Compare “sad Erinys” (tristis Erinys, Her. 6.45) to “bloody, wretched Erinys” (φονίαν τάλαιναν Ἐρινύν, Med. 1259–60). Vaiopoulos, who points out this “intertextual hint,” notes that this may explain Ovid’s unusual use of the singular Erinys.⁷⁵

Hypsipyle also adopts Medea’s Euripidean rhetoric of contracts, a rhetoric which figures Jason’s betrayal as illegal and unjust. As noted above, Hypsipyle foregrounds Medea’s foreign birth in order to construct her as Jason’s political enemy. This makes his alliance with Medea tantamount to treason. A similar argument is also central to Medea’s rhetorical strategy, although she argues it as a foreign ally and represents their marriage as part of a political contract whose terms included her own aid to the hero.⁷⁶ In Euripides, Medea’s justification for her anger relies on the keeping of oaths, which she claims Jason forswore.⁷⁷ Near the beginning of the play, she calls upon the “great Themis” (Justice) to witness the injustice which Jason and Creusa have committed (ἀδικεῖν, 165).

ὦ μεγάλα Θέμι καὶ πότνι᾽ Ἄρτεμι

λεύσσεθ᾽ ἃ πάσχω, μεγάλοις ὅρκοις

ἐνδησαμένα τὸν κατάρατον

πόσιν; ὅν ποτ᾽ ἐγὼ νύμφαν τ᾽ ἐσίδοιμ᾽

αὐτοῖς μελάθροις διακναιομένους,

οἷ᾽ ἐμὲ πρόσθεν τολμῶσ᾽ ἀδικεῖν. (160–65)

O great Themis and mistress Artemis, do you see what I suffer, I who bound with great oaths my accursed husband? May I see him and his bride some day destroyed along with their house, such injustice did they dare to commit against me before.

Medea calls Jason her “accursed husband” whom she has “bound by great oaths” (161–63). She will later bind Aegeus with oaths (734–55) in order to secure a safe refuge. Medea, however, has no authority to make such claims on either Greek man, being both a woman and a Colchian. Her mythological future as would-be murderer of Aegeus’s legitimate son, Theseus, also teaches that entering into contracts with Medea is ill-advised.

In her lament over the married woman’s plight (230–34), Euripides’s Medea describes a woman “buying her husband” (πόσιν πρίασθαι, 233). This language is at odds with a Greek woman’s traditionally passive role in the marriage exchange, where her father would offer the dowry to a prospective husband.⁷⁸ In her letter, Hypsipyle cites the Euripidean Medea’s self-presentation when she describes Medea’s help as her dowry (137–38).⁷⁹ Even during Ovid’s time, it would be unusual for a woman to contract her own marriage.⁸⁰ While this characterization of Medea as the masculine partner is meant to insult Medea and effeminize Jason in the process, Hypsipyle suggested a similar role for herself earlier when she offered Jason a dowry of her own, the kingdom of Lemnos and its subjects: “Your dowry will be Lemnos … you will be able to count me among your dowry payment as well” (Dos tibi Lemnos erit … Me quoque dotalis inter habere potes, 117–18).⁸¹

Hypsipyle opens her letter with a reminder of this contract, whose terms she, at least, has upheld by preserving her kingdom, which she promised in return for Jason’s marriage vows: pacta tibi … mea regna (5). She continues to cite this contract throughout her letter—promissi … tori (20) and pacta, iura (41). This constitutes another departure from the version told in Apollonius’s Argonautica, where Jason’s two-day visit on Lemnos does not end with a wedding.⁸² She later calls herself “Thoas’s daughter, cheated out of her marriage” (coniugio fraudata Thoantias, 163). If the literate reader thinks back to Euripides’s Medea,⁸³ whose claims to the rights of wife are baseless and refuted by Jason, or to Apollonius’s Argonautica, where there is no marriage and only the traces of a romance between Hypsipyle and Jason, Hypsipyle’s claims here in Heroides 6 appear suspect.⁸⁴ She is repeating, or perhaps imitating, the outraged but mistaken Euripidean Medea, whose marriage contract was interpreted very differently by the other party, Jason.

Although Hypsipyle warns Jason that Medea is considered by many, including herself (97–104),⁸⁵ to be the real hero (99–100),⁸⁶ Hypsipyle, like the Euripidean Medea, claims that she is responsible for his safety (53–55).⁸⁷ Jacobson (1974, 100) notes that “in each account of the deeds [10–14; 31–38], Jason’s role is completely ignored.” She credits Medea with overcoming challenges for him while simultaneously subjugating him (97–98). Hypsipyle further notifies Jason that he has not forfeited her kindness, although he does not deserve it (147–48). Offering salvation to the hero out of love is yet another characteristic of these myths, for Ariadne also cites her aid to Theseus in Catullus 64.149–51. Regret over their sacrifices on behalf of the hero after their ungrateful abandonment is the primary cause of their anger and the prime motivation for their subsequent revenge.

Hypsipyle has identified Medea as an inappropriate and even dangerous ally for Jason (51–53). Hypsipyle asks Jason why he is not afraid of Medea (95–96). She calls Medea her enemy (hoste, 82). In this respect, Ovid’s Hypsipyle is adopting but modifying the rhetoric of Euripides’s Medea, where Medea refers to Jason as very hostile (ἔχθιστος, 467). Jason, claims Medea, has in turn made her an enemy (ἐχθρὰ, 507) to her family,⁸⁸ but Hypsipyle threatens Medean vengeance (149).⁸⁹ Hypsipyle says that her heart is in pain (dolet), and that love mixed with anger abounds (6.76). Later in her letter, Hypsipyle comments that pain (dolor) gives weapons (arma) even to the cowardly (6.140). The pain of heartbreak is clearly connected in her mind (and the mind of Ovid) with revenge, which is figured as a military battle in 140. She is the queen of an island of women who kill their husbands because of erotic jealousy.⁹⁰ We know, as does Hypsipyle herself, although she never remarks on the irony, that her army is truly the enemy both of men and patriarchy.⁹¹ Unlike Medea, Hypsipyle’s tradition does not include revenge upon her rival, Medea, of whose existence she seems never to have been aware. Hypsipyle is also known for not taking revenge and sparing her father. She is driven into exile for not behaving like a Medea. The Ovidian Hypsipyle, however, demonstrates through subtle and sophisticated subtext of generic signals and literary allusions that, as a woman in love, she embodies the potential for revenge.

We have observed that, despite Hypsipyle’s self-representation as not-Medea, she resembles Medea in a number of ways. So too, the very strategies which Hypsipyle uses to define Medea as her opposite simultaneously demonstrate their similarities. I have argued that “Should I fulfill the vows? Will Medea enjoy the vows?” (vota ego persolvam? votis Medea fruetur?, 75) sets up Medea as Hypsipyle’s opposite, enjoying the fruits of vows made by Hypsipyle. Hypsipyle presents herself as a loyal and pious woman, whose dedication is exploited by a barbarian without these virtues. One may use this very line to demonstrate that the two women may be the same woman, for Hypsipyle’s placement of ego mirrors Medea’s name in its position as the second word of the hemistich after a form of votum. This is the first time Hypsipyle names Medea. By naming her, Hypsipyle finally gives Medea a full existence. She is brought onto the “stage” of Hypsipyle’s letter as her mirror image or as her substitute, for Medea will enjoy the benefits of Hypsipyle’s vows.

Hypsipyle’s tragic self-characterization reminds us that women cannot be allies to men and are always potential Medeas to Jasons. Ovid explores Medea’s own early career as a Phaedra in Met. 7.⁹² “Reason could not overcome passion” (ratione furorem/ uincere non poterat, Met. 7.10–11) expresses the struggle shared by every Phaedra and Medea, and it articulates the fundamental dichotomy of masculine reason and feminine madness, that is, lack of reason.⁹³ While Hypsipyle demonstrates a stunning command of the literary canon, her letter is written by Ovid, and Ovid’s readers know that Heroides 6 is in fact a demonstration of his own erudition. But while Ovid speaks with a female voice, his verse relies on gender stereotypes. Hypsipyle’s abjection of Medea, represented as complex and intentional in every way, reinforces gender norms that define femininity. It further constructs Medea’s abject subjectivity, in terms of the tragic generic code, as one beyond the bounds of woman, wife, and ally. Conte has demonstrated that “tragic” voices such as Dido’s in Vergil’s Aeneid offer a sympathetic passion that threatens the success of Rome’s epic hero, Aeneas, and, therefore, cannot thrive in the epic.⁹⁴ So too, Medea’s feminine passion, as Hypsipyle carefully outlines to Jason, is an obstacle to the epic hero. It must necessarily belong to the tragic stage. Ovid’s ventriloquism of Hypsipyle, moreover, further reveals, through her persuasive threat of generic transformation, that her passion also belongs to this genre. Ovid presents a literary critic who is gendered and suffers from a feminine passion which is excessive. She betrays this excess by her jealous rants. A woman speaking or writing desire is always, like Dido, a temporary alternative voice in the masculine genre of epic, borrowed from her appropriate genre—tragedy.

