RAPE AND RAPE VICTIMS IN THE METAMORPHOSES

Author(s): Leo C. Curran

Source: Arethusa , Spring and Fall 1978, Vol. 11, No. 1/2, WOMEN IN THE ANCIENT
WORLD (Spring and Fall 1978), pp. 213-241
Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/26308161

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 RAPE AND RAPE VICTIMS IN THE METAMORPHOSES

Leo C. Curran

vid's attitude towards women may appear paradoxical. A

though some of his work may give the impression of extravaga
elegant, sexism, at other times he exhibits a sympathy for wome
an effort to understand, as well as a man can, women's intellectual
and emotional life rivaled by no male author of antiquity other than
Euripides.1 Ovid was a keen student of female behavior and his pains
taking observation of women, despite its appearance of having originally
been undertaken in the spirit of the predatory seducer, finally led
him in the Metamorphoses to a recognition of aspects of their condition
which are only now becoming common currency.
Before turning to the subject of rape, I should like briefly to
consider a few examples of Ovid's perceptive insight into some other
facets of the lot of women. He made his Echo a devastating delineation
of the sort of woman who is nothing but an appendage of her man,
totally dependent upon him, literally hanging upon his every word, and
finding her identity solely in his.2 His formulation of the oracle to
Atalanta defines marriage as the loss of a woman's identity: "though
living you will lose your own self" (10.566).3
Although the victim in the Actaeon is male, his story neverthe
less exposes in all its savagery a patriarchal society's obsession
with female modesty and virginity, a major cause and effect of the
suppression of women in antiquity. Ovid seems to have realized that
the cult of virginity, especially under the patronage of Diana, had
little to do with the inviolability of a woman's body or the sacredness
of her person. This exaggerated restrictiveness is not so much a
positive assertion of a woman's right to control her body as a denial
of the right to exercise her sexuality. That this ideal is a negative
and life-denying principle is shown not only by the treatment of Actaeon
but also by Diana's merciless persecution of even her own most de
voted companions when, however unwillingly, they lose their virginity.4
The Pygmalion can fairly be read as an enactment of the male
fantasy of possessing a wife who is so docile and complaisant that she
might as well be his own creation; the same fantasy forms the plot of
the recent film "The Stepford Wives," in which the husbands of the

213

Arethusa Vol. 11 (1978) 1, 2

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 214 Leo C. Curran

town replace their wiv

in appearance from th
to the male ego.
However striking suc
may be, I intend to de
Ovid's treatment of wo
tion with the experien
for infinite variation o
women and rape from
often misapplied by th
the collection of techn
so much of the Amoves a

The Metamorphoses i
merely a handbook of
their manifestations, a critique of Roman values, traditional and
Augustan, an enquiry into the nature of personal identity, an affection
ate parody of the Aeneid, or a survey of the varieties of the universal
phenomenon of metamorphosis. It is more and less than any of these.
Ovid has many irons in the fire and in a given story the relative empha
sis on any one of these themes varies in accordance with the economy
and requirements of that story and of the poem as a whole. When one
stands back to look at the Metamorphoses from the perspective of rape
(nf rnnrsp nthpr nersnectives are annronriate in other circumstances).

one can see that by sketching a detail here and a detail there, Ovid
has produced a coherent and consistent vision of rape. No single
story exhibits all the elements, although some, for example the Daphne,
come close; but when the tales are taken together, a unified picture
emerges.

Although there are some fifty or so occurrences of forcible rape,

attempted rape, or sexual extortion hardly distinguishable from rape,
one would scarcely guess the fact from reading most of the commen
taries on the Metamorphoses, Ovidian scholarship in general, or the
retellings of Ovid's stories in the mythological handbooks. Traditional
scholarship, systematically ignoring this fact and refusing to take
rape seriously, glosses over unpleasant reality and prefers eumphemism
to the word rape.6

Rape is the dirty little secret of Ovidian scholarship. It is true

that the language of ancient myth is full of euphemism (usually trans

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 215

parent, however) and Ovid himself may give some encouragement to

obscurantism since his own language is often less than explicit.
However, he had as justification of his practice the artistic principles
of decorum and of variety and indirection of expression. Modern schol
ars have no such excuse. Once we accept the fact that Ovid's subject
is frequently rape, the commentators' elegant variation of nomenclature
becomes either evasion or condonation.
When commentators discuss or annotate the sexual exploitation
of women by, for example, Jupiter, they prettify the ugly facts of serial
rape with such coy euphemisms as "amours," "loves," "courtship,"
or even "marriage" (the latter term may seem to betray an eccentric
understanding of the institution of marriage, but is actually bowdlerism
carried to the point of dishonesty), although there is occasionally a
closer approximation to the truth and we may hear of a woman being
"ravished." When scholars can bring themselves to utter the word
"rape," it is employed as a noun and in a most imprecise sense, with
connotations suggesting anything from a love affair to seduction to
abduction; thus we find "the rape of Europa," rather than "Europa's
rape by Jupiter" or "Jupter raped Europa," wording which would
carry some intimation that rape is a most intimate violation of a
woman's person. "The rape of Europa" is as vague and figurative as
the Nazis' "rape of Czechoslovakia." In fact, the second phrase
conveys a greater impression of shockingness and atrocity, since the
language of the literature on Ovid has made us so used to phrases like
the first where the word "rane" has been thoroughly sanitized.
The commentators' arabesques of euphemism are the verbal
manifestation of certain underlying prejudices and habits of mind. In
the commentaries, as in society, it has not been the practice of men
lightly to accuse another male of rape even if, as it turns out, the
rapist is a figure in a myth thousands of years old. Classical Scholars
apparently require the same stringent proof of rape as do our least
enlightened rape laws, police, and courts. When such proof is lacking,
the reaction is disbelief or amusement.7 Whether it be motivated by
by timidity or prudery, .their own sexual anxieties, or a misguided and
fundamentally hypocritical reverence for the innocence of their younger
readers, the conventional reticence concerning sexual matters is a
badge of our profession and I will not concern myself here with what
contribution it may make to the preservation of our society's patriarchal
mythology of rape. However, such reticence has obstructed a full

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 216 Leo C. Curran

ventilation of what Ovid has to tell us about rape in the Metamor

phoses.
Many of the best known stories are of rape and their victims'
less well known sisters are also numerous. In addition Ovid will insert
rape into a myth where other versions omit it; for example, Tereus in
other sources marries Philomela after tricking her into believing that
her sister has died. Book I establishes the centrality of the theme
very quickly. After the Chaos, the Creation, the Flood, and the
Deucalion and Pyrrha, the latter half of the book is devoted to three
tales of attemnteri rane. the successful rane of lo and the failed at

tempts upon Daphne and Syrinx. With these rape stories, compar
length with the introductory ones, the poem has in its first book
settled down into one of its dominant themes.
Raped men can be quickly disposed of, since they are very few,
and violence, as in Aurora's rape of Cephalus, is virtually absent.
Salmacis, so long as she retains the form of a woman, cannot use
force on Hermaphroditus. Even in the case of the mighty goddess
Venus, who was in a position to exercise superior power over the
mortal Adonis, Ovid gives no hint of any of the violence, threats, or
gross deception so dear to male rapists like Jupiter. Male homosexual
ity is rare in the Metamorphoses and force is confined to an exceptional
case like Jupiter and Ganymede.
As for raped women, the varieties and strategies of violation to
be found in the Metamorphoses are many. In the discussion that follows
it will not always be necessary to distinguish between successful
-/?_·!
aiicuipio aim icunuv/o, oinvv/ uu ?iv u»vu* - ~o

failure, in its consequences for

success.

