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23
Sex and Gender
A.M. Keith
1. Introduction. Throughout its history, Latin literature was produced and
consumed largely by men of the Roman upper classes (Habinek 1998). Latin literature
therefore exhibits a class and gender bias that tells us a great deal about how the Roman
governing elites, by definition male, viewed themselves in relation to society. Of
particular concern in my discussion will be the ways in which this literature codifies
relations between the sexes. I shall argue that Latin letters were, from the outset,
harnessed to the didactic project of training the (male) children of the Roman aristocracy
in the codes and conventions of elite Roman masculinity. Formal Roman education
centered on training in public speaking, which the elite male needed to master for use in
the law-courts, Senate, and military camps, not only among his peers but also among his
social superiors and inferiors. This rhetorical education played an early role in shaping
the elite Roman man’s understanding of the world he was socially destined to govern, by
naturalizing and legitimating social hierarchies of class, nationality, age, and gender.
2. The Didactic Impulse: Fathers and Sons. Suetonius identifies the earliest
teachers of Latin at Rome as Livius Andronicus and Ennius, whom he notes were both
poets and half-Greeks (Suet. Gram. 1). Livius was the author of an Odyssia, adapted
from Homer’s Odyssey, which was still taught in Horace’s youth (Epist. 2.1.69-71). Like
its Homeric model, Livius’ poem seems to have opened with a statement of an avowedly
gendered subject: ‘the man full of stratagems, goddess, tell me of him’ (fr. 1, adapting
Hom. Od. 1.1). Livius’ translation of Homer’s andra by the Latin uirum is faithful to the
dual class and gender bias of the Homeric epics and implicitly encodes those foci at the
foundation of Latin literature, which emerges as written for and about an elite (rather than
base-born) and male (rather than female) audience. This is the audience addressed by
Ennius in his Annales, which took as its subject ‘the greatest deeds of the fathers’ (Enn.
epigr. 45.2 Courtney) and attributed the pre-eminence of the Roman state to her ancient
traditions and men (Ann. 156 Sk), in a line whose first four words begin with the letters
that spell out the name of Mars, the Roman god of war.
Implicit in the design of these early Latin epics (see also Goldberg, Chapter 1) is
the characteristically Roman social project of celebrating moral exempla in a ‘poetry that
trains men’ by inculcating the ‘values, examples of behavior, [and] cultural models’ with
which which Rome won and governed her Mediterranean empire (Conte (1994) 83). If
this project necessarily entails an imperial narrative of foreign conquest and external
expansion, it also requires a domestic narrative of internal hierarchy and social cohesion
that documents the establishment and maintenance of orderly relations between
generations, classes, and sexes. Thus we find embedded in Ennius’ record of foreign
conquest passages that delimit the social contributions of the statesman’s trusted
confidant (Ann. 268-86 Sk) and the good woman (147 Sk), as well as passages that
underscore the importance of military discipline even when it conflicts with intra-familial
loyalties such as those between father and son (156 SK) or brother and sister (132 Sk).
Of particular importance is the emphasis in these poems on exemplary military courage
and manly conduct in the context of their use as teaching texts for the sons of the Roman
elite.
Early in the Principate the Annales and other early epics were displaced from a
central place in the curriculum by Vergil’s Aeneid (see also Hardie, Chapter 6 above).
Like Livius’ Odussia, the Aeneid takes as its focus a singular man, Aeneas -- ‘arms and a
man I celebrate’ (Aen. 1.1) -- while like Ennius’ Annales, Vergil’s poem displays a
profound commitment not only to the generational succession of father by son but also to
the instruction of son by father. Mercury appeals to Aeneas’ love for his own son when
instructing him to quit Carthage: ‘if no glory of so great an empire moves you, consider
growing Ascanius, Iulus’ expectation as your heir, to whom the kingdom of Italy and the
Roman land are due’ (4.272-6). The paternal love Aeneas demonstrates for his son by
leaving North Africa in book four is parallelled by the filial love he shows for his father
in his descent to the underworld in book six.