Procne, Metamorphoses 6.412–674

In Heroides 6, Ovid creates a writer who relies on Jason’s literary knowledge in order to make an effective threat of revenge. In Metamorphoses 6 the Ovidian Procne relies on Tereus’s illiteracy in order to carry out her revenge without his knowledge. While Tereus is an eager audience and actor, he has not recognized the tragic stage on which he stands and he misinterprets the roles available to himself and others. As we saw in the case of Byblis’s tale in book 9, the narrator guides our interpretation of characters and events throughout Procne’s tale using framing devices, language, poetic syntax, and explicit commentary. Although Tereus is ignorant, we know the story and his role in it, and we may appreciate Procne’s literacy and clever performance of tragic roles available to her. At the close of the tale, Procne, Philomela, and Tereus are physically and permanently marked by their symbolic meaning in the megatext of myth and the literary tradition.⁹⁵ Procne and Philomela, stained by blood, bear the inscription of murderers (caedis … notae, signataque sanguine, 669–70), while Tereus carries formerly epic weapons now brandished in the interest of excessive tragic revenge (immodicum praelonga cuspide rostrum, 673).

Ovid’s audience was familiar with Procne’s story. The narrator of the Metamorphoses tells us that the Athenian princess, Procne, was married to the king of Thrace, Tereus. Missing her younger sister, Philomela, Procne sent her husband to Athens to bring her sibling back to Thrace for a visit. Tereus is overcome with lust for Philomela. He rapes her, removes her tongue to prevent her from reporting his crime, and keeps her captive. Philomela communicates with her sister by means of a tapestry. Procne and Philomela reunite and punish Tereus by tricking him into eating his only son, Itys. Some variations exist, but Philomela’s rape by Tereus, the sisters’ revenge, and their subsequent metamorphosis is shared by most extant accounts.⁹⁶ The first reference to the myth occurs in Homer (Od. 19.518–23) and Hesiod (Op. 564–70), where she is identified as a lamenting woman. She appears throughout Greek and Roman poetry in this capacity.⁹⁷ The tale was performed on the Attic stage in Sophocles’s (fragmentary) Tereus, produced some time before 414 BCE (TrGF 4.581–95b).⁹⁸ Fr. 581, if it belongs to Sophocles’s Tereus, suggests that the metamorphosis of the three characters was described in the play.⁹⁹ For the Roman stage, Livius Andronicus wrote a Tereus, which was performed in the late third or early second century BCE. A century later, Accius produced a Tereus (Dangel fr. 439–54). We may see from Sophocles’s and Accius’s fragments the influence of the former on the latter and of one or both on Ovid’s version in Metamorphoses.¹⁰⁰ As noted above, intertexts with Sophocles and Accius identify these plays as influences. Accius’s play in particular is likely to be most familiar to Ovid’s Roman audience, as his plays continued to be performed throughout the late Republic, and we know that this play in particular was produced in 44 BCE at the ludi Apollinares.¹⁰¹ From the fragments, we may see that Ovid (6.458–60) adopted and expanded the emphasis on Tereus’s Thracian barbarian descent found in both Sophocles and Accius:¹⁰²

digna quidem facies, sed et hunc innata libido

exstimulat, pronumque genus regionibus illis

in Venerem est; flagrat uitio gentisque suoque. (Ov. Met. 6.458–60)

Her beauty, indeed, was worth it, but his own innate passion also incited him, and the people in his part of the world are prone to lust; he is on fire because of his own moral failing and the moral failing of his people.

φιλάργυρον μὲν πᾶν τὸ βάρβαρον γένος (Soph. Ter. TrGF 4.587)

For all barbarian people love money.

Tereus, indomito more atque animo barbaro,

conspexit in eam; amore uecors flammeo,

depositus facinus pessimum ex dementia

confingit. (Acc. Ter. Dangel fr. 439–42)

Tereus, with unrestrained behavior and a barbarian mind, looked upon her; mad with fiery love and overcome, he concocted the worst crime from his madness.

The Ovidian Tereus is wholly identified by his ethnicity. He is introduced as Threicius Tereus (424), and later called rex Odrysius (490), and barbarus (515).¹⁰³ Other elements familiar from Ovid’s version appear to have been part of the Greek and Roman plays: the metamorphoses of Tereus and perhaps the sisters (TrGF 4.581), the presence of Dionysian worship (Dangel fr. 445),¹⁰⁴ a concern over the power of speech (Dangel fr. 443–44), a redefinition of piety (Dangel fr. 450), and the enthusiastic participation of Philomela in the revenge plan (Dangel fr. 453–54).

Hypsipyle foregrounded issues of literary tradition and reception through frequent references to storytelling, sharing, and watching or hearing performances of tales. So too, the narrator of Procne’s tale situates the audience in a context of storytellers and their audiences. Book 5, which precedes the tale of Procne and her sister, consists of a lengthy tale sung by the divine poets, the Muses, in a private re-performance of a song sung for an earlier poetic competition (5.250–678). The Muses’ anger and punishment of their rivals for hubris inspire their audience, Minerva, to seek out her own punishment for Arachne’s arrogant competition. The narrator comments that Niobe, whose tale follows Arachne’s, could have avoided her own punishment had she been able to learn from the story (rumor, 147) of Arachne (150–51). The story of Niobe inspires its audience to share similar tales. The narrator remarks on the naturalness of one story inspiring others: “and as it happens, because of a more recent event they recount events from before” (utque fit, a facto propiore priora renarrant, 316). An anonymous storyteller (e quibus unus, 317) relates a story told to him by an unnamed local (gentisque illius, 323) about Latona’s punishment of the Lycians. Another anonymous storyteller (reminiscitur alter, 383) then shares the tale of Apollo’s punishment of Marsyas. This tale reprises the context of poetic competition which inspired the song of the Muses in book 5 and the competition of textual tales in the weaving of Minerva and Arachne.¹⁰⁵ The narrator then returns to the reception of Niobe’s tale. We are told that she is criticized by everyone (mater in inuidia est, 403) but her brother Pelops, who is unique in his sympathetic interpretation of her story (“it is said that Pelops alone cried over her,” hanc quoque dicitur unus/ flesse Pelops, 403–4). Dicitur signals that his reception of Niobe’s story is itself the product of literary tradition. Additionally, his own tale is briefly told by the narrator, continuing the context of storytelling (404–11).

The narrator further prepares us for the tale of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus in particular by including proximal tales with similar content. Before beginning their winning song, Uranie tells Minerva about their attempted rape at the hands of Pyreneus whom they fled on wings and who, trying to follow them, fell from the high tower and stained the ground with his blood (5.269–293). The stain foreshadows the bloody marks on the swallow and nightingale (6.669–70; cited above).¹⁰⁶ The attempted rape, moreover, occurred in Thrace, associating this location with sexual violence in the minds of Uranie’s and Ovid’s audience. The tale which immediately follows that of Procne, Philomela, and Tereus confirms this association, for the Thracian Boreas, the divine North Wind, rapes another Athenian woman, Orithyia (681–710). In fact, the first half of book 6 is concerned with the theme of divine revenge. As noted above, the tale of Minerva’s punishment of Arachne is followed by Latona’s punishment of Niobe, her punishment of the Lycians, and Apollo’s punishment of Marsyas. Even Pelops’s brief tale repeats but inverts the theme of revenge. His father is famous for his punishment. Pelops’s fate, moreover, reverses the fate of Marsyas. One is dismembered by a god; the other is reconstituted by the gods.

As has been well noted by several scholars, Ovid’s epic version of this myth is marked as dramatic and specifically tragic by elements which are now familiar to us from other poems and passages.¹⁰⁷ Among these elements is the common tragic theme of revenge which we explored above in the surrounding tales.¹⁰⁸ It is safe to assume that revenge was also a central theme of the tragedies of Sophocles and Accius too. At the start of the tale, the wedding of Procne and Tereus is attended by tragic furies, divine agents of revenge.

Eumenides tenuere faces de funere raptas,

Eumenides strauere torum, tectoque profanus

incubuit bubo thalamique in culmine sedit.

hac aue coniuncti Procne Tereusque, parentes

hac aue sunt facti. gratata est scilicet illis

Thracia, disque ipsi grates egere diemque,

quaque data est claro Pandione nata tyranno

quaque erat ortus Itys, festam iussere vocari; (430–37)

The Eumenides held torches stolen from a funeral, the Eumenides spread the couch, and the ill-omened owl leaned on the roof and sat just above their marriage chamber. Under this bird of omen Procne and Tereus were joined, under this bird of omen they were made parents. In fact, Thrace rejoiced at these events, and themselves gave thanks to the gods, and they instituted a festival on that day when Pandion gave his daughter in marriage to the famous king and when Itys was born;

Eumenides, emphasized by the anaphora (430, 431), are furies associated generically with tragedy, as shown in Hypsipyle’s letter.¹⁰⁹ As noted above, this is also the title of Aeschylus’s tragedy that ends a trilogy recounting the cycle of murder and revenge in the house of Atreus. Furies continue to signal the generic code by which the tale should be interpreted throughout the passage: Procne arms herself with weapons of the furies (furialia arma, 591); she is goaded by the furies of grief (furiis agitata doloris, 595); Philomela is spattered by Itys’s blood which is described as “of the furies” (furiali caede, 657); and finally, Tereus calls upon the furies, “snaky sisters” (uipereas sorores, 662).

