The group of texts usually referred to as the Greek novel provides great scope for investigating female characterisation. The five ‘ideal’ novels all present the reader with very visible, and often vocal, female lead characters. One of the most striking texts in terms of a female voice, however, is not one of these ‘canonical’ Greek novels, but the Lucianic Onos. In this text women, particularly the slave-girl Palaestra, are fundamental to the narrative of the main character Lucius. They can be shown to shape and frame his narrative, highlighting his status as a pawn in a narrative over which he has little control.
Edith Hall reflects upon the fact that in the Onos, although the reader is provided with the double perspective of educated elite man and slave (in the form of a working animal),Footnote 1 there is no female perspective.Footnote 2 According to her women are simply objectified and treated in a misogynist manner: ‘with one exception, every woman in the Ass either practices witchcraft or is outrageously sexually voracious, or ostentatious, or stupid, or cruel, or old and ugly, or criminal, or some combination of these’.Footnote 3 While it is true that the female characters in the Onos do veer towards the baser end of the spectrum, I disagree with the assertion that they are treated always as objects.Footnote 4 Rather, it will become clear that the female characters in the Onos are significant – more significant than Lucius to some extent – because between them they frame and shape his narrative as active participants in the text. Ultimately this article will show that they control his narrative experience, since neither would his adventure have been initiated nor would his story have been the same without them.
Hall points out that Hipparchus' wife goes through a metamorphosis, just as Lucius does, and that this narrative remains unwritten: ‘The most subversive ancient novel never written would surely have been the Bird, the one which recorded her perspectives on early second-century Greek society.’Footnote 5
I take my cue from this search for female perspective in the Onos, which Hall suggests as possible but ultimately claims to be lacking. This article will argue that Palaestra is instrumental in laying down Lucius' narrative, before demonstrating a wider theme of female control in this text, and finally showing that women in the Onos fit in to a broader context of novelistic female characters who are used to controlling their own experience. Whenever a woman speaks or writes in a text written (and narrated) by a male, a tension is created between direct access to woman as expressing subject and filtered access to woman as always-written object; in other words, a tension is created between women's direct readability and their inscrutability.Footnote 6 In the Onos the ego-narrative enhances this tension by laying bare a space from which female characters, resisting their narrator, invite the reader to read from a perspective that is different from, or even in conflict with, that of the controlling narrative voice. This space allows the androcentricity of the text to be questioned, explored and pushed to the limit.
Palaestra's power and language
According to Hall, the fact that Palaestra cannot read (οὐδὲ γὰρ γράμματα ἔμαθον, 11) and therefore would not be able to enjoy the text ‘betrays the exclusivity of the shared male consciousness of author, hero and reader, collaborating in inspection of Palaestra as sex object’.Footnote 7 However, as I shall argue, the fact that she cannot read does not mean that she cannot participate in, and indeed control, the narrative: Palaestra's speech will reveal her to be a great mistress of metaphor and a skilful manipulator of language. Similarly, in Achilles Tatius' Leucippe and Cleitophon ‘Melite's appropriation of the tools of male agency, metaphor and the gaze … jeopardize[s] the illusion that control of language and sight are exclusively male prerogatives'.Footnote 8 By contrast, when Lucius becomes an ass he loses the ability to speak as well as his ability to control what is happening to him.
Before looking at Palaestra's speech in detail it is necessary to scrutinise what Lucius says in the two passages that frame it. It is clear from the description of Palaestra which Lucius gives that he is objectifying her, viewing her as something to be inspected through male eyes (Onos 6).
κἀγὼ εὐθὺς ἔνθεν ἑλών, Ὡς εὐρύθμως, ἔφην, ὦ καλὴ Παλαίστρα, τὴν πυγὴν τῇ χύτρᾳ ὁμοῦ συμπεριφέρεις καὶ κλίνεις. ἡ δὲ ὀσφὺς ἡμῖν ὑγρῶς ἐπικινεῖται. μακάριος ὅστις ἐνταῦθα ἐνεβάψατο.
