INTRODUCTION: PLATO COMICUS

The rape (or threatened rape) of a sleeping Europa in Plato Comicus has curiously not attracted any attention from critics commenting on later texts which narrate the story of Europa. Yet, the motifs of night, sleep and dreaming play a prominent role in the Europa poems of both Moschus and Horace. This article will investigate the role of these motifs and argue for a closer connection between these two poems than has thus far been allowed. It will also maintain that, in both poems, the suggestion that the heroine was (or could be) raped in her sleep is lurking in the background and that, if taken into consideration, it can significantly expand our scope of interpretation and perhaps account for some features which would otherwise be hard to explain. While it is not unlikely that the two authors to be discussed here had direct access to Plato Comicus' Europa,Footnote ¹ my argument does not rely on knowledge of this comedy, which could, after all, be parodying an earlier tragedy.Footnote ² Rather, the main thesis of this article is that a classical or early Hellenistic version of Europa's myth (which Plato Comicus may either reflect or be the source of) had the young woman raped in her sleep. This tradition, then, informs these two later poems, which may or may not have been directly influenced by Plato Comicus’ rendition.

First, a closer look at Plato Comicus’ Europa: the most substantial fragment to have come down to us from this comedy, fr. 43 K.–A., transmitted in Athenaeus’ Deipn. 9.367, reads thus:

Although assumptions must remain speculative as to the identities of the two interlocutors, the fragment implies that at some point in this comedy a woman, who in all likelihood must be Europa, was found sleeping. Commentators surmise that Speaker B, who is probably Zeus, was tempted to rape her in her sleep, while the more sexually experienced Speaker A advises him not to, arguing that one can derive much greater pleasure from having sex with a woman who is awake, owing to her παροψίδες: these ‘side-dishes’—or, as Pirotta and Storey put it, ‘hors d’ oeuvres’—must indicate the woman's enthusiastic participation in sexual intercourse.Footnote ⁴ Although this is an entirely plausible reconstruction of the scene, nothing prevents us from imagining a scenario in which the rape of a sleeping Europa has actually taken place at this point in the comedy. Speaker A could now be putting down his interlocutor, belittling his ‘accomplishment’, of which he may have bragged, and pointing out that he failed to secure the maximum amount of pleasure for himself. It might be useful to compare Terence's Eunuch, based on a Menandrean comedy, where young Chaerea dons a eunuch's garb, manages to be put in charge of the maiden Pamphile, and rapes her just as she has fallen asleep. Chaerea recounts all this in dialogue (starting at v. 560) with his friend Antipho, who pokes fun at him for his eunuch disguise. It is not inconceivable, therefore, that the surviving fragment portrays a moment not before but after the rape of a sleeping Europa, with Zeus already having described the rape and now receiving a (serious or mock-) erotodidaxis from a more competent lover, who is here pointing out the disadvantages of having sex with a sleeping woman.Footnote ⁵

MOSCHUS

The first poem to be considered here, and the one chronologically closer to Plato Comicus, is Moschus’ epyllion, which presents the sexual awakening and subsequent abduction of an acquiescent (if not openly desiring) Europa. This poem opens at night time, with Europa asleep in her father's house and Aphrodite sending her a dream in which two women, the personifications of Asia and (the as yet unnamed) Europe, fight over her. The latter will win her over, ‘not without her consent’ (v. 14: οὐκ ἀέκουσαν). It has frequently been noted that, for the sequence of the sleeping (and dreaming) Europa and her trip to the meadow, Moschus drew inspiration from the dreams and subsequent erotic encounters of Nausicaa in Odyssey Book 6 and Medea in Argonautica Book 3.Footnote ⁶ However, the verbal echoes from the Odyssey and the Argonautica do not tell the whole story, and, in fact, highlight the problematic nature of Europa's dream in terms of narrative continuity. It has been pointed out, for example, that, unlike the dreams of Nausicaa and Medea, which actually provide the incentive for their respective trips out of the house, Europa's dream does not lead to any particular action on her part: even though it makes her upset initially, she then gets on with her everyday activities.Footnote ⁷ Moreover, Homer and Apollonius are not the only models on which Moschus relies for the dream sequence: the presence of the two personified continents in Europa's dream is reminiscent of Atossa's dream in Aeschylus’ Persians (181–7), while Io's recurring nightmares, which led to her expulsion from her father's house in the pseudo-Aeschylean Prometheus Bound (645–54), provide another model from tragedy.Footnote ⁸ Kuhlmann has read Europa's dream against the background of these two tragedies, and detected a clear discrepancy between the introduction of the dream as γλυκύν … ὄνειρον in the first line of the poem and the ‘dark’ subtext of Aeschylean tragedy.Footnote ⁹