Direct speech is attributed to all of the characters:¹¹⁰ Procne (17 lines: 440–44, 611–19, 621–22, 631–35, 652, 655); Pandion (8 lines: 496–503, 509); Tereus (513); and Philomela (16 lines: 533–48).¹¹¹ Tereus’s reaction to Philomela’s speech is to silence her by cutting out her tongue. Her inability to speak determines the subsequent actions and preoccupies other characters. The narrator tells us that she wished most of all to speak again at the revelation of her revenge (659–60). Even Itys is given a line: “mother, mother” (mater, mater, 640). Of the 251 lines which make up this episode,¹¹² about 43 (some partial), or 17 percent, are uttered in direct speech. The number is slight in comparison to Byblis (56 percent), but the frequency and the participation of all the characters are significant, especially considering that the plot is focused on the inability of one central character to speak at all.

Ovid’s narrator offers notional stage sets, entrances, costumes, and props. Consider, for example, the description of the ill-omened wedding, which resembles the prologue of an Attic tragedy, where a character gives the audience background information before the action of the play begins. Here the narrator describes the marriage and birth of Itys before introducing the temporal location of the first act with iam tempora Titan (438).¹¹³ The formula is again employed to introduce the temporal location of Philomela’s rescue with “it was time” (tempus erat, 587). After Tereus’s speedy voyage to Athens and greeting between father- and son-in-law, Philomela makes a dramatic entrance onto the Athenian stage: “look, Philomela is here, splendid because of her grand attire” (ecce uenit magno diues Philomela paratu, 451). Ecce activates the vocabulary of spectacle and invites the external audience to turn their heads, so to speak, from Procne in Thrace toward Philomela in Athens as she enters the story.¹¹⁴ In this line, the narrator allows our eyes to focus first on the woman and then to admire her costume. The adjective magnus is suggestive of generic cues such as gravis and maior. We may imagine Ovid’s secondary meaning, “Look, here she comes, Philomela extravagantly costumed for the tragic stage (extravagant because of a tragic costume).”¹¹⁵ Procne later dresses herself and her sister as maenads (591–94, 598–99).¹¹⁶ The costumes include props associated with maenads: a vine leaf garland, deer skin, and spear (592–94 and cited as insignia Bacchi at 598). Philomela’s “pitiful song” (carmen miserabile, 582) is itself a tragic prop, acting as the token which facilitates the anagnoresis and resembles not only the textile which likely played a part on Sophocles’s and Accius’s stage but also embedded letters like the Euripidean Agamemnon’s in Iphigenia at Aulis or Phaedra’s in Hippolytus II.¹¹⁷

In addition, the god of tragedy, Bacchus, plays an important role in Ovid’s tale.¹¹⁸ In Athens, Bacchus is poured as wine into a gold cup after Phoebus the sun sets.

Iam labor exiguus Phoebo restabat equique

pulsabant pedibus spatium decliuis Olympi.

regales epulae mensis et Bacchus in auro

ponitur; hinc placido dant turgida corpora somno.

at rex Odrysius, quamuis secessit, in illa

aestuat … (486–91)

Now very little work was left for Phoebus and his horses were pounding the distance of sloping Olympus with their hooves. Royal feasts are set on the tables and Bacchus is poured into golden cups; then well-fed bodies give themselves to peaceful sleep. But the Odrysian king, although he retired to bed, burns for her …

For other tired bodies, once Bacchus is poured, the night is given to sleep; the Thracian Tereus, however, burns (aestuat, 491). The golden cup and his fires of love replace the sun while his sleep is replaced by sleepless fantasies (493).

Bacchus appears again when his worship becomes an opportunity for Procne to rescue her sister.

Tempus erat quo sacra solent trieterica Bacchi

Sithoniae celebrare nurus. Nox conscia sacris,

nocte sonat Rhodope tinnitibus aeris acuti,

nocte sua est egressa domo regina deique

ritibus instruitur furialiaque accipit arma.

uite caput tegitur, lateri ceruina sinistro

uellera dependent, umero leuis incubat hasta.

concita per silvas turba comitante suarum

terribilis Procne furiisque agitata doloris,

Bacche, tuas simulat. (587–96)

It was the time when the Sithonian daughters-in-law are accustomed to celebrate Bacchus’s biennial rites. Night is an accessory to their rites, by night Rhodope resounds with the ringing of shrill bronze, by night the queen has left her house and outfits herself for the rites of the god and takes up the weapons of the furies. Her head is covered with a grapevine, on her left side hangs the skin of a deer, on her shoulder a light spear lies. Procne pretends to be one of your own, Bacchus, frightful with a troop of women accompanying her, driven through the forest and impelled by the furies of her grief.

Here we may see Bacchus associated with night (588, 589, 590), as it was with the desire of Tereus, and connected to the revenge plans of Procne, thereby signaling the tragic lineage of both.¹¹⁹ When Tereus is later “blind” to the revenge enacted upon him, the narrator says that “such a great night is in his mind” (tantaque nox animi est, 652). He has consumed and incorporated the sisters’ tragic vengeance into his body in the form of night. At lines 472–73, the narrator exclaims, “by the gods, how much blind night do mortal hearts possess” (pro superi, quantum mortalia pectora caecae / noctis habent) after the description of Tereus’s deceitful plea to Pandion on Procne’s behalf and just before revealing his success. If interpreted through the association soon firmly established between night and Bacchus, the narrator is signaling the tragic nature of Tereus’s performance and the events which are set in motion—Pandion’s credulity, Philomela’s voyage, Philomela’s rape, and the sisters’ revenge.

Fitzpatrick and Curley comment that the notae of Philomela’s textile text were safe from Tereus because he was, presumably, illiterate (in the Greek language).¹²⁰ They and others further identify Philomela’s carmen miserabile as its own tragic script.¹²¹ Philomela’s “tragedy” represents Ovid’s own tragic text which is inscrutable to Tereus, for he is generically illiterate. Nevertheless, Tereus is characterized as an eager spectator and aspiring poet.¹²² The moment Tereus becomes a spectator in Athens marks the inception of his sexual desire. This desire coincides with and motivates a desire to become his own storyteller and playwright. We follow the irony of his generic misinterpretations and poor translation. Just as the semiosis of Phaedra and Byblis considered in chapter 2 created a generic monstrum because they were unable to retranslate their tales into the more accommodating genre of elegy, so, too, Tereus’s semiosis fails because he neither recognizes his tragic context nor understands the distinctions defining genre. Like the female tragic heroines whose failure to perform normative Augustan femininity confines them to their tragic genre in Ovid’s verse, so Tereus’s failed masculinity—foreign, culturally illiterate, and excessive—condemns him to a similar fate.

When the tale opens, we meet a silent Tereus, who is generically marked as an epic hero.

Threicius Tereus haec auxiliaribus armis

fuderat et clarum uincendo nomen habebat;

quem sibi Pandion opibusque uirisque potentem

et genus a magno ducentem forte Gradiuo

conubio Procnes iunxit. (424–28)

Thracian Tereus had routed these [enemies] with his auxiliaries and held a name famous for conquering; Pandion joined to himself through a marriage to Procne this man who was powerful because of his wealth and soldiers, and traced his people back to the great, brave Mars Gradivus.

His claim to fame is military victory, and his power derives from wealth and military strength. His divine ancestor is the god of war, by convention, a god at home in martial epic. The epic epithet Gradivus¹²³ is acoustically similar to gravis, a familiar generic marker for epic, which is intensified by the adjective magnus.¹²⁴ As military ally, Tereus wordlessly defends Athens (424–25), marries Procne (426–32), produces a male heir (433), and dutifully fulfills his wife’s requests (444–46). His greeting on arrival—the shaking of hands (447–48)—performs and affirms his normative, masculine affinity to Pandion. We may see, however, in this epic introduction potential generic crossings, for Tereus’s “famous name” in the literary tradition comes not from conquering Athens’s enemies but the maiden Philomela (“and he conquered by force one maiden” (uirginem et unam / ui superat, 6.524–25).¹²⁵ As we see at 525, vires/vis also means violence and is used in this passage and the larger poem to denote rape.¹²⁶ Gravis and maior, moreover, is used by Ovid to characterize tragedy as well as epic, and, as I argue above, magnus will qualify Philomela’s costume as tragic later in the passage.¹²⁷

Indeed, it is the spectacular entrance of Philomela in Athens, the birthplace of Greek tragedy, that initiates Tereus as a theatergoer and triggers his desire to translate his epic role into a dramatic role.¹²⁸ Tereus may be interpreted as a metic attending a dramatic performance. He continues to watch Philomela persuade her father: “Tereus looks at her and caresses her with his eyes, and feels the kisses” (spectat eam Tereus praecontrectatque videndo, osculaqua … cernens, 478–79). In many ways, however, Tereus is looking out onto an Athenian audience from the stage, an unwitting player in a tragedy. His lack of familiarity with drama leaves him unable to recognize and correctly interpret his plot.

