Obscenity and the Body

This paper takes as its starting point Hipponax frr. 26 and 26a West, two fragments sequentially joined by most editors (e.g. Schneidewin, Adrados, Medeiros, Masson, presupposed in West 1993; notably cautious is Degani) which appear to be an invective describing gluttony and profligacy. Through a close reading of fr. 26, it is argued that the fragment is instead a passage of thinly veiled sexual innuendo describing the fortunes of an avid cunnilinctor, a role signified through comparison with a pathic Lampsakene eunuch.

Persius famously identifies his difficult metaphors as a hallmark of his style (5.14: iunctura callidus acri), and modern scholars have framed their studies through the lens of his obscure language (Dessen 1968; Hooley 1997). My paper focuses on a constellation of such metaphors in Persius’ programmatic first satire. I argue that these collocations construct a matrix of images surrounding eyes and ears, which signify competing modes of poetics.

This paper examines the parallelism, in Valerius’s Argonautica, of the pairs Venus and Fama (Lemnos episode, Bk.2) and Juno and Tisiphone (Io-epyllion, Bk.4), and the connecting bridge of Juno and Dryope (Hylas episode, Bk.3). I argue that Valerius intensifies the disease element of the traditional equation between love, disease, and madness—so vividly depicted in Vergil’s Aeneid—by repeatedly drawing on the actual plague in Georgics 3, as well as other plague episodes from pre- and post-Vergilian literature, for language and imagery.