Boswell previews his ostensibly harmless footnoting strategy in an introductory admonition to his readers:
[A]lthough composing the pages that follow has required mastery of many different specialties (other than arcane languages), many readers may not be interested in the technical niceties of liturgical development or the details of moral and civil laws regarding marital status. The text has been aimed, therefore, at readers with no particular expertise in any of the specialties that have under-girded the research; all technical materials have been relegated to the notes, which will be of value to specialists but can generally be skipped by other readers.
The author goes on to suggest that whole chapters may indeed be skipped by all except those interested in what he dismisses as “liturgical niceties”—the kind of stuff that is, he self-deprecatingly hints, “perhaps not fascinating for the general reader.” I stress here, and shall emphasize again, how at the very outset of this study Boswell insinuates into his (general) audience’s mind the notion that his copious footnotes will deal with mere technicalities (he uses the words twice): that is, arcane fodder for the abstruse activity of “experts” and “specialists.”
With this in mind, then, let us turn to the author’s discussion of the Grottaferrata text. At the end of Part IV of Grottaferrata II, a line is drawn across the page following the Greek word apoluetai—that is, after the sentence that Boswell translates as “Then they shall kiss the holy Gospel and the priest and one another, and conclude.” This scribal line is a fairly standard indication that what follows constitutes a separate text, and hence in this case strongly suggests in itself that Patriarch Methodius’s Ecclesiastical Canon of Marriage is not, in fact, related to the adelphopoiêsis at all. That this is in fact the case seems to be supported by the use of the verb apoluô here, which generally marks the conclusion of liturgies from this period—as indeed it does in every other adelphopoiêsis ceremony provided by Boswell in which that word appears.
But not for Boswell, who instead tries to get around both the scribal line and the apolusis formula in a number of ingenious ways. The first of these involves a clever rearrangement of the text, at least for the benefit of his Greekless readers. In the Greek text, the closing instruction to kiss the Bible and the priest appears, as I have said, as the last line of section IV—that is, the last section of the adelphopoiêsis. But in Boswell’s English translation—the one, of course, that the book’s intended audience must consult—the author transposes this line so that it appears to be the first line of section V—that is, Methodius’s marriage canon. In so doing Boswell slyly creates one seamless ceremony where in the original there were almost certainly two. (This presentation is helped along by Boswell’s misleading insertion of an anachronistic colon following the word “conclude” at the end of the line in question, as if the word’s function was to announce what was to follow, rather than to conclude what preceded it.)
Still, Boswell seems to be aware that his decision to conjoin these two texts, based on a desire to demonstrate that adelphopoiêsis was a true marriage ceremony, requires more than a quick scissors-and-glue job. His self-justification takes the form of a lengthy footnote to the English translation that is filled with untranslated (even untransliterated) Greek. He begins by pointing out that there are occasional cases in which the scribal line usually drawn between separate texts has been drawn in error. And in order to justify appending an entire matrimonial service after the apolusis—the closing formula—that ends Part IV of the adelphopoiêsis, Boswell notes that the apolusis was occasionally accompanied by certain “final acts” or further prayers. This is indeed true, as Boswell’s citations of various learned definitions of the apolusis indicate. (Brightman: “the conclusion of an office and the formula with which it is concluded”; Oxford Dictionary of Byzantium: “a formula pronounced at the end of a liturgical service or sometimes of one of its parts.”) According to Boswell, the matrimonial service should be considered such a “formula.”
At best, these are tenuous arguments. To pin a radical textual claim on a fervent hope that scribal error took place is ludicrous, and hardly qualifies as rigorous scholarly methodology. In addition, the entire Methodian marriage service constitutes much more than a mere “formula or closing prayer.” (The ODB’s “sometimes one of its parts” is, moreover, every bit as shaky a ground for Boswell’s case as are his devout hopes for a scribal goof.) Indeed, in the examples that Boswell himself provides, the “final acts” and formulae that he posits as valid analogues for the matrimonial service consist of no more than a valedictory kissing of the Bible, the priest, and the participants of the ceremony. A kiss on the cheek may be quite continental, but it’s neither as lengthy nor as substantial a parallel as what Boswell needs to justify his appendage of the marriage rite to the adelphopoiêsis in his presentation of Grottaferrata II.
