Playing with Gender

Ovid’s poetic play with the limits of acceptable and abject desires resembles the way poets at the end of the first century BCE played with gender. Scholarship on artistic representations of men in effeminizing sexual roles, including and especially in Roman erotic elegy, has suggested that the Roman male took pleasure in “playing the other” (to borrow a phrase from Zeitlin by way of Skinner 1993, 120). Maintaining a position of masculinity in ancient Rome required constant vigilance in every area of life—public and private. Identifying with the effeminized, passive position may have served as an escape. As Skinner posits in the case of Catullan poetry, such a fantastical identification with a marginal figure “must have afforded a fleeting relaxation of stringent psychic controls, a luxurious but relatively harmless foray into sentimental self-indulgence” (Skinner 1993, 120). In order for Roman men to enjoy the license to oscillate between masculine and feminine subject positions free from a determining biological sex and without fear of remaining permanently effeminized, the gendered position of a woman (or any other marginal figure, e.g., a slave, a foreigner) had to be constructed as natural, ahistorical, and tied to their sexed bodies (i.e., precisely fixed).

If marginal figures are by nature passive and subordinate to the Roman male, then he may put on whatever costume he pleases, knowing he can resume his (never ceded) place of power in the hierarchy. Ovid’s construction of Phaedra- and Medea-like figures as abject participates in this process, allowing him as poet to align briefly with the heroines while never ceding his place as the true poetic authority.⁹ Abject female desire and the marginal position of powerlessness it embodies alleviated social, cultural, and political anxieties in Roman men of the Augustan age, whose ability to perform their masculinity had been seriously curtailed by the new emperor’s assumption of traditional social and political roles once shared among the aristocracy. “Literature under the new regime was less a means of self-assertion than a complex negotiation of new Imaginary and Symbolic categories of what Romanitas and nobilitas meant in a world of public subordination to a single central author” (Miller 2004, 75). Moreover, all Roman men occupied an effeminized position in relation to the emperor. Such a tenuous position made it all the more important to maintain a superiority over other groups. Preserving an already unstable status provided a motivation for Ovid and his contemporaries to sustain the inferior position of the other through repeated symbolic (i.e., discursive, literary, and artistic representations) repudiation.

The Other as Abject

Constructing the other as abject, however, results in an interdependent relationship. In one of two extant lines from Ovid’s tragedy, Medea (quoted at the start of this chapter), Medea asks perhaps Jason or Creon, “I was able to save: Are you asking whether I can destroy?” Such a comment articulates the power of the abject female subject, for the fiction of his privilege is founded on her as a fictional monster. Reminders of this relationship appear throughout Ovid’s literary representations. Hippolytus is literally torn to pieces because of female desire.¹⁰ Reborn as Virbius, Hippolytus introduces his story at Metamorphoses 15.479–621: “If the story has reached your ears that a certain Hippolytus fell to his death because of the gullibility of his father, the deceit of his wicked stepmother” (“Fando aliquem Hippolytum uestras si contigit aures / credulitate patris, sceleratae fraude nouercae / occubuisse neci”, 497–99). He describes Phaedra’s attempts at seduction (500–502). The fraus of Phaedra, Virbius maintains, ultimately resulted in his dismemberment which made him unrecognizable as the young man Hippolytus: “and none of my body parts which you are able to recognize” (“nullasque in corpora partes / noscere quas posses”, 528–29).

At Rome, Ovid freely ventriloquized Phaedra- and Medea-like heroines. In 8 CE, Ovid was relegated to Tomis on the Black Sea. The author himself is the only near contemporary source we have for his punishment, which, he tells us, was for “a poem and a mistake” (carmen et error, Tr. 2.207).¹¹ At Tomis (and en route toward his new home), Ovid’s position in opposition to the abject heroines of his earlier verse was less assured. Tomis shared the same sea as Medea’s Colchis. His verse, like that of his ventriloquized heroine Byblis, locates him at the very fringe of the civilized world: “the most distant land, the most distant world holds me” (ultima me tellus, ultimus orbis habet, Pont. 2.7.66). From exile, Ovid’s poetic strategies resume the reductive constructions of the Ars and highlight the fundamental symbolic meaning of these heroines in Ovid’s poetry and the importance of abject figures to maintaining the privileged position of the male author.¹²

Ovid’s epic recounts that, after chasing Caunus out of Miletus into the lands inhabited by monsters like the Chimaera (635–49), shouting through the lands like a celebrant of Dionysus (641–42), Byblis collapses and is finally silent: “Byblis lies silent, and she grips the green grass with her fingernails and wets the grass with a stream of tears” (muta iacet, uiridesque suis tenet unguibus herbas / Byblis, et umectat lacrimarum gramina riuo, Met. 9.655–56).¹³ Whether Ovid’s voice was rendered mute as Byblis’s is a mystery. If his contemporaries in Rome were aware of or discussed his exilic poetry, these receptions no longer survive.¹⁴ In fact, the lack of contemporary evidence of Ovid’s relegation beyond his own poems and the hyperbolic nature of his descriptions of Tomis have led some scholars to theorize that his “exile” was a poetic fiction.¹⁵

