Abstract
Chapter 7 analyzes poems in the elegiac canon that feature the figure of Isis and pushes further the conclusions of the preceding chapters on Orientalist rhetoric and colonial discourse as fashioning the Roman imperial subject. In so doing, we again examine where the text displays ambivalence and nuance in such identity formation. The figure of Isis in elegy returns the focus to Egypt (as in Chap. 2)—and away from Greece—as the culture employed by Rome for the purpose of binary self-definition. The poems considered here include Tibullus 1.3, Propertius 2.28 and 2.33, and Ovid Am. 2.13. All these poems display various aspects of the Egyptian goddess Isis and the ambivalent treatment of her status as a foreign ‘Other.’ The association of the domina with Isis as a healing goddess and Egyptian divinity, particularly during moments of illness and ritual separation (Tib. 1.3, Prop. 2.28 and 2.33, and Ov. Am. 2.13), provides a counterpoint to the amator’s cultural identity as Roman (for all his rejection of its norms). However, the frequent and long-standing identification of Isis with the Graeco-Roman mythological figure of Io (Prop. 2.28, 2.33) undermines the hard and fast distinction between Rome and Egypt that Orientalizing rhetoric seeks to maintain. Indeed, Io’s wandering the Mediterranean basin before arriving at the banks of the Nile, where she is transformed back into human form and subsequently identified with Isis, metaphorically figures a model of cultural circulation (similar to that argued by Wallace-Hadrill 2008) that belies a concept of Roman identity in stark opposition to Egyptian.
The whole world worships this single godhead under a variety of shapes and liturgies and titles. In one land the Phrygians, first-born of men, hail me as the Pessinuntian mother of the gods; elsewhere the native dwellers of Attica call me Cecropian Minerva; in other climes the wave-tossed Cypriots name me Paphian Venus; the Cretan archers, Dictynna Diana; the trilingual Sicilians, Ortygian Proserpina; the Eleusinians, the ancient goddess Ceres; some call me Juno, others Bellona, others Hecate, and others still Rhamnusia. But the peoples on whom the rising sun-god shines with his first rays—eastern and western Ethiopians, and the Egyptians who flourish with their time-honoured learning—worship me with the liturgy that is my own, and call me by my true name, which is queen Isis.
—Apuleius, The Golden Ass (220–22, trans. Walsh)
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Notes
- 1.
She is often identified thus in the elegiac poems; of course, she is the goddess of many names and, at various times in various places, identified syncretically with almost all the major female deities of the Graeco-Roman pantheon: Hera/Juno, Aphrodite/Venus, Demeter/Ceres, Artemis/Diana, etc. See Diod. Sic. 1.25.1–2; the chapter “The One Whose Names Cannot Be Numbered” in Witt (1971, 111–29); Turcan (1996, 75–129); Bricault (2013, 459–66).
- 2.
See Rowlandson (1998, 37–39) for primary sources, for example, temple walls, such as the one at Dendera, featuring an image of the queen with a crown similar to that of Hathor/Isis, as well as a silver tetradrachm with ledger reading “Queen Kleopatra, the new goddess.” See too Pomeroy (1984, 39); Wyke (2002, 202–7); Takács (2011, 78–95); Kleiner (2005, 27, 87, 100); Jones (2012, 166–68); Manolaraki (2012, 191–92).
- 3.
On the variegated background of Isis worshippers (i.e. by no means exclusively merchants, slaves, etc.), see Bricault (2013, 321–48); Malaise (1984, 1615–91); see too Takács (1995, 6–7), who concludes from the epigraphic and literary sources that followers of Isis were not generally citizens of Rome and came from all levels of society. Takács (2011, 83–84) discusses the first inscriptions giving evidence of Isis in Rome, claiming that the prosperous and well-connected families of freedmen status here belie previous scholarly claims about the “demimonde” as the demographic most drawn to the Egyptian goddess. Regardless, given the slave-trading business of these freedmen, that courtesans numbered among the first adherents of Isis worship in Rome seems quite likely. Moreover, the inscriptions indicate those who could afford such memorialization, and they may well have been just a small fraction of worshippers. Turcan (1996, 83) points out that “slaves purchased on the island [Delos] for or by Romans were able to import their beliefs and gods into Italy. Delian epigraphy gives us precise information about those Isiac worshippers of slave status who belonged to Romans.” Earlier views include Ferguson (1970, 25), who uses the term “demimonde,” Lafaye (1884), who introduced it, and Pomeroy (1995, 22), who reinforces this view with the observation that “Isis herself was said to have been a prostitute in Tyre for ten years…Her temples were located near brothels and marketplaces, and they had a reputation for being meeting places for prostitutes.” Orlin (2010, 206) argues for the popularity of Isis with the lower classes in Rome, citing the eight freedmen names out of thirteen in the inscription that first mentions worship of the goddess in the city; cf. Versluys (2002, 459). For a full bibliography, see Swetnam-Burland (2015, 4, n. 13).