The act of rape itself, i.e., penetration and the

accomplishment, usually takes very little time to
true both in those stories which are told at length a
with things other than the act itself, e.g., preliminar
such as flight of the victim, a transformation of sh
sequences, and in those instances which constitute li
mention of the occurrence of rape. Ovid is not writin
a kind of epic and does not have a lickerish inter
anatomical details.
Brevity, however, is often less a concession to de
means of illustrating some significant aspect of r

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 217

quick rapes have different causes and effects and, although t

be violence, actual, threatened, or implied, it is not dwelt upon in
such stories.

The casualness may be on Ovid's part: he may simply not take

the time to stop for details. Rape is sometimes a device to identify a
character when first introduced, somewhat in the manner of: "This is
X. You know, the one who was raped by Y." Narcissus is introduced
with a mention of his mother Liriope, whose rape receives a mere two
lines:

quam quondam flumine curvo

implicuit clausaeque suis Cephisos in undis
vim tulit. (3.342-344)

Medusa's rape takes less than two lines:

hanc pelagi rector templo vitiasse Minervae

dicitur. (4.798-799)

And Dryope's rape by Apollo is also swiftly told:

quam virginitate carentem

vimque dei passam Delphos Delumque tenentis. (9.331-332

Offhand allusions to rapes are reminders that, in the world

Metamorphoses, whatever else is going on in the foreground, r
always present or potential in the background. Arachne's cat
divine lechery in which most of the rapes take less than a line, d
Ά univprsp infpfifpH hv ranicfc rlroocori lilro ΤΉοπωυ; oIiqpqoIûio TKû

brevity and the need for variety of expression make it difficu

separate rape from seduction, but Ovid calls them all caelestia
(6.131). Moreover, as I shall argue later, seduction can be so
deceptive or unfair as to be the moral equivalent of rape.
At other times the casualness may not be Ovid's but the r
he impulsively takes a woman who momentarily catches hi
Syrinx is an example, although her rapist fails. Her story fol
Daphne, whose encounter with Apollo was her first and only
a potential rapist. Syrinx is in contrast a seasoned veteran, w
to have made a career out of evading rapists. In all previous en
she escapes with both virginity and humanity intact; with
salvages virginity only at the cost of human nature. Pan
have no more than the most fleeting interest in her; Ovid
bother to mention the god's physical arousal or emotional state

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 218 Leo C. Curran

One type of quick a

although it is common
victim. In the Metamorphoses this happens only to Chione, whom
Mercury puts to sleep with his wand before raping her, and Thetis, who
is asleep when Peleus begins his assault, although she soon awakes
and the assailant is denied his swift conquest after all.
At other times rape is instantaneous in order to demonstrate the
helplessness of woman in the face of overwhelming male superiority.
The suddenness speaks to the familiar men's fantasy of instant and
effortless conquest of women (to which are directed the advertise
ments in men's magazines for aids guaranteeing to make women fall
at the user's feet as soon as they see him). For the god in such
stories it is lust at first sight, followed by immediate gratification, or
gratification slightly delayed by pro forma preliminaries. In the Io
verbal seduction and flight are merely a brief prelude to the swiftly
accomplished act:

terras

occuluit tenuitque fugam rapuitque pudorem. (1.599f.)

The speed of the rape of Persephone is breathtaking:

paene simul visa est dilectaque raptaque Diti. (5.395)

Similar instantaneous rapes occur in the Caenis ( 12.189ff.) and the

Perimele (8.592).
Violence is more prominent in the longer rape stories, where it
ranges from wrestling (in the Thetis) to overt sadism and killing."
The rape of Orithyia is over quickly and the force of the assault itself
pales before what might be called rhetorical or pictorial violence in the
long and impressive portrayal of the raging fury of Boreas after the
failure of his polite and proper courtship (6.685ff.). As Ovid merges
the anthropomorphic features of Boreas with a more naturalistic rep
resentation of the irresistible force of wind and storm, he creates
such a vigorous poetic image of virility as aggressive potency on the
scale of the forces of external nature that the actual rape becomes
almost anticlimactic. At the same time there is a large measure of
burlesque, although Ovid is not making a joke out of rape. For him it
is no contradiction to present rape simultaneously as both an outrage
committed upon a woman and as a grotesque caricature of masculinity.
In the Semele, although the act is not technically rape, the

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 219

violence of male sexuality is so enormous that it annihilates the

woman.9 This myth and, to a lesser extent, the Orithyia illustrate some
of the darkest shadows not only of rape but of certain other aggressive
and sadistic forms of male sexuality. We are confronted with an es
pecially disagreeable fantasy and one that, if modern pornography
from de Sade on is a reliable guide, has an appeal to no small propor
tion of "normal" men: virility of such spectacular potency that it can
seriously hurt, wound, or even destroy a woman in the very act of
intercourse. When the most extreme version of the fantasy is acted
out in real life, we have the rapist who murders not in order to dispose
of a nnt.pnt.ial nrnspr.ntriY (tn nop thp lpcral fprm for thp nlaintiff in a

rape trial), but because it is an indispensable part of his pleasure in

violating a woman.10
It was not of course Jupiter's own wish that Semele be immolated
However, there is deliberate and undisguised sadism in the Tereus
where, after having raped Philomela the first time, her brother-in-law
tears out her tongue and goes on raping her. In what is probably the
most repellant passage in all of Ovid, Tereus is represented as re
peatedly deriving sexual pleasure from Philomela's mutilated body and
the language implies that the mutilation was itself a further sexual
stimulant (6.549ff.). Ovid understands male sexuality at its most
savage.

Rape in the form of bestiality occurs in Arachne's catalog

rapes in which gods become bull, eagle, swan, snake, ram, horse,
dolphin, hawk, and lion. The theme should not be given too much
weight, since this is a mere list and Ovid does not often tell a story
ai îengin in wnicn a maie goa assumes animai aisguise in order to
rape or seduce a woman. The Europa is long enough and does
the familiar phenomenon of a young girl's unconsciously sex
traction to large and powerful beasts, but he ends the story befo
point of intercourse. Among the many tales of bestiality in anci
mythology, one should note that it is rare for the female to be
animal, except when the rapist is semi-human, such as a satyr; Ju
for example, rapes Io and Callisto only before they become anim
Less fastidious in their lust than men, it is almost always wome
mate with animals. Such fantasies carry at least some implication
degradation: a woman will have intercourse with anything. It is ty
of Ovid's attitude that he generally avoids such stories.
Rape can be prefaced by attempted seduction. Jupiter approac

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 220 Leo C. Curran

Io with a speech wh
flattery, an invitati
tection against any d
lover; when all fails
what he wants (1.589
kind (11.239). Apoll
absurd that he make
to be as ruthless as his father (1.504-552). The Pomona is one of the
longest versions of this theme ( 14.623ff.). Vertumnus, having tried
many disguises, finally subjects the woman to a long speech of seduc
non. η η en mis memoa ians, ne resumes nis true iorm ana prepares to

rape her.
The longest version of the theme of the seducer who is ready to
turn to rape if persuasion fails is the Polyphemus and Galatea (13.
749ff.).In a literary equivalent of the archaeologist's Cyclopean walls,
Polyphemus sings an interminable love song of ludicrously overstated
rhetoric (782ff.). The frustration of his suit drives him to kill his
rival Acis and would obviously have driven him to rape Galatea had
she not already plunged into the sea (870 ff.). The monstrous scale of
the Cyclops' rhetoric and violence is a reductio ad absurdum of,
respectively, the overweening confidence of some seducers and, like
the fury of Boreas, an image of the headlong ferocity of exaggerated
male sexuality.11
In these stories in which an attempt at seduction precedes rape,
Ovid seems to have in mind the kind of man who intends from the start
to get wtiat ne wants, wnatever tne means, mai ne resorts to seuuouun
first is not out of politeness or out of a wish to spare the victim pain
or fear. What is more likely is that the male prefers the ego satisfaction
of manipulation of the woman's will by his attractiveness, charm, or
intelligence to brute physical mastery of her body. Ovid's tendency to
treat his would-be seducers and their speeches in a somewhat comic
way does not make their manipulative tactics any less unsavory, just
as his grotesque caricature of masculine violence does not obscure
his recognition of its destructiveness.
There is another kind of seduction. Germaine Greer makes the
useful distinction between "grand rape" and "petit rape."12 The
former is what is usually defined legally as forcible rape. Petit rape
she proposes as the proper label for certain conduct which is con
ventionally called seduction, but in which the seducer in fact has some

