Ovid's Tragic Heroines: Gender Abjection and Generic Code-Switching

By Jessica A. Westerhold

Ovid's Tragic Heroines expands our understanding of Ovid's incorporation of Greek generic codes and the tragic heroines, Phaedra and Medea, while offering a new perspective on the Roman poet's persistent interest in these two characters and their paradigms. Ovid presents these two Attic tragic heroines as symbols of different passions that are defined by the specific combination of their gender and generic provenance. Their failure to be understood and their subsequent punishment are constructed as the result of their female "nature," and are generically marked as "tragic." Ovid's masculine poetic voice, by contrast, is given free rein to oscillate and play with poetic possibilities.

Jessica A. Westerhold focuses on select passages from the poems Ars Amatoria, Heroides, and Metamorphoses. Building on existing scholarship, she analyzes the dynamic nature of generic categories and codes in Ovid's poetry, especially the interplay of elegy and epic. Further, her analysis of Ovid's reception applies the idea of the abject to elucidate Ovid's process of constructing gender and genre in his poetry.

Ovid's Tragic Heroines incorporates established theories of the performativity of sex, gender, and kinship roles to understand the continued maintenance of the normative and abject subject positions Ovid's poetry creates. The resulting analysis reveals how Ovid's Phaedras and Medeas offer alternatives both to traditional gender roles and to material appropriate to a poem's genre, ultimately using the tragic code to introduce a new perspective to epic and elegy.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Release date: Jul 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781501770364

Book preview

Cover: Ovid’s Tragic Heroines, GENDER ABJECTION AND GENERIC CODE-SWITCHING by Jessica A. Westerhold

OVID’S TRAGIC HEROINES

GENDER ABJECTION AND GENERIC CODE-SWITCHING

JESSICA A. WESTERHOLD

CORNELL UNIVERSITY PRESS

Ithaca and London

For Heather June-Ella Quinsey

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

List of Abbreviations

Introduction

1. Signs of Abject Desire in Ars Amatoria

2. Rescripting Phaedra for an Elegiac Role

3. Medean Disruptions in Epic and Elegy

Conclusion

Notes

References

Index of Ancient Sources

General Index

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This project has spanned several years and has undergone numerous metamorphoses. Along the way, I have benefited from the support, advice, and encouragement of many generous readers, mentors, colleagues, friends, and family. The acknowledgments below are by no means exhaustive, and I owe gratitude to many more than I can name here.

Alison Keith has guided this project from its inception. Without her kindness and expertise, this book would not exist. Alison continues to be my most trusted advisor, mentor, and role model. I am equally grateful to Victoria Wohl, Erik Gunderson, Carole Newlands, and Jarrett Welsh, for their challenging questions and insightful suggestions which informed this work at its earliest stages.

I am deeply grateful to the staff at Cornell University Press and in particular to Bethany Wasik, acquisitions editor, for expertly shepherding this project and especially for her unflagging patience with my questions during the process. I am also indebted to Cornell’s anonymous referees for their attentive reading of my drafts and their generous and valuable comments. Thank you to the production editor, Anne Jones, and the team at Westchester Publishing Services for their skillful copyediting and typesetting; to Scott Garner for his careful indexing; and to Bettina Bergmann for allowing me to use her beautiful image. Finally, I would have been lost without the sharp eye of my department research assistant, Daniel Green, who diligently checked my citations and quotations. All remaining errors and omissions are my own.

I have also benefited from the encouragement and advice of my colleagues at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Thank you all, especially the Classics Department staff and faculty: Justin Arft, Tristan Barnes, Salvador Bartera, Jessica Black, Dylan Bloy, Donna Bodenheimer, Stephen Collins-Elliott, Lorenzo Del Monte, John Friend, Reema Habib, Kelle Knight, Theodora Kopestonsky, Maura Lafferty, Merle Langdon, Robert Sklenar, and Aleydis Van de Moortel. My gratitude to the Marco Institute for Medieval and Renaissance Studies at the University of Tennessee for generously contributing to the publication costs. I also want to thank the members of my Reading Accountability Group in the summer of 2021, Robin Baidya, Dawn Coleman, and Kalynn Schulz, for sharing their writing strategies, keeping me focused, and lifting my spirits. The librarians at John C. Hodges Library must also be acknowledged for their skillful assistance locating so many important resources. My thanks in particular go to the staff in the Interlibrary Services Department and to Molly Royse, the Classics librarian.

