Animus Classics Journal, Volume 4, Issue 2

ANIMUS

CLASSICS

JOURNAL

Spring 2024

Volume 4

No. 2

COVER ART BY E.G. KEISLING

ANIMUS 1 THE CLASSICS JOURNAL OF THE UNIVERSITY

OF CHICAGO

VOLUME IV, NO. 2

SPRING, 2777 AUC

0ANIMUS, THE CLASSICS JOURNAL OF THE

UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO, VOL. IV, ISSUE 2

A LIST OF THE ARTICLES IN THIS VOLUME

12 ACHILLES AND THE CRISIS OF THE

HEROIC AGE: GENDER, MĒNIS, AND THE

DEATH OF THE DEMIGOD

Portia N. Juarez

30 BRONZE AGE ACHILLES’S SHIELD

Holly James Chanfrau

32 VERGIL, AENEID I.1-156: A LIMERICK

TRANSLATION

Ellis Mucchetti

42 OVID’S MINERVA: THE PARADOX OF

DIVINE FEMININITY

Ben McClarty

54 THE CALL OF MEDEA

Hillary Yip

60 CLEOPATRA, THEN AND NOW

S. Richard Stoller

64 SPEECHES, EXEMPLA, AND THE PURPOSE

OF HISTORY IN BOOK 1 OF LIVY’S AB

URBE CONDITA

Colton Van Gerwen

78 AMPHORA

Bex Steinberg

82 PICKING UP THE SATRAPES OF

SEMANTIC CHANGE: THE MEANING OF

SATRAPES (SATRAPA) IN THE

WALTHARIUS AND ITS BACKGROUND

Blake Alexander Lopez

98 REASSEMBLED FOR YOUR VIEWING

Olivia Emerick

BOARD OF THE ANIMUS CLASSICS JOURNAL

Sarah M. Ware, Elizabeth Harrison

Anjali Jain

Shama M. Tirukkala

Editors-in-Chief

Managing Editor

Secretary

ACADEMIC

Ken Johnson

Section Editor

Francesco Bailo

Thomas C. DeGirolami

Harris Lencz

Asst. Section Ed.

CREATIVE

Gabriel Roberto Clisham

Section Editor

Esther Kim

Shannon Kim

Hudson Kottman

Asst. Section Ed.

TRANSLATION

Matthew Turner

Section Editor

Bill Baker

Will A. Zimmermann

Asst. Section Ed.

BLOG

Penelope Toll

Section Editor

Bill Baker

Carrie Midkiff

Dania Siddiqi

Asst. Section Ed.

Jonathan Yin

Asst. Design Editor

p. 6 1

REVIEWERS & COPY EDITORS

REVIEWERS

Bill Baker

Ethan Brandaleone

Audrey Brunner

Judson Buchko

Cal Cavallaro

Gabriel R. Clisham

Amani Rahman Creamer

Kayla Davis

Thomas C. DeGirolami

Lola Flores

Soph Franklin

Elizabeth Harrison

Anjali Jain

Elizabeth Johnson

Ahna Kim

Isabelle Y. Lee

Harris Lencz

Alan D. Magallanes

Carrie Midkiff

Henry J. Ridley

Alondra Romero

Joachim Sciamma

Dellara Sheibani

Vidya N. Suri

Penelope Toll

Alexa Torres

Sarah M. Ware

Jonathan Yin

Will A. Zimmermann

COPY EDITORS

Bill Baker

Ethan Brandaleone

Audrey Brunner

Cal Cavallaro

Kayla Davis

Nina Dolenec

Elizabeth Harrrison

Anjali Jain

Elizabeth Johnson

Ahna Kim

Aaryan Kumar

Isabelle Y. Lee

Harris Lencz

Avery Metzcar

Joachim Sciamma

Vidya N. Suri

Penelope Toll

Sarah M. Ware

Will A. Zimmermann

p. 7 1

LETTER FROM THE EDITORS

As the clear skies and long, sunny days spent reading on the

grassy Quad return to grace us on the South Side of Chicago,

and as our Board looks toward the end of this academic

year, we believe it is important to reflect upon the work of those

who have so graciously supported our journal.

On our

gratitude for

our Staff

We would, as always, like to first thank our Animus Personnel, who

are essential to our effort to publish important work in the Classics

for a wider audience. Our Peer Reviewers, a staple of Animus since

our very first edition, have consistently outdone themselves with

their many hours of reading and illuminating feedback. We also

thank our Copy-Editors, who are ever eager to spot a misplaced

comma and correct usages of en- and em-dashes. Though their critiques

can sometimes be a bit too biting and their extensive line

edits might, at times, crash Google Docs, we are grateful that students

from around our university community have dedicated their

time and expertise to thoughtfully reviewing and editing the submissions

we receive. Without their many critiques and hundreds

of edits, the issue before you today would not have been possible.

p. 8 1

We would also like to thank the Classics department as a whole

for their guidance, support, and warmth, particularly Prof. Jonah

Radding, Prof. Emily Austin, and Kathy Fox. They have been our

biggest supporters since our inception in Fall 2020, and this issue

serves as a testament to their generosity of spirit. As always, we

also appreciate the help of Classics Bibliographer Catherine Mardikes

for archiving issues of Animus for posterity, and we are grateful

to those many librarians and archivists who support the work of

the scholars featured in this edition.

We are incredibly fortunate to have our amazing staff working with

us this cycle. Even amid the compressed Spring timeline, thesis due

dates, and final Beer Passports to stamp, our Staff and Board have

continued to make Animus everything that it was intended to be,

and more. We are exceptionally grateful for our graduating fourthyears,

who dedicated their time to Animus during their final Spring

quarter with the University. Though Sarah, Penelope, Gabe, Ken,

Esther, Dania, Shama, and Francesco will find themselves in new

academic programs, new jobs, and new places around the globe,

we are unspeakably excited for them and unspeakably proud of

the time we’ve had to work together with these amazing individuals.

Finally, we would like to take the opportunity to highlight Sarah

Ware for all that she’s done for the journal during her time with

us. As the journal’s first-ever Secretary, second-ever Managing Editor,

and the most dedicated of Editor-in-Chiefs, Animus will feel

her loss as this concludes her final cycle with us. Sarah’s work has

shaped and supported Animus since its nascence, and it is her we

have to thank for what the journal has flourished into today. We

wish her all the best in her future academic endeavors, and as her

friends, we are truly excited to be blown away by all she will accomplish

in the coming years. She knows, however, that she is leaving

Animus in good hands with Elizabeth, Anjali, and Bill, and she

looks forward to seeing the wonderful things that they will accomplish

at the journal’s helm in the coming years. Needless to say, she

has a lifelong Animus subscription. We could not be more grateful.

On our

gratitude for

Classics faculty

and staff

Farewell to

our graduating

Staff

On Sarah

Ware and

her legacy at

Animus

Warmly,

Sarah M. Ware and Elizabeth Harrison

p. 9 1

ACHILLES AND THE CRISIS OF THE HEROIC AGE1

GENDER, MĒNIS, AND THE DEATH OF THE

DEMIGOD

2 Portia N. Juarez, University of Michigan

How does a world die? Perhaps more importantly,

how do the survivors make sense of the world

that remains—the shape and the cause of the

absence—the act of making anew? As the Trojan War

demarcates the end of the Heroic Age, so the Iliad can

be seen to capture the end of that era within its lines. 1

The Heroic Race of the Iliad reached their terminus

not by external forces or actors but from those within.

Therefore, to understand how the Iliad creates a dying

world, one must be capable of articulating the world

that dies, the values and norms that cannibalized their

own. Gender plays a critical role in shaping the Iliad’s

narrative through its themes, vocabulary, and the relationships

between characters. I focus here on Achilles’s

often ignored connections to the Iliad’s women:

as a narrative shadow of Helen, a parallel in grief and

lamentation to the Trojan women, and a reception of

Hera’s wrath. And the expression of anger—including

the infamous wrath of Achilles—is governed by gender,

but divinity as well intervenes; the divinity of the

immortals complicates and sometimes supersedes

1. Hesiod, Works and Days, ed. and trans. Glenn W. Most,

Loeb Classical Library 57, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 2018), 156–173. Ruth Scodel, “Heroes and

Nephilim: Sex Between Gods and Mortals,” in Gods and

Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern Mythology, ed. Kelly

and Metcalf (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021),

176–178. Laura M. Slatkin, “The Wrath of Thetis,” Transactions

of the American Philological Association (1974–2014) 116

(1986): 23–4.

gender roles as an essence that can extend to their mortal

progeny. The first section of this paper will analyze Achilles’s

role as protagonist, interrogating how and why his character is

uniquely suited to frame the narrative. The latter section will

discuss sorrow and the inception of wrath, gender as a social

category, and semi-divinity. As protagonist, Achilles possesses

the singular ability to represent the cosmological role of the

Trojan War through his unique relationship to heroic society,

but chiefly to Helen; he is enmeshed in the social ambiguities

of gender tied to his divinity while being distinctly empowered

to act by the masculine role. The wrath of Achilles must therefore

be located within the broader web of narrative and personal

relationships that support, reflect, and inflect this corrective

anger. 2 Further, his character illustrates how the figure

of the demigod fundamentally represents the contradictions

and threats of the Heroic Age and its legacy into the fifth age.

In this way, Achilles embodies and enacts the death throes of

a social order, unable to continue substantiating its own existence.

Two main theoretical considerations will guide the analysis of

the text. The first comes from Classicist Gregory Nagy’s formulation

of theme in Homeric epic poetry. 3 He posits that

diction in epos constitutes theme and that the repetition of

phrases, content, or structure bears inherent meaning. Similarly,

themes are intentional but fundamentally based in tradition.

The final tenant of this primary analytical framework is

that the work should be interpreted as a whole, including its

cultural context. The second theory is reserved for a more precise

focus due to necessary limitations of scope and length. Its

application consists of a semiological device that will be employed

very narrowly to enable a deeper analysis of the meaning,

in the mode of signification, of the demigod as an imaginative

concept within the poem. Signification is concerned with

referents—the concept represented by a “sign” in the form of

words, images or other means. To divide between sense and

reference in this way is to separate a sign’s meaning either by

what other qualities are associated with it—its sense—or by

2. See discussion of mēnis as a corrective wrath that punishes the

breaking of religious taboos in Leonard Muellner, The Anger of Achilles:

Mēnis in Greek Epic (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 12–17.

3. Gregory Nagy, The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in

Archaic Greek Poetry, rev. ed. (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University

Press, 1999), 1–3. Nagy credits the origin of these ideas to Milman

Parry and his work on oral-formulaic poetry.

Achilles and the Crisis of the Heroic Age 11

the process of connecting it to its referent, which is its reference.

4

ACHILLES AS ILIADIC PROTAGONIST

Achilles’s position as the Iliad’s protagonist is often taken for

granted. One conventional explanation focuses on the martial

ideals of a warrior society. Achilles is the natural protagonist,

in the logic typified by Michael Clarke, because he exemplifies

the masculine ideal of heroic excellence and the foil of mortality

that drives the plot of the Iliad. 5 On its surface, this sort of

argument is straightforward and may even seem natural. But

why would the “best of the Achaeans” not be the expedition’s

leader or even Helen’s husband? 6 The real flaw in the prior argument

is that it fails to consider the poetic mechanism by

which Achilles is chosen as the best of the Achaeans in lieu

of other aristocratic warriors. Put another way, it presupposes

that Achilles existed as a character with particular attributes

before being fit to a narrative. Further, agreeing with the claim

that the themes of epic poetry are fundamentally traditional,

the story must, to some degree, precede the crystallization of

the character. Achilles in his totality—considering his genealogy

and social status alongside his personal characteristics—

must be filling a narrative purpose for which other characters

were unfit.

In further inspecting Achilles’s candidacy, we need to consider

the Iliad’s perception of its contents in relation to its audience.

For Achilles to simply stand for the heights of the warrior culture’s

ideal man, as others like Heracles and Theseus had done

before, would fail to account for the impending collapse of a

culture that had sustained many illustrious generations of heroes

before the war. 7 A narrative of decline is interwoven within

the text, both in relation to the heroes and the Homeric

4. Marcel Danesi, “Semiotics,” in The Encyclopedia of Literary and

Cultural Theory, ed. Michael Ryan (Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons,

2010).

5. Michael Clarke, “Manhood and Heroism,” in The Cambridge Companion

to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006).

This argument is, admittedly, somewhat tangential to Clarke’s focus.

It would be more appropriately considered an assumption of his

argument.

6. Homer, Iliad, trans. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago: University of

Chicago Press, 1951), 2.769–771.

7. Hom. Il. 1.260–72; 20.286–7. Heracles and Theseus are explicitly

mentioned by Nestor in the first passage.

12 Achilles and the Crisis of the Heroic Age

audience, as well as the Trojan heroes and earlier men of their

age. In the Iliad’s final book, Achilles says to Priam:

I sit here in Troy, and bring nothing but sorrow to you and

your children.

And you, old sir, we are told you prospered once…

But now the Uranian gods brought us, an affliction upon you

forever there is fighting about your city, and men killed. (Hom. Il.

24.542–3, 547–8)

Achilles speaks on his own behalf, but the audience is included

with the “we” who were told of the prosperous royal family of

Troy by the Iliad itself. Achilles has savagely killed Priam’s son

and keeps the corpse to mutilate it, an unjustifiable action in

the language of honor and glory. In the traditional view, Achilles

exists separately from the Iliad’s theme of decline. But if the

first book of the Iliad exposes a sort of hypocrisy in the Greek

camp’s execution of honor and trust among warrior allies, the

final book of the Iliad does the same to the notion of a hero’s

quest for glory—a notion so inextricable from sorrow and ruin

that the price of the Heroic age can be valued in mourners, victims,

and corpses. The poet may ponder how the conclusion of

a world and a way of life comes to pass through the reflective,

critical Achilles.

And while this theme is briefly drawn back into focus at the

story’s conclusion, it is one of Achilles’s most peculiar traits

throughout his withdrawal from battle. In Book 9, when the

Achaean envoy beseeches Achilles to re-enter the fray, Achilles

gives an explicitly damning response to the reconciliatory

attempt that threatens the security of the war.

[...] But from me alone of all the Achaians

he has taken and keeps the bride of my heart. Let him lie

beside her

and be happy. Yet why must the Argives fight with the Trojans?

[…] Was it not for the sake of lovely-haired Helen?

Are the sons of Atreus alone among mortal men the ones

who love their wives? (Hom. Il. 9.335–7, 339–341)

This diatribe leaves his visitors stunned, and for good reason—

Achilles not only states at the end of his rant that he will be

setting sail for Phthia in the morning but leaves open the suggestion

that Paris’s refusal to give up Helen has been, if not

right, then at least justifiable. At the very least, Achilles insinuates

that the integrity of the war is so compromised that there


may be no justification in fighting it; the war’s stated goals

defeat themselves as the pursuit of women valued in terms

of objective beauty and subjective sentimental attachment

encourages dishonorable and unjust theft within the Achaean

camp itself. And while his visitors justify their continued

participation in the war in terms of social obligations, enticing

him with the heroic glory that he is supposed to desire, Achilles

faces a crisis of clarity. Despite the severity of his words,

he reaches no ideological conclusion. In fact, his half-hearted

rupture with the heroic values that have commanded the

course of his life is what only truly resolves in Book 24, as he

receives Priam as suppliant. It is not a traditional resolution—

it is a cessation of bleeding after major trauma, representing

not the healing of the wound, but the bloodlessness of the

body. The hero’s tool is slaughter, and Achilles will realize too

late the disastrous cost of glory in a finite economy of mortals.

Achilles is not the only character to enjoy this reflective trait,

however. Helen engages in this same kind of dialogue with

the failure of her society and its values, albeit in more hushed

tones. As Ruby Blondell notes, Helen’s self-blame and degradation

subtly undermine the integrity of the masculine war

effort ostensibly fought on her behalf. 8 Achilles and Helen are

also joined in their shared resentment, aimed squarely at the

men who led them to Troy. Helen’s scorn towards her husband,

Paris, is apparent: “But this man’s heart is no steadfast thing,

nor yet will it be so ever hereafter;/ for that I think he shall

take the consequence.” 9 Like Achilles, Helen is not just critical

but forward-looking, capable of projecting future consequences

through her person. Helen is perhaps even more literally

capable of this than Achilles—after at least a decade in

Troy, she and Paris share no children in common. 10 Despite its

relatively normal form and function, their blighted marriage

has a fleeting character ready-made for dissolution. Similarly,

Achilles’s resentment of the expedition’s leader is the most

explosive source of tension in the Greek camp, and, in Book 1,

Achilles derides the treatment he experiences at the hands of

8. Ruby Blondell, “‘Bitch That I Am’: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion in

the Iliad,” Traditions of the American Philological Association 140, no. 11

(Spring 2010): 17–8.

9. Hom. Il. 6.348–358; for an explicit formulation of “I followed him

to Troy”: 3.173–4.

10. This fact goes completely unremarked upon, but various remedies

for ‘birth control’ were within the realm of women’s medicine so

it may as well be luck as Helen’s intention.


Agamemnon. 11 The theft of a woman echoes the beginning of

the war, while the supplication of Chryses begins the framework

for the poem’s final scene. Between Achilles and Helen

there is formed a sort of dialectic of decline, and criticism is

but one of many connections shared between the two in this

most fascinating bond. In fact, the thematic connection between

Achilles and Helen may be the single most important

factor influencing his status as protagonist.

This connection begins at the very inception of the Trojan

War, mentioned only once explicitly in the Iliad’s final book.

The Judgment of Paris is mentioned for the first and only time

roughly thirty lines before Hera states that all gods of Olympus

were present at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis. 12 Both

are mentioned as different kinds of explanations for the divine

perspectives towards their mortal actors. Through this narrative

framing, Achilles and Helen appear passively in the war’s

divine origins. Achilles is the product of a divinely arranged

marriage between goddess and mortal, Helen the divinely chosen

prize in a contest for mortal favor. And the gods do not just

defend the Achaeans but specifically Achilles as their prime

beneficiary, son of Thetis and key to the war’s success. 13 Helen

is not regarded as a regular woman of Troy; instead, she is

given special attention by the Olympians and manipulated by

Aphrodite as a crucial motivator for the Trojan side. They share

also basic traits: Achilles and obviously Helen are renowned for

their godlike beauty, above even other demigods. 14

But neither Helen nor Achilles can be considered entirely passive

in the story of Troy, Achilles more unambiguously so. Compare

two moments of explicit defiance that attempt to negotiate

with a god’s demands: Helen’s rejection of Aphrodite and

Achilles’s bout with the river Skamandros:

11. Hom. Il. 1.158–60; Phoenix says Peleus sent Achilles “to Agamemnon”

at 9.439–441.

12. Hom. Il. 24.25–30; 24.55–63.

13. Laura M. Slatkin, “The Wrath of Thetis,” Transactions of the American

Philological Association (1974–2014) 116 (1986): 9, 14–15.

14. Hom. Il. 3.157–158; 2.673–675.


Strange divinity! Why are you still so stubborn to beguile me?

…Go yourself and sit beside him, abandon the gods’ way,

…Not I. I am not going to him. It would be too shameful.

