1. Introduction
[1.1] One of the most famous love triangles in Ancient Mediterranean literature is Ovid's threesome of Polyphemus, Acis, and Galatea (Metamorphoses 13.750–897). Polyphemus, a giant cyclops made famous in Homer's Odyssey, is smitten with the sea nymph Galatea, herself romantically involved with the handsome young Acis. Their story is narrated by Galatea, who recounts to her friend Scylla Polyphemus's long, detailed amatory song, followed by his attempted murder of his rival Acis, whom Galatea saves by transforming into a river god. Polyphemus remains just a would-be lover.
[1.2] This Ovidian episode is not quite as straightforward as it may appear, however. A number of details in Polyphemus's song suggest a latent attraction to Acis, Galatea's strapping young lover. Polyphemus's apparent obsession with Acis's physical attractiveness and his fantasies about sex between Acis and Galatea suggests the possibility of Galatea, the episode's narrator, as a conduit. Conduit fic, a term coined by fan studies scholar Kristina Busse and derived from Rhiannonhero's story Cherry Blossom Conduit, is a category within fan fiction that features "a threesome that serves as a lead-up to or temporary distraction from the central pairing" (2017, 87). Conduit fic usually involves two popular heterosexual characters who, despite any sexual tension that may already exist between them, need a third character to whom they are both attracted in order to get together. The third character, the conduit, is often the focalizer or narrator of such stories. Conduit fic thus represents a way in which readers queer texts, a reclamation of supposedly straight media, or media with queer subtexts that can be developed by fans, in new readings that foreground their relevance to and within queer communities. In this way conduit fic enacts what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003) called "reparative reading," a way of reading that foregrounds the pleasure in a text and embraces any potential surprises avoided by so-called paranoid readings. We can think of conduit fic as one practice by which we can conduct a reparative reading, "repairing" the text through recognizing the conduit as a queer dynamic within it. Scholars frequently undertake queer readings of Ovid's Metamorphoses, in which the multifaceted, shapeshifting, ever-transforming narrative, queerly unstable, also engages queer characters, temporalities, and situations (Zajko 2009; Begum-Lees 2020; Kelly 2020), but the conduit motif is uniquely appropriate for the Polyphemus-Acis-Galatea triangle, as I argue.
[1.3] I do want to emphasize that although I use a motif from fan fiction to read Ovid, I am not claiming that the Metamorphoses is fan fiction in any meaningful way. Potential correspondences between mythology and fan fiction are often eagerly pointed out by teachers of classical mythology—claims abound such as "Vergil's Aeneid is Homer fan fiction!" or, to travel further down the chain, "Book 14 of the Metamorphoses is Vergil fan fiction!"—but I agree with Keen (2016), who establishes some important distinctions between myth and fan fiction; namely, texts cannot be removed from or added to the ancient canon in a way analogous to modern fan fiction. Recent applications of fan studies to ancient texts, with the requisite caveats, include Kozak (2018), who uses the concept of the "fanboy auteur" to read the Greek tragedian Euripides's engagement with Homer, and Santucci (2022), who reads the Apocolocyntosis of the Roman philosopher Seneca as a fan work that directly adds on to Ovid's Metamorphoses.
[1.4] This limiting of methodology aside, I argue that the conduit fic lens can help us understand the relationship between Ovid's Polyphemus and Acis, the latter of whom does not appear in extant versions of the romantic Polyphemus story before Ovid, as well as fully realize Galatea's place as narrator of the episode. Theoretical lenses that center the transformation and repurposing of traditional stories can always be profitably applied to Ovid, whose Metamorphoses transforms earlier narratives just as the characters within change forms themselves. Ovid always "tells the same story differently" (Ars Amatoria 2.128; Galinsky 1975); whenever I teach Ovid, I emphasize to my students that he strives for originality. Despite this tendency, much important scholarship on this episode spends little time on Acis (beyond noting his etiological connection with a river in Sicily; see Hopkinson 2000; Böttcher 2023) and does not seem concerned with his positioning toward and by Polyphemus. Although this positioning is queer-coded, Galatea's role as the conduit invites us to consider her narratorial power and pleasure first and foremost.