In this context, it is especially significant that the three great prophetic set-pieces
in books 1, 6, and 8, are founded on orderly sequences of genealogical descent deriving
the Julians from Ascanius/Iulus (1.267-88) and the Romans from Anchises (6.679-83,
754-886) and Aeneas respectively (8.626-731). All three scenes, moreover, enact the
principle of generational succession in their context as well as in their content: Jupiter
instructs his daughter Venus in the future hegemony of his grandson’s descendants in
book 1; Anchises instructs his son Aeneas in the exploits of their progeny in book 6; and
Vulcan forges a shield for Aeneas (at Venus’ request) that documents Rome’s warrior
heroes. In its celebration of Roman martial valour and the father-son relationship, the
Aeneid also continues the tradition of self-reflexive attention to the pedagogical context
in which Latin epic was first encountered. Aeneas relies on the advice and guidance of
his father Anchises throughout the first half of the poem, and offers both to his own son
Ascanius-Iulus (12.435-40):
‘Learn courage, son, and true toil from me, luck from others. Now my right hand
will keep you safe in war and lead you into the midst of great rewards. See to it
that you remember my deeds, when adulthood comes upon you, and that your
father Aeneas and your father’s brother Hector inspire you to live up to the
examples of your ancestors’.
Since the Aeneid came to occupy a central position in the Roman school curriculum, the
exemplary exploits Aeneas instructs his son to remember were taught as those for
emulation by Roman school-boys, especially the sons of the Roman governing class.
Quintilian endorsed the pedagogical practice of his day, which introduced
students to reading through instruction in the epics of Vergil and Homer, precisely for the
perceived moral exemplarity of the genre (Inst. 1.8.5):
therefore the established practice, that reading should commence with Homer and
Vergil is best ... let the boy’s mind be elevated by the sublimity of heroic verse,
derive inspiration from the greatness of the subjects, and be imbued with the best
sentiments.
The rich commentary tradition on Vergil that survives from late antiquity demonstrates
the long durée which this principle enjoyed. Of particular interest are the
Interpretationes Vergilianae dedicated by Tiberius Claudius Donatus to his son, a prose
paraphrase of the entire poem with discussion ‘which father passed on to son without
deceit’ (TCD 1.2.6).
It is very likely that the circulation of the early Latin epics was restricted to the
upper classes and so these texts may only have represented elite concerns, although the
wide dissemination of the Aeneid after its appearance in c.19 BCE meant that anyone with
the least education would in practice have been exposed to the poem. Nonetheless we are
fortunate to possess several popular dramatic works of mid-Republican date (on such
comedies in general see further Panayotakis, Chapter 9 above) which display a similar
attention to the relationship between fathers and sons, especially in terms of the moral
education of the latter by the former, and confirm the significance in Roman culture of
the principles of paternal guidance and male generational succession. In Terence’s
comedy Adelphoe, for example, the two brothers Micio and Demea exemplify rival
educational theories in the upbringing of their sons. The urban sophisticate Micio
propounds a doctrine of indulgence towards his (adoptive) son Aeschinus (64-77), in
contrast to his brother Demea’s strictness with his son Ctesipho. For most of the play,
Demea and his strictures are held up to mockery and derision by the other characters, but
the final scenes stage his recovery of the moral high ground in the exposition of an ideal
educational program in which father checks son’s waywardness but avoids the excesses
of either severity or indulgence (986-95). This is a paternal educative code which all can
endorse; as Micio himself says, ‘that’s the right way’ (997).
Plautus too highlights the father’s responsibility for educating his son in a number
of his comedies. In Trinummus, for example, Lysiteles acknowledges his father’s role in
forming his character, in a passage which highlights the advantages he has received from
following paternal precepts (301-2, 314-19):
LYSITELES. Fom the beginning of my adolescence to my present age I always
obeyed your commands and precepts, father .... By my modesty I have ever held
your precepts wind-tight and water-tight. PHILTO. Why are you reproaching me?
What you did well you did for yourself, not for me; indeed my life is nearly over:
this matters most for you.
Here Plautus illustrates the pragmatic familial and social goals that led father to educate
son. More frequently, however, he mocks and subverts the traditional paternal role in a
son’s education in his comedies. Thus in Mostellaria a wastrel son reflects on the
responsibility of parents for their children’s education (118-128):
parents are their children’s builders: they construct their children’s foundations;
they raise them up, carefully make them strong, and neither spare material nor
think outlay there an expense in order that their children be productive and
attractive to the public and to themselves; they groom them: they teach them
literature, statutes, laws, and strive by cost and labour to make others want similar
children for themselves.
