At least since Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, the ability of subalterns to speak has been questioned, with an emphasis on voice and discourse as instruments of agency for non-elite social actors. Amy A. Koenig’s study proposes to reverse this perspective by focusing on silence and the loss of voice in imperial literature, which she refuses to understand solely as a deprivation of power or a form of social and political alienation. The aim, clearly set out in the introduction, is to study the literary representation (and not to reconstruct the social experience) of the accidental loss of voice in several texts written in Latin and Greek during the Principate by Galen, Ovid, Achilles Tatius, Longus and Apuleius. Historiography and rhetoric (in particular declamation) are left aside, first because of existing scholarship on the theme of silence/silencing in these genres, then because the authors considered in Koenig’s study should allow us to go beyond the highly masculine and aristocratic perspective of the historiographical and declamatory corpora.
The first chapter (“The Embodied Voice. Conflict and Constraint in Galen’s Writings”) analyzes Galen’s medical thought. Koenig focuses her analysis on the cultural dimension of Galen’s treatises (De Praenotione, De Usu Partium, De Anatomicis Administrationibus and the fragmentary De Voce), questioning the metaphors used to depict the emission and loss of voice. She demonstrates that Galen considerably complicates the traditional representation (that of Plato and Aristotle, already more subtle in Lucretius) according to which the voice must be conceived as a simple stream of sound. The 2nd-century physician sees the voice in terms of a dual logic: on the one hand, it results from a constant “struggle between the breath and the muscles of the vocal apparatus” (p. 20); on the other, it is produced by the constraint and control exerted by the larynx over the breath (p. 22). This dialectic between balance and constraint can be read as the expression of a political representation of power relations under the Empire, particularly those imposed on the Greek thinkers of the Second Sophistic. If this second part of the reasoning sometimes seems a little forced (on the political interpretation of Galen’s refusal to use monkeys as guinea pigs, p. 26, or of the narrative events occurring in the treatises, p. 28), it leads to a stimulating reading of the case of Emperor Claudius. Once again, Koenig does not take a position on the princeps’ actual pathological affections, but convincingly expands on an idea already well recognized by philosophers (especially the Stoics): Claudius’ difficulty in expressing himself stems first and foremost from a lack of self-control. Here, liberation from constraint (essential to the emission of voice in Galen’s theory) paradoxically results in the loss of control over speech: this analysis forms a highly stimulating inversion of the traditional representation, according to which the liberation of bonds should result in a liberation of speech.
Chapter 2 (“The Mute Goddess. Speechlessness, Divinity and Power in Ovid’s Fasti”) offers three case studies from book II of Ovid’s Fasti. Koenig begins appropriately with the myth of Tacita, divinity of silence, an ancient Naiad originally named Lara, punished by Jupiter and then raped by Mercury; next comes Callisto, raped by Jupiter and turned into a bear by Juno, unable to speak in front of her own son, then Lucretia, raped by Sextus Tarquin and depicted as mute by Ovid. The comparison of the three episodes is convincing; some points of analogy are somewhat conventional (the gendered dimension of the loss of voice following rape), others are particularly stimulating, such as the fact that these characters lose their names in the poem after losing their voices. The myth of Philomela, present in the background of these episodes, offers an interesting counterpoint. Koenig navigates with ease through the extensive bibliography generated by “the anatomized tapestry of suffering and silenced bodies that constitutes the poetry of Ovid” (p. 41), mobilizing complementary sources (such as curse tablets, p. 45) and indulging in excursions into Roman religion (on the Angeronalia festivals for example, p. 55–58). The results clearly support the main thesis of this chapter, which is also that of the book: absence of speech does not always mean absence of power. In this regard, a complementary interpretation to Koenig’s might be proposed for the association between Tacita and the Lares, her sons: as Ovid himself makes the link between these Lares and the compita (Ov., Fast., 2.615), it seems relevant to highlight the fact that the compita were one of the places most frequently associated by imperial authors with the rumors and conversations of the Roman plebs. Tacita’s inability to express herself through her os mutum (Ov., Fast., 2.614) could thus be compared to the association between her children and the extremely loquacious os uulgi, which would reinforce the analysis (p. 46) that “the Lares have collectively taken over the name of their mother, who herself has lost it along with her ability to speak”. In short, in this chapter, Koenig demonstrates that the loss of a voice can open up new forms of power for these female characters, notably when they become deities in their own right thanks to their very muteness (Tacita), or when their physical actions enable them to gain a new kind of agency (Lucretia’s suicide as a “final act of bodily autonomy”, p. 67).
Chapter 3 (“The Dancers’s Silence. Ovidian Myths of the Voice and Roman Pantomime”) turns from the Fasti to the Metamorphoses to study three Ovidian myths linked to the loss of female characters’ voices: Philomela, Echo and Syrinx. Although researchers have long studied at least the first two myths, the author manages to considerably deepen existing analyses. Indeed, these stories not only highlight the well-known link between gendered violence and silencing, but the characters silenced by their metamorphosis seem to gain new forms of agency, as revealed, for example, by the pathetic power of the nightingale’s carmen. To demonstrate this, Koenig uses the genre of the pantomime, which was highly popular during the Principate, as a comparative tool of investigation. In an approach that could be described as intermedial, she notes that the myths studied present a dissociation between voice and body: losing their voices, these female characters nonetheless gesticulate a lot, which enables them to express themselves in a new way and to acquire a different form of power, charged with an erotic dimension. The analysis of Philomela’s severed tongue (Ov., Met., 6.554–560) and the voiceless reflection that seduces Narcissus (Ov., Met., 3.457-462) are particularly convincing in that regard.
