My discussion poses a series of questions about the Latin word puella, a diminutive noun literally meaning sexually immature “young girl”, and its use in three different Latin literary genres1. First, when and how do several Roman men who write about love in lyric and elegiac verse meters from the mid-first century BCE through the early first century CE – Catullus, Horace, Propertius, Tibullus, “Lygdamus” and Ovid – employ this term? Why, in particular, do they use the noun puella to designate women whom they depict not only as sexually mature and sexually active, but also as emotionally and erotically valued by themselves in their literary roles as poet-speakers, and as bestowing their erotic favors out of wedlock and apparently free of charge2? When, how and why does their female colleague, the Augustan elegist Sulpicia, employ this same noun in her elegies to characterize herself as both poet-speaker and sexually desirable, affectionately regarded love object, one who – unlike a rival she scornfully mentions – does not take payment for her erotic favors3?
How, moreover, does the use of the noun puella in elegiac and lyric verses by these male and female poets of the late Republican and Augustan era compare with the use of the same word by earlier Roman comic playwrights? As studies have long emphasized, certain Plautine and Terentian dramatic scenarios bear strong resemblances to those of Latin love poetry4. Various plays of Plautus and Terence feature sexually active female characters regarded affectionately and desired erotically by verbally adept, if not exactly literarily gifted, young males5. These Roman comedic texts depict these women as, like the puellae of later Roman elegy and lyric, unmarried, and unlikely to be married, to their youthful amatores 6. After all, like at least some elegiac and lyric puellae, these comic female characters do not occupy a social position legally entitling them to wed these lovers. In these Roman comedies, like their Greek literary models, these sexually desirable and active female characters sometimes turn out to be long lost daughters of citizen fathers, and hence marriageable after all7. But in most instances these women dispense erotic favors without benefit of marriage, and never free of charge.
In replying, very tentatively, to these questions about the use of puella in these three literary genres, I will be raising some further questions. My replies primarily draw on and respond in detail to the findings of two articles, both published in 1983: “Puella and Virgo”, by Patricia Watson, and “Words for ‘Prostitute’ in Latin”, by J. N. Adams8. While Adams himself never explains what he signifies by the English word “prostitute”, I would define the term, at least when applied by Roman writers to females, as a woman who receives payment for her sexual favors from a male partner other than her husband9.
Adams includes a lengthy discussion of the word puella, its semantic evolution, and its different connotations, on the grounds that puella can refer to a woman who receives payment – or is thought to receive payment – for performing sexual acts10. As we will see, Adams couches his observations in language that reflects and perpetuates unfair and presumably outdated assumptions about female sexual conduct, Roman and post-Roman, thereby limiting the value of his analyses11. My discussion will call attention to instances in which his choice of English words to describe ancient Roman conduct seems to blur and misrepresent important distinctions among the usages of puella by certain Latin authors. Yet Adams’ findings, however flawed, merit closer attention than they have so far attracted from specialists in Latin love poetry; those of Watson warrant further heed as well.
But I will at the same time be responding to a paper presented by Paul Allen Miller at a 2012 American Philological Association seminar on the puella in Latin love poetry. Here Miller seeks to explain what he perceives as a rapid and radical transformation of how we scholarly specialists understand “who and what the puella is, and of her relationships to the speaking subject in elegiac poetry”. Miller notes that two, opposing and yet “comforting mythologies”, one of them “conservative, the other progressive” are adduced to explain “the speed of these transformations” in literary interpretation. He then offers what he calls a “third position, which is that of meta-commentary and historical analysis” as his own explanation for these interpretive shifts. Miller rightly emphasizes that working from within a specific theoretical paradigm when attempting to illuminate Latin poetry prevents a critical analysis of the position that this paradigm adopts, because each paradigm “assumes the truth of its position before the arguments begin”. His own adoption of what he calls “meta-commentary” and “historical analysis” as explanatory tools endeavors to get beyond these bi-polarizing paradigms: by examining five “key moments” in the history of the puella as a concept over the past half-century, in the “romantic moment in elegiac criticism”, formalism, historicism, post-structuralism and feminism respectively; and by excavating the operative assumptions “regarding the puella and the speaking subject that makes these positions possible”12.
Yet Miller does not refer to the articles by Adams and Watson, much less pay attention to the linguistic evidence about the word puella itself, presented and analyzed by Adams and Watson in accordance with traditional philological research protocols. Indeed, Miller implicitly associates philology with the anti-theoretical, “conservative mythology” inadequate to account for the radical transformations that have occurred in how scholars have come to understand the puella. He even represents philology as, in the eyes of self-justifying theoreticians, a form of “fundamentalism”13. Like Adams with the term “prostitute”, though, Miller does not define what he means by “philology” or why he regards “philological basics” as perceived, at least by some classicists, as incompatible with innovative theoretical approaches to literary interpretation14.
