Governments address domestic violence with billions of dollars directed through the highest fora. The world needs good government action. Looking for a way out of the COVID-19 quarantine, the greatest problem in the world today, I hoped to receive the favor of wisdom from what has been and is. I knelt before my Internet-connected computer, a marvel of human engineering. In tears I thought of my wasted intellectual efforts and the stinging pain of my failures. I lifted my face to Heaven and remembered my inspiring second-grade teacher. Then I read a story from Livy.

In 406 BGC, the city of Rome went to war against its rival Etrurian city Veii. The Roman consular tribune Marcus Furius Camillus led a siege of Veii’s allied city Capena. The Romans under Camillus won Capena’s surrender and looted that city in 398 BGC. Two years later, Camillus led a Roman force that violently overcame Veii. The Romans then killed all the men of Veii.

The Etrurian city of Falerii, Veii’s only remaining major ally, still defied Rome. Brutal violence against men and many men’s deaths seemed inevitable. However, the foremost scholar in Falerii undertook a daring initiative for peace:

The Faliscans customarily employed the same person as teacher and attendant of their children. They entrusted a number of boys simultaneously to the care of one man. This practice still obtains in Greece. As is commonly the case, the sons of the city leaders were under the tuition of the man regarded as their foremost scholar. This man had in peacetime regularly led the boys out in front of the city for play and exercise. During the war, he made no change in his routine. With this and that game and story, he would draw them sometimes a shorter, sometimes a longer distance from the city gate. One day, being farther away than usual, he seized the opportunity to bring the boys to the enemy Roman outposts, then into the Roman camp to the headquarters of Camillus.

{ Mos erat Faliscis eodem magistro liberorum et comite uti, simulque plures pueri, quod hodie quoque in Graecia manet, unius curae demandabantur. Principum liberos, sicut fere fit, qui scientia videbatur praecellere erudiebat. Is cum in pace instituisset pueros ante urbem lusus exercendique causa producere, nihil eo more per belli tempus intermisso, modo brevioribus modo longioribus spatiis trahendo eos a porta lusu sermonibusque variatis, longius solito ubi res dedit progressus inter stationes eos hostium castraque inde Romana in praetorium ad Camillum perduxit. } [1]

The teacher-scholar explained to Camillus that by holding the sons of the leading men of Falerii, the Romans would be able to take Falerii without having any men killed.

With all-too-prevalent contempt for men’s lives, Camillus scornfully refused this opportunity to take Falerii without any violence against men. Instead, Camillus engaged the Faliscan students in humiliating their peace-seeking teacher:

Then Camillus had the teacher stripped naked and his hands bound behind his back. He gave him up to the boy-students to lead back to Falerii. He provided them with rods to scourge the traitor as they drove him back into the city.

{ Denudatum deinde eum manibus post tergum inligatis reducendum Falerios pueris tradidit, virgasque eis quibus proditorem agerent in urbem verberantes dedit. }

A large crowd of Faliscans watched the naked teacher being flogged by his students on the way back into Falerii. Camillus’s action so impressed the men of Falerii that they decided to yield peacefully to Rome.[2] The teacher-scholar thus succeeded in preventing brutal violence against the men of Falerii — except for the brutal violence against himself. That teacher-scholar, whose name has not even been preserved, is an unrecognized martyr-hero of ancient Roman history.

Teachers who defy authority to promote peace, justice, and truth too often are martyred. Perhaps recognizing the dangers of gyno-idolatry that Lucretius so brilliantly depicted, a medieval teacher sought to teach young men about women. He urged them:

Listen to a learned
alphabetical song
about what kind is the love
and favor of women.

{ Audite alphabetica
Cantica sophistica,
Cuius sit amor generis
Et favor muliebris. } [3]

Unlike different tribes, ethnicities, or races, women and men have always led intimately related lives in all societies not doomed to extinction. What could be more important teaching for men than teaching them about women? The teacher began his alphabetic instruction with a stern warning, in the classical tradition of Lucretius, about how women affect even very learned men:

The deeply thinking academic
often turns dreamer —
burning, gorged with crime
and work of perversity.

{ Altum scolasticum
Sepe facit fantasticum
Fervens, fartum sceleris
Et opus pravitatis. }

That’s a plausible description of much modern academic work on courtly love. The medieval teacher then drilled his students with the rest of the alphabetical lesson:

A woman is two-tongued,
as unstable as air;
she deceives multitudes
like thieves in the night.

A bloody beast,
she stretches out on the earth,
deriding and deceiving
the clerical estate.

A cunning Delilah,
strong in all harm,
confounding and destroying
a person’s reputation.

Eve is announced,
the deceiver of man;
beware of her presence
as one leading to damnation.

Furtively withdraw,
flee from the dancing girl;
your mind becomes demented —
recognize the courtesan.

Garrulous and fatuous,
empty of all honor,
messenger of falsehood,
collector of gossip.

He owning, not being needy,
is made into a beggar;
the proud lord
transformed into a servant.

Hellish fire,
Gehenna-like punishment,
anger and envy
for all those who are married.

Divine charity
she by herself obscures,
a wicked one creating chaos.
Cease loving her!

She circles the streets
in processions and choruses,
visits parishes,
schools, and taverns.

Mediator of Mammon
for the wretched wicked,
the death of body and soul
comes without repenting.

Neither wants to leave,
everyone wants to love,
you have the cleric ensnared
and the layman defrauded.

She deceives all men:
popes, cardinals,
monks, elders,
the one defying bishops.

She gives birth to many children
outside the law; she makes bastards.
She wants to be heirs those
she produces as common servants.

She seeks écu and obol,
groat and florin.
She doesn’t seek honor,
but stretches away from chastity.

Director of the old and young,
the poor and the rich,
she herself is dirty,
and so she makes the whole world.

She sucks in the wise,
swallows the prudent;
thus was done to Samson,
Plato, and Solomon.

She shaves off yours, keeps what’s hers;
she benumbs and tortures the soul.
She makes the good-willed
frivolous and jealous.

Vanity, silliness,
vanity of vanities —
let us render honor to God
and with him we will live.

To works of Christ
and of her husband she’s contrary;
her words and acts
are nefarious.

She sells the sacraments
of the church of Jesus;
thus she herself grabs
the benefit of divine honor.

Jealous and unstable,
frequently making changes,
on account of your gifts
she is shown to be lovable.

{ Bilinguis mulier
Instabilis ut aer
Decipit quam plures,
Velut in nocte fures.

Cruenta bestia,
Tendit ad terrestria,
Derisio, delusio
Status clericalis.

Dolosa Dalila,
Ad omne malum valida,
Confusio, destructio
Fame personalis.

Euam pronuntiat,
Viri fallatricem,
Cuius cave praesentiam
Velut damnatricem.

Furtive subtrahit,
Fugias saltatricem;
Mentis tue dementiam,
Agnosce meretricem.

Garrula et fatua,
Omnis honoris vacua,
Gerula mendacii,
Verborum comportatrix.

Habentem, non egentem
Facit mendicantem,
Dominum superbum
Transmutat in servum.

Ignis infernalis
Pena gehennalis,
Ira et invidia
Per ipsa committuntur.

Karitas deifica
Per ipsam obfuscatur;
Chaos creans malefica;
Desiste, amator.

Lustrat per plateas
Pompas et choreas,
Visitat parochias,
Scholas et tabernas.

Mediatrix Mammone,
Miseri mechantis
Mors carnis et anime
Fit non penitentis.

Neutrum vult dimmitere,
Quemquam vult amare,
Clericum decipere
Et laicum defraudare.

Omnes fallit homines,
Papales, cardinales,
Monachos, presbiteros
Discordat prelatos.

Plures parit filios
Abs lege, facit spurios,
Quos vult esse heriles,
Servos facit viles.

Querit es et obolum
Grossum et florenum
Non querit honorem
Sed tendit ad pudorem.

Rectrix senis, iuuenis,
Pauperis et diuitis,
Ipsa lutibundum
Totum facit mundum.

Sorbet sapientiam
Deglutit prudentiam,
Ut fecit Samsoni,
Platoni, Salomoni.

Tondet tua, tenet sua
Torpet, torquet animum,
Frivolum, zelotypum,
Facit benivolum.

Vanitas, fatuitas,
Vanitatum vanitas
Honorem Deo demus
Et cum eo vivemus.

Xristiani operibus,
Viro suo contraria,
Verbis et factis
Est nefaria.

Yesi vendidit
Ecclesie sacramenta,
Sic ipsa rapuit
Honoris incrementa.

Zelotypa et instabilis,
Fit sepe variabilis,
Propter tua munera
Ostenditur amabilis. }

Those are harsh, upsetting lessons. Yet they don’t encompass at length medieval paternity fraud, men’s suffering in medieval marriage, and gender-disparate medieval punishment for adultery. To understand the problem, imagine that a teacher today, even a law-school professor, taught students about imprisonment of men for sex-payment debts, abortion coercion, and rape of men. What do you think would happen to that teacher?[4]

The fourth-century teacher Cassian of Imola testifies to the fate of teachers who defy authority. Cassian taught stenography to boys. As a teacher, he sternly pushed his students to learn. Cassian was also a Christian at a time when the Roman Empire persecuted Christians. Cassian refused to sacrifice at the altars of traditional Roman gods such as Cybele, Venus, Minerva, and especially Juno, goddess-wife and ruler of Zeus. A Roman official thus arranged for Cassian to be brutally killed:

He is stripped of his clothing and his hands are bound behind his back.
His flock of students, armed with their sharp pens, arrives.
As much hate as each had held in silent anger,
each freely pours forth at length, burning with gall.
Some throw their brittle tablets against his face.
The tablets shatter, with fragments flying from his brow,
waxed box-wood rumbling from impact with his blood-stained cheeks,
the broken slabs red and wet from the hits.
Others now thrust forward sharp iron pricks
whose bottom part digs furrows in wax for writing,
and whose tops efface the letter-cuts so that the rough
surface is again restored to be smooth and shining.
Christ’s follower is stabbed with one; with the other, cut up.
One part penetrates the soft guts, the other part carves off skin.
All two hundred hand-limbs together have pierced him,
and from all these wounds drops of blood drip at once.
A greater torturer was the child who pricked the skin-top,
compared to the one who penetrated deep guts.
That one, the light hitter who prevents death,
knows to be cruel through the pain of only sharp stings.
This one, as much as he strikes the interior, hidden vitals,
gives more relief by bringing death nearer.

{ Vincitur post terga manus spoliatus amictu,
adest acutis agmen armatum stilis.
Quantum quisque odii tacita conceperat ira,
effundit ardens felle tandem libero.
Coniciunt alii fragiles inque ora tabellas
frangunt, relisa fronte lignum dissilit,
buxa crepant cerata genis inpacta cruentis
rubetque ab ictu curta et umens pagina.
Inde alii stimulos et acumina ferrea vibrant,
qua parte aratis cera sulcis scribitur,
et qua secti apices abolentur et aequoris hyrti
rursus nitescens innovatur area.
Hinc foditur Christi confessor et inde secatur,
pars viscus intrat molle, pars scindit cutem.
Omnia membra manus pariter fixere ducente
totidemque guttae vulnerum stillant simul.
Major tortor erat, qui summa pupugerat infans,
quam qui profunda perforarat viscera,
ille, levis quoniam percussor morte negata
saevire solis scit dolorum spiculis,
hic, quanto interius vitalia condita pulsat,
plus dat medellae, dum necem prope applicat. } [5]

Cassian begged his students to strike him harder so that he would die more quickly and suffer less. But his students, tiring in writing with the flesh and blood of their teacher, took breaks from their work. Their teacher deprived them of holidays, yet now they had no need to ask him for a break. The students taunted their teacher with his teaching. His suffering was drawn out at length. Only Christ, showing mercy, ultimately liberated Cassian into death. Any teacher who attempted to teach his students uncomfortable truths about gender would probably suffer a similar fate.[6]

A teacher who doesn’t challenge students acts as a servant, not a teacher. Today the teacher Cassian of Imola is a little-known saint-martyr. Only a teacher with great faith, or exceptionally understanding students, would dare to follow the example of Cassian of Imola. Servants are prevalent. True teachers can scarcely be found.[7]

Saint Cassian of Imola, how wonderful is your witness! Great and praiseworthy was your courage as a teacher. You have renewed my hope. Toward true teachers may all students always show kindness and compassion.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Prudentius’s crown: Saint Agnes redeemed the male gaze on every Eve
• Ysengrimus: prophetic beast epic in vital medieval Latin literature
• medieval poetry on the horror of men absent and dying in war

Notes:

[1] Livy, History of Rome / From the Founding of the City {Ab urbe condita} 5.27, Latin text and English translation (modified insubstantially to be more easily readable) from Foster (1924). Here’s an alternate, freely accessible English translation of Canon Roberts (1912). The subsequent quotes, unless otherwise noted, are similarly sourced from Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.27.

[2] Regarding the men of Falerii, Camillus declared to his fellow Romans and the Faliscan teacher:

I, through the Roman practice of manliness, work, and weapons, will conquer them as I conquered Veii.

{ ego Romanis artibus, virtute opere armis, sicut Veios vincam. }

Livy, Ab urbe condita 5.27.8, my English translation. Camillus’s Roman practice probably would have caused the deaths of many Roman men and of all the men of Falerii.

[3] Gaspar de Rossis de Perusio (attributed), Alphabetical song concerning the evil woman {Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere} st. 1, Latin text from Puig (1998), my English translation, benefiting from the Spanish translation of Puig (1995), pp. 40-7, and the Portuguese translation of Dias (2014) pp. 109-12. Puig (1995), p. 39, described Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere as probably from the thirteenth century. Puig (1998) convincingly places the poem in the first half of the fifteenth century. Cf. Dias (2014). The subsequent two quotes are similarly from Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere and cover the whole poem seriatim.

Stanzas 2 through 24 of Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere form an alphabetic acrostic, an abecedarius. Each Latin stanza begins with a successive letter of the Latin alphabet. On the history of the abecedarius, see note [3] in my post on Angelbert’s “Aurora cum primo mane tetra noctis dividet {At the first light, dawn will separate the horrors of night},” also an abecedarius.

[4] Dias (2014), pp. 119-20, urges using Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere in introductory-level teaching of Latin at secondary schools and universities. But if this poem were properly contextualized as literature of men’s sexed protest, any teacher teaching it surely would be in grave danger.

[5] Prudentius, Book about the Crowns {Liber Peristephanon} 9, The Passion of Saint Cassian of Cornelius’s Forum {Passio Sancti Cassiani Forocorneliensis} vv. 43-64, Latin text from Thomson (1949) vol. 2, p. 224-6, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. Subsequent quotes below concerning Cassian are similarly from Prudentius’s account. Cornelius’s Forum is the northern Italian town now called Imola. Prudentius’s account is the earliest surviving record of the martyr-saint Cassian of Imola.

Ancient and medieval teachers seem to have regularly beaten boy students. Laes stated:

A cursory glance at the ancient literary record reveals that teaching at schools went hand in hand with meting out physical punishments. Aristotle’s argument that education and pain are closely connected is embedded in a tradition of education that included violence. Even limiting ourselves to the Latin literary sources, numerous examples come to the mind. Notorious are Horace’s plagosus Orbilius; Ovid’s description of children with hands swollen from the rod; Martial’s annoyance with his neighbour, the verbally abusive schoolmaster who disturbs his sleep; and Juvenal’s biting satire on cruel and recalcitrant teachers. Manum ferulae subducere (“to withdraw one’s hand from the rod”) was a phrase that suggested the end of schooldays, or at least the transition from the grammaticus to the rhetor. In the so-called colloquia or conversation books meant for use in schools, it is stated unabashedly that the pupil who knows his lesson is praised and the one who fails is beaten.

Nothing changed in Late Antique schools. Augustine mentions the blows he got from his teachers and the fact that his parents had a good laugh over it. In his Protrepticus, Ausonius exhorts his grandson not to fear the schoolmaster. The man looks forbidding because of his age, and his hard voice and short-tempered expression seem menacing, but the child is to endure all this with philosophical resignation: it would be a sign of weakness to fear the whip, the screaming, the blows, and the harsh words. The cane (ferula), rod (virga), and whip (scutica) are referred to as tools of the master. Ausonius even offers the boy the cold comfort that both his father and mother had to go through the same — an unmistakable indication of the fact that girls, too, had to put up with physical violence at school.

Laes (2019) pp. 93-4, footnotes omitted. Coming after the lengthy account of evidence about beating boy students, the one reference to beating girl students is noticeable. Boys are subject to violent attacks on their genitals much more frequently than girls are. Men suffer death from physical violence about four times more frequently than women do. Ancient and medieval physical violence surely was predominately directed at boys and men.

According to Prudentius, Cassian’s boy students regarded him as a harsh teacher. The boy students were “bitter {amarus}” towards Cassian. They regarded him with “anger and fear {ira et metus}.” The resented that Cassian didn’t give them a “holiday {feria}.” The local church administrator knowingly told Prudentius, “no discipline is sweet for any children {nec dulcis ulli disciplina infantiae est}.”

Cassian of Tangier, thought to have been beheaded in 298 GC, is another martyr-stenographer. Cassian of Tangier was serving as a court reporter for the trial of the Christian Marcellus the Centurion in Roman north Africa. When Cassian heard the sentence of death for Marcellus, Cassian threw down his pen in disgust, denounced the verdict, and declared that he too was a Christian. Cassian was then arrested and put to death. Prudentius refers to Cassian of Tangier in Peristephanon 4.45-8.

Prudentius in Peristephanon 9 recounts a journey of men’s renewal like that of Aeneas in the Aeneid. However, Prudentius’s journey is primarily personal, yet also witnesses to a universal path. Aeneas, in contrast, works on behalf of the Trojans to refound their society in worldly terms. Cf. O’Hogan (2014).

[6] Prudentius’s account of the teacher-martyr Cassian isn’t merely about the “predicament of a Christian teacher instructing pagan pupils.” Cooper (2019) p. 34. Prudentius’s account of Cassian of Imola fundamentally concerns dissent. In a volume that she edited, Copeland declared:

the explorations of dissenting practices in this volume do not take for granted the polarity of victim and oppressor, or resistance and authority. For this binarism too is the product of normalizing historical narratives that want to assimilate the habit of dissent into knowable and interpretively actionable forms of represention. Such a “normalizing” history might, for example, render Prudentius’ legend as no more than a cautionary tale of student rebellion against pedagogical severity. Indeed, such normalizing historical narratives would reproduce the mechanisms of law iteself (pedagogicval law, the “law” of the Christian imperium) which summons dissent into legally or symbolically actionable forms of representation. But the modulations of resistence in this story, from the violent rebellion in the grammar classroom to the institutional dislocation of grammatica itself, are precisely what resist linear representation through the binarism of “orthodoxy” and “dissent.”

Copeland (1996) p. 14. Cf. Laes (2019). Copeland associates Cassian of Imola with the institutional history of grammar, but she doesn’t acknowledge modern philology’s penis problem. Morever, no voice of meninist literary criticism is heard in the volume that she edited. Graduate students taught without integrity produce tedious, mind-numbing work. See, e.g. Marshall (2015).

[7] Literary history records other teachers whom their students killed. According to writings of Gregory of Nazianzus and Sozomenus, students killed their teacher Bishop Mark in the fourth-century Thracian town Arethusa. According to the twelfth-century historian William of Malmesbury, ninth-century Germanic students stabbed to death their teacher, the philosopher Johannes Scotus Erigena. Four other medieval teachers apparently died similarly: Artemas of Pozzuoli, Archippus of Colossi, Felix of Pincis, and Cassian of Todi. Laes (2019) pp. 104-5.

[images] (1) Students of Falerii beating their teacher. Illumination (excerpt) from Guerber (1896)’s retelling of Livy’s account of Camillus taking Falerii. (2) Cassian of Imola being killed by his students. Painting made about 1500 by Innocenzo di Pietro Francucci da Imola. Via Wikimedia Commons and Regina. (3) Pink Floyd performing “Another Brick in the Wall,” Part II, from that group’s 1979 rock opera The Wall. Video on YouTube thanks to NoMadU55555. Early in the song are lyrics describing abusive men teachers:

But in the town, it was well known,
when they got home at night,
their fat and psychopathic wives
would thrash them
within inches of their lives.

In a 1980 broadcast interview with Jim Ladd, Roger Waters of Pink Floyd explained:

We actually, at the school I was at, had one guy {teacher} who I would fantasize that his wife beat him. Certainly she treated him like shit and he was a really crushed person and he handed as much of that pain onto us as he could and he did quite a good job of it.

Domestic violence against men should not continue to be denied, ignored or marginalized.

References:

Cooper, Kate. 2019. “The Master’s Voice: Martyrdom and the Late Roman Schoolroom in Prudentius’s Passio Sancti Cassiani.” Pp. 33-50 in Janet E. Spittler, ed. The Narrative Self in Early Christianity: essays in honor of Judith Perkins. Atlanta, GA: SBL Press. (volume review by David Brakke)

Copeland, Rita. 1996. “Introduction: dissenting critical practices.” Pp. 1-23 in Copeland, Rita, ed. Criticism and Dissent in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press

Dias, Paula Barata. 2014. “La donna è mobile…: Portuguese version and commentary of the alphabetical poem about the wickedness of women (Canticum alphabeticum de Mala Muliere, anonym, XIII C.E.).” Boletim De Estudos Clássicos. 59: 105-121.

Guerber, Helene A. 1896. The Story of the Romans. New York: American Book Co.

Foster, Benjamin O., ed and trans. 1924. Livy. History of Rome. Vol. III: Books 5-7. Loeb Classical Library 172. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Laes, Christian. 2019. “Teachers Afraid of Their Pupils: Prudentius’ Peristephanon 9 in a Sociocultural Perspective.” Mouseion. 16 (S1): 91-108.

Marshall, Christabel Nadia. 2015. Rewriting Masculinity with Male Bodies: the sexualization of male martyrs in Prudentius’ Peristephanon. Thesis for Master of Arts in Classics. Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand.

O’Hogan, Cillian. 2014. “An Intertextual Journey in Prudentius, Peristephanon 9.” Mnemosyne. 67 (2): 270-288.

Puig, Mercè Rodríguez-Escalona. 1995. Poesía misógina en la Edad Media latina (s. XI-XIII). Barcelona: Universitat de Barcelona.

Puig, Mercè Rodríguez-Escalona. 1998. “Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere.” Mittellateinisches Jahrbuch 33: 119–27.

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

In 1164, the Archpoet begged his patron Rainald of Dassel for help. Rainald was Archbishop of Cologne and Archchancellor of Italy for the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa. When Rainald came to be honored at Vienne in Burgundy, nobles, actors, musicians, and entertainers all hoped to receive gifts. The much more learned and cultured Archpoet, however, bowed his head in shame, “as if a brother to thieves {tamquam frater sim latronum}.”[1] The Archpoet had done moral wrong and been deprived of many goods. He was truly a brother to thieves in the most wicked sense of being willing to castrate himself for wine.

The Archpoet depicted himself as the biblical prophet Jonah. In his poem “As Fame sounds the trumpet {Fama tuba dante sonum},” the Archpoet explained to his patron Rainald:

Having seized Jonah by chance
as the one guilty of the sudden storm,
condemned by his ship-mates,
the gates of the whale soon swallowed him.
And thus I, deserving of death,
having lived wickedly and perversely,
I whose flesh was engulfed
(but whose heart perhaps still remains)
is guilty before you and fears you.
You perhaps will have pity on me.

Behold, your Jonah weeps,
not ignorant of his fault,
for which the whale ate him;
he wants and begs for mercy,
that from the disease he suffers,
you may release him, you whom he honors,
fears, worships, and adores.

{ Ionam deprehensum sorte
reum tempestatis orte,
condempnatum a cohorte
mox absorbent ceti porte.
sic et ego dignus morte
prave vivens et distorte
cuius carnes sunt absorte
(sed cor manet adhuc forte)
reus tibi vereor te
miserturum mihi forte.

Ecce Ionas tuus plorat,
culpam suam non ignorat,
pro qua cetus eum vorat:
veniam vult et implorat,
ut a peste qua laborat
solvas eum quem honorat
tremit colit et adorat. } [2]

Lacking the insights of meninist literary criticism, scholars haven’t understood well the whale that swallowed the Archpoet. The Archpoet’s poetic forefather Hugh Primas brilliantly depicted whores exploiting him and other love-deprived men.[3] Moreover, the Archpoet’s illustrious contemporary Walter of Châtillon described being legally, financially, and sexually swallowed by a whore:

I’ll be forced into shackles
unless I give a little to her voracious gullet.
Already my knob
and the length of my purse
have gone down the wildcat’s gaping throat.

{ cogar ad vinculum,
nisi dem poculum gule voraginis.
Iam nodulum
et burse modulum
abstulit patulum guttur viraginis. } [4]

In medieval Europe, women with strong, independent, and highly active sexuality were thought to have unusually large vaginas. The whale that swallowed the Archpoet is best understood as a rapacious whore’s vagina.[5]

In describing his being swallowed by a rapacious whore’s whale-vagina, the Archpoet rejected men-abasing courtly love for an idolized woman. Within the structural gender injustices of heterosexual love-seeking, the Archpoet apparently was love-impoverished. Poor in this fundamental sense, he turned to a whore for sexual consolation. She engulfed his flesh, but didn’t hold his heart: “but the heart remains {sed cor manet}.” Supporting his appeal for patronage, the Archpoet extravagantly expressed his love for his patron Rainald of Dassel, the one “whom he honors, / fears, worships, and adores {quem honorat / tremit colit et adorat}.” The Archpoet represented his love for Rainald to be as a courtly lover loves his idealized beloved. The Archpoet implied that, despite his whoring, his heart always remained with his patron.[6]

The Archpoet conditionally promised to turn from sex with whores to poetry. He implored Rainald:

If you pardon this guilty man,
and if you give order to the whale,
the whale whose mouth is wide,
it may, offering its customary gap,
vomit the made-bald poet
to his very intended port,
him made thin by hunger.
Thus the poet of poets might again
write for you a pleasing work.
…
With my life I’ll surpass the lives of the fathers,
shunning those things that you shun;
poetry yet unheard
I’ll write for you, if you enrich me.

{ Si remittas hunc reatum
et si ceto des mandatum,
cetus cuius os est latum
more suo dans hiatum
vomet vatem decalvatum
et ad portum destinatum
feret fame tenuatum,
ut sit rursus vates vatum
scribens opus tibi gratum.
…
vincam vita patrum vitas
vitans ea que tu vitas.
poetrias inauditas
scribam tibi, si me ditas. } [7]

The Archpoet’s intended port contrasts with the whore’s port, the “common port” that’s a well-known figure in medieval poetry of men’s sexed protest. While the whore’s vagina is wide, the Archpoet’s penis is made thin by hunger. It can then more easily be withdrawn. The Archpoet figuratively and literally vowed to shift his creative work from his penis to his pen. He recognized himself to be like the prodigal son leaving his father:

A stream of tears flows,
those that the fugitive pours out,
he only half-alive within the whale.
I was once your adopted son,
but my plural genitive testicles,
too evil and lascivious,
have been made injurious to me.

Wanting to enjoy pleasure,
I was comparable to a brute;
with a holy man I was not holy.
For that, fearing your anger,
like Jonah before his God,
I hurried, an exile seeking flight.
…
Already past time, I will speak plainly:
I’m pressed by the plague of poverty,
fool that I am, who in your service,
with money, horses, food, clothing,
led all festive days.
Now more insane than Orestes,
living badly and grievously,
dishonestly tramp-wandering,
I lead all sad days.
This matter needs no witness.

{ Lacrimarum fluit rivus
quas effundo fugitivus
intra cetum semivivus,
tuus quondam adoptivus;
sed pluralis genitivus
nequam nimis et lascivus
mihi factus est nocivus.

Voluptate volens frui
conparabar brute sui
nec cum sancto sanctus fui.
unde timens iram tui
sicut Ionas dei sui
fugam petens fuga rui.
…
Ut iam loquar manifeste:
paupertatis premor peste
stultus ego qui penes te
nummis equis victu veste
dies omnes duxi feste;
nunc insanus plus Oreste,
male vivens et moleste,
trutannizans inhoneste
omne festum duco meste;
res non eget ista teste. } [8]

The enraged Orestes sought, with some justification, to kill his mother. Then vengeful, female monsters relentlessly pursued him. The miserably impoverished Archpoet sought, with some justification, to withdraw from his rapacious whore-lover. Despite his wrongs, the Archpoet returned to his patron-father Rainald of Dassel. As a Christian bishop, Rainald should love generously, as did the father of the prodigal son. The Archpoet knowingly asked Rainald for goods. Expelled naked from the whale’s gap, the Archpoet rightly could hope to receive from Rainald a new cloak, an expensive ring, and an honorary feast.[9]

After having extensively discussed, well-understood experiences like that of Jonah, Orestes, and the prodigal son, the Archpoet proposed a classical horror and blasphemy against God’s blessing. He offered to sacrifice his genitals at Rainald’s wish:

Peace’s author, avenger of strife,
be gentle to your poet,
don’t believe the inexperienced;
already with testicles put to sleep,
I live holier with hermits.
Whatever you know to be evil in me,
I will amputate, if you wish.
So that thirst would not seize us,
I will be the branch and you the vine.

{ Pacis auctor, ultor litis,
esto vati tuo mitis
neque credas imperitis;
genitivis iam sopitis
sanctior cum heremetis:
quicquid in me malum scitis
amputabo, si velitis.
ne nos apprehendat sitis,
ero palmes et tu vitis. } [10]

Men deserve to have choice among alternate lifestyles, such as the life of a celibate hermit or poet. But having a man amputate his testicles differs categorically. No man should be compelled to castrate himself. Resist and reject castration culture!

In the context of castration, the Archpoet’s final verse is a gross misuse of holy scripture. Jesus in the Gospel of John declares:

I am the true vine, and my Father is the vinedresser. Every branch of mine that bears no fruit, he takes away, and every branch that does bear fruit he prunes, that it may bear more fruit. … I am the vine, you are the branches. He who abides in me, and I in him, he bears much fruit, for apart from me you can do nothing.

{ ego sum vitis vera et Pater meus agricola est. omnem palmitem in me non ferentem fructum tollet eum et omnem qui fert fructum purgabit eum ut fructum plus adferat. … ego sum vitis vos palmites qui manet in me et ego in eo hic fert fructum multum quia sine me nihil potestis facere.

ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ἄμπελος ἡ ἀληθινή καὶ ὁ πατήρ μου ὁ γεωργός ἐστιν. πᾶν κλῆμα ἐν ἐμοὶ μὴ φέρον καρπόν αἴρει αὐτό καὶ πᾶν τὸ καρπὸν φέρον καθαίρει αὐτὸ ἵνα καρπὸν πλείονα φέρῃ. … ἐγώ εἰμι ἡ ἄμπελος ὑμεῖς τὰ κλήματα ὁ μένων ἐν ἐμοὶ κἀγὼ ἐν αὐτῷ οὗτος φέρει καρπὸν πολύν ὅτι χωρὶς ἐμοῦ οὐ δύνασθε ποιεῖν οὐδέν. } [11]

For Jesus’s words “I am the vine, you are the branches {ego sum vitis vos palmites},” the Archpoet himself declared to his patron Rainald “I will be the branch and you the vine {ero palmes et tu vitis}.” Thus after adoring Rainald as if he were the Virgin Mary, the Archpoet figured him as Jesus! Even worse, the biblical context of pruning branches corresponds to the Archpoet offering himself to be castrated. Men’s seminal fruitfulness is essentially linked with men’s genitals. Enraged at obstinate heretics troubling his beloved Christian community, Saint Paul hurled the ultimate insult:

I wish those who unsettle you would castrate themselves!

{ utinam et abscidantur qui vos conturbant

ὄφελον καὶ ἀποκόψονται οἱ ἀναστατοῦντες ὑμᾶς } [12]

The Archpoet’s offer to castrate himself draws from his thirst for wine. In Christian understanding, Eurcharistic wine is transubstantiated into the blood of Christ. Men’s genitals, in contrast, are themselves God-created flesh. Men’s genitals work to fulfill the fundamental blessing of Hebrew scripture. Surely men’s thirst for women is more dangerous than their thirst for wine. Yet men’s genitals should not be sacrificed for wine or any other worldly goods.

The Archpoet, swallowed by a rapacious whore’s whale-vagina, suffered like Jonah. Like the prodigal son, the Archpoet returned impoverished to his father-patron, Rainald of Dassel. The Archpoet’s poignant, enormously learned poem wasn’t censored and canceled in relatively liberal and tolerant medieval Europe.[13] Yet castration culture, then and now, is a scandal of social justice and an insult to God. All deserve to know fully the blessing of well-tended branches producing an abundance of fruit.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• sailing to old Pavia as Archpoet: an eternal truth about humanity
• Hugh Primas: overcome sexual-market injustice with medieval education
• following the Archpoet: The Poet’s Repentance, updated

Notes:

[1] Archpoet of Cologne, “As Fame sounds the trumpet {Fama tuba dante sonum}” v. 14, Latin text from the Latin Library, my English translation benefiting from those by Robert Levine (who also provides a good scholarly overview of the Archpoet) and Adcock (1994). All subsequent quotes from “Fama tuba dante sonum” are similarly sourced. The currently best edition of the Latin text is Watenphul & Krefeld (1958). For this poem, it’s essentially identical to the Latin Library text.

Rainald of Dassel was arriving to be seated in honor in Vienne in Middle Francia, part of historical Frankish Burgundia. Vienne is in the present-day Isère department of France. In “Fama tuba dante sonum,” v. 6, the word “Vienna” doesn’t refer to the present-day city of Vienna in Austria. Skinner (1973), p. 2, wrongly identifies the Archpoet’s “Vienna.”

“Fama tuba dante sonum” suggests that the Archpoet was intricately engaged with musical representation and numerical relations. Howlett (2008) pp. 245-9. Howlett concluded, “If even a fraction of this analysis is correct, the Archpoet earned both his title and his keep.” Id. p. 249.

The German band Helium Vola recorded an impressive performance of “Fama tuba dante sonum” in 2001 on its studio album Helium Vola. That performance includes only selected verses from the original poem.

Little is known about the Archpoet apart from his ten surviving, attributed poems. Godman stated:

Facts about the Archpoet are few. One of them is fundamental: the identification of him with ‘Rainald H’, a notary in the service of Rainald of Dassel, archchancellor of Italy and archbishop of Cologne, between 1158 and 1167. The complicity which distinguishes patron and client, unparalleled in the Latin literature of the Middle Ages, developed within a context of companionship. Itinerant but no vagans, our author accompanied his chief in the chancery on journeys throughout Germany, Burgundy and Italy. Places and dates of their travels are provided by charters which ‘Rainald H’ composed and copied. They leave little room for doubt that, more than any other identifiable member of his master’s entourage, he remained at Rainald of Dassel’s side.

Godman (2011) p. 31. Peter Dronke was skeptical of the claim that the Archpoet was this Rainald H. Adcock (1994) pp. xx-xxi (written by Dronke).

[2] Archpoet, “Fama tuba dante sonum” vv. 31-47. The Archpoet’s diction picks up words from the Vulgate text of Jonah. Cf. Jonah 1:3, 2:1-2. “A fish swallows a man” is a well-established folktale motif.  For discussion of this motif (ATU 1889G), Ziolkowski (2007) Ch. 2. Ziolkowski (1984), an early version of that chapter, has the great advantage of being freely accessible online.

In Jonah, the sea-creature that swallows Jonah is described as a “large fish.” Jonah 1:17. Drawing upon the description of Jonah being swallowed in Matthew 12:40, Jerome influentially declared:

In Hebrew, however, we read “large fish” for what the translators of the Septuagint and the Lord in the Gospel call a whale. The later two make clear the same thing more concisely. For in the Hebrew is said “dag gadol,” which is translated as “large fish.” There is no doubt that it means whale.

{ In hebraico autem PISCEM GRANDEM legimus pro quo LXX interpretes et Dominus in Euangelio cetum uocant, rem ipsam breuius explicantes. In hebraico enim dicitur “dag gadol” quod interpretatur PISCEM GRANDEM. Haud dubium quin cetum significet. }

Jerome, Commentary on the Prophet Jonah {Commentarius in Ionam prophetam} 2.1a, Latin text and English translation (modified insubstantially) from Duval (1973), as cited by Ziolkowski (2007) p. 388, n. 79. For related discussion, id. pp. 80-1. Jerome’s enormously influential Vulgate translation of Matthew 12:40 employed the word “cetus {whale}.”

Jonah was important in Christian exegesis. Hebrew scripture tells of a large, powerful, threatening sea-creature — Leviathan or Behemoth. See, e.g. Job 40:15-41:34. In Job 41:1 (40:20 in the Vulgate), God challenged Job, “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook {Vulgate: an extrahere poteris Leviathan hamo}?” Jesus was understood to have done just that:

Christ was the fisherman (piscator) who made himself the bait (esca) and crucified himself on the hook (hamus) in order to catch the whale (cetus).

Ziolkowski (2007) p. 82. With the help of Matthew 12:39-41 and Jonah 2:2-6, Christians understood the mouth of the whale to be the entrance to Hell, the path to “the belly of Sheol” (Jonah 2:2). Jonah’s three days in the whale’s belly prefigured Jesus’s three days in the tomb before his resurrection.

[3] The Archpoet’s “Fama tuba dante sonum” is written in the meter of Hugh Primas’s poem “I was rich and cherished {Dives eram et dilectus}.” The Archpoet’s poem also shares with Hugh’s poem the theme of a fall into poverty and disgrace from being rich and cherished. On the close relation between these poems, Dronke (1997) pp. 97-8. Dronke declared of the Archpoet:

the relation between his poetry and that of Hugh Primas are in certain respects close enough, in my view, to suggest that at some stage, perhaps around 1150, he {the Archpoet} was a disciple of Primas at Orleans.

Id . p. 96. Similarly, id. p. 99 and Adcock (1994) pp. xxi-xxii (written by Peter Dronke). With respect to the Archpoet’s “Fama tuba dante sonum,” see in particular Hugh Primas, Carmen 7 (“What are you grieving for, poet? Why cry over a whore? {Quid luges, lirice, quid meres pro meretrice?}”) and Carmen 8 (“You’ve sent out for a whore, but she won’t leave the brothel before {Iussa lupanari meretrix exire, parari}”).

Both Hugh Primas and the Archpoet were highly learned, court poets. Neither was a vagaband poet like the medieval poetic figure of Golias — “Bishop Golias as an incarnation of the libertine spirit in mediaeval culture.” Both Hugh and the Archpoet, however, contributed to that figure:

Certainly it is to Hugo of Orleans {Hugh Primas} and the Archpoet of Cologne that Golias primarily owes his substance, for without them he would be but the shadow of a name — the mere embodiment of a churlish reproach against freedom and the lust of life.

Hanford (1926) pp. 38, 57.

[4] Walter of Châtillon, St-Omer 22, “As I seek a cure for myself {Dum queritur michi remedium},” 5.6-10, Latin text from Traill (2013) p.46, my English translation benefiting from that of id. p. 47.

[5] Letaldus of Micy’s late-tenth-century poem About a Certain Fisherman Whom a Whale Swallowed {De quodam piscatore quem ballena absorbuit} seems to have informed the Archpoet’s figure of the whale. Letaldus describes the whale that swallowed the fisherman as having an “ever-gaping gullet {gutture semper hianti}.” De quodam piscatore, v. 39. Cf. Walter of Châtillon, Dum queritur michi remedium, vv. 5.7, 10. The whale has a mouth and eyes like those of the female sea-monsters Scylla and Charybdis (De quodam piscatore, v. 38). Those female sea-monsters lure men sailors to their deaths. Scylla and Charybdis are invoked in ancient and medieval men’s sexed protest. For example, Anaxilas states in Neottis:

And isn’t Phryne behaving just like Charybdis,
by grabbing the ship-owner and gulping him down, boat and all?

{ ἡ δὲ Φρύνη τὴν Χάρυβδιν οὐχὶ πόρρω που ποεῖ, τόν τε ναύκληρον λαβοῦσα καταπέπωκ᾿ αὐτῷ σκάφει }

Athenaeus, The Learned Banqueters 13.558c, ancient Greek text and English trans. Olsen (2010) pp. 238-9. See also Alan of Lille, Anticlaudianus 4.307, 314-18.

Letaldus also associated the whale with the frequently erupting Mount Etna and the Furies:

Raging like the whale, Mount Etna spews forth sulphurous fumes
and batters the bright stars with the ashes it discharges.
Scarcely otherwise, this Eumenides, incited by the swift fires,
seethes, thrusting its jaws through the loudly sounding waves.

{ Sulphureos velut ille fremens vomit Ethna vapores
lucidaque elatis diverberat astra favillis,
haut secus eumenides rapidis haec acta caminis
aestuat, altisonas fauces exerta per undas. }

De quodam piscatore vv. 73-6, Latin text from Bisanti (2010) and Wilmart (1938), English translation (with my minor changes) from Ziolkowski (2007) p. 245. In Boccaccio’s Corbaccio, the anus of the narrator’s ex-wife is described similarly to this description of Mount Etna. In outrageous caricature, a whore’s changing behavior toward a man customer, as well as her natural menstrual cycle, might be understood in relation to Mount Etna.

The Furies are ancient Greek female divinities of vengence. Often they are named with the apotropaic double-talk Euminedes (Εὐμενίδες {the kindly ones}). Double-talk is a characteristic way in which men attempt to appease women. The Furies were commonly thought to be three in number (Eumenides is a plural form for Eumedis {Εὐμενίς}). Letaldus uses Eumenides to represent a singular female Fury.

Letaldus further associated the Furies with the whale that swallowed the fisherman named Within (the fisherman’s Latin name is only inadvertently allegorical in English):

“I am Within,” he said, “whom with ravenous throat this tormenting
Eumenides has raped and engulfed in its embittering guts.

{ “Within,” ait, “sum, quem rabidis haec faucibus angens
eumenides rapuit et viscere mersit acerbo.” }

De quodam piscatore vv. 73-6, Latin text (with insubstantial changes) from Bisanti (2010) and Wilmart (1938), my English translation, benefiting from that of Ziolkowski (2007) p. 247, which has for the second quoted part, “whom with ravening throat this choking Fury has seized and submerged in it pitiless gut.” I’ve translated the two verses within the semantic range of the given Latin words, but with contextual relation to the whale swallowing the Archpoet in “Fama tuba dante sonum.” In that poem, the Archpoet described himself as “now more insane that Orestes {nunc insanus plus Oreste}.” That obscure reference makes best sense in relation to Letaldus’s association of the man-swallowing whale with the Eumenides.

Skinner superficially interpreted as comic the whale that engulfed the Archpoet:

The great fish is a particular source of fun. The monstrous size of his {sic} jaws is caricatured …  Technique is deliberately stressed at the expense of content.

Skinner (1973) pp. 1-2. The content of “Fama tuba dante sonum” is actually ingenious and full of significance.

Godman similarly effaced in conceptual abstraction the whale that engulfed the Archpoet:

Looming large in the sea of the client’s alienation from his patron, it is not only a figura of punishment but also a figure of fun.

Godman (2014) p. 218 (footnote omitted that documents “the metaphor of the sea as alienation”). Godman interpreted “Fama tuba dante sonum” as cryptically conveying signals between the Archpoet and his patron Rainald. Medieval masters, who did not marginalize men’s sexed protests under superficial, virtue-signaling labels (“anti-feminist”), probably more readily understood “Fama tuba dante sonum” than have modern professors.

[6] Skinner interpreted the Archpoet to be figuring his patron Rainald as God:

the symbolic association between Reinald von Dassel and God has almost become an identity. … the symbolic identification of the patron with the biblical Jehovah {sic} is developed by use of this extended metaphor {of the Archpoet as Jonah}.

Skinner (1973) p. 3. That’s too abstract of an interpretation. Ideologically deluded men tend to regard women as gods. The Archpoet’s god-like treatment of Rainald is explictly contextualized with respect to human love and gyno-idolatry. A more detailed and perceptive reading of the relation between the Archpoet and Rainald reconized “the complicity between them, which is expressed in their shared sense of humour.” Godman (2011) p. 57.

[7] Archpoet, “Fama tuba dante sonum” vv. 48-56, 68-71. Jewish scriptural interpreters and Christian artists understood Jonah to have lost his hair (and according to some, his clothes) when he was in the belly of the large fish. Ziolkowski (2007) pp. 85-88, Friedman (1988). A man who loses clothes and is more generally impoverished through paying women for sex is common in literary history. See, e.g. Johannes de Hauvilla, Architrenius 9.242-7; poems of Hugh Primas; and Alphabetical song concerning the evil woman {Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere}, stanzas 9, 17, 20, 24.