2. Conduit fic
[2.1] What is conduit fic and how can it be used to read an ancient text? As is the case for much fan writing, conduit fic enables an author to bring to the surface latent truths about a text and the characters within it. In her exploration of the conduit, Busse (2017) reads the Marvel Cinematic Universe fan work open up my eager eyes by Glitteratiglue, who delves into the relationship between Steve Rogers (Captain America) and Bucky Barnes (The Winter Soldier), or "Stucky" as their pairing is sometimes called by fans. Glitteratiglue takes their relationship, defined by homosocial queer subtext, and writes the couple as queer on a textual level, enabled by a woman named Annie, who is sleeping with Bucky. On this fic, Busse writes (quotation marks indicate Glitteratiglue's original text):
[2.2] Steve comes back to his and Bucky's apartment to find that Bucky has brought home his date, Annie, from the Stark Expo for his last night before shipping out. Steve hears the two having sex and gets turned on by it. Even though he feels guilty, he doesn't stop: "It's bad enough that he's listening in on something so private, never mind getting turned on by it." Importantly, Steve's fantasy excites him as much as the sounds he is hearing: "His artist's imagination can fill in all the blanks for him." Moreover, it is clear in this tight third-person narrative that it is Bucky who turns him on, not Annie or the sex generally (2017, 87).
[2.3] Annie is based on Connie, a character who does appear briefly as Bucky's date in Captain America: The First Avenger (2011). Glitteratiglue has shifted the story's focalization in order to center Annie as a conduit for sexual encounters between Steve and Bucky. They are not the only one to do so, as the tag for Steve/Bucky fic on AO3 yields 58,772 results as of September 2024. These are not all stories that envision the two together, but tags such as "Sub Steve Rogers" (1,087 results), "Dom Bucky Barnes" (1,451 results), and even "Sex Worker Bucky Barnes" (265 results) surely signal fan works that do. But in Glitteratiglue's case, Annie provides the conduit that makes any sexual encounter between them possible, since these two "heterosexual" men would lack an opportunity to get together without her.
[2.4] The extent to which the rules of fan writing can apply to any nonfan writing, let alone a text created in a context far removed both chronologically and culturally from one's own, is an open question. But fan writing entails fan reading: writers must read (experience) a text (using a broad definition thereof) in order to understand it well enough to interact with it in a transformative way, and transformative writing, by its nature, resists the academic discomfort with surprise no less than it represents an investment in a text that itself can be rather academic. It is this notion of surprise that will reveal the usefulness of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick's (2003) "reparative reading" to my own application of conduit fic to this ancient threesome. In "Paranoid Reading and Reparative Reading, or, You're So Paranoid, You Probably Think This Essay Is About You," Sedgwick begins by questioning the utility of the "hermeneutics of suspicion," the de rigueur position of academics within the humanities. To what end are scholars suspicious when there are other ways of reading, learning, other experiences to be found in the various permutations of historical, literary, textual study? Sedgwick likens the hermeneutics of suspicion to paranoia and claims that a starting point of scholarly suspicion results in "paranoid readings," which always anticipate ways that our expectations can be undermined by potential surprises, subjecting us to humiliation. Scholars don't like making mistakes, after all, as they can undermine our credibility or standing within scholarly communities. By avoiding surprises one can avoid this sort of humiliation.
[2.5] Against this dominant tradition of paranoid reading, Sedgwick proposes a so-called reparative reading. She is influenced by the psychoanalyst Melanie Klein's "depressive position," which seeks to "repair" Klein's "paranoid" position, each position comprising a dialectic of infant states that vary depending on whether its primal needs are met: ("Part-objects" below, in Klein's object relation theory, refers to the functions of objects as they are split up by infants according to their primal needs, such as the mother's breast, the presence of which provides nourishment, the absence of which anxiety.)
