Accordingly, then, we hear only in retrospect about negative role models in the imperial household: within this period, Domitian’s niece Julia, with whom he is said to have committed incest (Juv. 2.29–33; Plin. Ep. 4.11.6; Suet. Dom. 22); his wife, Domitia, notorious for her love of the actor Paris (Suet. Dom. 3.1, 10.4). Xenophon’s Cyropaedia, popular in the Second Sophistic, is used by Lucian to achieve another sort of distance; he writes an extravagant double panegyric to a woman whose name he avoids mentioning, although he identifies her as having the same name as “the beautiful wife of Abradatas” (that is, Xenophon’s romantic heroine Pantheia) and as being the companion of “our kind and gentle emperor,” usually identified as Verus (Eikones 10, 22; compare In Defense of Eikones, where she is “the woman”).8 Lucian’s praise of this living woman is almost entirely expressed through a mash-up of famous classical statues, allusions, quotations, and abstractions; in the Defense, Pantheia’s rebuttal appears, not in direct speech, but quoted by one of the dialogue speakers.
Letters in Latin likewise present a refracted view of contemporary women in love. The younger Pliny’s letters to his much younger wife Calpurnia portray her as besottedly in love with him (esp. 4.19), while he describes himself in the language of an elegiac lover, haunting his beloved’s doorstep (Ep. 7.5, cf. 6.7); Pliny’s wife, however, is only away, not shutting him out. The letter-book of Cornelius Fronto allows an oblique look at the relationship between Fronto’s wife, Cratia, and the mother of the young Marcus Aurelius, Domitia Lucilla, the four of them being engaged in a sort of love quadrangle (Richlin 2011; Taoka 2013b): “my Cratia . . . could live on your mother’s kisses alone and be happy,” writes Fronto to Marcus (M. Caes. 2.13). Apuleius’s Apology, on the other hand, turns his wife Pudentilla into a character in a melodrama starring himself.
Once the contemporary women depicted are anonymous or obscure—fictional—all inhibition is lost. In keeping with his poem to Polla Argentaria, Martial claims a readership among matronae, just as lustful as his male readers despite their pretensions to moral purity; his epigrams portray many varieties of female sexual subject—lesbians, dozens of adulteresses, women who like or even marry cinaedi, old women who still want to have sex, ugly women, pretty women, prostitutes who charge too much, women naked in the public baths, women who have sex with their slaves (Richlin 1992, 11, 53–56, 133–134). He even discusses sex between husbands and wives, again rarely seen in Roman texts: sometimes he urges “his wife” to be sexy (11.104), sometimes he rejects her attempts to compete with pueri (11.43, 12.96). The stereotypes in this poetry, common to all ancient literature, must have policed the lives of real women (see Richlin 2014, 36–80). Similar stereotypes populate the pages of the satires of Martial’s younger friend Juvenal, most notably his massive sixth satire, a monument of misogyny; yet he also lets one female speaker in his second satire talk back to a cinaedus who castigates women’s promiscuity (2.36–63; cf. Braund 1995). This hypocritical moralist invokes the lex Julia, an Augustan law that criminalized adultery, revived by Domitian (2.30–31, 37); Martial had praised Domitian directly for its revival (6.2, 6.4, 9.6), but also made jokes about women who got around it.9 Laws, like jokes, aim to regulate real women contemporary with them. These moral norms were not applied to slave women, whose status incorporated sexual availability, and the jurist Ulpian in the Severan period specifies that women dressed like prostitutes or slaves have no legal recourse against public sexual harassment (Frier 1989, 183–184).