- 4.
- 5.
CIL X.178 for the Puteoli inscription, 102 BCE, as the first evidence relating to Isis in Italy; cf. Vidman (1970, 97); Orlin (2008, 236, n. 9); Heyob (1975, 12); Meyboom (1995,85, n. 7). Most scholars conclude that Delos, as a major trading site, introduced Italian merchants to the cults of Isis and Sarapis; Meyboom (1995, 86, n. 34), however, traces out a direct route between Alexandria and Puteoli; see too Turcan (1996, 83 and n. 4) above.
- 6.
Versluys 2004, 446.
- 7.
- 8.
Dio Cass. 42.26; Takács (1995, 65–57).
- 9.
- 10.
Dio Cass. 47.16; Takács (1995, 69).
- 11.
Swetnam-Burland (2005, 113–19, 2015, 18–64) discusses the distinction between ‘Egyptianizing’ as referring to the Roman imitation of an Egyptian aesthetic, and the actual artefacts imported from Egypt. The dichotomy, as she argues, obscures the meaning that Egyptian or Egyptian-themed works have in their Roman context. The term aegyptiaca, “things related to Egypt,” avoids this issue but is also debated: cf. Versluys (2010, 15–16). See Carettoni (1983, 67–85) and Orlin (2008, 239) on Augustus’s incorporation of Egyptian elements into the decoration of his own domicile.
- 12.
The pomerium strictly referred to the original boundary of the city, conceived as the space between the furrow ploughed around the site and the walls erected within that line. Varro Ling. 5.143 provides the etymology of “behind the wall,” post murum, for the pomerium, a derivation seen as spurious. See too Liv. 1.44.4–5; Tac. Ann. 12.24; Richardson (1992, 293–96); Andreussi (1999); Liou-Gille (1993).
- 13.
Dio Cass. 53.2.4; as Orlin (2002, 1–16, 2008, 241) notes, Octavian’s banning of Egyptian rites within the pomerium was unprecedented, since cults of foreign origin, such as those of Castor and Pollux, Venus Erycina, and the Magna Mater, as well as Apollo, all had temples within that boundary. The distinction, however, was that these cults of foreign origin had been incorporated into the Roman religious system, whereas the cults of Isis and Sarapis had not. (Takács 1995, 76–77 and 2011, 85) claims that Augustus’s actions were political, wishing to relocate the procession route of the cult away from public streets to private areas.
- 14.
Dio. Cass. 54.6.6; Takács (1995, 76–77).
- 15.
Orlin (2008, 231–53) argues that Augustus’s actual attitude toward Egypt and Egyptian religion, signified in his willingness to rebuild shrines to Isis, was more accepting than the propaganda campaign of the triumviral period, as also later reflected in Vergil, Propertius, and Horace, would imply. That said, one of the desired effects of such propaganda—to shore up ‘Romanness’ through the binary identity-formation of Orientalizing and ‘us-them’ tropes—squares precisely with what Orlin argues as the intent of demarcating worship of Roman gods, and those accepted within the Roman religious system (e.g. Apollo), on one side of the pomerium, and Egyptian gods on the other (2008, 244). In this regard, such Orientalizing rhetoric, of a piece with strategic state decisions regarding non-Roman religion, arguably does reflect patronal pressures, for all that it also derives from a deeper substrate (cf. Wyke 2002, 209–21). See Zanker (1988, 57–64) for visual propaganda in the material arts. On Prop. 3.11, see Chap. 5, pp. 171–75; see Wyke (2002, 195–243) on “Augustan Cleopatras,” including Propertius’s representations; for an overview of Roman literary texts treating Egypt, see Versluys (2002, 422–34).
- 16.
- 17.
