Lawyers have little time for Platonic love. In a trial in America that attracted nationwide media attention, however, one point of constitutional law turned on arguments involving pronouncements about sex by the fourth-century BCE philosopher Plato. Plaintiffs in Evans v. Romer, heard in a Colorado district court in October 1993, were attempting to invalidate an amendment to the Colorado state constitution, Amendment 2, approved by referendum a year before. This amendment prohibited public agencies, municipalities, and school districts from adopting laws or policies granting protected status on the basis of sexual orientation. Its opponents argued that putting gays, lesbians, and bisexuals at such specific disadvantage violated their right to equal protection of the laws under the Fourteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution because it did not serve legitimate government interests and placed unique burdens on their ability to participate equally in the political process. Plaintiffs also challenged it on First Amendment grounds, including violation of the prohibition against the establishment of religion. Since many Christian denominations take the position that homosexual acts are morally wrong without exception, Amendment 2, they alleged, was an intrusion of fundamentalist Christian bias against homosexuals into secular law.
Here is where Plato enters the courtroom. To refute the latter contention, the state called in John M. Finnis, a specialist in moral philosophy, as an expert witness. In an affidavit, Finnis asserted that condemnation of homosexual activity had its basis in natural-law theory, the notion that human morality is governed by inherent principles evident to reason, and was clearly articulated by the founders of the Western tradition of rational philosophy: “All three of the greatest Greek philosophers, Socrates, Plato and Aristotle, regarded homosexual conduct as intrinsically shameful, immoral, and indeed depraved or depraving” (Finnis 1994: 1054). Appearing for the plaintiffs, Martha Nussbaum, an authority on Greek philosophy, contested that claim. Finnis’s understanding of the Greek classical tradition was based on an erroneous reading of poorly translated texts, she maintained; there was no evidence that ancient philosophers considered same-sex erotic attachments immoral. Condemnation of such relationships “as a violation of natural law or the natural human good” was therefore “inherently theological” (Expert Witness Summary at 2, quoted by Clark 2000: 4). By inference, then, it was an establishment of religion.
As an example of what she said were the misleadingly translated passages that had given Finnis the wrong impression, Nussbaum cited the 1926 Loeb Library version of Plato’s last treatise, the Laws. There, the philosopher several times appears to condemn same-sex copulation explicitly, at 636c and again at 836c and 841d, as “contrary to nature.” She testified, however, that the translator, R. G. Bury, had rendered the Greek in keeping with the shame and embarrassment about homosexuality commonly felt at that time, giving it a far more negative cast than was appropriate. In a subsequent article defending her testimony, Nussbaum explained that Plato repeatedly expresses fears about the threat posed to rational judgment by all the physical drives – hunger and thirst as well as sex. He focused on the dangers of same-sex relations in the Laws not because he viewed them as wrong, but because they were “especially powerful sources of passionate stimulation” (Nussbaum 1994: 1580). As for the statements that homosexuality is “contrary to nature,” that is, to the practices of the animal kingdom, Nussbaum noted that they occurred each time in imaginary public pronouncements and construed them as rhetorical devices for convincing the ordinary man. Appeals to animal nature would carry little weight with Plato himself because he would say that a rational being cannot be guided by the behavior of nonrational creatures (1994: 1576–7, 1631, 1633, 1639).
After Nussbaum had finished her direct testimony, Robert George, a political scientist from Princeton, was brought in on rebuttal. Ensuing controversy dealt with the correct translation of certain passages of Plato’s Laws and, in fact, upon the single word tolmêma (“act of daring”) at 636c, which Nussbaum asserted was morally neutral and her opponent claimed to be pejorative. Both sides based their arguments for the meaning of the word upon the entry given in the most authoritative dictionary of ancient Greek, though they relied upon two different editions of the same dictionary. There is no need to go into all the philological technicalities, or all the courtroom charges and countercharges, whose repercussions continued on in print as fiercely argued follow-up discussions by participants appeared in academic and legal journals. Eventually, both the Colorado District and Supreme Courts found for the plaintiffs, and the United States Supreme Court ruled in 1996 that Amendment 2 was unconstitutional.
None of the judicial opinions issued by the various courts cited evidence from Greek texts in making a determination. Nevertheless, the philosophical and ethical issues raised in the Amendment 2 case indicate that informed discussion of Greco-Roman sexual protocols has the potential to shed valuable new light on modern controversies about sexuality. What was unfortunate about Evans v. Romer, as observers have since pointed out, was that the actual courtroom exchanges focused narrowly on Plato’s attitude toward male–male copulation, which is, indeed, of a piece with his distrust of all forms of sexual pleasure, including that provided by heterosexual acts. His well-known insistence that sublimated homoerotic affect, divorced from physical expression, can be an impetus toward moral and intellectual good was not given any weight in testimony, despite the fact that “Platonic love,” as an ideal, is affirmed not only in his earlier dialogues the Phaedrus and the Symposium but also at Laws 837d, where it is stipulated that “the love belonging to virtue and desiring that a young man be as good as possible” should operate in his model state. But homoerotic feelings are completely beyond the scope of the law, which can only take cognizance of acts (Mendelsohn 1996: 43–4). Thus the two discourses – that of the academy, where ancient texts are interpreted, and that of the courtroom – are, in a sense, inexorably fated to disagree with one another.
Provided it is done in a less adversarial setting, however, bringing a historical consciousness of Greek and Roman sexuality to discussions of public policy does open up broader perspectives on a given question. Reflecting upon the lessons of Evans v. Romer, Randall B. Clark points out that the Laws “offers its readers a provocative presentation of the problematic character of both homosexual desire and the family, as well as a thoughtful consideration of the appropriate governmental role in the regulation of both – pressing issues still” (2000: 6). He foresees an investigation of Plato’s moral position on same-sex eroticism serving as the starting point for timely inquiry into the overall relationship between personal behavior and the public good. What is true in this instance for Platonic doctrine seems no less valid for Greek and Roman sexuality as a whole field of knowledge. Studying the sexual values and practices of the ancient world with the goal of arriving at a more accurate understanding of them is not a frivolous undertaking but a matter of genuine practical concern.
Under the entry “sexuality,” the Oxford English Dictionary Online lists four related definitions: first, “the quality of being sexual or having sex”; second, “possession of sexual powers, or capability of sexual feelings”; third, “recognition of or preoccupation with what is sexual”; and, finally, “appearance distinctive of sex.”1 In current academic parlance, however, the word is often employed in two additional, more theoretical, senses. First, it can denote the meanings placed upon human sexual physiology, sexual sensations, and sexual behavior within a particular community, “the cultural interpretation of the human body’s erogenous zones and sexual capacities” (Halperin et al. 1990: 3). Second, it can also designate the dominant role that sexual inclinations, particularly object preference, are thought to play in the shaping of subjective identity. This last definition of “sexuality” has emerged only recently in the contemporary Western world, and, in gaining recognition, has acquired a troubled history.
The ancient Greeks, who had a specialized word for so many other things, had none for what we mean by “sexuality.” The nearest parallel in the Greek language is the collective expression ta aphrodisia, “the matters of Aphrodite” (Dover 1973: 59; 1978: 63–4). What Greek culture regarded as the preserve of the goddess of love was an ensemble of separate but closely related physical phenomena – sexual acts, urges, and pleasures. Although Latin, like Greek, had a rich vocabulary, both direct and metaphoric, for sexual organs and sexual acts, it too lacked an encyclopedic concept of the sexual. This explains why Adams’s 1982 study of Latin sexual terminology confines itself to terms for the body parts and the activities associated with them.
That difference in conceptualization is thought to mark a profound cultural difference. The historian of sex Michel Foucault distinguishes ta aphrodisia from “sexuality” in this way: “Our idea of ‘sexuality’ does not just cover a wider area; it applies to a reality of another type, and it functions quite differently in our morals and knowledge” (1986: 35). Whereas modern English speakers can form an abstract idea of human sexual behavior, Greeks and Romans supposedly viewed it in more concrete terms. For them, what was sexual was presumably limited and self-evident, as opposed to our notion of a broadly diffused and often masked biological and psychological drive. In addition, they appear to have attached a very different set of moral weights to certain expressions of sexuality, most notably same-sex eroticism. Whether this formulation is entirely accurate or not is one of the issues to be considered in this book.
