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so much innocent suffering and gratuitous violence.7 The Tereus episode, however, does more than just exploit the grand guignol possibilities offered by a Thracian barbarian's goriness. Ovid provides a powerful and sympathetic depiction of the victim's suffering; and, as we shall see, he even implies a female reader.8 The rape, he shows, has its origin in lust but soon becomes an attempt to control and degrade the victim. The very beginning, with the ill-omened wedding of Procne and Tereus, foreshadows the violated sanctity of family ties.9 Later, Pandion's fateful handing of Philomela over to Tereus, who has been devouring her with his eyes (47582), evokes the holy marriage rite of the dextrarum iunctio, the joining of right hands, a gesture of solemn trust that will be flagrantly violated (50610; see Pavlock, 1991, 35). |
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Tereus' acts, moreover, are not just the crimes of a psychopath. Ovid presents them against a cultural background that reveals their implications for the nature of excessive desire, the social status of women, and the ambiguity of violence by women, even justified violence. Tereus himself is the "tyrant" par excellence, as we know him from the famous description of the tyrannical soul in the ninth book of Plato's Republic. He exemplifies the tyrant's monstrous, uncontrolled appetites, especially sexual appetites, which lead him to outrage the basic laws of humanity and transgress the boundaries between god, man, and beast (see Pavlock, 1991, 34ff.). |
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As tyrannical man, Tereus has the tyrant's desire for unlimited and therefore sadistic power over his victim. This is also a desire for the "tyrannical" power that males in this culture claim over women's bodies. The ultimate form of that power is to rape, degrade, and silence women. In Ovid's narrative it emerges as the dark side of the power of the Father/King (Father as King) to dispose of his daughters' bodies as objects of exchange with other males in marriage (see Joplin, 1991, 4042, following Lévi-Strauss, 1969, 480ff.). The beginning of the story is King Pandion's exchange of Procne for Tereus' help in war (42428). The turning point is Pandion's decision to permit her younger sister, Philomela, to visit Procne in Thrace (465510). Both women, in fact, need male permission (cf. 44044); but Ovid dramatizes the situation of Philomela because he can thereby show Tereus' lustful desperation to use all available means to secure her transfer from the patria potestas of Pandion to his own power. |
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7 Segal (1971) passim, especially 377ff., 384ff.; Galinsky (1975) chap. 3, "Ovid's Humanity: Death and Suffering in the Metamorphoses," pp. 11057, especially 13840. |
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8 See Curran (1978), especially 23337. Richlin (1992a) 165 takes a less positive view of Ovid generally, arguing that Ovid makes up for the suppression of the physical details of rape by dwelling on meticulous descriptions of the female body undergoing ugly and painful deformations in metamorphosis (e.g. Io, Callisto, Cyane, Dryope, Byblis, Myrrha). |
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9 Note the triple anaphora of non in 6.428f., followed by the double anaphora of Eumenides in 430f. and of hac ave in 433f. |
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