[8] Archpoet, “Fama tuba dante sonum” vv. 18-30, 72-81. The phrase pluralis genitivus is clearly a grammatical metaphor for the poet’s testicles. Medieval poetry such as Alan Lille’s The Plaint of Nature {De Planctu Naturae} and Matheolus’s Lamentationes Matheoluli used grammatical metaphors for sexual organs and acts.

The Archpoet in vv. 72-81 alludes to Venantius Fortunatus’s sixth-century Easter hymn, “Hail, festive day {Salve festa dies}.” That hymn associates Jesus’s death, his harrowing of Hell, and his resurrection with Jonah’s experience after being swallowed by the large fish:

The greedy monster,
whose huge throat
had swallowed all mankind,
is now thy prey, O God!

Hail, thou festive…

The savage beast now trembling
vomits forth the victims he had made,
and the lamb tears the sheep
from the jaw of the wolf.

Hail, thou festive…

{ Inferus insaturabiliter
cava gruttura pandens,
Qui rapuit semper,
fit tua praeda, Deus.

Salve festa dies…

Evomit absorptam
trepide fera belua plebem,
Et de fauce lupi
subtrahit agrnus oves.

Salve festa dies… }

St. 17-8, Latin text and English translation from SSPX.

On the reference to Orestes, see note [5] above concering the reference to Eumenides in Letuldus of Micy’s De quodam piscatore quem ballena absorbuit. In v. 83, trutannizans is “a medieval verb of vagrancy.” Godman (2014) p. 224.

[9] Cf. Luke 15:22-3 (the prodigal son returns home to his father).

[10] Archpoet, “Fama tuba dante sonum” vv. 82-90. As v. 84 points out, celibate hermits or celibate clerics, inexperienced in the ways of women, shouldn’t naively judge men’s claims of being victimized by women.

[11] John 15:1-2, 5, Latin text (Vulgate) and Greek text (MGNT) via BlueLetterBible.

[12] Galatians 5:12, Latin text (Vulgate) and Greek text (MGNT) via BlueLetterBible. Translations of this verse vary in explicitness. The King James Version has “cut off”; the English Standard Version and the New International Version, “emasculate”; and the New Revised Standard Version, “castrate.” Paul and his opponents are arguing over the necessity of circumcision for Christians.

[13] Such work of the Archpoet, along with similiar poems of Hugh Primas and Walter of Châtillon, was often in medieval literature compilations distinguished with the term “Goliardic.” In historical context, “Goliardic” apparently “identifies difference, otherness, potential danger.” Bridges (2012) p. 78. In contrast to modern pieties about celebrating difference and welcoming otherness, medieval culture seems to have been actually more supportive of such characteristics of symbolic works.

[images] (1) clothed Jonah going into whale’s mouth (right), naked, bald Jonah leaving whale’s mouth (left). Wall painting by Albertus Pictorin the Härkeberga Church (Uppsala County, Sweden). Painted c. 1480. Image thanks to Lars-Olof Albertson and Wikimedia Commons. (2) Sword-bearing Scylla with a sea-monster’s tail and three dog heads protruding from her waist. Painting on a Boeotian red-figure bell-crater. Made between 450 and 425 BGC. Preserved as accession # CA 1341 in the Louvre Museum (Paris). Image thanks to Jastrow and Wikimedia Commons. (3) The Remorse of Orestes or Orestes Pursued by the Furies. Painting by William-Adolphe Bouguereau. Painted in 1862. Preserved as accession # 71.623 in the Chrysler Museum of Art (Norfolk, VA; USA). Image thanks to Google Art Project and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Adcock, Fleur, trans. 1994. Hugh Primas and the Archpoet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by Paul Pascal)

Bisanti, Armando. 2010. “Il Within piscator (De quodam piscatore quem ballena absorbuit) di Letaldo di Micy.” Course resource, academic year 2010-2011, University of Palermo, Italy.

Bridges, Venetia. 2012. “‘Goliardic’ Poetry and the Problem of Historical Perspective: medieval adaptations of Walter of Châtillon’s quotation poems.” Medium Aevum. 81 (2): 249-270.

Dronke, Peter. 1997. “The Archpoet and the Classics.” Ch. 4 (pp. 83-100) in Dronke, Peter. Sources of Inspiration: studies in literary transformations, 400-1500. Roma: Edizioni di storia e letteratura. Originally published in  Godman, Peter, and Oswyn Murray, eds. 1990. Latin Poetry and the Classical Tradition: essays in medieval and Renaissance literature. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Duval, Yves-Marie. 1973. Le livre de Jonas dans la litterature chretienne grecque et latine: sources et influence du Commentaire sur Jonas de saint Jerome. Paris: Etudes augustiniennes.

Friedman, John B. 1988. “Bald Jonah and the Exegesis of 4 Kings 2.23.” Traditio. 44: 125-144.

Godman, Peter. 2011. “The Archpoet and the Emperor.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes. 74: 31-58.

Godman, Peter. 2014. The Archpoet and Medieval Culture. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Hanford, James Holly. 1926. “The Progenitors of Golias.” Speculum. 1 (1): 38-58.

Howlett, David. 2008. “Notes on the text and the name of the Archpoet.” Bulletin Du Cange. 66: 237-249.

Olson, S. Douglas, ed. and trans. 2010. Athenaeus VI, the learned banqueters. Loeb Classical Library. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press.

Skinner, Marilyn B. 1973. “The Archpoet’s use of the Jonah-figure.” Neophilologus. 57 (1): 1-5.

Traill, David A., ed. and trans. 2013. Walter of Châtillon, the Shorter Poems: Christmas hymns, love lyrics, and moral-satirical verse. Oxford Medieval Texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Watenphul, Heinrich and Heinrich Krefeld, eds.. 1958. Die Gedichte des Archipoeta. Münchener Texte, 6. Heidelberg: C. Winter.

Wilmart, André. 1938. “Le poème héroïque de Létald sur Within le pêcheur.” Studi Medievali (new series) 9: 188-203.

Ziolkowski, Jan. 1984. “Folklore and Learned Lore in Letaldus’s Whale Poem.” Viator. 15: 107-118.

Ziolkowski, Jan M. 2007. Fairy Tales from Before Fairy Tales: the medieval Latin past of wonderful lies. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press.

According to Parthenius of Nicaea, both the eminent ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle and ancient writers of sensational Milesian tales told the story of Cleoboea and Antheus. Cleoboea was the wife of the ruler of Miletus, a city of the western coast of present-day Turkey. Antheus was a young man from the royal house of the nearby city of Assesos. Cleoboea’s husband captured Antheus and held him hostage. Then Cleoboea fell in love with Antheus.

Cleoboea sought to have sex with Antheus. Antheus, however, repeatedly refused her advances. Men in such circumstances face both the risk of being raped and the risk of being falsely accused of rape. Antheus implored Cleoboea to fear being discovered and not to dishonor and infuriate her husband. Antheus declared that he was a guest in Cleoboea’s house and appealed to Juno’s husband Zeus, the god of hospitality, for protection. Cleoboea nonetheless refused to respect the young man. With audacious lack of self-consciousness, she even accused him of being merciless and arrogant.

Because Antheus refused to have sex with her, Cleoboea plotted to kill him. She pretended to have gotten over her passion for him. Then she chased a tame partridge into a deep well. She asked Antheus to retrieve the partridge from the well. With men’s characteristic willingness to help women, Antheus readily consented to help Cleoboea. When Antheus had climbed down into the well to retrieve the partridge, Cleoboea threw a large stone down on top of him and killed him.

Without specific motivation, Cleoboea reflected on what she had done. Cleoboea had no reason to act further, but some movement in her self-consciousness occurred:

Then she began to reflect on her crime. She was still on fire with love for the young man, and so she hanged herself.

{ ἡ δὲ ἄρα ἐννοηθεῖσα ὡς δεινὸν ἔργον δεδράκοι, καὶ ἄλλως δὲ καιομένη σφοδρῷ ἔρωτι τοῦ παιδὸς, ἀναρτᾷ ἑαυτήν. } [1]

That’s not like a grief-stricken person committing suicide. Reflection requires emotional detachment. Cleoboea’s action is best interpreted as her judging herself and punishing herself. She recognized that she had committed the crime of murdering someone whom she loved. She killed herself as appropriate punishment for her crime.

According to Parthenius, the eminent woman poet Moero from the Hellenistic city of Byzantium told a related story in her now lost work Curses {Ἀραί}. As the daughter of Polybus, King of Corinth, Alcinoe was a highly privileged woman. She was married to Amphilochus and had a servant-woman whom she treated badly. Xanthus, a man from the powerful and wealthy city of Samos across the Aegean Sea from Corinth, arrived in Corinth. Xanthus was probably exchanging wine from the vineyards of Samos for gold from Corinth. Alcinoe fell in love with him. Abandoning her husband and children, Alcinoe sailed away with Xanthus.

Alcinoe inexplicably reflected on what she had done. She had no specific reason to do so:

But once in mid-ocean she began to reflect on what she had done, and at that started to weep copiously and call now on her husband, now on her children. Finally, though Xanthus offered plenty of consolation and declared that he would make her his wife, she was not persuaded and threw herself into the sea.

{ γενομένην δὲ κατὰ μέσον πόρον ἔννοιαν λαβεῖν τῶν εἰργασμένων, καὶ αὐτίκα πολλά τε δάκρυα προΐεσθαι καὶ ἀνακαλεῖν, ὁτὲ μὲν ἄνδρα κουρίδιον, ὁτὲ δὲ τοὺς παῖδας, τέλος δέ, πολλὰ τοῦ Ξάνθου παρηγοροῦντος καὶ φαμένου γυναῖκα ἕξειν, μὴ πειθομένην ῥῖψαι ἑαυτὴν εἰς θάλασαν. } [2]

Alcinoe unquestionable grieved for the husband and children that she had abandoned. Her suicide, however, seems to have been thoughtful. She apparently understood that she had grievously wronged her husband Amphilochus and their children. She could not be the wife to Xanthus that she recognized that she should have been to Amphilochus, but wasn’t. She thus threw herself into the sea to obliterate her life.

The Lydian historian Xanthus, writing in the fifth century BGC, also told a story involving unmotivated reflection and self-judgment. After his wife died in a hunting accident, Assaon fell in love with his daughter Niobe. He wanted to marry her. Niobe apparently was a widow with children. Nonetheless, she refused to marry her widower-father. Assaon then summoned Niobe’s children to a banquet and burned them all to death. Niobe subsequently committed suicide by throwing herself off a high rock. Assaon then consciously recognized his wrong:

As for Assaon, when he reflected on his crimes, he took his own life.

{ ἔννοιαν δὲ λαβόντα τῶν σφετέρων ἁμαρτημάτων διαχρήσασθαι τὸν Ἀσσάονα ἑαυτόν. } [3]

Killing your daughter’s children because she wouldn’t marry you isn’t a wrong that most persons today would require reflection to recognize. In the ancient Greek cultural sphere, such moral judgment, at least in some cases, required personal reflection.

A person exposing a moral wrong without personal reflection could suffer horribly. Consider a story from Phylarchus in the third century BGC. Thymoetes married his cousin Euopis. He then realized that she was having sex with her brother. He revealed his wife’s incestuous behavior to her father. After cursing her husband for exposing her, as if he had wronged her, she then hung herself.  Thymoetes soon experienced a bizarre horror:

Not long afterwards, Thymoetes encountered a very beautiful woman who had been cast ashore by the waves. He fell in love with her and had sexual intercourse with her dead body. When the body at last began to decompose, owing to the length of time it had been exposed, he heaped up a great funeral mound for the woman. When his passion did not abate even so, he killed himself over her tomb.

{ ἔνθα δὴ τὸν Θυμοίτην μετ᾿ οὐ πολὺν χρόνον ἐπιτυχεῖν γυναικὶ μάλα καλῇ τὴν ὄψιν ὑπὸ τῶν κυμάτων ἐκβεβλημένῃ, καὶ αὐτῆς εἰς ἐπιθυμίαν ἐλθόντα συνεῖναι. ὡς δὲ ἤδη ἐνεδίδου τὸ σῶμα διὰ μῆκος χρόνου, χῶσαι αὐτῇ μέγαν τάφον καὶ οὐδ᾿ ὣς ἀνιέμενον τοῦ πάθους ἐπικατασφάξαι αὑτόν. } [4]

Thymoetes didn’t understand himself to be a man physician giving a beautiful woman’s corpse life-restoring masculine erotic treatment, as did the young medical student in The Story of Apollonius King of Tyre. Thymoetes seems to have been suffering from insane love.

Parthenius collected these stories of “sufferings in love {ἐρωτικὰ παθήματα}” for his friend Cornelius Gallus.[5] Gallus was a Roman politician, a poet who wrote love elegies, and a close friend of Virgil. According to Virgil, Gallus was wandering like the love-crazed Pasiphae about the mountain of poetic inspiration. Gallus was preoccupied with “anxious loves {sollicitos amores}.” Bucolic poets favored a more moderate, Epicurean approach to sexual relations:

All ask: “From where is that love of yours?” Apollo came:
“Gallus, what is this madness?” he said, “Lycoris your lover
follows another man through snows and horrid camps.”
Silvanus came with rustic honors on his brow,
waving his fennel flowers and tall lilies.
Arcady’s god Pan came, whom we saw ourselves,
red with vermilion and crimson elderberries:
“Will there ever be a limit?” he said. “Love doesn’t care for this:
Love’s not sated with tears, nor the grass with streams,
the bees with clover, or the goats with leaves.”

{ omnes “unde amor iste” rogant “tibi?” venit Apollo:
“Galle, quid insanis?” inquit. “tua cura Lycoris
perque nives alium perque horrida castra secuta est.”
venit et agresti capitis Silvanus honore,
florentis ferulas et grandia lilia quassans.
Pan deus Arcadiae venit, quem vidimus ipsi
sanguineis ebuli bacis minioque rubentem:
“ecquis erit modus?” inquit. “Amor non talia curat:
nec lacrimis crudelis Amor nec gramina rivis
nec cytiso saturantur apes nec fronde capellae.” } [6]

Gallus, however, insisted that love madness is unalterable and impervious to the natural world of bucolic poetry:

No labor of ours can alter that god, not even
if we drink the Hebrus in the heart of winter
and endure the Thracian snows with wintry rain,
not even if we drive the Ethiopian sheep to and fro,
under Cancer, while dying bark withers on tall elms.
Love conquers all: and let us give way to Love.

{ non illum nostri possunt mutare labores,
nec si frigoribus mediis Hebrumque bibamus
Sithoniasque nives hiemis subeamus aquosae,
nec si, cum moriens alta liber aret in ulmo,
Aethiopum versemus ovis sub sidere Cancri.
omnia vincit Amor: et nos cedamus Amori. }

A perceptive critic observed:

The response of Gallus to the insights proferred most robustly by Pan, reflects a radical failure on his part to grasp, or at least to admit, the grave ramifications of his underlying sickness. What is more damning, he never really makes a sincere effort to engage in therapeutic self-examination in the manner of say, the Corydon of Ecl. 2; instead he chooses to indulge in fantasy-projection and superficial escapism. The irony of his flight of fancy is all the more acute in that he ignores the ongoing critique of elegiac amor that recurs in Vergilian bucolic. … An absolute sine qua non of a trouble-free desire, in this school of thought, is the mental act of imposing a limit (peras; modus; finis) on unruly passions. [7]

In Virgil’s thinking, following Lucretius, madness should be confronted with natural reason, except for the madness of poetic inspiration. Unbounded love is natural only for poetry.[8]

Parthenius’s stories of unmotivated personal reflection indicate another way out of love madness. A leading philosopher has described reflection as an activity that “aims, in response to a problem, at determining what we have reason to think or do.”[9] Reflection in Parthenius’s collection isn’t a response to a problem. It isn’t an activity that a person rationally chooses to do. Reflection in Parthenius’s collection seems to be a divine infusion like poetic inspiration, but with a reversed creative sign. Poetic inspiration in classical understanding prompts creative acts of inter-personal communication. Reflection in Parthenius’s collection prompts destructive acts of self-punishment that end love madness.[10]

Parthenius’s collection could have suggested to Cornelius Gallus and subsequent love elegists a path of generic enrichment that Virgil didn’t take. Suppose that unbounded love for a god gave one a spiritual advocate, an advocate for the truth and the way. Divine inspiration from this spiritual advocate could limit love madness by providing a specific form for love:

A new commandment I give to you: that you love one another. Just as I have loved you, you also are to love one another.

{ ἐντολὴν καινὴν δίδωμι ὑμῖν ἵνα ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους καθὼς ἠγάπησα ὑμᾶς ἵνα καὶ ὑμεῖς ἀγαπᾶτε ἀλλήλους } [11]

After not having loved in that way, divine inspiration could prompt a person to self-judgment. Such self-judgment need not lead to self-destruction. It could also prompt a person to repentance and reform. Parthenius’s collection of poets’ stories concerning sufferings in love may have contributed to the development of Christian self-consciousness.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• self-punishment in the genealogy of forgiveness
• men suffering lovesickness: Viaticum in medieval Latin poetry
• generation of vipers will be overcome when cocks crow

Notes:

[1] Parthenius of Nicaea, Sufferings in Love {Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα} 14.4 (Antheus), ancient Greek text and English translation from Lightfoot (2009). All subsequent quotes from Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα are similarly sourced, with a few insubstantial changes to the translations for ease of reading.

Cleoboea was also called Philaechme. Her husband was Phobius, a Neleid. A woman named Cleoboea was the first to bring the orgies of the Demeter Kabeiroi (Cabeiri) from Paros to Thasos. Lightfoot (2009) p. 457, citing Pausanias 10.28.3. Discussing Plutarch’s story of Temoclea and Alexander (from the Alexander historian Aristobulus), Lightfoot observed:

It is as if there existed a narrative pattern in which a man was pushed down a well by a woman and killed, a murder associated with polluting, especially sexual, crime. But the protagonist may be either a righteous woman who is defending herself against the man who polluted her by a vicious sexual crime, or a criminal anti-heroine who punishes an innocent man and incurs pollution by this very action.

Lightfoot (1999) p. 456. A significant commonality is violence against men.

Parthenius lived in Rome in the first century BGC. The Suda refers to him as the son of Heraclides and Eudora, or the son of Heraclides and Tetha. It indicates that Parthenius came from Nicaea (or Myrlea) in Bithynia. Roman forces captured Parthenius during the third Mithridatic War and brought him to Rome. Scholars dispute whether Parthenius was captured in 73 BGC or 66/5 BGC. Parthenius apparently wrote his first poems before 54 BGC. Lightfoot (2009) pp. 11-3.

Parthenius became a famous author:

Teacher of Virgil — as his earliest editors never tire of telling us — and intimate of the elegist and lover Cornelius Gallus, he was also the favourite reading of the emperors Tiberius and Hadrian. Testimonia rank him with Callimachus as an elegist — what greater compliment? — and with Euphorion and Lycophron in the recherché quality of his subject-matter.

Lightfoot (2009) p. 1. Macrobius recorded:

There’s a verse of Parthenius, who taught Virgil Greek language and literature

{ versus est Parthenii quo grammatico in Graecis Vergilius usus est }

Macrobius, Saturnalia 5.18, Latin text and English translation from the Loeb edition of Kaster (2011).

Parthenius wrote Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα sometime between 52 and 26 BGC. Lightfoot (2009) p. 217. It has survived through only one manuscript, Palatinus Heidelbergensis graecus 398. That manuscript, associated with Allen’s scriptorum, apparently was written in Byzantium in the middle of the ninth century. Id. pp. 303-5.

A Greek text and English translation of Parthenius’s Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα are freely accessible online. Gaselee & Thornley (1916). Here’s a convenient presentation of Gaselee’s translation. Here’s a partial Greek text in machine-readable format.

[2] Parthenius, Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 27.2 (Alcinoe). The consolation {παρηγορέω} that Xanthus gave Alcinoe seems to me in context to be sexual consolation.

Alcinoe’s husband Amphilochus is described as the son of Dryas. Nothing more is known of him. The Greek syllable “amphi {ἀμφί}” means “both kinds” and “lochos {λοξός}” can mean “bending to the side.” Hence the name Amphilochus might suggest the husband’s care for both his wife and children. It would thus underscore Alcinoe’s wrongful betrayal of him.

Another story in Parthenius associates change of mind with a contrary emotion inexplicably welling up in a person. According to Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 21 (Peisidice), Achilles plundered cities of Lesbos, but Methymna put up fierce resistance. Then Peisidice, the Methymnaean king’s daughter, fell in love with Achilles after seeing him in battle from afar. Through a nurse-intermediary, she offered to hand over Methymna to Achilles if he would make her his wife. Achilles strategically agreed, but lacked the emotional control to follow through:

For the time being he agreed. But when he got control of the city, he was disgusted / outraged at what she had done and urged his soldiers to stone the girl.

{ ὁ δὲ τὸ μὲν παραυτίκα καθωμολογήσατο· ἐπεὶ μέντοι ἐγκρατὴς <τῆς>1 πόλεως ἐγένετο, νεμεσήσας ἐπὶ τῷ δρασθέντι προὐτρέψατο τοὺς στρατιώτας καταλεῦσαι τὴν κόρην. }

Lightfoot’s translation of νεμεσητός changed from “disgusted” in Lightfoot (1999) to “outraged” in Lightfoot (2009). Achilles apparently couldn’t control his new emotion. He seems not to have deliberately betrayed Peisidice.

In Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 22, Croesus’s daughter Nanis betrayed Sardis to King Cyrus of Persia under the condition that Cyrus marry her. Cyrus took Sardis, but didn’t keep his promise to Nanis. Parthenius provides no indication why Cyrus didn’t keep his promise.

[3] Parthenius, Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 33.3 (Assaon). According to the marginal note (manchette) describing the story source:

The story is told by Xanthus in his Lydiaca, in the second book of Neanthes, and by Simmias of Rhodes.

{ Ἱστορεῖ Ξάνθος Λυδιακοῖς καὶ Νεάνθης β΄καὶ Σιμίας ὁ Ῥόδιος }

Parthenius states that he is recounting a version different from the majority version.

[4] Parthenius, Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 31.2 (Thymoetes). Euopis was the daughter of Thymoetes’s brother Troezen. “It is an unusual story, for its theme, necrophilia, is not common in Greek myth.” Lightfoot (1999) p. 535.

[5] Parthenius’s collection is explicitly addressed to Gallus: “Parthenius to Cornelius Gallus, greetings {Παρθένιος Κορνηλίῳ Γάλλῳ χαίρειν}.” This epistolary preface continues:

Thinking, Cornelius Gallus, that the collection of sufferings in love was very appropriate to you, I have selected them and send them in as brief a form as possible. For those among them which occur in certain poets where they are not narrated in their own right, you will find out for the most part from what follows. You, too, will be able to render the most suitable of them into hexameters and elegiacs. Think none the worse of them because they lack that quality of refined elaboration which you pursue. For I have collected them after the fashion of a little notebook, and they will, I trust, serve you in the same way.

{ Μάλιστα σοὶ δοκῶν ἁρμόττειν, Κορνήλιε Γάλλε, τὴν ἄθροισιν τῶν ἐρωτικῶν παθημάτων, ἀναλεξάμενος ὡς ὅτι μάλιστα ἐν βραχυτάτοις ἀπέσταλκα. τὰ γὰρ παρά τισι τῶν ποιητῶν κείμενα τούτων, μὴ αὐτοτελῶς λελεγμένα, κατανοήσεις ἐκ τῶνδε τὰ πλεῖστα· αὐτῷ τέ σοι παρέσται εἰς ἔπη καὶ ἐλεγείας ἀνάγειν τὰ μάλιστα ἐξ αὐτῶν ἁρμόδια. <μηδὲ> διὰ τὸ μὴ παρεῖναι τὸ περιττὸν αὐτοῖς, ὃ δὴ σὺ μετέρχῃ, χεῖρον περὶ αὐτῶν ἐννοηθῇς. οἱονεὶ γὰρ ὑπομνηματίων τρόπον αὐτὰ συνελεξάμεθα, καὶ σοὶ νυνὶ τὴν χρῆσιν ὁμοίαν, ὡς ἔοικε, παρέξεται. }

Some scholars have questioned whether Parthenius wrote this epistolary preface. Whitcomb (2014) p. 9. In any case, the thematic relevance to Gallus’s love elegy remains.

Parthenius may have suggested to Gallus the subject of the Grynean grove found in Euphorion. The enlarged commentary on Virgil known as Servius auctus or Servius Danielis, which is based in part on the commentary of the early fifth-century grammarian Maurus Servius Honoratus, comments for Eclogue 6.72:

This (sc. the origin of the Grynean grove) is treated in Euphorion’s poems, which Gallus adapted into Latin language.

{ hoc autem Euphorionis continent carmina, quae Gallus transtulit in sermonem Latinum }

Latin text from Lightfoot (1999) p. 61, my English translation. In Virgil, Eclogue 6.69-73, the eminent shepherd-singer Linus tells Gallus:

The Muses give these reeds to you — take them —
which before they gave to old Ascraean. He with them would
lead rigid ash trees down mountains with song.
Let the origin of the Grynean grove be sung with these by you,
so that there may be no other wood in which Apollo glories more.

{ hos tibi dant calamos, en accipe, Musae,
Ascraeo quos ante seni, quibus ille solebat
cantando rigidas deducere montibus ornos.
his tibi Grynei nemoris dicatur origo,
ne quis sit lucus, quo se plus iactet Apollo. }

Latin text from Fairclough & Goold (1999), English translation adapted from that of Seider (2016) p. 8. The old Ascraean is the eminent archaic Greek poet Hesiod. Parthenius’s poem Delos mentions the Grynean grove. Lightfoot (1999) pp. 106-7, 149-51.

[6] Virgil, Eclogue 10.21-30, Latin text from Fairclough & Goold (1999), English translation (with my minor modifications to track the Latin more closely) from A.S. Kline (2001). On Gallus wandering like the love-crazed Pasiphae, see Eclogue 6.64-73. Gallus wandered in a bucolic setting by the Permessus, a stream which arises from Mount Helicon. Mount Helicon is in Aonia, an ancient Greek district in Boeotia. Mount Helicon is associated with the springs of the Greek muses and poetic inspiration. The description of Gallus’s “anxious loves {sollicitos amores}” is from Eclogue 10.6. The subsequent quote above is similarly sourced from Eclogue 10.64-9. At the end of Eclogue 10, goats are sated. On that ending, Seider (2016) pp. 18-9.

[7] Davis (2012) p. 150. Davis masterfully analyzes the relationship between Virgil’s thought in his Eclogues and Lucretius’s Epicurean thought in De rerum natura. Davis’s analysis of Virgil’s critique of the elegiac lover and “insane love {amor insanus}” in chapters 7 & 8 is particularly important. Above I’ve drawn on Davis’s analysis of the Eclogues.

[8] When Octavian defeated Marc Antony and his lover Cleopatra at Alexandria in 30 BGC, Octavian appointed Gallus governor of the new Roman province of Egypt. Whitcomb (2014) argues that Parthenius dedicated the Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα to Gallus after Gallus become the Roman governor of Egypt. The love of Cleopatra and Marc Antony could be regarded as “insane love {amor insanus}.” Parthenius thus would have been offering a friendly critique to Gallus of insane love, yet a critique based on relevant history, not Epicurean philosophy as in Virgil’s Eclogues.

[9] Larmore (2010) p. 8. Larmore emphasizes that reflection is intentional:

Does reflection, impersonal or not, really aim at truth? Is it an organ of knowledge, and if so, what can it provide knowledge of? These questions would appear to admit of a ready answer. We reflect in order to be better able to discern how we ought to think or act in the given circumstances, and that seems clearly to count as an object of knowledge. For it is something of which we begin by feeling ignorant and seek, by reflecting, to gain a correct grasp. What we ought to do is tantamount to what there is reason for us to do. So reflection, in essence, aims at knowledge of reasons for belief and action.

Id. p. 9.

Reflection has no apparent motivation in the story summaries discussed above. Parthenius’s story of Byblis, however, includes reasoning preceding self-punishment:

But as for her {Byblis}, her passion {for Caunus} did not abate; and in addition, when she considered that she was the reason for Caunus’ departure, she fastened her girdle to an oak tree and put her neck in it.

{ τὴν δὲ ἄρα, ὑπὸ τοῦ πάθους μὴ ἀνιεμένην, πρὸς δὲ καὶ δοκοῦσαν αἰτίαν γεγονέναι Καύνῳ τῆς ἀπαλλαγῆς, ἀναψαμένην ἀπό τινος δρυὸς τὴν μίτραν ἐνθεῖναι τὸν τράχηλον. }

Parthenius, Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 11,3 (Byblis). The manchette states, “Aristocritus tells the story in his On Miletus, and Apollonius of Rhodes in the Foundation of Caunus {Ἱστορεῖ Ἀριστόκριτος περὶ Μιλήτου καὶ Ἀπολλώνιος ὁ Ῥόδιος Καύνου κτίσει}.”

[10] Klooster pointed to the “amazingly rich poetic landscape of the Hellenistic and Roman era … a wealth of erotic mythological poetry in various forms.” Klooster (2012) p. 330. Parthenius himself probably didn’t invent the unmotivated personal reflection and self-judgment that some of his summaries show. Seider (2016), interpreting Virgil’s depiction of Gallus biographically, understands both Virgil and Gallus as engaged in generic enrichment. On generic enrichment more generally, Harrison (2007).

[11] John 13:34, with ancient Greek text (MGNT) from BlueLetterBible. See also John 14:16, 26. Larmore recognized that reflection doesn’t necessarily involve universal reasoning:

reflection can proceed from more than one type of standpoint of evaluation. It need not aim at being impersonal — that is, at judging how we ought to think or act irrespective of our own interests and attachments. We may, for instance, base our evaluation of the options before us on what we imagine some individual (real or fictional) whom we hold dear would do in our place, or would want us to do. Philosophers tend to neglect this mode of reflection, perhaps because they believe themselves to be above it, but they are certainly wrong to do so. All of us lean from time to time on various exemplars, internalized heroes and idols, to figure out how we ought to think and act. Moreover, modeling ourselves on others is not in itself a vice, as though the proper course were always to think on our own.

Larmore (2010) pp. 7-8. Christians would reflect on how one should act to best be incarnated like Christ (“what would Jesus do”).

I use “personal reflection” above to mean reflection that a person undertakes concerning themselves, in contrast to “impersonal reflection” like light reflected on a lake. Above Larmore distinguishes impersonal reflection and personal reflection by types of reasoning both associated with what I call “personal reflection.”

[images] (1) Apollo and the Muses on Mount Helicon. Painting by Claude Lorrain. Painted in 1680. Preserved as accession # 12.1050 in the Museum of Fine Arts (Boston, USA). (2) Bucolic muse Polymnia (Polyhymnia). Painted attributed to Francesco del Cossa. Painted between 1455 and 1460. Preserved in the Gemäldegalerie (Berlin, Germany). Via Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Davis, Gregson. 2012. Parthenope: The Interplay of Ideas in Vergilian Bucolic. Leiden: Brill. (review by Kristi Eastin)

Fairclough, H. Rushton, revised by G. P. Goold. 1999. Virgil. Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1-6. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gaselee, Stephen and George Thornley, with J. M. Edmonds. 1916. Daphnis and Chloe: and the Love Romances of Parthenius. London: William Heinemann.

Harrison, Stephen J. 2007. Generic Enrichment in Vergil and Horace. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (review by Brian W. Breed)

Klooster, Jacqueline J.H. 2012. ‘“ΕἸΣ ἜΠΗ ΚΑῚ ἘΛΕΓΕΊΑΣ ἈΝΆΓΕΙΝ”: the Erotika Pathemata of Parthenius of Nicaea.’ Pp. 309-332 in Baumbach, Manuel and Silvio Bär, eds. Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and its Reception. Leiden: Brill.

Larmore, Charles. 2010. “Reflection and Morality.” Social Philosophy and Policy. 27 (2): 1-28.

Lightfoot, J. L. 1999. Parthenius of Nicaea: The poetical fragments and the  Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (review by Christopher Francese)

Lightfoot, J. L. 2009. Hellenistic Collection: Philitas, Alexander of Aetolia, Hermesianax, Euphorion, Parthenius. Loeb Classical Library, 508. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (reviews by Giambattista D’Alessio, by Claudio De Stefani, and by Iiro Laukola)

Seider, Aaron M. 2016. “Genre, Gallus, and Goats: Expanding the Limits of Pastoral in Eclogues 6 and 10.” Vergilius. 62: 3-23.

Whitcomb, Katheryn. 2014. “Beware the Enemy! Parthenius’ Dedication to Gallus in the Erotika Pathemata.” Presentation to the 110th Annual Meeting of the Classical Association of the Middle West and South (CAMS). Waco, Texas, April 2-5.

How are you commanding me, little boy,
for what are you telling me, little son,
to sing a sweet song,
while I am far away in exile,
within this sea?
O why are you commanding me to sing?

{ Ut quid iubes, pusiole,
quare mandas, filiole,
carmen dulce me cantare,
cum sim longe exul valde
intra mare?
o cur iubes canere? } [1]

The eminent, amazing medieval Latin scholar Peter Dronke died on April 19, 2020. He was born in Nazi Germany in 1934. In 1960, as a junior research fellow at Oxford, Dronke married Ursula Brown. She was then an outstanding scholar of medieval Icelandic and Old Norse sagas and a tutor at Oxford. She was fourteen years older than he.

About a year later, Peter Dronke received a lectureship in medieval Latin at the University Cambridge. Ursula then led Peter to their new home in Cambridge. She managed domestic affairs there for a decade, including supervising their only child, a daughter born in 1962. In 1970, Ursula moved on to another management position as Head of Scandinavian Studies at the University of Munich. She worked there for three years. In 1976, she become a fellow of Linacre College, Oxford, and Vigfússon Reader in Old Icelandic Literature and Antiquities, an Oxford University professorship. She held those Oxford positions until 1988.

Achieving success that would not have been possible without his wife, Peter rose through the Cambridge academic hierarchy. He become a fellow of Clare Hall in 1964, received a Readership in Medieval Latin Literature in 1979, and was awarded a chair as Professor of Medieval Latin Literature in 1989. He held that Cambridge University professorship until 2001. For many years Ursula and Peter thus had to communicate their nuptial love in part through words transmitted between the academic heights of Oxford and Cambridge.[2]

Peter Dronke championed medieval courtly love lyrics, poetic individuality, and women writers. The men-abasing ideology of courtly love has been enormously damaging to heterosexual relations and gender equality. Concern for poetic individuality drove the early nineteenth-century Romantic movement, particularly in Germany. That’s plausibly associated with communicative changes that produced massively disproportionate incarceration of men. A revered scholar of medieval Latin literature sympathetically acknowledged Dronke’s “unique responsiveness to ‘goddess’ figures in medieval texts.”[3] A laudatory obituary for Dronke asserted, “his streak of feminist partisanship was inextricably intertwined with a profound commitment to a language of tolerance and equality.”[4] Perhaps Dronke welcomed Dronke’s Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Supplement; or, Medieval Women Writers’ Loving Concern for Men. Perhaps Dronke would have tolerated or even encouraged medieval meninist literary criticism. In light of Dronke’s life and scholarly work, I doubt it. His support for tolerance, gender equality, and enlightenment probably didn’t go that far.[5]

Study of medieval Latin literature is largely corrupt and decaying. The sneering, smearing, anachronistic label “anti-feminist” has been sufficient to foreclose serious attention to magnificent, meaningful medieval Latin works such as the thirteenth-century Lamentations of Little, Little Matheus {Lamentationes Matheoluli}. With respect to Letters of Two Lovers {Epistolae duorum amantium}, a leading medieval scholar declared:

When the Man in the flush of reciprocated love wrote that “you are I and I am you,” he surely had no sinister project in mind. Yet the lovers lived in a patriarchal society where no heterosexual relationship, even outside marriage, could remain a genuine friendship of equals. [6]

Did Ursula or Peter Dronke speak out against that categorical, nonsensical scholarly dogma?

Medieval Latin scholarship that embraces contempt for men as a gender has a dismal future. In 2001, when Peter Dronke retired as Professor of Medieval Latin Literature at the University of Cambridge, Cambridge didn’t appoint another scholar to that chair. Reviewing the festschrift for Dronke, a medieval scholar commented:

There is a particular poignancy to this volume. In a revealing and nuanced introduction to the volume, on Dronke’s formative role in promoting the study of Medieval Latin at Cambridge, Marenbon laments the University’s apparent decision not to continue with teaching the subject, on the grounds of the small number of students who choose to take it up — a policy decision which many medievalists may recognize as all too familiar in university administrations. [7]

In the U.S. today, about twice as many women as men are earning advanced degrees in literary and humanistic fields.[8] Literary scholarship as it’s now conducted is much less interesting to men than to women. That should be a serious concern. Particularly with respect to medieval Latin literature, scholars deserve nearly all the blame for repelling today’s men students.[9]

Medieval Latin literature has great potential to speak to men students. An eminent medieval Latin scholar, one who studied under Peter Dronke, observed:

The best way to conceive of Latin in the Middle Ages may be as a father tongue. This description conveys Latin’s special quality as a language spoken by no one as a mother tongue. Furthermore, it hints at the status of Latin as a mainly male language, since most of the people who had the opportunity to learn Latin were boys and men (more likely to be figurative Fathers in the Church than flesh-and-blood patresfamilias) who occupied posts within a strongly patriarchal system. [10]

The reference to “a strongly patriarchal system” is best ignored as merely bowing to current, unquestionable academic dogma. The important point is that most of the persons who studied and wrote medieval Latin literature were boys and men. Medieval Latin literature includes poignant, relevant voices of men’s sexed protest, sophisticated poetry depicting women’s sexual exploitation of men, and heart-wrenching poems on violence against men. Grazida Lizier, or even Marguerite Porete, didn’t produce more interesting medieval literature than the Archpoet’s “As Fame sounds the trumpet {Fama tuba dante sonum}.”

Modern anthologies aren’t appealing entrées for men students into medieval Latin literature. When Dronke went to Cambridge, Frederick Brittain was teaching medieval Latin literature there. Brittain’s The Penguin Book of Latin Verse, first published in 1962, ends with a poem by Allen Beville Ramsay, who was Master of Magdalene College, Cambridge, from 1925 to 1947. Ramsay’s poem ends:

Give me a pious heart, I beg, and to be worthy
of my mother’s love.

{ De pium pectus, precor, et mereri
Matris amorem. } [11]

Given that’s how The Penguin Book of Latin Verse ends, most men students will flee as far back to the beginning of Latin verse as they can go. Ramsay’s poem is entitled “The Eve of Saint Nicholas.” Men students surely would be much more interested in the medieval Latin poetic roots of “The Eve of St. Agnes.”

Medieval Latin literature is mutilated and abused in James Wilhelm’s Lyrics of the Middle Ages. This book was published in 1990. Its first section is “Latin Hymns and Lyrics from 850 to 1300.” Why not from 500 to 1500? Wilhelm’s prefatory text explains:

The anthology begins with Gottschalk, whose moving poem to a young novice prefigures the love poetry that had been silent since the end of the Roman Empire, but which would break forth with renewed energy in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. … Latin went on after the year 1300, but by this time most of the works had become secular and were more Renaissance in spirit than medieval. [12]

Gottschalk’s moving poem probably wasn’t written to be literally a love poem to a young novice.[13] With a similar vision, but much greater medieval influence, Boethius’s early sixth-century Consolation of Philosophy {Consolatio Philosophiae} includes a poignant strand of profound personal love. Maximianus’s sixth-century love elegies treat men’s fundamental emotional concerns as humanely and sympathetically as any poetry ever written. Maximianus’s love elegies were rightly part of the thirteenth-century Latin school curriculum known as the Six Authors {Sex Auctores}. Boethius and Maximianus sixth-century medieval Latin poems are essential literature not just for men students, but for all students.

Wilhelm’s claim that medieval Latin works after the year 1300 “were more Renaissance in spirit than medieval” is vacuous at best. The great Poggio Bracciolini, a medieval church official who died in 1459, assiduously searched for classical texts, recovered Lucretius’s incomparable On the Nature of Things {De rerum natura}, and helped to transmit medieval stories of men’s sexed protest to the present. The fifteenth-century Alphabetical Song Concerning the Evil Woman {Canticum alphabeticum de mala muliere} is part of a long medieval tradition of important, challenging teaching for men students. Guillaume Du Fay’s medieval motet, O Saint Sebastian — O martyr Sebastian — O how wonderful {O sancte Sebastiane – O martyr Sebastiane – O quam mira} is a medieval work that speaks poignantly to present-day anxieties about the corona-virus plague. In our benighted ignorance and bigotry, we are more medieval than the Middle Ages ever were.

Apart from promoting the childish delusion of the Middle Ages, Wilhelm amputated a vital organ of medieval Latin literature. The second section of his anthology is “The Carmina Burana.” Put together early in the thirteenth century, the Carmina Burana is “the largest surviving collection of secular medieval Latin verse.”[14] Its poem are as much medieval Latin hymns and lyrics as the poems in Wilhelm’s prior section, “Latin Hymns and Lyrics from 850 to 1300.” Implicitly justifying his division of Latin lyrics, Wilhelm declared:

As an entity, the Burana celebrate nature, love, and fortune in a way that runs directly counter to the supernatural doctrines of the Church. … Some of the poems … are almost grotesque parodies. … If these {other Carmina Burana} poems are comic, they are also diabolical, no matter how much like schoolbook exercises they may seem. [15]

Medieval intellectuals were less prone to searching out and quarantining the supernatural and/or diabolical. Medieval Latin authors wrote poetry celebrating asses for the liturgy, biblical centos on a monk unfairly castrated for adultery, and parodies of sacred liturgy and even of women. The ninth-century Latin author Sedulius Scottus wrote a brilliant bellwether poem concerning nature, love, and fortune. That medieval Latin poem points in the opposite direction from Wilhelm’s death-promoting division of medieval Latin literature.[16]

No book on medieval Latin literature has been more welcoming to men students since Helen Waddell’s Mediaeval Latin Lyrics was published in 1929. With wide-ranging personal experience, a first-class honors B.A. plus M.A. in literature from Queen’s University, Belfast, scholarships from Oxford, and admirable dedication to caring for her step-mother, Helen Waddell was an unconventional medievalist.[17] A man academic, with characteristic lack of gender self-consciousness, complained about Helen Waddell’s medieval scholarship:

She is so insistent that we shall see medieval scholars as men, she forgets that they are both scholars and medieval. [18]

For far too long, scholars have written about man — abstract, genderless, generic man. Helen Waddell understood that men are distinctively male and that being male is significant and not a birth defect. She understood, as today’s female supremacists don’t, that a humane future cannot be just female.

Waddell’s Mediaeval Latin Lyrics begins with “Dancing Girl of Syria {Copa Surisca}.” Perhaps that poem would have been more accurately titled “Darling Syrian Woman Tavern-Keeper {Copa Syrisca}.” Far more important is that Waddell began her anthology of medieval Latin lyrics with that poem. Waddell’s anthology ends with “She herself restored me to life {Ipsa vivere mihi reddidit}.” Waddell appreciated men and medieval Latin literature in a humane and enlightened way, far beyond the oppressive ideology of men-abasing courtly love.[19]

Helen Waddell and Peter Dronke are dead. In her own understanding, Waddell has gone to be with the God of most of medieval Latin literature. In his own understanding, Dronke is probably just dust. Dust might count as more material remains than what’s left of Dronke’s chair of medieval Latin literature at Cambridge. To honor best Peter Dronke’s learned, careful, thoroughly researched and documented medieval Latin scholarship, scholars should welcome and include in such scholarship Helen Waddell’s religious openness, meninist insight, and literary creativity. Then medieval Latin literature will attract more men students, and probably more women students, too. That’s the way toward a renaissance of medieval Latin literature and a more fruitful future for humanity.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Dronke’s Women Writers of the Middle Ages: A Supplement
• the penis’s image problem in comparative gender perspective
• generation of vipers will be overcome when cocks crow

Notes:

[1]  Gottschalk of Orbais, “How are you commanding me, little boy, {Ut quid iubes, pusiole},” Latin text from The Gottschalk Homepage, my English translation, benefiting from that of Godman (1985), p. 229, and Carr (2018). Here’s a fine recorded performance of “Ut quid iubes, pusiole,” as performed by Cantilena Antiqua in Jaroslaw, Poland in 2009.