The real problem, though, is that a general audience has absolutely no way of knowing any of this. Aside from the fact that he or she has, in any case, been warned off the notes to begin with, and hence will accept Boswell’s extremely tendentious presentation here at face value, the interested nonspecialist reader who takes the trouble to go through the Grottaferrata text in English cannot evaluate Boswell’s argument about, say, the content of those final acts, because Boswell leaves the descriptions of them in the original Greek—a peculiar choice, given that this is, after all, the “Appendix of Translations.” If Boswell really intends his notes primarily for the specialist, why bother appending this Greek-filled, two-page-long note to the English text? The polyglot scholarship stuffed under the English translation makes for an impressive-looking footnote that indeed lives up to the author’s scarifying description, but it’s not going to be all that much use to those most likely to consult these translations in the first place: the Greekless readers at whom the book is aimed.
Here it is worth remarking that there is, in fact, a footnote that much more straightforwardly acknowledges the problems with Boswell’s organization of the manuscript. In it, the author articulates very clearly the twinned possibilities that this [i.e., the apolusis concluding part IV] is the closing rubric of this ceremony and that therefore “the following prayer is separate.” But this note, oddly enough, is appended to the Greek text, and hence occurs in a section destined to remain safely outside the general reader’s field of vision.
The convenient cutting-and-pasting and the self-serving deployment of notes vis-à-vis text that you get in the case of the Grottaferrata manuscripts are the most egregious examples of an unfortunate tendency on the author’s part to prefer (and proffer) the tendentious, when the judicious is what’s called for. Perhaps because they are less easy to manhandle without attracting attention, his discussion of his Greek and Roman sources often resorts to subtler tactics in order to alchemize the arcane, technical dross of adelphopoiêsis into the political gold of gay marriage. These come under the rubric of evidentiary abuses, and they pervade his discussion of classical material.
Boswell’s idiosyncratic interpretation of the adelphopoiêsis ceremony as an open, sanctioned rite of “gay marriage” depends on two lines of argument. First, he wants to demonstrate that the adelphos in adelphopoiêsis would have been most naturally understood figuratively, as “lover,” rather than literally, as “brother.” (This is indeed one possible sense of the word in certain contexts.) And to bolster this claim, he needs to show that the kind of homosexual relationship allegedly celebrated in the adelphopoiêsis—i.e., a loving, reciprocal, socially accepted affective bond—was in fact part of a long-standing tradition in Mediterranean culture dating back to classical Greece, rather than being some kind of aberrant blip on the socioerotic screen of late antique and early medieval culture. This is why the first third of Boswell’s book is devoted to detailed discussions of both erotic vocabulary and erotic institutions; without them, his argument crashes and burns.
When all is said and done, however, it is on the brother/lover ambivalence that Boswell’s thesis de
pends. After all, if the official title of the ceremony were something with less potential for ambiguity—the symmakhopoiêsis (“creation of military allies”), say, or for that matter the kinaidopoiêsis (“creation of sissies”)—there would hardly be any need for lengthy interpretive exegeses in the first place. And in his first chapter, “The Vocabulary of Love and Marriage,” Boswell laudably sets the interpretive stage by calling attention to the dangers inherent in walking the “excruciatingly fine line” between “providing too much or too little specificity” in translating ancient words and concepts.
