Women in war epic seem a curious paradox. In a genre that so explicitly states arma virumque as its subject matter,¹ the woman almost inevitably appears as ‘the other’, as someone who, instead of becoming an agent in her own right, is used to stress or to highlight, to criticise or to oppose the deeds and characteristics of the male hero. Can epic women ever speak of themselves, or are they inevitably a mirror that reflects the image of the male hero, for better or for worse? The most popular answer in earlier studies of Roman war epic has been ‘no, they cannot, and yes, they are’: epic women have been repeatedly observed either as ‘absorbed’ into the male ideology of the poem (as the docile servants of the patriarchy) or as its ‘transgressive’ opposers. In both cases, the female characters are considered as inevitably marginal to the poem’s narrative telos and to its ideological content: they are decorative elements who add suspense to the story, or figures of pathos who tend to quickly vanish from the pages of the epic.

Nevertheless, as I have attempted to show in this work, the exceptions to this rule are numerous and remarkable—so many, in fact, that they could be argued to contest the rule. There is Dido, who wards off the marginalisation and refuses to be written off the narrative—in addition to the latter books of the Aeneid, her story goes on in Lucan’s Pharsalia and in Silius Italicus’ Punica, where it continues to determine the Roman identity. There is Camilla, whose significance to the ideological content of Virgil’s epic is peerless, and who, instead of becoming an objectified locus of a male imperial conquest, is a plenipotentiary agent in the formation of the future Romanitas. Then there are the Lemnian matrons, whose ‘unnatural’ bestiality, in fact, appears to tell a story about the Roman self and its vulnerability to the violent drives of the body. And, of course, there is Antigone who, judging by the Graeco-Roman literary tradition, would not need to be present in many of the scenes of the Thebaid at all—but she is, because, arguably, her experience matters, and her viewpoint does more to Statius’ epic narrative than merely contest or validate its predominant male perspective. This means that the marginality of women in epic remains a complex issue that raises many questions—while it is true, in many cases, that the female characters are used to reflect the qualities of the male hero, this cannot be considered an absolute rule.

Moreover, in many academic discussions, it has remained somewhat ambiguous what the ‘marginality’ of epic women is actually taken to mean. Arguably, there is narrative marginality, whereby the female characters lack power to make an impact on the plot, or are unimportant to the progress of the story in general—that is, they are ‘pushed to the margins’. But there is also a psychological marginality that results from the reader’s inability to relate to the character in the narrative—in this work, I have usually referred to this as ‘a lack of subjectivity’. The archaic models of war epic and its position in the Roman curriculum mean that there are good reasons to regard the projected reader of the genre as an elite male—he is the imaginary addressee of the poem’s external narrator, and he is the one whom the characters within the poem have to ‘convince’ in order to earn their subjectivity. As has been noted, the Roman epic poets construct subject positions for this reader by inviting him to identify with certain characters in the poem (usually argued to be male), and by alienating him from others (almost without exception considered to be female).

In this process, emotions, and the way they are expressed, have a crucial role. Epic women have often been considered as ‘over-emotional’ characters tangled up with their personal anger, pain, or passion, and therefore as threatening to both the internal and the external audience. Moreover, the women’s resort to their private emotions has often been observed as a factor that positions them in opposition to the ‘temporal scene’: that is, the political affairs and the society ruled by logic and language. It is, however, worth asking whether ‘opposing the temporal scene and the logic of the symbolic order’ is the same thing as ‘opposing the teleological drive of the epic’ (another thing that epic women are generally considered to be guilty of). Arguably, in many of the Roman war epics, this ‘drive’ of the poem is extremely destructive and strongly at odds with the logic of the symbolic order. Whereas the Aeneid clearly is an epic directed towards a coherent Roman identity, and the Punica’s goal is the establishment of Rome’s imperial dominion, these ‘happy endings’ are ambiguous, because they contain a seed for future disruption of the social order. Lucan’s Pharsalia and Statius’ Thebaid are a completely different matter, poems where there is arguably nothing ‘heroic’ about the drive of the narrative, and where the telos of the epic—if there is one—is the ultimate collapse of social order and the disintegration of collective identity. In these epics, the logic of the symbolic order, on which society is built, is continuously under threat from the violent drive of the epics—their wars are not constructive conflicts, but something that tears society apart. This means that in this kind of situation, the epic woman arguably cannot win: either she condemns the war, thus becoming a character who is ‘opposed to the teleological drive of the narrative’, or she gets carried away by the chaos and the violence, and is therefore judged as a transgressive character, ‘opposed to the logic of the temporal scene’.

