The Flavian epic poets wrote in the aftermath of renewed political turmoil and social ferment at Rome, a time calculated to re-energize, if such were needed, a genre long at the forefront in classical antiquity for engaging with the most pressing political, social and literary issues of the day. Their self-conscious exploration of poetics has been well treated by Philip Hardie and a host of recent literary critics1; their political commitments have likewise received considerable attention from contemporary scholars2; and their treatment of current social issues too has attracted great interest amongst cultural historians3. An emergent focus of recent scholarship on these epics has been the relationship between gender and genre, especially as manifested in relations between the sexes4. My paper reopens the investigation of the dynamics of gender in the long epics of Valerius Flaccus, Papinius Statius, and Silius Italicus, by analyzing their deployment of the lexicon of sexual difference. I argue that the Flavian epic poets put on display the conventions, and contraventions, of normative femininity (and masculinity) in narratives that are acutely sensitive to contemporary contestations of the territorial assignments of gender in Roman culture.
I begin with Valerius Flaccus’ Argonautica, which recuperates several different models of epic femininity – from the hero’s lamenting mother Alcimede, through the sacrificial maiden Helle, to the terrifying witch Medea. Alcimede reprises the Homeric role of mater dolorosa, associated most famously with Thetis and Hecuba in the Iliad 5, in her proleptic lament over the death of her son in his epic trial. Introduced in conjunction with her husband Aeson (Arg. 1.296-8), Alcimede stands out as the feminine voice of grief (Arg. 1.315-19)6:
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Valerius’ lexical choices in this passage clarify the traditionally gendered distribution of sex roles in epic: mothers lament their sons’ departure on a heroic adventure (cf., e.g., Antikleia at Hom. Od. 11.197-203, and Alkimede herself in Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.251-2, 261-306); while aged fathers – once brave and thus fitting progenitors of the next generation of heroes – falter in the face of their sons’ new trials (cf., e.g., Laertes at Hom. Od. 11.187-96, and Aeson at Ap. Rhod. Arg. 1.253, 263-4). The poet identifies Alcimede as the leader of the women’s laments (317) in diction that rehearses the conventional assignment to the female sex of gemitus (315), planctus (317) and, especially, ululatibus (318), marked as characteristic of women by the adjective femineis (alluding to Verg. Aen. 2.487-8, 4.667). Thus, the younger Seneca observes that the Romans had traditionally ‘stipulated a year as the period of mourning for women, not to make them mourn that long but to prevent them from mourning longer’ (Epist. 63.13)7, for women were thought to be particularly subject to grief. Alcimede exemplifies this Roman stereotype in the short speech that follows (1.320-34), with her anticipation of Jason’s death and her own insupportable grief. She acknowledges the cliché of maternal fear (trepidis matribus, 1.324) and not only predicts that any mention of her son’s whereabouts will precipitate nervous alarm (quos iam mente dies, quam saeua insomnia curis | prospicio!, 1.329-30) and fainting (quotiens raucos ad litoris ictus | deficiam a! Scythicum metuens pontumque polumque, 1.330-1), but finally even hints that his departure will occasion her own death (1.333-4): da, precor, amplexus haesuraque uerba relinque | auribus et dulci iam nunc preme lumina dextra (‘cast your arms about me, I pray; leave me with words that will cling to my ears, and even now close these eyes with your dear hands’).
Valerius pointedly contrasts Alcimede’s (implicitly weak) womanly indulgence in lament here with Aeson’s stout manly encouragement of his son (1.335-6): talibus Alcimede maeret; sed fortior Aeson | attollens dictis animos (‘so Alcimede grieved; but Aeson more stoutly raised his [son’s] spirits with his speech…’). After reporting Aeson’s encouraging speech, Valerius tenderly portrays Jason’s attention to his fainting mother and aged father (1.348-9): sic ait. ille suo collapsam pectore matrem | sustinuit magnaque senem ceruice recepit (‘So spoke Aeson. Jason supported his mother, who had collapsed on his breast, and received his elderly father on his broad back’). This exchange will prove Jason’s last sight of his parents, however, for the aged pair commit suicide at the end of the book, and in his depiction of their deaths Valerius again alludes to contemporary Roman ideals of gendered behaviour.
