5 THE TOMB OF EPIC: BAKHTINIAN PARODY AND PETRONIUS' TALE OF THE WIDOW OF EPHESUS
In his essay entitled “Epic and Novel”, Mikhail Bakhtin mentions the Satyricon of Petronius as an exemplar of Menippean satire, a serio-comic genre which was one of the antecedents of the European novel, and which pioneered the novelistic parody of epic (EN. 22).1 Classicists have long debated the generic classification of the Satyricon as either a Menippean satire or an ancient novel; perhaps it is best to concede that it contains features of both genres, but eludes precise classification.2 Bakhtin's own solution to this generic quandary is lucid: “The Satyricon of Petronius is nothing other than a Menippean satire extended to the limits of a novel” (PDP, 113). Menippean satire, of course, with its formal combination of prose and poetry and wide use of inserted genres, lends itself well to the quotation and parody of epic poetry, and Bakhtin speaks of the novel and its ancient antecedents as exposing the “completed” genre of epic to a dialogue which serves both to exploit and to negate the legitimacy of epic (EN, 3–40). He also identifies folklore as the ultimate origin of the novelistic popular laughter that mocks the pretensions and heroic characterizations of epic.
Nonetheless, in his closest reading of the Petronian text. Bakhtin uncharacteristically neglects these considerations of parody and genre. One of the few episodes of the Satyricon he analyzes in any detail, in “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” (FTC, 220–224), is the Milesian tale of the Widow of Ephesus. In his analysis, he discusses the tale not in terms of its Menippean features, but as an example of a realistic folk narrative that compresses many of the discrete categories of human experience — particularly food, sex, and death — into a grotesquely brief compass. Strangely, however, Bakhtin does not apply to this particular tale the theories he elsewhere elucidates about the folkloric zone of the public square and the novelistic parody of “lofty” genres. In this essay, I will demonstrate how these theories are particularly applicable to the tale of the Widow of Ephesus. and how they enhance its carnivalesque leveling of the “high” and “low” categories of human existence. In the process, I will show how a Bakhtinian theoretical approach might enrich the close reading of a Petronian passage.
Indeed, the novelistic parody of epic Bakhtin that describes in “Epic and Novel” is precisely the sort of parody that is operating in Petronius' celebrated story of the Widow of Ephesus, one of the inset tales of the Satyricon which has a folkloric origin.3 The tale, which occupies chapters 111–112 of the Satyricon, is narrated by the decrepit poet/raconteur Eumolpus to expose “female fickleness” [muliebrem levitatem] (110.7) by illustrating that “no woman is so chaste that she might not be turned to fury by a foreign love [peregrina libido]” (110.7).4 In the tale proper, a matron who begins as a paragon of virtue ends up being seduced by a lowly Roman soldier in the tomb of her dead husband, for whom she has been keeping a vigil and fast. The widow's maid, in order to encourage her mistress first to eat and then to engage in sexual activity with the soldier, appeals to the authority of Virgil's Aeneid, quoting the words of Anna, who urged her sister Dido to forget her dead husband Sychaeus and yield to her passion for Aeneas. The maid here appeals to the authoritative and canonically privileged nature of epic utterance which she exploits for her own ends. And yet her act of reverential quotation simultaneously brings the Roman national epic into an unseemly contact with the grotesque realism of the novel.5 The tale of the Widow of Ephesus destroys epic distance by subjecting its heroes to a comparison with debased and mundane counterparts. Hence, Petronius opens between his novelistic genre and the epic a dialogue which causes the reader to re-evaluate both.
In applying to Petronius Bakhtin's theory of the novel's parody of epic, it is important to note the limitations of Bakhtin's view of the latter genre. As classicists have frequently pointed out, the Bakhtinian notion that epic and the other “high” classical genres are monologic, or composed in a single voice, is too rigid. Thus Frueh notes: “Critical studies have long since demolished the idea that a single voice or perspective dominates Homeric or Vergilian epic” (1988, 26).6 The notion of epic monologism does not take into account, for example, voices in the Aeneid that subvert or question Aeneas' mission to found the Roman nation. Indeed. Bakhtin's insistence on epic and tragic monologism contradicts his arguments elsewhere that all discourse is internally dialogic; that no speaker, however hard he may try, can avoid recognizing and addressing the other.7 Bakhtin's theory still retains its validity and usefulness, however, if it is modified to assert the more readily apparent dialogism of the novel and used to analyze the novel's characteristic play with the ostensible surface monologism of epic. In the act of parody, the novel destroys the distance between the original, ostensibly monologic text and its dialogic double, thus making it difficult to imagine a non-dialogic reading of the parodied text.
Petronius' parody of the Aeneid intensifies and reinforces the earnivalesqtie juxtapositions characteristic of “folk culture” that Bakhtin himself sees in his analysis of the tale of the Widow of Ephesus. As epic is parodied and reinterpreted in the tale, there occurs a concomitant reduction of human pretensions to virtue and lofty heroic impulses from the cerebral to the genital sphere, as the widow rejects her ideals for the more material consolations of food, drink, and sexual congress. And yet, this renunciation also has a regenerative aspect, as the widow renounces death, symbolized by her husband's corpse, and embraces life, as represented by lovemaking in the tomb. Simultaneously, on the generic level, the “moribund” epic genre gives way to the fertile, renewing power characteristic of the novel.8
In each of the three sections of this essay, I will focus on a different aspect of the tale: (I) the tale's recreation of the milieu of the public square; (2) its parody of epic and other genres by juxtaposition with this setting; and (3) its status as a condensed portrayal of what Bakhtin terms the “ancient complex” of folk culture. In the first section, I apply the Bakhtinian notion of the public square to the Petronian text in a close reading of the sort that Bakhtin himself does not undertake. For Bakhtin. the public square, as the main arena for carnival acts, is a symbolic zone of familiar, debasing contact between the sacred and the profane, official culture and the popular culture of the mob, and, in general, “high” and “low” elements of the social and literary hierarchy.9 My reading of the Petronian tale will demonstrate how the narration carefully constructs a tension between the widow and the audience of townspeople who come to scrutinize her performance of the rites of mourning. Thus, the widow becomes for the tale's internal and external audiences a spectacle subject to veneration and subsequent hilarious decrowning and ridicule. As mentioned above, Bakhtin's reading of the tale also does not address its use of parody, a topic he elaborates elsewhere. Therefore, in the second section, I will examine the tale's parody of the higher genres of tragedy and epic in light of Bakhtin's theory of the novel. This parody brings epic into maximal and debasing contact with the milieu of the public square discussed in section one. Finally, the third section will show how this parody, by deflating the higher genres, complements the tale's carnivalesque juxtaposition, noted by Bakhtin (FTC, 222), of various elements of human existence — public demeanor, food, drink, death, sex, and the renewal of life — which official culture usually keeps temporally and spatially separate. In the end, the novelistic parody and reinterpretation of epic go hand in hand with the destruction of conventional hierarchies of behavior in forging a new order through the renewing power of laughter. As we shall see, the tomb of the widow's husband thus symbolically becomes the tomb of epic and official culture and the womb of the novel and of the culture of popular laughter which characterizes this new literary form.
