Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid's Myth of Philomela

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chapter 9 Picturing Rape and Revenge in Ovid’s Myth of Philomela

Hetty E. Joyce

Only a fraction of the stories in Ovid’s Metamorphoses became popular subjects in the visual arts. That the tale of Philomela, Procne, and Tereus (6.424–674) was not one of these is hardly surprising, for of the many Greek myths recounting betrayal, rape, torture, and murderous revenge, this one may be the worst. It is not the story of a “heroic rape,” in which the aggressor is a god or hero, but rather concerns the abuse of power by a cruel and deceitful king. Ovid tells of how Tereus, king of Thrace, married the Athenian princess Procne, daughter of King Pandion. Five years later, at Procne’s request, he sailed to Athens to fetch her sister Philomela for a visit. He was immediately seized by a passionate desire for the beautiful virgin, and after arriving with her in his own country, he dragged her off to a hut in the woods and raped her. In order to silence Philomela’s threats to expose the crime, he cut out her tongue. Then, after forcing himself on her again repeatedly, he returned to his wife, telling her that her sister had died on the journey. Guarded in the hut to prevent her escape, the girl made use of a “barbarian loom” on which, in the course of a year, she wove “purple marks on white threads in witness to the crime” (pur- pureasque notas filis intexuit albis/indicium sceleris; 6.577–8). With gestures, she persuaded a female servant to deliver the finished tapestry to her sister, who upon reading it became speechlessly enraged. Under cover of a Bacchic festival, Procne freed Philomela from the hut, and to avenge Tereus’ wrongs, the sisters murdered Tereus and Procne’s young son Itys, dismembering, boil- ing, and roasting the body into a meal for the unsuspecting father. As Tereus dined, blood-spattered Philomela rushed into the room and flung Itys’ head at him. The horrified and furious king pursued the women with drawn sword until all three were changed into birds: a nightingale and a swallow pursued eternally by a hoopoe. The tale was already an old one when Ovid told it: Earlier treatments had included a Tereus by Aeschylus’ nephew Philocles, part of his Pandionis tetral- ogy (set of four plays), now lost, as well as Sophocles’ tragedy of Tereus, which survives only in fragments; these works must also have depended on earlier

300854 306 Joyce sources.1 Aristotle comments in the Poetics (54b) on the construction of the Tereus, citing Philomela’s revelatory fabric—“the voice of the shuttle” (ἡ τῆϛ κερκίδοϛ φωνή), in Sophocles’ phrase—as an example of a poetic device that aids in anagnorisis, the change from ignorance to knowledge. But Aristotle dis- approves of Sophocles’ use of the cloth as the vehicle of revelation, considering it contrived and inartistic. The surviving manuscript tradition of Ovid’s Metamorphoses begins in the ninth century in France and continues virtually uninterrupted into the Renaissance.2 In addition to editions of the Latin text, there were numerous translations into the vernacular in poetry and prose; retellings, condensations, and bowdlerizations; texts with added moralizing interpretations; and picture- books with little text. The best-known of the later versions are two early fourteenth-century works: the Ovide moralisé, whose imbedded Old French tale of Philomena has been attributed to Chrétien de Troyes (written about 1170);3 and Chaucer’s Legend of Good Women, which omits the sisters’ revenge entirely, however, ending the story with their reunion in the woods.4 John Gower’s late fourteenth-century Confessio Amantis (The Lover’s Confession) also includes the story of Philomela.5

I am very grateful to Alison Poe and Marice Rose for their thoughtful comments and sugges- tions regarding earlier versions of this study. Any errors that remain are my own. 1 Anne Pippin Burnett, Revenge in Attic and Later Tragedy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 177–91. 2 Ralph Hexter, “Ovid in the Middle Ages: Exile, Mythographer, and Lover,” in Brill’s Companion to Ovid, ed. Barbara Weiden Boyd (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2002), 413–42; John Richmond, “Manuscript Traditions and the Transmission of Ovid’s Works,” in Boyd, Ovid, 443–59, 469–74; Frank T. Coulson, “Procne and Philomela in the Latin Commentary Tradition of the Middle Ages and Renaissance,” Euphrosyne 36 (2008): 181–96. 3 Cornelis de Boer, Philomena, conte raconté d’après Ovide par Chretien de Troyes; pub. d’après tous les manuscrits de l’Ovide moralisé avec introduction, notes, index de toutes les formes et iii appendices (Paris: P. Geuthner, 1909); Roger Cormier, ed. and trans., Three Ovidian Tales of Love, Garland Library of Medieval Literature, ser. A, vol 26 (New York and London: Garland, 1986), 183–9, 200–65; Ana Poiret, “Recasting the Metamorphoses in Fourteenth-Century France: The Challenges of the Ovide moralisé,” in James G. Clark, Frank T. Coulson, and Kathryn L. McKinley, ed., Ovid in the Middle Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 83–107. 4 Sheila Delany, The Naked Text: Chaucer’s “Legend of Good Women” (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994): 213–21; Paul Beekman Taylor, Chaucer’s Chain of Love (Madison, nj: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1996), 57–70. 5 Carolyn Dinshaw, “Rivalry, Rape and Manhood: Gower and Chaucer,” in Chaucer and Gower: Difference, Mutuality, Exchange, els Monograph Series 51, ed. Robert F. Yeager (University of Victoria, bc, 1991), 130–42; Bruce Herbert, “The Myth of Tereus in Ovid and Gower,” Medium

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