Alcimede, animated by maternal anxiety, consults the underworld deities, attended by her no less anxious, but better disciplined, husband (Arg. 1.730-4):
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J.H. Mozely (whose Loeb translation I reproduce here unadapted), imports the gendered clichés of feminine fear and masculine self-discipline into his English rendering of the passage, and thereby accurately conveys the gendered contrast implicit in Valerius’ lexical choices in this necromantic scene. Moreover, the poet confirms these normative sex roles in his depiction of the pair’s suicide shortly afterwards. For when his father’s ghost summons him to death (1.749-51), Aeson ponders an appropriately martial exit (1.756-61) and earns comparison to a lion in Valerius’ reworking (Arg. 1.757-8) of a traditional simile applied to epic heroes (cf. Hom. Il. 20.164, Verg. Aen. 12.4-9)8.
At this crisis point, Alcimede responds with conventionally feminine fear, tears and agitation, Aeson with conventionally masculine dignity and heroism (Arg. 1.761-70)9:
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In the event, the noble death Aeson deems fitting is suicide (Arg. 1.816-22):
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Despite the troubling presence of a Fury presiding over this death scene, their mutual suicide, expressly undertaken in a spirit of opposition to Pelias’ tyranny (Arg. 1.790-811), resonates against the suicides of many members of the Stoic senatorial opposition to the Julio-Claudian and Flavian emperors10. Of particular relevance to Valerius’ description of the elderly couple’s death is the elder Arria’s decision to die with her husband Caecina Paetus, when he committed suicide after being condemned by Claudius in 42 ce for his part in the conspiracy of L. Arruntius Camillus Scribonianus11.
Valerius’ conventional treatment of the epic mater dolorosa, Alcimede, is matched by his innovative treatment of the sacrificial maiden, exemplified by Helle and Hesione. Orpheus includes Helle’s sad fate in the song with which he motivates the Argonauts on the night before their departure (Arg. 1.286-93):
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I have explored elsewhere, in connection with this scene, the Roman epicists’ predilection for making the death of a beautiful maiden the catalyst of heroic action12. Valerius treats the same topos at greater length in the second book of the Argonautica in Hercules’ (successful) rescue of Hesione from a sea-monster sent to ravage the Troad because of Laomedon’s refusal to pay Neptune and Apollo their wages for building the walls of Troy (Arg. 2.451-578)13. In this episode, the poet captures the traditional hero’s attention (and implicitly captivates that of his audience as well) with the promise of the spectacle of a beautiful young maiden exposed to cruel death (Arg. 2.451-7):
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Valerius’ introduction of the sacrificial maiden, Hesione, fetishes both her beauty and her vulnerability as the desirable objects of Hercules’ (and our) gaze (Arg. 2.462-7):
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Moreover, by memorializing her as a work of art at the very moment of her threatened death, he offers implicit commentary on his own gendered generic commitments in the Argonautica.
In response to the hero’s inquiry about the cause of her exposure, Hesione reports her royal lineage and Troy’s wealth until ravaged by a sea-monster (2. 471-92), to whom the flower of Trojan maidenhood has been sacrificed. Interestingly, Hesione increases the toll of virgins sacrificed to the beast in her explanation (Arg. 2.480-90):
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The supernumerary maidens of Hesione’s speech have occasioned difficulty amongst the commentators14, though they well exemplify the way that the Flavian epic poets repeat and amplify the conventions of the genre, including the territorial assignments of the sexus muliebris, whose members are so often reduced to immobility in the landscapes through which the epic hero travels15.