Watching Philomela inspires Tereus to script and perform his own play. Tereus, however, mixes generic roles unsuccessfully. Tereus’s performance is comic in the first instance, for he begins by considering various routes to obtaining a beloved familiar to a modern audience from Roman comedy—bribing her friends (461), or nurse (462), and promising her expensive gifts (463), even his kingdom (463). Of course, Ovid’s elegiac oeuvre suggests that Tereus is rather (or also) an elegiac amator, a conventional figure whose own indebtedness to comedy has been well established.¹²⁹ Tereus plays neither role well. Successful comic lovers are usually adulescentes, and both comic and elegiac lovers are also usually unmarried.¹³⁰ Tereus studies the role of father (et quotiens amplectitur illa parentem, / esse parens uellet, 481–82), another poor choice for a lover, but one found behind the myth of another tragedy depicting cannibalism—Thyestes, discussed below.¹³¹

Tereus’s first performance is a great success. His deceptive persuasion of Pandion is characterized by Ovid’s verse as a costume, another signal of the operative generic code in this passage. He is said to express his own wishes sub illa (“as if for her,” 468). The preposition sub, in the dramatic context created by Ovid’s narrative, carries the connotation of “concealed under” (OLD, sub, 4) as well as “in the name of” (OLD, sub, 5). Tereus costumes his own desires as Procne’s, thereby performing her role (agit, 468; OLD, agere, 25, “to play [a role]”;¹³² “he turns back to Procne’s commands and makes his own pleas as if for her. Love was making him eloquent,” reuertitur ore / ad mandata Procnes et agit sua uota sub illa. / facundum faciebat amor, 467–69; “By the sheer size of his crime Tereus is believed to be pious,” ipso sceleris molimine Tereus / creditur esse pius, 473–74).¹³³ We may compare this to the poet-praeceptor’s instructions for the proper “performance” of lover (agendus amans, Ars 1.611), where eloquence, inspired by desire, is described using the vocabulary of theatrical performance:

non tua sub nostras ueniat facundia leges;

fac tantum cupias, sponte disertus eris.

est tibi agendus amans, imitandaque uulnera uerbis;

haec tibi quaeratur qualibet arte fides. (Ars am. 1.609–12)

Your eloquence need not be governed by my laws: just make yourself want it, you will be well spoken on your own. You must play the role of lover, and speak as if you have a broken heart; you must seek this confidence by any and every skill.

In both passages, eloquence is performative and the means to credibility.

Pandion, the king of Athens, tragedy’s birthplace, should be the canniest theatergoer. Instead he continues to interpret Tereus through the code of epic, which, until Philomela’s entrance, has defined Tereus and his relationship to his father-in-law.¹³⁴ Pandion’s epic reading of Tereus’s performance is marked at the close by his repetition of the clasping of hands (“[Pandion] embraces his departing son-in-law’s right hand,” et generi dextram conplexus euntis, 494), to which he adds Philomela’s in a gesture that ironically recalls a marriage (“he joined their right hands between them,” dextras … inter seque datas iunxit, 506–7),¹³⁵ and a request for a promise to return Philomela soon (496–508). Pandion’s premonitions (praesagia, 510) mark an unconscious perception of the generic context.

After Philomela’s entrance, the simile comparing her to the nymphs familiar from the first books of the Metamorphoses foreshadows her rape. It also prepares us for the role Tereus will give her. As Hardie (2002) notes, the simile at 452–54 exposes Tereus’s fantastical desire for Philomela, who reimagines her as “the sort of Naiads and Dryads we are used to hearing about who walk around in the midst of the woods” (quales audire solemus/ Naidas et Dryadas mediis incedere siluis, 452–53). The simile continues, “if only you should give to them a similar style and costume” (si modo des illis cultus similesque paratus, 454). Anderson notes that Tereus’s sudden desire recalls Apollo’s for Daphne in book 1, and, as Hardie further argues, the stories in these first books condition us “to see nymphs as potential rape victims” (Hardie 2002, 262).¹³⁶ The narrator describes how Tereus begins to reimagine Philomela’s role while still in Athens. Much like Byblis, who would recall her erotic dreams with Caunus (9.468–86),¹³⁷ Tereus imagines looking at Philomela while the house sleeps. “But the Odrysian king, although he retired to bed, burns for her and, recalling her face and movements and hands, he imagines whatever he wants that he has not yet seen” (at rex Odrysius, quamuis secessit, in illa / aestuat et repetens faciem motusque manusque / qualia uult fingit quae nondum uidit, 490–92). The verb fingo, a word used to describe forming something physically with materials such as clay as well as forming ideas, suggests Tereus’s styling of Philomela’s appearance and actions.¹³⁸

Once Pandion has entrusted Philomela to Tereus, he proceeds to place Philomela in two successive notional sets. The first is his ship, which is painted (pictae) like a Roman stage: “Philomela was placed on his painted ship” (imposita est pictae Philomela carinae, 511). The narrator says that Tereus “never turns his eye away from her just as when the hunting bird of Jupiter drops a hare into his high nest” (see below, 515–17). The nest of the simile repeats the visibility of Philomela’s position while establishing the control of Tereus the watcher-director.¹³⁹

… nusquam lumen detorquet ab illa,

non aliter quam cum pedibus praedator obuncis

deposuit nido leporem Iouis ales in alto;

nulla fuga est capto, spectat sua praemia raptor. (Met. 6.515–18)

[Tereus] never turns his eye away from her just as when the hunting bird of Jupiter drops a hare into his high nest from curved talons; there is no escape for the captive, the captor looks at his prize.

The simile again recalls those used to describe Ovidian nymphs. Compare, for example, the image of a hare captured by an eagle to Apollo’s own disavowal as predator (1.505–6), the simile which compares him to a predator (1.533–38), and Arethusa’s simile comparing herself to a dove fleeing a hawk (5.605–6). While looking forward to the epic role of nymph which Tereus has in mind (and back to the nymphs earlier in the Metamorphoses),¹⁴⁰ Philomela’s placement on a ship also recalls another epic role, that of Apollonius’s Hellenistic Medea in love, soon to be encountered in several versions in Ovid’s epic—Scylla, Ariadne (8), Byblis (9), and Myrrha (10).¹⁴¹ The first of these mythological examples, Medea herself, appears soon after Philomela’s story ends (Met. 7.1–424). Each of these maidens will betray their father and endeavor to join their beloved on their voyage to a foreign (to the maiden) land.

The second notional set is a hut deep in the forest.¹⁴² In Sophocles’s play, as March notes, the mask would make it plausible for both sisters to share a stage without a recognition. The stabula, I believe, does more work than providing a plausible delay of recognition and emphasizing Tereus’s barbarity. Ovid has chosen this epic solution for Philomela’s concealment for its metapoetic resonance. The stabula locates Philomela in the epic world of nymphs and divine rapists surveyed above (“[Tereus] drags [Philomela] into a hut hidden by an ancient forest,” in stabula alta trahit, siluis obscura uetustis, 521).¹⁴³ In keeping with the denouement of Ovid’s earlier tales of divine rape (e.g., Daphne, Io, Callisto, Arethusa), Tereus performs his own metamorphic silencing of her body by taking her tongue.¹⁴⁴ The narrator adds to the scene appropriate hunting similes (527–30), again echoing similes from divine erotic pursuits like the ones considered earlier.

While the ancient forest where the stabula is located is appropriate to the epic context of a nymph, the woods carry a metapoetic resonance as poetic material. Such a metaphorical use is borrowed from the identical use of the Greek ὕλη, meaning “forest,” “matter,” “raw material.”¹⁴⁵ Tereus draws Philomela into the raw material of an ancient literary tradition in order to rewrite her role. He is, however, unfamiliar with the poetry from which he borrows. He appropriates ill-suited generic roles for himself and Philomela, for, as we have seen, a new role requires a new thesis. Meaning depends on the writing subject, who must be communicating appropriate messages to appropriate addressees. The addressee, moreover, is defined by their relationship to the writing subject.¹⁴⁶ Philomela’s new role requires, above all, Tereus’s ability to script and play a coherent supporting role. In this respect, Tereus resembles Phaedra and Byblis. Like the two desiring women, this desiring barbarian constructs roles which are interpretable only as monstra—incomprehensible generic hybrids.¹⁴⁷ The word stabula, moreover, was used to describe brothels (OLD, stabulum, 2.b.). This secondary meaning further signals Tereus’s complete misunderstanding of Philomela’s status and his generic confusion. She is a tragic maiden, not an epic nymph or elegiac meretrix. His confusion of generic categories is amplified by the social categories which are confounded as a result of his actions—sisters become romantic rivals, husbands become brothers-in-law.¹⁴⁸ His crossing of categories is permanently marked by his final taboo violation, cannibalism.

