Since 1892, when Collignon published his study on literary criticism, imitation, and parody in Petronius, scholars have observed various affinities between Roman elegy—particularly the elegiac poetry of Catullus, Tibullus, Propertius, and Ovid, composed in the mid- to late first century BCE—and the Roman novel. This chapter contributes to this longstanding research project by considering how Petronius’ Satyricon, written in the mid-first century CE, and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, from the following century, engage with the language, conventions, themes, and assumptions of earlier Roman elegiac poetry. Its intertextual investigations also accord attention to the different attitudes toward earlier elegiac writings that their allusions imply and to what these differences reflect about their respective audiences.
Building on earlier analyses of the intertextual relationships between Propertius 4.8 and the Quartilla episode at Satyricon 16–26 (Hallett 2003), this discussion argues that, by evoking Propertius here, Petronius critiques assumptions central to the genre of Latin love elegy itself, and offers a “resistant reading” of this earlier elegiac text. First, however, we situate Petronius’ portrayal in this episode of female sexual aggression and male responses to it, a portrayal that parodies conventional elegiac scenarios, in the tradition of earlier Roman verse satire and invective. Petronius’ efforts to parody and critique earlier elegists similarly figure in our discussion of the intertextual connections between Ovid, Amores 3.7, and the account of Encolpius’ impotence at Satyricon 126ff. This particular Ovidian elegy echoes and engages with several poems by Ovid’s predecessors Catullus, Propertius, and Tibullus, and represents Ovid’s literary persona as recalling that of these earlier poets. Hence, we also compare Petronius’ intertextual strategies in this portion of the novel with those employed in earlier Latin erotic poetry itself. Our discussion of Petronius contends that his allusions to Roman elegy presume a learned audience closely familiar with, and seek to render that audience cynically disposed to, Catullus and the Augustan love elegists.
Apuleius is recognized as a major source on Roman elegy because, at 10.2–3 of his Apology, he claims to reveal the actual names of several women celebrated by Roman love elegists. However, even though various studies have investigated the affinities of his novel with other literary genres—epic, drama, satire, mime, and the Greek romances—they have only begun to pay serious attention to its connections with Roman elegy (see, e.g. Mattiacci 1998; Harrison 2006; Mathis 2008; Hindermann 2009a, 2009b, 2010). By demonstrating through intertextual analysis that key elegiac themes survived and thrived in Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, this chapter seeks to establish that the genre of love elegy serves as a major field of literary reference throughout the novel. Thus, it contends, building on earlier analyses, that the relationship between the protagonist Lucius and the slave girl Photis takes the form of servitium amoris, love as slavery: an elegiac literary convention inverting social reality by representing a free Roman male as dominated by a woman of a lower social class. This discussion argues that Apuleius characterizes Photis as an elegiac puella endowed with charm, elegance, and beauty; it claims that the elegiac theme of militia amoris, love as military service, prominently figures in the relationship between Lucius and Photis as well. We maintain that Apuleius, a rhetorician of the Second Sophistic, expects his readers to reflect upon the relationships between his novel and earlier Greco-Roman literary works, and to admire his cleverness in combining different genres and styles. Nevertheless, by depicting Lucius and Photis as a loving elegiac couple, he validates assumptions of elegy that Petronius does not.
Merely by featuring several poems in the elegiac meter, the Satyricon invites its audience to reflect upon the relationship between its own narrative content and the situations portrayed in earlier Latin love elegies. It warrants emphasis, therefore, that Petronius inserts one of these elegiac poems into Chapter 18, during the Quartilla episode, and two into the impotence episode, at the end of Chapters 126 and 132, respectively. To be sure, when the poet Eumolpus waxes rhapsodic about the art of poetry in 118—immediately before delivering his own verses in dactylic hexameter on the Roman civil war—he cites Vergil and Horace as literary exemplars, but does not mention any of the Latin elegiac poets. In 109, however, the novel’s narrator Encolpius identifies Eumolpus’ six lines in elegiac couplets about hair (capillorum) as an elegidarion, little elegiac dirge, literally calling the “minor” literary genre of elegy to mind. What is more, by having Eumolpus refer to Horace immediately after reciting the opening line of Horace, Odes 3.1, odi profanum vulgus et arceo, in 118, Petronius may be reminding his audience of Horace’s own allusions to the sexual arrangements and scenarios of Roman love elegy, and Horace’s critique of the genre itself, in Satires 1.2.
In Satires 1.2, dated to the early thirties BCE, Horace argues for the importance of avoiding extremes in all human activity. He uses, as a specific example of behavioral extremism, the selection of recreational female sexual partners, representing adulterers, those who pursue the wives of other elite males, as a particularly pitiable category of extremists in lines 28–36. Then, after enumerating perils and physical injuries that await such men, Horace also proceeds to fault those who have affairs with freedwomen, mime actresses, and courtesans in lines 47–63, on the grounds that such women demand huge sums of money and damage the reputations of their male lovers. He concludes by recommending cheap and willing prostitutes, on the basis of his own personal, satisfying, experiences. Through this recommendation, and by casting aspersions on sexual liaisons not only with other men’s wives but also with freedwomen, mime actresses, and courtesans—the two different categories of women that the love elegists represent as the women they love—Horace criticizes love elegy as well (Hallett 2003).
Horace composed this satire a decade before the three major male Augustan love elegists—Propertius, Tibullus, and Ovid—began to write. However, by the early thirties BCE, their admired and imitated precursor Cornelius Gallus had established many of the literary conventions later associated with this poetic genre, as Vergil’s portrait of Gallus in his tenth Eclogue attests. Such conventions include writing in the first person, and sharing one’s intimate feelings, much as Horace does here, though the works of these elegists celebrate illicit liaisons with precisely the type of women Horace regards as problematic. Roman love elegies also pay frequent homage to the work of the Hellenistic poet Callimachus, to whom Horace alludes in lines 105–108 by evoking Callimachus’ own words in Anthologia Palatina 12.102. However, Horace does so to challenge not only Callimachus’ praise of unattainable love objects that cause emotional suffering, but also the worth of Callimachus’ poem as emotional solace (Hallett 2003).
