Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity 1138503541, 9781138503540

Table of contents :
Cover
Half Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Table of Contents
List of contributors
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations and spelling
Introduction
I Context
II Approaches
III Chapters
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 1 Women’s tangible time: Perceptions of continuity and rupture in female temporality in Homer
1 Introduction
2 Weaving and time in the Iliad
3 Weaving and time in the Odyssey
4 Looms and fabrics as temporal markers
5 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 2 Atalanta and Sappho: Women in and out of time
1 Introduction: experiences of time
2 Atalanta: running out of time
3 Sappho’s version of immortality
4 Gendered present
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 3 Feminizing aiōn (“life”/“lifetime”) in Pindar’s Epinikians
1 Introduction
2 Aiōn in Pindar
3 Pythian 4
4 Nemean 9
5 Pythian 5
6 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 4 Gendered time and narrative structure in Herodotos’ Histories
1 Introduction: structuring time
2 Time, integrative
3 Time, continuous
4 Time, discontinuous
5 Time, examined
6 Conclusion: telling the time
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 5 Time and gender in epic quests and Delphic oracles
1 Introduction
2 Sirens’ songs in Homer’s Odyssey
3 A voice at Delphi
4 Gender and time in the writing of Delphic history
5 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 6 Gendered patterns: Constructing time in the communities of Catullus 64
1 Introduction
2 Ariadne and Theseus: circles of revenge
3 Weaving the future: repetition and the Fates
4 Temporal connections
5 Conclusion
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 7 Delia’s Saturnian day: Gender and time in Tibullan love elegy
1 Introduction
2 Arrested development: youth’s prerogatives in the early Principate
3 Hedging clauses: enjoying the iners vita, “While the Fates allow”
4 Stumbling at the threshold: Delia’s Saturnian day
5 Conclusion: golden ages
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 8 Eating up time in Ovid’s Erysichthon episode (Metamorphoses 8.738–878)
1 Introduction
2 Tree violation/sexual violation
3 Fathers, daughters and masters
4 Erysichthon, Ceres and Fames
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 9 Telling time with Epiphanius: Periodization and metaphors of genealogy and gender in the Panarion
1 Introduction
2 Time and gender
3 Epiphanius
4 An excursus on style and the heresiological project
5 Periodization
6 Competing genealogies
7 Orthodoxy as a virgin mother
8 Conclusions
Notes
Bibliography
Chapter 10 (En)Gendering Christian time: Female saints and Roman martyrological calendars
1 Introduction
2 On Roman time
3 On the Christianization of time
4 The Calendar of 354
5 Christian list-making and time
6 The calendar of 354’s female saints
7 (En)Gendering time
8 And in the end …
Notes
Bibliography
Index

Citation preview

Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity

This volume offers new insights into ancient figurations of temporality by focusing on the relationship between gender and time across a range of genres. Each chapter in this collection places gender at the center of its exploration of time, and the volume includes time in treatises, genealogical lists, calendars, prophetic literature, ritual practice and historical and poetic narratives from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and why time is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male. Relying on theorists who offer ways to explore the connections between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots, pronouns, images or metaphors, the contributors tease out how time and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and Roman thought. Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity provides a rich and provocative theoretical analysis of time—and its relationship to gender—in ancient texts. It will be of interest to anyone working on time in the ancient world, or students of gender in antiquity. Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol, UK. She has a particular interest in ancient Greek religion and magic, and her publications include Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks (2007), Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy (2010) and Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (2016). She is interested in using anthropological and cognitive approaches to ancient evidence, and she is the co-founder and co-editor in chief of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography. Lisa Maurizio is Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College, Maine. She is interested in the interplay between gender, oral poetry and Greek religion, and she has published articles on Delphic divination as well as Classical Mythology in Context (2015). Her adaptations of Greek tragedies Tereus in Fragments and the Memory of Salt have been produced by the Animus Ensemble in Boston. She is currently working on a digital edition of Delphic oracles that acknowledges their oral composition and transmission.

Narratives of Time and Gender in Antiquity

Edited by Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 selection and editorial matter, Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Eidinow, Esther, 1970- editor. | Maurizio, Lisa, editor. Title: Narratives of time and gender in antiquity / edited by Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio. Identifiers: LCCN 2019036492 (print) | LCCN 2019036493 (ebook) | ISBN 9781138503540 (hardback) | ISBN 9781315145440 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Classical literature–History and criticism. | Time in literature. | Women in literature. Classification: LCC PA3015.T6 N37 2019 (print) | LCC PA3015.T6 (ebook) | DDC 880.09–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036492 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2019036493 ISBN: 978-1-138-50354-0 (hbk) ISBN: 978-1-315-14544-0 (ebk) Typeset in Times New Roman by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

Contents

List of contributors Acknowledgments Abbreviations and spelling Introduction

vii x xi 1

ESTHER EIDINOW AND LISA MAURIZIO

1

Women’s tangible time: Perceptions of continuity and rupture in female temporality in Homer

13

ANDROMACHE KARANIKA

2

Atalanta and Sappho: Women in and out of time

28

KIRK ORMAND

3 Feminizing aiōn (“life”/“lifetime”) in Pindar’s Epinikians

49

MARIA PAVLOU

4

Gendered time and narrative structure in Herodotos’ Histories

68

ESTHER EIDINOW

5

Time and gender in epic quests and Delphic oracles

89

LISA MAURIZIO

6

Gendered patterns: Constructing time in the communities of Catullus 64

105

AARON M. SEIDER

7

Delia’s Saturnian day: Gender and time in Tibullan love elegy HUNTER H. GARDNER

118

vi Contents  

Contributors

Elizabeth A. Castelli is Professor of Religion and Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women at Barnard College, New York. She is the author of Martyrdom and Memory: Early Christian Culture-Making and the translator of the script for Pier Paolo Pasolini’s never-produced film, Saint Paul. She serves on the advisory board of NYU’s Center for Religion and Media and is a contributor to the Center’s online magazine, The Revealer: A Review of Religion and Media. She is currently working on a collection of essays on the theme of confession. Nicola Denzey Lewis is the Margo L. Goldsmith Chair in Women’s Studies in Religion at Claremont Graduate University, California. She received her PhD in 1998 from the Department of Religion at Princeton University, New Jersey. A specialist in the Christianization of Rome, with a particular interest in social history and “lived religion” she has just completed her fourth book, The Early Modern Invention of Late Antique Rome, to appear in 2019. Denzey Lewis taught at Brown University, Rhode Island, between 2007 and 2015 and has been a recent recipient of research fellowships from the American Council of Learned Societies (2015–2016) and the National Endowment for the Humanities (2016–2017). Esther Eidinow is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Bristol, UK. She has a particular interest in ancient Greek religion and magic, and her publications include Oracles, Curses, and Risk among the Ancient Greeks (2007), Luck, Fate and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy (2010) and Envy, Poison, and Death: Women on Trial in Classical Athens (2016). She is interested in using anthropological and cognitive approaches to ancient evidence, and she is the co-founder and co-editor in chief of the Journal of Cognitive Historiography. Hunter H. Gardner is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of South Carolina. She is the author of Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy (2013) and co-editor of Odyssean Identities in Modern Cultures: The Journey Home (2014). Her monograph on Latin plague narratives and their impact on representations of contagion in Western literature and visual arts is forthcoming from Oxford University Press (Pestilence and the Body Politic in Latin Literature, 2019).

viii Contributors Andromache Karanika is Associate Professor of Classics at the University of California, Irvine. She has published articles on Homer, women’s oral genres, lament, pastoral poetry and, recently, on Homeric reception in Byzantine literature. She is the author of Voices at Work: Women, Performance and Labor (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2014); she has also co-authored a textbook on Modern Greek. She is currently working on a book on wedding songs and poetics and the interactions of lyric and epic poetry, as well as articles on trauma theory in classics and the reception of ancient myth and literature in contemporary fiction. She has been the editor of TAPA (Transactions of American Philological Association) since January 2018. Lisa Maurizio is Professor of Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College, Maine. She is interested in the interplay between gender, oral poetry and Greek religion, and she has published articles on Delphic divination as well as Classical Mythology in Context (2015). Her adaptations of Greek tragedies Tereus in Fragments and the Memory of Salt have been produced by the Animus Ensemble in Boston. She is currently working on a digital edition of Delphic oracles that acknowledges their oral composition and transmission. Kirk Ormand is the Nathan A. Greenberg Professor of Classics at Oberlin College, Ohio. He is the author of Exchange and the Maiden: Marriage in Sophoclean Tragedy (1999), Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome (2nd ed., 2018) and The Hesiodic Catalogue of Women and Archaic Greece (2014). He is the editor of A Companion to Sophocles (2012) and co-editor (with Ruby Blondell) of Ancient Sex: New Essays (2015). He has published articles on various Greek and Roman authors, Michel Foucault and Clint Eastwood. Μaria Pavlou is Lecturer at the Theological School of the Church of Cyprus, Nicosia. Her main areas of interest are archaic lyric poetry, Plato, digital classics and the modern reception of Greek tragedy. She has published on Pindar, Bacchylides, Thucydides, Plato, Apollonius Rhodius, Yannis Ritsos and Iakovos Kambanellis. She is the editor (with V. Liapis and A. Petrides) of Debating with the Eumenides: Aspects of the Reception of Greek Tragedy in Modern Greece (2018). She is currently co-editing (with A. Tsakmakis and E. Kaklamanou) Framing the Dialogues: How to Read Openings and Closures in Plato for Brill. Robert S. Santucci holds an MA in Classics from the University of Maryland, College Park, and a BA in Classics and Philosophy from Rutgers University, New Jersey. After spending time teaching secondary school Latin, he is currently a doctoral student in the Department of Classical Studies at the University of Michigan. His research interests include Augustan poetry, Roman Imperial literature, ancient sexualities and appetites (especially the points at which the two intersect) and ancient humor.

Contributors  ix Aaron M. Seider is an Associate Professor in the Department of Classics at the College of the Holy Cross, Massachusetts. He is the author of Memory in Vergil’s Aeneid: Creating the Past (2013) as well as articles on Catullus, Sallust, Vergil and Livy. He is currently working on a book exploring literary representations of men’s grief in Late Republican and Augustan Rome.

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Program in Classical and Medieval Studies at Bates College and the Costas and Mary Maliotis Charitable Foundation Fund for their generous funding of the conference that led to this volume; and the Leverhulme Trust for its support in publishing this research. We are very grateful to Elizabeth Risch, Ella Halstead, Vaishnavi Ganesh, Gillian Steadman and everyone in the production team. Finally, we would like to extend many thanks to all our contributors for their support, patience and wisdom.

Abbreviations and spelling

For ancient authors, works, and journal abbreviations we have used those given in the Oxford Classical Dictionary 4th ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012). We have adopted Greek spelling for names of people and places in discussions of Greek sources. We have used Latinised spelling for discussion of Latin sources, and also where the Latinized form is more familiar, or where the Greek spelling could cause confusion with an abbreviated form.

Introduction Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio

I Context In his brief but incisive essay, “Time in Ancient Historiography,” Momigliano argued against his fellow historians who had characterized societies by a particular notion of time, and, more specifically, had contrasted the approaches to time of ancient Jewish and ancient Greek historians, respectively. It is difficult to imagine any scholar today asserting, as Momigliano, that Homer “lived at least two centuries before the Greeks discovered or perhaps invented Time, as you and I know it,” let alone that a culture or religion had “neat and mutually exclusive views about time.”1 And yet the idea remains that a culture’s concepts of time (and vice versa) offer important insights. In current scholarship time is a popular topic, explored from a variety of different perspectives, across genres, and with a multiplicity of foci. Recently, research into the construction of time in historiography has produced a particularly rich vein of investigation. To give only two recent works as examples: the chapters in Alexandra Lianeri’s The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts (2011) analyze representations of time and temporality in historiographical narratives concerned with ancient Greek and Roman history; while the various contributors in Jonas Grethlein and Christopher Kreb’s Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The “Plupast” from Herodotus to Appian (2012), are concerned with representations of the “events that precede the narrated action” (the period before an ancient writer’s chosen present, and/or that of the characters he is writing about) described by Grethlein as the “plupast.”2 However, across this rich and fascinating field of research, there has been surprisingly little attention to the relationship between gender and time. Indeed, we could find only one volume that discussed this aspect in detail.3 In some cases, this may be because of the particular focus of the volume: for example, both Robert Hannah’s Time in Antiquity (2009), and Time and Cosmos in GrecoRoman Antiquity (2016) edited by Alexander R. Jones4 explore the development of perceptions of time through an examination of technologies designed to tell time.5 But in other volumes the omission of the role of gender is more surprising. For example, there has been particularly significant work on time in tragedy,

2  Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio but this has largely focused on the ways in which representations of time in this genre are used to convey (broadly) political aspects of the human experience. For example, Jacqueline de Romilly in Time in Greek Tragedy (1968) characterizes each tragedian’s idea of time: in Aeschylus’ dramas, time is continuous and orderly, because “it allows justice to be done,” while in Sophokles, time is “the cause of unsteadiness and lability in human life” and thus a disruptive force, as it also is in Euripides’ dramas, where it is “mixed up in our [human] emotions” and thus becomes irrational.6 More recently, scholars have investigated how individual tragic characters may be characterized by their perception and manipulation of time. For example, Marcel A. Widzisz in Chronos on the Threshold: Time, Ritual, and Agency in the Oresteia (2012), examines how characters in Aeschylus’ Oresteia expand and contract the time frame of rituals: their manipulation of ritual constitutes their ritual agency, which is replaced by the court of law, established at the end of the trilogy. Taking a broader purview, in Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus (2012), Richard Seaford draws on the work of Mikhail Bakhtin to examine the correlation of space and time in the work of Aeschylus.7 He replaces Bakhtin’s four “chronotopes” with three that he derives from the social world of Archaic and Classical Greece: “reciprocal” (associated with Homer, in which time is genealogical and lacks a spatial dimension); “aetiological” (linked to the developing polis, this includes past and present; while space has three aspects: ritual, cosmic and political); and “monetized” (in which time and space are unlimited). In tragedies, the expressions of these chronotopes collide with one another, each articulating a radically different worldview from the other, and thus participating in and shaping the conflicts between the characters on stage. As this suggests, time is a powerful theme for developing reflection on farreaching questions about the human condition. When we turn to recent monographs on time, we find that this is a key focus of, for example, Duncan Kennedy’s volume, Antiquity and the Meanings of Time (2013). Kennedy explores how “human beings have uniformly striven to understand the unfolding of history and their relationship to it.”8 Guided by Ricoeur’s argument that “time becomes human to the extent that it is articulated through a narrative mode,”9 Kennedy emphasizes the crucial role of narrative in conceiving of and living in time, examining both the temporality of discourse more generally and the ways in which time is configured in acts of interpretation. Covering a wide selection of writers from St. Augustine to Jorge Luis Borges, Kennedy’s study of narrative and temporality bridges ancient and modern theoretical approaches at a broad conceptual level. But, although the manipulation of ideas of time is a key part of his study, as with the other volumes above, reflections on the gendered construction of ideas about time are not included. Setting the theme of gender briefly to one side, we find that a number of these works have raised and explored other questions relevant to this volume. In particular, the idea of the spatial metaphor of time—how time is described in terms of space, and vice versa—is the focus of Alex Purves’ Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative (2010). Purves is concerned with time or rather temporality in

Introduction  3 its manifestation as the plot of a narrative, and its interactions with the different “mappings” of space, among different texts.10 This approach does introduce considerations of particular female characters (for example, Kandaules’ wife in Herodotos’ Histories and Ischomachos’ wife in Xenophon’s Oikonomikos), even if it does not explicitly address the gendered coding of time.11 The idea of the “space of time” is approached from another direction in Time and Temporality in the Ancient World (2004), edited by Ralph M. Rosen. This is one of several inspiring volumes of collected papers on time that take a diachronic approach, particularly to ideas of cyclical and teleological time in antiquity. Rosen’s volume ranges widely, considering conceptions of time in literature and societies from China to the Western Roman Empire. As well as its broader geographical remit, it differs from our present volume in its consideration of material and archaeological evidence. In contrast—and so closer in its focus to this present volume—De Jong’s and Nünlist’s comprehensive volume on Time in Ancient Greek Literature (2007) addresses itself to the question of narrative. It covers 30 different authors, categorized by genres in 8 sections. The volume is preceded by a detailed discussion of narratological theory on time and its analytical instruments, including analepses and prolepses, beginnings and multiple story lines, and rhythm and frequency. The work on each ancient author is highly detailed, analyzing, in particular, the techniques by which the respective narratives are structured. But less attention is paid to the question of how these instruments may interact with social or historical aspects—and the theme of gender is not raised. In turn, Constructions du temps dans le monde Grec Ancien edited by Catherine Darbo-Pechanski (2000) is perhaps the closest in intention to our volume, insofar as it attempts to evaluate time as a socially constructed phenomenon and considers it as a “psychological, philosophical, and social product.”12 Its remit is far larger than that of our volume, since it considers not only written narratives, but also visual imagery and rituals. The result is an informative set of essays, but with a range of foci and contexts that make it difficult to draw out overriding themes or conclusions. Darbo-Pechanski’s volume does include an article on gendered conceptions of time—“Temps rituel et temps féminin dans la cité athénienne au miroir du théâtre,” by Louise BruitZaidman13—which concludes that women represented continuity in politically tumultuous times. There is also some discussion of the role of the character of Pandora in Catherine Darbo-Pechanski’s own contribution “Historia et historiographique grecque: ‘le temps des hommes’.”14 But gender is not discussed in the other chapters of this volume, nor is there any examination of the ways in which time may be coded as masculine or feminine. Similarly, and finally, the most recent survey of time in antiquity (as of the writing of this introduction), The Construction of Time in Antiquity, represents well the current state of the field.15 Covering a range of cultures in the ancient Mediterranean and spanning the long period from the second millennium BCE to the fifth century CE, this collection considers time in terms of ritual, art and identity. However, only one essay considers questions of gender: Sarit Gribetz discusses how metaphors of women’s bodies are deployed in biblical, second

4  Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio temple and rabbinic literature.16 In conclusion, this brief survey of relevant literature demonstrates that although scholarly approaches to time in antiquity are both wide-ranging and detailed in their analysis, they lack any comprehensive consideration of time’s conceptual connection to gender. In that context, we hope that this volume, which explores how time was gendered in ancient narratives across different genres, can make a useful contribution, and stimulate further study of this topic.

II Approaches The chapters in this volume encompass the Archaic period of Greek history to the early Christian era. Most of the chapters treat representations of time and gender within specific ancient narratives and extend their enquiries in various ways to interrogate the connection between these two concepts. Providing a theoretical coherence to the volume, many of the contributors begin their exploration of time and gender with Kristeva’s essay, “Women’s Time” (1981), in which, deploying the resources of psychoanalytic thought, Kristeva briefly defines three common temporal modalities—linear, cursive/repetitive and monumental/eternal—and examines how they are commonly conceptualized as gendered. The first, linear time, is viewed as teleological and disembodied; it is evoked as masculine, patriarchal and dominant. The latter two are linked to “female subjectivity,” and they derive from women’s biological cycles and related repetitive labor or from the timeless, voiceless objects that offer the background for male activity. Kristeva argues that the re-articulation of female subjectivity requires a re-articulation of these concepts of temporality. Indeed, different feminist movements have sought either to privilege the different concepts of time—to assert their right to the first masculine option, or to reclaim the second two as their own. But neither approach is ideal; each leads to the same problem, that is, the closing off of future possibilities. In constructing this conceptualization of time’s modalities, Kristeva was building on Simone de Beauvoir’s reflections in The Second Sex (1949) in which de Beauvoir explored reasons why men are associated with reason, transcendence, creation, culture and linear time, while women, in contrast, become associated with cyclical time.17 By defining gender as a process that occurs over time and not a biological attribute or appearance, de Beauvoir did not simply assert the difference between sex and gender. She suggested that the experience of being female is connected to a mode of being realized in time, an anticipatory waiting or “a particular experience of time [that] is an underlying structure of sexual objectification.”18 Her claim challenges any “phenomenological account of temporality as a general, given structure of human existence,”19 even if one acknowledges that a particular experience of time associated with a particular gender will be inflected differently in different social formations. Her approach can be summarized by the statement that has become a tagline for her book: “One is not born, but rather becomes, woman.”20 Kristeva’s essay on time has become a touchstone among scholarly considerations of time and gender in a range of disciplines, but it has frequently been challenged, and, indeed, raises many questions. For example, scholars have debated

Introduction  5 whether this essay demonstrates that she was a constructivist or an essentialist.21 It can also be problematized in other ways: in retrospect, for example, we can observe how it fails to theorize female subjectivities beyond the white, privileged, European, heterosexual perspective. Nevertheless, as with Söderbäck, we see her work as “offering the tools for thinking subjectivity and embodiment in less exclusive terms.”22 Indeed, recent scholarship that focuses on very different areas of concern still builds on Kristeva’s work, even as it revises it: for example, recent research on the role of time in capitalist societies and the absence of pay for childbirth recapitulates key aspects of Kristeva’s analysis about how women are treated as temporally, economically and spatially Other.23 While many feminist scholars have adapted Kristeva’s lines of inquiry to examine time and gender in narrative (e.g., Teresa de Lauretis’s Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema [1984] and Patricia Parker’s Literary Fat Ladies: Gender, Rhetoric and Property [1988]), few classical scholars have pursued this topic or approach. An exception—and also used as a theoretical approach in the chapters in this collection—is Adriana Cavarero’s essay on Penelope in In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy (1995). Influenced by French feminists including Kristeva and Luce Irigaray, Cavarero offers one of the most cogent and comprehensive studies of gender and time in Greek literature, philosophy and society. She offers a distinct perspective, for example, describing Penelope’s web as a “potential female symbolic order” and contrasting this order with that demonstrated through the presentation of Odysseus’ activities, and, by extension, Greek and Western philosophical thought. In this volume, Kristeva and Cavarero are just two of the approaches used to analyze the gendered coding of time in ancient narratives. Irigaray is another influence on the chapters in this collection, some of which also bring to bear the theoretical approaches of Hayden White and Mikhail Bakhtin. Inspired by and drawing on this broad range of theorists, our contributors offer different ways to explore the connections between time and gender encoded in narrative tropes, plots, pronouns, images or metaphors, and tease out how time and gender were intertwined in the symbolic register of Greek and Roman thought. Common themes that emerge include not only the abstract conceptualization of time (including the cyclic, monumental and linear temporal modes), but also physical and embodied expressions and experiences of time, with close examination of the role of materiality. As explained below, the contributors investigate not only how time is presented in different ways and in different genres as continuous, but repeatedly note the subversion of dominant paradigms, in particular the unexpected, discontinuous and disruptive representations of time, and the sociopolitical resonances that these convey.

III Chapters The chapters in this volume are organized in chronological order according to their literary focus, starting with Homeric epic and ending with Roman martyrological calendars, with, in between, a range of texts from across genres, including

6  Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio prose and poetry, from Archaic Greece to Imperial Rome. Each chapter in this collection places gender at the center of its exploration of time in a particular genre from the Greco-Roman world. Many of the chapters begin with female characters, but all of them emphasize how and where time is implicitly coded as masculine or feminine, and thus is an integral component of ancient categories of female and male. Andromache Karanika opens the volume with “Women’s tangible time: perceptions of continuity and rupture in female temporality in Homer,” which examines the interrelations of male and female, material and conceptual, physical and mental, in depictions of time and temporality in Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey. She focuses on representations of weaving and woven garments, and their multiple meanings, arguing that weaving is not only a marker of female presence and activities, but also “becomes a temporal marker of beginnings, ruptures or ends, often encompassing and enshrining men’s activities.” She sees textile activities and their products as measures of time, and stresses, in addition, how weaving evokes the human body and its senses. Concentration on the physical, embodied experience of time is also part of “Atalanta and Sappho: women in and out of time” by Kirk Ormand. He analyzes the representation of time in the new Sappho poem—or rather how that poet characterized her own experience of time in that poem—and he traces intertextuality with the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite. Ormand’s aim is to look for something “more fundamental and more elusive than a gendered experience of the passage of time” in Archaic lyric poetry. He examines both linear and cyclical time, and their gendered associations, but he also raises the nature of divine time. And, while he establishes a particular interaction of women with cyclical time, he demonstrates how in some poems female characters can be seen to “interrupt, as it were, the mortal experience of infinitely recurring time,” and how, in doing so, “they approach, but do not fully acquire, an immortal experience of fixed, unmoving, achronological time.” In “Feminizing aiōn (‘life’/‘lifetime’) in Pindar’s Epinikians,” Maria Pavlou also looks for ways in which the gendering of “time” causes an interruption of usual genre-related expectations. Her chapter focuses on three instances in Pindar (Pyth. 4.186, 5.6–7 and Nem. 9.44–5) where the masculine noun aiōn (time) is used as a feminine. She argues that whereas at first sight Pindar’s use of the feminine noun might seem circumstantial and symptomatic of external causes, a closer examination of the relevant passages shows that its usage might be subtler and more intricate. In particular, she explores the significance of the fact that it is the aiōn of men that is at stake in all three cases, and she examines the connotations—especially in terms of time and temporality—that the configuration of a man’s life in feminine terms may have evoked for its ancient audiences. The language of time is also explored by Esther Eidinow, who, in “Gendered time and narrative structure in Herodotos’ Histories,” examines the ways in which Herodotos conceives of time, in terms of both imagistic language (time as space) and time-management (the manipulation of time sequences from a number of

Introduction  7 different sources). Drawing on the work of Hayden White, she identifies the underlying structure shaping Herodotos’ selection and integration of events in his narrative of the “long passage of time,” and how this both constructs, and is constructed by, his employment of the figure of the gendered body. Building on Kristeva’s insights, she highlights, in particular, how women, with regard to their social roles and their bodies, are used as metaphors for the expression and maintenance of temporal continuity and the generation of the future. Importantly, however, their activities do not mean that they ensure stability within the temporal world of the narrative. Instead, we also see them portrayed as catalysts for radical discontinuities, stopping, starting or redirecting events, and even provoking the potential for mortal danger. This last point draws our attention to a theme in common across these chapters: how the depictions of women as representations of cyclical time and/or narrative continuity nevertheless also frequently introduce disruption and discontinuity. For both Ormand and Eidinow, these moments of radical discontinuity create spaces within which ancient authors can allude to the presence of the divine. The relationship of mortal and divine is also a consideration of the sixth chapter, “Time and gender in epic quests and Delphic oracles,” by Lisa Maurizio, which investigates the ways in which tales of Delphic oracles replicate gendered notions of time in Homeric epic. She draws upon Kristeva’s linkage of monumental time— where the things that were, are and will be coexist, so that time neither moves nor advances—with the feminine and the divine, in combination with other formalist approaches to plot, such as those of Yuri Lotman. She argues that Delphic tales—modeled on the encounter of a quest hero, such as Odysseus, with a female obstacle or helper, such as Kirke or the Sirens—pits male linear time and narrative progression against female and divine monumental time. She then explores how this unrecognized pattern has shaped both ancient and modern approaches to Delphic tales and Delphic divination, by compelling readers to identify with a male protagonist and to treat prophetic female speech as an unverifiable and mythic obstacle to historical analysis. As we move into Roman literature, the notion of disruption continues, along with a further set of themes that draw attention to the benefits of studying femalegendered constructions of time. Aaron Seider writes on “Gendered patterns: constructing time in the communities of Catullus 64.” This epyllion or “little epic poem,” ostensibly about the marriage of Peleus and Thetis, contains a substantial description of the desertion of Ariadne by Theseus. But while it looks to epic conventions, this poem also distances itself from them, Seider argues, in particular through the introduction of the theme of the intersection of gender and time. Drawing on Kristeva’s ideas, he claims that by setting up the Fates and Ariadne as the poem’s internal female narrators, recording male actions and giving them meaning in a cyclical structure, the poem opposes the notion that male heroes and the male poets who record their deeds dominate the depiction of time as a linear movement. Seider argues that Catullus uses different temporalities to mark the difference between the mythic past, when gods moved among mortals, and his own troubled time.

8  Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio In making these arguments, Seider argues that Kristeva’s observations about the gendered structure of time are evident in Roman culture—as Hunter Gardner has shown in her earlier work.24 In her chapter for this volume, “Delia’s Saturnian day: gender and time in Tibullan love elegy,” she explores how Tibullan love elegy offers a cipher for understanding the temporal pressures that impacted the elite male of Augustan Rome. The self-representation of the elegiac amator suggests an accelerated life course for elite men in the early Principate. In contrast, the puella acquired an (a-)temporal status as a desirable alternative to such a course. Examining the significance of the Saturnian day that colludes with Delia to thwart the Tibullan amator’s departure, Gardner argues that the puella was aligned with representations of the Golden Age in Augustan poetry, both “free from the teleological pressures shaping masculine subjectivity.” The sense of male-gendered constructions of temporality as restrictive and selfdestructive are also apparent in Robert Santucci’s contribution, “Eating up time in Ovid’s Erysichthon episode (Metamorphoses 8.738–878),” which explores Ovid’s account of the Erysichthon myth, arguing that Erysichthon’s autophagy is an attempt to control his very sense of time—an attempt that ultimately fails. Santucci emphasizes the temporality of the punishment that Ceres imposes on Erysichthon: it is not that he eats himself, but that he constantly starts to eat himself. This rapaciously masculine figure becomes simply rapacious, transformed into the image of Fames, and trapped in an infinite loop of self-consumption, within the cyclical time that Ceres oversees. The final two contributions take us into narratives that introduce the conceptual matrices of Christianity. In “Telling time with Epiphanius: periodization and metaphors of genealogy and gender in the Panarion,” Elizabeth Castelli examines the Panarion of the fourth-century bishop Epiphanius to explore the relationships that emerge in that work between and among temporality, gender and heresy. Drawing on the work of Adriana Cavarero, and her insights into sexual difference, Castelli argues that Epiphanius’ portrayal of time and sects as maternal is no accident. After setting the Panarion in its broader context, she provides a detailed analysis of Epiphanius’ style and approach, exploring how he codes heresy as “a worthless/nasty woman,” a hypersexualized historical temporality, in contrast with the singular, eternal, virginal church, the bride of Christ. In fact, however, his imagery adopts, but subverts, the very heresies he criticizes: Castelli suggests it is as if “through his own rhetoric, Epiphanius seeks to perform a homeopathic cure on the disease of heresy, echoing the structural logic of his opponents in order to purge their cosmology of its virulence.” The creativity of the male Christian literary imagination is also a focus of Nicola Denzey Lewis’s argument in “(En)Gendering Christian time: female saints and Roman martyrological calendars.” She explores the “complex tapestry of processes” involved with the movement from Roman time, which revolved around honoring traditional gods and their festal days, to Christian celebrations of saints’ days. She starts with a close examination of the so-called Calendar of 354, the earliest Christian codex calendar, and the earliest Christian codex featuring fullpage illustrations. As she charts the development of martyrological calendars,

Introduction  9 her particular focus of inquiry is the role of women martyrs. She asks, “What does it mean that time came to be performed through the destruction of female flesh?” She argues that while late antique Christians “humanized” time by inserting human narrative and characters into its marking, they did so in a way that was driven by patriarchal concerns, to the clear detriment of women. And she ends her chapter with a vivid description of a gruesome passion play—the annual celebration of martyrdom of Cristina of Bolsena—that is still performed today. This final image from Denzey Lewis’s chapter is particularly significant for the volume as a whole. We use it here to round off this introduction as an illustration of our final observation, that is, that gendered conceptions of time have entered and occupied the Western imagination in such a way that they have simply become unremarked elements of our mental furniture. But as the chapters in this volume reveal, female characters and female figurations of time are more than simply the “matter” of Irigaray’s analysis, nor are they—to use the spatial metaphor of time—only occupying and offering a female space. While the chapters in this volume provide a detailed analysis of particular texts, individually and together they raise broader questions about how theoretical models for analyzing gender constitute an ineluctable part of nearly any inquiry into antiquity and its role as authorizing contemporary discourses. We add that we are well aware that the gender relations that we evoke in this volume are only one form of dominance (conceptual and actual); moreover, we realize that this volume touches on only one small aspect of these relations. In that context, in particular, we hope not only that its contents stimulate and enlighten readers, but also that they provoke thought and discussion, and more work, on the intricate ways in which abstract concepts of time have been gendered and used, and are still used, to shape daily lives, relations and institutions.

Notes 1 Momigliano 1966: 2. 2 This is just one of a series of terms that he has suggested to describe the ways in which “the narratives of ancient historians can and should also be seen as an engagement with temporality”; see Grethlein 2014. 3 Closest to our volume’s theoretical aims is Hunter Gardner’s Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy, which examines how and why time appears to affect men and women differently in Latin love elegy. This draws, as do many of the chapters in our own volume, on the work of Julia Kristeva, but is supported with insights from the writings of Sherry Ortner. Gardner suggests that, across this genre, each poet seeks to reject male constructions for time (linear and teleological) for female constructions (cyclical and repetitive). We are fortunate to have an chapter from Gardner in our current collection, in which she focuses on the relationship between the amator and his puella Delia in Tibullus’ first libellus, arguing that Delia is thus conceptually linked to the notion of a prehistoric, atemporal realm, presided over by Saturn and idealized in Tibullus’ work. 4 This is the catalogue for an exhibition of time-keeping devices at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World at New York University. 5 Our volume includes a chapter that considers the role and development of a particular type of calendar, (“(En)Gendering Christian time: female saints and Roman martyrological calendars,” by Nicola Denzey Lewis), which also examines the role of female

10  Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio deaths in the crafting of particular civic or local identities. It has more in common in its approach with Feeney’s Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and The Beginnings of History (2007), and its charting of the development of a Roman system of time-keeping (although gender is not a theme in that volume). 6 de Romilly 1968: 67 (Aeschylus); 88 (Sophokles); 122 (Euripides). 7 Bakhtin 1981: 84–258. 8 Kennedy 2013: i. 9 Ricoeur 1984: 52, cited by Kennedy 2013: ix. 10 The chapters of this work discuss the eusynoptic vision of the plot of the Iliad; a counter-cartographic view of space in the Odyssey; the relations between prose—and the invention of cartography, with reference to Anaximander and Pherecydes; the relationship between map-making and the prose of Herodotos’ Histories; and, in the two final chapters, the ways in which Xenophon addresses the interactions of narrative form and content, first, in the Anabasis where blurred narrative boundaries reflect the plot’s topographical uncertainty, then, in the idealized model of space in the Oikonomikos. 11 Purves 2010: 144 and 206–8. 12 As it is described by de Jong and Nünlist 2007: 522. 13 Bruit-Zaidman 2000. 14 Darbo-Pechanski 2000. 15 Ben-Dov and Doering 2017. 16 Gribetz in Ben-Dov and Doering 2017. 17 Burchill 2010. 18 Burke 2018: 112. 19 Burke 2018: 113 (italics ours). See also Deutscher 2006. Schües, Olkowski and Fielding 2011. 20 de Beauvoir 2009 (1949): 283 with xviii. 21 Jardine 1981; Ermarth 1989; Watts 1998. 22 Söderbäck 2012: 304. 23 Bryson 2007; Sweet 2018; Watts 1998. 24 Gardner 2007 and 2013.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Translated by Caryl Emerson and M. Holquist. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Ben-Dove, J. ed. 2017. The Construction of Time in Antiquity: Ritual, Art, and Identity. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bruit-Zaidman, L. 2000. “Temps rituel et temps féminin dans la cité athénienne au miroir du théâtre.” Darbo-Pechanski 2000: 115–68. Bryson, V. 2007. Gender and the Politics of Time: Feminist Theories and Contemporary Debates. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Burchill, L. 2010. “Becoming-Woman: A Metamorphosis in the Present Relegating Repetition of Gendered Time to the Past.” Time & Society 19: 81–97. Burke, M. M. 2018. “Gender as Lived Time: Reading The Second Sex for a Feminist Phenomenology of Temporality.” Hypatia 33: 111–27. Cavarero, A. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Trans. by S. Anderlini-D’Onofrio and A. O’Healy. New York, NY: Routledge. Darbo-Peschanski, C. ed. 2000. Constructions du temps dans le monde Grec Ancien. Paris: CNRS Editions. Darbo-Peschanski, C. 2000a. “Historia et historiographique grecque: ‘le temps des hommes’.” Darbo-Peschanski 2000: 89–114.

Introduction  11 De Beauvoir, S. 2009 (1949). The Second Sex. Translated by C. Borde and S. MalovanyChevallier. New York, NY: Random House: Alfred A. Knopf. De Jong, I. J. F. and R. Nünlist, eds. 2007. Time in Ancient Greek Literature. Leiden: Brill. De Lauretis, T. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press. De Romilly, J. 1968. Time in Greek Tragedy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Deutscher, P. 2006. “Repetition Facility: Beauvoir on Women’s Time.” Australian Feminist Studies 21: 327–42. Ermarth, E. 1989. “The Solitude of Women and Social Time.” In Taking Our Time: Feminist Perspectives on Temporality, edited by F. J. Forman and C. Sowton, 37–46. Toronto: Pergamon Press Canada. Feeney, D. 2007. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and The Beginnings of History. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foster, T. 1988. “History, Critical Theory, and Women’s Social Practices: ‘Women’s Time’ and Housekeeping.” Signs 14: 73–99. Gardner, H. 2007. “Ariadne’s Lament: The Semiotic Impulse of Catullus 64.” TAPA 137: 147–79. Gardner, H. 2013. Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grethlein, J. and C. Krebs eds. 2012. Time and Narrative in Ancient Historiography: The “Plupast” from Herodotus to Appian. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Grethlein, J. 2014. “Time, Tense, and Temporality in Ancient Greek Historiography.” Oxford Handbooks Online. [Online Publication Date: Oct 2014; retrieved 27 Aug. 2018, from http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019993539 0.001.0001/oxfordhb-9780199935390-e-43]. George, C. H. 2014. Expression of Time in Ancient Greek. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hannah, R. 2009. Time in Antiquity. London: Routledge. Jardine, A. 1981. “Introduction to Julia Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’.” Signs 7: 5–12. Jones, A. R. 2016. Time and Cosmos in Greco-Roman Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kennedy, D. 2013. Antiquity and the Meanings of Time: A Philosophy of Ancient Modern Literature. London: I.B. Tauris. Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Translated by A. Jardine and H. Blake. Signs 7: 13–35. Lianeri, A. (ed.) 2011. The Western Time of Ancient History: Historiographical Encounters with the Greek and Roman Pasts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Momigliano, A. 1966. “Time in Ancient Historiography.” History and Theory 6: 1–23. Parker, P. 1988. Literary Fat Ladies: Gender, Rhetoric and Property. New York, NY: Routledge. Purves, A. 2010. Space and Time in Ancient Greek Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and Narrative, vol. 1. Translated by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Rosen, R. M. ed. 2004. Time and Temporality in the Ancient World. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. Seaford, R. 2012. Cosmology and the Polis: The Social Construction of Space and Time in the Tragedies of Aeschylus. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Schües, C., D. Olkowski, and H. Fielding eds. 2011. Time in Feminist Phenomenology. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

12  Esther Eidinow and Lisa Maurizio Söderbäck, F. 2012. “Revolutionary Time: Revolt as Temporal Return.” Signs 37: 301–24. Söderbäck, F. 2010. Time for Change: On Time and Difference in the Work of Kristeva and Irigaray. Dissertation, New School for Social Research of the New School. Sweet, P.L. 2018. “Biopolitics.” In Time: Gender, edited by K. Selberg, 137–54. New York, NY: Macmillan Reference. Watts. C. 1998. “Time and the Working Mother: Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’.” Radical Philosophy 91: 6–17. Widzisz, M.A. 2012. Chronos on the Threshold: Time, Ritual, and Agency in the Oresteia. Lanham and Plymouth: Lexington Books.

1

Women’s tangible time Perceptions of continuity and rupture in female temporality in Homer Andromache Karanika

1 Introduction Women’s weaving as represented in ancient Greek literature is often depicted as an activity that reflects on the female experience in antiquity. In most studies of gender in the ancient world, weaving and textile activity have been read as markers of female space.1 Confined mostly (although not exclusively) to an inside as opposed to an outside space, female figures in ancient Greek narratives are often staged within domestic settings that are juxtaposed to the space of battle or civic engagements. Weaving, however, as I argue in this chapter, does not only mark feminine space but also becomes a temporal marker of beginnings, ruptures or ends, often encompassing and enshrining men’s activities. Moreover, textile activity reflects time like a measure, as intensive labor and many hours are needed in different processes to create an artifact to use; this sense of time is captured in scenes that present looms and textile activity and portray artifacts as having their own life that can last through generations. This chapter seeks to analyze the portrayal of weaving in Homer as a temporal marker in narratives that focus on female figures and to offer alternatives to the predominantly spatial readings of women’s weaving.2 It argues that textile activity, as represented in the Iliad and the Odyssey, becomes a coded reference that engenders time and temporality. In these poems, a woman’s woven fabric moves beyond the restrictions of the space and time of its making, when, for example, it is given as a gift, offered to the gods or used as a shroud or wedding veil. In serving such ritual functions, weaving marks defining moments, as do rituals such as marriage and burial. By referring to the time of weaving and the time needed to create a woven fabric (or undo it, as in Penelope’s case), the poems are afforded a different temporal sense beyond and above the progression of the narrative around male figures and their activities, engendering time. As Hillis Miller has put it in his essay on “Time in Literature,” “the basic issue is … how words can be used to represent the subjective experience of lived time.”3 In Homer, the loom, descriptions of garments and scenes of weaving introduce the notion that women’s lives are measured and experienced by their weaving activities, not by time periods dictated by men’s battles and journeys. Additionally, references to women’s handiwork in Homer evoke the sense of touch, which affords the text a sense of truth

14  Andromache Karanika and “realness” but also materiality and temporality.4 As I argue, weaving evokes tangibility, becoming a temporal marker as it marks rupture and continuity, beginnings and ends. Homeric discourse very sensitively depicts weaving, as well as its finished product, which, placed within a broader spectrum of time, bridges present, past and future. In other words, I offer a reading on certain weaving scenes that contextualizes female weaving as a temporal promontory in ancient oral texts. To that end, it is essential to clarify what I mean with my use of terms such as time and temporality. A common denominator among several theoretical works is that time is a term that marks an objective measure in the natural world, creating artificial divisions between what constitutes present, past and future, whereas temporality absorbs the human experience and reflects “experienced” time.5 While this is one of the most common distinctions made for the terms “time” and “temporality,” they have far more nuanced aspects.6 Temporality, as Klein indicates, is a primary category of our experience and cognition.7 Because of this, we can measure temporality in more flexible ways. We can fabricate markers of time past (through rituals or talk about things accomplished). Instead of asking a person how old they are (referencing time markers of years or year of birth) or for how long they have been at a place, we can construct different temporal questions and judgments, even if they seemingly have nothing to do with clocks or calendars (although they might translate back to it): one can ask how long it took someone to learn how to write, or to embroider a particular piece or to create a certain project. Materiality holds a special relation with temporality as the one shapes the other. Within narratives, descriptions of textile activity and textiles more broadly construct a physical dimension when they refer to objects that are the result of work rooted in specific time frames. Weaving, as it is represented in Homer, is a daily task that marks a big part of female activity. Through weaving, “social” time is projected in the poems, which encompasses, as Herzfeld defines it, the experience of daily activity with everything that it entails.8 All the female weavers of Homer are observed during the social time of textile work: Helen, Penelope, Arete, Kirke, Kalypso, the nymphs and Andromache. Weaving marks these characters’ presence in poetry; the product coming from female hands has a life of its own. In this way, weaving produces works that transcend human time. Textile activity, so deeply connected with the female experience, is often considered a mundane and tedious task, an activity that is repeated in ways that can seem to reflect what Kristeva has called “cyclical time.”9 Kristeva’s theoretical thinking about the ways in which cyclical time and monumental time pertain to the realm of the feminine10 comports with Lin Foxhall’s definition of monumental time, which she contrasts with human time in the classical world.11 Foxhall links “monumental” time to narratives of glory that create a temporal tableau to be remembered.12 “Monumental time” transcends the limits of generational memory and touches the realm of infinite time through various means such as poetry and monuments, while “human time” refers to lived time and is commensurate with

Women’s tangible time  15 the span of one’s lifetime.13 Kleos (glory) and monumentalization are inextricably linked to one another. Both the activity of weaving and the products that come from it can idealize and monumentalize “human” time. Helen’s weaving as we shall see is connected with “monumental” time when she weaves a tapestry depicting the Trojan War.14 Likewise, in the Odyssey, Helen’s woven garment that she bestows as a gift to Telemachos creates monumental time: she gives it as the “memory” or “monument” of her hands, one that rewrites Helen’s own story.15 This is one of the most famous and well-analyzed passages in Homer’s epics, and it demonstrates how the temporal breadth of a product acquires dimensions that can also surpass the life-limits of its maker. By moving beyond the geographical and temporal limits of one’s life, a handmade woven gift transmutes human time into monumental time.16 This chapter traces the representations of textile activity first in the Iliad and then in the Odyssey, seeking to show how these scenes present a female experience of time. Considering the fabrics and the loom as a temporal fingerprint, it also follows how cyclicality, repetition, but also interruption in the making of a fabric, underscore how this female activity in Homer steers poetic narrative.

2 Weaving and time in the Iliad Weaving is mentioned twice in Hektor’s speech to Andromache in Book 6. Hektor gives her the formulaic line asking her to go inside to her loom and distaff while men will take care of the war (Il. 6.491) after he has told her in a more intimate tone about his worry for the future for his family; he is distressed at the thought of his wife doing slave work in Argos. The reference to working at a loom as a slave is particularly revealing as it denotes not only a change of space and circumstances, but also a temporal projection in the future. Then perhaps in Argos you will weave on somebody else’s loom, and you will carry water from Messeis or Hypereia, much against your will, because mighty necessity will fall on you.17 Just as Hektor had told her to go inside and weave, the next time Andromache appears in the epic narrative in book 22, this time after Hektor’s death but before the news of his death has reached her, she is found inside weaving a twofold purple web (Il. 22.440). Her weaving and his death are linked as she abandons her task, once she learns that his life left him. So she spoke weeping, but the wife of Hektor had not been told anything yet, for no true messenger had come to tell her that her husband remained outside the gates. But she was weaving in the innermost part of the lofty house, a purple tapestry of double fold, and embroidered on it flowers of a different hue.18

16  Andromache Karanika The text gives us a vivid description of the moment Andromache is about to find out about her husband’s death. When she hears the shrieks of lamentation from outside, her shuttle falls from her hands; she, then, goes out through the halls “like a maenad” (Il. 22.460). Her interrupted weaving specifically signals imminent death and eventual exile, just as feared and predicted by Hektor earlier in book 6. The narrative gives a further important detail: her headdress falls in a symbolic movement.19 This is the veil given to her as a gift by Aphrodite on her wedding day.20 The time of her wedding is fused into her present reality, as she is about to learn of her husband’s death. Women are active participants in the gift economy presented in Homer.21 Gifts, in this case the gift of a goddess, present a bridge in the narrative between a distant past and present experience. The veil that she casts aside is constructed symbolically in a way that establishes connections with a defining moment of the past: her wedding is now linked with a scene that leads to Hektor’s funeral. Andromache’s movement away from her work and the removal of her veil entwine the themes of female work, wedding and lament, but also the present with her past and future. Upon hearing the news of Hektor’s death, Andromache gives a moving lament that is centered on her projection of herself as a widow and her son as an orphan.22 Lament is the genre of performance that not only expresses grief but also helps those left behind to manage the new situation of bereavement. Andromache negotiates her role in the new reality of the vulnerability of widowhood that begins with Hektor’s death. She finishes her lament by focusing on the absence of a shroud, the epitomized example of female work, to cover Hektor’s naked body that lies out in the battlefield: But now, near the beaked ships, worms devour your naked body far from your parents, until the dogs have satiated their hunger with your flesh. Yet, there are fine and graceful garments in your hall, made by the hands of women. All these, I will put to a blazing fire; they are useless to you, as you will never be wrapped in these, but they will be the glory of Trojan men and women.23 In this moving scene, Andromache destroys the potential clothing and even shroud for a man who has died; Andromache puts into the fire the finished works of other unnamed women, destroying their textile work, just as the work she was doing when she had the first intimation about her husband’s death, and, with it, her life as she knew it, has ended. This gesture of burning textile works, essentially erasing them, is loaded with further meaning. She erases the works but also any claim to monumentalization they could have. They “die” as her husband has died. We have the reverse moment of what textiles do: if they can carry on memory beyond human existence, their erasure pauses time, while the agent of this act tries to get control on something she cannot. Andromache cannot undo her husband’s death. She is not unlike Penelope, as we shall see, whose unweaving seeks to control time, while she, too, cannot undo her husband’s absence. Epic references to female weaving often link the past to the present and the future. In the following examples from the Iliad, the Homeric poems are

Women’s tangible time  17 particularly sensitive to registering the difference between finished versus unfinished women’s work, and textile work in the making; and they also very carefully highlight collective as well as individual work. When Andromache hears the news of Hektor’s death and leaves her textile work to go outside (Il. 22.460), the unfinished work that she leaves behind marks not only the change of space but also the change of time: her life after Hektor’s death when she will leave Troy. Conversely, when she decides to burn the garments “made by the hands of women” (Il. 22.511) we have a reference to a finished product destroyed. Rupture is followed by erasure through fire, linking women’s weaving of the past with the rupture that Andromache experiences in her present. The image of the destruction of textiles can be read as a cipher for the future of these characters. Andromache’s husband is dead, her life as she knew it is erased, just as her own weaving was interrupted and the weaving of others is burned. She will become one of the many Trojan women in widowhood and slavery away from Troy. The Sidonian slave women’s peplos, described in Book 6, which is dedicated to Athena, is a material offering that accompanies a prayer that the goddess emphatically rejects.24 Paris had acquired the cloth on his journey when he brought Helen back to Troy, and the fate of the women whose hands produced the offering is now connected with the Trojan women who are also about to become slaves. The finished product travels forward in space and time, always connected to its makers. From weaving to finished product, the Iliad often presents its female characters’ work in parallel with that of men’s. In Iliad 3, Helen weaves a tableau about what is happening outside her room, the battle between the Trojans and the Achaians, and is interrupted, as she weaves, by the appearance of the messenger goddess Iris who has taken the form of a daughter of Priam, Laodike. Helen stops her weaving as Laodike/Iris announces that there will be a duel for Helen between her former and current husbands. Helen’s past and present collide to determine the future. The great web (megan histon, Il. 3.125) that she was weaving becomes a temporal vestige to a great war. It takes much time to depict it on a tableau, so Helen’s weaving can be another tangible record of the temporal dimensions of the Trojan War and how long it lasted. Just as the war was happening, Helen’s work depicting it was also occurring. The work of Helen’s hands in Troy measures the time during which battles raged outside the walls of Troy. The interruption by Iris and her announcement about the imminent duel between her past and present husband bring the possibility of the end of the war and Helen’s weaving with it. And she was weaving a great purple web of double fold, on which she was embroidering the many battles of the horse-taming Trojans and the bronzeclad Achaians, which for her sake they had endured at the hands of Ares. And the swift-footed Iris came to her and spoke to her saying: “Come here, dear sister, so that you may see the wondrous deeds of the horse-taming Trojans and the bronze-clad Achaians....”25 Iris underlines the male deeds of war as Helen has reaffirmed her agency in both the war and its monumentalization.26 At the same time, Helen’s web acts as a

18  Andromache Karanika temporal mirror of war. Moment and continuum meet: the war and the many battles over a long period of time can only be presented as one scene in the monumentalized tableau that Helen is creating. Likewise, the time needed to create a tapestry can only be imagined here as we see Helen in the making of her tapestry, which has not finished, just as the war outside has not finished.

3 Weaving and time in the Odyssey The two most notable weavers in Homeric epics are Helen in the Iliad and Penelope in the Odyssey. Although other figures are associated with weaving in different ways, contributing to the distinct feminine temporal marking of the poems, Helen and Penelope are the figures associated par excellence with epic poetics and the deeper notions of time and temporal presence they afford the poems.27 In the Iliad, Helen is a stranger in Troy, brought from far away, whereas in the Odyssey, Penelope has been made a stranger in her own home through the presence of the suitors. As mentioned earlier, in Odyssey 15.126, Helen gives a “memory” of her hands to Telemachos so that he may hand it over to his future wife.28 Helen’s past becomes fused into Telemachos’ future. Helen’s gift is something she made with her own hands: what was touched by her hands touches the lives of others in a period of time that exceeds that of her own life span. The product of her hands can live beyond her body and touch the bodies of a future generation away from her home and land. Penelope, the legendary weaver of ancient Greek poetry, weaves during the day and unweaves at night, but her work is never interrupted per se until she has to finish it; an early interruption would mean marriage (for herself) or death, or her husband’s return, with further ramifications. As Adriana Cavarero has put it, “Odysseus’ return would (will) be the end of Penelope’s unending work. In a certain sense, maybe it would be the end of Penelope herself.”29 Penelope’s textile activity in Ithaka opens a different female dimension in the Odyssey, one that has been made possible through the absence of Odysseus but is, nevertheless, defined by it. As Penelope manages time, deferring a possible wedding with one of the suitors with her trick of weaving, she also affirms her position as the wife of Odysseus, despite his absence, by caring for his household and weaving a shroud for Laertes, her father-in-law.30 The idea that textile works can outlive their makers is prevalent throughout the Homeric epics. Penelope’s behavior, however, is in sharp contrast to that of Helen’s in the Odyssey (15.126). For Penelope the purpose of her weaving is not to create a memory, but to unweave: she consciously negates creation and goes against gender norms and expectations in order to enable repeated new beginnings. The goal is not to finish a product but to always begin weaving each morning. It is from this perspective that this episode introduces an idea of cyclical time. Traditionally, cyclical time has been viewed as expressing a feminine temporal sense, one that involves repetition and routine marked by ritual moments in the calendar sense, but Penelope rewrites that.31 By unweaving at night she constantly

Women’s tangible time  19 creates new beginnings that renew her cycle of work, one that seeks to leave no trace or tangible garment. Thus Penelope negates the production of a garment (or child) that women’s cyclical work usually yields. Penelope’s weaving in the Odyssey is an activity of the day while her unweaving is an activity of the night. According to Amphimedon (one of the suitors who died and speaks as a shade in the Underworld), when the shroud of Laertes was completed, it shone like the sun and the moon.32 Levaniouk has rightly read this as a deadly symbol for the suitors, but also a sign of wealth and pride for Laertes’ household.33 The combination of sun and moon is also a temporal recording of Penelope’s time, day and night, while she was working on the weaving of the shroud and its subsequent unmaking. Her weaving and unweaving were recorded as an effect on what she touched and through the affect of her creation, namely that the shroud shone like the sun and moon.34 Weaving and unweaving are combined to reflect on her work, a work that is nevertheless not described. The text does not give information about any patterns on the shroud; it is, so to speak, a blank, shining fabric. If the nocturnal activity is envisioned as erasing the day’s work, this shining was also undone through her unweaving. Unweaving requires less energy and time but is still part of a cyclical process that repeats itself, as Penelope’s nights cancel her work of the day. She undoes the product of her hands aspiring to leave no tangible trace of it. Penelope’s loom work is anchored in the temporal divisions of time between day and night, and the three years that passed while she was weaving Laertes’ shroud. It was only in the fourth year, as the text tells us, that a woman reported Penelope’s nocturnal activities to the suitors, who caught her in the act. When Penelope has her task interrupted (her unweaving, as the text tells us), her plan with regard to the suitors dissolves. By day she was weaving a great cloth, by night she was undoing it when she had torches by her. Thus, for three years she escaped our attention with her ruse and was persuading the Achaians, but when the fourth year came, as the seasons went by, then one of the women told us, one who knew well, and then we caught her undoing the loom of splendor (aglaon).35 Yet, she is made to finish it (Od. 19.156). At this juncture, she could not completely undo what she did and completed the weaving unwillingly. Rupture in this text is associated not with weaving but with unweaving. What could not be undone had to be completed. By the time she finishes it, her husband comes back; a half-woven fabric is often a marker of death (as was the case with Andromache’s work, when the rupture in her textile activity alluded to Hektor’s death). The precarious continuum of doing and undoing is a parallel activity for Penelope while Odysseus is away. By the time he is back, her work is completed. If weaving and unweaving are ways of signaling temporal experience for Penelope, then the completion of her weaving signals an end not only to her activity, but also to her life as a queen in a palace with all the suitors around her.

20  Andromache Karanika

4 Looms and fabrics as temporal markers As already mentioned, it is a long-standing tradition to view the loom as a marker of gendered space. The word histos is attested in both Homeric epics as the ship’s mast, connected with masculine work and the world beyond the home, and the loom, associated with domestic space and feminine work. What has been unremarked up to now is that both the Iliad and the Odyssey (the epic where the word histos has multiple attestations) have an almost even division of both meanings of these words. In the Odyssey, the word histos as loom is connected with human female figures such as Penelope and her maids, most notably, but also Arete, Kalypso and Kirke and the unnamed nymphs of the caves of Ithaka, who live in an unconventional, non-domestic setting; the mast of the ship is primarily connected with Odysseus and his companions and Telemachos. Histos meaning “loom” is attested 19 times in the Odyssey, and meaning “mast” is attested 20 times.36 This almost even presence of the two meanings of the word makes a strong case for differentiated space, and, as I argue in this essay, also a gendering of time, in Homeric epics. Histos becomes the symbol of male and female work, as well as the signifier of time management and temporal change. In the Odyssey, journeys are marked by temporal references.37 Both mast and loom become poetic devices that create a temporal sense as both journeys and textile work project the time of “experience” from the perspective of the characters in epic poetry; the loom, however, leaves a material artifact that itself can be a testament of time. The first attestation of the word histos in the Odyssey is in lines that establish the loom as a marker that separates off the inside domestic space for women. “… But go to your house and look to your own tasks, the loom, and the distaff, and order the servants to get on with their works; for speech is a matter for all men, and above all me, as I have authority in this house.” And she marveled, and went back to her house, and placed her son’s authoritative speech (mythos) to her heart and mind.38 Less attention has been given to Penelope’s reaction to her son’s coming of age than to Telemachos’ increasing maturity. His utterance is described as an authoritative utterance, a mythos. Penelope’s reaction to her son’s bidding is one of marveling, revealing her maternal side as she experiences, almost suddenly, her son’s adulthood as he is about to start his own journey.39 Her loom is a witness to her son’s new beginnings as he is about to embark on his adventure in the quest of his father. When Antinoôs talks to Telemachos about Penelope’s ruse in the second book of the Odyssey, he reports Penelope’s own words in an internal speech act.40 And then she played another trick on us, having set a great loom in the palace, she was weaving a very fine and huge piece of work. And then she said to us: Young men, suitors to me, since divine Odysseus is dead, do not press me to

Women’s tangible time  21 marry; wait, until I have completed a shroud for heroic Laertes, so that my threads do not go in vain, when the time of the wretched fate of death takes him. (Od. 2.93–100) Penelope’s use of the loom is one that marks time, the time between her husband’s and her father-in-law’s death, neither of which have, in fact, occurred in the course of the poem. Weavers have an intimate knowledge of how much time it takes to produce specific lengths of fabric, how different types of patterns can make a piece easier or harder to make, and therefore speed up or prolong the process of manufacture. In a world without clocks, the fabric is a distinct record of the time needed to make it. Penelope makes, destroys and starts over, for as long as she can. The weaving of Penelope can be compared to other characters’ weaving, as experienced by Odysseus. His important sojourns with Kalypso and Kirke are also marked by these goddesses’ weaving on their looms; when these figures are mentioned they are presented as weavers singing with their beautiful voices.41 The description of the weavers captures the sounds they make as they touch their looms. Both Kalypso and Kirke stop and then enable Odysseus’ journey, and the temporal aspect of ruptures, pauses and beginnings is highlighted again: the years he spent with Kalypso, longing for Ithaka, and the renewed journey in accordance with advice he received from Kirke, were both measured by otherworldly weaving with no further reference to the tangible garments. Ithaka remains his goal, a place that is also marked by female weaving. As these female weavers mark specific times of departure, rupture and pause of a journey, or arrival for the male hero, they locate him in the mortal world and hint at the alternative temporal frame he has rejected to return to Ithaka. Kalypso weaves as Odysseus’ departure is being plotted with divine agency; Kirke weaves as he arrives. In the first case, a seven-year period of Odysseus’ past is presented to us near its end, when he resumes his journey. In the second, in Odysseus’ own narration, with help from Hermes, Odysseus will not stay with the nymph but will depart again with her guidance. When Odysseus arrives in Ithaka, one of the first things he sees is the stone looms of the nymphs and the fabrics they produce. And in the cave, there were long looms of stone, at which the nymphs weave sea-purple fabrics (pharea haliporphyra), a wonder to behold.42 Both the stone looms and the sea-purple fabrics are significant temporal markers. Although the nymphs are not the first deities occupied with weaving, their stone looms highlight their divine status and separate them from Odysseus’ subsequent activities on Ithaka. The fact that the nymphs’ looms are made of stone is particularly revealing: these looms are out of time, not made from materials subject to decay. The reference to sea-purple fabrics (pharea haliporphyra) probably encodes ideologies and beliefs that go beyond our text. Nonetheless, we can surmise that sea-purple fabric is especially precious and connected with the sea.43

22  Andromache Karanika In its three occurrences in the Odyssey, it is associated on two occasions with the queen of the fantastic isle that enables Odysseus’ departure from Scheria to Ithaka and, here, with the nymphs who work the looms in the cave by the shore, the very spot that marks Odysseus’ arrival at long last in his homeland.44 Thus, the beginning and end of the last segment of the Odyssean journey is framed by sea-purple fabrics. The two references to sea-purple fabrics in the Odyssey connected with Aretē, the queen of the Phaiakians, have nuptial aspects. When Odysseus arrives on Scheria, the queen Aretē, spins sea-purple thread: And she was seated by the hearth with her servant women, spinning the seapurple (haliporphyra) thread.45 Because this description occurs the first time that Nausikaa appears in the text, when she is about to go to the seashore on the pretext of washing clothes with marriage in mind, the episode refers throughout to new beginnings with nuptial connotations.46 Again, a reference to a mother and her textile work coincides with the temporal coming of age of her child, here the daughter/princess, just as earlier in the Odyssey, as we saw, Penelope’s weaving coincided with Telemachos’ coming of age. A nearly identical line with sea-purple thread is repeated later when Nausikaa leads Odysseus to her parents’ palace instructing him on how to be their suppliant without raising suspicion.47 In a scene that is replete throughout with nuptial references, the loom and spindle mark times of change, coming of age, potential weddings and temporal turns such as departures and arrivals. For the shipwrecked Odysseus, his arrival in Scheria, as also his departure from it, is facilitated through the agency of the island’s queen who appears spinning her thread and his fate. Both sea-purple fabric and the stone looms are structural elements connected with divine or royal female figures, the nymphs and queen Aretē of the Phaiakians, which mark and intersect with temporal changes in Odysseus’ homecoming. Because the stone looms of the nymphs and sea-purple fabrics of both the nymphs and Aretē have divine and nuptial connotations, they signal Odysseus’ arrival in Ithaka in particular ways. Looms, as we have seen, are markers of beginnings, endings and ruptures of time. The stone looms and sea-purple fabrics separate divine and mortal space but also delineate figures that are themselves out of time. These signal the forms of immortality and marriages that Odysseus has rejected so as to return to Ithaka, as well as the fact that Odysseus’ arrival back in Ithaka is a remarriage, a new beginning for him, his land and his family. When Odysseus comes to Ithaka, he makes a new beginning, which is marked by the imagery of weddings. Wedding references can be found throughout the episode of his reunion with Penelope, and the entire episode is depicted like a new wedding, with a competition that the disguised beggar/Odysseus has to win in order also to “win” the bride/Penelope, the consummate weaver, whose garments will henceforth clothe Odysseus.48

Women’s tangible time  23

5 Conclusion The loom in Homer is a particularly imposing presence that creates multiple layers of meaning in the poem’s visual space; the repetition of the weavers’ activity creates a rhythmic soundscape, and a sense of touch is implied throughout such scenes and in their products of woven garments.49 The loom is not only a marker of female space but also a complex temporal marker within the narrative.50 Weaving scenes create a gendered appropriation of time and temporality. Female figures, both divine and mortal, are at work in different circumstances, but they always point to key moments in the greater narrative of the poem. Beginnings, ruptures and ends that circumscribe the female presence in the poetic narrative and the pivotal moments of male departures and arrivals are signaled through handiwork. Telemachos’ coming of age is demonstrated when he orders his mother to go to her loom. He then follows his own journey seeking his father, one that is marked by Helen’s work given as a gift to him before he returns. Likewise, his father’s arrival in Scheria and later Ithaka is carefully delineated by textile work and looms. As threads make fabric through textile work and weaving, the scenes that depict this type of work afford the poems a tangible sense of temporality and underline the female experience of time, one that embraces endings, ruptures and new beginnings.

