The Art of Resistance
Rereading Ovid in the Wake of Silent Sam
Months after Maya Little poured red paint and blood on the Confederate monument known as “Silent Sam,” UNC Chapel Hill’s Honor Court deemed her guilty of stealing, destroying, damaging, or misusing property belonging to the University or another individual or entity. A petition to appeal the verdict was later filed on the grounds that, by refusing to dismiss Confederate sympathizer Frank Pray from the decision-making panel, the court had violated Maya’s basic rights and failed to give her an impartial trial. The appeal was granted and scheduled for February 12th: the day before my special topic exam on disruption and brutalized bodies in Latin literature.
Prior to my last exam-prep meeting, I listened to Maya speak about the suffering the university imposed on her. She noted that their decision to drag her through multiple trials (both on and off campus) was not an isolated act of violence against a black person, but part of the university’s legacy of white supremacy. After Maya’s speech, I saw a group identified as “the artists of the Recontextualization Project” dedicate two commemorative plaques on campus. One plaque memorializing James Cates, a black man murdered on campus in 1970 by members of a white supremacist gang, was placed in the Pit. Another plaque memorializing the “negro wench,” who was whipped on campus by Ku Klux Klan supporter Julian Carr, was placed on Franklin Street in close proximity to a Jefferson Davis Memorial Highway marker.
I was sitting in my advisor’s office a few minutes later. As we discussed the aestheticization of violence in Ovid, I suddenly found it hard to focus. The topic felt more grotesque and disturbing than ever before. While I examined Ovid’s treatments of mythical brutalized bodies, activists were outside asking the university to confront its own brutalization of black bodies: brutalization not in the abstract, but brutalization that was real; brutalization that was deadly. This moment of troubled reflection on the intersections of my academic work and my activist work was not my first, but the chance concurrence of Maya’s appeal, the dedication ceremony, and my exam gave me serious pause: was Ovid intellectualizing violence only for the sake of intellectualizing it? Was I? What value was there in taking this exam and studying this topic? I mulled over these questions as I abandoned my plans to study for the night and walked back to Maya’s appeal hearing.
During the hearing, Maya’s defense counsel and co-founder of Take Action Chapel Hill, Gina Balamucki, argued that Frank Pray’s feelings about left-leaning activism prevented him from sincerely considering the defense’s argument during the original trial; that the pouring of paint and blood on Silent Sam was not an act of vandalism, but an act of artistic recontextualization — a visual rendering of the university’s violent history, which had been actively obscured and systematically ignored. Her reframing of the court’s claim to vandalism raised critical questions about how the university views “damage.”
She encouraged members of the court to reconsider their choice to prosecute Maya’s action. Why did pouring paint on a monument to represent the university’s white supremacist history need to be litigated, while violence inflicted by the university on people of color over the course of two centuries did not? Why was UNC more concerned by the depiction of its violence than by the effects of its violence? What choice did Maya have when the university had ignored countless requests — made through legal channels — to admit and make retribution for its wrongs?
When Frank Pray called in to the hearing to defend his impartiality, he not only refused to consider Balamucki’s points about power and violence, but also flatly insisted that Maya’s action at Silent Sam was, by definition, vandalism and thus fairly reprimanded. Pray repeatedly noted his allegiance to the “Four Corners” doctrine: a conservative approach to legal texts, which posits that a document ought to be interpreted solely according to its textual content. He therefore refused to reinterpret Maya’s action in terms of its response to the hostility embodied by a Jim Crow era monument to racial intimidation. He didn’t need any outside information: the Honor Code, exactly as it was written, was all that mattered. Pray’s approach infuriated me. Yet at the same time, his refusal to reinterpret the text allowed me to see the value of reading Ovid in the wake of Silent Sam.
Many scholars have interpreted Ovid’s Metamorphoses not simply as a grotesque poem, but as a poem that revels in its own violence. For example, in a book chapter titled “Reading Ovid’s Rapes,” Amy Richlin argues that the poem’s eroticized violence entices, rather than repulses, the male audience (Richlin 1992). Such approaches, even when they acknowledge the power of the resisting feminist reader, do not sufficiently account for the manifold ways in which Ovid actively encourages his audience to ask questions and resist. Richlin does not explore at any length, for example, how Ovid alters the rape narratives told by his literary predecessors to give greater voice to the suffering of the victims (for example, in Cyane’s diatribe against rape as Pluto snatches Proserpina, or Arethusa’s retelling of her own rape).