I have benefited from the attentive reading, feedback, and advice of many friends and colleagues. In addition to those named above, my sincere thanks go to Robin Barrow, Taylor Coughlan, Chris Craig, Dan Curley, Megan Drinkwater, Laurel Fulkerson, John Han, Sharon James, Anne Langendorfer, Rhonda Lott, Daniel Moore, Jocelyn Moore, Emma Scioli, Alison Sharrock, and Mark Tabone. Over the years and because of the generosity of my home department, I have also had the opportunity of sharing portions of these chapters with accommodating audiences. In particular, I am grateful to the questions and input from those attending my talks at conferences held by the Classical Association of Canada, the Classical Association of the Middle West and South and its Southern Section, the Society for Classical Studies, and the 2015 Augustan Poetry Conference sponsored by the University of São Paulo, as well as invited talks at the University of Kansas and the Haslam Scholars Program at my home institution.

Lastly, I owe my deepest gratitude to the friends and family who continued to cheer, comfort, and motivate me when I needed it the most. Above all, my wife Heather Quinsey, who has accompanied me through this journey from start to finish with unlimited patience and grace. She inspires my work and fills my life with joy every day.

Unless otherwise noted, I use Kenney’s text of the Ars Amatoria (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Palmer’s text of the Heroides (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1898); Tarrant’s text of the Metamorphoses (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004); and Owen’s text of the Tristia (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1915). All translations are my own.

ABBREVIATIONS

When citing ancient authors and works I follow abbreviations found in the OCD. For journals, I follow the Année Philologique abbreviations first. For journals not listed by the Année Philologique, I follow OCD.

Introduction

Ovid’s Tragic Performances

at tanti tibi sit non indulgere theatris,

dum bene de uacuo pectore cedat amor.

eneruant animos citharae lotosque lyraeque

et uox et numeris brachia mota suis.

illic adsidue ficti saltantur amantes;

But deem it important not to indulge in the theatres, until love withdraws entirely from your heart. The lutes and flutes and lyres and voice and arms dancing to their own beat weaken the spirit. There fabled lovers are constantly danced [in the pantomime];

(Ov. Rem. am. 751–55)

Supremo die identidem exquirens, an iam de se tumultus foris esset, petito speculo capillum sibi comi ac malas labantes corrigi praecepit et admissos amicos percontatus, ecquid iis uideretur mi[ni]mum uitae commode transegisse, adiecit et clausulam:

ἐπεὶ δὲ πάνυ κα<λ>ῶς πέπαισται, δότε κρότον

καὶ πάντες ἡμᾶς μετὰ χαρᾶς προπέμψατε.

On his final day he was repeatedly inquiring whether there was a disturbance outside because of him, and after he asked for a mirror, he requested that his hair be combed and that his slipping jaw be set straight and he asked his friends who had been admitted whether he seemed to them to have played the mime of life fittingly, and he added this tag:

Since the part has been played well, give applause

and all of you send me forth with joy.

(Suet. Aug. 99.1)