Notes 1 See Fantham et al. 1994: 33–4; Blundell 1995: 52; Nevett 1995: 379. 2 Jenkins 1985 reads the ambiguity inherent in the representation of weaving with a focus on Homer and tragedy but begins with a discussion of weaving in conjunction with domestic space (Jenkins 1985: 109–12). See also Pantelia 1993, and PapadopoulouBelmehdi 1994b who discusses the enclosed space and the loom as a barrier to the world outside the home. For a perspective from art see Kutbay 2002: 23 who writes that “one is confronted with ordinary domestic scenes mostly indoors that seem to suggest a restrictive environment.” 3 Hillis Miller 2003: 87. 4 For touch and the associations with truth, accuracy, and “realness,” see Purves 2017: 1–20. 5 For an overview of critical thinking and philosophical views on time and temporality see Hoy 2009: xi–xxi. For time and narrative see Bakhtin 1981: 2 who, as part of his discussion on genres of literature, time and temporality submits that “narrative is a monologic bid for order” whereas stories are characterized by fluidity. I think this point is especially relevant to my approach. See also Genette 1980: 85 who uses the term “temporality” to denote freedom from the chronological order of story. Ricoeur 1984: 3, one of the most important theorists of time in literature with his monumental work Time and Narrative, has submitted that “time becomes human time to the extent that it is organized after the manner of a narrative; narrative, in turn, is meaningful to the extent that it portrays the features of temporal experience.” 6 See analysis in Murphy 2001: 1–14 and 31–2 for a brief discussion of the gendered “linear” time. 7 See Klein 1994: 1–14 who discussed the terms time and temporality and how time is reflected in language. Time is necessarily temporal, but temporality can exist plainly without and beyond time.

24  Andromache Karanika 8 For the notion of “social” time see Herzfeld 1991: 1–15. 9 Kristeva 1981: 17. Kristeva presents two types of temporality, linked to the “female subjectivity,” namely cyclical and monumental linking the concept of repetition and eternity as fundamental in understanding numerous cultures and experiences. 10 Both of these terms are defined in the introduction to the volume and in subsequent chapters. 11 Foxhall 1997: 124. Foxhall also remarks “women and men experience time in different ways.” 12 See Herzfeld 1991:14–20 on “monumental” time and the “official” narrative created to stay and be imposed. 13 See Foxhall 1995: 132–5. 14 Hom. Il. 3.102, see below section 2. 15 Hom. Od. 15.126. 16 On time and temporality in antiquity, see also Marincola et al. 2012, Grethlein 2010, Calame 2009. 17 Hom. Il. 6.456–8. All translations are mine unless otherwise indicated. 18 Hom. Il. 22.437–41. 19 On this scene see Taplin 1992: 120–7. As Taplin remarks (1992: 126) Andromache’s gesture of throwing off her headdress brings to mind the image of the sacking of her former city, Thebes, by Achilles; Andromache’s past is linked with Troy’s projected future. On the poet’s emphasis on physical objects that relate to clothing, such as a headdress, and how such objects open a window into the emotional world, see Griffin 1980: 1–12. For Andromache’s laments see Muich 2011. 20 Hom. Il. 22.470–1. 21 See Lyons 2012. 22 Hom. Il. 22.497–9. 23 Hom. Il. 22.508–14. 24 Hom. Il. 6.289. On the prayer of the Trojan women, see Karanika 2017. 25 Hom. Il. 3.125–31. 26 On Helen’s agency as the ‘maker’ of the war see Blondell 2013: 68. 27 For Penelope’s weaving see especially Clayton 2004: 1–10, 20–35; Doherty 1995: 141–2; Felson 1994; Foley 1995; Heitman 2005: 11–14; Katz 1991: 1–10; Murnaghan 2009; Papadopoulou-Belmehdi 1994a; and Winkler 1990: 129–61. For weaving in particular, see Bergren 1983: 223–38; Karanika 2014: 41–4; Tuck 2006; and Vetter 2005: 41–7. For Helen, see Blondell 2013 and Roisman 2006. 28 On this scene see especially Mueller 2010 and Worman 2010. 29 Cavarero 1995: 13. 30 On this see Lesser 2017: 111. 31 For an overview of feminine and cyclical time see Kristeva 1981. 32 Hom. Od. 24.145–8. 33 See Levaniouk 2011. 34 See Nieto Hernandez 2008. 35 Hom. Od. 2.104–9. 36 Histos as loom is attested in the Odyssey 19 times: 1.357; 2.94; 2.104; 2.109; 5.62; 7.105; 7.110; 10.222; 10.226; 10.254; 13.107; 15.517; 19.139; 19.149; 21.351; 24.129; 24.139; 24.145; 24.147. Histos as mast is attested in the Odyssey 20 times: 2.424; 4.578; 4.781; 5.254; 5.316; 6.271; 8.52; 9.77; 9.322; 10.506; 11.3; 12.402; 12.409; 12.410; 12.422; 12.424; 12.438; 14.31;15.289; 15.496. 37 For example, Hom. Od. 5.35 and 6.170 marking Odysseus’ arrival at Scheria on the twentieth day. 38 Hom. Od. 1.356–61. 39 Hektor uses such formulaic lines in the Iliad when he tells his wife to look to her own tasks (Hom. Il. 6.490–1).

Women’s tangible time  25 40 Similar lines repeated in 24.131–5. 41 On the thematic relationship between weaving and poetry and recitation that guides material activity on the loom including patterning in textile manufacture see Tuck 2006. On weaving as metaphor of poetic activity and important observations on gender and weaving see Holmberg 2003. 42 Hom. Od. 13.107–8. 43 For research on sea-purple fabrics or on byssus in antiquity (possibly woven with threads from sea clams) see Campi 2004 and Sicken 2017. For linguistic issues and meanings see Maeder 2017. 44 The queen of the Phaiakians is depicted spinning with her distaff sea-purple thread, Hom. Od. 6.53 and 6.306. 45 Hom. Od. 6.52–3. 46 See Hague 1983. 47 Hom. Od. 6.305–6. 48 See Hague 1983. 49 For touch and its representation in ancient literature see Butler and Purves 2013; Purves 2017; for contemporary approaches on reading the senses in literary theory see: LeBreton 2017; Howes 2003; Howes 2016; and Howes and Classen 2014. 50 For example, already from antiquity, scholiasts have remarked about Penelope’s plan that while the fabric is upright, marital union is not possible.

Bibliography Bakhtin, M. M. 1981. The Dialogic Imagination. Austin, TX: Austin University Press. Bergren, A. 1983. “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought.” Arethusa 16: 69–95. Blondell, R. 2013. Helen of Troy: Beauty, Myth, Devastation. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Blundell, S. 1995. Women in Ancient Greece. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Butler, S. and A. Purves, eds. 2013. Synaesthesia and the Ancient Senses. Durham, NC: Acumen. Calame, C. 2009. Poetic and Performative Memory in Ancient Greece: Heroic Reference and Ritual Gestures in Time and Space. Hellenic Studies Series 18. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Campi, E. 2004. La Seta Del Mare: Il Bisso: Storia, Cultura, Prospettive. Taranto: Scorpione Editrice. Cavarero, A. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Translated by S. Anderlini-D’Onofrio and A. O’ Healy. New York, NY: Routledge. Clayton, B. 2004. A Penelopean Poetics. Oxford: Lexington Books. Cohen, B. ed. 1995. The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Doherty, L. 1995. Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Enegren, H. L. and F. Meo, eds. 2017. Treasures from the Sea: Purple Dye and Sea Silk. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Fantham, E., Foley, H. P., Kampen N. B., Pomeroy S. B. and H. A. Shapiro. 1994. Women in the Classical World: Image and Text. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Felson, N. 1994. Regarding Penelope: From Character to Poetics. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press.

26  Andromache Karanika Foley, H. P. 1995. “Penelope as Moral Agent.” In The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey, edited by B. Cohen, 93–116. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Foxhall, L. 1995. “Monumental Ambitions: The Significance of Posterity in Greece.” In Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology. Bridging the “Great Divide,” edited by N. Spencer, 135–49. New York, NY: Routledge. Foxhall, L. 1997. “Pandora Unbound: A Feminist Critique of Foucault’s History of Sexuality.” In Rethinking Sexuality: Foucault and Classical Antiquity, edited by D. H. J. Larmour, P. Allen Miller and C. Platter, 122–37. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Genette, G. 1980. Narrative Discourse: An Essay in Method. Translated by Jane E. Lewin. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Grethlein, J. 2010. The Greeks and their Past. Poetry, Oratory and History in the FifthCentury BCE. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffin, J. 1980. Homer on Life and Death. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Hague, R. 1983. “Ancient Greek Wedding Songs: The Tradition of Praise.” Journal of Folklore Research 20: 131–42. Heitman, R. 2005. Taking Her Seriously: Penelope and the Plot of Homer’s Odyssey. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Herzfeld, M. 1991. A Place in History: Social and Monumental Time in a Cretan Town. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hillis Miller, J. 2003. “Time in Literature.” Daedalus 132: 86–97. Holmberg, I. 2003. “Hephaistos and Spiders’ Webs.” Phoenix 57: 1–17. Howes, D. 2003. Sensual Relations: Engaging the Senses in Culture and Social Theory. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Howes, D. ed. 2016. A Cultural History of the Senses in the Modern Age, 1920–2000. London: Bloomsbury. Howes, D. and C. Classen. 2014. Ways of Sensing: Understanding the Senses in Society. Oxford: Routledge. Hoy, D. C. 2009. The Time of Our Lives: A Critical History of Temporality. Boston, MA: MIT Press. Jenkins, I. 1985. “The Ambiguity of Greek Textiles.” Arethusa 18: 109–32. Karanika, A. 2014. Voices at Work: Women, Performance, and Labor in Ancient Greece. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Karanika, A. 2017. “Materiality and Ritual Competence: Insights from Women’s Prayer Typology in Homer.” In Women’s Ritual Competence in the Graeco-Roman Mediterranean, edited by M. Dillon, E. Eidinow and L. Maurizio, 32–45. London: Routledge. Katz, M. 1991. Penelope’s Renown: Meaning and Indeterminacy in the Odyssey. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Klein, W. 1994. Time in Language. London: Routledge. Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time” Translated by A. Jardine and H. Blake. Signs 7: 13–35. Kutbay, B. 2002. “Some Observations on the Female Weaver in Classical Greek Art.” Mediterranean Studies 11: 19–27. Le Breton, D. 2017. Sensing the World: An Anthropology of the Senses. London: Bloomsbury. Lesser, R. 2017. “The Pandareids and Pandora: Defining Penelope’s Subjectivity in the Odyssey.” Helios 44: 101–32.

Women’s tangible time  27 Levaniouk, O. 2011. Eve of the Festival: Making Myth in Odyssey 19. Hellenic Studies Series 46. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Lyons, D. 2012. Dangerous Gifts: Gender and Exchange in Ancient Greece. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Maeder, F. 2017. “Byssus and Sea Silk: A Linguistic Problem with Consequences.” In Treasures from the Sea: Purple Dye and Sea Silk, edited by H. L. Enegren and F. Meo, 4–19. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Marincola, J., Llewellyn-Jones, L., and C. A. Maciver, eds. 2012. Greek Notions of the Past in the Archaic and Classical Eras: History without Historians. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. McKinley, D. 1998. “Pinna and Her Silken Beard: A Foray into Historical Misappropriations.” Ars Textrina: A Journal of Textiles and Costume 29: 9–223. Mueller, M. 2010. “Helen’s Hands: Weaving for Kleos in the Odyssey.” Helios 37: 1–21. Muich, R. 2011. “Focalization and Embedded Speech in Andromache’s Iliadic Laments.” ICS 35–36: 1–24. Murnaghan, S. 2009. “Penelope’s Agnoia: Knowledge, Power, and Gender in the Odyssey.” In Homer’s Odyssey, edited by L. Doherty, 231–46. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Murphy, P. 2001. Time Is of the Essence: Temporality, Gender, and the New Woman Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Nevett, L. 1995. “Gender Relations in the Classical Greek Household: The Archaeological Evidence.” BSA 90: 363–81. Nieto Hernandez, P. 2008. “Penelope’s Absent Song” in Penelope’s Revenge: Essays on Gender and Epic. Phoenix 62.1: 39–62. Pantelia, M. 1993. “Spinning and Weaving: Ideas of Domestic Order in Homer.” AJP 114: 493–501. Papadopoulou-Belmehdi, I. 1994a. Le Chant De Pénélope. Paris: Belin. Papadopoulou-Belmehdi, I. 1994b. “Greek Weaving or the Feminine in Antithesis.” Diogenes 167: 39–56. Purves, A. ed. 2017. Touch and the Ancient Senses. London: Routledge. Ricoeur, P. 1984. Time and Narrative, Volume 1. Translated by K. McLaughlin and D. Pellauer. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Roisman, H. M. 2006. “Helen in the Iliad ‘Causa Belli’ and Victim of War: From Silent Weaver to Public Speaker.” AJP 127: 1–36. Sicken, A. 2017. “Morphology, Properties and Microscopical Identification of Sea Silk.” In Treasures from the Sea: Purple Dye and Sea Silk, edited by H. L. Enegren and F. Meo, 20–9. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Taplin, O. 1992. Homeric Soundings: The Shaping of the Iliad. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Thompson, E. P. 1967. “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism.” Past & Present 38: 56–97. Tuck, A. 2006. “Singing the Rug: Patterned Textiles and the Origins of Indo-European Metrical Poetry.” AJA 110: 539–50. Vetter, L. P. 2005. Women’s Work as Political Art: Weaving and Dialectical Politics in Homer, Aristophanes, and Plato. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books. Winkler, J. J. 1990. The Constraints of Desire: The Anthropology of Sex and Gender in Ancient Greece, 129–61. London: Routledge. Worman, N. 2010. The Cast of Character. Style in Greek Literature. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press.

2

Atalanta and Sappho Women in and out of time Kirk Ormand

1 Introduction: experiences of time Time is often understood through a spatial metaphor: we perceive ourselves as moving through time, and moments of time start, have duration and reach an end. It would be surprising if men and women did not perceive the demarcation of different temporal segments differently, and in fact several Archaic and Classical Greek texts express a clear distinction in men’s and women’s experience of time. In Aristophanes’ Lysistrata, for example, the title character of the play suggests that the passage of time affects young, unmarried women in a different way than it does men, with distinct temporal results. LY: Next, we have to be cheerful and enjoy our youth, and we sleep alone because of the expeditions. And never mind our situation, we grieve for the korai who grow old in their bedrooms. PR: Do men not also grow old? LY: By Zeus, you do not speak of the same thing. For a man arrives, and even if he is grey, quickly he has married a young girl. But the right moment is short for a woman, and if she is not chosen then, nobody wants to marry her, and she sits looking for omens. [i.e., pines away?]1 Lysistrata laments the fact that while the men are off at war, the young women of Athens are growing old, and missing their chance for marriage. When the Magistrate suggests that men also get old, Lysistrata points out that age is different for them; kairos, the right time for women to marry, is short and, if missed, the woman in question enters a curious state of unmarked time. She grows old but does not experience the telos of marriage—and the image here of her sitting, listening for dire omens, is striking in the way that it leaves her suspended in time even while aging. The notion of kairos, of the right time, is simply not the same for men and for women. In the course of this essay, however, I will argue for something more fundamental and more elusive than a gendered experience of the passage of time: I hope to show that women are sometimes represented in Archaic Greek poetry as expressing a different relation to time itself, of creating a different idea of the subject in time.2

Atalanta and Sappho  29 Let me begin by sketching very briefly three ways that the ancient Greeks understood time. First, human beings experience time in at least two related, but not identical ways. There is linear time, conceived of through a metaphor of spatial movement, a journey with a beginning, middle and end. I am born, I flourish as an adult, I grow old and die. Sometimes, mortal men have choices that can affect the route: Achilles can die soon, in Troy, with kleos, or long from now, in Phthia, without glory. But there is no escaping the end, even for heroes, unless they become divine and begin to experience time in an entirely different way. Next, there is cyclical time: men and women die, but more are born; crops are harvested, some of the seeds are saved and replanted for the next year’s harvest; girls are born, become women, give birth, die. Though the individuals in these cycles still experience time as linear, the awareness of a larger cycle of deaths and rebirths can provide a form of compensation for the fact of mortality. And although men in Archaic poetry can be compared to the repeating generations of leaves,3 I take it as given that this cyclical understanding of time is particularly associated with women: Julia Kristeva noted that it was already a cliché in her important essay on “women’s time.”4 Indeed, we need only think of the Homeric Hymn to Demeter and Persephone’s peculiarly recurrent marriage/death and rebirth, leading to a regular cycle of seasons and agriculture on earth, to see that the cycle of fertility is especially associated with women in Archaic Greek thought. If the cyclical and the linear exhaust mortal experience of time, I suggest that Greek literature posits still another way of experiencing time, one generally reserved for immortals. Immortality, as Alex Purves has brilliantly argued, does not simply mean that the gods live endlessly, experiencing each minute as we do, a bone-crushingly dull experience if that were the case. At least in Archaic hexameter poetry, the gods experience time entirely differently from humans, in a mode that seems close to what Kristeva described as “monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word temporality hardly fits: all encompassing and infinite like imaginary space …”5 As Purves describes this immortal experience of time: Gods understand the movement of human time and use some of the same temporal markers as humans do (e.g., sunset) to determine it. However, they do not typically know what it means to experience time or—because they live forever—what it means for time to have length. While humans age, decay, and die in their passage through time, gods remain fixed and unchanging; they are always still in time and do not move with it.6 Time, for the gods, is like the dial tone on landline phones (now nearly obsolete): it is always there, waiting for you to pick up the receiver and enter into it, but you are not troubled by its infinite extension into the past and future when you are not interrupting it with a telephonic event. Of these three modes of time, cyclical time demonstrates some particularly gendered nuances, which I hope to bring to the fore: women in Archaic Greek poetry, though closely associated with cyclical time, occasionally step out of

30  Kirk Ormand it, interrupt, as it were, the mortal experience of infinitely recurring time. In so doing, these women approach, but do not fully acquire, an immortal experience of fixed, unmoving, achronological time. This stepping out of sequential time can perhaps be more clearly apprehended through the use of narratological terminology. As Rene Nünlist points out, events in narrative are expressed in one of two narratological modes: either “subsequent singulative narration,” or “simultaneous iterative narration.” The first mode consists of straightforward sequences of events, even if they include a certain level of temporal complexity: for example, “Yesterday I went to the store in order to buy milk, and on the way I was nearly abducted by the eagle of Zeus, but I managed to avoid his grasp, and here I am now.” The second mode, which we see with marked frequency in Archaic hexameter poetry, enumerates a series of events that take place repeatedly or permanently. Simultaneous iterative narration, then, can relate events that are either endlessly repeated (as happens in cyclical time) or, from a divine perspective, permanently occurring (divine temporality); it should not come as a surprise that this mode of time is particularly prominent in the Homeric Hymns, poems that are frequently concerned with divine expressions of power, human interactions with the divine, and the establishment of cyclically repeated religious ritual.7 I return to this point in the third section of this essay.

2 Atalanta: running out of time As a particularly interesting example of the way that a poet can play with subsequent singulative and simultaneous iterative narrative modes, let us consider the experience of Atalanta. Theognis’ corpus contains a temporally complex poem in which an erastēs tries to convince an erōmenos to gratify him, and does so through a reference to Atalanta, the korē who famously avoids marriage through her swiftness of foot. In this poem, Atalanta is figured as removing herself from the normal female experience of cyclical time, in which marriage is a key event in the ongoing process of fertility, but she does so by instantiating a new, slightly different mode of existence. This mode is marked by a short moment of simultaneous iterative narration: Boy, do not wrong me—I wish to be dear to you still— understanding this with noble grace.8 You will not pass by me with a trick, nor will you deceive me. Having won, you have still more in the future, but I will injure you as you flee from me, as once, they say the daughter of Iasios, the Iasian maiden, though she was ripe, spurned marriage with men, and fled. Having girded herself, she fulfilled fruitless deeds having shrunk from the home of her father, blonde Atalanta. And she lived in the high crowns of the mountains,9 fleeing desirable marriage, the gifts of golden Aphrodite. But finally she knew, though refusing strongly.10

Atalanta and Sappho  31 The logic of the poem is linear enough: the speaker suggests to the boy that it is pointless to run away, for he will be caught—even as Atalanta, the famous paradigm of avoiding marriage by running away, was eventually caught and experienced the telos of marriage. One of the curious aspects of the poem, as I have argued elsewhere, is that here the poet does not rely for his comparison on the familiar story in which Atalanta puts off marriage by means of a footrace against potential bridegrooms.11 Though the racing language in the first half of the poem might lead us to expect that story—which was told in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, a poem that was probably roughly contemporary with Theognis—here the footrace is obliquely alluded to, and then suppressed. Atalanta “flees from” marriage by simply retreating to an area of unbounded space, and living, in a surprisingly static mode, on the “high crowns of mountains.” I argue in my earlier discussion of this poem that this spatial dislocation provides a kind of geographical correlative to the boundlessness of Atalanta’s existence during this apparently brief phase of her life.12 I would like to call attention here to the temporal markers in this poem, and the effect, however brief, of Atalanta’s refusal of marriage. First, we should note that the narrative takes place in an indefinite past time: “As they say, once … (pote)” introduces Atalanta’s story, and as we will see, what happens in this indefinite “once” is a bit of simultaneous iterative narration. (This will raise an interesting point of comparison with the use of indefinite past time by Sappho, discussed below.) The function of this sort of temporal marker in Archaic poetry is nearly always to contrast it to nun or tote (“now” or “then”), that is, to a definite moment in present or past time (which often brings with it subsequent singulative narration).13 Once Atalanta avoided marriage—for how long, doing what, we do not really know—but eventually (telos) she came to know the gifts of Aphrodite. So, in the logic of the poem, the boy too will eventually cease from his (iterative) running away and will experience sex in the now. In both moments of the poem, then, the speaker’s ongoing present and Atalanta’s “once,” the act of running away is figured as a form of stepping out of time, a limited, but unmarked, delay of some inevitable telos.14 This removal from time is particularly characteristic of Atalanta, and it is marked here specifically as an interruption of the cyclical time that is associated with fertility: we learn in line 1289 that she avoids marriage with men although she is hōraiē, a word often translated as “ripe.” The root meaning of the word is something like “seasonable,” that is, “at the right time,” but especially at the right time to be harvested. Ta hōraia are the fruits of harvest, and hē hōraia is the harvest time. Women are frequently hōraiai gamōn, “ripe for marriage” (a kind of metaphorical harvest); young men who are hōraioi are “at the prime of youth.” And an old man can be said to be hōraios thanatōn, “at the appropriate time for death.”15 Atalanta’s move from her father’s house to the unbounded space of the mountains is also a denial of her role in the cyclical time of a wider natural world, a deliberate refusal to achieve the telos of marriage. For a moment, Atalanta removes herself from cyclical, seasonal time as well as bounded space.

32  Kirk Ormand Still more confounding, in line 1290, while Atalanta is out of time, we encounter one of the strangest phrases in all of Archaic poetry: atelesta telei, translated above as “she fulfilled fruitless deeds.” More literally, it means “she completes uncompleted (or uncompletable) things.” I know of no clear explanation for this phrase. Detienne ties it to other versions of the Atalanta myth, in which she survives by hunting, and contrasts this activity to that of agriculture: Instead of the fulfillment of marriage (telos … gamoio) she chooses to fulfill (telein) exploits whose essential virtue is to be deprived of conclusion and limit. They are atelesta in two senses: without end, since they must never cease, but also fruitless, since they are vain and useless. Atalanta’s hunt is interminable just as the race to flee marriage has no finish.16 This reading, attractive though it is, runs up against the fact that nothing in Theognis’ poem refers to Atalanta as a huntress, or engaging in hunting, a detail that Detienne has inferred from other, later versions of the myth. All we are told is that she completes things that are without end. Whatever we imagine that Atalanta is actually doing, however, it seems to me a perfect correlative for Atalanta’s state, whether we envision her running an endless series of races against potential suitors—she completes each race, only to remain unmarried and so race again and again and again—or whether, as here, she is simply living in unbounded, undefined, unmarried space and time. Whatever she completes, it is never the end; and so her experience of time, while she puts off her telos, can only be expressed through this paradox: she accomplishes a lack of accomplishment, she achieves a moment devoid of temporal markings, apparently repeatedly (iteratively). Eventually, however, this suspension of time must stop. And so, without explanation or detail, our poet tells us that Atalanta, too, came to know the “gifts of Aphrodite”: she too experienced the telos of marriage. Curiously, the poem ends there. It does not return to the situation with which it began—the speaker’s pursuit of his beloved boy. If this is a complete poem, it ends with the closing of the mythological comparison, and leaves the reader to infer that something similar will happen for the speaker.17 The ending is “open,” I would suggest, both poetically and temporally: will Atalanta’s “once” (pote) become the speaker’s “now” (nun)? The speaker would like to think so, but it is good to remember that this is only his argument, an attempt to bring about a satisfying future that does not yet exist, with a boy who is continuing to run away.

3 Sappho’s version of immortality I began with this poem of Theognis in part because it seems to me to provide a particularly clear paradigm for thinking about fictional women and their relation to time in the Archaic Greek imaginary. What particularly interests me is the way that Atalanta is seen as creating, through her resistance to marriage, an indefinite

Atalanta and Sappho  33 period of being outside of the normal structures of time, whether perceived as linear or cyclical. I turn now, however, to a poem by Sappho, evidently a real woman, who creates a series of brilliant, fictional speaking personas in her poetry. As a number of recent studies have shown, Sappho also engages in a range of temporal manipulations.18 In the course of these manipulations, Sappho makes a series of gestures toward poetic immortality. In so doing, however, she does not always make the claim that many of her male counterparts do—i.e., “I may die, but I will live on in my poems”—but rather, she creates an experience of time now, in which she finds ongoing satisfaction even while accepting the limitations of her mortal experience of time. I see this as analogous to Atalanta’s moment out of time: Sappho likens her present moment to an indefinite time “once,” and expands it into an experience approaching the eternal present that the divinities of Archaic poetry perceive. Before turning to my central text, let us consider a more well-known poem of Sappho, as an illustration of her skill in poetic manipulation of perceived time. Sappho’s famous first poem is, among other things, a brilliant exercise in simultaneous iterative narration. The speaker asks if Aphrodite ever came to her in the past, and then describes those repeated past visitations: And they used to lead you (imperfect indicating repeated action), beautiful swift sparrows over the dark earth, whirling close wings from the sky through the middle of the air Straight off they arrived. But you, blessed one, smiling (present participle) with your immortal face Asked what, again, I have suffered (perfect indicating present state) and why again I am calling, and what especially I want to happen (present indicating repeated action) in my raging heart. “Whom do I persuade, again, to lead you back to her desire?19 Who, Psappho, wrongs you?”20 Every action in this poem, which has for most readers a sense of immediate presence, is in fact a remembered simultaneous iterative event, a moment of action that has been repeated over and over again in an indefinite past, and which the speaker now wishes to happen again. Discussing the general function of simultaneous iterative narration, Nünlist points out that it “… lends the event a temporal vagueness or open-endedness that cannot be pinned down,”21 and, indeed, here it is easy to lose the present moment in the repeating spirals of past visitations by the goddess. The poetry of Sappho uses this sort of temporal vagueness with unusual frequency, and in the poem known as “The New Sappho” uses it to think about the temporal function of mortality in a way that is subtly distinct from the treatment of contemporary male lyric poets (which is to say, all the rest).

34  Kirk Ormand The poem commonly known as “Sappho on Old Age” caused a justified stir when it was published in 2004. As is well known by now, this new fragment, commonly known as the Cologne papyrus, provides us with the line-beginnings of the last eight out of twelve previously known line-endings, which were formerly Sappho fr. 58, from Oxyrhyncus papyrus 1787. The beginnings of the first four lines of the poem have been tentatively proposed with some variations by various scholars; I print here the most recent text proposed by Janko, who follows the general interpretation of West, but presents his own conjectures of several lacunae.22 The end of the poem presents a particular poetic and papyrological problem: the Oxyrhynchus papyrus (fr. 58) continues for four more line (ends) in the same meter. The Cologne papyrus seems to end at line 12, and a new poem in a different hand, apparently in a meter not ever used elsewhere by Sappho, begins. Scholars have responded differently to this set of facts: West, who tended to trust papyrological evidence, said that the Cologne papyrus must give us the complete twelve-line poem, and Janko agrees;23 Edmunds and Lardinois would like to include lines 13–16 (from the Oxyrhynchus papyrus), in part on the grounds that it is highly unusual to end a poem with a mythological exemplum; and Boedecker has split the difference and suggested that two versions of the poem might have existed in antiquity, perhaps for performance in different contexts.24 I cannot answer definitively any of the fascinating questions that these issues raise. Instead I will provide a reading of lines 1–12, and then suggest what might be added by the last four, if they belong. Here, then, is the poem in its current state: ὔμες τάδε Μοίςαν ἰ]ο̣κ[ό]λ̣πων κάλα δῶρα, παῖδες, ςπουδάςδετε καὶ τὰ]ν φιλάοιδον λιγύραν χελύνναν· ἔμοι δ’ ἄπαλον πρίν] π̣οτ̣ ’ [ἔ]ο̣ντα χρόα γη̃ρας ἤδη κατέςκεθε, λευ̃και δ’ ἐγ]ένοντο τρίχες ἐκ μελαίναν, βάρυς δέ μ’ ὀ [θ]υ̃μο̣ς̣ πεπόηται, γόνα δ’ οὐ φέροιςι, τὰ δή ποτα λαίψη̣ ρ’ ἐον ὄρχηςθ’ ἴςα νεβρίοιςι. τὰ ⟨νυ̃ν⟩ ςτεναχίςδω θαμέως· ἀλλὰ τί κεν ποείην; ἀ̣γ̣ήραον, ἄνθρωπον ἔοντ’, οὐ δύνατον γένεςθαι. καὶ γάρ π̣[ο]τ̣α̣ Τίθωνον ἔφαντο βροδόπαχυν Αὔων, ἔρωι δε̣δ̣άθ̣ειςαν, βάμεν’ εἰς ἔςχατα γα̃ς φέροιςα[ν, ἔοντα̣ [κ]ά̣λ̣ο̣ν καὶ νέον, ἀλλ’ αὖτον ὔμως ἔμαρψε χρόνωι π̣ό̣λ̣ι̣ο̣ν̣ γη̃ρας, ἔχ̣[ο]ν̣τ̣’ ἀθανάταν ἄκοιτιν (end? or …) ⌞ἔγω δὲ φίλημμ’ ὰβροσύναν,⌟ τὸ λά⌞μπρον ἔρως ἀελίω καὶ τὸ κά⌟λον λέ⌞λ⌟ογχε.

]ιμέναν νομίσδει ]αις ὀπάσδοι ]τοῦτο καί μοι

Atalanta and Sappho  35 Pursue the violet-robed Muses’ beautiful gifts, children, and their clear-voiced lyre, dear to song; But me—my skin which once was soft, old age now has taken, my hair has turned to white which once was black, my heart has become heavy, my knees do not carry me, which once were nimble in the dance like fawns. Now I lament these things often. But what can I do? It is not possible for a person to become ageless. For indeed once, they used to say, rosy-armed Eos, by love instructed25, took Tithonos while he was fine and young to the edges of the earth; but even so grey old age in time did seize him, though he had an immortal wife26 [end? or …]  ] thinks ] might provide but I love delicacy …  ] this, and for me love has provided the light and beauty of the sun. This poem is perhaps Sappho’s most explicit statement—from her extant fragments—of her experience of age. Many aspects of this poem have been welldiscussed by the essays in the online publication of Greene and Skinner; here, I add a few further points. First, I want to emphasize the way that the poem takes a specifically masculine image of epic mortality, and recasts it in a lyric, and perhaps therefore less markedly masculine context; second, I will tease out the intertextual reference to the story of Tithonos at the end of the poem, in order to show that it creates a complementary experience of time, an experience similar but not identical to immortality, created through poetic expression. Finally, I argue that the speaker’s expansion of the poetic present is potentially gendered, analogous to Atalanta’s and Penelope’s moments of timelessness. Sappho’s framing of old age is not simply an expression of linear time, but it takes part, as Eva Stehle has shown, in a larger pattern in Sappho’s poetry of contrasting an indefinite time in the past (pote) with the situation now (nun).27 That past time is framed in simultaneous iterative terms and is moreover marked with greater possibilities for fulfillment than the restrictive present. The speaker creates an indefinite, mythic time that is characterized by the speaker’s own closeness to divinity (especially Aphrodite), and by a general pattern of female erotic plenitude. As Stehle says, “Eos snatching Tithonos, Aphrodite leading Helen to Troy, and Aphrodite coming to Sappho to promise her erotic fulfillment all occupy the indefinite past time.”28 These indefinite past events, as we have already seen, are sometimes repeated past events (as in Aphrodite’s visits to Sappho in poem 1), but, in any case, exist in a vague period of time that cannot be precisely specified. The time “now,” by contrast, is “first of all, a time of limitations recognized.”29 The New Sappho, as Stehle notes, makes unusually dense use of these temporal markers: Sappho’s youth, “then” (pote) was characterized by soft skin, dark hair, and knees that carried her nimble like fawns to the dance. Nun (“now”),

36  Kirk Ormand by contrast, puts dancing out of reach.30 I would like, however, to introduce an important nuance to the general schema that Stehle has so ably demonstrated. The limited time “now” in which Sappho finds herself is unusually complex here. The speaker compares her current mortality to the experience of Tithonos, snatched away by Eos, and granted immortality but not agelessness. But the story of Tithonos—though it contains a moment of subsequent singulative narration when he is snatched away—taken as a whole also belongs to the indefinite time of pote, the same indefinite past time of Sappho’s nimble knees, and this is the first of several markers that encourage us to take Sappho’s current experience as similar to that of Tithonos in mythic time.31 That experience is not purely mortal; it is a kind of middle term between mortal and immortal, though expressed in linear, not the more usual cyclical, fashion. More importantly, Sappho here is expanding her sense of the (generally limited) experience of time “now” to include something like Tithonos’ story, a narrative of the more positive time “once.” Let us take a closer look at how Sappho characterizes her own experience of time as it moves from indefinite then to limited now, and her response to it. The first three markers in her list—aging skin, grey hair and a heavy spirit—are common enough: Anakreon, Mimnermos and other poets speak of greying hair, and in this poem it is “grey old age” that overtakes Tithonos, a common transferred epithet. More interesting is the statement that Sappho’s knees no longer carry her, knees that were once “nimble for dancing.” This image is not unique to Sappho: Alkman fr. 26 expresses a similar regret, notably addressing a chorus of young unmarried women—probably the social equivalent of Sappho’s paides (young men/young women). But outside of these two lyric poems, knees are a privileged site of age and mortality for Homeric heroes, as Purves has shown.32 Strong, vigorous heroes have able knees. A failure of the knees, an unstringing of the limbs, usually marks old age, or means imminent if not immediate death. So, for example, Purves cites Agamemnon’s comments on Nestor in Book 4 of the Iliad: “Old man, would that, as the spirit is in your breast, so might your knees follow, and the strength be steadfast for you. But old age, common to all, wears you down.”33 As Purves says, Knees are of considerable importance in the Iliad because they hold a person upright (empedos), and in several instances they represent a prime site of strength and vigor for the body. At Il. 15.262–70, for example, Apollo breathes strength back into Hector’s weakened legs and knees in order to revive him; and at 19.354, Athena feeds Achilles with nectar “in order that weakening hunger might not fall upon his knees.”34 When Sappho says that her knees no longer carry her, she is, as often, repurposing a Homeric idea from the battlefield and transporting it to the realm of lyric, possibly erotic, song. The fact that her knees are specified as once nimble for dancing (with an epexegetic infinitive) supports this idea.35 At the same time, the image of nimble young women as deer or fawns appears throughout Greek literature.36

Atalanta and Sappho  37 In one notable example, from the Homeric Hymn to Demeter, the daughters of Keleos run across the field: As deer or heifers in the season of spring bound through a meadow, satisfied in their hearts with pasture, thus they, holding up the folds of their beautiful robes, darted along the sunken wagon-road, their hair flowing over their shoulders like crocus flowers.37 The image of the women as springing deer is of a part with their youthful beauty, which is in turn linked to images of fertility. In sum, then, Sappho’s image of once (pote) fawn-like knees carries an effective and temporally marked message. In the “now” of her narrative, her knees are no longer like those of young Iliadic warriors, with an added contrast to the frisky knees of deer-like young women, perhaps in contrast to the knees of the paides to whom the poem is addressed.38 She grows simultaneously heroically and lyrically old. By far the richest and most complex aspect of this poem, however, is the comparison to the myth of Tithonos. I believe that Sappho is not just calling up a common exemplum, though Tithonos was also dealt with by Mimnermos (frs. 4 and 5 West). I see here a specific intertext with the longer version of the myth in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, lines 218 and following.39 In this passage, Aphrodite explains to Anchises why she cannot stay with him, nor make him, as Eos made Tithonos, immortal: Thus, golden-throned dawn snatched Tithonos, of your race, like in form to the immortals. She went in order to ask Zeus of the dark clouds, that he be immortal and live for all days. Zeus agreed, and granted her wish. Fool! She did not realize in her mind, powerful Eos, to ask for youth, to strip off baneful old age. But while very sexy youth still held him, he delighted in golden-throned early-born Eos, and lived by the stream of Ocean at the ends of the earth. But when first grey hairs began to flow down from his white head and noble cheeks, Powerful Eos stayed away from his bed, though she cherished him, keeping him in the house, giving him food and ambrosia and lovely clothes. But when hateful old age completely pressed down, and he could neither move his limbs nor lift them, this plan seemed best to her in her heart: She placed him in a bedroom, and fastened the shining doors. His voice flows endlessly, but there is no vigor, as once there was, before, in his crooked limbs.40

38  Kirk Ormand As Ariadne Konstantinou points out, there are three distinct periods in Tithonos’ married life here: his youth, when he enjoys his companionship with Eos; a middle period, when she will not have sex with him, but feeds him nectar and ambrosia and cherishes him at home; and finally, old age, when he is locked indoors and, it seems, no longer keeps Eos’ company at all.41 Sappho’s poem calls to mind the last two stages, but especially the third. The grey hair that appears in line 228 (the start of the second stage) is too common an image to be terribly significant; but in Tithonos’ final state we see significant emphasis on the degeneration of his limbs. It is when he can no longer lift or move his knees that the story reaches its rhetorical end, at which point Tithonos becomes a pure voice, locked away in a room, and singing endlessly in an immortal present time. He has become simultaneous iterative narration. We are told specifically that his voice has no strength, such as was before in his now crooked limbs (lines 234 and 238), directly linking his production of poetry to the loss of leg-strength. This seems to me very close to the narrative situation of Sappho’s poem: she sings, no longer able to dance.42 Several scholars have seen in the New Sappho the connection between Sappho, who is singing in the “now” of the poem despite her age, and Tithonos, who grows old but remains an eternal poet.43 We can only draw this comparison fully, however, by recognizing the Homeric Hymn in particular as an intertext. Sappho makes no mention, in her poem, of Tithonos as a poet, nor does she discuss his legs. In her poem it is her knees that are no longer sound, and she who produces poetry; we can only connect her embodied situation to Tithonos by recalling the specific passage in the Hymn. Sappho’s choice of this particular mythic example carries additional import. Eos is not just a powerful goddess, but a goddess specifically linked to the passage of time—time in its cyclical dimension.44 The rising of Eos out of the ocean brings about each new day, a point that is made emphatically at Odyssey 23.241–6, when Athena blocks Eos’ arrival in order to create a longer night for Odysseus and Penelope. As a personal embodiment of cyclical time, Eos does not herself feel its effects. But Tithonos, who has been “snatched” by this embodiment of time, experiences the arrival of each new day in its linear mode as well, growing older and older without end. The marriage of Eos to Tithonos becomes paradigmatic for different experiences of time, immortal-cyclical and mortal-linear. If we push harder and insist on the Homeric Hymn as a specific intertext to Sappho’s poem, a fuller poetic context comes to the fore, one that is hinted at when Sappho introduces the myth as proof that it is “impossible for a mortal to remain ageless.” For, in the Homeric Hymn, Aphrodite tells the story to Anchises after they have had sex, and tells it for a rhetorical point. The goddess needs to explain to the mortal Anchises why she cannot stay with him. Her argument, however, is a bit curious. Aphrodite begins with tale of Zeus abducting Ganymede for his beauty. When Ganymede’s father was distraught over the disappearance of his son, Zeus compensated him with a set of immortal horses, and more importantly, had Hermes tell him that Ganymede would be “immortal and ageless like the gods” (ὡς ἔοι ἀθάνατος καὶ ἀγήρως ἶσα θεοῖσιν, Hom. Hymn Aph. 214).

Atalanta and Sappho  39 Only after that does Aphrodite tell the story of Eos and Tithonos, in which Eos does not think to ask for agelessness along with immortality.45 Aphrodite’s speech, then, signifies a variety of temporal experiences; though she suggests that Anchises does not want to end up like Tithonos, the real point of her narrative is that she has no interest in a consort who, like Tithonos, will age. The passage ends as follows: But if you were to live as you are, in form and build, and you would be called my husband, then no grief would enclose my well-built mind, but now old age which comes to all will swiftly enclose you, pitiless, which comes then to humans, hated, troublesome, which even the gods despise.46 As an argument, this is not exactly watertight: the example of Ganymede would seem to suggest that ageless immortality is possible. (And here we should note that there are numerous other instances of mortals being made “immortal and ageless” in hexameter poetry, including Iphimede in the Catalogue of Women fr. 23a.47) Aphrodite carefully suppresses this possibility, choosing to present Tithonos as a negative paradigm of the possibilities available to Anchises. Her speech, in other words, is a polite way of putting Anchises off, and blaming it on the inevitability of age: were he forever young, she would be happy to marry him. But now, in that restrictive time of the present when the wishes of mortals cannot be granted, he will grow old, so it is better for him, Aphrodite suggests, that she not try to make him immortal. It’s not you—it’s your mortality.48 Recently Janko has argued that, in telling this narrative, the author of the Homeric Hymn knew, but did not express, the tradition that Tithonos becomes a cicada in his final state, an insect known for its continuous production of song.49 Though this tradition may well have been known to the original audience of the Homeric Hymn, the poet suppresses it because it does not serve Aphrodite’s rhetorical point. For, as Janko ably demonstrates, the cicada “was believed to have an immortality of a sort, since it was thought to feed on nothing but dew and to be able to rejuvenate itself by shedding its skin periodically, like a snake.”50 As Janko notes, the word gēras, “old age,” has a secondary meaning of “skin,” so that when snakes and cicadas sloughed off their skin, they were also sloughing off old age, an idea that may be hinted at by the Homeric Hymn at line 224, ξῦσαί τ’ἄπο γῆρας ὀλοιόν, which Janko translates as “[that he] rub off baneful age.”51 This tradition is attested early on Lesbos, and I agree with Janko that it is likely that Sappho knew it; but like Aphrodite in the Hymn, she chose to suppress it, leaving us with a Tithonos who is not rejuvenated, but who simply grows old, endlessly.52 This suppression by both the Hymn and Sappho strikes me as significant. For Sappho, the importance of the comparison to Tithonos consists in his aging, his ongoing experience of a mortal, poetic existence in the present. The larger context of Aphrodite’s argument suggests the full meaning of what Sappho accepts when

40  Kirk Ormand she says, “Now I lament these things often. But what can I do? / It is not possible for a person to become ageless. / For indeed once, they used to say, rosy-armed Eos, / by love instructed, took Tithonos …” She not only accepts her place in time, but she also accepts the middle term that Tithonos represents: not immortal and ageless like Ganymede, not mortal and aging like Anchises, but aging, even while remaining immortal in her song, a poem that has voice but no force, like her legs.53 She does not quite step out of time, as Atalanta does, but she imagines a different mode of time, and suggests that she can remain endlessly in it, even while aging, mortal and approaching death. By singing she enacts this present, here as often in the extant fragments of her poems.54 In tracing this logic out, however, it is important to note that Sappho does not say, “my poetry gives me a window of immortality.” We can only attribute this ongoing, immortal present to her as a poet through the intertext with Tithonos, who once, they used to say, became an endless source of song. One other point needs to be made, and that has to do with the curious imperfect form of the verb ephanto in line 9. Normally, when a poet introduces a mythological exemplum, she says, “As once, they say …” Such is the case in the poem of Theognis that we examined earlier. Why does Sappho here say, “Once, they used to say …”? Rawles suggests that this may be an oblique reference to the Homeric Hymn; i.e., “they said,” because of the pre-existing poem.55 That reading is certainly possible, but I believe that this is another example of the complexity of Sappho’s relation to time, and to the analogy that she draws. By placing the verb for “saying” in the imperfect, Sappho also places it in an indefinite and possibly iterative time frame, separate from her present and perhaps congruent with the mythical time of Tithonos’ marriage. By using the imperfect to refer to the act of narration, in other words, Sappho creates a link between her own experience of the passing of time and that of Tithonos. Even in the restrictive “now” of the poem’s narrative, she creates a memory of the time when people spoke about Tithonos, who exists in a curious middle ground of mythic immortality.56 It is, I think, reasonable to see a contrast between the Sappho who is singing now and the younger self who was like the paides who are dancing now; the choruses of Sappho’s songs are, in the cyclical experience of time, always young.57 But Sappho’s current time frame is not purely one of restrictions and limits: it is also tied through memory to the time “once” that created Tithonos’ curious state.58 Once Sappho was young too, but now, as they used to say of Tithonos, she occupies the middle ground of time, simultaneously in it, and, through song, experiencing it as endless. If the poem stops there—and it is very likely that it might—we can now see a striking similarity between Sappho’s poem and Theognis’. Not only do both of these twelve-line poems turn in the end to a mythological comparison, both of them—remarkably—end with those comparisons.59 There is no return, either in Sappho’s poem or in Theognis’, to the narrative situation with which the poem began. Atalanta knows the gifts of Aphrodite, and Tithonos is caught by old age, though married to an immortal wife. Both speakers close these attempts to circumvent the passage of time in a way that leaves the narrative situation “open”;

Atalanta and Sappho  41 and, if my reading of Sappho’s poem is correct, both also depend on unspoken parallels with their intertext in order to fully realize their meaning. Atalanta’s knowledge of Aphrodite must be taken to signal an end to her running—not mentioned in Theognis’ poem—in order to parallel the speaker’s hope that the boy will stop “fleeing.” Similarly, Sappho’s ongoing poetic voice invokes a form of immortality by analogy to Tithonos, whose flowing verses are mentioned only in the Hymnic intertext. I suggest that these references to narratives that are suppressed, as it were, are central to, indeed are a representation of, the way that the women in the poems (both Sappho and Atalanta) exist both in and out of time. Their gesture toward an achronological experience of time remains, in a literary sense, indefinite and unresolved. But the textual tradition of the New Sappho seems to resist even this difficult lack of resolution. What if Sappho’s poem does go on? What if, after the excursus to Tithonos, Sappho returns in the first person, loves delicacy, and then comments on the effects of eros (lines 13–16)? Here again, we can see a consolatory gesture.60 But it is surprising. Sappho does not do what so many poets do: she does not say, “I will die, but my poems will live on.”61 Rather, in the last two lines of her poem she returns to an absolute present, a present that seems to embody the kind of temporality that Kristeva invokes: “the massive presence of a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word temporality hardly fits: all encompassing and infinite like imaginary space …”62 In this version, Sappho closes with, but I love delicacy … ( something missing)] this, and for me Eros has provided the light and beauty of the sun.63 Here we are told that eros, the subject of so much of Sappho’s poetry, has provided her with light and beauty. Following the recent interpretation of Boehringer, moreover, we can see here yet another link to the myth of Tithonos existing in an endless present, married (still) to Eos, the dawn, which is to say, the rising sun. As Boehringer puts it, “In fr. 58, far from being an argumentative exemplum that reveals to the young girls the inexorable coming of old age and the end of love, the narrative of Tithonos and Dawn is mainly centered on the luminous image of what binds them to one another.”64 To see how this might be taken as an answer to the rest of the poem, it is worthwhile to compare this passage, as Alex Hardie does, to fragment 1 of Mimnermos, also on old age:65 What is life, what pleasure without golden Aphrodite? May I die, when these things no longer matter to me, secretive love and gentle gifts and bed, the sort of alluring flowers of youth that exist for men and women. But when hated old age arrives, which makes a man both shameful and base, and always in his mind evil cares wear him down,

42  Kirk Ormand he takes no pleasure in seeing the rays of the sun, but is hateful to boys, dishonored among women. Thus the god rendered old age grievous.66 Not only is Mimnermos’ view unrelentingly grim, but he specifically states that in old age there is no pleasure in looking on the light of the sun. Sappho, perhaps “correcting” Mimnermos somewhat obliquely, registers the light and beauty of the sun as a benefit of eros. Not, to be sure, an answer to the relentless march of time, but, on one reading, an assertion that this pleasure exists in an unmarked, indefinite, iterative present that Sappho’s erotic poetry has afforded her. That becomes another parallel to Tithonos, whose endless pouring forth of song took place (somehow) because of eros as well.67 This pleasure, indicated by a verb in the perfect indicating present state is, if not a stoppage of time, revealed as another embodied experience of its unbounded, iterative nature. “I am old,” Sappho says, “but erotic desire has brought me to a state of pleasure in being alive.” In this reading, the immortality of her poetry is not her compensation for the experience of age, but the ongoing present of “beauty,” (to kalon) is.

4 Gendered present In the discussion above, I have been concerned to demonstrate the ways in which Sappho’s treatment of time, and especially mortal time, differs from that of the other poets with whom she is often grouped. In so doing, I have run the real risk of assuming that because Sappho’s poems are by a woman, the differences in them can be traced to the gender of their author; that the unique ongoing present that she creates in the Tithonos poem is an expression of women’s experience of time. This risk is compounded by the fact that the form of time that Sappho creates seems, at least on the surface, to correspond to the “monumental” form of time that Kristeva articulated in her oft-cited essay.68 These assumptions will not hold on their own, and not only because they rely on an anachronistic and essentialist view of women’s writing. As Janko has pointed out, one of the curious aspects of Sappho’s poem on Tithonos is that the speaker avoids, throughout, any indication of her (or his) gender.69 Not only is the speaker’s gender left indeterminate, so is that of the paides of the first line who are her/his addressee; even the critical eighth line, in which Sappho resigns to the fact that a person cannot become ageless relies on the gender-neutral term anthrōpos (“person”), though that word might be chosen here in order to make clear the distinction from the gods and goddesses who are immortal and ageless. Unlike many of the poems in Sappho’s corpus, this poem reveals nothing about the gender of speaker, addressee(s) or potential readers. Janko suggests, quite plausibly, that one function of this gender-neutral stance is that it allows Sappho—a woman poet—to create a comparison between herself and Tithonos (unquestionably male) in the final lines of the poem.70 I would like, however, to argue beyond that, and to suggest that in making the comparison that she does, Sappho draws not only on the complex tradition of Tithonos, but also on

Atalanta and Sappho  43 the poetic tradition of women stopping time, discussed at the start of this essay. I see, in other words, Sappho’s comparison of her experience “now” to the story of Tithonos “once,” as analogous to Atalanta’s brief stepping out of cyclical time. The argument here is speculative and based on fragmentary evidence; but I see enough of a pattern of thought to justify suggesting it. When Atalanta avoids marriage (discussed above), she lives, for a while, in unbounded space and unmarked time. What she does there we do not exactly know; how long she does it is also left unspecified. We know only that, in the end (telos), that period of unmarked-ness is finished. In a similar way, as Cavarero has argued, Penelope uses the act of weaving and unweaving Laertes’ shroud to create both a place and time that is her own, outside the events of history: Penelope keeps herself in the present and, with her work, defines a separate place where she belongs to herself. All of Penelope fits into her small story of endless weaving and unweaving. It is her way of slowing down the tempo of a constant repetition that keeps her solitude intact and saves her from larger events.71 Sappho, similarly, creates an expansive “now,” a form of time that, while not contradicting her bodily experience of mortality, she figures as set apart. Several scholars have already noted this expansive time, “now,” in what has become known as the “Thalia poem,” a badly damaged fragment that immediately precedes the Tithonos poem in the Cologne papyrus.72 Janko’s translation of West’s proposed text indicates a wish for poetic kleos after death, but also calls attention to Sappho’s experience now: … may it provide me with great glory under the earth, as is right, since I have the favour of the Muses, and may they admire me on all sides, just as now when I am on the earth they call me the clear-voiced swallow, whenever I take up the pâktis, barbitos or lyre and sing in the chambers [thalamoi].73 Here Sappho is writing expressly of poetic immortality, as she does in several other poems; she may even imagine the acquisition of kleos, the sort of heroic fame that serves regularly as compensation for mortality in epic.74 But, as Hardie points out, here she also emphasizes a “continuity” between that imagined afterlife and her present experience.75 This is a similar continuity, I would argue, to that which she creates when she likens her limited experience “now” in line 7 of the Tithonos poem to the never-ending experience of Tithonos, by implication an experience marked by poetic production. We see this expansive sense of “now” in another fragment of Sappho, one for which, unfortunately, we have no real sense of context or speaker: “… these joyful things now for my [female] companions / I will sing beautifully” (Sappho fr. 165). In some poems Sappho does, as Hardie and others have argued, imagine an afterlife in which her works will continue to be read; but here, perhaps, as in the Thalia poem, she also imagines a continuity of that immortality with the time

44  Kirk Ormand now, the time in which she sings. This expanded now, this time in which she approaches a divine experience of time (but does not quite achieve it) appears when Sappho sings about her singing. It is, I suggest, a kind of time particularly associated with women in Archaic Greece: the time Penelope creates as she continuously weaves and unweaves, the time of Atalanta as she “completes uncompletable things,” while momentarily stepping out of time.

Notes 1 Arist. Lys. 591–7. 2 For a useful discussion of Penelope as creating a separate mode of time while she waits for Odysseus, see Caverero 1995: 12–14. I have benefited in this project from the work of Susan Cole (2004) on the Greeks’ gendering of space. 3 Glaukos to Diomedes, Hom. Il. 6.145–50; see also Mimnermos fr. 2.1–5 West. 4 Kristeva 1993 [1979]: 445. 5 Kristeva 1993 [1979]: 445. 6 Purves 2006: 195. 7 Nünlist 2007: 53–5. 8 There is considerable disagreement about the meaning of this couplet, and whether the participle suneis (“understanding”) should go with the speaker or the beloved. If the latter, we must understand the phrase “for I still wish to be dear to you” as parenthetical, as I have printed here. If the former, then touto, “this,” must refer to some unspecified situation, possibly the boy’s infidelity, hinted at in the following line. See the useful discussion in West 1974: 165 ad 1283–94. 9 Compare Sappho fr. 44Αa 5–6: “I will always be unmarried (parthenos) / … on the crowns of mountains” (ἄϊ πάρθενος ἔσσομαι / ] ων ὀρέων κορύφαις ἔπι,) apparently in reference to Artemis. 10 Theog. 1283–94. 11 Ormand 2014: 142, 144–6. 12 See Ormand 2014: 140–6. 13 See the splendid discussion of these temporal markers in Sappho’s poetry in Stehle 2009 (discussed further below). 14 Atalanta’s movement here is conceptually similar to that of Penelope as she waits for Odysseus, holding off both the suitors and the passage of historical time, as Cavarero (1995: 14) explains it: “This extended intermission becomes an absolute time removed from history’s events.” 15 See Chantraine 1968 s.v. ὥρα. 16 Detienne 1979: 33; see discussion in Ormand 2014: 143. 17 West 1974: 165 ad 1283–94 argues that this is not a single poem, but fragments of two poems, inexpertly joined at line 1288, which is inexplicably repetitive. 18 See especially Hardie 2005, Stehle 2009 and Janko 2017. Stehle’s article is central to my understanding of Sappho’s creation of a temporal period of erotic and personal fulfillment. 19 Text and meaning uncertain here; my translation is based on an emendation as accepted by Campbell 1982 ad loc., but see the discussion in Page 1955: 9–10. 20 Sappho 1. 9–20. 21 Nünlist 2007: 55. 22 Janko 2017: 268–73. In the process of establishing his text, Janko argues against the proposals of Lidov regarding the first and second lines (see Lidov 2009: 93–4). I find Lidov’s interpretation and reading attractive. As Janko points out, however, the space available in the papyrus seems to indicate a longer word than Lidov’s proposed φίλημμι (“I love”) in line 2. See Gronewald and Daniel 2004; Lardinois 2009: 42–3.

Atalanta and Sappho  45 23 West 2005: 4; Janko 2017: 268. Janko also makes a strong case for reading the poem as a complete composition, consisting of two neatly balanced six-line sequences. 24 Lardinois 2009; Edmunds 2009; Boedekker 2009 (all contained in Greene and Skinner 2009). 25 Here Janko provides the most successful supplement to date for this difficult lacuna (Janko 2017: 271–3). 26 My translation is dependent on that in Janko 2017: 270, modified. 27 Stehle 2009. 28 Stehle 2009: 122. 29 Stehle 2009: 124. 30 Stehle 2009: 118–20. 31 As Stehle 2009: 124 points out, “… when Dawn closes the doors to lock him away from her, he disappears from myth and becomes part of ‘now,’ a cicada. By assimilating his old age to her own, Sappho draws a parallel between their experience.” 32 Purves 2006. 33 Purves 2006: 190. 34 Purves 2006: 191. 35 Similarly, as Lidov 2009: 95 points out, when Sappho says that her thumos is heavy, “This is a physical incapacity, not a psychological affect.” 36 See Méndez Dosuna 2008: 109–11 and the parallels listed by Gronewald and Daniel 2004: 8. 37 Hom. Hymn Dem. 174–8. 38 Lidov 2009 argues that the central contrast of the poem is that Sappho can no longer dance, though she can still sing; this interpretation is easier with the textual supplements that Lidov proposes. Janko, agreeing with West, sees the central contrast as that between an aging Sappho and the young people to whom the poem is addressed (Janko 2017: 270). 39 See Rawles 2006: 2 and 2 n.8 for arguments that Sappho may have been familiar with the Hymn. Janko 2017: 280–9 now provides an extended argument for Sappho’s interaction with the Hymn; he goes so far as to suggest that the Hymn might have originated on Lesbos “… since it has elements of Aeolic dialect and shares vocabulary with Sappho, who may imitate it” (285). Janko discusses Aphrodite’s speech in the Hymn at 282–3. I find Janko’s arguments here compelling. See also Spelman 2017 for an extended discussion of Sappho’s interaction with Archaic hexameter outside of the Iliad and Odyssey. Boehringer 2013 argues that we should not presume the version in the Homeric Hymn to be operative here, emphasizing instead the force of erotic attraction between Tithonos and Eos. While our analyses are not in complete agreement, I find Boehringer’s reading of the end of the poem in accordance with my own. 40 Hom. Hymn Aph. 218–38. 41 Konstantinou 2016: 113–14. 42 See Stehle 2009 for a strong statement of this idea. 43 See especially Stehle 2009: 128, “… it is open to us to construe this poem as Sappho completing Tithonos’ story by singing in her old age.” See also Rawles 2006: 6; Lidov 2009. Janko 2017: 280–9 now argues strongly that both the Homeric Hymn and Sappho’s poem assume Tithonos’ transformation into a cicada, singing endlessly; see further below. 44 Konstantinou 2016: 10. 45 See Rawles 2006: 3, “Tithonus would seem a good exemplum to illustrate the harshness of old age, but not a very good one to illustrate its inevitability.” Konstantinou 2016: 14–15 argues that this distinction points up the importance of gender difference between gods and goddesses: goddesses, as Kalypso points out in the Odyssey, are not allowed to enjoy endless affairs with humans, though Zeus and other male gods are. 46 Hom. Hymn Aph. 241–6.

46  Kirk Ormand 47 See the useful discussion of Lyons 1997: 82, 141–2. As Janko 2017: 274 n.36 points out, the Homeric Hymn twice replaces this formula with the metrically equivalent ἀθάν ατόν τ’ εἶναι καὶ ζώειν ἤματα πάντα (“that he be immortal and live for all days,” Hom. Hymn Aph. 221, 240). 48 See Boehringer 2013: 35. 49 Janko 2017: 280–9. The tradition is first cited by the fifth-century BCE historian Hellanikos of Lesbos, and is well-attested from the fourth century BCE onward, notably in fr. 15a (Wehrli) of Hieronymos of Rhodes. I owe these references to the discussion by Janko 2017: 283–4. 50 Janko 2017: 283–4. 51 Janko 2017: 282, 287–8. 52 Janko 2017: 280 suggests that “Out of tact or subtlety, Sappho leaves it to her audience to fill in the missing ending of the tale.” 53 Boehringer 2013: 35–9, argues that the emphasis in Sappho’s version of the myth is on the erotic bond between Eos and Tithonos, not on his growing old. See especially 37. 54 This reading corresponds to the interpretations of Janko 2017: 288–9 and Stehle 2009: 125–6 of the badly damaged fragment that immediately precedes the Tithonos poem in the Cologne papyrus. See further below. 55 Rawles 2006: 3. 56 Edmunds 2009: 65 suggests something like this: “The peculiar imperfect ἔφαντο suggests that Sappho’s perspective has indeed changed, presumably because of selfunderstanding that post-dates the perspective of the subjects of ἔφαντο. She knows something they didn’t know.” 57 West (2005: 6) suggests that they are so “like undergraduates,” thus placing himself, tongue firmly in cheek, in the position of the aging Sappho. 58 Stehle 2009: 125 also sees Sappho’s use of memory as particularly tied to her present: “But we cannot speak simply of Sappho’s recapturing memory; she reshapes it into a different kind of past, emotionally absolute, supremely vivid, and now accessible only through poetry—like myth. In other words, the temporal divide gives Sappho’s poetry its monumentality.” 59 See the useful discussion in Edmunds 2009. 60 See especially the discussions of Lardinois 2009 and Boedecker 2009. 61 Readers may, nonetheless, see that as the message of the poem. See Lidov 2009: 99, “In content, the 12 lines of the New Poem assert positively what fr. 55 asserted negatively: having a share in the world of music—the roses of Pieria, the song even if not the dancing—assures one of continuing companionship, even in the afterlife.” See also the useful discussion of Hardie (2005: 22), who sees Sappho here developing a “fresh vision of the afterlife.” 62 Kristeva 1993 [1979]: 445. 63 P. Oxy 1787.15–16. West (2005: 8) argues convincingly that we should take the genitive of hēlios (“sun”) with “light and beauty,” and not with eros, despite the moderate syntactical difficulty that this presents. 64 Boehringer 2013: 37: “Dans le fr. 58, le récit de l’histoire de Tithon et d’Aurore, loin d’être un exemple argumentatif révélant aux jeunes filles l’arrivée inexorable de la vieillesse et la fin de l’amour, est principalement axé sur l’image lumineuse de ce qui les lie.” 65 Hardie 2005: 28. 66 Mimnermos, fr. 1 West. 67 Again, Boehringer 2013: 39–40 makes the acute observation that Sappho is also parallel here to Eos, who is taken by desire in line 10 of fr. 58. 68 Kristeva 1993 [1979]: 445. 69 See Janko 2017: 275–6.

Atalanta and Sappho  47 70 Janko 2017: 277–8. As Janko points out, there are a number of extended similes in epic in which a male speaker compares himself to a woman; the “gender-reversal” of the simile here is not, I think, particularly problematic in itself. 71 Cavarero 1995: 12. 72 See especially Janko 2017: 288–9; Stehle 2009: 125–6; Hardie 2005: 23. 73 Janko 2017: 288–9, translating the text of West 2005: 3. It is interesting to note that when Tithonos reaches his final stage, he pours forth song from the thalamos (generally taken to be a bed-chamber) in which Eos places him. 74 See West 2005: 1–3. Sappho fr. 65 contains the tantalizing words “everywhere kleos … / and you in Acheron …” but again it is impossible to know anything about speaker or context. 75 Hardie 2005: 23.

