In the nearly four decades that have followed the publication of Sarah B. Pomeroy’s Goddesses, Whores, Wives, and Slaves (New York 1975), feminist classical scholarship has expanded and enriched our understanding of the lives of ancient women and their representation in the material and textual records of classical antiquity. Historians of gender have recovered the traces of ancient women’s lives left in documents and on monuments while feminist literary critics have explored the constraints of genre and other cultural traditions that shape the depiction of women in Greco‑Roman art and literature. Marshall McLuhan’s famous phrase, ‘the medium is the message’,1 well describes how the textual and/or material form in which the evidence of classical women’s lives is preserved can exert pressure on that evidence, limiting or distorting the historical ‘facts’ to conform with generic codes and conventions. As Suzanne Dixon puts it, ‘the genre of the text determines what it treats, how it treats it and what it leaves out’.2 Thus, lyric poetry may celebrate a bride’s wedding without recording its date or location, let alone the culinary details of the feast or the identity of the cook who prepared it. Similarly, an archaeological site may preserve loom weights and other evidence of wool working without furnishing any indication of the numbers of woolworkers (presumably female, as they are in classical iconography from the archaic period to late antiquity), let alone their names, ages, or provenances.3
As a feminist scholar with a professional specialization in Latin literature and Roman culture, I analyze the rhetoric of the representation of women in Latin literature, aiming thereby to enrich our knowledge not only of ancient attitudes to women but also of women’s lived experience in Roman antiquity. Some feminist historians have expressed skepticism about using literary evidence to elucidate the lives of women in antiquity,4 but others recognize that in a discipline such as Classics, in which relatively little textual and/or material evidence produced by or dealing with women survives (especially in comparison with modern European literatures and document archives), it is crucial to scrutinize every scrap of evidence at our disposal.5 To this end, I wish here to ask what we can know about Gallus’ elegiac mistress, Lycoris, and her supposed inspiration, the mime‑actress Volumnia Cytheris, by investigating ancient literary and material evidence for the light they can jointly shed on the figure of the Greek courtesan in late republican Rome.6 I employ the tools of philology and intertextual analysis, methods of critical literary exegesis traditionally applied to classical texts, as well as the technique of prosopography (which uses onomastic evidence to illuminate an individual’s regional origins, social standing, and family relationships), in my examination of the sources for Gallus’ elegiac mistress and her onomastic kin in Latin literature and the Roman epigraphic record.7 French narratological and feminist theory, as well as gender theory and transnational feminist criticism (derived from post‑colonial theory), inform my analysis of this evidence throughout, as I seek to illuminate the gendered socio‑political and imperial context that shapes the representation of a courtesan bearing a Greek name in Latin letters and Roman inscriptions.8
My study begins by analyzing the textual life ascribed to Lycoris in Gallus’ elegiac poetry and its contemporary reception in the pastoral poetry of his friend Vergil, in the elegiac poetry of Gallus’ younger contemporaries, Propertius and Ovid, and in the epigrams of Martial. I situate this literary evidence in the context of the documentary and historiographical evidence we have for her putative inspiration, the freedwoman Volumnia Cytheris, and other contemporary courtesans in republican and Augustan Italy who bore the Greek names Lycoris and Cytheris. A primary goal of this study is to explore the generic pressures that inform (and deform) the portrait of this meretrix, or courtesan, in Latin letters.9 But I also aim to document the contemporary currency of the Greek names of Gallus’ mistress and elegiac puellae in late Republican and early imperial Rome, where the names Lycoris and Cytheris are resonant of Rome’s conquest of Greece; and to argue that Roman elegy is intimately correlated with Roman imperialism in its celebration of the sexual spoils of military conquest.10 The contrast between the legal Italian names of the Roman elegists (and the historical mime‑actress Volumnia) and the exotic Greek names of their beloveds (including Volumnia’s stage and elegiac names, Cytheris/Lycoris) encoded in their verse documents the Latin elegists’ recognition of the social changes resulting from the Roman imperial project that is otherwise occluded in an ostensibly un‑ or anti‑political presentation of elegiac themes.11
I. Lycoris Galli
Current scholarly consensus suggests ‘that the women who form the subject of Latin love poetry bear little relation to ‘real’ women’.12 But the late antique grammarian Servius records the information that C. Cornelius Gallus – soldier, statesman, and the first Latin elegist – ‘wrote four books of love poems about his mistress Cytheris’ (amorum suorum e Cytheride scripsit libros quattuor, Serv. ad Buc. 10.1), ‘whom he called Lycoris’ (quam Lycorin uocat, Serv. ad Buc. 10.6).13 Moreover, Heikki Solin, in his indispensable three‑volume compilation of Greek personal names in Rome, provides considerable inscriptional evidence for women bearing the names of celebrated Greek hetaerae (courtesans) at Rome, amongst them ‘Lycoris’.14 I begin, therefore, by examining the representation of Gallus’ Lycoris in Latin literature and papyri, before considering some inscriptional attestations of her name from ancient Rome.
In the final poem of his bucolic collection, Vergil promises ‘a few verses for his friend Gallus’, Latin poet and Roman politician, ‘of a kind that Lycoris herself might read’ (Buc. 10.2‑3): pauca meo Gallo, sed quae legat ipsa Lycoris, | carmina sunt dicenda. These opening words make clear the pastoral poet’s affection for ‘his’ Gallus, and link his friend closely to Lycoris in a relationship that Vergil explicitly characterizes as amatory, though troubled, when he announces his decision to ‘relate Gallus’ troubled loves’ (sollicitos Galli dicamus amores, Buc. 10.6). He thereby signals his engagement with Gallus’ erotic verse, probably entitled amores,15 but also symbolized by the name of his beloved ‘Lycoris’. Critics from antiquity to the present have accordingly interpreted Vergil’s poem as a meditation on Gallan elegy.16 Vergil portrays Gallus as wasting away over the unworthy Lycoris (indigno cum Gallus amore peribat, 10), who has abandoned him to follow another lover across the Alps (46‑49), as Apollo explains (21‑23): uenit Apollo: | ‘Galle, quid insanis?’ inquit. ‘tua cura Lycoris | perque niues alium perque horrida castra secuta est’ (‘Apollo came: “Why are you in a passion, Gallus?”, he said. “Your girlfriend Lycoris has followed another through the snowdrifts and shuddering war‑camps”.’). The mistress’ cruel abandonment of her lover and the unworthiness of his unrequited love are standard features of the elegiac mise‑en‑scène a generation later, in Augustan elegy, as Vergil suggests they also were in Gallan elegy.17
Vergil movingly evokes Gallus’ concern for his mistress on her travels through the Alps (46‑49):
tu [sc. Lycori] procul a patria (nec sit mihi credere tantum)
Alpinas, a! dura niues et frigora Rheni
me sine sola uides. a, te ne frigora laedant!
a, tibi ne teneras glacies secet aspera plantas!