Ovid seeks to distance himself from both heroines by coding Tomis itself as abject both in its extreme location and as a stage for tragedy. Throughout both the Tristia and Epistulae ex Ponto, Tomis the place is frequently constructed in opposition to Rome.¹⁶ Where Rome is warm, fertile, and filled with friends and family, Tomis is cold, barren, and devoid of any individually characterized figures who offer consolation, companionship, or aid.¹⁷ Trista 3.8, for instance, ends with his frequent plea for a change of location: “But, since once he employed hate in a civilized way, let our exile be lighter by changing the location” (at, quoniam semel est odio civiliter usus, / mutato levior sit fuga nostra loco, 41–42). The comparative aspect of this request resembles past and future pleas, first made to Augustus himself: “if you grant me, the petitioner, a milder and closer exile, a great part of my punishment will be lightened” (mitius exilium si das propiusque roganti, / pars erit ex poena magna levata mea, Tr. 2.185–86). We may see the same plea again and again throughout the remaining exile poetry.¹⁸ The comparative aspect also resembles that of female desire which we have seen in his earlier work.¹⁹ Female desire holds an abject status in its nature as more than the normative desire which it defines.²⁰ Ovid’s location is “further than” the borders of the civilized Roman world, marking the location beyond which all is barbara (barbara terra, Tr. 3.1.18; 3.3.46; 4.4.86; barbaria, Tr. 3.10.4; 5.1.46). Ovid reminds his addressees that his new abject location is geographically connected to the Euripidean heroines, Medea (Tristia 3.9) and Iphigenia (Tristia 4.4 and ex Ponto 3.2).²¹ Tomis’s connection to Medea is strengthened linguistically through the epithet barbara, used to describe Medea in Ovid’s verse (Ars am. 2.382; Her. 6.19, 107; 12.70, 105; Tr. 2.526),²² and by the description of Tomis and Medea’s Colchis as an icy region (axis gelidus: Her. 6.106; Tr. 2.190, 5.2.64; Pont. 2.10.48, 4.14.62, 4.15.36).

As Tristia 3.9 is the last extended treatment of the Medea myth in Ovid’s work, this poem makes a natural conclusion to our study of the heroines, Phaedra and Medea. This poem was written in Tomis perhaps a year or two after his arrival. Ovid tells us the etymology of the name Tomis, which, he says, takes its name “from the slaughter of Absyrtus” (ab Absyrti caede, 6). He derives Tomis from the Greek verb τέμνω, “to cut”: “Thereafter this place was called Tomis, since the sister is said to have cut apart her own brother’s limbs there” (inde Tomis dictus locus hic, quia fertur in illo / membra soror fratris consecuisse sui, 33–34).²³ The poem preceding 3.9 begins with a wish for mythological, magical flying instruments which include Medea’s own serpent-drawn chariot (Tr. 3.8.1–6). Ovid’s reference cites the end of Euripides’s play. The Euripidean Medea, therefore, is fresh in our minds as we move into Tristia 3.9, although the tale he tells in this poem brings us back to her early career told by Apollonius and Varro. Fittingly, Ovid’s strange etiology combines Medea’s Euripidean slaughter with her Hellenistic, Phaedra-like love for Jason.

Following the etiology, Ovid recounts Medea’s escape from Colchis (Tr. 3.9.5–10). Ovid tells us that she has already dared but, also, she will dare many crimes (ausa atque ausura multa nefanda manu, 16). The Argo has landed on the banks of Tomis and a lookout has spotted Aeetes on the water. Medea reacts in desperation. Her choice to kill and dismember her brother is represented as sudden—Ovid uses words meaning “by chance” (casu, 22), “right away” (protinus, 25)—but it is this lack of rationality which makes Ovid’s last extended treatment of the Medea myth so frightening. Her brother’s presence, like her sons’ in Euripides, inspires her plan, but this Medea does not struggle with her decision. Medea claims in her letter (Her. 12) that she can barely write about her brother’s murder, she is so ashamed, suggesting she was conflicted from the beginning. Here Medea is thrilled with the idea:

dum quid agat quaerit, dum versat in omnia vultus,

ad fratrem casu lumina flexa tulit.

cuius ut oblata est praesentia, “vicimus” inquit:

“hic mihi morte sua causa salutis erit.” (21–24)

While she was searching for a plan, while she was turning her head in every direction, by chance she directed her eyes toward her brother. When his presence offered itself, she said: “We have won. He will be the source of my salvation with his death.”

