Gender Fluidity

      There’s an old chestnut, famously reported in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, in which Jupiter and Juno are having a men-are-from-Mars-women-are-from-Venus argument. This is something of a noteworthy setup in itself, since Jupiter and Juno always have a contentious relationship, and it’s unusual for them to be having any sort of casual conversation, but set that aside for now. The topic of the discussion is orgasms, and who has better orgasms, men or women. One might note at this point that Greek and Roman gods are never imagined as omniscient, so this isn’t a question that Jupiter can simply answer by virtue of being the all-knowing creator god. Moreover, as king and queen of the universe, Jupiter and Juno probably have the most inflexible sexual identities in the cosmos: they embody the experience of their respective sexes, and they do not experiment with gender fluidity, period. (It is true that just a little bit earlier in the Metamorphoses Jupiter raped the nymph Callisto by disguising himself as the goddess Diana, but I tend to think of him as wearing a feminine disguise over a male body--the gendered language makes clear that Jupiter’s masculine identity remained intact throughout the rape, and the references to masculine equipment lurking under “Diana’s” dress are fairly blatant as well.) So neither Jupiter nor Juno has anything approaching empirical knowledge of what the opposite sex’s orgasms are like. With this established, they decide that the argument is too subjective to be settled through discussion; they need an objective judge who knows what it’s like to be both female and male. Hence they summon Tiresias.

      (I should note that, in their argument, Jupiter and Juno are both asserting that the sex OPPOSITE their own enjoys better orgasms. As in the case of many notions from classical myth, this is rooted in attitudes toward sexual humiliation and dominance. The idea is that if one sex enjoys more intense orgasms, that sex will be more eager to have sexual experiences, and therefore will be more easily manipulated with promises of sex or the withholding of sex. As mentioned above, Jupiter and Juno have a contentious relationship and are always looking for each other’s weaknesses--it’s never wise for one of them to admit that they particularly enjoy something that the other is in a position to withhold (see Iliad 14, the ‘Deception of Zeus;’ see also Aristophanes’ play Lysistrata, in which men and women alike are represented as desperately horny and unable to refrain from sex for even a few days). This argument between Jupiter and Juno is meant to be extrapolated out among husbands and wives in general and their attempts to manipulate each other via sexual enticement, so it’s advantageous for the purposes of this argument to have less exciting orgasms, to not be the one who can be easily manipulated by sexual means.)

      Tiresias appears! He has a lot of backstory. You probably met him in high school by reading Oedipus Rex, in which he is the famous Blind Seer of Thebes, whose lack of ordinary sight is an ironic inversion of the fact that he is the only character who sees events clearly, blah blah blah, we all wrote the same boring high school essay on the subject, let’s move on. But plenty of interesting things happened in Tiresias’ life, long before Oedipus even got to first base with his mother. Tiresias’ mother was a close companion of Athena (one of Callimachus’ hymns, the ‘Bath of Pallas,’ seems to describe them as lesbian lovers, although I may be reading too much into it). There are varying accounts of how Tiresias became blind; sometimes it’s because he saw Athena bathing, and other times it was Juno/Hera who took his eyesight away--in any case, his blindness always has a supernatural explanation, and his ability to see the future is given in compensation for that lack of ordinary sight. But he also has other supernatural experiences in his past, the relevant material that prompts Juno and Jupiter to summon him to settle their argument: one day walking in the woods, he came across a pair of copulating snakes. When he hit them with a stick (I don’t know WHY he chose to do this), he miraculously was transformed into a woman. He lived as a woman for several years, until he came across the same snakes copulating, hit them again with a stick, and was transformed back into a man.

