The focus of this note is the simile attached to Menelaus’ wound in Iliad 4 and its Virgilian transformation in Aeneid 12. My goal is to flesh out and specify the sense of the Homeric simile; as the parentheses in my title suggest, I call upon Virgil chiefly as a fellow-interpreter. Since an important part of my argument is that the simile only takes on its full significance when considered in its narrative context, I begin by setting the scene.

In Iliad 3 a truce is struck so that Menelaus and Paris can fight a duel—strangely late in the game, as it seems—to decide who will have Helen and so to put an end to the war. The duel is inconclusive: Menelaus is on the verge of winning when Aphrodite intervenes, snatches up her favourite, and carries him off to his bedroom. The goddess then goes to fetch Helen to join him, and Helen, though reluctant, perforce complies. Back in the bedroom, Helen upbraids Paris, who responds by urging her to come to bed (Il. 3.442–6):

Paris’ reference to the ‘first time’ makes it clear that this scene, like many others in this epic of intensity, serves figuratively to incorporate material that lies beyond the poem's austerely delimited temporal scope—in this case, the ‘rape of Helen’ by Paris as engineered by Aphrodite and consummated en route from Lacedaemon to Troy.Footnote ¹ While Paris and Helen are enjoying themselves in the bedroom, Helen's cuckolded husband is wandering haplessly around looking for his missing opponent.

In Iliad 4, after some testy conversation on Olympus, Athena intervenes and persuades the Trojan Pandarus to shoot an arrow at Menelaus, thereby breaking the truce and restarting the war; this violation is another return to origins, standing in for the crime that was the original casus belli (and re-incurring Trojan guilt).Footnote ² Though Athena takes care to protect Menelaus by diverting the arrow toward his sword belt, the arrow none the less pierces multiple layers of protection and grazes the skin beneath. Even though the wound is only a scratch, blood trickles down Menelaus’ legs, and this is the occasion for the memorable simile (4.141–7):

As many readers have sensed,Footnote ³ what Menelaus undergoes in this scene is the figurative equivalent of castration.Footnote ⁴ The arrow slices downward through sword belt, corselet and the guard beneath (μίτρης, 4.137; at 4.187 Menelaus also mentions a ζῶμα, a synonym for ζώνη) and, though the location of the scratch is not specified, the implication is that the arrow reaches those most carefully protected parts in the vicinity of the lower abdomen. The effect of this figurative castration, moreover, is to transform Menelaus into a woman. Given that in Homeric poetry, as in the conventions of archaic vase-painting, it is women who are conventionally white-skinned, the ivory pallor the simile lends Menelaus’ legs is itself highly suggestive.Footnote ⁵ This feminine colour spills over into the lingering description, an enjambed elaboration, of the hero's ‘shapely’ thighs and ‘lovely’ ankles; the last phrase is especially astonishing given that ‘lovely-ankled’ (καλλίσφυρος) is an epithet exclusively applied to women.Footnote ⁶

Like the sexual encounter of Paris and Helen at the end of the previous book, the simile returns to omitted origins by associating the immediate wound Menelaus suffers at the hands of Pandarus with the original ‘wound’ he suffered at the hands of Paris, the one that triggered the war. For the wounded Menelaus is not just generically feminine; he is assimilated to one woman in particular. Read in isolation, the precious object that ‘lies in the chamber, and many horsemen desire to carry it off’ (κεῖται δ᾽ ἐν θαλάμῳ, πολέες τέ μιν ἠρήσαντο | ἱππῆες φορέειν) could be a woman reclining in a bedroom, an object of desire to many men—and in this epic, the woman every man longs to possess is Helen.Footnote ⁷ This association is reinforced by narrative contiguity: the last time the word θάλαμος appeared it denoted the ‘perfumed chamber’ (3.382) in which Aphrodite (re)united Paris and Helen after the interrupted duel.

