Pathologies of Love in Classical Literature

Dimitrios Kanellakis

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9783111276618
• eBook ISBN: 9783110748062
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Historia antigua

Do you believe in love at first sight? The Greeks and the Romans certainly did. But far from enjoying this romantic moment carefree, they saw it as a cruel experience and an infection. Then what are the symptoms of falling in love? Are there any remedies? Any form of immunity?

This book explores the conception of love (erôs) as a physical, emotional, and mental disease, a social-ethical disorder, and a literary unorthodoxy in Greek and Latin literature. Through illustrative case studies, the contributors to this volume examine two distinct, yet historically and poetically interrelated traditions of 'pathological love': lovesickness as/similar to disease and deviant sexuality described in nosologic terms. The chapters represent a wide range of genres (lyric poetry, philosophy, oratory, comedy, tragedy, elegy, satire, novel, and of course medical literature) and a fascinating synthesis of methodologies and approaches, including textual criticism, comparative philology, narratology, performance theory, and social history. The book closes with an anthology of Greek and Latin passages on pathological erôs. While primarily aimed at an academic readership, the book is accessible to anyone interested in Classics and/or the theme of love.

In Sickness or in Health? Love, Pathology, and Marriage in the Letters of Acontius and Cydippe (Ovid’s Heroides 20–1)

Thea S. Thorsen

Abstract

The elegiac epistles of Ovid’s Heroides 20-21 recast an iconic tale of pathology and love, which is famously also found in Callimachus’ Aetia Book 3. Here Acontius’ desire for Cydippe is directly linked to her various grave illnesses: whenever she is about to marry her fiancé, she is inflicted with a serious disease as a punishment by Artemis, because she once swore (by accident) that she would marry Acontius. In Callimachus, Cydippe is cured as soon as she marries Acontius. In Ovid, they never get to this point, due to the narrative limitations of the epistolary form. This chapter argues that certain features embedded in Callimachus’ episode contribute to a special kind of erotic warfare, militia amoris, between Acontius and Cydippe in the Heroidean letters. The most important of these features is the fact that Acontius descends from the Telchines, described by Callimachus as sorcerers and metal-workers, among other things. The arts-and-crafts element in Heroides 20-21 is key not only to understanding how the ancestry of Acontius relates to the disease of Cydippe, but also to the way in which both of them express their feelings, which appear surprisingly hard throughout their Heroidean letters.

I would like to thank Dimitrios Kanellakis, Stephen Harrison and Stephen Heyworth for helpful comments on earlier versions of this chapter.

This chapter offers a new interpretation of the themes of love and pathology in the epistolary pair of elegies of Acontius and Cydippe in Ovid’s Heroides 20–1. According to this interpretation, Ovid challenges the narrative of the couple’s happy marriage in Callimachus’ Aetia by exploiting specific cues embedded in the Callimachean episode proper.¹ Pathology is key to this interpretation, as Ovid’s Acontius appears not so much obsessed by love as unhealthy obsessive, and Ovid’s Cydippe seems to suffer not so much from lovesickness as from actual physical disease. As will be argued, both the mental obsessiveness and the physical disease may be linked to Acontius being presented in the Callimachean episode as a descendant of the Telchines, a cue which has not been fully (if at all) discussed in scholarship so far. Moreover, this cue may be seen as related to conspicuous incompatibilities between the personalities of the hero and the heroine in their Heroidean letters, e.g. through Acontius’ fixation on Cydippe’s looks and disregard for what she wants in contrast to her stress on a person’s inner qualities and the importance of consent. Finally, this interpretation sheds new light on a long tradition of scholarly debate over the very last couplet in the second of the two letters, Her. 21.247–8, whose sense has proven especially hard to grasp.

