I. Introduction

To ‘insult’ or ‘jump on’ someone (insultare, contemnere, maledicere, irridere, etc.) requires the target (free, freed, or even slave) to have some notional repute (existimatio). She or he must also recognize at least some sense of shame (pudor), although some insulted parties are rhetorically denied any1. Common human expressions of that shame were (and are) to speak incoherently, fall silent, blush, and/or lower the head2. Since the mirror of the Roman spirit was the face (imago animi), the nearly uncontrollable blush of modesty (verecundia) often “leaked” a secret embarrassment or betrayed a palpable hit. Interactants, internal audiences, and external readers perceive(d) damaged “face”3. Youths develop at different speeds and to different degrees effective verbal retorts and nonverbal screens to hide behind and, even when flustered, to keep their social selves “in play”4. These masks of composure keep the disconcerted individual in countenance and obscure the chagrin caused by tests and taunts (voces contumeliosae, Cic. Cael. 30). This study examines insults and compliments in the two principal Latin novels in order to analyze the etiquette of verbal impoliteness and nonverbal aggression and kind words.

Norms of gendered behaviors – for elites, proper folk, and the unwashed – have changed less than academics may think5. Erving Goffman astutely asserted of mid-century North America, “Gender, not religion, is the opiate of the masses” (1977: 653). His descriptions of the subordinating “courtship complex” and the gendered “courtesy system”, in which women are deemed inferior, apply to earlier (if not current) assumptions about women’s physical, mental, emotional, and, therefore, to their social envelopes, personal space, verbal and haptic (touching) boundaries. Women’s presumed frailties and delicacy provided men with some hampering obligations but more licenses to contact women unknown or of another class6. Asymmetrical license to address and accost the other sex put Roman women at an analogous disadvantage in institutionalized competitions for social status. Depending on class, province, and period, Roman women in some situations escaped seclusion7. Female courtship and courtesy protocols, however, have a second, darker side – namely, women’s constructed defenselessness before male abuse, especially insinuations of sexual laxity. Their gendered legal status (including financial dependency and subordination in most forms of marriage), their dress, and their limited options for defending themselves in public increased discrimination, perceptible gender asymmetry. Women’s official inferiority only formalized and increased their vulnerability to informal verbal, nonverbal, and physical threats to their repute, not to mention casual presumptions on their bodies8. To feminize a man, to animalize a woman, to barbarize or de-animate either sex to a thing (e.g., a rock, a turd) disesteemed the person and his or her status and due respect. Thus, to call a man a woman (or whore, Petr. Sat. 9.6), or a dog-fucker (43.8), or to insult a woman as snake or blockhead (74.13, 77.1) insulted their sex, changed their gendered attributes, and thus degraded them both face-to-face and damaged any social or economic claims they make.

Banter and joshing presented low-level insults offensive to the Roman target’s sense of self, including his or her sex and associated gendered behaviors9. Blunt “name-calling” insults display a more derogatory and aggressive form of “impression management”, as Erving Goffman calls it. Both levels of hostility reposition the players’ “presentation of self”. “Kidding” and mortal insults deserve attention in any typology of status competition. Interlocutors in the Latin novels often mean to embarrass or put down others who threaten their territory10. Heroes, villains, and admitted deviants on the fringes find occasion to attack or defend “face”, to manage others’ impressions of their good standing with respect to gender, race, cultural competency, and maturity. Both verbal and nonverbal expressions of mockery and esteem manipulated one’s own and others’ status, as we show below. This paper examines in the Latin novels both hostile and ingratiating face-to-face behaviors arising from explicit and implicit references to (biological) sex and (social) gender11.

Male and female expectations, behaviors, and perceptions of gender presentation are important elements of “impression management”12. The successful interactant must enhance the impression s/he makes on others while s/he controls or subtly depresses the impression that other competitors can produce in a zero-sum competition. Playing the man or playing the woman, in life and literature, results in many arresting and successful performances, but literary texts, comic and tragic, prefer the miscues, unmaskings, instances of severe offensiveness, embarrassing silences, loss of face, mockery, and humiliations. Therefore, the derogatory instances and challenging vocabulary outweigh the flattering ones.

The two imperial Latin novels are satirical in theme and incident13. These cultural productions are both male-authored and presumably directed at male readers. Not surprisingly, then, women fare badly – individually and as a Roman gender. Nevertheless, these entertainments feature stumbling anti-heroes – Encolpius and Lucius – men (by sex, not necessarily gender) who repeatedly resemble Woody Allen’s clumsier, equally egocentric characters. They theatrically mis-perform their virility. They adhere inadequately to gender ideology, that is, to long-established Roman and Greek customs and ideals of masculine self-presentation and sexual performance, but these effeminate protagonists repeatedly collapse in manliness before violence and gendering insults, both verbal and gestural. Petronius’ protagonist loses his male lover and, soon after, successfully intimidated, his heroic sword and his basic capacity for sexual intercourse (82, 128, 130-132). Apuleius’ protagonist loses his presumed elite self-control, publicly breaks down in fear and tears in the Thessalian town Hypata’s crowded theater, and loses even his human genus (while gaining the bigger penis of a lowly ass). Soon after transformed into a four-footed beast, he faces imminent brutal emasculation, actual castration by knife and hot iron. Ultimately he renounces his Roman sexuality and masculinity – a spiritual castration. He voluntarily, after many traumas, accepts the garb, hairlessness, and celibacy demanded by a jealous African goddess, Isis, who demands a monotheistic fealty (3.10, 24; 7.26, 28; 11.6: in mea tutela, 19: castimoniorum abstinentiam).

The men in these two novels, paradigms of inverted male protocols, rarely retaliate14, or restrain expressions of their emotions as victims, in situations where men “should” hide their pain and react with force15. They passively suffer insulting words and deeds – consistently rather than episodically. Their creators, in a largely gender-segregated world, pledge allegiance to the hegemonic masculine ideal of assertiveness and sexual prowess known to us from Catullus’ lyrics, Cicero, Livy, Plutarch, Quintilian, Lucian, and the rest, and analyzed in recent work on Roman manhood16. The novelists align themselves by inverting long-standing ideals of paideia and andreia, of humanitas and virtus 17. That is, these men show us how “real” men should not behave.

Feminine norms of fearful self-effacement and docility thus frequently replace expectations of male self-assertion and massive retaliation against insults for these two novels’ male protagonists. The feminized Petronian gad-about suffers passively, and the Apuleian socially neutered aristocrat loses his status and even his human identity – when transformed into a beast of burden, low as a slave, and, later, when retransformed into a human Isiac initiate, tonsured and faced with myriad taboos affecting his sexual, gustatory, and dress codes. The Latin novels’ women, on the other hand, are both less spunky and norm-resistant than the adventurous heroines of the Greek novels. They largely conform to negative ancient stereotypes of excessive female appetites and evil intent: gossip, greed, gauche gluttony, spitefulness, and, especially, lust18.

Gender-specific argumenta ad feminam et marem, Petronius’ and Apuleius’ ignominy-producing insults and flattering compliments, in particular, illustrate these claims19. Polite and impolite “manners” inflect their social encounters: pompous and absurd public behaviors of Roman magistrates (Hypata’s lictor, Venus’ imperious treatment of “her” runaway slave, Corinthian trials and fatal amusements), of arrogant Greek women (Byrrhena, Psyche’s noble sisters, Circe), and of Greek-descended freedman communities and slaves enjoying themselves or pursuing advancement (Trimalchio and friends, Chrysis, Myrmex, Thiasus’ cooks). Gender-specific abuse will crowd the interchanges that we examine and thus provide a window on gender roles in Latin novels20. Expressions of contempt may contain logically incompatible suggestions that also animalize, vegetalize, infantilize, and barbarize others. Given the novels’ insecurely masculine protagonists, this paper focuses on insults that feminize male targets21. Compliments, like insults, may be sent and received face-to-face or may characterize an absent third party, as when Proculus is described as a fairy-prince or deceptive dream (phantasia), or Melissa as a superb “piece of ass”, pulcherrimum bacciballum (38, 61.7: whatever that hapax means). Such words may equally well be sincere or designedly self-interested22.

II. Insults (contumeliae, convicia, acerbitas, etc.)

Observers first distinguish gendering slurs by noting the biological sex and status of the aggressor and the target when a character in the Latin novels, or a narrator within, casts gendered aspersions on a male or female. The reader’s evaluation of derogatory or mocking statements about someone’s nature, appearance, or behavior is shaped by awareness of the gender of the source and that source’s presumed or identified bias, motives, and situation. Expressions of gendered ill will – including blunt name-calling, extended descriptions of deviant behavior, insolent gestures and postures – often meet verbal, gestural, or violently physical retaliation. Apuleius’ fictional intellectual wimp Socrates reports of his masterful mistress: in eam [Meroën] dicacule probrum dixerat [uxor alius viri]. The witch punished the anonymous wife’s imprudent and nasty disparagement – tit for tat with vicious compounded interest (Met. 1.9).