Performance was vitally important to ancient Roman identity. This is first evident in Ovid’s erotodidactic poem above, published at the end of the first century BCE, where he warns against going to the theater with a broken heart, for watching the performance of an emotion one is trying to overcome will have a negative psychological effect on the viewer. Writing over one hundred years later about events in Ovid’s lifetime, Suetonius reports that Augustus’s last words figured his life as a performance, even if it is unlikely that Augustus did, in fact, end his life with these words. Suetonius, however, relies on the verisimilitude of his story, which demands that an audience believe Augustus might have said these words.¹ Suetonius’s story is credible because Roman culture was highly theatrical, a characteristic which Anthony Boyle traces back to the sixth-century BCE Etruscans, and which can be seen in two very important cultural institutions, the triumph and the funeral. The theatrics of Rome’s social institutions and their political force were certainly well established before the city’s first attested drama was produced. Spectacle was always already both the display and the agent of power.² Spectacle constructed the Roman elite self. The spectacle of the triumphal general parading through the city was a transparent and transcendent performance of Roman military might and imperial expansion as embodied by the elite general at the center of the show.³ Similarly, during a funeral procession for an aristocrat, Roman funeral masks (imagines) of deceased officeholders in the family were worn by hired actors. A surviving relative attending a funeral would gaze upon the imagines of his distinguished ancestors as if upon a mirror. In addition to offering an opportunity for self-identification as a member of the family, the imagines functioned as models for emulation, motivating later generations to live up to or surpass the accomplishments of their ancestors.⁴

Plays also offered a way for Romans to examine their own identity and their relationship to others. In addition to native Italian and Etruscan spectacles, tragedy as a genre and a spectacle was an important institution imported into Sicily, Magna Graecia, and Roman Italy from Greece.⁵ Learned Romans would be familiar with the Attic Greek tragedies themselves, while they and less educated inhabitants would know them through the performance of Latin adaptations.⁶ Livius Andronicus, a man from Tarentum, identified as semigraecus by Suetonius (Gram. 1.2), is said to have translated the first tragedy into Latin for the ludi Romani of 240 BCE.⁷ Livius also famously translated Homer’s Odyssey into Latin Saturnians. Feeney (2016) has analyzed this unique translation project, situating it as part of Rome’s entrance into an international Hellenic world.⁸ As he and others have noted, translations of Greek dramas offered Romans the opportunity to become familiar with the Greek people with whom they were coming into contact and eventually would conquer.⁹ Simultaneously, as Feeney also argues, the Romans were identifying themselves as experts, even inheritors, of the canonical Greek literary and dramatic tradition.¹⁰

The process of translating Greek literature for a Roman audience also introduced new concepts into the Roman cultural vocabulary and, with these new concepts, new ways of imagining Roman identities. For this reason, Feeney (2016, 140) contends that performing Greek characters in Latin adaptations of Greek plays enabled the audience to try out what it was like to look at the world like a Greek, to identify momentarily with Greeks and their perspectives, in order to refine what it was like to look at the world as a Roman did.¹¹ In the case of Attic tragedy, these identities took the form of new roles, both dramatic and social, for, as noted above, the Roman subject figured his life as a performance. Ovid made important contributions to this translation project. His poetry, specifically his translation of two plays which appear throughout his work in various forms, Euripides’s Hippolytus and Medea, explores the roles Euripides’s characters Phaedra and Medea offer to Ovid’s audience, both when the characters act as vehicles for exploring new or expanded categories of gender and genre and as confirmations of reductive and stereotypical categories.

Ovid, in Theory

Here, I examine the ways in which Ovid’s poetry participates in the translation of Greek literature to Roman performance through a lens that brings gender and genre in dialogue with one another. To do so, I draw on the theories and vocabulary in scholarly literature in order to better understand Ovid’s process of gender and generic construction and its effect. For example, Judith Butler maintains that social identities are performative and theorizes the assumption of gender, sex, and kinship roles as an identification.¹² The roles which one may perform are defined and restricted by those recognized in one’s community. This identification is performative in as much as it is constituted through behavior and attire (e.g., by a Roman matrona) which act as a citation of the symbolic position with which the individual identifies.¹³ "Acts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through the play of signifying absences that suggest, but never reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are performative in the sense that the essence or identity that they otherwise purport to express are fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means" (Butler 2008, 185). Applying Butler’s formulation, a Roman becomes a matrona because she persuasively performs this role. She dresses (by wearing the stola) and behaves (by advocating for one’s children) in a way which is recognizable to Roman society as a matrona. Just as the adaptations of Greek drama did for republican culture, so Ovid’s Phaedra and Medea offered new roles to his audience in the Augustan Age and provided a guide for how to cite these roles. Throughout his work the heroines continue to evolve as identities multiply performed by various characters in his corpus. However, Ovid’s verse demonstrates that Phaedra and Medea always ultimately represent monstrous identities, whose lust and rage must be punished and eliminated in order to protect the normative subjects with whom they interact.