My own goal in trying, simultaneously, to build upon the traditional philological work of Adams and Watson, and engage with the innovative theoretical work of Miller, is to argue for the importance of analyzing Latin texts concerned with issues of gender through traditional philological lenses as well as lenses afforded by feminist, new historicist, and other theoretically informed approaches. In fact, I would view the lens afforded by philology, sorely neglected and undervalued in so-called progressive classical interpretive circles, as radical in its possibilities for illuminating Greek and Roman literary representations of gender. What Adams and Watson have to say about the word puella illustrates the benefits of applying this lens, at least after adjusting its field of vision with some significant corrections.
The analyses of the word puella by Adams and Watson do much to answer the questions I have posed. Adams’ study covers far more linguistic and literary territory than that of Watson, although without full consideration of the evidence at hand, and in (to my mind) inappropriate language. Hence I will foreground its findings, and treat it at greater length. Adams introduces his discussion of how, when and where puella is employed in classical Latin literary texts by considering comparative linguistic data from a diachronic perspective. Furnishing illustrations from German, Vulgar Latin, Provencal and French, he claims that “words for ‘girl’ often deteriorate in meaning and acquire the sense ‘whore, lewd woman’” in various languages. He adds that, in some languages, there is a constant process of replacement, with what he calls “deteriorating” words getting replaced, and replacement words “suffering the same fate”. But Adams then notes that in Latin the word puella “tended to degenerate. By “degenerate”, as with “deteriorate”, he apparently means “become employed to describe sexually experienced women, actively involved with men other than their husbands, and possibly viewed in a pejorative way”. Thus, Adams continues, “[the] history [of puella] is not exactly the same” as that of the examples he cites from these other languages, because the word puella “does not survive in the Romance languages”15.
Adams first explores the testimony of Roman comedy. He observes that in Plautus “the predominating use of puella is in reference to small female children”. He notes that in a few places Plautus also employs puella for innocent – and sexually inexperienced – young girls who have just reached nubile age; and that Terence uses puella in the same way as Plautus (since most of the six instances of the noun puella in Terence’s plays refer to small female children). Watson arrives at similar conclusions. After observing that both comic playwrights “most commonly” use puella for “newborn babies”, she claims that, “when used of older girls” the term usually refers to slave women (ancillae) or sexually inexperienced free-born young women, either masquerading as sexually experienced, fee-charging, one-client-at-a-time “courtesans” (meretrices) or in the possession of a leno, a male manager of and profiteer from the ownership of female prostitutes16.
According to Adams, “a leno in Plautus is as a rule spoken of as possessing mulieres, not puellae”. So, too, Adams says, “a whore could be called a mulier meretrix... but puella meretrix does not occur”. Adams then turns to the use and distribution of the word puella in texts from the late Republic onwards, highlighting the rarity of the word in epic poetry and what he labels “educated prose”. Roman “educated [prose] writers”, he asserts, “tend to restrict [puella] to the early sense” of “female child”. But, Adams continues, “the preferred word in educated prose [for a young female child] was virgo... frequently used in contexts in which it might have been replaced by puella”17. Here, too, his findings agree with those of Watson.
After noting, and by way of explaining, the rarity of the word puella in “educated Latin prose”, Adams observes and opines: “By the late Republic the word is frequently applied euphemistically to women past puberty, who in the context may be treated as of easy virtue. Indeed it approaches the meaning ‘whore’ often, or at least is used of women who are whores”. Adams then adduces eleven Latin passages in support of this claim, several passages of poetry (but not love poetry) from Horace’s and Juvenal’s Satires, Martial’s epigrams, the Carmina Priapea, and Statius’ Silvae. In addition, he cites several obscene Pompeian graffiti as evidence that the word puella had, by the mid-first century CE, acquired the sense of “women who were no doubt thought of as disreputable”18. Watson, by way of contrast, does not even consider the use of puella to mean “prostitute” in Latin prose and poetic texts that postdate Plautus and Terence, much less use the word “prostitute” in discussing the use of puella in “the erotic sphere”19.
Adams’ concluding remarks merit quotation: “Colloquial usage had changed since the time of Plautus [whose characters] fall in love with or engage in amatory activities with mulieres, not puellae. Mulier... continued to be employed in sexual contexts in the late Republic, and Empire... but in the colloquial language it was rivaled by puella, which is perhaps the preferred term of disreputable women. Clearly puella was by no means a perfect synonym of meretrix... ‘Correct’prose writers tended to avoid the use of the word in reference to mature young women, and they also showed some reluctance to use it of children. The semantic degeneration of puella clearly did not consist in its wholesale acquisition of an unfavourable meaning. It became no more than suggestive, and it could still, even at a late date, be used neutrally”20.