A. Petronius

Gendering and gendered abuse in Satyrica climaxes in Encolpius’ invective against his penis. After a new girlfriend whips him for impotence, the vagabond, leaning “erect” on one elbow, verbally assaults his unnamed male organ. He abuses his (unspecified) mentula, female in grammatical gender, with the otherwise unattested feminine form furcifera, “worthy of humiliating execution” (132v)23. Encolpius personifies and addresses his uncooperative, literally shameless but shameful (n.b., his vocative Pudor), indeed dysfunctional, member. He asks it/her quid dicis...? Rogo te... His elegant, allusive oratio, and obiurgatio (132.9), allegedly embarrasses his limp penis so much that, cold and wrinkled, it/she silently turns aside, averts its/her “gaze”. Crossing genders and genres24, he quotes verbatim to his inanimate penis Vergil’s hexameter description of the once lustful Queen Dido’s tragic nonverbal response to her lover who quickly deserted her, Aeneas (A. 4.331-3, 397-401). After having encountered the Trojan hero again, unexpectedly in Vergil’s underworld (A. 6.450-72, esp. 469)25, she had “replied” nonverbally to his self-justifying excuses for unannounced departure and permanent desertion. Her answer, anticipating that of Encolpius’ penis, had presented gaze aversion, fixed features, and silent shunning: illa solo fixos oculos aversa tenebat 26. Her justifiably haughty, more than “unresponsive” body-language (and proxemics) exhibits total rejection and dissociation from the man that she had once saved. Encolpius’ penis grotesquely echoes and deflates by its “gesture” Vergil’s epic grandeur as it self-deflates further Encolpius’ half-baked ego. He blushes and rubs his brow(132.12: rubor; 13: perfricata frons)27. The markedly defective body part (the feminine noun mentula to be supplied) and his shameless allusion to an epic female (Queen Dido) “betray” and ignore wishes of their male “superiors”.

Men in Satyrica who think themselves cheated or robbed abuse each other with latro and leno (male occupations) for perceived predations. Thus, Eumolpus assaults opponents with “thief” and “pimp” (84, 98, 107). Giton assaults the absent Ascyltus with words alone when defending his calculated desertion of Encolpius (91)28. The slanging matches among the three indigent vagabonds, all young males – Encolpius, Ascyltus and Giton (9-11) – bandy about a wealth of taunting terms: frater, frater sanctissime, comes, muliebris patientiae scortum, gladiator obscene, nocturne percussor, homo stultissime. Most of these have an assured or probable sexual connotation. The joshing sexual euphemism29 “Frater” in Satyrica plainly recognizes a homosexual partner30. The “sword” that the rapist Ascyltus draws when addressing Giton, should the boy play the part of a noble woman and mimic legendarily chaste Lucretia, stands as a double-entendre for his penis31. Tryphaena’s woman servant insults Giton as a male whore and paid catamite (113: scortum ... spintriam) and, given his jealous concern for his frater Giton, questions Encolpius’ heterosexual virility (si vir fueris...). Trimalchio the freedman asserts without irony that he was his master’s love and “equal”: delicias [femina] ipsimi 32. He is proud of his passive sexual services enthusiastically rendered to his male owner and liberally rewarded with half of that man’s estate (75-6).

Before the confrontation followed by rapist orgy organized by Priapic Quartilla, Encolpius, the self-deluded narrator, tells us that women are weak fighters (19), but his expectations of easy male triumph are soon foiled. The women and their homosexual associates (21 and 23, foul-mouthed and singing eunuchs) immobilize, tie up, and torture the three helpless men. Among other humiliations, the homosexual associates of the priestess slobber kisses on the men, grind their buttocks on the trussed men’s unresponsive genitals, and fellate their bound victims33. A rejected female sex-partner, Quartilla’s ancilla, mockingly paints phallic images (sopionibus) on Ascyltus’ helpless body and feminized body. Now she controls the scepter-like phallic brush. She ridicules his helplessness by blacking his face (22: fuligine). The socially powerless woman’s odd visual insults (flagitium) comically anticipate another gendered, woman-on-top revenge on Encolpius for sexual incapacity. Circe’s perverse taste for ass drivers, slaves, actors, and gladiators (126: mulio aut histrio, etc.) corresponds to Juvenal’s (Sat. 6) misogynistic mockery of aristocratic women who enjoy “glamorous” gladiators and their ilk, but Circe takes hierarchy-violation to new depths, jumping fourteen rows in the amphitheater to seek sordid sex-partners (extrema plebe). As Chrysis observes: Quaedam enim feminae sordibus calent nec libidinem concitant nisi... Encolpius subsequently addresses the attractive and empowered woman, a predatory aristocrat, with typical elegiac flattering words as domina and regina. In revenge, however, for his having destroyed her composure and confident sense of sexual attractiveness (132: hilaritatem), she physically humiliates her impotent partner (see below).

Petronius’ often befuddled narrator has a narrow range of insults for the men who persecute him, but the freedman Hermeros at Trimalchio’s cena lets loose a furious barrage against the party-crashing, alien males. Hermeros’ lexicon of convicia consists of blunt “names” and clichéd insults, low forms of speech that Trimalchio considers eloquentia (or so Encolpius thinks that his host appreciates his guest’s disparagements). In packed bursts of abuse, Hermeros animalizes Ascyltus as a stupid and castrated sheep, a bellwether, a worm, and a “goat in clover” (57: vervex, vermes, hircus in ervilia). Further, he infantilizes Ascyltus as a “baby” (laticulosus), demeans him qua man as a “night-time” “runaway”, and not “worth his own piss”. Worse judgments follow – Ascyltus is a “limp piece of leather”, a “broken-down pot” – clearly gendered insults to his virility34. Ascyltus’ sex-slave Giton (58), Hermeros continues, is a vegetable: a curly-headed onion, a subterranean tuber; or an animal: a mouse (mus, or, as we say, a rat; cf. 58.9: mus in matella); or he is dead meat: gallow’s garbage (offla cruces), food for crows (corvorum cibaria). Their teacher is a “blockhead” (mufrius? hapax). None of these males, he suggests, are really “men”. The spectrum of abuse, allied to his self-puffery, reflects Hermeros’ social, even sexual, insecurity with strangers, and his limited armory of self-aggrandizement in the freedmen’s usually closed, convivial setting.

Women are denigrated as madams and whores, meretrices and scortae (7, 8, 9 [Encolpius himself], 88, 113, 119 v25). The married ones are all assumed to be fickle adulteresses (110: nullam ... esse ... pudicam)35. The analogue of Hermeros’ irritated, gendered, and dehumanizing vituperation in response to two posturing males’ derisive laughter36 appears in Trimalchio’s37 irritated contumely responding to a female, his wife Fortunata’s maledictions (74). He implies that she, having risen from flute-girl (= prostitute) to a frog-like and pretentiously bejeweled domina, is both a sterile woman38 and a clawed animal (unguibus). Aside from the animalization and objectification, he specifically denies her both her female and animate identity calling her a “blockhead, not a woman”, codex, non mulier 39.

Chrysis characterizes the rich and beautiful Circe’s womanhood in four ways: as a powerful matrona and attractive domina (positive), one of the feminae (relatively neutral sex identifier) who seek plebeian partners (126), and negatively as one of the loose and uncontrollable mulieres 40 in those eccentric parts of South Italy (129) who fuck any man and, as the basic witch’s trope holds, “even draw down the moon”, etiam lunam deducunt. From Encolpius’ viewpoint, one of repeatedly bad judgment41, the rich matrona seems but another difficult mulier (132.2-4). This aristocratic woman, however, can and does have her servants (cubicularii) spit upon and whip (catomizari) her sexually incompetent partner, Encolpius, then otherwise abuse and humiliate him for his impotence. Finally, they eject him from the domina’s territorial domain (132: verberibus sputisque ... eiectus sum).

Between Quartilla and Circe, two episodes of women literally on top – of him (20-22, 127-32), cowardly Encolpius, once having set aside his shaven, pseudo-tattooed appearance of a slave disguise aboard Lichas’ ship (103), loudly threatens the fickle, unladylike lady Tryphaena, his rival for bisexual Giton’s affections. Encolpius the man bravely raises his fists in her face and threatens to beat her42. That exemplar of manners and manhood demeans all women as “squawkers”, elsewhere as “easy drunks”, and giggling, undignified gossips who boast, whine, and complain43. Worse, from the usual patriarchal perspective (ironized by Petronius, to be sure, when Encolpius voices it), they are promiscuous and fickle – even, or especially when, they are already married (69, 110). The randy poet Eumolpus, in the peace-making interlude aboard ship that follows, produces a naughty Ephesian/Milesian heterosexual, male-paranoid fantasy of women’s untrustworthiness – their incurable un-chastity. His story (see below) appeals to the male section of the audience, because “he started hurling much abuse against womanly undependability”, multa in muliebrem levitatem coepit iactare 44.

Petronius brandishes the usual weapons of insult (gendered and otherwise) satirizing the attitudes and gender-joshing language of low society, freedmen (but not their women), and half-time students45. Characters are branded as women (when men, 9.5, 6)46, children (57, 58), animals47, or barbarians, and as inanimate objects such as piss-bottles48. Shamed by her husband’s roving eye, Fortunata calls him, at his own celebratory party purgamentum, dedecusque and – anticlimactically – canis (74)49. Trimalchio retorts more elegantly on his whining wife, abusively describing her as a Cassandra Caligaria50. A fortune-teller authenticated his nastiest gendered and animalizing insult: “you nurse a viper in your armpit” (77: tu viperam sub ala nutricas). This proverbial phrase provides a “kernelled insult”. Fouler abuse nests in an already offensive remark51. In this instance, vipers are not only snakes, but a] they are poisonous, b] the females unexpectedly kill their male mates¸ and c] ‘viper’ provides one of many slang terms for female prostitutes or sex-addicted adulteresses52.

Francesca Santoro L’Hoir (1992: 175-84) claims of Petronius’ ventriloquistic prose that femina designates a respectable woman – at least momentarily, one with the female equivalents of dignitas and gravitas, while mulier designates all other females: freedwoman, slave, or casual sexual partner, e.g., the yokel’s wife in the opening scene of the stolen cloak (15)53. While it need not be derogatory, it often has no positive valence. Like other relatively neutral denotative terms, however, such as puella and amica 54, it may acquire negative connotations by associated adjectives or the social context. When angered, Lichas arraigns Tryphaena as “femina simplex”, a phrase in which her alleged mental inferiority is multiplied by her inferior sex: “an idiot even for a woman” (106).