In order to dig a little deeper into this issue, it is worth summing up briefly the views taken in the present study of gendered emotions and their narrative purpose in Roman war epic. This topic is marked particularly strongly by the influence of a Roman, politicised form of Stoicism. The idea that the political, military man should be able to entirely suppress his body and his emotions and dedicate himself to the service of the political organism can be observed, in one way or another, in all the epics of the Principate. The body appears as a strange and threatening source of drives that is in a constant danger of crippling language and reason. Because the Graeco-Roman philosophical discourse generally defined the woman as a more corporeal being than the man, women in ancient literature often appear as more vulnerable to the strong bodily experiences such as pain or pleasure. This train of thought, therefore, clearly labels women as more tuned into the semiotic modality, whereas the logic of the symbolic order remains the male domain.

This idea penetrates the Western philosophical discourse, since even today, it can be observed in the idea that (especially negative) strong emotions—and especially when expressed by a woman—undermine one’s credibility in the public sphere of politics. The drives of the body must be kept divorced from the temporal order, and the woman can gain a standing in the said order only by “identifying with the father”; by “playing a superman”.² In Roman war epic, there are many examples of women who do just this. We should note that when epic women subscribe to the values and ideals of the state, suppressing their personal agony (or articulating it in socially acceptable ways), they do in fact become idealised models of Romanitas, relatable to the male audience—however, it is equally crucial to note that in this role, they are inevitably marginalised, since their performance, while convincing, can only ever become ‘quite close’ to the moral excellence manifested by the best of men. Furthermore, it must be pointed out that these women appear to entirely lack narrative power in the epic plot. Although they do gain a certain degree of epic subjectivity by becoming points of identification for the reader, they are powerless to impact the course of events in the poem, and they often end up being removed from its pages, violently and against their will.

While this involuntary erasure is the fate of many transgressive epic women too, it is intriguing that in comparison to the women ‘playing supermen’, these rebellious and subversive characters often wield considerable narrative power. In particular, the fact that women’s speech and agency are at their most influential when their goals are violent or destructive, strengthens the impression that in Roman epic, the female role is more strongly connected to war than to peace—it is paradoxically when women become dangerous enemies of the social order that they actually wield most power in the plot. It is the over-emotional and destructive women, with whom the reader is most unlikely to identify, that drive the epic narrative forward, towards its ultimate telos. It would therefore seem that being marginal to the narrative structures of the epic, and being marginal to the construction of the subject position for the reader are two entirely different things.

Intriguingly, the same applies to men in Roman epic. As I have aimed to demonstrate throughout this study, the overwhelming and threatening emotions and their averbal expressions—markers of the semiotic chôra—are not an exclusively female phenomenon, but are in fact repeatedly associated with the male subjects of the epic. It is particularly interesting that the vulnerability to the call of the chôra, usually considered as a feminine characteristic, appears to be an inalienable part of the ultimate male attribute in the genre: virtus, the masculine belligerent courage. In all the epics of the Principate, aggressive heroism carries implications of ambitious, subversive, or threatening behaviour and, as Ripoll points out, is often connected to furor—aggressive anger that perverts the warrior’s courage, and brings it dangerously close to crudelitas and feritas.³ As I have argued throughout this book, furor can be considered to be the best expression of the semiotic in epic: it is an uncontrollable and destructive bodily drive that is ‘beyond words’ and that efficiently alienates the reader from the characters who express it. It would therefore appear that the utmost expressions of manly bellicosity are also the situations in which the male subject of epic is in danger of resorting to the semiotic, and of sliding out of reach of the reader’s identifying gaze—however, these are also the situations where his power to impact the narrative is at its greatest.