In its consistent preoccupation with the theatrical interaction between the widow and her audience of townspeople, the tale of the Widow of Ephesus creates the ambience of the public square and portrays the widow as a ritual spectacle of the marketplace.10 She begins by ostentatiously exhibiting herself as a faithful wife, and later attempts to conceal her sexual infelicities from the prying popular gaze. From beginning to end, the narrator presents the widow as a “show” which preoccupies the thronging populace (see Slater 1990, 109). The tale opens with a revealing description of the widow's reputation as a paragon of chastity and of the theatrical behavior she exhibits in order to uphold this reputation. The first sentence of the narration (111.1) bears careful scrutiny because it provides clues to the real motivations behind the widow's “exemplary” behavior: “There was a certain matron of Ephesus of such renowned chastity that she drew the women even of neighboring peoples to the spectacle of herself” [Matrona quaedam Ephesi tarn notae erat pudicitiae ut vicinarum quoque gentium feminas ad spectaculum sui evocaret]. The fact that a woman noted for her chastity would be so rare that women from the neighboring countryside would flock to her like one of the “seven wonders” [Scptem Spectacula] of the ancient world (see Lewis and Short 1958, s.v. spectaculum II. C) increases the reader's skepticism, already initiated by Eumolpus' misogynistic preface to the tale, about the widow's supposed chastity (pudicitia). Second, the word spectaculum often denotes a public show, whether gladiatorial or dramatic, put on by wealthy citizens or, in the time of Petronius, by members of the imperial household for the benefit of the populace (see Glare 1982, s.v. spectaculum). Thus, the usage spectaculum sui draws our attention to the theatrical nature of the widow's performance. Finally, the verb evocare, “to summon” (111.1) suggests that the widow takes a rather aggressive and active role in creating this “spectacle of herself”, a role which would seem inconsistent with the modesty inherent in pudicitia.
The widow's histrionic performance during the burial of her husband's corpse reinforces this portrayal of her as a spectacle. She tends to intensify her use of dramatic gestures in the presence of an audience, as at 111.2, where she “beats her breast in full view of the throng” [in conspectu frequentiae] and later, for the benefit of the soldier who importunes her in the tomb (111.9).11 A woman's actions during her husband's funeral seem to have been an especial occasion for public scrutiny. At Trimalchio's banquet, for example, Seleucus' observation that the wife of the recently buried Chrysanthus “did not mourn him well” [maligne ilium ploravit uxor] (Satyricon 42.7) provides the occasion for a diatribe against women in general.
Even after the widow has commenced her fast to the death, the language Petronius employs highlights the respective perceptions of the widow and her audience. Ironically, the widow who has chosen the darkness of tomb and death is perceived by the townspeople as more radiant than ever as the result of her exemplary behavior: “Therefore there was one story in the whole state: men of every rank confessed that that alone gleamed as a true example of chastity and love” [Una igitur in tota civitate tabula erat: solum illud adfulsisse verum pudicitiac amorisque exemplum omnis ordinis homines confitebantur] (111.5). Several of the words in this sentence, una, tota, solum, and omnis, serve to indicate the absolute nature of popular opinion and the tendency toward consensus. Notice that her status as a “fable” [fibula] has already begun among the townspeople (see also Slater 1990, 109) — a possible comment on the origins of folktale in popular gossip.
The portrayal of the widow as a spectacle and a fable places the tale unmistakably within the context of the folkloric domain of the public square discussed by Bakhtin in Rabelais and His World and “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel”. Bakhtin himself does not directly apply this notion to his analysis of the tale in the latter essay (FTC, 221–224), but he does remark elsewhere of the Satyricon in general that behind many of its scenes “the carnival square is glimmering” (PDP, 133). In the tale of the Widow of Ephesus, the townspeople use the public domain to scrutinize what they believe to be the manifestations of the widow's private sexual mores. The voyeurism of the subsequently unfolding narrative will highlight the novel's tendency, in Bakhtin's words, to attempt to make public “all unofficial and forbidden spheres in human life, in particular the sphere of sexual and vital bodily functions (copulation, food, wine)” (FTC, 165–166).12 Bakhtin classifies the Satyricon as an adventure novel of everyday life, and the subject matter of the talc of the Widow of Ephesus certainly accords with the obsession he observes in this subgenre with “spying and eavesdropping” on the secrets of private life, especially “the seamier side of sexual love”, including infidelity (FTC, 124, 128).
The terms of the interaction between widow and townspeople change after the widow's illicit affair in the tomb, as she attempts to conceal her private behavior from a public eye eager to discover her condition. When she is seduced and engages in nightly sexual activity with the soldier, she keeps up appearances by keeping “the doors of the tomb closed, of course, so that anyone of the renowned or the unknown who came to the monument would think that she had expired, a wife of the greatest chastity, above the corpse of her husband” (112.3). Finally, when the widow crucifies the body of her husband to save the life of the soldier, whose dalliance has resulted in the theft of one of the bodies on the cross he has been guarding, the tale ends with the stupefaction of the populace, “wondering” [miratus] how on earth the corpse of the dead husband found its way on to the cross!
Petronius' pervasive emphasis on the theatrical interaction between widow and spectators recalls Bakhtin's discussion of medieval carnival images: “Because of their obvious sensuous character and their strong element of play, carnival images closely resemble certain artistic forms, namely the spectacle” (RW, 7). Such a parallel also jibes well with the emphasis in the Petronian tale on an internal audience consisting of the masses and the exposure and degradation of respected citizens (the widow and her husband) to the common level — all major aspects of the carnival. This reversal of social hierarchy presents the peculiar carnival logic of “life turned inside out”, “the reverse side of the world” (Bakhtin PDF, 122: sec also RW, 11).