Kuhlmann's argument that a reader would be unpleasantly surprised by the content of Europa's dream, especially if (s)he recalled the gloomy precedents of Atossa and Io, can be taken further. A reader familiar with the comedy of Plato Comicus or another text in which Europa is raped in her sleep might, in fact, already be apprehensive when reading in the first verses that Europa, ‘still a virgin’ (v. 7: ἔτι παρθένος), is sound asleep in the upstairs part of her father's house (v. 6: ὑπωροφίοισιν ἐνὶ κνώσσουσα δόμοισι). The specificity of the sleeping arrangements not only creates a ‘Hellenistic’ feel of domesticity,Footnote ¹⁰ which could, in fact, have already been present in Plato Comicus,Footnote ¹¹ but also evokes an atmosphere of loneliness, in which Europa might be vulnerable to being raped by a god.Footnote ¹² The very first line of the poem, Εὐρώπῃ ποτὲ Κύπρις ἐπὶ γλυκὺν ἧκεν ὄνειρον, perfectly encapsulates the ambivalence about what is going to happen to Europa (and what her role in it might be) by pulling the reader towards two different directions. On the one hand, the dream is explicitly defined as sweet (but for whom, Europa herself or Aphrodite?). On the other hand, the verb employed for Aphrodite's sending of the dream, ἐπὶ … ἧκεν in tmesis, implies a violent act. The verb ἐφίημι has connotations of aggressiveness: it can be used for launching spears and arrows (as in Od. 24.180), sending death (as in Il. 4.396) and laying hands on someone (in a hostile sense, as in Od. 20.39). Even more impressively, this verb can mean ‘to put the male to the female’Footnote ¹³—a definition which would see Aphrodite leading the masculine ὄνειρος to mate with the passive sleeping Europa (imagined as a domesticated animal).Footnote ¹⁴ In this first line, Europa is already ‘raped’ in her sleep, and, although this does not happen in the literal manner of the fragment from Plato Comicus, a reader aware of such a tradition would perhaps confront the ‘sweetness’ of the dream with more suspicion than the usually ‘romantic’ takes of modern readers.

When we come to the dream itself, we notice another discrepancy between its description first by the external narrator (vv. 8–15) and then by Europa herself in direct speech (vv. 21–7). Europa emphasizes her own excitement and desire (v. 25: πόθος) for the unknown woman,Footnote ¹⁵ who welcomed her ἀσπασίως (v. 26), as if she were her own child. The external narrator presents a far more violent picture: the two women are fighting (v. 8: μάχεσθαι), and the ‘foreigner’ pulls Europa with the force of her ‘powerful arms’ (v. 13: κρατερῇσι βιωομένη παλάμῃσιν), although the girl is still ‘not unwilling’ (v. 14: οὐκ ἀέκουσαν). So, whereas Europa's account elides the violence and reinterprets the dream as a calm transition into a new family,Footnote ¹⁶ the external narrator suggests that Europa is raped by a very masculinized womanFootnote ¹⁷—the detail of the strong arms is, as Marco Fantuzzi and Richard Hunter argue, indicative of ‘rape by a male’.Footnote ¹⁸ Moschus’ Europa is, then, not only metaphorically raped (by the dream) while she sleeps but also dreaming of being, metaphorically, raped.