      Jupiter and Juno therefore call on his expertise, since he has lived as both a man and a woman; if anyone can resolve this question objectively, Tiresias can. And that’s a fairly loaded statement, since it implies that Tiresias had sex while in the form of a woman (in the Metamorphoses, Ovid specifies that ‘Venus of both kinds was known to him’). It’s well known that, with few exceptions, Greek and Roman society were rigidly patriarchal. The average woman did not have authority over her own sex life; it would have been controlled by her husband, father, or guardian. As a man, Tiresias would have been recognized as having autonomy over his sex life, but that privilege goes away once he goes home and announces his sex change. It’s clearly problematic to take someone who is inherently recognized as a part of a privileged class and, in response to something analogous to a lightning strike, demote them into an underprivileged class, assign them a guardian, and all the rest. Once she returned to her family, it seems unlikely that she would be having a lot of casual sex.

      On the other hand, maybe the female Tiresias never went home and attempted to fit herself into the conventional structure of her patriarchal family. Maybe she refused to give up her autonomy and instead set off for an independent life. This seems to fit perfectly well into Ovid’s world; the Metamorphoses certainly has enough random idiots bumbling around in the woods, seemingly cut off from any societal structure. The trouble is, the young idiots bumbling around in the woods inevitably run into trouble, whether they’re raped or turned into trees or attacked by dragons or forced to eat themselves. This isn’t the place to have a nice casual romantic encounter and write up some notes on the relative intensity of orgasms. If the possibility of a sexual encounter arises here, Tiresias would be lucky to still be human at the end of it.

      It seems as though Ovid didn’t want to put a lot of thought into how Tiresias lived her life when she was a woman. For his purposes, he only wanted to establish that Tiresias was an objective judge and move on with the argument between Jupiter and Juno (in case you were wondering, he quickly takes Jupiter’s side and says that women have better orgasms--possibly because Jupiter is more powerful that Juno and in a better position to reward him for his help). But it strikes me as unfortunate, because his sex change would be such a vexed situation, with a lot of potential to explore questions of gender roles in society, starting with what happens when a young man goes out for a walk and comes back saying that he’s misplaced his penis. Carol Ann Duffy took a shot at addressing this with her poem “Mrs. Tiresias” in The World’s Wife, which shows short vignettes of Tiresias’ new life as a supposedly objective authority on gender and sex differences. I still think there’s a lot left to be said.

A Non-Stereotypical Romance

      I admit that I’ve always loved the story of Procris and Cephalus (even though it has a maudlin ending), because the characters seem designed to defy all the standard narratives of Greek mythology: Cephalus is not a typical hero, Procris is not a typical heroine, and their relationship has a well-balanced power dynamic. At the outset, Procris and Cephalus are a besotted young Athenian married couple (Procris is a princess) who are inseparably devoted to one another, not terribly promising as narrative subjects go. Never fear: we would hardly be talking about them today if their romance had continued unproblematically forever; you can be sure that conflict will arrive and make them interesting. The dawn goddess Eos (who in an unrelated incident was cursed with a humiliating penchant to develop crushes on handsome mortal youths) becomes infatuated with Cephalus, and goes so far as to kidnap him and bring him to her home in the distant, exotic east. According to Ovid, Cephalus dauntlessly resists Eos’s advances, staying faithful to his beloved at home.