Stephens (2003, 8–9). As an example, Stephens refers to Callimachus’s identification of Argos as the “land of cow-born Danaus” in the opening of his poem on Berenice’s victory at the Nemean games. “Cow-born” refers to Io who, in bovine form, migrates to Egypt and gives birth to Epaphus, the Egyptian Apis. Since Danaus as a descendant of Io returns to Greece and spawns the Danaans, the epithet “cow-born” resonates in both the Greek and the Egyptian discursive fields.
- 18.
On Isis as directly compared to, or identified with, Io, see Hdt. 2.41.2; Callim. Epigr. 58. See too n. 21 below.
- 19.
Gruen (2006, 298–300).
- 20.
The authorship of Prometheus Bound has been disputed: Euphorion may have composed the play and produced it under Aeschylus’s name. See OCD s.v. Aeschylus.
- 21.
- 22.
Ov. Met. 1.582–751.
- 23.
- 24.
- 25.
The date of the temple’s original construction is debated, with some scholars placing it in the second century BCE and others arguing for an Augustan era date. The earthquake of 62 CE left the first building in ruins and necessitated an entire reconstruction. See Swetnam-Burland (2015, 106 and n. 6) for bibliography.
- 26.
- 27.
Stephens (2003, 6, 8).
- 28.
Ov. Ars am. 3.635; Ov. Fast. 5.619; Ov. Pont. 1.1.38; Mart. 10.48; Stat. Theb. 1.254. Cf. Ov. Her. 14.86 and see n. 17 above. As Bricault (2020, 160–61) notes, the epithet Pharia, the adjectival form referring to the adjacent island of Pharos, designates Alexandria by metonymy and possibly all of Egypt.
- 29.
Unless otherwise noted, all my citations of Tibullus are from Maltby (2002); all citations of Propertius are from Barber’s (1960) Oxford Classical Text; for Ovid, I use E. J. Kenney’s [1961] 1994 Oxford Classical Text, reprinted in 1995, with corrections. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted.
- 30.
- 31.
Cf. Liv. 4.25–30 on the first temple to Apollo in Rome in response to a plague. The temple to Apollo Medicus, originally built in 431 BCE, was rebuilt by Gaius Sosius after his victory in Judea in 34 BCE. Takács (2011, 87–88) suggests that Octavian Augustus’s temple to Apollo Palatine, adjoining the residence of the princeps, was a response to Sosius’s, the victor at Actium not wishing to be upstaged by a supporter of Marc Antony. For discussion of the primary sources on Isis as a healing goddess, see Alvar (2008, 318–36).
- 32.
Cf. Prop. 2.33, 4.5.34; Ov. Am. 1.8.73–74.
- 33.
See Chap. 2 on the assimilation of Osiris into a Graeco-Roman framework. As Tibullus makes clear in 1.7, Messalla effects such cohabitation of Egyptian and Roman gods by including an Osirian idol among his ancestral penates. Takács (1995, 79) comments that Osiris, a god of the underworld, but also associated with fertility, has a natural affinity with the penates as guardian spirits worshipped together with the hearth goddess Vesta and the familial lares connected with the dead.
- 34.
Despite the banning of rites celebrating Isis within the pomerium by Octavian Augustus in 28 BCE, worship of the goddess continued in Rome, as suggested by his simultaneous commitment to rebuild her sanctuaries outside that boundary. Versluys (2004, 421–48), contrary to previous scholarly consensus, concludes that there was no public temple to Isis on the Capitoline, within the pomerium, in the late republic, so that Octavian’s ban related to private, small-scale altars and shrines as well as possibly priests.
- 35.
- 36.
See n. 5 above, on Delos as the site from which Isis was introduced to the Italian peninsula.
- 37.
Vasunia (2001, 116, 292)
- 38.
- 39.
On Tibullus’s assimilation of Greek cultural references and the poem’s dramatization of “the on-going Augustan project of absorbing Egypt into the Roman imperial matrix,” see also Keith (2014, 482).
- 40.
While such incorporation and assimilation happen here strictly on a poetic level, it does reflect the very “transformation of Isis and Sarapis from personal to Roman state gods” that unfolds over the course of the Augustan principate and the first century CE (Takács 1995, 18). Cf. Takács (2011, 79): “It was Augustus who permitted the integration of the worship of Isis and her consort Sarapis into the array of Roman cults.”
- 41.
Barber transposes lines 33–34 to just after the first couplet.
- 42.