The discussions of both Adams and Watson merit commendation for clarifying, in traditional philological fashion, how Roman authors taken as a totality use the noun puella over the course of Roman historical time, and for spotlighting some distinctive features of the word’s Latin linguistic and literary usage. First, that notwithstanding the thematic similarities between the scenarios of comedy and those of later lyric and elegiac poetry, puella does not convey the same, sexual, connotations in Roman comedy that it does in late republican and Augustan amatory verse. Second, that by the time of the late republic, prose writers rarely use the noun puella for sexually mature and desired young women or even prepubescent female children. Third, that soon after the fifties BCE, the time in which Catullus wrote, the noun puella begins to describe what Adams would term “disreputable” women and to carry, occasionally and suggestively, “an unfavorable meaning”: that is, to designate women who engaged in sexual activity outside of marriage and may or may not have been judged morally delinquent by others for that reason.
Nevertheless, Adams relegates the topic of how the term puella is used in love poetry – as opposed to satire, epigram and other types of Latin sexual invective – to a brief footnote. Here he states: “So in Catullus puella is used partly of Lesbia”, citing five instances in the hendecasyllabic poems 3 and 5, and in the choliambic 8, and “partly of low women of mature age”, citing five instances in the hendecasyllabic poems 10 and 41. “In elegy”, he asserts, “it is the standard term for the mistress of the poet, often in the phrase mea puella”21.
In this brief footnote Adams oversimplifies Catullus’ use of the Latin noun puella. He does not, for example, acknowledge here that in poem 34, the hymn to Diana, which is written in stanzas of three glyconics followed by a pherecratean, Catullus also uses the noun puella in lines 2 and 4 to designate females who are not what he quaintly terms “low women of mature age” but youthful and supposedly virtuous religious celebrants. Nor does Adams indicate that, as we have seen, a female erotic elegist, Sulpicia, repeatedly uses puella when referring to herself as poet-speaker22.
Nor, for that matter, does Adams mention that Horace employs puella for sexually mature, amorously regarded women in his Odes. Consider, for example, Horace’s use of puella at Odes 1.9.22, in the final stanza of the Soracte poem, written in the Alcaic meter, to describe a female erotic possibility for his addressee, the young slave boy Thaliarchus. Or in the first line of another poem written in Alcaics, 3.26, where Horace bids farewell to his own service in erotic warfare (vixi puellis nuper idoneus/et militavi non sine gloria). Nor does Adams acknowledge that Horace also uses puellae, in the phrase puellae iam virum expertae, to describe respectably wed “young wives” in Odes 3.14.10. Like Catullus 11, in which the poet-speaker asks Furius and Aurelius to take a message to mea puella at line 13, Odes 3.14 is written in the Sapphic meter. Yet Horace also follows Catullus in using puella for sexually inexperienced young girls performing religious rites in the Carmen Saeculare, also written in Sapphics. Here Horace refers to the chaste young maidens singing the festival hymn first as virgines in line 6 and later as puellas in line 3623.
Just as seriously, Adams does not relate the use of puella for “the elegiac mistress”, beginning, insofar as we can determine, with Catullus in the mid first century BCE, to the relatively infrequent appearances of this noun outside of this love elegiac and lyric literary realm. Nor does Adams consider the metrical versatility of puella: a first declension trisyllabic noun consisting of a short syllable, followed by a long syllable, and a final syllable that can, depending on the case, be either short or long. To be sure, Catullus’ poems written in the elegiac meter, 65 through 116, only use the noun puella four times: all of them to designate the female sexual partners of other, disparaged males, rather than his own female beloved24. But he could easily have used it to refer to his own beloved in those poems. Metrically speaking, puella works beautifully as the end of a dactylic hexameter line, and within the second half of the pentameter line as well. By the same token, it fits into limping iambics, Alcaics, Sapphics and whatever one calls Catullus’ meter in the hymn to Diana.
To be sure, Watson, unlike Adams, observes that “puella, as diminutive in form, and a word used often to express pathos, erotic feelings or other emotions, is more at home in intimate, less elevated styles of writing”. This important observation about the affective resonances of puella may help account for its use by Catullus, Horace and the Augustan elegists for women to whom they accord emotional value. Watson also remarks that “the most noteworthy development in usage of puella is in the erotic sphere, where it becomes the standard term for a woman viewed as a potential object of love. The elegists, of course, make abundant use of the word; it is frequently employed with reference to meretrices (the cultae puellae of the Ars Amatoria, for example) or married women behaving as such”25.
