ANCW20021 CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY

UNIT EIGHT

UNIT CONTENT:
Ovid, Heroides, H. Isbell trans. (London, 1990).
N.Kampen, 'Omphale and the Instability of Gender' in N. Kampen ed.
Sexuality in Ancient Art (Cambridge, 1996), 233-46.
SEMINAR READING:
Selections from Euripides Bakkhai; Propertius Elegies; Ovids Heroides;
Statius Achilleid; Ovids Metamorphoses.
Kampen, N. B. Gender Theory in Roman Art, in D. E. E. Kleiner and S. B.
Matheson (eds.) I Claudia: Women in Ancient Rome (New Haven, CT, 1996)
Ovid, Heroides, H. Isbell trans. (London, 1990).
N.Kampen, 'Omphale and the Instability of Gender' in N.Kampen ed.
Sexuality in Ancient Art (Cambridge, 1996), 233-46
 BAKKHAI [764-8081 BAKKHAI 1809-8211

I LffTftt Ui 't w c g 0 t-0 w a r against the Bakkhai! This is 900 PENTHEUS

Too much to bear that what we're made to suffer
Wc should suffer at the hands of women. T o CIV ATTENDANT.

DIONYSOS Pentheus. you have heard me speak, but you Fetch mc my weapons!
Do not do what 1 say. And even though
I've been mistreated by you, still I tell you in DIONYSOS:
Not to raise arms against a god be calm,
Kor Bromios will not let you force the Bakkhai You bc silent, now;
Down from the mountains that resound with joy.
The ATTENDANT leaven to bring PENTHEUS his weapons
PENTIIKUS Will you slop lecturing mc and since you've escaped from the royal house, PENTHEUS turns to follow him.
your bonds
Hold onto your freedom? Or I'll punish you again! yio DIONYSOS Aaah!

DIONYSOS 1 would sacrifice to him instead of kicking angrily PENTHEUS stops aud looks back at DIONYSOS, aud as they
.Against the pricking goads mortal fighting a god. speak, return* to him.

PENTHEUS Sacrifice is just what I'll do, by slaughtering the women

Who entirely deserve it, in those canyons on Mount Do you want to see them sitting together on the mountain"
Kitha iron.
PENTHEUS Yes, 1 do lor that, I'd give a countless weight of gold.
DIONYSOS Yon will be routed and disgraced, that Bakkhai
With ivy rods should turn away bronze shields. DIONYSOS But why do you feel such desire (or this?

PENTIIKUS There's no way forward, wrestling with this stranger, PENTHEUS it would pain me if 1 saw them drunk.
Who won't be silent, whether suffering or free,
DIONYSOS And yet you'd see with pleasure thai which gives you
DIONYSOS And yetmy friend it's possible to set things right. pain?

PENTHEUS But how? Being a slave to those who are my slaves? 920 PENTHEUS Yes sitting beneath the fir trees, without a sound.

DIONYSOS I'll bring t h e w o m e n h e r e , without o n e w e a p o n . DIONYSOS But they will track you down, even if you hide.

P E N T H E U S U n d o u b t e d l y s o m e trick you play on m c . PENTHEUS A good point so I'll go openly lo them.

DIONYSOS W h a t trick, if I by m y devices wish to save you? DIONYSOS Shall we lead you, then? Will you undertake the journey?

P E N T H E U S You m a d e a pact with t h e m to b c Bakkhai forever. PENTHEUS Lead mc fast as you can this waiting irritates mc.

DIONYSOS O f that, b e certain b u t m y pact is with the god. DIONYSOS Put on the ritual robe of linen, then.

72 73
 BAKKHAI
PENTHEUS What for? Am I, a male, supposed to rank myself as
female?
DIONYSOS So they won't kill you if they sec you're male.
PENTHEUS You're right, again. How smart you've always been.
DIONYSOS It was Dionysos who taught us these things so well.
PENTHEUS What should 1 do to follow your advice?
DIONYSOS I'll go inside the house and dress you there.
PENTHEUS In what dress? Women's? But I'd be ashamed.
DIONYSOS You're not so eager to watch maenads, any more?
PENTHEUS What dress do you intend to clothe me in?
DIONYSOS First, on your head, I'll make your hair much longer.
PENTHEUS And the next piece of my adornmentwhat will it bc?
DIONY'SOS Full-length robes that reach your feet, and a headband.
PENTHEUS Is there anything more you'll add to this?
DIONYSOS Yes a thyrsos in your hand, and a spotted fawn skin.
PENTHEUS No I wouldn't wear a woman's clothes.
DIONY'SOS To war against the Bakkhai means great bloodshed.
PENTHEUS You're right. First I must go and spy on them.
DIONY'SOS Thai's wiser than to hunt down evils with evil.
PENTHEUS But how can I go through the town and not be seen?
DIONYSOS Along deserted streets I'll show you where.
74
[822-841] BAKKHAI [842-861:
PENTHEUS Anvthing's heller than the Bakkhai laughing that they've
won.
DIONYSOS SO we'll go in [. . . ]
PENTHEUS [ . . . ] I have to ponder what to do. %o
DIONYSOS Of course! Whatever you decide, my plan is set.
PENTHEUS I think that I'll go in. For 1 must either
Proceed against them armed, or suffer your advice.
He goes into the royal house.
DIONY'SOS
Returning to address the chorus:
Women! The man is heading toward our net.
Me will come to the Bakkhai, where he'll meet
His justice death. And now, Dionysos, things
Will turn your way for you arc not far off.
Let's lake our vengeance on him: first, derange
His mind and put him in a giddy frenzy
For in his right mind he will never want
To wear a woman's clothes, but if he drives
His chariot off the road of sanity,
He'll wear them. Then, 1 want him to be laughed al
By everyone when he is led through town
A rnan-turned-woman after his terrible threats!
I'll go dress Pentheus in what he'll wear
To Hades sacrificed by his mother's hand.
And he will know that Dionysos, son
Of Zeus, was born a god in full, and is
.Most terrible to mortals and most gentle.
He follows PENTHEUS into the royal house.
75
 BAKKHAI |8f>2-88; BAKKHAI [888-9141

The CHORUS dance a n d sin%.
S Third stasirnon (fourth ode)
Will f ever celebrate
All night with while foot
Flashing in the Bakkhic dance?
Will I ever fling back
My head and let the air
Of heaven touch my throat
With dew, like a fawn at play-
In the green joy ol meadows?
Having escaped just when the frightening
Hunt encircled ii, when the guards were standing
wa tch
Close around and it has
Leapt ihe strongly woven
Nets and then the hunter
Has cried the hounds
Onward and the lawn with utmost
Straining effort has run
last as slorm-wind and raced
Through river-watered plains
T o reach the deserted wilds and take joy
In being where no mortals come and the leafy
Forest stands above thick shade?
What is wise? W h a t gift from the gods
Do moilals judge more beautilul
T h a n to hold our outstretched
Strong hand over an enemy's head?
What is beautilul is what is alwavs loved.
The gods conceal the slow foot of time
To lull us while they hunt down
The desecrator. Never
strophe Should one think or act
As if above what is win
Accepted as the law
Of things. It costs so little
To believe that it does rule
Whatever the divine may be.
Whatever over long ages of time
Is accepted as lawful, always.
And comes to be through nature.
. yyi.) What is wise? What gift from the gods
Do mortals judge more beautiful
Than to hold our outstretched .OJO
Strong hand over an enemy's head?
What is beautiful is what is always loved.
Happy is he who escapes epode
A storm at sea and finds safe harbor.
Happy is he who has risen above
Great toils. In different ways,
1000 Some persons outdo others
In their wealth and power.
And hopes arc as many as those who hope
Some will end in rich reward, others in nothing. -ow
But those whose lives arc happy
Day by daythose
I call the blessed.

T h e unremitting power antistrophe ' S C E N E IV

Of the divine begins only
Slowly lo move, but DIONY'SOS enters from the royal house; he calls hack inside.
Always moves. Il brings
T o reckoning those mortals DIONYSOS You, Pentheus! rushing toward what you should
W h o honor senseless Not rush to see, zealous for what should not
Arrogance and who with mad Evoke such zeal you, Pentheus, come out!
Beliefs do not give Come out in front of the house, reveal yourself
T h e gods their due. For in their intricate way To me, come out here wearing women's clothes,

76 77
 BAKKHAI [915-9381
BAKKHAI 1939-964;

Clothes of maenads, clothes of Bakkhai, ready

DIONYSOS You'll certainly think I'm the first of all your friends,
To spy on your own mother and her troupe. 1050
When you're surprised lo see how modest the Bakkhai
arc.
PENTHEUS enters from the royal house, dressed as a woman,
wearing a wig, a sash around his head, and a long linen
PENTHEUS Which way is more as the Bakkhai do to hold
robe like a dress, and carrying a thyrsos.
The thyrsos in my right hand or my left?
You have the very form of Kadmos' daughters.
DIONY'SOS Raise it right-handed, in time with your right foot.
1 commend you on how changed your mind is.
PENTHEUS In fact, it seems to me 1 see two suns,
A double seven-gated fortress of Thebes.
PENTHEUS Would I be able to carry Mount Kithairon,
You lead me forward, so it seems, as a bull,
Canyons and Bakkhai, too, on my own shoulders?
You seem to have grown two horns upon your head.
Were you, all this time, an animal?
DIONYSOS Yes, i) you wished. Before, your mind was sick,
For you have certainly been . . . bullified.
But now you have the kind of mind you should have.
DIONY'SOS The god who earlier was ill-disposed toward us, comes
with us. PENTHEUS Should we bring strong bars? Or should I use bare hands
lo pry it up,
At peace with us. You're seeing what you should see,
now. And set my arm or shoulder underneath the mountain
top?
PENTHEUS How do 1 appear? Don't you think I'm standing 1060
DIONYSOS Don't go destroying the shrines of nymphs up tliere,
The way that Ino stands? Or as Agaue Mother does?
And the haunts of Pan, where he plays his reed pipes,
DIONYSOS Looking at you, 1 seem to sec them, here.
PENTHEUS You're right. It's not by force lhat we must conquer
But a lock of hair has fallen out of place,
The women. 1 will hide among the trees.
It's not where 1 tucked it up beneath your sash.

DIONYSOS You will be hidden as you should be hidden

PENTHEUS Inside, when I was shaking it back and forth,
A stealthy man who goes to spy on the maenads.
Acting like the Bakkhai, it came loose.

PENTHEUS I think they're flitting through the woods like birds,

DIONYSOS But since our task is to take good care of you,
Then fluttering in the nets of making love.
I'll put it back but hold your head up straight.

PENTHEUS Arrange it all! I'm dedicated to you.
DIONYSOS Your belt is slack. And then the pleats of your robe
Do not hang straight, below your ankles, either.
PENTHEUS No, it seems to me they don't, on my right side.
But on this side it's all straight at my heel.
DIONY'SOS And isn't that just what you'll guard against?
You will catch them, if you arc not caught first,
1070
PENTHEUS Escort me up the widest street in Thebes,
Since I'm the only man who'd dare to do this.
DIONYSOS You alone must bear all this for Thebes
fust you! That's why the contest you deserve

78
79
 BAKKHAI [965-9761 BAKKHAI ''77- 1008]

Awaits you. Follow me I'll escort you noo The CHORUS dance and sing
To salvation. But someone else will bring you back . . .
CHORUS fourth stasimon (fifth ode)
PENTHEUS . . . She who gave birth to me. Hounds ot Fury, rush to the mountain, strophe
Where the daughters of Kadmos gather their troupe.
Sting them to madness
DIONY'SOS You'll be remarkable to evervone Against this man who mimics woman.
The madman spying on the maenads!
PENTHEUS That's why I'm going. His mother from some, lalt pole or rocky cliff
Will catch first siyht of him.
She'll call out to the maenads,
DIONYSOS You will be carried home . "Who is this, O Bakkhai.
Who has come, who has come ro the mountain,
PENTHEUS It's soft delight you speak of! To the mountain, searching for us, O daughters oJ
Kadmos,
DIONYSOS . . . in your mother's arms. We who run freely over the mountainside?
What was it that gave birth to him? He was not born
PENTHEUS You'll force me to be spoiled. From the blood of women, but from a liouness,
Or he's descended from the Libyan Gorgons!
DIONYSOS Yes, true spoiling.
Let justice appear! Let her
PENTHEUS But I only claim my due. Carry a sword for killing.
And stab through the throat
Ekluon's unjust, ungodly, unlawful
PENTHEUS exits. Earthborn oflspring!

