at sacri vates et divum cura vocamur;
sunt etiam qui nos numen habere putent.
scilicet omne sacrum Mors importuna profanat,
omnibus obscuras inicit illa manus.Footnote 1
Yet, we poets are called ‘sacred’ and ‘beloved of the gods’
and some even think that we possess divinity.
Undoubtedly, cruel Death defiles every sacred thing,
and lays her shadowy hands over everything.
Ov., Am. 3.9.17–20
Death is a rapacious force that pulls everything it touches — including love poets — into its all-consuming void. The post-death space of the Underworld, then, must be bursting at the seams with residents and their memories.
In describing death’s tendency to absorb poets into it, Ovid cannot help absorbing the language of another poet — Amores 3.9’s dedicatee, Tibullus.Footnote 2 Where are people like Ovid and Tibullus called sacri vates (‘sacred poets’)? The first extant reference is Tib. 2.5.114: vati parce, puella, sacro (‘spare the sacred poet, girl’).Footnote 3 In the previous line of Tibullus’ poem, we find divum … tutela (‘charge of the gods’), which is reconfigured in Ovid’s divum cura (‘beloved of the gods’). The final two lines quoted above clearly absorb, then correct,Footnote 4 the beginning of Tibullus’ own Underworld poem, Tib. 1.3.4–5 (abstineas avidas Mors modo nigra manus./abstineas, Mors atra, precor, ‘black Death, hold back your greedy hands now. Hold them back, dark Death, I pray’). Both death and Ovid, then, are hungry for Tibullus.
In this article, I explore the Underworld as a queer ‘shared space’ in the homoerotic poetry of four Latin authors: Tibullus, Domitius Marsus, Ovid and Statius. I argue that these poets build, in overlapping ways, on one another’s presentation of the Underworld, such that their poems function as separate ‘entrances’ to the same Underworld space. Within this Underworld, later poets may encounter earlier poets (and, perhaps, vice versa), as well as the characters from their poems; this results in a ‘recycling’ of personalities over time, so that Ovid recreates Tibullus’ beloved, Marathus, within the dead soul of the poet Cornelius Gallus, who is then revived and killed anew under Statius’ pen, now using the name Philetus. These multiple stages of interconnection create a corpus of poetry from the early years of Augustus’ reign to the later years of the Flavian dynasty that interweave death, commemorative poetry and homoerotic love.
I begin, in Section I, with an overview of the poetic ends to which the Underworld is put in Latin poetry — particularly epic poetry — and the scholarship on it. I suggest that the Roman literary imagination associates the Underworld with cyclicality and iterability, which I connect to queer theoretical ideas about temporality. In Section II, I discuss Tibullus’ death as a literary trope in Ovid, Amores 3.9 and Domitius Marsus, fr. 180 (Hollis) to show how it is associated with homoerotic companionship and cyclical presence in Elysium. Next, in Section III, I turn to the death of Tibullus’ male beloved, Marathus, which is figured (if not stated outright) in Tib. 1.9. The effect of this is twofold: (1) Tibullus connects his own death, and the destruction of his poetry, with the loss of Marathus; and (2) Tibullus establishes what might be thought of as endings (e.g. death or the final line of a poem) as inflection points, not conclusions. Both features lay the ground for my discussion, in Section IV, of how, in Silvae 2.6, Statius recycles both Tibullus’ poems about Marathus (including his death) and Ovid’s poem about Tibullus’ own death. I show, by drawing on notions of poetic metempsychosis and cyclicality, how Statius’ play on anonymity and comparativity ultimately encourages a reading of Silvae 2.6 in which the deceased Philetus becomes a second Marathus. Finally, in Section V, I consider the implications of Elysium’s queerness for Roman poetic eternality and for classicists’ understandings of intertextuality.
Throughout, I set historical time (in which Tibullus precedes Ovid, who precedes Statius) against literary time which is queerer and less linear. Therefore, I read poets and poems against one another, in broadly chronological, but not always consistently linear, ways; the approach is intertextual, but in a manner that pushes beyond philologically charting allusions to previous texts, and into a queerer and more Kristevan sense of intertextuality which encourages textual filiations forwards, backwards and obliquely.Footnote 5 For queer intertextuality is not purely bidirectional: it is not just that Statius may act on Ovid as readily as Ovid may act on Statius (see V). Nor is it purely cyclical (although cycles are important), such that homoerotic poetry Oedipally returns to the same points on a ring, like the regulatory cycling of the seasons, and that the straight line of historical time bends into a slightly less straight, but nonetheless unidirectional, circle. Rather, it is attuned to strange or unpredictable entanglements and ‘loopy’ modes of reading that cycles may incur.Footnote 6 It is not cyclical in the sense ‘helical’, progressively winding around itself in a regimented fashion (the helix is, after all, the shape of that agent of procreation, DNA); instead, it is cyclical like the tornado, where repeated turning entangles objects in chaotic fashion and drives them towards metamorphosis, perhaps even destruction.Footnote 7 Not all cycles are queer but some cyclicality enacts and produces queer entanglement.
I Plutonian poetics
The Underworld is a well-mapped place in Latin poetry.Footnote 8 From LucretiusFootnote 9 to Virgil (twice),Footnote 10 to Ovid (thrice),Footnote 11 to Lucan,Footnote 12 to Silius Italicus,Footnote 13 to Statius, in the Thebaid,Footnote 14 there is a well-established tradition of the locales and geographies of Underworld spaces encountered by those who venture down on catabases,Footnote 15 especially in epic poetry.Footnote 16 Similarly well established are the poetological ends to which these spaces are put in Latin verse. The Underworld becomes at once a way to reflect on the plots and narratives of the poem at hand and a space which connects poems to the worlds of past and, I suggest, future, poetry; as Hardie has observed, ‘the traveler to Death’s kingdom has instantaneous access to a kind of worldwide web of the past’.Footnote 17
The Underworld is a shared space, and, as we shall see, a queer one, removed from the limitations of (straight)forward-moving chronologies as much as it is from the constraints of Upperworld events. It may be accessed from various places,Footnote 18 and at various moments in historical time, but, narratively, exists in perpetual cyclicality.Footnote 19 Thus, it is the space par excellence in which stories can be not only told, but retold.Footnote 20 As Aeneas descends into Aeneid 6’s Underworld, he meets Palinurus, a recycled Elpenor from the Odyssey; as he looks at the crowd of tragic women encircling Dido (Phaedra, Procris, Eriphyle, Evadne, Pasiphaë, Laodamia and Caeneus), we are induced to restage half a dozen Attic tragedies; as he speaks with Deiphobus, the reader’s mind circles back to the conversation between Hercules and Meleager in Bacchylides’ fifth Ode, which itself echoes with the memory of Odysseus’ conversations with Achilles and Agamemnon in Odyssey 11. The same cast of characters — albeit sometimes under different names — parades before any visitor to the Underworld and, as Reitz has it, looking at Latin literary Underworlds produces ‘a kaleidoscopic view nurtured by the many texts that have provided audiences with a ‘map’ of the abodes of the dead’.Footnote 21
The Underworld’s cyclicality was well known in the ancient world. Often attributed to the mythical Orpheus,Footnote 22 the notion that souls were engaged in a cyclical process of reincarnation is first expressed by Empedocles (Catharmoi fr. 108 Wright):
ἤδη γάρ ποτ’ ἐγὼ γενόμην κοῦρός τε κόρη τε,
θάμνος τ’ οἰωνός τε καὶ ἔξαλος ἔλλοπος ἰχθύς.
For I have already previously been both a boy and a girl,
a shrub and a bird and a mute fish in the sea.
Already, in Empedocles’ multi-gender (and multi-species) past lives, we may sense a queer potential in this process.Footnote 23 The Empedoclean soul’s cyclicality would be developed in subtly different ways across several Platonic texts (i.e. the Gorgias, Phaedo, Phaedrus, Republic and Timaeus) such that, by the advent of Latin literature, the Underworld was already cyclical, rather than static.Footnote 24 This cyclical Underworld is haunted by a particular group in Tartarus: the so-called ‘great damned’ — perpetually punished sinners whose torments enact the cyclicality of their setting.Footnote 25 In particular, the image of Ixion on his wheel is emblematic. For Ovid, ‘Ixion turns, and both follows and flees himself’ (Met. 4.461, volvitur Ixion et se sequiturque fugitque) — the cyclicality enacted by verb-heavy phrasing — while Virgil’s two mentions of Ixion (Aen. 6.616–17, radiisque rotarum/districti pendent, ‘some people hang, stretched out from the spokes of wheels’;Footnote 26 G. 4.484, Ixionii vento rota constitit orbis, ‘the turning of Ixion’s wheel stopped’) centre the wheel (rota) on which he eternally turns (or, in the Georgics’ case, stops turning).Footnote 27
The Ixionic wheel returns,Footnote 28 crucially, later on in Virgil’s description of the metempsychosis of the souls waiting by the river Lethe ‘where they turned the wheel for a thousand years’ (Aen. 6.748, ubi mille rotam volvere per annos), a phrase recycled from Ennius’ own lines on metempsychosis (= fr. 9 Manuwald).Footnote 29 I will cycle back to Virgil, metempsychosis and Ennius at this article’s end.
