8. Hercules in Rome (4.9)
Like amnesiacs
in a ward on fire, we must
find words
or burn.OLGA BROUMAS, “ARTEMIS”
Olga Broumas, Beginning with O (New Haven, 1977). Reprinted by the kind permission of Yale University Press.
Propertius 4.9 is the poet's most extended poem on Hercules. It narrates several events in the Greek hero's Roman career: his defeat of the monstrous cattle-rustler, Cacus, a victory the Ara Maxima commemorates; the tired hero's unsuccessful appeal for hospitality from the women of the Bona Dea shrine and his subsequent enraged assault upon the shrine; his prohibition of women worshippers at his Ara Maxima. After a flurry of interest in the late seventies and early eighties, the poem has received little attention from scholars. Prior to Francis Cairns' recent (1992) erudite analysis of 4.9's generic antecedents, L'Année Philologique records 1982 as the publication date of the last essay devoted solely to the elegy's exegesis.[1] The poem has given rise to a startling divergence of opinion on a variety of points: its “tone,” its coherence, its political import (if any). Scholars see the poem both as serious, even mournful, a portrait of Hercules as long-suffering victim[2] and (more recently) as farce, Hercules as a paraklausithyron's comically unsuccessful “lover,” caught up in a pastiche of Vergilian epic.[3] Both the comic and the tragic interpretations must strain to explain why Propertius would include two such different stories within one poem: Hercules' violent battle with the monster Cacus on the one hand, and his bombastic, but virtually harmless, revenge upon the Bona Dea's shrine. Either the battle with Cacus must be read as farce (despite its epic gestures) to match the Bona Dea story, or the Bona Dea story is pathetic and heroic (notwithstanding its comic elements) to sort with Cacus' destruction. Generally speaking, the efforts to unify this poem under the banner of tragedy or comedy accord with attempts to see it as a pro- or anti-Augustan poem, respectively. Propertius' humor pokes fun at Octavian's pretensions to align himself and his regime with the myth of Hercules at
Such unifying, monotonal readings of 4.9 do it little justice: its divergences and disjunctions are basic data produced by the poem that cannot and should not be ignored.[4] The Hercules poem's apparent inconsistencies problematize its status as an aetiology and impede the smooth functioning of the very program that ostensibly motivates Book IV. “I shall sing of ancient rites and their appointed days, and the ancient names of places” (“sacra diesque canam et cognomina prisca locorum,” 4.1.69) announces a search for what is originary (“prisca”) in present-day Roman observances and in the names that dot the contemporary landscape. Elegy 4.9's thoughtful impediments force a scrupulous examination of the conceptual premises, ideological implications, and hegemonic force of the search for origins— seen as a desperate and doomed search for essence—in two particular realms: the Hercules–Cacus episode broadly focuses the implied interrogation on nationalism, while the Bona Dea episode moves it into the realm of gender.
THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Propertius' aetiological program for his fourth book reflects in microcosm a long tradition of Rome forging a sense of its identity as a nation by writing its own history; histories locate points of origin that purport to explain contemporary cultural configurations.[5] Historiographers seek to explain a culture's end (in both senses of that word) by finding the mirror of its present-day culmination, and of its putative purpose, in its origin. The origin demonstrates destiny insofar as it contains the end en germe; on the other hand, insofar as the origin differs from the end, it registers “progress” (or “deterioration,” depending on the historiographer's relative optimism). Propertius' chief source for his version of the Hercules–Cacus battle, Aeneid 8.184–305,[6] has often been read as assuming the triumphalist mandate of finding the present in the past. R. D. Williams, for example, sees the Aeneid 's Cacus episode as parallel to “the task of Aeneas (and Augustus) of ridding the world of barbaric and archaic violence,” and other scholars have elucidated in detail the correspondences among Vergil's portraits of Hercules, Aeneas, and Augustus.[7] Vergil's reconstruction of Rome's prehistoric past foreshadows the destiny of Rome as moral arbiter and force majeure.[8]
To this it may be answered—correctly—that other, far more cynical interpretations of the Aeneid in general, and the Hercules' episode in particular, are possible.[9] David Quint, for example, notes that the Aeneid itself “devotes a considerable part of its energy to criticizing and complicating what it holds up as the official party line.”[10] Vergil sows suspicion of his own Hercules, savior of the Arcadians from Cacus, by putting the tale of the hero's exploits in the mouth of Evander, king of an Arcadia that once more needs allies against a formidable enemy, Mezentius. Evander's simple morality-play account has an implicit agenda—to persuade Aeneas to emulate Hercules by opposing the “barbarian” Mezentius and placing
By contrast to the account in Aeneid 8, the recalcitrant oddities of Propertius' Hercules saga frustrate any attempt to see either destiny or change registered in his backward glance at the origins. Though 4.9's aetiological explanations derive from the hero's Roman adventures, none adequately motivates the poem or draws the elegy's elements together in a coherent pattern. The poem mentions the Ara Maxima (whose building and rites set the seal on Vergil's Hercules narrative), but only glancingly (67–68). As Warden and Richardson point out, Propertius never describes the altar's actual construction, only registers the accomplished fact in a throwaway participial phrase.[12] The poet grants more attention to a fantastical etymology of the area along the Tiber known as the Forum Boarium, supposed to be so christened by Hercules' recovery of his cows (16–20); he perversely bypasses the more plausible (if no more correct) etymology recorded by Varro that traced the name to the existence of an ancient cattle market on the site, to correspond to the nearby sections called Forum Holitorium and Forum Piscarium.[13] Propertius then lavishes attention on Hercules' prohibition against women worshippers at the Ara Maxima, a consequence of the hero's pique at being refused entry to the Bona Dea shrine (21–70). Hercules' edict falls legitimately within the poet's stated intent to analyze the origins of contemporary ritual observations, but an abrupt transition to a hymn in praise of the hero as “Sanctus” (“the holy one”) skews the episode's relevance (71–74).[14] Hercules' violent assault on the Bona Dea shrine cuts the ground from under the hymn's epithet: how can he be “holy” if he violates a shrine prohibited to men?[15] The closing hymn to Hercules offers an end that is not an end: its surprising content throws all 4.9's loosely aligned components out of joint, exchanging closure for circular repetition. The codicil's disaccord sends us, the readers, back to the beginning to reread the poem, searching in vain for the overlooked detail that would motivate this final address to “Hercules the Holy.”
