Of All the Stars, the Evening Star: Real and Fictional Latin Women Poets

Of all the stars, the evening star is the brightest and most beautiful. It is of course not a star but the planet Venus, the Roman goddess of love, sex, beauty, and fertility, and thus is an appropriate title for Jim Levy’s book about first century Roman women. As he says in the author’s note, for over two thousand years the Latin poets have had their say about love and hate and sex and marriage, and he decided to give voice to the women that they wrote Catullus’ Lesbia, Propertius’ Cynthia, Ovid’s Corinna, Horace’s Lydia, and others. In all there are twenty-two, three of them historically real women (an aristocrat, an actress and a poet) and nineteen fictional; twenty human and two goddesses. Lesbia to CatullusYou mock my sparrow and what’s worse, you mock his death with phony tears,but it is you, not death, who feedson every little pretty thing. Cynthia to PropertiusAnd the lock of dark hair over your eyes, those poet eyes both dark and bright. pupils blue. I even like your gamey smell and ink-stained fingersthat gently touch my waist, and when we struggle to the sound of hissing silk, I am a slave to love and branded such. “The poet’s task is saying not what happened but the kind of thing that might have happened.” Aristotle “When to her lute Corinna sings” Adrienne Rich