Hercules Inc.; or, Ovid and the bovids
A few weeks ago my colleague Ed Bispham, after a visit to the archaeological museum at Chieti, alerted me to a piece of Ovidiana that was entirely new to me. It was a column excavated from the site of a sanctuary of Hercules Curinus on the slopes of Monte Morrone in Abruzzo, Italy, and among other graffiti scribbled on it were twelve hexameter lines of Latin poetry, with Ovid’s name NASONIS written in another hand above them.
The lines are very hard to read, and what can be read doesn’t correspond to any surviving works of Ovid, so it’s assumed that they are being attributed to him rather than actually by him. Here is what is legible, anyhow, from M. Buonocore, L’Abruzzo e il Molise in età romana (L’Aquila, 2002), p. 178:
What keeps it all quite intriguing, though, is where we are. Monte Morrone is just a few miles from Ovid’s hometown of Sulmo (modern Sulmona). The site of the sanctuary, largely covered by a landslip in antiquity, was in fact popularly regarded in the Middle Ages as Ovid’s villa, and the excavations that uncovered this column (and other items such as this very pretty statue of Hercules, also in the museum at Chieti) were commenced there in 1957, the 2,000th anniversary of Ovid’s birth. So it’s perfectly understandable that people have wanted to make something of the graffiti, even if it’s just, in its way, a modern version of the medieval impulse to believe that Ovid lived here.
A striking fact, though, is that Ovid, who has a lot to say about Hercules and a lot to say about his birthplace at Sulmo among the Paeligni, never makes any reference to Hercules Curinus, the most important religious foundation in the district.
What’s a blog for, though, if not to flog a dead horse? I’m going to suggest that we can still find the Hercules worshipped at Monte Morrone in Ovid’s work. This will involve a rapid survey of the Hercules cult in central Italy, and then some close reading of a moment in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.
The most important role that Hercules seems to have fulfilled in central Italy, surprising as it may seem, was as patron of pastoral activity and commerce more generally, in particular the herding of cattle between highlands and lowlands, and the trade in the critical commodity of salt which seems to have shadowed the movement of cattle. The sanctuary at Monte Morrone stood adjacent to the calles or drove roads along which these cattle were herded, and the networks were extensive: it’s no coincidence that the great sanctuary of Hercules in Rome, the Ara Maxima, stood in the “Cattle Market”, the Forum Boarium, nor that elsewhere in the Forum Boarium there was a place called the Salinae or Salt-pans: the Forum Boarium marked the termination of the Via Salaria, the “Salt Road” by which (Pliny the Elder informs us, 31.89) salt from the mouth of the Tiber was transported into the interior. At Alba Fucens, a Roman colony lying between Rome and Sulmo, there stood a major shrine of Hercules Salarius, Hercules in his aspect as patron of the salt trade.
Hercules’ patronage of this traffic could even turn him, a mediator through trade between the diverse peoples of Italy, into a god of Italy itself. In the Aeneid Virgil draws out the myth of Hercules’ tenth labour that underlies this connection with cattle, his killing of Geryon in Spain and herding of the monstrous herdsman’s cattle all around the north-Mediterranean littoral to Greece. In Aeneid 8, a book (in a poem) deeply concerned with Italy’s unity and divisions, Hercules, in reference to his violent suppression of the malefactor Cacus, who had attempted to steal Geryon’s cattle, is given a very suggestive epithet, the communis deus, “the god who is god for all” (8.275), a force for Italian unity. Aeneas will also unify this geographical space, but do it, as paradoxically as Hercules, by fighting a most divisive war within Italy.
As anticipated, a whistlestop tour of Herculean Italy there, but Filippo Coarelli can sum up the relevant bit: “in the great markets [Hercules] is always present as guarantor and intermediary. The cult of Hercules is thus closely connected with mercantile activity, especially in the Sabellic zone (i.e. central to southern Italy), where the divinity fulfilled the function of protector of herds and shepherds” (F. Coarelli and A. La Regina, Abruzzo-Molise. Guide archeologiche Laterza 9 (Bari and Rome, 1984), 87).
How can we drag this back to Ovid, though?
Well, Book 9 of the Metamorphoses (my favourite, as it happens) has a lot to say about Hercules, with Ovid having his characteristic fun at the expense of the greatest hero of them all. A key episode is the attempt by the centaur Nessus to carry off Hercules’ wife Deianira, under the pretext of carrying her safely across the river Euenus. Hercules shoots Nessus dead, but as he dies Nessus persuades Deianira that his cloak, soaked with his blood, will restore Hercules’ love to her should his affections ever wander. In fact, when Hercules does bring another woman home to Trachis, and Deianira sends to him “the shirt of Nessus” to win him back, Nessus’ blood (contaminated, as the centaur well knew, by the poisonous blood of the hydra with which Hercules’ arrows were tipped) causes Hercules a prolonged and agonizing death.
What interests me, though, is Hercules’ angry speech to Nessus (and Ovid’s account of its motivation) as the centaur attempts to make off with Deianira (9.118-28):
iamque tenens ripam, missos cum tolleret arcus,
coniugis agnouit uocem Nessoque paranti
fallere depositum ‘quo te fiducia‘ clamat
‘uana pedum, uiolente, rapit? tibi, Nesse biformis,
dicimus. exaudi, nec res intercipe nostras.
si te nulla mei reuerentia mouit, at orbes
concubitus uetitos poterant inhibere paterni.
haud tamen effugies, quamuis ope fidis equina;
uulnere, non pedibus te consequar.’ ultima dicta
re probat, et missa fugientia terga sagitta
traicit. exstabat ferrum de pectore aduncum.
And now he had reached the bank, and was picking up the bow he had thrown over,
when he heard his wife’s voice, and shouted at Nessus, who was preparing
to fail to honour the deposit: ‘Where is the empty security of your
feet carrying you, impetuous man? It is to you, two-formed Nessus,
that I speak. Listen to me, and do not steal my property.
If no respect moves you, the wheel
to which your father [Ixion] is attached might dissuade you from this forbidden union.
But you will not escape, however much you trust in your horsy advantage:
With a wound, not my feet, I will pursue you.’ Those last words
he makes good with action, and firing an arrow at Nessus’ fleeing back
he pierced it. The barbed tip jutted out of his chest.
Hercules is a character in an epic poem, and speaks like one. He’s a character in an epic poem, Ovid’s Metamorphoses, that doesn’t take itself at all seriously, mind you, so he’s rather too blustering as he shouts at Nessus, tipping over into parody. But it seems to me that Ovid is using other ways of puncturing the pomposity of this epic hero, and it takes us back to the quite mundane associations we’ve considered that Hercules at Monte Morrone carried, especially in the eyes of a Roman elite that looked down on trade. What I mean is that Hercules’ and Ovid’s language here, particularly the phrases I’ve underlined (and struggled to translate satisfactorily), are strikingly commercial in character, nec res intercipe nostras especially (I wouldn’t go to the cross for any of the others, but cumulatively they amount to something, I think): Hercules describes his wife as if she is a commodity, and Nessus as some kind of commercial rival trying to defraud him, their relationship a commercial deal that has gone sour. If so, it’s classic Metamorphoses: the most heroic of heroes transformed into a businessman with his eye on the bottom line.
The business-savvy god was a familiar notion in this part of Italy, as much to a reader in Rome as anyone who had visited the Hercules Curinus, which any native of Sulmo surely had. So maybe we can see a faint connection between the shrine at Monte Morrone and Sulmo’s most celebrated son, after all.
Ovid in Sulmona, from https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Statua_di_Ovidio,_Sulmona.jpg
While you’re here, and if you live in or close to Oxford, on June 15, 2019 there is one-off performance of George Sharpley’s dramatisation of selected scenes from the Aeneid, The Song of Arms and a Man. Performers, including Dame Emma Kirkby, will read Virgil’s original Latin, drawing out the beauty of his Latin verse. It will be a fantastic evening, and the tickets, which are absurdly cheap, are available here.
F. van Wonterghem, “Le culte d’Hercule chez les Paeligni. Documents anciens et
nouveaux”, L’antiquité classique 42 (1973), 36-48;
M. Torelli, “Gli aromi e il sale. Afrodite ed Eracle nell’emporia arcaica dell’ Italia”, in A. Mastrocinque (ed.), Ercole in Occidente. Atti del Colloquio Internazionale, Trento, 7 Marzo 1990 (Trento, 1993), 91-117;
Ll. Morgan, “A Yoke Connecting Baskets: Odes 3.14, Hercules, and Italian Unity”, CQ 55 (2005), 190-203;
T. D. Stek, Cult Places and Cultural Change in Republican Italy (Amsterdam, 2009).
Jaw jaw
There’s a moment in Aeneid 11 when the politics of Virgil’s own time feel unusually close to the surface.
A council of the Latins has been called by King Latinus, and there’s a hostile exchange of speeches between Turnus, Aeneas’ great rival, and the troublemaker Drances. Despite the principle of my enemy’s enemy, Drances is not drawn by Virgil as an appealing character.
Two hundred lines are devoted to this council in the Latin city. But when Turnus ends his impassioned refutal of Drances, the focus turns to what Aeneas has been up to all this time (445-6):
Illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant
certantes: castra Aeneas aciemque movebat.
Thus the Latins debated among themselves on matters they could not decide,
in competition: meanwhile Aeneas was advancing his camp and his battle line.
Aeneas’ action, so sharply contrasted with Latin debate, is expressed in less than a line, and yet what is described in those four words is a decisive step toward his conquest of the Latins. Virgil’s implication is clear, communicated by form as much as sense: Aeneas is the no-nonsense man of action; Turnus and the Latins just a bunch of ineffectual wafflers.