On the notion of such religious competition between the gods for mortals’ attention, see Woolf (2014, 62–92), “Isis and the Evolution of Religions,” and p. 69 in particular. With the three goddesses, Juno, Minerva, and Venus, as potentially put out by Cynthia, we have not only rivalry between Egyptian and Roman religion, but also an allusion to the judgement of Paris, a myth which highlights such competition within the Graeco-Roman pantheon.
- 43.
Note that, as discussed below, Isis was also identified with Juno/Hera (Witt 1971, 20, 38, 110, 121, 126, 128, 151, 253, 272), but this identification did not prevent a ‘propagandistic’ Orientalizing distinction between Roman and Egyptian gods, as apparent in Prop. 3.11.29–46 and Verg. 8.685–713, the shield of Aeneas. See n. 15 above.
- 44.
A view propagated during the fractious years of the second triumvirate and then poetically recalled in literature of the early principate. See n. 15 above.
- 45.
Witt (1971, 146); Stephens (2003, 21) observes: “…for Greeks newly imported into Egypt, the fact that many Egyptian divinities could already be imagined as virtually equivalent to Greek gods would have served to make the pantheon and other aspects of Egyptian religion progressively more familiar than they in fact were by authorizing a thought process that focused on similarities rather than differences.”
- 46.
Note that here Propertius follows the version of the myth that we have in Aeschylus’s Suppliant Maidens, which is also what he follows in 3.22, where it is Juno who changes Io out of anger, and not Jupiter who changes her in order to conceal Io from Juno’s rage.
- 47.
Fedeli (2005, 923): “Qui Properzio veste i panni del cittadino romano indignato per l’invasione dei culti orientali e le sue parole assumono i toni di una violenta polemica antiegiziana, che rinvia ai tempi, ancora vivi nella memoria, dello scontro fra la Roma di Ottaviano e l’Egitto di Antonio e Cleopatra.”
- 48.
Heyworth (2007, 260)
- 49.
On Isis identified with Hathor, see Witt (1971, 30). Diod. 1.11.4 suggests that Isis’s horns represent the waxing and waning moon.
- 50.
On Roman attitudes toward Egyptian worship of deities as animals, see Cic. Nat. D. 1.36; 3.16; Tusc. 5.27; Verg. Aen. 8.698; Lucr. 8.832; Juv. 15.1–13. Octavian’s comment while visiting Egypt after Actium illustrates well this Roman aversion to zoomorphized deities: “…he would not enter the presence of Apis, either, declaring that he was accustomed to worship gods, not cattle” (Dio Cass. 51.16–17, trans. Cary 1917). See Orlin (2008, 233–34) for further discussion. Cf. Strabo 17.1.40 on the various animals worshipped by different cities in Egypt. See Manolaraki (2012, 198–206) on Egyptian theriomorphism explored in Statius.
- 51.
The locus classicus for this hierarchy is Vernant (1988, 143–82).
- 52.
For primary poetic texts, see n. 15 above. On the reading of Antony’s will in the senate, see Suet. Aug. 17.2, Dio Cass. 50.3, 50.20.7, Plut. Ant. 58. On the spectrum of propagandistic media, including the material arts, see Zanker (1988, 33–77); Gurval (1995); Wyke (2002, 223); Takács (2011, 78–95).
- 53.
On the syncretic identifications of Isis with the major goddesses of the Graeco-Roman pantheon, see above n. 1.
- 54.
Such identification may well have extended further back to Io’s own divine origins, as Yalouris (1990, 663) suggests: “Io était probablement à l’origine une déesse, remplacée ensuite par Héra dont elle devint la prêtresse dans son sanctuaire d’Argos.” Indeed, the formulaic adjective often given to Hera, βοῦπιϲ, “cow-eyed” or “cow-visaged,” aligns her with both Io, her victim, and with horn-bearing Isis.
- 55.
See the epigraph to this chapter.
- 56.
Diod. Sic. 1.25.1–2; Witt (1971, 126 and 128–29): “It was as Queen of Heaven that Isis replaced Hera. Instead of the name Hera/Juno she generally preferred to be styled ‘Queen’….” See too Nagel (2017, 208–9) on the very first hymn of Isidoros, found in the Egyptian temple of Medinet Madi, and dated to the first century BCE, which also identifies Hera with Isis: “All mortals who live on the boundless earth, / Thracians, Greeks and all that are barbarians, / call your beautiful name, greatly honored among all, / each in his own language, each in his own land. / The Syrians call you Astarte, Artemis, Anaia, / and the Lycian tribes call you Leto, the lady, / the Thracians call you also Mother of the Gods, / and the Greeks (call you) Hera of the Great Throne / but the Egyptians call you ‘Thiouis,’ / because you alone are all other goddesses named by the peoples.” Cf. Gasparro (2007, 54); Moyer (2016, 209–44).