In ancient Greek and Latin, the name of a divinity may be a metonymy, or verbal substitute, for what he or she oversees. So “Aphrodite” or “Venus,” her Roman equivalent, can euphemistically mean “sex.” As the name Aphrodite is hard to fit into meter, Greek poetry usually refers to the goddess as “Cypris,” a title derived from her traditional birthplace, Cyprus, a large island lying south of the Turkish peninsula. Another deity who watches over the sphere of physical wants and satisfactions is Eros (“Desire”), often identified as Aphrodite’s son; his Roman name is “Cupid” (from cupido “desire”). While Eros, the god, is connected mainly with sexual passion, which he arbitrarily inflicts upon divinities and mortals, the semantic range of the abstract noun erôs extends well beyond the sexual. Homeric heroes, for example, have an appetite, eros, for food and drink (Il. 1.469, etc.).2 Similarly, himeros and pothos, both translated as “yearning,” can be used to express a sentimental or sad longing that may or may not be sexual in nature. In Aristophanes’ Frogs the god Dionysos confesses a pothos to Heracles, who immediately asks whether it is for a woman or a boy; no, the god of theater explains, it is for the recently deceased tragedian Euripides (55–67). Like Eros, the affective states of himeros and pothos can be personified, but only as an artistic convention, because their divine personalities are never fully realized. Finally, erôs as “desire” must be carefully distinguished from philia, the love we bestow on those close to us, family members and friends. In this book, the name of the god Eros will be capitalized and not italicized; the Greek noun erôs should be understood to mean a form of sexual passion or obsession; and feelings of philia will be termed “affection.”
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, open discussion of intimate matters was seldom conducted in university classrooms. Yet, even after the most cursory reading of certain texts, Classics majors at American colleges and universities were aware that many ancient authors took sex for granted and spoke frankly about it, making casual references to forms of desire, behavior, and acts then deemed “unnatural” by all but a relatively small minority of the population.3 Those students could not help but acknowledge that in Greece and Rome, the two foundational cultures of Western Europe, there existed a set of moral standards quite distinct from the ones by which they had been raised. While it would have been impossible then to bring up that fact in the classroom, consciousness of it as fact, and a predictable curiosity, were enough to motivate future scholars within their ranks to investigate ancient sexual notions enthusiastically once the academic climate permitted it.
Meanwhile, in a paradigm shift originating after the First World War and gaining great momentum around the middle of the twentieth century, cultural institutions central to industrialized Western society underwent radical structural changes. In particular, the attitudes, beliefs, values, and practices associated with gender and sexuality found themselves subjected to considerable transformation. In America, the reasons why a prior emphasis on restraint was replaced by a new sexual liberalism are complicated, but D’Emilio and Freedman (1988: 239–74) identify a number of issues that contributed to this development. In 1960, approval of the oral contraceptive pill by the Food and Drug Administration gave women the freedom to make their own reproductive choices, including postponing marriage and motherhood while being sexually active. Besides the accessibility of a reliable contraceptive, larger contributing factors included the spread of a youth subculture and an increased preoccupation with sexual satisfaction among middle-class married couples. The same phenomenon was occurring across the Atlantic, throughout Europe but perhaps most visibly in England during the “Swinging Sixties,” a period later labeled “the permissive era” (Weeks 1989: 249–72). Philip Larkin’s deeply ironic take upon the behavior of English young people at that time sums up the reaction of many witnesses to the onset of such an extraordinarily sudden adjustment of British mores:
Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(Which was rather late for me) –
Between the end of the Chatterley ban
And the Beatles’ first LP.
Up till then there’d only been
A sort of bargaining,
A wrangle for a ring,
A shame that started at sixteen
And spread to everything.
Then all at once the quarrel sank:
Everyone felt the same,
And every life became
A brilliant breaking of the bank,
A quite unlosable game.4
Experience of what is still popularly termed a “sexual revolution” suggested to many observers even then that cultural expressions of sex required much more in the way of explanation than a mere appeal to universal biological processes.
Under the motto “the personal is political,” radical feminists in the United States, educated in activist theory and tactics by their participation in the civil rights and anti-war movements of the 1960s, began analyzing heterosexual relations as the expression of a social power imbalance between men and women. Second-wave feminist theorists started from the premise that, for women, the so-called “revolution” was not a vehicle of emancipation and, in fact, had opened up additional opportunities for sexual exploitation by men. They proceeded to define medical and psychological explanations of woman’s nature and needs, along with rape and other forms of physical aggression against women, as strategies of gender oppression (Shulman 1980; Eisenstein 1983: 5–41; Donovan 1985: 141–69). Feminist anthropologists and sociologists followed suit by inquiring into the apparent universality of female subordination and the socialization of women into gender roles (Ortner 1974 and other essays in the same volume; see also the collection edited by Reiter 1975). Lesbian theorists questioned whether heterosexuality itself is a strictly biological or a culturally imposed phenomenon (Rubin 1975; Rich 1980). Notions that “natural features of gender, and natural processes of sex and reproduction, furnish only a suggestive and ambiguous backdrop to the cultural organization of gender and sexuality” and that “sexuality is socially shaped and, in the course of this, inevitably curbed” (Ortner and Whitehead 1981: 1, 25) were very much in the air during the late 1970s, largely due to feminist analysis of the interrelationship of social systems and sexual practices.
Within this climate of intellectual dispute over long-held assumptions about sex and gender, the timely appearance of two ground-breaking investigations of sexuality commanded immediate scholarly attention. Published in France in 1976, and in English translation two years later, the first volume of Michel Foucault’s projected six-volume History of Sexuality supplied a fresh theoretical perspective for the analysis of sexual experience. In undertaking to write an account of sexuality, the French historian and philosopher was not concerned with what people have actually been doing in and out of bed, but rather with how such activities have been classified by those endowed with medical, legal, and scientific authority. Foucault argued that modern societies have developed whole new disciplines aimed at promoting analytical discussion of sex, as well as whole new categories of persons fundamentally defined by their sexual practices and object choices. By encouraging people to get at the obscure “truth” of their private sexuality through therapies such as psychoanalysis, present-day systems of government are able to regulate the behavior of individuals more efficiently, often with their full cooperation. Foucault was by no means the first to propose that the forms sexuality takes in a given society are closely linked to the ways in which power is organized. Nevertheless, his exploration of the tactics used in recent times to convert sexuality into a “technology” capable of regulating the activities of individuals and entire populations sparked off keen interest in the question of whether, at other historical moments, societies had developed different kinds of frameworks for categorizing sexual behaviors and attaching significance to them.
As if in response to that very question, in the same year in which the English translation of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, Volume I appeared, K. J. Dover’s Greek Homosexuality (1978) was published. Occasional discussions of sexual behavior in antiquity had been published before, either privately or under a pseudonym. These, however, were tendentious: authors assembled information about Greek and Roman sexual conduct for sensational purposes or in order to make a political point and were not interested in studying the topic for its own sake (Halperin et al. 1990: 7–13). Dover’s was the first empirical book-length scholarly investigation of the social conventions governing same-sex eroticism among ancient Greek males. He could not go into the “facts” of personal relationships, for we lack trustworthy information about the feelings and activities of individuals. Instead, he intended to define the cultural values surrounding homosexuality in the classical Greek world and to analyze how accepted homosexual and heterosexual behaviors were integrated with one another (1978: 2).
Having examined textual evidence drawn from comedy, forensic speeches, philosophical discourses, and poetry, together with visual evidence from Athenian vases of the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, Dover concluded that erotic relationships between adult Athenian men and adolescent boys, not just slaves but freeborn citizen youths, were regarded as normal, natural, and even commendable, provided certain social rules were properly observed. Sexual desire for a boy was spoken of in terms no different from those in which desire for a woman was expressed. A man might readily turn from a love object of one sex to one of the other; alternatively, a strong preference for one sex over the other was thought simply a matter of taste. Finally, and most crucial of all for subsequent work on ancient sexuality, Dover argued that the Greeks conceptualized any act of sexual congress involving at least one adult male as a dominance–submission relationship in which the adult male was expected to assume the “active” role of penetrator; conversely, the person penetrated, whether woman, boy, or other adult male, was automatically reduced to “passive” female status (1978: 100–9). Athenian sexuality was therefore structured along the same hierarchical lines as Athenian society. The intrinsic superiority of the adult citizen male to females, prostitutes of both sexes, slave males, younger males, and those men alleged to prefer the passive role was confirmed in his use of their bodies for his own gratification, while their social inferiority corresponded to their accessibility as sexual objects. This is the so-called “penetration model” of ancient sexuality.