In addition to its artistic recreation of the folkloric zone of the public square, the tale of the Widow of Ephesus has as one of its primary characteristics the parody of lofty genres by subjecting them to an unseemly contact with it. Thus, after Eumolpus, in an informal recusatio13 prefacing his narration, claims a lack of concern for supporting his observations about feminine nature from “old tragedies […] or names renowned to the ages” [tragoedias veteres […] aut nomina saeculis nota] (110.8), he ironically goes on to parody these high genres by juxtaposing the language of tragedy and an exemplum from epic with his lowly subject matter (“rem sua memoria factam”, 110.8).14 Slater notes that in light of the theatrical portrayal of the widow, this disclaimer of tragedy is disingenuous on Eumolpus' part: “his story of the Widow of Ephesus […] is from the first presented in the language of theater and role-playing” (1990, 109).
Indeed, the tale of the Widow of Ephesus employs parodic stylizations of themes and language from tragedy and Augustan elegy, while reserving its most devastating parody for the most canonically privileged genre of all, Augustan epic, which it exposes to quotation in a grotesque and absurd context.15 The tale's indirect parody of tragedy and elegy involves the transfer of motifs and indirect quotations from their original context. The new, comic instance of the motif in the parodied text thus stands in dialogic relation to the original instance.16 I will analyze the parody of each genre in order of its appearance in the tale.
First, the widow's theatrical mourning and her maid's concerned reaction imitate the actions and diction of the tragic heroine Phaedra and her nurse in Euripides' tragedy the Hippolytus. Though the situations of the widow and Phaedra are not precisely parallel, the stories resemble one another in the respective heroines' tragic determination to die rather than incur the dishonor of an illicit affair, as well as their nurse-maids' attempts to get them instead to choose love, however illicit, rather than death. After her husband's demise, the widow of the Petronian tale begins a fast to the death (“mortem inedia persequentem”, 111.3) from which neither her parents, relatives, nor, with a touch of hyperbole on the narrator's part, even the magistrates could dissuade her. Compare the description of Phaedra in Euripides' Hippolytus, who also engages in a fast:17 the nurse, after learning that Phaedra has been fasting for three days (“tritian g'ous' asitos hemeran”, 275), determines that her mistress is fasting to the death: “asitei d'eis apostasin biou” (277). This Greek phrase is a rough equivalent of the Latin “mortem inedia persequentem” [pursuing death by fasting] in the Petronian text. For this tragic feat of self-deprivation, the widow is characterized by the townspeople as a woman “of singular example” [singularis exempli] (111.3). The maid who appears in 111.4 and provides faithful and assiduous attention to her mistress resembles the nurse-maid of Euripides' Hippolytus in valuing her mistress' survival and life above the latter's willingness to die to preserve her honor. When it comes to her mistress' fasting, the pertinent question for her is “quid proderit hoc tibi”, “What will this profit you?” (111.11). Compare the words of the nurse to Phaedra in Hippolytus 440–42: “Then, will you destroy your life for the sake of love? I Indeed, it would not profit [ou tara luei] those who love their fellows, I and all those who shall love, if it is necessary for them to die.” Strikingly, “ou tara luei” represents the Greek equivalent of the maid's rhetorical question, “quid proderit hoc tibi?”. In the two stories, the nurse and maid, rather than the heroine, are the first to interact with the prospective male partner. The nurse plots her interaction with Hippolytus (490–492), and we learn of her attempts at procuring him for Phaedra starting in line 601; similarly, the maid interacts with the soldier on behalf of the widow in the Satyricon (111.10–112.2).
The role of the nurse in the Hippolytus also resembles that of Anna in Aeneid IV in encouraging her sister Dido to forget her qualms about engaging in a love affair with Aeneas. This acts as a reminder that the Aeneid itself may already be “contaminated” by tragedy.18 Thus, we have the possibility that Euripides' tragic portrayal of Phaedra influenced both Virgil and Petronius, or that the three accounts of Phaedra, Dido, and the widow all share common folkloric motifs.19 That Petronius knew both the Euripidean and Vergilian passages, however, is indicated by the precise verbal reminiscences of both in his tale of the Widow of Ephesus.
In the Petronian scene in which the soldier seduces the widow, the paratragic tone described above gives way to the parody of two key themes of Latin elegiac poetry: the miles amator [lover as soldier] and the exclusus amator [shut-out lover] (Copley 1956). In this seduction scene, the language of siege in an erotic context, when combined with the use of a maid (ancilla) as intermediary, strongly suggests a parody of these elegiac motifs. The soldier's seduction of the widow is characterized throughout by the language of military siege and conquest. “The soldier does not retreat” [non recessit tam miles] (111.10) at her show of resolve but turns his attention on the maid, corrupting her with wine, so that she “first stretches her conquered hand [victam manumj to the kindness of him who offered it” (111.10). After this victory over the maid, the soldier's determined attack upon the chastity of the widow is described in the same language of military siege: “With whatever blandishments the soldier demanded that the matron wish to live, with these same (words) he attacked even her chastity” [Quibus blanditiis impetraverat miles ut matrona vellet vivere, iisdem etiam pudicitiam eius aggressus est] (112.1). The soldier's seduction of the widow, though accomplished verbally, is represented as an “attack” [aggressus est]. When he has finally compromised her virtue, then, according to the narrator, “the conquering soldier persuades her” to submit to his wishes (112.2).
The locus classicus for the theme of the miles amator is Ovid Amoves 1.9. already itself a parody of the motif in earlier elegiac poets.20 In this poem, Ovid draws the analogy between lovers and soldiers (“militat omnis amans” [every lover performs military service] 1.9.1). arguing that the former undertake erotic campaigns and sieges which rival the exploits of their military counterparts: “that man [i.e., the soldier] besieges mighty towns, this man [i.e. the lover] the threshold of an unyielding mistress” [ille graves urbes, hie durae limen amicae I obsidet] 19–20). Significantly, in Propertius and Ovid, this theme is part of an ideological move which asserts the validity of elegy, whose primary topic is love, against the canonically privileged genre of epic, whose main topic is military conquest. Petronius takes Ovid's parody of the elegiac language of militia amoris (the military service of love) one step further by literalizing the metaphor, with humorous results. In the Petronian tale, an actual, not merely metaphorical, soldier comes to play the role of lover. Thus, the usual language of siege that characterizes paraclausithura, the technical term for poems in which the excluded lover (exclusus amator) attempts to gain entrance to his often unwilling mistress' chambers, is doubly appropriate in describing the soldier's actions in the talc. In his erotic siege, the soldier also conforms to the elegiac tradition since he first acquires the confidence of the maid (111.10) before attempting to win her mistress' hand. In Ars Amatoria 1.351–352, Ovid explicitly recommends the use of the mistress' maid as intermediary: “But first let it be your concern to get to know the maid of the woman to be captured: she will facilitate your approaches” [sed prius ancillam captandae nosse puellae I cura sit: accessus molliet ilia tuos].