After citing several passages in elegiac poetry where both virgines and matronae are referred to as puellae, Watson asserts “It is to Catullus also that the elegists owe their most frequent use of the word: namely to allude to the girl who is the subject of their verse”. She notes that Horace, and various other Roman writers use puella to describe young married women, “where emotional connotations may well be to the fore”. Yet Watson’s discussion, like that of Adams, does not take metrical considerations into account when considering word choice, although many of the texts she analyzes are works of poetry. Unlike Adams, moreover, Watson does not acknowledge that the word puella eventually acquires negative associations, through implying that the women referred to by this term engage in sexually transgressive conduct that at times involves payment for their favors26.
The omissions as well as the findings of Adams and Watson prompt additional questions. Granted that Catullus evidently deserved credit for the use of puella, previously a noun for female child, to designate an affectionately regarded, erotically desired female not the wife or paid sexual partner of the male poet/speaker. Granted that his choice of this word seems to have influenced Sulpicia, a female poet-speaker emotionally and erotically engaged with a young and perhaps younger male lover free of charge, to employ it in describing herself. Why, however, did Catullus choose this noun as his operative term for his beloved rather than another word, such as amatrix, the feminine counterpart of amator 27? Most important, when do the elegists fail to use the term puella in reference to women valued both emotionally and sexually by men other than their legal husbands? What might their omission of this word imply about its connotations?
I would submit that the metrical adaptability of the noun puella initially appealed to Catullus, who wrote lyric, elegiac and “standard” hexameter verses, and that Catullus’ precedent authorized this noun, not only for the later male and female elegiac love poets Tibullus, Propertius, Sulpicia, “Lygdamus” and Ovid, but also for the lyric and sometime “amatory” poet Horace. Admittedly, and as those such as Miller seeking to theorize about “the” puella, should recognize, Catullus uses puella for women other than his female beloved, too; Horace, as we have seen, follows him in this practice. Some are young and sexually inexperienced girls; others what Adams would call “disreputable females of easy virtue”, and I would call sexually experienced women erotically active outside the bonds of marriage. These multiple meanings of puella in Catullus warrant scrutiny because they provide further testimony to its metrical usefulness. But Catullus’ memorable use of this noun for his female beloved Lesbia, albeit in his lyric rather than elegiac poems, powerfully cemented its connections with sexually mature and active women emotionally and erotically valued by a poet-speaker. It is these connections that earned puella the definite article “the” in Anglophone scholarly discussions about the women portrayed as sexually involved with, and emotionally cherished by, the first-person speakers in Roman erotic elegies.
I would also argue that, owing to its prominent use by elegiac and lyric poets during Augustus’ principate, the noun puella came to be associated with women, both elite and non-elite, whose sexual conduct transgressed the marriage and moral laws enacted by Augustus around the time Horace’s Carmen Saeculare was written, in 18 through 17 BCE28. This association of puellae with sexually transgressive behavior helps account for the uses of puella by post-Augustan authors to describe prostitutes, a usage which Adams regards as derogatory. It would also explain why Ovid does not use the word puella in two of his elegies from exile that seek to justify his life and exonerate his poetry: Tristia 3.7, addressed to his young female poetic protégée (and presumed stepdaughter) Perilla, and the autobiographical Tristia 4.10. By the time Ovid left Rome, in official disgrace, in 8 CE, the word puella had become sexualized, and illicitly so.
Owing to the dwindling number of those among “the educated public” aware of what the word “philology” means, much less how it relates to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity, the membership of the American Philological Association has voted to remove the word “philological” from its “official” name and its “brand”29. While there are legitimate and compelling reasons for this change of name, I hope that those of us who study gender as well as other aspects of Greco-Roman antiquity will not abandon philological approaches, and will use them in combination with other theoretical approaches foregrounded by scholars such as Miller, in our investigations and analyses. Philology has radical potential that other approaches lack. It enables us to accord informed, if speculative, consideration not only to artistic, cultural and historical motivations for literary production, but also to individual authorial intent, in our efforts to illuminate classical texts. In this instance, philologically based analysis, analysis that takes into account the changing connotations of words from genre to genre and the exigencies of meter, enables us to ask and formulate gender-sensitive, historically-grounded answers to the question of when, how and why an influential group of poets employed the noun puella. Both our questions and our answers encourage reflection on the gendered Roman linguistic, literary and cultural contexts that shaped the writings of these poets, contexts that they themselves shaped in return.