Although Dover’s study was addressed to fellow classicists, it soon achieved a reputation outside his own discipline because the findings summarized here dovetailed so neatly with a newly emerging method of looking at sexuality as a historical phenomenon. Responding to the theoretical model sketched in the first volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, researchers had begun to examine diachronic changes in patterns of sexual conduct. They identified two crucial aspects in which the organization of sexuality throughout classical antiquity was unlike that of the contemporary Western world. Sex relations were structured hierarchically, in contrast to our ideal of equality between the partners, and the gender roles of active and passive partner were not tied to sex – for the person in the submissive role, at least, structural “femininity” was the consequence of lower status, not sex. The foreignness of ancient sexual arrangements became the standard case in point for the controversial assertion that sexual identity and sexual practices are products of local circumstances and thus an argument for replacing biologically determinist assumptions about sexuality with those grounded on historical difference.
At this point we ought to sort out another set of classification terms readily confused in daily life: sex, gender, and sexuality. “Sex” as a category of identification is no doubt the simplest of these, for it designates the (usually straightforward) physiological result of a combination of XX or XY chromosomes, the possession of female or male primary and secondary physical characteristics. On the other hand, “gender,” originally a linguistic expression, was appropriated by feminists in the 1970s to mean the social and cultural constructions of masculinity and femininity associated with biological sex (West and Zimmerman 1987: 125–6). This distinction between bodily, primarily genital and reproductive, differences and the abstract system of expected traits and behaviors imposed upon them has been deemed the single most crucial advance contributed by late twentieth-century feminism to social theory (Flax 1990: 21; Sedgwick 1990: 27–8). Once gender had been identified as a cultural production, it was seen to mask an asymmetrical relation between social identities, one in which the disadvantaged position of the female might coolly be explained away as a consequence of “nature.” Throughout this book, accordingly, we will frequently employ gender as an analytical tool when trying to grasp how ancient notions of “masculinity” and “femininity” served as placeholders for organizing experience. What we will not do is to adopt the bureaucratic practice of using “gender” as a putatively less crude synonym for “sex.” Reducing gender to the binary opposition of “M” or “F” regularly encountered when filling in paperwork does not reflect the realities of ancient sexual protocols, or of contemporary ones, for that matter. To cite one commonplace instance: though the word “transsexual,” as generally used, specifies a person living a sex other than the one assigned at birth, “transgender” can refer to a much wider range of departures from established sexual norms (Wilchins 2004: 21–31). “Gender” is thus a very fuzzy variable.
The ancients had no abstract notion of gender. Their idea of sexual binarism was not the same as ours, either.5 For one thing, the word “unisex” would be hard to explain to a Greek or a Roman. That men and women lived for the most part in separate spheres was taken for granted. Similarly, “transsexual” and “transgender” are easily thinkable within our own cultural frameworks; that is, we have a medical understanding of those rare individuals born with the physical characteristics of both sexes, and we ourselves can imagine, even if we have never met, a person whose gender subjectivity is not aligned with her/his sexual category. Ancient society drew firmer lines. In our text we will regularly encounter stereotypes of androgynous conduct, men behaving in a womanish fashion or women thought to take the manly role in sex. Crossing boundaries of deportment was only too easy and was evidence of moral failings. Dual sexuality, or the possession of both sets of primary sexual characteristics, was quite another matter. In classical Greek and Roman thought systems, those creatures, known as hermaphrodites, violated the law of nature, which draws absolute distinctions between the sexes; accordingly, they were prodigies, indications of divine displeasure, and at certain periods legally condemned to exposure (Brisson 2002: 14–15). In the Hellenistic age, however, artists began to visualize the hermaphrodite as a mortal youth ideally combining the distinct beauties of masculinity and femininity. Hence the Louvre Hermaphrodite, whose profile and upper arm grace our cover, and whom you probably took for a girl until you noticed the biceps. (Nowadays everyone wants solid biceps, but up until very recently only men were supposed to have them.) Such a figure belonged to the realm of fantasy, like our unicorns.
“Sexuality,” as we have already observed, encompasses a group of meanings no less broad than that of gender. Moreover, when “sex” is utilized as the equivalent of “sexuality,” as it often is, to mean the entire assortment of acts, codes, desires, fantasies, pleasures, and role playing involved in human sexual conduct, additional difficulties arise. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick notes, the semantic field of “sex/sexuality” in this latter sense “is all over the experiential and conceptual map” because it takes in the extremes of both the biological and the cultural together with much in between (1990: 29). Clarifying the further entanglement of “sex/sexuality” with gender requires still more analytic precision, for the complexity of these multiple frames of reference ensures that some aspects of sex and gender will be aligned with each other at the biogenetic end of the spectrum, others united at the cultural end, while still others may prove completely autonomous, or even opposed. Yet in current work on the history of sexuality it is very tempting to conflate sexuality and gender because of a scholarly preoccupation with the dichotomy of heterosexual/homosexual orientation as it may or may not manifest itself in surviving records. To see why that problem is so central to an investigation of ancient sexuality, we need to examine past and present debate over the theoretical stances of essentialism and constructionism.
During most of the twentieth century, approaches to the topic of sex/sexuality assumed an “essentializing” point of view. Whether they attempted an empirical description of values and practices as found in given societies or an explanation of its psychic mechanisms, they envisioned sex, in Jeffrey Weeks’s words, as “a driving, instinctual force, whose characteristics are built into the biology of the human animal, which shapes human institutions and whose will must force its way out, either in the form of direct sexual expression or, if blocked, in the form of perversion or neuroses” (1989: 2). This quasi-Freudian notion of sexual psychodynamics dominated the thinking of academics and the general public through the middle decades of the twentieth century and still enjoys some popular acceptance, though its tenets have been repeatedly questioned, first by feminists and then by Foucault and his disciples.6 Another generalizing account of sexuality is the sociobiological, which identifies supposedly basic, universal patterns of male and female behavior and explains them as evolutionary strategies for procreative success: through processes of natural selection, it hypothesizes, gender-specific conduct has been “hardwired” into the human brain. To cite one passage from a recent British description of human sexuality aimed at the lay reader:
We have inherited a behavioural legacy from the lifestyle of our hunter-gatherer ancestors, which continues to mould much of our behaviour. Men are more driven by the immediate, short term gratification of sexual intercourse, although they often love and invest in the children they father. Women have evolved to be driven by a broader range of strategies for producing surviving offspring, networking with one another and with a special ability to juggle the many demands of raising a family. (Potts and Short 1999: 235)
Anthropological observations and historical records do show large congruencies in gendered behavior across cultures and centuries, such as the existence of a “double standard” for men and women. Yet, according to researchers whose thinking has been shaped by feminist, gay, and lesbian investigations of sex and gender, neither Freudianism nor genetic determinism can satisfactorily explain the multiplicity of culturally unique patterns sex takes.7 Both accounts, it is obvious, leave little room for variation from compulsory heterosexuality. Though Freud himself did not consider same-sex desire “degenerate,” he saw heterosexual object choice as the preferred outcome of the maturation process begun at puberty (1962: 1–14, 95–6). Meanwhile, sociobiology, with its focus on reproductive advantage, cannot offer a plausible evolutionary reason for homoerotic inclination.
During the past three decades, therefore, scholars espousing a “constructionist” approach to human sexuality have attempted to demonstrate that there are relatively few underlying features of sex so embedded in nature that they may be deemed constant. Sexuality, from this historical and critical perspective, is so shaped by cultural forces and mediated by factors such as language that it must be seen as exclusively the product of a particular society (Weeks 1989: 1–6). Indeed, Foucault actually proposed, in one of his most drastic formulations, that the abstract idea of “sex” was itself a construct, a by-product of the nineteenth-century deployment of “sexuality” as a technology of social control. Sex does not underlie sexuality; the reverse is true (Foucault 1980: 152–7; cf. Halperin 2002: 87–9).