The freedmen always refer to women as mulieres55, since their low type constitutes all the women that they know, and, obsessed with material gain, their stunted emotional affections are soured by distrust (75). Alluding to women’s alleged acquisitiveness, Habinnas declares: “If there were no mulieres, we would have everything dirt-cheap”. Mulier identifies the standing of Fortunata and Scintilla (37, 74, 67), and later also the female object of Encolpius’ jealousy, Tryphaena. This woman, rich but/and driven by sexual needs, is ready to do battle to gain possession of everyone’s sex-toy, Giton (101, 108, 113). Her currently politically impotent male rival Encolpius – sometimes unreliable – describes her as damnata and libidinosa. Earlier, after Encolpius recognizes the priestess Quartilla as his captor and sexual tormentor, he revises her gendered status, downgrading her from femina to mulier (16.3, 19.1). Trimalchio likewise terms the frightful witches of his included tale as mulieres (63). Diminutive forms double the insult: a maid or prostitute is described as a muliercula (12, 111). Nevertheless, the misogyny is general. Chrysanthus’ uxor remains dry-eyed when she is widowed, and women as a genus (at least to the freedman symposiast Seleucus) are less than human, mere vultures: sed mulier quae mulier milvinum genus (42, cf. 75, 106).

Petronius’ most compelling example of incurable female lability and (perhaps) hypocrisy is Eumolpus’ at first most modest and virtuous female, the pudicissima widow of Ephesus, a matrona lauded by all as the superlative paradigm of chaste womanhood and exceptional spousal grief. Five times the bereaved wife is denominated pudica femina, devoted spouse and preternaturally loyal widow56. Described specifically as a matrona (111 bis, 112), the narrator elevates her further on the social scale. When the vigilant soldier sees a light and hears a groan, he investigates, prompted by the vitio gentis humanae – desire to know. He discovers that night a different sort of creature, a mulier pulcherrima, inhabiting a tomb. She is not a dangerous ghost, only a weeping beauty57. He reasonably but wrongly might have first imagined, from her graveyard location and the time of night, that she was a prostitute, because there and then the ancient sex workers plied their trade. He would have been wrong in his perception and hope, but somehow right about her female nature, as the bawdy tale concludes that all women’s sexual compliance can be bought one way or another. The sleazy sexual opportunist Eumolpus soon inverts the genders of pursuer and the pursued: the noble woman seeks the soldier’s sexual companionship. She unhesitatingly pays the sacrilegious price of desecrating her husband’s corpse, nailing him to the degrading cross on behalf of her lover58. That is, the unnamed (because generic) matrona/femina reveals her true, sluttish character and becomes just another sex-crazed mulier (five times) dishonoring her deceased husband and protecting her current, random lover from the wrath of the military, enjoying sex in the tomb, night after night (112.3).

One then should not expect to find a respectable femina, much less a “lady” (matrona) who deserves the name, in Satyrica. Quartilla, and three Greeks – the Ephesian widow59, the Pergamene fortune-hunting mother, and the South Italian Circe60 – briefly enjoy this neutral descriptor, femina. Despite their status, wealth, and appearance (posture, garb, jeweled and golden accessories, attendants), the women are soon exposed as frauds seeking illicit sexual thrills or the material fortunes of men unrelated by blood or marriage (124, 141 for male captatores, heredipetae). Hermeros, Trimalchio’s boon companion, describes his host’s social-climbing wife, Fortunata, as formerly too filthy to hand a man a piece of bread. With a somewhat more flattering but animalizing description, since he admires her money-management skills, he now labels her as lupatria, a “foxy whore”61.

Do viri, the manly types both strong and brave, exist? Vir designates a respectable man, a possessor of vir-tus – courage – and usually a Roman, while homo designates any other male, especially of the lower orders, a vulgar “fellow” for example, a poor freedman62, a foreigner, or slave (Santoro L’Hoir 1992: 172-5, McDonnnell 2009 passim). Petronius’ narrators and characters reserve vir – for praise of themselves (54, 76). They often denigrate enemies, peers, and others with the contextually dismissive homo, pejorative adjectives, and ethnic slurs (peregrinus, Cappadox, servus: 45, 54, 127, 63, 73, 71)63. Trimalchio characterizes himself as vir, part of the Petronian parody of his social insecurity (54; or. obliq., 76), but one of Agamemnon’s slaves considers him only a (26) lautissimus homo, an ambiguous compliment at best, several steps below elegans 64. Seleucus, a freedman, philosophically considers all humans to be “walking bags of wind, empty bubbles, less than flies” (42: utres inflati ambulamus, minores quam muscae ... bullae).

Self-pitying Encolpius abuses the clown Giton for his passive and perverse sexual inclinations, and then he claims that he is a vir and prepares an epic revenge with his sword for Ascyltus’ sexual misdeeds (81). Elaborate plans for revenge contribute here to the parody of epic (cf. Verg. Aen. 9.44). Like his other grandiose plans, this one is soon completely deflated. Encolpius has no honor and hence no genuine shame-ability, although he briefly simulates courage (80, 82, 108) and he pretends to possess both65. His anger (ira) at violation and rejection leads him repeatedly to rage and feckless, soliloquizing self-pity66. The sneering, sex-hungry, golden handmaid Chrysis addresses him as “Mr. Picky” and “Cripple-Dick”, (“Fastose” and “Paralytice”: 131, both hapax in Petronius).

The insults of the angry guest Hermeros (57-8) feminize, animalize, and infantilize the party-crashers, who are rightly perceived as looking down on his base-born, self-made companions. His fellow symposiasts pride themselves on their squalid origins and their entrepreneurial willingness, earlier in life as delicati, to please sexually both their mistress and master (45). Their self-fashioning depends on their previous, flexible, gender-bending and their current self-sufficiency in money. In their male rivalry for esteem, their self-presentations exhibit the typical insecurities of nouveaux riches.

Encolpius’ impotence alone truly shames him, impotence experienced with both males and females. His sexual capacity defines his identity (not his gender). The lovely, high-class matrona (126) Circe67, failing sexually to arouse the limp protagonist, humiliates him to the point where he feels himself socially condemned (128: perfusus ego rubore ... damnatus). As he alleges of another well-endowed man, he finds his personal identity in his genital equipment: a penis attached to a body68. Fluidity of substances, statuses, genders69, fortunes, and reputations typify Satyrica’s characters and objects. Lability and false surfaces are thematic for the novel genre70. The banquet, for example, produces trompe l’œil dishes that never correspond to what they pretend to be, and they are served to guests who painfully ape their “betters” education, chatter, and manners. Eumolpus poses as accomplished poet, tutor, tourist, slave-owner, and wealthy but terminally ill millionaire, an aristocrat who has just buried his only son and heir (83, 85, 117). His claims contrast starkly to the known truth.

B. Apuleius

Gendering censorious judgments are plentiful in Apuleius’ novel, but men as a sex are never condemned. Many characters are angry, Lucius suffers impatiently, but (as a limited solacium) the ass narrator gets to observe other people’s foul plans motivated by greed, malice, and cruelty – often wife-initiated71. The baker’s wife, a married and evil adulteress72, hypocritically condemns another cheating wife as the “signal shame of her entire sex” (universi sexus grande dedecus) while hiding her own lover under a tub (alveum). The male inclination to condemn all women – rather than only guilty individuals – for their excessive sexual desire is a gendered prejudice found elsewhere in the text. Here, however, the condemnation gains credibility, since it is spoken by a woman73.

The entire female sex meets with ill repute for each (expected) violation of men’s asymmetrical gender-based rules. Men are adulterers, too, of course (2.27, 9.5, 9.22, 10.9), and a few are caught. For example, the handsome adolescent revealed as a stuprator (9.26) is the determined boy-lover (intempestivum tibi nomen adulteri) of well-guarded Arete as well as of that paragon of purity, the wife of the miller/baker who meets the rarely superlative but entirely sarcastic epithet pudicissima (!)74. As fitting and briefly comforting talionic punishment (gratissima corruptarum nuptiarum vindicta perfruebatur), the latter husband, once he has found his marriage violated by his pudica egregia uxor (9.22-3), locks his wife away and anally rapes her boy-toy (9.28: solus ipse cum puero cubans), the good-looking, not yet bearded adulescens, a mollis ac tener youth75. The next morning, while his slaves (familia) hoist the boy in the air (altissime), he semi-publicly whips the buttocks of this precociously heterosexual, adulterous lad, as if a master rebuking a schoolboy (9.28: ferula natis eius obverberans, plagis castigatum forinsecus abicit). An exception to the rule! – a rare and temporary exception to “getting away with murder”, but only a temporary vindication, however, since the aggrieved wife soon has the baker himself bewitched and killed by foul play.

Careful readers recall that men are nowhere condemned as a sex for their sexual escapades. The (male) slave (dotalis servulus) who provides his lustful mistress with poison for the murder of her stepson (10.2: nefarium facinus) is described as (10.4, 9) furcifer iste, “pillory worthy”76, and verbero, “whipping boy” or “scoundrel”77. The generic literary histories of these terms strike readers as familiar from Roman comedy. The plays often depict a servus currens who survives and prospers to another day (Opelt 1965: 60-9). Thus, they flag for an attentive reader that the pseudo-dreadful story will furnish another included narrative likely to reach a happier, comic ending78. Apuleius’ inset story here is the happiest in the book, happier for three: the intended youthful victim of poison, the accidental victim who survives (his step-brother), and their father, a miserable man in peril of losing both sons but who regains them (10.12 fin).