Lycoris, far from your homeland (nor let me believe such a thing) – ah! harsh mistress – you will see the Alpine snows and the snows of the Rhine, alone without me! Ah, may the snows not harm you! Ah, may the rough ice not cut your tender feet!
These lines contain a notable concentration of the stylistic features characteristic of Gallus’ older contemporaries Catullus, Cinna and Calvus (the so‑called ‘neoteric’ poets), such as the interjection a! in anaphora, and second‑person apostrophe (tu, te, tibi) in polyptoton, of a maiden wandering far from home – all in a rhetoric of heightened emotionality such as seems to have characterized neoteric verse.18 The mannered artistry and emotional expressivity of Vergil’s lines have therefore been taken to confirm Servius’ notice ad 10.46 that ‘all these lines are Gallan, transferred from his poetry’ (hi autem omnes uersus Galli sunt, de ipsius translati carminibus).19
Vergil’s lovelorn Gallus emphasizes not only the impropriety but even the unnaturalness of Lycoris’ trip over the Alps, so far from her homeland (tu procul a patria, Buc. 10.46) and her elegiac lover (me sine sola, 48), in the frigid landscape of the Rhine (niues et frigora Rheni, 47), where a series of military campaigns (cf. horrida castra, 23) in this period extended Roman hegemony into Gaul (59‑49 bce) and Germany (12 bce‑9 ce). Vergil sharply contrasts the impropriety of Lycoris’ Alpine travels with the expectation of Gallus’ service in just such a military context, by showing him explicitly acknowledging his own martial commitments in the immediately preceding lines (44‑45): nunc insanus amor duri me Martis in armis | tela inter media atque aduersos detinet hostis (‘now a mad passion for harsh war restrains me under arms in the midst of weapons and hostile enemies’). Although Vergil does not draw attention to the significance of Gallus’ cognomen, meaning ‘Gallic’, at this point in the poem, it may be implied earlier in the pointed juxtaposition of Apollo’s apostrophe of the poet (Galle, 22, at line beginning) with the name of his beloved (Lycoris, 22, at line end), in conjunction with the description, in the next line, of her travels ‘through snow and shuddering war‑camps’ (perque niues… perque horrida castra, 23), i.e., into Gaul (Alpinas… niues et frigora Rheni, 47).
Whether or not Vergil implicitly alludes to the Gallan provenance of Gallus’ cognomen here, it is clear that he represents his friend – a Roman politician and military officer, as well as Latin elegist – as out of place (and his elegiac poetry as out of generic context) in the Arcadian setting of his own pastoral poetry.20 A series of optative subjunctives (33‑36) and contrary‑to‑fact conditions (37‑41, 43) underlines Gallus’ generic dislocation, but facilitates Lycoris’ seamless immersion in the Arcadian landscape (41‑43):
serta mihi Phyllis legeret, cantaret Amyntas.
hic gelidi fontes, hic mollia prata, Lycori,
hic nemus; hic ipso tecum consumerer aeuo.
Phyllis would pluck garlands for me, Amyntas would sing. Here are cold springs, Lycoris, soft meadows, a glade; here with you I could waste away in the passage of time.
Not only is her name Greek, like those of the other pastoral beloveds whom Gallus names in these lines, but the specific setting of his lament, in Arcadia (26, 31‑33), may also intimate the generic propriety of situating Gallus’ harsh mistress Lycoris (named at 2, 22, and 42, always at line end) in the pastoral landscape where her poet‑lover wanders, specified by Vergil as beneath Mt Maenalus (14‑15) and the ‘rocks of cold Mt Lycaeon’ (gelidi… saxa Lycaei, 15). The implication of an etymological relationship between ‘Lycoris’ and ‘Lycaeon’ removes Gallus’ mistress from the ambit of Apollo, whose cult‑title Λυκωρεύς is feminized in her name, into the company of the Arcadian god Pan, to whom Mt Lycaeon (‘Wolf Mountain’) in Arcadia was sacred and whose animal sexuality is reflected in the Latin slang use of lupa (‘she‑wolf’) for prostitute.21 Vergil thus simultaneously naturalizes Lycoris in his own Arcadian landscape and bluntly alludes to a Greek courtesan’s social standing in contemporary Rome.
A similar ethnically charged tension emerges in Gallus’ anguished address to Lycoris as she travels over the Alps. Although he emphasizes her dislocation from home (tu procul a patria, 46), we may well wonder whether her fatherland is Greece or Rome. Commentators usually take patria as a reference to ‘the real world beyond the pastoral myth’,22 i.e., to Roman Italy where we meet Cytheris (the mime‑actress whom Servius records as the inspiration for Gallus’ Lycoris) in the contemporary correspondence of Cicero (see below). But her Greek name (like the stage name Cytheris) implies Greek lineage and hints at a slave provenance, thereby aligning her status with that of the rustics Phyllis (the name of Iollas’ contubernalis at Buc. 3.76) and Amyntas (the name of the herdsman’s lover at Buc. 3.66).