DIONYSOS Because he, of lawless attitudes antistrophe

And sacrilegious rage against your mystic rites.
His words follow PENTHEUS off stage: Bakkhos, and those of your mother.
Sets out with maddened heart and false ideals
To conquer by force what is unconquerable!
Terror, terror and awe surround you, now. Him, death will not be slow lo teach to have
You'll suffer something terrible, you'll find Right thoughts about the gods.
A fame that rises all the way to heaven. Whereas to live rightly as a mortal is to live without the
Open your arms, Agaue and your sisters, penalty-" of grief.
Daughter-seed of Kadmos I bring this youth
Let the clever bc clever,
To the great contest, and both Bromios
But I rejoice in hunting
And I will win. What happens next will show.
What is great and is clear, what leads
Life to right things, what leads us
He exits. By day and by night lo be holy

80
 BAKKHAI
And reverent, to cast .aside all customs
That do not belong to justice, and to honor the gods.
Let Justice appear! Let her
Carry a sword for killing,
And stab through the throat
Ekhfon's unjust, ungodly, unlawful
Earthborn offspring!
Appear as a bull! As a snake
With many heads, for us to see you!
As a lion with a mane of fire!
Go, great Bakkhos, O beast!, with your laughing face
Circle in a net of death this hunter of Bakkhai
Who falls now under the trampling herd
Of the maenads!
SCENE v
As if many hours had passed, a new MESSENGER enters.
SECOND MESSENGER O house once fortunate in all of Greece!
House of that patriarch of Siclon who planted
In the soil the dragon-crop that was born from earth
As men how I must grieve over you, now,
Although I am your slave but even so!
CHORUS What is it? Do you bring some news of the Bakkhai?
SECOND MESSENGER Pentheus, Ekhfon's child, is dead.
CHORUS
O Lord Bromios, revealed as a great god!
SECOND MESSENGER What do you mean? What did you say? Do you
Rejoice at what rny master suffered, woman?
CHORUS
82
[1009-1033] BAKKHAI 11034-1060!
I am a stranger here. I sing a foreign song to cry in joy.
No longer do 1 cower in fear of being chained.
SECOND MESSENGER DO you consider Thebes as so unmanly
That you will not bc punished for what you say?
CHORUS Singing.
Dionysos, Dionysos, not Thebes,
epode Has the power to rule me!
SECOND MESSENGER You women can bc pardoned for that, but joy
At suffering others have already borne is wrong.
CHORUS Singing.
Tell it to me, describe it to me, how docs
The unjust man, the agent of injustice, die?
SECOND MESSENGER After we left the settled ground of Thebes,
And crossed the streams of jAsopos, we climbed up
Sleep slopes of Mount Kithairon Pentheus
And I, for I was close behind my master
And that Stranger wrho escorted us on our
Procession lo the place where we would watch.
We were careful not to speak, nor to make
A sound when stepping, when we hid ourselves
In the grassy valley so lhat we could see them
Without them seeing us. There was a ravine
Surrounded by high cliffs, braided by streams,
-And shaded by stands of pine, and there the maenads
Were sitting, their hands engaged in pleasant tasks
Singing. Some put new ivy curls at the crown of a staff,
And others like young fillies that had been
Unharnesssed from embroidered yokes at rest.
Called out a Bakkhic song to one another.
Pentheus poor, reckless man who was
Unable to view the women, said, "O Stranger,
From where we stand f cannot see to where
Singing. Those faking maenads arc, but if 1 climbed
83
BAKKHAI 1061-1095;
A tall-necked tree, on higher ground, I'd see
Clearly what those shameless maenads are doing."
And then the Stranger performed some wondrous
deeds
He reached lo ihe top branch of a fir tree
As tall as the sky and pulled it downward, down,
Down till it touched the black earth and it formed
Half a circle, like a bow drawn back
Oi the wheel-curve that's traced by the taut end
Of a pegged string. That is, with his bare hands
1 he Stranger bent the mountain fir in a way-
No mortal could. And sealing Pentheus
Among the branches, he began to let
The tree straighten itself, passing it through
His hands so gently that it didn't buck
And throw its rider off, till it rose as far
As the aii" of heaven, my master on its back,
At the lop. Instead of seeing maenads, though,
He was seen by themfor, as soon as he rose
Up there, the Stranger disappeared, and a voice
From heaven Dionysos'voice, I'd think
Cried out, "Young women! I have brought you the man
Who makes a mockery of you and me
And of my mystic riles! Now take revenge
On him!" And as the voice proclaimed these things,
A rising light of holy fire was set
Between the earth and heaven. The high air
Was still; the leaves of all the trees were still
You would not have heard one animal
Stir or cry out.
The women, since the sound
Had reached their cars from no apparent source,
Stood up and looked this way and that. Again
Came the command, and when they recognized
Thai il was Dionysos' voice, these women,
Daughters of Kadmos [Agaue and all her kindred
Ofthe same seed,] and all the Bakkhai rushed
At him as last as doves, [but by the quickness
Ot their running feet]. And mad with the god's breath
They leapt the icy torrents and jagged boulders.
When they saw my master sitting atop
84
BAKKHAI [1096-11301
That tall fir tree, at first they picked up stones
And flung them at him with tremendous strength,
They clambered up on rocks as high as towers,
Some threw fir branches like crude javelins,
And others hurled their thyrsoi through the air
Of heaven at poor wretched Pentheus.
But not a thing could reach him. And as his heigh I
Was greater than their fury, there he sat,
Caught in an impossible place. But at last
They started tearing up the rools of the tree,
Striking with oak branches like thunderbolts
With bars of wood, not iron, they used as levers.
When all this toil proved useless, Agaue said,
"Maenads! Make a circle and take hold
Of the trunk let's capture this tree-climbing beast
And stop him from revealing to anyone
The secret dances of the god." They put
Countless hands on the tree and pulled it out
Of the earth. Sitting high up, high he is
When he starts to fall, and hurtling toward the ground
With countless groaning cries, he crashes down.
Pentheus knew that now he was at the edge
Of calamity. And his mother was the first,
As priestess, to begin the slaughter. She
Falls on him and he tears the headband from
His hair so that wretched Agaue will
Recognize him, not kill him, and he touches
Her cheek as lie begins lo say to her,
"Mother, it's Pentheus, your child! It's me!
You gave birth to mc in Ekhfon's house.
Have pity- on me, Mother! Don't kill me
For my wrongdoing!" But she was slavering,
Her eyes rolled up, she was possessed by Bakkhos,
Not thinking as she should, and Pentheus
Did not persuade her. Taking with both her hands
His left forearm and setting her foot hard
Against the ribs of this ill-fated man.
She tore his shoulder out not by her strength
But by the ease the god gave to her hands.
And Ino had destroyed his other side,
Breaking up his flesh, and Autonoe
 BAKKHAI
And the Bakkhai mobbed him and everyone was
screaming
At the same time he groaning his last breath,
And they raising the war cry of their triumph.
One of them was flaunting a severed arm.
Another held a foot still shod for hunting,
His ribs were being bared by clawing nails,
And all with bloodied hands were playing games
By tossing hunks of the flesh of Pentheus.
His.corpse lies scattered among the rugged rocks
And deep within the forest in thick foliage-
It will be difficult to find it all
Again.
His pitiful head, which his mother took
In her own hands, she put at the top of a thyrsos.
She carries il across Kithairon's slope
.As if it were a lion's head, she leaves
Her sisters with the dancing troupe of maenads.
Rejoicing in this hunt lhat is so un-
Lucky, she comes to town calling to Bakkhos,
Her fellow hunter, her comrade in the chase
Triumphant Dionysos, through whose power
What she wins for a trophy is her tears.
I must go now, away from this disaster,
Before Agaue comes back to the house.
Wise moderation and a reverence
For what is of the gods this is what's best.
And this, I think, of all possessions owned
By mortals, is the wisest one to use.
He exits.
The CHORUS dance and sing
CHORUS Fifth stasimon (sixth ode)
Let us dance the Bakkhic dance!
Let us shout the doom
Of Pentheus, descended from a dragon-snake!
He pul on women's clothes,
86
[1131-1156] BAKKHAI : 1 157-
He carried the fennel-rod of Hades,
The thyrsos that is the warrant of his death!
.And al his fall, a bull was in command!
You Bakkhai of the house of Kadmos,
You have changed your famous hymn of triumph
To tears, to lamentation.
Beautiful contest to plunge her hand in the blood
Of her child, to drip with il!
1 see A^ane, mother of Pentheus.
With rolling eyes she's rushing toward the house.
Welcome her lo the revelers ofthe god of rapture!
CLOSING SCENE
AGAUE enters carrying a mask before her as if it were a
head; alone, she dances as she sings, along witJi the
CHORUS, this ode:
AGAUE You Lydian Bakkhai . , . strophe
CHORUS O, why do you call to me, woman?
AGAUE Because, from the mountain.
And for this house, we bring in a blessed hunt,
A fresh-cut tendril.
CHORUS 1 see you, 1 welcome you as our sister-reveler.
AGAUE Without nets, I captured
This young creature,
As you see,
CHORUS In what part of the wilderness?
AGAUE ' Mount Kithairon
CHORUS Mount Kilhairon?
AGAUE . . killed him.
87
 PROPERTIUS B O O K IV.9
21
He spoke, and his palate was dry, his mouth
tortured with thirst: the earth, though teeming with
water, gives him none. Yet far off he hears the
The founding ofthe Ara Maxima laughter of cloistered maidens, where a grove had
created a covert of circled shade, the secret precinct
WHAT time Amphitryon's s o n a h a d driven his steers
o f t h e Goddess of Women, b and a well for worship,
from the stalls of Erythea, he came to t h a t
and rites never with impunity observed by men.
unconquerable 6 hill, the sheep-grazed Palatine:
Crimson garlands screened its secluded portal; a
here the weary drover halted his weary cattle,
mouldering h u t glowed with incense fire; a poplar
where the Velabrum made a lake of its river and the
adorned the shrine with its grey foliage, and a
mariner hoisted his sails over a city sea. But Cacus
wealth of shade concealed singing birds.
proved a treacherous host, and t h e cattle were not 31
left unharmed: by his theft he violated the law of Hither he rushes, the dust caking his parched
Jupiter. Cacus was a dweller there, a robber mak- beard, and before the threshold utters words
ing forays from his dreaded cave, whose utterance unworthy of a god: 'I beseech ye, who sport in this
issued forth from three separate mouths. grove's sacred bower, open your shrine as a hospice
11 to a weary man. In need of a spring I wander about
T h a t there might be no sure sign of obvious
glens t h a t echo with running water: all I ask is a
theft, he dragged the cattle backwards by their tails
drink cupped up in the hollow of my palm. Heard ye
to his cave, but not unwitnessed by the god: T h i e f
ever of him who carried the globe on his back? I am
bellowed the steers; the thiefs implacable 0 doors
he: the world I shouldered calls me Alcides." Who
were battered down by rage. Cacus lay dead, smit-
has not heard ofthe valiant deeds of Hercules' club
ten on his three foreheads by the Arcadian mace:
and his arrows never shot in vain against monstrous
and t h u s Alcides spoke: fGo, cattle; go, cattle of Her-
beasts, and how only to one mortal has the Stygian
cules, last labour of my club, cattle twice my quest
darkness become light 6 a n d Cerberus has howled
and twice my booty, and hallow with long-drawn
to find himself dragged off against the will of Dis?
lowing the Fields of Cattle: your pasture will be 65
T h i s corner ofthe world now finds me dragging
Rome's famous Forum.'
out my life: though weary I am scarce welcomed by
this abode. Even though you were consecrated to
a
The grandiose patronymic and generally solemn style
of the poem create a tone more elevated than that of love- b
elegy and closer to that of epic; Virgil had given {Aen. The Bona Dea.
a
8.185f0 a somewhat different version ofthe story, but Pro- Here deriving the name from aXKr/ 'bodily strength.'
pertius follows Varro(ap. Macrobius, Sat. 1.12.27). * Hercules was sent by Eurystheus to fetch Cerberus
b
Unconquerable as were Romulus and Augustus, who from Hades, his twelfth labour.
had their homes on the Palatine.
a
Probably as being decorated with the bones of his
victims.
cruel Juno's worship, even she, my stepmother,
73
would not have closed her waters to me. And if any- This hero, since with his hands he cleansed
one is frightened by my aspect or my lion's mane or and sanctified the world, Tatius' town of Cures thus
my locks burned by the African sun, I have also per- installed in his temple as Sanctiner. 6 Hail, sainted
formed menial service 0 dressed in a Sidonian gown Father, on whom even cruel J u n o now smiles!
and completed my daily stint at the Lydian distaff; a Sanctifler, be pleased to dwell propitiously in my
soft breastband once confined my shaggy chest, and book!
for all my rough h a n d s I proved a likely girl.'
51
Alcides thus; but t h u s the gracious priestess,
whose white locks were tied with a scarlet band:
'Stranger, withhold your gaze, and depart from this
sacred grove. Depart, I say, and leave its portals
while 'tis safe to go. Forbidden to men and avenged
by a dread law is the altar that protects its sanctity
in this secluded hut. At great cost 0 did the seer
Tiresias set eyes on Pallas, when with her aegis laid
aside she bathed her valiant limbs. Heaven grant
you other springs: this water, a sequestered stream
of secret passage, flows only for maidens.'
61
Thus the crone: but he pushed down the shady
entrance with his shoulders, nor could the closed
door withstand the w r a t h his thirst provoked. But
after he had slaked his parched throat and com-
pletely drained the stream, with lips hardly dry he
pronounces this stern decree: 'Let the Mightiest
Altar,' he said, 'dedicated on the recovery of my cat-
tle, made mightiest by my hands, never be open to
the worship of maidens, so t h a t the thirst of the
stranger Hercules go not unavenged.'

