Bringing with them a parade of notorious partners, the sex lives of famous men now became a topic for lubricious depiction. The commonplace accusation that a man had served as the object of pederastic lust in his youth, along with outrageous stories of effeminacy and licentious pederasty, peps up Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars and Plutarch’s Parallel Lives (Richlin 1992, 87–96). Cassius Dio is a wellspring of calumny, and provides a searing portrait of the vices of Commodus, of whose reign he was a direct witness (Gleason 2011). Of Domitian, Suetonius even claims that a certain man of praetorian rank had in his possession, and often showed, a handwritten note in which the young Domitian “promised a night” to him (Dom. 1.1). Invective of a different sort appears in Suetonius’s De Grammaticis et Rhetoribus, where several famous teachers, particularly Remmius Palaemon (Gram. et rhet. 23), are rumored to have been untrustworthy with their students: this is an issue of class—many of these men rose from slavery themselves, they are supposed to keep their hands off the clientele. Again, Remmius Palaemon lived in the reigns of Tiberius and Claudius; he is addressed as the type of the schoolmaster by Juvenal (7.219). Lucian indeed complains that the philosopher or sophist aspiring to tutor the sons of a wealthy house must submit to a background check for pederastic inclinations (Paid Companions 12, 15, 29); suspicions turn out to be justified at Lapiths 26, 29. The retrosexual payoff here is the glamor associated with the behavior of role models, and the spectacular scandal associated with a pair like Julius Caesar and King Nicomedes of Bithynia, whose relationship reverberates in Philostratus’s many tales of Asiatic sophists putting Caesar in his place.
The Second Sophistic also saw the last great blooming of pederastic fantasy texts: epigrams in Greek and Latin, lyric poetry, Philostratus’s Love Letters, even vignettes in satire. The general view expressed in later historiography that the reign of Marcus Aurelius was the last golden age before a calamitous era perhaps explains why the poem from Gellius 19.11 gets recycled later in an unlikely place: Macrobius’s Saturnalia (2.2.15–17). But it was in the nature of epigrams to be recycled, like jazz riffs; for the historian, epigrams are the music in the air, intangible, and stock themes about boys go back to Callimachus; it is the sheer number of pederastic epigrams in Martial and Strato that makes them seem characteristic of this period.16 As seen above, Lucian liked stories about forced sex with young girls; his Ganymede is similarly and shockingly childish (Dial. D. 10, see Richlin 2015, 366–367). As for the Love Letters of Philostratus, they are unique in both format (prose poems) and obsession (feet); Simon Goldhill has argued that they constitute an erotic manual that “teach[es] you how to speak the role of the educated lover, the erastês pepaideumenos” (2009b, 297).
The younger Pliny provides a perfect retrosexual moment in a letter describing a poem he was moved to write (a ) when a slave read him (b) Asinius Gallus’s book (c) comparing his father Asinius Pollio with Cicero; this book included “an epigram of Cicero to his Tiro” (Ep. 7.4.3)—a triple remove. Pliny’s response—set, oddly, in hexameters—moves from this inspiration, to Cicero’s writing praxis, to the content of Cicero’s poem, to Pliny’s decision to proclaim his own similar experiences (7.4.6):
When I was reading the books of Gallus in which he dared
to award the prize and glory to his father, not Cicero,
I found a sexy play-piece of Cicero, to be watched
with the same state of mind in which he wrote serious things,
and by which he shows that the minds of great men rejoice
in human wit, in many and various graces.
For he complains Tiro cheated his lover by trickery;
Tiro owed him a few little kisses after dinner,
but, in the nighttime, absconded. When I read this,
“Why, after this,” I said, “should I hide my own loves,
too timid to publish a thing? Why don’t I confess
that I’ve known the tricks of a Tiro, the fleeting flirtations
of Tiro, and teases that only add new flames to old ones?”
Apart from the other fascinating aspects of this text, it is an explicit case of a poem about a poem, one motivated more by desire to imitate a long-dead role model than by desire to express love for a boy (here, generically, “a Tiro”). What brings us back to Gellius’s dinner party here is what Pliny says about the book of lyric verse he has gone on to publish: “It is read, it is copied over, it is even sung, and by Greeks, too, whom the love of this book has taught Latin; they play it on the cithara, they play it on the lyre” (7.4.9). Pliny’s general self-delusion about the success of his oeuvre here takes on the air of transcultural competition we have seen not only in Gellius but in Fronto. The epigrammatists’ role model was Callimachus (in Martial’s case, via Catullus), while Pliny’s is Cicero and a long list of other senators, even emperors (5.3.5–6), but the impulse is the same: to put old wine in new bottles. The numerous images of Antinous suggest that there was real wine, somewhere, but you cannot get at it through a poem like Pliny’s.
