Ashley Kirsten Weed (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign)
At one point in Petronius’ Satyricon, Encolpius and his companions find themselves at the mercy of a woman named Quartilla who forces them to participate in an orgy (16.1-26.6). Although lacunose, Quartilla’s orgy is crucial to the thematic development of the Satyricon with respect to voyeurism and spectacle (McGlathery; Freudenberg), parodic initiations and theatricality (Cosci; Panayotakis; Battistón), and the wrath of Priapus (Gill; Habash). The fragmentary nature of this episode, however, has created number of interpretive issues concerning the nature of the sexual acts performed, who performs them, and how they affect our interpretation of the Satyricon broadly (Courtney; Schmeling & Setaioli). In this paper, I seek to clarify some hermeneutic difficulties present during Quartilla’s orgy and, in doing so, refine our understanding of some Latin sexual terminology.
After being bound hand and foot by Quartilla’s handmaid Psyche (20.4) and consuming more than his fair share of erection-inducing satyrion (20.6-7), Encolpius reports a series of assaults Quartilla, her handmaids, and a cinaedus enact upon his crew (21.1-2). One part of the cinaedus’ assault—extortis nos clunibus cecidit (21.2)—merits further investigation. This moment tends to be understood as the cinaedus wrenching apart the men’s buttocks and penetrating them, citing Adams’ explanation of caedo as a sexual metaphor for penetration. Here I build upon Courtney’s reading of this scene, which briefly pushes back against the puzzling image of a penetrating cinaedus, and propose that the semantics of cinaedus, caedo, and extorqueo instead mean the cinaedus is punishing the young men by grinding his buttocks against them (cf. App. Verg. Priapea 4.21-3). This alternation of nonconsensual grinding and kisses is mirrored, in typical Petronian fashion, more explicitly at 24.4, which further indicates that the cinaedus’ earlier assault is indeed grinding. Moreover, the conjunction donec, which connects the cinaedus’ assault to Quartilla’s subsequent entrance, signals to readers that the grinding and kissing are building up to a climax: Quartilla, with whalebone “rod” in hand (ballaenaceam tenens virga) and skirt hitched high (alteque succincta), orders that relief be given to her victims. The progression of penetrating phallic objects in this scene (acu comatoria…pungebat…penicillo…opprimebat, 21.1), well-attested use of virga as a phallic metaphor (Adams), and studied relationship between Quartilla’s orgy and Oenothea’s erotic rituals at Croton (in which Encolpius is penetrated with a dildo, 138.1-2) insinuate that Quartilla intends to penetrate Encolpius and Ascyltos with her whalebone phallus.
The ambiguous setting of this orgy (often interpreted as a brothel) paired with Quartilla’s association with a cinaedus and, most importantly, her intention to penetrate all figure her as a tribas. However, tribades are traditionally understood to be women who sexually penetrate others with oversized clitorises (Williams), which would exclude Quartilla. In reading this episode against erotic rites described by Juvenal (6.314-41), Elder Seneca’s Controversiae (1.2-3), Martial’s epigrams (1.90, 5.45, 7.67), and the Carmina Priapea (46), I argue that the semantic range of tribas should include any woman who penetrates others, whether by means of her own genitals or with the assistance of an artificial phallus.