In a recently published chapter on violence and resistance in the Metamorphoses, Carole Newlands points out that previous scholarship has failed to fully account for the fact that the suffering and violence in the poem are often consequences of excessive power. She argues (p. 144) that “the poem’s aestheticization of violence disrupts the possibility of a complacent reading and thus opens the poem up to multiple perspectives and interpretations from a presumably diverse readership.” To demonstrate her point, Newlands highlights episodes where “the conjunction of violence and aesthetics has been found particularly problematic.” In these same episodes gods and rulers are particularly cruel toward their inferiors.
The contentious debate over how to read Ovid reminds me of Neville Morley’s comment on reading Thucydides with a view to modern social ills: “Reading his text is, and should be, a constant challenge; an exercise in thinking through ambiguity and uncertainty. It is a tool (by no means the only available tool) for developing the intellectual capabilities we need today more than ever.” Similarly, Ovid’s Metamorphoses cannot be interpreted simply or singularly, and we cannot scour it for straightforward comparanda for modern problems. It does not contain any answers; it does not account for the unique experience of blackness in America, the ongoing dispossession of black life after slavery. Nevertheless, the practice of reading Ovid’s text can show us how language both enacts and resists violence. More importantly, it can help us pass on to our students a critical approach to parsing dominant narratives of “honorable” behavior, power, and resistance; it can help us show those students that the way we interpret texts, much like the way we interpret political statements or acts of civil disobedience, matters.
Apollo’s flaying of the satyr Marsyas is a good case study for the kinds of readings we ought to be doing in the classroom. Ovid omits the traditional explanation for Marsyas’ punishment: his arrogant challenge to Apollo’s musical skill and his presumptive accusation that the god’s addition of vocals to his performance is unjust (e.g. in Diodorus Siculus 3.59). The exclusion of Marsyas’ inflated ego from the Metamorphoses makes his mutilation seem all the more excessive and arbitrary (Newlands p.167). The poet’s graphic language also brings the satyr’s suffering into focus: “blood flows everywhere, his uncovered nerves are exposed, and his agitated veins tremble without any skin” (cruor undique manat / detectique patent nervi, trepidaeque sine ulla / pelle micant venae, Met. 6.388–90, all translations are my own). Yet more striking is the poet’s second-person invocation of the audience (“you could count his guts leaping about and the fibers clearly visible in his chest,” salientia viscera posses / et perlucentes numerare in pectore fibras, Met. 6.390–91), which implicates the reader in the violence: the decision to respond is theirs, but they can no longer ignore the reality of the mutilated body.
Part of what audiences have found so repulsive about Ovid is his use of elegant prose to describe grotesque conditions, as exemplified by the Marsyas episode. The satyr speaks only once, as he is flayed: “‘Why are you tearing me apart from myself?’ he said. ‘Ah! It hurts, ah! It is not,’ he was crying, ‘so valuable, the tibia’” (‘quid me mihi detrahis?’ inquit / ‘a! piget, a! non est’ clamabat ‘tibia tanti,’ Met. 6.385–6). Newlands notes that the alliterative phrase me mihi is repulsive because the polyptoton — repetition of words derived from the same root — mirrors the satyr’s body being torn apart from itself. The postponement of the phrase tibia tanti also shocks the reader: where they would have expected Marsyas to make further comment on his pain or beg for mercy, he makes a witty, alliterative quip about his instrument.
Marsyas’ gibe has made many readers of Ovid uncomfortable. Dryden objected to Ovid’s depiction of the satyr in 1700: “Was this a Time to be witty, when the poor Wretch was in the agony of death?” (Tissol 1997). Newlands, however, rereads the episode in a more positive light, arguing that Marsyas’ ability to speak “in the midst of such desperate circumstances [is] a sign of the heroism of the artist that exposes the disproportionate nature of divine vengeance” (Newlands p.167). Marsyas’ quip demonstrates the enduring influence of the artist and their art in uncovering the violence of excessive power, even as that very power attempts to stifle expression.