For a historian, then, the key problem at issue is the emergence of “homosexual” and its corollary “heterosexual” as categories of personal identity. Although individuals with a dominant or exclusive attraction to members of their own sex have probably always existed, scientific, medical, and layman’s discourses categorizing them as a deviant social group and obliging them to acquiesce in that description of themselves arose only at the end of the nineteenth century (Foucault 1980: 42–3). From an extreme constructionist point of view, then, there were no “homosexuals” prior to the actual invention of the term; there were only homosexual acts. Consequently, the theory that homosexual desire is a learned response to environmental conditioning that reflects changing social and economic conditions is an assumption with which Foucault’s name is very often associated. He himself never took an explicit position on the question of whether homosexuality is caused by biological or social factors and at least once refused to commit himself when pressed about the topic (Halperin 1995: 4).
That disagreement between proponents of “essentialist” and “constructionist” approaches to sex is not a mere academic controversy remote from daily life; it has immediate political repercussions. If patterns of human sexuality are a biologically determined certainty, it could be argued that homosexuality is innate and not a matter of personal choice; this would allow us “to consider sexual orientation in the same deterministic frame of reference that we have been accustomed to use for race” and confer the same set of ethical and legal protections upon it (Nye 1999: 6). However, an essentializing perspective might equally well be employed in order to demonstrate the intrinsic superiority of heterosexual marriage to other kinds of social arrangements, to justify different ways of treating men and women in the workplace, and even to allow disparate access to resources based solely upon gender. Suspicion that a theoretical acceptance of “natural” sexual arrangements can only further the repressive political agenda of social conservatives has given essentialist approaches to sex a bad name among feminists and queer theorists.
Constructionist thinking, on the other hand, presupposes that sexuality, not being underpinned by nature, is inherently unstable and its continuity of organization more apparent than real: new configurations of economic, political, and social power necessarily elicit new paradigms of gender and sexuality. Such assumptions mandate flexibility and relativism in weighing sexual behaviors, especially those that might be considered marginal or “queer” in relation to prevailing social standards. This stance, too, has practical implications that certain groups have found threatening. Some feminists object that constructionism dismisses the “noncoincidental” recurrence of similar patterns of gender oppression in unrelated cultures (Richlin 1992: xix–xx), while gay historians fear that it renders gay history impossible (Boswell 1989: 20). Insistence that “Greek love” had nothing in common with modern-day homosexuality could be taken as a repudiation of the iconic place of Greece (and, to a lesser extent, Rome) in the dawning gay activist movement of the 1950s and 1960s (Richlin 2005) and might even be construed as fundamentally homophobic, in so far as it denies the permanent reality of homoerotic orientation (Davidson 2007: 149–51). Other progressive academics can counter those protests by maintaining that a focus on change rather than inescapable continuity makes resistance to present modes of oppression more viable.
In the discipline of classical studies, scholarly debate over the validity of strict essentialist or constructionist approaches peaked in the early 1990s, the period of the “sexuality wars,” when adherents of a given position resorted to abrasive, often ad hominem, reviews of work with which they disagreed. The fracas had a chilling effect on both research and collegiality. Since then, new theoretical postulates have suggested that the opposition of essentialism to constructionism may itself be too rigid. One significant factor in tempering the dispute has been the growing acceptance of Judith Butler’s contention that subjects, via their material bodies, constantly enact their gender identities: gender is performed rather than passively worn like a costume (Butler 1990, 1993). Another was the insight that “homosexuality” is not one coherent and stable category but instead encompasses several kinds of gender deviance other than that characterized by exclusive object-choice and permanent orientation (Sedgwick 1990: 44–8; Halperin 2002: 104–37). Present-day “heterosexuality” is no less polyvalent. As a historicist benchmark dividing “now” from “back then,” the “homo/heterosexual” antithesis is not as clear-cut as it was once thought to have been. Hence “essentialism vs. constructionism” might well seem like a false dichotomy.
Not all current work is ready to move on, however. In 2007 James Davidson published The Greeks and Greek Love, a volume of over 600 pages ostensibly aimed at a general reading audience, although its length might well daunt the casual browser. The complexity of the subject, he argued, dictated the scope of the inquiry, since “Greek love,” though a single phenomenon, had to be understood within an array of contexts. While Davidson did not affirm an essentialist position, he dismissed the idea that the ancient Greeks had no sexual orientations at all as “hard to believe” (2007: 4). At the same time, his furious effort to discredit the “penetration model,” its proponents Dover and Foucault, and the cultural anthropology to which it owed its origins came across as an all-out war against social constructionism. Furthermore, his depiction of Greek same-sex affiliations seemed suspiciously akin to popular culture images of present-day gay male partnerships. To charges that he had distorted historical facts in order to draw a more appealing picture of Greek behaviors, the author responded acrimoniously and the old controversy opened up again, now facilitated by the technological advances of online reviewing and blogging.8
The lesson to be learned from this newest irruption of a seething issue in gay identity politics is that the longing to uncover continuities in the past rather than alterities goes deep. Though himself intellectually opposed to a “homosexual essentialism” inviting gay men to seek their counterparts in the Greeks, David Halperin can still find positive things to say about that impulse:
Identification is desire … Identification gets at something, something important: it picks out resemblances, connections, echo effects. Identification is a form of cognition. (2002: 15)
At the same time, psychic identification poses its dangers. Since intergenerational homoerotic relationships were the characteristic feature of institutionalized “Greek love,” historians’ wish to distinguish ancient liaisons with boys from what might seem the predatory exploitation of minors is pressing (Verstraete and Provencal 2005a: 3; Buffière 2007: 9–24; for a divergent outlook, Hubbard 2000). It is patently one of Davidson’s motives for insisting, rightly or wrongly, on both late physiological maturation and strict rules of age in courtship (2007: 68–71). Classical Athens is thus a limit case for both essentialist perceptions of uniformity and constructionist tolerance of the unfamiliar. It is easy to go along with the former; let us see how the latter might work out in practice.
Recent charges that Roman Catholic clergy, in America and elsewhere, have committed sexual offenses against children, subsequently covered up by those in authority, have stunned the general public all over the world and provoked angry protests from American Catholics. Erotic attachments between adults and adolescents, even when viewed from a historical distance, are a sensitive issue capable of arousing intense feeling in the classroom. Before we embark on a discussion of Greek pederasty, therefore, we need to clarify the sense of that word as it will be used in the present book by differentiating it from its common meaning in English, as well as from the expressions pedophilia and homosexuality, often used in the same general context.
We can begin by distinguishing pedophilia from pederasty. Pedophilia, derived from the ancient Greek words for “child” (pais) and “affection” (philia), denotes an attraction to prepubescent or pubescent children as sexual objects. Whether the subject acts on that drive or only fantasizes about it (by consuming child pornography, for example), such an inclination is deemed morally reprehensible by the vast majority of people in our society and is viewed by psychiatrists as an abnormal sexual proclivity. This is, then, the appropriate term for the sexual offenses alleged to have been committed in the diocese of Boston and elsewhere. The pedophile may be male or female and the object of his or her desire may be a girl or a boy; in neither case is the noun sex-specific. In contrast, the word pederasty, as used in ordinary English, specifies the desire felt by an adult male for a boy, or the concomitant sexual act, with the word “boy” usually understood to mean “preadolescent.” Thus pederasty is by definition homosexual, although “homosexuality” commonly implies consenting sexual behavior among adults, while both “pedophilia” and “pederasty” as labels for present-day sexual conduct designate the abuse of a victim below the age of consent.
When classical scholars utilize the noun “pederasty,” however, they draw an even finer set of distinctions. Pederasty designates the social custom whereby adult male Greeks courted citizen youths, as sexual objects but also, at least notionally, as protégés; in fact, our Anglicized word “protégé,” with its very slight nuance of indelicacy (especially in the feminine), comes close to suggesting that twofold objective. However, we do not as a rule apply “mentor” and “protégé” to the partners in the relationship, preferring the technical terms used by the ancient Greeks themselves: erastês (“lover”) for the adult male and erômenos (“beloved”) for the youth. The title of Dover’s pioneering study notwithstanding, most scholars nowadays also distinguish the term “pederasty” from “homosexuality” by restricting the latter word to the modern Western category of sexual orientation; when they wish to emphasize the same-sex aspect of pederasty, they have recourse to the descriptive adjective “homoerotic.”