As we have seen, the miles amator of elegy is already in itself a parodic motif which suggests, rather impudently, that an erotic hero compares favorably to the hero of epic, the loftiest of genres. Situations abound in epic poetry itself, however, in which military heroes are hindered from accomplishing their missions by amours or the complications arising therefrom.21 Virgil's Aeneid, the canonical Latin epic, provides the most famous example of a hero's erotic dalliance interfering with his military mission: a love affair with the Carthaginian queen Dido keeps Aeneas from leaving for Italy to found the Roman race. The consistent interruption of epic by the theme of love [amor] illustrates that this supposedly monologic genre is already inherently dialogized. Thus, given the varied literary tradition about love and war upon which he draws, it is natural for Petronius, in the context of the seduction of the widow of Ephesus by a Roman soldier, to proceed from a general parody of the elegiac theme of the soldiery of love to a direct parody of the epic love affair between Dido and Aeneas.22
Arguably the starkest means of parodying epic, which Bakhtin terms the completed genre par excellence, is to incorporate a direct quotation from the parodied text into an absurd and lowly context. This technique, on the one hand, exposes epic language to ridicule as a reified, bounded image of a language: but it also, on the other, evokes a productive dialogue between the epic quotation and its new novelistic context. In the Petronian tale, the lowly maid (ancilla) persuades the widow to accept the soldier's advances by first quoting the following line from Virgil's Aeneid: “Id cinerein aut manes credis sentire sepultos?” [Do you believe that ashes or the buried shades are able to feel this?] (IV.34).23 The immediate Vergilian context of this utterance determines the incongruity and hilarity of its application to the Petronian situation. Anna replies to her sister Dido's vow to be true to the memory of her dead husband Sychaeus with the following words: “O [Dido,] dearer to your sister than the light, will you. lonely and sad. pine away all your youth long and know neither sweet children nor the rewards of Venus?” (Virgil, Aeneid IV.31–33). Then she adds the line that Petronius quotes. In the tale, the maid may be appealing to the widow's lofty ideals and vanity by implicitly comparing this situation to that of the Aeneid,24 but the quotation seems incongruous, both because it comes from a lowly ancilla and because it is being applied to this grotesque situation. In any case, it is enough to convince the widow to break her fast. Petronius here appropriates Virgil's discourse, objectifying the poet's language but also rendering it distinct from the original utterance by placing it in an unseemly quotidian and grotesque context. The quotation of Virgil exemplifies what Bakhtin terms the novelistic “reilicalion” of higher literary language for parodic purposes (PND, 44). The language of the quoted portion of the original text becomes an object which may be manipulated and reinterpreted by the author and/or characters in the new text. The maid may not intend any parody herself; she merely appeals to the authority of epic utterance in order to fulfill her genetically determined function as the widow's nursemaid.
Eumolpus the raconteur and Petronius the author, however, certainly intend a deflation of epic by bringing it into unseemly contact with the zone of bodily needs. As the narrator comments wryly:
No one listens unwillingly when compelled either to take food or to live. And so the woman, thirsty with the fasting of so many days, allowed her resolve to be broken, nor did she fill herself with food less avidly than the maid who was conquered before.
[Nemo invitus audit cum cogitur aut cibum sumere aut vivere. Itaque mulier aliquot dierum abstinentia sicca passa est frangi pertinaciam suam, nee minus avide replevit se cibo quam ancilla quae prior victa est.] (111.13).
Thus, the pretentious “matron” [matrona] sinks to the level of her lowly maid in the greedy satisfaction of her bodily desires. At exactly the same moment, epic is parodied by its application to a bawdy Milesian tale and brought down to earth by the satirical commentary about bodily functions which immediately surrounds the epic quotations. With a wink to the audience, the narrator demonstrates the link between eating and sexuality as bodily desires which none can deny for too long, and he hints at the imminent sexual surrender of the widow: “Well, you know what temptations are normally aroused in a man on a full stomach” (112.1; Arrowsmith 1966 translation).
The maid finally convinces her mistress to submit to this sexual conquest by quoting further questions posed by Anna to her sister Dido: “Will you even fight a pleasing love? Does it not occur to you in whose lands you have settled?” [Placitone etiam pugnabis amori? I nee venit in mentem, quorum consederis arvis?] (Aeneid IV.37–38).25 Anna had used these words to convince Dido to cease in her steadfast devotion to her long-dead husband and welcome a love affair with Aeneas. Here, the maid implicitly compares herself to Dido's sister and the widow to Dido herself. Indeed, the two situations do have have some striking similarities. Both Dido and the widow of Ephesus are proud women of Eastern origin who make much of their devotion to their respective dead husbands, only to be convinced by a friend to submit to a sexual union with a Roman (or, in the case of Aeneas, proto-Roman) soldier.
But, of course, the relative humbleness of the dramatis personae here contrasts sharply with the legendary status of Dido and Aeneas. The widow is, after all, an ordinary matron, and the soldier a mere watchman with the disagreeable duty of guarding the corpses of crucified criminals. Furthermore, the grotesque union in the tale of the Widow of Ephesus, wryly termed nuptials (nuptiae) (112.3) is an ironic re-enactment of the divinely sanctioned “marriage” of Dido and Aeneas in the cave (Aeneid IV.172). Dido's husband is buried elsewhere, as is proper, while the widow and her soldier have sexual intercourse in the presence of her once-revered husband's “fresh corpse” [recens cadaver]! In fact, the widow's choice of boudoir proves no better than that of common prostitutes who, as Martial and Juvenal tell us, were wont to carry out their business in cemeteries.26 The tale of the Widow of Ephesus, by placing relatively humble characters in a situation reminiscent of Aeneid IV, represents a carnivalizing moment in which people of a relatively low social class intrude upon the regal world of epic. Anna's question, “Does it not come to your mind in whose lands you have settled?” presumably refers to the African princes in whose region Dido has settled and whose advances she has spurned, to her own peril. Anna cautions Dido against rebuffing yet another regal suitor. But in Petronius these words receive a humorous re-accentuation in the mouth of the widow's maid, referring instead to the cemetery in which the husband is buried and where the widow finds herself in an incongruous and unseemly erotic situation. In the process of this novelistic parody of the Aeneid, the valorized absolute past of the Roman national epic is brought down to the level of the sordid present (EN, 13–16).
