Fashion Victim? Domination and the Arts of Coiffure in Augustan Elegy

FASHION VICTIM? DOMINATION AND THE ARTS OF COIFFURE IN AUGUSTAN ELEGY Nandini B. Pandey Abstract for the 146th APA Annual Meeting, New Orleans Problems of Triumviral and Augustan Poetics 11 January 2015, 8-11 a.m. Ovid’s Amores 1.14, to an elegiac puella who has gone bald through excessive hairdyeing, has been analyzed as a dubiously tasteful joke or a metapoetic warning against overadornment (Levy 1968, Scivoletto 1972, McKeown 1987, Zetzel 1996, Boyd 1997, Papaïoannou 2006, Turpin 2012, et al.). This paper argues that the poem’s literal and metaphorical depictions of master/slave relations also bear on the broader discourse about power, culture, and Romanitas that lies beneath the surface of Augustan elegy. In response to Propertius’ condemnation of hair coloring as foreign frippery (2.18B), Amores 1.14 uses the topic to suggest Romans’ increasing political and economic dependence on provincial subjects as they attempt to articulate their identities using imported labor and consumer goods. This paper contextualizes recent studies of hair as a locus for feminine self-fashioning (Wyke 1994, Bartman 2001, Stephens 2008) within Roman elegy’s thematic interrogation of gender, socioeconomic, and imperial hierarchies (James 2003, Miller 2004, Davis 2006, Keith 2008, et al.). It stems from a larger interest in Ovid’s use of the relationship between dominae and their foreign-born slaves to explore power asymmetries and reversals. This is especially evident in the paired poems Amores 1.11/12 and 2.7/8, which depict the hairdressers Nape and Cypassis as experts in the arts of duplicity as well as style. These figures map on to the dramatis personae of Amores 1.14, which revisits the themes of domination and rebellion from the perspective of the domina rather than her ornatrix. Yet here, it is not her hairdresser but her hair itself that rebels. This twists the convention whereby Roman women lashed out against their ornatrices using the acus (hair-needle), described and condemned at Ars Am. 3.239-42. This act of symbolic violence both perpetuates and threatens the master/subordinate power dynamic in recalling slaves’ ability to turn the tools of their trade against a cruel mistress. In Amores 1.14, Corinna’s hairdresser is “safe” from such abuse (16-18), but her hair is not so lucky. Despite its native docility, Corinna afflicts it with tortures described in military terms (vallum pectinis, saucia … acu, ferro … et igni, etc.) that enhance this scene’s allegorical bearing on political leadership. While Ovid elsewhere advocates total submission to Augustus and his kinsman Cupid (e.g. Amores 1.2.10), this strategy does not protect Corinna’s hair, questioning the value of obedience to a tyrannical master. However, as so often in Ovid, the tables turn. Corinna’s refusal of clementia to her innocent ‘subject,’ her own hair, results in the cataclysmic loss of her erotic power. Ovid blames her downfall on her domineering behavior and cultivation of her public image at the expense of health – a lesson that reapplies to the Augustan body politic. He further complicates the geopolitical picture behind this domestic scene by advising Corinna to hide her baldness with “captive hair” from the recently conquered Germans (captivos … crines, 45-46). This completes her symbolic transition from domina into victim and suggests the physical and moral superiority of frontier stock to the effete urban population. A recollection of Apelles’ Venus Anadyomene, looted from Greece and displayed in the Forum Augustum (33; cf. Pliny, NH 35.91), further interrelates love of beauty and desire for domination with the threat of cultural decline. The poem’s final vision of Corinna in the guise of a German captive also engages with Ovid’s exploration of the latent reversibility of conquered and conqueror in his poems on the triumph (e.g. Ars Am. 1.177-228; cf. Beard 2009, Pandey 2011). While Amores 1.14 ostensibly concerns a different type of subjugation – slavery to fashion – it suggests a similar slippage. Foreign luxury goods, including hair and slaves, fueled the Roman economy and marked its domination. Yet they also spelled Rome’s sartorial ‘enslavement’ to the conquered; caused increasing resemblance, even identity, between urban citizens and foreign subjects; and hint that without good leadership, Rome’s glory – like Corinna’s – might prove impermanent. (640/650) Bibliography Bartman, Elizabeth. 2001. “Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment.” American Journal of Archaeology 105 (1): 1–25. Beard, Mary. 2009. The Roman Triumph. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press. Boyd, Barbara Weiden. 1997. Ovid’s Literary Loves : Influence and Innovation in the Amores. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Cameron, Alan. 1968. “The First Edition of Ovid’s Amores.” Classical Quarterly 18: 320–33. Davis, Peter J. 2006. Ovid and Augustus: A Political Reading of Ovid’s Erotic Poems. London: Duckworth. Hälikkä, Riikka. 2001. “« Sparsis Comis, Solutis Capillis » : Loose Hair in Ovid’s Elegiac Poetry.” Arctos 35: 23–34. Henderson, John. 1991. “Wrapping up the Case : Reading Ovid, Amores, 2, 7 (+8), I.” Materiali E Discussioni per L’analisi Dei Testi Classici 27: 37–88. James, Sharon L. 2003. Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy. Berkeley: University of California Press. Keith, Alison M. 2008. 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Fashion Victim? Domination and the Arts of Coiffure in Augustan Elegy Nandini B. Pandey, Assistant Professor of Classics, UW-Madison (nandini.pandey@wisc.edu) 1. Ovid, Amores 1.14: to a puella who has lost her hair through excessive dyeing Translation my own, using William Turpin’s 2012 Dickinson College Commentaries text and notes, which build on Kenney’s OCT and the commentaries of Barsby and McKeown: http://dcc.dickinson.edu/ovid-amores/amores-1-14. dicebam “medicare tuos desiste capillos”;     tingere quam possis, iam tibi nulla coma est. at si passa fores, quid erat spatiosius illis?     contigerant imum, qua patet, usque latus. quid, quod erant tenues et quos ornare timeres,     vela colorati qualia Seres habent, vel pede quod gracili deducit aranea filum,     cum leve deserta sub trabe nectit opus? nec tamen ater erat neque erat tamen aureus ille     sed, quamvis neuter, mixtus uterque color,    qualem clivosae madidis in vallibus Idae     ardua derepto cortice cedrus habet. adde quod et dociles et centum flexibus apti     et tibi nullius causa doloris erant. non acus abrupit, non vallum pectinis illos;       ornatrix tuto corpore semper erat; ante meos saepe est oculos ornata nec umquam     bracchia derepta saucia fecit acu. saepe etiam nondum digestis mane capillis     purpureo iacuit semisupina toro; tum quoque erat neglecta decens,ut Threcia Bacche,     cum temere in viridi gramine lassa iacet. cum graciles essent tamen et lanuginis instar,     heu, mala vexatae quanta tulere comae! quam se praebuerunt ferro patienter et igni,          ut fieret torto nexilis orbe sinus! clamabam “scelus est istos, scelus, urere crines.     sponte decent: capiti, ferrea, parce tuo. vim procul hinc remove: non est, qui debeat uri;     erudit admotas ipse capillus acus.”     formosae periere comae, quas vellet Apollo,     quas vellet capiti Bacchus inesse suo; illis contulerim, quas quondam nuda Dione     pingitur umenti sustinuisse manu. quid male dispositos quereris periisse capillos?        quid speculum maesta ponis inepta manu? non bene consuetis a te spectaris ocellis:     ut placeas, debes inmemor esse tui. non te cantatae laeserunt paelicis herbae,     non anus Haemonia perfida lavit aqua;     nec tibi vis morbi nocuit (procul omen abesto),     nec minuit densas invida lingua comas: facta manu culpaque tua dispendia sentis;     ipsa dabas capiti mixta venena tuo. nunc tibi captivos mittet Germania crines;           tuta triumphatae munere gentis eris. o quam saepe comas aliquo mirante rubebis     et dices “empta nunc ego merce probor. nescioquam pro me laudat nunc iste Sygambram;     fama tamen memini cum fuit ista mea.”  me miserum! lacrimas male continet oraque dextra     protegit ingenuas picta rubore genas; sustinet antiquos gremio spectatque capillos,     ei mihi, non illo munera digna loco. collige cum vultu mentem: reparabile damnum est;       postmodo nativa conspiciere coma. 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 I kept telling you, “Stop dyeing your hair”; Now you have no hair left to dye. But if you had left it alone, what was more luxuriant? It stretched all the way to the lowest point your side extends. What of the fact that it was fine, the sort you’d fear to style, Like the silk the tinted Chinese have, Or the thread that the spider spins with delicate foot, When she weaves her fine work under a neglected rafter? It wasn’t black, and it wasn’t golden, either, But, although neither, a color mixed from both, Just the shade of a lofty cedar, in the dewy vales Of Ida, when its bark peels off. Not to mention that it was obedient, and fit for a hundred twists, And was a cause of no grief to you. The acus did not break it, nor the palisade of the comb; Her hairdresser always came away unscathed; [My puella] often got her hair done before my very eyes, and never Made wounds in the maid’s arms with a snatched-up acus. Often in the morning, her hair not even yet combed, She lay reclining on a purple couch; Then also, neglected, it was beautiful, like a Thracian Bacchante’s When she sprawls exhausted on the green grass. Yet, though it was delicate and like to down, Alas, how many troubles your tortured hair has endured! How patiently it submitted itself to iron