Introduction
According to Servius Danielis’ commentary on Virgil there are two viragines in the Aeneid.Footnote 1 One is Iuturna, the sister of Turnus, who muscles in on her brother’s chariot driver Metiscus and then takes over the reins.Footnote 2 Iuturna’s status as a virago is clear – Virgil explicitly labels her as such, and then explains that she almost becomes Metiscus, adopting his voice (vox), his physicality (corpus), and his weapons (arma). Iuturna’s actions fit, and indeed may well have exerted some influence over, the eventual definition of virago, first articulated by Jerome, and codified by Isidore of Seville, of a woman acting like a man (vir-ago).Footnote 3
Servius Danielis’ other Virgilian virago gains this label through different means (Serv. ad. loc. Verg. Aen. 4.335):
‘Elissae’ autem Didonis, quae appellata est lingua Punica virago, cum se in pyram sponte misisset, fingens placare manes prioris mariti, cum nubere se velle Iarbae mentiretur.
‘Elissa’s’ but actually Dido’s, which is how a virago is called in the Punic language, because she willingly sent herself onto the pyre, pretending that she was placating the spirit of her first husband, when she was actually lying about wanting to marry Iarbas.Footnote 4
Dido’s immolation, her resolve to kill herself, and her eventual suicide, her self-murder, render her in Servius Danielis’ reckoning as a woman acting like a man.Footnote 5 In both cases virago describes women who stand up to men and assert themselves in a man’s world.
In the six centuries or so between Virgil’s epic and the Vandal Latin poetry of Dracontius the term virago has three main uses:
(1) for Graeco-Roman deities, especially Minerva and Pallas/Athena, but also Diana, Luna, Proserpina, Victoria, and the nymph Nebrophone;Footnote 6
(2) for heroines, from warrior-women like Iuturna or Hippolyte to female victims, including both Classical examples, such as Cassandra and Polyxena, and Christian martyrs or virgins;Footnote 7
(3) in exegetical contexts, including both Classical scholia and commentaries on Ennius and Virgil’s uses, and Christian commentaries and translations which use virago to reflect the Hebrew etymology of woman from man for the epithet used for Eve.Footnote 8
To this list one may also add four uses that are confined to single authors and texts: Prudentius uses virago to describe Superbia in his Psychomachia;Footnote 9 the anonymous author of the Historia Augusta labels Viturgia, the wife of Proculus, a late third century usurper, as a virago;Footnote 10 Priscian discusses technical linguistic features of the word;Footnote 11 and Firmicus Maternus claims that a certain astrological arrangement can make women into viragines.Footnote 12 Were it not for Servius’ remark regarding the Punic etymology of Dido’s name, the idea that killing could turn a woman into a virago may well have been forgotten.Footnote 13
This article analyses Dracontius’ use of the word virago in reference to three women, all murderesses: Medea, the mother-cum-murderess, who kills Glauce, her husband’s betrothed and Glauce’s father Creon, before stabbing her own children to death; Clytemnestra, the mother of Orestes, who conspires with her lover Aegisthus to murder Orestes’ father Agamemnon; and Judith, the biblical heroine, who saves Israel by decapitating the evil general and tyrant Holofernes. It argues that Dracontius’ use of the word virago to refer to these women is a distinct attempt to gender the act of murder, as it is only by these characters’ murderous acts that they become viragines.
The link between Dracontius’ viragines and their murders has so far evaded scholarly attention. When Dracontius’ use of the word virago has been considered it has typically been taken with a generic, militaristic sense. Moussy, for example, considers Dracontius’ use of virago as coda for heroine or warrior-woman, but this analysis is limited only to Dracontius’ depiction of Judith.Footnote 14 Moussy’s position is echoed by Stella.Footnote 15 This is not consistent with Dracontius’ use of virago for Medea nor Clytemnestra, neither of whom can be considered heroines, nor as ‘warrior-women’ given Clytemnestra was a queen, who was otherwise uninvolved in war or violence, and Medea a priestess. Only Judith may be considered a heroine, but the label of warrior-woman is hardly a fit, given Judith is a widow, who uses her feminine charms to gain Holofernes’ trust before decapitating him.
