by Sarah Ruden
Menippus, why is it that you’re covered to the ground, when before you would pull your robe clear up to your thighs? You keep your head down and don’t speak to me when you run into me. I know what you’re hiding from me: the hairs have come, just as I said they would.
The parallel heterosexual erotic poetry is about degraded slave-prostitutes—not courtesans, and not ordinary freedwomen. Some men felt that they could have a romance with either of the latter—single her out, get to know her, take some responsibility for her well-being; even one in a series of romantic conquests, according to the love poet Ovid, was someone to whom a man owed sexual pleasure. Hundreds of lines, whole volumes of poetry, were about individual women or personae such as Lyde and Corinna. Boys of all social classes in erotic literature got nothing like this: their poems were mostly epigrams, which half-drunken partygoers could compose and recite. It feels as if other men, and not the boys themselves, were the main audience for the poems, in a reign of gossip:
Son of Kronos [Zeus], I swore to you that I would never announce, even to myself, what Theudis promised me. But my awfully disobedient soul has soared up in the air in its glee, and I can’t keep this fine news in. I’ve got to say it—please forgive me: he did what I asked him to. Father Zeus, what’s the joy in good luck if it’s not known?
It is important not to assume too much about any reality behind these poems. Pornography tends to depict a world of fantasy. But the words—in a prestigious anthology and usually under authors’ real names—do shock. And given what psychologists say about compulsion in pederasty, I can’t imagine only a little lust vented in a lot of words.
How could what did go on have gone on for so long? Why did parents not hunt down at least the most obvious sources of danger? Virility in almost any form it chose was privileged, but how could it have been that privileged?
First of all, respectable free people did not, ever, countenance their sons’ being seduced.a A lower-class parent who could not afford a pedagogue would try on his own to protect his good-looking son. If the boy had to work where he was vulnerable, his father would be hovering, aware of the all-day danger:
Just now, as I was going by a garland workshop, I saw a boy weaving clusters of flowers—and I didn’t pass on without a wound. I stopped and whispered to him, “For how much would you sell your wreath to me?” He blushed redder than his buds, bent his head down, and said, “Get out of here, or my father will see.” I bought some wreaths as a pretext and went off home to hang them up on the gods’ statues—and prayed to get him.
But as open and as noxious as pederasty may have been, there was, in this society, hardly any way to combat it but to keep watch. For one thing, any special measures that drew attention to a boy would defeat the purpose of protecting him. Gossip was so vicious it would put the most evil construction possible on, for example, a family keeping its son at home if a would-be lover were hounding him. What had the boy done, or what was he likely to do? Much less could the parents prosecute anyone who had actually hurt him.
I have on my desk a late account (from Plutarch) of a very early alleged episode (from the 730s B.C.), part of which I cite in chapter 2 in connection to the kōmos (this page–this page): a pedophile and his gang pull a boy to pieces while trying to take him from his family and neighbors to rape him. This is one of only two stories I know of that include an official complaint (in this case, public display of the victim’s corpse and a demand for justice) and open revenge (a curse accompanying the suicide of the victim’s father) against an aggressor. It is easy to explain this exception. The father could act because his child no longer had a future to protect: he was dead.
The second story of striking back at pederasty is Roman, and it really confirms how vapid it is to assume that, because victims and their families did not want to acknowledge conflicts, there was tolerance for sodomy between citizens, or that sodomy was ever considered harmless, as opposed to being usually directed against people like slaves, whose harm didn’t count.
The historian Livy (late first century B.C., early first century A.D.) gives a version of the scandal leading to the expulsion of the cult of Bacchus from Rome in 186 B.C. An orphaned youth’s stepfather conspired to have him “destroyed” by anal rape in the course of initiation into the cult: the stepfather wanted to snatch up the forfeited inheritance. But the boy’s benevolent courtesan-mistress pounced on the danger that he in his naïveté had never suspected, and the government protected him and purged the cult in a reign of terror. Officials could act because no one could blame the intended victim, who had obviously been duped yet had escaped.
In such an unforgiving social world, there may have been a sort of standoff, with swarms of flaunting but frustrated pederasts and of quietly dodging, discreetly protected pupils. Here are more epigrams from “The Boy Muse”:
Stop your useless work, poor pedophiles, leave off your hard efforts. You’re crazed with impotent hopes. You might as well try to bail the sea onto the sandy shore, or to make a count of the drizzling particles of the Libyan desert, as to endure the desire for boys, whose arrogant beauty is sweet both to mortals and immortals. Look at me, all of you. My past toil has all been poured out for nothing on the barren beach.
Diphilos, these haughty boys with their purple-edged clothes,b boys that we can’t get hold of, are like ripe figs on stony mountain crests, food for vultures and crows.
Slave boys must have drained off much of pederasts’ sexual energy; sex, according to the pederasts, was what good-looking slave boys were for.
A eunuch has pretty slave boys—but for what? Can he offer them unholy abuse? Truly the cunt is a dog in the manger, barking stupidly, doing no good for himself or anybody else.
But a man was not limited to his own slaves.
If you were still uninitiated in what I’m trying to persuade you to do, you’d be right to be afraid, perhaps expecting something terrible. But since your master’s bed has made you an expert, why do you begrudge someone else what you’ve got? Your lord calls you in when he needs you, then he goes to sleep and lets you go—he doesn’t even share a word with you. But here I can spoil you. You can play as an equal, chatter in confidence, and do other things because you’re asked, not because you’re ordered.
An adult could exploit an abused slave child’s loneliness and humiliation again and again. It may be mainly slave children who are shown in the poems on bribery; the pederasts may masquerade as the parents or teachers the children do not have, and offer treats or rewards for “good” behavior.
Awww! Why are you downcast and in tears again, my little one? Don’t torment me, but come out and say it: what do you want? You hold your open hand out to me. I’m finished! I guess you’re asking for wages now. Where did you learn this? You’re no longer content with flatcakes and sesame seeds with honey, and nuts to shoot.c Already you’re thinking of profit. May the man who taught you this die, since he ruined my little boy!
But amid the shamelessness of the poems, I began to lose any sense of how they might have been grounded, even in the writers’ imagination. I stopped reading them when I couldn’t get one ghostly dialogue out of my mind. The boy speaking might be a slave or free, experienced or inexperienced.
Don’t you dare say that again to me!
Why’s it my fault? He’s the one who sent me.
So you’re going to say it again?
I will. He tells you, “Come.” So come on, don’t dawdle.
They’re waiting.
First I’ll go to where they are, and then I’ll get the
money. I’ve known for a long time what comes after that.
PAUL COULD HAVE, like generations of Greek and Roman moralistic and satirical commentators, lit into passive homosexuality, into the victims. But in Romans 1 he makes no distinction between active and passive: the whole transaction is wrong. This is crucially indicated by his use of the Greek word for “males,” arsenes, for everybody; he does not use the word for “men,” as the NRSV translation w
ould have us believe. The Classical and New Testament word for a socially acceptable, sexually functional man is anēr. In traditional parlance, this could mean an active but never a passive homosexual. But Paul places on a par all the male participants in homosexual acts, emphasizing this in Romans 2:1 (see below) and clearly implying that they are all morally degraded and that they all become physically debilitated from the sex act with each other. Such effects were unheard of among the Greeks and Romans when it came to active homosexuals: these were thought only to draw their passive partners’ moral and physical integrity into themselves.
According to all of the evidence, Paul’s revolutionary message stuck. This may be in part because he told his audience a more resonant truth than that of sexual misconduct in itself. First look at what he immediately passes on to (Romans 1:28–2:1):
28 And since they did not see fit to acknowledge God, God gave them up to a debased mind and to things that should not be done. 29 They were filled with every kind of wickedness, evil, covetousness, malice. Full of envy, murder, strife, deceit, craftiness, they are gossips, 30 slanderers, God-haters, insolent, haughty, boastful, inventors of evil, rebellious toward parents, 31 foolish, faithless, heartless, ruthless. 32 They know God’s decree, that those who practice such things deserve to die—yet they not only do them but even applaud others who practice them.
2 Therefore you have no excuse, whoever you are, when you judge others; for in passing judgment on another you condemn yourself, because you, the judge, are doing the very same things.
I picture Paul, flushed and sweating in his rage as he writes that everyone is responsible for what pederasty has made of society: especially those who, egging one another on in an insolent, boastful clique, damage others with active sodomy and then blame them. These acts are “the very same things,” no matter who is doing what to whom.
Compare the list of horrors here to the one in Galatians that I discuss in chapter 2. This list has a special relationship to the Greco-Roman version of sexual abuse through these terms:
1. wickedness, evil, malice
2. covetousness, envy
3. deceit, craftiness, inventors of evil
4. gossips, slanderers
5. insolent, haughty, boastful
6. heartless, ruthless, God-haters
Some terms here are rare or even unique, in the Bible if not in all the literature of the era: “inventors of evil,” “rebellious toward parents,” “gossips,” “slanderers,” and “God-haters.” I think that is because Paul was pioneering a general condemnation of pederasty in the West and needed special language to show how deeply, uniquely evil it was.
“Inventors of evil”: It did not look as if God had created sodomy, but that humans had. In its Greco-Roman form it was, like the idolatry it is linked with in this passage, essentially a worship of the self and its immediate desires, with all of the stupidity and cruelty that entailed.
“Rebellious against parents”: This kind of rebellion was a parent’s worst nightmare, the drug epidemic of the time, apparently the biggest threat for losing control of a son and seeing him lost to decent society.
“Gossips,” “slanderers”: The victims suffered and the perpetrators got immunity because of crude gossip and the possibility of blackmail.
“God-haters”: Those who practiced homosexuality showed a hatred of God—wait, what about that one? It’s a shocker. The Greeks had used the same compound word passively for “hated-by-god(s),” and some biblical translators deny that Paul makes the term active. I disagree, as all of the other words in the list denote acts or traits and not judgments provoked. Where are we with the word, then?
It is probably related to words Paul uses to lead into his blasting of homosexuality:
18 For the wrath of God is revealed from heaven against all ungodliness and wickedness of those who by their wickedness suppress the truth.