This phenomenon is eminently present in all the surviving imperial war epics. Ripoll and Wright have indicated that in Virgil’s epic, ferox virtus is often manifested in the character of Turnus, whose manliness—although it indisputably fulfils the requirements of the traditional heroic ideal—is a kind of masculinity that is difficult to control and is potentially ‘dehumanising’—the choice of words per se expresses the human fear of bodily drives, which are easily labeled as ‘bestial’.⁴ The poem’s depiction of Turnus’ inability to contain his virtus within the limits of the symbolic order, therefore, mitigates the juxtaposition between the semiotic chôra and masculinity as mutually exclusive phenomena.

An even more pronounced discomfort in the face of warlike masculinity can be observed in post-Virgilian epic. Although Lucan’s depiction of Julius Caesar in the Pharsalia is morally disapproving, Caesar nevertheless remains the unquestionable hero and protagonist of his epic—and, moreover, its dynamic driving force. As Alston and Spentzou put it, he is “inexplicable and sublime”, and it is his dangerous ambition that drives on the narrative.⁵ In all of Roman war epic, Lucan’s Caesar is one of the best examples of an epic subject who fails to conceal and renounce his underlying similarity with ‘the other’—one whose greatest strength is his greatest weakness and who, by repeatedly resorting to the semiotic, ends up destabilising the culturally hegemonic identity rather than strengthening it. Arguably, this suits Lucan’s luridly bare civil war depiction very well. The antihero of his epic is the dynamic force behind the narrative, yet in his virtus-furor he is clearly opposed to the logic of the temporal scene. In this sense, Caesar strongly resembles the many destructive women of Roman war epic, such as Virgil’s Amata and Dido, or Statius’ Jocasta.

The complex villain-hero characters mark the war epics of the Flavian period too. In the Thebaid, Statius fills the battlefield with ambivalent heroes full of martial ardour and driven on by frightening emotions.⁶ Tydeus and Capaneus are the most classic examples of heroes whose virtus develops into something sinister: either into savage crudelitas or into arrogant hubris.⁷ They are, however, far from being the only ones; from Polynices and Eteocles to Creon and Amphiaraus, the Thebaid is an epic of antiheroes, warriors unable to repress their bodily drives. Together, these characters lay waste to society—their distorted virtus is the manifestation of the abject itself because, in Kristevan terms, it “evokes horror as it makes the subject feel her mortality and her limits”.⁸ It is the ambiguous nature of warlike masculinity that determines Statius’ understanding of Romanitas—an unending, Lucanian drive of destruction and self-destruction, enforced by a manliness that is turned into madness. The line that separates the self from the other wavers when the very building block of Roman identity—martial virtus—is depicted as the quickest way to the all-consuming darkness of the chôra.

The Lucanian model is equally strong, although differently articulated, in Silius Italicus’ Punica. Constructed on the model of Lucan’s Caesar, Hannibal is the unquestionable villain-hero of Silius’ epic. His aggressive virtus largely overshadows that of the Roman heroes within the epic, and although he is a barbarian, he becomes the most important character defining Romanitas in the poem. It is arguable that Hannibal’s terrifying manliness, which borders on insensible frenzy, is something reminiscent of the virtus Romana: in his conduct, the reader can observe reflections of the powerful but unreliable bellicosity that makes possible not only the Romans’ world dominion, but also their impending civil strife and self-destruction. In one way, Silius’ Hannibal appears as an alter ego of the Roman people—a mirror that reflects Roman-ness in its most and its least attractive forms.⁹