Bibliography Boedeker, D. 2009. “No Way Out? Aging in the New (and Old) Sappho.” In Classics@ Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by E. Greene and M. Skinner, 71–83. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWra pper&bdc=12&mn=3534. Boehringer, S. 2013. “Je suis Tithon, je suis Aurore”: performance et érotisme dans le ‘nouveau’ fr. 58 de Sappho.” Quaderni Urbinati di Cultura Classica 104: 23–44. Campbell, D. A. 1982 [1967]. Greek Lyric Poetry. London: Bristol Classical Press. Cavarero, A. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy, 11–30. New York, NY: Routledge. Chantraine, P. 1968. Dictionnaire Étymologique de la Langue Grecque. Paris: Éditions Klincksieck. Cole, S. 2004. Landscapes, Gender, and Ritual Space: The Ancient Greek Experience. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Detienne, M. 1979. Dionysus Slain, Translated by L. Muellner and M. Muellner, Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Edmunds, L. 2009. “Tithonus in the ‘New Sappho’ and the Narrated Mythical Exemplum in Archaic Greek Poetry.” In Classics@Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by E. Greene and M. Skinner, 58–70. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harv ard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=3534. Greene, E. and M. Skinner, eds. 2009. Classics@Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWra pper&bdc=12&mn=3534. Gronewald, M. and R. W. Daniel. 2004. “Ein neuer Sappho-Papyrus.” ZPE 147: 1–8. Hardie, A. 2005. “Sappho, the Muses, and Life after Death.” ZPE 154: 13–32. Janko, R. 2017. “Tithonus, Eos and the Cicada in the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite and Sappho fr. 58.” In The Winnowing Oar: New Perspectives in Homeric Studies, edited by C. Tsagalis and A. Markantonatos, 269–94. Berlin: De Gruyter. Johnson, M. 2009. “A Reading of Sappho Poem 58, Fragment 31 and Mimnermus.” In Classics@Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by E. Greene and M. Skinner, 162–75. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic

48  Kirk Ormand Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=Artic leWrapper&bdc=12&mn=3534. Konstantinou, A. 2016. “Hestia and Eos: Mapping Female Mobility and Sexuality in Greek Mythic Thought.” AJP 137: 1–24. Kristeva, J. 1993 [1979]. “Women’s Time.” In Feminisms, edited by R. Warhol and D. Herndl, 443–62. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press. Lardinois, A. 2009. “The New Sappho Poem (P. Köln 21351 and 21376): Key to the Old Fragments.” In Classics@Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by E. Greene and M. Skinner, 41–57. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.e du/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWrapper&bdc=12&mn=3534. Lidov, J. 2009. “Acceptance or Assertion? Sappho’s New Poem in its Books.” In Classics@ Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by E. Greene and M. Skinner, 103–17. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=ArticleWra pper&bdc=12&mn=3534. Lyons, D. 1997. Gender and Immortality: Heroines in Ancient Greek Myth and Cult. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Méndez Dosuna, J. 2008. “Knees and Fawns in the New Sappho.” Mnemosyne 61: 108–14. Nünlist, R. 2007. “Homeric Hymns.” In Time in Ancient Greek Literature, edited by I. J. F. de Jong and R. Nünlist, 53–62. Leiden: Brill. Obbink, D. 2009. “Sappho Fragments 58–9: Text, Apparatus Criticus, and Translation.” In Classics@Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by E. Greene and M. Skinner, 7–16. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=Artic leWrapper&bdc=12&mn=3534. Ormand, K. 2014. “Uncertain Geographies of Desire in the Catalogue of Women: Atalanta.” In Geography, Topography, Landscape: Configurations of Space in Greek and Roman Epic, edited by M. Skempis and I. Ziogas, 137–60. Berlin: De Gruyter. Page, D. 1955. Sappho and Alcaeus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Purves, A. 2006. “Falling into Time in Homer’s Iliad.” CA 25: 179–209. Rawles, R. 2006. “Notes on the Interpretation of the ‘New Sappho’.” ZPE 157: 1–7. Spelman, H. 2017. “Sappho 44: Trojan Myth and Literary History.” Mnemosyne 70: 740–57. Stehle, E. 2009. “‘Once’ and ‘Now’: Temporal Markers and Sappho’s Self Representation.” In Classics@Volume 4: The New Sappho on Old Age; Textual and Philosophical Issues, edited by E. Greene and M. Skinner, 118–30. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Online edition of March 11, 2011: http://chs.harvard.edu/wa/pageR?tn=Artic leWrapper&bdc=12&mn=3534. West, M. L. 1974. Studies in Greek Elegy and Iambus. Berlin: De Gruyter. West, M. L. 2005. “The New Sappho.” ZPE 151: 1–9.

3

Feminizing aiōn (“life”/“lifetime”) in Pindar’s Epinikians1 Maria Pavlou

1 Introduction Time, in its various forms and with its various ramifications, holds a central position in Pindar’s poetry, especially his victory songs. The centrality of time in Pindar finds an eloquent expression in the hypostatization of chronos, the general word for “time” in antiquity, and its portrayal as an active agent in the unfolding of events.2 Chronos is also advanced as a cosmogonic and sovereign power, “the lord surpassing all the blessed gods,” and is ascribed the reverent title of “father of everything.”3 But in addition to the plethora of references to chronos, several other temporal terms, such as kairos (“the right or wrong time to do something”), aiōn (“life”/“lifetime”), hēmera (“day”), eniautos (“year”/“a cycle of time”) and Hōrai (“seasons”), also feature prominently in the Pindaric corpus.4 In this chapter, I narrow down my discussion to aiōn, a key term in Pindar’s temporal lexis, with a view to scrutinizing three instances in the victory songs where this typically masculine noun is used as a feminine noun. Drawing on linguistic theory and recent research on grammatical gender and its effects on cognition, I suggest that Pindar’s use of the feminine aiōn is not merely a capricious deviation from the norm, or symptomatic of external causes, such as meter, but that it might be subtler and could even be semantically significant.

2 Aiōn in Pindar The term aiōn occurs fourteen times across the epinikian corpus. Although its meaning spans a wide semantic field, it mostly bears the sense of “lifetime,” and is used to signify the limited and confined period of one’s life.5 In contrast to chronos, which stands for an abstract and enduring continuum independent of human existence, aiōn forms a “space,” so to speak, inside chronos, and its nature, even its length, are relatively determined by the subject whose aiōn it is.6 Thus mortals can determine the quality of their aiōn: one may want to lead an inglorious but secure life, while another may prefer to live dangerously in order to gain glory and kleos (“fame”). It is not surprising, therefore, that although Pindar refrains from qualifying chronos,7 he tags aiōn with a wide range of descriptive adjectives, which articulate the nature of aiōn in different circumstances. These are the

50  Maria Pavlou adjectives adakrus (“tearless”), akindunos (“without risk”), klutos (“famous”), meilichos (“gentle”), euthupompos (“straight”) and hēmeros (“calm”).8 This is not to say that the quality and length of one’s aiōn depend entirely upon one’s own decisions, or that aiōn lacks intrinsic or universal features common to all human beings. For instance, the adjectives thnatos (“mortal”) and morsimos (“allotted”) that Pindar attaches to aiōn highlight its inherently limited span: no matter how one lives one’s life, death is common to all, even to the protégés of the gods. The litotes ouk asphalēs (“not secure”), also applied to aiōn, serves to bring to the fore life’s precariousness and contingency, its unexpected shifts and reversals.9 Of particular interest is the elaborate imagery of aiōn in Isthmian 8, an ode celebrating the victory of the Aeginetan Kleandros in the pankration. Tagged with the adjective dolios (“treacherous”), aiōn is here hypostasized and depicted unrolling (or perhaps rolling?) the course of life while dangling precariously over our heads like the boulder of Tantalos: for over men hangs a treacherous time as it unrolls the course of life10 Aiōn is once again hypostasized in Olympian 9, where Pindar declares that Zeus, after impregnating the daughter of Opous, brought her to the childless Lokros “lest time (aiōn) destroy him and impose a destiny without children.”11 Clearly, aiōn here takes on fatalistic connotations and is rendered synonymous with fate and destiny; it is advanced as a sovereign power, a daimōn that determines life.12 Although aiōn is predominantly a masculine noun, and even though it is always visually represented as male,13 Pindar uses aiōn as a feminine in three cases: in Pythians 4 and 5 composed for Arkesilas of Kyrene, and in Nemean 9 composed for Chromios of Sikyon and Aitna. The grammatical gender of aiōn in these cases is marked either by the article or by the form of the adjective ascribed to it. It should be stressed at the outset that this feminine aiōn is not peculiar to Pindar. It first appears in the Iliad, at the point where, in a desperate attempt to prevent Hektor from confronting Achilles, Priam warns his son that such a clash may be fatal, depriving him of his “dear life” (philēs aiōnos).14 Hesiod uses aiōn as a feminine in a similar context, but substituting the epithet glukeros (“sweet”) for philos (“dear”). While Herakles and his charioteer Iolaos are getting ready to clash with Kyknos, son of Ares, the goddess Athena advises Herakles on what he should do “after robbing Kyknos of sweet life (glukerēs aiōnos).”15 The Hesiodean locution is also to be found in an epitaph for a prematurely diseased man called Timarchos, where sickness is charged with the “stealing” of Timarchos’ “sweet life.”16 At least one instance of the feminine aiōn is to be found in Euripides’ Phoinissai. Once again, the noun is employed in a context associated with death; yet, here the focus shifts from the “sweet” and “dear” life that one loses through death to the feeble afterlife existence that one receives in Hades. The chorus laments the “life of darkness” (skotian aiōna) that the dead Polyneikes, Eteokles and Jokasta are all doomed to lead in murky Hades.17 Aiōn might also be feminine in line 1520 of Euripides’ play,

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  51 where, after losing her family, Antigone deplores the “lonely life” (monad’ aiōna) she is condemned to live from now on: “With cries of woe, I lament before it comes the piteous lonely life, that I shall live for the rest of time, in streaming tears.”18 Though not unprecedented, Pindar’s use of aiōn as a feminine caused much perplexity among his ancient scholiasts. Commenting on the phrase τελέθει πρὸς γῆρας αἰὼν ἡμέρα (“life becomes gentle toward old age”) in Nemean 9.44, the scholiasts appear reluctant to construe hēmera as the feminine form of the adjective hēmeros (“calm”/“tamed”). They offer instead a radically different—albeit forced—construction of the verse in question by reading hēmera as a substantive (“day”) and keeping aiōn masculine.19 More precisely, the scholiasts understand the line from Nemean 9 to mean that, if one spends one’s youth performing virtuous deeds, the whole of one’s old age will be devoid of trouble, mishap and any kind of change; as such, it will seem to be reduced to a single day, to the degree that all of one’s days will be identical. Notably, even though one of the scholiasts appears to be aware of an alternative interpretation of the line in question where hēmera is understood as an adjective and aiōn as feminine, this more reasonable construction gains no acceptance. Clearly, the scholiast’s objection to the alternative interpretation emanates from his reluctance to read aiōn as a feminine noun. This is not surprising, considering that the use of the feminine aiōn must have been very rare, if we are to judge from the extant evidence. Modern scholars do not show the same perplexity regarding this issue. Instead, they treat the various instances of the feminine aiōn as circumstantial. Indeed, one could argue that the use of the feminine aiōn in Pindar and elsewhere is imposed by external factors such as meter. For instance, in Pythian 4, the feminine article tan that accompanies aiōn has a long syllable essential for the meter, which is a dactylo-epitrite and begins with a cretic (−∪−): τὰν ἀκίνδυνον παρὰ ματρὶ μένειν αἰ-    − ∪− − − ∪∪– ∪∪− − ῶνα πέσσοντ,               − ∪− − Τhe same explanation may apply to Εuripides’ use of the feminine noun in the phrase skotian aiōna, where the adjective skotian must have a long third syllable for the anapaest and therefore cannot be replaced with the male form skotion. Nevertheless, meter does not account for all instances where aiōn is used as a feminine. In Homer, Hesiod and Simonides, instead of the feminine forms philēs (∪−) and glukerēs (∪∪−) attached to aiōn, the metrically equivalent masculine forms philou (∪−) and glukerou (∪∪−) would work just as well. The same applies to Pythian 5, where aiōn is tagged with the feminine form of the epithet klutos (“from the very first steps of your glorious life” [klutas aiōnos], 6−7);20 Pindar could have used the masculine klutou (∪−). In Nemean 9, the long last syllable in the adjective hēmera is once again necessary for the meter; yet Pindar could easily have solved this problem if, instead of the marginal form of the feminine aiōn, he had used a synonymous female noun such as zōa (“life”).21

52  Maria Pavlou Since meter cannot sufficiently account for the instances of the feminine form of aiōn, a second hypothesis would be to associate it with the Doric dialect.22 As well as being the conventional language of choral lyric, Doric was the dialect spoken in the areas of Kyrene, Sikyon and Aitna, from where Arkesilas and Chromios, who commissioned Pythians 4 and 5 and Nemean 9, respectively, came. The fact that one of the four instances of the feminine aiōn in the authors other than Pindar is to be found in the lyric parts of Euripides’ Phoinissai prima facie seems to support this suggestion, since choral and solo tragic songs were largely in a version of Doric. That two of the three instances of the feminine aiōn in Pindar occur in the odes for the Kyrenean king Arkesilas might be further indication that what we have here is a regional dialect variation. Nevertheless, this hypothesis cannot be tested in the case of Chromios, because aiōn occurs only once in Nemean 9, and not at all in Nemean 1, the other ode composed for him.23 The explanation offered by associating the feminine aiōn with the Doric dialect is rendered less compelling, however, by the two instances of the word in Homer and Hesiod. Indeed, commenting on the single instance of the feminine aiōn in Homer, Eustathios identifies it as an Ionic dialect form.24 Although lack of further evidence hinders us from verifying Eustathios’ remark, if he is right, then Pindar’s use of the feminine aiōn is rendered even more notable. A third hypothesis would be to simply classify aiōn with nouns such as aēr, kiōn and aithēr, which can take either a masculine or a feminine article without denoting different meanings.25 Nevertheless, the instances of feminine aiōn are so limited compared to the extant instances of the noun that they render its use at least noteworthy. Although it is true that Pindar shows some flexibility in his treatment of gender,26 the example of aiōn is telling, not only because aiōn is used as a feminine in only 3 of its 14 instances in the victory songs, but also because of the great emphasis that Pindar lays, as noted above, upon the notion of time. Taking into account all the above, in what follows I attempt to explore whether Pindar’s use of the feminine aiōn could be in any way semantically significant. For, instance, could Pindar have employed this rare noun in order to gloss specific aspects of aiōn in the three cases under investigation and to encourage his audience to approach aiōn from a particular perspective? Inevitably, this question ushers in the broader and vexed issue of linguistic relativity first highlighted by Benjamin Lee Whorf.27 Even though Whorf’s authoritative theses were largely abandoned by the majority of researchers, during the last two decades the interdependence between the semantic and grammatical aspects of language has seen renewed interest and much research has since been conducted on the effects of grammatical gender on how people think about and categorize things in the world.28 Particularly enlightening in this respect is an experiment carried out in 2002 by Boroditsky, Schmidt and Phillips, which showed that grammatical gender can direct speakers to focus on different aspects of objects and attach to them properties stereotypically perceived as masculine or feminine. These researchers prepared a list of 24 items, half of them masculine and half feminine, which have opposite genders in Spanish and German. The items were listed in English and were distributed to a group of German and Spanish native speakers, who were asked to produce adjectives in English for each of the items. The adjectives

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  53 generated by the participants were clearly influenced by the grammatical gender of the item in their mother tongue and responded to gender stereotypes. For instance, for the noun “bridge,” which is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, the German participants produced adjectives such as “elegant,” “fragile” and “beautiful,” which are typically rated more feminine, while the Spanish participants provided adjectives such as “big,” “dangerous,” “towering” and “strong,” traditionally rated more masculine.29 According to Boroditsky et al., grammatical gender can effectively bring to the fore different aspects of objects, which are stereotypically associated with masculinity or femininity. As they point out: For example, if the noun that names a toaster is masculine, then perhaps its metallic and technological properties may become more salient; but if the noun is feminine, then perhaps its warmth, domesticity and ability to provide nourishment are given more importance.30 Similar conclusions were drawn in another study, the main objective of which was to investigate the personified gender of abstract entities in art. Segel and Boroditsky examined a number of images from the Artstor digital library, and found that there was a high correspondence (around 78%) between grammatical gender in language and personified gender in art.31 Although the researchers acknowledged that the visual representation of an abstract idea is not created in a vacuum, and that it is likely to be influenced by a matrix of mythological, cultural and historical precedents, grammatical gender also proved to be a crucial factor. This conclusion was further verified by the fact that the match between grammatical gender and artistic depiction was also observed in relation to personifications of less common abstract ideas, such as geometry, silence and necessity, for which there were limited precedents.32 To be sure, the methodology of several experiments on the cognitive effects of grammatical gender has been disputed, while several other findings concerning different languages do not always converge due to the particularities of the gender system in each case.33 What is more, the cognitive effects of grammatical gender with regard to the semantic category of inanimate (asexual) objects and nouns with a double gender are still insufficiently studied.34 As Pavlidou and Alvanoudi point out in a recent paper, it is still to be tested when and how grammatical gender effects operate.35 Nevertheless, this renewed interest in grammatical gender has served to highlight its complexity and the multiple and subtle ways in which grammatical gender, despite its arbitrariness, could influence various aspects of cognition. This complexity is, in fact, exemplified in the multifarious ways in which grammatical gender is very often ideologically charged.36 An eloquent example from modern Greek that springs to mind here is a poem by the Greek poetess Zoe Karelli titled Η άνθρωπος (“The [female] human being”) first published in the poetry collection Antitheseis (1957). In modern Greek the noun anthrōpos [“human being”] is masculine and is used to identify both males and females. By attaching the feminine article H to the noun, Karelli masterfully propounds a specific message, inviting her audience to read her poem from a particular point of view.

54  Maria Pavlou Now, if we accept the proposition that grammatical gender may carry connotative meanings and have an effect on the mental representation of inanimate objects and abstract ideas, this provides us with yet another angle from which to approach Pindar’s use of the feminine aiōn; Pindar might have employed this rare form seeking to urge his audience to conceptualize aiōn in feminine terms in the three instances under investigation, all of which concern the lives of males. This hypothesis becomes particularly intriguing if we take into account not only the predominantly subordinate social status of women in antiquity, but also, and most importantly, the nature of Pindar’s poetry. The epinikians are exclusively about males—more precisely men from the upper class—and, despite their communal orientation, are predominantly addressed to the male members of society. Pindar’s victory songs are populated with athletic victors, fathers, grandfathers and other close male relatives, all of whom are exalted and praised for their valor, virtue, athletic “heroism,” masculinity and inborn excellence. While female figures are not entirely excluded from the male-dominated epinikian world, they are mostly marginalized and mentioned only in passing. Women in Pindar remain more or less hidden within the private realm of their houses and come into the foreground only to offer consolation to the losers, who return humiliated to their homes, or to express their desire for a victorious son or husband.37 As for female mythical figures, they are very often associated with deception, hubristic and subversive behavior and sinister deeds. Whenever they are depicted transcending domestic space and intruding into the public sphere—envisioned by the Greeks as predominantly male terrain—females are often portrayed as dangerous, and as throwing “masculine” values into jeopardy.38 This is connected to their representation as objects of extreme beauty and desire, not only for mortal men but also for the gods, who strive to conquer them and even quarrel over them.39 On these grounds, in the rest of this chapter I investigate the three instances of feminine aiōn in Pindar, asking what it means for a man to be ascribed a life that is conceptualized in feminine terms. More precisely, I am interested in examining if there is some symbolic value attached to Pindar’s choice that is reflective of social structures and cultural beliefs with regard to the two genders, especially in terms of time and temporality. In her celebrated essay “Women’s Time,” Julia Kristeva maintains that female subjectivity is traditionally linked to two types of temporality: cyclical and monumental time. As she puts it: female subjectivity would seem to provide a specific measure that essentially retains repetition and eternity from among the multiple modalities of time known through the history of civilizations. On the one hand, there are cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm which conforms to that of nature and imposes a temporality whose stereotyping may shock, but whose regularity and unison with what is experienced as extrasubjective time, cosmic time, occasion vertiginous visions and unnameable jouissance.

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  55 On the other hand, and perhaps as a consequence, there is the massive presence of a monumental temporality, without cleavage or escape, which has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word “temporality” hardly fits: all encompassing and infinite like imaginary space …40 Against the two main feminine temporal modalities of cyclical time (associated with repetition) and monumental time (associated with eternity and space rather than time), Kristeva sets the time of history, which she associates with men, that is, “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression and arrival.”41 Based on this distinction, my main objective will be to examine whether the lives of the men whose aiōn is cast in the feminine form are permeated by temporal modalities traditionally more affiliated with women than with men, and to investigate the purposes that Pindar’s choice may serve in each case, by examining the three instances of feminine aiōn in context.

3 Pythian 4 Pythian 4 celebrates the chariot victory of the Kyrenean king Arkesilas in 466 or 462 BCE. The mythical narrative of the ode opens in medias res, with an incident drawn from the Argonauts’ homeward journey: Medea’s prophecy about the colonization of Kyrene by Battos, the progenitor of King Arkesilas’ clan, the Battiads. This is a tactical gambit, as it allows Pindar to secure a firm place for the Battiad dynasty in the tradition regarding Kyrene’s foundation, thus justifying and sanctioning their royal prerogative at a time when Kyrene seems to have been shaken by factional strife and political storms.42 From line 70 onward, Pindar relays the mythical story from its very beginning, recounting Jason’s arrival at Iolkos, his confrontation with Pelias—usurper of his father’s throne—and his acceptance of Pelias’ challenge that he set off in quest of the Golden Fleece in order to recover his legitimate right to rule as the king of Iolkos. In lines 184–7, Pindar provides the poignant detail that, while Jason was preparing for the Argonautic expedition, Hera instilled in many youths a sweet longing to participate in the mission, setting aside any fear of the fatal consequences that such a hazardous enterprise might have in store for them. In so doing, the goddess prevented the youths from remaining idle at home, living a coddled existence—literally coddling “a life without risk.”43 Here the gender of aiōn is marked with the feminine article tan:44 τὸν δὲ παμπειθῆ γλυκὺν ἡμιθέοι   σιν πόθον ἔνδαιεν Ἥρα ναὸς Ἀργοῦς, μή τινα λειπόμενον τὰν ἀκίνδυνον παρὰ ματρὶ μένειν αἰ   ῶνα πέσσοντ', ἀλλ' ἐπὶ καὶ θανάτῳ φάρμακον κάλλιστον ἑᾶς ἀρετᾶς ἅ   λιξιν εὑρέσθαι σὺν ἄλλοις.

56  Maria Pavlou And Hera enkindled in these demigods    that all-persuasive, sweet longing for the ship Argo, so that no one might be left behind to remain with his mother and coddle a life    without risk, but rather, even if it meant death, to gain the most noble remedy for his own achievement    in the company of others of his age.45 The two different modes of life emphatically juxtaposed in the passage—the idle/ passive life that Hera discourages the heroes from choosing, and the active/risky life that she exhorts them to embrace, and that is advanced as superior and most fitting for an aristocrat—are typically read in tandem with a passage in Olympian 1, where Pelops articulates a similar contrast in his prayer to Poseidon:         Great risk    does not take hold of a cowardly man. But since men must die, why would anyone sit in darkness and coddle (epsoi) a nameless old age to no use, deprived of all noble deeds?46 The affinity between the two passages is unmistakable; their tone and the ambience they evoke, however, are radically different. The rhetorical question posed by Pelops in Olympian 1 is grandiloquent, and the consequences of idleness and inactivity for one’s reputation are cast in the gloomiest light. Although by eschewing every danger the coward manages to prolong his aiōn, he ends up cosseting a nameless and useless old age, deprived of all noble deeds. Pelops, for his part, conscious of his own mortality, follows the example of Achilles: he chooses glory and early death over obscurity and long life.47 If we move to Pythian 4, we see that Pindar’s outlining of a coward’s life is more graphic and also has an ironic touch that is missing from Olympian 1. This is generated primarily by means of the locative prepositional expression para matri (“close to [his] mother”). Here the coward is not only condemned to a life in obscurity but is also depicted as clinging to his mother’s skirts, so to speak, a detail that skillfully locates him in the domestic sphere, a space traditionally associated with women and tightly linked with the secure/idle mode of life that is also characteristic of women.48 Similar observations could be made about the verb pessō, which among other things bears the meaning “to cook.” Even though Pindar uses pessō metaphorically, its novel association with aiōn should be read in tandem with his attempt to create a domestic ambience and promote the idea of the coward’s effeminate way of life.49 Being no different from Hesiod’s “tender maiden” who remains at home with her mother (para mēteri mimnei), spending her time washing her soft body and anointing herself with oil,50 a coward restricts himself to the home and “cossets” a life akin to that of women, that is, a demasculinized life. The infinitive menein (“to stay”) and the participle pessont[a] (“coddling”), both of which are in

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  57 the present tense, evoke the notion of repetition, a temporal modality traditionally linked, as noted above, with women.51 In contrast, the infinitive euresthai (“to gain”), which is used in contradistinction, befits the progressive and teleological character of the active life in so far as the aorist infinitive indicates the “completion of the state of affairs, expressing a well-defined or well-delineated state of affairs.”52 It is not, therefore, a coincidence that the adventurous life that Hera encourages the prospective Argonauts to endorse is situated far away from home, and proves to be full of risks, upheavals and changes. But by attaining “the noblest remedy” (kalliston pharmakon, 187) for their achievements—that is, fame and glory—the heroes will be remembered forever. Unable though they are to transcend biological death, through their heroic actions they can cast off the obscurity that covers one’s name when one dies. Taking into account both the vivid way in which Pindar orchestrates the coward’s effeminate life in the passage under discussion and the superfluous feminine article tan that he attaches to aiōn, in my view it does not suffice to concur with the scholia taking the feminine form of aiōn merely as a Pindaric idiosyncrasy.53 I suggest that by means of this rare form of aiōn, which would definitely attract the audience’s attention because of its very rarity, Pindar sought to incite his listeners to conceptualize the coward’s life in feminine terms, to amplify such a man’s emasculated and unheroic existence, and to gloss in a figurative way the severe danger that an effeminate mode of life poses to masculinity. This last point acquires special force if read in conjunction with Pindar’s portrayal of women in Pythian 4, particularly Medea and the women of Lemnos island. The Lemnian women, who according to tradition murdered their husbands to wreak revenge on them, are tagged by Pindar with the adjective androphonos, which can mean both “husband-slaying” and more generally “man-slaying.”54 Even though she is portrayed as a divine singer, Medea is also depicted as potentially dangerous: a passionate woman seduced by Jason, she even kills King Pelias for her lover’s sake; she is therefore dubbed by Pindar as Peliao phonon (“the death of Pelias” 250).55 In either case, women are presented as a fatal threat to men, a menace that absorbs their masculinity and inflicts death, an idea that reflects a wider stance toward women in antiquity.56 Consequently, although an adventurous life may result in a man’s premature death, heroic deeds are still the best remedy for death. Men really die when they adopt a passive way of living similar to that of women and refrain from the hazards of heroic action, which is what bestows eternal glory on men.

4 Nemean 9 Nemean 9 celebrates the victory of Chromios, the Sikyonian commander of Hieron, whom the Syrakusan tyrant appointed as regent of the city of Aitna, established in 476/5 BCE.57 In this ode, the feminine aiōn crops up in the gnomic statement that follows Chromios’ extensive and elaborate eulogy, which I quote here in its entirety:

58  Maria Pavlou My words are hard to believe, for the sense   of honor (aidōs) that brings fame is secretly stolen by greed for gain. Had you carried Chromios’ shield among   the shouting infantry and cavalry and in sea battles, you would have judged, during the danger of the fierce   battle cry, that in war that goddess (i.e. Aidōs) was urging on his martial spirit to ward off the onslaught of Enyalios.   Few are able to counsel how, with hands and soul, to turn the storm cloud   of imminent slaughter toward the ranks of the enemy. Truly they say that Hektor’s   fame blossomed close by Skamandros’ streams, but beside the steep and rugged banks of the Heloros, at the place which men call Areia’s Ford, such a beacon has shone forth for the son of Hagesidamos in his earliest   youth. I shall tell of his deeds on other days, many of the dusty land   and others on the neighboring sea.58 In the first part of the encomium (33–9)—which Pindar masterfully focalizes through the eyes of the ode’s recipients, and thus “co-opts the audience into the world of civic military performance”59—Chromios is highly praised for his steadfastness in infantry, cavalry and naval engagement, as well as for his physical capacity and intellectual ability to plan and execute the destruction of the enemy. He is also hailed for his strong feeling of aidōs, which never allowed him to act disgracefully on the battlefield and always pushed him into the front rank. In the second part (39–41), Chromios’ praise reaches a climax with a comparison to one of the most valiant Homeric heroes, Hektor.60 Like Hektor, whose fame flowered by the river Skamandros, Chromios “in his earliest youth” (en halikiai prōtai 42) gained immeasurable glory in battle on the banks of the river Heloros. Although at first glance this comparison appears to be somewhat problematic—unlike Hektor, a defender of his country, at the battle in question Chromios fought against other Sikeliots—it clearly serves encomiastic purposes.61 The encomium is rounded off with a gnōmē concerning the life of virtuous men as they get older: ἐκ πόνων δ᾽, οἳ σὺν νεότατι γένωνται    σύν τε δίκᾳ, τελέθει πρὸς γῆρας αἰὼν ἡμέρα. From labors which are borne in youth and with justice    life becomes gentle toward old age.62 The adjective hēmera that modifies aiōn here clearly marks its gender as feminine, investing it at the same time with positive connotations. Chromios’ past was

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  59 punctuated by toil, hardship, pain and motion, features that go hand-in-hand in Pindar with aristocratic male excellence, and that define the masculine temporal modality. As Chromios moves toward old age, however, his life will divest itself of all these “masculine” traits and instead be infused with calmness and stability, features mostly associated with the female temporal modality. This new, more “feminine-like” life that opens up for Chromios is skillfully registered in the sympotic scene with which Pindar chooses to close the ode, where Chromios is depicted enjoying his wine from the silver bowls that he once won at the games at Sikyon. Notably, the symposium is presided over by the female notion of hēsychia (“peace”/“good order”), which is here personified: Peace (Hēsychia) loves   the symposium, but victory increases with new bloom to the accompaniment of gentle song,   and the voice becomes confident beside the winebowl. Let someone mix that sweet prompter of the revel, and let him serve the powerful child of the vine in the silver bowls which his horses once won for Chromios   and brought to him along with the duly woven crowns of Leto’s son   from holy Sikyon.63 In spite of the similarities that Chromios’ future way of living seems to share with the female temporal modality, however, this does not signify a demasculinized or womanly mode of existence, and it is by no means derogatory. If Chromios can live without labor and pain hereafter, this is because, through his previous heroic actions, he has already successfully competed in what could be defined as the “arena of masculinity.” This idea is, in fact, implied in the adjective hēmeros, which, as well as meaning “calm” and “gentle,” also denotes that which has been “tamed” and “civilized,” thus presupposing hard work and continuous effort.64 The aiōn hēmera that Chromios can hereafter enjoy is a kind of war trophy, a prerogative gained through his proven manhood; it is not something that was freely given to him, but something that he strived for and managed to “conquer.” It can hardly be a coincidence that the sympotic scene that rounds off the ode places Chromios’ future life not in the realm of the house, as is the case with the coward in Pythian 4, but within the symposium, a forum predominantly for men. Furthermore, Chromios is also depicted enjoying his wine from the cups that he won, thanks to his inborn excellence and vigorous effort, at the athletic games at Sikyon. Once again, the wider context within which aiōn is used as a feminine form, prompts us to suggest that Pindar’s choice was not entirely coincidental. In the case of Nemean 9 this proposition seems to be supported by another thing—Chromios’ comparison to Hektor. As mentioned above, the first instance of the feminine aiōn occurs in Iliad 22 in relation to Hektor. Considering both the rarity of the feminine form of aiōn in the literature before Pindar and Pindar’s frequent allusions

60  Maria Pavlou to Homer, it would not be illegitimate to propose that in advancing Hektor as a model for Chromios’ martial achievements, Pindar wanted his audience to recall this Homeric passage and reflect upon the fates of the two men. In contrast to the Trojan hero, who is eventually defeated by Achilles and dies prematurely, Chromios has been granted the privilege not only of gaining immeasurable fame, but also of reaching a toil-free and peaceful old age. Seen from this perspective, Pindar’s patron proves to have surpassed and be far more blessed than his mythical, short-lived counterpart. It is against this background that Pindar’s declaration that Chromios has received “marvelous happiness from the gods” should be read and understood.65

5 Pythian 5 The third and last instance of the feminine aiōn in Pindar is to be found at the opening of Pythian 5, a poem that also commemorates the chariot victory of King Arkesilas: Ὁ πλοῦτος εὐρυσθενής, ὅταν τις ἀρετᾷ κεκραμένον καθαρᾷ βροτήσιος ἀνὴρ πότμου παραδόντος αὐτὸν ἀνάγῃ πολύφιλον ἑπέταν. ὦ θεόμορ' Ἀρκεσίλα σύ τοί νιν κλυτᾶς αἰῶνος ἀκρᾶν βαθμίδων ἄπο σὺν εὐδοξίᾳ μετανίσεαι ἕκατι χρυσαρμάτου Κάστορος· εὐδίαν ὃς μετὰ χειμέριον ὄμβρον τεάν καταιθύσσει μάκαιραν ἑστίαν. Wealth has wide strength, when, conjoined with flawless excellence, a mortal man receives it from destiny and takes it as a companion which brings many friends. Ο Αrkesilas, favored by heaven, truly have you, from the very first steps of your glorious life, been seeking it along with fame, thanks to Kastor of the golden chariot, who, after a winter rainstorm, sheds fair weather over your blessed hearth.66 Τhe poem opens with an elaborate praise of wealth, focusing on the two conditions required for the maximization of its strength: its coupling with excellence, and its use for the attraction of many friends, that is, its conspicuous expenditure rather than simple accumulation. Arkesilas, whom Pindar highly exalts, addressing him

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  61 in the vocative case, satisfies both. Though a “mortal man,” Arkesilas belongs to the caste of the chosen ones: he is “blessed by the gods” (theomoros).67 Far from being merely a passive and idle recipient of divine favor, however, the Kyrenean king has been striving to increase his wealth and fame since he was a child: “from the very first steps (bathmidōn) of his glorious life (klutas aiōnos),” as Pindar figuratively puts it.68 Interestingly, the noun bathmis, which means “step,” ushers in a particular imagery, inviting us to configure Arkesilas’ life as a ladder. Little attention has been paid to this metaphor, but the hyperbaton structure in lines 6–7, with its violation of the natural word order and the interruption of the flow of the sentence, indicates Pindar’s intention to spotlight it. The ladder metaphor is noteworthy not only because it is attested here for the first time, but also for the wider associations that it appears to evoke.69 In earlier poetry, life is usually compared to a path or road, and is therefore visualized as having a beginning and an end, as well as a rather straightforward and level course. In contrast, a ladder has a vertical axis and naturally suggests the idea of an upward journey, where every new step takes you not forward but higher.70 What is more, the ladder (whose upper end should be understood as reaching up into the sky) imposes the idea that life continues even after death. Unlike its use in the Judeo-Christian tradition, Pindar’s metaphor does not carry any spiritual overtones, nor does it have a temporal dimension symbolizing Arkesilas’ gradual ascent toward the gods.71 Rather, it serves to heighten his intimate and ongoing relationship with the divine. Obviously hyperbole, the emphasis laid upon Arkesilas’ extraordinary childhood at both the opening and closing of the poem stresses the “lofty position to which Arkesilas is born,” singling him out as unique.72 What is more, the fact that the top of the ladder reaches the sky and therefore does not lead to a dead end could also be understood as a masterful allusion to Arkesilas’ future heroization. This suggestion is strengthened by the several intimations of heroization for Arkesilas that we encounter in Pythian 5, primarily achieved through the various links, lexical and semantic, that Pindar draws between Arkesilas and his forefathers, the Battiads, who seem to have been heroized and accorded a posthumous public cult in Kyrene.73 As a mortal, the Kyrenean king is subject to historical time; at the same time, however, he was, is and will forever be the protégé of the gods and the recipient of their unreserved care, love and protection. The various stages of Arkesilas’ life are, accordingly, linked across the spectrum via this unfailing divine favor, a connection that is masterfully visualized through the ladder metaphor. Inevitably, this serves to evoke what Kristeva calls “monumental time,” a temporal modality that she associates, as we have seen, with the female order. Seen from this perspective, Pindar’s use of the feminine aiōn once again proves to be more than merely a deviation from the norm. By choosing to refer to Arkesilas’ life through the rare feminine aiōn, Pindar manages not only to single his patron out as unique, but also, I would add, to advance his life as an object of extreme desire for every man. As in the case of Chromios, the conceptualization of Arkesilas’ life in feminine terms is by no means derogatory or detrimental to

62  Maria Pavlou his masculinity, which is foregrounded through the emphatic reference to his continuous efforts to increase his wealth and fame from the very beginning of his life, and the positively valorized and ennobling adjective klutos (“famous”) attached to it. This particular adjective is tightly linked with the male temporal modality in so far as kleos (“fame”) is the prime desideratum of every aristocrat who strives to honor his nobility and validate and defend his masculinity.74

6 Conclusion My main objective in this chapter has been to examine three instances in Pindar where the masculine noun aiōn is cast as a feminine noun and to explore whether Pindar’s choice could be understood as being in any way semantically charged. Drawing on recent insights into the relationship between grammatical gender and cognition, and into how grammatical gender can often prompt us to conceptualize even inanimate and abstract nouns in feminine or masculine terms, I have tried to examine the connotations—especially in terms of time and temporality—that the configuration of a man’s life in feminine terms might have evoked by casting a closer look at the broader way in which Pindar describes Chromios’, Arkesilas’ and the coward’s existence. As I suggested, in Pythian 4 the feminine aiōn serves to highlight a coward’s inactive and passive life as effeminate and detrimental to his masculinity, while in Nemean 9 and Pythian 5 it is used to single out Chromios’ and Arkesilas’ aiōn as something desirable and appealing but by no means effeminate. The function of the feminine aiōn in the works of writers other than Pindar is more difficult to pin down, owing to the meager and sporadic nature of the evidence. Whether or not the feminine aiōn is an Ionic dialect form, as Eustathios claims, it is notable that even in Homer and Hesiod its use can be employed powerfully to evoke stereotypically feminine qualities. Of particular interest is the case of Euripides’ Antigone, the only woman whose aiōn is cast as a feminine, should we read aiōn of Phoinissai 1520 as such. Yet, Antigone was anything but an ordinary woman. It is the unending grief and the passive life in which she envisages herself immersed that render her future life a feminine aiōn. No matter how subtle such remarks on grammatical gender may sound, the vivid discussion on the mismatch between grammatical gender and biological sex in Aristophanes’ Clouds is a clear indication that the ancients were not insensitive, or at least not entirely indifferent, to matters associated with grammatical gender.75

Notes 1 Warm and sincere thanks are due to the volume editors and the anonymous referee for their astute and critical remarks. Thanks should also go to Theodossia Pavlidou, Stavroula Tsiplakou and Angeliki Alvanoudi for providing me with useful bibliography on grammatical gender and cognition. 2 See, e.g., Pind. Ol. 10. 51–5, 8.28–9, 6.97; Pyth. 1.46. Whereas not the first poet to substantiate chronos (see, e.g., Sol. 10 and 36 W; Sim. 88 W and 541 L-P), Pindar was the first to so emphatically present chronos as a vivid force. As Fränkel (1955: 10) suc-

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  63 cinctly put it, chronos in Pindar becomes “geladen mit Energien.” On time in Pindar see, among others, Fränkel 1955; Vivante 1972 and 2005; Theunissen 2000. 3 Pind. fr. 33; Ol. 2.17. Contrast Brisson 1997, who reads these references differently. 4 Chronos is mentioned no fewer than 47 times throughout the Pindaric corpus; see, e.g., Ol. 1.43, 115, 2.17; Pyth. 1.46, 3.96; Nem. 1.46, 69; Isthm. 3.6, 5.28; fr. 33, 52b.27. On the other temporal terms see, e.g.: (kairos) Pyth. 1.57, Ol. 2.54, fr. 168.6; (aiōn) Ol. 2.10, 67, 9.60, Pyth. 3.86, 4.186, 5.7, 8.97; (hamera) Ol. 1.33–4; (eniautos) Pyth. 4.104, 10.63, fr. 52a5; (Horai) Ol. 4.1, 13.17, fr. 52a6. As well as indicating the “seasons,” the Hōrai were also goddesses of civic order; see Hes. Theog. 901–3. 5 Slater 1969 s.v. aiōn classifies all instances but one of Pindaric aiōn under the meaning “lifetime.” Rumpel 1883 s.v. aiōn gives a wider range of meanings; see also Degani 1961: 46. 6 See Fraenkel 1950 on Aesch. Ag. 554 and 105. Gradually the term undergoes a farreaching development and by the Hellenistic period its semantic field widens so as to indicate time infinite. 7 Βut see fr. 52b26–7 where chronos is described with the adjective megas (“mighty”). 8 Ol. 2.66–7; Pyth. 4.186, 5.6–7, 8.97; Nem. 2.7, 9.44. 9 Nem. 3.75; Ol. 2.10; Isthm. 7.41–2, Pyth. 3.86–7. 10 Isthm. 8.14–15. All Pindaric passages are taken from Snell-Maehler’s Teubner edition (1987). Translations are from Race 1997, unless otherwise stated. On the representation of aiōn in this passage see Wilamowitz 1922: 198; Privitera 1982 on Isthm. 8.14–15. 11 Ol. 9.601. 12 See Degani 1961: 47–9. 13 To my knowledge, the earliest extant visual representation of aiōn is on a fourth century BCE red-figured vase; but only Aiōn’s name and a tiny part of his head with his one hand placed on the forehead remains (see German Hafner, CVA Karlsruhe 2, 1952, 64, pl. 1–4). On later representations of aiōn see Levi 1944. 14 Hom. Il. 22.568. On the use of the feminine form of aiōn here see Witte 1912: 109. Philos in Homer is used with reference to things on which one’s survival depends, and its meaning moves between “own” and “dear”; see Scott 1982. 15 [Hes.] Sc. 331. 16 [Simon.] FGE 70 [=A.P. 7.515]. Translation is taken from Campbell’s 1991 Loeb edition. Although the epitaph is attributed to Simonides in the Anthologia Palatina, modern editors dispute this and date it between the fourth and the second centuries BCE; see Page 1981, 291–2. 17 Eur. Phoen. 1480–4; trans. Coleridge 1938. See also Mastronarde 1994: 562. 18 See Mastronarde 1994: 562. Of course, the gender of aiōn is ambiguous in this case, as monas could also be masculine; see, e.g., Aesch. Pers. 734. 19 Schol. on Nem. 9.104a-b (Drachmann III, 161); see also Braswell 2012: 23. The adjective hēmeros occurs six times in Pindar: Ol. 13.2; Pyth. 1.71, 3.6; Nem. 7.83, 8.3, 9.44. Even though modern editors have adopted the writing hēmeros, all MSS have the form hameros instead. This detail helps us to understand the scholiasts’ confusion on whether to interpret hamera in Nem. 9.44 as an adjective or a noun. On this issue see the detailed discussion in Braswell 1998: 132. 20 On Pythian 5 see the discussion below. 21 See, e.g. Nem. 8.35–7: “but let me travel the straightforward paths of life (zōas), so that when I die I may leave my children no such disreputable fame.” Α possible objection to the alternatives proposed here could be that in all such instances the naked long syllable of the adjectives (philou aiōnos / glukerou aiōnos / klutou aiōnos) and of the noun zōa (zōa hēmera) would become short by position. Whereas a naked long syllable that antecedes a word which begins with a vowel or diphthong typically becomes short by position (vocalis ante vocalem corripitur), there are several instances where this rule does not apply and we end up with a chasmodic long syllable instead; see, e.g. Hom. Il. 1.30, 305; 2.323.

64  Maria Pavlou 22 An example οf a typically masculine word occasionally used as a feminine in Doric dialects is limos (“famine”); see Ar. Ach. 743, where limos is used as a feminine noun by a Megarian. 23 Note, however, that aiōn is used as a masculine in Ol. 2.10 (aiōn morsimos “allotted time”) for Theron of Akragas, another city in Magna Graecia where the Doric dialect was spoken. 24 Eust. on Il. 22.58. 25 Some authors employ these nouns with a double gender: e.g., Herodotus uses kiōn as masculine (4.184) and feminine (1.92); see also Pindar’s use of aithēr (Ol. 1.6, 13.88). Contrast other cases where a different article also marks a difference in meaning; e.g., ho hals and hē hals mean “salt” and “sea” respectively; see, e.g., Hom. Il. 1.141, 9.214. 26 E.g., Pyth. 1.15 and Ol. 13.110, where the masculine proper names Tartaros and Marathon are cast as feminine. 27 Whorf 1956. See also Kay and Kempton 1984. 28 Konishi 1993; Flaherty 2001; Boroditsky et al. 2003; Phillips and Boroditsky 2003; Segel and Boroditsky 2011; Haertlé 2017; Pavlidou and Alvanoudi 2018. 29 Boroditsky et al. 2003: 6971. 30 Boroditsky et al. 2003: 69. 31 Segel and Boroditsky 2011. 32 Segel and Boroditsky 2011: 2. 33 See Foundalis 2002; Pavlidou & Alvanoudi 2018. 34 See, e.g., Haertlé 2017. 35 Pavlidou and Alvanoudi 2018. 36 See, e.g., Abbou 2011. 37 Pyth. 8.867, 9.97100, 10.59. See also Pomeroy 1975: 53; Kyriakou 1994. 38 E.g., Hippolyta (Nem. 5.25–34) and Klytemnestra (Pyth. 11.16–25). 39 E.g., Thetis (Isthm. 8.26a–31), and Kyrene (Pyth. 9.25–37). 40 Kristeva 1981: 16. 41 Kristeva 1981: 16–17. On the links of masculine and feminine time with linear and cyclical time, respectively, see also Kellerman 1989: 612; Cavarero 1995, esp. 1419. 42 On this issue see Braswell 1988: 1–6; Currie 2005: 254–6. 43 As Braswell 1988 on Pyth. 4.186d rightly points out, aiōn here does not mean simply “life” but “life-span” with an implication of long duration. 44 Although Braswell 1988 on Pyth. 4.186a construes tan as equivalent to a possessive noun, I would rather side with Gildersleeve 2010 on Pyth. 4.186, for whom the article has rather a “contemptuous fling.” 45 Some scholars read this passage, especially the term pharmakon and its syntactic relationship with aretas, in a different way; see Braswell 1988 on Pyth. 4.187a; I follow Race 1985. 46 Ol. 1.81–4; see Gerber 1982. On its comparison with the Pythian 4 passage, see Braswell 1988 on Pyth. 4.186e; Gentili et al. 1995 on 184–7. 47 On Achilles’ predilection for a short life and glory see Hom. Il. 9.41016. 48 See Eur. Med. 2489; see Braswell 1988 on Pyth. 4.186b. 49 Τhe literal meaning of pessō is “ripen,” “bring to maturity” or “cook” but the metaphorical usage is attested since Homer, e.g., Il. 4.513; 9.565; 24.617, 639. See also Il. 2.237 and 8.513. 50 Hes. Op. 51920. 51 The tense of infinitives and participles does not indicate time, but aspect and the stage of action. 52 Rijksbaron 2006: 445 and 1023. On the active life of men as opposed to the passive life of women see also Cavarero 1995: 15. 53 Schol. on Pyth. 4.330a (Drachmann III, 142). 54 See Braswell 1988 on Pyth. 4.252.

Feminizing aiōn in Pindar’s Epinikians  65 55 See Braswell 1988 on Pyth. 4.250 and O’Higgins 1997: 1045. 56 See Pomeroy 1975: 93119; Padel 1992. 57 Schol. on Nem. 9 inscr. (Drachmann III, 150). 58 Nem. 9.33–43. 59 Morgan 2015: 373. See also Braswell 1998 on 347. 60 Braswell 1998 on 3940 and 39. See also the schol. on Nem. 9.93a (Drachmann III, 159). 61 On the Heloros battle see Braswell 1998 on 3940 and 402. 62 Nem. 9.44. 63 Nem. 9.4853. On the notion of hēsychia see Dickie 1984; Slater 1981. 64 See, e.g. Pind. Pyth. 1.71. 65 Nem. 9.45. The allusion to the Iliad is enhanced through the emphasis on aidōs. Chromios is emphatically portrayed as a hero of aidōs as is Hektor (Il. 22.1046). 66 Pyth. 5. 111. Currie (2005: 226) with bibliography, and Krummen (2014: 11778) argue that this was most likely performed during the Karneia festival; cf. Ferrari 2012: 1702. 67 A repeated idea in Pythian 5. 68 See also schol. on Pyth. 5.7 (Drachmann II, 173): ἀπ᾽ ἄκρων βαθμίδων τῆς αἰῶνος, τουτέστιν ἀπ᾽ ἀρχῆς τοῦ βίου (“from the very first steps of life, that is from the beginning of life”). 69 Degani 1961: 47. 70 On the road/path imagery in Pindar see Steiner 1986: 7686. The ladder metaphor is further illuminated through other references to roads in Pythian 5: 14, 88, 901, 923, 116. On the ladder imagery in the poem see Gentili et al. 1995 on 6–7; they also cite other relevant passages. The ladder metaphor appears twice more in Pindar, but in different contexts (fr. 162 and fr. 30.3) 71 E.g., Genesis 28, 11–12. 72 Gildersleeve 2010 on Pyth. 5.6. 73 Currie 2005: 236–48. 74 It is not insignificant that a “ladder” [klimax] is feminine in ancient Greek. If it were masculine, Pindar’s conceptualization of Arkesilas’ life in feminine terms would be less powerful. 75 Ar. Nub. 657–93. On this issue see Stafford 1998: 45–6.

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66  Maria Pavlou Currie, B. 2005. Pindar and the Cult of Heroes. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Degani, E. 1961. ΑΙΩΝ da Omero ad Aristotele. Padua: CEDAM. Dickie, M. 1984. “Hēsychia and Hybris.” In Greek Poetry and Philosophy. Studies in Honour of Leonard Woodbury, edited by Douglas E. Gerber, 83–109. Chico, CA: Scholars Press. Ferrari, F. 2012. “Representations of Cult in Epinician Poetry.” In Reading the Victory Ode, edited by P. Agócs, C. Carey and R. Rawles, 158–72. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Flaherty, M. 2001. “How a Language Gender System Creeps into Perception.” Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 32: 18–31. Foundalis, H. 2002. “Evolution of Gender in Indo-European languages.” In Proceedings of the 24th Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society, edited by W. D. Gray and Christian Schunn, 304–9. Fairfax, VA: Cognitive Science Society. Fraenkel, E. 1950. Aeschylus Agamemnon. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Fränkel, H. [1931]1955. “Die Zeitauffassung in der frühgriechischen Literatur.” In Wege und Formen frühgriechischen Denkens, 1–22. Munich: C. H. Beck. Gentili, B., P. Bernardini, E. Cingano and P. Giannini. 1995. Pindaro. Le Pitiche. Verona: Fondazione Lorenzo Valla. Gerber, D. 1982. Pindar's Olympian One: A Commentary. Toronto: Toronto University Press. Gildersleeve, B. [1885] 2010. Pindar. Olympian and Pythian Odes. Reprint, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Haertlé, I. 2017. “Does Grammatical Gender Influence Perception? A Study of Polish and French Speakers.” Psychology of Language and Communication 21: 387–407. Kay, P. and W. Kempton. 1984. “What Is the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis?” American Anthropologist 86: 65–79. Kellerman, A. 1989. Time, Space, and Society. Geographical Societal Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Konishi, T. 1993. “The Semantics of Grammatical Gender: A Cross-Cultural Study.” Journal of Psycholinguistic Research 22: 519–34. Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time,” translated by A. Jardine and H. Blake. Signs 7: 13–35. Krummen, E. 2014. Cult, Myth and Occasion in Pindar’s Victory Odes. A Study of Isthmian 4, Pythian 5, Olympian 1, Olympian 3. Translated by G. Howie. Prenton: Francis Cairns Publications. Kyriakou, P. 1994. “Images of Women in Pindar.” Materiali e Discussion Per l’ Analisi dei Testi Classici 32: 31–54. Levi, D. 1944. “Aion.” Hesperia 13: 269–314. Mastronarde, D. 1994. Euripides: Phoenissae. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morgan, K. 2015. Pindar and the Construction of Syracusan Monarchy in the Fifth Century. Oxford: Oxford University Press. O’Higgins, D. 1997. “Medea as Muse: Pindar’s Pythian 4.” In Medea: Essays on Medea in Myth, Literature, Philosophy, and Art, edited by J. J. Clauss and S. I. Johnston, 103–26. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Padel, R. 1992. In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Page, D. L. 1981. Further Greek Epigrams. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pavlidou, Th. and A. Alvanoudi. 2018. “Conceptualizing the World As ‘Female’ or ‘Male’: Further Remarks on Grammatical Gender and Speakers’ Cognition.” In Selected

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4

Gendered time and narrative structure in Herodotos’ Histories Esther Eidinow

1 Introduction: structuring time As scholars have observed, Herodotos’ Histories demonstrates extraordinary “time-management,” at a range of narrative levels. For example, it manipulates time sequences from a number of different sources, as each new culture confronts the Persian army’s advance.1 It also succeeds in drawing together different oral narrative traditions, and weaving them around specific details.2 As Iustus Cobet puts it, Herodotos “organizes and integrates different horizons of memory into an unequivocal and unconvertible sequence.”3 Second, there is use of vocabulary relating to time which helps to mark the narrator’s interpolations: just as Herodotos is playing with the “then and there” of the narrative sequence, he is also playing with the “then and here” of the storytelling process. Herodotos moves between the story time of the Histories on the one hand, and the time of its narration, on the other. His use of the word nun, “now,” provides an example: he often seems to employ it to draw the reader more directly into his/the narrator’s company. As Bakker has shown, this often “points not to the ‘now’ within which the discourse is presented, but to the ‘now’ of the discourse, a ‘now’ that is present as long as the discourse is listened to or read.”4 But there is a further aspect of the presentation of time that requires consideration: the ways in which it is understood in terms of embodied experience. Two initial quotations can begin to illustrate this aspect. First, in discussing the tribes of men that dwell north of the Ister (Thrace), Herodotos observes: “everything is possible in the long [span of] time”.5 I want to draw your attention to the evocation of time’s spatial dimensions: first of all, “time” has a shape and length suggested by use of the adjective makros, “long.”6 But this description also raises the possibility of time as providing “room” within which events occur.7 This latter aspect is made more explicitly in a second observation about time, which Herodotos places in the mouth of Solon as he talks to Kroisos: “In a long [span of] time it is possible to see many things that you do not want to, and to suffer them, too”.8 Again, with the term makros, time has a spatial aspect; it is described as a phenomenon that has dimensions. But Solon adds other elements of bodily experience: time is space through which mortals move, within which they see and feel.9

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  69 It is not unusual for humans to understand time through spatial metaphors based on embodied experience.10 But these observations introduce some further dimensions of Herodotos’ artistry in constructing the overall narrative, leading to the particular questions that will be the focus of this chapter. First, there is the question of the nature of the underlying structure of time that shaped Herodotos’ selection and integration of events as he created this narrative of the “long [span of] time.” This focus of inquiry is inspired by Hayden White’s work on the construction of historical discourse. White observed that, “just as there can be no explanation in history without a story, so too can there be no story without a plot by which to make of it a story of a particular kind.”11 He distinguished different levels of conceptualization in the development of a historical account and the explanation it provides: its modes of emplotment and of argument and the ideological implications. These conscious modes are profoundly related to the nineteenth-century historians whose work White analyses; but, as he explained, underlying these explanatory structures are other more fundamental models—a deeper grammar, if you like—which merit consideration as a heuristic tool for the investigation of historiography more generally. White describes the use of this grammar as a poetic act—insofar as it is precognitive and precritical—and its manifestations can be categorized according to the four principal tropes of poetic language: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche and irony.12 These four tropes create the rhetorical strategies by which a particular story will be told, offering a structure for the selection and the patterning of relationships between phenomena; the associations between, and interpretations and meanings drawn from, a sequence of events. In brief, and drawing again on White, the metaphoric is representational; the metonymic is reductionist, by making a part represent or stand in for any other part of a whole; the synecdochic is integrative, since the part represents the whole, and/or the whole the part; and, finally, the ironic undermines characterizations or associations made in the text, assuming that the reader will be able to recognize the absurdity of what has been asserted.13 In this chapter, I draw on this tropology of history to argue that one of these tropes—the synecdochic—can be traced in the structure of Herodotos’ Histories. This trope shapes a narrative so that its parts can be seen to represent some quality of the larger whole, and vice versa, so that the way the history is told itself implies an “intrinsic relationship of shared qualities.”14 Here I will examine in particular the ways in which Herodotos represents the embodied experience of time and its passing, but, as will become apparent, I regard this underlying synecdochic structure as helpful for understanding the structure of this narrative and its effects more generally. Much has been written about the Herodotean vision of the world and the echoes and resonances between its, at first sight, disparate parts.15 Recognizing the fundamentally synecdochic structure of this narrative explains how its apparently different elements—from a particular telling of a series of events, to an underlying vision of the organization of the world, to the role of fate versus contingency, to the characters of particular individuals or peoples—are intended to come together to create an integrated whole within which

70  Esther Eidinow mortals live and experience the world. It is an aspect of the narrative that lends the text its strong sense of fatalism. My investigation here, therefore, begins with an examination of Herodotos’ use of the term chronos, as expressing an embodied understanding of time, and as providing an integrative device in a synecdochic narrative structure.16 It then builds on this perspective to encompass a different aspect of the embodied understanding of time, which brings me to the second focus of inquiry of this chapter. Developing the idea of the symbolic relationship between time and bodies, this chapter focuses on the role of the female body and its sociobiological processes, examining how Herodotos engages with, and manipulates these conceptual relationships, first, to structure the temporality of the narrative, but then also more abstractly as a metaphorical language to reify temporal concepts such as continuity/discontinuity and future time. This focus of inquiry is particularly inspired by recent work in gender studies on other historical periods, which has raised provocative questions about scholarly approaches to the relationship between time and gender.17 For example, in Gender Trouble, Judith Butler describes gender as “an identity tenuously constituted in time.”18 This builds on the conception of the social construction of gender, while drawing attention to its dynamic aspects. But, as Bettina Bildhauer has noted, while this is usually interpreted as showing that gender is not as stable as it appears: the illusion of a consistent identity emerges only if gendered behaviour is repeated over time … What is never questioned is that time is the stable flow that joins these repeated moments into a continuous identity.19 She suggests rather that we might benefit from thinking about it from the other way around, and asks “What if it is the seeming stability of gender that creates the illusion that time flows in a constant line?” This stimulating question shapes my approach in this chapter: although it can be argued that particular conceptions of time reinforce the conceptions of gender apparent in Herodotos’ narrative, it is also fruitful to reverse this statement and explore how conceptions of gender are used to evoke time and temporality. By raising this question, I must underline that I am not attempting to identify a single, simple version of time that can be described as “women’s time.” Rather, and recalling the work of Julia Kristeva’s essay “Women’s Time,” I am interested in the larger question of the structuration of the symbolic order, in which (as Alice Jardine succinctly describes) the idea of the “woman-subject” is “caught in a series of semantic networks difficult (if not impossible) to untangle fully from within the ‘identity’ and ‘difference’ paradigm bequeathed to us by our history.”20 Thus, this chapter sets out to explore not women’s experience of time, but the ways in which Herodotos, as a “speaking subject” represents the interactions between culturally constructed conceptions of both time and female gender in his patterning of historical events.21

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  71

2 Time, integrative Powell’s Lexicon reveals that Herodotos uses the term chronos 295 times in total across his narrative. Of these instances, it occurs once in the plural, and 13 times to convey a point in time; the remaining 281 uses comprise a number of different ways to convey a period of time—and these are employed for different purposes. Thus, we find the accusative of time passing used 97 times, and that time has substance—it may be great or small.22 Using chronos in the dative, Herodotos draws attention to time passing with the idea of things coming to pass “at last” (36 times).23 But he also introduces metaphoric phrases that convey the idea of time as a separate phenomenon that moves through space: thus, time is depicted, through the use of prepositional phrases, as something that can be tracked “from” a certain point, and “up to” this day.24 Moreover, it may be described as moving forward with verbs that emphasize an anthropomorphic physicality.25 And this may be why one of the older methods of computation of distance is by time: thus, Herodotos instructs his audience about an unfamiliar journey that is “of equal time” to that of another recent journey.26 But time does not necessarily move in a straight line: certain natural processes, such as birth, death or Nile floods, can be expected to happen repeatedly, suggesting a cyclical movement forward.27 And, time can do more than just advance: it can also be generated by events, in a metaphor that suggests its organic nature, or be cut short, as a birth looms, for example.28 As these examples suggest, time itself seems to have dimensions. Descriptions of time include prepositions, some of which treat chronos like an object. There can be “little,” “more” or “most” chronos.29 In turn, one way to express “never” is to use a phrase that literally means “for no chronos.”30 Time also has substance in those phrases that appear to show it being worn away; in turn, it is something that can wear something else away and cause it to be forgotten.31 Other phrases give it a sense of internal spatiality.32 I have already noted the idea of the long [span of] time, within which events occur or are experienced. In such a span, some things can be placed in front of others.33 Other incidental phrases give this span a direction looking forward: these include es chronon, or es ton hapanta chronon.34 Elsewhere, this suggests a length that is impossible—and so can be employed rhetorically to emphasize claims or hopes that are to be considered excessive.35 But perhaps most important, for the purposes of this chapter, is the idea of time as something that people can somehow share, as though they inhabited the same space.36 Frequently, the idea of coexistence is observed using the accusative of “time when,” signaling coincidence.37 These types of phrases occur throughout the Histories, an almost incidental observation of events occurring simultaneously thus becomes a key narrative device. Bringing together events across time and place, it allows Herodotos to make a series of associations that create a coherent narrative. Moreover, as well as this more mechanistic role, the use of the vocabulary of time also conveys a qualitative aspect: the sense that events are shaped by divine will. This idea is rarely explicitly mentioned. Instead, the use of chronos

72  Esther Eidinow underlines a level of coincidence that implies that a higher cosmological force has manipulated events. For example, reflecting on the divine warnings that had been sent to the Chians before they were beaten by Histiaios (during his brief revolt against the Persians), Herodotos notes: In the first place, out of a chorus of one hundred young men they had sent to Delphi, only two returned home, while an outbreak of illness carried off the other ninety-eight. In the second place, at much the same time, shortly before the sea battle, a roof collapsed on a group of children learning their letters, and out of a hundred and twenty children only one survived.38 Such an implication may also be created by the omission of events, when crucial timing goes awry; for example, Nikodromos a prominent Aiginetan, intends to help the Athenians take the island of Aigina: Later, then, he [Nikodromos] occupied what is known as the Old Town (which was his side of the deal with the Athenians), but the Athenians failed to turn up as they were supposed to. They had asked the Corinthians for some ships, because their own fleet was in fact no match for the Aiginetans in a sea battle, and this delay was enough the ruin the whole enterprise. The Corinthians and the Athenians were on very good terms in those days, so the Corinthians responded to the Athenian request by giving them twenty ships—although they charged five drachmas per ship, because there was a law forbidding them from just giving them away for nothing. With these ships as well as their own, the Athenians made up a fleet of seventy ships in all and sailed against Aigina. But they arrived a day later than they had agreed to.39 Alternatively, it may only be hinted at, as in the following example from an earlier episode in Histiaios’ plans for revolt, when he was stuck in Sardis: That was Histiaios’ plan in sending the messenger, and it happened that all these things came together at the same time (sunepipte tou autou chronou panta tauta sunelthonta) for Aristagoras. So what he did was seek the advice of his supporters. He told them his own thoughts and explained about Histiaios’ message.40 As these examples suggest, chronos provides a crucial, but subtle, tool in the creation of a coherent narrative. Rather than bluntly stating relations of cause and effect, the narrative repeatedly includes a variety of chronos phrases. These bring individual episodes into relation with each other, making links and associations that not only describe events, but also explain them, generating the sense of an overriding cohesive narrative structure. Thus, to use the categories of Hayden White, Herodotos’ approach to time takes a synecdochic approach: it depicts a prevailing pattern, comprising a sequence of smaller related events of a similar structure.41 As White explains it,

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  73 “this mode of comprehension appeals to the microcosmic-macrocosmic relationship as a paradigm of all explanation and representation of reality.”42 It results in what White calls “Comic emplotment”—in the sense that it depicts struggle as a means to the establishment of social order—and it achieves this through an Organicist argument or mode of explanation, which tends to integrate apparently dispersed events into a larger whole.43 Moreover, each individual event symbolizes the overall quality or essence of the past as a whole, as the historian sees it; that is, there is a qualitative relationship among the elements of the totality/the history. This also seems a helpful way to describe the nature of Herodotos’ work: within the conflict between Persians and Greeks, the narrative depicts a number of further struggles between and among different communities. Dispersed across space and time, these events are nested within the narrative, not only in terms of their links to each other, but also in terms of their qualitative relationships. And chronos is one of the devices that Herodotos employs to achieve the integration of these events into the narrative. This begins, I hope, to establish the synecdochic structure of Herodotos’ narrative and the role of chronos in that literary creation. In the next section I turn to some of the ways in which the notion of time is implicitly generated within this text through Herodotos’ deployment of the female body and related sociobiological processes. It will explore how this approach to time is also part of the narrative’s synecdochic figuration, but, taking on Bildhauer’s challenge (as described in the introduction to this chapter),44 it will also argue that Herodotos’ construction of the female body and its activities bears closer examination, especially in terms of its apparent stability, and that this, in turn, has some bearing on the depiction of time and temporality in the Histories.

