The Body’s Borders: Violation and the Visual in the Carmina Priapea

Roman masculinity is often figured as an aggressive and violent sexuality in which the vir forcibly imposes his sexual, political, and social will upon women, slaves and men of lower classes (homines). The figure of Priapus is likewise often taken as documentary evidence for this mode of Roman masculinity, particularly in the collection of poems termed the Carmina Priapea. In the usual reading, Priapus is a stand-in for the master of the house (dominus), who can legally violate any intruders on his property – symbolizing Roman ideals of boundaries, borders, violation, and social and personal integrity. Intimately caught up in these boundaries – especially the body’s – is the gaze, an object of special anxiety among the Roman elite. The gaze can alternately affirm and violate, indicating submission or dominance. This paper argues that the Carmina Priapea uses the ambivalence of the gaze to allow vir, homo, woman and slave each to identify as reader, and to destabilize and re-evaluate the very masculinity that it at first appears to reinforce.