- 57.
Diod. Sic. 1.25.1–2: “For the same goddess is called by some Isis, by others Demeter, by others Thesmophorus, by others Selenê, by others Hera, while still others apply to her all these names” (trans. Oldfather 1933).
- 58.
The Roman imperialist impulse here derives from earlier Greek claims about Io: “And they [the Egyptians] say that…the origin of Isis is transferred by the Greeks to Argos in the myth which tells of that Io who was changed into a heifer” (Diod. Sic. 1.24.8, trans. Oldfather). Witt (1971, 248) comments that Ovid’s phrase “The Cow of Memphis” (Ars am. 3.393) “well conveys the Graeco-Roman assimilation of Io and Isis.” On the possibility of a fresco depicting Zeus (or Jupiter) and Io on the back wall of the Temple to Isis in Pompeii, Moorman (2007, 146) states: “the presence of Zeus on the focal spot of the rear wall would have enhanced Io’s prestige as the lover of the most important Olympian god. Their history connects ‘classical’ mythology with that of Egypt.”
- 59.
Yalouris (1990, 663): “Ces rapports permettent aujourd’hui de replacer au cours du IIe millénaire certains événements de Méditerranée Orientale, jusqu’ici obscurs, qui dénotent les incessantes migrations des peuples et la fusion de leurs cultures.” Cf. Manolaraki (2012, 199): “…Io–Isis, whose peregrination and transformation stands for cultural exchange with Egypt from Aeschylus onwards. From human to cow and cow to goddess, to quote Ovid (bos ex homine est, ex boue facta dea, Ov. Her. 14.86), Io–Isis embodies fluidity between myth and cult and Egypt, Greece, and Rome, as well as mutability between the past and present.”
- 60.
The Roman love elegists ‘published’ their works in ‘books,’ papyrus rolls in which scrupulous attention was paid to the sequence and aesthetic arrangement of poems within a single roll. See Heyworth (2012, 219–33) and the bibliography therein.
- 61.
“The walls of Aeaean Telegonus” (Aeaei moenia Telegoni) refer to Tusculum, a town founded by Telegonus, son of Odysseus and Circe (who inhabited the island of Aeaea); the “grove of the Trivian goddess” (nemus…Triuiae deae) refers to the cult of Diana Nemorensis at Nemi, close to the town of Aricia.
- 62.
As noted earlier, material remains indicate that worship of the goddess was already widespread in Campania and Latium by the mid- to late republic, but there is evidence, both epigraphic and otherwise, indicating Isiac activity throughout the Italian peninsula. Noteworthy here is the presence of either an Iseum or a Serapeum in three of the four towns that Cynthia is said to visit in 2.32 (Nemi Dianae, which also included a temple of Bubastis; Praeneste; and Tusculum), although these date to the first or second century CE. See Malaise (2004, 41–42). Despite the later dating, such building may well suggest much earlier Isiac activity, potentially supported as well by the presence of Nile mosaics at both Nemi and Praeneste, with the former dated to the middle of the first century BCE and the latter elaborate mosaic dated by most scholars to the end of the second century BCE (the dating of both, however, is not certain). See Versluys (2002, 288, n. 328, 456); Merrills (2017, 52). On the assimilation of Isis with the Roman goddess Fortuna and the fortuna of Praeneste in particular, see Bricault and Versluys (2014, 32). Meyboom (1995, 80) specifies that Isis “could be identified with Tyche who as Tyche Protogeneia was the Greek counterpart of Fortuna Primigenia,” but cautions that public buildings comprised the lower complex that featured the Nile Mosaic at Praeneste and that these were not connected to the sanctuary of Fortuna above. He inclines to view the Nile Mosaic as displaying a new taste in Egyptianizing decoration rather than fulfilling any religious function (89). On Isis Tyche/Fortuna, see too Mazurek (2022, 99).
- 63.
- 64.
- 65.
See Ov. Fast. 3.269.
- 66.
On Hecate identified with Isis, see Witt (1971, 121, 148, 277).
- 67.