and fire, So that a braided crest might be made from twisted coil! I kept shouting, “It’s a crime, a crime, to scorch your hair. It’s lovely of its own will; hard one, spare your own head. Take your violence far from here: there’s nothing here that deserves To be burned; this hair itself trains the instruments applied.” Your beautiful hair has perished, the sort that Apollo, that Bacchus,would wish to have on his own head; I could have compared it to the tresses which sometimes naked Aphrodite is painted holding up with a dripping hand. Why do you lament the loss of hair you thought badly ordered? Why, fool, do put down your mirror with despondent hand? You’re being looked at by yourself with unaccustomed eyes: For your reflection to please, you should be forgetful of yourself. The enchanted herbs of a rival did not wound you, Atreacherous witch did not wash it with Thessalian water; The power of a disease did not harm you (may ill omen be far away), And an envious tongue did not thin your thick hair: You know the loss was incurred through your own hand and fault; You yourself applied mixed poison to your head. Now Germany will send you captive hair; You will be safe through the gift of a triumphed-over people. O how often you will blush when someone admires your hair And say, “Now I am praised because of bought goods. Now that man praises some Sygambrian woman instead of me; But I remember when that fame was my own.” Wretched me! She barely contains her tears and she covers Her face with her hand, her free-born cheeks with a painted blush. She holds her old hair in her lap and stares at it, Alas for me, not a gift worthy of that place. Collect your mind along with your face: the damage is repairable; Some day you’ll be admired again for your native hair. 2. Elegiac condemnations of excessive vanity: Tib. 1.8.9ff, Propertius 1.2 and 2.18B 3. Paired poems involving ornatrices: Amores 1.11 and 12; 2.7 and 8 Amores 1.11.1-2: colligere incertos et in ordine ponere crines     docta neque ancillas inter habenda Nape Amores 2.8.1-2: ponendis in mille modos perfecta capillis,     comere sed solas digna, Cypassi, deas, 1 2 1 2 Nape, skilled at collected disarrayed hair and placing it in order, And not to be ranked among other maids… Cypassis, accomplished at putting hair into a thousand styles, But worthy to adorn the hair of the goddesses alone… 4. Ars Amatoria 3.239-42: Warning puellae against abusing their ornatrices tuta sit ornatrix; odi, quae sauciat ora      unguibus et rapta brachia figit acu.                devovet, ut tangit, dominae caput illa, simulque      plorat in invisas sanguinolenta comas. 239 240 241 242 May your hairdresser be safe; I hate the woman who claws her maid’s face with her nails and stabs her arms with a snatched-up acus. She curses her mistress’ head while she touches it, and at the same time bleeds and weeps over the hated locks. 5. German wigs in Rome: Ars 3.163f., Mart. 5.37.7f, 68, 8.33.20, 14.26, 27, Mayor on Juv. 13.164; cf. McKeown 1989 2.381 and Levy 1968 for the custom of surrendering hair Very Short Bibliography* Bartman, Elizabeth. 2001. “Hair and the Artifice of Roman Female Adornment.” AJA105 (1): 1–25. Davis, Peter J. 2006. Ovid and Augustus: A Political Reading of Ovid’s Erotic Poems. London. James, Sharon L. 2003. Learned Girls and Male Persuasion: Gender and Reading in Roman Love Elegy. Berkeley. Keith, Alison M. 2008. Propertius: Poet of Love and Leisure. London. Kennedy, Duncan F. 1993. The Arts of Love: Five Studies in the Discourse of Roman Love Elegy. Cambridge. Levy, H. L. 1968. “Hair !” CW 62: 135. McKeown, J. C. 1987 and 1989. Ovid, Amores, Vols. I and II. Liverpool. Miller, Paul Allen. 2004. Subjecting Verses : Latin Love Elegy and the Emergence of the Real. Princeton. Papaïoannou, Sophia. 2006. “The Poetology of Hairtstyling and the Excitement of Hair Loss in Ovid, Amores 1, 14.” Quaderni Urbinati Di Cultura Classica 83: 45–69. Perkins, Caroline A., and Maureen B. Ryan. 2012. Ovid’s Amores, Book One: A Commentary. Norman, OK. Scivoletto, N. 1972. “Motivi Epigrammatici in Un’elegia Ovidiana (Am. I 14), III.” In Studi Classici in Onore Di Quintino Cataudella, 355–61. Catania: Fac. di Lett. e Filos. Stephens, Janet. 2008. “Ancient Roman Hairdressing : On (hair)pins and Needles.” JRA 21 (1): 110–32. Turpin, William. 2012. Ovid: Amores Book I. Dickinson College Commentaries. Wyke, Maria. 1994. “Woman in the Mirror : The Rhetoric of Adornment in the Roman World.” In Women in Ancient Societies: An Illusion of the Night, ed. Leonie Archer, Susan Fischler, and Maria Wyke, 134–51. New York. Zetzel, James. 1996. “Poetic Baldness and Its Cure.” MD 36: 73–100. *For fuller bibliography, with abstract and slides, please visit https://wisc.academia.edu/NandiniPandey 11 January 2015 Pandey 1 2015 SCS Annual Meeting (New Orleans): Problems of Triumviral and Augustan Poetics