3 Time, continuous While much work has been done on women in Herodotos, there has been little to my knowledge that examines their relationship to the narrative’s representations of time.45 This may be because of modern preconceptions of what is appropriate: Luce Irigaray has argued that, historically, male conceptualizations of space and time have appropriated the female subject so that they become the narrative “matter” (space), which is then shaped by male action (time).46 We have only to think of the rounds of female abductions that open Book 1 to see this as an appropriate description of Herodotos’ portrayal of women in the Histories.47 At the most basic level, the temporal frame that women provide for the Histories depends on their gender role and certain of the socio-biological processes that they enact, including marriage, birth, and death (although their own births are rarely important). As Carolyn Dewald, notes, women are not [Herodotos’] chief focus of attention. He does not write the histories in order to prove a thesis about them as social actors (as, for instance, Xenophon does in the Oeconomicus); they tend instead to occur incidentally, as part of the background of his main narrative themes.48

74  Esther Eidinow Yet, as Dewald also acknowledges,49 Herodotos’ employment of females is more complex and nuanced than this might lead us to expect, even if a single thesis cannot be identified.50 At least some of these “background” figures are drawn with some intriguing nuances. In Book 6, Demaratos’ mother, for example, although anonymized—and therefore vulnerable to description as an incidental figure—is strongly characterized. She provides an example of how those socio-biological processes, for all that they are routine, may still play a key role in how events turn out, and how a mother herself may shape those processes and/or their perception. For example, in describing the conflict between Kleomenes and Demaratos over a Spartan throne, the paternity of Demaratos is put into doubt, and gives rise to his being deposed.51 In what has been called “one of the most fraught and unusual mother-son exchanges in all literature,” Demaratos’ mother dismisses the claims of his enemies.52 First, she asserts her impregnation by either Ariston or the hero Astrabakos, and then, more mundanely, she corrects Demaratos’concerns about the length of gestation: “Not all pregnancies last the full ten months: women give birth to children after nine months and seven months as well. You were a seven-month baby.”53 In another tale concerning Spartan kingship, the mother of Eurysthenes seemingly instinctively always bathes her eldest child first, thus leading to his being given the kingship.54 This activity has to be watched by the Elders of Sparta so that they can learn what the mother apparently intuitively knows. I say “seemingly” and “apparently” here because, before the bathing is described, Herodotos has already alerted his audience to the mother’s awareness of the situation and her desire to arrange things so that both her sons could become kings.55 In terms of their temporal function, it is through their socio-biological role that women ensure crucial genealogical continuity.56 They are part of the passing of generations that provides, as John Gould puts it, the anchoring of Herodotos’ stories.57 Moreover, as has been observed by Dewald, the women in Herodotos “guarantee the survival of their cultures both by preserving life and by transmitting the nomoi of the culture to the next generation.”58 Their presence is often implicit, and, even where it is mentioned, the woman herself often remains unnamed. Nevertheless, this role is still significant. For example, in Herodotos’ logos about Darios’ reign, power is described through a description of his territory; the women who appear here represent both the space of that territory and the longevity of his rule, and thus instantiate political connections.59 We can compare an example from the other end of the social scale: Herodotos describes how the daughters of the common people of Lydia prostitute themselves in order to collect dowries for their marriages.60 This occurs in the midst of a depiction of the tomb of Alyattes, built by market traders, craftsmen and prostitutes. The inscriptions on the tomb reveal that the prostitutes contributed the majority of the work—and, as Herodotos explains, the tomb is enormous (he gives its measurements). Like the women associated with territory in the description of Darios’ achievements, the labor of these anonymous women who contributed to Alyattes’ tomb has provided the foundations for the memorial of a monarch, and they have also left their mark on the landscape.

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  75 These unnamed Lydian women are one example of the incidental descriptions of marriage and sex that Herodotos provides in his ethnographic reports.61 It is noticeable how many of these societies are, in Herodotos’ terms “promiscuous,”62 meaning that the men of that society are able to have sex with any of the women that they like.63 This provides a contrast with stories concerning the control exerted over Greek women by male relatives, for example, the tale of the competition for Agariste set up by her father Kleisthenes.64 The naming of Agariste in this account is particularly significant: as Herodotos goes on to recount, this is the great-grandmother of Perikles, whose mother, Agariste, famously dreamed that she gave birth to a lion and who was herself named after Kleisthenes’ daughter.65 In fact, the original Agariste has already appeared in Herodotos’ work, in Book 1, as the mother of the daughter who is married to Pisistratos, and who learns from that daughter that Pisistratos is not having sex with her in the usual way (because he fears the curse of the Alkmaionidai).66 The use of names is for genealogical reasons—and this provides an anchoring sense of continuity. But it may also introduce a sense of foreboding: the image of a lion is ambiguous; while the mention of Xanthippos, Perikles’ father, is likely to have reminded the audience of more shocking events.67

4 Time, discontinuous These examples might suggest a certain predictability with regard to the way Herodotos deploys the bodies of women to portray time and manipulate temporality, in particular as sources of genealogical continuity. But this last example concerning Agariste indicates that Herodotos’ use of this more usual narrative function for women, is coupled with (and perhaps allows) its employment for other narrative purposes. As this chapter goes on to argue, there are further examples in which the activities of women, instead of helping to establish a sense of expected continuity, lead to surprising outcomes. In some passages this still leads to continuity, although perhaps in an unanticipated fashion; in others it introduces a radical narrative discontinuity. In either case, a woman’s action often poses a startling threat to those around her. While I will start with a key example that comes from the beginning of the Histories, I will consider the tales thematically, rather than in the order they appear in the narrative, so as to emphasize how these different stories interweave with and build on each other. 4.1 Death and survival My first example of an unexpected female shaping of temporal continuity comes from the very beginning of the Histories, and it concerns the wife of the Lydian king Kandaules.68 When she realizes that her husband has arranged for his visitor Gyges to see her naked, she arranges her husband’s death with the support of the man to whom he betrayed her. In her explanation to Gyges she tells him, in effect, that she is taking care of what will happen in the future:

76  Esther Eidinow Gyges, there are now two paths before you: I leave it up to you which one you choose to take. Either you can kill Kandaules and have me and the kingdom of Lydia for your own, or you must die yourself right now, so that you will never again do exactly what Kandaules wants you to do and see what you should not see.69 Gyges is astonished at this, and begs her not to compel him to make this choice— but she does not give in. His rule is, it seems, ratified by Delphic command, a first indication that Kandaules’ wife is, by setting up this choice from her own motivations, actually fulfilling a divine plan. This story, positioned at the beginning of the Histories, may in some ways be considered programmatic; but not only, as scholarship tends to emphasize, for its account of Kandaules’ mistakes and subsequent fall from power.70 This stark and simple tale, brought vividly to life with the use of direct speech, also shocks its audience into a realization of the potential power of women. Its setting, amidst the narrative’s opening series of female abductions, makes the agency and power demonstrated by Kandaules’ wife even more startling. She not only destroys her husband, but also reshapes the future of Lydia; and not only in terms of the transfer of power to Gyges, but, as Herodotos later makes clear, also for generations to come, even to the extent of the final loss of the kingdom and the subjection of Kroisos.71 As others have noted, her actions are paralleled by the appalling story of Xerxes and his brother, which is told at the end of the Histories, in Book 9.72 This more complex story almost works as a summation of the many different characters of women, and the situations they are forced to confront, which have appeared throughout the Histories. Again, as with Kandaules’ wife, the women of the story of Book 9 are seldom the focus of attention in scholarly analyses, although they, too, are far more than simply incidental characters. I have placed this first story under the heading “Death and survival,” because Kandaules’ wife’s actions not only lead to the death of her husband, but, in doing so, they also create a genealogical (dis)continuity. These are also important aspects of my second example, which concerns Intaphernes’ wife, who comes to negotiate for her husband’s release after he is arrested by the Persian king Darios on suspicion of organizing a revolt.73 Whereas Kandaules’ wife confronts Gyges with an unbearable choice, Intaphernes’ wife faces such a selection herself. She is allowed by Darios to save one male relative; the rest will be killed. She chooses her brother. As she explains, her intention is to maintain her (natal) family: children and husbands are replaceable, but a brother is not. Her decision is extremely disconcerting, and, when so carefully reasoned, may seem coldly calculating to modern sensibilities. But Darios himself is impressed and rewards her by releasing not only her brother, but also her eldest son.74 Indeed, in his treatise on Rhetoric, Aristotle suggests that an explanation is just what is needed when a character does something “beyond belief” (apiston).75 He gives the example of Sophokles’ Antigone—for which, in fact, this Herodotean episode is thought to have provided the model.76 But considering the two episodes together draws attention to how, in

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  77 contrast to Antigone, Intaphernes’ wife complies with power—and so survives. And it is this aspect that leads Dewald and Kitzinger to argue that the cleverness of her victory “rings hollow.” Indeed, they see her as one of “a long string of cynical, compliant courtier-subjects who ultimately corrupt the ability of the Persian king to govern effectively.”77 The two characterizations are not mutually exclusive, of course. In the process of complying with the king, Intaphernes’ wife may still be considered clever: after all, she managed to find a way both to save her brother and to receive the additional gift of her son’s life. If indeed we could read her actions as achieving the long-term effect of undermining the king, then it could also be argued to be a form of revenge. But either way, her approach to the king demonstrates, at least, a form of agency within the constraints of her position as not only a woman, but also a captive subject. Considering her position alongside that of Kandaules’ wife both emphasizes the latter restrictions, and draws attention to the limits of agency that she and Kandaules’ wife share, and manage, to an extent, to overcome. When viewed in terms of the usual genealogical activities of women in the Histories, we can see how Intaphernes’ wife and Kandaules’ wife both manage to ensure their own survival and their family’s or kingdom’s continuity by stepping outside their typical gendered roles; in doing so, each woman also ensures the death of her husband. 4.2 Marriage and risk The theme of the betrayal of husbands, found in these two stories, also appears in a number of other tales, demonstrating a spectrum of consequences for those involved. For example, in the account of the foundation of the Ionian cities, Herodotos describes how the Karian women taken by Athenian settlers swore that neither they nor their daughters would sit at table with their husbands or call them by name.78 Although we are not told of any bad outcome in this instance, this incidental anecdote evokes the violent associations of the preceding examples. Other examples take this a step further: in Book 4, we are told how, when the Skythians were away for 28 years, their wives had children by their slaves, and these youths later had to be chased away.79 And further still: in Book 6, Herodotos tells the tale of the Attic women seized by the Pelasgian men on Lemnos; the women bring their sons up in an Attic manner—so the Pelasgians feel forced to kill both sons and mothers.80 In these stories, the social and biological processes that characterize the role of women mean that their presence is far from a simple vector of genealogical continuity. Instead, those processes represent significant social pressure points, which become moments of risk for those involved.81 In each case, the temporal significance of the behavior of these women is marked. In the first, the oaths of the women mean that “they swear never”82 to share a meal with their husbands or call out to them by name; and the continuity that these women create—through the instilling of this behavior in their daughters—is one of hatred. Genealogical continuity is also profoundly disrupted in the second episode; the double use

78  Esther Eidinow of chronos draws attention to the different experiences of time by men and by women, and their distinct reactions. But after twenty-eight years away from their homeland, the Skythians returned—only to be greeted, after so long away (dia chronou tosoutou), by just as much trouble as the Medes had caused them, because they found a sizeable army opposing them. What had happened was that the long absence of their husbands (chronon pollon) had induced the Skythian women to resort to their slaves.83 In turn, in the final episode from Book 6, fear of the potential for future betrayal means that the Pelasgian men kill not only the children but also their mothers. As a result, any potential for these women to fulfill their role as providers of genealogical continuity is destroyed. Indeed, this story reinforces the implications of the previous two examples, demonstrating how the potential to give birth marks women as embodying the risks of new beginnings, which threaten established society more generally and their husbands in particular. This brings this section to its final theme, “Birth and bodies.” 4.3 Birth and bodies Several stories in the Histories place emphasis on a specific birth, and the conflict, instead of continuity, that it catalyzes: these include (in order of appearance in the narrative) the births of Kyros, Battos, Kypselos, Demaratos and Perikles.84 I have already discussed the narrative roles of the mothers of Demaratos and Perikles, but here I want to observe how, as providers of genealogical continuity, these two women are given very different types of agency. While, as we have seen, Demaratos’ mother is granted an active, even speaking role, in the outcome of events, Agariste’s agency extends to a dream. Indeed, by introducing and naming Agariste, mother of Perikles, after the description and naming of Agariste, daughter of Kleisthenes, the narrative elides the individuality of either woman, seeming to render them anonymous, each of them a conduit for the realization of a larger, cosmic plan. Similarly, the mothers of Battos and Kypselos demonstrate contrasting levels of agency. Phronime, Battos’ mother, is minimally characterized; she simply endures a combination of traditional story lines (a wicked stepmother, condemned to death by her father, salvation at the hands of the killer who sells her overseas). We are told little more about Labda, Kypselos’ mother, but she is described as actively saving her child by hiding him from his would-be assassins in a chest (leading to his being named “Kypselos”).85 In both examples, oracles mark the events as being divinely mandated, an impression that is reinforced, in each case, by the details of what happens to these women and the dangers they survive or overcome.86 In the end, whatever agency they may demonstrate, these women become vehicles for the plans of fate, and, considered at this level, they are no different from the male characters of the Histories. What Herodotos’ various stories

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  79 emphasize is the potential for women’s bodies—in their capacity for birth—to create an entirely new future, even when they are otherwise narratively passive. The final example in this section illustrates this aspect: in the case of Mandane, mother of Kyros, the elaborate dream-vision of her father and his response puts the emphasis on his activity.87 Astyages dreams of his daughter, first, as she floods Asia with urine, then, as the source of a vine that grows from her genitals to cover Asia. Astyages’ struggle to prevent the birth does not involve fighting with his daughter but over her, or rather over her body. As Herodotos portrays it, not only is Mandane’s body a reification of the future, it is also the source of radical discontinuities that disrupt the mortal status quo to follow a new, and, it seems, inescapable direction.

5 Time, examined So far, I have drawn attention to Herodotos’ manipulation of the bodies of women, and related socio-biological processes, as devices for organizing narrative temporality. This takes places at two levels, both within the stories told by characters, and at the level of the larger narrative, through Herodotos’ selection, positioning and telling of these stories. But the women depicted, while they are (like the male characters) constrained by their roles within a larger narrative structure, are not simply “matter” for male activity; in many cases, they are described as decision-making, action-taking agents.88 And even when these women are narratively passive—like Mandane in her father’s dream—their bodies retain importance as sites of (temporal) meaning and consequence. This draws attention to the ways in which the bodies of women are not only devices used to organize narrative episodes; they also provide Herodotos with a metaphorical language that evokes the larger abstract concepts of time that underpin his Histories, such as continuity and discontinuity, past and future, and, in this next and final example, divine and mortal time. This story is told during Herodotos’ trip to Sais, in Egypt. Here he sees the monument to the daughter of Mykerinos, a king of Egypt, and her maids. Herodotos reports that Mykerinos apparently placed his dead daughter in a hollow image of a cow made of gilded wood, which stood in his palace. He tells us that, in his time, it could still be seen, alongside another chamber holding 20 colossal figures, apparently concubines of the king, that had no hands.89 But then Herodotos reports an alternative version, a heartrending account that describes how the daughter killed herself after her father forced her to have intercourse with him. The figures represent the maids who betrayed the daughter, their hands removed to show how the girl’s mother had cut off the hands of the maids in punishment for their treachery.90 Herodotos himself expresses doubt: after all, the statues’ hands can be seen; they have fallen off the figures through age.91 Nevertheless, the story acquires a new, vivid life of its own, and, with regard to the aims of this chapter, it sheds a distinctive light on the metaphoric language of time offered by the female body and its socio-biological processes.

80  Esther Eidinow Herodotos sets a careful scene: a hollow cow containing the dead body of a girl, and nearby a room of colossal, unidentifiable, naked female statues. Despite their anonymity, these effigies are at least materially present: in turn, they draw attention to the evanescent figure at the center of the story. The body of the daughter of Mykerinos flickers in and out of view: first, it is concealed within the wooden cow, then it is made briefly, brutally visible by the story of her father’s violence against her, and, finally, it is conflated, in Herodotos’ description of the ritual, with the goddess that the cow represents (of whom Herodotos will not speak).92 In the end, the girl’s invisible body achieves not only a mortal memorial, but also divine continuity. In contrast, Mykerinos’ body has disappeared, as has any memorial to it. While he may have built a pyramid, Herodotos tells the reader, there is some doubt that it is his: some people attribute it to Rhodopis, the hetaira.93 The eradication of Mykerinos’ memory (and memorial) is tied to his treatment of time: it seems to be a punishment for his challenging the oracle of Buto, which had foretold when he would die.94 By the end of this episode, the mortal who tried to manipulate time, to extend his life, has literally and figuratively, faded from sight; the sexual offender replaced by discussion of the story of a sex-worker. (It seems to be a deliberate irony, that the appetites that destroyed Mykerinos are those that brought Rhodopis wealth.) One theme of this story is, then, the desire to continue into the future, both as a living person and after death, in the memories of others. (Not only do the characters exhibit this desire, but Herodotos’ discussion of monuments and memories also assumes an audience that understands these themes.) Mykerinos’ daughter’s body, hidden from view but present in so many respects throughout the story, can be seen as representing (future) time. When Mykerinos attacked it, he reified his lack of care for the future; his lack of respect for her, the source of his mortal legacy, was punished fittingly by his inability to attain a material legacy. In both his assault and his challenge to the oracle, Mykerinos transgressed mortal and divine boundaries. As a result, he was not only physically but also temporally eradicated; he has no memorial. In contrast, his daughter’s body lives on. Although she was denied mortal continuity, and her body was figuratively and literally erased by her father, nevertheless she has transcended this physical state and achieved the permanence of divinity. In this episode the body of Mykerinos’ daughter provides a rich metaphor to evoke not only conceptions of mortal time and its qualities (past time and memory, future time and potential), but also the notion of divine time—and the differences between the two.

6 Conclusion: telling the time In this chapter, I have argued that the narrative of Herodotos’ Histories is structured by a synecdochic figuration, creating an Organicist argument—which tends to integrate dispersed events into a whole—producing, in Hayden White’s terms, a typical Comedy.95 My analysis has revealed how Herodotos’ communication of ideas of time is crucial to this structure, and I have offered two key case studies.

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  81 The first is the explicit expression of time as chronos: Herodotos draws on spatial metaphors of time (based on embodied experience) to draw out temporal and spatial links between events. The second is his deployment of female bodies and socio-biological processes, which he uses in two ways: on the one hand, to organize the temporality of the narrative, and, on the other hand, more abstractly as a metaphorical language to reify temporal concepts such as continuity/discontinuity, past, present and future, and divine versus mortal time. We can see how conceptions of time and gender interact to enable these narrative functions: the notion of linear time underpins women’s gendered role as preservers and transmitters of life and culture; while their socio-biological functions—birth, marriage, death— reinforce the Histories’ temporal frame. Women, like the concept of chronos, facilitate associations not only across time, but also between characters, places and events. At one level this would be all that is required to maintain a sense of narrative coherence. But, as this chapter has argued, Herodotos’ presentation of women’s bodies and roles as representing time is more complex. For example, the Histories depicts episodes that describe how ensuring genealogical continuity can demand anomalous behavior from a woman (e.g., killing her husband); or the conduct expected of a woman (e.g., protecting her baby) can lead to a drastic discontinuity in the perceived linear course of events; or the treatment of a father toward his daughter can rupture mortal time to introduce divine temporality. As I hope this chapter has shown, these are not just eccentric or exceptional episodes. Rather, they resonate with each other across the text as part of a larger integrative pattern of interactivity between conceptions of time and conceptions of the female gender. In Hayden White’s analytical terms, this adds another layer of emplotment to the synecdochic structure of the narrative.

Notes 1 See on this Dewald 2013 [1981]: 173 (citing Jacoby 1913: 347ff.). 2 Cobet 2002: 390–3 provides a succinct overview of research in the field of Herodotos’ organization of time, for the quotation see Cobet, 2002: 412. 3 Cobet, 2002: 412. As Cobet (2002: 393) notes, the consensus appears to be that Herodotos had some basis for coordination of the different dates that he sifted from the narratives that he collected. 4 Bakker 2006: 97. 5 Hdt. 5.9.3: γένοιτο δ᾽ ἂν πᾶν ἐν τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῳ. 6 Cf. 6.83.2: χρόνον συχνόν. 7 Hornblower (2013 ad loc.) observes how this recalls “the long view taken at 1.5.4,” but notes the exaggeration here; for the thought he compares Soph. Phil. 305f. 8 Hdt. 1.32.2: ἐν γὰρ τῷ μακρῷ χρόνῳ πολλὰ μὲν ἐστὶ ἰδεῖν τὰ μή τις ἐθέλει, πολλὰ δὲ καὶ παθεῖν. 9 In using the term space, I am bearing in mind de Certeau’s distinction between space and place, in which place describes “an instantaneous configuration of positions” while space describes “a practiced place,” a “configuration of mobile elements.” I have explored this distinction in more detail elsewhere with regard to Greek sanctuaries, and I will not elaborate on that aspect here. 10 E.g., Radden 2003.

82  Esther Eidinow 11 White 1973: 297. 12 Cf. White 1978: 5: “[t]his process of understanding can only be tropological in nature, for what is involved in the rendering of the unfamiliar into the familiar is a troping that is generally figurative.” White provides the four tropes with their modes of emplotment, argument and ideological implication in the introduction to Metahistory (1973), and he goes on to apply them to eight historians and philosophers of history; the arguments are further explored in White 1978. 13 White 1973: 31–8. 14 White 1973: 35 (italics in original). 15 E.g., Gould 1989: 110: “Herodotus’ model of a world which is structured spatially and socially by patterns of reciprocity, tending outward from the norm of a central ego (which may be either individual or group—city culture people) and held together by a criss-crossing network of obligations, is the key to understanding his work as proto-historian.” On the so-called “unitarian” view (as opposed to the “separatist”); see Fornara 1971: 5, with discussion by Harrison and Irwin 2018: 2–4; but cf. Asheri 2007: 13. Examples of unitarian analyses are manifold; some helpful overviews of particular aspects of that debate include: Gray 2002, which examines Herodotos’ short stories and scholarship’s approach to them; Baragwanath and Bakker 2012 consider scholarly approaches to Herodotos’ use of myth. 16 I will not be examining the more poetic term aiōn, which occurs five times in Herodotos’ Histories, according to Powell’s Lexicon (1.32.5, 3.40.2, 7.46.4, 9.17.4, 9.27.3). Each of these uses is in a highly charged speech, in which a character is stressing the fragile nature of human life and the significance that may be attached to life coming to an end. The semantic focus of the term (in Herodotos, as well as other literature of this period) is on the span of human life, rather than an abstract conception of time. 17 It is not a feature of ancient historical research on time. An exception is Gribetz 2018 who examines women’s bodies as metaphors for time in ancient Jewish sources, but she focuses on (p. 175) “female bodies – and specifically women’s bodies at different stages of maternity and motherhood (menstruation, pregnancy, labor, and birth).” 18 Butler 1999: 179. 19 Bildhauer 2011: 21. 20 Kristeva 1993 [1979]; Jardine 1981: 10. 21 Kristeva 1982: 82. 22 Time passing (accusative): πολλόν (much time) 1.199.5, 3.57.3, 3.124.2, 4.1.3, 4.201.1, 5.16.4, 5.28, 5.48, 5.106.1, 8.68.b2, 8.114.2, 8.142.3, 9.10.2; ὀλίγον (little time) 1.132.3, 8.4.2; ὅσον χρόνον (for as long as) 3.48.3. Also, see below for: τὸν λοιπὸν χρόνον, τὸν πάντα χρόνον, τὸν πρότερον χρόνον, πλεῖστον χρόνον, τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον, τὸν χρόνον τοῦτον, τὸν αὐτὸν τοῦτον χρόνον, τὸν χρόνον ἐκεῖνον. 23 Things coming to pass (dative): 1.68.6, 1.80.6, 1.176.1, 2.1211.d3, 3.13.3, 5.77.3, 7.6.1, 8.53.1, 8.107.2, 9.62.1; with μετέπειτα (thereafter) 2.110.2, 3.36.6, 7.7, 7.137.1, 7.233; with ὕστερον (afterward) 1.171.5, 2.154.3, 3.123.1, 3.126.1, 3.129.1, 4.78.2, 5.21.2, 6.73.1, 7.33, 6.170.3, 6.213.2, 9.64.2, 9.75, 9.101.2; with ὑστέρῳ (after) 1.130.2, 3.149, 4.166.1, 5.32, 6.66.3, 7.190, 9.83.1. 24 Time tracked: τὸν λοιπὸν, ἀπὸ τούτου χρόνον (henceforward/from this time) 1.47.1, 5.86.3; ἀπὸ τούτου τοῦ χρόνου (from this time) 1.68.6, 1.82.7, 2.52.3, 2.108.3, 4.98.2, 6.117.2; ἐκ τούτου τοῦ χρόνου (from this time) 6.42; ἐξ ἐκείνου τοῦ χρόνου (from that time) 7.59.1, 9.26.2,9.107.3; ὁκόσος χρόνος εἴη ἐξ οὗ (how long since) 2.44.2; ἐκ πολλοῦ τευ χρόνου (very ancient) 2.58.1, 7.119.1. 25 Human physicality: χρόνου προβαίνοντος (time moving forward) 3.53.1, 3.140.1, 5.58.1; χρόνου διελθόντος (time passing through) 1.8.2, 2.152.4, 4.146.1, 5.41.1, 6.86b1, 9.16.3; χρόνου διεξελθόντος (time passing through) 2.52.2; χρόνου δὲ προϊόντος (time advancing) 3.96.1, 6.64, 7.197.2, 8.105.2,9.109.1.

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  83 26 Computation: Hdt. 2.30.1, cf. 5.53 where the distance is measured in days; cf. Thuc. 2.97.1. 27 Not in a straight line: Nile flooding: περιελθόντος τοῦ χρόνου (time coming around) 2.93.6; end of a human life περιιόντος (time coming around) 2.121A.2; birth of Battos (time passing around) 4.155.1. 28 Generated by events: plan to build: χρόνου ἐγγεγονότος πολλοῦ (much time having taken place) 2.175.5; heated discussion 5.92c.4. Grow/germinate1.61.4; as a birth looms, time being cut short (τοῦ χρόνου συντάμνοντος), 5.41.2. 29 ἐπὶ πλεῖστον χρόνον (for the most time) 2.157; ὡς πλεῖστον χρόνον (as long as possible) 4.9.3. 30 The Egyptians could never live without a king: οὐδένα χρόνον 2.147.2; Apries’ allies change sides without delay: 2.162.6. 31 Time worn away: τὸν πολλὸν τοῦ χρόνου διατρίβοντα (he spent most of his time) 1.24.1. Wearing away: ὡς μήτε τὰ γενόμενα ἐξ ἀνθρώπων τῷ χρόνῳ ἐξίτηλα γένηται (so that the things done by man may not be erased by time) 1.1. 32 Examples include kata: κατὰ τοῦτον ἅμα τὸν χρόνον (at this same time) 1.171.3; 5.82.2; 1.116.2, 5.46.2, 5.94.2, 5.119.1, 6.29.1, 8.129.1 9.22.1 9.70.2 (see also 1.82.1); epi: 2.25.1, 2.133.2, 3.27.3, 3.54.2, 4.1.3, 9.112.1; dia: 2.57.2, 3.1.4, 3.31.6, 5.28.1, 7.154.2; meta: 2.52.2, 3.1.4, 6.52.2; hupo: 2.131.3, 7.176.5; ana: 2.151.2, 5.27.1, 7.10f.1, 7.153.2, 7.170.1; en: 3.39.3, 3.150.1, where time is coupled with disturbance, ἐν τούτῳ παντὶ τῷ χρόνῳ καὶ τῇ ταραχῇ ἐς τὴν πολιορκίην παρεσκευάζοντο (during this time and confusion they had prepared for the siege), 4.8.3; 9. 61.3, 7.167.1, 7.178.1, 8.8.1, 8.27.1, 8.114.1, 9.56.1, 7.14.1; entos: 8.104.1; and ekas: 8.144.5, οὐκ ἑκὰς χρόνου 33 τὸν πρότερον χρόνον (before) 5.41.1. 34 Time as space: ἐς χρόνον (later) 3.72.5, 7.29.3, 9.89.3; ἐς τὸν αἰεὶ χρόνον. / τὸν ἅπαντα χρόνον (forever/for all time) 1.54.2, 3.65.7, 4.187.2, 9.73.1; ἐς τὸν μετέπειτα χρόνον (in the future) 1.108.5, 8.128.3;τὸν πάντα χρόνον τῆς ζόης (for all the rest of his life) 1.85.4, cf. 3.22.3; ὁ χρόνος τῆς ζημίης (“the period of punishment”) 2.111.2. 35 Impossibility: of guarding Ionians versus barbarians forever (τὸν πάντα χρόνον) 9.106.2; fighting the king forever (τὸν πάντα χρόνον) 8.140a.3, echoed at 8.140b2; cf. a deed of eternal value (ἐς τὸν πάντα χρόνον) 9.73.1; Alkmaionidai against tyranny (τὸν πάντα χρόνον) 6.123.1; Athenian claims (ἐν τῷ παντὶ χρόνῳ) 9.27.1; hopes of Mardonios (διὰ παντὸς τοῦ χρόνου) 9.13.1. 36 Shared space: ἐν δὲ τῷ αὐτῷ χρόνῳ τούτῳ ἐν τῷ Μυσίῳ Ὀλύμπῳ (at this same time on the Mysian Olympos) 1.36.1; ἐν τούτῳ παντὶ τῷ χρόνῳ ἐγίνετο τάδε (in this time these things took place) 5.108.1. See also: 2.142.4, 2.133.2, 3.150.1, 4.8.3, 4.98.2, 4.133.2, 5.108.1, 7.167.1, 6.178.1, 8.8.1, 8.114.1, 9.8.1, 9.56.1, 9.61.3, 9.112. 37 Accusative of coincidence: τοῦτον τὸν χρόνον (at this time) 1.1.2, 1.29.1, 1.59.1, 1.68.1, 1.75.4, 1.79.3, 1.191.6, 2.25.5, 2.128, 3.57.2, 3.104.2, 4.135.2, 3.144.2, 3.152.3, 3.162.3, 3.163.1, 5.30.2, 5.58.2, 5.83.1, 6.51, 6.86a2, 6.89, 6.127.1, 6.127.4, 6.137.3, 7.59.3, 7.208.2, 8.65.1, 9.7.1, 9.37.4; τὸν χρόνον τοῦτον (at this time) 1.65.1, 1.73.3, 1.77.2, 2.52.2, 2.52.3, 3.148.1, 5.44.1; τὸν αὐτὸν χρόνον (at the same time) 3.48.1, 3.131.3, 4.145.1, 4.147.1, 5.28.1, 5.30.2, 5.36.1, 6.22.2, 7.165.1; τὸν χρόνον ἐκεῖνον (at that time) 1.183.2; κατὰ τὸν αὐτὸν χρόνον (at the same time) 1.12.2, 1.82.1; κατὰ τοῦτον ἅμα τὸν χρόνον (at this same time) 1.171.3; κατὰ χρόνον ἐκεῖνον (at that time) 5.82.2. 38 Hdt. 6.27.2 (here and below trans. Waterfield, slightly adapted). 39 Hdt. 6.89. 40 Hdt. 5.36.1: the Greek for “and it happened that all these things came together at the same time for Aristagoras” is Ἀρισταγόρῃ δὲ συνέπιπτε τοῦ αὐτοῦ χρόνου πάντα ταῦτα συνελθόντα. Hornblower (2013 ad loc.) notes “the triple expression of simultaneity” (συνέπιπτε, τοῦ αὐτοῦ χρόνου, and συνελθόντα) and how they “enact the three separate

84  Esther Eidinow occurrences or causal strands denoted by πάντα ταῦτα”, that is Skylax’s humiliation, Aristagoras’ lack of money and the slave sent by Histaios. Cf. Aesch. Cho. 299 and Hdt. 7.3.1 and 7.6.1. 41 Thus, Herodotos does not use a metaphoric trope to represent events: neither the use of myth nor the employment of stories bears on contemporary events through such identifications. Nor is this a metonymic trope, which uses a mechanistic mode of explanation, treating events as governed by “laws” of history (“manifestations of extrahistorical agencies” as White describes [1973: 16] citing Kenneth Burke) that restrict human freedom. While fate plays a significant role in Herodotos’ view of historical events, at the same time, the roles of both contingency and human will are depicted as equally crucial. See further Eidinow 2011, where this is explored in detail. 42 White 1973 [2014]: 61. 43 White 1973 [2014]: 15–16 and 29. 44 See above (Bildhauer 2011: 21): “What if it is the seeming stability of gender that creates the illusion that time flows in a constant line?” 45 It has been noted that women are related to mythic time and relate past to present (see Blok 2002: 235–6). 46 Irigaray 2005: 9 describes the difference between the genders in terms of time and space—historically the male has been conceptualized as time, and the female as space—but the notion is really one of matter and form. 47 Hdt. 1.1.0–1.4.1. 48 Dewald 2013 [1981]: 152. Within this narrative, we find women are mentioned 375 times. 49 Dewald (ibid.) notes the clichés in Herodotos’ treatment of women, but also observes how he undercuts them (35 times); she does see passive women (128 times) usually in contexts of risk or danger; but in general, as she stresses, he portrays women as (p. 153) “actors who themselves determine the outcome of events” (212 times—well over half the total); she goes on to describe how “they articulate and transmit the conventions of their societies to others and work creatively within the constraints of their individual situations in order to accomplish their goals.” 50 Gould (1989: 130) argues that there is “no single formula which covers the role of women in Herodotus.” 51 Hdt. 6.63–69. 52 See Hornblower and Pelling 2017: 177; the commentary provides a detailed analysis of this episode. 53 Hdt. 6.69. 54 Hdt. 6.52. 55 Hdt. 6.52.4; see further Hornblower and Pelling 2017 ad loc. 56 See this when families are under threat: 1.51.5b, 2.1, 2.110, 2.111.4, 3.130, 6.41.2. 57 Gould 1989: 39: “Herodotus’ stories are, for the most part, anchored somewhere in a single continuum of time, either by counting years or more often by counting generations.” He gives as examples, 8.139, 6.86.2; and, where ancestry is given of the Spartan kings: 7.204 and 8.131.2. As he states (ibid.), “long stretches of time are regularly recorded by a count of generations”: e.g., 1.13.2, and 1.91.1, 4.147.5, 4.163.2. 58 Dewald 2013 [1981]: 165. Skyles’ mother (4.78) provides a neat example of how this may backfire: a Greek, she teaches her son, a Skythian, the “wrong” set of cultural activities. 59 Darius’ reign: 3.88; see also 8.136. 60 Alyattes’ tomb: 1.93.1-5. 61 Ethnographies: 1.93, 1.196, 1.199, 1.216, 4.104, 4.168, 4.172, 4.180, 5.6. 62 The Greek is epikoinon. 63 See 1.196, 1.199 (temple prostitution for a limited period), 1.216, 4.104, 4.172, 4.180, 5.6. 64 Hdt. 6.126–30.

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  85 65 Hdt. 6.131. 66 Hdt. 1.61.1-2. 67 Xanthippos agrees to the crucifixion of Artayktes (9.120.4), which might, as Hornblower and Pelling note (2017 ad Hdt. 6.131.2), recall Perikles’ treatment of the Samians in 439 (Plut. Per. 28.1–3); Hornblower and Pelling (2017 ad Hdt. 6.131.2) also discuss the ambiguity of the lion imagery. 68 Kandaules wife: Hdt. 1.10–11. 69 Hdt. 1.11.2–3. 70 Programmatic: Gray (1995) interrogates (and casts doubt) on the programmatic aspect of the Kandaules story. Cf. Welser (2009: 362) who observes “the inappropriateness of Candaules’ desires and actions” helping to establish the theme of (382) “the historical inevitability of transgression and fall.” Scanlon (2015: 40) calls the episode “arguably ‘programmatic’ in illustrating Candaules’ erõs-blinded passion” and notes “the perversity of his request (against laws of nature or culture?).” 71 Hdt. 1.91.1 72 As observed by Wolf (1964) who calls these “harem-love stories” (HaremsLiebesgeschichte, p. 55); and cf. Griffiths (1999: 181), who points out the linguistic similarities between the two accounts. These are developed by Welser 2009, who examines how these stories align with the historical evidence for the deaths of Kandaules and Xerxes, and the role of “wonders” in prompting transgressions. Tourraix (1976a) identifies a narrative pattern in which a woman plays a key dynamic role in the transmission and continuity of Power (“transmission et pérennité du Pouvoir.” p. 369) and finds many other, similar stories across the Histories. But see Annequin’s (1976) critique that this is simply because of the role allocated to a woman by the institution of marriage. The significance of the figure of the powerful queen in Torraix’s initial piece raised the specter of matriarchy, which Annequin attacked (1976: 388–9) and Torraix then reconsidered (1976b: 389). On scholarship on the theme of representations of historical matriarchies in Herodotos cf. Blok 2002: 234–9. 73 Intaphernes’ wife: 3.119. 74 Hdt. 3.119.7. 75 Arist. Rhet. 3.16.9 (1417a34–40). 76 Soph. Ant. 903–12; it has long been recognized that this episode in Sophocles’ depiction of Antigone was influenced by Herodotos’ portrayal of Intaphernes’ wife (cf. Finkelberg 1995: 149). Alan Griffiths (2001) argues that there is a parallel between the preceding chapter’s description of the king’s control over water and this episode’s interaction with Intaphernes’ wife. He argues: “both dwell on the King’s absolute authority to confine and release across the boundary of his power-base according to his whim.” 77 Dewald and Kitzinger 2006: 124. 78 Hdt. 1.146. 79 Hdt. 4.1 and 4.3-4. 80 Hdt. 6.138. Note how two of these stories also interact with another established narrative trope of the Histories, that of female abduction. 81 A more successful version of this theme occurs in the tale of the establishment of the tribe of the Sauromatai (4.111–16), where a new cultural continuity is established between men and women. This requires both men and women to move to a different place to live and undertake, as it were, a new beginning. That this takes place at the edge of the world and involves mythical women could be read as an implicit commentary on its likelihood. 82 Hdt. 1.146.3: μή κοτε ὁμοσιτῆσαι 83 Hdt. 4.1.3. 84 Dangerous new beginnings: Kyros: 1.107–8; Battos (Phronime): 4.154–5; Kypselos: 5.92c–e; Demaratos: 6.63; Perikles (Agariste): 6.131.

86  Esther Eidinow 85 Labda: 5.92d-e. 86 Indeed, in the case of Kypselos, Herodotos makes this aspect explicit (5.92d): “It was fated, however that Eëtion’s son would be the source of suffering for Corinth.” 87 Hdt. 1.107–8 and cf. Pelling 1997. 88 On agency, see Eidinow, Maurizio, Dillon 2017: 5. 89 Hdt. 2.129–30. 90 Hdt. 2.131. 91 Hdt. 2.131.3 92 The explanations of the accompanying ritual similarly align religious and mundane reasons: we are told, at first, that it is conducted because the Egyptians are mourning the goddess, then, Herodotos reveals it is because the daughter told her father before she died that she wanted to see the sun once a year (2.131.1 and 2, respectively). 93 Hdt. 2.134.1. Herodotos challenges this theory, but his detailed reasoning only leaves the reader wondering why he has to argue so fiercely, and he follows it with a potted biography of the hetaira. Hdt. 2.134.2–4 and 135, respectively. 94 Hdt. 2.133. 95 White associates this trope, Comedy, with a “conservative” ideology. As White explains (1973: 24) his ideologies designate “a general ideological preference” towards change (rather than a political party). A conservative ideology emphasises the value of current social structure, and a natural rhythm of change, as “plantlike gradualizations” (24). I see Herodotos revealing this preference in a variety of ways, including, narratologically, in his emphasis on the role of fate, and, structurally, in his widely recognised use of ring-composition.

Bibliography Annequin, J. 1976. “Remarques à propos de ‘La femme et le pouvoir chez Hérodote.” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 2: 387–9. Asheri, D. 2007. “General Introduction.” In D. Asheri, A. Lloyd and A. Corcella A Commentary on Herodotus Books I–IV, edited by O. Murray and A. Moreno and translated by B. Graziosi, M. Rossetti, C. Dus and V. Cazzato, 1–57. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bakker, E. J. 2006. “The Syntax of Historiê. How Herodotus Writes.” In The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, edited by C. Dewald and J. Marincola, 92–102. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Baragwanath, E. and M. de Bakker. 2012. “Introduction.” In Myth, Truth, and Narrative in Herodotus, edited by E. Baragwanath and M. de Bakker, 1–56. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bildhauer, B. 2011. “Queer Medieval Time in Hamlet (1921).” In Sex, Gender and Time in Fiction and Culture, edited by B. Davies and J. Funke, 19–37. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Blok, J. 2002. “Women in Herodotus’ Histories.” In Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, edited by E. J. Bakker and I. de Jong, 225–42. Leiden: Brill. Butler, J. 1990. Gender Trouble and the Subversion of Identity. London: Routledge. Cobet, J. 2002. “The Organisation of Time in the Histories.” In Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, edited by E. J. Bakker, I. de Jong and H. van Wees, 387–412. Leiden: Brill. Dewald, C. 2013 [1981] “Women and Culture in Herodotus’ Histories.” In Herodotus, vol. 2: Herodotus and the World. Oxford Readings in Classical Studies, edited by R. Munson, Oxford: Oxford University Press. (Originally published 1981. Women’s Studies 8(1/2): 93–126; also published 2004. In Reflections of Women in Antiquity, edited by H. Foley, 91–126. London: Routledge).

Gendered time, narrative structure: Herodotos’ Histories  87 Dewald, C. and R. Kitzinger. 2006. “Herodotus, Sophocles and the Woman who Wanted her Brother Saved.” In The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus, edited by C. Dewald and J. Marincola, 122–9. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Eidinow, E. 2011. Luck, Fate, and Fortune: Antiquity and its Legacy. London: IB Tauris. Eidinow, E., L. Maurizio and M. Dillon, 2017. “Introduction.” In Women’s Ritual Competence in the Ancient Mediterranean, edited by M. Dillon, E. Eidinow and L. Maurizio, 1–8. London: Routledge. Finkelberg, M. 1995. “Sophocles ‘Tr.’ 634–9 and Herodotus,” Mnemosyne 48(2): 146–52. Fornara, C. 1971. Herodotus: an Interpretative Essay. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gould, J. 1989. Herodotus. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson. Gray, V. 1995. “Herodotus and the Rhetoric of Otherness.” The American Journal of Philology 116(2): 185–211. Gray, V. 2002. “Short Stories in Herodotus’ Histories.” In Brill’s Companion to Herodotus, edited by E. J. Bakker, I. J. F. de Jong and H. van Wees, 291–317. Leiden: Brill. Gribetz, S. 2017. “Women’s Bodies as Metaphors for Time in Biblical, Second Temple, and Rabbinic Literature.” In The Construction of Time in Antiquity: Ritual, Art, and Identity, edited by J. Ben-Dov and L. Doering, 173–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Griffiths, A. 1999. “Euenius the Negligent Nightwatchman (Herodotus 9.92–6).” In From Myth to Reason, edited by R. Buxton, 169–82. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffiths, A. 2001. “Kissing Cousins: Some Curious Cases of Adjacent Material in Herodotus.” In The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, edited by N. Luraghi, 161–78. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hornblower, S. 2013. Herodotus Book V. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hornblower, S. and C. Pelling. 2017. Herodotus Book VI. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Irigaray, L. 2005. An Ethics of Sexual Difference. Translated by C. Burke and G. C. Gill. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Jacoby, F. 1913. “Herodotus.” In Real-Encyclopädie der classischen Altertumswissenschaft, Supplement, vol. 2, edited by W. Kroll and Buchhandlung J. B. Metzler, 205–20. Stuttgart. (Reprinted in Jacoby, F. 1956. Griechische Historiker. Stuttgart: Alfred Druckenmuller). Jardine, A. 1981. “Introduction to Julia Kristeva’s ‘Women’s Time’.” Signs 7(1): 5–12. Kristeva, J. 1982. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Translated by L. S. Roudiez. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. 1993 [1979]. “Women’s Time.” In Feminisms: An Anthology of Literary Theory and Criticism, edited by R. Warhol and D. Herndl, 443–62. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Pelling, C. 1997. “East Is East and West Is West—Or Are They? National Stereotypes in Herodotus.” Histos 1 http://research.ncl.ac.uk/histos/documents/1997.04PellingEas tIsEast5166.pdf. Accessed 21 April, 2019. (Reprinted, with additional footnotes, in Herodotus: Volume 2. Herodotus and the World, edited by R. V. Munson, 360–379. Oxford: Oxford University Press). Radden, G. 2003. “The Metaphor TIME AS SPACE across Languages.” In Zeitschrift für Interkulturellen Fremdsprachenunterricht 2003;8(2/3). Theme: Übersetzen, Interkulturelle Kommunikation, Spracherwerb und Sprachvermittlung - das Leben mit mehreren Sprachen. Festschrift für Juliane House zum 60. Geburtstag, edited by N. Baumgarten, C. Böttger, M. Motz and J. Probst, 226–39. https://tujournals.ulb.tu-darm stadt.de/index.php/zif/issue/view/33. Accessed April 21, 2019.

88  Esther Eidinow Rood, T. 2007. “Herodotus.” In Time in Ancient Greek Literature: Studies in Ancient Greek Narrative, vol. 2, edited by I. de Jong and R. Nünlist, 113–30. Leiden: Brill. Scanlon, T. 2015. Greek Historiography. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Torraix, A. 1976a. “La femme et le pouvoir chez Hérodote.” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 2: 369–86. Tourraix A. 1976b. “Réponse de A. Tourraix.” Dialogues d’histoire ancienne 2: 389–90. Welser, C. 2009. “Two Didactic Strategies at the End of Herodotus’ Histories (9.108–22).” Classical Antiquity 28: 359–85. White, H. 1973 [2014]. Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth Century Europe. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. White, H. 1978. Tropics of Discourse: Essays in Cultural Criticism. Baltimore, MD: John Hopkins University Press. Wolf. E. 1964. “Das Weib des Masistes.” Hermes 92: 51–8.

5

Time and gender in epic quests and Delphic oracles Lisa Maurizio

1 Introduction Stories of Homeric heroes who fight enemies on the battlefield and encounter monsters on the high seas have thematic and formal similarities to prose tales of individuals who travel to Delphi to seek an oracle. Despite their chronological and generic distance, both types of stories locate female characters in one place, while granting male characters the ability to move among various locations. More specifically, both types of stories stage an encounter between a mobile male hero whose movements are associated with linear or human time and an immobile female character whose narrative stillness correlates with monumental or divine time. After defining these terms, this chapter explores these encounters in order to understand how and why Delphic divination received little attention in ancient tales about Delphic oracles and continues to be relegated to the margins of scholarly editions and analyses of them. The similarities between the treatment of time in Homeric epics and tales of Delphic oracles are suggested by Lin Foxhall who delineates “two modes of temporal thought”—human and monumental—in Greek literary, epigraphic and archaeological evidence from the Archaic and Classical periods.1 Human time pertains to “the temporal sphere which contains but also restricts most aspects of mortal life,” while monumental time operates in a “different dimension” from human time;2 it is “permanent” and also “constitutes the realm of the divine.”3 These modes of temporal thought are embedded in the epic ideology of “imperishable glory.”4 Men who accomplish deeds and words worthy of being remembered in men’s songs extend the limits of their mortal lives and enter monumental time, which is the measure of the lives of the gods. Notably, all of Foxhall’s examples of human beings who serve as paradigms of human time, such as Tellos in Herodotos’ Histories, are male, as are those rare individuals who succeed in entering monumental time through the commemoration of their deeds and words after their death (Homer’s Achilles and the figures of Kleobis and Biton in Herodotos). Foxhall notes that men can also access monumental time by conversing with the gods through “magic, divination and oracles.”5 The guardians and voices of monumental time in such conversations are female and divine or nearly divine,

90  Lisa Maurizio namely the Muses and the Pythia, Apollo’s inspired priestess at Delphi.6 Male clients at Delphi seek knowledge that provides them with a way to escape the confines of a mortal perspective that necessarily has access only to the present and partially to the past. A consultation with the Pythia at Delphi, therefore, can be seen to be similarly motivated and inflected by the same anxieties that propel Homeric heroes to seek immortal glory. Both epic deeds and divinatory conversation allow a male to escape the coils of mortal time. In this way, Foxhall’s ancient examples imply a parallel between Homeric heroes and Delphic clients, who were exclusively male, and suggest that her two temporal modes are gendered. Foxhall “emic” temporal modes are similar to Kristeva’s gendered categories of monumental and linear time to which many chapters in this volume appeal.7 Kristeva defines linear time as a “time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history.”8 For Kristeva, such time coordinates with, and provides a measure for male prerogatives, while monumental time is a “massive presence … without cleavage or escape, which has little to do with linear time (which passes).”9 It is “all-encompassing and infinite like imaginary space,”10 and, along with cyclical time, which is the time of “cycles, gestation, the eternal recurrence of a biological rhythm,” it coordinates with female subjectivity.11 The similar gendering of Kristeva’s categories and Foxhall’s “emic” temporal modes make “linear” a more apt term than “human” for the mode that opposes monumental time. Furthermore, the terms linear and monumental allow aspects of gender to become evident in stories that juxtapose these two temporal modes and therefore will be used throughout this chapter. One repeated formal element, namely plot, makes clear how stories of Homeric heroes and Delphic clients juxtapose monumental and linear time while aligning them with female and male characters. Yuri Lotman, a Russian formalist, has distilled the plot of every hero’s quest as an encounter between characters who are mobile, who enjoy freedom with regard to plot-space, who can change their place in the structure of the artistic world and cross the frontier, the basic topographical feature of this space, and those who are immobile, who represent, in fact, a function of this space.12 A single mobile protagonist who can cross boundaries and obstacles “fixed at particular points in the plot-space” may enter such closed plot-spaces, but must exit from them in order for the narrative about the protagonist to continue. This plot-space, writes Lotman, is “the grave,” “a house” or “a woman.” As Teresa de Lauretis notes, Lotman’s comment implies that the mobile hero is always male and the plot-space is a non-man and non-human (place), an “an absolute abstraction,” and thus is always coded as female, even if it is not explicitly associated with a female character.13 In Lotman’s dynamic, the hero’s movement corresponds with the progression of narrative events and thus linear time. “Figures or markers of positions—places and topoi—through which the hero and his story move to their destination and to accomplish meaning”14 are linked with narrative stagnation and represent the conditions of monumental time. Such places frequently offer the

Epic quests and Delphic oracles  91 hero an escape from linear time and the possibility of an atemporal existence that eludes loss and suffering and promises divine knowledge; yet such an existence where a hero’s movement ceases also threatens his (narrative) demise, usually without a promise of immortality in song after his death. Lotman’s distillation of the plot of heroic tales into an encounter between a mobile male character and an immobile female space that juxtaposes linear time with monumental time is especially evident in Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey. This episode also shares many thematic elements, namely female speech, with tales about Delphic oracles that describe the encounter between a mobile Delphic client and an immobile Pythia.

2 Sirens’ songs in Homer’s Odyssey Homer’s Odyssey, the touchstone for many foundational studies of the hero’s quest, obsessively replays a male protagonist’s movement through female plotspace and thereby rehearses the intersection and incompatibility of linear and monumental time.15 The females whom Odysseus encounters never leave the place where Odysseus meets them and exemplify female plot-space as Lotman has defined it; their immobility blurs the boundary between their character and the space where they dwell.16 Female characters or space present “the general danger of being swallowed, engulfed, concealed, or obliterated”17 to Odysseus in two distinct ways. Figures such as Skylla or Charybdis threaten to swallow and thus kill Odysseus, while Kirke or Kalypso would conceal him indefinitely in their locations and thus grant him entry into monumental time as an escape from linear time.18 If Odysseus remains with Kirke or Kalpyso, thereby escaping suffering and forgetting Ithaka, he will sacrifice his identity as an adult male hero who might earn his escape from linear time through deeds commemorated in the songs of male poets. That is, within epic ideology, the male hero must accept that his only hope of survival beyond the limits of his life span rests in men’s songs and memories. Thus, all the females whom Odysseus encounters threaten his physical survival as well as his survival in song after his death. Moreover, the females who occupy plot-spaces where monumental time replaces linear time are not only alluring and potentially fatal, but also their songs appear to substitute for the songs of men, the proper channel for achieving immortality. In the Odyssey, female speech poses dangers to its protagonist and to its poet.19 Patricia Parker, who treats the Odyssey as a foundational text in her analysis of the representation of women’s voices in renaissance literature, argues that the expansion of the Odyssey is associated with females who speak and weave so that “the properly narrative desire to reach an ending” is “countered by the desire to linger or dilate” and amounts to “male anxiety about the feminization of the verbal body of the text.”20 Females who speak threaten both the male hero, who in listening to them would become passive and immobile, and the poet who, should he imagine them speaking for a very long time, would create a feminine text, i.e., one that articulates a female perspective. Both male hero and male poet, therefore, must escape or contain every dangerous female voice. For if a female plot-space speaks

92  Lisa Maurizio and conjures herself an identity and point of view, she will become a protagonist and thereby potentially unravel the narrative hierarchy of male and female and of linear time and monumental time. Among the females Odysseus encounters, the Sirens most explicitly epitomize the danger that a speaking female poses to a male protagonist.21 The Sirens have garnered much scholarly attention because of the diction and content of their songs as well as their membership in a network of images and tales about winged females credited with dangerous speech. In his seminal study, Pietro Pucci argues that the poet of the Odyssey makes the Sirens “speak with the diction of the Iliad” and fashions them as Muses,22 thereby implying that the Sirens are like the Muses who inspired the Iliad.23 In this way, the poet suggests the Sirens are turned toward an Iliadic past, defined as “an irretrievable and remote kleos and grief … that spells only death.”24 For Pucci, “the Sirens’ song would bring Odysseus out of the Odyssey to rot on their island” by appealing to his nostalgia for his past exploits at Troy. Lillian Doherty similarly treats the Sirens as “unauthorized Muses” who would not turn Odysseus toward his past, but rather would usurp the “the hero’s privilege as narrator and focalizer of his own story,”25 thereby potentially “feminizing” the text as they become narrators who tell Odysseus’ story. Such a possibility seems difficult to imagine, yet in the last book of the Iliad Homer presents female narrators of male lives when Hekabe, Helen and Andromache lament over the corpse of Hektor. This scene suggests that female speech implies the death of the male, in part, because female lament replaces male action and, in part, because all the males present become, like audience members, passive listeners, with Hektor the most passive of all. In the final scene of the Iliad monumental time—the standstill in battle and the end of the epic—replaces linear time, the actions of men in battle. Thus monumental time has another aspect, unnoted by Kristeva and hinted at by Foxhall. It is conjured and filled by female voices whose knowledge of the male exceeds his own knowledge of himself and extends beyond the limits of his life. Hekabe, Helen and Andromache existed and will exist beyond Hektor’s death. In this view, it is not surprising that Sirens come to be represented as lamenters. Both lamenters and Sirens recall and create “kleos and grief” associated with men’s death. Both narrate men’s lives because they speak when men are silenced or dead. These factors may explain why, in the fourth and third centuries BCE, Sirens increasingly resembled human female lamenters with arms and instruments in the iconographical traditions. This “music-making armed variety” of Sirens, as Jennifer Niels calls it, appears in two funerary contexts—on white-ground vases found in graves and on funerary monuments—where the creatures appear to lament the deceased, as Greek women did.26 Sirens have other connections to death: they are associated with Persephone and the Underworld;27 they appear on gravestones in the fourth century as guardians of the deceased; and Sirens sometimes carry off youths and thereby are seen to cause their deaths, like Sphinxes.28 The so-called Harpy tomb from Xanthos in Lykia (480–70 BCE) presents the identification of the Sirens and female mourners. Four winged females, variously

Epic quests and Delphic oracles  93 identified as Harpies or Sirens, tenderly cradle a small, yet adult, deceased human in their (human) arms in the manner of a mother with a child.29 On the north side, a mourning woman, holding her head in her hands, sits on a rock directly below a Harpy carrying the deceased, and thus poses an equation between female mourners who care for the bodies of the dead and Harpies or Sirens who carry them off.30 The north side of the Harpy tomb also represents in the starkest terms the opposition between the mobile male hero whose actions provide the narrative of men’s song, and the immobile male hero whose life and death becomes the object of women’s laments. The dangers of a speaking female and a passive male without a narrative to call his own are suggested in narratives about Delphic divination, albeit in less stark or dramatic ways than in the Odyssey. The Pythia’s oracles, when sought by a male client, are potential harbingers of death, if interpreted incorrectly or ignored. In this way, Delphic oracles as female speech sometimes correlate with male passivity or death, as do the songs of the Sirens or female laments. The assimilation of Delphic clients and the Pythia with their epic and mythological counterparts, as outlined below, may be deliberate or simply a consequence of the ubiquity of the narrative patterning of the hero’s quest. Whatever the reasons, the formal and thematic elements shared by these two types of stories render linear time and narrative progress as male and the lack of movement with monumental time as female in Delphic tales.

3 A voice at Delphi A client’s consultation with the Pythia at Delphi receives little attention in most tales of Delphic oracles, much like Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens whose location, physical appearance and songs are described in a few lines before Odysseus’ ship sails away.31 It is usually dispatched in one or two brief sentences stating that a client went to Delphi and that the Pythia or the god spoke. The Pythia is rarely named,32 is never described33 and almost never acts other than to prophesize.34 Narratives portray her, when she is mentioned at all, simply as the speaker of oracles in Apollo’s temple.35 Few narrative accounts of consultations at Delphi provide details about the divinatory ritual that took place there. For example, the Pythia orders Kalondas of Naxos to leave her temple;36 the Athenians refuse the first oracle the Pythia offers and ask for another;37 the Pythia refuses Glaukos’ special pleading after he receives a dire oracle;38 occasionally the Pythia speaks in the first person to the client, explicitly states that Apollo or the god demands something of the client, or addresses the client in the second person, and thereby makes evident the divinatory exchange that most oracles, like tales about them, occlude.39 Notably, oracles are never attributed to priests or prophets at the shrine; they are only attributed to Apollo, the god, or the Pythia.40 The interchangeability of Apollo and the Pythia (and not male priests) in Delphic tales suggests that the words of a divinatory consultation are imagined as divine and female. For these reasons, the Pythia’s presence in oracular narratives is fused with Delphi; she exists only in this space as its voice. The Pythia,

94  Lisa Maurizio not unlike her counterparts in the Odyssey, is an antagonist or helper to a Delphic client who plays the part of the male hero and must correctly interpret and act on the oracle he has sought.41 The male client is the principal of narrative movement, whose journey to Delphi may portend his demise, and thereby seem to cause it, particularly if the oracle he receives is ambiguous. Alternatively, an oracle may help him in his endeavors, giving directions that are precise and clear, like Kirke’s advice to Odysseus on his journey to the underworld. Although divinatory consultations are minimized in oracular tales, oracles are pivotal narrative devices because they bring knowledge of past, present and future to the tale’s audience and protagonist: they compel action, and often engage client and reader in puzzling out their meaning. More importantly, oracles signal a change in the client’s fortunes and, in many instances, the stakes are a matter of life and death;42 the client must interpret the Pythia’s oracle in order to complete his plans successfully. In this sense, Delphic tales stage the client’s acceptance of an oracle in the same formal and thematic terms as Odysseus’ encounters with the Sirens. Will the male hero or client at Delphi be able to understand and implement the dangerous and ambiguous information garnered from the Pythia in a particular plot-space, passing quickly through or by it? If he succeeds, he will continue his life and assert his particularity in a linear trajectory in which events have a cause and effect, and logically follow one another, and conversely the Pythia will become the margins of his tale. Or will his failure to interpret the Pythia’s words lead to his death and simultaneously freeze his narrative momentum? A high number of oracular tales correlate the success of a client with his accurate interpretation of an oracle or correlate his death or destruction with a narrative demise and a failure to interpret an oracle correctly. Such repeated correlations imply oracles as a female and divine speech at Delphi are dangerous. This aspect of oracles is highlighted in tales about the Keledones, “mythological prefigurations” and “precursors to the Delphic oracle,” who connect the Pythia to Sirens and thereby supply thematic links between Delphic clients and epic heroes.43 In a paean about the succession of Apollo’s four temples at Delphi (Paean 8b.7–11),44 Pindar writes that six bronze Keledones sat upon the bronze wall of the third temple and sang so sweetly that those who stopped to listen to them stayed rooted in place, eventually perishing. Later ancient authors, recognizing that the bodies and the effects of the seductive songs of the Keledones on men were identical to those of the Sirens, argued that the Keledones were most likely modeled on them.45 Not only the effects that the Keledones’ songs have on listeners, but also the content of their songs, are similar to content of the Sirens’ song that conveys Odysseus’ past in Troy and emphasizes their knowledge; they repeat “we know” twice and promise that the man who listens to their song will gain access to their knowledge.46 Ian Rutherford reconstructs the Keledones’ song as, “Pallas [Athene] put in … to the voice … and (the daughters of?) Memory told them everything that is, and that was before (and that will be?).” Further, he suggests their song “might have been a narration of universal knowledge like the song of the Sirens.”47 Similarly, Hesiod’s Muses “sing about what is, what will be, and what was before.”48 The temporal range of the songs of the Sirens and of the Keledones

Epic quests and Delphic oracles  95 suggests a reason for their deadly powers: songs that transcend the listener’s present offer knowledge about his past and future. To listen is to cease to move and to be subsumed in the stillness of female monumental space and time. To listen in hope of ascertaining one’s future is to create that future, namely death, in linear time. The mythological Keledones at Delphi signal the danger that attends a male’s attempt to reach or enter monumental time, and hint that the Pythia’s oracles are potentially lethal. Tales about them reinforce the similarities between Odysseus’ encounter with the Sirens and a client’s encounter with the Pythia and highlight the dangers that attend a male who listens to female speech and thereby seeks to enter monumental time. An ancient author may have crafted a Delphic tale to suit his narrative ends and ignored these mythological and narrative figurations of female speech and monumental time;49 yet to the degree that there is an oral tradition of Delphic oracles, an ancient author is constrained by the thematic and formal elements of this tradition.50 For example, Delphic oracles are never demonstrated to be false, even by Thucydides, a self-confessed observer of human gullibility in the face of disaster.51 Thucydides explains how individuals falsify oracles so that they fit events: during the plague at Athens, Athenians remember an oracle stating that a plague (loimos) would occur with a war. Thucydides points out that the oracle would have been remembered as stating a famine (limos) would occur with a war, if the Athenians were suffering a famine.52 Yet, Thucydides engages in the very same activity of falsification when he tells the story of Kylon. He explains that when a Delphic oracle told Kylon to invade Athens during a great contest of Zeus to become tyrant, Kylon interpreted the great festival to be the Olympics, not the Athenian Diasia in honor of Zeus Meilichios—which, Thucydides posited, was the festival the oracle intended.53 Thucydides demonstrates two seemingly contradictory responses to oracles: in one case he pulls up the curtain and argues that the way oracles are remembered insures their veracity, and in the other he engages in the sort of interpretation that falsifies an oracle. Thucydides’ treatments of these two oracles are an indication of how the Delphic tradition imposes itself even on skeptical ancient recorders. When an ancient author records a Delphic oracle, the oracle asserts the force of the oracular and perhaps specifically Delphic tradition. Almost always attributed to the Pythia and thus figured as female, an oracle seems to capture client and ancient author alike, as it leapfrogs over the present moment of its enunciation, supplying cause and effect to events. François Hartog has pointed out how the Pythia’s voice becomes a model for, or counterpart to, the words of a historian such as Herodotos, whose gaze and writing hopes to encompass the same temporal scale of past, present and future, albeit far more modestly.54 In this view, then, the Pythia, an internal narrator like the Sirens, threatens to feminize any text in which she is conspicuous. Her words may stop, or even predict the death of, a client; they may also stop an ancient writer from an accounting of events, if he (rather than a character) chooses to interpret her words. In this way, the Pythia threatens to escape her confinement through speech and to assume control of the narrative whose margins she defines.

96  Lisa Maurizio The organization of Delphic tales around the interplay or conflict between monumental female time and linear masculine time is underscored by Delphic oracles that do not mimic the formal and thematic elements in the hero’s quest because they have no narrative frame and they omit the Pythia altogether. Of roughly 60 or so inscriptional oracles I have examined thus far, not one names the Pythia. Instead, they refer to “the god,” and, less frequently, to Apollo.55 They often refer to the “oracle of the god” and omit the act of enunciation. With increasing frequency around the middle of the fourth century, oracles begin to be inscribed on stone and these oracles differ in significant ways from those that appear in the works of ancient authors. Sometimes they name clients at Delphi, and less frequently they include questions. Significantly almost every inscription omits the implementation of oracular advice or the fulfillment of an oracle. In other words, a client or protagonist may be mentioned but interpretations and consequences are generally not included. Such oracular summations on inscriptions, then, provide in the briefest of, often formulaic, terms, Apollo’s directive.56 They narrate one moment of time and do not include the juxtaposition of monumental time represented by the Pythia, who is not mentioned, and linear time as represented by a male client. Perhaps it is not surprising, and indeed appears reasonable, that scholars treat these inscriptional oracles as accurate and authentic recordings of Delphic oracles since they appear to lack authorial or traditional elaboration and to report only facts. Yet, this scholarly treatment has consequences for how the whole corpus of Delphic oracles has been collected and continues to be evaluated.