Chapter 4 (“The Instrument of the Voice. Body, Voice and Music in the ‘Second Sophistic’ Greek Novels”) examines two Greek ‘novels’, Leucippe and Clitophon and Daphnis and Chloe, through the prism of the relationship between voice, body and silencing. Although the genre investigated is different from Ovid’s poetry, the points of observation allow for continuity in the analysis, as the author seeks in these two novels traces of the myths of Philomela, Echo and Syrinx previously studied, and takes again an intermedial approach that resorts to pantomime to interpret their narrative. In Achilles Tatius’s novel, the myths of Philomena, Pan, and Syrinx are marked by an attention to the description of movements that goes as far as the grotesque and recalls pantomime. These passages reveal “not so much the objectification of women’s suffering as … the fallibility of the male ‘authoritative’ voice … that attempts to objectify them” (p. 110). In Longus’ novel, in which Koenig, no doubt in search of symmetry, endeavors (rather unconvincingly) to find traces of the myth of Philomela behind the story of a young woman transformed into a pigeon (Long. 1.27), the myths of Pan and Syrinx and of Pan and Echo borrow more clearly the form of pantomime. Here, the obvious separation between voice and body leads to a somewhat darker representation: the silenced body does not appear as endowed with a new form of power (as in Ovid and Achilles Tatius), but is the object of a form of usurpation by male actors that goes beyond the silencing of the voice to the silencing of the female body itself (p. 115).
Chapter 5 (“Nova vox. (Re)gaining a Voice in the Ass Novels”) is a comparative study of Apuleius’ Metamorphoses and of the pseudo-Lucian’s Onos. Both works present characters (Lucius and Loukios) for whom the loss of an articulate, human voice naturally leads to difficulties in oral expression, but who gain from their muteness a capacity for non-verbal communication close to the pantomime, ensuring them a certain erotic attractiveness (especially in the Greek novel). The specificity of the Metamorphoses lies in Lucius’ reluctance to engage in physical performance, which is obvious after his re-transformation, when the character feels self-conscious about (if not ashamed by) his body. This observation is followed by a study of Loukios’/Lucius’ relationship to the author of the novel: where Loukios asserts himself at the end of the work as a triple figure (author, narrator, character), Apuleius plays on a form of “metaleptic confusion” (p. 134) that distinguishes him from the narrator, who himself maintains a complex relationship with the character of Lucius. The theme of the fragility of discourse in the Metamorphoses is confirmed in the last book: in Apuleius, Lucius finds a voice before his re-transformation (since he addresses a prayer in direct speech to the goddess), then proves surprisingly mute or distrustful of voice once he has become human again. Where the pseudo-Lucian insists on the rich pantomimic bodily expressions Loukios has gained from his experience as an animal, Lucius in Apuleius has rediscovered a radically different voice that doesn’t bring him greater agency, but profoundly transforms his identity.
The epilogue (“Muteness and Martyrdom”) sums up the book’s main thesis, which is perfectly convincing: imperial authors think of loss of voice as not only a loss of power (although this dimension remains present in the texts), but also as an opportunity to explore other forms of communication, to free oneself from an unstable identity or a subaltern position. Finally, an extension of the scope is offered through a brief exploration of Christian martyrology with the figure of Romanus of Antioch (Prudentius, Peristephanon, 10), as an illustration of the central themes of the book: the dichotomy between voice and body, the problematic ‘auctoriality’ of speech and the paradoxical agency acquired thanks to mutism, or the relationship between expression and identity. An index rerum and an index locorum usefully complete the volume.
In this rather short (156 pages of text), thought-provoking study, Koenig succeeds in subtly analyzing a subject that is in itself interesting (the “narratives of silencing” p. 156), which she furthermore never approaches in a caricatured or uniform manner. The selective nature of the corpus does not give the analysis an exhaustive scope, but the case studies are well linked to one another, so that the essay does not appear heterogeneous, even if the contributions of chapter 1 (on Galen) are ultimately somewhat forgotten later. Repetitions (on the myth of Philomela, or on Ovid, at the beginning of chapters 2 and 3) are rare. To further enhance the scope of the study, it could be useful to determine what imperial institutions might have had in common with the themes addressed; for example, the importance of non-verbal communication (whose centrality in imperial Rome has been demonstrated by Gregory S. Aldrete’s Gestures and Acclamations in Ancient Rome). The reader, also, could sometimes want to better understand the relationship between the human and the animal voice, or to measure what other genres do with accounts of silencing and the power of the silenced, as in historiography, for example. These are obviously not shortcomings, but points for consideration brought up by Koenig’s stimulating reflections in this informed, intelligent and innovative book.