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 221

disproportionately unfair advantage over the woman. He need not

threaten her, but it is his superior power which induces her to acquiesce
against her will. Susan Brownmiller speaks of "unpleasant but not
quite criminal sexual extortion."1® Examples are the employer and
secretary or the professor and student, both matters to which the at
tention of the courts is currently being drawn in civil rights violation
cases. A good specimen in Ovid is Leucothoe, who has excited the
lust of the god Sol. After gaining entry to her room disguised as her
τπα! Vl/AT* if f ο 1τ"/A ο f V* /A rrnrl lnnn fVi on fUmn 1 in An f a ταπ! bin ι rl am f ι ti 7 in

grandiloquent and self-laudatory terms and simply to announce that

finds her desirable, an indeed smug and perfunctory way to proposit
a woman (4.226-228). Although absolutely no force is used or threate
and even the proposition is left unspoken, Leucothoe is seized with
fear. Yet it is not so much her fear that makes her submit as it is the
awesome appearance and power of the god after he has resumed his
own form. Ovid makes clear the distinction between the two: "Al
though she was terrified, she was overwhelmed by the god's radiance
and endured his assault without protest" (4.232-233). The Latin con
veys her emotional state with exquisite accuracy: posita vim passa
querella est. Although the phrase vim passa and its variants verge on
the formulaic in the Metamorphoses, Ovid here uses it with extreme
precision. No force or threat of force is present, but the effect is the
same. She recognizes that resistance or demurrer would be futile. To
many jurors in a trial today this would not constitute rape at all. Ovid
knows better; and so does the woman, if one were to try to imagine a
1
uJi/uui/ivn. iniu 10 uiv

when a powerfully built man of s

room and announces to her that he
The Daphne combines two sor
tributes at length in a parody of
documenting his power and expl
woman without actually resortin
ness also suggests a second kind
rape. An unwilling woman may
seducer who refuses to leave her
some sleep. Apollo is a fatuous
answer in Ovid's burlesque of him
view, he is much more formidable
There are in the Metamorphose

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 222 Leo C. Curran

elliptical rape stories, in which the act itself is not mentioned and
which, although longer, resemble the casual allusions to rape dis
cussed above. Sometimes we are told only of events after the rape, as
in the Latona and the Alcmena, in which Ovid relates the wandering
of the pregnant Latona and the difficulties both women endure in giving
birth of the fruit of their rape. At other times we are given only the pre
liminaries and the story is never finished. Such is the case in the
Europa, which begins with a leisurely description of Jupiter in the
guise of a bull, the growing passion of the deceived Europa, and then
the gradual and literal fading into the distance (and out of the poem)
eu. tue gui eu eue uacis. ei cue cswimmiiig uuu. ouicc we oil wiuw cue

story or can easily guess how it will end, Ovid

all.
Along with actual rape, we sometimes find
phorical rape in which the man's "conquest" is
language and imagery of rape. The Tereus, in a
also includes a large section which is an extend
mind of the rapist (6.455 ff.). As for metaphor
used of Hippomanes' race with Atalanta has c
and the implications are often those of conque
violent entry into the earth by splitting the po
and the effects upon Cyane herself (5.492) are
rape and shortly thereafter Arethusa speaks of
as rape: patuitque invita rapinae (5.492).
Of mneh en-eater moment throughout. the Mpt.nmnrnhnRP.fi than the

mechanics and strategies of the act of rape is the matter of the intel
lectual and emotional experience of the woman and her suffering. It is
this aspect of rape that most deeply engages Ovid's acute observation
and sympathetic imagination.
The stereotype of woman as victim, frequently with the corollary
of masochism, is nowadays such a commonplace in life and so much a
staple of the news and entertainment media that we may be conditioned
to accept it unthinkingly as perfectly "natural."" In soft- and hard
core pornography and in both popular as well as in much professional
psychology, women are supposed to enjoy being victims, to prefer
masochistic fantasies, and to want to be raped. (The degree of con
sciousness with which the idea of woman as victim is entertained or
the degree of explicitness with which it is portrayed on a given oc
casion is of course variable.) We may be predisposed therefore to

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 223

overlook the significance of the fact that a major function of

the Metamorphoses is to be a victim, usually, although not ex
of rape. The victims are not always female, and when they a
not always rape that they suffer; nor are the persecutors by a
always male. Victimizers are frequently female and often th
in which they figure have to do with divine jealousy and othe
unrelated to rape. In spite of these qualifications, those victi
are raped females constitute a large proportion.
Ovid does not simply take the role of woman as victim for gr
and get on with the story at hand; rather he draws out its im
He shows that there are few from whom the victim can expe
ury ui uuuuuiL. out; cuiu nut uit; icipist is uie unt; wuu iiiusl uticir tilt;

injury, the guilt, society's blame, and the punishment.

Damage, physical or psychological, done to the ra
ignored or taken lightly by society. Jupiter dismisse
Persephone as amor rather than injuria (5.525-6). The
victim is deemed by others to be secondary to that d
husband, since traditionally in Western and other soc
perceived primarily as an offense against the property
The rivers of Thessaly, instead of lamenting the fate
worried about her father and whether he should be c
consoled (1.578). Perimele's father found her rape so
he cast her from a cliff to her death (8.593f.). When t
raping the women at Pirithous' wedding, Theseus pro
is an offense to the groom and to himself as a friend o
to the women being raped (12.227-229). Guilt is pe
unjust burden the victim must bear. Women have be
that the victim may be quite ready to believe that
guilty and that she must have done something to prov
ate with the rape. Daphne curses her beauty because i
too desirable (1.547). The raped Philomela speaks of
(6.541) and cannot look her sister in the eye (605f.)
vent to her shame by using of herself the highly pejor
(537 and 606). In the Fasti, the husband and father of
her (2.819ff.). Society's blame is the external counter
portion of society has always believed that unless a w
senseless or bound helpless, what she calls rape must
at least minimal consent on her part. Leucothoe plead
raped against her will, in vain, since no force was used