The Underworld’s cyclicality renders it a queer space, vis-à-vis the Upperworld, where, on a human scale, life moves from A to B (or from B to D — Birth to Death) in a linear fashion.Footnote 30 Upperworld time follows a unidirectional arrow — an arrow that represents, after Halberstam, ‘straight time’.Footnote 31 The queer Underworld becomes a place where different people, plucked from different moments in ‘straight time’, may come together in ‘strange encounters’, to use Ahmed’s phrase;Footnote 32 where, in the Punica, Scipio Africanus, who lived in the third to second centuries b.c.e., may encounter Homer (13.778–97) and the great heroes of Greek myth (13.798–805) alongside late republican figures like Pompey and Julius Caesar who postdate him (13.861–64). Indeed, as we shall see, the topic of the Underworld threatens the dissolution of some aspects of identity as it moves through historical time.Footnote 33 Metempsychosis and the river Lethe make the Underworld a space in which some souls begin the process of reincarnation, losing their memories, but maintaining traces of their former selves. This queer place does not tend to reproduce the chronologies of the Upperworld. Here, death is not simply the end of life; instead, the Underworld allows (and even encourages) ‘encounter, fantasy, and imagination’ within and for its ‘devious landscapes of desire’.Footnote 34
The Underworld comprises ‘landscapes of desire’, precisely because it lies beyond the experiential and, for the living, can only be fantasised from the vantage of lack.Footnote 35 It is a utopian space of which the writer cannot (at the time of writing) have personal experience and to which they may never go (depending on one’s own beliefs).Footnote 36 In Lucretian language (3.627–30):
nec ratione alia nosmet proponere nobis
possumus infernas animas Acherunte vagare.
pictores itaque et scriptorum saecla priora
sic animas intro duxerunt sensibus auctas.
We cannot picture the Underworld souls wandering in
Acheron by any other logic of ours [sc. than the five senses].
That is why painters and previous generations of writers
have represented spirits like this, endowed with senses.
This Epicurean does not think he will see the Underworld, yet he projects it as a recurrent space in his De rerum natura — one which the fearful student conjures repeatedly (e.g. 3.27, 3.86, 5.996), but which even our poet-sage must confront. The Underworld is a true utopia, ‘that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing’, as Muñoz has it.Footnote 37 This lack, naturally, lends the Underworld to being understood as a primarily literary and intertextual phenomenon: Lucretius’ own parade of Underworld-but-Upperworld horrors (3.980–1023) is haunted by the epic and tragic spectres from which it is composed.Footnote 38 In the spirit of Barthes’ Fragments d’un discours amoureux (1977), any given literary Underworld is recursively recreated from the desire for fragments of other literary Underworlds. The Underworld, writ large, is ‘shared’ because many pens have gone into writing it.
Spatial and temporal queerness need not centre homosexuality or homoerotics, but it is no accident that this article’s Underworld figures — especially Tibullus, Marathus and Philetus — find themselves there in a way that is connected to their non-normative desires for other men. Unlike Aeneas’ search for the emblem of familial (straight) futurity in Aeneid 6, these poets seek queer community.Footnote 39 Repeatedly, I return to the image of an all-male, all-homoerotic coterie of poets and their muses who cycle around in the Elysian fields and who, occasionally, transform into one another in queer ways.
II Tibullan textual tombs
All ancient Romans are dead, but Tibullus is especially so — at least, poetically. He died in late 19 or 18 b.c.e.,Footnote 40 an event that is commemorated by at least two contemporary poems — one by Domitius MarsusFootnote 41 and one by Ovid — but which is also, proleptically, figured in his own poetry at 1.3.55–80.Footnote 42 Marsus’ sweet quatrain on Tibullus goes as follows (fr. 180 Hollis):Footnote 43
te quoque Vergilio comitem non aequa, Tibulle,
mors iuvenem campos misit ad Elysios,
ne foret aut elegis molles qui fleret amores
aut caneret forti regia bella pede.
Unfair death also sent you to the Elysian Fields,
Tibullus, you young companion to Virgil,
lest there be anyone to cry for soft loves in elegiacs
or to sing of royal wars in heroic metre.
These four lines abound with allusions to both Tibullus’ and Virgil’s poetry in a way which, as Myers has recently shown, associates those poets especially with their writings on the Underworld, so that Tibullus and Virgil become entombed by the walls of their own poetry.Footnote 44
Tibullan death, especially, is homoerotically marked. We feel it in Marsus’ use of comes (‘companion’) to describe the relationship between Tibullus and Virgil in the Underworld,Footnote 45 which engages comes’ homoerotically charged usages in Tibullus and Virgil’s earlier poetry. In poem 1.4, Priapus teaches Tibullus how to seduce his male beloved, Marathus, advising ‘do not refuse to go with him as a companion, however long the road’ (1.4.41, neu comes ire neges, quamvis via longa paretur), while in poem 1.9, Tibullus describes ‘how often I carried many torches for you at night as your companion’ (1.9.41–42, quotiens …/ipse comes multa lumina nocte tuli) in erotic servitude to the same boy.Footnote 46
When it comes to Virgil, the (homo)erotic force of comes is even clearer, as it evokes the opening of his Nisus and Euryalus episode in Aeneid 9, where the latter is introduced with et iuxta comes Euryalus (9.179, ‘and next to him, his companion Euryalus’), while the former is also characterised as a comes, although to Aeneas, not Euryalus (9.177).Footnote 47 This episode is laced with Underworld imagery in a way that figures Nisus and Euryalus as two comites, trapped in an Underworld they cannot escape, in direct contrast with Aeneas’ earlier catabasis in Book 6, which had ended with a successful return trip: the couple’s journey begins with ‘having left, they crossed the ditches and, through the shadow of night …’ (9.314, egressi superant fossas noctisque per umbram) in a way that evokes Aeneas’ road ‘beneath the night and through the shadow’ (6.268, sub nocte per umbram); later, Nisus declares to his comes ‘this is our path’ (9.321, hac iter est) in memory of the Sibyl’s words to Aeneas, hac iter Elysium nobis (6.542, ‘this is our path to Elysium’); finally, Nisus and Euryalus pass into an Acherontic forest at Aen. 9.381–83,Footnote 48 where ‘an occasional path was glinting along hidden tracks’ (9.383, rara per occultos lucebat semita callis) which retreads Aeneas’ catabatic road at 6.270–71 (quale per incertam lunam sub luce maligna/est iter in silvis, ‘like a path in a forest, beneath the faint light of an unclear moon’).Footnote 49 This netherworldly homoerotic companionship lurks behind Marsus’ presentation of Tibullus and Virgil as comites who accompany one another through the Underworld.
Marsus offers another netherworldly intertextual chain that pushes us forward to Ovid. Line 2 tells us that ‘death sent the young man to the Elysian fields’ (mors iuvenem campos misit ad Elysios), which clearly harks back to Tibullus’ own imagined journeys in the underworld: ipsa Venus campos ducet in Elysios (Tib. 1.3.58, ‘Venus herself will lead me into the Elysian fields’).Footnote 50
In a characteristic twist, Ovid’s own poem on Tibullus’ death, Amores 3.9,Footnote 51 reimagines Venus’ role: no longer Tibullus’ guide in the Underworld, she is now his grieving lover (like Delia and Nemesis some lines later). Her pain at her poet’s demise is like losing her lover Adonis (3.9.15–16), but is also figured as maternal, through her son Cupid’s, sense that Tibullus is his brother (3.9.9–14).Footnote 52 Here, Ovid develops Tib. 1.3.5–10, where Tibullus claims that neither his mother nor his lover are presently at hand, should he die.Footnote 53 Ovid combines these identities in Venus (and, at 3.9.1–3, in Elegia herself), transmuting biography into poetics. He also adapts Tibullus’ line from 1.3 about journeying to the Elysian Fields (Am. 3.9.59–60):
si tamen e nobis aliquid nisi nomen et umbra
restat, in Elysia valle Tibullus erit.
Yet, if anything remains of us but a name and a shadow,
Tibullus will be in the valley of Elysium.
The tenses are telling: Tibullus’ future (ducet) is situationally logical, as the diegetic Tibullan speaker is not actually deceased in 1.3’s timeline (nor is the extradiegetic Tibullus), while Marsus’ perfect tense (misit) gives death an epitaphic finality — Tibullus has descended to Elysium, and that is the end of it. Ovid, however, invites us to think not of death’s finality, but of the eternality of the Elysian afterlife, repurposing Tibullus’ ducet into his own future tense verb, erit. This third image of Tibullus in the Underworld might begin to solidify some things for us. Tibullus has not just died — Tibullus will always be dead. He is now, perhaps (see Section V), established as a character who can be encountered in the poetic Underworld for all time (Am. 3.9.66: auxisti numeros, culte Tibulle, pios, ‘you have increased their dutiful ranks, elegant Tibullus’), just like the ‘great damned’, whom he had imagined meeting at Tib. 1.3.73–80, albeit now in heroic Elysium, not dark Tartarus.
