Katherine Dennis, University of Wisconsin
As scholars like James and Bonandini have shown, Ovid’s elegies reformulate elegiac tropes in a way that exposes the social realities those tropes tend to conceal. Amores 1.6, for example, reimagines a paraclausithyron, a lament before the closed door of the beloved. Whereas Tibullus 1.2 is dedicated to the door itself, Ovid’s speaker confronts the enslaved ianitor who monitors the entrance to his beloved’s house. Elsewhere in the Amores Ovid similarly confronts the people enslaved in his mistress’ household: Corinna’s hairdresser Nape in Amores 1.11-12, the guardian Bagoas in 2.2-3, and the hairdresser Cypassis in 2.7-8.
Ovid would appear to do the work that much recent scholarship in Latin literature attempts: uncovering the often invisible existence, labor, and even subjectivity of the enslaved people. But for what purpose does he do so?
This paper focuses on one of the threats intimated to Bagoas in Amores 2.2: if he conspires with the speaker to enable a tryst with the puella he will be rewarded and freed, but if he alerts her husband he will be punished with imprisonment:
sic tibi semper honos, sic alta peculia crescent;
haec fac, in exiguo tempore liber eris.
….
vidi ego compedibus liventia crura gerentem
unde vir incestum scire coactus erat (2.2.39-40; 47-8)
As McKeown notes, imprisonment is precisely the opposite of what usually happens to an enslaved informant in the historical record (1998:46). I argue that these threats and their accompanying suasoria should be understood in relation to Roman declamation, a comparison justified not only by Ovid’s training in the schools (attested at Sen.Controv.2.2.8) but by the accumulation of legal language in the poem, a choice paralleled in the Cypassis diptych (and foregrounded by Henderson).
Declamation and the legal tradition provide us with two pieces of evidence that contextualize Ovid’s threat. First, the practice of interrogating slaves was customary in both domestic and judicial settings, and it often resulted in grave injury or death (Dig.48.18.6; [Quint.]DMin.328; Knoch 2018:95-118). Second, enslaved guardians maintained privileged access to Roman matronae, which made them particularly vulnerable when her chastity was called into question: thus Porcius Latro argues in Controv.2.7.4 that a woman whom a foreigner was trying to seduce could only prove her faithfulness by brutally beating the foreigner’s enslaved go-between.
These facts intersect in cases of adultery, and all the texts I consider reflect the kinds of litigation and punishment institutionalized under the Julian moral legislations. By reading Ovid’s poem alongside these forms of evidence, I acknowledge that both textual worlds construct contrived and often implausible scenarios to play out their argumentative expertise. However, I resist the idea that such exercises are merely “literary burlesque” (Davis 1977:91). Instead, as in those poems where Ovid demonstrates the limits of servitium amoris by exerting domination over those enslaved by their “shared” domina (on which see McCarthy, Henderson, and De Boer), the speaker of Am.2.2-3 exploits Bagoas’ bodily and legal vulnerability to force his hand: he will be tortured regardless.