Item and list (τὴν δέ)

Semonides’ catalogue proposes that the minds of women, specifically married women, are akin to those of animals, or to natural elements. Although this premise is simple-minded, its execution is elaborate, drawing on a range of conceptual and linguistic ambiguities. Most notably, the individual figures of the catalogue are not so much ‘analogies’ (North (Reference North1977) 36) or ‘trope[s]’ (Osborne (Reference Osborne2001) 47) as they are composites in which the human, animal and inanimate parts can only ever be imperfectly distinguished. What appear on the surface to be metaphorical connections between female personality types and species of animal or natural phenomena, grow unclear as the intersections between tenor and vehicle change from one entry to the next.Footnote ⁴ Although the repeated use of the word γυνή might appear a persistent reminder that women are the object of abuse (lines 1, 8, 23, 41, 67, 73, 88, 90, 92, cf. 97, 100, 106, 113, 118), there is a slide throughout the poem between the conceit that the behaviour (1 νόον) of women is akin to that of animals and material elements, and that the women are themselves constituted out of those same animals and elements. Indeed, the word γυνή may at some points remain ambiguous, since it can mean not only ‘woman’ or ‘wife’, but also simply a ‘female’ when used in reference to an animal (LSJ s.v. γυνή iv). Even taking the word at face value, moreover, the need for such a continual reminder of the human component would point to the sustained confusion of human and inhuman throughout the catalogue. One explanatory simile appears at first glance to imply that the sea-woman can be explained in terms of an analogy between woman and sea (37–40).Footnote ⁵ However, Semonides’ own interpretation of this simile, provided at its close, reveals the specific point of interaction to be a peculiarity of this female type: 41–2 ταύτῃ μάλιστ’ ἔοικε τοιαύτη γυνή | ὀργήν· φυὴν δὲ πόντος ἀλλοίην ἔχει ‘such a woman appears very much like this in temperament, but the sea has a different bodily form’.Footnote ⁶ This woman alone does not share her physical form with animal or element. The implication is that, for all other entries, the exchange of mental and physical features is not so clear-cut.

The assemblages in Semonides’ catalogue are indicated by means of a syntactically obscure pronoun: τὴν μέν … τὴν δέ … The feminine pronoun in the accusative indistinctly stands for either γυναῖκα, the female animal or the feminine element in each case.Footnote ⁷ The figures of Semonides’ catalogue are deprived of nouns in favour of pronominal placeholders; what is more, they are deprived of the agency of a nominative. Such insistent use of the accusative is by no means necessary. We may contrast the catalogue of deaths in Semonides fr. 1, a catalogue which also uses generalising pronouns, but in alternation between nominative and accusative plural: 7–8 οἳ μέν … οἳ δέ …, 12–13 τοὺς δέ … τοὺς δ’ … Moreover, this pronoun is a grammatical other, a direct object whose immobility from first position and immutability from the accusative singular are apparent in the variety of formulae used to sustain it: 7 τὴν δ’ θεὸς ἔθηκ[ε] ‘one a god made’, 21–2 τὴν δὲ πλάσαντες Ὀλύμπιοι ἔδωκαν ‘the Olympians, having fashioned another, gave her [to the world]’, 50 τὴν δ’ ἐκ γαλῆς γένος ‘another is of the race of the weasel’, 57 τὴν δ’ ἵππος ἐγείνατο ‘a horse gave birth to another’; at one instance the formula is even retained with a distinctly separate meaning: 28 τὴν μέν … ἡμέρην ‘another … day’. It is not clear that any one of these sentences is implied when no introductory formula is found at all, as is the case for most of the entries, including the first (2, 12, 27, 43, 71, 83).

The absence of syntax in lists is a reflex of the containment and organisation of miscellaneous items. Words regularly revert within lists to an extra-grammatical, default case – one which is morphologically coded as nominative, or less commonly accusative, and is understood outside any syntactical relation.Footnote ⁸ By a process of association, the list seems to accumulate actual things through its capacity to accommodate extra-syntactic forms, so that the words contained in such a list come to stand more directly for the things they name as objects. As Christopher Johnson notes, ‘to enumerate paratactically tends to conceptually and empirically conflate words and things’ (Reference Johnson2012, 1104). In Semonides’ list, the repeated use of the same pronoun locates the hybrids within the text and gives them a definite, object-like quality. We might contrast Semonides’ definite pronoun against the Hesiodic catalogue's indefinite motif ἢ οἷαι (‘or such a one as …’). The definite although unspecified point of reference of the accusative feminine pronoun τὴν δέ perfectly delineates the compound female figures for which it stands.