4 Gender and time in the writing of Delphic history The two standard collections of Delphic oracles—one by Parke and Wormell (1956) and one by Joseph Fontenrose (1978)—do not address gender and time, yet these concepts play a role in the organization and evaluations of Delphic oracles in both collections. Fontenrose’s collection, for example, revolves around the inscriptional oracles discussed above. He creates four categories of oracles whose order indicates the likelihood of authenticity, i.e., that the oracle issued from a consultation: historical, quasi-historical, legendary and fictitious. Most inscriptional oracles that omit mention of the Pythia fall in his “historical category,” while he considers many oracles within narrative frames (nearly half of Delphic oracles) as “quasi-historical.”57 This discussion of the epic influence on time and gender in the narrative patterning of Delphic oracles would seem to support Fontenrose’s categorization of Delphic oracles. On the one hand, the often simple and clear language of inscriptional oracles and the absence of a narrative frame similar to epic quests suggest the oracles recorded on inscriptions are historically accurate. On the other, the re-inscription of ancient narrative patterns in which time is gendered can be observed in Fontenrose’s own catalogue and leads in another direction. Fontenrose imposes a structure upon each entry in his collection that approximates Delphic narratives, and thereby inadvertently re-inscribes the

Epic quests and Delphic oracles  97 very sort of fictionalized patterning that he attempts to excise in the ancient record. Parke and Wormell adopt a very similar schema for presenting individual oracles, despite the fact that they do not place inscriptional oracles in the center of their definition of authenticity, which, not surprisingly, differs greatly from that of Fontenrose. In both collections, each entry that corresponds to an ancient oracle presents an encounter of a male protagonist with a female divine voice at the center of a uniform story with a beginning, middle and end. Fontenrose recreates this encounter because he divides each entry into client, occasion, question and response, followed by ancient attestations, even in cases when ancient evidence does not describe an oracle in a Delphic narrative, but simply refers to an oracle to explain a cultural practice. Parke and Wormell similarly use the terms enquirer, enquiry, reply and evidence. “Reply” is reserved for oracles presented as direct quotes in ancient sources. Oracles that are indirectly quoted in ancient sources are included under “evidence,” which also contains additional ancient citations of the oracle.58 To some degree, the presentation of individual oracles in such a format makes sense: it seems to offer information surrounding any oracle in a clear and consistent manner. Yet, in each collection, this format aligns the male protagonist with linear time and female character with monumental time, and it serves as a template by which the historicity or authenticity of an oracle is judged. In other words, the task of turning Delphic oracles into history, understood as a plausible series of events, unites the interests of the modern scholar with the ancient client at Delphi; both have teleological projects that attention to the consultation with the Pythia may render impossible to achieve. Both modern collections of Delphic oracles, then, replicate the epic pattern of a mobile male hero who encounters a female who threatens to entrap him and stop his progress or, alternatively, to escape confinement within a particular space through speech. In both collections, the Delphic client, if a known historical figure, is placed on the historical stage of men whose actions unfold in a linear fashion. The Pythia, accompanied by mythological and legendary figures said to have consulted Delphi, is relegated to the margins of history, where she and they exist in a realm untouched by linear time or change.59 When a Delphic client converts her words into action and initiates a sequence of events likely to have taken place, he becomes a historical actor in modern accounts. He, or the process by which he is evaluated, also establishes a distinction between ancient history as the realm of the “true” facts, and ancient literature or myth as fanciful expression. Since Delphi and the Pythia’s oracles coordinate with a monumental time (or timelessness) that is comprehensive and narratively stagnant, it inevitably falls into the category of myth and literature in many contemporary analyses of Delphic oracles that seek to identify historical or authentic oracles. What might be the alternatives to such analyses of Delphic oracles? Is there a way to escape the opposition between male linear time and female monumental time that has come to align with, respectively, contemporary definitions of history and literature/myth in analyses of Delphic oracles?

98  Lisa Maurizio

5 Conclusion Two possibilities for collecting and analyzing Delphic oracles are worth considering. Kristeva advocates for writing monumental history, which she defines as “a plurality of productions that cannot be reduced to one another,” that is, for layering of perspectives, voices, events and movements that cannot be easily laid out in a sequential or linear order.60 Maurizio Giangiulio’s analysis of oracles concerning the colony of Kyrene established by Thera offers a model study of how Delphic oracles might be presented in a “monumental history.” Concepts of orality and writing inform Giangiulio’s study in which terms such as “colonial,” “Delphic” and “local tradition” replace terms such as “authenticity” and “post eventum forgeries,” typically found in analyses of Delphic oracles.61 In Giangiulio’s work, layers of oral reports, divided interests and opposing groups are shown to intersect and contradict one another as Giangiulio explores “both the meaning of the past for an archaic Greek community and the exact nature of local memory.”62 Delphic oracles are remembered and curated by local communities to explain past and present events and provide shared interpretations. Positioned as a form of local history in Giangiulio’s work, Delphic oracles are not hindrances to, but crucial building blocks of, ancient and scholarly historical reconstructions, not spurious additions.63 The opposition between male linear time and female monumental time is dissolved in Giangiulio’s analysis of recursive communal memory and oral traditions. Additionally, his work poses a question: what principles might organize a collection of Delphic oracles that treats oral transmission as foundational? A second possibility can be found in Peter Struck’s recent book, where he has explored how divination functions as a metaphor for meta-cognitive intuition in various ancient philosophical works. To demonstrate how his delineation of philosophical notions of intuition may help illuminate “non-philosophical cultural production” in ancient Greece, Struck takes Odysseus and Penelope’s encounter in Homer’s Odyssey (books 15–22) as a case study. In his view, their interactions comprise “an aggregate of intuitive moments” that comport with and demonstrate philosophical definitions of intuition.64 Struck’s study suggests that it is possible to examine how Delphic divination was a process that encouraged intuitive reflection on the client’s question while providing divine guidance. Moreover, his study has affinities with recent anthropological work on divination that focuses on performance and examines how reports of divination fail to capture the complexity of divinatory interactions.65 Struck’s work lends credence to the notion that this strand of anthropological literature suggests, namely that ancient reports of oracles will perforce be summaries, that is, divine monologues, not intuitive dialogues. Complex and comprehensive perspectives—such as those of Giangiulio and Struck—on how Delphic tales were crafted and how Delphic divination was practiced suggest new ways to collect Delphic oracles and to modify scholarly attempts to make Delphic divination and ancient traditions about it conform to linear time and linear history.

Epic quests and Delphic oracles  99

Notes 1 Foxhall 1995: 133. 2 Foxhall 1995: 133 and 135. 3 Foxhall 1995: 133. Human and monumental time “are not rigid categories and there is a spectrum of continuity between them” and they are “important categories for lived behavior” in Archaic and Classical Greece. 4 Gregory Nagy has explored the concept of imperishable glory (aphthitos kleos) in many of his publications. See 1999 (1980): chapter 10.3–19 and 2013: Hour (chapter) 4. 5 Foxhall 1995: 136. 6 Foxhall 1995, 136. 7 Kristeva does not appear in the bibliography of the book Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology: Bridging the “Great Divide” for which Foxhall’s essay is a capstone. 8 Kristeva 1981, 17. 9 Kristeva 1981, 16. 10 Kristeva 1981, 16. 11 Kristeva 1981, 6, footnote 5. 12 Lotman in de Lauretis 1984: 118. Narrative analyses of epic heroes often fall under the category of studies of “the hero’s quest.” This synoptic term refers to traditional tales, often oral, that have at their center a male protagonist who must accomplish a goal that will secure a kingdom and a bride. The hero’s quest is often defined by three events: the hero travels somewhere, encounters someone or something he must obtain, overcome or escape, and then departs, either returning home or going on to his next adventure. These three events—departure, trial, return/or travel—derive in part from the integration of Van Gennep’s definition of rites of initiation into narrative, psychological and ritual studies of the hero’s quest. Segal 1990 and Schweizer and Segal 2012 offer brief overviews of the voluminous scholarship on definitions of and narrative approaches to the hero’s quest. 13 De Lauretis 1984: 120–1. 14 De Lauretis 1984: 109. 15 In Homer’s Odyssey, one such plot-space is occupied by a male, the Kyklops, Polyphemos. Yet this space has distinctly female attributes: it is a womb-like cave filled with milk and cheeses. Furthermore, Polyphemos cannot leave his island or his cave, because the Kyklopes do not know how to sail. On the feminine aspects of Polyphemos’ cave, see Schein 1995: 19. 16 Donald Lateiner (2005: 420) alludes to the immobility of all the females in Homer’s epics, when he remarks, “women have very little ‘room’ in the Iliad and Odyssey.” 17 Schein 1995: 19. 18 In the Odyssey, for example, Odysseus’ many years with Kalypso receive little narrative elaboration. Her cave offers an escape from the world of men and hence time as measured in hours and days. While Odysseus is with her, time seems to stand still insofar as each day repeats itself with little or no variation, so that time is not linked to a story with a beginning, middle and end. 19 Felson-Rubin 1996: 171–2. 20 Parker 1987: 10–12. 21 Homer Od.12.39–54; 158–200. On their threat to the poet, see Pucci 1998 (1979); Doherty 1995a; Pepponi 2012. On the origins and development of Sirens in Greece, see Gresseth 1970: 203–5; Tsiafakis 2003: 74–8; Cohen 1995: 30–4; Niels 1995: 178–81. 22 Pucci 1998 (1979): 1–3. 23 Pucci 1998 (1979): and Doherty 1995b treat the Sirens’ affinities with Muses, see below.

100  Lisa Maurizio 24 Pucci 1998 (1979): 4. 25 Mackie (1997) argues that the Odyssey distinguishes between first-person storytelling, such as Odysseus’ and the songs of the Muses. The former has greater affinity with Herodotos’ travelogue; the speaker is the guarantor of the story’s credibility; the focus is on the recent past. The Muses’ and Sirens’ songs, by contrast, often reach back to the distant past and concern the klea andron. See also Nagy 1987. 26 Niels 1995: 181; Buitron-Oliver and Cohen 1995: 33. Additionally, a Siren appears as a mourner in a prosthesis scene on an Attic black-figure pinax dating to 600 BCE (Tsiafakis 2003: 78 n.31). 27 Pl. Crat. 403 d; Eu. Hel. 168–78; Apoll. Rh Arg. 4.896–7. 28 Vermeule 1979: 171–4 29 Tsaiafakis 2003: 78; Vermeule 1979: 169–70. 30 Pepponi (2012: 77 and 86–8) suggests another link between Sirens and human females in a non-funerary context. She argues that in Alkman’s explicit equation between the Muses and Sirens (fr. 30 PMGF with Aristid. Or. 28.51), he attributes to both a voice like that of a bird, and he may be comparing the alluring voice of a chorus of maidens to that of Sirens. 31 Hom. Od. 12.181–200; the Sirens speak eight lines: 12.184–91. 32 Flower (2008: 225) discusses the Pythias who are named. 33 Diodoros Siculus describes the age and dress of the Pythias: after a young Pythia was raped, the office was held by older women who dressed as young women (16.26). 34 The three instances where she is bribed, PW 79 (Hdt. 5.63), PW 87 (Hdt. 6.66) and PW 10 (Thuc. 5.16) are the exception to this rule, on which see Fontenrose 1978: 224. 35 This account is typical of the brief references to the Pythia in Delphic tales. “Antiphemos and Entimos, having established Gela, consulted the Pythia and she prophesied the following …” PW 3 (Diod. Sic. 8.23). 36 PW 4 (Gal. Protr. 23). The Pythia also orders the men of Sybaris out of her temple, PW 74 (Ael. VH 3.43). She orders Themistokles not to dedicate Persian spoils in her temple PW 106 (Paus. 10.14.5). 37 PW 94 and 95 (Hdt. 7.140–1). 38 PW 35 and 36 (Hdt. 6.86). 39 The following list, although not comprehensive, provides examples of oracles that include references to the consultation itself in the ways enumerated in the text: PW 25 (Delphus FGrH 404 f11), PW 29 (Hdt. 1.65), PW 31 (Hdt. 1.66), PW41 (Hdt. 4.157), PW 52 (Hdt. 1.47), PW 68 (Paus. 10.1.4), PW 71 (Diod. Sic. 8.29), PW 163 (Paus. 8.9.3), PW 169 (Oenom. Ap. Eus. PE 6.7), PW 173 (Plu. Lys. 29), PW 206 (Certamen 215), PW 216 (Diod. Sic. 7.12), PW 225 (Sch. Clem. Al. Protr. 2.11), PW 245 (Diog. Laert. 1.106), PW 247 (Diod. Sic. 9.3). 40 Oracles, whether quoted directly or indirectly, in Delphic tales may be introduced by the Pythia, the god or Apollo. The interchangeability between the Pythia and Apollo is expressed in Herodotos’ account of Grinnos, the king of Thera. Herodotos writes that when the Pythia tells him to found a colony; he addresses her with the vocative “king” in PW 37 (Hdt. 4.150.3). PW 39 (Hdt. 4.155.3) follows this pattern as well. Fontenrose 1978: 217. 41 Nagy (1987) explores the continuities between epic heroes and historical actors: each seeks kleos through his deeds. See also Hartog (1992) who emphasizes the discontinuity between epic and Herodotos’ development of the historical genres in that the collective deeds of men constitute the center of Herodotos’ work. Oidipous offers a compelling parallel to Delphic clients. He must solve the Sphinx’s riddle that collapses past, present and future into one moment in order to save Thebes, and as several versions of the myth imply, remain alive; see Vernant 1978; Rokem 1996. 42 Fontenrose 1978: 58–72 outlines the various ways that oracles may predict the death of the client, whose interpretative acumen may or may not save him.

Epic quests and Delphic oracles  101 43 Sourvinou-Inwood (1979: 245) argues that “in the process of mythologizing about a mythical temple of Apollo at Delphi, created by divine craft, the model of the historical temple, created by human craft, in which a woman delivered prophecies, operated on the mythological imagination and prompted the creation of corresponding prophesying female beings of a supernatural character.” On the so-called Siren handles see Papalexandrou (2003/4); Muscarella1962 and 1992. 44 Pi. Pae. VIII in Rutherford 2001: 209–22. 45 Ath. VII. 290E; Philostr. VA VI.11; Paus. 10.5.9. Papalexandrou (2003/4: 154), on the other hand, links these figures to the so-called Siren attachments on seventh-century BCE bronze cauldrons at Delphi. Pindar, he suggests, may have gained information about the Keledones from a Delphic tradition that drew together bronze cauldrons from the East with Delphic divinatory practices to legitimate the shrine and its practices. In his view, then, it is likely that Keledones were not modeled on Homer’s Sirens, but instead “both categories of mythical creatures are symptomatic of the culturally conditioned association by the Greeks of femininity with dangerous intelligence, poetic skill, and monstrosity.” 46 Their boast is most similar to Hom. Il. 2.484 and Hes. Th. 97ff. with Pucci 1998 (1979): 6–7; Doherty 1995a: 81 and Pepponi 2012: 73–88, esp. 82. 47 Rutherford 2001: 213 and 220. See also Papalexandrou 2003/4: 154 n. 39 on Lobel’s reconstruction of these lines. 48 Hes. Th. 32 and 38. 49 Hartog (1999: 191–5, followed by Kindt 2006: 44–9) emphasizes how Herodotos shapes Delphic oracles to suit his historical purposes. At the same time, he acknowledges that the Pythia, or rather the oracular tradition of divine knowledge translated into human words that she represents, exerts some authorial control on the narrator himself for whom she (or Apollo) is a model. Hartog writes “Herodotus does not at all present himself as a diviner,” yet he “retains something (not the content, but rather the form) of the ancient knowledge of the diviner” insofar as he is able to assign responsibility for present actions and to anticipate future events from his knowledge of the past (193 and 195). 50 On the Delphic tradition, see Giangiulio 2007: 131 n.57. 51 Marinatos 1981. 52 Thuc. 2.54. 53 PW 12 (Thuc. 1.126.5–6); see also PW 122 (Thuc. 2.17.2) where Thucydides interprets an oracle in order to demonstrate its accuracy. Marinatos (1981: 138–40) discusses these and other ambiguous oracles in Thucydides’ work, arguing that he, like Herodotos and Sophokles “exhibited a consistent interest in oracular puzzles and their correct interpretation” and exhibits a “neutral tone” that supports such a view. 54 Hartog 1999. 55 The following inscriptional oracles omit mention of the Pythia: PW 89, 123, 124, 164, 165, 260, 262, 278, 277, 279, 280, 281, 284, 285, 330, 334, 335, 338, 340, 341, 342, 343, 344, 345, 346, 347, 348, 349, 350, 351, 408, 427, 429, 430, 432, 437, 457, 458, 459, 460, 466, 467, 471. PW 378, 379, 380, 381, 382, are all from one lengthy narrative inscription that nonetheless does not mention the Pythia. PW 336 mentions a prophetess of the god (prophetis theou). Fontenrose H 44, 49, 51, 74 refer to inscriptional oracles that are not included in Parke and Wormell’s collection. These inscriptions do not mention the Pythia. 56 The near formulaic language used frequently in these oracles is some form of “it is better and preferable to do x …” on which see Fontenrose 1978: 220–2. 57 Fontenrose 1978. Maurizio (1997: 309–11) reviews the organizational schemes of Fontenrose 1978 and explores the repetitive plot structure of Delphic tales in terms of oral traditions. 58 Parke and Wormell 1956, vol. 2.

102  Lisa Maurizio 59 Loraux 2011. In Nicole Loraux’s explication of how classicists have divided ancient sources into the categories of history (best exemplified by Thucydides) and literature, which she labels “monumental,” Loraux unintentionally recalls Kristeva’s term “monumental time” and explores how classicists parse these terms. 60 Quoted and discussed in Foster 1988: 75–6. 61 Maurizio 1997. 62 Giangiulio 2007: 120. 63 Foxhall (1995: 144–5) addresses how contemporary notions of inauthentic and spurious are antithetical to how the Greeks remembered and recorded events. “If ‘spurious’ works of art were attributed to Phidias, or speeches to Demosthenes, laws to Solon or the Great Deeds to Theseus, that simply reinforced their claim to fame in the realm of permanence.” 64 Struck 2016: 252–3. 65 See for example, Zeitlyn 2001 and 201;2 and Wilce 2001.

Bibliography Bergren, A. 2008. Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and Female in Greek Thought. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Bergren, A. 2008 [1980]. “Helen’s Web: Time and Tableau in the Iliad.” In Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and Female in Greek Thought, edited by Ann Bergren, 43–57. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Bergren, A. 2008 [1983]. “Language and the Female in Early Greek Thought.” In Weaving Truth: Essays on Language and Female in Greek Thought, edited by Ann Bergren, 13–42. Washington, DC: The Center for Hellenic Studies. Buitron-Oliver, D. and B. Cohen, 1995. “Between Skylla and Penelope: Female Characters of the Odyssey in Archaic and Classical Art.” In The Distaff Side. Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey, edited by B. Cohen, 29–60. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Cohen, B. ed. 1995. The Distaff Side. Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. De Lauretis, A. 1984. Alice Doesn’t: Feminism, Semiotics, Cinema. Bloomington, IN: University of Indiana Press. Doherty, L. E. 1995a. “Sirens, Muses and Female Narrators in the Odyssey.” Cohen 1995: 81–92. Doherty, L. E. 1995b. Siren Songs: Gender, Audiences, and Narrators in the Odyssey. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Felson-Rubin, N. 1996. “Penelope’s Perspective.” In Reading the Odyssey: Selected Interpretative Essays, edited by S. Schein, 163–83. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Fletcher, J. 2008. “Women’s Space and Wingless Words in the Odyssey.” Phoenix 62: 77–91. Flower, M. A. 2008. The Seer in Ancient Greece. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fontenrose, Joseph E. 1978. The Delphic Oracle: Its Responses and Operations with a Catalogue of Responses. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Foster, T. 1988. “History, Critical Theory, and Women's Social Practices: ‘Women’s Time’ and Housekeeping.” Signs 14: 73–99. Foxhall, L. 1995. “Monumental Ambitions: The Significance of Posterity in Greece.” In Time, Tradition and Society in Greek Archaeology: Bridging the Great Divide, edited by N. Spencer, 132–49. London: Routledge Press.

Epic quests and Delphic oracles  103 Gartziou-Tatti, A. 2010. “Prophecy and Time in the Odyssey,” QUCC 96: 11–28. Giangiulio, M. 2007. “Constructing the Past: Colonial Traditions and the Writing of History. The Case of Cyrene.” In The Historian’s Craft in the Age of Herodotus, edited by N. Luraghi, 116–37. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gresseth, G. K. 1970. “The Homeric Sirens.” TAPA 101: 203–18. Hartog, F. 1992. “Herodotus and the Historiographical Operation.” Diacritics 22: 83–93. Hartog, F. 1999. “Myth into Logos: The Case of Croesus, or the Historian at Work.” In From Myth to Reason? Studies in the Development of Greek Thought, edited by R. G. A. Buxton, 183–95. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Hernandez, P. N. 2008. “Penelope’s Absent Song.” Phoenix 62: 39–62. Kindt, J. 2006. “Delphic Oracle Stories and the Beginning of Historiography: Herodotus' Croesus Logos.” Classical Philology 101: 34–51. Kristeva, J. Jardine, A. and Blake, H. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Signs 7: 13–35. Lateiner, D. 2005. “Proxemic and Chronemic in Homeric Epic: Time and Space in Heroic Social Interaction.” The Classical World 98: 413–21. Loraux, N. 2011. “Thucydides is not a Colleague.” In Greek and Roman Historiography, edited by J. Marincola, 19–39. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lotman, J. M. 1979 [1973]. “The Origin of Plot in the Light of Typology.” Trans. J. Graffy, Poetics Today 1: 161–84. Mackie, H. 1997. “Song and Storytelling: An Odyssean Perspective.” Transactions of the American Philological Association (1974) 127: 77–95. Marinatos, N. 1981. “Thucydides and the Oracles.” The Journal of Hellenic Studies 101: 138–40. Maurizio, L. 1997. “Delphic Oracles as Oral Performances: Authenticity and Historical Evidence.” Classical Antiquity 16(2): 309–43. Morgan, C. 1990. Athletes and Oracles: The Transformation of Olympia and Delphi in the Eighth Century BC. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Morson, S. 1994. Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Muscarella, O. W. 1962. “The Oriental Origin of Siren Cauldron Attachments.” Hesperia 31: 317–29. Muscarella, O. W. 2013. “Greek and Oriental Cauldron Attachments: A Review.” In Archaeology, Artifacts and Antiquities of the Ancient Near East, Sites, Cultures, and Proveniences, 725–64. Leiden: Brill. Nagy, G. 1987. “Herodotus the Logios.” Arethusa 20: 175–84. Nagy, G. 1999 [1980]. The Best of the Achaeans: Concepts of the Hero in Archaic Greek Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Nagy, G. 2013. The Ancient Greek Hero in 24 Hours. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. Neils, J. 1995. “Les Femmes Fatales: Skylla and the Sirens in Greek Art.” In The Distaff Side. Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey, edited by B. Cohen, 175–84. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Nugent, B. 2008. “The Sounds of Sirens: Odyssey 12.184–91.” College Literature 35: 45–54. Papalexandrou, N. 2003/4. “Keledones: Dangerous Performers in Early Delphic Lore and Ritual Structures.” Hephaistos 21/22: 145–68. Parke, H. W. and D. E. W. Wormell. 1956. The Delphic Oracle. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Parker, P. A. 1987. Literary Fat Ladies: Rhetoric, Gender, Property. London: Methuen & Co. Ltd.

104  Lisa Maurizio Pepponi, A. E. 2012. Frontiers of Pleasures: Models of Aesthetic Response in Archaic and Classical Greek Thought. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Propp, V. 1968 [1928]. Morphology of the Folktale. Translated by L. Scott with an Introduction by A. Dundes. Austin, TX: University of Texas Press. Pucci, P. 1998. The Song of the Sirens: Essays on Homer. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Rank, O., Lord Raglan, A. Dundes and R. Segal. 1990. In Quest of the Hero. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Rokem, F. 1996. “One Voice and Many Legs: Oedipus and the Riddle of the Sphinx.” In Untying that Knot: On Riddles and Other Enigmatic Modes, edited by G. Hasan-Rokem and D. Shulman, 255–70. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Schein, S. L. 1995. “Female Representation and Interpreting the Odyssey.” In The Distaff Side. Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey, edited by B. Cohen, 17–28. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Scott, M. 2014. Delphi: A History at the Center of the Ancient World. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Schweizer, B. and R. A. Segal, eds. 2012. The Hero’s Quest. Hackensack, NJ: Salem Press. Segal, R. 1990. “Introduction.” In In Quest of the Hero, edited by O. Rank, Lord Raglan, A. Dundes and R. Segal, vii–xli. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Sourvinou-Inwood, C. 1979. “The Myth of the First Temples at Delphi.” Classical Quarterly 29: 231–51. Struck, P. 2016. Divination and Human Nature: A Cognitive History of Intuition in Classical Antiquity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Tsiafakis, D. 2003. “ΠΕΛΩΡΑ: Fabulous Creatures and/or Demons of Death?” In The Centaur’s Smile: The Human Animal in Early Greek Art, edited by J. M. Padgett, 73– 104. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Van Gennep, A. 1961 [1909]. Rite of Initiation. Translated by M. B. Vizedon and G. L. Caffee. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Vermeule, E. 1979. Aspects of Death in Early Greek Art and Poetry. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Vernant, J. P. 1978. “Ambiguity and Reversal: On the Enigmatic Structure of Oedipus Rex.” New Literary History 9(3): 475–501. Wilce, J. M. 2001. “Divining Troubles, or Divining Troubles? Emergent and Conflictual Dimensions of Bangladeshi Divination.” Anthropological Quarterly 74: 190–200. Zeitlyn, D. 2001. “Finding Meaning in the Text: The Process of Interpretation in TextBased Divination.” The Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute 7: 225–40. Zeitlyn, D. 2012 “Divinatory Logics: Diagnosis and Predicting Mediating Outcomes.” Current Anthropology 53: 525–46.

6

Gendered patterns Constructing time in the communities of Catullus 64 Aaron M. Seider

1 Introduction Greco-Roman epics typically begin by announcing the main subject of their narratives. Even before their first verses are complete, the Iliad, Odyssey and Aeneid declare that they will be about, respectively, anger; a man; and arms and a man. And, then of course, Homer and Vergil quickly offer more detail. The audience learns that the Iliad’s anger belongs to Achilles, the Odyssey’s man is one of many turns and the Aeneid’s hero and war both tend toward Rome’s foundation. Catullus’ poem 64 seems to opt for a very different tack.1 Rather than commencing with an appeal to the Muses and a brief exposition of its narrative, poem 64 offers a description of the voyage of the Argo, the “earliest” vessel to sail the seas. Given that Catullus’ poem will proceed to tell the story of Peleus and Thetis’ wedding, a narrative that itself frames a lengthy ekphrasis showcasing Ariadne’s abandonment at the hands of Theseus, the Argo’s story barely seems to relate to the rest of the work. Yet, poem 64 frequently alludes to the epic tradition even while renouncing many of the genre’s characteristics, and this is true of its opening verses as well.2 If the expectation is that an epic commences with a call to the Muses and a brief treatment of its content, poem 64 looks to and distances itself from epic conventions by obliquely introducing a theme central to Catullus’ poem: the intersection of gender and time. A series of different perspectives in the poem’s opening lines announce its interest in how gender and time interact. After ten verses relating how pine trees from Mount Pelion were built into a ship that carried the Argonauts to Colchis, the next eleven lines link this voyage to the start of Peleus and Thetis’ love: That vessel first introduced the inexperienced sea to a ship’s course; as soon as it ploughed the windy water with its prow and, turned by the oars, the waves grew gray with foam, the sea-nymphs, with wild faces, rose out of the white water and gazed at the strange thing with wonder. On that day, and not at all on any other, human beings saw sea nymphs with their own eyes, standing out from the white water up to their breasts.

11

15

106  Aaron M. Seider Then Peleus is said to have burned with love for Thetis; then Thetis did not despise marriage with a mortal; then the father himself judged3 that Peleus must be married to Thetis.4

20

These verses’ focus on the beginning of a new epoch and the different perceptions of that beginning. Line 11, “That vessel first introduced the inexperienced sea to a ship’s course” (illa rudem cursu prima imbuit Amphitriten) marks the Argonauts’ ship as the “first” (prima, 11)5 seagoing vessel, and this primacy already draws attention to questions of temporality. The Nereids wonder at this “strange thing” (monstrum, 15) gliding through their watery realm, while the Argonauts glimpse the naked sea-nymphs, a vision afforded to mortals only this once. This moment contrasts male and female perceptions of a single event: the Nereids are an object of erotic fascination for the Greek heroes, the first and only human beings to see them. The Latin noun monstrum, meanwhile, characterizes the sailors as a perplexing new phenomenon in the eyes of the nymphs, one that perhaps offers an omen for the future. The striking use of the verb imbuit in line 11 encapsulates the gap between two perspectives. As the translation above shows, the verb here must mean “to give (a person) initial instruction, experience in something,”6 and the Argonauts’ vessel is the active subject. Yet imbuit can also signify “to drench” or “to wet for the first time,”7 meanings that could easily apply to how the sea wets a ship for the first time.8 What is more, the very link between this moment, captured in differently gendered perspectives, and the main narrative is a temporal one: in Catullus’ Latin, lines 19, 20 and 21 all begin with the adverb “then” (tum), an anaphora that emphasizes the chronological coincidence between the beginning of the Argonauts’ travels and Peleus and Thetis’ wedding day.9 The temporal link between one new beginning (of a sea voyage) and another (of a marriage), combined with the multiple perspectives on what such beginnings might mean, suggests that time and gender will be a major theme of poem 64. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s writings,10 I argue that poem 64 destabilizes Roman gender binaries concerning time and agency. Kristeva describes conceptions of time wherein women are associated with cyclical temporal structures that are often opposed to and subsumed by linear temporalities generated by men.11 Kristeva distinguishes “repetition” and “eternity” as “modalities of time” that are “traditionally linked to female subjectivity,” while the “conception of linear temporality … is readily labeled masculine.”12 As Kristeva remarks, the notion that male time is linear and associated with war and politics as well as historical periodization is found in many traditional societies, and it is not at all alien to Roman culture.13 Kristeva’s remarks inform my approach to two episodes in poem 64, the ekphrasis of Ariadne and Theseus and the Fates’ prophecy of Achilles’ future. In each of these episodes, men begin periods of time, but it is women who influence how men will be remembered through the recursive patterns they create. Drawing on Kristeva’s ideas, this chapter claims that poem 64 sets up cyclical temporal structures, defined by women, that bound men’s deeds and determine their meanings. This vision of the relationship between time and gender opposes the notion that male heroes and the

Gendered patterns  107 male poets who record their deeds dominate the depiction of time as a linear movement. Instead, Catullus presents the Fates and Ariadne, the poem’s internal female narrators, as recording male actions and dictating their meaning in a cyclical structure.14 Given his potential identification with the poem’s female narrators as well as his emphasis on his role as the poem’s author, Catullus shows himself constructing time in a manner typically cultured as feminine.15 The conclusion of my chapter considers what this portrait of gender and time reveals about the enigmatic final verses of the poem, where Catullus considers whether the political and social actions of his contemporaries might be understood within a cyclical or linear temporal sequence of events.

2 Ariadne and Theseus: circles of revenge Within the lengthy ekphrasis that occupies more than half of poem 64, cyclical temporal structures encompass and reorient actions that start with a linear impetus. The beginning and end of this inset narrative focus on Ariadne’s reaction to Theseus’ abandonment of her, and it is her reaction that creates and controls the ekphrasis’ narrative arc. The temporal modalities elaborated by Kristeva help to interpret the patterns of time and experience in this ekphrasis. As Kristeva notes, temporal patterns that are repetitive are often associated with female identity and experience, while linear temporal motion is frequently linked with men.16 In Catullus’ ekphrasis, these modes are connected with the genders Kristeva notes, and when these temporal modalities come into conflict with each other, recursive temporal patterns prove to be dominant. When this conflict occurs, Ariadne’s hopes for the future are more powerful, and her wishes determine the temporal patterns and commemorative outcomes that mark Theseus’ life. As Catullus relates the setting of Peleus and Thetis’ wedding, his attention falls on the coverlet of a couch, “embroidered with ancient figures of people” (priscis hominum variata figuris, 64.50). Much of this coverlet is described from Ariadne’s perspective. In this rendition, first Theseus’ actions stand as the origin of her plight, but later Ariadne breaks this linear movement and imposes a new, cyclical temporal structure on Theseus’ deeds.17 The ekphrasis opens with a description of Ariadne watching Theseus sail off from Naxos, leaving her abandoned.18 As detailed from Ariadne’s perspective on the shore, Theseus’ earlier decision to come to Crete led to this moment. As she looks at his departing sails, she remembers when she first saw him on Crete. Theseus himself chose to make the voyage to battle the Minotaur, and desire filled Ariadne’s heart as soon as he appeared in her home. Now, as Ariadne stands on Naxos’ shore and realizes that she has been left there alone, this description attributes her misery to the moment when Theseus arrived.19 It was “at that time” (illa tempestate, 64.73) that Venus sowed thorny cares in her chest, a moment that is returned to and magnified when the phrase “as soon as” (simul ac, 64.86) showcases the speed with which desire for Theseus came over Ariadne. Later, Ariadne continues to connect her current predicament with Theseus’ arrival in Crete and to figure the movement between these two times as linear. In

108  Aaron M. Seider her recollection, she characterizes his presence as part of a sequence of actions tied back to the initial arrival of Athenian ships.20 She wishes that “Athenian ships had never touched Cretan shores in the first place” (utinam ne tempore primo / Gnosia Cecropiae tetigissent litora puppes, 64.171–2) and that Theseus himself had never come to Crete’s harbor or slept in her father’s house. Beginning with the first action in this chain, Ariadne moves from the arrival of Athenian ships to Theseus himself, who concealed his true intentions even as a guest. Ariadne’s conception of these actions fits well with Kristeva’s remarks about some of the characteristics of linear time: “time as project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding; time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history.”21 Ariadne conceptualizes the past as marked by ideas of departure, progression and arrival. And, in Ariadne’s rendition in these verses, linear time leads to pain, as she now is forced to look back on these moments alone and abandoned on Naxos. Moreover, the phrase “in the first place” (tempore primo, 64.171) casts its force over Ariadne’s entire wish, as if these events were naturally teleological and their linear progress could only have been halted by removing this first deed. Yet, even as men’s deeds are characterized as starting a narrative and as shaping time into a linear force, Ariadne stops the movement they initiate. Indeed, as she continues to stand on Naxos’ shore, she moves from remembering a linear past to shaping time into a recursive force and implicating Theseus within that structure. As Ariadne discovers when she awakens on Naxos, she has been abandoned in spite of the help she gave Theseus and the love he professed. Ariadne appeals to the Eumenides.22 These deities, given their connection with retribution for earlier wrongs, are themselves connected with a cyclical conception of time, as they seek to exact punishments equivalent to prior crimes. Ariadne’s opening invocation of the Eumenides makes this connection between past and present apparent. She first claims that “you punish men’s deeds with an avenging penalty” (facta virum multantes vindice poena, 64.192), next asks them to “listen to my complaints” (meas audite querellas, 64.195) and lastly prays that “Theseus bring death23 upon himself and his people with such a mind as with which he left me here, alone” (quali solam Theseus me mente reliquit, / tali mente, deae, funestet seque suosque, 64.200–1). Invoking female goddesses associated with vengeance, Ariadne seeks to make time cyclical. Her addresses to the goddesses in lines 193 and 201 form a ring structure and thereby accentuate the repetitive temporal structures she calls on the Eumenides to effect. The specific punishment that Ariadne requests emphasizes Theseus’ loss of temporal control. She asks that the goddesses send Theseus home “with such a mind as with which he left me here, alone” (quali solam Theseus me mente reliquit, / tali mente, 64.200–1), a prayer that sets up the future as a repetition of the past not planned by Theseus. Earlier characterizations of Theseus leave no doubt about the particular mental state Ariadne would like to see inflicted upon him. Ariadne herself uses the term “forgetful” (immemor, 64.135) to describe him earlier in her speech, while the poem’s narrator terms him the “the forgetful youth” (immemor … iuvenis, 64.58) and remarks that he left Ariadne “with a forgetful breast” (immemori … pectore, 64.123). Now, Ariadne wishes that this

Gendered patterns  109 particular mental state return to Theseus once more. These repeated attributions of forgetfulness to Theseus imply that he did not successfully retain information over time. More suggestively, though, this characterization of the hero strips away his agency over time and commemoration, as he has the power neither to remember the past nor to control how, and by whom, he is remembered. When Theseus’ suffering echoes the earlier pain he caused, this reifies the cyclical temporal structure Ariadne called on the Eumenides to create. Having been told by his father Aegeus to raise a white sail to signal his safety when he returns to Athens, Theseus forgets, and Aegeus commits suicide by leaping into the sea. Catullus first reveals that “Theseus let all things slip away, in a state of forgetfulness” (oblito dimisit pectore cuncta, 64.208) and then, after describing Aegeus’ death, Catullus makes clear just what caused this fatal mistake: “Theseus himself took back such a sorrow as he himself inflicted upon Ariadne with his forgetful mind” (Theseus, qualem Minoidi luctum / obtulerat mente immemori, talem ipse recepit, 64.247–8). Time becomes cyclical. According to Ariadne’s wish, Theseus suffers the same forgetfulness with which he had left her on Naxos, and he feels the same sort of loss with the death of his father as she felt with the Minotaur’s death.24 In Ariadne’s earlier recollection of the past, linear time occasioned her own pain, as Theseus’ arrival on Crete ineluctably led to her abandonment on Naxos. Now though, as the ekphrasis comes to a close, Ariadne’s wish effects a new end to the tale. A few lines later Bacchus will arrive on Naxos and take Ariadne as his bride, yet Theseus’ story closes with a deed that repeats the past and gives rise to his own suffering.

3 Weaving the future: repetition and the Fates Outside the ekphrasis, Catullus’ poem offers another instance of women’s words and activities encapsulating men’s deeds in a cyclical temporal structure. Here also, there is a conflict between linear and repetitive temporal modalities, as the Fates prophesy the future and, in doing so, enclose Achilles’ deeds within the temporal structure of their song. At the same time, their prophecy itself emphasizes how the meaning of Achilles’ actions are commemorated and defined through women’s actions and women’s suffering. The Fates use a typically feminine mode of production to structure time. “Throughout Greco-Roman culture, weaving fabric is women’s work,”25 and the Fates’ song is closely connected with their constant spinning of thread from wool. The time the Fates structure does not exclude men and linear action, but rather enfolds them within a repetitive temporal modality and sets female suffering as one of the prime forces determining the meaning of their deeds. Soon after the poem’s ekphrasis is complete, Catullus’ description of the Fates connects their control of time with feminine actions and ideas of repetition. Before they sing their prophecy for the immortal guests at Peleus and Thetis’ wedding, Catullus offers a description of the Fates that, like a miniature ekphrasis itself, halts the poem’s narrative progress. In eleven lines,26 the poet treats the Fates’ manipulation of their wool, threads and spindle. The section ends with a vivid link

110  Aaron M. Seider between their singing and spinning: “then plucking the fleeces, with a clear voice they poured out such fates in divine song, a song that no age will later convict of dishonesty” (haec tum clarisona vellentes vellera voce / talia divino fuderunt carmine fata, / carmine, perfidiae quod post nulla arguet aetas, 64.320–2). This detailed description associates the Fates with a cyclical action that nearly stands outside of time itself and will structure their prophecy of the future. In a certain sense, their actions, even though they are coupled with a prophecy that unrolls future time, belong to what Kristeva terms “a monumental temporality.”27 In addition to repeated time, Kristeva also associates monumental time with the female. “All-encompassing and infinite,” this temporality is “without cleavage or escape … [and] has so little to do with linear time (which passes) that the very word ‘temporality’ hardly fits.”28 The Fates’ work is termed “an eternal task” (aeternum … laborem, 310), while the eight imperfect verbs used to describe them emphasize the continuous and repetitive nature of their ever-lasting actions.29 At the same time, the mechanics of their spinning are themselves circular and hint at ideas of repetition. When the Fates pull the wool off with their fingers to form it into a thread, they twirl the “spindle” (fusum, 64.314), which in turn is weighted down by a “rounded whorl” (tereti … turbine, 64.314) that maintains the spindle’s speed while it spins. For the Fates, this mechanism of prophecy emphasizes the circular nature of time as well and reveals their ability to convert an unordered and inchoate mass (the wool of the distaff, so to speak) into an ordered and legible future (the threads around the spindle).30 The Fates’ song, which centers on Achilles, further develops women’s role in shaping social memory through its repetitive form and persistent focus on female commemoration. On a formal level, their song’s refrain sets a prototypically female activity as the metronome of Achilles’ life. This refrain first occurs near their song’s beginning, when it is folded into their address to their spindles: “but you, run, spindles, drawing out the weft that the fates follow, run” (sed vos, quae fata sequuntur, / currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi, 64.326–7). The order in line 327, “Run, spindles, drawing out the weft, run,” will be repeated ten more times in the Fates’ song, with each repetition standing on its own as an independent unit of syntax.31 Here, though, in its first use, the Fates’ injunction makes the link between the activity of spinning and fate explicit. The noun “weft” (subtegmina 64.327) is the antecedent of the relative pronoun “that” (quae 64.326), and the fates follow the thread spun by the Fates. Thus, whenever this verse reappears, whether it be at the end of a description of Achilles’ slain foes or his own grave, there is a connection between this feminine activity and the hero’s life. Indeed, the injunction “Run, spindles, drawing out the weft, run” (currite ducentes subtegmina, currite, fusi) places Achilles’ deeds within the rhythm of a quotidian yet impactful female activity, as the repetition of the imperative “run” (currite) has an effect of closure.32 Alongside these images of the Fates’ spinning, instances of female mourning and sacrifice dominate Achilles’ funeral and his foes’ burials, further establishing women as having a determinative role in controlling how men will be remembered. Through the suffering of these women, the commemoration of Achilles’

Gendered patterns  111 actions will be given meaning. Death is a moment when a standardized commemoration of an individual may become crystallized, and when the Fates describe the burials of Achilles’ foes, the dead men’s mothers hold center stage: Often mothers will sing of his illustrious virtues and bright deeds  348 at their sons’ funerals, when they will loosen their unkempt hair from their white heads,  350 and they will mark their withered chests with weak hands. Run, spindles, drawing out the weft, run.33 For Achilles too, a woman is connected with his tomb. In the final verses that treat his life, the sacrifice of the Trojan princess Polyxena is highlighted. The image of Polyxena, sacrificed on Achilles’ tomb, ends the Fates’ narrative of his existence,34 and it is a portrait of pitiful loss and bodily disfigurement, not everlasting glory. While Polyxena’s link with the Fates continues to establish that women define the commemorations of men, the activities of the Fates and the mortal women they describe are not completely equivalent. Polyxena and the mothers of Achilles’ victims define men’s activities through their physical and emotional pain. The concatenation of their losses, first in the sacrifices of their sons and then in Polyxena’s sacrifice of her life, create a compounding of trauma that combats the linear movement generated by Achilles’ glorious deeds. The Fates, though, fashion temporal structures and meaning without suffering themselves, and, as female internal narrators, they enclose Achilles’ life and deeds with the cyclical structure of their song. In terms of the social memory of the lives of Achilles and his conquered foes, namely those memories that are voiced by members of a group and are “relevant to and shared by the group,”35 these commemorations are crafted by women and enshrined in repetitive acts of mourning and weaving rather than in history’s linear narrative.

4 Temporal connections Both the ekphrasis and the main narrative of poem 64 showcase the interactions between linear and repetitive temporal modalities, and in each instance women define cyclical temporal structures that encapsulate men’s deeds and their linear movement. While the gendering of linear time as masculine and cyclical time as feminine matches the perspective of Roman gender binaries and Kristeva’s analysis of time and gender, the dominance of cyclical over linear time destabilizes these typical associations. Two features of the poem further undermine assumptions about the relationship between gender and time: the couch coverlet that illustrates Ariadne and Theseus’ story and the links between Catullus’ present day and the poem’s narrative time. Through its status as a woven object, the coverlet is implicitly associated with women, yet the manner in which Catullus narrates the ekphrasis blurs gender boundaries, as he himself takes on the role of artisan. Given the pervasive links

112  Aaron M. Seider between weaving and women in Greco-Roman culture, the coverlet is gendered as a feminine creation, even though the poem never specifies its creator.36 Along with the cultural associations between women and weaving, earlier literary examples tend toward this same conclusion. In her first appearance in the Iliad, Helen weaves a robe that showcases battles from the Trojan War.37 Here, poet and character temporally merge, as Helen, in her artistry, creates her own record of the war’s toll.38 Moreover, Penelope’s act of weaving and unweaving associates woven products with female artistry in the Odyssey, as does Clytemnestra’s work in the Agamemnon. Yet, it is too simple to designate all of the scenes in the ekphrasis as the product of a woman’s work and to associate its cyclical mode of temporality with women. As Julia Haig Gaisser points out, Catullus’ ekphrasis is unique in that it almost entirely leaves out descriptions of the coverlet as a physical object. In fact “only two of the many scenes in Ariadne’s story are actually described as being on the coverlet.”39 The poem’s internal audience, the human wedding guests who view this coverlet, only see Ariadne standing on Naxos’ shore and Bacchus’ later arrival, while the poem’s external audience, its readers, envision these two scenes along with the actions in Crete, Ariadne’s lengthy lament, and Aegeus’ subsequent death.40 Moreover, as Hunter Gardner notes, the “easy linearity” of the movement from Theseus’ departure to Bacchus’ appearance is confounded, “since the poet insists on returning to the heroine in her moment of abandonment.”41 This conflict showcases the power of the artist to shape how a story is narrated by a speaker and remembered by its audience. While the repetitive construction of time is typically associated with women, this ekphrasis calls attention to Catullus’ role as author and, in so doing, it associates him with this temporal modality as well.42 Moments of temporal discord between different aspects of the poem, along with an emphasis on the ability of the artist to shape the perception of time, further emphasize Catullus’ role in constructing the poem and its systems of time. The most blatant temporal discord concerns the question of which ship was the first to sail on the ocean. As discussed above, Catullus unambiguously designates the Argo as the first vessel to voyage on the sea,43 a primacy that creates a multiplicity of perspectives between the sailors and Nereids. Yet, the ekphrasis, which shows events that transpired prior to Peleus and Thetis’ marriage, unambiguously reveals that another ship had already set sail, as here “Ariadne watches Theseus sailing off with his swift fleet” (Thesea cedentem celeri cum classe tuetur, 64.53). Ostentatiously displayed at the ekphrasis’ very beginning, Theseus’ ship speeds away. In fact, in a move that seems designed to draw the reader’s eyes, this vessel is the object of Ariadne’s gaze. This difficulty is one of Catullus’ own making. Typical accounts of the Argo place its voyage prior to the story of Theseus and Ariadne, but Catullus calls attention to his reversal of this chronology.44 This discord, just like the discord between the scenes from the coverlet visible to the poem’s internal audience and the events Catullus recounts related to these scenes, highlights the role of the artist in constructing systems of time.45

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5 Conclusion Through emphasizing his own role as narrator, Catullus links himself with Ariadne and the Fates as well as with the cyclical temporal modalities they construct, and this focus on time raises questions about the temporal modalities of Catullus’ own social and political milieu. In the poem’s final verses, Catullus places the poem in his present day and points out the discord in the relations between humans and gods. In contrast with earlier times, when the gods would mingle with mortals, the crimes of Catullus’ age have polluted the human race to such an extent that the gods no longer visit mortals, nor allow themselves to be seen by them.46 The poem’s final verses illustrate the distance that separates mortal from immortal. A few lines before the poem’s end, Catullus emblematizes the discord that fractures Roman society by describing how brother kills brother, a father yearns to possess his son’s bride through his offspring’s death, and an impious mother lies with her unknowing child, an act whose impiety stains the Romans’ “household gods” (penates, 64.404). With the image of these gods marking the poem’s close, Catullus directs its concluding words to his own society and the question of whether it might return to an earlier, more just state of existence. The poem’s dominant temporal modes could offer a glimmer of hope, but the end of Catullus’ poem emphasizes that a cyclical mode of temporality is impossible for Roman society. The Fates and Ariadne fashion recursive temporal structures that influence how male figures are remembered, and such cyclical temporal patterns could portend the existence of a narrative wherein Roman society returns to its earlier, more pious ways. At the same time, though, as Catullus shows the existence of these patterns, he inscribes them within a poem that emphasizes artists’ power to fashion time in a manner of their own choosing. Catullus’ own art is studded with temporal inconsistencies and perspectival conflicts: the Argo is the earliest ship, but it is preceded by another vessel; and the poem’s interior audience sees one story on the couch coverlet, while the poem’s readers view a different one in its ekphrasis. From this perspective, Catullus characterizes the cyclical modalities associated with the poem’s female narrators and with himself as a conception of time that, like all others, is constructed. At the end of poem 64, this construction is not available to the Romans. Here, no Roman can stand like the unfairly abandoned Ariadne and justly call on the gods for revenge, and the Romans have driven off any goddesses who, like the Parcae, might prophesy a return to an earlier, more upright morality. These cyclical modalities are set beyond the reach of a society riven by moral decline and civil war. Instead, even as he still fashions every facet of its last verses, Catullus steps back to allow the Romans to construct their own temporal narrative through their deeds, and, in Catullus’ rendition, these deeds lead the Romans themselves and poem 64 down a path that is as bleak as it is linear.

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Notes 1 As Thomson 1998: 438 notes, there is “an enormous amount of scholarly literature … gathered around poem 64.” Thomson 1998: 438 and Trimble 2012 offer helpful introductions to this scholarship. My aim here is an engagement with work on the poem directly relevant to the themes discussed in this chapter. 2 Catullus’ poem 64 is often termed an epyllion. Thomson 1998: 388–9 and Trimble 2012 describe the main features of epyllia and how they relate to Catullus 64. Gutzwiller: 1981 and Baumbach and Bär: 2012 discuss the form in greater detail. Robinson 2006: 29 considers the relationship between Catullus’ poem and earlier epic. 3 For this translation of sensit, see Fordyce 1961: ad loc. 4 Cat. 64.11–21. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 5 Latin text from Thomson 1998; see Thomson 1998: ad 64.11 for discussion of the text of this line. 6 See OLD 4, where this verse is listed. 7 See OLD 1 and 3, respectively. 8 See Thompson 1998: ad loc. on this personification. 9 Wills 1996: 402 remarks on the triple anaphora in 64.19–21, where the different forms of Thetis show an “Alexandrian virtuosity.” Triple anaphora is relatively rare in Latin (Wills 1996: 403), and these lines’ focus on time would thus be emphasized all the more. Gardner 2007: 170n.54 also notes the high incidence of indications of time in the poem’s first fifty verses. 10 Kristeva 1981. 11 As part of her consideration of poem 64 and, specifically, Ariadne, Gardner 2007: 149– 56 offers an extensive discussion of Kristeva’s writings on time. 12 Kristeva 1981: 16–18. 13 Gardner 2007 and 2013: 3–4 and 177–80 show how these temporal structures described by Kristeva may be applied productively to Roman culture. 14 See Doherty 1995, who analyzes the role of the Sirens as internal narrators within the Odyssey and considers specific questions about the frame that encloses them and their potential “power … to subvert the hierarchy of narrative control” (86). 15 On Catullus’ frequent interrogations of gender norms, see Zetzel 1983: 264 and 266; Skinner 1991: 10–11 and 1993: 109; Selden 1992: 498; Janan 1994: 29, 48, 55, 58, 67, 112, and 145; Fitzgerald 1995: 34–5; Greene 1998: xiv, 1, 5, 11, 33, and 49; Wray 2001; Woodman 2002: 58–9; Greene 2006: 50 and 56; Manwell 2007: 125; Clark 2008; Gale 2012: 209–10; Hutchinson 2012: 73–4; and Seider 2016. On performance, masculinity, and the ancient world, see Gunderson 2000 and Jones 2012: 6–12. Manwell 2007: 113–16 and Masterson 2014: 22–8 offer overviews of the study of Roman masculinity. 16 See Kristeva 1981: 16–18. 17 In her discussion of this section of poem 64, Gardner 2007: 170 likewise notes Theseus’ association with linear time. Regarding Ariadne, Gardner 2007: 170–3 links “Ariadne’s experience of abandonment” with Kristeva’s conception of monumental time. While the repeated focus on the moment of abandonment does create an atmosphere of time “without cleavage or escape” (Kristeva 1981: 16), I argue in this section that the revenge that Ariadne eventually gains creates a cyclical temporal pattern. 18 Cat. 64.71–87. 19 As Thomson 1998: ad loc. discusses, the text of line 73 is uncertain, and both Ellis 1876: ad loc. and Fordyce 1961: ad loc. advocate illa tempestate, ferox quo ex tempore Theseus. Whether the line is printed as in Thomson or as in Ellis and Fordyce, though, there is a pronounced emphasis on the temporal link between Ariadne’s misery and Theseus’ arrival on Crete. Ellis 1876: ad loc. remarks that Catullus returns to this very moment in lines 86 and 171. 20 Cat. 64.171–6. 21 Kristeva 1981: 17.

Gendered patterns  115 22 Cat. 64.192–201. 23 For this translation of funestet, see Ellis 1876: ad loc. and Thomson 1998: ad loc. 24 Thomson 1998: ad loc. observes how luctus refers to Ariadne’s grief over the Minotaur and implies a similar closeness in affection between Theseus and his father. Gardner 2007: 160 notes how Ariadne “disturbs the heroic progress of Theseus and the paternal order he supports.” 25 Trimble 2013: 1379 writes this in the context of a consideration of weaving in Vergil’s poetry. For more discussion of weaving, see Chapter 1 in this volume. 26 Cat. 64.309–19. 27 Kristeva 1981: 16. 28 Kristeva 1981: 16. 29 Those eight verbs are “were resting” (residebant, 64.309); “were plying” (carpebant, 64.310); “was holding back” (retinebat, 64.311); “was shaping” (formabat, 64.313); “was turning” (versabat, 64.314); “was making equal” (aequabat, 64.315); “were clinging” (haerebant, 64.316); “were guarding” (custodibant, 64.319). 30 Alfaro 2016: 279–80 considers in detail the symbolism of the different aspects of the Fates’ spinning. 31 These repetitions occur in 64.333, 337, 342, 347, 352, 356, 361, 365, 371, 375, and 381. 32 See Wills 1996: 97 on the “closural capacity” of this line pattern. Beyers (1960) offers further analysis of the tone of the refrain and its impact on the structure of the Fates’ song. 33 Cat. 64. 348–52. 34 Thomson 1998: ad 369 notes how the use of victima for Polyxena has a “horrific and pathetic effect.” Catullus’ emphasis on how women’s laments enfold men’s lives reflects the situation in the Iliad, particularly at its end, where the last five of the six laments for Hector are spoken by women (see the list of laments in the Iliad in Tsagalis 2004: 28). 35 Seider 2013: 22. For more discussion of and bibliography on social memory, see Fentress and Wickham 1992; Assmann 2010; and Seider 2013: 22n.91. 36 Alfaro 2016: 280 comments on the fabrication of such coverlets. 37 Hom. Il. 3.125–8. 38 Robinson 2006: 31 remarks on this scene’s relevance to poem 64 and how “Helen’s tapestry is invested with special significance as a poetic medium itself, as a sign.” 39 Gaisser 2012: 155. 40 Gaisser 2012: 155–61 considers the ekphrasis of the coverlet and its various audiences. 41 Gardner 2007: 168. 42 Trimble 2013: 1379 remarks how Catullus, Vergil, and Ovid all link “weaving and poetry,” and this link in Catullus would only encourage the association of the two. Robinson 2006: 31–3 discusses earlier connections between poetry and textiles as well as their potential relationship in poem 64 and shows how in Catullus’ poem “woven cloth and spun thread” are used as “constant symbols of poetic creation” (54). 43 Cat. 64.11–21. 44 Weber 1983; Gardner 2007: 162n.38 and 170–1; and Gaisser 2012: 154 offer overviews of this temporal contradiction and note various ways in which Catullus calls attention to it. Moreover, as Armstrong 2013: 57 points out, the voyage of the Argo is in many ways presented as metapoetic, an association that would further highlight the poem’s temporal contradiction and Catullus’ agency in creating it. Thomas 1982: 145 writes that the first 18 verses of this poem stand “as Catullus’ major polemical demonstration of his literary affiliations.” 45 Doherty 1995: 88–9 explores similar points about multiple potential narrators and different potential focalizations within the Odyssey. 46 Cat. 64.405–8.

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Bibliography Alfaro, C. 2016. “Colchis, Wool and the Spinning Fates in Catullus Carmen 64.” In Spinning Fates and the Song of the Loom: The Use of Textiles, Clothing and Cloth Production as Metaphor, Symbol and Narrative Device in Greek and Latin Literature, edited by G. Fanfani, M. Harlow and M-L. Nosch, 271–84. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Armstrong, R. 2013. “Journeys and Nostalgia in Catullus.” CJ 109: 43–71. Assmann, J. 2010. “Communicative and Cultural Memory.” In A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies, edited by A. Erll and A. Nünning, 109–18. Berlin: De Gruyter. Baumbach, M. and S. Bär, eds. 2012. Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and its Reception. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Beyers, E. 1960. “The Refrain in the Song of the Fates in Catullus C. 64 (v. 323–81).” Acta Classica 3: 86–9. Clark, C. A. 2008. “The Poetics of Manhood? Nonverbal Behavior in Catullus 51.” CP 103: 257–81. Cohen, B., ed. 1995. The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Doherty, L. E. 1995. “Sirens, Muses, and Female Narrators in the Odyssey.” In The Distaff Side: Representing the Female in Homer’s Odyssey, edited by B. Cohen, 81–92. New York, NY: Oxford University Press. Du Quesnay, I. and T. Woodman, eds. 2012. Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ellis, R. 1876. A Commentary on Catullus. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Erll, A. and A. Nünning, eds. 2010. A Companion to Cultural Memory Studies. Berlin: De Gruyter. Fanfani, G., M. Harlow and M-L. Nosch. 2016. Spinning Fates and the Song of the Loom: The Use of Textiles, Clothing and Cloth Production as Metaphor, Symbol and Narrative Device in Greek and Latin Literature. Oxford: Oxbow Books. Fentress, J. and C. Wickham. 1992. Social Memory. Oxford: Blackwell. Fitzgerald, W. 1995. Catullan Provocations: Lyric Poetry and the Drama of Position. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fordyce, C. J. 1961. Catullus. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gaisser, J. H. 2012. Catullus. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Gale, M. 2012. “Putting on the Yoke of Necessity: Myth, Intertextuality and Moral Agency in Catullus 68.” In Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers, edited by I. Du Quesnay and T. Woodman, 184–211. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Gardner, H. H. 2007. “Ariadne’s Lament: The Semiotic Impulse of Catullus 64.” TAPA 137: 147–79. Gardner, H. H. 2013. Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Greene, E. 1998. The Erotics of Domination: Male Desire and the Mistress in Latin Love Poetry. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Green, E. 2006. “Catullus, Caesar, and Roman Masculine Identity.” Antichthon 40: 49–64. Gunderson, E. 2000. Staging Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Performance in the Roman World. Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan University Press. Gutzwiller, K. 1981. Studies in the Hellenistic Epyllion. Königstein/Ts.: Anton Hain. Hexter, R. and D. Selden, eds. 1992. Innovations of Antiquity. New York, NY: Routledge. Hubbard, T. K., ed. 2014. A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell.

Gendered patterns  117 Hutchinson, G. O. 2012. “Booking Lovers: Desire and Design in Catullus.” In Catullus: Poems, Books, Readers, edited by I. Du Quesnay and T. Woodman, 48–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Janan, M. 1994. “When the Lamp is Shattered”: Desire and Narrative in Catullus. Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press. Jones, M. 2012. Playing the Man: Performing Masculinities in the Ancient Greek Novel. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Signs 7: 13–35. Manwell, E. 2007. “Gender and Masculinity.” In A Companion to Catullus, edited by M. B. Skinner, 110–28. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Masterson, M. 2014. “Studies of Ancient Masculinity.” In A Companion to Greek and Roman Sexualities, edited by T. K. Hubbard, 17–30. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Robinson, T. J. 2006. “Under the Cover of Epic: Pretexts, Subtexts, and Textiles in Catullus’ Carmen 64.” Ramus 35: 29–62. Seider, A. M. 2013. Memory in Vergil’s Aeneid: Creating the Past. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Seider, A. M. 2016. “Catullan Myths: Gender, Mourning, and the Death of a Brother.” CA 35: 279–314. Selden, D. 1992. “Caveat lector: Catullus and the Rhetoric of Performance.” In Innovations of Antiquity, edited by R. Hexter and D. Selden, 461–512. New York, NY: Routledge. Skinner, M. B. 1991. “The Dynamics of Catullus Obscenity: cc. 37, 58, and 11.” SyllClass 3: 1–11. Skinner, M. B. ed. 2007. A Companion to Catullus. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Thomas, R. F. 1982. “Catullus and the Polemics of Poetic Reference (Poem 64.1–18).” AJP 103: 144–64. Thomas, R. F. and J. M. Ziolkowski, eds. 2013. The Virgil Encyclopedia. 3 vols. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Thomson, D. F. S. 1998. Catullus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Trimble, G. 2012. “Catullus 64: The Perfect Epyllion?” In Brill’s Companion to Greek and Latin Epyllion and Its Reception, edited by M. Baumbach and S. Bär, 55–79. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Trimble, G. 2013. “Weaving.” In The Virgil Encyclopedia, edited by R. F. Thomas and J. M. Ziolkowski, vol. 3, 1379. Chichester: Wiley Blackwell. Tsagalis, C. 2004. Epic Grief: Personal Laments in Homer’s Iliad. Berlin: De Gruyter. Weber, C. 1983. “Two Chronological Contradictions in Catullus 64.” TAPA 113: 263–71. Wills, J. 1996. Repetition in Latin Poetry: Figures of Allusion. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Woodman, A. J. 2002. “Biformis Vates: The Odes, Catullus and Greek Lyric.” In Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace, edited by A. J. Woodman and D. Feeney, 53–64. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Woodman, A. J. and D. Feeney, eds. 2002. Traditions and Contexts in the Poetry of Horace. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wray, D. 2001. Catullus and the Poetics of Roman Manhood. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Zetzel, J. E. G. 1983. “Catullus, Ennius, and the Poetics of Allusion.” ICS 8: 251–66.

7

Delia’s Saturnian day Gender and time in Tibullan love elegy1 Hunter H. Gardner

1 Introduction Time in Augustan elegy moves as unevenly as the couplets defining its meter. The Propertian, Ovidian and Tibullan amatores (“lovers”) mark the painful hours endured in the absence of their puella (“girl, girlfriend”) and constantly signal their youth and developmental delays, all while praising their beloved’s beauty as an elegant and timeless artifact,2 rather than a biological and deteriorating organism. Yet the genre also looks regularly to the future that awaits both the poetlover and his beloved at the end of the elegiac project: the male amator draws a gradual distinction between his own future—Tibullus praising Messalinus’ military accomplishments,3 Propertius writing of Roman history and aetiology4 or Ovid embracing long-deferred tragedy5—and that of his female beloved, who is frequently imagined as a grey-haired anus (“old woman”)6 or perhaps lena (“procuress”).7 We can better understand why time impacts men and women differently in elegy by examining how, as other chapters in this collection demonstrate, temporal modes are gendered in the Western imagination. In her essay “Le Temps de Femmes,” or “Women’s Time,” French theorist Julia Kristeva observes that these gendered temporal modes commonly attribute properties of cyclicality, repetition and transcendence of historical time to the feminine subject.8 Masculine subjectivity, in contrast, is defined by the forward momentum of history and teleology, in other words, by the same linear trajectory to which the amator considers acquiescing, after he has renounced his cyclical dalliances with his beloved. Kristeva’s articulation of women’s time also links the feminine subject with spatiality. In her doctoral thesis, La Révolution du langage poétique, the theorist famously appropriates the Platonic chora as a matrix (and maternally inflected) space in which the regulation of biological drives fuels the production of language; she invokes the chora again in “Women’s Time” as a model for female subjectivity in relation to the symbolic order.9 Le temps des femmes fails to progress beyond spatial boundaries and is characterized by confinement (… sans faille et sans fuite),10 insofar as its repression is necessary for sustaining the functions of the symbolic order. Like the drives of the chora, women’s time—as it conforms to biological rhythms—operates by repetition, eternity

Delia’s Saturnian day  119 and cyclicality. This temporal modality is the antithesis of “cursive” time (borrowed from Nietzsche’s use of the term 11), understood as “… project, teleology, linear and prospective unfolding: time as departure, progression, and arrival—in other words, the time of history.”12 Just as women’s time finds its structural analogue in the chora, and, in fact, operates like the repetitive drives that underlie language, cursive time, “readily labeled masculine,”13 is reflected by the linear movement that determines syntax and the operations of symbolic language. As observed above, Kristeva is not alone in exploring this gendered conceptual antithesis and its relationship to the production of discourse. Adriana Cavarero uses the figure of Penelope to demonstrate how the heroine’s weaving and unweaving within the women’s quarters of the palace on Ithaca displaces her from the historical progress associated with masculine subjectivity: “Penelope’s time cannot be touched by events … Unlike the pressing intrusion of the ‘new’ that characterizes action, this tempo, in fact, has the cadence of an infinite repetition.”14 Time for the elegiac puella is similarly impervious to historical events: she is often depicted in a virtually sealed-off house, or behind closed doors, and her movements are frequently bound by repetition. Within enclosed spaces, she anxiously awaits her lover, who mythologizes her devotion and explores her potential for transcending the linear operations of the symbolic. The following analysis focuses on the temporal dynamics defining the relationship between one elegiac amator, that of Tibullus, and his beloved Delia. It identifies a pronounced consistency in the language of repetition, delay and confinement in those elegiac vignettes that cast the puella as a dutifully waiting or abandoned beloved. By isolating such properties and setting them in a theoretical context that establishes their meaning within larger discourses of power and subversion, I demonstrate why this particular construction of woman, defined by these properties, was so appealing to poets writing in the early Principate. In the initial section of this chapter, I sketch the temporal pressures that impacted the elite male of Augustan Rome, whose perspective is reflected in the self-representation of the elegiac amator. Such temporal pressures have explanatory value insofar as they suggest an accelerated life course for elite men in the early Principate, when compared to the temporal norms governing coming-of-age in the late Republic, and clarify the puella’s (a-)temporal status as a desirable alternative to such a course. From there, I focus on how the temporal properties ascribed to poet and puella thwart or propel the progress of the elegiac affair, with particular reference to Delia and Tibullus as represented in poems 1.1 and 1.3. In concluding, I return to the larger context of Roman discourse to suggest that the puella assumes in elegy a function similar to some iterations of the Golden Age in Augustan poetry. The Saturnian day that colludes with Delia to thwart the Tibullan amator’s departure is not simply one in a series of bad omens, but instead points to a more fundamental kinship between the puella and the Golden Age, as alternatives to those historical imperatives that shaped the Principate.

