Female nightingales do not sing. Only the male sings, as Tereus does, attempting to woo Philomela with words. “Love made him eloquent,” Ovid writes, suggesting that Tereus’s language is aroused by Philomela’s silence. What space is a woman? “[S]ome Pallas in place which furthered my inuention. For I am in that point of Ouid his opinion, that, Si cupiat sponte disertus erit.” (Desire makes a man spontaneously eloquent.) A palace of pleasure arousing both erotic and narrative desires.

George Pettie, A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure, 1576.

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Just a kiss, he says, dropping his tackle box, and I know I should run. He grabs my head, and I am already clawing at his neck, terrified for myself but also terrified of hurting him. Hurting him will make it worse for me. He hisses in my ear as I slap his hands, and now he’s got his arms around me. I rear back, unbalancing myself, so that when I do the one thing I’ve been taught, which is to bring my right knee up hard into his groin, the blow is too weak.

That didn’t work, I stammer, as my leg grazes the inside of his thigh.

It never does, he replies. And now he has me on the ground.

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Philomel, Philomela: ME, from Greek philo + melos, song, a nightingale.
Matthew Arnold, “Philomela”:

How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!

Again—thou hearest!

Eternal passion!

Eternal pain!

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I do not use my voice. Two other men are ahead of us in the woods: I have no idea what they will do if called back, where their allegiances will lie. As if these were rules agreed upon, he doesn’t shout either. In retrospect, his silence suggests that his friends might have taken my side. But at that moment, the two of us cajole and beg and threaten in hisses. The whole attack is conducted in silence.

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Ovid says it is imagination that makes possible this sudden turn toward violence: Tereus “sees beyond what he sees,” an idea embroidered on by later writers. “[H]ee seemed to see her stand apparently before him (only a stronge imagination assurynge him that it was shee) which sight sunk so deeply into his heart and brought him such excessiue delight, that hee presently awaked, and missing the partie that procured him such pleasure, his ioy was turned to anoy,” writes George Pettie in his rewriting of the myth. To see past what we know into what we desire, to put that desire into language. And by performing that, to enact in the reader a similar performance. The art is not complete until we imagine the outcome for ourselves.

A Petite Pallace of Pettie his Pleasure

The Metamorphoses, 6.453–482

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