Lucius as man and ass expresses common Roman male attitudes of curiosity and disgust towards gender deviants. He refers neutrally to a tender lad as effeminate (1.4: puer in mollitiem decorus), a boy whom he saw in Athens performing a lubricious dance with a sword and magic trick. He refers with disapproval, however, to the entrepreneurial eunuch devotees of the Syrian goddess. These “half-men” who address each other as “puellae” (8.26)79. They wear women’s clothing to complement their painted faces and mincing gait while they beg for and collect alms (and steal precious votives) and tour the Thessalian countryside. The disgusted ass terms them and their leader Philebus to himself (since he cannot talk) “cinaedi” (and semiviri, 8.28). Their employment of a cheaply purchased slave, a flute-blowing and strong peasant youth, obtained to service their perverse sexual cravings, repels him80. He refers to the filthy blood-rituals of the men become women: solum spurcitia sanguinis effeminati madescere 81. Their alien rites and base pleasures offend the ass’s conventional views of sexual behaviors and he comfortably insults their immoral unmanliness.

Aristomenes’ opening inset tale in Met. 1 (fifteen of Book I’s twenty-six chapters) relates Socrates’ sexual enchantment by the witch Meroë. It contains many sexist insults typically leveled against powerless victims. Since Socrates reportedly cannot escape sexual intercourse with Meroë, his friend Aristomenes refers to her sarcastically as a bona uxor, although she is neither, and asks in his puzzlement about the paradoxical nature of her sex and status: “What kind of woman is she?” (7-8: potens illa et regina caupona, quid mulieris est?). More directly, he punningly terms her a scortum scorteum (8: a “leathery whore”, with reference to her advanced age for sexual agitation). Her fearsome insults to the men, after breaking down the hostelry’s door, produce ferocious acts going well beyond abusive and taunting words. She sweetly (if sarcastically) refers to sleeping Socrates as her “dear Endymion, my catamite” (12, both terms imply status inferiority and passivity). More forcefully and relevantly to his intended escape plan, Socrates knows that she has violently punished unfaithful lovers. Meroë changed one unfaithful lover into a male beaver, an animal that allegedly bites off its own genitals – desexing itself82. She afflicted with perpetual pregnancy (perpetua praegnatione damnavit) the pregnant wife of another seduced lover. This bold-talking woman had insulted her with witty vituperation (dicacule 83 probrum dixerat) and suffers what only a woman could, endless (eight years so far) and growing pregnancy: “she is ballooning just like an elephant about to give birth” – velut elephantum paritura distenditur. Then, irritated Meroë the witch and her female accomplice advance to heart-surgery, removal of the vital organ. Thus, they doom Socrates to an early death and Aristomenes, his well-intentioned savior, to indefinite fear and Aetolian exile far from home in Aegeum (1.19).

For Aristomenes (who originally fails to appreciate womanly witch-power)84, Meroë ponders whether she and Panthia, her fellow saga, should rip him apart or chop off his genitals85. Her dilemma offers two drastic male punishments at the hands of unbridled women, evilly empowered females of the species not always subject to male surveillance. In the end, they humiliate and unman the frightened and flattened would-be hero sprawled on the inn floor trying to hide under his bed. They squat over him and empty their bladders on him (13: me urinae spurcissimae perluerent)86. In a subsequent soliloquy offered by the still smelly Aristomenes, he worries anticipating his legal prosecution. His failure as a muscular man physically to resist the old women’s assault will sound incredible to a male jury in a court of law, whenever faces trial for his friend’s murder. His use of hypophora – expected allegations of unmanliness – insults himself, much as Lucius later also indicts himself for asininity (14: si resistere vir tantus mulieri nequibas...; cf. 7.10-12).

Apuleius, in conformity with Roman mores, describes as viri all mature men of wealth and standing (e primoribus), but his sarcasm often is plain to see, given these male characters’ frequently ungentlemanly activities87. Demochares (4.15) and the provincial vir principalis (8.30) – landed, entertainment-providing aristocrats – may have earned this honorific designation by their civic services and benefactions, but other non-euergetistic but wealthy men gain the same honorific title of vir, for example Milo, the rich miser and misanthropic usurer88. After Lucius the visitor has disappeared (because morphed into an ass), he becomes the number one suspect in the investigation of the robbery of Milo’s house. The defenseless soul is alleged to have written fraudulent letters of recommendation for himself in order to be welcomed as a vir bonus by a fellow member of the elite (7.1: fictis commendaticiis litteris ... commentitus). Thus, vir easily and politely flatters, as also when the stranger walking to Hypata with Lucius (1.20) deems him such a one, appealing in their dialogue to his intellectual discernment. This honor flows from markers of rank and culture that are always visible – namely bodily poise, appearance, and garb89.

Sometimes the narrator and sometimes the characters pass judgments on manliness by this gendered compliment. The fearless bandit chief Lamachus, a man of proven piratical vir-tus, seems “manly” to his fellow thieves (virtus, vir, vir praecipuus, etc.). The pseudo-bandit Haemus likewise calls himself a virum magnanimae vivacitatis to the discouraged bandit survivors of a botched Boeotian raid (4.8, 10-11; 7.5). Chryseros (“Goldlover”, another miser), who has sneakily ambushed and killed the morally offended bandit’s captain, is not a man, indeed he is but a bipedum nequissimus 90, “most vile of two-footers” (4.10). Perhaps this phrase is thieves’ cant, but the animalizing word denies his manliness. At the other end of the bipedal spectrum, Psyche’s lover, predicted by her ignorant sisters to be a bum, extremus homo (4.31, 5.24), actually has an existential status different from viri, since his epiphany proves him the god Cupid, great deity of sexual desire. Thieves and gods pronounce and observe standards of male achievement and female worth that differ from mere mortals’.

On trial for his life, Lucius, the rich tourist and pompous orator, quickly becomes the butt of Thessalian hoi polloi’s laughter – as well as that of his hosts’ (3.4-6). In the Thesssalian courtroom, fittingly an open-air theater, the autodidact orator91 claims macho and Herculean acts of bravery. He soon endures the ridicule of the entire theatrical crowd, aware of the game and hanging from the “rafters”. The goatskins under the shrouds reveal him to all Hypata’s denizens to be a drunkard, dupe, and braggart. Poor Lucius then weeps, blushes, and, once so traumatized, becomes immobilized. The insecure aristocrat has been mortally insulted (contumelia) by the guffaws of all social levels in the hilarity-filled town (3.7: totum populum – risu cachinnabili diffluebant, 10-12)92.

After Lucius unveils his alleged murder victims by drawing back the pall from the alleged human corpses, actually only goatskins, he cringes at the crowd’s unconstrained amusement. Stunned by his public embarrassment, he tries to prevent eye – and word-contact with the by-standing community (3.9-12). He endures in frozen shame (3.10: fixus in lapidem steti gelidus) the prying eyes, nods (nutus), and fingers pointed towards him93. Finally, he starts sobbing. Self-control and the ability to simulate it require practiced facial skills94. Rigidity of features, a calm gaze and postural self-possession, lay beyond innocent Lucius’ slim capacity to shrug off his embarrassment and to withstand public amusement95. Lucius could not yet – assuming any of us ever can! – reach this advanced and ambivalently admirable level of feigning. Catiline, Trimalchio, or the Murderess of Five could do it96. It perhaps redounds to Lucius’ credit as a decently raised, elite young Roman that facial forgery is foreign to his candid nature.

Soon after the Laughter Festival, the town authorities of Hypata offer Lucius the shaken victim an honorific statue, as a heroizing compensation for his abject public humiliation. No recompense, however, can equal his social loss. The still incautious protagonist, moreover, becomes an unwitting victim again. Flattering and being flattered by Photis97, his casual sex-partner’s clumsiness morphs him into a quadruped. Choosing the wrong medicament, the inexperienced magician (3.24) turns him into an inept ass, not a wise owl. Public mockery and shaming at Hypata has preceded his dehumanizing and debilitating transformation into a speechless but highly sexed beast of burden. Now, the man inside the ass meets further insult and shame. Lucius having disappeared, urban Hypatans falsely allege that he aided in the robbery of his personal host Milo, and subsequently the members of the region’s farm community believe that the asinine Lucius desires to “bestialize” young women. Finally, the quadruped is thought to have murdered his wood-gathering master, the sadistic boy whom in fact a bear savaged (3.1-3, 20-4). Lucius’ mind understands the charges, but his voice and tongue cannot refute them. His attempts at defending himself fail; his Latin (or Greek) utterances are entirely blocked. Robber, rapist, and murderer are serious insults, indeed.

Apuleius varies gender-specific insults for women more than for men, perhaps because he is quicker to find fault with all but one of the female characters (Charite). Gendered abuse for the Thessalian witches and Psyche’s wicked sisters includes lupulae, “wolf bitchlets”, sex-starved wives or whores, and lamiae (3.22, 5.11, 1.17: “bogey-women”). Scelerata and scelesta describe women seven times but men – never (although many are reprehended). The sharp eye of the bandits’ crone is compared to an avian kite’s (6.27: milvinos oculos). The offensive scortum appears as abuse for Meröe, Socrates’ witch-mistress (1.8.3), and for Charite when the male-opinionated ass misapprehends her as sex-crazed and eager for brothel service (7.11; see below). Venus indignantly wonders to herself and the chatterbox bird whether she has played lena, procuress, to her young and innocent but “whoring” son98. She had directed him to punish Psyche, her offensive succuba, the one who challenged her divine beauty and became her “supplanter in bed”, but Venus’ intent was to humiliate and destroy Psyche, not to provide her son Cupid with an attractive mate99.