120  Hunter H. Gardner

2 Arrested development: youth’s prerogatives in the early Principate No single model of masculine subjectivity defines the amatores of Augustan elegy, but scholars have rightly noted consistent features of their representation: all three describe themselves as young men, perhaps of the equestrian class, born outside of Rome into families of (at least formerly) significant wealth.15 As such, these poets foreground their capacity for a kind of upward mobility that they will conspicuously fail to use. The elegists’ propensity for describing their erotic life as a kind of militia (militia amoris) directs us to interpret the amatores’ position on their course of life as an alternative to the stage of “soldiering” that a more civic-minded young man would undertake at the start of his career.16 We regularly encounter the poet-lover comparing his own reluctance to progress on the cursus honorum (“course of public offices”) to the lifestyles and choices of more ambitious peers and patrons.17 Such claims, moreover, are made against a legislative background in which the Princeps was promoting marriage and fatherhood at a younger age and enacting policies meant to encourage the participation of young men in his administration.18 The status of the beloved has been notoriously difficult to determine, and we are misguided in looking for her precise extratextual analogue in contemporary Roman society.19 For the purposes of determining the textual life course of the puella, however, we cannot ignore references that mark her as unmarriageable, at least by the poet20 or by members of the wealthiest, senatorial class.21 Moreover, the puella’s regular depiction as lacking any male kin or guardian, her frequent association with a lena or anus, and her material demands encourage readers to identify the elegiac beloved as a courtesan (meretrix), whose course of life is not shaped by the wedlock that defines the future of the more socially orthodox matrona (“married woman, matron”).22 The puella is clearly represented as unmarriageable when the poet needs her to be: in particular, when he wishes to segregate her from social and familial entanglements or to threaten her with a lonely, impoverished old age. As Sharon James argues, the puella, as an unmarriageable courtesan, provided a relatively unregulated arena for poetic discourse, since she falls “below the radar of inquisitive and intrusive public notice.”23 My reading of Augustan elegy develops the notion of the puella as an alternative to marriage within the context of a public life marked by increased surveillance. Her distance from legitimate matrimony offered the poet a space for expressing his equivocations regarding coming-of-age in the novus ordo. This is not to say that these poets reject altogether the process of maturity; rather, they constantly question its expectations and proprieties. Tibullus’ amator, as we shall see, professes unwavering commitment to his beloved while also conceding the improprieties of love in old age. Extratextual ideals concerning the Roman life course—proprieties that govern the assumption of the toga virilis (“toga of manhood”), entrance into the cursus honorum and retirement from public life—offered Roman citizens a series of expectations for the future that the elegiac amatores will more or less reluctantly subvert. Augustus’ manipulations of both the individual’s life course and that of

Delia’s Saturnian day  121 the Roman state (e.g., through revision of various fasti, or “calendars,” or by the celebration of a new saeculum to mark the stability and prosperity of his administration)24 have remained an object of interest to scholars over the last 30 years.25 The life course of the elite male (equestrian and senatorial classes) appears most vulnerable to changes in civic expectations, both those expectations written into legal discourse concerning marriage and office-holding, and the less tangible pressures effected by transforming models of masculinity. The Princeps’ own representations as almost dangerously ambitious in his youth and as an eternally youthful Apollo, even in middle age, no doubt prompted young men to consider their own relative maturation.26

3 Hedging clauses: enjoying the iners vita, “While the Fates allow” Roman men more inured to the idea of a long, profligate youth might then reasonably adopt other temporal modes as a way of challenging new pressures on the life course.27 I now turn to the elegiac inertia championed by Tibullus as well as the delay and repetition that frequently accompany it, and examine how the ideal of inertia and the static existence it implies shape the life course and love story of the Tibullan amator. The poet’s sedentary inertia initially functions as a challenge to the ruptures, anguish and expectations identifiable with linear time and observed in the gendered temporal models of Kristeva and Cavarero. In the introductory poem of book one, the poet-lover expresses the hope that his frugality will afford him an “inactive life,”28 and then describes his labor as a rusticus sowing crops at just the right time: May my frugality lead me through (or “to”)29 an inactive life (iners vita), so long as my hearth shines with a constant fire. I myself will (may), as a field worker, sow tender vines at the right time (maturo tempore), nor would Hope desert me, but would always furnish heaps of crops and rich vintages in a full vat (1.5–10).30 Cairns has noted the irony of the Hellenistic poet’s espousal of life without “art,” and the etymological implications of in-ars would not have been lost on the ancient reader.31 More commonly, however, iners refers to a lack of activity or resistance to movement,32 the sort of movement undertaken by the acquisitive soldier, whose lifestyle is rejected in the poem’s introductory lines. While iners connotes “cowardliness” and “unmanliness,”33 and is consistent with the elegists’ tendencies to portray themselves as effeminate, this particular poetic context also activates a meaning of the adjective as resistant to forward momentum, especially movement along a prescribed temporal trajectory. Maturo tempore reflects the speaker’s awareness of temporal proprieties, but those that govern his rustic life are advertised as patently unorthodox, at least if applied to the elite Roman citizen. As Lee-Stecum notes, “in these lines the process underlying a conventional Roman career path is first revealed then comprehensively transformed.”34

122  Hunter H. Gardner The sense of developmental delay that presses upon the speaker’s course of life at the poem’s introduction becomes more salient in his self-representation as ideally segnis and iners, before his mistress’s door: he implores Messalla to gather the spoils of war, while he himself remains bound at the hard doors of his mistress: It is right for you to wage war on land and sea, Messalla, so that your house might display enemy spoils: the chains of a beautiful girl hold me bound, and I sit a doorkeeper before unyielding doors (duras fores). I do not care for praise, my Delia; so long as I am with you, I seek to be called sluggish and inactive (quaeso segnis inersque vocer).35 The Tibullan speaker positions himself primarily with respect to the widely roaming Messalla, whose accomplishments will speak to posterity and bring distinction to his family lineage. The amator, by contrast, denying his interest in future recognition, opts for present contentment with his mistress: he defines his own erotic ideal through spatial and temporal restriction, restriction that also, as Henkel has recently demonstrated,36 develops a literary polemic between epic’s steady forward momentum—signaled by Messalla’s viae37—and the halting gait of elegy. The speaker’s desire to be recognized as “sluggish” (segnis) enforces the impact of inertia by duplicating the moral connotations of idleness and lack of initiative (OLD segnis s.v. 3);38 and yet the adjective’s frequent use in describing physical movement as “slow” also clarifies the temporal dimension in which the amator wishes to dwell (OLD s.v. 1, 4). Despite the poet-lover’s insistence on temporal and spatial restriction, he betrays a preoccupation with the friction between appropriate and inappropriate timing, generated from the maturum tempus that governed the rhythms of his agricultural work in the opening lines of 1.1. Immediately following reminders of his physically constrained station (sedeo ad fores duras, 58), the poet-lover discloses how the “right time” impacts erotic subjects. He describes his deathbed scene, his suprema hora, and implores his mistress to make love while the Fates allow: Don’t hurt my shade, but spare your loosened hair, spare your tender cheeks (teneris genis). Meanwhile, while the Fates allow (dum fata sinunt), let’s make love: soon Death, his head covered in shadows, will come; soon sluggish old age (iners aetas) will creep up on us; nor will it be appropriate to make love and speak blandishments when our heads are grey. Now we must handle fickle love, while it is not shameful to break down doors, and it is pleasing to incite brawls.39 The poet speaks of the culmination of his mortal life, while embedding the moment in an erotic context.40 No longer isolated and enclosed behind “unyielding doors” (duras fores, 56), Delia’s status is rewritten as far from temporally or spatially resilient. She instead becomes subject to appropriate timing, like the tender vines planted by the poet as rusticus (teneras … vites, 7), vines anticipating

Delia’s Saturnian day  123 the very tender cheeks (teneris genis, 68) that the puella must avoid marring. Challenging Delia’s depiction as essentially immobile and the force behind the speaker’s immobility in the passage cited above, the poem’s conclusion hints at her malleable nature, as she is transformed into a pliant object of the speaker’s emotional manipulation.41 The fact that tener connotes a quality of age (“of tender age,” i.e., young, OLD s.v. 2) as forcefully as it describes a physical condition (“soft, delicate,” OLD s.v. 1), or erotic verse (OLD s.v. 6b), underscores Delia’s vulnerability to the very old age that the speaker has already deemed unsuitable for love. She is young now, but her future unfolds in syntax that limits her youth to the speaker’s present. The temporal dum–clauses that close the poem (dum Fata sinunt … dum frangere postes / non pudet), neatly described by Putnam as “hedging” clauses,42 point back to the original proviso that defined the lover as iners (tecum dum modo sim, 58) and forward to a time when erotic dalliances are no longer appropriate. As the meaning of iners is revised from “inactive” (but erotically content),43 to qualifying old age as “weak” and “impotent,” we can predict the gradual withering of an elegiac love in the current moment that will hardly be accommodated by old age (iners aetas, 71). The contrast between the uncertainties of a subjunctive provision in the lover’s isolated inertia with Delia44 and the resolute indicatives that address those conditions of human mortality at the close of poem 1.1 widens the gap between the lover’s ideals and the realities of which he becomes increasingly aware. As Putnam’s description of the accompanying clauses indicates, there is an element of practical foresight in the line, a contingency that secures an outlet for future endeavors just as it points to the ephemeral nature of erotic entanglements. The first-person plural verb, iungamus, haunts both lover and beloved with the specter of death. But the conclusion of poem 1.1 positions the poet-lover on the verge of a well-won Nachleben, with throngs of young men and women attending his funeral,45 and leaves Delia as one laudator among many, under the threat of the physical and temporal violence that will mar her cheeks.

4 Stumbling at the threshold: Delia’s Saturnian day In poem 1.3, Delia is—as her doorstep was in poem 1.1—configured initially as a means of resisting teleological pressure: failure of consulted omens to assuage Delia’s fear prompts the amator’s eager search for lingering delays (tardas moras, 1.3.16). Overcome by illness, Tibullus’ poet-lover has veered away from Messalla’s linear trajectory (ibitis Aegaeas sine me, Messalla, per undas, 1.3.1) and is cast as an Odysseus figure, lingering in Phaeacia, whose connotations of golden-age delights and easy converse with the divine momentarily extract him from the project of empire-building. In his musings, the amator looks fondly upon Saturn’s reign (quam bene Saturno vivebant rege, 1.3.35), a time before sea travel, when journeys abroad, or house doors, for that matter, did not separate lovers (priusquam/ tellus in longas est patefacta vias, 1.3.35–6). He will locate a similarly atemporal realm of erotic contentment in the underworld, in considering

124  Hunter H. Gardner death as a resolution to his current plight. Both spaces are, moreover, allocated with temporal properties linked with female subjectivity—repetition and eternity (“monumental” time)—properties illustrated elsewhere in the poem through Delia’s devotion to the goddess Isis. The first reference to Delia in poem 1.3 allows a narrative opportunity for reflection on the amator’s departure. Delia is cast initially as a puella relicta (an “abandoned” beloved) who attempts to secure her lover’s return first through consultation of the gods before their temples.46 She remains unconvinced that the speaker will ever reverse his advance into the realm of viae that, just as in poem 1.1, signal the teleological projects threatening his identity as a lover. Despite repetitively drawing sacred lots and receiving favorable omens, Delia looks back in tears: She drew the sacred lots from the boy’s hands three times: the boy brought back to her reassuring omens, three at a time. Everything predicted my return. Still she was never deterred from weeping and looking back at my departure. I myself, her comforter, after I had given my parting instructions, was anxiously seeking pretexts for delay. Or I pleaded as an excuse that birds and dire omens or the day sacred to Saturn held me back (Saturnive sacram me tenuisse diem).47 Delia’s attempt to thwart her lover’s departure marks her as occupying a distinctly feminine subject position, and the puella’s efforts here reinforce a fundamental link in the Tibullan corpus between repeated action and erotic efficacy.48 The mesmerizing anaphora of –re in lines 12–14 has the effect of an incantation, strengthening the power of Delia’s backward glance.49 As theorized by Kristeva and emphasized in Cavarero’s analysis of Homer’s Penelope, repetition (“the endless, cadenced sameness that Penelope weaves”),50 conceptually defines women as temporal subjects, and the poet-lover here capitalizes on that subjectivity to express his reluctance to participate in the expansion of empire. The burden of repetition shifts (ipse ego) at line 15, as focalization shifts to the amator, whose reaction, elaborated in three couplets, balances Delia’s: the amator also seeks slowing delays and invokes the day of Saturn, at first glance a superstitious pretext, but whose implications for hindering forward momentum become apparent in the subsequent account of the Golden Age. At this stage in the poet-lover’s recollections, the dies is merely one of many signa that confound his own repeated attempts to depart: “Oh, how often (quotiens) did I, on beginning the journey, say that my stumble at the gate had given me dire omens!”51 By renewing his delay ceaselessly at the threshold, the poet-lover not only reflects on Delia’s threefold test of omens, but complements her constant efforts at Isis’ shrine, as he imagines her assuming the position of an exclusus amator52 before closed temple doors: How is that Isis of yours any help to me, how does that bronze, struck time and again (totiens) with your hand, help, or how did it help, while you were

Delia’s Saturnian day  125 devoutly observing the ritual, that you washed yourself purely and (I remember) slept apart in a pure bed? Now, Goddess, now help me, for many painted tablets on your temples show that healing is possible; then Delia, paying back her vowed nights, may sit clad in linen and twice daily (bisque die) with hair unbound be obliged to speak your praises, distinguished among the Egyptian crowd.53 “Twice daily” Delia sings the praises of Isis, while “time and again” she beats back the bronze rattle in her worship of the goddess. Latin idiom encourages us to correlate the adverb totiens, despite its syntactic independence here, with the poet’s own repeated attempts to stall his departure (quotiens).54 As often as he fashions new excuses for delay, so many times does Delia beat her rattle in pleading reverence to the goddess. For the moment poet and puella share similarly feminized subject positions, in so far as both rely on distinct modes of repetition to forestall linear progress, or at least shelter those lovers exposed to its vagaries. Ritual and formal repetitions move to the level of narrative repetition, insofar as the goddess Isis imports her own elegiac tale of repeated loss and recovery. Isis’ rituals were marked by recognition of the goddess’s continuous lamentation, wanderings and eventual joy in the resurrection of her brother and consort Osiris.55 The Egyptian deity, as she is entreated by Delia in poem 1.3, establishes a template for the experience of the puella abandoned within the repetitive enclosure of women’s time. Isis, the goddess often associated with the courtesan class, as the poet’s repeated tua makes clear,56 is here cast in the role of both a puella clausa, “enclosed” in her sacred temple, and as a puella relicta, since the loss of her lover constitutes an integral part of her mythology. Just as the goddess will reunite with Osiris, so too may Delia hope to rejoin her poet-lover. The detail of ritual chastity (secubisse) codifies in a sacred context the separation of lovers that must be enacted and re-enacted within elegy’s erotic narrative. The repetitive temporality invoked in the rituals of both poet-lover and puella are soon complemented by invocation of another alternative to cursive time: that time before time, the Golden Age whose return had gained currency in verse of the triumviral period and early Principate. While there is some discrepancy among Augustan poets concerning the advantages of the Golden Age and its return, most acknowledge the possible correlation between the advent of a new golden saeculum and the advent of the Principate. Whereas Vergil, for instance, equivocates in casting the Golden Age as a bygone era57 but also predicting Saturn’s return, particularly in the figure of Augustus,58 Tibullus’ poetry explicitly relegates the Golden Age to a former, irretrievable past. His Saturn presides over a time before travel, war and agriculture: How well they used to live during Saturn’s reign (Saturno rege), before the earth was laid open in long roads (in longas vias)! Not yet had the pine ship defied azure waves (undas), and offered billowing sails to the winds. Nor had the wandering sailor, seeking profit in unknown lands, weighed down his raft with foreign goods. At that time the strong bull did not undergo the yoke, nor

126  Hunter H. Gardner did the horse chomp down on the bridle with tamed mouth; nor did any house have doors; there was no stone that marked off plough lands fixed in the fields; oak trees themselves used to provide honey. Of their own accord sheep offered udders filled with milk to carefree folks. There was no battle-line, no hostility, no wars (non acies, non ira fuit, non bella), nor (nec) had the cruel blacksmith forged a sword with pitiless artistry.59 Tibullus’ Saturn is twice within the poem distanced from art and agriculture as well as historical and imperial progress:60 the reference to Saturn’s kingship recalls efforts to delay the poet’s exploits, the dies Saturni that, along with other signa, hindered his departure from Delia in the first place. The echo thus reinforces the absence of travel associated with the Golden Age,61 and conceptually binds that age to the ritual devotions engaged in by poet and puella to prevent the speaker’s journey. Reference to “Saturn’s day,” in light of the poem’s following expansion on Saturnian conditions, thus marks the poet’s actions as “a self-imposed departure from the Garden of Eden.”62 The elegiac rewards of that Garden are, of course, contestable. As Miller has demonstrated, the Golden Age is fundamentally incompatible with the exclusivity and ownership sought through the genre’s erotic agenda.63 House doors are inconvenient for the amator who wants easy access to the beloved, but also necessary to keep out erotic rivals. The poet will return to the topics of sexual infidelity and exclusivity in book two, when he uses the language of the Golden Age to praise the prehistoric conditions of early humans.64 Yet for all its ideological contradictions, the temporality articulated through book one’s portrait of the Golden Age consistently aligns it with Delia as she is depicted impeding her lover through repeated ritual devotions. While the repetitions of the Golden Age emerge through verbal repetition rather than through a narrative of repeated actions, a pronounced and recurrent language of negativity shapes the amator’s concept of this period:65 after indicting the undas66 and vias67 that return the speaker to his opening predicament, the speaker excludes seafaring (nondum, 37), commerce (nec, 39–40), and animal husbandry (non … non, 41–2) from the Golden Age; nor did private property and land ownership exist (non … non, 43–4). After a single concession to the positive commodities of the age (honey and compliant sheep), he returns to repeatedly deny a place for the implements of war (non … non … non … nec, 47–8). In this way, the speaker constantly pushes back against the intrusion of those events that regularly threaten the cloistered enclaves of women’s time, signified through the Kristevan chora as well as through Penelope’s chambers, spaces both effected and abandoned by heroic teleologies: If measured against the action of the hero … this time is negative—it is a pure denial that takes place under the sign of the patriarchal order it intends to deny, implying that order. On the other hand, if its own measurements and standards become the basis of judgment, then this time carves out a feminine space where women belong to themselves.68

Delia’s Saturnian day  127 Models of masculine subjectivity (Messalla’s departure, the hero/amator’s return), in creating a frame for poem 1.3, make cursive measurements impossible to ignore, and thus determine the adamant denials that shape the amator’s golden-age musings. Poem 1.3’s final image of the dutiful Delia suggests that her initial representation as confined within a sacred space and association with an era before linear time will eventually unravel, like the threads of some tapestry that the puella ought to be weaving. As Putnam notes, a conjuring of Homer’s steadfast Penelope awaiting Odysseus, in its basic outline, mimics Isis’ separation from and reunion with Osiris, so aptly illustrated by Delia’s religious fervor.69 This particular iteration of the Penelope myth, however, weakens the cyclical assurances that the Isis tale offers earlier in the poem. The poem’s conclusion describes Delia, her female guardian, and young maids who work wool into the wee hours of the night. The poet-lover imagines returning unexpectedly, and his beloved running to greet him: But you, I pray, remain chaste (casta … maneas) and may a dutiful old woman (anus) sit by you as guardian. Let her tell you stories and measure out long threads from her full distaff. And may the girls around her, devoted to their weighty tasks, let up from their work little by little, wearied with sleep. Then suddenly I will come, nor will anyone announce my arrival beforehand, but I will appear to be at your side, sent from heaven. Then run to meet me on your bare feet, just as you are, with your hair disheveled. This I pray for; may splendid Aurora bring that shining morning star to us on her rosy steeds.70 The poet-lover can only hope that Delia will remain as loyal as Penelope—the adjective casta (“chaste”) applied to Delia is called into question through the subjunctive verb that begs her to remains so. The fact that she has an anus watching over her will do little to resolve his fears. Maltby, in citing parallels for the anus in elegy, with precedents from New Comedy, remarks that this figure “is not always in the role of the guardian of her mistress’ virtue.”71 To further complicate our ability to fit the elegiac puella into a model inspired by the dutiful Penelope, we observe that everyone in this tableau appears to be weaving, except Delia.72 Bright has argued that, after poem 1.3 and the speculative fidelity with which it concludes, the amator’s verse increasingly betrays disillusionment.73 The devoted beloved of 1.1, whose immobile status secured the poet-lover’s own resistance to venturing abroad with Messalla, has been supplanted, in the end, by a more tentative figure. Whether or not we attribute a chronological progression to the series of poems addressing love for Delia, there is an implied linear development to the poet’s experience as an amator. Thus the poem’s conclusion both hopes for unchanging fidelity (maneas) and implies, with its questionably attentive anus and hardly industrious Delia, that the chora, as well as the women’s time that defines it, must eventually succumb to symbolic pressures. Imagined as Penelope to an Odyssean lover who has been stranded in a Phaeacian never-land, Delia can be situated in a space dominated by women’s work, typified by the repetitive cycles of weaving, and refrain from any attempts to stray from her lover. At the same

128  Hunter H. Gardner time, her potential failure to reflect the idealized portrait that she inspires allows the poet to make a further advance into the very viae that he has so long decried. And in fact poem 1.3 also explores another outlet by which the lover may escape his current plight, the end point of linear time, death itself, in which there are no drives, no crises, indeed, no subjects. While scholars have reacted with ambivalence to the psychoanalyst’s death drive as the motivation for elegy’s preoccupation with mortality,74 Freud’s Thanatos—the final resting point and “stumbling block” of time associated with masculine subjectivity in Kristeva’s scheme75—is indispensable in poem 1.3 for understanding the properties that define both the Golden Age and its future tense alternative, Elysium.76 The routes toward death are identifiably linear (nunc leti mille repente viae, “now there are a thousand roads toward sudden death”)77 and in their wake leave the subject traced in the symbolic order, as imagined in the poet’s epitaph, where he describes his experience “wasted away by cruel death” (immiti consumptus morte), while following Messalla on land and sea (Messallam terra dum sequiturque mari).78 Following this stumbling block, however, the poet-lover enters another imagined eternity, the afterlife, which, like Saturn’s reign, is a realm not subject to the degenerative and progressive passage of historical time: Here (=campi Elysii) song and dance thrive, and birds flitting all about sweetly sing a tune from their slender throats; an uncultivated crop (non culta seges) bears cassia and throughout all the fields the kindly earth (terra benigna) thrives with fragrant roses. Young men frolic in a row with young girls (teneris … puellis) mingling among them, and continuously (assidue) join in the battles of love.79 As Whitaker has demonstrated, Tibullus’ Elysium echoes its golden-age counterpart most clearly in the uncultivated bounty (non culta, 1.3.61) that the kindly (benigna) earth produces.80 Moreover, the repetition we observed with respect to Tibullus’ account of Delia’s devotions and Saturn’s reign reasserts itself in the afterlife. While erotic desire motivates Elysium’s happy inhabitants, these lovers’ battles are staged constantly (assidue) among participants who are forever in youth’s prime, teneri. Thus the afterlife for the speaker is a space defined by recurring episodes of elegiac love. Still, in the speaker’s consideration of his post-mortem existence there is an awkward discrepancy between Delia’s generic role, as presumably one of the tenerae puellae indiscriminately frolicking in the underworld (just as she was, at 1.1’s conclusion, only one laudator among many), and the specificity with which he alludes to Messalla. As Lee notes, the poet-lover’s epitaph81 and the collocation of his own name with Messalla’s apparently prioritizes patron over beloved, and underscores the subtle but persistent distinction that the speaker makes in assigning puella and patron respective roles in imagining the future that awaits him.82 When it comes to the permanent record our poet wishes to leave behind, his life (or “fated years,” fatales anni, 1.3.53), as inscribed in

Delia’s Saturnian day  129 stone, reflects the amator’s services to a patron rather than his servitium amoris. By contrast, the speaker’s concluding plea to Delia that she remain “chaste” (at tu casta, precor, 1.3.83) looks forward to the very uncertainty that defines Delia’s future in her final appearance in the Tibullan corpus (nec saevo sis casta metu sed mente fideli, 1.6.75). Her close association with an anus, moreover, implicitly propels her forward in linear time, and into a future that will, at least under the restrictions of those hedging clauses at poem 1.1’s conclusion, hardly accommodate her old age.83

5 Conclusion: golden ages The poet’s subtle equation of golden-age enjoyments with a postmortem existence in which he might experience relief from his plight in poem 1.3 underlines the amator’s crisis as a fundamentally temporal one; that is, one generated from time’s linear constraints, constraints that exist neither in death, nor in the Saturnian age, nor (at least in the poet’s imaginings) in the space that he shares with Delia. Delia’s pleas to her lover, the Golden Age and Elysium all replay a similar rejection of viae and forward momentum, while conceding to, in fact depending on, a linear construction of time that will inscribe the amator’s deeds in the symbolic order. When the poet-lover speaks of generic evolution in book two, honoring Messalinus’ priesthood and poised to celebrate his future triumphs, he claims to be nearly free of his puella Nemesis’ hold. He adopts, moreover, a new attitude toward the Golden Age: it is still relegated to the past, but is no longer desirable. The poem opens by championing Jupiter’s victory and Saturn’s banishment (laudes for Jupiter, with “king Saturn put to flight,” Saturo rege fugato, 2.5.9–10). So too does the formerly in-ars amator assure us that “art is good” (ars bona! 2.5.107), or at least most of it. The Roman Golden Age is famously in-ers, especially since Vergil’s bleak theodicy in Georgics 1, which offers art as the only consolation to the farmer’s iron-age labores84, the same labores Tibullus goes on to celebrate through his portrait of the annual Parilia festival in poem 2.5. At the same time, the poet’s insistent denial of the Golden Age’s return resounds a discordant note in an Augustan cultural climate that, by the publication of book two, predicted the Age’s imminent renewal. Dennis Feeney has noted the peculiar nature of Rome’s preoccupation with the Golden Age as a kind of atemporal existence before the rupture that marks the advent of the Iron Age and its concomitant historical progress.85 J.K. Newman remarks on the appealing flexibility of the Age, as “… chronologically indeterminate, past and future; it can vanish and return, recovered by a champion.”86 Triumviral and Augustan poetic discourses reflect a shared Roman interest in an era built into a scheme of human existence that relies on cursive time—since it necessarily pre-cedes the decline of the Iron Age—but is, by many accounts, cyclical, since its renewal, along with its potential to fulfill the conditions of human happiness, was fundamental to its appeal. Tibullan elegy, idealizing the Golden Age while denying the possibility of its return, finds an analogous space

130  Hunter H. Gardner of pre-temporal plenitude in the beloved puella, who promises unbroken eternity, while also betraying her vulnerability to the linear time that will one day resign her to the poet’s past. Tibullus’ use of the Golden Age to clarify his puella’s allure, as I hope to have demonstrated here, underscores the similar assurances provided by the courtesan (meretrix) as an embodiment of women’s time and by Saturn’s reign, as an irrecoverable moment, free from the teleological pressures shaping masculine subjectivity. While the new Princeps, fairly early in his administration, appropriated the Golden Age and forced its entrance into historical time,87 advertising his reign as a returned golden saeculum, the puella’s symbolic potential was less easily managed. She and the unique temporality she offers proved less appealing to poets negotiating the pressures on their own developing loyalties, once the uncertainties of a new order in the early Principate were exchanged for the securities of a fait accompli. Ovid’s use of golden-age imagery to signal the venality of the times in his Ars Amatoria registers just how the Golden Age’s symbolic potential had changed, two decades after Tibullus’ second book of elegies was published, when the Principate’s power was virtually unchallenged: Nunc aurea Roma est!88 It is worth noting that, for all his pretensions of moving beyond le temps des femmes, Tibullus recants in his final poem, caught up in the cyclical reverberations of the elegiac couplet: upon Macer’s invitation to join his military campaign,89 the amator flounders in his commitment and returns, once again, to his mistress’s doorstep: iuravi quotiens rediturum ad limina numquam! / cum bene iuravi, pes tamen ipse redit (“I swore repeatedly that I would never return to her threshold; although I swore in good faith, my feet still take me back,” 2.6.13–14). But that is a different story, for another time.90

Notes 1 I would like to thank the editors as well as the anonymous readers for their thoughtful comments and recommendations. Any errors that remain are mine alone. 2 For the puella’s eternal or divine status, see, e.g., Prop. 1.2.15–22, 2.2.3, 3.10.17; cf. Ov. Am. 1.3. See Wyke 2002 and Sharrock 1991 for the artificial nature of the puella and her role as a signifier of poetics rather than the reflection of a flesh-and-blood woman. 3 Tib. 2.5.113–22. 4 Prop. 4.1. 5 Ovid Am. 3.1. 6 For example, Prop. 3.24/5.31–4, Tib.1.8.39–50. 7 Ov. Am. 1.8.105. Gutzwiller 1985: 111 remarks on the lena and anus as embodiments of the puella’s future. See also Gardner 2013: 108–11. 8 Kristeva’s “Le temps des femmes” was first published in 33/44: Cahiers de recherche de sciences des textes et documents, 5 (Winter 1979). In the present discussion I make frequent use of the English translation of A. Jardine and H. Blake (=Kristeva 1981), published in Signs. 9 That is, the realm of rules, codes and shared systems of language, including culture in its broadest sense; cf. Miller 2004: 5. Kristeva’s understanding of the symbolic is heavily influenced by, though not identical to, Lacan’s Symbolic. Her doctoral thesis was

Delia’s Saturnian day  131 translated into English by M. Waller as Revolution in Poetic Language (1984). For the maternal properties of the chora, see Kristeva 1981: 16. 10 Kristeva 1979: 7. 11 Kristeva 1981: 14. For differences between Kristeva’s “cursive” (and “monumental”) temporalities and Nietzsche’s use of the terms, see Wolfenstein 2000: esp. 113–14. 12 Kristeva 1981: 17. 13 Kristeva 1981: 18; cf. Kristeva 1979: 8: “qu’on qualifie facilement de masculine.” 14 Cavarero 1995: 16. 15 White 1993: 6–14; James 2003: 258; cf. Ov. Am.3.15.5–6. Propertius claims to have only a “small fortune” (parva fortuna) at his disposal (2.34.55), but also indicates that his family estate was once sizeable (4.1.129–30). For textual references indicating that Tibullus and Propertius came from families who suffered financially during the land confiscations carried out by the triumvirs in the 40s BCE, see Murgatroyd 1994: 7 and Putnam 1973: 3; cf. Miller 2004: 114. 16 Lyne 1980: 72. 17 Prop. 1.6; cf. 1.7.1–8; Tib. 1.1.53–56, 1.3.1–4; Ov. Am. 1.15.1–6. 18 For an overview of these measures, including evidence from historians and biographers (e.g., Dio 52.26, Suet. Aug. 31, 38) as well as the so-called leges Juliae, see Gardner 2013: esp. 37–42, who relies on Yavetz 1984, Csillag 1976 and Harlow and Laurence 2002. Fear 2005 offers an excellent discussion of elegy’s youthful perspective as a response to the imperatives of the early Principate. 19 The evidence concerning the social, legal and professional identity of the puella is often contradictory, a fact that denies these characters any traceable connection with the real world, as argued by Wyke 2002: 11–45. The impossibility of identifying the elegiac puellae with real Roman women, however, does not preclude the puella’s engagement with Roman political and moral discourse. 20 Tib. 1.6.67–8, Prop. 2.7. 21 Ovid Ars 1.31–4, 3.57–8, 3.611–61. 22 For the identification of the elegiac puella as a courtesan, drawn largely from the meretrices of New Comedy, see Lyne 1980: 8–13, Griffin 1985: 114–21 and Konstan 1994: 157–9. James 2003: 36–41 has demonstrated the puella’s courtesan status on the basis of her financial demands, which shape the lover’s persistent attempts to procure her sexual favors through poetry alone rather than through material compensation. 23 James 2003: 213. 24 The celebration (ludi saeculares) was officially correlated with a comet predicted for the year 17 BCE, as well as with remarks in the Sibylline books correlating the dawn of a new age with victory over the Parthians (a diplomatic victory achieved by Augustus in 20 BCE); see Zanker 1990: 167, 186. 25 Wallace-Hadrill 1987 examines the temporally focused enterprises of Augustan imagemaking (e.g., the Princeps’ commissioning of the triumphal fasti on the Parthian arch and his positioning of the Horologium in the Campus Martius). Harlow and Laurence (2002: 111–16) argue that Octavian’s entrance into public life at the age of 19 helped lower the age of responsibility for the Roman male. 26 For a fuller account of Augustus’ representation as a preternaturally ambitious youth (as Octavian) and as an eternally youthful divinity, see Gardner 2013: 50–7. 27 For the relatively unrestricted license allowed to young men coming of age in the late Republic (“an approved temporal space of youthful carnival”), as evident primarily from Cicero’s Pro Caelio and Seneca’s Controversiae, see Fear 2005: 16; cf. Gardner 2013: 37–9. 28 As Boucher observed (1965: 15–19), elegy’s interest in inertia as one form of escape from public life is predicated in Catullus’ own reluctant devotion to a life of otium; see esp. Cat. 76.21 (torpor) and Cat. 50.1 (otiosi), 51.13 (otium); cf. Lyne 1980: 67–71. As I hope to demonstrate the (anti)teleological resonance of an iners vita

132  Hunter H. Gardner offers a more direct challenge to the prescribed modes of life in the early Principate than Catullus’ use of otium in the Late Republic. Tibullus’ inconsistent or contradictory uses of inertia and related concepts have been well documented; see Miller 2004: esp. 117–28. 29 Some scholars (e.g., Lee 1990: 2–3) read a dative here (vitae inerti) and translate as if an ad + accusative construction (“to inactivity”). See Maltby 2002: 121. 30 All translations are the author’s, unless otherwise noted. 31 1979: 28. 32 See OLD s.v. 2a–d, 4; cf. Verg. G. 1.94 and Hor. Carm. 3.4.45, where iners is used of the unmoving and resistant earth. 33 OLD s.v. 3 and TLL iners IA, 1309; cf. Cic. Cat. 2.10 and Verg. Aen. 9.55 (for iners in a more obvious military context). As Lee points out (1974: 107), traduco also has decidedly military connotations, which may ironically allude to the erotic “soldiering” preferred by the speaker. 34 Lee-Stecum 1998: 30. 35 Tib. 1.1.53–8. 36 Henkel 2014: 467–8. 37 See, for example, Tib. 1.1.52. 38 Cf. Maltby 2002: 143. 39 Tib. 1.1.67–74. 40 On the frequent coupling of love and death in Tibullus, see Eisenberger 1960; cf. Putnam 1973: 49, 58–9, and below, pp. 128–9. Mursurillo 1967 sees the coupling as part of a pattern in Tibullus’ poetry that frequently shifts from present time, to future, and then reverts to the past. 41 Cf. Kennedy 1993: 31–2, esp. on the binary (and generic) opposition between “hard” (durus) and “soft” (mollis, tener) in elegy. 42 Putnam 1973: 58: “Love of home and love of Delia obviate ambition, but there is a hedging clause attached to each sentiment.” 43 Tib. 1.1.5, 1.1.58. 44 Tib. 1.1.55–8. 45 Tib. 1.1.65–6. 46 Tib. 1.3.9–10. 47 Tib. 1.3.11–16. 48 Fineberg 1999 interprets Tibullus’ characteristic repetition as reflective of the semiotic elements of language, repetitive drives grounded in the speaking subject’s material form. See Kristeva 1984: 96–105 on the semiotic versus symbolic aspects of language. It is worth stressing that Kristeva’s maternally inflected chora (as the conceptual site of semiotic pulsions) links the semiotic to female subjectivity; see above, pp. 118–9, and Gardner 2013: 149–50. 49 Rettulit e trinis omina certa puer / cuncta dabant reditus: tamen est deterrita numquam / quin fleret nostras respiceret vias. 50 Cavarero 1995: 14. 51 Tib. 1.3.19–20. 52 For Delia as an exclusus amator, cf. Putnam 1973: 78. 53 Tib. 1.3.23–32. 54 Tib. 1.3.19. For quotiens … totiens as correlatives, see OLD totiens 1a and quotiens 3a. 55 As Putnam notes 1973: 77, Isis was long identified with Demeter, whose loss and reunion with Persephone was a key element of her devotions; the cyclical nature of Isis’ experience is defined partly through that association. Apuleius emphasizes the connection between the goddesses at Met. 11.2. 56 Smith 1913: 241. See also Murgatroyd 1980: 108, who, in explaining the goddess’s appeal to the courtesans of elegy, notes that worship of Isis during this period was particularly associated with women of the demi-monde; cf. Lilja 1978: 154–5.

Delia’s Saturnian day  133 57 Verg. G. 2.532–40; A. 7.319–27. 58 Verg. Aen. 6.788–97. 59 Tib. 1.3.35–8. 60 Lee-Stecum 1998: 113–14. 61 Maltby 2002: 190. 62 Newman 1998: 233. 63 Miller 2004: 124–8. 64 Tib. 2.3.73–8. 65 Whitaker 1983: 68. 66 Cf. Tib. 1.3.1. 67 Cf. Tib. 1.3.14. 68 Cavarero 1995: 17. 69 Putnam 1973: 74. 70 Tib. 1.3.83–94. 71 Maltby 2002: 210. 72 Lee-Stecum 1998: 127. 73 Bright 1978: 153. 74 Cf. also Tibullus’ vision of death as a welcome release from distress brought by Nemesis in book two (2.6.19). Papanghelis 1987 explores Propertius’ tendency to conflate love and death, but resists a psychoanalytic reading (2–5). Miller 2004: 127–8 treats death in Tibullus 1.3 as a solution to the poet’s paradoxical desire to possess Delia exclusively but also exist in a world without boundaries. 75 Kristeva 1981: 17; cf. Cavarero 1995: 24, who observes a similar “living for death” and the eternity it achieves, in the mind/body dichotomy assumed by Western, and especially Platonic, philosophy. 76 Freud famously argues for an organism’s drive to return to an earlier (i.e., inanimate) state of existence in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, where he asserts that the “aim of all life is death” (in Gay 1989: 613). Cf. Eagleton 1996: 139 “The final goal of life is death, a return to that blissful inanimate state where the ego cannot be injured.” Kristeva (1984: 95, 119) identifies the death drive as one of many pulsions, but acknowledges that (for Freud) it is the most instinctual. 77 Tib. 1.3.50. 78 Tib. 1.3.55–6. 79 Tib. 1.3.59–64. 80 Whitaker 1983: 72 also notes various structural parallels in the two passages; cf. Miller 2004: 128. 81 Tib. 1.3.55–6. 82 Lee 1974: 111. 83 See above, p. 118 and n.7 for the anus/lena figure as an embodiment of the puella’s future. 84 Verg. G. 1.145–6. 85 Feeney 2007: 109. Rome is peculiar in articulating the concept of a pre-lapsarian existence temporally, through ages, rather than spatially or racially (as in, e.g., Hesiod); Feeney 2007, 110–18 and 262n.38. 86 Newman 1998: 239. 87 See Zanker 1990: 167–93 and Galinsky 1996: esp. 90–121 on golden-age imagery used to promote the Augustan regime; on the preparations for the celebration of a new saeculum, held in 17 BCE, see above, n.24. 88 Ovid Ars 3.111. 89 Tib. 2.6.1–10. 90 For the poet-lover’s tendency to recant after professing his interest in “higher” genres (e.g., epic, tragedy), and the implications of that recantation for the elegists’ attitudes toward the Principate, see Gardner 2013: 219–50.

134  Hunter H. Gardner

Bibliography Boucher, J.-P. 1965. Études sur Properce: Problèmes d’ inspiration et d’art. Paris: De Boccard. Bright, D. 1978. Haec mihi fingebam: Tibullus in His World. Leiden: E.J. Brill. Cairns, F. 1979. Tibullus: A Hellenistic Poet at Rome. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Cavarero, A. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Translated by S. Anderlini-D’Onofrio and A.O. Healy. New York, NY: Routledge. Csillag, P. 1976. The Augustan Laws of Family Relations. Budapest: Akademiai Kiado. Eagleton, T. 1996. Literary Theory: An Introduction, 2nd ed. London: Blackwell. Eisenberger, H. 1960. “Der innere Zusammenhang der Motive in Tibulls Gedicht 1, 3.” Hermes 88: 188–97. Fear, T. 2005. “Propertian Closure: The Elegiac Inscription of the Liminal Male and IdeologicalContestation in Augustan Rome.” In Gendered Dynamics in Latin Love Poetry, edited by R. Ancona and E. Greene, 13–40. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Feeney, D. 2007. Caesar’s Calendar: Ancient Time and the Beginnings of History. Berkeley, CA : University of California Press. Fineberg, B. 1999. “Repetition and the Poetics of Desire in Tibullus 1.4.” CW 92(5): 419–28. Galinsky, G. K. 1996. Augustan Culture. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Gardner, H. 2013. Gendering Time in Augustan Love Elegy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Gay, P, ed. 1989. The Freud Reader. New York, NY: W.W. Norton and Co. Griffin, J. 1985. Latin Poets and Roman Life. London: Duckworth. Gutzwiller, K. 1985. “The Lover and the Lena: Propertius 4.5.” Ramus 14: 105–15. Harlow, M. and R. Laurence. 2002. Growing Up and Growing Old in Ancient Rome. London: Routledge. Henkel, J. 2014. “Metrical Feet on the Road of Poetry: Foot Puns and Literary Polemic in Tibullus.” CW 107(4): 451–75. James, S. 2003. Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Kennedy, D. 1993. The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Konstan, D. 1994. Sexual Symmetry: Love in the Ancient Novel and Related Genres. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Kristeva, J. 1979. “Le Temps des Femmes.” Cahiers de Recherche de Sciences des Textes et Documents 5: 4–19. Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Translated by A. Jardine and H. Blake. Signs 7(1): 13–35. Kristeva, J. 1984. Revolution in Poetic Language. Translated by M. Waller. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Lee, G. 1974. “Otium cum indignitate: Tibullus 1.1.” In Quality and Pleasure in Latin Poetry, edited by Tony Woodman and David West, 94–114. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lee, G. trans. 1990. Tibullus: Elegies. Wiltshire: Francis Cairns. Lee-Stecum, P. 1998. Powerplay in Tibullus: Reading Elegies Book One. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Delia’s Saturnian day  135 Lilja, S. 1978. The Roman Elegists’ Attitude to Women, reprint of 1965. Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia. Lyne, R. O. A. M. 1980. The Latin Love Poets: From Catullus to Horace. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Maltby, R. 2002. Tibullus: Elegies. Text, Introduction, and Commentary. Wiltshire: Francis Cairns. Miller, P. A. 2004. Subjecting Verses: Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Murgatroyd, P. ed. 1980. Tibullus 1: A Commentary on the First Book of the Elegies of Albius Tibullus. Pietermaritzburg: University of Natal Press. Murgatroyd, P. ed. 1994. Tibullus: Elegies II, with Introduction and Commentary. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Mursurillo, H. 1967. “The Theme of Time as a Poetic Device in the Elegies of Tibullus.” TAPA 98: 253–68. Newman, J. K. 1998. “Saturno Rege: Themes of the Golden Age in Tibullus and other Augustan Poets.” In Candide Iudex: Beiträge zur augusteischen Dichtung. Festschrift für Walter Wimmel zum 75. Geburtstag, edited by Anna E. Radke, 225–46. Stuttgart: Steiner. Papanghelis, T. D. 1987. Propertius: A Hellenistic Poet on Love and Death. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Putnam, M. ed. 1973. Tibullus: A Commentary. Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press. Sharrock, A. 1991: “Womanufacture.” JRS 81: 36–49. Smith, K.F., ed. 1913. The Elegies of Albius Tibullus. New York, NY: American Book Company. Wallace-Hadrill, A. 1987. “Time for Augustus: Ovid, Augustus and the Fasti.” In Homo Viator: Classical Essays for John Bramble, edited by M. Whitby, P. Hardie and Ma. Whitby, 221–30. Oak Park, IL: Bolchazy-Carducci. Whitaker, R. 1983. Myth and Personal Experience in Roman Love–Elegy: A Study in Poetic Technique. Göttingen: Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht in Göttingen. White, P. 1993. Promised Verse: Poets in the Society of Augustan Rome. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Wolfenstein, V. E. 2000. Inside/Outside Nietzsche: Psychoanalytic Explorations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Wyke, M. 2002. The Roman Mistress: Ancient and Modern Representations. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Yavetz, Z. 1984. “The Res Gestae and Augustus’ Public Image.” In Caesar Augustus: Seven Aspects, edited by F. Millar and E. Segal, 1–36. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Zanker, P. 1990. The Power of Images in the Age of Augustus. Translated by A. Shapiro. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press.

8

Eating up time in Ovid’s Erysichthon episode (Metamorphoses 8.738–878)1 Robert S. Santucci

1 Introduction This chapter explores the intersections of gender, time and consumption in Ovid’s account of the Erysichthon myth at Metamorphoses 8.738–878. Ovid establishes Erysichthon as a destructively masculine figure: the central action in the story, Erysichthon’s act of felling a tree in the sacred grove of the goddess Ceres, is explicitly likened to sexual violation. The goddess’s punishment for Erysichthon, an eternal hunger that can never be satisfied, results in his autophagy (self-cannibalism). This punishment represents an imposition of recursive time (otherwise known as cyclical time, a view of time as an imitation of natural cycles, the dominant metaphor for which is the four seasons), often associated with the feminine, on Erysichthon, a rapacious masculine figure.2 He thus fails to reassert control over his personal temporal experience—forced to live in the cyclical time overseen by Ceres, he is stuck in an infinite loop of consumption. His final act of autophagy attempts to put an end to this cycle, as he tries to assert masculine dominance over time by consuming it. Erysichthon’s autophagy is, ultimately, an attempt to control his sense of time. Several notable conflicts underlie the present study: Erysichthon and Ceres; Erysichthon and his daughter (called Mestra in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women, but left unnamed by Ovid); Erysichthon and Fames (the embodiment of hunger, sent by Ceres to punish him); Erysichthon’s daughter as subservient to two male masters, Erysichthon and Neptune; and Erysichthon as attempting to express dominance (and ultimately failing) over two female figures, Ceres and his daughter. Each of these conflicts bears on the interrelation of gender, time and consumption, and will be treated in turn. Elements of these conflicts are common to the other episodes in Ovid’s ambitious epic: namely, conflicts between genders and between the mortal and divine, as well as ironic transformations (in this case, after consuming all available food, after which we would expect growth, Erysichthon begins a metamorphosis into nothing).3 Despite these compelling aspects of the story, scholarly attention to Ovid’s Erysichthon has been surprisingly limited. The most extensive accounts have concerned themselves largely with source research, aiming to categorize the myth’s Callimachean and Hesiodic elements, sometimes to the detriment of the Ovidian.4

Eating up time in Erysichthon episode  137 The work of Elaine Fantham and Alan Griffin, on the other hand, informs the present study. Fantham studies Erysichthon’s daughter in her capacity as a shapeshifter, placing her alongside fellow Ovidian transformers, Thetis and Vertumnus. She draws on these figures not only as unique within the narrative, but also as indicators of the complexities of the Ovidian text, which manages to weave together episodes from, inter alia, epic, lyric, comic and erotic traditions.5 Griffin analyzes Erysichthon’s autophagy, its paradoxes and the idiosyncrasy of its description in the characterization of Erysichthon as a mythical giant.6 These scholars shed light on the literary allusions in the episode, concerning themselves with Ovidian innovations. Indeed, many of the story’s details—Erysichthon’s violation of Ceres’ grove, his subsequent punishment, his all-consuming hunger— are Callimachean, while others—the daughter’s shapeshifting, Erysichthon’s attempts to sell her—are Hesiodic. Neither of these texts mention autophagy, although it is not known whether or not this detail is an Ovidian invention.7 The story as a whole, however, bears the unmistakable mark of Ovid’s desire to report the same subject differently (referre idem aliter).8 Ovid’s Erysichthon story is the final episode of Book 8; it stands near the very center of the poem, simultaneously managing both symbolic prominence and distance from the cosmogony at the poem’s beginning and the pseudo-flattering apotheoses of contemporary heads of state at the poem’s end.9 It is told by an internal narrator, at the home of the shapeshifting river god Achelous, who entertains Theseus, Pirithous and Lelex on their way home from the hunt for the Calydonian boar. Achelous begins by explaining the origins of some nearby islands, the Echinades, which had previously been nymphs.10 Pirithous—the son of Ixion, the violator of xenia (the divinely and societally important bond between host and guest) who had been punished by Jupiter for attempting to rape Juno—challenges Achelous’ notion that the gods can freely “give and take away forms” (dant adimuntque figuras, 615), to which his companion Lelex, aghast at his impudence, responds with the story of Baucis and Philemon, the elderly couple whose outstanding devotion to the gods earns them an eternity together as trees.11 Theseus requests more stories, and Achelous is happy to gratify him. He then introduces the story of Erysichthon as a testament to the Protean ability of Erysichthon’s daughter: a shapeshifter, she is able to change her form continually (sunt quibus in plures ius est transire figuras, 730). The daughter remains in a renovamen, as Achelous tells it: a state of being able to continually renew one’s form.12 In launching into this story Achelous is implicitly still addressing Pirithous’ challenge, though simultaneously offering the naysayer the inverse of the respectful Baucis and Philemon: the impious Erysichthon. Achelous introduces Erysichthon’s daughter, as is common, by way of her male relatives: in addition to being Erysichthon’s daughter she is also the wife of Autolycus (Autolyci coniunx, Erysicthone nata, 738). He immediately puts aside the daughter in favor of the father, however, describing Erysichthon’s affront to Ceres. Erysichthon, who never makes proper sacrifices, is a hater of the gods’ will.13 With no given motivation, and despite a number of ominous

138  Robert Santucci signs—a groaning noise made by the tree, a sudden pale discoloration sweeping across its surface, blood gushing from its trunk, a Dryad pleading with him from within the oak—he chops down an oak tree sacred to the goddess.14 Ceres will not be unavenged, however, and enlists a mountain nymph to travel to Scythia, where Fames (Hunger) lives, to request her help in afflicting Erysichthon with a suitable punishment for his greed: eternal hunger.15 As a result Erysichthon finds himself so ravenously hungry that he consumes the resources of his entire kingdom; in fact, his punishment is harsh enough that everything he eats only makes him more hungry: “All the food in him is a mere justification for food, and an empty void is always created by eating” (cibus omnis in illo / causa cibi est, semperque locus fit inanis edendo, 841–2). Left with no other option, he sells his daughter into slavery in order to feed his hunger. Seeking an escape, she prays to Neptune—who had previously taken her virginity—to deliver her from her plight (850–1). Neptune transforms her into a fisherman, giving her the ability to shapeshift at will thereafter. A humorous scene follows, in which she fools her new master, who, out looking for her, encounters her in this disguise.16 Erysichthon soon learns of his daughter’s Protean ability, and seeks to use it to his own advantage, selling her repeatedly only to have her escape in various different forms. This arrangement does not last long; for reasons Ovid never elaborates Erysichthon is soon deprived of his daughter and is left with no recourse but to devour his own body parts.17 By the end of the episode it becomes clear that time is inimical to Erysichthon. The more he eats, the hungrier he gets—hunger only breeds hunger as he demands banquets while banqueting (inque epulis epulas quaerit, 832). Ovid makes clear the eternity of Erysichthon’s consumption with the word semper: his hunger will always attend him. His autophagy is then an attempt to control his future, to end his hunger once and for all. Time, that is, his own personal temporal experience, is the last course of his feast.

2 Tree violation/sexual violation An analysis of Erysichthon’s sacrilege will help shed light on his punishment. His act of felling the oak evokes not only religious violation but also sexual violation. Concerning the former, there is much with which to work. In a 1988 essay Richard F. Thomas explored tree violation in the Aeneid, arguing that “The nature of violence directed against living but non-human objects is in the Virgilian scheme of things not inherently distinguishable from that directed against man.”18 Much the same can be said for the Ovidian scheme of things. Thomas cites evidence from Cato (Agr. 139) and Ovid (Fast. 4.751–55), in addition to the famous third-century BCE inscription from Spoleto forbidding violation of a sacred grove (CIL 12.366) to support his claim that tree violation is “stigmatized by society and divinity alike.”19 Hollis, in his commentary of Met. 8, notes “Of the gross impiety of this invasion one cannot doubt,” following with a historicizing point from Cassius Dio 51.8 about the murder of P. Turullius on Cos, on Augustus’ orders, for his violation of a grove of Asclepius for the purpose of building boats.20 Points such as

Eating up time in Erysichthon episode  139 these lead to Thomas’s conclusion of the inevitability of backlash, be it divine or societal, for such violations.21 He devotes only a paragraph in his essay to Ovid’s Erysichthon episode, though he does note its potential as a literary exemplum for the consequences of tree-felling.22 Erysichthon’s name and poetic epithets are, as has been observed, tied directly to his act of tree violation. Alan Griffin sees in him a man doomed to this very violation by his epithet Dryopeius, “the Thessalian” (8.751).23 Dryopeius derives from the Greek drûs, “oak,” giving Erysichthon a name linking his very existence with his destruction of the oak. Griffin suspects that Ovid’s audience, at least some of whom knew Greek, would have picked up on the connection.24 Callimachus’ Erysichthon desecrates a poplar grove, so an oak represents Ovid’s own contribution.25 Erysichthon’s act of desecration becomes him, both through the etymological connection of his epithet Dryopeius and his name itself, which means “Earth-tearer.” This is, of course, not only an oak tree, but one containing a dryad. The scene as a whole underscores the relationship between, and the conflation of, trees and bodies that occurs a number of times throughout the Metamorphoses. To name a few examples, Daphne becomes a laurel in her efforts to escape Apollo’s rape;26 Dryope, whose name is connected to Dryopeius, is turned into a lotus tree after picking a lotus flower, which, like Ceres’ oak, bleeds in response to its violation;27 Cyparissus mourns forever in the form of a cypress tree after killing his pet stag;28 and Myrrha becomes a myrrh tree after seducing her father.29 The episode under current discussion is a virtual addition to this catalogue, as Ovid plays on the double meaning of truncus and its related compounds, which can signify both tree trunk (OLD 2) and human body (distinguished from head and limbs, OLD 1). He uses truncus to refer to the trunk of the oak tree right before it bleeds in line 761, followed by detrunco a few lines later in 769 to refer to Erysichthon’s decapitation of his reluctant attendant. Ovid exploits this connection throughout the poem. Here he even establishes a verbal affinity between the daughter and Ceres’ oak: when he turns the focus of the narrative back to the daughter after Erysichthon consumes his entire kingdom, he does so with the phrase filia restabat (“the daughter remained,” 847), placed at a strong line-beginning position. This reintroduction echoes his ekphrastic description of the oak tree: stabat in his ingens annoso robore quercus (“A huge oak, with aged strength, was standing among these groves,” 743).30 The oak stabat, the daughter restabat; after the oak is cut down, the daughter is made subject to the will of the cutter, who violates the former and sells the latter into slavery. The sexual resonances in Erysichthon’s violence are numerous and explicit. In his introduction to Erysichthon’s crime, the first two verbs Ovid uses in characterizing his actions are forms of violare and temerare: ille etiam Cereale nemus violasse securi / dicitur et lucos ferro temerasse vetustos (“That man is said even to have violated a grove of Ceres with an axe and to have defiled ancient groves with his iron weapon,” 741–2). Both verbs mean “violate” and have a strong sexual connotation (violo: OLD 2c; temero: OLD 2). Adams, in The Latin Sexual Vocabulary, groups them together as words connoting sexual “violence, corruption, defilement.”31

140  Robert Santucci Perhaps a more vivid illustration of the sexually violent implications of Erysichthon’s sacrilege is Ovid’s use of two other words connoting violence: caedere (“to cut, beat”) and ictus (a “blow”). After Erysichthon decapitates (detruncare) his attendant, he redoubles his efforts in felling the tree: repetitaque robora caedit (“he chops the oak with renewed intensity,” 769). This treatment results in the dryad warning Erysichthon from within the oak, though her admonitions go unheeded as Erysichthon knocks the tree to earth with “countless blows” (ictibus innumeris, 775). Adams assigns these words to the semantic fields of striking and beating, which Latin literature mines freely for sexual metaphor.32 Concerning caedo, he writes “Used literally it possessed the senses ‘cut’ and ‘beat,’ either of which might have served as the basis for a sexual metaphor … Caedo sometimes implies a sexual act seen as a punishment.”33 Erysichthon could well seek to punish the tree here for its refusal to yield. The very femininity of the dryad herself should not escape our notice, much like the possible phallic symbol of Erysichthon’s securis should not (to say nothing of the hymeneal bleeding of the oak). But Ovid’s caedere heightens our sense of this passage as an embodiment of the violence of a sexual assault. Its coupling just a few lines later with ictus, a “beat” or “blow” of multifaceted definition, pinpointed by Adams as associated with male sexual penetration at Juvenal 6.126 (iacens cunctorum absorbuit ictus, “Lying down, she devoured every man’s blows”) and with a “blow” of semen at Lucretius 4.1245 (aut non tam prolixo provolat ictu, “it does not fly forward with a blow so long”) and 1273 (atque locis avertat seminis ictum, “and she diverts the blow of semen from these places”) further allows Ovid to conflate tree violation with sexual violation in this episode.34 One more sexual term remains to be discussed. After Ceres enacts Erysichthon’s punishment, Ovid introduces an epic simile, comparing Erysichthon’s mouth (ora, with the poetic plural perhaps also indicating the magnitude of his appetite) to a rapax ignis, a greedy fire that burns everything in its path (837). Adams identifies rapere (and by extension the related adjective rapax) as a sexual euphemism, metonymous for the act of penetration.35 The fire is not just greedy but sexually insatiable, threatening to seize or catch (OLD 1) anything in its way. This simile underscores Erysichthon’s wantonly destructive behavior, coded with penetrative language that suggests masculine sexual domination. His tree violation, then, is a signifier for sexual violation, the violence visited upon the feminine grove of Ceres and her nymphs. His masculinity is thus coterminous with his capacity for rape.36

3 Fathers, daughters and masters Having established Erysichthon as a masculine agent, I turn to his relationship with his daughter. Both the daughter’s service to her father and her ability to avoid her purchasers rest on her ability to change form at will.37 She is a shapeshifter in the Catalogue, though Neptune’s gift of this ability seems to be an Ovidian innovation.38 But Ovid’s own twist, his reconfiguring of the daughter as an anonymous

Eating up time in Erysichthon episode  141 shapeshifter, enables him to grant her leave from her father’s destructive cycle, with only his autophagy remaining. Her anonymity and ability to shapeshift are interrelated. As Hollis points out, Erysichthon is able to sell his daughter through his exercise of patria potestas; she of course goes unwillingly.39 The daughter is not here sold as a wife (alochos) as in the Catalogue of Women,40 but as a slave. Her purchasers are referred to as domini: dominum generosa recusat (“the nobly born girl refuses her master,” 848), eripe me domino (“snatch me away from my master,” 850), hanc dominus spectans (“the master, looking at her,” 855), credidit et verso dominus pede pressit harenam (“the master believed her, and beat the sand with his step retraced,” 869), saepe pater dominis Dryopeida tradit (“often the father gave her, the Dryopeian girl, to masters,” 872). The last of these lines is the only one to refer to multiple domini, wherein Ovid verbally establishes the daughter’s subjection with syntactic enactment, the use of word-order to mimic the sense of a passage.41 Herein he not only juxtaposes pater with dominis, identifying the father as among the daughter’s domini, but also places Dryopeida, the daughter as both direct object of the sentence and sharer of her father’s epithet, syntactically between dominis and the verb tradit, emphasizing that she is stuck between multiple domini and her father’s very act of selling her. Putting aside the nameless domini to whom she is sold, ultimately the daughter is framed as caught between two masters: Erysichthon and Neptune. The shadow of the daughter’s past rape by Neptune hangs over the narrative, openly acknowledged by the daughter with her prayer to the god “snatch me away from my master, you who have the rewards of my snatched-up virginity” (eripe me domino, qui raptae praemia nobis / virginitatis habes, 850–1). This prayer is remarkable for several reasons. In addition to its being an Ovidian innovation, it represents a shift in narrative focus back to the daughter after over one hundred lines detailing Erysichthon’s sacrilege and punishment, and also represents her first spoken line; in fact, it is her only line of dialogue save for her conversation while disguised as a fisherman. It also picks up the episode’s theme of eripere, “snatching up,” which connotes ravenous sexuality and consumption. Finally, it plays upon the tripartite idea of the dominus in the episode: she is praying to Neptune while evoking her father and her potential new masters. The daughter’s play on eripere and rapta seems like a response to Ovid’s simile of her father as a rapax ignis. Rapaciousness is associated with Erysichthon throughout the episode—even the words he spits in defiance of Ceres’ divine will are described as rapta (754). The daughter focuses our attention to her condition of having been violated sexually, the only solution to which is another act of snatching (eripere). The daughter seems aware, that is, of the double sense of eripere, to seize (OLD 1) but also to rescue or deliver (OLD 5): elsewhere in the poem, Ovid’s Midas prays to Bacchus to deliver (eripere) him from his double-edged gift of transforming everything he touches to gold,42 recalling the daughter’s prayer. The prayer thus seems like a commentary on the passage as a whole: the daughter gives her perspective on the rapaciousness that underlies the episode.

142  Robert Santucci Eripere and rapta, in the voice of the daughter, complement the complex sense of dominus in this scenario. Dominus connotes not only the master to whom Erysichthon sells her, but Erysichthon himself, in his capacity of head of household, the master of the domus. It evokes the recipient of her prayer, Neptune, as well: he is sometimes referred to as the “master of the deep sea” (dominus profundi).43 Eripe me domino, “snatch me away from my master,” could easily be reimagined in the sense of eripe me domine, “snatch me away, master,” with the daughter addressing Neptune as a dominus to save her from another dominus. She thus struggles for her freedom, overwhelmed by domini, who are portrayed as overpowering male figures. A sort of merging of Erysichthon and Neptune is thus achieved, as both are cast according to their potential for sexual violation. Just as Neptune grants the daughter’s wish, so does Ovid. Other than the domination of the final four lines of the episode by Erysichthon’s total ruin, she is the star of the last part of the story (846–74). As Fantham notes, the “impudent dialogue” between the daughter as pseudo-fisherman and her master commands the reader’s attention, as does her renovamen.44 The narrator Achelous thus brings the story back to his stated purpose: describing a figure who could continually change form. Filia restabat, indeed. The daughter’s fluidity is key to understanding her role in the complex series of relationships at play. Like Achelous, her narrator, she is gifted with a body capable of undergoing transformation at will (transformia corpora, 871). The adjective transformis (“that undergoes transformation,” OLD) appears only twice in extant Latin literature: here as well as at Fast. 1.373, where it denotes Proteus himself. But for all the changed bodies in the Metamorphoses, the poet uses transformis to describe Erysichthon’s daughter alone.45 Ovid underscores the daughter’s fluidity with the rapid asyndeton nunc equa, nunc ales, modo bos, modo cervus abibat (“now she went away as a mare, now a bird, now a cow, now a stag,” 873): each nunc and modo, without conjunctions connecting them, quickly signals a new transformation. The daughter’s appearance had been made new (novat, 853) by Neptune, and upon finishing this story Achelous boasts that he himself also has the ability to take on new forms (etiam mihi nempe novandi est / corporis, 879–80). Achelous here recalls the renovamen with which he introduced the daughter’s ability. We see, then, that Ovid emphasizes the daughter’s power to renew herself, to change form, to progress. The father conspicuously lacks this ability, and as a result has no option but to resort to autophagy, having no other means of satiating his hunger. The contrast between the father and daughter is underscored by their respective divine encounters: Ceres and Neptune both effect a change in their physical form.46 Fantham is struck by the uniqueness of the daughter in Ovid’s text. Along with Thetis and Vertumnus, she is one of only three “self-transformers” in the Metamorphoses (Achelous, whose transformations are limited to just man, snake and bull, is considered to be in a different category). Indeed, Fantham makes the point that, since most of the transformations in the Metamorphoses are “involuntary,” these figures warrant special notice.47 Hollis, for his part, notes that Ovid “seems mainly to follow ‘Hesiod’ when describing [the daughter’s] share in the

Eating up time in Erysichthon episode  143 action,” but he nonetheless identifies the daughter’s ability to shapeshift at the beginning of the Hesiodic narrative—at least as far as we can tell, given its fragmentary condition—as what he calls the “most important” difference in the two accounts of the daughter.48 Yet her prevalence in the episode, and if we are to heed Fantham’s word, her importance in the text as a whole, might cause us to wonder why Ovid leaves her unnamed. She is clearly Mestra from the Hesiodic account, and the name poses no metrical difficulties. She is, after all, the only major female character in an Ovidian episode not to be named.49 Scholars have, for the most part, seemingly not worried too much about this omission. McKay does not mention it at all, referring to the daughter in Ovid’s narrative simply as Mestra, though admittedly he concerns himself most with the Callimachean treatment of the myth, in which the daughter does not appear at all. Hollis notes the daughter’s introduction as Autolyci coniunx, Erysicthone nata (738), stating that “this periphrastic method of description is regular in epic poetry.”50 Fantham, like McKay, does not bring up Ovid’s failure to name the daughter. Ziogas expresses an interest in the daughter’s anonymity, but quickly resolves the issue by framing Ovid’s narrative as akin to the ehoiai pattern of the Catalogue of Women, wherein the woman in question is situated by her male relations, though this compelling point does not account for why she is left unnamed for the remainder of the episode.51 Certainly introductions by way of male family members are common in epic poetry, but failing to name a character creates an effect nonetheless.52 Her lack of name, I argue, is another factor that puts her at odds with her father: coupled with her shapeshifting ability, her anonymity seems to aid her liberation from her father’s cycle of consumption. Given the prevalence of patronymics in Roman society, daughters and fathers had an immediately recognizable (and unique) bond.53 Ovid naturally attempts to have it both ways in the Metamorphoses, casting Greek subjects in a Roman light for a cosmopolitan readership, so Erysichthon and his daughter, like the other subjects of the poem, bear a burden of double cultural associations.54 Her ability to shapeshift may reflect her tenuous social position as a young unmarried woman, but it also guarantees her a sort of freedom not available to her father, who is subject to his over-the-top appetite, the punishment he earns for his violent masculinity.55 This is the case in spite of the fact that her father receives the bulk of the attention in the episode, so one might even see the daughter as subject to her father on the literary level, as her story depends on his. This perspective gives additional weight to her introduction as the “daughter of Erysichthon,” not “Mestra.” Erysichthon consumes the majority of the reader’s attention in the episode, at the expense of his daughter. Ovid does not explain why or how she escapes her father’s subjection, though her introduction as the Autolyci coniunx gives us a preview of her future after Erysichthon’s autophagy.56 At the end of the episode, with the daughter gone, Erysichthon remains tied to both Ceres and Fames. The relationship between these three will elucidate the complex connections between gender, time and hunger in this text.