As evidenced in chapter 3, Hypsipyle and Procne do not try to innovate the Medea paradigm. Hypsipyle uses it as a threat to Jason if he fails to perform his epic role. Procne uses it as a model for her revenge, which the culturally illiterate Tereus does not recognize. So too, Medea’s creative process in Tristia 3.9 is described as taking advantage of what (or who) is at hand. Medea seems to be inspired by the version of her own myth which Apollonius does not employ,²⁴ but which is told by the mythographer Pherecydes.²⁵ In this version, Medea dismembers her brother and scatters his remains in the water in order to slow her father’s pursuit of the Argo. She transfers this version to her current location and uses it to save her own life. The last ten lines of the poem give a gruesome description of the murder (25–34). She scatters his limbs on the ground of Tomis, not in the ocean. She then places his hands and head on a jutting rock to be sure Aeetes recognizes him. Aeetes is slowed by a grief which is indeed new (novus, 31)—new not only to the myth but also to the poet, for Ovid’s new grief has found him, like Aeetes, on the shores of Tomis, looking at the scattered remains of his poetic corpus.²⁶

In 3.9, Phaedra surfaces as well, through an allusion to the Euripidean play Hippolytus and Ovid’s earlier descriptions of Hippolytus’s dismemberment, in which his body was scattered across the landscape (Eur. HII. 1236–39; Ov. Met. 15.524–29, Fast. 6.742–44; Tr. 3.9.27–32).²⁷ This secondary tragic allusion underscores the connection of female tragic desire and rage in Ovid, for Phaedra’s desire led to the death of a young man. The dual allusion and Ovid’s sustained self-construction in opposition to the space stained by Phaedra’s revenge and Medea’s fratricide draw an implicit association between him and the victims of this type of passion. In this formula, Ovid resembles Hippolytus. The blame for such irrational violence, moreover, is shifted conveniently from the true source of his punishment, Augustus, to the tragic woman.

The process of geographic abjection, which incorporates the gender and generic abjections from his pre-exilic work, again defines Ovid as what Tomis and the tragic heroines are not. The construction aligns Ovid as a masculine epic hero who is guaranteed a homecoming. He associates himself with the quest through comparison, simile, and allusion to the epic heroes of these myths.²⁸ The myth of Jason and the Argonauts, for example, is implicitly evoked in the penultimate poem of Tristia 1, where the masthead of Ovid’s boat, featuring Minerva, is addressed as a helping deity as Ovid sets out on his sea voyage to Jason’s initial heroic destination, the sea of Aeolian Helle (1.10.15), from his ultimate destination, Corinth (1.10.9).²⁹ At Pont. 1.4 Ovid compares his suffering to Jason’s (23–46) and envisions an Odyssean reunion with his wife (49–54). If Tomis is the realm of monsters and murderers whom epic heroes must overcome or tame, Rome is the land to which they inevitably return after achieving their goals.

Ovid’s Abject Subjects

The repetition of Phaedra- and Medea-like characters in various forms throughout his corpus may be a symptom of anxiety over women’s sexuality and the hierarchies of power articulated by representations of sexual subjects, but it also testifies to a fascination with these abject figures. As noted above, “playing the other” offered elite Roman men relief from their own rigid gender performance. Skinner (1993, 120) further argues that “the craving to undergo such a disorienting emotional experience, if only temporarily and artificially, was … a basic component in the construction of ancient male sexuality.” The reading subject, according to Elsner, may also share madness with the abject female desiring subject, at least while she is in the process of reading. He argues that the reader is complicit in her own deception that ars is natura, and this desire for self-deception is akin to madness.³⁰ Moreover, we have seen that these abject sexual subjects also articulate the relationship of a poet with his text and his audience.³¹ Their sexual circulation, like that of the text, introduces promiscuous, excessive, and sometimes dangerous interpretations of an author’s verses.³² Repudiated, she carries with her those aspects of authorship and the text which threaten the fiction of poetic authority, intentionality, textual control, and immortal fame. But, as Ovid’s Phaedras and Medeas emphasize through their repeated representations and as Ovid’s own relegation proves, an author has little control over her meaning once her message is uttered.³³ Ovid’s poetry and his abject subjects have the power to introduce new meanings for the paradigms of female sexuality, regardless of his (or Augustus’s) intention. His poetry does not belong to him. For that matter, it no longer belongs to his first Roman readers. As Ovid himself predicts at the close of the Metamorphoses, “he,” wearing the many guises of his narrators, from the poet-praeceptor to the lovesick Phaedra, lives “on the lips of the people” (ore populi, Met. 15.873).