The first 58 lines of Ovid’s poem address the effects of Tibullus’ death on those left behind (Elegia, Venus, Delia and Nemesis), but the final ten turn to those he will encounter now that he has died. In place of a line-up of heroes or sinners, Tibullus meets a pack of poets, to whom Ovid tells us he is (and will always be) a comes, in resonance with Marsus’ identification of Tibullus as the eternal Underworld comes to Virgil (Am. 3.9.61–66):
obvius huic venias hedera iuvenalia cinctus
tempora cum Calvo, docte Catulle, tuo;
tu quoque, si falsum est temerati crimen amici,
sanguinis atque animae prodige Galle tuae.
his comes umbra tua est; siqua est modo corporis umbra,
auxisti numeros, culte Tibulle, pios.
Learned Catullus, you will come to meet him, your youthful
brows bound with ivy, accompanied by your Calvus;
you too, who wasted your blood and life,
if your dishonoured friend’s accusation was, Gallus, truly hollow.
Your shade is a companion to them; if there is any shade of the body,
you have increased their dutiful ranks, elegant Tibullus.
Ingleheart demonstrates that Ovid’s choice of poets here is not serendipitous and, in fact, figures the Underworld as a homoerotic space.Footnote 54 Although such catalogues of poets are common in elegy (Prop. 2.34.85–94; Ov., Am. 1.15.9–30, Ars am. 3.329–38, Rem. am. 757–66, Tr. 2.361–70, 4.10.43–54),Footnote 55 Ovid almost uniquely here omits reference to their female beloveds,Footnote 56 distinguishing this coterie as particularly homosocial.Footnote 57 Indeed, Ovid’s omission is tendentious if we believe (and I do) that this trope of listing poets (often love poets) draws on a lost passage of Gallus in which he boasted that his poetry had brought Lycoris renown.Footnote 58 The puellae were the original point of such catalogues, but not in this queer twist on the form.
The first two mentioned — Catullus and Calvus — come as a ready-made couple from their erotic appearances in the Catullan corpus (also, presumably, in the now-fragmentary Calvan corpus);Footnote 59 Ovid invokes this by transferring Catull. 53.3’s meus Calvos (‘my Calvus’) into Calvo … tuo (‘your Calvus’), but also by continuing the funerary narrative of Catull. 96.Footnote 60
In 96, Catullus shares a eulogy with Calvus for the latter’s lover, Quintilia, that is coloured by a profound homosociality (e.g. Catull. 96.3–4, [dolore] quo desiderio veteres renovamus amores/atque olim missas flemus amicitias, ‘[grief] in which we renew our old loves with our longing and weep for the bonds that were once abandoned’). Quintilia’s death alienates her from Calvus — she does not await him in the Underworld; rather, she is locked away in ‘unspeaking tombs’ (96.1, mutis sepulcris), leaving him alone in the Upperworld with Catullus.
Ovid completes Catullus’ homoerotic eulogy, but also engages Calvus’ (presumably heteroerotic) funerary elegy on Quintilia, through negation.Footnote 61 Calvus imagines himself ‘when I will already have become dark ash’ (fr. 27 Hollis, cum iam fulva cinis fuero) which, we may infer, leads thematically into our second fragment, forsitan hoc etiam gaudeat ipsa cinis (fr. 28 Hollis, ‘perhaps even your ash itself delights at this’), implying a continued post-cremation affection between Calvus and Quintilia. Ovid refutes this, in line with Catullus’ homoerotic poem (96), so that Quintilia is ignored, remaining unresponsive (and unmentioned) ash in an Upperworld tomb, while Calvus — imagined as corporeal, with ivy-wreathed brows, not as ‘dark ash’ — accompanies his male lover, Catullus.
Gallus too is present in Amores 3.9 because of his associations with death and homoerotic elegy.Footnote 62 For Ingleheart, the deceased Tibullus is ‘reunited with the company that he may have been happiest in all along: that of his fellow, homoerotically inclined male poets. It is they, not Delia and Nemesis, who provide the conclusion to Ovid’s portrait of Tibullus’.Footnote 63 I would go further and, in the spirit of the Underworld’s cyclicality, suggest that the transformation of Ovid’s future tenses (erit at 3.9.60 and venias at 3.9.61) into the eternal present of est … est (3.9.65) reveals that Tibullus has not only joined his homoerotic coterie of comites, but will be with them always, in a space from which female lovers (Lesbia, Quintilia, Lycoris, Delia, Nemesis and, in the future, Corinna) are omitted. That omission is especially palpable given the contrast drawn between the Upperworld bickering of Delia and Nemesis immediately before this passage (3.9.55–58) and the strong catabatic turn initiated by line 59’s tamen (‘however’).
We see, then, that Tibullus, in the years after his death, became quickly associated with two interlocking motifs: postmortem existence in the Underworld and homoerotic companionship. These, as we shall see, are brought together tendentiously by Statius in Silvae 2.6.
III Entombing Marathus
The obvious rejoinder to Ingleheart’s suggestion that this coterie picks up on Tibullus’ association with homoerotic verse is that Tibullus’ male lover, Marathus, goes unnamed in the Ovidian Underworld; if the point is to stress homoerotics, why not include Marathus?Footnote 64 For Ingleheart, the answer lies in Ovid’s introduction of Cupid as a puer (‘boy’) in line 7, which, she argues, engages Marathus’ introduction into Tibullan poetry at Tib. 1.4.83 (parce, puer, quaeso, ‘spare me, boy, I plead’) and Ovid’s own flirtation with loving a puer at Am. 1.1.20.Footnote 65 I am not convinced that Am. 3.9.7 is Marathus’ hiding place, but I do believe that Tibullus’ male lover weighs on this eulogy.
What precisely does Ovid mean when he says to Tibullus’ ghost, at Am. 3.9.66, auxisti numeros … pios? What is the force of auxisti? Does it mean ‘you have increased their dutiful ranks [by joining them yourself]’ (which may seem, prima facie, the most obvious interpretation)Footnote 66 or ‘you have increased their dutiful ranks [by adding a person other than yourself]’? Both senses of augere numeros are evidenced in pre-Ovidian Latin,Footnote 67 and I suggest that both are at play here: Tibullus swells the crowd of homoerotic comites with his own presence, and with the presence of Marathus.Footnote 68 Indeed, we may detect that something odd is happening in Ovid’s change of tense from present (est in the previous line) to perfect (auxisti): Tibullus has increased the hordes of the dead not only by dying, but also by means of something that he had already done before dying — something we may find by turning to his poem 1.9.
1.9 is the conclusion to Tibullus’ Marathus Cycle, three poems which chart the poet-lover’s complex relationship with a young boy:Footnote 69 in 1.4, Tibullus struggles to woo Marathus, seeking erotodidactic advice from Priapus; by 1.8, Marathus has left Tibullus for a girl named Pholoë; in 1.9, Marathus has abandoned both Tibullus and Pholoë for an unnamed older man, and Tibullus takes his temper out on all three other parties (Marathus, Pholoë and the old man).
In his anger at Marathus, Tibullus brings to bear several motifs in this final poem that worm their way into Amores 3.9. Tib. 1.9 opens with a rebuke directed at Marathus’ inconstancy (1.9.1–6):
quid mihi, si fueras miseros laesurus amores,
foedera per divos, clam violanda, dabas?
a miser, et si quis primo periuria celat,
sera tamen tacitis Poena venit pedibus.
parcite, caelestes: aequum est impune licere
numina formosis laedere vestra semel.
If you were going to harm my wretched love, why make vows
in the gods’ names, only to violate them in private?
Ah poor boy, even if someone at first hides their perjuries,
eventually, Punishment still comes on silent feet.
Show pity, gods: it is justly allowed for beautiful people
to harm your divinity without punishment — once.
For Nikoloutsos, this litany of legalistic and diplomatic language conveys the impression of a marital agreement between Tibullus and Marathus which, in turn, underscores the severity of Marathus’ breach of his commitments.Footnote 70 Building on Nikoloutsos’ argument, I suggest that Tibullus’ focus on this semantic field opens Marathus up to Ovid’s recycling of him into Gallus.Footnote 71
As he introduces his coterie of comites in Amores 3.9, Ovid presents the first two — Catullus and Calvus — as a pair; the reader thus expects to encounter a second pair, but the whole couplet 3.9.63–64 is devoted to a single figure:Footnote 72
tu quoque, si falsum est temerati crimen amici,
sanguinis atque animae prodige Galle tuae
You too, who wasted your blood and life,
if your dishonoured friend’s accusation was, Gallus, truly hollow.