Philomela resists her generic translation and the confusion it causes for the kinship system. Her appeal to this family and the gods who protect it in her distress (frustra clamato saepe parente, / saepe sorore sua, magnis super omnia diuis, 525–26) emphasizes her strong connection with them in contrast to Tereus’s alienation. Just as Phaedra’s and Byblis’s abject desire violated the gender norms which demand a nonexistent or undetectable female desire, so too, Tereus’s abject and excessive desire violates the gender norms which demand a controlled and lawful masculinity. As we saw in chapter 1, Ovid’s poet-praeceptor cites this masculinity in his lessons (“Desire is more moderate in us and not so full of madness; the manly flame has a lawful limit,” parcior in nobis nec tam furiosa libido; / legitimum finem flamma uirilis habet, Ars am. 1.281–82). The abject desire of Phaedra-like figures is marked in Ovid’s verse by their gender and genre. For Tereus, it is his ethnicity and genre. Philomela identifies this abjection when she says that he is “barbaric because of savage deeds” (diris barbare factis, 533) and points out his inability to feel loyalty to the Athenian customs which govern their society—piety, empathy, and the institution of marriage (“did the pious and tearful requests of my father not move you or a concern for my sister or my maidenhood or your marriage vows?,” nec te mandata parentis / cum lacrimis mouere piis nec cura sororis / nec mea uirginitas nec coniugialia iura, 534–36).

As noted above, Tereus costumed Philomela according to his fantasy of putting her in a woodland scene appropriate to nymphs. The narrator presents Philomela as if performing onstage by directing our gaze, focalized by Tereus’s gaze, on the maiden.¹⁴⁹ The grammatical structure reproduces syntactically the theatrical gaze of the audience. Philomela is described with a series of feminine accusative participles: “pale and trembling and fearing everything and now in tears asking where her sister is” (pallentem trepidamque et cuncta timentem / et iam cum lacrimis ubi sit germana rogantem, 522–23). The participles describe the actor and her gestures, whom we watch along with the subject of the sentence, Tereus—pallid, shivering, showing fear, crying, and asking a question—while 523 reports the lines of the actor: “Where is my sister?”¹⁵⁰ Philomela soon becomes the grammatical subject as the narrator refocalizes the tale through her eyes, but this agency is undermined by the simile in which she is likened to the prey of predators (527–30). That we are meant to watch Philomela’s dramatic speech that follows is suggested by the description of her gestures: “tearing at her loosened hair [like one in mourning, arms cut from striking herself in lament], stretching out her palms” (passos laniata capillos, / [lugenti similis, caesis plangore lacertis] / intendens palmas, 531–33).

Just before she begins her speech, the narrator announces that Philomela’s reason has returned (mox ubi mens rediit, 531). When we privilege the metapoetic reading of this passage, Philomela’s reason emerges as the means by which she recognizes the generic context. Like the Ovidian Hypsipyle, Philomela is represented as consciously choosing to give free rein to her female rage and, thereby, to embrace her tragic heritage. Such a choice is tantamount to relinquishing all normative female kinship roles—daughter, sister, wife—and assuming an abject role only intelligible on the tragic stage. She appears, moreover, to combine several famous tragic roles, including, perhaps, the innovative tragic roles of Philomela created by Sophocles and Accius, now lost. She is at once Sophocles’s defiant Antigone and Elektra, the selfless protectors of family duty, and Euripides’s willing maiden sacrifices, Polyxena, Iphigenia, and the Parthenos of Heraclidae.¹⁵¹ Antigone, for example, reproaches Creon for his laws, which contradict divine laws governing kinship (Ant. 450–523, 891–928). Creon’s policies, Antigone claims, treat piety as impiety (“since I have acquired a name for impiety, although, in fact, I am living piously,” ἐπεί γε δὴ/ τὴν δυccέβειαν εὐcεβοῦc᾽ ἐκτηcάμην, 923–24). So Philomela reproaches Tereus’s disdain for kinship laws (534–36), which results in a similar paradox (“you have confused everything,” omnia turbasti, 537; cf. Procne later in the passage, who states “in my marriage with Tereus, piety is a crime,” scelus est pietas in coniuge Terei, 635). Philomela hopes that Tereus’s punishment will be guaranteed by the gods (“Nevertheless, if the gods perceive this, if the gods’ powers amount to anything … someday you will pay the penalty,” si tamen haec superi cernunt, si numina diuum / sunt aliquid, … / quandocumque mihi poenas dabis, 542–44).

Like all of these tragic maidens, Philomela welcomes death. Her gesture, in particular, echoes those of Euripides’s maidens, who bravely accept their fates.¹⁵² Philomela “was offering her neck and began to hope for her own death after she saw the sword” (iugulum Philomela parabat / spemque suae mortis uiso conceperat ense, 553–54). So do Iphigenia, who announces, “I will offer my neck with a stout heart” (παρέξω γὰρ δέρην εὐκαρδίωc, IA 1560), and Polyxena, “this throat is ready” (πάρεcτι λαιμὸc εὐτρεπὴc ὅδε, Hec. 565). This gesture is perhaps cued by the sight of the sword, which awaited Polyxena and Iphigenia at the altar, as it is for Philomela in Ovid’s tale (uiso … ense, 554).¹⁵³ Philomela, however, regrets her defilement before death: “Why not take this life, so that no crime remains for you to commit, traitor? If only you had done it before you had committed sexual assualt: I would have had a ghost free of crime” (quin animam hanc, ne quod facinus tibi, perfide, restet, / eripis? atque utinam fecisses ante nefandos / concubitus; uacuas habuissem criminis umbras, 539–41); by contrast, the Euripidean maidens took pride in their free and unviolated bodies.¹⁵⁴

As noted above, Tereus’s manual metamorphosis silences Philomela in a perverted imitation of the transformed nymphs such as Daphne, whose tree can only nod ambiguously (1.567), or Callisto, who could only give a bear’s growl (2.483–84).¹⁵⁵ While the nymphs’ newly speechless forms are the work of gods (Peneus and Juno), Tereus is a mortal, and the new form he fashions is a horrifying parody of divine creation. Instead of disappearing forever into the landscape and providing an etiology for a plant or natural phenomenon by her story, Philomela engineers a creative means of communication. This is commented on explicitly by the narrator: “great inventiveness is found in grief, and comfort comes to wretched circumstances” (grande doloris / ingenium est, miserisque uenit sollertia rebus, 574–75).

The nymph Io, whose tale follows Daphne in book 1.583–686, 713–79 of the Metamorphoses, appears to offer a close analog for Philomela, but the differences in their fate demonstrate Tereus’s misappropriation of the roles of amorous god and nymph.¹⁵⁶ Io is raped by Jupiter, who pursues the nymph after seeing her leave her father, Inachus (588–89). Jupiter suggests she cool off in the shade of a deep forest (umbras / altorum nemorum, 1.590–91), resembling Tereus’s hut set deep in the forest (6.521, cited above).¹⁵⁷ Io is transformed into a cow by Jupiter in order to prevent his crime from being discovered by his wife (1.610–11), as Tereus likewise silences Philomela to deceive his. Like Philomela, moreover, Io reveals her identity to a family member (her father) through writing: “she presented the sad evidence of her changed form, a letter in place of words, which her foot formed in the dust” (littera pro uerbis, quam pes in puluere duxit, / corporis indicium mutati triste peregit, 1.649–50). Her writing in the dust is “sad evidence of her changed form,” just as Philomela’s woven writing is a “pitiful song” (carmen miserabile, 6.582) and a “testimony of the crime” (indicium sceleris, 578).¹⁵⁸ Despite these similarities, however, Io’s story differs in fundamental ways. Her pursuer is a god. His transformation of her body results in something beautiful (formosa, 1.612), which even Juno reluctantly admires (quamquam inuita, probat, 613). Jupiter later restores her form (739–43), and she gives birth to Epaphus (748) and becomes the goddess Isis (747). Io’s father, Inachus, unlike Procne, does not seek revenge for Zeus’s actions. Instead, he laments (651–67) and accepts his immortal dolor (661).

By contrast, Philomela’s weaving more closely resembles the Euripidean Phaedra’s letter in its effect on its reader, for Procne does not console her grief with lament, as Inachus does. Just as Theseus reacts to Phaedra’s epistolary accusation by fatally cursing his son, so Procne becomes the image of revenge against Tereus’s mortal crimes (6.586).

Upon reading Philomela’s “tragedy,” Procne also recognizes the tragic context. Her psychological metamorphosis into a tragic angry woman is immediate: “but about to mix up right and wrong she rushes out and is entirely the image of vengeance” (sed fasque nefasque / confusura ruit poenaeque in imagine tota est, 585–86). This confusion of good and bad resembles the conflict faced by tragic characters, who commit crimes in order to right wrongs: Medea, like Procne, kills her sons to punish her deceitful husband; Clytemnestra murders Agamemnon in retaliation for their daughter’s sacrifice and his adultery; Deianira employs magic and deceit in the hopes of regaining Heracles’s erotic attention.¹⁵⁹ Imagine (586) engages with the language of exemplarity. We may see the very same exemplarity named for another tragic avenging mother in the Metamorphoses, Hecuba: “she is entirely the image of vengeance” (poenaeque in imagine tota est, 13.546).¹⁶⁰ The notae marking the avian bodies of the sisters at the end of this tale will reduce them to their “signs”—their exemplarity in the symbolic system of myth.¹⁶¹ Procne’s generic metamorphosis here defines her exemplary status as the tragic Procne, which her physical metamorphosis will inscribe into her new body.

