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FEMALE AND DWARFGLADIATORS I59
ered it a remote possibility that any of these matrons would actually
become gladiators. Admittedly. he does wonder if their devotion to
their training might be due to a desire to perform in public. but this
question functions as a rhetorical ploy. The sense that he had to search
for this explanation and the hesitant way he introduces it (nisi quod)
implies that he did not believe it was particularly plausible. In the end
the reader is led to ask what in fact lay at the heart of these women's
obsession with gladiators if it was not a desire to become one. The real
issue in Juvenal's opinion was that the simple desire to act like a gladiator
signaled a transgression by women on masculine territory and masculine
roles. particularly sexual roles. The thrust of his attack comes out
in 252-254 in which he first asks whether a woman who loves force and
violence (vires) could be chaste. and then asserts that. given a woman's
greater sexual pleasure. no woman would want to be a man. Courtney
rightly saw that the vires exhibited by gladiators in 253 harked back to
the gladiator's ferrum in Il2 ("the sword is what they love") and ultimately
to the diatribe in 103-13 on Roman women who pursue gladiators
as lovers. 44 Moreover. that women's desire for sex lay at the heart
of their interest in gladiators is revealed by the terms Juvenal used to
describe the most attractive feature of gladiators: ferrum in 112. clearly
a phallic image. and vires in 253. a broad hint at a gladiator's sexual potency
and possibly even a reference to his sexual organs. 45 In effect. Juvenal's
complaint was that Roman matrons had come to love things that
properly only men should love. and instead of being chaste they had
learned to be aggressive like gladiators, especially in the realm of sex. 46
44 E. Courtney. A Commentary on the Satires of juvenal (London 1980) ad
loe.
45 J. Adams. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (Baltimore 1982) does not specifically
list ferrum as a synonym for penis but does give a whole range of similar
terms drawn from weaponry (19-22). On the use of vires for male sexual potency
and sexual organs. see Lewis and Short. s.v. vis B3 (missed in the OLD
except in the sense of the testicles cut off in the taurobolium. s.v. vis 20C). Ovid
also plays with the idea that vires is something a man has but a woman wants:
see S. Wheeler. "Changing names: The miracle of Iphis in Ovid's Metamorphoses9,"
Phoenix 51 (1997) 194-199.
46 S. Braund. "Juvenal-Misogynist or misogamist?" JRS 82 (1992) 71-86. has
persuasively argued that Sat. 6 was not intended as a general attack on women.
The poem is concerned exclusively with how the lack of pudicitia on the part of
Roman matrons led to adultery and made a mockery of marriage. While Braund
demonstrated that the issue of adultery underlay nearly every section of the
poem. she overlooked the diatribe against women playing at being gladiators.
even though these matrons' abandonment of pudor is prominently mentioned
at 252. She also observed that. in keeping with his wildly indignant persona,
Juvenal's arguments tended to be far-fetched and even incoherent. This should
cause us to wonder how many Roman matrons ever sweated and grunted while