b
c Sancus, the actual cult-name, thus being derived from
To Omphale, queen of Lydia.
sancio, sanxi, sanctum 'to sanctify.'
a
He was blinded for his indiscretion.
 IO Achilleid
The stars in the sky are fading, and Apollo's resplendent car
240 has broken the ocean's surface, sluicing salt water. His steeds
shine in the freshness of morning with droplets of brine. But Thetis,
long gone, has already braved the waves to Scyros'
secluded shore, where she sets the weary dolphins loose.
The young Achilles' eyes flutter. He stirs and wakes,
startled to see how the world is different. The mountains he knows,
Pelion's towering shape, familiar, reliable . . . gone!
Instead, there is all that blue water with glinting waves.
What's happened? Is this a dream? Is this his mother or some
oneiric figment? She reaches her hand to his troubled brow
250 and soothes him, reassuring, "If I had married a god,
I shouldn't have to worry on your behalf or take
these srrange precautions. But you are mortal, and death lurks
everywhere, and 1 worryall the time, but these days
are worse now than any I've seen. There is danger afloat
in the very air we breathe. But I have devised a plan
by which I may keep you safe. I beg you not to dismiss it
out of hand, but remember how Hercules himself
sat widi Omphale's women in Lydia, spinning wool.
Think how Bacchus once put on once a gold-embroidered
260 robe. Or, better, consider how Jupiter tricked himself out
as Diana to fool Callisto. There's nothing inherently wrong
with wearing women's clothing. Caenis was first a girl
and then turned into a man, an especially valiant fighter
as I recall. I entreat you, just for a while, to indulge me.
After the danger is past, I shall restore you to Chiron
Book I 11
and you shall explore again those hills and defiles you have learned
to love, but now, for me, for a little while, I ask you
to do this thing: stay here. When I dipped you into the Styx,
I ought to have done it better . . . " But his face is turned away.
He cannot look at his mother and will not watch as she begs him 270
to do what his pride would never permit him even to think of.
She sees his reluctance and tries a different tack. "No one,"
she reassures him, "will ever know. It will be our secret,
I swear to you." But still it isn't working. Thetis
is growing desperate. She thinks ofthe boy as an untamed horse
young and full of spirit, resisting the feel ofthe bridle,
and afraid it means the end of die meadows and pastures he loves,
the end of freedom, and snorts with rage that the heart of a breaker
of horses breaks to hear, but he wears the bridle of fate,
himself, and what can he do? The mother, torn, was desperate, 280
looking about her for help, or up to the heavens where gods
smile or frown on our efforts. Whatever aid she could get
she was eager to haveand it chanced at this moment, the people
ofScyros
were holding a festival honoring Pallas, their patroness, goddess,
among other things, of seashores. On this particular day,
Lycomedes' daughters emerged from their cloistered life in the
palace,
their hair woven with blossoms, and carrying flower-decked spears
to welcome with dancing and singing the coming of spring. Achilles
could not help but notice this parade, appearing from nowhere,
of gorgeous, newly nubile girls, all dazzling beauties, 290
making their ceremonial way at the high-water line
sea-wrack traced on the beach. But one among them was special,
outstanding as Venus must be among her nymphs, or Diana
surrounded by beautiful naiads the goddess' looks put to shame.
So does this Deidamia outdazzle her lovely sisters.
It isn't just her figure, her face, complexion, or hair,
but the jewels she wears gleam brighter, die gold of her bracelets
shines
richer . . . She can't be human. A goddess, perhaps, who has doffed
 12 Achilleid
her helmet and put her regalia aside for the moment? The lad,
300 for all his strength, is undone. He has never before felt passion's
pang within him. Spellbound, dumbfounded he stares,
and, although there's a gentle wind on the beach this moderate
morning,
there are beads of sweat on his face and body. It is not illness,
for he feels fine, better than he can remember ever
before in his whole life. At once, he is pale and flushed,
the color of milk and blood that Massagetac mix
together and drink or, say, of ivory dyed purple,
for odd artistic effects. He would rush forward, abrupdv
interrupt their procession, and tell her . . . He doesn't know what
310 in the world he would say. With his mother standing there, he feels
shame and confusion. A young bullock whose curving horns
have not yet fully grown will look at a snowy heifer
and foam at the mouth and cavort in high spirits and vet
not understand what it is that nature is prompting. The herdsmen,
approving, study his antics but guard against what he may do.
So, with Achilles then, and his mother, seizing the moment,
asked him, "Is it so bad to join with those maidens and dance
and sport where they do, and wear those clothes? Do I demand
too much?" He is hardly paying attention as she goes on
320 to inquire whether on Pelion's flanks or Ossa's attractions
are greater than this. She is thinking aloud how fine it would be
to hold in her arms another infant Achilles, a baby
her own baby might give her. He blushes a deeper crimson.
His mother's absurd and undignified plan is no longer out
of the question. To join those girls and always thus to be near her . . .
He cannot resist. Thetis unfolds the dress and throws it
over his head. He lowers his neck to allow the garment
to settle onto his shoulders. Complaisant, he lets her comb
his hair into a gamine's page-boy cut and to deck
330 his neck with a pretty choker. He allows her to play with the skirt
to see that it falls just right. He is even willing to learn
how to walk, how to move his hips as a woman would do.
He lowers his eyes, a demure demoiselle. He is into the game now,
Book I
playing as well as he can, as he always does any game.
Like wax under the artist's thumb, he takes the imprint
of what she imposes. She turns her boy to a butch girl
with rather chiseled but all the more attractive features.
She has him walk down the beach and criticizes his gait
so he doesn't overdo it. She doesn't want him to camp.
She tells him how to hold his arms, what to do with his hands. 340
It's the king he has to fool, or he'll never be admitted
into the women's quarters, where she wants to hide him and he
is now willing and eager to go. She adjusts the bodice,
fluffing it out here and there. Diana, come back from a hunt,
would look more or less like thisslighdy disheveled, but gorgeous,
full of that vigor and health outdoorsy women can have.
It's show time! She takes her son to Lycomedes and presents him:
"Here, oh king, is Achilles' sister, proud in spirit,
an Amazon, one might say. She spurns the idea of marriage.
Let her stay with your daughters who'll teach her maidenly ways. 350
She can help carry their baskets of flowers and fruit to the altars.
It's as much as 1 can manage to see to Achilles; the girl
needs a different kind of attention, quiet, indoors and secluded. rs.
Most of all, I ask you to keep her away from the harbor
and out of sight ofthe ships. The sea isn't safe anymore,
and having heard the stories of Paris and what his crew
of Trojans did in Mycenae, I know you'll agree with mc: caution
is what we parents must learn." The king has no cause to suspect
the words Thetis has spoken. A mere mortal, he cannot
see dirough a goddess' wiles. He extends his hand and gives thanks 360
that she has seen fit to trust him. He welcomes the girl and forthwith
sends her to meet the other young ladies with whom she will live.
They look at her as they would at any newcomera tall,
broad-shouldered girl, she seems, the field-hockey-captain type.
They invite her, nevertheless, to join their ranks and offer
to teach her the steps ofthe dances they do in their holy processions.
Think of a flock of doves at Venus' shrine at Idalium,
and how, when a new bird appears, the others at first are cautious
but then settle down and welcome the stranger into their group,
 14 Achilleid
370 flying about her closer and closer until they let her
come with them into their nest to find an opportune perch.
Thetis watches a while, to see how Achilles performs.
Then, on the pretext of saying good-bye, she speaks in his ear,
words of advice, hints, suggestions, and warnings. At last,
when there's nothing more she can think of, she gives him the
quick kiss
a mother would give a daughter and plunges into the sea.
As she swims, she looks back at the island to bless it and offer
prayers rhat the place she has hidden her child may prosper in safety
and silence, as Crete kept silent for Rhea when she gave birth there
380 to Jove. She thinks how the wandering island of Delos earned
honor and shrines, and she hopes for such an outcome for Scyros
that rhe winds and waves may revere it, the Nereids all may play there,
and ships seeking a refuge from the sudden Aegean storms
mav find in irs lee their haven . . . except for the keels ofthe Greeks
who may come in search of Achilles. "Let diere be balmy breezes
of peace where the Bacchic thyrsus is the closest thing to a weapon.
Let terrible Mars who rages and rants roam where he will
throughout the world, but keep him far from this hole in die corner
where Achilles romps and primps with the princesses' companions."
Book I
And back at the Scyros zenana? By this time, Deidamia
has learned the delicious truththat the new girl isn't a girl
but a man. Do her sisters know? She can't be sure. If they do,
they pretend, out of fear or politeness, not to have noticed a thing.
The moment Achilles' mother departed, this bashful and shy 550
creature turned more outgoing. He took the princess' hand
and held it tight in a strong, not at all maidenly grip.
Picking her out as his special friend? Well, young girls do that.
But those eyes follow her always. He's never away from her side.
He teases her, flinging blossoms or whole garlands of flowers,
and it's more than friendship. A girlish crush? That often happens,
but diis is different. He plays die lyre for her and shows her
how to make interesting chords. He puts his hands upon hers
to demonstrate how, and his touch lingers gendy, sweetly.
He holds her close and kisses her, hard . . . He's hardly a girl! 560
No doubt now-. He confesses what she now knows for sure,
and tells her who he is, and putting it into a song,
recounts the details of his birth and childhood. She in her turn
helps him with his imposture, teaching him how to move,
sit, speak, spin, and maintain die pretense on which
their staying together, hour by hour and day by day,
depends. And yet, she wonders why he has picked her out
from all the girls. How deep is his love? Would it not be better
if they weren't to stay so close? For the sake of keeping dieir secret,
but also to see what he does, how long he will wait, and how patient 570
 20 Achilleid
his love can be, she avoids him. It's a game she plays, that they both
play, but in greater earnest than girlish games. She thinks
of Jove on Olympus and how diat god and his sister, Juno,
must at a certain moment have romped this way, as rheir innocent
sport turned suddenly real, and the sister and brother became,
as if by a change of light and despite the taboo, lovers.
Her thought reaches out to a similar thought, as a body yearns
for another body. The wiles of Thetis are working too well.
In a sacred grove, the women of Scyros, every three years,
580 go to celebrate Bacchus' mystic rites, to dance,
sing, and feel diat frenzy in which the god takes delight.
By law and custom, no male is allowed to set foot on that holy
ground. The king has thus commanded, and, keeping watch,
an aged priestess prevents any would-be interlopers
from daring to come too close. Achilles finds this amusing
and laughs to himselfhis companions cannot imagine why.
He leads the parade of maidens, moving his arms like a willowy
girl, and it's more than plausible. The ceremonial nebris
of fawn skin hangs from his neck with ivy wound in its folds.
590 His hair is done up with a purple ribbon. He wields the sacred
thyrsus as if he has trained for years to perform this way.
Dcidamia once was the fairest of all, but now
Pclcus' splendid child and Thetis' seems just as fair.
One thinks ofthe god for whom they perform these rites, of
Bacchus
who managed, when the occasion required, somehow to put on
not only the paraphernalia of fighting but even the look,
the angry brow and the sternly jutting jaw for his war
on the Indian tribes. Just so, or inversely so, Achilles
was tamed and gended now, disarmed and quite disarming.
600 Darkness fell, and die moon arose in its silver car
to reign in the dome of heaven. Sleep with his gentle wings
gathered the world below in feathers of blessed silence.
The songs ofthe. women hushed to die notes of memory's score,
and dieir metal gongs were mute, encased in the velvet blackness.
Achilles got up and wandered a litdc way from the group
Book 1 21
to stand alone and consider the thoughts of his troubled mind.
"Is this how I spend my life?" he accused himself. "My manhood
wastes away in this pillowed prison. My mother's fears
have sapped my strength. I imagine running, hunting down beasts,
and my hands that would grasp spearshafts and sword hilts clench
upon air. 610
I think of those mountain paths my feet remember so clearly.
Do they perhaps miss mc? Do the mountains wonder where
their careless boy has gone? Are the streams and pools I swam in
different now? Do they all suppose I am dead? I am
halfway there, in this life that is no man's life. I float
in a dream of my mother's devising, and would rouse, myself but
cannot.
Does Chiron mourn for the ghost I have all but become? Does
Patroclus,
as he bends my bow and shoots my arrows, sometimes think
of that comrade he once knew and of where he is now? 1 spin
wool with women! Shame! But a virile spirit rebels. 620
I play at love, but even there, it's a children's game,
anodier source of chagrin and self-reproach. My manhood
is utterly gone, denied, undone. And yet I may find it."
So, in the silent gloom, he debates with himself and discovers
the inner truth of his nature and being, which one must admit
or else, by denial, forfeit. He tiptoes back to the group,
finds die girl in the darkness, and takes her by force, his desire
the master now of both fares, hers and his own. The stars
look down in chilly candor on what had been foreordained,
and the horns ofthe moon blush red, as if some poet or painter 630
has designed the scene to let nature demonstrate what the gods
themselves know in dieir hearts ofthe actions of men and women.
Dcidamia cries outin fear and pain? Or in pleasure?
The grove rings with her rhythmic keening the hillside echoes,
and on every side the women awake. They take it as sign
that one of their number has been possessed somehow by the god
they have come to the grove to worship. They rise and join in, rheir
shouts
 22 Achilleid
a chorus of squeals in soprano, contralto moans, and cries
no one could place on a scale. Achilles holds the girl
640 in his close embrace and assures her as best he can, "It's me,"
he whispers, "the one you love, Achilles, the son of immortal
Thetis. Only for you did I put on a woman's clothing.
To be with you, whom I loved the moment I saw you. For you
I learned to spin and sew and how to walk like a lady.
Why do you weep? You are Thetis' daughter-in-law. Be brave
and even proud, for you bring forth a great-grandson of almighty
Jove himself. You have nothing to fear, I promise. Your father's
royal anger, is it? I shall destroy his city
with fire and sword, will leave no stone upon a stone,
650 before I let him punish his daughter for my misdeed.
I will protect you, I promise," he says again and again
as he strokes her hair. The girl is horrified, in shock,
and yet she is able to listen, and, just as important, to think
of what she can do. Report this crime to her father? Ruin,
for everyone, for her father, herself, and . . . her lover, too!
Does she want him dead? Would his death undo what he has done?
Has she not already imagined how this might one day happen
and dreamed with happy anticipation of how it would be?
Not diis way, but still, it has happened. She tells herself
660 she loves him, but what does that mean? She does not try to speak
but thinks ofthe general sadness of how things are in the world.
At length she decides, and tells him they share the guilt together.
She will be silent. They'll keep their secret, confide in no one
except her nurse whom she trusts with her life. That kindly woman
promises she will help them, and does, and they keep it quiet
the rape and its result that she carries now in her womb,
Weeks go by, and months, and Lucina, goddess of childbirth,
appears when the time is ripe to preside at the birth ofthe baby.
But now, in the offing, Ulysses' ship, which has threaded its way
670 among the Aegean islands, is tacking one way and another,
through the Cyclades, past Paros, Olearos, and Lemnos.
They have left Naxos behind, and Samos. Delos' shape
Book T 23
has shadowed their craft while the sailors poured out over the
transom
libations of wine to the god in prayer that Apollo's priest,
undeceived, was speaking the truth. Did the great god hear them?
Apparendy so, for a wind came up from die heights of Cy nth us
to belly the sail in fortunate omen and speed their journey
across the water. The gods or the fates were decided, and Thetis
could not alone gainsay them or reverse their stern decrees.
Apollo could see for himself, looking back from his car 680
that now hung low in the sky, its rays blazing the water
into crazed and glittering streams, that the ship was nearing Scyros,
and Thetis, who tried to roil the waves, bestir the winds,
and rouse the savage elements against that baleful boat,
was impotent, terrified, a part of an ongoing nightmare
in which her will was frozen and her voice stilled. She watched
that wake spread out behind the stern like a sluggish arrow-.
The other gods and goddesses looked onPallas, for insrance,
die keeper of Scyros' shoreas the Argivcs approached,
disembarked,
and offered prayers of thanks. The Ithacan hero is shrewd 690 ff ?S\
and, lest he alarm the locals, orders the crew to remain
on the beach. Diomedes and he will make their way to the castle
and announce themselves. In the tower, keeping watch, a servant,
Abas, has already seen diem. He runs to the council chamber
with news that a Greek ship has appeared in the harbor. The two
chiefs follow the obvious path up the hill. They seem
harmless enough. One thinks of a pair of desperate wolves
who have teamed together to feed themselves and their hungry cubs,
and, looking like stray dogs, slink along toward the shecpfold.
Diomedes, who's none too bright, wants to know- the plan. 700
He has no idea how they'll find Achilles or why Ulysses
told him to bring all those combs, brooches, knick-knacks,
gew-gaws,
scarves, and little religious objects. How will it work?
Ulysses, with half his attention, explains the not very subtle
trick he has figured out. What he's diinking about himself
 24 Achilleid
is how he signed on to be part of an epic and now is playing
his role in a farcehow strange are the tastes of die heavenly gods!
"The trinkets," he says, "are bait. If Achilles is trying to hide
among Lycomcdes' women, we'll use these toys to catch him,
710 these and the fancy shield with the carving and gold chasings,
and the good spear. Bring that, and tell Agyrtes to come,
with his bugle hidden away but ready to sound an alarm
when I give him the signal." Again and again, he runs over the plan.
They approach the gate ofthe casde where the old king
awaits them,
surrounded by his court and they in turn by guards.
Ulysses holds out before him the branch of an olive in token
of peaceful intentions. He bows and addresses Lycomcdes: "News
has reached your ears, O king, ofthe war of Europe widi Asia.
The world has called the roll ofthe names of die mighty chieftains,
720 which even here mu.st echo on the tranquil island air.
Beside mc is Diomedes, Tydeus' son, even greater
than was his most excellent sire; I am Ulysses, king
of Ithaca; wc come here, I am frank to say, to discover,
among the approaches to Troy whose shore we aim for, the best,
die safest, the least expected . . . What are their preparations?
What are their plans? What movements of ships and men have
you seen?"
It was not clear that he'd finished, but the King of Scyros broke in
with words of welcome: "I pray the gods may favor your cause!
Your visit does honor to me and my house. I welcome you here."
730 ITe leads them inside rhe gate, through rhe courryard, and into
the hall
where attendants prepare the couches and feasting tables. Ulysses
looks this way and that, approving, admiring, also
observing to see if one girl might be taller than others or marked
with somewhat masculine features. He wanders about like a tourist,
noting the castle's decor, its setting, its views ofthe hills,
but all the time he is scouting . . . Think of a hound in a field
that roves one way and another, alert for a movement, a scent,
some track ofthe quarry he seeks, nearby and perhaps unawares.
Book I
But the quarry knows. The zenana is all atwitter. The girls
can speak of nothing elsea ship ofthe Greeks has arrived, 740
and the king has welcomed the strangers, invited them in, and
guests
from all over the island are coming, decked in their finest,
to dine with the VI Ps. There's excitement and some apprehension
one never knows what strangeness strangers bring with diem.
But one
is nothing less than joyous: Achilles knows why they're here
and recognizes his moment. Whatever may happen, the time,
for which he has waited so long has come, and now at last
he can feel he is living his life. He can't stay away, but adventures
into the hall for a look at the guests who recline on rhe fancy
couches, drinking, nibbling dainties, and being seen. 750
Indeed, the king has commanded the ladies come to him now,
the princess and all her attendants. Like an Amazon army, they
troop,
descending upon the room with predictable girlish noise.
as Ulysses figures the odds: does the king not know? Or is this
a clever demonstration diat he's hiding nothing and no one j
here in rhe palace? The guest inspects the girlswho wouldn't? f tr
'
but it's hard to see by the light ofthe oil lamps and smoking
torches.
Still, there is one who arouses Ulysses' suspicion . . . tall?
Not so shy as the odiers?. A trick ofthe light? Or is there
something truly different about that one at the end? 760
He nudges his companion and nods at the one he means,
raising a questioning brow-. But thenis it quite by chance?
Deidamia blocks their view. The two girls whisper secrets,
are perfectly innocent maybe. Or maybe not. The tall one
seems about to stand up, but the other shakes her finger
and goes to fetch more wine. Later Ulysses glances
and notes how the prertiest daughter is smoothing the other's hair
and adjusting her golden headband. But the servants bring more
food
and then, when the tables are cleared and more wine is poured,
 26 Achilleid
770 the king gets up to speak, to toast die Achaeans, pledge
his loyalty, and confess his envy of dieir great chance.
"Were I ofthe proper age for such undertakings, I'd go,
join with you to fight, as I. used to be able to do.
The Dolopians came to Scyros, attacked us . . . The wrecks of
their ships,
those overturned keels on the beach, are monuments now- to that
batde.
Their arms are up there on display on the casde walls. But now
I'm past all that. Too old, 1 can't even offer sons.
And none of my daughters as yet has provided me with
grandsons . . . "
At this point, Ulysses rises, seizes the moment, and answers,
780 looking from time to time at that large girl down the table:
"I diank you, sir, and believe in your wordsfor who would not
yearn
to join with us, to bc part of this glorious venture? The chiefs
and princes of Greece have assembled on the field of honor.
The power
of Europe has come together, united, strong, and determined
ro do what is right. Our cities are ail but empty. Our fields
have given their beasts and our forests arc stripped for hulls
and masts.
Fish look up from their depths to a surface dark widi our vessels,
as birds look down to the sea's patchwork blanket of sails.
Fathers present their sons with heirloom weapons die younger
790 hands seize, and they're gone, in an instant. Never before
has bravery had such a chance to earn renown and glory,
and never before has the fighting skill of our best had occasion
in which to display itself in so just a cause." He looks
from face to face as he watches his words take their roll like blows
on the anvils of their souls. Some eyes are avoiding his.
The men of Scyros stare down at the floor beneath their places
as the Ithacan prince winds up with his usual peroration:
"Whoever has noble blood that flows in his veins, whoever
has known the pride of his javelin's hitting the target truly,
Bookl 27
whoever is good with horses, or the skill ofthe bow, or can offer 800
excellence, valor, and virtue, your moment has come. This war
awaits you with mighty names that will sound in the mouths of men
forever!" But then he puts in a new line or two. "Your mothers'
fears cannot hold you at home, or the arms of sweethearts who hate
the glory that you, deep in your heart, have always longed for."
And, yes, that girl he's been watching seems to bc trying to rise.
To agree? To volunteer? It is hard to tell, for the women
all get up and together withdraw from the hall. Ulysses
watches as that one lingers behind a moment, but then
is gone with the rest. He turns to the men and concludes his 8ro
remarks:
"1 wish you well. I hope your daughters may all find husbands
worthy of their great beauty and charm." Then he sits down
and asks about the girl he saw at the end ofthe table.
The king is pleased by Ulysses' interest. "Aren't diey pretty
each and every one? If die winds keep you here for a while,
perhaps you may wish tomorrow to observe them perform the rites
of Bacchus or those of Pallas." Ulysses is quick to accept ^-
this kind invitation. And so to bed, but during the long f' _}
hours of night, he remains awake. He is endlessly thinking, V ^
considering ways it could happen, and eager for dawn to break, 820
as of course, at last, it does. At first light, as arranged,
Diomedes is coming up from the ship, and with him Agyrtcs,
and the chest hill of presents. At length the young women
assemble to perform their dances and reels for the guests.
Leading this grand cotillion are the princess Dcidamia
and the one to whom Ulysses was paying special attention
the evening before at dinner. The music of pan-pipes trills
and the cymbals of Cybele crash, as the drums beat faster and faster,
while the girls perform their intricate elegant steps. They raise
and lower their wands and the ribbons float on the air as is done 830
in Samodirace and Crete in that complicated series
of geometrical figures they trace in their performance.
Ulysses notes that the girl he has sported is . . . not very good,
seems not to know the steps, not even really to care,
 28 Achilleid
as if this entire performance is somehow a joke. Achilles
makes mistakes, and laughs, clumps and lumbers, moves
in a parody of dancing, a skeptic, an unbeliever,
a Pentheus come from Thebes to watch the Bacchantes perform
(and the women in their frenzy tore him limb from limb).
840 At last they are .done and the girls acknowledge the guests' polite
applause and gather around the hall table where presents
are our on display. Diomedes invites them to choose what they will.
They look to the king who is pleased and nods in assenthe cannot
suppose that the gifts of Greeks are. not always what they may seem.
He has, in any event, no cause to suspect Ulysses,
famed though he is for his guile. The girls, being girls, are attracted
to the little drums and ritual cymbals, or pretty headbands
set with precious stones. To die weapons they pay no mind,
or else they assume these arc gifts for Lycomedes himself,
850 but the bold Achilles, Pclcus' son, of Aeacus' line,
is dazzled. His eyes shine at the sheen ofthe gold on that shield.
The wonderful workmanship invites him. The battle scenes
on the boss and around the rim speak to his spirit. He lifts
the. shield and the spear beside it, hefts them, wields them,
wears them
as the soul wears its flesh. He forgets his modier's instructions
and Deidamia's hints. He plants his feet like a soldier
and tries one battle cry rhat rings out from the stonework.
His eyes are ablaze and his hair is electric, an animal's hackles . . .
Think of a lion cub that some hunter has reared and tamed,
860 a regular pussycat, but then one day, when it sees
the steel ofthe javelin's tip, something deep in its heart
rebels. The beast reverts, goes wild, ashamed to have fawned
and purred and played like a pet. It turns on its keeper and mauls him.
The room is hushed. They are all staring. Achilles puts down
the shield, but he sees in the metal his own reflectiona face
noble and warlike, but wearing a woman's headband and earrings.
He is rhrilled and he blushes in shame. He cannot move. Ulysses
already beside him is speaking calmly, one man to another:
"We know who you arc. But more important, you know.
Book!
The game is over. The ship is waiting. The moment is here. 870
The towering walls of Troy invite you. At every step
you take in their direction, they tremble. You did as your mother
instructed, but nowr it's over." Ulysses removes the headband
from Achilles' head and looks to Agyrtes, who takes the trumpet
from the folds of his cloak and blows ir, a piercing martial blast
that scatters the terrified girls. But Achilles, strange to believe,
grows taller, broader . . . Amazing! He towers over Ulysses.
That spear in his huge hand now seems like a mere toy
as he waits, poised, ready for Hector or anyone else.
There's confusion, even panic. What's happened to Peleus' 880
daughter?
From the next room Dcidamia, hearing that war cry, hurries,
knowing that all is lost, but hoping somehow to retrieve
what she can. Achilles sees her, hears her drawn-out wail
of grief, and is undone. He drops the spear and shield
that clatter onto the flagstones and he turns to face the king,
who is utterly mystified. "I apologize, your highness.
I am that daughter Thetis entrusted to your safekeeping. S
It is fatedalways wasthat yours be rhe house from which \- ~-y*
I should proceed to Troy. Whatever 1 do there shall surely \ -
redound to both our honors, and Chiron's as well," he says. 890 ^
The king is stunned, and Achilles presses on: "To diis news,
I add a further detail. The goddess Thetis brought you
her child, and I leave behind a childher grandson and yours."
There is no response. Achilles continues, "I ask for your daughter's
hand, that we may consecrate what has been consummated.
Mine is a worthy house, royal and divine, and fir
to join with yours. You approve, I trust. Or if you cannot,
then let all the blame be mine. Your daughter could nor resisr
the embrace of diese strong arms." The king's mouth gapes as
Achilles
asks for pardon and places, at the foot ofthe throne, his baby. 900
"Would you put your daughter to dearh, and mc, and this, your
grandson,
all at once?" Ulysses and all the Greeks kneel down
 30 Achilleid Book 1 31