The decent baker’s procax and evil wife herself provides the extreme example of gender condemnation of a woman, but the irony here is amusingly apparent. The behavior of this promiscuous wife is even worse than that of the laundryman’s wife, whose offensive adultery story she hears from her unwary husband with feigned horror100. The baker’s wife has heard this story of the fuller’s wife’s adultery, while she is hiding her own young lover nearby in a flour bin (9.23). Now, sarcastically described as uxor egregia (9.23), she indignantly curses that other woman with appropriate insults as a disloyal, shameless whore. Her betrayal of marriage, deceit, and gross hypocrisy has blackened the reputation (maculasset infamia) of the entire female sex (universi sexus grande dedecus). She declares that such adulteresses should be burned alive (9.26: addebat et talis oportere vivas exuri feminas)101. Her own exposure as an adulteress, humiliating imprisonment in a closet, and insulting but legally proper expulsion from her marital home soon follow. The woman now described as audacissima uxor (9.23) reverts to “her old tricks and to women’s usual wiles” (9.29, another black mark against an entire sex: ad armillum revertitur et ad familiares feminarum artes). Seeking vengeance for her ignominious exit from her household (contumelia ... exasperata), the miller’s embittered second wife hires a witch (familiares feminarum artes accenditur) to mollify or destroy the life of her husband by ghoul or other criminal power (19.29: larva vel aliquo diro numine immisso ... facinerosae disciplinae suae). She has earned the very imprecations against women that she hypocritically hurled.

The closest parallel, condemnation of males as a gender, appears when Lucius indignantly condemns all jurymen – from Paris, through Odysseus at Troy, to Socrates’ Athenian jury. Some former judges and toti nunc iudices market their verdicts to satisfy their greed (10.33: sententias suas pretio nundinantur), but the entire male sex is not vilified and castigated for that reason. Lucius’ denigration of specific men contrasts sharply with his gender-specific criticisms against women in general.

Lucius maintains human self-awareness while encapsulated in the despised body of an ass (6.25-9, 7.10-12, 10.33)102. After many more undeserved accusations, the man’s spirit, although locked in the beast’s body, revolts against a culminating, death-sentence insult to his innocent “person” and his masculinity. The province’s imperial judicial decision condemns and compels the hugely penised creature to participate in the final public insult to a woman’s honor and in the death of the murderess. He must copulate before thousands with the depraved but once high-status (10.23: venerabilis domus) Corinthian criminal. She has been sanctioned by the state to the humiliating and painful torture of bestial sex with an ass before she dies in an amphitheater packed with amused spectators (10.23-8)103. This unwifely wife104 nearly escaped legal process (accusation, trial, and conviction) for five serial, unspeakable murders. The greedy psychopath had insulted and savagely killed her clueless, innocent sister-in-law, wrongly inferring and alleging that the innocent girl, maintained for her safety in a distant villulam, had been her husband’s mistress (aemula tori succubaque). She had poisoned her husband, a lethal insult (in the medical sense), mistakenly thinking him an unfaithful spouse rather than a respectful fraternal guardian of his otherwise unprotected, virginal sister. The widowed wife then poisoned her baby daughter (filia parvula) for her husband’s inheritance, and tricked into suicide both the poison-providing doctor (medicus ... notae perfidiae) and his complicit wife105. Following her women servants’ (cubiculariis mulieris) eyewitness testimony, extracted by judicial torture, the governor had condemned this vile and fierce (vilis, truculenta) female to talionic sexual punishment and violent destruction (sententia praesidis bestiis addicta, 10.23-8). State-enforced degradation, common in most advanced societies, remains crushing insult.

This unexpected death sentence on the feasting ass, unmerited by Lucius who was entirely innocent of the murderess’s crimes106, further insults his arguably limited pudor. He anticipates contagium scelestae pollutaeque feminae, and that fear exceeds his logical expectation that the predatory and hungry wild beasts, let loose in the arena for the purpose of devouring the foul convict, will also eat him, additional fresh meat (10.34). He is sorely afflicted with ingens angor, fear of scelerosae mulieris contagio, and pudor (10.29, 34). In an ironic twist, the assembled and amused Corinthian crowd would not mock the ass, as the earlier Hypatan audience had mocked the inept but (legally) innocent Lucius. Indeed, the Corinthians would ignore him, in their bloodthirsty interest in and pleasure at the sexual insults and lethal assault on the naked condemned woman. The sentence damning her ad bestias provides entertainment, a cautionary example for the masses, and fatal punishment for the perpetrator. She will suffer cruel exposure of her entire body to her fellow citizens’ gaze, her humiliating sexual penetration, rape by an herbivorous ass, and finally the hungry carnivores’ unimaginably horrifying destruction of her already twice violated body. Women, summed up by this one example in the narrating ass’s view, are vicious, universally depraved, and never as good as they seem. Adultery is their “common... denominator” (May 2005: 147).

III. Compliments (laudes) 107

Manly men are few in the ancient novels. Not “behaving like a man”, i.e., not living up to one’s male gender, frequently insults and stigmatizes “girlie-men”108. Behaving like a woman¸ accordingly, provides the inverse gender-specific insult for men, but perversely, the asseveration insults women also. The logical alternative, women behaving like men, only gains unqualified praise if the behavior conforms to conventional Roman gender ideals – permissible courage, that is, bravery that protects a family’s honor.

Women, however, never protect their spouses’ vital interests in Satyrica, and very few do so in Metamorphoses. Women doing women’s usual business in these two texts are more likely to be perceived as sex-crazy, unsatisfied wives than as chaste virgins or faithful spouses. The included tale of the workman’s wife has her pose as a wool-weaving, Lucretia-like housekeeper busy preserving her pudicitia and increasing her husband’s stores and honor109, but she enjoys her jolly adultery over a barrel while this cuckold is present cleaning it out. Virgo describes an age-group but rarely denotes pre-marital sexual “purity,” i.e., inexperience of genital sex.

A. Petronius

Real virgins (three or more!), paraded to sacrifice in order to avert a plague, appear fortuitously and uniquely already in the extant first scene (Sat. 1). These virgins in peril, however, present one derided example of the make-believe of rhetorical school declamations. Such doubts and proofs of female “virtue” (i.e., chastity, fidelity, abstinence from sexual adventuring) populate the truth-test motif found in many extant Greek novels110. Those fictional girls offer themselves (or are offered by their patriarchal masters) as expiatory victims – the mocked, ridiculous stuff of Petronius’ Professor of Prose and sweaty (sudaverat) Parasite Agamemnon111. The honorable term virgo, if not the derisory diminutive virguncula, is clearly ironic for the sexually adept maid Psyche, servant of the Priapic priestess Quartilla, and for Psyche’s companion, the seven-year old Pannychis. Her very name, “All-Night-Long”, a telltale nomen-omen, sarcastically suggests an already debauched sexual status (17, 19, 25)112.

Terms of affection, honor, and endearment are suspect in this novel describing a world driven by fraud, selfishness, and exploitation. Encolpius greets an old woman, as “Mother”, Mater, like American “Ma’am”, in order to obtain some basic town directions from her. To himself he thinks the unexceptional, deferential address to an elderly female is only “naive good manners” (7: delectata, urbanitas tam stulta)113, but she, a bawd or a pimp’s assistant, leads him to a brothel, and so she found the conventionally polite fictive kin term to be flatteringly elegant.

Other respectful gendered vocatives include “friends”, “young man”, “mistress”, and the hyperbolic, amatory exaggerations “mistress” and even “queen”114. Latin terms of address for lovers in these fictions express appreciation of physical and financial attractions and possessiveness, often in diminutives and superlatives115, and not rarely employing elegy and lyric’s artificial patter of female dominance and male servitude, known as sermo amatorius, e.g., Domina (20, 24, 105, 130).

Quartilla’s maid, on entering the young men’s temporary quarters in a cheap taberna, deceptively refers to the sacrilegious violators of Priapus116 as “elegant youths” (16: iuvenes tam urbanos). The Priapic priestess, randy Quartilla herself, appears to (Enclopius, at least) to compliment the mental capacity of Encolpius, exclaiming “o hominem acutum atque urbanitatis vern<ac>ulae fontem” (24), but the comment is toying sarcasm, as was her maid’s ironic flattery, and she delivers the oxymoron while she – here, a true domina brandishing a whip (tenens virgam) – smirks at her hapless male prisoners while her staff sexually abuses them.

In an earlier, better mood, Ascyltus had employed the euphemistic homosexual vocative “brother”, frater (13), just as his sex-partners Giton (91) and Encolpius (129, 133) also do. The moderately respectful addresses Domine and Domina come to the lips of suspiciously needy and greedy, non-slave characters (20: Encolpius to Quartilla; 86: the Pergamene boy to Eumolpus when in bed together; 130: Encolpius to Circe)117. In addition to respectful and affectionate diction, nonverbal analogues reinforce positive sentiments. Kissing constituted the commonest Roman gesture of greeting, affection, and respect (60, 74)118. Non-sexual osculation (in Roman life and, consequently, Latin novels) ingratiates strangers and greases familiars’ social encounters: to greet, bid farewell (67, 115), and convey effusive gratitude (31)119.

Encolpius’ flowery and flattering addresses to Circe as if the goddess (cultores, si te adorari permiseris) and to her maid Chrysis selfishly aim at obtaining their material aid, their indulgence of his ineptitude, or their sexual compliance (126, 130). Chrysis’ cross-gendered expressions of passion to bisexual Encolpius (139) provide the usual elegiac clichés, verbal inducements to sexual pleasure: si qua est amantibus fides (79): “tu desiderium meum, tu voluptas mea, numquam finies hunc ignem...”120.

Giton alleges to Encolpius (9) that Ascyltus had threatened to rape him [Giton]. Ascyltus asserted sardonically that with his “sword” [i.e., penis] he would play the rapist Tarquin, if Giton, imitating fabled Lucretia, were to play the faithful spouse role (as if Encolpius’). This jocularly lethal threat feminizes and mocks the alleged sexual fidelity of the wily, opportunistic catamite. Similarly but now inexplicitly, Eumolpus’ tale of the Ephesian wife at first presents a Hellenized version of Lucretia’s exemplary, extreme pudicitia, but soon that chaste, widowed saint – like Dido, sworn to fidelity to her dead husband (Aen. 4.15-17, 27-9) becomes another unfaithful wife, the lover of a soldier nearby. In sum, Satyrica infrequently flatters women with admiring terms, images, or portraits in any way positive. Petronius’ mistresses, wives, and daughters provide opportunistic objects and instruments for cynical men seeking sexual satisfaction. Alternatively, they set a trap, since Petronius’ narrators quickly expose any briefly lauded women as phony, flighty, and lecherous creatures – primarily motivated by lust, secondarily by greed.