Medea (Romulea 10)
Dracontius refers to Medea using the noun virago three times in the epyllion.Footnote 16 The first occurs in the prooemium, where virago is one of five nouns used in reference to Medea (Drac. Rom. 10.1–5):Footnote 17
Fert animus uulgare nefas et uirginis arte
captiuos monstrare deos, elementa clientes,
naturam seruire reae, seruire puellae,
astra poli et Phoebi cursus et sidera caeli
arbitrio mulieris agi […]
My mind compels me to publicise an unspeakable crime and to show that the gods were taken captive by a maiden’s skill, that elements are her clients, that nature serves a criminal, a girl, that the stars of the sky and the paths of Phoebus and the constellations of heaven are directed by the judgment of a woman […]
Medea is the virgo whose trickery has ensnared the gods, the criminal (rea), that is a mere girl (puella), and the woman (mulier) in control of the heavens.Footnote 18 The fifth noun reinforces Medea’s dominance over the pantheon (Drac. Rom. 10.11–13):
possidet astrigerum funesto pectore caelum
et superos impune premit prece nixa virago
invitos parere sibi […]
She possesses in her deadly breast the starry sky, and this manly woman, relying on her spells, with impunity pressures the gods against their will to obey her […]
Medea’s evolution from virgo to virago mirrors the changing nature of her relationship to the gods; initially she influences virginis arte ‘with a maiden’s skill’, but then she pressures, asserting herself as a powerful virago.Footnote 19 The multiplicity of terms that Dracontius uses for Medea in this opening speaks to the complexity of Medea’s femineity within Dracontius’ miniature epic. She is a dominant figure, immensely powerful, but also at key-points, vulnerable, a criminal who is also a girl, a maiden who stands up to men. Some of these labels are intrinsic, like puella, others like rea and virago, need to be earnt.
Jason is washed up on the shore and looks likely to be executed by king Aeëtes. Juno intervenes by asking Venus to send Cupid to shoot Medea, a priestess of Diana, with an arrow (Drac. Rom. 10.62–5):
igne tuo flammata cadat furibunda virago,
discat amare furor, tandem sit blanda sacerdos,
templa pharetratae contemnat virgo Dianae,
despiciat delubra deae. [...]
so that, inflamed by your fire, the woman, full of rage, behaving like a man, falls, so her rage learns to love, so the priestess finally becomes seductive, so the maiden despises the temples of the quiver-bearing Diana, and spurns the sanctuaries of the goddess. […]
Dracontius plays on the near homophonic nature of virgo and virago, but any suggestion that the initial list of nouns to describe Medea was diachronic, is dashed by Juno’s use of virago in her very first reference to Medea.Footnote 20 From Juno’s perspective, Medea was already mad (furibunda), already playing the man, even before she met Jason. The adjective furibunda is suggestive of Dido’s self-destruction (Verg. Aen. 6.646): conscendit furibunda rogos ensemque recludit (‘Full of rage she climbed the pyre and drew out her sword’). Dracontius was certainly aware of Virgil’s description of Dido’s final moments, given he invokes these lines again in his description of Dido in the catalogue of exempla in book 3 of De laudibus Dei.Footnote 21 The iunctura of furibunda and virago is highly suggestive of Juno’s foreknowledge of what will take place through its intratextual allusion to Medea’s state of mind when she murders her children.Footnote 22
The final use of virago to describe Medea occurs when she speaks to Jason, as he kneels, bound in the temple, on the very cusp of being sacrificed (Drac. Rom. 10.247–55):
[…] conversa sacerdos
ad iuvenem: ‘dic, nauta fugax, pirata nefande:
est consors matrona decens an caelibe vita
degis adhuc nullumque domi <tibi> pignus habetur?’
‘solus,’ ait captivus, ‘ego, mihi pignora nulla
coniugis aut subolis.’ dictis gavisa virago
blanda refert: ‘vis ergo meus nunc esse maritus?’
‘servus,’ Iason ait, ‘tantum ne vita negetur
te precor et dominam fateor.’
[…] The priestess turns to the young man: ‘Speak, escaped sailor, evil pirate, do you have an honourable woman or do you still live a celibate life
and is there no betrothal waiting at home for you?’
‘I am alone,’ said the captive, ‘I am not committed
to a partner nor to children.’ The woman-playing-the-man was pleased at these remarks, and replied seductively ‘So do you want to be my husband right now?’ ‘I’d be your slave,’ Jason said, ‘just, I beg you, do not deny me my life, I recognise you as my superior.’Footnote 23
Her seductive (blanda) address of Jason echoes Juno’s request at the start of the epic (Drac. Rom. 10.63): sit blanda sacerdos. Jason does not accept Medea’s proposition, but his answer that he will be the slave to her his mistress, speaks to the extreme circumstances of their encounter and the manifest power imbalance, as Medea holds Jason’s life in her hands.Footnote 24 His labelling of Medea as domina draws upon and informs Medea’s semi-divine status, given Cupid’s use of domina to refer to the goddess Diana, and Cupid’s effective classification of Medea as a suitable target on the basis of her divinity (a claim underscored by Dracontius’ identification of her as a divine figure at the beginning of the poem).Footnote 25 Medea is again the virago, as she holds Jason’s life in her hands.