A passage towards the end of the poem appears to confirm this reading of the catalogue's pronouns as purposefully ambiguous markers of the entities to which they refer:

As Robin Osborne has pointed out, these lines make clear that the poem's speaker has the perspective of a neighbour (Reference Osborne and Hunter2005, 23), and this self-positioning is affirmed through the use of pronouns. The oblivious husband is referred to in the first couplet using an accusative masculine pronoun that recalls its feminine equivalent in the catalogue: adverbial καί not only refers to the inevitable failure of male self-awareness, but also adds the husband (τόν) to the rota of wives whom the poem's neighbourly voice has been upbraiding. Indeed, the second couplet recalls the structure of the catalogue by offering the feminine article, as often, at line-beginning (τῆν ἣν δ’), and repeats the pronoun again in the following line (τὴν δέ). The first of these uses of τήν appears to float syntactically before its combination with γυναῖκα renders what could have been a relative pronoun (ἥν) into a possessive (τὴν ἣν … γυναῖκα).Footnote ⁹ Moreover, the transposition of γυναῖκα might lead us to construe this word together with the seemingly redundant μεμνημένος, focalised through the husband, for whom his wife is decidedly not animal or elemental: ‘each man will praise his own one, mindful of her as a woman’. The subsequent use of the article (τὴν δὲ τοὐτέρου) then reaffirms the primary focaliser, the poem's speaker, for whom the constituent elements of each compound remain indistinct.

The flitting back and forth between the human and inhuman aspects of the list's caricatures is typical: these are not harmonious blends but hybrid creatures, part woman and part not. Although Deleuze and Guattari themselves reject ‘hybridity’ as a true form of becoming-animal, that concept provides a useful model for thinking about Semonides’ catalogue. In particular, becoming-animal helpfully describes (1) a state of emergence or ‘intensity’ that obtains between human and animal and is not reducible to either,Footnote ¹⁰ (2) the necessity of a collective or ‘animal pack’,Footnote ¹¹ and (3) becoming-other itself, which includes becoming-woman and becoming-elemental.Footnote ¹² In other words, as with all ‘becomings’, the items in this list are instances of assemblage or more properly agencement, which is to say bodies entering a state of heterogeneous composition.Footnote ¹³ In contrast to Homeric animal similes, which tend to interact analogically along one dimension,Footnote ¹⁴ the entities in Semonides’ list are made up of a variety of intersections between human, animal and elemental. The precise relationship between parts changes, but in all cases unmatched pieces are drawn into relation.

The list is the site of this interaction for both Semonides and Deleuze and Guattari. Deleuze and Guattari make regular use of lists to emphasise the multiplicity involved in a becoming, as when they provide examples of ‘blocks of becoming’ whose parts are linked by contagion: ‘… for example a man, an animal and a bacteria, a virus, a molecule, a micro-organism. Or, in the case of the truffle, a tree, a fly, and a pig.’Footnote ¹⁵ By contrast, Semonides’ list strongly articulates its individual items, using the definite pronoun. The rigid structure of Semonides’ list makes for clear-cut divisions between entries and suggests a corresponding lack of distinction between components within entries. The block of becoming is a list in Deleuze and Guattari but an item in Semonides. Everything within Semonides’ entries is mixed together, including not only woman, animal and elemental parts, but also the husbands and neighbours for whom it is ultimately a becoming-woman-becoming-animal that is at stake in the poem.Footnote ¹⁶

This reading of the catalogue in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's notion of becoming helps account for the flexibility with which each entry is constructed. Although the catalogue is organised by the feminine pronoun, entries regularly locate female types within an environment, typically a house or home (3 ἀν’ οἶκον, 29 ἐν δόμοις, 46 ἐν μυχῷ, 47 ἐπ’ ἐσχάρῃ, 60 ἐξ οἴκου, 102 συνοικητῆρα, 104 κατ’ οἶκον). If itemisation is the linguistic equivalent of putting what is other into a box or cage, the house represents this idea of containment within the narrative world of the poem. Taken as a whole, the catalogue becomes the description of a town (74 δι’ ἄστεος). Moreover, a territory, for Deleuze and Guattari, is circumscribed by affective relations just as much as it is a physical boundary, and this helps make sense of the totalising references in the catalogue (3 πάντ’, 8 πάντων, 9 οὐδέν, 13–14 πάντ’… πάντα… πάντῃ…, 23 οὐδέν, 24 μοῦνον, etc.). What falls outside these conditions of relation is without meaning: neither stone (17), winter (25) nor public scorn (79) have any effect.

