by Sarah Ruden
Readers may think I am exaggerating, that the day-to-day culture of homosexuality could not have been so bad. They may have heard of Platonic homoerotic sublimity or festive or friendly couplings. None of the sources, objectively read, backs any of this up.
The Roman poet Martial uses “to be cut to pieces” as the ordinary term for “to be the passive partner.” The Greeks and Romans thought that the active partner in homosexual intercourse used, humiliated, and physically and morally damaged the passive one. Heterosexual penetration could be harmless in the Christian community, in marriage (see chapter 4); homosexual penetration could be harmless nowhere. There were no gay households; there were in fact no gay institutions or gay culture at all, in the sense of times or places in which it was mutually safe for men to have anal sex with one another.
In fifth-century Athens (the gay paradise we hear of), one of the most common insults in comedy was “having a loose anus,” meaning depraved—not just sexually, but generally. Plutarch, writing after Paul’s time but about fifth-century Athens, transmits a “smear” of the teenage aristocrat Alcibiades: that when he had run away to have passive sex with an adult man, his guardians glumly considered their options:
Antiphon wanted him denounced [or disinherited] publicly, but Pericles wouldn’t allow that. He said, “If he’s dead, we’ll get the news a day sooner because of the announcement; but if he’s alive, it will ensure that he’s lost for the rest of his life.”
Alcibiades was extremely lucky to keep his civic rights (probably thanks to the power of his family), and he even had a high-level political and military career. But his reputation as a kinaidos, or effeminate, passive “queer,” marred his short life. Here in Petronius is a Roman cinaedus, and this is a much more usual version:
A queer came in, a most vapid and washed-out individual, true son of that household. He snapped his fingers and spewed out a ditty something like this:
“Come hither, come hither, you faggots so frisky,
Come running, come prancing, come skipping here briskly;
Come bring your soft thighs, agile bottoms, lewd hands,
You flaccid old eunuchs from Delian land!”
When he had exhausted his supply of verse, he slobbered over me with the filthiest of kisses. Next he got on top of my bed and used his full strength to strip me as I fought back. Long and hard—what he did, I mean, not him—he ground his loins over mine. Hair tonic streamed over his forehead and down through so much powder between the wrinkles of his cheeks that he looked like a rough wall flaking in a rainstorm.
In my utmost grief I couldn’t hold back my tears any longer. “My lady,” I moaned, “is this the dessert you ordered for me?”
She clapped her hands affectedly and said, “Oh, you clever man! What a chic but earthy wit you have! Do you want your admirer to desert you already?”
To get the person to move on to my companion, I said, “Is Ascyltos the only one on vacation here?”
“No indeed,” said Quartilla. “Let’s give Ascyltos some dessert!” At this the pansy changed steeds, and when settled on Ascyltos proceeded to wear him to pieces with kissing and humping. Giton stood and watched all this, laughing himself into a hernia.
The reference to the island of Delos is about castration (the god Apollo, whose birthplace was thought to be there, was a sponsor of surgery), a workable analogy: both castrated men and cinaedi had lost their manhood to violence, either of the knife or of anal penetration. Both kinds of men were lower than women: there was no way to be a rare “good” cinaedus, or an attractive one—only quite fresh boys and youths had any charm for grown-up males.* The only satisfying use of an adult passive homosexual was alleged to be oral or anal rape—the satisfaction needed to be violent, not erotic. Greek and Roman men, in public, would threaten bitter male enemies with rape.
One joke among many was that a cinaedus had to pay for sex: had to pay someone who was destitute but could still look down on him from the height of his own all-important virility. The satirist Juvenal, of the late first and early second centuries A.D., gives such a man a monologue.