An outspoken concern with women’s intimate sexual lives, emphatically the lives of women contemporary with the writer, thus shows up in two other policing regimes, medicine and moral philosophy. The pages of Galen display case studies of his own female patients—among them, a famous detection of lovesickness (On Prognosis 6)—alongside stories of famous cases past (see King 2011; Flemming 2000, 263–266, who notes the novelistic nature of the lovesickness tale). Some medical handbooks advised clitoridectomy as a treatment for “women with masculine desires” (Brooten 1996: 143–174). Plutarch addresses his Advice on Marriage to Pollianus and Eurydice, a young couple of his acquaintance (or so the piece is framed); here Plutarch addresses the questions of sex between husband and wife and of how a wife should behave when her husband has sex with other women, and recommends the wife not to use love charms on her husband.10 An evidently popular set piece, the comparison between women and boys as sexual partners for men appears in Plutarch’s Erôtikos (Mor. 748f–771e) as well as in Achilles Tatius’s novel Leucippe and Cleitophon (2.35–38) and in the later dialogue associated with the name of Lucian, the Erôtes (see Goldhill 1995; Halperin 1993; Konstan 1994: 28–29; Morales 2008; and below). In the final section of his Euboean Oration, Dio Chrysostom, a contemporary of Martial, declaims against prostitution as leading to the corruption of upper-class women and, the ultimate depravity, young men, and this has been taken seriously as testimony to then-current sexual definitions (Or. 7.133–152, cf. Houser 1998); as will be seen below, Martial was also capable of deploring prostitution when it suited him, and Dio’s fantastical, even adoxographic speech, named for its opening tour of the romantic countryside, displays the talents of one of Philostratus’s star sophists (VS 487–488). As D. A. Russell says of this speech (1992, 12), “We began in the world of Theocritus; we end in the world of Juvenal”—a retrosexual countryside and a contemporary Vanity Fair. Certainly the rhetorical curriculum was as jam-packed as ever with the Clytemnestras of classical literature, while poisonous, adulterous wives still fill the Latin declamation exercises attributed to Quintilian, as well as contemporary Greek exercises (Russell 1983).
Arguably, the female characters in Greek novels of this period, as well as in Apuleius, are even further removed from reality and serve a more complex function. As in the modern “bodice-ripper” (Elsom 1992; Montague 1992), the always endangered, sexually alluring, never quite ravished heroine is available for all to try on, like a costume. That these novels were read as aphrodisiac in antiquity is explicitly attested by the fourth-century physician Theodorus Priscianus (Elsom 1992, 215); although David Konstan has argued that the female and male characters in these novels exhibit a “sexual symmetry” suitable for conditions of Greek diaspora and world citizenship under the Roman Empire (1994, 229–231), Helen Morales points out the “sheer relentlessness” with which women in the novels are threatened with rape and violence (2008, 53). The female characters in Apuleius’s Metamorphoses conform to the norms of invective, like the lust-thwarted hag Meroe, or the adulterous witch Pamphile, or the adulterous wives of books 9–10, while the slave Fotis (2.6–11, 16–18) acts out at length the myriad scenarios of erotic epigram, both in Latin and in Greek (Anth. Pal. 5, 11). These texts are fantasies, as are the captive women who cringe from the soldiers in military relief sculpture, for example on the columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius; like Ovid’s nymphs, they have trouble keeping their clothes on as they resist (see Dillon 2006, Uzzi 2015). Real women walked past them every day, as they walked past the frieze of Arachne in Domitian’s Forum Transitorium (see D’Ambra 1993).
Indeed the Second Sophistic was haunted by obsessive retrosexual visions of women’s bad behavior. Juvenal actually begins his Satires, in a famously cryptic programmatic statement, by saying he will satirize the dead (1.170–171); this is what he does in several of his most famous set pieces. For Juvenal, the sexual doings of the empresses Messallina (6.115–135), Caesonia (6.614–617), and Agrippina (6.620–626) belong to a time safely in the past. All the more so for the great historical and biographical works of the period: Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, Plutarch’s Parallel Lives, Tacitus’s Annales, and Cassius Dio’s history, even farther separated from its parade of wicked women. Cleopatra; Julia, daughter of Augustus; Antony’s wife, Fulvia—the monsters of female sexuality these writers created were made possible by their removal from the writer’s present, that he could not or would not write about; taken to be historical for the next two millennia, they are deeply engraved in Wester
n popular culture. But theirs are not the lives being told by the biographers; they only embellish the lives of men; as Sandra Joshel has shown for Tacitus’s Messallina, they are constructed figures on an imperial stage set (1997).