as suppliants, and the king is helpless. All these people, that Thetis was right to fear what may happen there. Go, then,
and behind them, casting greater shadows, the fates, the gods, but try to be careful. Try to come back to me. I wish you
are bullying him to submit, as he does. What option is there? more luck than a soldier's wife should dare to hope for.
What else can he possibly do? He thinks of his promise to Thetis, Go and come back. The Trojan women will sigh and swoon,
but, at last, he nods. His daughter gazes at him with love eager to be your slaves and concubines. Your couch 940
and dien turns to Achilleshis son-in-law now, Achilles! will seem to them more alluring than their own Trojan beds.
The king sees her take the hero's hand in her hand. Helen herself will be tempted to come down one night to your
910 Details, details. At once, a courier hurries off tent. . .
to Pcleus' court on the mainland, to inform him of these events, Which do 1 hate worse? Will you entertain your pals
and to ask his blessing, and also ships and men to go with stories about your conquest in Scyros? Or will you forget
with Achilles to Troy. For his part, Lycomcdes offers vessels, we ever met? It's dreadful but. . . Why can't I go with you
two ships widi their crews and fighting men. He is deeply to Troy, dressed as a man, as you dressed here as a girl?"
sorry he cannot give more to the cause. There is drinking and But she remembers dieir little baby. "Think of him," she insists,
feasting "ofthe two of us here together, and . . . grant mc this one
to celebrate all; the alliance, the wedding, die birth, the great request
day which draws to its close. As night comes on, the lovers let none of your trophy women bear you rheir bastard children,
retire, no longer furtive, for their last night together. Forever? unworthy grandsons to Thetis and half-brothers to our 950
She has no idea. She is worried, can see in her mind's eye dear child . . . " Achilles is moved and he strokes her hair
920 Xanthus' sinuous banks and Ida's lofty crest as he swears his oath that he will come back one day to Scyros
and imagine the dreadful things that will happen there when with treasures from Troy, but a breeze just come up from the harbor /
the Greek
"3"
carries away his weighdess words on the mists of dawn. \
ships have reached that shore. She lies in the dark, afraid
ofthe dawn's approach. She can feel the minutes oozing away
and, with arms around her lover's neck, she weeps as she asks him,
"Will I ever see you again? Will we lie together in bed
the way wc are now? Will you see your infant son grown up
to boyhood and manhood? Or will you go straight home
from Troy to Thessaly, passing this little island by
where you once wore a maiden's clodiing? For months I waited
for this,
930 for us to be joined as man and wife, but now my dream
has come cruelly true, for we have but this single night
and then you are gone. It's hard as well for you, I know,
and my misery makes it worse, but what can I do? Our love
deserves better dian this but must perforce give way
to the needs ofthe time. You must go. I realize that, and I fret
 Book II

