From sixth century Byzantine poet and courtier Pavlos SIlentarios comes this deeply disquieting epigram, whose narrator describes the violent assault and rape of a woman who he finds asleep:
«Δειελινῷ χαρίεσσα Μενεκρατὶς ἔκχυτος ὕπνῳ/κεῖτο περὶ κροτάφους πῆχυν ἑλιξαμένη:
τολμήσας δ᾽ ἐπέβην λεχέων ὕπερ. ὡς δὲ κελεύθου/ἥμισυ κυπριδίης ἤνυον ἀσπασίως,
ἡ παῖς ἐξ ὕπνοιο διέγρετο, χερσὶ δὲ λευκαῖς/κράατος ἡμετέρου πᾶσαν ἔτιλλε κόμην
μαρναμένης δὲ τὸ λοιπὸν ἀνύσσαμεν ἔργον ἔρωτος./ ἡδ᾽ὑποπιμπλαμένηδάκρυσινεἶπετάδε:
σχέτλιε, νῦν μὲν ἔρεξας ὅ τοι φίλον, ᾧ ἔπι πουλὺν/ πολλάκι σῆς παλάμης χρυσὸν ἀπωμοσάμην
οἰχόμενος δ᾽ ἄλλην ὑποκόλπιον εὐθὺς ἑλίξεις: ἐστὲ γὰρ ἀπλήστου κύπριδος ἐργατίναι».
“One afternoon pretty Menecratis lay outstretched in sleep with her arm twined round her head. Boldly I entered her bed and had to my delight accomplished half the journey of love, when she woke up, and with her white hands set to tearing out all my hair. She struggled till all was over, and then said, her eyes filled with tears: ‘Wretch, you have had your will, and taken that for which I often refused your gold; and now you will leave me and take another to your breast; for you all are servants of insatiable Cypris’.”
This is a thoroughly confronting work. At first, it appears that the reader is enjoined to become one with the narrator and thus becomes an accomplice not only to the rape of the hapless Menecratis, but also to the manifest delight which the rapist feels in committing this vile act, while she is at her most vulnerable. It is as if, through the poem, Paul is setting a trap for the reader: seeing to what extent if any, the reader can identify with the perpetrator and to determine their level of implication in this perverted scenario.
This can be evidenced by the fact that the narrator is not just recounting the events that took place. Instead, his tone is triumphant. He is boasting of his violent sexual subjugation of Menecratis, going so far as to make a repulsive joke at her expense, bragging that had she accepted his offer of gold in the first place, she could have avoided the rape and been financially better off, whereas now, he has obtained what he wanted without losing any money and will go off to find other lovers, leaving her alone.
Significantly, although the perpetrator quotes Menecratis, especially her lament that her violator will obtain another lover, abandoning her, it is not her voice we are hearing but rather her words as retold by the narrator, denying her very personhood and her ability to make available her true reaction to her rape known to the reader. It is almost as if the narrator is using her as a ventriloquist’s doll, placing the requisite words in her mouth to allow the reader to lessen the extent of her victimhood, so that the only loss suffered by this outrage is that she will no longer have the benefit of his erotic attentions, nor the benefit of his money.
In scholar Steven Smith’s study of the poem, he points out however that the read the poem in this way, is to “privilege the attacker’s perspective from beginning to end and to allow him to dominate the discourse about rape.” Yet there is more to Pavlos Silentarios’ poem than a crude celebration of cruelty, misogyny and rape. Indeed the name given to the victim, Menecratis, provides the first clue. Although the only other reference in Greek literature to this name as far as we know, is to an hetaira or courtesan who became a married woman, the name itself is an empowering one, meaning “she who abides in strength.”
With the use of one cleverly chosen name, Paul Silentarios thus subverts the entire discourse of his poem. Instead of condoning or applauding the perpetrator, the poet is actually undermining him by calling into question that very element of his that he believes is most dear to him: his masculinity. A man who must seek to purchase the sexual favours of another because they will not be freely given to him cannot be a particularly attractive man, let alone one who is so repulsive that not even his gold proves sufficient to buy love. Thus, while he may boast all he wants that Menecratis has lost a lover, the facts speak otherwise: Pavlos Silentarios portrays a narrator who has been rejected as a lover and is consequently also a failure as a man, having to resort to force to obtain what he wants.
In subverting the narrator’s hypostasis in this clever way, Pavlos Silentarios empowers the victim in a manner novel for the genre. He reinforces her freedom of choice and authority. Despite his entreaties and his provision of financial incentive, Menecratis chooses to reject him as a lover. While being violated, rather than being subdued, even in the narrator’s words, she struggles against him and attempts to tear out his hair. This too is a snide swipe at the rapist, for in ancient Greek literature, bald men were treated as smarter, more attractive and more accomplished on the battlefield, highlighting the fact that this ideal is the complete opposite to what we are dealing with in this poem.
Most importantly, Menecratis, having being raped, is neither subdued nor willing to accept her violation. Though the perpetrator may attempt to boast, even through his agency, she still has the last word in determining just how he will be viewed in the readers eyes. She calls him «σχέτλιε», a wretch, a word associated in Apollonius’ Argonautica, which recounts the story of Medea, with Eros. This connection with Medea thus reinforces Menecratis’ voice as one of potency and authority.
In seeking to empower Menecratis, Pavlos Silentarios does not only subvert the hypostasis of the perpetrator but of the genre in which the poem belongs as well. The poem is written in the manner and style of a traditional erotic epigram. Yet the language which he has Menecratis employ, is that which more properly belongs to mourning and lamentation. The act of her pulling her attacker’s hair, is expressed in the same words as those used to describe what mourners traditionally did to themselves at funerals. When in her lament, she states that he will leave, she uses the word οἰχόμενος, the word which was traditionally employed to denote “the departed.” Thus, Menecratis, is signifying that her attacker is dead to her, completely effacing his existence in a way that he is unable to achieve.
Not content with subverting the genre, Pavlos Silentarios ventures even further, endeavouring to subvert love itself. He has Menecratis describe Aphrodite, the goddess of love as ἄπληστος or insatiable. This adjective is rarely used within the corpus of ancient Greek literature in conjunction with the goddess and on the few occasions that it is, it is invariably in connection with death. Instead, it is a term more properly associated with Charon, whereas the Byzantine hymnographer Romanos Melodos employs it so as to label Death an insatiable glutton. Thus, when Menecratis excoriates her rapist as one who is in the service of “Insatiable Cypris,” she is disconnecting his acts from belonging to love proper. Instead, these are acts that belong to the realm of the dead. Menecratis has banished her rapist from the land of the living, to the land of the dead. In effect, she has terminated his very existence.
Pavlos Silentarios’ nuanced and layered epigram is remarkable in the sophisticated manner in which as far back as sixth century Byzantium, loaded language and a plethora of embedded intertextual references serve to highlight and condemn violence and abuse against women. By ridiculing the sense of entitlement, superiority and misogyny felt by the perpetrator that gave rise to the perverse act of transgression, Silentarios delegitimises not only both those feelings and the act, but also the sexuality, the gender and finally the perpetrator himself. In the light of the celebration of International Women’s Day on 8 March, it is instructive to re-evaluate texts such as these, which establish valuable precedents of resistance to inequality, violence and abuse of women.