Iphis and Ianthe

The story of Iphis and Ianthe comes to us only from Ovid, spans a mere 132 lines, and has been read as the only extant myth about homoerotic love between women in the entirety of the Greek and Latin classical corpus. It is precisely because of that last fact that it has been included in this collection but there are several complications - namely that Ovid’s myth repeatedly underscores Iphis and Ianthe’s problem as the fundamental impossibility of successful love between people whose bodies read as female. That is not to say that it is an unequivocally homophobic or transphobic myth, but that any positive readings will require us to grapple with Iphis’s considerable self-loathing, whether we read Iphis as a lesbian struggling with her sexuality or as a trans man struggling with his gender dysphoria. The Latin text enables readers to review passive and deponent verbs.