And I, immediately making a start from there, said ‘How rhythmically, beautiful Palaestra, you turn and tilt your rump in time with the saucepan. And your waist moves fluidly for me. He is lucky, whoever dipped in there.’Footnote 9
Much of the vocabulary here serves to sexualise Palaestra. ἐνέβάψατο is a particularly striking word, as on one level it could refer to ‘dipping into’ the food Palaestra is making which Lucius will eat for dinner, but on another level is equally likely to refer to ‘dipping into’ Palaestra herself. This has the effect of reducing Palaestra to the status of sex-object through sexual metaphor. Lucius’ speech contains several other words which can be read as double entendres that strengthen the objectification of Palaestra. Words for ‘bowl’, ‘dish’, ‘pot’ and so on are often used to mean female genitals, and according to Adams χύτρα does have the secondary sense ‘pudenda’,Footnote 10 and thus can be read as prefiguring Lucius’ sexual encounter with Palaestra. The word πυγή is a semi-respectable one and here describes a ‘well-rumped or well-padded’ woman.Footnote 11 ὀσφύς, which I have translated here as ‘waist’, can also mean ‘penis’, including twice in this text, at 9 and 51.Footnote 12 Through his double entendres, Lucius is creating a ‘text’ for the internal ‘reader’ Palaestra. Even though she cannot read letters, Palaestra not only reads between the lines to find the subtext in Lucius’ advances, but also responds on this level. Her speech will be shown to have a subtext too. Similarly, in Leucippe and Cleitophon, Leucippe understands the meaning behind Cleitophon's erotic stories in the garden at 1.16.2–1.18.5. Whitmarsh notes the fact that she appears to understand and responds on the same level as Cleitophon at 1.19.1: ἡ δὲ ὑπεσήμαινεν οὐκ ἀηδῶς ἀκούειν, ‘She gave subtle signs that she heard [what I said] not without pleasure.’Footnote 13 However, there is an interesting difference between the two examples: Leucippe does not speak, and Cleitophon therefore guesses at or imagines her response, whereas Palaestra does speak, betraying subjectivity more strongly. Cleitophon can read Leucippe how he wants to, but Lucius cannot stop Palaestra speaking.
Lucius uses language here that indicates his status as watcher/objectifier, but it becomes evident from Palaestra's subsequent speech that she knows both that she is being watched/objectified, and that Lucius desires her, which potentially reverses the power structure of the scene. This is made clear by the fact that after she has finished speaking Lucius immediately admits to being in Palaestra's power (Onos 6):
διὰ τῶν ὀμμάτων τῶν ἐμῶν τὸ σὸν μὴ φαινόμενον πῦρ κάτω ἐς τὰ σπλάγχνα τἀμὰ ῥίψασα φρύγεις καὶ ταῦτα οὐδὲν ἀδικοῦντα·
you have sent your invisible fire down through my eyes into my innards and you are roasting me even though I am doing nothing wrong.
Even as Lucius gazes upon his object of desire, the visual impact she has upon him gives Palaestra the upper hand.Footnote 14
The connection between vision, desire and fire is a well-known trope, and Palaestra exploits this link fully in the speech she makes at Onos 6 in response to Lucius’ advances, before adding her own personal twist. This speech is the most important in the whole text both in terms of betraying a female voice and perspective, and in terms of understanding how female characters relate to the narrator:
ἡ δὲ – σφόδρα γὰρ ἦν ἰταμὸν καὶ χαρίτων μεστὸν τὸ κοράσιον – Φεύγοις ἄν, εἶπεν, ὦ νεανίσκε, εἴ γε νοῦν ἔχοις καὶ ζῆν ἐθέλοις, ὡς πολλοῦ πυρὸς καὶ κνίσης μεστά· ἢν γὰρ αὐτοῦ μόνον ἅψῃ, τραῦμα ἔχων πυρίκαυτον αὐτοῦ μοι παρεδρεύοις, θεραπεύσαι δέ σε οὐδεὶς ἀλλ’ οὐδὲ θεὸς ἰατρός, ἀλλ’ <ἡ> κατακαύσασά σε μόνη ἐγώ, καὶ τὸ παραδοξότατον, ἐγὼ μέν σε ποιήσω πλέον ποθεῖν, καὶ τῆς ἀπὸ τῆς θεραπείας ὀδύνης ἀρδόμενος ἀεὶ ἀνέξῃ καὶ οὐδὲ λίθοις βαλλόμενος τὴν γλυκεῖαν ὀδύνην φεύξῃ. τί γελᾷς; ἀκριβῆ βλέπεις ἀνθρωπομάγειρον. οὐ γὰρ μόνα ταῦτα φαῦλα ἐδώδιμα σκευάζω, ἀλλ’ ἤδη τὸ μέγα τοῦτο καὶ καλόν, τὸν ἄνθρωπον, οἶδα ἔγωγε καὶ σφάττειν καὶ δέρειν καὶ κατακόπτειν, ἥδιστα δὲ τῶν σπλάγχνων αὐτῶν καὶ τῆς καρδίας ἅπτομαι.