I will not serve his bed, since the Trojan women hereafter

would laugh at me, all, and my heart even now is confused with

sorrows. (Hom. Il. 3.399–413) 15

Helen mirrors Achilles (or we see how, briefly, Achilles has been

mirroring Helen) as her rejection of Aphrodite amounts to her

rejection of a prescribed, ultimately feminine, role as a wife

that she is no longer interested in participating in due to the

toil it has cost her. She stresses her sense of social estrangement

as Paris’s wife, one that shames her in the eyes of her

same-sex peers. Helen’s demeanor suggests a personal sense

that the war was never worth the cost. 16 And although it is not

remarkable that she feels this way, the depth of her inner tumult

is stunning in contrast to her inability to act directly. Helen

is immediately cowed into obeying the goddess, with no real

power to stand her own ground. Achilles, in contrast, is able

to carry his will to completion, albeit with disastrous consequences.

He withdraws from battle, ultimately resulting in the

death of Patroclus. When he confronts the river, Skamandros,

Achilles defies the river’s wishes and continues to mercilessly

kill Trojans on the plain. 17 Ultimately, the gods must intervene

on Achilles’s behalf to save him from being drowned by Skamandros.

But Achilles is able to act in accord with his intent,

and the gods assiduously protect his ability to do so. Mortals

are both principal actors and key objects of divine conflict in

the Iliad, and this distinction is drawn, sometimes hazily, from

the poles of Achilles to Helen. Achilles’s ability to act is as important

to the continuance of the war as Helen’s inability to do

so, and it is this almost perfect mirror image that designates

Achilles as protagonist.

GENDER, WRATH, AND DIVINITY

Achilles’s thematic resonance with divine and mortal women

is more pervasive than Helen alone, when the characters are

15. Note the use of “still” and the emphasis on trickery when Aphrodite

has been trying to tempt Helen to visit Paris as suggestive of

Helen’s original abduction involving some level of seduction from

the divine. Attention should also be paid to the somewhat unusual

translation of this passage by Richard Lattimore, although I prefer

its tone.

16. Hom. Il. 3.172–5 for a stronger emphasis of this idea by Helen.

17. Hom. Il. 21.223–7.


understood to move through fundamentally different expectations

for the expression of emotion. The ancient Stoics expounded

the virtues of sublimating anger, but the ability to

do so appears to be the normative assumption for the Iliad’s

women. 18 When women in the Iliad do express anger, however

briefly, they are not included in the masculine capacity for

violence that would embody that anger. 19 And women held as

captives like Helen and Briseis may not even broach the point

of expressing anger overtly, a battle of wills ending before a

physical confrontation as they have no choice but to submit. 20

Even a goddess such as Hera, traditionally wielding divine

wrath, must sometimes restrain herself in relation to her husband’s

dominion over her. 21 In regards to mortal women, the

obstacle is between words and action. Menelaos cries to rally

the men: “Ah me! You brave in words, you women, not men, of

Achaia!” 22 This is the bridge that mortal men may cross, and

one that Achilles condemns as a refutation of his own humanity

as he confronts Hector. 23

The comparisons become very explicit when examined not at

the end result of anger, of which women are precluded, but at

one of the Iliad’s most fertile origins of anger: grief. The Iliad is

no stranger to death, but formal lamentation and the behaviors

of grief are not introduced into the narrative until Achilles

learns of the death of Patroclus. The reaction of Achilles

in Book 18 is recalled with startling clarity by Andromachē in

Book 22. The imagery of a dark cloud or mist is described enclosing

both characters as they drop to the ground, surrounded

by a throng of crying people. 24 A sense of immediate, overwhelming

despair, possibly manifesting as a suicidal impulse,

connects them as well. Something intangible connects the

young widow with Achilles—something otherwise concealed

without the nominally gendered scripts of lamentation. Al-

18. Seneca, Moral Essays, Volume I: De Ira, trans. John W. Basore,

Loeb Classical Library 214, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University

Press, 1928), 1.8, 1.12.

19. Nancy Felson and Laura Slatkin, “Gender and Homeric Epic,” in

The Cambridge Companion to Homer (Cambridge: Cambridge University

Press, 2006), 97–98.

20. Hom. Il. 3.418–419; 1.348.

21. Hom. Il. 1.568–569; but not always, as seen in 8.459–61 and

4.20–3.

22. Hom. Il. 7.96.

23. Hom. Il. 22.261–2.

24. Hom. Il. 18.22–27, 30–34 [Achilles’s initial reaction]; 22.466–7,

473–474, 481, 484–485 [Andromachē’s initial reaction].


though Patroclus is generally beloved by the Greeks, no other

man on the Greek side will reciprocate Achilles’s acts to establish

a framework of masculine grief. Further, Achilles and

Hector’s bereaved mother, Hecabe, are described as tearing

their hair out in grief, although the iconic beating of breasts

and face is performed by only female characters. 25 Achilles is

the only male character in the Iliad for whom the phrase λιγέως

κλαίοντα appears to describe mourning, where λιγυς otherwise

modifies κωκυω/κλαιω for exclusively female mourners. 26 Additionally,

in Book 24, Hecabe expresses her desire to eat Achilles’s

liver raw, mimicking the words Achilles said to Hector

shortly before killing him. 27

All of these interactions happen outside of the space of the

formal lamentation, which draws the gendered differences

into even starker relief. In ancient Greek culture, the lamentation

was traditionally led and delivered by women. 28 But

Achilles leads the lamentation of Patroclus, and the only other

formal lament offered comes from Briseis. 29 The other Greek

kings are not entirely absent from the process of grieving. They

weep for Patroclus, participate in the funeral games, and are

mentioned to comfort Achilles in his grief. But it is surely no

coincidence that the final lamentation offered on behalf of Patroclus

and Hector, respectively, come from Briseis and Helen.

The degradation of the women as captives, valuable objects of

exchange, is subverted as they survive warriors whose transformation

into corpses made them similarly priceless objects

of bargain. Even if the Iliad offers a picture of the alternative

military lamentation that functions in a scarcity of women

of appropriate social status, the poet draws out the parallels

between the lamentations of Patroclus and those of Hector—

25. Hom. Il. 18.27; 22.406. Hair tearing is sometimes identified as a

masculine response to grief. For more, see Christos Tsagalis, The Oral

Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality in the Homeric Epics (Cambridge,

MA: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008). But as a response to someone’s

actual death it is properly shared only between Achilles and

Hecuba.

26. Hom. Il. 19.4–5; 19.287–300 has an example of the latter. For discussion

of semantic distinctions see Tsagalis, 418–423. Achilles gets

the more typical ‘masculine’ formulation of lamenting elsewhere.

27. Hom. Il. 24.212–4. Also a maternal connotation of wrath associated

with Hera, see Joan O’Brien, “Homer’s Savage Hera,” The

Classical Journal 86, no. 2 (1990): 106.

28. Margaret Alexiou, Dimitrios Yatromanolakis, and Panagiotis

Roilos, “Tradition and Change in Antiquity,” in The Ritual Lament in

Greek Tradition (Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2002), 6.

29. Hom. Il. 23.17–23; 19.287–300.


uniquely privileging the ritual role of female mortals when they

could have otherwise been elided. When Andromachē laments

her husband’s death, she despairs for their son and home,

speaks of his parents’ grief, and wishes that her husband

might have died at home, arms outstretched to her. 30 Achilles’s

lamentation is sprawling, with several extended sequences

of mourning peppered throughout the poem’s last third.

His lament is infused with more masculine affects, with talk

of revenge killings and hostages. Achilles mourns his inability

to return either himself or Patroclus to their natal homes in

Greece, while Andromachē inversely laments her forthcoming

bondage in Greece as a prisoner of war. Both wish that they

had never been born, a common formulation of intense regret

or sorrow in the epic. Achilles also despairs for the future of

his child, who he had hoped to be under the care of Patroclus

for at least a brief time after the war. By all rights, Achilles and

Andromachē should occupy the most incomparable positions,

but the emphasis on the disruption of wartime domesticity

does more than produce sympathy. It establishes a shared set

of sentimental values and costs associated with extremely different

positions and behaviors.

A gender essentialist approach, whereby masculinity and femininity

are viewed as inborn, biologically determined traits, is

commonly viewed as the emic approach to interpreting the

Ancient Greek sex-gender system. 31 I will not dispute the maturation

of such ideas in the dramas of Aeschylus, or the works

of Aristotle, but to the reading of masculinity and femininity

in the Iliad, the essentialist framework is largely extraneous.

References are occasionally made to encourage soldiers to be

“like men” on the battlefield as a jibe, but adhering to gender

norms for their own sake is not invoked as a powerful cause of

action. 32 And while a generally misogynistic sense of women’s

inferiority does pervade the text, whether these differences

are ascribable to an idea of women’s holistic worseness or

women’s inferior education matching their perceived physical

inferiority is unclear. My assertion is not that domesticity is

feminine nor that all violence is categorically masculine. Rather,

gender should be defined as a fundamentally social identity,

made in the material circumstance of a particular place and

time in relation to others; the importance of gender is the so-

30. Hom. Il. 24.725–45.

31. Felson and Slatkin, “Gender,” 91–3.

32. Hom. Il. 16.270; 7.96.


cial function a person of that gender should perform. 33 When

Achilles, a young person of fine health, anxiously awaits the return

of Patroclus from the battlefield, he sidesteps the associations

with the ill and the elderly as fundamental tenets of his

character. His resemblance to Andromachē, further echoed in

their laments and grief, is heightened by the feminine connotations

of the able-bodied adult absent from the battlefield.

Achilles’s anger can thus be understood as not only representing

his individual claim, but those of a more complicated network

of aristocratic ties that include divinities and enslaved

people coalescing in Achilles’s person. The common framing

of Achilles sees his acts as impossible to understand, beyond

all reason, crossing unthinkable taboos. Yet, Hecabe seems to

understand intuitively what the aim had been in the desecration

of Hector’s body. 34 Further, his damning of the Greeks is

as much a reflection of the Greek attitude towards the Trojan

populace as it is a personal flaw. 35 In the widely shared origins

of Achilles’s anger, the Iliad suggests not that Achilles is

alone in his desire to enact violence but in his ability to do so.

This ability is not even shared equally among gods, as martial

prowess is notably beyond the scope of Aphrodite’s powers.” 36

Achilles is symptomatic of a state of critical decline, rather

than an individual cause, precisely because his wrath may represent

the sentiments of those it injures. More specifically, it

draws out the cycle of broken religious and culture tabus inciting

further tabu behavior, inciting further wrath. The circular

nature of the entire Iliad is found in Achilles’s ability to affect

others, where he may be representative of both inciting cause

and end result. Achilles’s pseudo-apotheosis is substantiated

by a shared platform of wrath that bridges divine preeminence

with the bitterly mortal concerns and sorrows of the Trojan

women.

The ability to access this state of social ambiguity—one that is

between gender roles without properly transgressing them—is

a feature of Achilles’s fundamentally connected to his semi-divine

nature. Helen has a similar moment, where in her weaving

she masterfully incorporates a narration of the Trojan war

33. David Mcinnes, “Gender as a Practice,” in The Wiley Blackwell

Encyclopedia of Gender and Sexuality Studies, ed. Nancy A. Naples

(Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016).

34. Hom. Il. 24.753–7.

35. Hom. Il. 7.400–2.

36. Hom. Il. 5.348–9; 5.421–5.


itself. 37 By stepping briefly into the position of the narrator,

somewhere between muse and poet, she dips a brief second

into the masculine role of the orator, but not transgressively

so. As a demigod, Achilles may access a similar nonbinary social

medium as goddesses like Athena and Iris when they drive

chariots and arm for battle. 38 As his mortal tragedy is enmeshed

in a wide net of shared sorrows, Achilles is able to combine it

with divine knowledge and ability to unleash devastation in

a way unmatched by even his male comrades. The ability of

the Heroic age’s characteristic semi-divinity to incite its own

destruction is fundamentally based in this state of ambiguous

belonging in tandem with the hero’s double-edged ideals. The

inseparability of glory and sorrow, power and death, is exaggerated

by the capacity of semi-divinity to exaggerate and

intensify them to epic proportions through the extent of its

societal reach.

How should we then make sense of the demigod as a figure

in the poet’s imagination? What does the semi-divine invoke

culturally to partake in this ambiguity? A discussion of significaction

is here relevant to sift through a rich trove of potential

meanings. The referent is both obvious and unknown: a real

demigod would be so like the gods that they would be immediately

identifiable, but the people of Homer’s audience would

never have seen one. 39 But they would, in the same breath,

be so like mortals in form that the image is easily conjurable,

the same in essence as any human. Perhaps it would be more

appropriate to say then that they possess a form that is godlike

up to the point of lacking whatever godly signature makes

Aphrodite recognizable to Helen, or Apollo to Achilles, even

as disguised in mortal appearance. 40 The imprecise admixture

of physical form and immaterial essence that shapes it is the

frame from which semi-divinity appears to trouble itself.

The Iliad presents a mixed image in regard to the demigod’s

ability to substantiate their own divine essence, one that depends

as much on parentage as on continued divine patronage.

Nowhere is the deeply troubled relations between mortality

and divinity in the same form as apparent as through

Achilles. One of the distinctive qualities of the divine body in

the Iliad is that its sustenance is taken not from food and wine,

37. Hom. Il. 3.125–8.

38. Hom. Il. 2.445–6; 5.365–6; 5.427–430.

39. Scodel, “Heroes and Nephilim,” 175–177.

40. Hom. Il. 3.396; 22.7–10.


but ambrosia and nectar. 41 The demigod Achilles starves like

any man. His semi-divinity is fractious—every step closer to

humanity pulls him, lurching, three steps closer to godhood.

The majority of the Iliad is marked by Achilles’s absence from

battle and his apparently callous attitude toward the deaths

and injuries racked up by the Achaeans. But after the death of

Patroclus, Achilles is apparently reconciled with his community—the

Greek kings rally to his side, urge him to nourish himself,

and share in his sorrow after fighting valiantly to recover

Patroclus’s body. 42 But it is precisely the renewal of Achilles’s

human connections, his re-establishment within a mortal

community, that is marked by his most drastic break from

mortality. He is the only living mortal in the Iliad to partake

in ambrosia and nectar. 43 The emotion that motivated him to

resume his communal responsibilities is severing him from that

community even as it is based in his strong sense of love and

affection for a fallen comrade.

And the problematic coexistence of the mortal and the divine

is further troubled by the divine tendency to exaggerate the

godlike qualities of their most favored demigods. Achilles enjoys

favor from Hera, stated both to be the right of his maternal

line and a product of his status on the front lines. 44 Achilles’s

defining wrath also finds its Olympian counterpart in Hera,

who shares one of his rare formulations of anger in the form of

raw-eating the enemy. 45 The connection here is unclear—does

Achilles’s divine wrath find its power from a benefactor, or is

his patronage based on the recognition of a shared sentiment

between patron and client? A similar relationship may be posited

between Aphrodite and Helen. Regardless of order, the

powerful favor of goddesses transforms the already semi-divine

into something beyond human. After the interventions

of Hera and Thetis, Achilles is compared to a star on the battlefield—evoking

a complete, brilliant separation from mortal

form even as death is wrought by his hands. 46 And without the

original intervention of Aphrodite, even the daughter of Zeus

would not have been the object of the war that destroyed the

heroic race of man.

41. Hom. Il. 5.339–342; For discussion of goddesses bestowing

special lines of divinity on children via breastfeeding, see O’Brien,

“Savage Hera,” 108, 118–9.

42. Hom. Il. 19.161–3.

43. Hom. Il. 19.347–8.

44. Hom. Il. 24.55–63; 18.165–8; 18.361–8.

45. O’Brien, “Savage Hera,” 106.

46. Hom. Il. 22.26–31.


The preceding exploration of the referent compels us to recognize

the two most salient senses of the semi-divine as (1)

oppositional, conflicting, or competing desire and (2) death,

dying. These may both be surmised from Achilles’s instructions

to Patroclus in book 16 before he takes to the field in the former’s

armor.

When you have driven them from the ships, come back; although

later the thunderous lord of Hera might grant you the winning of

glory, you must not set your mind on fighting the Trojans, whose

delight is in battle, without me. So you will diminish my honour.

(Hom. Il. 16.86–90)

This appears to be a return to form. Achilles has embraced the

heroic mission once more, reaching the natural conclusion of

his anger. But the style of repetition used within this scene to

reference and reinforce textual themes here draws out best

the theme of lingering inconsistency. 47 Achilles goes on:

You must not, in the pride and fury of fighting, go on

slaughtering the Trojans, and lead the way against Ilion,

for fear some one of the everlasting gods on Olympos

might crush you. (Hom. Il. 16.91–4)

Two reasons are offered for the same instructions, and both

are connected to Achilles’s own conflicted feelings about remaining

in Troy. But Achilles’s pursuit of honor has no connection

with his desire for Patroclus’s safety, and in fact, as the

audience is made aware, the two are directly at odds. The situation

itself was engineered through Achilles’s conflicted feelings,

his desire to fight and win glory juxtaposed with his desire

to abstain and force a restoration of his status through his

absence. But in fact, another layer of this inner conflict began

at the moment of his birth. In one of Thetis’s first lines in the

epic, she questions her decision to even raise a son she knew

would die so young. 48 Achilles’s choice to stay fighting in Troy

is never assured, and his conflicted desire to grow old in peace

is always in the background of his deliberations to rejoin the

battlefield. And here recurs the unique pressure binding the

demigod—the looming consequence of their own mortality.

And yet, Achilles seems incapable of prioritizing impulses or

concerns. It is not just a personal failure to act rationally, but a

societal inability to produce elites with either divinely perfect

abilities or fully mortal limitations that may produce stability.

47. Muellner, The Anger of Achilles, 159.

48. Hom. Il. 1.413–4.


And when the dust settled on Troy, only the demigod’s mortality

persisted.

CONCLUSION

It is easy to imagine an idyllic version of the past as a time

and place where people shared common values, morals, and

ideals. It is especially tempting to believe so when times grow

lean. But it can be equally as satisfying to picture a repugnant

and backwards past, to fashion a set of scales to weigh the

quantity of pride that can be derived from the distance. Neither

kind of story is quite true, not even in a simple way. This

remains, then, one of the most fascinating characteristics of

the Iliad—not just its own perspective on its legendary heroes

but the Iliad as an artifact of place, time, and people. For the

poet, his history is neither shallowly primitive nor basically superior,

in the human way. The complexity of Achilles’s character

has perhaps daunted readers and scholars for this same

reason, this inability to define him narrowly within his roles

as the best of the Achaeans and their most hateful king; the

cause of their sorrows and the man capable of killing Hector.

The ambiguity of Achilles’s moral presentation is perfectly fitted

to the social ambiguities of his character as a whole, bespoke

for the rhetorical layers of the poet’s historical vision.

And together with the infamously inscrutable Helen, the fabric

of a poetic tradition that captures the end of an age is knit

together. The Iliad is a product of people with their grief, their

love, their regret, and their anger—fundamentally foreign and

viscerally intimate all at once. The world of the demigods may

die, but we—the we of Homer’s past and the us of our present—still

bleed.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Alexiou, Margaret. “Tradition and Change in Antiquity.” In The

Ritual Lament in Greek Tradition, revised by Dimitrios Yatromanolakis

and Panagiotis Roilos, 4–14. Lanham: Rowman &

Littlefield Publishers, 2002.