The female Augustan elegist Sulpicia subtly testifies that she read Horace’s poem as a critique of the love elegiac genre by referring to her young male partner in an illicit and torrid affair by the pseudonym Cerinthus, apparently as a form of protest. Horace addresses a man of this name at Satire 1.2.81, faulting him for preferring women of high birth, wearing pearls and emeralds, over a common prostitute; Sulpicia makes it clear that she is herself a woman of high birth, and even introduces herself in 3.8 as dressed in expensive clothes and jewelry (Hallett 2003). Still, Horace does not represent the expensive, dangerous women he criticizes as causing their lovers emotional distress. Nor does he mention the explanations that the elegists themselves offer for enduring such treatment.
A six-line invective in elegiac meter recalling several earlier poems in the same meter by Catullus, and written around the same time as Horace, Satires 1.2, warrants attention in this context too. Composed by the man who became the emperor Augustus, it shares certain features with the amatory scenarios in the love elegies of this period and the later Augustan age, since it is written in the first person, and associates making love with making war, albeit literally rather than (in the manner of love elegiac texts) figuratively. However, it ridicules the erotic independence and self-assertiveness displayed by Sulpicia and the women celebrated by the male love elegists as their lovers (Hallett 1977).
Like Satire 1.2—though unlike Roman elegy itself, which always employs refined euphemisms to describe sexual activities and equipment—Augustus uses a string of primary obscenities in representing his own erotic circumstances. Here, he explains his decision to wage the Perusine War, in which he, then known as Octavian, confronted Mark Antony’s wife Fulvia on the battlefield. After claiming that Fulvia, angry over Antony’s affair with the Cappadocian queen Glaphyra, had demanded that he “fuck her (with the verb futuere) or fight,” he asserts that he had no choice but to fight, since Fulvia did not meet the standards of his “prick” (mentula). He even likens “fucking” her to “asshole-fucking” (with the verb pedicare) Antony’s male agent Manius.
It is significant that the late-first-century-CE epigrammatist Martial, to whom we owe the survival of these six elegiac verses, quotes them in 11.20 to justify his own use of primary obscenities such as futuere, mentula, and pedicare, by stating that Augustus knows how to speak with Romana simplicitate, “Roman frankness.” For in the elegiac verses at Satyricon 132, which defend sexual couplings and joys as narrative subject matter immediately before and after describing the impotent Encolpius’ erotic failures and sorrows, Petronius utilizes simplicitas too, to characterize his writing on this topic as a work of new frankness, novae simplicitatis opus. This detail may suggest that Petronius is alluding to, and assumes his audience’s close acquaintance with, Augustus’ poem and its dismissive portrayal of a libidinous woman who takes the sexual initiative.
Numerous other echoes in the Satyricon of Augustan elegiac texts and the situations they depict similarly indicate that Petronius assumes an audience familiar with the textual details of earlier love elegiac poems. He evokes these poems during the novel to critique the preoccupation of male elegists with female erotic control and male sexual performance, and to ridicule his narrator Encolpius for trying to emulate the poet–speakers of these elegists. Petronius does not appear to voice criticism of our one surviving Augustan female elegist Sulpicia through alluding to her work. Yet, as the two following examples illustrate, his critique of elegy as a genre contains strong misogynistic elements, as evinced in its unflattering portraits of sexually enterprising women in circumstances recalling elegiac scenarios.
Let us now turn to Petronius’ account of the encounter that Encolpius claims, at Satyricon 16–26, to have experienced with his two male sidekicks in the company of the priestess Quartilla, her slave girl and a 7-year-old virgin. This portion of the novel’s narrative has attracted and continues to deserve close attention because it has numerous features in common with Propertius 4.8. In addition to sharing specific details of language, the episode represents its first-person narrator Encolpius as—like the first-person poet–speaker in Propertius’ elegy—excusing his emotional mistreatment by a sexually promiscuous, heartless, and physically abusive woman on both religious and physically performative grounds. A summary of the events that Propertius relates, and some information on how he describes them, will facilitate our intertextual comparison between Propertius’ elegy and Petronius’ narrative.
Propertius 4.8 begins on an erudite note. By demanding that the reader learn the causes of a disruption that occurred one night on the Esquiline Hill, it evokes Callimachus’ Aetia, a learned poem about causes. It proceeds to provide several details about a fertility ritual in the town of Lanuvium, centered on the feeding of a snake by a virgin. Then, in lines 15ff., Propertius reveals that his beloved, anything-but-virginal Cynthia, treated him cruelly by travelling with another man to participate in this cult; he explains Cynthia’s abandonment of him by citing her religious obligations to Juno, the goddess honored by this ritual (though he notes that Venus was a better causa, “excuse”).
In the lines that immediately follow, Propertius represents Cynthia’s departure from Rome as a military triumph. He then refers to a noisy bar-brawl that shamed him, and hails Cynthia as a spectaclum, dramatic sight, to behold as she left the city. Using a military metaphor (“since my bed had been changed, I wanted to relocate camp”), he next reports that he attempted to find sexual consolation with two paid sex workers, women of precisely the sort that Horace recommends for erotic recreation, along with wine and song. Yet, at 43ff., Propertius relates that he could not perform sexually with them, since he kept thinking of Cynthia at her ritual.
It was at this point, Propertius tells us, that Cynthia suddenly returned. He again describes her appearance with the word spectaclum and, in military language, by likening this dramatic sight to that of a captured city. He testifies that after she physically attacked one of his two partners, the other called for help and their lamps awakened the respectable citizens of the neighborhood, Quirites. He recounts that Cynthia not only battered, bit, and beat him up but also inflicted physical harm on his innocent male slave. Then, in lines 71 ff., Propertius relates Cynthia’s demands and his own abject apology, employing legal as well as military language; he concludes the elegy by reporting that—after Cynthia ritually purified the premises—they made passionate love, employing a military metaphor to describe their activity: “we let our weapons (arma) loose on the entire bed.” Propertius underscores the success of their love making, despite the physical abuse he endured at Cynthia’s hands, giving it as his second justification for her emotionally cruel treatment of him. Indeed, he represents Cynthia’s cruelty, physical and emotional, as enhancing his own sexual performance (Hallett 2003).
