Content Note: The discussion below features a complicated example of what might be interpreted as a gender transition represented in ancient mythology. Because multiple perspectives on the gender identity of the central figure are plausible, pronouns are used here in accordance with the interpretation offered in that section of the narrative or the later analysis.
The lost world of antiquity regularly features in this blog, and for good reason: from Mesopotamia to early Christian Rome, queer narratives proliferate. Earlier features in this chronological category have included the Sacred Band of Thebes, Achilles and Patroclus, and the goddess Ishtar among others. This story, however, represents my inaugural foray into Roman mythology with a curious, oft-neglected topic in that canon: love among women. Or does it?
To be sure, the strange tale of Iphis and Ianthe is stubbornly difficult to categorize as a queer history researcher. Is this legendary couple a unique exemplar of lesbian passion in the ancient world, is it a story of transmasculine gender transition, or is it perhaps both at the same time?
Clash of Civilizations
While the ancient Greek world seemed rife with both mythical and real examples of queer intimacy (particularly among men), the Roman Republic and then Empire were a different matter entirely. The Romans, who absorbed many of their religious and sociocultural views from the earlier civilization which they conquered, were certainly aware of its views on homosexuality. Nevertheless, Louis Crompton writes that for the Romans, love among men “did not have the same high cultural import and was not regarded as the root of deep, inspiring personal devotion.”[1]
Indeed, the Roman view of homosexuality – again, maintaining the focus on men for the moment – was a decidedly more negative one compared to that of the Greeks. Though not exclusively the case throughout Roman society over its centuries of history, sexual activity of every variety was viewed through the lens of dominance versus subjugation.
Crompton notes, for example, that the sexual assault of male slaves by their Roman masters was both common and accepted, if not necessarily endorsed (this was also true for female slaves). This violent paradigm for homosexuality is particularly notable given that the early Christian communities, who were birthed at the height of Roman imperial power and cultural influence, ultimately adopted a profoundly negative view of homosexual acts.
R.B. Parkinson agrees that “[t]he Romans considered that a man should be dominant, both socially and sexually” and thus maintained his proper social role whoever he slept with. He adds, however, that “reality will have been much more varied.”[2] In other words, there is some (limited) evidence for genuine romantic passions between men within the Roman world around the turn of the millennium.
But what of women? As the above summary suggests, women were overwhelmingly disempowered in Roman society and relegated to “passive” social and sexual roles at every turn. Women were almost exclusively under the control of their father or their husband throughout their life; they were usually married as teenagers and their roles as wives and mothers were their foremost, lifelong responsibilities.[3]
While a handful of women exercised de facto political power through their husbands, sons and brothers, the vast majority of Roman women lived private lives and enjoyed few legal rights and limited status. Roman scholars and philosophers reinforced their society’s low view of women, citing lack of self-control, emotionality and irrationality as among the reasons no woman could be entrusted with self-governance.[4] Time, indeed, is a circle.
So it should come as no surprise that female sexuality was viewed as the domain and exclusive control of men – and anything which breached that mandated passivity, or trespassed on hetero- and masculine dominance, would be considered pernicious indeed. Undoubtedly, lesbian affairs and perhaps committed relationships were present in Roman history – but the available record to confirm them or understand any potential lesbian subcultures is especially thin, even moreso than among homosexual men. The legend of Iphis and Ianthe is thus a standout example from this culture and time period, though a mightily complex one.
Love in the Time of Ovid
The prolific Roman poet Ovid has gone down as one of the great writers of his age; unsurprisingly, Ovid’s views on women were a proverbial mixed bag. As one analysis of his magnus opus Metamorphoses notes, “[t]he psychology of women in love is especially intriguing to Ovid, who, like many Greco-Roman writers before him, presents women’s libidos as destructive…two readings are possible: Ovid’s interest in women might be sympathetic, or it might confirm long-standing misogynistic attitudes about women’s lack of control.”[5]
Who was this writer, so infamous that his work caused him to die in exile? Originally named Publius Ovidius Naso, he was born in Sulmo, Italy in 43 BCE to a moderately wealthy Roman family.[6] He had been trained for a career as an imperial official and studied in both Rome and Athens, giving him a wide breadth of knowledge in the extant philosophy and religious context of late antiquity. The latter perhaps inspired him to forego the predictable life of a technocrat and pursue the arts – namely, through his soon to be controversial pen.