Blondell, Ruby. “‘Bitch That I Am’: Self-Blame and Self-Assertion

in the Iliad.” Traditions of the American Philological

Association 140, no. 11 (Spring 2010): 1–32.

Clarke, Michael. “Manhood and Heroism.” In The Cambridge

Companion to Homer, edited by Robert Fowler, 74–90. Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2004.

Danesi, Marcel. “Semiotics.” In The Encyclopedia of Literary

and Cultural Theory: Literary Theory from 1966 to the Present,

edited by Michael Ryan. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

10.1002/9781444337839.wbelctv2s005.

Felson, Nancy and Laura Slatkin. “Gender and Homeric Epic.”

In The Cambridge Companion to Homer, edited by Robert

Fowler, 91–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2006.

Hesiod. Works and Days. Edited and translated by Glenn W.

Most. Loeb Classical Library 57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 2018. https://doi.org/10.4159/DLCL.hesiod-works_days.2018.

Homer. Iliad. Translated by Richmond Lattimore. Chicago:

University of Chicago Press, 1951. Mcinnes, David.

“Gender as a Practice.” In The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia

of Gender and Sexuality Studies, edited by Nancy A.

Naples. Hoboken: John Wiley & Sons, 2016. https://doi.

org/10.1002/9781118663219.

Muellner, Leonard. The Anger of Achilles: Mēnis in Greek Epic.

Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Nagy, Gregory. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero

in Archaic Greek Poetry. Revised edition. Baltimore: Johns

Hopkins University Press, 1999.


O’Brien, Joan. “Homer’s Savage Hera.” The Classical Journal 86,

no. 2 (1990): 105–25. http://www.jstor.org/stable/3297720.

Scodel, Ruth. “Heroes and Nephilim: Sex Between Gods and

Mortals.” In Gods and Mortals in Early Greek and Near Eastern

Mythology, edited by Adrian Kelly and Christopher Metcalf,

169–184. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021.

https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108648028.

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Basore. Loeb Classical Library 214. Cambridge, MA: Harvard

University Press, 1928. https://doi.org/10.4159/DLCL.seneca_younger-de_ira.1928.

Slatkin, Laura M. “The Wrath of Thetis.” Transactions of the

American Philological Association (1974-2014) 116 (1986): 1–24.

Tsagalis, Christos. The Oral Palimpsest: Exploring Intertextuality

in the Homeric Epics. Hellenic Studies Series 29. Cambridge,

MA: Center for Hellenic Studies, 2008. http://nrs.harvard.

edu/urn-3:hul.ebook:CHS_TsagalisC.The_Oral_Palimpsest.2008.


BRONZE AGE ACHILLES’S

SHIELD

HOLLY JAMES CHANFRAU

Univ. of Washington

p. 281

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

This digital piece explores the dark age conceptions of

Bronze Age Greece through the reconstruction of Achilles’s

shield. To do this, I created a shield that was as true

to the Homeric description as possible while trying to fit

this description into established Bronze Age art as much as

possible. I created my design by meshing the description of

Achilles’s shield in Book 18 of the Iliad (A.T. Murray’s translation)

with previous reconstructions and Bronze Age archaeological

finds. Much of the difficulties in this project came

from the fact that the Greek Iron Age world, wherein the

Iliad was composed, was vastly different than the Bronze

Age it was struggling to remember. Much of the imagery the

Homeric poem describes maps well to the Iron Age but not

so well to the palatial, extensively connected, and literate

Bronze Age. For example, finding war, soldier, and troop

depictions in Iron Age work for the Third Rim, a city at war,

was very easy. But war was rarely depicted in Bronze Age

art; instead, hunting or athletic images were often the preferred

method of showing battle prowess. Meanwhile, the

agricultural scenes in the shield description had a plethora

of Bronze Age examples of signet rings and wall paintings.

These two ages represented distinct cultures with their

own priorities; however, an Iron Age person would have no

way of knowing that with only the ruins around them. The

Homeric tradition, and my piece in turn, attempts to fill in

the gaps of history.

p. 29 1

VERGIL, AENEID I.1–1561A LIMERICK TRANSLATION

2Ellis Mucchetti, Univ. of Michigan–Ann Arbor

For two thousand years, Vergil’s Aeneid has occupied

an elevated, almost untouchable place in

literary culture. I have attempted to bring a bit of

levity to such a weighty epic by translating its beginning

into limericks.

As we know, these ancient epics were intended to be

read aloud, and it seems a shame to relegate our translations

to the written page. The original dactylic hexameter

begs to be spoken aloud, and my hope is that my

less-formal limericks encourage the same. In the same

spirit, I have attempted to preserve such poetic devices

as alliteration in my translation.

EDITION

J. B. Greenough, ed. The greater poems of Virgil. Boston:

Ginn, Heath, & Co, 1883.

p. 30 1

AENEID I.1–156

I sing about arms and a man,

who, fleeing from Troy’s final stand,

was far driven by fate,

and by Juno’s hate,

to seek the Italian land.

Arma virumque canō, Trōiae quī prīmus ab ōrīs

Ītaliam, fātō profugus, Lāvīniaque vēnit

lītora, multum ille et terrīs iactātus et altō

vī superum saevae memorem Iūnōnis ob īram;

multa quoque et bellō passus, dum conderet urbem,

inferretque deōs Latiō, genus unde Latīnum,

Albānīque patrēs, atque altae moenia Rōmae.

Muse, tell how he sailed abroad

Through great dangers, pursued and outlawed,

by Queen Juno, insulted,

and the trials that resulted,

Can such anger be held by a god?

Fate decreed: the old city Carthago—

strong, wealthy, and dearest to Juno,

one day’d be destroyed

by descendants of Troy.

This prophecy gave her great sorrow.

Mūsa, mihī causās memorā, quō nūmine laesō,

quidve dolēns, rēgīna deum tot volvere cāsūs

īnsīgnem pietāte virum, tot adīre labōrēs

impulerit. Tantaene animīs caelestibus īrae?

Urbs antīqua fuit, Tyriī tenuēre colōnī,

Karthāgō, Ītaliam contrā Tiberīnaque longē

ōstia, dīves opum studiīsque asperrima bellī,

quam Iūnō fertur terrīs magis omnibus ūnam

posthabitā coluisse Samō; hīc illius arma,

p. 31 1

She feared this, and thought of the war

Argos fought on old Ilium’s shore,

and the judgment of Paris.

She, scorned and embarrassed,

could never forget such a score.

So incensed, the spurned daughter of Saturn

kept the left-over Trojans from Latium

for so many long years,

over countless frontiers,

Such an effort it was to found Rome.

They were nearly at Sicily’s isle,

sailing with bronze through the water,

but Juno, long nursing

her wound ever burning

still had not forgotten her ire.

hīc currus fuit; hōc rēgnum dea gentibus esse,

sī quā Fāta sinant, iam tum tenditque fovetque.

Prōgeniem sed enim Trōiānō ā sanguine dūcī

audierat, Tyriās olim quae verteret arcēs;

hinc populum lātē regem bellōque superbum

ventūrum excidiō Libyae: sīc volvere Parcās.

Id metuēns, veterisque memor Sāturnia bellī,

prīma quod ad Trōiam prō cārīs gesserat Argīs—

necdum etiam causae īrārum saevīque dolōrēs

exciderant animō: manet altā mente repostum

iūdicium Paridis sprētaeque iniūria fōrmae,

et genus invīsum, et raptī Ganymēdis honōrēs.

Hīs accēnsa super, iactātōs aequore tōtō

Trōas, rēliquiās Danaum atque immītis Achillī,

arcēbat longē Latiō, multōsque per annōs

errābant, āctī Fātīs, maria omnia circum.

Tantae mōlis erat Rōmānam condere gentem!

Vix e conspectu Siculae telluris in altum

vela dabant laeti, et spumas salis aere ruebant,

cum Iuno, aeternum servans sub pectore volnus,

p. 32

“Must I give up my mission?” said she.

“Am I conquered, unable to keep

the Teucrian king

from far-off Italy?

Perhaps the Fates thus have decreed.

“But Pallas had no such constraint

and when angered by just one man’s rage,

she took Jupiter’s bolt,

and a whole fleet she smote,

yet I ever wage war on this race.”

haec secum: ‘Mene incepto desistere victam,

nec posse Italia Teucrorum avertere regem?

Quippe vetor fatis.

Pallasne exurere classem

Argivom atque ipsos potuit submergere ponto,

unius ob noxam et furias Aiacis Oilei?

Said she: “Who will worship my name?

—if I give up—or honor my fame;

why, if Pallas had power

to smite Ajax with fire,

why should Queen of the Gods bear this shame?”

So debating, her heart all in flame,

the queen to Aeolia came,

the land of the clouds,

where wild winds crowd,

and Aeolus rules in his cave.

Ipsa, Iovis rapidum iaculata e nubibus ignem,

disiecitque rates evertitque aequora ventis,

illum expirantem transfixo pectore flammas

turbine corripuit scopuloque infixit acuto.

Ast ego, quae divom incedo regina, Iovisque

et soror et coniunx, una cum gente tot annos

bella gero!

Et quisquam numen Iunonis adoret

praeterea, aut supplex aris imponet honorem?’

Talia flammato secum dea corde volutans

nimborum in patriam, loca feta furentibus austris,

Aeoliam venit.

p. 33

He presses the tempests and rains,

keeps the winds all imprisoned and chained

as they roar at the doors,

making mountains murmur,

his scepter soothes spirited rage.

If not, they’d sweep up from their lair,

carry land and sea off through the air.

But Jove feared this thing

and so gave them a king

who could tighten or slacken the reins.

Hic vasto rex Aeolus antro

luctantes ventos tempestatesque sonoras

imperio premit ac vinclis et carcere frenat.

Illi indignantes magno cum murmure montis

circum claustra fremunt; celsa sedet Aeolus arce

sceptra tenens, mollitque animos et temperat iras.

Ni faciat, maria ac terras caelumque profundum

quippe ferant rapidi secum verrantque per auras.

Sed pater omnipotens speluncis abdidit atris,

hoc metuens, molemque et montis insuper altos

imposuit, regemque dedit, qui foedere certo

et premere et laxas sciret dare iussus habenas.

Juno came to this king on her knees:

“Since my husband gave power to thee,

both to calm or to raise

all the winds and the waves,

now I ask that you do this for me.

My enemies sail the sea,

bearing Troy’s crushed gods to Italy.

Lend strength to the wind

or wreck their sunk ships,

or scatter them over the sea.

Ad quem tum Iuno supplex his vocibus usa est:

‘Aeole, namque tibi divom pater atque hominum rex

et mulcere dedit fluctus et tollere vento,

p. 34

Fourteen fair Nymph girls have I

and I’ll give the best one as your bride.

In marriage eternal,

she’ll make you a father

for such service you shall supply.”

Said he, “Your task is to decide

what you want; to fulfill it is mine.

For it’s all thanks to you

that I have all I do

from my scepter to kingdom divine.”

gens inimica mihi Tyrrhenum navigat aequor,

Ilium in Italiam portans victosque Penates:

incute vim ventis submersasque obrue puppes,

aut age diversos et disiice corpora ponto.

Sunt mihi bis septem praestanti corpore nymphae,

quarum quae forma pulcherrima Deiopea,

conubio iungam stabili propriamque dicabo,

omnis ut tecum meritis pro talibus annos

exigat, et pulchra faciat te prole parentem.’

Aeolus haec contra: ‘Tuus, O regina, quid optes

explorare labor; mihi iussa capessere fas est.

Tu mihi, quodcumque hoc regni, tu sceptra Iovemque

concilias, tu das epulis accumbere divom,

nimborumque facis tempestatumque potentem.’

Then he took his turned trident and struck

the bare mountain and out of it gushed

the winds, all in ranks,

through the gate he had made,

and blew over the earth in a rush.

Haec ubi dicta, cavum conversa cuspide montem

impulit in latus: ac venti, velut agmine facto,

qua data porta, ruunt et terras turbine perflant.

All those winds settle onto the sea,

dredge it up from its home in the deep,

And then, thick with storms

they roll great waves to shore,

and the men and the ropes creak and scream.

p. 35

Quickly clouds take the daylight away

from men’s eyes; dark night lies in its place.

Then thunders the sky

and glitters with fire,

and death, it seems, they can’t outrace.

Aeneas, his limbs weak with cold,

reaches up to the heavens and groans

“Oh, three-, four-times blessed

were those men who passed

in the shadow of Troy’s mighty walls.

Oh bravest Greek, Tydeus’s son,

why did I not fall at your hand?

In those fields with fierce Hector

and Sarpedon, fighter,

where Simois, full of arms, swiftly runs.”

Incubuere mari, totumque a sedibus imis

una Eurusque Notusque ruunt creberque procellis

Africus, et vastos volvunt ad litora fluctus.

Insequitur clamorque virum stridorque rudentum.

Eripiunt subito nubes caelumque diemque

Teucrorum ex oculis; ponto nox incubat atra.

Intonuere poli, et crebris micat ignibus aether,

praesentemque viris intentant omnia mortem.

Extemplo Aeneae solvuntur frigore membra:

ingemit, et duplicis tendens ad sidera palmas

talia voce refert: ‘O terque quaterque beati,

quis ante ora patrum Troiae sub moenibus altis

contigit oppetere!

O Danaum fortissime gentis

Tydide! Mene Iliacis occumbere campis

non potuisse, tuaque animam hanc effundere dextra,

saevus ubi Aeacidae telo iacet Hector, ubi ingens

Sarpedon, ubi tot Simois correpta sub undis

scuta virum galeasque et fortia corpora volvit?’

p. 36

Then a shrieking great wind from the North,

lifts the sea and strikes ships on their cloth,

The oars are all broken,

up raises the ocean,

waves part to reveal the earth.

Talia iactanti stridens Aquilone procella

velum adversa ferit, fluctusque ad sidera tollit.

Franguntur remi; tum prora avertit, et undis

dat latus; insequitur cumulo praeruptus aquae mons.

Hi summo in fluctu pendent; his unda dehiscens

terram inter fluctus aperit;

These ships hang on top of the crest

and these ones are dropped to the depths.

Three to altars—a reef

in the midst of the sea;

three in shallows and quicksands are left.

Then Orontes, Lycians and all,

with the captain, who’s thrown out headlong,

are turned three times around

and the sea sucks them down

as great waves are borne high by the squall.

furit aestus harenis.

Tris Notus abreptas in saxa latentia torquet—

saxa vocant Itali mediis quae in fluctibus aras—

dorsum immane mari summo; tris Eurus ab alto

in brevia et Syrtis urget, miserabile visu,

inliditque vadis atque aggere cingit harenae.

Unam, quae Lycios fidumque vehebat Oronten,

ipsius ante oculos ingens a vertice pontus

in puppim ferit: excutitur pronusque magister

volvitur in caput; ast illam ter fluctus ibidem

torquet agens circum, et rapidus vorat aequore vortex.

Floating swimmers and weapons appear,

Trojan treasure and cast-off ships’ beams.

Ships of Abas and others—

they quickly are smothered.

Water wins, and they crack at the seams.

p. 37

Neptune sees the sea stirred up and seething

looking up, he sees wild waves teeming

with Aeneas’s fleet,

and Trojans, sore beat,

and he knows this is all Juno’s scheming.

He calls East and West winds to his side

and he speaks, fixing them with his eye.

“Does such faith in your birth

let you mix sky and earth?

Once I calm it, you’re in for a trial.

“Quick, run and tell this to your king:

power’s given to me and not him.

It’s my trident, by lot,

and all he gets is rocks.

Let him rule in his prison of winds.”

p. 38

Adparent rari nantes in gurgite vasto,

arma virum, tabulaeque, et Troia gaza per undas.

Iam validam Ilionei navem, iam fortis Achati,

et qua vectus Abas, et qua grandaevus Aletes,

vicit hiems; laxis laterum compagibus omnes

accipiunt inimicum imbrem, rimisque fatiscunt.

Interea magno misceri murmure pontum,

emissamque hiemem sensit Neptunus, et imis

stagna refusa vadis, graviter commotus; et alto

prospiciens, summa placidum caput extulit unda.

Disiectam Aeneae, toto videt aequore classem,

fluctibus oppressos Troas caelique ruina,

nec latuere doli fratrem Iunonis et irae.

Eurum ad se Zephyrumque vocat, dehinc talia fatur:

‘Tantane vos generis tenuit fiducia vestri?

Iam caelum terramque meo sine numine, venti,

miscere, et tantas audetis tollere moles?

Quos ego—sed motos praestat componere fluctus.

Post mihi non simili poena commissa luetis.

Maturate fugam, regique haec dicite vestro:

non illi imperium pelagi saevumque tridentem,

sed mihi sorte datum. Tenet ille immania saxa,

vestras, Eure, domos; illa se iactet in aula

Aeolus, et clauso ventorum carcere regnet.’

Swiftly, he makes the ocean behave

parts thick clouds, and then brings back the day.

His children, together,

free ships from the water

as he rides with his wheels o’er the waves.

As when riots break out in a nation,

and fury gives people their weapons,

they are calmed by a man

who stands noble and grand—

with words he can calm their aggression.

Sic ait, et dicto citius tumida aequora placat,

collectasque fugat nubes, solemque reducit.

Cymothoe simul et Triton adnixus acuto

detrudunt navis scopulo; levat ipse tridenti;

et vastas aperit syrtis, et temperat aequor,

atque rotis summas levibus perlabitur undas.

Ac veluti magno in populo cum saepe coorta est

seditio, saevitque animis ignobile volgus,

iamque faces et saxa volant—furor arma ministrat;

tum, pietate gravem ac meritis si forte virum quem

conspexere, silent, arrectisque auribus adstant;

ille regit dictis animos, et pectora mulcet,—

And so Neptune; he calmed the sea’s violence.

The clear sky soon returned to its quiet

as soon as the father

looked over the water,

and now he flies off with reins pliant.

And the Trojans who weathered the gale,

very soon they continue to sail.

And now, as you know,

off to Carthage they go.

And we’ve come to the end of our tale.

sic cunctus pelagi cecidit fragor, aequora postquam

prospiciens genitor caeloque invectus aperto

flectit equos, curruque volans dat lora secundo.

p. 39

OVID'S MINERVA1THE PARADOX OF DIVINE

FEMINITY

2 Ben McClarty, College of William & Mary

Ovid’s poetry is replete with concern for the silencing

of marginalized voices. His Metamorphoses

exemplifies this concern, devoting itself

in part to an exploration of diverse points of view,

including victims of divine rape and violence, in great

psychological detail. One notable element is Ovid’s

characterization of the goddess Minerva, a frequent

actor in the space of divine retribution against mortal

victims of rape despite her own virginity. Focusing on a

series of related tales in Met. 4–6, I argue that Minerva

serves as a prime example of the hypocrisy of female

divinity. The sequence of scenes consisting of Minerva’s

punishment of Medusa, her visit to the Muses, and

her subsequent contest with Arachne, forms a subnarrative

embedded in Ovid’s work. By following this

thread, we can discover how the poet builds Minerva’s

paradoxical characterization as both a potential victim

and an upholder of Olympian permissiveness towards

divine rapists. Ovid at once accentuates her masculine

traits and draws attention to her similarities with victims

of divine violence, thereby challenging the reader

to confront the complexities inherent in the character.

