Methinks the Poet Doth Protest Too Much

As I mentioned in the intro to the previous post, trying to interpolate the historic realities of f/f desire in the classical era is extremely difficult. Ovid's Iphis and Ianthe is multiply distanced from the internal reality of his characters. He is a man discussing f/f desire (in a context where men were not culturally expected to have any interest in the interiority of female desire), he sets his characters in a mythic past, and he places them in a Greek setting while he himself was a product of Imperial Rome. All of this might lead us to discount the opinions and positions taken by his characters in relation to any actual historic culture (his or his characters'). And yet, even though the overt theme of the work is "f/f love is impossible," the story if full of evidence contradicting that claim. Perhaps we should instead read the moral of the story as "f/f love is not officially recognized by society," in which case it might have something useful to tell us.