It is significant that, when she awakes, Europa still has the two women right before her eyes (vv. 18–19: ἀμφοτέρας δέ | εἰσέτι πεπταμένοισιν ἐν ὄμμασιν εἶχε γυναῖκας), because the dream was as vivid as a waking vision (v. 17: τὸ γὰρ ὡς ὕπαρ εἶδεν ὄνειρον).Footnote ¹⁹ The persistence of this vision even after Europa has woken up suggests that this first rape (by and in the dream) is, to a certain extent, a real event: it is an extraordinary dream (or even apparition)Footnote ²⁰ that spills over into waking reality. At the same time, Europa's difficulty in both separating dream from reality and identifying the person she saw in the dream (and, supposedly, desired) is very characteristic of the epistemological issues perennially surrounding rape, whereby the victim (and others) might wonder what actually happened, as opposed to what she may have imagined, who the perpetrator was, and to what extent she may have been complicit.Footnote ²¹ Close to the end of the poem we will find Europa riding the bull and yet again wondering who her rapist is (v. 135: τίς ἔπλεο;). Even though Moschus has presented a daring Europa, who fondles the bull and does not hesitate to mount his back, the girl's ignorance of her rapist's identity and apparent self-blaming for abandoning her father's house (vv. 146: ὤμοι ἐγὼ μέγα δή τι δυσάμμορος, ἥ ῥά τε δῶμα | πατρὸς ἀποπρολιποῦσα) return us to the immediate aftermath of her dream, and again raise questions regarding knowledge, consent and representation. Ultimately, the Europa raped in ‘real life’ is the same Europa raped by and in the dream: she is in equal measure ignorant (and therefore innocent) of what is really happening and willing to assume responsibility for it by acknowledging her desire.

Helen Morales has recently made a compelling argument for the affinity between rape and dreaming in ancient narratives: dreams can articulate (or fail to articulate) rape, obscure or allegorize it; they can also provide counter-narratives in which a woman's dissent is recognized, antagonizing the authorized narrative which often suppresses dissent and presents women as willing and blameworthy.Footnote ²² We have seen how Moschus’ Europa herself suppresses the violence which, according to the external narrator, was carried out against her in the dream-rape. Such connections between dreams and rape are even more pronounced when the victim is actually raped in her sleep, and her dream stands in for her real rape. Indeed, Morales draws attention to the story of Ilia, the mother of Remus and Romulus, who was raped by Mars while asleep and dreaming.Footnote ²³ In Ennius’ Annals (vv. 34–50 Skutsch) we find her still asleep, probably in her own bedroom, where the rape must have taken place,Footnote ²⁴ and in the (literal and metaphorical) dark. After an old woman brings in light, she awakes frightened and tells her sister that she saw a handsome man carry her off through strange places,Footnote ²⁵ and that she then heard her father, whom she could not see, pronounce a brief prophecy about her future.

HORACE

The example of Ilia's rape will be relevant for the next poem to be considered here, Horace's Ode 3.27. This poem begins as a propemptikon to a certain Galatea before changing tack suddenly at v. 25 and somehow comparing Galatea's imminent journey to Europa's bull-ride across the sea.Footnote ²⁶ This second and more extensive section of the ode (vv. 25–76) is entirely dedicated to Europa and comprises a brief description of her journey (vv. 25–34), a speech by Europa lamenting her fortune (vv. 34–66), and a prophecy delivered by Venus (vv. 66–76). The first phrase in this mythological part of the poem (vv. 25–6: sic et Europe niueum doloso | credidit tauro latus) gives the impression that the poet is about to plunge into an ekphrastic description of the snow-white Europa on the bull.Footnote ²⁷ Instead, he focusses on Europa's fear of the sea teeming with monsters (vv. 26–8), and then compares the heroine's idyllic past to her terrifying present: just recently she was gathering flowers in meadows; ‘now in the glimmering night she saw nothing but the stars and the waters’ (vv. 31–2: nocte sublustri nihil astra praeter | uidit et undas).Footnote ²⁸

Horace is the only author to set the scene of Europa's bull-ride at night. Although a (now lost) precedent of Europa riding the bull under a starry sky (perhaps a pictorial precedent, conflating Europa and Selene)Footnote ²⁹ cannot be excluded, on the evidence we have, we must assume that the night-time setting is Horace's own innovation. In terms of narrative economy, this detail makes little sense: Europa would not have been out picking flowers at night, so, presumably, Jupiter abducted her during the day, but the journey is so long (even for omnipotent Jupiter!) that it is now night and they have yet to reach Crete.Footnote ³⁰ Gordon Williams argues that the nocturnal setting is ‘an inspired invention’, as it concentrates attention on the scene, rendering ‘the omission of great sections of the story’ irrelevant.Footnote ³¹ But which sections of the story have been omitted? The flower-picking is still present, even if it is reduced to two lines, and Europa still decides to mount the bull (in one and a half lines). The only significant elements not mentioned are Europa's companions (she is a singular opifex coronae in v. 30) and Jupiter’ metamorphosis and ‘seduction’ of the girl, which are merely hinted at in doloso … tauro (vv. 25–6). Horace's elliptic narrative compresses the ‘seductive’ parts of the story to create a vision that, at least for its heroine, is definitely nightmarish. Like the Europa of the opening lines of Moschus, but at different points in the story, in this first scene Horace's Europa is a lonely figure, she is having an experience she cannot fully comprehend, and it is night. Could she also be asleep? Could the abduction be happening in her dream? The analysis below will suggest that Horace recognized the general affinity between dreaming and rape and was aware of versions (or a version) in which Europa was raped in her sleep. Whether he was led to place such an emphasis on night, sleep and dreams by a particularly careful reading of Moschus or a direct knowledge of Plato Comicus (or another ‘sleeping Europa’) we cannot know, but this article will suggest that there can be truth in both of these assumptions.

