Gender Trouble in Latin Narrative Poetry

In the Bellum Civile proem, Lucan criticizes the citizens of Rome for their excessive love of war (tantus amor belli, 1.21) arguing that they have become distracted from their imperial potential by neglecting foreign enemies and turning against themselves.

            Ovid’s Metamorphoses is famous for its extraordinarily high incidence of stories of sexual coercion (Curran, Richlin, Murgatroyd, and Raval are essential background). Throughout these stories, the reader sees a common motif in which victims are disempowered by sexual force; when pursued by a sexual predator, those who are not actually raped are frequently “saved”--transformed into subhuman figures like plants, birds, or geographic features--such that they remain vulnerable to their attackers.

Ovid’s treatment of the character of Lucretia and his account of her rape in the second book of the Fasti (2.685-852) have been overwhelmingly interpreted as a portrait of a woman disempowered by enforced silence, a private individual whose suffering is “absorbed and altered by a political ideology committed to an exemplary view of the past," a system "whose acceptance she can seek only through dying” (Newlands 1995: 146, 167).

During her aristeia in Aeneid 11, Camilla encounters the Etruscan venator (678) Ornytus.  Several have observed that his name contributes to his characterization as a hunter, since ὀρνύναι “is used of starting up wild animals from covert in the chase” (Saunders 1940: 553; cf. Horsfall 2003 ad 677).  The Etymologicum Gudianum lists Ornytus under the lemma for ὀρνύω / ὄρνυμι as a derivative from the same root (*ὄρω).

Ovid’s Heroides opens with a letter by Penelope, whose Homeric predecessor is perhaps the most famous weaver in Greek literature, and whose weaving trick is, in Homer, a clear sign that she possesses metis to match her husband’s (Winkler 1990; Felson-Rubin 1994; Clayton 2004; Bergren 2008). In the Heroides, however, Penelope barely references the weaving at all; she makes only two oblique references to it (Heroides 1.9-10 and 77-78).

        This paper argues that, by aligning the Carmentis of the Fasti with his own poetic concerns, Ovid fashions her into his programmatic representative.  Furthermore, a comparison of Carmentis’ explicit praise of Livia in Fasti 1 to the implicit praise of Livia found in the Hersilia episode of Metamorphoses 14 suggests that Ovid uses Carmentis to deflect the offense potentially found in his ultimate statement of poetic power: the deification of Livia.