“So it’s an easy thing, an inviting thing, to drive my respectable penis into your guts and run into yesterday’s dinner? It’s less wretched for a slave to plow a field than to plow his master. I guess you think you’re a tender young thing, a beautiful boy worthy of serving drinks in heaven.…†
“Though you brush aside the other things and pretend, what do you think this is worth? My devotion as your retainer means that your wife’s not still a virgin.…
“I’m not going to be rewarded now, you cheat, you ingrate, for the birth of your little son and daughter? You bring them up as if they’re your own, and you enjoy getting this proof of your virility in all of the newspapers. You’re a father! Let the gossip chew on that. That’s what I’ve given you. You have a father’s rights, you can be someone’s heir, get a whole legacy.”
Paranoia about passive homosexuality was rife. Greek and Roman men led an intensely public life and believed that they could see character in nuances of clothing and gestures. Romans thought, for example, that scratching the head with one finger was a sure sign of a cinaedus. Juvenal depicted the doom of any actual passive homosexual’s reputation as certain—to say nothing of other men it was merely easy to slander:
What can a rich man keep secret? Though the slaves are mum, his horses, dogs, and mules, his doors, his marble columns will speak. He can shut the windows, cover every chink with hangings, lock the doors, take the lamp away, send everybody out, let nobody sleep anywhere near him. Still, before dawn, by the second cock crow, the barman down the road will know. The master will also hear the things his head cooks, his carvers, his confectioner make up. Who’d hesitate to invent a slanderous charge as payback for the lash? At the crossroads too, some drunk will run you down and swill the story into your cringing ear.
There was even a notion of closeted, protesting-too-much homosexuality—but only in the passive domain. In satire and epigram we see a small gallery of burly, hairy, stony-faced perverts (some of whom, like certain effeminates shown in literature, seem to have been real, not fictional persons). They can even play the role of stern, old-fashioned moralists, always ready to denounce others. Don’t be fooled, their own denouncers warn us.
How could any man feel safe in his reputation for proper masculinity? I can understand the storms of preemptive verbal aggression.
The active partner had no comeback from his callous and selfish behavior. There were no derogatory names for him. Except for some restraint to avoid conflict within his actual household, he positively strutted between his wife, his girlfriends, female slaves and prostitutes, and males. Penetration, after all, signaled moral uprightness—sorry about the image. We get our word “virtue” from the Latin virtus, literally “manliness”; courage, honesty, and responsibility were strongly linked to physical virility in the Greek and Roman minds.
In fact, society pressured a man into sexual brutality toward other males. To keep it unmistakable that he had no sympathy with passive homosexuals, he would tout his attacks on vulnerable young males. Encolpius (Crotcher), the narrator in Petronius, who dramatizes his loathing of the cinaedus so memorably, is an unashamed and enthusiastic pederast (especially of a youngster he shows in the role of Lucretia, a chaste, raped heroine of legend), though he chases women too.
Amy Richlin’s celebrated book The Garden of Priapus lays out the system of ethics that locked people into this cruel regime. The regime included the erotic oppression of women. While Paul may seem to mention lesbianism, this was such a rare or little-noticed phenomenon in the ancient world that it is likely he instead means anal penetration of women by men. That did happen often, but men valued it less than penetration of boys: women were made to be penetrated anyway; a real man needed to transform an at least potentially active and powerful creature into a weak and inferior one.
The Greeks and Romans even held homosexual rape to be divinely sanctioned. The
re was an idol of sexual aggression, Priapus, the scarecrow with a huge phallus who was said to rape intruders, lawfully policing gardens through sexual threat, pain, and humiliation. A collection of Priapus poems comes down to us from around the turn of the millennium.
“Hey you, who can’t keep your looting hand off the garden that’s been entrusted to me: the magistrate’s randy sidekick will go in and out of you until your gate’s permanently wider. Two more will be waiting at your side, who’ve enriched themselves with a pretty pair of pricks from the public purse. They’ll delve in you painfully as you lie there. Then a bawdy donkey no less well supplied with a dong will take his turn. So if a criminal has any sense, he’ll watch out, since he knows how many dicks are waiting for him.”
Adult passive homosexuals court the penalty, but Priapus refuses in disgust.