In Valerius’ innovative treatment of the episode, the maiden’s misery colours the unhappy landscape (through pathetic fallacy), which reminds the hero of the blighted sites of his earlier labours and thereby inspires him to another (Arg. 2.492-6):
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In this way, Valerius motivates the exemplary hero’s salvific activity as a reprise of his earlier labours. The sight of the impending death of the beautiful maiden further confirms Hercules’ motivation when his bow and arrows unexpectedly prove useless (Arg. 2. 524-6):
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The moment of despair, however, is the final spur to the hero’s triumph over the monster and rescue of the maiden (Arg. 2.542-5):
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In a striking departure from epic convention, Valerius does not make Hesione herself the hero’s reward, as she is elsewhere16, and as he himself implies she will be in the lines that follow (Arg. 2.545-9):
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These lines rework Vergil’s famous passage in Georgics 3 concerning the power of eros in the animal world, which he illustrates with the contest between two bulls for a beautiful cow (formosa iuuenca, Geo. 3.219). In the Georgics, the defeated bull goes into exile, groaning over the unavenged loss of his beloved (multa gemens … quos amisit inultus amores, Geo. 3.226-7), precisely in order to recruit his strength for a rematch. Valerius motivates Hercules’ victory over the sea-monster and release of Hesione on the model of Vergil’s exiled bull’s determination to avenge the loss of his love by way of the bull simile applied to Aeneas and Turnus in single combat in the last book of the Aeneid (12.697-724). As Aeneas and Turnus fight for marriage with Lavinia, and possession of the kingdom she brings to the victor17, so Hercules and the sea-monster, Valerius suggests, fight for Hesione.
Valerius merely hints at such an erotic motivation for his hero’s exploit, despite the conventionally amatory inspiration of epic combat in both Homer (Helen in Iliad 3, Penelope in Odyssey 22) and Vergil (Lavinia in Aeneid 7-12), who bring the woman for whom the heroes fight before the assembled warriors as if to display the prize for whom they compete to the rivals at the climactic moment of combat18. Rather Valerius reserves this motivation to Medea’s early encounters with Jason and the Argonauts in Argonautica 5.363-98 and 6.575-68219. His introductory notice of Medea in the first book of the epic, however, undermines this motivation by recourse to another gendered cliché of the genre, that of the epic witch, who appears as both a sexually desirable goddess (like Circe in Odyssey 10) and the fearsome exponent of magic rites (again like Circe in Odyssey 10, or like Dido’s priestess in Aeneid 4 and Lucan’s Erichtho in Bellum Ciuile 6). Medea enters the Argonautica in the guise of the latter, in Mopsus’ terrifying vision of the Argonauts’ Colchian labours (Arg. 1.223-6)20:
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Passing directly from the conflict over the Golden Fleece to Medea’s murder of her children and Jason’s Corinthian bride before her flight in the chariot of the Sun, Mopsus’s vision condemns Medea as the murderous witch who both secures Jason’s heroic stature and finally undoes it. But his prophecy also emphasizes her transgression of feminine norms and renders her almost Amazonian in her engagement of indiscriminate slaughter (caede madens) and usurpation of the male prerogative of the sword (quos ense ferit). Although Valerius’ epic, cut off by the poet’s early death, does not reach even her murder of Absyrtus (let alone those of her later career), Medea’s ominous future attends the maiden (uirgo, as she is regularly styled by Valerius)21 and undermines our sympathy for her maidenly fears in the poem. But the martial masculine exploits of the epic androgyne, merely hinted at here, find fuller development in both Statius and Silius, who explore the transgressive potential of women on the battlefield in Thebaid 12 and Punica 2 respectively.