The hymn's two couplets themselves reflect in miniature the sense of an ending elided that bends the poem's narrative trajectory into a circle. I have mentioned that the lines resist clear relation to the poem, and thus cannot grant it closure such as would draw a coherent pattern out of its divergent threads. In addition, though, most editors find both the content and the order of the last four lines themselves
What does this widespread dissent as to the order and content of these final lines mean? The range of scholarly opinion allows either couplet to succeed the other— or be banished to the poem's proem—or be excised from the text entirely. The finale of Propertius' poem resembles the epitaph of Midas the Phrygian that Socrates cites with contempt in the Phaedrus because any line may succeed any other; Midas' epitaph serves as counterexample to Socrates' ideal “organic” rhetoric, in which part fits part like the limbs of a body (Phaedrus 264). The very coherence of that body constitutes a claim to its truth value. The best rhetorician is the philosopher, Socrates argues, because her supreme command of the truth enables her to forge conceptual connections closely based on it, and correspondingly plausible to her audience (Phaedrus 261e-262b, 273d-274a). Socrates' “organic” aesthetic shepherds us toward only one “logical, natural” end, via a persuasive force that makes its chain of ideas seem elucidated from the very fabric of the universe.[19]
Elsewhere in his poetry, Propertius gratefully exploits this Socratic metaphor that sees artfully shaped language as equivalent to a body: he repeatedly equates Cynthia's body with (the nature of) his poetry.[20] But 4.9's organization around explicit and implicit images of the body's disintegration—Cacus smashed by Hercules' club, the Bona Dea's “putrefied shack” (“putris … casa,” 4.9.28), her priestess' fillets colored like clotted blood (“puniceae … vittae,” 4.9.27)—indicates a counter-aesthetic at work here. The interchangeable order of 4.9's finale refuses “organic” coherence and its implicit claim to truth value; as such, it problematizes the interpretation not only of the hymn itself, but of the entire poem to which the hymn ostensibly provides closure. Elegy 4.9 points to the chaotic mess beneath language's speciously smooth surface that Socrates' metaphor of biological organicity covers over in silence. The poem evades a decisive pattern, its interchangeable disintegration drawing attention to its own artful—and artificial—status.
The poem's other oddities, major and minor, can also be broadly organized as anomalies of ordering—in particular, of temporal ordering. For example, Camps and Richardson both note that Propertius has Hercules' recovered cattle “consecrating” the Forum Boarium in a spot that was, when the hero arrived shortly before, under Tiber's waters.[21] The narrative thus wavers in its description of the low saddle between the Forum Romanum and the Forum Boarium, oscillating between a time when the Velabra was, and when it was not, flooded by the Tiber; it juxtaposes the two in easy indifference to temporal logic. I have also noted the discomfort critics feel over the poem's juxtaposing Hercules' vengeance on Cacus with his assault on the goddess' shrine; Propertius' contemporaries apparently shared such unease, since he alone of the Augustans joins the two events in a single time frame. With both these gestures, Propertius refuses the tendency of his contemporaries to make time an instrument of history: in retelling Hercules' defeat of Cacus, Livy, Ovid, and Vergil link earlier and later events in meaningful relation. Hercules' victory variously parallels Romulus' “taming” of his people's wild spirit (Livy), or Aeneas' championing of Arcadia against the new “monster” Mezentius (Vergil), or Augustus' and Tiberius' protection of Rome, and their deification (Ovid). In the Aeneid in particular, Evander's narrative accomplishes its own implicit prophecy by tracing over the ethical and political complexities of Aeneas' entry into Latium the clear outlines of a morality play. While Evander's narrative does not banish all ambiguity from the picture, he offers Aeneas a pretext for concentrating on the bold strokes rather than the fine details. By contrast, Propertius' anomalous juxtapositions sever time as silken thread of significance. The elegy's time contradicts rather than seconds itself, by drawing water over the Velabrum and banishing it in the space of fourteen lines: time in this poem becomes a contingent and nomadic frame to events that emphasizes the randomness of Rome's mythic past, like a camera snapped haphazardly. The egregious “misapplication” of this frame, that indifferently captures the sublime and ridiculous elements of Hercules' career, works against the tendentious ordering of events into prophetic history. The poem's calculated ineptitude foregrounds the need artificially to impose a frame in order to make such a history.