The comedy of the passage resides in the spendthrift character of the youth who
enunciates these principles, since the play focuses on his efforts to conceal from his
father the depradations he has made on the paternal estate in the course of his parent’s
absence.
Latin epic and comedy are not alone in displaying both a didactic impulse and a
prominent emphasis on the generational transmission of the exemplary standards of
Roman manliness from father to son. These features also characterize the earliest Latin
prose writing, by Cato the Elder (see further Goldberg, Chapter 1 above). In the preface
to his treatise on farming, for example, Cato declares that farmers make the bravest men
and most energetic soldiers while their occupation is the most honourable (Agr. pr. 4).
The association of farming with the core values of exemplary Roman masculinity -bravery and military service -- both underlies and authorizes this didactic treatise on
farming. Moreover Cato seems to have promoted the same principles in other works no
longer extant. In the Origines, for example, he expounded the origins of Rome and other
Italian cities and documented her rise to domination of the Mediterranean through the
collective accomplishments, primarily in warfare, of the Roman people (defined as the
male citizen body). We also hear of a series of works addressed to his son Cato
Licinianus on agriculture, medicine, and rhetoric (sometimes referred to compendiously
under the title ‘Precepts to his Son’), which exemplify the Roman father’s special role in
educating his son. Plutarch records that Cato himself not only taught his son to read but
even wrote histories for him in large characters in order to instruct him in the exemplary
exploits of their ancestors and fellow-countrymen (Cat. Mai. 20.7).
At the end of the Republic Cicero produced an even more voluminous body of
prose-writing in rhetoric and oratory, philosophy and letters (see also Levene, Chapter 2
above). Like Cato in his agricultural and historical works, moreover, Cicero seems to
have been moved by a didactic impulse in the composition of his numerous rhetorical and
philosophical treatises. In Brutus, for example, he traces for his young protégé Brutus
(the tyrannicide) the history of oratory at Rome from its origins to his own day. As a
record of the evolution of oratory in ancient Rome, the dialogue contains a chronological
series of biographical sketches of famous Roman politicians, culminating in Cicero’s
autobiographical account of his own rhetorical training. With its teleological schema
celebrating successive generations of prominent Roman orators along with its
paternalistic dedication, the Brutus reads like the rhetorical equivalent of the pageant of
military heroes reviewed by Anchises in Aeneid 6. Unfortunately Brutus proved an
unsatisfactory ‘son’, resisting Cicero’s ‘Asianist’ teleology to remain firmly in the
‘Atticist’ camp.
Cicero seems to have been more successful in instilling his rhetorical and moral
principles into his own son, whose education he supervised and to whom he dedicated his
last treatise, the three books ‘On Duties’. In the proem Cicero asserts the rhetorical
utility of both his philosophical treatises and his speeches (Off. 1.1-3):
you will make your Latin discourse fuller by reading my works indeed ....
Therefore I encourage you especially, my son, to read carefully not only my
speeches but even those books on philosophy which are now nearly equal in
number to them -- for the force of speaking is greater in the former, but an even
and moderate style of discourse must also be practised.
Of particular interest is Cicero’s advice to his son to immerse himself in his literary,
which is to say rhetorical, style. For Cicero here undertakes to train his son in rhetoric by
harnessing retrospectively all his speeches, forensic and political, to the project of young
Marcus’ education. But it is not only as a stylistic model that Cicero claims value for this
work. At the end of the preface he emphasizes the utility for his son’s education of the
theme of duty (Off. 2.1):
But when I had decided to write something for you ... I wanted especially to start
with something most suitable for your age and my authority. For although many
weighty and useful subjects in philosophy have been treated carefully and fully by
the philosophers, those precepts which have been handed down concerning duties
seemed to have the widest significance. For no part of life -- neither in public nor
private, neither in legal work nor domestic, neither if you are transacting business
by yourself nor if you are contracting with another -- can be free of duty; every
honourable pursuit of life lies in its cultivation, every disgrace in its neglect.
The younger Cicero seems to have learned his father’s precepts well. Although he was in
Athens studying philosophy at the time of Cicero’s murder in 43 BCE, he went on to
enjoy a distinguished political career under Octavian, serving as his colleague in the
consulship in 30 BCE and was eventually appointed governor of the province Syria and
proconsul of Asia.