At the same time, such parody may also expand upon potentially subversive elements in the original text. By terming the widow's union “nuptials”, Petronius reminds those intimately acquainted with the Aeneid that in the epic, the narrator calls into question Dido's interpretation of her dalliance with Aeneas in the cave as “wedlock”, and he does so in terms which imply moral failings in the heroine: “She terms it wedlock, and veils her guilt with that name” [coniugium vocat, hoc praetexit nomine culpam] (Virgil, Aeneid IV. 172; see Connors 1988, 38). We see here the way in which novelistic parody of epic, in Bakhtinian terms, leads the reader to an open-ended reinterpretation of the latter genre: “The process of parodying forces us to experience those sides of the object (i.e. the represented word of epic) that are not always included in a given genre or a given style. Parodic-travestying literature introduces the permanent corrective of laughter, a critique of the one-sided seriousness of the lofty direct word” (PND, 55).27
As a result of this parody, the widow and her suitor become comic doubles for Dido and Aeneas. Bakhtin observes that no “serious” work of literature can be produced without an implied comic double which threatens to undermine its seriousness (PDP, 127–128; Clark and Holquist 1984, 288). He felt this impulse for parodic doubling to have been particularly strong in the ancient world:
In antiquity, parody was inseparably linked to a carnival sense of the world. Parodying is the creation of a decrowning double […]. For this reason parody is ambivalent […]. Parody here was not, of course, a naked rejection of the parodied object. Everything has its parody, that is, its laughing aspect, for everything is reborn and renewed through death. In Rome, parody was an obligatory aspect of funeral as well as of triumphant laughter (both were of course rituals of the carnivalistic type). (PDP, 127)
“The Widow of Ephesus” is just such a comic double of Virgil Aeneid IV. In the tale, the royal Dido and Aeneas are metaphorically decrowned, as the loftiness of the epic is called into question by its introduction into an absurd and grotesque context. And yet the parody of the Aeneid exhibits a certain amount of ambivalence, as the maid and widow emulate Anna and Dido, respectively.28 Most significantly, as we shall see, the funeral laughter which Bakhtin mentions in the above quotation as accompanying the parodic death of epic and birth of the novel is literalized in Petronius' tale by the setting of the tomb, where epic and actual death are simultaneously mocked and transcended.
The comic nature of this doubling is heightened by its transcendence of the tragic consequences of the original affair between Dido and Aeneas. There is a suggestion that in using Virgil as an authoritative voice to convince the widow to submit to the soldier's advances, the maid is misreading the original text. True, she correctly interprets Anna's intent of convincing Dido to accept Aeneas' love. Therefore, the maid's words to the widow lead to a re-enactment of the Virgilian scene, albeit on a less lofty literary plane. In employing the Virgilian quotation, however, the maid neglects to consider the tragic results of Anna's advice in the Aeneid: Dido takes Anna's advice and has an affair with Aeneas, but he deserts her when Mercury reminds him not to neglect his duty of founding the Roman race. Finally, at the end of Book IV, the deserted Dido commits suicide. Hence, the maid in the Petronian tale has understood the import of Anna's words to Dido in their immediate context but misunderstood their significance in bringing about the latter's destruction. Thus, the maid is an unsophisticated reader of Virgil; but nevertheless, her misinterpretation of Anna's words does not have serious consequences within the comic milieu of the Milesian tale. As we shall see, “The Widow of Ephesus” has a happy ending far removed from the tragic denouement of its epic model. Whereas the epic seduction of Dido by Aeneas ends in her death, the novelistic seduction of the widow by the soldier results in her rescue from a death which seemed certain. This reversal highlights the regenerative aspect which Bakhtin emphasizes in his analysis of the tale, an analysis which will form the starting point for the next section of this paper.
In “Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel” Bakhtin accurately characterizes the tale of the Widow of Ephesus as a compressed narrative including all the aspects of the “ancient complex of folk culture”, which exposes all human experience (death, the tomb, food and drink, copulation, the conceiving of new life, etc.) to ritual laughter (FTC, 221–224). As we have seen, the tale is set in the chronotope of the public square, a clear sign of its folkloric nature. Furthermore, after the seduction of the widow, which is couched in parodic literary terms, we witness the grotesque juxtaposition of the “gross realities of human life”, animalistic elements of existence that are normally kept apart by such human social niceties as the confinement of each separate element to its appropriate time and space.29 As noted above, the soldier and the maid employ food and drink, the alimentary elements of the ancient complex, in order to convince the widow to copulate with the soldier in the tomb of her dead husband. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin represents eating as a means by which people overcome fear and triumph over the constraints of their environment (RW, 281–283).30 This is certainly the case for the widow, whose desire to cat represents her will to live and her triumph over the forces of death.
The dénouement of the tale illustrates the accuracy of Bakhtin's analysis, although Bakhtin himself does not discuss the scene in detail. After her seduction, the widow converts the tomb into a living and functional household, where she and her paramour carry out the conventional roles of husband and wife. The widow betrays her weakness for sexual activity by sleeping with the soldier not once, but “even on the second and third day” [postero etiam ac tertio die] (112.3) as well, and her vigil in honor of her dead husband becomes a vigil in honor of Venus. After the widow's “nuptials”, the word casual (little house), mysteriously applied to the tomb in 111.5, suddenly becomes singularly appropriate, as the widow and soldier “play house”. They enjoy their conjugal rites nocturnally, and during the day the soldier goes about his business and gathers “whatever provisions he is able to secure through his resources” [quicquid boni per facilitates poterat) (112.4) which he will carry back to the household for storage and use.31 In and of themselves, these domestic activities would seem perfectly conventional. They are nevertheless belied by their situational context: the husband's tomb has become nuptial quarters of the new couple.