THE VICISSITUDES OF LANGUAGE
The patterns traced above, usually put down to 4.9's “playfulness” (at best) or poetic failure (at worst), instead evidence resistance to, and an investigation of, the ways we construct narratives about the world and its events. Fundamentally, these patterns examine “how things mean” and are thus caught up in questions of signification. In the next part of this chapter, I shall show that Propertius' investigation unfolds in a principled fashion the conceptual limits of signification, traced in the separate but intertwined registers of nationality and gender.
The complex patterns of 4.9's narrative proceed from a few words, familiar names within Propertius' contemporary landscape, for which the poet seeks an
Lest I be accused of imposing an anachronistic view of language upon Propertius' elegy, note that Plato comes to fundamentally these same conclusions in the Theatetus, though he views them with alarm rather than Saussure's complacency; David Bostock sums up the dialogue's aporia as follows:
The theory of “Socrates' dream” (201c-202d) brings out the fact that a definition of one thing will explain it in terms of others, and these other things will have to be known if mastery of the definition is to manifest knowledge of the thing defined. But if this means that these other things in turn have to be defined, a vicious regress apparently follows. In short: definitions must eventually end in indefinables.[22]
Nor does Plato find a way out of this dilemma—the Theatetus ' conclusion (206c-210a) simply undermines the rest of the dialogue's apparent progress toward a rigorous answer to the fundamental question, “What is x? ”[23] Language, as a search for meaning, turns forever in a vicious circle.
All this notwithstanding, the very form Propertius uses to launch his meditations on Rome's landscape—the aetiology—embodies a desire to extract essence from the relationship of pure difference that founds language. Etymology, a significant prop in his survey of Rome, forges a linguistic version of the meaningful relation between historical origin and end that we traced earlier in this chapter. Etymology posits that in the word and its meaning can be traced en germe a capsule summary of the circumstances that forged a causal link between signifier and signified (as in the “naturalist” theory of language pursued by the Stoics and Epicureans).[24]
Book IV repeatedly stages that causal link in its investigation of the origins of “ancient names” (4.1.69); 4.9 in particular abounds in both etymological explanations
Yet at the same time, clues sown throughout the poem work against the assumption that it forges a naturalist theory of language. I have already remarked that, among a number of plausible etymologies, Propertius flaunts the egregiously “bad” and absurd theory that founds the name of the Forum Bo(v)arium upon Hercules' cows (boves) recovered from Cacus. Further, sprinkled in among the plausible figu rae etymologicae are outrageous puns that point to no rational or historical link between similar sounds: incolumes/incola (“safe/denizen”), 4.9.8–9; furem/furis/fores (“thief/of the thief/doors”), 4.9.13–14 (about these I shall have more to say presently). In the midst of etymologizing familiar place-names, Propertius sows beguiling false trails built on specious homophonies. The prominent collocation of these words that teasingly suggest, and frustrate, meaningful relation, builds a case for the arbitrary nature of language. Propertius' absurd puns oddly resemble serious demonstrations of Saussure's theory that meaning in language emerges from pure difference—in this case, phonic difference: a thief (gen. furis) is not a door (gen. foris) merely by the difference of one vowel.[27]
DEFINING ROMANITAS
Propertius' meditation on language intersects his programmatic concern with aetiology precisely where the latter seeks to define Romanitas by tracing its origins. Book IV's patriotic celebration in verse (4.1.67) promises to array Rome as the city has arisen from its primordial beginnings.
| optima nutricum nostris lupa Martia rebus, | |
| qualia creverunt moenia lacte tuo! | |
| moenia namque pio coner disponere versu | |
| (4.1.55–57) |
She-wolf of Mars, you were the best of nurses for our country; what walls have grown from your milk! I shall try, then, to arrange those walls in reverent verse.