Similar interpretive problems surround Ovid’s description of Tereus’ rape and mutilation of Philomela. Here, too, the poet uses graphic language to describe the excision of Philomela’s tongue, which trembles (“the very root of the tongue trembles,” radix micat ultima linguae, Met. 6.557) and leaps (“just as the tail of a mutilated snake is accustomed to leap,” utque salire solet mutilatae cauda colubrae, Met. 6.559) like the guts of Marsyas. Yet more disconcertingly, the poet reveals Tereus’ repeated rape of his mutilated sister-in-law with an elegantly constructed line: saepe sua lacerum repetisse libidine corpus (“he continually sought out her mutilated body because of his own desire,” Met. 6.559). Apart from the initial adverb, this comment is composed in the form of a golden line — adjective a, adjective b, verb, noun A, noun B — widely regarded as a sophisticated linguistic arrangement.
Readers have recoiled at the horrific aestheticization of the scene and seemingly flippant elegance of the narrator, but, as in the case of the Marsyas passage, a more optimistic reading informs the audience’s understanding of the relationship between power, art, and violence. Daniel Libatique has recently argued that Ovid’s stories of brutality are relevant today because of the seemingly immanent nature of the power imbalances the poet portrays. Yet, he adds, “looking at the poems offers us a way of recognizing structures of power and the ways in which they are constructed.” Libatique looks to Philomela’s tapestry, which he argues acts similarly to the #MeToo movement. By retelling the story of her rape and mutilation, Philomela regains control of the narrative and restores her voice. Despite Tereus’ control over speech and Philomela’s body, the tapestry reunites Philomela with her sister Procne, reestablishing a broken bond of kinship and enabling her to take revenge on her abuser.
The first tapestry woven in Book 6 — the tapestry of Arachne — sheds yet more hope on the story of Philomela. During a contest with Minerva, Arachne, too, weaves rape narratives into a tapestry. The goddess, whose own tapestry depicts the gods as benevolent rulers, responds by violently beating Arachne and the girl attempts to commit suicide before being turned into a spider. That Arachne has no means to enact retribution on the goddess may initially be read as a pessimistic outlook on the power of art: her attempt to expose violence only begets punishment. When Philomela’s tapestry allows for successful retribution against an abuser, however, the poet asks his audience to reevaluate: Arachne’s tapestry may have failed, but Philomela’s has not.
Like Marsyas, Philomela demonstrates that the creative impulse persists even in the face of excessive violence and abuse of power: oppressors can mutilate bodies and destroy lives, but they often cannot stifle the ability of art to speak truth to power. The hyper-aestheticized violence of Ovid’s Metamorphoses may then be read as the poet’s attempt to draw attention to the violence of his own world — violence glossed over by his poetic predecessors. Unlike Pindar, who revises divine rape narratives by obscuring the pain caused to mortal victims and emphasizing the subsequent “blessing” of divine children (DeBoer), Ovid lingers on the experience of the brutalized body. Not unlike Seneca, who also had philosophical goals, he forces the reader to imagine what that body looks like and how it feels; he asks them to consider their own complicity in pain and suffering.
Of course, the relevance of art as a means to resist violence cannot be overstated in Ovid’s context, considering that he was writing in a newly imperial Rome — a Rome about which T.P. Wiseman writes that “the novelty was not the cruelty itself, only the emperors’ total freedom to engage in it” (Wiseman p.9). That Jupiter is compared to Augustus as early as Book 1 implies that art has metapoetic significance as a commentary on Ovid’s own work as poet.
These stories about artistic expression as weapon in the fight against oppressive gods and kings mirror the experience of writing epic poetry under an almighty emperor. Poetry could not, perhaps, directly critique the emperor’s suppression, but it could repackage and (re)present it so as to engender the resistance of the audience; it could ensure that his violence was not forgotten. As Newlands writes of Ovid’s myths: “language…plays a prominent role as an instrument of resistance to the inequities of cruel and excessive punishment, thus serving as a double-edged weapon against the erasure of memory in the face of social and political repression. Double-edged, for language can engender violence as well as resist it” (p.145).
