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The most intense longing for the speech comes at the climax of the vengeance. Philomela desperately wants the voice of which Tereus had robbed her (659f.): nec tempore maluit ullo / posse loqui et meritis testari gaudia dictis ("At no other time did she have a greater desire to be able to speak and to bear witness to her joy in the deserved words"). Her frustration, however, is compensated by Procne's inability to keep silent any longer as she announces her "cruel joy" (gaudia, 653 and 660) in the revenge (65355): |
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dissimulare nequit crudelia gaudia Progne
iamque suae cupiens existere nuntia cladis
"intus habes, quem poscis," ait. |
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Procne cannot conceal her cruel enjoyment, and now, eager to stand forth as the messenger of the destruction, she says, "You have within the one you are asking for." |
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The failure to suppress her speech in these "joys" is not only the mirror-image of Philomela's situation; it also harks back to the eager joy of Tereus' victorious persuasion (514): exsultatque et vix animo sua gaudia differt ("He leaps in joy and in his thoughts scarcely defers his enjoyment"). The echoes suggest the moral structure of the tale: the crime begets its own vengeance. But they also link the three main figures together in a pattern of reciprocal violence, into which they are frozen forever by the metamorphosis (cf. 66674). |
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These crimes within the house not only destroy the security of domestic space; they also fit the savagery of the deed to the savagery of the land. Ovid purposefully contrasts the center of the civilized world, Athens, with its dubiously civilized periphery, Thrace.23 He introduces Tereus in a splendid verse-paragraph, listing the glorious cities of Greece, with Athens conspicuous by its absence (41223). Athens is harassed by "barbarian troops," against whom "Thracian Tereus" offers his aid (424). Tereus enters the poem as Threicius, and as an ally against barbara agmina (423f.). The collocation proves ironical, for Tereus himself is the true barbarus and is so called as he carries out his crime (515, 533). O diris barbare factis, "O barbarian in your terrible deeds," Philomela calls him in the last speech that she will ever have (533). |
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Having entered the poem with the "victory of a glorious name" in a battle for Athens and against barbarians (clarum vincendo nomen habebat, 425), Tereus wins an evil "victory" (vicimus, 513) over his Athenian victim, proving himself truly a barbarian (barbarus, 515): |
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23 On the Thracians as uncivilized, see Bömer (1976) ad 458 (pp. 131f.). As in the incestuous births of Byblis and Myrrha, Ovid chooses a setting at the edges of civilization for the violation of basic human laws (cf. 9.640ff., 10.476ff.). |
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