[2.6] [The depressive] is the position from which it is possible in turn to use one's resources to assemble or "repair" the murderous part-objects into something like a whole—though, I would emphasize, not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one's own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Among Klein's names for the reparative process is love. (Sedgwick 2003, 128, emphasis hers)
[2.7] We can assemble texts to our own specifications in order to create more satisfying objects, which then provide nourishment and comfort. This is a process that foregrounds the love we have for the objects with which we identify, which themselves both help comprise our idiosyncratic worldview and complement our very identities. Such is the goal of much fan work, of course, and the process of reparative reading relates to two of the three axes of fan fiction proposed by Wilson (2021): transformation of the source text and existence revolving around or within an affective community.
[2.8] Recently, Sedgwick's model has found some acceptance within the discipline of classical studies. Mueller (2024) finds in Sedgwick a guide for her reading of the Greek poet Sappho alongside Homer; for Mueller, Sappho herself is a reparative reader, something of a Sedgwick in archaic Greece. Mueller remains interested in intertextuality, the phenomenon of texts positioned in response to other texts through strategies such as allusion, reference, and quotation, but she conducts an "avuncular" reading of Sappho and Homer, one that does not privilege the usual paranoid, historicist concerns of teasing out Homeric elements in Sappho or reconstructing a positivistic environment of ancient lyric performance. Such is the impetus for my reading of Ovid's Polyphemus, Acis, and Galatea, with some important differences: I foreground activities of reading and writing that may be more intentionally textual, as the production of Ovid's Metamorphoses in the early first century CE is far removed from the lyric performance milieu of Sappho's archaic Lesbos; and I see this textual production as both antecedent to and reminiscent of modern fan writing in its invitation to construct the trio as a queer threesome, with Galatea as the narrator-conduit enacting her own fantasy of the sexual attention of two male figures, not only for her but among each other. This reading comports also with Sedgwick's recognition of reparative reading as an especially queer mode of reading, one which resists dominant paradigms such as (often irretrievable) authorial intent and supposed objectivity.
3. Ovid's love triangle
[3.1] Let us turn our attention to the Ovidian scene with this mode of reading in mind. Ovid's episode is an embedded narrative told by the nymph Galatea, who narrates to Scylla the attempts of the cyclops Polyphemus to win her away from the handsome Acis. Polyphemus is a pastoral lover, influenced by the Hellenistic Greek poet Theocritus's depiction of him in Idylls 6 and 11, who sings a long amatory song to attract Galatea. This attempt fails, and Polyphemus subsequently crushes Acis by throwing a boulder at him. Galatea saves his life at the last minute by transforming him into a river god.
[3.2] I agree with scholars such as Tissol (1990) and Salzman-Mitchell (2007) who emphasize the feminine perspective with which Ovid rewrites the myth, focalized by Galatea. But on the other hand, I do think that the characterization of Galatea's speech by scholars such as Böttcher (2023, 305) and Mack (1999, 55–56) as "girl talk" or the conversation of "gossiping women" underplays the sophistication of Galatea's narratorial role in reporting (and constructing) the complex song of Polyphemus. Unlike most of the scholarship on this episode, my own reading does not foreground intertextuality but a space of possibility opened up by Galatea's narration, the fantasy of two men fighting over her and the potential titillation in Polyphemus displaying a preoccupation with Acis's physical and sexual attractiveness, as well as the sexually loaded language with which he fantasizes about Acis's dismemberment.
[3.3] Galatea has Polyphemus first sing about her attractive qualities, then her unwillingness to love him, then the benefits he will confer on her if she reciprocates his love. He then gives a sophistic explanation of his own unattractiveness, thereby spinning his supposed ugly physical appearance as a beautiful one. This allows him to transition to the subject of Acis and ask Galatea why she prefers him as a lover (Latin text is from Tarrant 2004):
[3.4] sed cur Cyclope repulso 860
Acin amas praefersque meis complexibus Acin?
ille tamen placeatque sibi placeatque licebit,
quod nollem, Galatea, tibi; modo copia detur,
sentiet esse mihi tanto pro corpore vires.
viscera viva traham divulsaque membra per agros 865
perque tuas spargam (sic se tibi misceat!) undas.[3.5] But why, after rejecting the Cyclops, do you love Acis and prefer Acis to my embraces? Anyway, let him be pleasing to himself, as well as to you—even though I hate that. But now let an opportunity be given for him to feel that I have great strength, just as great as my body. I will drag out his living organs and will scatter his torn-up limbs through the fields and through your waves—that's the way he'll mix himself with you!