B. Apuleius

Gender-specific compliments are unsurprisingly rare. Individuals beseeching strangers for a favor – information or aid – casually employ flattering forms of address. Thus, when Lucius the tourist inquires of an accessible old woman about Milo’s residence, he ingratiatingly calls her Mater, the deferential form of address noted already in Satyrica and conventional politesse for older female strangers121. Standard procedures, however, are not the excitement that fictions offer.

Men. A stranger attempts to gain Lucius’ support for judging their fellow-traveler Aristomenes’ story to be absurd. He “butters him up” to his face with flattering, gendered descriptors. To this stranger, seeking to persuade, Lucius seems “a respectable man [i.e., of good morals, urbanitas, culture, and reputation], as your appearance and bearing show” (20: vir ut habitus et habitudo demonstrat ornatus). His new acquaintance, the rich miser Milo, echoes this judgment and adds physical details, as do Byrrhena and her elderly male escort in Hypata (1.23, 2.2). Milo also mentions the manly appearance, adolescent “virgin” modesty, and noble family of the visiting youngster (23: te ... etiam de ista corporis speciosa habitudine deque hac virginali prorsus verecundia, generosa stirpe proditum et recte coniecerem). The gender inversion of the typically female modifier virginalis suggests an effeminate element in the young Lucius, or at least an incomplete rendering of a fully grown-up, Roman male.

Relieved that his old friend is not dead, as he had feared, Aristomenes (soaked in urine) warmly greets, hugs, and kisses Socrates. Pythias the magistrate similarly greets his old college friend Lucius nonverbally as well as verbally. The reunited robbers also kiss each other122. Byrrhena’s male escort kisses Lucius (2.2). These are Mediterranean, un-gendered salutations expressing egalitarian respect between parties barely or not at all acquainted.

Blatant grotesque satire of Latin’s complimentary erotic clichés that saturate elegiac love-talk pervades the sincere but banal, foreplay chatter (voculae) voiced by the sexually voracious matrona arousing Lucius, but he is not the usual man to whom a woman might speak such sweet-talk but the well-endowed hairy, big-toothed Ass (e.g., 10.21-2: amo, cupio, te solum diligo, sine te iam vivere nequeo, palumbulus 123, passer). In a sequestered boudoir, she rouses the ass to mount her by verbal and physical means, such as a full-body rubdown, deep kisses and devouring gaze (assidua savia et commorsicantibus oculis). This extremely abnormal sexual encounter124 parodies intimately mutual praise and expressions of desire between humans125. Then, despite Lucius’ fears about possible bodily harm to the woman from his large penis, she grabs him and pulls him (i.e., his penis) to her, emphatically all the way in: complexa totum me prorsus, sed totum recepit 126. Women’s sexual voracity and capacity find expression in this variation on the folkloric vagina dentata motif. Her dialogic compliments belong to human sexual foreplay, not interspecies copulation.

Vir underlines behavior suitable for sexually active and socially aggressive males. As a term of between-the-sheets exhortation, Photis teases Lucius with it: “if you are a man” (2.17: si vir es). The castrates of the Dea Syria are only semiviri (8.28, hapax in Apuleius). Genitally complete priests, poets, and philosophers receive his genuine compliments of viri as well as “wise” (11.21, 9.13, 7.2)127. In the inset tale of the large if dirty vat128, the nasty little lustful wife (postrema lascivia famigerabilis, uxorcula ... lasciva) repeatedly mocks (tractabat ludicre) her poor (is gracili pauperie laborans), cuckolded husband. The saucy wife addresses her spouse directly as inepte. She sarcastically insults him as magnum istum virum ac strenuum negotiatorem, belittling both his masculinity and business skills. After her bamboozled spouse climbs into the vat to clean the inside, the adulterous lovers fearlessly return to their coitus interruptus, their verbally heightened, impromptu, doggy-style sex on top of storage vat (adulter bellissimus ille pusio inclinatam dolio pronam uxorem ... secure dedolabat).

Apuleius’ Lucius seems ingenuus, an ambivalent descriptor bearing a positive and a negative sense: noble birth and social naïveté129. His interlocutors remark his innocent mien and bashfulness. He is shy – modest with a youngster’s blushes before a woman of rank130. Byrrhena remarks in his presence on his good looks131, his refined manner, and his “natural” gait: generosa probitas ... gracilitas ... speciosus et immeditatus incessus 132. However, these positive qualities invite exploitation in the highly hierarchical, yet dangerous and competitive, world of Roman imperial Thessaly. An involuntary blush reveals commitment to societal bonds, “a confession of subordination” (Barton 1999: 215) that signals consent to censure and, here, to some pushy teasing – the unpleasant bullying of Thelyphron II and of Lucius, the new scapegoat133. His friend the aedile, Pythias, his socially prominent relative, Byrrhena, and sundry strangers find him fair game for pushing around. His limited ability to recover himself, to collect his thoughts, and to reframe the message of his blushes, signals Lucius’ retarded but developing semi-adult self134.

The isolated miser Milo and the market magistrate Pythias enjoy Lucius’ boyish naiveté and exploit his inability to escape providing them with an audience for their boring blather (1.23-4, 26, 2.12-13). The former’s skimpy hospitality insults the tourist Lucius and his patron, Demeas, while the latter’s total destruction of his fish dinner on his first night in town renders him a fool to the tradesmen of Hypata. The young man’s delight in and stupefaction at his aunt Byrrhena’s semi-nude statue of the lovely goddess Diana (veste reflatum) resemble and reflect the overly curious Actaeon (curioso optatu), his predecessor in humiliation earned by inappropriate curiosity. Both young men show susceptibility to entrancement by attention-getting performances – most of them sexual135. Lucius fails to perceive, standing in the entrance of Byrrhena’s house, the central statue’s cautionary de te loquitur nature (2.4). Photis arguably achieves the same end of arresting the youth’s immediate goals in Thessaly (1.2) by flaunting her feminine charms. Self-awareness might caution a wiser lad, despite sexual exuberance, against enjoying additional lascivious nights with his host’s servant (2.6, 10, 17; 3.20). The imperial matrona Byrrhena warns him against dalliance and then hosts a cena, one to which all high Hypatan society has been invited136. Before he departs the party, Lucius has promised to cooperate with the Laugh God Risus. He has been set up to serve as their holiday scapegoat, to be insulted spectacularly by an entire community. He will provide Hypata’s victim of humiliating laughter in the next day’s capital trial, a theatrical farce137. With Byrrhena’s apparent cooperation (2.31), the young guest, flattered by all local interlocutors, becomes the protagonist, a rattled defendant in a mock murder-trial drama. Later, after Lucius has been laughed at by all and sundry for his hyperbolic rhetorical and emotional performance, the local magistrates propose to the Roman citizen and socially distinguished visitor (1.2., 2.2-3) an honorary statue (3.11: honores egregios). Seething inwardly in fury, he nevertheless politely refuses the commemoration of his embarrassment, hoping to recoup some of his stolen dignity138. Within a few days, he again falls into ill repute as an ingrate and thief who robbed his host and disappeared (3.21, 7.1-2). More injuries as well as insults are in store.

Women. Can one then find a respectable “lady” in Apuleius’ novel? A few, at best. The word femina is ubiquitous and unspecific in imperial Latin, usually neutrally specifying sex but sometimes specifying status, sometimes sardonic. Both royal Psyche and her wicked sisters are feminae, although her malevolent princess sisters deserve their damning modifiers scelestae and pessimae (4.28, 5.12, 15, 16). Although other females obtain this descriptor, Photis never does, since she is only a lowly amicula/ancilla/ancillula/famula – a living tool (in the Aristotelian view)139.

Lucius, hoping to seduce his host’s willing servant Photis, praises her comely body in terms familiar from Ovidian elegy140. He compliments her flashing (micantes) eyes and further catalogues ravishing elements of her charming sexiness: her cheeks, hair, and kisses. His praise climaxes with her perfumed breasts (3.19: fraglantibus papillis ... addictum; cf. Ov. Am. 1.5). This lover’s gendered flattery – with typical elegiac topoi describing her anatomy – attests his beloved’s power and his desire – something of an inept joke considering that the maid is equally aroused. He flatters his casually seduced, nonce bedmate as Photis mea, mea festivitas, and mea mellitula (“my little honey”)141 in the days before her mistake and his transformation142.

The grand lady Byrrhena accompanied by her retinue; the ideal of beauty that Photis approaches; bourgeois Thelyphron I’s poisoner wife; grumpy Venus’ allegorical enemy Sobrietas; and brave Charitê – these five gain the relatively neutral descriptor femina, while few others are so described143. Many superficially positive terms for men and women in Apuleius are blatantly ironic. Milesian Thelyphron (“Girly-Minded”) II, once in a manly mood, stepped up to guard for a night’s good pay a local Thessalian corpse (2.23: commasculo). In his own self-deprecating telling, he addresses respectfully the disingenuously weeping widow so that she will hire this inept stranger for gold coins to guard her spouse’s corpse all night long (2.23-4, 26: matrona flebilis, Domina [bis]). His self-presentation appears less heroic after his verbal gaffes, his insulting physical manhandling out the door by house-slaves144, the discovery of his severe facial disfigurement by the witch-weasels (loss of protruding nose and ears), and his consequent total public humiliation. The deflated hero, now the notoriously mutilated parasite at the matron’s party years later, also addresses Byrrhena as Domina (2.20). The term acknowledges her position as hostess and social luminary. Byrrhena first appears to observant Lucius to be just another unknown (and unrelated) rich woman surrounded by a retinue of influential hangers-on (mulierem quempiam, frequenti stipatam famulitione and flos ipse civitatis), but he addresses her politely as femina and later, when her relatedness is clear, as parens (2.2, 3, 19)145. In the course of recounting the deeds of the murderess of five, Lucius in an aside refers to her mother-in-law’s “natural maternal feelings” in keeping her newborn girl alive, disobeying her husband desire for infanticide (10.23: insita matribus pietate).