Here is one of those places in an ancient text where the figurative logic maps with startling precision onto psychoanalytic categories, not because those categories capture some unalterable underlying truth, but because both discourses, ancient and modern, operate with the same network of associations: here, woman = phallus, the badge of virility.Footnote ⁸ Moreover, it is not just that this passage can be shown to ‘fit’ the theory; the psychoanalytic approach brings its implicit argument into sharper focus. If the possession of a woman confirms a man's virility, the loss of a woman entails castration. So much is already suggested by the sequence of events: Paris has sex with Helen, Pandarus (a Paris-substitute) wounds Menelaus in the upper thigh. The simile reiterates this association and renders it explicit by identifying the wound with the lost woman. Yet, at the same time that it reveals this injury to Menelaus, the simile disavows it by literally fetishizing the wound: transforming it into a precious object, a thing to be admired and desired, and thereby figuratively restoring to the king the treasure he has figuratively and actually lost.

The gender distress registered in this simile would be subsequently recognized and resolved by Virgil. The final book of the Aeneid replays the duel of Iliad 3, now with Turnus and Aeneas as the contestants, rivals for the hand of the Italian princess Lavinia. As scholars have long recognized, this rivalry is also framed as an intertextual competition over who is to play which role. More than once in the course of the epic Aeneas has been identified as a second Paris, another effeminate wife-stealer (Aen. 4.215, 7.321, 7.363), and yet as the destined, divinely appointed husband of Lavinia he has a better claim than Turnus to the ‘Menelaus’ role. (The two are also vying for the role of ‘second Achilles’, but that complication does not bear on the present argument.) Virgil lets this ambiguity play itself out on the battlefield. Once again the truce is broken, in this case before the duel even gets under way, and, while vainly trying to restore the peace, Aeneas is struck by an arrow, evidently somewhere in his leg because he limps off the field (and later has some trouble running), though the location of the wound is never specified.Footnote ⁹ While Aeneas gets the arrow wound, other details of the Homeric scene gravitate toward Turnus: in their climactic final confrontation, the spear of Aeneas penetrates multiple layers of protection (the breastplate and edge of the ‘sevenfold shield’, 12.925) before driving through Turnus’ thigh (12.926). The castrative figuration is thus appropriately transferred from the destined husband to his doomed challenger.

Virgil also finds a use for the Homeric simile, though not in connection with a hero's wound. When Turnus declares his intention of calling for a truce and a decisive duel, Lavinia's mother Amata begs him in the most impassioned terms not to return to battle. Before supplying Turnus’ response, the epic deviates into a description of Lavinia's reaction—she blushes (12.64–9):

This famous passage, which provides our only glimpse into Lavinia's opaque subjectivity, has been amply discussed.Footnote ¹⁰ Here all I want to observe, since this dimension of the passage has gone unremarked, is how thoroughly the Homeric simile is domesticated by this Virgilian reapplication. Decoupled from the thigh wound that Turnus suffers much later in the book, and reattached to the figurative ‘wound’ of desire (or shame) by which Lavinia is suddenly enflamed, the simile seems to shed all castrative implications. Moreover, though the language is disturbingly violent (cf. sanguineo … uiolauerit, 67) and the fire burns shockingly hot, it is still the case that what Lavinia suffers here is nothing other than the figurative equivalent of a woman's proper destiny; what she loses is what she is meant to lose.Footnote ¹¹ The restoration of normative gender goes hand in hand with the normalization of the figure. It is not just that Virgil associates Lavinia with appropriately ‘feminine’ objects (an ivory ornament, flowers). He has eliminated the metaphysical strain in the original figure, with its startling conjunction of bloody leg and beautiful artefact, by supplying the Homeric vehicle, the ivory ‘cheekpiece’, with an ideally appropriate tenor: a girl's ‘cheeks’ (genas, 65).Footnote ¹² The relation is the more exact in that the word rendered as ‘cheekpiece’ is actually just a word for ‘cheek’ (παρήϊον, Il. 4.142).Footnote ¹³ The gap between vehicle and tenor could hardly be narrower.