Gallus is without his Lycoris, who is frequently paired with him in such catalogues and who inspired this take on catalogics.Footnote 73 Further, his name is delayed until almost the end of the pentameter, driving a reader to absorb his whole description — as an accused traitor in homosociality who has died — before deciphering these words’ referent. Indeed, this description is particularly elusive: it takes no small level of interpretation to identify the temeratus amicus (‘dishonoured friend’) as Augustus (presumably in reference to the breakdown of Gallus and Augustus’ relationship in the mid-20s b.c.e.),Footnote 74 or to unpick that Gallus’ presence in Elysium is contingent on Augustus’ accusation against him being falsum.Footnote 75 The reference to Gallus’ suicide is unusually explicit, with its deliberate (prodige) loss of blood (sanguis) and lifeforce (anima), given that other poets who mention his death present him as having died vaguely ‘for love’.Footnote 76
We may more readily imagine an intimate of Tibullus’ who dishonoured his friend (temeratus) and whom Tibullus might hope to be wrong in accusing (falsum crimen). I suggest, therefore, that Ovid cruelly teases the character of Tibullus in Amores 3.9, by dangling the possibility that Marathus waits for him in the crowd of Underworld homoerotic lovers, through a subtle reference to Tibullus’ rebuke of Marathus at 1.9.1–6 and a return to its theme and vocabulary of crime and punishment.Footnote 77 Ovid then reveals that it is in fact ‘only’ Gallus, the inventor of their shared genre of elegy who was, himself, closely associated with homoerotics.Footnote 78 There is a blurring, then, between the figures of Marathus and Gallus that anticipates the metempsychotic strategies I develop below.
And yet, for this to work, Marathus must already be dead — especially since, in Amores 3.9, both Nemesis and Delia have outlived Tibullus. Tibullus’ poetry does not explicitly detail Marathus’ death; it does, however, imagine his violent demise. In his anger at Marathus’ infidelity, Tibullus cries (1.9.11–16):Footnote 79
muneribus meus est captus puer. at deus illa
in cinerem et liquidas munera vertat aquas.
iam mihi persolvet poenas, pulvisque decorum
detrahet et ventis horrida facta coma;
uretur facies, urentur sole capilli,
deteret invalidos et via longa pedes.
My boy is taken by gifts. But may a god turn
those gifts into ash and flowing water.
Soon, he will pay me back: dust will drag down his
beauty, as will his hair, made foul by the winds;
His face will be burned, his tresses will be burned by the sun,
a long journey will wear down his weakened feet.
The language is destructive. The literal referent of lines 13–16 is a lengthy walk under the hot sun that will distort Marathus’ appearance with sunburn. However, we cannot ignore the apocalyptic force of line 12’s transformation of the gifts that have corrupted Marathus ‘into ash and flowing water’ (in cinerem et liquidas … aquas), especially given ash’s strong connection with death in Latin poetry,Footnote 80 as well as the double use of urere (‘to burn’) in line 15. Metaphorically, Tibullus desires the destruction of Marathus’ body, particularly through the elemental forces of fire and water — extinction in conflagration and inundation.Footnote 81 Perhaps Tibullus here brings to a head the etymological pun he has been making with Marathus’ name throughout the cycle: ‘Marathus’ may be associated with μαραίνω’s sense ‘to smoulder slowly’.Footnote 82 Thus, in imagining Marathus’ final moments, Tibullus brings the slow burn of Marathus’ love (Tib. 1.4.81, quam Marathus lento me torquet amore, ‘how Marathus tortures me with his slow love’) to an incendiary fever pitch. Furthermore, if we harken to the prefixes with which Tibullus begins lines 14 and 16 (detrahet and deteret), we feel a downward pull in this destruction that carries Marathus’ scorched body down to the Underworld.
As others recognise,Footnote 83 this scorched body (particularly its invalidi pedes, ‘weakened feet’), is a metapoetic one, especially when read against the more obviously metapoetic description of Marathus’ body at 1.8.9–14,Footnote 84 which also ends with a reference to Marathus’ wounded (read: elegiac) feet (1.8.14: compressos … pedes, ‘restricted feet’). Thus, when Tibullus, at 1.9.49–50, plans to destroy his poetry about Marathus, we may recognise it as a reflection of 1.9.11–16:
illa velim rapida Vulcanus carmina flamma
torreat et liquida deleat amnis aqua.
I wish Vulcan would burn those poems with devouring
flame and the river would obliterate them with its flowing water.
There are verbal repetitions (illa; liquida[s] aqua[s]) and clear parallels in situation (conflagration; inundation; the presence of a male god), which lead us to associate the destruction of poetry about Marathus with the destruction of Marathus himself — after all, what existence can Marathus have beyond poetry about him?Footnote 85 Indeed, for any reader who interprets Tib. 1.9.11–16 only in literal terms (as representing a walk on a hot day), Tib. 1.9.49–50 serves as an encouragement to revisit the earlier section and reconsider their interpretation.
Let us not ignore Tibullus’ own death in attending to Ovid’s grave-robbing from Tib. 1.9. Tibullus, the character, does not die in poem 1.9, of course; he survives throughout the entirety of Book 2. However, Tibullus prefers death by torture to seeing Marathus give into an old man’s munificence (1.9.21–22):
ure meum potius flamma caput et pete ferro
corpus et intorto verbere terga seca.
Rather, burn my head and come at my body
with a knife, and split my back with a twisted whip.
Tibullus is addressing Marathus, and the careful reader will notice that Tibullus begs his lover to burn him with precisely the same verb (urere) that he had earlier used twice, just six lines earlier (1.9.15), to illustrate Marathus’ own destruction.Footnote 86 Again, Tibullus draws on Marathus’ onomastic propensity towards matters fiery (μαραίνω) to figure the fatal flame that is love for the boy.
Tibullus’ scorching demise, prefigured at Tib. 1.9.21–22, is semi-realised in Ovid’s epicedion. Ovid gives no cause of death; he does, however, portray the fiery destruction of Tibullus’ body (Am. 3.9.41–44):
tene, sacer vates, flammae rapuere rogales,
pectoribus pasci nec timuere tuis?
aurea sanctorum potuissent templa deorum
urere, quae tantum sustinuisse nefas.
Holy poet, did the funereal flames snatch you away,
and were they unafraid to feast on your heart?
Flames that could have supported such unspeakable criminality
could burn the golden temples of the sacred gods.
We see again the verb urere (3.9.44), once more the first word in its line (as at Tib. 1.9.15 and 1.9.21), underscoring how the destruction of Tibullus’ body in flames is as sacrilegious (nefas) as the destruction of the gods’ temples. And yet, this image of the Tibullan body ablaze derives from Tibullus’ own poetry. The close reader of Ovid’s poem — and this dense eulogy demands close reading — is haunted by Marathus’ ghost, who still burns Tibullus, both onomastically and with the fires from the scorching punishment with which he is threatened at Tib. 1.9.11–16.
Ovid, then, has ample material on which to draw if he wants to inscribe Marathus (and, indeed, Tibullus) into Amores 3.9’s Elysian scene. Tibullus has laid the groundwork for him, poetically killing his darling, such that he has ‘increased the dutiful ranks’ (Am. 3.9.66, auxisti numeros … pios) of the dead by sending Marathus to join them.Footnote 87 Of Tibullus’ three beloveds, only Marathus receives any sort of death within the narrative arc of Tibullan elegiacs: the Delia Cycle ends with a hope for long-enduring affection (1.6.65–86, nos, Delia, amoris/exemplum cana simus uterque coma, ‘Delia, let us be the model of love, both of us with our white hair’). Book 2’s Nemesis Cycle ends more pessimistically and is haunted by death — the poet’s own (2.6.19–20, 2.6.51–52) and the premature passing of Nemesis’ sister, which occupies the centre of the poem (2.6.29–40) — but ends by emphasising the possibility of Nemesis’ continued existence (2.6.53, vivas, ‘you may live on’). Thus, for Ovid, only Marathus can be waiting for Tibullus when he reaches Elysium.
These images of destruction that figure Marathus’ death without actually killing him result in a (failed) attempt to bring closure to the cycle — and what is queerer than the iterative failure to close a loop?Footnote 88 The word ‘cycles’ has long been used to denote subgroups of poems by the same poet on a similar theme or character; it is particularly apposite for Tibullus’ three poems on Marathus, which consist of and construct multiple interlocking and cyclical rings. Fineberg shows how poem 1.4 stages the tension between time’s inexorable progression in one direction and repetitive loops that iterate the same images and behaviours.Footnote 89 She concludes by demonstrating that 1.4 ends with a beginning, suggesting that the final four lines (1.4.81–84) ‘would surely work as well at the opening of the poem as they do at the close’.Footnote 90 I suggest that we extend Fineberg’s arguments to apply to the entire trilogy, which is now revealed to be made up of repetition — one need only look to how poem 1.8 ends with the phrase quam cupies votis hunc revocare diem! (1.8.78, ‘how you will want to recall this day with your prayers’).
