The Writhing Tongue and the Scrabbling Hand
Jarrett Welsh
Harvard University
welsh@fas.harvard.edu
A gruesome moment in Ovid's Metamorphoses comes in the scene of Tereus' rape
of Philomela, when, to silence his victim, Tereus cuts out her tongue. We see
the root of her tongue flicking in her mouth, as the severed tongue itself murmurs
on the ground and crawls toward her feet (Met. 6.555-560). While Ovid seems
on one level simply to have enjoyed this kind of monstrous image, I argue that
Ovid is also engaging with a tradition of poetic zombies. The zombie tongue
of Philomela lives again not only within the Metamorphoses, after it has been
wrenched from her mouth, but it has further been resurrected from Ovid's hexametric
predecessors, which our poet signals to his reader through language, diction,
and imagery. Philomela's textual tongue thus becomes something larger than itself,
its own intertextual monster that reincarnates its Latin literary past.
A note in Servius' commentary on the Aeneid provides access to the Latin tradition
at three points: Ennius in the Annales, Varro Atacinus, and the lines of the
Aeneid in question. The recurrent use of severed hands and heads in battle contexts
in these examples suggest that we are to read an undertone of epic battle in
Philomela's struggle. This much of Ovid's debt has long been recognized. Yet
it has often gone unnoticed or unremarked upon that Ovid specifically and directly
alludes to other poetic predecessors, in particular Lucretius, Cicero's Marius,
and Vergil's Georgics. In this paper I demonstrate the debts of themes, imagery,
and language by which Ovid conjures up these poetic monsters, to show how Philomela's
tongue becomes not just Ovidian gore, but a way to construct and engage with
Latin literary history. I conclude by suggesting that the narrator's intrusion
(6.561-2) is meant to hint at the subtle use of this tradition of poetic zombies.