Like Propertius’ elegy, the Quartilla episode is narrated in the first person, by the literarily learned, self-deluded, youthful Encolpius. Both texts have a nocturnal setting and foreground women’s involvement in religious rites. Both assign a prominent role to a virgin: the elegy uses the word virgo three times; the episode also uses it three times, as well as the diminutive form virgiuncula twice, and the verb devirginari, to deflower. Both texts, moreover, make figurative use of military and legal language to describe erotic activities. In the sentence immediately preceding the elegiac verses in Chapter 18, for example, Quartilla claims that a crowd had been prepared to avenge (vindicaret) the injustice done to her (iniuriam); the verses begin with the statement contemni turpe est, legem donare superbum, “to be scorned is disgraceful, to impose a law glorious” (Hallett 2003).
Curiously, both Propertius 4.8 and Petronius’ Quartilla episode place a major emphasis on hands, and portray the tying up of feet. Just as Propertius has Cynthia claim that she abandoned him to worship Juno (while actually paying homage to Venus), so Petronius has Quartilla invoke the goddess Juno in defense of her voracious and promiscuous sexual conduct. In both texts, the noun spectaculum, shortened a syllable in the elegy, appears twice in connection with female erotic self-assertiveness: Petronius uses it for the mock marriage between Encolpius’ boy beloved Giton and a 7-year-old virgin that Encolpius is forced to watch with Quartilla. Laughter plays a role in both Propertius’ elegy and the Quartilla narrative (Petronius employs the noun risus six times within the episode), as do sounds of other sorts, especially those made by doors (Hallett 2003).
Each scenario centers on a public building of low status: a tavern in Propertius, and what one might call a “flophouse” in Petronius. Each narrative is marked by much action, and inaction, on couches and beds, described with the repeated use of the nouns lectus and torus. In each, we find drinking in abundance; faltering lamps and tables; a focus on eyes and eye-action, as well as on urban citified action and speech. Both narratives, too, feature the calling of neighbors referred to as Quirites; the verb admittere—“to confess”—used for confessions of bad behavior; and such other verbs as cadere, “to fall”; effundere, “to pour”; lenire “to lighten”; and spargere, “to sprinkle.” Finally, just as Propertius’ elegy readily lends itself to staging as a comic routine, so does Petronius’ narrative: both are developed dramatic scenes containing much descriptive information about the setting, gestures, and dialogue (Hallett 2003).
Nevertheless, Petronius locates his narrator Encolpius in totally dissimilar erotic circumstances from those in which Propertius situates himself as a poet–speaker. First of all, Petronius has Encolpius represent the religious activities of his female partner—to whom Encolpius twice refers by the Latin word domina, the very term used by the love elegists for their mistresses, as altogether different from the rites at Lanuvium so appealing to Cynthia. Quartilla conducts an all-night vigil in honor of the phallic god Priapus, on Encolpius’ own premises, which includes Encolpius’ former male lover Ascyltus and current boy lover Giton as well as Encolpius himself, and which demands energetic erotic performances of all participants. Still, like Propertius’ endeavors to couple with the two female prostitutes in 4.8, the multiple sexual couplings in which Encolpius has the chance to take part remain unconsummated, even those forced on him by cinaedi, aggressively pathic males (Hallett 2003).
Encolpius resembles Propertius in needing to compete with another man for the attentions of his female partner. However, this rival is his own younger male lover, who should not qualify as sexual competition. And though Quartilla ostentatiously fondles Giton’s sexual endowments in Encolpius’ presence, she postpones taking Giton on as her partner until she has made him deflower a 7-year-old girl. Petronius has Encolpius characterize Quartilla as lusty (libidinosa), portray this defloration as “children’s entertainment,” and report that he and Quartilla watched it “through a crack naughtily made in the door.” Yet, Encolpius is not aroused: while Giton and the little girl have no difficulties consummating their sexual union, Encolpius cannot perform at all. Unlike the first person poet–speaker of Propertius 4.8, he is not beat up, bitten, or bashed, merely kissed, by Quartilla. He depicts those kisses, however, with the verb verberare, “to lash,” as tantamount to whipping (Hallett 2003).
In addition to acknowledging that he suffered from sexual impotence throughout the episode, Encolpius describes himself as repeatedly paralyzed by fear: of Quartilla, her worry about tertian fever, and her demands. He claims that the female trinity of Quartilla, her maid, and the 7-year-old girl terrorized his two male companions as well as himself, employing military language to characterize the women as having made a long battle formation (longum agmen) and adding that Giton had not fought back (non repugnaverat). Whereas Propertius portrays Cynthia’s sexual aggression, brutal physical violence, and total control of their amatory transactions as physically empowering to him, energizing his erotic performance, Petronius has Encolpius describe himself as totally unlike Propertius as both lover and literary figure. By characterizing Encolpius in this way, Petronius parodies the circumstances and challenges the conventions of earlier love elegiac texts. He thus offers what has been termed a resistant reading of assumptions central to love elegy as a literary genre, indeed a reading that renders his first-person narrator and dramatic protagonist utterly ridiculous to those familiar with love elegy in general and Propertius 4.8 in particular (Hallett 2003)
Scholars have long noted that Petronius’ depiction of Encolpius’ debilitating penile failure at Satyricon 126ff. echoes key details from Ovid’s portrayal of his own temporary impotence, or at least that of Ovid’s poetic persona, in Amores 3.7. They have observed that both texts feature languor, “limpness,” brought on by veneficium, “sorcery”; the accusation by the offended lover that a rival party is the cause of sexual dysfunction; and such stylistic details as the prominent positioning of a tricolon accompanied by anaphora (McMahon 1998, 10; Courtney 2001, 193–194). However, further resemblances between the Ovidian elegy and the Petronian narrative merit scrutiny, as do the major differences between the two texts. Close comparison between their language and scenarios suggests that Petronius is parodying this particular Ovidian poem, as he does Propertius 4.8, but at the same time also ridiculing literary conventions and assumptions informing Ovid’s erotic verse, and love elegy as a literary genre. Among these conventions is Ovid’s own, at times parodic, intertextual evocations of his own poetic predecessors.