Ovid’s first major works included Heroides, Amores, and Ars amatorial also known as “The Art of Love” (published in 3 BCE). The latter work put Ovid on the metaphorical map in Rome. As one biography notes, “Ovid’s elegance, both in verse and comportment, made him a favorite among the moneyed class of Rome…His elegant verses on love appealed to a society being forced into a period of moral reformation by the emperor, Augustus.”[7] To be sure, the emperor wasn’t pleased with the especially salacious Ars amatorial. He ultimately condemned the scandalous poet to exile in Tomi in 8 CE, where Ovid would remain until his death.
Interestingly, his most storied work Metamorphoses was completed the same year as his exile began. It is in this later work that we find the story of Iphis and Ianthe. The story itself, elucidated below, fits comfortably with the wider theme of the material. As the title suggests, “[a] repository of Roman and Greek mythology, Metamorphoses explores the concept of change, both physical and emotional, that Ovid regularly referenced throughout his work.”[8]
Certainly, “transformation” in the realms of romance and sexuality (themes Ovid had explored heartily in his earlier canon) are prominent in Metamorphoses also. Unlike many of his contemporaries, however, Crompton contends that “Ovid can be confidently identified as a tolerant heterosexual” and that “he treats the bisexuality Greek myth without prejudice.”[9] For instance, Ovid offers thoughtful, even laudatory, interpretations of the myths of Apollo and Hyacinthus (the complicated subject of an earlier post on this blog). But did Ovid’s tolerance and nuanced view of sexuality extend to women, a subject dubiously portrayed in his prior catalogue? A final answer is beyond the scope of this blog post, but it is thanks to Ovid and Metamorphoses that Iphis and Ianthe are preserved to us.
It’s a Boy?
Ovid’s relation[10] of “the change of Iphis” begins in Phaestus on the island of Crete. He describes her father, a humble man named Ligdus, who is especially vexed as his wife, Telethusa, prepares to birth their first child:
“There are two things which I would ask of Heaven: that you may be delivered with small pain, and that your child may surely be a boy. Girls are such trouble, fair strength is denied to them. Therefore (may Heaven refuse the thought) if chance should cause your child to be a girl, (gods pardon me for having said the word!) we must agree to have her put to death.”
One can only be grateful that Ligdus preceded the era of gender reveals by thousands of years lest he today be “viral” for all the worst reasons. Yet Telethusa was not wholly bereft of support in her gravid condition, for the Egyptian goddess Isis appeared to her in a dreamlike vision:
“And now the expected time of birth was near, when in the middle of the night she seemed to see the goddess Isis, standing by her bed… ‘O Telethusa, one of my remembered worshippers, forget your grief;
your husband’s orders need not be obeyed; and when Lucina has delivered you, save and bring up your child, if either boy or girl. I am the goddess who brings help to all who call upon me; and you shall
never complain of me—that you adored a thankless deity’.”
Indeed, as fate would have it, she was delivered of a girl – but swore her nurses to secrecy. Ironically, the unknowing sire named his “son” after his own grandfather – Iphis – which happened to be a gender neutral name.
“Hearing it so called, the mother could not but rejoice, because her child was given a name of common gender, and she could use it with no more deceit.”
So Iphis was raised as a boy – dressed, trained and educated with the full expectation that she would be a fine, upstanding Greek citizen in the not-too-distant future. So it was the inevitable subject of marriage which brought the rub at last.
“Burnt With Passion”
Ligdus eventually sought out a suitable bride for his “son” when she reached the age of thirteen. He selected a charming young Cretan lady named Ianthe, described as golden-haired and of “unequalled beauty”. The match was a fortuitous one:
“Of equal age and equal loveliness, they had received from the same teachers, all instruction in their childish rudiments. So unsuspected love had filled their hearts with equal longing—but how different!”
But this puts Iphis in a seemingly intractable problem: she seems absolutely certain that she cannot sufficiently love or please her future wife.
“But Iphis is in love without one hope of passion’s ecstasy, the thought of which only increased her flame; and she a girl is burnt with passion for another girl! She hardly can hold back her tears, and says: ‘O what will be the awful dreaded end, with such a monstrous love compelling me?’”