3. Between Men: Homosocial Intercourse in Latin Literature. The
intimate connection between fathers’ education of their sons and Roman rhetorical
training recurs in the writings of the elder Seneca, who dedicated to his three sons,
ostensibly at their request, his ten books of Controversiae celebrating the declamatory
culture of the early principate (Contr. 1 pr. 1, 4, 6, 10). Seneca pater self-consciously
cites the elder Cato in his preface, implicitly taking the Republican censor as his own
model for educating his sons in rhetoric: ‘What then did that famous man say? “An
orator, Marcus my son, is a good man, skilled in speaking”’ (Contr. 1 pr. 9). Like Cato
and Cicero, the elder Seneca asserts the social value of rhetoric in his history of Roman
declamation (Contr. 1 pr. 6):
But, my young men, you are pursuing an important and useful matter because, not
content with the examples of your own day, you wish also to know those of an
earlier generation. First since the more examples one examines, the greater the
benefit to one’s own eloquence.
In the dedication to his sons, moreover, Seneca explictly includes a broader (elite Roman
male) audience for his reminiscences: ‘So much the more happily shall I do what you
ask, and I shall dedicate to the public whatever eloquent sayings of illustrious men I
remember, so that they do not belong to anyone privately’ (Contr. 1 pr. 10). Seneca
envisions his work in circulation among the Roman political elite (Bloomer [1997] 120),
which enjoyed privileged access to rhetorical education and gained political office
through competitive displays of eloquence (Gleason [1995] xx-xxiv). Seneca thus makes
explicit the paternal role in initiating sons into the male homosocial network central to
Latin political, rhetorical, and literary culture.
The adjective ‘homosocial’ describes social bonds between members of the same
sex in such arenas as ‘friendship, mentorship, entitlement, rivalry, and ... sexuality’
(Sedgwick [1985] 1). Seneca’s handbooks can be seen to articulate male homosocial
bonds along all of these axes. Thus in broadening his prospective audience from his sons
to the public, Seneca assumes the role of mentor to the sons of the Roman elite. In
recalling the declaimers of a previous generation, moreover, he privileges the
performances of his Spanish friends Latro and Gallio in the private halls of Roman
aristocrats while ignoring a host of Greek teachers and practitioners (Bloomer [1997]
115-135); his work thereby exemplifies the homosocial bonds of elite Hispano-Roman
male friendship and implicitly documents the social and political entitlement of that class.
Finally the format of the treatises, in which Seneca lists seriatim the interventions of the
declaimers on each side of a given theme, exposes the social and professional alliances
and rivalries that animated declamatory teaching and practice in the early Principate.
Declamation, like its nobler counterpart oratory, was an exercise in masculine cooperation and competition. The co-operative aspect of rhetoric is almost wholly lost to
our view since we lack complete speeches by anyone other than Cicero. We know
nonetheless that in the law courts the senior advocate could be supported by junior
counsel in both prosecution and defense. Similarly, more than one speech on either side
of a political issue would be heard in both senate and assembly. More visible to us is the
competitive nature of rhetorical culture. We possess, for example, a matched set of
political invectives, school exercises, in the form of a pseudo-Sallustian ‘Invective
against Cicero’ and a pseudo-Ciceronian ‘Invective against Sallust’. Rhetorical
competition is most clearly illustrated in Roman historical literature. In his Bellum
Catilinae, for example, Sallust selects for verbatim report from the debate in the Senate
on the punishment of the captured Catilinarian conspirators the speeches of Julius Caesar
and the younger Cato since senatorial opinion was swayed by each in turn. Caesar’s
speech invokes ancestral custom, which he characterizes as deliberation and daring (Cat.
51.37), to educate his fellow senators in the duties of the Roman political elite and
advocate confiscation of the conspirators’ property and their imprisonment. Cato
likewise appeals to mos maiorum in his speech in support of the consul’s proposal to
execute the conspirators, but for him hard work and the ideal of liberty constitute
ancestral custom (Cat. 52.21) and he contrasts the degeneracy of his contemporaries with
the manliness of the ancestors: ‘in their place we have luxury and greed, public want,
private opulence.... Between good and bad men there is no distinction, and ambition
holds all the rewards of courage’ (uirtus, literally ‘manliness’, Cat. 52.22).