Andrew Feldherr has persuasively argued that this passage models modes of spectatorship for Ovid’s Roman audience.¹⁶² The first is represented by Tereus’s objectifying gaze of Philomela, which constructs the viewed as an other, able to be possessed or rejected. He notes that in Procne we may see two ways of viewing—her objectifying gaze upon Itys and her sympathetic gaze upon Philomela. The former identifies a viewer in opposition to the actor, the latter blurs the boundaries between self and other. Feldherr has argued that Procne reads Philomela’s tragedy as her own. She identifies with and even assumes her role. As I have argued, this passage is also about gender and generic conventions. With the playwrights and performances foregrounded, the spectators embody modes of reception articulated by the poet and the limitations which delineate his or her choices. We have considered how, in the first part of this passage, all of the characters participate in a drama: as actors, whose gestures, costumes, and dialogue are described by the narrator; as spectators, who watch and react to performances; or as playwrights, scripting and directing their own plays. From this perspective, we can see how Tereus and Philomela reconceive their myths through their own scripts. We can also see in this passage, as we have in earlier passages, how gender is inextricably linked to generic codes in Ovid and how abject gendered subjects—women and emasculated men—are unable to successfully translate their “tragic” tales into another generic code.

While Tereus tries and fails to perform as an epic amorous deity, Philomela embraces tragedy, moving the drama forward to a successful revenge. Procne is represented as the most sophisticated poet and performer among them. It has been observed that her performance alludes to three Euripidean tragedies in particular, in addition to her own.¹⁶³ The first is Bacchae, in which Agave’s maenadic madness results in her son’s death.¹⁶⁴ The sisters share Agave’s role: both act the part of a maenad and participate in the dismemberment of a son, but Philomela, the aunt, is left holding his head. Itys’s head, like Pentheus’s, is both a gruesome prop and revelatory for the uninformed parent. Agave, however, has been struck by a Dionysian madness and is sympathetically grief-stricken once she regains her senses. By contrast, Tereus is the grief-stricken parent, whose ignorance is exploited by a mother who knowingly slaughters her own son. Omophagy, associated with Bacchic worship, and briefly mentioned in Euripides’s play, is here the vehicle for revenge.

The cannibalistic revenge alludes to a second Euripidean play, Thyestes.¹⁶⁵ Procne’s revenge replicates Atreus’s. Both trick their enemies into eating their own son(s) as revenge for sexual misconduct—Thyestes’s adultery with Atreus’s wife, Aerope, and Tereus’s adultery with and rape of Procne’s sister, Philomela. For the Romans, Atreus represented the danger of a tyrant, exploiting his power and acting excessively.¹⁶⁶ Both Accius and Varius Rufus were famous for their dramatic treatments of this myth.¹⁶⁷ While the Thyestes/Atreus treatments shift the cannibalism from the tyrant, Atreus, to his victim, the connection emphasizes both the messages about tyranny and the tragic provenance of Tereus himself. As Pavlock (1991) successfully shows, Ovid’s Tereus represents the quintessential tyrant. In the Fasti, Ovid extends the association of Tereus with famous tyrants in his comparison of Tereus to Tarquinius Superbus (Fasti, 2.851–56).¹⁶⁸ The Fasti, written while he was also working on Metamorphoses, introduces another tragic paradigm into the nexus from the uniquely Roman tragic subgenre of praetexta, Lucretia.¹⁶⁹ Lucretia represents a Roman reinterpretation of the Greek Attic sacrificial maiden, whose sacrifice is represented as voluntary and often welcome. As we have seen, Philomela endeavors to play this part to Tereus’s Sextus Tarquinius.

The third and most explicit allusion is to Eurpides’s Medea. Procne’s choice of punishment, killing a man’s son even though the child is also hers, is the same horrifying and heartbreaking punishment Medea chooses for Jason. While considering the appropriate punishment to fit the crime (615–18), she states that, whatever it is, it will be something magnus (“I have prepared something great; what it is I am still uncertain,” magnum quodcumque paraui; / quid sit, adhuc dubito, 618–19). Magnus signals that her choice will be taken from tragedy, for, as we have seen already in this passage, magnus carries a metapoetic resonance, associated here with the tragic genre (427, 451). Intratexts with Ovid’s Heroides 12 further inform the well-versed reader of Ovid that her revenge will be borrowed from Medea in particular. Medea ends her epistle with the threat: “Certainly my mind conceives something greater” (nescio quid certe mens mea maius agit, Her. 12.212). As Hinds has noted, her threat marks her entrance into the genre of tragedy with the metapoetic maius.¹⁷⁰ Procne’s echo of Medea’s line signals both the “code model” (Euripidean-style tragedy) and the “exemplary model” (Euripides’s Medea) of her intended revenge.¹⁷¹ The narrator tells us that Procne “is reminded of what she could do by [Itys]” (quid possit, ab illo / admonita est, 620–21). The Athenian princess is “reminded of” the revenge she has seen in the theater of Dionysus, where an earlier Procne and Medea punished their husbands with the murder of their sons. Procne’s monologue, in which she decides to kill her son and then struggles over her decision, rehearses the Euripidean Medea’s own,¹⁷² as we see by comparing Metamorphoses 6.620–34 to Euripides’s Medea 1021–80.¹⁷³ Sophocles, March (2003) argues, may have been directly influenced by Euripides’s Medea, having written Tereus after attending a performance of Euripides’s moving play.¹⁷⁴ If she is right, Procne’s revenge, and perhaps the conflicted speech, originates from this very play. Assuming March’s proposal, Ovid’s intratextual reference to Medea’s letter now appears to cite Sophocles’s own debt to Euripides’s Medea.

Ovid’s Procne recasts her own version of Tereus: Philomela as Procne, Tereus as Pandion, and Itys as Philomela, while she takes the role of Tereus.¹⁷⁵ For example, Feldherr (2010, 199–239) notes that Procne’s identification with her sister leads her to objectify Itys and thereby replicate the gaze of Tereus. When we consider Ovid’s tale from the perspective of poetic production, however, Procne can be interpreted as consciously assuming Tereus’s role. Procne’s assumption of mourning clothes after Tereus manufactures the story of Philomela’s death foreshadows her conscious generic change. The mourning attire suggests both tragedy and Tereus’s earlier characterization in the tale thus far. We watch her tear off the gleaming golden gown from her shoulders and put on dark garments (uelamina Procne / deripit ex umeris auro fulgentia lato / induiturque atras uestes, 566–68).¹⁷⁶ The description of her clothing, moreover, revives the gold/Phoebus–night/Bacchus dichotomy which appeared earlier in the passage. As we saw, the sun, day, and Phoebus Apollo are all associated with the Athenian Pandion. By contrast, Thracian Tereus is associated with night, darkness, and Bacchus. Night is further connected to Tereus’s ability to manipulate Pandion’s trust by the narrator’s interjection quantum … caecae / noctis (472–73). In preparation for her lament prompted by another successful Terean deceit, Procne replaces her shining, golden Apolline robes with dark Bacchic ones. The clothing change signals the beginning of a generic transition from epic to tragedy and looks ahead to her performance as Tereus.

Procne takes advantage of the celebration of Dionysus currently taking place in Thrace by disguising herself and Philomela as participants. This is the most explicit dramatic costuming in the passage, for Procne is consciously acting a part: “she pretends to be one of your own, Bacchus” (Bacche, tuas simulat, 596).¹⁷⁷ The costume also marks her complete transition. The narrator first sets the stage (“it was the time when … night … in the night … in the night,” tempus erat quo … nox … nocte … nocte, 587–90), then draws the external audience’s attention to Procne as she makes her entrance (“the queen comes out from her house,” sua est egressa domo regina, 590). Her exit from the house (and onto the metaphorical stage) is reminiscent of the ancient set where doors (one central door for Greek, three for Roman) are used as entrances and often represent a domicile or other private space.¹⁷⁸ It also repeats the common plot of tragedies featuring a heroine whose (often destructive) exit from the house sets the play’s plot in motion.¹⁷⁹ The narrator then describes Procne’s costume in detail.

ritibus instruitur furialiaque accipit arma.

uite caput tegitur, lateri ceruina sinistro

uellera dependent, umero leuis incubat hasta.

concita per siluas turba comitante suarum

terribilis Procne. (Met. 6.591–94)

She outfits herself for the rites of the god and takes up the weapons of the furies. Her head is covered with a grapevine, on her left side hangs the skin of a deer, on her shoulder a light spear lies. Procne pretends to be one of your own, Bacchus, frightful with a troop of women accompanying her, driven through the forest.

