Tribades et molles mares: gender and genre interactions in Phaedrus’ Fables

Phaedrus is fully aware of the importance of his project for the renewal of the Aesopic fable and participates in the literary discourse of his time, defending his choice of a humble genre. The analogy with other low genres, such as epigram, satire and novel, clearly emerges from several aspects of his poetics and is confirmed by the presence in his fables of themes and characters typical of those genres. In this paper, we will focus on the figures of the tribas and the cinaedus (see 4,16 [=5,15 Z.]; 5,1 [=4,2 Z.] and app. 10 [app. 8 Z.]) as examples of gender and genre interactions: subtexts and parallels will allow us not only to define the sexual identity of these characters, but also to highlight similarities and differences with the aforementioned ‘realistic’ genres. Our analysis will show that Phaedrus proposes an unusual treatment of the stereotype characters who engage in same sex relations, thereby revealing the specific literary identity of his fables.