Book II
The god ofthe sun emerges from ocean to strip the world
ofthe shroud of night. His torch at first is dim, moist
with the brine ofthe sea, but it soon burns off ro reveal clearly
Achilles, his shoulders bare now, that woman's robe thrown down.
The wind that rattles die lines on the spars in the harbor tousles
his hair, eager, prompting a quick departure. He holds
the spear and the shield, and no one who sees him would even dare
sail in the distance. She holds the child in her arms, young Pyrrhus,
and stares. Is that dot that swims in her blurring vision real?
She has no idea but dares not turn her head or blink.
From the deck, Achilles looks back at a toy city, the wall
he thinks he can still make out, and somewhere back there, a
woman.
He is filled with grief, and Ulysses stands at his side to offer ^o
words of comfort and courage: "Is this the man the Greeks
agreed they needed? Is this the man the oracle told us
our cause depends on? The portals of War have opened and wc
have already crossed its threshold. Your mother, as fond of you
as she was and as worried on your behalf, ought to have known
it was altogether hopeless to attempt to hide your brave
heart in a woman's clothes. It wasn't the shield or spear,
but that trumpet blast, or rather its resonance deep within you.
Nothing could keep you away, as you knew all along. Do not
blame your mother, or us, or yourself. This is how- things are." 40

compare this image of valor and strength with that other transvestite Achilles understands quite well what the Ithacan chieftain
figment. It's as though his time on Scyros has never happened. is trying to do. "My sojourn in Scyros, my woman's clothing . . .
That's all behind us now. Tell mc instead the story / cd
10 Assume he's departing only now from Chiron's cave. LHysses
of what has happened to bring us to the brink of war and beyond.
advises the younger hero diat die pious and proper thing
Fill my heart," he says, "with the fire of righteous anger." f rr
would be to propitiate the gods with the lives of beasts.
He agrees, and dedicates a huge bull to the sea-gods,
Neptune, of course, and Nereus, his own grandfather. To Thetis
he gives a spotless heifer with garlands wound on its head,
and, casting the animal's entrails onto the waves, he prays:
"Mother, I did as you told mc, hard as ir was to obey,
but they found me out, as you see, and they want me to come. They
need me.
I must go with the Greeks to Troy. Forgive me, protect and help
mc."
20 And then he boards, as the offshore wind picks up to speed
the journey. The island of Scyros dwindles away astern,
a smallish lump in the mist on the wide expanse of sea.
Far off, on the topmost turret ofthe castle wall, with her sisters
crowded about her, weeping, his wife looks out at the tiny
 IPHIS & I A N T H E

BOOK IX

316

In Phaestus, close to Gnossus' royal city,

there lived a man called Ligdus. Though the son
of humble parents, Ligdus was freeborn.
And like his lineage, his property
was modest; but he'd lived most honestly
he bore no stain, no blame. And when his wife
was just about to have their child, he turned
to her with these admonitory words:
"There are two things for which I pray: the first,
that you may suffer little in childbirth;
the second, that your child may be a boy.
Our means arc meagergirls require more.
So, if by chance (I pray it not be so)
you bear a female, I would have you know
that (hateful as it isand may the gods
forgive me) I shall have her put to death."
Such were his words. They both were bathed in tears:
he who had ordered this, and she who must
obey. Though Telethusa, his dear wife,

Latin [658-82]
I PHIS & I A N T H E

entreated Ligdus not to set such limits

upon the birth they both had longed for so,
she prayed in vain. He would not change his course.

And now the hour of birth drew close; her womb

was fulla burden she could hardly bear BOOK IX
when at midnight she sawor thought she saw
an image in her dreams: before her bed 31 7
stood Isis and her train of deities.
Upon her forehead she bore lunar horns
and, round her head, a yellow garlandstalks
of wheat that had been wrought in gleaming gold;
and she had other signs of royalty.
Beside her stood the barking god, Anubis;
sacred Bubastis; Apis, in his cloak
of many colors; and Osiris' son,
who checks his voice and, with his finger on
his lips, urges our silence. There were sistrums;
and there, at Isis' side, Osiris, he
who always is longed for; and the Egyptian
snake swollen with his soporific venom.
And Telethusa, who saw all of this
as if she were awake, heard Isis say:
" O Telethusa, you, who worship me
so faithfully, can set aside despair:
there is no need to heed your husband's order.
And once Lucina has delivered you,
don't hesitate to let your newborn live.
1 am the goddess who, when called upon
for help and hope, bring comfort: I respond.
No, I. am not a thankless deity."
Her counsel ended here. The goddess left.

The Cretan woman rose up from her bed,

rejoicing; stretching out her blameless hands
unto the stars, she prayeda suppliant
that what she'd seen in dreams would be confirmed.
Her labor pains grew more intense, and soon

Latin [682-704J
 IPHIS & IANTHE

she'd given easy birth: a girl was born.

Now, to deceive her husband, Telethusa
gave orders to the nurse (for she alone
knew of this guile) to feed the newborn child
and to tell everyone it was a son.
BOOK IX And Ligdus thanked the gods, and to the child
he gave the name of Ligdus' father: Iphis.
31 8 And Telethusa was most pleased with this:
it was a name that suited male or female
a neutral name, whose use involved no tricks.
N o one unmasked the pious lie. She dressed
her Iphis as a boyand whether one
assigned them to a daughter or a son,
the features ofthe child were surely handsome.

Some thirteen years had come; thirteen had gone.

O Iphis, now, for you, your father found
a bride, the blond lanthethere was none
among the girls of Phaestus who had won
more praise for the perfection of her form.
Her father was a man of Crete, Telcstes.

Iphis and she were equal in their age,

their beauty; and the two of them were trained
by the same tutors; they had learnedtogether
the basic rudiments of arts and letters.
In sum, they had shared much; and so when love
had struck their unsuspecting hearts, they both
shared one same woundbut not with equal hopes.
lanthe waits impatiently to wed;
she longs for what was promised and accepted,
her wedding one she takes to be a man;
while Iphis is in love with one she knows
is never to be hers; and just for this,
the flame is still more fierce; and now she burns
a virgin for a virgin. It is hard
to check her tears.

Latin /705-26j
IPHIS & IANTHE

"What end awaits me now?"

she says. "1 am possessed by love so strange
that none has ever known its monstrous pangs.
If heaven meant to spare me, then the gods
should have done so; and if the gods' intent
was to destroy me, then the means they chose BOOK IX
could have been naturala normal woe.
Cows don't love cows, and mares do not love mares; 31 g
but sheep desire rams, and docs are drawn
by stags. And birds, too, follow that same norm;
among the animals, no female wants
a female! Would I could annul myself!
Yes, it is true that all monstrosities
occur in Crete; and here Pasiphae
has loved a bull. But even that is less
insane than what I feel; for, after all,
she was a female longing for a male.
Yet she was able to attain her goal:
when she appeared in heifer's guise, then he
deceivedappeased her with adultery.
But how can I be helped? For even if
the world's most cunning minds were gathered here,
if Daedalus himself flew back to Crete
on waxen wings, what could he do? Nothing
no learned artcan ever make of mc
a boy. And it cannot change you, lanthe.

"Why then not summon all your mettle, Iphis?

Return to your own self; extinguish this
flame that is hopeless, heedless, surely foolish.
For you were born a girl; and now, unless
you would deceive yourself, acknowledge that:
accept it; long for what is lawful; love
as should a woman love! What gives most life
to love is hope; it's hope that lets love t h r i v e -
but it is hope of which you are deprived.
No guardian keeps you from her loving touch;
no jealous husband keeps a sleepless watch.

Latin [726-51]
 IPHIS & IANTIW;

and no harsh father; nor would she herself

deny you what you seek; yet you cannot
possess her. Though all things may favor you,
though men and gods may help in your pursuit,
you can't be happy. Even now there's no
BOOK ix desire of mine that's been denied; the gods
have been benevolentthey've given mc
320 as much as they could give; and what I want
is what my father and lanthe want,
and what my future father-in-law wants.
It's nature, with more power than all of these,
that does not want it: my sole enemy
is nature! Now the longed-for moment nears,
my wedding day is close at hand: lanthe
will soon be minebut won't belong to me.
With all that water, we shall thirst indeed.
Why do you, Juno, guardian of brides,
and you, too, Hymen, come to grace these rites
at which there is no husbandjust two brides?"

Her words were done. Meanwhile the other virgin,

whose passion matches Iphis', prays, o Hymen,
that you be quick to come. But Telethusa,
who fears the very thing lanthe seeks,
delays the date; at times she feigns some illness
and often uses omens seen in dreams
as an excuse. But no pretext is left,
and now the wedding day is imminent
indeed it looms tomorrow. She removes
the bands that circle her and Iphis' heads;
with hair unbound, she holds the altar fast
and pleads: " O Isis, you who make your home
in Mareota's fields and Paraetonium
and Pharos and the Nile, whose waters flow
to seven mouths, I pray you, help us now
and heal the fear we feel. O goddess, I
have seen you: yes, I saw and recognized
you and your regal signsyour mighty band

Latin [752-77]
IPHIS & I A S THE

of gods, the torches, and the sistrums' sounds

and I can still remember your commands.
If my dear daughter is alive, if I
have not been punished, we owe all of this
to your advice, your gift. Take pity, Isis:
wc two indeed have need ot you." Her words BOOK ix
were followed by her tears.
321
The goddess seemed
to shake her altar (and Osiris had
in fact done that): her temple doors had trembled;
one saw the glitter of her crescent horns;
one heard the clash and clatter of her sistrums.
Still not completely sure, yet glad to have
such hopeful auguries, the mother left
the temple. Iphis walked behind her, but
her stride was longer than it was before,
and her complexion darker; she was more
robust; her features had grown sharper, and
her hair was shorter, without ornaments.
You are more vigorous than you had been,
o Iphis, when you still were feminine
for you who were a girl so recently
are now a boy! So, bring your offerings
unto the shrines; set fear asiderejoice!