In addition to Butler’s theory of the performance of gender, I draw on Julia Kristeva’s understanding of the abject to elucidate why Ovid introduces these novel identities only to repudiate them. Kristeva theorizes the abject as that part of the self or of a society which must be rejected and is then refused acknowledgment as part of the self or society. Instead, the abject is established as an other who embodies these distasteful characteristics in order to create a fictional individual or society—an ideal self or state which is free from characteristics now associated solely with the abject.¹⁴ Judith Butler expands Kristeva’s definition in her formulation of the abject: The abject designates here precisely those ‘unlivable’ and ‘uninhabitable’ zones of social life, excluded from subjecthood but necessary to delimit the domain of the subject. It [the abject] will constitute that site of dreaded identification against which—and by virtue of which—the domain of the subject will circumscribe its own claim to autonomy and to life (Butler 1993, 3).¹⁵ By embodying what is unacceptable for normative society, the female abject subject reminds a good Roman woman how not to act. At the same time, abject behaviors and desires originate in and are, in fact, undesirable characteristics of any normative Roman matrona. This places pressure upon a Roman woman to repudiate and associate these failures with an abject subject and introduces the potential for her failed performance of the normative identity matrona by admitting or expressing any of these abject characteristics. As we will see in this study, Ovid’s Phaedras and Medeas make efforts to find a place for themselves in society, but Ovid’s verse repeatedly constructs them as abject subjects, required to define what is normative in terms of gender and genre.

I have expanded my definition of Ovid’s Phaedras and Medeas to include those heroines who cite them, following closely Curley’s application of Conte’s concept of code modeling.¹⁶ He has demonstrated that characters in Ovid, who embody distinct tragic dilemmas or code models, act as local models or tragic paradigms. When characters who do not have their own tragic provenance, such as Byblis (Met. 9), take up such dilemmas, or tragic codes in Ovid’s corpus, [their] story has been encoded as a tragedy (Curley 2013, 16). When I use the term tragic in the following chapters, I refer specifically to the tragic genre. So as not to create confusion, I do not use tragic at any point in its vernacular sense, that is, mournful, pathetic, or disastrous.¹⁷ While it may seem strange to call Byblis, for instance, tragic when scholars do not have any evidence that her myth was represented in a tragedy, I employ the term to describe her and the other female desiring subjects who cite Phaedra or Medea. These heroines make up the corpus of Phaedra-like and Medea-like figures under consideration in this study.

The code-modeling which Curley identifies in these episodes is thus a generic paradigm, not a series of specific allusions (although we will see that allusions are in some cases very pointedly made to Euripides’s plays).¹⁸ Like Curley, I do not pursue line-by-line comparisons of Ovid’s use of a Euripidean source text or aim to establish Euripides as the primary source for the Ovidian representations I consider in the following chapters. Rather, taking up Ovid’s own cues, which he gives us through direct allusions to Euripides, general thematic correspondences, and lexical and rhetorical strategies which evoke the tragic stage, I consider how the echoes of the Euripidean Phaedra and Medea guide and inform the interpretation of these mythological figures in Ovid. More specifically, I consider how the two heroines, as established by their tragic representations, disrupt Ovid’s verse and are mastered by the poet.

Looking specifically at the tragic voices citing Phaedra and Medea in Ovid’s elegy and epic, we may see that the tragic heroine’s voice is a threat—sometimes playful, sometimes domineering, sometimes desperate. Each heroine comes to embody the abject self and song. Her excessive passions are always present as the narrator’s (and audience’s) own secret but disavowed emotions. Her tragic tradition is always already drawn from the same mythological matrix as the more reasonable Roman genres of epic and elegy. In this way she can be located spatially on the fringes of both community and canon—included as a member of the group but excluded from the inner circle. Her threat and marginal location are marked by her feminine gender and by her tragic genre.¹⁹