The widow's dalliance with the soldier occurs in what Bakhtin terms “carnival time”, when the conventions of a society are temporarily ignored (PDP, 175–177; Clark and Holquist 1984, 302). The soldier, however, is caught on the border between carnival time and official time when his erotic dalliance causes him to neglect his duty of guarding the corpses of crucified criminals. When the family of one of the latter manages to remove a body from one of the crosses, the soldier, in fear for his life, relies upon the wits of the widow to rescue him from this dangerous situation. In a stunning reversal, she, who has been the object of the soldier's seduction, ultimately saves his life through a timely ruse by ordering him to replace the stolen corpse of the criminal with that of her own husband! This reversal is especially characteristic of the carnival sense of the world, which focuses on “the pathos of shifts and changes, of death and renewal” (PDP, 124). Thus, the scene exhibits carnivalization in both plot, with its unexpected reversals,32 and subject matter, with its emphasis on death and renewal.
The widow's decision to crucify the corpse indicates the ultimate betrayal of her dead husband, whose memory she had once seemed so devoted to preserving. Her action corroborates Bakhtin's comment that in general the Roman “funeral ritual was (…) composed of lamenting (glorifying) and deriding the deceased” (RW, 4). The husband, like the epic hero of the Aeneid, has been ritually decrowned. The replacement of the criminal's body, presumably taken down by his family for proper burial, with the corpse of her once respectable husband hints at a reversal of the social classes, as does the widow's use of the tomb in a manner more befitting a common prostitute than a matrona. Here we see a further carnivalesque aspect of this tale. Nonetheless, the decision to crucify her husband also represents the widow's final rejection of death and affirmation of life:
The woman, no less pitying than chaste, said “May the gods not allow this, that I see at one and the same time the corpses of the two men dearest to me. 1 would rather hang the dead than kill the living.”
[Mulier non minus misericors quam pudica “nee istud” inquit “dii sinant ut eodem tempore duorum mini carissimorum hominum duo funera spectem. Malo mortuum impendere quam vivum occidere.”] (112.7)
The ironic phrase “no less pitying than chaste” indicates that a concern for human survival has prevailed over the chastity which was apparently so important to the widow at the beginning of the tale. She has followed the advice of her maid who had warned against “burying a living being” [vivam sepelieris] (111.11). The removal of the dead husband to the cross marks the symbolic crucifixion of the ideals of human asceticism and marital fidelity; but at the same time this action averts the transformation of the tomb into a complete shrine of death and instead converts it into a household with only living beings within.
The tomb of her dead husband has thus become a womb, in the sense that it serves as the place where the widow consummates her "marriage" with her new lover, carries out the prescribed female role as manager of the “household”, and, finally, affirms the renewal of life by removing her husband's corpse, the last vestige of her past attempt to become the tragic bride of death. Her privileging of the erotic and survival instincts over death is not unrelated to the debasement of “higher” or heroic human ideals and their literary counterparts, particularly the genres of tragedy and epic. This debasement also has a regenerative aspect. As Bakhtin observes in his discussion of medieval grotesque realism, “to degrade an object does not imply merely hurling it into the void of nonexistence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception and a new birth takes place. Grotesque realism knows no other level; it is the fruitful earth and the womb. It is always conceiving” (RW, 21).33 The cross-fertilization inherent in Petronius' comic parody of various genres thus results in a new, topsy-turvy literary portrayal of human life. The tomb of epic becomes the womb of the novel.
The concentration of all these elements — death, food, drink, sex, and rebirth — spatially in the tomb of the dead husband, and temporally in what Bakhtin terms “a narrative with no slack” (FTC. 222), represents the destruction of the boundaries that normally separate the various aspects of human existence into a hierarchical structure. This phenomenon is analogous on the thematic level to the literary leveling of the boundaries that normally separate modes of discourse (epic, tragedy, elegy, folklore) into a generic hierarchy. Although Bakhtin's specific analysis of the tale fails to address the parody of the Aeneid analyzed above, it nevertheless elucidates the mechanism by which epic is reduced from its lofty plane and brought into dialogic contact with the comic realism of the ancient folkloric complex. If Bakhtin views the narrative of “The Widow of Ephesus”, at its simplest, as “an uninterrupted series of victories of life over death” (FTC, 222), I would add that it also represents the victory of the novelistic Weltanschauung, in its fertile dialogizing aspect, over the relatively completed and moribund genres of epic and tragedy and the ideals they embody.34
NOTES
1. See also the detailed exposition of the characteristics of the “Menippea” in POP, 112–119. For a discussion of the merits and limitations of Bakhtin's category of the Menippea, see Relihan 1993, 5–10.
2. For a brief defense of the Satyricon's status as a Menippean satire, see Relihan 1993. 91. For the Satyricon as a Roman novel in the form of a Menippean satire, see Knoche 1957, 75 and Walsh 1970, 7, 19. For the applicability of Bakhtin's theories to Petronius, see also Frueh 1988, 22–32 and Slater 1990, 141–144.
3. The story of the widow is also found in Phaedrus, Fabulae 15. Walsh uses this as evidence that the story itself is not original to Petronius but “must have been a favorite in the Greek world” (1970, 11 n. 4). On the folkloric origin of the tale, see Scobie 1977, 15–17 and Mueller 1980. 103–106. Walsh argues further that the claim of personal knowledge is one of the conventions of the Milesian Tale (1970, 11 n. 4). He does, however, attribute the tale's “artistic structure and Virgilian evocation” to Petronius (13). See EN, 26 for Bakhtin's postulation of the “folklore roots” of Menippean satire. For discussion of the Petronian tale, see the commentaries of Pecere 1975 and Fedeli and Dimundo 1989. 150–157. For analyses of modern literary parallels to the Widow of Ephesus, see also Boldrini 1989 on Amado's Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands and Kimball 1994 on Molly Bloom in Joyce's Ulysses. Like the widow. Molly Bloom, in her unfaithfulness to her husband, represents the antitype of such univirae (one-man women) as Penelope. On Molly Bloom see also Hutcheon 1985, 5.
4. Except in one instance (see n. 16 below), I will be following Konrad Mueller's third edition of Petronius (1983). All translations are my own unless otherwise specified. The theme of feminine inconstancy belongs to a long tradition of diatribe against women, originating perhaps in Hesiod and Semonides fr. 7 West and achieving its most notable Latin form in Juvenal 6. which also asserts the impossibility of a woman remaining an univira.
5. While subverting the epic genre. Petronius here remains true to the traditional features of the Milesian tale, with its “cynical reversal of accepted moral and literary norms” (Sandy 1970. 467).