I begin by examining Perseus’s tale of the metamorphosis

of Medusa, a clear example of Minerva’s victim-blaming.

Within this short passage we see Ovid’s

justification for the rape of Medusa, the maiden’s identification

with Minerva, and the goddess’s misdirected

punishment. By the arrangement of words in lines

798–9, which read hanc pelagi rector templo vitiasse Minervae |

dicitur (“As for [Medusa], the ruler of the sea is said to have violated

her in a temple of Minerva”), Ovid suggests that it is primarily

Minerva and not Medusa who is being violated by Neptune’s

actions; Medusa stands at the beginning of the clause,

while templo…Minervae surrounds the operative word vitiasse.

To the reader this conveys Minerva’s own point of view on the

rape: she considers herself the victim and responds accordingly,

changing Medusa’s hair from the source of her beauty

(796–97) to the epitome of ugliness. Instead of punishing Neptune

for both the rape and his defilement of her holy site (for

Medusa did not choose to be raped nor the site at which it occurred),

Minerva turns her wrath towards the mortal woman.

Perhaps this is a consequence of Neptune’s higher status. As a

male Olympian and brother of Jupiter, he is untouchable, and

Minerva need not think hard about what misfortunes might

befall her if she attempted retribution. So, instead of doing all

she can to help the maiden fight off Neptune, Minerva punishes

the victim, despite Ovid’s emphasis of their parallel virginity.

Ovid continues, further centering Minerva’s modesty

through the repetitive verbs in aversa est et castos aegide vultus

| nata Iovis texit (799–800: “the daughter of Jupiter turned

away and hid her chaste eyes with the aegis”). In doing so, the

poet forms a contrast between the characterization of her appearance

(she hides herself away as a model of chastity; castos,

line 800) and her impending revenge (neve hoc impune fuisset,

line 800). By accentuating Minerva’s virginity in this way, the

narrator prepares for a juxtaposition. A shocking portrayal of

the goddess’s brutality follows (801: Gorgoneum crinem turpes

mutavit in hydros), coupled with a foreshadowing of Medusa’s

incorporation into the aegis (799). Having just witnessed the

power of the head of Medusa in the previous section, the reader

is at this point well acquainted with its violent symbolism,

making it all the more striking as proof of Minerva’s mutilation.

Naturally, Ovid’s narration of a pre-existing myth tradition

does not necessarily prove his attitude towards his characters

or their actions. Nonetheless, one must take into account

Ovid’s choice to propagate this version of the myth and not

another. Another version of the myth holds that Medusa was

transformed not because of a rape, but rather because she

claimed to be more beautiful than the goddess. 1 Ovid’s choice

of this version (the earliest to survive, possibly an Ovidian in-

1. Lee Frantantuono, Madness Transformed: A Reading of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’

(Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011), 113, 121n59.

Ovid's Minerva 41

novation) instead of the older version supports this reading of

Ovid’s Minerva. Indeed, this alternate version, had Ovid incorporated

it, would have supplemented his depiction of hubristic

mortals in the Metamorphoses, such as the contest with the

Pierides and the rebuke of Arachne. If Ovid had only been concerned

with the politics of divine-human interactions when

crafting his narrative in Books 4–6, such a version would have

fit nicely. Instead, Ovid selects the version with an intersection

between divine power and female victimhood, thereby

priming the reader to look for the same thematic material in

the subsequent episodes.

With this account fresh in the reader’s mind, the fifth book,

devoted in large part to Minerva’s visit to the Muses on Mt.

Helicon, begins. Significantly, Minerva’s role as an audience

member of the Muses’ poetic contest with the Pierides seems

to be a novel addition to the myth since Minerva is not present

in other extant accounts. 2 Therefore, inserting the character

of Minerva into the story constitutes a deliberate choice

by our poet. This section begins at Met. 5.250, cleverly positioned

right after the use of Medusa’s severed head against

Polydectes, thereby bringing Minerva’s associations with the

Gorgon to the forefront of the reader’s mind. Ovid further connects

the Medusa episode to this story by describing the creator

of Helicon’s new spring as Medusaei (257) before referring

to Pegasus by name in line 262. In this reintroduction of Minerva,

the Muses flatter the Olympian visitor:

O, nisi te virtus opera ad maiora tulisset,

in partem ventura chori Tritonia nostri,

vera refers, meritoque probas artesque locumque,

et gratam sortem, tutae modo simus, habemus. (Met. 5.269–272)

O Tritonia, who would have come to be part of our chorus if your

manly strength had not carried you to greater works, you speak

the truth, and you deservedly approve of our arts and our dwelling

place, and we have a pleasing share [of life], if only it were safe.

Here, the unnamed sister claims kinship with Minerva, pointing

out their commonalities in temperament and opinion (5.271:

meritoque probas artesque locumque). This continues the tendency

already set forth by the poet-narrator, who reminds us

2. Patricia Johnson, Ovid Before Exile: Art and Punishment in the

‘Metamorphoses’ (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007), 47.

As Johnson discusses, the only other extant account, Liberalis’s paraphrase

of Nicander’s Heteroeumena, is entirely different in structure.

42 Ovid's Minerva

of the similarities between Minerva and the Muses through the

use of words like virgineum (254) and Iove nata (“daughter of

Jupiter”) (297). Notably, the idea that Minerva could have become

part of the Muses’ chorus herself is unique to the Met., 3

with the result that Ovid seems to force this identification

onto his readers. Nowhere does Minerva claim to be a singer

or poet in her own right. But this assertion is not mere flattery.

Instead, it emphasizes the contrast between Minerva’s two

halves: the virgin and the warrior. Virtus (269) is an essentially

masculine word and therefore transforms the Muse’s image of

Minerva into the masculine realm. In the same line, the Muse

refers to the masculine arts of war as opera maiora to suggest

a value judgment on Minerva’s choice of activity. She does not

spend her time singing with her half-sisters on Mt. Helicon; instead,

she is off fighting alongside her brother Perseus. In the

context of the remainder of the Muses’ tale, this last remark

seems ironic. The Muses are using this story as a critique of

Minerva’s character—they would much rather her join them in

being a model virgin. Minerva’s Olympian aggression is counter

to the Muses’ ideals, especially as this extends to her violence

towards innocent virgins. Therefore, the decision to relate the

poetic contest to Minerva is motivated by the Muses’ desire

to teach her a lesson and to urge her to take a different view

from that which she exhibited in her encounter with Medusa.

To further this strategy, the Muses, before they recount

their contest with Minerva, tell her about the time they were

almost raped by Pyreneus (273–293). Coming after a section

that so heavily emphasized the sorority between the goddesses,

this provides a shocking reminder of Minerva’s own fragility

as an object of lustful men’s desires. The Muses invite the

manly warrior goddess to step inside their shoes, remove the

masculine mask Minerva has fashioned for herself, and imagine

herself as the victim.

The theme continues in the foremost section of the Muses’

contest with the Pierides: the rape of Proserpina by Dis, god of

the underworld. In introducing this myth, Ovid inserts another

remarkable innovation: that of Venus as the instigator of Dis’s

lust. In the Homeric Hymn II to Demeter—the oldest account

and that upon which Ovid’s version otherwise depends—it

is Persephone’s father Zeus who plotted with the earth god-

3. Johnson, Ovid Before Exile, 49, 139n29. As Johnson discusses, the

only two references in classical literature to Minerva’s talents in

music or poetry are here and in Ov. F. 3.833, so this may well be a

distinctly Ovidian characterization of the goddess.

Ovid's Minerva 43

dess Gaia to lay a trap for her: the alluring narcissus flower

(8–9: …νάρκισσόν θ᾽, ὃν φῦσε δόλον καλυκώπιδι κούρῃ | Γαῖα Διὸς βουλῇσι

χαριζομένη Πολυδέκτῃ…). 4 The goddess of love is not an actor in

the Homeric version of the narrative nor anywhere else before

Ovid. Speaking to Cupid, Venus first outlines her reasons for

setting her plans into motion, starting with an appeal to the

wide-sweeping power of Love over even the gods on Olympus

(369) and in the sea (370). If these two domains fall under their

sway, argues Venus, why shouldn’t they strive to extend their

rule over Tartarus as well (371–2)? Venus then fixes her attention

onto one particular deity who dares resist her power:

Pallada nonne vides iaculatricemque Dianam

abscessisse mihi? Cereris quoque filia virgo,

si patiemur, erit: nam spes adfectat easdem.

at tu pro socio, siqua est ea gratia, regno

iunge deam patruo! (Met. 5.375–379)

Don’t you see that Pallas and the spear-thrower Diana have withdrawn

from me? The daughter of Ceres will also be a virgin, if we

allow it: for she strives for the same hopes. But you, on behalf of

our shared kingdom, if you have any regard for it, join the goddess

to her uncle!

In her rhetorically effective speech to her son, Venus calls out

Minerva directly (Pallada, 375) as the foremost example of a

goddess who aspires to remain a virgin. Love must conquer

all, as Ovid the elegist knows well, and the gods are no exception.

Venus uses the language of a personal affront (spernimur,

374; abscessisse mihi, 376), as if Proserpina’s, and therefore

Minerva’s, identity as virgo were a direct insult to Venus.

The Muses’ choice to emphasize Minerva’s virginity is not mere

flattery; 5 it also serves as a reminder that she could be next

on Venus’s list of targets. The masters of rhetoric have therefore

set the stage to teach Minerva a lesson. They have greeted

the goddess with hospitality and kinship while also implying

that her masculine virtus is not enough to save her, as a fellow

virgo, from the incessant world of male violence as instigated

by Venus, upholder of the Olympian status quo. Specifically,

the Muses use heavy subtext throughout their tale to draw

attention to Minerva’s past behavior towards virgin women.

Namely, they negatively contrast her victim-blaming with the

4. See also Fratantuono, Madness Transformed, 134–135, 134n38.

5. Patricia B. Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies: Gaze, Image, and

Gender in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses’ (Columbus: The Ohio State University

Press, 2005), 169.

44 Ovid's Minerva

helpful nymphs Cyane and Arethusa as well as the goddess

Diana. Andrew Zissos devotes much attention in his analysis

of the episode to how Calliope exaggerates the roles of the

two nymphs in order to win the favor of the contest’s judges

(who are also nymphs), 6 but does not tackle the role of Minerva

as an audience member. Indeed, when taking into account

Minerva’s experiences, the Muses are not simply playing to the

crowd by highlighting the roles of the nymphs (although it is

certainly accurate). Centering Minerva as the focal point of the

scene, the Muses elevate the roles of two nymphs who are violated

in some way themselves, yet offer their help to the grieving

mother Ceres, refusing to yield to the powerful men who

threaten their safety. As Dis steals Proserpina away, the nymph

Cyane first protests in a fiery speech to the chthonic god. She

appeals to Dis’s (and the reader’s) supposed sense of propriety,

saying nec longius abitis…non potes invitae Cereris gener esse: roganda,

| non rapienda fuit (414–6: “‘Go no further!’ she said, ‘you

can’t be Ceres’ father-in-law against her will: she had to have

been sought, not stolen’”). She compares this situation to her

own husband Anapis, who followed the proper procedures of

winning a bride: et me dilexit Anapis, | exorata tamen, nec, ut

haec, exterrita nupsi (417–18: “Anapis desired me, and I married

him after being petitioned, however, not petrified as you are

doing here”).

Here, Calliope invites Cyane to take center stage as a model

advocate for the cause of the rape victim. She places emphasis

on the necessity of the consent of Proserpina and her mother

and contrasts the impiousness of Dis with the good manners

of her own husband Anapis. Cyane stands up for Proserpina

here despite the reality that Dis may very well retaliate, which

he naturally does. This retaliation takes the form of a metaphorical

rape: Saturnius…in gurgitis ima | contortum valido sceptrum

regale lacerto | condidit (420–3: “The son of Saturn…sent

his royal scepter, hurled by his strong arm, into the depths of

the pool.”). 7 There is still more sexual imagery to follow, as the

earth, pierced by his scepter, receives his chariot and guides

it down to Tartarus (423–4: icta viam tellus in Tartara fecit | et

pronos currus medio cratere recepit). Unlike Minerva in her multitude

of violent acts against women, Cyane acts in service

of the victim with little regard for her own safety. Even after

6. Andrew Zissos, “The Rape of Proserpina in Ovid Met. 341–661: Internal

Audience and Narrative Distortion,” Phoenix 53 no. 1/2 (1999):

98.

7. Salzman-Mitchell, A Web of Fantasies, 172.

Ovid's Minerva 45

Dis escapes, Cyane proves her moral character when, having

decomposed into watery tears from the force of Dis’s assault

and therefore unable to speak, she still strives to give Ceres

manifesta signa of her daughter’s rape in the form of her zonam

(“girdle”). The Muses distort the familiar narrative to make the

“otherwise unknown” Cyane the star of the show, but this is

not just in service of winning the contest, which would have

been guaranteed regardless by the Muses’ very nature. 8 This is

a direct challenge to Minerva’s character.

The nymph Arethusa serves as another foil to Minerva’s attitude.

Ovid (and Calliope) even allow her to tell the story of her

own rape at the hands of Alpheus, a rare incidence of visibility

for the marginalized victim. In this narrative, Diana acts as a

more visible example of the Muses’ instructions to Minerva.

She is first paired with Minerva, bookending line 375, then appears

in Arethusa’s narrative as the nymph’s savior from harm:

Delia rupit humum, caecisque ego mersa cavernis

advehor Ortygiam, quae me cognomine divae

grata meae superas eduxit prima sub auras. (Met. 5.639–641)

The Delian goddess shattered the ground, and I was carried submerged

through dark caverns to Ortygia, which, pleasing to me

because of my goddess’s name, was the first to bear me out under

the upper air.

Instead of turning on Arethusa, the goddess of the hunt helps

her comrade, snatching her from the jaws of her rapist. Diana

therefore acts in service of her morals by answering Arethusa’s

prayers. In a notable reversal from her attitude in the case

of Callisto, whom the goddess punished after being raped by

Jupiter in Met. 2, Diana saves Arethusa by piercing the ground

much like Dis when he violated Cyane. Minerva and Diana start

in the same place at the beginning of the poem, as the two militant

protectors of their own virginity. Actaeon violates Diana

with only the power of his gaze, and she has him torn apart

by his own hunting dogs, just as the revealing of Erichthonius

and the rape of Medusa prove too uncomfortable for Minerva

to handle. But Diana has grown, and, unfazed by shame,

she confronts Alpheus’s rape head-on, right in the midst of

the heightened sexual imagery of the passage, and saves her

dependent, effecting no punishment or loss of status on the

nymph. In other words, Diana acts as a model for the role of

8. Zissos, “The Rape of Proserpina,” 99. See also Johnson, Ovid

Before Exile, 45.

46 Ovid's Minerva

the virgin goddess. She is protective of her body, and no less

so for her followers. This at least holds for the Muses’ portrayal

of the goddess, as they have picked out this tale, innovatively

inserting it into the narrative, in order to play to the twofold

needs of their audiences, while ignoring myths involving Diana’s

aggression towards victims like Callisto. In doing so, the

Muses are suggesting that Minerva needs to change. She must

do better in the future to make up for having wronged victims

like Medusa and Aglauros. 9 Minerva wants to live her life free

of any reminders that she, too, is vulnerable to the whims of

the male gods, but she must not let this selfish desire get in the

way of her ability to save others from harm.

But Minerva does not listen. Immediately after the close of

Calliope’s tale, the warrior goddess turns her attention to the

maiden weaver Arachne, a spitting image of the goddess herself.

She takes the wrong message from the contents of Book 5 and,

like many a reader after her, ignores the gender politics of the

Proserpina narrative, instead reading a critique of the hubris of

the Pierides. 10 At the forefront of her mind is the iustam iram of

the Muses (6.2), not the saddening content of the Muses’ tale,

despite the brevity of space given to the Pierides in comparison

to Calliope’s response. In Minerva’s confrontation with Arachne,

the poet-narrator clearly paints Minerva as unfazed by the Muses’

rebuke, identifying her with her masculine traits and Olympian

divinity within his description of her tapestry:

at sibi dat clipeum, dat acutae cuspidis hastam,

dat galeam capiti; defenditur aegide pectus,

percussamque sua simulat de cuspide terram

edere cum bacis fetum canentis olivae,

mirarique deos; operis Victoria finis. (Met. 6.78–82)

But to herself she gives a shield, she gives herself a sharp-pointed

9. Minerva does save a mortal maiden from being raped by Neptune

earlier in the Met., turning her into a crow (mota est pro virgine virgo,

2.579), but I follow Marturano (“Vim Parat,” 243–244) in suggesting

that the act of metamorphosis is in itself an act of violence that

results in the mutilation of the victim while the aggressor is able to

go free.

10. Minerva does not even correctly read the aesthetic program of

the contest, in which the Muses, singers of an elegiac epic in the

manner of the Metamorphoses as a whole, prevail over the martial

epic attempted by the Pierides. The goddess goes on to weave a

tapestry of epic themes contrasting Arachne’s web of metamorphoses,

a work that acts as a microcosm of Ovid’s own poem.

Ovid's Minerva 47

spear, she gives her head a helmet; her chest is guarded by the aegis,

and she depicts the earth struck by her own spear as it brings

forth the tree of the gray-trunked olive teeming with fruits, and

the gods marvel; Victory marks the end of her work.

The abundance of martial vocabulary (6.70–1: Cecropia Pallas

scopulum Mavortis in arce pingit; “Pallas depicts the hill of Mars

on the Cecropian citadel;” ferire (75), vulnere (76), Victoria (82),

and Minerva’s military garb) makes it clear that Minerva, in her

contest with Arachne, has chosen to emphasize her nature as

goddess of war, contrasting with Arachne’s insistence on an

identification with Minerva’s feminine traits as a model virgin

and patron of weaving (6.23: scires a Pallade doctam). Minerva

elevates the status of her father Jupiter (72–4: bis sex caelestes

medio Iove sedibus altis | Augusta gravitate sedent; sua quemque

deorum | inscribit facies: Iovis est regalis imago…; “the twelve celestials

sit on their high thrones, Jupiter in the middle, with

Augustan gravitas; their unique appearance marks each of the

gods: Jupiter’s image is regal…”). This suggests an alignment between

Minerva and traditional Olympian morality, where the

male divinities (and the masculine-coded Minerva) have free

rein over the cosmos and its people. Having rejected the label

assigned to her by the Muses, Minerva is not virgo in this passage;

she is virago (130). Fully embracing her masculine side,

she silences Arachne, the maiden bravely attempting to speak

out about the caelestia crimina she so masterfully weaves. 11 The

narrator’s voice foreshadows Minerva’s rage. As the ekphrasis

of Arachne’s tapestry progresses, the narrator’s gaze—and,

we must assume, Minerva’s—shifts from wounded mortals

11. Pavlock (The Image of the Poet, 6) asserts that Arachne’s tapestry

does not contain a coherent message unlike Minerva’s, a finding with

which I disagree. However, I agree with her assertion that Minerva’s

destruction of Arachne’s tapestry can suggest that the poet is concerned

with the viability of his own work, often opposed to the Augustan

order just as Arachne challenges the superiority of the Olympian

gods. The constant presence of this concern with the silencing

of the artist, and his clear Augustan critiques, suggest to me that the

Met. was a prefigurement, or even a cause, of Ovid’s 8 CE exile from

Rome. Either way, it is clear that Ovid’s critique of unchecked sexual

violence is connected with his critique of the Augustan regime and

its aesthetics, given the repeated associations thereof.