That project implies some thought for what constitutes Rome. The search for national identity structurally and functionally duplicates the search for “ancient names,” in that each quest exemplifies the principle of differentiality by which language functions. National identity emerges as a relationship of pure difference within a system of signifiers: if I define myself as Roman, I distinguish myself from
Book IV's investigation does not, however, evade the arbitrariness of language that ultimately severs Romanitas from any external support. Elegy 4.1's description of the overall program imagistically captures this transformation of an external boundary that circumscribes an autonomous system based on pure differentiality into an internal limit. In the search for “true Romanness,” this limit prevents any one from being “really Roman”: no empirical Roman can ever match the ideal standard of “Romanness.” Propertius 4.1.55–57 promises to raise Rome's defensive walls (moenia) in his verse; these walls are the boundary that divides “us” from “them.” But the particular walls that “grew from the milk of Mars' she-wolf” were used ab origine to distinguish degrees of Romanitas before they ever marked off Roman from foreigner. One popular account, recorded by Livy, sketches Romulus' and Remus' rivalrous attempts to found the new settlement that will be Rome; Remus inadvertently settles the dispute by leaping over his brother's newly-built walls, inspiring Romulus to kill him (Livy 1.7.2–3). The walls divide not (proto) Roman from foreigners, but the “true Roman”—the one destined to found the city of Rome—from his identical rival. Moreover, Propertius' telegraphic allusion to the feral twins' fabled rivalry itself draws a distinction, measuring the impassable gap between present-day empirical Romans and the ancestors who defined Romanitas.[29] Propertius quietly snaps any connection to a meaningful origin when he remarks “nil patrium nisi nomen habet Romanus alumnus/ sanguinis altricem non putet esse lupam” (“the Roman shares nothing with his ancestors except his name; he would not be able to suppose that a wolf was foster-mother to his blood,” 4.1.37–38). Romulus and Remus locate the point with respect to which the contemporary Roman always “goes wrong” relative to himself: his civilization can never shake this legacy, nor its bloodshed ever be redeemed by similarly fortuitous results. To that degree, the twins' paradigm—albeit bloody, violent, and internecine—is an “ideal” unattainable by the Nachgeborene. “Romanness” thus becomes an internal limit, an unattainable point that prevents empirical Romans from ever achieving full identity-with-themselves.[30]
Variations on this theme of trying vainly to locate essential Romanitas are repeated throughout Book IV. In 4.6, for example, Romulus himself comes back at the battle of Actium to condemn Antony's fleet, thereby separating “real Romans” from those whose Romanness has been vitiated by their submission to eastern, foreign, and female command under Cleopatra (“altera classis erat Teucro damnata Quirino, / pilaque feminea turpiter acta manu”—“the other fleet, and the spears hurled by a woman's hand, had been condemned by Trojan Romulus,” 4.6.21–22). However, since he comes back as “Trojan Romulus” (“Teucro Quirino,” 4.6.21), that is, in a guise hardly less foreign or eastern than Antony's Egyptian allies, the apparently firm distinction he represents slips and slides vertiginously. Even Romulus cannot recover his Romanness at Actium.[31]
ROMAN VER SUS OTHER
“Romanness” constructed as internal limit is the logical corollary of “Romanness” as external boundary; not surprisingly, therefore, 4.9 interrogates the logical limitations to conceiving Rome both as a function of “Roman versus Other” and of “Roman versus Roman.” Ethnography, as a subset of history and often intertwined with geography, interested the Romans, even if principally as consumers rather than producers.[32] Ethnography in the Republic and early Empire chiefly stages the confrontation between Rome and Greece, as exemplified in comparative biographies like Plutarch's Vitae Parallelae and Cornelius Nepos' De viris illustribus; Greece enjoys special status as the paradigm of culture, but some account is taken of other cultures.[33]
Propertius' most obvious model for the Hercules–Cacus episode, Aeneid 8.184–305, sketches in miniature the complex eddies of ancient ethnography laid under contribution to shape Rome's identity; 4.9's Hercules saga can be seen as, in part, a response both to the Aeneid and to its larger cultural context. The Aeneid 's account of the battle between Hercules and Cacus chiefly follows the “parallellives” organization of ethnography; Evander aligns (proto) Roman Aeneas with the Greek hero Hercules—the latter a model for emulation, as against the subhuman aborigine, Cacus.[34] Propertius unfolds a significantly complicated palimpsest over the Aeneid 's stark account. The details of 4.9 play upon the inherited theme of elucidating Romanitas by having Hercules define Rome topographically, as he founds the Forum Boarium and the Ara Maxima to celebrate his victory. Exactly how does Propertius reshape Hercules' conflict with Cacus—so strongly formed by Vergil— as a moment in the definition of national identity?
Among other modifications, Propertius makes the story a dyad rather than a triangle: Propertius does not even mention Evander. His omission eliminates one thread of the account (noted by Servius in his commentary on Aeneid 8) that makes it a battle between “The Good Man” (euandros) and “The Evil Man” (kakos).[35] Propertius goes behind Vergil's epic to a broader range of historiographic sources: he refers, for example, to Cacus as Hercules' host. Though the treacherous host offends
| sed non infido manserunt hospite Caco | |
| incolumes: furto polluit ille Iovem. | |
| incola Cacus erat, metuendo raptor ab antro, | |
| per tria partitos qui dabat ora sonos. | |
| (4.9.7–10) |
But they did not remain safe, Cacus proving an untrustworthy host: he fouled Jove with his theft. Cacus dwelt there, a robber from a fearsome cave, who uttered divided sounds through three mouths.