Thus Statius represents both Antigone and Argia, Polynices’ sister and wife, as assuming martial ambitions when they meet on the battlefield over his body. By marrying Polynices, Argia becomes privy to his desire for war with his brother (2.319-62), and so it is she who overcomes her father’s reluctance to send the Seven to war against Thebes (3.678-721) – as she acknowledges when cradling his corpse on the battlefield (12.336-7): ipsa dedi bellum maestumque rogaui | ispa patrem, ut talem nunc te complexa tenerem (‘I myself gave you war, I myself asked my sorrowing father – that now I might hold you thus in my embrace’). But Statius transforms Argia from the mouthpiece of war into her husband’s comrade-at-arms, when she determines (as Federica Bessone has argued) to ‘“follow” the deceased Polynices to Thebes, and alone faces death, after the dangers and labours of the march, to perform his funeral honours’22. Statius confirms her masculine daring at the outset of the trek (Theb. 12.177-86)23:
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Inspired by piety and chaste love (186), Argia is emboldened to unwomanly manliness: the juxtaposition of non femineae with uirtutis (177) underlines the masculine daring of her ‘huge project’, an undertaking (opus, 179) marked as ‘epic’ by its very size (immane, 178). Statius thereby signals Argia’s pretensions to the role of the epic ‘man’ (cf. arma uirumque cano, Verg. Aen. 1.1), in her transgression of feminine conventions, and concomitant assumption of manly valour (uirtus, 12.177), motivated precisely by her devotion to womanly ideals, viz. the marital compact24. Her matronly virtue thus paradoxically underwrites a martial ambition that surpasses even that of the Amazons (12.181-2)25.
On the battlefield, Argia and Antigone join forces to secure proper burial for Polynices. As the women lament over Polynices’ corpse, Argia proposes that they enter into alliance with one another (Theb. 12.378, iunge, age, iunge fidem) and Antigone agrees immediately when she recognizes her brother’s wife (Theb. 12.382-8):
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Their harmony is shattered, however, by the arrival of Creon’s armed guards, before whom they lay their competing claims to the burial of Polynices (12.456-60). In their rivalry for death (ambitur saeua de morte animosaque leti | spes furit, 12.456-7), they rehearse the brothers’ fratricidal duel – though in words rather than under arms (Theb. 12.461-2): nusquam illa alternis modo quae reuerentia uerbis, | iram odiumque putes (‘gone is the reverence that but now was in the words of each; you would think it anger and hatred’). Their unwavering commitment to death is only finally thwarted by the arrival of Theseus’ Athenian army, whose victory over the tyrant Creon will secure the burial of all the Argives (Theb. 12.677-81):
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Argia’s and Antigone’s entrance onto the battlefield and subsequent embrace of violent death are motivated by familial piety and conjugal loyalty, the highest feminine virtues celebrated in Flavian culture26. Polynices’ wife and sister thereby also invite comparison with such exemplary masterful women as the elder Arria and her granddaughter Fannia, whose conjugal loyalty earned them contemporary commemoration as Roman icons of Stoic virtue27.
Statius even adapts the quintessentially transgressive figure of the Amazon to the contemporary Roman idealization of marital fidelity. On display in Theseus’ (anachronistically Roman) triumph, the Amazons have been civilized, removed from the barbarous margins of the inhabited world and relocated to the centre of Greek civilization (Theb. 12.523-31):
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Theseus’ martial mastery of the Amazons complements his marital mastery of their queen, Hippolyte (Theb. 12.533-9):
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The Athenian king’s reduction of the Amazons to prisoners of war, and their leader to his bedmate, restores the traditional hierarchy of the sexes and thereby anticipates the restoration of order that he will impose on Thebes after defeating Creon. In Statius’ epic, the bellicose queen of the Amazons thus emerges as a model Greek wife, whose modest dress confirms her chaste readiness to bear her husband an heir.
The pregnant Hippolyte is in no position to campaign on her own, or her husband’s, behalf (Theb. 12.635-8):
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Hippolyte is here transformed from transgressive female warrior into dutifully reproductive wife, her weapons retired from the battlefield despite her own inclination to return to the fray. Statius is clearly indebted to earlier epic characterization of Amazons in his portrait of Hippolyte, most notably to Vergil’s description of Camilla28. But his domestication of the warrior woman Hippolyte also engages historical precedent in at least one respect. For in 60 or 61 ce, Boudicca – the widow of Prasutagus, the Romans’ client-king of the Iceni in East Anglia – led the combined forces of the Iceni and the Trinovantes in rebellion against the Roman governor Suetonius Paullinus and his army29.