This monograph joins the growing work of scholars who have applied the theoretical concepts of abjection and monstrosity to Greek and Latin literature with great success. Their studies demonstrate how Greek and Roman identity was constructed and shored up through various processes of disidentification. Most recently, Spentzou (2018) interprets Lucan’s Caesar as an abject subject, destabilizing the categories of subject and object. Felton (2012), Del Lucchese (2019), and Mitchell (2021) see the monster as a marker of the boundaries defining what is human and normative. By contrast, Valladares (2021) traces an aesthetic of tenderness in Roman art and literature beginning in the first century BCE, which paradoxically embraced monstrous mythological figures. Valladares’s focus on the late republic and early empire joins those of Hardie (2009), Lowe (2015), and Pietropaolo (2021). Hardie’s (2009) collection, Paradox and the Marvellous in Augustan Literature and Culture, includes several contributions which broach this subject, especially those from Barchiesi, Platt, and Rosati. Lowe (2015) and Pietropaulo (2021) explore the monstrous and grotesque in Augustan poetry specifically. Bloomsbury’s Cultural History Series will soon include Felton’s forthcoming A Cultural History of Monsters in Antiquity. Felton is also the editor of the forthcoming Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth.²⁰ This important work has illuminated Greek and Roman systems of categorization, marginalization, and oppression such as nationality, gender, ability, and sexuality. My reading of Ovid’s abject tragic heroines contributes to these studies by investigating how his poetic play both reinforces dangerous gender stereotypes and simultaneously reveals their fiction.

Phaedra and Medea in Greece

Euripides’s extant Hippolytus (Hipp. II), performed at the Athenian City Dionysia in 428 BCE, is his second and only surviving treatment of the myth.²¹ The action of the play takes place in Troezen while Theseus is away consulting an oracle. Phaedra, wife of Theseus, falls in love with her stepson, Hippolytus. The play begins with Aphrodite announcing that Phaedra’s desire is part of the goddess’s revenge upon Hippolytus. Phaedra has chosen to die rather than act on her desire, for the sake of her family’s reputation and her sons’ future, but her nurse approaches Hippolytus without Phaedra’s consent. Fearing the consequences if Hippolytus tells his father, Phaedra accuses her stepson of rape. This accusation is delivered in the form of a letter and read by Theseus after her suicide. Theseus, influenced by Phaedra’s false charges against Hippolytus, exiles and curses his son, who is killed by Poseidon’s bull, sent from the sea in response to Theseus’s curse.²²

In Euripides’s Medea, performed at the Athenian City Dionysia in 431 BCE, the eponymous heroine turns to murderous revenge when the hero, Jason, finds a Greek wife in Corinth.²³ We meet her in agony over her abandonment and watch her devise and implement a plot which results in the death, not of Jason, but of Jason’s children with Medea, his bride, and future father-in-law. Medea’s rage is provoked by Jason’s oath-breaking. She considers their marriage a sort of alliance between equals which he has violated. Her revenge appears to be a distorted version of the epic hero’s punishment of his enemies.²⁴ Unlike Phaedra, the Euripidean Medea has no gods motivating her excessive passion. The play ends with Medea flying from the stage on the mēchanē as if a god herself. Her myth continues with a career as a murderous evil stepmother to Theseus in Athens.²⁵

While Euripides tells one version of Medea’s and Phaedra’s myth, other poets in other genres foreground different themes and moments. Medea’s mythological tradition links her Euripidean revenge with Phaedra’s forbidden lust, for Phaedra’s story rehearses Medea’s at its beginning. In Apollonius’s famous epic, Medea is a maiden in love, who violates laws of kinship—betraying her father and killing her brother for love of a foreign (and therefore inappropriate) beloved.²⁶ Her erotic choice represents a violation of gender norms. It is the role of the male guardian, not a young girl, to choose a suitable match. Medea flees with Jason back to Greece, employing her magic to rejuvenate either Jason, his father, or the nurses of Dionysus, and her guile and reputation to persuade Pelias’s daughters to kill their father on Jason’s behalf.²⁷ Medea’s myth is expansive, encompassing a full life—maiden, wife, aged mother—and incorporating many tragic roles such as destructive lover, vengeful wife, and evil stepmother.²⁸ This Phaedra-like episode in Medea’s myth was fresh in the minds of the Roman literati as Ovid began his career, for Varro Atacinus had recently translated Apollonius’s epic Argonautica into Latin—Argonautae—sometime after 47 BCE.²⁹