The reader who knows the plot of the Medea might be surprised to see virago, a term that typically carries a sense of admiration in Latin literature prior to Dracontius, used repeatedly to refer to Medea.Footnote 26 This surprise speaks to the complexity of Medea’s character, especially in Dracontius’ telling, as he teases out the paradoxes of his prefatory remarks throughout the poem, as both a victim, of Juno, Venus, Cupid, Jason and Glauce, and a heinous perpetrator, the innocent girl who becomes a murderess.Footnote 27 Gender is critical to the tension within Dracontius’ Medea, as she struggles to fulfil gendered expectations as to what she should do, and ultimately rejects these expectations by the drastic actions that she takes. By the end of the poem Medea’s actions confirm her semi-divinity, if only by her lack of humanity, as the murderess mother of her children, unable to play the woman in a man’s world, nor able to play the man without suffering dire consequences.Footnote 28 In this respect Dracontius’ labelling of Medea as virago also encapsulates her duality, as both a priestess who sacrilegiously married and had children, and as a semi-divine being.Footnote 29
Clytemnestra (Orestes)
In Dracontius’ Orestes Queen Clytemnestra conspires with her lover Aegisthus to murder Orestes’ father, Agamemnon.Footnote 30 Much of the tension in the play revolves around Orestes’ hesitation about avenging his father by murdering his mother. In an extended dialogue prior to her death Clytemnestra begs her son to spare her, using language which stresses her femineity as Orestes’ mother (mater), birthmother (genetrix), and wetnurse (nutrix).Footnote 31 The latter involves a moment of heightened drama (Drac. Or. 739–740):
conturbata parens nudis exerta papillis
orabat natum: ‘per haec, puer, ubera, parce!’Footnote 32
His parent, now deranged with fear, bared naked breasts
and begged her son: ‘By these breasts, child, spare me!’
Exposing her breasts to her son amounts to a dramatic display of Clytemnestra’s claim that her dutiful rearing and raising of Orestes should grant her special indemnity against his revenge. This case is made especially ardently given that Agamemnon was away at war for the vast majority of Orestes’ formative years.Footnote 33
The noun virago only appears in reference to Clytemnestra in Orestes’ words as he finally resolves to dispatch her with his sword (Drac. Or. 745–6, 751–2):
[…] tum natus ‘inanes
perdis’ ait ‘lacrimas, genitor te expectat ad umbras.
[…]
haec mihi Pylades meus imperat et soror urget:
ut iaceas mucrone meo, truculenta uirago.’
[…] then the son said:
‘You waste vain tears, my father expects you among the shades.
[…]
My Pylades orders me to do this and my sister urges it
that you die by my blade, savage murderess.’
Orestes’ rejection of Clytemnestra’s status as his mother reaches its rhetorical crescendo with the phrase truculenta virago.Footnote 34 This gender-bending of Clytemnestra places her at risk and justifies Orestes’ actions, removing at least rhetorically any concerns regarding the impiety of matricide.Footnote 35 From this moment on, Clytemnestra – at least for the purposes of being a victim – is placed in the same category as the male actors of the play. Her gender does not protect her from suffering the same fate as Aegisthus, her lover and accomplice in Agamemnon’s murder.Footnote 36
Judith (De laudibus Dei 3)
In book three of the De laudibus Dei Dracontius explores gendered differences and similarities, building on his earlier characterisation of Adam and Eve in book one.Footnote 37 After a theological account of how God rewards and punishes, Dracontius posits the reaction of a non-Christian reader (profanus) who might be included to reject his Christian claims.Footnote 38 For the benefits of such a reader Dracontius turns to the Classical canon to make his point, citing Greek, Carthaginian and Roman exempla in support of his overall premise that God punishes evil and rewards good.Footnote 39
At the end of these catalogues Dracontius considers how a female reader might react (Drac. laud. Dei 3.468–475):
Sed ne forte viris tantum data verba putentur
et quasi sexus iners, fragili sub corpore mollis
laudis onus metuens, ne sit sibi fama superstes
tormentis quaesita suis, aeterna recuset
plurima dona dei – laudis mala femina summae
materiem retinere potest; audacius illis
deprensis nihil est, animos de crimine sumunt
datque nimis grandem mulieribus ira furorem.Footnote 40
But lest perchance these words are thought to be provided only to men, as if the mild sex refuses the many, eternal gifts of God, afraid of the burden of praise on their soft, fragile bodies, lest their notoriety gained through their own torment, survive themselves. A wicked woman can keep the basis of greatest acclaim. Nothing is more daring than they are when caught. They take spirit from the accusation, and their womanly wrath gives them exceedingly great rage.
Dracontius carefully imbeds gendered criticism within the negative purpose clause, and then pivots against it, arguing that women are capable of great evil, and therefore are also in need of corrective exempla to guide their moral decisions. In the catalogue of heroines Dracontius justifies the inclusion of female exempla by comparisons between their actions and what men would have done in similar situations. The first feminine exemplar for instance, the biblical heroine Judith, decapitates the tyrant Holofernes in his own camp (Drac. laud. Dei. 3.480–90):
Iudith Holofernem castissima finxit amare
et sibimet peperit de ficto crimine laudem
castra ducis metuenda viris ingressa virago.