And she, for the girl was very eager and full of delights, said, ‘You would flee, young man, if you had any sense and wished to live, as it is full of much fire and steam here. For if you only touch it, you will have a nasty burn, and will stay near me, and no one will be able to cure you, not even the healing god, but only I who burnt you. And, strangest of all, I shall make you yearn for more, and you will submit to being refreshed with the pain of the cure, and you will flee the sweet pain not even when you are pelted with stones. Why do you laugh? You are looking at a consummate man-cooker. For I do not only prepare these common snacks, but by now I know about that great and fine dish, man, and how to slaughter him and skin him and cut him up, and the sweetest thing is that I can take hold of his very innards and his heart.’
The passage has obvious sexual overtones, for example compounds of the verb δέρειν (‘skin’) can be used of a woman masturbating a man.Footnote 15 Palaestra not only turns Lucius’ sexualising language back on him, but also goes imaginatively beyond a traditional metaphor for obsessive love and desire through her use of words that invoke fire: she warns that her kitchen is ‘full of much fire and steam’ and that Lucius will receive a ‘nasty burn’ if he approaches.
In the course of her speech, in addition to drawing on stock metaphors of desire, Palaestra takes the cliché of the ‘edible woman’ metaphor (that is, the process of viewing woman as food to be consumed) and deliberately inverts it, creating an ‘edible man’ metaphor.Footnote 16 The ‘edible man’ metaphor that Palaestra uses is her own: the narrator does not compare her specifically with food before she starts talking about herself as a cooker of men.Footnote 17 Thus, although Palaestra may seem to take her cue from Lucius’ general metaphor about cooking, as will become clear she appropriates it and develops it for her own purposes. Crucially, this demonstrates that she has a narrative subjectivity: she possesses the skills to improvise on a theme.
Melite in Achilles Tatius’ Leucippe and Cleitophon provides a useful point of comparison with Palaestra. She is the rival to Leucippe for Cleitophon's affections, the novelistic ‘other woman’, and describes herself as being aflame with desire for him, while also wishing she could set him aflame (5.15.5):
πίστευσόν μοι, Κλειτοφῶν, καίομαι· ὄφελον ἠδυνάμην δεῖξαι τὸ πῦρ· ὄφελον εἶχον τὴν αὐτὴν φύσιν τῷ κοινῷ τοῦ ἔρωτος πυρί, ἵνα σοι περιχυθεῖσα κατέφλεξα·
Believe me, Cleitophon, I am aflame. If only I could show you the fire; if only I had the same nature as the usual fire of love, so that I could have inflamed you with my embrace.
Not only does Melite talk about her love for Cleitophon in terms of fire, albeit using more traditional language (καίομαι and κατέφλεξα, as opposed to Palaestra's ‘steam’ and ‘nasty burn’), but she also uses an ‘edible man’ metaphor when he accuses her of not eating (5.13.5):
Ποῖον γὰρ ὄψον, ἔφη, μοι πολυτελὲς ἢ ποῖος οἶνος τιμιώτερος τῆς σῆς ὄψεως; καὶ ἅμα λέγουσα κατεφίλησέ με, προσιέμενον οὐκ ἀηδῶς τὰ φιλήματα· εἶτα διασχοῦσα εἶπεν· Αὕτη μοι τροφή.