All four Greek names, moreover, are resonant of Roman conquest.23 Attested epigraphically before and after Augustus, the names Phyllis and Amyntas bear witness to the circulation of Greeks within the empire, not only in the Greek east but also in the Latin‑speaking west, where they appear in the Italian epigraphic record of Greek slaves and freedpersons.24 The name Lycoris too (like Cytheris) is securely attested in early imperial Rome of freedwomen and slaves.25 Surprisingly, however, scholars of Latin elegy have only rarely taken the inscriptional evidence into account in their discussions of the elegiac puella.26 Nor have historians of prostitution pressed the evidence of Roman elegy far in their consideration of the classical courtesan.27 Yet Sharon James has argued that the puella of Latin elegy is an avatar of the high‑priced Greek courtesan familiar from new comedy and Hellenistic epigram,28 both literally and literarily available to the Roman elites as a result of the expansion of their military empire into Greece. The elegiac mistress herself must thus be counted another luxury import from the eastern Mediterranean, like the silks, gems and perfumes in which she conventionally dresses.29
Ovid assures his readers in his handbook on erotic seduction that Rome provides an abundance of foreign women from whom to choose a mistress (Ars 1.171‑6):
quid, modo cum belli naualis imagine Caesar
Persidas induxit Cecropiasque rates?
nempe ab utroque mari iuuenes, ab utroque puellae
uenere, atque ingens orbis in Vrbe fuit.
quis non inuenit turba, quod amaret, in illa? 175
eheu, quam multos aduena torsit amor!
[Why, did Caesar not recently bring on Persian and Athenian ships in the guise of a naval engagement? Surely youths and maidens came from either sea, and the whole huge world was in the City. Who did not find something to love in that crowd? Alas, how many men did a foreign love overthrow!]
And his boast is borne out by the inscriptional evidence of the sexual availability of freedwomen, libertae, in Italy with the Greek names ascribed by the Roman elegists to their mistresses.30 Solin identifies fourteen Lycorides in the Roman epigraphic record: eight of uncertain status, one probably freed, five slave and freed, all of them dating from the principate (early 1st c. – 3rd c. ce), with the majority (nine of fourteen) from the first century ce.31 In the report of their nomenclature, epigraphic conventions suggest that the nine Lycorides datable to the first century ce were originally slaves who gained their freedom. Of particular interest are Lycoris Augustae li[b.] (CIL 6.8888) and Saenia C. l. Lycoris (6.25748), both datable to the first century ce, whose status as freedwomen is clearly marked by the onomastic formula ‘li[b]./l.’ (= liberta) that appears on their inscriptions. The Roman patron of the former, Augusta (whether Livia or a later Julio‑Claudian princess), is also telling in its association of the freedwoman with the leading domus of the early principate. Similarly august early imperial gentilician names are borne by the (probable) freedwomen Statilia Lychoris (6.6571) and Claudia Lycoris (6.8554), both datable to the reigns of Augustus’ Julio‑Claudian successors (Tiberius to Nero) and from households associated with the imperial domus.
Attestations of the name Lycoris in Rome are concentrated in the first century ce, a temporal distribution that may also be significant, as a reflection of the continuing popularity of Gallus’ amores in the century after his death. By contrast, for example, the most commonly reported courtesan’s name, Lais, occurs in the Italian epigraphic record as early as the late republican period.32 However that may be, and it must be acknowledged that the evidence does not allow us to draw firm conclusions, we can securely date all the extant references to Gallus’ amores in Latin literature to a little over a hundred years following his death.33
We have already seen that Vergil includes both Gallus and Lycoris as characters in the final poem of his Bucolics, whose publication is traditionally dated to the years 37‑35 bce. A decade later, in the mid‑20s bce, the elegiac poet Propertius identifies Gallus as his immediate predecessor in a catalogue of Roman amatory poets, and ‘Lycoris’ as the mistress with whom he was famously associated (Prop. 2.34.85‑94):
haec quoque perfecto ludebat Iasone Varro,
Varro Leucadiae maxima flamma suae;
haec quoque lasciui cantarunt scripta Catulli,
Lesbia quis ipsa notior est Helena;
haec etiam docti confessa est pagina Calui,
cum caneret miserae funera Quintiliae.
et modo formosa quam multa Lycoride Gallus
mortuus inferna uulnera lauit aqua!
Cynthia †quin etiam†34 uersu laudata Properti,
hos inter si me ponere Fama uolet.
Such passionate verse Varro too composed when his Jason was finished, Varro the greatest flame of his own Leucadia; this passion too the writings of playful Catullus celebrated, by which Lesbia is more famous than Helen herself; this too the page of learned Calvus confessed, when he lamented the death of pitiful Quintilia. And how many wounds from beautiful Lycoris does the dead Gallus now bathe in the rivers of the underworld? Why, even Cynthia has been praised in the poetry of Propertius, if Renown will wish to set me among these poets.