As soon as they arrive in Crete, and without any mention of Jupiter discarding his animal guise and having sex with Europa, she launches into a passionate speech expressing despair and acute remorse for her (unspecified) actions.Footnote ³² Near the beginning of her self-excoriating tirade, Europa asks three questions.Footnote ³³ The first (v. 37: ubi quo ueni? ‘Whence have I come, where have I arrived?’) is, as Robin Nisbet and Niall Rudd point out,Footnote ³⁴ a reflection on the change in her moral situation, but shows, on a literal level, how completely lost the heroine feels. The unfavourable comparison between her idyllic past (‘whence have I come’) and her dire present situation resurfaces in the third question, where she asks herself: ‘Was it preferable to journey over the long waves or to gather fresh flowers?’ (vv. 42–4). In the second (and longest) question, however, Europa asks: ‘Am I awake as I lament a disgraceful sin or am I free from stain and does a vain imagining delude me (ludit imago | uana), which, speeding from the ivory gate, brings a dream?’ (vv. 38–42). What is the correct answer to this question? And what motivates Europa to ask it? The nocturnal setting might be one answer to the latter question, as night and darkness can trigger confusion between reality and illusion. On the surface, the question reads as wishful thinking: the heroine does not want to believe that what is happening is true; she wishes it were only a false dream.Footnote ³⁵ Ιf, however, Europa's literary history is brought to bear on her question here, a different answer, one that Europa does not even consider, might appear more valid. In the opening of Moschus’ poem—a poem which Horace, as most critics agree, had read and transformed,Footnote ³⁶ Europa is having a dream which is explicitly identified as true (v. 5: ἀτρεκέων … ὀνείρων), and which she will later find difficult to separate from waking reality. Horace's Europa does not contemplate the scenario of a ‘true’ dream (a vision that she would be having while asleep and which might reveal or symbolize her actual rape), but a reader familiar with a version in which Europa is raped in her sleep might make that association for her. Her second question would thus admit an answer which diverges from the authorized narrative: the heroine is neither awake and guilty nor having a false dream and ‘free from stain’, but sleeping and having a lucid dream of her rape (lucid in that, even though fleetingly, she is aware of it being a dream).

There are further elements in the poem which reinforce the notion that Europa is having a dream or vision, perhaps while being raped. The last stanzas of her lament (vv. 57–66) are taken up by a speech, in which her father urges her to commit suicide, offering up two alternative ways in which she could do so (hanging herself with her girdle or jumping off some sharp rocks), if she did not want to become her lover's concubine and a slave to a barbarian mistress. The standard view is that this is an imaginary speech, in which ‘the girl puts into her father's mouth an assessment of her situation which she herself has no reason to deny’.Footnote ³⁷ In fact, this speech by Europa's father is introduced abruptly in v. 57 (‘uilis Europe’, pater urget absens), with an oxymoron between the ‘physical pressure’ implied by urget and the physical distance of absens.Footnote ³⁸ Another way of interpreting this verse would be to see in absens the insubstantiality of a dream or vision, which can still feel present and pressing for the one experiencing it.Footnote ³⁹ It might also be relevant at this point to recall the dream which narrativizes and substitutes Ilia's rape by Mars in Ennius’ Annals. In that dream, Ilia hears her father's voice address her, and, although she desires to see him, he remains invisible (v. 47: nec sese dedit in conspectum corde cupitus). The way in which Ennius introduces Aeneas’ words also plays with the paradox of hearing someone, who is probably invisible (and therefore ‘absent’) as he speaks,Footnote ⁴⁰ in the context of a vision: exim compellare pater me uoce uidetur | his uerbis (vv. 43–4). Aeneas ‘is seen’ or ‘appears’ (although he is himself not seen) to address her with his voice—compellare here does not imply reproach, although this is part of the semantic field of the verb, which is, at least visually, also very close to compellere; urging and reproaching, though, are exactly what Europa's father is doing.