Multiplicity and otherness (χωρίς)

For Semonides, as for Deleuze and Guattari, difference is indexed by multiplicity. The tension between the conjunction of states within entries and the clear-cut divisions of the list is raised in the poem's first line. As with the list in Semonides’ other major iambic fragment,Footnote ¹⁷ the female types are introduced by a tag line or theme,Footnote ¹⁸ for which the catalogue serves as corroboration:

Our text begins with the word χωρίς, and a prepositional construction, set up by word-placement – whereby we initially read ‘separate from woman’Footnote ¹⁹ – soon gives way to an ambiguous use of the adverb. Whether χωρίς means ‘differently from one another’Footnote ²⁰ or ‘differently from man’,Footnote ²¹ clearly variegation is the word. Semonides’ use of the singular γυναικός speaks against the first option, whereas the lack of a genitive ἀνδρός speaks against the second.Footnote ²² We are left with a triple ambiguity in the word χωρίς, which refers at once (1) to the senselessness of the female characters,Footnote ²³ (2) to the variety of types represented by the catalogue, and (3) to the underlying anxiety about the combination man–woman, whether sexualFootnote ²⁴ or social.Footnote ²⁵ Each of these three interpretations has been (repeatedly) argued over in the scholarship, to the exclusion of the other two; somehow the possibility that a word meaning ‘differently’ or ‘variously’ might be purposefully ambiguous has so far been overlooked.

The poem looks to substantiate its thesis by means of a catalogue which expounds and expands on the introductory χωρίς, presenting a set of assemblages whose components are alike in being other – where the otherness of women to men is matched by the otherness of the animal and elemental to the human.Footnote ²⁶ As already noted above, the poem's speaker has the perspective of the neighbour – and this places us at yet a further remove (Osborne (Reference Osborne and Hunter2005) 23).

There may be another ambiguity behind χωρίς, if we are to hear χορὸς γυναικῶν in χωρὶς γυναικός.Footnote ²⁷ For the group of women described in the poem does evoke a kind of mock-chorus,Footnote ²⁸ standing in marked contrast to choruses of younger women known from this same period of Greek literary history. In place of young maidens, who form a chorus of ten in Alcman's Partheneion (fr. 1.99, δεκ[άς, with scholium ad loc.),Footnote ²⁹ we find instead a group of ten married women. The mutability or mediation of the lyric chorus of maidens includes its ability to adopt animal personae (Alc. fr. 1.47),Footnote ³⁰ and this modality is not gratuitous: it reflects a common metaphor of pre-marital education as akin to the taming of a wild animal.Footnote ³¹ Both Alcman's poem and later tragic versions of the partheneia employ the mythological motif of the girl who metamorphoses into an animal in place of sexual union (Swift (Reference Swift2010) 180, 197, 201, 205, 228); here perpetual virginity is symbolised by an animal nature. Over against this motif, the figures of Semonides’ poem both are married women and yet maintain their untamed animal guises. Semonides thereby undercuts the traditional association of domesticity with domestication. Some of the visual and performative description in Semonides’ poem may be meaningful in the light of choral performance: verbs of movement are perversions of dance (4 κυλίνδεται, 14 πλανωμένη, 58 περιτρέχει), and while πρόσωπα (73) is probably not meant to recall a mask,Footnote ³² the neighbourhood community around the female types is framed as a group of spectators (29 ἐπαινέσει μιν ξεῖνος ἐν δόμοις ἰδών, 67–8 καλὸν μὲν ὦν θέημα τοιαύτη γυνή | ἄλλοισι τῷ δ’ ἔχοντι γίνεται κακόν, 73–4 αἴσχιστα μὲν πρόσωπα· τοιαύτη γυνή | εἶσιν δ’ ἄστεος πᾶσιν ἀνθρώποις γέλως).Footnote ³³ The chorus members in Alcman are individually identified in a list of their ten names (fr. 1.67–77), to which we may compare the ten mismatched figures in Semonides.Footnote ³⁴

The first entry in the catalogue is the only one to begin mid-line and functions as an elaboration on the introductory theme-word χωρίς. More specifically, this entry associates disorder with filth:

The disorder extends to our very interpretation of these lines. These are muddy lines, because of a particularly muddy τῇ: is this a dative of possession, of agent (the woman) or of origin (the sow)? An unspecified πάντ(α) is subject of the relative, and this too illustrates a consummate disorder: things here not only exist in a state of disorder (ἄκοσμα κεῖται), but roll about (κυλίνδεται). The whole domain is in flux; one thinks of Plato's parody of Heraclitus (Pl. Cra. 402a πάντα χωρεῖ καὶ οὐδὲν μένει).Footnote ³⁵ Woman and pig are mixed in here somewhere as well: lines 5 and 6 associate the disorder in the house more clearly with the pig-woman who is their cause (τῇ). She is unwashed and in unwashed clothes, and there is no need to clean up the disparity of the words ἄλουτος and ἀπλύτοις, nor the inelegant succession ἐν εἴμασιν | ἐν κοπρίῃσιν, which are in fact the same, once we belatedly interpret βορβόρῳ πεφυρμένα to mean stained with excrement. φύρω has the sense of a fabric clotting with thick fluid and might be translated ‘smear’.Footnote ³⁶ The absurdly repulsive innuendo of the final line is that the pig-woman ingests the filth of her own creation. This includes her own excrement, a greater symbol of disorder even than filth or mud – she is this disorder through and through.Footnote ³⁷

Filth here stands not only for consummate disorder, but also for a lack of comprehension of the other, reflecting two aspects of the opening word χωρίς. This dual association of filth with both disorder and otherness is also noted by Plato in the Parmenides:

Within part of a larger conversation about whether forms are properly distinct (χωρίς) from the objects which participate in them (from 129d), Socrates denies that hair, mud, dirt and the like have corresponding forms; instead, they are exactly what can be seen. In other words, grime and dirt are emblematic of the real-world, material existence to things, which sets one important challenge to the explanatory power of the theory of forms in this dialogue. It is notable that hair recurs alongside dirt both in Plato and Semonides.Footnote ³⁸ There is a material reality implied by dirt, grime and excrement, at once undeniable and distasteful (ἀτιμότατον, φαυλότατον), which cannot be reduced to a more general, abstract term. Where we might group these things under the general term ‘filth’ or the concept of ‘abjection’,Footnote ³⁹ Plato has no recourse to abstractions. Instead, as in Semonides, the list is used to contain what falls outside normal and normative systems of order: θρίξ, πηλός, ῥύπος are drawn into a list, understood in apposition to ἅ, bracketed by οἷον and a generalising et cetera (ἢ ἄλλο τι).

The otherness of the female types is also to be construed in terms of one another, further affirming the poem's association of variety with difference.Footnote ⁴⁰ Thematically, the first entry is contrasted with that of the horse-woman, who leaves another even to remove excrement from the house (58, 60 δούλι’ ἔργα καὶ δύην περιτρέπει … οὔτε κόπρον ἐξ οἴκου βάλοι) and washes herself repeatedly (63–4 λοῦται δὲ πάσης ἡμέρης ἄπο ῥύπον | δίς, ἄλλοτε τρίς, καὶ μύροις ἀλείφεται); hair is also a focus for both of these types (2 ταχύτριχος, 57 χαιτέεσσ’, 65–6 αἰεὶ δὲ χαίτην ἐκτενισμένην φορεῖ | βαθεῖαν, ἀνθέμοισιν ἐσκιασμένην). The specificity of these links suggests that interaction between the entries is intentional and meaningful, disorganised but not random. Further indications of this sort of pairing are found throughout the catalogue. Perhaps the clearest suggestion of pairing are the two non-animal elemental types, who are opposites in the sense that the one is physically and affectively inert (earth), the other animated and emotionally explosive (sea). The same entry is often subject to multiple pairs of opposition. For example, while the sow may be understood in opposition to the horse, the horse can also be linked to the ass: ‘As the poem unfolds, we may observe that this portrait of the hard and hardened she-ass and her hard-working offspring will serve as an effective contrast to the mare, delicate and long-haired (57 ἵππος ἁβρὴ χαιτέεσσ’), and to her daughter, the horse-woman, who avoids slavish labors and pain (58)’ (Fenno (Reference Fenno2005) 410). Similarly, earth and sea seem an obvious pair, yet the weasel-woman makes her bedmate seasick (54 ναυσίῃ διδοῖ); this is far and away the earliest use of the word ναυσίη ‘seasickness’, suggesting a live metaphor which recalls the description of the sea in a rage a few lines earlier (39–40 πολλάκις δὲ μαίνεται | βαρυκτύποισι κύμασιν φορεομένη).Footnote ⁴¹ The sea-woman is herself compared to a bitch in a simile (34), although there has already been a type drawn from this animal (12–20). Many other pairings are possible.Footnote ⁴² Some entries describe a multiplicity of mental states for individual types (11 ὀργὴν δ’ ἄλλοτ’ ἀλλοίην ἔχει, 27 ἡ δύ’ ἐν φρεσὶν νοεῖ), muddying the water in yet another way.