Tibullus ends the cycle, in 1.9, with the threat that it is about to start all over again, as he hurls at Marathus ‘then will you cry, when another boy has shackled me, and proudly holds dominion over your domain’ (1.9.79–80, tunc flebis cum me vinctum puer alter habebit/et geret in regno regna superba tuo), which rather neuters the poem’s actual final statement, a prayer to Venus in which Tibullus thanks her that he is now ‘freed from deceptive love’ (1.9.83, fallaci resolutus amore).Footnote 91 How resolutus (‘freed’) is a man who, by his own admission, will soon be vinctum (‘shackled’)? How resolutus amore is any lover who, seconds ago, was mid-tirade at an ex? These cycles remind me again of the image of Ixion, spinning forever on his Underworld wheel; how different is it to be trapped in a cycle of unrequited love than to be trapped on a wheel in Tartarus? As Tibullus’ (self-)torture turns into death at Am. 3.9.63–64, Ovid rubs salt in the wound by teasing out 1.9’s conclusory contradictions. Tibullus feigned to want a ‘another boy’, yet it is precisely Marathus, the same boy, who is absent from Tibullus’ Elysium. Perhaps Ovid’s cruellest and queerest joke is refusing to complete the cycle: conjuring the spirit of Marathus before Tibullus’ eyes (and the readers’), before jerking him away.
IV Statius and the circle of life (and death)
For the wheel’s final twist, I turn to Statius’ Silvae 2.6 — a poem with an odd history in scholarship, positioned at the margins of the various groups into which scholars might slot it.Footnote 92 It is a ‘standard text’ on the reading lists of classicists interested in literary depictions of homosexuality,Footnote 93 but its purpose there is often to be an odd bedfellow to the simpler dynamics of earlier homoerotic verse.Footnote 94 As one of the Silvae, it is seldom given detailed attention, compared to supposedly more productive poems.Footnote 95 Our poem is even overlooked relative to the other three Silvae commemorating the death of younger partners in homoerotic pairings (2.1, 3.4 and 5.5),Footnote 96 especially 2.1, which covers similar ground.Footnote 97
Scholars repeatedly query how Silvae 2.6 should be understood in its context — how to reconcile the fact that it immediately follows 2.4 and 2.5, poems which, in turn, eulogise a dead bird and a dead lion.Footnote 98 Does Statius, with King Lear, suggest that man’s (or, at least, Philetus’) life’s cheap as beast’s? I will not wade into these debates. This article is not a command to wall off the intertextual parameters of Silvae 2.6 such that it can only allude to Tibullus and Ovid’s queer Underworld poetry; rather, it is an appeal to begin extending 2.6’s limits beyond well-known Statian intratextuality, starting from an established locus of poetic play (Tibullus’ death).Footnote 99 My interpretation of Silvae 2.6 is uncompromisingly metapoetic; the poem has a context — as all Silvae, it was written for a specific occasion (Philetus’ death) and for a specific patron (Flavius Ursus), who was emotionally invested in that occasion — but here, I attend to what Statius’ poetry is doing in terms of its poetics.
I begin with a shorter discussion of a poetics of anonymity in Silvae 2.6, before turning to the end of the poem to show how Statius knits together his consolatory purpose (2.6 is called a consolatio at 2.praef.) and his learned intertextuality so as to recycle Augustan depictions of the queer Underworld.Footnote 100 In short, Statius casts Philetus as an alter Marathus — the ultimate male beloved of Latin elegiacs — who, fittingly, dwells among the Underworld’s homoerotic coteries alongside Tibullus, Calvus, Catullus, Gallus and, now in the Flavian age, Ovid.
Let us start at the beginning (Silv. 2.6.1–6):
saeve nimis, lacrimis quisquis discrimina ponis
lugendi modos. miserum est primaeva parenti
pignera surgentesque (nefas!) accendere natos;
durum et deserti praerepta coniuge partem
conclamare tori, maesta et lamenta sororum
et fratrum gemitus:
Whoever you are who places limits on tears or boundaries
on mourning, you are too cruel. It is awful for a parent to cremate
their young children and (for shame!) their adolescent sons;
it is also harsh to bewail the abandoned side of the bed, from which
a wife has been snatched, and sisters’ sad laments
or brothers’ groans.
This opening invokes many instantiations of the poetic Underworld; indeed, we may wonder if, in alluding so boundlessly here, Statius’ reference to the ‘limits on tears’ (lacrimis discrimina) and ‘boundaries on mourning’ (lugendi modi) is as tongue-in-cheek as it is metapoetic. In Statius’ catalogue of family members who participate in matters funereal (parens, ‘parent’; primaeva pignora, ‘young children’; surgentes nati, ‘adolescents’; coniunx, ‘wife’; sorores, ‘sisters’; fratres, ‘brothers’), we may recognise the spectre of the similar, densely-packed catalogue that Orpheus encounters during his catabasis in Georgics 4 (4.475–77):Footnote 101
matres atque viri defunctaque corpora vita
magnanimum heroum, pueri innuptaeque puellae,
impositique rogis iuvenes ante ora parentum
Mothers and husbands, and the bodies of great-hearted
heroes, emptied of life, boys and unwed girls,
and young men, set on pyres before their parents’ eyes
These lines are, themselves, composed of epic intertexts, and Virgil repeats them verbatim as Aeneas descends to this same Underworld at Aeneid 6.306–8.Footnote 102 Thus, from the beginning of Silvae 2.6, which must unfurl at an Upperworld funeral, we are alert not just to the haunting presence of the Underworld that will take centre stage over the course of the poem, but also to the fact that this Statian Underworld, when we reach it, will be the self-same Underworld that has been visited so many times in poetry.
Statius’ parenthetical nefas! (‘for shame!’) in line 3 stands out. Commentators point to a similarly funereal moment in the Thebaid (1.2.83–84: cui vita (nefas!) et sanguine nati/partus honos, ‘whose life (for shame!) and honour have been born from his son’s blood’), and I am happy to accept this intra-Statian allusion.Footnote 103 However, does the specific context of cremation push attentive readers towards Amores 3.9.44 (translated above),Footnote 104 where nefas is used in close connection with the burning of Tibullus’ body?Footnote 105
While we are in the world of Amores 3.9, I briefly consider anonymity. I have already discussed how a deceased figure’s anonymity can permit learned readers — and Silvae 2.6’s first reader, Ursus, is explicitly doctissimus (Stat. Silv. 2.praef., ‘extremely learned’) — to detect multiple intertextual presences in a poem. Statius’ opening lines (above) keep matters similarly innominate: Silvae 2.6’s direct addressee, Ursus, does not appear until line 10, and his beloved’s name (Philetus) is suppressed until 81.Footnote 106 For the first nine lines, then, the reader is engaged in a guessing game as to who has died (not least because, in reading Book 2 sequentially, they have encountered three previous epicedia, and are now accustomed to the form): is this a second poem on the death of Glaucias (2.1), or Melior’s parrot (2.4) or 2.5’s tamed lion?
Anonymity is ‘surprising’ in the light of epitaphic poems like Bion’s Lament for Adonis and Pseudo-Moschus’ Epitaph for Bion, which name their deceased in lines 1 and 2 respectively.Footnote 107 Even Statius’ earlier epicedia had been clearer: 2.1 gives its addressee’s name (Melior) in the first line (although Glaucias is unnamed until line 229), and psittace (‘parrot’) is the first word of Silvae 2.4.Footnote 108 This anonymity has been seen to contribute to 2.6’s ‘bloodlessness’; placed next to the far longer 2.1, 2.6 has seemed less personal to certain readers, a feature which is typically explained by Statius’ closer relationship with Melior than with Ursus.Footnote 109 However, there is purpose in this poetics of namelessness. Into the gulf left by the anonymity of 2.6’s subjects, the reader’s mind may extend to supply any name they wish or expect to see there — any deceased whom they may expect Statius to commemorate. Why would they not, shortly after two densely Ovidian poems (i.e. Silvae 2.3, which adapts scenes from the Fasti and Metamorphoses,Footnote 110 and Silvae 2.4, which reworks Amores 2.6, another epicedion),Footnote 111 expect a reworking of Ovid’s other eulogy (Amores 3.9)?Footnote 112 That reader may well remember that Ovid’s poem on Tibullus similarly opened with a game of name-guessing interwoven with familial mourning (3.9.1–6):
Memnona si mater, mater ploravit Achillem,
et tangunt magnas tristia fata deas,
flebilis indignos, Elegia, solve capillos!
a, nimis ex vero nunc tibi nomen erit!
ille tui vates operis, tua fama, Tibullus
ardet in exstructo corpus inane rogo.
If a mother grieved for Memnon, or for Achilles,
and so sad fates touch even the great goddesses,
mournful Elegia, set free your hair which does not deserve this!
Ah, now your name will be all too true!
That bard of your genre, your own glory, Tibullus,
burns on a pyre built for him — an empty body.
Ovid’s requiem gives us three personal names (Memnon, Achilles and Elegia), two implied names (Aurora and Thetis) contained within their titles (mater, mater), and one onomastic riddle that explains the eulogistic etymology of Elegia’s name (Am. 3.9.4, a, nimis ex vero nunc tibi nomen erit!, ‘ah, now your name will be all too true’) before it reveals the identity of the deceased in line 5. Indeed, names remain tied to (im)mortality throughout the poem: at 3.9.31, Ovid tells us that Nemesis and Delia longum nomen habebunt (‘will have a long-lasting name’) because of Tibullus’ poetry about them, and, at 3.9.59–60, Ovid gives us:
si tamen e nobis aliquid nisi nomen et umbra
restat, in Elysia valle Tibullus erit.