The resonances with Virgil’s own day here are strong. The indecisive exchange of speeches among the Latins suggests (a jaundiced view of) the political culture of the Republic, which could be dismissed as a time of unfettered expression and polarised political dispute, giving rise in turn to the conflict between citizens that had blighted Rome until Augustus put a stop to it. In Drances, particularly the way he is introduced at 336-42 (cf. Plut. Cic. 1.1), there seems to be a more specific allusion to the most celebrated practitioner of this old politics, the orator Cicero, and thus in his rhetorical conflict with Turnus a hint of Cicero’s famous (and fatal) series of attacks on Mark Antony, the Philippics. Aeneas’ military pragmatism, in contrast, is a model of the new, Augustan way of doing politics in Rome: decisive action by an individual, wasting no words and respecting no judgement but his own–autocracy, in a word.
Virgil may have expected his Roman readers to endorse this preference for deeds over words. But when the Latin council breaks up in panic as Aeneas’ advance is announced, what I see is civil society collapsing before military force, and it’s a moment I’ve been thinking about a lot during the parliamentary debates about Brexit. Many people are despairing of the “chaos” in the House of Commons, the MPs addicted to debate, incapable of reaching a consensus.
I’m not.
There’s plenty I’m unhappy about right now in UK politics, don’t get me wrong, but the sight of parliamentarians wrestling with their consciences in the most difficult political circumstances of recent times isn’t one of them. It would be stretching it to call the Roman Republic a democracy, but democracy is most definitely what we’re looking at in these indecisive parliamentary debates.
Yes, illi haec inter se dubiis de rebus agebant/ certantes, and all’s (still, essentially) right with the world.
Calling time
Time is whatever it is.
But what a culture does with time, how it gets organised, can be one of the most revealing things about a culture. The books listed at the bottom of this post have lots of interesting things to say on the topic, but this is a blog about how the Romans organised time, and ultimately how the ordering of time became, like pretty much everything else that the Roman elite concerned themselves with, a means for political assertion and self-promotion.
(Quite a lot of what the Romans did with time is still with us, as it happens, too.)
I’m currently writing about the Fasti, Ovid’s poetic account of the Roman calendar (fasti is the closest Latin word to “calendar”). One book devoted to each month, the Fasti should have extended to twelve of them, but Ovid’s exile to the Black Sea in AD 8 did for that. As Ovid left it, the end of the poem arrives prematurely on the last day of June (the conclusion of the sixth book, in other words), exactly halfway through the year–a marked and meaningful place to end a poem that should have lasted the full twelve months. Ovid is doing his best to underline how unsatisfactory an ending it is, how much better a poem this would be if he could just be allowed home to finish it…
In one respect at least, though, the Fasti finds an appropriate place to wrap things up. June 30 was the foundation date for the Temple of Hercules of the Muses (aedes Herculis Musarum). Such cult birthdays were important material for Roman calendars, and the Temple of Hercules of the Muses, as well as boasting an impressively odd name, was one of the most culturally significant locations in the city of Rome, as we shall shortly see.
This final notice in Ovid’s Fasti celebrates the cult of Hercules of the Muses, focusing on the recent renovation of the temple by the emperor Augustus’ stepbrother, L. Marcius Philippus, in 29 BC, and on Philippus’ daughter, Marcia, who had connections both to the royal family and to Ovid’s wife–potentially useful to an exile. But as Ovid and his Roman readers were well aware, this temple had a rich history before 29 BC, and particular relevance for Ovid’s poem about time since it was intimately associated both with Roman poetry and with Roman timekeeping.
The temple of Hercules of the Muses had originally been dedicated in 184 BC or thereabouts by M. Fulvius Nobilior. He may in fact have simply added a portico for the Muses to an existing temple of Hercules (the details are contested), but at any rate Nobilior decorated this new foundation with statues of the Muses that he had looted on campaign in Aetolia, Greece, from a palace that had once belonged to Pyrrhus of Epirus, one of Rome’s most daunting enemies from a century earlier. Nobilior was thus a ruthless and successful Roman general, and at the same time a sensitive devotee of Greek high culture. Nobilior’s temple with its statues of the Greek goddesses of the creative arts encapsulates the paradox of Rome’s cultural conquest by the Greece it had conquered (to paraphrase Horace). Along with the nine Muses, furthermore, came a statue of Hercules realised as Musagetes, “Leader of the Muses”, strumming a lyre.
It appears that this temple became a meeting place for Roman poets under the gaze of their patron deities; and Cicero, in his defence of the poet Archias in 62 BC, cites Fulvius’ act of “dedicating the spoils of Mars to the Muses” as an instance of the inseparability of military heroics and poetry, part of his argument that martial achievement might as well not happen if there weren’t poets like Archias around to celebrate it. What drove the association of this temple with poetic activity most of all, though, was what a poet who had actually accompanied Nobilior on his campaigns in Greece did with it all. Q. Ennius was the national poet of Rome before Virgil came along, his epic poem Annales a history of Rome from the fall of Troy to his own day. But within this poem Ennius seems to have given special prominence to Nobilior’s temple. According to an influential reconstruction, Ennius’ account of Nobilior’s victory in Greece and the foundation of the cult of Hercules of the Muses rounded off the fifteenth and last book of the first edition of his epic.
But the connection between Ennius’ Annales and his patron’s temple goes even deeper. Ennius was the first Roman poet to actually call his Muses “Muses”, Musae, rather than using the Latin equivalent Camenae, and he opened the Annales with a line, Musae quae pedibus magnam pulsatis Olympum, “You Muses, who stamp great Olympus with your feet”, which simultaneously flaunted the Greek name he was using for the goddesses of song, and also the Greek form he was adopting for his poem: the Annales were the first Roman epic to be composed in what henceforth became the standard metre for this kind of poetry, dactylic hexameters. As for the Muses, the strong suspicion is that Ennius was drawing a parallel between himself and his patron Nobilior, implying a symbiosis of the military and poetic such as Cicero had identified: both of them, after all, Nobilior and Ennius, had brought the Muses back to Rome.
So much for Nobilior’s temple and poetry, but what about time, which I did after all claim was my main topic here?
Well, one of the most celebrated things about Nobilior’s establishment was a calendar that it housed, presumably painted on the wall somewhere, to all appearances an influential attempt to bring order to Roman time–Ovid’s Fasti was a distant descendant. It’s a safe bet that Ennius helped his patron in this project, since the poet displayed a special affinity for matters temporal: the very name of his epic, Annals, indicated the importance to the poem of the passage of years, anni. (There is an appealing theory that the dedication of Nobilior’s temple, according to Ennius’ calculation, fell exactly 1,000 years after the fall of Troy in 1184 BC.) Ovid’s Fasti, which plays extensively on a rivalry between Ovid and his predecessor Ennius, reflects this association of Ennius with time, and elsewhere the poet’s name lent itself to chronological puns like perennis used (indirectly) of Ennius at Lucretius 1.118, perennis meaning “through the years”, “everlasting”.
There may also have been in Nobilior’s temple an example of another thing, beside the calendar, for which the Romans used the word fasti, the only other thing, in fact: a list of consuls stretching back to the beginning of the Roman Republic in 509 BC which, since the Romans identified years by the names of that year’s consuls, was also a timeline complementing the calendrical fasti, a chronological thread connecting with the calendrical loop. (For the year as a circle, see here.) These two kinds of fasti were commonly combined on later monuments, for example in the earliest Roman calendar that survives, the so-called Fasti Antiates from Anzio. If, as seems likely, the calendar and consular list were first found combined in Nobilior’s temple, it follows that it’s probably to Nobilior that the convention of calling both of them fasti (a word that attaches more naturally to a calendar) can also be traced.
All of this, needless to say, makes the topic with which the Fasti prematurely ends, with its associations of poetry, time and the intersection of the two, an exceptionally apt place for a poem about time to, well, call time.
But a subsequent development, one that strikes me as an intensely satisfying moment, involves another patron of Ennius called Nobilior. Because there was still a piece missing in the story of the fasti, calendrical and consular. The year 153 BC was to a Roman Q. Fuluio Nobiliore T. Annio Lusco consulibus, “[The year] when Q. Fulvius Nobilior and T. Annius Luscus were consuls.” Quintus Fulvius Nobilior, the first-elected consul, and thus the first named in the dating formula, was the son of the Marcus Fulvius Nobilior who had established the temple of Hercules of the Muses, but Quintus was also in his own right a patron of Ennius, since on the evidence of Cicero (Brutus 79) he bestowed Roman citizenship on the poet by enrolling him in a colony he was establishing at Pisaurum on the east coast of Italy. That colony was founded in 184BC, so Q. Ennius achieved Roman citizenship, by his own reckoning, 1,000 years after the fall of Troy.
Time, and orderly patterns in time, as you may be gathering, mattered quite a lot to the Romans.
But the date of Q. Fulvius Nobilior’s consulship, 153 BC, has its own special significance, since this was the year when consuls first began to enter office on the date that would thenceforth become standard, the 1st of January. Hitherto consuls, reflecting their essentially military character, had been inaugurated on March 15, the beginning of the campaign season, or before that at more or less any time of the year.
The main impact of this shift to January 1 in terms of chronology (and this was surely actually the fundamental point of the reform) was to reconcile the two kinds of fasti, the yearly calendar and the list of consuls: both the year and the consulate now started on January 1, and that meant that historical time and calendrical time intersected. It had the further effect, incidentally, of enhancing the status of Janus, god of the year and of time and frankly the best god of the lot (you can find him at the bottom), on whose day the consuls now carried out their inaugural sacrifices. Janus came to be understood as the god of the consulate, and presided not only over the calendar that started in his month of January, but also over that historical timeline constituted by the consuls’ names.
It has been suggested that this move to January 1 was actually motivated by the influential combination of fasti in Nobilior’s temple, and that seems obviously true to me. But what I haven’t seen noted, though I can’t believe it hasn’t been pointed out by someone somewhere, is that it’s no coincidence that the first consul to enter office on January 1 was none other than the son of the founder of the aedes Herculis Musarum. Nobilior junior looks very much like he is putting into practice an implication of his father’s monument, applying the coordination of the two kinds of fasti to the real-time workings of the Roman res publica.