Procne’s costume is “tragic” in multiple ways. While her mourning attire reflected the theme of night associated with the god of tragedy, here Procne is dressed as the god’s nocturnal worshipper, a maenad.¹⁸⁰ She is even accompanied by a chorus of sorts—a company of women (turba comitante suarum, 594).¹⁸¹ Her new role includes metaphorical “weapons of the furies” (furialia … arma, 591). The narrator tells us she is driven by “the furies of her grief” (furiisque agitate doloris, 595). As noted above, furies are also conventionally associated with the genre of tragedy through their function as deities of vengeance and their starring role in Aeschylus’s Eumenides.¹⁸²

Procne fully assumes the tragic role of her Thracian husband, Tereus, as she rescues her sister and begins to formulate her revenge. Procne takes on her new Thracian identity by feigning the Bacchic celebration of Thracian women (Sithoniae … nurus, 588). Striking, too, is that this is the only instance of her being called regina (Met. 6.590). The singular title complements Tereus’s strong characterization as tyrant (tyrannus, 436, 549, 581; rex, 490, 520). This new role as Thracian monarch may be foreshadowed by her description as “the matron of a savage tyrant” (saeui matrona tyranni, 581) as she reads Philomela’s message. Her costume, the traditional costume of a maenad, cites Tereus’s earlier role as soldier and erotic hunter. Her thyrsus is called a hasta (“spear,” 593) and she has “troops” (turba comitante suarum, 594). Her deer skin (ceruina … uellera, 592–93), while being a common accessory for the bacchant, looks back to the simile comparing Tereus to predatory animals (eagle, 516–17; wolf, 527–28; predatory bird, 529–30), and forward to her own simile as tigress hunting a nursing fawn—Itys (636–37).

Procne adopts the acquisitive gaze of her husband. At her rescue, just as at her abduction, Philomela becomes the grammatical object, this time of Procne, who grabs her, dresses her, drags her, and leads her: “she grabs her sister and, after grabbing her, dresses her and she covers … [and] dragging her, astonished, she leads her” (germanamque rapit raptaeque … / induit et … abdit / attonitamque trahens … ducit, 598–600). The narrator uses the verb rapio twice, in a chiastic anaphora surrounding the caesura to make the violence of the action and its resemblance to Tereus’s earlier violence clear (cf. raptor, 518; arreptam, 552, to germanamque rapit raptaeque, 598).¹⁸³ Moreover, Procne costumes Philomela (“she dresses [her sister] in the attire of Bacchus and covers her face with vines of ivy” (insignia Bacchi / induit et uultus hederarum frondibus abdit, 598–99) and places her on a new stage—inside the Thracian palace (“dragging her, she led her inside the walls of her home,” trahens intra sua moenia ducit, 600), just as Tereus had earlier placed Philomela onstage in the hut. The analogy is strongly suggested by the repetition of words (trahit, 521; trahens, 600) and deed (in stabula alta, 521; intra sua moenia, 600). Procne is described as burning and unable to contain her anger (“Procne herself is on fire and does not contain her anger,” ardet et iram/ non capit ipsa suam Procne, 609–10), just as Tereus cannot contain his burning desire (“and his heart does not contain his internal flames,” nec capiunt inclusas pectora flammas, 466). After seizing and dragging Philomela into the house, we glimpse Philomela’s horror (Philomela … horruit infelix, 601–2) before Procne denudes her of her costume in a way which is unsettlingly erotic, reinforcing the revival of her husband’s role:

nacta locum Procne sacrorum pignora demit

oraque deuelat miserae pudibunda sororis

amplexumque petit; (Met. 6.603–5)

After finding a place, Procne takes off the symbols of Bacchic rites and uncovers her pitiful sister’s shame-filled face and embraces her;

While Procne has already taken the role of Tereus and repeats the abduction of her sister, she costumes Philomela as Procne, installing Philomela in the palace as the queen. When Itys arrives he is recast as his aunt.

Nec mora, traxit Ityn, ueluti Gangetica ceruae

lactentem fetum per siluas tigris opacas;

utque domus altae partem tenuere remotam,

tendentemque manus et iam sua fata uidentem

et “mater, mater” clamantem et colla petentem

ense ferit Procne, (636–41)

Without delay, she dragged Itys away, like a tiger of the Ganges drags a deer’s suckling fawn through the dark forest; and when they arrived at an interior part of the grand house, Procne pierced him with a sword as he stretches out his hands and then realizes his fate and shouts “mother, mother” and seeks his mother’s neck.

Itys is dragged (traxit Ityn, 636) by Procne. Itys is described by accusative adjective participles, as we saw with Philomela and her body (Met. 6.639–41).¹⁸⁴ Tereus dragged Philomela through ancient woods into a deep and dark cottage. Procne, playing Tereus, is likened to a tiger dragging a fawn through dark woods. She takes him to a secluded part of the deep house (“[Tereus] drags [Philomela] into a hut hidden by an ancient forest,” in stabula alta trahit siluis obscura uetustis, 521; “through the dark forest, an interior part of the grand house,” per siluas … opacas; / domus altae partem … remotam, 637–38). Again, we watch an actor performing. In this case we also watch him watch the scene he is in, for we are told, “then [he] realizes his fate” (iam sua fata uidentem, 639). Again, we hear an actor deliver a line “Mother, mother” (640), just as Philomela calls out to her family (523–54).

Our narrator opens the next scene with a close focus on Tereus, who is set visibly on a high throne (sedens solio Tereus sublimis auito, 650). In this final scene, Tereus is represented as unwittingly “onstage.” Procne has cast Tereus as a sort of Pandion. This is highly ironic because, envying Pandion’s physical access to Philomela, he fantasized about playing his role in Athens (482).¹⁸⁵ He will suffer the loss of his child because of his own credulity. Pandion handed over both daughters to Tereus, believing him to be a friend when he was truly an enemy. Likewise, Tereus entrusts his son and himself to Procne. The narrator states that “such a great night is in his mind” (tantaque nox animi est, 652) before Tereus speaks. This phrase closely repeats the narrator’s sententia before revealing that Tereus’s deceitful speech to Pandion is successful: “how much blind night do mortal hearts possess” (quantum mortalia pectora caecae / noctis habent, 472–73). This is only the second time the narrator attributes direct speech to Tereus. The first is at line 513, where Tereus sincerely expresses his joy (“ ‘I have won!’ he shouts, ‘my prayers are being carried with me,’ ” “uicimus!” exclamat, “mecum mea uota feruntur!”). Like Pandion, Tereus is not consciously performing a role and is expressing, not performing, emotional responses. Pandion cries as he says goodbye to his daughter and son-in-law (495, 505, 509). Likewise, the narrator tells us that Tereus sheds tears upon learning that he has eaten his son (flet modo, 665), a stark contrast to the fictive tears Tereus employed in his previous performances which deceived Pandion.¹⁸⁶

Tereus’s epic power is a martial violence, which moves from a manifest normative, masculine epic violence (opibusque uirisque potentem, 426) that saved Pandion’s kingdom to an erotic and fearful violence that is realized only through deceptive persuasion (facundum faciebat amor, 469) and hidden deep in the forest. The Athenians resort first to persuasion: Procne (“when coaxingly to her husband,” cum blandita uiro, 440), Philomela (“coaxingly holding,” blanda tenens, 476), Pandion (“gently tears between requests,” lacrimae mites inter mandata, 505), and even Itys (“with childish coaxing words,” blanditiis puerilibus, 626). Philomela is the first to learn that persuasion is ineffective. Initially she tries to persuade Tereus with tears (cum lacrimis, 523). After suffering his erotic violence (ui, 525), Philomela’s threats to call for just aid (534–48) result only in his anger (ira, 549) and fear (metus, 550) followed by more violence. Procne seems to realize quickly that Tereus may not be swayed and moves immediately to violent revenge. She tells Philomela that it is time for the sword, not persuasion: “ ‘this must not be accomplished with tears,’ she said, ‘but with a sword’ ” (“non est lacrimis hoc” inquit “agendum, / sed ferro”, 611–12).

The revenge of the sisters is literally satisfying. They are finally reunited in their pleasure (gaudia, 653, 660). Retaliatory violence achieves the goal of reunion that Tereus had denied them in prefering his own gaudia (514). Like Tereus, the sisters dissimulate their violent intent, masking it under the guise of ritual—religion (“she pretends to be one of your own, Bacchus,” Bacche, tuas simulat, 596), and family tradition (“inventing a ritual in the custom of her country,” patrii moris sacrum mentita, 648).¹⁸⁷ It is the confession of their revenge which brings them pleasure (“Procne could not pretend that she was not feeling a cruel joy,” dissimulare nequit crudelia gaudia Procne, 653; “to testify to her joy,” testari gaudia, 660).¹⁸⁸ The reciprocity of suffering, Tereus’s for Philomela’s, suggests that the sister’s pleasure also resembles Tereus’s sexual pleasure.¹⁸⁹ The erotics of tragic revenge had already been expressed on the Attic stage. We may recall Clytemnestra’s orgasmic murder of Agamemnon. She describes his blood giving her pleasure (χαίρουσαν, 1391) as it covers her, likening it to a rain which feeds the fertile budding crops (“the sown corn [rejoices] in the water granted by Zeus in the bursting of the bud,” διοσδότῳ / γάνει σπορητὸς κάλυκος ἐν λοχεύμασιν, 1391–92).¹⁹⁰ The sexualization of the women’s tragic revenge, which tragic ira strives toward, brings us full circle to tragic libido. In the end, ira, not amor, offers the pleasure that tragic women in love seek.