Phaedra and Medea in Rome

As noted above, Phaedra and Medea would likely be familiar to a Roman audience from the stage. Moreover, elite Romans would know their myths and their literary tradition from school. Early Roman poets, beginning with Livius Andronicus, self-consciously chose and translated Greek models that were central to the Greek education of Magna Graecia.³⁰ Each act of translation was a judgment of the literary value of the text. Translations also consciously cited their Greek models and the later Roman models which mediated each new adaptation.³¹ As an example, Feeney (2016, 156) adduces Livius’s Odusseia, whose title and first line signals its model, Homer’s Odyssey, and its innovation, in Livius’s Latin Saturnians.³² This self-referential characteristic is especially strong in later translations. Euripides’s Medea, as I will discuss further below, was reworked by each subsequent generation of Latin poets, and we may see in successive translations expressions of an awareness of the past iterations as well as a desire to innovate.³³

We do not have any extant fragments of a Roman Phaedra or Hippolytus before Seneca’s Phaedra, a generation after Ovid’s death;³⁴ however, such an absence of the myth in Roman tragedy does not preclude access to and knowledge of the Greek plays. Suetonius (Vita Ter. 5) reports that Terence traveled to Greece to read Menander’s plays.³⁵ Ovid, at least, knew one of Euripides’s tragedies entitled Hippolytus, for this play is the first listed in a catalogue of tragedies which offer materiam … amoris (Tristia 2.382): "Is there anything in the Hippolytus except the blind passion of a stepmother?" (numquid in Hippolyto, nisi caecae flamma novercae, Tristia 2.383). Greek plays were being performed in southern Italy before Livius Andronicus’s Roman production; a Phaedra or Hippolytus may have been among them.³⁶ Feeney (2016) emphasizes the significance of Roman exposure to Greek theater in the third century as the Roman army expanded into Magna Graecia and the Greek mainland. In addition to southern Italians bringing Greek dramas to Rome and translating them into Latin, Roman soldiers spent a considerable amount of time in Sicily during the wars against Carthage and presumably attended Greek dramatic productions there.³⁷

While Phaedra is absent from our roster of extant Latin plays, the Roman tragedians produced several plays about Medea and Medea-like figures.³⁸ Medea herself appears in the tragedies of Roman playwrights Ennius,³⁹ Pacuvius,⁴⁰ and Accius.⁴¹ While Ennius’s Medea Exul and Accius’s Medea are believed to be adaptations of Euripides’s play, Ennius’s Medea may have been set in Athens and Pacuvius’s Medus in Colchis and Media.⁴² As Boyle (2006; 2012) and Cowan (2010) have argued, the Euripidean Medea offered the Roman audience the opportunity to assume or reject identification with a Greek character and Greek culture. Romans might have seen themselves in the Greek hero Jason facing a barbarian other, or in Medea for whom Greece is a foreign land and Greeks are enemies.⁴³

In the imperial period, tragedy seems to have been superseded to some degree by the pantomime.⁴⁴ The freedmen of Augustus and Maecenas, Pylades and Bathyllus, are credited with introducing the tragic and comic pantomime respectively to Rome in 22 BCE.⁴⁵ This was a more stylized performance with a single actor, which, nevertheless, incorporated arias and material from tragedy. Lucian advises the dancer of pantomime not to be ignorant of anything that is told by Homer and Hesiod and the best poets, and above all by tragedy (οὐδὲν τῶν ὑπὸ τοῦ Ὁμήρου καὶ Ἡσιόδου καὶ τῶν ἀρίστων ποιητῶν καὶ μάλιστα τῆς τραγῳδίας λεγομένων ἀγνοήσει, de Saltatione, 61).⁴⁶ He provides a list of popular pantomime subjects (37–61) which every good dancer should know, among which he includes the Athenian myths concerning Theseus and Aegeus (ὅσα περὶ … Θησέως καὶ Αἰγέως, 40), the reception of Medea and her flight back to Persia (τὴν Μηδείας ὑποδοχὴν καὶ αὖθις ἐς Πέρσας φυγὴν, 40), the daughters of Pandion (θυγατέρας … τὰς Πανδίονος, 40), and Hippolytus’ suffering (τὸ Ἱππολύτου πάθος, 40); the Corinthian myths, including Glauce and Creon (τὴν Γλαύκην καὶ τὸν Κρέοντα, 42); in Crete, Phaidra (τὴν Φαίδραν, 49); and in Thrace, Jason (τὸν Ἰάσονα, 52).⁴⁷