“Youth,” of course, is a vague expression, but it is generally assumed that adolescent Greek males became objects of open admiration from the time of the appearance of secondary sex characteristics at puberty until the growth of the full beard, an approximate age range of fifteen or sixteen to eighteen. Younger boys, though, were not off-limits. In the Symposium, Plato’s speaker Pausanias, who articulates the conventional aristocratic ideology of boy-love, states that the better sort of admirer refrains from loving boys who have not yet begun to possess intelligence (nous), which coincides with the onset of the beard (181d). This implies that some adults did court younger boys; it also indicates that such behavior was frowned upon not because it was deemed “abnormal” or “contrary to nature,” but because the boy was thought not yet mature enough mentally to make fully rational choices.9 We differ from the Greeks, then, not just in our moral condemnation of the employment of prepubescent children for sexual purposes, but also in fixing the age of consent well beyond puberty.
Yet ancient Greek society was ambivalent even about the risks of ostensibly innocent social interchange between adults and youths, as one episode from Plato’s dialogue Charmides indicates. Socrates, the first-person speaker, has just arrived back in Athens from military service during the first year of the Peloponnesian War (433 BCE). He tells of stopping by the wrestling school of Taureas and asking whether any of the current crop of young men has shown himself outstanding “in wisdom, or beauty, or both.” Critias, a man of distinguished family, proudly mentions his relative Charmides. When this boy enters, Socrates at once acknowledges his beauty. Informed that he is also interested in philosophy and writes poetry, the philosopher expresses a desire to meet him and asks Critias to call him over. “Even if he were younger,” Socrates says, “there’s nothing shameful about my conversing with him in your presence, since you’re both his guardian and his cousin” (155a). The two men concoct an excuse: Socrates supposedly knows a cure for the headaches the boy has been experiencing. After Charmides is seated beside him, and the surrounding crowd presses up against them, Socrates confesses to catching a glimpse of what he should not have seen (155d–e):
Right then, my good man, I saw what was beneath his cloak and I burst into flame and was no longer in command of myself and thought the poet Cydias wisest in respect to erotic matters, who, speaking of a beautiful boy, advises someone: “Take care not to be seized as a ration of meat, a fawn coming before a lion.” For I seemed to myself to have been caught by such a creature.
Of course, Socrates quickly recovers his aplomb and turns the talk back to questions of virtue. His frank admission of physical temptation kindled through a single inadvertent glance needs to be kept in mind, though, especially by readers saturated, as we are, with media images of sex. We might also think carefully about his discretion in assuring Critias that a conversation with Charmides would not be construed as improper provided an adult kinsman was present, and about the fact that he and Critias needed to invent a pretext for summoning Charmides to meet him. This is a culture at once more candid about young men’s sexual appeal for older men and much more prudish about it.
Understanding why erotic relationships between men and youths were permitted will be possible only if we step back to survey other cultural factors, including the ethical climate. It may be useful, then, to undertake a constructionist thought experiment in which we attempt to comprehend the ethics of Athenian pederasty from the perspective of the Greeks themselves.10 Making an effort at the outset to grasp one of the most perplexing features of classical Greek sexuality should give us good practice in thinking ourselves into an alien mindset – a skill required of all historians. As a convenient guide, we can follow the line of inquiry outlined in the second volume of Foucault’s History of Sexuality, published in English under the title The Use of Pleasure (1986). The reader should be aware, however, that employing Foucault’s account of Greek sexuality for this purpose does not amount to a blanket endorsement of it. Later on, we will engage with criticism of his thinking by expert Greek and Roman social historians.
First, some background. As we have already noted, the accepted age of sexual maturity in the ancient world was a few years lower than ours. Puberty marked the beginning of sexual activity for an ancient Greek girl as well as her brother: soon after its onset, at the age of thirteen or fourteen, she was married off – with medical justification and encouragement – to a man who might easily be twice as old as she was. Boswell observes that romantic dealings between men and boys were thus part of a large pattern of cross-generational erotic relations (1989: 32). For both sexes, too, the years between the end of childhood and full maturity were a period of gradual socialization, marked by discrete stages of development. Virgin girls did not become women (gynaikes) immediately upon the wedding night, but instead remained in a kind of liminal state, halfway between maiden and wife, until the birth of their first child. Adolescent boys were successively admitted to their clan-group or phratry at the age of sixteen and to membership in a tribe, with accompanying legal rights, upon reaching eighteen. Only at nineteen or twenty were they able to participate in public affairs as full members of the citizen body, probably after completing two years of informal military schooling or, from the late fourth century BCE on, compulsory service as trainees, ephêboi ([Arist.] Ath. pol. 42).
During this transitional period, older mentors coached them in the gender-related activities they would perform for the rest of their lives. Such instruction took place, for the most part, outside the natal home. The teenage bride frequently moved into a household (oikos) in which the groom’s widowed mother already lived and was taught domestic arrangements by her mother-in-law. Under special circumstances, the husband might undertake her training; in the treatise On Household Management by the essayist Xenophon, the principal speaker Ischomachus educates his fourteen-year-old bride in domestic science (Oec. 7.5–6). Boys of the same age learned to conduct themselves as men by attending all-male banquets, symposia, in the company of relatives and by imitating older peers at the gymnasium. As Plato’s speaker Pausanias emphasizes (Symp. 184d–e), the good example of an erastês was thought to be instrumental in developing traits of character. Hence, social historians of ancient Greece often describe the phenomenon of institutionalized pederasty as a gender-specific mode of initiation: in classical Athens it would have been the masculine analogue to marriage, the girl’s rite of passage. Whether its origins can be traced back to prehistoric initiation rituals is a question to be discussed in Chapter 2.
Though we cannot recover the actual experiences of persons involved, we must bear in mind that for the younger partner in such an erotic relationship the liaison may not always have been a positive experience. Let us again compare that boy with his recently married sister. The code of conduct expected of a new bride, stressing modesty, self-control, and submissiveness, was straightforwardly articulated by the culture. Boys courted by male lovers, on the other hand, found themselves subject to conflicting directives: a well-behaved youth was expected to resist the physical advances of any suitor but might (or might not) be commended for gratifying at last a patient, generous, and morally deserving erastês. Dover notes the close parallel with the rules prescribed for the woman, up until recently, in modern heterosexual courtship (1978: 88–90). Exactly like girls of my generation, then, adolescent Greek boys were given mixed messages about the conduct expected of them.
Athenian brides were also in a somewhat better position to turn to their elders for advice. The girl had married with her family’s consent. Though she now belonged to another household, her mother and other female relatives might still live in close proximity. Sympathetic and experienced women would consequently be around to help her adjust to her circumstances and offer guidance on matters of sex and pregnancy. To be sure, some erômenoi may have received equally good counseling and supervision; in Xenophon’s Symposium, the young athlete Autolycus attends a dinner at his admirer’s house while chaperoned by his father. However, the boy’s family could also create difficulties for both parties. If under eighteen, the youth was still subject to the authority of his father, who might put his son in the charge of a slave attendant (paidagôgos) to discourage the attentions of suitors (Pl. Symp. 183c). While no Athenian law specifically prohibited an adult male from having sex with a boy of citizen status, David Cohen (1991: 176–80) has suggested that a family could prosecute it as a violation of the boy’s honor under the law of hybris, which punished any action that gratified the perpetrator by shaming another person – man, woman, child, free or slave – intentionally (Arist. Rh. 1378b.23–9; cf. Aeschin. 1.15).