Yet, if anything remains of us but a name and a shadow,
Tibullus will be in the valley of Elysium.
There is little direct verbal intertextuality between the opening of Amores 3.9 and Silvae 2.6 and, on the face of it, little reason to propose a connection between Statius and Ovid’s poem beyond the obvious situational parallel. However, I argue, Statius capitalises on Ovid’s focus on names with his own plays of anonymity, metonymy and pseudonymity; thus, just as we cannot tell whether 2.6 will revisit 2.1, 2.4 or 2.5, we also begin to wonder whether it could retread Ovid’s epicedion for Tibullus.
On their mission to identify 2.6’s nameless subjects, Statius’ reader is quickly confronted with the language of comparativity, through which Philetus (still unnamed) is juxtaposed against other losses that Ursus might have suffered (2.6.6–8):
alte tamen aut procul intrat
altius in sensus, maioraque vulnera vincit
plaga minor.
Yet a lesser blow still comes
deeply (far more deeply) into one’s feelings
and conquers greater wounds.
Losing Philetus is a ‘lesser blow’ (plaga minor) compared to the ‘greater wounds’ (maiora vulnera) caused by the deaths of more important people in Ursus’ life. The comparatives (minor, maiora, altius) encourage readers to play a game of hierarchy,Footnote 113 balancing Philetus’ death against other deaths and, we may extend, Philetus himself against other dedicatees of commemorative poetry.Footnote 114 The given reason for Philetus’ ‘lesser’ position is his social status: he is a famulus (‘household slave’).
Yet, Statius suggests, enslavement and all the hierarchical ‘lesserness’ it would imply, do not fit well for Philetus (2.6.8–12):
famulum (quia rerum nomina caeca
sic miscet Fortuna manu nec pectora novit),
sed famulum gemis, Urse, pium, sed amore fideque
has meritum lacrimas, cui maior stemmate cuncto
libertas ex mente fuit.
You grieve for a household slave (since Fortune blends together
the names for things like this with her blind hands, and does not know the heart),
but a dutiful household slave, Ursus, and one deserving of these tears
through his love and loyalty, whose freedom was in the mind — greater than
your whole family tree.
The label famulus is misplaced, and Philetus really ought to be known by another nomen (his actual nomen remains undisclosed).Footnote 115 Statius pushes further at his games of anonymity and comparativity, begging the reader to bring some fixity to boy’s unstable identity, perhaps by drawing on an identity with which they are already intertextually familiar. Fortune’s power to blend and elide identities is particularly notable given, as we shall see, the polysemous way in which Statius characterises Philetus at the poem’s end.
Later, Statius further underscores the disconnect between Philetus’ enslavement and his libertas (‘freedom’) of spirit (2.6.21–25):Footnote 116
quid si nec famulus? vidi ipse habitusque notavi
te tantum cupientis erum; sed maior in ore
spiritus et tenero manifesti in sanguine mores.
optarent multum Graiae cuperentque Latinae
sic peperisse nurus.
What if he were not a household slave? I myself saw and noted the demeanour
of this boy that desired you alone as his master; but there was a greater spirit in
his face and the character in his tender blood was evident.
Greek and Latin girls alike would have wished and desired
to have borne a child like him.
This is autoptic evidence that Philetus does not fit the label famulus; line 22, in particular, implies that his servitude to Ursus was born out of personal desire (te tantum, ‘you alone’) rather than forced enslavement. Earlier, Philetus had been equated with a ‘lesser blow’ (2.6.8, plaga minor) but he is now possessed of ‘greater spirit’ (maior spiritus), in a move that directly contrasts Philetus’ innate and imposed qualities — libertas and enslavement. Moreover, the boy’s ‘character’ (mores) is ‘evident’ (manifesti) — Statius capitalises on the metapoetic force of manifestus to encourage readers to unpack this ‘evidence’, located in Philetus’ tener sanguis (‘tender blood’). This strange phrase (a unique collocation in extant Latin) has not been satisfactorily explained by commentators:Footnote 117 Van Dam suggests that the ultimate signification is ‘youth’, via sanguis’ meaning of ‘descent’, correctly pointing out that sanguis itself cannot refer to age.Footnote 118 Yet, it does not follow that ‘descent’ should mean ‘youth’ either. Although I disagree with Van Dam’s conclusions, ‘descent’ does seem right to me, but I recalibrate to something queerer than biology can provide: ‘kinship’. Statius is, I suggest, invoking Tibullus’ repeated characterisation, in his homoerotic elegies, of pueri delicati (‘charming boys’) — and especially Marathus — as teneri (‘tender’).Footnote 119 ‘Tender kinship’ meaning ‘Tibullan kinship’, therefore, would provide a clearer and queerer identity for Philetus in these lines.Footnote 120
Furthermore, line 24’s potential subjunctives (optarent and cuperent) drive readers to imagine the young Philetus being the offspring of mothers other than his own, dislocating him from the constraints of biography and reinserting him into the fictive space of the Greco-Roman literary tradition.Footnote 121 Once we envisage Philetus as an enslaved boy whom the desiring homoerotic mind wishes to imagine as free, it is not hard to crawl further down the bough of his queer family tree to find other such youths in, for instance, the tenerae puerorum turbae (Tib. 1.4.9, ‘tender crowds of boys’) of Tibullan poetry (1.4.11–14):
hic placet, angustis quod equum compescit habenis;
hic placidam niveo pectore pellit aquam.
hic, quia fortis adest audacia, cepit: at illi
virgineus teneras stat pudor ante genas.
This boy delights because he controls his horse with tight reins;
this boy strikes the still water with his snow-white chest.
This boy takes your fancy because he has a brave confidence: but
virginal shame stands guard on that one’s tender cheeks.
Tibullus constructs a fantasy here, in which the pueri delicati, who, as far as they can be said to be ‘real’, were ‘really’ enslaved, and could not participate in activities like horse-riding, swimming (in the Tiber) or military service;Footnote 122 Statius does likewise by imagining Philetus as having a mother from the heart of the Roman world (Graiae aut Latinae nurus, ‘Greek or Latin girls’) and eliding reference to his ‘real’ origin which, if Silv. 5.5 is anything to go by, could have been an Egyptian slave market (5.5.66–69). Philetus does not belong to a family tree constructed by the temporal and reproductive logics of heterosexuality; rather, he participates in a queerer insistence upon familial ties that refute such logics.Footnote 123
This kinship with softness (tener) is also generic.Footnote 124 Philetus is compared to, then distinguished from heroes like Theseus (2.6.25–26), Paris (2.6.27–29), Achilles (2.6.30–31) or Troilus (2.6.32–33), each of whom is here associated with both beauty and epic poetry. Instead, he is connected to homoerotic characters like Parthenopaeus (2.6.42–45) and a Spartan youth (2.6.45–47; perhaps Hyacinthus?), who is also defined in terms of tener (2.6.46, teneri sic integer aevi, ‘unimpaired in his tender age’);Footnote 125 Philetus even surpasses, in his devotion to Ursus, a ménage à six of famous homoerotic lovers from myth (2.6.54–55): Orestes and Pylades, Achilles and Patroclus, and Theseus and Pirithoüs.Footnote 126 Although this list shares some names with the epic catalogue above, it is here defined in terms of homosocial interpersonal relationships based on fides (‘trust’), rather than generic epicness.Footnote 127 The poem’s final comparative couple — Eumaeus and Odysseus (2.6.56–57) — are undeniably epic in origin, but here underscore the homosociality (if not the homoeroticism) of the fides that bonds Philetus to Ursus, whilst teasing again that Philetus’ ancestry may be greater than Ursus knows, given that Eumaeus was a slave who had been born a prince (Od. 15.403–92). Furthermore, the image of Eumaeus waiting for Odysseus prefigures Philetus in the Underworld, waiting for his beloved master.
Let us return to the spectre of Tibullus’ poetic death in Silvae 2.6, which emerges clearly as Statius consoles Ursus that the deceased Philetus is now safe in the Underworld (2.6.98–100):Footnote 128
subit ille pios carpitque quietem
Elysiam clarosque illic fortasse parentes
invenit,
He is descending to the dutiful dead and enjoying the
peace of Elysium and, perhaps, he even finds illustrious ancestors
down there.
