Sitting on the Edge: Masculine and Feminine Nouns in Alcaeus 130b (original) (raw)

Abstract

The wretched persona of Alcaeus 130b (Voigt) progresses through four stanzas of strife, exclusion, and finally resignation. Then, a respite: the fifth stanza introduces not the stasis-ridden world of the male hetaireia, but the harmonious religious gathering of Lesbian women. We sit with the persona on the edge of this stanza, listening to their harmonious cries and taking a break from the tumultuous world of the poem. Here it seems that the persona has found a community: unable to participate in the agora and boule, the persona might as well be a woman—he has as much political agency as one. Yet despite this, the utterly feminine nature of the fifth stanza of fragment 130b, from the gender of its nouns to the actions described and to the participants, excludes the male speaker from full integration and a complete return to the human community from which he is exiled. This paper reexamines Alcaeus 130b from the perspective of grammatical gender: how does the poet’s use of gendered nouns, adjectives, and participles affect the tension between inclusion and exclusion (content- and performance-wise) seen within the poem? By noting nouns according to grammatical gender and grammatical + social gender, we see how the gendered language of the poem carefully situates the persona loquens in between the active, politically viable masculine community and the contained, harmonious feminine community. The use and placement of nouns by their gender is striking, and even more so when compared with the larger Alcaic corpus. A preliminary survey of Alcaeus’ political poetry indicates that masculine nouns, etc. are preferred: at approximately 60% of total gendered language, masculine components outweigh feminine (roughly 25%) and neuter (15%) components. For 130b, however, masculine nouns, etc. account for only 53% of gendered components, while feminine nouns, etc. rise to 38% (neuters sit at 9%). Furthermore, in the other politically-themed poems, the feminine and masculine components are not strictly separated from one another. Yet in 130b, except for a few feminine nouns marked as either masculine (e.g., β[ό]λλας) or negative (e.g., μοῖραν ἀγροϊωτίκαν), the feminine nouns remain in the fifth stanza. We thus have a sudden concentration of feminine grammatical components, resulting in a stronger representation of feminine nouns, adjectives, and participles than in the other political poems. In 130b, then, the gendered language creates two communities from which the persona loquens is excluded that reinforce the two communities established by the persona’s narrative of his miserable life. The gendered grammar of the poem forces a liminality on the persona, complementing that forced upon him by his ‘life’ and by the speaker’s adoption of an exiled persona loquens for a performance in the close-knit masculine community of the symposion. The political efficacy and identity of the Greek, male citizen is ultimately at stake in this poem, and as this paper will demonstrate, the careful use of gendered grammar contributes to the speaker’s, and audience’s, dalliance with exile and feminine communities that is rejected in favour of masculine world of ἡ πόλις.

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