This all makes the management of Roman time look something like the family business of the Fulvii Nobiliores. Nobilior senior, aided by Mr Eternity himself, Ennius, formalizes the Roman year, and puts it up for all to see on the wall of his spanking new temple. His son Quintus then pursues the project of setting Roman time on a stable basis, and in an important sense properly realizes it, by synchronizing the beginning of the year with the entry to power of the eponymous consuls, in the process associating the arrangement with his own name in 153 BC.
Caesar’s radical reform of the Roman calendar tends to eclipse anything that went before it, but what a powerful piece of political theatre this must have been! At Q. Fulvius Nobilior’s inauguration, Rome experienced nothing less than time clicking into sync. What we seem to be looking at in the Nobiliores is a family of the Roman elite asserting its status and significance in Roman public life in a range of interesting ways, by military conquest, promotion of poetry and art of a Greek complexion–and by this responsibility they assume for the management of the city’s time. A later Roman family, the Julii, would achieve a similar familial status as timekeepers, alongside a couple of other things. Julius Caesar’s reform (still the basis of our calendar today, after some fine-tuning of leap years by Pope Gregory), which came into use in 45BC, was picked up by his adopted son Augustus, who corrected a misapplication of Caesar’s original mechanism and also renamed the months of Quintilis and Sextilis July (after his father) and August (after himself). Was Augustus’ model Q. Fulvius Nobilior?
Returning at length to Ovid’s Fasti, though. Its premature conclusion, I’ve suggested (like many before me), is in its way highly appropriate. But most apt of all to Ovid’s poem, a playful take on the Roman year that always resists the inherent seriousness of the topic, is the Hercules of the aedes Herculis Musarum himself.
This Hercules is the image with which we leave the poem: sic cecinit Clio, doctae adsensere sorores;/ adnuit Alcides increpuitque lyram, “So sang Clio, and her learned sisters assented;/ Hercules nodded his agreement and struck the lyre.” We are lucky enough to have a series of coins minted by Q. Pomponius Musa, who, apparently by way of a pun on his own name, reproduced the statues of the nine Muses from Nobilior’s temple, and Hercules himself. He wears the skin of the Nemean Lion, and has his club by his side, but he strums the lyre and with his sinuous physique is as unheroic a realisation of the god as one could imagine.
As such, though, this Hercules is very true to the poetics of Ovid’s Fasti, as well as to the poem’s preoccupation with time.
Everything here apart from Q. Fulvius Nobilior’s role in things and Hercules Musarum’s elegiac sinuousness (?) is filched from one or other of the following scholars:
A. Barchiesi, “Endgames : Ovid’s Metamorphoses 15 and Fasti 6“, in D. H. Roberts, F. Dunn & D.P. Fowler (eds.), Classical closure: reading the end in Greek and Latin literature (1997), 181-208;
J. Elliott, Ennius and the architecture of the Annales (2013);
D.C. Feeney, Caesar’s calendar (2007);
I. Gildenhard, “The ‘Annalist’ before the Annalists: Ennius and his Annales“, in U. Eigler, U. Gotter, N. Luraghi and U. Walter (eds.), Formen römischer Geschichtsschreibung von den Anfängen bis Livius (2003), 93-114;
R.J. Littlewood, A commentary on Ovid’s Fasti, Book 6 (2006);
J. Rüpke, The Roman calendar from Numa to Constantine (2011);
O. Skutsch, Studia Enniana (1968).
Non passibus aequis
A minor thought, even by my standards, which struck me between preparing a tutorial and rehearsing this, but to catch such random ideas was one of my original points in blogging, so…
An archetypal image from the Aeneid is Aeneas’ escape from Troy in the dead of night, bearing his aged father Anchises on his shoulders and holding his son by the hand, while his wife Creusa follows at a fateful distance behind the group of men (Aen. 2.721-6):
haec fatus latos umeros subiectaque colla
ueste super fuluique insternor pelle leonis,
succedoque oneri; dextrae se paruus Iulus
implicuit sequiturque patrem non passibus aequis; 725
pone subit coniunx.
With these words I spread over my broad shoulders
and bowed neck the covering of a tawny lion’s skin
and take up my burden; little Iulus entwined
his own hand in mine and follows his father with unequal steps. 725
Behind trails my wife.
The scene was already celebrated in antiquity, recreated in sculptural form in the Forum of Augustus at Rome among other Roman heroes like Romulus, from which derive depictions in images and visual parodies from Pompeii.
Specifically, it was 724-5, describing Aeneas’ son, known alternately as Ascanius or Iulus, that caught my attention. Non passibus aequis, “with unequal steps”, now a proverbial expression, is in context a vivid and poignant reminder of the boy’s age and vulnerability as his family flees the captured city. Meanwhile Ascanius’ alternate name Iulus is, here as elsewhere, a means for Virgil to link Aeneas and the Julii family to which Augustus belonged (for his importance in Julian family lore, there’s a bit more here). It appears that Virgil gives the boy special emphasis in his account. At the top of this post there is a coin of Julius Caesar, Augustus’ adoptive father, depicting Aeneas’ escape, and it includes his father on his shoulders, but no son, even though that son was crucial to Julius Caesar’s ancestral claim. In Caesar’s image Aeneas’ spare hand is holding the palladium, the talismanic statue of Athena/Minerva that, housed in the Temple of Vesta, would protect the future city of Rome.
Well, what struck me about Virgil’s description of Iulus on this, the umpteenth, occasion of reading it is a subtle shift in perspective in line 725, and perhaps another way of lending the boy the slightest boost in status. This is all within Aeneas’ narrative of the fall of Troy to Queen Dido in Carthage, and Aeneas describes the physical process of picking up his father from his own viewpoint, similarly introducing his son in 724 taking hold of his hand. Then in 726 Aeneas describes his wife’s position at the rear, again as if viewing her himself. But in 725 we seem to catch just a glimpse of a different perspective and consciousness, that of little Iulus himself. It all hinges on the word patrem. The only person properly capable of seeing Aeneas as “father”, after all, is Iulus, and the word thus momentarily gives us access to Iulus’ subjectivity.
A very subtle effect, for sure, and I’m here obviously indebted to Don Fowler’s classic article “Deviant focalisation in Vergil’s Aeneid” (PCPhS 36, 1990, 42-63), in which he investigates moments when Virgil implicitly conveys a point of view at variance with that of the narrator (hence “deviant”). In Book 2 Aeneas is the narrator, but here, with patrem, his son’s viewpoint intrudes itself, for a second, into Aeneas’ account.
Just for a second, though? It might be worth wondering if non passibus aequis is also the boy’s perception, and it would be nice: not just a vivid image of a small child, if so, but that child’s own viewpoint, Iulus himself aware that his legs are not as long as Aeneas’s, Iulus who by implication is striving to keep pace with his father.
Whether we see that as the boy’s point of view or not (and we certainly don’t have to), this scene deftly characterises the male characters of Aeneas’ family, critical in this poem as the ancestors of Augustus and of the Romans. Anchises is authoritative (in Virgil’s version he carries with him the gods of Troy) but physically weak, while Aeneas is by implication as impressive a warrior as Hercules (the lion skin he drapes over his shoulders, and the burden he assumes, point strongly to the Greek hero, for which see more here). As for Ascanius, we can see a boy as far removed from Aeneas’ heroism by youth as Anchises is by age, in any case completing a powerful tableau of past, present and future (from which, again, the mother is pointedly excluded). At the very least the word patrem establishes Aeneas’ claim to an important status marker in this poem and in Roman life more generally. A theme of Books 1 and 2 of the Aeneid is Aeneas’ growth into the role as pater, leader of the family, initially overshadowed by his father Anchises. Here patrem reminds us of Aeneas’ own potential to be the pater familias, head of the family and by extension of the Trojan people as they turn into Romans, a national hero fully realised.
Maybe that’s all this momentary shift to Iulus’ point of view is designed to achieve, identifying Aeneas as a father in his own right as his carries his father. But I do like the possibility that we also catch here just a glimpse of Iulus’ own nascent heroism, a third generation consciously measuring himself against his father, aspiring to match his manly pace, the boy who will build on Aeneas’ victory in Italy and ensure not only the foundation of Rome, but the preeminence within it of Augustus, father of the nation, pater patriae.
The Glorious Twelfth
“That there was an art of making statues established in Italy also, and from an early date, is indicated by the Hercules dedicated in the Forum Boarium (Cattle Market), so they say, by Evander, who is called the triumphal Hercules and is dressed in triumphal clothes when triumphs are being celebrated; and also by the statue of Twin-faced Janus dedicated by king Numa, who is worshipped as presiding over peace and war, with his fingers so arranged as to indicate, by the sign of three hundred and sixty-five days, that he is also the god of time.”
A paragraph from Pliny the Elder (Hist. Nat. 34.33) which caught my attention a few months ago. There’s nothing original in what follows, but I’m thinking, on and off, about Hercules (Heracles, Verethragna, Vajrapani…), and this clarified some things for me about Hercules in Rome. There is no reason on Earth why my noodlings should be of any interest to you, needless to say.
Specifically, I was thinking, as I often do, about Hercules in Virgil’s Aeneid.
In Book VIII of Virgil’s epic Aeneas visits the future site of Rome, and is welcomed and entertained by the Greek king Evander, the alleged dedicator (Pliny is clearly sceptical) of that statue, who has settled there. Evander’s son Pallas will be crucial to the rest of the plot, his death at the hands of Turnus motivating Aeneas’ culminating revenge. But a lengthy section of this book is taken up by Evander’s account to Aeneas of Hercules’ exploits at Rome, how he had visited the site as he was herding the cattle of Geryon from Spain back to Argos, his tenth Labour, and slain a monstrous bandit called Cacus who was terrorizing Evander’s people.