These resemblances between Ovid and Petronius include both individual words and larger themes. In Amores 3.7, Ovid thrice characterizes his own impotence as rendering him “not a man,” each time employing the Latin noun vir; in lines 59–60, the last of these passages, he describes his partner as worthy of arousing those “who are both alive and men” (vivosque virosque), lamenting that he was “neither alive nor a man” on this occasion. At 129.1, Petronius has Encolpius use the same word, vir, and the same motif of impotence as death, when complaining to his boy beloved Giton, “I do not feel that I am a man. That part of my body, in which I was once an Achilles, is dead and buried.” When speaking to his malfunctioning organ at 132.10, Encolpius also recalls Ovid’s representation of his past sexual vigor as both youthful and manly. Here he says that his impotent penis has “dragged him down to the dead,” and asks if the intent was “to betray [his] years blooming with first youth and afflict [him] with the weakness of extreme old age.”
Not only does Encolpius liken his sexual performance to that of the legendary epic warrior Achilles, at 130.4–5, he also employs a military metaphor for his male sexual equipment and endeavors when writing to the woman he desires, who bears the name of Circe, a goddess bedded by the legendary epic warrior Odysseus: “although I was a soldier (miles) ready to take action, I did not have my arms (arma).” Ovid uses the same figure of speech in saying, in line 68, that his sexual parts “now demand their work and military service” (militiam), and in telling his delinquent member in line 71, “through you I was caught in the act unarmed” (inermis). Both Ovid and Encolpius, moreover, address and admonish their male organs. At Amores 3.7.69–72, Ovid calls his manly member “the worst part (pars) of myself.” He then accuses it—as if the feminine gender of pars (and of the never-uttered primary obscenity for this bodily part, mentula) rendered it a faithless female lover—of having deceived him with promises, behaving falsely to him, its master (dominum), and of having caused sad losses with great disgrace, pudor. At 132.7, Encolpius speaks angrily to what he euphemistically calls “that noun of feminine gender (eam) which had been the cause of all my misfortunes,” using the word pudor as well.
Later in the same passage, Encolpius asserts to his organ that “[you failed me] in order that you might hand over my years (annos) flourishing with their first energy, and inflict the weakness of extreme old age (senectaeque).” He thereby recalls Ovid’s worry, at Amores 3.7.17, about “what old age (senectus) holds in store” for him “if his youth is so disappointing” as well as his claim in 19 that his plight “causes me shame for my years” (pudet annorum). So, too, and contrary to his practice elsewhere in the Amores, Ovid puts words in the mouth of the woman he has disappointed sexually at 3.7.77–80: “why do you play (ludis) with my feelings . … Either a sorceress from Circe-land (Aeaea venifica) bewitches you (devovet) … or you come worn out from another love routine.” Petronius assigns words not only to the woman Encolpius fails to satisfy sexually—literally named Circe—but also to her slave girl Chrysis. Indeed, Petronius represents Circe as writing a lengthy letter to Encolpius, which her slave girl conveys, and Encolpius as responding with a letter of his own. At Satyricon 129.4–5, Petronius calls to mind Ovid’s partner in Amores 3.7 by having Circe use the verb ludere, to play, in the context of her own sexual disappointment.
Yet, the distinctive differences between these two texts establish that Petronius is evoking Ovid’s elegiac scenario parodically, to emphasize that Encolpius’ impotence causes him not only to experience immense anxiety but also to suffer both emotionally and physically in painful and humiliating ways that Ovid, or at least his poetic persona, does not. Ovid is obviously relating the details of this failed sexual encounter to his readers. However, he represents the incident described by the poem as only known to his unnamed and dissatisfied female partner, who departs in a rush, and as a single occurrence quickly forgotten. Petronius, however, represents Encolpius’ plight as long lasting, and as known at the time to other women who do not share his bed.
Both Circe and Chrysis express their reactions to, and ponder explanations and cures for, Encolpius’ impotence; at 131.2, Chrysis even introduces Encolpius to a sorceress named Proselenos who manages to arouse and charge his organ with charms and chants. After Encolpius lashes out at Circe in 132.2, moreover, she takes revenge by having her bedroom attendants beat him, and other slaves spit upon him; they throw Proselenos out and beat Chrysis as well. Ovid’s puella merely upbraids him for his phallic failure; she does not inflict physical harm.
Significantly, and as has been noted, Ovid portrays the impotence of his poet–speaker as only temporary, setting Amores 3.7 at a dramatic moment when he recalls his past erotic failure to an organ now fully aroused. In lines 65–68, he reports that his “body parts” now “thrive and flourish (valent) at the wrong moment, and demand their work and military service.” By way of contrast as well, whereas Ovid sounds merely exasperated at his manly part for its poor timing, Encolpius expresses shame at having conversed with his. And his organ is in no way ready to perform. At Satyricon 1.32.8–11, Petronius vividly describes Encolpius’ male member, when Encolpius contemplates cutting it off, as retreating from his groin to hide away in the flesh of his entrails, utterly unrecognizable owing to its “covered head,” “averting its gaze,” and unresponsively drooping. He provides this description, moreover, in lines of verse, two of them lifted wholesale from the sixth book of Vergil’s Aeneid, another half-hexameter from the ninth. The Vergilian lines from Book 6 (469–470) represent the silent and angry Dido whom Aeneas encounters in the realm of the dead. The words from Book 9, in line 436, liken the dying Trojan warrior Euryalus to falling petals of a poppy with weary stalk.