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 224 Leo C. Curran

cry out for assistan

comes known, is called crimen (2.462) and she is guilty of culpa
(452). Ovid is here speaking from the point of view of society; earlier
it is Jupiter to whom he ascribes crimen (433). Philomela realizes that
if she tells others of her rape, it will be at the cost of her own pudor
(6.544-545).
In addition to blame, punishment is the lot of the victim, while
the rapist normally suffers nothing worse than occasional embarrass
ment. Leucothoe's father buries her alive. Vengeance may be exacted
by a deity of the victim's own sex. Minerva takes vengeance on Medusa
for having the presumption to be raped in the goddess' temple with her
version of a punishment fit the crime: defilement of what was most
beautiful in her, her hair. Harshest of all in her persecution of rape
victims is Juno. It is Juno who destroys Semele and chooses a means
which, since she is at the same time delivered of her fetus, is also a
travesty of childbirth, a mordant irony on the part of the deity to whom
women in labor pray for easy delivery. It is Juno who torments the
parturient Latona (6.232 ff. ) and Alcmena (9-284 ff.). In such stories
which link woman's reproductive functions so closely with extreme
suffering or death and in which the expected protector of women is
instead a cruel personification of the horrendous dangers of child
birth, Ovid display a sensitivity to the enormous risk women faced in
exercising their sexuality in a period long before the advances in
gynecology of the past century. In addition, most of his rape victims
are very young virgins (a subject to be discussed below in another
context) and the considerably higher incidence of complications in
ehilHhirth in the ease ef nriminaras in their earlv teens cannot have

escaped the notice of the Romans. It is against this grim background

of medical helplessness, in which intercourse, pregnancy, and child
birth mean potential destruction for the women, that the poet sets his
band of light-hearted rapists.
The punishment of the victim is not limited to her body. Ovid
subordinates the physical discomforts of Io's new life as a heifer to
her psychological suffering and to the indignity and degradation of her
new state." Her ludicrous appearance expresses the humiliation and
mortification to which the raped are subject. She has no privacy under
the constant gaze of the many eyes of Argus, like a woman in a small
town who must endure the stares of all in their knowledge that she
has been raped. (One is reminded of the look in the eyes of the vil

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 225

lagers who surround the widow in Zorba the Greek.) She is so terrifie
by the sight of herself in a reflection that she tries to flee from herself.
That rape has robbed her of her very humanity is shown less eloquent
in her external bovine shape than in her terrible isolation and inarticu
lateness. In the strange transformation rape has forced upon her, sh
is unable to plead with her captor by either voice or gesture; she can
not at first communicate with her father and sisters nor can they
recognize her. When she does succeed in making her identity known,
the reunion is short-lived since Argus soon drives her off. The psy
chological torture worsens when Argus is replaced by the Fury Juno
sends to drive her in madness and terror all over the world. When her
canif\7 anri humanifv oro finally rocfr»rorl it io nnlv with timiHitv that

she can resume speech.

Callisto, before any physical punishment, must undergo the
anguish of rejection by Diana, who pitilessly exiles from her company
the nymph who had once been her special favorite by reason of the
very virginity robbed from her by a Jupiter who had played the cruel
trick of assuming Diana's own appearance. When Juno subsequently
transforms Callisto's grace into the shambling awkwardness of a bear,
the grotesqueness of the elaboration of the details of metamorphosis
again expresses mental as much as bodily suffering in a dehumanization
the victim lasting long after the rape itself.
The role of Juno requires special discussion, since it may seem
anomalous for a female so often to be the one who punishes other
iemales. One obvious reason why we hnd her victimizing women is
that she happens to be the very jealous wife of the greatest womanizer
in ancient mythology. She has, however, a much larger significance.
However unhappy Juno's own experience with marriage, she was in
myth and, much more importantly, in cult, the divine patroness of the
social institution of marriage. In the Metamorphoses she is the em
bodiment, on the level of myth, of society's attitudes toward marriage
and such related matters as virginity and adultery. As Virgil is in the
Aeneid, Ovid is dealing with social realities not in discursive terms
but through symbolic objectification of them in the figures of myth.
Juno is the villain of the Aeneid and, as Pôschl has shown, represents
certain historical, political, and social phenomena." Much of the
Metamorphoses is devoted to playful, yet respectful, parody of the
Aeneid, as Ovid merrily stands many of its characters and incidents on
their heads. In his hands, the Virgilian Jupiter, that champion of order

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 226 Leo C. Curran

and the values of civilized society, becomes an anarchic rapist;

Virgil's Juno, the embodiment of anarchy and the breakdown of society,
becomes the defender of society's rules regulating marriage and extra
marital sexuality. As such, it is altogether fitting that dehumanization
be so often her way of punishing the rape victim: expulsion from the
human race is the ultimate excommunication from society. That her
motives are very personal and even small-minded does not diminish
her credibility as an objectification of society's sexual mores. On the
contrary, her character, especially her jealousy and vindictiveness,
provides the handy, natural, and thoroughly human (in the sense in
which the gods of ancient myth behave like humans) motivation for her
behavior. Juno was appropriate because her husband's rapes constantly
put her into situations in which it was natural and plausible for her to
punish rape victims and thus be the agent of society in enforcing its
rules.
For Ovid to take the Homeric Hera of sometimes comic jealousy
and the Virgilian Juno of antisocial anarchy and turn the goddess into
society's police is no harder to accept than Virgil's elevation of the
rather disreputable Aphrodite of Greek myth and literature into the
patroness of the loftiest of Roman and Augustan ideals. Indeed, the
union of the all-too-human character of the deity as a mythological
figure with a larger social reality is much more convincing in the case
of Ovid's Juno than in that of Virgil's Venus. Although Ovid can
hardly have conceived of it in such explicit terms, the treatment of
Τιιτ,η αο oiir-Vi a nrnminant vir+imivor of wnmpn shows how a natriarchal

society conditions women to punish their own sisters.

Beauty is dangerous. The victim's beauty (and, as in sensational
newspaper accounts today, the victim is always beautiful) is an in
vitation to and a justification for rape, as in the case of Herse (2.
723ff.),19 Philomela (6.451 ff.), Caenis (12.189ff.), or Daphne. Since
Daphne does not want to be raped, she is turned into a tree. One way
of reading this story is to conclude that a woman who is unwilling to
accept what is the potential threat faced by every woman might as
well be a tree. That way she can never be dressed in the wrong way
or in the wrong place at the wrong time. Since being the inhabitant of
a beautiful young female body seems to some a standing invitation to
rape, Daphne is emitting misleading signals. Transforming her into a
tree prevents further misunderstanding. Daphne is the kind of woman
about whom a certain sort of man says, "All she needs to straighten

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 227

her out is one good rape." Or as Ovid himself says to Daphne in

apostrophe:

te decor iste, quod optas,

esse vetat, votoque tuo tua forma répugnât. ( 1.488 f.)

Compare the daughter of Coroneus, who prefaces the account of her

rape with the words: forma mihi nocuit (2.572). Cephalus pays a com
pliment, very odd in a context other than the Metamorphoses, to his
wife's beauty: alluding to the rape of Orithyia, he calls his wife
"more worthy of raping" than her sister (7.697). One is inevitably
- 1 1 i-L 1 J ~X>
1^11I111UV/U V/l U1UI/ UV/UIJ UV/1V/UOV V/l lU^V, l/liv |/»V/»V/VMVXIV U11VV V»

dress of the woman, which an American judg

lenient treatment of a rapist who was only beha
the court to call a normal way.
Beauty and sexual desirability are enhance
clothing or hair, by discomfort and embarrassme
rapist these are all aphrodisiacs. Daphne's hai
tively disordered by the breezes as she flees Ap
"terror was becoming to her" (4.230). Of Europa
Fasti: "and her very fear was a source of additio
Below I will discuss the theme as the subjective,
of the victim; here terror is an external attribute t
attacker on.
In age the typical rape victim in Ovid is quite young, although
only once does he speak of child rape as such; in the Persephone he
conveys the pathos of a situation in which the girl is too young even
to realize what rape is: she grieves more for the damage done to her
clothing than to her person. Most of the other victims are also very
young and would today be considered virtually children or what many
would call Lolitas (although this is to ignore the fact that Nabokov's
heroine was only pubescent and in the event was no innocent virgin).
In Ovid's society a girl was an appropriate sex object from her earliest
teens, i.e., as soon as she was actually nubile.
The premium placed on the extreme youth of the victim is closely
related to, but by no means the same thing as, the exaggerated value
given to virginity. The obsession with being the first man to possess
a woman is dramatized sharply in the story of Chione, who is simul
taneously spotted by both Phoebus and Mercury (11.301 ff. ). Both
desire her at once, but Apollo has at least the patience and decency to