Concluding the sphragis to Propertius’ second book, these lines show Propertius measuring his elegiac fame against that of the most illustrious Roman love poets of the period. The reference to Gallus’ recent death – by suicide in 27 or 26, after Augustus renounced his friendship – suggests a date of 28‑25 bce for the composition of Propertius’ book,35 and bears witness to the continuing fame enjoyed by Gallus and his mistress Lycoris in the immediate aftermath of the poet’s death. Propertius’ faithful and loving Lycoris, however, differs significantly from the fickle Lycoris of Vergilian bucolic, though the wounds of the dead Gallus may recall Vergil’s reference to the historical Gallus’ military commitments, in addition to his recent political indiscretion and suicide.36 In Propertius’ lines, moreover, the parallelism of syntax in his citation of the Latin amatory poets, each named in the final position of the couplet’s hexameter, establishes them in a symmetrical relationship that distinguishes the poet‑lovers sharply from the mistresses whom they celebrate in their verse, and downplays any hint of literary rivalry. Propertius founds this structural congruence on male ‘homosocial’ desire, by harnessing the sexual and textual exchange of women for the consolidation of literary bonds between men.37
Subsequent references to Lycoris by Ovid and Martial lack the specificity with which Vergil and Propertius endow her, but exhibit a similarly homosocial dynamic in their textualization and circulation of the elegiac mistress/book. Thus Ovid repeatedly links Lycoris’ name with Gallus’, although he does not refer to specific events in their textual lives but rather to their literary repute. Already in the Amores, he represents their fame as extending to the western and eastern ends of the earth (1.15.29‑30): Gallus et Hesperiis et Gallus notus Eois, | et sua cum Gallo nota Lycoris erit (‘Gallus will be known both in the West and the East and, along with Gallus, his darling Lycoris will be known’).38 Scholars agree that Ovid here echoes Gallus’ own poetry, which seems to have proclaimed the ‘world‑wide fame’39 that Lycoris won through his verse and, indeed, as the embodiment of his verse. The Amores’ most recent commentator has observed that her name ‘here connotes both Gallus’ mistress and his poetry about her’40 as it does also at Ars 3.537: Vesper et Eoae nouere Lycorida terrae (‘Evening and the Eastern lands know Lycoris’). In the exile poetry too, Ovid briefly mentions Lycoris as Gallus’ poetic subject (Tr. 2.445, non fuit opprobrio celebrasse Lycorida Gallo, ‘it was not commemoration of Lycoris that disgraced Gallus’) and, at the end of the first century ce, the Flavian epigrammatist Martial memorializes ‘beautiful Lycoris’ as the inspiration of Gallus’ verse (Mart. Epigr. 8.73.6): ingenium Galli pulchra Lycoris erat (‘beautiful Lycoris was Gallus’ inspiration’).
A central gender dynamic of the Latin literary reception of Lycoris, both in Gallus’ own lifetime and increasingly after his death, is thus the textualization of Lycoris (as his mistress comes to symbolize his verse)41 and her concomitant circulation among men (as these passages set in play a tension between the mistress’ erotic and literary circulation).42 For we have seen first Vergil, then Propertius and Ovid, and finally Martial pass Lycoris around in their verse, repeatedly handling Gallus’ fickle mistress, by synecdoche for his poetic materia, and thereby increasing not only his literary fame but also her erotic circulation. Vergil’s representation of a promiscuous Lycoris, who has left his friend for another soldier‑lover (Buc. 10.22‑23, 46‑49), doubtless follows the lead of Gallus himself, one of whose extant lines of poetry characterizes his mistress as causing him pain because of her nequitia, ‘idleness’ in the moralizing sense of sexual ‘depravity’ often used in erotic contexts43 (Gallus fr. 145.1 Hollis): tristia nequit[ia fact]a, Lycori, tua (‘<? made> sad, Lycoris, because of your misbehaviour’).44 This, the first legible line of the famous papyrus fragment (P.Qasr Ibrîm inv. 78‑3‑11/1) discovered in 1978 in the fortress of Qasr Ibrîm in Egyptian Nubia, secured the attribution of the authorship of the verses to Gallus through the reference to Lycoris.45
The lines that follow, moreover, expressly articulate the gendered dynamic of the mistress’ textualization and circulation that we have already traced in her later literary reception (Gallus fr. 145.2‑9 Hollis):
fata mihi, Caesar, tum erunt mea dulcia quom tu
maxima Romanae pars eris historiae,
postque tuum reditum multorum templa deorum
fixa legam spolieis deiuitiora tueis. 5
] . . . . . tandem fecerunt c[ar]mina Musae
quae possem domina deicere digna mea.
] atur idem tibi, non ego, Visce,
] . . . . . . . . l . Kato, iudice te uereor.
My fate will then be sweet, Caesar, when you are the greatest part of Roman history and after your return I shall see the temples of many gods the wealthier, decorated with the spoils of your campaigns . . . at last the Muses have fashioned poems worthy for me to be able to utter of my mistress . . . the same I do not fear for you, Viscus . . . though you be judge, Cato.
Scholars have debated everything about these famous lines, including how many poems they represent. Like many, I accept the suggestion of the first editors of the papyrus that lines 2‑5 and 6‑9 constitute two short self‑contained epigrams, while the first legible line of the papyrus forms the conclusion of an elegy of unknown length.46 However many poems we posit, it is clear that the papyrus moves directly from a description of Lycoris’ misbehaviour (the details of which are no longer extant) to the poet‑lover’s apostrophes of Caesar (2‑5), the arbiter of Roman politics,47 and then of Viscus and Cato (8‑9), adduced here as the arbiters of Latin letters.48 The latter in particular are closely linked to Lycoris’ textualization and circulation between men, for the pair seems to be invited to judge (iudice te uereor, 9) the speaker’s achievement in composing poems worthy of his mistress (c[ar]mina… | quae possem domina deicere digna mea, 6‑7).
The literary renown that Lycoris’ general circulation brings the poet‑lover is thus an important factor to consider in his characterization of his mistress’ nequitia. For while the opening line of the papyrus may comment on the poet‑lover’s passionate relationship with his mistress, the remaining couplets seem to introduce a larger social and cultural context into his poetry collection, since they are addressed to an important political and military patron and to contemporary literary critics. Lycoris, both Gallus’ mistress and his literary material, is thereby subsumed into an object trafficked between the poet and his friends Caesar, Viscus, and Cato. In this way, Gallus’ extant verses give evidence of enacting the trope that figures the publication of his elegiac poetry as the mistress’ sexual circulation among men – the theme of Vergil’s final pastoral poem and the dynamic that animates later references to Lycoris in Latin erotic verse. The Gallus papyrus thus makes explicit the elegist’s participation in the elite male homosocial network central to Latin political, military, and literary culture. For his poetry circulates among the Roman political elite within a culture of institutionalized social relations that consolidate male authority in and through women’s bodies. The erotic cliché of feminine nequitia, to which Gallus’ (and Vergil’s) portrait of Lycoris appeals, not only strengthens male social bonds and elite authority (over female, foreigner, and slave) but also naturalizes the hierarchy of the sexes – as also the rule of the Roman elite over other nations and classes – on display in Latin literature and Roman society.