Most important, Ovid boasts of his past sexual prowess with other women at Amores 3.7.23–26, asserting “But recently blonde-haired Chlide was kept satisfied (continuata) by my functioning (officio) two successive times, shining Pitho and Libas three times; I remember that in a brief night Corinna demanded from me and that I held up for nine numbers” (numeros … novem). With this reference to performing “nine numbers” on one night, Ovid recalls Catullus’ more obscenely worded promise in poem 32, to one Ipsitilla, of an afternoon consisting of “nine non-stop fuckings” (novem continuas fututiones). With this intertextual detail alone, Ovid offers a phallically realized reenactment of the artistic theory propounded by the contemporary literary critic Harold Bloom, who posits that an “anxiety of influence” informs the competitive relationship between male poets and their predecessors (Bloom 1997). For what Ovid’s influential predecessor Catullus merely proposes, Ovid, through parodic allusivity, claims to have delivered.
Other details in this poem, recalling lines from other Catullan poems, as well as from elegies by both Propertius and Tibullus about their erotic performances, further suggest that Ovid is wittily competing with his poetic predecessors on a literary as well as a sexual level, and willing to admit that at times he has experienced erotic failures because he ordinarily enjoys amatory successes. For example, in 65–66, immediately before berating his recalcitrant organ, and while contrasting his present rigidity with his past flaccidity, Ovid states that his praemortua membra, “prematurely dead manly bits,” iacuere, “lay there,” hesterno languidora rosa, “more wilted than yesterday’s rose.” He thereby recalls the language of Catullus 50. It opens with a reference to yesterday, hesterno die; lines 15–16 describe Catullus’ bodily parts as lying half-dead (membra…semimortua…iacebant) on a bed. In this poem, though, Catullus employs the language of lovemaking to describe his participation not in non-stop erotic couplings, but in an impassioned, mutually demanding and productive verse-writing session with his friend Licinius Calvus.
Ovid’s self-representation in Amores 3.7 also calls to mind passages from Propertius in 2.22 and Tibullus in 1.5, each of which shares memories of both amatory success and failure. At 2.22.23–24, after bemoaning his own current erotic disappointment, Propertius consoles himself with the observation “often a girl has discovered that my sexual performance (officium) is strong (valere) for the entire night,” and with words Ovid also uses in Amores 3.7 for sexual activity. At 1.5.39–2, Tibullus relates that, even when he—unlike Ovid in Amores 3.7—has become physically aroused, “Venus often deserted” him as he “was approaching sexual joys”; at this point, Tibullus adds, the woman, departing, said that he “had been bewitched,” devotum. Ovid, as we have seen, describes his partner as responding in the same way with the same word (Holzberg 2009).
However, some of Ovid’s words for sexual acts and positions in Amores 3.7—numeri, “numbers,” in 18 and 26, and modi, “measures” in 64—also serve as terms for poetic meters in his earlier, programmatic elegy Amores 1.1. There, in fact, they refer to the workings of the elegiac couplet itself, in contrast to the dactylic hexameter of a martial Roman epic. By declaring, in lines 27–28, “let my work rise in six metrical units (numeris), and sink back in five: farewell, iron wars, with your meters (modis),” Ovid associates what it takes to make love with what it takes to make love poetry. Earlier in Amores 1.1, at 17–18, Ovid forges the same association. Here, he describes the effect of the elegiac couplet with such sexually charged words as surgere, “to rise,” and nervi, “muscular parts”: “when the new page rose up (surrexit) well with its first line of verse, the next one diminished its muscular parts (nervos).” He thereby characterizes the elegiac meter—in contrast to the hendecasyllabic meter employed by Catullus in 11 and 50—as operating in the fashion of a male sexual organ, alternatively turgid and detumescent.
In this narrative segment about Encolpius’ impotence, Petronius portrays Encolpius as responding to Ovid’s elegiac Amores 3.7, much as Ovid responds in that poem to Catullus’ hendecasyllabic 32 and 50, and to two elegiac poems by Propertius and Tibullus. However, while Ovid echoes these earlier texts to establish himself as a contender in the realms of both phallic and literary performance, Encolpius painfully testifies that he does not succeed in his phallic and literary competitive endeavors. Unlike Ovid, too, Encolpius does not recover quickly from his bout of impotence, and haplessly turns for help to women who harm him, with pain and humiliation resulting. And although in Satyricon 132 Encolpius directly quotes an earlier Roman poet after reproaching his uncooperative organ, these words from Vergil’s Aeneid were originally about the dead Dido and the dying Euryalus, not the life enhancing, energizing power of love poems by Catullus and the Roman elegists whom Ovid echoes.
In calling these poems by Propertius and Ovid to mind, Petronius assumes an audience familiar with these texts, and aware of the values that they embrace. He utilizes these evocations to imply through parody that the literary genre of Roman elegy in which they wrote obscures the anguish, pain, and humiliation that sexually independent and aggressive women may inflict and male sexual dysfunction may entail. These evocations of elegy, therefore, voice a learned, albeit laugh-inducing, critique of the genre itself.
Apuleius’ Metamorphoses also draws heavily on Roman elegy, through the author’s depiction of the relationships between the protagonist Lucius and the female figures he meets: the slave woman Photis, the Corinthian matron, and the goddess Isis. Apuleius’ novel recalls earlier Latin love elegiac texts in foregrounding such themes as dominant and submissive behavior, reversals of social hierarchies, and transgressions of borders, not only in its characterization of Lucius himself, but also of Lucius’ alter ego Socrates, whose experiences with the innkeeper Meroe anticipate the protagonist’s encounters. Yet, at the same time, the love affairs in the inserted stories also draw on the literary genres of tragedy, comedy, and mime.
This discussion contends that, in presenting his protagonist as an elegiac lover at both the beginning (Books 1–3) and the end (Books 10–11) of the novel, Apuleius adds another type of love to the broad spectrum of relationships between the sexes that he presents in the Metamorphoses. In the process, he subtly signals to the reader that his entire work lends itself to interpretation by means of a single Latin literary genre, one that is genuinely Roman and thus suits Apuleius’ aim of adapting his Greek literary model for a Latin-speaking audience (cf. Sandy 1997). By integrating elegiac themes, Apuleius bridges the two linguistic cultures, as he announces in the prologue, and simultaneously furnishes a new perspective on the relationship between Lucius and Photis that inaugurates the protagonist’s transformation and his subsequent adventures.