Even the stylistics of Propertius' description oddly undermine its burden: Warden remarks Propertius' “confusion” of Cacus with the three-bodied Geryon, the quaintly circumstantial detail of his description (“he uttered divided sounds through three mouths”), and the line's internal rhyme and careful organization that balances adjectives against (postponed) substantives each side the displaced relative at the line's center. From these details, he argues persuasively that Propertius has turned Cacus “into a very ‘mannered’ monster, something quite different from the incarnation of evil and unreason in Vergil's melodramatic morality play”[38] (about this, I shall have more to say presently). Taken in his totality, the Cacus of Propertius 4.9 curiously recollects mythic threads at odds with one another. Propertius reminds us of his thief's (lost) status as human, even a pillar of the community, while simultaneously sketching Cacus as both droll exaggeration and monster; the poet is thus truer to Cacus' function within the mythic tradition. Propertius draws upon versions of Cacus that Evander's account (like Livy's and Ovid's) quietly suppressed;[39] he aligns his aborigine with a varied tradition that makes Cacus everything from pastoral robber to Evander's slave to king and even ambassador from the east. J. G. Winter's analysis of the myth is worth quoting:
Cacus is a constant, but constantly changing, feature of the myth. The Romans themselves appear to have known scarcely more about him than is known today, and hence a new characterization could easily be effected for him without disturbing popular tradition. In Livy and the first account of Dionysius [of Halicarnassus] we found him to be a pastoral robber; in the Origo [Gentis Romanae], a slave of Evander with thievish propensities; in the second account of Dionysius, a ruler over a wild race of men; in Strabo, wholly absent; and in Solinus, an embassador, in bondage, from the east.[40]
Propertius grasps the fact that Cacus is but a structural convenience in the myth, able to be played off against his counterpart(s) to elucidate any dyad of ethical properties.
As if in response to his enemy's baffling complexity, Propertius' Hercules also blurs in outline as he trails strangely incongruous allusions: he enters bluff, brawny, and belligerent, matching the paradigm of Romanitas sketched in the Aeneid. Yet he unexpectedly softens upon his victory, thanks to another Vergilian echo. Addressing his recovered cattle, Hercules quotes the elegant rustics of the Eclogues. “Ite boves, Herculis ite boves,” he croons (“get along, cattle, get along, you kine of Hercules,” 4.9.16–17), echoing the cadence and carefully balanced structure of the Eclogues ' closing line: “ite domum saturae, venit Hesperus, ite capellae” (“get along home, you well-fed nanny-goats, get along, evening is coming,” Ecl. 10.77).[41] Propertius gradually reshapes Hercules from bellicose hero into mirror of a languorous shepherd touched by melancholy love (a lèse majesté appropriate to elegy rather than to epic).[42]
In Propertius' account of the encounter between Hercules and Cacus, the quest to extract an essential relation out of a purely differential system fails spectacularly. If the Aeneid 's Hercules exemplifies Romanitas as moral force majeure, and Cacus as barbaric Other, the appropriate object of such force, Propertius troubles this clean binary opposition such that neither party can fully achieve identity-with-himself. Different provenances compete to define each combatant, with the result that neither can attain himself as a fixed, stable identity with which he is fully coterminous. This destabilizes the clean conceptual antitheses the Aeneid 's narrative sketched— civilization versus barbarism, law versus lawlessness, control versus chaos—antitheses that molded Hercules into paradigmatic Roman hero, and suggested the existence and shape of a Roman Heroism (as well as a non-Roman Barbarism) above and beyond any empirical Romans or non-Romans. Propertius' account, by contrast, resists the smooth integration of either term into a Platonic ideal.
HERCULEAN LLANGUAGE
Thus far in examining the problematization of meaning in 4.9 I have traced the effects of arbitrariness and differentiality as principles governing the two halves of the sign, signifier and signified. I have, however, confined myself largely to elucidating these effects in the poem's larger narrative patterns; yet 4.9's language and stylistics per se are both so odd as to deserve special attention. I remarked earlier upon the outrageous puns dotting the narrative, and to these strange plays on similar sounds must be added the extended rhyme-patterns woven throughout the poem. Are these significant or not, given that they fall outside any purely linguistic model for producing meaning? I shall argue that they are meaningful, but in order to do so, I must expand the conceptual premises upon which I have so far based my analysis of the poem.
I spoke above of language's arbitrariness, its lack of any necessary or causal link to what it names. That principle (as Slavoj Žižek points out) constitutes language as a totality by drawing a boundary around it: one posits an external realm with
What happens when the boundary disappears? We are left with what Lacan calls lalangue (“llanguage”), the inconsistent, “non-all” entity logically primordial to la langue as totality—that is to language viewed as the abstract ideal of grammatical and syntactical rules generalized from particular speech-acts, “how speech is supposed to mean.”[44] Llanguage generates meaning effects that spill over the conventional rules for interpreting language, contingent effects manifest in puns, portmanteau words, rhyme, rhythm, and the like. The concept of llanguage can help us analyze the bizarre preciosities of the verses with which Propertius narrates the Hercules–Cacus saga.