Such rhetorical set-pieces are common in Latin literature, and as instances of elite
male homosocial competition often appeal to clichés of masculinity even as they enact
elite male solidarity. Livy furnishes a particularly lively example in his report of the
debate in 195 BCE about the repeal of the Oppian law, which limited the display of wealth
by Roman matrons. In this debate the consuls, the elder Cato and L. Valerius, spoke for
and against the law respectively. Livy’s Cato opens with an appeal to male solidarity in
the face of the women’s seditious demonstrations in favour of the law’s repeal: ‘if each
of us, Roman citizens, had decided to retain a husband’s right and power over his own
wife, we should have less trouble with the mass of them’ (34.2.1). Invoking ancestral
custom, Cato emphasizes Roman men’s long-standing authority over their womenfolk in
a formulation that vividly documents male social and financial power: ‘our ancestors
allowed no woman to transact business, not even privately, without a guardian and
wanted women to be under the control of fathers, brothers, husbands’ (34.2.11). If the
law were to be repealed, Cato argues, individual men’s power -- and therefore collective
male authority -- would be dangerously compromised. Indeed, for Livy’s Cato, yielding
to the women’s pressure will inevitably result in the complete overthrow of male
authority: ‘as soon as they begin to be our equals, they will be our superiors’ (34.3.3).
Cato’s appeal to male solidarity thus enlists the ideological support of ancestral custom in
a battle over legislative authority between the sexes.
In a debate concerning the repeal of a women’s sumptuary law, it is hardly
surprising that the speakers rehearse the clichés of femininity, and Cato’s opponent also
appeals to feminine stereotypes in his speech in support of the law’s repeal: ‘This could
wound the feelings of men; what do you think it does to foolish women, whom even
small things move? (34.7.7). Valerius, like the elder Cato, presses ancestral custom into
the service of his argument, but he scoffs at the idea that repeal of the Oppian law will
release women from male authority (34.7.11-14):
‘daughters, wives, even sisters will be less in the power (in manu, literally ‘in the
hand’) of some men -- but never will women’s slavery be shaken off while their
men are alive; and they themselves hate the freedom which loss of husband and
father causes. They prefer their dress to be at your discretion than the law’s; and
you ought to hold them in power and guardianship, not in slavery, and to prefer to
be called fathers or husbands than masters.’
Since under the stricter law of Republican Rome women were subject throughout their
lives to male authority, either of father in patria potestas or of husband if married in
manu, Livy’s Valerius implies that with the repeal of the Oppian law Roman men should
in fact recover full domestic authority over their womenfolk.
4. The Traffic in Women. The feminine clichés to which Livy’s consuls
appeal in their speeches not only strengthen male social bonds and elite authority -- over
foreigner, female, and slave -- but also naturalize the hierarchy of the sexes on display
throughout Latin literature. For like Latin speeches and texts, women are conceptualized
as circulating among men. Since, as we have seen, women are in the hands of father,
husband, or brother, their exchange -- from father or brother to husband -- can cement
good relations between natal and marital families. Thus Suetonius comments that in 70
BCE
Julius Caesar secured the political recall of his wife Cornelia’s brother, L. Cinna (Iul.
5). Caesar’s loyalty to Cornelia had already incurred the wrath of the dictator Sulla when
he took Rome from the Marians in the late 80s BCE, for it implied his continuing political
loyalty to her father Cinna, Marius’ colleague (Iul. 1.1-2):
He took to wife Cornelia, daughter of the Cinna who was consul four times ... nor
could he be persuaded in any way by the dictator Sulla to divorce her. Therefore
he was stripped of his priesthood, his wife’s dowry, and his family inheritances,
and was considered to be a member of the opposing faction.
His loyalty to Cornelia was such that on her death he delivered in her honour a funeral
oration in the Forum, which Suetonius connects with one Caesar delivered for his aunt
Julia (Iul. 6.1). Suetonius reports that Caesar used his aunt’s ancestry to trace his familial
lineage back to the king Ancus Marcius and the goddess Venus in order to enhance his
political prestige and authority, and it is likely that he used the opportunity of Cornelia’s
death similarly, to associate himself with his father-in-law’s politics. In this regard, it is
significant that Suetonius sets Caesar’s funeral orations for his dead womenfolk in the
context of his quaestorship, a junior political office en route to the consulship, for it
implies that Caesar made political capital out of these speeches.
