Chapter 8 Salome’s Dance: Heads and Bodies between Narrative and Intertextuality
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Abstract
The dance of Herodias’ daughter, who is not named in the Gospels, was to enjoy an extraordinary and long-lasting reception. This paper will start from the terse notices in Mark 6:22, “and when the daughter of Herodias came in, and danced, and pleased Herod and the guests”, and Matthew 14:6, “But when it was Herod’s birthday, the daughter of Herodias danced before them, and pleased Herod”. Herod’s niece and Herodias’ daughter, eventually famous as Salome, is in both cases anonymous, her activity reduced to a single verb, saltavit (“danced”), and to a subordinate clause in Mark. In 1984, René Girard tried to understand how and why these bare details got expanded into what would eventually become an iconic scene of fin-de-siècle Orientalising decadence in the 19th to 20th centuries. How did Salome herself become a (quite literally) femme fatale? This chapter examines how Herodias’ daughter’s eventually deadly dance was visualised and preached in late antiquity, and in particular, to what extent voyeuristic tendencies are already to be observed in patristic authors. There is an interesting story to be told through Biblical epic paraphrase, as in Juvencus 3.51–69, the first Latin author whom the passage demonstrably pleased. In Juvencus 3.56–57 we can already see the primordia of the belly-dance. This chapter works from Latin and also from Greek authors of late antiquity that are able to shed light both on the reception of dance per se by patristic authors and on Salome’s dance in particular. It will show that enhancing the dance with narrative features is central to this reception.