Lack of certainty about what was expected of them and potential tensions between erastês and kindred were circumstances that might have made youths vulnerable to psychological manipulation. During the banquet conversation in Xenophon’s Symposium, Socrates observes that an unscrupulous lover who verbally seduces a young man “corrupts [diaphtheirei] the soul of the one persuaded” (8.20). Negative physical consequences of forced sexual relations in early adolescence were also recognized. In the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle states that a disposition to sexual passivity can be created through habituation, “as in the case of those violated in youth” (1148b.27–9). The same opinion is expressed in a treatise falsely attributed to the philosopher, Problemata 4.26, where repeated penetration at the time of adolescent “ripeness” (hêbê) is said to create a quasi-natural desire through the recollection of pleasure (Dover 1978: 169–70; J. J. Winkler 1990: 67–9). Since the Greeks themselves were not unaware of the emotional and physiological hazards of pederasty, their approval of it as a social practice constitutes, as one early discussion called it, “a problem in Greek ethics.”11
It was the ethical aspect of ancient sexuality that had begun to preoccupy Michel Foucault during the eight years between the publication of the first and the second volumes of the History of Sexuality. As he tells us in the introduction to the long-delayed second volume, he had arrived at the conclusion that understanding how modern individuals could conceive of themselves as persons of a given “sexuality” required a preliminary analysis of how Western man had already, in antiquity, come to look upon himself as subject to certain desires and to examine his own responses to such desires (1986: 5–6). Accordingly, Foucault undertook the study of ancient Greek concerns about appropriate sexual behavior, considering them within a broader context of overall social values. The kind of evidence he chose to consult was more limited than Dover’s, for he deliberately concentrated on prescriptive texts addressed to men that dealt with the conduct expected of freeborn male citizens (1986: 22–3). In Athens, this was the only group of individuals recognized as fully accountable legal and moral agents.12
Democratic Athens invested each kyrios, or male citizen who headed a household, with patriarchal authority. This meant that the kyrios was himself responsible for the conduct of all other members of that household, its women, children, and slaves, and acted as their legal guardian and representative in the public sphere. At the same time, he also performed his civic duties by attending popular assemblies, voting, holding office, serving on juries, and defending the city-state in wartime. Competence to supervise the private economy of an oikos, to deliberate prudently on affairs of state, to manage public business, and to conduct oneself bravely on the battlefield depended upon self-mastery, enkrateia. The man properly in control of himself did not wholly abstain from bodily pleasures, which served as practical tests of his resolve. Instead, through meticulous training in virtue beginning in boyhood, he had become skilled in using pleasure wisely, never allowing desire, however keen, to overcome rational judgment. “Governing oneself, managing one’s estate, and participating in the administration of the city were three practices of the same type,” and only someone who had achieved the first objective was duly prepared to take on responsibilities in each of the other two areas (1986: 75–7).
The pleasures connected with sex posed the most difficulty. From a medical and ethical standpoint, sex was both natural and necessary, but the gratification it brought, being so intense, was open to misuse. Thus the two chief forms of immorality associated with sex were “excess and passivity” (1986: 47). For an adult male physically to assume the role of receptive partner was to surrender masculine status and assimilate oneself to the inferior female. But passivity could also be understood in a metaphoric sense, as capitulation to brute appetite in the case of someone who habitually overindulges in food, drink, or sex and becomes enslaved (we would say “addicted”) to pleasure. In abandoning moderation (sôphrosynê), he behaves in a womanish manner; hence the paradox, from our point of view, of a habitual adulterer being thought “effeminate.”13 The courtship activities involved in a pederastic relationship with a citizen boy were therefore a prime occasion for display of self-control by the erastês: he had to temper his passion with reason in order to show due respect for the boy’s civic status and personal autonomy.
For his part, the erômenos was expected to pay scrupulous attention to the distinction between honor and shame, since his youth was a preparation for manhood and he was being evaluated by onlookers for his potential to assume domestic and civic responsibilities. “By not yielding, not submitting, remaining the strongest, triumphing over suitors and lovers through one’s resistance, one’s firmness, one’s moderation … the young man proves his excellence in the sphere of love relations” (1986: 210). Manifesting such confidence and strength of character while yet a boy, particularly in a scenario theoretically casting him as the subordinate player, augured well for his future leadership qualities. Accordingly, an erômenos could not define himself in his own mind as an object of pleasure; there was, in fact, a cultural reluctance to imagine him participating in enjoyment of the act. Xenophon preserves a recollection of Socrates’ banquet conversation in which he voices what was apparently a common assumption: “A youth does not share in the pleasures of sex with the man, as a woman does, but soberly looks upon the other drunk with passion” (Symp. 8.21). He must not even feel desire himself: instead, he complies with his lover’s requests only out of esteem and gratitude, in anticipation of a lifelong friendship (philia) once the older man’s ardor has cooled. As the underlying ethical preoccupation of Greek pederasty, this question of “how to make the object of pleasure into a subject who was in control of his pleasures” (1986: 225) ultimately became the catalyst of the “Socratic-Platonic” definition of erôs as the means by which both partners arrive at philosophical truth through strict asceticism, totally abstaining from carnal satisfaction (1986: 229–46).
Apparently originated by Socrates,14 then greatly elaborated in two of Plato’s major dialogues, the Symposium and the Phaedrus, this erotics draws an absolute distinction between love of the body and love of the soul. All admirers of beauty are naturally kindled by the physical charms of a youth, but the true lover is even more warmly attracted to his beloved by the boy’s integrity of character and potential for growth in virtue. He therefore seeks, in the well-known imagery of the Symposium, to “beget” wisdom in the other and so engender offspring that are immortal (208b–209e). Physical consummation of erôs is, however, incompatible with the pursuit of spiritual goodness, and the lover must forcibly check his baser impulses like a charioteer restraining an unruly horse. Inspired by the older man’s example, the beloved himself develops a passion for truth; he begins to take an active part in the philosophic quest, responding to his lover’s erôs with a reciprocal anterôs (Phdr. 255e.1). From that lover, now his teacher, the young man learns the practices of self-restraint and rational inquiry that will allow him to participate as an equal partner in the lifelong pursuit of wisdom.
This combination of altruistic devotion, sexual asceticism, and the quest for mystic experience enjoyed a long afterlife in the Christian West – although, as Foucault notes (1986: 229–30), under Christianity the Greek homoerotic relationship was transformed into a union of male and female and featured feminine embodiments of temptation (Morgan le Fay in the Morte d’Arthur) and redemption (Beatrice in Dante’s Divine Comedy). Whether the object of desire is a boy or a woman, however, the fundamental ideology remains the same: steadfast mutual desire, erôs, becomes the means by which both partners, through suffering and perseverance, achieve mastery over their ignoble passions and arrive at the highest good – a rational understanding of absolute Being or a redemption bestowed through divine grace.
According to Foucault’s analysis, then, the Greek institution of pederasty indeed posed a problem in ethics. Yet the actual moral issue was framed differently from the way in which members of our own culture would conceive of it. From our perspective, the wrongdoing in pederastic relations involves the unjust exploitation of a trusting or helpless victim by someone in a position of power. The Greeks regarded the adolescent citizen boy as a self-sufficient human being able to make a rational decision about sex and quite capable of behaving with dignity and honor in a homoerotic relationship. Nevertheless, the young man’s susceptibility to persuasion due to relative lack of experience created an area of cultural anxiety, largely because of the negative effect any impression of dishonorable conduct would later have on his civic and social status. Because a Greek pederastic relationship, as ideally conceived, conformed to the dominance–submission paradigm of sexual intercourse, yet constituted a privileged venue for the mutual exhibition of virtuous self-mastery, interaction between the partners was invested with peculiar moral tensions that we, approaching it with an opposed set of assumptions, find ourselves at something of a loss to reconstruct.
If the ancient Greeks, like the very rich, are different from you and me – and not just in their sexual customs – ancient Romans, on the other hand, are often thought to resemble us far too closely. Yet a quick glance at the kind of jokes they laughed at will demonstrate that they, too, had some very unusual notions about sex.
Analogies between imperial Rome and the modern world have always been popular in Hollywood. During the Cold War era several big-budget films used the situation of an oppressive Roman government persecuting devout Christians to moralize on the place of the man or woman of good conscience within a totalitarian system (for example, Quo Vadis [1951], The Robe [1952], Demetrius and the Gladiators [1954], Ben-Hur [1959]). Rome’s decline has long served as a cautionary tale for the United States (Galinsky 1992: 53–70), and disquieting concerns about America’s vulnerability as a superpower were evoked in Anthony Mann’s 1964 motion picture The Fall of the Roman Empire (M. M. Winkler 1995: 138–46). The Oscar-winning epic Gladiator (2000), which pays considerable homage to the Mann film, stunningly explores one overriding social question of the new millennium: the impact of violent spectacle on an entertainment-hungry populace.