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 228 Leo C. Curran

wait until nightfall.

to reap praerepta gau
few hours is a major
What are the impli
married and almost a
price of beauty is ra
virginity. It is all in
Girls have always b
and that training, al
women physically v
^1

his rape stories exhi

in the Fasti, "When a woman fights, she loses" (2.801), and in the
Callisto he asks, "Whom can a girl overpower?" (2.436).21 The theme
is stated over and over again in the constantly recurring similes
likening women to the hapless prey of ferocious beasts and birds.
Furthermore, the youth and the innocence of the typical victims en
hance their weakness, as in the case of Philomela; she is exceptional,
however, in her transition from helplessness at the time of her rape to
immense strength in her vengeance at the end of the story.
The story of Caenis is especially instructive for an understanding
of Ovid's awareness of the implications of the physical vulnerability
of women. The story shows that the only totally sure way for a woman
Λ I XT i
tu ClVUlU. Ittpc ΙΟ tu give up UC1 UVV11 OCA eu lu UCCU1IIV/ u 111U11. nv^i/uiiv,

having raped Caenis, offers her a reward. The crime just c

against her determines her greatest desire, that she lose h
hood: tale pati nil posse; mihi da, femina ne sim; / omnia
(12.202-203). Ovid makes clear the aggressive nature of
intention to harm or hurt by having Caenis call it an injur
more explicitly a few lines later, by identifying sexual
with a wound: changed from woman to man, Caeneus is no
mune from any kind of penetration (12.206-207). The othe
penetration the speaker here (Nestor) has in mind are those
but the deliberate vagueness of language also includes
anal rape (which latter may be what Frankel has in mind w
"a touch of dry masculine humor" in 12.201-203)." But it m
a joke. It may be further emphasis on the vulnerability and
women. Caenis' tale pati nil posse reminds one of the co
expression for the act of the passive male homosexual: pat

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 229

So far from womanhood is Caeneus now that he is impregnable to

that one kind of rape that makes a man like a woman. When the s
of Caeneus is resumed later, Ovid again sounds the theme of the
cal inferiority and timidity of women by having a Centaur taunt Caene
with his once having been a woman (12.407 ff.). In Hermaphrodit
prayer that every man who enters Salmacis' pool, as he did, e
inde/ semivir...ut mollescat, there is a measure of anatomical ac
curacy in semivir; but this word and mollescat imply in a more general
way that a woman is only an incomplete and softened (not just softer)
man (4.385f.).
Rano nnspa a devastating throat to nersnnal intecritv and identity

and can destroy a woman's sense of self and of her relationsh

others. A recognition of the severe emotional damage rape ca
upon the personality of the victim is not surprising in a poe
cerned with the nature of personal identity. Frequently the
becomes confused as to who she is. Daphne can no longer live
own body (a sharp distinction between self and body which i
teristic of schizophrenia). The raped Callisto has "forgotten w
is" (2.493)." Philomela suffers a confusion in her relation to her
sister/rival and to her rapist/brother-in-law of exactly the kind being
reported today by those who work with young incest victims (6.537ff.).
Io, so bewildered over her identity after her rape when she saw herself
reflected in a pool as a cow-woman, "in terror fled from herself'
(1.641).24 The cover of a recent book on rape, Hursh's The Trouble
With Rape, aptly carries the face of a woman in form of a mosaic
disintegrating into its constituent tesserae.
Rape does worse than undermine a woman's identity; it can rob
her of her humanity. Change from human to non-human is a constant
occurrence in the Metamorphoses, and the majority of instances of
course has nothing to do with rape. However, transformation into the
non-human is uniquely appropriate in the case of rape, for the process
of dehumanization begins long before any subsequent metamorphosis of
the woman's body. The transition from human to sex object and then
to object pure and simple proceeds by swift and easy stages, its onset
being simultaneous with the decision to commit rape. The final physi
cal transformation of so many rape victims is only the outward ratifi
cation of an earlier metamorphosis of the woman into a mere thing in
the mind of the attacker and in his treatment of her.25 The identification
of rape and dehumanization is intimate and virtually immediate in the

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 230 Leo C. Curran

Daphne, where the heroi

chase begins. As Daphne
her fluttering clothing a
the wind will do to the branches and leaves of the tree she is to be
come. After her transformation, Daphne as tree is an exact analog of a
victim so profoundly traumatized by her experience that she has taken
refuge in a catatonic withdrawal from all human involvement, passively
acted upon by her environment and by other persons, but cut off from
any response that could be called human. Ovid's language describing
what he and Apollo choose to take as the laurel's "reactions" (1.556
*nr* γλπ\

cuiu υυντυυ ι / πασ eu ι cciic uui jjojv

The two elements perhaps paramount in Ovid'

the psychology of rape are the victim's unwilling
The women of the Metamorphoses do not secretly
when faced with rape, do they turn into more or
in their own violation, contrary to ancient and mo
glib assumptions of the poet in his earlier works.
of the Ovid, where a woman's "no" means "yes," g
empathy with women and their real wishes. It is
resists any temptation to exploit Tiresias' notorious appraisal of the
pleasure women derive from sex (3.316ff.).

The unwillingness of the victim is explicit or implicit in Ovid's

telling of the stories I have dealt with so far. Here I wish to restate
the point by way of calling attention of a special category of reluctant
women. A great many of his heroines are nymphs and his seemingly
eccentric treatment of them is a testimony to the significance he at
tached to his somewhat late discovery that women do not like to be
raped. He takes such pains to make the resistance of these women
unmistakable that he endows some of them with a deep-seated abhor
rence of sexuality that would seem to border on the pathological.
lhese are very special nymphs indeed.

Nymphs after all were young women who had a reputation for
very active sexual lives (or "amorous propensities" as one of the
handbooks discreetly puts it). Normally they did not have to be raped;
nymphs played a role in myth not unlike that played in the male imagi
nation today by the mention of airline stewardesses or cocktail wait
resses." But some of Ovid's nymphs are very different; they are
totally dedicated virgins, much to the bewilderment of the satyrs they

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 231

live among, who are used to more typical nymphs.27 When th

of the Metamorphoses resist, they are not being coy; they m
They will more readily endure the loss of anything ratherthan vi
including womanhood, humanity, or life.2" We do not find th
modern male fantasy, the reluctant virgin who learns during
rape that she actually enjoys it in spite of herself and becom
is usually but illogically called a nymphomaniac. (One would
nymphiasis on the analogy of satyriasis', it is the satyrs
nymphomaniacs.)
With his penchant for ironic reversal, what Ovid has in f
is to treat these nymphs as if they were those paragons of
virtue, the heroines of Roman legendary history, or the dau
traditional, respectable Roman families, whose most preci
sion was premarital virginity, a notion which, in his earlier
had ridiculed as uncouth rusticitas. To state his case in the s
and most paradoxical terms, he shows that even nymphs can
ing rape victims and chooses them as his heroines over and ov
an analogy today would be a feminist who maintained the rig
a prostitute not to be raped as an a fortiori argument in defe
women.

