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to judge. The closest Ovid comes to recognizing the tragedy of Procne's tranformation into a child-murderess is in her brief hesitation and monologue at 62435. Once decided, she is almost as monstrous as Tereus. As Tereus was an eagle or a wolf, she is an Indian tigress killing a suckling fawn (636f.), and she does not even turn her face away as she strikes her child who stretches out his arms to his mother (63942).33 |
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The unsatisfactoriness of the metamorphosis as a moral resolution is compounded by the mechanism that underlies the women's revenge. In his account of Procne's furor, Ovid recollects the maenadic furor of Virgil's Amata and Dido.34 In this way he assimilates Procne's terrible, if just, vengeance to the most familiar literary models for female violence: madness, rage, maenadism. |
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Behind the bacchantic imagery of the Dido and Amata episodes of Virgil lie the maenads of Greek tragedy, especially of Euripides' Bacchae and, to a lesser degree, his Hecuba. In both of these plays men do violence to women, with implications also of sexual violation. In the Bacchae Pentheus' voyeuristically spies on the Maenads; in Hecuba the Greeks at Troy sacrifice the virgin Polyxena to Achilles as a kind of posthumous bride. In both cases the women turn suddenly from total helplessness and subjection to murderous vengeance. In both cases that vengeance takes the form of collective violence: the band of maenads tears apart Pentheus, and the Trojan women band together to blind the treacherous Polymestor and murder his two (male) children. In the Bacchae the mother who leads her band of women on the mountains in the killing and mutilation of her son is literally a maenad. In Hecuba the Trojan queen's companions are compared to maenads when they lure the evil King Polymestor into their tent, kill his sons, and blind the father (1076; cf. 115075: see Segal, 1990a, 11922 and 1990b, 314f.). Indeed the Tereus episode resembles the Hecuba even more closely because it combines the motif of a conspiracy of women (a motif also parodied in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae, Lysistrata, and Ecclesiazusae) with the motif of bacchantic rage and collective violence. It is even possible that this bacchantic motif entered Ovid's tale via Sophocles' lost Tereus, though this is only conjecture. |
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Ovid explores the violence of the male criminal, Tereus, in terms of individual psychology (e.g. 458f., sed et hunc innata libido / exstimulat, "but his inborn lustfulness goads him on"). Female violence, however, in this highly androcentric world, has something uncanny or supernatural about it. |
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33 Contrast 7.34042, where Pelias' daughter, even with her good intentions, cannot look as she strikes. See Galinsky (1975) 131f. on the "untragic presentation of tragic material." |
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34 See Aen. 7.385405, 4.3003. Met. 6.587, quo sacra solent trieterica Bacchi, seems to be a conscious echo of Aen. 4.302, ubi audito stimulant trieterica Baccho . . . On Ovid's assimilation of Virgil's language of furor elsewhere, see Bömer (1968) 192f.; also Büchner (1968) 388f. On the Bacchantic imagery of Dido and Amata, see Suzuki (1989) 111ff., 130ff. |
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