One reason why comparisons between ancient Rome and contemporary America are so readily made is that a great deal of Roman first-person literature seems quite accessible to the modern reader. Composed by authors trained in rhetoric, it is written for oral delivery and generates an immediate emotional response when it professes to communicate feeling candidly. Thus Roman love elegy invites us to identify with a passionately enamored speaker whose subjective experiences seem the same as our own because they are depicted with considerable psychological acumen. Here, for example, is Sulpicia, the only Roman woman whose poetry survives, tangling herself up in her own syntax as she shamefacedly apologizes to her lover for standing him up ([Tib.] 3.18 = 4.12):
May I not be to you now, my love, the same burning obsession
that I seem to have been just a few days ago,
if I have committed anything in my whole stupid youth
of which I should confess I have repented more
than that I left you alone last night
wanting to conceal my own passion.
And here is Ovid, the self-styled praeceptor amoris (“love guru”) counseling a young man in his advice manual The Art of Love about courting a girl (1.707–18):
Alas, a youth has too much confidence in his own looks
if he waits until she asks him first.
Let the man approach first, let the man speak imploring words:
she will receive flattering entreaties courteously.
To gain her favors, ask: she’s just hoping to be asked;
state the grounds for your appeal, and when it all began …
But if you sense that the request is arousing smug conceit,
cease your efforts and step back.
What flees, many women desire: they despise what is in front of them;
by coming on more gently, stop them from getting bored with you.
Such extracts from erotic lyric and elegy can give the impression that nothing has really changed in two thousand years, not even the rules of dating.
Yet, at the pole furthest from the romantic fantasies of love elegy, we find Latin graffiti, rhetorical invective, and satire packaging fierce antagonism beneath a veneer of obscene wit. Amy Richlin demonstrated in her pathbreaking study The Garden of Priapus that in these genres humanity is divided into two camps: “us” (the speaker and his audience) and “them” (women, foreigners, the lower classes, sexual deviants). The humorist creates comic pleasure for his readers by displacing their insecurities on to such objects of ridicule (1992: 57–70). These texts respond to widespread fears permeating upper-class Roman society, fears triggered by the competitive scrutiny of peers, built-in inequalities in the omnipresent patronage system, and the uncertainties of political life. They are our best evidence for what the Romans considered kinky, unwholesome, and disgusting. Consequently, they demand a great deal of background knowledge about underlying sexual assumptions before a reader can grasp their implications, let alone their wit.
One revealing example is a short poem by the epigrammatist Martial (10.40):
Since people were always telling me
that my Polla was spending time in secret with a cinaedus,
I broke in on them, Lupus. He wasn’t a cinaedus.
To understand what is going on here, we have to start with a definition of cinaedus. This is one of two derogatory terms in Latin (the other is pathicus) used to designate adult males who were thought to prefer receptive anal sex. In Rome, in which the conceptual scheme of sexual relations is even more macho and phallocentric than that of classical Greece, such persons were objects of scathing ridicule (Richlin 1992: 220–2, 1993; Williams 2010: 191–7). Because Polla herself cannot penetrate the cinaedus anally, the speaker wonders what the pair is up to.
Holt Parker, whose translation I quote, explains how our way of thinking is likely to lead us astray at this point. When Martial tells us the fellow was not after all a cinaedus, we naturally assume the two were found having intercourse (if not “homosexual,” then “heterosexual”). Martial’s audience would reach a different conclusion: if not a cinaedus, something much worse. The one category of sexual acts more demeaning than passive anal sex was oral sex, and the foulest thing of all was to perform it on a woman. Oral sex was repulsive because it contaminated the mouth through association with the disgusting genitalia (Richlin 1992: 26–7), and cunnilingus may have seemed particularly nauseating because of a misogynistic revulsion at menstrual blood (Williams 2010: 223). Polla’s friend is therefore unmasked as a man who dirties his mouth by applying it to a woman’s vagina. “Perhaps few things,” Parker comments, “show the differences between our sexual system and the Romans’ more vividly than these three lines” (1997: 57).
In contrast to our system of sexual identities defined by the biological sex of the partner, Roman culture built its sexual taxonomy – its method of assigning identity – upon discrete practices (Parker 1997; Williams 1992: 259–64, 2010: 178–9). The vocabulary for those practices is very specific, each verb designating only one mode of genital or oral contact. When a man, playing the role of penetrator, inserts his penis into the vagina (futuere), the mouth (irrumare), or the anus (pedicare) of someone else, he performs a “normal” sexual act. All other acts are abnormal and vile because the performer degrades himself in proffering his own orifice to give someone else pleasure, though, as noted, they differ in the degree of contempt attached. Roman sexual ideology also assumed that men who derived gratification from deviant sexual conduct might be inclined to one practice and therefore could categorize persons according to their preferred activity: a pathicus craves anal intercourse; a fellator enjoys performing oral sex on a man; a cunnilingus pleasures women. However, the term cinaedus was so broad in its extension that it could be applied to those who performed oral sex on men or women (or both) and even, as Craig Williams reminds us, to womanizers (2010: 224–30). Transcending the distinction of active and passive roles, this label served as an all-purpose indicator of gender deviance.
What may be even odder than this set of pigeonholes is the fact that Roman authors took such glee in sticking real or make-believe persons into them, while audiences rejoiced at seeing it done. Writing in the last decade of the Roman Republic, the poet Catullus labels prominent statesmen, including Julius Caesar, cinaedi (57.1–2). Cicero, ex-consul and leading orator, slyly insinuates in a speech before the Roman priestly college that his political opponents are given to oral sex (Dom. 25). During the empire, when it became imprudent to attack actual dignitaries by name, Catullus’ imitator Martial published twelve books of epigrams, many of which conclude, often by way of a clever argument, that a certain fictitious target is guilty of this or that appalling habit.
The Roman man in the street might get mischievous satisfaction when a powerful figure like Caesar was slandered, but why were Martial’s epigrams about made-up sexual criminals so popular among the educated classes? Ancient Roman society prescribed firm rules of correct appearance and conduct for upper-class men, who were expected to maintain a cool, imposing demeanor, self-consciously avoiding whatever might seem “feminine” in gaze, walk, gesture, or dress (Gleason 1995). This highly stratified society, where rank was designated by clothing and other visible markers, associated social standing with moral repute (the political term boni meant both “virtuous men” and “upper-class men”). Naturally it was obsessed with possible gaps between external appearance and inner disposition. This mindset then aroused suspicions that outwardly “manly” men were secretly effeminate, together with a corollary fear that an inadvertent look or motion, however innocent, might spell “pathic” to an acute observer. Such anxiety, Williams suggests, “surfaces in various jokes at the expense of men who give every appearance of an unimpeachable masculinity, but who are actually cinaedi” (2010: 212). When he assumes the stance of the investigator who uncovers dirty secrets and reveals them to the world, Martial offers readers the opportunity to join him in performing the exposé. It does not matter that his comic butts are fictitious; the reassuring message communicated to the audience is that “we are both on the proper side.”
Martial’s epigrams turn an implicit power struggle between individuals into entertainment. Readers project themselves imaginatively into the character of the satiric speaker, enjoying his malicious humor and the skill with which he skewers his opponent. Gladiatorial games operate on much the same principle, although audience response to man-to-man combat may have been more complex, involving identification with vanquished as well as victor (Barton 1993: 15–25). Richlin provocatively suggests that gratification from watching the degradation of the weaker by the stronger is fundamental to the thought patterns of Roman society (1992: 210). For the Romans, hostility and sexuality would therefore be two sides of the same coin. Configured hierarchically, with its gender roles prearranged upon an axis of dominance and submission, sexuality provided a handy symbolic code for making light of status differentials, threats to social standing, and the underlying fears that accompanied them.
