Tracing Medulla as a Locus Eroticus

I. Introduction

The subject of passionate love can mire even the most creative author in clichés. When we read the corpus of Greek and Latin love poems that span half a dozen centuries, from Sappho to Ovid, we quickly become accustomed to the conventional topoi, the "moon-in-June" scenarios of desire and frustration that survive to this day in popular song. This is not to say that love poets never invent anything new. Indeed, the best of them, working within the genre's boundaries, develop striking variations on familiar themes. But it is rare to find a really fresh image in the age-old discourse of love. Sappho and the creative team employed by Hallmark Cards seem to share a (very long-lived) Muse.

Love is often described in terms that are also applicable to other experiences, such as madness, war, or physical illness.¹ The physiology of eros shares some of its terms with biology or medical science: passion can affect the mind, nerves, pulse, or tongue. In this paper, I will discuss one such "biological" erotic image: "marrow," or in Greek, medulla in Latin. The marrow, physically remote and insensate, deep within the bone or cerebro-spinal cavity, is not as accessible an image to the modern reader as, for example, a fluttering heart, another topos widely used by ancient authors.² Why did poets choose to portray the marrow as a specific locus of erotic experience, and what does this choice tell us about ancient views of sexuality?

It will become clear in the course of my argument that, as far as we can tell from the surviving literature, the word was not always used with a primarily erotic connotation. I propose here to trace its semantic shifts in poetry. At first glance, it seems to be the exception that proves the rule: a new trope, extremely popular in the works of Catullus and his successors. Did the Latin poets "discover" an erotic image unexploited by their Greek literary models? I will demonstrate that while the erotic application may be understood as a "semantic stretch" of earlier non-erotic uses of the word in Greek epic,³ "marrow" never appears in an explicitly erotic context in surviving archaic Greek poetry. We find a few scattered Hellenistic references to marrow as a locus eroticus, but the image suddenly becomes immensely popular in the works of the Latin love poets. How did the word become part of the physiology of eros, as it were?

I will explore two possible scenarios, not mutually exclusive: first, the idea that something new, a metaphor or a turn of phrase, could be the brilliant act of a single poetic authority—Theocritus or Catullus, for example, in a moment of "genius," suddenly inventing a novel way to write about passion; second, a possible non-literary influence, that of contemporary scientific theories of human sexuality, which may have inspired poets to expand their repertoire of stock erotic images to incorporate the newest trends and speculations. Such an overlap between literary and scientific domains, in the form of a term shared by love poets and medical/ philosophical writers, might again offer us an insight into the different ways cultures represent eros. Eros ("love"? "sex"? "desire"?) has a remarkable ability to cross category boundaries. In our culture, sex (for lack of a better word) may be viewed clinically (by a medical doctor), spiritually or psychologically (by a rabbi or a therapist), romantically (in romantic fiction), or explicitly (in pornographic films). Each aspect of sex has its own vocabulary, customs, expectations, and rules; we do not expect to find the same terminology used in a Harlequin romance and a medical journal. But each erotic sphere tends to have some points of contact with the others, as eros bursts every boundary built to contain it. Did ancient authors borrow this particular erotic image from contemporary scientific discourse?⁴ Or, to phrase the question differently, do references to marrow in both literary and medical contexts indicate a curiosity about sexuality common to both fields of interest?⁵

Let us begin by tracing instances...