Welcome to my series on race in Greco-Roman antiquity, based on my writings for a graduate seminar course I took at Stanford in fall 2020. Take a look at my introductory post about the series here. Each post features the immediate reaction (with some changes and additions for clarity and context) that I wrote right after completing the readings for that week, as well as further reflections that I wrote at the end of the class, after having time to think about my earlier responses and process the feedback I received from my professor and fellow students.
Ancient Source: Ovid, Metamorphoses Book 4, 604-end
Let’s dive into our ancient source, the famous Perseus and Andromeda episode from Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the epic compendium of Greco-Roman myths. For some background, Ovid (43 BCE –17 CE) was one of the great Roman poets of the Augustan era. He reached enormous heights of success in a multitude of genres ranging from elegy to epic during the reign of the first Roman emperor, Augustus, but that came to an end when he somehow ran afoul of Augustus and was exiled to the Black Sea in 8 CE.
As the episode begins, Perseus has just slain Medusa. In the first part of the story (604-662), he defeats Atlas by turning the Titan into stone with Medusa’s severed head. Then, he arrives in Ethiopia (663-752), where he rescues the princess Andromeda from being sacrificed to a sea monster, in exchange for being allowed to marry her. At the following celebratory feast (753-803), Perseus recounts both his own quest to slay Medusa and the gorgon’s tragic backstory.
Since race is the lens through which we are examining the past, I kept an eye out for any element of this story that might concern race or racial categorizations as they exist in the ancient world. However, I noticed very little in the story related to race, except for the briefly-mentioned fact that the story takes place in Ethiopia.
Instead, what seemed most interesting to me in this story was the strange suppression of any voice that does not belong to either the narrator or Perseus. Only Perseus gets to have any speech, while Andromeda and her parents have their statements paraphrased.
Furthermore, Perseus (or the narrator speaking through him) constructs Medusa as a monstrous and feminine Other, whose sympathetic experiences as a sexual assault victim, punished for being assaulted by Neptune, are glossed over in favor of Perseus’ heroic exploits. That was what seemed most problematic to me. I’ve actually written about this before in my post about Medusa and the artwork of Rubens. With regard to race, I did not see much that seemed relevant in this episode.
Ovid seems to dodge the opportunity to speak about ethnic or racial differences, or he does not consider them important. Perseus asks the Ethiopians to tell him “about the country and its culture, its customs and the character of its people,” but we do not get to hear the response: this is one of Ovid’s characteristic omissions or silences.
Perhaps we should take this as an indication that at least this version of the Andromeda story does not concern any construction of difference between Romans (or Greek heroes) and Ethiopians? However, we could also interpret it as a silencing of foreign viewpoints in favor of Perseus’ heroic Greco-Roman narrative.
As for the “racial identity” and skin color of Andromeda—which according to Dr. Elizabeth McGrath became complex issues of concern for authors and artists of later time periods who, in responding to the myth, sometimes portrayed her as white and sometimes as black—the only part of the narrative that could be construed to actually describe her skin color is when Perseus imagines that Andromeda is a “marble statue.” Some commentators (McGrath 8-9) would take this as evidence that she was white. However, the point in Ovid’s narrative is rather that she looks like a beautiful statue; her skin color does not matter.
As we now know, marble statues in the ancient world were painted with vibrant colors, and it is only their fading away through the ages that produces the illusion of a pure white color—an idea that was used to connect whiteness to a Classical ideal of beauty and has the impact of promoting a pseudoscientific legacy of racism. In addition, marble comes in a variety of different natural colors, including black.
So, taking a reference to a marble statue as a racial indication of whiteness would only be possible due to the preconceptions and biases of later ages regarding skin color and what white marble represents.
This can tell us quite a bit about later eras and how classical texts can be misunderstood, misused or abused in the modern age, but to me, it seems to take away from understanding the text of the Metamorphoses itself and distracts from what Ovid was actually saying in his own time and place.
Ovid does say in several of his other texts, such as Ars Amatoria and Heroides, that Andromeda has dark skin (McGrath 3-5, 9-10), but to determine the precise significance of those references would require looking in more detail at those specific texts.
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Further Reflections
In-class discussions about Andromeda, Medusa, and Perseus proved quite fruitful, producing a multitude of excellent ideas that build on some of my thoughts from the original post above.
The Meaning of Stone
I have to mention the brilliant idea proposed by a fellow student that Andromeda’s portrayal as a marble statue functions as a foil to the stone figures transformed by Medusa. There appears to be a progression in Perseus’ capturing of Medusa’s power: he first defeats her directly, then he redirects her power against Atlas, and finally rescues Andromeda, who is tied to a rock and trapped like a statue.
“Womanufacture”
Dr. Alison Ruth Sharrock, who works on gender in Latin literature at the University of Manchester, has written about the fascinating concept of “womanufacture”—an excellent parallel to my interpretation of Medusa and Andromeda. Thank you to Prof. Sarah Derbew for helpfully pointing me in this direction.