Callisto and Pomona are good instances of this extr

hostility to sexuality, but it is conspicuous from the first
poem, beginning with the programmatic Daphne, where Ov
invent for use on the heroine a novel anaphrodisiacal a
if she had to be inoculated against her normal proclivities
The result is to make her reject all men and not simply r
advances (1.471 ff. ). Arethusa blushes because of her unw
and thinks it a crimen to be desired by men (5.584).
Ovid's emphasis on the violation of unwilling youn
deeply committed to the protection of their sexual integrit
the psychology of rape. The victims can apparently be
hierarchy of desirability. The married or sexually mature v
entirely absent from the Métamorphoses, ranks lower than
inexperienced virgin, -because her innocence means th
rapist is forcing her to undergo is totally new to her a
first to have her. If she is not only inexperienced and simp
but also has a positive aversion to sex and wants desperate
her virginity, she is an even better victim because the rap
enjoy his mastery over her futile resistance against wh

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 232 Leo C. Curran

detestable and degrading. The three tiers in the hierarchy of rape

might be likened to: the theft of used goods; the conquest of virgin
territory, to change the metaphor to one of the many identifying woman
with the land; and the rape of the will, which for many real-life rapists
is much more important than anything done to the woman's body.29
The third type of victim is also more likely to have still another de
sirable feature lacking in the other two: timidity and fear, to which we
shall now turn.

Perhaps the most impressive element of Ovid's treatment of rape

is his understanding of the sheer horror of the experience for the woman
U11U 111 U IAKJJ. J. X V/Jf l/V VllipUKlUnV llll/ll 11VI U11U 1/11VI VWJ l/v yv/l VI IAJ 11V/1 I'V I 1 VI

with compelling authenticity. I shall for the most p

with fear at the time of the rape, but it should be
last long after the actual danger has passed: the M
in a state of dread with the memory of their narrow escape and
Persephone remains fearful even as Queen of the Underworld.
Ovid may simply state that the woman is terrified. He also has
artfully chosen techniques for dramatizing the horror for us by casting
it in the form of some common dread or anxiety we are all familiar
with. Arethusa is especially threatened because she is naked. Nudity
makes both men and women feel more vulnerable, even when there is
no overtly sexual danger. Totalitarian police are well aware of its
vaiue as lnnmiaaiion in ennancing trie enecis oi actual puysicai

torture and the famous shower scene in Hitchcock's "Psycho" owes

much of the profound effect it has on audiences, male and female, to
the fact that the defenseless heroine not only faces an armed psycho
path but is in addition nude.
The terror can take the form of the suffocating dread of being
overwhelmed, enshrouded, engulfed, or trapped. The victim may be
surrounded or caught up in some embracing substance, as Arethusa is
(5.621 ff.). In the Io, in the space of a little over a line, Ovid depicts
the blinding, suffocating embrace with which Jupiter encloses the girl
in order to rape her ( 1.599 f.).!0 This kind of fear resembles the infantile
dread of the dark, and we must remember that the victims in the Meia
morphoses are young. When Boreas comes to rape Orithyia, the poet
stresses the all-embracing dark cloud and the terror it inspires in the
girl.Peleus twice binds Thetis. In the Tereus Ovid deals with the same
fear so well evoked in Fowles' The Collector, that of being abducted
and imprisoned far from home with no idea of where one is.

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 233

Unquestionably the most effective of Ovid's techniques for c

veying the traumatizing horror of rape and to which he resorts th
out the poem is the recurring motif of flight and pursuit, of ch
the attempt to escape.51 Pursuit is so frequent an incident that it
strike us at times as gratuitous or automatic; in some cases, he does
not even indicate why the rapist, who at least some of the time is
standing close to his victim, cannot simply reach out and seize her,
but must instead resort to a chase.52 Far from gratuitous, flight was
for Ovid the consummate means for the expression of the terror of the
rape victim, the predatory appetite of the rapist, and the dehumanizing
reduction of a woman to the level of a hunted animal.55 It is also an
excellent poetic method for putting the reader in the position of the
victim, since we have all experienced similar dread in our nightmares
and there is a distinctly nightmarish quality in the flight scenes of the
Metamorphoses. We know this fear not only from our dreams but also
from its evocation in so many films; indeed, our familiarity with it
derived from this source may lead us to underestimate the originality
and perceptiveness of Ovid's choice of the motif.54
I have chosen to discuss the two salient instances of the use of
the flight motif to express the terror of the victim, the Daphne and the
Arethusa, although the peculiar horror evoked in these stories can be
experienced only by reading Ovid's text and not the critic's paraphrase,
analysis, and excerpting. That in one story the rapist fails entirely
and in the other succeeds only in a qualified, i.e., metaphorical, sense
can be no accident on Ovid's part. If actual penetration had been
achieved it would have obscured the true import of these stories: the
jjo^iiuiugiuau cutîut un uit? victim s iiuiiu υχ trie oraeai 01 oeing nuntea
down like prey can be more damaging than any physical invasion of
her body. Of course there are other stories in which the pursuer do
succeed in catching and raping his prey. In such cases flight, in
dition to portraying the emotional state of the victim, illustrates oth
aspects of rape, such as the vulnerability of woman, who must flee
instead of fighting back, and rape as an exercise by men of the
gression and violent physical activity they are trained in from boyhoo
In the case of Daphne, if we wish to be generous, we may sa
that Apollo's actions at first are closer to seduction than to rape, fo
he refrains from running as fast as he can and tries to persuade her
he pursues her. Ovid makes fun of Apollo and his overblown rhetor
For example, he has the god resort in his excess to no fewer than fou

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 234 Leo C. Curran

similes of animal predators chasing their prey only to claim, with

transparent hypocrisy, that they do not apply to him <1.504 ff.). But the
situation is no joke for Daphne and Ovid makes the frivolous Apollo
spout his ridiculous similes only to lend a contrasting gravity to his
own similar comparison a few lines later when Apollo abandons his
slower pace and the chase begins in earnest. Now he employs the
single, extended simile of a hunting hound chasing a hare (532-539).
Its deadly seriousness is enhanced by language strongly reminiscent
of Aeneas' final pursuit of Turnus (Aen. 12.749-765). Like its Virgilian
mnrlel the simile has a haunting nualitv. The direct descriDtion. re

suming after the simile, contains two terrifying touches: the god is
close to the girl that he looms over her and breathes on her ne

tergoque fugacis
inminet et crinem sparsum cervicibus adflat. (541-542)

As for the Arethusa, the initial question of the story at once

termines the tenor of all that follows: the terror of flight." Ceres'
tibi causa fugae...? ostensibly asks why Arethusa has taken refuge
Sicily and left her home (5.573). By the choice of fuga to designate
exile Ovid has at once established the act of fleeing (the basic mean
of fuga) as the dominant motif in the story and the feeling of bei
hunted animal as a central element in the emotional experience of
rape victim. The tale proceeds at a leisurely pace until, from
depths of the water in which she is innocently and nakedly bathin
Arethusa hears a strange murmuring sound. At once the tempo quick

territaque insisto propiori margine fontis. (5.598)

In the two words territa insisto we are swiftly given the emoti
reaction (terror) and the immediate defensive action (flight to the r
bank: insisto is frequently used of the alighting of birds). Her would
rapist's brief question, insidious in its simplicity and sinister in
repetition, again speaks of fleeing:

'quo properas, Arethusa?' suis Alpheus ab undis,

'quo properas, Arethusa?' iterum rauco mihi dixerat ore.
(599-600)

