Jay Oliver (University of Toronto)
As the term is frequently used in Classics, “the family” consists of those related by legal ownership, by blood, or by marriage, the latter representing the privileged form by which “legal kinship” is conferred. Marriage was surely inescapable for many in the ancient world, especially women. But in the realm of literature, repository for collective fantasy, alternatives to “the family” - indeed, alternative families - can be imagined. I suggest that the homosocial intimacies within huntress/Amazon bands in Latin literature constitute forms of queer kinship (see Freeman 2007). I interpret “Amazon” here broadly, given that there is significant overlap between the figures of the huntress and the Amazon in Latin literary discourse. Amazon-esque and/or huntress bands appear relatively frequently in Latin epic. Prominent examples include the huntresses of Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Camilla’s band in Vergil’s Aeneid, and Camilla’s literary successor Asbyte’s troops in Silius’ Punica. Almost all these women reject marriage and childbearing.
However, rejection of marriage is only the precondition to the lives they now lead. Beyond “man spurning”, we see the formation of new kinds of queer relationality outside the bounds of the normative family. In her dying speech, Camilla addresses Acca, her most faithful companion, as soror (Aen. 11.821-3), while the Silian narrator refers to Asbyte’s troops as sorores (Pun. 2.120). This appropriation of kinship terminology hints at an entire mode of sociality. These bonds, exceeding the Roman cultural lexicon, incorporate elements of kinship, friendship, military comradeship, but none of these terms is enough. Although there is no explicit “lesbianism” in these narratives, there are hints of homoeroticism (Oliver 2015); besides, if queerness is the opposition to normativity (cf. Warner 1999), these women are leading profoundly queer lives.
Elsewhere, one can find the life of the Amazon/ huntress conceptualized as a pointedly chosen retreat from domesticity. One example is Procris, who, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, turns to Diana as an immediate response to dissatisfaction with her husband (7.745-6). Another significant example is Phaedra in Seneca’s eponymous tragedy. Phaedra’s desire for Hippolytus poses a threat to the fabric of the fabric of the elite family in a much more radical way than simply its incestuous nature. Her lust tears her away from her domestic duties, instilling in her a yearning to become a huntress or Amazon (Ph. 394-403). She desires in Hippolytus a combination of his Amazon mother and his androgynous adolescent father (Ph. 646-60). Her desire radically exceeds its putative object. It is a heavily eroticized longing, not straightforwardly “heterosexual”, for a particular lifestyle. Here we see the idealization by an elite wife of the kind of queer life the epic narratives foreground.
Searching for explicit narratives of sexual desire between women in the ancient world is something of a dead end, given their paucity. But shifting our terms (“queer”, I suggest, is a flexible hermeneutic), and refusing to interpret solely from the perspective suggested by male-authored narratives themselves, results in a range of new possibilities. Amazon/huntress bands constitute a particularly fertile site for the reinvention of kinship in the absence of marital bonds.