Medusa's Gaze in Imperial Latin Epic: In memoriam R. Elaine Fantham (1933–2016)

Abstract

The mythical figure of the Medusa has had a potent afterlife in twentieth-century critical theory from Freudian psychoanalysis to French feminism.1 In her classical literary reception, too, Roman authors struggle to come to terms with the power of her image. From Ovid in Metamorphoses 4, through Lucan in Bellum civile 9, to Statius in Thebaid 1, we can see the Latin epic poets treating Medusa’s gaze as a powerful image of the desiring female and wrestling with the threat it poses to masculine projects, both heroic and literary. In this study I argue that Ovid, Lucan, and Statius draw on a variety of androcentric rhetorical strategies to regain control of, and indeed annihilate, Medusa’s threatening power of commodification. Domestication of Medusa’s gaze in these poems is necessary, I suggest, to confirm both the epic hero’s martial valor and the epic poet’s literary authority. Ovid introduces Medusa in Metamorphoses 4 with the iconic image of her decapitated head (Met. 4.614–620):2