[3.6] I want to focus on several details in this passage. First, Ovid's bounding of line 861 with Acin, an inflected form of Acis's name, on both sides; in other words, the word signifying his name both begins and ends the line. These two occurrences of Acis's name are the only times Polyphemus mentions him by name in his song. The word order suggests a preoccupation with Acis, however; not only is his name repeated at the end of the line, but Ovid syntactically loads the line so that Acis surrounds (or is wrapped around) words that signify both Galatea and Polyphemus. It is as if Acis's embraces, not his own (meis complexibus "my embraces"), surround them both. On this passage, Garth Tissol notes that Polyphemus is "incapable of comprehending Galatea's preference" and "betrays in these lines even greater naiveté and arrogance than before" (1990, 57). But Polyphemus's acknowledgement of Acis's ability to please (placeat) Galatea, certainly with sexual overtones, suggests Galatea's own insertion of her lover's attractiveness into the song—we shouldn't forget that the song is a product of her own narration.
[3.7] Polyphemus then seems to accept the amatory supremacy of his rival, choosing instead to threaten him physically, but his threats seem sexual in themselves. Polyphemus sings "But now let an opportunity be given for him to feel that I have great strength, just as great as my body." Several words in this sentence suggest Polyphemus's preoccupation with Acis's attractiveness. The Latin noun copia ("opportunity," 863) can connote erotic access, an opportunity for sexual intercourse, as it does earlier in Ovid's poem, in the famous Echo and Narcissus episode. There the young man Narcissus swears he will die before a sexual opportunity (copia) is afforded to the nymph Echo as she pursues him. She of course repeats his closing lines sit tibi copia nostri! ("Let us have an opportunity for you!", Met. 3.392), in accordance with the plight suggested by her name. Hopkinson (2000) and Hardie (2024) in each of their respective commentaries pick up this possible meaning, but beyond Hopkinson's noting that the following line "contains an element of surprise" (226) in light of this meaning, neither author pursues it further for its relevance to Polyphemus's own mention of Acis's attractiveness.
[3.8] Polyphemus's vires, "strength," suggests a force that can compel sexual assault, as in some loci elsewhere in Ovid (Ars 1.673, Met. 4.233 and 9.332) as well as in the Roman prose writer Cicero (Mil. 4.9, Ver. 2.1.24). The attention he calls to his own body (Latin corpore) invites images of the bodies of these two male figures close to each other, particularly considering the possible sensuality of the verb sentiet, "he will feel," with which the line begins. Viscera, "organs," at the beginning of 865 sometimes connotes the testicles (as in Petronius 119.21 and Pliny NH 20.142), and membra often refers to the membra virilia, the penis and testicles. The ironic ending "That's the way he'll mix himself with you!" conjures a confused combination of body parts in Galatea's sea, a moment when violent dismemberment and sex are intertwined. Polyphemus's threatening stance toward Acis foregrounds his status as the excluded part of the love triangle, the voyeur looking in. Jealousy and a palpable preoccupation with Acis's body put the focus on Polyphemus's viewing experience—a source of irony, considering his fated blinding at the hands of Odysseus.
[3.9] The hermeneutics of suspicion train us to see what we can unearth in Ovid's literary and historical worldview from the desire lines running neatly from Polyphemus to Galatea, Galatea to Acis, not overlapped or queered as in this reparative reading, in which both lines originate from Polyphemus and aim at both figures. Here I think of the literalization of sexual orientation, as explored by Ahmed (2006); Polyphemus is oriented toward both Galatea and Acis, addressing Galatea in his song and attempting to woo her but attracted also to her lover.