Socrates, knowing what his dominatrix witch can do, describes Meroë to his friend as a femina divina 146. Lucius the ass sardonically refers to several scary and powerful females of the included tales as if they were respectable feminae (1.8; 9.14-15, 24; 10.5, 26, 34: scelestae pollutaeque). Nevertheless, the same or similar women are also denominated mulieres – when – as usual – they turn out badly, reveal themselves as sex-hungry vamps or worse criminals (9.19, 26-7; 10.2, 29, 34).

Arete – generosa, formosa, pudica, famosa castitate (9.17-18) as her name implies – like Petronius’ Ephesian matrona, has her status described as domina (for her slave Myrmex, 4x), as uxor for her husband Barbarus, 3x). The coniunx possesses local matrona status (18), at least until Philesitherus’ money bribe conquers her pudicitia. Then the narrator reduces her status to that of another unchaste mulier. “True to her fickle sex, the woman sold her [sexual] honor...” (9.19: nec a genuina levitate descivit mulier, sed ... pudicitiam suam ... auctorata est)147. So, not even the woman of virtue (Arete) can be trusted, although one learns that her husband, male chaperone, and young seducer are also fools themselves. Several other women, like Arete, are well enough off, clearly upper-class and not plebeian. They meet respect as matronae, even if they are not optima or sanctissima like the distant Salvia, Lucius’ well-married mother, or like Haemus’ fabled, indeed fabulous and fictional heroine, Plotina (2.2, 7.7)148.

Plotina invites consideration of three women in Apuleius’ novel who gain praise for their “masculine” courage, albeit their undoubted bravery is praised only in a way that does not honor the female sex in the highest terms149. These females show a “manly spirit”, briefly active to protect their marriage, a gendered trope with a noble history in Roman legend, historiography, and comedy150. Most such heroines – resourceful, initiatory, courageous – will die rather than betray their honor – a quality defined for women by their virginal chastity or (if married) by their spousal fidelity (fides, pudicitia, constantia)151.

1] Psyche, Apuleius’ allegorical princess, is delicate of spirit (animi tenella, 5.18, cf. 21). She features in the extended, embedded consolation tale, the truth value of which is compromised by its irritated teller (iratior, saevior), an aged, drunken, semi-demented female housekeeper. Cook and maid in the cave-house fashioned by the band of robbers, the anus also serves as guard and comfort for the attractive female hostage. She tells her an ultimately happy story of another attractive, rich young woman’s apotheosis (4.28-6.24; anilibus fabulis). The fabulous Psyche’s greedy sisters152 harass her, insult her intelligence and trust153. Evetually her own curiosity destroys her happiness. Virgo Psyche (4.31, 32, 33, 35, etc.) looks forward to gaining the honorable title of mater by her pregnancy (5.12: materni nominis dignitate gaudebat). Nevertheless, her jealous sisters persuade her to kill the beloved but unseen ophidian and humanoid “Beast”. The weak little sister experiences understandable discomfort with her sisters’ ugly plan. Psyche nearly assassinates her allegedly reptilian “husband” (5.17: immanis coluber). Although by nature Psyche lacks male boldness, in crisis, audacity changes Psyche’s sex (5.22: sexum audacia mutatur)154. The meek and passive princess, then, briefly transforms herself into a determined (male) killer. The alcoholic spinster (6.25: delira et temulenta) spins this fabellam to cheer up her virgin prisoner, Charite. This captive audience and analogue to Psyche will also experience a happy (first) ending, despite further insults in her future.

After expulsion from Cupid’s hideaway, having seen the forbidden (god), wandering Psyche fails to obtain Juno’s support. In desperation, she rouses herself to approach Venus hoping for unlikely mercy. She then addresses herself with four successive rhetorical questions in a parody of epic and tragic, heroic (male) self-exhortation (6.5; cf. Verg. Aen. 2.69; GCA ad loc.), of which the third runs: quin igitur masculum tandem sumis animum et casulae speculae renuntias fortiter...? Lucius, the non-heroic male, ass, soon echoes this heroine’s desperation and self-interrogation, when confronted with the robbers’ plan to throw him over a cliff (6.26): quin igitur masculum tandem sumis animum et tuaque saluti, dum licet, consulis 155? The ass moralizing and soliloquizing, as if a reflective man (cf. 7.11; 9.26, 30; 10.33), and indeed echoing a mostly helpless woman’s speech spoken in a story recently overheard, adds gender and genus elements to the humorous feared catastrophe.

2] Haemus’ tells and sells the hokum story of brave Plotina to the gullible bandits. Lucius embeds it in Tlepolemus’ recapture of his fiancée Charite. She overhears it and is amused. The tale clarifies the novel’s assumed masculine attitudes. A woman who acts like a man is the exception that proves the rule. Plotina transforms her appearance with men’s clothes (in masculinam faciem reformato habitu) and undertakes with a man’s spirit the difficult life of her husband’s indefinite exile (7.5: aerumnas adsiduas ingenio masculo sustinebat). The contrast with ordinary, spineless women is explicitly described, whether Haemus shared this view of women or thought it would render his fierce, new bandit community more benevolent to him. Chaste and loyal, fecund Plotina (quaedam rarae fidei atque singularis pudicitiae femina) had borne her distinguished husband ten children, a service to his patriarchal line. To accompany him in imperial exile, she cropped her hair like a man’s (tonso capillo)156. She packed all her coins and jewelry into belts, walked fearlessly (intrepida) through legionaries’ unsheathed swords, and shared her husband’s difficulties. She boldly sounded the alarm when Haemus’ (fictional) robber band had arrived to plunder her husband’s substantial entourage157. That is, Haemus’ fictional back-story cryptically emphasizes wifely loyalty, while he loudly urges his fellow robbers next to sell the comely prisoner to a whorehouse.

3] Charite’s included tale in two acts refers to her manly spirit both in courageous desperation (6.27: sumptaque constantia virili facinus audet pulcherrimum) as a prisoner threatened with sexual violation and fatal insults. In her angry revenge as a matrona Charite assumes a different gender: masculis animis impetuque duro fremens invadit ac supersistit sicarium (8.11). Her murderous vengeance, at the behest of her husband Tlepolemus’ ghost (8.8), and her suicide by sword (not by a woman’s typical tools: noose or poison) lead the somewhat histrionic, young slave narrator of her dénouement to describe her as “exhaling her manly spirit”158. Her courage in both sections leads her to attempt escape in order to rejoin her fiancée in this world, and to avenge the same man, now her murdered husband in the other world (8.13: deorsus ad meum Tlepolemum viam quaeram).

These three “manly matronae”159 act admirably, in their three internal narrators’ opinion. They preserve their husbands’ (and therefore their own) honor and the stability of patriarchal marriage within gender-demarcated parameters160. Nevertheless ... even Apuleius’ bravest, autonomous females are compromised by their gender. 1] Psyche, the generally helpless, deceived, and deflowered girl, avenges her misguided loss of her husband on her sororal competitors – but only through similar, womanly guile, enticing her adulterous sisters to take suicidal leaps over the cliff above Cupid’s palace. In despair at Venus’ persecution, later she collapses repeatedly and repeatedly tries without success to commit suicide herself (the woman’s exit mode) – until she is saved by her loving god despite herself and her habitual collapse into curiosity (6.21). She remains passive, reactive, and ineffective. 2] Plotina, a non-violent but canny and determined woman of singularis pudicitia, donned men’s garb to accompany her prominent, disgraced husband into exile and to comfort him161. She protects him by raising a cry, but she is a male’s narrative deception, an ad hoc invention of Haemus, her disguised fiancé and savior162. In addition, 3] uncompromisingly chaste Charite wreaks havoc by blinding her would-be seducer and stalker Thrasyllus – but acts only when directed by her husband’s spectral commands (8.8). She tricks, drugs, and blinds the lecherous “Mr. Bold”163. Emerging from a widow’s isolation, after having explained her actions to her local public for revenge stopping short of homicide, like Lucretia, the grief-stricken widow kills herself for shame and to reunite with her husband (cf. Indian purdah and suttee)164.

Plutarch may illuminate how accurately these two Latin prose fictions reflect imperial Roman self-presentations and perceptions. The Mulierum Virtutes (Γυναικῶν Ἀρεταί)165 selects allegedly historical and plainly legendary stories that showcase brave, mostly Greek, women of yore. This antiquarian and philosophical essay first praises women who dare by radically equating the moral capacities and psychological excellences of men and women166. McInerney demonstrates167, however, that Plutarch’s actual narratives, intended as moral protreptic, deflect and narrow examples of women’s courageous daring into conventionally gendered channels and bourgeois achievements. Women maintain aidos, the Greek equivalent of pudor, and defend their bodies, but they do this chiefly by spurring their men folk to employ sharp weapons – not by exercising agency and killing for themselves. Their goal is to protect their bodies’ sexual integrity, and their weapons are usually deceit and lies (McInerney 2003: 339), although occasionally poison or gendering abuse serves their purpose (Aretophila’s κακίζειν, 255E-57E). Women’s courage, therefore, is undercut, a second-order compromise with real men’s manly bravery. Women in the literary record who truly think and act like men, such as Aiskhylos’ ferocious construct Klytemestra (Ag. 10-11: γυναικὸς ἀνδρόβουλον ... κέαρ), or Herodotos’ Artemisia in Xerxes’ infuriated exclamation of inversion (Hdt. 8.88), are aberrations. Their examples of killing, governing, and naval commanding contravene experience and thereby threaten established (male, of course) expectations and order (εὐταξία, 249D, McInerney 2003: 324). The precedents of such autonomous women trouble men, since these aberrant females do not subordinate themselves to male-kin directives about property and progeny. They are “good to think with”, (bonnes à penser, in Lévi-Strauss’s famous formulation).