      You can already see what sets Cephalus apart from most mythic heroes. Greek marriage customs had no expectation of exclusivity on the man’s part. While married women were required to refrain from sex with anyone except their husbands, married men were only restricted insofar as they could not (legally) have sex with other men’s wives--they would be expected to have sex with slaves, prostitutes, and other available women. Cephalus’ pledge to save himself for Procris alone is extraordinarily romantic. More importantly, for all the innumerable young virgin girls who are kidnapped and raped by aggressive gods, there are very, very few men in classical mythology who are kidnapped by goddesses and subjected to their inappropriate advances. Even more rare is for a man who is subject to a woman’s inappropriate advances to turn the woman down. Remember Odysseus on Circe’s island--it’s dangerous for a mortal man to get mixed up with a powerful goddess (she can turn men into animals!), and Odysseus for this reason takes substantial precautions before he even dares to approach Circe’s house. But once he has taken those precautions and thinks he had overpowered Circe, he has no qualms about sleeping with her at her suggestion, Penelope’s unceasing devotion notwithstanding. For a more obscure (and in my mind, much more entertaining) myth, you can look up the Homeric Hymn to Aphrodite, in which Zeus humiliates Aphrodite by causing her to become infatuated with a mortal named Anchises. Anchises knows how dangerous goddesses are to mortal men, and he is naturally suspicious when a gorgeous ambrosia-scented girl with a neckline cut down to her navel shows up on his doorstep claiming to be a virgin. Nevertheless, once Aphrodite convinces him that she’s a mortal who was brought to him via some improbable divine intervention to be his bride, Anchises has no objection to jumping into bed with her. (And for an amusing counterexample from a different culture, you should read the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which the goddess Ishtar propositions the hero Gilgamesh, and he angrily rejects her, citing all the terrible fates that befell her past lovers.) The message is clear: divine women are bad news for mortal men, particularly in bed. Cephalus knows this, and he chooses to reject Eos and save himself for Procris, even though Eos is a goddess and, it goes without saying, divinely beautiful and not a virgin so probably great in bed, etc.

      Eos is upset. Having kept Cephalus in captivity for a substantial period of time without having managed to seduce him, she (with evident bitterness) agrees to release him. She takes a page from Iago’s book and gets her revenge by congratulating Cephalus on his unshakable fidelity and expressing her sincere wish that Procris has been just as faithful in his absence.

      So what has Procris been up to while Cephalus was gone?

      Spoiler alert: Procris has been faithful all along. But Eos manages to plant enough doubt in Cephalus’ mind that he decides to test her--in fact, to lay a trap for her. Eos, in her infinite charity, provides him with a disguise that renders him totally unrecognizable at home, and sends him off with gifts for Procris. Once in Athens, Cephalus uses the gifts, and his disguise, and no doubt his extensive knowledge of his devoted wife’s weaknesses, to seduce Procris. When she finally relents to his seduction, he throws off his disguise and accuses her of adultery. (This is worse than Odysseus and his barely coded talk about geese.)

      In disgrace, Procris flees to Crete, and this is where her story really starts to get interesting. As mentioned above, she is Athenian, but in Crete she undertakes a liaison with King Minos (remember him from Ariadne’s story?). Minos at the time is suffering from a curse: his wife Pasiphae, fed up with his tendency to neglect her and have affairs with other women, has placed an extraordinary curse on him, with the result that whenever he has sex with someone other than his wife, he ejaculates wild animals, scorpions, millipedes, etc., which in a bloody and disgusting process kill the woman in bed with him. He is on the market for a Scheherazade who could have sex with him without dying, and Procris steps up to be that Scheherazade. She uses magic to cure him, in most accounts has sex with him, and he is so grateful that he gives her some magical gifts and (in contrast to most of the Athenians who showed up in Minoan Crete, cf. Theseus and friends) sends her home unharmed. Like her husband, she also returns in disguise (as a man, by the way), shows Cephalus the magical gifts--a hunting dog that will always catch its prey, and a hunting spear that will always strike its target--and declares that she will not sell them for any price other than sex. In his eagerness to obtain the prizes, Cephalus agrees to sleep with the stranger, and is duly ashamed when she reveals herself. They have a heartfelt reconciliation, although the jealousy problem won’t go away.

      Even outside of her involvement with Cephalus, Procris is an extraordinary woman. She has magical knowledge that she can use to remove curses. She has the wherewithal to travel to hostile places and return unharmed. She has been given magical gifts by a foreign king, and these gifts grant her unequaled prowess in hunting, not a typical pastime for married women. Most incredibly, she has  a sex life outside of her marriage. There are so very few princesses in Greek mythology who are allowed to have sex with anyone besides their husbands; usually they become involved with a disreputable adulterer and are resoundingly condemned for their wickedness, often even killed for adultery. Procris is a princess who has a sexual partner outside of her romance with Cephalus and doesn’t seem the worse for it; in fact, she comes home with magical gifts, and Cephalus freely enjoys them. In respect to the fact that she enters an extramarital sexual relationship of her own initiative, and the non-condemnatory way this relationship is presented even in light of her primary romance with Cephalus, she may be unparalleled among the women of Greek myth.

