When it came to mothers, as Nicole Loraux has remarked, the oedipally minded Freud had his own blind spot. The relation of mother to son appeared to Freud as the least fraught of human associations. The mother might cherish the son whose arrival supplied her want of a penis, and the son might take the mother as his first object of desire, one never entirely abandoned, but these fond emotions are relatively unproblematic; it is the intrusion of the father that makes the really interesting difference. It would be left to Melanie Klein and others working with the very young to uncover the exciting world of infantile fantasy, in which the mother, or the mother's breast, internalized in both “good” and “bad” forms, plays so signal a role, most notoriously negative: devoured and devouring, eviscerated and eviscerating. Whereas the Freudian father provides (if not in his own person, then in the function he more or less successfully represents) the structure and telos of action, this mother is simply embarrassing: she is what the reader and the hero are normally hastening to get past. This chapter is my attempt to slow down and bring the mother into better focus.

If psychoanalysts of Roman literature and culture have tended to pay more attention to the father, it is out of deference not just to the Freudian bias but to the overwhelmingly paternal cast of Roman ideology. After all, the Roman father appears to be a truly formidable figure.