Lycoris’ circulation, in Gallus’ verse, amongst powerful members of the Roman military and cultural elite implicates both Gallus and his mistress in the wider literary and political contests of the late Republic. The famous papyrus fragment also constitutes crucial evidence concerning the intimate commerce of Greek courtesan and Latin literature with the business of Roman imperialism. The find spot of the papyrus fragment, in Egyptian Nubia, bears material witness to the dissemination of Gallus’ poetry – and the concomitant circulation of ‘Lycoris’ (attested also in Vergil, Propertius, Ovid, and Martial) – throughout the Roman‑controlled Mediterranean littoral. The editors of the papyrus dated its context and handwriting to the last quarter of the first century bce, likely 25‑20 bce, and connected the papyrus closely with Gallus himself who in 29 bce, as Augustus’ first prefect of Egypt, put down a rebellion at Thebes and marched south, beyond the first cataract of the Nile, to the vicinity of Ibrîm.49 Four years later, after Gallus’ disgrace and suicide in 27/26 bce, his successor in the position of prefect of Egypt, C. Petronius, actually occupied the site of Ibrîm in the course of his military operations against the Aethiopian queen Candace (Strabo 17.820‑21; Plin. NH 6.181‑82; Dio 54.5.4‑6).50 The editors of the papyrus therefore concluded that ‘we can assume that the Gallus‑papyrus . . . arrived at Ibrîm in the baggage of a Roman officer’.51 Gallus’ connection with Egypt, and particularly with the Philean border of Nubia, offers an additional reason why their putative Roman officer might have brought Gallus’ elegiac poetry with him.52
The Gallus papyrus thus provides tantalizing evidence of the co‑implication of literary pursuits and military commitments in the imperial contest of the Roman elite for wealth, political power, and erotic success, even as Gallus’ verse documents the poet’s apparently sharp contrast between his patron’s service to Roman imperialism (2‑5) and his own service in the company of Lycoris (1) and literary camp of love elegy (6‑9). In its textual materiality and its literary orientation, the papyrus implies a complex interdependence of Roman military service on the margins of empire with the life of literature, love, and leisure in the capital. While the papyrus was found in Egypt, the extant verses document the importation into Rome of the wealth of the Greek east (postque tuum reditum multorum templa deorum | fixa legam spolieis deiuitiora tueis, 4‑5) and their momentum links Gallus’ dalliance with a dissolute Greek courtesan to the wealth and leisure that imperial service abroad has bestowed upon Caesar’s compatriots at home. The sexual spoils that accrue to the elegist (the enjoyment of his mistress’ bed and/or a day spent idling in love/love‑elegy) are, it seems, as much the fruits of Roman imperialism as the rich booty Caesar exhibits in the capital. Lycoris thus emerges from Gallan elegy (and its reception in Latin literature) as a prostituted Greek courtesan, circulating throughout the empire among Roman magnates and men of letters.53 What light can the textual and material record shed on the ‘real woman’ who inspired the elegist’s verse?
II. Volumnia Cytheris
We have seen that Servius preserves the information that the woman who inspired Gallus’ ‘Lycoris’ was the mime‑dancer Volumnia Cytheris, the freedwoman of a certain Volumnius (Serv. ad Buc. 10.1): hic autem Gallus amauit Cytheridem meretricem, libertam Volumnii, quae, eo spreto, Antonium euntem ad Gallias est secuta (‘this Gallus loved the courtesan Cytheris, a freedwoman of Volumnius, but she spurned him [Gallus] and followed [Marc] Antony when he went to Gaul’). Another late source records the information that M. Junius Brutus too, ‘along with Antony and Gallus, loved the mime‑actress Cytheris’ (Vir. Ill. 82.2): Cytheridem mimam cum Antonio et Gallo amauit.54 The phraseology of this notice evokes the homosocial dynamic of Lycoris’ circulation among Gallus, Caesar, Cato and Viscus implied by the Gallan papyrus fragment, and obliquely acknowledges the traffic in Greek courtesans among members of the Roman elite. G. Traina has therefore suggested that Cytheris’ patron Volumnius, to whom she would have owed sexual services upon her manumission, lent her to various powerful friends, as it suited his political purposes.55 Certainly her attested lovers, like her patron, were adherents or protégés of Caesar in the mid‑40s bce.56 Competitive homosocial bonding would thus seem to have obtained among the different men who shared and circulated Cytheris physically; and, as I argued above, Vergil, Propertius, Ovid and later Martial then reiterate her sexual circulation among members of the Roman republican elite in their circulation of Lycoris on the poetic plane.
In Cytheris’ case, we are in the fortunate position of possessing important contemporary evidence of her circulation among Roman magnates, for Cicero mentions both Cytheris and her patron, P. Volumnius Eutrapelus, in his correspondence from the 40s bce; and, indeed, Volumnius himself figures among Cicero’s correspondents (Fam. 7.32‑33). Cicero also refers to Cytheris in his second Philippic, an oration delivered in the fall of 44 bce denouncing Antony’s political actions after Caesar’s murder, and the sharp contrast in tone that distinguishes the references to her in his correspondence from those in his Antonian invective has occasioned astute analysis, by feminist scholars and Roman historians alike, of the distinct generic pressures exerted by the two very different literary forms. Here I wish to build on this earlier scholarship, but with the goal of documenting the application of the same themes to Volumnia Cytheris that emerged from our discussion of Lycoris Galli: the textualization and circulation of a Greek‑named demi‑mondaine among Roman elite men, or the representation of a Greek courtesan at Rome as one of the spoils of imperialism.
We may begin with Cicero’s correspondence, where we find the orator writing to his friend Paetus, in November 46, from and about a dinner party he attended at the house of Volumnius (Cic. Fam. 9.26.1):
Accubueram hora nona cum ad te harum exemplum in codicillis exaraui. dices ‘ubi?’ apud Volumnium Eutrapelum, et quidem supra me Atticus, infra Verrius, familiares tui.
I had reclined at the ninth hour when I drafted the text of this letter to you in my tablets. You will say “Where?” At Volumnius Eutrapelus’ place, and indeed above me reclined Atticus, below me Verrius, your cronies.