She ruefully mourns that she, apparently of all females on the earth, loves another female. She begs for intervention, to be spared such a cruel fate of perpetual longing. Her mother, Telethusa, understands her daughter’s crisis and delays the wedding long enough that they might pray together in a nearby temple for a miracle from on high:
“The mother took the circled fillets from her own head, and her daughter’s head, and prayed, as she embraced the altar—her long hair spread out upon the flowing breeze—and said: ‘O Isis, goddess of Paraetonium, the Mareotic fields, Pharos, and Nile of seven horns divided—oh give help!’”
Telethusa and Iphis experience a sudden burst of the goddess’s might throughout the temple: shaking doors, a quaking altar, beams of light surrounding them. Once stillness returns, the pair leave together – but Telethusa quickly realizes that her daughter has been changed.
“Her face seemed of a darker hue, her strength seemed greater, and her features were more stern. Her hair once long, was unadorned and short. There is more vigor in her than she showed in her girl ways. For in the name of truth, Iphis, who was a girl, is now a man!”
The miracle achieved, a jubilant Iphis weds his beautiful Ianthe – and so ends one of Ovid’s most infamous stories.
Lesbian Love Story?
Where to even begin with such a complex, unusual and multi-faceted tale? How does one go about interpreting the text alone, let alone its queer subtexts, and determine which labels (if any) might apply to this particular legend?
At the outset, I would clarify that staking down clear boundaries around the definition of “lesbian” and “women loving women” relationships is not in my purview (speaking as an aroace), and the gallons of ink spilled around that particular topic is not the prerogative of this blog post. What I aim for here is a discussion about what her narrative tell us about how Ovid and his contemporaries viewed what were then non-normative sexual and perhaps gender identities.
We might start with the relationship between Iphis and Ianthe itself and ask if Ovid views the prospect of a lesbian relationship through a negative lens. Certainly, Iphis seems to do so: the prospect of her love for Ianthe alone sends her spiraling into a pit of despair, shared and reinforced by her own mother. She bemoans their explicit physical incapability, going so far as to cite how the “ram inflames the ewe, and every doe follows a chosen stag”. One imagines, given the wider Roman view on sexuality, that this lamentation reflects as much the social reprobation associated with a woman sexually and romantically loving another woman as any fear of physical incompatibility.
Christine Downing takes the view that, while Ovid sees Iphis’ transformation as a “happy ending”, what we have here instead is “a story which suggests how isolating, confusing and terrifying lesbian desire can be when there are no myths, no models, to follow.”[11] She goes on to add that Iphis’ tale is one of lesbian self-discovery: “[t]he myth recognizes the love the two girls feel for one another and shows the confusion this engenders in Iphis who does not know that women have ever before been drawn to women.”[12]
Deborah Kamen provides a similar interpretation grounded in a matrix of how Romans (like Ovid) viewed unconventional and unnatural sexual acts. She writes, “Iphis’s desires must be naturalized and she herself must undergo a compulsory metamorphosis from female to male.”[13] Otherwise, a lesbian sexual relationship is impossible and incomprehensible (at least to the Roman mind).
These interpretations suggest that this story is perhaps bittersweet after all; because a lesbian partnership is out of the question in the Roman paradigm, Iphis has no choice but to gratefully accept a changed body in order for her love to be “naturalized”, in Kamen’s phrasing. If we accept this view, then the tale is a brief flirtation with the notion of lesbian love, but one which tidily resolves itself to fit neatly into the worldview of its then audience.
Gender Bender?
But this discussion raises an obvious counter: given the plain text, is Iphis best understood as a transgender man?
Gender bending legendary figures, after all, were far from unknown in the Greek and Roman myths (Hermaphroditus being one example) while documented figures who exhibited gender dysphoria and/or took actions suggestive of gender transition are sprinkled throughout antiquity. The cult of Atargatis is one such exemplar featured on an earlier blogpost.
Does the text itself support this view? Certainly, Iphis seems to have no challenges being raised as a boy, and is by all appearances happy and contented with being perceived as such. The external world (including his own mother and father) perceives and interacts with Iphis as a male, to everyone’s apparent consent and satisfaction.
In this perspective, his “identity crisis” only comes about when the prospect of sexual incompatibility is raised by the imminent marriage. These clues could be used to infer that Iphis is simply an assigned female at birth transgender youth, pleased to have grown up as a boy and delighted to ultimately become a man in every way.