It is obvious from these examples that in Roman imperial war epics, being ‘male’ or ‘Roman’—while these are the most crucial building blocks of subjectivity in the genre—is not enough to protect the character from falling victim to the drives of his body. On the contrary, these attributes can make him more vulnerable to these drives, since epic furor clearly is something that not only marks women and foreigners, but is an inalienable part of manliness and Roman-ness. As I see it, epic furor is simultaneously a productive and a destructive force: without it, the narrative would never move forward—Rome would not be founded, its Mediterranean empire would not be established, nor would civil war ever tear the Republic apart. In the epic plot, furor represents the ‘bodily need to communicate’: the underlying motivation for anything, for any speaking subject’s engagement in the signifying practice. But like the semiotic chôra, it is a force that needs to be curtailed by the logic of the symbolic order, and by the laws and norms of the temporal scene. Accordingly, the epic plot (and the body politic that constitutes its subject matter) is very similar to the Kristevan sujet-en-procès: it comes to being only in the interaction between the dynamic furor and its socially regulated articulations.

While this study, therefore, is generally opposed to the strong juxtaposition between the male and female roles in epic, at the same time, however, it would be ludicrous to deny that there is a strong and dominant overtone in the Roman epics of the Principate, and that this overtone—loyal to the Graeco-Roman literary tradition—tends to objectify and otherise female characters more often and more strongly than it does men. There is a reason why the figure of the Absolute Other (a female, foreign, sensual and dangerous character) is a recurrent acquaintance on the pages of these epics: and that reason, arguably, is the human attempt to alienate the animalistic aspects of the psyche by turning them into the defining qualities of someone who appears different in all aspects.

The same attempt is apparent in the civil war narratives of Roman war epic. In this book, I consistently deal with civil war as a ‘war against the self’, as a symbolic shattering of the collective identity. In a war between those who should be natural allies, the subject detaches a part of his self, creating an enemy whom he henceforth perceives as ‘the other’, and in whom he can locate the disturbing elements that trouble him about himself. However, this act inevitably splits the self in two, destroying the collective identity. The conflict can end only in a complete self-destruction on the collective level, or else, alternatively, it can lead to the subject’s confrontation and acceptance of ‘the other’ as part of the self and, through this acceptance, to the construction of a new, coherent identity. The Roman epic poets’ opinions on which it will be differ greatly, because of their different ideological backgrounds and historical circumstances. What is common to all, however, is that the destructiveness of running from the abject, and the necessity of confronting the ‘strangers within us,’ form a bigger, more comprehensive theme in these epics, a theme that is not limited to the transgressive female characters. Its workings on a more general narrative level are stressed and reinforced by the episodes where gendered otherness and the feminised nature of the abject are questioned.

In this work, I have been particularly interested in and focused on these kinds of episodes: the narrative moments where the poets appear to ‘break free’ from tradition, and reveal the underlying sameness between the other and the self. Arguably, when the epic poets reverse and rewrite the literary models offered by Roman historiography, Athenian tragedy or Homeric epic, they are communicating something essential about the social environment and the mental ambience in which their works came into being. When they assimilate the characters of Caesar and Cleopatra, or Dido and Aeneas, implying that the Absolute Other might, in fact, be an abject other, the reader can hear echoes of the history of the civil wars. Similarly, when they turn the female archetype of a peace-making mediator into a warmongering Fury, contesting the nostalgic worldview of Roman legendary history, the reader can observe a deep-rooted cynicism that is typical of these disillusioned generations. Furthermore, in the many cases where epic men—the allegedly devoted servants of the political system—are shown playing the role of a mourning mother or a frantic woman, it seems clear that issues of cultural importance are being discussed. I believe that the episodes where Roman epic poets choose to reject the tradition, and turn down its obvious literary models in favour of new (and sometimes disturbing) performances, are exactly the moments where the semiotic pressure on the narrative logic makes its presence heard and gives Roman epic its characteristic bitter-sweet and confusing touch. It would appear that, in the end, the war epics of the Roman Principate are not as keen on master narratives and watertight storylines as they might seem at first sight—on the contrary, they are tales that embrace uncertainty, discomfort, inconsistency and loose ends, making Rome’s painful past a living genotext of epic.