Pairing, most often through a contrast or polarity, is not however the only or even the dominant principle of order in the catalogue. Teresa Morgan identifies a distinction between ‘domestic (sow, bitch, ass, ferret, mare, bee) and wild (vixen, monkey)’ ((Reference Morgan2005) 75, cf. Marg (Reference Marg1938) 10), which gives us another pair, but also a set of six. Might it be important that these two wild animals, second and penultimate, bracket the rest in Semonides’ catalogue? If so, this would reinforce the special position of the first and final entries (sow, bee). However, perhaps only the final entry is distinct: Pat Easterling interestingly treats the bee-woman not as an animal type at all, but as the single example of an insect (Reference Easterling, Easterling and Knox1985, 113).Footnote ⁴³ Robin Osborne identifies a more gradual form of organisation, suggesting that the female types become more orderly, and increasingly sexualised, as the catalogue progresses (Reference Osborne and Hunter2005, 23). While these various suggestions are individually convincing, the intimation of multiple classes of order undercuts any one understanding of the link between entries.

The disorder of the coprophiliac sow-woman's entry is equivalent to the surfeit of conceivable relationships between entries in the catalogue: both express the otherness of the female types. Only two entries specifically refer to dirt, excrement and hair. The theme of filth is picked up elsewhere by other forms of confusion between the internal and external of the female types, especially sexual intercourse and the consumption of food.Footnote ⁴⁴ Few of the types are able to do work or produce anything external to themselves: only the bee and, although barely (44–5 μόγις … κἀπονήσατο), the ass; the focus instead is on sexual and alimentary appetites (24 ἔργων δὲ μοῦνον ἐσθίειν ἐπίσταται). As the sow-woman sees no division between interiority and exteriority in her cycle of excrement and reingestion, so the ass-woman receives both food and sex equally (48 ὁμῶς … ἐδέξατο): there is parity between the functions of this body's apertures. The husband's fantasy of knocking out his wife's teeth can also be understood in this light: it is an attempt to disrupt a point of access between his wife's body and the external world. It is also a misapplication of the Homeric model to the wrong animal: Iros threatens to knock out Odyssey-beggar's teeth ‘like those of a crop-destroying sow’ (συὸς ὣς ληιβοτείρης).Footnote ⁴⁵ The husband attempts to stop the yapping, but also to divide up, to render this compound elemental in new ways,Footnote ⁴⁶ to end its becoming-animal. This moment is marked by failure. As the speaker at once admits, this act of violence does not break the association of woman and dog, but only reinforces it: all too common a way in Archaic Greece to treat a dog.

Generation, heredity, inheritance (γένος, φῦλον)

The construction of female assemblages in Semonides’ poem functions in a variety of ways: the ἐκ used to describe it is both genealogical and material, as is clear from the expressions τὴν δὲ πλάσαντες γηίνην (21), ἐκ θαλάσσης (27) and ἐκ γαλῆς γένος (50) taken collectively. A similar confusion of substance and stock is found in the Hesiodic myth of races, e.g. Hes. Op. 176 γένος ἐστὶ σιδήρεον.Footnote ⁴⁷ Moreover, the notion of generation (γένος) at work in Semonides’ poem is ambiguous, in that it is used to refer both to animal species, as in the case of the weasel-woman (50 ἐκ γαλῆς γένος), and to progeny, as in the case of the bee-woman (87 τεκοῦσα καλὸν κὠνομάκλυτον γένος). In this way, the catalogue of types hijacks the tradition of Archaic genealogy, by turns replacing and conflating the idea of heredity with that of species. In the entry on the horse-woman, for example, we find both ideas at work at once: τὴν δ’ ἵππος ἐγείνατο (57).Footnote ⁴⁸ The horse gives birth to the horse-woman. Perhaps the sexual undertones of the poem (48–9, 53, 62, 75) are humorous in part because they suggest zoophilia. Moreover, the conceit of birth from an animal implies that the female types are biologically constituted in part as animals, so that female and animal parts are not always distinguished on a physiological level.

