On the road with Tibullus

In poem 1.7, Tibullus celebrates the accomplishments of Messalla as an incarnation of Osiris. The occasion of the poem is the birthday of the triumphant general, and the mythic evocation of the god that occupies its center, as in a Pindaric ode, was meant to reflect the glory of the laudandus. The identification of Messalla, a Roman patrician, with the eastern, castrated consort of Isis is striking. In part, poem’s the mythic center functions so as to equate the prominent Roman general, literary patron, and political personality with the extent of the empire—its global reach under the reign of Octavian and its mapping of a new cosmopolitan world of conquest and exchange stretching from Aquitaine in the West to the Nile in the East. This paper offers a Lacanian reading of Tibullus’s assimilation of Messalla’s accomplishments to the Egyptian god, arguing that the poem’s focus on Messalla’s travel and conquests, including his status as road-builder, is inseparable from his embodiment of the Law of the father, a role that always assumes both the possession of the phallus and its submission to the law under the sign of castration

Art · Castration · Psychoanalysis · Sociology · Classical Antiquity Studies · Gender Studies · History · Medicine · Psychology · Internal Medicine