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CHAPTER 8
RETROSEXUALITY SEX IN THE SECOND SOPHISTIC
AMY RICHLIN
THE history of sexuality is notoriously difficult to write due to the general lack of first-hand records of events (not that historians trust these, either, any more).1 The problem is exacerbated by a distance of two thousand years from the events we would like to know about, in a society where free men wrote almost all the extant texts and where slaves were commonly used for sex; even more so, in a period during which the traditional penchant for looking backwards had reached the point where life was lived, as it were, in quotation marks. Or so it would seem from those texts most characteristic of the Second Sophistic itself, so that it is hard to tell when we are looking at second-century experience and when we are looking at what might be called “retrosexuality.”2 That is, does a text attest to something in the writer’s own experience? Or does it attest to a period costume he likes to wear, perhaps only on paper or on stage? If all gender is performed anyway, can some sex acts be more performed than others? After all, the mask is always all we have to go on.
Correcting “likes to wear”: all masks were not worn voluntarily; slaves did not choose the name Ganymedes or Tiro.
A DINNER PARTY
In a chapter of the Attic Nights, Aulus Gellius describes a birthday dinner at which some early Latin epigrams were recited by one of the guests (19.9).3 The epigrams are of interest in themselves and are regularly taken out of their setting to attest to the times in which they supposedly originated (Richlin 1992, 39; Stroup 2010, 289; Williams 2010, 70; cf. Stephens 2002 on the problems caused by disembedding fragments). Here the frame narrative itself will establish some themes (19.9.1–5):
A young man [adulescens] of equestrian rank from the land of Asia, of a happy disposition and graced with both fortune and manners, and with talents eagerly inclined toward things musical, was giving a dinner to his friends and teachers outside the city in his little country place to celebrate that day of the year that marked the beginning of his life. There had come with us to the same dinner Antonius Julianus the rhetor, a teacher who offered public instruction to young men, of the Spanish tongue, a person of blooming eloquence and well versed in the history and literature of the ancients. He, when an end came to the victuals and it was now time for cups and conversation, expressed his desire for a display of those of both sexes, very clever at singing and playing, whom he knew that young man owned. And after the boys and girls were brought in, they sang to a pleasing beat many Anakreonteia and Sapphic songs and certain erotic elegeia also of modern poets, sweet and lovely. Indeed we were delighted, apart from many other things, by very charming little verses of Anacreon in his old age, which I in fact wrote down . . .
And Gellius proceeds to quote the verses in Greek.
However, the harmony of the scene is shattered by “quite a number of Greeks” present (Graeci plusculi), who begin to insult Julianus as a “boorish barbarian,” unfit by his birth for elegant speech and trainer of students in a language “that had no loveliness, none of the charm of Venus and the Muse” (that is, Latin); what could he know of Anacreon? Who of “our poets” (nostrarum poetarum—Gellius’s point of view) could write that well, except Catullus and Calvus? In reply, Julianus covers his head with his pallium, “as they say Socrates did in a certain none-too-chaste speech” (quod in quadam parum pudica oratione Socraten fecisse aiunt), and begins to sing Latin epigrams of the generation before Catullus, which Gellius praises highly. This story has a coda of sorts two chapters later, when Gellius repeats a two-line Greek epigram, attributed to Plato, about kissing Agathon; a young friend, he says, has done an expanded translation (19.11.3), and Gellius proceeds to quote all seventeen lines. He introduces this bilingual young person bilingually: ouk amousos adulescens, “a young man pas sans Muse.”
The attention of the reader is directed toward the poems, which attest not only to the existence of pederastic love poetry in Latin before Catullus, but to antiquarianism in the 100s CE, including the transposition of paradigmatic Greek pederastic poetry (by actual Plato!) into a robustly erotic Latin in Gellius’s own day: “While with half-wide-open kiss / I kiss my laddie. . . .” The author of this poem is now held to be Apuleius, and echoes of it, I have argued, show up in the letters between Fronto and the young Marcus Aurelius.4 Let us also note, however, the structural elements in the dinner party and its coda: only male guests are mentioned; they are differentiated by place of origin (Asia, Spain, Greece), yet are all together; the relative value of Latin and Greek literature is at stake; Gellius displays his own and his friends’ bilingualism in the face of Greek disdain for Latin; and the floor show is made up of a mixed chorus of young slaves trained to sing erotic poetry. Antonius Julianus, the Latin-speaking Spaniard, acts the part of Socrates making a “none-too-chaste speech” in the Phaedrus (237a), a familiar school text in this period, and a move, as will be seen below, not unique to him. Indeed, Julianus pegs the reader firmly onto Gellius’s lifetime, being a real-life famous professor of oratory, Gellius’s own teacher, and a recurring character in the Attic Nights (see Gunderson 2009, 173–174, 235–236; Holford-Strevens 2003, 86–88).
