Thomas Biggs (University of St. Andrews / University of Georgia)
Camilla/Chloreus: Gender Fluidity and Intersexuality in Aeneid 11
This paper argues that Vergil’s Camilla encounters an intersex and non-binary character whose escape from the disciplinary regime of gender the Voslcian virgo bristled under since birth illuminates previously unknown aspects of the self (cf. 7.803-13 & 11.573-84; for terminology, see Mikkola 2019; for methodological bibliography, Surtees and Dyer 2020). This pivotal figure is Chloreus, the eunuch priest of Cybele, the Great Mother Goddess. The impact of this encounter is far from clear-cut, however, since Chloreus also transforms Camilla into a viewing subject who has appropriated the Roman masculine gaze’s mode of engagement with bodies that challenge gender binarism (for example, statues of Hermaphroditus [see Åshede 2015 & 2020] and Attis).
Despite many productive interpretations of the episode (e.g. West 1985; Wilhelm 1987; Boyd 1992; Keith 2000: esp. 27-32; Morello 2008; Viparelli 2008; Ramsby 2010; Sharrock 2015; Xinyue 2017; De Boer 2019), thorough explorations of Camilla qua mythological figure (esp. Arrigoni 1982), and the recent appearance of four commentaries devoted to Aeneid 11 (Horsfall 2000; Fratantuono 2009; Gildenhard and Henderson 2018; McGill 2020), Chloreus’ importance for Camilla requires further elucidation. Through their gender performance on the battlefield, the Phrygian eunuch expresses as masculine and feminine (for Roman eunuchs, see Tougher 2020). Might this diversity offer Camilla a way to realize a gender-fluid identity? How, then, to account for the seemingly contradictory compulsion to kill and despoil Chloreus, the specular object of attraction? An answer, I submit, lies in Camilla’s indecision about what to do with Chloreus’ couture after her imagined victory (11.778-82).
The readings in this paper find support in the grammar and morphology of Vergil’s Latin. In a well-known passage of Book 9, Numanus Remulus insults the Trojans by alluding to Attis’ tale of castration and servitude to the Great Mother in Catullus 63 (9.614-20). Cat. 63 is notable for shifts in the grammatical gender of certain pronouns and adjectives that mirror the stages of Attis’ reassignment (see Corbeill 2015: 93-4). Chloreus is presented similarly, but unlike Catullus’ Attis there is no permeance to the transition: at 11.772, they are introduced with ipse followed by peregrina, a word I read fluidly as nominative with ipse and ablative with ferrugine; Chloreus is then immediately modified by the masculine clarus (ipse peregrina ferrugine clarus et ostro, “himself a foreign woman resplendent in rusty red purple”). Only three lines earlier, Vergil also employs a masculine form where one likely anticipates the feminine Cybele (11.768, Forte sacer Cybelo Chloreus olimque sacerdos). Perhaps most significantly, Camilla even achieves a form of (grammatical) gender transformation during the hawk simile of 11.721-24.
By way of conclusion, the lack of fixity in gender (grammatical and otherwise) is compared with the fluid presentation of Camilla’s death. The poem reasserts a sexualized femininity for Camilla (see discussion in Fowler 1987: 195-7; Oliensis 1997: 307-8; Reed 2007: 19-24; Xinyue 2017), but it simultaneously presents her as the dying Turnus avant la lettre through a well-known intratextual act (11.831=12.952), one that leads a (re)reader of the epic to visualize these final images of Camilla and Turnus as intersextional palimpsests.