Essentially, womanufacture is the process by which a male artist/poet/lover (these figures are merged in Latin love elegy) constructs a perfect woman as an art-object and/or a love-object. The Pygmalion myth (10.243-297), about a sculptor who made a statue of a woman so beautiful that he fell in love with it, is one of the chief examples of womanufacture in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. The idea is that Pygmalion serves as a metaphor for the elegiac poet himself, Ovid.
Sharrock describes the process as follows:
“By foregrounding the lover as artist/artist as lover, the text consciously or unconsciously exposes the workings of gendered power relations in erotic and specifically elegiac discourse. Love poetry creates its own object, calls her Woman, and falls in love with her – or rather, with the artist’s own act of creating her. This is womanufacture”(49).
A similar process occurs with regard to Medusa and Andromeda, except that it does not occur in the context of the genre of elegiac poetry. Whereas womanufacture in elegiac love poetry concerns the construction of an objectified, perfect woman for the male poet to love as an object of his own creation, we do not see any erotic element in the Medusa and Andromeda story.
Instead, the heroic narrative of Perseus’ deeds dominates the entire episode. Medusa and Andromeda are portrayed and silenced in such a way as to champion Perseus as the male protagonist and hero of the text.
So, this story, or more broadly, the heroic genre of epic poetry itself, also involves the creation of women as objects to be utilized by the male hero for his own purposes, which in this case is not to fall in love with her, but to act as objects that he can heroically fight or rescue. In this sense, the Medusa/Andromeda story “exposes the workings of gendered power relations” as well.
If we accept that Pygmalion is a stand-in for Ovid as an elegiac poet, then Perseus, the “hero” of an epic text who spends so much time as a narrator himself, perhaps serves as a stand-in for Ovid himself as an epic poet, who creates female characters to advance the interests of his own narrative.
Authorial Intent
This is what appears to be happening in the Metamorphoses, but it is more difficult to determine what meaning Ovid actually intended to carry across with his text. One of my fellow grad students raised the issue of authorial intent and wondered whether we could apply this concept to Ovid’s silencing of Andromeda/Medusa and his seeming omission of race.
Does authorial intent matter, or is the meaning of the text constructed by the reader? Is it possible to really know what Ovid’s intention was? When he apparently omits something from his text, how can we tell if this action was intentional?
Authorial intent in general is such a tricky issue. My view of it is that the text will do what it will, and the readers will react to it how they will. These meanings are often an extension of what the author intended, but these two things are not the same.
To take a modern example, I’m sure that every movie director or script writer sets out to make the best movie that they can, but that doesn’t mean the resulting film will actually be a good, high quality film or that the audience members will respond in the way the creators intended. Think of Clash of the Titans films, both the original 1981 version and the 2010 remake, featuring their own interpretations of the Perseus and Andromeda myth (favorite targets for Classics student to nitpick at and ridicule, although always in good fun).
As for writing, if an author is successful, he or she might be able to carry across some of his or her intentions, but some meanings in the text may be unintended.
Ovid is an especially difficult author in this regard. The Metamorphoses is filled with so much silencing of women, and it is fraught with narratives of extreme violence, danger, and sexual assault. The problem is that these narratives can be interpreted in opposing ways: Do they dismiss and leave out marginalized characters, or do they expose and critique the processes and structures by which those in authority abuse their power and silence their victims?
Especially in the new imperial political climate of the Augustan era, what Ovid leaves unsaid can be as impactful as what he does say. Authors like Ovid respond to the issues of the day. His conflicts with the imperial family and his banishment no doubt affect how we read his text. Aiming to discover Ovid’s intent is not a useless endeavor.
I don’t know if we can really determine what he intended with his apparent silence about racial differences, but in the case of Perseus and Andromeda, Ovid does not just leave out race and the unique customs of the Ethiopians. He actually seems to point out that he could talk about them but has decided not to.
Tentatively, I would say that the gratuitous extent to which Medusa and Andromeda are silenced in favor of Perseus’ narrative, alongside Ovid’s almost obvious omission of race, points to how one narrative can be favored at the exclusion of all else, including by wiping out differences and the unique customs of different cultures.
Secondary Sources
Sources on Black Africans in Ancient Italy and Greece:
For this week’s assignments, we were also asked to read two articles by Dr. Snowden from the 1940s. They were helpful in providing an overview of the evidence we have of black Africans in both ancient Italy and Greece. However, I found their interpretations unhelpful because they focused excessively on biological characteristics to determine “what” these people with dark skin are in terms of racial categories from the 1940s, instead of figuring out “who” they are in terms of identity as defined in the ancient world.
- Snowden, Frank M. Jr. 1947. “The Negro in Classical Italy.” The American Journal of Philology 68 (3): 266–92.
- Snowden, Frank M. Jr. 1948. “The Negro in Ancient Greece.” American Anthropologist 50 (1): 31–44.
Sources on Andromeda and Ovid:
See the article by McGrath for a detailed survey of Andromeda’s skin color as portrayed/described by later artists and authors. For more about portrayals of women by Ovid, especially in the Pygmalion story, take a look at the article by Sharrock.
- McGrath, Elizabeth. 1992. “The Black Andromeda.” Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes 55: 1–18.
- Sharrock, A.R. 1991. “Womanufacture.” The Journal of Roman Studies 81: 36–49.
Winds & Waves 