Hercules is worshipped as a god by Evander (he has in the interim died and been deified), and it turns out that Aeneas has arrived on the very day of the festival of Hercules, suggesting a parallel between Aeneas and Hercules that Virgil periodically activates in the course of the poem. This festival, celebrated in Virgil’s day at the Ara Maxima, the shrine of Hercules in the Forum Boarium, fell on August 12, and that date opens up an entirely different dimension of significance.
Book VIII will end with the scene of Augustus’ Triple Triumph in 29 B.C., as represented by Vulcan on the shield he has forged for Aeneas. The triumph was a spectacular procession of troops, captives and spoils through Rome, staged by a successful Roman general, himself dressed in impressive clothing and riding in a chariot. In 29 Augustus celebrated triumphs, for military victories in Dalmatia and then over Antony and Cleopatra at Actium and in Egypt, on three consecutive days, August 13, 14 and 15. Augustus thus formally arrived at Rome, in preparation for these processions, on the day that Aeneas first comes to Rome, according to Virgil, but also the day on which Hercules had rid the city of the scourge of Cacus, and on which his delivery of Rome was to be celebrated thereafter. Denis Feeney (Caesar’s Calendar p.162) calls this a kind of wormhole, times widely separated, in the case of Hercules or Aeneas and Augustus by a thousand years, but identified in Roman minds by the sanctity of the day. It’s clear enough that Augustus had timetabled his triumphs so as to associate himself with Hercules in his role as Rome’s saviour, and that Virgil is elaborating on that.
What Pliny’s information about the statue of Hercules gives us is further reason for Augustus to align his own arrival in Rome with Hercules’s. What we learn from that “Triumphal Hercules” at the Ara Maxima, supposedly dedicated by Evander himself, and dressed up in the same elaborate clothing as a triumphing general during his triumph, is that Hercules could be understood to be the original triumphator, the model for every triumphing general, and that Augustus was in this respect as well something like a reincarnation of Hercules as he processed through the streets of Rome in 29 B.C.
As I say, there’s nothing remotely new about any of these observations. Here, for example, is Matthew Loar batting around similar ideas in greater depth and with much greater sophistication. What follows, furthermore, is provoked by a rereading on my part of Mary Beard’s The Roman Triumph, and some hints there of the depth of the connections Romans came to perceive, and Virgil was able to exploit, between Hercules and the triumph. It seems clear, at any rate, or at least clearer to me than it used to, that the very name of Hercules could evoke the triumphal ceremony. Horace in one of his Odes, 3.14, welcomes Augustus returning from campaign in Spain “in the manner of Hercules”, Herculis ritu, suggesting the Hercules who had also come to Rome from that direction, but also bestowing on Augustus’ arrival something of the character of a triumph.
What Mary’s book made me think of more, though, was food. There is a persistent association, albeit hard to pin down in detail, between Hercules, the triumph, and feasting. Athenaeus, citing the Stoic philosopher Posidonius, a visitor to Rome in the first century B.C., describes a feast at Hercules’s shrine (presumably the Ara Maxima), laid on by the triumphing general, the generosity of which, Posidonius remarked, was itself “Heraclean” in the provision of wine and food (Deipnosophistae 4, 153c; cf. 5, 221f). There seems to be some connection here to a ritual described by Plutarch (Roman Questions 18) whereby wealthy men would gift 10% of their wealth to Hercules at the Ara Maxima by throwing a massive dinner for Roman male citizens (women were forbidden access to the Ara Maxima).
Plutarch on the Hercules tithe, courtesy of Lacus Curtius
Quite what the connecting threads were between the dinners at Hercules’ shrine and the triumphal dinners is elusive, but one thing all this emphasis on feasting illustrates is a fundamental, and fascinating, tension in the Greco-Roman perception of this, their greatest, hero. Hercules was a god-like bringer of peace and order, but Hercules was also an all-too-human and notorious carouser, according to Plutarch somehow both gluttonous (ἀδηφάγος) and frugal in his lifestyle (ἀπέριττος τῷ βίῳ).
At the Ara Maxima in Rome he was all of these things, on the one hand one of Rome’s many founder figures (like Romulus, and Aeneas himself), and on the other the instigator of unrestrained self-indulgence. Propertius 4.9, which playfully continues Hercules’ story in Aeneid VIII after his conquest of Cacus, exploits this contrast to comic effect, depicting a Hercules ravenous with thirst after his exertions begging for entry to the shrine of the Bona Dea, a sanctuary that excluded men (just as his shrine excluded women). The statue in the photo above is from Alba Fucens in Central Italy (now in the Museo archeologico nazionale d’Abruzzo in Chieti), a cult of Hercules closely related to that in the Forum Boarium (involving a further dimension of Hercules, as a god of commerce, but that’s another story). He strikes a relaxed pose, wine cup in his left hand (perhaps the wooden scyphus that Servius at Aen. 8.278 tells us Hercules brought with him to Italy) and garland on his head.
It is with feasting at the Ara Maxima in honour of Hercules that the day ends in Aeneid 8, too, before Evander leads Aeneas through Rome-before-Rome to Evander’s simple hut on the Palatine hill. This feasting is seemingly as strong an allusion to triumphal ritual as anything else.
Was it a statue like the one from Alba Fucens, Hercules relaxed and tipsy, that was decked out in the elaborate gear of a triumphing general, I wonder? It would capture something essential about this culture hero if it was.
Genre, gender (& some genitalia)
A seasonal blog about how heroes die. Draw your own conclusions about my state of mind at the end of 2018.
One of the most celebrated/notorious episodes of Ovid’s Metamorphoses is the Calydonian boar hunt in Book VIII (270-444), and it typifies Ovid’s irreverent approach to epic narrative. An impressive band of heroes (Theseus, Jason, Peleus, Telamon, Laertes, Nestor and many more: the generation before the Iliad, so in principle even more heroic than Achilles, Ajax or Odysseus) gathers together to help Meleager deal with a monstrous boar that is wreaking havoc in Calydon, but Ovid turns material that might make a very acceptable epic narrative into a “boisterous comedy”, in Nicholas Horsfall’s words.* Telamon trips over a tree root, for example, and Nestor polevaults onto a branch. Most outrageously of all, it is a woman, Atalanta, who shows most physical prowess, drawing first blood from the boar.
Ovid’s approach to writing epic, in simple terms, is not to do what an epic is supposed to do, but at the same time constantly remind us what a respectable epic should be doing. An essential characteristic of epic, perhaps its quintessential quality, is its masculinity, its concern with males who are more male than ordinary males and excel in stereotypically male activities, warfare and violent physical activity especially, but also forceful speech and charismatic leadership. Promoting a female character at the expense of the male suits Ovid’s aims perfectly: the prominence in Ovid’s telling of this myth of a woman huntress, alongside male heroes falling far short of the heroic ideal, strikes epic at its core.
Which brings us to the business of this blog. Ancaeus is another hero who meets a humiliating end in the course of the boar hunt, but his mode of death is particularly meaningful. An exaggeratedly male, bombastic hero, wielding a double axe, Ancaeus responds to Atalanta’s success by commanding his comrades to stand back and “Learn how far men’s weapons surpass women’s,/ and make way for my action” (discite femineis quid tela uirilia praestent/ o iuuenes, operique meo concedite, 392-3), before being peremptorily despatched by the boar with a blow from both tusks in the groin. There is nothing coincidental about the location of Ancaeus’ terminal wound. As I wrote a few years ago,** citing Adams’ seminal reference work The Latin Sexual Vocabulary (p. 93 n. 3), “tela, uirilia, and opus are all terms regularly used of the penis, and ‘there was a marked tendency for adjectives of the base femin- to be applied… to the female parts.'” Alternative translations of operique meo concedite may suggest themselves. But if epic is all about uirtus, “manhood”, this caricature of an epic hero dies a death that encapsulates Ovid’s contrarian attitude to the genre he’s supposed to be writing.
My mind turned back to poor Ancaeus a couple of weeks ago when preparing a MOOC for my old student Chris Tudor (Massolit is a great resource, incidentally, which I enthusiastically recommend). I was talking about Aeneid XI, and one of my lectures was on Camilla, the female warrior whose exploits occupy the latter part of the book (and who is a key model for Ovid’s Atalanta). Here also we find an epic investigating its own gender biases, but Virgil’s poem is altogether more conventional in this respect than Ovid’s. Camilla is a formidable warrior, dominating the battlefield and seeing off a number of male antagonists (aduenit qui uestra dies muliebribus armis/ uerba redargueret, “the day has come for a woman’s weapons to refute your words”, she vaunts over one victim, 687-8). But her death is occasioned by a dramatic reversion to (a stereotype of) conventional female behaviour: Alison Keith^ talks of “a Greco-Roman stereotype regarding women’s excessive interest in clothing and personal adornment” (p. 29). Distracted by the sight of a gorgeously bedecked Trojan priest called Chloreus, Camilla forgets her military priorities and goes in pursuit, burning “with a womanly desire for plunder and spoils” (782). Her defences down, Camilla is easily picked off by a nonentity called Arruns (whose own, weirdly anonymous, death shortly after is one of the eeriest passages in the Aeneid).
Camilla’s death seems in some respects like a crude replay of Dido’s departure from Virgil’s epic. In a similar way, a woman’s presence in this overwhelmingly male space of epic is condoned for as long as she acts like a stereotypical man, in Dido’s case as a head of state and dux, in Camilla’s as a fighter. But when women start to behave like (the ancient stereotype of) women, falling in love, acting and speaking irrationally, indulging their own selfish interests, distracted by beautiful superficialities, their time in epic is limited.
Of course Virgil, in this as in other respects, was well able to exploit the rigid generic expectations he inherited by contravening the rules for effect, and the intrinsic power of these female characters derives not least from their anomalous status in epic. “Ce qui fait l’expressivité, c’est la règle enfreinte”, as Joseph Hellegouarc’h^^ succinctly expressed it: classical literature is rule-bound, but drew much of its power of expression from that very fact. Ultimately, however, Virgil’s treatment of women in the Aeneid cannot fail but represent an endorsement of the misogyny enshrined in epic poetry, the most culturally authoritative of ancient poetic genres.