‘What sort of costly dish’, she said, ‘or what sort of wine could be more valuable to me than the sight of you?’ And while she was speaking she kissed me and I received her kisses not without pleasure; then, tearing away, she said ‘This is my sustenance.’Footnote 18
Melite inverts a usual cliché, making herself the desirer, and this reversal of the usual logic and dynamics of the gaze gives her the ‘male’ role.Footnote 19 Whilst Melite appropriates the ‘edible woman’ metaphor and turns it into the ‘edible man’, Palaestra does something more with her use of the metaphor than simply reversing it. She describes herself as an ἀνθρωπομάγειρος, which literally means ‘man-cook’ or ‘man-butcher’. Although it is tempting to put a modern gloss on the word and translate it as ‘man-eater’, Palaestra's metaphor is one of cooking rather than eating, and it even extends to the gory preparation for cooking. μάγειρος can mean ‘slaughterer’, ‘butcher’ and ‘cook’, specifically of fish or meat.Footnote 20 Palaestra uses three verbs to expand upon her theme and construct herself as a man-killer (σφάττειν), a man-skinner (δέρειν) and a person who cuts men up (κατακόπτειν), all of which are encompassed by the one noun ἀνθρωπομάγειρος.
There is a great physicality to Palaestra's cooking metaphor. κατακόπτειν means ‘to cut up’, or ‘to dissect’: Palaestra is capable of carefully taking the man apart. Her language also implies that the man is something to be penetrated: ‘I can take hold of his very innards and his heart.’ She is physically getting inside the innermost parts – the σπλάγχνα – of the man, which is similar to a reader's encounter with a narrative text. Reading can, in the ancient world, be theorised as a journey of discovery that involves dissecting, deconstructing, getting inside and turning over – even digesting – the text in a reader's mind. Often one thing which drives a narrative is the desire to discover the body,Footnote 21 and in the ancient novel a link between body and text is often made: ‘The desire to know the individuals we encounter in reading, to see beneath the surfaces of the body and of the text, is a motivating force for readers and characters alike.’Footnote 22 The vulnerability of bodies within the text stands for the penetrability of the text itself, and the reader wants to know both the text and the bodies it represents. Palaestra, then, threatens to do what the reader does: participate in the bodily disintegration of Lucius by reading about his metamorphosis.
In addition to the concept of text as body, the notion of text as food is prevalent in ancient literature: ‘The Greeks and Romans could describe the whole process of creating, presenting, and consuming a literary text in alimentary terms.’Footnote 23 Literary criticism ‘enlisted several terms originating from the notion that literature has a taste – sweet, sour, bitter, e.g. ἀγλευκής, δριμύς, πικρός, γλυκύτης, μελιχρός … If literature has a peculiar flavour, the reader or listener tastes or savours it, enjoying the physical sensation: in Greek γεύειν and γεύεσθαι are used.’Footnote 24 The imagery that connects literature with food seems to have originated in Greek comedy,Footnote 25 but spread to other genres in both Greek and Latin. In Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, where the setting involves eating, we find literature being compared with dinner in the feast of words: λογόδειπνον (1.1).Footnote 26 Closer to home, in Petronius’ Satyricon ‘[l]iterature is a currency that can be exchanged for dinner’.Footnote 27 Palaestra's speech in the Onos comes within the context of cooking, a context in which text can be figured as food, and so her ‘edible man’ metaphor, implying as it does that a man can be treated as food, also implies that a man can be treated as text. Lucius will become a ‘text’ in the sense that his adventures become the text of the Onos, and Palaestra's carefully chosen words here point towards this: Palaestra threatens to dissect and cook Lucius’ body. Reading a text can be figured both as dissecting a body and as enjoying a feast. Hence, with her cooking metaphor, Palaestra prefigures the conversion of Lucius’ body into text.