Although Cicero did not correspond solely with men, his extant correspondence (with the exception of Fam. 14, addressed to Terentia, her parents, and their children) was entirely conducted with men. Moreover, the whole of the extant correspondence (including Fam. 14) can be seen to exhibit the characteristic features of elite Roman homosociality in its implicit documentation of their social and political entitlements. In this regard the letter to Paetus is exemplary, not only in Cicero’s emphasis on the friendship of the diners and the clubby atmosphere of the dinner party,57 but also in his extension of the convivial contexts of friendship and dining to the act of letter writing itself.
Cicero sets the scene in order to regale Paetus with the titillating information that the participants at this dinner party were not exclusively male (Fam. 9.26.2):
Audi reliqua. infra Eutrapelum Cytheris accubuit. ‘in eo igitur’ inquis ‘conuiuio Cicero ille
“quem aspectabant, cuius ob os Grai ora obuertabant sua”?’
non mehercule suspicatus sum illam adfore. sed tamen ne Aristippus quidem ille Socraticus erubuit cum esset obiectum habere eum Laida. ‘habeo’ inquit, ‘non habeor a Laide’ (Graece hoc melius; tu, si uoles, interpretabere). me uero nihil istorum ne iuuenem quidem mouit umquam, ne nunc senem. conuiuio delector; ibi loquor quod in solum, ut dicitur, et gemitum in risus maximos transfero.
Listen to the rest. Cytheris reclined below Eutrapelus. ‘And so’, you say, ‘in such a party was the famous Cicero’
“to whom they looked, upon whose face the Greeks turned their own countenances”?
By god, I had no inkling that she would be present. But nonetheless, not even Aristippus the follower of Socrates blushed when someone cast it up to him that kept the courtesan Lais. ‘I keep her’, he said, ‘I am not kept by Lais’ (this works better in Greek;58 you translate, if you want). But as for me, nothing of the kind interested me even as a young man, much less now that I’m an old one. I enjoy the party; there I converse on whatever comes up, as they say, and I transform a groan into great laughs.
The homosocial networks underpinning the cultural and political structures of republican Rome emerge clearly from this gossipy letter. For just as Volumnius sets his freedwoman Cytheris into circulation amongst his friends at the dinner party, so Cicero immediately traffics her to Paetus in a letter ostensibly composed at that very dinner party.59 Although Cicero implies that Cytheris’ attendance at the party lowered the tone of the gathering considerably, it is clear that her presence implicitly strengthened the bonds of male friendship, elite entitlement, and Roman solidarity between Volumnius and his friends, and between Cicero and Paetus. Cytheris functions both at the dinner party and in the letter to cement male friendships.60
We may note, in addition, that unlike Lycoris in Bucolic 10, who has run out on both Gallus and his friend’s pastoral poetry, Cytheris attends Volumnius’ party, though she apparently has nothing to say for herself. Her presence affords Cicero, however, an opportunity for a display of his wit and an occasion to show off his cultural capital, not only in his self‑comparison to Socrates’ pupil Aristippus, who dedicated two treatises to the famous Corinthian courtesan Lais, but also in his Latin rendering of two Greek quotations, including Aristippus’ double‑entendre (for which another English rendering might be ‘I hold her, I don’t cling to her’). Roman convivial participation and epistolary composition can thus be seen as exercises in masculine co‑operation and competition, cementing the homosocial bonds of social privilege, literary culture, and heterosexual desire that unite Cicero in friendship with Atticus, Verrius, Volumnius and Paetus. And the ground of their homosocial intercourse, as Cicero represents it in his letter, is Volumnius’ freedwoman, Cytheris. In other words, the letter founds a structural congruence between host and guests, letter‑writer and recipient, on male homosocial desire, by harnessing the sexual and textual exchange of a mime actress for the consolidation of literary and affective bonds between elite Roman men. A similar rhetorical strategy, as we have seen, undergirds the citation and circulation of ‘Lycoris’ in the poetry of Gallus, Vergil, Propertius, Ovid, and Martial.
As a freedwoman of Volumnius, Cytheris will have received the legal Roman name of Volumnia on her manumission (as Servius implies in his comment on Verg. Buc. 10.1, quoted above). And so Cicero styles her some years later, in a passage of the Philippics that underlines the impropriety of her public appearance in the retinue of Caesar’s deputy Marc Antony during the general’s absence from Italy in 49 bce (Phil. 2.58):
uehebatur in essedo tribunus plebis; lictores laureati antecedebant, inter quos aperta lectica mima portabatur, quam ex oppidis municipales homines honesti, obuiam necessario prodeuntes, non noto illo et mimico nomine, sed Volumniam consalutabant. sequebatur raeda cum lenonibus, comites nequissimi; reiecta mater amicam impuri fili tamquam nurum sequebatur.
[Antony, although] a tribune of the people [and therefore not legally entitled to lictors], was riding in a luxurious chariot; before him walked laurel‑bearing lictors, between whom was conveyed in an open litter the mime‑actress – whom local aristocrats and prominent citizens from the towns met, by necessity, as they advanced, and greeted not by her well known stage‑name [Cytheris] but by the name of Volumnia. Another car followed with pimps, the most worthless of companions! His mother, relegated behind, followed her disgraceful son’s girlfriend, as if she were her daughter‑in‑law.
In this designedly prejudicial picture of Marc Antony’s performance of his administrative duties, Cicero describes Antony appearing in public on official business in, and flanked by, luxury vehicles (the essedus and raeda) associated with women and wastrels;61 accompanied by his girlfriend, a mime‑actress tainted with the legal disadvantage (infamia) conferred by association with the stage,62 and pimps, who were regarded as even less respectable company than actresses; and disdaining to show his mother and, by implication, his then wife (Antonia), due respect.