48 Ovid's Minerva

to divine aggressors. 12 The virgin goddess turns to violence,

first striking Arachne, then dissolving her bodily autonomy by

transforming her into a spider in an act of apparent “pity.” 13

This transformation is once again a stand-in for rape, adding to

Minerva’s all-around rejection of a virginal morality.

This concludes Ovid’s finely-woven portrait of Minerva. Minerva

makes a mistake by violently punishing Medusa, is lectured

through a series of exemplary tales by the masters of song,

then fails to reach the correct conclusion and change her attitude.

She herself becomes the perpetrator of violence—the

perpetrator of silence—towards Arachne, thereby betraying

the visibility of the stories of all the gods’ victims. She acts

to cover up the rapes of her fellow Olympians despite having

been a target of the likes of Venus and Neptune herself. Joseph

Solodow suggests that Ovid often characterizes the gods

as having “split divinity”; the poet concerns himself with the

two warring attributes of a particular divine figure, their personhood

and their divinity at odds in often humorous ways. 14 I

would venture to extend this to the very serious exploration of

Minerva in this continuous subnarrative. The virago suppresses

the virgo out of a very real necessity, for Minerva must be

masculine to escape the gaze of her male relatives. It is the

virgo that fears for her safety, who is reminded of her fragility

when confronted with Neptune’s rape. It is the virgo whom the

Muses appeal to in their tale, in their reminder that she is a

virgin first, and she must necessarily act in defense of others or

risk morally bankrupting herself. But it is virago that wins the

day, punishing Medusa for daring to be raped, and Arachne for

12. Clara S. Hardy, “Ecphrasis and the Male Narrator in Ovid’s

Arachne,” Helios 22 (1995): 144–145. This phenomenon can be doubly

read as Arachne placing emphasis on the injustices of the gods as

her work progresses. Both views are simultaneously correct, just as

this tale is simultaneously about divine injustice and mortal hubris,

but as we do not get to see Arachne’s work apart from the narrator’s

imposition, I think the first view is perhaps more striking.

13. I break with Harries (“The Spinner and the Poet,” 74) who

concludes that only the act of violence itself, and not the metamorphosis,

is the punishment. As before with the crow, the act of

metamorphosis, especially one that prevents Arachne’s final act

of self-determination (her attempted suicide) and mutilates her,

cursing her to a life filled with the reminder of what she once had,

is itself a harsh punishment. Minerva means to make an example of

Arachne, discouraging subsequent women from speaking out against

male sexual violence.

14. Joseph B. Solodow, The World of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988), 94–96.

Ovid's Minerva 49

daring to speak out in defense of victims everywhere, becoming

the voice that Minerva should have been all along. Minerva

can only be virgo when acting in a manner approved by the

male gods—therefore, her (feminine) tapestry necessitates a

masculine, Olympian theme. 15 This is the paradox of the divine

virgin and its resolution. Minerva holds her virginity as the sine

qua non of her existence, but divine must supersede virgin, or

else she risks losing that which she holds most dear.

15. Patricia Joplin, “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours,” Stanford Literature

Review 1, no. 1 (1984): 49. Minerva is the “male fantasy of what

a woman ought to be” and therefore cannot act as virgo unless it

upholds the status of the male Olympians. Consequently, when Minerva

does act in full support of a victim of rape, Cassandra, by killing

Ajax Oileus in Met. 14.466–469, she needs only to attack a mortal

man and is therefore perfectly capable of just retaliation. Furthermore,

her actions necessitate the approval of the male narrator

Diomedes (quam meruit poenam solus, 14.469).

50 Ovid's Minerva

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Anderson, William S. Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ Books 1–5. Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1997.

Anderson, William S. Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses,’ Books 6–10. Norman:

University of Oklahoma Press, 1972.

Fratantuono, Lee. Madness Transformed: A Reading of Ovid’s

‘Metamorphoses.’ Lanham: Lexington Books, 2011.

Hardy, Clara S. “Ecphrasis and the Male Narrator in Ovid’s

Arachne.” Helios 22 (1995): 140–155.

Harries, Byron. “The Spinner and the Poet: Arachne in Ovid’s

‘Metamorphoses.’” PCPhS 36 (1990): 64–82.

Johnson, Patricia. Ovid Before Exile: Art and Punishment in the

‘Metamorphoses.’ Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2007.

Joplin, Patricia. “The Voice of the Shuttle is Ours.” Stanford Literature

Review 1, no. 1 (1984): 25–54.

Marturano, Melissa. “Vim Parat: Patterns of Sexualized Violence,

Victim-Blaming, and Sororophobia in Ovid.” Doctoral dissertation,

The Graduate Center, City University of New York, 2017.

Pavlock, Barbara. The Image of the Poet in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses.’

Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2009.

Richlin, Amy. “Reading Ovid’s Rapes.” In Pornography and Representation

in Greece and Rome, edited by Amy Richlin. New

York: Oxford University Press, 1992.

Salzman-Mitchell, Patricia B. A Web of Fantasies: Gaze, Image,

and Gender in Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses.’ Columbus: The Ohio

State University Press, 2005.

Solodow, Joseph B. The World of Ovid’s ‘Metamorphoses.’ Chapel

Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1988.

Zissos, Andrew. “The Rape of Proserpina in Ovid Met. 341–661:

Internal Audience and Narrative Distortion.” Phoenix 53, no.

1/2 (1999): 97–113.

Ovid's Minerva 51

THE CALL OF MEDEA1

2Hillary Yip, Durham University

Horror is not an emotion I regularly feel when reading

Latin. That changed when I read Seneca’s Medea,

as I was captivated by the rage, the power,

and the madness Medea embodies. Her rage reaches a

peak in Act Four as she prepares poison for Creusa. This

passage is an excellent demonstration of utter loss of

control, as Seneca’s verse destroys all order and fully

gives into primal rage—a reminder to readers of what

happens when one fails to adhere to a Stoic philosophy.

In translating, I decided to sacrifice the meter and use

prose to avoid the distraction of English verse. I did not

think rhyming couplets would befit Medea’s rage, and I

thought that her rhetorical force could be better conveyed

in prose. Metrically, this passage separates into

four distinct sections. Lines 740–751 use catalectic trochaic

tetrameter, often used for conversation in Latin

drama; 752–70 iambic trimeter, which mimics chanting

for incantations; 771–786 alternating iambic trimeter

and dimeter, creating the rhythm for her witchcraft; and

787–816 use anapestic dimeter and monometer, replicating

Medea’s religious frenzy. To reflect an aspect of this

in prose, I begin my translation more literally and with

longer sentences, and as Medea begins giving sacrifices, I

make the sentences more formulaic and regular to mimic

the incantation. The passage is mainly driven by supernatural

imagery and upsetting natural order, reflecting

Medea’s internal loss of control over her emotions. From

lines 751–759, Medea’s rage is conveyed through asyndeton,

which I have tried to replicate in my translation.

Seneca’s writing demands a lot from the reader, as he

makes abundant references to mythology, and particularly

here as Medea seeks help from the worst of the

underworld and presents her sacrifices. For clarity, I have

referred to some names by their more commonly known

counterparts, like changing Trivia to Hecate.

p. 52 1

MEDEA IV.740–816

I summon you, you mob of shades and you fatal gods, and blind Chaos,

and the dark home of shadowy Dis, and the caves of filthy death

bound by Tartarean streams. You spirits, freed of your torments,

run to this novel union: may the wheel tormenting limbs halt, may

Ixion touch the ground, may Tantalus, untroubled, drink the Pirenian

wave. But may a graver punishment settle on my husband’s “fatherin-law”:

let the slippery stone crush Sisyphus backwards over the

rocks. You too, Danaids, whose useless labor is mocked by pierced

urns, gather! This day demands your hands. Now summoned by my

rites, come, Hecate, star of the night, wear your wickedest looks,

and threaten, not only with face.

Comprecor vulgus silentum vosque ferales deos

et Chaos caecum atque opacam Ditis umbrosi domum,

Tartari ripis ligatos squalidae Mortis specus.

supplicis, animae, remissis currite ad thalamos novos:

rota resistat membra torquens, tangat Ixion humum,

Tantalus securus undas hauriat Pirenidas.

gravior uni poena sedeat coniugis socero mei:

lubricus per saxa retro Sisyphum volvat lapis.

vos quoque, urnis quas foratis inritus ludit labor,

Danaides, coite: vestras hic dies quaerit manus.

Nunc meis vocata sacris, noctium sidus, veni

pessimos induta vultus, fronte non una minax.

For you, in the customs of my people, I have loosened my hair from its

bonds and with bare feet, I have roamed your haunted woods, I have

summoned water from the dry clouds, I have driven the sea to the

deepest depths—with the tides conquered, deepest Oceanus stilled

his heavy waves—I have upset the laws of heaven, the world saw sun

and stars together, even the Bears have struck the forbidden sea.

Tibi more gentis vinculo solvens comam

secreta nudo nemora lustravi pede,

et evocavi nubibus siccis aquas

egique ad imum maria, et Oceanus graves

p. 53 1

p. 54

interius undas aestibus victis dedit;

pariterque mundus lege confusa aetheris

et solem et astra vidit, et vetitum mare

tetigistis, Ursae.

I have overturned the wheel of time: by my spells, summery lands

have withered and Ceres was forced to see a winter harvest. Phasis

has turned his violent flow to the source, and Histher, divided into so

many mouths, subdued his wild streams, and all banks lie stagnant.

The waves have crashed, the frenzied seas have swelled with the

winds still; the home of the ancient woods have lost their shadow

with the command of my voice. (The day abandoned, Phoebus stood

in the middle, and the Hyades trembled, shaken and disturbed by

our song.)

Phoebus, it is time to attend to your ritual.

temporum flexi vices:

aestiva tellus horruit cantu meo,

coacta messem vidit hibernam Ceres.

violenta Phasis vertit in fontem vada,

et Hister, in tot ora divisus, truces

compressit undas, omnibus ripis piger.

sonuere fluctus, tumuit insanum mare

tacente vento; nemoris antiqui domus

amisit umbras vocis imperio meae.

[die relicto Phoebus in medio stetit,

Hyadesque nostris cantibus motae labant]

Adesse sacris tempus est, Phoebe, tuis.

For you I give this wreath, plaited with bloody hands, tied with nine

snakes. For you I give these limbs which warlike Typhon bore, who

shook the throne of Jupiter. In this dwells the blood of the deceitful

ferryman, which Nessus gave, breathing his last. Into those very

ashes the Oetaean pyre collapsed, steeped in the venom of Hercules.

Behold the torch of vengeful Althaea, dutiful sister, wicked mother.

The Harpy left these very feathers in an impassable cave while she

fled Zetes. Add to these the Stymphalian feathers of the wounded

birds, struck by the Lernaean arrows.

Tibi haec cruenta serta texuntur manu,

novena quae serpens ligat,

tibi haec Typhoeus membra quae discors tulit,

qui regna concussit Iovis.

vectoris istic perfidi sanguis inest,

quem Nessus expirans dedit.

Oetaeus isto cinere defecit rogus,

qui virus Herculeum bibit.

piae sororis, impiae matris, facem

ultricis Althaeae vides.

reliquit istas invio plumas specu

Harpyia, dum Zeten fugit.

his adice pinnas sauciae Stymphalidos

Lernaea passae spicula.

The altars echoed. I recognize my tripods moved by the favouring

goddess.

Sonuistis, arae, tripodas agnosco meos

favente commotos dea.

I see the swift chariot of Hecate—not the one that she used to drive

in nightlong brightness with shining face, but the one she drives with

a grim and ghastly expression when she is harassed by Thessalian

threats and sails the skies with reins gripped, white-knuckled. And

so throughout the skies, grim-faced, pour mournful light; with novel

terror menace the people, and in your help, Dictynna, let the precious

brass of Corinth sound.

Video Triviae currus agiles,

non quos pleno lucida vultu

pernox agitat,

sed quos facie lurida maesta,

cum Thessalicis vexata minis

caelum freno propiore legit.

sic face tristem pallida lucem

funde per auras;

horrore novo terre populos,

inque auxilium, Dictynna, tuum

pretiosa sonent aera Corinthi.

For you on bloodstained earth—I dedicate the solemn sacrifice. For

you a torch stolen from mid-tomb has lifted fire to the night. I have

given voice to you, with shaking head and bowed neck, for you, this

band encircles my loose hair like a corpse. I have thrust to you the

sad bough from the Stygian wave. For you, as a Maenad with bare

chest, I will slash my arms with the blessed knife. My blood shall flow

onto the pyre: accustom yourselves, hands, to drawing steel and to

enduring dear blood—with a strike, I give the liquid sacrifice.

p. 55

Tibi sanguineo

caespite sacrum sollemne damus,

tibi de medio rapta sepulcro

fax nocturnos sustulit ignes,

tibi mota caput

flexa voces cervice dedi,

tibi funereo de more iacens

passos cingit vitta capillos,

tibi iactatur

tristis Stygia ramus ab unda,

tibi nudato pectore maenas

sacro feriam bracchia cultro.

manet noster sanguis ad aras:

assuesce, manus, stringere ferrum

carosque pati posse cruores—

sacrum laticem percussa dedi.

But if you complain that I call to you too often and excessively, I

pray, forgive me: the reason I must call, Perseis, upon your bow so

often, is always one and the same—Jason.

Quodsi nimium saepe vocari

quereris votis, ignosce, precor:

causa vocandi,

Persei, tuos saepius arcus

una atque eadem est semper, Iason.

EDITION

Seneca. Tragedies, Volume I: ‘Hercules.’ ‘Trojan Women.’ ‘Phoenician

Women.’ ‘Medea.’ ‘Phaedra.’ Edited and translated by

John G. Fitch. Loeb Classical Library 62. Cambridge, MA:

Harvard University Press, 2018.

p. 56

CLEOPATRA,

THEN AND

NOW

S. RICHARD STOLLER

Concordia University Montreal

Cleopatra VII was born in 69 or 70 BCE and died less than forty years

later. Cleopatra had a fascinating career, tales of which have survived

and flourished until today. She was intelligent, determined, highly

personable and spoke several languages, though her native tongue

was the Koine Greek which would have been spoken as the administrative

language throughout the Hellenistic empire. The Hellenistic

empire was established by the successors of Alexander the Great and

comprised of his Macedonian companions who went on to establish

their control over the regions that he had conquered.

Ptolemy (Soter/Saviour), one of Alexander’s generals, established

the Ptolemaic dynasty of Egypt. Cleopatra, Ptolemy’s descendant,

was the last ruler of the Ptolemaic empire. Egypt was conquered by

Rome in 30 BC. Cleopatra, now a Roman prisoner, took her own life

later that same year rather than being paraded through the streets

of Rome as a piece of high value plunder. Cleopatra had children by

Mark Anthony and Caesar.

Several depictions of Cleopatra have been rendered throughout history.

She is known to have some non-Macedonian blood, possibly on

her maternal side which may have influenced her depictions. Some

statues are dated from when she was still alive but not all have been

definitively identified. Some statues, whether live size or busts, are

highly stylized examples in the pharaonic tradition.

My artwork is based on a photograph of a bust of “The Berlin Cleopatra”

located in the Altes Museum in Berlin. The marble bust dates to

the middle of the first century BC. Given the date, it may have been

sculpted from life.

The second image is a charcoal drawing on paper (22 in. x 30 in.)

based on the ancient sculpture. In it, I have rendered a quite alive

Cleopatra assessing a situation before acting. She appears to be

weighing her options.

The third image is an oil painting on canvas (44 in. x 40 in.). This

image might be of Cleopatra today. Gone is the furtive glance. I

have painted her with the features of an open faced woman who

has a calm expression, unopposed in her easy assessment of a given

situation.

58

THE BERLIN CLEOPATRA

Photograph of 1st cen. bust in marble

59

CLEOPATRA, IN CHARCOAL

Charcoal on paper, 22 in. by 30 in.

60

CLEOPATRA, IN OIL

Oil on canvas, 44 in. by 40 in.

61

SPEECHES, EXEMPLA, AND THE PURPOSE OF

HISTORY IN BOOK 1 OF LIVY'S AB URBE CONDITA1

2 Colton Van Gerwen, University of Winnipeg

The writing of history in antiquity served many purposes:

ancient historians took to chronicling the past not

only to record events and deeds which they believed

to be worthy of remembrance from a time before

theirs but also for the edification of the men and women

of their own day, which could be achieved through

the dissemination of exempla (“examples”). 1 Historical

exempla held an important position in ancient Greek

and Latin historiography on account of their ability to

effect persuasion and to teach lessons to the audiences

of the ancient historians. Book 1 of Livy’s Ab Urbe

Condita, in particular, is an example of how an ancient

historian could utilize a historical narrative in order to

adduce exempla with the intent of teaching his audiences

lessons. But how then could Livy incorporate

exempla into and disseminate exempla through the historical

narrative of Book 1 of his Ab Urbe Condita? An

answer to this question is that Livy distributes exempla

through the speeches of historical individuals. Jane

D. Chaplin identifies three methods whereby Livy can

disseminate exempla within the historical narrative of

Ab Urbe Condita as a whole. This includes speeches:

1. Jane D. Chaplin, Livy’s Exemplary History (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2000), 7. Many other ancient historians,

including earlier Greek writers such as Herodotus, Thucydides,

and Xenophon, make use of exempla. For a more

comprehensive overview on the historiographical tradition

of incorporating historical exempla with the intent to teach

audiences lessons see: Chaplin, Livy’s Exemplary History,

5–11.

through the historian as the narrator; through the thoughts of

historical characters; and of course, through the speeches of

historical characters. 2 In this regard, speeches in the Ab Urbe

Condita operate not just as methods of advancing a historical

narrative but also as means of illustrating exempla. Thus, Livy

utilizes speeches in Book 1 of his Ab Urbe Condita as one method

of adducing exempla in order to teach his audiences lessons

about what sorts of behaviour and conduct they should either

imitate or avoid.

First, an understanding of what exempla are in the ancient Roman

world will be necessary for comprehending this phenomenon.

The Latin word exemplum (“example”) has the same implications

as the English word “example,” and similarly ancient

Roman exempla can also refer specifically to things which people

adduce in order to support an argument. 3 One can use the

word exempla in the ancient Roman context to refer variously

to things such as performers of deeds, deeds performed, a narrative

or monumental form which relates or refers to a deed,

or a set model or moral standard. 4 Furthermore, exempla occupied

an important position in the ancient Roman world on account

of the moral authority which they held, and as Matthew

B. Roller explains further, “they provided norms for others to

accept as their own and models for them to imitate.” 5 In the

ancient Roman world, exempla were powerful rhetorical devices

that could be employed to effect persuasion, and they

represented a unique kind of moral discourse. 6

Now, it is necessary to direct attention to Livy’s preface to the

Ab Urbe Condita and his purpose for writing about the history

of Rome from its very beginnings. Livy wrote Ab Urbe Condita

not simply to record the events and deeds of the past but,

above all, to memorialize the rise and triumph of the city of

Rome; however, Livy also wrote in order to highlight the decay

of behaviour and morals in Rome: 7

2. Chaplin, 50.

3. Matthew B. Roller, Models from the Past Roman Culture: A World of

Exempla (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018), 1.