In the Onos, the epitome of the lost Greek Metamorphoses, the relationship between the female slave Palaestra and the protagonist Lukios is described as purely sexual. Its only purpose is to bring the protagonist in contact with the world of magic. By way of contrast, Apuleius adds suspense to the relationship between Lucius and Photis by having it oscillate, in elegiac fashion, between submission and domination, authentic feelings and strategic role-playing.
The protagonist Lucius, a free citizen, becomes enamored of the slave girl Photis and, once their love affair commences, behaves toward her in a manner recalling the love elegiac convention of servitium amoris, “the slavery of love” (Hindermann 2009b). This notion of erotic bondage inverts Roman social reality by representing a free Roman citizen as dominated by a woman from a lower social class (see Murgatroyd 1981). The actual social roles occupied by Lucius and Photis, those of civis, free citizen, and ancilla, slave maid, are stressed in 1.22–25, immediately before they launch their love affair; the reversal of these roles is therefore soon perceptible in their changed behavior.
Photis, for example, gives Lucius various orders when they first flirt with one another in the kitchen (2.7 discede … discede; 2.30 cave; abi, te compara) and during the following night (2.17 proeliare … proeliare … derige … grassare … occide). What is more, Lucius has to ask his domina Photis for permission to accept an invitation from Byrrhena, his mother’s close friend and an important member of Hypata’s social elite. Like a slave, Lucius has no right to go where he wishes. He is tied to the house and has to ask his mistress to allow him to leave (2.18).
Apuleius strengthens the impression of Lucius’ complete dependence on his beloved by stating that he waits for her nod, nutus. This word often appears in the Metamorphoses in connection with the power wielded by goddesses: Fortune, Juno, Venus, and Isis all express their will wordlessly in this way (e.g. 6.4 and 11.11). By associating Photis with this gesture, Lucius classes her with the female divinities who appear in the novel, thus elevating her above the human sphere, as he does elsewhere in the work (2.17 and 3.22) by comparing her to Venus, goddess of love. Unlike Palaestra, her counterpart in the Onos, Photis is a fully developed character. Apuleius not only changes his female protagonist’s name (cf. Scobie 1969), but also transforms her into Lucius’ witty, clever, and attractive partner, whose character and appearance—particularly her seductive movements and her hair—are modeled on the idealized females of Roman elegy, and the prescriptions for sexually appealing female conduct and looks in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (Hindermann 2009a, 100–144). Although magic surrounds Lucius completely, his attraction to Photis derives from her cultivated looks and manners: nam et forma scitula et moribus ludicra et prorsus argutula est, “because she is attractive, sexy and clever” (2.16–17).
In addition to employing the motifs of servitium amoris and the idealization and deification of the beloved, Apuleius introduces another elegiac theme, that of militia amoris (cf. Murgatroyd 1975). Lucius not only begs his Photis humbly for permission to attend a dinner party without her, but also entreats her explicitly for a short break from his military service of love, amatoriae militiae brevem commeatum (2.18). Unlike the Greek novel, where the love scenes between protagonist and slave—whose name, Palaestra, means a gym, place for male exercise—feature metaphors of wrestling, sexual encounters between Photis and Lucius are figuratively referred to in the language of waging war (2.16–17).
Although Lucius acts like a slave and a soldier of love, he does not have to experience the anxieties and sorrows of an elegiac lover. His mistress Photis, moreover, does not resemble the harsh girl, dura puella, immortalized in earlier Roman elegy. She is not cruel, but kind and generous; the relationship between the lovers is portrayed as relaxed and full of mutual affection. As a survey of the different forms assumed by servitium amoris in Roman elegy indicates, this specific, more enduring, variety of the motif surfaces prominently in Ovid’s Ars Amatoria (see Holzberg 1981). Ovid advises that the male student of love seek to dominate and structure a relationship according to his own wishes. Such an arrangement does not prevent him from being indulgent to his female beloved, or even from letting her have her way at times. Occasionally, Ovid notes at Ars 2.209–222, the student of love may even have to perform slavish tasks for her. However, he is never enjoined to obey his beloved completely, and is simply supposed to let her play the role of the more powerful partner. In this way, the student of love may use servitium amoris as a pose, in order to enjoy a relationship that suits him. Ovid thus upgrades the role of the love-slave by teaching that slavery has to be feigned, performed for the sake of deceiving the female lover.
It is striking that Lucius depicts himself as a slave of love (in servilem modum addictum atque mancipatum; tuumque mancipium) in Met. 3.22, only when he wants Photis to fulfill his desire for magic. With his choice of words, Lucius indicates that he sees himself as a voluntary (mancipatum … volentem at 3.19) and short-term slave of love. He can offer his beloved the prospect of staying with her forever if she is willing to help him realize his greatest wish. As an independent salesman, he bargains with Photis according to the principle of do ut des, “I give so that you may give,” utilizing as well several commercial terms (fructu, inremunerabili, pignora at 3.22). By displaying his emotional and physical dependence on her, he tries to allay her fears, and promises that he will stay with her even after an encounter with the world of magic. This promise, in fact, does not turn out to be true. As the praeceptor amoris Ovid recommends in lines 631–634 of Ars Amatoria 1, Lucius simply commits perjury and never really loses control of his feelings. His submission to Photis is not an end in itself, but a means of getting in touch with magic.
How independent Lucius remains despite his adopted pose as a servus becomes clear when we compare his fate to that of Socrates (Hindermann 2010). Lucius learns Socrates’ story in 16–19 of Metamorphoses 1, immediately before his own adventures with both love and magic. The circumstances of Lucius and Socrates are similar in many respects. Both are salesmen who meet, in the very same city, women with magical powers: Meroe and Pamphile, Photis’ mistress. For both men, an erotic encounter proves to be the path for magic. The consequences of these magical experiences are serious: Socrates dies, and Lucius not only suffers painfully in his asinine form, but also faces mortal danger several times before he is changed back into human shape.
