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Philomela: how to narrate this horror? To conceal his crime, Tereus utters fictitious groans, and with his tears wins "faith" or "credibility" for his version of Philomela's fate (56567): |
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dat gemitus fictos commentaque funera narrat;
et lacrimae fecere fidem. velamina Progne
deripit . . . |
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He gives forth feigned groans and tells of the death that he has falsely invented; his tears win him credence. Procne rends her veils.15 |
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This narrator, like the poet himself, makes his tale convincing by adding an affective dimension. He enacts, in his own narrative role, as falsehood, that fulness of emotional life that the master-narrator, Ovid, needs in order to bring the tale to life for us his audience. This life-likeness (vraisemblance), however, is purchased by a sacrifice, the graphic victimization of Philomela. |
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The craft, artistry, careful plotting, eloquence, pretence, masks, and multiple identities of Tereus coincide temporarily with those of his creator, the poet Ovid, with his plotting, his shifting perspectives, his ability to take on and imitate different roles and different voices. Lust makes the Thracian warrior eloquent (facundum faciebat amor, 469), so that he becomes craftily persuasive and seductive through both his words and his tears (47074). Yet however much Ovid may identify with Tereus' skill in winning over and manipulating his hearers, he has little sympathy with the character as a whole. By stressing the contrast with his Athenian victims, Ovid establishes Tereus as the barbarian, the Other, the one whose desires and acts stand outside the limits of humanity. As the Other, Tereus also serves as the field upon which can be projected libidinal and aggressive wishes that the (male) Roman audience may be reluctant to accept consciously in themselves. The shift in focus from the male to the female characters, however, also marks a change from the buildup and release of uncontrolled (male) desire to female victimization and vengeance. This shift of sympathy to the female victims coincides with the narrative's turn from verbal communication to other forms of expression, now between women. This mixture of media also brings a heightened narrative self-consciousness, particularly as the text envisages, if only momentarily, a female recipient, a female "reader" of its story, namely Procne. |
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When Tereus "relates his invented (story of Philomela's) death" (commentaque funera narrat), no verbal response from Procne is reported. Instead she turns at once to the gestures of mourning: she rips her rich garments from her shoulder, puts on black, and immediately begins funerary |
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15 For the motif of fides and pietas in the episode and their corruption, see Ortega (1970) 217 and 22022. The motifs run throughout the tale, signalled by the repetition of pius and fides and derivatives: cf. 474, 482, 496, 498, 503, 506, 535, 539, 566, 629, 635, etc. |
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