BACCHANT OR AMAZON?
Most of these images are intriguing but minor stitches in a complex tapestry—save one: as Tarpeia rushes to find Tatius and offer him Rome, Propertius compares her to a woman running alongside a river. The Vestal “rushes headlong, just as a woman from Strymon, her breast bared by the torn fold of her dress, alongside the swift Thermodon” (“illa ruit, qualis celerem prope Thermodonta / Strymonis abscisso pectus aperta sinu,” 4.4.71–72). The cunning oddity of this image sketches a woman “out of place,” for whom no clear context can be found. John Warden elucidates the picture's duplicity: mentioning the Thermodon suggests an Amazon and the woman's nude breast corroborates this, given Graeco-Roman sculpture's tradition of Amazons with one breast bared.[37] But, as Warden points out, Amazons belted back their garments to expose the breast, rather than tearing them. Torn garment and headlong haste imply a Bacchant, especially since erotic passion drives Tarpeia; Latin literature often represents women's love as inspiring maenad-like behavior.[38]
Warden principally elucidates the parallels between Propertius' Tarpeia and Vergil's Dido, reading the Vestal as a response to the Sidonian queen. His fine exposition
For example, although Warden initially finds tension in the juxtaposition of Bacchant, so often a convenient figure for a woman passionately in love, and a traditionally “manhating” Amazon, he later observes: “As one gazes more steadily at the two figures, one begins to suspect that they are not as diametrically opposed as might appear at first sight. The pack of wild women who tore apart Orpheus and Pentheus might seem, at least to the threatened male, all too reminiscent of the women warriors of the Thermodon.”[39] He marshalls this duplicity to support reading Dido, the chaste warrior-queen turned impassioned lover, behind Tarpeia; yet, when seen in the context of Propertius' other references to Maenads and Amazons, the implications of 4.4's composite sauvagesse open out onto the intertwined problems of the feminine within and without the state, and the inadequacy of thought to frame her.
Propertius' own sketches of Bacchants are few, but richly suggestive: in 3.22, Bacchants figure as fierce manhunters, who define Greek “barbarity” as opposed to Roman decorum (however ironic the comparison may be). Italy may congratulate itself, he says, that here “savage Bacchants do not hunt Pentheus in the woods” (“Penthea non saevae venantur in arbore Bacchae,” 3.22.33). In 1.3, Propertius compares his lover, insensibly slumbering and thus unresponsive to his attentions, to an exhausted maenad wrapped in a sleep indifferent to man after communion with her god (“nec minus assiduis Edonis fessa choreis / qualis in herboso concidit Apidano,” 1.3.5–8). Cynthia is the sleeping maenad of Greek vase paintings, and Propertius the satyr who spies upon her—but as on those vases, always in vain, the object of the maenad's sleeping inattention or waking rejection.[40] Propertius represents Amazons with like ambiguity: Warden notes that the poet's women-warriors disquietingly juxtapose the eroticism of female nudity with weapons and belligerence.[41]
When brought to bear upon the Tarpeia poem, these vignettes attest aspects of Woman's desire that escape Man's calculation: beside blind hatred or blind love for his sex arises a mystifying passion for war or for god, passion that places Man nearer margin than center of any epistemology—if he figures at all. In the light of these images, as well as of their wider cultural context, the Bacchant and Amazon evoked by Tarpeia in flight together sketch the extremes of Woman's figuration, but extremes that keep eerily collapsing into one another. Bacchant and Amazon share a passion for the divine, whether Ares, Artemis, or Dionysos;[42] they share a penchant for violence and a capacity to exceed the place marked out for Woman within the polity.[43] They can be construed as opposites, given their reversed—though oddly symmetrical—relations to Man and the state. Love-mad women behave like maenads, and so inscribe the Bacchant as “manlover,” while the Amazon is “manhater” par excellence;[44] the Bacchant originates within the city-state and is drawn outside its confines, while the Amazon dwells at civilization's borders, but is drawn into war with those at
That “something” erupts at the very heart of the city, in the figure of its stability and continuity—the goddess Vesta. The virgin goddess paradoxically fans the flame of Tarpeia's love as she sleeps:
| dixit, et incerto permisit bracchia somno, | |
| nescia se furiis accubuisse novis. | |
| nam Vesta, Iliacae felix tutela favillae | |
| culpam alit et plures condit in ossa faces. | |
| (4.4.67–70) |
[Tarpeia] spoke, and stretched out her arms/surrendered her embrace[46] to uncertain sleep, not knowing that she slept with fresh furies. For Vesta, happy guardian of the flame of Troy, nurtured her [Tarpeia's] guilt and buried more torches in her bones.
This witchlike Vesta answers to the twin images of Bacchant and Amazon she inspires Tarpeia to emulate, in their broadly overlapping contradictions. Vesta here feeds passion, though herself ritually its enemy; she overturns Rome, her own city, from its very heart, stretching its extremes to include the Sabines; she modulates erotic passion into war and violence.[47] Her flame itself embodies irresolvable contradiction. The flame came from the ruins of Troy; as evidence of Rome's continuity and stability, it nonetheless bears the trace of transience and destruction, especially since that flame now incites Tarpeia's betrayal of Rome.[48] Vesta's weird image points to aspects of the very heart and origins of Rome—aspects characterized as feminine—whose conceptual intractability Rome dissimulates.[49] The poem marks feminine desire as a different economy of thought, wherein traditional categories of thought are exceeded and binary opposition, as the foundation of meaning, collapses under the weight of its own conceptual inadequacy.
Vesta also inspires images that elaborate the spatial contradictions she embodies, as the foreign transient at Rome's heart who nonetheless “protects” its boundaries (after her fashion). Let us return for a moment to the Bacchant-Amazon whom Tarpeia imitates under Vesta's goading: this woman in mad career cannot easily be located in anything like recognizable space. If she is a woman from Strymon, why does she run alongside the Thermodon a thousand miles from her home?[50] Like the mysterious spring that opened this poem, we are offered yet another surreal geography of water; it, too, suggests eerie mobility in apparently stable categories (such as Cappadocia versus Thrace), and it marks that mobility as feminine. Always, before thought can overtake it in this poem, the feminine is already elsewhere.