In some measure, these painstaking distinctions are informed by earlier texts. The same confusion of the elemental, biological and parturient is paralleled by Semonides’ best-known model, the description of the Maiden in Hesiod's Theogony (570–612). Although the close literary affiliation of Semonides’ poem with this passage has long been recognised, a number of details have been overlooked. First and foremost, the format of Semonides’ entries recalls one line in particular, which uses the feminine article (ἐκ τῆς) to connect the Maiden genealogically with all women: Hes. Th. 590 ἐκ τῆς γὰρ γένος ἐστὶ γυναικῶν θηλυτεράων.Footnote ⁴⁹ This line resembles the opening formula of the entries in Semonides’ catalogue in its use of the feminine article as a pronoun and of the preposition ἐκ, in its association of genealogical filiation with biological constitution, and in the straightforwardly sexist content.Footnote ⁵⁰

Second, if the Maiden is a model for the Semonidean catalogue as a whole, she is also specifically a model for the woman made of earth. The degree to which this is the case has not been fully elucidated. In the Theogony, the Maiden is fabricated by Zeus (Hes. Th. 513–14 Διὸς πλαστὴν … γυναῖκα, παρθένον) and moulded from earth by Hephaistos (571–2 γαίης γὰρ σύμπλασσε περικλυτὸς Ἀμφιγυήεις | παρθένῳ αἰδοίῃ ἴκελον Κρονίδεω διὰ βουλάς, cf. Op. 61, 70). Not only is Semonides’ earth-woman constructed using the same root (21 τὴν δὲ πλάσαντες … Ὀλύμπιοι),Footnote ⁵¹ but a recollection of the Hesiodic passage also explains the group designation Ὀλύμπιοι (Zeus plus Hephaistos), where Zeus alone is held to account for these women everywhere else in Semonides’ poem (θεός in lines 1, 7, 25, घεύς in 72, 93, 94, 96, 115). Finally, in Hesiod, Prometheus’ gift of fire to man is repaid by the gift of a woman made from earth (Th. 570–1 αὐτίκα δ᾿ ἀντὶ πυρὸς τεῦξεν κακὸν ἀνθρώποισι· | γαίης γὰρ σύμπλασσε κτλ.), and this too seems to be recalled by Semonides. Here the gift in place of fire is a lame woman: τὴν δὲ πλάσαντες γηίνην Ὀλύμπιοι | ἔδωκαν ἀνδρὶ πηρόν (21–2). This woman is lame in the sense that she is impassive – so impassive that she does not draw near to the fire: κοὐδ’ ἢν κακὸν χειμῶνα ποιήσῃ θεός, | ῥιγῶσα δίφρον ἆσσον ἕλκεται πυρός (25–6).Footnote ⁵² Furthermore, fire (πῦρ) is repeatedly and exclusively found in the genitive in Hesiod's account of Prometheus’ deception (Th. 563, 566, 569, 570), so that Semonides’ πηρόν may specifically recall Hesiod's πυρός.

The idea of human composition from earth and water, which was widespread in the Archaic period,Footnote ⁵³ is exploited by Semonides for the idea of hybridity which it allows. Nor is this idea exclusively adopted from the Theogony: Semonides’ second elemental woman, the woman made from the sea (27 τὴν δ’ ἐκ θαλάσσης), provides a comparable tongue-in-cheek retooling of a specific passage from Homer. The sea-woman recalls Patroclus’ slur regarding Achilles’ birth, when he is said to have been born not of Peleus and Thetis, but of grey sea and sheer rock:

In contrast to our two other instances of birth by water in Homer, the reference here is not to water itself (ὕδωρ, Il. 7.99 cited in n. 53 above) nor to Oceanus (Ὠκεανός, Il. 14.246 Ὠκεανοῦ, ὅς περ γένεσις πάντεσσι τέτυκται), but to the sea (θάλασσα) in particular.Footnote ⁵⁴ The interpretative force of this revisionist Achillean genealogy is remarkably similar to the one found in the opening words of Semonides’ catalogue: birth by sea and rocks explains Achilles’ disposition or mind (νόος), as do the lineages of the Semonidean types (1 νόον).Footnote ⁵⁵ Patroclus claims that Achilles’ birth from water has an impact on his character diametrically opposed to that which it has on Semonides’ sea-woman, who is not obdurate but supremely lively – an inversion of metaphor to which we may compare Semonides’ contrastive reuse of the Hesiodic slur against women as drones in the Theogony (Janko (Reference Janko1982) 96–8).