Returning to topic, a case in point is the detail that reminded me so strongly of Ancaeus, another mortal blow delivered in a significant location. Arruns’ spear strikes Camilla below her “exposed breast” (exserta papilla, 803): Camilla is portrayed as dressed for the fight like an Amazon, one breast uncovered, the archetypal ancient image of a fighting woman. (What made this the archetypal image is worth contemplating: see Adrienne Mayor,^* Chapter 5.) Again, the death of a warrior, and the location of the terminal wound, defines the character of the poem, Virgil’s conventional epic focusing on Camilla’s gender as she exits the poem, as Ovid had highlighted Ancaeus’s.
But what imperils those tidy categories just a little bit is the episode that immediately precedes Camilla’s death, again foregrounding gender/genre-defining concerns and indeed clearly setting the scene for what follows. The Etruscan leader Tarchon, mythical founder of Virgil’s hometown Mantua, rallies his cavalry against Camilla’s by hurling himself into the heart of the enemy forces, actually seizing hold of one of them, Venulus, and carrying him off bodily on his own horse. It is a spectacular exercise in male bravado: Tarchon grapples with Venulus while still on horseback, snapping off the point of Venulus’ spear and trying to drive it into his opponent’s throat. And as he gallops forward Tarchon berates his own men for their effeminacy in failing to resist Camilla. femina palantis agit atque haec agmina uertit?, 734, “Is a woman driving you off in disorder and routing these ranks?!”, he asks incredulously.
Virgil sums up this peculiar scene in a very suggestive way: uolat igneus aequore Tarchon,/ arma uirumque ferens, “Tarchon flies like fire over the plain, bearing the man and his weapons”, 746-7. Arma uirum, “Arms and the man”, deliberately recalls the opening words (and alternative title) of the Aeneid, and the central role it promises for the uir, the heroic man, the embodiment of uirtus. Back in Book 9 the Latin warrior Numanus Remulus in a vaunting speech had dismissed the Trojans as eastern effeminates, and there also the poet had implied that “toxic masculinity” was of the essence of his own poem: sinite arma uiris et cedite ferro, Numanus tells the Trojans, “Leave weapons to the men, and renounce the sword” (Aen. 9.620). “Virgil’s readers will take sinite arma uiris in the further sense of a command to leave the world of martial epic”, Philip Hardie comments.*^ Epic is male territory. If the Trojans are indeed inadequately male, as Numanus suggests, they have no role to play in it.
Well, Virgil’s narrative enacts a similar judgement on Camilla and Dido, expelling them when they start acting too much like women. But it is well said that Ovid finds almost all the material he needs to mock epic values already present in conventional examples of the genre like the Aeneid, working on details in Virgil or Homer that threaten the clear-cut definitions epic aspires to project. Ovid fashions Atalanta from Virgil’s Camilla, but Tarchon isn’t so different from Ancaeus, either. The hyperbole that makes Tarchon a character worthy of epic, superhuman and extraordinary, is also what makes Ancaeus’ overblown antics so absurd. What distinguishes the two is not much more than the license Ovid gives us to laugh at his creations (there is much of great value in the Aeneid, but very few laughs). Tarchon’s exploit carries a hint of the ritual of devotio, the last word in Roman military heroics whereby a general ensured victory by hurling himself into the midst of the enemy and vowing himself and the enemy to the gods of the underworld (for Tarchon and devotio see Matthew Leigh in this volume of Proceedings of the Virgil Society),^*^ which is a further disincentive to laugh at him.
Once again, though, especially if we happen to writing a chapter about it, we can say thank God for the Metamorphoses, and Ovid’s acute sense of the instability of epic bluster. After reading Ovid on Ancaeus, certainly, it’s hard to take Tarchon very seriously.
The Latin for “toxic masculinity”, by the way, is temeraria uirtus (Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.407).
^A. M. Keith, Engendering Rome: women in Latin epic (Cambridge, 2000);
*^P. R. Hardie, Virgil, Aeneid Book IX (Cambridge, 1994);
^*A. Mayor, The Amazons: lives and legends of warrior women across the ancient world (Princeton, 2014);
*N. Horsfall, “Epic and burlesque in Ovid, Metamorphoses VIII,” CJ 74 (1979), 319-32;
^*^M. Leigh, “Hopelessly devoted to you: traces of the Decii in Virgil’s Aeneid,” PVS 21 (1993), 89-110;
^^J. Hellegouarc’h, Le monosyllabe dans l’hexamètre latin; essai de métrique verbale (Paris, 1964);
**Ll. Morgan, “Child’s play: Ovid and his critics,” JRS 93 (2003), 66-91.
When words collide
In Poem 84 Catullus has a go at a man named Arrius.
Arrius’ fault is to aspirate, add an initial aitch to, unaspirated Latin words, turning insidiae into hinsidiae and commoda into chommoda, the ch not as in church but (W. Sidney Allen’s example, Vox Latina p. 26) quite like the initial sound of cot. Catullus’ target may be Q. Arrius, a lower-class, self-made orator snootily dismissed by Cicero in his history of oratory at Brutus 242-3. There are other open questions about the poem (what the point of calling Arrius’ uncle “free” is, for example, and whether the joke in the last line is just that Arrius and his aitches are on their way home), but Catullus’ objection to Arrius’ hypercorrection no doubt carries an edge of disdain from the upper-class (and self-consciously sophisticated) poet toward a social inferior, someone socially as well as phonetically aspirational. Romans were terrible snobs, needless to say.
I’m interested in something more specific, though. Line 8, audibant eadem haec leniter et leuiter, describes the halcyon aural conditions that obtain when Arrius and his aitches have left the country; literally, “they (either everyone, or everyone’s ears) heard these same words smoothly and softly” in Arrius’ absence, leuiter hinting at the spiritus leuis or “soft breathing”, the symbol that indicates a lack of aspiration over an initial vowel in Greek (Quinn, Catullus, the poems, ad loc.). But what there also is in line 8 is an example of the meeting of two words in a poetic line generally known as elision, but more accurately as synaloepha (“melding”): the four syllables eadem haec become three, because -em and hae- coalesce into one.
Synaloepha is a common feature of Latin poetry, and it happens when a vowel or diphthong at the end of one word meets a vowel or diphthong at the start of the next. In this poem, for example, we see it in line 2, dicere, et (pronounced diceret), and 3, se esse (sesse). In most cases it was not strictly a matter of “elision”, a syllable being entirely lost, but some kind of combination of the two vowels or diphthongs into one–hence the preference for “synaloepha” as the term to describe it. Eadem haec, one word ending with -m, the next starting with h-, doesn’t at first sight look like it should be subject to the same process. But a vowel followed by m in Catullus’ Latin was pronounced as a nasalized long vowel, while the aspiration of h was so weakly realised, in elite Latin at least, that it was as if the word simply opened with the diphthong ae.
That said, how exactly the blending of eadem and haec would have sounded is hard to reconstruct: a nasalized contraction of long e and ae, maybe (W. Sidney Allen, Vox Latina p. 81), or (J. Soubiran, L’élision dans la poésie latine p. 132, supported by Quintilian, Inst. 9.4.40) something like ewae, the -em expressed by “rounding the lips as if to end with a -w” (A. Gratwick, Plautus, Menaechmi p. 251).
If that seems awkward, there are indications in the poetic use of this kind of synaloepha of -m, as Soubiran remarks, that it could be heard as an unpleasant sound: the textbook example (for ancients and moderns) is Virgil’s description of Polyphemus at Aeneid 3.658, monstrum horrendum, informe, ingens (monstruworrenduwinformingens), a splurge of sound that destroys the elegant fabric of the heroic hexameter and is clearly designed to convey the ugliness of the Cyclops. That doesn’t exhaust the expressive power of synaloepha of -m, though: a line in many ways similar to the Cyclops line, Aen. 9.170, describing Latinus’ palace, tectum augustum, ingens, centum sublime columnis (tectuwaugustuwingens), seems to suggest a building soaring beyond one’s ability to discern its structure, dissolving the structure of the hexameter for different effect, or so I once proposed (Musa pedestris p. 331). More persuasive is E.J. Kenney’s remark, in a review of Soubiran (CR 17 (1967), 325-8), that synaloepha can be “used, especially by Virgil, to produce an almost unlimited range of effects.” Elsewhere Catullus himself, at 17.26, ferream ut soleam tenaci in voragine mula, “as a mule [leaves] her iron shoe in the clinging mire”, “smears together” two normally separate elements of a composite verse to evoke, in tenacin, a horseshoe left stuck in the mud.
Returning to Catullus 84, what cannot assert itself in this encounter between eadem and haec is any aspiration of the h. The synaloepha in line 8 is tackled in a very acute reading of this poem by E. Vandiver (“Sound patterns in Catullus 84”, The Classical Journal 85 (1990), 337-40). Her suggestion is that it would have been pronounced eadhaec (a true elision of -em, in effect), and thus might evoke the aspirated consonants like ch that Arrius was in the habit of inflecting on everyone. In fact, though, as I’ve explained, that kind of elision of vowel + m isn’t generally considered the most likely account. But even if it were, an h with sufficient force to persist in this way wouldn’t admit synaloepha (by compromising the preceding vowel sound) at all.
So my suspicion is that something like the opposite is true. My polymathic colleague Jonathan Katz points out to me that unless Catullus is making a point about haec, there’s really no need to include this word at all. What is his point in introducing an h only to suppress it, then? Surely, rather than echoing Arrius’ crimes against good Latin, the line that describes a life (temporarily) free of Arrius’ aspirations is serving up an aitch pronounced as it should be pronounced, i.e. not pronounced at all.
For as long as Arrius is away, in other words, even when there’s an h on the page, no one ‘as to ‘ear it.