As instances of the rhetorical genre of invective, the Philippics were carefully shaped to impugn the reputation of Cicero’s political opponent and in this they certainly succeeded, for a hundred years later, Plutarch not only repeats but even elaborates Cicero’s charges (Ant. 9).63 But it is also striking that Cicero’s sketch of Volumnia in this passage of invective appears in a markedly homosocial context, such as also structures his reference to Cytheris in the epistle to Paetus. Antony’s retinue of lictors announces his (illegitimate) assumption of the trappings of Caesar’s (illegitimate) imperium and embeds him in the fraying networks of male political and military patronage and prestige in the late republic. Cytheris’ unparalleled presence between Antony’s lictors embeds her in these male political networks and vividly demonstrates her status as a woman for the display to, and handling of, men. Her discreditable profession as a mime‑actress is particularly well suited, Cicero implies, to her dramatic role in Antony’s spectacle, even though she is not only displayed here to Italian aristocrats but also shamelessly greets Roman citizens as one herself.
Tom Hillard has demonstrated that suspicion is always warranted when women are represented as involved in political activity in late republican Rome, because
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practically all such information is transmitted as allegation, which highlights the unsubstantiated nature of each claim and the fact that an active political role for women was regarded as undesirable; and
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the women concerned were politically irrelevant in that they were not the primary targets of this hostile material; rather, their alleged roles were a means of attacking the politically potent, that is, their male kinsfolk or associates.64
While these strictures certainly seem valid for Cicero’s references to Cytheris in the Philippics, which were explicitly designed to discredit Antony for his abuse of political office and legal process in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination, in this particular case we possess contemporary evidence (albeit from Cicero, in private correspondence with his friend Atticus) from the spring of 49 bce, that has been taken to confirm the slurs of the Philippics. Thus on 3 May 49, Cicero wrote to Atticus (Att. 10.10.5) that Antony carried ‘Cytheris with him in an open litter, [like] a second wife. Seven litters of mistresses are joined together besides; and there are boyfriends too’ (hic tamen Cytherida secum lectica aperta portat, alteram uxorem. septem praeterea coniunctae lecticae amicarum; et sunt amicorum). He repeated the charge a few days later, on 14 May 49, in another letter to Atticus (Att. 10.16.5): collega noster Antonius, cuius inter lictores lectica mima portatur (‘our colleague Antony, whose mime‑actress is carried in a litter between lictors’). Both letters also engage the homosocially‑inflected rhetoric we have identified in Cicero’s letter to Paetus.
In his correspondence with Atticus, Cicero explicitly dissociates Antony from legitimate masculine networks of patronage and politics, by emphasizing the disgraceful (female and feminized) company he keeps and by referring to him contemptuously as hic and collega noster. As in his later invective, moreover, he comments on Cytheris’ appearance in a public spectacle and thus characterizes her as a woman who circulates among men. His designation of her as a second (or alternate) wife to the legally married Antony, implies not only the illegitimacy of Antony’s spectacle but also the invalidity of a courtesan’s aspiration to marriage above her station.65 The courtesan’s illegitimate public circulation among men documents Antony’s (and Caesar’s) illegitimate usurpation of political authority at Rome. Cicero’s references to Cytheris in these letters to Atticus thus anticipate those in his invective Philippics not only in their presentation of the ‘facts’, but also in their strategic representation of Antony’s relations with Cytheris to figure the perversion of his political and social bonds with other men.
It is particularly notable that when Cicero names her in his correspondence with friends (Att. 10.10.5, Fam. 9.26.2), she is Cytheris the mime‑actress, a freedwoman of Greek name and dubious morals who is appropriately trafficked between men. By contrast, when he writes to his wife Terentia in a letter of 47 bce, he calls her Volumnia (Fam. 14.16): Volumnia debuit in te officiosior esse quam fuit, et id ipsum quod fecit potuit diligentius facere et cautius (‘Volumnia ought to have been more respectful to you than she was, and she could have done what she did more attentively and carefully’). Scholars have not universally accepted the identification of Volumnia here with Volumnia Cytheris, on the assumption ‘that a Roman matron like Terentia would not have had dealings with such a person’.66 Shackleton Bailey has noted the naivety of this view, however, and rightly observes that when writing to his wellborn, extremely wealthy, and respectable wife, Cicero appropriately refers to Volumnia Cytheris by her Roman gentilician.67 Indeed, the very different epistolary context of Fam. 14.16 from that of his letters to his intimates may be taken to illustrate Cicero’s punctilious observance of generic propriety. But his reference to ‘Volumnia’, in writing to his wife, throws into sharp relief the circulation, between Cicero and his cronies, of the mime‑actress ‘Cytheris’, whose name implies Greek lineage, slave provenance, and the carnal sexuality associated with Venus/Aphrodite, from whose association with the island of Cythera her stage name was derived.68
In this context it is worth considering, as a coda to our discussion of Volumnia Cytheris, the ample attestation of her stage‑name among slave‑ and freedwomen in the early principate. Solin marshals nineteen women of the name from the Roman epigraphic record: six of uncertain status,69 one probably freed, and twelve freed former slaves.70 The name proves durable, being attested from the late republic (Volumnia Cytheris herself) all the way down to late antiquity (third‑ or fourth‑century ce); again, however, attestations cluster in the first century ce (fifteen of nineteen). Given the associations of the name with Venus, it is perhaps not surprising to find women of the name memorialized as Cytetris delicium (‘darling Cytheris’)71 and Cytheri dulcis (‘sweet Cytheris’);72 both may have been slave ‘pets’.73 The affectionate tone in which both are named confirms the erotic propriety of the name Cytheris for Volumnius’ freedwoman, mime‑actress cum courtesan.
Especially notable is a Rusticelia Cytheris of Augustan date, for on her tombstone were inscribed six elegiac couplets in two blocks of three couplets each (CIL 6.25617 = CE 965):74
R U S T I C E L I A M. L. C Y T H E R I S
debitum reddidit X K. Sept. Maluginense et Blaeso cos.
Quandocumque leuis tellus mea conteget ossa
incisum et duro nom[en] erit lapide,
quod si forte tibi [fuerit] fatorum cura meorum, 5
ne graue sit tumulum uisere saepe meum,
et quicumque tuis umor labetur ocellis,
protinus inde meos defluet in cineres.