Semonides’ models for the idea of animal generation are equally varied. One is probably generic: the poem appears to draw on the intermingling of human and animal worlds in fable (Aesop 140 Perry, cf. Lloyd-Jones (Reference Lloyd-Jones1975) 21; Brown (Reference Brown and Gerber1997) 73 n. 16) and ainos (Archil. fr. 177). The she-fox, who is experienced in everything (8 πάντων ἴδριν), may be a riff on Archilochus (fr. 201 πόλλ’ οἶδ’ ἀλώπηξ, ἀλλ’ ἐχῖνος ἓν μέγα), although there is no precise verbal link (Marg (Reference Marg1938) 10; Gerber (Reference Gerber1970) 58; Pellizer and Tedeschi (Reference Pellizer and Tedeschi1990) 121). The fox is a regular in fable, and the reference may be to the whole generic portrait of the animal. Other animal types find justification as allusions to earlier poetry. For example, the she-bitch recalls Helen's speech to Hector at Il. 6.342–58 (344 ἐμεῖο κυνός, 356 εἵνεκ’ ἐμεῖο κυνός). One indication that Semonides may be thinking of his passage in particular is found in the hapax αὐτομήτορα (12). If this refers to autogenesis,Footnote ⁵⁶ it would echo Helen's wish to have been carried away at birth (345 ὅτε με πρῶτον τέκε μήτηρ κτλ.).Footnote ⁵⁷ Of course, the comparison of women to dogs also has broader currency in the Archaic world (Archil. fr. 186a.41; Semon. fr. 7.34–6). Indeed, Semonides may also allude to Skylla, an ‘unpreventable disaster’ (ἄπρηκτον ἀνίην, Od. 12.223), who is reduced here to an ‘unpreventable yelp’ (ἄπρηκτον αὐονήν).Footnote ⁵⁸ In addition to generic and specific allusions, the Homeric simile provides a third important model for Semonides.Footnote ⁵⁹ The description of the she-ass, for example, may draw from the simile at Il. 11.558–62 (Gerber (Reference Gerber1970) 60). Similar points could be made for the types fashioned out of weasel, mare and monkey.Footnote ⁶⁰ Semonides’ poem uses a plethora of models for the idea that humans can take on animal dimensions. This positions the catalogue of types within the larger history of such interactions: Semondies’ catalogue collects specimens of human–animal interaction from throughout the Archaic literary corpus.

These many and various ideas about generation are given over to Semonides ready-made. The Maiden and others are gifted by Zeus to mankind (21–2 Ὀλύμπιοι | ἔδωκαν, 72 ὤπασεν), even as the woman-animal-elemental combinations are inherited by Semonides and his audience as poetic tradition. This makes the catalogue into a list of gifts, recalling the custom of gifting women in Archaic networks of exchange, and the presence of women in ancient lists of gifts. For example, when Odysseus in the guise of Epiretus tells Laertes of the gifts he imagines having given to himself, the four women he includes provide a sort of climax:Footnote ⁶¹

The women are marked out as distinct (χωρίς) from the other gifts because of their superior worth, valuable in part for their having been individually (αὐτός) selected; however, they are no different from the other items in the list in being possessions that can be traded.Footnote ⁶² In a much more elaborate list of items, which Agamemnon promises to Achilles in an attempt to entice him to return to battle (Il. 9.120–57 = Il. 9.264–99 ~ Il. 19.243–8), we find tripods, gold and other material items, horses, a variety of women,Footnote ⁶³ and even whole cities – a grand list in which the value of the items is steadily amplified as part of a rhetorical strategy meant to showcase Agamemnon's generosity.Footnote ⁶⁴ Just as whole cities can be reduced to mere entries within a list, so too can living people be objectified, treated as objects or items in an enumeration.Footnote ⁶⁵

Mankind inherits the varieties of woman as gifts from Zeus, a note on which the catalogue ends:

Semonides’ φῦλα recalls the periphrasis φῦλα γυναικῶν, which appears at three other key locations in Archaic poetry:Footnote ⁶⁶ it is found in Hesiod's description of the Maiden (Th. 591 τῆς γὰρ ὀλοίιόν ἐστι γένος καὶ φῦλα γυναικῶν),Footnote ⁶⁷ in Agamemnon's extravagant list of gifts (Il. 9.130 αἳ κάλλει ἐνίκων φῦλα γυναικῶν = Il. 9.272),Footnote ⁶⁸ and in the opening line of the Hesiodic Catalogue of Women (fr. 1.1 νῦν δὲ γυναικῶν φῦλον ἀείσατε).Footnote ⁶⁹ The demonstrative ταῦτα applies this conceit to the members of Semonides’ catalogue: nine of these items are examples of the tribes or species (φῦλα) of woman, where ἄλλα identifies the types other than the bee (Lloyd-Jones (Reference Lloyd-Jones1975) 87; Schear (Reference Schear1984) 48). These worse types remain among men (παρ’ ἀδράσιν μένει); these gifts are given to mankind by Zeus, but unlike other ancient gifts, they cannot be traded on or passed off. They also remain in the sense that these species of hybrid pre-exist Semonides’ catalogue: they are given over from previous literary tradition, and in Semonides’ catalogue they now remain. The plural φῦλα also recalls the many conceptions of generation which underpin the female types. The couplet is not merely a bridge to the second half of the poem; its powerfully ambiguous language displays with kaleidoscopic variety the ideas about hybridity deployed throughout the catalogue.

Conclusion: categorical abuse

Lists are used in a variety of ways to express misogynistic ideas in ancient literature. They can devalue by means of repetition, as in Zeus’ list of conquests in the Iliad (14.313–28), where the accumulation of the names of lovers diminishes their individual importance.Footnote ⁷⁰ The listing of negative characteristics for greater emphasis is also common, as in Lucretius’ catalogue of Greek euphemisms used by lovers to mask the defects of the beloved (DRN 4.1160–9). Semonides’ catalogue shares analogues with both these modes of abuse. It also operates in a third way: this list emphasises variation and difference within and between entries, making it particularly useful for describing hybrids. The catalogue's architecture places emphasis on the individual unit or entry, and this limited organisation of information creates the potential for disorder between the interstices. Distinctions are emphasised at one level, so that they fall apart at another.

The intersection of misogyny, list and hybrid extends far beyond the Female Types. In what may be a recollection of Semonides’ poem,Footnote ⁷¹ Ovid ends the first book of the Ars amatoria with a list of ways the lover should adapt himself in his pursuit of a woman, as a hunter might change tactics in his pursuit of different animals, because, he says, ‘the hearts of women are various’ (Ars am. 1.755–6 sunt diversa puellis | pectora). These connections also reappear without reference to Semonides, as in Anaxilas fr. 22. This fragment from the Middle Comedy lists associations between hetaera, wild animals and monsters. Anaxilas’ catalogue, like that of Semonides, begins with a statement about its own operation, here framed as a rhetorical question (fr. 22.1–2): ὅστις ἀνθρώπων ἑταίραν ἠγάπησε πώποτε, | οὗ γένος τίς ἂν δύναιτο παρανομώτερον φράσαι; ‘Who, among those who have ever loved a prostitute, could name a more disreputable race?’ παρανομώτερον is ambiguous; it means both ‘lawless’ and more generally ‘transgressive’ (Montanari (Reference Montanari, Goh and Schroeder2015) s.v. παράνομος), in this case with reference to the dissolution of borders between prostitute, animal and monster. As in Semonides, we find a pun on γένος (fr. 22.2, 5, 6), which sets up the comparison of courtesans to monsters and wild beasts (fr. 22.31 θηρί’). Many of Anaxilas’ monsters are mythological hybrids (Χίμαιρα, Σφίγξ), and there is direct reference to the idea of a compound in the pun δράκαιν’ ἄμεικτος (fr. 22.3). Anaxilas’ catalogue exploits the potential of the list to suggest multiplicity and hybridity in a remarkably similar way to Semonides, although nothing in the language suggests direct interaction between the two texts.

The pay-off of reading Semonides in terms of Deleuze and Guattari's becoming-animal is that this opens up ideas about the uses of catalogic literature more generally in the ancient world. Catalogues are able to contain what is other, and they tend to emphasise heterogeneity in whatever form this comes. Lists are therefore used widely for parody, poking fun of what is different: items are held at a distance, unintegrated, various, disorderly. A heightened awareness of Semonides’ careful use of the list also reveals the importance of its conceptual frame. The opening line associates variety with otherness, and connects these with the catalogue's structure and contents. The final couplet refers to the complex of ideas about generation found in this list, and hints at Semonides’ awareness of his own recycling of earlier literary material relating to hybridity. The Female Types is allusive and subtle; it exploits every opportunity of language and register to engender the species of ambiguity detailed in its catalogue.