Kathleen Cruz, University of California, Davis
Scholars have well appreciated imperial Latin literature's interest in the monstrous and grotesque. This includes its centralization of evocative descriptions of both transgressed or transformed mortal bodies as well as non-human creatures whose bodily multiplicity seems pointedly designed to evoke fear and disgust (for recent sustained studies, see Lowe 2015, Backhaus 2019, McClellan 2019, and Estèves 2020). In this paper, however, I consider how post-Vergilian Latin epic at times offers a different understanding of bodies traditionally conceived of as monstrous. More specifically, I argue that certain of its composite creatures sustain a more complex relationship with their own bodies, thereby offering an underlying counternarrative to the dominant perspective within which they are often confined.
Before turning to these hybrid bodies, I briefly observe how earlier epic, too, may guide the reader to question its presentation of monstrosity. Polyphemus and the community within which he dwells offer a well-known example in Odyssey 9. For while Odysseus presents a monstrous Polyphemus (πελώριος; 9.187-92) among the lawless Cyclopes (Κυκλώπων...ἀθεμίστων, 9.106), his narration also delineates a greater, functioning society on the island (9.105-15 and 395-409; see Nieto Hernández 2000: 353 and Newton 2008: 1-2; 7-9). The epic thus implicitly gestures at another story about these beings hidden beneath the one Odysseus chooses to tell.
In this example, both the episode’s framing (Odysseus’ human and narrative bias) and periphery details (the very existence of a Cyclopean community) may prompt the reader to re-evaluate the Cyclops. In the remainder of my investigation, I demonstrate how post-Vergilian Latin epic takes a different approach to this kind of interpretive destablization in the hybrid bodies of both Lucan's Medusa as conceived in Bellum Civile 9 and Tisiphone as she is featured throughout Statius’ Thebaid. While scholarly attention has focused on how both beings’ physicality elicits complicated responses of threat and aversion (see Lovatt 2013: 353-57 and Agri 2022 for powerful articulations), I locate two key moments where their bodies prompt alternative responses, namely: Medusa’s relationship with her serpentine hair at Bellum Civile 9.633 and 652-3 and Tisiphone’s offering of water to her slithering tresses at Thebaid 1.90-91.
In each case, Medusa and Tisiphone engage in positive relationships with their composite corporality at odds with how others view their bodies. The uncertain relationship between Medusa’s joy in her hair (gaudentis...Medusae, BC 9.633) and how those very snakes view her (9.652-3) suggests a complex bodily navigation that mirrors Lucan’s obscure presentation of Medusa’s physicality on the whole (cf. Fantham 1992, Eldred 2000, and Malamud 2003). Statius’ introduction of a peaceful Tisiphone caring for the needs of her body in turn offers a jarring counter to the Fury as an enthusiastic force of destruction, thus disrupting her very nature in the poem. After excavating these two hidden portraits, I close by considering how these figures' bodily relationships contrast with each epic’s greater themes of political and corporeal disunity and thereby suggest alternative, but unfilled, possibilities.