As Orlin (2008, 246) distinguishes, “The decision to locate the temple of Apollo inside the pomerium…demonstrates clearly that the exclusion of Egyptian rites from [there] …was not a ban on cults of foreign origin, but an expression of their status as “non-Roman” cults…in reshaping the boundaries of Roman identity, Egypt was marked as non-Roman, while Greece could now be seen as Roman.” See n. 15 above.
- 68.
- 69.
Cf. Stephens (2003, 8): “Divinities that in other parts of the Mediterranean had distinct and separate mythologies, in Egypt were already part of the same discursive field, so that a narrative about the one was predisposed to converge with the other.”
- 70.
- 71.
See the discussion of Prop. 2.14, for example, pp. 169–71 of Chap. 5. Of course, this is not to deny that, at a basic level, the speaker’s production of elegiac poetry often rests on the premise of the unavailability of the mistress, the speaker’s frustration, and his consequent complaints—in meter. Nonetheless, given the trope of mistress as elegiac verse and given Latin love elegy’s Alexandrian pedigree, triumphal rhetoric in the erotic domain necessarily also suggests conquest and appropriation in the poetic sphere.
- 72.
See pp. 180–84 of Chap. 5. Of course, Ovid here is characteristically performing this cultural anxiety, a familiar discourse that runs through the late republican literature of the first century BCE, preceding his work.
- 73.
On Cato’s speech, see Chap. 4, pp. 143–44 and Chap. 6, pp. 241–42. Cicero’s assumed depreciatory comments about the neoteroi (Att. 7.2.1; Tusc. 3.45; cf. Tac. Dial. 18) would suggest the aesthetic analogue or corollary to Cato’s supposed warnings about the corruption of Roman values. See n. 60 of Chap. 1, the introduction. Cf. Lyne (1978, 167–87).
- 74.
See Gamel (1989, 183–206), which focuses on the diptych 2.13 and 2.14, and the bibliography therein for earlier “male” readings of the poem; James (2003, 173–77) examines the diptych’s focus on the risks of pregnancy and abortion for the elegiac mistress. The former threatens to disfigure her body with permanent stretch marks—a distinct liability for courtesans who professionally depend on their beauty.
- 75.
McKeown (1987, 285) cautions against assuming “procession,” but Amores 2.12 draws 2.13 into its orbit.
- 76.
All the figures mentioned comprise part of Isis’s retinue in a similar invocation in the Metamorphoses (9.690ff), but without the critical concept of the pompa.
- 77.
Arguably, with the rape of the Sabine women, we also have the genre of history referenced. In all these exempla, with the exception of the Trojan war and Helen (a ‘passive’ victim, ironically, given the usual censure of her), the speaker exculpates men and disingenuously lays the blame on the women as bringing about the conflicts.
- 78.
- 79.
As Gamel (1989, 197) notes, edere (“to bring forth”) is the verb that is used of poetic production at the beginning of the Amores: Arma gravi numero violentaque bella parabam / edere, materia conveniente modis (1.1.1–2). Although here the speaker writes as though bringing about his own ‘birthing,’ in 1.3, as Gamel goes on to point out, the amator invokes the further metaphor of the woman offering him ‘fertile matter’ for poetry, so that he is ‘fathering’ his child on her by sowing her field: te mihi materiem felicem in carmina praebe (1.3.19), an agricultural trope apparent in 1.11.7, peraratas tabellas (“ploughed tablets”), and in 1.11.21, comprimat ordinibus versus (“let her press together the lines in rows”).
- 80.
Analogously, in Prop. 4.7, we see the ghost of Propertius’s Cynthia attempting to wrest control of the poems that feature her, demanding they be destroyed now that she is dead: it is her vitality, as the implicit argument goes, that gave them and their creator life—ultimately she is the author and owns copyright!
- 81.
- 82.
See Kennedy (2012, 189) on the idea of two-way traffic in metaphor.
- 83.
See Chap. 1, pp. 15–17; Chap. 5, n. 13, n. 63; and p. 179 on Fulvius Nobilior’s importation of statues of the Muses. As Beard (2007, 161) comments: “Nor can there be any doubt at all that the triumphal procession was one major route through which not only cash but the artistic traditions of the eastern Mediterranean were brought to a Roman audience…. It was, of course, the preceding conquest—the victory, not the victory parade—that was the main agent in delivering wealth and “luxury” to Rome.” Cf. Keith (2008, 146, 189, n. 24).