They bring their offerings, and then they add

a votive tablet, one on which they had
inscribed these words: "These gifts, which Iphis pledged
as girl, are paid by him as man." And when
the first rays of the next day's sun again
revealed the wide world, Venus, Juno, and
Hymen assembled: marriage flames were lit,
and the boy Iphis made lanthe his.

Latin [777~97]
Gender Theory Introduction
I, Claudia brings together the material traces of Roman women. In works of art depicting
in Roman Art women, objects of everyday use connected with women, and reconstructions ofthe spaces through
which women passed, we have the chance to understand something about who Roman women were
Natalie Boymel Kampen and what their lives were like. But /, Claudia also raises a number of important questions concerning
the way we think about those lives and those objects, the way we as modern viewers interpret the
evidence the exhibition offers us. These questions, like the very idea of having such an exhibition,
are a product of several decades of significant work in feminist gender theory.1 This kind of theory
asks us to think in new ways about systems of social difference and power and to question their basis
in assumptions about the nature of women and men. My essay is designed to take the reader through
a few central ideas proposed by modern gender theory in order to provide some new interpretive
tools with which to think about and enjoy the exhibition.
I'll start by discussing some assumptions about power that must frame any conversation
about gender. Then I'll move from a consideration of Roman gender as, to quote Simone de
Beauvoir, made and not born, and go on to write about the role of visual representation in doing the
making.2 My next step will be to suggest some ideas about the gendered nature of representation. To
make clear the role gender plays in shaping thoughts and feelings about the world and about social
relations in it, I'll end by exploring the question of vision and desire; it will help to reveal with some
historical specificity the nature of relations between viewers and things seen.

Some Definitions: Power

To speak of gender, of what for the moment I'll describe as "difference in hierarchy," is to
speak of power, a power that never operates in simple or linear ways. Although some women in the
Roman world had more power than some men, there is no question that, structurally, Roman soci-
ety evolved in such a way as to enable elite men to establish and maintain power over everyone else.
The complex negotiations for power among elite men and their objections to perceived inroads by
elite women or by men of lower orders are well documented in Roman literature and law. 3
The power of Roman elite men over those below them had its parallels for women, as is
the case in other socially stratified societies. In Rome, women's power was never built into the legal
and governmental institutions of Rome; it was always de facto. Elite women had the connections and
the money to own slaves over whom they had power, to have financial and social dependents, to
give advice that was to be heeded, to wield civic patronage, to control the distribution of certain
priesdy offices, and to buy, sell, and manage property of all kinds.* But this never evolved into the
right to govern, never changed from what anthropologists specify as authority rather than power.
In this complicated society, with its grids and overlays of different kinds of power and pow-
erlessness, gender and social stratum are constandy in conversation. Even at the "bottom" of society,
power differentials weren't ever purely based on gender. Freed slave women could have their own
slaves; slaves could be richer or poorer, better or worse connected, more or less able to influence
events.5 We could add to this mix age, as when a son has authority over his mother if there is no
father available, or location within the imperial map, as in the case of a woman ofthe provincial elite
who loses relative status when she goes to Rome. Gender, thus, speaks constandy in the languages of
age, status, ethnicity, and they in the language of gender; it exists only and always in relation to other
social categories. And power can only be understood as it is generated through these complexes of
categories.
The operations of power can render certain things visible and mask others, can enforce and
control in clear and sometimes brutal ways, yet power can also work with great subdety. It is easy to
imagine that most women saw the world through the same lens as their men, that they thought the
structures of their society inevitable, that they enjoyed the benefits of whatever male protection there
was or felt it hopeless to try to change anything. That bits of information to the contrary peek from
the seams in the textual and visual fabric of Roman history is, I suppose, amazing, but reports of bad
women, of blue stockings, of protests by matrons over the infringement of their traditional preroga-
tives all hint at different kinds of resistance, just as do the arriviste freedmen, the rebellious frontier
folk, and the followers of Spartacus.6 It makes sense, therefore, to keep the concepts of complicity
and resistance in mind as we think about the way power can be exercised through visual imagery and
through the act of commissioning, choosing, or even viewing a work of art.

Some Definitions: Gender

Gender is the social transformation of biological sex into cultural category. This is a modern
concept and one that will be reconsidered in light of Roman ideas throughout this essay. However,
what will become clear, I hope, is that this process of transformation is about power, about the estab-
lishment and justification of power relations, and about the creation and maintenance of hierarchies.
For the Romans, whose society differs from ours as much as it resembles it, power operates in com-
 fl-rwtaawiW j?af :'KST#i\:X>: ZSte*

plex and multilinear ways. Cultural categories such as gender function in relation to many others,
from age to status to ethnicity, and so the transformation of ideas about bodies into ideas about social
relations is never simple.
To begin simply, though, we can see many cultures making the conceptual and political
move from reproductive organs and secondary sex characteristics such as facial hair or its absence
(male and female) into elaborated systems of assumptions. One such assumption is that people with
wombs are meant to supervise child-rearing. A second is that if those without wombs (men) do such
work, they will compromise their identities and become feminine/like women. Consequendy, social
organization based on sexual differences is seen as "natural" and not as dependent on historical or
economic factors. ? It seems simple.
When a culture believes that its biological categories are natural, inevitable, and universal,
it has the ideal foundation for any social arrangements it wants to find unquestionable. At the same
time, its social arrangements, reproducing, reinforcing, replaying the foundational sense of inevitabili-
ty in Nature, shape the assumptions of scientists, artists, and philosophers about Nature in such way
as to create a wondrous ideological circle.8 Where it starts is anyone's guess, but here is how it looks
when Romans, often basing their ideas on older Greek ones, engage in the process: Believing men
and women to be different from one another, believing them to differ, for example, in terms of
physical strength and size, Roman writers felt it logical that they differed as well in terms of mental
and moral strength. Consequendy, it seemed reasonable to them to prevent women from governing
or going to war.9 That this is far from astonishing occurs to us immediately on recalling U.S. history.
At the same time, a number of Romans, including some important medical writers,
believed that men and women were fundamentally the same at the biological level of reproductive
organs.10 They said that women's bodies were basically the same as men's but less perfect, men's repro-
ductive organs being analogous to women's but with differing functions and on the outside rather
than the inside of the body. The functions and location of sexual organs, like the size and carriage of
the body, placed men and women in a hierarchical relationship within a common humanity. That
outside is better than inside is far from self-evident, and consequendy the point reveals itself as rooted
in an a priori notion of male superiority.
Differences between men and women, according to these theories, were biologically based,
and biology established their placement on a kind of human continuum of value. The continuum
mirrored and reinforced the social relationships of men and women in the following way: It allowed
men and women to be seen as sufficiendy similar to share a common human project of physical and
social reproduction, but it insisted that they do different work in the project. The valuation ofthe
work differing, the valuation of the worker could differ as well. And ideas of naturalness or biology
functioned to support these differentiations, to make them seem inevitable and foundational.
Indeed, difference itself, as an abstract concept, could take on that same kind of inevitabili-
ty. If biological differences were understood as hierarchical (for example, women's organs the same as
men's but less perfect), then hierarchy could take on the status ofthe natural too. What these exam-
ples are showing us is the complexity of gender as it extrapolates from beliefs about nature to the
organization of social, political, and economic arrangements that are then assumed, on the basis of
biology, to be natural and permanent.'*

Complicating the Picture

In order to give a fuller sense ofthe sophistication and complexity of Roman ways of rep-
resenting gender, let me recount a little story about the transformation of biological sex into social
category (or perhaps it is the other way round). In the story of Iphis, Ovid, the Augustan author of
the Metamorphoses, deals direcdy with the relationship of sex and gender by telling about a poor man
who directed his pregnant wife to raise their baby, if it should be a boy, and to expose it if a girl;
immediately, information emerges about different valuations placed on boy and girl children and
about the differences in authority between fathers and mothers. 12 The mother, turning for help to
the Egyptian maternal goddess Isis when she bears a baby girl, receives instructions to raise the infant
as a boy. "3 She gives the baby a neutral name, Iphis, dresses her in boy's clothes, and fools the baby's
father. A pastoral childhood follows for Iphis until the fateful day 13 years later when the "boy" is
betrothed to a girl, lanthe, with whom "he" has been raised and whom "he" has come to love. Iphis
wanders, raging over the injustice of it all, complaining to the gods about the unnaturalness of this
love.
"Oh, what will be the end of me," she said, "whom a love possesses that no one ever
heard of, a strange and monstrous love? If the gods wished to save me they should
have saved me; if not, and they wished to ruin me, they should at least have given me
some natural woe {Naturale malum), within the bounds of experience. Cows do not
love cows, nor mares, mares; but the ram desires the sheep and his own doe follows

-iSiJfc.-
 the stag. So also birds mate, and in the whole animal world there is no female smitten
with love for female. I would I were no female! Nevertheless, that Crete might pro-
duce all monstrous things, the daughter ofthe Sun (Pasiphae), a female to be sure,
loved a bulla male; my passion is more mad than that... Yet she had some hope of
her love's fulfillment..."14
And so on in a wonderfully overwrought and parodic lament that constitutes same-sex love as not
simply monstrous, but utterly unheard of. All seems lost on the very day ofthe wedding, when
Iphis's mother calls on Isis once more; the goddess saves the day and makes all "natural" by turning
Iphis into a real boy. Says the poet, "Iphis walked...with a longer stride than was her wont. Her face
seemed of a darker hue, her strength seemed greater, her very features sharper, and her locks, all
unadorned, were shorter than before. She seemed more vigorous than was her girlish wont." 15 Off
to the wedding they march, and Isis permits true love to have its day.
In this astonishing story, we see a sophisticated Roman way of defining the difference
between sex and gender. Ovid offers us a manifestation of what we mean by the constructed quality of
gender, as opposed to its being something natural, inevitable, and permanent; it comes into being and
lives in social customs, practices, ideals, and norms. 16 Ovid calls into question, as we too must, the
naturalness of gender. He tells us that gender is a matter of clothing and behavior, that sex is mutable
and can change with the aid of the gods, and he gives us a tale of transformation that renders the
unnatural (gender) natural (sex). The goddess Isis, taking the place of hormone treatments and sur-
geons, effects a transsexual shift in order to bring desire into alignment with identity and identity into
alignment with biology. The story insists that gender and sex need to be in harmony in order for all
to end well. Ironic though the story is in its playing with notions of what is natural, its outcome is an
insistence on the alignment and ordering ofthe world in a thoroughly conventional way.

Gender Constructed/Gender Represented

Gender as Social Construction
By recounting the story of Iphis, I've shown something ofthe constructed nature of gender.
People don't discover gender lying under a cabbage leaf; they build it over generations. They use
gradually accumulating ideas rooted in social practices and needs, in the structures and customs of
their language and the accretions of standard ways of talking about relationships, and in the interpre-
tations of the things they see and use. The Iphis story shows all the building blocks that transform
biological sex into a gender system.1? We see the hierarchical relationships of gods, men and women,
and children as they come into focus within the frames of reproduction, work, and authority. A
social practice, such as a father's ability to decide which child will live, exemplifies the operations of
these frames. Language gives form to Iphis's chance at life; her neutral name allows her father to mis-
take her for a boy, as does the use of terms such as puer or "boy" rather than the neutral liber, "child."
And her anguish takes shape through her interpretive language as she contrasts her "unnatural" love
with "less unnatural" ones such as the love of Queen Pasiphae for a bull by whom she will bear the
Minotaur (less unnatural because the bull is male!).
Gender is built through social practice and discourse, but the story of Iphis shows that it
also comes into being through the visual perception and representation of social practices and their
artifacts.18 That is, seeing and representing are themselves social practices by which people communi-
cate, order their lives, and structure their societies. Clothing, what spaces are occupied and how, and
the making and display of monuments, these are some ofthe elements that go into making gender.19
Iphis is a boy because he wears customary boys' clothing. The assumed androgyny of young boys and
girls avoids the threat of betrayal. These signal that no questions need to be asked about his status;
anyone can see he's a boy even though/because no one in the story (not even his father) sees him
naked. As he walks with his mother to his wedding, thanks to Isis he changes "before our eyes." His
skin darkens (in other words, he shows his manliness by the tan of outdoor life but also loses the pale
skin of feminine boyishness), his stride lengthens, and so on. We see him becoming both male and a
man at the same time, eligible for entry into marriage and adulthood.