Her flight is now described at some length, with similes

cluding the dove and the hawk), with catalogs of geographical nam

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 235

and varieties of terrain, and with constant reiteration of wo

flight, pursuit, and physical exhaustion (605 ff.). Such elabor
be self-indulgent and may suffer by comparison with the chilling
economy of Alpheus' succinct question, but it is simply another tech
nique, this time perhaps a shade too mechanical, to convey the feelings
of the rape victim as prey in flight.
Two motifs first used in the pursuit of Daphne appear again,
now with greater elaboration: her attacker's shadow looms threateningly
before her and behind her she hears the sound of his feet and feels his
panting breath on her hair. Diana comes to her aid by engulfing her in
darkness, a form of assistance which, as I have argued above, illus
trates another, but related, side of the terror of the rape victim. Hidden
and trapped in a mist around which her attacker skulks, she is in her
fear turned into water. Recognizing her in her new form, Alpheus re
sumes his own aqueous state. She loses her identity in his in a com
mingling of their waters that is described in sexual terms: se mihi
misceat (638).
"Flight" in English has an ambiguity Ovid would have relished
had it been available to him: flight is flying as well as fleeing. De
spite the impossibility of the word play in Latin, the flight of the rape
victim in the Metamorphoses can take the form of flying. In this man
ner the Muses thwart their attempted rape (5.288). As the daughter of
Coroneus runs from Neptune, she is turned into a bird (2.580ff.). The
motif of flying is displaced in the Tereus until the end of the storv
(6.665 ff.), long after the rape, so that the pursuit of Procne and
Philomela becomes an eternal reenactment of the original violation,
as if the rape victim were to have a constantly recurring dream of her
terrifying experience.
Flight figures in a different way in the Herse. After introducing
Herse and depicting at length the initial stages of her effect on Mer
cury, Ovid turns to other matters and never tells us how he thought
the god got her to bed, although the description of his first seeing
Herse, with its overtones of motifs habitually associated with rape,
makes us anticipate rape. Flying over Athens, Mercury spies young
girls engaged in sacrifice. There follows a series of three extended
similes (2.715ff.). Not ready to strike, the god is first compared to a
kite circling and recircling its prey at a safe distance. The girls are
the sacrificial meat the kite is patiently waiting to swoop down upon.
Here the attention is focussed on the flight of the predator, since the

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 236 Leo C. Curran

prey do not seem to b

suggests the modus op
stalks or "shadows" h
routines and the safes
activities of her surveillant. Once Mercury has selected Herse, the
third simile (to ignore the second simile for the moment) conveys the
increasing ardor of his passion by comparison with a leaden bullet
fired by a sling and growing warmer and warmer from the friction of
the air it speeds through." The details in the simile fuse the notions
of heat, flight (of the pursuer), and the headlong impetuosity of male
sexuality.
The succession of similes is bravura writing. Between the
leisurely circular motion of the first simile (male lust restrained by
caution) and the rectilinear thrust of the third (male lust let loose),
stands the static, serene, two-part simile of Lucifer outshining the
stars and the moon in turn outshining Lucifer. Since Herse is not
named until the last words of her simile, we are momentarily tricked
into assuming that this is another comparison with the airborne Mercury
and her first appearance in the poem is thus an effectively placed
surprise. Instead of the more obvious device of three similes for the
god, we have the calm central Herse simile, which describes the object
of Mercury's lust, framed by the two agitated similes of flight, the
first describing the circumstances of his first seeing Herse and the
third the result triggered by the sight of her. On the page of verse, the
framing aptly mirrors the manner in which the future victim's freedom
is circumscriDea Dy rne nigra 01 ine gou.

Terror, whether it be manifested by flight or in other ways,

thus placed by Ovid at the heart of the experience of the victim, w
has been the major subject of my discussion. In the course of
have had occasion to comment on various aspects of the poet's t
ment of the rapist as well. I would like to link these observati
together by way of summary in order to argue that Ovid's hab
reverting to certain themes and motifs suggests that he was on
verge of a realization that rape is less an act of sexual passion t
of aggression and that erotic gratification is secondary to the rap
desire to dominate physically, to humiliate, and to degrade. Am
these themes the most significant are: the violation of youth,
defilement of beauty, the exploitation of vulnerability, the repre
tion of the rapist as a predatory beast, the predilection for violen

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 237

and the pleasure taken in the victim's terror and in the mast
will. Finally, Ovid's rapists are on the whole not the depraved or
abnormal monsters who are the inaccurate stereotypes of the popular
notion of the typical rapist today, but ordinary males, with the excep
tion that, since most of them are devine, they enjoy greater ease and
less restraint in obtaining what they desire. Jupiter and Apollo are no
drooling psychopaths.
Although Ovid may not always have shown great respect for
women as a sex, his fascination with them led him to an insight into
their plight as rape victims almost unique in ancient literature. There
are other major implications of my subject, but they cannot be dis
cussed in this paper: 1) What role can we presume his rape stories to
have played in the fantasy lives of his audience of unnerclass Roman
women37 and men (the latter of whom had such ready accessibility to
the bodies of women that any interest in rape must be explained)?
2) To what extent is Ovid himself, in the manner of a scientific analyst
of society rather than an artist portraying society, consciously aware
in the fullest sense of all that his stories reveal about rape? 3) Is his
attitude sympathetic, indifferent, amused, or a sadistic? As for the
last issue, it has not been possible to conceal my own belief, although
I have not defended it, that Ovid exhibits a sympathy which, if some
times patronizing or obscured by a lightness of surface or tone and by
his love of burlesque and exaggeration, is fundamentally genuine and
well conceived.

State University of New York at Buffalo

Notes

1 I wish to thank Ms. Margaret M. Tarajos for assistance in research for t

paper and for advice and comments on matter of substance and style. I
also profited from discussions with Ms. Teri Ellen Marsh and Ms. J
Godfrey. My female students, especially those in undergraduate courses
women in antiquity I have taught over the past few years, (some of wh
have had direct or indirect experience with rape and rape victims) hav
also provided me with insights from perspectives far closer to those o
Ovid's heroines than are personally accessible to me and with some know
edge of how women feel about rape. See also note 5 below.

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 238 Leo C. Curran

The text used is Haupt-Ehwald-von Albrecht, P. Ovidius Naso: Metar

morphosen 11th ed. (Zurich 1969), with one minor orthographic change:
I will use the letter j.
A considerably shorter version of this essay was read at the Women's
Classical Caucus at the annual AIA-APA meeting in Atlanta in December,
1977.

"Echo is mere otherness and is herself only an insubstantial reflection....

She has no self of her own...," E. Frankel, Ovid, A Poet Between Two
Worlds (Berkeley 1956) 84-85.
Cf. Anderson's note on 10.629-630 in his commentary (note 6 below).
For Ovid's exaggeration of Diana's cruel conception of virginity, see
Brooks Otis, Ovid as an Epic Poet 2nd ed. (Cambridge 1970) 133.
The most accessible and useful contemporary study of rape is Susan Brown
miller, Against Our Will: Men, Women and Rape (New York 1975), which
has also been published in a paperback edition. Some of her argument is
anticipated in briefer compass by Susan Griffin, "Rape: The Ail-American
Crime," Ramparts 10 (September 1971) 26-35, reprinted in Jo Freeman, ed.,
Women: A Feminist Perspective (Stanford 1975 ) 24-39. Other recent works
are Nancy Gager and Cathleen Schurr, Sexual Assault: Confronting Rape in
America (New York 1976) and Carolyn J. Hursch, The Trouble With Rape
(Chicago 1977). To those who are familiar with it, it will be obvious that
contemporary literature on rape has very much influenced my approach, but
this paper is about Ovid and to rehearse the evidence and parallels from
such literature, except for an occasional reference, would add undue
length.
Recently there has been an encouraging tendency to replace reticence with
candor and to call a rape a rape. Some examples: Hugh Parry, "Ovid's
Metamorphoses: Violence in a Pastoral Landscape," TAPA 95 (1964) 268
282 deals frankly with forcible rape; C. P. Segal, Landscape in Ovid's
Metamorphoses: A Study in the Transformation of a Literary Symbol =
Hermes Einzelschr. 23 (Wiesbaden 1969) which has some excellent remarks
on such serious issues in the Metamorphoses as violence, suffering,
brutality, and the violation of innocence and recognizes rape as such;
W. S. Anderson, Ovid's Metamorphoses: Books 6-10 (Norman 1972) which is
candid and sensitive on the subject of rape and the victimization of women;
Eleanor Winsor Leach, "Ekphrasis and the Theme of Artistic Failure in
Ovid's Metamorphoses," Ramus 3 (1975) 102-142.
For a specimen of one contemporary classical scholar's treatment of rape
as a matter of innocent merriment, see Classical News and Views 21 (1977)
63, with its translation into elegant Latin verse of a joke about rape which
is most insulting to women.
One very violent story, the Polyphemus and Galatea, will be discussed
below in another context.