- 84.
McKeown (1998, v.3: 280–81) claims that there is no other evidence for Isis worship at Paraetonium, whereas Bricault (2020, 161, n. 4) claims these verses as such. As Bricault (2020, 35–36) notes from a dedication, Canopus unequivocally featured a temple for Isis and Anubis (with Sarapis significantly omitted from the dedicatory document), built in the name of Ptolemy Philadelphus and Arsinoe. On Pharos—or more broadly Alexandria—as a site of Isis worship, see n. 28 above. On the importance of Memphis as a site of Isis worship and its diffusion throughout the Mediterranean world, see Gasparro (2007, 40–72). Strabo 17.1.31 asserts that Memphis also contains a temple to the bull-god Apis, whom the geographer here claims as conflated with Osiris.
- 85.
Not only is Isis a goddess associated with healing, but she also represents a mother-figure, with Horus, the “divine counterpart of the male pharaoh,” as her child. See Jones (2012, 166) and Mazurek (2022, 100). McKeown (1998, v. 3, 280) claims that because Isis nowhere else is associated with childbirth, pregnancy, and the attendant dangers, Ovid invokes Ilythia as well. Contra McKeown, see Alvar, n.89 below. Moreover, the cohabitation of Egyptian and Graeco-Roman goddesses on equal footing in the same poem speaks to the gradual assimilation of Isis into the same pantheon.
- 86.
On the trope of “woman as earth,” see DuBois (1988).
- 87.
See n. 79 above.
- 88.
See Miller (2013, 166–79).
- 89.
On the asymmetry between the goddess and her suppliant, see Alvar (2008, 318–19) and (ibid. 321–22, with notes), for Isis’s protection of women’s health in childbirth. Here, of course, we have illness in the context of attempted abortion, but this would seem to fall within Isis’s purview. In her analysis of the Isis paintings in the sacrarium of the temple at Pompeii, read against Plutarch’s De Iside et Osiride where the twin siblings give birth to a child, Horus (improbably conceived while they were in the womb), and then conceive and give birth to a second child, Harpocrates, after Isis resurrects Osiris (with a fashioned phallus substituting for his penis), Swetnam-Burland points out that the visual evocation of the myth underscores not only the goddess’s power over life and death but also “her capacity to bear children in otherwise impossible conditions” (2015, 111).
- 90.
Heyob (1975, 52): the Oxyrhynchus hymn to Isis (214–16) attributes to her the gift of power to women equal to that of men. Gamel (1989, 188) argues that the poet-amator’s conscious use of rhetoric (as opposed to the subconscious elements of the text she discusses) displays his own narcissistic needs and aligns with ‘male’ readings of the poem that, in her view, mistakenly emphasize the ‘earnestness’ of the appeal to Isis. However, this rhetorical earnestness too displays an unconscious element that reveals the degree to which Isis had come to have a secure foothold in the Roman religious imaginary.
- 91.
Gamel (1989, 192).
- 92.
Gamel (1989, 194–95) discusses Ovid, Amores 2.13 and 2.14 in light of Propertius 2.7, where it is the poet-amator who refuses to produce children for Roman triumphs. That the Ovidian speaker subconsciously acknowledges a woman’s power in 2.13 appears also in a distorted form in 2.12, where women effectively, if metaphorically, “give birth to war”—Helen, Hippodameia, Lavinia, the Sabine Women.
- 93.
Cf. Gamel (1989, 196) in reference to the poet-amator’s use of rhetoric: “Language refuses to be restricted to the meaning he attempts to impose on it: 2.13 shows failure to control an individual woman, and 2.14 reveals a breakdown in social and political hegemony.”
- 94.
Loomba (2015, 176).
- 95.
Bhabha (1994, 158).
- 96.
See Lembke (1994, 65–67) on the dating of the Iseum Campense; and Versluys (2002, 353–56) for an overview of the site; whether or not Claudius’s extension of the pomerium in fact included the Iseum Campense within the “pomerial circuit” is difficult to determine: see Poe (1984, 76–77) and Goodman (2018, 75–76).
- 97.
- 98.
See Swetnam-Burland (2015, 4) on the two rivers as paired in sculptures.
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Bowditch, P.L. (2023). Isis-Io, Egypt, and Cultural Circulation. In: Roman Love Elegy and the Eros of Empire . The New Antiquity. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-14800-2_7
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