If Iphis is indeed a transgender man, then the central issue in this narrative is not whether or not the pair can be properly wed, or if either or both are lesbians. Rather, the crux issue is if Iphis can achieve his desired gender transition. In the full context of the poem, this interpretation is compelling: after all, Iphis’ birth is the inciting event in the story, and his life is its central theme and subject. The story is relayed in a master work called “Metamorphoses”, which strongly indicates that his “transition” is the core of the story at hand. Iphis literally and metaphorically cries out, begs the gods for a gender transition. His mother joins her cries to his, and their linked devotion at last produces the desired results.
Ken Moore’s analysis takes this view. He argues, “Iphis clearly sees himself as male, albeit within a biologically female body. And he eventually gets re-sexed so that his body matches his gender.”[14] In Moore’s view, the subsequent unfolding of the story can be correctly identified as an episode of gender dysphoria – one which is resolved through an expedited physical transition.
This transition resolves Iphis’ dysphoria and enables his complete happiness, as well as his marriage to his beloved Ianthe. Moore suggests that Ovid himself views Iphis as a male in his relation of the story, concluding that “[Ovid] has managed to produce a fictional case of an individual who conforms remarkably closely to modern definitions of gender dysphoria.”[15]
Happily Ever After?
Viewing Iphis through the lens of the transgender experience in some aspects simplifies the narrative and leaves us with a fully satisfying ending: the lovers are each happy, happy with each other, and living happily ever after. But a definitive conclusion (as I so often repeat on this blog) for this story’s interpretation is impossible. Scholars and amateur commentators alike have reviewed, reassessed and reimagined this tale for a millennium, and will probably do so for a millennium more.
In that context, how the Romans of Ovid’s day interpreted Iphis – long before the modern queer terminology available to us – becomes less relevant in light of what the story means (or can mean) for queer individuals today. Even a conservative analysis would have little choice but to agree that this myth is decidedly “queer”, however one chooses to use the word and whichever identities one assigns to its central characters.
Even in the strictly patriarchal Roman Empire (a culture legendary for violent subjugation of individuals and ideologies which challenged established norms) a story of impassioned queer love breaks through from the pen of a scorned poet. Perhaps Ovid, who spent the end of his life in an ignominious exile, saw fit to contest Roman notions of sexuality and biologically-determined gender identity. Whatever his motivations, or those of the Greeks who told this myth long before he wrote it down, the story which survives to us is a fascinating bit of history. Or, more to the point – our history.
[1] Louis Crompton, “Rome and Greece” in Homosexuality and Civilization (Harvard University Press, 2003), pg. 80.
[2] R.B. Parkinson, “The ‘Warren Cup’”, in A Little Gay History: Desire and Diversity Across the World, Columbia University Press, New York, 2013, pg. 51.
[3] Suzanne McGee, “What Role Did Women Play in Ancient Rome?,” History, updated June 8, 2023, https://www.history.com/news/women-ancient-rome.
[4] Ibid.
[5] Stephanie McCarter, “Reading the Power Dynamics of Gender in Ovid’s Metamorphoses,” excerpted from Metamorphoses by Ovid, November 8, 2022, https://lithub.com/reading-the-power-dynamics-of-gender-in-ovids-metamorphoses/.
[6] “Ovid”, The Poetry Foundation, accessed February 23, 2025, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/ovid.
[7] “Ovid”, Academy of American Poets, accessed February 23, 2025, https://poets.org/poet/ovid.
[8] The Poetry Foundation, ibid.
[9] Crompton, pg. 94.
[10] The full text from Metamorphoses can be read here, although Ovid’s recollection is one version of the legend which at one point likely had many versions.
[11] Christine Downing, “Lesbian Mythology,” Historical Reflections / Réflexions Historiques 20, no. 2 (1994): 169–99, http://www.jstor.org/stable/41298993.
[12] Ibid.
[13] Deborah Kamen, “Naturalized Desires and the Metamorphosis of Iphis,” Helios 39, no. 1 (2012): 21-36, https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/hel.2012.0000.
[14] Ken Moore, “The Iphis Incident: Ovid’s Accidental Discovery of Gender Dysphoria,” Athens Journal of History 7, no. 2 (2021): 95-116, https://doi.org/10.30958/ajhis.7-2-1.
[15] Ibid, pg. 112.