“Somebody softer than goose down is coming here to steal—in his itch for punishment. Let him steal on and on. I won’t see.”
NO WONDER PARENTS guarded their young sons doggedly. It was, for example, normal for a family of any standing to dedicate one slave to a son’s protection, especially on the otherwise unsupervised walk to and from school: this was the pedagogue, or “child leader.” A pederast in Petronius gets access to a pretty boy by becoming his pedagogue, but only after much work in convincing the boy’s parents that he is a rare model of restraint.
Since success with freeborn, citizen-class boys was rare, predators naturally turned to those with no protectors, young male slaves and prostitutes. Besides that of the pedagogue, another telling slave profession—perhaps only among the Romans—was that of the deliciae (“pet”) or concubinus (“bedmate”), a slave boy whose main duty was passive anal sex with the master. The public acknowledged such a child’s status, as well as his vulnerability to being retired at a young age. His retirement was not likely to be a happy one; he kept the stigma of passive sodomy, but he lost the protection of his close relationship to his master, while usually remaining bound to the same household and the other slaves with their accumulated grudges. They may have refused him, as he would have passed his “bloom,” even the status of a sexual plaything.
These threats lurk under the words addressed to the nameless concubinus in a wedding song of the first century B.C. Roman poet Catullus. The little boy, a sort of catamite ring bearer, is forced to hand out nuts to celebrate his master the groom’s new union that has made him redundant.
Don’t let there be any gaps in the bawdy Fescennine joking; and don’t let the bedmate refuse nuts to the children when he hears that his master has abandoned all love for him.
Give the children nuts, you lazy bedmate! You’ve been playing with nuts long enough; now you’re a slave to this wedding procession. Let the people have their nuts, bedmate.
You sneered at the women out on the farm, yesterday and today. Now the hairdresser’s going to shave your face. You poor bedmate, poor thing—let the people have their nuts.
They say you struggle to keep away from your smooth-skinned boys, perfumed bridegroom—but keep away. O Hymen Hymenaeus! O Hymen Hymenaeus!‡
We know that you’ve only explored things that are allowed, but the same things aren’t allowed for a husband. O Hymen Hymenaeus! O Hymen Hymenaeus!
The most pathetic portraits of deliciae, however, are in Petronius. Two rich freedmen, one of whom admits in a self-humiliating drunken monologue that he himself was a deliciae as a child, treat their deliciae almost as if they were their own children, boasting of how bright and talented they are, indulging them, playing with them—which makes clear their own emasculation. The freedmen are married but have sired no children. These youngsters are not proper substitutes; and sympathy with them, in fact, only suggests the masters’ degradation. Here is one of the freedmen:
Trimalchio himself was imitating the sound of a trumpet, but then he looked at his pet slave, who was called Croesus. This was a cruddy-eyed little boy with teeth covered in scum. He had a black puppy, obscenely fat, that he was wrapping in a chartreuse scarf. He also put a half-eaten hunk of bread on the couch in front of the animal and forced the poor thing to eat, making it gag and heave.
This scene of thoughtful husbandry reminded Trimalchio to have Scylax, “the protector of hearth and home,” brought into the room. In no time, the doorkeeper fetched an immense dog on a chain and kicked it into a sitting position beside the table. Trimalchio took some of the white bread and tossed it to the beast, remarking, “Nobody in this house loves me more.”
The boy was upset at such lavish praise directed toward the brute. He placed the puppy on the floor and urged it to fight. As a dog will do, Scylax filled the dining room with ear-splitting barking and lunged forward, nearly dismembering Croesus’s little Pearlie. The tumult spread beyond the dogfight when a lamp on the table was tipped over, breaking all the crystal dishes and spattering some of the guests with hot oil.
Trimalchio, however, was chiefly concerned with appearing indifferent to the destruction of his treasures. He kissed the boy and offered him a piggyback ride. The little slave did not hesitate to mount his master and slap him again and again on the shoulder blades, laughing and shrieking the whole time, “Come on, horsy, how many fingers am I holding up?”