[3.10] I want to complicate the picture of Polyphemus's one-sided viewing experience by noting the ambiguity of voyeurism in this episode. As Acis and Galatea watch and listen to Polyphemus's song, "their behavior smacks of voyeurism" (Griffin 1983, 196). Griffin thinks that Acis's introduction—and witnessing of Polyphemus's song—helps inspire the reader's sense of pity for poor Polyphemus, unsuccessful lover. It is worth mentioning, however, that Theocritus's Polyphemus—a chief influence on Ovid—has no rival yet is also pitiable for his lack of erotic success. Given the sexually loaded language with which Polyphemus casts Acis, Acis's presence in this episode suggests that Ovid has brought us into the realm of fantasy, the narrator Galatea's experience of two male figures fighting over her. She is narrator-voyeur, capable of arranging the elements of the threesome in any way she likes, including the orchestration of a Polyphemus-Acis pair. Acis, of course, does not seem to reciprocate Polyphemus's prurient attention to his body. Acis doesn't get much of a say in the episode's action at all; Mack notes that the only time he speaks is to ask Galatea for help as Polyphemus runs after him (1999, 54–56). Just as when she saves Acis by transforming him into a river-god, Galatea pulls all the strings.
[3.11] The narrative power given to Galatea enables the conduit fantasy. In Glitteratiglue's fic, Annie is the x-factor that makes possible any sexual contact between Steve and Bucky. She represents the voice of a fan writing public eager for the sexual undertones between the male heroes to burst out into the open, a change in the film's focalization for the benefit of the reader as voyeur. A similar innovation is happening in Ovid's version of the Polyphemus as lover myth: a third lover is introduced, not only to put Ovid's own twist on a familiar story or to increase the episode's emotional depth or ability to evoke pity but to subvert the reader's expectations about who receives pleasure in narration. Through Galatea, and only through Galatea, the monstrous cyclops and the handsome youth get together, a spin on the story enabled not just by the story's internal narrator but by a reading public that lays claim to a beloved threesome and reconfigures it, based on some textual details, for their own pleasure. Or in Sedgwick's terms, we reassemble the text to our own specifications, making it more satisfying and conducive to our nourishment and comfort. But this is not done ex nihilo, rather from clues to which the desirous reader is attuned.
4. Conclusion: Repairing a broken text?
[4.1] Ancient texts such as Ovid's Metamorphoses, itself composed of hundreds of inset stories connected by a common theme of transformation, have been subjected to rigorous analysis by myriad generations of scholars of disparate times, cultures, and settings. This analysis, the word itself deriving from a Greek noun that means "breaking up" or "dissolving," indeed cannot help but break a text. We break up texts so that we can make meaning of them through interpretive processes that foreground a variety of different concerns. These texts are then, in a very real way, broken. This does not necessitate any uniform mode of fixing, but it does raise questions about how and why we read and what we hope to gain from our reading.
[4.2] Any questions about the presentation of the events in Ovid's Polyphemus, Acis, and Galatea episode must start with Galatea's role as narrator. The fact that she recounts a long song, gives her beloved Acis virtually no speaking role, and orchestrates Polyphemus's attraction not only to her but to Acis makes her something of an ancient fan writer, the self as conduit, through which the machinations of desire work their way up to the surface of the story. Ovid encourages a revision of this well-known story by using Galatea's narratorial vision, which makes it easier for the reader to enact a reparative reading. We, taking Galatea as our model, can reassemble the characters into any permutations that we see fit.
5. Acknowledgments
[5.1] Many thanks are due to Kristina Busse, Liana Orazi, and an engaged audience at the 2024 annual meeting of the Classical Association of the Atlantic States in New Brunswick, NJ. The idea for this article was hatched in an advanced Latin course entitled Fan Fiction in Ancient Rome that I taught at Kalamazoo College in Winter 2023, so I’d like to thank the students in that course: Faith Bacon-Angevine, Helen Edwards, Garrett Hanson, Clara Szakas, Katelyn Williams, and Nick Wilson. Lastly, I am grateful to the TWC Symposium editor and anonymous readers for their helpful feedback.