Right after the end of her father's speech, and without listening from Europa herself again, the poem draws to its close by staging an epiphany of Venus, who appears suddenly at vv. 66–7 (aderat querenti | perfidum ridens Venus), and will be the one to inform Europa that the bull was in fact Jupiter and that half the world will bear her name. The question here is: why Venus?Footnote ⁴¹ In Moschus it is Zeus himself who reveals his identity to Europa (vv. 153–61). Venus is here ‘smiling treacherously’ (perfidum ridens),Footnote ⁴² but the only god who can properly be called perfidus in the story as it has been told thus far is Jupiter. A late antique Virgilian cento on Europa will conclude precisely by calling Jupiter ‘a treacherous plunderer’ (perfidus … praedo).Footnote ⁴³ My suggestion is that Venus appears here to put an end to the nightmare or hallucination that Europa is experiencing, and which, in a way, is still the same ‘sweet’ dream (a dream of the heroine's rape) she herself had prepared and sent in the opening lines of Moschus’ poem. Tellingly, perhaps, Venus picks up the aetiological theme that was introduced in Moschus’ poem when Aphrodite sent upon Europa the dream of the two fighting continents—a theme that was never revisited in that poem,Footnote ⁴⁴ and thus allows Horace to create a kind of intertextual ring composition. It is also significant that Venus only speaks now, ‘when she had enjoyed herself enough’, or, literally, ‘when she had played enough’ (v. 69: ubi lusit satis),Footnote ⁴⁵ and that the same verb is used for the false dream that may be ‘playing with’ Europa in v. 40 (ludit imago). We know from Lucretius that lovers are like people who are asleep and dreaming, and that ‘in love Venus tricks lovers with phantoms, and they cannot sate themselves by gazing at bodies’ (4.1101–2: sic in amore Venus simulacris ludit amantis | nec satiare queunt spectando corpora coram).Footnote ⁴⁶ By making Venus appear here at the end of Europa's lament (and dream / hallucination?), Horace is both alluding to the dream in Moschus, suggesting that it only ends here, and making a more general point about the furor (v. 36) of love, which, as in Lucretius, makes people see not the truth but ‘vain imaginings’ and simulacra.Footnote ⁴⁷ This could, then, work as a warning to the mysterious Galatea of the propemptikon, who may be going abroad with a (dubious) lover,Footnote ⁴⁸ and stars in her eyes. On my reading, Galatea is warned that what may begin as a ‘sweet’ dream can easily turn into a nightmare—a hellish, dark reality, in which she will lack both control and knowledge of her true situation, and be at the mercy of her all-powerful (and perhaps adulterous, like Jupiter) lover.

What Venus says to Europa is in part conventional (mostly towards the end, where she prophesies her great fortune, vv. 74–5: magnam … fortunam) and in part startling. First, she orders her to cease from her angry outburst, ‘for the bull you hate [or do not see?] will give you his horns to tear’ (vv. 71–2: cum tibi inuisus laceranda reddet | cornua taurus). Venus echoes Europa's own furious words in vv. 46–8, where she had wished to gash the bull with steel and smash his horns (lacerare ferro | et frangere … cornua monstri), but the precise meaning of Venus’ prophecy is unclear. Is this an oblique reference to the return of the god no longer in his bull-form or to imminent lovemaking or both?Footnote ⁴⁹ An attractive suggestion is put forward by Gordon Williams, who would like to print cornua and taurus within inverted commas as better representing the ‘amused contempt of Venus’ remarks’: Horace would be ‘hinting at an interpretation of the legend which viewed the appearance of Jupiter in the form of a bull as a fantasy of the girl's imagination’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Reinforcing a dark and Lucretian take on the playfulness of Venus, Horace would thus be making the goddess acknowledge her part in causing Europa to see Zeus as a ‘bull’ with ‘horns’. But if Venus is suggesting that Jupiter's bull-guise is but a figment of Europa's imagination, will this not also mean that the whole affair of her abduction and the bull-ride across the sea only happened in her imagination (or dreams) too?

