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The story of the Widow of Ephesus is a Milesian Tale, a short story of love and adventure, 'generally erotic and titillating' and a forerunner Of such medieval collections of tales as the Gesta Romanorum, the Decameron of Boccaccio, and the Heptameron of Marguerite of Navarre'.1 The versions of the tale in Phaedrus and Romulus, in the medieval collections noted above and the modern rehandling of the tale, Christopher Fry's A Phoenix Too Frequent, are not set in Ephesus. In contrast Petronius in the Salyricon sets his tale at a place where the devoutly chaste Artemis 'was worshipped in her second person, as Nymph, an orgiastic Aphrodite with a male consort'.2 It is this ambivalence-virtue and vice in one figure-with which Petronius' widow is associated even before the tale begins. Petronius' tale is selectively crafted: the means (in this case, the setting) and the end (the moral theme) are perfectly integrated.
The Tales in Context
Although Petronius' version of the tale (Sat. 111f.) is intelligible when excerpted and the versions in Phaedrus and Romulus are self-sufficient, Petronius' version is sketched on a larger canvas within the immediate and wider contexts of the rest of the Satyricon. The version in Phaedrus is prefaced with a moralistic sub-title: 'The great inconstancy and lustfulness of women'; similarly the tale in Romulus begins with moral authority: 'A woman who does not put up with an importunate man is chaste'. In contrast the immediate context of the Petronian tale is given by the narrator, the disreputable poet Eumolpus, whose taunts at feminine unfaithfulness might be taken seriously if it were not for the fact that he has no moral authority; his moral judgements are hypocritical. This is perhaps the most significant difference between the three texts: the shorter versions have omniscient narrators which, we may assume, are the voices of the fabulists, Phaedrus and Romulus, but Petronius' tale is narrated by one of his characters.
The moral positions of Phaedrus and Romulus are readily accessible and reliable; there is nothing in the fabulists' texts to suggest that their judgement ought to be questioned. Indeed it may be said that the very function of fable is to reform the bad habits of men by presenting a tale to illustrate an...