The central figure of reference for the Apuleian Socrates, who lacks his namesake’s celebrated restraint, is of course the Greek philosopher. Without rejecting a Platonic reading of the novel’s narrative—a combination of multiple intertexts is found throughout the Metamorphoses—we would like to propose a new interpretation of the story about Socrates and Meroe, reading it as an example of servitium amoris in the original, “severe,” form of the motif. Critics, for example Walsh (1970, 177) or Tatum (1969, 493ff.), have maintained that Socrates’ story is to be read as a warning about the dangerous consequences of both magic and sexuality that Lucius fails to heed. It can, however, be argued that Lucius absorbs valuable lessons from Socrates’ story, since he does not succumb completely to the power of his beloved.
In his first appearance, Socrates makes a pitiful impression. He is emaciated, pale, half-naked, and far away from home. Aristomenes, a salesman and old friend, meets him by chance, sitting on the ground in the streets of Hypata. Instead of being happy about their reunion, or asking his unlucky friend about the reasons for his misfortune, Aristomenes heaps reproaches on Socrates. Since it was assumed that Socrates had passed away, Aristomenes tells him that his children have been given a guardian and his wife has been urged by her parents to marry again (1.8). Aristomenes’ mercilessness can be explained by his inability to make an accurate diagnosis of what ails Socrates. He appears to be an expert in interpreting symptoms of love-sickness: without asking, he deduces that Socrates must be in love. Paleness and emaciation are typical symptoms of love-sickness, characteristic of the elegiac lover, for example Propertius 4.3.27 and Ovid Ars 1. 729. Thus, it is assumed that Socrates has abandoned his family in order to enjoy sexual pleasures with his mistress.
Despite his friend’s mistrustful attitude, Socrates proceeds to tell Aristomenes how he got into this situation. He begins his story by exclaiming me miserum (and also refers to himself as miser in 1.7), a phrase that conveys a special meaning in an erotic and elegiac context (Hinds 1998, 29–34). The same words, miserum me, are found in the first line of Propertius’ first poem in his first book, known as the Monobiblos, and also occur at line 25 in the first poem of Ovid’s Amores, 1.1. They programmatically point to the elegiac lover’s state of mind, and establish the tone for the elegies that follow as well as for Socrates’ story.
After visiting a gladiatorial show, Socrates is attacked on his way back to the inn. A gang of robbers take away all of his possessions, leaving him only with the clothes he is wearing. Back at the inn, Socrates, in a state of shock, confides in his friendly landlady Meroe. She listens to him, provides him with free food and drink, and seduces him. After spending a single night with him (ab unico congressu, 1.7), the old but still attractive Meroe brings Socrates under her control. Like Photis, Meroe enchants her lover not by means of magic, but with her looks—in 1.7 she is described with the same adjective, scitula, as Photis—and her skilled ways. Socrates is so devoted to Meroe, whom he describes in 1.8 as a femina divina, a goddess, that he even sells the clothes the robbers did not take from him. After he no longer owns any possessions, he begins to carry bags to earn money for her (1.2). Socrates has changed from a free and reputable salesman into a slave who does servile labor to please his beloved and fulfill her wishes.
Complaints about the financial demands of the greedy mistress are common in Roman elegy, found at, for example Propertius 2.16, Tibullus 2.4, and Ovid, Amores 1.10. There, puellae want to be rewarded for their physical favors with costly gifts, which the poeta-amator cannot afford. Like an avaricious puella in love elegy, Meroe also plunders her lover until he is completely exhausted and looks like a ghost (1.8). As Socrates fears his mistress’ wrath, he does not defend himself against this mistreatment and gives up his right to freedom of speech. Such a reaction is also characteristic of an elegiac amator who accepts the superiority and control of his domina. Although he suffers physical and psychic violence, an elegiac lover does not dare to complain, or to leave (e.g. Propertius 1.9.1–4; 1.18.25ff. and Tibullus 1.6.69–72).
By viewing Lucius as a strategist rather than a true slave of love, we understand that his relationship to Socrates is different from that which earlier critics have assigned him. While the helpless Socrates pays for his attempt to abandon his mistress with his life, Lucius remains independent. With this attitude, he not only fulfills his wish of acquiring magical skills, though not exactly in the way that he intended, but also saves his own life.
After his transformation into an ass, Lucius abstains from relationships with women until the end of the tenth book, when he meets a matron at Corinth who falls in love with him. Scholars (e.g. Zimmermann 2000, 26) interpret this episode as a counterpart to the sex scenes with Photis at the beginning of the novel. Here, again, Roman gender roles are reversed, since the matron pays Lucius, the keeper of the ass, a great deal of money to have sex with her (10.19 grandi … praemio; 10.22 pari … pretio). She defines the rules of their encounter in every detail, whereas Lucius remains entirely passive. If we compare this Apuleian episode to the corresponding one in the Onos (50–52), it becomes clear that Apuleius uses typical, and faked, elegiac blandishments to unmask the matron’s bestial desire and the naïve credulity of Lucius, the elegiac lover.
The importance of sweet-talk for initiating and enhancing love, as well as during sex, is a frequent theme in Ovid’s love poems (e.g. Ars 3.523f. and 795f.; Amores 2.19.17; 3.7.11f.; 3.14.25). Lucius believes the words of his beloved—“amo” et “cupio” et “te solum diligo” et “sine te iam vivere nequo” et cetera… (10.21)—who acts with the same fury (10.19 vaesana libido) as Ovid’s Pasiphae, who evinces furiosa libido at Ars 1.281 and, as Apuleius notes with ad instar asinariae Pasiphaae at 10.19, serves as her role model. By calling her beloved palumbulum, “little dove,” and passer, “sparrow,” the matrona adopts on the one hand Ovid’s advice to engage in sweet-talk during sex. By using bird names, at the same time she reminds the reader that Photis, Lucius’ first lover, transformed him into an ass instead of what he wished to become, a bird.