But the discussion that follows seems intended to muddy the lexical waters precisely so that his own slippery readings will appear no more or no less approximate than any other in a semantic field that he constantly portrays as being hopelessly prone to inexactitude. “Many ancient and modern tongues,” he writes, “fail to distinguish in any neat way between ‘friend’ and ‘lover.’” “Fail” here is sly. What clarifies the differences between literal and figurative usages is, of course, context: but throughout Same-Sex Unions, the only context that Boswell recognizes is a homoerotic one. His repeated suggestions that our classical sources are characterized by a pervasive inability to sort the literal from the figurative merely serve to justify his own unwillingness to distinguish between “brother” and “lover.”
Boswell’s sometimes willful indifference to context becomes apparent when he attempts to bolster his claim about lexical confusion by using the example of the classical Greek word hetairos. According to conventional scholarship, the masculine form of this noun denotes “companion”; by classical times, however, the feminine form seems to have assumed the almost exclusively figurative meaning of “courtesan.” To those who accept that Greek society was characterized by strict separation of the sexes, this etymological evolution makes sense: the only women who would have been available to mix freely with men as their “companions” would have been prostitutes. But not for Boswell, who hints that this traditional construction of the word is an instance of homophobia on the part of a repressive scholarly tradition:
For classical Greek, for example, it is conventional (especially in societies marked by extreme antipathy to homosexual feelings and behavior) to render [hetairos] as “companion” and [hetaira] as “courtesan” or “lover,” although the basic meanings of the two words are the same, and there is every reason to believe (especially about classical Athens) that there was little distinction in the nature of the relationships in the two cases.
Everything in this paragraph that follows the word “although”—which is to say, the part that is characteristic of Boswell’s readings throughout his book—is mere assertion. (And rhetorically speaking, that first parenthetical aside amounts to little more than coercion.) The basic meaning of the English word bottom is “the underside of something,” but that won’t get you very far if you hear your gay friend wondering whether that cute guy he met at the gym is a “bottom”—that is, gay slang for someone who tends to be the passive, receptive partner during intercourse. The great weight of our evidence indicates that there is in fact very little reason to believe that we should eroticize masculine hetairos on analogy with hetaira (or de-eroticize hetaira, for that matter); the nature of the two relationships to which Boswell here alludes was quite different. Classical Greek has perfectly good words to describe male homosexuals as erotic subjects (erastês, erômenos, paidika, etc.) and does not need to resort to code words like hetairos. But you can’t tell any of this to Boswell, because he’s too busy spotting same-sex eros lurking behind every linguistic palm. Indeed, you’d never guess from his remarks here that according to more conventional scholarship, a clearly erotic sense of the masculine hetairos occurs only twice in the entire classical Greek corpus. But then, why would you, a well-intentioned and liberal-minded reader, want to guess as much—and in so doing reveal your “extreme antipathy to homosexual feelings”?
Boswell then goes on to declare that the semantic slippage that is “most significant” for his own argument is “the use of sibling designations for romantic partners, of either gender.” Characteristically, he begins by offering a flawed English analogy for this alleged confusion. “‘Brother’ and ‘brotherhood,’” he remarks, “have often had sexual or romantic overtones in modern English during the last two centuries.” Whose modern English? Boswell’s examples are hardly representative: he cites lyrics of Walt Whitman and Elton John (in the pop song “Daniel”). More questionably still, the author then goes on to intimate that “brother” does in fact mean “sexual partner” in the argot of today’s gay community. This is simply wrong, and grossly misleading. Gay men do not use “brother” to mean “lover.” The author’s so-called evidence for such usage is wrenched from a quite specific context—the personal ads in popular gay publications—where “younger brother” or “kid brother” typically refer to specific physical (and occasionally psychological) types. But it’s ludicrous to suggest that these are synonymous with “sexual partner” in everyday speech among gay men. They’re not—or at least, no more than “redheaded professional” or “cuddly, overeducated mensch” are among straights.
