Decius Maximus Ausonius is an author who deserves to be
better known and appreciated. He covered the bulk of the fourth century AD
(AD310–305) and rose from prosperous farming stock to become professor at the
University at Burdigala (modern Bordeaux) and later was raised to becoming
tutor to prince Gratian, who was emperor of the West from 375 to 383. Gratian
made him consul in and at the same time Ausonius’ son was Pretorian Prefect of
Gaul.
Among the most affecting of Ausonius’ poems are his eulogies
to his family members, the Parentalia.
These seem to have been written by his to be recited over their graves on the
anniversaries of their deaths as part of what seems to have been a ‘pagan’ (or
at least traditional)ceremony in which they were invoked by having their names
recited three times. These verses seem to have been collected and ‘published’
late in his life, perhaps when his poetic energies were lower.
I want here to highlight the unusual case of Aemilia Hilaria,
his maternal aunt (matertera), who
was a doctor, as was Ausonius’s own father, Julius Ausonius. This is the text
of his verses to his aunt’s shade. The ellipsis is believed to indicate a
textual lacuna.
Aemilia Hilaria, My Mother's Sister, An Avowed Virgin
You too who, though
in kinship's degree an aunt, were to me a mother, must now be recalled with a
son's affection, Aemilia, who in the cradle gained the second name of Hilarus
because,
bright and cheerful after the fashion of a boy, you made without pretense
the very picture of a lad ...
busied in the art of healing, like a man. You
ever hated your female sex, and so there grew up in you the love of consecrated
maidenhood. Through three and sixty years you maintained it, and your life's
end was also a maiden's end. You cherished as well me with your precepts and
your love as might a mother; and therefore as a son I make you this return at
your last rites. (Ausonius Parentalia 6, from Loeb Edition Opuscula vol.1, trans Hugh G Evelyn
White, 1919, pp.67 & 69)
It is hard
to say what Aemila was. She might have been a lesbian, or more probably
considered herself to be a male in some sense. It was not of course possible to
alter the physicality of one’s sex in those days. But it was possible to
transcend the social expectations, which she did, becoming a doctor. Perhaps
she worked alongside Julius, the author’s father. While Ausonius describes his
mother with little affection, and reports her spinning wool in the convention
of the Roman matrona, Aemilia was
clearly a but unusual. As we know from many studies, a lot of women worked
outside the home, ran businesses and professions, ventured money as investors. Jane
Gardner’s excellent book Women in Roman
Law and Society (Indiana University Press, 1991) gives many accounts from
Roman primary sources of just that, many in the eastern provinces; she
discusses Aemila and other women doctors on pp.240-1).
There seems
to have been a tension in parts of the empire between social expectations and
individual wishes. Aemilia’s sister Aemilia Maura (‘the dark’) is said to be
‘perpendiculum’ (rigidly upright, as the word refers to a mason’s or
carpenter’s plumb line), but no such terminology is given for Aemilia Hilaria,
who is said to have more virum.
That her
cognomen (given in the poem’s title as in female form, but the title might not
be on the original) is given as masculine in the text suggests that she carried
a male name and identified with that name. She supposedly did so ‘without pretense’,
but ‘ever hated [her] female sex’.
Aemila
Hilaria and her sister Aemila Maura seem largely to have brought up Ausonius
after his mother died early. The term ‘virgin’ as translated by White need not
make us assume anything of her sexuality or lack of it. Virgo just means ‘unmarried woman’ and the use of that word alone
English sense of someone who has never had sex dates only to c.AD1300. Here virgo devota is someone who has pledged
not to marry, which might simply be a dedication to her career as a doctor. It
is only a generation back that most women did not drop their work upon
marriage, and in the UK is was considered appropriate for women teachers to be
single if at all possible. However, Graydon Snyder in Ante Pacem: Archaeological Evidence of Church Life before Constantine
says there were ‘pagan’ communities of women with the term virgo devota (virgines
devotae), but that a simple unmarried woman might be termed virgo innupta. (Mercer University Press,
2003, p.234), this being from analysis of memorials. Perhaps Aelia lived in a
female community as a male, or relieved from the pressure of females to
conform.
It is
Ausonius’s comment that she hated her own sex (feminei sexus odium tibi semper et inde/ crevit devotae virginitatis
amor,) which is slightly surprising.
Greek myth
contain several instances of contrary sexuality. In Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Iphis is female but raised as a boy (Ov. Met. 9.9);
the name Iphis, allegedly Cretan, was available for both sexes. The mother,
impelled by her husband’s command to kill her first child if a girl, invokes
Isis, who tells her to pretend the newborn girl is a boy; Iphis reaches
adulthood and falls in love with a girl, Ianthe. Isis, invoked again,
transforms Iphis into a male.
Antoninus
Liberalis, a later Greek author, wrote a collection of Metamorphoses, which
includes the myth of Leucippus, born female and given a male name, again in
Crete, but in this case the deity is Leto, mother of Apollo and Artemis.
Reference is made to other, mostly lost, myths. Leucippus means ‘white horse’
(leukos hippos). There is also a Leucippus, a male disguised as a female and a
companion of Daphne.
Only in
myth could sex be changed in those days. But there is a possibility that Aemilia
Hilaria could have been intersex; a few years ago I remember reading of a
number of children in Cuba, growing up in a remote community, who were male at
birth, but who became female at puberty. This was a significant genetic
indeterminacy, but every year many children are born biologically intersex. It
is not impossible that children on Crete in antiquity were subject to the same
limited gene pool in an island community and that such a prodigy entered myth.
However,
there is real warmth in Ausonius’s writing about his unusual aunt, showing she
was valued and loved in her own society.
