Virgo to Virago: Medea in the Silver Age by Kirsty Corrigan (review)

Virgo to Virago: Medea in the Silver Age by Kirsty Corrigan, which focuses on Medea’s reception in Silver Age Latin poetry, is an elaboration of the author’s doctoral thesis on female figures in Silver Age literature. As noted in the introduction, what prompted the author to select this female figure from the other female characters of her thesis was her personal interest for Medea, the rich modern scholarship on her persona, and the fluidity and particular traits of the period examined. As is justly supported, the character’s multiplicity and popularity leave space for further interpretation of its various aspects and also for new discussion of older interpretive questions regarding this persona.

In her brief survey of the Silver Age (beginning around 14 CE and lasting until the mid-second century), Corrigan refutes the old and no longer supported view that this is a period of decline in literature compared to that of previous times (e.g., the so-called Golden Age, approximately 80 BCE to 14 CE). Corrigan focuses on the Silver Age because this period, with its emphasis on rhetoric and gruesome motifs, was fascinated by Medea and, consequently, provided long and important literary treatments of her story. Ovid’s inclusion in this period is briefly and convincingly justified.

Corrigan chooses to study each poet separately and in chronological order. First, Ovid’s narration in the seventh book of the Metamorphoses is discussed, along with the twelfth and sixth epistles of the Heroides, and other, shorter Ovidian references to Medea. The priority given to the interpretation in the Metamorphoses is reasonably justified. The four-hundred-verse narrative provides a short but complete account of the myth, while the epistles in Heroides 12 and 6 refer only to the end of the myth. They are intended for readers who are already aware of Medea’s story.

Corrigan’s analysis and interpretive comments on the various intertexts providing models for the Ovidian Medea are extremely detailed. Corrigan correctly points out Ovid’s elaboration of the Vergilian material on Dido, the influence of other genres, and the modification of values to fit the Roman version of a heroine who originated in Greek myth. She also carefully examines where the two protagonists, Jason and Medea, prevail in the Ovidian narration and adequately explores Ovid’s intelligent technique of contaminatio (a word used by modern scholars to describe an ancient author’s practice of incorporating material from another source into his work). For example, when Ovid briefly describes the notorious infanticide, he uses this description in order to set the stage for another infanticide in the story of Tereus, Procne, and Philomela. Thus, Ovid gives other stories a complementary function within his narrative, surprising his audience by limiting his description of Medea’s most notorious acts.

Corrigan rightly comments on Ovid’s technique in demonstrating the gradual transformation of the heroine from a young, innocent girl into a witch by choosing specific episodes that present only slight changes at every stage. As a result, the readers are surprised, if not actually shocked, when they realize the distance separating Medea’s initial condition from her final one.

In analyzing Ovid’s Heroides 12 and 6, Corrigan maintains the same interpretive model. She reproduces widely accepted theses regarding the collection and ends by examining the heroine’s role in the fictitious letter she supposedly wrote. Here Medea refers to the moments before she is liberated from her elegiac bonds of idleness, which allows her to unfold her tragic actions and commit the infanticide. Corrigan understands that everything relevant to infanticide must respect the reservations imposed by epistolarity and the elegiac genre. She recognizes intertextual debts to the Aeneid and appreciates the metapoetic importance of the two letters examined. Of course, she could have shed more light on the intratextual relations between the two epistles (12 and 6). In other words, the supposed dialogue between Jason’s two...