Generic Performances

With the exception of Ovid’s own tragedy, Medea, which is now lost but for two lines,⁴⁸ Ovid’s adaptations of Euripides’s heroines were twofold—translated from Greek into Latin and reconceptualized from tragedy into elegy or epic.⁴⁹ As Curley (2013) and others have noted, Ovid signals both strategies of adaptation through allusive play. In this process, Ovid’s construction of Phaedra and Medea as gendered abject subjects is also defined by the generic contexts in which Ovid locates them, inextricably linking their embodiment of characteristics undesirable to both the Roman woman and the genres of epic and elegy to their tragic provenance. They wreak havoc in Ovid’s Roman elegy and epic because they do not belong either at Rome or in the genres to which the Augustan poet has relocated them.

This play with tragic disruption of other genres by Phaedra and Medea is characteristic of Ovid’s thematization of genre throughout his poetry. There has been a great deal of scholarly attention to the dialectic of epic and elegy in Ovid.⁵⁰ This is no surprise as elegy is the genre most represented in his corpus, and elegy programmatically defines itself as epic’s antithesis.⁵¹ His elegiac poems include the erotic Amores; the erotodidactic Ars Amatoria, Remedia Amoris, and Medicamina; the epistolary Heroides; the calendar Fasti; and the exilic Ibis, Tristia, and Epistulae ex Ponto. Hinds (1987), reconsidering Heinze (1919), argues that Ovid’s poetry intentionally crosses the boundaries differentiating genres and signals these crossings while betraying anxieties over the resulting generic contamination.⁵² Hence, Ovid’s epic poem, Metamorphoses, has been called a masterpiece of generic transformation (Farrell 2009, 376).

Both undermining and observing generic expectation, however, rely on literary codes and conventions to which attention is drawn, especially in the process of their transgression. That generic codes are not the product of modern criticism is attested by, for example, Horace’s comments about genre in Ars Poetica (73–85), where the poet identifies themes and meters appropriate to each genre.⁵³ Horace contends that hexameter is suitable for kings and wars, elegiac couplets for lament and humble elegies, rage for iambics which are used by comedy and tragedy, lyric for gods, their children, athletic victories, and lovesickness. Ovid gives a similar description of the conventions of literary genre in Remedia Amoris (372–86). Responding to criticisms of his Ars Amatoria, the poet-praeceptor cites generic expectations as a defense for the content of his verse. He enjoins his pupil to suit each [work] to its own meter (ad numeros exige quidque suos, 372): war for hexameter; anger for tragedy; everyday life for comedy; insults for iambics; and love for elegy.

The passage, of course, invites suspicion. Ovid anticipates his audience’s laughter over such strict rules articulated in the context of a didactic poem written in elegiac couplets. Nonetheless, these programmatic rules and expectations accord with Horace’s earlier list. Ovid’s generic play relies on a familiarity with such traditional definitions of literary genre. A generic code is described by Conte (1986, 81) as a model in relation to which poets can define their own poetry. Reference to the norm of a generic discourse delimits the common space within which new poetry can both emulate tradition and speak with a fresh voice. Conte (1986, 93) sees genres as definable precisely in their mutual relationship and as a horizon of historically formalized (and historically variable) literary expectations. Codes would be familiar to an ancient audience,