Ovid’s Heroides 20–1 is famously one of four sources for this story in ancient literature, all of them pivoting on erotic desire, illness, and a wedding.² The others are Xenomedes’ Cean chronicle,³ Callimachus’ Aetia frr. 67–75 (Pfeiffer/Harder) and Aristaenetus 1.10 (Bing/Höschele). The following are the story’s main events, which are relevant to the argument in question: Acontius sees Cydippe during a religious festival on the island of Delos, and immediately falls in love with her. He then tricks her into swearing that she will marry him, by inscribing an oath on an apple, which she unwittingly reads aloud in the temple of Diana. Cydippe subsequently returns to her home island of Naxos and her father repeatedly attempts to marry her to her fiancé. Each time, she is stricken with life-threatening diseases. At last, the father consults the oracle of Apollo, which responds that the illnesses are due to Cydippe breaking her oath by trying to marry a man different from the one whose name she uttered in the temple of Diana. Finally, Cydippe is cured, she marries Acontius, and the two become the ancestors of the prosperous Acontiadae, a noble family of his native island of Ceos. Notably, this last element remains only a future possibility in Heroides 20–1, as the epistolary form does not allow for actual closure, unlike the other sources of the tale, which apply a third-person perspective.⁴ This non-closural quality of the Heroidean⁵ form facilitates the new interpretation in question. The argument follows the lines of enquiry of the volume as a whole, focusing first on the theme of love, then on that of pathology, and finally on the marriage between Acontius and Cydippe.

nota certa furoris: Love

Without doubt, love is a major theme in Heroides 20–1. This element is especially conspicuous in Acontius’ letter. And yet, despite being linked to issues that are generally at home in love literature, such as marriage⁶ and writing, including the kind which involves descriptions of the beloved,⁷ the passion of Ovid’s Acontius is characterised by a surprisingly obsessive nature, centred on ideas of harm and violence, submission and superiority.

Thus, Acontius can claim (Ov. Her. 20.34): si noceo quod amo, fateor sine fine nocebo (‘If I harm that which I love, I confess I shall harm endlessly’).⁸ To this, Cydippe responds (Her. 21.55–8):

dic age nunc, solitoque tibi ne decipe more:

quid facies odio, sic ubi amore noces?

si laedis quod amas, hostem sapienter amabis;

me, precor, ut serves, perdere velle⁹ velis!

Come, tell me, and do not deceive me in your usual manner: what will you do from hatred, when you harm me so from love? If you injure the one you love, then you will be wise to love your enemy; to save me you must bring yourself to wish my doom!

Acontius, however, not only confesses that he will ‘love and harm’ Cydippe endlessly; he also invites her to harm him freely, in an elaboration of the elegiac topos of servitium amoris, ‘slavery to love’ (Her. 20.75–86):

ante tuos liceat flentem consistere vultus

et liceat lacrimis addere verba suis,

utque solent famuli, cum verbera saeva verentur,

tendere summissas ad tua crura manus!

…

ipsa meos scindas licet imperiosa capillos,

oraque sint digitis livida nostra tuis.

omnia perpetiar; tantum fortasse timebo,

corpore laedatur ne manus ista meo.

sed neque conpedibus nec me conpesce catenis:

servabor firmo vinctus amore tui!

Let me have leave to stand weeping before your face, and leave to add words which match the tears; and let me, like slaves in fear of bitter stripes, stretch out submissive hands to touch your legs! … With your own imperious hand you may tear my hair, and make my face black and blue with your fingers. I will endure all; my only fear perhaps will be lest that hand of yours be bruised on me. But bind me not with shackles nor with chains – I shall be kept in bonds by unyielding love for you.¹⁰

Acontius’ embracing of servitium amoris may be seen as a confirmation of his role as a prototypical poet-lover.

And yet, there are certain features within his letter that call this assumption into question. An important aspect of the elegiac servitium amoris is that it is represented as an inescapable, unconditional, and sometimes torturous situation,¹¹ as may be seen in Catullus,¹² Tibullus,¹³ Sulpicia¹⁴ and Propertius,¹⁵ and in Ovid’s own wor...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• List of Figures
• Texts and Abbreviations
• Introduction
• The Ophthalmology of Lovesickness: Poetry, Philosophy, Medicine
• Performance and Pragmatics of Erotic Poetry in Archaic and Classical Greece: A Pathology of Sexualities?
• Pathological Erôs in the Euripidean Fragments: Aeolus, Cretans, and Protesilaus
• Pathological Heterosexuality and Other Male Anxieties
• Xenophon and the Pathology of Erôs
• The Pathology of Love in Ovid’s Metamorphoses
• In Sickness or in Health? Love, Pathology, and Marriage in the Letters of Acontius and Cydippe (Ovid’s Heroides 20–1)
• Pathological Love in the ‘Open’ or ‘Fringe’ Novels
• Appendix: An Anthology of the Pathologies of Love
• List of Contributors
• Index Locorum
• Index Nominum et Rerum