The textualization of women and their circulation among men is a central gender
dynamic of Roman lyric and love elegy (cf. Harrison, Chapter 13 above and Gibson ,
Chapter 11 above). Catullus, for example, invites his friend and fellow-poet Caecilius on
a visit to Verona to discuss the progress of his friend’s unfinished poem on Cybele, which
he calls both ‘Mistress of Dindymus’ (35.13-14) and ‘Great Mother’ (35.18). Catullus’
poem constitutes particularly interesting evidence about the reception of a textual woman,
because it sets into literary circulation a second female figure, whom Catullus treats at
even greater length than Caecilius’ Cybele (35.7-18):
And so, if [Caecilius] is clever, he’ll eat up the road, even if a beautiful girl calls
him back a thousand times, casts both hands round his neck and asks him to
linger; who now, if the report I hear is true, loves him hopelessly with an
ungovernable passion. For from the time when she read the unfinished ‘Mistress
of Dindymus’, the tender flames of love have consumed her to the core. I forgive
you, girl more learned than Sappho’s Muse; for Caecilius has begun his ‘Great
Mother’ charmingly.
Catullus thus responds to Caecilius’ textual woman by composing another: one literary
‘mistress’ is exchanged for another.
Catullus addresses some of his most passionate love lyrics to a woman he names
‘Lesbia’ (5, 7, 51), usually identified as a Clodia (see Wiseman [1985] 130-7), but he sets
these poems in a collection dedicated to Cornelius Nepos (Cat. 1):
To whom shall I give my slender new book, freshly polished with dry pumice?
To you, Cornelius: for you were accustomed to think my trifles something ....
Therefore have for yourself whatever this little book is, such as it is ...
The Lesbia lyrics are thereby subsumed into the gift presented to a literary patron. Even
within the collection, moreover, Lesbia circulates between Catullus and his friends
(Fitzgerald [1995]). In poem 11, for example, Catullus asks Furius and Aurelius to
inform Lesbia of his repudiation of her, while in poem 58 he tells Caelius of Lesbia’s
sexual degradation:
Caelius, our Lesbia, that Lesbia, infamous Lesbia, whom alone Catullus loved
more than himself and all his relations, now peels great-souled Remus’ grandsons
at crossroads and in alleys.
Most critics have interpreted this obscene lyric more or less literally, to the effect that
Lesbia abandons herself to a succession of degenerate lovers (though it is frequently
allowed that she is perhaps not actually working as a prostitute) after throwing over
Catullus and his friend Caelius. Certainly the poem explicitly sets Lesbia in circulation
among Roman nobles in general, and between Caelius and Catullus in particular. But its
placement so close to the end of the polymetric part of the collection as a whole, invites
interpretation in metaliterary terms, as a meditation on the circulation of Catullus’
‘Lesbia’ lyrics among the Roman reading public.
This reading receives some support by analogy with elegiac poetry. Propertius,
for example, wrote elegies about a woman he calls ‘Cynthia’, and opened his first book
with a description of how he fell in love: ‘Cynthia first captivated me -- alas! -- with her
eyes, though I had been untouched by desire before’ (Prop. 1.1.1-2). The first word of
the first poem in the book, ‘Cynthia’ will have functioned as the title of the work as
Propertius himself implies, in a later reference to his ‘Cynthia read in the whole forum’
(Prop. 2.24.2) that recalls Caesar’s delivery of a funeral oration for his dead wife and aunt
from the Rostra. But the public circulation of Propertius’ Cynthia -- both elegiac mistress
and text -- redounds in this instance to the speaker’s discredit, for it reveals his essentially
frivolous lifestyle in avoiding the political career laid out for upper class Roman men to
publish instead literary trifles about a courtesan (24.3-10). If Propertius here accepts
Cynthia’s circulation as a source of disgrace for himself, Ovid both accuses his mistress
of prostitution (like Catullus) and accepts a measure of responsibility (like Propertius) for
her circulation among men (Am. 3.12.5-8):
She who just now was called my own, whom I alone began to love, I fear I must
share with many. Am I mistaken, or did she become known in my little books?
So it is -- she prostituted herself through my talent. And I deserve it! For what
did I do but auction her beauty? My mistress was put up for sale through my
fault.
Ovid thus literalizes the trope that figures the publication of poetry about an elegiac
mistress as the mistress’ sexual circulation among men (Fear [2000b]).