Some of the episodes in the ensuing narrative in which Lucius’ body is violated are even suggested by Palaestra's vocabulary.Footnote 28 After Lucius becomes an ass he is stolen from Hipparchus’ home by some bandits. When he tries to escape along with the girl they have later kidnapped, the bandits come up with a particularly gruesome punishment (Onos 25):
τοῦτον οὖν ἕωθεν ἀποσφάξαντες ἀνατέμωμεν ἐκ τῆς γαστρὸς καὶ τὰ μὲν ἔγκατα πάντα ἔξω βάλωμεν, τὴν δὲ ἀγαθὴν ταύτην παρθένον τῷ ὄνῳ ἐγκατοικίσωμεν, τὴν μὲν κεφαλὴν ἔξω τοῦ ὄνου πρόχειρον …
Therefore early in the morning let us kill him and slit him open from his stomach and take out his entrails, and let us house this good maiden in the ass, with her head sticking out of the ass…
At 33 Lucius is again threatened either with being killed and having his entrails given to the dogs (ἀποσφάξατε αὐτόν, καὶ τὰ ἔγκατα τοῖς κυσὶ δότε) or castrated (λαβὼν αὐτὸν ἔκτεμε), and at 39 a cook's wife suggests Lucius be killed and cut into pieces:
τῶν κιναίδων τὸν ὄνον λαβὼν ἔξω εἰς ἔρημον χωρίον κἄπειτα σφάξας αὐτὸν τὸ μέρος μὲν ἐκεῖνο τὸν μηρὸν ἀποτεμὼν κόμιζε δεῦρο καὶ σκευάσας τῷ δεσπότῃ ἀπόδος.
Take the ass belonging to the catamites outside to a deserted place and then kill him and cut off the part that is the leg and bring it here and, having prepared it, serve it to the master.
It is not an accident, I think, that some of the vocabulary used in these passages recalls Palaestra's speech: ἀποσφάξαντες, ἀποσφάξατε and σφάξας recall σφάττειν; σκευάσας recalls σκευάζω; and ἀνατέμωμεν, ἔκτεμε and ἀποτεμών remind the reader of κατακόπτειν. Mention of Lucius’ entrails being ripped out (25) and thrown to the dogs (33) recalls the fact that Palaestra can lay her hands on a man's σπλάγχνα. In addition to this at 23, when he becomes lame, Lucius is worried that vultures will eat him for dinner (δειπνήσουσιν), which recalls Palaestra's earlier threat to turn him into supper, and is indicative of the text's obsession with dining. When his driver sets fire to the load he is carrying at 31 Lucius fears that he will be roasted (ὀπτήσομαι), prefigured perhaps by Palaestra's assertion that if he comes near her he will receive a ‘nasty burn’, and his own use of φρύγω (‘I roast’) at 6. Finally, the cook at 39 very nearly does become Lucius’ ἀνθρωπομάγειρος: ὁ μὲν οὖν ἀνόσιος οὗτος οὑμὸς μάγειρος ἐμοῦ πλησίον ἑστὼς τῇ γυναικὶ ταῦτα συνεβουλεύετο (‘and that unholy man, my cook, stood beside me plotting these things with his wife’). Palaestra's speech, with its clear threats to burn and dissect Lucius, prefigures the later allusions to the cooking and eating of Lucius which underpin the text once he is transformed into an ass.
Choosing and controlling Lucius’ narrative
Very near the beginning of the text, before his conversation with Palaestra, Lucius meets with a woman called Abroea. In a sense it is Abroea who begins Lucius’ narrative for him. He has been searching for an adventure, or an experience that he can watch (Onos 4):
ἐπεθύμουν δὲ σφόδρα μείνας ἐνταῦθα ἐξευρεῖν τινα τῶν μαγεύειν ἐπισταμένων γυναικῶν καὶ θεάσασθαί τι παράδοξον, ἢ πετόμενον ἄνθρωπον ἢ λιθούμενον.
But I wished very much to stay here and find one of the women accomplished in sorcery and to see something incredible, a man either flying or turning to stone.