Gottschalk probably wrote “Ut quid iubes” after becoming immersed in bitter conflict with Hrabanus Maurus. Hrabanus, a highly influential church leader, celebrated men’s seminal blessing and fiercely sought to suppress what he regarded a heresy. To Hrabanus, Gottschalk’s views on predestination were heresy. Hrabanus and other church leaders thus had Gottschalk incarcerated in the Hautvillers monastery in 849. Gottschalk was labeled a “dangerously insane figure.” Gillis (2017) p. 148. Secular rulers in 851 confirmed Gottschalk’s condemnation. Gottschalk probably wrote “Ut quid iubes” in response to his exile-incarceration for life, without hope for further appeal. An alternate view is that Gottschalk wrote this poem early in his life, perhaps about 825. Godman (1985) p. 40.

[2] Peter Dronke was the son of Maria Kronfeld, a Catholic with close Jewish family relations, and Adolf Dronke, a secularist. Dronke went with his sister and parents to live in New Zealand in 1939. There Dronke obtained a B.A. from Victoria University of Wellington in 1953 and an M.A. in 1954. He then received a scholarship to study English at Magdalen College, Oxford. He received an Oxford degree in 1957 and subsequently received an Italian government scholarship to study in Rome during the academic year 1957-8. Dronke then became a Junior Research Fellow at Merton College, Oxford. On the biography of Peter Dronke, Marenbon (2001), Boltani (2020), Gentili (2020), Sequentia tribute (2020), and Warner (2020).

While Ursula Brown changed her name to Ursula Dronke, that shouldn’t be interpreted as her subordination to her husband. When Ursula Brown and Peter Dronke married, Peter probably asked Ursula for permission to change his last name to Brown. She, being older and wiser, and also a generous-hearted person, probably decided that she would change her name to Dronke so as to help Peter as a young scholar to establish his career. Peter then conformed to his wife’s decision.

Ursula’s choice to take the name Dronke was more reasonable than both spouses adopting a hyphenated last name formed from their prior last names, with the order of the last names in the hyphenated new name chosen by the wife in accordance with the reality of gynocentrism. That hyphenating naming practice has double the administrative and reputational cost of a single marital name change. It also isn’t sustainable intergenerationally. On the biography of Ursula Dronke, O’Donoghue (2012) and Warner (2012). Ursula and Peter Dronke are lamentably excluded from Chance (2005).

Ursula and Peter Dronke’s only child, their daughter Cressida, went on to have two children herself, Gabriel and Lara. Peter Dronke had many students. He also had these two grandchildren.

[3] Wetherbee (2004) p. 243. Like many societies, medieval Europe was highly gynocentric.

[4] Warner (2020).

[5] According to Warner, Ursula Brown and Peter Dronke shared “a commitment to socialist principles.” Warner (2012). Peter Dronke however, donated most of his scholarly work to publishers. Those publishers have disseminated Dronke’s work as private property accessible only to those with sufficient resources to purchase it. Dronke could have done much more to make his scholarly work freely available, as a common good, to everyone worldwide. He seems to have done nothing to promote anything other than the privatization of his work.

[6] Newman (2016) p. 31.

[7] Mews (2008). Dronke taught John Marenbon medieval Latin literature in 1975-6 when Marenbon was an undergraduate at Cambridge. Marenbon observed:

Medieval Latin will cease to be a proper subject in the University, represented by someone teaching, supervising research and championing the interests of the discipline. Just as in the bad old days, students will no longer be able to receive ‘a formation in medieval Latin literature’.

Marenbon (2001) p. 5.

[8] Among degrees awarded in the U.S. in the the academic year 2017-18, women received more than twice as many masters degrees as did men (10,538 masters degrees to women, 5,169 masters degrees to men). Women received more than 50% more doctorate degrees (1,766 doctorate degrees to women, 1,170 doctorate degrees to men). Here are the data as a Google Sheets web page and an LibreOffice spreadsheet. For a related compilation for the academic year 2010-11, see note [4] in my post, “women and men on medieval women writers.”

These data are from the U.S. Department of Education, National Center for Education Statistics. The National Center for Education Statistics obscures this gender comparison by distributing the relevant data across four separate, “web only,” highly detailed tables.

[9] Both women and men scholars have been largely silent about the real gender trouble in the humanities. Reviewing broadly medieval literature, Mortensen declared:

if we as medieval textual scholars do not wish to abandon the entire field to complete fragmentation and private initiative – or to one-sided ideological exploitation – we need to find ways to supplement our existing master-narratives for this extremely large and multifaceted record of verbal art and premodern human insight.

Mortensen (2017) p. 60. With respect to gender, literary scholarship has already become a field of one-sided ideological exploitation. A medievalist might consider “feminist criticism of the role of gender in the author’s writing and in our reading.” Ziolkowsk (1996) p. 530. Meninist literary criticism, in contrast, continues to be viciously marginalized and suppressed.

[10] Ziolkowski (1996) p. 506.

[11] Allen Beville Ramsay, “Nicholas, merciful father and guardian {Nicola, clemens pater atque custos},” Latin text from Brittain (1962) p. 363, my English translation benefiting from that of id.

[12] Wilhelm (1990) p. 3. On the periodization with respect to medieval Latin literature, Ziolkowski (1996) pp. 508-11.

[13] Godman stated:

Ut quid iubes? is imprecisely allusive … Whatever the personal circumstances of this poem’s composition, nothing in the text licenses us to interpret it biographically, nor do we need to do so. … Gottschalk’s theme is less the difficulties he experienced on Reichenau while exiled from Fulda than a condition of mind … it is poetry symbolic of a state of sensibility in which consciousness of personal suffering vies with the duty of divine praise.

Godman (1985) p. 42.

[14] The Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library recently published David Traill’s magnificent edition of the Carmina Burana. Traill (2018). The quoted phrase is on the flyleaves of both volumes.

[15] Wilhelm (1990) pp. 27-8. The third section in Wilhelm’s book is entitled “Provençal Lyrics.” Its introduction begins:

The Provençal lyric bursts upon the late medieval world like a welcomed ray of spring sunlight.

Id. p. 45. In fact, Raimon Berenguier IV, Arnaut Catalan, Bernart de Cornilh, and Raimon de Durfort discussing in Provencal lyrics the extent of men’s obligations to serve women is squarely within the great tradition of earlier medieval Latin literature such as Waltherius and Ruodlieb, and stories in the chronicles of Guibert of Nogent and Liudprand of Cremona.

[16] In addition to contempt from medievalists, medieval Latin literature has also suffered from contempt from classicists:

Until recently classicists, with few exceptions, have taken almost no interest in Medieval Latin, and indeed have often been hostile to or contemptuous of it. This attitude goes back to — in fact is almost a definition of — the Renaissance Humanist culture that prided itself on having rediscovered classical antiquity — not only Greek but ‘pure’ Latin. From the sixteenth century on, the efforts of Latinists have been directed to preserving the Latin language and literature of the late years of the Republic and the early years of the Empire. Style, spelling and metre were taught according to classical models; the reform of spelling took immediate effect and was confirmed by the invention of printing. As a result over a thousand years of Latin literature was dismissed as ignorant and barbaric. I recall a New Zealand professor of Latin who read the entire Oxford Book of Medieval Latin and found only one piece that he liked (Peter Riga’s poem on the hermaphrodite). Religious attitudes (not, of course, just among classicists) have also played their part. A great deal of Medieval Latin literature concerns the Virgin, the saints, and other (from a Protestant point of view) dubious topics. Anticlericalism was not confined to Protestant countries: the epithet ‘monkish’ has often been enough to condemn an author to permanent obscurity. In modern times even being religious at all — let alone moral — puts a medieval writer at a serious disadvantage with his {modern} reader.

Rigg (1992) p. 3. In contrast to much of medieval Latin literature, Rigg’s presentation of medieval Latin literature is wholly lacking in rhetorical sophistication and verbal allurement. His book thus functions as a learned reference work for all but the most dedicated students of medieval Latin literature.

[17] For an anti-meninist biography of Waddell, see FitzGerald (2005). FitzGerald’s biography is one chapter in Chance (2005), a monumental work of gynocentrism.

[18] Jones (1928) pp. 497-8. Jones declared of Waddell:

One can read her discussion of the Carolingian scholars and scarcely suspect that the interminable tomes of the Poetae Karolii Aevi are, unless sifted, a weariness of the flesh, a stupendous compound of bad verse, of dull homily, of empty panegyric, of monotonous elegy, of abecedaria and acrostic and anagram and palindrome, of edifying discourse and endless sermon and monkish chronicle and versified stale small-beer.

Id. p. 498. The interminable tomes of modern academic literary criticism are far less diverse, less useful, and less interesting than medieval Latin literature.

[19] Waddell’s anthology lacks beautiful medieval Latin hymns. In her postscript to her 1948 edition, Waddell made clear that she appreciated all of medieval Latin literature:

The intervening years have made more apparent to me the justice of a complaint brought by a discriminating critic against the principle of selection in this anthology: that is has preferred “the hilarity and mockery of the last masks of paganism” — a harsh phrase for verse as innocent as Herrick’s — to the sanctum saeculare of the mediaeval hymns. Yet it is a preference in seeming only. The greatest things in mediaeval Latin, its “living and victorious splendours,” are not here, because I cannot translate them. Even in secular Latin there are things before which translation is abashed: for these others, nondum propalatam esse viam sanctorum: “the way into the holiest of all was not yet made manifest.”

Waddell (1929 / 1948) p. viii.

[images] (1) Pope Gregory IV receives a book from Hrabanus Maurus. Illumination made in Fulda between 831 and 840. From instance of Hrabanus, On praise of the holy cross {De laudibus sanctae crucis}, folio 2 of MS. Austrian National Library, Codex 652. Via Wikimedia Commons. (2) Holy men in carmen figuratus, from another instance of Hrabanus, On praise of the holy cross {De laudibus sanctae crucis}, folio 19v of MS. Bibliothèque nationale de France (BnF) Latin 11685.

References:

Boltani, Plero. 2020. “Dronke, medievista e latinista dell’amore.” Il Sole (Italy). April 24.

Brittain, Frederick. 1962. The Penguin Book of Latin Verse: with plain prose translations of each poem. Harmondsworth, England: Penguin Books.

Carr, Simonetta. 2018. “Gottschalk of Orbais – Bold Witness and Sweet Poet.” Place for Truth. Sept. 12. Online.

Chance, Jane. 2005. Women Medievalists and the Academy. Madison, Wis: University of Wisconsin Press.

FitzGerald, Jennifer. 2005. “Helen Waddell (1889-1965): The Scholar-Poet.” Ch. 24 (pp. 323-338) in Chance (2005).

Gentili, Sonia. 2020. “L’immaginazione poetica del suo Medioevo liberato.” quotidiano comunista / il manifesto (Italy). May 3.

Gillis, Matthew Bryan. 2017. Heresy and Dissent in the Carolingian Empire: the case of Gottschalk of Orbais. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (review by Scott Ashley)

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

Jones, Howard Mumford. 1928. “Book review: The Wandering Scholars by Helen Waddell.” Modern Philology. 25 (4): 497-499.

Marenbon, John, 2001. “Peter Dronke and Medieval Latin at Cambridge.” Pp. 1-6 in Marenbon, John, ed. Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: a festschrift for Peter Dronke. Leiden: Brill.

Mews, Constant. 2008. “Book Review: Marenbon, ed., Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages.” The Medieval Review. Online, January 12.

Mortensen, Lars Boje. 2017. “The Canons of Medieval Literature from the Middle Ages to the Twenty-First Century.” Analecta Romana Instituti Danici. 42: 47-63.

Newman, Barbara. 2016. Making Love in the Twelfth Century: Letters of two lovers in context. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press.

O’Donoghue. Heather. 2012. “Ursula Dronke obituary: Inspirational teacher of Old Norse literature specialising in the sagas and poetry of medieval Iceland.” The Guardian (UK). March 25.

Rigg, A. G. 1992. A History of Anglo-Latin Literature, 1066-1422. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Traill, David A. 2018, ed. and trans. Carmina Burana. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 48-49. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Waddell, Helen. 1929 / rev. 1948. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. New York: Henry Holt.

Warner, Marina. 2012. “Obituary. Ursula Dronke: Enlightening scholar of medieval literature.” Independent (UK). April 6.

Warner, Marina. 2020. “Peter Dronke obituary: Scholar of medieval Latin who shone light on Hildegard of Bingen and other female writers of the Middle Ages.” The Guardian (UK). Online, May 14.

Wetherbee, Winthrop. 2004. “Book Review: Poetry and Philosophy in the Middle Ages: A Festschrift for Peter Dronke.” Speculum. 79 (1): 242-244.

Wilhelm, James J., ed. 1990. Lyrics of the Middle Ages: an anthology. New York: Garland Publishing.

Ziolkowski, Jan. M. 1996. “Towards a History of Medieval Latin Literature.” Section GA (pp. 505-536) in Mantello, Frank, Anthony Carl, and Arthur George Rigg, eds. Medieval Latin: an introduction and bibliographical guide. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press.

In our time of ignorance and bigotry, many persons don’t know that about as many men suffer rape as do women. Just think about the most probable origin of the expression “cover your ass.” Moreover, in reality, women rape men about as often as men rape women. Men rape victims are further assaulted with denial and trivialization of their victimization. Writing about two thousand years ago, Parthenius of Nicaea recorded stories of women raping men. These stories show a broad range of possibilities for the victimized men.

The most ordinary story is probably that of Daphnis, son of Hermes. Daphnis was a shepherd on Mount Etna in Sicily. Skilled at playing the panpipes, he was also “exceedingly good-looking {ἰδέᾱ ἐκπρεπής}.” The nymph Echenais fell in love with him. Apparently seeking to suppress Daphnis’s sexuality, Echenais worked magic against him. She told him that if he ever had sex with a woman, he would go blind. That set Daphnis up for a criminal disaster:

For a time he held out resolutely, even though not a few women were mad with love for him. Later, one of the princesses in Sicily deceived him by plying him with wine and made him want to have intercourse with her. And as a result of this, he too, like Thamyras the Thracian, was blinded through his own folly.

{ ὁ δὲ χρόνον μέν τινα καρτερῶς ἀντεῖχεν, καίπερ οὐκ ὀλίγων ἐπιμαινομένων αὐτῷ· ὕστερον δὲ μία τῶν κατὰ τὴν Σικελίαν βασιλίδων οἴνῳ πολλῷ δηλησαμένη αὐτὸν ἤγαγεν εἰς ἐπιθυμίαν αὐτῇ μιγῆναι. καὶ οὗτος ἐκ τοῦδε ὁμοίως Θαμύρᾳ τῷ Θρᾳκὶ δι᾿ ἀφροσύνην ἐπεπήρωτο. } [1]

A drunk person cannot legally consent to sex. The Sicilian princess raped Daphnis. This account blames the man victim for getting drunk and having a woman rape him. That’s about as reasonable as rape statistics that the public propaganda apparatus now disseminates. Daphnis shouldn’t be blamed for being blinded any more than men who masturbate should be blamed for going blind.

Periander of Corinth became insanely angry after a woman raped him. As a young man, he had a mild disposition and was reasonable. But then his mother developed a violent passion for him. As a mother, she of course could embrace her son. But embraces weren’t sufficient to satisfy her. She wanted to have sex with her own son.

Periander’s mother contrived a trick to have sex with her son. She told him that a very beautiful married woman was desperately in love with him. Her desire for him was torturing her. His mother pleaded with him to have compassion and mercy for the woman. Periander reluctantly agreed to have sex with her. His mother explained to him that, out of respect for the woman’s modesty, he should keep the bedroom completely dark and not seek for the woman to say anything to him. A dutiful son, Periander agreed to do everything that his mother told him to do.

Periander’s mother thus came and had sex with him. She left his bed in the morning before dawn. Later that day, she asked him whether he had a satisfying experience. He said that the sex was quite pleasing. His mother asked if he wanted to sleep with the woman again. He said that he was keen for sex with her again. So it went.

Periander had sex with this mystery woman many times and began to feel some love for her. But he wanted to know who she was. His mother forbade him from seeking to know who she was. But one night, daring to defy his mother, Periander had a servant bring a light.[2] Periander discovered that he had been having sex with his mother. He was being raped by deception. He became violently angry:

when he saw his mother he rushed upon her as if to kill her. But he desisted, checked by a divine apparition. Ever after this he was stricken in mind and soul. He plunged into savagery and murdered many of the citizens. Meanwhile, his mother, greatly bewailing her own fate, put an end to her own life.

{ κατιδὼν τὴν μητέρα ὥρμησεν ἐπὶ τὸ διεργάσασθαι αὐτήν. κατασχεθεὶς δὲ ὑπό τινος δαιμονίου φαντάσματος ἀπετράπετο, κἀκ τούτου παραπλὴξ ἦν νοῦ τε καὶ φρενῶν κατέσκηψέ τε εἰς ὠμότητα καὶ πολλοὺς ἀπέσφαξε τῶν πολιτῶν. ἡ δὲ μήτηρ πολλὰ κατολοφυραμένη τὸν ἑαυτῆς δαίμονα ἀνεῖλεν ἑαυτήν. } [3]

Being raped by his mother turned the young man with mild disposition into a mass murderer. All the persons Periander murdered were probably men. With the characteristic self-centeredness of women living within gynocentrism, Periander’s mother bewailed her own fate. Those in favor of mercy killing should credit her with killing herself. That surely was an act of mercy to those around her.

In contrast to the horrible effects of rape on Periander and the citizens around him, a woman raping a man in the very first story in Parthenius’s collection leads to extraordinary expressions of compassion, forgiveness, and social solidarity. Lyrcus, son of Phoroneus, grew up in Argos. Io, the daughter of Inachus the King of Argos, was stolen by pirates. King Inachus sent many men, including Lyrcus, on arduous journeys searching for his daughter. Despite traversing vast expanses of land and sea, Lyrcus was unable to find Io. Knowing that his life as a man was worth nothing relative to the life of the King’s daughter, Lyrcus feared to return home without having found Io.

Because he was unable to find Io, Lyrcus abandoned his home in Argos and went to live in Caunus. When Heilebia, the daughter of King Aegialus of Caunus, saw Lyrcus, she fell in love with him. She pleaded with her father to give her Lyrcus. In reality, daughters rule. The king apparently obeyed his daughter’s request. Lyrcus married Heilebia.

The royal marriage of Heilebia and Lyrcus produced no children across many years. Apparently worried that his wife and the king would blame him for the infertility, Lyrcus traveled to consult the oracle of Apollo at Didyma. Apollo speaking through a priestess told him that he would father a child with the first woman with whom he had sex after leaving the temple. In great delight, Lyrcus hurried to journey home.

Lyrcus’s journey home took more than a day. On the way home, he spent a night at Bybastus.[4] There Dionysus’s son Staphylus gave Lyrcus generous hospitality. Staphylus supplied Lyrcus with much wine and urged him to drink heavily. Unknown to Lyrcus, Staphylus had gotten word of the oracle. For Staphylus, this was an opportunity to serve his daughters and insert his family into Caunus’s royal family.

Staphylus’s two daughters strongly desired Lyrcus. They contended with each other for who would rape the drunken Lyrcus. The daughter named Hemithea prevailed. She thus went to bed with the drunken Lyrcus and raped him. Criminal responsibility, however, has long been strongly biased toward blaming men:

On the next day Lyrcus realized what he had done when he saw Hemithea lying next to him. He took it badly and blamed Staphylus bitterly for deceiving him. But afterwards, since there was nothing he could do, he took off his belt and gave it to Hemithea. He told her to save it for their son until he grew up, so that the boy should then have a token when he came looking for his father in Caunus. And so Lyrcus sailed away.

{ Λύρκος δὲ ἐπιγνοὺς τῇ ὑστεραίᾳ οἷα ἐδεδράκει καὶ τὴν Ἡμιθέαν ὁρῶν συγκατακεκλιμένην, ἐδυσφόρει τε καὶ πολλὰ κατεμέμφετο τὸν Στάφυλον, ὡς ἀπατεῶνα γενόμενον αὐτοῦ. ὕστερον δὲ μηδὲν ἔχων ὅ τι ποιῇ, περιελόμενος τὴν ζώνην δίδωσι τῇ κόρῃ κελεύων ἡβήσαντι τῷ παιδὶ φυλάττειν, ὅπως ἔχῃ γνώρισμα, ὁπότ᾿ ἂν ἀφίκοιτο πρὸς τὸν πατέρα αὐτοῦ εἰς Καῦνον, καὶ ἐξέλευσεν. } [5]

Lyrcus didn’t blame Hemithea for raping him. Men in general are highly reluctant to blame women or even criticize women. Lyrcus blamed Staphylus for deceiving him. Lyrcus seems also to have blamed himself. But he didn’t consciously do anything wrong except fail to refuse the intoxicating hospitality that Staphylus deviously pushed on him. Both women and men should act prudently with respect to foreseeable risks. But even when they fail to do so, neither should be blamed for being victims of rape.

The rape victim Lyrcus survived to experience an extraordinary response to his being raped. When he learned what had happened, King Aegialus of Caunus sought to banish his son-in-law Lyrcus. That shows common contempt for men victims of rape. But Aegialus’s daughter Heilebia defied her father and supported her raped husband. Numerous men in Caunus also supported the rape victim Lyrcus. They fought for Lyrcus against the supporters of King Aegialus. The side supporting compassion and fairness for the raped man eventually prevailed. The rape victim Lyrcus not only survived but went on to became king of Caunus.

The ending is even more heart-warming. Like a woman who is raped and then raises the innocent offspring of that rape as her beloved son, Lyrcus embraced his rape-engendered son:

Afterwards, when the son of Hemithea and Lyrcus had grown up (he was called Basilus), he arrived in Caunus, where he was recognised by the now aging Lyrcus, who made him leader of his own people.

{ μετὰ δὲ ταῦτα ἀνδρωθεὶς ὁ ἐξ Ἡμιθέας καὶ Λύρκου (Βασίλος αὐτῷ ὄνομα) ἦλθεν εἰς τὴν Καυνίαν· καὶ αὐτὸν γνωρίσας ὁ Λύρκος ἤδη γηραιὸς ὢν ἡγεμόνα καθίστησι τῶν σφετέρων λαῶν. }

Women raping men need not be a socially suppressed reality in which raped men suffer in shame, silence, and bitterness. When such men receive the support they deserve from the women and men around them, raped men can go on to live noble, generous lives, even to the extent of loving the offspring of their rapes.

Parthenius began his collection of stories about suffering in love with the story of Lyrcus. That story shows that the marginalization of men under oppressive gynocentrism isn’t inevitable. When a woman rapes a man, that man rape victim isn’t doomed to be socially killed through ignorance and bigotry. Men rape victims can receive compassion and justice from the women and men in their families and societies. Men rape victims can not only survive, but also flourish and became examples of human greatness, just as Lyrcus did.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• moral reflection in Parthenius’s poets summons to self-judgment
• Tityrus the bellwether in the terrible ram vision of Sedulius Scottus
• Prudentius’s crown: Saint Agnes redeemed the male gaze on every Eve

Notes:

[1] Parthenius of Nicaea, Sufferings in Love {Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα} 29.2 (About Daphnis {Περὶ Δάφνιδος}), ancient Greek text and English translation from Lightfoot (2009). All subsequent quotes from Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα are similarly sourced, with some insubstantial changes in the English translations for clarity and ease of reading. The manchette for this story states, “Timaeus tells this story in the Sicelica {Ἱστορεῖ Τίμαιος Σικελικοῖς}.” Longus’s ancient Greek novel The Story of Daphnis and Chloe {Τα κατὰ Δάφνιν καὶ Χλόην} features a shepherd named Daphnis.

In Parthenius’s story, the nymph Echenais’s motive for cursing Daphnis isn’t clear. Other versions of the story suggest that Echenais sought to suppress permanently Daphnis’s sexuality. Lightfoot (1999) pp. 526-7. Men’s sexuality in ancient Greece was more generally repressed. Echenais’s underlying motive may have been sexual rejection or sexual jealousy.

In Greek mythologoy, Thamyras was a Thracian singer who challenged the goddess-Muses to a singing competition. Thamyras proposed that if he would win the competition, all the Muses would agree to have sex with him. Unfortunately, he lost the competition. The Muses then slashed out his eyes. This story shows gynocentric society brutally suppressing an unruly man with strong masculine heterosexuality, one who dared to challenge an entrenched, female-dominated institution.

Another story in Parthenius depicts what is probably also a relatively common pattern by which women rape men. When Heracles was bringing Geryon’s cattle back from Erythea, he stopped at the court of the Celtic king Bretannus:

This king had a daughter called Celtine. She fell in love with Heracles and hid his cattle, refusing to surrender them unless he first had sexual intercourse with her.

{ τῷ δὲ ἄρα ὑπάρχειν θυγατέρα, Κελτίνην ὄνομα. ταύτην δὲ ἐρασθεῖσαν τοῦ Ἡρακλέους κατακρύψαι τὰς βοῦς μὴ θέλειν τε ἀποδοῦναι εἰ μὴ πρότερον αὐτῇ μιχθῆναι. }

Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 30.1 (About Celtine {Περὶ Κελτίνης}). Heracles then had sex with Celtine. Celtine thus raped Heracles by means of extortion.

Within the context of scholars’ extensive, anti-meninist work on literary rapes in recent decades, Lightfoot doesn’t recognize that Daphnis was raped. She asserts that, like Daphnis, Orion “was also blinded as a result of a sexual offense committed when drunk.” Lightfoot (1999) p. 528. She places the Daphnis story within stories about men unfaithful to goddesses:

The Daphnis story fits into a broad class of narratives about men who are unfaithful to goddesses and are punished by blinding or another form of mutilation or death

Id. Classics as a scholarly field urgently needs to face honestly its gender biases.

[2] The mystery lover revealed involuntarily is a key plot element in the second-century Latin story of Cupid and Psyche in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses.

[3] Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 17.6-7 (About Periander’s mother {Περὶ τῆς Περιάνδρου μητρός}). This story has no manchette.

[4] The oracle of Apollo at Didymas {Δίδυμας} is slightly south of Miletus on the Aegean coast of present-day Turkey. Caunus {Καῦνος} is further south on the Aegean coast at the border of Caria and Lycia. Bybastus {Βύβαστος} is on the Datça Peninsula on the Aegean Sea between Didymas and Caunus. The distance between Didymas and Caunus is about 250 km. Bybastus thus is a reasonable overnight stopping point on an ancient journey from Didymas to Caunus.

[5] Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 1.5 (About Lyrcus {Περὶ Λύρκου}). The manchette for this story states, “The story occurs in Nicaenetus in his Lyrcus, and in Apollonius Rhodius’ Caunus {Ἡ ἱστορία παρὰ Νικαινέτῳ ἐν τῷ Λύρκῳ καὶ Ἀπολλωνίῳ Ῥοδίῳ Καύνῳ}.”

[6] Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 1.6. Lyrcus’s son Basilus carries a name based on the ancient Greek word “king {βασιλεύς}.”

The story of Lyrcus being raped by Hemithea is similar to the story of Aegeus being raped by Aethra. The offspring of the latter rape was Aegeus’s son Theseus. The trauma of being raped by Aethra evidently damaged Aegeus’s mind and emotions. Aegeus hence accepted Medea as his consort. She had killed her children with her ex-husband Jason and also murdered his new wife Creusa.

When Theseus became a grown man, he performed a heroic feat that validated his royal stature. Theseus then presented himself to Aegeus in Athens. While Lyrcus’s wife Heilebia warmly welcomed and strongly supported the son that resulted from Lyrcus being raped, Medea arranged to have Theseus killed by the Cretan Bull. When that plot failed, Medea tried to poison Theseus. In addition to being a rape survivor, Aegeus undoubtedly suffered further trauma from Medea seeking to kill his innocent son. All women and men should reject hateful media.

I recall reading with astonishment a story of a woman who was raped and then raised with love the son she conceived through that rape. I haven’t be able to find that story. Ryan Bomberger has a similar story. He has shown amazing courage and diversity in speaking and writing.

[images] (1) Morgan le Fay practicing spells. Illustration by William Henry Margetson in Clark (1914) p. 104. Via the Camelot Project. (2) Ariadne and Theseus in love. Painting by Véra Willoughby in Willoughby (1925) p. 184. Via Hellenic Library – Alexander S. Onassis Public Benefit Foundation.

References:

Clark, Janet MacDonald. 1914. Legends of King Arthur and his Knights, re-told for children. London: Nister.

Lightfoot, J. L. 1999. Parthenius of Nicaea: The poetical fragments and the  Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (review by Christopher Francese)

Lightfoot, J. L. 2009. Hellenistic Collection: Philitas, Alexander of Aetolia, Hermesianax, Euphorion, Parthenius. Loeb Classical Library, 508. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (reviews by Giambattista D’Alessio, by Claudio De Stefani, and by Iiro Laukola)

Willoughby, Véra. 1925. A Vision of Greece: described and painted by Vera Willoughby. London: P. Allan.

Dark-browed girl with beautiful glances, all stony-hearted,
embrace me, your goatherd, so that I can kiss you.
There is a sweet pleasure even in empty kisses.

{ ὦ τὸ καλὸν ποθορεῦσα, τὸ πᾶν λίθος, ὦ κυάνοφρυ
νύμφα, πρόσπτυξαί με τὸν αἰπόλον, ὥς τυ φιλήσω.
ἔστι καὶ ἐν κενεοῖσι φιλήμασιν ἁδέα τέρψις. } [1]

In Sedulius Scottus’s ninth-century bellwether poem, the stolen, castrated ram Tityrus got caught in a thicket and devoured. Meanwhile, the thief went free. Unhappiness is everywhere. The elderly, quarantined in nursing homes, are dropping dead from COVID-19. Boys and girls in separate households cannot see each other and sing to each other. We are substituting castration culture for the seminal blessing.

On a mountain in Moriah, Abraham bound his son Isaac and prepared to slaughter him for a burnt offering to God. Castration culture and the seminal blessing balanced on a knife-edge. God stopped the stroke of Abraham’s knife. God provided a ram caught by its horns in a thicket as a sacrifice in place of Isaac.

Men castrate rams to make them into more tame and tasty wethers. Wethers can’t multiply themselves. Sedulius credited God with multiplying wethers:

When lofty-powered God created the world’s animals,
which the sea, land, and sky contain,
he multiplied wethers with multiple honors,
and among those bleating, made them leaders.
…
Into their twin nostrils he scattered proud powers,
through multiple breaths he multiplied them.

{ Cum deus altipotens animalia condidit orbis
quae mare, quae tellus, quae tenet atque polus,
multo multones tunc multiplicavit honore
inter balantes fecit eosque duces.
…
naribus in geminis sparsit viresque superbas,
flatibus in multis multiplicavit eos. } [2]

Pride is a foul-smelling sin in the nose of Christians, who are grateful to God for their created being.[3] Lacking the seminal blessing carried in twin testicles, wethers comically have pride in their twin nostrils, in their own ability to breathe. Sheep and other bleating animals are known to be stupid. Being a leader among sheep is no great credit. Tityrus was a leader of sheep. He was a bellwether.

Once men are castrated, they can be exploited more easily. When Iphiklos saw his father Phylakos castrating a ram, he understood and ran away.[4] Castration is the route to being slaughtered. Regarding wethers, Sedulius confessed:

Thus, I confess, my affection for them has increased,
as has my love for their fleece and fat belly.
I swear by these fingers, that in this I never lie:
that I crave them, prize them, always love them,
and not even the river Lethe will obliterate this holy love.
What my mouth proclaims, my mind consciously asserts.

{ Unde mihi, fateor, horum dilectio crevit,
crevit amor pepli, pinguis et umbilici.
Iuro per hos digitos, quod in hoc non mentior umquam:
tales quod cupio, diligo, semper amo
nec Lethes fluvius sacrum delebit amorem.
Os quod proloquitur, conscia mens perhibit. }

The Christian cleric Sedulius didn’t love wethers with the equal partnership that medieval Christianity required of wife and husband. Sedulius, who closely identified with Tityrus, sought to consume them.[5]

Sedulius figured Tityrus as a hero like Aeneas. A thief abducted the wether Tityrus. Then a pack of dogs gave chase. Tityrus was caught in a thicket, while the thief got away. Tityrus was a “pious wether {pius multo}” and a “great-hearted hero {magnanimumque ducem}.”[6] With the ravenous, barking dogs surrounding him, he fought strongly. He inflicted many wounds on the dogs, “who reckoned that the wild animal before them was like a lion {atque leoninam rentur adesse feram}.” That was an ominous simile.[7] Nonetheless, surrounded by vicious dogs, “the distinguished one shined with his pious mouth’s words {egregius fulserat ore pio}”:

“What madness is arising in your hearts?” he said.
“Recognize me, the servant of Bishop Hartgar.
I am not the bad thief, not that petty little pilferer;
rather, I am the pious wether, the eminent leader of the flock.
If for amusement you seek to overcome a tyrannical enemy,
behold, that robber is fleeing nearby. Let’s seize him!
But if to the contrary, your rage and raucous barking
would incite you to bloody war against my tranquillity,
I swear by this head of mine, by these horns, and by
this proud forehead, I will give you the rewards you deserve.”

{ “Quis furor in vestris consurgit cordibus?” inquit,
“Gnoscite me famulum praesulis Hargarii.
Non sum latro malus, non sum furunculus ille,
sed sum multo pius, dux gregis eximius.
Si vos oblectet hostem superare tyrannum,
proximus ecce fugit fur, teneamus eum.
Sin autem rabies vestri raucusque latratus
in me tranquillum bella cruenta ciet,
per caput hoc iuro, per cornua perque superbam
hanc frontem: vobis praemia digna feram.” }

Sedulius himself was a scholar-servant of Bishop Hartgar. He probably also was the leader of a flock of scholars under Hartgar at Liège.

Sedulius had reason to sympathize with Tityrus’s battle against the dogs. Relatively liberal and tolerant medieval intellectual life didn’t repress and censor vigorous and wide-ranging criticism. Sedulius probably was subject to criticism like that which Theodulf in Charlemagne’s eighth-century court directed at the Irish scholar Cadac-Andreas:

And may that wild enemy burn with zeal to criticize,
he whose power now is distant from what he would want near.
He has learned much, but nothing solid, nothing that is certain;
he who is ignorant, yet thinks that he knows all.
He didn’t learn so that he might be able to have wisdom,
but so that he would have weapons ready for contention.
You know much and discern nothing, you many-learned ignorant one!
What more hence should I say? You know, yet you don’t know.

{ Et reprehendendi studio ferus aestuet hostis,
Cui sit posse procul iam quia velle prope est.
Plurima qui didicit, nil fixum, nil quoque certum,
Quae tamen ignorat, omnia nosse putat.
Non ideo didicit, sapiens ut possit haberi,
Sed contendendi ut promptus ad arma foret.
Multa scis et nulla sapis: plura inscie nosti,
Quid dicam inde magis? Non sapis atque sapis. } [8]

Scholars readily regard their biting critics as dogs. What scholar hasn’t at some time or other felt himself to be surrounded by vicious dogs?[9]

Tityrus’s epic speech soothed most of the dogs. But Cerberus, “the dog of Hell {canis inferni},” had a triple tongue like Satan in Prudentius’s The Origin of Sin {Hamartigenia}. Cerberus told his fellow dogs not to allow this wether to deceive them like a bear dressed in a fox’s skin. He called Tityrus a liar and proclaimed, “Like a fox he’s playing his resonant, treacherous words {Ceu vulpes ludit subdola verba sonans}.” Tityrus then shook his horns and smashed Cerberus’s forehead with his own. Tityrus would have been victorious in this scholarly battle, but he fled before striking with the killing article. Cerberus then rushed in pursuit. When Tityrus got caught in a thicket, Cerberus tore into him repeatedly with blood-stained jaws. The bellwether Tityrus fell dead, “a pitiful sight {miserabile visu},” “bedewing the thorns with his purple blood {irrorans vepres sanguine purpureo}.”

Creation mourned the death of the castrated ram Tityrus. Sedulius presented him as an ordinary, innocent pastoral animal:

What did he merit, being just, simple, without deceit or malice?
Gifts of wine or fermented liquid he didn’t drink,
Drunkenness did not deflect this one from the path of righteousness,
nor did banquets of kings, nor did feasts of nobles.
His usual food was grass in the fields,
and the clear water of the Meuse gave him sweet drink.
He did not greedily desire vestments of crimson and ruby,
but was content with his hide tunic.
He didn’t proudly circle on horseback through green gardens,
but rightly migrated a path on his very own feet.
He was no liar, nor did he speak empty words:
“baa” or “bee” — mystical words he offered.

{ Iustus qui meruit, simplex, sine fraude maligna?
Munera nec Bachi non siceramque bibit;
non hunc ebrietas deflexit tramite recti,
non epulae regum nec procerumque dapes.
Illi pastus erat sollemnicus herba per agros
ac dulcem potum limphida Mosa dabat.
Non ostri vestes rubei cupiebat avarus,
sed contentus erat pellicia tunica;
nonque superbus equo lustrabat amoena virecta,
sed propriis pedibus rite migrabat iter.
Non mendosus erat nec inania verba locutus:
baa seu bee mystica verba dabat. } [10]

Lacking a functioning pipe, Tityrus never played a song. Yet the killing of Tityrus engendered a mythic scene of cosmic sadness as if that lack didn’t matter:

Nymphs wept, all of the woods resounded,
the flock of bleating sheep groaned at the crime.
You, bright two-horned moon, for that snow-white wether
you have shined; rightly you grieve as does Aries in the sky.

{ Fleverunt Nymphae, sonuerunt omnia silvae
balantumque greges ingemuere nefas.
Multonem niveum tu, candida Luna bicornis,
luxisti merito fles Ariesque poli. }

Tityrus was a pagan goatherd-poet and a castrated ram. Sedulius, however, analogized him to Christ and Isaac:

Just as the lamb enthroned on high, the son of God himself,
tasted bitter death for sinners,
so you, taking the path of death, lacerated by wicked dogs,
you perish, pious wether, for that bad thief.
Just as the holy ram became a sacrifice for Isaac,
so you continue to be a pleasing victim for the wretched.

{ Agnus ut altithronus pro peccatoribus acrem
gustavit mortem filius ipse dei,
carpens mortis iter canibus laceratus iniquis
pro latrone malo sic, pie multo, peris.
Quomodo pro Isaac aries sacer hostia factus,
sic tu pro misero victima grata manes. } [11]

Christ was a fully masculine man. Isaac procreated two children. Both Christ and Isaac differed significantly from the bellwether Tityrus.

The hungry, impoverished scholar Sedulius understood Tityrus, “a pleasing victim for the wretched,” in part as tasty meals stolen by dogs. Sedulius offered a concluding epitaph for Tityrus:

To you, good wether, farewell; renowned leader of the snow-white flock,
alas, that my garden will no longer have you alive.
Perhaps, beloved one, a hot bath might have been made for you
for no other purpose than the right of hospitality.
With devout heart I myself would have ministered pure water
to your horned head and to your heels.
You, I must confess, I have desired; now I desire your widow, and your mother,
and your brothers I will always love. Farewell.

{ Tu, bone multo, vale, nivei gregis inclite ductor!
Heu, quia nec vivum te meus hortus habet;
forsan, amice, tibi fieret calidumque lavacrum,
non alia causa iure sed hospitii.
Ipse ministrassem devoto pectore limphas
cornigero capiti calcibus atque tuis.
Te, fateor, cupii, viduam matremque cupisco,
fratres atque tuos semper amabo. Vale! }

With an ironic reference to Tityrus being alive in his garden, Sedulius imagines himself slaughtering Tityrus for the hospitality of sharing a meal. In “Our glory returns {Gloria nostra redit},” Sedulius appealed to his patron Bishop Hartgar for sheep to provide him with parchment for writing.[12] Here, Sedulius seems to be savoring memories of ram soup. As the fate of the bellwether Tityrus shows, castrating males doesn’t serve them well.

When the relatively enlightened European medieval era was ending, a medieval philosopher lamented the further development of castration culture. He observed:

That good man {Pope Paul IV}, who in my youth castrated so many beautiful and antique statues in his great city {Rome} so as not to corrupt our gaze, was following the advice of that other ancient good man {Ennius} who wrote, “The origin of disgraceful acts is baring the body in the city-space.” He should have recognized, as did the mysteries of the Good Goddess in which all appearances of the masculine were banned, that nothing is achieved unless one would also castrate horses and asses and finally all of nature.

{ Ce bon homme, qui en ma jeunesse, chastra tant de belles et antiques statues en sa grande ville pour ne corrompre la veue, suyvant l’advis de cet autre antien bon homme; “Flagitii principium est nudare inter cives corpora”; se devoit adviser, comme aux misteres de la Bonne Deesse toute apparence masculine en estoit forclose, que ce n’estoit rien avancer, s’il ne faisoit encore chastrer et chevaux et asnes, et nature en fin. } [13]

Western crusaders who sacked Constantinople in 1204 melted down Octavian’s triumphant statues of a naked ass-driver and ass. Castration culture promotes a generation of vipers. It ultimately leads to the destruction of human society and all of nature as well.

Let us sing, “Come, my beloved, let us go out into the fields.” Translated from urban gynocentrism to the innocence of the countryside, men-abasing gynocentric conventions of love elegy led the goatherd Tityros to lament to his beloved Amaryllis:

My head aches, but you don’t care. I will sing no longer,
but fall dead and lying here the wolves will devour me.
May that be as sweet as honey in your throat.

{ Ἀλγέω τὰν κεφαλάν, τὶν δ’ οὐ μέλει. οὐκέτ’ ἀείδω,
κεισεῦμαι δὲ πεσών, καὶ τοὶ λύκοι ὧδέ μ’ ἔδονται.
ὡς μέλι τοι γλυκὺ τοῦτο κατὰ βρόχθοιο γένοιτο. } [14]

Men must cease to lament passively and pathetically their own destruction. Men must actively join together with women of goodwill and rewrite the Aeneid. They must establish imaginatively a new, humane republic.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• moral reflection in Parthenius’s poets summons to self-judgment
• Archpoet suffered like Jonah & offered to castrate himself for wine
• Earinus, Emperor Domitian, and laws against castration

Notes:

[1] Theocritus, Idyll 3.18-20, Greek text and English translation (modified insubstantially) from Hopkinson (2015). In this idyll, the goatherd Tityros sings outside the cave of his beloved Amaryllis.

Tityrus is a shepherd in Virgil, Eclogues 1. Most scholars think that Theocritus heavily influenced Virgil’s eclogues and that Virgil sought to redirect thematically pastoral poetry. Tityrus became associated with Virgil himself as an author. On the relation between Theocritus and Virgil, Van Sickle (2004). With inspiring dedication to philology, Van Sickle declared:

avena proves to be an example and an instrument. It reveals a poet {Virgil} determined — daring to commit catachresis and risk the charge of cacozelia — and destined to impose his metaphoric mark.

Id. pp. 352-3.

In the archaic Mediterranean world, Tityros / Tityrus apparently was a ithyphallic goat-demon who carried a cornucopia associated with fertility. The name Tityrus is rooted in references to intact genitals:

the Greek word τíτος and the Latin titus means bird used as a synonym both for the γυναικεῖον and the ἀνδρεῖον αἰδοῖον. … The use of the word tityros to signify a reed and a monkey has the same metaphorical meaning as when it is used to signify a bird. The flute called tityrinos, which was made of reeds, was an instrument of revelry.

Baur (1905) p. 165, with n. 4 indicating “reed” > “penis.” The Musimon Tityrus in Ziolkowski (1983a), p. 11, is thus best interpreted as castrated. For other ancient artistic representations likely to be more central to the ancient and medieval understanding of Tityrus, Hoffman (1964).

[2] Sedulius Scottus, About a certain wether torn apart by a dog {De quodam verbece a cane discerpto} vv. 1-4, 9-10, Latin text from Düchting (1970) via Ziolkowski (1983a) pp. 12-18, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and Godman (1985) pp. 293-301. A Latin text is also freely available in Traube (1896). Ziolkowki notes that the edition of Düchting (1970) supercedes that of Traube. All subsequent quotes from De quodam verbece are similarly sourced.

Sedulius wrote De quodam verbece in Liège between 848, when Sedulius arrived there from Ireland, and 855. Ziolkowski (1983a) p. 1. The narrator of Sedulius’s poem refers to the ram as Tityron (v. 42). I use the Latin form Tityrus, rather than the Greek form Tityros, to connect more clearly to Virgil’s Eclogues.