If contemporary Roman descriptions of Boudicca implicitly draw on the mythological figure of the Amazon, the fate of the historical British queen may reciprocally inform the Flavian epicists’ representation of Amazonian warrior queens. In this context, a final figure to consider is Silius’ Asbyte, introduced (like Vergil’s Camilla) as both virgin huntress (haec, ignara uiri uacuoque assueta cubili, | uenatu et siluis primos dependerat annos, Pun. 2. 68-9) and also (like Vergil’s Penthesilean Dido) as a queen (regina, 2.66, 169) of Libyan forces, in this case from Marmarica30. As a warrior maiden (belligera uirgo, 2.168), she is duly compared by Silius to the Thracian Amazons (Pun. 2.73-6):
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Bare-breasted and carrying the Amazonian lunate shield (nuda latus Marti ac fulgentem tegmine laeuam | Thermodontiaca munita in proelia pelta, 2.79-80), Asbyte enters Silius’ narrative as a conventional Amazonian figure, right down to the company of female comrades-at-arms that surrounds her (2.82-3)31. Her two-horse chariot (biiugo curru, 2.82), however, links her to Boudicca, whom Tacitus portrays addressing the British troops ‘from a chariot with her daughters before her’ (curru filias prae se uehens, Tac. Ann. 14.35; cf. Dio 62.8.2).
Silius reflects on the conventional hierarchy of the sexes throughout Asbyte’s aristeia. As she hurls her weapons at Saguntum’s walls, the old Cretan warrior Mopsus, stationed between his two sons (medius iuuenum, 2.108), catches sight of her and aims his weapon, only to kill her comrade Harpe. In response, Asbyte kills his sons Dorylas and Icarus, and the devastated father leaps from the city-walls in despair at their deaths. This scandalous overthrow of the hierarchy of gender can only be righted by a second battle of the sexes, between Asbyte and Hercules’ priest Theron (Alcidae templi custos araeque sacerdos, Pun. 2.150), who reprises the role of Camilla’s killer Chloreus, the priest of Cybele in Aeneid 11. Theron, however, is the diametric opposite of Chloreus – no gold-clad effeminate votary of the Magna Mater, but a club-wielding avatar of his muscle-bound god, who relies on his youth, physical prowess and Herculean weapons (club, lion-skin, and shield) to best the warrior maiden (Pun. 2.193-205):
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The violence of Theron’s assault on Asbyte offers a striking contrast to the eroticism of Silius’ Vergilian model. Spaltenstein attributes the brutality of Theron’s killing of Asbyte to imperial taste (what used to be called ‘decadent “silver” Latin’)32, and we may agree that the violent realism owes something to the contemporary spectacles of the amphitheatre. But here again, details of the Roman rout of Boudicca’s forces provide an illuminating context for Asbyte’s violent death on the battlefield. Amazonian (and Camillan) though she undoubtedly is in her literary lineage, Asbyte’s martial exploits are depicted by Silius in a starkly contemporary idiom of military violence.
In this regard, we can trace the impact on Silius of some of the same socio-cultural developments that influence Valerius and Statius in their portrayal of the female sex in epic. Perhaps the most notable feature shared by all three Flavian epicists, however, is their repeated definition of the female sex against the standards of masculinity (and often vice versa). The traditional epic mater dolorosa acquires new purpose in her quasi-Stoic opposition to the tyrant who sends her son to sea, while sacrificial maidens and Amazonian warriors entertain epic audiences with lurid spectacles of feminine death that reflect those recently staged in the Flavian amphitheatre (Mart. lib. de spect. 6, 7, 8, 30 Shackleton Bailey)33. If it is difficult to discern parallels in these epics for the chaste wives and dutiful daughters of early imperial prose literature34, it is perhaps because their transgressive sisters provide such spectacular narrative counterpoints to the heroes and antiheroes of the Roman epic tradition.