144  Robert Santucci

4 Erysichthon, Ceres and Fames By afflicting Erysichthon with endless hunger, Ceres effectively transforms him into a sort of amalgam of himself and Fames. Ceres’ command to Fames is that she “bury herself in the wicked innards of the impious man” (ea se in praecordia condat / sacrilegi scelerata, 791–2); Fames subsequently wraps the sleeping Erysichthon “in both her arms and breathes herself into him and blows into his jaw and chest and mouth and sprinkles starvation into his empty veins” (geminis amplectitur ulnis / seque viro inspirat faucesque et pectus et ora / adflat et in vacuis spargit ieiunia venis, 818–20; note the sense of urgency and thoroughness suggested by the abundance of conjunctions). There is something tender, even sensual about this detail because amplector can connote a loving embrace; Fames, in an intimate moment, makes Erysichthon like herself, namely, starved.57 She is ieiuna Fames (791); she sows ieiunia in Erysichthon. Ovid’s nightmarish description of Fames’ physical appearance, the logical extreme of extreme hunger itself, includes her stomach, which is just an empty void: ventris erat pro ventre locus (“she had a void of a stomach instead of the stomach itself,” 805). But rapax Erysichthon is given precisely the same characteristic: semperque locus fit inanis edendo (“an empty void is always created by eating,” 842).58 He has been made into another Fames, exactly the opposite of the bountiful Ceres. There is another irony in alere (878). The verb often connotes childrearing and nourishing (OLD 1 and 2b); we rightly think of our alma mater. But instead of fulfilling a nurturing parental role, Erysichthon feeds his own body. Although his daughter has somehow exited the cycle of his consumption, Ovid’s use of alebat nevertheless guarantees that she will remain an absent presence. Erysichthon’s act of alere ultimately brings to mind his fatherhood, albeit in a cruelly sardonic sense. In fact, the daughter’s service to her father in providing non iusta alimenta (“undeserved nourishment,” 874) inverts the notion of the father himself as the provider. This seems to be another emasculative punishment for his masculine consumption: the father becomes dependent on the daughter for sustenance. Ceres herself is called alma in contemporary and earlier texts.59 Ovid thus unites each element of this episode with the theme of nourishment. At the divine level, Ceres is the great nourisher; as a parent, Erysichthon provides no nourishment for his daughter, while she provides nourishment for him, and the story revolves around the perverse nourishment of the body (autophagy). The inversion of the expected role of the father as altor (male caretaker) underscores the unnaturalness with which the very notion of feeding is handled in the story as a whole; the anger of alma Ceres, her grove defiled, turns the very idea of nourishment on its head as Erysichthon eats his own body parts. The authorial control exercised by the poet must not escape us. Griffin, in his analysis of the end of the episode, concludes that Ovid “leaves us with the bizarre point that Erysichthon nourishes his own body by eating it and concludes on an appropriate note: diminuendo.”60 Erysichthon’s last meal is here narrated: he nourishes his body by (euphemistically) making it smaller (infelix minuendo corpus alebat, 878). Notably he does not metamorphose, but instead performs a

Eating up time in Erysichthon episode  145 sort of anti-metamorphosis: his body does not change into an explicitly new form, but gradually diminishes. Ovid’s use of diminuendo warrants a closer look. Griffin’s notion of its triggering an “abrupt fade-out” is perceptive, as it represents the very end of the Erysichthon episode, yet the story ends before the viewer can see the conclusion of Erysichthon’s auto-cannibalistic feast. The image with which the reader is left is of infelix Erysichthon in the process of “making his body smaller,” featured in his final textual appearance still in the act of eating. Ovid describes in the previous line that he “began to tear his limbs with his teeth” (ipse suos artus lacero divellere morsu / coepit, 877–8), yet the reader never sees him finish his meal; the imperfect verb alebat reinforces this point. Ovid offers, then, a sort of anti-ending, to complement Erysichthon’s anti-metamorphosis. Ovid uses minuere in its connotation of a gradual action (OLD 4d): time moves mercilessly slowly for Erysichthon at the end of his episode, just as it has done since his affliction by Fames. Erysichthon’s punishment, then, is not that he eats himself, but that he starts to eat himself. He does not die, nor does he transform into a flower, tree, animal or body of water; he merely begins a metamorphosis that will only negate him. Ovid actively pulls the authorial curtain, leaving the reader with the image of a desperately starving man beginning to eat (alebat) his limbs. In this sense his punishment continues; Ovid’s Erysichthon, “Earth-tearer,” becomes this punishment, although he will tear his own flesh, not the earth. His infinite loop of eating and demanding still more food does not end, as he feeds his own hunger, underscored by the episode-ending alebat. His continued, endless consumption of his own body, his own future, is the punishment for his rapaciousness. He resembles an ouroboros, a snake eating its own tail in a symbol of nature’s cyclicity.61 Ceres’ revenge is thus several-fold: she punishes Erysichthon not only in a way appropriate to her sphere of food and nourishment, but also as befits the cyclical time she oversees. Erysichthon’s act of violation, verbally coded as masculine by Ovid, has more or less emasculated him, as he is transformed into a perverse combination of Fames, the embodiment of hunger, and Ceres herself, who nourishes mankind as the goddess of agricultural death and rebirth. He is forced to live in the cyclical time represented by Ceres, an indication that his punishment is appropriate on multiple levels, not only as an ironic hunger, but a requirement to live on the goddess’s own terms, unwillingly trapped in the never-ending cycle of recursive time, wherein his masculine appetites are rendered toothless.

Notes 1 Many thanks are due to the editors, as well as to my fellow contributors, for all of their helpful comments in developing this chapter. Any remaining mistakes are my own. 2 For an exploration of gendered time through the narrative of Odysseus (representing linear time) and Penelope (representing an autonomous cyclical time), see Cavarero 1995. Julia Kristeva’s “Women’s Time” is an important forerunner to the interpretive perspectives undertaken in this chapter, as well as others in this volume: see Kristeva 1981. For a wider historical, societal and economic perspective on linear and cyclical time, see Kellerman 1989.

146  Robert Santucci 3 Good general introductions to the themes and literary methods of the Metamorphoses are abundant, but Fantham 2004 and Newlands 2015: 71–98 are especially recommended. Galinsky 1975, in the book’s opening chapter, notably highlights Ovid’s Erysichthon episode as paradigmatic of his epic as a whole, deeming it “a good introduction to some basic characteristics of the Ovidian narrative” (5). His justification is that the episode “typifies Ovid’s narrative technique in most stories of the Metamorphoses” (7), providing evidence that the episode is indicative that the Ovidian text “deliberately refuses to sustain a certain mood or tone” (11–12). 4 The most complete extant sources for Ovid’s Erysichthon are Callimachus’ Hymn 6 to Demeter and fragment 43a of the Catalogue of Women. Callimachus’ text features a teenage Erysichthon who earns Demeter’s ire by chopping down trees in her grove to build banquet halls, making his punishment of uncontrollable hunger ironic. The Hesiodic text focuses mostly on Mestra, though Erysichthon’s burning (aithôn) hunger is mentioned therein; its source is either not provided or lost to us, given the fragmentary nature of the text. Ormand’s 2004 text and translation of the fragment is a good point of reference. The most recent Anglophone monograph on the myth is K. J. McKay’s Erysichthon: A Callimachean Comedy (1962), in which the author delineates the sources and mythological precedents of Callimachus’ Hymn to Demeter. McKay engages in a careful study of Callimachus’ Erysichthon, occasionally invoking Ovid’s treatment in Met. 8 as a comparandum, though he concentrates on potential Callimachean models and Greek folktales that might have shaped Callimachus’ Erysichthon. 5 Fantham 1993: 21–36. 6 Griffin 1986: esp. 60–2. 7 Griffin 1986: 62; see Hollis 1970: 130 on the Etymologicum Magnum of ca. 1150 CE, containing a possible—but difficult to date—Greek reference to Erysichthon’s autophagy s.v. αἴθωνα λιμόν, a subheading of αἴθων: it is defined as a “great” or “killing” hunger (τὸν μέγαν, ἢ ἑαυτὸν φονεύοντα). At any rate variations of the phrase αἴθων λιμός occur both in the Hesiodic account (43a.5–6) and the Callimachean account (Hymn 6.66–7). 8 The reference is to Ars 2.128, ille referre aliter saepe solebat idem, wherein Odysseus often tells Calypso the story of the fall of Troy, albeit with differences in each recitation. On this point as a metaphor for Ovid’s own literary aim see Galinsky 1975: 5ff.; Krupp 2009: 144. 9 Boyd 2006: 173. For an exploration of the place of Book 8 within the Metamorphoses, highlighted by the structural similarities in its episodes, cf. also Crabbe 1981. For the relevance of Erysichthon’s autophagy to Pythagoras’ speech extolling vegetarianism in Book 15, cf. Crabbe 1981: 2322–33. 10 Ovid. Met. 8.577–610. I use the OCT, ed. Tarrant 2004, with the notable exceptions of Triopeius at 8.751 and Triopeida at 8.872, preferring, after Hollis and Griffin, Dryopeius and Dryopeida respectively. All line numbers are from Met. 8 unless otherwise specified; all translations are my own unless otherwise noted. 11 Ovid. Met. 8.618–724. 12 Ovid. Met. 8.729. The word is a hapax legomenon (“thing said once”); this is its only occurrence in Classical Latin. 13 Ovid. Met. 8.739–40. Hollis, Crabbe, Thomas, et al. compare him to Vergil’s Mezentius, a fellow contemptor divum—a mortal who, at best, does not recognize the divinity of the traditional gods of the pantheon, or, at worst, specifically acts with intent to defy them. Erysichthon certainly belongs in the latter category. 14 Ovid. Met. 8. 741–76. 15 Ovid. Met. 8.777–827. 16 Ovid. Met. 8. 855–70. 17 Ovid. Met. 8. 875–8. 18 Thomas 1988: 262. Emphasis is in the original.

Eating up time in Erysichthon episode  147 19 Thomas 1988: 263–4. 20 Hollis 1970: 134. 21 Thomas 1988: 265. 22 Thomas 1988: 264. 23 Griffin 1984: 57; for the preference of reading Dryopeius over Triopeius, “son of Triopas,” favored by some editors, see Hollis 1970 ad loc. 24 Griffin 1984: 57. 25 A story preserved through oral tradition on the island of Cos, called “The Fairy’s Revenge” in its 1950 publication by R.M. Dawkins, resembles Ovid’s Erysichthon episode in many respects, including the desecration of an oak tree. We have no way of dating the story, which may or may not have had an ancient genesis. 26 Ovid. Met. 1.546–67. 27 Ovid. Met. 9.349–93. 28 Ovid. Met. 10.136–42. 29 Ovid. Met. 10.489–502. 30 Ovid puns on robur here, which has both the literal meaning of “oak tree” (OLD 1) and firmness or strength (OLD 4). 31 Adams 1982: 198–9 adduces Varro Ling. 6.80 and Cicero Fam. 9.22.1 as evidence for violare and Pseudo-Ambrosius Laps. Virg. 39 as evidence for temerare. Ovid uses these words elsewhere in similar contexts: violare has an explicitly sexual and forceful connotation at Ars amatoria 1.375, quaeris an hanc ipsam prosit violare ministram? (“You ask whether it may be useful to violate the maid?”) and temerare at Heroides 9.49, non ego Partheniis temeratam vallibus Augen (“I will not mention Auge defiled in the Parthenian valleys”). 32 Adams 1982: 145 cites Catullus 56.7 and Priapea 26.10, as well as Petronius 21.2, for caedere as indicative of sexual punishment. 33 Adams 1982: 145–6. 34 Adams 1982: 148–9. 35 Adams 1982: 175. 36 In this way Erysichthon is akin to Ovid’s Achilles, who rapes Deidamia while avoiding service in the Trojan War disguised as a girl on Skyros (Ars am. 1.681–706). See Richlin 2014: 149 for the argument that Ovid binds up Achilles’ masculinity with his ability to commit sexual assault. 37 For this paradox, wherein the daughter gains a sense of social and class ambiguity through her transformative ability, see Feldherr 2010: 108–9. 38 Fantham 1993: 31. In the Hesiodic account Poseidon whisks her off to Cos, where she gives birth to his son Eurypylus (fr. 43a, 55–9). 39 Hollis 1970: 144. Patria potestas refers to the legal power of the Roman father: see Evans Grubbs 2006 and Hallett 1984 for explorations of the Roman family with emphasis on father–daughter relationships. 40 Hes. Cat. 43a.20. 41 For a thorough exploration of syntactic enactment in Ovid, see Lateiner 1990. 42 Ovid. Met. 11.133. 43 See also Sen. Med. 597. 44 Fantham 1993: 31. 45 Feldherr 2010: 109 observes that she is the only human (as opposed to gods) in the poem gifted with this ability. 46 On this point see Ziogas 2013: 136–47, wherein a thorough discussion of the structural resonances of Ovid’s Erysichthon and (especially) his daughter with those of Mestra in the Catalogue can also be found. 47 Fantham 1993: 21. 48 Hollis 1970: 129. 49 Although one of the Muses is also left unnamed, and only described in relation to her sister Calliope: she is given a relatively long speech at 5.269–93.

148  Robert Santucci 50 Hollis 1970 ad loc. 51 Ziogas 2013: 136. 52 Wheeler 1997 discusses names in the Metamorphoses (with a focus on the Iphis and Ianthe episode), claiming that “no author is more aware of the signifying power of names than Ovid, whose major poems, the Fasti and Metamorphoses, are well stocked with etymological lore” (190), before memorably calling Ianthe’s nomen an omen (194). If nomina indeed tend to be omina in the Metamorphoses, Erysichthon’s daughter would seem to occupy a sort of onomastic purgatory: without a name, the reader loses a possible frame for understanding her as a character (or, more positively, they may view her as freed from an interpretive constraint). 53 On this point see Hallett 1984. 54 On Ovid’s use of (predominantly) Greek stories in the Augustan Metamorphoses, see Segal 1971. By and large, Ovidian scholarship in the last decade or so has not concerned itself with the relevance of Greek subjects in an Augustan context, but see Dufallo 2013 for an analysis of the ambivalent Roman response to Greek themes as expressed through ecphrasis. 55 For an exploration of the story of Mestra and its place within a wider corpus of unmarried female shapeshifters used as a metaphor for male anxiety over the instability of their social position, see Ormand 2004; Ziogas 2013: 142–3. 56 See Fantham 1993 on what happened to the daughter later, chiefly her marriage to Autolycus. Hollis notes ad loc. that habet (739), referring to the daughter’s possession of shapeshifting abilities, is a “true present,” an indication that the daughter is still alive at the time of Achelous’ narration. 57 OLD s.v. amplector 1. See Keith 2009 for Ovid’s tendency to bring out sensual elements in narrative events that do not seem overtly sexual. 58 Segal 1998: 15–16 picks up the repetition of locus, viewing Erysichthon’s transformation as a manifestation of his “tyrannical power,” this time aimed at his own body. 59 In, e.g., Verg. G. 1.7 and Lucil. 200. 60 Griffin 1986: 62. He puts it well when he notes that the episode paradoxically “fades out abruptly.” 61 An early representation of the ouroboros (MS Marcianus 2327, f. 188v) was drawn in the Chrysopoeia of Cleopatra, an Egyptian alchemist living in the third century BCE. Within the image she wrote the words ἓν τὸ πᾶν, “all is one.” The image is discussed and published in Keyser 1990.

Bibliography Adams, J. N. 1982. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Boyd, B. W. 2006. “Two Rivers and the Reader in Ovid, Metamorphoses 8.” TAPA 136: 171–206. Cavarero, A. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Translated by S. Anderlini-D’Onofrio and A. O’Healy. London: Routledge. Crabbe, A. 1981. “Structure and Content in Ovid’s Metamorphoses.” ANRW 2(31): 2274–327. Dufallo, B. 2013. The Captor’s Image: Greek Culture in Roman Ecphrasis. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans Grubbs, J. 2006. “The Family.” In A Companion to the Roman Empire, edited by D. Potter, 312–26. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Fantham, E. 1993. “Sunt quibus in plures ius est transire figuras: Ovid’s Self-Transformers in the Metamorphoses.” CW 87: 21–36.

Eating up time in Erysichthon episode  149 Fantham, E. 2004. Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Feldherr, A. 2010. Playing Gods: Ovid’s Metamorphoses and the Politics of Fiction. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Galinsky, G. K. 1975. Ovid’s Metamorphoses: An Introduction to the Basic Aspects. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Glare, P. G. W. 2012. Oxford Latin Dictionary. 2nd edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Griffin, A. H. F. 1986. “Erysichthon—Ovid’s Giant?” G&R 33: 55–63. Hallett, J. P. 1984. Fathers and Daughters in Roman Society: Women and the Elite Family. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Hollis, A.S. ed. 1970. Ovid: Metamorphoses Book VIII. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Keith, A. 2009. “Sexuality and Gender.” In A Companion to Ovid, edited by P. Knox, 355–69. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kellerman, A. 1989. Time, Space, and Society: Geographical Societal Perspectives. Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers. Keyser, P. T. 1990. “Alchemy in the Ancient World: From Science to Magic.” ICS 15: 353–78. Knox, P. ed. 2009. A Companion to Ovid. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Kristeva, Julia. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Translated by H. Blake and A. Jardine. Signs 7: 13–35. Krupp, J. 2009. Distanz und Bedeutung: Ovids Metamorphosen und die Frage der Ironie. Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag Winter. Lateiner, D. 1990. “Mimetic Syntax: Metaphor from Word Order, Especially in Ovid.” AJP 111: 204–37. McKay, K. J. 1962. Erysichthon: A Callimachean Comedy. Vol. 7. Leiden: E.J. Brill Press. Newlands, C. E. 2015. Ovid. London: I.B. Tauris. Ormand, K. 2004. “Marriage, Identity, and the Tale of Mestra in the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women.” AJP 125: 303–38. Richlin, A. 2014. “Reading Ovid’s Rapes.” In Arguments with Silence: Writing the History of Roman Women, 130–65, Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Originally published in Pornography and Representation in Greece and Rome, 1992, edited by A. Richlin, 158–79. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Robertson, N. 1984. “The Ritual Background of the Erysichthon Story.” AJP 105: 369–408. Segal, C. 1971. “Ovid’s Metamorphoses: Greek Myth in Augustan Rome.” Studies in Philology 68: 371–94. Segal, C. 1998. “Ovid’s Metamorphic Bodies: Art, Gender, and Violence in the Metamorphoses.” Arion, Third Series 5: 9–41. Spentzou, E. 2009. “Theorizing Ovid.” In A Companion to Ovid, edited by P. Knox, 381– 93. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Tarrant, R. J. ed. 2004. P. Ovidi Nasonis: Metamorphoses. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Thomas, R. F. 1988. “Tree Violation and Ambivalence in Virgil.” TAPA 118: 261–73. Wheeler, S. M. 1997. “Changing Names: The Miracle of Iphis in Ovid Metamorphoses 9.” Phoenix 51: 190–202. Ziogas, I. 2013. Ovid and Hesiod: The Metamorphosis of the Catalogue of Women. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Telling time with Epiphanius Periodization and metaphors of genealogy and gender in the Panarion Elizabeth A. Castelli

1 Introduction This chapter has its origins in a peculiar textual detail. Very early on in the Panarion, his foundational and magisterial work of Christian heresiology, the fourth-century CE bishop Epiphanius overlaid his exhaustive taxonomy of heresies onto the whole of ancient history. Crafting both an origin story and a classification system, Epiphanius made his argument at once aetiological and historiographical. Epiphanius understood history to possess a single point of origin and to be organized into clearly differentiated periods of time that are distinct and chartable. According to his reconstruction, the first four periods of ancient history were synonymous with the first four heresies and also the “mothers” of future heresies.1 In this curious conflation, time itself emerges as both gendered and generative. This collapse of temporality, heresy and gender takes place in a massive work that seeks to offer a comprehensive account of “heresy” tout court. Scholars have understood Epiphanius’ project in a variety of distinct if overlapping ways: in recent work, Averil Cameron characterized it as a genealogical project; Richard Flower has argued that it is an example of ancient knowledge-ordering practice akin to encyclopedia writing; and Todd S. Berzon has called it a work of ancient ethnography.2 Yet despite Epiphanius’ commitment to comprehensiveness and classification without remainder, his method is often more improvisational than systematic. His interpretive and rhetorical practices are citational and gestural, blending lengthy quotations from other sources with strategic biblical interpretation and conventional metaphors for categorizing difference. The folding together of temporality, gender and heresy is a particularly telling example of this improvisational rhetorical approach. To place this rhetorical move in an interpretive frame, the insights of feminist philosophy inflected by psychoanalysis and poststructuralism can be illuminating. Such feminist theory frames gender as a metaphorical and symbolic concern (rather than a material or empirical matter), often in relation to notions of time and temporality. One particularly compelling approach originates with Italian feminist philosopher Adriana Cavarero’s In Spite of Plato [Nonostante Platone], which rereads early works of the Western canon and charts the hierarchical binaries that provide the scaffolding for Western philosophy. In a provocative reading

Telling time with Epiphanius  151 of Homer’s Odyssey, Cavarero formulates sexual difference as a matter of temporality and of tempo: Penelope’s time is “dilated,” “endless, cadenced sameness,” “quiet”; it is a “time of self-belonging,” a time distinct from the linearity of “men’s time,” and “the worldly time of action.” Although she distinguishes the feminine “cadence of an infinite repetition” from the masculine “time of action,” she then turns to a third mode of temporality: the time of philosophy that “has no beginning or end,” the time of thought, which is “solemn and immobile,” “the eternal that never runs out.”3 Cavarero’s reading of gender and time produces a philosophical critique of the Western canon’s accounting of and for sexual difference, far afield at first glance from the world of late ancient Christian heresiology. Yet I will suggest that a similar framing of gender and time emerges in Epiphanius’ Panarion, where Christian ideals of sacred time and its resolution of the problem of historical time relate to other hierarchical binaries: universal and particular, unity and diversity, masculinity/femininity, asceticism/generation, soul/body and so on. My discussion explores the relationships between and among temporality, gender and heresy in Epiphanius in three parts: a brief exploration of ideas about time inherited and deployed by Epiphanius; a short exposition of the work of gender in late ancient Christian texts as a mode for coding difference; and readings of some key passages from the Panarion in order to unpack Epiphanius’ curious assertion about periodization and generation.

2 Time and gender To consider time and gender together in the context of late ancient Christianity is to invite a broader reflection on the underlying structure of each term in Christian thought and theology. A detailed analysis of each term across centuries is beyond the scope of this brief chapter, but some broad patterns can set the scene for the reading of Epiphanius that follows. Time, according to the biblical book of Genesis, was among God’s first creations. Through the agency of divine speech, God created light and separated it from darkness. As a consequence, a notion of temporality (day and night) emerged, all “on the first day.”4 Building upon these mythic, primordial moments, over time Christian notions of temporality developed and remained relentlessly linear. These varied in intensity from one author to the next but reflected a shared and overarching notion of unidirectional movement from creation to its culmination, Genesis to Apocalypse, beginning to end. The intensity and precise contours of temporal periodization among Christian thinkers may differ considerably, but a strong tradition threads through the centuries of Christian history, from Tyconius and Augustine through Joachim of Fiore to the millennialist movements of European expansionism and into nineteenth- and twentieth-century millenarian and apocalyptic movements, parsing historical time in order to comprehend the divine plan for history’s resolution. Time, in this framing of it, is linear and finite, created at a particular moment and subject to a termination scheduled according to a well-laid out divine plan.

152  Elizabeth A. Castelli Genesis tells the story of the creation of temporality, laying the groundwork for Christian speculation about time and its culmination. It also narrates the creation of sexual difference, on the sixth day: “So God created humankind in his image, in the image of God he created them; male and female he created them.”5 Were this the only account in Genesis for the creation of gender, Christians who took up the account as their own might well have cultivated a more neutral and horizontal notion of sexual difference. But Genesis 2 preserves a second account: the story of Eve the helper, extracted from the side of the earth creature, Adam. This version frames the feminine as a secondary derivative of the original human, and it embeds in the biblical tradition taken up by Christians a foundational tension over the nature of gender and sexual difference that haunts debates over gender and sexuality within Christian communities up to the present. Those seeking warrants in canonical texts to support their claims about gender as a natural and primordial system for coding perceived sexual difference find their proof text in this second creation narrative in Genesis. They need not travel far interpretively to transform gender as a marker for perceived difference into a more generalized and productive metaphor by which to organize other concepts into hierarchically arranged binaries. By the first century CE, the Christian writer Paul will argue, for example, that women’s participation in liturgy requires clothing—a veil—that distinguishes them from men.6 He will ground that claim in a series of arguments about nature, the order of creation and divine authority, all of which derive from his reading of the story of creation as told in Genesis 2. Paul’s arguments lay the groundwork for centuries of such assertions, and although there are notable exceptions in early Christian sources—exemplary women whose spiritual virtuosity allowed them to cast off the limitations that characterize “the feminine”—the dominant model of hierarchical gender binaries remains intact among Christian writers, and the model remains tied to the notion of creation itself.7 Once gender comes to function metaphorically as a mode for signifying difference and for coding divinely ordained hierarchies of value, with masculinity in the superior position and femininity in the subordinate position, it is a short distance to discover how, within the Christian historiography, the figure of the “heretical woman” has long served as a foil for (masculine) orthodoxy. Some second-wave feminist historical reconstructions of early Christianity have read this metaphorical framing of “heresy” as “feminine” oppositionally, arguing that the “heretical woman” is a heroic remnant of a suppressed history of Christian women practitioners. More recently, other feminist scholars have emphasized the rhetorical and symbolic character of the heretical and the untethered feminine, interpreting the figure of the heretical woman as a literary figure constructed precisely as a counterpoint to orthodoxy/masculinity or positioned in ideological opposition to the highly valued virginal feminine (the figure of Mary the Mother of Jesus or the church as Christ’s virginal bride).8 So temporality and gender ideology have long histories within the context of Christian thought. That they come together in the work of the fourth-century CE heresiologist Epiphanius of Salamis is, in some sense, not surprising—although

Telling time with Epiphanius  153 his particular mode of co-implicating them in his analysis is singular. It is to this treatment of gender and time that we now turn.

3 Epiphanius Epiphanius is one of the colorful characters in the history of early Christian heresiology. His life spanned the entirety of the fourth century CE—he was born around 310 and died in 403—and he lived a fiercely renunciatory life, first as a monk and later as a bishop.9 His major works were the Ancoratus, a text about the well-lived Christian life, and the Panarion, a comprehensive account and refutation of heresy, which is the focus of this chapter. Epiphanius became the bishop of Constantia [Salamis] (on Cyprus) in 367 CE and served there for almost 40 years. A few years into his episcopacy, he began his monumental work of heresiology, the Panarion, ostensibly in response to a letter sent to him by Acacius and Paul, two presbyters and abbots who had written to him seeking instruction on the heresies contained within various sects they had heard Epiphanius name. The Panarion is a massive work—the recent English translation by Frank Williams runs to almost one thousand pages—and it is simultaneously captivating and almost unreadable. I think it is fair to say that even many specialists in the literature of late ancient Christianity have not read this text cover to cover: it is more the sort of text that one mines for juicy tidbits, which are legion. Epiphanius was not only a deeply devoted renunciant, he was also a stickler for orthodoxy. His long episcopacy lent him the institutional framework for its rigorous defense of what he considered correct doctrine and practice. Early on in the Panarion, Epiphanius lays out a complex periodization of the early stages of world history. In this passage, he declares several of these early periods of human history “the mothers” of heresy. In the first Proem to the work, Epiphanius lays out the full structure of the project: he has organized the work into three volumes divided into seven discrete sections, arranged within each of which are descriptions of 80 “sects and schisms.” A passage from the opening paragraphs gives a sense of Epiphanius’ language and imagery, as well as his rhetorical self-positioning: Since I am going to tell you the names of the sects and expose their unlawful deeds like poisons and toxic substances, and at the same time match the antidotes with them as cures for those already bitten and preventatives for those who will have this misfortune, I am drafting this Preface for the scholarly to explain the “Panarion,” or chest of remedies for those whom savage beasts have bitten. It is composed in three Books containing 80 Sects, symbolically represented by wild beasts or snakes.10 In this preface, he goes through his material twice, naming each of the poisons (heresies) and their sources and laying the groundwork for their treatment and vaccination (orthodoxy). In the second iteration of the litany, he writes, “In the first Volume there are three Sections and 46 Sects, including

154  Elizabeth A. Castelli (ταῖς ) names for them, I mean Barbarism, Scythianism, Hellenism, Judaism and Samaritanism.”11 At first glance, this conflation of temporality and maternity might seem incidental, with Epiphanius deploying an accidental metaphor on his way to a broader taxonomy of the complexes of theological error. If this metaphor of motherhood, mapped simultaneously onto sects (αἱρέσεις) and historical periods, is more than an accident—how might we make sense of it? What I want to suggest is that the imbrication of time and gender/generation relates centrally to a series of broader themes that suffuse the Panarion and to the biblical text that Epiphanius uses as a framing device for the argument as a whole.

4 An excursus on style and the heresiological project According to Frank Williams, the English translator of the Panarion, and other scholars working on this text, Epiphanius composed his three-volume work over the course of a three-year period. His composition was largely oral and dictated. His stenographer Anatolius (“whose task, with much labor and the utmost good will, has been to transcribe and correct the work against these sects … in shorthand notes”12) and his scribe Hypatius (“who copied the transcription from notes to quires”13) both sign the work at the end. In his introduction to the translation, Williams observes, “The poorness of the Panarion’s style must not lead us to suppose that Epiphanius was an uneducated lout.”14 Rather, as Williams points out, Epiphanius emphasizes in the second Proem, Proem II 2.5, that he intends to write “not with eloquence of language or any polished phrases, but with plain speech in a plain dialect, but with accuracy of the facts my speech conveys”—that is, his aim is to be understood by the simple.15 This reflection on Epiphanius as an inelegant writer and a faulty rhetorician is relevant to this discussion because of the curious (and repeated) insistence that sects/historical periods are the mothers of heresy, and the repetition of the figures of motherhood throughout the text. I do not imagine that this formulation is necessarily systematic, nor that Epiphanius has a fully fleshed out historiographical/ hermeneutical blueprint for his argument. Nevertheless, the degree to which the scaffolding of his argument depends upon the interlocking ideas of temporality, generation and gender suggests that he is invested in this arrangement of terms. In addition to the problem of Epiphanius’ vexed style is the problem of genre: the much-maligned genre of heresiology itself. As historian of Christian late antiquity Averil Cameron puts it succinctly in her essay, “How to Read Heresiology”: Heresiology is an embarrassment to modern scholars. It began early and never lost its appeal. But our modern liberal prejudices make us highly resistant to the idea that there can be much imaginative content in such writing, still less that anyone can have found it of interest. Is heresiology therefore merely utilitarian, or worse, a kind of scholastic exercise? For whom was it written, and did anyone bother to read it? Was it the equivalent of publishing a note in a learned journal, whose main claim to fame will be the number of entries in a future citation index?16

Telling time with Epiphanius  155 Indeed, contemporary scholars have most often approached heresiology as a field to be mined for the raw material of ancient heresies or simply to construct the fantasmatic “other” of orthodoxy. Yet, as more recent scholarship has argued, heresiology is simultaneously a disciplinary approach (in both senses of the term, as intellectual discipline and as regulatory regime) and a performance that generates authority and orthodoxy.17 For considerations of gender and time, both of these relatively new ways of conceptualizing heresiology are significant: the genre itself draws upon and reconfigures notions of temporality (including notions of the eternal and unchanging) and gender hierarchies and symbolisms that underwrite orthodoxy’s claims.

5 Periodization In his book, Classifying Christians, Todd Berzon unpacks Epiphanius’ highly structured and dense catalogue of heresies, arguing that the Panarion is a singular exemplar of ancient ethnography: the organization of knowledge about different “peoples” into a comprehensive narrative. Berzon is primarily interested in the project of classification and knowledge-production in heresiological literature, that is, how early Christian orthodox heresiologists recast their heterodox opponents through an intellectual project of (what I will call) proto-anthropology. Berzon notes that Epiphanius’ project is distinctive from earlier heresiological writing (for example, by Irenaeus of Lyons and Hippolytus of Rome) because Epiphanius expands the scope of heresy’s historical reach and merges the history of the world with the “history of religion and religious deviation.”18 Because his project is simultaneously polemical and historiographical, Epiphanius divides historical time into periods. Moreover, he finds the template for his periodization in scripture itself, in this case, the expanded baptismal formula found in the deutero-Pauline letter to the Colossians 3:11: “There is no longer Greek and Jew, circumcised and uncircumcised, barbarian, Scythian, slave and free.”19 From this aspirational, forward-looking ritual formulation, Epiphanius constructs the periodization of the past: barbarism, Scythianism, Hellenism and Judaism are simultaneously historical periods, names for sectarian/religious deviance, and “mothers” of future deviations. Epiphanius then breaks these periods down into more finely grained temporal categories (“mother heresies,” as Berzon calls them):20 From Adam until Noah, Barbarism. From Noah until the tower, and until Serug two generations after the tower, the Scythian superstition. After that, from the tower, Serug and [Terah] until Abraham, Hellenism. From Abraham on, the true religion which is associated with this same Abraham—Judaism, (named) for his lineal descendant Judah.21 As Epiphanius lays out the histories of these periods, the ethical and theological and religious errors multiply: sorcery, witchcraft, licentiousness, adultery, injustice (φαρμάκεια, μάγεια, ἀσέλγεια, μοιχεία, ἀδίκια); more sorcery, more

156  Elizabeth A. Castelli witchcraft, astrology, magic, and so on. Berzon notes the inconsistencies and incoherence within the subplots of this historical narrative, but he observes, “Though Epiphanius’s account of the history of human error may be internally inconsistent, the general schema remains perfectly clear: each age produced certain anthropological, theological, and religious errors.”22 That is to say, Epiphanius’ understanding of the structuring of time is integral to his historiography of the birth and development of generations of heresies, which he frames as a matter of the generation of difference. As Epiphanius organized the past into distinct periods and assigned them the responsibility for the generation and reproduction of error, he also narrated a history of the emergence of cultural difference. In the primordial age, he argued, “there was no difference of opinion yet, no people that was at all different, no name for a sect, and no idolatry either” (οὔπω δὲ οὐχ ἑτεροδοξία, οὐκ ἔθνος τι διαφερόμενον, οὐκ ὄνομα αἱρέσεως, ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ εἰδωλολατρεία).23 But as the generations multiplied, so too did cultural differences, and these early mythological/ historical periods became prolific “mothers” of heresy, producing their numerous and multifarious offspring. Moreover, Epiphanius seems to claim that the very process of generation, the birth of new heresies in subsequent generations/periods, produces ever more virulent strains of deviation and error. Time and gender/ generation are integral to the production of the problem Epiphanius seeks to remedy with his medicine chest of antidotes and cures.

6 Competing genealogies Temporality in the Panarion focuses in the first instance on historical periodization, but then on generations. As he analyzes the sects he critiques, Epiphanius spends a significant amount of time on the genealogies contained within the teachings of these groups, which he diagnoses as false genealogies. That is, in his characterizations of the groups he opposes, he focuses extensively on the mythological, cosmological and aetiological stories that they tell. Meanwhile, his entire argument is structured around the conviction that his historiographical and ethnographic project is unveiling true genealogies. The term “generation” in his text simultaneously counts units of time and refers to acts of generativity. For Epiphanius, the mythological accounts of generation mirror the generativity of the historical periods/sects: both give birth to multiple offspring and multiple errors. This mirrored pairing of the generation of offspring and error appears throughout his text, but a few exemplary passages from the text will illustrate how Epiphanius connects genealogy and the generation of error. The first passage comes from his discussion of a group called the Nicolaitans. This group appears briefly in the letter to the church in Ephesus at the beginning of the book of Revelation, where the seer, who has otherwise been upbraiding the Christians of Ephesus for having fallen away from their earlier love, nevertheless congratulates them for hating the works of the Nicolaitans, “which I also hate.”24 Elsewhere in the New Testament, in the Acts of the Apostles, Nicolaus is named as one of the seven deacons of the church, chosen by the apostles.25 Epiphanius

Telling time with Epiphanius  157 criticizes the Nicolaitans because, in his eyes, they promulgate false stories about cosmology—stories that are, themselves, about abnormal modes of generation and regeneration—and they promote improper sexual activity. These two modes of misbehavior are interlocking, in Epiphanius’ reading of them, and they both produce heretical offspring. Though he [Nicolaus] had a beautiful wife he had refrained from intercourse with her, as though in emulation of those whom he saw devoting themselves to God. He persevered for a while but could not bear to control his incontinence till the end. Instead, desiring to return like a dog to its vomit, he kept looking for poor excuses and inventing them in defense of his own intemperate passion. ( would have done him more good!) Then, failing of his purpose, he simply began having sex with his wife. But because he was ashamed of his defeat and suspected that he had been found out, he ventured to say, “Unless one copulates every day, he has no part in eternal life.” For he had shifted from one pretense to another. Seeing that his wife was unusually beautiful and yet bore herself with modesty, he envied her. And, supposing that everyone was as lascivious as he, he began by constantly being offensive to his wife and making certain slanderous charges against her in speeches. And at length he degraded himself not only to normal sexual activity but to a blasphemous opinion, the harm of perverse teaching, and the deceit of the covert introduction of wickedness.26 Epiphanius goes on to diagnose heterodoxies within the Nicolaitans’ understanding of the story of creation.27 He attributes to them a capricious and mistaken interpretation of the earliest verses of Genesis 1, where the biblical text describes the primordial creation of light, the division of light from darkness and the declaration that one shall be called “day” and the other “night”—that is, in essence, a mythological account of the creation of time itself. For Epiphanius, the problem is not only with Nicolaitans but also with others of their ilk, a motley collection of gnostic sects, whom Epiphanius argues have contracted heresy from Nicolaus and his predecessors (e.g., Simon Magus and “the others”) by way of proximity and contagion.28 Collectively, their problem from Epiphanius’ point of view is that they have misapprehended this primordial story, and their misunderstanding of the very foundations of the world—including its temporality—has produced demonically inspired sexual deviance (both in the stories they tell about creation itself and in their own behavior). For some of them glorify a Barbelo who, they claim, is on high in an eighth heaven, and say she has been emitted by the Father. For some of them say she is the mother of Ialdabaoth, others, of Sabaoth. But her son has ruled the seventh heaven with a sort of insolence, and tyrannically. To the ones below him he says, “I am the first and I am the last, and there is none other God beside me.” But Barbelo has heard what he says, and weeps. And she keeps appearing in some beautiful form to the archons and stealing the seed

158  Elizabeth A. Castelli which is generated by their climax and ejaculation—supposedly to recover her power which has been sown in various of them. And so, on such a basis as this, he covertly brought his smutty mystery (τὸ τῆς αὐτοῦ αἰσχρολογίας μυστήριον) to the world. And as I said, some of the others too, with much turpitude (κακομηχανίας), taught the practice—it is not right to say how they did it—of promiscuity with women and unnatural acts of intolerable perversity (ἐν πολυμιξίᾳ γυναικῶν καὶ ἐν αἰσχροποιίαις ἀνηκέστοις ἀναστρέφεσθαι ἐδίδαξαν) as the most holy apostle somewhere says, “It is a shame even to speak of the things that are done of them in secret.”29 For Epiphanius, the “unnatural acts of intolerable perversity” are wholly implicated in the disruption of proper generation (in the biological sense) and the generations (in the temporal sense). They are also tied up with Epiphanius’ highly gendered framing of heresy as a whole, which he characterizes elsewhere in a discussion of the Collyridians as a “worthless [or, in my translation, a “nasty”] woman” (πᾶσα γὰρ αἵρεσις φαύλη γυνή) who is sexually promiscuous, wantonly reproductive and seeding the generations with error.30 Having fully developed this slanderous figuration for “heresy,” Epiphanius has only a short distance to travel to make his next rhetorical move: to formulate a stark contrast between heresy as “a worthless/nasty woman” figured as a hypersexualized historical temporality, on the one hand, and her opposite, the singular, eternal, virginal church, the bride of Christ and “our mother.” Epiphanius, like other church fathers, routinely uses the rhetoric of gender and sexuality to code orthodoxy and heresy, using the language of feminine and masculine, but also rhetoric of sexual deviance as a signifier for religious deviance.31 In his polemic against Simon Magus, for example, Simon is a magician (religiously deviant), deranged and deluded (mentally unsound—that is, deviant with respect to reason and rationality) and “naturally lecherous” (sexually deviant) who “had the nerve to call the whore who was his partner the Holy Spirit.”32 Epiphanius is not the first Christian writer to deploy this sort of characterization. His portrait builds on earlier texts—those of Justin Martyr, Irenaeus, Hippolytus, Tertullian and Eusebius—and capitalizes on an older tradition, well-documented by historian Jennifer Wright Knust, whereby Christian writers demeaned their opponents through the strategic use of sexual slander.33 What follows in Epiphanius’ portrait of Simon Magus strategically conflates the historical figure of Simon’s woman companion, Helen, whom Epiphanius has already called a “whore,” with Ennoia, Prunicus and Barbelo, cosmic emanations that appear in various Sethian and Valentinian gnostic mythological sources. They are figures who exist at the early stages of cosmic creation, as emanations of the thought of the invisible God, outside of time. In Epiphanius’ retelling of the story of Simon and Helen, then, Helen is also Ennoia and Prunicus and Barbelo; she migrates into different bodies, which are all, by degrees, ravaged.34 As he does repeatedly throughout the Panarion, Epiphanius here aligns “heresy” with unstable, excessive, unnatural sexuality— all poised, implicitly, against its orthodox opposites. But if Simon is the progenitor of other heresies, as Epiphanius and others argue, then Helen emerges as their

Telling time with Epiphanius  159 whoring mother, structurally parallel to the historical periods that Epiphanius has asserted earlier on are the “mothers of heresies.” Simon Magus is just one case: throughout a series of examples, Epiphanius diagnoses the instability, malleability, protean, hyper-reproductive nature of both the cosmological figures who appear in heretical mythologies and the followers/ practitioners of these communities. Temporality and gender appear, meanwhile, intertwined: historical periods and generations coded simultaneously as deviantly feminine and perversely maternal, while the orthodox church is coded as singular, eternal (uncontained by time), virginal, and “our mother.” A paradox at the heart of Epiphanius’ polemic is the degree to which the ideological scaffolding of his analysis finds parallels in precisely the systems of thought he seeks to dismantle. Although the “mother heresies,” as Berzon calls them, are present in the earliest stages of human history, things seem to get worse as subsequent generations unfold. In this framing of the matter, he seems to be in uncanny alignment with those whose cosmologies and biblical interpretations he critiques and rejects. In his lengthy discussion of Valentinians, for example, Epiphanius quotes extensively from both Valentinian texts and from Irenaeus’ Against Heresies, interweaving the themes of gender and time in a fashion that has become familiar. In one lengthy quotation from a Valentinian text, Epiphanius highlights how gender and sexual difference, generation (both a reproduction and as period of time), sexual wantonness (prounikia) and the hierarchies of creation intersect in Valentinian cosmology and mythological speculation, with the Self-Progenitor himself (though encompassing both male and female qualities) and maleness possessing the qualities of agelessness (timelessness)—eternity: When, the beginning, the Self-Progenitor himself encompassed all things within himself, though they were within him in ignorance—he whom some call ageless Aeon, ever renewed, both male and female, who encompasses all and is yet unencompassed—then the Ennoia within him (softened the Majesty). Her some have called Ennoia, others, Grace, but properly— since she has furnished treasures of the Majesty to those who are of the Majesty—those who have spoken the truth have termed her Silence, since the Majesty has accomplished all things by reflection without speech. Wishing to break eternal bonds, the imperishable , as I said, softened the Majesty to a desire for his repose. And by coupling with him she showed forth the Father of Truth whom the perfect have properly termed Man, since he was the antitype of the Ingenerate who was before him. Thereafter Silence, having brought about a natural union of Light with Man—though their coming together was the will for it—showed forth Truth. She was properly named Truth by the perfect, for she was truly like her own mother, Silence—this being the desire of Silence, that the apportionment of the lights of male and female be equal so that the which is in them might also be made manifest, through themselves, to the ones which were separated from them as perceptible lights.

160  Elizabeth A. Castelli Thereafter Truth, having manifested a wantonness [prounikia] like her mother’s, softened her own Father toward her. They were united in immortal intercourse and ageless union, and showed forth a spiritual tetrad, male and female, a copy of the tetrad already existent, (which was Depth, Silence, Father and Truth). Now this is the tetrad which stems from the Father and Truth: Man, Church, Word, and Life. Then, by the will of the all-encompassing Depth, Man and Church, remembering their father’s words, came together and showed forth a dodecad of male and female wantons [prounikōn]. The males are Advocate, Paternal, Maternal, Ever-Mindful, Desired—that is, Light—Ecclesiasticus; the females, Faith, Hope, Love, Understanding, Blessed One, Wisdom. Next Word and Life, themselves transforming the gift of union, had congress with each other—though their congress was the will for it—and by coming together showed forth a decad of wantons, they too male and female. The males are Profound, Ageless, Self-Engendered, Only-Begotten, Immoveable. These obtained their names the glory of the All-Encompassing. The females are Copulation, Uniting, Intercourse, Union, and Pleasure. They obtained their names to the glory of Silence.35 The passage, taken on its own, is a bit obscure, but what is significant for this discussion is how Epiphanius puts the text in the service of his larger project. He emphasizes the transformations and degradations that take place as generations of emanations descend over and through time from the eternal Self-Progenitor, whom some gnostics will call “the Invisible God.” The generational degeneracy he diagnoses links temporality to sexual difference/gender as each generation, in its relative distance from the eternal Self-Progenitor, becomes more corrupt. Although Epiphanius quotes this text at length in order to refute and ridicule it, he also inadvertently draws attention to the ways in which his own understanding of cosmology, the generation of temporality, and its links with the creation of sexual difference and ideas about gender uncannily parallel the structure of gnostic cosmology and genealogy. The particular details are not identical, but the overall ideological structuring of temporality and gender is remarkably similar. Most striking, toward the end of the chain of emanations, is the framing of masculinity as “Profound, Ageless, Self-engendered, Only-Begotten, Immoveable,” and femininity as manifest in various elements of sexual activity. These claims resonate with Epiphanius’ own use of figures of both temporality and the feminine to describe heretical histories and movements. It is as though, through his own rhetoric, Epiphanius seeks to perform a homeopathic cure on the disease of heresy, echoing the structural logic of his opponents in order to purge their cosmology of its virulence.

7 Orthodoxy as a virgin mother Epiphanius closes his monumental work with a short text, a postscript— “A Concise, Accurate Account of the Faith of the Catholic and Apostolic

Telling time with Epiphanius  161 Church”—which traditionally travels under the name, De Fide. In this text, he uses a seagoing metaphor: We have sailed across the shoreless sea of the blasphemies of each sect, with great difficulty crossed the ocean of their blasphemous, shameful, repulsive mysteries … And we have approached the calm lands of the truth, after negotiating every rough place, enduring every squall, foaming, and tossing of billows, and, as it were, seeing the swell of the sea, and its whirlpools, its shallows none too small, and its places full of dangerous beasts … Let us hasten to the city the moment we spy it—the holy Jerusalem and Christ’s virgin and bride, the firm foundation and rock, our holy mother, Christ’s bride.36 Having spent hundreds of pages characterizing heresy as a problem of poison and contagion, it now emerges as a roiling sea whose opposite is the firm dry land of orthodoxy—the church, the bride of Christ, and virginal mother of orthodox Christians. Given the earlier portraiture of historical periods as “mothers of heresy,” Epiphanius here draws a sharp contrast between these unfaithful, prolific, profligate mothers and the unitary virginal mother that is the Church, our holy mother. Eventually, he shifts the terms of his discussion by turning to an anagogical/ spiritual interpretation of the Song of Songs 6:8–9: “There are threescore queens, and fourscore concubines, and maidens without number, but one is my dove, my perfect one” to another gendered image for time: “a generation in Christ is called a ‘queen,’” Epiphanius writes, “not because the whole generation ruled, but because the one generation which knew the Lord is elevated to the royal rank and status by the name of its husband.”37 The analogical reading proceeds into a lengthy excursus on the generations of humanity, as narrated in the book of Genesis and retold in the genealogy of Jesus recorded in the Gospel of Matthew, a reading that emphasizes the gender of time itself by means of wordplay in Greek, since the noun genea is itself a feminine form. Most significantly, Epiphanius claims that the counting of generations stops with Christ: for after Christ the world’s time periods are no longer counted by lineages [of queens] in this way, since [of them] is summed up in one unified whole which, by God’s good pleasure, indicates an unshakeable stay. This [unity] will make it that the end of the age is separate from time, and will be over at the transition to the age to come.38 Todd Berzon helpfully analyzes the temporal stakes involved in Epiphanius’ argument in De Fide: “For Epiphanius,” he writes, “the atemporal finality of Christ orients the progression of sacred time toward a decisive eschatological moment.”39 This eschatological or messianic moment ushers in the timelessness that resides outside history. Meanwhile, Epiphanius emphasizes the singular purity of the church as “the only daughter of the only mother,” whereas

162  Elizabeth A. Castelli all the women who came after her and before her have been called concubines. They have not been entire strangers to the covenant and inheritance, but have no stated dowry and are not receptacles of the Holy Spirit, but have only an illicit union with the Word.40 Here, one sees how Epiphanius adapts the more general polemic against heresy, figured as a wanton woman, and links it to his notions of generation and temporality, the church as a manifestation of pure femininity existing in a time outside of time.

8 Conclusions Recent scholarship on heresiology has shown it to be more than a mere catalogue or exercise in ideological othering. Rather, it is a performative, order-making mode of knowledge production in late ancient Christian literary work—or, in the case of Berzon’s framing of the project, ethnography avant la lettre. Epiphanius’ Panarion set the standard in many respects for what came later, and he thematizes temporality and gender in order to make a more sweeping case for an idealized orthodoxy outside historical time and beyond difference. He also echoes the underlying logic of his opponents when he frames each subsequent generation of heresy as more debased than its predecessors, much as the Valentinians (for example) assert that each generation of aeon or emanation in the process of creation is more corrupt and more distant from its first origin.41 Time, temporality, generation are all symptoms of the problem that Epiphanius’ orthodoxy seeks to resolve. Sexual difference and gender are also for Epiphanius apt metaphors for the distinctions and diversity that characterize heresy itself. Even when he seems to be arguing against actual historical women, such as the Collyridians who reportedly make food offerings to Mary the mother of Jesus, his discussion veers off very quickly into polemical generalizations about “women” as a class: “Women are unstable, prone to error, and mean-spirited,”42 he declares early on. “The speculation is entirely feminine, and the malady of the deluded Eve all over again.”43 He concludes that the ritual behavior of these “worthless [nasty] women” is “silly and heretical, and demon-inspired insolence and imposture.”44 He arrives here after a rambling tour through a vast array of scriptural prohibitions and proof texts that re-inscribe the general tenor of his declarations concerning the mania and unreliability of “woman” herself. For Epiphanius, both time and gender (in the form of the “worthless/nasty woman”) are symptoms of a worrisome state of existence, equally vulnerable to the proliferation of diverse and erroneous opinion and to the malady of the heretical feminine itself—a malady that traces itself all the way back in time to Genesis. Orthodoxy promises the resolution of time-boundedness and change over time into eternity, and it posits the solution to the problem of gender difference in the form of the virginal mother church, unified forever with the virginal bridegroom, Christ. In the Panarion, Epiphanius, who possessed such a certainty about the authority and supremacy of orthodoxy, stages a rather

Telling time with Epiphanius  163 desperate effort to contain the failures of so many around him to conform to his idealized reality. He did so by producing a text that used the foundational terms of time and difference to try to usher in a reality that would cancel out the very terms of his engagement, replacing them with his theological fantasy of an eternal unity.

Notes 1 This textual detail came to my attention in the work of Berzon 2016: 131. For a history of the idea of a place as the “mother of heresy,” see Reynolds’ discussion of the claim that Arabia is the “haeresium ferax” (bearer/mother of heresy); Reynolds 2014: 43. 2 Cameron 2015: 197–9; Flower 2011; Berzon 2016. 3 Cavarero 1995: 14–18. 4 Genesis 1:3–5. 5 Genesis 1:27. 6 1 Corinthians 11:2–16. 7 Castelli 1991. 8 Burrus 1991; Petersen 2013. 9 Two recent biographies of Epiphanius are especially worthy of note: Kim 2015 and Jacobs 2016. Also worthy of special mention, in addition to Berzon’s work, are specialized studies of Epiphanius’ heresiological work: Pourkier 1992; Schott 2007; Flower 2011. 10 Epiphanius, Panarion Proem I.1.2. 11 Epiphanius, Panarion Proem I.5.2. 12 Epiphanius, De Fide 25.3; Williams vol. II, 681. 13 Epiphanius, De Fide 25,4; Williams vol. II, 682. 14 Williams vol. I, xxviii. Epiphanius’ lackluster reputation as a rhetor stretches back into antiquity. As Kim (2016: 3) writes: “To his detractors, Epiphanius was a narrowminded zealot, a divisive meddler, and a subpar scholar with a penchant for harsh rhetoric, hyperbole, and invective.” Kim goes on to quote John of Jerusalem, ninthcentury Photios, and more contemporary scholars to make his point. See also Flower 2011: 86–7 on Epiphanius’ style. 15 Williams vol. I, xxix. 16 Cameron 2005: 194–5. 17 In addition to Berzon 2016, see Cameron 2005. 18 Berzon 2016: 131–2. 19 The formula in Colossians is expanded and transformed from an earlier version, found in the authentic letter of Paul to the Galatians at 3:28, where Paul quotes the formula: “there is neither Jew nor Greek, slave nor free, nor male and female, for all are one in Christ Jesus.” Notably “nor male and female” falls out of the baptismal formula when it is repeated later on. 20 Berzon 2016: 132. 21 Epiphanius, Panarion 8.3.2; Berzon 2016: 132. 22 Berzon 2016: 133. 23 Epiphanius, Panarion 1.1.9. 24 Revelation 2:6. 25 Acts 6. 26 Epiphanius, Panarion 25.1.4–6. 27 Epiphanius, Panarion 25.5.1–2. 28 Epiphanius, Panarion 25.7.2. 29 Epiphanius, Panarion 25.7.2–5. 30 Epiphanius, Panarion 79.8.2.

164  Elizabeth A. Castelli 31 This move is well documented by earlier scholarship; see Burrus 1991. More recently, Petersen 2013 makes a more explicit argument in support of the view that gendered imagery for heresy is highly rhetorical and not reflective of historical women’s actual roles in “heretical” groups. 32 Epiphanius, Panarion 21.2.1–2. 33 Other ancient authorities that make the same argument: Justin Martyr, 1 Apology 26.1–3; Irenaeus, Contra haereses 1.23.2–4; Hippolytus, Refutio omnium haeresium 6.19–20; Tertullian De Anima 34; Eusebius, Historia Ecclesiastica 2.13. For a more comprehensive history of the figure of Simon Magus in late ancient and later Christian sources, see Ferreiro 2005. On the strategic use of sexual slander in early Christian polemic, see Knust 2006. 34 Epiphanius, Panarion 21.2.5–6. 35 Epiphanius, Panarion 31.5.3–9. 36 Epiphanius, De Fide 1.1–3, 6. 37 Epiphanius, De Fide 3.2; 4.1. 38 Epiphanius, De Fide 5.4. 39 Berzon 2016: 144. 40 Epiphanius, De Fide 6.1. 41 Epiphanius, Panarion 31. 42 Epiphanius, Panarion 79.1.6. 43 Epiphanius, Panarion 79.2.1. 44 Epiphanius, Panarion 79.9.3.

Bibliography Berzon, T. S. 2016. Classifying Christians: Ethnography, Heresiology, and the Limits of Knowledge in Late Antiquity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Burrus, V. 1991. The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Alexander, Athanasius, Epiphanius, and Jerome. Harvard Theological Review 84: 229–48. Cameron, A. 2005. “How to Read Heresiology.” In The Cultural Turn in Late Ancient Studies: Gender, Asceticism, and Historiography, edited by D. B. Martin and P. Cox Miller, 193–212. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Castelli, E. A. 1991. “‘I Will Make Mary Male’: Pieties of the Body and Gender Transformation of Christian Women in Late Antiquity.” In Body Guards: The Cultural Politics of Gender Ambiguity, edited by J. Epstein and K. Straub, 29–49. New York, NY: Routledge. Cavarero, A. 1995. In Spite of Plato: A Feminist Rewriting of Ancient Philosophy. Translated by S. Anderlini-D’Onofrio and Á. O’Healy. New York, NY: Routledge. Epiphanius. Panarion. Vol. 1, Ancoratus und Panarion, Haer. 1–33, edited by K. Holl et al., GCS n. F. 10. Boston: de Gruyter, 2013; Panarion. Vol. 2, Panarion, Haer. 34–64, edited by K. Holl and J. Dummer, GCS 31. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1980; Vol. 3 Panaron, Haer. 65–80 und De Fide, edited by K. Holl and J. Dummer, GCS 37. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1985. Epiphanius. 2009. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Book I (Sects 1–46). (2nd edn., rev. and expanded) Translated by Frank Williams. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 63. Leiden: Brill. Epiphanius. 2013. The Panarion of Epiphanius of Salamis, Books II and III. De Fide. (2nd rev. edn.) Translated by F. Williams. Nag Hammadi and Manichaean Studies 79. Leiden: Brill. Ferreiro, A. 2005. Simon Magus in Patristic, Medieval and Early Modern Traditions. Studies in the history of Christian traditions 125. Leiden: Brill.

Telling time with Epiphanius  165 Flower, R. 2011. “Genealogies of Unbelief: Epiphanius of Salamis and Heresiological Authority.” In Unclassical Traditions: Vol. II: Perspectives from East and West in Late Antiquity, edited by C. Kelly, R. Flower and M. W. Stuart, 70–87. Cambridge Classical Journal, Supplemental Volume 35. Cambridge: Cambridge Philological Society. Jacobs, A. S. 2016. Epiphanius of Cyprus: A Cultural Biography of Late Antiquity. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Kelly-Gadol, J. 1977. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In Becoming Visible: Women in European History, edited by R. Bridenthal and C. Koonz, 174–201. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin. Reprinted in J. Kelly. 1984. Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, 19–50. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kim, Y. R. 2015. Epiphanius of Cyprus: Imagining an Orthodox World. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. Knust, J. W. 2006. Abandoned to Lust: Sexual Slander and ancient Christianity. New York, NY: Columbia University Press. Kristeva, J. 1979. “Le Temps des femmes.” 34/44: Cahiers de recherché de sciences des textes et documents no. 5: 5–19. Kristeva, J. 1981. “Women’s Time.” Translated by A. Jardine and H. Blake. Signs: The Journal of Women in Culture and Society 7: 13–35. Le Boulluec, A. 1985. La notion d’hérésie dans la littérature grecque, IIe–IIIe siècles. Paris: Études Augustiniennes. Petersen, S. 2013. “‘Jede Häresie ist eine wertlose Frau’ (Epiphanius von Salamis): Zur Konsruktion der Geschlecterdifferenz im Religionsstreit.” In Doing Gender – Doing Religion, edited by U. E. Eisen, C. Gerber and A. Standhartinger, 99–126. WUNT 302. Tübingen: Mohr Siebeck. Pourkier, A. 1992. L’Hérésiologie chez Épiphane de Salamine. Christianisme Antique 4. Paris: Beauchesne. Reynolds, G. S. 2014. “On the Presentation of Christianity in the Qur’ān and the Many Aspects of Qur’anic Rhetoric.” Al-Bayān: Journal of Qur’ān and Ḥadīth Studies 12: 42–54. Schott, J. 2007. “Heresiology as Universal History in Epiphanius’ Panarion.” Zeitschrift für Antike Christentum: Journal of Ancient Christianity 10: 546–63. Scott, J. W. ed. 2008. Women’s Studies on the Edge. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

10 (En)Gendering Christian time Female saints and Roman martyrological calendars Nicola Denzey Lewis

1 Introduction Every January 21 in a handsome medieval church some two miles outside Rome’s ancient city walls, Romans gather from all quadrants of the city to mark the festal day of the young virgin martyr Agnes. The day is celebrated with great excitement and solemnity here at this church dedicated to her, Sant’Agnese fuori le mura, where she has been venerated since the 330s CE. On this day, two small lambs from the Trappist abbey of Tre Fontane in Rome are brought into the church in baskets, their flesh marked with SAM (St. Agnes, Martyr) and SAV (St. Agnes, Virgin), respectively. The cardinal—and sometimes the pope—intone their blessings over the lambs, who are fortunate to suffer a better fate than Agnes herself; after the blessing they return to the abbey’s fields, where they remain until they are grown. Indeed, their identification with Agnes is only a very loose one. On Holy Thursday before Easter, their wool is sheared and woven into the pallium, a woolen band that the pope confers on new metropolitan bishops as a signal of their authority. This ritual is not ancient; at least, no late antique or early medieval source gives any indication of it. It is abundantly clear, however, that Agnes’ natal day, January 21, or the 12th of the Kalends of February, was already observed by the middle of the fourth century CE, although perhaps not with lambs. On this day, the day that she was “reborn” into paradise, Roman Catholics still read from the fourth-century bishop Ambrose’s De Virginibus, which instructs Ambrose’s flock to commemorate Agnes: “It is the birthday of a martyr, let us offer the victim. It is the birthday of St. Agnes, let men admire, let children take courage, let the married be astounded, let the unmarried take an example.”1 For 1,700 years, then, Agnes’ death has marked out Catholic time in the city of Rome. Agnes is still today a well-known and familiar virgin martyr, immediately recognizable iconographically from the lamb that flanks her image. She is the patron saint of diverse people and things: engaged couples, crops, gardeners, bodily purity, girls, virgins, even rape victims. Along with Peter and Paul, she is also the patron saint of the city of Rome, an early (and rare) female to have received such an honor. Her acta recount a typically harrowing tale. At the tender age of only 12 or 13, the beautiful young Agnes caught the eye of a young man, the only son of Rome’s pagan praefect, Sempronius.2 The son becomes so lovesick he literally

(En)Gendering Christian time  167 falls ill, particularly when Agnes refuses to return his affections. His father intervenes. Agnes is bold: she has but one bridegroom, she says, and that is Christ himself. Given the choice to marry or to become a vestal virgin, Agnes refuses both. The reprisal is swift, and she is subject to a cascading series of sexual humiliations and assaults: forced prostitution, thrown naked before crowds, burned at the stake, and finally beheaded by sword. In this essay, I seek to unpick the complex tapestry of processes involved with the movement from Roman time to Christian time. I begin with Agnes because she is one of the few female figures to stand in the center of these processes as they swirled around her. And, in fact, she remains the sole female figure from our earliest late antique literary and calendrical sources whose natal day continues to be marked in Christian tradition. I argue here that the Christianization of time through the use and circulation of martyrological calendars (and the feasts that they listed) represents a striking innovation in the way that time was reckoned: for the first time, time was marked through human flesh—quite literally, through the torture and death of human beings. Still more remarkable, to me, is the fact that at least some of these martyrs, in the late antique literary imagination, were female. What does it mean that time came to be performed through the destruction of female flesh?