The debates over the relative merits of boys and women likewise dress up in period garb. Plutarch sets the model in his Erôtikos, with a frame narrative modeled on Plato’s Symposium surrounding a decidedly local setting in Plutarch’s Boeotia, while the topic itself recalls the Symposium of Xenophon; the same pederastic verse by Solon quoted here (751b–c) reappears in Apuleius’s Apology (9) and in Athenaeus (602e); among the oceans of Attic quotations float bits of the elder Cato (759c) and stories about Maecenas (759f–760a). The frame narrative in ps.-Lucian’s Erôtes entails a voyage to Italy from Asia Minor, the inner dialogue taking place at a tourist stop on Cnidos; the pro-pederasty speaker brings in the plane tree of the Phaedrus (31) and improves on Plato’s Symposium while incorporating a Juvenal-like tirade against women’s vices (38–43); the closing frame responds with a bawdy sendup of the ladder of love in the Symposium. In these dialogues, the arguments against pederasty are generally outweighed by the arguments in favor; ps.-Lucian’s Charicles and Theomnestus express skepticism over the supposedly chaste loves of the philosophers (23, 53–54), and the moderator, Lycinus, concludes that all men should marry, pederasty being reserved for philosophers (51). Arguments against pederasty, however, are fully laid out, including the argument that the boy experiences physical pain (27).
That Severus Alexander attempted to end male prostitution we are told by the unreliable HA-writer (Alex. Sev. 39.2), but there is little police activity around pederasty in the Second Sophistic as compared with the sex lives of women.17 Marcus Aurelius, late in life, gives thanks (Med. 1.17.7) that he never touched Benedicta or Theodotus—the latter “a court Catamite,” as an eighteenth-century translator speculated (Richlin 2012, 500). An indication of what lay ahead is seen in Marcus’s ambiguous statement that he learned from his adoptive father, Antoninus Pius, “to put a stop to things having to do with the love of boys” (to pausai ta peri tous erôtas tôn meirakiôn, 1.16.2).
EUNUCHS
Eunuchs hover around the edges of the Second Sophistic, freakish figures whose future prominence at the imperial court could not yet have been foretold (see Gleason 1995, 6–8; Hopkins 1978, 172–196). Not only Martial’s epigrams but Juvenal’s satires, carrying on from Petronius, treat the eunuch as a joke: a household slave performing personal duties that often include sexual use, by female owners (Martial 6.67, 10.91; Juvenal 6.366–376) as well as by male (Martial 2.54, 3.82.15, 8.44.15, 11.75.1–6). These slaves are either purchased from a dealer already castrated, or castrated by the owner, as Juvenal puts it, “after [his testicles] have gotten to be two-pound bags” (6.372)—that is, well past adolescence, so that he can be used as a human dildo (but see Parker 2007, 290–292, arguing that this is a fantasy).
Suetonius’s Life of Titus, in its obligatory chapter on Titus’s sex life, reports rumors about his “flocks of exoleti and eunuchs” (Tit. 7.1), and the epitome of Dio (67.2.1–23) suggests that Domitian illegalized the process of making eunuchs to cast aspersions on his
brother’s memory: such a bad emperor.18 For Suetonius, this act still counts among Domitian’s good deeds; he notes that the emperor also made the dealers drop their prices on current stock in trade (Dom. 7.1). If Juvenal’s eunuchs are not the retrosexual property of a nostalgic household, the law seems not to have been well enforced. Martial’s honorific poems pay lip service to a fate he treats as horrific (9.6, 9.8):
To you, supreme conqueror of the Rhine and father of the world,
chaste emperor, the cities pay thanks:
they will be populated; it is no longer a crime to give birth.
No boy [puer] cut by the skill of the greedy dealer
mourns the loss of his ripped-away manhood,
nor does the wretched mother give her prostituted boy-baby [infanti]
the wages counted out by the arrogant pimp.
That chastity which never, before you, belonged to the bedroom,
has now begun to exist even in the whorehouse.