6. For examples of such arguments against the utter monologism of epic in general see. e.g.. Lynn-George 1988. 102–105 and 193–195: Redfield 1975 on Homer's Iliad; Peradotto 1990 and 1993 and Felson-Rubin 1993 on the Odyssey; and Johnson 1976 on Virgil's Aeneid.
7. “The dialogic orientation of discourse is a phenomenon that is. of course, a property of any discourse […], On all its various routes toward the object, in all its directions, the word encounters an alien word and cannot help encountering it in a living, tension-filled interaction” (DN. 279). For discussion of this inconsistency in Bakhtin's thought, see Todorov 1984, 80–93 and Peradotto 1990, 53 n. 13 and 1993. 174 n. 2. For a distinction between primary and secondary dialogism as a useful refinement of Bakhtin's thought, see Miller 1993. 183–185.
8. “Degradation digs a bodily grave for a new birth: it has not only a destructive, negative aspect, but also a regenerating one” (RW, 21).
9. For the laughter of the public square and the parodic literature it engendered, see RW, 4–15; on the importance of the image of the carnival square for the Socratic dialogue and Menippean satire, see PDF. 128–134.
10. On ritual spectacles of the marketplace see. e.g.. RW, 4–6 and 155.
11. The conception of funeral as spectacle rinds a close parallel earlier in the Satyricon. Toward the end of his cena. Trimalchio stages his own wake: “imagine that you have been invited to my funeral.” he says to his guests (78.4). He proceeds to “stretch himself on his death-bed”, and say: “Imagine that I am dead. Say something nice.” Earlier, like the widow of Ephesus, he expresses concern for the popular observation of his rites: “I want to be carried out in splendor, in order that the whole populace [totus populus] may call down blessings upon me” (78.2).
12. Petronius has used similarly theatrical language elsewhere in the Satyricon to characterize a woman striking an artificial and extravagant pose: Quartilla. priestess of Priaptis. presents Encolpius et al. with “tears gotten up for a show of grief” [lacrimas ad ostentationem doloris paratas] (17.2) in order to win their sympathy before subjecting them to sexual torture for profaning the god's rites. This episode provides evidence that Bakhtin rightly characterizes the portrayal of everyday life in adventure novels, and particularly the Satyricon. as “priapic” (FTC, 128–129). Earlier in the novel. Trimalchio presents several of his dishes at the cena as spectacular whose true culinary nature is only gradually revealed. One thinks especially of the enormous pig which Trimalchio pretends the cook has failed to gut (49). After threatening to torture the cook for this lapse, Trimalchio melodramatically orders him to gut it in front of the spectators. Instead of the expected entrails, sausages and bloodpuddings (“thymatla cum botulism”) pour out of the apertures in the pig's belly. In 49.10 I read thymatla rather than Mueller's lomacnla, as Bodel (1989) has recently shown the former to be the correct spelling.
13. Recusatio is the technical term for the “refusal” of a poet to write epic poetry, the magnum opus to which every poet of the classical age was expected to aspire. Recusatio was elevated to the level of ideological trope by the Hellenistic poet Callimachus. who through the guise of false modesty asserted the supremacy of his “slight” poetry to the weighty epic. Primarily because of the profound influence of Callimachus on Latin poetry, recusatio is employed very often by such lyric poets as Catullus and Horace and such clegists as Propertius and Ovid.
14. The use of mythological exempla from epic and tragedy seems to have been characteristic of this sort of exposure of female foibles (see note 4 above, especially ad fin.).
15. Linda Hutcheon terms the parodic “quotation” of a previous work in a new context a “trans-contextualization” which results in the ironic inversion of the literary model. She employs the term “trans-contextualization” to emphasize the “distance and difference” present in art's reference to the past (1985. 15). Bakhtin's insistence on the serio-comic genres' parodic destruction of epic distance (EN. 23) would seem at lirst glance diametrically opposed to Hutcheon's terminology. However. 1 would bridge the gap by saying that parody of the sort I discuss in this essay emphasizes the similarities between the original and its comic double in order to destroy the original's claims of a loftier literary and moral status. Thus, the novel emphasizes the distance between the original, ostensibly monologic. text and the dialogized double, only to destroy this distance by making it difficult to imagine a non-dialogical reading of the parodied text.
16. For a discussion of similar comic doubling in Aristophanes' paratragic passages, see Platter, who notes that the comic poet “incorporates the diction, plots, and actual words of the tragedians into comedy, only to deprive them provisionally of their previous authority” (1993. 210).
17. In the Greek tradition, which draws upon the same religious base as that of the Hellenic widow of Ephesus. ritual fasting in mourning for the dead also occurs in the Homeric Hymn to Demeter. where the goddess forces the world to join in her fast by preventing the growth of crops until her daughter Persephone is returned to her. In classical Athens, this fasting was replicated on the second day (nesteia) of the annual festival of the Thesmophoria. where the women observe a fast in the absence of men in mourning for Persephone (cf. the dramatization in Aristophanes' Thesmophoriazusae). As bride of death and symbol of renewal. Persephone is an important mythological antecedent for the widow. According to Burkert. in the pig sacrifice on the first day of the Thesmophoria. “the women […] enter into contact with the subterranean, with death and decay, while at the same time phalloi. snakes, and fir cones, sexuality and fertility are present; the death marriage land subsequent rebirth of Persephone are] thus recapitulated in the sacrifice” (1985. 243).
18. See Williams, who notes that Dido “resembles the tragic figures of Greek drama […] more than her predecessors in epic or epyllion” and terms her characterization “truly the stuff of great Greek tragedies (one thinks especially of Euripides' Phaedra or Medea)” (1972. 333). Williams' comparison of Dido to Euripides' Phaedra is interesting for our purposes. as is the general notion that Virgil's epic is already dialogized by tragic voices. Cf. also Aeneid IV.469–473. where Virgil compares Dido to the famous Greek tragic heroes Orestes and Pentheus.
19. For the folkloric origin of the Phaedra legend, see Barrett 1964. 6–10.
20. For a discussion of Ovid's parody of the language of militia arnoris, see McKeown 1989, 258–259; Myerowitz 1985. 62–72; and Kennedy 1993, 57–58. See also Gamel 1989 on the implied connection between male military and sexual aggression.
21. So, for example, in Homer Odyssey V, Odysseus is detained from returning home from the Trojan War for many years in the cave of his mistress Calypso; and in Iliad I. Achilles refuses to join in the Greek war effort when his commander Agamemnon takes his mistress Briseis away from him.