4. Roller, 1.

5. Roller, 1.

6. Roller, 1.

7. Iiro Kajanto, “Notes on Livy’s Conception of History,” Arctos II

(1958): 55.

Speeches, Exempla, and the Purpose of History 63

ad illa mihi pro se quisque acriter intendat animum, quae vita, qui mores

fuerint, per quos viros quibusque artibus domi militiaeque et parturn

et auctum imperium sit; labente deinde paulatim discillina velut

desidentis primo mores sequatur animo, deinde ut magis magisque lapsi

sint, tum ire coeperint praecipites, done ad haec tempora quibus nec

vitia nostra nec remedia pati possumus perventum est. (Livy, Praefatio

9) 8

In the first part of this section, Livy describes the things

which brought Rome to power: vita (“life”), mores (“morals”),

viri (“men”), and artes (“policies”). 9 In the second part of this

section, he outlines how the decline and decay of morals in

Rome resulted from the negligence of disciplina (“discipline”). 10

Livy perceived this negligence as contemporary laxity in behaviour

and morals in comparison to Romans commonly referred

to the maiores (“greater men”) of the past who were

responsible for making Rome the great city that it was. 11 For

Livy, “Rome’s moral decay was due to excessive prosperity,

which undermined the old simple way of life by giving rise to

greed and luxurious living.” 12 Livy shared this idea with Sallust,

who, although Livy’s predecessor, similarly viewed the present

as a degeneration from the past. Indeed, Sallust wrote his De

Coniuratione Catilinae in order to highlight the corruption and

decline of morals in Rome, believing that this caused the Catilinarian

conspiracy of 63 BCE. 13 Sallust explains how the security

and prosperity afforded to Rome bred luxury, greed, and

a laxity in morals among the population: Igitur ex divitiis iuven-

8. “But to such legends as these, however they shall be regarded

and judged, I shall, for my own part, attach no great importance.

Here are the questions to which I would have every reader give his

close attention —what life and morals were like; through what men

and by what policies, in peace and in war, empire was established

and enlarged; then let him note how, with the gradual relaxation

of discipline, morals first gave way, as it were, then sank lower and

lower, and finally began the downward plunge which has brought

us to the present time, when we can endure neither our vices nor

their cure.” I have used the Latin and English translations for Livy’s

Ab Urbe Condita from: Livy, Books I and II With An English Translation

(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1919; Perseus Digital

Library).

9. Kajanto, “Notes on Livy’s Conception of History,” 55.

10.Kajanto, 55.

11. Kajanto, 59.

12. Kajanto, 56.

13. Ann Thomas Wilkins, Villain or Hero: Sallust’s Portrayal of Catiline,

American University Studies, Series XVII, Classical Languages and

Literature, Vol. 15 (New York: P. Lang, 1994), 1.

64 Speeches, Exempla, and the Purpose of History

tutem luxuria atque avaritia cum superbia invasere: [...] nihil pensi

neque moderati habere (“From the influence of riches, accordingly,

luxury, avarice, and pride prevailed among the youth;

[...] and [they] threw off all consideration and self-restraint”). 14

In this regard, Livy subscribes to the idea of other earlier authors,

such as Sallust, who also understood the present to be

a degeneration into greed and luxuriousness from a more disciplined

and morally upright past.

A further comparison of the relationship between Sallust’s

and Livy’s approaches to writing history will aid in more clearly

defining the nature of Livy’s own opus (“work”). 15 Indeed, the

Sallustian approach to writing history provides an important

point of comparison for better understanding Livy’s aim in

writing the preface and Ab Urbe Condita as a whole. It cannot

be denied that Livy extensively employs Sallustian parallels for

his opus, since as we saw Livy “clearly approves [of Sallust’s]

moralising analysis of the causes of Roman decline,” 16 but he

also makes a decided departure from his distinguished predecessor.

17 For although they were each writing their histories as

a way of highlighting the decline and decay of their own contemporary

Rome, Sallust’s De Coniuratione Catilinae only covers

contemporary history of Rome. 18 While Sallust expounds

the moral value of earlier Roman history, he does not treat it

as the subject of his work. 19 By contrast, Livy wrote about the

history of Rome even before the foundation of the city and up

until his contemporary Rome. 20 Furthermore, Livy’s treatment

of the history of Rome in this way had implications for the

present too: Livy wrote his Ab Urbe Condita in an attempt to

help to remedy the malaise of his contemporary Rome. 21 In this

respect, Livy did not just write about the issues that plagued

14. Sallust, De Coniuratione Catilinae, 12. I have used the Latin of

Sallust’s De Coniuratione Catilinae from: Sallust, Catilina, Iugurtha,

Orationes Et Epistulae Excerptae De Historiis, ed. Axel W. Ahlberg

(Leipzig: Bibliotheca Teubneriana, 1919; Perseus Digital Library).

I shall also note here that all English translations of Sallust’s De

Coniuratione Catilinae are from: Sallust, Conspiracy of Catiline, trans.

Rev. John Selby Watson (New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899; Perseus

Digital Library).

15. John Moles, “Livy’s Preface,” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological

Society 39 (1994): 158.

16. Moles, “Livy’s Preface,” 161.

17. Moles, 161.

18. Moles, 161.

19. Moles, 161.

20. Moles, 161.

21. Moles, 161.


his contemporary Rome, but he was in effect attempting to

cure them. 22

The cure for the malaise of Livy’s contemporary Rome, according

to Livy, lay in the study (and writing) of history. Livy

believed that in history one can locate exempla of models for

imitation (or avoidance) in a decayed present: hoc illud est

praecipue in cognitione rerum salubre ac frugiferum, omnis te

exempli documenta in inlustri posita monumento intueri; inde

tibi tuaeque rei publicae quod imitere capias, inde foedum inceptu,

foedum exitu, quod vites (“What chiefly makes the study

of history wholesome and profitable is this, that you behold

the lessons of every kind of experience set forth as on a conspicuous

monument; from these you may choose for yourself

and for your own state what to imitate, from these mark for

avoidance what is shameful in the conception and shameful in

the result”). 23 By this means, Livy underscores the idea that he

was writing his history as a monumentum (“monument”) which

teaches “by providing paradigms of behaviour,” that is, exempla.

24 Nonetheless, Livy’s preface provides a clear elucidation

of what the theme of Ab Urbe Condita is: the rise and fall of

Rome. 25 Further, we can also ascertain from Livy’s assertion in

section 10 of the preface what he hopes the reader will derive

from the study of the history of Rome: lessons from exemplary

models, exempla, from the past about behaviour and conduct

for imitation or avoidance in a decayed and morally bankrupt

present.

The speeches of Lucretia in Ab Urbe Condita 1.58.7 and 1.58.10

constitute perhaps the clearest cases of how Livy uses speeches

as means of adducing exempla and exemplary models in

Book 1 of Ab Urbe Condita. Through Lucretia, Livy illustrates

the quintessential Roman matrona. 26 Even before Lucretia’s

first appearance in the narrative of Ab Urbe Condita at

1.57.9, her husband Collatinus praises her for her virtue as a

wife, during a discussion between him and other men concerning

their wives; Collatinus explains that by observing her

behaviour they could ascertain that she stood out over other

wives. 27 The men observe Lucretia’s modesty and chastity

22. Moles, 161.

23. Livy, Pr. 10.

24. Moles, “Livy’s Preface,” 154.

25. Kajanto, “Notes on Livy’s Conception of History,” 55.

26. Tom Stevenson, “Women of Early Rome As Exempla in Livy, Ab

Urbe Condita, Book 1,” Classical World 104, no. 2 (2011): 186.

27. Livy, 1.57.7.


when they arrive, since they find her sitting at the loom with

her handmaids, instead of spending time in banquet and luxury

with the king’s daughters-in-law. 28 However, tragedy soon

befalls Lucretia, when Sextus Tarquinius rapes her. Before she

commits suicide out of concern for her husband and family, 29

Lucretia delivers two brief speeches which provide a poignant

portrayal of her regret of having been forced into adultery by

Sextus Tarquinius. Lucretia exhorts her husband and father

that they should exact revenge against Sextus Tarquinius, but

not before she expresses grief at having been deprived of her

pudicitia (“sexual virtue”):

“minime,” inquit; “quid enim salvi est mulieri amissa pudicitia? vestigia

viri alieni, Collatine, in lecto sunt tuo; ceterum corpus est tantum violatum,

animus insons; mors testis erit. sed date dexteras fidemque haud

inpune adultero fore. Sex. est Tarquinius, qui hostis pro hospite priore

nocte vi armatus mihi sibique, si vos viri estis, pestiferum hinc abstulit

gaudium.” (Livy, 1.58.7–8) 30

This implies that even if she herself or anyone else were to consider

this rape, in Lucretia’s view, she still committed adultery.

So overcome by the grief of having been forced into adultery

by Sextus Tarquinius, suicide as the only solution fills Lucretia’s

mind: “vos,” inquit, “videritis, quid illi debeatur: ego me etsi peccato

absolvo, supplicio non libero; nec ulla deinde inpudica Lucretiae

exemplo vivet” (““It is for you to determine,” she answers,

“what is due to him; for my own part, though I acquit myself of

the sin, I do not absolve myself from punishment; not in time

to come shall ever unchaste woman live through the example

of Lucretia””). 31 From these speeches and her subsequent suicide,

it is clear that Lucretia remains dedicated to the importance

of her pudicitia, even if her suicide is a punishment for

the crime of adultery into which she had been forced and for

which she carried no blame. 32

28. Livy, 1.57.9.

29. Stevenson, “Women of Early Rome,” 185.

30. ““Far from it; for what can be well with a woman when she has

lost her honour? The print of a strange man, Collatinus, is in your

bed. Yet my body only has been violated; my heart is guiltless, as

death shall be my witness. But pledge your right hands and your

words that the adulterer shall not go unpunished. Sextus Tarquinius

is he that last night returned hostility for hospitality, and armed

with force brought ruin on me, and on himself no less —if you are

men —when he worked his pleasure with me.””

31. Livy, 1.58.10.



These speeches of Lucretia assert how she is therefore an exemplum

as well. Livy uses the speeches of Lucretia as a means

of making an exemplum of her concerning certain Roman ideals

and the crime of adultery. 33 According to Lucretia herself,

she does not deem it right for any woman to manipulate her

precedent to justify unchastity and adultery; 34 furthermore, as

Stevenson writes, “no Roman women caught in adultery shall

cry rape and escape punishment on the strength of her precedent.”

35 In respect to Roman ideals, then, Lucretia should

be an exemplum who deserves imitation: Lucretia embodies

the Roman ideals of loyalty, chastity, and physical and moral

courage. 36 But, rather than encouraging suicide for victims of

rape, the exemplum of Lucretia seems to concern itself with

attempting to discourage married women from committing

adultery in the first place and from attempting to excuse it. 37

Livy thus understands adultery itself as an offense which one

must avoid at all costs. Accordingly, through the speeches of

Lucretia, Livy provides not just an exemplum but, in the words

of Ovid, an exemplum coniugis bonae, 38 which underscores the

importance of the Roman ideals of loyalty, chastity, and physical

and moral courage, the severity of such offenses of adultery,

and how the punishments for it should be assessed by

Livy’s audiences. 39

For another exemplum adduced by speeches in Book 1 of Ab

Urbe Condita, it should be worth examining the speech of Tullus

Hostilius concerning Mettius Fufetius at Ab Urbe Condita

1.28.7. Livy first introduces Mettius Fufetius in the narrative at

Ab Urbe Condita 1.28.9. Here, Livy describes Mettius Fufetius

as having been brought forth as dictator (“dictator”) by the Albans,

40 and as Mettius Fufetius himself says, 41 he was selected

as the leader of the Albans gerendo bello (“to conduct the

33. Stevenson, 186.

34. C. S. Kraus, “Take your Medicine! Livy 1 and History’s Exemplary

Purpose,” Omnibus 40 (2000): 19.


36. Kraus, “Take your Medicine!,” 19.

37. Stevens, “Women of Early Rome,” 186.

38. Emily A. Hemelrijk, “Masculinity and Femininity in the ‘Laudatio

Turiae,’” The Classical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2004): 194. See: Ov. Tr.

1.6.26.


40. Livy, 1.28.9.

41. J. D. Noonan, “Mettius Fufetius in Livy,” Classical Antiquity 25, no.

2 (2006): 328.


war”). 42 Furthermore, Livy reports that Mettius Fufetius was

the leader of Alba Longa when they formed a foedus (“treaty”)

with Rome, before the duel between the three Horatii

and the three Curiatii: priusquam dimicarent, foedus ictum inter

Romanos et Albanos est his legibus (“Before proceeding with

the battle, a treaty was made between the Romans and the

Albans”). 43 The three Horatii were victorious and so the Albans

were subject to the authority of Rome, according to the conditions

of this foedus. However, later in the narrative of Book

1 of Ab Urbe Condita, Mettius Fufetius breaks this same foedus

between Alba Longa and Rome, as Tullus Hostilius remarks:

Mettius foederis Romani Albanique ruptor (“Mettius who broke

the treaty between Roman and Alban”). 44 Mettius Fufetius

does so by deserting the Roman army mid-battle and leading

the Alban army to a hilltop in order to watch for and take the

side of the victorious army: thus, his mind is torn between allegiance

with Rome and Fidenae.

As a result, the speech which Tullus Hostilius delivers at Ab

Urbe Condita 1.28.9 makes Mettius Fufetius a negative exemplum,

and in the narrative of Ab Urbe Condita, Mettius Fufetius

is “a lesson in unethical power politics.” 45 Indeed, Mettius Fufetius

himself represents an exemplum and lesson to be learned,

as adduced by the speech of Tullus Hostilius:

“metti Fufeti,” inquit, “si ipse discere posses fidem ac foedera servare,

vivo tibi ea disciplina a me adhibita esset; nunc, quoniam tuum insanabile

ingenium est, at tu tuo supplicio doce humanum genus ea sancta

credere quae a te violata sunt. ut igitur paulo ante animum inter Fidenatem

Romanamque rem ancipitem gessisti, ita iam corpus passim

distrahendum dabis.” (Livy, 1.28.9) 46

Seen here Tullus Hostilius exclaims that through his punishment—being

pulled apart by two four-horse teams—Mettius

Fufetius will teach the humanum genus ea sancta credere quae

violata sunt (“the human race to hold sacred the obligations

42. Livy, 1.23.8.

43. Livy, 1.24.3.

44. Livy, 1.28.6.

45. Noonan, “Mettius Fufetius in Livy,” 334.

46. “‘Mettius Fufetius, if you were capable of learning, yourself, to

keep faith and abide by treaties, you should have lived that I might

teach you this; as it is, since your disposition is incurable, you shall

yet by your punishment teach the human race to hold sacred the

obligations you have violated. Accordingly, just as a little while ago

your heart was divided between the states of Fidenae and Rome, so

now you shall give up your body to be torn two ways.’”


[which he has] violated”). 47 Additionally, the story of Mettius

Fufetius also signals a beginning for Livy’s exposition concerning

Roman political mortality: 48 that is, as Noonan writes,

“specifically the political morality that informed the hostile

relations between Rome and its Oscan/Sabellic neighbors and

rivals.” 49 In this manner, the speech of Tullus Hostilius concerning

Mettius Fufetius, and the dismemberment of his body as a

punishment for his betrayal of the treaty, adduces the exemplum

of Mettius Fufetius in order to teach a lesson about the

sanctity of treaties, that they must not be broken but rather

upheld, and the suitability of such punishments for such a

crime. In addition, the exemplum of Mettius Fufetius, which

the speech of Tullus Hostilius articulates, also reiterates the

importance of loyalty and the consequences of unfaithfulness

to Rome. Thus, the story and exemplum of Mettius Fufetius

represents a sort of “original sin” with regard to Roman political

morality, 50 and so, it “becomes the paradigm for Rome’s harsh

dealing with faithless allies over the next five centuries.” 51 On

all accounts, the exemplum of Mettius Fufetius therefore represents

faithless behaviour and conduct which is understood

to be that which must be avoided.

The speech of Horatius in Ab Urbe Condita 1.26.4–5 further instances

support for this idea of speeches as adducing exempla

in Book 1 of Ab Urbe Condita in order to perform a didactic

function. Here, Livy introduces seemingly heroic Horatius and

his seemingly traitorous sister Horatia. In the first half of his

story, Livy portrays Horatius as the archetypal courageous and

patriotic Roman hero. 52 Horatius’ heroism is founded above all

upon his willingness to sacrifice himself for and subordinate

his interests to the wellbeing of his fatherland. 53 This is especially

evident when Horatius and the other two Horatii engage

in battle against the three Curiatii: nec his nec illis periculum

suum, publicum imperium servitiumque obversatur animo (“Neither

side thought of its own danger, but of the nation’s sovereignty

or servitude”). 54 But in the second half of the story of

Horatius, after his triumph in battle, out of the same fervent

47. Livy, 1.28.9.

48. Noonan, “Mettius Fufetius in Livy,” 335.

49. Noonan, 335.

50. Noonan, 327.

51. Noonan, 327.

52. Joseph B. Solodow, “Livy and the Story of Horatius, 1.24–26,”

Transactions of the American Philological Association 109 (1979): 254.

53. Solodow, “Livy and the Story of Horatius,” 254.

54. Livy, 1.25.3.


dedication to his fatherland, Horatius kills his sister Horatia, to

whom one of the three Curiatii was betrothed, when he finds

her mourning the loss of her inimical fiancé. 55 The speech which

Horatius delivers after he kills his sister explains his reasoning

for doing so more fully: “abi hinc cum immaturo amore ad sponsum”

inquit, “oblita fratrum mortuorum vivique, oblita patriae. sic

eat quaecumque Romana lugebit hostem” (“‘Begone’ he cried,

‘to your betrothed, with your ill-timed love, since you have

forgot your brothers, both the dead and the living, and forgot

your country! So perish every Roman woman who mourns a

foe!’”). 56 A perfunctory reading of the speech of Horatius, and

of how it makes an exemplum of Horatia, warning women and

also perhaps men against betraying not just their fatherland

but Rome in particular, could suggest a justification of Horatius’

killing of his sister. 57 The juxtaposition of the patriotic

Horatius and the unpatriotic Horatia supports this idea too.

Livy could therefore be making an exemplum of Horatia here

in the speech of Horatius in order to teach a lesson about how

serious an offence it was to betray not only one’s fatherland

but especially Rome.

