In northern France in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, men and women poet-singers known as trouvères composed lyric debates. This type of song, called the jeu-parti, involved two voices defending in alternate stanzas alternate responses to a question set out for debate in the first stanza.[1] Jeux-partis involving women trouvères depict significant aspects of women’s privilege in medieval France.

Like most women today, women trouvères in medieval France rarely assumed the emotional risk of soliciting an amorous relationship. A jeu-parti between Dame Margot and Dame Marote debates a case involving a woman and man who love each other dearly. The man dares not declare his desire to the women. The debate question is whether the woman should assume a man’s typical burden and declare her love to him. Dame Margot argues against the woman taking the initiative to establish an amorous relationship. Dame Marote argues for the woman taking the initiative.

In their arguments, both Dame Margot and Dame Marote recognize women’s privilege in relation to men. Dame Marote declares that “she should not be proud {pas ne doit cele estre fiere},” as if a woman telling a man that she loves him in some way injures her pride and lowers her worth. Dame Margot counters Dame Marote’s position, but confirms women’s privilege:

You are not heading the right way,
Dame Marote, I believe.
A lady makes a grave mistake in courting
her beloved first. Why
should she thus demean herself?
If he lacks courage,
I do not think it proper
that she should then solicit his love.
She should rather conceal her feelings
and suffer love’s pains
without ever disclosing them,
because a woman should have such high merit
that no word would come from her
that could diminish her worth.

{ Vous n’ales pa droite voie,
Dame Marote, je croi.
Trop mesprent dame ki proie
Son ami avant. Pour koi
S’aveilleroit elle si?
Se cil a le cuer falli,
Ne di jou pas k’il afiere
Por ce k’ele le reqiere,
Ains s’en doit chovrir
Et les fais d’Amours soufrir
Sans ja fiare percevoir;
Kar feme doit tant valoir
Que n’en doit parole issir
Ki son pris puist amenrir. } [2]

Underscoring that women equally sharing men’s burdens is inconceivable to gynocentric reason, Dame Marote argues that true love should make a woman act insane. While a sane woman would retain women’s privilege, a woman insane with love would take the initiative to solicit an amorous relationship. Dame Marote concludes:

Better it is to live in joy
for having pleaded than now to languish
for having been silent and then die.

{ Miex vient en joie manoir
Par proier q’adés langir
Par trop taire et puis morir. }

Dame Marote’s point seems indisputable. Yet many women today would rather be coerced into a having an abortion or even die rather than relinquish their gynocentric privilege.

Another jeu-parti between two women trouvères debates women’s preference regarding how men bear the burden of soliciting an amorous relationship. In this case, two knights both love one woman. One knight seeks to communicate his love through the woman’s friends. The other declares his love to her directly. According to women’s preference, which knight behaves better? One woman trouvère argues that a man who directly declares his love to her would make her seem shameful and weak. The other woman trouvère disputes that claim:

Sister, you are in error,
of that I do not doubt in the least.
When this one tenderly
humbles himself before you
and requests your loyalty,
you feel contempt for him.

{ Suer, vous estes en errout,
Je ne m’an dout mie.
Cant celui par sa dousor
Ver vous s’umelie
Et vos requiert loialteit,
Vos lou teneis an vitei. } [3]

As if that would justify him soliciting her love, the man humbles himself before the woman. In actuality, if he approached her as an arrogant jerk, she would more likely feel her loins tingle. Men must be learned enough to reject women’s privilege in prescribing how men should behave.

Women’s privilege prompts women to look down on men as if men were inferior human beings afflicted with “toxic masculinity.” A jeu-parti between two women trouvères debates whether a woman should allow a man to declare his love to her. One woman trouvère proposes listening to the man. College administrators evaluating sexual assault charges today generally reject the practice of listening to an accused man. But this medieval woman argues:

By listening to him you will be able to decide
if it pleases you to accept him or refuse him,
and you will know if he speaks wisely or foolishly.

{ Qu’en lui oiant porrez vous bien eslire
Se il vous plaist l’otroi ou le desdire,
Et si savrez s’il dist sens our folour. } [4]

What could be wrong with listening to a man? At least with respect to men, everyone isn’t required to listen and believe. Yet the other woman trouvère vehemently argues against even just listening to a man:

a woman should really not
listen to a man; she should rather fear
being seduced by the words she hears.
For men are consummate flatterers
and their arguments they so beautifully describe
that simply by listening to them she could well agree
to something that would quickly dishonor her.

{ fame ne doit mie
Home escouter, ains doit avoit paour
Qu’ele ne soit a l’oir engignie,
Quar home sont trop grant losengeour
Et leur raisons sevent tant bel descrire
Qu’en eulz oiant puet a cele souffire
Chose dont tost cherroit en deshonour. }

For women’s safety men must not be allowed to speak. That such ridiculous claims about women’s safety are taken seriously exemplifies women’s privilege.

Medieval scholars have recognized that these women-exclusive jeux-partis closely engage relational reality. One eminent medieval scholar observed:

it is the practical, level-headed outlook of both {women} speakers, calculating the respective roles of the emotions and social niceties, which is notable. Even if these debates are about questions of love, they are not romantic, or erotic, lyrics. … The jeux-partis were among the games devised for that {mixed-sex castle} hall, diverstissements of a society that thought such topics up in order to amuse as well as wittily to provoke. Yet the range and subtlety of emotion and argument that we glimpse in some of the debates involving women suggest something more. Here were poets who, even if they lived lightly — at least in the imagination — could also reflect searchingly. [5]

One doesn’t need to reflect searchingly to recognize women’s privilege in the jeux-partis involving women. Two knights seek one woman’s love. One is rich and worthy, the other is wise and worthy. Which man should the woman choose? A woman again has the choice of two knights. One extensively offers his warrior skills in knightly combat. The other generously shares his money and goods. Which man should the woman choose? Between an arrogant knight and a quarrelsome knight, which man should a woman choose?[6] Men’s choices are much more narrow than women’s choices. Men are burdened with responsibilities while women are privileged with choices.

At least medieval women recognized women’s privilege and men’s hardships. Regarding men’s sexual labor for women, one woman trouvère frankly observes:

You know full well that back pain sets in
that keeps old men from laboring as long.
Beyond the age of forty, he does nothing but decline;
he is then hardly suited to partake in pleasure.

{ You saveis bien ke li maus tient en rains,
Dont li vielars an sont ovriers dou moins;
Puis .xl. ans ne fait hons fors c’aleir,
Pou vaut on puis por deduit demeneir. } [7]

Men’s sexual service to women is a matter of life and death, yet it’s often undervalued, disparaged, and criminalized. Men deserve more choices in how they sexually serve women. Men deserve reproductive freedom. Women’s special privilege must end. Women and men must share equally privileges and hardships.[8]

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• misdirected chivalry in Guillelma de Rosers & Lanfranc Cigala’s tenso
• medieval wife’s sexual entitlement banged against her husband’s love
• women competing with men prompts men’s self-abasement & weakness

Notes:

[1] Jeux-parti typically have six stanzas. The final stanza often appeals to an external judge for a decision regarding the winning position. For extensive discussion of the historical definition of jeu-parti, Mason (2018) Ch. 1. Debate poems in Old Occitan are known as tensos or partimens.

Trouvères composed and performed jeux-partis primarily in Arras in northern France in the thirteenth century. Arras was a center of commercial trade and artistic activity. The trouvères of Arras were associated with the literary academia Puy d’Arras. On Arras in relation to jeux-partis, Barker (2013) pp. 6-9, 52. About 175 jeux-partis have survived, 60% of which come from Arras. Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 73  (total number 182), Barker (2013) p. 4 (total number 170), p. 52, n. 92 (Arras share 60%, citing Symes estimate).

Most surviving jeux-partis involve only men trouvères. Mason (2018) p. 298. Jeux-partis in which women trouvères participate as debaters have survived mainly in the Oxford Chansonnier (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308), known by the siglum I.

Jeux-partis could be aggressive contests, but such symbolic violence has far different effects on human lives than does actual violence. In medieval Europe, elite men had a life expectancy nine years less than that of women. Medieval literature depicts horrific violence against men. The enormous masculine gender protrusion in suffering violent injury and death reflects in part women’s privilege.

Literary scholars have tended to ignore and trivialize the reality of violence against men. Mason’s thesis, for example, shows no awareness of the actual gendered facts about violent victimization. In accordance with prevailing academic fashion, Mason suggests violence against men is about misogyny and the exclusion of women:

In applying the metaphor of single combat to the jeu-parti, Jeanroy, Fiset and Nicod invoked the homosociality of combat prevalent in Europe before the First World War. The paradigm of the duel is demonstrably at work in the ‘footnote quarrels’ of German and French musicologists at the start of the twentieth century, whose blows and counterblows in their retaliatory publications and footnotes are reminiscent of verbal sparring. Jeanroy, Fiset and Nicod defined the jeu-parti as a combative, robustly masculine genre, in which poetic skill could be equated with bravura and violence. The misogyny of late romantic duellers could map neatly onto the subject of many dilemma questions in jeux-partis: how best to please one’s Lady. In defining the genre in this way, women were excluded as possible interlocutors and, as a result, the genre has since been treated as principally masculine.

Mason (2018) p. 54. Women, including during the First World War, have played a important role in promoting violence against men. Men and women scholars should show more love for men and less eagerness to please “the Lady.”

[2] Dame Margot & Dame Maroie, Jeu-parti, “I entreat you, Lady Maroie {Je vous pri, dame Maroie}” st. 3 (vv. 29-42), Old French text (Picard dialect) and English translation (with my modifications to follow the Old French more closely) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 76. Within this jeu-parti, Dame Maroie is subsequently called Dame Marote. I use the latter name consistently above. The previous short quote above is similarly from v. 22; the subsequent quote above is vv. 82-4 (ending stanza 6 of 6). Here’s a performance of “Je vous pri, dame Maroie” by Musiktheater Dingo (2012).

Many women today have never contacted an man, expressed amorous interest in him, and invited him to dinner and evening entertainment, with the clear understanding that she would pay for the cost of the whole evening. Of course the man for a variety of reason might reject the woman’s proposal. Most men have many times had the experience of paying for dates and being romantically rejected. Today is long past the time for women to share that experience equally.

[3] Lorete & Suer, Jeu-parti, “Lorete, sister, in the name of love {Lorete, suer, par amor}” vv. 57-62 (from st. 5 of 5), Old French text (Lorraine dialect) and English translation (with my modifications) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 80. This jeu-parti survives only in the Oxford Chansonnier. The 26 jeux-partis in that chansonnier have been dated to 1310. Barker (2013) p. 43.

[4] Sainte des Prez & Dame de la Chaucie, Jeu-parti, “What shall I do, Lady of Chaucie {Que ferai je, dame de la Chaucie},” vv. 12-4 (from st. 2 of 5), Old French text (Lorraine dialect) and English translation (with my modifications) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 81. The subsequent quote above is similarly from id. vv. 15-21 (in st. 3).

The woman trouvère who opposes the man making known his love through the woman’s friends figures a man acting that way as being like Renart the Fox:

he is Renart the Fox,
who pursues his intrigue until he has seized his prey.

{ s’est Renars li Werpis,
Ke quiert ses tors tant ke il soit saixis. }

Id. vv. 64-5. The man trobairitz Pèire de Bossinhac in his song “Quan lo dous temps d’abril” uses Renart as a figure of being shrewdly vengeful. See note [7] in my post on medieval women’s strong, independent sexuality.

[5] Dronke (2007) pp. 330, 335. Dronke concludes with flattery for gynocentric authority:

And it certainly looks as if some of these poets — perhaps indeed, the most perceptive of them — were themselves women.

Id. p. 335. Similarly conforming to academic orthodoxy, Barker concludes her chapter on women’s desire with gynocentric panegyric: “these feminine voices are able to carve out space in which they resist the pressure to conform.” Barker (2013) p. 313.

[6] The four jeux-parti described in the above paragraph (in order of description above, with page citations in Quinby et al. (2001) are: Dame & Rolant de Reims, “Advise me, Rolant, I entreat you {Concilliés moi, Rolan, je vous an pri},” pp. 87-8; Dame & Rolant de Reims, “Dear lady, do respond {Douce dame, respondex},” pp. 89-1; Dame & Rolant de Reims, “Dear lady, I would gladly {Douce dame, volantiers},” pp. 92-4; and Dame & Perrot de Beaumarchais, “Dear lady, let this one be your call {Douce dame, ce soit en vos nomer},” pp. 97-8.

[7] Dame & Sire, Jeu-parti, “Tell me, lady, who has better discharged his debt {Dites, dame, li keilz s’aquitait muelz},” vv. 29-32 (from st. 4 of 5), Old French text (Lorraine dialect) and English translation (with my modifications) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 104.

[8] The term “women’s privilege is preferable to “female privilege.” Infants in laughing, crying, pooping, sleeping, etc., typically do not act with gender privilege. Gender privilege emerges through human development. Brothers and sisters as children, however, can experience analogues of women’s privilege. Consider, for example, the childhood experience of U.S. politician Joe Biden:

According to Biden’s own words his sister regularly beat him in his childhood and adolescence. “And I have the bruises to prove it,” he said, at a senate hearing on violence against women, December 11, 1990. To make sure the audience knew this wasn’t a joke, he added, “I mean that sincerely. I am not exaggerating when I say that.”
…
In Biden’s brief tell-all, he acknowledged that the beatings he received were condoned and sanctioned by his parents, and that he was prevented from defending himself; That he was literally, in fact, powerless to make the abuse stop.

“In my house,” he stated, “being raised with a sister and three brothers, there was an absolute. It was a nuclear sanction, if under any circumstances, for any reason –even self defense– you ever touched your sister, not figuratively, literally.”

“My sister, who is my best friend, my campaign manager, my confidante,” he continued, “grew up with absolute impunity in our household.”

From Elam (2010). While such behavior should be a matter of serious social concern, “women’s privilege” seems to me nonetheless a more reasonable term than “female privilege.”

[image] Women occupying the castle of love from above assail men confined outside the castle and besieging it. Excerpt from design on a side panel of an elephant ivory coffret made in Paris between 1310 and 1330. Preserved as accession # 17.190.173a, b; 1988.16 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, USA). Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917; The Cloisters Collection, 1988. Image derived from an image that the Metropolitan Museum has made available under a public spirited public domain dedication (CCO license).

References:

Barker, Camilla. 2013. Dialogue and Dialectic in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Occitan and Old French Courtly Lyric and Narrative. Ph.D. Thesis, King’s College, London.

Doss-Quinby, Eglal, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubery. 2001. Songs of the Women Trouvères. New Haven: Yale University Press. (review by Carol Symes)

Dronke, Peter. 2007. “Women’s Debates in Medieval French Lyric.” Ch. 18 (pp. 323-336) in Dronke, Peter. Forms and Imaginings: from antiquity to the fifteenth century. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

Elam, Paul. 2010. “VAWA — Corrupt Law and Joe Biden’s Abusive Sister.” A Voice For Men. Online.

Mason, Joseph W. 2018. Melodic Exchange and Musical Violence in the Thirteenth-Century jeu-parti. D. Phil. Thesis, Faculty of Music Lincoln College, Oxford.

About two millennia ago, the tyrant Herod heard that a boy had been born who would overthrow tyranny’s reign. Herod’s primitive surveillance method wisely didn’t reveal the boy’s location. The learned Roman poet Prudentius four centuries later wrote:

Crazed at the news, the tyrant shouts:
“My successor looms, I’m thrown out —
guards, go, take your swords,
drench the cradles in blood!

Every male infant shall die:
search the nurses’ bosoms,
and at his mother’s breast,
redden your sword with boy’s blood.

I suspect all who have given birth
in Bethlehem. They’re traitors,
underhand, ready to smuggle
their baby boys to safety.”

{ exclamat amens nuntio,
“successor instat, pellimur:
satelles, i, ferrum rape,
perfunde cunas sanguine!

mas omnis infans occidat,
scrutare nutricum sinus
interque materna ubera
ensem cruentet pusio.

suspecta per Bethlem mihi
puerperarum est omnium
fraus, ne qua furtim subtrahat
prolem virilis indolis.” } [1]

Women in the ancient world strove to save the boys. They failed:

Therefore the executioner,
crazed, sword drawn,
stabs the new-born bodies,
gashes the baby lives.

The killer can hardly find
space in the tiny limbs
for the cutting stab to penetrate,
the dagger is bigger than the throat.

O savage sight! A head
dashed on the stones
scatters the milk-white brains,
vomits the eyes from the wound.

Or a quivering infant is thrown
into the depths of the stream,
down there, his tiny throat gasps,
water with breath chokes him.

{ Transfigit ergo carnifex
mucrone destricto furens
effusa nuper corpora,
animasque rimatur novas.

Locum minutis artubus
vix interemptor invenit,
quo plaga descendat patens
iuguloque maior pugio est.

O barbarum spectaculum!
inlisa cervix cautibus
spargit cerebrum lacteum
oculosque per vulnus vomit.

Aut in profundum palpitans
mersatur infans gurgitem,
cui subter artis faucibus
singultat unda et halitus. }

A few decades later, the learned Roman poet Sedulius, writing in epic meter, invoked a simile before going on to describe the slaughter of boys and their mothers’ grief:

Groaning over the criminal deed snatched from him, like a voracious lion
from whose mouth a tender lamb suddenly slips free,
and who then launches an assault on the entire flock and mauls and rends
the soft animals, as the new mothers all trembling call for
their offspring in vain and fill the empty breezes with their bleatings,
even so Herod was provoked because Christ had been taken away from him,
and he kept on dashing to the ground and slaying masses of infants,
fierce in his unwarranted murder. …
Killing them at their first cries and daring to
perpetrate wickedness beyond number, he slaughtered boys
by the thousands and give a single lament to many mothers.
This one tore out her mangled hair from her bare scalp,
that one scored her cheeks. Another beat her bared breast with fists.
One unhappy mother, now a mother no longer,
bereft, pressed her breast to her son’s cold mouth — in vain.

{ Ereptumque gemens facinus sibi, ceu leo frendens,
Cuius ab ore tener subito cum labitur agnus,
In totum movet arma gregem manditque trahitque
Molle pecus — trepidaeque vocant sua pignera fetae
Nequiquam et vacuas implent balatibus auras —
Haut secus Herodes Christo stimulatus adempto
Sternere conlisas paruorum strage catervas
Inmerito non cessat atrox. …
primosque necans vagitus et audens
Innumerum patrare nefas puerilia mactat
Milia plangoremque dedit tot matribus unum.
Haec laceros crines nudato vertice rupit,
Illa genas secuit, nudum ferit altera pugnis
Pectus et infelix mater (nec iam modo mater)
Orba super gelidum frustra premit ubera natum. } [2]

This massacre was a brutal gendercide of boys. Like calling the massacre of the men of Shechem “the rape of Dinah,” calling Herod’s massacre of innocent boys “the Massacre of the Innocents” misrepresents the actual gender structure of violence.

In 1611, the enormously influential King James translation of the Gospel of Matthew obscured gender in this massacre of innocent boys. The King James Bible told of Herod ordering the massacre of “children”:

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.

{ tunc Herodes videns quoniam inlusus esset a magis iratus est valde et mittens occidit omnes pueros qui erant in Bethleem et in omnibus finibus eius a bimatu et infra secundum tempus quod exquisierat a magis

τότε Ἡρῴδης ἰδὼν ὅτι ἐνεπαίχθη ὑπὸ τῶν μάγων ἐθυμώθη λίαν καὶ ἀποστείλας ἀνεῖλεν πάντας τοὺς παῖδας τοὺς ἐν Βηθλέεμ καὶ ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς ὁρίοις αὐτῆς ἀπὸ διετοῦς καὶ κατωτέρω κατὰ τὸν χρόνον ὃν ἠκρίβωσεν παρὰ τῶν μάγων } [3]

The underlying Greek word for those killed is the accusative plural for the substantive παῖς, which is cognate with the Latin puer. Both those words predominately imply “boy.” Moreover, Matthew almost surely was addressed to Jews pondering the significance of Jesus. A genealogy begins Matthew and roots Jesus in Jewish history. That genealogy lists Jacob as the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Joseph led Jesus and Mary into Egypt to save Jesus from Herod’s massacre. For Jews, Herod’s massacre and Joseph going to Egypt would have evoked the Pharaoh’s government and the Pharaoh’s order to the Hebrew midwives and then to all his people to kill all newly born Hebrew boys:

When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, she shall live.

Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live. [4]

{ וַיֹּאמֶר בְּיַלֶּדְכֶן אֶת־הָֽעִבְרִיֹּות וּרְאִיתֶן
עַל־הָאָבְנָיִם אִם־בֵּן הוּא וַהֲמִתֶּן אֹתֹו
וְאִם־בַּת הִיא וָחָֽיָה

וַיְצַ֣ו פַּרְעֹ֔ה לְכָל־עַמֹּ֖ו לֵאמֹ֑ר כָּל־הַבֵּ֣ן הַיִּלֹּ֗וד הַיְאֹ֨רָה֙
תַּשְׁלִיכֻ֔הוּ וְכָל־הַבַּ֖ת תְּחַיּֽוּן׃ ס }

A Jewish Christian writing Matthew would regard Jesus as the fulfillment of Hebrew scripture. Joseph taking Jesus into Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre would have been understood as paralleling Moses escape from the Pharaoh’s massacre of Hebrew boys and the Jewish people’s flight from Egypt. The learned Roman authors Prudentius, Sedulius, and Macrobius understood Herod’s massacre to have targeted boys.[5] Both linguistic and contextual evidence convincingly indicates that Matthew described Herod ordering gendercide. According to the best reading of Matthew, Herod ordered a massacre of innocent boys.[6]

Prior to the more repressive gynocentrism of the modern era, medieval authorities openly acknowledged the gynocentrism of Christian society. Writing about 885, Notker of St. Gall composed a poignant interior monologue for the eminent Jewish woman Rachel. She was the beloved wife of Jacob (Israel) and the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Notker apparently thought deeply about Matthew’s description of Herod’s massacre of innocent boys:

Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.”

{ τότε ἐπληρώθη τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ Ἰερεμίου τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος: φωνὴ ἐν Ῥαμὰ ἠκούσθη κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὀδυρμὸς πολύς Ῥαχὴλ κλαίουσα τὰ τέκνα αὐτῆς καὶ οὐκ ἤθελεν παρακληθῆναι ὅτι οὐκ εἰσίν } [7]

Here Rachel is weeping for “children,” as represented by the accusative plural for the substantive τέκνον. The central meaning of that word is child, irrespective of sex. Rachel herself, however, didn’t give birth to any female children. The prophet Jeremiah, whom Matthew cited, invoked Rachel more abstractly as the mother of the children of Israel. Jeremiah chided Rachel for her weeping. He prophesied that a day would come when a woman would protect a man:

How long will you waver, O faithless daughter? For the Lord has created a new thing on the earth: woman protects man. [8]

{ עַד־מָתַי֙ תִּתְחַמָּקִ֔ין הַבַּ֖ת הַשֹּֽׁובֵבָ֑ה כִּֽי־בָרָ֨א יְהוָ֤ה
חֲדָשָׁה֙ בָּאָ֔רֶץ נְקֵבָ֖ה תְּסֹ֥ובֵֽב גָּֽבֶר׃ ס }

Women must not merely weep in sorrow for themselves. Women must do more to save men’s lives and to prevent wars.

In his sequence entitled “A virgin crying about a martyr {De uno martyre virgo plorans},” Notker depicted Rachel’s extraordinary concern for miserable men. Notker’s sequence begins:

Why do you, virgin

mother, cry,
lovely Rachel
whose face
delights Jacob?

As if your little sister’s
moistened eyes would please him!

Wipe dry, mother,
your flowing eyes.
How could be worthy of you
water-cracked cheeks?

{ Quid tu, virgo

mater, ploras,
Rachel formosa,
Cuius vultus
Jacob delectat?

Ceu sororis aniculae
Lippitudo eum iuvet!

Terge, mater,
fluentes oculos.
Quam te decent
genarum rimulae? } [9]

The reference to Rachel as a virgin mother associates her across time with the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. Rachel competed successfully with her sister Leah for Jacob’s heart-felt love. Yet in this sequence, Rachel displays the insecurity of a woman appreciating the importance of woman’s beauty to men. So incomprehensible in today’s thinking, Rachel sought to please her man’s gaze, and she was concerned to retain his affection.

Another voice within Rachel’s self-consciousness speaks differently. That voice laments to herself:

Alas, alas, alas,
why do you accuse me
of having shed tears in vain?
Now I am without
my son, who in my poverty
alone would have cared for me.

He would not yield to the enemy
the paltry territory
which for me
Jacob had acquired.
His stupid brothers —
the many, sad to say,
that I have brought forth —
he would have helped.

{ Heu, heu, heu,
quid me incusatis fletus
incassum fudisse.
Cum sim orbata
nato, paupertatem meam
qui solus curaret,

Qui non hostibus cederet
angustos terminos,
quos mihi
Jacob adquisivit;
Quique stolidis fratribus,
quos multos, pro dolor,
extuli,
esset profuturus. } [10]

The son that Rachel has lost could be literally only Joseph. His brothers faked his death and sold him into slavery. Joseph’s father Jacob mourned Joseph’s apparent death for many days. Rachel herself died in giving birth to Benjamin. Just as Rachel being virgin mother collapses time and person, so too does Rachel lamenting the loss of her son.[11] Christians interpreted Rachel’s son Joseph as a figure of Jesus. They understood Rachel as a figure of the Christian church. In Christian understanding, the Christian church possesses the heritage of Jacob and the Jews. Joseph’s stupid brothers are both those who sold him into slavery and mass of men in the Christian church.

In Notker’s Rachel sequence, why are most Christian men represented as stupid? Many Christian men and women throughout history haven’t recognized that the Christian church is female as a figure and gynocentric in its pragmatic orientation. Men must actively affirm the goodness of their masculinity and cherish their masculine fruitfulness. Passive and apathetic in relation to women’s dominance, most men today don’t even question current female supremacist dogma that the future is female. These men are stupid. Men throughout history have been stupid in similar ways.

Another voice within Rachel’s self-consciousness recognizes Jesus’s love and concern for men. Rachel laments the loss of her son in part out of typical womanly self-concern: what man will provide me with money? But she also recognizes men’s need for help. She questions herself:

Are tears to be shed for him
who possesses the heavenly kingdom,
who with frequent prayers
for his miserable brothers
intercedes before God?

{ Numquid flendus est iste,
qui regnum possedit caeleste
quique prece frequenti
miseris fratribus
apud deum auxiliatur? } [12]

Rachel understood the misery of men enduring earthly gynocentrism. Yet miserable men have reason for hope. Rachel as the virgin mother Mary, and Rachel as the church, both have as son Jesus. Jesus loves men as well as women. The fully masculine man Jesus brings miserable men’s plight before God in heaven. Men need only wonder: how long, Lord, how long?

Like the Massacre of the Innocents, deaths of boys and men typically pass without particular notice. The issue isn’t just modern philology’s gender trouble. The lives of boys and men are gynocentrically devalued. Like earlier poetry, Notker of St. Gall’s brilliant ninth-century Rachel sequence, “De uno martyre virgo plorans,” recognized that the Massacre of the Innocents was the massacre of innocent boys. Moreover, Notker’s Rachel shows that Christian gynocentrism can encompass concern for miserable men. Women and men today must develop this medieval Rachel’s breadth of emotional life.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• medieval poetry on the horror of men absent and dying in war
• women dominant gender in Christian literary history
• sacralizing men’s sexuality: Jacob & his wives to Jesus & his church

Notes:

[1] Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon}, 12 “Hymn for Epiphany {Hymnus epiphaniae},” vv. 97-108 (st. 25-7), Latin text and English translation (adapted slightly) from O’Daly (2012) pp. 357-60. The subsequent quote above is similarly from “Hymnus epiphaniae” vv. 109-24 (st. 28-31). Here are Latin reading notes for these passages. Here’s the translation of these passages from Thomson (1949) vol. 1. Both Pope (1905) and Thomson (1949), vol. 1, provide freely accessible text and translation of Liber Cathemerinon.

Prudentius lived on the Iberian Pennisula and worked as a Roman government official until about 390 GC. He then retired and began writing poetry. He distributed his collected poems in 405. Prudentius wrote in the high tradition of Augustan Latin poetry, yet recast his sources to reflect a “cosmic Christian vision.” McKelvie (2010).

A few decades later, Caelius Sedulius may have responded to the fear of Prudentius’s Herod:

Impious Herod, stranger,
what is to fear with Christ to come?
He takes away no earthly realms,
he who gives the heavenly crown.

{ Hostis Herodes impie,
Christum venire quid times?
Non eripit mortalia,
Qui regna dat celestia. }

Sedulius, “From the pivot of the sun’s rising {A solis ortus cardine},” vv. 29-32, Latin text from the Latin Library, my English translation. These verses now begin a portion of Sedulius’s poem used at Vespers for Epiphany. Michael Martin’s Treasury of Latin Prayers {Thesaurus Precum Latinarum} provides for “Hostis Herodes impie“ a Latin text and an English translation by J.M. Neale, and similarly for an truncated version of “A solis ortus cardine.”

[2] Caelius Sedulius, Easter Song {Carmen paschale} 2.110-17, 120-26, Latin text and English translation (modified slightly) from Springer (2013) pp. 52-3. Sedulius (not to be confused with the ninth-century Latin poet Sedulius Scottus) apparently wrote Carmen paschale between 425 and 450 GC. On Latin biblical epics, Green (2006) and McBrine (2017).

[3] Matthew 2:16. The biblical texts are via Blue Letter Bible. Subsequent biblical texts are similarly sourced. The Greek text is from the Morphological Greek New Testament (MGNT). The Latin text is from Jerome’s Vulgate. Herod’s massacre is widely called the “Massacre / Slaughter of the Innocents” or the “Massacre / Slaughter of the Holy Innocents.” Even as learned a philologist as Jan Ziolkowski wrote:

the event in the Gospel that instigates it {the citation of Jeremiah 31:15} is the Slaughter of the Innocents (Matthew 2. 16) — the killing, at Herod’s order, of all children in the environs of Bethlehem who were two years or younger. … Herod decided to execute the infants of Bethlehem directly as a result of the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2. 16–18) … Christian responses to the Massacre of the Innocents reflect the Christian ambivalence about the death of children.

Ziolkowski (2010) pp. 94-5.

[4] Exodus 1:16, 22. The Hebrew text is from the Westminster Leningrad Codex.

[5] On Prudentius and Sedulius, see quotes previously above. Writing about 400 GC, Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (Macrobius) reported:

When he {Emperor Augustus} heard that among the boys in Syria under two years old who Herod, king of the Jews, had ordered to be killed, Herod’s own son was also killed, Augustus said: “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.”

{ Cum audisset inter pueros quos in Syria Herodes rex Iudaeorum intra bimatum iussit interfici filium quoque eius occisum, ait: Melius est Herodis porcum esse quam filium. }

Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.11, Latin text of Ludwig von Jan (1852) via LacusCurtius, my English translation, benefiting from various publicly available ones. Jewish law regards pigs as unclean animals. Jews therefore shouldn’t slaughter a pig. MGV Hoffman notes that the jest encodes a pun in Greek: “hus / ὑς means pig and huios / υἱος means son.”

Jests are commonly attributed falsely to prominent figures. Emperor Augustus probably never uttered this jest. Moreover, he almost surely didn’t know Greek. Given the jest’s significant Greek pun, most likely it was originally formulated in Greek. It evidently circulated broadly enough to cross into Latin. While a matter of contentious argument, in my view no convincing evidence has been put forward to establish whether the jest independently attests to Herod’s massacre of innocent boys.

[6] Most modern biblical translations of Matthew 2:16 into English represent Herod ordering a massacre of “male children.”  See here a variety of translations. The New Revised Standard Version, first published in 1990, retains the gender-obscuring translation “children.” In a preface to the Catholic version of the New Revised Standard Version, Alexander A. Di Lella, Professor of Biblical Studies at The Catholic University of America, stated that this translation “offers the fruits of the best biblical scholarship in the idiom of today while being sensitive to the contemporary concern for inclusive language when referring to human beings.” Biblical scholarship must honestly address contemporary gender trouble.

[7] Matthew 2:18, which quotes Jeremiah 31:15. After the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, Jewish captives were transported to Ramah on their way to exile in Babylon. Jeremiah 40:1. Rachel was the foremother of the Jewish tribe of Benjamin, as well as of Ephraim and Manasseh of the house of Joseph.

[8] Jeremiah 31:22. Philologists are uncertain about the meaning of the concluding clause. Among a variety of English translations is “a woman shall encompass a man.” That translation can also be interpreted as a woman protecting a man. The New American Bible, Revised Edition (released in 2011) comments:

No satisfactory explanation has been given for this text. Jerome, for example, saw the image as a reference to the infant Jesus enclosed in Mary’s womb. Since Jeremiah often uses marital imagery in his description of a restored Israel, the phrase may refer to a wedding custom, perhaps women circling the groom in a dance. It may also be a metaphor describing the security of a new Israel, a security so complete that it defies the imagination and must be expressed as hyperbolic role reversal: any danger will be so insignificant that women can protect their men.

The concluding reference to insignificant danger shows sexist ignorance. Men and women currently face very significant danger. Women could play a vital role in protecting men from society-destroying gynocentric oppression and contempt for men.

[9] Notker of St. Gall, also know as Notker the Stammerer {Notcerus Balbulus}, “A virgin crying about a martyr {De uno martyre virgo plorans},” Latin text from Godman (1985) pp. 320-3 (with some minor changes to the editorial punctuation), my English translation, benefiting from those of id. and Dronke (1994) p. xxix. Subsequent quotes from “De uno martyre virgo plorans” are similarly sourced and cover all of this sequence. Godman described this sequence as a “dramatic interior monologue.” Godman (1985) p. 68. I follow that interpretation above.

Notker wrote this sequence about 885 and included it in his Liber ymnorum {Book of Hymns}. It has survived in 35 manuscripts. For a manuscript list, Yearley (1983) vol. 2, pp. 44-5 (lyric L134). Notker composed “De uno martyre virgo plorans” to the melody (he wrote it as a contrafactum) for his earlier Easter sequence “This is the holy solemnity of solemnities {Haec est sancta solemnitas solemnitatum}.” That melody was re-used in many subsequent songs and became known as the “virgin weeps {virgo plorans}” melody. On the musical characteristics of Notker’s lament and subsequent laments of Rachel, Yearley (1983) vol. 1, pp. 94-5, 269-75, and Stevens (1986) pp. 351ff.

A performance of “De uno martyre virgo plorans” by Gérard Le Vot et al. from the album Ultima Lacrima, Sacred Chants of the Middle Ages 9th-13th centuries (Studio S.M., 1997) is freely available on YouTube. This sequence seems to me quite difficult to perform well. Here’s a rather different performance of “Haec est sancta solemnitas“ directed by Jón Stefánsson in 2015.

Notker’s Rachel sequence contributed to early liturgical drama. Ordo Rachelis, a late-eleventh-century play in a lectionary from the cathedral of Freising (Munich, Staatsbibl. MS S Lat. 6264) incorporated Notker’s “Quid tu virgo” as concluding dialogue between Rachel and a consoler. The late-twelfth-century Fleury Playbook (Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS. 201) similarly incorporates “Quid tu virgo” in its play Interfectio Puerorum {The Massacre of the Boys}. With respect to the Freising and Fleury Rachel laments, Boynton observed:

“Quid tu virgo” is the structural basis of the lament, providing typological, allegorical, and tropological readings of Rachel that are complemented by the literal interpretation in leonine hexameters added before the sequence.

Boynton (2004) p. 326. Other dramatic Rachel laments are the eleventh-century Lamentatio Rachelis from Saint-Martial at Limoges (Paris, BnF lat. 1139), a lengthy part of a twelfth-century Epiphany play from the cathedral at Laon (in troper Laon 263), and Rachel’s dramatic lament incorporated into a twelfth-century Magi play (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 1712). For relevant discussion, id. pp. 320-7. On laments for lost children in Latin generally, Ziolkowski (2010).

[10] Notker wrote “De uno martyre virgo plorans” for the feast day of a martyr. For the Feast of the Holy Innocents – Boys, Notker wrote the sequence “Praise to you Christ, who tastes goodness {Laus tibi Christe cui sapit}.” The speaking voice of that sequence triumphantly declares:

The fresh and tender
warriors,
slaughtered
by Herod’s sword, preached
you today.

{ Recentes atque teneri
milites,
Herodiano ense
trucidati, te hodie
praedicaverunt }

St. 3a, Latin text and English translation from Kovács (2017) p. 203*.

[11] Notker’s sense of time’s unity is similar to that which Prudentius presents in Christ:

Born of the Father’s life before the world began,
called Alpha and Ω, the source and the ending
of everything that is, and was, and shall be in the future.

{ corde natus ex parentis ante mundi exordium,
alfa et Ω cognominatus, ipse fons et clausula
omnium quae sunt, fuerunt, quaeque post futura sunt. }

Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon}, 9 “Hymn for Every Hour {Hymnus omnis horae},” vv. 12-14 (st.4), Latin text and English translation from O’Daly (2012) pp. 252-3. Cf. Revelation 1:8, 21:6; Virgil, Georgics 4.392-3; Homer, Iliad 1.70. This poem ends:

Let the flowing river waters, the seashores,
rain, heat, snow, frost, wood and wind, night and day,
praise you, all together, for ever and ever!

{ fluminum lapsus et undae, littorum crepidines,
imber, aestus, nix, pruina, silva et aura, nox, dies,
omnibus te concelebrent saeculorum saeculis. }

Id. vv. 111-3 (st. 38), sourced as previously. The modern hymn “Of the Father’s Heart Begotten {Corde natus ex parentis}” is based on Prudentius’s “Hymnus omnis horae.” O’Daly explains that, in context, “life” is a better translation of corde than is “heart.” Id. p. 264.

[12] The martyr who possesses the heavenly kingdom seems to be Joseph / Christ. In “Laus tibi Christe cui sapit,” that Notker wrote for the Feast of the Holy Innocents – Boys, the boys together pray to Christ:

Dear little sons,
sweet little boys,
help us with your prayers,
which may Christ gently listen to,
feeling pity for your
innocent death hastened
for his own sake;
may he deem us worthy of his kingdom.

{ Clari filioli,
dulces pusioli,
Nos iuvate precibus,
Quas Christus, innocentem
mortem vestram miserans
Pro sese maturatam,
placidus exaudiens
Nos regno suo dignetur. }

St. 7b-10, Latin text and English translation from Kovács (2017) p. 204*. This sequence doesn’t represent the men of the church as being stupid. Scholars regard Notker’s Rachel sequence as poetically superior to this sequence.

[images] (1) The Massacre of the Innocents – Boys. Illumination from Codex Egberti, Fol 15v. The Codex Egberti was produced in the Reichenau Monastery for Egbert, who was Bishop of Trier from 980 to 993. Preserved at Stadtbibliothek Trier, Germany. Source image via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Horse’s ass and soldier pissing. Detail from painting of the Massacre of the Innocents – Boys by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Painted between 1565 and 1567. Preserved as accession # RCIN 405787 in Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, London. Via Wikimedia Commons. Sometime between 1604 and 1621, parts of the painting were painted over to make the painting depict a general scene of plunder, rather than a massacre of innocent boys. At the far left in the doorway of the brick house, the child being dragged away is clearly a boy. (3) Illumination (color enhanced) of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents – Boys in Sedulius’s Carmen paschale. From folio 16r of a manuscript made in 860 in a Liège scriptorium. Preserved in Antwerp, Belgium, as Museum Plantin-Moretus  M 17.4. This manuscript apparently is a copy of a manuscript made for Cuthwine, Bishop of Dunwich (in Suffolk, England), sometime between 716 and 731.

References:

Boynton, Susan. 2004. “From the Lament of Rachel to the Lament of Mary: A Transformation in the History of Drama and Spirituality.” Pp. 319-40 in Petersen, Nils Holger. Signs of Change: transformations of Christian traditions and their representation in the arts, 1000-2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Dronke, Peter. 1994. Nine Medieval Latin Plays. Cambridge Medieval Classics, 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by James Whitta)

Godman, Peter. 1985. Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance. London: Duckworth.

Green, Roger P. H. 2006. Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kovács, Andrea. 2017. Monuments of Medieval Liturgical Poetry in Hungary: sequences; critical edition of melodies. Musica sacra Hungarica (English ed.), 1. Budapest: Argumentum Publishing House.

McBrine, Patrick. 2017. Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England: divina in laude voluntas. Toronto Anglo-Saxon series, 27. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McKelvie, Christopher Gordon. 2010. The Cosmic Christian Vision of Prudentius’ Liber Cathemerinon, and the Inculturation of Augustan Vatic Poetry. M.A. Thesis. Halifax: Dalhousie University.

O’Daly, Gerard J. P. 2012. Days Linked by Song: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pope, R. Matin, trans. 1895. The Hymns of Prudentius. London: J.M. Dent.

Springer, Carl P. E., ed. and trans. 2013. Sedulius. The Paschal Song and Hymns. Writings from the Greco-Roman world, v. 35. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Stevens, John E. 1986. Words and Music in the Middle Ages: song, narrative, dance and drama, 1050-1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by Hans Tischler)

Thomson, Henry John, ed. and trans. 1949. Prudentius. Loeb Classical Library 387, 398. Vol. 1, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Yearley, Janthia. 1983. The Medieval Latin Planctus as a Genre. Ph.D. Thesis. University of York.

Ziolkoswki, Jan M. 2010. “Laments for Lost Children: Latin Traditions.” Pp. 81-107 in Tolmie, Jane and M. J. Toswell, M. J., eds. Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature. Turnhout: Brepols.

In the mid-ninth-century Carolingian empire, the eminent Irish scholar-cleric Sedulius Scottus urged God to spare the people from plague. He prayed to God with a poem entitled “Against the plague {Contra plagam}”:

Would not your people have to drink
now the cup of your anger, deserved wrath.
May you shine upon us your former compassion;
we beg you, you hear us.

Destroy our evil deeds, we pray;
save us, blessed prince.
Disperse dark shadows covering our minds,
faithful light of the world.

Holy of Holies, Lord of kings,
may your right hand be with your lowly ones,
may your serene face look upon us,
or else we perish.

{ Non propinetur populo tuoque
nunc calix irae, meriti furoris.
clareant priscae miserationes;
quaesumus, audi.

Deleas nostrum facinus, precamur;
nosque conserva, benedicte princeps.
mentium furvas supera tenebras,
lux pia mundi.

Sancte sanctorum, dominusque regum,
visitet plebem tua sancta dextra,
nos tuo vultu videas serenus,
ne pereamus. } [1]

Sedulius’s prayer in humility acknowledges the wrongs that he along with the people have done. They don’t even count on their own strength to repent. He prays that God will “destroy our evil deeds {deleas nostrum facinus}.” As a matter of justice, Sedulius recognizes that they deserve to be punished by God. Yet “we beg you, you hear us {quaesumus, audi}.” God in Hebrew scripture again and again in various contexts declares:

If he cries to me, I will hear, for I am compassionate.

In distress you called, and I rescued you. I answered you in the secret place of thunder. [2]

{ צְעַק אֵלַי וְשָׁמַעְתִּי כִּֽי־חַנּוּן אָֽנִי

בַּצָּרָה קָרָאתָ וָאֲחַלְּצֶךָּ אֶעֶנְךָ בְּסֵתֶר רַעַם }

In biblical understanding, God is by nature compassionate and merciful. The people experienced God’s compassion in the past. They cry out to God to experience that compassion again. The right hand of God represents the strength of God. The serene face of God represents the people seeing God blessing them. If God, the light of the world, doesn’t dispel the fear of the plague, the shadows covering their minds, they will perish.

The Great Plague that struck Europe in the middle of the fourteenth century killed roughly half of Europe’s population. Devastating plagues continued to strike European cities periodically up to the eighteenth century. A medieval prayer against the plague appealed to Mary, the mother of Jesus, with explicit reference to the plague:

Star of Heaven,
who nourished the Lord
and rooted up the plague of death
which the first parents of humankind planted;
may this star now deign
to hold in check the constellations
whose strife grants the people
the ulcers of a terrible death.
O glorious star of the sea,
save us from the plague.
Hear us: for your Son
who honors you denies you nothing.
Save us, you to whom
the Virgin Mother prays.

{ Stella celi extirpavit
que lactavit Dominum
mortis pestem, quam plantavit
primus parens hominum.
Ipsa stella nunc dignetur
sydera compescere;
quorum bella plebem cedunt
dire mortis ulcere.
O gloriosa stella maris,
a peste succurre nobis.
Audi nos: nam Filius tuus
nihil negans te honorat.
Salva nos, Jesu, pro quibus Jesus,
virgo mater te orat. } [3]

This prayer depicts Mary as a star restraining the effects of a pestilent constellation of stars. That’s a learned figure. Ancient Indian, Persian, Greek, and Egyptian thinkers described astrological effects on human health. Asaph’s Book of Medicines exemplifies the reception of that learning in medieval Europe.[4] This prayer thus draws upon highly respected, ancient non-Christian knowledge.

A Christian believer unaware of its non-Christian intellectual context could still appreciate this prayer. It invokes the Virgin Mary to intercede with Christ on behalf of her imploring Christian children. Intense devotion to the Virgin Mary was prevalent across all strata of medieval European society. Moreover, a Franciscan friar probably composed this prayer to fit a popular melody. Persons differing widely in social status and learning read and sung this prayer across Europe in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.[5]

In mid-fourteenth-century Italy, a priest wrote a relatively unsophisticated prayer for popular use against the plague. According to liturgical instructions that accompany this prayer against the plague, the dawn Christmas Mass was to be said at dawn on three consecutive days. All the people were to attend, including “babies sucking at their mothers’ breasts {enfans tetans sian a las messas}.” The people were to hold candles in their hands during the Mass. During those three days, they should make a general confession and fast. At a certain point in the Mass, all the people were to recite together this prayer:

Lord God, Jesus Christ, merciful redeemer, have mercy on me, a sinner. Lord, you hold me in this tribulation, but you have said, “I do not want the death of the sinner, but that one convert and live and confess and make amends for all one’s sins.” I beg you for mercy, Lord. By the love you have for the Virgin Mary, your blessed mother, and by the merits of the blessed martyrs, Saint Sebastian, all the other martyrs, and the virgin Saint Anastasia, save me from this epidemic. Amen.

{ Senher Dieu Jhesu Christ redemptor misericordios, aias merce a mi peccador, que mi tenes en aquesta tribulation, senher, que tu as dich, “Non vuelh la mort del peccador, mas que si convertisqua e viva e que si confesse e si esmende de thozs sos peccazs.” Clami ti merce, senher, que per aquella amor que tu as a la verges Mari, mayre tieua benaurada, e per los meritis dels benaurazs martirs, sant Cebastian e per tozs los autres martirs e per la verges sancta Anastasia, mi vulhas gardar d’aquesta epidimia. Amen. } [6]

This prayer begs for God’s mercy. It cites Ezekiel 33:11 to affirm the possibility of such mercy. The prayer directly and specifically states the urgent need: “save me from this epidemic.”

Christians fearing the epidemic allied themselves with revered Christian foremothers and forefathers. Medieval Christians understood the Virgin Mary to be both the blessed mother of Christ and the mother of all Christians. As Christ’s mother, Mary was thought able to influence Christ more than could any anyone else. Yet dire times require marshaling all important spiritual resources. The eighth-century historian and monk Paul the Deacon {Paulus Diaconus} recorded that prayers to the deceased Saint Sebastian had in 680 freed Rome from a raging pestilence. Saint Sebastian thus became known in medieval Europe as a saint with special power to protect persons from pestilence and plague. Moreover, within the liturgical calendar, the dawn Mass of Christmas Day was extraordinary in commemorating Saint Anastasia of Sirmium. She was born in the second century in what today is Serbia. Her name associates her with Christ’s resurrection. From early medieval centuries she has been venerated as “Medicine for Poisons {Φαρμακολύτρια}.” Calling on all Christian martyrs for additional help implicitly suggests concern to ward off the people themselves becoming martyrs, dying faithfully from the plague.

To pray to God for deliverance from a plague, a person doesn’t need to be extraordinarily holy or pious. A learned Epicurean might reason that praying wouldn’t hurt. In the ninth century, Sedulius Scottus himself followed Epicurus in appreciating the pleasures of eating and drinking. Subtly consistent with his “Contra plagam,” Sedulius in another poem expressed earthy awareness of his own contradictory humanity and implored God for mercy:

I read and write, teach and study wisdom;
night and day I beseech God the High-Throned One.
I eat and drink gladly, I invoke pagan Muses in verse;
as I sleep, I snore; waking, I pray to God.
My mind, conscious of misdeeds, weeps for sins of my life.
O Christ and Mary, have mercy on your wretched man.

{ Aut lego vel scribo, doceo scrutorve sophian;
obsecro celsithronum nocte dieque meum.
Vescor, poto libens; rithmizans invoco musas;
dormisco stertens; oro deum vigilans.
Conscia mens scelerum deflet peccamina vitae:
parcite vos misero, Christe, Maria, viro. } [7]

In this poem, “wretched” in the last line seems to function as a Janus word, an enantiosemic term. Is this man miserable, or not? Deciding that question ultimately doesn’t matter. The point of the poem seems to be that all need God’s mercy.

A plague functions in part as a selection mechanism. Those with stronger immune systems are more likely to survive. Gratitude for life as it is, hope that the future will be better, and trust to the end will boost your immune system. Do whatever, in your best informed judgment, is wise to prevent illness.[8] Then, even if you don’t believe in God, with reason against reason, pray to be spared from a plague.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Boccaccio’s Decameron: joyful companionship during plague
• through labyrinths: medieval fullness of life and joy in creativity
• men’s blessing of seminal creativity as numerous as stars of heaven

Notes:

[1] Sedulius Scottus, “Against the plague {Contra plagam},” incipit “Set free the lowly ones who serve you {Libera plebem tibi servientem},” st. 3-6 (of 6), Latin text (with my minor changes to the editorial punctuation) from Ludwig Traube, Poetae Latini aevi Carolini (1886) vol. 3, part 2, p. 46, via Waddell (1948) p. 124, my English translation benefiting from that of id., p. 125, and the partial English translation by G. Hunter. Here’s the full Latin text.

“Contra plagam” is written in classical Sapphic stanzas. Sapphic stanzas are now most prominently associated with Horace’s Odes. On the prevalence of Sapphics in early medieval poetry, Daintree (2000).

Sedulius Scottus was an Irish monk living in mid-ninth-century Iceland when invading Norse Viking drove him and his compatriots to continental Europe. Sedulius probably was in Liège when a plague struck that city. In pleading for patronage to Hartgar, Bishop of Liège, Sedulius described himself and two fellow Irish scholars as “learned grammarians and pious priests {doctos grammaticos presbiterosque pios}.” See “Gusts of the north wind are blowing and there are signs of snow {Flamina nos Boreae niveo canentia vultu}” v. 14, Latin text and English trans. from Godman (1984) pp. 286-7. In a Christmas poem written in Liège about 850, Sedulius likened himself and his fellow Irish scholars to the Wise Men of the Gospel:

Out of the east came the Magi bearing gifts, hastening in their journey to the Christ child; but now Irish scholars arrive from western lands, bringing their precious gifts of learning

Trans. Doyle (1983). pp. 112-3, via Anglandicus. For notes and corrections to Doyle’s translations, Ziolkowski (1986) and Lofstedt (2001).

Sedulius Scottus’s works survive in very little more than just one manuscript, Brussels, Bibliothèque royale, MS 1061. Modern philologists have scrutinized that text with pain-staking concern for accurately transmitting to the present Sedulius’s precious, ancient intellectual work. See, e.g. Ziolkowski (1986). Shanzer (1994), and Lofstedt (2001).

[2] Exodus 22:27, Psalm 81:7, Hebrew text from the Leningrad Codex via Blue Letter Bible. On God hearing the cry of the victim, Kugel (2003) Ch. 5. Kugel himself has failed to hear the cry of the massacred men of Shechem.

[3] “Star of Heaven who rooted out {Stella celi extirpavit},” Latin text from the York Book of Hours {Horae Eboracenses} of the early-sixteenth century, via Macklin (2010) p. 4, English translation (with my modifications) from Horrax (1994) p. 124. For manuscript witnesses from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Macklin (2010) Appendix, pp. 27-31.

In fifteenth-century England, John Lydgate reworked “Stella celi extirpavit” in his poem “Thou heavenly Queen of grace our lodestar {Thow hevenly quene of grace owre loodesterre},” and perhaps also in a variant, “O blessed Queen about the starred heaven {O blissid queen a bove sterrid heuene}.” Lydgate also wrote another poem against the plague, “O Heavenly Star most comfortable of light {O hevynly sterre most Comfortable of lyght},” also known as “On Holy Mary against the pestilence {De sancta Maria contra pestilenciam}.”

[4] The medieval medical doctor Simon de Covino of Liège wrote a lengthy allegorical poem concerning the plague. It’s entitled On the Judgment of the Sun at the Feasts of Saturn {De judicio Solis in conviviis Saturni}. Simon’s poem uses traditional Greco-Roman deities to explain the plague. Written in hexameters, Simon’s poem witnesses to the eagerness of many medieval scholars to display their classical learning. Simon explained the meaning of his poem in a lengthy prose prologue:

In case the material in this little book should seem too burdensome, I here explain it in four parts. — In the first I describe, in the manner and fashion of poets, how Saturn prepared a great feast in his own house and invited all the other gods. This description signifies how all the planets were in conjunction with Saturn in his own house of the Zodiac, that is Aquarius, in the three months of 1345 — January, February, and March. That is not to say that all the planets were in conjunction with Saturn at once, but one after on various days in those three months. My main intention is to describe the great conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, which only happens in Aquarius every ninety years; a conjunction which, according to philosophers, signifies great and amazing upheavals. Aristotle in his book on the properties of the elements says that because of the conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter in Aquarius kingdoms have been emptied and the earth depopulated. … In the fourth part I deal with the remedies given against such mortality {mortality from death-bearing plague (“pestis mortifera”)}. And the poem treats of the three fatal goddesses — Clotho, Lachesis, and Atropos. Clotho, who holds the distaff of life, represents generation; Lachesis, who draws out the thread of life, represents the span of human life from birth to death; Atropos, who breaks the thread of life, signifies corruption and death. And therefore I treat of remedies in this fashion, putting them poetically into the mouth of Lachesis, who represents the lengthening of life and the means whereby that can be achieved. And she seeks these remedies to prolong life in opposition to her sister, Atropos, who represents decay. And although doctors arm her with remedies to fight against her sister, those arms, that is the remedies of doctors, are of little worth to her.

{ Ne materia libelli videatur onerosa, ipsam declaro divisam per quatuor partes. — In prima quidem, secundum morem et ritum poetarum describo Saturnum magnum convivium fecisse in sua propria domo, et omnes deos ad suum convivium invitasse. Et ista descriptio significat omnes planetas fuisse conjunctos Saturno in propria domo Saturni, quae est Aquarius anno Domini millesimo CCCXLV, in tribus mensibus, scilicit januario, februario, et martio; non tamen quod simul fuerint conjuncti Saturno, sed unus post alium in diversis diebus illorum trium mensium. Et maxime in ea intentio est describere magnam conjunctionem Jovis et Saturni, quae non evenit in Aquario in nongentis annis nisi semel. Et ista conjunctio habet significare magnas et mirabilies mutationes rerum secundum dicta philosophorum. Unde Aristotiles in libro de proprietatibus elementorum dicit quod propter conjunctionem Jovis et Saturni in Aquario, regno vacua facta sunt et terrae depopulatae. … In quarta parte tracto de remediis datis contra hujusmodi mortalitatem. Et primo quia apud inferos poetae descripserunt tres deas fatales esse, scilicet Clotho, Lachesis et Atropos; ita quod Clotho, quae portat colum vitae, significat generationem; Lachesis, quae trahi fila vitae, significat productionem vitae humanae a principio usque ad mortem; Atropos vero, quaa rampit fila vitae, significant corruptionem et mortem, idcirco tracto de hujusmodi remedis, et hoc poetice sub nomine Lachesis quae dicitur productio vitae et quae habet producere vitam. Et ista querit remedia ad prolongationem vitae contra sororem suam, scilicet Atropos, quae dicitur corruptio; et qualiter medici armaverunt eam suis remediis ad pugnandum contra sororem suam, et qualiter ill arma id est remedia medicorum parum valuerint ei. }

Latin text from Littré (1841) pp. 206-8, English translation from Horrax (1994) pp. 163-7. Geoffrey de Meaux, a former court official apparently writing at medieval Oxford, similarly emphasized the effects of the stars and focused even more on classical authorities. For some analysis, Johnson (2009) pp. 11-2. On these authors in relation to “Stella celi extirpavit,” Macklin (2012) p. 21.

Concern for the stars in explaining the plague wasn’t only a tendency of medieval scholars with a classical orientation. The medical faculty of the University of Paris in October, 1348, issued a lengthy, scholarly report on the plague. This report declared in its first chapter:

We declare that the distant and first cause of this pestilence was and is the configuration of the heavens.

{ ‘Dicamus igitur quod remota et primeua causa istius pestilentie fuit et est aliqua constellatio celestis.}

Latin text from Hoeniger (1882) p. 153, English translation (modified slightly) from Horrax (1994) p. 159. In her book on the fourteenth-century plague in Europe, Horrax put this report first in a chapter entitled “Scientific explanations.” Her explanatory preface observed:

This is the most authoritative contemporary statement of the nature of the plague and therefore forms an appropriate introduction to this section.

Id. p. 158. In today’s scientific perspective, that day’s scientific perspective has a mythic character similar to medieval Christian beliefs about the plague.

[5] This poem appears frequently in late medieval English Books of Hours. It also exists in the “Adoration of the Shepherds” play in the N-Town mystery cycle and in fully notated polyphonic collections of pre-Reformation English vocal music. Macklin (2010) pp. 5-6. “Stella celi extirpavit” probably was circulating some time before its earliest surviving written record, dating to the period 1415 to 1430. Id. p. 12. On Franciscan friars composing such a hymn as a contrafactum, id. pp. 13-21. Here’s a performance of “Stella celi extirpavit” by the Binchois Consort (Andrew Kirkman, director).

[6] Old Occitan text and English translation (with my modifications) from Paden (2014) pp. 677-8. Paden presents evidence that versions of this prayer were known at Piacenza in northern Italy in 1348, at the prior of Jenza in Auvergne in south-central France in the fourteenth century, at Toulon in Occitania in the third quarter of the fourteenth century, at Saint-Antonin-Noble-Val in Occitania in the fifteenth century, and at Tarragona in Catalonia in the sixteenth century.

Facing the horror of a plague, medieval Christians most often prayed to the Virgin Mary. Saint Sebastian followed in popularity for help against a plague. From the fifteenth century, Saint Roch also became prominent in appeals. On medieval saints called upon to prevent or lift plagues, Ortega (2012) and the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Saint Anastasia was not distinctively associated with relief from plagues.

Church officials established special liturgical events to address plagues. See, for example, the directive of William Zouche, Archbishop of York, calling for special public processions in 1348. Here’s a prayer book from about 1500 with specific prayers for use against plague.

[7] Sedulius Scottus, “I read and write {Aug lego vel scribo},” full poem quoted, Latin text from Traube, Poetae, via Godman (1985) p. 282, my English translation, benefiting from those of id. p. 283, Waddell (1948) p. 123, the Lion of Chaeronea, and Alistair Ian Blyth at Dialogue on the Threshold {Диалог на пороге}.

[8] I regard the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, an agency of the U.S. federal government, as the most authoritative U.S. source for information about COVID-19 and associated mitigation strategies. However, relevant reality should be recognized. Leading public health authorities, including the U.S. Surgeon General, have performed disastrously badly in communicating basic facts about domestic violence. In response to prevailing political sentiment, they have propagated grotesquely false and hugely damaging myths about domestic violence. Truth thus isn’t necessarily what leading authorities proclaim. Commitment to honoring truth is a tenuous social norm. Everyone has responsibility for earnestly and sincerely seeking to know the truth. Doing so builds up social respect for truth.

[images] (1) Burying the dead from a plague in Tournai (in present-day Belgium) in 1349. Illumination by Piérart dou Tielt in a chronicle of Gilles li Muisis. Made about 1351. On folio 24v of Bibliothèque Royale de Belgique MS. 13076-13077, via BALaT of the Belgian Royal Institute for Cultural Heritage {Koninklijk Instituut voor het Kunstpatrimonium / Institut Royal du Patrimoine Artistique}. (2) Icon of Saint Anastasia of Sirmium. Made between the end of the 13th century and the first half of the 15th century. Preserved as catalog # 94.С.254 in the Hermitage Museum (St. Petersburg, Russia). Via Wikimedia Commons. (3) The Virgin Mary, Saint Sebastian, and Saint Roch beg the angy God the Father to stop a plague. Two wings from a plague alterpiece from the Augustianian Monastery at Wenden (Ulm, Germany). Made by Martin Schaffner, 1513/14. Preserved as item Gm1103 in the Germanisches Nationalmuseum (Nuremberg, Germany).

References:

Daintree, David. 2000. “Non omnis moriar: the Re-emergence of the Horatian Lyrical Tradition in the Early Middle Ages.” Latomus. 59 (4): 889-902.

Doyle, Edward. 1983. Sedulius Scottus. On Christian Rulers and The Poems. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, Vol. 17. Binghamton, NY: State University of New York.

Godman, Peter. 1985. Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance. London: Duckworth.

Hoeniger, Robert. 1882. Der schwarze Tod in Deutschland; in Beitrag zur Gesch. des vierzehnten Jahrh. Berlin: Grosser.

Horrox, Rosemary, ed. and trans. 1994. The Black Death. Manchester: Manchester University Press.

Johnson, Rebecca. 2009. “From Sin to Science: Astrological Exlanations for the Black Death, 1347-1350.” Ex Post Facto (Journal of the History Students at San Francisco State University). 18: 1-16.

Kugel, James L. 2003. The God of Old: inside the lost world of the Bible. New York: Free Press.

Littré, Emile. 1841. “Opuscule relatif à la peste de 1348, composé par un contemporain.” Bibliothèque De L’école Des Chartes. 2 (1): 201-243.

Lofstedt, Bengt. 2001. “Notes on Doyle’s translation of Sedulius Scottus.” Acta Antiqua Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae. 41-4 (3): 413-415.

Macklin, Christopher. 2010. “Plague, Performance and the Elusive History of the Stella celi extirpavit.” Early Music History. 29: 1-31.

Ortega, Jessica. 2012. Pestilence and Prayer: Saints and the Art of the Plague in Italy from 1370 – 1600. B.A. Honors Thesis. University of Central Florica. HIM 1990-2015. 1367.

Paden, William D. 2014. “An Occitan Prayer against the Plague and Its Tradition in Italy, France, and Catalonia.” Speculum. 89 (3): 670-692.

Shanzer, Danuta. 1994. “A New Edition of Sedulius Scottus’ Carmina.” Medium Ævum. 63 (1): 104-117.

Waddell, Helen. 1948. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. New York: Henry Holt.

Ziolkowski, Jan. 1986. “Review: On Christian Rulers, and The Poems, by Edward Gerard Doyle.” Speculum. 61 (2): 465-466.

In 410, Alaric, King of the Visigoths, culminated his third siege of Rome by sacking the city for three days. About seven years later, Rutilius Namatianus, a former head governor of Rome, returned from Rome to his native home in southern France. Gothic invaders had also devastated southern France. Rutilius was deeply invested in Roman tradition and gynocentric society. His poetic account of his journey home, On returning home {De reditu suo}, is filled with tense oppositions.[1] Rutilius’s inability to integrate his experience of collapsing gynocentric society shows in his sharp criticism of hated others.

Rutilius revered the traditional Roman society mythically supported by the Sabine women’s victory. On departing from Rome, Rutilius lauded his beloved city:

Hear, O queen, O fairest of your universe,
O Rome, received among the starry skies,
of humans and gods alike the mother, hear my prayer,
for your temples grant proximity to heaven.

We sing of you and always will, while fate allows —
everyone alive remembers you!
Accursed oblivion will hide the sun before
the honor that I owe you leaves my heart,

for you extend your gifts just as the sun its rays
where all-embracing Ocean ebbs and flows.
The Sun, who holds all things in place, revolves for you:
its steeds both rise and set in your domain.

{ exaudi, regina tui pulcherrima mundi,
inter sidereos Roma recepta polos,
exaudi, genetrix hominum genetrixque deorum,
non procul a caelo per tua templa sumus:

te canimus semperque, sinent dum fata, canemus:
sospes nemo potest immemor esse tui.
obruerint citius scelerata oblivia solem,
quam tuus ex nostro corde recedat honos.

nam solis radiis aequalia munera tendis,
qua circumfusus fluctuat Oceanus.
volvitur ipse tibi, qui continet omnia, Phoebus
eque tuis ortos in tua condit equos. } [2]

Rome is the beautiful queen, the mother. Men revere their mothers. They desire beautiful women. They delight in women ruling over them. No one can imagine that gynocentric society could collapse. The Roman Empire did collapse.

Some Roman men rebelled against gynocentrism. Briefly recounting that “a citizen was lost to living death {perditus hic vivo funere civis erat}” by going to live in a cave on a cliff, Rutilius heaped scorn on Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW):

Not long ago, our friend, a youth of noble birth,
appropriately wed, with ample means,
went mad, abandoning the world and the human race
for exile in this filthy den, the fool!

This wretch believes divinity can feed on filth.
He does himself more harm than the gods he spurned.
Is not this sect, I ask you, worse that Circe’s drugs?
While she changed human bodies, they change minds.

{ noster enim nuper iuvenis maioribus amplis,
nec censu inferior coniugiove minor,
impulsus furiis homines terrasque reliquit
et turpem latebram credulus exsul adit.

infelix putat illuvie caelestia pasci
seque premit laesis saevior ipse deis.
num, rogo, deterior Circaeis secta venenis?
tunc mutabuntur corpora, nunc animi. } [3]

This young man spurned the traditional elite Roman married man’s life and became a Christian ascetic. Why would a wealthy noble man abandon his wife and go to live in rags and filth on a cliff? Perhaps he felt that his marital life was lacking in some way. Circe changed men into happy pigs. Christianity offered an alternate lifestyle. Many men are foolishly committed to traditional gynocentrism. They, like Rutilius, castigate men who repudiate everyday gynocentrism and the gender inequalities of ordinary life.

Rutilius viciously disparaged Jewish men merely because they rest one day a week. On his way home, Rutilius stopped at Falesia in southern Greece. He complained about the Jewish innkeeper of a pleasant country inn:

he’s an animal, cut off from human food,
who charges us for breaking shrubs and hitting seaweed,
and begrudges us the water we have drunk!

We pay him back with all the scorn that’s owed a filthy
and disgraceful race that circumcises.
The root of foolishness! They love their chilly Sabbath,
but their hearts are colder than their creed.

Every seventh day is damned to lazy sloth,
a feeble image of its tired god!

{ humanis animal dissociale cibis:
vexatos frutices, pulsatas imputat algas
damnaque libatae grandia clamat aquae.

reddimus obscaenae convicia debita genti
quae genitale caput propudiosa metit:
radix stultitiae, cui frigida sabbata cordi,
sed cor frigidius religione sua.

septima quaeque dies turpi damnata veterno,
tamquam lassati mollis imago dei. } [4]

Men typically bear a triple burden of work. Most men work outside the home for money. Men also often engage in gender-unequal unpaid work around the home, such as establishing, reviewing, and maintaining household sports-entertainment subscriptions, repairing household motorcycles, cleaning and lubricating household guns, provisioning, storing, and rotating the household cigar stock, roughhousing with the kids, etc. Above and beyond that gender double burden, men have the additional gender burden of performing unpaid erection labor. Under Roman gynocentrism, Roman men didn’t even have one well-established rest day a week. Roman men were expected to be like worker-gods who never tire while still maintaining a hotly passionate heart. Roman men resented the modest Sabbath protection from gynocentric exploitation that Jewish and Christian men enjoyed.

Rutilius also disparaged Jewish men because he attributed to them vigorous, dynamic sexuality. Romans believed that circumcision enhanced men’s sexual performance. Romans thus stereotyped Jewish men as having strong, independent sexuality — being “prone to sexual excess.”[5] However, circumcision, a form of male genital mutilation, actually reduces the sensitivity of the penis. Circumcision thus diminishes men’s sexuality. That’s consistent with historical suppression of men’s sexuality and current unreasonably gender-biased regulation of reproductive rights. Rutilius badly misrepresented the gender structure of circumcision.

Rutilius hated the leading Roman general Stilicho even more than he hated Jewish men and ascetic Christian men. The son of a provincial Roman woman and a Vandal soldier, Stilicho, by serving in war’s horrible violence against men, rose to become the most powerful man next to his wife in the Roman Empire. Stilicho had his forces fight alongside Visigoth King Alaric I against the western Roman emperor-claimant Eugenius. Stilicho burned Sibylline books sacred to traditional Roman religion. In 408, Stilicho persuaded the Roman Senate to agree to pay Alaric a large ransom not to invade Italy. After a political reversal later that year, Stilicho was executed for treason. Alaric went on to sack Rome in 410. Rutilius declared:

How much more bitter was the crime of Stilicho,
the cruel betrayer of the empire’s heart?
As he struggled to outlast the Roman race,
his bloody madness overturned our world,

and while he feared the very Goths who made him feared,
he sent barbarian arms for Latium’s death
and plunged an armed foe into her naked vitals —
an even bolder trick that brought disaster.

And Rome herself, exposed to skin-clad troops,
was captive even before she could be captured.
It wasn’t only Gothic arms the traitor used:
he burned the books that brought the Sibyl’s aid.

We hate Althaea for the deadly torch she burned;
the bird, they say, still mourns for Nisus’ lock,
but Stilicho threw away the empire’s pledges
and Fate’s spindles, full of destiny.

Let Nero be released from all of Hades’ torments,
let hellish torches burn a grimmer ghost,
for Nero killed a mortal, but Stilicho a goddess:
one murdered his mother, the other the world’s mother.

{ quo magis est facinus diri Stilichonis acerbum,
proditor arcani quod fuit imperii.
Romano generi dum nititur esse superstes,
crudelis summis miscuit ima furor;

dumque timet quicquid se fecerat ipse timeri,
immisit Latiae barbara tela neci:
visceribus nudis armatum condidit hostem,
illatae cladis liberiore dolo.

ipsa satellitibus pellitis Roma patebat
et captiva prius quam caperetur erat.
nec tantum Geticis grassatus proditor armis:
ante Sibyllinae fata cremavit opis.

odimus Althaeam consumpti funere torris;
Nisaeum crinem flere putantur avis.
at Stilicho aeterni fatalia pignora regni
et plenas voluit praecipitare colos.

omnia Tartarei cessent tormenta Neronis;
consumat Stygias tristior umbra faces.
hic immortalem, mortalem perculit ille,
hic mundi matrem perculit, ille suam. } [6]

Rutilius figured Stilicho as promoting violence against a woman, Rome. Threats of violence against women incite men to violence against men. Violence against men is normative violence. Thus Rutilius without any marking of gender associates Stilicho with Althaea killing her son and Nisus physically assaulting her father. Within traditional Roman gynocentrism, the worst offense is doing harm to the highest mother — the goddess Rome, mother of the world.

Mired in traditional Roman gynocentrism, Rutilius struggled to understand how barbarians could have sacked sacred mother Rome. He hated those whom he perceived to be Rome’s internal enemies. While misconceiving them, Rutilius at least recognized the importance of internal enemies. For both women and men, we have met the enemy, and she is us.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Sabine women win Pyrrhic peace for Roman men
• holy mother Rachel weeping for the massacre of innocents: boys
• aspects of women’s privilege in the Old French jeu-parti

Notes:

[1] Verbaal observed of Rutilius’s De reditu suo:

Even when the poet alludes only slightly to the acute problems of his day (the collapse of Roman power in the West, the decline of central government, the ravaged provinces and sacked towns), a tension is felt in every episode and each observation he makes. … The seemingly loosely connected episodes are kept together by an all-pervading opposition of stability and impermanence, of decay and lasting fame, of human mortality and the eternity of Roma.

Verbaal (2006) p. 158. Unity in opposition is roughly equivalent to inability to integrate.

[2] Rutilius Namatianus, On returning home {De reditu suo} vv. 1.47-58, Latin text from Duff & Duff (1935) v. 2, pp. 753‑829, via LacusCurtius, English translation (modified slightly) from Malamud (2018) p. 44. Subsequent quotes from De reditu suo are similarly sourced. I’ve modified Malamud’s translation to use gender-neutral terms except where the Latin clearly specifies the semantic gender. The critical edition Vessereau (1904) is freely available online.

Duff & Duff refer to Rutilius as  the “last of the classical Latin poets” and De reditu suo as the “swan-song of Rome.” Duff & Duff (1935) v. 2, p. 753.

[3] De reditu suo vv. 1.519-6. The previous short quote is 1.518. Rutilius harshly disparaged ascetic Christian monks:

As we proceed by the sea, Capraria rears itself:
the island reeks with men who shun the light.
They are called monachoi — the name is Greek — because
they want to live alone, without a witness.

They fear both Fortune’s gifts and Fortune’s punishments:
they hug the very misery they dread.
What stupid madness of a perverse mind is this,
to fear that happiness will cause them harm?

Prisoners seeking punishment for crimes, perhaps,
or grim hearts swelling with the blackest bile
(as Homer thought the worries of Bellerophon
came from an illness caused by excess bile,

for pierced by savage grief, the story goes, the lad
conceived a hatred of the human race).

{ processu pelagi iam se Capraria tollit;
squalet lucifugis insula plena viris.
ipsi se monachos Graio cognomine dicunt,
quod soli nullo vivere teste volunt.

munera Fortunae metuunt, dum damna verentur:
quisquam sponte miser, ne miser esse queat.
quaenam perversi rabies tam stulta cerebri,
dum mala formides, nec bona posse pati?

sive suas repetunt factorum ergastula poenas,
tristia seu nigro viscera felle tument,
sic nimiae bilis morbum assignavit Homerus
Bellerophonteis sollicitudinibus:

nam iuveni offenso saevi post tela doloris
dicitur humanum displicuisse genus. }

De reditu suo vv. 1.439-52. Rutilius’s description of Bellerophon is characteristically prejudicial. Bellerophon overcame a devastating false accusation of rape. Under gynocentrism, the serious problem of false accusations of rape tends to be trivialized.

Rutilius tolerated Christianity as long as Christianity subordinated itself to Roman gynocentrism. As a traditionalist, Rutilius supported traditional gender roles and gynocentric bureaucracy:

Apparently Rutilius considers Christianity to be a dangerous enemy of this mythologized Roman bureaucracy, especially in its more radical forms as incorporated by the monks and hermits. For this reason, his poem is a much stronger attack on Christianity than it has been considered until now. …
Yet this conclusion must be qualified. The poet is not such an enemy of Christianity that he cannot bring himself to close the poem with the eulogy on the Christian {Consul of Rome} Constantius. He attacks Christianity only in so far as it prevents people from facing up to their responsibilities. As soon as Christians show themselves in their acts to be good Romans, i. e. adherents of Rutilius’ ‘cult’ of Roma, their religious background becomes less important. According to our poet, a man has to be first of all a Roman citizen. His other convictions, what ever they may be, are of little account.

Verbaal (2006) pp. 170-1. On Constantius, De reditu suo, fragment B, available in English translation in Malamud (2018) p. 79.

Men must follow the life path that mother Rome sets out for men:

Roma is the mother of men and gods. She can give mortal man a nearly divine status if he only wants to serve her, i. e. if he does not refuse the responsibilities of the cursus honorum, which allows him to approach mythical greatness and which assures him eternal glory and divine adoration after his death.

Id. p. 170.

[4] De reditu suo vv. 1.384-92. Just as for Christians, some Jews were Roman citizens: “a not inconsiderable number of Jews in Rome had become cives Romani by the time of Augustus.” Rutgers (1994). With the “root of foolishness {radix stultitiae},” Rutilius refers to Judaism’s status as the root of Christianity. Christians identify themselves as fools. 1 Corinthians 1:18-21, 4:10.

In the above passage, Rutilius also refers to God resting on the seventh day in Genesis’s account of creation. Genesis 1:27, 2:2-3. Rutilius used the term imago in a thematically coherent way across De reditu suo. Verbaal (2006) pp. 165-7.

[5] Malamud (2018) supplies the phrase “prone to sexual excess.” See id. pp. 24-6 for insightful, close reading of Rutilius’s description of the Jewish inn-keeper.

[6] De reditu suo vv. 2.41-60. The skin-clad troups were Visigoths under Aleric I. Rutulius’s compared Stilicho burning the Sibylline books to women killing close male relatives:

Althaea caused the death of her son Meleager by burning the magical firebrand on which his life depended. … Scylla caused the death of her father Nisus by depriving him of the purple lock on which his life depended.

Duff & Duff (1935) notes 149-150. See id. for references to the relevant ancient source literature. Men’s deaths, as well as men’s lifespan shortfall, has no gender significance under gynocentrism.

The Latin text for De reditu suo 2.47-8 is awkward. A proposed solution is to emend:

Visceribus nudis armatum condidit hostem
Illatae cladis liberiore dolo.

{ plunged an armed foe into her naked vitals —
an even bolder trick that brought disaster. }

to:

Visceribus nudis armatum condidit hostem
Illiacae cladis deteriore dolo.

{ plunged an armed foe into her naked vitals —
a wile more wicked than that which brought disaster on Troy. }

Reid (1887).

[images] (1) Alaric’s sacking of Rome in 410. Anachronistic fifteenth-century French miniature. Via Wikimedia Commons. If you have a more accurate citation for this image, please supply it in the comments below. (2) Romans seeking to preserve sacred vessels during Alaric’s sacking of Rome. Illumination from instance of Augustine, La Cité de Dieu, translated from the Latin by Raoul de Presles. On folio 9v in MS. The Hague, MMW, 10 A 11. Via the National Library of the Netherlands.

References:

Duff, John Wight, and Arnold Mackay Duff, ed. and trans. 1935. Loeb Classical Library, 284. Minor Latin poets. Rutilius Namatianus. Revised Edition. London: Heinemann

Malamud, Martha A., trans. 2018. Rutilius Namatianus’ Going Home: De reditu suo. London: Routledge.

Reid, J. S. 1887. “Rutilius Claudius Namatianus, II. 47, 8.” The Classical Review. 1 (2-3): 78. (available here)

Rutgers, Leonard. 1994. “Roman policy towards the Jews: expulsions from the city of Rome during the first century C.E.” Classical Antiquity. 13 (1): 56-74.

Verbaal, Wim. 2006. “A Man and his Gods. Religion in the De reditu suo of Rutilius Claudius Namatianus.” Wiener Studien. 119: 157-171.

Vessereau, Jules, ed. and trans. (French). 1904. Cl. Rutilius Namatianus. Paris: A. Fontemoing.

About 1423, an outbreak of plague in Bologna prompted intense fear along the Adriatic coast of Italy. Guillaume Du Fay, now generally regarded as the greatest European composer of the fifteenth century, wrote an isorhythmic motet praying for divine help against this plague. For his motet’s text, Du Fay combined two pre-existing Latin prayers to Saint Sebastian. Du Fay’s motet shows fear of plague playing against Christian embrace of martyrdom.

The life of Saint Sebastian is more directly associated with martyrdom than with preventing plague. According to the Passion of Saint Sebastian {Passio Sancti Sebastiani}, Sebastian was a clandestine Christian and a high-ranking officer under the Roman Emperor Diocletian, who reigned from 284 to 305 GC. Sebastian healed the sick and urged conversion to Christianity. For these offenses, Diocletian ordered archers to shoot Sebastian. Under the care of the compassionate woman Irene, Sebastian survived his arrow wounds. Then he was arrested again. This time the imperial guards clubbed him to death. To prevent Christians from honoring Sebastian’s dead body, the imperial guards threw it into a sewer.

Christians managed to recover Sebastian’s body from the sewer. They buried his body alongside the bodies of the apostles Peter and Paul in the catacomb on Rome’s Appian Way. By 354 GC, Sebastian’s tomb was already attracting Christian pilgrims. A basilica, called the Church of the Apostles {Ecclesia Apostolorum}, was built above the catacomb late in the fourth century. In both Passio Sancti Sebastiani and the cult of the saint, Sebastian was honored as a heroic Christian martyr without any reference to plague.[1]

The prayers that Du Fay used for his motet emphasize Sebastian’s status as a martyr. Du Fay’s motet begins with one voice (the triplum / cantus 1), then another slightly offset (the resolutio), singing:

O Saint Sebastian,
always, evening and morning,
at all hours and minutes,
while I am of sound mind

{ O sancte Sebastiane,
Semper, vespere et mane,
Horis cunctis et momentis
Dum adhuc sum sanae mentis } [2]

The above verses are a preface that sets the context of earnest devotion. The first voice then continues:

protect and preserve me,
and, O martyr, untie me from the cords
of harmful weakness
called the epidemic.

From this kind of plague
defend and guard me,
along with all my friends.
We confess ourselves sinners
to God and to Holy Mary
and to you, O faithful martyr.

{ Me protege et conserva
Et a me, martyr, enerva
Infirmitatem noxiam
Vocatem epidemiam.

Tu de peste hujusmodi
Me defende et custodi
Et omnes amicos meos,
Qui nos confitemur reos
Deo et sanctae Mariae
Et tibi, o martyr pie. }

This prayer apparently draws upon upon a prayer attributed to Ambrose in the life of Saint Sebastian in Jacobus de Voragine’s The Golden Legend {Legenda aurea}:

The blessed martyr Sebastian for the confession of your name, worthy Lord, in shedding his blood shows at the same time your marvels: you confer strength in weakness, you give success to our efforts, and in response to prayer you supply help to the weak.

{ beati martiris Sebatiani pro confessione nominis tui, domine venerabilis, sanguis effusus simul et tua mirabilia manifestat, quod perficis in infirmitate virtutem, et vestris studiis das profectum et infirmis a prece praestas auxilium. } [3]

Weakness in Ambrose’s prayer means fear of martyrdom. Success means becoming a blessed martyr. In the leading vocal line of Du Fay’s motet, the reference to binding cords of harmful weakness, described as an epidemic, a kind of plague, seems to refer subtly to popular resistance to martyrdom. The epidemic that Du Fay’s motet addresses is both the plague and the fear of dying as a faithful Christian suffering plague. That latter fear is associated with fear of martyrdom.

The leading vocal line of Du Fay’s motet continues with more specific balancing of stopping the plague and the blessing of martyrdom. Saint Sebastian, citizen of Milan, has the power to stop the plague:

You, citizen of Milan,
you can make cease
this pestilence, if you so wish,
and from God accomplish this,
for among many it is known
that you have from Him this benefit.

Zoe the mute you healed
and restored healthful
to Nicostratus her husband,
and you did this miraculously.
In their suffering you consoled
the martyrs and promised
to them eternal life
and all that’s owed to martyrs.

{ Tu Mediolanus civis
Hanc pestilentiam, si vis
Potes facere cessare
Et ad Deum impetrare
Quia a multis est scitum,
Quod de hoc habes meritum.

Zoe mutam tu sanasti
Et sanatam restaurasti
Nicostrato ejus viro,
Hoc faciens modo miro.
In agone consolabas
Martyres et promittebas
Eis sempiternam vitam
Et martyribus debitam. } [4]

If this pestilence were to make faithful Christians into martyrs, would Saint Sebastian have wished to stop it?

The motetus (cantus 2) clearly expresses desire for protection from plague. Yet in addition it contains a semantic counterpoint. Consider:

O martyr Sebastian,
you with us always, remain with us!
And through your merits
we, who are in this life —

guard, heal, and rule us,
and from the plague protect us,
presenting us to the Trinity
and the holy virgin mother.

And may we so finish life,
that we have mercy
and the company of martyrs
and the vision of holy God.

{ O martyr Sebastiane,
Tu semper nobiscum mane
Atque per tua merita
Nos, qui sumus in hac vita,

Custodi, sana et rege
Et a peste nos protege
Praesentans nos trinitati
Et virgini sanctae matri.

Et sic vitam finiamus,
Quod mercedem habeamus
Et martyrum consortium
Et Deum videre pium. }

The opening address isn’t to “O savior Sebastian” or “O merciful Sebastian,” but to “O martyr Sebastian.” We are in this earthly life, but the martyr Sebastian is in blessed, eternal life. The phrase “you with us always {tu semper nobiscum}” suggests a declarative, but resolves in an imperative “remain with us {mane}.” The implicit declarative seems to be an implicit hope. How is one to finish earthly life so as to receive God’s mercy, have the company of martyrs, and experience the beatific vision of God? One answer is martyrdom, even martyrdom by the plague.

The contratenor similarly has a semantic counterpoint celebrating martyrdom. Sebastian again has the epithet martyr, accompanied with words celebrating that status:

O how he shined with wondrous grace,
Sebastian, famous martyr,
who bearing a soldier’s insignia,
but caring for his brothers’ victory,
comforted their weakening hearts
with words brought from heaven.

{ O quam mira refulsit gratia
Sebastianus, martyr inclytus,
Qui militis portans insignia,
Sed de fratum palma sollicitus
Confortavit corda pallencia
Verba sibi collato caelitus. }

In Jacobus de Voragine’s life of Saint Sebastian, Sebastian exhorted Marcellian and Marcus, two brothers from high nobility, not to yield to their parents’ tears and forego Christian martyrdom:

O you strong soldiers of Christ, do not let these tearful blandishments cause you to forsake the everlasting crown!

{ O fortissimi milites Christi, nolite per misera blandimenta coronam deponere sempiternam. } [5]

To Marcellian and Marcus’s parents, Sebastian declared:

Do not fear, they will not be separated from you, but will go to heaven and prepare starry dwellings for you. Since the world began, this life has betrayed those who placed their hopes in it. Life has deceived their expectations and fooled those who took its goods for granted, and thus it has left nothing certain and so proved itself false to all. … Therefore, let us stir up our desire, our love for martyrdom!

{ Nolite timere, non separabuntur a vobis, sed vadunt in caelum vobis parare sidereas mansiones. Nam ab initio mundi haec vita in se sperantes fefellit, se exspectantes decepit, de se praesumentes irrisit et ita nullum omnino certum reddidit, ut omnibus probetur esse mentita. … In amore ergo martyrii nostros iam suscitemus affectus. }

In the context of Sebastian’s life, caring for his brothers’ victory and comforting their weakening hearts mean urging them to accept Christian martyrdom.

Welcoming death has long been regarded as madness. Christians’ fearlessness in facing death under Roman persecutions was regarded at least in part as Christian foolishness. Willing to embrace the male gaze, as Bishop Nonnus did with respect to the dancer Pelagia, a non-Christian poem from about two millennia ago described a sexy Syrian dancing girl with sinuous thighs. This poem, known as the Copa, celebrates sensuous beauty, counsels against fear of even an enormous penis, and concludes:

If you have sense, you’ll recline and drink deeply from the summer pint-glass,
or perhaps you might prefer to hold a chalice of new crystal.
Come here, rest your weary self under the vines’ shade
and fasten to your heavy head a breast-band of roses.
Pulling on the soft lips of a lovely young woman —
ah, go rot in your grave, you old-fashioned eye-brow raisers!
Why save fine-smelling garlands for ungrateful ashes?
Asssshole, do you want your bones to be covered with a crowned gravestone?
Set out the undiluted wine and dice. Let rot one who cares about tomorrow.
Death is yanking on the ear. “Live,” he says, “I’m coming.”

{ si sapis, aestivo recubans te prolue vitro,
seu vis crystalli ferre novos calices.
hic age pampinea fessus requiesce sub umbra
et gravidum roseo necte caput strophio,
formosa et tenerae decerpens ora puellae —
a pereat cui sunt prisca supercilia!
quid cineri ingrato servas bene olentia serta?
anne coronato vis lapide ossa tegi?
pone merum et talos; pereat qui crastina curat:
Mors aurem vellens “vivite” ait, “venio.” } [6]

In this poem, the coming of death means the end of pleasurable life. Despite its disappointments, uncertainties, and deceptions, life is good. If you have set before you the Copa’s vision of life and death, choose life. Life is the better choice.

For Christians, life and death are dynamically linked. About 400 GC on the occasion of a burial, the learned Roman Christian Prudentius wrote:

God, fiery soul-source,
you brought together two elements,
one living, one subject to death.
Father, you created humans.

Yours are both elements, yours, master,
for you they are linked,
for you they cling together while enlivened,
spirit and flesh serve you.

But detached from each other,
they are called back to their origins.
The hot breath seeks for the atmosphere,
the dry earth receives the body.

{ Deus ignee fons animarum,
duo qui socians elementa,
vivum simul ac moribundum,
hominem, pater, effigiasti,

tua sunt, tua, rector, utraque,
tibi copula iungitur horum,
tibi dum vegetata cohaerent
et spiritus et caro servit.

resoluta sed ista seorsum
proprios revocantur in ortus:
petit halitus aëra fervens,
humus excipit arida corpus. } [7]

Separation of spirit and body at death isn’t the end of the living body in Prudentius’s understanding:

Now receive him, earth, to cherish,
take him to your soft breast.
I hand over to you parts of a human,
fragments of noble origin I entrust.

This was once the home of a soul
created from its maker’s mouth.
In these remains the fire
of wisdom lived with Christ as leader.

You earth, cover the deposited body.
He will not forget his handiwork,
he will ask for it back, maker and creator
using the stamp of his own face.

Let the merited time come
when God fulfills all hope.
You will be opened, you must give back
the image as I impart it to you.

No! Though withered age
reduce the bones to powder,
the dry and scanty ashes
to the least of a tiny handful —

No! Though changing winds and breezes
fly through the empty void and
carry away his strength, his dust,
he will not be permitted to perish.

{ nunc suscipe, terra, fovendum,
gremioque hunc concipe molli:
hominis tibi membra sequestro,
generosa et fragmina credo.

animae fuit haec domus olim
factoris ab ore creatae;
fervens habitavit in istis
Sapientia principe Christo.

tu depositum tege corpus;
non inmemor ille requiret
sua munera fictor et auctor
propriique enigmata vultus.

veniant modo tempora iusta,
cum spem deus inpleat omnem,
reddas patefacta necesse est
qualem tibi trado figuram.

non, si cariosa vetustas
dissolverit ossa favillis,
fueritque cinisculus arens
minimi mensura pugilli,

nec, si vaga flamina et aurae
vacuum per inane volantes
tulerint cum pulvere nervos,
hominem periisse licebit. }

Prudentius concludes his poem with the promise of the body’s resurrection, a prayer, and a promise of care:

Behold! For believers lies open
a bright road to the great garden.
They can enter the pasture
that the serpent stole from humans.

I pray, best of leaders,
command that this spirit, your servant,
be consecrated there at its birthplace,
which it left, an exile and wanderer.

We will care for the buried bones
with violets and branches dense with leaves.
The epitaph and cold stones
we will drench with liquid perfume.

{ patet ecce fidelibus ampli
via lucida iam paradisi,
licet et nemus illud adire,
homini quod ademerat anguis.

illic, precor, optime ductor,
famulam tibi praecipe mentem
genitali in sede sacrari,
quam liquerat exul et errans.

nos tecta fovebimus ossa
violis et fronde frequenti
titulumque et frigida saxa
liquido spargemus odore. }

All Christians, if they actually believe in Christ, must believe about death what Prudentius believed. With sixteen hundred years of Christian witness since the learned Roman Prudentius wrote, Christians should be able to believe what Prudentius believed.

Death by plague doesn’t seem like heroic martyrdom. Yet Guillaume Du Fay’s fifteenth-century motet alludes extensively to martyrdom on calling upon Saint Sebastian to save the people from plague. From a Christian perspective, being a hero counts for nothing relative to dying with faith in Christ’s promise of resurrection. Facing the fear of plague with faith in Christ makes one like Saint Sebastian in the way that matters most.

Martyrdom is a painful point that should be appreciated in hearing Guillaume Du Fay’s poignant motet on the plague.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Contra plagam & other medieval prayers against plague
• Jephthah’s daughter sought bigger name than Abraham’s son Isaac
• trade slogans of Abbasid singing slave girls (qiyān) goaded men

Notes:

[1] Neither Passio Sancti Sebastian nor surviving evidence about the early cult of Saint Sebastian refers to plague. For reviews of the life of Sebastian, Gecser (2017), Hedquist (2017), and Barker (2007).

The earliest written account of Sebastian is from Ambrose of Milan late in the fourth century. Ambrose in his Commentary on Psalm 118 {Expositio psalmi CXVIII} tells of “Sebastian the Martyr {Sebastianus martyr}” whose birthday is being celebrated on January 20. According to Ambrose, Sebastian was a citizen of Milan and was martyred in Rome. See Expositio psalmi CXVIII, Ch. 20.43-51. Here’s an excerpt in English translation of Ambrose’s commentary concerning Sebastian (shorter excerpt here). The Latin text is available in Petschenig & Zelzer (1999) pp. 466-70.

The Passio Sancti Sebastian was written about 430 GC. Once attributed to Ambrose of Milan, the Passio Sancti Sebastian more recently and more plausibly has been attributed to Arnobius the Younger. Gecser (2017) p. 2, n. 3. Patrologiae Latinae (PL) 17 (published 1879) cols. 1111-1148 provides Acts of Saint Sebastian {Acta S. Sebastiani}. Gecser (2017) p. 2, n. 3, cites PL 17 col. 1021-1058 for the Passio Sancti Sebastiani, but that references isn’t correct for the 1879 volume of PL 17. For more recent references, see id.

[2] Guillaume Du Fay, O Saint Sebastian — O martyr Sebastian — O how wonderful {O sancte Sebastiane – O martyr Sebastiane – O quam mira}, Latin text from Planchart (2011), my English translation, benefiting from those of id. and David Wyatt (2012). Subsequent quotes from Du Fay’s O Saint Sebastian are similarly sourced.

For the musical score for O Saint Sebastian, along with Latin text, English translation, and commentary, Planchart (2011). The LiederNet Archive suggests a date of c. 1437 for this motet. Planchart reasonable suggests instead 1423 or 1424. Planchart (2011) p. 14. At that date, Du Fay was only about 27 years old. He was then apparently serving the House of Malatesta in Rimini, Italy.

Steffen at My Albion offers a poetic response to the martyr Sebastian’s life.

[3] Jacobus de Voragine, The Golden Legend {Legenda aurea} Ch. 23 (Saint Sebastian), Latin text from Grässe (1850) p. 113, my English translation benefiting from that of Ryan (1993) v. 1, p. 101. The Latin Library’s text of Jacobus on Sebastian is truncated. It’s missing the text above.

Jacobus first distributed his Legenda aurea about 1260. William Caxton translated Legenda aurea into English and so printed it in 1483. Here’s Caxton’s translation in modernized English. In the fifteenth century, the Legenda aurea was a medieval bestseller. It fell sharply out of favor in the sixteenth century. On the reception of the Legenda aurea, Reames (1985).

In the eighth century, Paul the Deacon recorded in his Historia Langobardorum that Sebastian’s relics saved the Lombard capital Pavia from the plague about 680. In his study of Paul’s work, Jacobus de Voragine came across that account and included it disconnectedly in his life of Sebastian:

In the Annals of the Lombards we read that during the reign of King Gumbert {King Cunipert} all Italy was stricken by a plague so virulent that there was hardly anyone left to bury the dead. This plague raged most of all in Rome and Pavia. At this time there appeared to some a good angel followed by a bad angel carrying a spear. When the good angel gave the command, the bad one struck and killed. When he struck a house, all the people in it were carried out dead. Then it was divinely revealed that the plague would never cease until an altar was raised in Pavia in honor of Saint Sebastian. An altar was built in the church of Saint Peter in Chains. At once the pestilence ceased. Relics of Saint Sebastian were brought from Rome to Pavia.

{ Legitur quoque in gestis Longobardorum, quod tempore Gumberti regis Italia tota tanta peste percussa est, ut vix unus alterum sufficeret sepelire, et haec pestis maxime Romae ac Papiae grassabatur. Tunc visibiliter bonus angelus multis apparuit malo angelo sequente et venabulum ferenti praecipiens, ut percuteret ac caedem faceret. Quotiens autem aliquam domum percutiebat, tot inde mortui efferebantur. Tunc cuidam divinitus revelatum est, quod nequaquam haec pestis cessaret, donec sancto Sebastiano altare Papiae construeretur. Quod quidem constructum est in ecclesia sancti Petri, qui dicitur ad vincula; quo facto statim cessavit illa quassatio. Et illus a Roma reliquiae sancti Sebastiani delatae. }

Legenda aurea, Latin text from Grässe (1850) p. 113, English translation (modified slightly) from Ryan (1993) v. 1, p. 101. Prior to the Great Plague in the mid-fourteenth century, only in Pavia was Saint Sebastian venerated as protector against the plague. Gecser (2017) pp. 3-5, Barker (2007) pp. 91-2.

[4] The Legenda aurea tells the story of Zoe. She was the wife of Nicostratus. Marcellian and Marcus were being held in Zoe and Nicostratus’s house. Zoe had lost the ability to speak, apparently for some wrong she had done to the two young brothers. Gesturing and nodding, she knelt at Saint Sebastian’s feet and begged forgiveness. Sebastian prayed that her ability to speak be restored. So it was. Zoe then declared Sebastian blessed and explained that she had seen an angel holding a book in front of him.

[5] Legenda aurea Ch. 23 (Saint Sebastian), Latin text from Grässe (1850) pp. 109-10, my English translation benefiting from that of Ryan (1993) v. 1, p. 98. The subsequently quote is similarly sourced.

[6] Pseudo-Virgil (Appendix Vergiliana), Darling Syrian Woman Tavern-Keeper {Copa Syrisca} vv. 29-38 (of 38), Latin text from Fairclough (1918) p. 440, my English translation benefiting from that of id. p. 441, Waddell (1948) p. 5, and Mooney (1916). Here’s an online Latin text and a very loose English translation.

Fairclough describes the Copa as “a pure pearl: it reflect the language of Virgil and the meter of Propertius.” He dates it to the Neronian period (37 to 68 GC). Fairclough (1918) p. 375. Morgan favors dating Copa to the Flavian (69 to 96 GC) or Antonine ( 96 to 192 GC) periods. Morgan (2017) p. 85. In accordance with now-dominant ideology, Morgan provides an anti-meninist interpretation of Copa:

We imagine the undulating figure of the dancer as though present before our very eyes — the sense of immediacy heightened by the iteration of present-tense verbs (sunt . . . est . . . est . . . sunt) — and we hear her music ringing through our ears. Yet, try as we might to ‘own’ our ‘little Syrian’—to objectify and fetishize her like Martial’s Telethusa or Juvenal’s pin-up girls, mere ‘playthings’ for the well-to-do to enjoy as they please (nugas, Juv. Sat. 11.171; cf. Mart. Ep. 6.71.5-6) — we encounter constant reminders of the scene’s artificiality, reminders of the fact that this is all an elaborate mytho-literary façade constructed by and for the titillation and gratification of elite Roman male readers.

Id. p. 100. Within the unreality of contemporary academia, academic literary critics can hardly be expected to recognize reality.

The Copa itself rejects historically entrenched anti-meninist representations and affirms the goodness of men’s genitals, no matter how large. A poetic voice, perhaps the knowing dancing girl herself, declares:

The protector of the cottage is armed with a willow sickle,
yet despite his gigantic genitals, he isn’t terrifying.
Come as his tenant. Your weary donkey has been sweating for awhile;
spare him. Vesta’s darling is the donkey.

{ est tuguri custos armatus falce saligna,
sed non et vasto est inguine terribilis.
huc calybita veni lassus iam sudat asellus;
parce illi Vestae delicium est asinus. }

Copa, vv. 23-7, sourced as previously. As the Priapeia subtly assert, representations of gigantic masculine genitals have been used to brutalize masculine sexuality. Men’s genitals, no matter how large, should be understood as instruments of love. The goddess Vesta experienced one mythic attempted sexuxal assault. On that unjustly stereotyped incident, Ovid, Fasti 6.311ff. Vesta herself is associated with keeping the fire burning and a penis rising up out of flames. The Copa sympathetically describes the donkey, renowned for its large penis, as Vesta’s darling.

[7] Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon} 10, “Hymn at the Burial of a Dead Person {Hymnus circa exequias defuncti},”  vv. 1-12, Latin text and English translation (modified according to my poetic sense) from O’Daly (2012) pp. 292-3. The subsequent two quotes above are similarly sourced from “Hymnus circa exequias defuncti” vv. 125-48 (Now receive him…) and 161-72 (Behold! …).

[image] Recording of Guillaume Du Fay’s motet O sancte Sebastiane – O martyr Sebastiane – O quam mira, with cover photo-still of Saint Sebastian dying as a martyr. Recording by Huelgas-Ensemble / Paul Van Nevel from the album O gemma lux (released 2011 by Harmonia Mundi). Here are recordings by La Reverdie (Arcana,  2009), the Hilliard Ensemble (Paul Hillier, conductor; Parlophone Records, 1987), and Francesca Cassinari and Cantica Symphonia (Glossa, 2008).

References:

Barker, Sheila. 2007. “The Making of a Plague Saint: Saint Sebastian’s imagery and cult before the Counter-Reformation.” Ch.4 (pp. 90-131) in Franco Mormando and Thomas Worcester, eds. Piety and Plague from Byzantium to the Baroque. Kirksville, MO: Truman State University Press.

Fairclough, H. Rushton, revised by G. P. Goold. 1918. Virgil. Aeneid: Books 7-12. Appendix Vergiliana. Loeb Classical Library 64. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press..

Gecser, Ottó. 2017. “Intercession and Specialization: St Sebastian and St Roche as Plague Saints and their Cult in Medieval Hungary.” Pp. 77-108 in Marie-Madeleine de Cevins and Olivier Marin, eds. Les Saints et leur Culte en Europe Centrale au Moyen Âge. Turnhout: Brepols. (page references above are to the online edition)

Grässe, Johann Georg Theodor, ed. 1850. Jacobus a Voragine. Legenda Aurea: Vulgo Historia Lombardica Dicta. Lipsiae: Impensis librariae Arnoldianae.

Hedquist, Valerie. 2017. “Ter Brugghen’s Saint Sebastian Tended by Irene.” Journal of Historians of Netherlandish Art. 9:2. DOI: 10.5092/jhna.2017.9.2.3

Mooney, Joseph J., trans. 1916. The Minor Poems of Vergil, comprising the Culex, Dirae, Lydia, Moretum, Copa, Priapeia, and Catalepton, metrically translated into English. Cornish Bros: Birmingham.

Morgan, Harry. 2017. “Music, Sexuality and Stagecraft in the Pseudo-Vergilian Copa.” Greek and Roman Musical Studies. 5 (1): 82-103.

O’Daly, Gerard J. P. 2012. Days Linked by Song: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Petschenig, Michael and Michaela Zelzer, eds. 1999. Ambrosius. Expositio Psalmi CXVIII. Corpus Scriptorum Ecclesiasticorum Latinorum (CSEL) 62. Vindobonae: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenshaften.

Planchart, Alejandro Enrique, ed. 2011. Guillaume Du Fay. Opera Omnia 02/03. O sancte Sebastiane. Santa Barbara, CA: Marisol Press.

Reames, Sherry L. 1985. The Legenda aurea: a reexamination of its paradoxical history. Madison: The Univ. of Wisconsin Press.

Ryan, William Granger, trans. 1993. Jacobus de Voragine. The Golden Legend: readings on the saints. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.

Waddell, Helen. 1948. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. New York: Henry Holt.

Earinus, a beautiful young boy, was sent from his native land of Pergamum to be a slave in the court of the Emperor Domitian in first-century Rome. Emperor Domitian enjoyed having sex with his slave-boy Earinus. Earinus was castrated so that his boyish attractiveness wouldn’t be changed by the onset of puberty.[1] The violence against the boy Earinus is a horror that nearly approaches that of crucifying an innocent adult man. Did the sexual abuse and castration of Earinus have any salvific value relative to historically pervasive castration culture?

History is replete with horrible violence against boys and men. Homer’s Iliad, the most influential work of ancient Greek literature other than the Christian New Testament, depicts epic slaughter of men in war, that is, socially institutionalized violence against men. In medieval Europe, despite the risks to women in childbirth, elite men’s life expectancy was about nine years less than the life expectancy for elite women. Today in the U.S., about four times more men than women suffer death through physical violence. Violence against men frequently targets men’s genitals, and men are about as likely to suffer sexual assault as women are. Social devaluation of masculinity is a seminal issue. Castration culture makes clear social contempt for males as a gender.

Violence against boys and men can be lessened. About a decade after Earinus was castrated, Emperor Domitian issued an edict against castrating boys. Both the Roman court poets Statius and Martial tell of Earinus being given to Domitian, Earinus’s castration, and Domitian’s edict against castration. But the way that both Statius and Martial contextualize Domitian’s edict against castration shows the social difficulty in recognizing castration culture as a grave moral wrong.

Fawningly praising Domitian, Statius offered no critical perspective on violence against boys and castration culture. Statius hailed Pergamum for delivering Earinus as a slave-boy to Domitian:

Pergamum, much more fortunate than pine-clad Ida,
though Ida allows herself to be pleased on a cloud of holy rape —
for surely she gave the high ones him {Ganymede} upon whom always
troubled Juno looks, recoiling from his hand, refusing the nectar.
But you have the gods’ favor by your beautiful nursling {Earinus}.
You sent to Italy a minister {Earinus} whom with kindly brow
Ausonian Jupiter {Domitian} and Roman Juno {Domitian’s wife} alike
view and both approve. Not without the will
of the gods is the lord of earth {Domitian} so well pleased.

{ Pergame, pinifera multum felicior Ida,
illa licet sacrae placeat sibi nube rapinae
(nempe dedit superis illum quem turbida semper
Iuno videt refugitque manum nectarque recusat),
at tu grata deis pulchroque insignis alumno
misisti Latio placida quem fronte ministrum
Iuppiter Ausonius pariter Romanaque Iuno
aspiciunt et uterque probant, nec tanta potenti
terrarum domino divum sine mente voluptas. } [1]

The god Jupiter forcefully abducted the beautiful boy prince Ganymede from Mt. Ida to be his cup-bearer and to have sex with him. Jupiter’s wife Juno was jealous of Jupiter’s affection for Ganymede. Domitian’s wife Domitia Longina evidently wasn’t jealous of Domitian’s slave-boy Earinus. Perhaps she was satisfied merely to live in the royal palace in a sexless marriage. According to Statius, the will of the gods is that Domitian, the lord of the earth, have the beautiful slave-boy Earinus.

Statius depicted the delivery of Earinus to Domitian and the castration of Earinus as acts of gods. The goddess Venus saw the boy Earinus playing before the altar of the god Aesculapius in Pergamum:

She sees that boy, a shining star of peerless beauty,
as he plays before the very god’s altar.
… “I
shall give this beauty the lord it deserves. Come now with me,
come, boy! I shall lead you through the stars in my winged chariot,
you a great gift to the leader. No common commands shall await you:
you should be a servant to honor in the Palace. Nothing, I myself
confess, nothing so sweet in all the world
have I seen or birthed. …
You, boy, are beyond them all; more beautiful is only he
to whom you shall be given.”

{ hic puerum egregiae praeclarum sidere formae
ipsius ante dei ludentem conspicit aras.
… ego isti
quem meruit formae dominum dabo. vade age mecum,
vade, puer. ducam volucri per sidera curru
donum immane duci, nec te plebeia manebunt
iura: Palatino famulus deberis honori. nil ego,
nil, fateor, toto tam dulce sub orbe
aut vidi aut genui. …
tu, puer, ante omnes; solus formosior ille
cui daberis. }

According to Statius, the Emperor Domitian as an adult was more beautiful than Earinus, castrated to prevent his beauty from fading through puberty. According to Statius, the physician-god Aesculapius himself gently castrated Earinus:

O you, under a lucky star
brought forth, the gods have favored you with much kindness.
Once, lest the first downy hair mar your shining cheeks
and darken the joy of your beautiful form,
your fatherland’s god himself abandoned lofty Pergamum to cross the sea.
Scarcely any could be entrusted to soften the boy,
but with silent skill the son of Phoebus {Aesculapius}
gently, with scarcely any shock of a wound, commanded
the body to pass beyond its sex. Yet anxious concerns
bite at Venus, fearing that the boy is feeling pains.
Not yet had the leader’s beautiful mildness begun
to keep males intact from birth; now to break a male’s sex
and change a person is forbidden. Nature rejoiced that only
those it created it sees. No longer under evil law
do servant-mothers fear the burden of birthing sons.

{ o sidere dextro
edite, multa tibi divum indulgentia favit.
olim etiam, ne prima genas lanugo nitentes
carperet et pulchrae fuscaret gaudia formae,
ipse deus patriae celsam trans aequora liquit
Pergamon. haud ulli puerum mollire potestas
credita, sed tacita iuvenis Phoebeius arte
leniter haud ullo concussum vulnere corpus
de sexu transire iubet. tamen anxia curis
mordetur puerique timet Cytherea dolores.
nondum pulchra ducis clementia coeperat ortu
intactos servare mares; nunc frangere sexum
atque hominem mutare nefas, gavisaque solos
quos genuit Natura videt, nec lege sinistra
ferre timent famulae natorum pondera matres. }

Even with the physician-god Aesculapius castrating Earinus, the love-goddess Venus fears that Earinus would suffer pains. Statius follows her sensible fear with praise for Domitian’s “beautiful mildness {pulchra clementia}” in forbidding the castration of male infants. Domitian’s mildness parallels Aesculapius’s gentleness in wielding the castrating instrument. Domitian with his beautiful mildness continues to have sex with his beautiful slave-boy Earinus. Such poetry, like today’s dominant claims about gender equality, induce vomiting in anyone with understanding.

Martial, another Roman court poet, only twice forcefully addressed castration culture, and in both instances he also flattered the Emperor Domitian. Martial wrote three epigrams playing technical poetic games with Earinus’s name. In three more epigrams, Martial celebrated Earinus dedicating to Aesculapius a lock of hair, a mirror, and a jeweled box. In one epigram, Martial dared to voice explicit male sexed protest:

As if it were too little an injustice to our sex
to have males prostituted for the people to defile,
the pimp also owned the cradle. Thus seized from mother’s breast,
the young boy wailed for his sordid pay.
Immature bodies were given unspeakable punishments.
Italy’s father {Domitian} did not support such horrors,
he who recently aided tender youths,
not allowing savage lust to make males sterile.
Boys, young men, and old men loved you
before, Caeser, and now infants too adore you.

{ Tamquam parva foret sexus iniuria nostri
foedandos populo prostituisse mares,
iam cunae lenonis erant, ut ab ubere raptus
sordida vagitu posceret aera puer.
immatura dabant infandas corpora poenas.
non tulit Ausonius talia monstra pater,
idem qui teneris nuper succurrit ephebis,
ne faceret steriles saeva libido viros.
dilexere prius pueri iuvenesque senesque,
at nunc infantes te quoque, Caesar, amant. } [3]

The hyperbole of the final couplet implicitly contrasts with Domitian’s continuing sexual love for castrated boys such as Earinus. In another epigram, Martial has the god Jupiter say to his boy-love Ganymede:

Our Caesar {Domitian} has a thousand ministers like you;
his vast palace can scarcely contain so many star-like boys.

{ Caesar habet noster similis tibi mille ministros
tantaque sidereos vix capit aula mares } [4]

In celebrating Domitian’s edict against castrating infant boys, Martial praised Domitian as “the world’s father, chaste prince {parens orbis, pudice princeps}.” Whatever merit Domitian had as the Roman Emperor, Domitian also had sex with many young boys, surely many of them like Earinus castrated to prolong Domitian’s pleasure with them.

Why did Domitian issue an edict against castrating infant boys? One speculation is that Domitian not only had sex with Earinus, but also loved and respected him. Earinus, from his place of royal favor and privilege, still recognized the horror done to him. Perhaps he understood that few other castrated infant boys could realistically hope for the royal favor and privilege that he had obtained. Earinus thus persuaded Domitian to ban castrating infant boys.[5] Rulers’ lovers, including slave girls, can have enormous influence on them. Yet this speculation requires Earinus to care generally about boys’ welfare. Right up to our day, very few women or men have shown compassionate concern for boys’ welfare. Unless Earinus loved as distinctively as Jesus Christ did, Earinus being castrated as a boy sex-slave probably didn’t save other infant boys from that horror.

Ugly self-interest more plausibly explains Domitian forbidding castration of infant boys. Writing in the second century, a Roman statesman and historian reported:

though he {Domitian} himself entertained a passion for a eunuch named Earinus, nevertheless, since {Roman Emperor} Titus also had shown a great fondness for eunuchs, in order to insult his memory, he forbade that any person in the Roman Empire should thereafter be castrated.

{ καίπερ καὶ αὐτὸς Ἐαρίνου τινὸς εὐνούχου ἐρῶν, ὅμως, ἐπειδὴ καὶ ὁ Τίτος ἰσχυρῶς περὶ τοὺς ἐκτομίας ἐσπουδάκει, ἀπηγόρευσεν ἐπὶ ἐκείνου ὕβρει μηδένα ἔτι ἐν τῇ τῶν Ῥωμαίων ἀρχῇ ἐκτέμνεσθαι. } [6]

The Roman Emperor Titus was Domitian’s brother. Perhaps hatred for his brother prompted Domitian to forbid castration. Roman emperors’ moral examples to their subjects probably also encouraged other elite Roman men to have boys castrated to serve them as sex slaves. Martial claimed that Roman cities favored Domitian’s edict against castration:

Cities offer thanks:
they have growing populations; to give birth is no longer wickedness.

{ gratias agunt urbes:
populos habebunt; parere iam scelus non est. } [7]

Martial suggests that giving birth to a male infant who would be castrated amounts to participating in wickedness. More abstractly, he suggests that having sexual intercourse of reproductive type in the context of castration culture is wickedness. Castrating males and encouraging sex of non-reproductive type tend to reduce cities’ populations. Obviously Martial is engaged in hyperbole. Yet societies historically have valued men instrumentally as workers and soldiers. Rulers’ interests in the welfare of their empires might well promote constraints on castration culture.

Domitian eventually freed his castrated slave-boy Earinus. No one knows why. Anyone awake surely recognizes that incredible lies and wickedness continue to exist among ordinary persons and elites. How can they be overcome? One can only strive to know the truth and try to act rightly. To exult that light has overcome the darkness, you must have faith.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• castration culture promotes vicious, jealous eunuchs as officials
• hateful castration culture: castrated Abelard disparaged & demeaned
• swan-song of Rome: Rutilius, On returning home / De reditu suo

Notes:

[1] For thorough study concerning Earinus’s life, Henriksén (1997).

[2] Statius, Silvae 3.4, “The Hair of Flavius Earinus {Capilli Flavi Earnini},” vv. 12-20, Latin text from Shackleton Bailey (2015), my English translation benefiting from that of id. Subsequent quotes from Statius are similarly sourced from Silvae 3.4.

Statius wrote Silvae 3.4 in 94 GC in response to Earinus’s request:

Earinus, our Germanicus’s free person, knows how many days I put off his request, when he asked me to dedicate in verse his hair, along with a jeweled box and mirror, that he was sending to Pergamene Asclepius.

{ Earinus praeterea, Germanici nostri libertus, scit quam diu desiderium eius moratus sim, cum petisset ut capillos suos, quos cum gemmata pyxide et speculo ad Pergamenum Asclepium mittebat, versibus dedicarem. }

Silvae 3, “Statius to his Pollius, Greeting {Statius Pollio suo salutem},” ll. 17-20. Statius most important work is his Achilleid, a work of men’s sexed protest. Achilleid and Silvae 3.4 are best read together. Russell (2014).

Perseus and the Latin Library have freely accessible Latin texts of Statius. Quinn (2002) provides English translations for Silvae 3.4 and relevant epigrams of Martial, along with a possessive note of symbolic capitalism. Mozley (1928) is a freely available source for all of Statius’s works, with English translation.

[3] Martial, Epigrams 9.7, Latin text from Shackleton Bailey (1993), my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and the commentary of Henriksén (2012). Subsequent quotes from Martial are similarly sourced. Other evidence suggests that Domitian was a sexual hypocrite. Charles & Anagnostou-Laoutides (2010).

Martial’s three epigrams playing poetic games with Earinus’s name (which doesn’t fit Latin poetic meter) are 9.11, 9.12, and 9.13. For analysis of the metrical subtleties of 9.11, Morgan (2016). Martial’s three epigrams on the dedication of Earinus’s lock of hair are 9.16, 9.16, and 9.36.

Classical scholarship has shown little critical concern about castration culture. Horrendous injustices of castration culture seem merely to invoke academic preciousness:

The figure of Earinus compels us — and Martial — to acknowledge that there were eunuchs in Martial’s readership, and that they were subjects in their own right, even if ideologically overlooked ones, and that we can attempt to reconstruct perhaps not what Earinus himself thought or felt as reader of Book 9 of Martial’s epigrams, but at least what Martial as author may have imagined him to have thought or felt.

Larash (2013) p. 10. A recent classics dissertation trumpeted minor adaptations of academic gender platitudes: “How the Eunuch Works” and “eunuchs are good to think with.” Erlinger (2016), title and p. 246 (in conclusion). Stevenson (1995) formulates academic research questions about eunuchs’ success in rising to high official positions.

[4] Martial, Epigrams 9.36.9-10. For reference to Earinus as a star-like boy, Statius, Silvae 3.4.26. The subsequent short quote is 9.5.2-3 (the world’s father, chaste prince).

[5] The central idea of this speculation is from Morgan (2017). I’ve filled in details.

[6] Dio Cassius, Roman History {Ῥωμαϊκὴ Ἱστορία} 67.2.3, Greek text and English translation from Cary & Foster (1914) vol. 8. On Domitian’s edict in relation to Dio Cassius’s description of legislation (68.2.4: “no man shall be made a eunuch {εὐνουχίζεσθαί}”) of the subsequent emperor Nerva, Murison (2004) pp. 348-55.

[7] Martial, Epigrams 9.5.2-3. Martial’s concern about general public welfare is a traditional basis for moral and sumptuary laws. That appears to be the direction of argument in Lewis (nd).

[image] The rape of Ganymede. Painting by Peter Paul Rubens. Made in 1636. Preserved as accession # P001679 in the Museo del Prado (Madrid, Spain).

References:

Cary, Earnest & Herbert B. Foster. 1914. Dio Cassius. Roman History. Loeb Classical Library 32. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Charles, Michael B., and Eva Anagnostou-Laoutides. 2010. “The Sexual Hypocrisy of Domitian: Suet., Dom. 8, 3.” L’Antiquité Classique. 79 (1): 173-187.

Erlinger, Christopher Michael. 2016. How the Eunuch Works: Eunuchs as a Narrative Device in Greek and Roman Literature. Ph.D. Thesis. Ohio State University.

Henriksén, Christer. 1997. “Earinus: An imperial eunuch in the light of the poems of Martial and Statius.” Mnemosyne. 50 (3): 281-294.

Henriksén, Christer. 2012. A Commentary on Martial, Epigrams, Book 9. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (review by Bret Mulligan)

Larash, Patricia. 2013. “Reading for Earinus in Martial, Book 9.” Paper presented at APA Annual Meeting, Seattle, 6 January 2013. Online.

Lewis, Juan. nd. “‘Ne spadones fiant’: Domitian’s emasculation ban: effectiveness and purpose.” Draft under consideration at Classical Quarterly.

Morgan, Cheryl. 2017. “Earinus: A Roman Civil Rights Activist?” History Matters: History brought alive by the University of Sheffield. Online.

Morgan, Llewelyn. 2016. “Sugar & spice & all things nice.” Lugubelinus:the marginalia of an easily distracted Classicist. Online.

Mozley, John Henry. 1928. Statius: With an English translation. Vol. 1 (Silvae, Thebaid I-IV), Vol. 2 (Thebaid V-XII, Achilleid). London, N.Y.: William Heinemann, G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Murison, Charles Leslie. 2004. “Cassius Dio on Nervan Legislation (68.2.4): Nieces and Eunuchs.” Historia: Zeitschrift Für Alte Geschichte. 53 (3): 343-355.

Quinn, John T. 2002. “Earinus the Eunuch: Martial (from Book 9) and Statius (Silvae 3.4): translation and notes.” Diotíma. Online.

Russell, Craig M. 2014. “The Most Unkindest Cut: Gender, Genre, and Castration in Statius’ Achilleid and Silvae 3.4.” American Journal of Philology. 135 (1): 87-121.

Shackleton Bailey, D. R., ed. & trans. 1993. Martial. Epigrams, Volume II: Books 6-10. Loeb Classical Library 95. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shackleton Bailey, D. R., ed. & trans, rev. by Christopher A. Parrott. 2015. Statius. Silvae. Loeb Classical Library 206. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015.

Stevenson, Walter. 1995. “The Rise of Eunuchs in Greco-Roman Antiquity.” Journal of the History of Sexuality. 5 (4): 495-511.

St. Agnes’ Eve — Ah, bitter chill it was! [1]

My beloved is mine and I am his;
he pastures his flock among the lilies.
Until the day breathes and the shadows flee,
turn, my beloved, be like a gazelle
or a young stag in the mountains’ cleft. [2]

{ דודי לי ואני לו הרעה בשושנים׃
עד שיפוח היום ונסו הצללים סב דמה־לך דודי לצבי או לעפר האילים על־הרי בתר׃ ס }

About the year 304, the son of Rome’s head administrator Symphronius fell in love with the young, beautiful Agnes:

Having seen her beauty,
held by his heart’s great love for her,
he chose her over all others as his own beloved one.
He believed himself to be fortunate and suitably honored
if he would succeed in having so beautiful a young woman
as his special sweet spouse for all the days of his life.

{ vidit speciosae,
Affectu nimio cordis suspensus in illa
Hanc sibi prae cunctis unam delegit amandam,
Se fortunatum credens et honoribus aptum,
Si tam praepulchra meruisset habere puellae
Dulcia per propriae tempus consortia vitae. } [3]

The son procured lavish gifts of gold and diverse gems from his father’s treasury, and he gathered many friends. Then he went to ask Agnes to marry him. With him before her with rich gifts in his hands and in front of all his friends, she categorically rejected him:

O death’s son, deserving perennial condemnations,
O crime’s tinder, you who despise the All-Mighty,
depart from me quickly, flee and go away.
Do not believe that you can pervert my pure
heart, to which has already come the sweet love of a far nobler
lover, whose beautiful sign of faith I bear
upon my brow as well as throughout my whole body.
He has signed me and bound me strictly to himself,
so that my mind should not presume to seek any other
lover, but rather learn to embrace him alone,
who is potent in all manliness and properly resplendent,
who is far above all divine and mortal ones.

{ O fili mortis merito dampnande perennis,
O fomes sceleris, contemptor et omnipotentis,
Discedens a me citius fugiendo recede,
Nec credas te posse meum pervertere purum
Cor, quod amatoris praevenit nobilioris
Dulcis amor, pulchrum cuius fidei fero signum
In facie summa necnon in corpore toto,
Quo me signavit strictimque sibi religavit,
Ne mea mens alium iam praesumpsisset amicum
Quaerere, sed solum complecti disceret illum,
Qui virtute potens omnique decore refulgens
Caelestes et mortales supereminet omnes. } [4]

Men have long endured a highly unequal gender burden of amorous rejection. While most men have experienced rejection in love many times, surely few have been called “death’s son” and been so harshly scorned. Men compete aggressively and sometimes even violently with each other for women’s love. But Agnes was in love with Jesus Christ himself. No mortal man can compete with Jesus Christ in loving a woman.

Symphronius’s son suffered greatly from Agnes’s brutal rejection of him. He groaned and grieved and languished in bitter sorrow. He went to bed and remained in bed, deathly ill. Physicians were unable to cure him. They eventually understood that he suffered from mortal lovesickness. The physicians told Symphronius of his son’s terrible disease.

Woke to the gender injustices that men endure, Symphronius became furious. He and his son followed the dominant, traditional Greco-Roman religion in contrast to Agnes’s Christianity. Symphronius thus ordered Agnes to become a Vestal Virgin if she wanted to remain a virgin. He didn’t merely issue this order as a Roman high judge. Symphronius also drew upon his seductive skills with women to make it effective. Agnes, however, fiercely refused to serve a non-Christian god:

so first subject to many artful temptations —
now being seduced by the mouth of the flattering judge,
now threats of the raging executioner —
she stood steadfast in her fierce strength,
and her body to harsh torture
freely offered, not refusing to die.

{ temptata multis nam prius artibus,
nunc ore blandi iudicis inlice,
nunc saevientis carnificis minis,
stabat feroci robore pertinax
corpusque duris excruciatibus
ultro offerebat non renuens mori. } [5]

Symphronius in response moved to match Agnes’s fierceness:

Then the fierce tyrant says, “If it’s easy for her
to bear the pain of crushing punishment,
and she spurns her life as worthless, still her chastity
as a vowed virgin is dear to her.
Hence into a common brothel I’ll thrust her,
surely so, if she doesn’t bow her head to the altar,
having asked pardon of Minerva,
a virgin-goddess whom she continues to despise.
All the young men will hurry there and
request her fresh flesh for their games.”

{ tum trux tyrannus: “si facile est,” ait,
“poenam subactis ferre doloribus
et vita vilis spernitur, at pudor
carus dicatae virginitatis est.
hanc in lupanar trudere publicum
certum est, ad aram ni caput applicat
ac de Minerva iam veniam rogat,
quam virgo pergit temnere virginem.
omnis iuventus inruet et novum
ludibriorum mancipium petet.” }

Not all young men are like that. Moreover, men deserve better than having sex with a prostitute. The truly Christian Agnes refused to have men pay her for sex. Symphronius in response ordered that Agnes stand exposed in a public square.

What is a man to do when he knows that a beautiful woman is naked in a public place? By her own free choice, Lady Godiva rode naked through Coventry. Peeping Tom shouldn’t have been killed for taking a look. The situation with Agnes was different. Agnes had been directly compelled to stand naked in public. Almost everyone responded rightly:

As she stands, the sorrowful crowd flees,
their faces averted, not being so insolent
as to look upon her awe-inspiring genital area.
One strong man shamelessly turns
his head toward the young woman, not fearing
to gaze with his lustful eyes upon her holy form.

{ stantem refugit maesta frequentia,
aversa vultus, ne petulantius
quisquam verendum conspiceret locum.
Intendit unus forte procaciter
os in puellam nec trepidat sacram
spectare formam lumine lubrico. } [6]

Many literature professors today teach students that the male gaze is a criminal act tantamount to rape. Sadly, even nearly two millennia ago a strong, young man suffered mortally for his male gaze upon the naked Agnes:

Look! A swift flame like a thunderbolt,
throbbing and burning, strikes his eyes.
Blinded by the blazing light, blown
down, his body shudders in the square’s dust.
His companions carry him, almost killed, from the soil,
weeping with words for one soon to be dead.

{ en ales ignis fulminis in modum
vibratur ardens atque oculos ferit.
caecus corusco lumine corruit
atque in plateae pulvere palpitat.
tollunt sodales seminecem solo
verbisque deflent exequialibus. } [7]

Yet death wasn’t the end of this young man’s life. Agnes was a warm-hearted Christian woman with compassion for men. Agnes saved this young man from death’s darkness and seeing only the horrors of hell:

they have reported that she was asked to pour out
prayers to Christ, so that Christ would restore light
to the guilty one laid low in death. Then the young man’s
life-breath was renewed and his vision made complete.

{ sunt qui rogatam rettulerint preces
fudisse Christo, redderet ut reo
lucem iacenti: tunc iuveni halitum
vitae innovatum visibus integris. }

Oh, Saint Agnes, you are a beautiful woman. Blessed are all men through your compassion for men!

Saint Agnes in going to her death appreciated men’s vigorous masculine vitality and defied historical brutalization of men’s sexuality. As her executioner approached, she boldly proclaimed:

I rejoice that such a more able one comes,
an impetuous, fierce, wild, armed man,
rather than if one would come limp and soft,
a delicate young man dripping with perfume —
such would waste me with the death of my chastity.
This, this lover now coming, I confess, he pleases me.
I will meet his in-rushing course half-way;
I will not delay my burning desire.
His whole hard blade into my breast I will receive;
I will draw the force of his sword deep into my heart.

{ exulto talis quod potius venit,
vesanus, atrox, turbidus, armiger,
quam si veniret languidus ac tener
mollisque ephebus tinctus aromate,
qui me pudoris funere perderet.
hic, hic amator iam, fateor, placet:
ibo inruentis gressibus obviam,
nec demorabor vota calentia:
ferrum in papillas omne recepero
pectusque ad imum vim gladii traham. } [8]

The executioner, respecting Saint Agnes’s fine mind, cut off her head rather than stab into her breast. According to Prudentius’s Passio Agnetis, the spirit of this wonderful woman, accompanied by angels, immediately rose into Heaven. Moreover, the world now lies beneath her feet, and from Heaven, Saint Agnes laughs at the world’s follies.

Vessel of election, vessel of honor,
flower of uncorrupted fragrance,
beloved of angels’ choirs,
your figure of honored chastity
you display through the ages.

{ Vas electum, vas honoris,
incorrupti flos odoris,
angelorum grata choris,
honestatis et pudoris
formam praebes saeculo. } [9]

The eminent Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan and one of most influential church officials of the fourth century, shows the gynocentric tendency against which Saint Agnes witnessed. Ambrose recounted how, after the machinations of her mother has caused Thecla to be condemned to wild beasts, the beasts adored Thecla:

Thecla changed even beasts’ nature through their reverence for virginity. For indeed readied to go to the wild animals, Thecla, while turning away from men’s gaze, offered her very vitals to a fierce lion. She thus made those who brought forth impure eyes to bring back pure ones. The beast was seen lying on the ground, licking her feet, with mute testimony calling out that it could not violate the body of the holy virgin. Thus the beast adored his prey, and forgetful of his own nature, had put on a nature that men had lost. You could see that by some transfusion of nature, men had put on wildness and were commanding the beast to savagery. The beast was kissing the virgin’s feet and so teaching what men owed to her. … The lions taught religion when they adored the martyr. What they taught was chastity, when they did nothing but kiss the virgin’s soles with their eyes turned to the ground, as if from awed reverence, not any male, not even a beast, should see the virgin naked.

{ naturam etiam bestiarum virginitatis veneratione mutavit. Namque parata ad feras, cum aspectus quoque declinaret virorum, ac vitalia ipsa saevo offerret leoni, fecit ut qui impudicos detulerant oculos, pudicos referrent. Cernere erat lingentem pedes bestiam cubitare humi, muto testificantem sono quod sacrum virginis corpus violare non posset. Ergo adorabat praedam suam bestia et propriae oblita naturae, naturam induerat quam homines amiserant. Videres quadam naturae transfusione homines feritatem indutos, saevitiam imperare bestiae: bestiam exosculantem pedes virginis, docere quid homines deberent. … Docuerunt religionem dum adorant martyrem docuerunt etiam castitatem, dum virgini nihil aliud nisi plantas exosculantur, demersis in terram oculis, tamquam verecundantibus, ne mas aliquis vel bestia virginem nudam videret. } [10]

Ambrose thus figured men in their sexual desires as worse than wild lions. Ambrose urged upon men the gynocentric norm of kissing women’s feet. Kissing his wife’s feet didn’t work out well for General Belisarius in sixth-century Byzantium. Dehumanizing men hurts men, corrupts relations between women and men, and ultimately destroys society.

In concluding his account of Saint Agnes, the learned Roman author Prudentius recognized with keen foresight the importance of Saint Agnes for men today. Saint Agnes looked with favor on the man killed for his male gaze. Her propitiating face led to his resurrection. Just as Saint Paul’s Christian teaching transforms Jacob’s dog-like sexuality into a sacrament, Saint Agnes redeems men’s impure passions:

O happy virgin, O new glory,
noble dweller in Heaven’s height,
on our impure outpourings turn
your face with its twin crowns.
The father of all has given you alone the power
to render even a brothel itself guiltless.
I shall be cleansed by the brightness of your propitiating
face, if you satiate my organ of passion.
Nothing is unchaste that you, blessed one,
deem worthy to view or with your gracious foot touch.

{ O virgo felix, o nova gloria,
caelestis arcis nobilis incola,
intende nostris conluvionibus
vultum gemello cum diademate,
cui posse soli cunctiparens dedit
castum vel ipsum reddere fornicem.
Purgabor oris propitiabilis
fulgore, nostrum si iecur inpleas.
nil non pudicum est, quod pia visere
dignaris almo vel pede tangere. } [11]

Men don’t kiss Saint Agnes’s feet. Her feet graciously touch men’s earthy humanity. Men surely deserve better than a brothel, and so Saint Agnes makes the brothel guiltless.

In asking Saint Agnes to fill his organ of passion, literally his liver {iecur}, Prudentius recast the ancient Greek male-goat song of Prometheus. Prometheus was a male prisoner who continually cried out about the injustices that he was enduring. The vital importance of Prometheus’s generosity and creative capacity was ultimately recognized. The head male god in charge of the cosmos Zeus, acting of course under the will of his wife Hera, had Heracles set Prometheus free. The freed Prometheus received a crown woven from the branches of the agnes castus tree. In ancient Greek ritual, the agnes castus tree is associated both with supporting sexual continence and promoting sexual fruitfulness. Prudentius, which in Latin literally means foresight, associated himself with Prometheus, which in Greek literally means forethought. By having Saint Agnes fill his liver, Prudentius gains the blessing of Saint Agnes on men’s sexuality.[12]

John Keats’s famous poem, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” romantically emplots Saint Agnes’s redemptive compassion for the male gaze. This poem centers on Madeline. She is a young woman living in a cold, sterile, gynocentric fantasy world. All the wintry day long through to St. Agne’s Eve (January 21), Madeline’s heart brooded:

On love, and wing’d St. Agnes’ saintly care,
As she had heard old dames full many times declare. [13]

Through their vital knowledge of medieval Latin literature, the old dames told Madeline about a particular ritual:

They told her how, upon St. Agnes’ Eve,
Young virgins might have visions of delight,
And soft adorings from their loves receive
Upon the honey’d middle of the night,
If ceremonies due they did aright;
As, supperless to bed they must retire,
And couch supine their beauties, lily white;
Nor look behind, nor sideways, but require
Of Heaven with upward eyes for all that they desire.

Twas said her future lord would there appear
Offering as sacrifice — all in the dream —
Delicious food even to her lips brought near:
Viands and wine and fruit and sugar’d cream,
To touch her palate with the fine extreme
Of relish: then soft music heard; and then
More pleasure followed in a dizzy stream
Palpable almost: then to wake again
Warm in the virgin morn, no weeping Magdalen. [14]

Madeline, not yet fully taught to be emotionally dead, “sigh’d for Agnes’ dreams, the sweetest of the year.” With faith and hope, she resolved to follow the ritual of St. Agnes’s Eve, as the old women told.

Porphyro, a figure of Prometheus, brought to Madeline the warmth of flesh-and-blood love. Porphyro in Greek means fire-bearer. He was a young man of fiery passion. Seeking for Madeline, he dared to enter her dark, dangerous, gynocentric castle. There he encountered Angela, an old woman and a long-time friend to both him and Madeline. Porphyro learned from Angela that Madeline was performing the ritual of St. Agnes’s Eve. A thought like a rose blooming came to Porphyro. He would hide in the closet in Madeline’s room, gaze upon her naked body, and then transform her dream into reality. Angela was horrified:

A cruel man and impious thou art:
Sweet lady, let her pray, and sleep, and dream
Alone with her good angels, far apart
From wicked men like thee. Go, go! — I deem
Thou canst not surely be the same that thou didst seem.

No dumb, fake angel, Angela came to understand. She agreed to help Porphyro make real the ritual of Saint Agnes’s Eve.[15]

After gazing upon Madeline naked, Porphyro watched her get into bed and go to sleep. Then he set about to make real her dream:

And still she slept an azure-lidded sleep,
In blanched linen, smooth, and lavender’d,
While he forth from the closet brought a heap
Of candied apple, quince, and plum, and gourd;
With jellies soother than the creamy curd,
And lucent syrops, tinct with cinnamon;
Manna and dates, in argosy transferr’d
From Fez; and spiced dainties, every one,
From silken Samarcand to cedar’d Lebanon.

These delicates he heap’d with glowing hand
On golden dishes and in baskets bright
Of wreathed silver: sumptuous they stand
In the retired quiet of the night,
Filling the chilly room with perfume light.—
“And now, my love, my seraph fair, awake!
Thou art my heaven, and I thine eremite:
Open thine eyes, for meek St. Agnes’ sake,
Or I shall drowse beside thee, so my soul doth ache.”

Madeline didn’t wake. Porphyro then got up and with a lute played for her the sad medieval song, “La belle dame sans mercy.” Madeline uttered a soft moan. Her blue eyes opened wide. Perhaps Saint Agnes’s witness of mercy toward the man who had gazed on her naked flashed in Madeline’s mind and stirred her heart and soul. Madeline spoke:

“Ah, Porphyro!” said she, “but even now
Thy voice was at sweet tremble in mine ear,
Made tuneable with every sweetest vow;
And those sad eyes were spiritual and clear:
How chang’d thou art! how pallid, chill, and drear!
Give me that voice again, my Porphyro,
Those looks immortal, those complainings dear!
Oh leave me not in this eternal woe,
For if thy diest, my Love, I know not where to go.”

Porphyro wrapped his arms around her and pressed his heart against her heart. They spent the night together in bed.[16] Then they escaped from the dark, cold, gynocentric castle and fled away together into the storm.

Saint Mary of Egypt, pray for us!
Saint Thais, pray for us!
Saint Pelagia, pray for us!
Saint Mary the Harlot, pray for us!
Saint Mary Magdalen, pray for us!
Saint Eugenia, pray for us!
Saint Agnes, pray for us! [17]

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• risus paschalis for Christmas: laughing with Sarah, begetter of Isaac
• martyrdom & fear of plague in Guillaume Du Fay’s O sancte Sebastiane
• sailing to old Pavia as Archpoet: an eternal truth about humanity

Notes:

[1] John Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 1.1 (cited by stanza.verse). Keats wrote this poem in 1819.

[2] Song of Songs 2:16-7, Hebrew text (Westminster Leningrad Codex) via Blue Letter Bible.

[3] Hrosvitha of Gandersheim, The Passion of Saint Agnes, Virgin and Martyr {Passio Sanctae Agnetis virginis et martyris} vv. 45-50, Latin text from Wiegand (1936) p. 238, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. Subsequent quotes from Passio Sanctae Agnetis are similarly sourced. Here’s a general account of Saint Agnes of Rome and her cult. Hrosvitha, like many women writers of the Middle Ages, had loving concern for men.

Writing in the tenth century, Hrosvitha for her Passio Sanctae Agnetis drew mainly upon an earlier epistle on the life of Saint Agnes. That epistle, written no later than the sixth century and known as Gesta Agnetis, was falsely attributed to Ambrose of Milan. The Latin text of Gesta Agnetis is available in Patrologia Latina 17 as Ambrosius Mediolanensis Incertus, Epistolae 1. For an English translation, Anonymous (1896) pp. 354-62 (translation by the South African Rev. Dr. Kolbe for the South African Catholic Magazine). For textual history and analysis of Gesta Agnetis, Poché (2015) pp. 208-19.

Literary scholarship on the life Agnes and other early Christian women martyrs shows a dispiriting trajectory of intellectual decay from the time of Hrosvitha and other brilliant, creative medieval thinkers to our day of academic gynocentric apparatchiks. Behold the deadening force of omnipresent scholarly orthodoxy:

how much female audacity could the late ancient church really tolerate? The answer seems clear enough: not much. The question of why is more intriguing but best approached, I believe, along routes both circuitous and digressive. This essay follows one such indirect path toward interpreting the particular “patriarchalism” of late ancient Christianity. …

I suggest that we take careful note of the masculine self-representation of fourth century Christian orthodoxy, recognizing further the distinctive assertiveness and ambiguity of the emerging Christian rhetoric of masculinity. The assertiveness of this masculinized speech illumines the competitive rhetorical economy within which it seeks to usurp the privileged maleness of the classical discourse. Its ambiguity constitutes both its vulnerability and its peculiar power — on the one hand introducing the uncertainty that demands constant reassertion, on the other hand allowing a “bending” of gender identity through which the strategies of both a feminized resistance and a masculinized hegemony can be mobilized simultaneously. …

Through the manipulation of the figure of the lion, the subjugating force of male sexual violence has not been defeated so much as sublimated. On one reading at least, the lion’s averted, feminized gaze continues paradoxically to restrain the virgin; the very gesture of honoring her — indeed, of freely mirroring her feminine subjugation — becomes itself the vehicle of her constraint.

Burrus (1995) pp. 25, 29, 33. That academia has not only tolerated but honored such work is ponderous, painfully testimony to our benighted age of ignorance and bigotry.

[4] Hrosvitha, Passio Sanctae Agnetis vv. 61-72. Hrosvitha toned down Agnes’s disparagement of Symphronius’s son in her source Gesta Agnetis. In the latter, for proposing marriage to her, Agnes called Symphronius’s son “fomenter of sin, nurturer of wickedness, pabulum of death {fomes peccati, nutrimentum facinoris, pabulum mortis}.” Gesta Agnetis 1.3. Latin text and English translation from Poché (2015) p. 210.

[5] Prudentius, Book about the Crowns {Liber Peristephanon} 14, The Passion of Agnes {Passio Agnetis} vv. 15-20, Latin text from Thomson (1949) vol. 1, p. 338, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. Subsequent quotes from Peristephanon, Passio Agnetis are similarly sourced. Clutching my Rosary offers an easily accessible Latin text and alternate translation of Prudentius’s Passio Agnetis. The subsequent quote above is from Passio Agnetis vv. 21-30 (Then the fierce tyrant says ….).

Prudentius (Aurelius Prudentius Clemens) was born in 348 GC in Spain. After serving as a government official under the Roman Emperor Theodosius, Prudentius retired in his 50s to devote himself to literature and prayer. Little else is known about Prudentius’s biography. On Prudentius’s life, Malamud (1989) pp. 274-5.

Prudentius regarded names as semantically significant. The name Symphronius is from Greek. It means literally “collected practical wisdom.” That name is appropriate in the context of Symphronius’s Roman office and actions. While Prudentius doesn’t specifically name Symphronius, his name may have already been well-known in the story of the Christian martyr Agnes.

The name Agnes comes from the Greek adjective ἁγνός, meaning “chaste.” The Latin word agna means “female lamb.” Pious representations of Saint Agnes often depict her holding a lamb. Prudentius, however, also associated Agnes with the she-wolf. In Peristephanon, Passio Agnetis v. 1, Prudentius declared, “The tomb of Agnes is in Romulus’s home {Agnes sepulcrum est Romulea in domo}.” Romulus, along with his twin Remus, were founders of Rome. Sons of Mars and a Vestal Virgin, Romulus and Remus were raised by a she-wolf {lupa}. Agnes herself was condemned to a brothel, literally a house of the she-wolf {lupanar}. Under gynocentrism, women tend to be figured as innocent lambs, and men as ravenous wolves. Prudentius defied that anti-men gender stereotype. Cf. Malamud (1989) pp. 289, 292.

[6] Peristephanon, Passio Agnetis vv. 40-45.

Following the line of literary scholarship that promotes mass incarceration of men and supports rape-culture culture, Leme reports in describing Passio Agnetis “one, who dares to violate the virgin with his sight, as if raping her with the gaze.” Leme (2019) p. 439. Professor Lilia Melani teaches students at CUNY Brooklyn that Anges was “condemned to be executed after being raped all night in a brothel; however, a miraculous thunderstorm saved her from rape.” According to Burrus, the judge “invokes the threat of rape” and “martyrdom may be identified with rape.” Burrus (1995) pp. 35, 36. According to Malamud, the judge condemning Agnes to work in a brothel provided “substitution of rape for death.” Malamud (1989a) p. 159. Sexually impovished men who hire sex workers should not without reason be charged with raping those sex workers. Literary scholars, like most persons, remain largely ignorant about the reality of rape.

Regarding Agnes’s verendus locus, Malamud stated:

Even the mention of her exposed genitals is avoided by the neutral periphrasis verendum locum.{ft. 11}
{ft. 11} The virgin in Palladius’ parallel account uses a similar periphrasis — she {Agnes} tells her suitors that she has a sore in a kekrummenon topon, “hidden place” (Palladius Hist. Lau. 65.3).

Malamud (1989a) p. 163. Within ne petulantius / quisquam verendum conspiceret locum (Passio Agnetis vv. 41-2), for verendum locum Thomson has “her modesty” and Malamud “the fearful place.” Thomson (1949) p. 341, Malamud (1989a) p. 163, Malamud (1989b) p. 291.

Underscoring modern philology’s structural gender bias, verendus locus in Passio Agnetis has been translated poorly. In Palladius, the reference to the virgin’s “hidden place {κεκρυμμενον τοπον}” might accurately be called a “neutral periphrasis.” However, verendus locus in Passio Agnetis is far from a neutral paraphrasis. In ancient Greek and Latin literature, in contrast to representations of men’s genitals, the genitals of young women are overwhelmingly represented as being extremely beautiful, like a rose. As many men have throughout the ages, the strong young man in Passio Agnetis desired to gaze upon the genitals of a young, beautiful woman. The correct English translation of verendus should recognize the powerful attractiveness of young women’s genitals to men, and men’s awe and reverence for young women’s genitals. The relevant meaning of verendus is clearly attested:

Neptune removed their mortal essenses,
Clothed them in majesty and awe, and changed
Features and names alike, the boy to be
Palaemon, and his mother Leucothoe.

{ Adnuit oranti Neptunus et abstulit illis,
quod mortale fuit, maiestatemque verendam
inposuit nomenque simul faciemque novavit
Leucothoeque deum cum matre Palaemona dixit. }

Ovid, Metamorphoses 4.539-42, English translation by A.D. Melville. Similarly:

Yet by my husband’s bones, badly covered in a hurried tomb,
Bones always to be revered in my mind

{ Per tamen ossa viri subito male tecta sepulcro,
semper iudiciis ossa verenda meis }

Ovid, Heroides 3.103-4, English translation (which I have adapted slightly, not concerning the word verendus) by James M. Hunter. In his Vulgate translation of Genesis 9:22 and Deuteronomy 25:11, Jerome used verenda to refer to men’s genitals. Jerome’s Vulgate thus insightfully evokes reverence for God and God’s blessing of the Jews in relation to men’s genitals. Malamud, following an anti-meninist direction of recent classical studies, interprets verendus locus in Passio Agnetis completely opposite to objective, philological truth. Malamud (1989a) pp. 161-4.

[7] Peristephanon, Passio Agnetis vv. 46-51. Prudentius uses alliteration to emphasize the thunderbolt striking the young man. My English translation uses alliteration similarly. The subsequent quote is from vv. 57-60 (they have reported…).

[8] Peristephanon, Passio Agnetis vv. 69-78. Malamud observed:

her final speech is disturbing enough to have evoked the dismay of Prudentius’ French editor, Lavarenne, who calls it a speech ‘shamefully lacking in innocence.’ More than simply lacking in innocence, Agnes’ speech makes it only too clear that she envisions her death as an explicitly sexual act, and one which she welcomes.

Malamud (1989b) p. 291; similarly, Malamud (1989a) pp. 169-70. The beheading of Agnes Malamud interprets within obfuscatory gynocentric idealogy concerning the regulation of sexuality.

[9] Adam of Saint Victor, Sequence venerating Saint Agnes, vv. 67-71, Latin text via Clutching my Rosary, my English translation. The Latin text and an alternate English translation is also available on Traditional Catholic Prayers. Adam of Saint Victor was a monk at the Abbey of St. Victor on the outskirts of Paris in the twelfth century. Mary, the greatly revered mother of Jesus, reportedly honored Adam of Saint Victor for his poetic work celebrating her.

[10] Ambrose, Archbishop of Milan, Concerning virgins, to Marcellina, his sister {De virginibus ad Marcellinam sororem suam} Bk. 2, para. 19-20 (chapter 3), Latin text from Patrologia Latinae 16.197-244, my English translation, benefiting from that of De Romestin, de Romestin & Duckworth (1896) in Nicene and Post-Nicene Fathers, Series II, Vol. 10 (alt. presentation). Ambrose wrote De virginibus in 377 GC.

In De virginibus, Bk. 2, Ch. 4, Ambrose tells of a virgin of Antioch. She was condemned to a brothel because she refused to honor idols. A man soldier, however, entered the brothel to take her place and help her escape. He was then martyred. Like many men killed throughout history, his name has been forgotten, and his sacrifice for women scarcely remembered. For a similar story, Palladius of Galatia, Lausiac History {Historia Lausiaca} 65.

[11] Peristephanon, Passio Agnetis vv. 124-33.  Cf. the priestly benediction of Numbers 6:22-6.

[12] On Prometheus receiving a crown, Athenaeus, Deipnosophists 15.13.672E-F, 15.16.674D. On the agnus castus plant in relation to Prudentius’s Passio Agnetis, Malamud (1989a) pp. 172-5, Malamud (1989b) pp. 292-4.

Malamud helpfully directs attention to Prudentius’s relation to Prometheus, but interprets that relation loosely and abstractly:

ambivalent Agnes, whose trials complete the garland of the Peristephanon, becomes the equivalent of Prometheus’ willow crown: the symbol of Prudentius’ mastery of the creative force of poetic binding as well as of the chains of the flesh from which he longs to escape.

Malamud (1989a) pp. 176-7. Alternately:

ambivalent Agnes, whose trials complete the garland of the Peristephanon, becomes the equivalent of Prometheus’ willow crown: a token of the competing claims of artist and God for ultimate textual authority, and a sign that Prudentius has attempted, with great and perhaps unconscious audacity, to reinscribe his relationship with the Christian God within a paradigm that promises the ultimate vindication of the artist.

Malamud (1989b) p. 296. Passio Agnetis is centrally concerned with Christian commitment, virginity, men’s sexuality, and martyrdom. Prometheus, like men persecuted for the “crime” of seeking women’s love (“seducing women”), was a prisoner-martyr. Prudentius’s conclusion to Passio Agnetis directly relates to its central concerns and fundamental issues in men’s lives.

Prudentius’s poetry is enormously ambitious. Not merely acting like a pagan poet casting his poetry out in a bottle onto the waves of the ocean, Prudentius imagined his words to be ultimately incarnated:

Prudentius, by effacing the distinctions between his own poem and first the inscription, then the painting, and ultimately the martyr’s body itself, gives the impression that what he describes is not bounded by any physical limitations.

Fielding (2014) p. 819. To Prudentius, poetic immortality meant bodily resurrection. Pelttari (2019). The bodily resurrection of Jesus, a fully masculine man, is a type for the bodily redemption that all men need today under gynocentrism. Prudentius had faith that, at least in the fullness of time, women and men who read his poems would realize it.

[13] Keats, “The Eve of St. Agnes,” 5.8-9. Subsequent quotes, unless otherwise noted, are from this poem. For accessible, critical perspectives on this poem, Chen (2019) pp. 216-58, Dorn (2017),  and Gilbreath (1986).

[14] In Keats’s final manuscript version of “The Eve of St Agnes,” the second stanza quoted above was between the published stanzas 6 and 7. Richard Woodhouse, a legal and literary advisor to Keats’s publisher John Taylor, objected to that stanza as well as to other aspects of the final manuscript version:

I do apprehend it will render the poem unfit for ladies, & indeed scarcely to be mentioned to them among the “things that are.”

Letter of Richard Woodhouse to John Taylor, September 12, 1819, from Rollins (1958) II.162-3, quoted by Stillinger (1963) pp. 208-9. That stanza was thus deleted from the published version of “The Eve of St Agnes.”

Sources for the St. Agnes’s Eve ritual describe a vision of one’s lover or husband. John Aubrey reported an account in a masque of the eminent English playwright Ben Jonson:

And on sweet Saint Agnes Night
Please you with the promis’d sight,
Some of Husbands, some of Lovers,
Which an empty Dream discovers.

From Aubrey (1696) Ch. XIII, Magick. Ben Jonson died in 1637, hence the ritual was known before then. Aubrey recounted that a woman testified to him that using a similar ritual, she saw her future husband. For later witnesses to the St. Agnes’s Eve ritual, Brand (1777) pp. 19-20.

None of the sources for the St. Agnes’s Eve ritual mention nakedness. Keats probably found that element in some account of the life of St. Agnes. For speculation that Keats read Sherling’s The Life of the Blessed St. Agnes: Virgin and Martyr in Prose and Verse, published in 1677, Chen (2019) pp. 232-4. Keats’s poetic insertion of ritual nakedness into “The Eve of St. Agnes” underscores the importance of St. Agnes’s saving intercession for the young man who gazed on her naked and was struck dead.

[15] Literary scholars have been more obtuse than Angela. In an enormously influential article, Stillinger described these stanzas as representing “peeping-Tomism.” Shrewdly perceiving and supporting gynocentrism, Stillinger confessed his gynocentric merit “in admittedly exaggerated fashion portraying him {Porphyro} as peeping Tom and villainous seducer.” Stillinger (1961) pp. 540, 546. Pathetic, boot-licking male anti-meninists have done enormous cultural damage.

John Keats himself suffered from internalized anti-meninism. In July, 1818, Keats confessed to his friend Benjamin Bailey, “When I am among Women I have evil thoughts.” In his copy of Richard Burton’s The Anatomy of Melancholy, Keats wrote:

There is nothing disgraces me in my own eyes so much as being one of a race of eyes nose and mouth beings in a planet call’d the earth who . . . have always mingled goatish winnyish lustful love with the abstract adoration of the deity.

Quoted in Stillinger (1961) pp. 546-7.

[16] Keats’s final manuscript version more directly communicated the physical intimacy that Madeline and Porphyro enjoyed:

See, while she speaks his arms encroaching slow,
Have zoned her, heart to heart, — loud, loud the dark winds blow!

For on the midnight came a tempest fell;
More sooth, for that his quick rejoinder flows
Into her burning ear: and still the spell
Unbroken guards her in serene repose.
With her wild dream he mingled, as a rose
Marrieth its odour to a violet.
Still, still she dreams, louder the frost wind blows.

“The Eve of St. Agnes,” final manuscript version of the last two verses of stanza XXXV and first seven verses of stanza XXXVI, quoted by Stillinger (1963) p. 210.

While lacking due concern for the structural gender bias in criminalizing men, Weiner perceptively observed:

We may question, at least at this point in the poem, Porphyro’s act of robbing Madeline of something she might have lost under more conventional circumstances, but the fact remains that, as his name and its associated imagery of fire suggest, he represents the only genuine warmth in the poem, the only one capable of melting the iced stream of Madeline’s cold and stagnant paradise.

The cold imagery associated with Madeline’s dream world and its guardian moon brings into focus what was for Keats the primary fallacy of the Edenic myth: its unwillingness to accept the potentialities for growth in a world of process because such a world inevitably involves pain. In her paradisal world, Madeline becomes “Blissfully haven’d both from joy and pain” (line 240), “Blinded alike from sunshine and from rain, / As though a rose should shut, and be a bud again” (lines 242-243). If she has no pain or rain in such a world, she also has no joy or sunshine; the blissful protection offered by this Eden is highly ironic since the only kind of bliss to be found in a world without joy is a stuporous insensitivity.

Wiener (1980) p. 123.

[17] A litany loosely modeled on the Litany of the Saints {Litaniae Sanctorum}. A Litany of the Saints was used in Christian liturgy in the sixth century under Pope Gregory the Great. In the Roman Catholic Church today, the Litany of the Saints is commonly sung during the Easter Vigil. According to the Order of Chants for the Mass {Ordo Cantus Missae} that Pope Paul VI issued in 1972:

saints and blesseds whose names appear in the Church’s Martyrology may be added “at the proper place (suis locis) in the Litany”; and it also allows for other petitions “suitable to the occasion” and in the form proper to the Litany to be added “at the proper place”.

From Fitzgerald (2008). The litany above has not yet been officially approved for liturgical use by any Christian church bureaucracy. All persons, however, are free to pray it, sing it, ponder it, meditate upon it, etc.

[images] (1) Porphyro realizing the ritual of St. Agnes’s Eve for Madeline. Central image from a triptych made by Arthur Hughes in 1856. Preserved as ref. # N04604 in the Tate (London, UK). (2) Eve. Painting by Lucas Cranach the Elder. Made in 1528. Preserved as catalog # 00286591 in the Galleria Uffizi (Florence, Italy). Reflecting the biblical unity of male and female, Lucas Cranach painted a similar picture of Adam.

References:

Anonymous. 1896. “More about St. Agnes.” The Irish Monthly. 24 (277): 350-364.

Aubrey, John. 1696. Miscellanies upon the following subjects. London: Printed for Edward Castle.

Brand, John. 1777. Observations on popular antiquities: including the whole of Mr. Bourne’s Antiquitates vulgares, with addenda. Newcastle upon Tyne: printed by T. Saint, for J. Johnson, London.

Burrus, Virginia. 1995. “Reading Agnes: The Rhetoric of Gender in Ambrose and Prudentius.” Journal of Early Christian Studies. 3 (1): 25-46.

Chen, Kang-Po. 2019. Rethinking the Concept of Obscenity: the erotic subject and self-annihilation in the works of Blake, Shelley and Keats. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Edinburgh.

Dorn, V Ron. 2017. ‘Balancing Act: Power in Both the Male and Female Gazes in John Keats’ “On the Eve of St Agnes.”‘ Owlcation. Online.

Fielding, Ian. 2014. “Elegiac Memorial and the Martyr as Medium in Prudentius’ Peristephanon.” Classical Quarterly. 64 (2): 808-820.

Fitzgerald, William. 2008. “The Litany of Saints in the Liturgy: About Adding Names of Saints and Blesseds.” Adoremus 14 (8). Available online.

Gilbreath, Marcia L. 1986. The Apocalyptic Marriage: eros and agape in Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes. M.A. Thesis (English, no. 6299). North Texas State University.

Leme, Fernando Gorab. 2019. “Prudentius’ Metamorphoses.” Pp. 417-443 in Paulo Martins, Alexandre Hadegawa, Joāo Angelo Olivia Neto, eds. Augustan Poetry: New Trends and Revaluations. Humanitas: São Paulo.

Malamud, Martha A. 1989a. A Poetics of Transformation: Prudentius and classical mythology. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 49. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Malamud, Martha. 1989b. “Making A Virtue of Perversity: The Poetry of Prudentius.” Ramus. 19 (1): 64-88.

Pelttari, Aaron. 2019. “The Reader and the Resurrection in Prudentius.” Journal of Roman Studies. 109: 205-239.

Poché, Eric. 2015. Agnes in Agony: Damasus, Ambrose, Prudentius, and the Construction of the Female Martyr Narrative. Ph.D. Thesis. Department of History, Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical College.

Roberts, Michael John. 1993. Poetry and the Cult of the Martyrs: the Liber Peristephanon of Prudentius. Ann Arbor: Univ. of Michigan Press.

Rollins, Hyder Edward, ed. 1958. Letters of John Keats. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Stillinger, Jack. 1961. ‘The Hoodwinking of Madeline: Scepticism in “The Eve of St. Agnes.”’ Studies in Philology. 58 (3): 533-555.

Stillinger, Jack. 1963. ‘The Text of “The Eve of St. Agnes.”’ Studies in Bibliography. 16: 207-212.

Thomson, Henry John, ed. and trans. 1949. Prudentius. Loeb Classical Library 387, 398. Vol. 1, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Wiegand, Sister M. Gonsalva. 1936. The Non-Dramatic Works of Hrosvitha: text, translation, and commentary. Ph.D. Thesis. St. Louis University.

Wiener, David. 1980. ‘The Secularization of the Fortunate Fall in Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes.”’ Keats-Shelley Journal. 29: 120-130.

In times of great worry, many have difficulty sleeping. The modern English word worry comes via Middle English werien, via Old English wyrġan, via proto-Germanic wurgijaną. These worry source-words mean choke and strangle, like a dog seizing a small, frightened duck and biting down on it and shaking it fiercely until it dies. Just so does the experience of worry feel to many today. How could anyone manage to sleep in such circumstances?

The learned Roman Prudentius included a Hymn Before Sleep {Hymnus ante somnum} in his poem cycle Days Linked By Song {Cathemerinon}. Prudentius began his hymn with a simple Christian evening prayer:

Come, sovereign Father,
whom none has ever seen,
and Christ, the Father’s Word,
and kindly Spirit

of this Trinity:
O one strength and power,
God from God eternal,
God from both is sent.

The day’s work has ebbed,
and the quiet hour has returned,
now is the turn of gentle sleep,
relaxing weary limbs.

The mind tossed by storms
and wounded by worries
drinks in its very depths
the cup of forgetfulness.

The power of oblivion
steals through all the body,
and leaves those suffering
no sense of bitter pain.

{ Ades, pater supreme,
quem nemo vidit umquam,
patrisque sermo Christe,
et Spiritus benigne,

o trinitatis huius
vis ac potestas una,
deus ex deo perennis,
deus ex utroque missus.

fluxit labor diei,
redit et quietis hora,
blandus sopor vicissim
fessos relaxat artus.

mens aestuans procellis,
curisque sauciata,
totis bibit medullis
obliviale poclum.

serpit per omne corpus
Lethaea vis nec ullum
miseris doloris aegri
patitur manere sensum. } [1]

This evening prayer assumes that one is able to fall asleep — to drink the cup of forgetfulness and be overcome by the the power of oblivion. But what if one, overwhelmed with worries and desires, cannot sleep?

Even when wanting sleep, bodily life may refuse oblivion and make demands. An ancient Greek poem from roughly 2600 years ago represents one woman’s personal circumstances:

The Moon is down,
the Pleiades also. Midnight,
the hours flow on,
I lie, alone.

{ Δέδυκε μὲν ἀ σελάννα
καὶ Πληΐαδες, μέσαι δέ
νύκτες, πάρα δ’ ἔρχετ’ ὤρα,
ἔγω δὲ μόνα κατεύδω. } [2]

Many men and women today personally understand these circumstances of sleeplessness and bodily loneliness. A poem from before the middle of the tenth century describes restlessness in bed and unsatisfying sleep:

For you my eyes are keeping watch, my soul at night requires you.
Subdued and laid low, my limbs lie alone with me in bed.
I have seen myself with you, a deceit in the imagination of sleep;
in dreams you appear, yet if only to me you would truly come.

{ Te vigilans oculis, animo te nocte requiro,
victa iacent solo cum mea membra toro.
vidi ego me tecum falsa sub imagine somni:
somnia tu vinces, si mihi vera venis. } [3]

In the first two verses, the poet speaks of his eyes, his limbs, and his soul. They are with him in bed, as if he were falling to pieces. The second two verses express frustration at experiencing life’s completeness only in dreams. Lucid dreaming isn’t a common experience of sleeping. Disappointment in thinking about one’s dreams is associated much more commonly with despair and sleeplessness.

Those who apprehend reality struggle to sleep with deceit. They feel compelled to seek their desires:

Nestled in bed, I was scarcely seizing night’s first
silence and giving my vanquished eyes to sleep.
Then savage Love grabbed me, pulling me up by my hair.
Love roused me, wounded, and ordered me to stay awake.
“You, my slave,” Love said, “you love a thousand young women.
How can you stiffly lie alone — goodness me, alone!”
I jump up with bare feet and bed-robe undone and enter
every way, but no way leads me out with what I need.
Now I rush, now to go grieves me, to return causes me
regret, and I’m ashamed to stand in the middle of the road.
Silent here are humans’ voices, the road’s rumbling,
the song of birds, the faithful pack of dogs.
I alone among all fear bed and sleep.
I follow your command, great god of desire.

{ Lecto compositus vix prima silentia noctis
carpebam et somno lumina victa dabam,
cum me saevus Amor prensat sursumque capillis
excitat et lacerum pervigilare iubet.
“Tu famulus meus,” inquit, “ames cum mille puellas,
solus, io, solus, dure, iacere potes?”
Exsilio et pedibus nudis tunicaque soluta
omne iter ingredior, nullum iter expedio.
Nunc propero, nunc ire piget, rursumque redire
paenitet, et pudor est stare via media.
Ecce tacent voces hominum strepitusque viarum
et volucrum cantus fidaque turba canum;
solus ego ex cunctis paveo somnumque torumque,
et sequor imperium, magne Cupido, tuum. } [4]

This isn’t a dreamy dream-poem. Although having loved a thousand women, this man is sleeping alone, wounded with lacerations. He feels himself yanked up by his hair. He has bare feet and his bed-robe is undone. From a Christian perspective, the traditional Greco-Roman love-gods Eros, Cupid, and Amor are deceits. But human voices, roads, birds, and dogs are real. So too is worry, desire, and sleeplessness.

Seeking to separate human spirit from fleshly life isn’t a propitious path to sleep. From a Christian perspective, Prudentius condemned Marcion for this heresy:

Marcion, shaped from utterly corrupted earth,
teaches dualists to disagree with the spirit,
offering up his gifts of tainted flesh
and worshiping everlasting power in separate shapes.
If he could heed warning and be still,
then quiet familial bonds could cultivate peace,
and acknowledge that the one God of the living lives.
But this man, an initiate of a transitory cult,
profanely divides the highest being,
separating good and bad, as if two gods could rule.

{ Marcion, arvi forma corruptissimi,
docet duitas discrepare a Spiritu,
contaminatae dona carnis offerens
et segregatim numen aeternum colens.
qui si quiescat nec monentem neglegat,
pacem quieta diligat germanitas,
unum atque vivum fassa vivorum Deum.
hic se caduco dedicans mysterio
summam profanus dividit substantiam,
malum bonumque ceu duorum separatis } [5]

With a telling figure, Tertullian more vehemently condemned Marcion:

Nothing about Pontus is so barbarous and mournful as that Marcion was born there. He is more repulsive than a Scythian, more wandering than the wagon-dwelling Sarmatian, more inhuman that the Massagete, more obnoxious than an Amazon, darker than fog, colder than winter, more fragile than ice, more treacherous than the Danube river, more coarsely precipitous than the Caucasus mountains. What else? How about that the true Prometheus, God Almighty, is lacerated by Marcion’s blasphemies. More uncivilized than the wild beasts of that barbarous land Pontus is now Marcion. Is any beaver more self-castrating than this man who has abolished marriage?

{ nihil tam barbarum ac triste apud Pontum quam quod illic Marcion natus est, Scytha tetrior, Hamaxobio instabilior, Massageta inhumanior, Amazona audacior, nubilo obscurior, hieme frigidior, gelu fragilior, Istro fallacior, Caucaso abruptior. Quidni? penes quem verus Prometheus deus omnipotens blasphemiis lancinatur. Iam et bestiis illius barbariei importunior Marcion. Quis enim tam castrator carnis castor quam qui nuptias abstulit? } [6]

The male beaver was thought to gnaw off his own testicles to save himself from hunters who sought to kill him for his testicles. Marcion was a dualist reflecting castration culture. He divided the god of human spirit from the god of human flesh. Yet, from the perspective of Jews, Christians, and Muslims, there is no god but God, and God is one. Humans are made in the image of God. The living human is one in spirit and flesh. A human will be restless until both spirit and flesh rest.

Prudentius urged bodily action and performative utterance in order to overcome worry and desire that prevent restful sleep. He counseled:

Worshiper of God, remember
that you have gone under the sacred water
of the source that cleanses,
that you have been marked with oil.

See that when sleep calls
and you go to your pure bed,
the symbol of the cross seals
your brow and the place of your heart.

The cross drives off all sin,
darkness flies from the cross:
with this sign consecrated,
the mind knows no storms.

Away with you, far away,
monstrous errant dreams!
Away with the deceiver
and his unceasing cunning!

Sinuous serpent,
by a thousand twisting paths
and tortuous tricks,
you stir up hearts that rest —

Go, Christ is here,
here is Christ: melt away!
The sign that you know well
condemns your crowd.

The tiring body is allowed
to lie down for a little while,
and even in our sleep
our thoughts will be of Christ.

{ cultor dei, memento
te fontis et lavacri
rorem subisse sanctum,
te chrismate innotatum.

fac, cum vocante somno
castum petis cubile,
frontem locumque cordis
crucis figura signet.

crux pellit omne crimen,
fugiunt crucem tenebrae,
tali dicata signo
mens fluctuare nescit.

procul, o procul vagantum
portenta somniorum!
procul esto pervicaci
praestigiator astu!

o tortuose serpens,
qui mille per meandros
fraudesque flexuosas
agitas quieta corda,

discede, Christus hic est,
hic Christus est, liquesce!
signum quod ipse nosti
damnat tuam catervam.

Corpus licet fatiscens
iaceat recline paulum,
Christum tamen sub ipso
meditabimur sopore. } [7]

Prudentius’s A Hymn Before Sleep is a lullaby for Christian adults. They must cross themselves to sleep. They must say the words they need to hear. Thoughts of Christ are hopes for the body and the spirit.

Once upon a time, scholars hoped that literary theory would renew the face of the earth. Yet even a promising new field of literary theory, meninist literary criticism, offers sleep only to the small group of scholars that study it. That’s no cause for worry. We can do all that we must do. We have all that we need.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• curing Encolpius’s impotence: Proselenos & Oenothea unlike Jesus
• Disciplina Clericalis: origin of counting sheep to fall asleep
• the Thracian filly & the original understanding of chivalry

Notes:

[1] Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon} 6, Hymn Before Sleep {Hymnus ante somnum}, incipit “Ades pater surpeme,” vv. 1-20, Latin text and English translation (modified slightly according to my poetic sense) from O’Daly (2012) pp. 172-3. For freely accessible online Latin text and English translation, Thomson (1949) and Pope (1895).

Prudentius wrote Hymnus ante somnum about 400 GC. Verses from it were subsequently used liturgically. A medieval liturgical hymn known as Ades pater supreme was made from Hymnus ante somnum:

It consists of lines 1-12, 125-8, 141-52, and a doxology: Gloria aeterno Patri, Et Christo, vero Regi, Paraclitoque sancto, et nunc et in perpetuum. {This} selection of lines was found as a hymn in a 10th-century hymnal from Laon, in northern France, now at Bern (S.B. 455). It is a hymn for Vespers or Compline, marking the end of the day

From The Canterbury Dictionary of Hymnology.

[2] This poem is conventionally known as “Midnight poem.” It’s attributed, without strong evidence, to the archaic Greek poet Sappho. The Greek text above is that of fragment 168 B in Voigt (1971). The English translation is that of  A.S. Kline, with my slight modifications. Many English translations of this famous poem are readily accessible. Here’s detailed analysis of it.

[3] “Te vigilans oculis” (quoted above in full) comes from a now lost manuscript, Codex Isidori Bellovacensis, that belonged to the cathedral library of St. Sylvius at Beauvais, France. That manuscript was written in the late ninth or early tenth century. Waddell (1948) p. 286. The Latin text is edited in Baehrens (1879) vol. 4, p. 100 (n. 103), where it’s attributed to Petronius. Heseltine & Rouse (1930), however, doesn’t include this poem among Petronius’s poems. The English translation is mine, benefiting from those of Waddell (1948) p. 23 and composer William Hawley.

Hawley used “Te vigilans oculis” as text for a motet. For readily accessible performances of Hawley’s motet, see those by Volti, conducted by Robert Geary (Innova, 2010), and by Choral Arts, conducted by Robert Bode (Gothic, 2013).

[4] Petronius Arbiter, incipit “Lecto compositus vix prima silentia noctis” (whole poem quoted above), Latin text from Heseltine & Rouse (1930) p. 424 (no. 26), my English translation, benefiting from those of id., Waddell (1948) p. 11, and aleator classicus. The Latin text is edited in Baehrens (1879) vol. 4, p. 98 (n. 99). Here are Latin reading notes for this poem.

Among those who manage to get to sleep, some experience delightful dreams. A poem from no later than the early-eighth century proclaimed to a dream-girl:

Beautiful of hair, young in years, and fair of face,
you sweetly gave me kisses in my sleep.
If now waking I cannot anywhere discern you,
sleep, I pray, hold my eyes together always.

{ Pulchra comis annisque decens et candida vultu
dulce quiescenti basia blanda dabas.
si te iam vigilans non unquam cernere possum,
somne, precor, iugitur lumina nostra tene. }

Latin text from Baehrens (1879) vol. 4, p. 118 (n. 131), via the Latin Library; English translation (modified slightly) from the Ancient Literature Dude, who provides an audio reading of this poem in medieval Latin. For other English translations, Waddell (1948) p. 21, and Rexroth (1967) p. 86.

This poem survives in two sources. One is the ninth-century manuscript cataloged as British Library Royal 15. B. XIX (fol. 99). That manuscript belonged at some point to the library of St. Rémy at Rheims. Waddell (1948) p. 286. In BL Royal 15. B., the poem includes the inscription, “To a young woman who was seen in a dream {ad puellam quam in somnis viderat},” and the poem is attributed to Virgil. In addition, Aldhelm (died 709), Abbot of Malmesbury and Bishop of Sherborne, cited this poem in his Letter to Acircius {Epistola ad Acircium} / On metrical feet {De pedum regulis}. Aldhelm attributed this poem to Ovid. Orchard (1994) pp. 214-5.

[5] Prudentius, The Origin of Sin {Hamartigenia}, Preface {Praefatio} vv. 36-45, Latin text from Thomson (1949), English translation (modified slightly) from Malamud (2011) pp. 5-6.

[6] Tertullian, Against Marcion {Adversus Marcionem} 1.1.4-5, Latin text from Evans (1972), my English translation, benefiting from that of id. To protect himself from castration culture, the fourth-century hermit Ammonas of Tunah reportedly followed the mythic example of the male beaver and castrated himself. Tertullian’s disparagement of Marcion probably would be censored today under Facebook’s code of conduct. Tertullian fortunately lived in a more liberal and tolerant age.

[7] Prudentius, Liber Cathemerinon, Hymnus ante somnum, vv. 125-52, Latin text and English translation (modified slightly) from O’Daly (2012) pp. 178-9. The above quotations runs to the end of Hymnus ante somnum.

[image] Suzy Bogguss, video performance of the southern African-American traditional lullaby Hush-a-bye / All the pretty little horses. Audio from Bogguss’s album American Folk Songbook (Loyal Butchess Records, 2011). Peter Paul and Mary recorded Hush-a-bye on their album In the Wind (Warner Bros., 1963). Grant Campbell performed this lullaby as a soundtrack for the horror movie The Burrowers (2008).

References:

Baehrens, Paul Heinrich Emil, ed. 1879-83. Poetae latini minores. 5 vols. Lipsiae: Teubner. Online: vols. 1 & 2, 3 & 4, 5.

Evans, Ernest, ed. and trans. 1972. Tertullian. Adversus Marcionem. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Heseltine, Michael and W.H.D. Rouse, eds. and trans. 1930. Petronius. Poems. Rev. Ed. Loeb Classical Library 15. London: Heinemann.

Malamud, Martha A. 2011. Prudentius. The Origin of Sin: an English Translation of the Hamartigenia. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press.

Orchard, Andy. 1994. The Poetic Art of Aldhelm. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pope, R. Matin, trans. 1895. The Hymns of Prudentius. London: J.M. Dent.

Rexroth, Kenneth. 1967. Poems from the Greek anthology. Translated, with an introd., by Kenneth Rexroth, with drawings by Geraldine Sakall. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

Thomson, Henry John, ed. and trans. 1949. Prudentius. Loeb Classical Library 387, 398. Vol. 1, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Voigt, Eva Maria, ed. 1971. Sappho et Alcaeus fragmenta. Amsterdam: Athenaeum-Polak & Van Gennep.

Waddell, Helen. 1948. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. New York: Henry Holt.

In northern France in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, men and women poet-singers known as trouvères composed lyric debates. This type of song, called the jeu-parti, involved two voices defending in alternate stanzas alternate responses to a question set out for debate in the first stanza.[1] Jeux-partis involving women trouvères depict significant aspects of women’s privilege in medieval France.

Like most women today, women trouvères in medieval France rarely assumed the emotional risk of soliciting an amorous relationship. A jeu-parti between Dame Margot and Dame Marote debates a case involving a woman and man who love each other dearly. The man dares not declare his desire to the women. The debate question is whether the woman should assume a man’s typical burden and declare her love to him. Dame Margot argues against the woman taking the initiative to establish an amorous relationship. Dame Marote argues for the woman taking the initiative.

In their arguments, both Dame Margot and Dame Marote recognize women’s privilege in relation to men. Dame Marote declares that “she should not be proud {pas ne doit cele estre fiere},” as if a woman telling a man that she loves him in some way injures her pride and lowers her worth. Dame Margot counters Dame Marote’s position, but confirms women’s privilege:

You are not heading the right way,
Dame Marote, I believe.
A lady makes a grave mistake in courting
her beloved first. Why
should she thus demean herself?
If he lacks courage,
I do not think it proper
that she should then solicit his love.
She should rather conceal her feelings
and suffer love’s pains
without ever disclosing them,
because a woman should have such high merit
that no word would come from her
that could diminish her worth.

{ Vous n’ales pa droite voie,
Dame Marote, je croi.
Trop mesprent dame ki proie
Son ami avant. Pour koi
S’aveilleroit elle si?
Se cil a le cuer falli,
Ne di jou pas k’il afiere
Por ce k’ele le reqiere,
Ains s’en doit chovrir
Et les fais d’Amours soufrir
Sans ja fiare percevoir;
Kar feme doit tant valoir
Que n’en doit parole issir
Ki son pris puist amenrir. } [2]

Underscoring that women equally sharing men’s burdens is inconceivable to gynocentric reason, Dame Marote argues that true love should make a woman act insane. While a sane woman would retain women’s privilege, a woman insane with love would take the initiative to solicit an amorous relationship. Dame Marote concludes:

Better it is to live in joy
for having pleaded than now to languish
for having been silent and then die.

{ Miex vient en joie manoir
Par proier q’adés langir
Par trop taire et puis morir. }

Dame Marote’s point seems indisputable. Yet many women today would rather be coerced into a having an abortion or even die rather than relinquish their gynocentric privilege.

Another jeu-parti between two women trouvères debates women’s preference regarding how men bear the burden of soliciting an amorous relationship. In this case, two knights both love one woman. One knight seeks to communicate his love through the woman’s friends. The other declares his love to her directly. According to women’s preference, which knight behaves better? One woman trouvère argues that a man who directly declares his love to her would make her seem shameful and weak. The other woman trouvère disputes that claim:

Sister, you are in error,
of that I do not doubt in the least.
When this one tenderly
humbles himself before you
and requests your loyalty,
you feel contempt for him.

{ Suer, vous estes en errout,
Je ne m’an dout mie.
Cant celui par sa dousor
Ver vous s’umelie
Et vos requiert loialteit,
Vos lou teneis an vitei. } [3]

As if that would justify him soliciting her love, the man humbles himself before the woman. In actuality, if he approached her as an arrogant jerk, she would more likely feel her loins tingle. Men must be learned enough to reject women’s privilege in prescribing how men should behave.

Women’s privilege prompts women to look down on men as if men were inferior human beings afflicted with “toxic masculinity.” A jeu-parti between two women trouvères debates whether a woman should allow a man to declare his love to her. One woman trouvère proposes listening to the man. College administrators evaluating sexual assault charges today generally reject the practice of listening to an accused man. But this medieval woman argues:

By listening to him you will be able to decide
if it pleases you to accept him or refuse him,
and you will know if he speaks wisely or foolishly.

{ Qu’en lui oiant porrez vous bien eslire
Se il vous plaist l’otroi ou le desdire,
Et si savrez s’il dist sens our folour. } [4]

What could be wrong with listening to a man? At least with respect to men, everyone isn’t required to listen and believe. Yet the other woman trouvère vehemently argues against even just listening to a man:

a woman should really not
listen to a man; she should rather fear
being seduced by the words she hears.
For men are consummate flatterers
and their arguments they so beautifully describe
that simply by listening to them she could well agree
to something that would quickly dishonor her.

{ fame ne doit mie
Home escouter, ains doit avoit paour
Qu’ele ne soit a l’oir engignie,
Quar home sont trop grant losengeour
Et leur raisons sevent tant bel descrire
Qu’en eulz oiant puet a cele souffire
Chose dont tost cherroit en deshonour. }

For women’s safety men must not be allowed to speak. That such ridiculous claims about women’s safety are taken seriously exemplifies women’s privilege.

Medieval scholars have recognized that these women-exclusive jeux-partis closely engage relational reality. One eminent medieval scholar observed:

it is the practical, level-headed outlook of both {women} speakers, calculating the respective roles of the emotions and social niceties, which is notable. Even if these debates are about questions of love, they are not romantic, or erotic, lyrics. … The jeux-partis were among the games devised for that {mixed-sex castle} hall, diverstissements of a society that thought such topics up in order to amuse as well as wittily to provoke. Yet the range and subtlety of emotion and argument that we glimpse in some of the debates involving women suggest something more. Here were poets who, even if they lived lightly — at least in the imagination — could also reflect searchingly. [5]

One doesn’t need to reflect searchingly to recognize women’s privilege in the jeux-partis involving women. Two knights seek one woman’s love. One is rich and worthy, the other is wise and worthy. Which man should the woman choose? A woman again has the choice of two knights. One extensively offers his warrior skills in knightly combat. The other generously shares his money and goods. Which man should the woman choose? Between an arrogant knight and a quarrelsome knight, which man should a woman choose?[6] Men’s choices are much more narrow than women’s choices. Men are burdened with responsibilities while women are privileged with choices.

At least medieval women recognized women’s privilege and men’s hardships. Regarding men’s sexual labor for women, one woman trouvère frankly observes:

You know full well that back pain sets in
that keeps old men from laboring as long.
Beyond the age of forty, he does nothing but decline;
he is then hardly suited to partake in pleasure.

{ You saveis bien ke li maus tient en rains,
Dont li vielars an sont ovriers dou moins;
Puis .xl. ans ne fait hons fors c’aleir,
Pou vaut on puis por deduit demeneir. } [7]

Men’s sexual service to women is a matter of life and death, yet it’s often undervalued, disparaged, and criminalized. Men deserve more choices in how they sexually serve women. Men deserve reproductive freedom. Women’s special privilege must end. Women and men must share equally privileges and hardships.[8]

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• misdirected chivalry in Guillelma de Rosers & Lanfranc Cigala’s tenso
• medieval wife’s sexual entitlement banged against her husband’s love
• women competing with men prompts men’s self-abasement & weakness

Notes:

[1] Jeux-parti typically have six stanzas. The final stanza often appeals to an external judge for a decision regarding the winning position. For extensive discussion of the historical definition of jeu-parti, Mason (2018) Ch. 1. Debate poems in Old Occitan are known as tensos or partimens.

Trouvères composed and performed jeux-partis primarily in Arras in northern France in the thirteenth century. Arras was a center of commercial trade and artistic activity. The trouvères of Arras were associated with the literary academia Puy d’Arras. On Arras in relation to jeux-partis, Barker (2013) pp. 6-9, 52. About 175 jeux-partis have survived, 60% of which come from Arras. Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 73  (total number 182), Barker (2013) p. 4 (total number 170), p. 52, n. 92 (Arras share 60%, citing Symes estimate).

Most surviving jeux-partis involve only men trouvères. Mason (2018) p. 298. Jeux-partis in which women trouvères participate as debaters have survived mainly in the Oxford Chansonnier (Oxford, Bodleian Library, MS Douce 308), known by the siglum I.

Jeux-partis could be aggressive contests, but such symbolic violence has far different effects on human lives than does actual violence. In medieval Europe, elite men had a life expectancy nine years less than that of women. Medieval literature depicts horrific violence against men. The enormous masculine gender protrusion in suffering violent injury and death reflects in part women’s privilege.

Literary scholars have tended to ignore and trivialize the reality of violence against men. Mason’s thesis, for example, shows no awareness of the actual gendered facts about violent victimization. In accordance with prevailing academic fashion, Mason suggests violence against men is about misogyny and the exclusion of women:

In applying the metaphor of single combat to the jeu-parti, Jeanroy, Fiset and Nicod invoked the homosociality of combat prevalent in Europe before the First World War. The paradigm of the duel is demonstrably at work in the ‘footnote quarrels’ of German and French musicologists at the start of the twentieth century, whose blows and counterblows in their retaliatory publications and footnotes are reminiscent of verbal sparring. Jeanroy, Fiset and Nicod defined the jeu-parti as a combative, robustly masculine genre, in which poetic skill could be equated with bravura and violence. The misogyny of late romantic duellers could map neatly onto the subject of many dilemma questions in jeux-partis: how best to please one’s Lady. In defining the genre in this way, women were excluded as possible interlocutors and, as a result, the genre has since been treated as principally masculine.

Mason (2018) p. 54. Women, including during the First World War, have played a important role in promoting violence against men. Men and women scholars should show more love for men and less eagerness to please “the Lady.”

[2] Dame Margot & Dame Maroie, Jeu-parti, “I entreat you, Lady Maroie {Je vous pri, dame Maroie}” st. 3 (vv. 29-42), Old French text (Picard dialect) and English translation (with my modifications to follow the Old French more closely) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 76. Within this jeu-parti, Dame Maroie is subsequently called Dame Marote. I use the latter name consistently above. The previous short quote above is similarly from v. 22; the subsequent quote above is vv. 82-4 (ending stanza 6 of 6). Here’s a performance of “Je vous pri, dame Maroie” by Musiktheater Dingo (2012).

Many women today have never contacted an man, expressed amorous interest in him, and invited him to dinner and evening entertainment, with the clear understanding that she would pay for the cost of the whole evening. Of course the man for a variety of reason might reject the woman’s proposal. Most men have many times had the experience of paying for dates and being romantically rejected. Today is long past the time for women to share that experience equally.

[3] Lorete & Suer, Jeu-parti, “Lorete, sister, in the name of love {Lorete, suer, par amor}” vv. 57-62 (from st. 5 of 5), Old French text (Lorraine dialect) and English translation (with my modifications) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 80. This jeu-parti survives only in the Oxford Chansonnier. The 26 jeux-partis in that chansonnier have been dated to 1310. Barker (2013) p. 43.

[4] Sainte des Prez & Dame de la Chaucie, Jeu-parti, “What shall I do, Lady of Chaucie {Que ferai je, dame de la Chaucie},” vv. 12-4 (from st. 2 of 5), Old French text (Lorraine dialect) and English translation (with my modifications) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 81. The subsequent quote above is similarly from id. vv. 15-21 (in st. 3).

The woman trouvère who opposes the man making known his love through the woman’s friends figures a man acting that way as being like Renart the Fox:

he is Renart the Fox,
who pursues his intrigue until he has seized his prey.

{ s’est Renars li Werpis,
Ke quiert ses tors tant ke il soit saixis. }

Id. vv. 64-5. The man trobairitz Pèire de Bossinhac in his song “Quan lo dous temps d’abril” uses Renart as a figure of being shrewdly vengeful. See note [7] in my post on medieval women’s strong, independent sexuality.

[5] Dronke (2007) pp. 330, 335. Dronke concludes with flattery for gynocentric authority:

And it certainly looks as if some of these poets — perhaps indeed, the most perceptive of them — were themselves women.

Id. p. 335. Similarly conforming to academic orthodoxy, Barker concludes her chapter on women’s desire with gynocentric panegyric: “these feminine voices are able to carve out space in which they resist the pressure to conform.” Barker (2013) p. 313.

[6] The four jeux-parti described in the above paragraph (in order of description above, with page citations in Quinby et al. (2001) are: Dame & Rolant de Reims, “Advise me, Rolant, I entreat you {Concilliés moi, Rolan, je vous an pri},” pp. 87-8; Dame & Rolant de Reims, “Dear lady, do respond {Douce dame, respondex},” pp. 89-1; Dame & Rolant de Reims, “Dear lady, I would gladly {Douce dame, volantiers},” pp. 92-4; and Dame & Perrot de Beaumarchais, “Dear lady, let this one be your call {Douce dame, ce soit en vos nomer},” pp. 97-8.

[7] Dame & Sire, Jeu-parti, “Tell me, lady, who has better discharged his debt {Dites, dame, li keilz s’aquitait muelz},” vv. 29-32 (from st. 4 of 5), Old French text (Lorraine dialect) and English translation (with my modifications) from Doss-Quinby et al. (2001) p. 104.

[8] The term “women’s privilege is preferable to “female privilege.” Infants in laughing, crying, pooping, sleeping, etc., typically do not act with gender privilege. Gender privilege emerges through human development. Brothers and sisters as children, however, can experience analogues of women’s privilege. Consider, for example, the childhood experience of U.S. politician Joe Biden:

According to Biden’s own words his sister regularly beat him in his childhood and adolescence. “And I have the bruises to prove it,” he said, at a senate hearing on violence against women, December 11, 1990. To make sure the audience knew this wasn’t a joke, he added, “I mean that sincerely. I am not exaggerating when I say that.”
…
In Biden’s brief tell-all, he acknowledged that the beatings he received were condoned and sanctioned by his parents, and that he was prevented from defending himself; That he was literally, in fact, powerless to make the abuse stop.

“In my house,” he stated, “being raised with a sister and three brothers, there was an absolute. It was a nuclear sanction, if under any circumstances, for any reason –even self defense– you ever touched your sister, not figuratively, literally.”

“My sister, who is my best friend, my campaign manager, my confidante,” he continued, “grew up with absolute impunity in our household.”

From Elam (2010). While such behavior should be a matter of serious social concern, “women’s privilege” seems to me nonetheless a more reasonable term than “female privilege.”

[image] Women occupying the castle of love from above assail men confined outside the castle and besieging it. Excerpt from design on a side panel of an elephant ivory coffret made in Paris between 1310 and 1330. Preserved as accession # 17.190.173a, b; 1988.16 in The Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York City, USA). Gift of J. Pierpont Morgan, 1917; The Cloisters Collection, 1988. Image derived from an image that the Metropolitan Museum has made available under a public spirited public domain dedication (CCO license).

References:

Barker, Camilla. 2013. Dialogue and Dialectic in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Occitan and Old French Courtly Lyric and Narrative. Ph.D. Thesis, King’s College, London.

Doss-Quinby, Eglal, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubery. 2001. Songs of the Women Trouvères. New Haven: Yale University Press. (review by Carol Symes)

Dronke, Peter. 2007. “Women’s Debates in Medieval French Lyric.” Ch. 18 (pp. 323-336) in Dronke, Peter. Forms and Imaginings: from antiquity to the fifteenth century. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

Elam, Paul. 2010. “VAWA — Corrupt Law and Joe Biden’s Abusive Sister.” A Voice For Men. Online.

Mason, Joseph W. 2018. Melodic Exchange and Musical Violence in the Thirteenth-Century jeu-parti. D. Phil. Thesis, Faculty of Music Lincoln College, Oxford.

About two millennia ago, the tyrant Herod heard that a boy had been born who would overthrow tyranny’s reign. Herod’s primitive surveillance method wisely didn’t reveal the boy’s location. The learned Roman poet Prudentius four centuries later wrote:

Crazed at the news, the tyrant shouts:
“My successor looms, I’m thrown out —
guards, go, take your swords,
drench the cradles in blood!

Every male infant shall die:
search the nurses’ bosoms,
and at his mother’s breast,
redden your sword with boy’s blood.

I suspect all who have given birth
in Bethlehem. They’re traitors,
underhand, ready to smuggle
their baby boys to safety.”

{ exclamat amens nuntio,
“successor instat, pellimur:
satelles, i, ferrum rape,
perfunde cunas sanguine!

mas omnis infans occidat,
scrutare nutricum sinus
interque materna ubera
ensem cruentet pusio.

suspecta per Bethlem mihi
puerperarum est omnium
fraus, ne qua furtim subtrahat
prolem virilis indolis.” } [1]

Women in the ancient world strove to save the boys. They failed:

Therefore the executioner,
crazed, sword drawn,
stabs the new-born bodies,
gashes the baby lives.

The killer can hardly find
space in the tiny limbs
for the cutting stab to penetrate,
the dagger is bigger than the throat.

O savage sight! A head
dashed on the stones
scatters the milk-white brains,
vomits the eyes from the wound.

Or a quivering infant is thrown
into the depths of the stream,
down there, his tiny throat gasps,
water with breath chokes him.

{ Transfigit ergo carnifex
mucrone destricto furens
effusa nuper corpora,
animasque rimatur novas.

Locum minutis artubus
vix interemptor invenit,
quo plaga descendat patens
iuguloque maior pugio est.

O barbarum spectaculum!
inlisa cervix cautibus
spargit cerebrum lacteum
oculosque per vulnus vomit.

Aut in profundum palpitans
mersatur infans gurgitem,
cui subter artis faucibus
singultat unda et halitus. }

A few decades later, the learned Roman poet Sedulius, writing in epic meter, invoked a simile before going on to describe the slaughter of boys and their mothers’ grief:

Groaning over the criminal deed snatched from him, like a voracious lion
from whose mouth a tender lamb suddenly slips free,
and who then launches an assault on the entire flock and mauls and rends
the soft animals, as the new mothers all trembling call for
their offspring in vain and fill the empty breezes with their bleatings,
even so Herod was provoked because Christ had been taken away from him,
and he kept on dashing to the ground and slaying masses of infants,
fierce in his unwarranted murder. …
Killing them at their first cries and daring to
perpetrate wickedness beyond number, he slaughtered boys
by the thousands and give a single lament to many mothers.
This one tore out her mangled hair from her bare scalp,
that one scored her cheeks. Another beat her bared breast with fists.
One unhappy mother, now a mother no longer,
bereft, pressed her breast to her son’s cold mouth — in vain.

{ Ereptumque gemens facinus sibi, ceu leo frendens,
Cuius ab ore tener subito cum labitur agnus,
In totum movet arma gregem manditque trahitque
Molle pecus — trepidaeque vocant sua pignera fetae
Nequiquam et vacuas implent balatibus auras —
Haut secus Herodes Christo stimulatus adempto
Sternere conlisas paruorum strage catervas
Inmerito non cessat atrox. …
primosque necans vagitus et audens
Innumerum patrare nefas puerilia mactat
Milia plangoremque dedit tot matribus unum.
Haec laceros crines nudato vertice rupit,
Illa genas secuit, nudum ferit altera pugnis
Pectus et infelix mater (nec iam modo mater)
Orba super gelidum frustra premit ubera natum. } [2]

This massacre was a brutal gendercide of boys. Like calling the massacre of the men of Shechem “the rape of Dinah,” calling Herod’s massacre of innocent boys “the Massacre of the Innocents” misrepresents the actual gender structure of violence.

In 1611, the enormously influential King James translation of the Gospel of Matthew obscured gender in this massacre of innocent boys. The King James Bible told of Herod ordering the massacre of “children”:

Then Herod, when he saw that he was mocked of the wise men, was exceeding wroth, and sent forth, and slew all the children that were in Bethlehem, and in all the coasts thereof, from two years old and under, according to the time which he had diligently enquired of the wise men.

{ tunc Herodes videns quoniam inlusus esset a magis iratus est valde et mittens occidit omnes pueros qui erant in Bethleem et in omnibus finibus eius a bimatu et infra secundum tempus quod exquisierat a magis

τότε Ἡρῴδης ἰδὼν ὅτι ἐνεπαίχθη ὑπὸ τῶν μάγων ἐθυμώθη λίαν καὶ ἀποστείλας ἀνεῖλεν πάντας τοὺς παῖδας τοὺς ἐν Βηθλέεμ καὶ ἐν πᾶσι τοῖς ὁρίοις αὐτῆς ἀπὸ διετοῦς καὶ κατωτέρω κατὰ τὸν χρόνον ὃν ἠκρίβωσεν παρὰ τῶν μάγων } [3]

The underlying Greek word for those killed is the accusative plural for the substantive παῖς, which is cognate with the Latin puer. Both those words predominately imply “boy.” Moreover, Matthew almost surely was addressed to Jews pondering the significance of Jesus. A genealogy begins Matthew and roots Jesus in Jewish history. That genealogy lists Jacob as the father of Joseph, the husband of Mary, the mother of Jesus. Joseph led Jesus and Mary into Egypt to save Jesus from Herod’s massacre. For Jews, Herod’s massacre and Joseph going to Egypt would have evoked the Pharaoh’s government and the Pharaoh’s order to the Hebrew midwives and then to all his people to kill all newly born Hebrew boys:

When you serve as midwife to the Hebrew women, and see them upon the birthstool, if it is a son, you shall kill him; but if it is a daughter, she shall live.

Every son that is born to the Hebrews you shall cast into the Nile, but you shall let every daughter live. [4]

{ וַיֹּאמֶר בְּיַלֶּדְכֶן אֶת־הָֽעִבְרִיֹּות וּרְאִיתֶן
עַל־הָאָבְנָיִם אִם־בֵּן הוּא וַהֲמִתֶּן אֹתֹו
וְאִם־בַּת הִיא וָחָֽיָה

וַיְצַ֣ו פַּרְעֹ֔ה לְכָל־עַמֹּ֖ו לֵאמֹ֑ר כָּל־הַבֵּ֣ן הַיִּלֹּ֗וד הַיְאֹ֨רָה֙
תַּשְׁלִיכֻ֔הוּ וְכָל־הַבַּ֖ת תְּחַיּֽוּן׃ ס }

A Jewish Christian writing Matthew would regard Jesus as the fulfillment of Hebrew scripture. Joseph taking Jesus into Egypt to escape Herod’s massacre would have been understood as paralleling Moses escape from the Pharaoh’s massacre of Hebrew boys and the Jewish people’s flight from Egypt. The learned Roman authors Prudentius, Sedulius, and Macrobius understood Herod’s massacre to have targeted boys.[5] Both linguistic and contextual evidence convincingly indicates that Matthew described Herod ordering gendercide. According to the best reading of Matthew, Herod ordered a massacre of innocent boys.[6]

Prior to the more repressive gynocentrism of the modern era, medieval authorities openly acknowledged the gynocentrism of Christian society. Writing about 885, Notker of St. Gall composed a poignant interior monologue for the eminent Jewish woman Rachel. She was the beloved wife of Jacob (Israel) and the mother of Joseph and Benjamin. Notker apparently thought deeply about Matthew’s description of Herod’s massacre of innocent boys:

Then was fulfilled what had been spoken through the prophet Jeremiah: “A voice was heard in Ramah, wailing and loud lamentation, Rachel weeping for her children; she refused to be consoled, because they were no more.”

{ τότε ἐπληρώθη τὸ ῥηθὲν διὰ Ἰερεμίου τοῦ προφήτου λέγοντος: φωνὴ ἐν Ῥαμὰ ἠκούσθη κλαυθμὸς καὶ ὀδυρμὸς πολύς Ῥαχὴλ κλαίουσα τὰ τέκνα αὐτῆς καὶ οὐκ ἤθελεν παρακληθῆναι ὅτι οὐκ εἰσίν } [7]

Here Rachel is weeping for “children,” as represented by the accusative plural for the substantive τέκνον. The central meaning of that word is child, irrespective of sex. Rachel herself, however, didn’t give birth to any female children. The prophet Jeremiah, whom Matthew cited, invoked Rachel more abstractly as the mother of the children of Israel. Jeremiah chided Rachel for her weeping. He prophesied that a day would come when a woman would protect a man:

How long will you waver, O faithless daughter? For the Lord has created a new thing on the earth: woman protects man. [8]

{ עַד־מָתַי֙ תִּתְחַמָּקִ֔ין הַבַּ֖ת הַשֹּֽׁובֵבָ֑ה כִּֽי־בָרָ֨א יְהוָ֤ה
חֲדָשָׁה֙ בָּאָ֔רֶץ נְקֵבָ֖ה תְּסֹ֥ובֵֽב גָּֽבֶר׃ ס }

Women must not merely weep in sorrow for themselves. Women must do more to save men’s lives and to prevent wars.

In his sequence entitled “A virgin crying about a martyr {De uno martyre virgo plorans},” Notker depicted Rachel’s extraordinary concern for miserable men. Notker’s sequence begins:

Why do you, virgin

mother, cry,
lovely Rachel
whose face
delights Jacob?

As if your little sister’s
moistened eyes would please him!

Wipe dry, mother,
your flowing eyes.
How could be worthy of you
water-cracked cheeks?

{ Quid tu, virgo

mater, ploras,
Rachel formosa,
Cuius vultus
Jacob delectat?

Ceu sororis aniculae
Lippitudo eum iuvet!

Terge, mater,
fluentes oculos.
Quam te decent
genarum rimulae? } [9]

The reference to Rachel as a virgin mother associates her across time with the Virgin Mary, mother of Jesus. Rachel competed successfully with her sister Leah for Jacob’s heart-felt love. Yet in this sequence, Rachel displays the insecurity of a woman appreciating the importance of woman’s beauty to men. So incomprehensible in today’s thinking, Rachel sought to please her man’s gaze, and she was concerned to retain his affection.

Another voice within Rachel’s self-consciousness speaks differently. That voice laments to herself:

Alas, alas, alas,
why do you accuse me
of having shed tears in vain?
Now I am without
my son, who in my poverty
alone would have cared for me.

He would not yield to the enemy
the paltry territory
which for me
Jacob had acquired.
His stupid brothers —
the many, sad to say,
that I have brought forth —
he would have helped.

{ Heu, heu, heu,
quid me incusatis fletus
incassum fudisse.
Cum sim orbata
nato, paupertatem meam
qui solus curaret,

Qui non hostibus cederet
angustos terminos,
quos mihi
Jacob adquisivit;
Quique stolidis fratribus,
quos multos, pro dolor,
extuli,
esset profuturus. } [10]

The son that Rachel has lost could be literally only Joseph. His brothers faked his death and sold him into slavery. Joseph’s father Jacob mourned Joseph’s apparent death for many days. Rachel herself died in giving birth to Benjamin. Just as Rachel being virgin mother collapses time and person, so too does Rachel lamenting the loss of her son.[11] Christians interpreted Rachel’s son Joseph as a figure of Jesus. They understood Rachel as a figure of the Christian church. In Christian understanding, the Christian church possesses the heritage of Jacob and the Jews. Joseph’s stupid brothers are both those who sold him into slavery and mass of men in the Christian church.

In Notker’s Rachel sequence, why are most Christian men represented as stupid? Many Christian men and women throughout history haven’t recognized that the Christian church is female as a figure and gynocentric in its pragmatic orientation. Men must actively affirm the goodness of their masculinity and cherish their masculine fruitfulness. Passive and apathetic in relation to women’s dominance, most men today don’t even question current female supremacist dogma that the future is female. These men are stupid. Men throughout history have been stupid in similar ways.

Another voice within Rachel’s self-consciousness recognizes Jesus’s love and concern for men. Rachel laments the loss of her son in part out of typical womanly self-concern: what man will provide me with money? But she also recognizes men’s need for help. She questions herself:

Are tears to be shed for him
who possesses the heavenly kingdom,
who with frequent prayers
for his miserable brothers
intercedes before God?

{ Numquid flendus est iste,
qui regnum possedit caeleste
quique prece frequenti
miseris fratribus
apud deum auxiliatur? } [12]

Rachel understood the misery of men enduring earthly gynocentrism. Yet miserable men have reason for hope. Rachel as the virgin mother Mary, and Rachel as the church, both have as son Jesus. Jesus loves men as well as women. The fully masculine man Jesus brings miserable men’s plight before God in heaven. Men need only wonder: how long, Lord, how long?

Like the Massacre of the Innocents, deaths of boys and men typically pass without particular notice. The issue isn’t just modern philology’s gender trouble. The lives of boys and men are gynocentrically devalued. Like earlier poetry, Notker of St. Gall’s brilliant ninth-century Rachel sequence, “De uno martyre virgo plorans,” recognized that the Massacre of the Innocents was the massacre of innocent boys. Moreover, Notker’s Rachel shows that Christian gynocentrism can encompass concern for miserable men. Women and men today must develop this medieval Rachel’s breadth of emotional life.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• medieval poetry on the horror of men absent and dying in war
• women dominant gender in Christian literary history
• sacralizing men’s sexuality: Jacob & his wives to Jesus & his church

Notes:

[1] Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon}, 12 “Hymn for Epiphany {Hymnus epiphaniae},” vv. 97-108 (st. 25-7), Latin text and English translation (adapted slightly) from O’Daly (2012) pp. 357-60. The subsequent quote above is similarly from “Hymnus epiphaniae” vv. 109-24 (st. 28-31). Here are Latin reading notes for these passages. Here’s the translation of these passages from Thomson (1949) vol. 1. Both Pope (1905) and Thomson (1949), vol. 1, provide freely accessible text and translation of Liber Cathemerinon.

Prudentius lived on the Iberian Pennisula and worked as a Roman government official until about 390 GC. He then retired and began writing poetry. He distributed his collected poems in 405. Prudentius wrote in the high tradition of Augustan Latin poetry, yet recast his sources to reflect a “cosmic Christian vision.” McKelvie (2010).

A few decades later, Caelius Sedulius may have responded to the fear of Prudentius’s Herod:

Impious Herod, stranger,
what is to fear with Christ to come?
He takes away no earthly realms,
he who gives the heavenly crown.

{ Hostis Herodes impie,
Christum venire quid times?
Non eripit mortalia,
Qui regna dat celestia. }

Sedulius, “From the pivot of the sun’s rising {A solis ortus cardine},” vv. 29-32, Latin text from the Latin Library, my English translation. These verses now begin a portion of Sedulius’s poem used at Vespers for Epiphany. Michael Martin’s Treasury of Latin Prayers {Thesaurus Precum Latinarum} provides for “Hostis Herodes impie“ a Latin text and an English translation by J.M. Neale, and similarly for an truncated version of “A solis ortus cardine.”

[2] Caelius Sedulius, Easter Song {Carmen paschale} 2.110-17, 120-26, Latin text and English translation (modified slightly) from Springer (2013) pp. 52-3. Sedulius (not to be confused with the ninth-century Latin poet Sedulius Scottus) apparently wrote Carmen paschale between 425 and 450 GC. On Latin biblical epics, Green (2006) and McBrine (2017).

[3] Matthew 2:16. The biblical texts are via Blue Letter Bible. Subsequent biblical texts are similarly sourced. The Greek text is from the Morphological Greek New Testament (MGNT). The Latin text is from Jerome’s Vulgate. Herod’s massacre is widely called the “Massacre / Slaughter of the Innocents” or the “Massacre / Slaughter of the Holy Innocents.” Even as learned a philologist as Jan Ziolkowski wrote:

the event in the Gospel that instigates it {the citation of Jeremiah 31:15} is the Slaughter of the Innocents (Matthew 2. 16) — the killing, at Herod’s order, of all children in the environs of Bethlehem who were two years or younger. … Herod decided to execute the infants of Bethlehem directly as a result of the Adoration of the Magi (Matthew 2. 16–18) … Christian responses to the Massacre of the Innocents reflect the Christian ambivalence about the death of children.

Ziolkowski (2010) pp. 94-5.

[4] Exodus 1:16, 22. The Hebrew text is from the Westminster Leningrad Codex.

[5] On Prudentius and Sedulius, see quotes previously above. Writing about 400 GC, Macrobius Ambrosius Theodosius (Macrobius) reported:

When he {Emperor Augustus} heard that among the boys in Syria under two years old who Herod, king of the Jews, had ordered to be killed, Herod’s own son was also killed, Augustus said: “It is better to be Herod’s pig than his son.”

{ Cum audisset inter pueros quos in Syria Herodes rex Iudaeorum intra bimatum iussit interfici filium quoque eius occisum, ait: Melius est Herodis porcum esse quam filium. }

Macrobius, Saturnalia 2.4.11, Latin text of Ludwig von Jan (1852) via LacusCurtius, my English translation, benefiting from various publicly available ones. Jewish law regards pigs as unclean animals. Jews therefore shouldn’t slaughter a pig. MGV Hoffman notes that the jest encodes a pun in Greek: “hus / ὑς means pig and huios / υἱος means son.”

Jests are commonly attributed falsely to prominent figures. Emperor Augustus probably never uttered this jest. Moreover, he almost surely didn’t know Greek. Given the jest’s significant Greek pun, most likely it was originally formulated in Greek. It evidently circulated broadly enough to cross into Latin. While a matter of contentious argument, in my view no convincing evidence has been put forward to establish whether the jest independently attests to Herod’s massacre of innocent boys.

[6] Most modern biblical translations of Matthew 2:16 into English represent Herod ordering a massacre of “male children.”  See here a variety of translations. The New Revised Standard Version, first published in 1990, retains the gender-obscuring translation “children.” In a preface to the Catholic version of the New Revised Standard Version, Alexander A. Di Lella, Professor of Biblical Studies at The Catholic University of America, stated that this translation “offers the fruits of the best biblical scholarship in the idiom of today while being sensitive to the contemporary concern for inclusive language when referring to human beings.” Biblical scholarship must honestly address contemporary gender trouble.

[7] Matthew 2:18, which quotes Jeremiah 31:15. After the Babylonians destroyed Jerusalem, Jewish captives were transported to Ramah on their way to exile in Babylon. Jeremiah 40:1. Rachel was the foremother of the Jewish tribe of Benjamin, as well as of Ephraim and Manasseh of the house of Joseph.

[8] Jeremiah 31:22. Philologists are uncertain about the meaning of the concluding clause. Among a variety of English translations is “a woman shall encompass a man.” That translation can also be interpreted as a woman protecting a man. The New American Bible, Revised Edition (released in 2011) comments:

No satisfactory explanation has been given for this text. Jerome, for example, saw the image as a reference to the infant Jesus enclosed in Mary’s womb. Since Jeremiah often uses marital imagery in his description of a restored Israel, the phrase may refer to a wedding custom, perhaps women circling the groom in a dance. It may also be a metaphor describing the security of a new Israel, a security so complete that it defies the imagination and must be expressed as hyperbolic role reversal: any danger will be so insignificant that women can protect their men.

The concluding reference to insignificant danger shows sexist ignorance. Men and women currently face very significant danger. Women could play a vital role in protecting men from society-destroying gynocentric oppression and contempt for men.

[9] Notker of St. Gall, also know as Notker the Stammerer {Notcerus Balbulus}, “A virgin crying about a martyr {De uno martyre virgo plorans},” Latin text from Godman (1985) pp. 320-3 (with some minor changes to the editorial punctuation), my English translation, benefiting from those of id. and Dronke (1994) p. xxix. Subsequent quotes from “De uno martyre virgo plorans” are similarly sourced and cover all of this sequence. Godman described this sequence as a “dramatic interior monologue.” Godman (1985) p. 68. I follow that interpretation above.

Notker wrote this sequence about 885 and included it in his Liber ymnorum {Book of Hymns}. It has survived in 35 manuscripts. For a manuscript list, Yearley (1983) vol. 2, pp. 44-5 (lyric L134). Notker composed “De uno martyre virgo plorans” to the melody (he wrote it as a contrafactum) for his earlier Easter sequence “This is the holy solemnity of solemnities {Haec est sancta solemnitas solemnitatum}.” That melody was re-used in many subsequent songs and became known as the “virgin weeps {virgo plorans}” melody. On the musical characteristics of Notker’s lament and subsequent laments of Rachel, Yearley (1983) vol. 1, pp. 94-5, 269-75, and Stevens (1986) pp. 351ff.

A performance of “De uno martyre virgo plorans” by Gérard Le Vot et al. from the album Ultima Lacrima, Sacred Chants of the Middle Ages 9th-13th centuries (Studio S.M., 1997) is freely available on YouTube. This sequence seems to me quite difficult to perform well. Here’s a rather different performance of “Haec est sancta solemnitas“ directed by Jón Stefánsson in 2015.

Notker’s Rachel sequence contributed to early liturgical drama. Ordo Rachelis, a late-eleventh-century play in a lectionary from the cathedral of Freising (Munich, Staatsbibl. MS S Lat. 6264) incorporated Notker’s “Quid tu virgo” as concluding dialogue between Rachel and a consoler. The late-twelfth-century Fleury Playbook (Orléans, Bibliothèque Municipale MS. 201) similarly incorporates “Quid tu virgo” in its play Interfectio Puerorum {The Massacre of the Boys}. With respect to the Freising and Fleury Rachel laments, Boynton observed:

“Quid tu virgo” is the structural basis of the lament, providing typological, allegorical, and tropological readings of Rachel that are complemented by the literal interpretation in leonine hexameters added before the sequence.

Boynton (2004) p. 326. Other dramatic Rachel laments are the eleventh-century Lamentatio Rachelis from Saint-Martial at Limoges (Paris, BnF lat. 1139), a lengthy part of a twelfth-century Epiphany play from the cathedral at Laon (in troper Laon 263), and Rachel’s dramatic lament incorporated into a twelfth-century Magi play (Paris, Bibliothèque Mazarine, 1712). For relevant discussion, id. pp. 320-7. On laments for lost children in Latin generally, Ziolkowski (2010).

[10] Notker wrote “De uno martyre virgo plorans” for the feast day of a martyr. For the Feast of the Holy Innocents – Boys, Notker wrote the sequence “Praise to you Christ, who tastes goodness {Laus tibi Christe cui sapit}.” The speaking voice of that sequence triumphantly declares:

The fresh and tender
warriors,
slaughtered
by Herod’s sword, preached
you today.

{ Recentes atque teneri
milites,
Herodiano ense
trucidati, te hodie
praedicaverunt }

St. 3a, Latin text and English translation from Kovács (2017) p. 203*.

[11] Notker’s sense of time’s unity is similar to that which Prudentius presents in Christ:

Born of the Father’s life before the world began,
called Alpha and Ω, the source and the ending
of everything that is, and was, and shall be in the future.

{ corde natus ex parentis ante mundi exordium,
alfa et Ω cognominatus, ipse fons et clausula
omnium quae sunt, fuerunt, quaeque post futura sunt. }

Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon}, 9 “Hymn for Every Hour {Hymnus omnis horae},” vv. 12-14 (st.4), Latin text and English translation from O’Daly (2012) pp. 252-3. Cf. Revelation 1:8, 21:6; Virgil, Georgics 4.392-3; Homer, Iliad 1.70. This poem ends:

Let the flowing river waters, the seashores,
rain, heat, snow, frost, wood and wind, night and day,
praise you, all together, for ever and ever!

{ fluminum lapsus et undae, littorum crepidines,
imber, aestus, nix, pruina, silva et aura, nox, dies,
omnibus te concelebrent saeculorum saeculis. }

Id. vv. 111-3 (st. 38), sourced as previously. The modern hymn “Of the Father’s Heart Begotten {Corde natus ex parentis}” is based on Prudentius’s “Hymnus omnis horae.” O’Daly explains that, in context, “life” is a better translation of corde than is “heart.” Id. p. 264.

[12] The martyr who possesses the heavenly kingdom seems to be Joseph / Christ. In “Laus tibi Christe cui sapit,” that Notker wrote for the Feast of the Holy Innocents – Boys, the boys together pray to Christ:

Dear little sons,
sweet little boys,
help us with your prayers,
which may Christ gently listen to,
feeling pity for your
innocent death hastened
for his own sake;
may he deem us worthy of his kingdom.

{ Clari filioli,
dulces pusioli,
Nos iuvate precibus,
Quas Christus, innocentem
mortem vestram miserans
Pro sese maturatam,
placidus exaudiens
Nos regno suo dignetur. }

St. 7b-10, Latin text and English translation from Kovács (2017) p. 204*. This sequence doesn’t represent the men of the church as being stupid. Scholars regard Notker’s Rachel sequence as poetically superior to this sequence.

[images] (1) The Massacre of the Innocents – Boys. Illumination from Codex Egberti, Fol 15v. The Codex Egberti was produced in the Reichenau Monastery for Egbert, who was Bishop of Trier from 980 to 993. Preserved at Stadtbibliothek Trier, Germany. Source image via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Horse’s ass and soldier pissing. Detail from painting of the Massacre of the Innocents – Boys by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. Painted between 1565 and 1567. Preserved as accession # RCIN 405787 in Royal Collection, Windsor Castle, London. Via Wikimedia Commons. Sometime between 1604 and 1621, parts of the painting were painted over to make the painting depict a general scene of plunder, rather than a massacre of innocent boys. At the far left in the doorway of the brick house, the child being dragged away is clearly a boy. (3) Illumination (color enhanced) of the Massacre of the Holy Innocents – Boys in Sedulius’s Carmen paschale. From folio 16r of a manuscript made in 860 in a Liège scriptorium. Preserved in Antwerp, Belgium, as Museum Plantin-Moretus  M 17.4. This manuscript apparently is a copy of a manuscript made for Cuthwine, Bishop of Dunwich (in Suffolk, England), sometime between 716 and 731.

References:

Boynton, Susan. 2004. “From the Lament of Rachel to the Lament of Mary: A Transformation in the History of Drama and Spirituality.” Pp. 319-40 in Petersen, Nils Holger. Signs of Change: transformations of Christian traditions and their representation in the arts, 1000-2000. Amsterdam: Rodopi.

Dronke, Peter. 1994. Nine Medieval Latin Plays. Cambridge Medieval Classics, 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by James Whitta)

Godman, Peter. 1985. Poetry of the Carolingian Renaissance. London: Duckworth.

Green, Roger P. H. 2006. Latin Epics of the New Testament: Juvencus, Sedulius, Arator. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Kovács, Andrea. 2017. Monuments of Medieval Liturgical Poetry in Hungary: sequences; critical edition of melodies. Musica sacra Hungarica (English ed.), 1. Budapest: Argumentum Publishing House.

McBrine, Patrick. 2017. Biblical Epics in Late Antiquity and Anglo-Saxon England: divina in laude voluntas. Toronto Anglo-Saxon series, 27. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

McKelvie, Christopher Gordon. 2010. The Cosmic Christian Vision of Prudentius’ Liber Cathemerinon, and the Inculturation of Augustan Vatic Poetry. M.A. Thesis. Halifax: Dalhousie University.

O’Daly, Gerard J. P. 2012. Days Linked by Song: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Pope, R. Matin, trans. 1895. The Hymns of Prudentius. London: J.M. Dent.

Springer, Carl P. E., ed. and trans. 2013. Sedulius. The Paschal Song and Hymns. Writings from the Greco-Roman world, v. 35. Atlanta: Society of Biblical Literature.

Stevens, John E. 1986. Words and Music in the Middle Ages: song, narrative, dance and drama, 1050-1350. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by Hans Tischler)

Thomson, Henry John, ed. and trans. 1949. Prudentius. Loeb Classical Library 387, 398. Vol. 1, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Yearley, Janthia. 1983. The Medieval Latin Planctus as a Genre. Ph.D. Thesis. University of York.

Ziolkoswki, Jan M. 2010. “Laments for Lost Children: Latin Traditions.” Pp. 81-107 in Tolmie, Jane and M. J. Toswell, M. J., eds. Laments for the Lost in Medieval Literature. Turnhout: Brepols.

Mind and mother are out of control: they have lost dominion over themselves.[1]

Small-minded local officials allow householders in cities and suburbs to have families of hens without even a single rooster. Those hens produce sterile eggs that are worse than seedless watermelons. We are complicit in the generation of vipers. Our corrupt hearts and minds birth wickedness and lies. Listen for the glorious sound of cocks crowing. When once again our societies are welcoming and inclusive of cocks crowing, the deadliest plague will vanish. All will then rejoice in the fullness of life.

We cannot flee from the terrible effects of generating vipers. In the fourth century, the learned Roman poet Prudentius described how females and males relate in circumstances of perverse gynocentrism:

Her genitals don’t make her fertile, nor does
her womb swell from lying together, but when she burns with the fire
of female lust, that obscene one opens wide her mouth,
thirsting for her soon-to-die husband. He inserts his three-tongued head
into his mate’s jaws, entering with hot kisses,
by oral sex injecting seminal lust-juice.
His wife, wounded with the force of pleasure, draws him in;
within the bonds of sweet love she uses her teeth to break his neck.
She drinks the infused spittle of her dying dear one.
By these allurements the father is killed, and
the enclosed offspring kill their mother; for after the seed matures,
small little bodies in their warm refuge begin
to slither, and quivering they strike her shaking womb.
The internal crime against filial piety inflames the mother;
conscious of her guilty sex, she bemoans her executioner,
her progeny, as they rupture the enclosing barriers to birth.
Since no birth canal provides an open exit, her belly
is tortured by her offspring straining toward the light.
Their tearing opens a way through her lacerated guts.
At last, with the death of their nourisher, the brood of sorrows emerges,
with difficulty struggling along a path into life and carving out
their birth through crime. The creeping cubs lick the cadaver
that birthed them, offspring orphaned at birth,
having experienced daylight only after their poor mother’s death.

{ non sexu fertilis aut de
concubitu distenta uterum, sed cum calet igni
percita femineo, moriturum obscena maritum
ore sitit patulo; caput inserit ille trilingue
coniugis in fauces atque oscula fervidus intrat,
insinuans oris coitu genitale venenum,
nupta voluptatis vi saucia mordicus haustum
frangit amatoris blanda inter foedera guttur,
infusasque bibit caro pereunte salivas.
his pater inlecebris consumitur, at genitricem
clausa necat subolis; nam postquam semine adulto
incipiunt calidis corpuscula parva latebris
serpere motatumque uterum vibrata ferire,
aestuat interno pietatis crimine mater
carnificemque gemit damnati conscia sexus
progeniem, saepti rumpentem obstacula partus,
nam quia nascendi nullus patet exitus, alvus
fetibus in lucem nitentibus excruciata
carpitur atque viam lacerata per ilia pandit,
tandem obitu altricis prodit grex ille dolorum
ingressum vitae vix eluctatus et ortum
per scelus exculpens; lambunt natale cadaver
reptantes catuli, prolis dum nascitur orba,
haud experta diem miserae nisi postuma matris } [2]

That’s the generation of vipers.[3] That’s a soul mating with three-tongued Satan and giving birth to a litter of deadly sins. That’s not the medieval joy of sex. That’s castration culture in its ultimate, deadly expression.[4]

Cocks crowing signify light and new life. Satanic forces demean cocks as obscene and seek to exterminate them. Prudentius rejected that Satanic gynocentric practice. He recognized the virtue of cocks:

They say that wandering demons
who love night’s darkness
are terrified when the cock crows,
then demons, dispersing, fear and flee.

They hate the nearness
of light, salvation, divinity,
that bursts through the stagnant dark
and scatters the agents of night.

They are prescient, they know
this sign of promised hope
that will free us from sleep
to hope for the advent of God.

{ ferunt vagantes daemonas
laetos tenebris noctium
gallo canente exterritos
sparsim timere et cedere.

invisa nam vicinitas
lucis, salutis, numinis,
rupto tenebrarum situ
noctis fugat satellites.

hoc esse signum praescii
norunt repromissae spei,
qua nos soporis liberi
speramus adventum dei. } [5]

The Apostle Peter connects the cock to both betrayal and love of Christ. Prudentius explained:

What this bird means
the Savior showed to Peter,
declaring that he would be denied
three times before the cock crew.

For sins are committed
before the herald of coming dawn
lights up the human race
and brings an end to sinning.

And so the denier wept
for the evil that slid from his lips,
though his mind remained blameless
and his heart kept the faith.

And never after did he say
such a thing, a slip of the tongue.
Recognizing the cock’s crow,
he stopped sinning, a just man.

That’s why we all believe
that in this time of sleep,
when the exultant cock crows,
Christ has returned from the dead.

{ quae vis sit huius alitis,
Salvator ostendit Petro,
ter antequam gallus canat
sese negandum praedicans.

fit namque peccatum prius
quam praeco lucis proximae
inlustret humanum genus
finemque peccandi ferat.

flevit negator denique
ex ore prolapsum nefas,
cum mens maneret innocens
animusque servaret fidem.

nec tale quidquam postea
linguae locutus lubrico est,
cantuque galli cognito
peccare iustus destitit.

inde est quod omnes credimus
illo quietis tempore
quo gallus exultans canit
Christum redisse ex inferis. }

The cock is the seminal sign. We must stop denying the cock and brutalizing the cock. We must start loving the cock. Look:

The bird that ushers in the day
foretells that it will soon be light.
The one who wakes our souls
now is Christ — he call us to life.
…
So let’s rise up with energy!
The cock wakes those who lie prostrate
and castigates the somnolent.
The cock confutes the deniers.

When the cock crows, hope returns,
health is restored to the sick,
the robber’s sword is put away,
faith comes back to the fallen.

{ Ales diei nuntius
lucem propinquam praecinit;
nos excitator mentium
iam Christus ad vitam vocat.

Surgamus ergo strenue;
gallus iacentes excitat
et somnolentes increpat.
gallus negantes arguit.

gallo canente, spes redit,
aegris salus refunditur,
mucro latronis conditur,
lapsis fides revertitur. } [6]

The wonderful cock is fully masculine, just like Jesus. Reader, hear this cock crow!

While delighting in their masculine blessing and following the cock in crowing, men must also remember that they, like women, are sinners. Prudentius expressed his willingness to be judged, not as a superhero, but as merely an ordinary man:

For me, it’s enough if I don’t see a Tartarean minister’s
face, if the flame of greedy Gehenna doesn’t
devour this soul plunged into its deepest furnace.
If the failings of my body are such that will require
me to be licked in the mournful fire of cave-like Avernus,
at least may the burning be mild and slow, exhaling
warm mist, with fire diminishing so its heat would warm gently.
Let boundless splendor and temples circled by garlands
glorify others: may I have light punishment that mercifully burns.

{ at mihi Tartarei satis est si nulla ministri
occurrat facies, avidae nec flamma gehennae
devoret hanc animam mersam fornacibus imis.
esto, cavernoso, quia sic pro labe necesse est
corporea, tristis me sorbeat ignis Averno:
saltem mitificos incendia lenta vapores
exhalent aestuque calor languente tepescat;
lux inmensa alios et tempora vincta coronis
glorificent me poena levis clementer adurat. } [7]

In referring to the punishing place, Prudentius united the ancient Greek underworld Tarturus, the Roman entrance to the underworld Avernus, and the Jewish-Christian place of fiery torment, Gehenna.[8] Moreover, in his poem’s final line Prudentius associated himself with Ovid. Exiled to Tomus on the Black Sea, Ovid wrote his Sorrows {Tristia}. Ovid’s book of poetry seeks in Rome a good reader, a reader who understands his suffering:

and silently to herself, such that no hurtful man should hear, wishes
that Caesar be more lenient so that my punishment be light.

{ et tacitus secum, ne quis malus audiat, optet,
sit mea lenito Caesare poena levis. } [9]

Ovid was castrated for defying the great goddess Cybele. Prudentius personally understood the impurity of men’s sexual desire and gynocentric forces favoring harsh punishment of men’s sexuality. Prudentius voluntarily consigned himself to punishment in textual relation to Ovid.

In his poem’s final couplet, Prudentius also covertly declared his masculine poetic self worthy of garlands. The final line contains an anagram of a signature phrase {sphragis}. When that signature phrase is unscrambled, the final couplet reads:

Let boundless splendor glorify others and temples circled with garlands
glorify me: Aurelius the prudent proclaims himself.

{ lux inmensa alios et tempora vincta coronis
glorificent me poena levis clementer adurat. } [10]

In referring to the generation of vipers, John the Baptist declared that God could raise up children to Abraham from stones. All is possible with God. But remember, too, that the pinnacle of God’s creation is humans.[11]

According to traditional Greco-Roman religion, a flood wiped out all the people of the world except Deucalion and his wife Pyrrha. They wept in loneliness. Deucalion said to Pyrrha:

O wife and sister, the last woman alive,
our common race, our family, our marriage bed,
and now the perils themselves have united us.
In all the lands from sunrise to sunset
we two are the whole population; the sea holds the rest.

{ o soror, o coniunx, o femina sola superstes,
quam commune mihi genus et patruelis origo,
deinde torus iunxit, nunc ipsa pericula iungunt,
terrarum, quascumque vident occasus et ortus,
nos duo turba sumus; possedit cetera pontus. } [12]

Humanity had been reduced to a woman and a man. Deucalion then pondered an even more horrible loss:

Poor soul,
what would you feel like now if the Fates
had taken me and left you behind? How could you bear
your fear alone? Who would comfort your grief?
You can be sure that if the sea already held you,
I would follow you, my wife, beneath the sea.

{ quis tibi, si sine me fatis erepta fuisses,
nunc animus, miseranda, foret? quo sola timorem
ferre modo posses? quo consolante doleres!
namque ego (crede mihi), si te quoque pontus haberet,
te sequerer, coniunx, et me quoque pontus haberet. }

Deucalion longed to reproduce human beings:

O, if only I could restore the people of the world;
by my father’s arts, breathe life into molded clay!
Now the human race depends on the two of us.
We are, by the gods’ will, the last of our kind.

{ o utinam possim populos reparare paternis
artibus atque animas formatae infundere terrae!
nunc genus in nobis restat mortale duobus.
sic visum superis: hominumque exempla manemus. }

Lacking the conjugal teaching of Abraham’s God in Genesis, Deucalion and Pyrrha went to the temple of Themis:

When they reached the temple steps, husband and wife
prostrated themselves. With trembling lips they kissed
the cold stones and said, “If divine hearts can be softened
by righteous prayers, if the wrath of the gods can be deflected,
tell us, O Themis, how our race can be restored,
and bring aid, O most mild one, to a world overwhelmed!”

{ ut templi tetigere gradus, procumbit uterque
pronus humi gelidoque pavens dedit oscula saxo
atque ita “si precibus” dixerunt “numina iustis
victa remollescunt, si flectitur ira deorum,
dic, Themi, qua generis damnum reparabile nostri
arte sit, et mersis fer opem, mitissima, rebus!” }

In figured language the goddess told them to throw stones behind their backs. When they did, those stones began to change form and grow into humans.

As Prudentius understood, kissing cold stones and generating children from stones is no more necessary than the generation of vipers. God made cocks that can crow with the beginning of new life. The man poet Aurelius, not chaste but prudent, proclaimed his glorious masculine self. The ultimate poetic work, the poetic work most deserving of garlands, is creating new humans. For those men and women that embrace the cock and create with desires that threaten the stain of sin, may the fires of Hell be mild.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Prudentius’s crown: Saint Agnes redeemed the male gaze on every Eve
• in celibate Hell, resentful Dis threatens civil war & abducts girl
• men’s blessing of seminal creativity as numerous as stars of Heaven

Notes:

[1] Dykes (2011) p. 152. Dykes here is interpreting Prudentius’s account of the generation of vipers in Hamartigenia.

[2] Prudentius, The Origin of Sin {Hamartigenia} vv. 584-607, Latin text from Thomson (1949) pp. 244-6, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and Malamud (2011) pp. 30-1.

About Prudentius’s time, Hamartigenia seems to have had the title Amartigenia. The late-fifth-century author Gennadius refers to it by that title. The oldest manuscript of Hamartigenia, dating from the sixth century and designated A, also uses that title. Dykes (2011) p. 249. This title is rooted in the ancient Greek words for fault {ἁμαρτία} and origin {γένεσις}. However, as Dykes points out, “the aetiology of sin is by no means the poet’s only concern.” Id. p. 251.

Prudentius’s writings, particularly his Psychomachia, were highly respected in relatively learned medieval Europe. About 300 manuscripts of Prudentius have survived. These manuscripts have been the subject of vigorous philological debate according to high standards of reason. See, e.g., Cunningham (1968) and Cunningham (1971). The best Latin text of Prudentius’s Hamartigenia is currently Pallia (1981).

Prudentius is a highly creative and extremely sophisticated poet. Cunningham noted:

Not only do the poems of Prudentius, for the most part, lack direct filiation in the classical Latin tradition; a good many of them in fact represent striking innovations even in terms of contemporary practice so far as we know it.

Cunningham (1976) p. 61.

[3] The generation of vipers is well-known in ancient literature. Writing about 440 BGC, Herodotus explained the generation of vipers:

As it is, when they pair, and the male is in the very act of generation, the female seizes him by the neck. She doesn’t release her grip until she has devoured him. Thus the male dies, but the female is punished for his death. The young avenge their father. They eat their mother while they are still within her. They don’t come forth until they have devoured her womb.

{ νῦν δ᾽ ἐπεὰν θορνύωνται κατὰ ζεύγεα καὶ ἐν αὐτῇ ᾖ ὁ ἔρσην τῇ ἐκποιήσι, ἀπιεμένου αὐτοῦ τὴν γονὴν ἡ θήλεα ἅπτεται τῆς δειρῆς, καὶ ἐμφῦσα οὐκ ἀνιεῖ πρὶν ἂν διαφάγῃ. ὁ μὲν δὴ ἔρσην ἀποθνήσκει τρόπῳ τῷ εἰρημένῳ, ἡ δὲ θήλεα τίσιν τοιήνδε ἀποτίνει τῷ ἔρσενι: τῷ γονέι τιμωρέοντα ἔτι ἐν τῇ γαστρὶ ἐόντα τὰ τέκνα διεσθίει τὴν μητέρα, διαφαγόντα δὲ τὴν νηδὺν αὐτῆς οὕτω τὴν ἔκδυσιν ποιέεται. }

Herodotus, Histories 3.109, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified unsubstantially for readability) by Godley (1920) via Persesus. Similarly, Pliny, Natural History 10.62.169-70 in Latin with diction apparently unrelated to Prudentius’s description.

The Physiologus, probably written in Greek in Egypt in the second half of the third century and translated into Latin soon thereafter, is closely associated with Prudentius’s figure of the generation of vipers. The Physiologus explicitly refers to John the Baptist calling the crowd coming to him a generation of vipers. Matthew 3:7, Luke 3:7. The Physiologus uses the distinctive term catuli {cubs} in referring to the viper’s offspring:

When it does sexual intercourse, the male inserts his head into the female, and she swallows his semen. She bites off his masculine genitals and he immediately dies. You understand, therefore, what falsely alluring sexual relations will do. And when the cubs come forth from the belly of the female viper, their gnawings perforate her side and they send out their mother to the dead.

{ Quando coitum facit masculus infert os eius in feminam, et illa degluciens semen. abscidit virilia eiusdem masculi et moritur statim. Intellege ergo, quid faciet concubitus meretricius. Cum autem creverint catuli in ventre viperam perforant mordentes latus ejus et exeunt mortua matre. }

Latin text dating from no later than the eleventh century from Maurer (1967) p. 81, my English translation. The ninth-century Bern Physiologus describes the male and female vipers as human-crocodile chimeras, but their sexual intercourse is similar. Malamud (2011) p. 132. Other medieval versions of the Physiologus moralize the vipers’ sexual intercourse more extensively in relation to humans. See, e.g. White (1954) pp. 170-3. On the dating of the Physiologus, Scott (1998). The Physiologus / beastiary literature has an enormously complex literary history. On that literary history, Kay (2016).

[4] Prudentius described the devil as three-tongued and having a coiled belly like a snake. Hamartigenia vv. 195-205. Regarding Prudentius’s description of the generation of vipers, Dykes commented perceptively:

the union of the snakes is blatantly eroticized and blankly explicit … Actions and words seem not to be well matched here. We have the vocabulary of love, romance and the marriage covenant, mixed with the pejorative, the quasi-medical and the abusive; this adds additional unease to the reader’s experience.

Dykes (2011) p. 150. The reader should feel uneasy. In Hamartigenia, “Sin is responsible for the present configuration of the world.” Moreover, “the world is a microcosm of man”; “the world projects human responsibility.” Id. pp. 39, 41, and the title for id., Ch. 2. In Prudentius’s words, “the life of the human gives an example for all else to sin {exemplum dat vita hominum, quo cetera peccent}.” Hamartigenia v. 250. Acccording to Conybeare, “What is at stake is the spiritual health of the reader.” Conybeare (2007) p. 226. The stakes are actually much bigger.

[5] Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon} 1, “Hymn at Cock-Crow {Hymnus ad galli cantum},”  st. 10-12 (vv. 37-48), Latin text and English translation (modified slightly according to my poetic sense) from O’Daly (2012) pp. 40-1. The subsequent quote above is similarly from “Hymn at Cock-Crow” st. 13-17 (vv. 49-68) (What this bird means…). Pope (1895) provides a freely available Latin text and English translation of all of Prudentius’s hymns. Those prone to angrily “flip someone the bird” should meditate upon Prudentius’s “Hymn at Cock-Crow.”

Historically, cocks have been castrated to make them more easily raised to be slaughtered and eaten. A castrated cock is called a capon, which is different from a cuck. Castrating cocks is one element in the overall configuration of castration culture.

[6] The first quoted stanza above is “Hymn at Cock-Crow” st. 1 (vv. 1-4), sourced as previously. The subsequent two stanzas are from Ambrose of Milan, “Eternal creator of things {Aeterne rerum conditor}” st. 5-6 (vv. 17-24), Latin text and English translation from O’Daly (2012) pp. 55-6. Here’s an alternate English translation of “Aeterne rerum conditor.” On the close relationship between the two hymns, Mans (1990).

Four distichs in Aeterne rerum conditor, st. 3-4, begin with hoc. This repeated word evokes the sound of a cock crowing. The poetic effect is meaningful:

Each of these four distichs that begin with hoc have this in common: they propound a dark dilemma, whether it be night itself, or nocturnal criminality, or the tendency of sailors to stray far from land and perish at sea, or the murky spiritual issues of forgetfulness and guilt at stake in the Gospel account of Peter’s denial of Christ. Each of the four areas of difficulty is resolved by the cock’s crow: the natural light of the sun puts the darkness of night to flight; justice is restored on earth, at least until evening falls again, while wrongdoers retreat from the exposure of daylight; comfort and hope is provided to those who, at sea, are especially susceptible to the dangerous and unforgiving forces of nature; and repentance with its healing tears comes to Peter when he realizes that he has denied the one who was most important to him.

Springer (2014) p. 167. Springer deserves credit for recognizing Ambrose’s poetic sophistication in this hymn. Springer, however, regrettably lacked the courage to consistently refer to cocks as cocks. At seminal points, such as titling, he bends and shrinks to the less evocative term “rooster.”

[7] Prudentius, Hamartigenia vv. 958-66, Latin text from Thomson (1949) pp. 270-2, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and Malamud (2011) pp. 46-7. These are the concluding verses of Hamartigenia.

Prudentius regretted that as a young man he engaged in misdirected and imprudent lust. In his Preface {Praefatio} to his collected works, Prudentius described himself about age 16 (having taken the toga virilis) as being “infected with vices {infectus vitiis}”:

Then lascivious brazenness
and arrogant luxury — oh, it shames and pains me! —
defiled my youth with the mud and dirt of wickedness.

{ tum lasciva protervitas
et luxus petulans — heu pudet ac piget! —
foedavit iuvenem nequitiae sordibus ac luto. }

Praefatio st. 4 (vv. 10-12), Latin text from O’Daly (2012) p. 386, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. The description infectus vitiis is from Praefatio v. 9. Here are some Latin reading notes for Prudentius’s Praefatio and the English translation of Pope (1895). While men’s sexuality is a blessing, it can be turned to wickedness.

Prudentius apparently recognized that women’s dominant position within gynocentrism arises from neither greater physical strength nor stronger intellect relative to men. Gynocentrism is a social phenomenon. Prudentius’s frank appraisal of women’s strengths relative to men doesn’t imply that Prudentius “had a low opinion of women.” Hershkowitz (2017) p. 14. Prudentius’s views of women apparently were similiar to those of Jerome. Jerome had profound concern for women, and women admired and supported him. The same was probably true of Prudentius.

[8] Prudentius similarly invoked both Tartarus and Avernus in his Psychomachia, vv. 89-97. For relevant commentary, Mastrangelo (2008) p. 26 and p. 188, n. 48.

[9] Ovid, Sorrows {Tristia} 1.1.29-30, Latin text from the Loeb edition of Wheeler (1939), my English translation. Malamud helpfully identifies Prudentius’s allusion to Ovid in the conclusion to Hamartigenia, but interprets that allusion in terms of abstract communicative problems and misunderstood theology:

In the final line of the Hamartigenia, then, Prudentius casts himself in the role of Ovid … The pointed allusion to Tristia 1.1 suggests that Prudentius saw his carmen, like Ovid’s, as double-edged, as likely to bring down the wrath of his ruler as to redeem him. It cannot but be implicated in the duplicities and snares of human language, but at the same time it offers his only hope for salvation. … How can he tell if his poetry, which he imagines as all he can offer to God, is acceptable or not? In a fallen world, where accurate vision, knowledge, and understanding are unavailable and even the word of God is subject to misinterpretation, how can a writer determine whether his words reflect divine truth or are implicated in the snaky coils of error?

Malamud (2911) p. 190. Human communication and human life in general inevitably are implicated in errors and failings. Certainly Christ, not what Prudentius wrote, was Prudentius’s hope for salvation. Prudentius’s allusion to Ovid, medieval Europe’s great teacher of love, is best understand as pointing to the importance of incarnated, flesh-and-blood love. A reader must recognize his responsibilty to live well. Dykes (2011) pp. 17-8. A reader may need to change or convert her life. Mastrangelo (2008) pp. 166-9.