Swat II: on Heracles’ track to the Indus
In 1926 Aurel Stein, the Hungarian/British archaeologist and explorer, spent two and a half months touring Upper Swat, then an independent princely state beyond the boundaries of British India. In 1926 it was for the first time peaceful enough, and friendly enough with the British authorities, for Stein to secure access. As with Afghanistan, Swat was a place that Stein had long aspired, and strived, to visit.
Aurel Stein’s aims in Swat were twofold, to explore Buddhist sites along the Swat valley, and to trace the route of Alexander the Great in his conquest of Swat in 327-326BC. In particular, he wanted to identify the site of one of Alexander’s most celebrated military exploits, the mountain fastness of Aornos where the people of Swat had taken refuge from Alexander’s attack. This assault was in part motivated, the ancient sources tell us, by Alexander’s desire to rival Heracles, who had long before tried and failed to capture the “Rock”. Stein’s account of his tour, On Alexander’s Track to the Indus (a great read, I should say), opens with an apology to Xuanzang, the seventh-century Chinese monk whose account of his travels to India in search of sacred texts had been Stein’s guide across Central Asia (and was again in Swat), but who on this occasion was playing second fiddle to a fascination with Alexander that Stein had harboured since boyhood.
Aurel Stein’s trip to Swat inaugurated the archaeological investigation of the valley, subsequently taken up by the Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci and his successors in the Missione Archaeologica Italiana in Pakistan. Tucci himself, who had a special expertise in Tibetan Buddhism, came to Swat after the Chinese occupation of Tibet in the 1950s.
Stein had a candidate for Aornos, and it was was Pir-Sar, “Peak of the Saint”, some distance to the east of the Swat river. At the climax of his book (p.119) this exceptionally fit 63-year old reaches the top of the mountain and establishes to his satisfaction that it was indeed Aornos:
“It was long after midnight before I could seek warmth among my rugs. But the growing conviction that Aornos was found at last kept my spirits buoyant in spite of benumbed hands and weary feet. Alexander, so Arrian and Curtius tell us, offered sacrifices to the gods when he had gained possession of the ‘Rock’. I had no victory to give thanks for. Yet I, too, felt tempted to offer a libation to Pallas Athene for the fulfilment of a scholar’s hope, long cherished and long delayed.”
In another blog (one I feel great fondness for, as it secured me an invitation to Swat) I expressed my view, which is entirely indebted to other people’s research and insight, that Stein was wrong about the location of Aornos, as well as about his idolisation of Alexander: there is a more plausible site for Aornos first proposed by Tucci, and that site also gives its capture a very different complexion. Here in Alexander’s track, though, Stein elegantly links the sacrifices that Alexander made to Athena and Victory on the summit of Aornos (Curtius 8.11.24) with Athena’s role as the protector of artisans and scholars such as Stein. In fact Athena’s patronage of Stein was even more intimate: on the front cover of his books was embossed an image of Athena which he had unearthed in Xinjiang, China. (As I explain here, I don’t think Stein appreciated quite how closely tied to Alexander his image actually was.)
I went to Swat (just a week in my case) interested in both these Pallas Athenas, the warrior’s and the scholar’s. In other words, I wanted to see for myself why Tucci, and more recently Luca M. Olivieri, were so convinced that Alexander’s Aornos was not Pir-Sar but Mt. Elam, a mountain much more central to Swat. (It is, as I shall explain, in important ways a matter of seeing.) But I also wanted to understand why Stein was so determined to locate Aornos at Pir-Sar, because I think his misplacement is potentially just as fascinating as anything to do with Alexander.
Stein had devoted a lot of time and effort to this question. In 1904 he had managed to visit Mt. Mahaban, on the right bank of the river Indus, a site that had been proposed for Aornos fifty years before by James Abbott, an imperial functionary at the cutting edge of British expansion into N-W India, and the man who gave his name to Osama bin Laden’s adopted home at Abbottabad. On this occasion Stein was able, with regret, to rule out Abbott’s theory about Mahaban, but he could investigate no further himself until 1926.
When he did, it was another site on the Indus he plumped for: Pir-Sar overlooks the river some way upstream of Mahaban. It’s worth considering why Abbott, Stein and a host of others were determined to locate Aornos by the Indus. The obvious reason is that in three ancient accounts it is explicitly stated that the base of the mountain was washed by the waters of the river (Diodorus 17.85.3; Strabo 15.1.8; Curtius 8.11.7, cf. 8.11.12)–they are clearly following a common source. Classical sources of course carried authority for the classically-educated Europeans engaged in this quest.
But something that is altogether clearer when you’re physically there, specifically when you’re approaching the Indus in a taxi from Islamabad airport, is the psychological compulsion for the British to locate Aornos by the Indus. British jurisdiction extended as far as the Indus and no further at the relevant point: Swat never fell under British control. Abbott had developed his theory about Aornos by a combination of local intelligence and a telescope trained on the mountains from the eastern side of the river. (He painted a watercolour of his view.) Bound up with the British search for a defensible boundary to its Indian possessions was the pursuit of a pretext for their presence in this territory. The activities of Alexander, a familiar historical figure in this profoundly alien space, were of intense interest to all the colonial officials involved in the borderlands: my favourite example is Alexander Burnes squandering a few days of his mission to Bokhara scouring the Punjab for a trace of the twelve altars to the Olympian gods raised by Alexander on the river Hyphasis. Abbott training his telescope on the far side of the Indus is an intensely imperial moment too. The British occupied one side of a river both strategic and fraught with classical associations. The site of Alexander’s exploit was all-but in their grasp, and it had to be one of those shadowy mountains just on the other side of the Indus.
Abbott’s sketch of “Aornos”, from his article “Gradus ad Aornon”, viewed from the far side of the river Indus (f).“The construction of a map of Sohaut (Swat) is a matter of much importance,” Abbott says by way of conclusion to his long argument for Mt. Mahaban: “Sooner or later the Sohauties will compel us to punish them. Every possible means should then be applied to add to our knowledge of the features of that rich and extensive valley, and imperfect as is the sketch map now offered, it will yet I trust serve as a foundation for more satisfactory charts, and if so, the toil it has cost me, will be well rewarded.” The search for Alexander and the work to extend and consolidate colonial territory were, as I say, thoroughly intertwined. Even in Stein’s case, it was an officer involved in a border campaign along the Indus, Col. R. A. Wauhope, who had given him the tip about Pir-Sar, and Stein himself had crossed the river and investigated Buddhist sites while attached to a punitive force dispatched in 1898. Commenting in The Times on Stein’s “discovery” of Aornos in 1926, Francis Younghusband describes how, “during the Chitral campaign of 30 years ago, when the engineers were road-making through the Malakand Pass into Swat, they came across evidences of an ancient road made in Buddhist times, as well as many artistic remains of the period” (27 May 1926 = H. Wang, Sir Aurel Stein in The Times p. 84).
That winding road up to “the once blood-soaked heights of the Malakand” is still the main route into Swat. Here is a view back from Malakand toward Mardan and the Kabul river:
Whatever their reasons for placing Aornos beside the Indus, Abbott and Stein and all their many fellow Aornos-hunters were almost certainly wrong, and it took the proper access to Swat achieved by Giuseppe Tucci (as well as, I believe, an academic mind somewhat less fettered by respect for classical authors) to offer a better solution. (The Indus detail is perplexing, for sure, but I need no persuading that the ancients could get their geography very badly wrong.) Tucci proposed Mt. Elam, his persuasive argument being that it was just the kind of place the people of Swat would take refuge in, a mountain considered sacred by the people of Swat since time immemorial. Elam is an important place of pilgrimage for Hindus, site of the Ram Takht, the throne of Rama, the Indian deity, while Xuanzang claims “Hilo” as the place where the Buddha in an earlier existence had surrendered his life in return for hearing half a line of scripture. Buddhist foundations on the slopes of the mountain confirm its sanctity. The stupa of Amluk-dara stands just off an ancient path to the summit of Elam–in the words of Dr Olivieri, it is a station on the pilgrimage route to the summit, and a watchtower nearby from the Hindushahi period (tenth century) underlines the importance of this, the shortest route to the mountain top.
The stupa at Amluk-dara, with Elam/Aornos behind, a perennially sacred place, photo (much better than any of mine) courtesy of Luca M. OlivieriIn my earlier blog I made something of Tucci’s idea that the very name Aornos, as recorded by Greek sources, might conceal “aarana”, “a common name for any sheltered place”: this was a place of refuge, of protection by the gods. A different kind of sense of the centrality of Elam to the part of Swat attacked by Alexander can be got from a remarkable text found and translated by Tucci, the account of a thirteenth-century Tibetan monk Orgyan pa. Tucci compares the author to Kipling’s unworldly Lama in Kim: his description of Swat is “quite possibly an almost contemporary record of a journey to a country which was already considered as a magic land, and was seen through the eyes of a man who [because of his Buddhist beliefs] had no sight for reality”, capable (in other words) of conveying less the reality of Elam than the awe that this mountain could command:
“To the east there is the mountain Ilo, which is the foremost of all mountains of the Jambudvipa (the World).There is no medical herb growing on the earth which does not grow there. It is charming on account of its herbs, stalks, leaves and flowers. Sarabhas and other antelopes wander there quite freely. There are many gardens of grape; beautiful birds of every kind and of gracious colours make a deep chattering.
From that country we went to the west for seven days;
Up to the mountain Ilo, the peak of K’a rag k’ar
In the mountain, sarabhas play
And there are gardens of grape in abundance.
I did not covet any thing.”
From reading Susan Whitfield and Gregory Schopen*, who explain the Buddhist association of thought between natural beauty, especially the cultivated landscape of the garden, and religious sanctity, I realise that when this Tibetan monk describes Elam as verdant and fertile, he is in effect saying that it is an intensely sacred place. If I understand Aurel Stein correctly, Xuanzang had converted the ancient name of Swat, Uddiyana, into the Sanskrit word for “garden”, udyana, with the same implication that Swat is a beautiful and thus a sacred space. But for Orgyan pa, Mt. Elam is the most beautiful, the most sacred place in the “magic land” of Swat.