In this exemplary scene of sex in the Second Sophistic, then, we have a kind of antiquarian sex, scripted and acted out by well-known contemporary figures, quoting and imitating lines venerated due to their age, and staged using slaves: retrosexuality. The slaves and Julianus remind us that, however bedecked by quotation marks, these acts involved living people. Are the quoted poems, the translation, and the performance of lyric poetry evidence for the continuation of the old sex/gender system? Or is this costume drama? Both, surely. There are still “modern poets”; Plato’s poem is not only expanded but the expansion is first-person, the speaker describing meum puellum, “my laddie.” The only females mentioned as present are the puellae, the singing girls. Still, t
aking the Second Sophistic to be the time from Domitian to the Severans mapped out by Philostratus, and taking it to be transnational, we can occasionally see women as sexual subjects, or at least deduce them. Let us trace, as best we can, women and other sexual subjects through the mirror-box of retrosexuality: women, boys, eunuchs, cinaedi, and sophists. The shape of this box is peculiar to the Second Sophistic in that the accidents of time have left us a particularly rich store of technical texts—from law, medicine, dream analysis, physiognomy, astrology—which serve, along with satire, history, and moral philosophy, a policing function.5 The contents of the box are both Roman and Greek, for the owners, despite their mutual frictions, their differing motives for nostalgia, were all attending the same dinner parties.
WOMEN
One woman speaks for herself in this period: the satirist Sulpicia. Cryptically, in a fragment quoted by a scholiast on Juvenal, who borrows a rare word from her, she sets a condition: “If, the straps of my cadurcum having been restored, / [someone? something?] should show me lying naked with Calenus. . . .” The cadurcum is an article of bedding, something like a mattress. Satire thrives on exposing the female body; Sulpicia does it for herself and, according to Martial’s poems on her, her husband. Autobiographical texts by ancient women are rare, texts where women writers talk about sex with men much more so; this image is unique, and its fragmentary nature only underscores the gaps in our sources.6
Martial’s version of her in his book of epigrams is much tamer; here she is a faithful wife, eminently chaste, writer of chastely naughty poems, her husband congratulated by the poet on their anniversary (10.35, 10.38). She here inhabits a conventional frame, familiar in depictions of Roman women from all periods, like other contemporary women named in Martial’s poems: Nigrina places her husband’s ashes in the tomb (9.30), the chaste (casta) Arria heroically addresses her heroic husband (1.13). Yet in this period the frame is literary and amatory in a particular way. So Lucan’s widow, Polla Argentaria, is addressed on the anniversary of Lucan’s birth and their marriage, and the wicked Nero reproached (7.21); then again, she is asked not to wrinkle her brow at the poet’s obscene poems, since her husband wrote ones just as obscene (10.64; the wrinkled brow is conventionally associated with prudish readers). Jane Stevenson remarks that “a public reputation for verse seems to have been compatible with chaste and respectable marriage” (2005, 47); rather, chaste marriage was the public armor for the verse we hear about. These women’s leading sexual characteristic, indeed their leading characteristic, is marital fidelity. The same would be true for female members of the household of the adoptive emperors as commemorated in relief sculpture and coins; slogans and inscriptions celebrate their wifely loyalty, also the fecundity of Marcus’s wife, Faustina the younger (fourteen children).7 Remarkably, under Hadrian, the court included women writers among the retinue of his wife, Sabina—writers of Greek poetry who were also respectable ladies (Hemelrijk 1999, 119, 164–170, 173, 178; Pomeroy 2007, 83–84; Rosenmeyer 2008). Whereas male writers of erotic verse followed Catullus’s apologia in claiming their lives were chaste though their verse was not, the chastity of female subjects was part of their labeling by male writers.