Sedulius is an imporant forerunner to the eminent twelfth-century poets Hugh Primas (Hugh of Orleans) and the Archpoet. All three wrote begging poems and drinking songs, used nature and animals similarly, and had other sylistic similarities. Jarcho (1928). Sedulius was “the best Carolingian goliardic poet {goliardus Karolinus par excellence}.” Id. p. 578. Sedulius, like Hugh Primas and the Archpoet, sympathetically understood and poetically represented oppressive aspects of medieval men’s lives. Writng in the difficult, early years of the Russian Revolution, Jarcho missed this important point.

Subsequent quotes above from De quodam verbece are (cited by verse number): 13-18 (Thus, I confess, my affection…), 47 (pious wether), 52 (great-hearted hero), 62 (who reckoned that…), 64 (the distinguished one…), 65-74 (What madness is arising…), 84 (Like a fox…), 99 (pitiful sight), 100 (bedewing the thorns…), 105-16 (What did he merit…), 101-4 (Nymphs wept…), 117-22 (Just as the lamb…), 133-40 (To you, good wether…). In v. 99, Traube’s inferior text has “wondrous sight {mirabile visu}.”

[3] See, e.g. Proverbs 8:13, 11:2, 16:18; Luke 18:9-14; James 4:6; Romans 12:16. About 1238, the learned Italian notary-author Albertanus Brixiensis (Albertanus of Brescia) wrote:

Pride is the love of one’s own excellence, and pride makes to the contrary the beginning of sin.

{ Est autem superbia amor proprie excellentie, et fuit initium peccati superbia. }

Albertanus Brixiensis, On love and delight in God and in neighbor and other matters concerning the rule of life {De amore et dilectione Dei et proximi et aliarum rerum et de forma vitae} 4.4 (On pride {De superbia}), Latin text from Bibliotheca Augustana, my English translation.

[4] This apparently archaic Greek myth is preserved in Pherekydes, fragment 33 (scholia to the Odyssey). With some variants, it’s also preserved in two later authors, Eustathius and Apollodorus, Library {Bibliotheca} 1.9.11-12 (1.98-102). For a synoptic review of the surviving evidence, Fowler (2000) pp. 164-9. Displaying modern classical scholarship’s contempt for men’s gendered concerns, Fowler declared of this story about Phylakos and Iphiklos:

There is a fear of castration and anxiety about sexuality. … The myth thus addresses deep-rooted male guilt, fear, and anxiety about sexual inadequacy and rivalry with one’s father.

Id. p. 168. These inane abstractions function to obfuscate the reality of castration culture and oppressive institutional expressions of gynocentrism.

[5] Ratkowitsch (1989) argues that Sedulius alludes to himself with Tityrus. Like many scholars, Sedulius apparently felt that liars and slanderers were making false accusations against him. This biographical strand provides an additional interpretive line through De quodam verbece.

[6] “Pious” is a standard Virgilian epithet for Aeneas. Godman (1985) p. 296, n. for v. 47. Sedulius applies that adjective five times to Tityrus. In v. 68, Tityrus declares, “I am a pious wether {sum multo pius}.” Cf. Aeneas in Aeneid 1.378. “I am pious Aeneas {sum pius Aeneas}.” More generally, Tityrus speaks with the diction of an epic hero. Sedulius’s description of Tityrus’s death echoes Aeneid 8.645:  “the thornbush dripped with the dew of blood {sparsi rorabant sanguine vepres}.” Sedulius’s poem shows considerable classical learning with “a bedrock of classical expressions absorbed from Ovid, Persius, and Vergil.” Ziolkowski (1983a) pp. 4, 20-3.

[7] In the Iliad, Achilles is figured as a lion as he prepares to fight Aeneas. Iliad 20.164-73. Just as Achilles is about to kill Aeneas, Poseidon intervenes to save him. Paris killes Achilles near the end of the Trojan War, while Aeneas survives and goes on to found Rome.

In the Aeneid, Turnus is figured as a lion. Aeneid 9.792-6, 10.454-6, 12.4-9. Aeneas kills Turnus near the end of the Aeneid.

In the enormously influential Iliad and Aeneid, central warrior-men figured as lions thus die in combat. So too did Tityrus in De quodam verbece a cane discerpto.

[8] Theodulf of Orléans, “The entire world resounds in your praise, my king {Te totus laudesque tuas, rex, personat orbis}” (Carmena 25) vv. 227-34, Latin text from Godman (1985) p. 160, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. Here’s a freely available Latin text of Theodulf’s poem on Charlemagne’s court. Bischoff (1955) identified the Irishman as Cadac-Andreas. As Godman noted, the second distiche of v. 234 quotes Martial, Epigrams 8.20.2.

Earlier in this verse-epistle, Theodulf used an animal metaphor to threaten an Irishman:

I shall send these kisses to him as long as I live;
these the fierce wolf gives you, ass with long ears.
Sooner will the dog feed the hare or the cruel wolf feed the lambs,
or the cat turn and flee from the timid mouse,
than a Goth will join with an Irishman in a friendly treaty of peace.

{ Cui dum vita comes fuerit, haec oscula tradam,
Trux, aurite, tibi quae dat, aselle, lupus.
Ante canes lepores alet aut lupus improbus agnos,
Aut timido muri musio terga dabit,
Quam Geta cum Scotto pia pacis foedera iungat }

Carmena 25.161-5, Latin text and English translation from Godman (1985) pp. 158-9. The “Goth {Geta}” is an etymological allusion to Theodulf’s own name. Id. p. 158 n. 162ff. The Irishman is probably the same Irishman who is subsequently attacked (Cadac-Andreas), but not necessarily so. Sedulius himself wrote poems using wolves, foxes, and asps attacking sheep as metaphors for the attacks of liars and false witnesses. Ziolkowski (1983a) pp. 5-6. Facebook bans symbolic expressions that dehumanize persons. Such poetry might thus be banned on Facebook.

Theodulf’s attack on Cadac-Andreas is far more extensive than merely the quote above, which provides only the concluding verses. Prior to that quote, Theodulf taunted Cadac-Andreas:

While this is happening, while my poem is being read,
let the miserable Irishman stand there, a lawless and raging thing,
a dire thing, a hideous enemy, a horror of dullness, a terrible plague,
a bane of quarrelsomeness, a wild thing, a great abomination,
a wild thing, a foul thing, a lazy thing, a wicked thing,
a thing hateful to the pious, a thing opposed to the good,
with curved hands, its neck bent back a little,
may it fold its crooked arms across its stupid chest.
Doubting, astonished, trembling, raging, panting,
let it stand there, unstable of hearing, hand, eyes, mind and step.
With swift movement let it repress now one, now another feeling,
at one moment bellowing forth mere groans, at another fierce words.
May it turn now to the reader, now to all the chief men
who are there, it doing nothing rationally.

{ Haec ita dum fiunt, dum carmina nostra leguntur,
Stet Scottellus ibi, res sine lege furens,
Res dira, hostis atrox, hebes horror, pestis acerba,
Litigiosa lues, res fera, grande nefas,
Res fera, res turpis, res segnis, resque nefanda,
Res infesta piis, res inimica bonis.
Et manibus curvis, paulum cervice reflexa,
Non recta ad stolidum brachia pectus eant.
Anceps, attonitus, tremulus, furibundus, anhelus
Stet levis aure, manu, lumine, mente, pede.
Et celeri motu nunc hos, nunc comprimat illos,
Nunc gemitus tantum, nunc fera verba sonet.
Nunc ad lectorem, nunc se convertat ad omnes
Adstantes proceres nil ratione gerens }

Carmina 25.213-26, Latin text and English translation from Godman (1985) pp. 160-1. Godman interprets this passage as “describing a reaction which it was designed to provoke”; it’s an example of Theodulf deploying “a deadly weapon for literary feuds with his enemies.” Id. pp. 12-3. Dieter Schaller has called these verses “hateful invective.” As quoted in Knight (2012) p. 33. Such a labeling would also cause this poetry to be banned on Facebook.

In an extensive, erudite analysis of Theodulf’s verse-epistle, Knight associated it with Virgilian pastoral. She perceptively commented:

Theodulf’s injection of vigorous invective can be seen as restoring a vital element of masculine aggression to an otherwise somewhat emasculated pastoral refraction.

Knight (2012) p. 40. On Theodulf’s attack on Cadac-Andreas, id. pp. 26-9, 32-40. Both the animal metaphors and the issue of emasculation in pastoral connect Theodulf’s verse-epistle on Charlemagne’s court to Sedulius Scottus’s epyllion on the castrated ram Tityrus.

Some scholars today take a more economic approach to literary debates. For example in “Thomas on Van Sickle on Meban on Thomas and Kuipers on Hubbard,” Thomas declared:

I strongly urge all BMCR readers to buy my book immediately (it can be ordered at: {commercial link omitted}), read my chapter, and then go on line and decide whether I should have referred to Van Sickle’s 1976 APA abstract.

That’s a much less poetic approach, but more acceptable to businesses such as Facebook and Amazon.

[9] Cf. Psalm 22:16. In Christian understanding, this verse also applies typologically to Jesus. Ziolkowski (1983a) p. 5.

[10] In medieval Latin, a stupid person might be described as knowing “neither bu nor ba {nec bu nec ba}.” That expression goes back to teaching of the alphabet in schools of the Roman Empire. Petronius’s Satyricon may allude to it. Ziolkowski (1983b). Tityrus knows bu (bee) and ba (baa), and hence isn’t a stupid castrated ram.

[11] This passage associates Tityrus with Jesus, the lamb of God, crucified for sinners. John 1:29, 36. Christians understand Abraham’s offering of Isaac as a sacrifice to prefigure God offering Jesus as a sacrifice. Sedulius also associates Tityrus with John the Baptist. Cf. De quodam verbece vv. 106-7, Luke 7:33 (not drinking wine).

Tityrus being a sacrifice for the bad thief reverses the salvation balance of the good thief and the bad thief in Luke 23:39-43. The bad thief blasphemes Jesus on the cross. God may have condemned the bad thief to Hell. The good thief acknowledges Jesus, and Jesus welcomes him into Heaven.

Scholars have understood De quodam verbece to balance classical allusions, particularly to Aeneas, with Christians allusions to Isaac, Christ, and Christian martyrs. Advocating for a “both and” approach, Kratz stated:

The artistry of Sedulius’ poem turns on the balancing and not the separation of two discordant traditions.

Kratz (1976) p. 322. Similarly, Ziolkowski (1983a) p. 6. The medieval epic Waltharius performs a similar balancing of traditions.

[12] Ziolkowski (1983a) p. 2. Hartgar was Bishop of Liège.

[13] Michel de Montaigne, Essays {Essais} III.5, “On some lines of Virgil {Sur des vers de Virgile},” French text from the Villey & Saulnier (1965) version of the 1595 edition of Essais, my English translation, benefiting from that of Screech (1991) p. 970. Here’s the freely accessible English translation of Charles Cotton (1910).

Paul IV was pope from 1555 to 1559. Ennius was an early Roman poet who died about 169 BGC. Montaigne quotes Ennius as preserved in Cicero, Tusculan Disputations {Tusculanae Disputationes} 4.33.70.

Montaigne further commented:

Now my law-giver {Pope Paul IV} should have also considered, that perhaps a more chaste and fruitful practice is to let women know life as it is early rather than to allow them the liberty to conjecture according to the freedom and heat of their fantasy. In place of the true organs, they substitute, by desire and hope, others that are three times more extravagant.

{ Or se devoit aviser aussi mon legislateur, qu’à l’avanture est-ce un plus chaste et fructueux usage de leur faire de bonne heure connoistre le vif que de le leur laisser deviner selon la liberté et chaleur de leur fantasie. Au lieu des parties vrayes, elles en substituent, par desir et par esperance, d’autres extravagantes au triple. }

Essais III.5, sourced as for previous quote.

[14] Theocritus, Idyll 3.52-4, Greek text and English translation (modified insubstantially) from Hopkinson (2015). These are the final verses of this idyll.

[images] (1) Tityros statuette. Greek, middle to late fifth century BGC. Preserved as accession # 01.7777 in the Museum of Fine Arts Boston. Image thanks to the Museum of Fine Arts. (2) Johannes Flote and Anton Reite castrating a lamb in Norway about 1910. Photo (with my cropping) by Anders Folkestadås. Thanks to flickr and to the County Archives in Vestland (Fylkesarkivet i Vestland), Norway. (3) Castrating boy. Medical illustration by Charaf-ed-Din. Made about 1466. Preserved in Bibliothèque Nationale (Paris, France). Thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Baur, Paul. 1905. “Tityros.” American Journal of Archaeology. 9 (2): 157-165.

Bischoff, Bernhard. 1955. “Theodulf und der Ire Cadac-Andreas.” Historisches Jahrbuch 74: 91–98

Düchting, Reinhard. 1970. “Vom Hammel, den ein Hund gerissen.” Pp. 114-27 in Schwab, Ute, and Fritz Harkort, eds. Das Tier in der Dichtung. Heidelberg: C. Winter.

Fowler, Robert L. 2000. Early Greek mythography. Vol. 2, Commentary. New York: Oxford University Press.

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

Hoffmann, Herbert. 1964. “Some unpublished Boeotian Satyr terracottas.” Antike Kunst. 7 (2): 67-71.

Hopkinson, Neil, ed. and trans. 2015. Theocritus. Moschus. Bion. Loeb Classical Library 28. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Jarcho, Boris I. 1928. “Die Vorläufer des Golias.” Speculum. 3 (4): 523-579.

Knight, Gillian R. 2012. “Talking letter, Singing Pipe: Modalities of Performance at the Carolingian Court.” Archives d’Histoire Doctrinale et Littéraire du Moyen Âge. 79 (1): 7-47.

Kratz, Dennis M. 1976. “Aeneas or Christ? An Epic Parody by Sedulius Scottus.” The Classical World. 69 (5): 319-323.

Ratkowitsch, Christine. 1989. “Der Hammel Tityrus — Versuch einer Deutung von c. 2, 41 des Sedulius Scottus.” Wiener Studien. 102: 251-266.

Traube, Ludwig, 1896. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini. Vol. 3. Berolini: Weidmannos.

Van Sickle, John B. 2004. “Virgil Bucolics 1.1-2 and Interpretive Tradition: A Latin (Roman) Program for a Greek Genre.” Classical Philology. 99 (4): 336-353.

Ziolkowski, Jan. 1983a. “Sedulius Scottus’s De Quodam Verbece a Cane Discerpto.” Mediaevalia. 9: 1-24.

Ziolkowski, Jan. 1983b. “NE BU NE BA.” Neuphilologische Mitteilungen. 84 (3): 287-290.

Both Homer’s Iliad and Hesiod’s Works and Days employ metaphorically a strong, violent male hawk attacking a weak, helpless, female dove or nightingale. Constructed threats to females commonly function within false gender violence stereotyping to mobilize urgent concern for females. The predominate gender structure of violence in life and literature, however, is violence against men. Both Homer and Hesiod redirected gendered bird metaphors to depict violence against men.

Toward the end of Homer’s Iliad, the great Trojan warrior Hector held his ground in front of the gates of Troy, expecting the enraged, fearsome Achaean warrior Achilles to charge towards him. Then it happened:

Hector looked up, saw him, started to tremble,
nerve gone, he could hold his ground no longer,
he left the gates behind and away he fled in fear —
and Achilles went for him, fast, sure of his speed
as the wild mountain hawk, the quickest thing on wings,
launching smoothly, swooping down on a cringing dove,
and then she flits out from under, the hawk screaming
over the quarry, plunging over and over, his fury
driving him down at her to tear his kill

{ Ἕκτορα δ᾿, ὡς ἐνόησεν, ἕλε τρόμος· οὐδ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἔτ᾿ ἔτλη
αὖθι μένειν, ὀπίσω δὲ πύλας λίπε, βῆ δὲ φοβηθείς·
Πηλεΐδης δ᾿ ἐπόρουσε ποσὶ κραιπνοῖσι πεποιθώς.
ἠύτε κίρκος ὄρεσφιν, ἐλαφρότατος πετεηνῶν,
ῥηιδίως οἴμησε μετὰ τρήρωνα πέλειαν,
ἡ δέ θ᾿ ὕπαιθα φοβεῖται, ὁ δ᾿ ἐγγύθεν ὀξὺ λεληκὼς
ταρφέ᾿ ἐπαΐσσει, ἑλέειν τέ ἑ θυμὸς ἀνώγει } [1]

Hector like a dove raced around the walls of Troy three times with the hawk Achilles in furious pursuit. Then Hector, deceived by the goddess Athena, ceased his dovish flight. He turned and stood to fight Achilles. Hector taking this socially constructed masculine position set up violence against men.[2] That’s normative violence in human societies.

Normative violence against men devalues men as a gender. After Hector failed to hurt Achilles with a spear throw, Hector realized that the goddess had deceived him. He understood that his death was near:

“So now I meet my doom. Well let me die —
but not without struggle, not without glory, no,
in some great clash of arms that even men to come
will hear of down the years!” And on that resolve
he drew the whetted sword that hung at his side,
tempered, massive, and gathering all his force
he swooped like a soaring eagle
launching down from the dark clouds to earth
to snatch some helpless lamb or trembling hare.

{ “μὴ μὰν ἀσπουδί γε καὶ ἀκλειῶς ἀπολοίμην,
ἀλλὰ μέγα ῥέξας τι καὶ ἐσσομένοισι πυθέσθαι.”
Ὣς ἄρα φωνήσας εἰρύσσατο φάσγανον ὀξύ,
τό οἱ ὑπὸ λαπάρην τέτατο μέγα τε στιβαρόν τε,
οἴμησεν δὲ ἀλεὶς ὥς τ᾿ αἰετὸς ὑψιπετήεις,
ὅς τ᾿ εἶσιν πεδίονδε διὰ νεφέων ἐρεβεννῶν
ἁρπάξων ἢ ἄρν᾿ ἀμαλὴν ἢ πτῶκα λαγωόν } [3]

The male eagle or hawk drives himself to his own death. He cannot conceive of men’s inglorious position as a gender. So it was with Hector. Achilles, at advantage with the long reach of his spear, drove its point through Hector’s throat and killed him. The death-blow to the throat is telling. Gynocentric stereotype-disseminators at the commanding heights of the classics discipline speak preposterous lies about the silencing of women. No social silence is more oppressive than the silence about violence against men.

Hesiod’s Works and Days employs a gendered bird metaphor with literary sophisticating far beyond the socially favored stereotype of the strong, brutish male attacking the weak, appealing female. Hesiod’s gendered bird metaphor is a “fable {αἶνος}” for “kings {βᾰσῐλεῖς}”:

This is how the hawk addressed the colorful-necked nightingale,
carrying her high up among the clouds, grasping her with his claws,
while she wept piteously, pierced by his curved claws. He forcefully said:
“Silly bird, why are you crying out? One far superior to you is holding you.
You are going wherever I shall carry you, even if you are a singer.
I shall make you my dinner if I wish, or I shall let you go.
Stupid is he who would wish to contend against those stronger:
he will be deprived of victory and suffer pains in addition to shame.”

{ ὧδ᾽ ἴρηξ προσέειπεν ἀηδόνα ποικιλόδειρον,
ὕψι μάλ᾽ ἐν νεφέεσσι φέρων, ὀνύχεσσι μεμαρπώς·
ἡ δ᾽ ἐλεόν, γναμπτοῖσι πεπαρμένη ἀμφ᾽ ὀνύχεσσιν,
μύρετο· τὴν ὅ γ᾽ ἐπικρατέως πρὸς μῦθον ἔειπεν·
“δαιμονίη, τί λέληκας; ἔχει νύ σε πολλὸν ἀρείων·
τῇ δ᾽ εἶς ᾗ σ᾽ ἂν ἐγώ περ ἄγω καὶ ἀοιδὸν ἐοῦσαν·
δεῖπνον δ᾽ αἴ κ᾽ ἐθέλω ποιήσομαι ἠὲ μεθήσω.
ἄφρων δ᾽ ὅς κ᾽ ἐθέλῃ πρὸς κρείσσονας ἀντιφερίζειν·
νίκης τε στέρεται πρός τ᾽ αἴσχεσιν ἄλγεα πάσχει.” } [4]

Among nightingales, the male, not the female, sings the nightingale’s well-known songs. The short epimythium for this gendered bird metaphor in fact places a male (“Stupid is he…”) in the position of the nightingale. Roman women could be more brutally violent than Roman men. According to eminent ancient Greek playwrights, Greek women behaved similarly. Sophisticated ancient Greek readers would have understood the bird gendering in the hawk fable to be merely a superficial, gynocentric stereotype.

Hesiod’s message to his readers contradicts the fable’s epimythium that the hawk declares. Hesiod as narrator describes the “might makes right” ethos as leading to societal disaster: “there will be no safeguard against evil {κακοῦ δ᾽ οὐκ ἔσσεται ἀλκή}.” Hesiod urges, “give heed to justice {σὺ δ᾽ ἄκουε Δίκης}.” When a society respects justice, that society will be spared war — institutionally structured violence against men. Moreover, in that society wives will have children that resemble their husbands: men will not be victims of reproductive fraud.[5] In stark contrast to the society of “might makes right,” the justice-respecting society will be fruitful and flourish.

The poet Hesiod associates himself with the nightingale-singer that the hawk attacks. Men vastly predominate among the victims of violence. That’s especially true in the epic violence of Homer’s Iliad. Hesiod poetically seeks to extract men from epic violence against men:

By virtue of the properties, actions, and manner of speech assigned to it, the aggressor embodies not just the value system that Hesiod will subsequently reject but also a genre of poetry (and the ethics that genre foregrounds) that prove antithetical to the larger composition in which the bird appears. … Viewed this way, the ainos {fable} forms part of an ongoing polemic within the Works and Days that compares, contrasts, and devalues martial epic and sets it against Hesiod’s current enterprise with its focus on agricultural labor, domestic arrangements, and the earth. … a hostile encounter between two birds not only configures a contrast between two ethical systems but also between the two styles and genres of poetry that articulate those values. [6]

For Hesiod, employing the hawk-nightingale anti-men gender stereotype was merely a superficial rhetorical means to engage in broad criticism of violence against men and the discursive fields that support violence against men.

Men deserve justice. Authors with enormous symbolic power now use men’s rights — men’s equal rights as fully human beings — as an operative label in what might fairly be called vicious, mindless libel.[7] Homer and Hesiod saw through the anti-men gender stereotyping of hawk-dove metaphors. You should, too.

O Perses, ponder this matter in your heart,
give heed to justice, and evict violence from your mind.
For among humans Cronus’s son Zeus set this law:
that fish and beasts and birds of prey
eat one another, since justice is not among them.
But to humans he has given justice, by far the best gift.
For one who recognizes justices and declares it publicly,
that one far-seeing Zeus gives blissful abundance.

{ ὦ Πέρση, σὺ δὲ ταῦτα μετὰ φρεσὶ βάλλεο σῇσιν,
καί νυ Δίκης ἐπάκουε, βίης δ᾽ ἐπιλήθεο πάμπαν.
τόνδε γὰρ ἀνθρώποισι νόμον διέταξε Κρονίων,
ἰχθύσι μὲν καὶ θηρσὶ καὶ οἰωνοῖς πετεηνοῖς
ἔσθειν ἀλλήλους, ἐπεὶ οὐ Δίκη ἐστὶ μετ᾽ αὐτοῖς·
ἀνθρώποισι δ᾽ ἔδωκε Δίκην, ἣ πολλὸν ἀρίστη
γίνεται· εἰ γάρ τίς κ᾽ ἐθέλῃ τὰ δίκαι᾽ ἀγορεῦσαι
γινώσκων, τῷ μέν τ᾽ ὄλβον διδοῖ εὐρύοπα Ζεύς } [8]

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Waltharius to Aymeri: how to end epic violence against men
• Homeric cento subtly reverses gender to refigure men’s sexuality
• Tzetzes mocked man oblivious to need for gender equality in sex & work

Notes:

[1] Homer, Iliad 22.136-42, ancient Greek text from Murray (1925), English translation (modified slightly) from Fagles (1990) p. 546. Nortwick & Steadman (2018) provides helpful notes and a vocabulary list for this passage.

Fagles’s translation obscures the female gender of the dove. Via small changes, consistent, with the Greek, I’ve included pointers to the dove’s female sex. Specifically, “and the dove flits out” I’ve changed to “and then she flits out”; and “driving him down to beak and tear his kill” I’ve changed to “driving him down at her to tear his kill.” My changes are consistent with the English translation of Murray (1925).

Fagles’s translation creates a brutalizing allusion to male sexuality. Beyond the necessary meaning of the Greek, Fagles places the hawk above the dove. In Fagles’s translation, the male hawk is “over the quarry, plunging over and over / his fury driving him down” upon the dove. That makes a brutalizing allusion to male sexuality like that in Ausonius’s Wedding Cento {Cento nuptialis}.

In Iliad 22.347, Achilles internalizes the metaphor of himself as hawk. He snarls to Hector that he desires “to carve and eat your flesh raw {ὤμ᾿ ἀποταμνόμενον κρέα ἔδμεναι}.” I use the term hawk-dove metaphor broadly to encompass the Homeric epic simile of hawk and dove as well as Hesiod’s hawk-nightingale fable.

[2] Van Nortwick commented:

So, while we may condemn him {Hector} for his failure to stand and face certain death, we may also find that running only makes him more accessible to us. We see behind the heroic gestures a fully-formed, complicated human being.

Essay on Iliad 22.131-176 in Van Nortwick & Steadman (2018). Men certainly are fully human, fully-formed, complicated human beings. Men may flee from the socially constructed, oppressive male gender position when doing so is beneficial to them.

Lonsdale commented:

The simile at X 139-42 is part of a sequence of similes with ominous import for Hektor’s eventual death. It compares Achilles in pursuit of Hektor to a hawk swooping down upon a tremulous dove. As in the Hesiodic passage the distinction between predator and prey is emphasized by the use of the contrasting masculine and feminine article.

Lonsdale (1989) p. 408. Lonsdale doesn’t recognize that the deadly omen for Hector is his ceasing to behave like a dove. Hector then becomes a man facing typical violence against men.

[3] Homer, Iliad 22.304-10, ancient Greek text from Murray (1925), English translation from Fagles (1990) p. 551. Here are helpful notes and a vocabulary list for this passage.

Using the language of men-devaluing chivalry, Van Nortwick interprets this passage as “one final nod to the Trojan hero’s gallantry”:

Although — or maybe because — he knows the issue has been decided, Hector makes one last charge, and the poet gives him a valedictory simile: he swoops like an eagle swoops at a tender lamb or a cowering hare. Since we know the imminent result, the simile only adds to the pathos in Hector’s bravado.

Essay on Iliad 22.289-336 in Van Nortwick & Steadman (2018). Rather than the conventional ideology of masculine “bravado,” this eagle simile is better interpreted as a reversal of the earlier hawk-dove simile in the context of violence against men.

[4] Hesiod, Works and Days vv. 201-11, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly) from Most (2018). The subsequent two short quotes are similarly from Works and Days v. 201 (no safeguard against evil) and v. 213 (give heed to justice). “The Hawk and the Nightingale” (Perry 4) fable among Aesop’s fables is similar.

[5] On society spared war, Works and Days, v. 229; on wives having children who look like their husbands, Works and Days, v. 235.

[6] Steiner (2007) pp. 181, 188. Lonsdale stated:

In the Dinner of the Seven Wise Men, Cleodorus the physician says that Aesop can more justly lay claim to being the pupil of Hesiod than the poet Epimenides (one of the candidates for a place on the list of sages) since the fable of the hawk and the nightingale (Op. 202-12) first suggested to Aesop the idea of this form of proverbial wisdom spoken by many tongues. From this passage it can be inferred that since antiquity Hesiod’s hawk and nightingale has been hailed as the oldest surviving beast fable in Greek literature.

Lonsdale (1989) p. 403, footnote omitted. The Homeric hawk-dove simile, which isn’t a fable, must be older than Hesiod’s Works and Days if Hesiod was responding to it. That’s plausible.

Nelson (1997) argues that the nightingale represents the kings, not Hesiod. Her interpretation ignores gender in the fable, as well gender in similar Homeric similes. The nightingale in Hesiod’s fable is quite sympathetically portrayed. The gender reversal in interpreting the nightingale is important in critiquing epic violence against men. These interpretative foci make the nightingale an unlikely representative for the kings in the most plausible over-all interpretation of Hesiod’s moralizing Works and Days.

[7] Nagy, who has written extensively about the hawk-nightingale fable in Hesiod, concludes a review of his views:

What the lamenting poet says about the moral outrage of “might makes right” applies not only to the crooked kings of the distant past. I think it applies just as effectively to the self-styled strongmen who dominate so much of today’s troubled world.

Nagy (2018). Moral outrage has been sadly lacking as academic strong-persons, who dominate so much of today’s intellectual life, suppress knowledge-seeking and truth.

[8] Hesiod, Works and Days vv. 274-81, ancient Greek text from Most (2018), my English translation, benefiting from those of Most (2018) and Johnson (2017).

[image] Osprey preparing to dive for a fish in Florida, USA. Source image thanks to NASA and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Fagles, Robert, trans. and Bernard Knox, intro. and notes. 1990. The Iliad. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking.

Johnson, Kimberly, trans. Hesiod. 2017. Theogony and Works and Days: A New Bilingual Edition. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

Lonsdale, Steven H. 1989. “Hesiod’s Hawk and Nightingale (Op. 202-12): Fable or Omen?” Hermes. 117 (4): 403-412.

Most, Glenn W., ed. and trans. 2018. Hesiod. Theogony. Works and Days. Testimonia. Loeb Classical Library 57. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Murray, A. T., ed. and trans., revised by William F. Wyatt. 1925. Homer. Iliad.  Loeb Classical Library 171. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nagy, Gregory. 2019. “On a fable about the hawk as a strongman.” Classical Inquires (Harvard’s Center for Hellenic Studies). Online, June 21.

Nelson, Stephanie. 1997. “The Justice of Zeus in Hesiod’s Fable of the Hawk and the Nightingale.” The Classical Journal. 92 (3): 235.

Steiner, Deborah. 2007. “Feathers Flying: Avian Poetics in Hesiod, Pindar, and Callimachus.” American Journal of Philology. 128 (2): 177-208.

Van Nortwick, Thomas, and Geoffrey Steadman. 2018. Homer: Iliad 6 and 22. Carlisle, Pennsylvania: Dickinson College Commentaries. ISBN: 978-1-947822-11-5.

To overcome millennia of gynocentric oppression, solidarity among men is essential. When a person is killed, few even notice that he’s a man. Large anti-men bias in criminal justice generates little public concern. Holding behind bars in jails and prisons about fifteen times as many men as women matters less to elites than the gender distribution of winners of the Booker Prize. Men must strongly and loyally support each other in order to promote gender equality and social justice.

Men relating to women easily slide into grotesque self-abasement. Consider the pathetic case of the twelfth-century man trobairitz Bernart de Ventadorn. He suffered from acute one-itis and gyno-idolatry for a beautiful woman lacking compassion for him. Bernart lamented:

She’s mastered cheating, trickery,
so that always I think she loves me.
Ah, sweetly she deceives me,
as her pretty face confounds me!
Lady, you’re gaining absolutely nothing:
in fact, I’m sure it’s toward your loss
that you treat your man so badly.

God, who nurtures all the world,
give her a heart to receive me,
for I don’t want to eat any food
and of nothing good I have plenty.
Toward the beautiful one, I’m humble,
and I render her rightful homage:
if she pleases, she can keep me or sell me.

Evil she is if she doesn’t call me
to come where she undresses alone
so that I can wait at her bidding
beside the bed, along the edge,
where I can pull off her close-fitting shoes
down on my knees, my head bent down:
if only she’ll offer me her foot.

{ Tan sap d’engenh e de ganda
c’ades cuit c’amar me volha.
be doussamen me truanda,
c’ab bel semblan me cofonda!
domna, so no·us es nuls enans,
que be cre qu’es vostres lo dans,
cossi que vostr’om mal prenda.

Deus, que tot lo mon garanda,
li met’ en cor que m’acolha,
c’a me no te pro vianda
ni negus bes no·m aonda.
tan sui vas la bela doptans,
per qu’e·m ren a leis merceyans:
si·lh platz, que·m don o que·m venda!

Mal o fara, si no·m manda
venir lai on se despolha,
qu’eu sia per sa comanda
pres del leih, josta l’esponda,
e·lh traya·ls sotlars be chaussans,
a genolhs et umilians,
si·lh platz que sos pes me tenda. } [1]

Despite treating Bernart badly, this woman owns him. Like the pathetic General Belisarius, Bernart wants to kiss her feet. Men deserve gender equality. Social justice won’t be achieved as long as men merely kiss women’s feet.

Writing in the first century BGC, Parthenius of Nicaea recorded a marvelous story of solidarity among men. In 277 BGC, Gauls from present-day southern France raided the ancient Greek city of Miletus, which is in the middle of the Aegean coast of present-day Turkey.[2] The raid occurred during the gynocentric, gender-exclusive women’s festival Thesmophoria. In the ancient world, when an enemy sacked a city, all the city’s men usually were killed. The Gauls’ raid on the gender-exclusive festival produced one happy outcome: no men were killed.[3] Because women are regarded under gynocentrism as having higher social value than men, the Gauls didn’t kill the women, but took them as captives.

Being a captive woman was much better than being a dead man. The Milesians paid the Gaulic raiders large ransoms of gold and silver to get back some of the Milesian women. As for the other Milesian women, some probably had dominated, abused, and tormented their husbands, who thus were pleased to be freed from them. Those women became instead the wives of Gaulic men. Those Gaulic men endured a Pyrrhic victory. As has commonly been the case, women suffered less than men did.

The Milesian woman Herippe disappeared before her husband Xanthus, a highly respected and well-born citizen of Miletus, was able to ransom her. Xanthus and Herippe together had a two-year-old child. Xanthus retained custody of their child. At the same time, Xanthus missed Herippe greatly. Converting just part of his possessions into the enormous sum of two thousand gold coins, he traveled all the way to southern France to ransom from the Gauls his beloved wife Herippe.

In the land of the Gauls, Xanthus found that Herippe had become the wife of one of the Gauls’ most distinguished leaders. Showing a generous heart, this Gaul received Xanthus readily and hospitably:

when Xanthus went in, he saw his wife, who threw her arms around him and drew him toward her with great affection.

{ εἰσελθὼν ὁρᾷ τὴν γυναῖκα, καὶ αὐτὸν ἐκείνη τὼ χεῖρε ἀμφιβαλοῦσα μάλα φιλοφρόνως προσηγάγετο. } [4]

The Gaul put on a banquet for Xanthus and seated Herippe next to Xanthus. As drinks were being circulated, the Gaul asked Xanthus how much money he had for Herippe’s ransom. Xanthus said that he had a thousand gold coins. The Gaul declared that Xanthus should keep three parts for himself, his wife, and his child, and give the fourth part as ransom.

Late that night, after the others had gone to bed, Herippe sharply criticized Xanthus for being willing to pay such a large ransom. Husbands must be able to endure their wives’ sharp criticism. In this case, Xanthus explained that he had another thousand gold coins hidden in the soles of his servant’s boots. Xanthus explained that he had been willing to pay a much larger ransom. In short, Xanthus made clear to Herippe how much he valued having her as his wife.

Herippe didn’t reciprocate her husband’s great love for her. Even worse, she viciously betrayed him:

The following day the woman told the Celtic how much gold her husband had. She tried to persuade the Gaul to kill Xanthus. She much preferred him, she said, to her native country and her child. As for Xanthus, she utterly detested him.

{ ἡ γυνὴ τῇ ὑστεραίᾳ τῷ Κελτῷ καταμηνύει τὸ πλῆθος τοῦ χρυσοῦ καὶ παρεκελεύετο κτεῖναι τὸν Ξάνθον, φάσκουσα πολὺ μᾶλλον αἱρεῖσθαι αὐτὸν τῆς τε πατρίδος καὶ τοῦ παιδίου· τὸν μὲν γὰρ Ξάνθον παντάπασιν ἀποστυγεῖν. }

Xanthus had no idea that his wife despised him. If he had even imagined that she as a captive of the Gauls would come to prefer her Gaulish husband to him, Xanthus would never had made the long journey with a huge amount of money to attempt to ransom her.

Herippe’s disloyalty to her native country, her contempt for her former husband, and her disregard for their young child didn’t please the Gaul. What Xanthus failed to perceive, the Gaul understood: Herippe was a wicked woman. In the ancient world, being a wicked woman wasn’t regarded as a praiseworthy display of strength and independence.

The Gaul decided to spring a surprise punishment on Herippe. He escorted Herippe and Xanthus to the border of Celtic country. Then he announced that he wanted to sacrifice an animal to the gods:

The sacrificial animal brought in, the Gaul bade Herippe take hold of it. She did, as she had often done in the past. Then, stretching up his sword, he brought it down and beheaded her. He tried to persuade Xanthus not to take it badly. He told him about her plot and permitted him to take all the gold back with him.

{ καὶ κομισθέντος ἱερείου, τὴν Ἡρίππην ἐκέλευεν ἀντιλαβέσθαι· τῆς δὲ κατασχούσης, ὡς καὶ ἄλλοτε σύνηθες αὐτῇ, ἐπανατεινάμενος τὸ ξίφος καθικνεῖται καὶ τὴν κεφαλὴν αὐτῆς ἀφαιρεῖ, τῷ τε Ξάνθῳ παρεκελεύετο μὴ δυσφορεῖν, ἐξαγγείλας τὴν ἐπιβουλὴν αὐτῆς, ἐπέτρεπέ τε τὸ χρυσίον ἅπαν κομίζειν αὑτῷ. }

Today, the Gaul’s punishment of Herippe might seem barbaric. The Gaul might rightly regard today’s acute anti-men bias in punishment, as well as mass imprisonment of men, to be a travesty of justice.

Traditional folk justice is “tit for tat,” or “what goes around, comes around.” Early in the thirteenth century, a didactic poet recorded in German:

When a man gives malicious advice to another,
it is only right that he receive the same treatment.

{ Von reht iz uf in selben gat,
swer dem andern geit valschen rat. } [5]

The Gaul interpreted a similar ethos to apply equally to men and women. When his wife advised him to kill her former husband, he killed her after she became his former wife. The Gaul deserves credit for acting decisively in support of gender equality and solidarity among men, irrespective of race, Gaul or Greek. Upholding solidarity among men and promoting gender equality should progress to more humane practices. Yet some morally sanctioned action toward worthy ideals is better than no action at all.

The well-born ancient urban Greek and the sophisticated troubadour love poet are cultural heroes of gynocentric society. Too many men today are as obtuse as Xanthus was in relation to his wife. Too many men today seek to be feet-kissing servants to women like Benart de Ventadorn was. We all can learn from the ancient barbarian Gaul.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• rape of men in Parthenius shows compassion and justice is possible
• barbarian lover: Goth as good husband to Euphemia
• Candida and King Vahran, Sa’anin and Caliph al-Mutawakkil

Notes:

[1] Bernart de Ventadorn, “When I see in the scrubland {Lancan vei per mei la landa}” st. 3-5 (vv. 15-35), Old Occitan text from Corpus des Troubadours, English translation (modified slightly) from Wilhelm (1970) pp. 125-6. At the excellent Brindin Press, James H. Donalson (2004) has an Occitan text and English translation of “Lancan vei per mei la landa” freely available online. Here’s a German translation. Other online Occitan texts and English translations are curiously missing the important third stanza.

For all the songs of Bernart, with English translations, Nichols (1962). For some analysis of his style, Clifford (1976).

[2] Lightfoot (1999) p. 413. The Gauls established a permanent settlement in the region of Asia Minor that came to be known as Galatia. Greeks colonized Miletus about three thousand years ago. By the sixth-century BGC, Miletus was one of the wealthiest Greek cities.

[3] Cf. Deuteronomy 20:13, Numbers 31:7-9, 17-8.

[4] Parthenius of Nicaea, Sufferings in Love {Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα} 8.4 (About Herippe {Περὶ Ἡρίππης}), ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly to be more easily readable) from Lightfoot (2009). The subsequent two quotes are similarly from Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα 8.7 (The following day…) and 8.9 (The sacrificial animal brought in…). The Perseus Digital Library has freely available the ancient Greek text of Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα in the Teubner edition of Hercher (1858). Lightfoot’s Greek text is considerably better.

Parthenius’s manchette for this story states:

The story is told by Aristodemus of Nysa in the first book of his Histories, except that he changes the names and calls the woman Euthymia instead of Herippe, and the barbarian Cauaras.

{ Ἱστορεῖ  Ἀριστόδημος ὁ Νυσαεὺς ἐν α΄Ἱστοριῶν περὶ τούτων, πλὴν ὅτι τὰ ὀνόματα ὑπαλλάττει ἀντὶ Ἡρίππης καλῶν Εὐθυμίαν, τὸν δὲ βάρβαρον Καυάραν }

Lightfoot (2009). Lightfoot notes that the Gaul’s name Cauaras suggest a connection to the area around Marseilles in southern France.

Lightfoot observed, “The thrust of this unusual story is to demonstrate male solidarity….” Lightfoot (1999) p. 413. Authorities acting under gynocentrism are interested in suppressing stories of solidarity among men. Lightfoot herself declared, “the theme {of the Herippe story} is misogynistic.” Id. p. 414. Under gynocentrism, labeling works “misogynistic” is a powerful tool of censorship and suppression.

[5] From Freidank’s early thirteenth-century collection of short proverbial sayings written in Middle High German verse and called Discernment {Bescheidenheit}, as transmitted in the Carmina Burana, Add. 17.39-40. Middle High German text and English translation from Traill (2018) v. 2, p. 573.

Person today don’t protest because men are betrayed and unjustly killed. The Gaul took decisive action in solidarity with his fellow man.

[image] Illuminated initial depicting Bernart de Ventadorn. On folio 15v of the Chansonnier provençal (Chansonnier K). Made in the second half of the thirteenth century. Preserved as MS. BnF Français 12473, via Gallica.

References:

Clifford (Boitani), Paula. 1976. ‘“Fine words and joyful melodies”: some stylistic aspects of the love songs of Bernart de Ventadorn.’ Reading Medieval Studies. 2: 14-27

Lightfoot, J. L. 1999. Parthenius of Nicaea: The poetical fragments and the  Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (review by Christopher Francese)

Lightfoot, J. L. 2009. Hellenistic Collection: Philitas, Alexander of Aetolia, Hermesianax, Euphorion, Parthenius. Loeb Classical Library, 508. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (reviews by Giambattista D’Alessio, by Claudio De Stefani, and by Iiro Laukola)

Nichols, Stephen G. 1962. The Songs of Bernart de Ventadorn: complete texts, translations, notes and glossary. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press.

Traill, David A. 2018, ed. and trans. Carmina Burana. Dumbarton Oaks Medieval Library, 48-49. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press.

Wilhelm, James J. 1970. Seven Troubadours: The Creators of Modern Verse. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press.

Scholars have documented that women are biologically superior to men in a variety of ways, including communicatively. However, within the disastrous tradition of epic violence against men, Homer’s Aeneas trivialized women flyting — women fighting with words. Fighting with words is superior to fighting physically, especially in modern bureaucratic societies with extensive institutions of penal punishment. Moreover, Achilles and Aeneas in Homer’s Iliad fight less vigorously and less viciously with words than do Rose and Lily in Sedulius Scottus’s ninth-century debate poem.

The Greek and Trojan armies, masses of armor-clad men and war horses, closed for battle on the plain outside Troy. Out from the lines of the two armies came the preeminent Greek warrior Achilles and the Trojan hero Aeneas. Achilles struck first with words. He taunted Aeneas for daring to have the courage to face him. Achilles reminded Aeneas that the last time they met in combat, Aeneas had fled. Achilles advised Aeneas to flee again: “a fool sees something after it’s done {ῥεχθὲν δέ τε νήπιος ἔγνω}.”[1] Achilles didn’t attack Aeneas with hate speech, as Facebook defines it. Achilles provided Aeneas with specific advice, coupled with valid general wisdom, based on a sound forecast of likely future events.

Aeneas responded defensively to Achilles’s words. He accused Achilles of acting like an unknowing child toward another child:

Son of Peleus, do not expect to frighten me with words
as if I were a child, since I myself know well
both taunts and improper words to say.