For me, in my resolutely secular way, a comparable effect was achieved simply by standing in the archaeological site of Bazira in Barikot (a city captured by Alexander) and looking toward Mount Elam. Not for the first time I discovered that there’s nothing like physically placing yourself somewhere for understanding ancient perceptions of a place. Elam simply dominates the view. This really cannot be conveyed by a wide-angle shot, but I’ve done my best.
Obviously, though, this is where you would seek refuge from Alexander the Great.
II
A detail recorded by all the ancient sources, as I’ve mentioned, is that Alexander’s motivation for storming Aornos was partly that Heracles had unsuccessfully attempted it before him. Heracles’ failure to reach the summit was presented as an act of piety, after divine displeasure had been signalled to him by an earthquake. More Heracles than Alexander, I failed to see the summit of Aornos because I heeded warnings that Elam is still a refuge, these days for a type of person best not encountered if possible.
But another thing I’ve been reminded of in Swat is how fundamentally tied to the landscape Heracles is. Any unusual island, promontory, rock-formation, hot spring or mountain was very likely to be associated with this hero in his wanderings across the world. And while they probably shouldn’t be pushed too far, the parallels between what Westerners (and especially British) saw in Alexander and what Alexander and his army found in Heracles are striking.
In Alexander the British Empire found a precedent for their own presence in Central Asia, evidence that they were not the rank interlopers they appeared to be. If the ground was “Classic”, it was familiar–it was, in a sense, “ours”. In antiquity Heracles had long played a similar role for Greeks on the move, a god of trade and travel and colonisation whose myths of wandering always offered Greeks the option that Heracles had been there (and “there” might be Cadiz or Monaco or the Nile Delta) before them. Alexander had a special connection to Heracles, claiming descent from him, and he put the hero on his coins: it is sometimes hard to distinguish images of Heracles and Alexander, so close is their assimilation. The stories associated with Aornos are another illustration. Wherever Alexander went, so also had Heracles, assuring the Macedonians and Greeks that this was a place to which they had a valid claim.
The Heracles that came to India with Alexander entered the local artistic repertoire. This is a link to a Heracles apparently from Pakistan, now in the Ashmolean Museum, and here is a fragment of a jug handle from Charsadda, ancient Peshawar, which represents either Heracles in his lionskin, or Alexander as Heracles in his lionskin (from M. Wheeler, Charsada p. 115 and pl. XXXVIb; for a similar artefact, cf. J. Marshall, Taxila 2.433 and 3. pl. 130f, no. 226b):
I did find myself wondering if this silver repoussé head found at Sirkap, Taxila by Marshall (but stolen from the Taxila Museum in 1999), and identified by him as Dionysus or Silenus (J. Marshall, Taxila 2.614-5), might actually be Heracles, who is often depicted garlanded and drinking, and more often than Dionysus depicted bearded:
More dramatically, and excitingly, Heracles found his way into the visual language of Buddhism, a religion of which the Indo-Greek kings who ruled this area in the second century BC, indirect heirs of Alexander, seem to have been significant patrons, the most famous such king, Menander, especially. In Gandharan art Heracles becomes Vajrapani, a figure accompanying the Buddha who holds the vajra or thunderbolt (this is what his name Vajrapani means) which symbolises the power of Buddhist insight, but also regularly sporting a lionskin and/or physically evoking Heracles. Here is one of a very large number of Vajrapanis I snapped in Swat and Peshawar, this one in the Swat Museum in Saidu Sharif, and originally from the site of Nimogram:
Why this Heracles/Vajrapani became so important to Gandharan Buddhist art is a matter of much debate. Vajrapani has the role of guiding and protecting the Buddha, and the physical presence represented by Heracles suits that well enough. One explanation by Katsumi Tanabe, though, emphasises the connection of the vajra with the Indian god/hero Indra, a god of war (also, like Heracles, fond of a drink) who is regularly represented attending the Buddha: the Gandharan Vajrapani, so the theory goes, is a Greek-influenced realisation of some version of this same Indra (my thanks to @kaeshour for pointing out to me that Indra is called vajrapani with a small v, so to speak, in the Mahabharata and elsewhere).** (Heracles is certainly very good at being mistaken for non-Greek hero-deities, whether Indra or Melqart or Verethragna.) Tanabe cites this Vajrapani in the Peshawar Museum, who clearly carrries more than a hint of Heracles, but also wears Indra’s characteristic spherical cap (also to be seen on the Kanishka casket, where Indra and Brahma attend the Buddha):
I am way beyond any knowledge of what I’m talking about by now, needless to say, but what anyone can see here is an interesting mix of heroic exploits localised in Swat. Olivieri plausibly explains the idea in the Alexander historians that Heracles had tried and failed to capture Aornos as a Macedonian/Greek reinterpretation of a local myth, maybe a story of Thraetaona or Indra, Persian and Indian versions of the Indo-European dragon-fighting hero.*** From many centuries later comes a peculiar appropriation of similar heroic myth for the Buddha. It is a story concerned, as in the classic form of such stories, with a dragon and a water source crucial for agriculture. As told in Xuanzang’s account of his travels, the dragon Apalala was interfering with the flow of the river Swat, on which the valley’s prosperity of course depends, and the Buddha, out of his universal pity for creation, persuaded the dragon to relent. He did so either by striking the mountainside himself with the vajra, Indra’s characteristic weapon, or by bringing along with him Vajrapani, brandishing the vajra, as the muscle.
In either case, some more or less distant relation to the story that Alexander’s army heard in Swat had persisted and entered Buddhist belief, and it isn’t hard to see how Heracles could also have maintained an existence for centuries in this resonant environment. The transformation from Alexander’s ancestor to an attendant of the Buddha and enforcer of his universal empathy is pretty remarkable, all the same.
After the Buddha subdued the dragon, according to Xuanzang, he left this imprint of his feet in the rock, the size of which is supposed to vary with the merit that the viewer has accrued (I’ve left my own feet visible to give an idea how huge they are, and how colossal my, and now your, merit is). These footprints were also seen by Faxian and Song Yun, both also Chinese monks, in the fifth and sixth centuries, and by Aurel Stein in 1926, at Tirat on the right bank of the Swat: they are now in the Swat Museum at Saidu Sharif.
Song Yun says that it looks like an imprint left by the Buddha in the mud, and in the well-watered, fertile, much-coveted, and for all these reasons sacred valley of the Swat that certainly seems appropriate.
*G. Schopen, “The Buddhist ‘monastery’ and the Indian garden: aesthetics, assimilations, and the siting of monastic establishments,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 126 (2006), 487-505;
**K. Tanabe, “Why is the Buddha Sakyamuni accompanied by Hercules/Vajrapani? Farewell to Yaksa-theory,” East and West 55 (2005), 363-81;
***L. M. Olivieri, “Notes on the problematical sequence of Alexander’s itinerary in Swat, a geo-historical approach,” East and West 46 (1996), 45-78.
Swat I: the Jahanabad Buddha
I have just spent a week in Swat, N.-W. Pakistan, the guest of Dr. Luca M. Olivieri and the Italian Archaeological Mission in Pakistan, based in Saidu Sharif. I had been planning to blog a daily journal once I was back in the U.K., but the best-laid plans, etc.: a bout of food poisoning got in the way, and I’ll blog selected highlights over the next few months instead. Today I’m starting with one of the last sites I visited, which was also one of the most memorable.
Jahanabad lies in a side valley off the main River Swat. The road from Saidu Sharif and Mingora tracks along the edge of the main river: when Aurel Stein visited in 1926 there was no road, and he had to ride his horse through the river. Then at Manglor or Manglawar we turned up to the right, and before long we could see what we were aiming for: a huge 7th-century Buddha carved on a cliff dominating the approach up the valley. At six metres tall the Jahanabad Buddha was claimed to be the largest carved buddha in Central Asia after the Buddhas of Bamiyan. The connection to Bamiyan would prove to be regrettably apt in other ways.
Seeing the Buddha from afar is one thing. To get up close to it you walk up the mountain through an orchard of persimmon trees underplanted with onions (which scented the path), fragments of ancients structures visible at the edges of the orchard. I was being led by Akhtar Munir, also known as Tota, who as a young man (he showed me a photo) had worked for Giuseppe Tucci, the great Italian scholar who established what is now called ISMEO, Associazione Internazionale di Studi sul Mediterraneo e l’Oriente, and the Missione Archeologica Italiana in Pakistan, based at the Mission House in Saidu Sharif. Tota and I communicated in basic Italian on this hillside in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, to the intense amusement of the policeman who was accompanying us, and Tota put me to shame with the cracking pace he set as we climbed. He was careful, as we went, to pick out an ancient staircase that survived in fragments up the mountain–the original staircase associated with access by the pious to the Buddha image above.
We passed a spring, then at length emerged onto a ledge below the Buddha image. In 1926 Aurel Stein commented how difficult it was to take a decent photo, and this is partly because, as restorers of the image recently discovered, it is designed to be viewed from a precise location ten metres below it. The head alone is 1.6m high, rendered disproportionately large for reasons of perspective. My best shot, with apologies:
The Buddha may be hard to photograph, but the view back down the valley toward Manglawar and the Swat river conveys how dominant was the position occupied by the Buddha. Tota and the policeman are taking a breather in the foreground:
We were in fact in the middle of a massive ritual complex. The architectural fragments in the orchards below were what remained of a Buddhist monastery encompassing the spring, with the staircase rising up through the monastery toward the Buddha. Above us, on the top of the mountain, were the remains of a stupa, to which paths from our location led up. Further images and inscribed rocks in the vicinity, and caves with indications of ritual use, confirm how significant a cult centre it was in its day.