Abroea informs him that what he is looking for is in the house where he is staying: Φυλάττου … τὴν Ἱππάρχου γυναῖκα πάσῃ μηχανῇ· μάγος γάρ ἐστι δεινή (‘Beware of the wife of Hipparchus in every way, for she is a clever witch’, 4). She also tells him that Hipparchus’ wife has the ability to turn men into animals. Lucius then says, ἐγὼ δὲ πυθόμενος ὅτι τὸ πάλαι μοι ζητούμενον οἴκοι παρ᾽ ἐμοὶ κάθηται, προσεῖχον αὐτῇ οὐδὲν ἔτι (‘When I found out that what I had been seeking for a long time was in the house with me, I had no more interest in her’, 5). Abroea gives Lucius the tools with which to discover his narrative, and so starts off his adventure. Later on he asks Palaestra to let him see herself or Hipparchus' wife metamorphose: μᾶλλον <δ᾽> εἴ τι σὺ οἶδας, αὐτὴ μαγγάνευσον, ὥστε φανῆναί μοι ἄλλην ἐξ ἄλλης ὄψιν (‘or, rather, if you know how, perform some magic yourself, so that you appear to me in one form after another’, 11). Lucius would have Palaestra present him with very many narratives about herself, but in the end it is Lucius who is transformed and presented to the reader as a narrative. His curiosity and desire to be a spectator to a narrative are spurred on by what a female character says, but the outcome of actually living the narrative is far from his original intention.
Despite the fact that he narrates an ego-narrative Lucius does not get to choose what happens to him in this text, from the moment he sees Hipparchus’ wife smear her metamorphosis-inducing potion on to her body, and throughout the indignities he suffers while he is an ass, to his rejection by his lover right at the end of the text. It is significant, then, that he does not see which ‘narrative’ is chosen for him in Hipparchus’ wife's room.
Lucius watches through a crack in the door to her room as Hipparchus’ wife transforms into a bird in order to fly away and meet with a lover.Footnote 29 She takes a potion from a jar that is inside a box and smears it on herself in order to effect the metamorphosis. The fact that the potion is inside a jar that is inside a box that is itself inside a room with a closed door represents the very closed nature of Hipparchus’ wife's narrative. It is telling that Lucius cannot see what is inside this woman's jar (he says, ἡ δὲ εἶχεν ἐμβεβλημένον ὅ τι μὲν οὐκ οἶδα, ‘It had something inside it; whatever it was I do not know’, 12), but nevertheless he asks Palaestra to get him the jar in question so that he too can become a bird. Palaestra, not being able to read, picks the wrong one. There are many potential, and similar, narratives within the box in Hipparchus’ wife's room,Footnote 30 but Palaestra chooses a narrative that Lucius, once he is inside it, does not want to experience. Palaestra may not know how to read, but she does know the ingredients for a good tale.
The ‘wrong jar’ motif found in both the Greek and Latin versions of the Ass-narrative calls to mind the myth of Pandora who takes the lid from her jar and scatters all manner of evils into the world (Hesiod, Op. 94–5). In particular, the evils that are released into the world resonate with the trials undergone by Lucius while he is an ass in both the Greek and Latin versions.Footnote 31
It is significant that the character who leads Lucius to his adventure, Abroea, is a woman: she is one of a series of women who appear at crucial junctures in the narrative. After Abroea has acted as a catalyst and Palaestra has laid down some narrative truths, two more women form a frame to Lucius’ adventures as an ass: Hipparchus’ wife, and the unnamed female character at 51.
The actions of Hipparchus’ wife when she gets ready to transform into a bird and of the lady with whom Lucius has sex towards the end of the text are similar. At 12 Hipparchus’ wife strips naked and smears herself with her transformative potion:
ὁρῶ οὖν τὴν μὲν γυναῖκα ἀποδυομένην. εἶτα γυμνὴ τῷ λύχνῳ προσελθοῦσα … ἐκ τούτου λαβοῦσα χρίεται ὅλη, ἀπὸ τῶν ὀνύχων ἀρξαμένη τῶν κάτω …
I saw the woman taking off her clothes. Then, naked, she went over to the lamp … having taken [the oil] out of this [jar] she anointed herself all over, starting with her toenails …
The lady towards the end of the narrative performs very similar actions (51):
ἡ δὲ λύχνον ἔνδον ἔκαιε μέγαν τῷ πυρὶ λαμπόμενον· ἔπειτα ἀποδυσαμένη παρέστη τῷ λύχνῳ γυμνὴ ὅλη καὶ μύρον ἔκ τινος ἀλαβάστρου προχεαμένη τούτῳ ἀλείφεται
Inside she lit a large, bright lamp. Then she stripped, stood naked all over next to the lamp, poured out some oil from an alabaster vase and anointed herself with it.