***
As if small were the injury to our sex
that males were prostituted to be made foul by the public,
now cradles belonged to the pimp, so that, snatched from the teat,
a boy [puer] asked for the dirty money with his wailing:
bodies too young [inmatura] were paying unspeakable penalties.
The Italian father did not tolerate such monstrous deeds,
that same father who recently rescued tender youths [ephebis],
lest barbarous lust should make men sterile.
Before now boys [pueri] and young men [iuvenes] and old men loved you,
but now boy-babies [infantes], Caesar, love you, too.
This is one of the few places in Latin that expresses a sense that persons sold into prostitution by their families deserved better, or that child prostitutes were pitiful; surprising in Martial, who elsewhere treats boys mainly as commodities whose occasional inaccessibility inconveniences him. The reader’s sense of hypocrisy is not helped by the appearance on the same page of the first in a series of epigrams praising Domitian’s puer, the eunuch Earinus (9.11–13, 16–17, 36)—ille puer tota domino gratissimus aula, “that boy most pleasing to his owner in the whole palace” (9.16.3). This juxtaposition has often been commented on.19 That Earinus was freed we know from the preface to book 3 of Statius’s Silvae, in which Statius, stating the occasions for which each poem was written, claims that “Earinus, too, the freedman of our Germanicus [that is, Domitian], knows how long I forestalled his longing, when he had asked that I should dedicate by my verses the locks which he was sending, with a jeweled box and mirror, to Pergamene Asclepius.” That is, Earinus, an historical subject, requested a poem from Statius about the dedication of a lock of hair, an action that (in poetry) evoked Callimachus’s Coma Berenices but (in real life) generally marked the end of a boy’s status as a sex object. Evidently not so in this case, for the poem itself (Silv. 3.4) treats Earinus as an exotic piece of luxury goods from Asia Minor, working in tactless praise of Domitian’s law (nunc frangere sexum / . . . nefas [“now, to break sex—a sin,” 3.4.74–75]) alongside a treatment of Earinus’s own surgery as a sort of immaculate castration. As analyzed by Carole Newlands, the poem exhibits a “set of tensions . . . : between East and West, past and present, traditional and contemporary mores, male and female, the simultaneous power and subjection of Earinus himself” (2002, 108; full discussion 106–116). She takes him to be a figure for the predicament of the courtier.
This predicament was fully realized by the most famous eunuch of the Second Sophistic, Favorinus: lionized by Gellius and Philostratus, satirized by his rival Polemon and by Lucian in Eunuch and Demonax. According to Philostratus, Favorinus himself saw his life in terms of paradox: “a Gaul who practiced as a Greek, a eunuch prosecuted for adultery, one who quarreled with the emperor and lived” (VS 489). Favorinus inhabited a world in which his body made him a freak, and yet, as Maud Gleason argues, he constructed himself as a paragon, through paideia (Gleason 1995, 3–20, 131–158, 166–168).
CINAEDI
The figure of the cinaedus or kinaidos pervades the Second Sophistic as never before, and I want to suggest here that what we are seeing may in fact be specific to the period: retrosexual, but only in some respects. The word appears in Latin and Greek as a generalized pejorative term for an adult male with a set list of physical features, behaviors, and characteristics: a special sort of glance, bent neck, fluting or cracking (fractus) voice, swaying walk; scratches his head with one finger, wears makeup, curls his hair with a curling-iron, puts his hand on his hip; often characterized as mollis or malakos (“soft”), or by words meaning literally “effeminate.” These men are also said to desire to be on the receiving end of anal intercourse with another adult male, and to wish to seem to be boys long after youth has left them; also, as satirists warn, to like to have sex with women. Numerous other words in both languages denote this person, and I have argued elsewhere that these wide attestations strongly suggest an actual subculture of such men (1993), although nowhere do we have a first-person statement about such behaviors or desires by an historical person, or a self-identification as a cinaedus. In Latin, the word cinaedus appears long before the Second Sophistic, used, for example, as a pejorative, but also in association with a song-and-dance, in Plautus (see Moore 2012, 106–114); in Catullus, just a pejorative (c. 16, 25); and in Petronius (23.3), again in connection with a song. The dozens of uses by Martial and Juvenal (Domitian to Hadrian), and the similar uses by Lucian (Antoninus Pius to Commodus), may be more representative of their own than of earlier periods. The fact that Juvenal devotes an entire satire to such men (2), and another (9) to a male prostitute who services a rich man who acts like a cinaedus—adorned though these are with retrosexual insets like Domitian’s sex laws and incest with his niece (2.29–33), or the primping of the emperor Otho before the battle of Bedriacum (2.99–109), or an obscene twist on a line from Homer (9.37)—perhaps responds to a current trend.20