      At this point the jealousy between Cephalus and Procris spins completely out of control, and the story devolves into a disappointingly predictable tragedy, in which a series of ironic misunderstandings lead to Procris’ death. Procris covertly follows Cephalus out on a hunting trip to make sure that he isn’t cheating on her; Cephalus says some misleading things that make her think he is cheating; Procris starts sobbing in the bushes; Cephalus thinks the noise is an animal and kills Procris with her own spear. This is the end of what is, if not the greatest romance of Greek myth, certainly the one in which devotion and fidelity are most important. I find it disappointing that these two extraordinary characters are ultimately flattened out into a tragic morality tale, after which Cephalus is exiled and remarries another woman in a much more traditional, which is to say, not heartbreakingly romantic, marriage. Cephalus and Procris deserve a better ending, and in my mind the real tragedy is that they fall victim to ordinary irony and jealousy, which they should have been able to escape.

Notice

My apologies. A confluence of illness, some family issues, and the income tax deadline have made it impossible for me to complete a mythology write-up this week. I'll be back next Sunday; in the meantime, enjoy this invective against the notorious Heinrich Schliemann.

Dear Mr. Schliemann

My ire is too distant here

to reach a proper pitch.

I’ve only heard about your crimes

in textbooks, secondhand,

but since you razed the citadel

after three thousand years

and did what Greeks dared not to do,

I want to be incensed--

but you were dead a century

when I was born, your crimes

passed by me unavengeable

and perished out of time

and yet still smoking. Were I she

who “Priam’s Treasure” wore

(or her real-life counterpart)

I think I could not be

more angry than I am. And yet

it’s not commensurate

and can’t be, ever, in my life,

I’ve been thwarted by fate:

so she three thousand years too soon,

so I one hundred late.

The Paragon of Fidelity

      Everyone knows who the paragon of fidelity is, and there’s no use pretending you don’t: it’s Penelope. Just as Tarpeia was used as the Roman metonym for treachery, on many occasions I’ve heard one person called another person’s Penelope to communicate patient fidelity, whether over a protracted absence or in the face of deep uncertainty. And we all know why: Odysseus was mired in a distant war for ten years (despite his best efforts to dodge the draft) and was lost at sea for another ten, while Penelope waited at home, holding the fort for Odysseus and refusing to marry a new husband. At long last he returns and murders all his rivals, reassuming the kingship long abandoned. It can be told as a very simple fable, but there is more going on under the surface.

      Penelope is her own woman, most definitely. Here Odysseus has been off besieging Troy for ten years and getting lost at sea for another ten, and meanwhile Penelope was stuck at home, unsure for twenty years whether her husband was alive or dead (gone twenty years and he couldn’t pick up a phone, can you imagine). She’s independent and fully capable of getting along without her husband, and Dorothy Parker wrote an excellent poem on the subject of Penelope’s long-tried patience--a worthy rejoinder to Tennyson’s depiction of Odysseus as irresponsible, obsessed with novelty, and totally unsuitable for the kingship that Penelope so carefully defended on his behalf. In the Odyssey Penelope is very quiet, but she might be incredibly clever. In effort to maintain control over her home life, she dreams up the Web of Penelope: after Odysseus has been missing for some time, Penelope’s house begins to fill up with Suitors, who demand that she declare her husband dead and remarry. In the meantime, they set to drinking all the wine in the house and slaughtering the livestock. In response, Penelope announces that she’ll remarry only after she finishes weaving a burial shroud for Laertes, Odysseus’ father, who has no other offspring in evidence to take care of him. (He’s not dead, of course, but she thought he might appreciate a morbid little gift that will every day remind him that he is doomed to die, and that she is fully prepared for that eventuality.) To buy herself even more time, she weaves the shroud during the day and then unweaves it at night. The Suitors, who probably don’t do much weaving themselves (and are too busy drinking to worry about it anyway) don’t notice that the weaving is going slowly until one of the maids tips them off, at which point they force Penelope to complete it in a timely manner. So that’s the end of that.