However, the story of Horatius continues, and it becomes apparent

that a perfunctory reading of the exemplum of Horatia

as a traitor to her family and Rome in the speech of Horatius

does not suffice. 58 The speech of Horatius also illustrates a

departure for Livy from using speeches as means of disseminating

exempla that demonstrate clear cases of behaviour and

conduct which should either be imitated or avoided. 59 At once

after his speech, Livy describes Horatius’ killing of his sister as

atrox (“atrocious”), and Horatius is hauled into court before

the king on the charge of killing his sister: atrox visum id facinus

patribus plebique, sed recens meritum facto obstabat. tamen raptus

in ius ad regem (“Horrid as this deed seemed to the Fathers

and the people, his recent service was an off-set to it; nevertheless

he was seized and brought before the king for trial”). 60

Certainly, as Solodow elaborates further, “Though it was obvious

that his loyal subordination of himself to the state merited

the highest praise before, it is far from obvious now, when he

murders his kin.” 61 In the end, the story of Horatius seemingly

55. Livy, 1.26.2–3.

56. Livy, 1.26.4–5.


58. Stevenson, 182.

59. Stevenson, 182.

60. Livy, 1.26.5.

61. Solodow, “Livy and the Story of Horatius,” 254–5.


remains unresolved, for, although Horatius is acquitted, Livy

acknowledges that his aquittal came admiratione magis virtutis

quam iure causae (“more in admiration of his valour than

from the justice of his cause”). 62 And so, Livy compels his readers

to consider how the behaviour and conduct of Horatius

and the exemplum of Horatia disseminated by the speech of

Horatius should be interpreted: in particular, “are the qualities

important to war and empire compatible with civil society,

with ordinary life?” 63 In the case of Horatius’ killing of his sister

and the exemplum of Horatia, Livy portrays an exemplum and a

punishment which present a moral problem and an awareness

of this problem, which he then transfers from the characters

within the narrative of Book 1 to his audiences. 64 In this way,

the killing of Horatia and the exemplum of Horatia which Horatius’

speech disseminates leaves readers with the unresolved

moral problem which they need to work out for themselves. 65

Indeed, whether or not Horatia was iure caesa (“justly slain”),

since she had mourned an enemy and so was guilty of proditio

(“treason”), accusanda (“to be accused”) and damnanda (“to

be convicted”) in any event, 66 and whether the crime of Horatius

was a paradigmatic case of perduellio (“high treason”), or

parricidium (“parricide”), or something else, as others have argued,

67 Livy leaves these questions up to his audiences to answer.

In this sense, perhaps Livy does not intend to suggest that

one character, Horatia or Horatius, should be imitated and

the other condemned, but rather that their actions altogether

should be avoided. In such a way Livy could use the killing of

Horatia; Horatius’ speech, which disseminates the exemplum

of Horatia; and the trial and acquittal of Horatius in order to

62. Livy, 1.26.12.

63. Solodow, “Livy and the Story of Horatius,” 255.

64. Solodow, 258.


66. R. M. Ogilvie, A Commentary on Livy, Books I–V (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1965), 114. Ogilvie cites three sources in support of the

assertion that Horatia was guilty of proditio: Ulpian, Dig. 3. 2. II. 3;

Marc., Dig. II. 7. 35; Suetonius, Tiberius 61.

67. Ogilvie writes that there are others who argue that the crime of

Horatius was parracidium, but Ogilvie asserts that it was a paradigmatic

case of perduellio: 115–6. A. Watson (“The Death of Horatia,”

The Classical Quarterly 29, no. 2 (1979): 436–47) sees the trial

of Horatius more as “the paradigm not just of one major criminal

offence and the appropriate procedure, but of criminal jurisdiction

and procedure in general, and especially of the overlap of competing

jurisdictions” (445).


teach his audiences lessons more about the sorts of behaviour

and conduct which should be avoided, such as the proditio of

Horatia as well as the perduellio or parricidium, however one

interprets the crime, of Horatius. Nonetheless, it remains clear

that the speech of Horatius in Ab Urbe Condita 1.26.4–5 provides

another example of how Livy uses speeches within the

narrative of Book 1 as a method of adducing exempla in order

to not only teach his readers lessons but also to raise questions

for consideration by them about what sorts of behaviour

and conduct is moral or immoral and in what contexts.

Throughout the narrative of Book 1 of Livy’s Ab Urbe Condita,

there are many cases of exempla which serve to teach his audiences

lessons about what sorts of behaviour and conduct they

should either imitate or avoid. The speeches of Lucretia at Ab

Urbe Condita 1.58.7 and 1.58.10 and of Tullus Hostilius about

Mettius Fufetius at Ab Urbe Condita 1.28.7 all act as pertinent

examples in support of this idea. However, Livy does not always

present exempla which demonstrate clear cases of good

or bad, moral or immoral, behaviour and conduct: the story of

Horatius and the exemplum of Horatia instances merely one

situation where Livy obfuscates his use of exempla. Ultimately,

through the dissemination of these exempla with the speeches

of various historical individuals throughout the narrative

of Book 1 Livy compels his audiences to work through and

attempt to understand the implications of these exempla. 68

And if in fact these exempla were to serve as exemplary models,

from which Livy hoped his audiences would learn lessons

about behaviour and conduct that they should either imitate

or avoid, in order that they might shape their own character

and improve their own state, it would be necessary then for

his audiences to be active participants in identifying and understanding

them. 69 Indeed, through these exempla and their

dissemination by the speeches of historical individuals in the

narrative of Book 1, we are more easily able to discern Livy’s

conceptualization of the purpose of history, and how we can

turn to the past for exemplary models, exempla, for the present.

68. Kraus, “Take your Medicine! Livy 1 and History’s Exemplary

Purpose,” 20.

69. Kraus, “Take your Medicine!,” 20.


BIBLIOGRAPHY

Chaplin, Jane D. Livy’s Exemplary History. Oxford: Oxford University

Press, 2000.

Hemelrijk, Emily A. “Masculinity and Femininity in the ‘Laudatio

Turiae.’” The Classical Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2004): 185–97.

Kajanto, Iiro. “Notes on Livy’s conception of history.” Arctos II

(1958): 55–63.

Kraus, C. S. “Take your Medicine! Livy 1 and History’s Exemplary

Purpose,” Omnibus 40 (2000):18–20.

Livy. Books I and II With An English Translation. Cambridge,

MA.: Harvard University Press; London: William Heinemann,

1919. Perseus Digital Library. https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/

hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0151%3Abook%3D1%3Achapter%3Dpr

(accessed December 9, 2023).

Moles, John. “Livy’s Preface.” Proceedings of the Cambridge

Philological Society 39 (1994): 141–68. https://doi.org/10.1017/

S0068673500001759.

Noonan, J. D. “Mettius Fufetius in Livy.” Classical Antiquity

25, no. 2 (2006): 327–49. https://doi.org/10.1525/

ca.2006.25.2.327.

Ogilvie, R. M. A Commentary on Livy, Books I–V. Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1965.

Roller, Matthew B. Models from the Past Roman Culture: A

World of Exempla. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

2018.

Sallust. Catilina, Iugurtha, Orationes Et Epistulae Excerptae

De Historiis. Edited by Axel W. Ahlberg. Leipzig: Bibliotheca

Teubneriana, 1919. Perseus Digital Library. https://

www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A2008.01.0002%3Atext%3DCat.%3Achapter%3D1

(accessed January 25, 2024).


Sallust. The Conspiracy of Catiline, trans. Rev. John Selby Watson.

New York: Harper & Brothers, 1899. Perseus Digital Library.

https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.02.0124%3Achapter%3D1

(accessed

January 25, 2024).

Stevenson, Tom. “Women of Early Rome As Exempla in Livy,

Ab Urbe Condita, Book 1.” Classical World 104, no. 2 (2011):

175–89.

Solodow, Joseph B. “Livy and the Story of Horatius, 1.24–26.”

Transactions of the American Philological Association 109

(1979): 251–68. https://doi.org/10.2307/284061.

Watson, Alan. “The Death of Horatia.” The Classical Quarterly

29, no. 2 (1979): 436–47. https://doi.org/10.1017/

S0009838800036041.

Wilkins, Ann Thomas. Villain or Hero: Sallust’s Portrayal of

Catiline. American University Studies. Series XVII, Classical

Languages and Literature, Vol. 15. New York: P. Lang, 1994.


AMPHORA

BEX STEINBERG

Mount Allison University

76

77

78

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

Throughout history, artworks tell the stories of their owners

and creators, providing clues about their societies, habits,

and presentations through the ages. In my work, I aim to

illustrate contemporary times through various styles and

approaches of the past, finding commonalities within centuries

of humanity viewed through its creations.

This soft sculptural amphora recreation is inspired by classical

red-figure pottery, which would often show scenes from

mythology or the life of everyday people in ancient times.

Crochet is a medium usually associated with the domestic

space, and the malleability of its form reminded me of the

process of shaping clay. I aimed to recreate the characteristic

colors and patterns that I admire in Greco-Roman pottery

while depicting everyday activities from my own daily

life, such as painting, cooking, or walking to class while using

my phone. By referencing narratives and iconography that

resonate across time, I hope that viewers draw similarities

with and humanize those who lived so long ago.

79

PICKING UP THE SATRAPES OF SEMANTIC

CHANGE1THE MEANING OF SATRAPES

(SATRAPA) IN THE WALTHARIUS AND ITS

BACKGROUND 1

2 Blake Alexander Lopez, Harvard College

Attila sed celeres mox huc deflectit habenas,

Nec tardant reliqui satrapae vestigia adire. 2

But Attila at once turns his swift reins in this direction,

And the rest do not hesitate to follow the satrap’s footsteps.

3

Thus do vv. 42–3 of the Waltharius, the ninth or

tenth century Latin epic poem of Germanic

heroic subject matter, describe Attila the Hun

leading his men in their march on the Burgundians. This

march was one which Attila’s men joined without hesitation,

following in the footsteps of their satrap (Latin

satrapes/satraps, -is, or satrapa, -ae, m.), Atilla. The use

of the Latin term satrapes to refer to Attila the Hun in

the above passage, as we shall come to see, while generally

undiscussed in the scholarship surrounding the

Waltharius, is quite interesting and of significance to

the poem’s interpretation. But the first question to ask

is, what is satraps supposed to mean?

In Classical Latin, satraps is a decidedly foreign term

with a fixed meaning. The Oxford Latin Dictionary

defines a satrapes as “[a] Persian provincial governor,

1. I would like to thank Professor Jan Ziolkowski, Arthur

Kingsley Porter Professor of Medieval Latin in Harvard University’s

Department of the Classics, for his many recommendations

of secondary literature for this paper.

2. All text cited from the Waltharius in this paper comes

from Karl Strecker, Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae

Latini Medii Aevi VI, 1: Nachträge zu den Poetae Aevi Carolini

(Weimar: Hermann Böhlaus Nachfolger, 1951).

3. Translation mine.

satrap”; 4 other major dictionaries like Lewis and Short correspond

with this meaning for Classical sources. 5 The Classical

meaning of satrapes adheres rigidly to the chain of foreign borrowings

that eventually resulted in the term’s arrival in the Latin

language. The term originally began with the Iranian compound

*xšaθra-pā-, literally meaning “protector of the empire,”

which was used in the Persian Empire as the title for the official

imperial position of satrap as we use the term today. The

term was eventually borrowed into Greek as satrápēs under its

original Persian definition and was then in turn borrowed into

Latin from the Greek. 6 (Non-German-language scholarship on

the etymology of the Latin term is generally lacking, with no

entries to be found in, for instance, Ernout and Meillet’s Dictionnaire

étymologique de la langue latine, Maltby’s Lexicon of

Ancient Latin Etymologies, or de Vaan’s Etymological Dictionary

of Latin and the other Italic Languages.)

So given that satraps is, in Classical Latin, a decidedly foreign

term, are we to understand the term’s application to Attila

the Hun in the Waltharius as an indication of Attila’s status as

a foreigner? This conclusion might seem likely given the fact

that almost every other character within the narrative of the

Waltharius is Germanic, and the general modern consensus is

that the Waltharius Poet, although not identified for certain,

is likely Germanic. 7 However, I argue that the application of

the term satrapes to Attila the Hun does not mark Attila as

a foreigner relative to the rest of the characters within the

Waltharius: Rather, the usage of the term satrapes that we see

applied throughout the text of the Waltharius indicates that

the term is applied merely to indicate a “ruler” in a very generalized

sense. Furthermore, although I have chosen “satrap” as

the literal English translation of the Latin term satrapes (here:

satrapa) in the passage above cited from the Waltharius, one

would easily be able to translate the term satrapes into English

as “ruler.”

4. S.v. satrapes.

5. Charlton T. Lewis, A Latin Dictionary for Schools (Oxford: Clarendon

Press, 1889), s.v. satrapes.

6. Hjalmar Frisk, “Das Reich schützend,” in Griechisches Etymologisches

Wörterbuch (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1960), s.v. σατράπης.

Translation mine.

7. For an argument in support of the Germanic conclusion on a

metrical basis, see Blake A. Lopez, “The Prosody of Latin S Impura

Consonant Clusters in the Waltharius,” Discentes: Penn’s Classical

Studies Publication: September 24, 2023.

Picking up the "Satrapes" of Semantic Change 81

The evidence for this interpretation of the term satrapes as a

term with not a specific, foreign meaning, but rather with a

very general meaning comes from its repeated usage throughout

the poem. Including in the above cited passage, the term

satrapes appears, in total, seven times in the Waltharius: Three

of the seven occurrences of satrapes refer to Attila the Hun (vv.

43, 170, and 371); two occurrences refer to Gunther, king of the

Franks (vv. 573 and 1126); and the final two occurrences of satrapes

(vv. 136 and 278) are general references to, respectively,

the “satraps … of the Pannonias” (satrapis … Pannoniarum) and

the satrapes who form part of Attila’s court at a royal feast. Notably,

Attila exercises evident authority over these two groups

of satrapes while himself being named a satrapes as well, reinforcing

the generality of reference of the term satrapes. From

this selection of contexts, it is clear to see that in the Waltharius,

the Latin term satrapes is used to refer to various different

rulers of various different peoples and of various different

standings; if we were to give a name to the meaning of the

term, we might settle upon a formulation like we suggested

above: “generic ruler.”

In Classical Latin idiom, as an immediate result of the chain of

foreign borrowings which deposited the term in the language,

satrapes possesses a single, markedly technical definition, referring

to a specific office of specifically delineated authority

within a specific imperial organization. This original, technical

meaning of the term satrapes does not even occur once within

the Waltharius, in comparison to the newer, generalized meaning:

None of the characters referred to as satrapes are, after all,

actual Imperial Persian satrapes. So how, then, did this semantic

shift occur?

To a certain extent, semantic change within Medieval Latin

terms compared to their Classical counterparts is well to

be expected (whether such change be motivated by natural

language evolution, vernacular influence, Christian influence,

etc.), and a given term is likely to have undergone a semantic

shift-like transference of meaning, readjustment in scope, or

shift in geo-cultural reference. The Waltharius’s usage of satrapes

is so noteworthy, however, because this single term appears

to have undergone all of these discrete semantic shifts,

with the end result being that one can scarcely connect the

definition displayed in the Waltharius with its original meaning.

This term, which referred originally to a Persian office of specifically

limited, dependent, regional authority, is by the time

82 Picking up the "Satrapes" of Semantic Change

of the Waltharius being used freely in reference to the holders

of many different offices of authority across multiple different

peoples and at many different levels within a given power

hierarchy. Attila the Hun, ruler of the greatest land empire by

domain in history, is a satrapes, and a Classical Latin author,

familiar only with the term’s reference to limited, dependent,

regional authorities, would find this designation strange. But

for us today, examination of the synchronic and diachronic

context surrounding satrapes’ semantic field can render this

designation far less bizarre.

Importantly, as we examine the changed sense of the term

satrapes from Classical idiom in the context of the term’s usage

within the Waltharius, confounding factors appear absent

from the poem’s context that would invalidate our observations

made thus far. For instance, given that Attila the Hun

and traditional Persian satraps both represent, to Europeans,

Eastern authorities, the fact that the Frankish king Gunther

is additionally named a satrapes removes any doubt that, to

the Waltharius Poet, satrapes should be an exclusively Eastern

term. Furthermore, satrapes does not appear to be a specific

title reserved for a specific named ruler like Attila, Gunther,

etc.: Our earlier discussed reference to “satraps … of the Pannonias”

(v. 136) solidifies the term’s generality and applicability

to a variety of rulers of a variety of standings from a variety of

places.

Given too that the Waltharius is, after all, an epic poem in dactylic

hexameter, one could express concern that the poem’s

usage of the term satrapes is simply metrically motivated. Important

for addressing this point is the fact that the Latin term

dominus is also available in the Waltharius as a generic term

for “ruler,” being applied to both Attila and Gunther at various

different points in the poem (e.g. vv. 124 and 120 respectively;

note also how even this close proximity does not prevent

the term from being repeated with reference to different individuals).

In six of the seven occurrences of the term satrapes

in the Waltharius, the grammatical form of satrapes is metrically

identical with the grammatically corresponding form of

the term dominus (the specific forms being the genitive singular,

dative singular, and ablative plural, forms which, given

the mute-liquid rule and the fact that satrapes is declined as a

first-declension noun in the Waltharius, all scan as short-shortlong

for both words). The only occurrence in the Waltharius in

which the term satrapes is leveraged for specific metrical effect


which dominus would be unable to provide is in v. 1126, where

the hiatus at the word boundary satrapa et causes an elision.

Thus, almost every single occurrence of the term satrapes in

the Waltharius confers no metrical benefit over the equivalent

term dominus; the pattern of usage of the term satrapes in the

Waltharius thus cannot be said to be metrically motivated.

However, although the use of the term satrapes within the

Waltharius appears to be unconfounded by external factors,

one might wonder if the term’s inclusion in the poem at all

is merely a peculiarity of the poem itself (e.g. an attempt at

archaism), unreflected by contemporary texts; however, the

usage of the term satrapes does not appear to be a peculiarity

of the Waltharius among its contemporaries. Apart from its

seven occurrences within the Watharius, the online database

of the Monumenta Germaniae Historica lists eleven additional

ninth and tenth century occurrences of the term satrapes

spread across seven independent works (including, again,

works whose occurrences in no way reference the Persian Empire,

such as the “Carmen de Sancta Benedicta”). 8 Thus, while

the Waltharius contains a large number of the ninth and tenth

century occurrences of the term satrapes, it does not contain

all or even the majority of occurrences of the term: Many other

Latin works of the ninth and tenth-centuries are not limited

to using satrapes in the traditional Persian sense. Furthermore,

by comparing these total eighteen occurrences (including the

Waltharius) of the term satrapes during the ninth and tenth

centuries to the total 35 occurrences of the term satrapes attested

by the Library of Latin Texts in the four centuries from

163 BCE to 200 CE, we can see that the rate of occurrence of

the term satrapes (approximately nine occurrences per century)

is exactly the same between the two medieval centuries

in question and the four Classical centuries in question. The

term satrapes is thus statistically exactly as common during

the ninth and ninth centuries as it is during the Classical era.