2 On Roman time We might begin by considering what came before the Christianization of time. Romans had a variety of methods to mark out calendrical time.3 The focus might be on astrological time, or festal time, or a combination of both. Time reckoning might be individual—in the form of parapegmata or small, personal peg calendars—or civic, such as the feriales or festal calendars that announced fixed days for everything from markets to days in which the senate was in session, to feasts dedicated to the gods. These traditional calendars had a longue durée at Rome; we have a feriale from 362 CE, written on a wall in the city, as well as a Constantinian-era parapegma. In these instances, the marking of time ranged from intensely personal and individual (parapegmata) to civic and collective, though not yet “universal.” Roman reckoning of time went through a period of organization and change in between the Republic and the early Empire, most trenchantly evident in the creation of the new Julian calendar. Denis Feeney has already demonstrated the connection between the marking of time through the creation or imposition of a calendar and imperial power.4 Feeney identified the ancient Roman calendar as both a “religious instrument” for priests to regularize rituals and a device “used by kings and then aristocrats and priests to stage the community’s identity as a civic unit.”5 Julius Caesar’s famous calendar reordered time, but it did so in the service of increasing Caesar’s political and religious authority, inexorably stamping his presence on the life of the city.6 Still, Feeney emphasizes that Romans preferred each city to have its own calendar rather than imposing a standard calendar across the empire; the calendar was not meant to be a “unifying grid.” Thus while the

168  Nicola Denzey Lewis imposition of marked time was, in a sense, an imperial concern, there was also room within Roman ideology for individual civic identity. Time was, therefore, primarily civic, and it was fluid. Inasmuch as an abstract notion of eternal time (aeternitas) existed, it was confined to use on imperial coinage; now personified (interestingly, sometimes as female and sometimes as male), the concept of aeternitas bolstered imperial ideology, yet did not appear to affect an individual’s experience of time—either as gendered, or as universal rather than local.7 There existed a complex relationship between the Roman calendar as a way of organizing time and designating how it should be marked, and the Roman, civic performance of time. Romans performed time in a variety of manners, but here I want to focus on the celebration of festal days dedicated to the gods. These festivals had a religious function (i.e., honoring the gods appropriately) but also a social function, in that they acted to unify the population as well as to re-inscribe social hierarchies, in what some anthropologists have termed “confirmatory rituals.”8 There were many of these rites, but for present purposes, we might briefly focus on those that involved either women, or the specific performance of gender, or both. The Carmentalia (January 11 and 15), for example, was celebrated exclusively by women; other festal days called for specific performances not just of gender but, more intersectionally, of social class, such as the Matralia, when elite women entertained and provided food for their female slaves, but during which time matronae also slapped a slave woman admitted into the temple of Mater Matuta, driving her out. The Feralia (February 21), a day that closed the nine days of the Parentalia, had no public rites, but Ovid famously describes a private one, where an anus ebria, a “drunken old woman,” sits with nubile girls to honor the silent goddess Tacita. With three fingers, she puts three bits of incense in three places over a threshold where a dead mouse has been hidden. Rolling black beans in her mouth, the woman then smears the head of a fish with tar, impales it with a bronze needle and burns it in a fire, saying “I have gagged spiteful tongues and muzzled unfriendly mouths” (Hostiles linguas inimicaque uinximus ora).9 Women, then, actively participated in Roman time, but it was neither organized around their bodies nor even based on male literary projections of their bodily experience.

3 On the Christianization of time How, then, did Romans move from honoring traditional gods and their festal days to celebrations of the saints? As leading, influential Christians actively “Christianized” time, they could exploit older patterns of festal commemoration and overlay them with the celebration of a new saint’s natal day. Such appears to have been the case with Paulinus of Nola, who engineered the natalicia of Felix, his special patron. At Felix’s shrine, visitors were treated to spectacularly theatrical feats of healing. Felix’s feast (January 14) also coincided with an older, traditional midwinter festival, when peasants slaughtered livestock and shared the meat. Instead of offering food to the gods, as they had traditionally done, they dedicated their sacrifices to St. Felix. And in the middle of the fifth century,

(En)Gendering Christian time  169 Polemius Silvius, a Gallic Christian, attempted to integrate the Roman festal cycle into the Christian calendar produced for the bishop Eucherius of Lyon.10 The Christianization of time was nevertheless not merely about putting a Christian veneer over a pre-existent pagan calendar. Most of the saints commemorated in our earliest Christian calendars were not celebrated on days of major Roman festivals. One exception is the feast of the Chair of St. Peter, celebrated on February 22, the same day as the family holiday of the Caristia, where Romans celebrated the Lares with offerings of food and cake. By 567, however, ecclesiastical authorities emphasized that the Caristia rites were pagan and therefore must not be allowed to interfere with the proper celebration of Peter.11 Things would be much tidier if Christian female saints’ days corresponded to earlier Roman festivals where women played a prominent part, but this is not borne out by the evidence. In fact, none of our early female saints’ days line up with earlier Roman festal days at all. Our earliest Christian calendars make it absolutely clear that the Christianization of time was not simply a matter of replacement: Roman festivals continued to be marked and ostensibly celebrated in the post-Constantinian era. Indeed, famously, the Lupercalia (February 13–15)— celebrated in the early imperial period by lusty young men dressed in skins of sacrificed goats, whipping girls and women with februa—was still performed in some fashion at least up until the time of Pope Gelasius (494–6).12

4 The Calendar of 354 How did the Catholic calendar, marked out by saints’ days, come to replace Roman fasti and ferialia? We are fortunate to have still preserved a remarkable document from the fourth century CE, called the Calendar of 354, also called the Chronography of 354, the Almanac of 354, or the Philocalian Calendar, after its original calligrapher, Furius Dionysus Philocalus.13 It was produced, on commission, for a wealthy fourth-century Roman, Valentinus, who is otherwise unknown.14 It remains our earliest Christian codex calendar, and our earliest Christian codex featuring full-page illustrations. While the original manuscript has unfortunately been lost, its contents have been preserved in several Carolingian and Renaissance copies. The calendar has been well studied in recent decades by Michele Salzman,15 and to a lesser extent, Jörg Rüpke.16 It might be mentioned that Salzman sees the codex as a Christian document, while Rüpke disagrees; at least, he sees it as belonging to a wealthy Roman pagan senatorial family. Christianity, Rüpke insists, was for this family not something to be scorned, but something that was, nevertheless, still a private matter.17 In an important sense, Salzman and Rüpke are not saying two entirely different things: the Christianization of the Empire and the Christianization of time itself were not things that happened at a stroke, but by small shifts at the levels of individuals and families. The Codex gives us insight into one particular moment, and one particular experiment, so to speak, in Christianizing time. This luxury object from a key era in the transformation of Rome into Roma Cristiana gives us a sense of a tremendously layered conception of time. Closer to

170  Nicola Denzey Lewis what we would call an almanac than a calendar, the Codex reckons time in various ways. Astronomical or zodiacal time is marked with illustrations of the personified months, along with a brief description; days of the week are similarly illustrated, along with their significance; each day, too, is reckoned according to whether it is neutral, auspicious or inauspicious. Beyond these astronomical calendars, the Codex also contains a consular list, specific to Rome; a list of imperial reigns, and then a feriale calendar. This feriale calendar served various purposes: it was political, noting days when the Senate might meet, for example, just as it was mercantile, advocating which days were proper for business; it was ludic, noting days for major games or circus races, and at the same time religious, noting major Roman festivals and observances. It is clear that, in the middle of the fourth century, the Roman festal cycle was still observed: in January, the calendar marks the celebration of the Carmentalia; in February, the Lupercalia, Feralia and Caristia; in March, the Navigium of Isis and a festival in honor of Juno as well as the festal cycle of Magna Mater. Ceres is honored in April; the Vestalia, Matronalia and Fors Fortuna in June; the Hilaria in November and the Saturnalia in December. But that is not all: the Codex includes a list of popes with the years of their reigns; a list of saints with the days of their commemoration; and finally, a Christian chronicle of significant events. Strikingly, the Calendar of 354 starts out as a pagan book and ends as a Christian one: as it moves from images of the personified cities at the beginning of the Codex, to its Genesis-like Book of Generations and city Chronicle at its end, it becomes progressively Christianized. In other words, the Christian religion’s slow creep over individuals—including the consuls and prefects of the city who gradually become Christian, to the regions or neighborhoods of the city, to the city itself—is reflected in the progression and organization of this Codex. This deeply textured manner of marking time ensured that time was richly determined in the late Roman imagination—each day significant on a variety of levels. Any given day might be auspicious or inauspicious, astrologically significant, a market day, the day the Senate is out of session, the day a famous consul became consul, and/or that a pope led his church in the commemoration of a martyr that happened to fall during a major Roman festival. Fourth-century time was as complex as imperial time, and arguably more so. It followed all earlier ways of marking time, and a separate set of Christian concerns, which had been grafted onto the existing calendar-keeping.

5 Christian list-making and time Let me focus on the list form, so prevalent in the Codex and the way in which martyrologically marked time comes to replace most other ways of marking time. Kim Bowes has worked extensively on a particular form of Christian list—ivory consular diptychs that once listed the names of consuls.18 In time, Bowes observes, these consular lists were literally erased and replaced with the names of saints and martyrs. Bowes sees these new liturgical diptychs as having evolved from third- or fourth-century lists of deceased members of a Christian community read aloud

(En)Gendering Christian time  171 as a general prayer, the oratio communis.19 As these lists became “separated and enlarged from the main liturgy,” a separate list or communicante—this time, listing saints, or martyrs—evolved from the oratio communis.20 If the names of a Christian community’s dead were enumerated along with their dates of death—and let me emphasize that we do not know that this was the case—then it would seem natural, perhaps, that communicantes might make the jump from a textual/liturgical form to a calendar, such as we find for the very first time in the Calendar of 354. This brings us to the Calendar of 354’s list of saints and the days of their commemoration, known as the Depositio Martyrum since it includes information— again, for the first time—of where these saints were buried. I reproduce it here, in my English translation: December 25: Christ, born in Bethlehem, in Judaea. January 20: Fabian, in the cemetery of Callistus and Sebastian ad Catacumbas. January 21: Agnes, on Via Nomentana. February 22: Natal Day of the Cathedra of Peter. March 7: Perpetua and Felicitas, in Africa. May 20: Parthenus and Calocerus, in the cemetery of Callistus, when Diocletian was consul for the ninth time and Maximianus for the eighth. June 29: Peter, ad Catacumbas; Paul, on Via Ostiense, when Tuscus and Bassus were consuls. July 10: Felix and Philip, in the cemetery of Priscilla. And in the cemetery of the Jordani: Martialis, Vitalis, Alexander. And in the cemetery of Maximus: Silanus. This Silanus, martyr, was stolen by the Novatians. And in the cemetery of Praetextatus: Januarius. July 30: Abdon and Sennen, in the cemetery of Pontianus, which is located “ad ursum piliatum.” August 8: Sixtus, in the cemetery of Callistus. And in the cemetery of Praetextatus: Agapitus and Felicissimus. August 10: Secundus, Carpoforus, Victorinus, and Severianus, at Albano. And at the seventh mile of via Ostiense, at “Ad Ballisteria,” Cyriacus, Largus, Cresentianus, Memmia, Iulianus, and Ixmaracdus. August 12: Laurentius, on via Tiburtina. August 13: Hippolytus, on via Tiburtina. And Pontianus, in the cemetery of Callistus. August 22: Timotheus, on via Ostiense. August 28: Hermes, in the cemetery of Bassilla on via Salaria Vetus. September 5: Acontius, at Portus and Nonnus, Herculanus and Taurinus. September 10: Gorgonus, on via Labicana. September 12: Protus and Hyacinthus, in the cemetery of Bassilla. September 14: Cyprian, in Africa. In Rome he is celebrated in the [cemetery] of Callixtus. September 22: Bassilla, on via Salaria Vetus, when Diocletian was consul the ninth time and Maximianus for the eighth.

172  Nicola Denzey Lewis October 14: Callistus, on the Via Aurelia, at the third mile. November 9: Clement, Sempronianus, Clavus, Nicostratus, at “In Comitatum.” November 29: Saturninus, in the cemetery of Thraso. December 13: Ariston, at Portus. Historically, this list has played a significant role in the creation of a new, Christian topography in Rome, since it effectively turned the cemeterial sites of Rome into martyria.21 But what does this do to time? Who drove the commemoration of the saints? And how do issues around gender come into play in the Christianization of time? Bowes argues persuasively that just as the older form of the consular diptych defined the length and greatness of the Roman state and community through a cursus hominum, the new liturgical diptychs she has studied similarly define Christian identity by listing its saints and bishops, as new “consuls of Christ,” to borrow (as she does) the phraseology of Prudentius and Paulinus of Nola.22 These saints would come to frame “the very identity” of a new Christian community.23 Unfortunately, the Depositio gives us only a very small window into a process that remains almost entirely opaque. What came first, I wonder: the “popular” commemoration in the form of a feast on certain days associated with the saint? Or was this a top-down decision, expressing purely episcopal, or even private, lay concerns? Rüpke wonders if it reflects the “practice of a unified organization,” noting that its commemorative days appear to have been carefully selected at times that do not conflict with, say, Easter.24 This is possible, but if so, it is difficult to reconcile the existence of a “unified organization” with the single, elite pagan family that produced and dedicated the Codex to one of their own members. I suggest instead that while we consider the Calendar of 354’s Depositio list as the load-bearing identity mechanism of a new Christian community in Rome, we think of it as one that was nevertheless shaped in its “public” presentation by one or a few individuals. I say “public” here in quotation marks, because there is every indication that the Depositio, like the Calendar Codex itself, was a private rather than a public document. But let us consider the Depositio more fully. We might consider it a handy “map,” so to speak, of regional Christian identity. The degree to which it is specific to its commissioner’s particular interests remains unfortunately unknown. One mistake, however, is to see this martyrological calendar as the only one that existed in the middle of the fourth century. Although we have no others in this form, it is clear that other saints were already venerated by this time, and probably on specific days. For example, Rome’s bishop Damasus drew upon the skills of the very same calligrapher of this Codex, Filocalus, to help him complete a number of monumental inscriptions to be set up at the burial sites of martyrs whom Damasus considered worthy of veneration; his list of significant martyrs does not coincide fully with the Depositio.25 Neither, interestingly, did Damasus ever attempt through his elogia to connect martyrs to any particular date of commemoration:

(En)Gendering Christian time  173 his conquest was space, not time. That, in itself, makes the Calendar a precious and peculiar document; all the more so, because, while in this particular experiment with time’s Christianization, the traditional fasti and feriales are still present, only the Depositio Calendar will move forward as an “appropriate” way to mark out time. Yet the content of the Depositio Calendar was less important than its form: in Reggio di Calabria, for instance, Agnes (venerated here on January 21) is celebrated on July 5, the same dates as the region celebrates the African martyrs Perpetua and Felicitas (here celebrated March 7). It is curious that three of the four female saints of the Depositio are still venerated in Calabria, just not at the time designated.

6 The calendar of 354’s female saints Of 51 saints commemorated in the Depositio, 4 are female: Agnes on the twelfth day before the Kalends of February or January 21; Perpetua and Felicitas on the Nones of March (March 7) and Bassilla on the tenth day before the Kalends of October. A total of four women is, to me, depressingly few; on the other hand, it was a radical addition, in that consular and imperial lists that marked out time according to a cursus hominum were lists of men only, and they did not include any women. It is impossible to determine what criteria the unknown author of this list used to determine the inclusion of these four women; as I said, it is unlikely that only these four were commemorated in mid fourth-century Rome. But let us start with Bassilla, who, according to the calendar, was martyred “when Diocletian was consul for the ninth time, and Maximianus for the eighth,” or the year 304 CE, making her a victim of the Diocletianic “Great Persecution.” We know of Bassilla from two funerary inscriptions. In the first, parents commend the care of their deceased infant Crescen(s) into the hands of “Domina Bassilla.”26 The second inscription is similar, from a mother commending the care of her son Aurelius Gemellus to Lady Bassilla.27 The catacombs of Bassilla to the north of the city, from where this inscription derives, bear her name, so in all likelihood she was a real person—a benefactor—who donated space for burial on lands that she owned.28 It is unusual that the Depositio mentions her, of all the female benefactors we know of in the city of Rome, and more unusual still that it assigns her a date for commemoration, the tenth day before the Calends of October, or September 22; no other Roman female benefactor gets a dies natalis. The fifth-century Martyrology of Jerome— written as a sort of addendum to the Depositio—includes Bassilla and, as here, lists her feast day on September 22, but adds a brief martyrological narrative that strongly resembles that of Agnes. According to tradition, Bassilla’s bones were translated to the Roman church of Santa Prassede in the ninth century; her date of commemoration, however, remained unstable. Although it is September 22 in the Depositio, it is May 20 in the Roman Martyrology. In fact, in that same text we find three other saints named Bassilla: one killed at Alexandria (May 17), one at Smyrna (August 29), and another, the mother of St. Eugenia, commemorated on December 24–25. Sadly,

174  Nicola Denzey Lewis however, St. Bassilla never really caught on; there are no longer any commemorations of Bassilla on that day, nor was any formal or separate passio composed for her. In the Irish Martyrology of Oengus, Bassilla has become a man: Bassillus, martyred on the Via Salaria. She was removed from the Roman martyrological calendar in the reforms around Vatican II. The presence in the Depositio of Perpetua and Felicitas is also interesting; their passio is well known and must have been in circulation by 354 (the date of their martyrdom is generally given as 203). Although the Depositio carefully notes the burial sites of most of the other martyrs on the list, it says only that Perpetua and Felicitas are “of Africa.”29 Cyprian, like Perpetua and Felicitas, from Carthage, is also on the list, yet the calendar notes that he was celebrated at the cemetery of Callixtus on the Via Appia. It is curious that on this list, the point of which is to “locate” the martyrs in both space and time, Perpetua and Felicitas have only a natal day. Did late antique Romans celebrate them on the nones of March? All Romans? Or just Carthaginian immigrants, as Rüpke suggests?30 Whether or not their cult was widespread in Rome, why are Perpetua and Felicitas dislocated from a place in Rome where they were honored? If all Roman Christians venerated them and they had a popular festival, why do we not hear about this from other sources? My best guess is that the presence of Bassilla, Perpetua and Felicitas indicates the highly idiosyncratic and “personal” tastes of whoever wrote this list, someone who perhaps had significant ties with a North African Christian community in Rome and who certainly knew of a cemetery of Bassilla to the north of the city. This leaves us with Agnes, the only female martyr on the list whose dies natalis is still celebrated today. Unlike Perpetua and Felicitas, Agnes held territory as well as time. Agnes’ cult was firmly in place in Rome by the 330s, although what this entailed, precisely, is unclear.31 A large cemetery basilica later dedicated to her was built off the Via Nomentana between 337 and 351. In 354, Constanza, Constantine’s daughter, chose to be buried in the cemetery where Agnes was thought to have been buried. The church built by Honorius I in the seventh century still stands today at the place where Agnes is celebrated with the festival of the lambs. Agnes was also, by the eighth century, commemorated intermurally at a monastery near the church of Santa Prassede. The church still bearing her name, Sant’Agnese in Agone in Piazza Navona, is a significant cult site, built on the ostensible place of her martyrdom at the stadium of Domitian, but it is not clear how old the veneration of Agnes is at this site.32 Her body today remains in both places: her headless body at the church off Via Nomentana, but her tiny skull in Agone. Already in late antiquity, Agnes was celebrated in homilies, hymns and dedicatory inscriptions by the popes Damasus and Innocent I, as well as Ambrose and Prudentius; but what a celebration! In these longer tellings, Agnes’ story reveals a troubling confluence of torture, the male gaze and what Peter Brown has called “strong fantasies of disintegration and reintegration.”33 As Virginia Burrus so perceptively notes, Agnes’ execution is her defloration.34 Burrus effectively highlights the male erotic gaze of the late antique poet: Ambrose wonders of the young Agnes, “Was there room for a wound in that small body?”35 Martyrdom is here a

(En)Gendering Christian time  175 “death marriage,” the moment at which Agnes becomes, as she declares herself, the “bride of Christ.” Furthermore, Burrus writes, “Prudentius gives us full permission to observe her sexualized encounter with death.”36 Agnes shares a violently erotic passio with other late antique female saints, none of whom are mentioned in the Calendar of 354, but who are in the fifth- or sixth-century martyrologies: Agatha, Lucy and Cristina of Bolsena, to name only three, whose stories and marking of time continues today. By that time, the number of female saints had increased exponentially, just as the passiones of martyrs, both male and female, increased. But the hagiographies of male martyrs never sexualize their violence. It is striking to me, then, that late antique Christian time was marked out through the flesh of both men and women, but that lists of consuls and emperors were gradually replaced in the liturgy by accounts of the sexually tortured flesh of women, read on the anniversaries of these often unspeakable, unimaginable tortures.

7 (En)Gendering time But let us return to the calendar. The Calendar of 354 apparently had some degree of traction in the early middle ages; it laid the basis for the Martyrology of Jerome, known from a Gallic recension made at Auxerre in 592.37 What happened to it next involved a complicated web of recensions and at least one scandalous forgery (860 CE, when all the dates of commemoration were altered), until we come to 1584, the publication of the Roman Martyrology under Gregory XIII. Its earlier recension of 1568 contained fewer than two hundred feasts. Over time, this number increased: by 1900, 145 more had been added either in the heyday of martyrological popularity in the seventeenth century, or later, in the era between Vatican I and Vatican II. Some of these were modern saints, including Teresa of Avila or Teresa de Lisieux, but others—more obscure—were added primarily to fill in the martyrological calendar, particularly in the empty spaces around Lent, which remained largely unpopulated in the Calendar of 354. In 1969 under Paul VI, the martyrological calendar list, now quite unwieldy, was revised. At this point, saints whose existence was questionable were weeded out, along with the commemoration of local Roman martyrs about whom little was known except for their names and dates and, occasionally, their place of martyrdom or relic translation. Also removed at this point were founders of Rome’s ancient titular churches; thus Prisca, Sabina and Bassilla were struck from the registers. Agnes was kept, as one of the principal martyrs of the city of Rome. The complicated literary history of martyrological calendars from late antiquity to the early modern period reveals that the compilation of saints’ days—whether the saints were female or males—was not a preoccupation of church congregations, nor inspired by communities promoting their local saints: martyrologies (including the setting of dates) were made through the process of copying prior manuscripts, sometimes collating them, and occasionally shifting dates to avoid important conflicts or crowding. All this was done through the labors of medieval scribes, presumably far away from village-level commemorations.

176  Nicola Denzey Lewis How, then, did women martyrs come to play the roles that they did within the Christianization of time? First, I hope to have demonstrated that their inclusion in calendars was not documentary in a simplistic sense; I am of the belief that our female martyrs, Agnes and her sisters, were either wholly fictitious or else had their deaths elaborated and distorted by the male literary imagination. Second, I want to emphasize that women martyrs carried a different symbolic “weight” than male martyrs when it came to Christianizing time. Male clerics created and elaborated the cults of both male and female martyrs, fixing their dates according to a logic lost to us. For reasons that remain beyond anything other than broad theorization, these male clerics also progressively developed the grotesque details of female saints’ labored deaths, while the deaths of male martyrs were considerably less elaborated. When it came to women, these scribes literally carved out time from women’s flesh. Why did this matter? The creation of Christian time worked hand-in-hand with the male elaboration of a deeply conservative, misogynistic literature concerning female saints. The creation of multiple saints’ days, for a rapidly multiplying number of saints, afforded the opportunity for misogynistic ideologies to be effectively and repeatedly promulgated, moving them beyond the confines of monastic text and into the public domain. The saint’s day occasioned the public reading of a martyrology, and those describing the tortures and sufferings of women martyrs were different in quality from those of male martyrs. Thus public recitations on marked days also brought repeated opportunities for these ideologies to be inculcated into public consciousness. What they taught was that women must endure, and that female virtue was important to maintain above all things (virtue both in the sense of preserving bodily virginity or chastity, and moral virtue in the form of being passive, stoic, in the face of male domination). In a famous article, historian Joan Kelly-Gadol asks if women had a Renaissance.38 The answer is, of course, in the negative. She argues that with the rise of a bourgeoisie, “female chastity and passivity better suited the needs of the expanding bourgeoisie and the declining nobility.”39 From the perspective of women’s history, the Renaissance brought new restrictions for women to the fore: the regulation of female sexuality as compared with male sexuality; the shrinking of women’s economic and political roles; changes in the cultural roles of women; and the promulgation of specific male ideologies concerning women.40 Virtually all the literary sources from the Renaissance, she notes, “establish chastity as the female norm and restructure the relation of the sexes to one of female dependency and male domination.”41 One might ask if this is not precisely the same thing that we see in the rise of martyrological time. If we follow Kelly-Gadol’s call for historians of women to “call into question accepted schemes of periodization,”42 the phenomenon of the Christianization of time requires that we consider how women were impacted by the shift away from Roman time. And here I argue that, although late antique Christians “humanized” time by inserting human narrative and characters into its marking, they did so in a way that was driven by patriarchal concerns, to the clear detriment of women. The popularity of martyrologies and the roaring success of martyrological

(En)Gendering Christian time  177 calendars—even given local, regional differences as to which particular saints were marked, and when—allowed the inculcation of patriarchal ideals into the city: most vividly and consistently, female chastity as moral virtue. Tales of the extraordinary, sexualized torture of women were naturalized as they had never been in a Roman context, civically celebrated and even ritually marked through processions and performances, such as the annual celebration of Cristina of Bolsena. This can still be witnessed, in an extraordinary passion play still performed today. It features young girls in a series of tableaux depicting Cristina experiencing eight gruesome ordeals. Dressed in white raiment, these young girls stare off into the distance, dispassionate and expressionless, as they are flogged, burned, drowned, mutilated, and shot through with arrows before an enthusiastic crowd.

8 And in the end … What were late antique Christians thinking when they came to add saints’ days to this already complex canvas of marked time? The elaborate, emotive nature of martyrologies perhaps suggests that the recitation of the martyr’s story at their feast wove communal feeling—if perhaps pathos more than celebration—into time. Of course, not all of this was lacking in Roman time; surely festivals to Isis, or Magna Mater, elicited strong feeling and Durkheimian communitas. Yet these festivals linked humans with the gods, and a saint’s day did not do that—not precisely. Although the martyrs themselves had been translated to the celestial realms, their commemoration focused on that very moment of translation—the tortures and superhuman endurance. The new martyrological calendars nevertheless introduced human narrative into the fabric of time. The narrative of female saints and time continues on in an unending annual cycle, from late antiquity until today. They are different in kind from the narratives of male saints, for although male saints are tortured cruelly, their genitals, their masculinity, is never breached, castrated, negated. Their maleness remains inviolate. But female saints are different from male saints; they are sexually tortured, their breasts and tongues severed, their bodies exposed. And remarkably, these female “virgin martyrs” embody cyclic time, although not “female time”—murdered by men around the onset of puberty and menstruation, these women bleed annually (enacted publicly!) not naturally, but because men bleed them. Removed from human time and women’s life passages, these women neither live to give birth nor even to die. Or perhaps they do die, only to die again, over and over, in a visual spectacle each year. At the same time, these female saints participate in monumental time: like Artemis of Ephesus or the city Tychai, these martyrs, become in late antiquity, city patrons, always and eternally present, brushing the plague or wars off their children in the city as gently as a mother brushes a fly off her child’s cheek. Still, unlike civic goddesses who also marked time cyclically and monumentally, these female saints had once been human. The Christianization of time, then, involved marking it out through human flesh, through women’s flesh, made transcendent through violence and resistance.

178  Nicola Denzey Lewis

Notes 1 Ambrose of Milan, De Virginibus 2.5 (trans. P. Schaff, NPNF ser. 2, vol. 10). 2 Ancient accounts vary as to Agnes’ age at death. Ambrose of Milan gives it as 12 (De Virginibus, I.2; PL XVI, 200–2: Haec duodecim annorum martyrium fecisse traditur), whereas Augustine writes that she was 13 (Sermo 273.6; PL XXXVIII, 1251: Agnes puella tredecim annorum), which harmonizes better with Prudentius’s Peristephanon 14:10. 3 See Rüpke 2011. More technical is Brind’Amour 1983. 4 Feeney 2009: 7–9. 5 Feeney 2009: 7. 6 Feeney 2009: 7. 7 Dowling 2003. 8 Gudeman 1976: 710. 9 Ovid, Fastus 2. v. 572. 10 McLynn 2008: 161; Salzman 1990: 242–5. 11 Effros 2002: 74–8. 12 McLynn 2008. 13 For the critical edition, see Mommsen 1892, along with his study, Mommsen 1850. For a complete description of the codex, see Stern 1953. On the textual history and transmission, see Burgess 2012; Salzman 1990, 1994; Divjak 2002. 14 Rüpke 2015: 249, surmises that Valentinus must be a juvenile member of the illustrious pagan Symmachus family, perhaps a brother or nephew of the famous orator Q. Aurelius Symmachus. Rüpke makes a surprising but convincing case that Valentinus is not Christian but pagan. He also (p. 250) identifies the dedicatee of the codex as L. Aurelius Avianius Symmachus, orator, poet and pagan priest. 15 Salzman 1990. 16 Rüpke 2015: 247–69. 17 Rüpke 2015: 265. 18 Bowes 2001: 338–57. 19 Bowes 2001: 347. 20 Bowes cites Kenney 1938: 9–17. 21 See Delehaye 1933: 35–6; Kirsch 1924; Pietri 1976; Saxer 1989. 22 Bowes 2001: 348. 23 Bowes 2001: 348. 24 Rüpke 2015: 259. 25 For editions, see Ferrua 1942; more recently, Trout 2015. 26 ICUR X, 27060: “Domina Bassilla commandamus tibi Crescentinus et Micina filia [?] nostra Crescen(tia) qui vixit mens X et dies …” Mid- to late-fourth century, from the Catacombs of Bassilla. Now in the Pio-Cristiano Museum. 27 ICUR X, 27034: “somno heternali / Aurelius Gemellus qui bixit an(nos) III / et meses VIII dies XVIII mater filio / carissimo benaemerenti fecit in pace / conmando Bassila innocentia Gemelli.” 28 There was no sign or label to the catacomb; when Giuseppe Marchi discovered the intact tombs of Protus and Hyacinth in 1845, he turned to the Depositio to determine that this complex was known in antiquity as the catacombs of Bassilla. 29 Perhaps the specification is to differentiate between Felicitas of Africa and Felicitas of Rome, the mother of seven martyred brothers. Interestingly, the seven brothers are there on the Depositio, commemorated on July 10 and buried in four (!) different catacombs, but Felicitas of Rome is not mentioned, nor are the seven identified as brothers. Felicitas of Rome was commemorated on November 23, according to the fifth-century Martyrology of Jerome. Her cult was still active in the sixth century, when Gregory the Great delivered a homily at her tomb on the Via Salaria (Homiliae super evangelia, Bk. 1, hom. 3), but at that point the day of commemoration had moved to January 25.

(En)Gendering Christian time  179 30 Rüpke 2015: 259. 31 See Lanéry 2014. 32 Bernard and Rossetto 2014; Thacker 2014. Agnes also had churches dedicated to her in late antiquity in Beziers, Capua, Parenzo and Ravenna. 33 Brown 1980: 82. On Agnes, see Burrus 1995: 25–46; Grig 2004. 34 Burrus 1995: 37. 35 “Fuitne in illo corpuscolo vulneri locus?” (Ambrose, Concerning Virginity 1.2.7). See also the opening of Burrus 1994: 27. 36 Burrus 1995: 38. 37 The Martyrology of Jerome also drew on another early martyrological calendar, the Calendar of Nicomedia (ca. 363), but added narrative. 38 Kelly-Gadol 1984. 39 Kelly-Gadol 1984: 175. 40 Kelly-Gadol 1984: 176. 41 Kelly-Gadol 1984: 177. 42 Kelly-Gadol 1984: 176.

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180  Nicola Denzey Lewis Kelly-Gadol, J. 1984. “Did Women Have a Renaissance?” In Women, History, and Theory: The Essays of Joan Kelly, edited by J. Kelly-Gadol, 19–50. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press. Kenney, V. L. 1938. The Saints of the Canon of the Mass. Studi di Antichitá Cristiana. Vol. 14. Vatican City: Pontifical Institute of Sacred Archaeology. Kirsch, J. P. 1924. Der stadtrömische christliche Festkalender im Altertum: Textkritische Untersuchungen zu den römischen ‘Depositiones’ und dem Martyrologium Hieronymianum. Liturgiegeschichtliche Quellen 7/8. Münster: Aschendorff. Lanéry, C. 2014. “La legend de sainte Agnès: quelques réflexions sur la genese d’un dossier hagiographique (IVe–VIe s.).” MEFRA 126(1). https://mefrm.revues.org/1702. McLynn, N. 2008. “Crying Wolf: The Pope and the Lupercalia.” JRS 98: 161–75. Mommsen, T. 1850. “Über den Chronographen vom J. 354.” Abhandlungen der KöniglichSächischen Gesellschaft der Wissenschaften, phil.-hist. Cl. 1: 547–693. Mommsen, T. 1892. Chronica Minora saec. IV. V. VI. VII. Monumenta Germaniae Historica. Auctorum Antiquissimorum 9.11.12. Berlin. Pietri, C. 1976. Roma Christiana, Recherches sur L’Eglise de Rome, son organisation, sa politique, son idéologie de Miltiade à Sixte III, 311–440. Rome: École Français. Rüpke, J. 2011. The Roman Calendar from Numa to Constantine: Time, History, and the Fasti. Translated by D. M. B. Richardson. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. Rüpke, J. 2015. “Roles and Individuality in the Chronograph of 354.” In Group Identity and Religious Individuality in Late Antiquity, edited by J. Rüpke and É. Rebillard, 247– 69. Washington, DC: The Catholic University of America Press. Salzman, M. 1990. On Roman Time: The Codex-Calendar of 354 and the Rhythms of Urban Life in Late Antiquity. The Transformation of the Classical Heritage 17. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Salzman, M. 1994. “The Christianization of Sacred Time and Sacred Space.” In The Transformations of Urbs Roma in Late Antiquity, edited by W. V. Harris, 123–34. Portsmouth, RI: Journal of Roman Archaeology. Saxer, V. 1989. “L’Utilisation par la liturgie de l’espace urbain et suburbain: l’exemple de Rome dans l’Antiquité et le Haut Moyen Âge.” In Actes du XIe Congres International d’Archéologie Chrétienne (Lyon, Vienne, Grenoble, Genève et Aoste, 21–28 septembre 1986), 917–1033. Rome: École Française de Rome. Stern, H. 1953. Le calendrier de 354: Étude sur son texte et ses illustrations. Institut française d’archéologie de Beyrouth: Bibliothèque et historique 55. Paris: Impr. Nationale. Thacker, A. 2014. “The Origin and Early Development of Rome’s Intramural Cults: A Context for the Cult of Sant’Agnese in Agone.” MEFRA 126(1). https://mefrm.revues. org/1858. Trout, D. 2015. Damasus of Rome. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.

Index

For individuals and places mentioned only in the Depositio Martyrum, please see the entry for Depositio Martyrum. Acacius 153 Achelous 137, 142 Achilles 29, 36, 50, 56, 60, 89, 105–106, 109–111 Adam 152 Adams, J. N. 139–140 Aegeus 109, 112 Aegina 50 Aeneid (Vergil) 105, 138 Aeschylus 2 aeternitas see eternity Africa 171, 173–174 Against Heresies (Irenaeus) 159 Agamemnon (Aeschylus) 112 Agamemnon (king) 36 Agariste: Kleisthenes’ daughter 75; Perikles’ mother 75, 78 Agatha, Saint see martyrs aging 28, 35–41, 122–123 Agnes, Saint see martyrs Agone 174 Aigina 72 aiōn: and epinikian odes 6, 49–50, 55–61; and gendered use 50–54, 62 Aitna 50, 52, 57 Alexandria 173 Alkmaionidai 75 Alkman 36 Almanac of 354 see codex Alvanoudi, A. 53 Alyattes 74 Ambrose 166, 174 Amphimedon 19 Anakreon 36 Anatolius 154 Anchises 37–40 Ancoratus (Epiphanius) 153 Andromache 14, 15–17, 19, 92

Antigone: of Euripides 51, 62; of Sophocles 76–77 Antinoôs 20 Aphrodite 16, 33, 35, 37–41 Apollo 36, 90, 93–94, 96, 121, 139 Ares 50 Arete 14, 20, 22 Argo and Argonauts 55, 57, 105–106, 112 Argos 15 Ariadne 7, 105–109, 111–113 Aristagoras 72 Ariston 74 Aristophanes 28, 62 Aristotle 76 Arkesilas of Kyrene 50, 52, 55, 60–62 Ars Amatoria (Ovid) 130 Artemis of Ephesus 177 Asclepius 138 Asia 79 Astrabakos 74 Astyages 79 Atalanta 30–32, 35, 40–41, 43–44 Athena 17, 36, 38, 50, 94 Athens and Athenians 72, 77, 93, 95, 108–109 attendant to Erysichthon 139–140 Augustine, Saint 2, 151 Augustus 120, 125, 138 Aurora 127 authority 20, 152, 155, 162, 166–167 Autolycus 137 autophagy 8, 136–138, 141–144 Auxerre 175 Bacchus 109, 112, 141 Bakhtin, Mikhail 2, 5 Bakker, E. J. 68 Barbelo 157–158

182 Index Bassilla, Saint see martyrs Bassillus, Saint 174 Battiads 55, 61 Battos 55, 78 Baucis 137 behavior and temporal significance 77–78 Berzon, Todd S. 150, 155–156, 159, 161–162 Bildhauer, Bettina 70, 73 birth 29, 71, 73, 78–79, 81 Biton 89 boar, Calydonian 137 bodies: and literature 3–4; and time 70, 73, 79, 81, 168; and trees 139 Boedecker, D. 34 Boehringer, S. 41 Borges, Jorge Luis 2 Boroditsky, L. 52–53 Bowes, Kim 170, 172 Bright, D. 127 Brown, Peter 174 Bruit-Zaidman, Louise 3 Burrus, Virginia 174–175 Butler, Judith 70 Buto 80 Cairns, A. 121 Calendar of 354 see codex calendars: and Christian calendars 8, 168–170, 173, 176; and the Julian calendar 167; and martyrological calendars 8, 167, 170–172, 175–177; and Roman calendars 167–169; and temporal manipulation 121 Callimachus and Callimachean elements 136–139, 143 Calydonian boar see boar, Calydonian Cameron, Averil 150, 154 Caristia 169, 170 Carmentalia 168, 170 Carthage 174 Cassius Dio 138 Catalogue of Women (Hesiod) 31, 39, 136, 140–141, 143 Cato 138 Catullus 64 and Catullus 7, 105–107, 109, 111–113 Cavarero, Adriana 5, 18, 43, 119, 121, 124, 150–151 cemeteries 171–172, 174 Ceres 8, 136–145, 170 Charybdis 91 chastity 125, 176–177

Chians 72 Christ 8, 152, 158, 161–162, 171, 175 Christianity and Christians 151–153, 156, 161–162, 167–172, 174, 176–177 Chromios of Sikyon 50, 52, 57–62 Chronography of 354 see codex church 152, 156, 158–162 cicada see Tithonos Clouds (Aristophanes) 62 Clytemnestra 112 Cobet, Iustus 68 codex 8, 169–173, 175 cognition 14, 49, 53, 62 Colchis 105 Collyridians 158, 162 Cologne papyrus 34, 43 communicante 171 concubines of Mykerinos 79 Constantia see Salamis Constantine 174 consuls 171, 173 continuity 70, 73–81 Corinthians 72 Cos 138 cosmology and cosmological forces 72, 156–157, 159–160 Costanza 174 courtesans 120, 125, 130 cowards 56–57, 59, 62, 121 cow goddess 80 creation, divine 151–152, 157, 159, 162 Crete 107–109, 112 Cristina of Bolsena, Saint see martyrs cursive time see time cursus honorum 120 Cyparissus 139 cypress tree see trees Cyprian, Saint 171, 174 Cyprus 152 Damasus 172, 174 Daphne 139 Darbo-Pechanski, Catherine 3 Darios 74, 76 death: and aging 36; and aiōn 50; and gender 57, 75–77; and glory 43, 56–57; and immortality 40, 61, 80, 91; and interruptions 15–19, 21; and memory 111; and mortality 123, 128; and oracles 93–94; as socio-biological function 73, 81; in Tibullan elegy 123–124; and time 29, 71, 89, 92, 94, 128; and traditional storylines 78

Index  183 de Beauvoir, Simone 4 De Fide (Epiphanius) 160–161 degeneration 38, 128 De Jong, I. J. F. 3 de Lauretis, Teresa 5, 90 Delia 8, 119, 122–129 Delphi 72, 89–91, 93–97 Delphic oracles or commands see oracles Demaratos, and his mother 73, 78 Depositio Martyrum 171–174 de Romilly, Jacqueline 2 Detienne, M. 32 De Virginibus (Ambrose) 166 Dewald, Carolyn 73–74, 77 Diasia 95 dimensions and time 71 Diocletian 171, 173 diptychs 170, 172 discontinuity see continuity divination see oracles the divine: as force 71–72, 76, 78, 80; and oracles 89, 93–94, 97–98; and plot-space 7, 91 Doherty, Lillian 92 Domitian 174 Doric (dialect) 52 dryads 138–140 Dryope 139 Dryopeida see Mestra (Erysichthon’s daughter) Dryopeius see Erysichthon Durkeim, Émile 177 Echniades 137 Eden, Garden of 126 Edmunds, L. 34 Egypt 79 ekphrasis 105–107, 109, 111–113, 139 Elders of Sparta 74 elegy 118–120, 125, 128–130 Elysium 128–129 “emic” as temporal mode 90 emplotment 69, 73, 81 Ennoia 158–159 Eos 35, 36–39, 41 Ephesus 156 epics 7, 89, 91, 93, 96; see also individual epics epinikian odes 49–52, 54; see also individual odes Epiphanius 8, 150–162 Erysichthon 8, 136–145 eschatology 161

Eteokles 50 the eternal see eternity eternity: and the afterlife 128; and eternal tasks 110; and female subjectivity 54, 118, 124; and heresiology 155, 159, 162–163; and hunger 138; and time 55, 168 ethnography 150, 155, 162 Eucherius of Lyon 169 Eugenia, Saint 173 the Eumenides 108–109 Euripides 2, 50–52, 62 Eurysthenes, and mother of 74 Eusebius 158 Eustathios 52, 62 Eve 152, 162 experiences and time: and aeternitas 168; and Aphrodite’s speech to Anchises 39; and Atalanta 30–32; and controlling the experience 136, 138; and female identity 4, 107; and Herodotos’ Histories 68, 78; in Lysistrata 28; and Sappho 33–40; and temporal modalities 29–30; and women’s experiences 4, 42–44, 70, 125 Fames (Hunger) 8, 136, 143–145 Fantham, Elaine 137, 142–143 Fasti (Ovid) 142 fate and Fates 7, 78, 106–107, 109–111, 113 Feeney, Dennis 129, 167 Felicitas, Saint see martyrs Felix, Saint 168, 171 female as monumental time see time female subjectivity see subjectivity female time see gender femininity and the feminine: and Christian thought/theology 152; and creation 112; and effeminate males 121; and female speech 91; and feminization 91–92, 95; and grammatical gender 52–53, 55–57, 62; and heresy/orthodoxy 158–159, 160, 162; in the Metamorphoses 140; and space 118; and temporal modalities 4, 56, 59, 61, 162; and time 14, 18–19, 107, 111, 136; and universal binaries 151 Feralia 168, 170 feriales and fasti 8, 166–170, 173, 177 Filocalus 172 Fiore 151 Flower, Richard 150 Fontenrose, Joseph 96–97 Fors Fortuna 170

184 Index Foxhall, Lin 14, 89–90, 92 Freud, Sigmund 128 Furius Dionysus Philocalus 169 future 70, 79–81, 94–95, 106–108, 110, 118, 123, 128 Gaisser, Julia Haig 112 Ganymede 38–40 Gelasius, Pope 169 gender: and aeternitas 168; binaries 111, 150; and Christian texts 151–152; and festal days 168; grammatical 49, 52–54, 62; and heresy 8, 150–151, 154, 156, 158–159, 162; and martyrs (and saints) 175–177; in Metamorphoses 136, 143; and mobility and immobility 89–91; and modes of existence 30–31; and narrative 3; and oracles 93, 96–97; personified 53, 59, 63n13; and the poetic present 35; and space-time 73; and spatial markers 13, 20; and temporalities 55–56, 59, 61–62, 90, 118–119, 121, 151; and time 1, 3–5, 20, 70, 81, 93, 95–97, 105–107, 111, 150–151, 161, 168; and women’s roles 17–18, 73–74, 77, 79, 81 genealogy 74–78, 81, 150, 156, 160–161 Georgics 1 (Vergil) 129 Giangiulio, Maurizio 98 Glaukos 93 gnostics 157–160 god 152, 158–161 Golden Age 8, 119, 124–129 Golden Fleece 55 Gould, John 74 Greco-Roman culture 105, 109, 111 Greece 98 Greene, E. 35 Gregory XIII 175 Grethlein, Jonas 1 Gribetz, Sarit 3–4 Griffin, Alan 137–139, 144–145 groves of trees see trees Gyges 75–76 Hades (place) 50 Hannah, Robert 1 Hardie, Alex 41, 43 harpies 92–93 Harpy tomb 92–93 Hartog, François 95 Hekabe 92 Hektor (Hector) 19, 36, 50, 58–60, 92 Helen, companion to Simon Magus 158 Helen of Troy 14–18, 23, 35, 92, 112

Heloros 58 Henkel, J. 122 Hera 55–57 Herakles 50 heresiology 150–151, 153–155, 162 heresy 8, 150–162 Hermes 21, 38 Herodotos 3, 6–7, 68–80, 89, 95 heroes: and Delphic oracles 93–94, 96–97; and epics 105–106; and female activity 110; and Greek heroes in Catullus 64 106; Hektor as 58, 60; and the heretical woman 152; and heroic time 126; and heroism 54; Homeric heroes 36, 89–90; and linear time 7, 29, 90–91; and masculinity 59; and mobility 89–91, 93; and modes of life 56; and mortality 29, 36, 43, 57; as narrator 92; and time 21, 109 heroization 61 Herzfeld, M. 14 Hesiod 31, 50–52, 56, 62, 94, 136–137, 142–143 Hieron 57 Hilaria 170 Hippolytus (of Rome) 155, 158, 171 Histiaios 72 Histories (Herodotos) 3, 6, 68–69, 71, 73, 75–76, 78–80, 89 historiography 1, 69, 150, 152, 154–156 Hollis, A. S. 138, 141–143 the Holy Spirit 158, 162 Homer: and aiōn 51–52, 60, 62; and the loom 15, 23; and mortality 36; and temporality 2, 6, 13–15, 89, 91–92, 124, 127, 151; see also Iliad (Homer); Odyssey (Homer) Homeric Hymns: to Aphrodite 6, 37–41; to Demeter 29, 37; in general 30 Honorius I 174 Hypatius 154 hyperbole 61 Ialdabaoth 157 identity 3, 70, 91–92, 107, 124, 167–168, 172 ideology: and civil identity 168; and epics 89, 91; and gender 152, 176; and grammatical gender 53; and heresies 159–160, 162; and temporality 126 Iliad (Homer): and aging 36; and aiōn 50, 59; comparing Sirens to Muses 92; and histos 20; and narration 92, 105; and temporality 6, 13, 15–18; and weaving 112

Index  185 imagination 90 immortality 29–30, 33, 35, 38–40, 42–43, 90–91; see also mortality Innocent I 174 Intaphernes 76 Intaphernes, wife of 76–77 Iolaos 50 Iolkos 55 Ionian cities 77 Ionic (dialect) 52, 62 Iphimede 39 Irenaeus of Lyons 155, 158–159 Irigaray, Luce 5, 9, 73 Iris 17 Iron Age 129 irony 69, 145 Ischomachos, wife of 3 Isis 124–125, 127, 177 Ister (Thrace) 68 Isthmian 8 (Pindar) 50 iteration see repetition Ithaka (Ithaca) 18, 20, 21, 22, 23, 91, 119 Ixion 137 James, Sharon 120 Janko, R. 34, 39, 42, 43 Jardine, Alice 70 Jason 55, 57 Jerusalem 161 Jesus 152, 161–162 Joachim of Fiore 151 Jokasta 50 Jones, Alexander R. 1 Julius Caesar 167 Juno 137, 170 Jupiter 129, 137 Justin Martyr 158 Juvenal 140 kairos 28, 49 Kalondas 93 Kalypso 14, 20, 21, 91 Kandaules 3, 75–76 Kandaules, wife of 75–77 Karelli, Zoe 53 Kastor 60 Keledones 94–95 Keleos 37 Kelly-Gadol, Joan 176 Kennedy, Duncan 2 Kirke 7, 14, 20, 21, 91, 94 Kitzinger, R. 77 Kleandros 50 Klein, W. 14

Kleisthenes 75, 78 Kleobis 89 Kleomenes 74 kleos 15, 29, 43, 49, 92 knowledge 150, 155, 162 Knust, Jennifer Wright 158 Konstantinou, Ariadne 38 Kreb, Christopher 1 Kristeva, Julia: and chora 126; and cyclical time 14, 29; and the feminine as subject 54–55, 70, 118, 124; and gendered temporalities 54–55, 90, 106–108, 118–119; and the masculine subject 128; and monumental time 29, 41–42, 61, 92, 98, 110; and time and gender 4–5, 8, 111, 121 Kroisos 68, 76 Kyknos 50 Kylon 95 Kypselos 78 Kyrene 50, 52, 55, 61, 98 Kyros 78–79 Labda 78 Laertes 18, 19, 21, 43 laments: and lamentation 16; and lamenters 92–93 Laodike 17 Lardinois, A. 34 Lares 169 Lee, G. 128 Lee-Stecum, P. 121 Lelex 137 Lemnos Island 57, 77 Lesbos 39 Levaniouk, O. 19 Lianeri, Alexandra 1 linguistic relativity 52 Lokros 50 looms 13, 15, 19–23 Lotman, Yuri 7, 90–91 lotus see trees Lucretius 140 Lucy, Saint see martyrs Lupercalia 169–170 Lydia and Lydians 74–76 Lykia 92 Lyon 169 Lyons 155 Lysistrata (Aristophanes) 28 Macer 130 the Magistrate 28 Magna Mater 170, 177

186 Index maids, of Mykerinos’ daughter 79 Maltby, R. 127 Mandane 79 marriage: in Augustan Rome 120–121; and avoidance 18, 30–32, 39, 43; in the Histories (Herodotos) 73–75, 81; and martyrdom 175; and Sappho 40; and sea-purple fabric 22; and temporality 106, 112; and Tithonos 38, 40 martyrologies 167, 170, 175–177 Martyrology of Jerome 173, 175 Martyrology of Oengus 174 martyrs: and the Desposition Martyrum 171–175; and the destruction of female flesh 9, 167, 176; Saint Agatha 175; Saint Agnes 166–167, 171, 173–175; Saint Bassilla 171, 173–175; Saint Cristina of Bolsena 9, 175, 177; Saint Felicitas 171, 173–174; Saint Lucy 175; Saint Perpetua 171, 173–174; Saint Prisca 175; Saint Sabina 175; and time 176–177 Mary, mother of Jesus 152, 162 masculinity and the masculine: and Christian thought/theology 152; and Epiphanius 160; and Erysichthon 136, 140, 143–145; and grammatical gender 52–53, 56–57, 62; and heresy/orthodoxy 158; and mortality 35; and subjectivity 120; and temporal modalities 59, 62, 106; and time 4, 96, 111, 119, 151; see also gender masters, in the Metamorphoses 141–142 materiality 14 Mater Matuta 168 Matralia 168 Matronalia 170 McKay, K. J. 143 Medea 55, 57 Medes 78 memory 18, 68, 94, 98, 106, 110–111, 113 Messalinus 118, 129 Messalla 122–123, 127–128 Mestra, Erysichthon’s daughter 136–138, 140–144 Metamorphoses (Ovid) 136, 138–139, 142–143 metaphors: and the dial tone 29; and Herodotos’ use of female bodies 70, 79–80; and poetic language 69; and time 71 metonymy 69 Midas 141

millenarian movements 151 Miller, Hillis 13 Miller, P. A. 126 Mimnermos 36–37, 41–42 Minotaur 107, 109 mobility and immobility 89–91, 93, 97, 123, 127, 151 Momigliano, A. 1 mortality 33, 35–36, 38, 43, 57, 122–123; see also immortality motherhood 150, 153–156, 159, 161 Mount Pelion 105 mourning 110–111; see also laments Muses 90, 92, 94, 105 Mykerinos 79–80 Mykerinos, daughter of 79–80 Myrrha 139 myrrh tree see trees myth 20, 93, 95, 97, 137, 156, 159 narration 30–31, 33, 38, 40, 68–69, 91–93, 95 narrative: and desire 91; and devices or structures 3, 70–73, 94, 124, 141, 155; and eroticism 125; and gender 3, 5; and hierarchy 92; and historical narrative 156; and oral traditions 68, 95; and patterns or frames 96–97; and plot-spaces 3, 7, 90, 94; and the Pythia 93; and temporality 2–3, 79, 81, 91, 108, 111–113, 125; and time 111–113, 176 narratology 30 narrators: female 113; internal 7, 107, 111, 137 Nausikaa 22 Navigium of Isis 170 Naxos 93, 107–109, 112 Nemean odes (Pindar) 50–52, 57–60, 62 Nemesis 129 Neptune 136, 138, 140–142 Nereids 105, 112 Nestor 36 New Comedy 127 Newman, J. K. 129 “The New Sappho” (Sappho) 33, 35, 38, 41 Nicolaitans 156–157 Nicolaus 156–157 Niels, Jennifer 92 Nietzsche, Friedrich 119 Nikodromos 72 Nile 71 Nola 168

Index  187 Nünlist, Rene 3, 30, 33 nymphs 14, 20, 21–22, 106, 137 oak tree see trees Odysseus 5, 7, 18–19, 20–22, 38, 91, 94, 123, 127 Odyssey (Homer): and narrative subjects 105; and oracles 94, 98; and the Sirens 91–93, 95; and temporality 6, 13, 15, 18–20, 22, 38, 91, 151; and weaving 112 Oikonomikos/Oeconomicus (Xenophon) 3, 73 OLD (Oxford Latin Dictionary) 123, 139–141, 145 old age see aging Olympian odes (Pindar) 50, 56 Olympics 95 Opous 50 oracles 7, 76, 78, 89–91, 93–98 oratio communis 171 Oresteia (Aeschylus) 2 Organicism 73, 80 orthodoxy 152–153, 155, 158–159, 161–162 Osiris 125, 127 Ovid 8, 118, 130, 136–145, 168 Oxyrhyncus papyrus (1787) 34 Paean 8b (Pindar) 94 paides 36–37, 40, 42 Panarion (Epiphanius) 8, 150–151, 153–156, 162 Pandora 3 parapegmata 167 Parcae 113 Parentalia 168 Parilia festival 129 Paris 17 Parke, H. W. 96–97 Parker, Patricia 5, 91 passivity 56–57, 61–62, 79, 91–93, 176 past (indefinite past) or “once” (pote) 31–33, 35–37, 40, 43 patriarchy 176–177 Paul VI 175 Paul (presbyter and abbot) 153 Paul, Saint 152, 166, 171 Paulinus (of Nola) 168, 172 Pavlidou, Th. 53 Pelasgians 77–78 Peleus 7, 105–106, 109, 112 Pelias 55, 57 Pelops 56

Penelope: and her web 5; and intuition 98; as myth 127; and space 43, 126; and time 16, 20, 35, 38, 43–44, 151; and weaving/unweaving 13–14, 16, 18–20, 112, 119, 124 Perikles 75, 78 Perikles, mother of see Agariste periodization 151, 153, 155–156, 176 Perpetua, Saint see martyrs Persephone 29, 92 Persians 68, 72–73, 76 personification 53, 59, 168, 170 Peter, Saint 166, 169, 171 Phaeacia 123, 127 Philemon 137 Phillips, W. 52 Philocalian Calendar see codex Phoinissai (Euripides) 50, 52, 62 Phronime 78 Phthia 29 Pindar 6, 49–52, 54–62, 94 Pirithous 137 Pisistratos 75 poetry see individual poems Polemius Silvius 169 Polyneikes 50 Polyxena 111 popes 170; see also individual popes poplar grove see trees Poseidon 56 Powell, J. Enoch 71 present/now (nun) 31–32, 35–38, 40, 43–44, 68 Priam 17, 50 Princeps 120–121, 130 Principate 8, 119, 125, 130 Prisca, Saint see martyrs Propertius and Propertian elegy 118 prostitution 74 Proteus 142 Prudentius 172, 174–175 Prunicus 158 psycholanalysis and psychoanalysts 4, 128, 150 Pucci, Pietro 92 Purves, Alex 2–3, 29, 36 Putnam, M. 123 Pythia 89, 91, 93–97 Pythian odes (Pindar) 50–52, 55–57, 59–62 rape see violation Rawles, R. 40

188 Index Reggio di Calabria 173 Renaissance 176 repetition: and gender 107–112, 118–119; in the Panarion 154; and temporality 4, 15, 32–33, 35, 57, 107–112; in Tibullan elegy 121, 124–126, 128; see also time Republic (time period) 119, 167 Rhetoric (Aristotle) 76 Rhodopis 80 Ricoeur, P. 2 rituals 2–3, 13–14, 166, 168 Roma Cristiana see Rome Roman (ancient) culture and society 5, 106, 111, 113, 120, 143, 167–168, 177 Roman Martyrology 173, 175 Rome: and Augustan Rome 7, 119–120, 129; and the Christianization of 169, 172; and the codex 170; and discourse 119, 129; and festal days 166; and the Metamorphoses 143; and saints 173–174 Rosen, Ralph M. 3 Rüpke, Jörg 169, 172, 174 Rutherford, Ian 94 Sabaoth 157 Sabina, Saint see martyrs sacrifice 91, 110–111, 137, 168–169 saints 8, 166–177 Sais 79 Salamis 152 Salzman, Michele 169 Sant’ Agnese, church of 174 Sappho 6, 31, 33–44 “Sappho on Old Age” (Sappho) 34 Sardis 72 Saturn 119, 123–125, 128–130 Saturnalia 170 Scheria 22, 23 Schmidt, L. 52 Scythia 138 Seaford, Richard 2 Segel, E. 53 Sempronius 166 Sethians 158 sexuality 152, 157–158, 176 sexual violation see violation shapeshifters 137–138, 140, 142–143 Sikeliots 58 Sikyon 50, 52, 57, 59 Simonides 51 Simon Magus 157–159 Sirens 7, 91–95 Skamandros 58

Skinner, M 35 Skylla 91 Skythians 77–78 Smyrna 173 Söderbäck, F. 5 soldiers and soldiering 120–121 Solon 68 songs: in Doric 52; and the Fates 110–111; and gender 89, 91–95; and Sappho 36, 40; and Tithonos 39–40, 42; and victory songs 49, 52, 54 Sophokles 2, 76 space: as bounded 31–32, 43; and gender 9, 13, 20, 23, 56, 118; and place 174; and plot-space 90–92, 94; and spatiality 31, 122; and temporality 2–3, 6, 124; and time 55, 95, 124 Sparta 74 Sphinxes 92 spindles 22 Spoleto 138 Stehle, Eva 35–36 stepping out of time 29–33, 40, 43–44, 161 Struck, Peter 98 structures and time 68–69, 109, 111 subjectivity: female 4–5, 54, 73, 90, 118, 124–125; male 8, 118–120, 127–128, 130 suffering 91, 109–110 symbols 70, 73, 118; see also bodies synecdoche 69, 72–73, 80–81 Syrakuse 57 Tacita 168 Tantalos 50 Telemachos 15, 18, 20, 22, 23 Tellos 89 telos (end) 28, 31–32, 43 temporality: and Catullus 64 106; and Christian thought 151–152; and control 108; and cyclical structures 106–109, 110–113, 118, 125, 127; and discord 112–113; and epinikian odes 54; and female subjectivity 4, 54–55; and heresiology 155, 157, 160; and Herodotos’ Histories 70, 73–75; and immortal time 29–30; and linear time 41, 106–107, 111–112, 118, 123, 151; and male-gendered constructions 8; in modes of thought 89; and monumental temporality 110; in the Panarion 8, 150–151, 154, 158, 160–162; and resilience 122; and restriction 122; and temporal modalities 55, 107, 109,

Index  189 112–113, 118; and time 7, 13–14, 62, 73; via bodies 70; and weaving 13–14, 23 temporality and gender see gender temporal structuring see structures and time Teresa de Lisieux, Saint 175 Teresa of Avila, Saint 175 Tertullian 158 textiles and fabric: and creating 13–15; and erasing or destroying 16–17; and sea-purple fabric 21–22; and time 13–21, 23; and unweaving 16, 18–19, 43; and women’s work 109; see also weaving “Thalia poem” (Sappho) 43 Thanatos 128 Theognis 30, 32, 40–41 Thera 98 Theseus 7, 105–109, 111–112, 137 Thetis 7, 105–106, 109, 112, 137, 142 Thomas, Richard F. 138–139 Thrace 68 Thucydides 95 Tibullus and Tibullan elegy 8, 118–130 Timarchos 50 time: achronological 30, 41; of action 151; astrological 167, 170; astronomical 170; atemporal 91, 119, 123, 129, 161; calendrical 167–169; Christianization of 151, 167–170, 172–173, 176–177; cyclical 3–8, 14, 18–19, 29–31, 36, 38, 40, 43, 54–55, 71, 90, 108–111, 129–130, 136, 145, 177; dilated 151; divine 6, 30, 79–81, 89, 158; eternal see eternity; festal 166–169, 174; and heresiology 155; and heresy 156; historical 61, 108, 118–119, 128, 130, 161–162; and interruptions 16–17, 18, 19, 21–23, 30; as a journey 13, 17, 20–23, 29, 55, 61, 71, 94; linear 4–7, 29, 35–36, 38, 55, 81, 89–98, 107–111, 119, 121, 124–125, 127–130, 151; men’s 28, 29, 55, 151; and monumental 4–5, 7, 14–15, 17–18, 29, 41–42, 54–55, 61, 89–93, 95–98, 110, 177; mythic 7, 35–36, 40; quiet 151; recursive 107–108, 119, 145; Roman 167–168, 176; ruptures 6, 121; sacred 151, 161; self-belonging 151; spatiality of 68–69, 71, 81; of thought 151; women’s 28, 29, 30, 44, 70, 118, 126–127, 130; zodiacal 170 time and gender see gender Tithonos 35–43

tragedy as genre 1–2 trees 133, 136, 138–139 Tre Fontane 166 Troy and Trojans 17–18, 29, 92, 94, 111–112 Turullius, P. 138 Tychai 177 Tyconius 151 underworld 19, 92, 94, 123, 128 Valentinians 158–159, 162 Valentinus 169 Vatican I 175 Vatican II 174–175 Venus 107 Vergil 105, 125, 129, 138 Vertumnus 137, 142 Vestalia 170 Via Appia 174 Via Nomentana 171, 174 Via Salaria 174 victory songs see epinikian odes violations 136, 138–142, 145 virgins and virginity: and Erysichthon’s daughter (Mestra) 138, 141; and femininity 152; and martyrs 166, 176–177; and orthodoxy 8, 159, 161–162 weaving: and fabrics 6, 13, 15, 19, 21, 109, 111–112; as gendered activity 13–15, 109, 127; in the Iliad and the Odyssey 15–19, 20, 43, 91; and looms 13, 15, 19, 21; and memory 111; and sea-purple thread 21–22; and space 13, 17, 127; and spinning 22, 109–110, 127; and time 14, 119; weft 110–111; see also textiles weddings 16, 18, 22, 105–107, 112; see also marriage West, M. L. 34, 43 Whitaker, R. 128 White, Hayden 5–6, 69, 72–73, 80–81 Whorf, Benjamin Lee 52 Widzisz, Marcel A. 2 Williams, Frank 153–154 women: and agency/power 76–78, 106, 110–111; and Attic women 77; as bodies 70, 73, 79; and control 75; and festal days 168; and Karian women 77; in Lydia 74–75; and memory 110; as other 5; and the Panarion 8, 152, 162; in Pindar 54, 56; and the puella 118–119; as

190 Index saints 173, 176–177; and socio-biology 4, 70, 73–74, 77, 79–81; and sociocultural roles 74, 92; and time 7, 28, 29, 30, 44, 70, 109, 112, 118–119, 126–127, 130; and weaving (see weaving); see also individual women Wormell, D. E. W. 96–97

Xanthippos 75 Xanthos 92 Xenophon 3, 73 Xerxes 76 Zeus 38, 50, 95 Ziogas, I. 143