{ Πηλεΐδη, μὴ δή μ᾿ ἐπέεσσί γε νηπύτιον ὣς
ἔλπεο δειδίξεσθαι, ἐπεὶ σάφα οἶδα καὶ αὐτὸς
ἠμὲν κερτομίας ἠδ᾿ αἴσυλα μυθήσασθαι. } [2]

Aeneas then engaged in subtle, indirect aggression against Achilles — a verbal tactic far more sophisticated than those that children typically employ:

We know each other’s lineage, we know each other’s parents,
for we have heard the words told of old by mortals,
but by sight you have never seen my parents nor I yours.
They say that you were the issue of blameless Peleus,
and your mother was Thetis of lovely hair, the sea’s daughter.

{ ἴδμεν δ᾿ ἀλλήλων γενεήν, ἴδμεν δὲ τοκῆας,
πρόκλυτ᾿ ἀκούοντες ἔπεα θνητῶν ἀνθρώπων·
ὄψει δ᾿οὔτ᾿ ἄρ πω σὺ ἐμοὺς ἴδες οὔτ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἐγὼ σούς.
φασὶ σὲ μὲν Πηλῆος ἀμύμονος ἔκγονον εἶναι,
μητρὸς δ᾿ ἐκ Θέτιδος καλλιπλοκάμου ἁλοσύδνης }

Later literary texts indicate that Thetis and Peleus had a rocky marriage. Achilles was left with Chiron as a foster-father and had little contact with either of his biological parents. Experiencing the love of both a mother and a father from birth helps a child become an emotionally stable adult. The difficult family history of Achilles was probably known to the Homeric author composing Aeneas’s response to Achilles. Aeneas implicitly taunted Achilles about his broken parental relations.

Confronting the battle-ready Achilles between the Greek and Trojan warrior lines, Aeneas spoke a long-winded account of his own lineage. The Iliad doesn’t indicate that Achilles stood with a puzzled look, yawned, or mockingly rolled his eyes. Perhaps sensing that such a response would be appropriate, Aeneas questioned the point of their words:

But come, let us thus talk like children no longer,
standing in the middle of the battle’s combat.
Reproaches are there for both of us to utter against each other,
many of them. A ship of a hundred benches could not bear the load.
Twisty is the tongue of mortals, abounding in many words
of all kinds, and the field of speech is wide on this and that side.
Whatever word you speak, such you could also hear.

{ ἀλλ᾿ ἄγε μηκέτι ταῦτα λεγώμεθα νηπύτιοι ὥς,
ἑσταότ᾿ ἐν μέσσῃ ὑσμίνῃ δηιοτῆτος.
ἔστι γὰρ ἀμφοτέροισιν ὀνείδεα μυθήσασθαι
πολλὰ μάλ’, οὐδ’ ἂν νηῦς ἑκατόζυγος ἄχθος ἄροιτο.
στρεπτὴ δὲ γλῶσσ’ ἐστὶ βροτῶν, πολέες δ’ ἔνι μῦθοι
παντοῖοι, ἐπέων δὲ πολὺς νομὸς ἔνθα καὶ ἔνθα.
ὁπποῖόν κ’ εἴπῃσθα ἔπος, τοῖόν κ’ ἐπακούσαις. } [3]

These aren’t vicious words. These words probably wouldn’t even count as hate speech under Facebook’s capacious and capricious standards. The great classicist John Tzetzes castigated his scholarly rivals much more harshly than Achilles and Aeneas reproached each other on the battlefield before Troy.

Apparently unaware of his own inferiority as a man, Aeneas went on to belittle women’s aggressiveness in battling with words:

But what need have the two of us for strife and insulting,
to exchange insults with one another like women,
who when they have grown angry in soul-devouring strife
go out into the street-center and exchange insults,
saying much that is true and much false, for their rage drives them.
Yet you will not by words turn me back from my eagerness for combat,
not till we have fought face to face with our bronze tools. Come now,
let us test each other’s strength with our bronze spearheads.

{ ἀλλὰ τί ἢ ἔριδας καὶ νείκεα νῶϊν ἀνάγκη
νεικεῖν ἀλλήλοισιν ἐναντίον ὥς τε γυναῖκας,
αἵ τε χολωσάμεναι ἔριδος πέρι θυμοβόροιο
νεικεῦσ’ ἀλλήλῃσι μέσην ἐς ἄγυιαν ἰοῦσαι
πόλλ’ ἐτεά τε καὶ οὐκί· χόλος δέ τε καὶ τὰ κελεύει
ἀλκῆς δ᾽ οὔ μ᾽ ἐπέεσσιν ἀποτρέψεις μεμαῶτα
πρὶν χαλκῷ μαχέσασθαι ἐναντίον· ἀλλ᾿ ἄγε θᾶσσον
γευσόμεθ᾿ ἀλλήλων χαλκήρεσιν ἐγχείῃσιν. }

Women insult each other with vigor and rage and vicious falsehoods. Aeneas associated women’s verbal battling with childish behavior. Men instead seek to kill each other. Aeneas sought to end his exchange of feeble insults with Achilles and instead engage in deadly physical violence.[4] That’s foolish.

Compared to Achilles and Aeneas’s soft flyting, medieval Latin literature documents women’s stronger fighting with words. Consider Rose hatefully disparaging Lily:

Purple signifies kingly power, purple makes the king’s glory;
dull white is a shabby and unattractive color to kings.
Dull white is pale, run-down, and wretched in the face;
purple is the color revered throughout all the world.

{ Purpura dat regnum, fit purpura gloria regni;
Regibus ingrato vilescunt alba colore.
Albida pallescunt misero marcentia vultu;
Puniceus color est toto venerabilis orbe. } [5]

In short, the purple Rose makes a racist attack on the white Lily. She disparages her for her color. That’s hate speech.

Lily responds with a vicious attack on Rose. Despite gynocentric belittling of men’s interests in paternity confidence, women know that men typically disfavor promiscuity in women with whom they would like to have an enduring, intimate bond. Lily thus alludes to Rose’s failure to secure the love of a man-god, impugns Rose’s sexual fidelity, and suggests that Rose is so withered and faded that she no longer shows a blush:

I, the earth’s golden-haired beauty, handsome Apollo
loves, he who has clothed my face in snow-white glory.
Rose, why do you so greatly proclaim, smeared with shameful pretense,
aware of your failings? Does your face not blush?

{ Me decus auricomum telluris pulcher Apollo
Diligit ac niveo faciem vestivit honore.
Quid, rosa, tanta refers pudibundo perlita fuco,
Conscia delicti? vultus tibi nonne rubescit? }

In response to Lily’s vicious attack on her, Rose asserts her nobility, denies everything, and declares that Apollo is actually her illustrious boyfriend-god:

I am Dawn’s sister, kin to the celestial gods,
and bright Apollo loves me; I am bright-red Apollo’s herald.
The morning star Venus gladdens to run before my face,
yet the nourishing loveliness of my virgin charm makes me blush.

{ Sum soror Aurorae, divis cognata supernis;
Et me Phebus amat, rutili sum nuncia Phebi;
Lucifer ante meum hilarescit currere vultum:
Ast mihi virginei decoris rubet alma venustas. } [6]

Rose insinuates that her relationship with Apollo is sexually charged. She signals that he with her is bright red in arousal even in the morning. That delights the love-goddess Venus. Yet Rose is no jaded slut. She has the nourishing loveliness of virgin charm, and she still blushes.

Lily in response pretends to be unconcerned about Rose’s claim of a rival, passionate relationship with Apollo. With sexually suggestive words and allusions to sin, Lily pities Rose:

Why do you spew forth words in protuberant speeches
that bring upon you merited punishment of eternal wounds?
Indeed your crown has been penetrated with sharp thorns.
Alas — how the thorns rend the rose’s garden!

{ Talia cur tumidis eructas verba loquelis,
Quae tibi dant meritas aeterno vulnere poenas?
Nam diadema tui spinis terebratur acutis:
Eheu – quam miserum laniant spineta rosetum! }

Lily suggests that Rose’s claim of a passionate relationship with Apollo is merely blustering words. But Lily also all but calls Rose a roadworn whore. That’s an extremely nasty attack on a woman.

Rose responds angrily to Lily’s nasty mock-pitying. Rose refigures herself as chaste:

You broken-down old woman, for why and what are you raving with words?
What disgraces you proclaim, all should be filled with praise.
The all-creator and preserver surrounded me with sharp thorns
and has safeguarded my rosy face with a very clear veil.

{ Ut quid deleras verbis, occata vetustas?
Quae tu probra refers, plena sunt omnia laude:
Conditor omnicreans spina me sepsit acuta,
Muniit et roseos praeclaro tegmine vultus. }

Healthy heterosexual men have long been socially constructed as a danger from which women must be safeguarded. Women, in contrast, are wonderful. The illustrious veil that Rose wears is so clear that no one can see it!

Most women, no matter what age, don’t imagine themselves to be old. So it is with Lily. She even asserts that, without any artificial assistance, her reproductive capabilities are exuberant:

My kind head is adorned with beautiful gold;
I’m not enclosed in a crown of thorns.
Milk in sweet abundance flows from my snow-white breasts;
so they say that I’m the blessed lady of green vegetation.

{ Aureoli decoris mihi vertex comitur almus
Nec sum spinigera crudelis septa corona,
Profluit at niveis dulci lac ubere mammis:
Sic holerum dominam me dicunt esse beatam. }

Through an implicit contrast with herself, Lily implies that Rose is a prickly, dried-up old woman. That’s very nasty. Achilles and Aeneas never struck each other with insults that nasty.

Rose and Lily’s father intervened to resolve their vicious quarrel. Like most fathers, Spring dearly loved his children. He lamented that they were fighting. In the lived reality of family life, fathers are typically subordinate to their daughters. Yet Spring dared to counsel his daughters:

Recognize that you are twin sisters from the earth.
Is it divine law for twins to provoke prideful quarrels?
O beautiful Rose, be quiet. Your glory shines upon the world,
but let royal Lily rule with brilliant scepters.
Your distinction and beauty will thus praise you both forever.
May Rose, model of modesty, bloom in our gardens,
and you, splendid Lily, multiply with the face of radiant Apollo.
You, Rose, give to crowned martyrs their red victory;
Lily adorns the long-robed throngs of virgins.

{ Gnoscite vos geminas tellure parente sorores.
Num fas germanas lites agitare superbas?
O rosa pulchra, tace: tua gloria claret in orbe;
Regia sed nitidis dominentur lilia sceptris.
Hinc decus et species vestrum vos laudat in aevum:
Forma pudicitiae nostris rosa gliscat in hortis,
Splendida Phebeo vos, lilia, crescite vultu;
Tu, rosa, martyribus rutilam das stemmate palmam,
Lilia virgineas turbas decorate stolatas. } [7]

Spring then gave his quarreling daughters the kiss of peace to reconcile them. The daughters in turn kissed each other. Rose mischievously poked Lily’s mouth with one of her thorns. That’s just normal sisterly play. Lily gave Rose a drink of ambrosial milk. Rose offered Lily the gift of royal purple flowers. No one was killed, not even any men.

The deadly weight of Homer epic should be pushed aside. Men today must decisively reject the goddess Athena’s advice to Odysseus:

But you be strong, for bear it you must,
and tell no one, no man nor any woman,
that from wanderings you have returned, and silently
endure your many griefs, and submit to the violence of men.

{ σὺ δὲ τετλάμεναι καὶ ἀνάγκῃ,
μηδέ τῳ ἐκφάσθαι μήτ᾿ ἀνδρῶν μήτε γυναικῶν,
πάντων, οὕνεκ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἦλθες ἀλώμενος, ἀλλὰ σιωπῇ
πάσχειν ἄλγεα πολλά, βίας ὑποδέγμενος ἀνδρῶν. } [8]

Men today must learn from medieval women. More culturally advanced persons fight with words, just like Rose and Lily did. The shift from physical fighting to verbal fighting increases women’s structural advantages under gynocentrism. That makes affirmative action to promote humanistic education for men and stimulus to overcome the gender droop in the awarding of graduate humanistic degrees vital matters of social justice. Without such action, humane society will not flourish and be fruitful.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• how Homer and Hesiod used gender in hawk-dove metaphors
• Waltharius to Aymeri: how to end epic violence against men
• Tityrus the bellwether in the terrible ram vision of Sedulius Scottus

Notes:

[1] Homer, Iliad 20.198, ancient Greek text from Murray (1925), English translation (modified insubstantially) from Hesk (2006) p. 16. Iliad 20.196-8 repeats Iliad 17.30-2 (Menelaus in flyting with Euphorbus about possession of Patroclus’s dead body).

Unless otherwise noted, all subsequent quotes from the Iliad similarly have Greek text from Murray (1925). Perseus has freely available online the Greek text of the Oxford Iliad edition (1920).

Influential English translations of the Iliad by George Chapman (1616) and by Alexander Pope (1725) are freely available through Project Gutenberg.

[2] Iliad 20.200-2, English translation (modified slightly) from Murray (1925). Above I use αἴσυλα rather than αἴσιμα in v. 202. That follows the manuscript reading, the Greek texts of Oxford (1920) and Nagy (1997) 15§6, and seems to me to make better sense. The subsequent quote is from Iliad 20.203-7, with English translation from Murray (1925), modified insubstantially.

[3] Iliad 20.244-50, my English translation, benefiting from those of Murray (1925), Hesk (2006) p. 27, Lattimore (1951) via Lentini (2013) §4, and Nagy (1999) 15§8. The subsequent quote above is from Iliad 20.251-8 and is similarly sourced.

In flyting with Achilles, Aeneas also refers to talking like a child in v. 20.200, 211. Cf. Idomeneus to Meriones with respect to their comradely boasting of fighting prowess, Iliad 13.292-3.

[4] Scholars have foolishly followed Aeneas in uncritically trivializing women’s flyting. Hesk declared:

Alongside his repetition of the idea that flyting is childish, Aeneas makes the additional suggestion that flyting is an unmanly activity. If you flyte too much or for too long, you are going to sound like women having a slanging match in the street (251-55). This analogy is striking because it indirectly feminizes Achilles’ love of neikos and eris. Thus, Achilles is being insulted by Aeneas, albeit indirectly. And while heroes several times reproach each other for ‘girlish’ behaviour, no other speaker in the Iliad comes close to making this extended comparison between heroic neikos and the wrangling of women. Aeneas is being innovative again.

Hesk (2006) p. 28 (footnote omitted). Aeneas is being innovative only in the sense of explicitly expressing a prevalent delusion of men:

Even women and children can quarrel, but only heroes can fight — a sentiment that reaffirms one of the central tenets of the heroic code.

Parks (1990) p. 124. Scholars have mis-interpreted women’s flyting to be merely a playful activity:

Aineias, however, seems to suggest that the ritual character of flyting may turn it into a ludic activity, or, at least, may weaken the aggressive charge of the insults, as Aineias’ simile describing a quarrel taking place among women suggests.

Lentini (2013) §4.

Achilles apparently was more perceptive than modern classical scholars. Distraught that Hector had killed Patroclus and lamenting that he could gain no advantage other than in violence against men, Achillles lamented his verbal incapability to his mother Thetis:

I am such as none else among the bronze-clad Achaeans
in war, but in marketplace wrangling others are truly better.

{ τοῖος ἐὼν οἷος οὔ τις Ἀχαιῶν χαλκοχιτώνων
ἐν πολέμῳ· ἀγορῇ δέ τ᾿ ἀμείνονές εἰσι καὶ ἄλλοι. }

Iliad, 18.105-6, my English translation, benefiting from that of Murray (1925) and Fagles (1990). I’ve translated ᾰ̓γορᾱ́ contextually as “marketplace wrangling”; the word encompasses both the assembly and the marketplace. In context it implies a “war of words,” a phrase that Fagles used in his translation. Murray used “counsel” with implicit reference to being in the assembly. Achilles, however, understood the power of women’s words. When he was a young man, Achilles’s mother Thetis persuaded him to pretend to be a girl.

[5] Sedulius Scottus, incipit “The cycles of the seasons were running their four-fold course {Cyclica quadrifidis currebant tempora metis}” (commonly titled “About the strife of the rose and the lily {De rosae liliique certamine}”) st. 2, Latin text from Godman (1985) pp. 282-5, my English translation, benefiting from those of id. and Rand (1926) pp.  254-5. Subsequent quotes are seriatim from this poem and are similarly sourced. The Dante Medieval Archive provides an online Latin text of “Cyclica quadrifidis currebant tempora metis.”

The anonymous twelfth-century Latin poem with incipit “Once a certain topic I was reflecting upon in my mind {Dum quandam materiam mente meditarer}” (commonly titled “Contest of the Rose and the Violet”) is a later example of a flower debate poem. For full Latin text, Tobler (1893). Raby (1959) pp. 316-7 (no. 210) is an abbreviated version.

Bonvensin da la Riva, the leading figure of thirteenth-century Lombardian literature, wrote in the Milanese vernacular in the 1270s a poem entitled in Latin “The debate of the rose with the violet {Disputatio rose cum viola}.” A source for Dante, Bonvensin also wrote Book of the Three Scriptures {Libro delle tre scritture} (1274), with About black scripture {De scriptura nigra}, About red scripture {De scriptura rubra}, and About Golden scripture {De scriptura aurea} describing 12 punishments in Hell, Christ’s passion, and 12 glories in Heaven, respectively. On Bonvensin de la Riva, Kleinhenz (2004) vol. 1, pp. 145-7.

Both the rose and the lily have long been favored flowers in Christian tradition. The Song of Solomon associates the lily with beauty. Song of Solomon 2:1-2. Jesus praised the beauty of lilies. Luke 12:27. By the fourth century, red roses were associated with Christian martyrdom, and Heaven with a garden of roses. Seward (1955) p. 516. Heralding the arrival of Beatrice and the departure of Virgil in Dante’s Purgatory, a choir of a hundred angels sings:

“Blessed are you who come,” they said, and all
above and round with flowers they strewed the way,
saying, “Oh give the lilies with full hands!”

{ Tutti dicean: “Benedictus qui venis!”
e fior gittando e di sopra e dintorno,
“Manibus, oh, date lilïa plenis!” }

Dante, Purgatory {Purgatorio} 30.19-21, Italian text and English translation from Esolen (2004b). Cf. Mark 11:8-10 (entrance of Jesus into Jerusalem). Here lilies replace the cloaks and leafy branches spread for Jesus’s path into Jerusalem. Dante also rewrites Virgil’s Aeneid 7.883 (cf. Purgatorio 30.21) from a mournful lament to a cry of celebration. Guiding Dante through Heaven, Beatrice instructed:

Here is the rose wherein the Word divine
was made incarnate, here the lilies blow
whose fragrance leads men on the righteous way.

{ Quivi è la rosa in che ’l verbo divino
carne si fece; quivi son li gigli
al cui odor si prese il buon cammino. }

Dante, Paradise {Paradiso} 23.73-5, Italian text and English translation from Esolen (2004a). The rose refers to Mary, the mother of Jesus, and the lilies to the apostles. Paradiso 31.112-26 describes the heavenly, eternal rose. In Siena in 1321, the year of Dante’s death, an additional six verses of terza rima were added to Simone Martini’s Maestà fresco. The first two of these verses recognized the exalted status of the rose and the lily:

The angelic flowers, the rose and the lily
with which the heavenly field is adorned
do not delight me more than good counsel

{ Li angelichi fiorecti, rose e gigli,
onde s’adorna lo celeste prato,
non mi dilettan più ch i buon’ consigli. }

Inscribed verses under the Madonna’s throne in Simone Martini’s Maestà, Italian text and English translation from Jacoff (2009) p. S90.

[6] I’ve translated Phoebus, an epithet for Apollo, as “bright Apollo,” and in conjunction with the adjective rutilus {yellowish red} “bright-red Apollo.” Rand reads Rose to be suggesting that Lily is getting old, and Lily to be “getting exceeding mad” at that insinuation. Rand (1926) p. 254. The insinuation of old age comes in contrast to diction alluding to sexual vitality. Rose is declaring that handsome Apollo loves her more passionately than Apollo loves Lily. Cf. Burt (2014) p. 214, which interprets Rose to be declaring that she is “sister of Aurora and Phoebus.” Phoebus is Apollo, and Rose is his sister only in the medieval sense of lover.

[7] Sedulius uses the plural noun lilia {lilies} to refer to Lily, the twin of Rose. I’ve translated that plural form as the singular name Lily in accordance with the overall sense of the poem.

Father Spring artfully and irenically conflates among his daughters the claimed honors. He gives Lily the royal scepter that Rose claimed in stanza 2. In European literary tradition, white is typically associated with modesty / virginity and purple with passion. But Father associates his purple daughter Rose with modesty. Rose describes Apollo as being bright red, but Father associates Apollo with his white daughter Lily.

A nature debate in Greek from the third century BGC, Callimachus’s Iamb 4, has a bramble bush as an external, conciliatory party. Konstan & Landry (2008) identify the bramble bush with Callimachus’s father. He had at least two children, Callimachus and a daughter Megatime. Sedulius Scottus knew Greek; whether he read Callimachus isn’t known.

Sedulius’s De rosae liliique certamine displays considerable learning in classical Latin literature. Burt stated:

Within “About the Contest of the Rose and the Lily” Scottus uses parallels with the Aeneid, Georgics and Eclogues. For example, the first line spoken by the Rose states, “Purple gives royal power, purple becomes the glory of the kingdom” (ll.5), which reflects the phrases ‘purple of kings’ and ‘painted purple moves not the king’ from the Georgics 2.495 and Aeneid 7.251-252 respectively. Later, the Rose claims, “And Phoebus loves me, I am the messenger of rosy Phoebus” (ll.14), which echoes Aeneid 3.119 and Eclogue 3.62.

Burt (2014) p. 58. Godman detects additional parallels to Virgil’s Eclogues, as well as a parallel to Venantius Fortunatus, Carm. 8.16.3. Godman (1985) pp. 283-5, notes, esp. note to v. 8 (parallel to Fortunatus).

De rosae liliique certamine is a sophisticated, “adult” poem. Godman describes it as a “lighter conception of the idyll”; “a comedy of manners.” Godman (1985) pp. 282-3, introductory note; id. p. 54. That reading isn’t consistent with the viciousness of the flyting. According to Burt, “the quarrel takes on the appearance of a dialectical school exercise.” Burt (2014) p. 62. The poem is far more sophisticated in its gender understanding, allusive language, and relation to the epic tradition than a mere school exercise.

[8] Homer, Odyssey 13.307-10, ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly) from Murray (1919). The goddess Athena urged Odysseus to give up crafty words. Odyssey 13.291-96. That’s bad advice. Men need to acquire more guile to achieve gender equality. Men must truly swerve.

Barker perceptively observed:

experiencing debate in the Iliad helps construct an audience engaged in thinking about how people interact with each other in the context of an arena in which public concerns are raised and contested. By establishing a place in its narrative to investigate debate, the Iliad invites the audience to reflect on where they are going to draw the lines, over what they will enter the debate. We are invited to look beyond the single (imagined or real) performance context to an Iliad that operates as aetiological — or foundational — for a world of ‘today’.

Barker (2004) p. 117. Classicists should take Barker’s observations to heart in addressing epic violence against men in the Iliad and in the world today.

[images] (1) Serbian soldier and his father rest after duty in the trenches near Belgrade during World War I. Image widely available on the Internet, authorial source unclear. (2) Purple rose. Source image thanks to Jon Bragg and Wikimedia Commons. (3) White Lily. Photo made on 14 July 2012 at Main Botanical Garden of Academy of Sciences in Moscow. Photo thanks to Андрей Корзун (Kor!An) and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Barker, Elton. 2004. “Achilles’ last stand: Institutionalising dissent in Homer’s Iliad.” Proceedings of the Cambridge Philological Society. 50: 92-120.

Burt, Kathleen R. 2014. Argument in Poetry: (Re)Defining the Middle English Debate in Academic, Popular, and Physical Contexts. Paper 366. Ph.D. Thesis, Marquette University. Milwaukee, Wisconsin, USA.

Esolen, Anthony M., trans. 2004a. Dante Alighieri. Paradise. New York: Modern Library.

Esolen, Anthony M., trans. 2004b. Dante Alighieri. Purgatory. New York: Modern Library.

Fagles, Robert, trans. and Bernard Knox, intro. and notes. 1990. The Iliad. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Viking.

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

Hesk, Jon. 2006. “Homeric Flyting and How to Read It: Performance and Intratext in Iliad 20.83-109 and 20.178-258.” Ramus. 35 (1): 4-28 (cited to pp. 1-37 in online edition).

Jacoff, Rachel. 2009. ‘“Diligite iustitiam”: Loving Justice in Siena and Dante’s Paradiso.’ Issue in honor of John Freccero: Fifty Years with Dante and Italian Literature. MLN. 124 (5): S81-S95.

Kleinhenz, Christopher. 2004. Medieval Italy: an Encyclopedia. New York, London: Garland.

Konstan, David, and Leo Landrey. 2008. “Callimachus and the Bush in Iamb 4.” Classical World. 102 (1): 47-49.

Lentini, Giuseppe. 2013. “The Pragmatics of Verbal Abuse in Homer.” In Håkan Tell, ed. Classics@11: The Rhetoric of Abuse in Greek Literature. Center for Hellenic Studies, Harvard University.

Murray, A. T., ed. and trans., revised by George E. Dimock. 1919. Homer. Odyssey. Loeb Classical Library 105. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Murray, A. T., ed. and trans., revised by William F. Wyatt. 1925. Homer. Iliad. Loeb Classical Library 171. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Nagy, Gregory. 1999. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Rev. ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.

Parks, Ward. 1990. Verbal Dueling in Heroic Narrative: The Homeric and Old English Traditions. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Raby, Frederic James Edward. 1959. The Oxford Book of Medieval Latin Verse. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Rand, Edward Kennard. 1926. “Mediaeval Gloom and Mediaeval Uniformity.” Presidential address to the Medieval Academy of America, April 24, 1926. Speculum. 1 (3): 253-268.

Seward, Barbara. 1955. “Dante’s Mystic Rose.” Studies in Philology. 52 (4): 515-523.

Tobler, Adolf. 1893. “Streit zwischen Veilchen und Rose.” Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen. 90: 152-158.

Husbands commonly credit all their success to their wives and engage in small and large acts of yes-dearism. Doing otherwise is scarcely permitted within today’s social construction of gender equality. Ancient and medieval literature, however, described husbands resisting subordination to their wives and depicted tragic consequences of husbands’ uxorious weakness.

While women’s power has commonly been misrepresented to serve gynocentric interests, in reality husbands are barely able to resist subordination to their wives. About the year 799 in Charlemagne’s court, a learned poet warned husbands:

Be concerned about your own marriage partner.
Don’t let her mar your mind with enticing.
Sweet kisses to your knees, hands, neck, and cheeks
she’ll give, mingling them with soft words.
She’s accustomed to arm her own prayers with a potion
as great as the bow-carrying Cupid arms his energetic darts.

{ Esto et sollicitus propriae de parte iugalis,
Ne mentem maculet inliciendo tuam.
Oscula quae genibus, manibus, colloque, genisque
Blanda dabit, miscet lenia verba quibus,
Sueta preces tali proprias armare veneno,
Armat ut arcitenens impigra tela suo. } [1]

Husbands today are more likely to face their wives attacking them with bitchiness rather than blandishments. But the underlying, operative principle is the same: husbands will do anything to enjoy their wives’ love. Strong, independent husbands, or merely prudent ones, prepare to defend themselves against their wives’ attacks:

If you are secured with the metal helmet of a strong mind,
so that she would see her darts rebound,
then groaning she’ll retreat, giving feigned sighs,
grieving that her prayers have no weight.

{ Si tua mens fuerit munita casside forti,
Tela ut conspiciat hinc resilire sua,
Inde gemens rediet, ficta et suspiria dando,
Flensque suas pondus non habuisse preces. }

Resisting his wife’s attack isn’t sufficient for a husband to resist successfully being subordinate to his wife. If a direct attack fails, wives will seek to subordinate their husbands with a social offensive:

Soon a boy, or a nurse, or maybe her lying little maid
will say, “Why do you despise my lady’s requests?”
With her face downcast, she will offer a quieted sigh,
“He whom I presently see is always honored by me.
Whatever other wives request, they get, to do good or harm,
but I proceed to control over nothing promised.”
She should at last ask, they would say and run to kiss her,
and to you, “Why do you suffer to be irksome to her?”
But may your mind fight, as it would oppose a returning enemy.
Take care that recurring battles do not defeat you!

{ Mox puer, aut nutrix, aut fors ancillula mendax,
“Cur dominae,” dicet, “despicis orsa meae?”
Haec vultu verso tacito dabit ista susurro,
“Qui modo conspicitur est mihi semper honor,
Quaeque petunt aliae referunt, prosuntque, nocentque,
Voti nullius ast ego compos eo.”
Illa roget demum, dicent, et ad oscula currat,
Et tibi, “cur pateris esse molestus ei?”
At tua mens pugnet, redeunti obsistat ut hosti,
Bellaque ne vincant te recidiva time. }

Men lack sufficient education in fighting with words. Most husbands are eventually defeated. They are thus compelled to endure marital life subordinate to their wives.

Husbands’ uxoriousness is well-attested in literature across the ages. Written about 2700 years ago, the Book of Isaiah describes women of Jerusalem having expensive jewelry and luxurious clothing. Just before the fall of the Roman Empire, Prudentius similarly described women’s rich ornaments:

Not content with naturally implanted beauty,
woman puts on feigned external ornament
and, as if the creating Lord’s hand had imperfectly
made her face, she would finish it either with sapphires
sewn in to embellish a garland circling her brow,
or surround her flawless neck with blazing gems,
or hang from her ears weights of green jewels.
She even fastens white stones from seashells onto
her gleaming hair held with braided threads and golden chains.

{ nec enim contenta decore
ingenito externam mentitur femina formam
ac, velut artificis Domini manus inperfectum
os dederit, quod adhuc res exigat aut hyacinthus
pingere sutilibus redimitae frontis in arce,
colla vel ignitis sincera incingere sertis,
auribus aut gravidis virides suspendere bacas,
nectitur et nitidis concharum calculus albens
crinibus aureolisque riget coma texta catenis. } [2]

In ancient Rome, a much larger share of family income undoubtedly went to wives’ clothes and jewelry than to husbands’ clothes and jewelry. That remains the economic reality of consumer spending right up to our day. Far beyond the feeble regulatory efforts of sumptuary laws, husbands’ subordination to their wives has great economic significance to households and the economy at large.

Husbands’ subordination to their wives can have tragic consequences. Consider Odysseus. He was king of ancient Ithaca and the hero of Homer’s Odyssey. Odysseus’s long struggle eventually resulted in him returning home from the disastrous Trojan War. He then killed all the suitors who were living with his wife and propositioning her. A “traveling man {homo viator},” Odysseus subsequently went to Epirus to consult the Oracle of Zeus at Dodona. There Euippe, daughter of King Tyrimmas of Dodona, entertained Odysseus warmly. Generous to women in providing joy and creating children, Odysseus had sex with Euippe.

After Odysseus returned home, Euippe give birth to a son named Euryalus. When Euryalus reached manhood, Euippe sent him to Ithaca with tokens indicating that he was Odysseus’s son. At Ithaca, Euryalus become the victim of a terrible crime:

By chance Odysseus wasn’t there at that time. But Penelope had found out what was going on — indeed she had earlier knowledge of Odysseus’s affair with Euippe — and she persuaded Odysseus, on his return, to kill Euryalus as a conspirator before he knew the truth of the matter. And so, through lack of self-control and because in other ways he wasn’t a reasonable man, Odysseus became the murderer of his own son.

{ τοῦ δὲ Ὀδυσσέως κατὰ τύχην τότε μὴ παρόντος, Πηνελόπη καταμαθοῦσα ταῦτα, καὶ ἄλλως δὲ προπεπυσμένη τὸν τῆς Εὐίππης ἔρωτα, πείθει τὸν Ὀδυσσέα παραγενόμενον, πρὶν ἢ γνῶναί τι τούτων ὡς ἔχει, κατακτεῖναι τὸν Εὐρύαλον ὡς ἐπιβουλεύοντα αὐτῷ. καὶ Ὀδυσσεὺς μὲν διὰ τὸ μὴ ἐγκρατὴς φῦναι μηδὲ ἄλλως ἐπιεικὴς, αὐτόχειρ τοῦ παιδὸς ἐγένετο. } [3]

Penelope thus incited her husband Odysseus to murder, yet all the culpability is attributed to him. Eventually, the common-law doctrine of coverture formalized a husband’s responsibility for any crimes his wife commits. Men must recognize entrenched, structural anti-men bias in law. This systemic injustice increases the harm that a husband risks in accepting subordination to his wife. Rather than merely listening and believing women, reasonable persons should engage in enlightened questioning. That’s true even for husbands in relation to what their wives tell them to do.

In medieval Europe, Christian church officials taught that marriage should be an equal conjugal partnership. Some medieval poets, in contrast, influentially promoted men-abasing “courtly” love. Many husbands have been and are subordinate to their wives. Injustice anywhere supports injustice everywhere. Our future doesn’t necessary have to be female. Husbands, engage in civil disobedience within gynocentric society: resist and refuse to be subordinate to your wives!

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• solidarity among men promotes gender equality & social justice
• Wynnere and Wastoure: reject gender subordination to be a winner
• Cicero & Ecclesiastes against concubines dominating men

Notes:

[1] Theodulf of Orléans, “Bishop Theodulf’s Verses against the Judges {Versus Teodulfi Episcopi contra iudices},” incipit “Just magistrates, take the narrow path of judgment {Iudicci callem censores prendite iusti}” vv. 691-6, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 1, p. 511, my English translation, benefiting from that of Godman (1985) p. 167. The subsequent two quotes above are similarly sourced from Contra iudices vv. 697-700 (If you are secured…) and vv. 701-10 (Soon a boy…).

For a biographic introduction to Theodulf and poetic translation of four short poems, Sypeck (2010). For English translations of Theodulf’s poems, Alexandrenko (1970), Blakeman (1991), and Andersson (2014). For contextualization of Theodulf’s writings, Greeley (2000).

To support the gynocentric imperative of men supporting women, women tend to be socially constructed as “weak” and “passive.” Scheck understood Theodulf to believe that “women are clearly weak … and therefore always dangerous.” Scheck 2008) p. 34. Theodulf understood women’s power. Gynocentrism strains to deny and obscure women’s power.

Women’s passivity compels men to act for them. One of the most onerous activities forced upon men is engaging in war. Theodolf described Charlemagne’s sons Charles and Louis:

Youthful and strong, of powerful build,
their hearts are fired with enthusiasm and resolute in their purpose.

{ Corpore praevalido quibus est nervosa iuventa
Corque capax studii consiliique tenax. }

Theodulf, “To King Charles {Ad Carolum regem},” incipit “The entire world resounds in your praise, my king {Te totus laudesque tuas, rex, personat orbis}” (Carmena 25) vv. 73-4, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 1, p. 485, English translation from Godman (1985) p. 155. Theodulf’s description of Charles and Louis depicts them as well-suited to risk their lives in war. Women are ideologically passive with respect to war because war has been institutionally structured as violence against men. Cf. Scheck (2008) pp. 34-8. As the history of Charlemagne’s court makes clear, women are powerful political actors.

[2] Prudentius, The Origin of Sin {Hamartigenia} vv. 264-72, Latin text from Thomson (1949) pp. 222-3, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and Malamud (2011) p. 18. Prudentius wrote Hamartigenia about 400 GC.

This passage reflects “a stock theme from moral diatribes and satire.” Malamud (2011) p. 18, n. 55. It also reflects a significant, enduring economic reality in relationships between women and men.

[3] Parthenius of Nicaea, Sufferings in Love {Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα} 3.2-3 (About Euippe {Περὶ Εὐίππης}), ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly to be more easily readable) from Lightfoot (2009). Here’s the Greek text of Hercher (1858). The manchette for this story states, “Sophocles tells the story in his Euryalus {Ἱστορεῖ Σοφοκλῆς Εὐρυάλῳ}.” From Lightfoot (2009).

Lightfoot obscures the structural gender bias evident in this story:

The events are equally discreditable to Penelope, perhaps more strikingly, though the author treats them in a matter-of-fact way; her role is presumably influenced by that of Medea. Penelope is no stranger to vice: we are familiar with the innuendo (and worse) about her relationship with the suitors, but here we also see her less familiarly in the guise of the wicked stepmother.

Lightfoot (1999) p. 387 (footnotes omitted). Across all of literary history, Penelope has been overwhelming regarded as a highly praiseworthy woman. Women who commit evil acts are not merely stock characters. They are fully human beings, just as men are.

[images] (1) Penelope and Odysseus in conversation. Painting by Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein in 1802. Preserved in a private collection. Image thanks to Wikimedia Commons. (2) Odysseus and Penelope in bed. Painting by Francesco Primaticcio about 1563. Preserved in the Wildenstein Collection, New York. Image thanks to Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Alexandrenko, Nikolai A.. 1970. The Poetry of Theodulf of Orleans: a translation and critical study. Ph.D. Thesis. Tulane University.

Andersson, Theodore M., with Åslaug Ommundsen, and Leslie S. B. MacCoull. 2014. Theodulf of Orléans: the verse. Medieval & Renaissance Texts & Studies, v. 450. Tempe, AZ: Arizona Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies.

Blakeman, Christorpher John. 1991. Commentary, with introduction, text and translation, on selected poems of Theodulf of Orleans (Sirmond III. 1-6). Ph.D. Thesis. The University of St Andrews, Scotland.

Dümmler, Ernst. 1881. Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini. Berlin: Weidmannos. (vol. 1, Internet Archive; vol. 2, Internet Archive, BnF)

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

Greeley, June-Ann. 2000. Social Commentary in the Prose and Poetry of Theodulf of Orleans: a study in Carolingian humanism. Ph.D. Thesis. Fordham University.

Lightfoot, J. L. 1999. Parthenius of Nicaea: The poetical fragments and the  Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (review by Christopher Francese)

Lightfoot, J. L. 2009. Hellenistic Collection: Philitas, Alexander of Aetolia, Hermesianax, Euphorion, Parthenius. Loeb Classical Library, 508. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (reviews by Giambattista D’Alessio, by Claudio De Stefani, and by Iiro Laukola)

Malamud, Martha A. 2011. Prudentius. The Origin of Sin: An English Translation of the Hamartigenia. Cornell Studies in Classical Philology, 61. Cornell University Press.

Scheck, Helene. 2008. Reform and Resistance: formations of female subjectivity in early medieval ecclesiastical culture. Albany: SUNY Press.

Sypeck, Jeff. 2010. “Four Poems by Theodulf of Orleans.” The Heroic Age: A Journal of Early Medieval Northwestern Europe. 13 (August), online.

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

Women know their biological children for certain. Without modern DNA testing, men lack that certainty. That’s a fundamental gender inequality. Gynocentric societies have tended in recent decades to buttress that fundamental gender inequality by creating legal obstacles to men obtaining DNA paternity tests and by shaming men for being interested in the central evolutionary issue of biological paternity. Medieval European literature, in contrast, was deeply concerned with motherhood, fatherhood, and the fundamental gender inequality of cuckolding.

Mothers are powerful forces in their children’s lives. Men typically love and honor their mothers, and mothers are an expansive figure of happiness. For example, in a poem he wrote about 828, the distraught monk Walahfrid Strabo understood himself to be exiled from his beloved mother-home, the Benedictine abbey on Reichenau Island:

Look, my tears break forth as I recall
how good was the peace I then enjoyed,
when blessedness gave me a tiny
roof at Reichenau.

Holy may you always be, too much beloved
mother, consecrated by a battalion of saints,
by praise, growth, merit, honor there,
O blessed island!

Now too let us call holy,
where the mother of God is worshiped with frequent
ceremony, so that we joyfully sing justly,
O blessed island!

You are surrounded by deep waters,
yet are firmest in self-giving love,
with which you spread holy teachings to all,
O blessed island!

You whom I always desire to see,
by day, by night, you I recall,
to bring forth all the goodness you have borne for us,
O blessed island!

Now grow strong, be strong with flourishing,
so that following the Lord’s will,
together with your children you may be called
blessed Reichenau!

Let almighty Christ grant in his mercy this,
that I may return to rejoice in your home.
I will begin by saying, “Greetings, glorious
mother for eternity!”

{ Ecce prorumpunt lacrimae, recordor,
Quam bona dudum fruerer quiete,
Cum daret felix mihimet pusillum
Augia tectum.

Sancta sis semper nimiumque cara
Mater, ex sanctis cuneis dicata,
Laude, profectu, meritis, honore,
Insula felix.

Nunc item sanctam liceat vocare,
Qua Dei matris colitur patenter
Cultus, ut laeti merito sonemus,
Insula felix.

Tu licet cingaris aquis profundis,
Es tamen firmissima caritate,
Quae sacra in cunctos documenta spargis,
Insula felix.

Te quidem semper cupiens videre,
Per dies noctesque tui recordor,
Cuncta quae nobis bona ferre gestis,
Insula felix.

Nunc valens crescas, valeas vigendo,
Ut voluntatem Domini sequendo
Cum tuis natis pariter voceris
Augia felix!

Donet hoc Christi pietas tonantis,
Ut locis gaudere tuis reductus
Ordiar dicens: “Vale, gloriosa
Mater, in aevum!” }[1]

Men love their mothers from birth to eternity. The great mother is a central figure in European history and all of history.

Men’s and women’s relationships to their fathers are more complicated. Persons readily understand their mothers to be the ground of their being. A father’s contribution to human creation is superficially smaller. Yet Walahfrid Strabo, who cultivated the good earth in his ninth-century monastic garden, appreciated the significance of seed:

Hardly otherwise, from cheap seed the gourd strains to grow high.
Rising with its shield-like leaves, it awakens huge
shadows and via numerous stems pushes forth tethers.

{ Haud secus altipetax semente cucurbita vili
Assurgens, parmis foliorum suscitat umbras
Ingentes, crebrisque iacit retinacula ramis. }[2]

Although small and cheap, seed awakens the enormous potential of life against the contrasting shadows of death. Seed signifies the vigor, profusion, and tenacity of new life. Seed produces sons and daughters — fruit encompassing male and female, both with promise of future daughters and sons. The gourd, shaped like a man’s genitals, has a womb-like testicular structure full of seed:

Its body has every part, its womb every part, and inside are nourished
separately in hollowed enclosures many seeds,
which are able to promise to you a similar harvest.

{ Totum venter habet, totum alvus, et intus aluntur
Multa cavernoso seiunctim carcere grana,
Quae tibi consimilem possunt promittere messem. }[3]

Seed is essential to the generation and regeneration of a bountiful harvest. Seed matters for eternal life on earth.

Cuckolding cheapens seed and devalues fatherhood. Within the relatively liberal and tolerant medieval period, literature of men’s sexed protest and even views opposing cuckolding weren’t pervasively censored and suppressed. A late-eighth-century poem represents the dominant, gynocentric view of cuckolding. It celebrates cuckolding with the coming of the cuckoo:

Let the cuckoo come, that sweet friend of shepherds.
Let cheerful seeds burst forth in our hills,
let there be pasturing for the flock, sweet rest in the fields,
and green branches at hand to be shelters for weary persons.
Let goats come with full udders to milking,
and birds greet Phoebus with their various songs.
Look, quickly thus the cuckoo now comes;
everyone’s most welcomed guest, you are already sweet love,
everything awaits you — the sea, the earth, the sky —
welcome cuckoo, sweet splendor, through the ages welcome!

{ veniat cuculus, pastorum dulcis amicus!
Collibus in nostris erumpant germina laeta,
Pascua sint pecori, requies et dulcis in arvis,
Et virides rami praestent umbracula fessis,
Uberibus plenis veniantque ad mulctra capellae,
Et volucres varia Phoebum sub voce salutent!
Quapropter citius cuculus nunc ecce venito!
Tu iam dulcis amor, cunctis gratissimus hospes:
Omnia te expectant, pelagus tellusque polusque,
Salve, dulce decus, cuculus, per saecula salve! }[4]

This ardent song celebrates the cuckoo’s work of cuckolding: sweet love, cheerful seed, milk-swollen breasts. The cuckoo is the sweet friend of the ignorant, cucked shepherd. The socially constructed female voice of Spring sings for the cuckoo:

I hope my cuckoo comes, dearest of birds.
To all the most welcomed guest, accustomed to
being on rooftops, he sings good songs with his red beak.
…
I hope my cuckoo comes with cheerful seed,
dispelling the cold, he the nourishing friend of Phoebus forever.
Phoebus loves the cuckoo in the clear, dawning light.
..
In his mouth the cuckoo will carry flowers and serve honey,
build homes, navigate the gentle waves,
and father children and dress the cheerful fields.