The surface-level sense is clearly that Philetus, once in the Underworld, may discover that, despite his enslaved status, he really did have well-born biological ancestors. However, the pii (‘dutiful’) dead whom Philetus encounters remind us of Tibullus’ augmentation of the numeri pii (‘dutiful ranks’) at Amores 3.9.66, and we may even hear an aural echo between the metrically equivalent phrases ille pios (Silv. 2.6.98) and Tibulle pios (Am. 3.9.66).Footnote 129 Philetus had already been called pius at 2.6.10 (printed above), which anticipates his union with the queer kin group of pii here. Furthermore, in picking up his earlier musing on Philetus’ parentage (2.6.8–12, 2.6.21–25) precisely when he most opens his poem up to allusions to Tibullus’ death, Statius asks an audience to decode the identity of the ‘illustrious ancestors’ (clari parentes) who await Philetus, not least through his provocative fortasse (‘perhaps’).Footnote 130 Fortasse encourages meditation on these ancestors’ existence, as does the metapoetic claros (‘illustrious’), which implies that an audience will recognise who is being discussed.Footnote 131 Philetus, I suggest, meets, as his homoerotic forebears, at least Tibullus, but also the whole queer coterie of Calvus, Catullus, Gallus and Virgil whom earlier poets had gathered in a homoerotic post-mortem grouping.Footnote 132
Finally, let us turn to the conclusion to Statius’ poem — a conclusion which has been seen to be so odd that editors have over-emended the text (2.6.103–5):Footnote 133
pone, precor, questus; alium tibi Fata Phileton,
forsan et ipse dabit, moresque habitusque decoros
monstrabit gaudens similemque docebit amari.
Lay aside, I pray, your wailings; perhaps the Fates will give another Philetus
to you, or perhaps he will himself, and he will gladly teach him proper
character and demeanour and will teach someone similar to himself to be loved.
The scenario is bizarre: Philetus, once dead, will provide his own replacement as Ursus’ lover (presumably from among the Underworld souls?) and will teach this new boy how to behave and be loved as Philetus had. It is understandable that some have sought to edit the poem here to make it more palatable (as outlined at my n. 133); however, the text printed above, which is relatively close to the paradosis, makes good sense when considered in the light of the intertextual games we have seen Statius play.
Let us unpack the identity of alius Philetos (‘another Philetus’). The most prosaic interpretation is that this will be some new lover, perhaps purchased from Egypt (cf. Silv. 5.5.66–69); however, how would Philetus instruct a living boy from beyond the grave?Footnote 134 Gibson rightly invokes the end of Virgil’s second Eclogue — invenies alium … Alexin (Ecl. 2.73, ‘you will find another Alexis’)Footnote 135 — securing Silvae 2.6’s lovers to another homoerotic pair in Eclogue 2’s Corydon and Alexis,Footnote 136 while also inscribing this Flavian epicedion into the tradition whence springs Virgil’s Hellenistic source.Footnote 137
This alius Philetos echoes, then, with memories of other homoerotic lovers; while we are listening to these echoes, I suggest we also hear Tibullus’ self-defeating proclamation from the end of poem 1.9 that ‘another boy’ (1.9.79, puer alter; full lines printed above) will fall in love with him after Marathus’ treachery. Indeed, the Tibullan echoes are all the louder if we have been attuned to Statius’ repeated allusions to Amores 3.9, the poem on Tibullus’ death. Statius capitalises on Marathus’ figurative death in Tib. 1.9, interweaving Ovid’s description of Tibullus’ own death in Am. 3.9, so that the deceased Philetus has ready access to a Rolodex of homoerotic Latin literary loves. Perhaps in the spirit of the cyclical turning of Ixion’s wheel, the alius Philetos/Phileto similis (‘another Philetus, one similar to Philetus’) could be one of these characters from previous erotic poetry — a suggestion reinforced by the pun in Philetus’ name. He is φιλητός, ‘worthy of love’ or, perhaps even, ‘worthy of love poetry’. Whichever word is printed as the final one of the poem (amorem, amari, amori or amare),Footnote 138 Statius plays on Philetus’ name’s onomastic origin by restating the centrality of love in this poem commemorating ‘Loverboy’.
Statius, then, suggests that the alius Philetos could be a character from our queer coterie; however, the issue that the dead Philetus is being asked to teach a living boy remains unsolved. I suggest that Statius invokes metempsychosis,Footnote 139 as introduced at the end of Aeneid 6’s Underworld scenes (6.703–51). Virgil’s Elysian souls prepare to re-enter the Upperworld as ‘other’ versions of themselves; as Anchises has it, there are ‘souls to whom fate owes other bodies’ (Aen. 6.713–14, animae, quibus altera fato/corpora debentur).Footnote 140 Philetus’ location in the Underworld, next to the shores of the Lethe (Silv. 2.6.100), in the so-called nitentes campi (‘gleaming fields’), places him in that part of the Underworld where souls wait before undergoing metempsychosis.Footnote 141 In short, he is ready to provide his own replacement through reincarnation.
And yet, this seems to be about more than just reincarnation; Statius is remembering the longstanding tradition of metapoetic metempsychosis.Footnote 142 From Latin literature’s earliest moments, the Pythagorean transmigration of the soul had been associated with metapoetic self-awareness, ever since Ennius declared himself alter Homerus (‘another Homer’) when the Greek epicist came to him in a dream and explained the philosophy of metempsychosis (Enn., Ann. frs. 2–9 Manuwald).Footnote 143 As Hardie has shown, this tradition travels through almost all Latin hexameter poetry: Lucretius identifies as an alter Empedocles and alter Epicurus in the same breath (a position complicated by Epicureanism’s non-belief in the soul’s immortality); Virgil’s Anchises in Aeneid 6 is an alter Ennius (himself an alter Homerus); Ovid’s Pythagoras in Metamorphoses 15 is made up of the reincarnated souls of all the above (an anachronistic joke, given that Pythagoras chronologically precedes all of them except Homer), in a move which prompts the reader to see Ovid himself as an alter Pythagoras, alter Ennius, alter Homerus (etc.),Footnote 144 with, as one would expect, some alterations.Footnote 145 The process of metempsychosis, then, moves forward through historical time in one sense, while in another, it instantiates a constant recycling.Footnote 146 Philetus performs a pedagogical task which echoes Homer’s at the beginning of the Annales, teaching his replacement (who is also his reincarnation) how to continue his legacy.
If Philetus is preparing alius Philetos (‘another Philetus’) for metempsychotic reincarnation, he is engaged in turning the cycle of love (onomastically speaking). If the alius Philetus is set to return to the Upperworld, we begin to wonder who Philetus was before he was Philetus, or where the turning wheel last stopped. Was he Marathus? Or Tibullus? From the Underworld, Philetus will teach ‘character and demeanour’ (mores habitusque) to the new boy — attributes that were linked to his tener sanguis (‘tender blood’; 2.6.23 and 2.6.21, respectively), and in which, therefore, we feel the presence of Tibullus, Marathus and other Underworld figures.Footnote 147 Thus, as Statius’ poem draws to a close, we turn back to motifs from its beginning and, in his recycling of the language of mores and habitus, we feel an allusion to the recycling of the soul.
This ‘teaching moment’ between Philetus and the alius Philetos is, itself, coloured by the homoerotic. How could Philetus teach his new self the art of love but through practical example? The participle gaudens (‘rejoicing’) that is ascribed to Philetus in the poem’s last line hints at an eroticism between him and his alius-self, that itself recycles the queer encounter between Homer and Ennius, where the latter says of the former, ‘I see you in dreams, and ever I embrace and kiss you’ (Enn., Ann. fr. 2 Manuwald, video in somnis, numquam est quin amplectar et exosculer).Footnote 148 Notably, Ennius does not ‘inherit’ from Homer as his father-figure, reinforcing patrilineal procreativity;Footnote 149 rather they merge in transhistorical queer desire. The moment in which the baton changes hands in metempsychosis may be a tender and erotic one.Footnote 150
Into this cyclicality, Statius introduces phrases that recycle not his own words, but Tibullus’ pleas in the Marathus Cycle, wheeling us back from the end of one Flavian poem to the beginning of an Augustan poetry cycle. Statius’ final appeal to Ursus, which immediately precedes the reference to Philetus’ metempsychosis, is pone, precor, questus (2.6.103, ‘lay aside, I pray, your wailings’). In these wailings, we hear the echoes of Tibullus’ cry to Marathus, parce, puer, quaeso (Tib. 1.4.83, ‘spare me, boy, I plead’), preserved in the lachrymose alliteration of ‘p’, ‘c’ and ‘r’ sounds, the direct parallelism of ‘p’, ‘p’, ‘q’ initial lettering, and the exact metrical equivalence of the two phrases.Footnote 151 Indeed, the iterative potential of this phrase had already been exploited by Tibullus, who reuses it in his rebuke at Pholoë, after her theft of Marathus from him: parce precor tenero (Tib. 1.8.51, ‘spare, I pray, the tender boy’).Footnote 152 As Statius recycles Marathus, he also recycles generic identity: with his instruction ‘to lay aside wailings’ (ponere questus), he instructs Ursus, on the generic level, to do away with elegiac poetry, which is strongly associated with questus and its cognates in ancient literary criticism — a fitting instruction given that Silvae 2.6 is in hexameters, rather than elegiac distichs.Footnote 153 If Philetus is an alter Marathus, then poetry about Philetus is also a transmigration of poetry about Marathus across metres and genres. Statius becomes a second Tibullus, at least in these poetic moments.