On both sides of the great cultural schism in our society, there are educated men and women of strong convictions who wish to appropriate the classical past in order to justify their own principles, courses of action, and objectives. Evans v. Romer, the lawsuit discussed at the beginning of this chapter, illustrates the problems with trying to do so. True, an informed grasp of Greco-Roman social history can indeed contribute to a discourse on citizenship. It is even possible that ancient sexual protocols may be germane to public policy. However, arriving at a consensus about the correct meaning of such protocols is not easy even for trained philologists and philosophers. In attempting to fathom the evidence correctly, we can be led astray by a natural tendency to impose our own presuppositions upon a concept that seems tantalizingly akin to one with which we are familiar. Examining Athenian pederasty and Roman sexual humor as cases in point has shown why we must be sensitive to the surrounding conceptual framework of the society. Extracting strands of belief or practice from the complex fabric of ancient sexuality in order to thrust them into present debate as supposedly clinching examples is counterproductive. Any manifest lack of fit between antiquity and now will only provoke further disagreement – and some lack of fit is inevitable.
In surveying Greek and Roman sexuality, this book therefore assumes an objective and nonjudgmental stance. For the purposes of historical inquiry, it also adopts a constructionist approach, postulating that ancient sexual behaviors were socially determined responses to the overall cultural environment. Our method of study involves analyzing relationships between social institutions and prevailing attitudes to sex and gender and studying the effect of modifications to those institutions upon cultural definitions of “good” and “bad” or “normal” and “abnormal” conduct. Elements of sexual ideology indigenous to Roman culture are carefully differentiated from those characteristic of classical and Hellenistic Greece. We focus upon what is distinctive and remarkable about the sexual thinking of the ancient world, contrasting it with the beliefs about sex that most of us share today. That last strategy requires, of course, that we keep an open mind about what we learn.
Provided we allow the Greeks and Romans to remain neutral in our culture wars, looking back at antiquity may help us to gain a more balanced perspective on the twentieth century’s drastic shift in sexual mores. One well-recognized justification for studying ancient Mediterranean gender systems is that they offer a historically distanced model for understanding how social constructions of masculinity and femininity necessarily reflect a wide array of other cultural assumptions. Sexual beliefs and values are components of more extensive gender systems. If we confront the Greco-Roman paradigm of sexuality within its own cultural setting and without passing judgment, pro or con, on the forms of expression it took, we will be better equipped to recognize presuppositions about sex that we ourselves take for granted and to determine what contemporary social purposes they may serve.
1 Sexuality, n.” Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd edn., ed. J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). OED Online (Oxford University Press, April 17, 2001: http://oed.com/cgi/entry/00221321).
2 One minor problem is that the abstract noun can be spelled either with an omicron (eros) or an omega (erôs). Since they mean the same, I use whichever spelling appears in the ancient text.
3 I am drawing upon my own recollections as an undergraduate student in that era. Rumors that the innocuous selections from Catullus assigned in a Latin survey course during my freshman year (fall 1957) were not fully representative of the author inspired me to purchase Merrill’s complete edition and attempt to translate the less innocent poems. Trying to discover what was going on with the help of a tame translation and a noncommittal dictionary was maddening, though ultimately rewarded by shocked enlightenment. See Halperin (1990: 2–3) for an autobiographical account of studying the same poet in the early 1970s; while he and his fellow-students were then allowed to read Catullus’ obscene and pederastic texts, the lexical information needed to grasp them fully was available only as “a body of subterranean lore which circulated informally among classical scholars and was communicated from like-minded professor to student in the course of private conversations outside the classroom” (1990: 3). A textbook to be used in an undergraduate course on ancient sexuality would even at that time have been unthinkable.
4 Annus Mirabilis,” from High Windows (New York: The Noonday Press, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1974), p. 34.
5 The relationship of the contemporary idea of gender to ancient notions of sexual difference and the sexed body is examined in Holmes 2012, which appeared too late for its conclusions to be fully incorporated here.
6 I employ the term “quasi-Freudian” because Freud’s own concept of the sexual drive is more complex: though an innate, elementary psychic force, in the mature adult it is repressed by the super-ego and can be sublimated into socially beneficial kinds of expression, such as art (1930: 36–45; 1962: 104–5). Because channels of repression and sublimation are culturally specific, sexual subjectivity is shaped in part by historical circumstances; there is a sense, then, in which even the Freudian model of human sexual desire is “constructed” (Sissa 2008: 201–2).
1 For a classical scholar’s critique of biological reductionism as an unsatisfactory approach to studying ancient (and modern) sex/gender systems, see Parker (2001: 330–8). The author employs anthropological theory to “defamiliarize” Greek and Roman gender categories, which, as he shows, are integral to the larger cultural system and cannot be assimilated to modern Western categories.
2 See the comments on the Bryn Mawr Classical Review blog (www.bmcreview.org/) regarding reviews and responses posted as BMCR 2008.07.20, BMCR 2009.09.61, BMCR 2009.11.03, and BMCR 2009.11.15.
3 A cup in Oxford by the Brygos Painter (ARV2 378/137; illustrated as no. R520 in Dover 1978 and Kilmer 1993) shows a mature, bearded man about to have sex with an apparently prepubescent boy. The second-century CE epigrammatist Strato celebrates the allure of a twelve-year-old, though he increases his praise of the charms of each successive year up through seventeen (Anth. Pal. 12.4). Twelve, then, may be the absolute minimum age at which a boy, for the Greeks, became sexually desirable. It was also felt that girls ought not to have sexual activity before puberty – even if they were prostitutes ([Dem.] 59.22).
4 Dover 1973 is a short and very accessible survey of classical Greek attitudes toward various kinds of sexual behavior between members of the same sex and between those of opposite sexes.
5 John Addington Symonds, A Problem in Greek Ethics, being an inquiry into the phenomenon of sexual inversion, addressed especially to medical psychologists and jurists. Symonds, a classicist, wrote his study of ancient Greek homosexuality in 1873; a decade later, it made its first appearance in a private edition of only ten copies. After his death, a revised version was appended to the first edition of Havelock Ellis’s Sexual Inversion (1897), but Symonds’s executor bought out the entire printing and prohibited any reference to the essay in the second edition (which, in turn, was suppressed by the British government). A limited edition of 100 copies finally appeared in 1901 (Halperin 1990: 4).
6 The Neopythagoreans, Hellenistic followers of the precepts of the sixth-century BCE philosopher Pythagoras, considered women moral subjects and wrote advice treatises directed especially to them, but Foucault does not take those writings into account.
7 In Greek thought, as we will see in Chapter 1, women are by nature more susceptible to passion and less capable of mastering their desires. The medical model of female physiology in the Hippocratic corpus actually denies them any control over their sexual appetites (Dean-Jones 1992).
8 The question of how far “Socrates,” the speaker in Plato’s dialogues, expresses opinions that can be attributed to the historical Socrates is a very difficult one. However, both Plato and Xenophon present us with a Socrates who enjoins abstinence from sexual pleasure in love affairs and proclaims the superiority of spiritual to carnal love; while these portraits are fictionalized, then, it is likely that the Socrates who inspired them advocated similar views.
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Dover, K. J. 1978. Greek Homosexuality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Essential for understanding both the basic features of institutionalized pederasty and the development of work on ancient sexuality.
Halperin, D. M. 1990. One Hundred Years of Homosexuality. New York and London: Routledge. Highly influential expansion of Dover’s key ideas.
—— 2002. How to Do the History of Homosexuality. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Collection of essays dealing with specific theoretical issues involved in writing the history of homosexuality from a constructionist perspective.
Holmes, B. 2012. Gender: Antiquity and Its Legacy. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Groundbreaking survey of the ways in which the classical past has been employed in order to formulate modern conceptions of gender.
Hubbard, T. K. 2003. Homosexuality in Greece and Rome: A Sourcebook of Basic Documents. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press. Compiles essential Greek and Latin materials on the topic in English translation.
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McClure, L. K. 2002. Sexuality and Gender in the Classical World. Oxford and Malden, MA: Blackwell. Useful selection of primary sources and reprinted articles, including several cited in this volume.
Ormand, K. 2009. Controlling Desires: Sexuality in Ancient Greece and Rome. Westport, CT: Praeger. Ormand’s introduction treats many of the same questions raised in the present chapter.
Richlin, A. 2013. “Sexuality and History.” In N. Partner and S. Foot (eds.) The SAGE Handbook of Historical Theory. London: Sage Publications. 294–310. Highly recommended survey article of work on the history of sexuality that asks provocative questions about how “history” and “sexuality,” as areas of academic knowledge, intersect with each other.