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the crime only through the silent, non-verbal medium, which itself defies a spoken response (58385). We can gain access to the unspeakable crime only through a symbolical representation, an imago, which shocks and incites revenge (poenaeque in imagine tota est, 586). Procne, the tale's first "reader," unrolls (evolvit) the woven narrative as a contemporary of Ovid would unroll the poem; and she is the model for the later reader's immediate reaction. What she finds is a tale whose pain lies beyond the power of words: silet: dolor ora repressit (583). |
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Thus the double function of the weaving, as a tableau of unspeakable crimes and as a message that involves us in the demand and the necessity of its being read and understood, holds multiple contradictions. It holds in tension the possible pleasure of a male reader in the sexual violence of the rape, the moral satisfaction of the violent revenge, and the pleasure in the poetry which recreates all of this violence, both the moral and the immoral. These tensions and contradictions are played out in part in the alternation of speech and silence in the narrative, for this alternation reflects the problem of the poet's decision to retell this violent myth and to lend his grace and skill to its horrors. |
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The central role of language in the episode is closely related to Tereus' status as both a barbarian and a tyrant, that is, as a threat to the defining features of civilized humanity. In his "tyrannical" lust, he had destroyed language, along with the sanctities of kinship and marriage.20 He attempted to destroy his victim's humanity by destroying her power to speak and then separating her from civilized society by imprisonment in the forest.21 Philomela's role henceforth is to "struggle to speak" (luctantemque loqui, 555f.; cf. tua facta loquar, 545). Tereus had used all the means of persuasion at his command (cf. 46066); but, having won Philomela by eloquent speech and by tears, he is moved by neither (535).22 Philomela, made dumb, ultimately proves the more effective communicator. The women's revenge self-consciously echoes these inversions of speech and silence. Procne, as she prepares her response, "seethes with silent wrath" (triste parat facinus tacitaque exaestuat ira, 623). Her silence recalls Philomela's, but her ''seething" links her with the violence of Tereus' lust (cf. aestuat, 491). Like Tereus too, she disregards the pleas of her victim, her child, Itys (64042). |
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20 Note Philomela's cry in 537, omnia turbasti, "You have overturned everything." Cf. also 537f. and 605f. |
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21 There is also a cruel irony in the fact that Philomela's "last farewell" as she leaves Athens proves to be the last words that she will ever speak there or anywhere else: supremumque vale pleno singultibus ore / vix dixit (509f.). |
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22 The inversion of cultural values in this failure of an Athenian princess to move a Thracian king by her plea would be appreciated by an audience for whom Athens was the home of rhetorical training. Ovid uses the victim's silence to depict the horror of rape also in the Lucretia episode of the Fasti, especially 2.823ff.: see Newlands (1988) 3840. |
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