22. By the time Petronius is writing, circa 65 C.E., Virgil has become the canonical epic poet, and hence Vergilian allusions and parodies abound in the Satyricon. See Collignon 1892, 109–206 for thorough citations of allusions to Virgil in Petronius' text; for the parody of Virgil in “The Widow of Ephesus”, see 123–126. Some other notable references to Virgil are the synopsis of Aeneid 11 in Eumolpus' poetic effusion on the sack of Troy, the Troiae Halosis (Satyricon 89) and the detailed linguistic parody of the Cerberus scene in Aeneid VI when Encolpius and his friends enter and depart the social and literary underworld represented by Trimalchio's dining room at Satyricon 29.1 and 72.8–73.1. respectively (cf. Aeneid VI.417–425). On this latter parody, see Fedeli 1981.
23. The quotation is verbatim, except that Petronius replaces Virgil's curare with the verb sentire.
24. Cf. Slater, who calls this tale a good example of a scene “in which one character's appeal to a literary model” and “the authoritative tone of the hexameter” can carry the day (1990. 169).
25. Mueller 1983, following Buecheler, brackets the second line of the quotation. But, as Walsh puts it, “in the context of the crucifixion-field the line is so apt that if Petronius did not quote it one feels he ought to have done so” (1970, 12 n. 3).
26. Griffin cites as evidence for this contention Juvenal VI.365. “flava ruinosi lupa sepulchri” [the tawny whore of the ruined sepulchre] (see Courtney 1980. ad loc), and Martial III. 93.14–15; “cum te lucerna balneator extincta I admittat inter bustuarias moechas” [when the bath attendant turns out the light and admits you among the prostitutes of the cemetery] (1986, 161–162). Inscriptions on the walls of graves sometimes show that the seclusion of such spots was exploited by other sorts of lovers (cf. Croenert 1909. 447–448). Griffin adds that “Petronius' celebrated story of the Widow of Ephesus […] shows the motif promoted halfway to the dignity of literature proper”. indicating that we have here an interesting instance of the incorporation of language from outside literature (what Bakhtin calls extra literary heteroglossia) into the novel.
27. Also interesting is the possibility that Petronius, in quoting in the folktale of the Widow of Ephesus the words of Anna to her sister Dido, is alluding to the folkloric origin of the Vergilian legend of Dido. Scobie includes both the legend of Dido and “The Widow of Ephesus” in his grouping of Greco-Roman folktales having Eastern analogues; he comments on the former: “Despite the epic associations of this lale, it is known to folklorists as [the] ‘Deceptive Land Purchase‘. It is indicative of the [scanty] attention classicists pay to the interest and value of folklore as an aspect of Nachleben, that not one commentator on Vergil, Aeneid, I. 365–368 alludes to even one of the very large number of analogues which seem to be represented in writing for the first lime in Virgil's passage” (1977. 10). It is quite possible, then, that Petronius is alluding to the folkloric elements of the Dido legend which Virgil's epic (and its readers) have repressed, and thus bringing the legend down from epic heights to its folkloric roots.
28. On parody's inherent ambivalence between emulation and ridicule of the parodied text, see Hutcheon 1985. 26.
29. Elsewhere, Bakhtin cites this juxtaposition as a feature of the Menippea, in terms which could easily be applied to this scene: “Very characteristic of the Menippea are scandal scenes, eccentric behavior, inappropriate speeches and performances, that is, all sorts of violations of the generally accepted and customary course of events and the established norms of behavior and etiquette […]. [Such] scandals and eccentricities destroy the epic and tragic wholeness of the world, they make a breach in the stable, normal, (seemly) course of human affairs and events” (PDP. 117).
30. See the discussion in Clark and Holquist 1984. 301–302. Bakhtin mentions the nuptial banquet as symbolic of the joint powers of sexual and culinary renewal (RW, 283). For an examination of the connection between food and sex in Catullus and Martial, see also Boldrini 1989, 121–123.
31. Cf. Xenophon, Oeconomicus VII. 30: “for it is better for the woman to remain indoors than to go outside, but for the man it is more disgraceful to remain inside than to concern himself with the outdoors.” This is evidence that outdoor activity was shameful for fourth-century Athenian women and remaining indoors disgraceful for men. When the soldier neglects his duties because of his dalliance inside with the woman, part of his shame comes from the breaking of this sort of cultural code. See also the bee simile. Oeconomicus 33. which is reminiscent of Hesiod. Ischomachus' wife asks: “And pray, how do the queen bee's tasks resemble those that I have to do?” And he responds: “she stays in the hive, and does not allow the bees to be idle: but those whose duty it is to work outside she sends forth to their work: and whatever each of them brings in, she knows and receives it, and keeps it till it is wanted.”
32. “Behind all the slum-naturalism scenes of the Satyricon, more or less distinctly, the carnival square is glimmering. And in fact, the very plot of the Satyricon is thoroughly carnivalized” (PDP, 133–134).
33. Such a comparison with the grotesque realism of the Middle Ages is rendered more plausible by the Nachleben of “The Widow of Ephcsus” and also by the fact that Bakhtin's only citation of Petronius in Rabelais and His World involves this talc: “In the sixteenth century a farce entitled ‘The Living Corpses” was produced at the court of Charles IX. A lawyer loses his mind and imagines that he is dead. He gives up eating and drinking and lies motionless on his bed. In order to cure him, one of his relatives pretends that he too is dead […]. All weep for the ‘dead' relative. Then (the latter) makes comic grimaces, and everybody laughs, including the supposedly dead man. The lawyer is surprised but is told that dead men laugh, so he forces himself lo laugh: this is the first step in regaining his sanity. Then his relative begins to eat and drink. The lawyer is now persuaded that dead men also nourish themselves. He does so, too, and is completely cured. Thus, laughter, food, and drink defeat death. The theme recalls the novella ‘The Chaste Matron of Ephesus” by Petronius (from the Satyrikon)” (RW. 299). Like the widow, the fasting lawyer in this farce requires food and drink to restore him to sanity (cf. Sat. 111.9: “ad sanitatem revocantur” [they are recalled to sanity]). In each case, the mental preoccupations of the fasting character are defeated by the demands and enticements of the needs of the belly, part of the body's “material lower stratum”.
34. I would like to thank Professors Catherine Connors. Stephen Hinds, K. Sara Myers, Jim Porter, and Charles Witke. who have read drafts of this paper and offered valuable suggestions. Vivian Rivera has also offered useful advice. Any remaining errors arc mine alone.
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