For Juvenal, oddly, describes a cinaedus as installed in a household as a wife’s confidant and dance instructor—also as her lover (Sat. 6.O.1–29). What would he be doing there? Kinaidoi seem originally to have been dancers (see Williams 2010, 193–194), as were kinaidologoi—men hired to do a particular kind of song-and-dance at parties; this performance genre was associated with a verse form invented by the Hellenistic poet Sotades, and Athenaeus puts the story of Sotades along with kinaidologoi among a list of naughty performers (Deip. 620e–621f).21 We see this earlier, of all places, in a letter of Pliny’s, in which he responds to a complaint from his friend Julius Genitor, a teacher of Latin rhetoric, about the entertainment at a recent lavish dinner party (9.17): scurrae, cinaedi, moriones, “running about the tables.” Here we find cinaedi in the company of stand-up comics and fools. The tolerant Pliny says he does not mind this sort of thing, although it hardly comes as an entertaining surprise “if a cinaedus utters something effeminate [molle], a scurra utters something insolent, a morio utters something stupid” (see Parker 2009, 205 for context). Indeed, Pliny himself, if the emended text is correct, gives “Sotadics” in a list of performance types he enjoys, as a parallel with his own production of not-so-moral verses (5.3.2).
The household role of the kinaidos who plagues the learned man in Lucian’s Paid Companions is developed at length. First, the learned man is warned that he might be edged out by a kinaidos or a dancing teacher or an Alexandrian dwarf who rattles off erotic songs (erôtikôn aismatôn)—that is, by the lowest sort of entertainer (27; cf. Lapiths 18–19). Then the story is told (33–34) of a teacher, Thesmopolis the Stoic, who went with his wealthy employer to her villa and was made to sit in the wagon next to a depilated kinaidos called Chelidonion (“Little Swallow,” with an obscene pun on a slang term for the female genitalia). Again recognizable by his heavy makeup, darting glance, and bent neck, this character would have liked to wear a hairnet, hummed and whistled during the journey, and would have been happy to dance (all the
se elements except the neck appear in Juvenal 2). As if this were not enough of an indignity, Thesmopolis is forced to hold the woman’s lapdog, which urinates on him, providing material for the kinaidos to joke about that night at dinner.
The currency of Sotadic performance in the 100s CE receives its most surprising attestation at the end of the Second Apology of Justin Martyr (on the circumstances, see Minns and Parvis 2009, 32–41). A Greek-speaking Samaritan rhetorician/philosopher living in Rome—what might be called a Christian sophist—Justin wrote to defend his marginal creed and explain its tenets. The First Apology, possibly a petition, possibly in Justin’s possession at the time of his arrest some time between 163 and 168, addresses Pius, Marcus, and Verus directly, and assumes a taste for philosophy in its audience, evidently to win favor. The Second, which bears an uncertain relation to the first, likewise ends with a final effort to align Christianity with philosophy (in fact Minns and Parvis have tacked this section onto the First as 70.2 [15.3]):
And our teachings are not shameful, according to a temperate judgment, but are more elevated than all human philosophy, or, even if not, they are nothing like what is in the Sotadean and Philaenidian and Archestratean and Epicurean and other such poetic teachings, which all are allowed to encounter, both in performance and in writing.
Here performers of Sotadic verse are lumped together with the writings of Philaenis, the fabled authoress of pornography (see Parker 1992a), and other enthusiasts of the flesh, and their “teachings,” according to Justin, are available to the public. So, about twelve years earlier, when Marcus and Fronto read the Sota of Ennius together, with its vivid description of cinaedi (M. Caes. 4.2.6), they were reading about performances familiar in their own day, among the houses in their neighborhood: not in Pliny’s house, and probably not in Fronto’s own house, or Pius’s, but perhaps in the house of Hadrian. At the same time—and perhaps this is part of what made cinaedi popular in this period—Fronto and Marcus are enjoying a form with the perfect pedigree: the Latin of the mid-Republic; the Greek of the Alexandrian court. A fine example of how retrosexuality allowed the participants to eat their cake and have it.
The Oxford Handbook of the Second Sophistic Page 21