The bridegroom Catullus celebrates has the “proper” attitude: use the kid and throw him aside when convenient. Once you have polluted him, you can catch the same pollution by getting close emotionally. This is how twisted and doubled back the ethics of homosexuality were among the Greeks and Romans. This was what Paul and his readers were seeing.
WHERE, THEN, do we get our notion of a gay idyll, especially in the Greek world? It is mainly from Plato, with his whitewash of pederasty in philosophical and religious terms. Plato’s fullest treatment is in the dialogue Phaedrus.
A good-looking boy makes the soul of his admirer “recall” the ultimate beauty it has forgotten through mortal life. The soul begins to grow the “feathers” it needs for flight. Lower and heterosexual natures have no chance for this spiritual advancement. Desire launches them “against nature” into straight sex and fatherhood.
The homosexual lover longs to impart his own spirituality to the beloved. He has picked someone with sublime potential and works to educate and improve him. Sexual attacks on the boy are part of the process, but are naturally cut short by the loftier elements of the passion—and, it is stated briefly, by the fact that the boy and his circle take a very, very dim view of the adult’s advances. This remark suggests to me either that it is actual sodomy and not lesser sex acts at stake here; or that the disapproval of sodomy covered lesser sex acts, which might lead to sodomy.
But according to Plato, as the lover persists, the boy will come to see him as a benefactor. The lover’s attentions will trump regard for friends and family. The boy will desire the lover in turn and become compliant.
The lover will still make an effort at holy restraint. If the couple do not have sex, they will spend their lives in the most blessed of human relationships and have a proportional reward in the afterlife. If they do have sex, their love will still save them from Hades and put them on the road to the highest spiritual development.
It would take quite a lot of space to explain in detail how I think Plato got away with presenting this kind of fantasy as philosophy, and got away with it so well that the “cult of homosexuality” at Oxford used his dialogues as sacred texts. He had going for him, among other things, a long-dead mentor and “source” of the dialogues, Socrates, and a long exile in which to write without the usual raucous Athenian public participation in literature. But suffice it to say that what he so lovingly paints is total hokey.
The pederastic writers, the most direct heirs of Plato’s literary eroticism, force us to acknowledge how far outside mainstream values he stood. The densest source of their work is a section named “The Boy Muse” in the Greek Anthology of epigrams. These poems extend back several hundred years from the early second century A.D., when they were collected.
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p; Though Plato states that prepubescent boys are out of bounds, no such scruples are visible in the generations after him. These later authors called themselves “pedophiles,” lovers of children. True, several authors state that they want teenagers:
I enjoy twelve-year-olds at the height of their beauty. But a thirteen-year-old is even more desirable. And the one passing through his fourteenth year is a sweeter blossom of the love deities. More enjoyable is the one who’s barely fifteen. Sixteen is the gods’ year. Seventeen is for Zeus to hanker for, not me. But if someone has a yen for older boys, he’s not playing anymore but looking to get some of what he gives.
But as this poem shows, pedophiles were supposed to want only passive boys they could treat as playthings; a young age was key. And the correct target was a child’s body, a completely hairless one. Poem after poem tells of disgust at the signs of sexual maturity:
What a good goddess Revenge the latecomer is, for fear of whom we spit into the front of our tunics.§ You did not see her coming behind you; you thought you would have your grudging beauty forever. Now it’s destroyed. The thrice-jealous‖ deity has come, and your former worshippers now walk past you.
Now you want it, when a light first growth of beard creeps under your temples, and sharp wool fixes itself to your thighs. Now you say, “I like this better!” But who would claim that dry stalks are better than tassels of wheat?
The pursuer may be enraged that, whereas he prayed for the boy to return from a journey just as he was, the boy must have prayed for the stubble he now sports. A series of poems plays on this theme, but a contrasting series shows the boy ashamed of growing up and losing his “attractiveness”: