Representing Gender

Ovid’s Fasti relates a wide variety of apotheosis narratives, from the catasterisms of characters like Callisto and Orion to the miraculous assumption of Romulus. Throughout the Fasti, most of the narratives of supernatural transformations are some species of apotheosis (in contrast to the Metamorphoses, in which most supernatural transformations are punitive transformations into subhuman forms (see Salzman (1998))), and moreover most of these transformations are catalyzed by violence.

According to the Phaedrus, the first-century Roman fabulist, tribades and molles men were created when Prometheus got drunk and accidentally mixed up their genitalia: adplicuit virginale generi masculo, / et masculina membra adposuit feminis. / ita nunc libido pravo fruitur gaudio (4.16.12-14: “He attached the virginal part to the masculine race, / and placed masculine parts onto women, / thus lust now enjoys perverted pleasure”).

In disputing the estate of Euctemon, the son of Philoctemon, the orator Isaeus employed a peculiar legal argument: he accused the plaintiff in the case of fabricating the existence of Callippe, Euctemon’s wife. Even more remarkable than the charge of “inventing a woman,” however, is the method by which the speaker in this case attempted to disprove her existence.

Though Sappho’s ‘Brothers Poem’ contains many familiar features—an invocation to a female divinity, expressions of personal anxiety, and gnomic reflections on the human and the divine—the absence of erotic love makes it difficult to compare the Brothers Poem to other poems in Sappho’s corpus. As a result, domestic affairs, sibling affection, and ‘The Brothers’ have dominated many discussions of this new fragment.

This paper examines the erotic subtext of Anacreontea 1 and its literary and social implications.