We are not, however, limited to Latin corpus analysis for establishing

the commonality of the “generic ruler” meaning of the

term satrapes: While satrapes has thus far lacked a comprehensive

modern scholarly account detailing its semantic change

over its history in the Latin language, multiple dictionaries

written in and about post-Classical language address the term

in some way. For instance, the Dictionary of Medieval Latin

8. “Carmen de sancta Benedicta,” BHL-1088, Poetae 4, no.1, ed. P.

von Winterfeld, (1899), 209–231.


from British Sources, the preeminent completed national dictionary

of Medieval Latin, catalogs a multitude of occurrences

of the term satrapes in reference to various different positions

of authority: the vast majority of these referenced positions of

authority belong squarely to the realm of native British medieval

authority (both secular and ecclesiastical), and only a scant

few (mostly biblical) occurrences point to Eastern authority of

any kind. 9 Such generalization of the term is reflected in medieval

dictionaries/encyclopedias, such as the Suda, which, even

for its heavy reliance on Classical sources (and sources in the

original Greek for that matter), goes no further than to define

the Greek satrápēs (whence Latin satrapes derives) as “a kind

of position” 10 —a meaning with no reference whatsoever to the

Persians or the East and which, frankly, is even more general

than the sense of “generic ruler” that we have decided to label

as the intended meaning of the term in the Waltharius.

Just the same manner of generality of reference of the term

satrapes can be found in even the etymological dictionaries/

encyclopedias, such as Uguccione da Pisa’s famous 12 th -century

Derivationes, wherein he writes: “Satraps are called wisemen,

judges, kings or leaders as well as magistrates of the

Persians…” 11 In this definition, we see foremost enumerated

the various diverse positions of authority to which the term

satrapes can be applied (though we get the impression that

this is not an exhaustive list, and perhaps that Uguccione was

simply running out of unique Latin inclusive conjunctions to

string together), with the traditional Persian definition added

abruptly at the end; while the inclusion of the Persian definition

does indicate Uguccione’s recognition of the word’s origin,

the fact that the Persian definition appears last in the enumeration

of far more general definitions seems rather indicative of

Uguccione’s etymological interest throughout the Derivationes

than of any pressing need to present a common contemporary

meaning of the word satrapes. Uguccione’s primarily etymological

motivation for mentioning the word is confirmed by the

second half of this same sentence, wherein he postulates an

outright etymological connection between the term satrapes

9. Latham et al., Dictionary of Medieval Latin from British Sources, s.v.

satrapa.

10. σατράπης δὲ σατράπου, εἶδος ἀξιώματος. Suda On Line, trans. Catherine

Roth (Stoa Consortium, 2005), s.v. “satrapy.” Translation mine.

11. Satrape dicuntur sapientes, iudices vel reges sive duces et prefecti

Persarum… Uguccione da Pisa, Derivationes, ed. Enzo Cecchini (Florence:

SISMEL, Edizioni del Galluzzo, 2004), 1064. Translation mine.


and the phrase satis rapientes vel petentes (“quite rapacious or

ambitious”), a connection which draws strongly on the impression

of satrapes as power-hungry rulers rather than as limited

regional authorities within a greater imperial administration.

Perhaps the most insightful attempt at connecting the “general

ruler” definition of satrapes in contemporary post-Classical

Latin with the term’s original technical meaning is Forcellini’s

entry for the term satrapes in his 18 th -century Lexicon Totius

Latinitatis, arguably the most monumental work of Latin lexicography

before the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae. As an early

modern academic work, Forcellini’s Lexicon is now generally

concerned with establishing the prescriptive Classical definitions

of the Latin terms contained within the work, though in

the case of satrapes, Forcellini happens to include an insightful

comment in an attempt to explain some of the term’s semantic

change over the medieval period: “These [satraps] were considered

to be most rich, and like petty kings [reguli].” 12 That is

to say: By sharing in the wealth and influence traditionally attributed

to the Persian Empire, the Persian satrapes, though in

reality only regional authorities within a greater imperial body,

were seen to be comparable in material, territorial, and even

authoritative scale even to minor independent monarchs, otherwise

referred to as reguli. Consequently, as the positions of

regulus and satrapes became functionally interchangeable in

the minds of Latin speakers, so too would the pertinent terms

of reference for these positions likewise become interchangeable.

The term satrapes would consequently undergo an expansion

of its semantic field, since the term’s original meaning

of “regional authority subordinate to an independent ruler”

would now be complemented by another potential meaning

of “(minor) independent ruler in one’s own right.”

This semantic development of satrapes via conflation with regulus

would perfectly contextualize the “generic ruler” meaning

of the term displayed throughout the Waltharius, since the

conflation with regulus allowed satrapes to extend its meaning

from merely subordinate rulers to encompass independent

rulers—e.g. Attila the Hun or Gunther—as well. It is worth

mentioning that one more step in the chain of semantic shifts

of the term satrapes is necessary in order to explain the term’s

ability in the Waltharius to refer to both greater kings as well as

lesser kings [reguli]—one would be hard-pressed to argue, for

12. Hi opulentissimi habebantur, et quasi reguli, Forcellini, Lexicon

totius latinitatis, s.v. satrapes. Translation mine.


instance, that Attila the Hun, one of the greatest land rulers

in history, is a petty king [regulus], but he is patently a satrapes

in the Waltharius. This latter semantic change, however, is an

exceedingly common example of natural language evolution,

where a strict distinction of scale simply becomes less important

over time. Can we not call both a coffee table and a dinner

table simply a “table”?

The conflation of satrapes and regulus thus provides a clear

path to the semantic expansion of satrapes that we see on

such a noteworthy display in the Waltharius. The simple fact

that this argument can explain this semantic change, however,

does not necessarily mean that it should explain this semantic

change. In order to establish that this logically sound

argument for the semantic change of satrapes on the basis of

conflation with regulus is also historically sound, we must first

settle a matter of historical fact: Do we possess actual historical

evidence that materially attests the conflation of satrapes

and regulus, or is our evidence for the conflation merely its logical

consistency?

In short, yes, we do have actual material evidence of the conflation

of satrapes with regulus in the form of the Vetus Latina

Bible translations. The Vetus Latina comprises the body of

pre-Vulgate translations of the Septuagint 13 and the Greek New

Testament into Latin (Jerome’s Old Testament translations in

the Vulgate constitute the first recorded translations of the

Hebrew Old Testament into Latin). 14 As the Vulgate was the

first standardized translation of the Bible into Latin, the Vetus

Latina Bible translations are all, as a rule, unstandardized, as

well as fragmentary; in addition, given the demographics of the

Christian community in the first few centuries CE, the writers

of the Vetus Latina were generally poor and lesser educated,

factors which certainly ended up harming the Latinity of the

translations. However, this vernacular tilt of the Vetus Latina

is exactly why these translations form a perfect body of investigation

for our present line of inquiry: few better sources can

be found for seeing how an uneducated Latin speaker would

translate a Greek term of Eastern origin into Latin, oftentimes

by substituting in an equivalent native word even if the Greek

13. All Septuagint Greek referenced in this paper comes from Septuaginta:

Vetus Testamentum Graecum (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck &

Ruprecht, 1931).

14. W. E. Plater and H. J. White, A Grammar of the Vulgate: Being an

Introduction to the Study of the Latinity of the Vulgate Bible (Oxford:

Clarendon Press, 1926), 6.


word were an attested loan in higher Latin registers. 15

One way of investigating the body of evidence of the Vetus

Latina Bible translations is to see where the term satrapes occurs

in the text of the Vulgate and to compare its corresponding

translations in the Vetus Latina: 16 If we are able to find a

specific Bible verse wherein an original Greek satrápēs is translated

by Jerome as satrapes but by a Vetus Latina translator as

regulus, then we will have material evidence of the conflation

of these two terms by means of their being interchangeable

translations of the exact same term in the exact same context.

One might draw this method of investigation into question by

positing that such interchange of satrapes and regulus among

varying translations is not necessarily indicative of satrapes~regulus

conflation, but rather that instances of Greek satrápēs

being translated into Latin as regulus may simply reflect Latin-speaking

translators’ poor command of Greek. This concern,

however, is allayed by the general consensus that, as

Christine Mohrmann, a renowned master in the field of Christian

Greek-Latin loans, relates, “[T]hese old versions [of Bible

translations] were made in communities that were formed by

a large share of bilinguals.” 17 With native bilingualism then taken

as a given for the early Christian communities in which the

Vetus Latina Bible translations were produced, the rationale

for the selection of the Latin regulus to translate the Greek satrápēs

as opposed to the acceptable Latin term satrapes may

have been multifarious. Perhaps the Vetus Latina translators,

who, despite their bilingualism, were generally lesser-educated

all the same, were simply unaware that satrapes was an acceptable

Greek loanword in higher Latin registers; one is, after

all, not generally free to translate simply by transliterating.

Alternatively, selecting the native term regulus over the loanword

satrapes may have been an intentional choice in order to

aid in evangelism towards monolingual Latin speakers. Whatever

their rationale ultimately may have been, we can remain

confident that when a Vetus Latina translator translated the

15. Theodore A. Bergren, “Greek Loan-Words in the Vulgate New

Testament and the Latin Apostolic Fathers,” Traditio 74 (2019): 5n7.

16. All Vulgate Latin referenced in this paper comes from Library of

Latin Texts, Centre Traditio Literrarum Occidentalium (Turnhout:

Brepols, 2002).

17. “[C]es anciennes versions ont été faites dans des communautés

qui étaient constituées pour une large part de personnes bilingues.”Christine

Mohrmann, “Les Emprunts Grecs Dans La Latinité

Chrétienne,” Vigiliae Christianae 4, no. 1 (1950): 198. Translation mine.


Greek satrápēs as the Latin regulus, such translation was not

due to poor command of the language.

Despite the Vetus Latina translators’ native bilingualism allaying

this critique of our analytical framework, however, two

definite difficulties do present themselves as we seek evidence

for the satrapes~regulus conflation by means of comparing the

Vulgate and Vetus Latina corpora, which I outline below.

Firstly, given that the term satrapes is confined to the Old Testament

exclusively, we are unable to lean on other scholars’

lexicographical analysis: Most work on the Vetus Latina and

on Greek loanwords in Christian Latin focuses on exclusively

Christian works like the New Testament and the writings of

the Church Fathers. For instance, Bergren’s recent study on

Greek loanwords in early Christian sources focuses exclusively

on these two sources, and the great canonical concordances

of Greek-Latin translation in early Christian texts, such as

Schmoller’s Handkonkordanz zum griechischen Neuen Testament

and Kraft’s Clavis Patrum Apostolicorum, restrict their

scope to these two sources respectively. Such restriction in

scope amongst modern scholarship makes sense in order to focus

on the linguistic innovations and contributions particular

to the Christian community, but unfortunately, this restriction

in scope also leaves by the wayside interesting Old Testament

phenomena like the treatment of the term satrapes.

The second challenge to our investigation of the Vetus Latina

Bible translations is that our investigation cannot exactly be

corpus searching as such. The Vetus Latina Database, unlike

other BREPOLiS databases like the Library of Latin Texts or

Monumenta Germaniae Historica, is not text-searchable: Rather,

non-text-searchable images of record cards containing individual

Bible verses from individual Vetus Latina translations

are uploaded and must be individually examined via manual

searches. Given this difficulty, it was necessary to restrict the

“corpus” search for this present paper to the nine occurrences

of satrapes attested by the Library of Latin Texts in Vulgate I

Samuel (AKA I Regum): 5:8, 5:11, 6:5, 6:12, 6:16, 7:7, 29:2, 29:6,

and 29:7.

When searching these Bible verses in the Vetus Latina Database,

it is moreover necessary to be aware that, while the database

contains cards from many Vetus Latina Bible translations,

it does not contain cards from all of them; furthermore,

the translations which are contained in the database are, as


a rule, fragmentary. For these reasons of investigatory restriction

in terms of both breadth and depth, the conclusions that

we draw from searching the Vetus Latina Database for corresponding

translations to Vulgate satrapes will be necessarily

limited. For whatever number of examples of interchange between

satrapes and regulus that we are even able to find, given

our above parameters, we must bear in mind that additional

examples of such interchange may in fact exist but are merely

kept out of reach by logistical and technological restrictions.

Given these restrictions which we expect to limit the number

of positive hits in our corpus searching, it is incredibly noteworthy

that we do in fact find copious examples of interchange

between satrapes and regulus when comparing the Vulgate

and the Vetus Latina translations of I Samuel. For seven of the

nine total verses containing satrapes in the Vulgate (all but 7:7

and 29:7), there exist corresponding Vetus Latina translations

wherein the Greek satrápēs is translated not as satrapes but

rather as regulus or an almost identical term. Namely, satrápēs

is translated in 6:5 as princeps rather than regulus, but this difference

presents no difficulty to our interpretation given that

the meanings of the terms princeps and regulus overlap in the

sense of “prince.” 18 Additionally, in 29:6, satrápēs is translated

not as regulus but as subregulus, an exclusively post-Classical

term whose sub- prefix merely intensifies the diminutive suffix

of regulus.) Three texts recur multiple times and consistently

translate satrápēs as regulus or similar: The Vetus Latina quoted

in Lucifer of Cagliari’s De Athanasio, 19 Palimpsestus Vindobonensis

(or Codex Vindobonensis), and the margines codicis gothici

legionensis (AKA Codex Legionensis). 20

This strong evidence for such thorough conflation of satraps

and regulus, especially given our investigatory restrictions of

breadth and depth, could hardly have been anticipated, but

remarkably, the evidence does not even stop here: Examining

the Vetus Latina Bible translations also allows us in certain cases

to examine associated interpretational and exegetical texts

glossing the scripture in question. One such text is Augustine’s

Quaestionum in Heptateuchum Liber VII (AKA Questiones in Iudices),

which, although it does not present any unique Vetus

18. Lewis, Latin Dictionary, s.vv. princeps and regulus respectively.

19. Lucifer, Luciferi Calaritani opuscula (Austria: C. Geroldi, 1886), ,

86–7.

20. Alan E. Brooke, Norman McLean, and Henry Thackery, The Old

Testament in Greek: Volume II: The Later Historical Books. Part I: I and

II Samuel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1927), vii.


Latina translation on its own, is evidently a gloss of some Vetus

Latina translation of I Samuel 6:16, though one containing satrapes

instead of regulus; Augustine’s comment on the satrapes

found in this passage, however, is immensely illustrative of our

argument.

Satrapiae autem dicuntur quasi parva regna, quibus satrapes praeerant.

(Augustine, Sancti Aureli Augustini, 461)

“Satrapies, moreover, are said to be like small kingdoms, over

which satraps ruled.” 21

No more appropriate a name can be given to the ruler of a

“small kingdom” (parva regna) than “small king” (regulus), and

in Augustine’s conception, a satrapes is synonymous with such

a ruler. Similarly, no greater vindication of Forcellini’s earlier

mentioned identification of the kinship between satraps and

regulus could be hoped for than one of the Church Fathers himself

going so far as to all but outright state their synonymity.

From Augustine’s time until the ninth or tenth century, then,

we are left with but a single straightforward semantic shift,

an expansion of scale, in order to fully explain the polysemy of

satrapes in the Waltharius: by the ninth or tenth century, the

term satrapes’s original Persian Imperial meaning of “subordinate

ruler,” its additional Roman Imperial meaning of “small

independent ruler,” and its evident eventual expansion to

“independent ruler of any size” have all coalesced into a semantic

field so widely encompassing as to have allowed the

term to have served merely as a term for a “generic ruler” in the

Waltharius’s composition. Thus, though the formulation of the

satrapes Attila the Hun leading the subordinate satrapes of his

court in a march toward the kingdom of a completely separate

and independent satrapes would have been completely incomprehensible

at the earliest period, the eventual possibility for

such a formulation by the time of the Waltharius is wholly comprehensible

given the historical context of the term’s semantic

development.

As a final note, while we have thus far leveraged the Vetus Latina

evidence in order to analyze the changes of scale and dependency

relationships within the semantic field of the term

satrapes, the Vetus Latina evidence also helps establish a definitive

chain of semantic shifts in the geo-cultural meanings of

satrapes as well. After all, satrapes was, as we have discussed,

originally a Persian term referring to a specific Persian Imperial

21. Translation mine.


institution, while by the time of the Waltharius, the term had

been generalized so broadly as to lack any specific geo-cultural

reference whatsoever, being used for Hunnic rulers, Germanic

rulers, etc. without any qualification whatsoever.

We find early indication of semantic generalization of satrapes

(or, at this point, still satrápēs) in the Septuagint, where, in

contexts like I Samuel, the term is used to refer not to the

Persians, but merely to another Eastern people, the Philistines.

Interestingly, the I Samuel terms referring explicitly to

Philistines in the Septuagint and the Vulgate are even further

broadened in reference in the Vetus Latina, and this often

co-occurs specifically with satraps~regulus conflation: For instance,

in De Athanasio’s quotation of I Samuel 5:8 is found

regulos alienigenarum, literally “the foreigners’ petty kings,”

rather than the Vulgate’s satrapas Philistinorum, “the Philistines’

satraps.” In these translations, the Philistines and their

rulers are not being presented as specifically Eastern foreigners,

but simply as general foreigners, indicating that the term

satrapes was by that point a term of, at most, general foreign

reference as opposed to specifically Eastern foreign reference.

Augustine’s earlier discussed description of satrapes as simply

rulers of “small kingdoms,” completely unqualified in terms of

foreignness, then finally serves as a terminus ante quem for the

complete loss of any inherent foreign connotation for the term

satrapes. This semantic freedom would ultimately end up serving

the Waltharius Poet well in being able to use satrapes as a

term of reference for any of the leaders of relevance to the narrative

of the Waltharius, regardless of said leaders’ contrasting

geo-cultural origins.

Semantic shift is an expected phenomenon in the evolution

of any language, and especially so in the case of Latin, whose

geographical and chronological extent is among the widest

known. In certain cases, as with the term satrapes, semantic

shift may be drastic and may be difficult to connect with a

term’s original meaning. As I hope to have demonstrated in

this paper, even such drastic instances of semantic shift can

be rendered understandable when historical, literary, and

geographical context is duly considered. Such consideration

affords us insight not only into the final outcomes of these circumstances,

but also into the discrete stages of change over

the course of an ever-changing language with which individual

authors grappled, and our understanding of these works of

Latin literature is thereby enriched. Just as importantly, the life


stories of words like satrapes help us appreciate the fact that

developments peculiar to later stages of the Latin language

are not owed to decadence, corruption, or spontaneous bouts

of irrationality: these developments are the logical outcomes

of longstanding processes and interactions whose interrelationship

weaves a rich tapestry of threads that we are lucky

enough to be able to trace.


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REASSEMBLED FOR YOUR VIEWING1

2 Olivia Emerick, Boston College

stuffing shoved down lungs

dry eyes, glued open for eternity,

forced to meet your gaze as you stare;

invisible stitches from a Frankenstein maneuver

combined with metal pinning us in place

we constitute your silent, unmoving zoo,

our prison kept between high ceilings and marble floors.

we temporarily escape your scanning when doors lock,

when the janitor and night guards do their rounds,

too unnerved by our presence among shadows

and our beady eyes lit by the occasional flashlight

to actually meet our gaze

we are absent from where you stole us from,

where you hunted, slaughtered, and rebuilt us,

where you dared to play ‘god’

you obsessive necrophiliacs

where is Antigone

advocating for our rest,

our return to damp soil,

later caressed by the sun’s touch,

and cleansed by gentle rain?

or did you

take that

too?

Animus Classics Journal, Volume 4, Issue 2

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