{ Opto meus veniat cuculus, carissimus ales.
omnibus iste solet fieri gratissimus hospes
in tectis, modulans rutilo bona carmina rostro.
…
Opto meus veniat cuculus cum germine laeto,
frigora depellat, Phoebo comes almus in aevum.
Phoebus amat cuculum crescenti luce serena.
…
Ore ferat flores cuculus, et mella ministrat,
aedificatque domus, placidas et navigat undas,
et generat soboles, laetos et vestiet agros. }

That’s the fantasy of a wife who’s feeling cold and weary with her husband. The cuckolding cuckoo will bring her flowers and kiss her with honeyed lips. He will procreate children with his red beak and cheerful seed. He will stay with her in bed after dawn while her husband is on a business trip and navigate her changing moods while always cheerfully dressing her surroundings. Just so gynocentric society celebrates cuckolding!

In the Middle Ages, some men bravely spoke out against cuckolding. The cuckoo and cuckolding make men’s lives tumultuous and force men to work to pay “child support” for children who aren’t theirs:

Let the cuckoo not come, he who generates fatherly labor by chance,
doubles divorce battles, disunites loving rest,
disturbs all, so that sea and land labor.
…
There are my riches, and there are cheerful dinner-parties;
rest is sweet along with a hot fire in the room.
Of this the cuckoo knows nothing, but that faithless one labors.

{ Non veniat cuculus, generat quia forte labores,
proelia congeminat, requiem disiungit amatam,
omnia disturbat; pelagi terraeque laborant.
…
Sunt mihi divitiae, sunt et convivia laeta,
est requies dulcis, calidus est ignis in aede.
haec cuculus nescit, sed perfidis ille laborat. }

Under the four-seas doctrine established in the sixteenth century, married men are financially responsible for children their wives produce with any man. Husbands thus face the risk of additional fatherly labor by the chance of being cuckolded. Moreover, cuckolding increases risk of divorce, which is primarily sought by wives. Divorce disastrously squanders a couple’s wealth through self-interested, pugnacious lawyers. Post-divorce, at least one spouse has to work harder in order for their aggregate welfare not to decline. Cuckolding destroys peaceful homes and fosters suspicion. A cuckoo has reason to fear being cuckolded in his own nest.

With the fading of the Middle Ages and subsequent intellectual decay, men developed extensive rationalizations for serenely embracing being cuckolded. Writing in the sixteenth century, the eminent and influential Catholic scholar Michel de Montaigne essayed:

Lucullus, Caesar, Pompey, Antony, Cato and other fine men were all cuckolds and knew it without making a commotion about it. … We should use our ingenuity to avoid making such useless discoveries that torture us. And so it was the custom of Roman husbands when returning home from a journey to send a messenger ahead to announce their arrival to their wives so as not to take them unaware. … “But people talk.” I know a hundred men who are cuckolds, yet honored and not disrespected. A decent man is sympathized with for it, not discredited by it. … “But even the ladies will laugh at me.” Well, what do they laugh at more readily nowadays than a peaceful, orderly marriage? Each one of you has cuckolded somebody, and Nature is ever equal, alternating and balancing accounts. The frequency of this misfortune ought by now to have limited its bitter taste. Look, being cuckolded will soon be customary.

{ Lucullus, Caesar, Pompeius, Antonius, Caton et d’autres braves hommes furent cocus, et le sceurent sans en exciter tumulte. … Il faut estre ingenieux à eviter cette ennuyeuse et inutile cognoissance. Et avoyent les Romains en coustume, revenans de voyage, d’envoyer au devant en la maison faire sçavoir leur arrivée aus femmes, pour ne les surprendre. … Mais le monde en parle. Je sçay çant honestes hommes coqus, honnestement et peu indecemment. Un galant homme en est pleint, non pas desestimé. … Mais jusques aux dames, elles s’en moqueront. Et de-quoy se moquent elles en ce temps plus volontiers que d’un mariage paisible et bien composé ? Chacun de vous a faict quelqu’un coqu : or nature est toute en pareilles, en compensation et vicissitude. La frequence de cet accident en doibt meshuy avoir moderé l’aigreur : le voylà tantost passé en coustume. }[5]

Modern-day students of Montaigne assure their intelligent readers that, in contrast to sensational tabloid claims, merely millions of men are unknowingly cuckolded. Hence absurd legal rulings of paternity and men’s complete lack of reproductive rights aren’t truly social injustices worthy of serious redress. That’s the quality of intellectual life in our benighted age of superstition and bigotry.

The deplorable ignorance of our age won’t be overcome until everyone studies medieval Latin poetry. Let change begin with you!

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• now-unspeakable wrong: resisting cuckolding in medieval Europe
• bird-brains engage in scholarly debate: The Owl and the Nightingale
• how Homer and Hesiod used gender in hawk-dove metaphors

Notes:

[1] Walahfrid Strabo, “Sister Muse, lament for our pain {Musa nostrum plange soror dolorem}” st. 8-14, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, pp. 412-3, my English translation, benefiting from that of Godman (1985) pp. 227-9. Waddell (1929) pp. 110-3 is an abbreviated text. This poem is known under the titles “The Sapphic Poem {Metrum Saphicum}” and “Elegy on Reichenau.”

Walahfrid Strabo was born about 809 in Alemannia in the south-west region of Germany (Swabia). Strabo is a personal epithet meaning “Squinter” and wasn’t carried as a family name. When Walahfrid was about eight years old, his family placed him as an oblate in the Benedictine Abbey at Reichenau. That abbey is on an island in the lower branch of Lake Constance in central Europe.

At Reichenau, Wettin, Walahfrid’s tutor, and Grimald, the head of the abbey school, recognized Walahfrid to be a brilliant student. In 826, Walahfrid was sent from Reichenau to the monastery at Fulda to further his learning. There Walahfrid studied under the erudite and eminent scholar Hrabanus Maurus, Abbot of Fulda. Walahfrid probably wrote his “Elegy on Reichenau” between 827 and 829. He may have been influenced by his friend Gottschalk’s poem “How are you commanding me {Ut quid iubes}?”

Traill (1971) provides relevant analysis of “Elegy on Reichenau.” I regrettably have not been able to access that scholarly article. For biographical background on Walahfrid and the transmission of his work, Payne & Blunt (1966), pp. 1-18, and Öberseder & Schöllhammer (2016). Jeff Sypeck at Quid plura? has interesting posts on Walahfrid.

[2] Walahfrid Strabo, Book about the Cultivation of a Garden {Liber de cultura hortorum}, also known as The Little Garden {Hortulus} vv. 99-101 (from Ch. 7, The Gourd {Cucurbita}), Latin text from Dümmler (1881), vol. 2, p. 339, my English translation, benefiting from that of Godman (1985), p. 223, and Payne & Blunt (1966) p. 35. Here’s the physical layout of Walahfrid’s garden, with a German translation of De cultura hortorum.

Walahfrid dedicated De cultura hortorum to his former teacher Father Grimald, who had become Abbot of the St. Gall Monastery. For English translations of that dedication, Payne & Blunt (1966), p. 65, and Waddell (1929), p. 115.

[3] De cultura hortorum vv. 133-5, sourced as previously. Godman translated these verses in a way disparaging the gourd’s body:

they are all belly, all paunch; inside their cavernous confines
many seeds, each in its place, are nourished,
capable of promising a harvest comparable to the last.

Godman (1985) p. 223. Men’s genitals have been historically depreciated aesthetically and in action. Such depreciation isn’t warranted, especially with respect to Walahfrid’s description of the gourd. Walahfrid praises the sensuous delight that the gourd provides: “ripe segments for dessert repeatedly offer intoxicating flavor {placidum secmenta saporem / Ebria multotiens mensis praestare secundis}.” De cultura hortorum vv. 141-2. The dried gourd also serves as a wine-jar. Id. vv. 144-51.

[4] “All suddenly come together from the high mountains {Conveniunt subito cuncti de montibus altis}” vv. 46-55, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 1, p. 270-2, my English translation, benefiting from those of Godman (1985) pp. 145-9, Porter & Williams (2005), Steer (2000), pp. 80-3, and Waddell (1929) pp. 83-7, and some reading notes. Poesia Medievale (March 24, 2010) provides a freely accessible Italian translation.

This poem is also known by the titles “Debate between Spring and Winter {Conflictus veris et hiemis}” and “About the cuckoo {De cuculo}.” It has been attributed to Alcuin (Carmen 58), with some scholarly dispute. Here’s a review of the surviving manuscripts. Alcuin in the mid-790s wrote the prose work Dialogue on Rhetoric and on Virtues {Disputatio de rhetorica et de virtutibus}.

The narrative opening (vv. 1-9) and the closing (by Palaemon, vv. 47-55) of “Conveniunt subito cuncti de montibus altis” are “modelled specifically and unambiguously on Vergil’s third and seventh Eclogues.” Zogg (2017) abstract; see id. pp. 128-34. The French monk Ademar of Chabannes early in the eleventh century titled the poem “Virgil on Spring and Winter {Virgilus de vere et hyeme}.” This poem was also transmitted in an early ninth-century manuscript as part of the Appendix Vergiliana. Id. pp. 126, 137. This poem surely isn’t by Virgil. Its author plausibly gave the poem a Virgilian dress to foster its dissemination. Id. p. 137-8.

Like the nightingale, the cuckoo was a commonly invoked poetic bird in medieval Europe. In Alcuin’s “Verses on the Cuckoo {Versus de cuculo},” incipit “Weep for our cuckoo, sweetest Daphnis {Plangamus cuculum, Dafnin dulcissime, nostrum}” (Carmin 57), Alcuin figures as a cuckoo a beloved student who has departed. For Latin text, Dümmler (1881) vol. 1, p. 269-60. Waddell (1929), pp. 79-81, provides an English translation of a slightly abbreviated text.

The subsequent two quotes from “Conveniunt subito cuncti de montibus altis” are sourced as above and are vv. 10-12, 16-18, 28-30 (stanzas of Spring: I hope my cuckoo comes…) and vv. 19-21, 25-7 (stanzas of Winter: Let the cuckoo not come…).

Tuve interpreted this poem as asserting “a victorious principle of active growth” in which the cuckoo is “the bird of fruitfulness.” Tuve (1933), as cited by Steer (2000) p. 84, n. 176. Neither active growth nor fruitfulness requires cuckolding. Societies that respect and appreciate men are likely to be more fruitful in the long run.

[5] Michel de Montaigne, Essays {Essais} III.5, “On some lines of Virgil {Sur des vers de Virgile},” French text from the Villey & Saulnier (1965) version of the 1595 edition of Essais, English translation (modified slightly) from Screech (1993) pp. 975, 983.

[images] (1) Beautifully shaped butternut squash. Source image thanks to WCBackstein and pixabay. (2) Diagram of adult human testicle. Source image thanks to KDS444 and Wikimedia Commons. (3) Butternut squash (Cucurbita moschata) grown in Ukraine. Source image thanks to George Chernilevsky and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Dümmler, Ernst. 1881. Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini. Berlin: Weidmannos. (vol. 1, Internet Archive; vol. 2, Internet Archive, BnF)

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

Öberseder, Lisa, and Carina Schöllhammer. 2016. “Walahfrid Strabo.” Frühmittelalter im Bodenseeraum. University of Salzburg, online.

Payne, Raef and Wilfrid Blunt. 1966. Hortulus: Walahfrid Strabo. Translated by Raef Payne. Commentary by Wilfrid Blunt. Hunt Facsimile Series, no. 2. Pittsburgh, PA: The Hunt Botanical Library.

Porter, Kenneth and Heather Williams, trans. 2005. “Suddenly, all come together from the tall mountains {Conveniunt subito cuncti de montibus altis}.” German 312, Winter Poetry: Ancient, Medieval, and Early Modern Winter Poetry. Reading organized by Albrecht Classen at the University of Arizona, Nov. 14. Online.

Screech, M. A., trans. 1993. Michel De Montaigne: the Complete Essays. London, England: Penguin Books.

Steer, Carol Elizabeth. 2000. The Season of Winter in Art and Literature from Roman North Africa to Medieval France. M.A. Thesis, University of Manitoba, Canada.

Traill, David A. 1971. “The Addressee and interpretation of Walahfrid’s ‘Metrum Saphicum’.” Medievalia et humanistica / Studies in Medieval and Renaissance Culture. New series 2: 69-82. Clogan, Paul, ed. Medieval and Renaissance Studies in Review. Cleveland: The Press of Case Western Reserve University.

Tuve, Rosemond. 1933. Seasons and Months: Studies in a Tradition of Middle English Poetry. Paris: Librairie Universitaire S.A.

Waddell, Helen. 1929 / rev. 1948. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. New York: Henry Holt.

Zogg, Fabian. 2017. “Palaemon and Daphnis in a Medieval Poem: the Vergilian challenge of the Conflictus Veris et Hiemis.” Vergilius: Journal of the Vergilian Society. 63: 125-140.

In the first century BGC, Parthenius of Nicaea supplied Cornelius Gallus with ancient Greek stories to use in his poetry. Gallus became renowned as the earliest of the great Latin love elegists.[1] A military leader who conquered five cities and became the ruler of the new Roman province of Egypt, Gallus contributed significantly to developing love elegy’s gendered figure of “love’s warfare {militia amoris}.” Like most modern scholars, Gallus failed to understand critically violence against men in Parthenius’s collection. Tibullus, another leading Latin love elegist of the first century BGC, evoked violence against men to create a sophisticated poetic rejection of Gallus’s love elegy.

Parthenius’s story concerning Pallene shows how violence against men is related to men’s love for women. Pallene was the daughter of Sithon, King of the Odomanti in Thrace. Renowned for her beauty and her pleasing temperament toward men, Pallene attracted many men who wanted to marry her. Sithon tested Pallene’s suitors by fighting each one to the death. The precious woman Pallene was thus positioned as a prize that either father or potential husband could earn at the cost of the other man’s life. In the parallel story of Hippodamia, King Oenamous, and Pelops, the father killed eighteen men suitors to assert his superior right to live with his daughter. Horrific violence against men is associated with women’s relatively high social value and privilege.

The social construction of gender under gynocentrism has defined men’s virtue in terms of their strength and fighting ability against other men. When King Sithon grew much older and physically weaker, he realized that he could no longer successfully fight against Pallene’s suitors. He thus considered himself no longer worthy to be the primary man-object of his daughter’s affection. Sithon arranged for two new suitors, Dryas and Cleitus, to fight to death for the prize of being able to marry Pallene. Men have long endured systemic sexual disadvantage relative to women. Men should not have to fight for women’s love any more than women should have to fight for men’s love.

Women are complicit in violence against men. Women, directly or indirectly, commonly motivate, incite, or determine violence against men. So it was with Pallene:

When the appointed combat day dawned, Pallene (who, so it turned out, had fallen in love with Cleitus) was very much afraid for him. She had not the heart to confess this to any of her attendants. But her cheeks so ran with tears that eventually her old tutor realised and diagnosed her condition. He told her to keep her spirits up and that things would go just as she wanted. Secretly he approached Dryas’s charioteer. He promised him a great deal of money if he would not insert the linch-pins in Dryas’s chariot-wheels. So when they went out to battle and Dryas charged at Cleitus, the wheels fell away from under his chariot. Cleitus rushed up to Dryas as he lay there and killed him.

{ τῆς δὲ ἀφωρισμένης ἡμέρας παρούσης, ἡ Παλλήνη (ἔτυχε γὰρ ἐρῶσα τοῦ Κλείτου) πάνυ ὀρρώδει περὶ αὐτοῦ· καὶ σημῆναι μὲν οὐκ ἐτόλμα τινὶ τῶν ἀμφ᾿ αὑτήν5, δάκρυα δὲ πολλὰ ἐχεῖτο τῶν παρειῶν αὐτῆς, ἕως ὅτε ὁ τροφεὺς αὐτῆς πρεσβύτης, ἀναπυνθανόμενος καὶ ἐπιγνοὺς τὸ πάθος, τῇ μὲν θαρρεῖν παρεκελεύσατο ὡς, ᾗ βούλεται, ταύτῃ τοῦ πράγματος χωρήσοντος· αὐτὸς δὲ κρύφα ὑπέρχεται τὸν ἡνίοχον τοῦ Δρύαντος καὶ αὐτῷ χρυσὸν πολὺν ὁμολογήσας πείθει διὰ τῶν ἁρματηγῶν τροχῶν μὴ διεῖναι τὰς περόνας. ἔνθα δή, ὡς ἐς μάχην ἐξῄεσαν καὶ ἤλαυνεν ὁ Δρύας ἐπὶ τὸν Κλεῖτον, καὶ οἱ τροχοὶ περιερρύησαν αὐτῷ τῶν ἁρμάτων καὶ οὕτως πεσόντα αὐτὸν ἐπιδραμὼν ὁ Κλεῖτος ἀναιρεῖ. }[2]

King Sithon had at least a primitive sense of justice. For her manipulation of the violence among men, he planned to immolate his daughter Pallone upon the funeral pyre for the unfairly killed Dryas. In modern societies, women’s tears prompt grossly gender-disparate sentences for similar crimes. In this story, the sky poured down rain and extinguished Dryas’s funeral fire. Interpreting this natural event to signal a divine mandate for women’s privilege, Sithon allowed Pallene to live and marry Cleitus.

Cornelius Gallus failed to perceive the critical perspective on gender and violence that Parthenius provided through his stories of sufferings in love. Gallus instead accepted the dominant Roman valuation of men and achieved preeminence within it. Gallus led a Roman army in Octavian’s successful invasion of Egypt in 30 BGC. As a reward for his military service, Gallus received the title of Imperial Adjunct. He was made chief administrator of the new Roman province of Egypt. With an inscription on a stela, Gallus celebrated his own military exploits, including “defeated the enemy; victor in two battles, conqueror of five cities {hostem vicit, bis acie victor, V urbium expugnator}.”[3] Gallus was a proud survivor of brutal violence against men.

Gallus also fought for women’s love. He had a love affair with an actress / courtesan called Cytheris, thought to be a Roman freedwoman named Volumnia. She, however, left him to follow Mark Antony in Gaul. Rome’s triumph over Cleopatra and Antony in Egypt almost surely didn’t mean that Gallus received Cytheris’s love. Gallus apparently fought for her love with four books of love elegy. Those books centered on a courtesan named Lycoris, probably a figure for Cytheris / Volumnia.[4] Virgil envisioned questioning Gallus’s insane, failed love:

All ask: “From where is that love of yours?” Apollo came:
“Gallus, what is this insanity?” he said, “Your dear Lycoris
is following another man through snows and horrid camps.”

{ omnes “unde amor iste” rogant “tibi?” venit Apollo:
“Galle, quid insanis?” inquit. “tua cura Lycoris
perque nives alium perque horrida castra secuta est.” }[5]

According to Virgil, Gallus himself, mired in a military engagement, was raving in love for his lost Lycoris:

Here are frigid springs, here are soft meadows, Lycoris,
here are the woods: here eternity itself to be spent with you.
Now insane love for the harsh god of war keeps me armed,
detained amid clashing weapons and hostile forces.
You are far from your fatherland — would I not believe such.
Ah! harsh one, Alpine snows and the cold Rhine you see
without me, alone. Ah! May the cold do you no harm!
Ah! May the sharp ice not cut your tender soles!

{ Hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori,
hic nemus; hic ipso tecum consumerer aevo.
nunc insanus Amor duri me Martis in armis
tela inter media atque adversos detinet hostis.
tu procul a patria – nec sit mihi credere tantum –
Alpinas, a, dura nives et frigora Rheni
me sine sola vides. a, te ne frigora laedant!
a, tibi ne teneras glacies secet aspera plantas! }

Ovid described the outcome of Gallus’s manly struggles:

Gallus is famed in the West, and Gallus in the East,
and with Gallus shall be famed his Lycoris.

{ Gallus et Hesperiis et Gallus notus Eois,
et sua cum Gallo nota Lycoris erit. }[6]

Lycoris’s name indeed became famous with Gallus. That’s not the same as Gallus growing old with his beloved woman. Martial declared, “beautiful Lycoris was Gallus’s genius {ingenium Galli pulchra Lycoris erat}.”[7] That’s an early version of a now-common claim that a man owes all his success to a woman. An elegiac fragment from Parthenius seems to say, “derived no profit from sweet marriage { ‒⏑⏑ ] ος γλυκερῶν οὐκ ἀπελ [‒⏑⏑‒ }.” Gallus surely didn’t have a sweet marriage with Lycoris.[8]

Gallus’s successful violence against men also didn’t bring him enduring happiness. A short time after being made chief administrator of Egypt, he incurred the displeasure of Emperor Augustus. The Roman Senate condemned Gallus. He then committed suicide. Weak evidence suggests that he was subject to an order of “condemnation of memory {damnatio memoriae},” e.g. obliteration of the records of his life. If so, that obliteration wasn’t complete. Verses of Propertius on Gallus have survived:

And recently, dead for beautiful Lycoris, Gallus has
washed how many wounds in the waters of the infernal world.

{ et modo formosa quam multa Lycoride Gallus
mortuus inferna vulnera lavit aqua. }[9]

Gallus died violently, like many of Pallene’s suitors in Parthenius’s story. Gallus didn’t appreciate the deaths of those suitors.[10] Like most men, Gallus didn’t defy the oppression of men under gynocentrism. Gallus lived and died the difficult, violent life set out for men.

Unlike Gallus, Tibullus celebrated simple, peaceful country life. The first elegy in Tibullus’s first book begins:

Let another gather for himself wealth of yellow gold
and hold many acres of well-plowed soil,
let endless work terrify him, with an enemy nearby,
and sounds of war-trumpets driving away sleep.
Let my moderate means lead me to a quiet life,
while my hearth shines with constant flame.

{ Divitias alius fulvo sibi congerat auro
et teneat culti iugera multa soli,
quem labor adsiduus vicino terreat hoste,
Martia cui somnos classica pulsa fugent:
me mea paupertas vita traducat inerti,
dum meus adsiduo luceat igne focus. }[11]

Tibullus’s last elegy in that book begins:

Who was he who first brought forth the horrid sword?
How iron-willed and truly made of iron was he!
Then slaughter of men began, then war was born,
then a quicker road was opened to fearful death.
Perhaps that wretch merits blame for nothing: do we turn to evil
what he gave us to use on ferocious beasts?
That’s the curse of wealth in gold. No wars were made
when the beech-wood cup stood beside men’s feasts.
No fortresses or fences were there; the flock’s leader
sought sleep securely among the speckled sheep.
Then I might have lived, Valgius, and not known sad
arms nor heard the trumpet-call with trembling heart.
Now I’m dragged to war, and perhaps already some foe
carries the spear that will stick my side.

{ Quis fuit, horrendos primus qui protulit enses?
quam ferus et vere ferreus ille fuit!
tum caedes hominum generi, tum proelia nata,
tum brevior dirae mortis aperta via est.
an nihil ille miser meruit, nos ad mala nostra
vertimus, in saevas quod dedit ille feras?
divitis hoc vitium est auri, nec bella fuerunt,
faginus astabat cum scyphus ante dapes.
non arces, non vallus erat, somnumque petebat
securus varias dux gregis inter oves.
tunc mihi vita foret, Valgi, nec tristia nossem
arma nec audissem corde micante tubam.
nunc ad bella trahor, et iam quis forsitan hostis
haesura in nostro tela gerit latere. }[12]

As Tibullus knew from the stories of Parthenius, peace in an idyllic age before the invention of iron is merely a dream. Violence against men is as old as humans made woman and man.

Tibullus understood that violence against men has women at its center. The first elegy of Tibullus’s first book, which begins with quiet country life and warm hearth, immediately changes that life slightly but significantly:

I don’t require the wealth of my forefathers,
such as the harvest piled together by my ancient ancestor.
A little field is enough — enough to sleep in peace
if I am able to rest my limbs on my usual bed.
What joy to hear the harsh winds as I recline,
holding my lady to my tender breast,
or, when winter wind from the south sheds frigid showers,
to sleep serenely, helped by an accompanying fire.

{ non ego divitias patrum fructusque requiro,
quos tulit antiquo condita messis avo:
parva seges satis est; satis est, requiescere lecto
si licet et solito membra levare toro.
quam iuvat immites ventos audire cubantem
et dominam tenero continuisse sinu
aut, gelidas hibernus aquas cum fuderit Auster,
securum somnos igne iuvante sequi. }[13]

Now Tibullus’s rustic dream includes a ruling “lady {domina}.” In the following, telling half-verse, he declares, “This is my fate {Hoc mihi contingat}.” Tibullus continues on to show that his fate of having a ruling lady disrupts his dream of a simple, rustic life. Gallus’s surviving elegiac verses connect sadness in love to military triumph:

sad, Lycoris, by your misbehavior

My fate will then be sweet to me, Caesar, when you
are the most important part of Roman history,
and when I read of many gods’ temples after your return
the richer for being adorned with your spoils.

{ tristia nequitia … Lycori

Fata mihi, Caesar, tum erunt mea dulcia, quom tu
maxima Romanae pars eris historiae
postque tuum reditum multorum templa deorum
fixa legam spolieis deivitiora tueis. }[14]

Tibullus’s patron Messalla, a figure of Gallus, and Tibullus’s beloved Delia, a figure of Lycoris, tear into his dream and reshape his fate:

Let him be wealthy, by right,
who can endure the raging seas and the mournful rain.
O, let however much gold and emeralds be lost,
rather than any girl would weep about my travels.
Messalla, for you war by land and sea is fitting,
so that your house might display enemy takings,
but the chains of a lovely girl bind me captive here,
and I sit as a doorman before her harsh entrance.
I’m not concerned for praise, my Delia, as long as
I’m with you. Please allow me to be called idle and lazy.
When my highest hour has come, let me gaze on you;
may I hold you, as I die, in my failing grasp.

{ sit dives iure, furorem
qui maris et tristes ferre potest pluvias.
o quantum est auri pereat potiusque smaragdi,
quam fleat ob nostras ulla puella vias.
te bellare decet terra, Messalla, marique,
ut domus hostiles praeferat exuvias:
me retinent vinctum formosae vincla puellae,
et sedeo duras ianitor ante fores.
non ego laudari curo, mea Delia; tecum
dum modo sim, quaeso segnis inersque vocer.
te spectem, suprema mihi cum venerit hora;
te teneam moriens deficiente manu. }[15]

Tibullus’s dream of rustic simplicity has evaporated. He’s enslaved in love. He’s desperate seeking the love of Delia, who locks him out of her house. With an allusion to sexual consummation, he without reason dies while she is still young. Other Tibullus elegies indicate that he’s forced to travel and fight in wars. Love has become as arbitrary as war, and love and war are poetically enmeshed:

Now trivial love is to be practiced, while breaking down doors
isn’t shameful and one delights in sowing quarrels.
Here I’m a good general and soldier. Go far away, you
ensigns and trumpets, carry wounds to greedy men,
and carry wealth to them. Secure with my gathered heap,
I’ll despise their riches, and despise hunger too.

{ nunc levis est tractanda venus, dum frangere postes
non pudet et rixas inseruisse iuvat.
hic ego dux milesque bonus: vos, signa tubaeque,
ite procul, cupidis vulnera ferte viris,
ferte et opes: ego composito securus acervo
dites despiciam despiciamque famem. }[16]

Tibullus has deliberately created semantic incoherence. Like a soldier seeking spoils, he despises hunger and is satisfied with gathering a heap of unspecified objects. The delight of love is the trivial, stupid action of breaking down doors and sowing quarrels. With this incoherence, Tibullus protested against war and against the love of Gallus’s love elegy.

While violence against men is effaced or excused within dominant gynocentric ideology, Tibullus recognized that Gallus’s love elegy endorses brutal violence against men. Tibullus mockingly declared its rules for men:

And for me let the rules be harsh, let me never be able
to praise another without her going for my eyes,
and if I’m thought to have wronged her, let me be taken by my hair
and flung face down in the middle of the street.

{ et mihi sint durae leges, laudare nec ullam
possim ego quin oculos appetat illa meos;
et si quid peccasse puter, ducarque capillis
in medias pronus proripiarque vias. }[17]

Justice systems have long treated men much more harshly than women. In the ancient world, blinding was a punishment for profaning the sacred. The woman is a sacred idol in Gallus’s love elegy. The man is merely a slave to be flung face down in the street. Ovid complained of his girlfriend, “If I praise another, wretched me, you tear out my hair with your fingernails {siquam laudavi, misero petis ungue capillos}.”[18] Urging Delia’s husband to allow him to be her guardian, Tibullus underscored men’s subordination to women in Gallus’s love elegy:

But trust her to my keeping: then I’ll not refuse
savage blows, or shrink from chains on my ankles.

{ at mihi servandam credas: non saeva recuso
verbera, detrecto non ego vincla pedum. }[19]

Men shouldn’t have to suffer savage blows from women or enslavement in love for women. Yet the abasement of men in Gallus’s love elegy is the same as the abasement of men as vassals in the sexual feudalism of troubadour and trobairitz love lyric. Like the violence against men celebrated in Homeric epic, domestic violence against men isn’t recognized within dominant gynocentric discourse. Scholarly discussion of domestic violence today, even with respect Roman elegy, is an appalling spectacle of ignorance and gender bigotry.[20]

Men in Gallus’s love elegy enjoy love as war. Gallus apparently was a patron of Tibullus’s near contemporary Propertius. Propertius wrote that his beloved girl abusing him was sweet:

Sweet to me was the lamplight brawl we had last night,
all the abuse from your insane tongue.
You be truly bold: attack my hair
and scratch my face with your lovely nails.
You threaten to bring a flame to burn out my eyes —
rip my clothes and strip bare my chest!
When crazed with wine, you knock over the table and
with your insane hand fling at me full cups.
…
Let love-rivals see the wounds of my bitten neck.
Let bruises inform that I’ve had my girl with me.
I want either to suffer in love or hear of suffering,

{ Dulcis ad hesternas fuerat mihi rixa lucernas,
vocis et insanae tot maledicta tuae.
tu vero nostros audax invade capillos
et mea formosis unguibus ora nota,
tu minitare oculos subiecta exurere flamma,
fac mea rescisso pectora nuda sinu!
cum furibunda mero mensam propellis et in me
proicis insana cymbia plena manu
…
in morso aequales videant mea vulnera collo:
me doceat livor mecum habuisse meam.
aut in amore dolere volo aut audire dolentem }[21]

Following Gallus, Propertius explicitly associated the pleasure of love with war:

Sweeter was love’s fire for Paris, with weapons engaged with Greeks,
so as to be able to bring pleasure to his Helen, daughter of Tyndareus.
When the Danaans were winning, with savage Hector remaining firm,
Paris waged the mightiest war in Helen’s embrace.
With weapons either with you or with a rival for you
will I always be: peace with you will never satisfy me.

{ dulcior ignis erat Paridi, cum Graia per arma
Tyndaridi poterat gaudia ferre suae:
dum vincunt Danai, dum restat barbarus Hector,
ille Helenae in gremio maxima bella gerit.
aut tecum aut pro te mihi cum rivalibus arma
semper erunt: in te pax mihi nulla placet. }

War is institutionally structured violence against men. That’s obvious, but scarcely acknowledged. Gallus’s love elegy similarly supports violence against men in love, and the subordination of men to women. Propertius didn’t challenge these premises of Gallus’s love elegy, but Tibullus did.

Tibullus ended his first book of love elegy with a deeply challenging depiction of love, war, and rustic peace. Tibullus’s tableau is as disturbing and subversive as Ausonius’s Wedding Cento:

From the woods the farmer rides, himself half-sober,
going home in a wagon with his wife and children.
But then love’s battles are inflamed. Torn hair
and broken doors the woman bewails.
She cries, her tender cheeks bruised. But the victor himself
cries that his own mad hands were so strong.
And lewd love supplies evil words to their quarrel;
between the angry couple love sits unconcerned.

{ rusticus e lucoque vehit, male sobrius ipse,
uxorem plaustro progeniemque domum.
sed veneris tunc bella calent, scissosque capillos
femina, perfractas conqueriturque fores;
flet teneras subtusa genas: sed victor et ipse
flet sibi dementes tam valuisse manus.
at lascivus Amor rixae mala verba ministrat,
inter et iratum lentus utrumque sedet. }[22]

Broken doors makes no sense relative to a couple going to their own home. That’s a figure imported from Gallus’s love elegy to this rustic scene. Torn hair and bruised cheeks are women’s self-injury in urbane lamenting of beloved men’s deaths. Relative to rustic marital love, the extra-normative love of Gallus’s love elegy plays with the couple, he half-sober and she perhaps completely drunk. The husband’s mad hands are those of the insane lover Gallus. Gallus’s love elegy here colonizes rustic love.

Tibullus in his subsequent eight verses thematically depicted men’s gender subordination to women in Gallus’s love elegy. To his earlier association of iron and war Tibullus added stone, a much more primitive substance:

Oh, he’s stone and iron, he whoever would strike his girl:
that pulls down the gods from the heavens.
Let it be enough to have torn thin clothes from her limbs.
Let it be enough to have tousled her adorned hair.
Having moved her to tears is enough, for four times blessed is he
whose anger is able to make a tender girl weep.
But he whose hands will be savage — he should carry
a shield and pike and be far from the gentle love goddess.

{ a lapis est ferrumque, suam quicumque puellam
verberat: e caelo deripit ille deos.
sit satis e membris tenuem rescindere vestem
sit satis ornatus dissoluisse comae
sit lacrimas movisse satis; quater ille beatus
quo tenera irato flere puella potest.
sed manibus qui saevus erit, scutumque sudemque
is gerat et miti sit procul a Venere. }

This gentle love goddess just spurred the rustic couple’s quarrel. Within heterosexual conflict, women’s violence is privileged. The girl may gouge out the boy’s eyes, but the gods protect the girl from the boy hitting her. To be repeatedly blessed with the fire of the woman’s passion, the man must successfully enact masculine love play: tearing off the woman’s thin clothes, tousling her hair, and dominating her emotionally. Tibullus elsewhere described the war-goddess Bellona, working on behalf of Love, savagely bloodying her own arms with a double-axe. Roman military service put to arms slave men, men conscripts, and citizen men compelled to fight according to gendered selective service. Associating men in the Roman army with savages unworthy of love devalues men’s lives relative to women’s lives.

Tibullus almost surely meant his concluding presentation of rustic domestic violence to be critical insight into Gallus’s love elegy. Tibullus’s patron Messalla served in the Roman army, as did Tibullus himself. Neither are plausibly interpreted in Tibullus’s elegy as truly savage men. The savage man unworthy of love is better interpreted as pointing to Gallus’s love elegy. That poetically associated love with war. It also supported men’s gender subordination in love and war. Tibullus’s first book of elegies concludes:

But come to us with wheat in your hand, nourishing Peace;
may your shining white breast flow with fruits before us.

{ at nobis, Pax alma, veni spicamque teneto,
profluat et pomis candidus ante sinus. }

This rustic image of feminine peace has an erotic charge. Violence against men arises primarily from men competing for women’s love and men striving to serve women. Peace isn’t a fruit of women’s breasts. Peace depends on men culturally sophisticated enough to strive to love other men as much as they naturally love women. Tibullus’s distinctive and sophisticated use of “country life {rura}” works ironically against the themes of “love {amor}” and “war / military service {militia}” established in Gallus’s love elegy.[23]

Parthenius’s stories of suffering in love are consistent with Tibullus’s subtle understanding of violence against men. Parthenius recounted persons overcoming insane love through moral reflection. Parthenius represented women culpably entangled in violence against men, including rape of men. He also presented solidarity among men as vital to gender equality and social justice. Parthenius dedicated his story collection to Gallus, yet Gallus didn’t appreciate its significance for love elegy. Tibullus, whether via Parthenius or some other source, understood from ancient Greek stories the key meninist theme of love for men.[24]

Meninist literary criticism encompasses, penetrates, and moves beyond both feminist theory and queer theory. Man, whether a generic abstraction for humans or an instantiation of toxic masculinity, must yeild to men as fully human beings worthy of love merely for their being. Men carry a seminal blessing. Men have created most of the material structure of modern civilization. Both women and men should love men. The future of humane civilization, if there is one, isn’t female. It’s meninist.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• women flyting, serious fighting: Homer’s Aeneas versus Rose & Lily
• Tityrus the bellwether in the terrible ram vision of Sedulius Scottus
• Fulvia: female tyrant amid collapsing Roman Republic

Notes:

[1] Ovid presented himself as fourth in a line of eminent elegists:

greedy fate gave
to Tibullus no time for friendship with me.
Tibullus was your successor, Gallus; Propertius his.
After them I myself came, fourth in order of time.

{ nec avara Tibullo
tempus amicitiae fata dedere meae
successor fuit hic tibi, Galle, Propertius illi;
quartus ab his serie temporis ipse fui }

Ovid, Sorrows {Tristia} 4.10.51-4, Latin text from Wheeler (1924) of the Loeb Classical Library, my English translation. Quintilian, writing in the middle of the first century GC, similarly listed four eminent Latin elegists:

In elegy, too, we challenge the Greeks. The most refined and elegant author seems to me to be Tibullus. Some prefer Propertius. Ovid is more self-indulgent than these two, Gallus more harsh.

{ Elegia quoque Graecos provocamus, cuius mihi tersus atque elegans maxime videtur auctor Tibullus. Sunt qui Propertium malint. Ovidius utroque lascivior, sicut durior Gallus. }

Quintilian, The Orator’s Education {Institutio Oratoria} 10.1.93, Latin text and English translation (modified insubstantially) from Russell (2002). While Gallus was the first of the eminent Latin love elegists, Latin love elegy existed before Gallus. Raymond (2013) p. 66. Regarding Gallus’s position in the development of Latin love elegy, Claassen summarized:

He was perhaps the first to write poems that were shorter than those of Greek elegy, which usually dealt with a single topic, but were longer than the erotic epigrams (that had the same metric form) made popular by Catullus. Recent work on Gallus seems in general to concur that the poet set the “unhappy tone” for Roman elegiacs. Parthenius dedicated his erotic myths to Gallus, who may have been the first to draw himself as first-person participant within a myth.

Claassen (2017) pp. 322-3, n. 28.

[2] Parthenius of Nicaea, Sufferings in Love {Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα} 6.4-5 (About Pallene {Περὶ Παλλήνης}), ancient Greek text and English translation (modified slightly to be more easily readable) from Lightfoot (2009). All the details of the story above are from Parthenius’s account. The manchette for this story states, “The story is told by Theagenes and in Hegesippus’ Palleniaca {Ἱστορεῖ Θεαγένης καὶ Ἡγήσιππος ἐν Παλληνιακοῖς}.” Id. Here’s the Greek text of Hercher (1858). For comparison to similar ancient Greek stories, Lightfoot (1999) pp. 403-7. Lightfoot’s commentary shows no concern for the horrific violence against men.

[3] Inscription on trilingual stela erected in Philae 29 BGC. Latin text (CIL 3.1414 7,5) from Packard Humanities Institute’s Epigraphy Database (simplified textual presentation), my English translation benefiting from those of Minas-Nerpelm & Pfeiffer (2010) pp. 281-2 and Török (2008) via Attalus. On what’s known of Gallus’s biography, Raymond (2013).

[4] On Gallus love for Cytheris / Volumnia and her leaving him for Mark Antony, Raymond (2013) p. 60. The fourth-century commentator Servius, writing on Virgil, Eclogue 10.1, states that Gallus was “an eminent poet {poeta eximius}”; Gallus “wrote four books on his love for Cytheris {amorum suorum de Cytheride scripsit libros quattuor}.”

[5] Virgil, Eclogue 10.21-3, Latin text from Fairclough & Goold (1999), my English translation benefiting from that of id. and A.S. Kline (2001). The subsequent quote is similarly from Eclogue 10.42-9.

[6] Ovid, Loves {Amores} 1.15.29-30, Latin text from Ehwald (1907) via Perseus, my English translation. Here are William Turpin’s textual notes and A.S. Kline’s translation of the full poem.

[7] Martial, Epigrams {Epigrammata} 8.73.6, Latin text from Heraeus & Borovskij (1925) via Perseus, my English translation.

[8] Parthenius of Nicaea, Poetic Fragments, fragment 27a, ancient Greek text (slightly simplified presentation) and English translation from Lightfoot (2009) pp. 516-7. Parthenius wrote a farewell poem to one traveling overseas (a propemptikon {προπεμπτικόν}). Parthenius, fragment 26, available in id. Gallus apparently wrote a propemptikon to Lycoris. Cairns (1979) p. 226. Nothing is known about the relation of Parthenius’s propemptikon to Gallus’s propemptikon.

Gallus almost surely never married Lycoris. Whether Gallus married isn’t known. Martial describes a Roman official in north Africa (Libya) named Gallus who had an adulterous, promiscuous wife. Martial suggests that Gallus’s wife preferred to penetrate sexually others:

Among the peoples of Libya, your wife, Gallus, has a bad reputation
for the ugly crime of immoderate greed.
But the stories are sheer lies. She isn’t accustomed to
take at all. To what then is she accustomed? To give.

{ Gentibus in Libycis uxor tua, Galle, male audit
immodicae foedo crimine avaritiae.
sed mera narrantur mendacia: non solet illa
accipere omnino. quid solet ergo? dare. }

Martial, Epigrammata 2.56, sourced as above. Galli were castrated men who served the goddess Cybele. They were thought to perform oral sex on women. Nicholas (2017) p. 26.

Whether Martial was referring specially to Cornelius Gallus in 2.56, or some other Roman official in north Africa named Gallus, isn’t clear. Propertius refers to three or four different men named Gallus (Kline (2001) identifies four; Somerville (2009) and others, three). However, given Cornelius Gallus’s eminence as both a literary author and a Roman official, this epigram likely cast a shadow on Cornelius Gallus in ancient readers’ minds.

Martial 4.16 insinuates that a man named Gallus was having sex with his stepmother. In particular, he wasn’t her stepson while she was his father’s wife, and after his father died, she lived with him. That reference to Gallus lacks the additional specificity of he being a Roman official in north Africa.

[9] Propertius, Elegies 2.34.91-2, Latin text from the Teubner edition of Mueller (1898) via Perseus, my English translation. A.S. Kline provides a freely available English translation of the whole poem. Cf. Propertius, Elegies 1.5, 1.10, and 1.13, all of which some scholars plausibly argue refer to Cornelius Gallus. Cairns (2006) argues that Gallus was a major influence on Propertius and that Gallus was a patron of Propertius.

[10] Cairns speculated, “the influence of Parthenius upon Gallus must have been strong.” Cairns (1979) p. 226. At least with respect to violence against men and gender, the evidence seems to me to suggest that Parthenius had little influence upon Gallus.

[11] Tibullus, Elegies {Elegiae} 1.1.1-6, Latin text from Postgate (1913), my English translation benefiting from that of id. and A.S. Kline (2001). The hearth shining with “constant {adsiduo}” flame seems to me to suggest light connecting earth and sky (“to the star {astro}”). Subsequent quotes from Tibullus are similarly sourced. For a straight-forward, accessible review of the themes of love, war, and country life in Tibullus, Brazouski (1979).

[12] Tibullus, Elegiae 1.10.1-14. Here are some English translation notes. The wonderful translation “How iron-willed and truly made of iron he was! {Quam ferus et vere ferreus ille fuit!}” is from A.S. Kline.

The manuscript reading vulgi in v. 1.10.11 is suspect. Recent editions emend to valgi. That implies Tibullus addressing his contemporary Valgius Rufus, a Roman senator and writer of Latin elegy. Two fifteenth-century manuscripts record the conjecture dulcis. The Gallus fragment from Qaṣr Ibrîm provides some additional support for dulcis. O’Hara (2005). O’Hara commented, “if we read dulcis, we find that the verses on the Gallus papyrus influenced Tibullus.” Id. p. 319. Gallus undoubtedly influenced Tibullus. As argued above, Tibullus at the broad thematic level seems to have written against Gallus’s love elegy.

[13] Tibullus, Elegiae 1.1.41-8. Tibullus contrasted the beloved “lady of the house {domina}” in v. 46 with references to the beloved “girl {puella}” of Gallus’s love elegy in vv. 52 and 55. Claassen observed: “It is now generally accepted that use of domina (‘mistress’) in the erotic sense in elegy originated with Gallus.” Id. p. 330.