5. Among Women.We look in vain for women writing to, for, or about
women in extant Roman literature. Archaeology, however, has unearthed an invitation to
a birthday party from a Roman matron named Claudia Severa, whose husband was an
army-officer stationed in Britain early in the second century CE, to her close friend (or
sister) Sulpicia Lepidina, whose husband was the prefect of a cohort of Batavians at
Vindolanda. The invitation was written by a scribe, but contains a post-script added by
Claudia Severa herself: ‘I shall expect you, sister. Farewell, sister, my dearest soul, as I
hope to prosper, and hail’. This tantalizing artefact offers us a rare glimpse into the
personal lives of two women living in Roman Britain and illustrates the close bonds of
affection among women that for the most part elude us in our scrutiny of the dynamics of
gender in Latin literature.
The best known female author of classical Rome is probably the elegiac poet
Sulpicia, either the daughter or the grand-daughter of Cicero’s friend, the jurist Ser.
Sulpicius Rufus, and the niece of Augustus’ senior statesman, the orator and literary
patron M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus. Her poetry could be said to ‘traffic in men’, or at
least in one man since she publishes her love for a certain Cerinthus in her verse. And
indeed recent scholarship has found her to be a subtle reader of the gender clichés of
contemporary Augustan epic and elegy, adapting them in her poetry in such a way as to
articulate a female perspective on love and love elegy (Santirocco 1979, Parker 1994,
Keith 1997; see also Gibson, Chapter 11 above). There is, however, no evidence for the
circulation of her poetry among women. Quite the contrary, in fact, for she addresses
individual poems exclusively to men -- Messala (3.14.5) and Cerinthus (3.17.1;
presumably also the addressee of 3.15, 16, and 18). Whatever the context in which her
poetry circulated, however, and this remains unclear, she herself explicitly invites others
to rehearse the details of her passion ([Tib.] 3.13):
At last has come a love which it would disgrace me more to hide out of shame
than expose to someone. Prevailed upon by my Camenae the Cytherean delivered
him into my arms on trust. Venus has kept her promise. My joys can be the talk
of all who are said to have none of their own. I would not wish to send a message
under seal so no one could read it before my man. But I’m glad to sin and tired of
wearing reputation’s mask. The world shall know I’ve met my match.
Stephen Hinds (1987) has observed that at least one of her readers met this
challenge -- the author of some, or all, of the poems of the so-called ‘Garland of Sulpicia’
([Tib.] 3.8-12). There is considerable controversy over the identity of the auctor de
Sulpicia (interested readers should consult Parker [1994] for the debate), but it seems
clear that the reason her poetry is still extant is its inclusion in the manuscripts of
Tibullus, a context which sets her poetry in a framework consistent with the sociological
conventions of gender in Latin literary culture and thereby facilitates her assimilation to
an elegiac puella. Thus in the opening couplet of (Tib.) 3.8, the first poem in the
sequence, Mars is invited to enjoy the sight of Sulpicia adorned on the occasion of the
first day of his month, March ( [Tib.] 3.8 1-2): Great Mars, on your Kalends Suopcia’s
dressed for you; if you’re wise, you’ll come from heaven to see her’. The couplet, and by
implication the sequence that follows, thus engage the conventionally male ‘gaze’ of
elegiac poetry to objectify a puella named Sulpicia for our delectation. Indeed the
opening poem celebrates Sulpicia’s beauty at some length and concludes with an
exhortation to the Muses and Apollo to make her the subject of their song on this day
every year ([Tib.] 3.8.21-4): ‘Of her on the holiday Kalends sing, Pierides and Phoebus,
proud of your tortoiseshell lyre. May she celebrate this solemn rite for many years; no
girl is worthier of your choir’. Sulpicia and her poetry are thereby framed from the outset
as circulating among men.
Although we look in vain for female intimacy such as we find in Sappho in the
elegidia of Sulpicia, there are some notable instances elsewhere in Latin literature.
Towards the end of Trimalchio’s dinner party in Petronius’ Satyricon, for example, with
the arrival of Habinnas and his wife, Trimalchio’s wife Fortunata joins the party and
reclines with Scintilla on her couch. While the two women compare jewellery their
husbands mock this feminine interest in baubles (Petron. Sat. 67): ‘“You see women’s
chains”, Trimalchio said. “Thus we fools are plundered”.... Then Habinnas said, “If
women didn’t exist, we’d rate everything dirt cheap”.’ Ignoring their husbands’
mockery, the women drink wine and cuddle as Fortunata complains about her household
responsibilities and Scintilla about her husband’s affairs. This comic scene illuminates
Roman clichés of feminine nature in its focus on the pair’s interest in gold and trinkets,
household duties and love. But it also testifies to the emotional intimacy of women’s
relations with one another, for their absorption in conversation allows Habinnas to sneak
over unnoticed and play a practical joke on Fortunata.