John Warden has painstaking analyzed the saga to elucidate its peculiar sound patterns. However, Warden dismisses these effects as meaningless sprezzatura on Propertius' part; they merit more serious attention. Consider again, for example, the two couplets that introduce Cacus (4.9.7–10, quoted above in “Roman versus Other”). The chiastic sound pattern of the line endings and beginnings (Caco/incolumes … incola/Cacus) sketches a close, quasi-punning relationship between “denizen” (incola) and “safe” (incolumes); staying incolumis in fact proves to be more nearly the incola Cacus' concern than immigrant Hercules' or his cattle's. This sotto voce suggestion playfully foreshadows the battle's outcome, but it also draws upon a sinister pattern into which Vergil's Cacus-episode fits: the Aeneid consistently shows the realization of Roman destiny as injuring the inhabitants anywhere it intrudes, though in each case the Romans are formally “innocent,” either because they are but indirect causes or because they “act in self defense.”[45] In the Aeneid, this “curse” cuts down Dido in Carthage, Turnus and his followers in Latium, even Evander's son Pallas among the Arcadians. Propertius' wordplay edges Hercules' victory that much closer to bullying, because it shades his triumph with overdetermination. Poor nerveless Cacus has to steal the cattle as a formal necessity for constructing the myth of Roman heroism—he must become the oppositional term that allows Roman manifest destiny to be construed as strictly ethical. Cacus never had a chance against the exigencies of Romanitas.[46]
Another evocative sound pattern further underlines Cacus' purely formal role in the general pattern of destruction:
| nec sine teste deo: furem sonuere iuvenci, | |
| furis et implacidas diruit ira fores. | |
| Maenalio iacuit pulsus tria tempora ramo | |
| Cacus … | |
| (4.9.13–16) |
Not without a god as witness: the cattle bellowed “thief !” and anger tore asunder the unappeasable doors of the thief. Cacus lay dead, his triple brow shattered by the club from Mt. Maenalus.
Warden notes the “near-pun” on furem … furis … fores, but makes nothing of it. The quasi-pun gains point, however, insofar as it emphasizes how little difference Hercules' destruction of the thief and his doors makes between them. Doors and thief fall in about a line apiece (as opposed to Evander's grand guignol depiction of Cacus' death). Once again true to Cacus' role as depicted in the polymorphous mythic tradition (and in contrast to the Aeneid 's richly detailed clash of determinate Good and Evil) Propertius reduces Hercules' enemy to the myth's “furniture,” a prop on which the plot turns, but that need be no more filled out with details than the doors to the thief's cave.
The near-pun implies a shift in perspective, a stepping back from Cacus as content to make Cacus as pure form visible anew. The poem earlier evoked some of the mythic tradition's congeries of characterizations, in which Cacus appears as pastoral robber, thievish slave, ambassador in bondage, courteous host, and so on; here, though, the poem reverts to a severe reductionism that empties Cacus of positive content. Like the signifier “Roman,” Cacus initially emerges from a field of pure differences without positive content; yet by that very fact he absorbs and organizes existing expectations of the Other within himself as capacious symbolic vehicle. Elegy 4.9 makes visible the process whereby Cacus not only pins down Roman heroism by opposition, but “gives body to” free-floating anxieties about the Other.[47]
Lalangue emerges in the Cacus episode as the source of contingent, fortuitous meanings; it also appears in the section's oddly consistent rhyme scheme, but with an impact less easy to pin down. Warden aptly summarizes the pattern:
The final words of the pentameters are as follows: tuis, boves, aquas, Iovem, sonos, boves, fores, boves, boves, forum. This is almost a systematic rhyme, the recurrence of the -o, boves four times (with the rhyming Iovem) and the chiastic fores, boves, boves, forum. This degree of formalisation is highly unusual.[48]
The elaborate rhyme scheme is almost incantatory; it looks forward to a similar rhyme scheme based on word beginnings (also noted by Warden) in the closing hymn to Hercules:
Sanc … pat. … sal … Sanc … sanx … sic … Sanc … Tat … com … Cur.[49]
Here again, at the level of form in addition to content, the poem escapes linearity, with the Cacus episode's rhyme scheme referring to the final hymn's similar formalization, and vice versa. The elaborate sound patterns enforce a circular reading
THINKING THROUGH THE BODY
The Bona Dea episode, like the Cacus–Hercules episode, uses the concepts that inform lalangue to approach the problem of extracting meaning from a purely differential system, but transposes them into the register of gender, seen as the oppositional relation between the signifiers Man and Woman. Little wonder in that, given that lalangue turns upon the distinct, but related, concept of jouissance (“enjoyment”); the latter intimately shapes Lacan's analysis of gender. Whereas lalangue is the nonall, non-universal collection of meaning-effects that escape the ordered principles of la langue, jouissance locates the enjoyment of a non-all, non-universal knowledge that also escapes accounting according to any single, logical principle. Poem 4.9 figures this renegade knowledge and illicit pleasure/pain as bodily disintegration.