What Is Seen: Ideals and Differentiations

Representation, the interpretation ofthe visual world through material means, does a num-
ber of things essential to the construction of gender. Among other things, it shows people idealized
forms of themselves, forms by which to recognize the categories to which their society assigns them
and by which to mark their hopes and desires. It also shows people how they differ from one another
both as individuals and as members of categories (for example, of status or of age).
From the start, ideal and differentiation become visible together; they make it clear that
gender is always comprehensible only in relation.20 There is no woman without man.'no visible
femininity without a parallel masculinity. To see how this works, consider the plethora of gendered
ideals visible everywhere in /, Claudia and in Roman art in general. From the sarcophagi of the
Three Graces to the persistence of a soft youthful image in so many ofthe female portraits, ideal
femininities pervade Roman art. The Graces sarcophagus type, borrowing Greek images of three
nude young women, establishes a basic ideal for women; their bodies and poses, their youth and soft-
ness epitomize a gendered notion of beauty (fig. i). When would an adult male appear as a curving
nude, his body draped against those of two other men? If he was an adult mortal, never. A youth
such as Narcissus, a divinized dead male lover of an emperor (Antinous, the beloved of the emperor
Hadrian), a god (Dionysus or Apollo most often) might take on such a pose and become androgy-
nous by it, but no ordinary mortal man would do so. Rather, the male will stand erect, his knees
apart and never knocking together, his head straight on his neck and never tilted like a question
mark. He participates actively in the construction of the femininity of the Graces; they are specifically
what he is not. ?j-
T h e portraits o f Marcus Aurelius and his wife Faustina t h e Y o u n g er (figs. 2 and 3; cat. nos.
27 a n d 26) a n d o f Septimius Severus and his spouse Julia D o m n a (cat. nos. 43 a n d 42) help us t o see
h o w t h e ideals o f physical attractiveness take a gendered form. B o t h w o m e n have t h e same broad
faces as their husbands, b u t the cheeks are softly modele d a n d rounded; t h e men's chins a n d lips are
hidden beneath lush curly beards, whereas t h e w o m e n ' s delicately curving m o u t h s a n d small chins
contribute a childlike quality. This similarity t o the portrait heads of children (fig. 4; cat. n o . 77),
with their broad brows, large eyes, small chins, a n d curving lips, enhances b o t h w o m e n ' s youthful-
ness a n d t h e impression o f their being less aggressive than t h e m e n . 2 1 T h e s e facial features,
c o m b i n e d with expressions serious, sweet, o r seductive, b u t rarely c o m m a n d i n g , further establish a
feminine ideal.
When female portraits lack some of these feminine characteristics, as perhaps in the portrait
of a woman as Cybele (fig. 5; cat. no. 64), what are we to conclude? Her luxuriant body and fleshy
arms, neck, and face have the softness and roundness ofthe statue type on which the portrait is based,
the form apparendy desired by Romans in a woman whose fecundity was one of her major attrac-
tions; it gave her value.22 But her face is square, her chin broad and solid, her cheekbones heavy, and
her eyes set quite close together. Her mouth, despite the damage, suggests strong character and per-
haps even a sense of irony. Such juxtapositions of idealized feminine bodies with faces that diverge
from the ideal need to be seen within the framework of conceptions of gendered virtue.23 Looking at
portraits of matrons represented nude with bodies borrowed from famous statues of Venus and recog-
nizable portrait heads, new scholarship suggests that the firm mouths and serious expressions of the
women's faces may signify virtues associated by Roman men (and women?) with manlinessgravity
and dignity among others (fig. 6)M The body of a goddess who, for Romans, conveyed not only
sensual beauty but also reproductive potential, spoke of a set of feminine virtues, while the head with
its manly firmness spoke of a strength of character conveyed (in Roman terms) by men's, not
women's, features.
The relational character of gendered imagery conveys as well its hierarchical nature.
Thus, a woman, by taking on selected attributes of men, became more virtuous.25 A man, taking on
attributes of women, became suspect unless he was a youth or a god in whom androgyny was
permissible.26 The visual images help to make viewers aware, over and over, of this "fact": Men and
women are different and unequal. The very reiteration helps to make it into a fact.
"But wait," you may say. "Couldn't all this just be a result ofthe way people really looked?
Why read all this into the portraits, since, after all, a portrait is a likeness?" Well, yes, but among
Romans it seems that visual likeness is but one element in a portrait; spiritual likeness and the repre-
sentation of virtue (real or wished for) or fictive associations (familial, class, or divine) may count for
quite as much. 27 So Augustus and Livia, even in their old age, are relatively youthful; so the women
in youthful Venus or Diana bodies are too; so the vast majority of men are sculpted in the first centu-
ry BC, in Rome, with their lined, grim faces as evidence of their grave and severe character and the
reverence with which old age was held in the period.28 In other words, Roman portraits regularly
sacrifice verisimilitude for idealized depiction of character or status-enhancing associations. The point
is that these are gendered, and, as such, they participate in the social construction of gender as a sys-
tem of differentiations and hierarchies.

Gender Constructed7Representation Gendered

Gender and Analogy
Gender is a partner in the complex process of forming social relations; it is constructed but
also constructs. It does so because it functions within a system of analogies (x is to Y as Y is to z) that
for Romans might go: Barbarian is to Roman as woman is to man, or slave is to master as woman is
to man, or even province is to Rome as woman is to man. One analogy among many in Roman life,
gender is especially valuable for structuring and organizing thought because of its apparent naturalness
and its ability to make both difference and^hierarchy seem equally natural regardless of their temporal
or geographic particularities.
Mm
y.:'J::.-.\!
Fig. i. Sarcophagm of the Three
Graces. O i . 22_s. Pittsburgh.
Carnegie Museum of Art.

^^Mw

Fig. 4. Portrait of a Boy.

Car. no. 77.
Fig. 2. Portrait of Marcus
Amelias. Cat. no. 27.

Fig. 5. Portrait of a Roman

Matron as Cybele. Cat. no. 64.
 : ; !
>," y - * i " - i : ' ' ' .: -. '-V- iV. !
' V" . V ^ " " ^ . ' " . ; ;s.:"l

V .;"... < i / . ,

'mi
--""iV'1 -"i
*'.'-'' 1 ' - ; v -:'
=W1
-,, ;.;'' . , j f i : . .

'"'*".''/:: ^ K " :
ill]
\ : : ^ y ~ r ':;;
^^Jf;'-^^

^$4
s^Sf ' " ' ! ' .'' j" '.
J>&\
""-"<.!?v .-*'j)

Fig. 3. Portrait, of Faustina the

Younger. Cat. no. 26.

fi?

Fig. 6. Portrait of a Matron
in the Guise of Venus. Ca. 100.
Vatican Museums.
Fig. 7. Grand Camee de France.
Ca. 20. Sardonyx. Paris,
Bibliotheque Nationalc,
Cabinet des Medailles.
A perfect example of hierarchy in difference, gender often functions as a model for other
kinds of social relations. The depiction of a barbarian couple, as on victory monuments (the Arch of
Lucius Verus and Marcus Aurelius at Tripoli or the monument at St. Bertrand de Comminges in the
Pyrenees), gems and cameos (the Gemma Augustea or the Grand Camee de France), or sarcophagi
(the "Portonaccio" sarcophagus), is an interesting case study.21-* The shaggy-haired man, often in
exotic furs or trousers, stands or sits with his head bowed and his hands chained behind him. The
bedraggled woman, her long hair and her gamients disheveled, stands or sits, her hand on her head in
a traditional pose of mourning. On the Grand Camee de France of ca. 20 (fig. 7), the seated men
appear with a woman holding a baby in her arms. Above her are images ofthe emperor Tiberius
seated beside his mother Livia as his now deceased and divinized father (by adoption) floats in the
heavens above. Kin and Kin! Together they present male aggression and female passivity as norma-
tive, for she, after all, need not be chained. At the same time, the couple mark out the totality of
Roman power over the conquered barbarians by suggesting that the family, and thus the future
of their world, has been forever transformed by defeat.
Like the frequent ancient representations ofthe barbarian, Amazons also represent the
Other, the one who is the opposite of one's (Roman) self.3 The Amazon's status as outside of civi-
lization is due in large measure to her refusal to behave like a real woman, and her defeat is absolute
and final since she never has a next chapter, an afterwards. In this she differs from the barbarians.
The Romans insisted on the heterosexual pairing of their Others, as they did for them-
selves. The endless supply of images of brides and grooms shaking hands in the marital gesture
known as the dextramm iunctio, seen in tombs, on coins, in religious imagery, used by freed slaves, the
imperial couple, Christians and non-Christians alike, conveyed the absolute naturalness of marriage.
On a late antique sacophagus that belonged to an imperial official and his wife, the handshake appears
in an elite pagan context (fig. 8). This reiterated image made marriage the vehicle by which to stress
the common human project of men and women, that which bound them together in the service of
family, community and state.
By insisting on the pairing of male and female barbarians, the Romans stressed the barbar-
ians' common humanity with themselves; this laid the groundwork for a "next chapter" whose
absence from the Amazon story is so striking. The barbarian couple may become Roman.and may
live that transformed life in a positive sense. Constandy incorporating the outsider, the Romans
reveal their belief in an ever expandable empire rather unlike the finite boundedness of Greek
empire. So the barbarian couple reproduces and thereby gains a future that will not only represent
Rome's total victory; it will represent as well the humanity ofthe barbarians that entitles them to
Romanization and eventual membership in the civilized world, which will continue to expand both
its population and its territory.
In this discussion of barbarian and Amazon, gender plays against ethnicity, a second system
of hierarchy in difference. I've used the example to demonstrate the Roman way of thinking about,
of mentally and visually constructing, difference. Conveying the hierarchical nature of difference,
barbarians also speak to the permeability of Roman conceptual boundaries. They, like freed slaves or
people from the provinces, may move from one category to another, just as, on the imaginative level,
Iphis moves from female to male.
Viewer, Object, Desire
The system of analogies I've been discussing has relevance not only for the construction of
imagery but for thinking about the relationship between viewers and objects. 3' Here we enter into a
realm of greater complexity, of paradoxes entangled with power and difference. Two contradictory
notions (at least two) come into play when we try to imagine the gendered relationship of Viewer to
Seen, and the contradictions point up the unstable nature of gender ideology.
On one hand, we can argue that the Roman object is like the conquered or the enslaved or
Woman. We might say that things are feminized to the extent that they are possessable, and that
works of art therefore always have a feminine side that makes the possessor more of a man (even if
the possessor is a woman). And further, if we imagine that the object is in some ways feminized, then
the very act of Roman looking can be understood as active and possessing and thus a manly one.
On the other hand, we can argue that the object also addresses, attracts, or even dominates
the viewer, and so the viewer, desiring or manipulated by the object, is possessed by it. Imperial
portraits are designed to do just this, as arc erotic and pornographic images. At one moment this
reversal makes the image masculine in its dominance, whereas at another it suggests a kind of erotic
domination fantasy in which the feminine compels the masculine to submit. The elegiac poets ot
Rome play on this theme, as when Propertius calls himself the "slave to one love" 12 or calls himself a
suppliant, suing for terms from his withholding mistress.33
The question, then, is not which of these positions is right, for I think both are operating in
Roman viewing, and their entanglement with one another helps to reveal the instability of gender
and gendered thinking. Rather, I want to emphasize the complexity of gendered desire as it becomes
Fig. S. Sarcophagus of an Imperial
Official and his Wife. Ca. 275.
Rome, Museo Nazionale
Romano.

4075)9

Fig. 9. Column of Trajan, Scene

86: Trajan Sacrifices to the
Gods on His Way to Dacia.
110. R o m e .

W
a conceptual model for the process of looking. How does what we see participate in creating what
we desire? With what or whom do we identify in the process of desiring? And who do we think we
are when we are people who desire?34
Let me take an example from a text about desire as a way of illustrating this set of questions.
In Pliny's Panegyric for the emperor Trajan, written about 100, the author has a passage in which he
speaks ofthe triumphant ruler coming back to Rome.35 Pliny addresses Trajan, saying,
...think ofthe day when you entered your city, so long awaited and so much desired
{desideratus)\... You towered above us only because of your splendid physique (unlike
other victors borne in on the shoulders of men); your triumph did not rest on our
humiliation... Thus neither age, health nor sex held your subjects back from feasting
their eyes on this unexpected sight: small children learned who you were, young peo-
ple pointed you out, old men admired: even the sick disregarded their doctors' orders
and dragged themselves out for a glimpse of you as if that could restore their health.
...Then the greatest desire {maxima voluptas) for their fertility overcame the women
when they realized for/to which prince they had borne citizens, for/to which impera-
tor they had borne soldiers.36
Pliny describes Trajan in terms that make clear his physical as well as moral attractiveness.
Old and young, men and women seem drawn to him. His magnetism works on them as it does on
his troops and his enemies in the reliefs that depict them on the Column of Trajan (fig. 9), and on
the men and children who gather around him as he distributes largesse on the contemporary arch at
Benevento. Finally, by claiming that the women experience voluptas in relation to their fecunditas at
the mere sight of the emperor, Pliny sets in morion a series of transfers. His desire for Trajan, to be
like, with, ofthe emperor, is displaced onto the populace as a whole, and that desire ends by being
heterosexualized and rendered reproductive. Women's desire is thus represented as a desire, chan-
neled through Trajan, to bear children for the state. Notice that the reproductive desire on the
Benevento arch takes the form of female place personifications and mortal men with children. The
process of creating images of visual attraction to the ruler is thus a process of instituting and embody-
ing desire, here for state ends.
The idea that one draws from this passage is that vision is often about desire, can create
desire, and the Roman author knows perfecdy well that visual desire is analogous to sexual desire.
Phny knows it in a political context as much as the second-century author Lucian knows it in his dis-
cussion of men looking at the statue ofthe Knidian Aphrodite. 37 The men discover a stain on her
thigh that testifies to the masturbatory desire of at least one viewer. The viewer possesses the statue,
but the statue has power over him. Pliny's passage also makes clear that desire can be homoerotic in
some sense as men visually desire other men (Trajan in this case; the buttocks of the Knidian
Aphrodite, which a man in Lucian's text asserts are as desirable as a boy's).
Further, desire can be part ofthe construction of gendered individuals who become,
through their desire, members of a community and an empire. For example, Pliny has the women
desire Trajan's presence as their ruler; he makes them feel more Roman as they yeam to bear Roman
children. Conceptualizing the relationships of vision to desire can, thus, be crucial to the way we
understand the workings of ideology, the way the social structures become part of the psyches of
individuals.