In a recent article (“The itinerary of O rgyan pa in Swat/Uddiyana (second half of 13th Century)”, Journal of Asian Civilizations 40 [2017]), Dr Olivieri establishes that additional confirmation of the site’s importance comes in an account by a Tibetan pilgrim to Swat (ancient Uddiyana) in the 13th Century, O rgyan pa (whose name means “the man of Uddiyana”: his trip made him famous), originally translated by Giuseppe Tucci in Travels of Tibetan pilgrims in the Swat valley (Calcutta, 1940), at p. 52. O rgyan pa describes a temple called Mangalaor, founded by king Indraboti, “where there are various stone images of Buddha (Munindra), Tara and Lokesvara” (aspects of the Buddha). Mangalaor must be Manglawar, and Indrabhuti, in the Tibetan tradition, was both himself an important teacher and also the spiritual father of Padmasambhava or Guru Rinpoche, the figure credited with the establishment of Buddhism in Tibet.
Aurel Stein may have complained about the difficulties of photographing the Jahanabad Buddha, but he also commented that its elevated position had protected it from anyone who might have wished it harm. In September 2007, however, the Buddha was defaced by Taliban looking to emulate the achievements of their fellow-militants over the border in Afghanistan. The attack on the image, with rockets and later explosives, was a highly symbolic gesture at a time when the Taliban were extending their control over Swat. In 2009 they also blew up a boulder decorated with an image of Avalokitesvara, “pre-eminently the dispenser of mercy and help in the northern Buddhist Pantheon” in Stein’s words. Over five seasons from 2012 Dr Olivieri and the Italian Mission have meticulously reconstructed the Buddha’s face, a task complicated further by the subtle issues of perspective mentioned earlier. The result is a fine piece of contemporary reconstruction, which advertises what is new but manages also to convey the impact of the original monument. The Avalokisvara boulder, blown to pieces by the Taliban, has also been reconstituted, and just this year was installed in the garden of the Swat Museum in Saidu Sharif, itself almost entirely rebuilt after a huge bomb blast severely damaged it in 2008:
This story is bound to resonate with me, so reminiscent of Bamiyan but with an overwhelmingly positive outcome. More importantly, though, it illustrates both the determination of the people and authorities of Swat to preserve their incredibly rich archaeological environment, and the commitment of the Italian Mission to apply their academic and technical skills to supporting them in that task. The symbolism of this restored Buddha looking down over its valley is intensely powerful.
The archaeological study of Swat began with Aurel Stein’s visit to the princely state of Swat in 1926. (On Stein’s activities in the North-West Frontier Province and beyond, now Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, see this excellent account by Wannaporn Rienjang.) His description of the Buddhist remains in this valley in his popular account On Alexander’s Track to the Indus ends with some charming speculation about the persistence of ancient observation in this remarkable place (p. 80):
“About half a mile to the east of [Manglawar], alongside of the track leading up the valley, there are some large trees where wild-duck abound by day and night. They gather there in great numbers from their feeding-grounds on the network of channels and pools formed by the Swat river and the large stream that joins it from the side of Manglawar. The birds while in the trees or flying to and from them are considered sacrosanct, though elsewhere the Swatis eagerly shoot and trap them. No explanation was forthcoming of the asylum thus granted. Could it possibly be connected with the fact that the mound of the great ruined Stupa already mentioned rises not far off?”
Desperately seeking Sulpicia
A blog on something that caught my attention at a conference this week, an epitaph (AE 1928, no. 73) discovered in Rome in the 1920s:
Behold, traveller, the ashes of Sulpicia the reader,
to whom had been given the slave name Petale.
She had lived in number more than thirty-four years
and had given birth to a son, Aglaos, in this world.
She had seen all the good things of nature. She flourished in art.
She excelled in beauty. She had grown in talent.
Jealous Fate was unwilling for her to lead a lengthy time in life;
their very distaff failed the Fates.
The suggestion made during the conference was that what I’ve given as the translation of the first three words, “the ashes of Sulpicia the reader”, was only one option: they could also be read as “the ashes of the reader of Sulpicia”, i.e. Sulpicia was not the name of the dead woman, but of her employer or owner. In either case we’re dealing with a servant who apparently had the job of reading to her current or former owners. This person would be a rarely-attested example of a female reader, a lectrix rather than a male lector. If her name was Sulpicia she had certainly been freed, as I’ll explain, whereas if she was “of/belonging to Sulpicia” she might still be a slave; in the latter case, too, the identity of Sulpicia would offer scope for speculation.
I had not heard of this inscription before yesterday, but it struck me as obvious on reading it that the subject of the epitaph was Sulpicia Petale the lectrix, and that there was no other Sulpicia directly relevant to this inscription: it really wasn’t ambiguous. The key was the second line, quoi seruile datum nomen erat Petale, “to whom the slave name Petale had been given”. Why would the inscription specify the subject’s “slave name”, rather than simply recording her name as Petale, unless she was no longer a slave? And if, as it seems, she had been freed, why wouldn’t her freed name be given? Manumitted slaves assumed the name of their former masters: Tiro, freed by M. Tullius Cicero, became M. Tullius Tiro. If Petale had belonged to Cicero and then been freed, she would have become Tullia Petale. Our Petale belonged to a family of Sulpicii, hence when freed became Sulpicia Petale. What the first couplet of this epitaph is doing, then, is naming the dead person, albeit in a more elaborate fashion than usual. “These are the remains of Sulpicia, whose name when a slave was Petale.” Her respectable name leads; her older, slave name is consigned to the end of the couplet. It’s very elegant composition, and that can’t be said of everything in this poem.
I really can’t think of any other way of understanding the second line, and I find the popularity of the idea that there’s ambiguity here quite hard to fathom. For that matter, an epitaph beginning not with the name of the person honoured but their employer or owner seems awkward even in a Roman context, and taking Sulpiciae as governed by lectricis and unrelated to cineres feels like a very unnatural way of reading the Latin. Nevertheless this is a reading found in all the recent discussions of the inscription that I’ve seen, and it originated with no less an eminence than Jérôme Carcopino, who introduced the newly-found inscription to the Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France in 1928: “De Sulpicia la lectrice (ou: De la lectrice de Sulpicia?)” is the translation he offered of Sulpiciae … lectricis.
Carcopino’s interest in this inscription, as expressed in his presentation to the Société, explicitly consists in the possibility that it offers a connection to the most celebrated bearer of the name Sulpicia. This Sulpicia was a poet some of whose compositions (which poems in particular is fiercely debated) are included in the third book of Tibullus’ elegies: she is in fact the only female poet in Latin whose poetry survives from antiquity (Carcopino speculates that this epitaph is another one of her poems), and in the past this has drawn to her an interesting kind of attention. Mathilde Skoie’s book in the bibliography is a brilliant study of the reception of Sulpicia from the Renaissance onwards, responses she sees as united by a determination “to write scandal out of the text”, a refusal to acknowledge the truly scandalous force of a woman speaking of sexual desire in the context of a culture as male-dominated as Rome (cf. Stevenson 36). Carcopino doesn’t escape this style of patronising chivalry himself, speculating that Petale’s name, which suggests Greek petalon, a leaf, bears a resemblance to the name of Sulpicia’s lover in her elegies, Cerinthus, from kerinthon, honeywort, “as if, in the house of Sulpicia, all the names she gave had to breathe a perfume similarly mingled with flowers and Hellenism.” Hmm, though, to be fair, he does also study the language of the epitaph, concluding that it could be dated to late Republic/early Empire–Sulpicia the elegist’s time, in other words.
If seems clear enough that nobody would have paid much attention to this inscription if it hadn’t featured the name Sulpicia. But I think I’d go further and say that it’s this wish to find Sulpicia the poet in the epitaph that also explains the peculiar determination, in the face of fairly obvious objections, to find its opening ambiguous. Some kind of connection to the poet is not entirely precluded if we read “Sulpicia the lectrix” (she belonged to, and was freed by, people bearing the name Sulpicius), but it’s much more tenuous. If it were “the lectrix of Sulpicia”, on the other hand, there would be someone other than the dead woman identified as Sulpicia, and this Sulpicia would be someone who enjoyed having literature read to her.
Well, my concern in all this is really just a question of interpretation: I can’t make the Latin say what Carcopino and many others want it to be able to say. Not everything in this epitaph is crystal-clear, but the first couplet is: the dead woman was a Sulpicia with the slave name Petale, Sulpicia Petale. But there is another dimension to all this. Sulpicia the poet, while a truly remarkable individual, was the aristocratic daughter of Servius Sulpicius Rufus, renowned jurist and correspondent of Cicero, and niece of M. Valerius Messalla Corvinus, one of the most prominent figures in Augustan Rome, both in poetry and politics.
Sulpicia Petale had by sheer ability escaped slavery and earned the immortality represented by this versified inscription. Well, maybe that’s me being as sentimental as Carcopino, but I can’t help feeling that Sulpicia Petale, the real subject of this epitaph, is where we should be directing our attention.
M. J. Carcopino, “Épitaphe en vers de la lectrice Petale”, Bulletin de la Société Nationale des Antiquaires de France 1929, 84–6;
P. Hallett, “Absent Roman Fathers in the writings of their daughters: Cornelia and Sulpicia”, in S. Huebner and D. M. Ratzan (eds.), Growing Up Fatherless in Antiquity (Cambridge, 2009), 175-91, at 187-90;
P. Hallett, “Ovid’s Thisbe and a Roman Woman Love Poet”, in B.W. Boyd and C. Fox (eds.), Approaches to Teaching World Literature: Ovid and Ovidianism (New York, 2010), 414-433, at 367-370;
P. Hallett, “Scenarios of Sulpiciae: moral discourses and immoral verses”, EuGeStA 1 (2011);
E. Hauser, “Optima tu proprii nominis auctor: The semantics of female authorship in ancient Rome, from Sulpicia to Proba”, EuGeStA 6 (2016);
M. Skoie, Reading Sulpicia: Commentaries 1475-1990 (Oxford, 2002);
J. Stevenson, Women Latin Poets: Language, Gender, and Authority from Antiquity to the Eighteenth Century (Oxford, 2005), (on this inscription) 42-44.