Operating on their own, Plutarch’s brave women employ trickery to disable threats to their perceived interests – which amount to their male relations’ status. Plutarch cites Roman Lucretia’s arete (250A), but her only violence turns the dagger against herself once she has decided her sexual violation by Tarquin stains her husband’s family honor. The point of this comparison between Plutarch’s moralizing essay and Apuleius’s salacious novel is that when the two authors (rarely) admire women for transgressing womanly expectations, only two reasons justify their flattery of “masculine” courage168. Either the females transgress gender bounds in order to defend their own “virtue”, i.e., their sexual purity and thus their husband’s standing, or they impel male kin to fulfill their gendered role as protectors of sexual honor169. Women who exceed these narrow parameters in “virtue” and manliness (e.g., those who engage in killing, blinding, binding, and raping) are perceived and presented as monstrous threats to natural gender roles. Autonomous women living beyond (male) control regularly “act up”, delve in improper sexual relations, and kill, e.g., Klytemnestra170 and Medea, Quartilla, Petronius’ and Apuleius’ witches, Circe, and Juvenal’s sex-crazed noblewomen, Heliodoros’ Persian Queen Arsake, and Apuleius’ bestial matrona, the anonymous seductress who attempts to murder her stepson, and the hoodwinking wife who gets away with copulating in her cuckolded husband’s presence in the “tale of the tub”. The last recorded Apuleian murderess jams a white-hot poker up the vagina of her bound and naked, already tortured sister-in-law. Stabbing deep to strike her dead, she delivers the ultimate, retaliatory, female sexual insult171. Men’s acceptable parameters for women responding to threats expect their passive endurance, except for suicide and other actions taken to protect male kin’s honor.

IV. Conclusions

Self-control, a virtue that Cupid paradoxically recommends to Psyche (Met. 5.12: religiosa continentia), was central to the self-presentation of both sexes in nearly all situations challenging normal Roman social expectations. Republican and Imperial society, if examples from popular entertainments provide useful sources (as I think they do), stayed glued together by powerful shaming mechanisms, many of them orchestrated by gender172. Young and immature Roman men and women could not always control their feelings of shame, exhibited by visible blushing (e.g., Virgil’s Lavinia, Ovid’s Pygmalion’s ivory statue) and breaking off further face-to-face connection. Social surveillance and policing gladly employs insults, stares, lampoons, and graffiti173. Encolpius and Lucius (and Psyche) lose control of self not only by being embarrassed and humiliated174 but also by suffering imprisonments, intrusive social exposures, and verbal dressings-down.

Males have domesticated select species and sub-species – cattle, dogs, donkeys, parrots, horses, monkeys – that provide them with help and comfort: labor, food, amusement, and pleasure. Women provide these same benefits – and line-propagating children, too. Species and vocations that threaten the patriarchal order – violent bears, boars, bandits, witches, prostitutes, and blandishing adulteresses175 – violate those male-initiated codes of civilized social and legal behavior176. Men must control and restrain women to prevent threats to their own fragile self-esteem. Thus, they can maintain confidence in their genealogy, believing in the legitimacy of their descendants and their cherished social order. From this point of view, bald Lucius’ somewhat voluntary but psychologically and financially pressured contractual submission to, and trust in, the hegemony of the female goddess Isis represents an unexpected and unflattering Victory of the Divine Feminine177. Gender discrimination ends only in a bad joke mocking conventional Roman markers of manhood.

Women and men in Apuleius’ tale contemplate or perform with sadistic pleasure stoning, hamstringing, and throat slitting, castration, torturous testicle pricking by heavy thorns, and entombing in a dead animal to achieve a slow, painful and stinking death178. The bandits propose a slow, punishing execution of Charite (6.31-2). They will sew her into the ass’s carcass to starve in stink and suffer a pecking death by worms, dogs, and birds, a stinking Homeric avian excarnation (morsus ferarum ... vermes ... canes et vultures intima protrahent viscera ... faetor). This torture and death only matches – arguably mirrors – the repulsive and sadistic ingenuity of state-sanctioned Roman penalties. The authorities arrange carnivorous, state-sponsored and – enforced dramas designed to degrade and execute condemned criminals (10.34, cf. 4.13 and 3.9)179.

Personal stability (psychic, sexual, and social) seems out of reach to characters in the Roman novels (analogous to Lucius’ hunt for the salvific roses necessary to return him to human form). Gender roles are inverted; women by means more foul than fair achieve power and substantial wealth. Giton plays the accommodating passive role for Encolpius, Ascyltus, Eumolpus, and Lichas. Encolpius is tied up and raped by Quartilla’s men and women, whipped and spat upon by Circe’s retinue, and finally drugged and anally raped by a solicitous witch. Meroë controls Socrates and the fate and location of whole villages, Pamphile bewitches her young male lovers, Photis with less hocus-pocus spells the doom of the sexually opportunistic child of privilege, Lucius. The effeminate semiviri (8.28), devotees of the Syrian goddess, sexually exploit both their peasant slave boy-toy and their ass – unconsenting homosexual and bestial impulses to double their repulsiveness. The humble ass Lucius observes a world of exploitation, pain, and humiliation.

Examples of chaotic gender and species behavior ominously mark high imperial Roman injustice180. Women in the novels – scelestae and nequissimae – insult and ignore the bonds of marriage and take adulterous lovers. They may fall in lust with an ass, kill their husbands or terrorize their children181. When such a defendant has been convicted of murder, the state demands that the culprit suffer execution – summa supplicia 182. The criminal in this instance must endure a “gender appropriate” humiliation: vaginal rape by an ungulate followed by beast-bitten death. The offenses are repulsive, but the punishments are no better and arguably worse for expecting the community to witness the gruesome spectacle.

The male proclivity in Apuleius to condemn the entire female sex because of one or another “bad apple” may satirize universal male suspicions or merely provide another dead male author who exemplifies that distrustfulness. The ancient double standard of sexual morality disallows or at least diminishes a total condemnation of Lucius’ covert affair with his host’s unmarried servant Photis. At the same time, he proudly exhorts himself to respect the chastity of Milo’s wife (2.6: genialem torum religios<us> suspice)183. The castitas of women as the marked, irresponsible sex falls under constant suspicion and patriarchal surveillance, indeed siege. Seek and ye shall find! Encolpius and Lucius’ unreliable observations in their noir environments justify somewhat this male anxiety184. Placing trust in any woman or man is futile.

Lucius himself, the moral philosopher and prudent ass (7.12, 10.33) observes the captive Charite happily smiling (7.10: risu laetissimo), when she hears she will be sold to a disgusting whorehouse to supply the whoremaster with fresh merchandise, virgin flesh (talis aetatula) for a huge profit (leno, fornix, lupanar spurcum sordidumque, lucrum ... nec levi pretio, magnis talentis). He reports his outraged, gender-damning reaction: ut mihi merito subiret vituperatio totius sexus ... et tunc quidem totarum mulierum secta moresque de asini pendebant iudicio. Lucius, in brief, unself-consciously, but rashly and thus, in manly fashion, condemns Charite and all contemporary women’s characters. He has not, however, yet perceived, as Charite has, that the pseudo-brigand Haemus is really the gentleman Tlepolemus, her fiancé and savior. Because the narrator Lucius, reporting this incident later, reflects that all women’s reputation depended on an ass’s (clearly faulty) judgment, perhaps he (and his creator Apuleius) now questions the appropriateness and accuracy of unrelenting male condemnations of the female sex185.

How then does the Latin literary genre of fiction (historia, lepidae fabulae: no consistent term dominates) – melding as it does epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, historiographical clichés, and other respected genres186 – differ from these other genres in its inclusion of Mediterranean habits of gendered affront and disparagement and of gendered compliments? Gendering abuse pervades warriors’ flyting in Homer, heroes calling their enemies “women”. Allegations of sexual deviance and infidelity populate the Greek and Latin Iambic poets, comedy, nearly all literary genres187. The low registers, however, of Petronian and Apuleian society and conversation, soliloquy, and frequent episodes of strenuous lower-body activities188 amusingly multiply degrading descriptions of opponents, competitors, friends and enemies. The quantity, language, and nature of demeaning episodes distinguish the foul pleasantries of epics, tragedy, and history from those of novels, the later genre featuring comic aspects of vulgarity, while the earlier genres include them for horrific and tragic effects on heroes189. Repugnant bodily fluids and sounds, not only those already mentioned but also burps, farts, and vomit, allow characters in the novels to foul their opponents’ person or besmirch their reputation, to inflict retributive pollution on those with whom s/he is at odds190. Unflattering images and vocabulary populate even the compliments at Trimalchio’s vernacular banquet191. Miserable Encolpius’ sexual impotence is thematic and funny to his uncharitable “friends”. One or more bystanders laugh at nearly every insult to body or soul that Lucius endures as man and beast.

The sexual adventures – many adulterous scrapes – of Petronius and Apuleius’ characters generate internal and external hostile judgments from both sexes. Sexual games and off-limit activities are central to both novels. Sexual anomalies emerge in fixed and shifting examples of male inadequacy and female power. Both men and women come under examination, and unwelcome discoveries and realizations about social vulnerabilities invite, or require, a few compliments but many more gender-specific insults192.