This similarity is striking and significant. The second time the smearing scene happens it should perhaps warn Lucius that something – a change – is going to take place: the first time, when he watches Hipparchus’ wife through a gap in her door, he is just about to be turned into an ass, and shortly after the second smearing scene he is returned to human form. Outside these two smearing scenes, there is another frame to Lucius’ ass narrative consisting of two sex scenes:Footnote 32 the scene with Palaestra and another scene, which never gets started, with the woman who appears at 51, who this time sends Lucius away since he no longer has an ass's proportions.
At the beginning of the sex scene at 8–10, Palaestra reminds Lucius who is in charge: δεῖ σε μνημονεύειν, ὦ νεανίσκε, ὅτι εἰς Παλαίστραν ἐμπέπτωκας (‘It is necessary, young man, for you to remember that it is Palaestra whom you have fallen upon’). After she strips (linking her with both Hipparchus’ wife and the woman at the end of the text), she orders (ἤρξατο ἐπιτάττειν) him to strip and anoint himself: ἔκδυσαι καὶ ἀλειψάμενος ἔνθεν ἐκ τοῦ μύρου (9). Palaestra, whose name literally means ‘wrestling ground’, uses violent vocabulary and a wrestling metaphor. She calls herself a trainer and explains that Lucius is there to obey her commands (8):
ἐγὼ μὲν νόμῳ διδασκάλου καὶ ἐπιστάτου τὰ ὀνόματα τῶν παλαισμάτων ὧν ἐθέλω εὑροῦσα ἐρῶ, σὺ δὲ ἕτοιμος γίνου ἐς τὸ ὑπακούειν καὶ ποεῖν πᾶν τὸ κελευόμενον.
I, in the manner of a teacher and trainer, will say the names of the holds I want, having devised them, and you: be ready to hear and do everything you are ordered to do!
Throughout the scene Palaestra uses many imperatives, and also slaps Lucius at one point when he answers back. She is very much in charge,Footnote 33 just as when she holds Lucius in her thrall in the kitchen.
The stripping scenes which feature Hipparchus’ wife and the unnamed woman later in the text recall Palaestra, and her presence is even felt at the end of the text when the stripping of Lucius leads to his humiliation. Lucius goes to the house of his former lover once he regains human form. After having dinner he strips in order to go to bed with her, but is forcibly removed because the woman is disappointed that he has not retained his ass-sized genitals. Stripping for Lucius, instead of confirming a masculine identity ready for the gymnasium, subverts it firstly by having Palaestra lead the ‘training session’, and secondly by the fact that his lover rejects him when she sees him naked.
Women's voices in novelistic texts
The female characters in the Onos fit in to a wider context of prominent novelistic women, many of whom seem to be in charge of their experience. Here I outline three examples.
The Oxyrhynchus Papyrus 4762Footnote 34 is a fragment of an episode of an ass-story in which the ass has sex with a woman, a passage which finds parallels in both the Onos and Apuleius’ Metamorphoses. The fragment contains female direct speech, which makes it pertinent to the hunt for a female point of view:
δεινῶς φλέγομαι·
[τὸ] ῥεῦμά μ᾽ ἥκει· δε̣[ῦτ᾽] ἴδητε κνωμένη[ν.
τί ποτέ με νύσσε̣ι;
σ[α]ί̣[νω] ὄνον φιλοῦσ᾽ ἀω̣ρ̣[ο]ῦ̣νθ᾽ ὥς ποτε
συν[ανέ]πεσ᾽ αὐτῶι.
(καὶ αἰ̣[δο]υμένη λέγει·)
οὐᾶ, παχεῖα καὶ μεγάλη ᾽στὶν ὡς δοκός.