But it would be wrong to suggest that Virgil simply erases the implications of the Homeric simile. Enflamed all the more by Lavinia's blush, Turnus proceeds to schedule the truce and the ensuing duel for the very next day, cum primum crastina caelo | puniceis inuecta rotis Aurora rubebit (Aen. 12.76–7), a beautiful periphrasis coloured by the same red that flushes Lavinia's cheeks (rubor, 66). The ‘blush’ of dawn is a conventional figure, but, given the notorious destiny of Aurora's much-abused husband, the decrepit Tithonus, it is also possible that (wittingly or not) Turnus is channelling anxieties like those associated with the wound of Menelaus. Lavinia's blush presents Turnus both with an image of contagious desire and with a displaced representation of the wound he is destined to suffer at the hands of Aeneas.

This last suggestion may seem far-fetched, but it receives some support from Ovid's handling of this same material in a bravura passage of Amores 2.5. The lover has caught his girlfriend making out with another man at a party, when she thought he was safely asleep; in response to his loud accusations, she blushes: conscia purpureus uenit in ora pudor (Am. 2.5.34). This blush triggers an unprecedentedFootnote ¹⁴ array of five similes including Homer's ivory artefact, Virgil's blended lilies and roses, and Lavinia herself, or a girl very like Lavinia. But it is a simile featuring the dawn-goddess Aurora that leads off the set (2.5.35–40):

As J.C. McKeown observes, in this context of infidelity, Ovid's reference to the ‘wife of Tithonus’ cannot but evoke the inconstancy of Aurora and the decrepitude of Tithonus, the latter forming a striking contrast to the nouus sponsus of the second simile, a bridegroom who is both ‘new’ and ‘young’.Footnote ¹⁵ But Tithonus is not the only wronged husband in this passage. The reference to ivory dyed by a ‘Maeonian woman’, a detail drawn directly from the Homeric passage (Μῃονίς, Il. 4.142, likewise heading its line), brings the cuckolded Menelaus into view. That Tithonus and Menelaus are filed together in the lover's imagination is indicated by the purpose assigned to the ivory's dyeing, here not decorative but preservative, ne longis possit flauescere ab annis (39). Elsewhere in the Amores Ovid uses the expression ab annis just once, in an address to Aurora and with reference to Tithonus: cur ego plectar amans si uir tibi marcet ab annis? (1.13.39). At the same time, the rare verb flauescere—derived from a colour normally associated with pleasant things such as gold, honey and blond hair—conjures up the image of Aurora, invoked as recently as the end of the previous poem as the prototype of the attractive blond (seu flauent, placuit croceis Aurora capillis, 2.4.43). Thus the dysfunctional couple featured in the first of Ovid's ‘blush’ similes also hovers over the last of the five. That the lover identifies with the emasculated cuckolds seems clear from the pathetic sequel, in which he is reduced to begging his girlfriend, as if on his knees, to give him kisses no worse than those she bestowed on the ‘other man’ (supplex ultroque rogaui | oscula ne nobis deteriora daret, 2.5.49–50). In this condensation, it is the guilty blush itself that delivers the wound and generates the explosion of similes that simultaneously obscures and communicates its symbolic effect.

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Each of the similes discussed above responds obliquely to the narrative context within which it arises; in every case, the vehicle carries something more than its official freight. The Homeric simile, a rhetorical ornament dedicated to an ornamental artefact, at once displays and covers over what the narrative has shown Menelaus to be missing. The Virgilian and Ovidian simile-clusters vividly depict a blush flooding a girl's cheeks while simultaneously conveying, with the help of the Homeric intertext, the plight of her emasculated beholder. For my purposes here, it is important that Virgil and Ovid only achieve this complex effect with Homer's help. If Latinists are inclined to read Homer with a certain freedom, it may be because the poets we spend our time reading have already shown us the way.