V Queer Elysium
Let us cycle back to queer theory. Through the pens of Marsus, Tibullus, Ovid and Statius, we have traversed four different Underworlds, which are, of course, all the same Underworld. We have met an imbricating series of homoerotic lovers, poets and poems, which cycle between one another: Marsus’ Tibullus walks ever more as Virgil’s comes; Ovid’s Tibullus, however, joins a coterie of lovers, from which Virgil is absent, but in which we may detect the half-hidden shade of Tibullus’ lover, Marathus; Statius’ commemoration of Philetus has him ready to provide his own replacement as Ursus’ lover in a way that prompts us to wonder both who Philetus was before (Marathus?) and who he will be in the future.
These interweaving rings of poetry cast the Underworld as a place that is separate from the chronologies of the Upperworld’s historical time; for all that the philologist may want to read forward-moving, backward-looking linearity here (Tibullus leading to Ovid, leading to Statius), we know that, in Elysium, we can touch the future as much as the past. When Statius responds to the dead Tibullus and Ovid, those Augustan poets are not the past and passive victims of his will to rework. They have already projected an agency into Elysium by walking there poetically. Rather than thinking of Statius as ‘mastering’ his predecessors (in macrocosm of Ursus’ mastery over Philetus), perhaps we should attend to the erotic intermingling of Homer and Ennius at Latin literature’s birth — a very queer parentage for this literary tradition. Ennius neither controls nor dominates Homer — they commingle by means of two deponent verbs that enact the neither-active-nor-passive act of tender and eternal love (Enn., Ann. fr. 2 Manuwald, ‘ever I embrace and kiss you’, numquam est quin amplectar et exosculer). Love — distinctly, homoerotic love — is precisely the vehicle and the metaphor here; this is not a love of alterity (etymologically at the core of heteroerotics), but of the homoerotic pull towards sameness.
Ennius and Homer’s mingling moment should be instructive for our journeys in intertextuality.Footnote 154 If we uncritically declare that, in writing, Statius acts on Ovid or Tibullus, figured as the sexually and literarily passive partners in this encounter, we reproduce a heterosexualist mode of (male) dominance over the other. In the context of classical reception studies, Butler rebukes the historicising premise that ‘the past cannot, in fact, love you back’, which, he argues, produces the almost homophobic edict that ‘if we want finally to get the past off our backs, we must never be seen, in our relationship to the past, to be on our backs’.Footnote 155 And Statius is, to some degree, on his back for Philetus; this puer delicatus is a little buffer than his previous incarnations (2.6.40–44):
torva atque virilis
gratia nec petulans acies blandique severo
igne oculi, qualis bellus iam casside visu
Parthenopaeus erat, simplexque horrore decoro
crinis
you were masculine, with stern
good looks, your gaze was not wanton, and your eyes were
sweet with a serious gleam, as Parthenopaeus was to look at,
now beautiful in his helmet; your hair was unadorned and its
roughness was beautiful
Philetus’ looks abound with oxymorons: beautiful (pulchrior) yet manly (virilis); flirtatious (petulans, blandique …/oculi) but stern (torva …/gratia, severo/igne); epically warlike, but like pre-masculine Parthenopaeus, in whose epithet bellus (‘beautiful’) we hear the paradoxical echo of bellum (‘war’).Footnote 156 He is not figured as the unambiguously passive recipient of a (Statian/Ursan) penetrating love but as a versatile youth who straddles the dichotomy of active and passive. Versatility makes him the perfect lover for queer, commingling intertextuality: a Statian ‘reception’ of Ovidian and Tibullan homoerotics, who puts Statius on his back for these older poets; yet simultaneously a Statian thrust backwards that drives Ovid and Tibullus to their knees.
Philetus, in his glorious versatility, belongs in the queer Underworld — this space that privileges cyclical queer time over straight time’s linearity, where identity is not fixed by the constraints of chronology and corporeality, but may dissolve and fracture, at once pushing into and taking on impressions from past lives (and past poems).Footnote 157 Thus, queer Elysium demands to be interpreted through interlocking intertextualities, but never to be concluded. Statius’ cannot be the last word — he is simply the last (Roman) speaker in this article.
Ultimately, in contemplating Elysium’s queerness, we are left with a notion both disconcerting and hopeful.Footnote 158 If Marathus is both Gallus and Philetus, at different moments on metempsychosis’ wheel, we must confront the fact that Ovid’s coterie of homoerotic lovers in Amores 3.9 is an inflection point, not a conclusion. His hopeful future tense — in Elysia valle Tibullus erit (3.9.60, ‘Tibullus will be in the valley of Elysium’) — represents a snapshot, not a final resting place: after a brief stint in Elysium, Tibullus will cycle into some other mode of poetic existence (into Statius?). Elysium is queer precisely because it is not the straightforward end of life — the tip of time’s arrow. It is a place that cannot be occupied, but poetry may, temporarily, offer us glimpses of it.
Elysium figures Muñoz’ notion of queer utopia as a horizonal space and time that lies just beyond the experiential; as he memorably puts it, ‘we may never touch queerness, but we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality. We have never been queer, yet queerness exists for us as an ideality’.Footnote 159 Rather than the image of poetic eternality with which Roman poetry (especially Ovid) so often acquaints us, queer Elysium provokes us to consider the unfixity and malleability of poetic afterlives.Footnote 160
How, then, can we read those literary Underworlds where authors seek, momentarily, to straighten out Elysium’s queerness? In particular, Aeneid 6’s catabasis stands on a knife’s edge. Virgil wants this catabasis to bear upon linear genealogies: the father, Anchises, tells the son, Aeneas, about their future descendants, biological and political, arrayed in linear chronology (6.752–885).Footnote 161 In short, this Underworld seems the ultimate servant of Halberstamian ‘straight time’; where is the queerness here?
It lies in the threat of cyclicality haunting Aeneas’ catabasis. Anchises the patriarch, we have seen, is both an alter Ennius and an alter Homerus, the result of and participant in queer intermingling that bridges historical time — an inflection point, not a conclusion.Footnote 162 He offers Aeneas not fixed futures, but spokes on a wheel (Aen. 6.792–94):Footnote 163
Augustus Caesar, divi genus, aurea condet
saecula qui rursus Latio regnata per arva
Saturno quondam
Augustus Caesar, progeny of the deified, who will
establish a Golden Age again throughout the fields where
once Latin Saturn ruled.
Famous lines, and cyclical ones. Anchises does not present eternal imperium sine fine (1.279; cf. 9.446–49), but the temporary recycling of a past Golden Age; the promise of his future-tense condet (‘will establish’) — which both looks forward to the Aeneid’s closural, ambiguously ctistic use of condere at 12.950 and looks backward to Lucretius’ use of condere saeclum to denote death (3.1090)Footnote 164 — is problematised by rursus (‘again’) and fully confounded by the perfect regnata (‘ruled’).Footnote 165 Queerness inhabits the interstitials between condet and regnata — if Saturn’s kingdom can come again for Augustus, so too must the periods where no imperium exists at all. This imperium has not one, but multiple fines; its cyclical multiplicity can only be expressed from the vantage of the Underworld.
While I have focused on journeys to Elysium that are, because of their homoerotic content, more obviously queer, we should, after Aeneid 6, recognise that Elysium is queer by its very nature. Even the most progressional, procreational, ‘hetero’ instantiation of the Underworld comprises the same cyclicality and mingling identity that we saw in Silvae 2.6. This Underworld poetics prompts us to remember, as we theorise the connections between ancient texts, that poets need not (only) follow or surpass one another along the straight line of historical time’s arrow; they can also walk shoulder to shoulder, especially in the Underworld, where queer wheels keep on turning.Footnote 166
Virgil, Tibullus, Marsus, Ovid and Statius are all dead. They are all remembered, sometimes by one another, in ways that allow parts of their selves to ‘live on’, but that also push them over into a ‘horizon imbued with potentiality’. Rather than entering a (stable) state of immortality, they turn the wheel. In her 1991 novel Le vieil homme et les loups (‘The Old Man and the Wolves’), Julia Kristeva, mother of the theory of intertextuality, has her character Septicius Clarus (reincarnated after a real second-century c.e. Roman), ask ‘mais où sont passés Ovide, Tibulle[?]’ (‘but where have Tibullus and Ovid gone?’).Footnote 167 He answers himself (1991: 64–5):
Je pense, quant à moi, qu’ils se sont métamorphosés. En quoi? En nous. En vous. Dans les disques du barman. En Santa Barbara elle-même, pourquoi pas? Par conséquent, on peut les retrouver, si l’on cherche bien. Dans les texts, évidemment, sous les ruines des vieux palais et des églises, et même dans les pensées des gens qui changent de visage. … chez vous, il reste des traces.
For myself, I think that they have metamorphosed. Into what? Into us. Into you. Into the bartender’s records. Into Santa Barbara itself, why not? Thus, we can find them, if we search well. In texts (obviously), under the ruins of ancient palaces and churches, and even in the thoughts of people who change their faces. … there remain traces [of them] in you.
En nous? En vous? The queer metempsychosis continues. Where next?
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