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Philomela's Web and the Pleasures of the Text:
Reader and Violence in the Metamorphoses of Ovid |
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Introduction:
Violence and Pleasure |
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Generations of Romans were trained in the sadistic spectacles of the gladiatorial games.1 This delight in watching pain being inflicted is one of those unpleasant features of Roman civilization that we would happily forget. Ovid is not immune to the influence of the amphitheater: witness the long catalogue of wounds in Perseus' battle against Phineus in Metamorphoses 5, the centauromachy in book 12, and the account of the mangling of Hippolytus by his horses in book 15.2 |
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In fairness to the Romans, it must be said that there was occasional inquietude about these bloody spectacles. Lucretius, Cicero, Horace, and Virgil in the generations before Ovid express repugnance in various ways.3 Even before the fulminations of the Christian fathers, the same Seneca who presented awful mutilations, blindings, and dismemberments in the Tragedies wrote about the corruption of the soul in the amphitheaters.4 Social historians and literary scholars alike have often speculated on why the Imperial poets dwell at length on such scenes of physical suffering. But even if we can explain them as externalizing anxieties about individual identity, the arbitrariness of power, and personal helplessness in an ever-increasing |
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1 See Seel (1961) 54ff. on some particularly ugly examples in Martial's book of Spectacula; also Williams (1978) 184ff.; Barton (1989); Richlin (1992a) 161 and 17477; Brown (1992) 183ff.; Most (1992) passim, especially 400ff. I am grateful to Professor Most for allowing me to see his paper in advance of publication. The Roman interest in gory scenes of physical suffering is, however, well established even prior to the Empire: see Segal (1990c) passim, especially chaps. 57. |
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2 On 6.55260, for example, Bömer (1976) 151 remarks: "Hier beginnt ein Katalog von Scheusslichkeiten . . ., den Ovid, ebenso wie anderswo, in genüsslicher Ausführlichkeit schildert . . ." See also Galinsky (1975) 12632; Diller (1968) 333f. |
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3 Lucretius' disapproving account of wild beasts in warfare in DRN 5.130840 is sometimes attributed to the experience of the amphitheater. Cf. also Horace C. 3.13, on the mixture of the cold, pure water of the fons Bandusiae and the hot blood of the young goat sacrificed to it. |
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4 Seneca, Ep. 7.2ff., 14.4ff. For other criticism of the contemporary taste for gladiatorial contests see Cic., Tusc. Disp. 2.17.41 and Ad Fam. 7.1.3; Pliny, Ep. 9.6. Seel (1961) 5456 points out, however, that even these authors are not consistent in their disapproval of gladiatorial bloodshed. |
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