[10] Prudentius, Hamartigenia vv. 965-6, my English translation of the anagram that Malamud identified and explicated. Malamud (2011) pp. 190-1, correcting an error identified in Cameron (1995) p. 482. Malamud fairly engages with criticism and reasonably justifies her reading. Id. pp. 210-11, notes 37-41. The analysis above supports Malamud’s reading, although with a much different direction of interpretation.

[11] Matthew 3:9, Luke 3:8 (stones into children of Abraham); Matthew 19:26, Luke 1:37 (all things possible with God); Genesis 1:26-30 (humans as pinnacle of God’s creation).

[12] Ovid, Metamorphoses 1.351-5, Latin text from Magnus (1892) via Perseus, English trans. (with my minor modifications) from Lombardo (2010) p. 15. The subsequent three quotes are similarly sourced from Metamorphoses 1.358-61 (Poor soul…), 1.363-6 (Oh, if only I could restore…), 1.375-80 (When they reached the temple steps…).

[images] (1) Generation of vipers. Illumination from Physiologus manuscript. Made in the second quarter of the 13th century. On folio 94r (slider page 204) in Oxford, MS. Bodleian 764. (2) Male and female human-serpent chimeras. Color-enhanced illumination from the Bern Physiologus. Made about 830. Bern, Burgerbibliothek, Cod. 318, f. 11r – Physiologus Bernensis (www.e-codices.ch). (3) Cock. Illumination from Physiologus manuscript. Made in the second quarter of the 13th century. On folio 85v (slider page 186) in Oxford, MS. Bodleian 764.

References:

Cameron, Alan. 1995. “Ancient Anagrams.” The American Journal of Philology. 116 (3): 477-484.

Conybeare, Catherine. 2007. “Sanctum, lector, percense volumen: Snakes, Readers, and the Whole Text in Prudentius’s Hamartigenia.” Ch. 11 (pp. 225-240) in William E. Klingshirn and Linda Safran, eds. The Early Christian Book. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press. (review by Ian H. Henderson)

Cunningham, Maurice P. 1962. “A Preliminary Recension of the Older Manuscripts of the Cathemerinon, Apotheosis, and Hamartigenia of Prudentius.” Sacris Erudiri. 13: 5-59.

Cunningham, Maurice P. 1968. “The Problem of Interpolation in the Textual Tradition of Prudentius.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 99: 119-141.

Cunningham, Maurice P. 1971. “Notes on the Text of Prudentius.” Transactions and Proceedings of the American Philological Association. 102: 59-69.

Cunningham, Maurice P. 1976. “Contexts of Prudentius’ Poems.” Classical Philology. 71 (1): 56-66.

Dykes, Anthony. 2011. Reading Sin in the World: the Hamartigenia of Prudentius and the vocation of the responsible reader. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by Gerard O’Daly)

Hershkowitz, Paula. 2017. Prudentius, Spain, and late antique Christianity: poetry, visual culture, and the cult of martyrs. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by Rosario Moreno Soldevila and by Kathleen M. Kirsch)

Kay, Sarah. 2016. “‘The English Bestiary’, the Continental ‘Physiologus’ and the Intersections Between Them.” Medium Aevum. 85 (1): 118-142.

Lombardo, Stanley, trans. 2010. Ovid. Metamorphoses. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing.

Malamud, Martha A. 2011. Prudentius. The Origin of Sin: An English Translation of the Hamartigenia. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 61. Cornell University Press. (review by Dennis E. Trout)

Mans, M. J. 1990. “A Comparison between Ambrose’s Aeterne Rerum Conditor and Prudentius’ Cathemerinon 1 or Hymnus ad Galli Cantum.” Acta Patristica et Byzantina. 1 (1): 99-118.

Mastrangelo, Marc. 2008. The Roman Self in Late Antiquity: Prudentius and the poetics of the soul. Baltimore, MD: The Johns Hopkins University Press. (review by E. J. Hutchinson)

Maurer, Friedrich. 1967. Der altdeutsche Physiologus Die Millstäter Reimfassung und die Wiener Prosa (nebst dem lateinischen Text und dem althochdeutschen Physiologus). Berlin, Boston: De Gruyter.

O’Daly, Gerard J. P. 2012. Days Linked by Song: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (review by Catherine Conybeare)

Palla, Roberto. 1981. Prudentius. Prudenzio: Hamartigenia: Introd., trad. e comm. Pisa: Giardini.

Pope, R. Matin, trans. 1895. The Hymns of Prudentius. London: J.M. Dent.

Scott, Alan. 1998. “The Date of the Physiologus.” Vigiliae Christianae. 52 (4): 430-441.

Springer, Carl P. E. 2014. “Of roosters and repetitio: Ambrose’s Aeterne rerum conditor.” Vigiliae Christianae. 68 (2): 155-177.

Thomson, Henry John, ed. and trans. 1949. Prudentius. Loeb Classical Library 387, 398. Vol. 1, Vol. 2. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

White, Terence Hawbury. 1954. The Bestiary: a book of beasts. New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons.

Some women complain that men are overly devoted to getting their job done. Old French jeux-partis, probably written in the thirteenth century, indicate that before marriage, women complain about men’s concern for their job, but after marriage, women appreciate men’s dedication to their work. Moreover, wives appreciate their husbands’ work so much that they are willing to tolerate their husbands’ occasional extra-marital affairs. As inconceivable as that it is today, so it was in medieval France.

In one Old French jeu-parti, a lady and her boyfriend debate how men treat their beloved women. The lady asks her boyfriend:

My boyfriend, who is more worthy:
he who lies all night
with his beloved, with great love-play,
and without consummating his desire,
or he who comes quickly and takes quickly,
and when he has done it, hurries off,
for he cares not for what remains,
he just plucks the flower and neglects the fruit?

{ Amis, ki est li muelz vaillans:
Ou cil ki gist toute la nuit
Aveuc s’amie a grant desduit
Et sans faire tot son talent,
Ou cil ki tost vient et tost prent
Et quant il ait fait, si s’en fuit,
Ne jue pais a remenant,
Ains keut la flor et lait le fruit? } [1]

This question is like, “Do I look fat?” To avoid being a victim of domestic violence, and then getting arrested for perpetrating domestic violence, most men understand that they dare answer only “no,” irrespective of what they actually think. Similarly, this man’s safe, subservient answer to his girlfriend’s question is that the second hypothetical man is a very bad man; a savage, brutish man; a bad boy, a jerk. In short, that second hypothetical man is just the sort of man for whom women’s loins typically tingle.

This man apparently isn’t an ignorant, chivalrous toady destined for tepid friendship with her. Though learned in gynocentric norms of courtesy and deference to women, he has at least enough sense of self to be willing to state his own interest:

My lady, what my heart feels about this
I will tell you, but don’t let it vex you:
from doing it comes the pleasure,
and he who does that and only that
can remove himself lightly,
for all other acts are vain
if one doesn’t do it sooner or later.
Therefore, doing it is preferable, I think.

{ Dame, ceu ke mes cuers en sent
Vos dirai, maix ne vos anuit:
Del faire viennent li desduit
Et ki lou fait tan soulement
Partir s’en puet ligierement:
Car tui li autre fait sont vuit
S’on ne.l fait aprés ou davant;
Dont valt muelz li fiares, je cuit. }

Not all men are like that. But men should have enough strength to say what they want. Moreover, what men want should matter.

Not surprisingly, the lady has a different preference for how the man should behave. She declares:

My boyfriend, more preferable are embracing
and playing and enjoying,
pleasuring and caressing,
imploring and gazing,
than doing it and then leaving;
because so sweet is lingering
and so grievous is parting.

{ Amis, muelz valt li acoleirs
Et li jüers et li joïrs,
Li desduires et li sentirs,
Li proiers et li esgardeirs
Que li faires et puis aleirs,
S’a faire n’est li grans loixirs;
Car trop est doulz li dmorers
Et trop est griés li departirs. }

The man appreciates his lady’s interest, but highlights the seriousness of the issue:

My lady, very nice is playing
and kissing and lying side by side,
pleasuring and caressing,
imploring and gazing,
yet that is murder without doing it.
That is the root of all sighs
and of all that is bitter in love.
Hence more preferable to do it and flee.

{ Dame, moult est boens li jueirs
Et li baixiers et li gesirs,
Li desduires et li sentirs,
Li proiers et li esgardeirs;
Sans lou faire c’est li tueirs,
C’est la racine des sospirs
Et ceu k’en amors est ameirs;
Dont valt muelz faire et li foïrs. }

In most criminal justice systems, murder is ranked as an even more serious crime than rape. Teach women not to murder men. With laudable common sense, no one would even consider doing that. Men, if you fear you will be murdered, you may have consensual sex, but flee if you can!

Like too many women, the man’s girlfriend refuses to recognize the extent of violence against men. She also as a woman audaciously informs him about how men feel:

My boyfriend, I do not regard it as love
to hurry to do it and hurry to leave:
such love is not desirable,
for it has no savor.
But he doesn’t have such big suffering
who can embrace at leisure,
and kissing brings him even greater joy.
To enter into such love makes sense.

{ Amis, ne tieng pais a amors
Lou tost faire ne tost alier:
Teille amor ne fait a amer
Car elle n’ait poent de savor.
Maix cil n’ait pais moult grant dolor
Ke puet a loisir acolleir,
Et baissier ait joie grignor.
En teil amor fait sen entreir. }

As a man, the boyfriend surely has better knowledge than she has of men’s feelings and sufferings. He explains:

My lady, I have never seen one healed even for a day
by staying lying beside his beloved.
No one who has been wounded by love is healed
if she doesn’t grant him a good turn.
Such love resembles fire in an oven
that has no way by which it can vent,
but has within it such great heat
that one cannot extinguish it.

{ Dame, onc ne vi guerir nul jor,
Por soi deleis s’amie esteir,
Nullui ki fust navreis d’ameir,
S’on ne li fist aucun boen tor.
Teil amor semble feu en for
Ke ne s’en ait par ou aleir,
Mais enclos ait si grant chalor
C’on ne le puet desalumeir. }

Women should listen to men when men talk about their feelings and their sufferings. Listening to men is a necessary beginning of compassion for men.[2]

In another Old French jeu-parti, a wife affirms the importance of her husband having sex with her. Rolant de Reims set out a hypothetical for a gracious lady to consider:

Sweet lady, you have taken a husband,
a handsome and worthy young knight.
Some people who do not like you
let you know that he does not cease going out
with other women. I want to ask you
to tell me please, in the name of love,
which would be preferable to you, for your part:
having exclusive possession of him sexually,
while he let his longings roam elsewhere,
or to suffer others to possess him sexually,
while for you only was his longing always?

{ Douce dame, vos aveis prins marit,
Bel et vaillant et jone baicheleir.
Aucune gent qui ne vos ainme mi
Vos font savoir k’il ne fine d’aleir
Deleiz femes. Je vos voil demandeir
Ke mi dittes par amors, je vos prie,
Lou keil ariez plus chier, en vos partie,
Ou lou pooir de lui entierement
Et aillors fut sa volenteit menant,
Ou li pooirs de lui fut mis aillours
Et a vos fut sai volenteit tous jours? } [3]

The wife values her husband’s work for her:

By God, Rolant, given the dilemma you have proposed,
I am confident that I can ascertain the better.
I take possessing my husband, I tell you,
for I have a good body to carry such weight.
To sip from an empty bowl is all too wretched a mood.
Let his longings be allowed to go everywhere,
but let me have sexual pleasure from him.
I hold much more dear to have sex with him frequently,
than a longing from which I can take nothing.
The woman is worthless who does not have love’s joy
and who does not feel night and day its sweetness.

{ Par Deu, Rollant, teil jeu m’aveis partit
Ke je cuit bien au millour aseneir.
Je pran lou poir mon marit, jou vos di,
Que j’ai bien cors por teil fais a porteir.
Au veude escuele fait trop mavais humeir.
Sa volentei soit par tout otroïe,
Mais ke j’aie de lui la druwerie.
J’ai trop plus chier pooir que vient sovent
Ke volenteit ou je ne pran niant.
Feme ne vaut qui n’ait joie d’amors
Et qui n’en sent nuit et jour lai dousour. }

Perhaps drawing upon his own experience of epic failure, Rolant declares:

Lady, to the worse you have consented,
as I wish through reason to demonstrate.
You are lying next to your husband, let’s suppose,
and you well believe that he is fully capable of performing,
but his desire isn’t in accord with sexually performing.
Instead, he gets up and leaves your company
to go where his desire invites him.
You are left distraught, with a lamenting heart.
Now jealousy attacks you
and makes you think that he loves another,
which brings you both sorrow and anger.

{ Dame, au pïour vos aveis asenti,
Je lou vos voil bien par raison monstreir.
Leiz vos maris gixeis, or soit ansi,
Et bien santeis qu’il ait boin poir d’ovreir,
Mais volenteiz ne s’i welt acordeir,
Ainz lieve sus et lait vos compaignie,
Et si s’en vait ou volenteit li prie.
Vos demoreis marrie, a cuer dolant;
Jalozie vos court sus maintenant
Et fait panceir qu’il ainme autre ke vos,
Dont vos aveis et mezaixe et corrous. }

Men are not, in fact, dogs. Men are emotionally and sexually complex human beings. A man cannot always force himself to perform sexually when a woman demands it from him. Men’s desires matter for their sexual performances. A wife who wants her husband to have sex with her frequently should work to cultivate and maintain his desire for her. Authorities on outrageous, disreputable men’s websites suggest that women not get fat, that they keep their hair long, and that they strive for a joyful, warm, and receptive personality.

As meninist literary criticism makes clear, medieval literature has enduring value for women and men. Study medieval literature assiduously to enjoy a better life!

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• aspects of women’s privilege in the Old French jeu-parti
• men’s blessing of seminal creativity as numerous as stars of Heaven
• medieval poetry on the horror of men absent and dying in war

Notes:

[1] Lady & her Boyfriend {Dame & Ami}, a game in parts {jeu-parti}, “My boyfriend, who is more worthy {Amis, ki est li muelz vaillans}” st. 1, Old French text (Lorraine dialect) from Doss-Quinby (2001) p. 100, English translation (with my modifications to track the Old French more closely) also from id. The subsequent five quotes are similarly sourced and cover serially stanzas 2-6. Two additional stanzas exist for this song, but those two stanzas are clumsily written and have a different rhyme scheme. They probably aren’t authentic to this song. Dronke (2007) p. 331. In not naming either participant, this jeu-parti is unique in the corpus of jeux-partis. Id. p. 330.

The music for this song is a contrafactum (re-use) of the music for Bernart de Ventadorn’s “Now when I see the skylark lift {Can vei la lauzeta mover}.”  “Amis, ki est li muelz vaillans / Amis, quelx est li mieuz vaillanz” reads as “as a spirited ‘take’ on Bernart’s lyric.” Murray (2015) p. 70.

The term jeu-parti developed into the rather different English word “jeopardy”:

“Jeu parti” passed into Anglo-French as juparti, and from there it was borrowed into Middle English and respelled “jeopardie.” At first, the English word was used to refer to the risks associated with alternative moves in the game of chess. Soon, however, the term came to be used more generally in the “risk” or “danger” sense that it has today.

Via Merriam-Webster online page for “jeopardy.” The English meaning of jeu-parti anticipated men’s position under modern college sex regulations.

[2] Women should listen particularly to men who tell them what they would prefer not to hear. Taking the opposite, “courtly” path, Dronke speculated:

was this poet a man, trying to justify a brutish, macho view of sex against women’s notions of tenderness surrounding the act of love? Or, was the anonymous poet a woman, arguing subtly for a more sensitive conception of love, while presenting her partner as simpleminded, lustful and coarse — the Baron Ochs of his generation? I am inclined to think so.

Dronke (2007) p. 332. Ausonius wrote his Wedding Mix {Cento nuptialis} as an outrageous amplification of such fawning anti-meninism.

[3] Lady & Rolant de Reims {Dame & Rolant de Reims}, a game in parts {jeu-parti}, “Sweet lady, you have taken a husband {Douce dame, vos aveis prins marit}” st. 1, Old French text (Lorraine dialect) from Doss-Quinby (2001) p. 94, English translation (with my modifications to track the Old French more closely) also from id. The subsequent two stanzas are similarly from id. They are cited serially and cover all three stanzas of the song. Three stanzas are unusually few for a jeu-parti. This song, which survives in just one manuscript, may well be incomplete. Dronke (2007) p. 332.

A man trouvère named Rolant participated in 25 jeux-partis. Outside of those songs, nothing is known of him. Dronke (2007) p. 332. In four of those 25 jeux-partis, Rolant queries women’s privilege.

Barker interprets the wife having sex with her husband “in terms of power over” him and argues that the wife is “focusing on the benefits of tangible power over her husband.” Barker (2013) p. 251. The crucial verb pooir seems to me much better read as “to have capability” than as “to have power.” Barker further interprets:

The ‘good’ lover, for the two feminine voices, becomes the man they can see in front of them, doing things they can see and manage, which force the lover into real interaction with the lady.

Barker (2013) p. 254. Men shouldn’t be forced in love. Rape of men occurs about as frequently as rape of women. Neither women nor men should force each other in love.

[image] Medieval couple embracing in bed. Illumination made in the 1390s. From Österreichische Nationalbibliothek Codex Vindobonensis 2762 (Wenceslas Bible {Wenzelsbibel}), fol. 86.

References:

Barker, Camilla. 2013. Dialogue and Dialectic in Twelfth- and Thirteenth-Century Occitan and Old French Courtly Lyric and Narrative. Ph. D. Thesis, King’s College, London.

Doss-Quinby, Eglal, Joan Tasker Grimbert, Wendy Pfeffer, and Elizabeth Aubery. 2001. Songs of the Women Trouvères. New Haven: Yale University Press. (review by Carol Symes)

Dronke, Peter. 2007. “Women’s Debates in Medieval French Lyric.” Ch. 18 (pp. 323-336) in Dronke, Peter. Forms and Imaginings: from antiquity to the fifteenth century. Roma: Edizioni di Storia e Letteratura.

Murray, David Alexander. 2015. Poetry in Motion: the Mobility of Lyrics and Languages in the European Middles Ages. Ph. D. Thesis. King’s College, London.

Another-Slave-Man: Hey, One-Slave-Man, you fool, what are you doing?

One-Slave-Man: (waking up) I’m getting ready to type out notes, “Topics to Study for the Mid-Term.”

Another-Slave-Man: Good luck. Ask something that’s not in the study notes, they’ll kick you in the ribs in the course evaluation.

One-Slave-Man: I know, and I don’t want to think about it.

Another-Slave-Man: It’s dangerous work, but they don’t care, and why should I? I think I’ll turn off the webcam, put the phone on silent mode, and take a snooze like you were.

One-Slave-Man: Do what you want. But I’m gonna give my students a play for their money. It’s time that they get a sense of the plot. (He turns on his webcam and microphone.) Hey students, you must press @ within 30 seconds to get credit for attending this class. (His admin dashboard subsequently shows 46 @’s out of 65 registered students).

Look, I’ll keep this brief, and you shouldn’t expect anything uplifting. I’m no Mary Beard, so you can’t brag about having attended a course by a member of the Board of the British Museum. But that’s no reason to put your mic on mute and ignore me. What I’ve got for you is simple and praise-worthy, just like you. The Paragon-Guardian Content Tribunal had deputized an army of cyber-residents to help Facebook, Google, Twitter, and other Internet mega-corps moderate content. It’s even worse than that. Most of the PGCT’s deputy paragon-guardians are young women, and our own university president, Love-Dworkin, is the head of the PGCT. She’s seriously sick. What do you think she’s doing? You want to guess? Go ahead.

Hey, Nitin Nohria, you say that she’s working to make women feel loved? No, that’s what Professor Proserpina was doing, before Emma Penelope betrayed her with their very own son!

And you, Vivek Wadhwa, you say she’s promoting women in technology? Get real. How many women do you think want to spend their days staring at a computer screen, alone and focused on writing code? Tech companies already have more software project managers and tech HR specialists than coders, plus huge stacks of women’s applications for those tech jobs. Women who go into tech today have to be coders. They’d have to be bugged out on the autism spectrum to want to be coders!

You’re all babbling nonsense, as usual. Just shut up and I’ll tell you what President Love-Dworkin is doing. She’s sex-trafficking in young women on behalf of Internet mega-corps. She’s enslaving them in the demeaning and mind-numbing work of content moderation. She tells them that working for meager wages as a Paragon-Guardian Content Tribunal deputy paragon-guardian content moderator is a very prestigious position. She tells them it’s an important stepping stone to becoming a published writer, or even a journalist.

President Love-Dworkin’s daughter, Hate-Dworkin, is trying to save our girls. So she’s ordered us to teach you Aristophanes’s great comedy, Wasps. If you study this play and learn all that we have to teach, you’ll find for yourself a much better life than orchestrating mobs on Twitter as a deputy paragon-guardian content moderator. Write that point down in your notes and double underline it!

(A message alert pops up on Another-Slave-Man’s screen. It’s from Hate-Dworkin.)

Hate-Dworkin: Teach them about the romance writer’s hate-fest against each other. Who would want to work on content-moderating that? Teach them that romance novels perpetuate sexist stereotypes and that romance novels are a form of women’s porn.

One-Slave-Man: Look, young lady, you ordered us to teach Aristophanes’s Wasps. Now you want us to teach romance novels? What sort of comedy is this?

Hate-Dworkin: Have you found my mother’s iPhone yet? She’s sure to call women students and try to seduce them into allowing her to be their mentor.

Another-Slave-Man: Her iPhone? Lady, we’ve already taken from her two iPhones, an Android, and a Blackberry.

Hate-Dworkin: The campus police told me that their Stingray is still picking up mobile phone calls from my mother’s iPhone 11 to women students. She must have another iPhone. Find it and get rid of it!

One-Slave-Man: Ok, if that’s what you want me to do to help women students.

(An email-received notification pops up on Another-Slave-Man’s screen. He opens the new email.)

Another-Slave-Man: Hmmm… “Prof. Another-Slave-Man, Hi! Instead of a 10-page paper on resisting misogyny in Wasps, can I write a 10-page paper on Nathan Taylor’s hate postings and moderating Twitter communication about knitters’ yarn colors to fight white supremacy? I think that’s more relevant and would help me get a good summer internship. Thanks. :)” … Well, well.

Hate-Dworkin: My mother has spoken with her. For sure.

Another-Slave-Man: So what do you want me to do?

Hate-Dworkin: Tell her no, you idiot! She can’t write a paper on Internet content moderation for a classics course on Aristophanes’s Wasps!

Another-Slave-Man: You want me to just tell a woman student “No”?

Hate-Dworkin: Yes!

Another-Slave-Man: Ok, whatever you say, you’re the college president’s daughter.

(A chorus of women students complaining about their mothers starts to fill the course chatroom.)

I’m fed up with social-media relations. I don’t want to be a paragon-guardian content moderator. I wanna be an elementary school teacher, an elementary school art teacher! Don’t call me again!

Stop texting me all the time. I just don’t care, ok? Patriarchy-tyranny, patriarchy–tyranny, patriarchy-tyranny — I just don’t care!

You’re my daughter. I raised you. What’s wrong with you?

Stop complaining about my father. We haven’t seen him for years. Just, like, let it go. My classics professor, he cares about me. I’ve got to write a paper on Wasps in relation to Thesmophoriazusae for him. No you can’t listen in. Leave me alone.

I am NOT your therapist. Stop posting all our family drama on Facebook, or I’ll unfriend you. I’ve got to FaceTime with my girlfriends, we need to figure out what to write about Wasps. Oh please, you know my boyfriend is black and a Muslim. It’s a play by Aristophanes!

One-Slave-Man: Students, please ensure that your devices aren’t on speakerphone when you’re in the course chatroom. We’re getting a lot of background conversations.

Chorus Leader: Being confined to our homes is ruining our college experience. Let’s write a group email to our glorious role model, the president of our college, a true woman leader, President Love-Dworkin. She’s always spoken out against women in the home.

(President Love-Dworkin’s icon pops up in the course chatroom.)

Love-Dworkin: The home is a prison. Liberate women!

(The president’s daughter’s icon pops up in the course chatroom.)

Hate-Dworkin: Mom, you were the one who closed down the campus and ordered all students to go home.

Love-Dworkin: I want them to roam about freely as virtual residents of vast cyber-space, searching out hateful content and suppressing patriarchy-tyranny through collective Twittering.

Hate-Dworkin: That’s ugly, nasty work.

Love-Dworkin: Young women must be champions of social justice!

Hate-Dworkin: Most would prefer to get together with their friends and talk about who went where last night, where you can get the best deal on that, what that bitch did, and boys.

Love-Dworkin: Women of the chorus, you future glorious deputy paragon-guardian content moderators, did you read what my daughter just wrote? She’s sexist, misogynist, and heterosexist. Denounce her, denounce her, cancel her virtual existence! Chase her from the course chatroom. Now! Start Twittering! Storm Facebook!

One-Slave-Man: Neither President Love-Dworkin nor her daughter Hate-Dworkin are registered for this classics course. You’re disrupting our teaching of Aristophanes’s Wasps. You two college officials, please leave the course chatroom.

Love-Dworkin: WASPs? White supremacist! You’re done teaching at this college! Just wait ’til I text the Board of Trustees!

Hate-Dworkin: Don’t forget that I’m the one who manages my mom’s online Fidelity account and who makes electronic payments to professors. I’m staying to monitor the course content. Tell my mom’s yes-woman chorus to leave.

Leader of the Chorus: We’re not leaving. We’re going to indict you as a criminal.

Hate-Dworkin: In Heaven’s name, stop raving, you lunatic woman. What joke of justice is this?

Chorus: You’re complicit in patriarchy-tyranny. That’s not licit, as long as love flows through our fists. Take this! (The chorus in unison moons the college president’s daughter.)

Another-Slave-Man: Uh-oh, we’re in big trouble. Switch to ancient Greek to calm the chatroom. They won’t understand.

Hate-Dworkin:

ὡς ἅπανθ᾿ ὑμῖν τυραννίς ἐστι καὶ ξυνωμόται,
ἤν τε μεῖζον ἤν τ᾿ ἔλαττον πρᾶγμά τις κατηγορῇ.

{ Patriarchy-tyranny and co-conspirators everywhere, according to you,
as soon as you hear any critical voice, no matter how marginal. }

Chorus:

ἆρα δῆτ᾿ οὐκ αὐτὰ δῆλα
τοῖς πένησιν, ἡ τυραννὶς ὡς λάθρᾳ γ᾿ ἐ —
λάμβαν᾿ ὑπιοῦσά με

{ It’s now white as light for all to see clearly,
how patriarchy-tyranny seeps through micro-slights,
creeps up and tries to jump us with white supremacy. }

Hate-Dworkin:

ἢν μὲν ὠνῆταί τις ὀρφῶς, μεμβράδας δὲ μὴ ᾿θέλῃ,
εὐθέως εἴρηχ᾿ ὁ πωλῶν πλησίον τὰς μεμβράδας·
“οὗτος ὀψωνεῖν ἔοιχ᾿ ἅνθρωπος ἐπὶ τυραννίδι.”
ἢν δὲ γήτειον προσαιτῇ ταῖς ἀφύαις ἥδυσμά τι,
ἡ λαχανόπωλις παραβλέψασά φησι θἀτέρῳ·
“εἰπέ μοι· γήτειον αἰτεῖς· πότερον ἐπὶ τυραννίδι;
ἢ νομίζεις τὰς Ἀθήνας σοὶ φέρειν ἡδύσματα;”

{ If someone buys sea-perch, but doesn’t want smelt,
the smelt seller in the next stall pipes up:
“Disgrace! This guy buys fish like a patriarch-tyrant!”
And if he asks for an onion for free to pep up his smelt,
the offended lady selling onions gives him an evil eye, saying:
“Asking for an onion because you want to be a patriarch-tyrant?
Or maybe you think Athens grows spices as post-colonial tribute to you?” }

One-Slave-Man:

κἀμέ γ᾿ ἡ πόρνη χθὲς εἰσελθόντα τῆς μεσημβρίας,
ὅτι κελητίσαι ᾿κέλευον, ὀξυθυμηθεῖσά μοι
ἤρετ᾿ εἰ τὴν Ἱππίου καθίσταμαι τυραννίδα.

{ The graduate student I’m sleeping with also got testy with me
when I went to her room yesterday noon and asked her to ride me.
She claimed that I, like Aristotle, seek to support patriarchy-tyranny! }

Chorus:

Ancient Greek is dead, dead letters,
teach in English, we’ll understand better!
Busy students have no time for philology,
teach in English & give us a classics degree!

One-Slave-Man: Bag groceries?

Another-Slave-Man: I did that for awhile. It’s not so bad.

Love-Dworkin: Stop teaching WASPs. If you don’t teach Aristophanes in support of social justice and fighting hate, you’ll be serving women by bagging groceries, if I have any breath left in me!

One-Slave-Man: Yup, women are grateful if you carry heavy bags for them.

Love-Dworkin: Offer to carry a heavy bag for me, and I’ll tear open your testicles with my stilettos.

Hate-Dworkin: Not all women are like that.

Love-Dworkin: Shut up! Who asked you? Didn’t I teach you as a little girl, when I took you to faculty meetings and parked your stroller in the conference room, to be seen but not heard?

Hate-Dworkin: Can’t we engage in dialogue and discussion without all this fighting and shrill screaming?

Love-Dworkin: Hold your tongue before I smack you, you over-educated little twit. You’re just like your father.

Hate-Dworkin: I thought you said he wasn’t actually my father.

Love-Dworkin: Not now, honey, not now.

Hate-Dworkin: Mom, are you happy?

Love-Dworkin: I’d be happy if I could mentor a whole army of women students to be deputy paragon-guardian content moderators.

Hate-Dworkin: Wouldn’t you be happier if you had a warm and cheerful young girlfriend, well-educated in classics and a good cook, too?

Love-Dworkin: Well, yes.

Hate-Dworkin: So instead of organizing mob actions on Twitter, why don’t you spend some time browsing Scissr?

Love-Dworkin: How do you know about Scissr? What does Scissr have to do with social justice?

Hate-Dworkin: It’s like classics, mom. It’s like Sappho’s poetry.

Chorus:

Your daughter is wise beyond her years. Listen to her!
Your daughter understands the ways of the world. Listen to her!

Love-Dworkin: Later, my dear. I can’t give up on Internet content moderating while knowing that there’s so much hate out there.

Hate-Dworkin: How about you moderate your own use of social media? We can feed your Facebook, Google, Instagram, Whatsapp, Pinterest, Snapchat, WeChat, and whatever accounts into one unified moderating app. There you can review each item you would have posted and discuss them at length with a committee of women deputy paragon-guardian content moderators.

Love-Dworkin: Hmmm, would you help gather that group of young women for me?

Hate-Dworkin: Gladly.

Love-Dworkin: Let’s do it, right away.

Leader of the Chorus: Now please, students, listen to what I have to say. You’ve seen a mother and daughter reconciled in a classics course chatroom after it was flooded with ancient Greek. Can any of you now question the value of studying ancient Greek? Your hardworking classics professors, One-Slave-Man and Another-Slave-Man, respond to emails, answer phone calls, and text back to you even when fatigued and needing sleep. They have inserted jibberish in the margins of your essays so that you know that they have opened the electronic papers you have sent them. They deserve to be honored. Give them a five-star rating in your course evaluation for their course on Aristophanes’s Wasps.

(A warning pops up on the admin dashboard. It’s 2 minutes until the end of the recorded lecture.)

Another-Slave-Man: My lecture’s nearing its end. Should I cut to the edict on doing the reading? That should take their minds off all the COVID-19 executive orders.

One-Slave-Man: Yea, stream that piece out to the students.

(An image of the face of Another-Slave-Man appears above the course chatroom.)

Another-Slave-Man: (via pre-recorded video) All students must do the reading. You must do the reading. I repeat, you must do the reading. Watching YouTube videos does not substitute for doing the reading. You may do an virtual-reality performance of the play as a substitute for writing a term paper, but not as a substitute for the mid-term multiple-choice examination. Students may not collaborate in taking the mid-term. The college will use its full array of surveillance and monitoring systems installed on your computers, your phones, your watches, your televisions, your smart speakers, your earphones, and your refrigerators to ensure that you do not engage in illicit communication with each other concerning answers to the mid-term multiple-choice exam. I remind you that possible answers to each mid-term question are A, B, C, D, or E. On the day of the mid-term, no student may use any of these letters in communicating with any other student. Thank you for your strict adherence to this important prohibition.

Another-Slave-Man: (live) Today’s class is about to end. Press @ within 30 seconds to get credit for attending this class. (His admin dashboard subsequently shows 17 @’s out of 65 students).

Another-Slave-Man: Where can they be? All the cafes, restaurants, and bars are closed.

Chorus:

We’re making faces about that girl wearing braces;
poor little dear, she’s so queer!
And what a pattern on her blouse,
and the mousy brown hair, she’s so queer!
She’s coming over here, so we’re gonna dance,
dance right out of here!

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• the marriage of Socrates, friendship, and life and death of the sole
• Ysengrimus: prophetic beast epic in vital medieval Latin literature
• men’s studies: academic struggling against patriarchal prison

Notes:

The above play is loosely based on Aristophanes’s comedy Wasps. Wasps was performed in Athens in 422 BGC. The Atticist has generously made freely available online an ancient Greek text for Aristophanes’s Wasps, an English translation that follows closely the ancient Greek, and commentary and notes. Here’s an alternate ancient Greek text and alternate English translation. Above I’ve quoted Wasps vv. 488-9, 463-5, 493-9, and 500-2, using Greek text from the Loeb edition of Henderson (1998). I’ve taken considerable liberties with the English translations below the Greek texts.

[images] (1) Thalia, the ancient Greek muse of comedy, holding a comic mask. Detail from the “Muses Sarcophagus” that was found by the Via Ostiense. Made in the second century GC. Preserved as accession # Ma 475 (MR 880) in the Louvre Museum (Paris). Image thanks to Jastrow and Wikimedia Commons. (2) Detail from a bust sculpture of Aristophanes. Made between the 4th and 1st centuries BGC. Image from the book, Greek Dramas by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes, D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1900, hence in the public domain in the U.S. Via Encyclopedia Britannica.

Reference:

Henderson, Jeffrey, ed. and trans. 1998. Aristophanes. Vol. 2, Clouds, Wasps, Peace. Loeb Classical Library, 488. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.