Procne’s tale transitions into the brief tale of Boreas (677–721), the North Wind, whose sons, Calais and Zetes, will quickly mature and join the crew of the Argo, providing a bridge to book 7 where Medea’s story begins.¹⁹¹ The narrator, momentarily, regains control and resituates us firmly in the masculine epic genre with the political succession of Erectheus, who takes (capit, 677), rather than snatches (rapit), his Athenian scepter. He has a reputation for justice (iustitia). The Thracian Boreas seeks the hand of the Athenian princess, Orithyia. He is compared and defined in opposition to Tereus and other Thracians (“Tereus and the Thracians were causing trouble for Boreas,” Boreae Tereus Thracesque nocebant, 682). The suggestion is that, because he is not a Tereus, he is worthy of being the affine of the Athenian king, Erectheus. The external reader may be sympathetic, but the internal audience, Erectheus, is not. Boreas first follows Athenian custom, preferring persuasion to violence, but this strategy fails, for violence is natural to the god (“while he asks and prefers to employ prayers rather than force. But since he is getting no traction with coaxing words, frightening because of rage, which is customary for him …,” dum rogat et precibus mauult quam uiribus uti. / ast ubi blanditiis agitur nihil, horridus ira, / quae solita est illi … , 684–86). Boreas connects the epic opes of Tereus, the epic ally (“powerful because of his wealth and soldiers,” opibusque uirisque potentem, 426), with the erotic vis of Tereus the rapist (ui superat, 525). With these lexical similarities, Ovid encourages his audience to compare the two Thracians.

“et merito!” dixit “quid enim mea tela reliqui,

saeuitiam et uires iramque animosque minaces,

admouique preces, quarum me dedecet usus?

apta mihi uis est: ui tristia nubila pello,

ui freta concutio nodosaque robora uerto

induroque niues et terras grandine pulso.

idem ego cum fratres caelo sum nactus aperto

(nam mihi campus is est), tanto molimine luctor,

ut medius nostris concursibus insonet aether

exsiliantque cauis elisi nubibus ignes;

idem ego, cum subii conuexa foramina terrae

supposuique ferox imis mea terga cauernis,

sollicito manes totumque tremoribus orbem.

hac ope debueram thalamos petiisse, socerque

non orandus erat mihi sed faciendus Erectheus.” (Met. 6.687–701)

“And I deserve it!” he said. “For why have I abandoned my weapons, cruelty and violence and rage and threatening attitudes, and [why] have I applied prayers, whose application does not suit me? Violence suits me; with violence I compel the dark clouds, with violence I shake the sea and I overturn the knotty oaks and I harden the snows and I strike lands with hail. Likewise, when I meet my brothers in the open sky (for this is my battlefield), I struggle with such great effort that the middle of the heaven resounds with our clashes and fire is forced out and leaps forth from the hollow clouds; likewise, when I have entered the vaulted caves of the earth and fiercely I have set my body beneath the lowest caverns, I frighten the ghosts and the whole world with my shaking. With this power I should have sought marriage, and I should not have begged Erectheus to be my father-in-law but made him.”

His power is constructed as divine (he customarily uses it to control the natural world) and suited to him (690), and its application is undisguised. The word vis is repeated five times in eight lines (684–91). He appropriately redefines Erectheus as an enemy and takes his spoils (700–701, 706–7), the maiden Orithyia, who is, unlike Philomela, one of the maidens who populate the first few books of the poem taken by an amorous god from a less powerful father and made the mother of two heroes.¹⁹² Boreas does not write himself. He is fully written. Even his words are signaled as a script (“having spoken these things or things not weaker than these, Boreas …,” haec Boreas aut his non inferiora locutus … , 702).

Conclusion

The previous chapter examined how Ovid’s representations of the tragic women in love, Phaedra and Byblis, are characterized by attempts to renovate or expand the role for which they are famous in the tragic tradition—examples of perverse and destructive female desire. Their gender and overdetermined generic tradition, however, prevents a transposition. Ovid’s verse repeatedly signals their tragic nature, thereby duplicating their abject status—active female desirers and tragic characters in the wrong genre. This chapter explores Ovid’s construction of female tragic ira. Like his construction of female tragic libido, Hypsipyle’s and Procne’s passion is constructed simultaneously and ineluctably through gender, genre, and politics. In terms of gender, the ira threatened by Hypsipyle and fully experienced by Procne is marked as excessive and destructive, as it was in the catalogue in Ars Amatoria. Like female libido, this passion cannot be contained by women, so must be excluded due to the threat it poses to society. Hypsipyle and Procne, however, do not attempt a transposition. Ovid’s representation of tragic women enraged reverses this signifying practice—it is reductive, not expansive. Instead, the heroines demonstrate their knowledge of the literary canon and the inescapable influence of the tragic tradition in order to accomplish their goals.

In her poetic epistle, Hypsipyle uses intimidation, not seduction, as Phaedra did, to persuade her addressee. She threatens a tragic end to Jason’s story, constructing the tragic instantiation of his myth as an abject possibility, an unlivable life in which gender roles are reversed—Medea is the hero and punisher, and families are dissolved. She offers as an alternative his epic tradition which rescues his masculinity, his family, and his heroic legacy. In Ovid’s epic poem, Procne recognizes the tragic clues provided by the narrator and tricks the illiterate Tereus into performing his tragic role, despite an initial epic introduction to his character. In the process, Ovid portrays the struggles of an author to create a new authoritative text in the face of a long poetic tradition. This process resembles that of Byblis in book 9 of the poem. Procne’s tale, by contrast, does not offer an alternative to the punishment of abjection as Byblis’s and Hypsipyle’s do. Rather, her tale demonstrates that the successful poet and playwright is the one who innovates her tragic tradition but does not try to write against it.

Ovid, moreover, demonstrates the gravity, so to speak, of the tragic code, which threatens the integrity of their new generic contexts—epistolary elegy and epic. As his poet-praeceptor warns in book 2 of the Ars Amatoria, following the examples of Medea and Procne (2.381–84): “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). “Well-composed loves,” as I argued in chapter 1, are both strong romantic bonds and Ovid’s earlier, well-written collection of elegies, the Amores. The Ovidian Hypsipyle offers Jason a choice between the masculine genres of epic and elegy and the emasculating genre of tragedy. If she chooses to play Medea, he will, necessarily, be read as her tragic counterpart, the suffering victim. Likewise, Procne, knowing that Tereus is generically illiterate, draws him into his own tragedy.

In both cases, tragedy overshadows and eventually overtakes the message. Hypsipyle ends her letter with a Medean curse on Medea and Jason that they suffer the events performed in Euripides’s play. The tale of the Athenian sisters briefly marks a traditionally tragic end with the suffering of male characters. While Tereus, himself an abject masculine subject, is eternally trapped within his desire for revenge motivated by sorrow (“he was swift due to his own grief and desire for revenge,” ille dolore suo poenaeque cupidine uelox, 671), Pandion’s sorrow, which kills him (675–76), resembles that of male heroes brought low at the end of Attic tragedies, who face the revelation of events and, along with the audience, learn a lesson. Consider, for example, the Euripidean Jason with the bodies of his sons in his arms, or the Sophoclean Creon left alone after the suicides of his niece, his son, and his wife.

Productive or reductive, the literary strategies of an Ovidian Phaedra or Medea have the same results. Ovid’s verse demonstrates that their abject tragic passion is their nature. The tragic woman in love appears in the elegiac genre as an abject amator. Likewise, the tragic woman enraged is constructed in opposition to the epic hero. On the tragic stage, the focus shifts from war to its aftermath. Grief, which motivates female revenge, is directly or indirectly caused by epic action. In Ovid’s verse, we see political and martial language in both Hypsipyle’s ventriloquized self-construction and Procne’s tale. Hypsipyle makes much of her power as ruler over subjects who have recently acted as soldiers. She describes Medea as a hostile foreign power, an enemy and poor choice as ally. Procne, likewise, is characterized as a soldier and assumes the weapons which Tereus abandoned in his own poetic project inspired by libido. In Procne’s hands, however, the weapons are Bacchic. She cannot be trusted with exacting justice, for hers is an abject ira, unable to be contained or managed and therefore destructive to all, Tereus and Pandion alike. This is Hypsipyle’s threat, that she will become a tragic warrior like Procne. Her new generic thesis as Medea is guaranteed by generations of readers who recognize this subjectivity. It draws Jason into the same tragic code. If she is read as avenging Medea, he is necessarily read as Jason bereft.