μένε, κατὰ μικρόν, μὴ ὅλην ἔσω βάληις ̣.
τί ποτε;
οὐκ ἔστι τοῦτο. ἀλλὰ τί;
οὐδὲ πάλ̣ι τοῦτ̣ο̣· ἀλλ᾽ἄλλο̣ τι̣ ἂν δ̣ια̣[
I’m badly on fire; the wetness is on me: see here how I’m aroused! What is it goading me? I’m making up to a donkey with kisses, uncaring though he is of how once I lay down with him.
(Bashfully:) Wow, it’s fat, it’s big as a plank! Hold on - gradually, don’t put it all in! What on earth?! No way! What then? No, not that either. But something else might …Footnote 35
The passage is focalised through a female character: it describes the woman's thoughts and point of view about a sexual experience. The passage is indeed fragmentary, but all the speech is in the mouth of the woman, and the fact that she strongly vocalises her feelings implies that she has a voice of her own which she uses to control her experience, aligning her with Palaestra and Lucius’ unnamed lover in the Onos, as well as female characters in the wider novelistic genre.
In Longus’ Daphnis and Chloe, for example, Lycaenion is shown to be in charge of her own sexual experience when she lures Daphnis away from Chloe in order to seduce him (3.16–19).Footnote 36 Lycaenion has lied to her husband about where she is going (σκηψαμένη πρὸς Χρόμιν, 3.15.4) and pretends to need Daphnis’ help in order to get him on his own (3.16.2–3), at which point she explains that she has been told by the Nymphs to help Daphnis with the ‘deeds of love’ so that he and Chloe can consummate their love (3.17.2). Lycaenion's knowing manipulation of Daphnis to get her own way is juxtaposed and contrasted with Daphnis’ own naivety: he is not suspicious of Lycaenion's intentions (οὐδὲν … ὑποπτεύσας, 3.17.1), but is delighted with her proposition, and offers her presents in return. The result is that Lycaenion gets exactly what she wants: sex with an attractive young man.
Melite, as we have seen, is a powerful woman who subverts the dynamics of the gaze, appropriating the ‘male’ role, but she also has great rhetorical impact,Footnote 37 most notably when she uses a sexual metaphor to characterise the ship on which she and Cleitophon are travelling in order to persuade him to consummate their marriage (5.16.3).Footnote 38 Cleitophon tries her patience: she attempts several times to persuade him to have sex with her, but he will not. He finally gives in at 5.27.3–4, citing the fact that he has recently regained Leucippe and will soon be rid of Melite as a reason. In addition, at 5.11.6 Satyrus says that Melite βούλεται δὲ τοῦτον ἔχειν δεσπότην (‘wants to have this man as her master’), demonstrating that Melite is used to being in charge of her own sexual experience, much as Hipparchus’ wife is when she flies off to meet her lovers. Melite also demonstrates her authority over her household when she sacks Sosthenes at 5.17.10 for abusing Leucippe: ἡ δὲ τὸν μὲν τῆς διοικήσεως, ἧς εἶχεν, ἀπέπαυσεν (‘and she put a stop to the administrative role which he held’).
Women's control of their own narrative experience (particularly sexual) and manipulation of other characters is a prevalent theme in novelistic texts, but the female characters in the Onos go further than this and between them shape Lucius’ narrative experience. After he is pointed firmly in the direction of a magical narrative by Abroea, a double frame of erotic encounters with women who are in control of their experience marks his entry into and exit from his adventures as an ass, which are themselves punctuated by mishaps at the hands of female characters. Lucius’ entire narrative is chosen for him when Palaestra picks out the jar containing a lotion that will transform him into an ass.
Palaestra is the most significant woman Lucius meets, since she is the one who transforms him into food, and by extension text, using a culinary metaphor which is recalled throughout the ensuing narrative by allusions to the possibility of cooking and eating Lucius, whose story we are reading. Her voice is therefore the strongest and echoes throughout the narrative, which loses its androcentricity as a result. Lucius may have wanted to be a passive observer (‘reader’) of other peoples’ narratives, but he ends up as the protagonist in a narrative entirely created for him and controlled by the female characters.