A popular approach in research on Apuleius’ Metamorphoses is to interpret Lucius’ lovemaking with the matrona as his final degradation, reading the malevolent deeds of the lustful witch figures Photis, Paphile, and Meroe as negative foil for Isis’ benevolent acts. According to this reading of the novel, Lucius has to overcome the destructive powers of the first 10 books in order to reach the savior goddess and true religion. However, typical elegiac patterns also figure in the relationship between Lucius and Isis. If one reads the 11th book, as van Mal-Maeder (2001) and many other scholars have recently suggested, not in contrast to, but in continuation of, the first 10 books, and at the same time not as the serious report of a convert, but as a playful literary mélange drawing on different texts and traditions, parallels between elegiac lover and religious believer are unmistakable.
First of all, Lucius is not released at the end of the novel but remains a slave. Whereas Lukios, the protagonist of the Greek Onos, finds his way back to his former life by shedding his asinine appearance, Lucius stays under the control of others for the rest of the novel. Although he recovers his human shape, his re-transformation does not turn him back into the man he was before his adventures. His metamorphosis is only an external one, and he is kept in a servile state. Not only does he shave his head like a slave in 11.28–30 (van Mal-Maeder 1997, 100f.), he is also summoned by the priest of Isis to spend his life in the service of the goddess, which is described as a new, more powerful mistress. In the priest’s order to serve Isis at 11.15, we can find the same connection between the metaphors of slavery (deae servire; servitium deae; ministerii iugum) and military service (sanctae huic militiae) as in Lucius’ earlier plea to Photis (Hindermann 2009b).
To reward Lucius for his persistent veneration, both Isis and Photis provide him with voluptas, pleasure. After finally having accepted Byrrhena’s invitation to a dinner party, Lucius promises Photis that he will return home early because he prefers to share voluptas with her, a slave girl, to an evening with Hypata’s high society (2.18). The same love addiction is evident in Lucius’ relation to Isis (11.24). Spending time with Isis seems to be more important to Lucius than a reunion with his friends and relatives, whom he has not seen for at least a year. Even though he welcomes his compatriots, he soon returns back to his goddess, from whom he is inseparable (11.19). In his intense service, Lucius forgets in both cases to return back home to his normal life (nec domuitionem paro at 3.19; tardam satis domuitionem comparo at 11.24).
Isis is a much more demanding mistress than Photis. Whereas his conquest of Photis is quite easy, Lucius has to fight hard to obtain access to the interior of Isis’ temple, which is described by the unusual term cubiculum deae (the goddess’ bedroom) in 11.17. Like an exclusus amator, “locked-out lover,” of elegy, in 11.21, Lucius repeatedly begs to be admitted while the priest, Isis’ guardian, custos, defends the door. And, like lovers in elegy (e.g. Propertius 2.16; Tibullus 2.4; Ovid, Amores 1.10; 4.8), Lucius has to pay a great deal of money to maintain his relationship with her (11.21–23; 11.28).
Another difference between Lucius’ relationship with Photis and that with Isis is the exclusive and lifelong connection that he has with the goddess, reminding readers of the “eternal bond,” foedus aeternum, described by such elegists as Tibullus at 1.6.85 f. and Propertius at 1.12.20. Not only does Isis’ priest want Lucius to swear an oath of allegiance at Metamorphoses 11.15, Isis also wants Lucius to be faithful to her for his whole life (11.6). Her statement is astonishing, as initiation in several mystery cults was not unusual; what is more, Lucius has, as Photis tells us at 3.15, formerly been initiated into a number of cults. At 11.25, Lucius promises to worship Isis constantly, even when they are apart. Whereas, with Photis, the male protagonist remains always in full control of the situation and keeps his free will despite his gestures of subjection, in his relations with Isis he is utterly dependent and servile. He is incapable of resorting to strategies that enable him to keep his emotional freedom, like the Ovidian student of love. Isis is a true domina of the kind readers encounter in Tibullus and Propertius, a woman whom Lucius cannot manipulate as he did Photis. It is Isis who is in control, and Lucius totally obeys.
This representation of the relationship between devotee and goddess as servus and domina raises serious questions about one-dimensional religious interpretations of the novel’s 11th book, as suggested by a variety of scholars. It brilliantly illustrates how Apuleius combines various literary motifs, interweaving and juxtaposing them, not only in Book 11 but also in the rest of the novel. The relationship between Lucius and Isis contains elements from the Isaic mysteries and the Greek love novels, as well as from Roman elegy. While, in the Greek novels, separated couples are invariably reunited in the end and live happily ever after in marital bliss, Lucius finds a lucky conclusion to his adventures, not as a pater familias, but in servile submission to a demanding goddess.
Both Petronius and Apuleius look to earlier Roman elegy, and assume an audience familiar with Roman elegy, when constructing the characters and plotting the events of their narratives. As we have seen, Petronius closely models segments of his narrative on specific elegies by Propertius and Ovid, evoking numerous textual details as well as themes, and expecting his readers to be closely acquainted with these earlier texts. Apuleius assumes that his readers merely have some exposure to earlier love elegiac conventions and concerns, among them those formulated by Ovid in his didactic elegiac poem on the art of loving.
However, at the same time, Apuleius has a more positive impression of love elegy, its values, and its scenarios than Petronius. In addition to evoking love elegy when describing successful as well as disastrous love affairs, he acknowledges that its final practitioner Ovid offers sound advice to protect male lovers from the disappointments and complications that love can bring. Petronius focuses exclusively on, and derives comic capital from, the pains and humiliation caused to male lovers by the sexually aggressive, promiscuous, and unfeeling conduct of the women elegy celebrates; he also underscores the inability of male lovers to handle the sexual and emotional pressures characteristic of love elegiac scenarios. In this way, he casts elegy in a negative light, and encourages his readers to share his opinion.
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For elegiac elements in the first two books of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, see Mathis 2008; for the tale of “Amor and Psyche” see Mattiacci 1998; and for an overall view of the relation between Roman elegy (particularly Ovid’s Ars amatoria) and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses, see Hindermann (2009a). On the intertextual relationships between Ovid Amores 3.7 and Petronius’ account of Encolpius’ impotence see McMahon 1998 and Courtney 1998; on the echoes of Propertius 4.8 in the Petronius’ Quartilla episode, see Hallett 2003.