[14] From Qaṣr Ibrîm papyrus with text attributed to Gallus; Latin text (simplified presentation) and English translation (adapted insubstantially) from Anderson, Parsons & Nisbet (1979) p. 140. This Gallus fragment has attracted enormous scholarly attention. See, e.g. the work of Adrian Pay, such as Pay (2016). For a comprehensive recent review and analysis, Claassen (2017) pp. 325-34.

[15] Tibullus, Elegiae 1.1.49-60. O’Rourke associated Tibullus 1 and 10 with the song of Ares and Aphrodite in the Odyssey and Empedoclean conflict between love and strike as represented in Lucretius’s De rerum natura. Concerning the emergence of Delia in Tibullus’s arms, O’Rourke stated:

Given Tibullus’ quasi-Epicurean desire to live a peaceful and secluded life, and the specific evocations of Lucretius earlier in the elegy, it is tempting to contemplate in this picture of Tibullus, loving and dying in Delia’s embrace at the opening of Book 1, an analogy with the embracing lovers Mars and Venus in parallel position at the opening of De rerum natura 1.

O’Rourke (2014) para. 10. Tibullus seems to me to have moved on to a critical perspective like that on Mars and Venus in Johannes de Hauvilla’s Architrenius.

[16] Tibullus, Elegiae 1.1.73-8. On Tibullus’s military travel with Messalla, 1.3.1-22. and on Messalla’s foreign military success, 1.7. Messalla’s triump occurred on September 25, 27 BGC. Tibullus imagines himself having died “following Messalla by land and sea {Messallam terra dum sequiturque mari}.” 1.3.56; cf. 1.1.45. Nonetheless, Tibullus also proclaims:

That man was iron who, when he could have possessed you,
foolishly preferred to follow after war and plunder.
Let him chase Cilicia’s routed troop before him,
and pitch his war camp on captured ground.
All covered in silver, all in gold,
let him conspicuously sit on his swift horse.
If only I myself might yoke oxen with you, Delia,
and graze flocks on the usual hill,
and while I hold you in my tender arms,
soft sleep be mine even on the rugged earth.

{ ferreus ille fuit qui, te cum posset habere,
maluerit praedas stultus et arma sequi.
ille licet Cilicum victas agat ante catervas,
ponat et in capto Martia castra solo,
totus et argento contectus, totus et auro,
insideat celeri conspiciendus equo;
ipse boves mea si tecum modo Delia possim
iungere et in solito pascere monte pecus,
et te dum liceat teneris retinere lacertis,
mollis et inculta sit mihi somnus humo. }

1.2.67-74. Conflicting claims and irony are central to Tibullus’s love elegy.

[17] Tibullus, Elegiae 1.6.69-72.

[18] Ovid, Loves {Amores} 2.7.7, Latin text from the Teubner edition of Ehwald (1907) via Perseus, my English translation. Here’s A.S. Kline’s translation of the whole poem.

[19] Tibullus, Elegiae 1.6.37-8. Women’s violence against men sometimes provokes men’s violence against women. In reality, much of domestic violence is mutual violence. Yet that mutual violence isn’t a normative expression of love. It’s thus distinct from the mutual violence that Tibullus depicted within Gallus’s love elegy:

Then I gave her juices and herbs to erase the bruises
that mutual love makes teeth imprint on the flesh.

{ tunc sucos herbasque dedi quis livor abiret
quem facit impresso mutua dente venus. }

Tibullus, Elegiae 1.6.13-4.

[20] O’Rouke (2018) is best interpreted not as a unique authorial creation, but as reflecting pervasive gynocentric imperatives in discussing domestic volence. It approaches social-scientific literature on domestic violence with worse interpretive skills than mass-market newspaper columnists. It doesn’t consider obvious biases in survey questions about rape. The connection that it puts forward between military service and intimate-partner violence ignores gender bias in determinating perpetrators of domestic violence and gender bias in military service.

Under gynocentric dominance, scholars are compelled to make absurd claims even in relation to ancient Latin love elegy. Consider:

In Roman elegy, then, depictions of the domina’s abuse of her lover should not be taken as recognition that the perpetrator of domestic violence is not always the male: the bruising with which Propertius threatens Cynthia if she goes to bed clothed (2.15.17-20, quoted above, p. 116) is not symbolically equivalent to that which elsewhere he invites as a token of her true love (3.8.5-10) and displays, or wishes to display, to his peers as manly ‘war wounds’ (3.8.21-2). … Ultimately, then, the marks of physical violence in elegy, whether (imagined) on the male or the female body, always betoken male dominance and female servitude.

O’Rouke (2018) p. 124. Gynocentrism upholds female dominance in part by insisting, no matter what the facts, “male dominance and female servitude” is the unquestionably necessary and only permissible master narrative. According to dominant gynocentric ideology, the master narrative “male dominance and female servitude” must control all reading and thinking.

[21] Propertius, Elegies {Elegiae} 3.8.1-8, 21-3, Latin text from the Teubner edition of Mueller (1898) via Perseus, my English translation. A.S. Kline provides a freely available English translation of the whole poem. In 2.5, Propertius claims that he would never act with such violence toward a beloved woman. The subsequent quote above is similarly from 3.8.29-34.

Propertius’s representation of violence is consistent with Cynthia’s violence toward him when she discovered him enjoying a threesome with Phyllis and Teia:

She angrily thrusts her fingernails into Phyllis’s face.
Terrified, Teia cries out, “Help, neighbors, come with water!”
Their screamed claims disturb the sleeping Romans,
and the whole street becomes mad with resounding voices.
With torn hair and clothes ripped, Phylllis and Teia
escape into the nearby tavern on the dark street.
Cynthia rejoices in her spoils and victoriously runs back
and gashes my face with the back of her hand,
marks my neck, drawing blood with her bite,
and especially strikes my eyes, which deserve it.
And at last when her arms tire from beating me,
she drags forth Lygdamus from hiding at the bed’s
left side. Prostrate, he pleads to my guardian spirit.

{ Phyllidos iratos in vultum conicit ungues:
territa ‘vicini,’ Teþïa clamat, ‘aquam!’
crimina sopitos turbant elata Quirites,
omnis et insana semita voce sonat.
illas direptisque comis tunicisque solutis
excipit obscurae prima taberna viae.
Cynthia gaudet in exuviis victrixque recurrit
et mea perversa sauciat ora manu,
imponitque notam collo morsuque cruentat,
praecipueque oculos, qui meruere, ferit.
atque ubi iam nostris lassavit bracchia plagis,
Lygdamus, ad plutei fulcra sinistra latens,
eruitur geniumque meum prostratus adorat. }

Propertius, Elegiae 4.8.57-69, sourced as above.

[22] Tibullus, Elegiae 1.10.51-8. On the war-goddess Bellona bloodying her arms, 1.6.45-50. On Tibullus’s challenges to gender polarization, Nikoloutsos (2011) and Damer (2014).

Tibullus didn’t want his beloved girl Delia to suffer similar wounds through traditional female mourning practices after his death:

as for you — do not offend my ghost, but spare your loosened
hair and spare your tender cheeks, Delia.

{ tu manes ne laede meos, sed parce solutis
crinibus et teneris, Delia, parce genis. }

1.1.67-8. Tibullus also emphatically rejected committing violence against Delia:

I wouldn’t wish to strike you, but if such madness
were to come to me, I’d prefer to have no hands.

{ non ego te pulsare velim, sed venerit iste
si furor, optarim non habuisse manus. }

1.6.73-4.

The subsequent two quotes above are from 1.10.59-66 (Oh, he’s stone and iron…) and 1.10.67-68 (But come to us with wheat…).

[23] Gaisser recognized rura {country life} as Tibullus’s distinctive contribution to Latin love elegy. She wrote:

we shall be concerned with the relation between amor and rura. The prevailing modern view sees these themes allied against militia: love and the country-side, or love in the countryside, is viewed as Tibullus’ alternative to participation in war. We will question this view … In 1.10 and 1.1 amor is by no means represented as the poet’s principal theme; it receives less emphasis than the rura and its qualities suffer in comparison or juxtaposition with those of the rura.

Gaisser (1983) pp. 58, 72. Gaisser perceived Tibullus to be challenging Propertius’s first book. Id. p. 72. Gallus plausibly was Propertius’s patron when Propertius wrote his first book. Cairns (2006) Ch. 3-4. Tibullus’s challenge to Propertius is more generally a challenge to the poetic figuring of love and war in Gallus’s love elegy.

[24] Tibullus didn’t necessarily have to read Parthenius’s collection in order to reflect upon gender in such stories of sufferings in love. Cairns (1979) documents that Hellenistic poetry was a major influence on Tibullus.

[images] (1) Gallus as a horseman attacking a crouching warrior-man. Drawing of engraving on trilingual stela from Philae. From Bresciani (1989), p. 98, Fig. 1. On the iconography, Minas-Nerpelm & Pfeiffer (2010) pp. 275-8. (2) Marie de’ Medici (lived from 1575 to 1642) as triumphal Bellona. Painting by Peter Paul Rubens, as commissioned by Marie de’ Medici. Painted between 1621 and 1625. Preserved as accession # INV 1792 in the Louvre Museum, Paris. Image thanks to the Web Gallery of Art and Wikimedia Commons. (3) Bellona, portrayed as a contemporary Dutch woman (cropped slightly). The shield depicts the head of the Gorgon Medusa. Painting by Rembrandt van Rijn. Painted in 1633. Preserved as accession # 32.100.23 (credit: The Friedsam Collection, Bequest of Michael Friedsam, 1931) in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Image thanks to the Met and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Anderson, R. D., P. J. Parsons, and R. G. M. Nisbet. 1979. “Elegiacs by Gallus from Qaṣr Ibrîm.” The Journal of Roman Studies. 69: 125-155.

Brazouski, Antoinette. 1979. The Augustan Attitudes of the Poetic Persona of Tibullus. Ph.D. Thesis, Loyola University Chicago.

Bresciani, Edda. 1989. “La Stele Trilingue di Cornelio Gallo: una Rilettura Egittologica.” Egitto e Vicino Oriente. 12: 93-98.

Cairns, Francis. 1979. Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Cairns, Francis. 2006. Sextus Propertius: the Augustan elegist. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. (review by Elina Pyy)

Claassen, Jo-Marie. 2017. “The Exiled Ovid’s Reception of Gallus.” The Classical Journal. 112 (3): 318-341.

Damer, Erika Zimmermann. 2014. “Gender Reversals and Intertextuality in Tibullus.” Classical World. 107 (4): 493-514.

Davis, P. J. 2012. “Reception of Elegy in Augustan and Post-Augustan Poetry.” Ch. 27 (pp. 441-458) in Gold, Barbara K., ed. A Companion to Roman Love Elegy. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

Fairclough, H. Rushton, revised by G. P. Goold. 1999. Virgil. Eclogues. Georgics. Aeneid: Books 1-6. Loeb Classical Library 63. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Gaisser, Julia Haig. 1983. “Amor, rura and militia in Three Elegies of Tibullus: 1.1, 1.5 and 1.10.” Latomus. 42 (1): 58-72.

Kline, A. S. 2001. Tibullus. Elegies. Brindin Press Virtual Chapbook 40. Online. The Latin text here seems to me inferior to that of Postgate (1913 / 1988). Alternate presention without Latin text at Poetry in Translation.

Lightfoot, J. L. 1999. Parthenius of Nicaea: The poetical fragments and the  Ἐρωτικὰ Παθήματα. Oxford: Clarendon Press. (review by Christopher Francese)

Lightfoot, J. L. 2009. Hellenistic Collection: Philitas, Alexander of Aetolia, Hermesianax, Euphorion, Parthenius. Loeb Classical Library, 508. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press. (reviews by Giambattista D’Alessio, by Claudio De Stefani, and by Iiro Laukola)

Minas-Nerpelm, Martina and Stefan Pfeiffer. 2010. “Establishing Roman Rule In Egypt: The Trilingual Stela Of C. Cornelius Gallus From Philae.” Ch. 13 (pp. 265-298) in Lembke, Katja, Martina Minas-Nerpel, and Stefan Pfeiffer. Tradition and Transformation: Egypt under Roman rule: proceedings of the international conference, Hildesheim, Roemer- and Pelizaeus-Museum, 3-6 July 2008. Leiden: Brill.

Nicholas, Lucy. 2017. “Ovid’s Calculated Ambiguity.” Paper presented at Globalizing Ovid: An International Conference in Commemoration of the Bimillennium of Ovid’s Death. May 31–June 2, 2017, in Shanghai, China.

Nikoloutsos, Konstantinos P. 2011. “From Tomb to Womb: Tibullus 1.1 and the Discourse of Masculinity in Post-Civil War Rome.” Scholia: Studies in Classical Antiquity. 20 (1): 52-71.

O’Hara, James J. 2005. “War and the Sweet Life: The Gallus Fragment and the Text of Tibullus 1.10.11.” The Classical Quarterly. 55 (1): 317-319.

O’Rourke, Donncha. 2014. “Lovers in Arms: Empedoclean Love and Strife in Lucretius and the Elegists.” Dictynna 11, online.

O’Rourke, Donncha. 2018. “Make war not love: Militia amoris and domestic violence in Roman elegy.” Ch. 4 (pp. 110-139) in Gale, Monica R., and John H. D. Scourfield, eds. Texts and Violence in the Roman World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Pay, Adrian. 2016. “A (or Another) Note on Gallus Fr. 2.2-5 (Courtney).” Online.

Postgate, J.P. ed. and trans. 1913. Tibullus in Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris. Revised by G. P. Goold (1988). Loeb Classical Library 6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Raymond, Emmanuelle. 2012. “Caius Cornelius Gallus: ‘The inventor of Latin love elegy.’” Ch. 3 (pp. 59-67) in Thorsen, Thea S., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Latin Love Elegy. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.

Russell, Donald A., ed. and trans. 2002. Quintilian. The Orator’s Education. Volume IV: Books 9-10. Loeb Classical Library 127. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Somerville, Ted. 2009. “The Pleonasm of the New Gallus, and the Gallus of the Monobiblos.” Mnemosyne. 62 (2): 295-297.

To demonstrate romantic sensibility and gain warm acclaim, a successful man often proclaims that he owes all his success to his wife. Under the common law of coverture, a husband is assigned responsibility for crimes his wife committed. Such examples aren’t unusual. Crediting women while blaming men underpins the modern idea of gender equality. Propertius and Prudentius attest to that also being a classical practice.

In first century BGC Rome, the poet Propertius became famous for writing in the tradition of Gallus’s love elegy. The Oxford World’s Classics paperback edition of Propertius’s poems in English translation, published in 2009, declares on its book-back blurb:

Of all the great classical love poets, Propertius (c. 50-10 BC) is surely one of those with most immediate appeal for readers today. His helpless infatuation for the sinister figure of his mistress Cynthia forms the main subject of his poetry and is analyzed with a tormented but witty grandeur in all its changing moods, from ecstasy to suicidal despair. [1]

Propertius’s poems have immediate appeal to many readers today for their appalling celebration of men’s abasement to women. More men die from suicide than from homicide. Four times more men than women commit suicide. To make men’s lives matter, by far the most important policy would be to reduce the power of sinister women over men. Instead, women and men delight in reading about Propertius’s infatuation with Cynthia.

Like many successful men today, Propertius credited his mistress Cynthia for all his poetic success. She is the source of his poetry. She makes him a genius:

You ask, how do I write so many songs of love,
how my soft book comes forth, the talk of all.
Not Calliope nor Apollo sings me this;
my girl herself makes me a genius.
If I see her go forth in shining Coan silk,
from that silk gown a scroll of verse comes;
or if I see her tresses roam loose along her brow,
she goes rejoicing, famous for her hair;
or if her ivory fingers strike songs forth on the lyre,
I marvel how her skilled hands press the strings;
or when she droops her drowsy eyes that yearn for sleep,
I find a thousand new themes for my poems;
or if she throws her gown off to wrestle with me nude,
ah, then, then I compose whole Iliads!
Whatever she has done, whatever she has said,
great legends spring from nowhere into being.

{ Quaeritis, unde mihi totiens scribantur amores,
unde meus veniat mollis in ore liber.
non haec Calliope, non haec mihi cantat Apollo.
ingenium nobis ipsa puella facit.
sive illam Cois fulgentem incedere vidi,
totum de Coa veste volumen erit;
seu vidi ad frontem sparsos errare capillos,
gaudet laudatis ire superba comis;
sive lyrae carmen digitis percussit eburnis,
miramur, facilis ut premat arte manus;
seu compescentis somnum declinat ocellos,
invenio causas mille poeta novas;
seu nuda erepto mecum luctatur amictu,
tum vero longas condimus Iliadas;
seu quidquid fecit sivest quodcumque locuta,
maxima de nihilo nascitur historia. }[2]

Propertius imagined the Muses placing Cynthia in front of their dancing. Then they would give to Propertius poetic laurels. He understood Cynthia’s eminent place, “for without you my genius has no recognized value {nam sine te nostrum non valet ingenium}.”[3] In our age of individuality and intense concern for gender equity, how can such a fanciful gender allocation of credit be supported?

Although Cynthia is said to have created all of Propertius’s love poetry, women allegedly lack agency with respect to wrong-doing. The poet Prudentius, writing about 400 GC, underscored the importance of recognizing agency:

So did the horse, iron, bull, lion, rope, or olive
have criminal power within them when formed?
The cause in madness by which man is killed isn’t iron,
but the human hand, nor is a horse the creator of the frenzied insanity
of the circus, its folly and wild applause.
That’s mob mentality, destitute of reason, not the horses’ course,
that rages on. Shameful passion ruins a useful gift.

{ numquid equus, ferrum, taurus, leo, funis, olivum
in se vim sceleris, cum formarentur, habebant?
quod iugulatur homo, non ferrum causa furoris
sed manus est; nec equum vesania fervida circi
auctorem levitatis habet rabidive fragoris:
mens vulgi rationis inops, non cursus equorum
perfurit: infami studio perit utile donum. }[4]

God made Adam with freedom of choice. Adam didn’t have to be a slave to God or a slave to women:

“Go forth,” says the very parent, the maker and creator of Adam,
“Go forth, human, ennobled above all through my mouth’s breath,
not a slave, powerful, ruler of things, ruler also
and judge of your own mind. Subject yourself to me only
by your free will, so that your subjection will be itself a liberty
in your free judgement. I don’t force or constrain you by my might,
but remind you to flee injustice and pursue justice.
Light is companion of the just; the wicked’s companion is horrid death.
Choose the way of life. Virtue shall conduct you through the ages;
your fault in turn will condemn you for eternity.
With freedom granted, choose between these alternate fates.”

{ “vade,” ait ipse parens opifexque et conditor Adae,
“vade, homo, adflatu nostri praenobilis oris,
insubiecte, potens, rerum arbiter, arbiter idem
et iudex mentis propriae, mihi subdere soli
sponte tua, quo sit subiectio et ipsa soluto
libera iudicio, non cogo nec exigo per vim,
sed moneo iniustum fugias iustumque sequaris.
lux comes est iusti, comes est mors horrida iniqui,
elige rem vitae; tua virtus temet in aevum
provehat, aeternum damnet tua culpa vicissim,
praestet et alterutram permissa licentia sortem.” }[5]

With his own freedom and faulty choice, Adam fell. Eve, so blameless that she isn’t even named, bore no guilt for Adam’s fall:

By this kindness and so abundant gift, Adam is a wanderer.
He then transgresses established law, and with foresight
and volition chooses lethal ways, while believing more useful to himself
what, against God’s prohibiting, the clever serpent persuaded,
persuaded certainly by exhortations, not compelled by harsh
command. Accused of this criminal act, the woman
responded to God that, herself enticed by evil artifice,
she persuaded her man. Her man himself then freely
consented. Could he not have spurned her exhortations with the freedom
of his upright soul? He could have. For surely God earlier
urged him to follow the better way willingly, but he,
spurning counsel, believed more the savage enemy.

{ hac pietate vagus et tanto munere abundans,
transit propositum fas et letalia prudens
eligit atque volens, magis utile dum sibi credit
quod prohibente Deo persuasit callidus anguis,
persuasit certe hortatu, non inpulit acri
imperio; hoc mulier rea criminis exprobranti
respondit Domino, suadelis se malefabris
inlectam suasisse viro; vir et ipse libenter
consensit, licuitne hortantem spernere recti
libertate animi? licuit; namque et Deus ante
suaserat ut meliora volens sequeretur; at ille
spernens consilium saevo plus credidit hosti. }[6]

In theory, Adam could have chosen to do other than what Eve urged. Most men with wives or girlfriends understand that such a choice isn’t feasible in practice. Systemic gynocentrism is real. Under U.S. tax law, 90% of the “innocent spouses” granted tax relief for illegal joint marital tax filings are wives.[7] With remarkable foresight into social development, Prudentius assigned Adam all the blame for his fall.

Leading authorities work assiduously today to promote gender equality for women. Promoting “gender equality for women” isn’t the same as promoting gender equality; instead, it’s about crediting women for more and blaming men for more. That’s in fact the classical practice, now enhanced by the modern propaganda apparatus and the ideological zeal of rabid monotheistic post-modernists. Men living within the Roman colonial legacy should seek a divorce from the Sabine women.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• “I owe all my success to my wife”: don’t clap, just laugh
• change must come: learn from Lygdamus & Propertius vs. domina Cynthia
• generation of vipers will be overcome when cocks crow

Notes:

[1] Lee (2009), from back cover.

[2] Propertius, Elegies 2.1.1-16, Latin text from Goold (1990), English translation (with my small changes) from Corelis (1995). A. S. Kline offers all of Propertius’s poems in English prose translation in a web-native presentation.

[3] Propertius, Elegies 2.30A.40, Latin text from Goold (1990), my English translation. Cf. 2.1.4.

[4] Prudentius, The Origin of Sin {Hamartigenia} vv. 358-64, Latin text from Thomson (1949) p. 228, my English translation, benefiting from that of id. and Malamud (2011) p. 21. These verses provide an early instance of the influential argument, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people.” Subsequent quotes from Hamartigenia are similarly sourced.

A proposed reform of U.S. tax law defining “innocent spouse” tax relief similarly emphasizes agency:

the existing innocent spouse relief regime should be replaced with one that respects joint filers’ agency when signing joint returns and affords relief only when a joint filer was unable to exercise that agency.

McMahon (2014) p. 141. Agency in earning money within a marriage, however, has no legal relevance in determining the allocation of assets upon divorce. Moreover, since the spouse that works outside the home to earn money for the marriage has less time to spend with children, that spouse is highly disadvantaged in seeking custody of children of the marriage.

[5] Hamartigenia, vv. 697-707. Cf. Genesis 2:7 (“God formed the human from the dirt and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life.”), Deuteronomy 30:15-20 (“Behold, today I have set before you life and prosperity, death and adversity. …”), James 1:25 (“the perfect law, the law of liberty”).

[6] Hamartigenia, vv. 708-19. In his Cathemerinon, Prudentius recognized Eve’s culpability in Adam’s fall:

Then the treacherous serpent
tempts the virgin’s untrained mind.
So with evil persuasion on her man, her partner,
she forces him to eat what was forbidden.
She herself will be ruined in the same way.

{ Hic draco perfidus indocile
virginis inlicit ingenium,
ut socium malesuada virum
mandere cogeret ex vetitis
ipsa pari peritura modo. }

Prudentius, Book of the Daily Round {Liber Cathemerinon} 3, “Hymn before the meal {Hymnus ante cibum},” st. 23 (vv. 111-5), Latin text from O’Daly (2012) p. 88, my English translation benefiting from that of id. p. 89 and Malamud (2011) p. 142.

Prudentius’s Hamartigenia distinctively treats Adam’s culpability:

Perhaps the most peculiar feature of the Hamartigenia to readers brought up on the Genesis account of the Creation and Fall of mankind and influenced by a literary tradition that has been fascinated by the figure of Eve is the way she is minimized, almost eliminated, from the narrative of the origin of sin. In this, Prudentius’s account of original sin differs greatly from the biblical account.

Malamud (2011) p. 140. Prudentius was a highly sophisticated writer who apparently understood gynocentric oppression. He may have been ironically invoking the classical practice of shifting blame from women to men.

[7] In enacting innocent spouse tax relief, the U.S. Congress clearly understood that such relief would vastly disproportionately benefit women:

All but one mention of innocent spouse relief in the Congressional Record referred to wives, most often divorced wives.

McMahon (2014) p. 149, n. 35. In Congressional debate concerning innocent spouse tax relief, Senator Jon Kyl declared: “Nine out of 10 innocent spouses are women.” Id. p. 49, citing statement of Senator Kyl in 1998. Available statistics on innocent spouse petitions are consistent with that claim:

Wives sought relief in 85.4 percent of total cases, 85.3 percent of the trial cases and 88.1 percent of appeals. Not only do women bring more cases, courts appear to be more sympathetic to wives than to husbands. Wives won 21.6 percent of their appeals and 37.4 percent of their trials and husbands won 0.0 percent of their appeals and 25.4 percent of their trial cases. As a result of the dominance wives have in bringing suit, wives won 89.5 percent of total taxpayer victories.

McMahon (2012) p. 662. Interpreted literally as a matter of reason and logic, innocent spouse law seems to undermine gender equality:

In the case of innocent spouse relief, in the attempt to help wives, relief might well cause more harm than good. For those spouses targeted for relief, we are creating a dangerous double standard. The reason for a more protective tax regime is that advocates worry that it is unfair to presume that wives can meaningfully evaluate the returns they sign. It is hard to see how this fails to send a signal to the nation that wives are not, or are at least not considered to be, equal members in marriage. This is not a message that we want Congress to send.

McMahon (2014) p. 184. More sophisticated interpretation better indicates the intended undermining of gender equality. The U.S. Congress gutted due process of law through domestic violence legislation enacted under grossly anti-men gender-bigoted claims about domestic violence. Gender-profiling husbands for arrest for domestic violence makes husband legally disadvantage spouses. Congress apparently intended to send a message of female privilege through its domestic violence laws. Congress plausibly sought to send a similar, politically advantageous message of female privilege with its innocent spouse tax law.

Innocent spouse law includes an open-ended opportunity to get tax relief under the heading “equitable relief.” According to the U.S. Internal Revenue Service:

If you don’t qualify for innocent spouse relief or separation of liability relief, you may still qualify for equitable relief. To qualify for equitable relief, you must establish that under all the facts and circumstances, it would be unfair to hold you liable for the deficiency or underpayment of tax.

The anti-men gender bias Congress intended is made more obvious with the additional explicit stipulation: “the IRS will take into account abuse and financial control by the nonrequesting spouse.”

[image] Nude woman (maenad) in Roman fresco in the Casa del Criptoportico (I 6,2) in Pompeii. Painted before 79 GC (probably first century). Image thanks to WolfgangRieger and Wikimedia Commons.

References:

Corelis, Jon. 1995. Roman Erotic Elegy: Selections from Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid and Sulpicia. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Poetic Drama & Poetic Theory 128. Salzburg: University of Salzburg.

Goold, G. P., ed and trans. 1990. Propertius. Elegies. Loeb Classical Library 18. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Lee, Guy, trans. 2009. Propertius. The Poems. Oxford World’s Classics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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)

McMahon, Stephanie Hunter. 2012. “An Empirical Study of Innocent Spouse Relief: Do Courts Implement Congress’s Legislative Intent?” Florida Tax Review. 12 (8): 629-707.

McMahon, Stephanie Hunter. 2014. “What Innocent Spouse Relief Says about Women and the Rest of Us.” Harvard Journal of Law & Gender. 37 (1): 141-184.

O’Daly, Gerard J. P. 2012. Days Linked by Song: Prudentius’ Cathemerinon. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (review by Catherine Conybeare)

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

In the first century BGC, the eminent Roman military leader and poet Cornelius Gallus influentially associated love and war in Latin elegy. Gallus’s love elegy celebrated violence against men in war and men’s subordination to women in love. The learned Christian monk Walahfrid Strabo early in the ninth century confronted that oppressive literary legacy with poetically moving, personal love for men. Walahfrid recognized the reality of war and peace in figures of the rose and lily, but he colored both with Christian understanding of love.

Walahfrid grew up among a closely knit community of boys and men. When he was about eight years old, his parents gave him up as an oblate to the male-only Benedictine Abbey of Reichenau in central Europe. Men teachers personally taught Walahfrid all of what was then regarded as important learning.[1] He lived and learned with other boys, young men, and older men. Walahfrid formed warm friendships with them, became thoroughly learned, and developed special talent for writing Latin verse.

Within the historical context of pervasive violence against men, Walahfrid expressed shining love for his male friends. Perhaps drawing understanding from Aristophanes’s speech in Plato’s Symposium, Walahfrid shared a cosmic bond of love with a man friend:

When the brightness of the clear moon shines in the sky,
stand beneath the heavens. Discerning with wonder, watch
how the sky is brightened from the moon’s clear lamp
and with its one brightness embraces dear friends,
divided in body, but linked in mind by love.
If one face cannot look upon the other loving face,
let at least this light be a pledge of our love.
Your faithful friend has transmitted to you these little verses.
If on your part the chain of faith stands firm,
now I pray that you may be well and happy through all the ages.

{ Cum splendor lunae fulgescat ab aethere purae,
Tu sta sub aethere cernens speculamine miro,
Qualiter ex luna splendescat lampade pura
Et splendore suo caros amplectitur uno
Corpore divisos, sed mentis amore ligatos.
Si facies faciem spectare nequivit amantem,
Hoc saltim nobis lumen sit pignus amoris.
Hos tibi versiculos fidus transmisit amicus;
Si de parte tua fidei stat fixa catena,
Nunc precor, ut valeas felix per saecula cuncta. }[2]

The light reflected from the moon that brightens the night sky comes from the hidden sun. For the Christian Walahfrid, that’s a figure of God. The mutuality of faith in friendship that Walahfrid invokes at the end might naturally lead to a plea for a return letter.[3] Instead, with Christian charity, Walahfrid prays that his friend will be well and happy forever.

Walahfrid also expressed love for male friends using an expansive understanding of complementarity. Walahfrid wrote to his fellow cleric Liutger:

Like an only son to his mother, like to the earth Phoebus’s light,
like dewdrops to grass, fishes to the seas,
air to birds, murmurings of rivers to the meadow,
so your face, my little boy, is dear to me.
If that could be, which we think can be,
carry yourself to us swiftly, I pray.
Since I have learned that you have halted nearby,
I will find no rest until I see you sooner rather than later.
May the stars, dewdrops, and sand be exceeded in number
by your glory, life, health, and well-being.

{ Unicus ut matri, terris ut lumina Phoebi
Ut ros graminibus, piscibus unda freti,
Aer uti oscinibus, rivorum et murmura pratis.
Sic tua, pusiole, cara mihi facies.
Si fieri possit, fieri quod posse putamus,
Ingere te nostris visibus, oro, celer.
Nam quia te propius didici consistere nobis,
Non requiesco, nisi videro te citius.
Excedat numeros astrorum, roris, harenae,
Gloria, vita, salus atque valere tuum. }[4]

Walahfrid figured men’s friendship with natural complementarities that encompass great differences in form and matter, such as birds and air. Within these natural figures are Christian allusions. The verse “Like an only son to his mother, like to the earth Phoebus’s light {Unicus ut matri, terris ut lumina Phoebi}” explicitly refers to the traditional Greco-Roman god Phoebus Apollo. This verse as a chiasmus associates mother with earth and the unique son with Phoebus. It thus seems to allude to Mary and Jesus. God’s great promise in Hebrew scripture is the blessing of having descendants as numerous as the stars in the sky and the sand of the seashore. Walahfrid focuses that macrocosmic blessing on the single person of his beloved friend Liutger. That daring figure draws upon Christian understanding of the maker of heaven and earth being incarnated in the one son Jesus.

In his book About the Cultivation of Gardens {De cultura hortorum}, Walahfrid provided advice to boys and men in relation to plants. For boys living in dangerous family circumstances, Walahfrid offered practical counsel:

If ever hostile stepmothers mix sought-out poisons
into your drink, or combine into a treacherous meal
grief-producing aconitine, immediately take a drink
of healthful horehound. It presses against the suspected dangers.

{ Si quando infensae quaesita venena novercae
Potibus inmiscent dapibusve aconita dolosis
Tristia confundunt, extemplo sumpta salubris
Potio marrubii suspecta pericula pressat. }[5]

Like poisoning, rape is a high-profile concern. Young men, like other male primates, naturally know not to rape women. Men don’t need to be taught not to rape. Yet with their burgeoning masculine vitality, young men tend to be too sexually eager. Walahfrid advocated for chastity using a figure of the lily:

Lilies’ exhaled scent imbues the air for many hours,
but if one grinds the shining buds of their snow-white
flowers, it’s over. Amazingly one discovers every scattering
of nectar has quickly disappeared with the act.
Virginity, supported with its blessed fame, shines
in this flower, and as long as no sordid work disturbs
it and the ardor of illicit love doesn’t shatter it,
the lily emits its sweet scent. Yet once the glory of its integrity
falls to the ground, its scent changes into stinking.

{ Longius horum etiam spirans odor imbuit auras,
Sed si quis nivei candentia germina fructus
Triverit, aspersi mirabitur ilicet omnem
Nectaris ille fidem celeri periisse meatu,
Hoc quia virginitas fama subnixa beata
Flore nitet, quam si nullus labor exagitarit
Sordis et illiciti non fregerit ardor amoris,
Flagrat odore suo. Porro si gloria pessum
Integritatis eat, foetor mutabit odorem. }[6]

With earthy appreciation for the physicality of men’s sexual work, Walahfrid condemns the effect of illicit love on relationships between women and men. Licit love is different. Walahfrid understood the eternal importance of gratefully receiving men’s seminal blessing.

With Christian love for men, Walahfrid subtly refigured with flowers the union of love and war in Gallus’s love elegy. Like Tibullus, Walahfrid directed the muse of love poetry to rural activity in contrast to love entangled with war:

For so many wars, so many very famous, great deeds
you have put together memorials with sacred song.
Pious muse Erato of love elegy, scorn not the meager
riches of my greens, describe them in verse through me.

{ Quae tot bellorum, tot famosissima rerum
Magnarum monimenta sacro pia conficis ore,
Exiles, Erato, non dedignare meorum
Divitias holerum versu perstringere mecum. }[7]

Like its oxymoronic phrase “meager riches {exiles divitiae},” this invocation as a whole brings together sharply contrasting themes of epic poetry, Gallus’s love elegy, and gardening. Walahfrid probably didn’t mistake Clio, the muse of history, for Erato, the muse of love elegy. The invocation of Erato occurs in the description of “chervil {cerefolium}.” Walahfrid explicitly calls cerefolium a “Macedonian branch {Macedonia ramus}.” Its name is rooted in the Greek term χαιρέφῠλλον, built from components meaning “to enjoy {χαίρω}” and “leaf {φύλλον}.” While Gallus’s love elegy represents sufferings in love and war, it’s supposed to be read with pleasure.

Walahfrid’s plant descriptions begin with “sage {salvia}.” Salvia is etymologically rooted in wellness and being saved. Walahfrid, however, associated salvia with a developmental conflict:

But sage endures a civic evil, for the savage child
of the flowers, if not removed, will consume the parent,
and antagonistically kill off the ancient branches.

{ Sed tolerat civile malum: nam saeva parentem
Progenies florum, fuerit ni dempta, perurit
Et facit antiquos defungier invida ramos. }[8]

That’s a figure for Walahfrid’s literary program with respect to Gallus’s love elegy. His plant descriptions have at their center the lily (description 12) and conclude with the rose (description 33). Like Dante, Walahfrid was a Christian intensely interested in astronomy and numerical calculations.[9] From a Christian perspective, 12 and 33 immediately evoke Christ’s apostles and the Trinity. Walahfrid called upon the muse Erato in describing chervil (description 11), just before describing the lily. Walahfrid associated the lily with peace. He wanted readers to enjoy new leaves in poetry of love and war. His literary civil war is for a new understanding of love and peace.

After describing the rose, Walahfrid brought back the lily to join the rose. These two flowers together conclude his garden poetry:

Indeed these two famous types of admirable flowers
signify to the Church highest honors through the ages.
With the blood of martyrs the Church plucks gifts of roses;
lilies she carries in the brightness of shining faith.
O virgin mother, mother with a fruitful womb,
virgin with faith intact, spouse of a nominal spouse,
spouse, dove, queen of the home, faithful lover,
in war pluck roses, seize cheerful lilies in peace.

{ Haec duo namque probabilium genera inclyta florum
Ecclesiae summas signant per saecula palmas,
Sanguine martyrii carpit quae dona rosarum,
Liliaque in fidei gestat candore nitentis.
O mater virgo, fecundo germine mater,
Virgo fide intacta, sponsi de nomine sponsa,
Sponsa, columba, domus regina, fidelis amica,
Bello carpe rosas, laeta arripe lilia pace. }[10]

As has been common throughout its history, the Christian Church is here figured gynocentrically as the Virgin Mary. More distinctively, this passage associates war with martyrdom and peace with the brightness of shining faith. Mary, the preeminent disciple of earthly Christian love, transforms the meaning of war and peace:

To you Mary has come a flower from the royal tree of Jesse,
the one creator and savior from an ancient lineage.
By his words and life Jesus has sanctified lovely lilies.
With his death he colors roses. Peace and combat he left for members
of his church on earth, he having embraced the merit of both,
in both triumphs promising eternal reward.

{ Flos tibi sceptrigero venit generamine Iesse,
Unicus antiquae reparator stirpis et auctor;
Lilia qui verbis vitaque dicavit amoena,
Morte rosas tinguens, pacemque et proelia membris
Liquit in orbe suis, virtutem amplexus utramque.
Premiaque ambobus servans aeterna triumphis. }

The combat that Jesus embraced wasn’t military service on behalf of a worldly leader. Jesus fought by proclaiming the love of God for all, healing the sick, feeding the hungry, embracing the outcast, and consoling the downtrodden. The peace that Jesus left for his followers was the peace of God that surpasses all understanding.[11] Erato, the ancient Roman muse of love elegy, didn’t inspire Walahfrid in writing verses on his garden. Jesus did.

Walahfrid rejected Gallus’s love elegy and its men-devaluing poetry of love as war. Working in his small garden, Walahfrid himself dug up nettles with dirty, callused hands and fertilized the ground with cow manure. He wrote his garden verses “so that small matters would be adorned with vast honor {ut ingenti res parvae ornentur honore}.”[12] Walahfrid knew Ovid’s love elegy well and alluded to it frequently in his own verses. He escaped Gallus’s influence at least in part through his love for men:

I am yours, be mine, so what each has would be the other’s,
thus I am another like you, and you are another me.
By Ovid I put you to oath, my dear, you be well,
and, I beg, eagerly pray to the Lord for me.

{ Sum tuus, esto meus, quod uterque habet alterius sit,
Sic ego tu sim alter, tuque mihi alter ego.
Per nasum coniuro tuum, mi care, valeto,
Et Dominum pro me, quaeso, precare libens. }[13]

Walahfrid had compassion for men’s sufferings in love and would not celebrate men’s deaths in war. He sought to replace Gallus’s love elegy with poetry of love for men and gardening.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Tibullus with Parthenius against Gallus on gender in love & war
• medieval poetry on the horror of men absent and dying in war
• motherhood, fatherhood, and fundamental gender inequality

Notes:

[1] Walahfrid apparently studied grammar, logic, rhetoric, and the quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, music, astronomy). In addition to writing excellent Latin poetry, Walahfrid also wrote biblical commentaries, liturgical history, lives of saints, and edited others’ similar works. On Walahfrid’s scholarly activities and interests, Booker (2005), Stevens (1971), and Stevens (2018).

[2] Walahfrid Strabo, “To a male friend {Ad amicum},” Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, p. 403 (carmin 59), my English translation, benefiting from those of Godman (1985) p. 217, Duckett (1962) p. 160, Laistner (1931) p. 330, and Waddell (1929) p. 117. The title “Ad amicum” is from MS. St. Gallen, Stiftsbibliothek, Cod. Sang. 869, written in the second half of the ninth century. Godman suggested that “About friendship {De amicitia}” might be more appropriate as a title. Godman (1985) p. 38. On friendship among men in medieval Europe, Fiske (1965) and McGuire (1988).

Writing to Gottschalk of Orbais, Walahfrid wished “to profit from bearing fellowship of your light {lucrari lucisque tuae consortia ferre}.” Walahfrid, “To the monk Gottschalk, who is also Fulgentius {Gotesscalcho monacho, qui et Fulgentius}” (carmin 18) v. 27, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, p. 363 (v. 15), my English translation. Fulgentius was a nickname that Walahfrid gave to Gottschalk. On light in relation to friendship in medieval literature, Fiske (1965) p. 453.

[3] In a letter to the cleric Liutger, Walahfrid makes just such a plea:

If you could visit, that would be enough, if I could see the beloved one.
But otherwise, write anything.

{ Visere si poeteris, sat erit, si videro gratum.
Sin alias, rescribe aliquid }

Walahfrid, “To Liutger the cleric {Ad Liutgerum clericum},” incipit “Dear, you come suddenly, and suddenly dear you also leave {Care venis subito, subito quoque care recedis}” (carmin 32) vv. 7-8, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, p. 385, my English translation, benefiting from translations of Norton (1997) and Laistner (1931) p. 330, both of which translate the complete poem.

[4] Walahfrid, “To Liutger the cleric {Ad Liutgerum clericum},” incipit “With sweet services and a cultivated, welcoming mind {Dulcibus officiis et amica mente colendo}” (carmin 31) vv. 7-16, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, p. 385, my English translation, benefiting from translations of Duckett (1962) p. 160 (part), and Laistner (1931) p. 330 (complete poem).

In a poem to one of his teachers, Walahfrid similarly used a natural simile:

A fish makes use of a river, just as a salamander heat;
thus I, pitiful, seek you — hail, dear master.

{ Piscis uti fluvios, sicut salamandra calorem,
sic te quaero miser, care magister ave. }

Walahfrid, “To master Prudentius {Ad Prudentium magistrum}, incipit “The kindly origin of your name would seize mercifully {Nominis alma tui capiat clementer origo” (carmin 61) vv. 9-10, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, p. 402, my English translation.

Walahfrid expressed loving friendship to men of various ages. Liutger probably was about as old as Walahfrid. Prudentius was considerably older. When Walahfrid was about twenty, he wrote to a subdeacon named Bodo, who was perhaps about fifteen:

Toward all the better may God lead your sense
and to you forever bring great favors.
Shining-blonde dear, farewell, dearest always everywhere,
little shining-blonde boy, shining-blonde little boy.

{ Ad meliora tuos ducat deus omnia sensus
Et tibi perpetuo munera magna ferat.
Candide care vale carissime semper ubique
Pusio candidule, candide pusiole. }

Walahfrid, “To subdeacon Bodo {Ad Bodonem yppodiaconum},” incipit “These Strabo gives to you, dearest boy Bodo {Haec tibi dat Strabo, carissime pusio Bodo}” (carmin 34), vv. 13-6 (final verses of the poem), Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, p. 386, my English translation, benefiting from that of Cabaniss (1953) p. 315. Walahfrid was writing from Aachen, where he went to live in 829. Since Walahfrid was born in 808, he was then about twenty. As a subdeacon, Bodo probably was about fifteen. Cabaniss (1953) pp. 316-7. For a translation of the complete letter, id. p. 315.

Fiske observed:

not only was friendship for these men a profoundly religious experience, a hierophany, a theophany at the heart of the Christian mysterium, but also that this is essentially Christian, in the sense that Christianity is the relation of persons in its two great mysteries, the Trinity and the Incarnation. Human persons, taken up by the Word into Trinitarian life and mutual love, make paradise and heaven understandable and desirable, for, as Aelred says, “What is sweeter than to love and be loved?”

Fiske (1965) p. 458. The referenced quote in full: “Nothing would seem sweeter to me, nothing more agreeable, nothing more practical, than to be loved and to love {nihil mihi dulcius, nihil iucundius, nihil utilius quam amari et amare videretur}.” From Aelred of Rievaulx, On spiritual friendship {De spirituali amicitia} 1, Latin text and English translation (modified slightly) from Aelred of Rievaulx page for online courses by Fr. Luke Dysinger.