I mentioned above that the Bona Dea episode's diction oddly draws upon imagery of broken and rotting bodies; these references have a quite specific provenance. The portrayal of the Bona Dea's shrine (23–30) draws particularly upon the Aeneid 's grisly description of Cacus' cave (as Warden, following Richard Heinze's suggestion, has shown).[50] The putrefaction of the “putris casa” (28) and the color of clotted blood (“puniceae vittae,” 27) correspond to the rotting bodies and gore-saturated earth around the Vergilian monster's home.[51] This correspondence forms part of the evidence that Warden tellingly summarizes as Propertius' “cannibalism” of the Aeneid:
It is the Vergilian account that not only provides the main lines of the narrative—the description, the hearing of the telltale sound, the chase, the shattering of the obstacle, the struggle—but is also used as the main quarry for the diction. Propertius rummages through, picking up bits and pieces for use without much respect for the context. The effect of this cannibalising—this breaking down and redistributing of parts—is to sound false and beguiling echoes, to lead the mind to seek for correspondences which when found are delusory; to create an epic ambience which is denied and subverted by the narrative itself.[52]
Warden concludes, though, that leading the reader a merry chase is an end in itself: Propertius thus demonstrates his ability to transform meaningful epic into virtuosic, but merely playful, elegy.[53] Yet deployed in a poem demonstrably organized about the theme of dehiscence—tracing, in its structure and its motives, the places where order falls apart—these muted suggestions of the-body-in-pieces deserve fuller consideration. Propertius disturbingly links the different registers (epic and
GENDER-BENDING
The Bona Dea's shrine is imagined beneath such an aegis of the body's radical transformation: Tiresias is its unsettling emblem, a terror to frighten away unwanted guests (4.9.57). Yet through this transformation comes another order of (feminine) knowledge that defies certainty or accounting; this knowledge breaks through the orderly organization of conventional wisdom (“what everybody knows,” the “masculine” side of Lacan's gendered epistemology) and the latter's specious claim to totality. Propertius pursues the theme of the Other as unknowable, mysterious, and essentially ungraspable—because produced solely by a relationship of pure differentiality—into the realm of relations between the sexes when he stages Hercules' confrontation with the Bona Dea's devotees.
After his defeat of Cacus, Hercules finds himself tortured by thirst; he has heard the laughter of women inside the Bona Dea's shrine, however, and though in the well-watered Tiber valley, insists that he can find no source to slake his thirst other than their sacred fount. After appealing to the implacable gatekeeper on the basis of his dire need and the consideration due his heroic status, he urges her, astonishingly, to relax her prohibition against men because his fearsomely hypermasculine appearance merely conceals his experience with a feminine toilette:
| “sin aliquem vultusque meus saetaeque leonis | |
| terrent et Libyco sole perusta coma, | |
| idem ego Sidonia feci servilia palla | |
| officia et Lydo pensa diurna colo, | |
| mollis et hirsutum cepit mihi fascia pectus, | |
| et manibus duris apta puella fui.” | |
| (4.9.45–50) |
“If my face and these lionskin bristles and my hair frizzled by the Libyan sun frighten anybody, I'm nonetheless the same guy who performed a maidservant's duties and
Hercules' peculiar willingness to emphasize his transvestite career has (when noted at all) largely been interpreted as further evidence of Propertius' aiming for the humorous deflation of his epic hero.[55] But if the explanation were that trivial, why would Propertius have the priestess-gatekeeper reply by naming Tiresias, whose myth (in its wider repercussions) expands on the theme of transsexuality?
| “magno Tiresias aspexit Pallada vates, | |
| fortia dum posita Gorgone membra lavat. | |
| di tibi dent alios fontis: haec lympha puellis | |
| avia secreti limitis unda fluit.” | |
| (4.9.57–60) |
“Tiresias the seer saw Pallas when she laid aside her aegis and bathed her strong limbs, and a great price was paid. May the gods grant you other springs: this water flows for women only, its wave off the beaten track and of channel set apart.”
Other stories provide stronger warnings against profaning the secrets of goddesses—Actaeon, for one, violently gave up both life and human form, not just his gender, when he accidentally happened upon Artemis bathing. Tiresias, on the other hand, gains as much as he loses for having seen the goddess naked: a great price was paid, but by him or her? He forfeited his eyesight, but the goddess in turn had to compensate him with the gift of “second sight”—an ambivalence perfectly captured in the hexameter's progression from the ambiguity of “magno” to “vates.” Why would the gatekeeper weaken the force of her warning by using this decidedly ambiguous example?
Francis Cairns has mused, en passant, that Tiresias' significance rests in the part of his myth that portrays him as a transsexual as well as a prophet.[56] I shall attempt to have the courage of Cairns' convictions and to show by detailed examination that the prophet's gender-crossing is indeed crucial to the poem's interpretation. The gatekeeper proffers one account of Tiresias' blindness, but held up in warning to a Hercules who has just drawn attention to his own transsexuality, the prophet's name inevitably recalls the variant accounts that sacrificed Tiresias' sight to Hera's wrath rather than Athena's. When Hera and Zeus quarreled over which sex derived the greater pleasure from intercourse, they called upon Tiresias to referee the dispute; he qualified as judge because he had been transformed into a woman as the consequence of having interfered with two snakes copulating (repeating his interference later restored his maleness). Tiresias sided with Zeus, claiming that women enjoyed greater pleasure than men; Hera, piqued at losing, blinded him, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of mantic skills.