“Wickedness” sounds either comically old-fashioned or fairly vague to modern readers. But people of Paul’s time who were fluent in Greek, if they could time-travel and learn English, would translate the word as “injustice.” There is nothing vague about it. It is about hurting people. Paul pairs the word with “ungodliness” (more precisely, “failure in worship”), but he repeats “wickedness.” Hurting people really shows how much contempt you have for God.
In the Greco-Roman as well as the Jewish tradition, outrageous cruelty or exploitation insulted divinity, which was roused to avenge the helpless. The Greeks and Romans didn’t have a thoroughly just god in their traditional pantheon to correct these imbalances in the universe; usually the Greek Zeus or the Roman Jupiter, as supreme ruler, would have to do. Sometimes the polytheists invoked an unnamed god, or a personification, Justice. Two or more deities might work together. But in any case, judgment was coming, and the arrogant and power-hungry were going to be sorry. Here is Hesiod from the seventh century B.C., the first identifiable Greek author:
This fable is for rulers—and they’ll get it.
High in the clouds, a hawk grasped in his talons
A spotted nightingale, and spoke to her;
Piteously she cried, pierced by his hooked claws.
In his great arrogance, he only sneered:
“Why are you squawking, fool? I’m so much stronger.
I’ll take you where I want—though you’re a singer.
I’ll make a meal of you, or let you go.
Opposing power’s stupid. You can’t win,
But only bring on shame as well as pain.” …
Leaders, you must consider what you’re doing—
Is it just? Nearby, among you, are immortals
Who note how people wear each other down
With crooked judgmentsd—which the gods they scorn
Will punish. Three times infinite on lush earth
Are Zeus’s deathless watchmen over mortals.
Covered in mist and ranging through the land,
They keep a watch on evil acts and judgments.
And Justice is a virgin, born of Zeus,
Feared and revered by the Olympian gods.
And when some twisted person blocks her, taunts her,
Right then she sits by Kronian Zeus, her father,
And tells of unjust men’s thoughts, till the people
Pay for the crimes of leaders—evil-minded
Twistings of judgments, verdicts launched askew.
Leaders, bribe eaters, look to this! Pronounce
The law straight, and forget your crooked judgments.
The evil that you plot is for yourself.
The concept did not change over the next six hundred years. Paul’s Roman audience knew what justice was, if only through missing it. They would have been surprised to hear that justice applied to homosexuality, of all things. But many of them—slaves, freedmen, the poor, the young—would have understood in the next instant. Christ, the only Son of God, gave his body to save mankind. What greater contrast could there be to the tradition of using a weaker body for selfish pleasure or a power trip? Among Christians, there would have been no quibbling about what to do: no one could have imagined homosexuality’s being different than it was; it would have to go. And tolerance for it did disappear from the church.
All this leads to a feeling of mountainous irony. Paul takes a bold and effective swipe at the power structure. He challenges centuries of execrable practice in seeking a more just, more loving society. And he gets called a bigot. Well, it’s not a persecution that would have impressed him much.
* The only exceptions I know of were Roman glabri, or “smoothies.” A Roman slave might stay in sexual service as an adult but would have to wear a boy’s clothes and have all his body hair plucked out regularly. Paul’s contemporary Seneca writes that it is a pitiful form of oppression.
† In myth, Zeus raped the prince Ganymede but compensated him with eternal youth and a job as the gods’ bartender.
‡ The refrain invokes Hymen, the god of marriage.
§ To avert evil.
‖ A pun for “smoothness with hair on it.”
a There is one account, by the fourth-century B.C. historian Ephorus of Cyme (in Asia Minor), of ritualized homosexual kidnapping in Crete, but this has no corroboration.
b The uniform of upper-class Roman boys.
c The ancient equivalent of marbles.
d Throughout the passage, this word can be translated literally as “justices.”
CHAPTER 4: AN APOSTOLIC OINKER? PAUL AND WOMEN
If you polled people in public at random, you would likely find that Paul has made his overall worst impressions on modern thinkers with his statements on women. Here is George Bernard Shaw reacting:
[Paul] tells us definitely that he finds himself quite well able to avoid the sinfulness of sex by practising celibacy; but he recognizes, rather contemptuously, that in this respect he is not as other men are, and says that they had better marry than burn, thus admitting that though marriage may lead to placing the desire to please wife or husband before the desire to please God, yet preoccupation with unsatisfied desire may be even more ungodly than preoccupation with domestic affection. This view of the case inevitably led him to insist that a wife should be rather a slave than a partner, her real function being, not to engage a man’s love and loyalty, but on the contrary to release them for God by relieving the man of all preoccupation with sex just as in her capacity of housekeeper and cook she relieves his preoccupation with hunger by the simple expedient of satisfying his appetite. This slavery also justifies itself pragmatically by working effectively; but it has made Paul the eternal enemy of Woman.*
Shaw is referring, mainly or entirely, to Paul’s teachings on marriage in 1 Corinthians 7, but that letter also contains two other controversial passages about women, 11:2–16 and 14:33–36. The three show a whole range of attitudes, so they seem to be a good basis for asking how fair our criticisms of Paul as an antifeminist are.