So, in a different way, Lucian’s courtesans (Dialogues of the Courtesans) and wealthy women (Paid Companions 33–34, 36) mask their bad behavior in Attic Greek; the women of Paid Companions are carefully marked as Roman, and the occasional Greek women who are criticized are either anonymous or located in the far past (Defense of “Eikones” 3–4). Particular to Lucian is a prurient interest in the sexual initiation of very young girls (Dial. meret. 6; Dial. Mar. 8, 15), and his courtesans go into unusual detail on pregnancy and lesbian customers (Dial. meret. 2, 5; cf. ps.-Lucian Erôtes 28). 11 The influence of Juvenal, or a common pool of jokes, may be detected here—unsurprising, in light of the lengthy account of Roman after-dinner entertainment in Paid Companions.
Alciphron’s courtesans, following Lucian, are even more clearly marked as historical fictions (see Costa 2001; Rosenmeyer 2001). The wives (few and disappointing) in Philostratus’s Lives of the Sophists, the beauties in his Love Letters, wear a similar period guise, necessarily separate from the court of Julia Domna, his patron. As for Athenaeus, he deals exclusively in the witticisms of courtesans dead for five hundred years and more. Madeleine Henry (1992) points out that these women are treated as consumables in the same way as the food at the dinner, forming part of a prescriptive etiquette for the properly educated; Laura McClure (2003) sees their quoted voices as fetish objects that serve the needs of an eroticized literary nostalgia typical of the Second Sophistic. So the story of Regilla, for Philostratus, is really about her husband, Herodes Atticus, his (long-dead) hero, and her murder is in the Lives for Herodes to be absolved of it (Pomeroy 2007). Herodes’s extravagant mourning, and the monuments he built for Regilla, Maud Gleason (2010) argues, mark his own bicultural identity, along with the lost Roman half of his bicultural marriage, while the Appian Way shrine he retrofitted as a memorial casts Regilla in terms of Greek and Roman mythical pasts. The placid faces of Augustae stared away from these writers on the coins in their hands.
BOYS
The sheer volume of pederastic texts from this period poses a “lamppost problem” for the historian: these voices give details only sparsely available earlier, and so might be seized upon to represent times and places not their own.12 Retrosexuality makes it even more difficult to know what these texts mean. Martial and Strato provide graphic descriptions of sex acts; Strato specifies the desirable age-span for boys; Apuleius explains what underlay the pen names given to beloved boys and women by famous writers, and remarks that Hadrian himself liked to write amatory verses (Apol. 9–13); Athenaeus retails gossip about how the Stoics broke age norms, pursuing younger partners well into their twenties who needed to shave (Deip. 563d–e, 564f–565b, 565d–f, 605d). The model of Plato as versifying paiderastês circulates from Gellius (19.11) to Apuleius (Apol. 10) to Diogenes Laertius (Lives of the Philosophers 3.29, 31), the point being that Phaedrus and his ilk were not just characters in dialogues, but boys actually loved by actual Plato. A lengthy stretch of Athenaeus lists role models from Zeus to Alexander, quoting from famous poets and learned historians (601a–605d). We might cautiously conclude that a retrosexual valorization of Platonic and Stoic philosophy boosted a practice already fully enabled by the slave trade, and made it a topic for elegant boasting.
Again we are fortunate in this period to have a rare first-person voice; this one, unlike Sulpicia’s, is both well preserved and famous, although not for its testimony to pederastic affection. Marcus Aurelius, at the age of eighteen, long before he was emperor, was assigned M. Cornelius Fronto as his teacher of Latin rhetoric. The letters they exchanged for the next five years or so are pervasively amatory. That their relationship in these years was sexual has been doubted, and the letters mention no physical contact other than kisses; the deeply allusive nature of the language in which this correspondence is carried out perhaps also suggests a sort of paper romance.13 Here, a single exchange must represent how retrosexuality worked in the Marcus/Fronto letters.