      Penelope’s real cleverness, though, comes in when Odysseus returns. He wants to scout out the scene quietly, so he disguises himself as a beggar and starts casually hanging around Odysseus’ house--which by the way annoys the regular beggar, who challenges Odysseus to a fistfight for the rights to beg from the Suitors (the regular beggar loses miserably). This disguise ruse goes on for a good while, in which time Odysseus reveals to select people who he is--but never to his wife. If you study the Odyssey in a myth class, one of the big questions people ask about Penelope is, when does she realize that the “beggar” is really Odysseus in disguise? It’s clear that Odysseus doesn’t want her to recognize him; in fact, when the elderly nurse Eurycleia recognizes him, he threatens to kill her, and actually grabs her by the throat, to prevent her from revealing the truth to Penelope. Penelope herself never says anything to indicate that she’s in on the secret, but there are certain hints in the text that suggest she’s just putting on a pretense to keep everyone else in the dark. And it’s quite plausible she would do so, really. One of the difficulties of being a socially prominent woman in the Odyssey’s world is that Penelope is never alone: she’s always accompanied by at least two handmaidens, even in private settings. The text also makes clear the fact that the handmaidens are not necessarily to be trusted. We’re told that some of them are sleeping with the Suitors and therefore have an interest in deposing the current ruling family, and they could easily report Odysseus’ arrival if he reveals himself to Penelope. So we’ll concede that Penelope has a motivation to speak equivocally. But does she realize the truth the moment this “beggar” walks in the door, or is she truly in the dark right up until he starts shooting people?

      The most revealing scene, I think, is when Penelope has a dream (or at least claims to have a dream--she might just be fabricating it to have a coded discussion), wakes up in the middle of the night, and summons the “beggar” for a dream-interpretation. In the dream, she says, she had a little flock of twelve geese, and she enjoyed keeping the little pets, but then suddenly an eagle appeared overhead and killed all of them, and she was greatly distressed. The dream turns out not to need any strenuous interpretation, since the eagle delivers a speech claiming that the geese represent the Suitors and the eagle represents her husband. (The “beggar,” prompted for his interpretation, says that he's satisfied with the eagle's summing-up.) In the conventional interpretation, this is a rather transparent means for Penelope to discuss her suspicions with Odysseus, to let him know that she’s in on his plan and that she knows he’s only disguised himself so he can murder all the Suitors in good time. But then why does she say that the geese are to her, and that she’s upset when the eagle returns? Well, Penelope might have been a merry quasi-widow and have enjoyed various attentions from the many men who were so eager to marry her, but why would she reveal that so casually to a stranger who was hostile to the Suitors--or worse, to her husband? A much more interesting hypothesis was advanced by Margaret Atwood in her novel The Penelopiad, in which the geese are not code for the Suitors but rather the handmaidens, who work as Penelope’s spies, sleeping with the Suitors to extract information from them and remaining truly loyal to the mistress of the house. In the Odyssey, the handmaidens will be duly executed by Odysseus for their infidelity, and much of the drama in Atwood’s novel stems from Penelope’s sense of guilt in letting the punishment fall on their heads. It certainly makes more interesting material for contemplation than the dream-eagle’s interpretation.

     When Odysseus finally kills the Suitors and reasserts his right to the palace, Penelope insists on confirming the identity of this person who has been disguised in her home for so long. To this end, she proposes moving their private marital bed. Both of them know that one of the bedposts was a live sapling that was carved down to function as furniture, and cannot be moved because its roots are still in the ground. Odysseus grows irate at the prospect of moving the bed, and Penelope is satisfied that he is who he claims to be. The immovably fixed position of the bed, of course, is a metaphor for Penelope herself and the undisruptable state of their marriage, regardless of how other things change.