Quid lacrumis opus est, Rusticeli carissime coniunx,
extinctos cineres sollicitare meos? 10
una domus cunctis nec fugienda uiris,75
ut quae uolui, tempore tempus habet
nondum (bis) uic[e]nos annos compleuerat annus,
supremum Parcae sorte dedere mihi.
Rusticelia Cytheris, freedwoman of Marcus Rusticelius, died ten days before the Kalends of September in the consulship of Ser. Cornelius Lentulus Maluginensis and Q. Junius Blaesus [10 ce]
Whenever the light earth will cover my bones and my name be inscribed on hard stone, if perchance you will feel concern for my fate, let it not be painful to visit my tomb often, and whatever moisture slips from your little eyes, will drip thence immediately down into my ashes.
What need is there Rusticelius, dearest husband, to trouble my dead ashes with your tears? One house (sc. Hades) cannot be avoided by all men, though what I wanted, time has provided by time. Not yet had a year filled up twice twenty years each, when the Fates gave me the last by lot.76
By contrast to the silent Lycoris Galli, who occasions the elegiac verses of Gallus (and others), and Volumnia Cytheris, who appears in the letters and later invectives of Cicero, Rusticelia Cytheris has something to say and does so in elegiac couplets at that. Let me close, therefore, by considering both the similarities and differences between these two distinct Cytherides, separated by at least a generation, but both memorialized in elegiac verse.
III. Rusticelia Cytheris
Spoken in the dead woman’s voice, the elegiac verses that adorned her tomb were, in all likelihood, not only composed by someone other than the speaker herself but also probably commissioned by someone other than her – perhaps by her widower, M. Rusticelius, or by the supplier from whom he purchased the gravestone.77 Traditional conceits of Roman funerary commemoration appear in references to the light earth covering her bones (leuis tellus mea conteget ossa, 3), the incised gravestone (incisum et duro nomen… lapide, 4), and the one house (i.e., Hades), which receives all comers (una domus cunctis nec fugienda uiris, 11).78 Also conventional is the reference, before the elegiacs even begin, to death as payment of a debt (debitum reddidit, 2).79
Like the late‑republican Volumnia Cytheris, the Augustan Rusticelia Cytheris was a freedwoman legally bound to her patron. But unlike Volumnia Cytheris, who circulates among Roman magnates in the notices of Cicero, Servius, and others (even, perhaps, under the name Lycoris, in the verse of Gallus and Vergil), Rusticelia Cytheris appears to speaks for herself on her tombstone, addressing her patron as her husband (coniunx, 9) and reserving the affective language of love for her relationship with him (cura, 5; carissime, 9).80 Throughout the text, in fact, the speaker expresses sentiments that conform closely to Roman ideals of conjugal affection in the formulaic clichés of Roman funerary epitaphs.81 Thus Rusticelia Cytheris addresses her patron/husband Rusticelius (whose metrically intractable name is included, unmetrically, in a hexameter line) as ‘dearest husband’ (Rusticeli carissime coniunx, 9). She assumes that he will be saddened at her death (quod si forte tibi [fuerit] fatorum cura meorum, 5) and find visiting her tomb so painful (ne graue sit tumulum uisere saepe meum, 6) that he will weep (quicumque tuis umor labetur ocellis, 7; lacrumis, 9). Her concern for his grief may well reflect his sorrow, but also shows her to advantage as she focuses from beyond the grave on her husband’s emotional well‑being. Although the speaker has gone to join ‘all men’ in the house of Hades (cunctis uiris, 11), her husband fills her thoughts (tibi, 5; tuis ocellis, 7; Rusticeli carissime coniunx, 9), as she assures him that time has brought all that she wanted (ut quae uolui, tempore tempus habet, 12).
This ‘picture of an ideally happy family’82 is consistent with the funerary conventions of classical antiquity, and stands in striking contrast to the portraits of Volumnia Cytheris and Lycoris Galli on display in Latin literature. From another perspective, however, the apparently divergent representation of Rusticelia Cytheris admits of some reconciliation with that of her more famous literary namesake and her elegiac avatar. Richmond Lattimore observes that ‘we must allow for a good deal of falsification in inscriptions composed, for the most part, by owners and patrons who were anxious to pose as benefactors’.83 This formulation invites us to attend to the ‘ventriloquization’ of the dead woman’s voice on her tombstone84 and to recognize once again, in the masculine composition and circulation of women’s words on tombstones, the traffic in women that subtends and supports the patriarchal heterosexual economy of classical Rome, realized in this case quite literally with the freedwoman’s marriage to her patron. The elegiacs spoken in the voice of Rusticelia Cytheris thus also repay analysis according to the pattern of textual trafficking we have explored in connection with Lycoris Galli and Volumnia Cytheris, women whose sexuality was both guarded and displayed in contests of Roman male literary and political rivalry and entitlement.
Like her literary sisters, Lycoris Galli and Volumnia Cytheris, Rusticelia Cytheris is constructed within the homosocial economy of desire that grounded the social relations of patriarchy in classical antiquity and contributed to Rome’s military hegemony over the Mediterranean littoral in this period. Her bipartite name testifies not only to her Greek lineage and slave provenance (Cytheris), but also to her achievement of manumission and Roman citizenship (Rusticelia), and her social standing was further elevated by legal marriage to her Roman patron Rusticelius. Her social mobility may be interpreted as having outstripped that of Gallus’ literary mistress Lycoris, who remains a Greek courtesan in Gallan elegy and its literary reception, and even that of Volumnia Cytheris, who remained socially disreputable as a mime‑actress and courtesan although she gained her freedom and, with it, limited legal rights. The common themes that emerge from this study of three ‘scripted’ women, however, well illustrate the generic pressures that shape the ancient textual and material evidence concerning women’s lives and still hinder the (literary) historian’s unmediated access to ‘real’ Roman women. Nonetheless, the gendered dynamic of women’s textualization by, and circulation among, elite men in the pan‑Mediterranean context of Rome’s empire, illustrates important constraints on, and conventions in, the lives of women in ancient Rome.