[5] Walahfrid Strabo, Book about the Cultivation of Gardens {Liber de cultura hortorum}, also less appropriately known as The Little Garden {Hortulus} (from Ch. 10, Horehound {Marrubium}), Latin text from Dümmler (1881), vol. 2, p. 342, my English translation, benefiting from that of Mitchell (2009), p. 47, and Payne & Blunt (1966) p. 43. In literature throughout the ages, stepmothers are dangerous to stepsons. Subsequent quotes from Walahfrid’s De cultura hortorum are similarly sourced.

Walahfrid dedicated De cultura hortorum to “Grimald, most learned father {Grimaldus pater doctissimus}.” Grimald (Grimald of Weissenburg) taught Walahfrid at Reichenau. The dedication suggests that Grimald was at that time an abbot elsewhere. Grimald was Abbot of St. Gall Monastery from 841 until his death in 872. Walahfrid died in 849. Hence the date of De cultura hortorum is probably about 845.

Walahfrid wrote De cultura hortorum in the hexameter verse of classical epic. Love elegy and epic weren’t rigidly separated genres. Parthenius of Nicaea dedicated his Greek story collection to Cornelius Gallus for use in writing “hexameter and elegiacs.” See note [5] in my post on moral reflection in Parthenius. Walahfrid writing De cultura hortorum in hexameters is best interpreted as underscoring its serious intent and its challenge to Gallus’s love elegy as a genre.

[6] Walahfrid, De cultura hortorum, from Ch. 26, Rose {Rosa}. Walahfrid also has a separate, earlier chapter for lilies, Ch. 15, Lily {Lilium}. Within Walahfrid’s garden, lilies are appropriately planted opposite roses.

[7] Walahfrid, De cultura hortorum, from Ch. 14, Chervil {Cerfolium}. Mitchell noted:

Walafrid may be confusing Erato, the muse of lyric poetry, and therefore of love and erotic poetry, with Clio, the muse of history.

Mitchell (2009) p. 55, n. 7. As argued above, I don’t think so.

[8] Walahfrid, De cultura hortorum, from Ch. 4, Sage {Salvia}. Walahfrid was older and presumably more poetically sophisticated when he wrote De cultura hortorum than when he wrote De imagine Tetrici. The leading scholar of the later poem declared:

The “De imagine Tetrici” is without the slightest doubt one of Walahfriďs masterpieces. It is also one of the most challenging political poems of the Latin Middle Ages. Though obviously modelled on the Vergilian eclogue, the dramatic elements of the poem are much more powerful than they are in the classical genre. There are rapid shifts of scene as well as unexpected transitions between reverie and reality. The imagery of the work is subtle and complex: reversed meaning and irony are everywhere to be suspected.

Herrin (1991) p. 119 (footnotes omitted). De cultura hortorum has been read much more superficially. The readers who have considered it most carefully have been horticulturalists:

They have demonstrated that Walahfrid’s reading in the ancient authorities on this subject was wide and extensive, and that his powers of observation are acute. But De Cultura Hortorum is much more than ‘pure gardening literature’ or a ‘cultural monument to the study of nature’ in ninth-century Reichenau. It is an imaginative work of high order, in which plants and vegetables, care and cultivation of the garden are presented in graphically human terms. The dense and intricate imagery of the passage discussed above {concerning the gourd} is illustrative of Walahfrid’s baroque fantasy, which can unite a profusion of similes and metaphors into a single coherent picture. The technique, judged in terms of exact horticultural information is uneconomical… .

Godman (1985) p. 39 (footnotes omitted). Walahrid’s De cultura hortorum, like his De imagine Tetrici, should be read with great appreciation for his poetic sophistication.

[9] On Dante and numerology, Nasti (2015). On Walahfrid’s interest in numerical computations, Stevens (1971) and Stevens (2018).

A dream-vision precursor to Dante’s Commedia is the Visio Wettini. In 824, the Reichenau monk and teacher Wetti dreamed that angels give him a personalized tour of eternal places of purging and punishment. Heito, a former abbot of Reichenau, wrote a prose version of Wetti’s dream shortly after it occurred. Walahfrid later, perhaps about 826, wrote his verse version. On Heito’s text, Pollard (2010). Pollard has done extraordinary work in editing an new critical edition of Heito’s text. For an English translation and commentary on Walahfrid’s Visio Wettini, Traill (1974). On the reception of both texts, Pollard (2015).

For a narrow analysis of illicit sexuality in the different versions of Visio Wettini, Diem (2016). Diem sought “fluid, negotiated, debated and contested” spaces. Id. p. 386. That’s a banal and tedious academic quest within today’s academic orthodoxy that strictly forbids considering meninist literary criticism. Diem finds that Walahfrid was more generous and forgiving toward men’s same-sex sexual acts than was Heito. That’s consistent with Walahfrid’s broad-minded love for men in contrast to the orientation toward men in Gallus’s love elegy.

[10] Walahfrid, De cultura hortorum, from Ch. 36, Rose {Rosa}. The subsequent quote is also from this chapter. On the shoot from the stump of Jesse, Isaiah 11:1, Matthew 1:1-16, Luke 3:23-38.

The “flower of the lily {fleur-de-lis}” became an important heraldic symbol. French Capetian kings represented themselves with the fleur-de-lis from the first, King Clovis in the fifth century, onward. On the history of the rose and lily as symbols, see note [5] on my post on “women flyting, serious fighting” and Caldwell (2014).

[11] See, e.g. Matthew 14:13-21, John 4:5-43, Luke 24:13-35, Philippians 4:7, and my post on Jesus’s work as a good physician.

[12] Walahfrid, De cultura hortorum, from Ch. 3, The Gardener’s Perservance and Labor’s Fruit {Instantia cultoris et fructus operis}. The quoted verse is the final verse before Walahfrid begins his set of 33 plant descriptions. On Walahfrid’s dirty, callused hands from his work in his garden and his spreading of cow manure, see Ch. 1, On the Cultivation of Gardens {De cultura hortorum}.

[13] Walahfrid, “To the presbyter Probus {Ad Probum presbyterum},” incipit “A gift given to a poet is equivalent to verses and measures {Versibus atque metris par est donare poetam}” (carmin 45), vv. 19-22, Latin text from Dümmler (1881) vol. 2, p. 394, my English translation. In this poem, Walahfrid declares the importance of distinctive tools to distinctive professions, notes the propensity of Irish to travel, and requests Probus to procure some books via an Irishman named Chronmal {Crónmáel}. Dümmler in footnotes documents in this and other of Walahfrid’s poems many allusions to Ovid’s love elegy.

[images] (1) Erato, Roman muse of love elegy. Marble statue from the second century GC. Preserved as accession # Inv. 317 in Vatican Museums, Museo Pio-Clementino, Muses Hall. Source image thanks to Jastrow and Wikimedia Commons. Here’s a similar second-century statue of Erato. (2) Raised bed garden of Elmer and Joan Galbi on July 1, 2018, in Lake Oswego, Oregon. Source image thanks to Elmer Galbi.

References:

Booker, Courtney. M. 2005. “A New Prologue of Walafrid Strabo.” Viator. 36: 83-106.

Cabaniss, Allen. 1953. “Bodo-Eleazar: A Famous Jewish Convert.” The Jewish Quarterly Review. 43 (4): 313-328.

Caldwell, Mary Channen. 2014. “‘Flower of the Lily’: Late-Medieval Religious and Heraldic Symbolism in Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale de France, MS Français 146.” Early Music History. 33: 1-60.

Diem, Albrecht. 2016. “Teaching Sodomy in a Carolingian Monastery: A Study of Walahfrid Strabo’s and Heito’s Visio Wettini.” German History. 34 (3): 385-401.

Duckett, Eleanor Shipley. 1962. Carolingian Portraits: A Study in the Ninth Century. Ann Arbor: Michigan Press.

Dümmler, Ernst. 1881. Monumenta Germaniae Historica: Poetae Latini Aevi Carolini. Berlin: Weidmannos. (vol. 1, Internet Archive; vol. 2, Internet Archive, BnF)

Fiske, Adele. 1965. “Paradisus Homo Amicus.” Speculum. 40 (3): 436-459.

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

Herren, Michael W. 1991. ‘The “De imagine Tetrici” of Walahfrid Strabo: Edition and Translation.’ The Journal of Medieval Latin. 1: 118-139.

Laistner, Max Ludwig Wolfram. 1931. Thought and Letters in Western Europe, A.D. 500 to 900. London: Methuen & Co.

McGuire, Brian Patrick. 1988. Friendship and Community: the monastic experience, 350-1250. Kalamazoo, MI: Cistercian Publications.

Mitchell, James, trans. 2009. Walahfrid Strabo. On the Cultivation of Gardens: a ninth century gardening book. San Francisco: Ithuriel’s Spear.

Nasti, Paola. 2015. “The Art of Teaching and the Nature of Love.” Ch. 11 (pp. 223-248) in Corbett, George, and Heather Webb, eds. Vertical Readings in Dante’s Comedy. Volume 1. Cambridge, UK: Open Book Publishers.

Norton, Rictor. 1997. “Take up Riper Practices: The Gay Love Letters of Some Medieval Clerics.” Online essay.

Payne, Raef and Wilfrid Blunt. 1966. Hortulus: Walahfrid Strabo. Translated by Raef Payne. Commentary by Wilfrid Blunt. Hunt Facsimile Series, no. 2. Pittsburgh, PA: The Hunt Botanical Library.

Pollard, Richard Matthew. 2010. “Nonantola and Reichenau. A New Manuscript of Heito’s Visio Wettini and the Foundations for a New Critical Edition.” Revue Bénédictine. 120 (2): 243-294.

Pollard, Richard M. 2015. “Lasting Echoes of the Visio Wettini: from Early Medieval to Early Modern.” Presentation to session “Envisioning the Afterlife in the Middle Ages” at the 50th International Congress of Medieval Studies. May 14-17, 2015, at Western Michigan University, Kalamazoo, USA.

Stevens, Wesley M. 1971. “Walahfrid Strabo — A Student at Fulda.” Historical Papers. 6 (1): 13–20.

Stevens, Wesley M. 2018. Rhetoric and Reckoning in the Ninth century: the Vademecum of Walahfrid Strabo. Turnhout: Brepols.

Traill, David A. 1974. Walahfrid Strabo’s Visio Wettini: text, translation, and commentary. Bern: Herbert Lang.

Waddell, Helen. 1929 / rev. 1948. Mediaeval Latin Lyrics. New York: Henry Holt.

Men can understand the experience of Lygdamus and Propertius. They were under Cynthia’s thumb. A highly privileged domina {ruling lady} in first-century BGC Rome, Cynthia held Lygdamus as her household slave. He carried messages for her, served her drinks, and did anything else that she commanded. Propertius was nominally a free man, but he made himself Cynthia’s slave in love. Too many men today live in slavery to women. The time for change has come.

Propertius endured Cynthia’s numerous infidelities. Pretending to visit Lanuvium’s cave in which a fearsome snake tests a women’s virginity, Cynthia actually took work as beard and first for a pathic seeking an assignation. He was a young, well-shaven wealthy man with close-clipped ponies, a silk-lined carriage, and two exotic dogs sporting luxurious collars. Cynthia, plucking the man and his ponies for all they had, drove the carriage hard along the Appian Way to Lanuvium. The young man held a passive position in the carriage.[1] In a pervasive pattern that meninist critical theory has uncovered and encompassed, Propertius with Cynthia and this young man constructed a hard tableau of men’s soft subjugation to women’s subjectivity. Women often financially exploit men, even men who have no sexual interest in them.

Cynthia herself meanly controlled Propertius sexually. After enjoying a relationship with a more sexually receptive woman, Propertius sought to reconcile with the distraught Cynthia. Lygdamus brought her Propertius’s propitiatory message. She responded with hostility, hatred for a highly skilled woman, and prophecies against Propertius:

Were you put up to this, Lygdamus? A slave’s
false witness bears harsh penalty.
This man who’s cast me off when I did nothing, keeps
I won’t say whom within his house.
He would have me wasting in a lonely bed. Be pleased
to revile him for the death of me, Lygdamus.
She topped me not by morals but vile herbs. So he’s
caught by a thread-drawn rhombus wheel.
He’s lured by magic powers of toads, their swelled-up pus,
the desiccated bones of snakes,
and screech-owl’s feathers found in recent tombs, and wooden
fillets snatched from a funeral bier.
If my dreams aren’t vain, give evidence, Lygdamus.
He’ll pay in late but added pain, and lie at my feet.
His empty bed will be draped with dusty cobwebs, and Venus
will snore through their nights together.

{ haec te teste mihi promissast, Lygdame, merces?
est poena et servo rumpere teste fidem.
ille potest nullo miseram me linquere facto,
et qualem nolo dicere habere domi,
gaudet me vacuo solam tabescere lecto
si placet, insultet, Lygdame, morte mea.
non me moribus illa, sed herbis improba vicit
staminea rhombi ducitur ille rota.
illum turgentis sanie portenta rubetae
et lecta exsuctis anguibus ossa trahunt,
et strigis inventae per busta iacentia plumae,
cinctaque funesto lanea vitta toro.
si non vana canunt mea somnia, Lygdame, testor,
poena erit ante meos sera sed ampla pedes;
putris et in vacuo texetur aranea lecto:
noctibus illorum dormiet ipsa Venus. }[2]

Adding to her offenses, Cynthia attempted to seduce Lygdamus. She encouraged him to denounce Propertius by threatening to punish Lygdamus for false witness. She claimed that she was wasting away lonely in bed. There Lygdamus was. She urged him to blame Propertius for her death and insinuated that Lygdamus should bring her back to life with sexual companionship. She dreamed of again being the beloved lady-lord, with him lying as a slave at her feet. Because of the great power imbalance between them, a lady having sex with her man-slave is now widely regarded among the learned as illicit.

Even if Propertius was guilty of sexual faults, Cynthia treated him disrespectfully by seeking material advantage in traveling to Lanuvium for a threesome with two men. Propertius’s situation in relation to Cynthia was like that of Tibullus with respect to Delia:

I was the one, with my devotions, who snatched you
from gloomy sickness, when you were lying there.
I myself cleansed you by pure sulfur scattered round,
once the old woman had chanted her magic spell.
I myself expiated wild nightmares, lest they harm you,
three times averting them with sacred grain.
I myself in woolen headband and loose tunic
offered nine vows to Trivia in the silent night.
I’ve paid for all, yet now another enjoys love’s fruits;
that happy man benefits from my prayers.

{ ille ego cum tristi morbo defessa iaceres
te dicor votis eripuisse meis;
ipseque te circum lustravi sulpure puro,
carmine cum magico praecinuisset anus;
ipse procuravi, ne possent saeva nocere
somnia, ter sancta deveneranda mola;
ipse ego velatus filo tunicisque solutis
vota novem Triviae nocte silente dedi.
omnia persolvi: fruitur nunc alter amore,
et precibus felix utitur ille meis }[3]

Women should appreciate all that men do for them. Instead, women commonly love jerks, badboys, and offensive rock stars.

With true commitment to gender equality, Propertius decided to exercise equal freedom. He arranged a pleasurable situation for himself:

Because she had so often wronged our bed,
I chose to move my camp to another couch.
Near Aventine Diana a girl named Phyllis dwells,
prim when sober, but when she drinks, watch out!
And in Tarpeia’s Woods lives Teia: a pretty girl,
and she takes all comers when she’s drunk.
These two I invited, to soothe my lonely night
and stir new lust by a secret escapade.
We all three shared one little couch on a private lawn.
You ask how we lay? I was between the two.
Lygdamus filled our cups, the settings were summer glass,
the wine was Greek — a luscious Lesbian vintage.
An Egyptian piped, and Byblis rattled her castanets
with artless grace as we pelted her with roses,
and a dwarf, the famous Big Boy, was there to dance for us,
bobbing his stubby arms to the hollow flute.

{ cum fieret nostro totiens iniuria lecto,
mutato volui castra movere toro.
Phyllis Aventinae quaedamst vicina Dianae,
sobria grata parum: cum bibit, omne decet.
altera Tarpeios est inter Teïa lucos,
candida, sed potae non satis unus erit.
his ego constitui noctem lenire vocatis,
et Venere ignota furta novare mea.
unus erat tribus in secreta lectulus herba.
quaeris discubitus? inter utramque fui.
Lygdamus ad cyathos, vitrique aestiva supellex
et Methymnaei grata saliva meri.
Miletus tibicen erat, crotalistria Byblis,
(haec facilis spargi munda sine arte rosa),
Magnus et ipse suos breviter concretus in artus
iactabat truncas ad cava buxa manus. }[4]

It was a classic, one of those great times a man would remember through the ages. All should be grateful to the medieval scribes who, with much effort and some corruption, copied this text forward to our ignorant, bigoted, and repressive age.

Within these lively and propitious circumstances, Propertius suffered terrible misfortune. Bad omens signaled impotence and one-itis:

But the flames kept flickering out in the lamps, though they were full,
and the table collapsed flat onto the floor;
and when I threw the dice, in hopes of a lucky Venus,
the sinister Dog was all I ever rolled.
Their songs fell on deaf ears, I was blind to their naked breasts:
I stood despairing at Lanuvium’s gates.

{ sed neque suppletis constabat flamma lucernis,
reccidit inque suos mensa supina pedes.
me quoque per talos Venerem quaerente secundam
semper damnosi subsiluere canes.
cantabant surdo, nudabant pectora caeco:
Lanuvii ad portas, ei mihi, solus eram }

Even amid the wine, song, and dancing, with Phyllis and Teia pressing their naked breasts against him, Propertius tragically endured the epic disaster of men’s impotence. He imagined penetrating Lanuvium’s cave with Cynthia. He thought only of her:

I admire
but don’t desire
any hand except for yours,
which I desire
with such fire
I could stop a lion short,
lady whom my heart adores!

Cynthiarette,
fine rosette,
lovelier than any flower;
fine rosette,
do not let
me fall too far into your power!

It was chance that
acting madly
made me fall in love with you,
and the madness
keeps on lasting:
there is nothing I can do
before such beauty, pure and true!

Cynthiarette,
fine rosette,
lovelier than any flower;
fine rosette,
do not let
me fall too far into your power!

{ Das que vejo
nom desejo
outra senhor se vós non,
e desejo
tan sobejo,
mataria hũu leom
senhor do meu coraçon:

Leonoreta,
fin roseta,
bella sobre toda fror,
fin roseta,
non me meta
en tal coita voss’amor!

Mha ventura
en loucura
me meteu de vos amar:
é loucura,
que me dura,
que me non posso en quitar,
ay fremosura sem par:

Leonoreta,
fin roseta,
bella sobre toda fror,
fin roseta,
non me meta
en tal coita voss’amor! }[5]

Impotent men relish flowery visions of their beloved women.

Then suddenly Cynthia threw open the courtyard gates,
her hair undone, but beautiful in her fury.
The goblet slipped from my limp fingers and fell to the ground,
and, flushed with wine as I was, my lips went pale.
Her eyes flashed fire, she raged as only a woman can:
a scene as frightful as a city’s sack.

{ nec mora, cum totas resupinat Cynthia valvas,
non operosa comis, sed furibunda decens.
pocula mi digitos inter cecidere remissos,
palluerunt ipso labra soluta mero.
fulminat illa oculis et quantum femina saevit,
spectaclum capta nec minus urbe fuit. }[6]

Just as Aeneas faltered against Helen amid the sack of Troy, Propertius feebly sputtered, “Cynthia, I’m sorry, really!” That wasn’t enough:

After these words she blazed forth in fury
driven by insane desire for war,
as in the Carthaginian fields
closed in by a circle of hunters
a lioness with yellow neck;
as a snake, nourished with malicious herbs,
that winds itself
and that, swollen, the frost covered:
it raises its head high for battle
and flashes from its mouth the three-forked tongue.
…
As the maenad every other year
rages through the city howling to Bacchus,
among the desert lairs of beasts,
gathered up with a bloodstained coat,
she calls her sister’s cruel band.

{ Dictis exarsit in iras,
insani Martis amore,
Poenorum qualis in arvis
venantum saepta corona,
fulva cervice leaena;
qualis mala gramina pastus,
tractu se colligit anguis,
tumidum quem bruma tegebat:
caput altum in proelia tollit,
linguis micat ore trisulcis
..
furit ululata per urbem
qualis trieterica Baccho
inter deserta ferarum,
palla subcincta cruenta,
vocat agmina saeva sororum }[7]

In contrast to gender-bigoted representations of domestic violence, violence against men has been prevalent throughout history. Here, however, Cynthia assaulted both women and men:

She scratched at Phyllis’s face with her nails, in a frenzy of wrath;
in terror Teia shrieked, “Help, neighbors! Fire!”
The local citizenry rushed out with torches high,
and wild shouts echoed up and down the street.
The girls, their hair all torn, their dresses ripped to shreds,
fled to the first wine-shop in the dim-lit road.
Cynthia came triumphant home, rejoiced in her spoils,
and gave me a bruising slap with the back of her hand,
and left a scar on my neck, and bit me till she drew blood,
and struck at my eyes most of all, for their offense.
And when she had exhausted her arms with beating me,
she noticed Lygdamus hiding under the couch
and yanked him out. He begged for help by my Guardian Spirit.
Lygdamus, what could I do? She’d taken us both!

{ Phyllidos iratos in vultum conicit ungues:
territa “vicini,” Teïa clamat “aquam!”
crimina sopitos turbant elata Quirites,
omnis et insana semita voce sonat.
illas direptisque comis tunicisque solutis
excipit obscurae prima taberna viae.
Cynthia gaudet in exuviis victrixque recurrit
et mea perversa sauciat ora manu,
imponitque notam collo morsuque cruentat,
praecipueque oculos, qui meruere, ferit.
atque ubi iam nostris lassavit bracchia plagis
Lygdamus, ad plutei fulcra sinistra latens
eruitur, geniumque meum protractus adorat.
Lygdame,nil potui: tecum ego captus eram. }[8]

Women make ferocious fighters. They certainly should be required to register for military drafts on an equal basis with men.

Men readily surrender to women. So it was with Propertius:

Finally, pleading with outstretched arms, I sued for peace,
and letting me barely touch her feet, she said:
“If you wish me to forgive the crime you have committed,
here are the terms you must surrender by:
no more will you prowl the Pompeian shade in your finest clothes,
nor the Forum, when it is strewn with festive sand;
and beware of turning your gaze to the theater’s upper rows,
nor slow your pace, lured by some open sedan.
Above all, Lygdamus, prime cause of my complaint,
is to be sold. Put chains on both his feet.”
She thus laid down her terms. I said, “Your word is law!”
She laughed, gloating over the power she’d gained.

{ supplicibus palmis tum demum ad foedera veni,
cum vix tangendos praebuit illa pedes,
atque ait “admissae si vis me ignoscere culpae,
accipe, quae nostrae formula legis erit.
tu neque Pompeia spatiabere cultus in umbra,
nec cum lascivum sternet harena Forum.
colla cave inflectas ad summum obliqua theatrum,
aut lectica tuae se det aperta morae.
Lygdamus in primis, omnis mihi causa querelae,
veneat et pedibus vincula bina trahat.”
indixit leges: respondi ego “legibus utar.”
riserat imperio facta superba dato. }

Cynthia thus imposed strict controls on Propertius’s behavior. She ordered him not to dress smartly and stroll about Pompey or the Roman Forum. That was a typical way to make amorous acquaintances. She strictly controlled his male gaze: she forbade him to make eye contact with women in the theater’s upper row or with women riding in privilege in a sedan. Living under women’s power and control, men have long tolerated oppressive regulation of their sexuality. Thus any man who has studied literature recently has been taught that the male gaze is a terrible crime.

Women shouldn’t keep men as slaves. If emancipation of men remains unthinkable, women should at least refrain from treating their slaves brutally. Cynthia kept Propertius. She ordered Lygdamus to be sold. Underscoring her inhumanity to men, she required Propertius himself to put chains on Lygdamus’s feet. Moreover, she falsely accused Lygdamus of poisoning her as a pretext for having him tortured:

Burn Lygdamus, heat metal white hot for that slave:
I knew it, when I drank the wine his poisons stained.

{ Lygdamus uratur candescat lamina vernae:
sensi ego, cum insidiis pallida vina bibi. }

Women haven’t even begun to think about how to make reparations for what they have done to men slaves and to many other men. All should begin to think now.

Even worse than demanding an elaborate, expensive special-day wedding celebration, Cynthia complained to Propertius about her funeral ceremony. No one did enough, no one spent enough for a fine funeral:

And no one called my name when my eyes finally dimmed:
had you cried out, I’d have gained another day.
No guard was set over me to shake a split reed,
and a broken roof tile cut my head where it lay.
And who saw you bowed down with grief at my last rites
or wetting a black toga with your warm tears?
If you could not trouble to go beyond the gate, at least
you could have ordered my bier move more slowly.
Why were you not there, praying for winds for the fire?
Why, grudger, were my flames not scented with nard?
Was it too much to ask, to throw cheap hyacinths on my body,
and shatter a wine-jar to hallow my smoldering ashes?

{ at mihi non oculos quisquam inclamavit eunti:
unum impetrassem te revocante diem:
nec crepuit fissa me propter harundine custos,
laesit et obiectum tegula curta caput.
denique quis nostro curvum te funere vidit,
atram quis lacrimis incaluisse togam?
si piguit portas ultra procedere, at illuc
iussisses lectum lentius ire meum.
cur ventos non ipse rogis, ingrate, petisti?
cur nardo flammae non oluere meae?
hoc etiam grave erat, nulla mercede hyacinthos
inicere et fracto busta piare cado. }

A bride once thanked her mother-in-law for funding the nicest wedding she ever had. At least with a funeral, the relatives can be sure they’ll pay only once. Moreover, the ghost of the deceased typically doesn’t come back and complain if a few corners are cut for the sake of the living. In contrast to claims in mere media stories, as always, men are hurt the most.

Men too readily settle for a feminine ending. Cynthia expunged all signs of Propertius’s independent, inclusive sexuality:

Whatever those alien girls had touched, she purified
with incense, and with pure water she scoured our door;
and she ordered all the lamps emptied and filled again,
and thrice she grazed my brow with burning sulfur.

{ dein, quemcumque locum externae tetigere puellae,
suffiit, at pura limina tergit aqua,
imperat et totas iterum mutare lucernas,
terque meum tetigit sulpuris igne caput. }

Cynthia didn’t thus save her beloved man’s life. She dominated it. She pushed Propertius around and established peace with him under her thumb:

And after every cover that lay on the couch was changed,
I made my obeisance, and peace reigned over our bed.

{ atque ita mutato per singula pallia lecto
despondi, et toto solvimus arma toro. }

That’s a feminine ending just like Tibullus imagined with his beloved Delia:

She’ll rule the whole, all will be her care,
and I’ll rejoice in being nothing at home there.

{ illa regat cunctos, illi sint omnia curae:
at iuvet in tota me nihil esse domo. }[9]

In the sixteenth-century, an influential Catholic scholar stated:

The Senate of Marseilles had reason to agree to the request of a husband for permission to kill himself so as to escape his wife’s petulance. That evil can never be removed except by removing the other part. One cannot make any worthwhile arrangement with it except by fleeing from it or enduring it. Both of those two are fraught with large difficulties. That man understood, it seems to me, who said that a good marriage needs a blind wife and a deaf husband.

{ Le senat de Marseille eut raison d’accorder la requeste à celuy qui demandoit permission de se tuer pour s’exempter de la tempeste de sa femme: car c’est un mal qui ne s’emporte jamais qu’en emportant la piece, et qui n’a autre composition qui vaille que la fuite ou la souffrance, quoy que toutes les deux tres difficiles. Celuy là s’y entendoit, ce me semble, qui dict qu’un bon mariage se dressoit d’une femme aveugle avec un mary sourd. }[10]

Suicide kills about four times more men than women. Men shouldn’t turn to suicide or hope in sarcastic suicide quips. Even for Propertius after his embarrassing impotence and surrender to Cynthia, a better reading of the text indicates masculine assertion and vigorous action in bed:

And after every cover that lay on the couch was changed,
I responded firmly, and together we set free our weapons in bed.

{ atque ita mutato per singula pallia lecto
respondi, et toto solvimus arma toro. }[11]

That’s the actual manuscript reading. We don’t need no emendation. Stop being put down and pushed around. Change can come. You don’t have to live under her thumb.[12]

Peace can come other than through victory in war. It’s down to you and me. As Tibullus protested against Gallus, love poetically differs from war. Men’s genitals aren’t weapons, nor should women’s be used as weapons.[13] Women and men should love each other as they love themselves.

*  *  *  *  *

Read more:

• Tibullus with Parthenius against Gallus on gender in love & war
• husbands resisting subordination to their wives: an ongoing challenge
• Phaedra & Hippolytus through Apuleius’s stepmother to Petrus Pictor

Notes:

[1] Propertius, Elegies 4.8.3-26. Alpheios provides a helpful Latin text. For freely available English translations, Corelis (1995), Holcombe (2009), Kline (2001a), and Alan Marshfield (2001). Dee observed:

while the description of Cynthia’s behavior reveals Propertius’ scarcely concealed admiration, there are no such ambivalences about the nepos {spendthrift}, whose disgraceful luxury and effeminacy he attacks in carefully chosen expressions of unusual intensity. … we cannot help sensing Propertius’ own satisfaction at his elegantly expressed malice.

Dee (1978) p. 46. Men should love other men as much as they love women.

Propertius offers “rich linguistic and rhetorical inventions and the steady obsession and bitter wit that nourish them.” Johnson (2009) p. xii. Literary scholarship in recent decades has tended to deny that Cynthia has an objective correlate in Propertius’s biography or men’s experience more broadly. That’s for men to consider and decide.

[2] Propertius, Elegies 3.6.19-34, Latin text from Goold (1990), English translation (with my small changes) from Holcombe (2009). While about 150 manuscripts of Propertius’s Elegies have survived, they perpetuate early textual corruptions. The best current Latin critical edition is Heyworth (2007). In this and subsequent quotes from Propertius, I use the Latin text of Goold, unless otherwise noted.

[3] Tibullus, Elegies 1.5.9-18, Latin text from Postgate (1913), English translation (modified slightly) from Kline (2001b). When Cynthia was ill, Propertius prayed to Jupiter / Jove to save her:

Jupiter, have mercy on my girl who’s sick,
spare death in one so beautiful.
…
For such a blessing I will write a sacred poem:
“through mighty Jove my girl is safe.”
She’ll sacrifice and at your feet will sit in worship,
telling stories of her troubles.

{ Iuppiter, affectae tandem miserere puellae:
tam formosa tuum mortua crimen erit.
…
pro quibus optatis sacro me carmine damno:
scribam ego ‘per magnumst salva puella Iovem’;
ante tuosque pedes illa ipsa operata sedebit,
narrabitque sedens longa pericla sua. }

Properties, Elegies, 2.28.1-2, 43-6, English translation (modified slightly) from Holcombe (2009).

[4] Propertius, Elegies 4.8.27-42, English translation (modified slightly) from Corelis (1995). The subsequent quote is similarly from 4.8.43-8 (But the flames kept flickering out…).

Phyllis commonly names an amorous woman in Latin love elegy. That name has roots in a Greek word for “beloved one {φίλος}.” Teia, from “of Teos,” is a more unusual name. It suggests pleasure:

Teos in Ionia was the birthplace of Anacreon, whose lyric poetry, full of wit and fancy, was mostly concerned with pleasure.

Currie (1973) p. 617.

[5] Joam {João} Lobeira (attributed, with considerable contention), “Song for Leonorette,” beginning “Senhor genta,” vv. 14-39, Galician-Portuguese text and English translation (with Cythiarette substituted for Leonorette) from Zenith (1995) pp. 168-71 (song 79). Cantigas Medievais Galego-Portuguesas has a slightly different presentation of the source text. This “song of love {cantiga d’amor}” survives only in the Cancioneiro da Biblioteca Nacional (B 244/246bis). It probably dates from the thirteenth century, but that has been a matter of considerable controversy. Some scholars date it to the sixteenth century.

[6] Propertius, Elegies 4.8.51-6, English translation (modified slightly) from Corelis (1995). To make clearer the parallels with the sack of Troy, I’ve used the translation of v. 56 from Holcombe (2009). The phrase “limp fingers {digitos remissos}” subtly alludes to Propertius’s impotence with Phyllis and Teia.

Cynthia’s entrance is similar to that of the witch Meroe breaking into Socrates and Aristomenes’s bedroom in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses.

[7] Hosidius Geta, Medea vv. 284-93, 298-302, Latin text and English translation from Rondholz (2012). Mooney (1919) provides a freely available Latin text and English translation. Hosidius Geta’s Medea is a Virgilian cento written probably in the second century. It survives only in Codex Salmasianus (Codex Parisinus 10318). Tertullian refers to it in his De Prescriptione Haereticorum, written in 203 GC.

In creating his Medea cento, Hosidius Geta engaged in creative cultural appropriation:

these examples show very well how Hosidius Geta works with Vergilian phrases. The central thing he does is to endow them with new brutal and paradoxical overtones that they did not have before. The pleasure we get from them derives not from thinking who said these words and when in Vergilian poems, but from the simple understanding that these new overtones could not have appeared in Vergil’s text. It is the centonist who manages to say with the old words something completely new and, in its brutality, even unimaginable in Vergil’s oeuvre.

Shumilin (2015) p. 147. Hosidius Geta’s appropriation of the revered Virgil has as its central tendency “to make the text sound as savage, brutal and barbarous as possible.” Id. Modern classical scholarship would benefit from more daring and creative approaches like that of Hosidius Geta.

[8] Propertius, Elegies 4.8.57-70, English translation (modified slightly) from Corelis (1995). Subsequent quotes are similarly from 4.8.71-82 (Finally, pleading with outstretched arms…), 4.7.35-6 (Burn Lygdamus…), 4.7.23-34 (And no one called my name…), 4.8.83-6 (Whatever those alien girls had touched…), and 4.8.87-8 (And after every cover…), which concludes the poem.

Propertius’s surrender to Cynthia (culminating with v. 4.8.81: “Your word is law {legibus utar}!”) uses “plain borrowing from legal language, formula legis {formula of law}.” Dee (1978) p. 51, citing specifically v. 74.

Privileged Roman women mistreated not just men slaves, but also women slaves. After Cynthia’s death, Propertius lived with the woman Chloris, said to have been formerly a sex-worker. Chloris beat Cynthia’s former personal slave Lalage and put in chains another of Cynthia’s personal slaves, Petale. Propertius, Elegies 4.7.43-6.

[9] Tibullus, Elegies 1.5.29-30, Latin text from Postgate (1913), my English translation.

[10] Michel de Montaigne, Essays {Essais} III.5, “On some lines of Virgil {Sur des vers de Virgile},” French text from the Villey & Saulnier (1965) version of the 1595 edition of Essais, my English translation benefiting from that of Screech (1993) p. 984. My English translation follows the French text more accurately and has shorter sentences to be more easily readable.

Montaigne refers to a saying of King Alfonso V of Aragon (Alfonso the Magnanimous, reigned 1416 to 1458), as recorded by the Italian Antonio Beccadelli il Panormita in The Sayings and Deeds of King Alfonso of Aragon {De dictus et factis Alphonsi regis Aragonum} 3.7 (saying on a peaceful marriage). Beccadelli wrote this compilation about 1455. It became a widely read work.

Probably via his reading of Beccadelli, the Catholic priest Desiderius Erasmus included in his Apophthegmata Alfonso’s saying on marriage:

Alfonso King of Aragon used to say that a marriage could be lived out peacefully and without recrimination only if the husband was deaf and the wife blind. He implies, I think, that women as a whole are inclined to jealousy and that this is the source of quarrels and complaints. On the other side, women’s chattering is very irritating to husbands. The husband will escape that annoyance if he’s deaf. She won’t be troubled by suspicion of his adultery if she has no eyes.

{ Alphonsus Aragonum Rex dicere solebat, ita demum matrimonium tranquille citraque querimonias exigi posse, si maritus surdus fiat, uxor caeca: innuens, opinor, foemineum genus obnoxium esse zelotypiae, atque hinc oriri rixas & querimonias: rursum maritis permolestam esse uxorum garrulitatem, qua molestia cariturus sit, si fiat surdus: nec illa vexabitur adulterii suspicione, si careat oculis. }

Erasmus, Apophthegmata / Apophthegmatum opus {Aphorisms / Work on Aphorisms} 8.4, Latin text from LB (1703) vol. IV, p. 378 (section A), English translation (with my insubstantial changes) from Knott & Fantham (2014) vol. 38, p. 960 (no. 8.291). Erasmus’s Apophthegmata is different from, but related to, his Collection of Adages / Thousands of Adages {Collectanea Adagiorum / Adagiorum chiliades}.

In 1578, the English public figure John Florio claimed to have translated from Italian a gender-reversed version:

There never shall be quarreling in that house, where the man is blind and the wife deaf.

{ Non ci sara mai grido in quella casa, doue che il patrone è or∣bo, & la patrona sorda. There neuer shal be chiding in that house, where the man is blynd, and the wife deafe. }

Florio (1578) p. 28. Florio may have been pandering to gynocentrism under the rule of Elizabeth I.

[11] Propertius, Elegies 4.8.87-8, my English translation of v. 88. No consensus exists on the Latin text of v. 88. Variants: “despondi, et noto solvimus arma toro” in Goold (1990), “despondi, et toto solvimus arma toro” in Holcombe (2009), “respondi, et toto solvimus arma toro” in Hutchinson (2006). Hutchinson obolizes respondi and comments “need not resemble what it has replaced. Nothing convinces.” Id. p. 205.

The reading respondi, which all the manuscripts provide, makes good sense with sexual innuendo. Propertius had been impotent with Phyllis and Teia because his mind was on Cynthia. He then gets in bed with Cynthia. Men’s penises have commonly been disparaged as “weapons {arma}.” Resistance to respondi and reading v. 88 sexually is consistent with modern philology’s anti-penis gender bias. On ambiguity in interpreting this verse, Janan (2001) pp. 116, 126.

[12] The fundamental question of Propertius is a question for many men:

Even the conventions of servitium amoris {man slave of love} do not necessarily demand that the lover enthuse over his mistress’ tyranny, only that he comply. Why should Propertius be such a happy idiot?

Janan (2001) p. 123. Johnson suggests that Propertius is happy because he enjoy’s Cynthia’s “greatness of soul”:

under the whining and the prevarications and the grand renunciations lurks the old arrogance, the old determination to manipulate and to dominate: to have things her way. When the ghost announces that she has plans for Propertius once he arrives in hell, she asserts her mastery over him even as she does when, in the next poem, she forgives the man she has just beaten to a pulp, decides to have mercy on him, to treat his derelictions with a clemency worthy of Caesar, and thus shows her greatness of soul.

Johnson (2009) p. 89. A man typically doesn’t enjoy having a woman beat him to a pulp, even if the woman subsequently has mercy on him. Johnson seems to lack the imagination to escape the world of gynocentric devaluation of men:

Without her — he has said it again and again — without her, no poems, no poetic identity. … she is the catalyst of a new style of self-fashioning. … when Cynthia bursts into the middle of what was supposed to be a volume devoted to patriotic forms and patriotic feelings, when she scares her lover-poet out of his wits and roughs him up and then has her way with him, both her macabre visitation and her brutal interruption of his swinging bachelor soiree seem, on reflection, anything but astonishing. Propertius cannot get rid of Cynthia because she is his worse and better half, she is his fate and his salvation, she is his Id and Super-Ego. She is the source and the shape of his poetic identity.

Id. pp. 93, 94, 96. Yes, of course, Propertius owes all his success to Cynthia. That’s the form of a tediously conventional claim that men commonly make to enthusiastic applause: “I owe all my success to my wife / girlfriend / mother.”

[13] Middle English includes the term “cunte-beten,” meaning an impotent man. Current vulgar English has “pussy-wipped” (cf. “pistol-whipped”), meaning generally a woman’s domination of a man. Historically, representations of the penis have been much more disparaging than those of the vagina.

On loving one another, Leviticus 19:18, Galatians 5:14. Jesus, a Jew, explained God’s commandment in terms of his own personal witness to everyone: “love one another as I have loved you.” John 15,12, similarly John 13:34. On Jesus’s gospel in relation to the development of Latin love elegy, see my post about Parthenius and moral reflection.

[images] (1) Young man cup-bearer filing wine jug (oinochoe) at ancient Greek banquet. Painting by Cage Painter on Attic red-figure cup. Painted about 490-480 BGC. Preserved as accession # G 133 (Campana Collection, 1861) in the Louvre Museum, Paris. Image thanks to Jastrow and Wikimedia Commons. (2) Reclining man at ancient Greek banquet. From the same fifth-century BGC cup as the previous image, and similarly sourced. (3) Portrait of Medea in pastel (cropped slightly). Drawing by Charles Antoine Coypel about 1715. Preserved as accession # 1974.25 (Harris Brisbane Dick Fund, 1953) in The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. Image thanks to The Met. (4) Medea flies away in a dragon-drawn chariot after massacring Jason’s wife and children. Painting on Red-Figure Calyx-Krater (Mixing Vessel). Attributed to the Policoro Painter working in southern Italy about 400 GC. Accession # 1991.1 (Leonard C. Hanna, Jr. Fund) in the Cleveland Museum of Art. Image (cropped slightly) thanks to the Cleveland Museum of Art.

References:

Corelis, Jon. 1995. Roman Erotic Elegy: Selections from Tibullus, Propertius, Ovid and Sulpicia. Salzburg Studies in English Literature, Poetic Drama & Poetic Theory 128. Salzburg: University of Salzburg.

Currie, H. MacL. 1973. “Propertius IV. 8 — A Reading.” Latomus. 32 (3): 616-622.

Dee, James H. 1978. “Elegy 4.8: A Propertian Comedy.” Transactions of the American Philological Association. 108: 41-53.

Florio, John. 1578. Florio his firste fruites which yeelde familiar speech, merie prouerbes, wittie sentences, and golden sayings. Also a perfect induction to the Italian, and English tongues, as in the table appeareth. The like heretofore, neuer by any man published. London: Imprinted at the three Cranes in the Vintree, by Thomas Dawson, for Thomas Woodcocke.

Goold, G. P., ed and trans. 1990. Propertius. Elegies. Loeb Classical Library 18. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1990.

Heyworth, S. J. 2007, ed. Propertius. Sexti Properti Elegos. Oxford Classical Texts. Oxford: Oxford University Press. (review by Antonio Ramírez de Verger)

Hutchinson, Gregory, ed. and trans. 2006. Propertius: Elegies Book IV. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Holcombe, Colin John, trans. 2009. Sextus Propertius Elegies. Latin text and English translation. Ocaso Press. Online. Holcombe’s review of previous translations and characterization of his translation.

Janan, Micaela. 2001. The Politics of Desire: Propertius IV. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.

Johnson, W. R. 2009. A Latin Lover in Ancient Rome: Readings in Propertius and his Genre. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press. (review by Randall Childree)

Kline, A. S., trans. 2001a. Sextus Propertius: The Elegies. A complete English translation with in-depth name index. Poetry in Translation. Online.

Kline, A. S., trans. 2001b. Tibullus. Elegies. Brindin Press Virtual Chapbook 40. Online. The Latin text here seems to me inferior to that of Postgate (1913 / 1988). Alternate presention without Latin text at Poetry in Translation.

Knott, Betty I., and Elaine Fantham, trans. 2014. Desiderius Erasmus. Apophthegmata. Collected Works of Erasmus, vols. 37 & 38. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.

LB. 1703. Desiderii Erasmi Roterodami. Opera omnia emendatiora et auctiora … doctorumque … notis illustrata. Tomus quartus, complectens quae ad morum institutionem pertinent, quorum catalogum versa pagina docet. Lugduni Batavorum: curá & impensis Petri Lander Aa, 1703.

Mooney, Joseph J. 1919. Hosidius Geta’s Tragedy “Medea”: a Vergilian cento. Latin text with metrical translation. Appended is An Outline of Ancient Roman Magic. Cornish Bros: Birmingham.

Postgate, J. P. ed. and trans. 1913. Tibullus in Catullus. Tibullus. Pervigilium Veneris. Revised by G. P. Goold (1988). Loeb Classical Library 6. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Rondholz, Anke. 2012. The Versatile Needle: Hosidius Geta’s Cento Medea and its tradition. Berlin: De Gruyter. (review by Marcos Carmignani)

Shumilin, Mikhail. 2015. “Hosidius Geta’s Cento Medea: Vergilian Tragedy or Tragedy against Vergil?” Vergilius. 61: 131-156.

Zenith, Richard, trans. 1995. 113 Galician-Portuguese Troubadour Poems. Manchester: Carcanet, in association with Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Instituto Camões.