Perhaps surprisingly, the genre in which bonds among women are most fully
explored and elaborated in Latin literature is epic. Ennius, for example, describes
Aeneas’ daughter Ilia reporting a dream which has frightened her to her half-sister and
their old nurse (Ann. 34-50 Sk). The exclusively feminine audience for Ilia’s story
contrasts with the male figures in her dream: Mars, who ravishes her, and Aeneas, who
reassures her. It is her sister, however, whom Ilia seeks in the confusion of her dream
(38-42 Sk): ‘For a handsome man seemed to drag me through pleasant willow-thickets,
along river banks and new places; and then, dear sister, I seemed to wander alone,
walking slowly and seeking you; nor could I embrace you’. Yet although Ennius
emphasizes Ilia’s affection for her sister, he also implies Ilia’s erotic interest in the
‘handsome man’.
Love stories are frequently represented as the subject of women’s narratives in the
mostly male-authored texts of antiquity, and Ilia’s report of her dream-encounter finds a
suggestive parallel in the love stories Clymene tells her sister river-nymphs in Vergil’s
fourth Georgic (345-7): ‘in their midst Clymene was telling the story of Vulcan’s vain
care, the tricks and sweet thefts of Mars, and was recounting the frequent loves of the
gods from Chaos on’. In the Aeneid too, Vergil includes a scene in which sisters
exchange amatory confidences, when Dido discloses her love for the handsome stranger,
Aeneas, to Anna. Ovid in the Metamorphoses admits several scenes of female intimacy,
but his women also discuss erotic subjects. In the third book, for example, Juno visits the
Theban princess Semele in the guise of her aged nurse Beroë and turns their talk to
Semele’s lover: ‘I wish that he may be Jupiter’, she said, ‘but I fear all things: many men
have entered chaste bed-chambers under the name of the gods’ (3.280-2). Moreover in
the fourth book, the daughters of Minyas beguile their wool-working with a series of
mythological love stories while they spurn the rites of Bacchus. The wool-working
context is itself quintessentially feminine, an activity that enjoyed particular esteem in
Augustan Rome where the emperor boasted that his wife, daughter, and grand-daughters
wove his clothing (Suet. Aug. 64.2, 73). The Minyads implicitly assert their exemplary
feminine virtue by drawing a contrast between their own service to the ‘better’ goddess,
Minerva, and the Theban women’s misguided worship of the false god Bacchus (4.37-8).
Yet the stories they tell reveal the excessive interest in love of even the most virtuous
women: the forbidden love of Pyramus and Thisbe; Venus’ punishment of the Sun for
betraying her adulterous liaison with Mars; and Salmacis’ rape of Hermaphroditus.
Guide to Further Reading
The socio-political implications of Latin literature have been well discussed
recently by Bloomer (1997) and Habinek (1998), who emphasize the upper class bias and
aristocratic invention respectively of this literature; see also Habinek’s chapter in this
volume. Lee (1979) is a comprehensive introduction to the theme of fathers and sons in
the Aeneid, while Starr (1991) analyses an exemplary case of father-son instruction in the
context of reading Vergil’s epic. The standard discussion of male homosocial relations is
Sedgwick (1985), on English literature: the subject is treated in connection with classical
rhetorical culture by Gleason (1995), who examines the construction of masculinity in the
period of the second Sophistic, and Bloomer (1997), who analyses the assertion of class
privilege by declaimers in early imperial Rome; in connection with Catullan lyric by
Fitzgerald (1995) and Wiseman (1985); and in connection with Ovidian elegy by Fear
(2000). The Vindolanda writing tablets were comprehensively edited by Bowman and
Thomas (1994). Hemelrijk (1999) investigates what is known and what can be surmised
about women’s writing in Latin. The literary qualities of Sulpicia’s poetry are discussed
by Santirocco (1979) and Keith (1997); Hinds (1987a) examines the literary achievement
of the ‘Garland’-poet, while Parker (1994) analyses the misogynistic scholarly tradition
that attributes Sulpicia’s work to him. Keith (2000) discusses the public roles of women
in Latin epic.