Boswell’s analogies from English are, therefore, hardly cogent—unfortunately, the one respect in which they do in fact parallel his arguments about other languages. But they do get him to the bottom of the slippery slope that ends in his assertion “that the nouns most commonly translated from Greek , Latin (frater), or Slavic are similar”—i.e., similarly ambiguous with respect to potential erotic overtones. Indeed, it’s somehow appropriate that when the author concludes that the supposedly erotic connotations of English “brother” in the gay subculture are “closely related to the imperial Latin usage of the word ‘brother,’” it turns out that his evidence for the erotic potential of the Latin, frater, comes from literary or lyric sources as stylized in their way as is the Whitman and Elton John material.
For this discussion, Boswell depends primarily on Petronius’s Satyricon. Citing Circe’s attempted seduction of Encolpius at Satyricon 127 (“You’ve clearly got a ‘brother’—I wasn’t too bashful to ask, you see—so what’s to stop you from ‘adopting’ a ‘sister’ as well?”), he asserts on the basis of this that frater is “manifestly…a technical term for long-standing homosexual partner” in Roman culture (67). This passage, he says, “implies” that frater was “widely understood in the Roman world to denote a permanent partner in a homosexual relationship.” Although the author of Same-Sex Unions goes out of his way to admire Petronius’s “sharp ear for quotidian speech,” he neglects to indicate how precarious it might be to base far-ranging claims about popular Roman mores and argot on a single line from a work whose author (Nero’s arbiter elegantiarum, for Heaven’s sake) belonged to the rarified Roman beau monde.
The nonliterary evidence for Boswell’s claim that the words brother and sister were “common terms of endearment for heterosexual spouses in ancient Mediterranean societies” turns out to be equally problematic. To support his point about the eroticization of sibling terminology in Roman poetry, Boswell cites papyri from Hellenistic Egypt. But the very ancient cultural traditions of brother-sister incest make the use of Egyptian material problematic, to say the least, especially as the basis for sweeping statements about the “ancient Mediterranean.” Indeed, when the author cites the historian Keith Hopkins on the prevalence of sister as a term of endearment used by Egyptian husbands of their wives, he fails to mention that the thrust of Hopkins’s article is that there was in fact real sibling incest going on in Roman Egypt, perhaps because this information might weaken the force of Boswell’s own linguistic interpretations, which forever shun the literal in favor of the figurative. This is not to say that Hopkins is necessarily right (or wrong); the debate about sibling incest in Greco-Roman Egypt is an ongoing and fierce one. But it’s a typical omission on Boswell’s part. (Indeed, he often allows bibliographical trees to obscure the argumentative forest. For example, he cites snippets of Susan Treggiari’s
thoroughgoing study of Roman marriage, but you’d never guess from them that her overarching conclusion is that mutual affect and the procreation of offspring were vital elements of that institution, which Boswell insists on portraying as a mere “property arrangement.”)
Ah well. Why quibble over secondary sources like Hopkins and Treggiari when you can support your claims about Latin usage in the first century A.D. with a footnote about the Old Babylonian epic of Gilgamesh, composed two thousand years earlier? This Boswell does—just one example of the astonishing methodological free association that continually mars this book. In this scholar’s approach to world literature, pretty much everything turns out to be about same-sex unions, and he’s hardly shy about sharing that insight with you. For Boswell, the phrase ambo fratres (“both brothers”), as used by the theologian Tertullian at the end of the second century A.D., is “strongly reminiscent” of the phrase fortunati ambo (“fortunate pair!”), used by the pagan Vergil to describe the lovers Nisus and Euryalus in Book 9 of the Aeneid, written two hundred years earlier, because each contain the Latin word ambo, “both.” This is the kind of thing that gives pedantry a bad name; you may as well say that Tertullian’s fratres are the literary antecedents of the eponymous sibling in the American pop tune “He Ain’t Heavy, He’s My Brother,” simply because both are about brothers. But then, why bother, when Boswell himself goes on to suggest as much? This isn’t scholarship, it’s Rorschach. Blotches like that one turn up on too many of Same-Sex Unions’s pages.
How Beautiful It Is and How Easily It Can Be Broken Page 36