Ovid is certainly complicated. His poetry has been read as both proto-feminist and reprehensibly misogynist, and we must engage these difficulties while reading his work. We must also teach our students that language, like art, can be both oppressive and liberating. More importantly, we must teach them that we as readers have the ability to replicate and reinforce the violent erasures of the past. Texts do not exist within the “four corners” of a page, isolated from their social and political contexts. Likewise, monuments do not represent history in isolation, but a particular view of history.
Silent Sam, like Minerva’s tapestry, exemplified how works of art could be used to falsify narratives for the benefit of the powerful: it reaffirmed lies of Confederate beneficence while obscuring the inherent violence of the Confederate cause and Jim Crow intimidation. Yet Maya’s action reclaimed the power of art to call attention to what Silent Sam had concealed and what the university had been trying to forget: UNC’s campus is covered in black people’s blood. We have a duty to “read” Maya’s action with these circumstances in mind. Her recontextualization of Silent Sam sought a reckoning with violence where there never was one.
In a zine distributed on the day of Maya’s appeal, “the artists of the Recontextualization Project” explained their choice to create and install the plaques for James Cates and “the negro wench”:
We install these monuments as an act of transfiguration. We are reclaiming the built landscape. It is not too late to do what those before us would not or could not; it is not too late for a moral awakening and a true reckoning with the past. The future we want will not come about unless we fight for it. We commemorate James Cates and the Negro Wench as an act of war against a version of reality that has been created by white greed, hatred, lies, and genocide. We commemorate James Cates and the Negro Wench as an act of love for them and for a persistent dream, the dream of a world without white supremacy.
The plaques transformed the university’s landscape, forcefully confronting its occupants with the truth of its foundation on the backs of enslaved black folks and its sustained existence on, as Maya put it, “white aggression and black mercy.” Like Philomela’s tapestry and Maya’s recontextualization of Silent Sam, the plaques told stories that had been silenced to benefit the powerful. Like Ovid aestheticizing the brutalized body of Marsyas, the plaques asked viewers to consider their own complicity in violence: how had the erasure of these stories benefited them? How had their own ignorance of foundational violence begotten institutional violence?
Certain members of our community were not yet ready to answer these questions. By the time I took my special topic exam, the university had already removed the first plaque from the Pit, citing a facilities use policy. Shortly thereafter, local neo-Confederates stole the plaque on Franklin Street. The former was never recovered, but the latter was reinstalled for a short time before being stolen once again.
Despite these thefts, campus activists have continued to create in the name of anti-racism. Take Action Chapel Hill raised enough money to create new monuments, while the Recontextualization Project set up a patreon page with the goal of publishing a monthly zine. Individuals have also been inspired to create occasional changes to the university’s landscape, especially in the form of flash banner drops. Activists’ resilience in the face of repression by the university sends a powerful message to our community: UNC, for all its attempts to threaten them into silence, will hear from them; it will see them; and it will be forced to see itself as they see it.
Perhaps their resilience should send a message to Classicists, too. The texts we study have the potential to be both dangerous and redemptive. Greek and Roman authors preserved some of the most repulsive facets of ancient sexism, xenophobia, ethnocentrism, and classism, but also demonstrated possibilities of resistance under oppressive regimes. Samuel Ortencio Flores has recently argued that we can celebrate the achievements of ancient world, while simultaneously grappling with “the ways in which [its] culture and institutions … have been used and abused as exemplars to abhorrently long-lasting effect.” Indeed, it is our responsibility.
When we consider that most of our students will never again engage our discipline after leaving our classrooms, we must ask ourselves what we want them to remember. What skills do we want them to take away? The answer is clearer to me now more than ever. It is imperative that we teach our students to grapple with the complex nature of the past. We must show them how to see through the veneer of straightforward, unproblematic representation, and apply these skills to racist narratives in their own world. Otherwise, we may be missing an opportunity to undo some of the harm our field has perpetuated. We may also be doing a disservice to its radical potential. But as the Artists of the Recontextualization Project wrote, “It is not too late to do what those before us would not or could not.”
Kelly McArdle is a graduate student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, pursuing a PhD in Classics and a Graduate Certificate in Women’s and Gender Studies. She believes wholeheartedly in the anti-racist work done by Take Action Chapel Hill, whose cause you can donate to through the Anti-Racist Activist Fund.