Inter belligeros fremitus et tela cruenta,
inter et ensiferas saevo sub Marte catervas
ingreditur vestita fide, munita pudore
et quod tanta manus non est adgressa virorum,
nocte sub obscura perfecit femina sola
et duce truncato viduavit castra tyranni!
Quae caput ad patriae proceres portavit et urbis
civibus una dedit cum libertate triumphum.
The most chaste Judith pretended to love Holofernes and the virago, once she entered the general’s camp, a place feared by men, she received praise from him for a crime that she invented. Among the warmongering roars and bloody weapons, and sword-bearing hordes in the midst of fierce war, she entered clothed only with her faith, armoured only by her honour, and did what such a band of men had not attempted, the woman, all on her own, during a dark night, decapitated the general and so widowed the tyrant’s camp! She carried the head to the leaders of her county and on her own gave to the citizens of the city a triumph to go with their freedom.
Judith lies twice, first by pretending to Holofernes that she loves him, and secondly by pretending that she has done some sort of criminal act worthy of praise.Footnote 41 Dracontius however is full of praise for Judith, as he contrasts her heroic actions, as a virago – a heroine or warrior woman – with those of the men (viris) who are too scared to confront Holofernes.Footnote 42 The verb viduavit emphatically underlines Judith’s inversion of her role and status as society, as the widow who forces the camp into widowhood by killing Holofernes. The feminine participles vestita and munita underscore Dracontius’ claims regarding Judith’s incredible actions, as a woman, acting all on her own (femina sola, una).Footnote 43 In the end Holofernes (Drac. laud. Dei. 3.491): Femineo mucrone perit (‘dies by a woman’s blade’).
Judith’s capacity not only to overcome gendered expectations regarding her behaviour, but in so doing, outdo the men justifies both Dracontius’ decision to include a catalogue of female exempla, and his decision to begin with Judith. By gendering Judith’s heroic action against Holofernes, Dracontius broadens the relevancy of her exemplum. Women should look to Judith for inspiration, but men can too, as they look to avoid following the men in the story, who are all anti-exempla, either on account of their cowardice in refusing to confront Holofernes or in Holofernes’ case on account of his tyranny.
Conclusion
Dracontius’ use of virago to describe violent female figures is not wholly without precedent in the history of Latin literature. In a fragment that has often puzzled commentators, Ennius wrote (Enn. Ann. 220–1 Sk.):
corpore tartarino prognata Paluda virago
cui par imber et ignis, spiritus et gravis terra.
The virago Paluda, born with a hellish body,
to whom rain and fire, spirit and weighty earth are equal.
It is difficult to reconcile this picture, of a grotesque, ghastly woman with the heroic imagery associated with a Iuturna or Minerva. Beginning with Norden, scholarship has suggested that these lines are a description of the goddess Discordia, which is consistent with the use of virago to refer to deities, and more broadly consistent with the militaristic and violent connotations that virago can convey.Footnote 44 Dracontius’ use of virago to describe murderesses may thus be seen as a continuation of a tradition begun by Ennius, and perpetuated by Virgil (by way of Servius) through the etymology of Elissa/Dido, whereby a woman behaving like a man is coda for a female killer whether of themselves or others.
For Wolff, a clear divide can be seen between the biblical heroine and positive exemplar of Judith, and the negativity and evil of a Medea or Clytemnestra, but we may bridge this divide in two ways.Footnote 45 Judith’s murder of Holofernes is a triumphant act, but this triumph is as much against the Assyrian general as it as the men who failed in their duty to confront Holofernes. There is thus a sense of shame operative in Dracontius’ account of Judith’s actions, not for the pious widow who necessarily undertook such a risky and violent act, but for the men who stood by while it happened. In this regard Judith is both a perpetrator, and a victim of male incompetence and tyranny. The same may be said of Medea, whose guilt for the murders that she commits is necessarily complicated by the conspiracy of divine and human interests that have made her into a victim, from Juno to Jason.Footnote 46 To a lesser extent one may even see some victimhood in Clytemnestra given Agamemnon all but abandoned her. By using the word virago to refer to these women Dracontius invokes the epic tradition embodied by Ennius and Virgil, while highlighting the complexity of these female characters, as they defy their gendered social expectations of their behaviour, and try to assert themselves against powerful men.Footnote 47
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to Paul Roche and Alexandra Pinkham for their help with this article. This research was funded by the Australian Research Council as part of DP220100395 ‘The Vandal Renaissance, Latin Literature in Post-Roman Africa (435–534CE)’.
Competing interests
The author declares none.
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