Ovid's language is explicit in indicating that Semele's immolation takes

place during the act of intercourse and not merely when Jupiter approache
her (3.284-286 and 308-309).

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 239

10 It is perhaps no accident that what Ovid chooses to emphasize in the de

scription of Jupiter's preparing himself to go to Semele as he goes to Juno
is his arming himself with the weapons of lightning and thunderbolts. In
pornography, as in military and other obscenity, the penis is frequently
spoken of as a weapon.
11 The gross disproportion in size between the brutish monster and the nymph
is an expression of the same sexual fantasy that lies just beneath the
surface of the original film version of "King Kong," with its faintly dis
guised theme of the tiny woman at the mercy sexually of a subhuman
creature many times her size (although Ovid's story of course lacks the
racist overtones of the film); cf. also my remarks below concerning the
theme of the physical vulnerability of woman.
Unfortunately I cannot supply a bibliographical citation; it is not from
The Female Eunuch but was an article published several years ago some
where in the popular press.
13 Brownmiller 401.
14 Cf. Anderson's note ad locc. in his commentary (see note 6 above).
15 For a film critic's view of the role of woman as victim in one popular
medium, see Molly Haskell, From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of
Women in the Movies (New York 1974).
* On guilt and society's blame, see Adrienne Rich, Of Woman Born (New York
1976) 244.

17 Cf. Frankel 80. W. S. Anderson, in his article, "Multiple Changes in the

Metamorphoses," TAPA 94 (1963) 1-27, and in his commentary, cited in
note 6 above, is acutely sensitive to psychological metamorphosis.
" V. Poschl, Die Dichtkunst Virgils: Bild und Symbol in der Aeneis (Inns
bruck-Wien 1950) 31 ff.
19 The language used in the Herse is instructive. As soon as Mercury catches
sight of her, obstipuit forma (2.726). With a strong word like obstipuit
Ovid has lapsed into the language of those who defend a rapist on the
grounds that the irresistible urges of male sexuality "naturally" force a
man to lose control of himself in the presence of a desirable woman.
20 It is more than a matter of upbringing, size, and weight. Adrienne Rich
(see note 16 above) 14 quotes an apparently anonymous review of Brown
miller; "...rape is the crime that can be committed because women are
vulnerable in a special way; the opposite of 'vulnerable' is 'impregnable.'
Pregnability, to coin a word, has been the basis of female identity, the
limit of freedom, the futility of education, the denial of growth." For
another supposed biological reason for vulnerability, menstruation, see
Janice Delaney, Mary Jane Lupton, and Emily Toth, The Curse: A Cultural
History of Menstruation (New York 1976).
21 Many instances in the category of quick rape discussed above also illus
trate female vulnerability.
22 Frankel 222 n82.
23 Cf. Frankel 80.
24 Frankel 79-80.

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 240 Leo C. Curran

For an analysis of the importance and meaning of other than physical

transformation, see the works of W. S. Anderson cited in note 17 above. I
have discussed two of the best examples of the dehumanization inherent in
rape, the Io and the Callisto, above in another context.
1 For the robust sexuality of the typical nymph, cf. Paully-Wissowa 17.2,
col. 1547, s.v. nymphai (e.g., the preferred epithets for them of Roman
poets were salaces, improbae, and procaces).
Both kinds of nymph are represented in ancient sculpture and painting.
Generally, they are the willing partners of the satyrs, but satyrs are oc
casionally depicted as resorting to rape.
1 Ovid's nymphs are precursors of the female martyrs of Christian hagiology,
who are also usually young, beautiful, virginal, and the objects of unwanted
sexual desire. In addition it is frequently through divine intervention that
virginity and modesty are preserved, e.g., by a miraculous growth of hair.
The role that such unwholesome episodes from the Lives of the Saints may
have played in the fantasy life of some Christians raises the question of
what role the rape stories of Greek myth played in that of some Romans.
There is controversy today concerning whether it is safer for a woman to
resist a rapist or to submit. Some rapists are easily frightened, but others
look for resistance as an opportunity for violence or may be provoked to
violence they had not intended.
As a bit of anecdotal testimony of the correctness of Ovid's psychology
here, I might mention that a woman recently told me of having been power
fully moved by a Renaissance painting of Io being raped by Jupiter in the
form of a dark cloud.
For the chase motif, cf. Otis 78f. As Parry (see note 6 above) puts it:
"In the majority of instances, then, heterosexual relationships in the
Metamorphoses, particularly when one party is divine, suggest violence, a
chase, ultimate rape " (273)
In the Io, where the flight is not especially prominent, Ovid nevertheless
includes the theme. Jupiter ends his speech of seduction with the request
that the nymph not flee, but she has already begun (1.597): 'ne fuge me!'
fugiebat enim.
Flight during or just after rape attempt resembles the punishment of wander
ing that often follows rape, e.g., Io, Callisto, and Latona. It should also
be noted that some women who are not rape victims but who are driven to
sexual acts against their will (like incest) by inner psychological compul
sion, pay for their deeds by the same punishment of wandering. Myrrha
wanders for nine months after her father discovers the identity of his
mysterious mistress. The language of 10.475-476 is sexually loaded and
suggests a further connection in Ovid's mind with rape:
pendenti nitidum vagina deripit ensem;
Myrrha fugit.

Byblis wanders after her incestuous lust is revealed and so does the object

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Rape and Rape Victims in the Metamorphoses 241

of that lust, her brother, who behaves here in a manner analogous to the
female rape victim. Wandering is an endless repetition of the fearful ex
perience of rape or an objectification of the guilt felt by the unwilling
subject of incestuous desires.
Ovid anticipates Hollywood, which has long capitalized on the profound
psychological resonances of the theme, and film is perhaps a medium better
suited to the realistic representation of the chase than is verbal narrative.
The chase has become a cliche of the film, its comic variant going back
beyond the Keystone Kops and what may be called its mechanical variant
having become almost obligatory in so many recent films in which the
spectator is more often expected to identify with the pursuer or to experi
ence vicariously the exhilaration of controlling powerful machines at very
high speeds. But the movies also have a long tradition in which the chase
is chosen as the supreme expression of the terror of the victim, whether
the pursuer be rapist, murderer, spy, vampire or other monster, or wild
animal. Ovid was trying to do something similar in a much less tractible
medium.

Cf. L. P. Wilkinson, Ovid Recalled (Cambridge 1955) 176 on the motif of

flight in the Arethusa.
Note that the technical term for bullet, glans, which can also mean penis
(cf. Martial 12.75.3) is here avoided, because its explicitness would
coarsen the already strongly implicit sexuality. Contrast a shorter bullet
simile, where glans is safely used, since the non-erotic context would not
bring to mind the sexual meaning of the word, and where the increasing
heat is of less importance than it is in our simile (14.825-26).
Research, which I have recently started, is beginning to shed some in
teresting light on the reaction to Ovid's rape stories on the part of con
temporary young women.

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