Who Is Looking?
We have so little information about the people who made Roman objects of the sort in this
exhibition, so little about the nature ofthe audience as well. We tend to speak of the artist or the
audience or the viewer and too often fail to specify the social variables that distinguish people from
one another. But the evidence is so sparse that to try to specify implies a significant risk of inventing
people's identities. This is clearly one of those areas where modem viewers want to ask questions
that ancient material seems unable to answer.
What can we say about who is looking? Men tell us much about their own looking, but
women, as usual, leave us few words that can safely be called their own.

]
Conclusion
I have been suggesting that vision and representation in the Roman world come into sharp-
er focus for us if we understand something ofthe gendered assumptions and systems of analogy that
were at work for many, if not most, viewers. The fundamental issues with which feminist gender
theory has concerned itself over the past two decades, the constructedness of gender, its relational yet

Fig. 10. Tombstone in the Form
of a Double Door. Late second
or third century. From
Dorylaion in Phrygia, Asia
Minor.
non-binary character, its participation in the construction of images, and its instability, all help to
reveal the links between imagery and ideology. This seems especially vivid in the depiction of gender
relations as emblematic of other kinds of relations (social and political). It emerges as well in the way
that the common humanity of man and woman or barbarian and Roman plays against hierarchy and
difference to naturalize political messages. The circuit of desire between viewers and things seen may
work in much the same way, to naturalize ideology, but it may also have the power to cause fissures
in ideology's surface, to create places in which new ideas, resistance to old ones, can form. And
finally, gender theory, by addressing the nature of social boundaries and calling into question their
apparent solidity, helps to reveal something that seems crucial to Roman culture: the permeability
of many of its boundaries, between classes, between peoples, between life and death. Even gender
boundaries seem to be permeable, what with Iphis or hermaphrodites, but in the end, these figures
emerge as constructions too, made in the hope of stabilizing boundaries that kept threatening, at least
in the eyes of certain Roman writing men, to come apart.
The list of questions one could raise on the basis of theoretical claims such as these is
potentially very long and the need for clarity very great, especially about what questions modern
viewers can and cannot expect to have answered. But I suspect that the study of gender in the history
of Roman art will continue to produce a desire that is, to cite Ovid, less monstrous than insatiable.

i. There is an immense and ever-growing bibliography
for feminist gender theory, but the most useful introduc-
tions to the subject include L.J. Nicholson ed.,
Feminism/Postmodernism (London 1996); J. Butler, Gender
Trotible: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (London
1990); S. Gunew ed., A Reader in Feminist Knowledge
(London 1991); T. Morrison ed., Race-ing Justice, En-
Gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas,
and the Construction of Social Reality {New York 1992); J.
Buder andJ.W. Scott eds., Feminists Theorize the Political
(New York 1992); and S. Yanagisako and C. Delaney
eds., Naturalizing Power (New York 1995).
2. S. de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H . M . Parshley
(New York 1953) 249.
3. A useful introduction to Roman social history is R.
Sailer and P. Garnsey, Tl\e Roman Empire: Economy,
Society and Culture (Berkeley 1987) esp. 107-59. For gen-
eral information on Roman women, see, most recently,
E. Fantham, H.P. Foley, N.B. Kampen, S.B. Pomeroy,
and H.A. Shapiro, Women in the Classical World: Image
and Text (New York 1994) 207-394.
4. See supra n. 3.
5. See supra n. 3 and also K. Bradley, Slaves and Masters
in the Roman Empire (Brussels 1984).
6. Sec supra n. 3, and also M. Wyke, "Augustan
Cleopatras: Female Power and Poetic Authority," in A.
Powell cd., Roman Poetry and Propaganda in the Age of
Augustus (London 1992) 98-140; Livy 34.1-8; G. de Ste.
Croix, Class Struggle in the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca
1981); or M. Benabou, La resistance africaine a la romanisa-
lioti (Paris 1976).
7. O n the naturalization of gender, sec especially clas-
sics such as de Beauvoir (supra n. 2); S. Ortncr, "Is
Female to Male as Nature Is to Culture?" in M. Rosaldo
and L. Lampherc eds.. Women, Culture and Society
(Stanford 1974) 67-87; S.M. Okin, Women in Western
Political Tliought (Princeton 1979); and M. Barrett,
"Ideology and the Cultural Production of Gender," in J.
Newton and D. Rosenfelt eds.. Feminist Criticism and
Social Change: Sex, Class and Race in Literature and Culture
(Now York 1985) 65-85, among many others.
S. Sec especially S.J. Gould, The Misnieasuiv of Man
(New York 1981); A. Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender:
Biological Theories about Women and Men (New York
1985); and T. Laqucur, Making Sex: Body and Gender from
the Greeks to Freud (Cambridge, Mass. 1990).
9. See, for example, the jurist Gaius in Inslituiiones
1.144, and discussion byJ.F. Gardner, Women in Roman
Law and Society (Hloomington 1986). and S. Treggiari,
RMan.
10. See T. Laqueur, "Orgasm, Generation and the
Politics of Reproductive Biology," Representations 14
(Spring 1986) 1-41, as well as L. Dean-Jones, Women's
Bodies in Classical Greek Science (Oxford 1994).
11. Recent feminist work in classics and archaeology
deals with many of these points: see especially antholo-
gies such as N . Sorkin Rabinowitz and A. Richlin eds.,
Feminist Tlieory and the Classics (New York 1993) or L.
Archer, S. Fischler, and M. Wyke eds.. Women in Ancient
Societies: An Illusion ofthe Night (New York 1994) on
gender and the classics; essays on archaeology such as S.
Brown, "Feminist Research in Archaeology: What Does
It Mean? Why Is It Taking So Long?" in Rabinowitz
and Richlin 238-71; the special issue of the journal
Antiquity 65 (1991) on gender and archaeology; j . Gero
and M. Conkey eds.. Engendering Archaeology: Women and
Prehistory (Oxford 1991); or M. Conkey and R.
Tringham, "Archaeology and the Goddess: Exploring the
Contours of Feminist Archaeology," in D. Stanton and
A. Stewart eds., Feminisms in the Academy (Ann Arbor
995) I99~ 2 47; ard the many issues of the journals
Arethusa and Helios that have published feminist work on
antiquity.
12. Ov., Met. 9. 666797, trans. F.J. Miller (London
1926); see also L. Barkan, The Gods Made Flesh:
Metamorphosis and the Pursuit of Paganism (New Haven
1986). O n infanticide in the ancient world, see especially
S.B. Pomeroy, "Infanticide in Hellenistic Greece," in A.
Cameron and A. Kuhrt eds.. Images of Women in
Antiquity (Detroit 1983) 207-22; and W. Harris, "The
Possibility of Extensive Infanticide in the Graeco-Roman
World," C Q 32 (1982) 114-16.
13. Ov., Met. 9. 666-713
14. Ov., Mel. 9. 726-38.
15. Ov., Met. 9. 785-91.
16. For feminist discussions ofthe construction of gen-
der, sec especially E.V. Spelman, Inessential Woman:
Problems of Exclusion in Feminist Thought (Boston 1988);
D. Fuss, Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature and
Difference (New York 1989); o r J . W. Scott, "Gender: A
Useful Category of Historical Analysis," in E. Weed ed.,
Coming to Terms: Feminism, Theory, Politics (New York
1989) 81-100.
17. To explore the rich literature on this subject, one
might begin with works from feminist anthropology
such as the classic studies of Margaret Mead and the

24 1 CLAVDIA WOMEN IN A N C I E N T R O M E
more recent collections by R . R . Rapp, Toward an 32. Prop. 2.13.35.
Anthropology of Women (New York 1975); S. Ortner and 33. Prop. 4.8.71-72. In a written communication, A.
H. Whitehead eds.. Sexual Meanings: The Cultural Gregory suggests that when "an object causes us to react,
Construction of Gender and Sexuality (Cambridge 1981); S. it is we who are 'feminized,' and not the object, because
Ardener, Women and Space (New York 1981: rev. ed. our emotions or intellect are being manipulated by the
Providence 1993); or M. di Leonardo ed., Gender at the dominant (and therefore 'masculine') image." See also his
Crossroads of Knowledge: Feminist Anthropology in the essay, '"Powerful Images'; Responses to Portraits and the
Postmodern Era (Berkeley 1991) esp. 1-48. Political Uses of Images in R o m e , " J R A 7 (1994) 80-99.
18. O n gender and representation, see R. Williams, I thank him for his helpful suggestions on this issue.
The Sociology of Culture (New York 1982); P. Rabinow, 34. O n many of these questions, see the essays in my
"Representations Are Social Facts: Modernity and Post- collection (supra n. 23).
Modernity in Anthropology," in J. Clifford and G.E. 35. Pliny, Pan. 22, esp. 2 - 3 , trans. B. Radice
Marcus eds.. Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of (Cambridge, Mass. 1969).
Ethnography (Berkeley 1986) 234-61; E. Cowic. "Woman 36. Pliny, Pan. 22. The translation is by B. Radice, but
as Sign," M / F 1 (1978) 49-64; or G. Pollock, Vision and the final sentence is by N . Finkelstein, for whose help I
Difference: Femininity, Feminism, and the Histories of Art am grateful.
(New York 1988) esp. 1-49. 37. Lucian, Affairs oflhe Heart, 10-17, p . 15-17, trans.
19. See, for example, S. Ardener, "Ground Rules and M.D. Macleod (London 1967).
Social Maps for Women: An Introduction," in Ardener 38. See e.g. M.T. Boatwright, "Plancia Magna of
(supra n. 17) 1-30. Perge: Women's Roles and Sums in R o m a n Asia
20. O n the relational nature of gender, see especially J. Minor," in S.B. Pomeroy ed., Women's History and
Flax, Thinking Fragments: Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Ancient History (Chapel Hill 1991) 249-72.
Postmodernism in the Contemporary West (Berkeley 1990)
75-185.
21. S.J. Gould's discussion o f t h e transformation of
Mickey Mouse from rat to neonate in his collection The
Panda's Thumb (New York 1980) 95-107 is especially
wonderful on this point.
22. O n the importance of female fecundity, see esp.
Soranus, Gynecology trans. O . Temkin (Baltimore 1956)
1-34-35-
23. E. D'Ambra, " T h e Calculus of Venus," in N . B .
Kampen ed.. Sexuality in Ancient Art (New York 1996)
219-32.
24. D'Ambra (supra n. 23) 226-27.
25. For example, the praise of women's manly virtue
in, e.g., Seneca, Helv. 16, trans. J. Basore (his mother's
manly spirit); or Val. Max. 8.3, trans. M.B. Fant in M .
Lefkowitz and M.B. Fant eds., Women's Life in Greece and
Rome: A Sourcebook in Translation (Baltimore 1982) 206
(on Amasia Sentia w h o was called Androgyne because of
her manly spirit in a woman's body).
26. O n this point, see especially M. Gleason, Making
Men: Sophists and Self-Presentation in Ancient Rome
(Princeton 1995), or her earlier essay, "The Semiotics of
Gender: Physiognomy and Self-fashioning in the Second
Century, C.E.," in D . Halperin, J. Winkler, and F.
Zeidin eds., Before Sexuality: The Construction of Erotic
Experience in the Ancient Greek World (Princeton 1990)
389-415.
27. Sec Wrcde, C F D on portraiture and virtue; P.
Zanker, "Grabreliefs rSmischer Freigelassener," J d l 90
(1979) 267-315; Kleiner, R G P on portraits and class
mobility; and, more generally, R . Brilliant, Portraiture
(Cambridge, Mass. 1991)-
28. O n male old age as a praiseworthy characteristic in
the Late Republic and Early Empire, see e.g., R .
Brilliant, Roman Art from the Republic to Constantine
(London 1974) 180-83.
29. See, for example, H . Walter, Les barbares de I'ocddent
romain (Paris 1993).
30. O n Amazons, see W.B. Tyrell, Amazons: A Study
in Athenian Myth-Making (Baltimore 1984). O n the
Other, see P. duBois, Centaurs and Amazons (Ann Arbor
1982); J. Hallett, "Women as Same and Olher in the
Classical Roman Elite," Helios 16 (1989) 59-78; and B.
Cohen ed.. Representations ofthe "Other" in Athenian Art,
c. 510-400 B.C. (New York 1995) = Source: Notes in the
History of Art 15.1 (Fall 1995).
31. With little to say about gender but much of interest
about this relationship, D . Freedberg, The Power of Images
(Chicago 1989); on gender imagery, the viewer, and cin-
ema, see especially the classic work of L. Mulvey, Visual
and Other Pleasures (Bloomington 1989) esp. 14-38, or T.
de Laurctis, Alice Doesn 't: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema
(Bloomington 1984).