The next line spoken by Venus, v. 73, is equally enigmatic: uxor inuicti Iouis esse nescis. This can be read in two ways: Europa does not know that she is the wife of almighty Jupiter or does not know how to be, how to play the part of, Jupiter's wife.Footnote ⁵¹ The first alternative implies a Greek construction and is not favoured by most commentators,Footnote ⁵² but, even if we dismiss it, the second alternative, as Gordon Williams again points out, does not imply that Europa already knows that she is Jupiter's wife, but rather combines this new information with the command that she needs to behave as his wife.Footnote ⁵³ It is probably also the case that Venus is revealing not only the true identity of Europa's lover but also the very fact that she is now a wife (uxor is both emphatic and ironic; Jupiter has another wife). But how is it that Europa is (not ‘will become’) a wife,Footnote ⁵⁴ if no sexual encounter has been described or even referred to? The reader might be as surprised as Europa herself to hear that she already is Jupiter's wife. The problem of Europa's ‘absent rape’, as Michèle Lowrie calls it, has puzzled critics.Footnote ⁵⁵ On the one hand, the heroine's lament and self-reproach make more sense if Jupiter has already raped her. On the other hand, no such rape is mentioned, Europa begins speaking as soon as she lands on Crete, and shows no awareness of the fact that the bull that carried her off is not really a bull.Footnote ⁵⁶ Perhaps Europa's rape is ‘absent’, although real and with consequences, because it happens while she is dreaming or having a vision. If Europa's experience, up to Venus’ epiphany, is placed within the realm of dreams, her ignorance of her true situation not only makes sense but can also be seen to parallel another Ilia, this time Ovid's. After being raped by Mars in her sleep, she awakes by the river strangely languid, but does not know why this is so (Fast. 3.25: languida consurgit, nec scit cur languida surgat). The dream, in her case, was entirely symbolic and had nothing to do with the specifics of her sexual violation by Mars.Footnote ⁵⁷ The fact that Horace leaves his heroine in the dark until the very end of the poem highlights (and forces the reader to think about) the same epistemological problems Moschus’ Europa had grappled with at the end of her own vision: what exactly happened, how much of it was true and how much a product of the heroine's imagination, and to what extent did she wish for it to happen? And is there any way these questions can be answered with certainty?

One final word should be said regarding the ode's tone and generic affiliation. With few exceptions,Footnote ⁵⁸ scholars have found this entire poem playful and ironic,Footnote ⁵⁹ while the section on Europa has been seen as a parody of either Hellenistic epyllion or tragedy.Footnote ⁶⁰ Stephen Harrison, in particular, has outlined a plethora of tragic tropes which are used to comic effect in the Europa section, starting from the very introduction of the myth, which evokes an exemplum of consolation from tragedy, and ending with the theatrical fashion of Venus’ epiphany, reminiscent of a deus ex machina offering an aetiological compensation for present sufferings.Footnote ⁶¹ More remarkably, the suggestion of alternative methods of suicide in the speech of Europa's father is a motif of Euripidean origin already parodied by Aristophanes in Frogs (Ran. 117–34), while Europa's threats of revenge against the bull in vv. 45–6 can find parallels in comedy (for example Ter. Ad. 311–21).Footnote ⁶² Now, Plato Comicus was apparently still widely read and admired in Horace's contemporary Rome: an inscription on a statue base from first-century b.c.e. Ostia identifies the bust it must have supported as ‘Plato, the poet of Old Comedy’.Footnote ⁶³ It is not far-fetched, therefore, to assume that Plato Comicus' (probably para-tragic) Europa was known to Horace, and, perhaps, had some part in shaping his own version of the myth and influencing its tone. At the same time, positing a comic (and para-tragic) Europa as one of the models behind Horace's Europa should not reinforce interpretations of the heroine as ‘hysterical’ or ‘silly’ and the poem as a ‘literary spoof’ or ‘melodrama … calculated to entertain rather than move the reader’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Rapes in New Comedy, at least, are not funny in themselves, and the panicked pitiful reactions of the heroines that suffer them are wholly serious; these women are clearly not meant to be seen as ‘hysterical’.Footnote ⁶⁵ Far from turning the poem into an inconsequential burlesque, shades of comedy and para-tragedy should rather be taken as a manifestation of the poem's pervasive irony: Europa is left in the dark, and her misreading of her story can be, on some level, both entertaining and genuinely tragic.Footnote ⁶⁶ Until the very end the heroine does not understand her real situation, which, in many ways, is in fact unknowable. (Is she still a virgin or not? Has she been complicit in her rape? Did she just imagine or dream of the bull? These questions will always be left unanswered.)