In an early exchange, Fronto writes for Marcus a version of the erôtikos logos of Lysias as set out in Plato’s Phaedrus (Addit. 8). The Phaedrus was a common part of the second-century curriculum (Trapp 1990), and Fronto’s letter is cast as an exercise, part of Marcus’s education, and written in Fronto’s best Attic Greek. Yet this costume allows Fronto to address Marcus O phile pai, as if Marcus were Phaedrus, and to conflate them throughout; to profess that he wants the same thing from Marcus “that lovers do”; to speculate in lurid detail about what a lustful lover might want from Marcus; and to end by inviting him to take a stroll down by the Ilissus—just as Socrates strolled with Phaedrus. That Marcus took this all as referring to himself and Fronto is clear from his response (Addit. 7.1):
Go ahead, as much as you like, threaten me, accuse me, with whole clumps of arguments, but you will never put off your erastes—I mean me. Nor will I proclaim it any less that I love Fronto, or will I be less in love, because you’ve proven . . . that those who love less should be helped out and lavished with more. God, no, I am dying so for love of you, and I’m not scared off by this doctrine of yours, and if you’re going to be more ripe and ready for others who don’t love you, I will still love you as long as I live and breathe.
Notably, however, Marcus has switched roles, making himself the lover and Fronto the beloved, showing not only that historical costume can be assumed for a living love affair, but that improvisation is perfectly possible.
Marcus begins the finale of this letter with further role-switching and a dollop of a different love code (Addit. 7.3):
But this I’ll personally swear to, no fear: If that Phaedrus guy of yours ever really existed, if he was ever away from Socrates, Socrates didn’t burn more with desire for Phaedrus than I’ve burned during these days—did I say days? I mean months—for the sight of you.
The topos of the lover’s slow time is a very old one in Greek and Latin literature, and belongs, around 140 CE when this letter was written, to the world of Greek epigram (cf. Rufinus, Anth. Pal. 5.9, with Rosenmeyer 2001, 107).14 Examples of this kind of well-worn theme are all over these letters, especially in the closings, where the recipient of a letter looks for the emotional bonus. Fronto and Marcus learned to write in terms of Socrates and Phaedrus in school, and learned to write in hearts and flowers most immediately, perhaps, in the literary milieu at the court of Hadrian (Bowie 1990); then there was their voluminous reading in Republican Latin literature, from which they borrow Plautine love songs and flirtatious witticisms. Marcus tells Fronto that his erôtikos logoshas surpassed “those oh so self-satisfied and teasing Atticists” (multo placentis illos sibi et provocantis Atticos, Addit. 7.2), by whom he must mean Fronto’s rival sophists at court—one of whom was Herodes Atticus. The competitive aspect recalls the Greeks at Gellius’s dinner party, suggesting that, as here, the performance of love in historic guise could also serve as a move in courtship, a form of display.
Other pederastic relationships are much less well documented. Under Domitian, Statius wrote a long poem commemorating a puer who had belonged to his friend Atedius Melior (Silv. 2.1; this poem is picked up by Martial in two epigrams (6.28, 6.29).15 If Statius’s poem did not exist, Martial’s would be indistinguishable from the hundreds of poems he wrote for generic slave boys. In the reign of Antoninus Pius, Apuleius records in his Apologia (9–13) the accusations made against him for writing verses to two slave boys not his own. He responds with a long defense that cites as precedent the poems written to actual boys by poets and philosophers—Lucilius, Vergil, Plato—along with a long list of love poets Greek and Roman, among them the three quoted at Gellius’s dinner party. This defense paradoxically casts doubt on the use of any love poem as testimony to any real experience of desire, since the stimulus to write may as easily be an earlier poem as a present love: a notable
instance of retrosexuality.
The love of Hadrian for Antinous, of course, is lavishly documented. The scandal of future historians (HA Hadr. 14.5–9, Aurelius Victor [14]), it is attested as real by contemporary evidence from poems to statuary (see Kampen 2007; Vout 2007, 52–135). This high-profile romance perhaps contributed to the literary atmosphere at Hadrian’s court, fostering the tropes that show up in the Marcus/Fronto letters. According to the HA-writer, Marcus was “raised in Hadrian’s bosom” and attended Hadrian’s banquets (Marc. 4). Certainly, Marcus in later life shows no nostalgia for the house where he spent the last six months of Hadrian’s life (HA Marc. 5); in the Meditations, he says nothing of what it meant to move there at the age of sixteen, but cryptically thanks the gods “that I preserved the flower of my youth and did not play the man before my time, but even delayed a little longer” (1.17.2, trans. Farquharson 1944).
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 20