Interestingly, the precise account Tiresias offered the gods is a mystery that joins gender-differentiation to a logical impasse much like the conceptual difficulties that
Something has gone afoul in the account, for Apollodoros first says that, reckoning such pleasure into nineteen parts, man enjoys nine and woman ten, then cites two hexameter lines in which man enjoys one of ten shares and woman all ten. Both confusion in the first version and interpolation of the second have been suspected. But the second version with its hexameter quote and one-to-ten ratio also appears in the scholia to Odyssey 10.494, and something very close to it in the scholia to Lykophron 683. This last, however, also brings in something about nine shares, and knows too a version in which the ratio is one to nine out of a total of ten. This slight difference probably reflects uncertainty over whether men and women could be rated separately on the same scale or had to share out the ten parts of it between them; the resulting ten parts for women in the first instance and nine parts in the second may then have led to the erroneous notion of nineteen parts, and Apollodoros' probable error.[57]
This garbled account of Woman's pleasure recurs to the central problem addressed by elegy 4.9: the conceptual inadequacies of a system of definition based on pure difference. The Tiresiasmyth's varied account of Woman preserves the traces of different conceptual deadlocks derived from trying to seize the object of inquiry on the basis of a single principle. Ancient as well as modern constructions of gender relations conventionally make Woman the exclusion that constitutes Man as a totality—Aristotle, for example, describes Woman as a “deformed” Man, and similar thought controls the gynecological writings of the Hippocratic Corpus, of Celsus and Soranus.[58] Man regards Himself as the norm of “humanness” per se, measuring Himself against Woman as the deviation that defines the norm. This renders Man and Woman as “Man” and “not-Man,” mere positions mutually crossreferenced within a signifying system, and as such unstable. Tiresias' own story points to this instability when he crosses so easily from one side of the gender-divide to the other. Yet the prophet cannot smuggle an account of Woman across that same divide; a definition as only “not-Man” cannot adequately express Her, so that she remains a persistent “blind spot” for Man.
Tiresias' myth thus rounds off the pattern that unites 4.9's seemingly disjointed collection of details: it demonstrates language's inability to name an essence in the objects it denominates, insofar as Man and Woman, like Roman and Other, or Roman and “real” Roman, emerge as positions of pure differentiality. The Bona Dea episode has merely transposed the problem into the register of gender rather than nationalism. Tiresias' example seconds the implications of Hercules' own transsexuality: a hero who can plead for himself as a “pretty good woman” with the change of a few surface details—on with fascia and palla, off with lionskin and sunburn—points to Man and Woman as the shifting effects of signification.
Yet the poem represents this instability as leading (just as in the case of nationalism) to the quest for something essential in gender positions that could fix and stabilize them—for the “Platonic ideal” of Woman that would guarantee Her identity (and, more to the point, Man's). The poem telegraphically captures Hercules'
His legend, taken as a whole, supports this interpretation. Hercules uses and discards particular women throughout his career as if in a perpetual search for the feminine ideal; eventually he rejects each particular woman because she does not measure up to Woman. Nicole Loraux summarizes Hercules' erotic career by remarking that “the female body as an object of conquest and pleasure is continually new for him,” but the obverse of this truth is that each body is also continually palling, revealing its empirical differences from a fantasized Universal and driving Hercules on to the next instantiation. In Sophocles' Trachiniai, for example, Deianeira plots Hercules' career as always reaching for the next beauty that is blossoming as his old love fades in his eyes (Tr. 543–49). His continual need to renew conquest and pleasure means that something always remains in abeyance, something he seeks in the next object of desire.
Hercules' own transsexuality (like Tiresias') indicates the futility of his quest, since it points to gender-categories as unanchored to any substratum of Being. His rather mean-spirited prohibition against women-worshippers at the Ara Maxima— oddly petty as the great hero's final word—desperately fends off the large questions raised by his own, and Tiresias', change of gender positions. Hercules falls back in the end upon a circular definition of the sexes, in default of any more substantial difference: women will be excluded from his shrine—therefore, women are those who will be excluded from his shrine. Gender difference re-emerges by fiat, conveniently covering over the initial dilemma by a petitio principii (how is the Ara Maxima's doorman supposed to treat a cross-dressing worshipper? As abomination, or purest devotee, the one who most closely emulates the god himself?). Hercules' prohibition parallels the extinction of his consuming desire for the mysterious fount (63–64): from now on, his ban says, “I (Man) don't want to know anything about it (Woman); I persuade myself that my knowledge is already self-sufficient.” The inconvenient, riddling, renegade knowledge of Woman is refused and covered over, a fresh blinding of Tiresias.